editors’ introduction editors’ introduction: open access charles piot anne alison duke university in assembling this half-issue on open access, we solicited articles from scholars we hoped might give a panoptic view of the complex, politically-charged terrain of open access (oa) today. we were aiming for bold, visionary pieces—articles that would make clear the stakes surrounding oa for the journal and the discipline. at the same time, we asked authors to assume that many today remain under-informed about open access—not only about its politics but also its defining features—and that this special issue might serve as a primer or go-to issue for the society of cultural anthropology’s membership, and for the american anthropological association more broadly, as it considers future publishing options.1 we feel that the authors have delivered on this agenda, and brilliantly so. they have written smart, informative pieces that bring readers into the open access conversation, while also providing thought pieces about oa’s politics and possibilities. ryan anderson’s interview with jason jackson goes over the fundamental issues in a way that only these two longstanding oa warriors are able to do. the articles by ali kenner and tim elfenbein, cultural anthropology’s former and current managing editors, provide a ground-up view of the journal’s transition to open access, carefully documenting the steps taken and obstacles encountered. their focus is on the building of infrastructure, an under-appreciated aspect of oa publishing—the information and internet infrastructure that enables cultural anthropology to publish on its own. since university libraries are at the center of the open access discussion, librarians have often been leading advocates of the open access movement. university libraries not only shoulder the increasing financial burden of the current system of commercial publishing but also have a constitutive interest in the future of knowledge preservation. we thus asked two duke librarians, paolo mangiafico and kevin smith, to weigh in from the standpoint of the library and they have provided a piece that is sure to become a classic—one that is visionary in advocating for open access while also sketching the larger ecology of scholarly publishing today. chris kelty, one of the leading oa talking heads in anthropology, expands our field of vision once again by placing open access into the larger political-economic context of the neoliberal university, while also raising significant questions about open access and scholarly authority.2 for those not yet initiated into the arcane terminology of oa, we have included a short glossary of key terms at the end of the section. cultural anthropology’s experiment with open access is very much a work in progress. while we have been able to build the infrastructure that enables us to publish on our own—and to do so relatively quickly and easily—we now face the task of making it technologically and financially sustainable, while holding onto longstanding standards of excellence. we feel much urgency in this task, and invite you to join us in making it a success. notes 1. we would like to thank former cultural anthropology editors kim and mike fortun for their tireless efforts in promoting open access. 2. for those seeking additional resources, the interview with alex golub on the cultural anthropology website covers basic and some complementary ground in a smart, informative way. see “bonus extended interview with alex golub on open access.” http://culanth.org/fieldsights/492-can-scholarship-be-free-to-read-cultural-anthropology-goes-open-access. editors’ note on “neoliberal futures” editors’ note on “neoliberal futures” anne allison charles piot duke university for anthropologists, neoliberalism is one of those terms that goes without saying. like other keywords—modernity, capitalism, development, race—we seem to know what it means and what its politics entails. but as a catch-all descriptor of the contemporary condition, this promiscuous signifier loses much of its force as a diagnostic of what is distinctive about the current moment. and yet neoliberalism continues to do important work in our discipline as evidenced by the flood of submissions we have received over the last four years under its sign, and its use may conceal more progressive political valences. in deciding to devote one issue per year to what we have called the “futures of neoliberalism,” we hoped to thicken and nuance the term’s meaning by showcasing what anthropologists do best: offering theoretically-astute, fine-grained ethnographic analyses, in this case, of the effects of global restructuring today. we envisioned articles that might take us beyond a mere re-issuing of those political-economic truisms—though undeniably all-too-real—that neoliberalism entails state pullback, increasing marketization, growing inequality between haves and have-nots, the “self-responsibilization” of individuals, and so on. indeed we find that the essays we have published deepen and transform the meaning of the term in fundamental ways, some of which we aim to spell out here. by invoking neoliberalism’s “futures,” we hoped to call attention to what happens to sensibilities of time—whether or not their horizons of expectation are oriented to the present or future—and to the futures of the term neoliberalism itself. as our authors have consistently noted, the architecture of time under regimes unilaterally focused on economic growth, individual responsibility, and state pullback can be remarkably schizophrenic. it is not that the modernist dreams of a progressively-better future—the promise of the post-war fordist social contract (in metropolitan countries)—have totally disappeared; nor that people have abandoned the desire or capacity to dream of elsewhere—whether spatial, temporal, or social—beyond the here and now. rather, in the precariousness and risk such dream-making now inhabits, attachments to the present have intensified. embedded in rhythms of truncated work, interrupted life cycles, and the arrival of foreign migrants or military incursions, imaginings are often radically presentist, collapsed or imploded into the immediacy of survival (especially in today’s global peripheries and margins). such a refiguring of temporality is accompanied by an intensified attention to the materiality of everyday existence, one focused on shelter, food, and body—on an everyday here and now that has become little more than the struggle to survive. thus, amira mittermaier (29:1) describes a sufi soup kitchen in cairo, inside the “city of the dead,” where the guiding principle is to give food and tea to anyone who comes by. in what she calls an “ethics of immediacy,” this humanitarian gesture is the inverse of developmentalism (with its promise of a better future). here, care is disseminated on a post-identitarian basis, as if all outsides, both cultural and economic, have vanished. kregg hetherington (28:1), inspired by the new materialism studies—many of our authors are influenced by the latourian turn—writes about a war over beans in paraguay, where beans themselves became triumphant agents in peasant struggles against corporations and the state. another type of materiality can be found in the grotesque piles of cash that imaginatively saturated the landscape in albania, goading so many into investing in the pyramid schemes that raged during the 1990s (musaraj 26:1). mis-imagining the materiality of the present is also at work in the xenophobia that erupted in violent riots against foreign workers in south africa in 2008. jason hickel (29:1) not only shows how the violence was justified by local perceptions of usurping foreigners as witches but also suggests that such violence be read, ironically, as contesting the culture of neoliberal labor itself—as flexible, cheap, uprooted, mobile, kinless, and individualized. how work aligns itself with—bleeds into, poaches on—life, indeed bare life, is critical here. as one barters labor for life in an economy in which employment becomes ever more flexibilized and just-in-time—continually outsourced to those willing to work the hardest for less—the organization between work and life, and the ecology of existence itself, takes on a kinetic shape with labor often assuming novel forms. danny hoffman (26:1), for example, shows how war becomes a form of labor for young men in sierra leone. qualitatively similar to other kinds of labor, like working in the mines, the timber industry, or on rubber plantations, selling one’s ability to fight renders all labor commensurable in the violent economy of war-torn sierra leone. war is productive of money and life for these paid-for rebels, and their allegiances easily shift, since they are engaging in violence more as a job than as political endeavor. the line between job and life—or in hoffman’s case, death—is porous, much as it is for the japanese cell-phone novelists described by gabriella lukacs (28:1), writers who draw on lives of suffering and pain to produce novels that, posted on cell-phones, entertain fast-paced commuter-consumers in urban japan. expected to invest their souls in this work—to extract stories from bodies in pain—these cell-phone novelists engage in labor they experience as hard but meaningful, and less alienating than other kinds of work available to young precariat. in the dream-work they produce, and co-author with readers who write back, cell-phone novels enable a circuitry of affect that also creates new collectivities. and yet, as with hoffman’s youthful soldiers, the horizon of expectation is turned to the present, to getting through the here and now rather than imagining a there and beyond. this is also true, but with a twist, for the urban poor described by kathleen millar (29:1), who plunder the dumps outside of rio de janeiro for recyclables to sell. in a wage-less job at the very bottom of the socio-economic spectrum, the scavenging poor are not only stigmatized but also put at considerable risk. nonetheless, there is a “continual return” in the rhythms of their work in the dump because, living amidst multiple forms of insecurity and everyday emergency, this is one kind of labor that accords them flexibility. they can return any time, work for as long as they want, and always make a small profit. work like this melds itself to the unpredictability of lives on the ground. while working in the dump is a source of suffering, it is also a refuge of sorts. the exigencies of a precarious life—sick children, the need to tend to an aging parent—are not eased by the precarity of such work, but they are also not sacrificed in the contract made between labor and life. as millar notes, insecure labor is increasingly becoming a shared condition that is merging the destinies of global north and south. but how precisely people respond to this condition and what they make of life in the present—and whether and how they imagine it otherwise—is quite varied. being without work produces an affect of boredom for the jobless and homeless in post-communist bucharest (o’neill 29:1). unable to do or buy anything, they bear the marks of social exclusion, and their dreams are of drinking nescafé, as if a jolt of caffeine might s(t)imulate the activity of a job or of life itself. in asking how the poor corporealize their poverty in the seemingly permanent state of crisis in post-revolutionary nicaragua, elysée nouvet (29:1) describes what she refers to as the current moment’s “(in)convenient affects.” one woman is able to carry on despite the precarity of labor and life, while another too often just stays in bed. unable to motivate herself to sell the meager foodstuffs she peddles, she puts her four young children at risk of survival. and yet, as nouvet asks, is there a difference between carrying on or staying in bed in a context of acute structural violence? when life becomes so indistinguishable from death, what accounts for those who can manage—and from what resources do they draw—to keep living? the crisis in value is seen not only in barters made between life and death but also in the pursuit of homeownership by middle-class israelis in a real-estate market where such investment no longer makes financial “sense” (h. weiss 29:1), or in the recent banking crisis in argentina, where a new ecology of dollars, bricks, and pesos deprives currency of its anchor in anything beyond the fragility of the moment (d’avella 29:1). in indonesia (luvaas 28:1), guatemala (thomas 28:1), macedonia (graan 28:1), and brazil (dent 27:1), brands—of corporations and nation-states—are hyped alongside their counterfeits (nakassis 28:1), and the piracy of fakes flourishes while a desire, even belief, in authenticity still reigns. we have also seen in many of the articles creative efforts to engage in subsistence bricolage, to find a way to keep going or “make time” out of the very lineaments of a market economy that cuts off jobs (muehlebach 26:1), shuts down the electricity (mains 27:1), and makes persons socially redundant or dead (molé 29:1). this is what clara han (26:1) discovered in her work on a low-income neighborhood in santiago, chile, where temporality for residents is one of waiting: waiting for life to take a turn while balancing the demands of caring for kin, the struggles to find or keep a job, and the cascading effects that pepper life for those suffering from intractable mental illness, violence, and drug addiction. while the materiality of everyday life is both fractured and in continual flux, people dream nonetheless; not so much of making fortunes as of having a modicum of security for or with family. the economy of credit allows them to buy a bit of life, “loaned life” in han’s felicitous phrase: some food for the kids today or repairs for their home tomorrow. this makes one indebted, and debt consumes so much interest that whatever is gained is often taken away, in spades, only too soon. but, for a while, one “makes time” and, in this sliver of hopefulness about an indeterminate future, life is lived for the moment. while certainly depressing, this intensification or implosion of the political-economic—into presentism and immediacy, into a recursive materiality, into new bargains waged between labor and life, into the barest of life—also bespeaks an excess or surplus beyond political-economy and labor alone. holding on, making do, or getting by in situations of uncommon precarity also produces new socialities and openings. if not exactly politics as we know it, and not entirely hopeful, there is emerging a type of melancholy rejouissance that points toward a different future, perhaps even a future or beyond to neoliberalism itself. in the world that affect proposed in the world that affect proposed kathleen stewart university of texas at austin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2236-381x for me, affect came into view through a slowed ethnographic practice attuned to the forms and forces unfolding in scenes and encounters. this practice pulled the apparatus of conceptualization itself into a tricky alignment with slow ethnography’s immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds it was trying to trace. anthropological objects became things that shimmered out of molten states or lay nascent in an atmosphere. they had to be walked around, approached from precise angles, and seen as states of being; they were emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter as if it were their resting point. the cultural became a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions. ethnographic writing began, again, to try to describe collective states and sensibilities hitting people and traversing otherwise incommensurate things: bodies of thought, assemblages of infrastructures and institutions, new ecologies, the rhythms of a daily living, and the strangely connective tissue produced by handheld devices and social media. in the world affect brought into view, the point of analysis was not to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures but, rather, to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding. figure 1. photo courtesy of jason pine. all this meant not just that systems and modes of being in worlds had to be seen as messier than what older forms of theory and modeling had allowed but that the singularities of what circulated across the everyday, across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, atmosphere, the political, and dream took place as a series of precisions. far from being the instantiations or embodiments of a generality, these singularities were the events of a sociocultural world. they animated an energetic field of shifting common concerns. they emerged in the lived problematics of a present, and therefore they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. sociality itself was a rhythm marking the beat of a saturation in a world. the subject and agency were immersed in the fundamental, practical, and artful workings of difference and expressivity taking place in big and small events every day; they were weighted with a world and charged with intensity, splintering and layered. affects, then, were not just the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries located in an elsewhere but, rather, the registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic (see pine 2012). affect helped return anthropology to sense and sensation, materialities, and viscera. it proposed a world that is lived, though not simply anchored in the consciousness of the humanist subject or its categories of thought. rather, a world charged with affect is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves people “improvising with already-felts” (manning 2009, 30). the subject emerges in the risky labors of being in a world through the precise forms that forces take in lives. people labor in the very precarity of their situations, in an overwhelm of tendencies, openings and foreclosures, dissolutions and solidifyings, and in the cohesions of a milieu, a project, a habit entrained. the affective subject is a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what’s coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity. for the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters. life is an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical (see pine 2016) transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state. life takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious. such a world is not already laid out on the table, with the only task left being an evaluative one. the turn to affect worried the mantras of structure, mediation, representation, and code that had come to operate as a good-enough shorthand for culture and power. in place of the sheer critique of representation, affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen. it waits to see as things unfold in a moment, notes points of contact, recognizes the weight or smell of an atmosphere, or traces the spread of intensities across subjects, objects, institutions, laws, materialities, and species. the everyday is not naturalized as the un-thought, but approached as a prolific generation of temporary inventive resolutions to problematics that set off unexpected trajectories. this is a world deliteralized, one in which there is no endemic divide between a naturalized, given order and the exceptionalism of event or mobilization. in the world that affect proposed, things were thrown together, perhaps with a great deal of force, to become recognizable as something to be in or near, or else to oppose and resist. yet this was always still an approximate composition of what was happening, a rough angle, a ricocheting impression still shooting side glances at what wasn’t captured or recognized, an exposé of the real as a rhythmic alternation that shimmers and dims. what happened could endure and do real damage not because it was always already in a finished state of achieved power but because it was charged with its own retractability, essentially haunted by the possibility of its limited life span. through the work of gilles deleuze, affect studies pointed to a differential ontology—the prolific generativity of difference and connection taking place in a field of possibilities. the actual became a multiplicity of precisely occurring possibilities in the forces set in motion by one thing or another. affect studies, along with other current trends in thought now hitting anthropology—new materialism, object-oriented ontology, naturecultures and multispecies work, science studies, new ecologies and the study of social and affective as well as material infrastructures, analysis of energies or rhythms, and new approaches to the radical performativity of race or of state power—returned anthropology to the longstanding problem of how to open the conventions of academic argument to the generativity and volatility of life as such, to its capacity to actively shift or harden into forms of peace or violence, pleasure and pain, collectivities and chaos. affect studies forms part of a renewed search for modes of ethnographic theory and critique divested from the distanced, sheerly evaluative plane of academic conversation based on the stability of academic terms. instead, it looks for ways to describe what precedes and exceeds the categorical in the labors of living through historical presents. a concept becomes a thing deployed in a situation in an attempt to register something of the prepersonal and performative qualities of collective life. like experience itself, affect-inflected ethnography leans into its descriptive objects with an eye to their hardenings into something recognizable, their iron-clad investments or slippages or failures to endure. these moves have been variously theorized as, for example, what erin manning and brian massumi (2014) call “thought in the act,” a close but diffuse tracing of lines of possibility still only partly unfolded and yet already palpable, or what isabelle stengers calls a “vivid pragmatics” (stengers, massumi, and manning 2009). following bruno latour, there have been articulations of the empirical as compositional, or, in donna haraway’s (2015, 161) terms, as the “compost” of emerging worlds. matter has a heartbeat. in what karen barad (2003, 817) calls “the process of mattering,” things come to matter in both senses of the term. life is deliteralized in a robust realism of energetic surfaces, qualities, and remainders that withdraw from phenomenological and representational efforts at reduction and paraphrase (see harman 2011, 2012). categories are at best an oblique mode of access to the generativity of singularities taking place (harman 2008). affect studies, then, is one of the current approaches that present the possibility of sidestepping the dualist dead ends of modernist, humanist social science and its unfortunate affective habits of snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and thinking is just to catch it in a lie. as eve sedgwick (1997) argued, what is often called critical thinking and enacted as strong theory plowing through data on the strength of its independent logic is a paranoid approach to the world. its repetitive resting point is the conviction that something is wrong with other people, and it dreams of finding some bad fixative of state power or normative fantasy as if these might be the only problem. in place of this head-on, demagnetizing, evaluative critique, affect studies offers an ethnographic method of mattering that slows to gather into an account any number of things the modernist mode of critical thinking misses: all the bodies, the lines of things on the move, the widespread joking, the sonorousness, how any line of a life vies with an unwitting ungluing, how things get started, how people try to bring things to an end, why thought as such might become an add-on or window dressing, why conceptuality might take radically different forms, or why it matters that attention sometimes slows to a halt to wait for something to take shape. as a critical mode of affirmation, affect studies is in good company with long legacies of feminist thought, critical race theory, cultural studies, and major strands of thought in the work of friedrich nietzsche and georges bataille, alfred whitehead, baruch spinoza, as well as in surrealism and the projects of the situationists, among others. affect studies helped propel anthropology out of the mental habit of describing its objects as if they were fixed. an attention to the still unfolding has returned to ethnography’s commitment to thinking from the ground, but now the ground is a set of provocations and problematics that cannot be summarized in a literalized description and therefore does not so easily slip, under the spell of a kind of analytical shorthand, into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world as a direct reflection of abstracted categorical distinctions. analytic attention to the forms and forces of moving bodies and events invites experiments with description and with the conceptual. rather than fix concepts in academic traditions to be imposed on the real, we might think of the concept as a mode of thought that takes place in what isabelle stengers (stengers, massumi, and manning 2009) calls the mezzo—the state of being in the middle of attachments and threats, of what lingers and what jumps. this is a method that tries to move in the manner of things slipping in and out of existence. one that makes demands on visceral imaginaries and the sensoria. as an ethnographic method, this would be a mode of thought that tries to describe the things that also propel it. its objects would be its subjects. rather than fix notions of agency, subjects, objects, bodies, and intentions, it would try to more fully describe a world under pressure, the way a present moment can descend like a curtain on a place, the way a world elaborates in prolific forms, taking off in directions, coming to roost on people and practices. in the state of emergence and precarity, points of aesthetic-material-social-political precision can appear as a flickering apparition, a flash of color, or they can come to bear, roughly, on bodies like a hard shard landed in a thigh muscle. the ethnography of such things has to be both nimble and patient, jumping with the unexpected event but also waiting for something to throw together. the ethnographic reals it approaches are not flat and incontrovertible but alchemical, traveling in circuits of impact and reaction. in this world things happen. analysis trains itself on an effort to describe the iterations, durations, and modes of being taking place. references barad, karen 2003 “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs 28, no. 3: 801–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321. haraway, donna 2015 “anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin.” environmental humanities 6, no. 1: 159–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934. harman, graham 2008 “delanda’s ontology: assemblage and realism.” continental philosophical review 41, no. 3: 367–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-008-9084-7. 2011 “realism without materialism.” substance 40, no. 2: 52–72. https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2011.0011. 2012 weird realism: lovecraft and philosophy. alresford, u.k.: zero books. manning, erin 2009 relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy. cambridge, mass.: mit press. manning, erin, and brian massumi 2014 thought in the act: passages in the ecology of experience. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. pine, jason 2012 the art of making do in naples. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 2016 “last chance incorporated.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 2: 297–318. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.2.07. sedgwick, eve kosofsky 1997 “paranoid reading and reparative reading: or, you’re so paranoid, you probably think this introduction is about you.” in novel gazing: queer readings in fiction, edited by eve kosofsky sedgwick, 1–40. durham, n.c.: duke university press. stengers, isabelle, with brian massumi and erin manning 2009 “history through the middle: between macro and mesopolitics—an interview with isabelle stengers.” inflexions, no. 3. http://www.inflexions.org/n3_stengershtml.html. editors’ farewell editors’ farewell anne allison charlie piot duke university when we were invited to apply for the editorship of cultural anthropology five and a half years ago, we had to step back and think long and hard. the speed-up of our jobs already felt excessive. and the invitation came at a time when we were spending a sabbatical year in morocco under the balm of the mediterranean sun. during daily walks in the kasbah of tangier, we kept asking ourselves, should we do this, and if so, whatever for, and with what vision for the journal? this we would debate, then go for sardines by the port. in the end, we decided to proceed and were excited when chosen as editors. though we were right about the workload (and what does it say about the labor of editing academic journals these days that our predecessors were also a couple and our successors a collective of three?), we’ve immensely enjoyed the intellectual engagement, the excitement of working with authors writing with such diverse theoretical palettes about such varied terrain, and the challenge of trying to keep tempo with the times—of trying to keep anthropology and the journal in sync with the world we inhabit. as we said when we assumed the editorship (allison and piot 2011, 1–5), we saw our mission as trying to think expansively about the anthropological endeavor while fostering the highest standards of scholarship: to publish work that was conversant with some iteration of the imponderabilia of everyday life, and also experimental in (writing/ethnographic) style, pioneering in theory-making, and sensitively engaged (in a political, ethical, or humanitarian sense) with what, for so many today, has become a crisis of presence. anthropology, as we saw it then and still do, must be committed to generating ever-new ways of theorizing the world out of, and alongside, engagement in peoples’ lives. and, because of its epistemological commitment to studying lived worlds, anthropology must be responsive to and resonant with shifts in the times: with a world that is forever in a state of becoming. during our tenure, we have been pleased not only with the excellence of the scholarship we were able to publish but also with the various initiatives we implemented: a number of special issues (on the futures of neoliberalism, race, writing culture at 25, and open access), new journal features (playlists), and especially the overhaul of our website and the transition to open access in february of this year, making cultural anthropology the first major american anthropological association journal to go oa. the website is exceedingly dynamic, housing the journal but also, as originally designed, expanding beyond scholarly articles. in addition to supplementary pages and curated collections, features we inherited from our predecessors kim and mike fortun, we have added a number of others including the highly popular hot spots (series of short essays on politically volatile areas in the world today), theorizing the contemporary (series around ongoing theoretical debates), and photo essays (smartly conceived and edited by michelle stewart and vivian choi). we are indebted to so many for all of the above. to those who contributed, labored, and inspired us during our tenure as editors, we thank you. this includes our two wonderful managing editors, ali kenner and tim elfenbein, without whom we could not have operated and who did so much for the website and the transition to oa; all the authors who gave us their best and then worked to make their contributions even better, and also those whose submissions did not make it into the journal (despite many being top quality); the reviewers who so generously gave of their time and wrote such substantive reviews; our editorial board who provided advice, reviews, and camaraderie during annual get-togethers at the aaas; those graduate students of ours who worked as editorial assistants (spencer, brian, nadia, leigh, and brian); vani subramanian who has produced one magical cover after another for the journal; the fastidious attention given the manuscripts by our copyeditors (lisl, sara, and petra); the deans at duke university who generously provided financial support and teaching release; the stable of graduate student interns from departments around the country who have been amazingly creative and generous in the labor they have given to produce content for the website; the members of the society for cultural anthropology board who have given the journal and us as editors such continuous and thoughtful support; and all of you as readers who—in reading the journal and website—have kept cultural anthropology running as a site of excellence and innovation in the field today. finally, we’re extremely pleased to pass the baton to the editorial team at rice university—dominic boyer, cymene howe and james faubion—whom we are sure will maintain and enhance cultural anthropology in all sorts of ways. references allison, anne, and charles piot 2011 “new editors’ greeting.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 1: 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01077.x. cultural anthropology, 1992–1996 cultural anthropology, 1992–1996 fred myers new york university i became the second editor of cultural anthropology in 1991, with my first issue published in 1992. it was volume 7, issue 1. it might be of some interest to readers to understand the stakes of the journal at that time—or at least how i thought of them. the journal came into being under george marcus’s editorship, at a time when his work with writing culture and anthropology as cultural critique was gaining much attention (clifford and marcus 1986; marcus and fischer 1986). i don’t know how many people remember that the founding of the society for cultural anthropology (sca) was occasioned by the desire of some senior members of the field of cultural anthropology to have what they thought of as a serious fellowship and what others called a more “elite” venue in which anthropological matters could be discussed and pursued. in those days, members of the society had to be nominated and elected. shortly thereafter, the idea of the journal emerged. marcus became the editor, and as i remember, the directions he pursued—absolutely in line with his own theoretical trajectories—were not entirely popular with all the senior founding members of the society. at this time, marcus’s trajectory was referred to as postmodern; for some, this was a condemnation, for others, it was cause for celebration. george and his editorial board made the journal a new and lively place, open to all kinds of new writing—“experimental” writing, as it was called—and different genres. the postmodern included many different things: new voices emerged, and george was open to longer-form writing, critical essays, as well as to traditional work, putting articles together in novel ways, and even encouraging essays from non-anthropologists. since this isn’t a research article, i will simply assert my memories here to say that these new directions disturbed many anthropologists. it probably wasn’t what the senior anthropologists, and founders of the society and the journal, had expected. no doubt george and others enjoyed the young turks standing they had. the journal prospered as some senior anthropologists embraced it and younger scholars found a voice in it. i can’t say that i was necessarily a part of the developments as they began at cultural anthropology, but my own experience as a scholar of indigenous australia, engaging with the problems of representation of fourth world peoples, gave me a sense that the traditional objects of the discipline were fragmenting, dispersing, and that new objects were emerging out of the changing relationships of anthropologists to their research subjects. it seemed to me at the time that the postmodern movement included both a kind of nietzschean skepticism about the possibility of knowledge in anthropological texts (as articulated in deconstructions of classical anthropological writings), and also a critical reflexivity about the cultural and political locations of anthropological knowledge and its production—a sense of anthropology itself as a cultural activity. perhaps i should remind readers today that marshall sahlins (1976) had articulated this—albeit in less political terms—in cultural and practical reason, and indigenous critics of anthropology had also identified this conundrum. in two articles i published on my own research right around the time i became cultural anthropology’s editor (myers 1988, 1991), i was engaging exactly with the problem of anthropological knowledge and its circulation, so the project of the journal closely tied into my personal trajectory. i probably had less interest than george in experimental writing and was drawn more to the politics of representation—but these differences coalesced around a sense that the “crisis of representation” (as george called it) offered new opportunities and circumstances for anthropological work. i was myself suspended in the threads of the debates around which the journal had crystallized. i feel fortunate that the sca committee selected me as the editor of cultural anthropology to follow george marcus. i believe the choice was made because i supported the journal’s direction and its theoretical orientations, while also showing a bit more commitment to the empirical dimensions of work in these new directions. i was conservative enough to quiet the traditionalists and radical enough to continue the direction—with a bit more attention to the ethnographic data themselves. it was a great opportunity and i felt excited to take on this new responsibility. the journal migrated out of rice university, and its close relationship to the rice circle as a crucible of anthropological experiment, to new york university and a different set of external social relations. in the beginning, of course, the articles i published were all or mainly those george had already accepted. i tried to mix them up in ways i thought would give some impression of my editorship and elicit articles from people who had not previously thought of cultural anthropology as a place to publish. i felt i needed to signal that we weren’t only interested in “that kind of work,” but i had no desire to turn away from the critical trajectory we had established. the goal was to reach more people and, if possible, extend the framework to explore the shifting boundaries of knowledge production, between disciplines and also between anthropology and the world. i presented my vision for the journal in the first number i published. i still like that vision, and it may make clearer what we were attempting to do if i quote part of the original statement: cultural anthropology offers an unusual opportunity for delineating new developments in the anthropological study of social life, especially in expanding the perspectives of the field in facing the challenges presented by the changing historical conditions of cultural practice and cultural analysis. a principal dimension of this change has been the shifting of boundaries between those who study and those who are the subjects of study, as well as a radical reorganization of the boundaries between disciplines and their relocation in the world. many of us have experienced that disorientation that can occur when literary critics, political scientists, film studies experts, and anthropologists are all attempting to understand the same phenomena. the current climate in universities, in the arts, and in other cultural venues suggests that a good deal of ferment and reconsideration remains ahead. in my own view, the possibility or necessity of such reconsiderations is exciting and demanding of creative response from anthropologists. one of the greatest challenges to anthropology, i believe, is the development of “cultural studies” in other disciplines. this challenge should not be understood as academic turf warfare, but different disciplines have different histories, problematics, and practices of engaging the data of the world. at the same time, anthropology’s own categories have been constructed and organized in a set of practices and contexts that have been challenged periodically since world war ii. these challenges have been seen by some as refutations of anthropology. this seems ironic for american anthropology, at least, which took as its mission from the start a critical stance concerning ethnocentrism. such critiques should not make anthropologists defensive, but rather they should engage us in rethinking our work—even at the level of formulating undergraduate texts and courses. given all this, the conditions of production, distribution, and consumption of anthropological knowledge and the related forms of its representations are critical concerns that should frame the research published in the pages of cultural anthropology. (myers 1992, 3) a few qualities distinguished the journal. first, we managed to publish articles of varying length, some quite long and others quite short. second, i reserved the right as editor to reject submissions without review if i thought they were not in the spirit of our vision. this was not standard practice for scholarly journals, but given the mission of cultural anthropology, i continued this editorial prerogative as george had established it. i hope i didn’t make too many enemies, but a relatively new journal of the sort needed not only to publish what was worthy scholarship but also to extend sorts of scholarship and writing. as editor, my obligation was not only to publish what was acceptable but also, perhaps more so, what was new, pushing boundaries in interesting ways. this was a curatorial enterprise, as i understood it, to show what the discipline could and should be doing. that possibly sounds rather self-important. i didn’t regard myself as the producer of new directions, but as more of a filter. in 1992, however, many of us did feel that a turning point had been reached. in this sense, editing the journal at this time was a privilege. i was able to take part in these explorations, to see them in the making. it was not simply a matter of my pursuing a vision as editor; rather the journal wanted to allow visions to be seen, read, and criticized. i am trying to remember how many submissions we had each year. i think something between 150 and 200. obviously, even then, we could not publish all of them. the submissions, moreover, came in print form and had to be handled as manuscripts, in one big filing cabinet. i managed to convince the university and the department to let me have an office, which housed this filing cabinet, a computer on which we logged the articles, and a graduate student editorial assistant who worked twenty hours per week. that made for the totality of our enterprise to manage the journal. yes, i forgot. we also had a telephone line. the flow of manuscripts grew, and it was not easy to keep abreast of sending them out for review (i used two reviewers for each paper), editing them for grammar and style, getting them to the publishers and then the galleys to the authors, and we did fall behind. the filing cabinet filled with manuscripts in progress, manuscripts rejected, manuscripts being revised. one interesting dimension of editing the journal during this period was the occasional inquiry from senior scholars who had heard of the journal’s “difference.” i can remember having a manuscript submitted and reviewed, and being told by the author that we could “take it or leave it,” but that the author had no intention or interest in rewriting or revising. i suppose that to the non-editorially indoctrinated, the answer to such a stance would be simply to send it back. but for a fledgling journal still trying to establish itself and draw in new forms of work from authors of varying histories, such behavior did not seem productive. regarding the journal as a combination of vetted research articles and curated innovative research and writing, i thought we had a different mandate to pursue. not simply acting as a judge with thumbs up or thumbs down, which would have been easier, i found it more productive to work with such authors, in hopes of having work from scholars of reputation—if there was something genuinely of interest—and sometimes, to waive my criticisms with the expectation that having such work out there would provoke its own effects in the anthro-sphere of commentary. i don’t know if such editorial decisions would be acceptable to those with abstracted imaginations of professionalization and strict interpretations of quality. we did not accept work simply because it was written by people of reputation. we were, rather, interested in work that might not fit easily into the usual canons of judgment if it might propel discussion, questions, explorations. most articles were not of this sort. yet such was the mandate of cultural anthropology when i became the editor, the mission of this distinctive journal when it was established. i loved the chance to engage with quirky and eccentric pieces, longer-form essays, and especially finding the work of emerging scholars. that is, of course, the great privilege and pleasure of editing. we sought to increase the readership, to be different enough to provide a forum for scholars who thought they might be doing something distinctive, even to publish work that was not, strictly speaking, anthropological if it spoke to anthropological questions. this was to continue the mission and to expand its audience. at the same time, i did try to apply more rigorous empirical standards, to tighten the reviewing process in such a way that work that was formally interesting but not empirically as strong as it should have been would be held back for revision. thus, having established the existence and value of experiment and innovation, we could insist that work satisfy the research expectations even of those antagonistic to the new movements. i suppose one could call this an establishmentarian move. i certainly received some communications that suggested i was less than a visionary, just as i heard from more traditionalist scholars that i was abetting the enemy. in hearing these complaints, i knew i had struck a good chord. our submissions continued to increase, and—i am proud to say—the journal succeeded in becoming widely acceptable without giving up its mission. references clifford, james, and george e. marcus, eds. 1986 writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. berkeley: university of california press. marcus, george e., and michael m. j. fischer 1986 anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences. chicago: university of chicago press. myers, fred 1988 “locating ethnographic practice: romance, reality, and politics in the outback.” american ethnologist 15, no. 4: 609–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1988.15.4.02a00010. 1991 “representing culture: the production of discourse(s) for aboriginal acrylic paintings.” cultural anthropology 6, no. 1: 26–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1991.6.1.02a00020. 1992 “a note from the editor.” cultural anthropology 7, no. 1: 3–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00010. sahlins, marshall 1976 culture and practical reason. chicago: university of chicago press. one view from a deterritorialized realm one view from a deterritorialized realm: how black/queer renarrativizes anthropological analysis jafari sinclaire allen university of miami http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6475-9209 in a previous contribution to cultural anthropology, i suggested that “to take articulations of race and sex seriously, is to realize that there is no ‘colorblind’ sexual desire, and no neutral race/sex project” (allen 2013, 552). in this short provocation toward collectively troubling and projecting various queer anthropological futures with a host of brilliant colleagues, i want to refocus this question of a race/sex project. here, i attempt to raise a few critical questions about the prospect for reciprocation in queer anthropology, and in the discipline more broadly, through a brief reflection on the emergence of black/queer anthropology. whose daddy? while the exuberance represented by the titles fear of a queer planet (warner 1993), global sex (altman 2001), and the world we have won (weeks 2007) is seductive, as anthropologists we know that between their covers there is not much to learn about the world outside of a small, privileged, phallus-shaped sliver of the north. and as scholars writing on lesbian and gay studies and, later, queer studies “in the house of anthropology” (weston 1993; boellstorff 2007a) have shown, anthropological contributions to what came to be known as queer studies predates the emergence of queer as a term of art. in contrast to equally important ways of doing queer studies, the anthropology of lgbtq subjects has attempted, as tom boellstorff (2007b, 24) has averred, to anthropologize queer studies. that is, it has set out not only to provide empirical grounding and humanistic context for what is over there, but more fundamentally, to advance an understanding of “the foundationally social character of human being” (boellstorff 2007b, 2). still, i contend that we cannot understand the dimensions and dynamism of the social character of human being without thinking gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation as they are lived—simultaneously. this critical supplement is, of course, the signal contribution of black feminism. and this seems to be something that anthropologists, concerned with social actors and social structures, would find essential. in his discussion of the (dis)articulation of anthropology and queer studies, boellstorff (2007a, 25) argued that an impasse had been reached in anthropology apropos of a proper relationship between sexuality (studies), race (studies), and gender (studies). to this point, i want to offer a friendly critical amendment. an impasse connotes a relation of mutuality, or at least mutual recognition and engagement. but what has developed in the wake of recent increased scholarly recognition of notions of mutual constitution of identity is a cosmetic, evacuated reflex chant of “race-gender-class” (sexuality has not yet even achieved enough status to be feigned), with little real engagement with this scholarship and its politics. one unacknowledged route of this intransigence is a broad and studied ignorance of black intellectual traditions within academe. more specifically in the guild of anthropology, resistance to seeing “native” cultural production as theory constitutes a disabling contradiction (evidencing that we have not come as far from “the savage slot” named by michel-rolph trouillot [1991]). given this, to read black feminist scholarship as anthropology of course seems anathema—which makes for dreadful missed opportunities and cross-purposes. queer’s radical promise on its own (that is, outside of the reworking it continues to undergo in the hands of critical race, decolonial, indigenous, and disability theorists in the arts and activism, as well as in academe) queer may never do what some defenders claim it was meant to do—include a more capacious coarticulation of a number of embodied and embodying categories of normativity, like nationality, gender, region, class, and ability, as well as sexuality. still, despite often important critiques of its provenance and the ways it can be used as no more than an inaccurate or sloppy shorthand, queer thinking and queer seeing (still) uniquely facilitates pushing past normative assumptions of sexuality. while emerging from a very particular place and time, the use of queer in scholarly work not only describes a sense of the nonnormative status of men and women who identify with or are identified as homosexual or those whose gender self-identification is not resonant with the sex assigned to them at birth. more pointedly, to borrow josé muñoz’s (2009, 1) brilliant brown lens, “queerness is essentially about . . . an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” at its best, therefore, queer (still) offers a glance at the gleaming, aspirational horizon of utopia, from an important vantage. it is therefore worthy of revision and supplement. as my teacher sherry ortner reminded me many years ago, “we (ethnographers) are the people who do people.” the people do not, however, have to be or to identify as queer for queerness to be a useful, disruptive, and prospectively capacious hermeneutic. continuing to vociferously argue that (some) so-called natives do not use the word queer to describe themselves, while overlooking the ways that other words we use to describe folks—like individual, women, men, and children, for example—are also socially, culturally, and historically contextual, seems less significant than the volume and persistence of this charge. in any event, while we have certainly been guilty of using queer imprecisely and too much, i hope that this tired argument for its abolition in anthropology soon finds its final rest. still, please do not mark me or my fellow travelers in the queer camp. black/queer does not do camping; it is unsettled by choice and necessity. the articulation i have offered—the stroke connecting black to queer—signals at least a critical repositioning, if not also a novel take altogether. it is an attempt to at once register some political uneasiness (by now probably closer to boredom) with the overused, overwrought yet not easily replaced queer, and at the same time to reassert the concept and experience of blackness complexly and even contingently, but not apologetically or in lowercase. the nomadic, destabilizing interrogative stance of black/queer scholars, artists, and activists has formulated a response to what audre lorde (2009a, 98) has named global “racism, destruction, and a borrowed sameness” with respect to the state’s disposition toward black and brown folks, both here and there. as lorde (2009b, 80) wrote elsewhere, “the battlefields shift: the war is the same. it stretches from the brothels of southeast asia to the blood-ridden alleys of capetown to the incinerated lesbians in berlin to michael stewart’s purloined eyes and grandmother eleanor bumpers, shot dead in the projects of new york.” honestly, perhaps we were just never that into queer theory—even teresa de lauretis, judith butler, and eve sedgwick, from whose singular contributions i have learned a great deal, but who i do not hear daily in my head as i do essex hemphill and audre lorde, joseph beam and sylvester. for myself, and for a number of emerging anthropologists of black lgbtq experience, stellar queer theorists arrived on our bookshelves only after we had already imbibed the political and poetic nectars of intellectual activism and intersectional politics offered by black lesbian and gay poets, essayists, and scholars. thus, this author does not feel partisanship or ownership in queer incorporated (and like most black/queer scholars, i have not been offered a share in the ongoing concern). i am instead an interested observer of the game of thrones jack halberstam (2013) reimagines. with tongue in cheek—and, typically, with no small amount of keen, smart provocation and shade—halberstam likens the various streams of current queer studies to the great houses of the popular hbo drama. of course, the material well-being and rights of real people in real places and the scholarly framing of their lives are nothing to play with, as halberstam certainly knows. in any event, allow me to project backward—reimagining the game of thrones ficto-historical medieval moment through africentric historiography: i imagine my people having already circumnavigated the globe, building foundations of art and architecture in africa, the americas, and oceania. after inventing higher mathematics and charting the stars, beating their faces with galena and kohl, and sailing strategically around the foolishness of the seven kingdoms, they would not be vying for a throne of swords dripping with blood. if i could, i would warn them about the disastrous consequences of doing business in any kingdom of the north. ecce black/queer the ethnography of black/queer is constituted by the conjuncture of scholarly literatures, theoretical frameworks, and sites of struggle and cultural production. primary among these is a commitment to the quotidian serious games of black folks, here and there. another is a reworking of anthropological traditions, and of queer theory. for our purposes in this discussion, the articulation black/queer is most profitably thought of as a habit of mind—a way of seeing and saying as much as a mode of thinking or doing. as outside children of black studies and queer studies, we claim new ways to queerly trace our emergences beyond the patronymic reconstruction of theoritism and narrow disciplinarity. black/queer ethnographic work draws its understanding of black subjects as agents centered in their own globally situated political-economic dramas, and of the anthropologist as an observant full participant, coauthoring witness, and chronicler—aligned and in on the joke, the groove, and the affect—from the decolonizing stream of anthropology, which has yet to be fully critically assessed, much less socialized in graduate training (see allen and jobson 2016). this radical and decolonizing intellectual tradition is currently being extended to contemporary forms of black/queer life by the anthropologists shaka mcglotten, vanessa agard-jones, serena dankwa, lyndon gill, alix chapman, andrea allen, kwame edwin otu, and others, working, for example, on pleasure, resistance, endurance, violence, statecraft, media, displacement, belonging, advocacy, and spirituality, and making important methodological, theoretical, and writerly innovations. each of their projects is unique, but also resonant as black/queer. it is now clear that standard or traditional academic frameworks and optics do not allow us to see anyone or anything fully enough, or clearly enough. the recent emergence of black/queer and queer of color work alongside current crises in queer theory/queer studies and anthropological theory brings intellectual kinship into relief, but it also shows the current limits of our disciplinary kens. the dutch-surinamese anthropologist gloria wekker stands as the premier exemplar of this radical black feminist decolonizing intellectual tradition in the anthropology of sex and sexuality. in her remarkable book the politics of passion, wekker (2006) closely examines translocal experiences of age, class, color, gender, and spirituality among black and creole working-class women in suriname and the netherlands. one of many important ethnographic insights of wekker’s book is that what we would call sexuality is not a stable, discrete ontological category but a complex of multiply constituted, integrated, and contingent desires. and rather than weave theoretical webs centering the western intellectual traditions, she finds theorization on the ground, in the translocal networks and local religious, ethical, historical, and political-economic conditions of her respondents. i, too, have tried to illumine these dimensions of experience in my own work. today we must attend to what folks are reading, listening, and dancing to, and who their people are: their political, economic, and historical sources of “exposure, entanglement, and endurance” (to borrow the title of a recent symposium at yale university1), at the same time and in relation to who they are (or wish they could be) fucking. some of the most intractable or nettlesome political issues, as well as methodological and theoretical conundrums, can be illumined by careful attention to this understudied intersection of race/place(lessness), movement, and sexuality, which a few of us have pursued in ethnographic monographs. finally, and most important: real fists hit actual flesh. material jails—those with physical bars—imprison living human beings guilty only of poverty and desire. and what is more, though writing a book will never un-punch or de-rape, will never reverse the court decision, people should know that they are free and that they deserve study, a record of some of the highlights of how this freedom is performed. thus, out of political-economic and cultural crisis, and precisely to stage the inauguration of “a new and more possible meeting” (lorde 1984, 123) of disciplines, commitments, aesthetics and geographies, black/queer anthropology has emerged as another way—renarrativizing social-cultural analysis through an insistence on and/both, intersections and compounds, hyphens, strokes, parentheses, and messy interstices of real life and audacious imagination. this exceeds the current limits of anthropology, because those limits were set and are policed by those whose politics and reading practices do not allow black subjects to stretch beyond the readymade savage slot. this mode of work is new in academe, but it has a longer history in black lgbtq, queer of color, and black feminist activist work, artistic practice, and art of living life. in the united states in the early 1980s, at the onset of the hiv/aids pandemic, black same-gender-loving and gender-nonconforming forms of making sex, literatures, and other expressive practices emerged, thereby pushing notions of erotic experience beyond heterosexual sex and reproduction. that, for example, black lesbians announced that they (like to) fuck, and black gay men, who were assumed to be fucking unconsciously and unnaturally, added “now we think as we fuck” at what was the height of the aids epidemic, constituted a profound contribution to radical praxis. at a crucial moment in which it was clear that, as phill wilson, the founder of the black aids institute, commented, “they are going to let us die,” black lesbians, bisexuals, transgender folks, and gay men created community out of crisis—in nepantla, in life, en el ambiente—complex, troubled, and often riddled with candela. the radical promise of black/queer work is located in scholarship, art, and activism that not only has cellular and psychic connections to resistance to enslavement—which tried but failed to dehumanize our ancestors—but also is “shaped by the burden of persistent colonialism and the euphoric promise of nationalism and self-determination” (alexander and mohanty 1997, xiii); by activist intellectual black women who had analyzed the interlocking spheres of race, gender, sexuality, and class through the prism of antiviolence organizing (the combahee river collective); by writers who had, in nonacademic spheres and languages, poetically called for black men loving black men as a revolutionary statement of selfand community preservations (joseph beam, marlon riggs, and essex hemphill); and by activists who participated in blocking the public arteries of london, paris, rome, buenos aires, and san francisco with their “dead,” tracing bodies and leaving their haunting presence on the streets as a sharp indictment of the callous state (queer nation/act up). but, what to do when anthropology colleagues—especially those senior anthropologists responsible for programming conferences, structuring curricula, supervising dissertations, and recommending hiring and tenure—are ignorant of or hostile to the work that grounds and animates one’s own original scholarship, or too possessively invested in their own narrow disciplinary or area-studies reading practices and methodologies to admit new ways of reading, seeing, and saying? how best to point out that the deficiency lies in their reading practices, archives, and repertoires, not ours? today, among the pressing challenges laid before the guild responsible for participating in, observing, and chronicling lived (and dying?) experience is the work of crafting a set of anthropologically informed responses apropos of the matter of black/queer life (and death). as we come together across areas of experience, expertise, and affinity to do this work, we would be wise to note the recent provocation of the political scientist cathy cohen (2014), apropos of what i think of as a sort of “critical demeanor” (see ducille 1994). in the wake of the state-sanctioned police executions of eric garner, tamir rice, mike brown, and others,2 and the domestic-terror assassination of black churchgoers at the historic church of one of the nation’s most famous slave insurrectionists, and also in a moment in which there is at once unprecedented visibility of black queer and trans people and record numbers of unsolved murders of black and brown trans women in the united states and elsewhere, cohen draws out another dimension of what i called a “cosmetic, evacuated reflex chant.” in her kessler award lecture (cohen 2014), she names the “performative solidarity” of lgbtq groups (i.e., statements of support, and many times also unfortunate and inaccurate “parallels” “between” race and sexual identity that suggest one must choose one) that belies complicity with the selfsame neoliberal policies that support the fact that “in fact, black lives do not matter.” that is, like the project of decolonizing anthropology, this work will demand that anthropologists begin a hard and even painful critical assessment of our politics—perhaps beginning, as trouillot (1991, 17) suggested twenty-five years ago, with the “electoral politics” of discipline, which condition what (and whom) gets read and promoted. for the small but increasing number of anthropologists working in black feminist, black/queer, and queer of color critique, ethnography brings us closer toward answering hortense spillers’s (1984, 74) entreaty to verb black erotic experience and saidiya hartman’s (2008, 3) attempts at “redressing the violence” of the archive. this is an effort, as hartman (2008, 2) offers apropos of the “impossibility” of her own historiographic project, pace foucault, to “register [more than an] encounter with power . . . [but] a sketch of . . . existence.” who, if not anthropologists, would possess and deploy the most appropriate scholarly and methodological toolkit to probe the deep, inextricably intersectional, and embodied narrativization of “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens” (cohen 1997)? the sort of ethnographic renarrativization black/queer work takes up is not merely about restructuring just-so stories, single-issue politics, or old-school analysis. renarrativization holds a number of theories, methods, reading practices, disciplines, and writerly positions in tension—sometimes elegantly, at other times mirroring the mess and clumsiness of lived experience. the world we live in now calls for this sort of expansive engagement, rather than for refusals and the jealous guarding of theoretical, area-studies, or disciplinary borders. moreover, to remain relevant in an academy in which our students are demanding more intersectionally explanatory and usable knowledges: this is a call for a redisciplining of the intellect, a widening of reading practices, and the political commitment to at once master particular methods and theoretical frameworks and at the same time loosen our possessive investment in narrow disciplinarity or theoretical chauvinism. black/queer anthropologists are leading the way and have much to offer the discipline—if our colleagues will read and engage the work. notes 1. “toxic: a symposium on exposure, entanglement, and endurance” was organized by vanessa agard-jones and took place on march 3–4, 2016. for more information, see http://www.toxicsymposium.org. 2. i have chosen not to edit this passage to reflect the long list of murders since i originally drafted this essay. but, as i make my final edits, i would be remiss if i did not note that the killings are ongoing; there have been at least three over the past seven days. readers can keep up with the death toll at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database. references alexander, m. jacqui, and chandra talpade mohanty 1997 “introduction: genealogies, legacies, movements.” in feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, edited by m. jacqui alexander and chandra talpade mohanty. new york: routledge. allen, jafari s. 2013 “race/sex theory ‘toward a new and more possible meeting.’” cultural anthropology 28, no. 3: 552–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12024. allen, jafari sinclaire, and ryan cecil jobson 2016 “the decolonizing generation: (race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties.” current anthropology 57, no. 2: 129–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/685502. altman, dennis 2001 global sex. chicago: university of chicago press. boellstorff, tom 2007a “queer studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 36: 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094421. 2007b a coincidence of desires: anthropology, queer studies, indonesia. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cohen, cathy j. 1997 “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics?” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 3, no. 4: 437–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437. 2014 “do black lives matter? from michael brown to cece mcdonald: on black death and lgbtq politics.” kessler award lecture, clags: center for lgbtq studies, graduate center, city university of new york, december 12. http://videostreaming.gc.cuny.edu/videos/video/2494/. ducille, ann 1994 “the occult of true black womanhood: critical demeanor and black feminist studies.” signs: journal of women and culture in society 19, no. 3: 591–629. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/494914. halberstam, jack 2013 “game of thrones: the queer season.” bully bloggers, april 8. https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2013/04/08/game-of-thrones-the-queer-season-by-jack-halberstam-house-of-nemo/. hartman, saidiya 2008 “venus in two acts.” small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism 12, no. 2: 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1. lorde, audre 1984 “age, race, class, and sex: women redefining difference.” in sister outsider: essays and speeches, 114–23. berkeley, calif.: crossing press. 2009a “a burst of light: living with cancer.” in i am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of audre lorde, edited by rudolph p. byrd, johnnetta betsch cole, and beverly guy-sheftall, 81–149. new york: oxford university press. originally published in 1988. 2009b “turning the beat around: lesbian parenting 1986.” in i am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of audre lorde, edited by rudolph p. byrd, johnnetta betsch cole, and beverly guy-sheftall, 73–79. new york: oxford university press. originally published in 1987. muñoz, josé esteban 2009 cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. spillers, hortense j. 1984 “interstices: a small drama of words.” in pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality, edited by carole s. vance, 73–100. boston: routledge and kegan paul. trouillot, michel-rolph 1991 “anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness.” in recapturing anthropology: working in the present, edited by richard g. fox, 17–44. santa fe, n.m.: school of american research press. warner, michael, ed. 1993 fear of a queer planet: queer politics and social theory. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. weeks, jeffrey 2007 the world we have won: the remaking of erotic and intimate life. new york: routledge. wekker, gloria 2006 the politics of passion: women’s sexual culture in the afro-surinamese diaspora. new york: columbia university press. weston, kath 1993 “lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 22: 339–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.002011. encountering indeterminacy encountering indeterminacy: colonial contexts and queer imagining scott l. morgensen queen’s university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8654-2422 queer draws our attention to excess, and to the inconceivable. at its queerest, queer slips from attempts at definition or codification. facing negation, queerness remains undisciplined: it is what negation cannot actually erase, for negation requires it as a target for projecting power. and if discipline ever attempts to embrace what it once negated, queerness still complicates conformity by exposing discipline’s fabrication and threatening its unraveling. where are these critical potentials being practiced within anthropology, and where might queerness still press against the disciplining and normalization of knowledge? among the many directions such questions might take, i will focus on the ways in which queerness continues to expose and destabilize colonial conditions of anthropological epistemology and methodology. just as queer accounts must analyze the violences of colonial modernity, thinking with qualities evoked by this term disturbs the colonial structuration of knowledge and invites unanticipated thought. once queerness draws my attention toward excess within power relations—toward the relationship between power and indeterminacy—i find that my desire for sure knowledge wavers, and my attention turns to questions that are neither readily asked nor answered. when trinh t. minh-ha (1989) diagnosed epistemic coloniality in the works of bronislaw malinowski and claude lévi-strauss, she argued that to acknowledge that which exceeds it—much less to try to negate its excess—would follow first confronting the incapacity of things to be wholly contained by language. in so doing, i understand trinh to be indicating that negation is a tertiary act: it follows naming excess—that which power does not predict or contain—an act that is itself secondary to the initial confrontation of language with what trinh (1989, 48) calls “realms of opaqueness.” if anthropology articulates queerness, and if it tries to do so queerly, then one effect may be to reflect on the opacity of things to any effort “to perforate meaning” (trinh 1989, 48), while another will be to interrogate power’s demand that things be made transparent to knowledge. an anthropology that has been queered may still go to great lengths to study and interpret social histories and cultural practices that congeal around negation or excess. but its aim would not be to codify, and thereby restrict in meaning that which cannot be contained by conventions of knowledge (anthropological or otherwise). such directions in scholarship need not be called “queer,” but their implications do arise in anthropological scholarship that takes critically queer turns. i began confronting such conjunctures during my ethnographic research in the united states, in which i plied the tensions between critically queer potentials and the subjects and movements that attach to the term queer under conditions of white settler colonialism. on realizing that white gay men formed identities and movements through racialized negations of indigenous peoplehood, i began to examine a constitutive coloniality within the modern sexual-minority subjectivity that they produced. theorists of racialized sexuality and diaspora had prepared me to build on the insight, which i learned from two-spirit critics, that white sexual politics and white anthropology perform white settler colonialism when indigeneity is codified as a potential in (presumptively white) sexual subjects, even as indigenous politics is erased from view. chickasaw scholar jodi byrd (2011) clarifies that colonialism produces modern subjects in their passage through an imagined indianness that functionally disappears the landed and sovereign life of indigenous peoples. in queer form, we could interpret these practices as what jin haritaworn, adi kuntsman, and silvia posocco (2014) call queer necropolitics: whether they consign indigenous sovereignties to impossibility by negating sexualized/racialized/colonized bodies, or absorb them into modern “freedoms” that maintain colonial and racial power (reddy 2011).yet on forthrightly examining white queer settler colonialism, my account fractured after confronting its procession through white desires for kinship across the differences presented by native, black, and non-black racialized people. i thus faced an ethnographic conundrum, in which some of those to whom queer might seem to apply came into being by queering others, and precisely through desire, even as their own objects of desire acted discrepantly to undercut this violence and to imagine lives beyond white settler reach. thinking with this queer situation, i have grown cautious when deciding to whom i will choose to ascribe the category queer, even as my research interests continually return to the queer violences of colonial modernity. theorists of the formations of modernity show that the slippages we meet or read as queer are imbricated within race and coloniality, which arise and persist through distinctly queer means. we know, for instance, that queerness comes to define racial and colonial violence through mutually constituting projections of extermination (miranda 2010), pathologization (cohen 1997; snorton 2014), specification (ferguson 2004), contamination (shah 2001), animality (chen 2012), mixture (somerville 2000), and mobility (manalansan 2004), as well as via processes of settlement (rifkin 2010), normalization (carter 2007), and exaltation (fiol-matta 2002), to name only a few examples. to conduct research amidst these histories, in these times, on and across these varied lands and waters, is to take up modern violences as conditions of the queerness that we know and of our accounts of it. linking queer to anthropology therefore invokes similar concerns within the discipline: namely, anthropology’s unceasing need to unsettle its epistemic coloniality as this emerges from within western ontology. here, by ontology, i invoke first frantz fanon’s (1967) analysis of the normalization of white subjectivity, which evicts blackness from the human (see also wright 2004). i also invoke modes of indigenous governance that are ontologically incommensurate with western law and that interrupt their colonial universalization (l. simpson 2011; smith 2012). anthropologists who critique coloniality within knowledge thus study structural violences within social worlds, and the epistemic violences conditioning the field of intelligibility within which our accounts emerge. in turn, a queer anthropology must interrogate the formation of its accounts from within the same colonial and racial violences that condition the worlds it examines. it must confront the conditioning of its accounts by the power and limits of anthropology, and by all that slips from the capacity of language to contain. queer anthropology will thus present not externalized and codifiable objects, but conditioned relations within and among social worlds and their interpreters; its writers will appear alongside all other subjects as products and interpreters of the power it examines. such work would resonate with trinh’s (1989, 76) call to turn from a colonial desire to define and consume an other, and to imagine instead “writing close to the other of the other.” in such work, she argues, “i can only choose to maintain a self-reflexively critical relationship toward the material, a relationship that defines both the subject written and the writing subject, undoing the i while asking, ‘what do i want wanting to know you or me?’” following such thoughts, then, a queer practice of anthropology marks and transforms colonial legacies within the intellectual projects that brought it into being. the anthropology of sexuality and gender has taken myriad forms across generations, geopolitical contexts, and academic and extra-academic sites. various versions helped establish anthropology’s epistemological purview, as explained by the expansive and incisive accounts of kath weston (1993), kamala visweswaran (1997), and tom boellstorff (2007). in one version, enlivened by midto late-twentieth-century sexual-minority politics, anthropologists renewed the classic project of cross-cultural comparison by exhorting western science to document minoritized sexualities and genders worldwide and to assemble them under a global optic that could make them a basis for claims about human culture or nature. this project has been variously embraced, discarded, or renewed over the past fifty years of anthropological research on sexuality and gender. my interest rests in the epistemological work that this mode of inquiry does for those who enact it and those who draw upon it; i want to understand what sort of political subjects it produces. i am concerned about the potential slippage between, on the one hand, carefully noting where bodies, pleasures, or desires are marginal or minor within historically contingent power relations and, on the other, discovering sexual and gender minorities throughout the world that can be specified and codified across borders. analytical interest in sexual/gendered diversification or marginalization may take many routes, but anticipating global analogues to the sexual and gender minority statuses that found western sexual science projects epistemic coloniality across human existence (see, for instance, towle and morgan 2002). where such projections take place, they justify a second move: projecting anthropology, or another scientific apparatus, to particularize and assemble a globalized world into a database for professional interpretation. scholars have long critiqued colonial uses of anthropology to assert epistemic control over human possibility. yet such gestures recur if western sexual and gender minorities seek globally systematized knowledge about those whom they perceive to be their others, or even their own selves. perhaps the cross-cultural comparison and codification of minoritized sexuality and gender retains its appeal because, like cultural relativism, it can be presented as an anticolonial act. scholars may make a number of ethical and methodological decisions: rejecting primitivism to honor coevalness; respecting local terms, while refusing to impose foreign ones; writing accountably to, if not collaboratively with, subjects. yet alone or together, such methods do not displace the epistemic context of colonial modernity in which they are deployed. philip deloria (1998) confronted a similar situation when examining a paradox at the heart of white settler subjectivity in the united states. white settlers inherit what deloria calls “playing indian” as a resource that may be used to express opposition to perceived oppression, even as doing so advances white settlers’ rightful representation within the white settler state. deloria’s project demonstrates that colonial subjects narrate anticolonialism through colonial narratives, which is to say that their supposed anticolonialism constitutes an oscillation that exists within, not beyond the power of colonial knowledge. when white settlers challenge their sense of marginality on anticolonial terms, they naturalize their sustained power and authority in an ongoing colonial situation. in turn, a queer account of the anthropology of sexuality and gender should ask to what degree either its colonial or its anticolonial leanings connect to the power of colonial modernity, which cannot be simply dismissed or resolved, but requires ongoing critical study. queer anthropologists are interrogating colonial legacies in the field by confronting how social life and representation are conditioned by racial and colonial power. in so doing, they act within legacies of decolonial anthropological scholarship. by decolonial, i invoke approaches within black, indigenous, postcolonial, and diaspora studies that challenge modern violences (genocide, antiblackness, settler colonialism, global capitalism, empire) by recalling what western thought finds inconceivable and by marking western thought’s point of dissolution (chakrabarty 2000; coulthard 2014; harney and moten 2013; a. simpson 2014; vargas 2015). decolonial approaches in anthropology inherit the legacy of what jafari allen and ryan jobson (2016, 129) call “the decolonizing generation,” in which “black, allied antiracist, feminist, and political economy–oriented scholars” joined together in faye harrison’s (1991) collection decolonizing anthropology. harrison states that this project arose by “grappling with what we call today the enduring coloniality of power, political economy, and knowledge” (mcgranahan, roland, and williams 2016), which allen and jobson (2016, 134) say decentered then-ascendant white theorists of postmodernity “in favor of a critique of modernity and its enduring significance.” reflecting on the same era, chela sandoval (2000) interrogated white masculinist theories of postmodernity by arguing that modern power and its limits were already explained within decolonization struggles and rearticulated in the postmodern praxes of u.s. third world feminism. like sandoval, trinh in the late 1980s confronted modern violence within epistemology by interrogating structuralism and deconstruction and then rearticulating them through postcolonial and women-of-color feminist methodologies. these works’ legacies resonate within queer ethnography when ethnographers locate within and challenge the violences that their subjects queerly survive, while narrating their relational locations decolonially with respect to western ontology. for instance, kale fajardo (2011) explains how global capitalism is constitutively gendered by the practice of filipino masculinities—specifically, tomboi masculinities—as these permeate and illuminate how race and empire inflect the relation of the philippines to the united states and to global economics. fajardo’s explicitly decolonizing analysis highlights how indigenous filipino gender practices interrupt projections of a western sex/gender binary and embed tomboi existence within the political-economic conditions that filipino masculinities diagnose and negotiate. marcia ochoa (2014, 13, 15) writes within her own relationship to diaspora to examine the gendered conditions of venezuelan national culture through a “queer diasporic ethnography,” a method that for her addresses how “the process of modernity extinguishes humanity but creates other possibilities for existence.” ochoa interprets misses (beauty queen contestants) and transformistas (transgender women) from within the racial and gendered power relations that produce and link them, in venezuela and transnationally. in the process, “the perverse paths that make queer existence tenable, perhaps even legible” (ochoa 2014, 14) begin to diagnose the power of the nation-state, of transnational capital, and of modernity itself. in his account of black diaspora culture, anti-black racism, and creative acts of resistance in cuba, jafari allen (2011, 187) applies audre lorde’s concept of erotic subjectivity to explain how black practices of self-making portend the “material and psychic liberation of marginal communities and marginal subjects.” citing critical insights in black studies and black feminist thought, allen (2011, 187, 97) defies the racist optics placed on black life by arguing “that inhering in these small, intimate, troubled spaces is a powerful and virtually unexplored ground for political possibilities” where erotic subjectivity “works towards not only transgressing but transcending and finally transforming hegemonies of global capital, the state, and of bourgeois, limited, and limiting notions of gender, sexuality, and blackness.” without preemptively folding these works into queer anthropology, as opposed to other categories to which they may belong, i indicate their capacity to breach or circumvent the tensions that appear once queer and anthropology meet. interrogating modern power and its resonances within narrative, these accounts—to quote trinh (1989, 76)—relationally examine “the subject written and the writing subject,” tracing the routes of their subjects and authors through the unfolding of power and its disruptions. they also share in articulating critical theory with what allen (2011, 131) calls “the risk and reward of ethnography”: in studying situated practices, “cultural, historical, political, and economic difference and pathos interrupt, exceed, and sully theorization.” these works thus clearly interpret power while affirming complexities that remain opaque to extractive definition while slipping past what colonial thought might presume to know. traversing the imbrications of anthropology and coloniality, queer anthropology advances beyond concerns about defining an object to congeal around concerns of context and method. certain topics will not cease to draw the field’s attention—notably, the racial and colonial conditions that contextualize practitioners of queer anthropology and their inquiries. but, following the critics whom i have named, i am calling attention to methods that interact with those conditions, so as to encounter queer life existing both within and beyond their power. such methods communicate knowledge about social worlds that can specify positioned and politicized interactions with power. but the performance of knowledge about those worlds places the demand for codification in question. work in such modes unsettles any expectation that choosing to practice anthropology in anticolonial fashion will disrupt all of the ways that inquiry and representation may articulate colonial power. methods that confront that power create space not to withdraw from language, but to interact with it as a medium that may perform its own limits while acknowledging that which exceeds it. against a premise of “trying to find the other by defining otherness or by explaining the other through laws and generalities,” trinh (1989, 76) argues that “the other is never to be known … unless one understands the necessity of a practice of language which remains, through its signifying operations, a process constantly unsettling the identity of meaning and speaking/writing subject, a process never allowing i to fare without not-i.” the relational formation of the subject within the conditions of modernity leaves ethnography poised to apprehend power and indeterminacy. i remain inspired by works that return such questions to new ethnographic research, from which narratives may emerge that pivot toward what might not yet be known, or even knowable. acknowledgments this essay presented an opportunity for me to reflect on the enduring significance of scholarship that has provided direction to my work, from the time of my graduate studies to my current work teaching feminist and queer methodologies. in that spirit, i would like to recall and thank the many faculty whose contributions to the doctoral program in anthropology at the university of california, santa cruz nurtured critical interdisciplinary study within and about anthropology, and in particular to anna tsing, carolyn martin-shaw, lisa rofel, donna haraway, and patricia zavella. for their constructive feedback on drafts of this essay i also thank martin manalansan, cymene howe, and j. kehaulani kauanui. i am solely responsible for all content. references allen, jafari s. 2011 ¡venceremos? the erotics of black self-making in cuba. durham, n.c.: duke university press. allen, jafari sinclaire, and ryan cecil jobson 2016 “the decolonizing generation: (race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties.” current anthropology 57, no. 2: 129–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/685502. boellstorff, tom 2007 “queer studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 36: 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094421. byrd, jodi a. 2011 the transit of empire: indigenous critiques of colonialism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. carter, julian b. 2007 the heart of whiteness: normal sexuality and race in america, 1880–1940. durham, n.c.: duke university press. chakrabarty, dipesh 2000 provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. chen, mel y. 2012 animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cohen, cathy j. 1997 “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics?” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 3, no. 4: 437–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437. coulthard, glen sean 2014 red skin, white masks: critiquing the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. deloria, philip j. 1998 playing indian. new haven, conn.: yale university press. fajardo, kale bantigue 2011 filipino crosscurrents: oceanographies of seafaring, masculinities, and globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. fanon, frantz 1967 black skin, white masks. translated by richard philcox. new york: grove press. originally published in 1952. ferguson, roderick a. 2004 aberrations in black: toward a queer of color critique. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. fiol-matta, licia 2002 a queer mother for the nation: the state and gabriela mistral. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. haritaworn, jin, adi kuntsman, and silvia posocco 2014 “introduction.” in queer necropolitics, edited by jin haritaworn, adi kuntsman and silvia posocco, 1–27. new york: routledge. harney, stefano, and fred moten 2013 the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. new york: minor compositions. harrison, faye v., ed. 1991 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. washington, dc: american anthropological association. manalansan iv, martin f. 2004 global divas: filipino gay men in the diaspora. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mcgranahan, carole, kaifa roland, and bianca c. williams 2016 “decolonizing anthropology: a conversation with faye v. harrison, part i.” savage minds, may 2. http://savageminds.org/2016/05/02/decolonizing-anthropology-a-conversation-with-faye-v-harrison-part-i/. miranda, deborah 2010 “extermination of the joyas: gendercide in spanish california.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 16, nos. 1–2: 253–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2009-022. ochoa, marcia 2014 queen for a day: transformistas, beauty queens, and the performance of femininity in venezuela. durham, n.c.: duke university press. reddy, chandan 2011 freedom with violence: race, sexuality and the u.s. state. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rifkin, mark 2010 when did indians become straight? kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty. new york: oxford university press. sandoval, chela 2000 methodology of the oppressed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. shah, nayan 2001 contagious divides: epidemics and race in san francisco’s chinatown. berkeley: university of california press. simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. simpson, leanne 2011 dancing on our turtle’s back: stories of nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence, and a new emergence. winnipeg, mb: arbeiter ring. snorton, c. riley 2014 nobody is supposed to know: black sexuality on the down low. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. smith, linda tuhiwai 2012 decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 2nd edition. new york: zed books. somerville, siobhan b. 2000 queering the color line: race and the invention of homosexuality in american culture. durham, n.c.: duke university press. trinh t. minh-ha 1989 woman, native, other: writing postcoloniality and feminism. bloomington: indiana university press. towle, evan b., and lynn m. morgan 2002 “romancing the transgender native: rethinking the use of the ‘third gender’ concept.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 8, no. 4: 469–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8-4-469. vargas, joao 2015 “black lives don’t matter.” in “#blacklivesmatter: anti-black racism, police violence, and resistance,” hot spots series edited by bianca c. williams, cultural anthropology website, june 29. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/695-black-lives-don-t-matter. visweswaran, kamala 1997 “histories of feminist ethnography.” annual review of anthropology 26: 591–621. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.26.1.591. weston, kath 1993 “lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 22: 339–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.002011. wright, michelle m. 2004 becoming black: creating identity in the african diaspora. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. cultural anthropology and the infrastructure of publishing cultural anthropology and the infrastructure of publishing timothy w. elfenbein society for cultural anthropology this essay is based on an interview conducted by matt thompson, portions of which originally appeared on the blog savage minds the week after cultural anthropology relaunched as an open-access journal.1 herein, i elaborate on my original comments to provide a nuts-and-bolts account of what has gone into the journal’s transition. i am particularly concerned to lay bare the publishing side of this endeavor—of what it means for a scholarly society to take on publishing responsibilities—since the challenges of publishing, and the labor and infrastructure involved, are invisible to most authors and readers. matt thompson: when did the society for cultural anthropology (sca) decide to go the open-access route and what was motivating them? tim elfenbein: cultural anthropology was one of the first american anthropological association (aaa) journals to start its own website. kim and mike fortun were responsible for the initial site. they wanted to know what extra materials they could put on a website that would supplement the journal’s articles. that experience helped germinate the idea that there was more that the journal could do itself. the fortuns are also heavily involved in science and technology studies (sts), where discussions about open access have been occurring for a long time.2 when anne allison and charlie piot took over as editors of the journal in 2011, they continued to push for an open-access alternative in our publishing program. although the sca and others had been making the argument for transitioning at least some aaa journals to open access for several years, it was the crow report and survey by the committee on the future of print and electronic publishing that finally provided the impetus for the aaa to look for a test case (crow 2012; nicholas and schmid 2012). in august 2012, the aaa put out a call to all the association’s sections to see if any would be willing to transition their journal to an open-access model. the sca formed a task force to evaluate the aaa’s proposal and the feasibility of shifting the journal. at the time, the sca was the only section ready to make the leap, and i think this is because it had already been thinking seriously about open-access publishing for quite some time (weiss 2014).3 mt: what has the transition to open access meant for the production and organization of the journal? te: from my perspective as the managing editor, the most important change that has occurred in transitioning cultural anthropology to an open-access publication is that the sca is now a publisher. the journal isn’t just open access, it is society published. in other words, in leaving our contract with wiley-blackwell, we have not left publishing. rather, we have become our own publisher. from the point at which the sca made its decision in the spring of 2013, we had a very short amount of time to develop our publishing capacities (i took over the position of managing editor from ali kenner in july, 2013). we are now responsible for a greatly expanded set of tasks, processes, and relationships. in brief, they are as follows: production process: production takes final manuscripts through copyediting, typesetting, proofing, and file conversion, the output of which is finished articles in several file formats (typeset pdf, xml, html). i do some of this labor in house (coordination, file preparation, language quality control) and external vendors take on other tasks (copyediting, page and cover design, typesetting, file conversion, document quality control). a print-on-demand service adds another layer to production, including uploading final files and proofing hard copy. i am responsible for the scheduling and coordination of authors, freelancers, and vendors during the production process. content management: we must create and maintain a file management system and pair it with specific management practices. while the sca has operated its own submission management system since 2008,4 we have expanded our use of open journal systems (ojs) by pushing information about published articles from the submission to the publishing side of the platform. this entails uploading all final article files into the article records and correcting metadata, and then creating issues by assigning article records and structuring a table of contents. we must create and correct records not only for newly published articles but for all of the journal’s back issues up to the november 2013 issue. beyond our content management system, we are also responsible for working with archival services to ensure the preservation of the journal’s content. metadata preparation, editing, and dissemination: once the metadata in our content management system has been edited, updated, and proofed, it needs to be packaged and fed into a number of data streams. these include our website, alerting services, indexers, identifier and citation-linking agencies, and our print-on-demand service. our social media publicity efforts can also be considered as channels for metadata. publishing platform: the platform where the public accesses the journal is the cultural anthropology website, which was designed and developed from scratch and came online in late 2012. the website needs additional developments to improve user experience and to add new features, and it requires ongoing maintenance such as the periodic updating of style sheets, the codebase, or server configurations. we also need to create adequate documentation to prepare for the succession of managing editors and web developers. administration: with every new vendor or service, more work goes into administration. we are now responsible for maintaining relationships with a number of abstracting and indexing services, standards agencies, archives, and production vendors. we must also respond to customer service requests, whether from libraries with questions about the journal or from authors and readers having problems with the website or submission system. the cultural anthropology staff was already responsible for more tasks than usual before we left our publishing arrangement with wiley: as mentioned above, we developed our own submission management system, and we took control of copyediting several years ago because of the poor quality of editing provided by wiley. however, of the areas listed above, wiley took responsibility for the majority of the labor in production, infrastructure, administration, and dissemination. when i started as the managing editor in the summer of 2013, i had seven months to figure out what pieces of infrastructure were needed to publish the journal and how they were going to fit together. what could we do in house and when would we need to go to outside vendors? what needed to be in place for the release of the first issue and what could wait until later? how do we decide what kind of final files we will need and how they can be designed to maximize current and future usability? in designing our xml schema, would there be later consequences if we created a customized document model rather than using the current standard document-type-definition (dtd), such as greater costs to update the files in the future? what would be the translation issues when we make html conversions?5 although it would have been cheaper to forego typesetting, we know a large percentage of readers either print out paper copies of articles or use pdf files when creating their own digital libraries.6 so we want nicely designed pdfs, but also need functional, machine-readable files. figure 1. top portion of the xml file for this article including the document type definition, article definition (with attributes for article type and namespace declarations), journal metadata, and part of the article metadata. figure 2. top portion of the html file for this article including the document type definition, document head (with title metadata and link to cascading style sheet), and the beginning of the document body. then there is the whole publishing infrastructure that circulates metadata about the journal issues among indexers, search engines, library and retail catalogs, and other discovery systems. tapping into this infrastructure entails establishing relationships with standards agencies and commercial indexing firms, and complying with their requirements. we are now dues-paying members of crossref, an organization that assigns and provides the infrastructure to cross-link digital object identifiers (dois).7 our primary goal in obtaining dois for each article is to make sure it can be persistently located, even if its uniform resource locator (url, what is commonly understood as a web address) changes over time.8 having our articles cross-linked with other articles that cite them, however, also plugs our metadata into a network that enhances connections between pieces of scholarship and makes our content more discoverable. getting our data systems up and running was a big part of the journal’s development. figure 3. submission for a digital object identifier (doi). the doi registration agency, crossref, records basic metadata, the identifier character string, and the current uniform resource locator for the resource. beyond the workflow and procedures for producing final documents and metadata, we had to figure out what internal developments were needed for our content management system and reading platform: our ojs installation and the cultural anthropology website. open journal systems is not bad open-source software, but my sense is that its imagination of the basic form of journals, of who might work on them, and of how editorial labor is organized is too inflexible. the system takes some time to learn: users have to overcome its lack of documentation, and to understand its quirks and limitations. the new cultural anthropology website was originally designed to continue playing a supplementary role to the journal, as well as allowing us to experiment with forms of non-peer-reviewed content. when the decision was made that the journal would go open access, suddenly the website was no longer the supplement; it was going to be the reading platform and principle point of distribution. this required us to rethink what would appear online and how it would be organized. the website already contained supplemental pages for most of the articles published during cultural anthropology’s twenty-eight-year history. because we had already put in the labor to produce these pages, our new article–page design could not diverge radically from the underlying data model of the supplemental page. as with any media organization—from publishers to libraries—legacy content places important limitations on what kinds of changes can be made to one’s platforms. cultural anthropology is in a different position than a newly launched journal because we have a large catalog of back content: for example, we must focus more of our development efforts on information architecture, and on searching and browsing functions, which would not be big concerns if we only had a few volumes worth of content. in ten months, we were able to relaunch the journal with the release of the first open-access issue in february 2014. this was an important achievement, but it needs to be put in perspective. in the rush to get our systems and workflows up and running, we had to skimp on certain technology developments and push other important projects down our priority list. some of this leaves us vulnerable to even predictable problems. we do not have an it department supporting us; currently, we have a freelance web developer who has a full-time job and works on the website in his spare time. this means we have a lot less flexibility when problems crop up. for example, there was a typo in the subtitle of one of the articles in the february issue as it appeared on the website. you would think it would be easy to fix one character, but sometimes it isn’t. the way we set up our systems, i place corrected metadata into ojs and then feed that metadata to the website. but we were experiencing problems with the metadata feed from ojs, which made it impossible to make the correction. it took us several days and the intervention of our web developer to fix the typo. if the same problem had occurred before our initial metadata feed to the website, the release of the issue might have been delayed. figure 4. article dashboard on the cultural anthropology website where metadata from ojs is fed. an error in the link between ojs and the website prevented the correction of a typo in the displayed article’s subtitle for several days after the mistake was discovered. this is one of the hardest parts about setting off on your own. when a large commercial press such as wiley adds another journal to its collection, it will in all likelihood already have a well-tested platform to sit on. the cost of building that platform and the rest of its publishing systems is spread across a huge number of journals, which means that the company can afford dedicated technology and infrastructure services. when a large commercial publisher creates or acquires a new journal, adding the journal’s content is relatively easy (although we should not underestimate the labor still required). for the sca, everything is being built anew, and our systems are breaking all the time. it could take us years and a whole lot more investment to fix all the bugs in our systems, and that signals a level of vulnerability we did not have when we were publishing with wiley. it also suggests that large infrastructure projects, like the development of a complex website/reading platform, might require the investment of more than one aaa section. mt: you have made the argument that open-access advocates do not acknowledge that there is this full slate of possible consequences of open-access publishing, which could be good or bad. what were you getting at? te: we have a couple of very particular problems in mind when we look at open access as a solution. it is overwhelmingly focused on access to documents as the main problem. discoverability and persistence are, in my opinion, as great a problem as accessibility. i can put text up on the internet and call it published, but if nobody can find it, does it really matter?9 what if an author cites a document with a link, but then the url changes or the document disappears altogether?10 for some types of writing and informal publishing this might be fine, but the more formal the venue, the more responsibilities a publisher must take on. much of my job is not just figuring out how to display documents online but how information about them is going to circulate, where they will be discovered, how to make sure they have a life beyond their publication date, and the whole infrastructure that supports this. the extent to which cultural anthropology takes on all of these responsibilities will determine whether we are any good at publishing. our level of accessibility to readers is only one measure of the full job of being a publisher. not all pieces of scholarship need the entire range of practices in formal publishing. for good reason, we usually reserve the full treatment, both on the editorial and publishing end, for scholarship that we expect big things from. as long as everyone is aware of the trade-offs, let a thousand publications bloom. my worry about the possible consequences of open-access publishing comes from a sense that our focus is too narrow and our understanding of publishing not deep enough. we are already making trade-offs and compromises, whether we are conscious of them or not. as things currently stand, cultural anthropology is not providing the same level of discoverability as wiley, both in terms of indexing coverage and of our website’s search functionality, and we are more vulnerable to service outages and other significant platform glitches and disruptions. for the moment, the open accessibility of the journal trumps these measures of our quality, but how we design our publishing platforms and documents, the kinds of data management practices we adopt, and our ability to maintain and improve our systems will have long-term consequences. possible outcomes, and strategies for influencing them, can only come to the surface if we start to take the material practices of publishing more seriously. my hope is to encourage the more wide-eyed open-access advocates to curtail their idealism: not their ethically driven ideals for a more equitable scholarly communication system, but the notion that publishing trades in ideas instead of in documents, data, and the infrastructure through which they travel.11 a critical anthropology of scholarly communication, along the lines envisioned by jason jackson and ryan anderson (2014), would need to tackle the materiality of scholarly publishing if it is going to help fill this significant lacuna in our understanding of knowledge production. mt: how are you approaching the problem of archival storage? one hundred years from now, print is going to be accessible, but not necessarily a pdf. te: the nice thing about a print book or journal is that once it is printed, it is in a pretty good archival state—the object is going to be around for a while—whereas with digital files, there is no end to maintenance. knowing that maintenance is going to be an ongoing issue, we have to design our documents, data, and systems to be as easily upgradable as possible for the day when we update the codebase of our website, or the next version of xml comes down the line. there is an enormous amount of labor required every time you upgrade or move your data to a new system, and the labor needed grows in proportion to the size of your catalog of content. i was lucky enough to arrive at the sca after the new website had been launched and ali kenner and her team of interns had moved all of the content from the old website (kenner 2014). we will only see how well we were able to incorporate data portability into the design of the current website when the journal inevitably moves to another home. i have had more of a hand in the specifications for the designs of our documents. the whole point of using a standardized xml schema was to increase the chances that there will be more, and cheaper, options for upgrading when needed. our archival strategy is not based on the pdf files readers see but on our xml files, because the machine-readable xml can produce new galleys or new html files in the future. we are going to be updating files from here to eternity. archiving means making sure our content lives on, no matter what happens to our organization. we are very fortunate to be partners with the duke university libraries, who host our ojs installation and help with archiving.12 we are already looking into what archiving has been done in the two primary archiving services for electronic journals, clockss and portico. these are services that accept a journal’s files and keep them either in a dark archive that would open if something were to happen to one’s organization (publisher ceases operation) or in the case of an event that affects availability (servers go down).13 most of the content of cultural anthropology is in one or the other of these archives. we will be filling holes in past coverage and making submissions for our new issues. when planning for the creation of new content, one has to plan for its preservation as well. mt: the back catalog goes back twenty-eight years, but only the previous ten years’ worth of content is going to be made available on a permanent basis. what about the rest of it? te: our next big project is getting that back content ready and onto our website. the aaa owns the pdfs and the final files of everything that has been published from their section journals. what wiley delivered to us this fall was pdf files for the entire run of the journal, and xml files back to 2008. getting back content ready means adding it to our database in the correct way, which takes several steps. from 2008 through 2013, we were using ojs as a submissions management system, not as a content management system, which is a much bigger operation. the problem with this shift is that much of the data in our records has not been corrected. by the time an essay has gone through the review and publication process to become a published article, the title may have changed, the keywords may have changed, the abstract may have been edited, the author may have moved to a new institution. we never had a reason to go back into ojs to update this information. a significant amount of labor has been expended on perfecting that data, and it ended up on the pdf and in wiley’s content management system. we must take that corrected information and get it back into our system. when we get to articles published before 2008, there are no records in ojs, so we will need to create these and enter the metadata from scratch. one of the problems with ojs is that it is not designed for this type of operation, as it deviates from the typical submission–review–edit–publish workflow, which means that we will need to create new submissions for articles already published. only after we have created and corrected all the article records, uploaded the final files, and built journal issues from them will we be able to publish the content on our website. the aaa made the agreement with wiley that the sca would be allowed to publish ten years of back content. that is what we are aiming for. once the content is up on our website, we will see what we can do with the rest of the files. i do not know if we are going to be able to post more or not. although we have the pdfs back to 1986, it is unlikely that we will be able to create xml and html files for all of these volumes. depending on the cost and complexity, we may not have html pages for anything earlier than 2008. we would have to use old, ugly pdfs to create new xml, and the files would undoubtedly require a lot of quality control—people proofing documents—to fix. mt: with the transition to open access, have there been thoughts about changing the copyright, maybe going to copyleft or a creative commons model? te: i know that the initial push was for a creative commons license. my sense is that the aaa is not quite ready for this yet. up until the week before the relaunch, we were trying to figure out our copyright language. all of the content on our website falls under a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, share-alike, license. the journal, however, does not use a creative commons license. the aaa still wants to retain copyright.14 for me, there is an open question here: is there a value for us, as an association, to keep our content together through copyright? i would be a little worried if each journal had a different copyright regime, but perhaps my worries are misplaced. this is a discussion for the members of the association. i was happy, however, with the language that we got for what readers can do with our articles, as well as with the expanded rights granted in our new author agreement. both strike me as being more expansive than previously. our move to open access is requiring the staff of the aaa to think through the implications of this transition, to rethink what might have been settled practices. but we still have a long way to go before these questions are settled. mt: are you going to offer print-on-demand copies of the journal, and how is this going to be priced? te: my research into print-on-demand (pod) services has been extremely interesting, taking me into completely new areas of the publishing business. it is worth pointing out that the emergence of print-on-demand is a hugely important development in scholarly publishing, lest anyone think the internet is the whole story. we were looking for a vendor that could provide a certain package of services: not just a machine to print copies of the journal but a good interface for uploading our cover and pdf files; a service that would distribute our metadata to all of the important retail, wholesale, and library subscription-agent catalogs; and a service with the ability to sell and ship books to as many parts of the world as possible. the major pod vendors are overwhelmingly oriented to the needs of self-publishing book authors who have very different requirements and concerns than a scholarly society with an established journal, which added to the complexity of finding the right vendor. the two viable candidates for pod services were amazon’s createspace and lightning source, which is part of ingram, the largest book distributor in the world.15 we signed a contract with lightning source. our goal is to make print issues of cultural anthropology as globally available as possible because many libraries in south and east asia still want print, and we have also received some requests from european libraries. the print-on-demand agreements are quite complicated: we signed contracts with ingram printers in the united states, united kingdom, and australia, plus another contract for independent (non-ingram) printers in brazil and germany. the australian printer cannot sell anywhere but australia and new zealand, so if a chinese or indonesian library orders an issue of the journal, it will be sent from the u.k. and we are set up to sell individual issues, not yearly subscriptions that would automatically be printed and shipped, because we would have had to maintain subscriber rolls, accept payments, and coordinate with ingram—tasks that are beyond our administrative capacity. all this takes more labor. so pod gets very complicated, but we are wading in. the goal of the sca is not to earn a lot of money from print: we mainly want to make sure issues are affordable for those who want them. the trick is pricing issues at a level where we can sell enough copies to cover the labor and material costs of running the service, and to do so with little initial sense of demand. our retail price will be $12.95. we hope that sca members who liked the print version of cultural anthropology will be able to afford purchasing pod issues. we understand that paper has affordances that electronic documents do not, and we want to make sure people can get the medium they want. mt: is there going to be a move to find other external funding sources? te: at our spring meeting, we will be convening another committee to do some strategic planning. we need to reevaluate the costs of publishing the journal and to weigh our options for possible revenue sources. at the moment, we have our financial reserves from the money we received from the wiley deal and two main sources of revenue: our continued share of the revenues from anthrosource, which is not insignificant, and membership fees for our section. my sense is that the membership fees will become more important, and we stand to lose some members because print copies of cultural anthropology are no longer a benefit. another small stream of revenue comes through our submission policy: if an author is a member of the aaa but not a member of the sca, he or she must become a member of the sca to submit to our journal. if an author is not a member of the aaa and wants to submit to the journal, he or she must pay a submission fee of $21 (half the cost of an sca membership). we put this submission policy in place in part because we are trying to communicate to authors that we are no longer supported as we previously were by libraries through subscriptions: authors benefit directly from the activities of the journal, and we feel it is reasonable that they should be asked to help sustain us. if authors and readers understand what we are doing as a public good, then they need to support it. i use the word support, taking this directly from national public radio, which is asking for private support of a public good. the sca is essentially saying to authors, readers, institutions, everyone, “if you think this channel of communications is valuable, you need to figure out how to support it.”16 we will need to look for other sources of revenue as well, whether grants, advertisements on the website, or through more assistance from departments, libraries, and university presses. no matter what, we are going to have to find more support to make this journal viable in the future. notes acknowledgments i thank anne allison, greg downey, mary murrell, charlie piot, and the three anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their suggestions and efforts at refining the text of this article. i am also very grateful to those who worked to improve the material form the article eventually took, and the infrastructure that supports its distribution: petra dreiser, an extraordinary copyeditor who i have worked with for several years, but always over others’ words; chris cott, daniel grossberg, and the talented team at grapevine publishing services; and ryan schenk and paolo mangiafico, our web developer and ojs administrator, respectively. 1. see elfenbein and thompson 2014. my sincere thanks to matt for the interview and for providing me with the transcript of our conversation. 2. see the fortuns’ thought experiment on the viability of making cultural anthropology an open-access publication (fortun and fortun 2012). 3. see ali kenner’s (2014) firsthand account of the developments that lead to the journal’s transition. 4. the fortuns chose not to use the submission management system offered to the aaa journals by wiley. see fortun and fortun 2012, and kenner 2014. 5. for an excellent introduction to document markup languages in publishing, see kasdorf 2003. 6. although i have taken many of willinsky, garnett, and wong’s (2012) useful suggestions for improving the design and usability of pdf articles, i do not share their incredulity over some readers’ preference for paper copies of articles. see sellen and harper (2003) for the relative affordances of paper and digital versions of the same documents. 7. for more on crossref, see the organization’s website, http://www.crossref.org. 8. see davidson and kimberly (1998) for a description of the doi system, and lyons (2005) for an overview of the problem of persistent identification of scholarship on the web. 9. discoverability is nicely defined by roger schonfeld as “the description or measure of an item’s level of successful integration into appropriate infrastructure maximizing its likelihood of being found by appropriate users” (quoted in somerville and conrad 2014; emphasis removed). 10. there are at least two issues here: whether a digital document continues to exist in some form online, and whether it can be located. on the problem of url half-lives and citation link–rot, see lyons (2005), dimitrova and bugeja (2007), and sellitto (2004). to guard against these two problems, i have created webcite submissions for my citations to content in blogs and other web publications without clearly evident archiving practices. this is a citing-author-initiated, as opposed to publisher-initiated, method of archiving web content that can be used when a relatively more persistent type of document (i.e., formally published article) cites relatively more ephemeral documents (i.e., blog entries). see the webcite website, http://www.webcitation.org. 11. michael silverstein and greg urban (1996, 2n1) argue that “to confuse the mediating artifact and its mode of production (‘inscription’) for a text and the sociosemiotic process that produce it perpetuates a particular fetishized substitution.” this insight is as important for the material production of scholars’ own publications as it is for their analyses of the textual practices of ethnographic interlocutors. there are a number of ways of focusing on the materiality of the artifacts and infrastructures of scholarly communication. for example, see frohmann (2004) and hull (2012) for methods of approaching the materiality of scientific and bureaucratic documents, respectively; coleman and brunton (2014) for the overlapping analysis of hardware, users, and discourse in information and media infrastructure; downey (2014) for ways of uncovering and understanding information labor; and elfenbein (2013) for a material semiotic approach to the creation and use of metadata. 12. see mangiafico and smith (2014) for a description of the duke university libraries support of cultural anthropology, and of the evolving role of libraries in scholarly publishing more generally. 13. for clockss, see http://www.clockss.org. for portico, see http://www.portico.org. 14. see the copyright information page on the cultural anthropology website, http://culanth.org/pages/copyright. 15. this should disabuse anyone who thinks we have returned scholarly publishing to its craft origins: we are more reliant than ever on multinational corporations to publish the journal, even as we have left our relationship with one corporation, wiley-blackwell. among the services we rely on are google’s suite of productivity apps and analytics, amazon cloud servers, and facebook and twitter social media platforms. 16. see my comments to joseph esposito’s (2014) blog post about cultural anthropology. references brunton, finn, and gabriella coleman 2014 “closer to the metal.” in media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, edited by tarleton gillespie, pablo j. boczkowski, and kirsten a. foot, 77–97. cambridge, mass.: mit press. crow, raym 2012 “american anthropological association: publishing program analysis,” version 1.3, september 26. report prepared by the chain bridge group for the aaa. davidson, lloyd a., and douglas kimberly 1998 “digital object identifiers: promise and problems for scholarly publishing.” journal of electronic publishing 4, no. 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0004.203. dimitrova, daniela v., and michael bugeja 2007 “the half-life of internet references cited in communication journals.” new media & society 9, no. 5: 811–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1461444807081226. downey, greg 2014 “making media work: time, space, identity, and labor in the analysis of information and communication infrastructures.” in media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, edited by tarleton gillespie, pablo j. boczkowski, and kirsten a. foot, 141–65. cambridge, mass.: mit press. elfenbein, timothy w. 2013 “metadata pragmatics: toward a unified semiotic framework.” master’s thesis. university of north carolina, chapel hill. available through the carolina digital repository, https://cdr.lib.unc.edu. elfenbein, timothy w., and matt thompson 2014 “inside baseball with tim elfenbein, managing editor for cultural anthropology.” savage minds, february 11. http://savageminds.org/2014/02/11/inside-baseball-with-tim-elfenbein-managing-editor-of-cultural-anthropology. archived by webcite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6nsh1plej. esposito, joseph 2014 “when professional society publishers take an independent path.” scholarly kitchen, february 3. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/02/03/when-professional-society-publishers-take-an-indpendent-path. archived by webcite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6nhrlgypw. fortun, kim, and mike fortun 2012 “liberating cultural anthropology? a thought experiment.” anthropologies, no. 12. http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2012/03/liberating-cultural-anthropology.html. archived by webcite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6nshuuhyk. frohmann, bernd 2004 deflating information: from science studies to documentation. toronto: university of toronto press. hull, matthew 2012 government of paper: the materiality of bureaucracy in urban pakistan. berkeley: university of california press. jackson, jason baird, and ryan anderson 2014 “anthropology and open access.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 236–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.04. kasdorf, william e. 2003 “markup: xml and related technologies.” in the columbia guide to digital publishing, edited by william e. kasdorf, 65–154. new york: columbia university press. kenner, ali 2014 “designing digital infrastructure: four considerations for scholarly publishing projects.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 264–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.05. lyons, susan 2005 “persistent identification of electronic documents and the future of footnotes.” law library journal 97, no. 4: 681–94. mangiafico, paolo, and kevin l. smith 2014 “reason, risk, and reward: models for libraries and other stakeholders in an evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 216–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.03. nichols, deborah, and oona schmid 2012 “the state of the aaa publishing program: what we have learned and next steps.” memorandum to aaa members, october 12. sellen, abigail j., and richard h. r. harper 2003 the myth of the paperless office. cambridge, mass.: mit press. sellitto, carmine 2004 “web-cites in scholarly articles: towards an evaluation framework.” journal of information science 30, no. 6: 484–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0165551504047822. silverstein, michael, and greg urban 1996 “the natural history of discourse.” in natural histories of discourse, edited by michael silverstein and greg urban, 1–17. chicago: university of chicago press. somerville, mary m., and lettie y. conrad 2014 “collaborative improvements in the discoverability of scholarly content: accomplishments, aspirations, and opportunities.” sage white paper, january 14. http://www.sagepub.com/repository/binaries/pdf/improvementsindiscoverability.pdf. weiss, brad 2013 “cultural anthropology will go open access in 2014.” cultural anthropology website, march 11. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/142-cultural-anthropology-will-go-open-access-in-2014. 2014 “opening access: publics, publication, and a path toward inclusion.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 1: 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.1.01. willinsky, john, alex garnett, and angela pan wong 2012 “refurbishing the camelot of scholarship: how to improve the digital contribution of the pdf research article.” journal of electronic publishing 15, no. 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0015.102. viral speed viral speed: infrastructure, connectivity, ontogeny; or, notes on the molecular epidemiology of epidemics vinh-kim nguyen the graduate institute, geneva http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6959-5327 an anthropology of speed is drawn to the experience of speed, as was noted in the introduction to this openings collection, focusing on contemporary forms of acceleration and the foreclosures that result. in this article, i suggest that an anthropology of speed must attend to infrastructures of connection, and to speed as what transforms randomness into facticity. taking a cue from the semantic clustering of acceleration, speed, and epidemics, and attendant notions of things “going viral,” my proposal stems from a consideration of viral speed. at the most fundamental level, viral speed is expressed as the number of infections generated over time, such that a fast epidemic like ebola infects many people in a short period of time, compared to a slow epidemic like hiv. speed is a product of connectivity. frequent users of urban transit, railway systems, or airlines know that the fastest route from point a to point b is not the shortest one, but the one that takes routes served at the highest frequency, ensuring shorter waiting times and mitigating the impact of missed connections. molecular epidemiology shows that the speed of viral outbreaks also depends on network effects, suggesting that speed is a function of what connects us. molecular epidemiology makes visible an ontology of speed, of how life is connection and connection makes space and time matter: how life is speed. viral sociality foreshadows human sociality, at least in the age where human connection increasingly relies on technology. the molecular epidemiology of viral outbreaks illuminates speed as the product of infrastructures of connection. let me begin with what is by now the most notorious fast epidemic: the massive ebola outbreak that struck west africa in 2014 and continues to (slowly) sputter on. more than ten thousand died from the horrific epidemic of hemorrhagic fever caused by a highly infectious virus—so infectious that even fleeting contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, or their cadaver, was enough to be contaminated. the virus, moreover, killed up to 90 percent of those infected (although actual figures may be lower). remarkably, it now appears that this unprecedented, and unpredicted, epidemic, drawn out of a science-fiction scenario, stemmed from one single event: an event that led the virus to be transmitted from an infected bat to a young boy (baize et al. 2014; carroll et al. 2015; mate et al. 2015). this remarkable assertion stems from molecular analyses of the epidemic, and points to how infrastructures of connection that enable speed also stabilize stochastic events. molecular epidemiology is a comparatively young science, but one that has come to play a growing role in understanding epidemics. as a science, molecular epidemiology became possible when the ability to sequence the genomes of microorganisms became harnessed to growing computational power from the mid-1990s onward. this allowed the genetic sequences of individual viruses and bacteria to be compared to each other. the degree of difference—or divergence—between genomes allows an analysis of viral kinship. just as siblings share a hierarchically closer common parent than cousins, the more two organisms resemble each other, the more recently they diverged from a common ancestor. in this way family trees—or phylogenies—of organisms can be constructed, all the way back to a common ancestor or founder. random mutations occurring as microorganisms replicate are the engine of genetic diversity. mutations that compromise fitness are choked off, kept from reproducing, as hostile conditions—such as host immune systems—pick them off. molecular phylogenies are increasingly called upon to track the spread of epidemics, illuminate transmission dynamics, and pinpoint epidemic origins (see georges-courbot et al. 1997 for the earliest example with respect to ebola). yet the assumptions embedded in the construction of molecular family trees have been called into question. the first of these is the assumption of homogenous evolutionary time, the so-called molecular clock, such that mutations occur at a steady rate over time. this stands at odds with theories of quantum evolution, which hold that rates of evolution can vary significantly, particularly in times of accelerated environmental change such as those often associated with the emergence of epidemics. another assumption is that bursts of differentiation that lead to the founding of new family lines are associated with specific real-world events, such as instances of cross-species transmission known as zoonotic events. most epidemics are believed to originate when a microorganism crosses the species barrier, leaving an animal host reservoir (such as the chimpanzee for hiv’s simian ancestor, or bats for ebola virus) to infect humans. zoonotic events are sporadic, occur with variable frequency, and do not always trigger an epidemic. when human/animal interactions are dense and sustained, as in the case of poultry and pig farming in southeast asia, zoonotic events are regular occurrences and add a genetic froth to the genetic pool. within this broth viruses can crystallize and sweep across the globe, as in the case of the annual influenza epidemic. bursts of microbial evolution can be interpolated from the microbial family tree, and correlations can be attempted with actual real-world events such as a cross-species transmission, a climatic event, or a shift in host-population dynamics. controversy over using molecular phylogenetic analyses to infer epidemic origins is best exemplified in the debates around the origins of hiv, which began when a british journalist, edward hooper, argued that contaminated batches of oral polio vaccine inadvertently spread the virus in the 1950s: a hypothesis that has since been largely discredited by molecular epidemiologists who instead point to rapid urbanization, railways, and sex-ratio imbalances that shifted sexual networks (e.g., faria et al. 2014). as an hiv physician, i initially became familiar with molecular epidemiology in the early 2000s when analyses of hiv sequences were used to construct family trees of the virus in the debate over the origins of hiv. phylogenies were instrumental in adjudicating disputes relating to the origin of this epidemic. branch points in family trees identify moments of genetic exuberance (the equivalent to an epidemic of outmarriage in a previously endogamous village) that found new populations appearing as bristly clusters in the family trees. by the early 2000s, once genotyping of patients’ viruses became routine to detect drug-resistance mutations, i would analyze viral genomes daily as part of my clinical job. epidemiologists assembled genomes into phylogenies to inform public health efforts. they used these family trees to pinpoint clusters of transmission (visible in the virtual space of the phylogenetic tree) and thereby provide clues as to where transmission might be occurring in real space and time. returning to ebola, the ability to map the epidemic spread was of crucial significance in a rapidly spreading and lethal epidemic that threatened, at one point, to consume large swaths of west africa. the tipping point was the epidemic in liberia’s capital city, monrovia, in the summer of 2014. there, the epidemic spread out of control, hospitals were overrun, and patients died waiting to get in. bodies were left on the street in scenes that shook the director of the centers for disease control and prevention, thomas frieden, when he came to visit in august 2014 (frieden et al. 2014). at the time, in the face of this terrifying, unforeseen, and out-of-control epidemic, urgent questions included those that could only be answered by molecular epidemiologists: namely, was the epidemic the result of an isolated incident, or had the virus somehow mutated and as a result become far more dangerous than previously thought? the need for molecular epidemiological data raised operational and epistemological issues from the get-go. operationally, highly contagious blood samples had to be drawn from seriously ill patients stricken with ebola and transported to laboratories in europe with adequate biosecurity and molecular technological capacity. epistemologically, molecular epidemiology offered clues—and raised new questions—about how a previously sporadic and rural epidemic, which had until then only ventured once outside of west africa, had triggered a massive international epidemic that at one point burned uncontrollably in monrovia. all the viruses sequenced in this ebola epidemic share a common ancestor. the phylogenies point back to a single event, perhaps a bat bite or a mango contaminated with an infected bat’s saliva or urine and inadvertently consumed, which would have been responsible for an unprecedented epidemic. how could one random event trigger an epidemic? i have heard many explanations in the course of fieldwork in the region over the past two years. all three countries affected by the epidemic are among the poorest in africa, and indeed the world; two have been ravaged by civil wars. reconstruction in the wake of these wars added infrastructure—notably, in sierra leone, a network of roads that made previously treacherous journeys a thing of the past, and spurred trade. according to this line of reasoning, economic growth intensified travel and allowed the infection to spread along social and economic exchange routes. other explanations, relating to deforestation and ecological changes due to climate change (leroy et al. 2004), seem less promising. yet what each of these explanations pointed to was the articulation of infrastructure, connectedness, and (viral) speed. microbial phylogenies map space and time. space is plotted out in terms of genetic distance, and it assumes some approximation of real-world geographic and biological distance. distantly related microorganisms are unlikely to be found in the same hosts or in those from whom they acquired the infection; they are found in individuals separated by a longer chain of transmission than close relatives, whose more recent common ancestor was not too far back in time and not too far back in terms of transmission. in other words, as a microorganism moves from host to host, it mutates. mutations give the bearer an advantage in response to changing hosts whose immune systems may be more efficient than those of other hosts (at killing certain microbial offspring or variants). genetic sequences archive space and time. or, alternatively, they are the materialization of speed, space over time. i argue that three ontologies of speed are revealed. the first expresses speed as change, as mutation. faster transmission materializes as more mutations, more change. the second links change to infrastructures of connection—roads, commerce, and certainly the internet. the third comprises the sedimentation of speed in viral genomes, snapshots of mutation that constitute stills of ceaseless viral change. i have always been fascinated with these molecular diagrams and their ability to map previously invisible social relations. hiv is sexually transmitted, which makes it complicated to gather information about transmission networks. reconstituting the social networks along which hiv spreads requires informants to disclose the identities of sexual partners, so that their sexual partners can in turn be identified—something people are often unwilling or unable to do. to research this, prior consent of sexual partners would be required. as a result, the information obtained through consent would be unrepresentative of the broader pool of sexual partners and of little scientific interest. molecular epidemiology provides another approach. as an epidemiologist once told me, “viruses don’t lie,” and molecular methods allow sexual networks to be elucidated as never before. the closer two viruses are (from two patients) the more “linked” they are—the viruses of two sexual partners are more alike than the viruses of their partners’ partners’ partners. molecular epidemiology plots individual viruses sampled from patients by genetic distance, which corresponds to the likelihood that patients are part of the same chain of transmission. phylogeny recapitulates kinship. proximity translates into descent. such studies have been used to identify so-called clusters of transmission: individuals who share a nearly identical virus and therefore most likely acquired it from each other. in a fascinating and seminal study, a group of sociologists used another method to reveal sexual networks without requiring informants’ disclosure of the names of their sexual partners (bearman, moody, and stovel 2004). in a suburban colorado school, investigators used a computerized questionnaire to ask students to identify other students they had had sex with from a list of those attending the high school. the computer program anonymized their choices, and generated a map of the sexual network. the map looks a bit like one would imagine an airline network map: spokes branch out from a series of linked hubs. in the article, the authors refer to this as a spanning tree network, referring to how tree branches and roots can entangle while trunks line the side of a road. (in this case, the trunks are the interhub links.) three findings emerge from this remarkable study. the first, which confirms other studies of sexual networks but also of other types of linkage such as internet searches, suggests that a lucky few are hyperconnected (i.e., have huge numbers of partners), the majority have a much smaller number, and an unlucky few have very little. this corresponds to common sense and, indeed, the normal distribution found with many naturally occurring phenomena. when translated into a network, however, this logarithmically increases the degree of connection and potential exposure of individuals the closer they get to the hubs of the sexual network. the second relates to the structure of the network. since choice of sexual partners is not random, the authors tried to identify rules that would predict the structure they found. they found one, which they called the yuck factor: partners did not hook up with ex-partners’ current partners’ former partners. what is striking here is that this is a kinship rule. in lévi-straussian terms, this is a rule that generates exogamy. the third is a practical consequence: just by diminishing by a small number the amount of sexual partners, the sexual network disaggregates, isolating hubs from each other. small changes in a network’s connectivity can transform its overall structure. molecular epidemiology reveals a similar picture, with bursts of viral evolution suggesting highly efficient transmission hubs (or “super-spreaders”) that push out large numbers of viruses, which then end up languishing in the evolutionary dead ends of sexual monogamy. for many years, i presented these studies to make a case for social structure, in the sense first advocated by émile durkheim. contrary to claude lévi-strauss’s view, the formal properties of social structure are neither linguistic nor a property of mind; they reflect the ontology of connection. even in what would seem to be the most intimate and individualized sphere—our choice of sexual partners—we obey algorithmic rules, a powerful argument that the social is structured independently of individual volition or agency. in this article, however, i have explored another angle. i have argued that speed is also an ontology of change, of viral mutation that functions as the irreducible element of speed. this is what enables speed to be mapped in molecular epidemiologies, which constitute sedimented residues of ceaseless mutation, archived in viral genomes. rather than the inability to imagine a future, in this case speed is instead the ceaseless possibility offered by the random mutation of life. references baize, sylvain, et al. 2014 “emergence of zaire ebola virus disease in guinea.” new england journal of medicine 371: 1418–25. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa1404505. bearman, peter s., james moody, and katherine stovel 2004 “chains of affection: the structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks.” american journal of sociology 110, no. 1: 44–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/386272. carroll, miles w., et al. 2015 “temporal and spatial analysis of the 2014–2015 ebola virus outbreak in west africa.” nature 524: 97–101. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14594. faria, nuno r., et al. 2014 “the early spread and epidemic ignition of hiv-1 in human populations.” science 346, no. 6205: 56–61. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1256739. frieden, thomas r., inger damon, beth p. bell, thomas kenyon, and stuart nichol 2014 “ebola 2014—new challenges, new global response and responsibility.” new england journal of medicine 371: 1177–80. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1409903. georges-courbot, marie-claude, et al. 1997 “isolation and phylogenetic characterization of ebola viruses causing different outbreaks in gabon.” emerging infectious diseases 3, no. 1: 59–62. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid0301.970107. leroy, eric m., et al. 2004 “multiple ebola virus transmission events and rapid decline of central african wildlife.” science 303, no. 5656: 387–90. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1092528. mate, suzanne e., et al. 2015 “molecular evidence of sexual transmission of ebola virus.” new england journal of medicine 373: 2448–54. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa1509773. ethnography and theory of the signature in physics ethnography and theory of the signature in physics arpita roy laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, collège de france the lord whose oracle is at delphi neither reveals nor conceals, simply announces by a sign. —heraclitus ending a decades-long search for the elusive higgs particle, physicists at the conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire, or cern, in switzerland, announced the news of its historic discovery on july 4, 2012. after analyzing trillions of proton-to-proton collisions in experiments conducted at cern’s large hadron collider (lhc), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, two independent teams of physicists confirmed spotting the higgs, a particle postulated back in 1964 as a possible explanation for one of the most fundamental questions in physics: what is the origin of mass, or matter, in the universe? this extraordinary confirmation demonstrates the prerequisite and ultimate measure of a physical science in the inescapable givenness of things. as césar gómez, a string theorist and one of my more reflexive informants, once remarked, “physicists are platonist only in credo. in actuality, they hold an absolute trust in the reality of things.”1 under what conditions does an experiment disclose the reality of things? i examine this question by way of the commonly used term signature in experimental physics. characteristic patterns of decay formed by particles subsequent to collisions, such as a higgs boson decaying into two energetic photons, are termed signatures and constitute the chief unit of discovery in particle physics. this is a preliminary definition whose detailed exposition i will take up later. for now my concern is to introduce the notion of a signature and how it anchors the indisputable reality of things in science. but to begin with, is it not a little paradoxical to approach things through signs, or the material through the mental? in positivistic thought, nothing is more radical than the opposition of things to signs. things are concrete, exemplified by a materiality—or to use hegel’s expression, immediacy—whereas signs are pure values, arbitrarily generated and differentially interpreted (cassirer 1957). the paradox of the physics signature is that it is at once a thing and a sign, or a fact and a value. the lhc sees roughly 600 million proton-to-proton collisions per second. but the bare fact of a collision tells us nothing because it means nothing. it is the attribution of meaning—as a signal—to the fact of a collision that makes it decisive. here meaning is not an outward garb subsequently added to a bare fact. rather, in the very identification of a collision (fact) there lies suppressed an evaluation that inflects it with purpose and significance (value). to regard a pair of photons as a conclusive signal of a higgs particle, or high-energy muons as a signature for dark matter, constitutes a mode of recognition involving two elements—thing and sign—that are so completely taken up into each other that although they can be identified as different in reflection, they participate intrinsically together. not like anything that science can describe, the signature of physics revels both in being itself (thing) and something other than itself (sign), and this bipolar orientation shifts modern metaphysics into a completely new light. underlying the investigation is an attempt to raise the signature from the interstices of the dichotomy of thing and sign to an existence as an autonomous and subversive element in a semiotic triad. at a time when we are revisiting perplexing questions and envisioning new elements of a postconstructivist anthropology (kirksey and helmreich 2010), we may confidently give form to a nondualistic mode of inquiry that regards the universe not from the standpoint of things or signs but from that of relations. subordinate to no other aim save mediation, the postulate of relations expresses a powerful intellectual orientation. as numerous contemporary works attest, the overwhelming need to find relations between humans and nonhumans has led to the creation of novel non-dichotomous concepts such as cyborgs, hybrids, or assemblages in rethinking much of the work accomplished in the natural sciences (haraway 1991; latour 1993; rabinow 2003). in the dispensation of emerging new sciences, the inquiries are distinguished for dispelling the illusion of pure categories like the biological, the social, the material, and so forth (franklin 2003). varied in their focus, these approaches hold in common an emphasis on the emergence of objects, on how these take on fluid avatars and enter new configurations (fischer 2003). the path here takes me slightly away from these recent developments. for in this rapid survey, i should like to point out one force that decisively governs the trajectory of relations. the links connecting heterogeneous objects, events, or practices are principally observed to follow a logic of instrumentality and contingency. paul rabinow and gaymon bennett (2012, 7) note, “the dominant mode of rationality and purpose guiding the life sciences today is instrumental.” moving away from “the imaginary desire of historical narration for coherence, integrity, totality, and closure, … we are currently witnessing a lively debate concerning the contingent, contaminated, local and situated making of science” (rheinberger 1997, 140). donna haraway (1997, 113) has suggested that the commitment “after the implosions of technoscience requires immersion in the work of materializing new tropes in an always contingent practice of grounding or worlding.” a critical evaluation of contemporary technoscience, however, remains incomplete if we grasp the element of correspondence of nature and culture, or human and nonhuman, only in contingent practices or instrumental action. it remains one-sided because the strength of the relation derives not from within, but must be sought from the outside—the context—of motivations, which makes it provisional or partial (strathern 1991). the problem most intriguing to me are the questions found in émile durkheim’s (1965) framework, namely, (1) how concepts are forms of symbolic classification, and (2) what gives them their necessary or compulsory character. durkheim clarifies that the importance of conceptual associations is “not to facilitate action, but to advance understanding. … the australian does not divide the universe between the totems of his tribe with a view to regulating his conduct or even to justify his practice, it is because, the idea of the totem being cardinal for him, he is under a necessity to place everything that he knows in relation to it” (durkheim and mauss 1963, 81–82). the evaluation of the physics signature is a foil for considering in a comprehensive way durkheim’s insistence on concepts as instruments of knowledge that reveal necessary interconnections of mind and nature. based on two and a half years of fieldwork at the lhc particle accelerator complex at cern and building off a rich ethnographic data set comprising close interactions with more than a hundred physicists and engineers, the present essay probes the indissoluble coalescence of fact and value in the notion of the physics signature. this unity will be approached first in the material culture of the laboratory to elaborate key elements of instrumentation in relation to the production of signatures. the second section, with its emphasis on interpretation and analysis, will outline how signs provide a way of determining the factual in experimental physics. the chief contribution of the following section is to make explicit the kinds of reasoning and negotiations through which the form of a signature manifests. at this juncture i arrive at the core of what i seek to inquire: dissecting the internal unity of the signature from the point of view of its adequacy or efficacy and examining the relevance of formal theories by ferdinand de saussure or charles s. peirce in considering “natural signs.” the essay ends with an appeal to the realm of relations, which serves to distinguish the activity of meaning and form—as much as mass or momentum—intrinsic to physics, as well as the more provocative problem of how necessary consequences follow from contextual signs. my ethnographic attention dovetails with rabinow’s (2003) “concept-centered” approach. the physics community routinely uses the term signature to identify events of importance, such as the recent discovery of the higgs particle. still lacking, however, is an analytical discussion of what the general concept entails. the demand for such a discussion involving a leading physical science becomes especially alluring when we learn that “the concept of signature disappears from western science with the advent of the enlightenment” (agamben 2009, 68). re-emerging in the most exact of all post-enlightenment sciences, this remarkable concept provides, as i aim to show, the means and material by which an experimental science gives expression to the secrets of the physical world, where it shows a universal splendor and simultaneously exhibits a concrete and fastidious logic when its source is disclosed in human thought. to get to both these aspects, the material culture of the laboratory forms the indispensable starting point for our discussion. material culture of the laboratory amid much fanfare and publicity, the first beam of protons went into circulation in the large hadron collider on september 10, 2008, at 10:28 a.m. it was a singular beam sent at injection energy of 450 gigaelectron volt (gev), steered around the full twenty-seven kilometers of the accelerator. although there were no collisions at the time, the event of the first beam generated considerable excitement at cern. crowds of physicists stood glued to the monitors watching the first operational lhc beam go around the accelerator. a little later, at lunch, i ran into michael doser, an antimatter experimentalist and then deputy director of the cern physics division. he asked me rather sarcastically, “so how does the first step in the social construction of the higgs appear?” doser’s provocative comment meant to indicate the spuriousness of the claim of the social construction of nature when faced with its tangible materiality. like most particle physicists, he was aware of andrew pickering’s (1984) book, or certainly of its title, constructing quarks. doser’s remark that theories of physics, which may well be social constructions, are materially constraining (and pickering’s work hardly ignores materiality or experimental reality) serves as a reminder of the tension between the physical and the human sciences that continues to exert an uneasy pressure (weinberg 2001). the tension becomes clear when we examine how the physical component, like that of beams or collisions, is connected to the human element, of computations or calculations, say, and how the two simultaneously remain distinct. in the physical register, the instrument looms large. built at a staggering cost of 3.5 billion swiss francs, spread over fifteen years, the lhc is the highest-energy particle accelerator in the world. at a record energy of 14 trillion electron volts, two counter-rotating proton beams are made to collide head-on with each other every twenty-five nanoseconds (ns). at four specified points of collision, detectors record the “data,” or the product ensuing from the collisions. the site of each detector forms a distinct experiment pursuing specific physics goals. the two large experiments, based on general-purpose detectors, are atlas and cms, designed to investigate the widest range of physics discoveries, whereas lhcb and alice are specialized experiments that delve closely into the areas of flavor physics and heavy ions, respectively. on the human side reside two elements of utmost importance: trigger and analysis. to obtain maximally “interesting” or atypical physics interactions, special parameters are used to make a selection. this selection is called a “trigger,” which assorts events with a bias, for example, a muon trigger would select events from collisions containing muons. this element of selection is vitally important because most of the particle interactions are considered “junk,” since physicists have viewed these millions of times in previous experiments. here they are focusing on atypical ones produced in the lhc, since it is geared to unprecedentedly high levels of energy and luminosity. after the selection of data, or the trigger, the complex electronics of readout channels integrate millions of segmented data into a coherent description called an “event” and transmit the data to the computing grid for physicists across the globe to process and analyze. analysis, then, constitutes the final stage of the combination and reconstruction of key events, and one where the prospects of a discovery become distinctly conspicuous. it is not surprising to learn, therefore, that the analysis of data, or physics analysis, forms the most distinguished stage in experimental physics. figure 1. atlas is the largest-volume particle detector in the world, weighing over seven-thousand tons. (image by maximilien brice, cern) i started fieldwork at cern in august 2007 in standard participant-observer mode in the atlas control room, tagging the t/daq (trigger and data acquisition) group headed by livio mapelli and later by david francis. within a few months, well-meaning informants impressed on me that trigger and data acquisition was simply a preparatory stage. the “real action” would begin, they said, after the data started emerging and people who did analysis would be at the forefront of the game, which is where i should be if i wanted my research to capture the front-line excitement. after some deliberation, i followed their advice and shifted my attention from trigger and data acquisition to event reconstruction and analysis. it was during the time spent with teams in physics analysis in the atlas experiment that i first encountered the term signatures, which suggested a unique intellectual orientation in the world of matter. before i explicate this uniqueness, a feature of instrumentation claims our attention. to maximize the probability of collisions, the countercirculating lhc proton beams are divided into so-called bunches. each bunch contains 1.1x1011 protons, and there are in all 2,808 bunches per beam. every twenty-five nanoseconds, the proton bunches cross, resulting in about 600 million collisions per second. an undeniable materiality or facticity clearly underlies experimental physics. but the assumption so often set forth by naive realism as self-evident—that materiality explains itself—is an exaggeration (cassirer 1957). in the consideration of every single material fact lies concealed a prerequisite for its existence. this prerequisite is the gradation of purpose or significance. how is beam dynamics affected by collimation or why is the superconducting magnet placed in front of the electromagnetic calorimeter? the characterization of purpose and significance built into such questions indicates that a perspective has been imposed on matters of fact. in mentioning this, i am trying to highlight the intellectual character of physics. but do bear in mind that gradation of purpose or relevance is merely a conditioning mechanism. that is, in the functioning of technology, facticity and significance come together—or go apart—in accordance with exigency. let me clarify: i am not arguing that operations involving beams and collisions do not require engineering skill or administrative decisions, factors that clearly suggest human intervention. for sure, an engineer is needed to turn on the beams or to design the beam pipe. but when the beam is running, no reference to a human observer is needed. that is, once a technology is instituted, it functions independently of the scientist or the engineer, whose presence becomes extraneous and is required simply for maintenance, safety, and repairs. on the other hand, in the case of a signature, fact and significance are intrinsically bound together as a unity at all stages and modes of operation. the relation to the human subject cannot be eliminated at any stage without losing the whole concept. what peirce said for signs—they “address somebody”—holds true of the physics signature. the signal is real, and this is absolutely crucial, not because it is materially present in a collision. no, it is real because the physicist recognizes or receives it. the signature of physics compels our attention to the human subject. and as the element of human recognition gains in strength, it does not abolish the relevance of the material, but rather makes use of it to forge a unity. this coalescence of the human and the material and its anchoring in the conception of a signature is what i lay out in the next section. higgs → γγ signature it is easier to illustrate what a signature is in experimental physics than to define it. consider a statement: “a two-body mass peak in the region of hundred gev and above is the most robust signature one can hope for” (mangano 2008, 3). the application of this statement finds its most conspicuous expression in the decay of a higgs boson into two photons (γγ) of definite mass. as an analogy, let me ask the reader to imagine a ball, whose material composition is not known a priori, getting hit and subsequently smashing to pieces. now if the ball were made of crystal glass weighing, say, a hundred pounds, then according to the principle of the conservation of mass or momentum, we should expect to find in the debris two conspicuous glass pieces of roughly fifty pounds each. once we detect these two distinct pieces in the debris, we deduce that the original object in the collision was most likely a crystal object with a mass of more than one hundred pounds. likewise, a particle collision, if it succeeds in producing a higgs boson in a certain mass range, say, between 100 and 120 gev, would most likely decay into two energetic photons of roughly 50 or 60 gev each, owing to the principle of the conservation of mass. the analogy is useful but must not be pressed to an extreme. for in relativistic quantum physics, decays are processes in which particles (such as a higgs particle) spontaneously transform into other particles (like two photons), instead of decomposing or dissolving into constituent particles. new particles are really produced under the effect of field interactions based on the principle of the conversion of energy into mass (e = mc2). that is, when fast-moving or energetic particles collide with each other, some of their energy is converted into the creation of completely new particles. yet due to the relatively short-range quantum nature of interactions, physicists cannot directly observe the new particles. instead, their evidence has to be sought in the decay products, and the term signature is used to characterize the decay products by which physicists identify the source particles. this should make clear how the beginning of a signature lies in the reverse deduction through which physicists draw inferences about unknown particle states from observed final states. the task of deduction that a signature demands, however, is not an easy one. it is not easy simply because the signature has to be extracted from the background. background refers to identical and competing processes that often fake a signal process. a potential source of background, as in this particular illustration of the higgs decaying into two photons, are photons produced by bremsstrahlung, or electromagnetic radiation given off by accelerated particles. the photons from bremsstrahlung form the “irreducible background” and create a massive problem for physicists (atlas 1994, 217). the problem is to figure out, on a statistical basis, which photons are emerging as a consequence of bremsstrahlung, the irreducible background, and which ones are decaying from a possible higgs source, the signal. while speaking to the convener of the higgs search on the atlas experiment, andreas hoecker, i asked him how he deals with the high photon background in the analysis of the higgs signature. he replied rather nonchalantly that he did not believe in the concept of an irreducible background. hoecker is a highly regarded figure in physics analysis, but soon i heard a few friendly murmurs of criticism in the community of his approach to background. if he does not believe in the background, how can he discern a signal? skeptics were quick to point out that on a hadron collider especially, an experimentalist must have a complete understanding of the irreducible background to obtain a relevant signal, because hadrons are composite particles. collisions involving hadrons are therefore rather messy, generating a lot of debris, that is, background. i went back to hoecker and posed to him the same concern on the extraction of a higgs signal from the heap of photons, the background, generated in the lhc. he confidently replied that he was aware of the “conservative view in the community,” but argued that while statistically plotting the decays, if a clear peak starts emerging from the “invariant masses of the energetic photons,” it forms the “signal that these are from a higgs.” on the other hand, the photons from bremsstrahlung with differing masses, the irreducible background, would be all over the graph, falling in the “tail regions” of a quintessential gaussian distribution. the peak formed by the invariant masses of the two isolated photons in the final state against the overall shape of the distribution would give hoecker and his team a clear signature of the higgs boson. i confess that i listened to hoecker’s explanation attentively but that it took me almost a year to understand, and not without the aid of other physicists at cern. in fact, listening to his and others’ expositions on the way they extract signals from collision data—as they filled my field notebooks with rough, sketchy histograms and plots—i was struck by how materiality turns away from itself while seeking itself. the task of probing matter is foisted on a vast semiotic terrain that involves recognizing signals, tracing them to initial conditions, measuring background, and so on. it follows that the case of a material discovery, like that of a higgs particle, can be settled only after isolating the photons emerging from random bremsstrahlung (the background) against those issuing from a genuine higgs particle (the signal). this, however, is an act of discrimination or judgment, which presupposes a subject, or more appropriately, a community of subjects. without the recognition of a scientist immanent to it, nothing answers to the notion of a signature. figure 2. signal of a possible higgs boson obtained from di-photon invariant mass spectrum. (image from “higgs boson,” cern, 2008. figure 8, page 1228. available at http://cds.cern.ch/record/1159618/) here we face a decisive turning point in the appraisal of modern science. the signature of physics presents us with an unmistakable case of non-dualism between human and nonhuman, and it places before us a new angle of inquiry into science. as is well known, several studies have called our attention to the entanglement of material-semiotic intermediaries in experimentation, emergent “inter-actions” of nature and culture, or the use of analogies and metaphors in the sciences (barad 2006; galison 1997; knorr-cetina 1999). in my view, this distinguished catalogue of studies manifests, however, a lacuna in that exigency or contingency is seen as providing the impetus to the play of associations and the meaning of science is divined in the extrinsic rhapsody of assemblages and fractures, which are themselves understood in an unending logic of means and ends (haraway 1997; rabinow 2003; strathern 1991). as it stands, this account is inadequate. to criticize science from the standpoint of contingency or exigency alone is to leave it half unread, because there remains the possibility of “necessary relations” (durkheim 1965, 41) obtaining between concept and object in the interpretation of nature. this question of necessary relations or the conditions under which science creates “its special universe of efficacious principles” (douglas 1999, 252) has received little clarification. this is where i wish to advance current understanding. i argue here that the signature of physics betrays a necessary unity of conception. the relation of sign and thing is not extraneously forged through metaphors or analogies. a heterogeneous mix of elements is not lumped together under the rubric of a signature. operating by means of conceptual interrelations (atlas 1994; mangano 2008), the signature synthesizes individual features under a form, a form held together with a perspective. as outlined above, without the perspective that recognizes in tracks of photons a signature of a higgs boson, we cannot grasp how a collision provides the starting point of a new order of things in the precise moment of its decay. this perspectivization of nature, which the signature embodies, closes the gap of fact and value in a single stroke. here we confront the full significance of my insistence on the signature exemplifying a unity as opposed to an assemblage or a hybrid. haraway frequently tells us that science is given to divergent influences, partial viewpoints, and fragmentary connections that have no necessary or essential relation to the world. the ground of its activity is purely exigent or external. the signature repudiates this approach. instead of confusing diverse realms, it introduces distinctness into a confused obscurity. instead of soliciting connections in the flux of material activity, it favors the concomitance that subtends and awakens human interest, which comes not by dint of (external) activity, but by (inner) judgment and form. to ask if events are bound by connections is a concern of mechanism (descartes or locke), while our interest is in the principle (leibniz or kant). the signature forms the inner reason by virtue of which a discovery is what it is, thus affording an opportunity to grasp the source of scientific activity. the value of such an instructive opportunity reposes not only on the inner structure of a signature but also on the community and its thought, as well as on the wider experimental tradition, which i shall now take up for elaboration. differentiation and singularity the chief difficulty in the way of recognizing a signal event, as previously stated, is the background. the difficulty consists in how to isolate and evaluate the strength, or significance, of a signal for which no strict rule exists. there is no foolproof method “that works under all circumstances that can be picked out from a textbook,” as malcolm john, from the lhcb experiment, explained. “it is mostly a judgment call” on what procedures to follow for what data set. the judgment, which establishes this significance, is not a sum or an aggregate of particular instances, but a form of thought at once logical and mathematical, which works in a kind of a double movement: a movement from confused data to a suggested meaning and from the meaning back to observational facts to which the suggestion had originally directed attention. this movement explains why problems at any level—be they hardware issues of alignment or calibration, or software concerns of timing, trigger, or analysis—can seriously affect the assessment of a signature. the physics community considers the observation of a signature valid if a statistical significance of “5-σ standard deviations” can be obtained. the 5-σ level is simply another way of saying that a model or a theory has a 0.00003 percent chance of being false. claims and counterclaims establishing a 5-σ discovery level are rampant as these are debated or dissolved in talks and publications. at seminars and conferences, i heard over and over again questions like: “how well have you estimated the errors from systematics?” “are you basing your evidence solely against monte carlo simulations?” “to what degree can you distinguish a standard model higgs from look-alikes?” in addition to background, informants explained, they have to take care against the so-called noise generated by electronics such as the amplification of small electrical signals, against statistical errors from limited event samples, detector effects like limited acceptance and the resolution of measurements, and so on. while there operates a clear chain of tasks, specification of procedures, and recognition of skills, the ultimate extraction of a signature makes for a delicate and drawn-out process, much like finding a needle in a haystack. a lot can be written to describe in detail the methods and procedures employed by experimental physicists in extracting signatures from the bulk of the background (collins 2004; galison 1997; knorr-cetina 1999). my aim here is more ascetic: to inquire into the conditions under which the significance (of a signature) is gauged. jacques derrida (1982) identifies a tension at the heart of the general concept of signature—how to reconcile difference with repetition. in his essay “signature event context,” derrida looks at signatures in the everyday context and ascribes “iterability” as their primary specification. he writes, “in order to function, that is, in order to be legible, a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form, it must be able to detach itself from the present and singular intention of its production” (derrida 1982, 328). but equally the signature is a singularity, the bearer of a unique identity, which derrida recognizes but fails to elaborate on. i wish to pursue this. what is the locus of the signature’s singularity? figure 3. the extraction of a w-boson signature from the decay of two leptons in proton-proton collisions. (image by cern, from the atlas experiment blog, http://pdg3.lbl.gov/atlasblog/) in the case of the physics signature, to be sure, unless a signal is repeated enough times, it would be difficult to make recognition of it. it is never, properly speaking, one signal or one event that experimentalists invoke. it is the peak around which a cluster of events coheres that gives meaning to a signature in physics. so prominent is this requirement of basing evidence on a collection of cases that statistical inference is treated as one of the yardsticks of experimental confirmation (galison 1997; mangano 2008). but while it is true, as derrida asserts, that without the support of iterability or repeatability a signature would be less credible, recurrence is not a condition for its occurrence. this plain assertion means to put before us the recognition that characterization of singularity arises from differentiation (saussure 1983, uberoi 2002). every experimental physicist attests to the merit of the statistical repeatability of signatures, or the need for counting and collecting like cases. but what they do not utter in words but which constitutes, or consumes, the whole of their professional existence is evincing the signal from its contrast, the background. nowhere does the meaning of the factual emerge with as much clarity as in the distinction of signal and background. to return to the example of the higgs outlined in the previous section, repetition by itself does not explain which ones amid the bulk of photons form the signal of a higgs particle. how a material fact gains truth value adheres not in the aggregation of events but in their differentiation. as opposed to derrida’s emphasis, i argue that it is not sameness as much as differentiation that explains the singularity and versatility of a signature. the signature is an exemplification of an indissociable unity whose meaning derives from differentiation: these are the two elements that i have shown so far to be fundamental to the constitution of the signature. now arises the question: how does the signature come to indicate definite material states of affairs? here it would be rewarding to consider the input of semiotics (peirce 1982–2009; todorov 1982), especially because they proffer the additional advantage of us no longer needing to inquire separately into decay modes, trigger criteria, or statistical significance. instead, we may focus on the concept of the signal and its probatory force to ascertain if science can be assimilated to a general problematics of the sign, or semiotics. the classification of signs in considering the signature semiotically, there are at least three elements involved, which we must examine closely. first, in experimental physics, signs come in the form of things. this feature, of things functioning as signs, explains the specificity of physics as a privileged discourse of matter as well as the tremendous task of experimental physicists in probing the structure of matter. second, the signature of physics constitutes a relation among three terms: observed events, matter fields, and possible objects. the observed events are the closest to the receiving subject (i.e., the physicist), and their relevance lies in what they make accessible, either particular aspects or suggested meanings, of possible objects. the matter fields play the mediating role in the generation of possible objects from observed events. third, in this semiotic chain something present leads to some kind of conclusion about the existence of things not immediately given. for instance, final states of hadronically decaying tau leptons in proton-to-proton collisions may indicate the presence of supersymmetry (susy). the sign, that is, the final states of tau decay, provide some information on a reality not yet known, like that of susy masses. this complex chain of signification with which experimental physics confronts us can be grasped more comprehensively when we relate it to a basic question: how is it that signs reveal the character of objects? the question has utmost importance in theories of semiotics. in peirce’s (1982–2009) classification, for instance, we find that the relation between signs and objects may be (1) iconic (based on resemblance), such as portraits; (2) indexical (based on contiguity and context), such as weathercocks; or (3) symbolic (based on convention) such as human language. saussure’s (1983) schema, which is dominated by the category of the linguistic sign, lends emphasis to arbitrariness, or conventions, as the principal feature of signs. as is well known, the chief danger in making arbitrary the link joining the signifier and the signified is the exclusion of the referential object from consideration (benveniste 1971). more recent efforts by umberto eco (1984), giovanni manetti (1993), and tzvetan todorov (1982) have also brought the arbitrariness of saussure to grief. building on classical sources, most notably, stoic logic, the authors have put forward a conception of sign that relates to its designata not as an equivalence, in the sense that p is identical with q, or p≅q, but as an implication, such as if p, then q, or p⊃q. the move is highly felicitous because the relation of inference or implication (e.g., “if there is a scar, there must have been a wound”) works well for the class of natural signs such as indices and symptoms. yet in some sense we are left with two modes, of equivalence and implication, operating at different levels, and either could be accepted without the other. in their one-sided emphasis, a fundamental problem makes an appearance: a dualism begins to appear between signs considered natural and necessary, the reason of signification being contained in their very notion, and signs that are cultural and arbitrary, deriving their meaning from social conventions. the dualism of natural impulse and cultural intent, or phusei and thesei, appears in a number of approaches, including classical sources such as saint augustine’s or early modern works like port royal grammar (foucault 1970; todorov 1982). the chief objections raised against mutually exclusive accounts of sign behavior are that the grounds of division are insufficient or that overlapping criteria are employed, with the consequence that as many typologies as signs arise (nöth 1990; sebeok 1976), all of which lead eco (1976, 217) to rue that “there is a radical fallacy in the project of drawing up a typology of signs.” although these objections are undoubtedly correct in raising our awareness to the complexity of sign behavior and the need for multidimensional typologies, a seductive alternative might be to accept and go beneath the apparent simplicity of the dualism to communicate something concerning the possibility of transcending it. this is what the signature of physics achieves. the signs that disclose the structure of matter are necessary to the extent that there is a prior intrinsic connection between signifier and signified, but they simultaneously require a language for the interpretation of this connection. in this twofold aspect, of the sign as an instance and as an image of material generation, lies the key to understanding how signatures form the thread through which the composition of matter is glimpsed and on which the very possibility of an experimental science depends. to appreciate this rare semiotic possibility where a sign shares a likeness to a thing and also coincides with it, let us revisit the so-called doctrine of signatures espoused with great rigor by the paracelsians in the sixteenth century. with an ingenious eye for noncausal explanations, in the treatise “concerning the signature of natural things,” paracelsus (1967) offers a theory of dynamically related occult sympathies, or signatures, cascading through nature, from worms and plants to minerals and stars, which god has imprinted for man to intercept for his own benefit. every signature forms an (1) outward vehicle for inner forces and faculties; (2) makes visible what is otherwise invisible and obscure; (3) depends “not only upon the principles of similarity, homogeneity, resemblance, correspondence and sympathy, but also equally upon the contrary principles of difference, separateness, heterogeneity and antipathy” (uberoi 2002, 14); and (4) “ultimately coincides with the created thing itself, insofar as it is understood as part of the divine plan and purpose of creation” (weeks 1997, 170). this vitalistic conception of signatura rerum, or of all things bearing signatures that orient them to meaningfulness and efficacy, acquires prominence in the works of later rhineland thinkers like valentin weigel and jakob böhme. however, the metaphysics of signatures gradually breaks loose from nature to involve itself exclusively with mystical relations between man and god, which achieves impeccable clarity in the tridentine dogma of the eucharist where the flesh and blood of jesus are held to be “truly, really, and substantially” present under the appearances of bread and wine. while there exist diverse contentions over the issue of the “real presence” of christ (agamben 2009; uberoi 2002), what we attain is the radical ontological possibility of a signature as something that is both itself (thing) and something other than itself (sign). this short summary of the signature’s role in alchemy, cosmology, and theology intends to remind us of both its antiquity and continuity. yet if the signature of physics deserves our attention today, it is not for being mystical, but for once again being the semiotic framework that makes nature expressive and experiment the hunt for these expressive effects. two objections to the ongoing account might be raised here. one, that the idea of the extreme proximity of meaning and reference has been developed in the notion of indexicality (nöth 1990) and that therefore the signature discloses nothing new. the objection is just, and indeed appearances favor the signature manifesting a contextual or part-whole relation. however, i would insist that to understand a signature in the sense of physical proximity is insufficient. to return to the example of the higgs laid out in the second section of this essay, the context by itself cannot explain which photons, amid the bulk of photons, form the potent signal of the higgs; a material fact gains truth value not through proximity as such, but through selection and differentiation, which denote a relation of judgment. the second argument, one favored by foucault and agamben, is the recognition that signature is “a form of similitude” that signifies by means of analogical resemblance (foucault 1970, 25).2 furthermore, although “the similarity is metaphorical,” the thistle plant with its prickly thorns, for instance, is efficacious as well against sharp and acute pains (agamben 2009, 36). the question arises: how is a resemblance or a representation able to produce an observable effect? looking at the issue from the standpoint of experimental physics, i would argue that what distinguishes the signature is not so much the power of representation (metaphor) as the power of development of one representation into another (metamorphosis). a group of theory fellows at cern explained to me that signatures of quantum physics make matter intelligible through myriad transformations that affect the values of physical quantities of particles, such as their masses or lifetimes, as a result of their interactions with various fields. these transformations depend on quantum uncertainty and require several different techniques of computation. the computations disclose how the effect of a transformation communicates itself, and if that is within the framework of standard theory or indicative of new physics beyond standard theory. either way, and regardless of its individual type, every signature is characterized by this force of progressive transformations, which explains the real correlation of sign and effect. the heuristic value of signatures stands out most sharply when we consider that these are quantum events of discovery. signatures are annunciations of particle states yet to come. any overview of scientific semiosis must emphasize two closely related issues, namely, the promise of discovery and the hazard of error. i find that traditional semiotics offers little by way of explanation, except viewing these possibilities as the perfect foil for pragmatics (eco 1984). the clarification of how the sign prepares the way to those final steps where it purely signifies itself or signifies itself to be an illusion is the final theme of this article. with this i will also conclude the original aim with which the inquiry into signatures began—discerning the methodological import of the signature in the substrate of relations. discourse, error, and possibility in a recent piece, bruno latour (2000) revisited the issue of materiality and its relevance for both science and social science. there is much that is interesting and polemical in his essay, but the chief argument is fairly straightforward: restore the rights of the object, recognize its ability to mobilize orders of existence, and reconfigure language and society. the result is “objectivity,” which is “not a special quality of the mind, an inner state of justice and fairness,” but simply the obduracy of objects, “how they object to what is told about them” (latour 2000, 115). latour recognizes the significant contribution of language to the scaffolding of objects, but he decides to place the accent on “the thingness of the thing.” undeniably, things form the substance of any laboratory science. hits (of particles), jets (of strong interactions), or tracks (of electromagnetic charges) traced on the detectors can force the most recalcitrant or platonist physicist back to things. to that extent, i hardly disagree with latour on the pervasive presence of things in science. but i strongly disagree with him concerning their epistemological status in science or the implications for social science. from my research i wish to underscore that to comprehend scientific objectivity, one needs to take into account not only the presence (or absence) of objects but also the possibilities of thought (hacking 1999; weinberg 2001). this central tenet yields the consequence that a doubt can be raised about the objectivity of a scientific fact other than as a doubt about the existence of an object in question. an example may help here. in 1999, the collider detector at fermilab, one of the experimental collaborations on the tevatron accelerator in illinois, reported the claim of a discovery of “new physics” from an event of di-photons with a large amount of missing transverse energy.3 that is, an event was observed in the detector with two photons and a large amount of missing energy in the final state. according to the rules of statistical significance, the event qualified as evidence for a discovery. but “why do we not consider it as evidence of new physics? because consensus built up in the community that … the evidence is not so compelling” (mangano 2008, 9). for further clarification i quizzed albert de roeck, the deputy spokesperson of the cms experiment and one of my key informants at cern. he replied, “yes, there was a case of di-photons, but what did the event signal? nothing. of course, it didn’t prevent theorists from going into a frenzy and proposing new models, but no attention was given [to those].” de roeck’s dismissive response made clear to me that physicists’ recognition does not simply convey an interpretation of a signal but forms part of the conception of a signal. if we take seriously latour’s (2000, 121) proposal to demarcate between a “social sociology,” dealing with the “symbolic,” and a “physical sociology” that is attentive to “things,” the question arises: on which side should the cdf signature of the di-photons with missing energy be placed? the real problem that remains unaddressed in latour’s essay is that if the existence of an object alone were decisive, then science would have no category of “error” (cassirer 1957). the category of error assumes particular relevance when we regard the process of formation: it holds a mirror to every object that presents itself as self-evident and shows once again that facts are meaningful by virtue of having a logical conception. owing to the overwhelming presence of signs in high-energy physics, karin knorr-cetina (1999, 146) describes its epistemic culture as moving “in the shadowland of mechanically, electrically and electronically produced negative images of the world—in a world of signs and often fictional reflections, of echoes, footprints, and the shimmering appearances of bygone events.” the decisive importance of her analysis lies in her recognition of the “sign processing machinery” as the distinguishing character of high-energy physics (knorr-cetina 1999, 46). her error lies, if i may put it that way, in consistently viewing signs as “fictions,” “phantasms,” or “chimeras,” from which she deduces the world of high-energy physics to be a “ghostly self-enclosed system” (knorr-cetina 1999, 52–53). in my view, the question for anthropology (of science) concerns not so much the ontological status of nature or facts, and to what extent they are to be viewed as constructed or described (knorr-cetina 1981), but rather from what perspective and by what logic does an experiment acquire knowledge of physical reality. in an attempt to address the question, i started my inquiry with the words of césar gómez on the trust scientists place on physical reality. yet until now i have only stressed the paradoxical character of the physics signature that defies any notion of brute physical reality. the sheer act of identifying a signature includes a change of form, an intellectual transposition that goes beyond physical reality. with this claim, i attempted to undermine latour’s argument on the autonomy of things. on the other hand, signatures are not arbitrary assertions of signs or “fictions,” as knorr-cetina contends, without an embedding in the order of things. by rejecting the position that physics reposes on the thingness of things, and its alternative that it is laden with arbitrary signs, we seem to have reached a difficult position. we shall meet this difficulty by considering a third option: of relations and their importance. the argument goes as following: first, we have seen that the ground from which the sign shows the logic of the material world is not a single source, but a janus-faced relation of signal and background. rooted in the same system, each shows something specific about the physical world. second, what distinguishes them is the judgment that experimental physicists bring to bear in their evaluations. this judgment constitutes, as it were, the inner limits of the factual. but this does not suggest that discrimination of a signal is a matter of a few minds agreeing with one another. third, the act of judging has outer limits marked by the space of possibilities, the configurations linking signatures to specific states of affairs.4 since the set of possibilities is internal to the discourse, what it expresses is necessary. fourth, these two orders, the contextual, where the signature is perceived, and the necessary, which engenders its genesis, form a cross-cutting grid from which experimental physics gives shape to its oracles on matter. once again appearing paradoxical, we are, nonetheless, faced with the distinct recognition, and to whose substantial prospect the signature is forever alive, that from the syntax of difference arises the semantics of unity (uberoi 2002). ludwig wittgenstein (1953, §50) makes a puzzling observation in the philosophical investigations: “there is one thing of which can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long and that is the standard meter in paris.” the philosophical puzzle gestures at something that is contingent and necessary, commemorative as well as implicative, itself and also something other than itself, which it contains and by virtue of which it signifies. the entire conception of the signature turns on this. while instances of radical discoveries grant it a powerful conviction, negative cases of error are also living witnesses to the fact that when the world of signatures comes undone, the contrast of representation and thing also disintegrates. conclusion the articulation of science according to things and signs is by no means self-evident. the recognition of a signature from myriad collisions constitutes an act of meaningful discrimination. to this end, the present essay raises awareness of the signature of physics that bears in itself the germ from which the meaningful apprehension of the physical universe takes place. physics has systematically obliterated traces of the subject from the process of inquiry, with the exception of models and theories, for which personal credit is duly given, and of the instrument as an engineering feat, where human presence is soundly acknowledged. yet we find precisely at the juncture where discoveries in nature are claimed the rather subversive concept of the signature, which enjoins on grounds of logical necessity (rather than, say, of ease of manipulation or functional coordination) a subject or, more appropriately, the community of subjects. we are told that the signature, as a general class of signs simultaneously efficacious and expressive, was born in the sixteenth century, in the superposition of semiology, concerned with the constitution of signs, and hermeneutics, involved with the meanings of signs (foucault 1970, 29), only to rapidly “[disappear] from western science at the end of the eighteenth century” (agamben 2009, 43). so far only history and philosophy have commented on its extraordinary importance, which i have wished to avail for anthropology from contemporary particle physics. notes acknowledgments it is a delight to thank the physicists at cern for providing rich and stimulating discussions, especially david cockerill, albert de roeck, david francis, ian hinchliffe, andreas hoecker, malcolm john, giuseppe mornacchi, thorsten wengler and, above all, michael doser. thanks are also due to lawrence cohen who gave the manuscript multiple readings and made many valuable suggestions, most of which have been incorporated. research rarely brings uninterrupted joy but jit singh uberoi was always there to provide good cheer. it was under his spell that i began paying attention to medieval doctrines of signature and his insistence on methodological clarity and rigor has greatly helped streamline the argument. to such a brilliant and generous teacher, i owe an enduring debt. fieldwork was supported by the wenner-gren foundation’s dissertation grant #7758. i am grateful to the director and staff of the laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale for hosting me, which enabled me to complete the article. 1. actual names of informants have been used throughout the text after obtaining their consent as per the protocol of the committee for protection of human subjects. 2. it is fair to add here that while assimilating the signature to the larger circle of similitude, michel foucault (1970, 29) admits that it “forms a second circle” with a “tiny degree of displacement” between the two. but he is largely silent on the source of displacement. likewise, giorgio agamben (2009, 37) imparts to the signature a degree of mystery when he writes that here “signum and signatum exchange roles and seem to enter into a zone of undecidability.” 3. “missing energy” describes energy in the transverse plane that is not detected by a particle detector but is expected due to principles of the conservation of energy and momentum. therefore events with missing energy become generic signals of new physics processes, 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observed, between 8.3 and 10 minutes. no part of the planet remained unaffected: the earthquake caused the entire earth to vibrate as much as half an inch (lay et al. 2005). the earthquake also triggered several devastating tsunamis along many landmasses bordering the indian ocean, killing more than an estimated 230,000 people in more than fourteen countries. indonesia was the hardest hit, with more than 160,000 deaths, and sri lanka was the second most devastated, with over 35,000 dead or missing and 500,000 displaced (world bank 2005). more than three-quarters of the island nation’s shoreline was affected, mostly the eastern and southern coasts. before the tsunami grabbed the world’s headlines, sri lanka was perhaps best known for being engaged in what was asia’s longest-running civil war, in which the sri lankan government had been battling an insurgent militant group, the liberation tigers of tamil eelam (ltte), for more than twenty-five years. as the country engaged in an arduous project of national reconstruction in the wake of the tsunami, it also initiated a renewed militaristic approach to end its “terrorism problem,” or the ltte. in this article, i trace how the devastation of the tsunami and the logics of disaster risk management that followed it offered a political opening for new techniques of state power and projects of nation-building in sri lanka. as naomi klein’s conception of “disaster capitalism” points to the way disasters open the door for corporate and free-market reorganization, i highlight a different but related phenomenon that has taken shape in sri lanka amid the ruins of both the civil war and the indian ocean tsunami, what i call disaster nationalism. because the sri lankan government functioned as the obligatory passage point (callon 1986) through which disaster management practices and reconstruction programs were conceived and executed, post-tsunami reconstruction efforts were refracted as nation-building projects, enabling new forms of population and territorial management (deleuze 1992; foucault 2007; collier and ong 2005). specifically, i show how the reassertion of state practices and power after the tsunami gave purchase to nationalist imaginations and visions of sri lanka, in turn leading to a vigorous military campaign by the government and a controversial victory over the tigers in may 2009, nearly five years after the tsunami. the sri lankan government’s response to disasters could not be more clearly illustrated than by the speech delivered by the then sri lankan minister of disaster management and human rights, mahinda samarashinghe, at the second session for the global platform on disaster risk reduction in geneva, switzerland, on june 17, 2009. after discussing the merits of mainstreaming a disaster risk reduction (drr) framework in national planning, he concluded his speech by shifting his focus from the tsunami to the recent end of sri lanka’s human-made disaster, the civil war: my country—sri lanka—has just overcome a human-made disaster of a magnitude unparalleled by any similar recent events elsewhere. we have overcome the scourge of terrorism that has beset our island nation for well over two decades. from a humanitarian standpoint we have now moved into a “care and maintenance” phase, which is the initial phase of early recovery. the government of president mahinda rajapaksa has taken on the task of reconstructing a nation which has suffered much in its efforts to reunite its people ensuring that all sri lankans are now able to lay claim to one, undivided territory as their common motherland. . . . all our efforts at renewal, rebuilding and resettlement, however will be put at risk if the cause factors of the conflict and terrorism are not addressed and our president has committed himself to evolving a home grown political response to those factors. borrowing from drr methodology, our political response will reduce the risk of a renewed human-made disaster, i.e. terrorism and conflict, through systematic efforts to analyse and manage the casual [sic] factors, evolve consensual responses and improved preparedness for adverse events. we do not for a moment think that sri lanka’s national renewal will be quick or easy. there are ever-present threats that we must, and will, guard against, including the threats of new violence and destabilization. (samarasinghe 2009, emphasis added) samarasinghe’s address in geneva illustrates a significant political response to disasters, both natural and human-made, in sri lanka. that is, the sri lankan government’s response does more than suggest that disasters are not just natural: the conceptualization of natural disasters and terrorism, even after their supposed ends, as “ever-present” threats to the stability of the nation articulate a new regime of security in sri lanka. while the sri lankan state’s extrajudicial and violent history toward insurgency would suggest, perhaps, that this security regime was not new, i offer that the tsunami did provide fresh opportunities for national and social restructuring on the island.1 the war did not merely constitute the social context in which the tsunami played out. rather, the tsunami leveraged a certain logic of managing uncontrollable threats, including war and terrorism.2 this logic of disaster risk management and control is one built around an anticipation of disasters. anticipation might evoke a familiar structure of feeling in our contemporary security moment and looming era of the anthropocene. turning on a notion of futurity, and in particular a future rife with risk and insecurity (beck 1992), anticipation also works as an apt heuristic to examine new modes and logics of governance, security, and subjectivity (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009; adey and anderson 2012; anderson 2010; appadurai 2013; see also tironi, rodriguez-giralt, and guggenheim 2014). literature in anthropology and science and technology studies on risk illustrate as much, focusing on the practices of experts and expertise, technoscience, and state-based securities that deal with the production of anticipatory knowledge and practices—from the speculative life sciences (fortun 2006) and health (dumit 2012) to wall street (zaloom 2004), imagined pandemics (lowe 2010), and biothreats (lakoff 2008).3 risk management and anticipatory action result in a variety of preparedness and preemptive actions (collier and lakoff 2014; cooper 2006; massumi 2005; stewart n.d.; see also foucault 2007), soliciting new technical band-aids: warning systems, infrastructure, evacuation drills, and event simulations and overall attempts to increase government management and control. the impetus of such programs and collaborations is to invoke a continual state of readiness and maximum security of state territory: it is not a matter of if a disaster strikes, but a matter of when. anticipation thus is productive. it reorganizes and restructures lives, nations, and economies; it generates new biosocialities, ethical plateaus (fischer 2003), technologies, and orientations to the future and to the past. anticipation is profoundly political, even “psychopolitical” (orr 2006), bringing together new regimes of fear, hope, and governance (masco 2008). in sri lanka, the anticipation of disaster has proven no less productive in restructuring the nation. recent scholarship by anthropologists on regimes of preparedness and biosecurity—or what has been termed “vital systems security”—pinpoints infrastructure and territory as what is maximally securitized by the state (lakoff and collier 2008). in sri lanka, however, while certain war-related infrastructures were in place— the checkpoint being exemplary in this regard—other everyday, practical infrastructures had long been neglected or affected by the war.4 it was therefore not as if sri lanka had an ideal state of normalcy to restore after the tsunami. war had long scarred the social and political landscape. as one development official pointed out, in the war-affected regions of northeastern sri lanka, it was difficult to decipher if the destruction was caused by the tsunami or war-related bombing. hence the sri lankan state’s technologies of disaster nationalism were not only aimed at protecting and maintaining existing infrastructures, but also sought to build new ones.5 the ruins of the past would have to give way to a new vision of the nation: a sri lankan nation prepared for disaster and finally freed from the scourge of terror. the construction of new buffer and border zones, national disaster early-warning systems, the maintenance of military checkpoints6—these state-employed technologies of control cemented the construction of the newly liberated, “undivided motherland.”7 yet these governmental attempts to control the future remain in constant tension with the attitudes and opinions of people affected by both the tsunami and war. these collective relations, practices, and infrastructures of feelings are what i refer to as “anticipatory states.” my use of the plural “states” is deliberate, to foreground the ways in which anticipation has multiple valences and resonances in sri lanka. from the calculative risk management projects and the anticipatory practices of the sri lankan state to the everyday state of being ready and aware in the spaces of disaster, anticipation weaves into and out of experiences and encounters, its different forms and possibilities shaped by complexly layered histories and landscapes of disaster and violence. for the people i knew in eastern sri lanka, the possibility of a disastrous future depended on what they knew and had experienced in the past. for while an anticipatory logic of preparedness conjures up an imagination of a catastrophic future, for them, one could say, the impossible, the unimaginable, had happened already. as the rest of this article will make apparent, their anticipatory actions critique and illustrate the limits of the anticipatory sri lankan state. the unified and securitized sri lankan nation as the medium of state power exists as a “fragile equilibrium” (aretxaga 2003), an order susceptible to disruption when a place, person, or event remains unaccounted for in its control and order. that is, crucial to the imaginary of the nation, as minister samarasinghe pointed out in his speech in geneva, is the always dangerous future that must be harnessed to maintain peace. as we will see, the fantasy of total control is not susceptible just to the threat of disaster but also to its own impossibility—a nervous system indeed (see taussig 1992). one nation, under disaster the securitization of the nation (see hyndman 2007) following the tsunami was not necessarily an unexpected project and force in sri lanka. the country, after all, had been engaged in decades of civil war, the starting point of which is generally recognized as july 1983, when riots broke out in many cities on the island. most of the rioting, looting, and killing was targeted at tamils, a minority ethnic group in sri lanka, perpetrated mostly by the majoritarian ethnic group, the sinhalese. most strikingly, the riots, disorder, and violence were sponsored by the state: police, if not partaking of violent acts themselves, stood by and watched as the injustices unfolded before them (jeganathan 2002; manor 1984). leading up to these horrific events, tensions between tamils and the government of sri lanka had been growing. after independence and through the 1970s, a period of intense sinhalization took place, including the implementation of education quotas in the university system. tamils faced increased marginalization and racism in sri lankan politics, giving rise to the notion of an independent state of tamil eelam, which included the northern and eastern parts of the island. though some tamil organizations, such as the tamil united liberation front (tulf), were committed to a non-violent resolution, a group of young, militant tamil men who called themselves the tamil new tigers had begun to commit acts of robbery and violence toward sinhalese police officers. the notion of an independent eelam and the growing power of the tigers roused enough suspicion within the sinhala-dominated government to create the draconian prevention of terrorism act of 1979, which granted the state exceptional police powers (uthr 2001; tambiah 1986); it is still in place today.8 after 1983, the war would take several twists and turns, characterized by waves of violence and several failed attempts to reach a peace accord or resolution. the tamil new tigers, led by villupillai prabhakaran, would eventually become the liberation tigers of tamil eelam, killing off other tamil political parties and claiming to be the sole representative of all tamils in sri lanka. over the years, both the government and the ltte would commit atrocities, but the tigers especially would come to be recognized as a ruthless organization that forcibly recruited child soldiers and was credited with suicide bombing tactics, earning terrorist status in more than thirty-two countries (bhattacharji 2009). the most hopeful moment for a peaceful negotiation came in 2002, when the ltte and the sri lankan government signed a cease-fire agreement mediated by the norwegian government, leading to temporary abatements of security and safety checkpoints throughout the island. yet the break in fighting would not last long, for relations had begun to sour between the two warring parties when the tsunami struck sri lanka’s already embattled shorelines. at first the tsunami was seen as a great equalizer. the tsunami did not care if people were rich or poor, sinhalese or tamil, muslim, hindu, or buddhist. hopes sprung up that the destruction might lead to a unified effort between the ltte and the sri lankan government to rebuild the nation together. moreover, under international pressure and to receive $3 billion in u.s. aid conditioned on a resumption of peace talks, the former president, chandrika bandaranaike kumaratunga, attempted to push forward a joint aid-sharing mechanism, the post-tsunami operation management structure (p-toms) with the ltte. the p-toms would facilitate reconstruction in the northern and eastern parts of the tsunami-affected country that were under the control of the tigers.9 the tigers insisted on as much autonomy as possible from the government in the distribution of aid, stirring the ire of sinhala buddhist chauvinist groups. the aid mechanism eventually was struck down by the sri lankan supreme court as unconstitutional. so while the tsunami did result in a temporary reprieve in open hostilities between the government of sri lanka and the ltte, disputes over the p-toms cast the final blow to the already tenuous 2002 cease-fire agreement. the only way to unify the nation, it seemed, would be through war. following the failure of the p-toms, in november 2005, sri lanka elected a new president, mahinda rajapaksa, who offered a plan “towards a new sri lanka.” “mahinda chinthana” or “mahinda’s vision” consisted of a new strategy toward the war, which faulted the previous majority parliamentary party for allowing foreign countries to dictate national politics. rajapaksa pledged to bring a swift solution to the war, with an agenda that “renounced separatism” and looked to the creation of a national security policy foregrounding the sovereign and territorial integrity of the island. the post-tsunami disaster risk reduction logic of national preparedness seemed to articulate well with rajapaksa’s vision. by 2006, the ltte and the government were engaged in low-scale warfare. in 2007, the government gained control of the east. and by january 2008, the sri lankan government declared the cease-fire officially over: year 2008, the government proclaimed, was the year for war in sri lanka. sri lanka’s disaster “roadmap towards a safer sri lanka” was being paved in the increasingly volatile context of war. “mahinda’s vision” was abundantly clear when i arrived in colombo in 2008 to begin my fieldwork. the city and its suburbs were decorated with billboards (figure 1) illustrating the government’s proclamation for the year of its sixtieth anniversary of independence: “the year for war.” figure 1. “the year for war in sri lanka” billboard. photo by vivian y. choi. the representation on the far-left image demarcates in bright red the areas controlled by the ltte in 2005 and reads, “areas under terrorists.” the center image illustrates the “areas where terrorists are hiding at the end of 2007.” in 2007, the government seized control of the eastern bloc of eelam, leaving only the ltte stronghold of the north under the control of the supposed terrorists. the final map on the right shows an all-green, glowing sri lanka—a nation freed from the clutches of terrorism. the text reads: “let us build a country where all nationalities can live in freedom.” this billboard was displayed for sri lanka’s independence day celebrations, and at the top it said, “let us celebrate 60 years of independence with pride.” though the government did not necessarily fulfill its goal of ending the war in 2008, it did finally proclaim victory over the tigers on may 19, 2009. while this free, unified vision of sri lanka did not necessarily depict a new imagined community, its ostentatious re-articulation was galvanized by the logics of disaster management that emerged following the tsunami—specifically, the logic of risk reduction and preparedness implemented in national disaster management projects that categorized both tsunami and terrorism as risks to national security.10 anyone living in sri lanka, or with an interest in the country’s politics, knows that nationalism and authoritarian forms of state power are hardly subtle. yet, studying the tsunami and the civil war together in this way illustrates new technologies and techniques of state power employed in the protracted and persistent issue of nationalism in sri lanka.11 the simultaneous militarization of nature (see, for example, kosek 2010) and the naturalization of terrorism in sri lanka found further legitimacy with the global war on terror, justifying military actions in areas impacted by both the tsunami and the war, eliciting even more insecurity. while disaster nationalism has had particular cohesion and force in the sri lankan context, it also suggests how political power may unfold in other contexts of disaster. certainly, in line with several ethnographies focused on the social and political conditions leading up to disasters and their aftermaths (e.g., fortun 2001 on bhopal; adams 2013 on katrina; farmer 2011 on haiti; petryna 2002 on chernobyl),12 the persistence of insecurity in sri lanka shows that the beginnings and endings of disasters cannot be easily demarcated. in sri lanka, the ongoing disaster, it might be said, is state-sponsored nationalism. anticipatory states i spent fifteen months in sri lanka during the government’s aggressive military campaign between 2008 and 2009, and was living in a bustling coastal town in the eastern province of sri lanka when the war came to its dramatic end. the eastern coast, referred to as a “crucible of conflict” (mcgilvray 2008), was a particularly intriguing area in which to examine the intersections of security, tsunami, and war. the east is characterized by complexly layered social and political histories of violence, migration, displacement, and resettlement. for many years, and especially during the 1990s, the eastern province constituted much fought-over territory, as it was considered part of the ltte’s imagined homeland, until 2007, when government forces liberated the region.13 moreover, the eastern coastal region was the area hardest hit by the tsunami: not only is the eastern coast the area located closest to the epicenter of the tsunami-generated earthquake of 2004, it is also the most densely populated area on the island.14 in this section i bring together the different ways in which anticipation, as a logic of state power crucial to processes of disaster nationalism in sri lanka, plays out in this disaster-stricken area. preserving and upholding sri lanka’s newfound freedom enabled the moral justification for increased militarism and securitization of areas in sri lanka after the tsunami and after the war, in turn leading to a palpable lack of social and political change. following their commitment to disaster risk reduction and as outlined in the “roadmap towards a safer sri lanka,” the disaster management centre and the sri lankan state implemented new forms and spaces of knowledge and security building. one major project set up a national early-warning system for natural disasters. initially, the warning system consisted of the construction of multi-hazard warning towers dotting the sri lankan coastline—a total of fifty in all, with twenty-five more slated to be built in the newly “freed” northern part of the island.15 the towers are all connected; they communicate with each other via satellite from the village, to the district, and all the way up to the national level. the main disaster management centre is located in the capital city, colombo. the towers deliver warning messages to the coastal communities that live around them. according to the disaster management centre, the sirens can be heard within a five-kilometer radius. the department of meteorology in colombo is first to get word of an earthquake or a potential tsunami from its information sources—the japanese meteorological association and the pacific tsunami warning center in hawaii. it then contacts the disaster management centre, and the center can either directly send a message to the towers to signal a warning or it can instruct district-level coordinators to manually turn the warning sirens on. the messages are recordings, spoken first in sinhala, then in tamil, and lastly in english. the first message issues a warning. if evacuation is necessary, an evacuation message will be broadcast. finally, when the danger passes or if there is no need to worry, a cancellation message will be issued. to ensure the system’s functioning, the government staged several tsunami evacuation drills. on july 20, 2009, i found myself staring up into a cloudy blue sky to observe the technology and warning system in action. my friend, a disaster coordinator working with the united nations development program (undp) and the disaster management centre invited me to the drill. i wiped the sweat from my brow and shifted my feet standing in the muggy late afternoon. we turned and faced east, toward the ocean, although tall trees and homes obstructed our view of it. behind those trees and homes stood a newly erected disaster-warning tower. this new one in thirrukkovil, a town in southeastern sri lanka, stood above rooftops, bright and shiny, red and white (figure 2). in just a few minutes, at 3 p.m., it would be wailing its warning siren as part of a national, government-mandated tsunami evacuation drill. figure 2. multi-hazard warning tower, thirrukovil. photo by vivian y. choi. i glanced behind me down the quiet, empty street lined with the houses of the locals who would be evacuating their homes once the warning siren went off. they had been given advance notice by the local disaster management coordinator. over the sound of silent anticipation, the din of drums and music at the nearby temple festival could be heard. it was july, the season for the annual kataragama festival and the pada yatra, an annual walking pilgrimage that starts in may in northeastern sri lanka and ends in july in kataragama, a city in southeastern sri lanka famed for its multi-faith temples and festivals. the chitra velayudha swami temple in thirrukkovil marks a resting point for those making their way to kataragama. i looked at my watch: 3 p.m. i looked towards the tower: silence. back to my watch again: 3:05 p.m. still, nothing. at 3:15 p.m., i sent an sms to my contact at the district disaster management office: “what’s wrong?” i asked. “just wait,” he texted. so we waited. and still: no siren. i stood there waiting for the action to begin: how loud would the siren be, on a day like today, with no wind, when the siren could supposedly be heard within a five-kilometer radius? i turned back to the street behind me, which was no longer empty. it was becoming slowly populated by people trickling out of their houses with their emergency bags. some brought out plastic chairs in front of their homes so that they could sit while they waited for danger to be signaled. i switched my gaze back to the tower. we were all ready. finally, at around 3:30 p.m, the local disaster officer answered his cell phone, nodding his head, and appearing to take directions. on hanging up, he quickly picked up his bullhorn, climbed atop his colleague’s motorbike, turned on the decidedly less-dramatic-sounding bullhorn siren, and raced down the street. understanding this cue, the designated evacuees began their movements toward the tsunami safe site—a small hindu temple, about one kilometer inland. some ran, shouting, carrying their disaster bags, acting as if danger lurked closely. others strolled leisurely, laughing and talking along the way. this, actually, was not the first time the siren had failed to sound, either as scheduled or during a real tsunami scare in sri lanka. in 2007, another massive earthquake had rocked the ring of fire off the coast of indonesia. could another tsunami be making its way to sri lanka again? at that time, the government had erected three pilot warning towers. in a different eastern coastal town, one of those towers stood steadfast and . . . silent. the local disaster management coordinator, after multiple failed attempts to contact emergency operations at the national disaster management centre for instructions, climbed up the tower and manually switched the siren on. at that point, nearly everyone in the surrounding areas had already evacuated inland and to higher ground. at the disaster management centre in colombo, i had been informed that the incident in 2007 was seen as a success. an official informed me that he was “proud” to say that “without harming [sic] to any single human, we [had] evacuated people in coastal areas within 30 minutes.” he prefaced this statement by saying that sri lanka was “lucky,” as the event was “good practice.” the role of the disaster management centre (dmc), as he further explained to me, was to get the correct details. at the moment and during the time of the tsunami and the tsunami scare, the dmc continues to be dependent on information from other sources; it simply does not have the accurate equipment available. the dmc collaborates with the department of meteorology to monitor for tsunamis and cyclones, while the irrigation department monitors for floods. the official went on to tell me, “we must give correct information and then let people know who are affected.” accordingly, he told me that the dmc now had “confidence about people; now they will not react without the proper information from the dmc.” “yes, i received a call from my brother in trincomalee that a tsunami was coming,” fathima16 relayed to me (trincomalee is a town roughly 175 kilometers north). her brother, a fisherman, had been listening to the radio and had heard some news about an earthquake in indonesia, which immediately prompted him to call his sister, who lives in the area most affected by the tsunami of 2004. fathima’s home stands roughly ten meters from the warning tower. she said she did not wait to hear it ring, but instead gathered her family members, made some phone calls to relatives and close friends, and began to spread the word to her neighbors. she said that in a matter of half an hour, nearly everyone in her village had begun to make the journey inland to the main road. on visiting other towers in other coastal regions of the island, people informed me that the warning towers had sometimes gone off at unscheduled times, occasionally inciting moments of fear and panic. sentiments toward these towers were ambivalent at best. as i sipped a warm coke near the cooling breeze of the ocean, mohamed, a local owner of a small kadai (shop) on the beach, relayed to me that he was happy about the tower. in fact, because of the warning tower, he had felt comfortable enough to reopen his shop near the beach. “at night i can sleep better,” he said, looking toward the expanse of ocean. he blinked slowly, “before i could only listen to the sound of the waves, listening for the way the waves sounded the day of the tsunami.” still, others were skeptical: at a local tea stall, near the same tower to which mohammed referred, i asked some villagers what they thought. raheem took a sip of his tea, smiled, and told me, “it is there.” laxmi informed me: “we are always alert.” she, like many others living near the shoreline, takes note of the slightest shift in wind, the gray color of the sky, and the behavior of birds. the day of the tsunami, the sky was gray and engulfed in clouds. on cloudy days, laxmi often felt nervous, avoiding going to the sea. sometimes false alarms and rumors of tsunamis spread on days with high winds. on those days, many fishermen would stay home. temple and mosque loudspeakers also now double as potential community warning broadcasters. alongside and beyond the preparedness rationale of the government, people consider the possibility of another disaster, using their own modes of communication to get relevant information. the staged evacuation drill took place two months after the government’s declared end of the war, but could such a proclamation be so easily celebrated? especially on the eastern coast, military presence several months after the war continued unabated. the eastern province had already been freed from so-called terrorism in 2007, yet an official state of emergency remained in place.17 the state of emergency granted special military powers to the special task force (stf), an arm of the police. in the months following the proclaimed end of the war, military checkpoints, like the warning towers, dotted the physical landscape of the east. these checkpoints were located on main roads, stopping vehicles to check for bombs and hidden terrorists. gun-wielding military men and women checked ids, bags, and sometimes patted people down. these checkpoints constituted an anticipation of violence, the possibility of a bombing, and also, quoting pradeep jeganathan (2002), the “not-so-diffuse” tentacles of the state. the stf continued to monitor roadblocks and checkpoints, while also conducting neighborhood and house checks, making sure that random strangers—or potential terrorists—were not taking refuge in the area. the officers could be seen roaming the streets, entering homes, and then lounging at the local tea stalls. indeed, as an interview with the commanding officer of the stf revealed to me, “the war is over, but terror is there.” he continued to inform me that the division that i was researching, and in which i was living, was deemed a “vulnerable” area—an area vulnerable to lurking terrorists; it only made sense to increase the number of troops to counter terrorism and “secure the situation.” shortly after this conversation, the sri lankan army began rebuilding an old camp that had been run down for more than a decade. here the anticipatory practices of the military state attempt to purify the region of potential terrorists, while creating a system of national vigilance. this form of state power was predicated on ensuring security, the future of the nation characterized by the possibility of another disaster. with the ever-present stf conducting checks in the east, my friend parvati explained to me how she stayed alert: “as long as we have all our documents and have registered all of our family members with the police, the stf will not give us any trouble when they are doing their household checks.” the fear of arrest or violence remained palpable after the end of the war, when people would confess to me in hushed tones their disbelief that the ltte leader prabhakaran was really dead. a rumor went around about a boy on a bus, who, unaware of the presence of a police officer, proclaimed he did not believe prabhakaran had been killed and was smacked and threatened with arrest for making such a statement. my friends could only tell me, with resignation, that “inside, we feel sad”; there was a lingering sense that the resumption of war was possible. people commented on my seeming naïveté when i probed them about the end of the war: “who told you the war was over?” asked ravi, who had come home for just three months, on holiday from his job in qatar. in conversation, i mentioned that his visit had coincided with a historic moment in sri lanka’s history. i asked him if he would return for good from qatar and stay in sri lanka? he said his plan was to go back qatar, perhaps to return to sri lanka only if he got married and had a family. for now, he informed me, he felt that the east remained unsafe. he further explained, “the government says the war has stopped, but there is no full freedom for people to roam and move about freely. when that happens, we can say that the war is finished.” after hearing about my research project, he remarked, “if you release a fact about what is happening here that makes the government unhappy, the next day you can’t come back here. if there’s no safety for foreigners, how can there be safety for locals?” fawzi, who was living in a block of post-tsunami flats, challenged me: “have the food prices gone down? are there new jobs? if they [the government and the ltte] want to start up the war again whenever they want, they can.” sitamma explained the demise of the ltte to me like this: “in the sea there is a lot of fish, but can you catch all the fish? any little thing can start things up all over again. and if they [the government and the ltte] want to start something again, they can.” so no easy peace had come to settle over sri lanka. the rebuilding of the nation requires constant vigilance, and the past hovers restlessly over daily life. how do realities and experiences merge and emerge amid national orderings, out of the past and into the future? here, i offer that vigilance is not merely a technique of self-disciplining for those living near the shorelines and in the spaces of potential and past terrorism. living in eastern sri lanka requires a type of anticipation that sees neither the past nor the future as closed (bloch 1995; see also jameson 2002). this anticipatory state offers a conscientious recognition and critique of the contradictions of the material and social conditions in which many continue to live in sri lanka, and it enables people to go about their daily lives—carrying worries with them, but not being debilitated by them. for the people i came to know, their experiences of and engagements with tsunami and war resulted in an anticipatory platform for living and enduring through times where the possibility of another disaster looms. anticipation, for many exposed to the ongoing insecurities of disaster management, is a recognition that the “ends” of disasters lead to neither a stable peace nor emotive complacency, but also not despondence (on the “ends” of war, see nelson 2009; nelson and mcallister 2013). these experiences and sentiments, these anticipatory states, speak to the reaches and limits of the government’s anticipatory measures. anticipation is not only evidenced by the ways in which people are prepared: bags and id cards safely packed with a change of clothes. security articulates differently when considering how people rely on their neighbors, the sound of the ocean, the color of the sky, the tug of memory, the blackness of the rising ocean tide, past warning failures and hasty evacuations from danger—the conditions that shape how people are attuned to the future and the past. sri lankans know very well the fragility of peace. they anticipate that something could always be—a condition of living in a place that has proven sometimes cruel and often difficult. these encounters and exchanges of what i call, then, anticipatory states highlight not only the changing structures in which sri lankan disaster nationalism manages the risks of tsunamis and terrorism but also how anticipation, as a state of being, a being that has long been a way of life in sri lanka, coalesces and pulls back on the anticipatory state. anticipation is a persistent awareness that also works to critique the social conditions reproducing ongoing forms of insecurity that must be negotiated. everyday anticipation wrests the total control and management of the nation away from those dangerous forms of state power that still lurk and have long been a part of life in sri lanka. yet just as state power lingers and lurks, it is upheld by its own nervousness, its own fragility. returning to the evacuation drill: the day we stood under the hot late afternoon sun in july, waiting for the alarm bell to sound, was special. the national disaster management centre had actually moved the date of the evacuation forward, because two days later a monumental total solar eclipse would occur—the longest solar eclipse in the twenty-first century, in fact. scientists and other excited observers clamored around different parts of asia, where the eclipse would be visible. local and international astrologers recognized the exceptionality of the eclipse as well. it was predicted that with this eclipse and following it great catastrophes could befall the world—from catastrophic natural disasters to another world war. the predictions were printed in the local newspaper, and people were on high alert: rumors of another tsunami began to emerge before the july 22, 2009, solar eclipse. although these rumors had no scientific basis, even the government and the disaster management centre could not ignore the hype. the government still moved forward with the evacuation drill, as if there were something to actually fear, or perhaps to allay fears and anxieties being expressed, especially by coastal populations. and so schools were closed the morning of the eclipse. in anticipation of something great, the government decided to stage the evacuation drill. it also had its local offices (rather than just the central one in colombo) staffed twenty-four hours a day the day before, the day of, and the day after the eclipse. astrology is a social force that cannot be ignored in sri lanka. it is put to use in everyday practices from marriage pairings to auspicious dates for travel and wedding days. even politics is steeped in this tradition; all political players have their personal astrologers, seeking appropriate days to make speeches and travel plans, including president rajapaksa. he takes astrology so seriously that about a month after the war had been declared over in june 2009, authorities arrested one of sri lanka’s most popular astrologers, chandrasiri bandara, for predicting that rajapaksa would be ousted from office on september 9, 2009. this did not sit well with the administration. the president’s spokesperson, lucien rajakurunayake, stated, “we have to wonder why an astrologer would say such a thing. in sri lanka, astrologers are not just for fun. they play powerful roles in steering outcomes. saying it can make it so.” bandara, the “opposition” astrologer, on his arrest responded, “the sri lankan government arrested and imprisoned me, but they could not prison [sic] saturn” (wax 2009). and then, on one of my visits to the village where the first tsunami-warning tower was built, i sat in the small community center built after the disaster with najeema. the warning tower stood next to the center, protected by metal fencing. playing children screamed and laughed around us: she ran a small village montessori program here. we were discussing how the warning towers had been working, and as i began to talk about the complex communication network of experts, scientists, and meteorologists involved, she interjected, “the scientists, the experts, they can know about earthquakes and the tsunami after they happen, but only god knows if they will happen beforehand. and only god knows if the tower will work.”18 notes 1. although, to be sure, in sri lanka’s postwar climate, the so-called peace dividend and the reconstruction of the war-torn northeastern regions of the island are seen as blank slates of development and economic reconstruction. so, alongside disaster nationalism, we have disaster capitalism, which are certainly interrelated. as naomi klein (2008) outlines in the shock doctrine, “disaster capitalism” is the modus operandi of expanding free market capitalism— that is, the radical privatization of war and disaster. in sri lanka she highlights the primacy given to the reconstruction of tourist hotels along the coastline—“resorts as recovery” (gunewardena 2008) in addition to the privatization of fishing. see also gunewardena and schuller 2008. acknowledgments to usha and nitharshini, my research assistants, my friends and confidants, without whom my research would not have been possible. to fajru and muradh, disaster experts and coordinators extraordinaire; their dedication to their communities was inspiring. to the bartholomeusz family for a real home in sri lanka. i was humbled by those who shared their memories and lives with me in sri lanka. they persist in my own memories and heart, and hopefully in these words. this article benefited immensely from earlier presentations: the aaa meetings in 2010; the sri lanka graduate student conference in 2011; the department of anthropology and the department of science and technology studies at cornell university; the society for the humanities conference on risk at cornell university; the hurford center for the humanities, haverford college; and the department of anthropology at the university of tennessee. at various stages, the comments of the following were invaluable: tim choy, nicholas d’avella, joe dumit, maria fernandez, kim fortun, durba ghosh, t. j. hinrichs, alan klima, nidhi mahajan, rachel prentice, sara pritchard, smriti srinivas, michelle stewart, sharika thiranagama, marina welker, wendy wolford, the patience and insight of the editors of cultural anthropology, especially dominic boyer, and the generous comments of three anonymous reviewers. lastly, i dedicate this article to my dad, whose spirit and fortitude i missed, but, i like to think, watched over me as i revised this piece. 2. joseph masco’s (2010) tracing of how cold war logics enabled the translation of hurricane katrina into nuclear terms (i.e., hiroshima), and the language of the war on terror prove helpful in thinking through this point. 3. lakoff 2008 and collier and lakoff 2014 build off of michel foucault’s (2007) work on disciplinary biopower to discuss how “vital systems” rather than population become the focus in preemptive techniques of disaster management. stephen collier and andrew lakoff suggest that apparatuses of vital systems security are a form of reflexive biopolitics that have emerged in response to the risks of modernization (see also beck 1992). in light of new modes of networked technologies of power, i would add to this discourse gilles deleuze’s (1992) proposal that we are moving beyond a disciplinary society into a society of control. 4. see winslow and woost 2004 on how unending war became the grounds on which to fashion lives, for as the war grew into its own reality, its reproduction could be less and less tied up with the politics of ethnicity and more dependent on the politics of profits and making a living. 5. celia lowe (2010) offers a different perspective on how biosecurity plays out in indonesia, where vital systems and infrastructure differ markedly from the united states. 6. for work on the anticipation of danger and insecurity at checkpoints in sri lanka, see jeganathan 2002 and thiranagama 2011. 7. following scholars of technology and technocracies, the construction and implementation of infrastructures and technologies reveal much about politics, state power, and nationalism (pritchard 2011; scott 1998; mitchell 2002; on sri lanka, see tennekoon 1988). 8. in the late 1980s, the sri lankan government put down the antigovernmental insurgency of the janatha vimukthi peramuna (jvp), a formerly marxist turned sinhala nationalist group, through extrajudicial killings, death squads, and kidnappings. 9. in southern sri lanka, many people felt that those affected in the north and east deserved tsunami aid, but they were deeply suspicious of aid being funneled through the ltte and thus, they feared, used for warring purposes rather than to help people (gamburd 2013). 10. here is an interesting twist to the “modern constitution” (latour 1993), in which nature and culture, or science and politics, remain separate spheres, never to be intertwined. in sri lanka, the state, the modern political formation par excellence, manages nature (natural disaster) and culture (war) together. this is possible, however, not because the sri lankan state is attempting to make a contentious ontological claim, but rather because the figure of the terrorist has obtained an exceptional juridical status outside humanity, and is thus excluded from the realm of the political or of culture. the figure of terrorism, thus, is also cast into the realm of the “non-human” (see, in a very different context, de la cadena 2011 for a discussion of how nature and other-than-humans became occluded from the realm of the political). 11. thus i add a critical dimension to the rich literature on sri lankan nationalism, beyond the lens of ethnicity and religion. 12. on expertise and disaster, see button 2010; bond 2013; knowles 2013; and frickel and vincent 2011. american anthropologist dedicated a special issue to hurricane katrina (paredes 2006). on katrina, see also dowty and allen 2011. for a discussion on the politics of conflict and tsunami reconstruction in sri lanka and indonesia, see de alwis and hedman 2008. see also oliver-smith and hoffman 2002. 13. that the ltte nationalists proclaimed the northern and eastern parts of the island as solely for tamils problematically suffused a mono-ethnic imagination with the territory, thus eliding the long history of both tamil and muslim settlement and sociality in those regions (mcgilvray 2008). the coastal part of the eastern district is majority muslim and tamil, while the interior of the district is predominantly sinhala-buddhist, and much has been written on the national redistricting policies and government resettlement projects of the area (hasbullah and korf 2009; mcgilvray and raheem 2007; spencer 2003). 14. when i left in late september 2009, sri lanka’s postconflict situation remained tense. the state of emergency had just been extended by parliament, tamil civilians were still interned in northern camps, and the government had increased the military budget by 20 percent and the size of the military by 50 percent, all in the name of protecting its fragile security. since the war, sri lanka’s 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sight of a dying animal in 1959 to stay and work in india. the passage gandhi cites from rogers’s (2000, 42–44) memoir, mad dogs and an englishwoman, reads as follows:1 i was on my way to new zealand when i saw a horse which caused me to remain in india. it was standing at the side of a very busy road, with the crows tearing the flesh off its back. as i ran towards it, it turned its head towards me and to my horror i saw that it had bleeding sockets from which the crows had already pecked out its eyes. i rang up the spca [society for the prevention of cruelty to animals] but there was little that could be done and the horse had to be shot. if any passerby had done something earlier the horse might have been saved. i cancelled my journey to new zealand and stayed in india to see what i could do for animal suffering. we need to fight on every front. if we run away and hide our heads to avoid seeing the sight which horrifies us, we are unworthy of the compassion that has been granted us by the almighty. gandhi (2000, 5), after citing this passage, writes: “crystal is one of the people who opened my eyes twenty years ago and showed me how to work for what i believed in instead of merely showing concern.” i want to begin by thinking about the variety of ways that both rogers and gandhi invoke sight and the eyes. rogers sees a horse that compels her to stay; rogers sees, but the horse, its eyes pecked out by crows, cannot see; we are told we must see the sight that horrifies us; gandhi’s eyes are opened by a story about sight, its willful absence, and its graphic, pitiable loss. this centrality of sight and of human witnessing of acts of violence against animals in activist narratives is a standard trope. similar to a coming-out story, animal rights activists in india (and perhaps elsewhere) stake their commitment to a way of life based on one critical moment after which nothing can ever be the same. i argue in this essay that animal rights activists describe this critical moment as an intimate event in which the sight of a suffering animal, the locking of eyes between human and nonhuman, inaugurates a bond demanding from the person a life of responsibility. that event is uniquely intimate because it occurs between two singular beings—because based on the locking of eyes, the human’s knowledge is not of all animals in general, but of this animal, at this moment. the moment is uniquely intimate, too, because it expands ordinary understandings of the self and its possible social relations. as elizabeth povinelli (2006, 179) puts it, an intimate event “exfoliates the social skin.” this article has two main objectives. first, i address how people come to act on behalf of animals in india. in doing so, i sketch moral biographies of action and inaction. these biographies connect with my second objective, to examine the sensorium of political engagement between humans and animals. why this emphasis on sight, why the valorization of the witness? while i suggest that the event of intimacy between human and animal has the potential to blow the conceit of humanity apart, another reading is possible: that the act of intimacy, insofar as it relies on the witnessing human subject, constructs the animal as theoretical, as a mere object in the autobiography of the woman who sees and consequently acts (derrida 2008, 82). does animal activism thus reproduce the supposed value of human being, a valuation that underlies the mass exploitation of animals in the first place, a reproduction of what agamben (2004) calls “the lethal and bloody logic” of the anthropological machine, which functions on the perpetual differentiation of human and its other? or is that reading itself a sign of humanism’s triumph—is seeing humanism everywhere only a capitulation to its colonization of imagination and thought?2 if so, what would it mean to believe that in the ethical encounter between human and animal a woman can indeed become an animal, not theoretically but carnally, morally, spiritually? this essay engages with the sensorium of animal activism and its life inside and outside the anthropological machine. but first, some context. moral biographies, affective histories animal activism in india is inseparable from a larger affective history of liberalism, a history that, in turn, is deeply entwined with the history and politics of empire (gandhi 2006).3 if we were to simply replace horse or animal in rogers’s recollections with the phrase “the female child” or “the hindu woman,” her memoir would read no differently, for example, than katherine mayo’s 1927 anti-india polemic, mother india—a book that, in its stark portrayal of everyday acts of astonishing violence against women and girls, served as a powerful tool of empire, arguing for the need to stay fast in india to protect its most vulnerable from barbarity and neglect (sinha 2000). and indeed, animal welfare in contemporary india—like pro-women reform in colonial india—is largely driven by foreigners. the biggest animal shelters and ngos (except for maneka gandhi’s) are founded by foreigners who came to india on holiday or for work and found themselves, like rogers, compelled by the sight of suffering to stay there, or at least to try and transform the place from afar. two british women helped catalyze the first high court judgment in india prohibiting the killing of stray dogs.4 they had taken it upon themselves to sterilize dogs, seeing that the consequence of their overpopulation on goan beaches was to be killed by dog shooters who would exchange the tail of a defeated dog at the municipal office for a sum of rupees. when the women found out that the city had committed a mass culling of dogs they had already sterilized (and who would thus not be guilty of begetting more), they set in motion a series of events that would lead to the founding of people for animals, goa, and the building of a landmark court case. and then there is another briton, peta’s (people for the ethical treatment of animals) ingrid newkirk, a renegade and murder fantasy of carnivores and vivisectionists everywhere (see specter 2003). the indian animal holds a special place in newkirk’s heart, in part because she was raised there. as an adult she returned to india to walk the trail of horror that cattle are made to walk, the roughly nine-hundred miles from gujarat—one of the highest dairy-producing states, but one where cow protectionists have secured the illegality of slaughter—to west bengal, one of the only two states in india in which cow slaughter is legal. (the other is kerala. both are communist party strongholds.)5 newkirk’s journey was the basis for a film on india’s leather industry but perhaps more important, it is the reason that newkirk will never quit india. in 2000 she set up a peta office in bombay with which she has daily involvement, an office headed by a thirty-eight-year-old american-born indian woman. numerically, the passionate involvement of such foreigners is a boon for animal welfare; culturally and socially, however, it makes for a liability. critics of animal rights have every reason and many a chance to paint the movement as a product of foreign meddling and elite interests, and as ultimately working against the economic well-being of the nation. of course, a homegrown animal welfare politics exists too: cow protection or gauseva. but even this is only superficially homegrown. cow protection was conceived as an anticolonial endeavor and thus emerged in an unequal encounter with the foreign (pandey 1983). and in any case, cow protection does not really constitute a politics of animal welfare: it exclusively concerns the cow, and the cow as a symbol separating those who eat or slaughter them (christians, muslims, and lower-caste hindus) from those who do not (higher-caste hindus) (yang 1980). because of this deep cultural association of animal protection with caste violence and hindu nationalism, people (including the human rights activists i have worked with [dave 2012b]) will express their cosmopolitanism and progressive politics in part by deliberately and ostentatiously eating meat, a performance in the “aggressively visible public theater” that is eating in colonial and postcolonial india (roy 2010, 8). in their eyes animal activists are, at best, elite and out of touch with important human issues and, at worst, harboring high-caste, anti-muslim sentiments. this perspective is influenced by the faces of animal welfare groups, many of which do belong to high-caste or non-muslim middle-class people (as is common across the ngo sector in india). but it is also blind to the fact that the field workers and volunteers span the demographic spectrum, and that those who bring animals into clinics are often the poor, those who share the streets with so-called stray animals (dave 2012a). the animal rights sector, defensive, responds to these perceptions in various ways. one organization asked a muslim vegan activist to pose for a poster holding a dog (muslims are widely considered to think of dogs as unclean). in case that was too subtle, they also asked him to wear a skullcap. the indian vegetarian congress, founded in the 1950s, boasts that it has on occasion given its college paper prize to muslims.6 try as some animal activists might, however, to distance themselves from hindu, high-caste, antiminority politics, rumblings about muslim butchers, the slaughter-house’s “stench of death” (reminiscent of language about dalit leatherworkers), and beef-eating christians continue to sound from within animal rights organizations.7 animal rights activism finds challenges in india’s changing economy as well. the conspicuous consumption of animal products, from leather to meats, has increased among elite and upwardly mobile groups during india’s global economic rise. this rise itself has, in part, been accomplished through the massive trade in animals, with india becoming the biggest exporter of leather in asia and the biggest producer of milk in the world (fiapo 2011). but under whose watch did india become such a renowned specialist in the mass exploitation of cows? well, of course—because every good story needs irony—under the party of cow protectionists and antislaughter campaigners, the hindu right-wing bharatiya janata party (bjp). and who but india’s foremost animal activist and former bahu of the indian national congress party is a star politician of the bjp?8 of course, maneka gandhi. gandhi’s moral biography is as captivating and mercurial as she is. she was not yet sixteen when, at a cousin’s party, a man in a white kurta and red scarf approached her. the line at the buffet was long and the man did not want to wait, so he asked her if she would share her plate of food with him, particularly her lamb; she declined.9 and so did maneka anand first meet sanjay gandhi, son of the prime minister, indira gandhi, and grandson of india’s first prime minister, jawaharlal nehru: over a plate of lamb. maneka, who was so apolitical that she did not know who sanjay was, would marry into one of the world’s great political dynasties and, as it happened, into a family of animal and environment protectionists. nehru had made it his personal mission as prime minister to pass the prevention of cruelty against animals act (pca) in 1960. the bill was first drafted by member of parliament rukmini devi, a legendary dancer mentored politically by annie besant and whose philosophy about human-animal relations was shaped by the theosophical society in madras. nehru asked devi if he could introduce her bill himself because, as he told her, the issue was too dear to him and to the country to let fail. devi acquiesced, but to unexpected consequences (krishna and gandhi 2005). the central points of devi’s version of the pca were to prevent animal experimentation and slaughter for food; nehru’s version—the one passed and still in effect—made animal experimentation and food the two major exceptions to cruelty law, concerned as he and his advisers were with modernity and development. (or, as some animal activists explain in conspiratorial tones, nehru was pro-muslim and aimed to protect butchers and slaughterhouses.) his daughter, indira gandhi, sponsored progressive environmental legislation and was known for her ambitious conservation initiative, project tiger. her politics were deeply felt. a visiting dignitary had given gandhi a tiger skin rug, head and all. likely under some adviser’s suggestion, she displayed the rug in her drawing room. writing a letter to her elder son, rajiv, who was studying at cambridge, gandhi mourned the life of that tiger in two handwritten pages. “someday,” she wrote, “i hope people will shoot only cameras, and not guns, in the jungle.”10 animal lovers perhaps, but they were meat-eaters all, the nehru-gandhis, until one night at dinner when maneka began pontificating about the treatment of animals. she was just putting a spoonful of meaty soup to her mouth when sanjay said, “how can you go on about animal cruelty while eating meat? stop eating meat or shut up.” and like that, an epiphany. so obvious to her was her hypocrisy that she dropped the spoon that very instant, the soup scalding her wrist. “see?” she said to me as she pulled up the sleeve of her kurta; “the scar is still there.”11 i will return to this: the wound as trace, the scar as birthmark (ahmed 2004, 27). that same year, the year she turned eighteen, she asked her husband for some property under an overpass in south delhi, which he gave her as a birthday gift. gandhi in turn gave it to a friend, who started an animal shelter called friendicoes. “so that was the beginning of your activism?” i asked. she laughed. “what a stupid beginning! my husband was the boss of this city. my mother-in-law was the prime minister of india. and i asked for a shop under a flyover. this is one of my problems. and it was one of my husband’s problems too. everybody talks about how wicked he was, but the truth is that he was just young. he had no idea what power he had. neither of us did.”12 people do talk about his wickedness. it is some sort of awful irony (once again) that he led a mass sterilization program of india’s poor during his mother’s autocratic emergency regime in 1975–1977 (see tarlo 2003), anecdotally aided by maneka gandhi who is responsible for instituting the increasingly popular abc program to sterilize stray dogs. since her husband’s death in a plane crash in 1980, and her banishment from home and party at the hands of her mother-in-law shortly after (see singh 2003), she has devoted herself to animals, founding india’s largest animal rights organization, people for animals. she exploits her name for all it is worth: “i thank god every day,” she told me once, “for making me a gandhi.” she works seven days a week from morning to night, usually sitting behind a cluttered desk, wearing plain cotton salwar kameez (never silk, never wool), thin from years of wear, advocating for cows, pigs, dogs, cats, donkeys, and chickens by writing weekly newspaper columns, lobbying fellow parliament members, and threatening over the phone to have people beaten, hanged upside down in their underwear, killed, maimed, and disappeared. given her history, nobody takes these as idle threats. putting her violence aside if possible—much of which is idle threat—gandhi is tireless in her labors. the heavy bags under her eyes, the softening body, the more frequent battles with illness—all stand as testaments to the strains of a passion that will not let her go. “why must you work so hard?” i asked her once while on a doctor-mandated walk. “aren’t you worried about the consequences, the enemies you make, the stress?” it turns out i had asked the wrong question; she has nothing to do with it. she answered that she was “a machine that is designed to do this, exactly this, only this. it is a machine so sensitive,” she continued, “that its skin literally prickles with another’s pain. but there is no inside to the machine. there is just this skin.” there is no inside. there is just this skin. what gandhi pointed out to me was the limitation of my worldview, my assumption that she was a subject with volition, one who could stop and start at will. perhaps she was once such a subject, but the day the soup scalded her skin she became something new: she became subject to the world, rather than insisting on being a subject in it. at the heart of this transformation lay a moment of radical humility, and her guiding principle: surrender. the activists she takes on as protégés are few, for they must be hardy sorts with thick skin as well as the kind that prickles, and they must share with gandhi one thing, that “in the face of that which is bigger than you, stronger than you, you give yourself over to it, you surrender.” the universe is such a thing—bigger, stronger—and what gandhi pushed me to see is that the readiness to be transformed, even if by an unrelenting stream of stimuli—painful, god-awful—is not an act of extraordinary courage but the only thing that makes any sense. we are all bound to lose, standing up to the world. the only way to survive is to give ourselves over, to trust that we will be alternately battered and buoyed. and survive she must, in order to keep “sticking my fingers into all the holes in the dam.” this sounds futile, but in her mind, and to the activists she trains, so is the notion of the rational actor, of someone who changes the world at will. and if everything is futile, including our very being, then what is so terrible about working in futility? and work she does. the perpetual witness so i was surprised when she said to me one day, from behind her desk, wearing a tense, world-weary expression: “i only wish there were a slaughterhouse next door. to witness that violence, to hear those screams … i would never be able to rest.”13 as far as i could tell she never rested anyway, even without piercing screams to keep her pulse racing and her eyes open. she never rested, nor did the others: abodh, the director of welfare for stray dogs (wsd), whose personal cell phone is the default animal emergency line for all of bombay and who has not had an uninterrupted night of sleep in fifteen years and whose wife, however kind, is running out of patience; abodh’s fieldworker, dipesh, who treats animals on the streets six days a week, voluntarily heals his own neighborhood animals on sundays, and in his spare time—such as it is—works another job to keep his ailing parents alive; maya, who finally got engaged but had no time for love, and so lost it. all of them have witnessed something that allows them no respite; all, like gandhi, once transformed are now forever compelled by something that, on the face of it, usurps their very (well-) being. and so i want to explore this thing called witnessing, specifically three things about it: first, the idea of witnessing as distinct from merely seeing; second, how witnessing requires a disciplined presence, or the witness’s thereness; and third, the importance of movement in the witnessing of violence, both a movement toward the subject of intimacy and away from the self and its protective skin. to witness, as rogers and gandhi each have invoked the term, means to see in a manner that is present, to root themselves when they might rather run or turn away. the same stubborn presence characterizes voyeurism of horror, but it differs from witnessing in two crucial ways. in witnessing and being present to pain as these activists describe it, they seek to place themselves in a situation in which they could—if brave enough—change the events that they are framed and marked by (das 2007). to witness is to be implicated and culpable in an event not at all inexorable. further, a voyeur heightens the affective experience of being alive in his or her own skin (“i have survived this moment and now i feel euphoric”); in witnessing, by contrast, that skin is shed, so that something in the person ceases to exist after the event is over. the fiction of the self is blown apart. or is it? maybe the better question is: must it be? i am suggesting an understanding of witnessing that blows the self apart, but witnessing can create truth as much as it can explode it, can concern the safely encased human self as much as the radically exfoliated one. consider witness not as the thing one does but as the imperative. “witness,” says rené descartes (qtd. in derrida 2008, 77), “the fact that the beasts have less reason than men … that they have no reason at all.” this is the other meaning of witness, witnessing as “we see that,” witnessing as an appeal to evidence presumed to be commonly shared, witnessing—because of our privileged linking of ocularity to reason—that demands that each be in lockstep with the others who see. in witnessing, vision is not always singularly intimate; it is its opposite—common sense. that seems reason enough to be skeptical of the privileging of sight, and of the politics of witnessing. jacques derrida (2008) reminds us of another reason to be wary. witnessing, he says, is autobiographical, it is proof that i am, that we are. the animal is objectively staged for this purpose, it is seen but does not itself see, such as the animal in descartes’s discourse when he renders it an automaton, appealing to a man who witnesses an animal that does not see him in turn. this is the animal that exists as theoretical spectacle, an object for the human that says, “i am, because i see that.” (“see that” here has two meanings: i see that thing, and i see that this is true.) derrida (2008, 82) calls the witnessed animal the “spectacle for a specular subject.” that specular subject becomes the subject he or she is in the act of seeing, but not through the act of being reflected back in the animal’s gaze. this is the levinasian animal, the one that does not have a face capable of compelling a relationship of ethical obligation (levinas 2004; calarco 2008, 55–78). that is the levinasian animal, but what kind of animal is crystal rogers’s horse? the one with crows tearing the flesh off its meatless back and with bleeding sockets from which those crows have already pecked out its eyes? does this animal have a face? is this animal a theoretical spectacle, objectively staged for rogers’s story of “i am?” i don’t know. that animal senses rogers running toward it, and in turn, it turns to “face” rogers. the animal, in other words, responds. rogers is transformed, recognizing in herself an ethical responsibility at the moment of seeing the animal other. i have a hard time seeing her as only a specular subject. the specular subject becomes such through an act of differentiation owed to an ocularcentric logic of sameness and difference: “because i see that (“see that” in both senses of seeing that thing and seeing reason), that is not me.” the specular subject, further, can only see himself reflected in his own gaze; the animal’s gaze cannot reflect to him his soul (derrida 2008, 82). rogers is not that specular subject because she, i think, does see her soul reflected in the gaze of the animal: but that soul, like the sockets of the animal’s eyes, is empty. the witnessing subject, in this case, is violently stripped away: revealed to be, and becoming, emptiness—the emptiness that, giorgio agamben (2004, 92) argues, is the nothing-space between human and animal, the space of ontological vulnerability. and yet we cannot take this nothingness too far. as veena das (2007) reminds us, the witness of violence is only a witness because she survives it—because she has witnessed, in fact, she has an obligation to live. recall gandhi, who knows she must survive to keep working, and who knows that to survive she has no choice but to surrender. but she survives not as what she once was, before she became a perpetual witness. the scar she still wears from the night of the soup is indeed, as sarah ahmed (2004, 27) would suggest, a birthmark, a reminder of what she became: just skin. to witness, then, might best be understood as a radical interpenetration of life and death: to exercise a disciplined presence to violence that opens up a death that then compels a new kind of responsible life in a previously unimaginable skin. in the case of animal activists, it is a skin also inhabited by the animal. carmelia satija, a middle-aged hindu animal rights activist in delhi does not appear, on the face of it, to wear a skin unusual for a person of her social position. i first met her three summers ago while trying to track down an animal rights organization called kare (kindness to animals and respect for environment). the address i had located through a website appeared erroneous. instead of an ngo office or animal shelter, i found myself in front of rio grande, a small store with an armed guard in an upscale marketplace in south delhi. it turned out that satija was both the owner of the shop and the founding trustee of kare, now defunct. after learning from her sales clerk that i was there, she drove to her shop in a black suv to meet me. we greeted each other and she led me through the store to her second-floor office, where she offered me a seat across from her at her desk. she has an oval face, long black hair, and deep-set eyes. her movements are elegant, jewelry quietly jangling, her accent clipped, the smell of her perfume mixing with the strong jasmine incense wafting through her shop. “so,” she began, “does this really interest you, this activism of mine?” i answered that it did, and she, unbelieving at first, began a slow reveal, bringing out reports, pamphlets, court filings, and photographs, all filed away behind store financials and inventories. (the basement of her house held much more, entire shelving units worth.) “thirty years of my life,” she said, her eyes a mix of guilt and sadness. when i asked her to tell me about those years she began with images.14 the slaughterhouse footage she had in her possession, satija said, was “more valuable to me than gold.” she continued: “those images reminded me. of how horrible the world is. of the pain we cause. even without watching the videos, just knowing that they were in the cabinet served a purpose. they would never let me stop.” she then told me about her illicit visits to the idgah slaughterhouse in new delhi, whose horrors she filmed and later had shown on the state-owned broadcast service, doordarshan (an effort by the government, no doubt, to whip up anti-muslim sentiment under the guise of compassion). the idgah slaughterhouse has a capacity to process 2,500 animals per day for meat, leather, and by-products, but instead it butchers upward of 13,000 animals daily, around 3,000 buffaloes and 10,000 goats.15 the animals are brought in from miles around the city, thrown from the trucks into heaps by their limbs, most with their legs already broken and some crushed to death from the journey. boys and men begin the process of hacking and skinning the animals with rusty knives, the butchers barefoot and shin-deep in blood and shit. there are few sights more heartbreaking— or for those less sentimental than i, more ironic—than of sickly cows eating from the nearly one thousand pounds of cattle excrement, body parts, and clotted blood that the idgah slaughterhouse dumps at a nearby landfill, a playground for kite-flying slum children, every day. figure 1. death by rubbish. (photo courtesy of animal aid, india telling me about her visits to idgah, satija continued: “it’s not just the sights that you always remember. worse even than the looks in the animals’ eyes, worse than the screams, was the stench of death. it’s not only the stench of blood and gore, it’s the stench of death. even now, i wake up in the middle of the night with that stench in my nostrils.” the value for satija of witnessing slaughter is that it forces her always to move, to stave off rest and the pretenses that enable it. the activism, then, compelled by witnessing (which, as i have suggested, is partly defined by a disciplined staying put in the face of horror) is also a kind of running—fervent movement away from the bounded self that only impotently remembers, and toward that which suffers on account of one’s own life. this defining dynamic of witnessing as staying put in the face of death only to then constantly move away from our own impotence and toward the other in a relation of intimacy that thins the human skin and thickens relationality, is one described by many of the people who have populated my narrative. recall how rogers runs toward the dying horse and keeps moving until her death thirty-five years later, homeless and almost penniless; gandhi anticipates never resting while in the earshot of the nightmarish cacophony of death; the stench of death in satija’s nostrils bolts her awake from the tenuous refuge of sleep. these relationships among witnessing, animal activism, and the impossibility of respite also come into play in people’s decisions not to involve themselves in the lives of animals. a woman in her early twenties explained to me why she did not volunteer at an animal shelter at home in chennai, saying that she was “deathly afraid of caring too much.” is any other politics, i wonder, constrained by such a mortal fear of caring too much, of the heart bursting, the skin thinning, of not being able to rest again? is any other politics so limited, that is, by the fear of intimacy, or so determined by the witnessed events that create it? satija’s witnessing of the suffering of animals did more than force her to labor ceaselessly; that witnessing, i want to stress, constituted an intimate event in which her own social skin would be opened up, stripped away, and remade, thickening worldly relations. in her own words, such witnessing forced her—would force us all—to become the animal in pain. “to realize the suffering of animals,” she said to me, “requires you to become an animal that talks. because they cannot [talk], that becomes my responsibility.” i want to think now, through the rubrics of humanism and its others, about what it means for satija to “become an animal that talks.” becoming animal povinelli (2006) elaborates a history of the concept of intimacy in post-enlightenment western thought. intimacy here is the freely chosen bond between sovereign subjects, a foundational fiction of the autological society that sets itself apart from the genealogical—those incapable of intimacy because their bonds are already chosen for them in advance along such lines as tribe, caste, custom, and kin. what interests me about this material on animals and witnessing in urban india is, in part, how it contributes to the project of destabilizing that fiction by showing how an act of intimacy—intimate because singular, because it exfoliates the social skin, because it expands the boundaries of possible relationality—both exceeds and even resists sovereignty. for one, the animal subject is brought into its intimate relation with a human through its unfreedom. second, by entering into intimacy with an animal in pain, the activist seeks not to be more free, but to render herself even more deeply subject to unequal relations of obligation and responsibility (see mahmood 2005): in fact, to surrender. but the intimacy of human and animal, by showing that intimacy is other than a freely chosen bond between two sovereign (and thus presumably human) subjects, does not only explode the species divide. intimacy also reintroduces and stabilizes that chasm. as satija describes it, realizing the suffering of animals makes imperative a simultaneous sublimation and deployment of the self as a sovereign human subject to and for the needs of the unfree other. the activist simultaneously must become the animal (her own skin shed in sublimation) and must hyperembody herself as human by doing precisely that which defines what it is to be human: to speak, here, to “give voice” for that unfree other that cannot speak, the witness safely encased in her human self. satija exemplifies how voice itself emerges in the “zone between two deaths” (das 2007, 61–62)—here, the death of the animal and the death of the man the witness was in the moment before he witnessed. but the voice that emerges in the zone between two deaths does not only cry against injustice; it also calls forth the very cleavage between human and animal that enables that injustice to thrive at all. or does it? maybe the better question is: must it? an obvious and eminently reasonable analysis of satija’s vision of becoming an animal is the one i just made (see also derrida 2008; ticktin 2012): that despite its aim to break from violence, animal activism only reproduces the war between species through its anthropocentric humanism. but then again, that is just one interpretation, and perhaps its damning flaw is precisely its eminent reasonability—a kind of approach to the world that, too, finds its foundation and value in the “bloody and lethal” tradition of metaphysical humanism (agamben 2004). and so what if i suggested that my very assumption of anthropocentric humanism in satija’s desire to “become an animal that talks” may well be the problem here: that my assumption of humanism results from my being locked in a closed, binary logic of representation in which (1) i know what human and animal are, and (2) i know that they are either different or that they are the same. instead of hearing in her claim, “i = it” or “it = me,” why am i not hearing “i + it + b + z = something you have never thought before?”16 perhaps it would be useful to linger on her use of the word becoming. satija did not say she wanted to be an animal, but that she wanted to become one. the difference between being and becoming is similar to that between witnessing and specular subjects, a difference that lies, to use brian massumi’s words, between rendering the self molar or dissolving the self into supermolecularity. we are all capable of becoming-other, massumi (1992, 94) tells us; all we have to do is want it. we have to want to escape our bodily and social limitations, a desire that may be sparked by politics, by philosophy, by witnessing. but that desire may also be conflicted: oscillating between the desire for molarity (which manifests in being something other—say, an animal that talks— and is administered through the logic of sameness and difference) and the desire for supermolecularity (which does not, strictly speaking, ever manifest: it is only becoming and hyperdifferentiation). i do not know the nature of satija’s desires, but i am willing to say that my immediate unwillingness to accept that she does become animal in a way that is disruptive rather than productive of anthropocentric humanism unjustly limits in advance the potential effects of her, my, and the animal’s becoming. i never saw satija in the field—never saw her becoming-animal with my own eyes and therefore cannot say “i see that” her becoming is true—so let me move for a moment to something i did witness. in the summer of 2013 i spent a week with an american family, the abrams-meyers, who had moved from seattle to a rocky, hilly village outside udaipur, in the northwest indian state of rajasthan. they were jim, erika, and claire, and when i stepped out of the udaipur train station and gave the name of the village i wanted to get to, the rickshaw driver said, “erika ka ghar?” (erika’s house?), which erika had told me might happen, but which still tickled me, this indication of their local celebrity. the driver brought me to their gate and the sound of the engine brought claire to the door, followed closely by erika, who was quite literally flapping with excitement. they were all abnormally tall, these americans. jim, aged sixty, is a sturdy man who wears dickies pants and a thin gray t-shirt and heavy work boots. he rides to their shelter every morning on a royal enfield motorcycle, and when i sat behind him i was transfixed by the deep creases on his sun-reddened neck. he was once a professor of literature. claire, aged twenty-two, dresses simply and wears a bandana to keep the hair off a face beautiful in its classic symmetry, including a striking roman nose dotted with a stud. she was twelve when they left seattle and has not been formally schooled since, which might in fact account for her extraordinary curiosity and wisdom about the world. erika: well, erika, i have to say, is a lot like big bird. and i can say that because i know she does not mind, for she has nothing against either birds or muppets, and is quite aware that she is tall, wild, and gangly. erika, aged fifty-nine, almost always wears saris, but while i was there the family was moving their animal shelter to a larger site, which involved actually carrying animals in their arms, one by one, from a van into large outdoor enclosures. so i usually saw her in random house pants and kurtas, her glasses sometimes on her head, sometimes her head covered with a bandana that she otherwise wears around her neck. i think i will always remember the sight of her, slightly disheveled, slightly mad looking, but somehow calm, and everything revolving around her in a steady, necessary orbit. she is carrying a bucket full of water even though it has been a very long and hot day, and the dogs trail behind her and she is harried but full of love. and i can see why an activist named jaivardan says erika “is like a god” to him, and another activist named rohit calls her “the mother of animals,” and why timmie kumar, who directs jaipur’s renowned shelter, help in suffering, and has a cult following herself, told me she “fell to the ground and wept when [she] first saw erika with the animals.” i know that sounds overly dramatic but somehow it is not when you see this woman rolling in the dirt with salivating, joyous, romping three-legged dogs. i wish i had fallen to the ground in tears myself. one of the things about erika, as with any witness, is her mix of movement and stillness. she walked me to the large animals section of the shelter, populated mostly by donkeys, goats, and cows, with a couple of paralyzed pigs. we came upon a large lump on the ground, covered by burlap, and then i saw the hooves and tail showing from under it. i came around and saw the nearly closed eyelids, the body rising and falling with laborious breath: it was a dying cow, her neck bent unnaturally. because of rajasthan’s antislaughter law, erika could not euthanize her. she had been dying for days. erika had assumed that the previous day was going to be the cow’s last, and she told me what they do at times like those. erika calls the workers over, one by one or perhaps two at a time, and she asks them to stop whatever work they are doing and just be there with the animal. she got down on the ground, next to this burlap and flesh, and demonstrated to me. “just be silent next to its dying body, stroking its head if they feel they can, cradling it, kissing it, or just sitting there, body to body, life to life, death to death, soul to soul. say you’re sorry that it’s leaving this world, if you feel moved to say that, say you’re sorry that it lived in a world like this, if that’s what you want to say. whatever you do, just be there.” in these moments of being-with, she added, the social boundaries between humans, too, fall apart, when they are together, all from their varying backgrounds of caste and race, with their butts equally on the shitand piss-strewn ground and their hands on the crusted body of an animal in pain, sometimes crying, sometimes stoic, sometimes calm, but all the time, and all of them, there, facing the boundary between life and death that will someday hunt us all down, regardless of the skin we wear. these are becomings, all i turned to erika to answer a question that satija had provoked: can we become animal, become other, in a way that is disruptive rather than productive of anthropocentric humanism? or to put it differently: can we become something other than the safely encased human self? i have no doubt that i watched some of erika die in that instant, that i witnessed her becoming-other through her surrender to becoming-death. i simply would not feel right reducing that moment to a reproduction of anthropocentrism, though surely one could make that argument if they wanted to. but more important, i want to suggest that it does not matter what she became; she affected me, forever, just as she affects all those who enter her orbit. for the entire point of becoming, in the deleuzian sense, is not to go from one thing to another, but to be a phenomenon, an event, an act of bordering in which both (original) categories are revealed to be infinitely other than what they are. becoming is pure effectuation, only the effect of affectively redefining the places we started from: in this particular case, woman and animal. in another case it was man and rat. this is from gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s (1987, 259) a thousand plateaus: when hofmannsthal contemplates the death throes of a rat, it is in him that the animal “bares his teeth at his monstrous fate.” this is not a feeling of pity, as he makes clear; still less an identification. it is a composition of speeds and affects … it makes the rat become a thought, a feverish thought in the man, at the same time that the man becomes a rat gnashing its teeth in its death throes. the rat and the man are in no way the same thing … but are expressed … in an affectability that is no longer that of subjects. unnatural participation.17 becoming; unnatural participation; turning the self not into another kind of self, but only into a “question-machine” (deleuze and guattari 1987, 259). social movements, in this sense, are full of becomings: they are defined and made by them. the phrase “unnatural participation,” in particular—because of its echoes, i suppose, of sodomy law and sexual policing, but also of the emergent and perverse—takes me from the animal to the queer, to a pivotal moment in the history of queer organizing in india. (this might seem quite apart, but the queer and the animal have many connections between them [see chen 2012; halberstam 2011; haraway 1991].) in 1998, a film called fire, about the love affair between two sisters-in-law in a middle-class new delhi home, was released throughout india. what followed were violent public clashes instigated by right-wing activists who claimed that the film was an abomination: there are no lesbians in india, they said. lesbians responded with three simple words: “indian and lesbian” (dave 2011). figure 2. becoming indian. (photo from times of india) is this so unlike satija’s claim that she becomes an animal? was not “indian and lesbian” an act of becoming par excellence? those words were certainly, when first uttered, as improbable as a wealthy, middle-aged hindu woman saying, “i am an animal.” the very identity of india, after all, rested on its exclusion of queer, and the very identity of queer rested on its exclusion from citizenship (bacchetta 1999), mirroring the mutual exclusions of human subject and animal abject. “indian and lesbian,” during the riotous weeks that followed that utterance, was indeed a becoming, an effectuation, a question-machine: affectively redefining dominant categories of social understanding, birthing inbred monstrosities where there was once, so we thought, a simple, gaping abyss between this and that. lesbians became indian as blacks had become men in another radical becoming in memphis in 1968, as the sanitation workers’ strike gave rise to a mass of signs that also marked a singular becoming, this time with four words instead of three: “i am a man.” these are becomings, all: a lesbian becoming indian, a black man becoming man, a woman becoming animal. but putting it this way, there are at least two differences between the first two and the last one. the first two begin with a movement from the particular (molecular) to the general (molar), while the last one begins with a movement from the general-particular (human–but still only woman) to the particular. the first two, in other words, are majoritarian, the last one minoritarian. this first difference can probably explain the second, which is that the first two becomings we believe (for who, really, would not want to be more, to be a man?), while the last one most of us do not (for who, really, would want to be less, to become an animal?). figure 3. becoming man. (photo by ernest c. withers, i am a man, sanitation workers strike, memphis, tennesee, march 28, 1968) and so what is it for me, or anyone, to critically question satija’s becoming-animal? i question, in part, the motivation and effects of satija’s “animal that talks,” describing it as more humanism. i call on the signs from our maiden conversation: her references to mythology to suggest that hindus, perhaps more than others, are inclined to compassion; her use of the phrase “stench of death,” unleashing a chain of references in my own mind that takes me quickly to a history of caste violence (though it could just as well take me to omaha, nebraska, where they use the same phrase to speak of slaughter [pachirat 2011, 30]); her wealth and comforts, which might signal to me a remove from struggle. but what do i know? what do i know of her heart other than what she tells me of it, and she tells me that she becomes an animal because she has witnessed an animal in pain. but then i think, “can it really be so?” a lesbian can be an indian because she already is; a black man can be a man because he already is; but satija cannot be an animal because i know what an animal is and an animal is not this bejeweled woman with a daughter in the ivy league. throughout all of this, i know. but what if we were to surrender to the spirit of becoming?18 to truly, carnally enact a critique of cartesianism by allowing other facets of the sensorium to reign? what if we were to become satija, to see what she sees, to experience what inspires her to shed her skin and become the animal in pain, the animal that writhes at night, a smell in her nostrils, a flash in his mind’s eye, a scream neither past nor present but here, in her bed, calling from below—to make her, and what she sees, a feverish thought coursing through our flesh? could we feel, then, that she is not becoming or failing to become a subject, but becoming an event, an operation on the categories of thought and action that we hold on to, demanding that we not be something new, but let go of what we tell ourselves that we and our interlocutors are, so that we can, sometimes, like her when she tries, become? it would be to be like maneka gandhi, to give ourselves over. it would be to be like timmie kumar, to come apart in the face of something extraordinary. it would be to be like erika, to put arms around the body of a dying animal, ear to its flesh, and be filled with the pulse of its enormous, failing heart. it would be to feel more ourselves and yet be ever less certain, and more curious, about what that even means. and is that not the point of all our multispecies ethnographic explorations (kirksey and helmreich 2010, 546, 559)? is that not what it means to do an anthropology—not of anthropos as we believe we know it, but of life (kohn 2007)? * * * toward the end of my first visit with satija, she began showing me images from a collection of photographs. as we came upon one of a dog covered in maggots with a mangled leg, i noticed her wet eyes. it reminded me of something frida kahlo once wrote: “they say there are two things that don’t mean anything: a dog’s limp, and a woman’s tears.” in her witnessing, in her intimacies, and in her becomings, satija tries and fails and tries again to make those things matter after all. notes acknowledgments this essay began with an invitation from michael lambek to participate in a panel he organized at casca/aes in vancouver. i am grateful to him for that nudge. i have since presented pieces of this argument and narrative at the aaas in new orleans, the university of toronto, york university, the university of stockholm, and azim premji university in bangalore, and i thank those organizers and audiences. i also thank george mantzios, kajri jain, amira mittermaier, joshua barker, anne allison, charles piot, and the two anonymous reviewers. the research for this project has been funded by a multiyear grant from the social science and humanities research council of canada (sshrc), as well as by a fellowship from the jackman humanities institute. 1. gandhi, though presenting rogers’s narrative as a direct quote, is actually paraphrasing rogers. the passages about sight and the eyes are still accurate. 2. jacques derrida (2008) and miriam ticktin (2012) have revealed how animal rights politics rely on humanist values such as compassion, thereby reproducing the very distinctions between action and passivity, the noble and the mute, that underlie other colonial and neocolonial forms of exploitation. this is an important reading of human action on behalf of animals—one i largely agree with—but i hope to show alternative ones. 3. that said, as leela gandhi (2006) shows in her affective communities, animal activism in india is also inseparable from an affective history of radicalism. among her central figures is mohandas k. gandhi, the mahatma, whose vegetarianism was part of a broader fin de siècle anticolonialism that grew deep affective bonds between humans and humans, specifically whites and indians. indeed, part of what i demonstrate in this article is the difficulty of parsing the liberal or conservative from the radical and that it might come down to what we are and are not able (and willing) to see. mahatma gandhi is a good example of this ambivalence, his vegetarianism being part of a radical anticolonial pacifism as well as a masculinist politics of purity (though not one reducible to caste) (see roy 75–115). 4. vinyog parivar trust v. municipal corporation of greater mumbai, writ petition no. 1596, 1998. 5. i have asked activists why they think these two states allow slaughter. slaughter in kerala is explained through its high population of christians. but the fact that both states have been governed by communist parties is also significant for at least four reasons: leftists tend to be staunchly humanist; as non-party feminists have long attested, they are often unwilling to recognize connections between workers’ rights and other forms of inequality; in india consuming meat is associated with the working class and lower castes and is thus valorized by leftists; and finally and most obviously, slaughtering cows is a rejection of the hindu right. 6. e. giridhar, interview with the author, july 8, 2011, chennai, india. 7. anthropological literature on animal politics in india has largely focused on its failures, violences, and hypocrisies. parvis ghassem-fachandi (2012), for example, demonstrates that the hindu right’s enforced pacifism toward the cow serves as the ground for its mortal violence against non-hindus and lower castes (see also chigateri 2008). i could not agree more. but that is not all there is to say about the politics of humans and animals in india. by telling stories from the perspective of animal activists who identify with progressive rather than conservative causes (see also leela gandhi 2006), and from theoretical perspectives other than that of how power reproduces itself in predictable ways, i hope to show that there are and must be other ways we conceive of human-animal engagements in india, ways that are not predetermined or fully determined by hindu nationalism. 8. bahu is hindi for “daughter-in-law.” maneka gandhi joined the bjp after being cast out of the congress party. it appears to me that this is mostly a functional arrangement (the bjp gives her a political stage for her animal activism, she gives them celebrity and a small victory over their archenemy, sonia gandhi), and not one based on ideological synergy. 9. this is how she told it to me, anyway. maneka gandhi, interview with the author, june 11, 2011, new delhi, india. khushwant singh (2003) says that the two were inseparable all night. he also does not mention the mutton. 10. this is from a letter on display at the indira gandhi memorial museum in delhi, india, which i visited in the summer of 2011. 11. maneka gandhi, interview with the author, may 29, 2008, new delhi, india. 12. maneka gandhi, interview with the author, may 29, 2008, new delhi, india. 13. this sentiment is like one expressed by paul mccartney, michael pollan, or timothy pachirat, one that imagines glass-walled slaughterhouses that would inevitably transform our treatment of animals through horror and repugnance. pachirat (2011, 242–43) in fact calls for a “politics of sight,” in which activists work to render transparent the violences we systematically conceal, creating a kind of reverse panopticon. but pachirat’s work is not entirely relevant here for at least two reasons. first, the activists in this article are not concerned with motivating others to act; they are concerned foremost with disallowing complacency in themselves. second, violence against animals in india is not nearly as concealed as it is in the united states, and it is more the apathy of ubiquity that is the problem than the tendency to conceal. 14. carmelia satija, interview with the author, june 11, 2010, new delhi, india. 15. maneka gandhi v. union territory of delhi and others, civil writ no. 2961, 1992. 16. or, as gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1987, 263) put it, riffing off virginia woolf, “five o’clock is this animal! this animal is this place! … that is how we need to feel.” 17. hugo von hofmannsthal was an austrian writer who published at the turn of the twentieth century. in this section of their text, deleuze and guattari (1987, 240) discuss a number of writers who, through their “unnatural participation” beyond the human, act as “sorcerers,” able to throw the self (and an openhearted reader) into radical upheaval. 18. in asking what it would mean to believe a phenomenon that challenges our regimes of rationality, and not merely to believe that this phenomenon is true for our interlocutors, i am interested in a long-standing debate about belief and ethnographic method, one that paul nadasdy (2007) recently engaged. he persuasively asks us to inhabit alternative ontologies, to believe, in his case among first nations in the yukon, that the animal gives itself as a gift to its hunter. i follow nadasdy to a point, diverging to ask what it would mean to inhabit only becomings that traverse lines of sameness and difference, self and other. references agamben, giorgio 2004 the open: man and animal. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. ahmed, sara 2004 the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. bacchetta, paola 1999 “when the (hindu) nation exiles its queers.” social text, no. 61: 141–66. calarco, matthew 2008 zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. new york: columbia university press. chen, mel y. 2012 animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, queer affect. durham, n.c.: duke university press. chigateri, shraddha 2008 “‘glory to the cow’: cultural difference and social justice in the food hierarchy in india.” south asia: journal of south asian studies 31, no. 1: 10–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856400701874692. das, veena 2007 life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. berkeley: university of california press. dave, naisargi n. 2011 “indian and lesbian and what came next: affect, commensuration, and queer emergences.” american ethnologist 38, no. 4: 650–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01328.x. 2012a “posthumanism in the postcolonial city.” paper presented at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association, san francisco, november 17. 2012b queer activism in india: a story in the anthropology of ethics. durham, n.c.: duke university press. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari 1987 a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. derrida, jacques 2008 the animal that therefore i am. new york: fordham university press. federation of indian animal protection organizations (fiapo) 2011 the state of dairy cattle in india. new delhi: fiapo. 36 pages. gandhi, leela 2006 affective communities: anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship. durham, n.c.: duke university press. gandhi, maneka 2000 heads and tails. mapusa, goa: other india press. ghassem-fachandi, parvis 2012 pogrom in gujarat: hindu nationalism and anti-muslim violence. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. halberstam, judith 2011 the queer art of failure. durham, n.c.: duke university press. haraway, donna 1991 “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.” in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, 149–82. new york: routledge. kirksey, eben, and stefan helmreich 2010 “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25, no. 4: 545–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x. kohn, eduardo 2007 “how dogs dream: amazonian natures and the politics of transpecies engagement.” american ethnologist 34, no. 1: 3–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3. krishna, chinny, and maneka gandhi 2005 “rukmini devi and animal welfare.” in rukmini devi arundale, 1904–1986: a visionary architect of indian culture and performing arts, edited by avanthi meduri, 67–84. chennai: motilal banarsidass. levinas, emmanuel 2004 “the name of a dog, or natural rights.” in animal philosophy: essential readings in continental thought, edited by peter atterton and matthew calarco, 47–50. new york: continuum press. mahmood, saba 2005 politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. massumi, brian 1992 a user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: deviations from deleuze and guattari. cambridge, mass.: mit press. nadasdy, paul 2007 “the gift in the animal: the ontology of hunting and human–animal sociality.” american ethnologist 34, no. 1: 25–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.25. pachirat, timothy 2011 every twelve seconds: industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight. new haven, conn.: yale university press. pandey, gyan 1983 “rallying round the cow: sectarian strife in the bhojpuri region, c. 1888–1917.” in subaltern studies. vol. 2, edited by ranajit guha, 60–129. oxford: oxford university press. povinelli, elizabeth 2006 the empire of love: toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, and carnality. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rogers, crystal 2000 mad dogs and an englishwoman: the memoir of crytal rogers. new delhi: penguin. roy, parama 2010 alimentary tracts: appetites, aversions, and the postcolonial. durham, n.c.: duke university press. singh, kushwant 2003 truth, love, and a little malice: an autobiography. new delhi: penguin. sinha, mrinalini, ed. 2000 mother india: selections from the controversial 1927 text. ann arbor: university of michigan press. specter, michael 2003 “the extremist.” new yorker, april 14. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/14/030414fa_fact_specter. tarlo, emma 2003 unsettling memories: narratives of emergency in delhi. berkeley: university of california press. ticktin, miriam 2012 “human rights/ humanitarianism beyond the human.” paper presented at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association, san francisco, november 16. yang, anand 1980 “sacred symbol and sacred space in rural india: community mobilization in the ‘anti-cow killing’ riot of 1893.” comparative studies in society and history 22, no. 4: 576–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500009555. scenes of commitment scenes of commitment bharat jayram venkat university of oregon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5246-9586 on a late spring morning in 2011, a middle-aged man with a respectable head of gray waited patiently in the hallway of a private clinic in chennai, the capital city of the south indian state of tamil nadu. this man, whom i will call vasudevan, had for many years been committed to therapy, unfailingly consuming the medications that made it possible for him to live with hiv.1 for many of the clinic’s staff, vasudevan had been an ideal patient, in stark contrast to those who came to the hospital only in moments of desperation, long after their drug supplies had been exhausted. that morning, he had been among the first to arrive at the clinic, so he would be among the first to be seen by the doctors. his appointments tended to run like clockwork. on this particular morning, however, things did not go as expected. he no longer wished to take his medication. to the contrary, vasudevan asked to die. a commitment to his daughter, specifically, to successfully arrange her marriage, had thrown into question vasudevan’s commitment to a therapeutically sustained life. for many of the people i met at the clinic, the commitments that arose in relation to being a family member and to being a patient were congruent enough so as not to pose a conflict. vasudevan, however, arrived at the clinic that day convinced that his commitments to his daughter and to his survival were intractably opposed. such intractability demanded a response from the clinic’s staff. in this and similar situations, i argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the relationship between what were experienced as divergent or contradictory commitments in terms of what i call hierarchical subsumption.2 this mode of response worked not simply to recast treatment as noncontradictory with familial obligations; rather, the commitment to therapy became hierarchically subsumed by and therefore necessary to the fulfillment of such kin-based commitments. this essay contributes to recent efforts by anthropologists to rethink ethics from the grounds of situated, lived experiences. of particular interest here is the scholarship that has been loosely organized under the rubric of ordinary ethics. as michael lambek (2010, 2) puts it, the ordinary refers to that which is “relatively tacit . . . and happen[s] without calling undue attention to itself.” he contrasts this surreptitious register of ethical life against more explicitly ethical situations in which, for example, “the right thing to do is unknown or hotly contested.”3 this way of delineating the ordinary makes good sense in the context of a well-founded anthropological emphasis on practice (as a domain distinct from explicit knowledge or belief) and a desire to locate ethics as immanent to everyday life. yet this programmatic focus on the tacit threatens to obscure those forms of ethical reasoning that are employed in everyday life. it cannot be assumed that the clash of commitments only occurs outside of everyday life, as in those moments of “moral breakdown” described by jarrett zigon (2007). in particular, when everyday life itself becomes precarious, it should come as no surprise that questions of ethics, survival, and kinship become bound up with the ordinary. here, i draw on the insights of stefania pandolfo (2007), who describes the forms of ethical disputation engaged in by two young men pondering the dangerous migration to europe from morocco. in these debates, what was at stake was not obvious or given in advance, but rather emerged through ethico-theological reasoning in an everyday marked by existential threat. in thinking through the place of reasoning in ethical life, the work of webb keane proves particularly illuminating. in his contribution to lambek’s volume on ordinary ethics, keane (2010, 82) insists that “ethics are not only tacit competences.” he makes clear that certain circumstances call for what he describes as “explicit deliberation and justification” (keane 2010, 69). one kind of circumstance in which ethical reasoning emerges might be productively conceived of in terms of ethical complexity, a concept developed by james faubion (2011, 14) to denote situations in which one is subject to “two or more ethical commissions.”4 in the clinic, one was regularly called on as family member and as patient. as i detail below, ethical reasoning about what it might mean to fulfill a commitment proved critical to understanding how the relationship between any given commitment and other commitments might be configured.5 prior to asking, for example, whether a man might simultaneously take care of his daughter while adhering to a strict therapeutic regimen, the people that i met in the clinic grappled with the question of what precisely a man must do to take care of his daughter. building on the work of keane and faubion, i suggest that when two recognizable commitments are felt to be incommensurable—when, for example, caring for one’s daughter and taking medication are not obviously congruent—the ethical might take on a more explicit appearance in everyday life. in this essay, i focus in particular on a shape that ethical reasoning might assume to evade the impasse formed at the crux of potentially contending commitments. i follow the lead of signe howell (1997), who argues for a shift away from simply analyzing the content of moral discourse. howell (1997, 13–14; emphasis added) instead asks “what kind of reasoning a person (or a group of people) conducts in order to justify a particular decision in a situation of a moral dilemma.” along these lines, develops the concepts of commonplace and axiomatic forms of reasoning to describe the ways in which “people negotiate paradoxes in their daily lives.” both of these forms of reasoning, however, leave in place the tensions and contradictions between competing desires or obligations. by contrast, the style of ethical reasoning i describe in this essay works to refigure potentially contending commitments into a hierarchy of means and ends, such that one becomes necessary to the other. in what follows, i begin by illustrating how the clinical encounter became a space of ethical reasoning about the relationship between kin-based and therapeutic commitments. i provide a brief history of how hiv has been governed in india, a story that in fact has its starting point in chennai (then madras), to show how the increased availability of antiretroviral treatment transformed hiv from a problem of law into one of adherence. in an effort to make lifelong therapy manageable, the staff at the clinic where i conducted my research framed treatment as a matter that might be domesticated into everyday routines and knowledges. paradoxically, the submersion of hiv treatment into the everyday made possible the suspension of the ethical priority of therapy, and of biological survival itself.6 this suspension established the grounds for the articulation of other, kin-based commitments within the space of the clinic.7 while other anthropologists have also pointed to the tensions between therapy and familial obligations in south asia (e.g., cohen 2001; pinto 2014; das 2015), my goal in the following two sections is to attend to how such tensions are alleviated through a particular style of reasoning that works to render these commitments congruent. in the second section, i trace the movement from ethical suspension to hierarchical subsumption by returning to vasudevan, the man who requested his own death to end his therapy and fulfill his commitment to his daughter. in the course of his conversation with a counselor at the clinic, the relationship between commitments, as well as the proper means of fulfilling them, were called into question, open to the interpretive capacities of the patient, the clinical staff and the anthropologist. what was expected to be a routine checkup quickly became an ethical deliberation on the utility of life and death. i conclude by turning to another patient, sendhil, whose indefatigable silence posed a challenge for his physician and for his family. rather than insisting on the ethical priority of the commitment to therapy, sendhil’s physician argued instead that therapy was a means for sendhil to fulfill a commitment to his mother. here again, therapeutically sustained life, as well as death in the absence of treatment, were conceived of in terms of how they might impact what was recognized to be a hierarchically superior commitment to a close family member. both sendhil’s silence and vasudevan’s speech called on the clinic’s staff to reason beyond the ethical primacy of therapy to consider the ways in which treatment—and survival—might be recruited into the fulfillment of other commitments. suspension into the everyday prior to 1986, there had been no reported cases of hiv in india. in that year, suniti solomon, a professor of microbiology at madras medical college, identified the condition among sex workers who had been detained in a government remand home. as in much of the world, hiv quickly devolved into a problem of law and moral order, prompting the intensification of surveillance, policing, and detention (dube 2000). soon, drugs were developed that could suppress viral replication. the united states food and drug administration (fda) approved the first such drug, azt, in 1987, followed by a host of other drugs that, taken in combination, promised to transform a terminal diagnosis into a chronic condition. the activism of patient-based groups and allied communities that spurred pharmaceutical industry and regulatory bodies into making new drugs available has been well documented. in india, however, treatment was available only through private means, and at exorbitant cost. it was not until 2004 that flexible patent laws, a growing generic pharmaceutical industry, and previously unimaginable levels of international aid set the stage for mass antiretroviral provision (mahajan 2008). the indian national aids control organization began what many critics diagnosed as a fatally slow rollout of first-line treatment at a handful of public medical facilities scattered around the country. over time, the treatment-provision program was scaled up, buoyed by fears that hiv would spread: that so-called high-risk populations, like sex workers, men who have sex with men, truck drivers, and injection drug users would pose a biomoral risk to the broader population.8 at the same time, the growing availability of antiretrovirals in india fueled new anxieties about drug adherence. within a normative epidemiological logic, the failure of patients to regularly take these medications was understood to be catalyzing the evolution and transmission of drug-resistant strains of the retrovirus.9 however, what was at stake in the commitment to lifelong therapy seemed to exceed this bifurcated logic of individualand population-level risk. rather, the value of therapy frequently came to be adjudicated in relation to potentially competing commitments to close kin. in 2011, i began fieldwork in a small, private clinic in the city of chennai. my work at the clinic constituted the final piece of a longer project on hiv that i had begun in 2006, two years after the creeping start of the government’s antiretroviral treatment provision program. the clinic operated within the confines of a narrow building tucked away into a corner of a larger voluntary hospital inaugurated half a century earlier by jawaharlal nehru, india’s first prime minister. the clinic’s reputation drew patients from the farthest reaches of the traffic-choked city, as well as from surrounding parts of tamil nadu and even from neighboring states. those who came to the clinic had been—or feared that they had been—infected with hiv. each morning, patients poured into the clinic, waiting to see doctors, counselors, and nurses, to receive a new batch of medications, or to learn their diagnosis. during my time in the clinic, many of the staff, but also the families of patients, expressed to me their fear that a patient would not be able to “cope” with a positive diagnosis: because they were too young or too old to handle it, because they lacked the education required to understand, because it would cause them “tension” and make the condition worse. increased knowledge was not, it seemed, equated with increased therapeutic commitment. at the same time, too little knowledge also posed a problem. one morning, while conducting rounds in the inpatient wards, we stopped at the bed of a dangerously gaunt woman who had previously been receiving treatment from either a private practitioner or a government hospital. when asked what medications she had been taking, the woman reached for a plastic bag filled with pills of assorted size and color that she jangled in front of the doctors. what these pills were called, or what they treated, she could not say. therapeutic commitment was understood to require just the right amount and type of information, conveyed in the proper register (cf. brada 2013). otherwise, as with the woman we spoke to that morning, the risk of nonadherence was too great. as a counselor at the clinic, prabhakar’s job was to strike this balance. prabhakar was in his early twenties, raw-boned and energetic, with prematurely thinning hair subdued by a close crop. although prabhakar lacked medical training, he had completed a degree in social work, making him an indispensable part of the clinic’s functioning. prabakhar admitted to me that he had known very little about hiv when he first came to the hospital as part of the practicum for his degree. after seeing the work, and witnessing the need firsthand, he had decided to stay on. i spent many mornings with prabhakar in his office as he counseled patients and their family members. prabhakar’s small space had a window facing out onto the troubling juxtaposition of a sprawling park and an ever-growing garbage heap. there was no fan, so the lone window provided the only solace from the heat. hung on the wall was a calendar, a gift from a diagnostic laboratory. each month featured men and women in lab coats, grinning at the camera while simultaneously managing to operate complex x-ray machinery. when the flow of patients dried up, usually in the early afternoon, prabhakar and i would steal away for strong, sweet filter coffee, served in paper cups that transmitted the heat directly into our fingertips. in this highly caffeinated state, prabhakar and i would discuss the patients we had seen together, or we would talk about something else entirely: the indian tennis star who occasionally played on his neighborhood soccer team, prabhakar’s visits to his parents’ home in the southern region of the state, or the nuances of tamil grammar. from prabakhar, i also began learning the tamil neologisms for biomedical terms. immunity or immune system became noi ethirppu sakthi, literally, a power in opposition or resistance to disease (see also van hollen 2013).10 back in his office, prabhakar would explain to patients how hiv lessened this power. before receiving testing, patients would meet with prabhakar to learn what hiv was, how it migrated between bodies, how they might have contracted the virus, and how it could be treated. after the laboratory had finished analyzing the tests, prabhakar would once again meet with patients to deliver the results. when a patient’s test results came back positive, prabhakar would deliver the news with the utmost pragmatism, emphasizing the importance of adhering to the therapeutic regimen. every day. morning and night. at exactly the same times. with each new patient, he repeated these words, a kind of passcode to the “kingdom of the sick,” as susan sontag (1990, 3) put it. adherence, in other words, was not a once-and-done proposition, but rather premised on an ongoing repetition, a commitment to a specific temporal patterning of everyday life. once a patient had been diagnosed, they were expected to visit the hospital regularly to have lab analyses run of their white blood cell and viral levels, to pick up medications, and to receive adherence counseling. the existence of counseling suggests that nonadherence was expected and therefore to be rebuffed. indeed, counseling explicitly addressed obstacles to adherence and reminded patients of this therapeutic rhythm, morning and night. when actually speaking with patients, however, prabakhar worked hard to de-exceptionalize the commitment to therapy. he would compare hiv to diabetes, an increasingly common condition among indians across socioeconomic strata: “if you have sugar, you have to take your medicines every day.” here, a perceived cause of diabetes—sarkkarai or sugar—comes to stand in for its perceived effect, the condition itself. “hiv is just like sugar,” he continued. “you can live an absolutely normal life.” prabhakar pivoted smoothly from metonymy to simile, drawing on the common reference point of a seemingly manageable disease like diabetes to make a claim for hiv’s normalcy. he told me that this comparison made hiv easier to understand. but he also hoped that the comparison made a positive diagnosis easier to accept. it was precisely this movement from the register of the medical profession—hiv is a chronic disease—to a more ordinary register—hiv is like sugar—that was supposed to make knowledge of diagnosis both appropriate for and palatable to the patient. this was prabhakar’s way of providing just enough but not too much knowledge. such knowledge, conveyed through the image of another disease whose treatment had been largely domesticated, worked to submerge the commitment to therapy into everyday life.11 but normalcy required more than drugs alone. prabhakar would also remind patients to eat nutritious food, drink boiled water, and exercise regularly. these practices, he would add, were important for everyone, regardless of hiv status. in this generalizable injunction—do this; everyone should do this—hiv became normalized even further. having hiv is like having sugar because you must take medications daily, but having hiv is also like living an ordinary life because you must drink boiled water. in this fashion, the clinical demand to commit to therapy was rendered unexceptional through a gradual widening of the public to which it was addressed. i began to think of prabhakar as preaching a gospel of temporal normalcy, a well-practiced form of disclosing a diagnosis by submerging it into the rhythms of everyday life, rather than framing it as a radical break. if you take your medicines every day, and at the right times, then both the activities of your life and your lifespan can be normal: this is the promise of antiretroviral drugs. it was not simply that the commitment to a specific therapeutic rhythm (morning and night) made possible a continuation or return to normalcy. everyday life was itself reorganized to include this punctuated pharmaceutical cycle. rather than simply representing a deviation from the norms of health, pathology (and treatment) generated its own norms that nonetheless hewed closely to what was recognized as ordinary (cf. canguilhem 1989). according to prabhakar, the norms pertaining to the management of hiv so closely resembled the norms established by more domesticated conditions that hiv itself became normal, “just like sugar.” yet, as i will discuss below, this submersion of therapeutic commitment into everyday life paradoxically generated the conditions under which the priority of therapy could itself be suspended as other commitments came to the fore. not the usual injection i return now to vasudevan, who on the day of his visit was called to meet with prabhakar before seeing the doctors. vasudevan sat down in front of prabhakar’s desk and began to dab his forehead furiously with a crumpled handkerchief extracted from his shirt pocket. on many days in the clinic, i would watch as doctors reprimanded patients about skipping doses and appointments. vasudevan was never subject to such displays. his commitment to both the duration and discipline of therapeutic time had been beyond reproach. over the course of many years, he never missed appointments and took his medications twice daily. failure to adhere, to “comply” in an outmoded idiom that on occasion still found its way to the lips of the hospital staff, often resulted in easy labeling: noncompliant, nonadherent, defaulter. these terms partake of a strong juridical and sovereign undertone, suggesting a failure to fulfill one’s obligations. failure to adhere also raised questions of desire and will. “there’s no point,” i was told by numerous doctors in moments of exhaustion. “they don’t want to get well.” it is important to note here that vasudevan was never spoken of in this manner. vasudevan’s medical file recorded his regularity through its relative narrowness: instead of the heterogeneous sheets of paper that indicated problems—hospital admissions, treatment for opportunistic infections, and various other complications—vasudevan had only the regular laboratory reports and clinical notes indicating that all was well. to my eye, vasudevan bore none of the visible stigmata of hiv infection, not even a mild fatigue that might indicate something amiss. his thin file and his physical appearance suggested an unswerving commitment to therapeutic discipline. by such measures, vasudevan wanted to get well—or at least stay well, the best that can be hoped for when a condition lacks cure. prabhakar began to run through his regular battery of questions. “are you taking your tablets daily?” he asked. “yes, morning and night,” vasudevan responded. “any physical problems, old or new?” “no,” vasudevan replied. this interview seemed destined to produce yet another innocuous sheet of paper fitted neatly into vasudevan’s patient record. prabhakar’s pen raced across the page as he made all of the cursory marks in the file, indicating that there were no concerns. putting down his pen and closing the file, prabhakar looked up and asked vasudevan if he had any other questions, concerns, or doubts (santhegam). vasudevan dabbed his brow, clearly losing the battle against the indomitable heat. “yes, one question.” he met prabhakar’s eyes with his own. “can you,” he asked, pausing for a moment, “give an injection to kill me?”12 i leaned forward slightly from my chair. i thought that i had heard incorrectly. but even prabhakar—for me, a paragon of tranquility—was visibly startled. he quickly regained his composure and asked vasudevan to repeat himself, but the question remained unchanged. prabhakar was initially dumbfounded by vasudevan’s request. what could possibly be wrong, he wondered aloud. after all, vasudevan seemed incredibly healthy, with none of the signs or symptoms of illness. he was not suffering from any of the debilitating opportunistic infections or drug-related side effects that plagued many of the other patients who sat waiting outside the counselor’s office. vasudevan’s laboratory results were consistently good. his white blood cell counts were high. the drugs were doing their job. what could be the reason for his strange appeal? the problem, explained vasudevan, precisely related to his continuing good health. he knew that he was doing well. but to maintain the efficacy of his treatment, he had recently switched to a second-line regimen of anti-hiv drugs, substantially more expensive than his earlier first-line regimen. like the drugs that constitute basic first-line therapy, second-line drugs were also available from indian generic drug manufacturers. but even in generic form, these drugs remained prohibitively expensive. second-line drugs were dispensed without cost through the indian national aids control program, but only by means of a very selective, time-consuming rationing process that involved repeated meetings by state-level boards composed of medical bureaucrats. this left many without access to free or affordable treatment. many of those who were eventually approved for government-provisioned second-line therapy only received these medications after becoming seriously ill. horror stories abounded of those who died while waiting. vasudevan purchased the drugs with his own money to circumvent these time-consuming and potentially lethal bureaucratic channels, but the high cost constituted a substantial drain on his government pension. that money, he lamented, should have gone to “settling his daughter”: that is, arranging her marriage. although dowry had been legislatively outlawed in 1961 by the dowry prohibition act, such forms of exchange remain central to marriage arrangements in tamil nadu and throughout much of india. at the clinic, i heard from many patients that expectations of dowry had actually intensified in recent years: an effect of economic liberalization, the increased availability of a range of consumer goods and, in certain parts of the state, remittances from overseas employment. families also feared that failing to provide an adequate dowry could provoke in-laws to harm their daughters (see diamond-smith, luke, and mcgarvey 2008). dowry not only facilitated marriage but was also thought to provide at least a partial safeguard for one’s daughter. for vasudevan, adherence therefore came at a very high cost. to be committed to this medicine for life—a life that, according to prabhakar, could extend to a normal lifespan—was also to be tethered to a perpetual financial drain that undercut the possibility of successfully and safely marrying off his daughter. for vasudevan, to remain committed to therapy was to be “given over” (cohen 2013) to medicine; it meant having nothing left to invest (in starkly financial terms) in the marriage of his daughter. in contrast to dominant bioethical and epidemiological framings, in which nonadherence figures as the central concern and adherence the solution, here, adherence emerged as the very problem. in addition to his financial concerns, vasudevan was also anxious that others might learn of his condition. he explained that he lived with his family in a small village near the town of kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of the subcontinent. he belonged to the large brahmin community in his village, into which he wished to marry his daughter. he despaired that if other villagers were to discover his condition, his daughter’s prospects for marriage would dwindle to nothing. word would spread quickly to the other brahmins of the village, and no one would marry a daughter into such a family. although vasudevan’s illness did not pose a biological danger to his daughter, public knowledge of his illness, as well as the cost of treatment, threatened her future. prabhakar listened to vasudevan’s concerns. the clinic, usually organized around the priority of therapeutic commitment, had been opened up to the articulation of other kinds of concerns: of a father’s obligation to his daughter, and of a brahmin’s relation to a community in which both dowry and affliction had particular moral consequences. as this other commitment, structured by ties of kinship and caste, materialized within the space of the clinic, the value of adherence, and of living on, were called into question. in vasudevan’s request for death, these commitments—to his daughter, and to his treatment—were presented as being at odds, as a zero-sum game. to commit to one was to commit without remainder, to leave no excess—in this case, in monetary terms—for the other. after acknowledging vasudevan’s anxieties, prabhakar offered a counterpoint. if vasudevan were to die, if he were able to somehow safeguard the secret of his illness and redirect his financial resources to settling his daughter, who would remain alive to ensure that his daughter was properly settled? it was vasudevan’s duty as a father, prabhakar maintained, to orchestrate his daughter’s marriage and ensure that a suitable match was made for her. although vasudevan’s wife was alive and had not been infected by the virus, both prabhakar and vasudevan seemed to implicitly agree that she could not fulfill this (arguably paternal) duty. death might solve some problems—for example, the financial difficulties that remained unresolved in the discussion between prabhakar and vasudevan—but it would also mean that vasudevan’s daughter would be without a father. here, the conversation became about what precisely might be required for vasudevan to fulfill his commitment to his daughter. in prabhakar’s framing, vasudevan’s survival was necessary to fulfilling the very commitment that vasudevan had feared could not be fulfilled without his death. through this feat of ethical reasoning, prabhakar sidestepped what for vasudevan had been figured as an impasse in which he felt compelled to choose between commitments. prabhakar proposed instead a reconfiguration of commitments in which adherence came to matter insofar as it would make possible the fulfillment of vasudevan’s obligation to marry off his daughter. although his primary task in the clinic was to encourage treatment adherence, prabhakar never suggested to vasudevan that therapy should be afforded priority simply for the sake of survival. rather, prabhakar acceded to the primacy of vasudevan’s commitment to his daughter, while arguing that its fulfillment required the continuation of treatment. in the conversation between vasudevan and prabhakar, therapeutic adherence—and by extension, survival—had been subsumed under what was recognized as vasudevan’s hierarchically superior paternal commitment. prabakhar managed to reverse the terms of vasudevan’s argument by insisting that he must not die for his daughter, but, on the contrary, must live for her. here, the ethnographic record on tamil kinship proves instructive. we can see, for example, how reciprocal duties and claims figure prominently within louis dumont’s (1986) classic structuralist ethnography of a pramalai kallar community. however, in her recent ethnography of tamil marriage practices, isabelle clark-decès (2014) offers a striking reassessment of dumont. she finds that such normative duties (kadamai) and claims (urimai) regularly fail to be actualized.13 nonetheless, they remain for her interlocutors critical points of orientation, elaboration, and in many cases, aspiration. such duties and claims operate less like kantian moral laws demanding universal acquiescence and more as norms that orient creative reordering and ethical ratiocination. even with a shared sense of what was right or appropriate, how one might go about fulfilling commitments to close kin was no clear-cut matter. similarly, the ethical priority was clear for both prabhakar and vasudevan: not therapeutic adherence, but rather a father’s commitment to his daughter. when vasudevan arrived at the clinic, he expressed the relationship between these commitments in starkly opposed terms. in his meeting with prabhakar, he spoke of paternal obligation, caste-based approbation, and limited financial resources. rather than insisting on the priority of therapy, prabhakar accepted the primacy of vasudevan’s commitment to his daughter. their conversation developed around the practical and ethical means by which such a commitment might be fulfilled, whether through life or through death. by proposing that vasudevan’s continued commitment to therapy was necessary to marrying off his daughter, prabhakar offered a way to reconfigure the relationship between commitments in terms of hierarchical subsumption rather than mutual opposition. she’ll never recover in addition to sitting with prabhakar during his counseling sessions, i also spent time with various clinicians in the hospital, especially dr. vijay. uniformly stern with his patients, vijay would occasionally break into a toothy grin when talking about his newborn daughter. he reserved a more thoughtful expression for describing to me the latest discoveries that he had read about in the medical journals. in addition to his work at the clinic, vijay worked night shifts at another hospital to cover his bills. remarkably, he never seemed to tire, or at least never showed it. as in the counselor’s office, questions of kinship and survival emerged alongside concerns about therapeutic adherence. one morning, about six months after i had begun working at the hospital, a man hesitantly entered into vijay’s office, helped along by his brother and his elderly mother. the patient, whom i will call sendhil, appeared to be in his midto late twenties, rail-thin, with clothes hanging loosely from his joints. vijay sat at his desk, quickly scribbling down case notes from his previous consultation. he closed the folder and looked up at the new arrivals. the three of them sat in the chairs against the wall, to the side of vijay’s desk, sendhil sandwiched uneasily in the center. i had vacated my usual seat and taken up a position at the edge of the examining table, greeting sendhil and his family while trying not to knock over the stack of medical records piled high next to me. sendhil’s mother and brother wore doleful expressions on their faces. they took turns explaining that sendhil had not been sleeping, and that he had not taken his medications in fourteen days. sendhil slouched down in his chair, fixing his gaze on the opposite wall. after listening to their worries, vijay quietly asked sendhil’s mother to wait outside. he seemed concerned about what could be asked and answered in front of her. sendhil’s mother acquiesced, gently closing the door behind her. as soon as she had exited, vijay turned to sendhil and began firing questions at him about what was wrong and why he had stopped taking his medications. sendhil, however, remained silent and maintained his eye contact with the blank wall in front of him. instead, it was sendhil’s brother selvan who answered. selvan explained that sendhil would leave the house in the morning, as if going out to work. but just a few hours later, sendhil would return home drunk. he would spend the rest of the day sleeping. when sendhil was not sleeping or “hitting water” (that is, drinking alcohol), he lingered around the house, not working, not doing much of anything. worry creasing his face, selvan also reported that sendhil continued to experience occasional “fits” or seizures. in spite of these concerns, and in spite of sendhil’s silence, vijay assured selvan that sendhil was “almost normal” now. it was a miracle that he had survived at all, he added. later, after sendhil and his family had left, vijay explained to me that sendhil had been admitted to the hospital about six months earlier, just prior to my own arrival. he had been very ill and was eventually diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis. this meant that the bacteria that cause tuberculosis had infected the protective membrane surrounding sendhil’s brain and spinal cord, leading to severe inflammation. his weakened immune system had been unable to keep the infection in check. in general, tuberculous meningitis is exceedingly difficult to diagnose and treat, particularly when specialists and certain kinds of medical equipment are in short supply. a few weeks earlier, i had observed a middle-aged man in a coma admitted into the inpatient ward. vijay had performed a lumbar puncture to collect cerebrospinal fluid. even before receiving the results of the laboratory tests, he felt certain that the man was suffering from tuberculous meningitis. vijay had debated whether to invite a neurologist from a nearby hospital for a consultation, but he believed the comatose man to already be in a late stage of disease. many of the neurologists and other specialists whom he had previously called on were extremely hesitant to work with hiv-positive patients. with this in mind, vijay only asked for consultations when he thought that something might be done for the patient. in this particular case, vijay had decided that it was too late. almost as if to confirm the wisdom of his decision, the comatose man died the next morning. but sendhil’s case had been different. after a few weeks of intensive treatment and monitoring in the inpatient ward, he had been pronounced clear of the tuberculosis infection and allowed to return home. since this near fatal episode, sendhil’s health had improved remarkably. in the weeks and months following sendhil’s hospitalization, there had been no discernible trace of tuberculosis. with the addition of antiretroviral drugs, his viral levels had dropped dramatically. the combined forces of these pathological microbes had been, at least momentarily, held at bay. soaking in sendhil’s silence, vijay gestured toward the hefty patient file sitting on the desk in front of him, seemingly to indicate how much work had been involved in keeping sendhil alive. admission and discharge records, counseling reports, drug regimens, clinical observations, laboratory results, and referrals populated this record of sendhil’s medical history, in stark contrast to vasudevan’s meager file. for vijay, sendhil’s patient file was also a history of labor, of expensive drugs and scarce time devoted to the work of preserving a life: a record of his own commitment to keeping sendhil alive. vijay turned toward sendhil and repeatedly asked him why he was not taking his medications, but it was his brother selvan who responded over and over again: “he won’t tell me why; he just drinks.” taking a deep breath, vijay launched into a kind of homily: “your life is in your hands. we’ve put in all of this work for you,” he said. “now, you must do something, keep yourself busy: play table tennis, badminton, get a job, anything at all. keep yourself busy instead of lying around at home.” in his pensées, blaise pascal (1995, 247; emphasis added) asks: “who ever proved that it will dawn tomorrow . . . ?” he proceeds to answer his own question: “it is, then, custom which persuades us of it.” it is precisely this dawn, which i take to be the fact of living on, that was at stake in vijay’s office. sendhil did not need to survive so that he might enjoy the pleasures of racket sports. rather, he needed to do these things, to do “anything at all,” as vijay put it, in order to survive. for vijay, it was through submitting to the customs of the kingdom of the well—however small in themselves—that sendhil might once again be inclined toward life. once again, hiv was submerged into an everyday life structured by ordinary activities. here, the goal was to furnish sendhil with a livable subjectivity, but such a remaking was not attempted primarily through the clinical demand of committing to therapy. vijay’s request was that sendhil pray or play, do anything at all, to regain a grasp on life. rather than biological survival grounding the possibility of social life, in vijay’s framing it was social life that made possible biological survival (cf. butler 2004, 39). although sendhil had gradually turned toward vijay, he remained silent, avoiding the doctor’s eyes while searching for a safe spot to train his vision between the doctor’s chin and the clinic floor. it was impossible for me to say whether vijay’s admonitions had moved him. but sendhil’s silence did not deter vijay. “listen: if something happens to you, your brother will be sad for some time, but he’ll be fine again after a while. your father will be sad too, but he will also be fine.” “your mother,” he began, “and mothers are different from fathers, your mother will be heartbroken. she’ll never recover. i’ve seen that your mother accompanies you on every visit to the hospital. just think of how lucky you are. listen: we all have problems. some seem worse than others, but all are relative. we must learn to live with it.” despite her exile from the examination room, sendhil’s mother was reincorporated as a critical figure in vijay’s address. she was the one who accompanied sendhil to the hospital each time. she was the one who waited for him just outside. these simple acts of accompaniment constituted the kind of tacit ethics demonstrated through the “minutest of gestures” (das 2012, 135). although the physical presence of sendhil’s mother had been limited to the first minutes of the clinical encounter, her presumed desire for her son to live was very much present, articulated through the doctor’s speech. here, vijay had rendered explicit the generally unarticulated forms of care provided by sendhil’s mother into his argument. it was in the name of his mother that vijay called on sendhil to live: she’ll never recover. for vijay, such a claim could not have been articulated from the position of just any kin relation. the generic trope of the dutiful and doting mother, while arguably pan-indic, has a particularly strong hold in the state of tamil nadu, through such figures as tamil thai (mother tamil) and the recently deceased chief minister jayalalitha, commonly referred to as amma, or mother (trawick 1992; ramaswamy 1997). this genericity is present in vijay’s claim that brothers and fathers could recover, but mothers would remain heartbroken, because “mothers are different from fathers.”14 at the same time, vijay invoked the singularity of sendhil’s mother; she was the one who accompanied him to the hospital every time. sendhil’s mother is a token of a general type: motherhood, indian motherhood or, perhaps more specifically, tamil motherhood. at the same time, she is irrepressibly singular, as sendhil’s mother, as the one who accompanies him, as the one who will never recover. indeed, such kin-based commitments might also be productively related to older tamil ethical traditions frequently articulated in terms of concrete familial ties. for example, a particularly damning couplet from the sixth-century thirukkural notes that a drunkard’s glee brings suffering primarily to his mother. vijay might not have consciously intended to invoke this stanza in singling out the relationship between sendhil’s nonadherence to therapy (which included his drinking) and his mother’s suffering. yet as anand pandian (2008) has convincingly argued, these older ethical traditions continue to suffuse tamil life (and familial relations) in the present, albeit in fragmentary form and perhaps most often in the absence of explicit citation. although vijay began by repeatedly asking sendhil why he would not take his medication, sendhil’s silence forced him to adopt a different tack. rather than continuing to insist on the ethical priority of the commitment to therapy, vijay instead invoked another commitment structured by a form of maternal care that was generic and yet painfully specific. in so doing, vijay did not abandon his investment in medication altogether. rather, returning to treatment became a means to an end: here, to prevent sendhil’s mother’s unending heartbreak. vijay proposed that sendhil’s primary commitment was to his mother, a commitment that hierarchically subsumed his commitment to therapy. for his mother, if not for himself, he must live, and to live, he must recommit himself to treatment, and to the minor customs that composed a life. having already spent more time with sendhil and his family than he did with most of his patients, vijay hastily scratched a list of drugs on his prescription pad. he tore out the page and handed it to selvan. the two brothers left, sendhil never having said a word. commitments that are not only one’s own both within the clinic and beyond it, everyday life is shot through by a variety of commitments. although many of these commitments are found to be congruent, even unremarkably so, others might be experienced as mutually exclusive. such conflict demands a response, not only from the subject who is pulled on from many directions but also from those caught in the often extensive webs that spin out from such commitments. in the clinical encounters i have described in this essay, doctors and counselors were drawn into reasoned engagements with patients and their families as they navigated these ethically complex terrains. at stake were not only life and death but also the fulfillment of hierarchically superior commitments to close kin. in attending to those ordinary moments when commitments are felt to be at odds, we can develop a better understanding of the particular styles of reasoning that people employ to manage conflictual situations that refuse the kind of tacitness that scholars have associated with everyday ethical life. in the scenes i have discussed above, the congruence of commitments was not established in advance. rather, congruence was attempted through a particular style of ethical reasoning that i have described in terms of hierarchical subsumption. the cases of sendhil and vasudevan present very different interpretive challenges. in the end, i cannot tell you what sendhil wanted, what his silence meant. nor do i know whether vasudevan managed to find a way to settle his daughter while continuing his treatment. instead, what i have focused on in this essay is a specific style of ethical reasoning that i observed in these clinical encounters, through which the relationship between commitments to therapy and close kin was actively reconfigured. both sendhil’s silence and vasudevan’s speech compelled the staff at the clinic to consider not only the relationship between such commitments but also to elaborate what might be involved in fulfilling them. in both cases, survival—and the commitment to therapy—was proposed as a means to what was recognized as a superior end. notably, such reasoning did not constitute a private act. indeed, it was only through the engagement of clinicians, counselors, patients, and their families that a momentary priority could be established, one in which therapeutic adherence was hierarchically subsumed by specific familial commitments. whether or not these other commitments were genuinely felt or invoked as tactics of persuasion, the staff at the clinic critically came to articulate the commitment to therapy as subordinate yet necessary to the fulfillment of specific commitments to close kin. paradoxically, their willingness to engage from the position of their patients, for whom survival was not necessarily of primary import, made possible a creative reordering in which therapeutic adherence could continue to matter: not simply because treatment made survival possible, but also because living on was figured as a necessary condition to the fulfillment of ethically prioritized commitments to specific kin. the hierarchies i have described were emergent phenomena, the products of an ethical reasoning that became possible when the clinic was opened to other forms of commitment in which patients never figured simply as patients, but as sons and fathers as well. the demands posed by these other commitments, although addressed primarily to the patients, also required vijay and prabhakar to engage in the work of ethical reasoning. in the conversations i have discussed, the relative valuations of both kinship and survival were, at least in part, shared between clinical staff and patients. if patients could be fathers and sons, so too could doctors and counselors. in this sense, perhaps these other commitments were also theirs. notes acknowledgments my deepest gratitude to mara green, aniruddhan vasudevan, t. r. p. kesan, laurence tessier, anthony stavrianakis, lawrence cohen, mareike winchell, janelle lamoreaux, ruth goldstein, emily chua, patricia kubala, stefania pandolfo, joão biehl, naisargi dave, sophia powers, greer waldrop, michele friedner, and jonathan yamakami, who have all in various forms encouraged me to persist in the revision of this essay since its first drafting in 2011. my thanks for the helpful comments and suggestions from audiences at the south asia by the bay conference at stanford university and the tamil studies conference at the university of california, berkeley, in particular anjali arondekar, dolly kikon, and sharika thiranagama. i would also like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their incisive yet supportive critique, as well as to the editors at cultural anthropology, in particular james faubion, for pushing me to engage more deeply with recent work on the anthropology of ethics. research and writing were supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, the charlotte w. newcombe foundation, the university of california, and princeton university’s program in global health. finally, my thanks to the doctors, counselors, patients, and their families in chennai for sharing with me their various and complex commitments. 1. names and identifying markers have been modified to preserve anonymity. the ethnographic material draws on notes written during or immediately after the events in question. all conversations took place in either tamil or english. translations are my own. 2. this dialectical mode of reasoning, simultaneously intellectual and ethical, closely resembles what louis dumont (1980, 240) famously described in terms of the “encompassing of the contrary.” however, it is important to note that dumont generally thought about hierarchy in terms of the relationship between caste groups, and social strata more generally, whereas i am retooling his concept to think about the relationship between ethical commitments. unlike dumont, i make no claims about an indic or even a tamil holism. i am indebted here to joel robbins (2007, 2012a), whose rehabilitation of dumont’s work on hierarchy and the prioritization of specific values over others informs my own thinking about ethical reasoning. as robbins (2012b) notes, “ever since aristotle, the tendency within virtue ethics has been to imagine that the various virtues one ought to cultivate work well together. . . . this means a life well lived need not feature too many hard decisions and tragic choices between competing goods. but there is clearly room for the anthropology of ethics also to constitute itself as an ethics of decision making.” 3. many anthropologists working to systemize the study of ethics in anthropology have developed similar schemas in which ethical life is divided between two registers (e.g., faubion 2011; laidlaw 2014; robbins 2009, 2012a, 2012b; zigon 2007, 2009, 2014). each, however, envisions this division somewhat differently, occasioning a set of helpful debates. for two examples relevant to this essay, see james faubion’s (2011, 20) critique that jarrett zigon draws too stark of a line between these two registers, and in the process evacuates from the ordinary the possibility of reflection. for his part, zigon (2014) argues that michael lambek and veena das smuggle the baggage of transcendental philosophy into the ordinary, despite their own claims to the contrary. 4. in his discussion of ethical complexity, james faubion (2011, 66) points out that “certain subject positions might be the necessary or the sufficient condition of certain others to which they are nevertheless not equivalent.” he further notes that “certain subject positions include or can include or permit the nesting within of certain others.” in faubion’s terms, my focus in this essay is on how a specific commitment might be granted ethical priority such that subsidiary yet necessary commitments can be nested within it. 5. we might think in particular of saba mahmood’s (2005) ethnography of the islamic da’wa movement among egyptian women, in which ethical life does not entail simply acceding to norms without reflection, but rather involves determining how one might come to inhabit a norm in a particular way. along similar lines, james faubion (2011, 65) points out that one might be a prodigal son or a good son. the difference is not one of subject position, but rather of the way in which one comes to occupy the same position. it is clear that the existence of norms does not provide ready-made answers to the question of “what counts as living up to being a subject of one or another quality of kind” (faubion 2011, 4). 6. here, my research echoes the findings of many medical anthropologists who have demonstrated that survival is not always the highest priority, neither for hiv-positive patients nor for caregivers, albeit for a variety of different reasons (see biehl 2007; nguyen 2010; ticktin 2011, 192; whyte et al. 2013; smith 2014). 7. i draw this idea of suspension from søren kierkegaard (1985), who famously describes how the suspension of the ethical opens up the possibility for abraham to heed a contradictory calling. 8. the idea of the biomoral comes from the work of mckim marriott (1976), who, inspired by david schneider’s work on kinship, wrote of the simultaneously biological and moral substance that composes the indian dividual. although this idea has been creatively developed by many anthropologists, far beyond those who work on questions of medicine and personhood in south asia, we might nonetheless think in particular of joseph alter’s (1996, 301) extensive scholarship on gandhian dietetics, in which morality was a problem in which “truth and biology were equally implicated.” at the same time, it is important to note the ways in which both antistigma activists and those involved in the anti-brahmin/anticaste movements in south india have worked to pry apart ideas of morality and biology, under the signs of political and scientific modernity, bhakti devotional movements, and the tamil self-respect movement (suya mariyathai iyakkam). 9. however, adherence and nonadherence have a much longer history as critical terms in the public health vocabulary, stretching back at least as far as the early 1950s, with the introduction of long-term chemotherapy for tuberculosis (venkat 2016). 10. although counselors and nurses often spoke of noi ethirppu sakthi, doctors preferred communicating in terms of cd4 count, an enumeration of the number of cd4 white blood cells in a cubic millimeter of blood. for the clinicians, this number indicated whether treatment was effective or failing. 11. see the work of harris solomon (2016) on the incorporation of diabetes care into everyday routines in india. 12. vasudevan’s request immediately brought to mind what was then a recently decided supreme court case. the newspapers had carried daily coverage of the case, and television pundits regularly expounded their views on the theological, medical, and legal issues at stake. the case itself involved a nurse from the south indian state of karnataka, aruna shanbaug, who had been working in the king edward memorial hospital in bombay. in 1973, shanbaug had been raped and beaten by a ward boy (a term used to refer to male hospital staff who clean the floors, change sheets, and perform other services in the hospital), putting her into a vegetative state. she became a patient in the same hospital where she had worked, cared for by her fellow nurses.in 2010, the journalist pinki virani filed a plea for euthanasia on behalf of shanbaug to the indian supreme court. the court’s landmark judgment stated that passive euthanasia was acceptable under certain strictly defined conditions. however, virani’s petition was denied on the grounds that the nursing staff at the hospital who cared for shanbaug were her real family and wanted her to live. although the principle of euthanasia had been affirmed, the court ruled that virani lacked standing in comparison to this surrogate family of nurses. in the court’s own ruling, the nurses’ commitment to shanbaug outweighed the court’s principled commitment to the right to die. for the sake of her nonbiological family, shanbaug was made to live. i do not know whether vasudevan had the shanbaug case in mind when he made his plea to prabhakar, but the timing of his request and the ubiquity of the case in the media made it unlikely he was unaware of the ruling.it also bears mentioning that the specific means by which prabhakar asked to die—usi or injection—enjoys extreme popularity as a therapeutic modality throughout india (van der geest 1982; nichter 1989; whyte, van der geest, and hardon 2002). however, what was unique about vasudevan’s plea was that the heightened healing potential of the injection had been reversed, transforming a therapeutic modality into a means of death. interestingly, the tamil word marunthu—much like the greek pharmakon—is generally used to refer to medicine, but in slightly modified forms it can refer to pesticide, insecticide, poison, or magic used to cause illness in humans. vasudevan’s entreaty extended this ambiguity to the injection, as a particularly potent form of marunthu. 13. critically, such concepts have been powerfully resignified in various moments—for example, kadamai in the later sangam literature refers to the duties or taxes paid to the king. in the modern era, kadamai was refigured as part of the anticaste self-respect movement in south india, which gave rise to the massively popular slogan kadamai, kanniam, kattupaadu (roughly, duty, dignity, and discipline or control). as such, it is important to keep in mind how such concepts operate with different valences within and between caste-based groups, and how such concepts undergo subtle mutations in light of broader socioeconomic and political transformations. 14. in subsuming therapeutic adherence under the hierarchically superior commitment to one’s mother, prabhakar’s way of caring might be understood as generic, but not for that reason anonymous, an important distinction in light of lisa stevenson’s (2014) characterization of the mode of care common to colonial and postcolonial regimes in her powerful study of suicide and tuberculosis epidemics in the canadian arctic. in fact, stevenson’s work would suggest that anonymity emerges through an inverse style of reasoning, in which the therapeutic (or biopolitical) mandate occupies an ethically superior position and hierarchically subsumes commitments to kin. references alter, joseph s. 1996 “gandhi’s body, gandhi’s truth: nonviolence and the biomoral imperative of public health.” journal of asian studies 55, no. 2: 301–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/2943361. biehl, joão 2007 will to live: aids therapies and the politics of survival. 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n.j.: princeton university press. zigon, jarrett 2007 “moral breakdown and the ethical demand: a theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities.” anthropological theory 7, no. 2: 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499607077295. 2009 “within a range of possibilities: morality and ethics in social life.” ethnos 74, no. 2: 251–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840902940492. 2014 “an ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: a critical response to ordinary ethics.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 20, no. 4: 746–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12133. becoming a force in the zone becoming a force in the zone: hedonopolitics, masculinity, and the quest for respect on haiti’s streets chelsey l. kivland dartmouth college the demagogue had sponsored several koudyay and popular feasts for the people and all the beggars came running. he had even gone in person to the lower class sections of town where the lumpen proletariat were cramped. he gave coins to kids and a few pats on the behind to women—and he had a drink with the men. “papa vincent is a good old boy!” sang the drunks. —jacques stephen alexis, general sun, my brother, 1955 the afternoon sun of august 7, 2010, scorched the hilltops of bel air, the impoverished neighborhood that overlooks downtown port-au-prince, haiti. a candy vendor joked that today bel air was literally earning its reputation as a “hot,” or dangerous, zone. six months had passed since the earthquake destroyed much of the neighborhood and surrounding city. aside from rubble and curbside tents, the quake still made itself felt in the heightened activity among the male youth whose political aspirations and ventures i had been following for two years. together these men represented the local base (baz) that held a degree of political authority over this zone. this base was called zapzap, after the local rara, or mystical music band, that was its most public face.1 i had planned to attend a meeting about bel air bases’ participation in a un rubble removal campaign. when i arrived, however, the overheated residents were relishing other news. a brightly painted poster announced the annual beach day of martin luther king, one of the area’s male cliques (staff). though standing where two friends had died under a collapsed house, the poster and its message eschewed grief. chiding trash-talkers and the penniless, and welcoming the displaced, it read: “this year mlk brings the stuff. . . . pay money so you can do it. we await all new, pretty ladies in the zone, all my new brothers. . . . we await all at baz zapzap. those with big mouths, stay home!” figure 1. bel air streetscape. photo by chelsey kivland. i may have dismissed the beach day if its significance had not been immediately stressed. echoing jacques stephen alexis’s fictionalization of president vincent in the 1930s, michel, a twenty-year-old mlk member, explained:2 “the beach day is a little thing. . . .  but it’s a big little thing. we can’t stay sitting every day . . . under tents, under misery, under insecurity. [it’s] problems. we must organize a program, a big little koudyay (party). we’ll make feeling for everyone, totally. that takes force, people must respect us . . . [but] like that, our force grows. . . . they’ll say, ‘look, they’re doing something!’ like that, a big little thing becomes a big, big force.” his friend added, “we must find success in this! each base does a beach day. ours must be more beautiful. . . . all the men will find a little feeling in it, without disorder. koudyay pa blozay! [exuberance not explosion!] . . . we have a lot of sponsors, and we have made the state before. the nice beach day we did last year—you don’t remember?—mlk became a force in the zone!” the interplay of violent force and a form of social force manifested in collective enjoyment have long characterized power relations in haiti. this tension between “necropolitics” (mbembe 2003) and what i call “hedonopolitics” holds true in the haitian state as well as in more localized domains of power. political violence, service provision, and festivity are all said to fè leta (enact the state), whether performed by politicians or urban strongmen. as michel asserted, the reference point for mlk’s beach day was the koudyay (from the french coup de jaille, “jolt of force”), the age-old political festival in which leaders attempt to garner support by sponsoring “collective effervescence” (durkheim 1995, 218). likewise, at this beach day, male residents of an impoverished neighborhood could fashion themselves as leaders, as those with power and respect (respè), by showcasing and transducing good feeling. in this article, i argue that insofar as displays of good feeling embodied political power, the production of programs full of feeling—what feld (1988) would call “feelingful” programs—represented efforts to perform sovereign agency and power. i use the language of sovereignty to highlight four aspects of this process: state mimicry, self-fashioning, territorialization, and performativity. yet i focus on vernacular expressions of sovereignty. local geographies of power have become particularly important under conditions of neoliberal democracy and globalization, flourishing alongside the collapse of state hegemony and the breakup of governance into targeted projects, as opposed to national policy (cf. ferguson and gupta 2002). in this milieu, of which haiti is exemplary,3 a networked model of sovereignty—a nodal rather than leviathan organization of power—offers a better way to understand how localized forms of control adopt statelike features. this networked model structurally aligns itself with post-9/11 efforts to theorize sovereign power as located in bodies and, in turn, as “multiple, provisional, and always contested” (hansen and stepputat 2005, 172). the workings of feeling and force, however, bring together the corporality of sovereignty, masculinity, and pleasure in ways that complicate the apocalyptic zeitgeist that resurrected carl schmitt’s oeuvre and located sovereignty in the embodiment of violence (singh 2012). most notably, anthropologists have focused on the way sovereign power is enacted through violence against those bodies caught in states of exception caused by war or other conflicts (agamben 2005; bogues 2006; das and poole 2004). the injured bodies of ordinary people have also been explored as mediums for enacting sovereign power. scholars have argued that cases of self-immolation, hunger strikes, and suicide bombers articulate the strength of the personal body to become metonymic of broader political power (hansen and stepputat 2006). still others have argued that individual big men or gangs harness violence to establish statelike control of territory and economies (bogues 2006; hoffman 2011; jaffe 2012; roitman 1998). what seems surprising about these accounts is that despite the range of actions and instances analyzed, death and injury remain the primary modes of performing sovereignty. given the interplay of state terror and state carnivals in places like haiti, this seems misguided. as georges bataille (1988) would remind us, sovereign power unfolds as a dialectic between death and vitality, such that the sovereign world involves the negation of death through spectacular displays of life force. the emphasis here is on excessive life, not death, which is why, for bataille, killing constitutes one, but not the only, sovereign gesture. focusing on power’s positive rather than negative aspects, on vitality and becoming rather than on death and finality, allows sovereignty to emerge as a project in flux and incomplete. this does not negate necropolitics but reveals how the loss and gain of life force interact in politics. indeed, feeling in haitian creole is semantically opposed to both the deprived state of misery (mizè) and the anxious state of insecurity (ensekerite). feeling is an affect that facilitates recognition of bodily force and, when shared across bodies, of social force.4 feelingful programs display this force as well as put it at risk; and they unfold under threat of attack from rival bases or by governmental or un forces. of additional significance is that feeling, as both a political and gendered affect, raises the underanalyzed issue of masculinity in sovereign relations. classic theorizations of sovereignty—from thomas hobbes to hannah arendt, from michel foucault to giorgio agamben—presume a male sovereign but fail to account for manliness as a crucial aspect of sovereignty.5 and while feminist social scientists have long situated women’s exclusion from political leadership at home and in the state in relation to their material and symbolic subordination to men (di leonardo 1991), fewer works have performed the countermove and looked at what wendy brown (1992, 26) called the “masculinism of state prerogative power” (see also gutmann 1997).6 recently, bonnie mann (2014) addressed this issue by showing how displays of hyperbolic agency in the war on terror situate masculinity at the center of american imaginaries of sovereignty. in the caribbean, scholars are reexamining this concern through the figures of the sex tourist (gregory 2003) and the “don” (thomas 2013), showing how transnationally mobile, lower-class men use manliness to negotiate a sense of power and control in relation to racially marked women, as well as to other men.7 indeed, this article takes as a core premise that respect constitutes a culturally and socially specific sovereign register expressed through gendered and racialized forms of bodily force and pleasure. as achille mbembe (2006, 162) suggests, properly treating the interplay of manhood and power would require a “genealogical analysis of the symbolic systems” that “have historically tied the social worlds of sexuality and of power to the phantasmal configurations of pleasure (jouissance) on the one hand and to structures of subjection on the other.” i take up this provocation by using hedonopolitics as an analytic for exploring pleasure and power as mutually constituted vitalities. hedonopolitics highlights both the pleasing sensations of power and the power that derives from pleasing others. i organize my discussion around three forms and sites of hedonopolitics in postdictatorial urban haiti: the sensualization of power at the street party, the politicization of pleasure-makers at the soccer tournament, and the affectation of manliness at the beach day. i begin with some background. democratizing militarism an ethos of militarism has permeated haitian politics since the first generation of haitians built an army that abolished slavery and won independence from france in 1804. this event engendered a nationalist ideology centered on the army and its male soldiers (laguerre 1993; sheller 2012). the 1805 constitution went so far as to conceive of the nation as a fraternal army and the citizen as “a good father, a good son, a good husband, and above all, a good soldier.” in haiti’s early years, building an army constituted a claim to sovereignty, and the country was divided through the power of provincial armies to repel larger forces. throughout the nineteenth century, local big men organized armed peasant bands that effectively controlled local territory and were regularly mobilized by regional or national politicians to overthrow state power (trouillot 1990). these big men also organized, alone or with politicians, local koudyay to celebrate victories and rally popular support. until the consolidation of the army during the u.s. occupation (1915–1934) and the militarization of the state during the duvalier dictatorship (1957–1986), localized armies provided key checks on power and alternative sources of political leadership and community. this history undergirds the formation of localized bases in the city, whose male members claim to defend (defann) their zones. bases, like those regional armies, risk becoming engaged in battle against other bases or together against the political opposition. yet the base also designates a contemporary construct, which reflects two faces of the postdictatorial democratic transition. the term base was first associated with the neighborhood organizations and ecclesial base communities (ti kominote legliz) that mobilized around the catholic priest and liberation theologian jean-bertrand aristide, and that elected him president in 1990. shedding this grassroots association, today the term suggests gang (a word now used in haiti). this second usage emerged when these factions protested the first coup against aristide and the resulting de facto government (1991–1994). the association intensified during aristide’s second term, begun in 2000. several bases were then organized into politicized militias supportive of the government. following the second coup against aristide in 2004, these militias waged violent protests for several months in hopes of restoring his leadership. as the fighting continued, some bases became involved in thievery and kidnapping, but the movement retained political intentions. nevertheless, the political opposition and international community constructed base leaders, affiliates, and residents as criminal gangs. targeting them as bandits rather than as militants, oppositional and intervening un forces killed or imprisoned several base leaders and those associated with them (kolbe and hutson 2006). today’s base formations are reducible neither to political resistance nor to criminal gangs. most generally, the term base denotes moral and political communities at different scales, from a few friends to a network of cliques. though usually oriented around an armed male chèf (chief), the networked base incorporates several youth involved in various activities simultaneously—including legal activities, such as political associations, music groups, business ventures, and development organizations, and illegal ones, such as engaging in protection rackets, secret political plots, petty and major crimes (e.g., robbery, kidnapping, or assassination), and marketing arms, housing, or services (e.g., electricity, garbage collection, and food aid). bases function, on the one hand, as communal spaces where one finds, or seeks to find, security, friendship, assistance, benefits, income, and enjoyment and on the other hand, as platforms for engaging more powerful people and groups. forming a base marks a localized effort to fashion particular subjects as those with the power and respect to defend the community and its interests. this is accomplished through the public display of force and by contracting with multiple producers of “state effects” in globalized haiti (trouillot 2001). base leaders manage the entrance of public servants, politicians, development agents, and, at times, police or peacekeepers into the neighborhood, profiting politically and financially from this brokerage. as both agents and brokers of governance, base leaders resist conflating the state with government and instead construct an idea of state power around those who govern. they “make the state” by performing its work and by creating interdependencies between those who govern and the governed (cf. chatterjee 2004). significantly, base leaders see themselves less as resisting state authority than as furnishing statelike community and connections by providing security against outside threats, brokering development projects, basic services, and employment, and by providing the material and social goods of a proper life. spanning necropolitics and hedonopolitics, these activities provide the source for vernacular sovereigns as well as stratified citizenship in which subjects’ participation in the national legal public is mediated through their position in local insurgent publics (cf. holston 2008; jaffe 2012). if represented schematically, the networked base would be shaped not like a web but like a bipolar network. imagine a node from which broader political networks extend in one direction, and a set of localized cliques in the other (see figure 2). the namesake of the base introduced earlier was zafè pèp la, zafè peyi a (the affairs of the people, the affairs of the country), also known as zapzap, a highly politicized rara group founded in 1992 and supported by aristide. one of the rara’s former members, yves, served as the de facto leader of the base. he was a well-known militant—to his disparagers, a chimè (chimera, meaning illusive, enraged bandit)—who violently defended aristide’s rule and went to prison during the 2004 coup. adept at shifting alliances, he has acted under the current administration as a liaison for the postearthquake relocation committee and as the security guard at the local health clinic, with the authority to bear arms. he referred to himself as the zone’s chief, leader, or street director, all of which meant that he was the base’s principal promoter and benefactor. he also used connections with state and ngo actors to broker jobs, services, handouts, and development projects for area residents and for the youth organization for the renaissance of bel air (ojreb), for whom he served as publicist. directed by frantzy, the rara’s vice president and yves’s right-hand man, ojreb brokered development projects such as paving dirt corridors, installing solar street lamps, or hosting seminars on hiv/aids. the mlk clique, which hosted the beach day, was tied to the rara zapzap because they ran the organization of moral youth for the enrichment and education of bel air (ojmoteeb), which yves also promoted. in addition, ojreb and ojmoteeb shared a secretary, and they often co-organized events and projects. other base activities included a secret spiritual society, or chanpwèl, called blada (mimicking the word brother in jamaican parlance), founded by core rara members, and also an armed clique called mog (threatening a trip to the morgue [mòg]) and a rap group, bèlè masif, both recently begun by mlk/ojmoteeb members. figure 2. diagram of base. these domains were integrated through shared membership, black populist ideology, common geography, and an orientation to particular leaders and political contacts. still, it is important not to consign the base to a distinct group with fixed membership. base leaders and affiliates spoke of themselves as wearing multiple hats, and they proudly displayed their collection of plastic id cards or badges (badj) identifying their roles in several organizations. the emergence of a unified base occurred when they were mobilized in neighborhood or national conflicts, employed in development projects, drawn together in political campaigns, or when they hosted and participated in koudyay-like programs. the consolidation of the base and its leadership formed part of what was at stake in such programs. as one of the key shifts in the postdictatorial production of programs, hosts, who used to be mostly state agents, must today work through local bases. and even when politicians, ngos, and/or businesspeople sponsor the party, the local group receives recognition for it. the success of the programs attests to these men’s bipolar power: both their political power and level of local influence. by way of programs, base leaders seek what nancy munn (1986) has called the spatiotemporal extension and value formation of the subject by embodying consequential nodes of a social network—or in popular parlance, respect. caribbean respect and hedonopolitics discourses of respect among base leaders echo the symbolic duality between respectability and reputation introduced in the 1970s to explain gender and class relations in the postcolonial caribbean (wilson 1973). respectability, according to peter wilson, referred to the system of social distinction imposed by the old colonial order and exemplified by proper bourgeois women, whereas reputation designated the black, populist value system that found expression in men’s quests to win peers’ acclaim. the duality expressed the gendered ordering of space, with respectability pursued at home and in church, and reputation on the street and in watering holes. mainly concerned with lower-class men,8 wilson showed that the pursuit of manly reputations was not just a response to the scarcity of respectability; it also mobilized seemingly deviant acts as mediums for resistance and agency. this becomes apparent in the politics of the base. as others have shown, we cannot reduce the appeal of gangs for poor black youth to economic necessity; instead, we must see the allure as tied to their role as alternative value systems that offer spaces of belonging and opportunities to attain status and influence (bourgois 1995; venkatesh 2000). wilson’s framework, however, can obscure how base leaders have used the concept of respect in historically particular ways. indeed, their uses illuminate how this value system has both intensified and transformed alongside a caribbean-wide structural adjustment, which, has simultaneously offered the urban poor new sources of social mobility and imposed increased unemployment, foreign dependency, and poverty since the 1980s (freeman 2000; thomas 2011). this shift has affected men and women differently. on the surface, the global economy favors the flexible labor and entrepreneurialism long prized by urban men who define success not by a stable job but by managing several activities. yet haiti’s main urban economies, informal marketing and subcontracted assembly, along with the capital source of microcredit, favor female workforces. in this context, poor men (and some women) are prone to bypass respectable livelihoods and seek success through a transnational black cultural repertoire that includes music, street politics, and crime. paradoxically, these pathways can provide not only racial and masculine respect but also the promise of using respect to meet the norms of respectable manhood. the men i met in bel air sought social acclaim not only as respected comrades but also as respectable fathers. yet these roles, though not mutually exclusive, were in tension. the respectable way to assert manhood was as a fruitful laborer and responsible father of as many children as possible. yet without steady, formal employment, most men found themselves far removed from a productive and remunerative lifestyle. not only could they not provide for their children or their children’s mothers but they usually depended financially on entrepreneurial women. men’s unemployment also challenged women’s respectability, since women often formed multiple sexual unions in search of a stable provider (maternowska 2006). whereas women complained of absent fathers and “vagabond” lovers, the complaints i heard most commonly from men were “no work,” “no activity,” or “nothing to do.” both of their complaints referenced critiques of unemployment under conditions of urbanization and neoliberal reform. yet men’s complaints also surfaced as the moral rejoinder to their engagement in illicit ventures and homosocial distractions (distraksyon), from playing dominos and “getting feeling” with a stiff drink and a laced cigarette to hosting a koudyay. in this more cunning usage, the grievances attested not to these activities’ insignificance, but rather to a descent into manly play and the need to salvage respectable manhood (especially before my female gaze). indeed, public displays of distraction not only passed idle time; they proved key mediums for cultivating respect in male circles. such workings of respect in caribbean domains of play are well documented, yet play’s connection to street life and politics remains relatively neglected. ethnomusicologists have ranged among the few to note the semiotic entanglement of festivity and militancy in haitian politics. in particular, studies of rara, the musical and spiritual tradition practiced by zapzap, have explored how ritual work, play, and warfare intermingle in the competitive processions of musicians and dancers (averill and yih 2003; mcalister 2002). extending this scholarship, my argument addresses not the simultaneity but the interdependency of masculinity, pleasure, and power. consider the evolving idiom of respect. the haitian idea of respect semantically entails political and spiritual power. customarily, it has marked hierarchical though not exploitative relations, as that between god and servitor or a just leader and his subjects. the traditional haitian greeting—in which the guest says “honor,” and the host responds “respect”—perhaps offers the best example. men in urban haiti today have replaced this greeting and now salute each other by simultaneously saying “respect” and bumping fists. this usage of respect invokes a particular racialized and gendered political subjectivity, located in the risky but also spirited space of the ghetto (geto). further, the exchange of respect articulates not absolute hierarchies (like that of honor-respect), but rather egalitarian yet competitive relations. it thus sets the stage for the material, symbolic, and spiritual violence that will define the manliest and the most respected. in urban haiti, this battle plays out through the politics of the base. becoming involved in a base, whether as a member of a clique, band, organization, or armed faction, offers a way to demonstrate manhood and emerge as a big man. this holds true in part because the base positions men in contests of leadership with each other and with other bases, often igniting lethal feuds over the distribution of monetary resources or social goods. here i aim to show, however, how activities coded as playful are tied up in these power projects. getting respect entails, as michel’s friend put it, “becoming a force in the zone,” and this means exercising control over insecurity, often through its opposite of good feeling. showing off one’s ability to throw a party makes for more than a distraction; it constitutes politicized adventure. i now take a careful look at three feelingful events, asking how they participated in the construction of respected men, and what relationship between politics and pleasure they forged. as noted earlier, the erotic sensualization of power, the politicization of pleasure-makers, and the affectation of manliness figured prominently in expressions of what it meant to be a local leader. i begin with a street party, not least for reasons of its connection to the koudyay and the sexual politics of the vivacious spirit gede. performing the man one october afternoon in 2008, zapzap’s core members and i were crammed into the ten-foot-wide gallery of a two-story building that served as “kay (house) zapzap.” frantzy, a member of the rara and the director of ojreb, complained, “ever since the foreigners killed the feeling and took our ancestors during the coup, the band has lost its force.” he was referring to aristide’s exile and to the two-year imprisonment of yves, whose apprehension by police and peacekeepers occurred shortly after the 2004 coup. frantzy continued, “we need the force of the youth. we won’t let them stay sitting. we have to put them on the concrete, make a big activity, give everyone feeling! the first of november we’ll make a big koudyay.” and then with a smirk, “just like in the duvalier epoch.” after stressing the work it entailed, berman, another core zapzap member, added that on this day they would “fè [make] the man” for the zone. women often used this expression to ask men to claim household responsibility. here berman had moved from household to polity, invoking a paternalistic political discourse, in which the group embodied the man for the zone. while this suggested providing a good time for the zone, it also affirmed the belief that acting like a man—active, authoritative, respected—provided its own pleasures. the street party in fact unfolded as the animation of power in terms of heterosexual relations. zapzap did not normally go out in early november, when crowds incarnating the spirit gede fill city streets. the epoch, in fact, belongs to their rival rara and its base of power located at the neighboring intersection. yet the spirit definitely fit the festival’s competitive aim of appointing new “masters of the concrete,” as the party’s poster announced. spanning the symbolism of life and death, sexuality and mourning, gede’s surrogates wear funerary colors, powder their faces, and enact mock funerals while soliciting change for their kisses, lustful dances, and lewd jokes. the ethos of erotic feeling as the antidotal energy to death and misery prevailed at zapzap’s street party. even more explicitly, gede’s life force was invoked in the mission to reignite zapzap’s capacity to transduce feeling to others. as mannaze, the vodou priest for zapzap told me in the days before the event: “everyone has a gede for himself. he is the first spirit, the first zozo [slang for penis]. he’s there to give you feeling. gede, big zozo. for that reason gede is the master of the party. nice zozo makes feeling multiply.” he then inserted a betiz [sexual pun] from a song zapzap was known to perform: the size of our wood/penis mezi bwa nou they’ll hate us y ap rayi nou this lyric plays on multiple meanings. it suggests the double meaning of bwa as wood and penis, and in turn, that of hardness and pleasure. the lyric can be read as a threat of violence or rape. a more nuanced (and freudian) meaning is that women or feminized others desire the “big penis,” but since they cannot claim it, detest these men out of jealousy (cf. mcalister 2002). hardness and pleasure became ritually entangled at the party, which unfolded like a typical koudyay. it got underway at 10 p.m. and petered out at dawn. female vendors sold fried foods, alcohol, and cigarettes as young men and women listened to music that a dj blared from a deafening sound system rigged to a generator. rows of chairs were placed in front of the corner store boutique mystère facing a display of new murals in honor of zapzap, mlk, ojmoteeb, and ojreb. the chairs were for vips such as the presidents of other bands, local businessmen, and party sponsors, including yves, whose white jeep was parked in the intersection the entire evening. by midnight, the party roared and zapzap could claim sonic and physical control of the zone. this social domination of place entailed fabricating spiritual and ancestral force within and over the neighborhood crossroads. to ritually “heat up” the party, mannaze buried two white doves alive before a black cross that stood in front of the house of zapzap’s deceased founder. he then summoned the band’s core spirit, mèt kalfou, the “master of the crossroads,” and asked guests to pay a toll to him. he stressed how dropping change in the band’s demanbre, the hut where the spirits reside, would ensure the militant spirit’s protection. next, he placed a drum and kerosene lamp before the cross, and then gathered some dirt and brought it into the hut with the secret society. when they emerged, mannaze carried an old beer bottle tied in a red scarf, signaling his capture of the founding member’s soul (zonbi), which would now ceaselessly “work” for the band. he then lit a pile of wood on fire in the intersection. the band circled the fire, their shadows cast on yves’s jeep. typically, this ritual consolidation of force ensured the band’s performative prowess and protection along long procession routes. yet given that they only circled the block, it was more oriented toward facilitating good feeling for the street party by symbolizing the group’s territorial control and ability to secure the crowd. it may appear surprising that this militant ritual could produce the communal feeling at the other end of the experiential spectrum. though “getting feeling” signals a pleasant, easeful mood, it presupposes and entails sensations of might and upheaval. the entanglement of feeling and force resonates with the way steven feld (1988, 89) theorizes the embodied process of “getting into the groove” as “hardness” in papua new guinea. he writes, “hardness is force, the attainment of that evocative, charged, energized state (where to extend the notion into english one is ‘knocked out’ or ‘blown away’).” this force does not resemble violent domination, but it is nonetheless intensely powerful and persuasive. it aims to control others not through fear of death but by stimulating common structures of feeling. here is where the notion of enacting the man begins to take on a specifically masculinist meaning. the production of feeling by the society members allowed them to imagine themselves as all-powerful male subjects capable of manipulating the physical world and the sensual experiences of feminized others. “in zapzap, there was feeling flowing in the blood of all. when our army entered, we gave you feeling. [we] put pleasure in your dada (gut/ass)!” was how yves summed up the party. this sanguineous imaginary tweaked a conventional model of belonging. here blood was not a marker of descent but an affect of moral and political community. those with common feeling in the blood formed an agentive and righteous “army” of kin, neighbors, and acquaintances. the opposing force, in turn, had weak blood flow and also immoral lifeblood. people at base zapzap characterized other bases as overrun by vagabon san sal, dirty-blood vagabonds. such accusations of illicit force valorized their control of the zone while undercutting others’ influence. the song zapzap later composed for carnival that year articulated this sensual moralization of power, boasting about how the band’s magical, militant powers (petwo) enforced their party and destroyed their rival’s. the song also served as reportage, as police and peacekeepers had indeed disbanded the rival’s party, arresting a major base leader. it’s zapzap that passes here se zapzap k ap pase la it gives me feeling li ban m filing it moves in my blood li mache nan san m our petwo [sorcery9] is our dangerous party/endangers your party petwo nou se malè fèt nou menm it’s not just talk se pa pale chief rivalries the sensualization of power thus existed alongside the politicization of those who organized the affective political economy. this becomes most evident at the street soccer tournaments that bases organize during summer weekends. while some women enjoy these tournaments, soccer (and sport in general) constitutes a male-centered cultural practice that invites masculine sociality. because of the crowds they attract and the politicized patronage that make them possible, tournaments are prime targets for those seeking to disrupt the power of local organizers. in the summer of 2005, for example, when coup-era hostility was still active, armed actors supporting the interim regime violently disbanded several tournaments in bel air and other pro-aristide neighborhoods. while this violence encouraged the wary to stay home, the association of the tournaments with danger and risk also added to their allure as charged events fit for men or those seeking respect as men. “there cannot not be shooting at this program!” was a phrase that would advertise a program’s danger, but also its social value. in june 2009, ojmoteeb began planning its second annual tournament on the porch of kay zapzap. with all seated around, berman called an informal meeting. michel, charged with typing documents for the youth organizations, was quickly roused from his nap on the concrete bench tagged mlk and called over to chat with the others. after announcing that this tournament must have “more feeling” than last year’s, frantzy gave michel a one hundred goud note ($2.50) to draft letters requesting support at a cybercafé. he paused before telling him whom to write to, complaining that since no one was in charge, “we’ll have to write everyone.” he decided on several powerful actors, the brazilian ngo viva rio, the ministry of youth and sport, usaid, the national palace, president préval, and a local politician. he also quickly dictated a six-hundred-dollar budget, which included t-shirts and decorations ($150); a dj or other entertainment ($275); refreshments ($125); and equipment ($50). he wondered aloud if this would allow enough to give the base members something, and then added another hundred dollars for “mobilization.” he ended the meeting by telling michel to print out some extra letters without addressees. these would be for less official sponsors as well as important personages, including yves and the leaders of rival bases. as funding requests, these letters signaled that the group was not profiting, but also that if it did, these actors would get their cut. the letters thus respectfully recognized and integrated powerful actors by requesting their permission and protection. such gestures of respect proved critical to ensuring the success of a program. in effect, obtaining permission from base leaders substituted for a city permit system. once the letters and budget were stamped with the organization’s seal, frantzy, sporting a button-down white shirt tucked into his pristinely ironed khakis, went with me to deliver them. frantzy had insisted on my company. he hoped that my privileged status as a white foreigner would help him get by the front desk to a meeting. it did not. we received from each office a small paper affirming the reception of the letter, allowing frantzy to follow up on the request. this ceaseless following up and meeting to deliver news accounted for much of the activity and enjoyment of the next two weeks. the hustle and bustle displayed the group’s engagement in planning an important matter. while base members would regularly complain about being very busy in the run-up to events, i rarely heard them express fatigue, as they might when toiling away at “women’s work.” in fact, they often highlighted pleasure. leading up to the street party, for example, a single, unemployed neighbor who ran errands in exchange for small change, exuberantly told me: “me myself, i am doing a lot of activity today. oh oh . . . a lot of work. good feeling! travay se liberte [work is liberty]!” this organizational activity, in other words, promised not just economic but also sensual liberation from misery. ultimately, the activity for the tournament resulted in a check from the ministry of youth and sport and a cash payment from the politician, which i was told totaled a hundred dollars. the ngos, as frantzy complained, “don’t like our match. they don’t see ‘serious things’ in taking pleasure. they make the state in corridor-paving projects, violence projects only.” in suggesting that hedonopolitics contrasted with ngos’ agendas, his comment extended the idea of the state and its duty beyond the “bare life” minimums of humanitarianism to the cultivation of a good life. it also conveyed frustration with this technology of governance and, in particular, with the need to shape local initiatives to fit highly specified ngo project agendas (e.g., water and paving corridors). not surprisingly, yves contributed the lion’s share, another few hundred dollars. with a budget of only a few hundred dollars, the refreshments and t-shirts were foregone: the teams wore matching promotional shirts, and the decorations were downscaled to blue-and-white striped plastic bags tied to informal electricity lines. for entertainment, two large stereos were secured onto the gallery of a boutique that had a generator, and frantzy acted as dj. a small version of zapzap—comprising mainly new, young members—was also paid to make a short appearance after the finale. finally, the group hired an older friend and neighbor to referee the game. the soccer game consisted of four five-member teams from the surrounding blocks that ojmoteeb had invited to play. they had extended the written invitations to other youth organizations that also staged summer soccer tournaments. each organization, including ojmoteeb, then had to mobilize a team. like other associations, these teams were connected to particular zones. thus, the tournament, which brought together three different zones (two teams from the same one), also became integrated into the politics of the base. yet it would be wrong to view the tournament as a competition between zones or organizations played out through the teams. the significant match rather took place at the organizational level. throughout the tournament, the main organizers, including five members of zapzap and michel, sat in plastic lawn chairs on a balcony even with midfield, where frantzy was playing music from an amplified boom box. while yves remained absent, his white jeep was parked in the crossroads, behind one of the goals. the organizers wore their best hip-hop fashions, adding jewelry, new caps, and shiny sneakers to their standard attire. they usually had their arms around each others’ shoulders, and they greeted spectators by “giving respect” with a fist bump and self-assured smirk. several entrepreneurial women set up shop in spots ojmoteeb had designated with white chalk, and for which the women had made a small contribution. the organizers purchased from them rounds of fried food, drinks, and cigarettes to share with friends and guests. the nearly all male spectators, crowded on sidewalks, balconies, and rooftops, affirmed the good feeling with their relaxed vibe. it helped that affiliations were shared across teams, with cheers erupting at goals on either side. but this does not mean to suggest a lack of competitive spirit. before leaving, kal, a key organizer, told me, “look at how we make good feeling, give all the people feeling. no person has misery at this hour in our lakou [zone]. no insecurity. it’s because it’s us who do this, because it’s us who represent the base now.” as clifford geertz (1973, 417) famously wrote of the balinese cockfight, “it is only apparently cocks that are fighting. actually, it is men.” this maxim is easily interpreted as suggesting that men engage in power plays via the cockfight. but as geertz’s ethnography attests, the competition is not only between the men whose birds are fighting but also (and perhaps more so) between which village chief throws the better fight. the same holds true for these tournaments. the competitions waged in the match were, to borrow from claude lévi-strauss (1966), rituals serving a larger game waged between those who organized it. just as with the street parties, the significant question was which group of men organized the better tournament. and this decision largely rested on which group orchestrated the best ambiance of male sociality. hence, while some event funds entered the organizers’ pocketbooks, profit was not the tournament’s goal. of greater importance was the way it allowed them to act as pleasure providers for the zone, and in turn, to make a show of political power. this feat, however, depended on the principal patron yves. channeling an expansive political network, yves stepped in and performed the role of the state in a way that the ministries and ngos did not. the tournament enabled his own power play and positioned him against other local leaders. beyond a display of might, however, it formed part of yves’s larger quest to become a respected authority following the coup-era violence. here, as at the party, he engaged in the kind of extra-economic gift exchange that presumed debt forgiveness. it was key that such gifts did not just revolve around cash handouts, but rather around the production of communal good feeling. when successful, these events helped transform his reputation from that of a bandit to that of a militant defender of the zone. manly affectations another focal point of summer sees busloads of residents travel an hour or so outside the city for a beach day. these days, even more than street parties or soccer games, revolve around the display of manly power. in the imaginary of bel air residents, the beach is a space reserved for rich haitians, peacekeeping troops, and development workers. this association with elite leisure makes beach days an exercise in class mobility. the beach is also associated with flirtation and sex, and beach days likewise involve the display of masculine sexuality. new or secretive couples seek out the beach to engage in sex acts beyond the view of neighbors. the sea can provide a degree of privacy, as it is impossible to see what takes place underwater. yet despite this sexually charged atmosphere, actual sex acts occupied a small portion of social interactions during the beach days i attended. the mainly male beachgoers spent most of their time advertising to other men their potential for engagement in this erotic adventure. by the time preparations for the 2009 beach day ignited, i had already heard a lot about the outing. for several months ojmoteeb had been inviting me to its annual beach day. in mid-july, the youth organization displayed an elaborately painted placard on the corner and circulated to friends and neighbors a grainy flyer designed by michel (see figure 3). it pictured a young, attractive girl in a white bikini, jumping enthusiastically, her long locks bouncing around a caramel-colored face. “chacha [dance] your body, romp your body, good thing!” around this image radiated the architecture of the base; the titles of the various groups appeared in graphic displays, with the names of the sponsors, yves and mystère boutique, in finer print. the ministry of sport and youth, as well as the ngo viva rio, were also solicited in writing, and the former was added to the placard after issuing a check for about fifty dollars. both the flyer and the placard advertised the ticket price (about $5) that would be printed on raffle tickets and distributed to attendees. this proved a prohibitive cost for most. in fact, it was largely an empty performance of economic agency, since the organizers gave most attendees complimentary tickets. nonetheless, the performance delivered a real social good, constructing the organizers and beachgoers as possessing the economic and social capital of bona fide men. the placard even announced, “you must work hard for the ticket, or else you’ll be ashamed!” figure 3. beach day flyer, 2009. photo by chelsey kivland. when i arrived at the base at 6 a.m., as the flyer had announced i should do, i found the street bustling with the ambiance of a street party. a yellow school bus, for which ojmoteeb would pay $75, was already parked before kay zapzap, next to yves’s jeep. the group members were casually chatting on the gallery, as two women finished cooking a huge pot of rice and beans and saucy chicken. we appeared ready to go, but the hours kept passing. this delay went beyond the lax concern for punctuality to which i had grown accustomed. the organizers kept retreating to private meetings on the roof. i suspected a problem with the finances, but when i went upstairs, i found them sharing a joint and surveying the crowd gathered on the street. after assuring me of our “big adventure,” berman told michel to go and check if the bus of the family—another base that was also doing a beach day—had left, and to assess their crowd. this ritualized display of going to the beach made clear that the day’s success depended not only on the orchestration of the outing but also on the measure of attention it garnered in the neighborhood. the interactions at the beach unfolded as a montage of attempts by the attendees to display sexualized attractiveness and erotic prowess. there were about three times as many men as women, though all the core base members brought along dates. these dates ranged from longtime partners to extramarital partnerships to prostitute-like arrangements, where the women received compensation for their time. yves had, for example, financed the dates for jak and bernie, core yet less powerful base affiliates. along with these distinctions, the activities of the attendees varied. young men, like jak and bernie, spent the day taking photos with their bikini-clad ladies or flirting with them before their friends. berman used the beach day to socially consummate his relationship with his girlfriend nerlande. having left his wife at home with five kids, he disappeared with his lover into the water and engaged in underwater intimacies. those without dates busied themselves with taking cell-phone pictures. they posed for the camera in an assortment of hip-hop tableaux, with low-slung shorts, crossed arms, and gang gestures of respect. few such men entered the water, spending most of their time engaged in the kind of activities that dominate their days in bel air: socializing, playing dominoes, and trying to get a buzz sipping strong liquor. a dance party in which an amateur dj, hired by the beach managers, played popular songs and local hits, stimulated a few of the fun flings publicized in the poster. after the beats of the local rap group caused a frenzy, a loop of slower tunes brought couples together in tight embraces. the most exaggerated display of masculine prowess came with the arrival of yves. he drove in his own jeep, accompanied by a friend. their dates, attractive teenagers, were bel air residents but not affiliates of the base, and they approached the organizers with obvious discomfort. they excused themselves, then quickly changed into new florescent bikinis, took a quick swim, and retreated to the jeep, where they spent the rest of the day by themselves. in the meantime, yves openly joked with frantzy, jak, and another friend, as nadine, the singer of zapzap, and i chatted nearby. yves, never one to shy away from sexualized boasting, affirmed that he had already “tasted the sweetness” of his date. “her pussy gives me too much feeling, oh, oh, all that [pubic] hair. now i have to pound her ass,” he said with a guffaw, which the other men met with laughter. yves held court for a while, telling us how his sexual feats cost him dearly. he concluded by sexualizing my presence, joking that his new girl was driving him crazy, just like the “one who doesn’t know what the other is doing.” this reference to me, a lyrical nickname that poked fun at my long-distance relationship, was well played, and we all fell into laughter. the girls’ seeming irrelevance in this scene provides an example of how the masculinity of respect relies on performances of manliness that happen between and are primarily addressed to other men (gregory 2003; sedgwick 1985). yves’s homosocial performance did not exhibit sexuality itself, but was rather, following wilson (1973), a gesture aimed at giving the impression of sexual prowess without actually achieving anything other than men’s emotional excitement. this was not the last laugh, however. having long since found a way of asserting female sexuality in this male group, nadine countered with another joke in my defense. “you too ugly, yves,” she said, grabbing her crotch. “this beautiful, pink clitoris, if you don’t have a beautiful penis, it’ll cost your car.” the joke played on the assumption that desirability and economic agency are two powers women have over men. in this way, nadine used female sexuality to undermine yves’s claim to manhood as a source of pleasure and provision. in another way, the beach day provided an opportunity for organizers to embody manhood not only erotically but also as a provider. the key organizer kal, for example, spent much of the day sitting at the water’s edge with his wife sophie nestled between his legs, as she supervised their adolescent daughter playing in the ocean. unable to afford a new bikini, sophie wore a blue obama tank, boxer briefs, and a hair cap, which kal realigned with each splash. when i approached them, kal told me in an elated tone: “i’ve had time to forget the city, the ghetto, totally. they call it bel air, but it’s here i get the feeling of bèlair, itself, together with my wife [squeezing sophie]. ojmoteeb, a lot of respect! we organized ourselves well. we’re mobilizing a lot of men with all this feeling. good thing!” this was the happiest i ever saw kal, who struggled with depression and anger, and the most relaxed and joyful i found him and sophie together—their relationship was often troubled by bouts of domestic violence triggered by kal’s demands for some of sophie’s meager earnings as a hairstylist. his comment thus left me wondering about the personal and social significance of the moment. in conveying respect for ojmoteeb, of which he was a member, he attributed his good feeling to his organizational achievement, suggesting his joy was political. this event allowed him and the other organizers to momentarily transcend their everyday lives in their socially marginalized neighborhood. this bèlair was, however, no less enmeshed in the portrayal of family life, in the fondness with which he and his partner looked after their child. as i watched this wholesome intimacy, i felt sure the day provided kal with an arena to ask forgiveness for past transgressions. it enabled him to show the kind of man he might be under different circumstances. as much as feeling was realized in his abilities to act as a respected leader in the zone, it also found expression in him personifying the role that eluded him on most days: that of a respectable man. that this public display of domesticity—of home, marriage, children—enabled a performance of respectable manliness exemplifies how both respect and respectability work on and through women as much as men, and through performed heterosexuality in the context of homosociality. moreover, it shows how the search for respect is at once a struggle to moralize street cred and to mobilize it to meet the norms of manliness unattainable in the formal economy. after the dance, the drum is heavy says a haitian proverb that captures how worldly pressures always return once festivities have passed. while providing an escape from daily life in the ghetto, these programs also highlighted participants’ poverty and marginalization. anxieties about exercising mobility in the city marred trips to the beach. beach days often had unsuccessful aspects, with buses breaking down, gas money running out, or rival bases attacking. peacekeepers or policemen, with suspicions of kidnapping, theft, or political conspiracy, might also stop buses at checkpoints surrounding bel air and routes exiting the city. those who stayed home could also undermine organizers’ efforts to feel like big men. as we disembarked the bus that day, celebratory gunshots sounded in the background. but the owner of boutique mystère soon disturbed the vibe, chiding sarcastically, “today they acted like leaders.” his wife and shopkeeper then joked, “what’ll they do tomorrow? nothing at all!” while offering an intense display of hierarchical community, the beach day, like other feelingful events, by definition constituted an ephemeral and contested consolidation of political power and masculine pleasure. conclusion the emergence of the base as a key player in haitian politics affirms the scholarly trend to view the workings of state sovereignty as not only not distinct from but as also connected to localized and personalized arenas of rule and order. yet base leaders’ attention to feeling and to its entanglement with force suggests we rethink the way this vernacularization of sovereignty has been conceptualized through the embodied power to take life or, for agamben, to flout it. theoretically, the entanglement of feeling and force in the construction of bases in urban haiti can enable us to reformulate ideas about sovereign self-fashioning beyond the standard actions of death and injury. this does not mean dismissing these actions, but rather incorporating the dialectical play of the negation and intensification of life force at work in the sovereign gesture. feelingful programs, by virtue of being bound up with symbolic and material contestations of space and power, constitute hedonopolitics, or critical expressions of pleasure and political power. these programs articulate several aspects of this intersection: the street party as a mode of sensualizing power as good feeling, the organization of neighborly sporting events as a medium for displaying benevolent power, and the affectation of manliness at the beach as the performative script for embodying respect. in this way, feeling not only proves integral to the construction of localized rule and order in urban haiti; it also constitutes the affective repertoire through which men fashion themselves as consequential in relation to their peers and their localized social milieu. this occurs because manifesting feeling necessitates an artful ability to mobilize resources by activating contacts in particular networks, organizing friends and neighbors, and, not least, conjuring power and stimulating others to imagine it as well. the affective intensity generated at programs can then be channeled in all sorts of productive ways—to incite pleasure, articulate manhood, promote reputations, and fortify political standing. amid a disordered and uncertain political world, feelingful programs provide a stage on which young men can momentarily perform the contours of sovereign power and become a force in the zone. notes acknowledgments the research for this article was supported by a fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research award, the social science research council, the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation (no. 0819054), and the university of chicago. stephan palmié, jean comaroff, greg beckett, judy farquhar, kerry chance, ajantha subramanian, grete viddal, james igoe, john watanabe, dale eickelman, sienna craig, hoyt alverson, sergei kan, karen pittleman, and william eidtson provided critical advice on earlier iterations. i am especially thankful to the editors anne allison and charles piot, as well as the two anonymous reviewers for invaluable guidance during the revision process. finally, i say mési anpil to my hosts and friends in bel air. 1. rara is a performance genre, a vodou ritual, and an annual lenten festival in which roaming bands traverse city streets and rural villages playing music, singing, dancing, and serving the spirits. 2. all personal names are pseudonyms, except for berman and nerlande, who died in the earthquake. 3. haiti’s dependence on modern foreign aid and development predates and also outpaces the rate in the region and for comparable countries globally. 4. see gregg and seigworth 2010 for a discussion of affect as force. 5. for a recent study of the masculinities at stake in political theories of sovereignty, see di stefano 1991. on foucault’s omission, see diamond and quimby 1988. 6. exceptions include luhrmann 1996 and cohn 1987. more attention 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the ground. there was a distant flap of wings. much closer, i could hear larvae chewing on the granadilla leaves and insects humming from within knotty bundles and flower petals. it was cooler here, and the humming grew more intense. my only words for it, a hundred damp index fingers gliding around the rims of water glasses. life as it pulsates, withers, draws at once a next and last breath. this was the distinct sound—better yet, force—permeating the air when i first stepped off the bus in san miguel, putumayo, at the amazonian farm school la hojarasca, which means “litter layer” or, more colloquially, decomposing leaves often used as compost. groups of farmers were conversing next to a wooden table lined with seeds as big as fists, others as tiny as mites. hens and wild turkeys roamed about trampling through the underbrush. a family of geese honked noisily as they descended on their lunch of minced sugarcane. there was the crunch of boots pressing down on layers of decaying leaves and stalks, a sound quite distinct from the squish of shoes sliding against bare mud. i heard the slice of a machete, the heavy thump of copoazú when the fruit hit the ground, laughter, buzzing, and the friction of scraped stone as bore leaves were ground into grain. the trees were lined with mochilero nests, and every so often i could make out the birds’ call—the sound of water, the reverberation of a drop of water, that almost-electric sound it makes in the exact moment it hits a surface and morphs into disparate forms. i failed to sense heraldo’s presence until i heard a voice call out from behind. “wouldn’t you agree,” he asked as he approached where i stood in the middle of the creeping plant garden, “life makes life happier?” figure 1. a small farm in the andean-amazonian foothills of colombia. photo by kristina lyons. from april 2008 to march 2011, and again between june 2013 and april 2014, i conducted fieldwork in and around the southwestern frontier state of putumayo among small farming families, rural social movements, soil scientists, state officials, armed actors, and aid workers. referred to as the gateway to colombia’s amazon, putumayo shares borders with ecuador and peru, and transitions from central andean foothills into the extensive amazonian plains that comprise 85 percent of its territory. with 66,022 hectares of commercial coca under cultivation in 2000, the year the bilateral u.s.-colombian antinarcotics policy plan colombia commenced, putumayo produced around 40 percent of the nation’s illicit coca (unodc 2005). the region quickly became the focus of militarized eradication, as well as state and u.s. agency for international development (usaid) crop-substitution efforts. the global militarization of the drug war in the 1980s became more explicitly intertwined after 9/11, with the hemispheric conflation of counternarcotic and counterterrorism wars. this merger resulted in a series of military surges into southern colombia, where the oldest and largest leftist guerilla group in the country—the revolutionary armed forces of colombia (farc-ep)—and right-wing paramilitary groups operating with the complicity of state military and police forces had battled over territory and control of the cocaine trade since the 1980s. after the official demobilization in 2006 of the umbrella paramilitary organization, the united self-defense forces of colombia (auc), paramilitaries are said to no longer exist.1 yet overwhelming evidence suggests that mid-level commanders failed to demobilize or simply reorganized into countrywide narcocriminal structures, such as los rastrojos, los urabeños, or los constructores, which continue to operate in putumayo. the colombian government now refers to these groups as bacrim (emergent criminal bands). since 2000, plan colombia has provided around $9 billion in supply-side drug interdiction assistance. as much as 75 percent of aid has been invested in provisioning weapons, equipment, technical assistance, and training for colombian military and police through contracts with u.s.-based multinationals like monsanto, sikorsky aircraft, and dyncorp international (beittel 2012). for twenty years, forced eradication strategies relied on a controversial aerial fumigation program that remains a heated topic of science wars disputing its environmental and public health risks. the program consisted in deploying crop-duster planes to spray a concentrated formula of monsanto’s herbicide glyphosate over suspected illicit crops.2 aerial aspersion operations were coupled with manual eradication by contracted workers who were sent, accompanied by the military and police, to rip out whatever stubborn coca plants remained after crop dusters passed overhead. in putumayo alone, 277,849 hectares have been aerially fumigated since 2000, and 82,780 hectares of coca have been manually eradicated since 2004.3 despite this, putumayo continues to produce 20 percent of the country’s illicit coca, exemplifying long-standing critiques of the effectiveness of repressive eradication strategies in achieving permanent national reductions in illicit crops (unodc 2015). a long-awaited resolution to suspend aerial fumigation with glyphosate was issued by the colombian government on may 29, 2015, in the wake of a report published by the world health organization’s cancer research arm declaring the world’s most widely used herbicide a probable carcinogen to humans. it is still unclear what policy will come to replace aerial spraying after the national environmental licensing agency (anla) suspended the license to use glyphosate in aerial fumigation operations on october 1, 2015. colombia, up until that point, was the only country in the world to implement aerial fumigation as a counternarcotic strategy. i began fieldwork in the andean-amazonian foothills in 2004, at the height of renewed critiques of plan colombia. through the ensuing years, as i returned to putumayo for further research, to film a popular education project, and to accompany farmers during the 2013 national agrarian, ethnic, and popular strike, i was struck not so much by the kinds of violence and ecological destruction produced by the war on drugs, but rather by the tenacious vitality of life in the midst of war. indeed, what most impacted me when i first arrived at la hojarasca in 2007 was the pulsation the farm school was generating, literally resonating by its very existence in the midst of a criminalized ecology. it was bundles of life pulsating away—dense entanglements of diverse plants, decomposing leaves and rootlets, the buzz of insects, the sounds of small animals and birds cloaked by selva canopy—that allowed it to carve out a transformative space for itself, even if precariously so. this was not a space where life was simply enduring within social suffering and contamination, but rather one where other modes of eating, growing, seeing, exchanging, cultivating, and hence, decomposing were being set in motion—what the farmers i met refer to as selva or agricultura amázonica (amazonian agriculture). while selva is often translated into english as “jungle”—a word imbued with a complex colonial history and civilizatory connotations—i continue to use the spanish word selva throughout this article, because i learned from farmers to treat selva as a concept, analytic, and relation, rather than as an entity that can easily be divided into units or reduced to a representational landscape descriptor. furthermore, these farmers explained that the word forest does not necessarily convey biodiversity, since it may refer to a monocrop or arrangements of commercial timber. indeed, my research questions and political commitments were deeply impacted by this pulsating farm, la hojarasca, and i set out to explore the contrasting logics of life and death, the kinds of possibilities and foreclosures for both living and dying, in a tropical forest ecology under military duress. what i learned was that rather than on productivity—one of the central elements of modern capitalist growth—the regenerative potential of these ecologies relies on organic decay, impermanence, decomposition, and even a robust fragility that complicates modernist bifurcations of living and dying. this allows, i argue, for ecological imaginaries and life processes that do not depend on productivity or growth to strive into existence. peace through poison “the general did not mince words. he said it like this: ‘the only solution is to arm yourself, leave, die, or figure something out.’” —small farmer, piñuña blanco, putumayo, august 2013 at times i heard farmers in putumayo speculate that not only herbicides but also biological weapons had been released in covert experiments to attack coca crops. they described swarms of black butterflies descending on fields, and a pathogenic fungus—fusarium oxysporum—infecting forest floors.4 however, the butterflies’ larval offspring seemed to munch on just about anything besides coca leaves, and suspiciously mirrored the way spray-drift from aerial fumigation most often kills staple foods, pasture grass, forest canopy, and even usaid alternative development crops rather than targeted illicit plants. furthermore, alternative development programs have tended to follow the same market logic of commercial coca, largely failing to substitute illicit export-oriented crops with legal market-oriented varieties, such as pepper, coffee, vanilla, heart of palm, and cacao.5 i clearly remember the day i accompanied a farmer as she pointed to a row of dying cacao plants that were part of a usaid crop substitution pact that local communities had signed, and that had been fumigated two weeks earlier. “there is no way to say this,” the woman told me. we stood for a long while in her field in silence. a group of indignant neighbors gathered near the front of the house displaying deformed plantains, wilted husks, and more cacao and pepper leaves riddled with holes and spots. others expressed growing uncertainties about the protracted life span of chemical agents in human bodies, soils, and watersheds. antidrug policy “está acabando con la vida [is finishing off life],” they said. toxicity seemed likely. one waited to be deprived of the resources that allow living beings to thrive—at any moment the sting of a droplet, a dampened leaf, inhibited enzyme, and the end to synthesis—a strangling of life from the inside out. it was not lost on this woman or any of her neighbors that their life staple had been excised so that life elsewhere, and in the wounded soil itself, could claim to be protected and flourish. cocaleros (coca growers) have argued since the first massive coca growers’ protests in southwestern colombia in 1996 that repressive antidrug policy produces a cocriminalization of “natures” and “subjects”—plants and people (ramírez 2001). a criminalized nature is no longer the object of conservation or protection, and is perceived to be in cahoots with a criminal subject rendered ineligible for humanitarian aid even when public policies turn people into internally displaced populations and refugees. on the one hand, the colombian government has been willing to aerially fumigate its national parks and the biodiverse amazon basin. on the other, law 30, passed in 1986, criminalizes the cultivation of marijuana, coca, and opium poppies in excess of twenty plants. this places small growers, who account for around 70 percent of coca cultivation (unodc 2005), and large-scale traffickers in the same legal category by ignoring the structural forces that lead individuals and families to settle in rural frontier zones and resort to illicit livelihoods in the first place. it is a liberal way of making and justifying the ongoing nature of war that wraps various kinds of killing within an imaginary of safeguarding and life-making narratives. killing is posed within a “future perfect” tense (povinelli 2011a, 167) as a necessary redemptive mode of birth that will bring new beings and domains of social life—in this case, the geopolitical intervention of liberal moralities, such as rule of law, culture of legality, public health, and licit capitalist-based economies—into existence. the capacity to make live rests on the necessity to make die, rendered evident in the dual meanings of the colombian spanish word arrancar (as in arrancar la coca). arrancar means to start something—an engine, for example—and also to uproot or rip out, a violent cleansing or weeding out that pries open the space for regrowth. a 2009 volvamos a la vida (back to life) campaign organized by usaid in putumayo posed what one government official called “reflective questions about the social drawbacks of cultivating illicit crops.” postcards distributed during the campaign starkly contrasted black-and-white images with images in color. they read: “live or die? smile or cry? what kind of life are we sowing?” and pose a moral choice between pepper harvests or handcuffs, saxophones or headstones, goalie kicks or toes tagged in a morgue. la mata que mata (the plant that kills, according to stigmatizing state campaigns) must be purged from soils and souls. a disavowal of criminal mentalities—crime blamed on a primitive form of individual propensity—becomes necessary for cocaleros’ resuscitation not only back into the nation’s productive citizenry but also back to what state and usaid officials sanction as a better and more dignified life than the social and literal death supposedly produced by an illicit livelihood. figure 2. usaid postcard distributed during the 2009 volvamos a la vida campaign. at first glance, it seems possible to situate the chemical warfare and overall eradication component of antidrug policy within other biopolitical histories and formations of killing: in this case, one in which a future peace is actively pursued through present acts of poisoning.6 however, at stake at the heart of antidrug policy is not only the taking of the biological life of a plant or the severing of illicit human-plant relations in the defense of security, territory, and population in the context of international pressures to wage a war against narcotic drugs. rather, it is the increasingly evident association between eradication efforts and the expansion of a national development model euphemistically referred to as a locomotora minero-energética, which i roughly translate as “mining-energy locomotive” (departamento nacional de planeación 2010). in 2011, more than half of putumayo, along with several neighboring regions, was reclassified from amazonian territory to special mining district, accelerating oil production from 8,000 barrels a day in 2000 to 48,000 in 2013 (calle 2014). the biodiverse ecosystems of the andean-amazonian foothills have never been conceived of as anything other than a commodity frontier, beginning in the nineteenth century with the voracious extraction of quinine, rubber, and timber, and followed in the twentieth century by intensified oil exploitation and the boom-and-bust waves of monoculture coca (aguilar 1999; taussig 1984). these extractive activities violently dispossessed native indigenous populations and propelled the modern colonization of the region, as well as the sporadic extension of the nation’s agricultural frontier. waves of small farmers, urban dwellers, and indigenous peoples not originary to the western amazon were driven to occupy the territory due to land concentration in the country’s andean interior, increasing urban poverty and ongoing political violence since the 1940s (ariza, ramírez, and vega 1998).7 the prevailing analysis among rural communities living in coca-growing regions is that antidrug policy has allowed for an intensified and qualitatively different mode of transnational capitalist expansion, linking the role of foreign direct investment in war through the securitization of development. antidrug policy has become a pretext not only to wage a war against the people (guerra contra los pueblos) (paley 2014) but also to wage a war against life (guerra contra la vida). or, similarly, a war waged in defense of growth at the expense of all forms of life. in the process, a variety of social values become reduced to one exchange value, and a diversity of ecologies, ethics, and practices said to produce death in life (that is, illicit coca cultivation), or that cannot be assimilated to or openly resist growth-oriented and extractive-based priorities, are actively dismissed or rendered impossible. indeed, rural communities in putumayo perceive militarized aerial fumigation as yet another violent attempt to weaken their will: one mode of destroying the material base and food crops of local sustenance, starving them out in an effort to force the abandonment of territory that facilitates industrial oil and mining concessions. moreover, colombia’s law 160, passed in 1997, prohibits the titling of land within a five-kilometer radius of oil or mining exploitation. small farmers argue that this law contributes to the ongoing concentration of land and the precarity of property titles in a country that has never undergone a lasting history of agrarian reform.8 it is life, and not only human rights or land rights, that has come to the fore in rural struggles against extractivism, gmo seeds, biofuels, and other forms of industrialized agriculture, large-scale infrastructural projects, free-trade agreements, and all sorts of neoliberal reforms privatizing public goods and services and fomenting transnational capitalist growth throughout the hemisphere. of course, development has always signaled more than just material progress and economic growth indicators: it has marked a historically specific model of judgment and control over life itself. although modern capitalist principles such as growth, progress, better living, and their correlate—more development—have been thoroughly repudiated in theoretical debates emerging in the global south since the mid-twentieth century, these principles remain politically and economically dominant (escobar 2011, 2014). a new set of struggles over the definitions of and relations between nature and resources has become one of the most salient features of contemporary latin american political dynamics in both overtly neoliberal regimes and in self-declared post-neoliberal ones. economic convergence around a growth-oriented development model—mostly a wave of neoextractivism—can be witnessed across ideologically opposed progressive leftist and conservative governments (gudynas 2014; veltmeyer and petras 2014; bebbington and bury 2013). it becomes crucial, therefore, to ask: what kinds of radical politics or structural transformations can exist if socioenvironmental justice and sociopolitical inclusion tend to be fueled through the same modern, capitalist-based model of extraction? indeed, what relations to life and death, place and territory will be potentiated and which others will continue to be criminalized, rendered obsolete, or sacrificed in the name of national growth and social(ist) good? these questions lie at the heart of colombia’s ongoing national peace process between farc-ep guerrillas and the state as the country continues to debate its socioeconomic-environmental future, including the terms of a democratic reformulation of antidrug policy and integral agrarian reform in a possible post-conflict scenario of transitional justice.9 the cultivation of counterlife and death rather than ask what it means for rural communities to live in coca-growing regions that have been epicenters of colombia’s violence, i follow the practices that make life possible in a criminalized and poisoned ecology. how do people keep on cultivating a garden, caring for forest, or growing food when at any moment a crop-duster plane may pass overhead, dousing entire landscapes with herbicides? beyond official policy imperatives to “uproot (coca) or be uprooted”—extract or be extracted from—what other potentialities and limits emerge among communities that are responding to war by cultivating life, which is not altogether separate from death? i came to these research questions from a shared conceptual ground built through my long-term relationships with a dispersed network of farmers whom i first met at la hojarasca. these farmers did not tell me stories of social suffering and abandonment or the endurance against all odds of precarious life (nouvet 2014; allison 2013; das 2006; biehl 2005). nor did they dwell on modern life rendered meaningful only by denouncing its finitude, and thus animating biopolitical logics that aim to optimize, regulate, and police all sorts of transgressors against proper human ways of living and dying (stevenson 2014; zeiderman 2013). instead, they obliged me to depart from a biopolitical register that distinguishes between life and death, and between human life and the well-being of other entities to make an ethico-analytical move and pay careful attention to processes of human and nonhuman material composition and decomposition. the farmers did not describe a romantic relationship with the selva, but rather what and how they were learning from the recycling nature of hojarasca—rot, decay, and regeneration—which emerges along with the cultivation of experimental practices on farms and forests in the midst of war. the agrarian-based material practices and corresponding life philosophies they shared open up ways of thinking about the different kinds of political, economic, and ecological relationalities that emerge when life and death are no longer (or never could be) experienced as oppositional categories or morally dictated ultimates. my work is influenced by scholarship at the interface of anthropology and feminist science studies that critically bypasses a modern nature/culture divide and a cascade of associated distinctions (such as objects/subjects, bio/geo, and organic/inorganic) to arrive at processual understandings of life that necessarily reconceive our notions of the human, and consequently of politics and ethics (tsing 2011; de la cadena 2010; stengers 2010; haraway 2008; mol 2008; barad 2007; verran 2002). however, rather than concentrate on realized things or achieved political events, which has been the focus of much of the twentieth century’s and, especially, the international left’s political thinking, i build on scholarship that emphasizes everyday transformations in the ways people produce, reproduce, consume, and hence compost their material worlds (puig de la bellacasa 2013; papadopoulos, stephenson, and tsianos 2008; gibson-graham 2006). in particular, i focus on what these processes of decomposition and renewal may tell us about the everyday practices through which not only people but entire ecologies—trees, soils, plants, seeds, insects, chickens, microbes, and farmers—strive to collectively change the conditions of their lives. they do so not by transcending these conditions, but rather by sinking into them, slowly turning them over, aerating, and breathing in new life that also potentiates different possibilities for and relations to death. i draw on elizabeth povinelli’s (2011a, 2011b, 2011c; povinelli and berlant 2014) and kathleen stewart’s (2007) discussions of potentiality to open up ways of thinking about how alternative life processes—always at risk of disappearing and with no guarantees—come to shake loose, to whatever degree possible, from dominant definitions to set something else in motion. not in the sense of denouncing the world in the name of an ideal world, or in the rush to push aside one set of object and subject positionalities to replace it with another, but rather in the ways that bodies, dreams, and socioecological relations of all kinds strive to pick up density and texture without necessarily being rooted in fixed conditions of possibility. i depart from povinelli’s work in that i am interested not only in potentiality but also in the actualizations germinating in the very thickness of the present. the creative emergences and actual work occurring in the present when cultivating different conditions for life and death also constitute a contestatory act motivated by what farmers in putumayo describe as “propositional rage” (mesa regional de organizaciones sociales 2015). propositional rage not only opposes or denounces current social conditions but also works to cultivate alternatives to the asymmetric forces that make certain ecologies thrive at the expense of forcing others to endure. it was a dispersed group of farmers in putumayo, including my closest farmer friend and intellectual colleague, heraldo vallejo, who rejected commercial coca since its arrival in the region in 1977, even though they respect coca leaves as medicine, sustenance, spiritual substance, and a constitutive element of local biodiversity. these farmers argue that both monoculture coca and its official alternatives force not only people, but all the life forms with whom they live and labor, into dependent relations with market-based goods, modes of exchange, and values. they critique this singular economic logic, in part, because it treats commodity exchange as a founding principle of agrosociality, assuming that small farmers are simply poor farmers lacking the proper technology, financial capital, alliances, and work ethic to become full-blown agroindustrial farmers. this kind of economic model dismisses small farming as an obsolete livelihood of the past. it has also turned putumayo into a laboratory for public policies gone awry by denying the cultural particularities of small farming families and economies, as well as the ecological conditions of a particular amazonian territory. heraldo is an animal husbandry technician, and one of two students from his rural elementary school who finished high school and went on to study at the closest university in the neighboring andean state of nariño. following graduation and imprisonment as a leftist student leader, he returned to putumayo to, as he says, “unlearn” the dominant teachings of agricultural science. he uses the term agricultura de la muerte (agriculture of death) to refer to the extractive-based practices that result when farmers begin to perceive themselves as external to, rather than conforming relations within andean-amazonian ecologies. concretely, agriculture of death refers to the use of chemical inputs, patented and transgenic seeds, monoculture and export-oriented crops, land-titling premised on deforestation, a singular notion of the market, and neoliberal reforms implemented during the past two decades—all of which strangle and attempt to render obsolete diverse small-farming practices and economies.10 for two years, i spent at least part of every day accompanying heraldo and other farmers as they worked on their farms to turn them into collective spaces of aprendizaje e intercambio (learning and exchange). they conceive of their farms as spaces of learning rather than knowing, and contrasted them with the model farms that form part of conventional state agricultural extension. rather than teach standardized technical models intended to be replicated from one farm to the next, these farmers strive to multiply biodiversity across farms by engaging in the production of what heraldo calls conocimiento vivo (live or living knowledge). living knowledge results from ongoing experimental processes in gardens, orchards, and forests precisely because seeds, soils, plants, and trees become entities through recursive relationalities that are always in the making, awaiting their next realization based on different socioecological conditions, human aptitudes, and imaginaries. given the historic lack of agroecologically appropriate state-based technical assistance, the decades of breached political agreements on the part of the national government after previous civilian protests and mobilizations, and the ways both monocrop coca and repressive antidrug policy have largely eliminated local food production, these farmers have come to provide an informal regional network of alternative agricultural technical assistance. thus i also joined them when they worked in solidarity with small-farming associations, unions, and indigenous communities interested in gradually transitioning from commercial coca, usaid development models, and other unsustainable agricultural systems to what they refer to as selva or amazonian practices. this included attending popular education workshops with the regional working group of social organizations of putumayo, baja bota caucana, and cofanía, jardines de sucumbíos nariño; inga and nasa indigenous reservations; guardians of seeds networks; and rural communities that form part of the environmental clinic in neighboring sucumbíos, ecuador.11 my fieldwork also led me to collaborate with the regional working group of social organizations in the design of an andean-amazonian integral development plan (pladia). this plan aspires to provide a community-designed alternative to official rural development paradigms, and to address the structural conditions that lead to illicit coca production and the displacement and impoverishment of rural families in the region.12 the mere existence of these selva practices in gardens, orchards, and forests brings something into being. they express the capacious potential for life to strive to resist the polarizing and irreconcilable terms of life and death embedded in public policy. however, amazonian or selva agricultural practices are not yet widespread beyond a dispersed network of small farming families. alternative agricultural proposals form part of an ongoing twenty-year political struggle between the state and regional social movements as the latter oppose antidrug policy and extractive economic development, and reimagine how to build a different political, economic, and socioenvironmental future for the territory. the amazonian-based agricultural practices i witnessed are a central component in the design of what pladia calls a transition to fincas agroproductivas sostenibles (sustainable agroproductive farms). inspired by what i came to think of as pulsations of cosustainability—these dispersed selva practices striving to resonate and multiply across the andean-amazonian foothills outside existing modes of agrarian regulation—i now focus on one family that forms part of this alternative agricultural network. what most compelled me is their everyday cultivated partnership with soils, and in particular, how this partnership enabled a sundry of organisms and elements, including humans, to resist violent modes of death by becoming into death rather than working against it in the pursuit of a better life. by becoming into death, i refer to a mode of dying that is an aspect of the transformation of being, an emerging into many other living and dying things much like the regenerative decay of hojarasca or decomposing leaves. this kind of death results from the recycling of selva life rather than the violence of war, or, what is the same, killing in the defense of growth. *** the story of the family’s forced return to mocoa pivoted on a negotiated displacement between don nelso and members of the auc who forcibly occupied the subregion known as bajo putumayo in 1998, where the majority of coca in putumayo is still grown. the paramilitaries explained that they had no real reason to chase nelso out of town, as they had been watching him for months and found no evidence that he was collaborating with farc guerrillas. however, other people wanted him gone, and these families made use of a generalized context of violent displacement to wage personal vendettas.13nelso had acquired enemies as a community leader encouraging cocaleros to stop cultivating the crop before the state’s threat of aerial fumigation honed in on the region. this was 2001, and visible seesaw trajectories between town and country drew immediate suspicion due to the strict territorial divide imposed by the farc and the paramilitaries as they vied for control over land, local populations, coca production, and the cocaine trade. the death threat that paramilitaries nailed to nelso’s front door read: “we will mow you down while you walk home!” paramilitary violence was most gruesome in the dismembering of bodies and the public throwing of corpses into nearby rivers, a kind of ultimate deterritorialization of bodies from soils and souls. it was a quick decision. nelso and his wife, maría elva, packed up a few belongings and headed north with their five children until they reached putumayo’s capital town of mocoa. what followed was a year, as they described it, of quedándonos quietos (lying low; staying still), a forced retreat from public life and the exposure inherent in too many social relations. they were lucky enough to receive a government housing subsidy for displaced families, but when the first opportunity arose, they traded the one-room apartment for half a hectare of land on the outskirts of mocoa. the family has not yet been able to formalize the land title, and a handwritten note continues to serve as a deed. “we were getting sick living in a matchbox,” elva tells me. she is bent over a cafeteria tray full of seeds, varieties of beans we inspect for tiny holes, a literal worming-in of uninvited mouths. these are “beans for eating, not for commercial purposes,” nelso explains, but of course, not all mouths are the same, nor are they fed equally. these are beans to feed other beans, beans to feed microorganisms and cloak naked soils, to gift and trade; they are also for the family’s lunch and dinner. red, black, speckled, gray, maroon, shades of café and mustard. not only seeds, then, but mouths as well. one by one these seed-mouths are turned over in the palms of hands and stored again, a laborious practice to cleanse rather than submerge them in chemical insecticides. figure 3. thirty varieties of beans grown in nelso and elva’s garden. photo by kristina lyons. glancing over at their neighbor’s plot, i begin to envision what the area looked like more than ten years ago when they first arrived. a stretch of rust-colored earth, compacted by hooves, burned out by herbicides, open faced and exhausted. “seemingly left for dead,” says nelso, referring to a state of being which, as i explain later, can be conceived as refusal—a state of imperceptible playing-dead through which regenerative transformation may be achieved. in the case of their neighbors, like so many farmers following the green revolution technical advice of agronomists advocating for the use of chemical inputs—and to whom nelso refers as ladrónomos (or “thiefgronomists”)—the natural limitations of amazonian soils have to be continuously struggled against and corrected.14 nelso’s punning neologism for the agronomists speaks to the softer kinds of violence exerted through dominant technoscientific paradigms, and to how small farmers find their knowledges, ethics, and practices under the gun of capitalist productive imperatives. to combat the so-called poverty of the soils—their thinness, acidity, old age, and mineral deficiency—nelso describes the conventionally prescribed technical treatment plan: drips of urea and triple 15, a chemical pump strapped to the back of a farmer, the hissing sound it makes close to an ear like an old man’s raspy breath. an entire life-support system is assembled not only to resuscitate the soil but also to force its betterment. it is treated not as a natural body with corporeal finitude, but rather as artificial strata whose mortality is not only cast as a weakness to be overcome but is all but denied. in stark contrast to this kind of optimization of the soil’s regenerative capacities, doña elva spoke about “creating conditions.” these conditions do not forcibly supersede corporeal vulnerability to resuscitate soils, but allow for the kind of withdrawal that the family sees its own lives cyclically retreating into and slowly emerging back from: underemployment, displacement, landlessness, lying low, and the ongoingness of recovery. they were not in the business of imposing conditions to make productive soils or—in a broader sense—productive lives emerge. rather, each day nelso and elva bring together seeds, manure, eggshells, husks, and vegetable and fruit skins to create conditions for their intermingling in anticipation of what might emerge. an example is the way decomposing bodies and elements—litter layer, ash, rinds, rootlet, manure, human urine, sugarcane mash—come to mutually constitute each other as they transform into hojarasca, which holds their traces while also constituting something new. nelso and elva began by collecting the cans, tires, and plastic bags left behind by previous residents. they discussed which plants would be their allies in interrupting the life cycles of the domineering pasture grasses that flourish in open sunlight. they planted sunflowers, low-growing kisses, yams, beans, cowitch, cudzú shrubs, and wild clover: food and protective covering for others, mostly microbes that would nurture plant rootlets that would eventually come to shade soil. then they waited, thinking, searching for building materials to “create conditions” for the house itself. in this way their shared lives—soils, farmers, plants, worms, microbes—emerged out of a retreat as necessary as it was imposed. many neighbors and agricultural extension experts looked on in bewilderment as they watched them sow what appeared to be roadside weeds. “los locos viviendo en medio del rastrojo,” they said—crazy people living in the midst of animal fodder, or the selva that returns when left unattended, and that most farmers clear in the act of occupying and working the land. figure 4. living in the midst of “animal fodder.” photo by kristina lyons. only after knotty bundles of diverse roots and organisms had, as elva explained, “created a climate” was it acceptable for human hands to loosen up and turn the insides of soils out, allowing for the aeration that invites life and death—digestion, defecation, and decomposition—to proliferate. later on they began to plant human food crops, most of which were noncommercial (or at least nontraditionally commercial) perennial varieties that do not require replanting after each harvest, purchased seeds, chemical inputs, or daily upkeep: for example, amazonian wheat, medicinal plants, star nut, plantains, tubers, fruits, and greens for the hens, ducks, rabbits, and guinea pigs that provide manure for the farm (and that are also easily stolen by petty thieves). nelso and elva’s children did not show initial interest in farming, and instead took minimum-wage jobs in town to support their own growing nuclear families. however, they continued to share the same house and eat from the gardens. over time, they watched the farm convert into a dynamic space frequented by other farmers interested in trading seeds, produce, and recipes, and also town folks who came to buy fruits, vegetables, and medicinal plants unavailable at commercial markets in mocoa. elva now specializes in preparing more than three hundred amazonian recipes that she shares with other women, especially those of mocoa’s network of displaced rural families who have lost their land, their food security, and their food autonomy. dying decompositionally: creating conditions and living en medio del rastrojo the different waves of structural and armed violence in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries that expelled families from the country’s fertile andean regions into frontier territories impacted by extractive economies, “poor” soils, and armed conflict necessarily transformed biopolitically informed attachments to life. for example, nelso and elva seek to create conditions to combat displacement in a context of ongoing uncertainty by working toward a future they may never see. they partake in material practices in the present that are overly inhabited by a future territory that does not yet exist, but that strives to materialize its collective affordances and capacities (for example, in grassroots struggles to fund pladia and transform the state’s rural development model, and in everyday practices through which people attempt to figure something out without abandoning their farms). at the same time, a past territory can never be fully eradicated because it remains present in different modes of cultivating, and in the recovery of recipes, medicines, and seeds. in this way, the cultivation of a farm or garden strives to farm itself as a community of future human and nonhuman cultivators.15 the network of farmers i accompanied engages in a recursive balance between creative innovation and the recovery of diverse popular, traditional, and ancestral practices. for example, they combine popular processes to low-tech their farms with elements from specific sciences they consider subversive, such as agroecology and soil microbiology, without granting science a unique authority over indigenous and popular knowledges and experimental practices. there is no singular story to tell about how these farmers come to engage in selva practices. they read agroecology pamphlets and remember practices their grandparents and indigenous neighbors performed. they exchange experiences and seeds with other small-farming families. they take long walks in the forest to study plants and trees. some have read marx. others explain that they are “apprentices of the selva” and have learned to cultivate ojos para ella (eyes for her [la selva]) (lyons 2014). farmers engaged in these selva life processes are becoming what heraldo calls “amazonian men and women” (vallejo 1993). i argue this is less an environmental subjectivity than an ongoing relationality: learning to cultivate new modes of eating, walking, seeing, tasting, exchanging, growing, and inhabiting the andean-amazonian foothills that do not rely on the idea of a human who is somehow separate from and master over a selvatic nature. heraldo contrasts amazonian men and women with líderes sociales (social leaders) who constitute a newly organized generation of activists leading protests, denouncing human rights violations, and negotiating with government officials to demand the recognition of rural communities as legitimate political interlocutors. if they have time to carry on farming, many of these social leaders continue to be cocaleros, or have replaced coca with other monocrops such as pineapple, which has the ability to resist the acidity left behind by intensive coca production in naturally acidic soils. while they stand in solidarity with these social leaders and the ideological struggles they represent and provide regional social organizations with the kind of alternative technical assistance i have mentioned, amazonian men and women do not necessarily have the time or disposition to attend every protest, sit through bureaucratic meetings, or negotiate with elected officials.16 their lives are deeply enmeshed with, and hence mutually obliged by, other beings and elements that share life and labor among gardens, orchards, and forests. the ecological temporalities of these kinds of relations are largely imperceptible within the official time of politics, such as government reports on competitive agricultural yields, the four-year development plans that accompany elected officials or news reports on popular uprisings. after being violently dispossessed of five farms during the past twenty-five years, heraldo now lives fifteen minutes down the road from nelso and elva. when we received news that his neighbor was gunned down at dawn, he explained to me: “i can die, but the farms will remain.” he was not referring to the desire to demarcate private property inhabited by a self-interested household, deforested fields, and ordered rows of commercial crops. these kinds of farms that fall in line with conventional state-based forms of property acquisition can easily slip away, working against the continuation of rural life in the territory. instead, he referred to cultivating conditions for life by “recolonizing the farm with selva.” this recolonization of farms with forest materially and conceptually disrupts notions of private property. farms are never only farms when they are also always regional watersheds, foothills, forests, biological corridors, and floodplains. it is farms as more than farms that multiplies what i have referred to as pulsations of cosustainability: the different birds and bees attracted to creeping plant gardens, the reawakening of microbial worlds as communities of plants return, the multiplication of diverse selva practices resonating throughout a territory in community seed banks, the bartering of food, the stimulation of small-farmer markets, the recovery of food autonomy, the multiplication of happiness one farm at a time, and the creation of conditions for the recycling of hojarasca itself. this layer of fallen and dying leaves eventually undergoes natural processes of decomposition, and when incorporated back into the germination of the earth, it is always already regenerative of selva life. in an attempt to reflect carefully on the contingent potentiality of this kind of germinating withdrawal or decompositional mode of retreat, i take inspiration from discussions in feminist and disability studies (davis 2013; harrison 2008; diprose 2002) on corporeal vulnerability, and such phenomena as susceptibility, indolence, and fatigue. rather than conceive of these states as degraded ways of being in the world that must be set right or transcended by benevolent action, we can think of fatigue as an occurrence whose reality is made up of refusal or hesitancy. one of the most poignant lessons nelso, elva, heraldo, and other farmers shared with me is that the region’s soils—and by soils they were never referring to a stable entity, but to continuous relations of composure and decomposing that in fleeting, massifying moments produces a natural body scientists call “soil”—could never be colonized, but only destroyed. amazonian soils could not be tamed by human-led productive fantasies, but they could be used up and abandoned. furthermore, through this seeming destruction a vocation to live might resist violent modes of death by becoming into it, which is not necessarily death or dying, but a melding back into a transformative fatigue. according to nelso, what many agronomists and farmers describe as the “limiting fragility” of amazonian soils is actually a mode of resistance that might allow—indeed oblige—farmers to slow down as well. it is not soils’ intentional refusal in the same way that they express their own growing recalcitrance before the commodified notion of life underpinning growth-oriented economic imperatives. rather, it may be an expression of a capacity for weariness and recoil from the impossibility of existing under the relentless strain of extractive conditions that exceed the soil’s abilities to absorb, repose, and transform. thus what appears dead is not; rather, for nelso, this transformational period marks the soil’s imperceptible and regenerative unworking and reworking. the reworking evades not only its own exploitation but also a continuum of exploitation linking farmers, microbes, plants, seeds, soils, and trees. not simply a mechanical cause-and-effect interaction or biological breakdown, but the sheer physical force of fragility, the feeding loop of activity and withdrawal characterizing an ecological relationality. relatedly, heraldo and nelso argue that when technicians and bureaucrats claim that one cannot sustain a productive agricultural livelihood in the amazon, they are really suggesting that one cannot sustain a colonizing, extractive, and neoliberal agricultural livelihood. in this article, i have not tried to tell a triumphant tale of small-scale agroecological farming as an improved agricultural model that should be singularly adopted throughout colombia’s western amazon. nor do i want to argue that technical decisions over crop choice and livelihood are always or simply a political choice. rather, i have highlighted the built-in expectation of vulnerability present in an ecological sense of being in the world: farmers’ necessary acceptance of decay, looping back to begin again, a cautionary lying low and a decompositional mode of regeneration. they remind us that transformative potentiality is not a human privilege, but rather a relational matter dispersed in the connections and labor among people as well as other kinds of beings and things. they urge us to take seriously the ways different human and nonhuman relations afford differential political and economic capacities. at stake in these farmers’ struggle is not the right to idleness, but the right to another kind of work, another kind of dream, and a world that does not run only on the inevitable and structurally designed market-based time and velocity. what may be most inspiring is how their selva practices slow down the power of dominant reasoning: for example, planting “weeds,” living “in the midst of animal fodder,” preferring not to correct or resuscitate “poor soils,” and rejecting the salvation offered by the eradication of illicit crops. much as the feminist philosopher of science isabelle stengers (2005) does, their practices demand that we slow down the power of reasoning imbued in our own concepts to create a space for hesitation. this hesitation obliges us to ask what we claim to know when we say that we are constructing a good or common world, and how this knowledge comes to justify war while rendering unimaginable other kinds of political thought and action. in the andean-amazonian foothills of colombia a growing number of rural communities argue that there is something more important at stake than uprooting illicit crops or biopolitically improving the productive capacities of soils and souls, something more vital than producing enough exportable commodities to feed a far-off world whose moral standing is protected by continued assaults against the worlds that these farmers strive to build. they suggest that the wrong kinds of questions are being asked. perhaps it is not a question of becoming better—more productive farmers, more legal and more responsible citizens, or more efficient capitalists. it is necessary to slow down and ask what kinds of questions emerge from an ecologically relational world that not only obliges different strategies for how to keep on enduring in the face of a war machine that proposes peace through poison, but that is also striving to cultivate a different socioecological, economic, and political reality. these struggles in southern colombia articulate with larger contemporary political processes in the global north and south, including antiextractivism, anticapitalism, degrowth, and—throughout the andes—heterogeneous practices of buen vivir (living well) that reject human-centered notions of growth and productivity tied to a universal vivir mejor (living better) (d’alisa, demaria, and kallis 2015; gudynas and acosta 2011). living well is, of course, never separate from the question of the right to die well—of the right to modes of dying in which death is allowed to decompose into life, rather than being violently ripped from place, territory, soil, selva, and home. this is a death that decomposes into life, just as leaves spill from branch to ground, turn over and slowly rot to germinate from a pulsating layer of hojarasca again. notes acknowledgments this article would not have been possible without the ongoing friendship of heraldo vallejo, nelso enríquez, maría elva montenegro, and members of the mesa regional de organizaciones sociales del putumayo, baja bota caucana y cofanía, jardines de sucumbíos, nariño, among innumerable others in colombia with whom i have learned to think and live. i am also very grateful for the careful readings that versions of this article received from marisol de la cadena, andrew mathews, tanya richardson, jake culbertson, morten pedersen, brent crosson, and iván vargas, as well as three anonymous readers. i received invaluable feedback from audiences at the ethnographic engagements workshop at the university of california, santa cruz, the feminist studies department at the university of california, santa cruz, the center for studies on political ecology in bogotá, and the biennial meeting of the society for cultural anthropology—in particular, from karen barad, donna haraway, mark anderson, don brenneis, judith farquhar, diana ojeda, and diana bocarejo. my research was funded by the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, and the university of california pacific rim research program. 1. with roots in the 1980s, the auc grew to about twenty thousand members, and was heavily financed through the drug trade, local landowners, cattle ranchers, mining and oil companies, agroindustry, and colombia’s traditional political class. 2. glyphosate, which monsanto packages as roundup ultra, has been used to spray illicit crops in colombia since 1986. the quantity of glyphosate used in fumigation operations was estimated to be 110% more concentrated than the commercially available version. glyphosate was mixed with polyethoxylated tallow amine (poea) and an additional surfactant, cosmo flux 411f, to make the herbicide stick to plants in humid tropical climates (vargas meza 1999). 3. the antinarcotics directorate of the national police provided these official statistics on august 18, 2015. 4. between 2000 and 2002, controversial debates over whether to introduce biological agents into coca eradication strategies resurfaced in the u.s. congress, the european parliament, and the colombian ministry of the environment. while the u.s. government affirmed that it would only support biological eradication research in colombia through a multilateral mechanism, rural communities claim that covert experiments have occurred. 5. in interviews, usaid employees explained more than a decade and $80 million of failed development projects in putumayo in terms of an “unfortunate, but instructive learning curve.” the cost of production in remote areas was much higher than anticipated; market studies were not conducted to ensure a niche for newly introduced agroindustrial products; offering aid only to coca-growing families stimulated the planting of coca and failed to help individuals who did not grow coca, but were employed within its broader commodity chain; market-oriented crops were plagued by problems of “quality control” (that is, rampant fungus and tropical pests). 6. in “society must be defended,” michel foucault (2003) outlined the complex entanglements of the sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical forms of power at play in the machinery of nazi genocide. achille mbembe (2003) then situated this industrialized european savagery within a history of african colonization, where colonists experimented with the spectacular display of irrational and excessive killing. 7. there are nine indigenous peoples that currently inhabit putumayo, five of which are original to the territory. margarita chaves (2005) elucidates the everyday interactions, shifting identifications, and political alliances between indigenous communities and small farmers in putumayo, despite classic representations of their supposed isolation and conflicting forms of conviviality. 8. colombia is currently the second-most unequal country in the world. despite its reputation as one of latin america’s most stable democracies, the state has never experienced a period of full labor incorporation, widespread land reform, or a true populist phase. its democracy has traditionally been described as restrictive, elite, and violent (carroll 2011). 9. since october 2012, the farc-ep and the colombian government have been engaged in what is now the country’s fourth national peace process. colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the national liberal army, has expressed interest in entering into a similar negotiation process. 10. constitutional reforms since 2004 have steadily declared a variety of food production, commercialization, and seed-propagating practices used by small farmers to be illegal. for more information, see www.semillas.org.co. 11. the regional working group of social organizations is an umbrella network of rural social organizations that has inherited a history of political protest and organizational work on the part of rural laborers and farmers, workers in the oil industry, civic organizations, indigenous and afro-colombian communities, and youth and women’s organizations dating back to the 1970s. some 80 percent of organizations that belong to the regional working group are campesina. the environmental clinic is an initiative supported by the quito-based ngo acción ecológica. 12. after the marchas cocaleras, right-wing paramilitary organizations occupied the majority of towns in putumayo and persecuted community leaders. this forced the majority of rural social movements to suspend their organizational activities for almost a decade between 1996 and 2006. pladia is the current version of the community-based development plan that was proposed during strike negotiations in 1996. despite verbal and written accords, the implementation of pladia has yet to be funded at the municipal, state, or national level. 13. for more on the relationship between government forces and paramilitaries, the role of farc-ep with respect to the profitability of drug trafficking, and local results of the demobilization of the auc, see jansson 2008. 14. the dominant scientific representation of amazonian soils is that they are “senile” (león 1999). that is, they are inhospitable to conventional market-driven agriculture without heavy corrective measures, such as lime, fertilizer, and other chemical inputs. for insight into soil scientists’ stakes in these debates and their growing dissatisfaction with the modern soil classification systems they institutionalized in colombia in the 1970s, see lyons 2014. 15. i am indebted to alberto corsín jiménez’s (2013) discussion of the urban cultivation table produced in handmade urbanism workshops in madrid, as a means of imagining how a city or territory may jump ahead of itself. 16. the regional working group of social organizations has come to reject what winifred tate (2013) calls “proxy citizenship” by distancing itself from ngos that interfere with their ability to make direct claims for redress from the state. references aguilar, j.c. 1999 evangélico y colonización: una aproximación a la historia del putumayo desde la época prehispánica a la colonización 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beside itself: imagining care in the canadian arctic. berkeley: university of california press. stewart, kathleen 2007 ordinary affects. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tate, winifred 2013 “proxy citizenship and transnational advocacy: colombian activists from putumayo to washington, dc.” american ethnologist 40, no. 1: 55–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/amet.12005. taussig, michael 1984 shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study in terror and healing. chicago: university of chicago press. tsing, anna 2011 “arts of inclusion, or, how to love a mushroom.” australian humanities review, no. 50. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-may-2011/tsing.html. united nations office on drugs and crime (unodc) 2005 “colombia: coca cultivation survey for 2004.” https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crop-monitoring/?tag=colombia. 2015 “colombia: monitoreo de cultivos de coca 2014.” https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crop-monitoring/?tag=colombia. vallejo, heraldo 1993 “el nuevo 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george washington university https://http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3347-411x burj al barajneh, a palestinian refugee camp with a population of around eighteen thousand located in the southern suburbs of beirut, is one of fifty-eight officially recognized palestinian camps in the middle east. most of these camps have existed for nearly seventy years, since the massive displacement of palestinians in 1948.1 material changes in camp life over this long period were a recurring subject in my conversations there during field research in 2011 and 2012. concrete shelters have gradually replaced tents, and the buildings have grown vertically over the years. people described increased crowding as the population grew but camp boundaries could not expand. where once there were open spaces to play, people who had spent their childhood in the camp told me, a neighbor was now pressed right up against you. most of the camp passageways are only a few feet wide, far too narrow for a car to traverse, but leaving enough space for a motor scooter. the water is salty; the electricity (as in much of lebanon) is not only unreliable but also often jerry-rigged. another frequent topic in these conversations were people who had died untimely deaths, or who had suffered a calamity that brought them close to dying. aseel told me about a woman who died, young, from a botched tonsillectomy. ismail described a newly widowed woman whose request for financial support from the united nations relief and works agency for palestine refugees in the near east (unrwa) was denied because the agency deemed her house too nice. kamilah recounted how a relative was killed by an electric shock, a persistent threat in the camp. abu ahmed put a portion of the blame for wrongful deaths at the feet of unrwa and its overcrowded, understaffed clinics. in these circumstances, he told me, doctors sometimes became neglectful. he relayed accounts of doctors leaving patients to suffer while they ate their lunch or prescribing the wrong medication. such stories of death and dying also tell the story of life in the camp. chronic poverty contributes to ill health. limits of institutional capacity mean insufficient access to health care. dangerous infrastructure means a constant exposure to risk when traversing camp alleyways. crowded conditions exacerbate all these problems and further degrade people’s capacities to cope. figure 1. camp alleyway. photo by ilana feldman. what do the conversations mentioned above suggest about what it is to live as a refugee over the long term? one thing that it can mean—and in the palestinian case of decades of displacement, what it necessarily has meant for many people—is to die as a refugee. how do humanitarian actors respond to the inevitability of death? ordinary deaths are not easily incorporated into a field of intervention whose primary purpose is to save lives: to stop people from dying from “stupid things” (redfield 2013, 31). this aim helps delimit the activities within the scope of humanitarian concern. humanitarianism is a “regime of life,” in the sense that lisa stevenson (2014, 68) describes, a system “in which keeping people alive has become the primary goal.” practitioners do not, of course, imagine immortality for aid recipients, but their orientation toward life-saving has limited their attention to servicing dying. a second characteristic of most humanitarian work is that it is intended to be short-term: to respond to crisis and conclude when normal conditions reemerge. in the palestinian case, and in many other instances around the globe, this intention cannot be realized. instead, humanitarian work has been compelled to respond to chronic conditions and to confront people’s needs across the whole life cycle. long-term refugee status means that not only life, but also the end of life must become a humanitarian concern. this work exposes an array of limits to humanitarian capacity. of course humanitarian practitioners are concerned about the lives of the elderly, but many see the services that cohort needs as belonging to a different care regime. in addition to such limits of definition, stark constraints exist on humanitarian resources. providing the full spectrum of medical care that many people require in old age lies beyond the financial ability of many humanitarian organizations. these limits generate confrontations with palestinian communities, as people demand more services and raise questions about the rights and values embedded in certain choices. drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in burj al barajneh, this essay explores a variety of interventions that respond to end-of-life concerns. humanitarian attention to the end of life, just like humanitarian attention to other moments of life, takes place within a broad landscape of insufficient care, services, and opportunity. chronic and widespread undercare forms part of the conditions of both living and dying in burj al barajneh. catastrophic illnesses often produce the sharpest confrontations with these conditions of undercare, as they do in many circumstances. the unrwa health-care system, focused on primary care, takes a life-cycle approach that seeks to address the needs of the population as it moves through these stages. the care available is limited, but it has the explicit aim of promoting “a long and healthy life” (unrwa 2013, 25). the agency is the largest service provider in the camp, though by no means the only one. for instance, a local ngo, the women’s humanitarian organization (who), works to expand access to limited services by sending nurses on home visits to elderly patients unable or unlikely to make it to unrwa clinics on their own. the social support society (sss), another local organization, has likewise established a day center for the elderly, the only one in the camp. an aim of the larger project of which this essay forms a part is to understand the ways in which humanitarianism—especially when extended over the long term—constitutes a social world: with ethical concerns, political claims, and subject positions that are in some sense proper to it, but that are also never wholly contained by it. humanitarian practice can determine the course of people’s lives, and yet the effects of these interventions also travel beyond their direct targets, shaping sensibilities and entire communities. this is a world populated by a multiplicity of subjects, humanitarian providers and aid recipients key among them. these category distinctions often delineate differences of position, rather than of demographics. for instance, palestinians constitute the overwhelming majority of unrwa staff, and local ngos such as who and sss also see themselves as part of the refugee community, rather than just as service providers to it. the categories provider and recipient contain internal multiplicities and therefore have blurry boundaries. humanitarian responses to aging and dying are a setting that brings into view, and into existence, key aspects of this social world. with questions about services for the aging and dying foregrounded, the possibility of the future becomes a site of confrontation among providers and recipients. often this future appears to be foreclosed. to be sure, there are many sources of constraint on palestinian lives. in lebanon, responsibility for the foreclosure of the future lies with many actors—the lebanese state, other arab countries, palestinian leadership, the international community, and israel among them—and my interlocutors in burj al barajneh exposed this full range. attention to this diversity—to the fact that, as rosemary sayigh (1994) puts it, palestinians have “too many enemies”—does not undermine the centrality of the domain of care in the formation of this constrained world. in the conditions in which refugees live and die, humanitarian limits seep into the palestinian experience and participate in the foreclosure of the future. this foreclosure is experienced as both an individual matter (i am being told to die; i will die before my time) and a collective experience (we will not be able to provide what we hope for our children; we will not realize our political aims).2 the multiple impossibilities in humanitarian care for the aging and dying have contributed to circumstances that constrain the political imagination, circumstances in which the future appears lost. the humanitarian landscape in lebanon in 1948, approximately 750,000 palestinians were displaced from their homes, going largely to jordan, syria, and lebanon, and to the parts of mandate palestine that became the west bank and the gaza strip.3 these territories constitute the five fields of unrwa operations. today, there are five million refugees registered with the agency. around four hundred thousand live in lebanon, more than half of them in one of the twelve official camps in the country. the most significant underlying problem confronting palestinian refugees, and arguably the one from which most others stem, is the ongoing lack of resolution to the problem of 1948. there has been no implementation of most of the many united nations resolutions on the displacement of palestinians.4 key among these unfulfilled ideals is the right of return, a central feature of refugee political thought and claims. in recent years the impact of the ongoing failure of the project of palestinian liberation and statehood has been compounded by an increased loss of hope, of belief in the palestinian political leadership, and of a personal willingness to make sacrifices for political goals. the tide may yet turn again, but at the moment, the political situation appears rather grim. things also look bleak in other arenas. in lebanon palestinians suffer from endemic poverty (allan 2013; perdigon 2015). they are restricted from working in a range of professions and face widespread discrimination even in fields where they are allowed to work (knudsen 2009). since 2001 they have not had the right to purchase property, and they cannot pass on the property they do own to their children. diminishing work opportunities both in lebanon and abroad have contributed to a devaluation of education among many youth—this, in sharp contrast to the past, when educational attainment was a central value. as one young man put it, rejecting his father’s desire that he stay in school: “they tell you get educated and there are no jobs. you look for work and they tell you it is banned. . . . the story is you waste years for nothing.” as in the political field, the economic situation of palestinians in lebanon has gotten worse, not better. living conditions are also quite difficult (peteet 2005; sayigh 1995). camps near beirut suffer from the most severe overcrowding. as a denizen of burj al barajneh commented to a resident of the rashadiyya camp, located along the beach in south lebanon: “here you have some distance, space. air might enter. it is suffocation for us.” these dire material, economic, and political conditions contribute to the health problems so widespread in the camp. and the chronic conditions that form part of living as a refugee have a clear impact on the experiences of dying as a refugee. difficult economic circumstances mean that people have limited resources to confront the increasing medical expenses of old age.5 material in this essay is largely drawn from fieldwork conducted prior to the large influx of refugees fleeing the conflict in syria. this displacement has put tremendous additional pressure on a humanitarian system already stretched. these latest developments are not part of my analysis here, but they will certainly make the challenges i describe yet more acute. figure 2. shelters in burj al barajneh. photo by ilana feldman. the most important source of humanitarian assistance in the camps, in size and influence, is unrwa. since 1950, unrwa has provided aid to refugees in the five fields of its operations. in the first decades, services were extensive, including rations, clothing, housing, education, and health care. today the organization provides primarily the last two, along with sanitation and some social services. but unrwa has never been the only agency working in the camp. others include international organizations like doctors without borders/msf, palestinian national organizations such as the palestine red crescent society, and local, sometimes camp-based organizations such as who and sss.6 palestinians view unrwa as an acknowledgment of international responsibility for the loss of palestine and the fate of palestinians (even as they also express concern that humanitarian aid stands in the way of political resolution). thus they attach obligations to it that they do not ascribe to other humanitarian agencies. with education and health care at the center of its work, unrwa provides the services a national government might, though it lacks the security and administrative capacities of such governments.7 given unrwa’s profound financial constraints, the presence of other organizations to fill in service gaps has been an important feature of the humanitarian landscape in lebanon (khalili 2007). the humanitarian experience always involves contestation between the structure of the aid system and the desires and demands of recipients. humanitarian actors explicitly define their politics of life as nonpolitical: both neutral and impartial, concerned with fostering well-being rather than promoting particular agendas (redfield 2013; terry 2002). for palestinians, who view un humanitarianism as a right, the well-being of the community depends on pursuing a politics of restoration, one in which their national rights and demands are protected and promoted. palestinians insist on this expansive view of humanitarian responsibility across the spectrum of humanitarian activities, though providers generally respond that this sort of politics lies beyond their mandate and authority. the challenges of servicing old age, as a stage of life marked in part by illness and dying, bring these conflicts into sharp relief. they structure a conversation about humanitarian politics that centers the question of the character and quality of the life that humanitarianism is meant, and may be obligated, to foster. this conversation, which is produced out of encounters with the limits of both humanitarian services and political possibility, shapes how people experience their own lives, including the intrusion of dying into living. death as a humanitarian concern death itself, and the burial and mourning processes that go along with it, is largely experienced outside the humanitarian realm in burj al barajneh. the camp has a cemetery, and families pay the fees for plots and burials on their own. even as people frequently complained to me about service inadequacies, no one ever mentioned burials as a matter for which they wanted humanitarian assistance. they did, however, blame humanitarian insufficiency for some of the deaths in their lives.8 the end of life thus appears to people as a matter of humanitarian concern, but death and its aftermath largely do not. the lines were not always drawn in this manner. in the early years after 1948, unrwa did recognize death as a matter of agency concern: as both a site of service and a mechanism of control. in the early 1950s, unrwa officials debated the agency’s financial responsibility for refugee burials. the head of the social welfare division suggested these expenses as “an appropriate activity” for his division, but also noted that other resources for covering the costs should be explored.9 another official reported staff consensus that the “proper interment of refugees who have died should be a responsibility of the agency.”10 the question of cost sharing seems to have been a primary concern. as noted in another memo, “it is well known in these countries that there are charitable community organizations that spend on burying the dead who were poor or strangers and had no one to look after them; particularly in the moslem communities the waqf department takes charge of this work.”11 this statement indicates agreement that death and burial were matters of humanitarian concern: the question was which humanitarians should be financially responsible.12 these conversations about services for refugee deaths also included discussions about how such contributions might assist in the project of managing refugee communities, specifically in keeping the refugee rolls accurate. financial constraints posed a problem for unrwa from the beginning (and are acute today), with the consequence that a ceiling existed on the number of registered refugees permitted in each field. to register infants, and any other eligible nonregistered persons, the ration rolls needed to be regularly cleared of fraudulent registrations, of people who had lost eligibility because of income or movement away from the area, and, crucially, of people who had died. precisely because reporting deaths would have meant a reduction in rations for remaining family members, people were very reluctant to do so. reports from the early 1950s indicate that as few as 10 percent of deaths were being reported in some fields.13 paying for burials was proposed as one mechanism to increase reporting. punitive suggestions also included discontinuing the registration of babies until reporting increased.14 when the syrian government asked for unrwa help in covering burial costs in 1953, it made direct reference to cost recovery. stating that payment would have a double benefit, the syrian official argued that “it would on the one hand render a humanitarian service, which is not existing, by providing the family of the deceased with the burial fees which often families are unable to secure. on the other hand this device would ensure a correct [sic] of death cases as they occur.”15 yet unrwa officials had by then already tried this approach in other fields, with limited success. the jordan field office reported discontinuing the practice after failing to reach the expected level of reporting.16 seeking another means to acquire accurate information about deaths, a few years later unrwa officials in jordan suggested creating “a list of all the refugees recorded as of sixty years of age and above in a given camp or area” and then having the government check its register of deaths “to ascertain which of the refugees in question were still alive.”17 this reference to age sixty as a significant threshold between life and death has had lasting relevance, and will reappear in this essay. this naming of sixty as a likely end of life finds echoes in the humanitarian practice of later years, in how palestinians understand the value humanitarianism attaches to their lives, and in how they experience those lives. the exchange in 1960 makes clear that the jordanian government had information about deaths that unrwa did not, indicating that despite its various efforts, the agency had not succeeded in gaining control of the information management around death. this failure became somewhat less troublesome in later years, when presence on the registration rolls conferred fewer benefits to people. if death and burials have largely receded from the humanitarian arena, the end of life now has a place in this field. living, dying, and the foreclosed future long-term humanitarian work (an increasingly common experience) poses both operational and existential difficulties for what peter redfield (2005, 329) terms its “minimalist biopolitics,” the use of biopolitical techniques primarily to keep people alive, rather than help them thrive. redfield (2005, 344) describes minimalist biopolitics as “the temporary administration of survival in circumstances that do not favor it.” the longevity of humanitarian operations in the palestinian refugee case calls the temporariness so central to its self-definition into question. in this circumstance temporariness has not been replaced by permanence, but rather by an uncertain in-between. although unrwa has existed for sixty-five years, its existence needs to be reauthorized every five years. the agency’s finances depend on voluntary contributions from un member states, which are never guaranteed and are often inadequate, making planning difficult. this problem of the in-between is also experienced by palestinians in exile, for whom an insistence on the temporariness of their condition forms part of their claims for a political resolution and who also recognize that many will live their whole lives in a “humanitarian condition” (feldman 2012), therefore making it necessary for the needs of that condition to be addressed.18 the problems of aging and dying introduce additional challenges into the conundrums of long-term humanitarianism.19 palestinians experience the humanitarian inability to provide adequate care for end-of-life conditions as part of a constellation of threats to the population. they understand the continued existence of palestinians as a people to be their strongest weapon in national struggle, and see undercare as part of a concerted effort to undermine that existence. they believe it to form part of the production of inequalities that didier fassin (2009, 49) identifies as central to biopolitics. fassin argues that biopolitics is not just about fostering or disallowing life but also about “deciding the sort of life people may or may not live.” palestinians view undercare as such a decision.20 indeed, some see it as a necropolitical tactic, a direct attack on the life of their community.21 not only does insufficient care contribute to people’s deaths, but the persistent experience of inadequacy contributes to the degradation of expectations and hope for the future. the elderly now reaching the end of their lives in palestinian refugee camps are also the last of the so-called palestine generation: those who were exiled in 1948, who have memories of life in palestine, and who have lived with acute longing for these places. so their deaths, and the inadequacy of the care they receive in their old age, bring this failure into especially stark relief. no intervention could halt the passage of time, but this generational loss forces a confrontation with the impossibilities baked into long-term humanitarianism. the longer such a situation continues, the harder it becomes for humanitarian practice to effect a meaningful change in the conditions of people’s existence (feldman 2015). and the work needed to change the underlying situation lies beyond the jurisdiction and power of humanitarian organizations. palestinians experience this loss of the palestine generation as yet another defeat, as a loss of their homeland yet again. the disappearance of the past is also experienced as a foreclosure of the future. yet defeat is not the only palestinian response to this condition. the effort of local ngos to intervene in the landscape of insufficiency, to provide additional care, indicates an intersection between humanitarian practice and palestinian experience. in offering supplemental care, these organizations make a humanitarian intervention into a humanitarian system. they also confront failures of palestinian society to provide the kind of elderly care common in the past. these efforts highlight a recursive problem: humanitarian presence is a sign of failure (of states to protect populations, of the international community to push for political resolution, and in this case of a palestinian state to be realized). humanitarian practice always works with and up against the limits of its capacity (to save, improve, transform lives). a humanitarian response to humanitarian incapacities responds to, and reproduces, both these problems. these local organizations cannot solve the problems of humanitarianism and, by working in its terms, they cannot escape its limits. undercare and the threshold of dying conditions of health care in the camp clearly indicate how palestinians are and feel inadequately cared for.22 unrwa provides primary health care, generally through clinics located in the camps, to all registered refugees who want these services. both refugees and humanitarian actors identify this care as insufficient in many ways.23 the longevity of the palestinian question has required unrwa to develop an expansive health-care model, but the services provided are necessarily limited. refugees complain that medicines are frequently unavailable and that those in stock have often expired. both refugees and doctors bemoan the overcrowding, which means that patients get only a minute or two with a physician: not enough time for a thorough evaluation. those refugees with the resources to get their primary care elsewhere often do so. beyond primary care, the situation proves even more difficult. in lebanon, without health insurance, or the independent means to pay, people will not be admitted to a hospital. i often heard about crises engendered by medical emergencies, serious illness, and hospitalization. an unrwa assessment from 2009 revealed that access to hospitalization for both secondary and tertiary care was deeply inadequate. reforms to the system led to complete secondary coverage and 40 percent coverage for tertiary care (unrwa 2012). given the tremendous poverty among refugees, the remaining costs often proved prohibitive, something unrwa recognized, but budget restrictions made further coverage impossible. in january 2016, with unrwa facing a financial crisis, a further policy reform was introduced: refugees will now have to pay up to 20 percent of secondary care costs (depending on where they receive this care). even as unrwa (2016) has defended the change as both “in line with international good practice” and as intended to enable more funds to go toward tertiary care, the change caused widespread protests in the camps (zaatari 2016a).24 even as health care is meant to manage and maintain life, refugees frequently identify the existing system as both a source of degradation and debasement and as a cause of death. i use the term undercare to point precisely to this dual condition. to describe someone as being “under care” means that they are being cared for, being treated by a physician, located within a system of concern. those who experience undercare are also under care in this broader sense, but the care they receive is systemically inadequate—a fact that both providers and recipients recognize. refugees also view it as part of a systematic attempt to harm the community. there are many expressions of undercare: lack of medicine, limited services, and poor-quality care rank among them. my fieldwork in burj al barajneh introduced me to others. in unrwa’s life-cycle approach to primary care, the official goal for the elderly is described as “active and healthy aging”—a goal implemented primarily through screening for diabetes and hypertension. when i talked with people in the camp, i learned about other features of these policies toward the elderly. at the beginning of my research i was struck by a phrase heard repeatedly: “refugees don’t have the right to live past sixty.” as i probed to find out what people meant by this, i was told by refugees that unrwa cut off access to more than primary health care after age sixty. as one elderly woman told me: “now, at my age, i go [to unrwa], and they do not help me. i am old. i should die.” at first i wondered if this was correct, as people can sometimes speak in hyperbole to make a point about inequity, but i soon learned that these words did reflect an unrwa position. a 2008 unrwa report describes the policy: “rationing of care is the rule, with patients over sixty not reimbursed (and thus often not treated) for end-stage renal disease, cardiac surgery (even stunts [sic]) or cancer. while the budget constraints are clear, rationing criteria are often inadequate or too stringent” (unrwa 2008, 31). in the past few years, unrwa health-care procedures in lebanon have undergone reform, in part in response to an american university in beirut–unrwa survey of health conditions in the camps, which provided a quantitative accounting of their inadequacy. according to a 2011 report by the british ngo medical aid for palestinians, “as part of its restructuring in 2010, unrwa halted the policy of prioritizing those patients aged under sixty years” (map 2011, 11). it remains unclear to me to what extent this policy change has been enacted on the ground. certainly my informants were unaware of it. the seepage effect of humanitarian practice means that even when a policy changes, its effects linger on: in the lives of people not treated, in the ways people continue to experience this judgment of their value. so here is another encounter with age sixty being tagged as a kind of threshold in the life cycle. the archival record of information management efforts around death described an expectation that those older sixty might likely die. this more recent instance concerns a policy decision to offer different life-sustaining services to those over that age. yet it is not only around services that sixty is a marker. it is also the age of mandatory retirement from unrwa employment. so age sixty stands for people as the end of both economic productivity and full access to services. this marking suggests that the life cycle is divided in two—the stage of active living and the stage of preparing for death—and that as people cross the threshold, they need to redirect their energies and attentions. the decision to withhold or restore services to parts of the population based on age is clear evidence of didier fassin’s (2009, 53) point about the “differences in values attached to lives” that form part of biopolitical practice. palestinians certainly see these decisions as being about much more than access to services. they view them as reflecting humanitarian decisions about both the right to life, a right they see as denied to the elderly, and their assigned role in society, which, for the elderly, is to prepare to die: “i am old. i should die.” people may not entirely accept this judgment of their value and their role, but they cannot wholly escape its impact. the humanitarian politics of life is defined in part by the tension between the goal of valuing all lives equally and the necessity of differentiating among lives. like emergency medicine, humanitarian action requires triage (nguyen 2010): decisions about whom to help first and, given resource limits, whom not to help at all. the necessity of triage marks an uncomfortable but unavoidable feature of this intervention. in a crisis, the criteria of attention produce hierarchies of need (the more life-threatening conditions receive aid first). but in chronic conditions, where life itself is not the central question, triage produces hierarchies of kind. unsettling the limits of care even as active aging forms an explicit part of unrwa’s health-care vision, the limits of humanitarian capacity mean that aging remains largely a non-serviced experience. the elderly mostly depend on their families for assistance, and those without family present are particularly vulnerable. when i visited the rashadiyya camp outside tyre in southern lebanon, an employee in a local ngo identified the absence of such assistance as a crucial service gap. in rashadiyya, samar told me, most activities were focused on children, and no one paid attention to the elderly. the elderly, she said, sit in their houses without care. there should be a center for them to gather, to spend time, and to talk about palestine. and, she argued, this would not only be for their benefit but for that of the community, because the elderly “are our memory.” as she talked, she kept returning to the imbalance of attention: “yes, children have rights, but the elderly have rights too.” this general question about the correct allocation of care has additional significance in this instance, because the elderly are the final palestine generation: the last people who can talk about their own memories of palestine. failing them, therefore, is to fail the entire community, to disrespect its past and therefore to impede its future. the limits that samar described do not describe the whole of the service experience. two local organizations, who and sss, are trying to respond to the gaps in coverage for the elderly and other vulnerable populations. their efforts hold both humanitarian and political significance. to a certain extent their work can be viewed as a humanitarian response to system failures: in the palestinian refugee case, the system is itself a humanitarian organization (unrwa). as palestinian organizations, they view their practices as also political: insisting that all palestinian life has value, that the elderly have a specific value as members of the palestine generation, and that supporting these people will strengthen the capacity of the entire community to persist and resist.25 this care differs from what lisa stevenson (2014, 82) calls “anonymous care,” through which “life becomes an indifferent value [such that] it no longer matters who you are, only that you cooperate in the project of staying alive.” the imperative to care for the palestinian elderly comes not just from their generic status as human beings but also from their position as a link to palestine. the women’s humanitarian organization was established in 1993 by oulfat mahmoud, a resident of burj al barajneh. oulfat began her career as a nurse and worked during the war of the camps, a stage of the lebanese civil war when the camps came under attack and siege. during this period, she told me, “the camp was under siege, no ambulance could enter. . . . i thought people died very cheaply, and that was a turning point in my life, when i decided to quit nursing.” she also could not cope with the work of triage: “that was horrible. who am i to decide who will live or not?” as difficult as this experience was, oulfat said it “made me stronger towards my cause and my people’s rights.” and so she started who. as the name suggests, its founding purpose was to provide services for women, focused on empowerment and opportunity. this remains a central goal for the organization, but it also has programs (such as those for the elderly) that define constituencies in different terms. both men and women receive services from the home-visit program, which is a key feature of who’s elder care. during my research, i accompanied nurses on a number of these visits. almost all the patients had diabetes and high blood pressure, these being the most common chronic conditions in the camp. the key intervention during these visits was to check blood pressure and insulin levels. each patient had a notebook in which the nurse recorded their levels. the nurses always asked the patients whether they were taking their medicines (some said they couldn’t afford them), whether they were eating right (too much bread and rice in the diet also constitutes a chronic problem), and whether they were getting any exercise. they did not provide medicine, though i was told that that who will sometimes help with a delivery from the unrwa pharmacy if patients cannot get there. even if patients’ numbers were very bad, the nurses did not intervene more aggressively than encouraging them to stay on track with medicine and diet. they chatted a bit with the patients and then moved on. visits typically lasted not much longer than fifteen minutes (much longer than an appointment with a doctor, however). even as the actual services the nurses provide are limited, they seem to amount to something more. in providing another eye on someone’s health, they expand the sense of care to let patients know that someone is attentive to their condition and will know, and be concerned, if it worsens. they may not be able to change the actual limits of available health care, but they can mitigate the feeling of abandonment, which is not an insignificant effect. no patient we visited seemed anything other than pleased to see the nurses. they might not all have been compliant with their medical recommendations, and they certainly did not feel that they had all the help they needed, but there was no hint of the frustration and resentment often evident in the waiting rooms of unrwa health clinics. these small interventions push back against and unsettle (see murphy 2015) people’s experience of the limits of care. in addition to this sort of health-care outreach, in burj al barajneh there is a center of precisely the sort that samar called for in rashadiyya. the social support society, established in 2006 by a turkish woman who has long lived in lebanon, runs the active aging house: a day center for elderly men and women. the criteria for participation in the program (which is free) are the degrees of social isolation, with priority as follows: the never married; the married and widowed with no children; those with only female children; those with male children, but who are out of the country or otherwise absent. on days i visited the center i found fifteen to twenty people there, usually twice as many women as men. a tv was usually on in the corner, tuned either to dubbed turkish soap operas (popular across the arab world) or to a station that played palestinian nationalist songs over a montage of pictures of the nakba (catastrophe; the term used for the palestinian displacement of 1948). more avid attention was paid to the former. activities at the center are oriented around keeping people physically and mentally active. in general they seek to help people endure old age, to remain connected to community, to stay healthy. after one day’s art activity—coloring in pictures from elementary-school alphabet worksheets—the center’s director told the participants that the goal of the activity was to have them focus, to identify the object in the picture, and color it in correctly. this purpose explained to me why she had been chastising the women when they picked the “wrong” colors for objects. as much as any particular activity, of course, participation in the center gives these elderly a social outlet, a continued presence in society, and an excuse to leave their homes. the challenges of growing old, and especially of growing old alone, are not unique to palestinians, or to humanitarian situations,26 but they are exacerbated by these conditions. chronic undertreatment leads to frailty; the material conditions of the camp make it exceptionally hard for those who have mobility problems to get around (this applies equally to the disabled); generally inadequate social services keep people more isolated than they would otherwise be. so the humanitarian condition has a direct effect on the experience of aging, whether or not humanitarian actors provide services for this population. and the impending death of the last palestine generation, without return or resolution, brings the political failures of both palestinian political leaders and the international community into sharp relief. the efforts of organizations like who and sss to provide services to the elderly are meant to disrupt the material circumstances and value ascriptions that are part of living in the humanitarian condition. they aim, of course, to impact the lives of those who receive services, but they also seek to make a different claim about the community. to this extent they not only speak back to perceived humanitarian devaluations of the elderly but also to failures in the palestinian community to maintain social traditions of respect for the elderly and political recognition of the particular importance of this generation. social practices of elder care have been degraded by the material difficulties in people’s lives. political recognition is troubled by the fact that the palestine generation are not just those who know palestine, but the ones who left palestine. following generations have lived with the consequences, and they sometimes blame the elders for having done so. activities that bring young people to the active aging house to hear stories of palestine, emphasizing the importance of elder knowledge, are intended to restore traditions of respect. the efforts of organizations like who and sss to intervene in the conditions of undercare that dominate the refugee service experience are, to be sure, bounded in their effects. they serve a small number of people and they can only help them a little bit. but these efforts are part of a challenge by palestinians to the circumstances of their life, and a claim to more value and greater rights than they see others ascribing to them. in this way, by pushing at the boundaries of care and value, they are unsettling these limits. their efforts are also unsettling in another sense, along the line that michelle murphy (2015) describes when she talks about “unsettling care” as a critical practice that challenges an easy equation of care and the good. i do not mean that they approach their work as a project of critique, but that their practice reveals the recursive problem at the center of humanitarian care. as a former un high commissioner for refugees put it: “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems” (tan 2005). “every day we die”: living with dying in mind however difficult their circumstances, the deaths of the elderly are at least age-appropriate. because of the conditions of pervasive poverty, restricted opportunity, and inadequate health coverage, many younger palestinians in lebanon’s refugee camps think about their lives with a shortened horizon, and live with dying in mind. not only is there the belief that old age is a right not granted to palestinians but people still relatively young often talk about their lives as being “over.” they may have hope for their kids, but imagine little for themselves. so while age sixty stands as a kind of institutional threshold for life-cycle stages, people’s personal thresholds, and the point at which they tip over into thinking about dying as their proper activity, are often considerably earlier. this condition of living with dying in mind echoes both lisa stevenson’s (2014, 96) discussion of the “psychic life of biopolitics” and lauren berlant’s (2011, 95–119) account of “slow death.” when refugees describe this experience, they often evaluate it in terms that anthropologists would recognize as necropolitical. they do not view themselves as failing to thrive, or being allowed to fail to thrive, but as being killed. to consider this condition, i turn to a conversation i had with faris, a forty-two-year-old father of two. reflecting on his life and the life of his community, faris painted a bleak picture of possibility and was damningly critical of nearly every actor on the palestinian scene: unrwa, the palestine liberation organization, the various factions, the lebanese government, and so on. just like anywhere and in any condition, of course, camp residents have a range of attitudes, experiences, and emotional states. life is difficult for almost everybody, but people live with these difficulties in various ways. faris’s very gloomy views tend toward one end of the spectrum, but he is by no means exceptional in his evaluation. his comments underscore that, even as humanitarian care could not restore people’s rights, withholding such care is experienced as an attack on both those rights and their lives. faris summed up his view of life in the camp by saying: “every day we die; we are dying slowly. there is no interest in us. no one cares for us.” this abandonment of palestinian life can be understood in biopolitical terms as disallowing life “to the point of death” (foucault 1990, 138).27 but palestinians mostly do not feel generically disregarded, but targeted as political subjects.28 they have demands, for both services and sovereignty, and view the abandonment of palestinian subjects as a project to undermine their capacity to press these claims. faris thinks this tactic has had some real success, and sees his own views—his own desires for himself and his children—as evidence: “when we were young, we used to say ‘we want to return.’ there was love for palestine. we love it; we do not say no. but in the conditions we are experiencing: no. let them open any european country for us.” that so many palestinians can no longer imagine a future in palestine is, for faris, a sign that they are dying “every day.” where undercare for the elderly seems to mark them as being in the stage of dying, in faris’s view that stage now extends across the life cycle. faris talked about health care the most in our conversation, but it was not the only threat he, and others, identified. he also viewed the basic infrastructure of the camp as a threat to life. everywhere in the camps a jumble of electrical wires and water pipes stretches over one’s head, a result of the inadequate and ad hoc network in place. i heard many stories of people being electrocuted by loose wires, especially in rainy weather when the camp alleys often flood. as faris said, “we are scared of the electric cables and . . . the water pipes. this is our fear because in winter, the children cannot walk on the street because it is all . . . the street, the ground is electrified. most of the time when a child, an elderly person, or anyone, dies, it is from electricity.” in these conditions, sources of life can become causes of death. figure 3. electric wires over a camp street. photo by ilana feldman. in faris’s view, the inadequate health care available marked precisely that: something that should be life-sustaining instead becoming both degrading and life-threatening. it is degrading because people need to beg for assistance to access care. it is life-threatening because such begging is not always successful and many people are denied access. as he put it, once you’ve begged every organization in the camp for money and have come up short (as he argued was inevitable), “what would you do? you would borrow money or sell your house or sell your furniture. there is nothing left, nothing left to sell. so you wait for your death.” he directed his ire primarily at unrwa and the political factions governing the camp. as he put it: “unrwa is a liar. the revolution is a liar. all of them are liars.” as a consequence: “there is no concern. the popular committee doesn’t care for us, nor the factions. nor the islamic groups. there is no interest, not any. not for the old nor the child. they don’t see the people’s suffering.” in his view, the ill and the vulnerable were being directed to simply prepare for death. like many people, faris had not just a general commentary on the problems of access to care in the camp, but a personal story of medical hardship. his account shows both a confrontation with humanitarian limits and the work of claim-making. he told me that his son’s leg had been crushed in an accident and required an operation, but that the hospital demanded us$3,000 ahead of the surgery: “where am i going to get the $3,000 from? i started to beg from here and from here until i managed to [gather the money].” unrwa would cover the hospital stay, but not the operation itself: “how much would the stay cost, $200? they don’t pay anything. they should cover the whole operation. we are people who are known. we are not rich; we are poor.” from faris’s perspective, the denial of support was a denial of value, but in insisting that unrwa should pay and that the palestinians are known, he sought to reassert that value and to make a rights claim. so perhaps he is not as utterly defeated as he thinks.29 faris linked the psychological problems so widespread in the camp to the lack of care and the constant presence of dying as a possibility, and he identified the young as particularly vulnerable to this defeat. as he told me: “our psyche is tired. and this new generation will have a more tired psyche. the kid of six years: when he turns sixteen, he stops thinking of something called palestine. he begins to think how he can eat, drink, and live.” his generation lived through the suffering of war, he said, but this generation “lives in misery.” with little work available, hope is quickly lost. he saw drug abuse as a direct result of these conditions, suggesting that young men started drinking and using drugs “to forget his life and the misery he lives in. all of this is our environment.” for faris, this progressive worsening of the palestinian psyche, this kind of living, forms part of the death of palestinian community. the palestine generation is dying without return. and the young may live without political struggle or political imagination. humanitarian limits and the politics of dying the passage of time makes dying a new sort of problem for humanitarian practice. and the very necessity for humanitarian services over a person’s full life cycle confirms the failure of political actors to address the core problems facing palestinians. when palestinians talk about their experience as an ongoing nakba, as they increasingly do, they argue that they are not just being left to suffer but are subject to continuing attack. as service sites, aging and dying bring many of the fundamental challenges of the palestinian humanitarian condition to the fore. a key challenge is that it goes on and on. available services can never be adequate to meet people’s needs. and no matter how much effort goes into reforming service delivery (removing the age barrier, finding new mechanisms for providing care), humanitarian systems are always partially defined by failure, whose causes often lie outside the humanitarian domain. because humanitarianism helps define the world in which palestinians live, they do not only judge or evaluate these problems but also experience their lives, their value, and their community in part through these terms. when palestinians declare the constricted service landscape a denial of right—not just the right to generic life but also to full life into old age and to a vibrant palestinian life at any age—they (using other words) name humanitarian services as both biopolitical and necropolitical. the biopolitical decision about the lives they may live and the sort of dying they might experience is, in many palestinians’ view, matched with a necropolitical determination that this people (even if not any particular palestinian person) must die.30 humanitarian actors such as unrwa certainly do not seek to be part of a necropolitical project (their work must be distinguished from, for instance, the israeli weaponization of humanitarianism as part of its military strategy). and most palestinians acknowledge this difference. even as people offer trenchant critiques of humanitarian operations generally, and of unrwa’s work in particular, many also show genuine appreciation of many of unrwa’s efforts.31 in identifying the necropolitical features of the work around dying, they call attention to the impossibility of wholly separating the humanitarian politics of life from other sorts of politics: the international geopolitics that ensures that palestinian needs and demands never get their due; the politics of siege that makes palestinian lives repeatedly vulnerable; and the degraded politics of the palestinian political leadership, which makes it harder to challenge these attacks and inequities. the view of someone like faris that the difficulties of palestinian circumstances in lebanon have transformed the condition of living into one of dying shows how all of these are brought together in people’s experience. in confronting the failures of palestinian politics and the impotence of international humanitarianism, faris seems to have moved beyond hoping for a better configuration of life and death: “we have no value,” he said. yet this “anticipation of death” (stevenson 2014, 96) is not the only palestinian response to very difficult circumstances. the work of who and sss to change the “sort of life [and death] that people may or may not live [and die]” (fassin 2009, 4) is another. to understand the politics of living with dying in palestinian refugee camps, both responses must be recognized. neither answer escapes the limits of humanitarian care, but the latter offers an attempt to push back against the impoverishment of the future that has been a consequence of this condition. notes acknowledgments earlier versions of this article were presented at the university of connecticut, the graduate center of the city university of new york, and the peace and conflict studies in anthropology biannual meeting. i am grateful to the critical engagement of the audiences in these venues. i completed this article as a friends of the institute for advanced study member in the school of social sciences at the institute for advanced study. i thank the institute, and especially didier fassin, for enabling me to work in such excellent conditions. i also thank colleagues at the institute for advanced study—brian connolly, monica kim, sylvain perdigon, joan scott, and miriam ticktin—for incisive and helpful comments on the manuscript. the thoughtful engagement of three anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective were vital for shaping the piece. this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant no. ses-1026287. 1. ten camps were established after the 1967 june war in which israel occupied the west bank and gaza strip. lebanon’s twelve camps all date to 1948. 2. the palestinian experience suggests this emphasis on foreclosure, in distinction from much of the literature on futurity, which focuses on things like aspirations (appadurai 2013), anticipation (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009), preparation (lakoff 2007), and accessibility (ginsburg and rapp 2015). 3. this displacement was a consequence of the conflict over the end of the british mandate and the proposed partition of palestine into two states (jewish and arab). palestinians left as fighting came to their villages, when they learned about atrocities committed in other towns (such as deir yassin), and when they were expelled by zionist, and then israeli, military forces. 4. an exception to this general rule of inaction is the fact that unrwa was established as a result of a un resolution, in keeping with a broader trend in which international responses to the palestine problem have been dominated by the humanitarian. 5. palestinians are not alone in these problems. access to health care is a problem for many in lebanon, and elderly lebanese are also relatively underserved (abdulrahim, ajrouch, and antonucci 2015). 6. i have written about both doctors without borders and the palestine red crescent society elsewhere (feldman 2015, n.d.). 7. in describing its role, unrwa insists that it does not administer the camps but provides services in them. 8. these judgments are what sherine hamdy (2012, 179) calls political etiologies: the linking of disease causation to political-economic structures that determine resource distribution. 9. chief, social welfare division to deputy director, memorandum, 11 february 1952, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 10. reports officer to deputy director, memorandum, 31 january 1952, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 11. assistant chief, social welfare division to reports officer, memorandum, 15 january 1953, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 12. comptroller to acting director, memorandum 7 april 1953, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 13. reports officer to director, memorandum, 3 october 1952, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 14. “relations between the jordan government and the unrwa,” n.d., unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 15. director of pari to unrwa representative, syria, letter, 30 may 1953, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 16. acting director to syria representative, memorandum, 15 june 1953, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 17. note for the record, 6 july 1960, unrwa archives, amman, jordan. 18. by “humanitarian condition,” i mean both how humanitarian practice shifts over the long term from crisis response to addressing more chronic needs and also how living with humanitarianism moves from the shock of catastrophe to a condition of life. 19. these challenges also raise the more general question of the place of death in biopolitics. foucault (2003, 248) argues that as power is expressed less as “the power of the right to take life, and increasingly the right to intervene to make live,” death is privatized. under these conditions, “death is beyond the reach of power, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical terms.” giorgio agamben’s (1998, 160) attention to brain death as a site of “politicizing death” suggests that the grip power has on death may not always be as statistical as foucault suggested. 20. when it confronts the limits to its capacity, unrwa often evaluates the problems in technical terms, focusing on the management of resource scarcity and on structural and financial constraints on organizational capacity, but its officials are also aware that palestinian death in exile stands as a stark reminder of the utter failure to achieve a political resolution. 21. scholars have also noted the necropolitical (see mbembe 2003) features of, especially, weaponized humanitarianism. israel’s relationship to palestinian populations under occupation is often highlighted as a key case in point (weizman 2011; bhungalia 2010, 2012). 22. in distinguishing between “are” and “feel” here, i do not intend to introduce a gap between reality and meaning (though such gaps always exist), but to underscore that a key effect of undercare is to shape how people experience their lives. 23. liisa malkki (2015, 59) notes the pain and frustration “technical insufficiency” can cause humanitarian workers. such responses are evident in the palestinian case as well. 24. protests were also fueled by reports that a refugee with thalassemia from burj al shemali camp, near tyre, set himself on fire after being faced with increased costs for treatment (zaatari 2016b). 25. the work of the palestine red crescent society is a significant instance of how palestinian politics and humanitarian principles can be enacted by single organizations (feldman n.d.). 26. for anthropological accounts of aging in other contexts, see cohen 1998; lamb 1997, 2009; lock 1994. 27. on forms of abandonment, see biehl 2013 and povinelli 2011. 28. this is why i suggest that they evaluate this practice as necropolitical. they see themselves identified as those “who must die” (mbembe 2003, 11), as persons and as a people. 29. although faris’s story did not end with the death of his son, i heard similar accounts that did. 30. mbembe (2003, 29) cites the palestinian case when he writes that “late-modern colonial occupation is a concatenation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical.” 31. palestinian attitudes toward unrwa are deeply conflicted, both across the population and within individuals. people recognize unrwa as a crucial service provider and source of recognition, even as they critique it for shortcomings in both these areas. there are also significant differences across the fields of operation in prevailing opinion about unrwa. relations have been most strained in lebanon. references abdulrahim, sawsan, kristine j. ajrouch, and toni c. antonucci 2015 “aging in lebanon: challenges and opportunities.” gerontologist 55, no. 4: 511–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnu095. adams, vincanne, michelle murphy, and adele e. clarke 2009 “anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” subjectivity 28, no. 1: 246–65. 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15. http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/adjustments-hospitalization-support-lebanon. weizman, eyal 2011 the least of all possible evils: humanitarian violence from arendt to gaza. new york: verso. zaatari, mohammed 2016a “unrwa defends cuts to medical subsidies.” daily star, january 9. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/news/lebanon-news/2016/jan-09/330989-unrwa-defends-cuts-to-medical-subsidies.ashx. 2016b “man sets himself on fire due to unrwa cuts.” daily star, january 13. http://www.dailystar.com.lb/news/lebanon-news/2016/jan-13/331605-man-sets-himself-on-fire-due-to-unrwa-cuts.ashx. santería copresence and the making of african diaspora bodies santería copresence and the making of african diaspora bodies aisha beliso-de jesús harvard university “my saints are wherever i go,” obá bi, an initiated priest of santería1 (afro-cuban orisha diaspora religious practices) living in new york city told me in 2006. “they [the saints] are here,” he said touching the crown of his head. obá bi envisioned his saints (orisha) as part of his body.2 he described how the initiation ritual, making santo (also making ocha), “seats” the orisha on the crown of practitioners’ heads. in santería, priests’ bodies are described ritually as being “made lucumí” (a term used for enslaved yoruba in colonial cuba) through a seating (asiento) process, which entails two spiritual “birthing” (pariendo) ceremonies. priests first wash and sanctify the orisha, a combination of sacred stones (otá) and cowry shells (dillogún), and then wash and sanctify the new initiate (iyawó/omó).3 these two new sets of beings, orisha and iyawó, are then joined in the seating, where the sanctified orisha are placed on the iyawó’s ritually shaved and painted head (orí). obá bi told me that the painting unification is spiritually permanent; it “can never be erased.” each initiation in santería is a culmination of interarticulated bodily gestures; orisha and iyawó are cleansed, shaved, fed, and other ritual acts establish mutual living-ness. practitioners, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or national affiliation, are thus remade into yoruba-diaspora religious bodies; they are made lucumí.4 obá bi described the heavy weight his arms had to bear during initiation rituals. “i almost can’t stand it. my arms tremble.” as a godparent, he must physically place the orisha in a soup tureen or cauldron directly on the new lucumí’s head. initiation rituals require complex religious skills that reference slavery and african-inspired ways of knowing the world. for instance, when discussing the butchering of animals, obá bi told me, “it’s about precision. … when we open [butcher] the four-leggeds [animals], it’s in the traditional way. the animals are saving our lives.” he then placed his hand around his neck demonstrating how a noose was once put around the necks of slaves as they were hung from trees. “we cut the meat for the collar [necklace/noose] so that we won’t be hung like the slaves. it’s about being lucumí. … and as we eat the meat, it heals our pains. it makes us whole when most of us are not.” the butchering and consuming of the ritually sacrificed animals is understood to ward off this terrible fate. obá bi, a light-skinned man of mixed black american and puerto rican descent, described how embodied actions of being and becoming lucumí are linked to forms of racial consciousness. “it’s a blessing for black folks to know themselves in this way, and know where we came from and who we are.” the orisha (divinities), various spirits, and familial ancestors are recognized as being on, around, and within practitioners’ bodies. they are sensed and felt on the body. i call these multiple energies, copresences. obá bi and other priests walk with copresences, talking to them and placing them on each other’s bodies even as they are understood to manifest through spiritual possessions and trance. copresences emerged historically in enslaved black people’s pragmatic everyday negotiations with cuban colonialism and racial violence. they embody the physical endurance of black enslaved africans in the americas under colonialism and imperialism, as well as contemporary forms of racial feeling and marginalization. spirits and orisha engage in warfare; these copresences liberate those enslaved in problematic situations and infiltrate enemies. the agency of the spirits of the dead and of orisha is thus directly linked to racial-spiritual works (trabajos). copresences and the everyday rituals that engage them mean to bring balance to otherwise turbulent lives. with their capacity for action, or agency, copresences reflect a form of embodied spiritual habitus. habitus, according to saba mahmood (2005, 136–39), involves the pedagogical practices in which people cultivate a specific conception of self.5 a spiritual habitus, i suggest, highlights the self-forming capacities for action enabled through the somatic practices and spiritual relationships practitioners engage in with copresences. in this article, i explore a specific racial-historical matrix from which these spirits, orisha, and ancestors emerge as copresences in matanzas, cuba. i argue that these self-forming capacities involve the coming together of multiple spiritual and material beings in order to make practitioners into african diaspora bodies. scholars of african diaspora religions have documented the strategic ontologies that have emerged within histories of racial violence, slavery, colonialism, and imperialism (brandon 1997; brown 2003; de la torre 2004; palmié 1995; routon 2008, 2010), and they have referenced these flows of power and resistance within transnational and diasporic projects of reconciliation and recuperation (clarke 2004; johnson 2002; olupona and rey 2008; mann and bay 2001; matory 2005). african-inspired (ochoa 2010) diasporas have been conceptualized as relations rather than as a (singular) condition (see brown 2005), and more recently, diaspora has been conceived historically as a feeling (guridy 2009). yet these discussions of diaspora have elided how embodied sensings of copresences might transform the very conception of being from within particular racial schemas (see matory 2009).6 for instance, african and african diaspora spirituality has for the most part continued to be examined through theories of transcendence and notions of mediation (engelke 2010; van de port 2006). media, broadly conceived to include anything from incense, books, cassette tapes, or a person’s body (meyer 2009), are understood to partake in a transcendental (i.e., religious) negotiation between a divine “other place” and an earthly “here” (mazzarella 2004). yet recent debates challenge the christian presumptions that underlie mediation (hirschkind 2011; engelke 2011). they have argued that mediation’s transcendentalism hails a universalizing imperialism. talal asad (in derrida 2001, 70)7 and charles hirschkind (2011) have shown, for instance, how within islamic practices, the koran should not be envisioned as a mediator—rather, it is touched, cared for, recited, and thus requires a broader notion of religious experience. these scholars argue for theories of practice instead of mediation. yet these conversations have inadvertently reified a presumed opposition between christian transcendence and islamic practice. the discussion also plays into what martin holbraad (2008) has shown to be an ethnographic locus of negation, the presumed falseness of our anthropological subjects. indeed, anthropological modes of conceptualizing presence have elided “alternative,” “divergent,” multiple, or “non-abrahamic” ontologies of presence (see matory 2009), and in doing so, they do not take seriously the constitutive body logics and worlds produced through these ontologies.8 people like obá bi situate the orisha as part of their body. orisha, ancestors, and other spirits are not mediated through a heavenly distance between self and divine other, but rather are experienced as intimate copresences of practitioners' sensory modalities, feelings, and bodies. a constitutive principal of mediation as anthropological reasoning cannot see the work that orisha as body do to practitioners’ worlds. in the following, i first examine the historical renderings of slavery as fields of power for contemporary practitioners. i suggest that copresences must be situated within a racial-historical matrix (fanon 1967) that shifts conceptions and sensing of being. second, i argue that practitioners’ everyday acts with copresences redefine the capacities of and for action, constructing a spiritual habitus. the various rituals, works, and spiritual acts in santería thus culminate in a different form of bodily engagement with the world, operating in racial space. finally, drawing on frantz fanon’s (1967) notion of racial corporeal schema, i show how copresences produce alternative ontologies, conceptions of racial-spiritual being. i argue that santería’s sensing of copresences refocuses anthropological readings of diaspora. spiritual defenses in 2005, inéz, a venezuelan practitioner living in the united states, had to undergo a lengthy series of ritual cleansings in cuba, because she had inadvertently picked up a dead african slave who was causing havoc in her life. the malevolent spirit was sent to her sexual partner by an enemy, and because of their proximity (sleeping in the same bed), the spirit had instead latched onto her. in this instance, the “plane of immanence” that “turn[s] out bodies and senses” of the dead as identified by todd r. ochoa (2007, 490, 484), could only be resolved by intervention from the agency of the orisha. inez had to become lucumí to get rid of the spirit. divination rituals diagnosed that the only way to stop the spiritual warfare was for inez to become a priestess of santería. during the consultation she was told, “you need a tribe. you need a black african spirit to stand up for you. and changó [a warrior orisha] will defend you.” many practitioners i spoke with were drawn to afro-cuban religions as a result of spiritual twistings (trastornos) in which spirits of the dead caused them grief. depending on the type of twisting, different spiritual-physical strategies are employed to heal both the multiple spirits and the body of the practitioner. copresences simultaneously provide evidence of their existence (holbraad 2008) and are fed, paid honors, treated as a person, and form constitutive parts of bodies. copresences form part of practitioners’ sixth sense (guerts 2003), that is, their kinesthetic experiences of being-in-the-world. practitioners in santería describe chills, shivers, tingles, premonitions, and possessions of the multiple ancestors, spirits, elements of nature, and ritual items as “felt” (los siento), as bodily presences. these hybrid material-immaterial “agents of association” (ochoa 2007) operate on, in, and as the body. indeed, as noted by thomas csordas (1999), embodied epistemologies might be understood to make worlds. sensing in orisha diasporas might allow us to rethink ontological questions of being-in-the-world (merleau-ponty 1964; csordas 1999).9 colonial bodies: dominated … but not slaves “ma monserrate was young when she came but she was already rayada [cut] and fundada [sworn] from over there [africa],” alfredo calvo cano, a now deceased priest of aganyu in matanzas, cuba, told me in 2006.10 he made cutting signs on his cheeks to show where she had been marked. “she was a judge in the land of egwardo [egbado]. … when she came, she came drumming the egwardo drum.” pointing with his hand, showing it was from way back, from africa, he said, “from over there in a canoe, she tried twice, but the canoe wouldn’t hold, so they got on a boat. those old boats that used to exist. they drummed so that everyone would make it. so then that was how they were able to get here.” “she came as a slave?,” i asked. “ma monserrate was not a slave!” shaking his head emphatically and waving his hand, “and ma fermina [his godmother] was not a slave.” clarifying that ma monserrate had come to cuba of her own choosing, padrino alfredo said that the first time she tried to leave africa she was unsuccessful. “she tried in a canoe.” it took another try before she could find a ship, and this time she brought the egwardo drums with her. according to padrino alfredo, ma monserrate’s drumming proved that she had not been a slave; she came to cuba for prosperity and development. “ma monserrate was already pregnant with ma florentina in her belly, and when she got to this land she gave birth.” then he stopped for a moment and continued: “ma florentina gonzalez [monserrate’s daughter] was my mother’s grandmother.”11 padrino alfredo explained, “which makes me the great-great-grandson of ma monserrate.” puzzled, i pushed him. “you mean to tell me that a single, pregnant, black african woman traveled first by canoe and then on a ship from africa to cuba with her drums and she wasn’t a slave?” shaking his head, he responded: “by the time they got here, everyone was liberated.” he clarified, shaking his finger back and forth, “but ma monserrate was not a slave. you know, she was dominated by masters, but she was not a slave.” monserrate ápoto gonzalez (whose religious name was “obbatero”), like other african-born priestesses in the latter part of the nineteenth century in cuba, formed part of a reconfiguration of space, time, and body. through making bodies african (lucumí), she and many others managed to consolidate a form of embodied racial ontology. postures and gestures of cutting, shaving, drinking, bending, and swearing—links with fundamentos (copresences) carried or made on their bodies—form part of contemporary santería’s spiritual habitus. between 1820 and 1920, a core group of priestesses and priests entered cuba with significant ritual knowledge that transformed local lucumí practice and ethos (mason 1996, 17). stephan palmié (2013, 43) notes how a commercialized “proto-ethnology,” driven by the slave trade in cuba, created a puzzling ad hoc where as many as 137 variations of the qualifier lucumí have been documented: “lucumí egba, lucumí egguadó, lucumí iechá, lucumí ifá, or lucumí eyó” to name a few. we know that ma monserrate was one of the priestesses from the egba (also, egbado) who brought both the orisha olókun and olókun’s drums with her from africa to matanzas. armando ferrer castro and mayda acosta alegre (2006, 26–27) place the arrival of egbado to cuba around 1830, when they were forced to flee their townships due to war in africa and began a southward migration toward the ogún river, where many faced enslavement. ma monserrate, known as ápoto, or the “first to reign,” was a priestess of changó who, in the 1830s, began the cabildo egwardo on daoiz street between compostela and america streets in matanzas (ferrer castro and acosta alegre 2006, 35; barrington edmonds and gonzalez 2010, 99). the legacy of this period ripples through contemporary copresences—somatic transformations of power and nature. fermina gómez pastrana, who has been described as “the most illustrious and venerated santera in cuba” (canizares [1993] 2002, 18), was initiated right before the turn of the century. she was born maría pilar gómez pastrana in alacranes in the province of matanzas on october 12, 1844, during the period known as la escalera, when colonial fears of a slave rebellion provoked mass torture, racial genocide, and the expelling of black matanceros to africa (ferrer castro and acosta alegre 2006, 64–65). it is said that ño josé kudaasi,12 a priest of ochún, initially made fermina to ochún, even though she was a daughter of yemayá. some say that during the initiation, when they sang to yemayá, that orisha mounted her and they were forced to reverse (virar el oro) the initiation from ochún to yemayá (mason 1996, 26). other stories claim that they actually completed the ceremony, but that within her first year “she became twisted” (se trastornó), referring to a mental, physical, and spiritual break. fermina sought help from ma monserrate, who corrected fermina’s somatic transformation and named her “ocha bi,” translated as either “orisha is born” (mason 1996, 26) or “orisha alive.”13 in either instance, fermina is the most famous case of a reversing of the lucumí initiation process and a key element in the transformation of making lucumí bodies in cuban santería. through ritual decisions and complex manipulations in the process of making santo, fermina transformed secret initiations in matanzas. she is famous for several ritual moves, including continuing rare initiations such as aganyú and babaluayé, “directly to the head” (ferrer castro and acosta alegre 2006, 64). interviews with elders who lived during fermina’s time make clear that she sought to activate the sensory modes of being-in-the-world through an african-inspired epistemology that reframed the terrors of lived racial trauma. she is said to have established a complex modality of rituals that united ancestral spirits, the orisha, and deceased slave-warriors in practitioners’ bodies in order to heal the spiritual twistings that she and others had experienced. osvaldo cárdenas villamil, a priest in matanzas, noted that it was fermina gómez who first began doing full-seating initiations in the 1940s (velez 2000, 8–9).14 the egwardo lineage in matanzas is famous for continuing the worship of the orisha olókun, whom fermina saw as key to calming the spiritual turmoil that blackened bodies had experienced in, through, and as a result of slavery. the story goes that in an effort to calm the instability and racial violence of the time, ma fermina created an interpretive transformation of santería, which allowed non-initiates (aleyos) to receive olókun. all of the olókuns on the island are thus considered born from fermina gómez’s pot. in 1944, fermina began the tradition of feeding olókun directly at the ocean, which padrino alfredo described as part of “giving the souls who died at sea,” and the orisha who “had to swallow” them, a form of temporary appeasement (ferrer castro and acosta alegre 2006, 64). “it won’t ever be enough,” alfredo told me, “because their suffering is too great. … and it is still something that comes and wretches us. … it can only give them a small reprieve.” the spiritual hauntings of unappeased spirits and the ocean forced to swallow the bitter taste of blackened bodies thus form part of an intimate somatic register of social trauma, and of the interarticulated mechanisms of working in and through these frames. it is important to note that while the histories of afro-cuban religions show a multiplicity of african ethnic backgrounds (for instance egba, fón/dahomey, congo, etc.), yoruba hegemony is crucial to the ways that bodies are conceived of as lucumí. drawing on the historical trastornos that emerge in these religious practices, we must note that the move toward a yoruba-centric sense of blackness as a source of power does not completely reject other forms of blackness, which also arise and twist bodies through their copresences. for instance, fermina gómez serves as an example of how a priest might be made erroneously to the wrong orisha. the bodily practice of these spiritual acts thus has a profound impact on people’s ontologies. twistings show how the relationship with these copresences constitutes cautious and precise techniques of the body. indeed, as marcel mauss ([1935] 1992, 461) identified, “there is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition.” embodied traditions of santería develop active capacities for the impact of copresences on people’s bodies. indeed, copresences’ capacities of and for action suggest a specific form of racial-ethnic spiritual habitus.15 according to saba mahmood (2005, 139), the ethical considerations of habitus show how specific conceptions of self (and i would add here, in the case of santería, copresences), “require different kinds of bodily capacities.” for instance, like ma monserrate, a female consecrator of heads (oriaté), fermina gómez initiated priests, made bodies lucumí, during a period of extreme racial repression and open hostility to african-inspired religiosities. contemporary twistings, such as those reflected by inéz, who could only relieve her spiritual turmoil by becoming lucumí, demonstrate an intimate relationship to colonial racial histories such as those twistings encountered by fermina gómez. as we shall see, copresences actively challenge, redirect, and at times lay claim to and reenact the historical violences out of which they emerged. “[b]odily form does not simply express the social structure,” as mahmood (2005, 139) suggests, “but also endows the self with particular capacities through which the subject comes to enact the world.” the bodily capacities enabled by copresences, i argue, can be seen as a form of spiritual habitus. grinding bodies and tensed muscles george brandon (1997, 49; emphasis added) describes the christening rituals of new sugar plantations in nineteenth-century cuba: “after praying and sprinkling holy water on the machinery, the priest uttered the benediction most appropriate to the occasion: ‘in the name of god, go on and prosper.’ … the planter and his family, friends, and relatives went away to rejoice and feed themselves. meanwhile the slaves continued what the godfather had begun, grinding and grinding.” santería emerged within this colonial system maintained through violence, repression, and racial ordering, as well as through its countertechnologies of rebellion, sabotage, secret religions, and other resistance (brandon 1997; herskovits 1941; johnson 2002; ortiz 1987; routon 2010). the grinding of sugar production mirrors the grinding of bodies in slavery and the birthing rituals of making lucumí bodies. grinding techniques and catholic benedictions are similarly used to make practitioners’ bodies into lucumí with the expectation that they, like the sugar mill, might “go on and prosper.” depending on lineage, either a mortar or stone is used by the godparents to grind herbs into aché, the sacred substance used for the spiritual birthing process. during the ceremony for the priests’ ancestors (oro egun), godparents will sprinkle holy water and perfume on the assembled and recite the our father and hail mary prayers. then, practitioners enter the ritual room (cuarto de santo) and begin making the sacred waters used to bathe and birth the new initiate and the orisha by tearing up herbs with their hands. songs are sung in lucumí as herbs are torn. hunched-over priests collectively rip herbs for the different orisha. this constitutes only a small part of the ritual work of the body. as has been noted, secrecy has played a key role not only in slavery subversion but also in the embodied technologies of african-inspired religions that emerged from this racial recollection (brown 2003; clark 2007; miller 2009; otero 2010). palmié (2002, 181) has described the use of sorcery to counter the “witchcraft” of slavery (see also otero 2010, 134). the threat of rebellion caused the episode of la escalera in 1844, a horrific inquisition during which the spanish authorities tied people to ladders as a form of torture to extract information and find members plotting to overthrow slavery in matanzas.16 today, small wooden and metal ladders are given to orisha to prevent practitioners from being “stepped on,” “climbed over,” “tied up,” or have religious power (aché) stolen. in matanzas in 1844, cumpuzano mandinga, the “great sorcerer of matanzas,” made “a small fortune” by selling “all sorts of magic devices” such as “protective amulets” for the liberation movement (barcia 2008, 45). today, these same types of amulets continue to be used and are tied to practitioners’ waists, on belts, necklaces, or bracelets to keep away death and negativity. secrecy remains crucial for practitioners. complex hierarchies of initiation keep those not committed to the orisha way of life at the periphery of certain practices. white sheets, hung from doors in ritual rooms, block the view of the uninitiated. yordanka, an uninitiated woman in her early twenties from a large house of santería in havana, told me of her frustration at being excluded, while others, particularly foreigners with money but with less knowledge of the religion than her, gained access into exclusive ritual spaces. “these whites have no clue, but they have money,” yordanka told me. referring to the foreigners as both “white” and “yankee” (yuma), yordanka believed her lack of resources made it difficult for her to access a religion that she felt was “in her blood.” in an interesting parallel, simone, an african american from oakland, california, told me how “whites,” “central americans,” or “latinos” thought they had more access to santería because they spoke spanish. talking about a possession in which an orisha mounted a black cuban and spoke spanish, she told me: “they [latinos/white central americans] try and translate for us and look down at [black americans] like this religion belongs more to them because they speak spanish. i was like, the orisha should speak lucumí, not spanish. if it’s a real orisha, it should speak lucumí!” the racial politics of authenticity, religious access, and secrecy form a crucial aspect of conceptualizing santería as a black practice, but also as lucumí. as we have seen, lucumí is a complex and puzzling “proto-ethnology,” as described by palmié (2013); it is a language, an ethnic identification, and an initiate. in the transnational practice of santería, practitioners from diverse racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds lay claim but also disavow these notions of authenticity in their religious-spiritual habitus. for instance, while obá bi and i watched a video of a drum ritual (tambor) in new york city, he marveled at the bodily movements of black cubans, telling me, “we just can’t move like that. even the puerto ricans can’t get the african down like the afro-cubans.” body logics and somatic rituals were used during liberation movements to maintain secrecy among conspirators (fernandez-olmos and paravasini-gebert 1997; miller 2009). even as slaves were coded with africanized-colonial ethnicities, they also self-organized within cabildos de nación (african ethnic associations) modeled after spanish catholic cofradías (guilds) or mutual-aid groups (moliner castañeda 2002; brandon 1997, 73). lucumí cabildos in particular were structured along the lines of african body epistemologies such as the awo, secret hierarchical societies that included initiations and “oath taking” (otero 2010, 16). for instance, in a deposition recorded after the discovery of la escalera, josé gangá recounted the rituals he underwent to join the cause: “after drawing a cross on the ground with a knife, [they] swore loyalty to god and the virgin mary … he and the other initiated slaves had their hair cut short along their right ears” (barcia 2008, 42). in contemporary santería initiations the shaving of the head makes for a particularly important element. yet during the early years of the cuban revolution, many practitioners told me that they could not fully shave their heads for fear of being discovered as santería priests. the corona or crown shaving emerged as a result, in which only a small circle at the top of the head was shaved while the rest of the hair was left intact. one black cuban woman, an elder priestess in matanzas who had been a member of the young communist party, told me that for her initiation in the early 1980s she had a corona shave, and could only complete three instead of the seven days of seclusion. she told me, “my corona was just fine. in slavery they couldn’t do the whole white thing, or have their head shaved if they were a woman, so this whole fanaticism with having to shave it all or you’re not a true lucumí is just fanaticism. that’s what it is: fanaticism.” with the abolition of slavery in 1887 and the formation of the new republic, cabildos were driven underground by authorities (brandon 1997, 72; de la fuente 2001, 161; paquette 1952, 62, 78). the paraphernalia of african-inspired religious practices were hidden in plain sight in practitioners’ homes: in pots, closets, and cabinets, under beds, and in secret altar rooms—much as they are today. shrines and permanent altars were hidden and clandestine initiation ceremonies became the rule of ocha (la regla de ocha). afro-cuban religions emerged through ritual postures and gestures based pragmatically on navigating the layered fields of racially embodied violence and repression. making bodies lucumí enabled a religious setting in which proving trust, dedication, and loyalty was a matter of life (arikú) and death (ikú), of “showing face” (cara/courage) and “having heart” (okán/truth). much of this depended on establishing the true nature (iwapele) of new adherents through divination, embodied demonstrations of commitment, and a reliance on somatic attunement with african-inspired copresences (clark 2007, 21, 146). copresences: attending to bodies ontology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. for not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man. some critics will take it on themselves to remind us that this proposition has a converse. i say that this is false. the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man. over night the negro has been given two frames of reference within which he has had to place himself. his metaphysics, or, less pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they were based, were wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him. —frantz fanon, black skin, white masks addressing abjection and opposition, racial phenomenologists of the body and postcolonial theorists have leaned on fanon’s corporal schema in black skin, white masks (1967) to reflect on lived experiences of the colonized (khalfa 2008; noland 2009; scott 2010). fanon posits the blackness of the blackened body as an alienated pathological consciousness that is always opaque, never revealed to (him)self, and must therefore be transgressed. yet whereas some scholars interpret fanonian existentialism as a gesture toward the need to open a “third space” (kipfer 2007), i follow those who walk with fanon’s embodied experience (scott 2010). in one of the most powerful moves in black skin, white masks, fanon (1967, 89) describes being “blackened” when a white child on a train sees him and cries out: “look, a negro!” fanon explodes, crying involuntarily. in that moment, the body, what he calls the “lived experience of a black man,” is kinesthetically experienced.17carrie noland (2009, 205) suggests that when we first come into contact with fanon’s sob, it is his body that insists, demands, that we witness it. fanon’s gesture “argues from the body” from which he is compelled to throw himself à corps perdu, “headlong into action (or creation)” (khalfa 2005, 47). indeed, fanon describes the feeling of being blackened as “tensed muscles,” in which the body registers what the mind might not fully comprehend (scott 2010). barnor hesse (1997, 82; emphasis in the original) finds potential in fanon’s somatic action-creation— the possibility for racially experienced diasporic reversals. hesse describes the potential of black diaspora ontology: “it initiates … it turns subordination into insubordination and constitutes a series of tactical disruptions which expose an ethical precariousness in the racialised governance of western culture; it creates, that is, the space of interrogation.” an anthropology of the body and the senses is helpful in decentering particular forms of cartesian consciousness by shifting elemental awareness and attending to bodies as the primary locus of experience (bendix 2005; brenneis 2005; csordas 1999, 2009; diaconu 2002, 2006; guerts 2003; hirschkind 2006; howes 1990, 2003; jackson 1983, 1989; jobs and mackenthun 2011; lingis 2005; mauss [1935] 1992; seremetakis 1993; sklar 1994; stoller 1984; van ede 2009). because senses are culturally encoded (guerts 2003), we can pay ethnographic attention to the somatic modes that encompass not only one’s own way of attending to and experiencing the body but also the “embodied presence of others” (csordas 1999, 138). as csordas (1999, 149) suggests, it is important to not simply reproduce the false distinction between bodies and “culture,” but instead explore with bodies. rather than aiming to fill a discursive gap between cognition and embodiment, i suggest that santería copresences allow us to walk with embodied ontologies (sheets-johnston 1999; noland 2009). i follow the moves of scholars who invoke fanon through his tears and tensed muscles (noland 2009, 204; scott 2010). in situating phenomenological racial somatics as a framework in anthropology, we might open up glimpses into specific loci of racialized, gendered, and sexed embodied spatial temporalities. to be clear, my interest in this approach is not to posit santería solely as a liberatory experience or as an exemplary site of decolonization, nor even as pure resistance, but to examine the attempts (whether successful or incomplete) to constitute embodied subjecthood in the very nexus of abject power that fanon decried, which is then felt and sensed diasporically by different religious subjects. the initiations that hesse suggests thus constitute key elements in psychic-somatic relations from which african-inspired practices emerge as countercolonial sites of modernity (palmié 2002). it is in these racial ontological pragmatics that religious diasporas are sensed. conjure, for a moment, the slave-referenced ontologies of grinding sugar, whipping bodies, drowning souls, plowing fields, and the kinesthetic spontaneity of movement in santería rituals. african-inspired blackened racial corporeal schemas are part of the historical memory-making of people’s affective registers. santería epistemologies offer a site to examine the ways in which racial diasporas are felt. moving in historical racial-spaces, santería and other african-inspired practices find their racialized and sexualized power of embodied self-awareness precisely in the experience of extravagant black abjection (scott 2010). this awareness creates detours that reroute trauma to reach a place where (even if only for a glimmer) blackness is recovered and bodies are made lucumí through an embodied racial sensitivity. this form of corporeal schema indeed constitutes a habitus, a combined set of ritual practices and praxis that assert racial sensitivity. thus, whereas fanon lamented black subjects’ loss of agency, that is, colonial subjects’ inability to access sensorimotor awareness, we can perhaps imagine sites where embodied racial memory initiates embodied capacities of and for action. feeling copresences in santería is ritualized and practiced, a spiritual habitus that asserts the capacities of blackened agency. nevertheless this assertion of racial sensitivity is not always limited to black subjects—and becomes extremely complicated when hailings of black embodiment conflict with racial religious hierarchies. for instance, the examples of yordanka and simone above demonstrate that racial corporealities are often out of place on nonblack bodies. fanon (1967, 116) refers to this as being “overdetermined from without.” phenomenologically, he revises hegel’s formula of sense certainty to show how racial ontologies form a “certain uncertainty.” that is, where his body knows the world through habits, what fanon (1967, 110–11; emphasis in the original) describes as “a slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world—such seems to be the schema.” in exploring the penetrating ontology of cuban palo spirits of the dead, ochoa (2007) similarly draws on the philosophical unfoldings of hegelian being to show instead how sense un-certainty lingers in the immediacy and connection of sense experience. he looks at immanence and bodily intimacy with spirits of the dead as a way “to posit a kind of knowing that is outside of negation/penetration mediation, a knowing outside of the dialectic” (ochoa 2007, 487). i bring together fanon’s certain uncertainty, the racial corporeal schema in a specific blackened habitus, and ochoa’s sense uncertainty, the forceful sensations and moments of knowing spirits, to understand santería’s lingering and forceful relations in the notion of copresences. copresences are intimately sensed as beings—agents of racial-corporeal schemas that attune bodies through a habitus of slavery, imperialism, and colonialism as historical-cultural matrixes. while blackness emerges as multiple, uncertain, and not necessarily celebrated in these schemas, blackened immanence is indeed a presence. i argue that blackness cannot be removed from santería copresences’ formations of body worlds. santería’s body schema emerges from within a complex racial-historical matrix that must be situated within specific ontologies of violence, power, and religious inspiration. i suggest that the process of making lucumí bodies creates particular forms of somatic registering. it is a mode of sensing diaspora—a way of being in and knowing the world emerging within specific racialized and gendered body memory (daniel 2005). the historical spatio-temporal-racial encodings, themselves initiated in the transatlantic commerce in bodies, are thus crucial to how santería copresences are sensed by differently situated practitioners (bordo 1998; bourdieu 1990; csordas 2011; howes 2003; mascia-lees 2011; taussig 1993). spirit agency: foldings santería’s spiritual habitus encourages us to fold temporal spatialities. the material elements—otá and dillogún of orisha diasporas—have been described as “external organs” of practitioners’ bodies (sansi-roca 2005) and as affecting presences (armstrong 1981). they encompass a broad range of material-immaterial beings and can be thought of as active spiritual and religious subjectivities intimately tied to practitioners’ bodily registers. once an initiate is “crowned” (coronado), the priest’s spirit space multiplies into different bodily spheres. while alive, this connective spirit-energy (ayalá) sits in the back of the neck at the base of the skull (monokú eledá), and the orisha enters through the crown and lives in the head organ (orí). inspired by french kardecian spiritism, santería cosmologies fold soul energies as multiple and united simultaneously and can be hailed through bodily tingles and sensory reactions to spiritual-environmental fields (clark 2007, 89; cros sandoval 2008, 365; fontañez 2006, 269). priests’ spirit souls are diffracted as they journey to obtain constant and always expanding forms of enlightenment (luz) and development (desenvolvimiento), while they are also in “the dark” (la oscuridad) through their encounters with the difficulties and contaminations of life, dangers, and negative spirits and people (cros sandoval 2008; feraudy espino 2002). these ontologies fold body and spirit. ritually, the moyuba (invocations of the dead) ensure the continued acknowledgment of egun (ancestor) copresences. the dead contain agency and influence. as j. lorand matory (2009, 250) noted more broadly, in yoruba diasporas “each person’s body, set of vessel altars, and sacred paraphernalia thus embody the accumulating presence of a dozen or more gods, spirits of the non-kin dead, and ancestors who have been materially represented, nourished, and ritually inserted in or tied to the body of the priest.” in death, portions of priests’ spirits remain among the living, while they are also incorporated into olorun, the rays of light from the sun. egun are also fused with orisha; they reside in the natural elements—oceans, rivers, mountains, crossroads, and so forth—even as they are embodied copresences that walk with and often inhabit the bodies of the living (atwood-mason 2002; bolívar-aróstegui 1990; cabrera 1968; falola and genova 2005; murphy 1994). in the past, when possible, the bodies of deceased priests were buried in the house compound (ilé de ocha); now their bodies exist in photographs placed in specific locations (bovedas) in the home. tables, corners, glasses of water, baskets, and other marked sites are established through complex spiritual communications that discern the placement needs of each copresence. egun are consulted, offer advice, eat, see, perceive, and, like the orisha, provide “definitive evidence” (pruebas) of their existence (holbraad 2008). they differ from the “unenlightened” energies of the death matrix, ikú, which consist of spirits that are not “uplifted” but nevertheless must be appeased and reckoned with. egun are especially crucial in keeping death, negativities, and other unenlightened spirits away from practitioner’s body worlds (murphy and sanford 2001, 112). these sensoriums stimulate senses and sensibilities through divinatory and embodied gazes (miradas). copresences are not always positive—they can be demanding, jealous, petty, or spiteful and require complex social-spiritual manipulations. managing the everyday interpersonal logistics of copresences therefore constitutes an integral aspect of santería’s spiritual habitus. an unhappy, distraught, or twisted copresence (from wherever it may come) can mean sickness, death, destruction, tragedy, or misfortune. thus deals, swindles, bets, and bargaining also take place with copresences alongside the veneration. priests i spoke with discussed body logics on different levels of consciousness. while not all practitioners are “horses” (caballos) or “mounters” (subidores), who are possessed by spiritual agents, they are nevertheless in constant states of bodily negotiation with different copresences. they must pay attention to the embodied signs that indicate copresences’ warnings or dissatisfaction. shivers, hair standing on one’s arms, feelings, voices, mental pictures, and dreams, as well as divination and trance-based communications, constitute the numerous sensory paradigms that priests register daily. in a dramatic rendition of bodily negotiations, belkis, a priestess of changó, discussed her experience of becoming mounted as alternating between moments of distress, nausea, and exhilaration. if she fought the orisha, she said, “it was almost painful,” making her feel like she “would vomit”; otherwise, if she let go, she was filled with “warmth and exhilaration” before she lost consciousness. yet the body experiences different copresences variously. for example, when describing being mounted by her egun, belkis said it felt “like falling asleep.” while when she is mounted by her palo congo, she is “violently flung around.” santeros walk through the world negotiating with and being closely related to various spiritual assemblages, and they are constantly concerned about interactions and transactions with diverse copresences in, on, and around the body. indeed, these embodied ontologies enable santeros to draw from diverse forms of practice, worship, and different systems of belief as they engage with various energies and beings as copresences. palmié (2010, 89) references the seeming oddity of santería energetic diversity: and what about all the statues of catholic saints, buddhas, indians, dr. gregorio hernándezes, or masonic implements in the shrines of our interlocutors? what of kardec’s oraciones escogidas flowers and water on a shelf in their living room, the nganga power objects they keep hidden in a shed in the backyard, the spanish translations of the egyptian book of the dead, nostradamus’s prophecies, or reiki manuals that we might find on their bookshelves, or the abakuá handshake that some of them might offer to a male ethnographer? is all of this santería? where does it begin or end? i suggest that an embodied epistemology of copresence enables unifications through sensing diaspora. multiple heterogeneous cosmologies are incorporated within copresence body logics, and reordered as part of santería’s sixth sense (guerts 2003). for example, the twisted bodies of fermina gómez’s drowned spirits living with olókun at the depths of the sea might need attention and erupt like fanon’s tears. these somatic epistemologies unite and initiate bodies, activating relations of embodied consciousness. neither an ending nor a beginning, death is a kinesthetic continuum of shifting sensory elements. conclusion: santería’s sixth sense just as the agency of “rocks and shells” (sansi-roca 2005), protected from the public and hidden in sacred receptacles, disables gazes, their agency also gestures toward diaspora body logics—forms of sensing diaspora. the inherited legacy of copresence enables practitioners to draw from and incorporate diverse formations within racial somatic kinesthetics. however, sensing, knowing the world through the body, is often ignored as a profound element of epistemology. the ways bodies intuit are themselves sociocultural registers (desjarlais 1992; guerts 2003; thomas and ahmed 2004) and can be described as their sixth sense (guerts 2003, 3; noland 2009, 9–10). copresences manifest as a form of sixth sense, and animate practitioners’ bodies. since sensory experience produces worlds, each form of bodily register constitutes a form of world-making. santería diasporic sensing is thus an embodied historical editing, an alignment of collective habituated experiences that draw on revivifications of dominance and violence in somatic-spiritual power. thus in the grinding and cultivating wherein bodies were made and remade black, racialized bodies collapse time and initiate through kinesthetic expression. copresence punctures cognition, transposing pragmatic resolutions of everyday violences, pleasures, and spontaneous happenings of life. in these kinesthetic movements santeros and copresences discover themselves as alive (sheets-johnstone 1999, 135). the making of lucumí bodies is thus an acknowledgment of the historical memory-in-our-own-cells, that is, how muscle tension, pain, despair, suffering, domination, and pleasure are tightly bound with postures of perception and consciousness. in conjuring fanon’s copresence i situate santería as an inspiration to explore the ways in which “the powers of blackness” (scott 2010, 39) are phenomenologically harnessed. in this sense, then, santería is about working with, rather than transcending copresence. whereas ato sekyi-otu (1997, 76) discusses fanon’s concept of imperialist time as an “eviscerated organ of the social body that demands to be resurrected,” santería copresences are kinesthetic extended organs of bodies made lucumí. in the making of lucumí bodies, tensed muscles of embodied racial space are loosened and flexed, even if only tenuously. historical sobs might be released, streaming out and down the face; they eventuate. in the somatic registers of santería, even fanon’s sobs might be rendered copresences and at least momentarily appeased. notes acknowledgments this article is based on field research conducted between 2004 and 2011 with santerı´a practitioners in matanzas and havana, cuba, and in new york city, miami, los angeles, and the san francisco bay area. i use pseudonyms for priests who requested confidentiality. this essay forms part of a larger study on the relationship between cuban and u.s.-based priests examining issues of race, gender, and sexuality from a transnational anthropological approach. i would like to thank alfredo calvo cano and his family in matanzas, cuba, for their contributions to my research. i am grateful to oba´ bi and the many priests i interviewed. an earlier version of this article was presented at the yale university anthropology department colloquium, where generous feedback was provided. my heartfelt thanks go to kamari m. clarke, john jackson, jr., sean brotherton, jafari s. allen, amy hollywood, solimar otero, naomi bragin, brad erickson, and two anonymous reviewers for their careful readings of the manuscript. i am especially grateful to the editors of cultural anthropology for their useful suggestions. 1. also, la regla de ocha, “the rule of ocha.” 2. the orisha are also called ocha or santos. 3. omó is a “child” of the orisha. new initiates are also called iyawó (or yawó), the bride of the orisha. i refer here to the term omó because even uninitiated (aleyo) practitioners learn their embodied familial relations with orisha first, as omó, “children of the saints” (hijos de santo) (brown 2003). 4. the colonial term used to identify yoruba diaspora bodies in cuba. 5. michael atwood-mason (2002, 91, 94) attentively draws on pierre bourdieu’s notion of habitus to show how santería embodied rituals demonstrate the structuring of actions in santería. in particular, he is concerned with how “symbolic work” is mapped onto bodies where the “source image (the item which is symbolically brought into play) is transferred and mapped onto the target situation (the situation or object symbolically described by the source)” (atwood-mason 2002, 102). here, i follow saba mahmood (2005, 136) who critiques bourdieu’s emphasis on the unconscious reproduction of society, which, she argues, ignores the learned processes of self-fashioning. this move, i suggest, shifts habitus from a mind/body and subject/object binary to processes of forming. 6. santería experiences are often presumed to be readily identifiable within our normatized ethnographic frameworks, but this forms part of what kristina wirtz (2007) identifies as an “epistemological ethnocentrism” inherited by discursive categories. see also palmié 2010, 89. 7. talal asad’s comments are taken from the question and answer section of a transcribed talk given by jacques derrida in 1997 in paris, france, during a workshop entitled “religion and media.” the proceedings from the workshop were published in de vries and weber (2001). 8. see, for example, todd r. ochoa’s (2007, 487) critique of hegelian negation in mediation. 9. martin holbraad (2008) similarly suggests that anthropologists shift modes of understanding truth by drawing from “native” ontologies in what he calls “ontography.” 10. interview with the author, may 13, 2006, matanzas, cuba. 11. alfredo calvo cano was raised by his maternal grandmother, lilita, who, as he indicated, was monserrate gonzalez’s granddaughter. see also, ferrer castro and acosta alegre (2006, 45), who also interviewed alfredo calvo cano. 12. there is a discrepancy on who initiated fermina gómez. armando ferrer castro and mayda acosta alegre (2006, 35) agree with john mason (1996, 26) that it was a priest of ochún. the former state only “ño josé,” while mason gives the name “kudaasi.” david h. brown (2003, 329), was told gómez was initiated by “josé pata de palo” (josé wooden leg), a priest of eleguá, named “ño cordá-isí.” 13. lydia cabrera (1970, 81, 230; my translation) defines “bi” as “born, engender, or alive” and describes “ocha bi” as the religious name for a priest of yemayá. 14. in partial seatings, practitioners receive “head and feet”: the warriors (the feet) and their tutelary orisha (the head). 15. jacqueline copeland-carson (2004, 149) also uses habitus to understand how african ancestors in african diaspora bodily practices inform individual actions, but like atwood-mason (2002), situates the unconscious as central to formations of agency and embodiment. 16. la escalera is described as the first racial genocide in cuban history (barcia 2008, 45). more than four hundred africans and free people of color 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mangroves disappearing mangroves: the epistemic politics of climate adaptation in guyana sarah e. vaughn yale university university of california, berkeley http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7127-0575 “see! just ruined,” shouted carmichael as he pointed into the distance where mangrove trees once stood.1 carmichael, a state-sponsored civil engineer, was leading me on a walk along the seawall of guyana’s atlantic coast. he was gathering information for a newly implemented climate-adaptation policy called the guyana mangrove restoration project (gmrp). the forest’s low-hanging branches and its spongiform earth made the walk all the more laborious. as we clumsily maneuvered around trees, carmichael explained, “those mangroves are gone now. . . . we don’t know why those mangroves uprooted.” more importantly, he noted, “we can’t just replace them.” it was not easy to change the calculus of the forest, even a little bit. for carmichael, climate-adaptation policies like the gmrp are opportune. but they still might not get him anything more than a hold on the status quo—that the forest is a rather unstable place. in 2010 the guyanese government announced the launch of the gmrp. as a response to the threat of sea-level rise, the gmrp looks to mangroves for storm protection. the program is partially funded by the european union’s global climate change alliance, which complements un climate treaties by supporting national-level research about climate adaptation. for engineers more familiar with seawalls than mangroves as defense against the sea, the gmrp entails a particularly broad-based research program into mangrove ecosystems. it focuses on exploring how and why processes of erosion impinge on forests. these research questions have put engineers in unorthodox partnerships with other technoscientific experts, including geoscientists analyzing mudbanks, environmental consultants cultivating trees, and beekeepers developing apiaries. this is not to say that their combined efforts always prove effective—they are, in fact, often thwarted by a variety of things like waves, mud, and debris. in guyana’s forests, climate adaptation requires expertise that can reconcile humans’ and nonhumans’ entangled and increasingly insecure futures. the factors that contribute to mangroves’ vulnerability inform the kinds of practices gmrp participants use to observe, measure, and analyze them. the participants’ time in forests forces them to recognize that climate adaptation is not solely dependent on their well-intentioned efforts. through these encounters, their understandings of mangroves transform, and what was once familiar terrain suddenly appears strange. in this article i examine the ways in which climate adaptation holds purchase and sway among gmrp participants, as well as the role mangroves play in constituting their relationships with each other. as research objects, mangroves are not only forms of evidence but also tools that guide expert action and distinctions in day-to-day labor. thus, what follows is an ethnography of how epistemic politics shape climate adaptation and its enactments of expertise. during the initial phases of research, gmrp participants produced a report describing guyana as a difficult place for mangrove research. in the face of a call for improved communication between engineering and agricultural agencies, the report highlighted the complex dynamics of erosion shaping the coastal plain. it built on a model that engineers have long used to explain mangroves’ vulnerability: that of mudbank migration. mudbanks are formed by the mixing of silt and clay in the amazon and orinoco rivers. they can vary in length from a few hundred feet to three miles. as they migrate from rivers along the shorelines of northern brazil, the guianas, and venezuela, they dampen waves and provide sediment for mangroves to take root. yet the areas between mudbanks are prone to erosion and susceptible to mangrove loss. the fact that mudbanks will eventually migrate meant that gmrp participants had to devise a plan to manage and restore forests. to facilitate planning, geoscientists created a model detailing mudbank and mangrove interactions. engineers focused on instituting a program in forest mapping. meanwhile, environmental consultants and beekeepers concentrated on administering forest reserves. all contributed to constituting a field of expertise in mangrove disappearance. despite their varying terminologies, all were adapting to climate change. figure 1. mangroves huddled around derelict sea defenses at low tide. photo by sarah e. vaughn. climate adaptation unfolds in asymmetrical ways, not only among gmrp participants but also within forests. while gmrp participants may rely on a variety of practices to restore mangroves, the mangroves themselves do not always respond as helpful companions. they can distract gmrp participants or slow down their work, creating moments that sometimes lead to new insights and, in other cases, to dead ends. in this article, i offer a close analysis of these encounters and the concerns they provoke among experts about the viability of climate adaptation as a policy. first, i tell the story of the previous crisis in sea defense that brought about a paradigm shift in modeling under the gmrp and its climate-adaptation efforts. i suggest that climate adaptation simultaneously depends on scientific accounts of vulnerable environments and experts learning to recognize their limited capacities to manage them. this background is followed by an analysis of engineers’ forest-mapping activities, which details the relationship between expertise and enumeration. i then explain how environmental consultants’ planting activities help them to reconcile doubts about mangroves as sea defense. i explore the ways that this doubt materializes in the bodies of other kinds of living things, particularly through the work of beekeepers. finally, the conclusion offers a broader discussion about how this case of climatological expertise can contribute to anthropological discussions about expertise and performativity. in their efforts to think and act with mangroves, gmrp participants constantly test expert practices in sea defense. their encounters with mangroves tie together human and nonhuman potentialities, research programs, and the localized ecologies to which they become obligated. the gmrp offers just one example of climate adaptation in action, and of experts’ imperfect aspirations to relate nature to technology. impermanent and wondrous, mangroves urge us to think more creatively about vulnerability to climate change and the kinds of practices that inspire knowledge about it. stories we tell this article joins conversations in the anthropology of expertise on climate adaptation (orlove 2009; barnes 2016; crate and nuttall 2016; whitington 2016) by examining the ways in which experts become aware that climate change threatens sea defense. i analyze a variety of forms of expertise—competence in an activity that requires a practical skill set (boyer 2008; carr 2010)—as they are enacted in and across vulnerable environments. at the same time, i emphasize the unpredictable course of such expertise, as it extends beyond the ecologically knowable or measured impacts of climate change. the idea that mangroves can be maintained as a primary form of sea defense is a recent one in guyana. it is rooted in certain qualities of guyana’s coastal plain, which is below sea level, subject to biannual rainy seasons, and historically resistant to human efforts to hold back flood waters. more than 90 percent of guyana’s population lives on the coastal plain, where agriculture has long been the dominant industry. beginning in the late seventeenth century, dutch colonists imported slaves from africa, while british colonists later brought in more slaves and indentured laborers from india, portugal, and china to cultivate sugar. since, flood management has been tied to sugar plantations’ elaborate canal and sea-defense grid.2 this grid snakes between farms, city promenades, rivers, and shopping centers, blurring distinctions between rural and urban flood management. in the capital city, georgetown, fifty miles of drainage canals support roughly three hundred thousand people. but tons of debris and garbage fill them daily, compromising engineers’ efforts to drain water. part of the problem with floods in guyana is that people have tried to outrun the coast. so, too, have the new economies in tourism and luxury real estate that infringe on mangrove forests. yet the architecture of these economies is increasingly built out of concrete instead of wood, a shift some engineers believe contributes to land sinking into the atlantic. rahul battacharya’s novel the sly company of people who care crystallizes what these coastal transformations mean for the people battacharya (2011, 102) calls “water technicians,” writing that “everything [they do] starts with the land.” some of these people are participants in the gmrp. their work with mangroves is haunted by a dystopian sense of an untameable world. they envision a restorative unity with nature, but have parted with older fantasies that human technologies might guarantee sea defense. they do assume, however, that mangroves require expert interventions to survive, even when those interventions are not always aligned with clear objectives, let alone outcomes. in recent years, mangroves have been subject to various land and protected species acts. yet one would barely notice this fact. guyana’s coastal forests are dominated by acres of black species (avicennia germinans), with patches of white species (laguncularia racemosa) that compete for nutrient rich soils. while the gmrp is primarily concerned with mudbanks, its participants also worry that sea-level rise could upend this dynamic. indeed, climate change leaves no time for humans to negotiate a “contract with nature” (latour 2014, 6–7). these regulations provoke porous zones of inquiry about the relevance of climate-adaptation policies like the gmrp. how best to relate to mangroves? when does a mangrove tree form part of a forest or sea defense? why and who cares about a forest under siege? in forests we witness a practical redefinition of expertise, one that shifts symbolic understandings and experiences of the world amid ecological crisis (kohn 2015). mangroves demonstrate that climate change forces experts to imagine a future world without humans to manage ecological crises in the present (chakrabarty 2009). as julie cruikshank (2005, 3) writes of melting glaciers, “they take action and respond to their surroundings” in ways that can challenge memories and radically reroute narratives of a given place. mangroves, too, are part of a speculative web of not only facts but also expert figures, technologies, and coalitions that make a place imaginable (ogden 2011). but mangroves are not solely metaphors about the specters of human agency in the anthropocene. they also provide starting points for an analysis of the ways nonhuman matter mobilizes epistemic politics or distinctions in the day-to-day labor of knowledge production (stoler 2008). scholars in the social studies and anthropology of finance have taken up this point with vigor in recent years. their studies have illustrated that economists and other finance experts do not operate in a predetermined market environment but rather constitute markets and market activity through their expert practices (callon 1998). thus, the discipline of economics plays a pivotal role in the practical making of the market and the circulation of its discourses (lee and lipuma 2002; appadurai 2015). decisions about, say, computational programs or the use of particular variables in a formula act as performative utterances, in j. l. austin’s sense, producing effects with identifiable consequences on markets. this emphasis on the performativity of expertise counters a certain sort of essentialism, revealing how cultures of expertise seek to exert analytical authority over the world as well as other groups of experts (du gay 2010; see also bourdieu 1991). donald mackenzie’s (2006) analysis of option pricing, for example, troubles the idea that mathematical formulas are self-evident snapshots of preexisting reality and suggests that they are instead an “engine” for producing that reality. expertise has proven no less performative within the context of climate adaptation. their models help gmrp participants to define and monitor vulnerable forests through the construction and maintenance of grass buffers, apiaries, and fences. but, at the same time as they build these infrastructures, they learn to question the relevance of their models and the expert practices through which observations and measurements can be made. thus modeling operations “interweave ‘words’ and ‘actions’” (mackenzie, muniesa, and siu 2007, 5), exposing gmrp participants’ dependencies on mangroves to make climate adaptation a possible and sustainable practice. i suggest that these dependencies influence the ecology of human expertise and experts’ collaborative efforts to create epistemic paradigms about vulnerable environments. in other words, mangroves reciprocally constitute the gmrp’s operational lexicon. though inconsistent in both form and function, they are resources for expert improvisation and contribute to the operative logics of climate adaptation. it is no surprise then that gmrp participants find value in working and thinking with mangroves, even though they do not have full confidence in them. mangroves have become preferred things for use in considering the limits of expertise. specifically, they are essential to what adriana petryna (2015, 150) calls “blindsidedness.” this is a condition in which undeniable climatological realities affect experts in such a way that they have no time to act and guarantee business as usual. beyond modeling operations, climate adaptation depends on modes of self-reflection that find potential in the collapse, or even the erasure, of expert jurisdictions. as i detail below, gmrp participants have no problem admitting that they are less than prepared for climate change; they question if any person, species, or place is capable of adapting to its future. epistemic jujitsu systems of mudbanks have been active in the amazon river and basin for the past five thousand years. dutch and british colonial explorers’ travelogues offer some of the first documented evidence of mudbank migrations (e.g., schomburgk 1922). colonial administrators marshaled these texts to finance agricultural labs and research in the region (winter 1883). in turn, slaves and indentured laborers toiled on plantations, which influenced where engineers preserved mangrove forests or built seawalls (rodney 1981, 31–33). certainly, south america’s guianese coast has historically been a place for entangled political and knowledge projects invested in taming mud’s recalcitrant form. this means that sea defense belongs within a “greater ecology of modern expertise” (redfield 2000, 23) dedicated to reordering relations between nature and technology. the first time engineers completed a study to investigate mudbank migration was in the early 1920s. the british colonial governor recruited foreign experts with experience in low-lying delta regions for the task (case 1920). gleaning insights from plantation estate records dating to the early 1800s, they identified that mangroves survive in areas with ample mudbanks. but it was unclear to them why and how some areas of the coast become more hospitable for mangroves after mudbanks migrate. in response, the governor institutionalized the “case method,” a practice that involves engineers taking walks along the shore to monitor mudbanks and related erosion. as noted in the project report: “there is no mistake about it, our enemy is the sea. it is our business to find out what we don’t know, what hitherto we have hardly begin [sic] to find out, what he [the sea] is doing . . . and whether by a kind of jujitsu we can use our own strength against him” (case 1920, 8). the last case method study was completed in 1962 by the british guianese ministry of public works, along with engineers affiliated with delft hydraulics laboratories. with the aid of shore walks and eco-sounders attached to boats, the researchers conducted bathymetric surveys (underwater topography studies). the study discovered that mudbanks migrate every thirty years and that, during this migration, they cause microprocesses of erosion (delft hydraulics laboratory 1962, 10). in areas where these microprocesses occurred, mangroves uprooted but regrew within three years. the researchers described these dynamics as “subject to special laws, that their consequences can be predicted and that through their magnitude indeed prevent human control” (delft hydraulics laboratory 1962, unpaged preface). in light of the surveys, engineers further concentrated their efforts on building and maintaining seawalls. wieber bijker (2007, 120) has analyzed the (dutch) character of the engineering that inspired the study. he describes it as oriented toward immediate strategies to “keep the water out” to prevent disaster. predicting such events, he argues, is a “technical” issue secondary to the “professional” obligation of engineers to act at whatever cost (bijker 2007, 121). hence, even though the 1962 team identified the hypothetical mechanisms for predicting mangrove regeneration, engineers were never interested in turning mangroves into research objects or in considering how they might aid in the project of turning the sea’s powers against itself. their narrow focus on seawalls was further informed by the rigid administration of resources, racial-political chauvinism, and fiscal crises that characterized guyana’s postindependence socialist era from 1974 to 1985 (rose 2002).3 i do not mean to suggest that engineers uniformly believed in a clear association between seawalls and aspirations for modernization.4 many simply made do with crumbling seawalls and unbalanced budgets, persevering as best they could in the face of the sea. even with the massive debt that accompanied liberalization in the early 1990s, mangrove research was deprioritized with respect to plans for expensive seawalls.5 priorities shifted in 2005 after unprecedented rainfall contributed to a disastrous flood. postdisaster engineering assessments showed that the drainage system could not withstand future storms unless it underwent a comprehensive overhaul in design (kirby, messen, and ogink 2006). likewise, local media raised alarm that the next flood could come from waves overtopping seawalls. engineering research articles of the period reinforce these concerns. some warn that sea-level rise will contribute to extreme periods of erosion that will compromise seawalls (ledden et al. 2009). others highlight the “lack of understanding” (dalrymple and pulwarty 2006, 8) about the effects of wave intensity on mangroves. a new urgency for mangrove research emerged in the wake of the disenchantment with seawalls. the guyanese government responded by releasing its low carbon development strategy (lcds), a report that notes the potential role of mangroves in sea defense (government of guyana 2010, 11). this strategy informs the government’s second national communication to the united nations framework convention on climate change, which also highlights mangrove research as an invaluable component of climate adaptation. laying out national priorities around the various blind spots of the copenhagen accord, the lcds creates a critical nexus between transnational climate negotiations and the research networks needed to sustain them. the european union’s global climate change alliance is one such network that caught the attention of guyana’s newly mangrove-conscious government.6 similar to that of the policy domain of public health, the potential value of climate adaptation is shaped by the research networks that emerge from previous or anticipated crises. the technopolitical careers of mangroves are implicated in these networks, but never predictably so. as research objects, mangroves have the potential to organize adaptation research and resources beyond national or site-specific vulnerabilities. more than sentinel species, they are forests that sustain the travels and propagations of diverse species assemblages (tsing 2015). as detailed in the 2011 film island president, mangroves are persuasive for climate adaptation in some places more than others. the threat of sea-level rise has thus created something of a paradox for guyanese sea defense. it places an extraordinary burden on mangroves to make visible habits of practice and coexistence, as well as their increasing discontinuities. isabelle stengers (2000, 159) argues that such visibility is central to how expertise materializes in risk-policy contexts more broadly. experts, she explains, “have to recognize rather quickly that they are not qualified to speak of other stories, nor to follow through all its consequences the logic of the story they [wish to] advocate.” so, while the threat of sea-level rise reaffirms the vulnerability of mangroves in guyana, it has made engineers even more dependent on them as sea defense and in turn, on other kinds of expertise. models for adaptation the collaborative efforts of grmp participants involved learning to treat sea defense as a complex system of animate and inanimate parts. the ministry of public works recruited a french geoscientist, nicholas, to create a model of mangrove and mudbank interactions. while engineers had created mudbank models predicting migration routes since the 1960s, gmrp participants needed something more: a model that could detail precise mangrove regeneration processes and how mangroves colonized land before, during, and after a migration. by discerning patterns in these processes, they hoped to locate fertile areas to plant trees. building on prior research about mudbanks in french guiana, nicholas’s work with the gmrp extended to research teams and stations across the region. on some days nicholas walked forests accompanied by engineers or led workshops at the ministry on modeling software and methods. at other times, he combed through a computerized archive of mudbank images downloaded from french and american satellites. these images afforded a regional perspective on mudbank migrations that complemented the ministry’s existing records of wave data generated from bathymetric surveys. in the context of the gmrp, mangrove regeneration is targeted by planetary research infrastructures, systematic measuring practices, and graphic representations. nicholas’s computer mouse clicked as he adjusted the resolution of mudbank images on a laptop while i interviewed him at his ministry office. i asked him what the images told him about mangroves. he dragged his cursor over black lines that marked the staggered increase and decrease in the width of the guyanese shore. more than evidence of mudbank migration, nicholas said that the images offered “a glimpse of mangroves” in action. this is sea defense without guarantees, a gap that makes explicit the work required to realize climate adaptation. nicholas modeled these dynamics with a numerical approach called the simulating waves nearshore (swan) model. building on the laboratory work of johan winterwerp and colleagues (winterwerp et al. 2007), the swan model uses differential equations that assume the height and direction of dampened waves in two dimensions. the swan model details a particular dynamic locally called “sling-mud,” a gelatinous mixture that breaks off from mudbanks as they migrate and that anchors mangrove roots both in water and on land. nicholas incorporated parameterizations to account for sling-mud’s density. with wave data from several locations, he found that the shore is shifting progressively from muddy to sandy-silty conditions. based on historical satellite images of regional mudbanks, he also assumed that sandy-silty areas would have more underdeveloped forests compared to muddy areas. but when nicholas and the engineers went on shore walks, they encountered muddy areas with more eroded land than the swan model indicated. surprised, they watched where waves broke and fringes of mangroves dissipated. these areas had seedlings that took root in shallow crevices. seedlings arrived there after falling from mature trees and being dispersed by waves, drawn into currents without volition and congealed with sling-mud before being carried great distances and dropped arbitrarily on the shore. nicholas speculated that because the crevices were shallow, seedlings were not securely anchored by sling-mud. he took photographs to document their efforts. some had limp stems while others sprouted straight into the air, seemingly determined to outmaneuver the terrain. engineers picked at the ground around seawalls to see if those structures were impacting and contributing to the harsh conditions. seedlings abounded, yet gmrp participants scarcely recognized them. after encountering erosion in other areas that the swan model did not detect, engineers began to treat those forests as surveillance sites. they reasoned that by monitoring insecure seedlings at these sites, they might obtain new sources of insight about tree restoration. as one engineer explained: “we [engineers] recognize moments of sedimentation. like the other day, i was near celina’s [a resort] and saw seedlings everywhere. they weren’t there a week ago when the mud there was low [eroded]. . . . we’ll see what they will do.” this engineer expressed a combination of wariness and curiosity about seedlings, distinguishing between the importance of sling-mud anchoring them and their relative autonomy to decide if and when to sprout. his reflections exemplify what natasha myers (2015, 43) calls “enchantments” with “the vegetal sensorium,” or the human interest in learning to become aware of plant sentience. thinking with plant practitioners, myers treats plants as companions that generate interspecies relations through their movement and their physical structures. in the case of the gmrp, seedlings shaped engineers’ intuitions about complex processes of sedimentation that sometimes hang together and at other times fall apart. seedlings encouraged engineers to develop patience for sling-mud and the imperfect role it plays in the long duration of forest monitoring. from the tiniest to the largest particles, sling-mud interacts with other kinds of things: rocks, plankton, fish, and especially sea-defense structures that create conditions for mangrove regeneration. groynes offer another example. built perpendicular to seawalls, groynes in guyana are wooden structures first implemented by the colonial dutch to reduce erosion. it is unknown, however, to what extent groynes impact sling-mud compared to other kinds of sediment such as sand and clay. as with nicholas’s attempts to calibrate sling-mud density, engineers have used tide gauges to estimate erosion near groynes. but they have found that the composition of sediment changes each day and that erosion near groynes is a process too dynamic to compute. several engineers talked about this indeterminacy by recounting their experiences from childhood into the present day, seeing mangroves near some groynes and not others. a few proposed that the gmrp create a plan to end the ministry’s dependence on groynes. others had a less radical proposal that involved building tubes out of a flexible material that, when placed near groynes, could act as wave buffers to accommodate tree roots. indeed, gmrp participants were awkward intruders into the lives of mangroves. more than a paradigm shift, their work was a relational effect of geologic processes (yusoff 2013; mclean 2011). but what kinds of worlds do their intrusions create, undermine, or sustain? and why does it matter if mangroves thrive in them or not? nicholas confronted these questions when he explained to me a disagreement he had had with an engineer over the distribution of red mangroves (rhizophora mangle) in guyana. he conceded: “i was suspicious of red mangroves. i’ve never seen them anywhere else colonizing behind black mangroves. but it’s true; they are no longer right in the sea water. many are especially near dams and canals draining freshwater. but geologically, for millennia, the coast has not been this way. they might give us a clue about what human development is doing to the shore.” alongside engineers, nicholas was learning to pay attention to things mangroves pay attention to, even if those things challenged his assumptions about interand intraspecies living. with shore-walk observations in mind, he began to change his views on mangrove regeneration. he now granted that mangrove regeneration was far more complex than he had initially thought and not primarily dependent on mudbank migration events. in consultation with the engineers, he decided that it was not necessary to refine the swan model to move forward with the gmrp. instead, the participants would focus on forest mapping and tree planting to improve sea defense and their understandings of the shore. the measured rebuffs of the swan model by grmp participants show how climate-adaptation strategies can depend on nonhuman matter coming to shape new possibilities for expert action. following stefan helmreich (2011, 138), mangroves “athwart theory” as entities that help experts “tack back and forth between seeing things as explanation and taking them as phenomena to be examined.” this dynamic is central to decision-making in climate adaptation when models prove immediately unhelpful but experts still need to imagine and enact logistical measures.7 a view from the forests reveals that climate adaptation emerges from gmrp participants’ urgent need to draw flexible distinctions between the empirical and the theoretical. enumerating expertise nicholas’s modeling efforts forced the engineers not only to care about counting mangrove trees but also to think about how forest stocks might impinge on the shore itself. kristen hastrup (2013) describes similar concerns among biologists and hunters in northern greenland who are preoccupied with climate-related fluctuations in narwhal populations. biologists have used aerial photography to estimate populations, while hunters estimate populations based on their encounters with prey and melting glaciers. numbers, hastrup suggests, mediate various expert understandings of nature’s potential to help them relate evidence to reality. prior to the gmrp, engineers were not accustomed to identifying mangroves as individual living entities; rather, they saw them as unreliable wave buffers. consequently, they aspired to create maps that could represent tree counts relative to mudbank migration routes. their attempts at mapping required learning to pay attention to subtle changes in the space a tree occupied and what it could potentially do in that space. mapping activities began when a ministry staff member informally interviewed engineers about their backgrounds in geographic information system (gis) mapping techniques. he found that most had no familiarity with these techniques, so he offered some informational sessions about the importance of forest mapping to sea defense. the engineers completed more shore walks to create a useable database for the maps. much of the work of lower-ranked engineers involved forming groups, each responsible for monitoring (il)legal development such as boating docks, housing, and farming along the shore. higher-ranked engineers, who had some background using remote-sensing technologies, were charged with scheduling trips to identify and keep tabs on forest growth. eventually, when a gis specialist was hired, the forests’ coordinates would be computed and engineers’ observations analyzed and transformed into maps. as a search for a gis specialist began, engineers attempted to identify forests that they described as robust, or areas that could possibly forego further development of sea defenses. scouting for robust forests required them to check for characteristics that distinguished species: the length and shape of roots and the height of trees. such distinctions mattered; while black mangroves have sturdier aerial roots, white mangroves are shorter and so are believed to be less susceptible to direct wave impact. the maps were intended, therefore, to present both a virtual stock of forests and patterns of zonation by species. in general, the engineers felt that mapping activities were shaped as much by techniques of counting as by the cataloguing of vulnerability. time spent in forests also informed their views about the practical import of gis. some noted that mapping activities forced them to change their focus and acknowledge the stress that forests placed on their daily routines. consider, for instance, mangrove roots. like spider tentacles clumsily treading the earth, they transform forests into mazes. engineers had to contour their bodies to bend low, becoming fatigued as they traversed entangled roots, trunks, and branches. shore walks helped engineers understand the material character of mangroves’ quotidian presence as sea defense. engineers faced comparable difficulties when they left the forests. one engineer explained that he was ambivalent about the ministry’s search for a gis specialist. he explained, “the gmrp is back and forth. you move two steps forward and then when another [mangrove] washes away, one step back.” but he noted that the ministry seemed to be reinvigorated by mangroves. with institutional support from the global climate change alliance, it sponsored public-awareness campaigns about mangroves and a regional gis conference to share information about sea-defense standards and protocols. this engineer’s conflicted attitude parallels the differences between the gmrp and the case of kristen hastrup’s narwhals. for hastrup (2013, 10), “the case of narwhal counting . . . shows how both the counted and the uncounted enter into the equation that results in an iconic number on which to act.” but rather than assuming nature’s potential, gmrp mapping activities prompted a second look at the expertise such counting entails. for most engineers, mangroves are difficult to work with not solely because the swan model cannot predict their life spans but also because of their biomateriality. to this extent, gis training is not in tension with their established epistemological frameworks or even an index of the ministry’s historical struggles maintaining sea defenses. rather, engineers acknowledge that mapping proves useful, but only because of experiential encounters with mangroves whereby expert habits, numerical assumptions, and morale are adjusted to the materiality of the forest. the mapping done by the gmrp reverses the common narrative about climate adaptation as a strategy of defense against climate change and its destructive impacts. instead, we see that experts interpret climate adaptation as a strategy in “modulating natural processes,” so that “nature’s diversity provides the ‘service’ of cancelling out the very risks that nature itself presents” (braun 2014, 59). mangroves are thus never simply objects to be enumerated; instead, they are entities that prompt certain ways of knowing. doubt, cultivated as mapping continued, mangrove-planting activities commenced. while mangrove cultivation was new for guyanese sea defense, it was not entirely unheard of in other situations of climate adaptation. particularly in oceania, the mass mediation of the 2004 tsunami and heightened interest in carbon markets led organizations such as the alliance of small island states to sponsor tree planting (lipset 2013). while many states mobilize mangrove research through a geopolitics of disaster, mangroves are directly accessible through experts’ efforts to plant them. by the spring of 2010, environmental consultants affiliated with guyana’s ministry of agriculture were responsible for implementing planting activities. all but one of the consultants was guyanese, with prior experience working on state-sponsored coastal environmental projects and, therefore, some experiential knowledge of mudbanks. with backgrounds in conservation and agroforestry, these consultants brought into focus mangroves’ uncanniness as entities whose remedial properties and value lay in their situated vulnerability. their efforts initially focused on planting black species, so as to not disrupt the shore’s virtual monoculture. they sourced seedlings from the ministry’s nursery, a decision they hoped would ensure sturdier roots than if seedlings were collected from wild forests. i walked with an environmental consultant to check on land that the team was preparing to sow. as we made our way, she explained: “we can declare the mangroves protected, but we can’t just sit in sunshine. [what we do] isn’t just about protecting mangroves: planting them . . . research is important . . .” the plots had their own disorienting presence, at once amplifying and scrambling the boundaries of the shoreline. but for seedlings to get their bearings, some concessions were required. one of these concessions was the seawall. at a planting strategy meeting i attended, an engineer warned that on shore walks he had observed waves overtopping the seawall in places where it had never happened before. “does this mean we should plant in front or behind the seawall?” he queried. an environmental consultant responded, suggesting that location was not the main issue in this instance. mangroves’ potential, in his account, lay in the availability of other kinds of plants to protect their stems and roots. he stressed that when dealing with mangroves the priority is to not discriminate, reiterating that mangroves can thrive near seawalls with mudbanks. along these lines, he proposed that they also plant marine grasses (e.g., spartina alterniaflora, also known as cord-grass) in what he called “acutely vulnerable” areas. he detailed distinctions between mangrove and marine grass species that were morphological, particularly the appearance and length of their root systems. the root systems also produced sensory capacities: “once grasses are there, more whites [mangrove species] will know to come and be near the black mangrove.” the consultant underscored this point by reminding the engineer of the multiple definitions of mangrove: “people often think that a mangrove is just a tree . . . but i mean a community of plants growing along the shore—a mangle of forests.” there is very little fixed about taxonomy (raffles 2011). the environmental consultant was not using the word mangle as a referent for a specific mangrove species, but was rather describing communities of plants with the potential to be domesticated as wave buffers. his distinction underscores a fundamental point of climate adaptation. the ineluctable blend of nature and technology in the practice of sea defense challenges the idea that climate adaptation is a mere effect of human science and its taxonomies. more than managed sites of biodiversity, these forests have lives that often push back and reorient algorithms of sea defense. in these forests, encounters unfold, and projects rise and fall. planting took place by trial and error. dozens of volunteers helped the environmental consultants fill plastic bags with mud and seeds. they transported the bags to the shore at low tide and used wooden planks to transverse the muddy shores on their knees. they clawed through the mud to create crevices for the seedlings, alternating between bags filled with mangrove and grass seedlings. in some locations, the environmental consultants conceded that this technique might not be enough and so built fences to help stabilize seedlings’ roots. after one season, they experienced some success, but still lost more than twenty thousand mangrove seedlings. determined not to give in to the sea, the engineers prescribed that subsequent planting sessions would involve storing mangrove seedlings in the cracks of seawalls to help acclimate them to the shore before planting. in other cases, the environmental consultants outsourced nursery production to people who lived near forests, paying them to grow mangroves and to plant them only after they had matured. in his analysis of mangroves and climate adaptation in suriname, ravic nijbroek (2014, 534) argues that planting is a “situated environmental science.” based on historical field observations, experts have employed mudbank-migration models to justify planting and, at the same time, to acknowledge that mangroves are always already susceptible to so-called maladaptation. in both guyana and suriname, mangroves extend influence far enough and long enough to accommodate speculations about the terms of “collective empiricism” (daston and lunbeck 2011, 7; see also west 2008). ultimately, the gmrp relied on planting procedures its participants knew were more than likely untenable as tides rose, but they did so in an attempt to increase forest populations in the present. one environmental consultant i interviewed spoke unselfconsciously about this paradox. she explained that the gmrp was establishing a new framework in “guyanese forestry,” a framework in contrast to what she interpreted as the global climate change alliance’s reductionist idea of mangrove nurseries. “the lady who did [the initial policy brief], her expertise was in mangrove nurseries in the asian context, so it didn’t have any of our specifics. a nursery is a nursery? no. but the mangrove protocol we now have talks about erosion. it’s filled with stuff our engineers think blocks mangroves, those unknown processes [like sling-mud], you know. . . . with this [the gmrp], we have had to become a slew of local forest experts.” although she had experience rehabilitating sea-turtle habitats in northeastern guyana, this consultant’s time planting pushed her to think of mangroves in a new way. they proved to be not merely standing reserves, but tacit reminders to humans of the shore’s insecurity. her objections to the initial policy brief demonstrate that climate adaptation depends on experts recognizing that their models and realities may not always align. based on her time with the gmrp, the consultant worried that this fact is not so obvious once expert knowledge about climate adaptation achieves closure. the gmrp’s planting activities can thus be understood as what anthropologists of science, following michael fischer (2009), call experimental systems, instruments and practices that shape expert understandings of nature and its mutability. through planting activities, gmrp participants have learned to treat differences and fluctuations within plant communities as essential components of climate adaptation. as such, their doubts about the life spans of trees remain useful resources for thinking about empirical matters (mathews 2014). importantly, these doubts underscore divisions in labor. engineers remain invested in shore walks, albeit with an emphasis on tracking erosion and forest stocks. environmental consultants are primarily invested in planting and tracking forest succession. but in the context of the gmrp, they have also “become a slew of local forest experts,” meaning that their putatively translocal expertise has absorbed and been transformed by a new set of experiences with forests. putting the cart before the horse with planting underway, the environmental consultants were eager to recruit another group of experts, beekeepers, to further advance their adaptation work. the beekeepers were drawn into the gmrp because of the environmental consultants’ belief that apiaries had the potential to increase mangrove populations. the environmental consultants interpreted beekeepers’ practices as commensurate with theirs and with those of the engineers and nicholas, since beekeepers were intimately familiar with the dynamics of mangrove forests even if their attention was focused differently. yet the gmrp’s turn to beekeepers serves as a reminder that different expert practices produce different realities (mol 2002). the continual rediscovery of mangrove reality through different expert lenses and the subsequent adjustment of expert practices prove integral to the way in which gmrp participants perceive mangroves as vulnerable. for example, instead of interpreting the life span of mangroves as mainly contingent on mudbanks, the beekeepers prompted the gmrp to rethink mangroves’ life cycles through pollination as well. climate adaptation not only has a tendency to disorient expertise but also to invite its reinvention through appeals to still other ways of understanding living things. but as the ecology of experts becomes more and more complex, these ways of understanding can diverge rather than converge, creating tensions that undermine an allegedly collaborative and synthetic enterprise such as the gmrp. beekeepers working on the coast rely on an indigenous species of stingless bees (meliponinae) that relies on black mangrove trees for feeding and breeding grounds (bradbear 2009). due to their particular scent, nectar type, and color of flower, black mangroves contribute to what guyanese beekeepers call “tar honey” pollination. even though mangroves are optimal feeding grounds for bees, beekeepers have had uneven success in coastal forests due to urbanization. consequently, many professional beekeepers now work in the interior amazonian region consulting on microfinance programs, developing apiaries with river-based red mangroves. the beekeepers’ initial concern about the gmrp revolved around whether they would receive short-term compensation for moving from the interior back to the coast. they claimed that it would take months to adjust their bees to a new landscape. the transition period, they argued, was an intuitive matter as much as a technical one, a point that a well-seasoned beekeeper knows all too well. they also requested private land plots to accommodate their bees’ fourto five-mile flight patterns. yet environmental consultants turned a deaf ear to the beekeepers, encouraging them to provide more scientific evidence for their requests. citing nicholas’s and the engineers’ work with the swan model, the environmental consultants warned that even if land officials granted plots, they were not confident about where land would eventually erode. ultimately, they asked beekeepers to adapt their methods to smaller areas in reserves. the boundaries the environmental consultants articulated and the exclusions that they performed simultaneously coordinated and undermined another community of experts’ sustained interest in mangroves. the environmental consultants’ request reverberated well beyond the boundaries of the reserves. the home of edward, a beekeeper consulting with the gmrp, signaled the tensions underlying their relationship. mechanical toy bees hung from ceilings, educational posters describing bee species lined walls, and honey extractors and frames were stacked on floors. resembling a museum display, his home spoke of an unstinting devotion to the insect, distinct from the ordinary world in which he struggled to master his craft undisturbed. a few days after edward met with consultants about land plots, he explained to me the apparent disjuncture between his practices and their request. “no bees, no trees. . . . they [the consultants] don’t understand. . . . they are putting the cart before the horse.” edward suggested that the swan model itself was a contributing factor to the destruction of forests through its elevation of sedimentation and mudscapes over pollination. to further emphasize this point, he narrated the history of the arrival of africanized bees (apis mellifera) to the coastal mangrove apiaries. within the first years of handling africanized bees, edward recounted that the majority of the stingless population collapsed. the introduction of a new species pushed beekeepers out of business because they did not know how to “smoke out” the bees’ aggressive behavior. by the late 1980s, edward and his colleagues had adapted to the new species, but it was already too late. much of the standing mangrove forest where he had worked was gone. edward explained: “by the time the mangroves were destroyed i really began to learn the bees’ flight, how to read them. i could tell you if the rain was going to fall, how long, when the trees are blossoming. . . . if i visited my hive i saw them working. they sing and move to make it plain to me that mangroves are healthy despite whatever cycle of erosion.” edward regards his expertise as grounded in the entangled histories of bee, human, and plant kinetics that have contributed to climatological insecurities (kosek 2010). he reframes a taken-for-granted assumption of the swan model, arguing that bees can aid mangroves even during mudbanks’ microerosion cycles. the expert focus on pollination created awareness among gmrp participants about subtle variations and temporalities in mangrove regeneration, disrupting certain assumptions on which the group relied. pollination offered a new view toward the resurrection, not merely the transformation, of mangrove forests. at the same time, pollination is indifferent to the expert modes of organization, measurement, and observation that the gmrp envisions as crucial to mangroves’ protection. bees and mangroves do have a coevolutionary relationship with mudbanks. but bees have their own everyday lives of communication and occupation that has often simply ignored mangroves. it is in such moments of divergence that it becomes unclear who is adapting to what and to whom. these entanglements have unsettling effects that disrupt domains of expertise within the gmrp. climate adaptation, therefore, is rarely born out of convenience, but rather out of the necessity of recognizing the power of the world to challenge and reshape expert paradigms. conclusion: inverse performativity mangroves are good to think with, especially as to who or what should count as expert in the anthropocene. they are the evidence gmrp participants use to issue warnings about sea-level rise. at the same time, mangroves participate in the material constitution of expert practices. while gmrp participants recognize mangroves’ capacity for sea defense, mangroves challenge existing arrangements of human defense technologies like seawalls and groynes. in so doing, mangroves foster relations that blur boundaries between land and sea, animate and inanimate, nature and society in manners rarely anticipated by technoscientific bureaucracies. sometimes glossed as simple wave buffers, mangroves are often seen in pragmatic terms of their technological value. but as i have shown, mangroves—as seed pods, root systems, and objects of pollination—are also material forces that inform and challenge expert practices in diverse ways. they coordinate activities between gmrp participant groups while also placing these groups in tension with one another, as each seeks to advance its own ideas for mangrove protection, management, or change. there are a number of different theoretical approaches for framing the demands on and for expertise that i have laid out here. throughout this article, i have suggested that one approach is to treat climate adaptation as a specific case of a move away from representationalist approaches to performativity (mitchell 2002; pickering 1995). climate adaptation, on this view, takes its cues from karen barad’s (2003) philosophy of posthumanist performativity. barad emphasizes the relational ontology that informs the production of technoscientific expertise, particularly with regard to the apparatuses experts use to make observations. apparatuses are not “static arrangements” (barad 2003, 816) but sets of practices that enact boundaries, allowing experts to see certain things in the world and not others. in other words, there is no inherent separation between the observer and the observed. apparatuses are a property of the phenomena observed; they create obligations and demand particular kinds of responses from experts. for barad, technoscientific facts are not a given, and neither are the relationships experts cultivate with apparatuses. a recursive relationship between apparatuses and the realities gmrp participants attempt to model is also at play in their work with mangroves. in the first instance, as i have shown, they make observational assessments about the kinds of vulnerability that exist in forests, such that their own models come into question. second, these assessments provoke participants to collaborate across divisions of specialization, labor, and socio-professional affiliation to respond to mangrove loss. third, these efforts at collaboration yield mixed, uncertain, and sometimes contentious results. this relational ontology is emblematic of climate-adaptation policy’s operative logics, or what i would call inverse performativity. it is a process whereby an unruly world forces one expert group to seek help from others, building a new ecology of expertise to adapt to a changing climate.8 thinking in terms of inverse performativity helps to clarify not only how climatological expertise is produced but also how it materializes. ethnographic studies of climate change have taken up this point to demonstrate the role that model outputs play in the formation of expert cultures (lahsen 2005; taddei 2012). uncertainty emerges as a central theme, with scholars detailing discourses about model accuracy, visual styles of models, and the socio-political stakes of modeling. but as i have suggested, settings like the gmrp also force experts to speculate about the validity of their own and others’ models and the importance of activities besides modeling (like shore walks and plantings). the idea that climate adaptation depends solely on modeling operations is not self-evident. instead, the efficacy of this claim is continuously remade, as experts learn to engage vulnerable environments. and while they learn, the nonhuman world continues to wield a considerable force that pays little heed to experts’ ideas and activities. many places in which experts implement climate-adaptation policies are more than vulnerable; they are experiencing radical biodiversity loss. this distinction is important because it reveals the differential, yet indeterminate material conditions that shape the formation of climate-adaptation policies. it reminds us why models matter in climate adaptation: they can pattern the chances of certain humans and nonhumans to survive the next disaster. sometimes models can shore up relationships of accountability (scott 2014). to this extent, anthropological studies of climate adaptation require ethnographic specificity about knowledge production and the epistemic politics that make adaptation imaginable. in particular, climate adaptation raises questions about the resilience of local and national expertise and the influence of transnational climate institutions in disavowing that expertise.9 climate adaptation can make the expert seem rather vulnerable. in what are often concerning or even desperate conditions, other cultures of expertise and the nonhuman world are not always on the expert’s side. the gmrp participants’ first-order analyses of mudbanks and mangroves aptly demonstrate these concerns. from tacit to explicit claims about the sociality of mangroves, the participants recognize that climate adaptation constitutes a moving target. the turn to climate adaptation implicates them in broader conversations about modernization as a relic of the anthropocene. these conversations unfold within a national context in which sea defense has been continuously made over by external agents—be these mudbanks, colonizers, donor organizations, or the sea. to be sure, these conversations have broader implications for environmental justice, particularly as disasters loom that blur contestations over social and environmental forms of citizenship (vaughn 2012). inverse performativity thus occurs not only within rarified domains of government science but also across other sectors of society, as the experiences of beekeepers with the gmrp indicate. the inverse performativity of the anthropocene shapes expert understandings of biopolitical possibility in geological time. how climate adaptation develops in concert with genealogies of power, geopolitics, and narrative strategies about nature lies at the very heart of these understandings. yet it is also incumbent on us to consider what constitutes expertise and how this question materializes across a vulnerable planet. notes acknowledgments i am indebted to all those who worked for the gmrp and welcomed me into their professional and personal lives. my explorations would not have been possible without their interest and, most of all, their patience. i am grateful to andy graan, elina hartikainen, karl swinehart, joe masco, david bond, ben orlove, ram natarajan, and don moore for their sharp readings of various drafts. i would like to give special thanks to jake kosek for challenges that pushed me to think critically about the many forms expertise and vulnerability take. this article also benefited from engagements at the mit-harvard workshop for the history of environment, agriculture, technology, and science, the ethnography and social theory colloquium in the department of anthropology at yale university, and the environmental studies workshop at the university of chicago. the cultural anthropology editorial collective and anonymous reviewers provided invaluable feedback that made this article possible. i especially thank dominic boyer for his thoughtful suggestions and encouragement. finally, research for this article was supported by the mellon mays–social science research council grant initiatives and the american council of learned societies. 1. i refer to many of my informants by pseudonyms to protect their privacy. 2. archaeologists and historical anthropologists debate whether the early sugar industry’s grid had any overlap with flood structures built by arawak communities in the guianas’ upriver region (whitehead, heckenberger, and simon 2010). 3. historians attribute a so-called technical crisis during this period to the majority afro-guyanese socialist government’s doctrine of party paramountcy. this doctrine ensured that high-level government positions were filled by those supporting guyana’s vanguard party, which espoused a julius nyerere–inspired black nationalist populism. 4. the association between engineering and modernization in guyana, as in many other parts of the world, cannot be overstated. the ethnographic record is ripe with examples of plantation infrastructures as components of a total social institution that shape, among other things, racial-political identities. in the case of state bureaucracy, many speculate that the socialist government prioritized funding for sea defense over irrigation and drainage because indo-guyanese were the majority ethnic labor pool in the agriculture sector. the divestment ignited racial divisions within the engineering public sector. since, engineers have referred to the ministry of public works as a stereotypically “black agency,” and the ministry of agriculture as a stereotypically “indian agency.” in practice, however, these stereotypes are routinely ignored or circumvented for technical and political reasons (see williams 1991). 5. this critique of the state’s technical crisis was reversed with liberalization when a majority indo-guyanese government came into power and was understood by many to espouse the “hinduization” of state bureaucracy. 6. the lcds has involved a shift in the state’s focus from agriculture toward green economies that purportedly rely on amerindian forms of expertise (e.g., investments in microcapital grants in carbon markets and tourism in the interior amazonian region). this means that gmrp participants’ time spent “shadowboxing in the mangrove” (price and price 1997) reshapes links not only between expertise and identity but also with landscapes vulnerable to climate change. 7. gmrp participants’ efforts to act in the interim resemble what lauren berlant (2011, 24) calls “crisis ordinariness,” or adjustments to living with unpredictability in the everyday. 8. it is with this point about collaboration between expert groups that i extend karen barad’s notion of a posthumanist performativity. as the gmrp’s work suggests, not every expert claims or desires to be a posthumanist in the same way; philosophies of posthumanism create boundaries as much as they erase them. 9. i am not advocating salvage ethnography. instead, i focus on the material-representational 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dialogue with other futures, or in conflict with them.1 gustav peebles (2008, 238), in an analysis of the nationalist politics of paper currency, has suggested that “the state, long recognized as a colonizer both of the past and of physical territory . . . proves itself adept at colonizing the future, as well.” but we might well ask: is the state always successful in this grab? or can futures be decolonized, as it were? if futures can get confiscated, misdirected, or disrupted, then how might they subsequently get reappropriated, repaired, or reconnected? what is the relationship between activist futures and state futures? it is this line of inquiry that i take up here, via an analysis of a recent french militant form, a circular march called the ronde infinie des obstinés, the “infinite rounds of the stubborn.” in june 2009, three days after arriving in france, i came upon the ronde in the early evening atop the hill at the heart of paris’s latin quarter. it had taken up residence that day in the long cobblestone square beside the iron fence of the panthéon. as i began walking alongside the protesters, the air cooled, the light faded gray behind forks and tongues of cloud, and the monumental architecture emitted its usual hush. wreathed in red flags, the ronde was already established when i arrived, a circle drawn up out of a small crowd of academics from local universities. they were walking around and around the square, one person behind the next, carrying banners and backpacks, retracing the same circular path as if aiming at their own past footsteps. figure 1. the ronde beside the panthéon, june 2009. sketch by eli thorkelson, based on a photograph by jean-claude saget. the ronde had initially been launched by french activist academics in march 2009, during nicolas sarkozy’s five-year term as president of the french republic. the sarkozy administration’s neoliberalizing civil-service reforms had provoked ire across a wide swath of french public-sector workers, ranging from those employed in hospitals and the justice system to those in public schools and universities, yet substantial protests by students and civil servants had produced scant results. in theory, the ronde was a strategy of last resort, intended to overcome the sarkozy administration’s antipathy to protest politics. but last resorts are strange places, and even the ronde’s organizers seemed somewhat surprised by the paradoxical nature of their action, as a professor of dance told me during a retrospective interview in 2011: professor: i think that it was kind of the last-chance solution. that is, deciding to march in rounds, it was kind of the last gesture we could imagine. ethnographer: the stubbornnest thing possible? professor: yes, but at the same time, it brought hope back to life. because being together with our colleagues, on an everyday basis, that gave us the courage to continue. . . . we had people come saying it was the last time they were doing it, this thing, which after all was such a, well, an intense site for so many people’s encounters. a kind of madness that we had all shared. ethnographer: why a madness? professor: because there was something totally crazy, after all, about marching in rounds for entire days. i mean, it was at once a despairing act and a very joyous act. it seems to me hard to define. it was really between the two, between the madness of marching in rounds, because no one would receive us, speak to us—it was that too. if we couldn’t speak to representatives of the ministry, there was nothing left but to show that we existed, to talk to the citizens. thus the ronde constituted a paradox on several levels. its incoherent affect turned out to be politically useful: the actors’ political desperation became practical—“brought hope back to life”—by being antipragmatic and antinormative (“crazy”). it instantiated a form of political speech by resorting to a strategy of ritualized corporeality, setting itself apart from other forms of faculty protest—like canceling classes or boycotting paperwork—through its repetitiveness and formality (bell 1992). and it tried to produce political momentum by enacting a temporal impasse, thus playing on the tension between what jane guyer (2007) has called “punctuated” and “enduring” forms of time. as we will see below, the marchers’ desired rupture in state temporality never came to fruition, but a glimmer of a new future nevertheless did emerge at the ronde. yet i claim in this essay that this was a politics of futurity without hope, of optimism pushed outside of subjectivity to the level of ritualized form.2 as we will see, in place of hope, an activist poetics of stubbornness helped keep the ronde in motion. as such, it strikes me that the ronde has something to teach us theoretically about what happens after futures break down, a moment that has preoccupied many recent ethnographers of the present. its nonsubjective and reparative forms of futurity have further implications for our understanding of prefigurative politics (graeber 2002) in other recent radicalisms, like occupy wall street, its european predecessor the indignés, or the 2011 wisconsin statehouse occupation (collins 2012; juris 2012; rasza and kurnik 2012; ruzé 2012). but before we see how the ronde tried to craft a reparative future through rupture, we need to see how futures break down in the first place. theories of broken time after the contemporary donna haraway (2015, 161), thinking about the proliferation of global ecological crises and the stories we tell about them, has observed that “immense irreversible destruction is really in train, not only for the eleven billion or so people who will be on earth near the end of the twenty-first century, but for myriads of other critters too.” but in spite of the ardent debates over the obscure futures of the anthropocene or, as haraway and others call it, the capitalocene, plantationocene, or even chthulucene (haraway et al. 2016; yusoff 2016; todd 2015), the empirical fact remains that not every cultural situation is (yet) attuned to its ecological circumstances. phenomenologically speaking, not everyone’s future is in crisis these days.3 ethnographers of dominant economic sectors in the global north, like biotechnology (rabinow and bennett 2012; rabinow and dan-cohen 2005), finance (holmes 2009), or tech entrepreneurs (marwick 2013), have lately documented futures that seem flush with openness and possibility, however much they may be permeated by a sense of risk or an anxiety about making good calculations. these ethnographers have drawn out of their work a set of deeply affirmative and rather nonlinear categories for apprehending the present and near future. michael fischer’s (2003, 37) notion of emergence, for instance, foregrounds a present distinguished by “multiple interdigitated temporalities,” rooted in a white-collar phenomenology within which “traditional concepts and ways of doing things no longer work.” and paul rabinow (2008, 3) qualifies the contemporary not just temporally—as a “moving ratio” of the modern and the traditional—but also politically, insisting that “its goal is not reform or revolution but rather a type of remediation.” these kinds of categories help us understand the persistence of temporal effervescence and momentum in a world splintered by precarity (e.g., millar 2014). as generalizing discourses in contemporary cultural anthropology, they seem to aspire to a certain magnetism, as if expecting to get all sorts of current ethnographic objects to stick to them, and subsuming various modernisms while also breaking with them.4 i would argue, however, that ethnographic metacategories like emergence and the contemporary, precisely because of their seeming openness, are missing something, and that this something helps us make sense of the ronde.5 given that the ronde was premised on a temporal impasse or closure, it seems inadequate to treat it in terms of affirmative categories that foreclose, in the end, on foreclosure itself. the concept of foreclosure has chiefly been developed in psychoanalysis to designate a “primordial casting-out of a fundamental ‘signifier’ . . . from the symbolic universe of the subject” (laplanche and pontalis 1972, 186; cf. dolar 2012). we can readily socialize this concept, viewing foreclosure as the socio-subjective process by which a given signifier or relationship (a history, a temporality, a form of life, an institution) is cast out of the collective symbolic universe and shuttered. the ronde infinie des obstinés shows us an instance of actors responding to foreclosure in the moment of its perceived arrival; the ronde made for a “desperate” or “crazy” form precisely because of the actors’ overwhelming sense that futurity was getting foreclosed upon—that is, their futurity, good or desirable futurity, the future of the social-democratic university. in this light, to interpret the ronde as a “contemporary” or “emergent” form, in rabinow or fischer’s senses, would be tantamount to trying to take a photograph that contained no shadows. in an effort to help us see the future as not only affirmative (say, as a matter of hopes and aspirations; see appadurai 2013), i would turn here toward a more depressive body of research, one that casts its gaze farther from the epicenters of capitalist production. in this literature, we find analyses of numerous types of temporal breakdown and impasse, reminding us that the ronde’s phenomenology of closure is not, in fact, so distinctive. some theorists have undertaken to show how arrows of time are always arrows of ideological misdirection, pointing somewhere other than where they say they go, whether in the realm of military or of heteroreproductive ideologies (edelman 2004; masco 2008, 2012). others have taken a more phenomenological tack, showing how the arrow has broken down into a moment of blockage or discontinuity: thus lauren berlant (2011, 199) chronicles “the present as impasse” as “a space of time lived without a narrative genre,” while charles piot (2010, 19) finds in a recent togolese case that “the gap between a known but rejected past and an unknown though desired future appears unbridgeable.” piot, nicholas de genova (1997), dominic boyer (2006), and others have also documented a nostalgia for past futures, a formally distinct configuration in which a present bends back toward the unrealized future of a previous timeline. and in response to the amply documented growth of apocalyptic and millenarian tendencies during the post–cold war period (comaroff and comaroff 2000; stewart and harding 1999), jane guyer (2007, 409, 417) has remarked on a “strange evacuation of the temporal frame of the ‘near future’” that is only filled up again by a “punctuated” time of innumerable date-events. video 1. some recent theories of temporal breakdown and impasse. what does this body of research have in common, in spite of its global scope and evident empirical diversity? precisely, i think, that it documents how the present can become disconnected from the future, and how the future can thus come to seem unreachable, dystopian, apocalyptic, loathsome, or just lost. in all these cases, the arrow of time has stopped pointing in a good direction, or points in circles, or has become impossible to endorse. (in edelman’s queer theory case, it is not that the future of heterosexual reproduction has broken down in practice, but that its very continuity strikes him as ideologically repulsive.) in short, in all these cases, futurity has been foreclosed upon. and such a foreclosed future was precisely the ronde’s point of departure. i would suggest that we can only understand the ronde’s desperately reparative futurity as a reaction to such an initial moment of temporal blockage and shattering. let us now see how this reaction was brought into existence. a university movement rises and falls i found myself walking in circles, in circles, in circles. staring blankly at the next body in front of me, sensing the footsteps of the body behind me. we were not walking practically, to get somewhere, nor impractically, for the sake of adventure or recreation, but symbolically: “to show that we exist,” as my interlocutor put it earlier. we were walking reflexively (see silverstein 1993): to establish and stabilize the sign of ourselves walking. we inhabited an odd mix of tenses: at once in an absolute present, where time slowed to a halt and the usual course of life was bracketed, but also in the future anterior (povinelli 2011), so that in the future we would have walked and the government would have had to change course. i walked by myself for a while, surrounded by a big crowd; or struck up conversations with people near me; or overheard things. the other marchers were predominantly french nationals, largely university professors in long dark coats.6 “it’s cold,” i said to a woman beside me; she was small, scarved, with brown hair in a steep slope trailing her face. “yes,” she said, “but less cold than i expected.” we were in the middle of paris, at the symbolic and spatial heart of the french state apparatus, during a major period of campus protest. in july 2007, the just-elected sarkozy administration had introduced sweeping national university reforms, led by then–minister of higher education valérie pécresse (caillé and chanial 2009; neyrat 2008). these reforms aimed to “autonomize” the traditional centralized system of public universities, which had historically been very inexpensive, open to everyone with a high school diploma, governed by a system of council democracy, and chronically underfinanced. incidentally, these universities also had elected campus presidents, an open-shop union system, and tenured civil-servant status for most staff and faculty. they exhibited considerable stratification by race and class, real problems with sexual harassment, and highly dilapidated facilities (beaud et al. 2010, 48–63; hamel 2008; soulié 2009). the 2007 sarkozy reforms, in any event, were far from a direct privatization project. instead, drawing on what is termed new public management (bleiklie 1998; bruno 2009, 2010; scott 2010), the project continued a longer french shift toward contractualized, incentive-based, rankings-oriented and entrepreneurial public administration (boure 2010; musselin 2004; vinokur 2008). the reforms particularly angered the faculty by threatening to increase teaching loads for professors with low publication rates (ertzscheid 2009), and by trying to fold teacher education into more traditional academic master’s programs.7 a student protest movement emerged in response to the reforms, and was only stemmed by a ministerial promise not to raise tuition or admission requirements. by the next academic year, 2008–2009, faculty and staff were increasingly angry with the pace of the reforms, the lack of consultation, and the rising structural threats to their traditional social-democratic university model. in february 2009, a massive faculty strike broke out at public universities across the nation. initially, it consisted of teaching stoppages, symbolic proclamations, and a series of large street demonstrations (manifestations). these events continued throughout the month, but much to the organizers’ frustration, the government dismissed their actions, expressing incredulity at the opposition to the necessary “modernization” of public services. the ronde infinie des obstinés was thus conceived in early march 2009 as a tactic of last resort to overcome the impasse of the movement, reach out to the public, and pressure the ministry. it was organized by a number of faculty at the left-wing university of paris 8 (cohen 2010; soulié 2012). the organizers hailed primarily from the arts and philosophy, and they worked in what i’m told was a collaborative mode: one person invented the name, another proposed the place (on the place de grève, “strike square,” in front of the paris city hall), a third suggested the circular structure (borrowed from the argentinean mothers of the plaza de mayo). the immediate aim was to provoke a response from the minister, and on march 16, they issued an ultimatum: withdraw the contested reforms, or else, “in a week, that is monday, march 23, at noon, if the government has not taken our demands into account, we will march on the place de grève day and night. we will turn day and night to show our stubbornness. we will march without end, for we have no intention of giving in.” the ultimatum went unanswered, and on march 23, the ronde began. in its first and most important incarnation, it continued from that date until may 4, for just over a thousand hours. every hour the rondeurs announced the cumulative duration of their march, and a tally of the hours was kept on a large chalkboard. they circulated a fairly thorough user’s guide: be prepared for a long walk (with water bottles, rain gear, etc.); don’t make too much noise; bring signs or materials for making them; don’t forget your identity papers; distribute tracts to passersby; consider organizing “sonic or theatrical punctuations” or readings. individuals and entire academic departments signed up online to march, and there was often a large crowd of participants, although one older philosophy professor was said to have found himself marching alone, one night at 3 a.m. in any case, as we will see below, its participants described the ronde as a place of unusual effervescence. while some students at paris 8 criticized the faculty for leaving campus to dedicate themselves to the ronde (one called it “bobo,” that is, bohemian-bourgeois), others reported developing newfound intimacies with their professors by marching together. in general, the event attracted positive media coverage, at least from left-wing newspapers like libération and l’humanité, although the spokesman for sarkozy’s party, the ump (union for a popular movement), would eventually describe it as the “rounds of the diehards” (ronde des jusqu’au-boutistes). at the thousand-hour mark in may, the rondeurs held a press conference to criticize the government’s silence: today, as the thousand-and-first hour has come and gone, we have to admit that the government has not wanted to hear a single one of our demands. it has persisted in maintaining its ideological posture, predicated solely on immediate profitability, stigmatizing the risk of thinking as a useless luxury and academic freedoms as mere privileges. instead of negotiations, this government has preferred to stick with lies and threats. . . . the infinite rounds of the stubborn opposes the politicians’ silence with the permanent flux of our speech. and each time we speak, new forms of action are being invented to counter these policies. the ronde came to a halt at this point. “if we could have kept going another two weeks, the minister would have had to say something in response,” one organizer told me, “but people were at their limit.” publicly, of course, the rondeurs cast the situation in a more positive light: they issued another ultimatum, maintaining their demand that the government back down, and if not, promised to march again in june during the elections for the european parliament. the government again did not back down, and they did march in june, briefly, which was when i first met the ronde in front of the panthéon. after that the movement fell still for the summer. at first public discourse spoke largely of a partial victory; later, a narrative of defeat set in instead. in the fall, a number of activists wanted to continue their movement, but the mass base had disappeared and it took time to set things in motion. a final, scantily attended effort to coordinate a national movement was held in november 2009, and the ronde was launched again that month, but it dwindled rapidly after the first two meetings. i know the ronde myself mainly from attending that winter, as the group clung to existence until march 2010. but even when it ceased to attract a mass base, it maintained a fixed political logic, making parisian urban space into a theater of the future. let us examine the semiotics of this form in more detail. parisian spacetime and the semiotics of a future the ronde’s political logic, and its very legibility as a political event, had emerged from its synthesis of two of the most prominent forms of protest in contemporary paris: the more militant occupation and the more normative street demonstration (manifestation). as the political historian danielle tartakowsky (2004, 149) has observed, the manifestation emerged in france toward the end of the nineteenth century, after the defeat of the paris commune, as a sort of symbolic replacement for more direct forms of militancy like riots and armed insurrections (cf. harvey 2003). during the twentieth century, it was standardly employed as a protest tactic by groups across the political spectrum, hinting at official parades like the annual bastille day march and at a more militant history of street protest still inscribed in the memories of may and june 1968.8 during the time of my 2009–2011 fieldwork, the parisian street manif—as manifestations were usually called for short—was clearly a well-institutionalized ritual form. it typically involved a linear street procession along a designated route, blocking major avenues with the help of police escorts, and emitting political messages through chants, songs, protest signs, and banners. its very conventionality seemed to render it ineffective: an officially tolerated ritual of disapproval that seldom interfered directly with the state apparatus. as a result, french campus activists during this period sought to reinvent their forms of political action, trying everything from mock funerals and international countersummits to academic pride parades (brisset 2009). these politics were informed, in part, by traditions of direct action and direct democracy that had been elaborated in 1990s altermondialisation (“another world”) movements, which had long maintained links to the french academic left (bodin 2009, 38–41). but the ronde also continued a more local trend toward occupation as a political tactic. even as the manifestation declined, the 1990s and 2000s saw the growth of more subaltern politics centered around les sans (“those without”), a category including the out-of-work, undocumented immigrants, and the homeless. while lessans were largely excluded from more normative political forms like the manifestation, the politics of spatial occupation came to constitute an effective means of criticizing the french state even while demanding its recognition. as daniel mouchard (2002, 433) put it, this “self-limiting radicalism” often “played with the limits of legality,” setting up squats and other forms of civil disobedience. while they occasionally proved tactically successful, these subaltern protest forms seldom changed the structures of the parisian political economy. in recent decades, the paris region (île-de-france) has seen massive gentrification in the city center, while the outskirts (banlieues, “suburbs”) have alternated unevenly between gentrification and racialized immiseration. public funds fostered neobohemian cultural enclaves (vivant 2010) and constructed grandiose monuments like the 1996 french national library (jordan 2004), but public services like education were threatened by austerity politics, and youth unemployment rose enormously.9 in 2005, racial and class tensions broke out into massive riots in the northern banlieues, after two north african teenagers were electrocuted while running from the police. this national event inevitably left traces on activists throughout the nation, including the ronde’s future organizers at the university of paris 8, one of whom would even write an essay defending riots’ emancipatory potential (lecerf 2007). while subaltern politics centered on the banlieue, the space of normative political ritual stayed centered on paris proper. this normative space was divided, generally speaking, into two geographically opposed poles. the space of official state and military rituals remained in the bourgeois western arrondissements, particularly around the place de l’étoile and the place de la concorde, while left-leaning popular demonstrations typically occurred in the symbolically more working-class eastern quarters, particularly in the triangle formed by république-bastille-nation (tartakowsky 2004, 147). the ronde strategically placed itself between these two poles, establishing a semipermanent presence in the center of paris in front of prominent public buildings. initially at city hall, it eventually moved to the conseil d’état, the panthéon, and the ministry of higher education and research. these sites also situated the ronde in and around the latin quarter, the traditional heart of french academia, and thus hinted spatially at the french quasi-identity between the university and the state. yet by synthesizing mainstream forms of strike and demonstration with more militant forms of occupation and direct action, the ronde’s organizers—all of whom worked at a “banlieue university” (brossat 2003)—also conjoined the political logics of the urban peripheries and the french state center. one might call the ronde a more respectable, bourgeois type of occupation, one that stayed constantly upright and in motion, like a manif. they thus avoided police harassment of the sort that touched, for instance, the 2011 camps of the indignés at the place de la bastille and the business district of la défense (ruzé 2012). in the form of its march, the ronde sketched out a tripartite spatial structure, producing a new space on the public square and before the state building, a space enclosed by the physical motion of the marchers. this reappropriated space of political mobilization came to intervene between the ambiguous space of the urban mass public and the space of legitimate political power, making visible a political model of applying pressure to the powers that be. schematically speaking, it was a model of politics in which activists mediated between the state and the people. although there was usually some effort to engage with passersby, who stood in for the public at large, the main practical imperative of the ronde was to maintain the circular form that established the space of the ronde itself. the bodies of the marchers created a physical barrier that was also a symbolic barrier, enclosing a mostly empty space in the center that held banners and marchers’ backpacks. this physical barrier required constant patching: when gaps sprung up in the circle, people would hurry ahead to close them, and during the thousand-hour period in 2009, an elaborate scheduling system maintained temporal continuity, with different university departments signing up online to march during certain slots. this intense emphasis on the internal structure of the ronde itself created an unusual social effervescence. the overwhelmingly dominant activity at the ronde was simply talking to the other marchers. people would talk about the pressures of their work, about current events, about the cops watching; they would gossip about their colleagues, critique american universities, give me advice about how to deal with my landlord, and talk about the sorry state of the french left. this created a sense of social and political belonging: months afterward, people i barely recognized would say, “oh yes, i know you from the ronde.” figure 2. a schematic diagram and interpretation of the ronde's spatial structure. we will see below how this space of sociability prefigured the content of the future university world that the marchers wanted. but sociability was not perceived as sufficient, since sociability by itself did not serve to accomplish the strategic objective—to stop the government’s university reforms and thereby to reconnect the present to the future. an intermediate semiotic apparatus was needed, one that wove together a practice of corporeal stubbornness with an image of redirected time. in semiotic terms, the ronde’s circular form came to constitute a spatial icon that made the physical and geometrical into signs of the affective, political, and temporal. this circle was never literally visible, but rather raggedly traced out in space by the motion of the marchers’ bodies. the circularity of marchers’ paths was a given; the circle as such was something only posited. yet as a collectively posited spatial figure, the circle worked as an icon of the marchers’ stubbornness. just as stubbornness implies an unconditional, seemingly infinite tenacity and determination, so a circle never comes to an end. table 1. levels of signification in the ronde. this stubbornness in turn served as an icon and an index of the university movement’s political project. stubbornness was both cause and expression of a political threat to the government’s university reforms, an icon of a politics of total resistance. according to the ronde organizers themselves, this politics of resistance was not an end in itself, but rather a means to, and at least hopefully an index of, a utopian commitment to an alternative future for the university. the ronde’s flier proclaimed: “we teachers, researchers, staff and students . . . are devoted to preserving and restoring a democratic future for the institution”—a future, moreover, “that cannot be dictated by short-term economic needs.”10 video 2. a schematic diagram of disruption in official temporality. there was a paradox here, but it was a strategically viable one: that stubbornness and temporal blockage would work to mobilize the universities, to prove their obstinacy to the government, and ultimately to point the future in a new direction. as such, this was a rather nonlinear logic of the future, contrasting strongly with the top-down state modernization telos the sarkozy government sought.11 from the government’s perspective, state action was essentially linear, with ministerial decrees flowing out across the university system and pointing history in the chosen direction. but since faculty activists at the ronde did not have the means to impose their own (opposing) temporality directly, they tried instead to trump a linear temporality with a circular one. in theory, their circular march could create a knot of political energy and stubbornness, interrupt the state’s university reform project, and ultimately change the dominant direction of politics. these efforts to redirect time toward a democratic future did work in practice, to a degree, at least. the stubbornness of the ronde had a vital performative dimension, projecting political agency and strength, visibility, and constancy. in strictly strategic terms, the ronde’s performativity and the ensuing media attention did succeed in contributing political momentum to the 2009 movement. this analysis would nevertheless be incomplete without a closer look at the work of stubbornness (obstination), which always remained a fragile, compensatory form. stubbornness as compensatory form and prefigurative content i watched as the marchers had innumerable repetitive conversations, or at times had nothing to say to each other, as the same dusk fell on the same square again and again. i would listen to the marchers chant a certain chant: “qu’est-ce qu’on veut? le retrait! retrait de quoi? la lru!” (“what do we want? withdrawal! withdrawal of what? the lru [university reform law]!”) the voices would echo intermittently across the square, the sky dimly visible behind the red flags with their circular icons. stubbornness at the ronde came to compensate for the lack of hope that many of the marchers expressed, exemplifying an attachment to the future that—as i suggested at the outset of this essay and now want to demonstrate—does not figure as hope or affirmation. one night, i found myself talking to a science professor. after lamenting how french science education was getting watered down and jobs were getting cut, she denounced the baneful american university model, much criticized in france on account of its ostensible policy influence. “i believe in public education, equal education regardless of your background. but you americans have private universities, which we’re against. the question of a public university isn’t even intelligible over there . . .” as the ronde came to an end that night, i asked her where the movement got its political hope. “it’s less about hope, more about it being impossible to give up after everything they’ve done so far,” she said. “it would just be too much to give in.” i asked if i’d see her at the next ronde; she wasn’t sure she’d come. at the ronde, i found it virtually impossible to get people to say that they were optimistic. a relationship to the future existed that actors could only express by walking, and were unable to put in words. while the bodies of the marchers continually traced out their political commitments, i found that their stances could be put in question if you said the wrong thing or asked for too much reflection. by the end of the winter of 2010, i had to stop asking people about the sources of their political hope, because the question elicited too much despair. “i don’t do politics out of hope,” said one graduate student, sighing. “voilà, as time went on they pushed through their decrees, and little by little we figured out that, well, it wasn’t gonna happen,” a music professor said. yet she continued to march in the ronde, as if in spite of her own analysis. it seemed at times a very inarticulate utopianism, one almost ashamed. as if to say: i’m still marching, but don’t push me to explain myself too closely. what stood in for a discourse on hope was a discourse on keeping going, framed as a discourse on stubbornness—a feeling that the winter 2010 rondeurs more freely professed. it was a common occurrence that winter for someone to wonder aloud whether the ronde should be stopped. the standard response was: no, let’s keep going at least a little while longer. i’m still stubborn (“j’suis toujours obstiné(e)”). through conversations like this, collective attachments to an alternative future were maintained in a desubjectified form. the marchers’ stubbornness became a public, collective construct that sidestepped individual doubts, externalizing and formalizing their political feelings and attachments. once the ronde was established, in a sense the marchers no longer needed to say or even feel they were stubborn, because the very form of their action already expressed their stubbornness. this stubbornness was embedded in the very name of the infinite rounds of the stubborn. the three terms—ronde, infinie, and les obstinés—were in context almost synonymous, each encoding the same message of “not stopping,” so that the very name showed obstinacy through repetition. stubbornness thus turned out to facilitate a whole activist poetics, affording a performative efficacy that more anodyne signifiers like “hope” might not have provided. nevertheless, as evidenced by the constant proposals to give up, stubbornness proved itself quite fragile, and the infinitude of the rounds was decidedly finite. according to the professor of dance i interviewed, even at its height in spring 2009, the ronde had never felt stable as a form: professor: what i do know is that people regularly asked the question: are we continuing or not, eh? ethnographer: so it wasn’t at the start [in march] that you decided to do the thousand hours? professor: oh no. not at all, eh? no, when we started, we didn’t even know if we were going to keep it going twenty-four hours. ethnographer: oh, yeah? professor: no, but it’s true. we didn’t know if we’d be capable of that. i would say, each day was a victory. every twenty-four hours, it was like, hey, we’ve done it, yeah, it worked. at the end of a week, we were already pretty stunned that it had—because it was working, definitely, thanks to the faculty at paris 8, but it could only keep working if other campuses showed up too. and even at paris 8, not all the faculty were on strike. . . . [when we got to april] there were the easter vacations. it was the first decisive [critique] moment. . . . in the end, it continued. so we succeeded, like! but it was hard. . . . do we stop? because there was no one but paris 8 still marching? only paris 8? and the other universities had gone back to class. but at the same time, no one wanted to stop. it’s quite strange, because people didn’t want to stop, but at the same time, they were incapable of saying, i’ll show up for a day. stubbornness was thus both a generative and a tenuous form. as we saw in the previous section, it powered a political semiotics that pointed decisively toward an alternative future, and as we see here, it kept the action going in spite of widespread doubt and despair. my analysis can now take one last step, showing how stubbornness also shaped the content of the ronde’s alternative future. even as the form of their action broadcast the marchers’ politics on repeat, as it were, it left them free to build an informal space of conversation and sociability, which prefigured the democratic future they sought. first, through its profusion of open-ended conversations, the ronde modeled horizontality and egalitarianism among its participants, enacting an academic community not based on bureaucratic hierarchy. as an april 28, 2009 pamphlet remarked, “this ronde is a living demonstration of the collegiality on which the university is founded. . . . this ronde certifies that the university is nothing without the community it emerges from.” second, this community was framed as being outside the market (or at most, adjacent to it). thus while the marchers often partook of the nearby cafés and restaurants before and after marching, the march itself was always set firmly apart from commercial transactions. in this, the ronde mirrored its own idealized image of the university; “the university is not a corporation” (“l’université n’est pas une entreprise”) was a common slogan. and finally, the ronde exemplified a community in which belonging was an intrinsically political activity, in which one’s mere presence sent a political message. stubbornness was framed as a key component of this political identity, reframing academics as citizen-activists in direct contact with the public, rather than as “human resources.” in sum, we might say that the ronde’s “democratic future” was imagined as an egalitarian academic community, centered on an open space of conversation and free association, set apart from markets, commodities, and corporations (though not opposing these as such), and organized through political voluntarism, rather than bureaucratic hierarchy. each of these parameters was, in effect, a symbolic negation of what the university system was becoming under the sarkozy government’s reforms—in protesters’ eyes, at least.12 in spite of the fragility of its form, the ronde continued to prefigure this future, on and off, for more than a year, before coming to a final halt in march 2010. “we were spreading ourselves too thin,” one of the organizers told me afterward, describing how she had gone back into activism on her campus. but curiously, even when the ronde finally came to its last day, on march 29, 2010, it proved all but impossible to bring it to an end. first the march came to a stop and people gathered around. then they had champagne. then they stood around and talked. a few people left, but most of them lingered and talked some more. it was as if it was impossible for people to leave the scene of their stubbornness, impossible to leave the scene of their imagined alternative future. people smiled, looked away, sipped their drinks. they left slowly, one by one, the self-appointed photographer taking photos of the person who took down the last banner. the ronde wasn’t said to be over; it was said to have been “put in orbit.” the photographer, jean-claude saget, shared his photos online with the caption: “our stubbornness persists—and will show itself in other rondes!” the future, it seemed, was a difficult thing to give up.13 prefiguration, opposition, and repair what happens to the future if modernist temporalities become more obscure and more distant, hidden at times behind claims that we are post-history or post-ideology, drowned out at other moments by an eco-apocalyptic “narrative of imagined endings” (yusoff 2016, 22)? without venturing a general account here, the ronde hints at a landscape of ordinary futures constantly getting smashed and reconstituted, disconnected and reconnected, repaired in the face of foreclosure. not all repair work is successful, of course, but if we can talk about conversational repair or reparative reading (schegloff, jefferson, and sacks 1977; sedgwick 2003), surely we can talk about reparative temporalities as well? if so, the lesson of the ronde would be that a reparative futurity need not be—and in some cases must not be—solely a matter of subjective stance. what kept the ronde going, i have argued, was its preference for walking over talking, its use of ritualized motion to work around its participants’ lack of hope. here i would concur with dominic boyer and alexei yurchak’s (2010, 212) argument that a subversive politics of form can emerge precisely when it becomes ineffective to “challeng[e] the language of authoritative discourse directly.” i would modify their conclusion, though, on one major point. boyer and yurchak (2010, 213) view their case—a type of media satire called stiob, where the form of dominant discourse gets mimicked perfectly, even while the content is made ridiculous—as an instance of “contexts where pure opposition may be inefficient, counterproductive, or impossible.” but opposition through formal innovation, as the ronde reveals, is not a less pure type of opposition than conventional street marches or manifestos.14 rather, it is a moment in which opposition itself gets refashioned and remediated. the theoretical upshot of the ronde, then, is chiefly that opposition through form can constitute a reparative temporality. this thought, in turn, allows us to revisit the notion of prefiguration, which has become so central to analyses of recent radical politics (van de sande 2015; yates 2015). as we saw, the ronde’s ritualized form spared its participants from having to inhabit political hope directly, while freeing them to enact a version of an idealized academic community. earlier, i called this a way of prefiguring the content of their democratic future. but their sort of prefiguration was more ambivalent than david graeber’s (2002, 72) familiar image of the means joyfully enacting the ends, such that direct action leaves one’s “sense of human possibilities . . . profoundly transformed.” direct action, graeber (2002, 62) tells us, rejects “a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative.” of course, the ronde’s politics were substantively more social-democratic than anarchist. yet what we saw at the ronde formally resembled what graeber describes: an opposition to state power that is at once a means of prefiguring an alternative future. other analysts of radical politics have nevertheless emphasized that graeber’s utopian type of prefiguration is actually somewhat rare: it turns out to be unusual for activists to evoke the future with any concreteness. maple rasza and andrej kurnik (2012, 252), in a study of occupy slovenia, propose that, “rather than seeing direct action, as graeber has described it, as the ‘defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free’ or expressing hope in an eventual telos of freedom, activists around occupy slovenia are engaging in a messy, and, some activists stressed, never-ending liberation struggle.” stine krøijer (2010, 149) argues that, for anti-nato protesters in strasbourg, the future could appear only very abstractly as “the otherwise,” in protest moments where temporalities were always multiple and bodies were pressed together. “this figuration [of the future] is not a pre-figuration . . . not an anticipation or foreshadowing of a future to come,” she argues, but “a giving of bodily form to the indeterminable.” finally, in felix ringel’s (2012, 174, 178) study of east german anarchists who are “decorating the basement with cardboard machine guns” for an antiauthoritarian party, he finds that their “creative presentism” was quite critical of “dystopian notions of the distant future.” at stake here, i think, is whether prefiguration is a good general category for analyzing time and utopian aspiration in contemporary radical politics; kroijer, ringel, and rasza and kurnik’s cases clearly show that prefiguration as such is not ubiquitous in this milieu. one might at this juncture observe that prefiguration is more an influential model for radical politics than an adequate model of them. but what, then, would be the general structure of radical protest temporality? prefiguration, rather than being foundational, may only be an instance of an affirmative moment in the dialectics of temporal repair. reconnected futurity is based, at least in the ronde’s case, both on a moment of negation (not that future, as opposed to no future) and on a moment of deictic reorientation (the arrow of time should point this way instead; the future should look like this; there should be a future). and far from divulging a primordial affirmation or hopefulness, reconnected futurity is fundamentally reparative and compensatory. rather than appearing ex nihilo, it emerges from moments of temporal foreclosure (the reform of a university system, the death of an ideal, etc.) that it hopes to forestall. to be reparative and compensatory is, however, not a bad thing if one accepts that no one is sui generis or outside history. indeed, if the ronde infinie des obstinés had a moral for academics outside france, it might well be this: that being reparative can sometimes be the closest thing possible to a radical gesture. as it shows us how to be reparatively political by generating new forms of sociability within the academic world, the ronde reminds us that “our stubbornness persists”—and that this is no bad thing. notes acknowledgments this essay owes its existence to the remarkable warmth and hospitality i found at the ronde and among the rondeurs, who i hope will recognize themselves in these pages. i am also deeply indebted to svetlana borodina, victor giménez aliaga, and anneli joplin, who realized the animated diagrams. i am grateful to steve coleman for organizing the session at the european association of social anthropologists meeting where the analysis was initially presented, and to lauren berlant, joshua reno, davydd greenwood, tracey rosen, lashandra sullivan, eric james triantafillou, and the cultural anthropology reviewers and editorial collective for their perceptive comments. 1. without giving a formal definition of a future in this article, i would simply note that i do not think of futures (as a cultural form) solely as a matter of representation, rhetoric, or genre. instead, revising jean-paul sartre’s view that human being is fundamentally constituted by projects and projections that may elude representation (thorkelson 2014), i will say that any project of social production and reproduction entails a specific form of futurity toward which social actors are carried, though not without a degree of agency in the process. when this form of futurity encounters resistance from other social actors’ projects, political conflicts over the form and content of the future readily ensue. 2. as catherine bell (1992, 186) has observed, ritualization as a social strategy can be decoupled from subjectivity or consciousness. thus “ritualized activities specifically do not promote belief or conviction. on the contrary, ritualized activities afford a great diversity of interpretation in exchange for little more than consent to the form of the activities.” in the present ethnographic case, we can go even farther: at the ronde, the disjuncture between subjective conviction and ritual form proved necessary and productive. 3. as janet roitman (2014) rightly observes, crisis is a historically specific epistemic form whose invocation can serve as a form of transcendental alibi for those who wish to summon it. given the specificity of this form, one would not expect that crisis (qua narrative) could set in everywhere, as the ethnographic data indeed demonstrates. yet roitman’s focus on conceptual genealogy tends to occlude a more phenomenological, affective or reproductive reading of “crisis ordinariness” (berlant 2011, 81–82). in the protest case i consider here, crisis designated less a transcendental classifier than a cluster of affects (anger, stubbornness, hopelessness) that was sensed more or less collectively and inchoately, emerging from life amid a set of neoliberal reforms whose effects, i argue elsewhere, were largely lived in advance. 4. both fischer and rabinow are experts at assimilating certain modernisms while still organizing their discourse structurally around outright rejections of things that get framed as past. while rabinow is quite sympathetic to certain aesthetic modernisms, his rejection of “reform or revolution” clearly indexes a former era’s characteristic politics. and fischer (2007, 3) frames contemporary anthropology in an almost evolutionary perspective—for instance, he historicizes culture theory in terms of seven quasi-epochs (a “historically layered growth of specifications and differentiations”) that build on but also replace each other over time. while fischer acknowledges that contemporary senses of novelty are in no way new, he constantly polices the boundaries between past and present. describing contemporary anthropology, he comments that “[its] cross-cultural perspective is no longer a binary logic (us/them, civilized/primitive, europe/the rest, christian/savage, developed/underdeveloped), but, like most contemporary information matrices, a constantly comparative and difference-scanning perspective” (fischer 2003, 13). the move that strikes me as typical here is to subsume past distinctions into some more capacious theoretical system, while also differentiating us from a past whose “binary logic” ironically needs rejecting. as susan stanford friedman (2001, 299) remarks about modernisms in general, there is “a transferential process in which people become caught in a repetition of the unresolved contradictions present and largely repressed in modernity itself.” 5. i would certainly not argue that nothing is emergent or in “flux” in a broadly deleuzian sense, nor that there is no “vagueness” or “unfinished quality of the ordinary” (stewart 2007, 127; cf. pandian 2012). rather, in my view, emergence and openness become problematic when they are (ironically) promoted to the status of privileged ethnographic objects, general theories of the present, or “totalizing categories” (hodges 2008, 403). 6. most of the marchers hailed from public universities in the paris region, though some of the grandes écoles were also represented, particularly social scientists from the école des hautes études en sciences sociales. as the ronde dwindled in the fall of 2009 and the winter of 2010, its composition became more exclusively paris 8 faculty. 7. see the extensive documentation by sauvons l’université collected at http://www.sauvonsluniversite.com/spip.php?article762. 8. one tract from may 24, 1968 commented explicitly on a potential for political unity that could only be realized in the street: “the riot police are already trying to cross the picket lines, each isolated from the next and thus vulnerable. in the street, we can show them an irresistible front” (mouvement du 22 mars 1968, 160). 9. over the past thirty years, youth unemployment was at its lowest in 1989 at 15 percent, reaching its highest numbers in 2013 with 23.9 percent. 10. of course, stubbornness turned out to be ambiguous: the government viewed it as a symptom of a pathological refusal of all reform, a symptom of a sort of leftist conservatism. but here we are taking this political event on its own terms. 11. as numerous european analysts have noted, university neoliberalization often involves a paradoxical demand that universities be more “autonomous” only to better serve strategic goals set by the state (vinokur 2008; wright and ørberg 2008). 12. to be clear, i aim in this article to reconstruct the logic of a protest against the sarkozy university reforms, not to offer my own assessment of these policies. 13. lauren berlant has pointed out to me that what was being given up here was an impasse, but i would still observe that the political impasse in which the 2009 movement survived was itself construed as a symbol of a pathway to a possible future, a sign of an open futurity. in this sense, giving up on the ronde was indeed giving up on the future, in ideological terms. 14. in boyer and yurchak’s (2010) case study of the yes men, for instance, it is manifest that the activist group was in no way indirect about their basic opposition to their protest targets (the world trade organization, dow chemicals), even though they certainly mediatized their opposition in a new way. references appadurai, arjun 2013 the future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition. new york: verso. beaud, olivier, pierre encrenaz, marcel gauchet, françois vatin, and alain caillé 2010 refonder l’université: pourquoi l’enseignement supérieur reste à reconstruire. paris: la découverte. bell, catherine 1992 ritual theory, ritual practice. new york: oxford university press. berlant, lauren 2011 cruel optimism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bleiklie, ivar 1998 “justifying the evaluative state: new public management ideals in higher education.” european journal of education 33, 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african countries like mozambique, somalia, and zimbabwe, known collectively as makwerekwere—a derogatory term for foreigners and onomatopoeia for someone who speaks unintelligibly, a “babbler.” two people were killed in this first bout of violence, and more than forty injured. over the following weeks, similar riots erupted in other informal settlements around johannesburg, as well as in settlements around durban and cape town, south africa’s two other major cities.1 tens of thousands of african immigrants—irrespective of their actual legal status—were harassed all across the country in mass eviction campaigns led by angry vigilante mobs comprised mostly of unemployed young males, despite the efforts of community members and local leaders to stop them. news of the pogroms spread through the media under headlines that followed the general formula, “south africa descends into chaos,” often featuring the iconic photograph of the mozambican immigrant ernesto nhamuave being “necklaced” with a petrol-filled tire and set alight by a mob—an image eerily reminiscent of the internecine battles that grabbed headlines in the years leading up to the collapse of apartheid. by the end of this first wave of riots, sixty-two people had been killed and over one hundred thousand displaced and forced to seek refuge in sprawling camps erected by the government.2 these events have inspired a great deal of soul-searching in south africa as analysts seek to explain why multiculturalism in the much-vaunted rainbow nation has become so dangerously unstable. as a result, an enormous body of scholarly literature has emerged that explores the many causes of xenophobia in meticulous and sophisticated ways.3 i do not intend to rehearse that literature here, or recapitulate its valuable insights. rather, i want to explore the fact that many of the accounts that scholars have offered of the pogroms—much like accounts of xenophobic violence elsewhere in the world (e.g., hobsbawm 1992; malkki 1995; appadurai 1998)—seem to focus on globalization as a primary driver. there are two main strands of this argument. one strand, which derives from marxist or political economy perspectives, holds that neoliberal policy and structural adjustment undermine livelihoods and spur violent competition over scarce resources such as jobs and housing. a second strand, which focuses on identity politics, holds that the cultural “flows” that characterize globalization induce a state of hybridity, flux, and moral anomie that triggers the impulse to violently recreate social boundaries. both of these theories provide useful ways to think about the recent troubles, but i suggest that we need to critically examine some of their core assumptions. focusing on the specific ethnographic context of durban, i argue that the marxist perspective is correct to claim that xenophobic violence is a reaction to neoliberalism, but only inasmuch as economic decline is experienced according to a particular cultural idiom; namely, as a crisis of social reproduction. in other words, the relationship between neoliberalism and xenophobic violence is not deterministic in the materialist sense. building on this point, i argue that, while there are many causes of xenophobia in south africa, we can only fully understand the phenomenon by grappling with people’s particular representations of otherness. in the durban case, this means exploring the ways that people’s perceptions of foreigners are often—although certainly not always—informed by popular ideas about witchcraft; ideas which provide the blueprint for a moral economy that rejects the forms of economic behavior that characterize neoliberalism in south africa, with which immigrants have become symbolically associated. violence against foreigners is less about fixing flows and ordering anomie than about reestablishing the conditions for social reproduction and demarcating the precincts of moral personhood. i leverage data from the durban case to articulate a critique of the anomie perspective, which imports what i will preliminarily gloss as euro-american cosmologies of order, chaos, and violence that bear interesting resonances with the long and problematic history of ideas about race in south africa. a crisis of social reproduction xenophobic riots coursed through informal settlements around durban not long after they first erupted in the johannesburg area in may 2008. there were five crucial hotspots: the informal settlements of cato manor and bottlebrush, where foreigners have set up shacks amongst those of citizens; the central business district, where foreigners and citizens compete in the informal marketplace; the point near the harbor, which has become a space of considerable gang activity; and dalton hostel, a labor barracks known for the most serious episodes of intimidation against foreigners. during fieldwork in 2011, i visited all of these areas, but given considerations of access, i focused my research specifically on cato manor, a recently settled community of about one-hundred thousand residents—mostly isizulu-speaking—that sprawls across the valley on the far side of the berea ridge, seven kilometers west of the city center.4 the first major incident in cato manor happened late on a friday night mere days after the incidents in alexandra. a group of vigilantes—a core of eleven men in their thirties—tried to rid the settlement of foreigners by forcing them out of their homes, killing four in the process. less than a week later, more than three-thousand foreigners had been forced to seek refuge in police stations and churches around durban. while i came to know some of the perpetrators, i found that they were generally unwilling to discuss their participation in the purges. instead of focusing directly on the incident itself, then, i sought to understand how the residents of cato manor conceptualize foreigners, and how those conceptualizations open up the possibility of violence. on one of my first days in cato manor, i found myself whiling away the afternoon with a group of young men who were loitering around a construction site, hoping to be offered piecework. like most labor in south africa, none of the workers on the site were employed in any formal capacity; they were being paid in cash by the hour, and without any job security. when the owner of the building ran out of money for the renovations, they would be out of work, fired without any notice. this scene—illustrative of the structural violence of unemployment and informal labor that characterizes south africa today (barchiesi 2011)—provided a poignant backdrop for what the men told me once i started to steer the conversation to the topic of the xenophobic violence in the area. for them, the primary problem with immigrants is that they undermine the economic opportunities of local citizens. according to my interlocutors, they do this by both outcompeting south african–owned businesses in the informal economy, and by undercutting the labor market by working for rates far below the minimum wage, allegedly as low as r25 per day. thus the ubiquitous complaint that “foreigners are stealing our jobs.” in addition to job theft, the men also accused foreigners of stealing their women by wooing them with cash, outdoing the local competition because they have fewer financial responsibilities to kin. on the face of it, these concerns about livelihoods seem similar to cases of xenophobia everywhere else in the world where people seek scapegoats for their deprivation. a popular group of leftist intellectuals in south africa has argued that xenophobic violence is ultimately the consequence of economic decay and uneven development as a result of structural adjustment and deindustrialization (bond et al. 2011; see also tshitereke 1999; harris 2002). they point out that the anc government’s policies have sent unemployment rocketing from 13 percent in 1994 to 25 percent in 2013, or 40 percent by unofficial measures. according to the economist, “half of south africans under 24 looking for work have none. of those who have jobs, a third earn less than $2 a day.”5 since 1994, the number of people living on less than one dollar a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million. two million people have lost their homes because of forced removals and inflated rents, and the number of shack dwellers has increased by fifty percent, to the point where today more than one quarter of south africans live in shacks (klein 2007).6 the argument holds that as livelihoods become ever more precarious, competition over jobs, housing, and retail have reached extreme levels. in the face of this mounting competition, people seek to leverage whatever social distinctions are most readily available in order to lay claim to diminishing resources (cf. comaroff and comaroff 2009). in the context of post-apartheid south africa, those who believe they have the right to benefit from the promised—but as yet unrealized—fruits of liberation draw lines between themselves and the non-citizens who they believe should not have such a right. this approach establishes important correlations between xenophobia and its broader political-economic context, but its universalizing bent tends to miss the culturally particular ways people in south africa understand economic deprivation. the experience of neoliberalism is shot through with deeply gendered implications informed by the history of the past half-century. during the post-war period, apartheid planners—concerned about the possibility of a black uprising—sought to generate consent among urban africans through fordist-style “embedded liberalism” (harvey 2005), a sort of class compromise that centered on the construct of what frederick cooper (2003) calls the modern “industrial man,” the figure of the married male breadwinner living in a formal township house and working a stable job in manufacturing, mining, or the civil service (see hickel 2012). this figure was central to south africans’ expectations of modernity in the second half of the twentieth century, but rapidly crumbled as new strategies of capital accumulation undermined the conditions for such aspirations and cast most south africans into a state of abjection (cf. ferguson 1999). this has given rise to what mark hunter (2010) so aptly terms a “crisis of social reproduction” (see also weiss 2004). one of the most obvious manifestations of this crisis is the precipitous decline in marriage rates, down to less than half of 1960 levels, so that today only 3 of 10 south african adults are married. with unemployment rates as high as they are, most young men find it impossible to raise the resources they need to pay lobola (bridewealth) and establish their own legitimate, respectable homes. this helps explain the complaint most frequently on the lips of vigilantes—who, remember, are mostly young males (hsrc 2008, 6)—that foreigners are taking away their jobs, houses, and women, even though the reality of it is more complicated.7 the point of the complaint is that they feel they are losing their grip on the most basic means of social reproduction. this is particularly true in cato manor, where livelihoods are even more precarious than in formal townships like nearby kwamashu or umlazi, and where younger men cannot access the tight ranks of unionized, relatively high-paying sectors such as mining, milling, and metallurgy. they suffer from a crisis of masculinity, having been expelled from the path to manhood that was encouraged under apartheid—that of becoming umnumzane, a respectable, working-class family man.8 instead, they find themselves in their thirties and still living with their mothers, earning the social derision due to umnqolo—a “mamma’s boy.” young men in cato manor are often subject to ridicule from their female peers, who jeer at their emasculation and accuse them of being izahluleki, “failures” incapable of performing their expected roles (cf. hunter 2010). many of the women i interviewed complained that their boyfriends, and even sometimes their husbands, were effeminate and weak, incapable of executing the duties of “true men.” in short, neoliberalism has undermined the modern dream of industrial man—or at least nostalgic versions of it—and threatened the gendered edifices upon which it was once built (see hylton 2012). representations of witchcraft of course, the fact that neoliberalism creates a crisis of social reproduction is not a novel argument. what is interesting in this case, rather, is the particular way this crisis is understood in cato manor according to ideas about what constitutes a proper moral economy and what marks its opposite, which is often conjured by drawing on the logic of witchcraft. in cato manor, people often draw evocative connections between their ideas about foreigners and their ideas about witchcraft, or, in isizulu, ubuthakathi. sometimes this is quite explicit. for example, one middle-aged woman, who i will call thandile, complained to me over tea in her sitting room one afternoon that, when the makwerekwere come here we no longer develop, and our children no longer progress. if we have reached 80 percent then we fall back to 10 or 0 percent. for example, if i have a shop and a foreigner comes here and sets up a shop nearby, then his shop will succeed and my shop will fail. they will go up and we will go down. the only way to explain this is that they are using something … that they are using ubuthakathi. you see how they come here, they are so poor, they come from a poor country and they come across the border with nothing but a passport. there’s no way that they can become rich after only three years or so here! there must be something behind it … they are using ubuthakathi. there’s no other way to explain it. this is not to say that people always explicitly speak of foreigners as witches. some of them do, like thandile. but the more important point is that people conceptualize and evaluate foreigners and witches as morally analogous types of persons—as mysterious, anti-social agents that disable productive and reproductive processes. ideas about witchcraft in cato manor provide a moral framework within which people evaluate economic behavior as either conducive to or destructive of “development” (ukuthuthuka) and social reproduction. this framework becomes a primary heuristic through which south africans experience and respond to the present neoliberal economy (see niehaus 2001; ashforth 2005). discourse about witchcraft in cato manor usually focuses on explaining the experience of “misfortune” (amashwa). economic misfortunes like poverty, joblessness, and the consequent inability to marry are often understood not as neutral market outcomes or the product of chance, but as orchestrated by specific human agents (cf. hammond-tooke 1970). the people most likely to be suspected of orchestrating misfortunes are people who exhibit morally questionable economic behavior. people in cato manor like thandile draw sharp distinctions between economic behavior that contributes to social production and economic behavior that serves anti-social accumulation. social production involves the valuable work of producing people and relationships (cf. ferguson 2006). in the south african wage economy, this generally takes the form of sponsoring life-cycle rituals such as nubility rites, marriages, and funerals, which build kinship. by contrast, anti-social accumulation involves the selfish appropriation of the labor and vitality of others for oneself. anti-social accumulators hoard their cash and assets, closing them up in such a manner that they cannot be used to benefit the community. in cato manor, unaccountably rich individuals are often accused of using witchcraft to help them amass wealth. one way they are thought to do this is by procuring mythical shiny snakes known as mamlambo, which bless their owners with an abundance of money and good fortune but only on the condition that their owners provide them with a steady supply of human blood—ideally that of their young kin. the wealth that mamlambo provide, therefore, requires the unmaking and destruction of kinship and social relations. in isizulu, this kind of illegitimate wealth is regarded as isheleshe, or “slippery”: it appears to come out of nowhere, tends to disappear suddenly, and, crucially, never benefits the succeeding generation. individuals whose wealth is questionable may also be accused of using witchcraft to produce zombies (imikhovu), dead bodies that have been semi-revived and set to work as mindless slaves. with an army of zombie labor at their disposal, witches are able to produce and accumulate much more than their neighbors. by stealing the dead, they effectively appropriate the ancestors of other families, not only stripping those families of vital protection from misfortunes, but also making the ancestors of others work for their own enrichment rather than that of their actual descendants, transferring vitality and good fortune from their neighbors to themselves. these collective representations offer poignant, almost marxist critiques of accumulation, complete with a theory of labor power and the appropriation of surplus value. the moral claim in these accounts is that accumulation for its own sake—without honest work and fair redistribution—destroys communities and families rather than building them up. the people who deploy these idioms do not miss the fact that value does not emerge from thin air, and that accumulation requires the exploitation—indeed, even the death—of others in sort of a zero-sum game of vitality. these ideas crop up in discourse about foreign immigrants with remarkable frequency in cato manor. just like witches, immigrants are said to participate in forms of accumulation that are considered immoral and anti-social, enriching themselves at the expense of others. this adds another degree of cultural nuance to the marxist approach i discussed above. it may seem universal that xenophobes hate immigrants because they lay illegitimate claim to allegedly scarce local or national resources. but in south africa’s informal settlements, ideas about scarcity and illegitimacy make sense specifically within a moral economy that offers a folk theory of surplus extraction, and evaluates certain kinds of economic behavior as witch-like. just like the young men waiting for piecework, thandile’s chief concern was that immigrants always seem to outcompete south africans in the informal economy. in a separate conversation, thandile told me that this is mostly because foreigners use umuthi, the medicinal substances used by witches, to make their businesses succeed. “the umuthi they use to get rich needs blood,” she told me. “but not necessarily of their kin. eventually it might need the blood of kin. but right now they kill south africans. this is why there are so many murders in south africa; it is to feed the umuthi. [also] some of them come with zombies, which only children can see. we adults can’t see them, but children can see them running all around their houses.” here, thandile explains twin misfortunes that plague south africa, a high unemployment rate and a high murder rate, by accusing immigrants of witchcraft. while immigrants are often accused of using witchcraft to gain an unfair advantage in the local economy, they are not usually accused of bewitching south africans; witchcraft accusations are normally made against intimate insiders. but, as paul landau (2012) suggests, this may be changing as the social context changes. there is evidence of this in cato manor. a local zionist prophet, who i will call themba, spoke at length to me about how immigrants use mamlambo to become wealthy. he claimed that it is not uncommon to see immigrants walking around the markets in downtown durban with snakes, which (according to him) cost about r9,000 to procure—slightly more than the cost of a cow. i have personally never seen anyone walking around durban with snakes, but this accusation is nonetheless quite common. themba also explained that foreigners are known to use a special umuthi that steals the izibusiso (blessings) of others. “it works like a cell phone camera,” he told me. “it shoots and captures your izibusiso. they will use small magnets and mirrors inside the umuthi and bury it in your path so that when you pass it takes your izibusiso. then they can put all your izibusiso to themselves. they will go up, and you will go down.” here we see the same (incorrect) theory of zero-sum economics that thandile invoked, which a number of scholars have commented on.9 in this case it comes with the added implication that immigrants have heightened command of technology, a claim that neatly corresponds with the common stereotype that immigrants (specifically those from west africa) have special knowledge of cell phones, which they can unlock and reprogram with ease. tellingly, themba explained that much of his work as a healer involves treating people whose izibusiso have been stolen from them. he told me that one of the most common symptoms is that women bewitched in this manner cannot give birth; when they get pregnant, they gestate for more than ten months and then both mother and child die—an evocative image of social reproduction gone awry. not everyone attributes immigrants’ economic competitiveness directly to witchcraft, however. some people point instead to the perception that immigrants come to south africa alone, as single individuals, without family, children, and other kin. one young man i spoke to agreed that “immigrants can make do with very little money for wages because they come here with no responsibilities. if they get r25 per day they have enough to eat. they don’t have responsibilities. they don’t have wives, for example, so they don’t need to buy airtime to give them.” this statement illustrates how residents of cato manor accuse immigrants of hoarding their money without reinvesting it in the community through exchange. people accuse them of impregnating local women without paying bridewealth or cleansing fines (inhlawulo)—the ultimate sign of illegitimate reproduction. in this sense, just like witches, immigrants are perceived to traffic in the pure commodity, accumulating only for themselves while avoiding entanglement in relationships of reciprocity, in stark contrast to south africans who are increasingly burdened by debt obligations (james 2013). this representation is inaccurate, of course, as most immigrants remit to their home countries and are deeply embedded in transnational kin networks, while many young south african men in cato manor father children without providing for them. yet the stereotype retains its power because it underscores a basic moral contrast between the production of wealth through kin and the production of wealth in the absence of kin, with the latter representing a form of value negation (cf. munn 1986).10 immigrants are considered to be like witches in a number of other respects as well. people in cato manor discuss them in the register of inside/outside distinctions. immigrants are often called abantu abangaphandla, people of the “outside.” this status partially explains their mysterious power. in kwazulu-natal, the most powerful witches are said to be foreign ones, for the “outside” registers as simultaneously powerful and dangerous. people rationalize this belief by pointing out that witches from places like mozambique bring exotic herbs that south african healers do not know about, and therefore cannot counteract. witches also trouble the boundaries between culture and nature. witches are said to go about naked (instead of clothed) during the night (instead of day), eat raw meat (instead of cooked), and associate with familiars of ambiguous taxonomy, such as baboons and bush babies, that destabilize the distinction between human and animal. these ideas seem to lie behind the allegations of some cato manor residents that immigrants are known to cook and eat human children. these putative acts of cannibalism signal a perceived blurring between human and animal categories; they flag an excess of nature and a deficit of culture. we might think of this through the lens of giorgio agamben’s (1995) work on the “state of exception,” whereby people who violate serious taboos assume the status of homo sacer, which means simultaneously “sacred” and “vile” (or, both “powerful” and “dangerous”). along these lines, immigrants appear to live in a state of bare life (zoe, in agamben’s terms) rather than according to any particular mode of human culture (bios). in addition, immigrants (particularly nigerians, as the stereotype goes) are thought to be heavily involved in illicit trade in drugs, arms, and human organs. they are also accused of trafficking in goods that are considered to be fake, like counterfeit designer clothes and pirated dvds. they are regarded as shadowy masters of the black market, capable of marshaling arcane techniques to secure wealth from hidden sources. as far as i am aware, there is no evidence to suggest that immigrants participate in illicit economies any more than south africans do, but this characterization is nonetheless significant, for the idea of fake or inauthentic wealth is also attributed to witches and their ill-gotten gain. in other words, the trickster motif in this discourse is shifted from the use of mamlambo and zombies to the trade in drugs and knock-off gucci. as jean comaroff and john comaroff (2002) have suggested, these representations bear witness to an economic era where stable, honest labor in the factory has been eclipsed by risk, speculation, and blind faith in the inscrutable workings of the “invisible hand.” making sense of violence in light of the above, it seems likely that the analogies people commonly draw between immigrants and witches informed the xenophobic violence that became so serious in 2008. the anti-immigrant purges were carried out in a manner that bore unmistakable parallels to witch-hunts described in the ethnographic literature (e.g., niehaus 2001). both involve groups of disaffected young men as perpetrators, and both are organized around restoring the conditions for social reproduction. while it would require further research to prove, it is also possible that ideas about witchcraft and social reproduction help explain the use of arson in many cases of xenophobic violence in south africa, such as that of ernesto nhamuave. as i explained above, the kinds of misfortunes (amashwa) that people blame on witchcraft usually have to do with reproductive blockages; anything from getting fired from work to having a miscarriage. but the most potent and dangerous manifestation of amashwa is said to come in the form of lightning. witches are thought to be able to command lightning to strike their victims’ homes and obliterate them through flames. this evocative image forms the center of collective nightmares about witchcraft in much of kwazulu-natal: since the home symbolizes the family itself, this form of amashwa represents the total destruction of the material locus of legitimate social reproduction. crucially, witches are punished with the same formula. when a vigilante group engages in witch-hunting, they seek to burn the home of the suspected witch—and perhaps even burn the witch him or herself—turning their houses and bodies into icons of their moral flaw in a sort of homeopathic correction. house-burning symbolizes the epitome of social destruction and infertility; it gives witches a taste of their own medicine, so to speak.11 these same symbolic, and emotionally charged, schemes may organize the way that some south africans act against foreigners, and this may explain why foreigners’ houses and bodies became the targets of fire-related violence in 2008. in other words, far from being senseless, chaotic, and anomic, as many accounts have asserted, xenophobic violence in south africa follows a recognizable cultural logic; it is semiotically loaded. but because most existing accounts assume violence to be purely instrumental, they fall short of explaining the use of arson as a tactic. why are foreigners so often killed by burning? why are they not lynched or beheaded? in light of the semiotic parameters of witchcraft analogies, it is clear that this is more than a convenient tactic of warfare. it is a bid, however heinous in its manifestation, to heal the land by obliterating the agents of anti-fertility. this explains the striking parallels between the xenophobic attacks in 2008 and the incidents reported in the 1990s, when young unemployed males burned accused-witches while chanting the words “die, you witch; we can’t get jobs because of you!” (african eye 2007). both attacks targeted agents of value negation; blockages to productive and reproductive processes. the particular form of the violence used is not incidental or external to its purpose; rather, the form is the purpose itself. to draw on j. l. austin’s (1962) notion of speech acts, the violence is not simply illocutionary. it is not meant solely to accomplish the immediate instrumental task of eliminating an enemy. it is also perlocutionary, intended to convey a broader message, in this case a message about moral order, the social good, and the consequences of their violation. in other words, the form of violence illuminates people’s conceptions of the social ills at hand. and here we might think about the use of violence through the lens, again, of agamben’s notion of homo sacer. as i have described, the immigrant—like a witch—exists in a state of exception and thus represents, in agamben’s (1995, 86) words, “a life that may be killed by anyone” without counting as homicide. this makes it not only thinkable for people to orchestrate violence against immigrants, but also gives the violence the aura of legitimacy, for it appears to be in the service of culture and morality. xenophobia and cosmologies of western social science we can leverage the interpretation i have outlined above to question some of the key categories that dominate the social scientific literature on xenophobic violence. this body of scholarship developed toward the end of the 1990s as analysts attempted to make sense of the central paradox of globalization: instead of inaugurating a new era of peaceful, cosmopolitan liberalism, globalization seems to have inspired a return to rigid and violent parochialisms. in their seminal volume, birgit meyer and peter geschiere (1999a) sought to explain this contradiction between “global flows” and “cultural closure,” by arguing that “people’s awareness of being involved in open-ended global flows seems to trigger a search for fixed orientation points and action frames, as well as determined efforts to affirm old and construct new boundaries” as people seek “to create clear markers in the flux of the globalization process” (meyer and geschiere 1999b, 2, 9). the same metaphors of flux and fixity underwrite two influential essays in the globalization literature: eric hobsbawm’s (1992) “ethnicity and nationalism in europe today,” and arjun appadurai’s (1998) “dead certainty.” i focus on these particular accounts because their ideas—specifically their ideas about anomie—have informed so much of the discourse about xenophobia in south africa. hobsbawm (1992) considers the rise of xenophobia across europe to be a result of late-capitalist modernity, claiming that economic liberalization, the collapse of the welfare state, the decline of the sovereign nation, and the disintegration of traditional values and certainties has led to a general ethos of what he calls “social disorientation.” reviewing a number of specific cases in europe, hobsbawm concludes, “all are comprehensible as symptoms of social disorientation, of the fraying, and sometimes the snapping, of the threads of what used to be the network that bound people together in society. the strength of this xenophobia is the fear of the unknown” (7). add to this the fact that people are competing against their neighbors for scarce jobs in a context in which livelihoods are increasingly precarious, and you have, according to hobsbawm’s analysis, a recipe for disaster. people are forced to establish claims to limited resources by defining “the others who do not belong, who should not belong, and who never can belong. in other words, by xenophobia” (8). the assumption underlying hobsbawm’s approach is that society will naturally decompose into “anomie”—his synonym for “social disorientation”—in the absence of mechanisms for maintaining social solidarity and cohesion, such as the welfare state or the nation. for him, globalization has eroded all of the neat structures and boundaries that modernist statecraft established, and people are forced to mitigate their confusion by reasserting parochial forms of identity. but this analysis seems to rely less on actual data than on the assumptions of a social science that privileges the concept of bounded order, and that remains deeply anxious about change and flux. the model at play here assumes, to borrow jonathan friedman’s (2002, 26) words, that “the world was once a mosaic of separate cultural units, but that with globalization these units have been opened up and culture is flowing all over,” creating a process of “mixing” or “hybridity” reminiscent of a “leaky mosaic.” as ira bashkow (2004) points out, this vision derives from structural-functionalist assumptions about the unity and boundedness of cultures (see clifford and marcus 1986).12 of course, given that hobsbawm is primarily concerned with europe—a cultural context to which he is native—we might expect that his anxieties about flux, flow, and hybridity are shared by the people whose xenophobia he is trying to explain. as richard handler (1988) has pointed out, european nationalism shares a great deal with social-scientific models of boundedness and unity; indeed, the former derives directly from the latter. but hobsbawm never thinks of this model as a native logic particular to a specific cultural context; rather, he writes as though it were natural and universal, or at least the universal concomitant of the nation-state. appadurai (1998) also links his approach to a theory of anomie, explicitly citing emile durkheim’s (1951)suicide. responding to critics who complained that his modernity at large (1996) offered too rosy a picture of global flows, he concedes that globalization has a dark side: “given the growing multiplicity, contingency, and apparent fungibility of the identities available to persons in the contemporary world, there is a growing sense of radical social uncertainty about people, situations, events, norms, and even cosmologies” (1998, 226). for appadurai, these uncertainties proceed from “the forces of globalization,” by which he means weakened states, refugees, economic deregulation, and deterritorialization: “it is not difficult to see that the speed and intensity with which both material and ideological elements now circulate across national boundaries have created a new order of uncertainty in social life,” specifically with respect to the differences between the categories “us” and “them” (228). similar notions of flux and flow operate in the recent work of achille mbembe and sarah nuttall (2008, 7) who, building on filip de boeck’s (2004) work, describe kinshasa as “bathed in a constant overproduction of signs, an ‘overheating’ or excess of the signifier that literally leads to a crisis of meaning [and produces a struggle to] reestablish control over an increasingly overflowing imaginary.” according to appadurai, violence becomes a useful tool in this struggle to reorder categories and define indeterminate social boundaries. drawing on mary douglas’s (1966) and liisa malkki’s (1995) ideas about purity and category mixture, he claims that violence is exercised not simply in order to accomplish the practical task of eliminating the other, but more importantly in order to stabilize it symbolically, to mark it, to make it what it is supposed to be, to fit it back into its category. in other words—to use meyer and geschiere’s (1999b) terms—the body becomes a site of violent “cultural closure” in situations of categorical uncertainty. what appadurai gives us is an approach to xenophobia rendered in classic anthropological terms. yet the underlying argument parallels hobsbawm’s, despite the fact that appadurai deals with the postcolonial world rather than with europe. in its broadest outlines, the formula goes like this: globalization creates cultural flows, breaks down boundaries, and generates semiotic overheating; cultural flows create anomie and uncertainty; and anomie propels new and violent forms of boundary-making. violence functions as the best method of reestablishing boundaries, much like the role that ritual was thought to play in early structural-functionalist anthropology. but it seems to me that the assertion that globalization generates moral uncertainty stands in for an explanation—or even an ethnographic description—of this phenomenon. the correlation is assumed rather than demonstrated with empirical evidence (cf. friedman 2002, 33), and is thought to pertain across cultures, featuring among european skinheads and hutu refugees alike. i do not mean to caricature these thinkers; i acknowledge that they have theorized globalization and violence in a variety of nuanced ways. i mean only to raise questions about the keystone concept of flows and anomie threaded through some of their work. i suggest that this approach smuggles an unacknowledged cultural model into the center of the literature on xenophobia, a model which assumes that in contexts of rapid change, in the absence of state order and clear boundaries, individuals are liable to spin off into a condition of confusion, uncertainty, and violence. at its core, this model is really less durkheimian than hobbesian, and as such relies on specifically western assumptions about human nature (see sahlins 2008). it seems to me that in contexts where western models of personhood and society do not enjoy popular currency, applying the flow/anomie theory can lead to analytical mistakes. this point becomes particularly vital in the context of south africa, where ideas about anomie and violence have a long and sordid history in discourses and technologies of european rule. “anomie,” race, and violence in south africa following the broader literature on globalization, scholarly treatments of xenophobic violence in south africa also tend to rely on theories of anomie and chaos. in a widely-read review of the local xenophobia literature, owen sichone (2008, 257) writes: “xenophobia has been defined as one among several possible forms of reaction generated by anomic situations in the societies of modern states. the new south africa is a good candidate for a society in a condition of anomie … and we should therefore not be surprised to find unusual levels of moral confusion among the citizenry.” similarly, francis nyamnjoh (2006, 1) claims that “the accelerated flows of capital, goods, electronic information and migration induced by globalization have exacerbated insecurities and anxieties, bringing about an obsession with citizenship and belonging and the re-actualization of boundaries through xenophobia.” the basic theory, once again, is that globalization automatically generates anomie and confusion, and that xenophobic violence is a reaction to this flux. but why should we believe that people are significantly more fluxy, or culture more flowy, now than in the past? historians of southern africa affirm that rapid migration, mixing, and culture contact has been a feature of the region since at least the mid-1800s, and in arguably more extreme forms than today: consider the mfecane, the forced removals of the apartheid era, and other periods of intense dislocation (e.g., etherington 2001; landau 2010). there is little evidential basis for the anomie theory of xenophobic violence, yet it retains its currency because it seems to make intuitive sense according to folk models about violence in south africa. ideas about anomie underpin popular representations of the xenophobic riots as “savage” and “animalistic.” indeed, sichone’s (2008) analysis makes liberal use of words like “senseless” and “irrational” to describe the attacks in 2008. while sichone surely does not intend it, this representation resonates with longstanding racial tropes that associate blackness with unrestrained passion and blind impulse—the same tropes that colonial administrators once deployed to justify european overrule. indeed, the image of ernesto nhamuave burning became so popular in the local and international press precisely because it fit with the metanarrative that regards black people as naturally given to irrational violence; it provided a sort of catharsis by furnishing evidence for what many observers already believed about race. importantly, the blackness at stake here is a blackness of a certain geographically-located class, namely, of people who live in informal settlements, or “slums.” as i pointed out above, almost all of the xenophobic violence has been perpetrated in informal settlements. there are specific reasons for this pattern, as i have shown, but most media accounts fail to do serious causal analysis and instead simply assert an association between the disordered nature of the built environment and the moral disorder that they presume to be endemic to these settlements—a folk model that posits correlations between anomie and violence. in south africa, slums have long been the focus of moralizing discourses about anomie (see hickel 2012). all through the twentieth century, social scientists expressed deep concerns about culture change among “natives” who moved from rural areas to urban areas, and worried extensively about what they referred to as “detribalization” (see hellman 1971, 1974; wilson and wilson 1945; mayer 1961). taking a cue from durkheim, they thought that detribalization would generate anomie, and that anomie, in turn, might result in violence. apartheid administrators thought of detribalized slum-dwelling africans as a social-evolutionary misfire; they represented a kind of matter out of place, or, more specifically, matter out of social-scientific category. as james ferguson (2007, 73) has put it, “urban natives … confused and confounded the orderly divisions between traditional and modern, native and western, and rural and urban.” in other words, they muddled the categories that underpinned the project of colonial governance. within this paradigm, the state regarded informal settlements as “dirty,” “diseased,” and “dangerous,” for they fit neither with the image of tradition (round wattle-and-daub huts in homesteads inhabited by patriarchal extended families) nor with the image of modernity (four-room nuclear family houses laid out in a formal township grid). these views were endorsed by social scientists of the time. both karl polanyi (1944) and bronislaw malinowski (1945) expressed precisely these anxieties upon visiting the region, and worried about how the existence of detribalized natives living in slums not only threatened the clarity of social-scientific categories, but—as structuralist analysis might predict—presented the potential for dangerous chaos. drawing on these same ideas, colonial and apartheid administrators explicitly believed that people who were “in between” the traditional and the modern were plagued by anomie associated with their liminal state, and that this made them intrinsically irrational and given to riotous violence (the equation works the other way around as well, in the imaginary of european civilization: violence not sponsored by nation-states is always considered irrational). beginning in the 1950s, the state acted on these concerns, initiating massive slum-clearance projects and forcibly relocating hundreds of thousands of africans back into category—either putting them into formal urban townships or sending them to the rural reserves. incidentally, cato manor was the target of one of the largest experiments with this kind of social engineering. it was razed to the ground in the mid-1950s and most of its residents relocated to the distant township of kwamashu, where they could be “civilized” for the purposes of control. in south africa, then, anxieties about change, anomie, and violence have a long history, and have mostly been the province of mid-century social scientists and colonial administrators. they are the ones that seem to be most concerned about flux and anomie—not the people in question. theories about anomie become prevalent in social-scientific accounts when analysts cannot understand local frameworks of order (see haynes 2012). analysts project their own confusion onto those they study. there is no reason to believe that africans find globalization any more confusing than earlier epochs of social change. to borrow ruth marshall’s (2009, 27) words, “in a continent whose history has been marked by fluid boundaries and the continual integration of strangers, where economies have been structured over several centuries through extremely brutal forms of economic extraversion, and where radical, violent change has marked the past century and a half … [a]re people really more confused by globalization or neoliberalism”? instead of assuming confusion, we need to do the difficult work of learning local patterns of order. as jane guyer (2004, 8) puts it, “rising levels of what a systems scholar would see as disorder may be ordered, may have landmarks and navigational pathways, to those with long familiarity with this kind of condition.” the point i wish to underline is that to explain xenophobic violence as anomic precludes substantive understanding of what is actually going on, and, more dangerously, leaves space for folk explanations about innate racial proclivities to flourish. conclusion: culture, order, and otherness my claim has been that the flux-and-anomie theory of xenophobia epitomized by hobsbawm and appadurai, and apparent in scholarly discourse within south africa, may actually reflect the anxieties of social scientists more than those of the people on the ground. this point resonates with michael scott’s (2005) work on hybridity, as well as with recent work by friedman (2002) and don kalb (2005). scott demonstrates that since the initial critique of the culture concept, anthropologists have been preoccupied with the notion of hybridity. on the one hand, they tend to celebrate hybridity as morally superior to bounded forms of cultural difference. on the other hand, they also represent hybridity as dangerously conducive to “new forms of segmentation” and reactionary differentiation, as we see in much of the literature on globalization and violence. scott (2005, 192) points out that these are two sides of the same coin in contemporary anthropological thought: “the relative moral values assigned to chaos and order may invert according to the point of view of the analyst … but the structure is constant: there is an ongoing oscillation between differentiation and integration.” as i have shown, much of the literature on globalization operates on the underlying assumption that xenophobic violence represents the urge—assumed to be a human universal—to establish order against encroaching chaos. scott (2005, 193) identifies this as a “meta-cosmology” of anthropological theory, which posits that “all people seek to impose ordering distinctions on chaos.” there is good reason to believe that the terminology of order and chaos is too particular to western cosmology, and too loaded with moral meaning, to be applied universally. but even if we accept that the impetus to impose order on chaos is a human universal, as scott wants to do, we need to relativize the notions of order and chaos. there are multiple understandings of what constitutes a condition of chaos, and multiple activities that are considered to most-effectively banish that chaos. in the globalization literature, chaos is understood almost exclusively as either insufficient social differentiation or an overload of signs and meaning. in cato manor—and, i would imagine, in other informal settlements across south africa—by contrast, local conceptions of order and chaos are quite different. they are rooted in ideas about what constitutes a proper moral economy, and they draw on and borrow from ideas about witchcraft as value negation. the perpetrators in this instance are not responding to chaos in the sense of hybridity, semiotic overheating, flux, and flow; they are not concerned with purity and pollution, and they are not trying to clarify blurry boundaries between natives and foreigners in the face of fears about ethnic uncertainty. as far as i can tell, none of these register as germane for them. if they are concerned about chaos, it is a chaos of a rather different sort. in cato manor, the salient concern is that the conditions for social reproduction are under serious threat. in this respect the marxist approach comes quite close to getting it right—it falls short only inasmuch as it fails to comprehend the constellation of symbols and meanings within which social reproduction is conceptualized. in cato manor, as i have shown, a cosmos in order is one in which economic activity facilitates social reproduction; where people (especially young men) have stable jobs, circulate money among kin and neighbors, and can afford to get married and establish neo-local domestic units. this notion of order is mapped onto a romantic vision of the bygone fordist economy and its order of gender, which exists more as a spectral nostalgia than as actual historical fact (hunter 2010). by contrast, a cosmos in chaos is one in which economic activity blocks social reproduction; where certain anti-social individuals disrupt the conditions for fertility by accumulating capital at the expense of others, by illegitimately manipulating value and exchange, and by generally taking wealth out of circulation. given a structure of conjuncture through which new experiences are interpreted in terms of older categories (cf. sahlins 1985), immigrants happen to appear very similar to the prototypical figure of the witch, albeit shifted from the usual register of intimate kin to the new register of foreign stranger. this discourse on moral economy offers an oblique but trenchant critique of the policies that have demolished formal-sector employment and left people to fend for themselves in a precarious informal economy and rely on state patronage. we might say the figure of the immigrant represents the ideal neoliberal subject: individualized, kinless, uprooted, cheap, flexible, enterprising, maximizing, and risk-taking. residents of cato manor refuse to celebrate this kind of personhood, and cast it as cultureless, dangerous, unstable, and destructive; in sum, as bare life, devoid of the characteristics that make a person fully human. the violence that locals direct against foreigners, then, has more to do with reestablishing the conditions for social reproduction than with reestablishing boundaries in the usual sense. of course, boundaries between “us” and “them” do come into play, but we have to understand the culturally-particular nature of these boundaries. following bashkow (2004), we need to look at the cultural construction of otherness, at how people demarcate and differentiate through symbolic contrasts or moral oppositions. in cato manor, xenophobia has to do with boundaries only in the sense that people are drawing evocative distinctions between moral beings and behavior and immoral beings and behavior. indeed, there is nothing essential about the substance of a foreigner in this discourse; no one is anxious about blood or essence. people do not operate with the notion that culture is a substance that fills people and flows around, which, as friedman (2002) argues, seems to underwrite the concept of culture that operates in the globalization literature. in fact, some foreigners never become the targets of hostility from their neighbors. if they engage in key forms of ritual exchange, such as paying for bridewealth, they become affectionately known as s’bali, the kin term for sister’s husband, and are considered attached to local families. one of the perpetrators articulated this model of difference when he told me: “we chased them out because they are different; they are different because they make their money in the wrong way. but not all of them.” in this sense, to label the violence as “xenophobia” is to mischaracterize it. this draws false equivalences between concepts of otherness in places as disparate as amsterdam and durban, or germany and rwanda, even though the xenophobes in each of these contexts are anxious about different kinds of issues and respond to them in different ways. notes acknowledgments i would like to thank spha shandu, nokhutula cele, and constance mkhize for helping me establish contacts in the field and for assisting with some of the interviews; gxhabhasha xulu and mwelela cele for helping me interpret some of my data; and richard and elda lyster for once again inviting me to use their home as my base in durban. thanks also to matthew engelke, michael scott, ira bashkow, and arsalan khan for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper; meghan healy, naomi haynes, and isak niehaus for helping me with particular points in the argument; and two anonymous reviewers for their very useful corrections and suggestions. it goes without saying that any remaining flaws are my own. 1. steinberg (2008) demonstrates that while the alexandra incidents were ignited by party-political conflict and ethnic feuding particular to that area, these elements evaporated as the violence “spread” to other areas and took on a more general xenophobic character. while i think this account is broadly correct, i would caution—as many others have done—that the metaphor of spreading risks obscuring the particular tensions and concerns that made violence thinkable in any given locality. 2. see steinberg (2008) for a timeline of events and desai (2010) for a useful overview. 3. in addition to the literature i cite in this paper, it is worth highlighting the many reports that have been produced by the human sciences research council, the center for sociological research, the center for civil society, and the southern african migration project. 4. cato manor was razed and its residents forcibly relocated during the early 1960s. it was resettled in the late 1980s, and in the mid-1990s was fast-tracked for renewal as a “presidential lead project.” 5. “sad south africa,” economist, october 20, 2012. 6. see bond (2000) for a comprehensive account of the rise of neoliberalism in south africa. 7. steinberg (2008) reports that employers do tend to prefer immigrants to south africans in construction, security, and domestic work. yet more than half of foreign nationals who work are self-employed, so they are not technically “stealing” jobs. indeed, foreign nationals actually employ remarkable numbers of south africans—at least one hundred thousand in johannesburg alone. 8. most of the people i encountered in cato manor did not come from long-standing urban families, but neither did they consider themselves tied to rural homes. they were relatively recent settlers in the area who nonetheless considered themselves to be urban, unlike cyclical migrants from zululand who retain proud rural connections. in light of this, the idea of umnumzane at work here is something of a hybrid between the modern industrial man and the rural patriarch. 9. steinberg (2008) argues that popular assumptions about zero-sum economics are a result of the fact that the south african economy is based largely on (unproductive) resource extraction, to the point where people have come to rely for their incomes on distribution rather than on entrepreneurship. people have come to regard national wealth as a fixed lump, and they compete for state patronage to receive grants, homes, and jobs. yet, as steinberg himself admits, south africans know that foreigners do not have access to state patronage; their incomes come from work, not from distribution. so this theory fails to explain why the logic of a zero-sum economy applies to foreigners. i propose that it may have to do with ideas about witchcraft and the appropriation of fortune instead. 10. recall the contrast that themba drew between cows (considered a morally legitimate investment) and snakes (considered a morally illegitimate investment). the former are used to produce kinship, while the latter are used to destroy it. 11. for ethnographic explanations of witch-burning, see bergland (1976) and hammond-tooke (1977). 12. bashkow (2004) notes that discourses about hybridity take boundedness for granted at the same time as they attempt to critique it; in other words, something can only be hybrid if it begins as bounded. references african eye news service 2007 “witchhunts in the 21st century.” mail & guardian. july 20–26. agamben, giorgio 1995 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. appadurai, arjun 1998 “dead certainty: ethnic violence in the era of globalization.” public culture 10, no. 2: 225–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10-2-225. ashforth, adam 2005 witchcraft, violence, and democracy in south africa. chicago: university of chicago press. austin, john l. 1962 how to do things with words. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. barchiesi, franco 2011 precarious liberation: workers, the state, and contested social citizenship in 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the bill and melinda gates foundation (bmgf) that was launched in 2005 to better integrate hiv vaccine research on a global scale. the conference welcome gift—aside from the usual brochures, programs, and pens—is “the 2010 scientific strategic plan of the global hiv vaccine enterprise” (bernstein et al. 2010) i have been following the formulation of this plan since 2009. for almost two years i have been sitting through meetings in hotel rooms in paris, in new york, in bethesda, listening to administrators, scientists, funders, industry representatives, and activists from all continents discussing how to best achieve the enterprise’s ambitious task—to transform the rather dispersed, dramatically underfunded, and, on the level of nomenclature and technology, largely incommensurable hiv vaccine labs into a single, closely integrated research community. the plan they eventually came up with suggested organizing hiv vaccine research in form of a carefully designed, global division of labor, held together by a single experimental system continuously monitored and adapted by the enterprise. i had traveled to atlanta in hopes of engaging a few scientists in a conversation about the future the scientific strategic plan (ssp) had envisioned for them. but there is no need to engage the conference participants, for the roughly one thousand scientists from almost fifty countries attending hiv vaccine 2010 are engaged. there is much talk about the plan’s bold vision, its futility, its genius. journalists flock to the room reserved for the enterprise, and representatives from the bmgf, the aids vaccine advocacy coalition (avac), the world health organization (who), the canadian government, the u.s. military, and unaids comment on the ssp in special sessions and meetings. amid all this talk about “the plan,” i become fascinated by what i had simply taken for granted thus far—planning. what actually is planning? since when is there such a practice? and what is a plan? plan/planning halfway through the conference i start searching the internet for articles on the plan and on planning.1 from etymological websites i learn three things. first, planning is a rather novel form of practice. in european languages the term did not exist before the seventeenth century. second, planning is a distinctively modern form. to plan is to come up with a rationally thought-through scheme of action for how to achieve a particular objective. its realization, which often involves technical measures, is overseen with administrative or bureaucratic accuracy. and third, the plan and planning document the fantastic, dreamy side of modernity. this has many reasons. one is that planning is not doing. the planner—often conflated with the project maker—is one whose business is to come up with plans, not to realize them. another one is that the figure of the planner often appears endowed with too much fantasy. planners have the aura of the fantast. a planner may ceaselessly invent plans for futures that are too fantastic, less than needed, sometimes less than desirable. plans may abound, actualizations don’t. i conclude that planning oscillates between the feasible and the fantastic. as i follow the conversations about the ssp, i can easily identify the modern technical aspect of the plan (the feasible)—it develops a map of the field, of how different centers (some yet to be built) should collaborate, of what the appropriate next steps might be.2 but what, i wonder, is its fantastic side? what is the bold future that it dreams of? shortly after i scribble this question in my notebook, i hear alan bernstein,3 the executive director of the enterprise, the master planner, say, “this plan is a plan for humanity.” i look around me. people nod. i am baffled: a plan for humanity? humanity (biological) bernstein’s statement gripped me. humanity? was this the bold future? the fantastic side of the ssp? i withdrew to my hotel room and read through my field notes. one of the most striking findings of my research have been stories that i grouped together under the category negative humanity experience. these stories almost always came in the same form: a scientist or doctor narrated how deeply she or he was moved by travels to africa in the midto late 1990s (that is, after arvs, antiretroviral drugs, first became available in western countries). what they found moving was not so much poverty, misery, or the absence of a medical infrastructure, but rather their encounters with others who were dying familiar deaths, deaths they knew from their work with aids patients in the united states or in europe. having seen death caused by the virus at home, and having seen death caused by the virus elsewhere, led those who shared their stories with me to a recognition between the familiar and the foreign, a recognition of what they called, in unison, “humanity.”4 i had found these stories striking for two reasons. first, there was the form the humanity experience took. it was not, as one might perhaps assume, a variant of existentialism and its rather familiar ethical ramifications—human beings are those beings who know about their own mortality; who suffer from this knowledge; and who have the additional ethical potential to recognize the other as equally knowing/suffering, a recognition that (where it occurs) has the powerful consequence of humans becoming solidary neighbors in death. the key argument of this twentieth-century philosophy had been that humans differed from animals—from the merely biological—by their existential knowledge and their ethical potential. in sharp contrast, the humanity experiences i was told about were grounded in the powerful experience of a shared biology. here humans were coming into view not as more than biology—but as biology. as living organisms, biologically constituted, inseparably related through a single phylogenetic tree, exposed to similar pathogens. i am almost inclined to speak of a powerful experience/discovery of a biological continuum—a continuum (a biological humanism) made visible by the deadly work of a virus. second, while many described the humanity experience as beautiful—there was widespread use of an aesthetic vocabulary—all of them experienced it as well as deeply troubling: for the people in africa were “still” dying deaths that north americans and europeans were basically no longer dying. the effect of arvs, as josé esparza from the bmgf provocatively put it, was that aids became another “tropical disease.” the conclusion that most of my interlocutors drew from this tropicalization of aids was that humanity did and did not yet exist. or, as steven wakefield from the hiv trials network taught me: humanity is present through its absence. it is rather a future, something we work toward. it is not a reality, yet. i found these humanity experiences remarkable. i was moved by the negative form—presence through absence—my interlocutors gave to it. and i was struck by the fact that humanity was articulated in biological, even in evolutionary terms (a curious inversion of the nineteenthand twentieth-century racisms that set humans apart). but i also was never quite sure what to do with these stories. as moving as they were—they seemed to me rather marginal to my actual curiosity. how does one actually put in place, maintain, and advance—on a world scale—a single experimental system? how to standardize assays, cell media, nomenclature, and the like? how does one convince researchers with diverse backgrounds (and stakes), working in different countries, on different continents, to participate in a massive, global division of labor? i thought of myself as studying the work—infrastructurally as well as conceptually—that would make the emergence of a global biology possible (franklin et al. 2000; cambrosio and keating 2012; collier and ong 2005; rabinow 1989). and at times i imagined the enterprise preparing a global biomodern project—a project that brings cutting-edge biology to remote places and people to modernize their biology (or at least their biological circumstances of existence).5 the humanity stories i had collected were not unrelated to this research imaginary—and yet, they had no real place in it either. or did they? “this is a plan for humanity.” the effect of bernstein’s statement (though perhaps made in passing, without any second thoughts), coupled with my new appreciation of planning as a most curious practice (one oscillating between the feasible and the fantastic), was that my understanding of the stakes of my research was profoundly set in motion. what were the links between humanity and planning? between the biological humanity experiences and the effort of grounding all hiv vaccine research in a single experimental system? thinking through these questions, my fieldwork endeavor gradually began to appear to me in a new light. if humanity (understood as a moral, biological challenge) does not yet exist, if it is a future anticipated in the present, then couldn’t one say that a most plausible (or modern) way of responding to this challenge is to come up with a plan for how to achieve this future? with a plan, as bernstein put it, for humanity? walking through the omni hotel in atlanta, i no longer saw scientists and activists and administrators. instead i saw myself surrounded by a diverse set of practitioners of humanity—funders of humanity, technicians of humanity, bureaucrats and administrators of humanity, and planners of humanity.6 they understand humans in biological terms and experience the (moral) challenge of humanity as at stake in biological research—as at stake at the bench, at stake in getting oneself immersed in the nitty-gritty details of experimental work, in building a global infrastructure, in the standardization of nomenclature and technologies. as the problem is rather complex, and resources rather minimal, humanity requires planning. hence the creation of a planning bureau for humanity—the global hiv vaccine enterprise. i got tremendously excited about my discovery. on the one hand, it radically changed what was at stake in my research. to be sure, i am still interested in the administrative and technical effort of the enterprise to establish a single global experimental system. but now this single experimental system appeared to me as the material basis of a global, biological humanity plan. to formulate the ssp, to establish standardized bio-assays, to convene conversations about innate or mucosal immunity, to conduct clinical trials—this is work toward humanity. my ethnographic study of the enterprise is literally an ethnography of humanity in the making. on the other hand, it generated a most fascinating set of new research questions. if humanity is less of a given—a collective singular of which all humans are part—than a future anticipated in the present, a project in need of planners, then one may ask how the enterprise’s humanity plan differs from previous conceptions of humanity. how does it continue—or depart from—what i now would call earlier humanity plans (and projects)? is there a difference in style, ethos, problem, approach? what difference(s)? the possibility of an anthropology of humanity i left atlanta with an idée fixe. conceptual historians have frequently shown that an all-encompassing, truly global concept of humanity is a product, in europe, of the late eighteenth century. roughly sketched, it first appeared in french and soon thereafter in german and english (foucault 1966; ritter 2004; koselleck 1979). what if i took my discovery literally? what if one approached all the documents written during the past 250 years as if they were plans? as if they were planning sketches for how to achieve what does not yet exist, humanity? hasn’t humanity been, from the moment of its emergence in the late eighteenth century, a future potential? a potential equally in need of poets and planners? implicit in these fieldwork-generated questions was a whole research program: read the great (literary and administrative) works about humanity not as local conceptual breakthroughs to the universal but as expressions of the fantastic side of (european) modernity (here defined as the age of planning; see gadamer 1966). it also seemed to me that these questions opened up a huge analytical space where before there was nothing but taken-for-grantedness. they transformed a given (all humans constitute the totality of humanity) into a provincial, historical, contingent phenomenon, thereby engendering the possibility of an anthropology of humanity; one that grounds in an ethnographic exploration of a set of actors—the practitioners of humanity—that, despite its extraordinary significance, is usually nowhere accounted for, one that calls for a meticulous epistemology of humanity plans (chakrabarty 2000). the promise, the beauty, of such an anthropology of humanity is that it would bring into sharp analytical view mutations in the way humanity is thought of (conceptually) and sought to be achieved (practically).7 does the enterprise, does the ssp, stand in for such a mutation? at the same time i felt derailed—derailed by the powerful (nominalist) implication of my discovery: that humanity is not a given, but an invention (a plan); that it is not a timeless, independent object out there, but the rather recent product of inventors (planners); that it does not exist independently of the plans and planners that imagine it. no plan, no humanity. (this is not) a history of humanity plans after i returned to montreal i started to work my way through available histories of humanity. what i found was that the majority of authors concerned with humanity took it for granted that humanity comes in form of a family of nations. for the majority, humans were not as such, not as individuals, members of humanity—but as members of a given nation (arendt [1951] 1958; gehlen 1973; kohn 1944; lévi-strauss 1952; niezen 2008).8 what i found as well, and this came as a major surprise, was that most of the authors who first wrote about humanity actually understood their texts as humanity plans (krajewski 2006). the eighteenth-century authors of humanity and the nation, this is to say, were aware of the relative newness of these terms—a newness that opened up novel spaces of thought and politics (the term nation acquires its modern meaning only in the late eighteenth century; see hobsbawm 1990). what is more, they were clearly aware that to achieve the future humanity/the nation opened up, amounted to a revolutionary challenge (foucault 2003). if humanity, or so the key argument of their plans went, is composed of nations, then isn’t the only way to achieve humanity to make nations—rather than kings—the principle of all politics? wasn’t the way forward to establish nation-states, that is, states constituted by a national society, states that would have only one reason to exist, namely, to foster their own society?9 the first humanity plans thus were revolutionary calls to action—and the way to achieve humanity was to establish a plurality of nation-states, one for every european nation, each of which would then evolve around the principle of fostering the national society (on the link between nation, humanity, and the european revolutions, see anderson 1991; hobsbawm 1990; gellner 1983; malkki 1992; on the rise of society fostering and early conceptions of social welfare, see desrosières 2002; foucault 1978).10 in the late eighteenth century, humanity was a rather european, and national, affair. this began to gradually change only during the long nineteenth century (hobsbawm 1962, 1975, 1987): once european nation-states had emerged, two new kinds of humanity plan were formulated. the first one was internationalism. european countries and the united states began to work out an administrative and legal framework for the international affairs that no single nation-state could address alone (faries 1915; geyer and paulmann 2001; huber 2006; iriye 1997).11 the second one—it emerged slightly later—was empire building. backed up by a linear philosophy of history and convinced of their own modernity, european countries like france, belgium, england, and germany claimed that they alone had broken through to universality (to science, economy, administration, technology) and were therefore alone in the position of allowing for humanity (kramer 1979; fabian 1982; said 1978). it was their self-proclaimed civilizational duty to build empires and thereby lift other nations into the future (aldrich 1996; conklin 1998; crowder 1964; mamdani 1996). one could call the first two lines internal, for they concerned themselves with the relatively small number of sovereign nation-states in the european (and american) tradition, while one could call the third one external, for it dealt with non-europeans. in the “short twentieth century” (hobsbawm 1994), the external line gradually faded. as empires began to crumble, as decolonialization movements began to rise (first in asia then in africa), the way to plan humanity was increasingly seen in the global imposition of the nation-state form as it had emerged in late eighteenth-century europe, and in the establishment of international agreements and institutions (staples 2006). the concrete form this idea took after world war ii was, on the one hand, the creation of the united nations system, and, on the other hand, the massive funding and support of new nations—usually in form of developmental aid, which one could interpret as an indirect continuation of empire building (luard 1982; ziring et al. 1994; for a critique, see balibar 1991; malkki 1992). the british philosopher jonathan ree (1992, 9–10) elegantly captured the logic that has, at least retrospectively, organized humanity planning: “to generate a plurality of sovereign nation states,” each one endowed with the task of fostering its national society, “in order that, for any human being, there should be a definite answer to the question ‘which nation is responsible?’” now what if one juxtaposes the ssp of the enterprise with the nation-centered humanity plans of the past two and a half centuries, especially with the global imposition of the nation-state form that dominated the second half of the twentieth century? the contrast is most striking conceptually (how humanity is thought of) as well as practically (how humanity is sought to be achieved). conceptually: nowhere in the ssp are nations or a family of nations evoked. the assumption that one is a member of humanity by way of belonging to a nation is radically absent. instead, humanity is evoked in biological terms, as a global continuum composed of individual biological beings that are the product of a shared evolutionary history; it is borderless, nationless, and yet not without local specificity (hiv comes in many local variants).12 practically: the actual building (achieving) of humanity under the nation-state plan has been the task of national governments and intergovernmental organizations. for example, the way to achieve world health has been to encourage (as the who actively did) each government to offer health services as part of its national society building and fostering practice (call it—with foucault 1978—biopower). the ssp calls on neither nation-states nor international organizations. instead, the practice of humanity building—in accordance with the biological understanding of humanity—is the task of biological and medical research facilities, clinical trial sites, pharmaceutical companies, activist networks, philanthropies, consulting companies, community advisory boards, transnational organizations, and various ngos (for closely related arguments, see nguyen 2010; petryna 2009; redfield 2013). an assemblage of sites, institutions, and actors not reducible to the idea of nations as the basic building blocks of humanity, an assemblage that potentially undermines it, sets it in motion, points elsewhere (nguyen 2005). how to make sense of this rupture? how the vital was decoupled from the social (on the rise of global health) the emergence of what i called a “global biological humanity project” is inseparably related to the entry of the world bank, traditionally focused on socioeconomic development, into world health (brown et al. 2006; godlee 1994; walt 1993; zwi 2000). in the 1980s, the world bank issued its first exclusively health-related loan, and it has since steadily increased its health-related spending (becoming, from a financial point of view, the most significant investor in world health; see institute of health metrics and evaluation 2013). the rationale informing the bank’s entry into a terrain formerly considered beyond its mandate was the belief—spelled out in the 1987 world bank report (the first exclusively concerned with health)—that health is a financial issue and must be treated as such. evoking the financial crisis of the 1970s, the world bank proposed to relieve nation-states of their health-care obligation toward their citizens and encouraged privatization—a move opposed to the national society-building projects advertised by the un and, in particular, by the who (world bank 1980, 1987; ruger 2005; stein 2008). the consequences of the shift from a public, social welfare to a privatized, market-based conception of health care were, on the level of world health, disastrous—especially in countries that had no or almost no health-care infrastructure to privatize (for a helpful review, see pfeiffer and chapman 2010). the reforms introduced, or demanded, by the world bank had the effect that large portions of humanity were left with no or almost no access to health care and that the nations formerly responsible for establishing it were relieved (if this is the right term) of their duty to do so—precisely at the time when hiv was spreading dramatically. in the midto late 1990s (when arvs became available) it became apparent that there were large parts of humanity for which—from the perspective of humanity planning—no nation held responsibility any more. health had quite literally transformed into a fallow field in which humanity, an unprotected, vulnerable humanity, was at stake. it was a biological humanity threatened by disease that the established institutions formerly in charge of health (the nation-state, the who) could not (or would not) take care of (brown et al. 2006; breman and shelton 2007). humanity, if it was to be achieved, required new institutions, efforts, plans, and practices—a requirement gradually identified by health activists (think of the humanity stories referred to above) and addressed by the emergence of what became known as the global health movement, made up of a series of organizations that have come into existence since the late 1990s: in 1998 the global health council; in 2000 the bill and melinda gates foundation and the gavi alliance; in 2001 the global fund to fight aids, malaria, and tuberculosis; in 2002 the millennium project and data; in 2003 millennium promise and pepfar; in 2005 the chai initiative, the consortium of universities for global health, and the global hiv vaccine enterprise; in 2006 product red and malaria no more; in 2007 the institute of health metrics and evaluation. during the past decade, the work of these global health organizations has gained a (powerful) dynamic of its own. they have generated a vision of a global, biological humanity that has—conceptually as well as practically—outgrown the older nation-state plan of humanity. in addition, they have effectively marginalized the two institutions formerly alone responsible for world health: the nation-state and the who. could one claim, therefore, that the specificity of the enterprise’s biological humanity plan is precisely that it has historicized the nation-state form of humanity? that organizations like the enterprise have succeeded it?13 more radically put, could one claim that such organizations have mutated what humanity is and thus who holds responsibility for it? how could one conceptually capture the difference the ssp makes? stateless the anthropological literature operates with several powerful concepts to analytically make sense of organizations like the enterprise. they are shown to foster biological citizens (petryna 2002); bring about biosocialities (rabinow 1996); establish a logic of experimentality (petryna 2009; nguyen 2010); ground minimal biopolitics (redfield 2006a); undermine sovereignty and create states of exception (notably fassin 2011); or foster a “will to live” (biehl 2007). most of these concepts share a negative assessment of the definition of humans in biological terms; they suggest, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, that the exclusively biological approach produces an animalization insofar as it ignores the social and political dignity constitutive of humans, a dignity best ensured by national-society-fostering states (agamben 1998; badiou 2007). while i find many of the concepts used helpful—experimentality is established, biosocialties are fostered—my fieldwork has made me wonder about the appropriateness of the normativity they often transport. to be more precise, my research has made me wonder if the articulated norm does not simply reflect the nation-state plan of humanity—a plan that relies on the conceptual presupposition that humans are national beings, that is, constitutive of a national polity/society and that proper humanity building must take the form of fostering the political foundation of states, so that humans, as basic elements of the polity, can flourish.14 from the perspective of the anthropology of humanity i have sought to articulate here, humanity is not a given. instead it is a plan—or something to be planned. what it is—or whether it is something at all—depends on how (if at all) it is planned (and on how the plan is put in practice). it follows that the idea of a family of nations—or the assumption that humans are first and foremost national, societal, political beings—is simply one plan among various possible ones.15 the task of an anthropological exploration of humanity plans can, therefore, hardly be to normatively judge a novel plan in terms of an already established one. rather, the challenge would be to ask what difference a novel plan makes, to bring it into view in its own right, with its own dynamics, on its own terms, to make accessible and palpable the novel space it opens up for humanity to exist. today, what is humanity becoming? in the final part of this essay, i endeavor to offer such a conceptual effort—in the form of a rearticulation of the concept of the stateless as it is has been introduced by hannah arendt. in her origins of totalitarianism, arendt ([1951] 1958) tells the story of the stateless in form of a drama with its origins in the french revolution. the dilemma of 1789, she suggested, was that, while the revolutionaries sought to ground the law in man himself, they did not institutionalize the rights of man (the law) in a juridico-political state apparatus (also see arendt 1961, 1972, 2005). instead, they assumed that the “inalienable rights of man would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to sovereign self-government” (arendt [1951] 1958, 291).16 this assumption, according to arendt, implied the factual abolition of the state (understood here, following hegel, as a legal apparatus set apart from the nation). in other words, the law was now no longer a matter of the state—but of the nation (les peuples français) for the nation (the french). the disastrous potential of this abolition of the state became visible only after world war i, with the falling apart—in part caused by intense national upheavals—of the empires of russia and austria-hungary. the story is well known. the western european nation-states, guided by the league of nations, established all over eastern and southeastern europe sovereign nation-states as defined by the 1789 and 1848 revolutions, according to which each nation—defined in terms of a purity of population—had a right to its own territory and its sovereign self-government. the problem was, however, that in an area where many nations shared one territory, the idea of national sovereignty could hardly be realized. identity of nation and territory was possible only when the nations not involved in government were denaturalized and classified as minority nations, that is, as alien nations within nations, as nations without their proper territory, without their own government, and hence without any legal apparatus to guarantee their political rights. and this is precisely what happened: “the emergence of minorities in eastern and southern europe” made visible the problem of the nation-state form that arose with the french revolution: “the moment human beings lacked their own government no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (arendt ([1951] 1958, 292, 269). to grasp the full critical intent of arendt’s account of the stateless—the brutal realism it articulates—one has to recall that built into her account is a normative aristotelian argument, according to which humans are biological beings with the additional capacity to organize themselves politically. the concept of humans arendt upholds is a juridico-political one. only as member of a polity can one be a political being, can one be more than a mere animal. it follows that the concept of the stateless not merely points to a group of people beyond the reach of the law. instead it points to a group of humans that is, precisely insofar as they are beyond the law, deprived of what sets them apart from mere animals: their juridico-political dignity. what makes arendt relevant here is her presupposition—not questioned at all by her critique of the nation-state form—that the possibility of human dignity is contingent on politics, and that the possibility of politics is contingent on the state. couldn’t one claim that it is precisely this presupposition—this impossibility, in 1951, to think humanity independent of the state—that gives contour to the difference the humanity plan of the global hiv vaccine enterprise makes? couldn’t one claim that the space opened up for humanity by the ssp of the enterprise is a space beyond this presupposition? a space beyond the state—but also beyond the juxtaposition of the merely biological and the political upheld by arendt (and by most anthropologies of global health)? the conceptual suggestion i would like to make here is that the specificity of the enterprise’s ssp—the specificity of the new space it opens up for humanity—is best understood as a (provocative) positive rearticulation of the stateless. i will make three comparative points to illustrate this suggestion. 1. i begin with the apparent. the conception of the human that guides the nation-state plan of humanity is—or so arendt is usually understood—a sociopolitical one.17 the humanity practice of the nation-state ideally was or has been the responsibility to assure and maintain the social conditions of existence (health has been one of them). in this sense, one could state that the nation-state form is less a humanity-achieving than a humanity-securing practice. in sharp contrast, the sociopolitical remains absent from the enterprise’s humanity plan. the humanity at stake in the ssp is a biological rather than a sociopolitical conception of the human. in fact, it is rooted so firmly in a straightforward biological conception—in talk about viruses, immunity, molecules, genes, proteins, genomes, and evolution—that almost all of my interlocutors find the distinction at the core of the nation-state form, here mere biology, there free political existence, implausible. “aren’t human beings more than merely biological,” i asked yegor voronin, a staff member of the enterprise? “more?,” he asked me with a baffled face. “yes, more.” i explained. “we are also social or political beings, no?” his response: “maybe man is social, maybe political, i am not sure about that. but if there are such traits in humans, then it is because of their biology.” he paused and then added: “the epigenetic is still genetic.” that is, from a strictly biological perspective, humans are (what else?) biological beings. and if they are political—even if politics is understood as an open, non-determined space (arendt 2007)—then only insofar as their biology allows for politics and the open. 2. from the perspective of the nation-state humanity plan, the stateless is a negative category, a temporal condition that needs resolution. for to be stateless is to have lost one’s human dignity, is to be nothing but human, part of a naked humanity. in the perspective of the enterprise, the stateless appears in a different, (almost) positive light. the enterprise de facto focuses on and seeks to achieve humanity in the form of the stateless, whether at home or abroad. to a certain degree one may even say that the enterprise—or the bmgf—opposes the nation-state plan of humanity (it understands itself as an alternative or as a historical successor), for it looks at the nation-state as a failed humanity project, precisely because the humanity that the nation-state secures is always an exclusive one, one focused on the nation—on the national society—only. the non-national other—and hence the majority—is always left out. in contrast, the enterprise defines humans biologically, defines them in inclusive, global terms. to be sure, the members of the enterprise have nothing against social organization. but this is a project only states can offer—and states are exclusive. hence, the social—insofar as it depends on the nation-state form—is not the level of organization on which humanity can be achieved. more emphatically, one cannot think a global humanity in national or societal terms. therefore, the enterprise departs from the national society-fostering logic and focuses on a different, entirely inclusive level—the biological one (see also nguyen 2005).18 3. what follows from the first two comparative observations is that the talk about a “minimum humanity” or a “minimal definition” of the human as a living species often evoked when it comes to humanitarian aid does not make sense if addressed to the enterprise (barnett 2011; fassin 2011; fox 1995; redfield 2006b). the enterprise, just like classical medical humanitarianism, is interested in stateless humans. the difference between the enterprise and classical humanitarianism, however, is that the latter works under the so-called emergency paradigm. it offers a minimal biopolitics—secures the bare life of the temporarily stateless in a time of crisis—until the state can take over again (redfield 2006a). in the humanity plan of the enterprise, this orientation toward the state is entirely absent.19 this has led some to the claim—directly or indirectly—that institutions like the enterprise lock others into an animal existence, that they reduce others to mere biological beings. or that they create a permanent state of exception in which the sovereign self-government of the people is suspended. both these claims, however, only make sense if one subscribes to the nation-state plan of humanity: only if humans are defined as more than biological—and only if the task of the nation-state is to secure this “more” (at least for its national society)—does such a critique make sense. i conclude my conceptual effort by suggesting that from the perspective of the enterprise (and this probably holds true for other global health organizations), the stateless constitutes a positive space precisely insofar as it allows for a humanity beyond the corrupt, exclusive, and failed nation-state form. for those who shared their work and motivation with me, the stateless is a promise—the promise of a global (biological) humanity. the very least one can say, independent of how one relates to this positivization of the stateless, is that it amounts to a major mutation of the 250-year-old space that has opened up the possibility of humanity.20 and to a massive analytical, conceptual and critical, challenge for the human sciences.21 anthropology of knowledge/thinking as an anthropologist of knowledge/thinking, i am interested in events that mutate the space of possibility within which we can think about the human, about humanity. to be more precise, i am interested in events that open up the possibility of thinking and acting in ways that escape previously established concepts and categories. such events pose a challenge to critical analysis—precisely insofar as they cannot be grasped in terms of the already known, they may require new, not yet existing analytical tools and thoughts. they require an analysis of motion, in terms of motion. the power (and aim) of the enterprise is to undermine the already known—this includes our aesthetic as much as our moral and political vocabularies—and the power of an anthropology of knowledge/thinking lies in that it can ethnographically investigate the open spaces that such an undermining produces. it can critically, beyond the norms of the already established, assess these new spaces in which humanity is today thought of and sought to be realized. how to enter these spaces, leaving behind anachronistic forms and concepts but not critical potential, is a major but most fascinating challenge. “il faut une science politique nouvelle,” tocqueville (1835, 9) once wrote, “à un monde tout nouveau. mais c’est à quoi nous ne songeons guère.”22 notes acknowledgments i am grateful to alan bernstein and the members of the global hiv vaccine enterprise for many conversations. without their generosity my research would have been impossible. miriam ticktin carefully read the paper and helped me improve it immensely. without our conversations about global health and humanity i could not have written this essay. peter redfield has consistently encouraged me, and i have greatly gained from our conversations about the social, the vital, and about provocation. nell gabiam has read and commented on earlier drafts of the present article and has helped me to avoid conceptual pitfalls. i would also like to thank fiona gedeon achi, lawrence cohen, nicole rigillo, sharon kaufman, and vincanne adams for their support and encouragement—and the faculty and graduate students of the department of anthropology at the university of washington, where a much earlier version of this piece was presented. finally, i would like to acknowledge the helpful guidance of charlie piot and anne allison. 1. i am aware that an internet search in a hotel room hardly counts as research. yet my fieldwork has led me to make a distinction between fieldwork—understood as a powerful method to generate unexpected, surprising research questions—and research, by which i mean the actual working through these surprising questions. and it seems to me as if at least some of these field-generated questions are such that they are better worked through by turning away from the actual field and to archives or already published material. here fieldwork, there research. consequently, the fieldwork episodes (discovery stories) i provide here are neither meant as “thick description” (geertz 1973) nor as “thick analysis” (cohen 2000). rather, they trace the unexpected emergence of a powerful new research question. 2. first, if indirect, steps toward an anthropology of planning have been taken by rabinow 1989, 2003, luhmann 2007, and collier 2011. see also the still powerful analysis of gadamer 1966. 3. alan bernstein left the enterprise in summer 2011. he was replaced by william snow. along with the change in leadership went a new orientation to what the enterprise is and aims to achieve. 4. it was not always clear to me what was meant by humanity. the recognition that a concrete other shared something fundamental with oneself? or the recognition of a global collective called humanity, which is constituted by something all share? or both? 5. i am grateful to stephen collier for our exchanges about biomodernism. the background to these have been discussions of rabinow 1989 and 1996. 6. ilana feldman (2011, 417) speaks insightfully about “humanity practices.” 7. my thinking about an anthropology of humanity has gained tremendously from conversations with miriam ticktin and samual moyn. ticktin and feldman (2010) have offered a powerful, if in orientation slightly different, version of such an anthropology of humanity—an anthropologically scrupulous study of humanity claims, that is, of claims that one is working in the name of humanity. what is the humanity at stake in such claims? who is entitled to speak of humanity? what are the power relations? more specifically, they are interested in what, in terms of power and politics, these claims enable and what they leave in the dark. see as well ticktin 2011 and feldman 2011. and see the seminal malkki 1994. moyn, in addition to his extraordinary the last utopia (2010), has launched the journal humanity, devoted exclusively to the analysis of the many-faceted discourses on and practices of humanity. that europe cannot possibly be the limit of an anthropology of humanity has been powerfully documented by faisal devji (2008) and samera eismar (2006, 2011). 8. in this section i work through a large amount of literature, without having space to do justice to its complexity. yet i think that the basic argument holds up to critical scrutiny: that when humanity was first articulated as a concept, it came in the form of a family of nations. it is striking to note that many of the histories of the nation-state can be read as histories of humanity. in fact, anderson 1991, foucault 1966, gellner 1983, hobsbawm 1990, niezen 2008, malkki 2002, and ree 1992 all present their works, at least in part, as accounts of humanity. 9. not only do both concepts—humanity and nation—emerge in eighteenth-century revolutionary discourses but they also emerge as mutually constitutive of one another: humanity was said to require nations, and nations were said to be constitutive of humanity. as liisa malkki (1992, 54) observed more than twenty years ago: “that the world should be composed of sovereign, spatially discontinuous units is a sometimes implicit, sometimes stated premise in much of the literature on nations and nationalism.” 10. one may well argue that some thinkers of the nation-state had little or no interest in humanity. yet these exceptions do not undermine that humanity was first conceptualized as a family of nations, each one of which would ideally have its proper territory and state. 11. a first if perhaps not powerful and largely western institutionalization was the league of nations (henig 2010). 12. i am inclined to push the argument even further. during the planning meetings convened by the enterprise i heard the assumption expressed that nation-states were in no position to address the challenge, because they tended to look at their own humans and national societies, rather than at humanity in general. what is needed now, and this is precisely the ethos that inspires the enterprise (and, as far as i can tell, much of the bmgf), are novel forms of action, undertaken by non-state actors, grounded in science. “for science,” as bernstein explained, “knows no borders.” 13. independent of how one answers these questions, one can at the very least say that during the past decade and half, a new humanity plan has emerged, one that does not define humanity in national societal but in global biological terms. global is here understood as a space constituted by non-state actors independent of any nation.. 14. biological care would then form part of the national society-building service offered by the state. that is, humans are first national beings—and then, as national beings, biological organisms to be cared for (foucault 1978). 15. what, then, of politics? what if the enterprise—the space it opens up for humanity—escapes the established political (and critical) vocabulary? would the challenge not be to research what new, what other forms of politics—beyond the nation, beyond society—are emerging today? 16. “in other words, man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into a member of a people.” as a consequence, “only the emancipated sovereignty of the people, of one’s own people, seemed to be able to insure them. as mankind, since the french revolution, was conceived in the image of a family of nations, it gradually became self-evident that the people, and not the individual, was the image of man” (arendt [1951] 1958, 291). 17. i write “is usually understood,” for this is not arendt’s actual argument. for her, the social is equivalent with the biological, and this is precisely what defies proper politics—which should unfold beyond the merely biological. 18. my intervention “what about race?,” was countered with the comment that race is not a biological but a social concept, with a reference to lewontin 1972. 19. states may be part of the story, but the story is not a state one but a stateless one. 20. note that i am not suggesting that it is the first mutation ever, for it surely is not. the whole point of the approach is to suggest that every change in a plan—or in the way it is set to practice—equates a mutation. but some mutations are minor, while others—like the one i seek to assess in this essay—are major. 21. a stateless humanity? how does the enterprise, or the bmgf, actually imagine such a stateless humanity? my research led me to think that this is perhaps the wrong question, for it mistakes the fantastic for the feasible. the anticipated stateless humanity—a future exemplarily enacted on a small scale in a few select places—is perhaps better understood as a powerful critique of the nation-state than as a fully worked-out alternative to it. perhaps this is the dreamy, the fantastic, side of the ssp? 22. in my free rendering: a radically new world requires, if it is to be understood, a new political vocabulary, but this we do not even dare to dream of. references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: 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ziring, lawrence, robert riggs, and jack c. plano 1994 the united nations: international organization and world politics. belmont, calif.: thomas wadsworth. zwi, anthony 2000 “policy forum: the world bank and international health.” social science & medicine 50, no. 2: 167–68. homeownership in israel homeownership in israel: the social costs of middle-class debt hadas weiss helsinki collegium for advanced studies during the summer of 2011, israelis took to the streets in unprecedented numbers to demand social justice. the uprising billed itself as targeting the high cost of living in general, but its casus belli was housing, as evidenced by the multiple tent encampments that sprang up overnight. in less than a decade, housing prices in israel have practically doubled with rents becoming prohibitive and homeownership slipping ever further out of reach.1 despite the deep political, ethnic, and religious cleavages that exist in israeli society, housing emerged as perhaps the most passionately endorsed political concern. the flag-bearers for the 2011 protests were middle-class students and young professionals, and they remained vocal as political action retreated from the streets to media venues and policy debates. yet even as the actors remained the same, the shift away from the street transformed the terms in which those protesting the cost of housing proposed and discussed solutions. very quickly, housing became real estate, citizens became investors, and the nation became the market. in the process, their political argument was fundamentally transformed in ways that attenuated much of its initial force. in the wake of the uprising i set out to explore the paradox of the protestors’ abandonment of their most powerful claims and immediately stumbled upon another. since the uprising was framed as a consumer revolution, homebuyers were vulnerable to criticism of their willingness to buy overpriced houses. collective action, such as boycotting an overpriced market, is difficult to accomplish in the face of a necessity as pressing as housing, but individual investments in overpriced homes continue to confound consumer-choice expectations. to afford the purchase, buyers take out burdensome and demonstrably uneconomic mortgages, even when, according to economists, they could live better as renters while saving their extra earnings or investing them more profitably. considered as investments, home purchases defy the logic of rational choice. to make sense of these purchases i studied the real-estate market, but here i encountered a third paradox. on the streets as in the media, demands for cheaper housing were made in the name of public interest. yet as much as seventy percent of israeli households own their own homes. israel is a model homeownership society insofar as citizens are enlisted as investors in economic growth by virtue of their home values. the majority of the population has a stake in the stability, if not the rise, of housing prices, so as not to lose the value of their investments. still, they consider rising home prices as a burden rather than an asset. in the matter of housing, it seems as though society as a whole was acting to undermine itself. in what follows i unravel each of these paradoxes in turn, asking what motivates people to make home purchases that seem imprudent in narrowly economic terms, and how homeownership debt shapes political struggles for social justice. i address these issues with reference to a new form of accumulation, wherein investments are not of privately owned resources, but rather leveraged by loans credited by banks and other financial institutions. the climate created by the privatized provision of necessary goods like education, health, and housing has pushed workers onto financial markets for loans such as mortgages. the leveraging of credit in investment ventures has been de rigueur for the finance industry, but its insinuation into households chafes against different orders of practice. whereas for finance, credit is a means of maximizing profit, for ordinary lenders credit is a means of gaining access to housing and other consumption goods and services (dos santos 2009; lapavitsas 2009). in resolving the paradoxes, i suggest that homebuyers’ reliance on credit compels them to operate as investors despite themselves, by making homeownership synonymous with achieving security. middle-class domestic security distinguishes those who are able to take out burdensome loans in order to afford the purchase of a home from those who cannot, thereby making mortgages desirable and defusing resistance to housing’s commodification and overpricing. the competitive pursuit of security through homeownership contributes to israelis’ collective insecurity. credit-leveraged accumulation widens the gap between market growth and public welfare, even as they are widely represented as interlinked. this analysis will illuminate the relation of credit and debt to political agency. paradox i: politics eclipsed by the market in their analysis of the 2011 uprising, filc and ram (2013) marvel at how the first de-facto challenge to the neoliberalization of the israeli economy was promptly caught up in the logic of this very economic formation. protesters’ demands to remedy socio-economic injustice were couched in the language of the republican social contract, in which the state guarantees citizens’ welfare in return for their fulfillment of civic duties like military service and the paying of taxes. protesters accused the state of reneging on this implied contract. their accusations resurfaced in the report issued by the post-uprising government-appointed investigative committee, headed by economist manuel trachtenberg. yet the housing section of the trachtenberg report (2011) opens with an exposition, not about citizens’ right to housing but, in the language of quantifiable market demand, about everyone’s need for affordable housing. the report attributes expensive housing to undersupply and calls on the government to stimulate competition through such measures as diversifying landownership. political intervention in the form of public housing and subsidies for housing purchase is recommended only for marginal populations whose low incomes preclude them from buying homes in the free market with the aid of bank loans. here political grievances arrive at an impasse. people accuse politicians of allowing housing prices to rise so immoderately as to undercut the welfare of citizens, but their trust in the market for housing provision leaves no clear sense of what is to be done. the impasse was articulated on june 5, 2012, nearly a year after the protests, when the economics daily, calcalist, convened a real-estate conference in tel-aviv featuring presentations by politicians, financiers, and businessmen. calcalist’s editor, golan friedenfeld, and ceo, yoel asteron, set up the housing challenge as follows (paraphrased from their opening remarks): the homes we bought only a few years ago have doubled in value. yet we would not be able to afford them today, nor can we help our children buy their own first homes. how can we help them attain the comforts that we enjoy?2 the politicians in attendance—mindful of the state’s enormous revenues from housing taxes and land sales—suggested increasing supply through more credit for construction and purchase. the bankers—mindful of all the houses that banks own as collateral for mortgage loans—warned that immoderate increase in supply would perniciously deflate home values. the private developers called for favorable zoning and access to more migrant construction workers. their disparate interests notwithstanding, these stakeholders never strayed from market parameters and united in warning against fiscal irresponsibility. when the minister of housing, ariel atias, advocated public housing, audible groans arose from the audience (“that would be the end of us,” grumbled the entrepreneur sitting beside me). reuven cogan, from the ministry of finance, concluded the morning session by asserting that “the market knows how to correct itself, and it is our job to allow it to do so.” citizens distressed by the poor provision of housing follow the lead of politicians and bankers in deferring to the market. some attribute housing prices to the vagaries of global finance and currency exchange, factors beyond anyone’s direct control (dardari and cohen 2012). others claim that it is the effective demand of homebuyers that puts upward pressure on prices. “whoever can buy, should buy,” a jerusalem realtor told me. “prices keep rising and it’s better to enter the cohort of homeowners than to gaze upon it from outside.” in be’er sheva, a hotspot for real-estate investment, another realtor recommended buying to those who can afford the down payment, and subletting to those who cannot. if you can pay off a mortgage loan at an annual 2 percent interest, he said, while making an annual 6 percent earning on the home value in rent, you are a profitable real-estate investor who also, incidentally, provides housing solutions to those with lower incomes: the interests of homeowners are aligned with market growth. this image of the distributive wisdom of the housing market is bolstered by faulting homebuyers for not acting as individual investors would. the liberal business daily, the marker, spotlights those who purportedly “grease the wheels of the real-estate market,” and “fuel the housing bubble”; namely, parents of certain means who, rather than leave their sons and daughters to navigate the real-estate market to the best of their financial ability, help procure houses for them at inflated costs. housing prices are out of sync with average incomes, the analysts conclude, because of such parents (lutski 2010; smuleski 2010). experts routinely set up efficient pricing as a contrast to the distortions of political bias. it is absurd to insist on a depoliticized real-estate market in israel, where over ninety percent of the land is state owned (shenhav 2003, 8). yet no one can arrive at a legal definition of affordable housing for fear of political interests favoring one constituency over another. if the state sells land below the market price, it would be interfering in a public good, a land appraiser explained to me. why should only some people enjoy lower land-prices rather than others? upon describing conflicts in housing committees between entrepreneurs and environmentalists, a ministry of housing planner assured me that they all represent public interest: the state merely acts to satisfy demand in the same way as private developers do. if this is the government’s stance, the stance of the banking sector is no different. stanly fischer, acting as governor of the bank of israel, rejected accusations that he favored banks over young couples struggling to buy a home. he insisted, “we care about the stability of the banking system because we care about young couples” (pilot 2012). what lends these claims their plausibility to the public is credit, in the form of real-estate’s reliance on mortgage. in the gift, marcel mauss (2000) proposes that the foundations of human sociability arise from generalized obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate. when everyone is indebted to everyone else for utilities and services, exchange is a common good. deferred mutual obligations—the prototype for credit and debt—are for mauss among the foundations of the modern state, which repays its members’ work with welfare (2000, 67). anthropologists today are less inclined to consider credit as underwriting collective well-being. if maussian-style interpersonal credit binds together households and small communities, modern state-backed bank credit, in david graeber’s (2011) account of power’s intrusion of moral networks, quantifies mutual obligations, subordinates them to market exigencies, and necessitates their policing. in parker shipton’s (2007, 2009, 2010) trilogy on credit in east africa, the financial credit apparatus encroaches upon a prior balance of reciprocal obligations: by using native land as collateral for mortgage loans, credit subjects the community to anti-social pledges. another difference between interpersonal and impersonal debt, however, keeps the maussian vision of mutually-beneficial interdependencies alive. interpersonal debt makes imbalance transparent; if my neighbor charges me interest on a loan, she plainly profits at my expense. in impersonal transactions, however, imbalances are opaque. the banking system presents its credit as the safeguard of public wealth, which empowers consumers, savers, and investors. banks pay interest on deposits and reinvest profits in the national market’s growth. the implied beneficiaries are citizens-cum-stakeholders. with credit financing homes and other necessities, the resources of entire populations are mobilized as a common pool. excess capital is reinvested rather than remaining idle. depositors have a stake in the preservation of a system, the destruction of which would spell the destruction of their interest-bearing savings (harvey 2006, 262–65). the interdependence of bank credit and private resources reinforces pierre bourdieu’s (1977, 181) conception of credit as “a sort of advance which the group alone can grant those who give it the best material and symbolic guarantees.” the promise of credit incentivizes competitive contribution to pooled resources, because pooled resources provide material and social rewards relative to the size of investments made within them. gustav peebles (2008) works out credit’s normativity with respect to the history of banking: by placing their cash reserves in bank accounts, depositors entrust banks to manage their finances. bank credit simultaneously builds personal credibility and enables the state to manage, through banks, the welfare of its citizens. personal wealth is tallied in a bank-mediated unit of value, which is construed as a social good and thereby a rational and moral good. the conceptual alignment of credit-leveraged accumulation with public welfare has materialized in every housing fair held in israel in the wake of the housing protests. the nadlaniada fair, held in june, 2012 at tel-aviv’s fair and exhibition center, underscored the real-estate (nadlan) industry’s role in housing. advertised as addressing the housing shortage, it was designed to promote financial investment. the main aisles featured booths with posters and pamphlets listing the most expensive offerings, properties located in tel-aviv and its environs, priced in the one to two million nis range.3 the prices displayed corresponded with proximity to the center aisles of the exhibition center, falling towards the outskirts, in correlation with real-estate values in the peripheries. if a visitor gravitated toward the center, this implied choosing to spend more. all aisles converged in a perpendicular row assigned to israel’s major mortgage banks, where explanatory leaflets linked their financial backing to income stability and security. the housing booths featured ads in which homebuyers were encouraged to seek profit in the name of family values, therein defining “community” as a common pool of high-quality investors. housing projects announced “a real-estate chance of a lifetime” alongside scenes of family idyll: “the fourth-floor neighbors’ daughter takes rexy out for walk.” one ad for housing plots featured a hand inserting a coin into a piggybank. the caption read, “saving is nice, but your children deserve to build on a better future.” the next image was of homes under construction: “for you, it’s a singular opportunity. for your children, it’s an investment in the future.” as in peebles’s (2008) account of banking, investment is prioritized over the hoarding of cash reserves as the rational choice for individuals and the moral choice in terms of family and public well-being. american mortgage defaulters personify the flipside of the coin: in reneging on the terms of their credit agreement, they are considered un-savvy or immoral (maskovsky 2012). since the return on investment in a home is deflected to the distant future, its rationality is more compelling than that of a savings account. what is more, it is not private wealth that is invested, but a bank loan. people’s entrustment of their savings to the bank is thereby mirrored by the bank’s entrustment of its capital to the community in fulfillment of the community’s residential needs. the paradox of public outrage over inflated housing costs, despite a deep distrust in political manipulation of the housing market, is sustained by an idealization of credit-leveraged growth. through the rhetorical and material conflation of credit with a resource-pooling community, financialized accumulation is equated with the growth of public welfare. paradox ii: economic irrationality banks incur huge profits by doling out mortgage loans to borrowers who then repay the original principles plus interest. since the 1990s, israeli banks assumed full responsibility over mortgages, which had previously been sponsored by the state (carmon 1999). the recent spike in housing prices combined with low interest rates has sent mortgage debt climbing apace. the erstwhile fear of debt has transformed into indifference, if not outright optimism (mirovsky 2012). a mortgage consultant in bank hapo’alim told me, “if only three years ago people would take out fouror five-hundred-thousand nis in mortgage, today most people ask us for sevenor eight-hundred-thousand.” he added, “i don’t think they always know what they’re doing.” many analysts concur. real-estate lawyer, edi arbili (2005), mobilizes bank data to show that in a country like israel, where housing prices are exceptionally high relative to incomes, mortgages are a rip-off. by the time a person has paid off his mortgage debt, he has paid a sum far higher than the original cost of the house. it is as if he has functioned, for much of his adult life, as a small branch of the bank, expending his utmost resources and energy towards an increase of the bank’s capital. economist, danny ben-shahar (2007), likewise questions the rationality of home purchase. eighty-five percent of the participants in his study agree with the following statement: “one of the reasons for which purchase of a residential asset is superior to rent is that while the purchase leaves the buyer with the asset at hand after completing the mortgage payments, renting leaves the renters with nothing in hand after paying rent installments for the entire lifetime” (2007, 845). i quote the statement in full because i have often so heard versions of it in my own conversations with homebuyers. ben-shahar (ibid.) claims that this sentiment reveals an error in judgment, since, “according to traditional economic theory, after the mortgage loan is paid off, the renter is supposedly left with an accumulated cash equivalent in value to that of the dwelling asset.” the down payment is your investment in real-estate, ben-shahar explained in an interview. but maybe the initial investment would be better directed toward stocks, which typically offer higher revenues in the long term, or even, for the more risk-averse investor, government bonds? the monthly payments of interest are the correlate of the rent one would have paid. a mortgage-borrower risks paying for housing services and ending up thirty-years later with nothing but an overpriced apartment, while the renter may have accumulated capital in the same amount as the homeowner has paid in interest. but is home-purchase really the free investment-choice that economists make it out to be? evidence suggests otherwise. long-term renting is almost unheard of in israel, where there is no significant regulation of the rental market. housing insecurity is an assumed reality of the poor, and often tolerated by young adults without families of their own. in contrast, those seeking stability for their children cannot afford to live at the mercy of their landlord’s desire to sell, renovate, or raise the rent of the property. homebuyers might imagine they make their long-term housing choices independently, reflecting the way that home purchases are presented publicly. yet mortgage investments are a social constraint masquerading as an outcome of their decisions. the portrayal of restriction as free choice became apparent in a consultant training-course i attended, led by the mortgage consultancy, esh lidor. it began with the lecturer asking the twenty-odd participants, “why do we buy homes?” he reformulated each of their responses, interrogating concepts like security, self-esteem, and peace of mind, assessing how they are constructed to meet desires rather than needs. one participant interjected to ask what the alternative was. “there is none,” conceded the lecturer. “if you don’t want to move every two years, you have to buy a house, but it’s your responsibility to buy it well.” he then reviewed the variety of mortgages, evaluating the risks and benefits of each with respect to various scenarios. he concluded by again conceding to necessity: since one cannot predict illness, job-loss, inflation, or interest rates, the best bet would be a diversified mortgage that allays risk. beyond the difficulties of planning for the unknown, i encountered the presumption of individual financial acumen despite a financial environment lacking clear choices. a study of the u.s. market suggests that mortgage contracts might be complex and multidimensional precisely so that borrowers will be unable to grasp them (bar-gill 2009). the mortgage tracks offered by israeli banks are complex enough to make a borrower’s head spin. bank, government, and nonprofit websites nevertheless encourage borrowers to educate themselves about the different possibilities. the premise of individual economic agency is necessary for the demand that households adjust financing to price expectations. banks thereby exert pressures on clients to be “banks unto themselves” (holmes 2009, 406). anthropological contributions to a volume on public policy (shore, wright, and però 2011) demonstrate that individuals are “responsibilized” to choose prudently in a free market of utilities and services, even when confronting disempowering countertrends. the array of choices in mortgage strategy can create a sense of freedom under the tightest constraints, inducing homebuyers to confidently and self-assuredly take out mortgages that they will be paying back, interest included, for decades. seeking further insight into the economic irrationality of housing investments, i observed twenty-some mortgage transactions at two banks (le’umi and tfachot) and a private mortgage consultancy (matan). private firms with paying clients take more time to explain the different mortgages and their financial repercussions, and i begin by describing one such transaction. a young couple enters with a baby. led by the consultant’s questions, they state that they are willing to pay 2,000,000 nis for a four-room apartment in tel-aviv, and they can put up 600,000 nis as down payment. they would finance the remainder drawing from the maximum seventy percent funding approved by banks. the husband, a career military officer, earns 9,000 nis per month. his wife, a computer programmer, earns 12,000 nis. they pay a 4,300 nis monthly rent on their current apartment. for a mortgage they would go as high as 6,000 nis per month, and commit to doing so every month for thirty years. over the next hour, the consultant works out various payment strategies. he shows them matrices of how much they would be paying in each scenario. he advises a regular refinancing of their loan to keep down monthly charges. for all of his ingenuity, the final sums seem huge. when the woman asks if they should forsake their dream apartment and buy one priced at 1,600,000 nis instead, the consultant shows them a simulation of what they would then be paying. he cautiously adds, “i sense that you realize how unreasonable a two million shekel apartment would be?” the couple confirms this but confesses that since their bank had approved the higher mortgage, they got excited about the opportunity to buy the more expensive apartment. the mortgage process is structured such that the amount of bank funding is the first hurdle in the quest to buy a home. when setting an appointment at a mortgage bank, prospective borrowers are asked to provide evidence of their money on deposit and monthly income for the past three months. these numbers are used to calculate the amount of funding the bank will approve. clients, sometimes guided by bankers, often try to tweak their numbers and to increase the down payment, made possible through loans and family assistance, in order to improve their chances of getting a larger loan. upon official approval of the loan, they can sign the deed on the house. the signing of the mortgage contract takes place in the limited timeframe between signing the deed and paying for the house. prospective borrowers spend this time getting quotes from other banks on their mortgage conditions. banks usually recommend an off-the-shelf product of two to three combined mortgage tracks. understanding the differences among them is daunting enough that most borrowers go along with the package deal and proceed to compare the different interest rates each bank offers. once borrowers choose a bank, they schedule a final meeting to which they bring a formal appraisal of the value of the house that the bank will now own as collateral. the meeting ends with the money for the purchase being transferred to the borrowers’ bank account. banks are in the mortgage business for profit, but in individual mortgage transactions bankers often try to help borrowers work out an agreeable mortgage plan, if only to ensure their business against competitors. it is this attitude that borrowers encounter when they take out a loan. the off-the-shelf mortgage product might be more expensive than an individually tailored and managed one, yet it is less risky given that most borrowers are not inclined to sort through it alone. what is more, israeli banks gain nothing by making payments so high that borrowers are forced to default, and borrowers are legally protected to the extent that banks have everything to lose by trying to requisition a home. banks are further limited in their maneuverability by rigid guidelines set by the bank of israel for rates of funding and interest. what actually transpires during a mortgage transaction is a dizzying array of activities: document checking and photocopying, typing figures into matrices and the printing of results, and signing and faxing, all against the backdrop of constantly ringing phones and the next customers waiting their turn. as with the work of technicians in japanese banks, reflection and negotiation are curtailed by the legalities of paper documentation, which impose a disciplining rhythm on the transaction (riles 2010). every amount agreed upon needs approval from superiors, often accomplished by the bank consultant walking a few cubicles over to speak to her boss. consultants deny or question borrowers’ requests on the grounds of their likelihood of being approved. conversely, consultants inform borrowers when a payment strategy would reduce the cost of commission or interest. on several occasions i have seen borrowers taken aback by a detail they had not accounted for. once, a borrower noticed that his mortgage tracks were calculated over different payment periods. when the consultant explained that they are adjusted to guarantee lower interest rates, the impressed borrower thanked her. another time, a borrower refinancing her mortgage noticed that after all of the fuss she would end up paying the same monthly fee she had been paying all along. the consultant explained that it would be for a shorter period. during the mortgage transactions, a fair amount of haggling took place over supplementary fees like insurance, commissions, or the cost of issuing some form or another. this stood in contrast to the unquestioning acceptance of the mortgage contract. when, during a lunch break, one consultant asked me what i had learned so far, i replied lamely that borrowers appear not to have thought the process through entirely. she agreed, referring to a borrower from earlier that day. he came in for the final document signing but could not seal the deal because his wife, the co-signer, was bedridden with pregnancy complications. as the consultant guided him through the bureaucratic hoops, he assessed the details of the loan. was the seventy-three percent funding he had initially asked for approved after the apartment was revalued at 1,100,000 nis? and what was the monthly charge again? when the consultant informed him it was 3,365 nis, he was startled. is there really no way to pay less than 3,000 nis a month? and what were the interest rates again? could the combination be changed before his wife came in? the consultant claimed that his case was typical. “the only thing anyone is ever interested in is how to borrow as much as possible and pay as little as possible, without considering for a second if it’s really worth it in the end.” borrowers want to own a home and as far as they are concerned, banks are there to help them. at no point did i witness any intimation about the total amount that they would end up paying the bank for their loan, and, by extension, the actual cost of their home. the most significant hurdle is securing the bank’s approval to buy one. this necessity exists on a different conceptual plane than the rest of the transaction, which centers on the monthly amount to be paid for the privilege of being homeowners. borrowers do not calculate the monthly charge as a percentage of the mortgage debt, rather, they compare it to rent, an indication that nearly the same amount of money they had heretofore “thrown away” will now go toward the ownership of their home. borrowers are single-mindedly focused on buying a home because they have little choice in the matter. their financial circumstances often compel them to seek maximal funding for minimal monthly charges—the very loans that end up being the most expensive. yet the transactions are designed as free negotiations, wherein clients make pleas for credit and banks go to great lengths to accommodate them. paradox iii: society undermining itself most young couples in israel today cannot afford to buy a home without their parents’ help with the down payment and a bank’s help with funding. addressing their predicament, economist yaakov sheinin (2011) makes the following assessment: housing prices have not spiked due to housing shortages, as conventional wisdom would have it, but due to the sheer escalation of housing prices, which recommends real-estate as a good investment.4 people buy homes anticipating their rising value. paradoxically, the parents of protestors are likely happy about the rising prices: “parents really want their children to buy an apartment cheaply, but only so long as the value of their own apartment does not decline. as an economist, i regret to say that this is impossible” (ibid.). i question the assumption that sheinin and many others makes about homebuyers and homeowners—namely that they are simply investors seeking to maximize capital returns on their investments. if true, this would imply their working against their own interests by protesting escalating housing prices. one explanation for society appearing to irrationally undermine itself lies in the conflict between homebuyers’ dependency on credit, which turns them into investors despite themselves, and their own goals, which are not accumulation per se. the dynamic of housing-purchase groups can shed some light on homebuyers’ actual goals. relying on collective bargaining, housing-purchase groups have become a popular vehicle for reducing housing costs. they vary in scope, organization, and strategy. the groups i studied were advertised as helping young, working, college-educated households buy their first homes. “until government solutions come to fruition,” a coordinator of one such group told me, “we need to do more with the means at our disposal.” they seek not only to help with home purchase, she added, but to create a community, because “people are willing to pay a bit more to live alongside other college graduates like themselves with children the same age.” something of this appeal came through in the information session for the first purchase group i visited. i found myself in a large hall surrounded by over two-hundred men and women, all comfortably similar to me. the speakers reminded the audience that to qualify for the group they needed to provide evidence of their age (the cutoff was forty), employment status, and college degrees. their willingness to purchase apartments priced at over 1,000,000 nis silently implied their possession of sufficient financial resources. in another session for the purchase of five apartments priced at over 1,500,000 nis each, a question about the other purchasers was fielded by a simple “look around you.” an organizer of a group, bidding on the exclusive ownership of an apartment building, announced that applicants must already possess thirty percent of the apartment price. “i don’t care where you get it from,” he said. “your aunt, your grandmother, but if you don’t have at least that much, don’t even bother joining.” the twenty-one couples that had joined the bid attended a subsequent meeting. most looked to be in their thirties, and they brought along parents or infants. pulling up chairs in a circle to discuss the purchase details, they asked one another, “where do you live now?”; “what do you do for a living?”; “where did you study?” throughout the briefing, a toddler rolled a ball around and the attendees cheerfully rolled it back. camaraderie grew, inspired by equivalent resources, lifestyle, and now also pooled investments. this camaraderie resonated with that of the residents of the israeli middle-class neighborhood studied by birenbaum-carmeli (2000), where social and material differences were suppressed in favor of shared commitments to parenting and consumer patterns, which differentiate residents from people further down the social ladder. another group i observed wanted to purchase thirty-six apartments in a larger complex. as usual, attendees asked who the other purchasers would be. the organizer replied that since those in attendance were the first buyers, the entire project would be colored by their “young and productive” characteristics. during the consultancy days, i spoke with virtually every member of the group. one member told me that seeing others like her join gave her the courage to do the same. another reflected on the day the group gathered to choose apartments on a first-come, first-served basis: “not one person shoved or behaved in a rowdy way. everyone waited their turn calmly. you could tell straightaway that these were high quality people.” members of the group had their pick of three-, four-, or five-room apartments then under construction, all priced at over 1,000,000 nis. everyone i spoke with was taking on a 30 to 70 percent mortgage debt. “we graduated from university, found jobs, got married—this is the next step,” said one couple. another said, “we finally managed to save enough for the down payment, so it’s time.” another observed, “we’re thirty now, and we’ll be paying mortgage until we’re sixty. any later than this would be too late.” many compared the monthly amount they would be paying for their mortgage to what they were then paying in rent. “either way too much,” said one. “but it doesn’t make any sense to give so much money to someone who’s exploiting you.” a sense of the banks as exploitative entities never arose among the group members, but their feelings about landlords was altogether different. “i don’t want to be indebted to my landlady anymore,” said one member of the group. “i don’t want to keep begging him to fix something when it gets broken,” remarked another. i asked one couple if the massive mortgage debt stressed them out. they said it did, “but less than paying all that money in rent and knowing that it goes into somebody else’s pockets, and doesn’t advance us toward something of our own.” when i brought up the likelihood that the apartments would increase in value, no one seemed interested. the response was the same when i suggested there might be more profitable ways to invest their money. “we’re not in this for the investment,” i was told. “we’re in it for the security.” security was frequently mentioned in reference to family. against the erratic rental market, which buyers had experienced as students, they sought domestic containment, stability, and continuity. this anchoring of stable domesticity to homeownership is fortified by inter-generational and lifecycle budgeting. it is commonplace in israel for middle-class parents to devote the means at their disposal to helping their adult children settle down (almog 2011). most members of this group had put together the down payment thanks to a cash gift from their parents, or by having saved the necessary amount while living rent-free in their parents’ homes. one woman came to a group meeting accompanied by her mother, in whose house the woman was living with her husband and two small children. she and her husband had both taken twelve years to complete medical school and internships, and had no savings. the mother told me that she did what she could to help her three grown children. after she had retired, she could contribute 300,000 nis to her daughter’s down payment. the daughter said, “it’s a problem when people like us, who are almost forty, still need this kind of help from our parents.” others took pride in their family values. “we get help from our parents and we want to have kids of our own,” a newlywed couple told me. “we want to have something to give our kids. it’s not like we’re wealthy, so this is our opportunity.” the opportunity comes into relief against a complaint raised in media outlets during and after the housing protests. because it is almost impossible for a young couple to buy a home without their parents’ help, and since homeownership is popularly associated with the middle class, there is very little possibility for those who cannot rely on such help to enter the ranks of the middle class. public discussion frames this issue in terms of economic insecurity, as the israeli middle class shares with its global counterparts a “longing to secure” (heiman, freeman, and liechty 2012, 20). the homebuyers with whom i have spoken discussed their pursuit of middle-class domesticity in terms of their own longing for security, even at the cost of burdensome mortgage debt. what does it really mean to be middle class? classifications abound, but a structural approach is useful when it comes to real-estate investment. in capital (1990), karl marx identified only two, opposed, classes—capitalists and workers. whereas capitalists receive part of the surplus they do not themselves create, workers retrieve only part of the value they create. marx has been criticized for glossing over multiple social and economic roles, but he never intended for these two classes to be considered as empirical categories. rather, he constructed a model of how a capitalist economy reproduces itself. within this model, class distinctions are “personifications of economic relations . . . [as] they come into contact with each other”: the capitalist is “capital personified” and the worker is the bearer of labor-power (marx 1990, 179). because class is a function in the accumulation of capital across society, a person can alternately occupy either or both class positions. hence, erik olin wright (1985, 42–43) favors the idea of “contradictory positions” within class relations, which partake in both sides of the dichotomy. the contradictoriness reaches its apex among “the middle mass”—mostly white-collar workers earning average incomes (marshall 1998). as salary-earners, these workers create more value than they retrieve. yet they operate as capitalists insofar as they appropriate the surplus created not by their work, but by money that they save, borrow, and invest. their incorporation into homeownership through credit encourages their attachment to the established order, regardless of credit’s cost (bourdieu and saint martin 1994). their pursuit of credit puts downward pressure on its availability and value. salaried workers leverage their private resources through loans in order to invest in the maintenance of their social advantages, and in reproducing them in the form of advantages for their children. by accessing the capital necessary to generate more capital, members of the middle class try to create a reserve fund for the future. they can do this through access to quality education (wallerstein 1991a, 1991b), or by purchasing a home. a general erosion of savings typically makes the home a household’s sole asset. an owned home turns salaried workers into capitalists and, perforce, into investors. it is a bulwark against residential and employment instability, and a valuable asset to draw on for cash in case of emergency. homeownership stands in contrast to the paying of rent, the profits of which factor into another household’s reserve. the middle class relies for its maintenance and reproduction on ownership and investment. its structural insecurity puts a premium on security itself. with the erosion of public provision, this security is premised on the leveraged purchase of a home. the majority of mortgage borrowers are first-time homebuyers (tsion 2012). they cannot afford a home without a bank loan, but they do generate income sufficient to ensure eventual repayment. a manager at bank tfachot said the bank could give exceptionally high funding to recent university graduates with no savings but good jobs because of their ability to pay reasonable monthly charges. in media, policy, and popular discourse this group is labeled middle class because of their ability to buy a home. even when first-home purchasers are not young couples, they are nonetheless presented as upwardly-mobile families to encourage investment in homes (paz-frankel 2012). for parents aspiring to give their grown children a competitive edge in a society made up of homeowners and tenants, no price is too high. homebuyers fear that today’s overpriced house will fall out of reach tomorrow and they strive to get on the first rung of the real-estate ladder as early as possible. homeowners, in turn, show little concern about the market value of their homes: “even if i sell my house today, what house could i afford instead?” they each calculate the value of their home not by its potential selling price, but by the relative advantages it affords them by their possessing and living in it. because banks consider regular income as collateral, leveraged home-purchase necessarily assumes a middle-class career. jane guyer (2001) observes that while these institutionalized connections are largely implicit and non-agentive, they become self-conscious investments for those outside the framework of a middle-class career trajectory. the increase in precarious jobs and irregular incomes inflates the ranks of investors seeking security even as budgeting models are shaped by traditional middle-class lifecycles. yet far from being mere carryovers from a more secure past, investments in homes are guided by a household’s concern for its members’ future. guyer (2007) identifies a tendency in contemporary monetarist policies to consider only the short-term rational choice and the long-run vision of market growth. she claims this brings about an evacuation of the near future from the social purview, and that the subsequent discontinuity gives people a sense of rupture and friction. the evidence presented here suggests that the drive to buy homes is a way of holding this discontinuity at bay. security takes shape in the form of an asset that anchors a household through time, and assures its material coherence, against the backdrop of rupture and friction. but within the logic of a financialized real-estate market, the pursuit of security by salary-earning households remains unreasonable in the short-term perspective of a capital-maximizing investment choice—just as society appears to be undermining its long-run growth. resolution a resolution to the three paradoxes of homeownership—the eclipse of politics, the irrationality of investments, and the self-undermining of society—rests on the relation between homeownership and credit-leveraged accumulation. with the recent reduction in buying and saving powers, credit allows consumption to continue by defraying its costs. even necessities like health and education, once publically funded, are increasingly financed by credit loans. the lion’s share of private credit is taken out to finance housing construction and purchase. in israel, a growing reliance on mortgage credit marks the demise of state-run housing construction (alfasi and portugali 2009), and of public housing, which once served over forty percent of the population (silverman 2007). barring public provision, private homeownership is the only way a household can secure domestic stability. mortgage allows home purchases to exceed immediate buying powers by spreading the cost of homes, plus interest, over decades. the popularization of mortgages, coupled with low interest rates, fuels the inflation of housing prices and enables banks to dole out higher mortgages. a continuous rise in housing prices appears to make investments in homeownership profitable. but the real-estate market, like a pyramid scheme, only rewards early buyers with the capital expended by latecomers, while pushing the price of housing further away from everyones’ reach (marazzi 2011). a generalized competition over incomes, goods, and services compels everyone to insure themselves against harm by means of their own investments (foucault 2008). deprived of public provision of housing or regulated rentals, those seeking security become de facto investors. in investment terms, their reasoning appears flawed when they pay too much for their homes, just as it seems odd that people who already own homes would protest soaring home prices that rise to their advantage. this only makes sense when viewed as a structural necessity. a mortgage-borrower today seeks domestic containment, stability, and continuity. she can achieve these qualities by leveraging what capital she can muster. yet she is forced to compete for these advantages with other de facto investors. the intensity of this competition drives up the price of housing and, by extension, her debt. the flaw in rationality lies not in her decision-making, but in the social and economic conditions that make her decision inevitable. because homeownership can contribute to an otherwise-lacking household security, it prevails in countries where social insurance programs are scant (conley and gifford 2006; doling and ronald 2010; froud, johal, and williams 2002). when homes become the only reserves that struggling households can rely on, homeownership becomes associated with status, rationality, security, autonomy, control, adulthood, and good citizenship (ronald 2008), precisely the values embraced by the middle class. in israel during the 1960s and 1970s, universal welfare policies enabled an increasing share of the population to amass the material and educational resources to ascend to the ranks of the middle class. salaried workers who attained educational credentials and investment capital could transform them into household reserves, thereby transferring their social advantages to their children. since the 1980s, the middle class has grown dependent on such investments (ben-porat 1999; gal 1996). but the rising cost of goods and provisions makes it tougher to attain and retain middle-class status (bar 2010; ben-naim and blinski 2012). homes are the only material assets that middle-class households can rely on to maintain and reproduce their social advantages. the young adults facing a higher threshold of entry into the middle class are the ones footing the bill for financialized growth, hence their salience in housing protests. yet their predicament collapses into inter-household competition as successive generations of each household pool and secure resources to maintain and reproduce their advantages. parents dedicate their capital reserves to helping their grown children purchase homes of their own. if parents have no savings, they sometimes mortgage their own homes, which they have already paid for in full, to enable the investments of their children. young adults avail themselves of this help, leveraged by bank credit, for the sake of their own children’s security. while social injustice incites public outrage, the pressures of reproducing a stable domestic sphere discourage protesters from prioritizing their common cause. to secure their own futures they must relate to one another as competing investors and consider rent paid to others as money “thrown away.” in turn, they ally themselves with banks that leverage their investments, as well as with state institutions that protect the value of these investments and that of their parents’ and teachers’ investments in them. credit dissolves political agency, first by pitting one struggling household against the other, and second, by linking financially-leveraged growth to public interest, even when such leveraging systemically undermines common welfare and security. notes acknowledgments for suggestions that helped me make this a much better article, i thank anne allison, charles piot, and the anonymous reviewers of cultural anthropology; also josh berson, amanda englert, yaqub hilal, matan kaminer, turo-kimmo lehtonen, joel robbins, guy shani, and last but not least, the middle-class homeowners of my own family, mordechai weiss, tal weiss, and lilach weiss. 1. figures vary, but among the most conservative are those of the government commissioned trachtenberg report (2011), published in the wake of the uprising. the report points to a 50 percent rise in nominal values of housing and a 30 percent rise in real (adjusted to purchasing power) values. 2. this and all other references to hebrew sources are my translations. 3. to remain 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http://www.themarker.com/tmc/archive/arcsimpleprint.jhtml?elementid=skira20101119_1199422. trachtenberg report 2011 report by the committee for social and economic change. jerusalem, september 2, accessed february 21, 2012. http://hidavrut.gov.il/content/4172. tsion, hila 2012 “bank israel: rochsay dirot l’haskara avru l’haifa.” ynet, march 5. http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,l-4198577,00.html. wallerstein, immanuel 1991a “class conflict in the capitalist world-economy.” in race, nation, class: ambiguous identities. etienne balibar immanuel wallerstein, 115–24. london: verso. 1991b “the bougeois(ie) as concept and reality.” in race, nation, class: ambiguous identities. etienne balibar immanuel wallerstein, 135–52. london: verso. wright, erik olin 1985 classes. london: verso. dear dr. freud dear dr. freud charles l. briggs university of california, berkeley dear dr. freud, i hope you don’t mind my writing you. people might think it strange that i address myself to a dead person, casting the living as overhearers. yet my letter is precisely about that subject, so this mode of address seems uncannily appropriate. and i think that this type of intimacy, which i hope does not seem inappropriate to you, will allow me more freedom to explore connections between two quite different sites that have opened up issues of grief and mourning for me. one is your essay “mourning and melancholia” and the psychoanalytic literature it inspired.1 another lies in laments i heard in the midst of a mysterious and frightening epidemic in the delta amacuro rain forest of venezuela in 2008 and how they shaped indigenous leaders’ efforts to diagnose the disease and demand action. your essay helped me think through poetic and acoustic features of the laments, the demands they made on listeners, and what they can tell us about the work of mourning and anthropology. i think that you and other psychoanalysts might discover new lines of thinking in how these parents, some of whom lost nearly all their children to an undiagnosed illness, displayed collective and critical ways of producing knowledge and placing it in circulation. my goal is to reflect on my engagement with “mourning and melancholia” and the particular forms of mourning i encountered, not to position myself as critiquing psychoanalysis or anthropology. a letter will, i think, provide a more open space to explore insights that got lost in translation, literally. this format might help me respond more directly to what i perceive as the remarkably and productively tentative, even hesitant, tone you adopted in the essay, starting with your “warning against any over-estimation of the value of our conclusion,” sustained in recurrent expressions like “i think” and “is not at all easy to explain.” you opened up a space of indeterminacy by suggesting that mourning is both analytically perplexing and “is taken as a matter of course by us”; accordingly, you never seem to resolve the question of how we move between clinging to and reimagining “the object” and reality-testing. i want to further open up this space of indeterminacy and draw attention to its productivity. like many readers, i was captured by your expression “the work of mourning” and your sense that mourning is not pathological, so that “we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful.” your emphasis on the contradictory character of mourning engaged me deeply. on the one hand, the work of mourning involves hyper-cathexis, recovering and reinternalizing the image of the dead person and imbuing it with such intense psychic energy “through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis” that “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged,” creating a fantasy world in which we allow ourselves to believe that the person never really died or will return. nevertheless, “reality-testing” requires that “each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists,” leading to a struggle “so intense that a turning away from reality takes place.” crucially, you pointed out that this juxtaposition engenders both the “extraordinarily painful” character of mourning and the emergence of a “compromise” between the two processes. i think that listening to laments will deepen our understanding here by drawing attention to some acoustic, bodily, and material dimensions of this contradiction. other readers have distanced themselves from how they see you as projecting the temporality of mourning. my colleague at berkeley, judith butler, suggested that your essay “implied a certain interchangeability of objects as a sign of hopefulness, as if the prospect of entering life anew made use of a kind of promiscuity of libidinal aim.” she thought that a linearity informs your distinction between mourning and melancholia, which would equate mourning with forgetting. butler argued that you later changed your mind, admitting in “the ego and the id” that reincorporation of the lost attachment “was essential to the task of mourning.” and the french psychoanalyst jean laplanche contended that “the freudian theory of mourning” involves a unilinear process of stripping away memories. julia kristeva extended your thinking about the pervasiveness and persistence of melancholia, depicting it less as pathology than as a painful but productive force. anne cheng, angela garcia, and other writers have reflected on the complex ways that melancholia gets woven into the fabric of racial inequalities and vice-versa, a point i want to discuss with you shortly. i agree that casting mourning in linear and functionalist terms as a process that reestablishes a psychic status quo would be problematic. by suggesting that “when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again,” you do invite such readings, but recently i have come to doubt that your text points us squarely in this direction. during six delightful months in germany, i spent a great deal of time with “trauer und melancholie” in german. that exercise, admittedly long overdue, convinced me that this projection of a unlinear temporality in your essay partially emerges through problems of translation. the translation of the crucial paragraph in which you characterize the contradictory nature of mourning suggests that the “orders” of the “respect for reality” “cannot be at once obeyed.” the next sentence of the translation suggests that these “orders” “are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy.” nevertheless, my reading of the german text suggests to me that these projections of a single, universal, unilinear temporality are absent. you continue: “er wird nun im einzelnen unter großem aufwand von zeit und besetzungsenergie durchgeführt und unterdes die existenz des verlorenen objekts psychisch fortgesetzt,” which is translated, problematically i think, in the standard edition as “they are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged.” you point to the need to link a “great expense of time and cathectic energy” to the specificities of individuals and situations. the next sentence, “jede einzelne der erinnerungen und erwartungen” (“each single one of the memories and expectations”), lodges the call for considering specificities (einzelne reappears) precisely in multiple temporalities, both pasts (“memories”) and anticipated futures; mourning seems to multiply the complexity of interactions between pasts, presents, and futures. the english translation of the next sentence suggests that this work “is carried out piecemeal,” again seemingly suggesting a gradualist temporality, if less explicitly. your german text rather repeats the word einzel (einzeldurchführung), pointing once again to specificities in particular acts of carrying out the “orders” of reality-testing. this sense of open-endedness and indeterminacy prompts you to a stunning admission: “why this compromise … should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics.” the temporalities that unfold in the german text enabled me to find new ways of thinking about mourning, temporality, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. i have always been perplexed, however, by the absence of an element that is prominent in jokes and their relationship to the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams. the anthropologist vincent crapanzano suggested that you regard language as a referential apparatus. this statement certainly rings true for “mourning and melancholia,” but in these other two works you pointed to how people engage the formal properties of language reflexively. oddly, you left poetics out of “mourning and melancholia,” and i missed your reflections on the role of poetics in shaping the struggle between reattachment to the “existence of the lost object” and “the testing of reality.” so i invite you to take a journey with me to delta amacuro, to meet people who not only lodge the work of mourning in poetics but also reflect deeply on this process. there i think that you will find an eerie resonance with your call to attend to the specificities of struggles and compromises, of hyper-cathexis and reality-testing. on the threshold in muaina the morning of july 28, 2008, in muaina afforded one of those scenes that is both unimaginable and whose horror you know intimately, one where your feet seem to propel you inexorably into the middle of a disquieting space—and yet are susceptible to the urge to turn and run. the doorway, flooded with sunshine, led to a darkened interior that would confront us with our first direct encounter with death. not just any death, but a body claimed by an epidemic of a “mysterious disease” in this small settlement where the rain forest meets the caribbean in eastern venezuela, just one of numerous strange fatalities. having recruited us for the investigation they were organizing, conrado and enrique moraleda had invited clara mantini-briggs, norbelys gómez, tirso gómez, and me to a meeting, a sober gathering in which measured voices would provide clues that might add up to a diagnosis. but this is what we saw: first our eyes were directed to the right side of the house, where a wisidatu (a particular type of healer) with graying hair and a kind face was treating a young man in a hammock. his song, which called on hebu (pathogens treated by the wisidatu) to leave the body, was drowned out by the voices of five women and one adolescent who became visible as we took another step forward along the dock. standing directly opposite the doorway, we also saw a young man lying in a coffin, bringing visual and auditory senses into disconcerting alignment. one of the faces, transformed into a mask of grief and fatigue by more than a day of mourning, belonged to florencia macotera, the mother of mamerto pizarro, the third muaina resident to die from the unknown disease; beside her mamerto’s grandmother, two of his aunts, a sister, and a brother rocked back and forth as they collectively composed and performed laments. the exhaustion that would have ordinarily weakened their voices by this time had been overpowered by the realization that they would soon take mamerto to the cemetery. in retrospect, witnessing that scene seems both accidental and overdetermined. our relationship to the delta and its residents has been long and intense. i began working there in 1986, learned the language (warao), and studied healing, narratives, indigenous legal practices, gender relations, and the racialization of citizenship. given the precariousness of health conditions, i witnessed numerous wakes and documented several; after a couple of years had passed and people wanted to hear my recordings, i sat with women for extended periods, transcribing their words and discussing performances. clara, a venezuelan public health physician, began working for delta amacuro’s regional health service (rhs) in april 1992, just months before a cholera epidemic killed some five hundred indigenous residents. she served as the assistant epidemiologist and the state director of health education. after collaborating with indigenous communities to establish nursing stations and prevention programs, we researched the underpinnings, bureaucratic as much as epidemiological, of such extensive death from a preventable and treatable bacterial infection. after years of working elsewhere in venezuela, it was the book that documented this epidemic, stories in the time of cholera, that brought us back in 2008. collaborating with norbelys and tirso gómez and residents of several communities, we were using income derived from royalties and prizes to explore new models for health programs. we had documented how president hugo chávez’s socialist revolution had brought doctors, mainly cubans, to live in most low-income urban neighborhoods in venezuela. nevertheless, other than the creation of two larger facilities, the revolution had brought few changes to delta health conditions. more than a quarter of children still died, mostly as infants from treatable diarrheal and respiratory infections. then an epidemic started in mukoboina, a community of about seventy-five residents, in july 2007; by january, eight children had died. then children started dying in neighboring communities. when strange symptoms appeared, parents took their children to healers and the local doctor, but neither could save them. patients were referred to metropolitan hospitals, but all died. as the president of the health committee, conrado moraleda observed the patients in the local clinic; parents and leaders pressed him to demand that public health officials take firmer steps to diagnose the disease and stop the epidemic. cuban and venezuelan epidemiologists visited, but they could not sort it out. conrado appealed to the regional legislature, but the public meeting that resulted infuriated health officials. when a third wave of deaths began in june 2008 and the regional government seemed to have given up, conrado and enrique decided to form their own team to investigate the epidemic and take the results directly to officials and journalists in caracas, the national capital. having stumbled onto the epidemic, we were looking for the resident physician to ask what he knew about the strange cases when conrado buttonholed us as we ascended the clinic’s stairs. “you have to help us! you, dr. clara, must work as a physician, and you, dokomuru,” my warao name, “you have to work with us in finding out what is killing the children.” i was positioned as an anthropologist, but my training as a healer, my ability to translate between diagnostic languages, and my photographic training were also interpellated. the investigation began in muaina. i think you would be fascinated to see how the features of the work of mourning you analyzed—its contradictory dimensions, the tremendous investment of psychic energy, and the depth of the pain—were highlighted by lamenters’ words and voices. each explored the specificity of the process of resurrecting erinnerungen, memories, investing them with tremendous poetic, musical, and psychic energy. mamerto’s brother melvi reflected on how they played together as children, traveled with their parents to their mother’s natal community to garden, and, shortly before mamerto died, worked together in constructing houses. his grandmother remembered that he sometimes slept in her house and brought her fish. mamerto’s mother reflected with pride on his studies at the indigenous university of venezuela. infusing our consideration of mourning with attention to poetic detail can provide insight into complex issues of temporality. in “mourning and melancholia,” you used the power of german’s noun morphology to build evocative phrases around complex nouns, as when you joined kompromißleistung (accomplishment of a compromise), einzeldurchführung (particular acts of implementation), and realitätsgebotes (dictates of reality). although warao grammar can rival german in the complexity of nominal constructions, the poetic action in laments lies in the verbs: in the laments for mamerto, mourners wove complex temporalities deeply into poetic images. lamenters attached the present-tense marker –ya and the durative aspect form –ha to verb stems, sometimes both in the same word, to make images of the deceased seem as if they were unfolding at that moment and would continue indefinitely into the future. performers created tiny imagist poems that placed listeners in the middle of actions, as if we were currently sharing these experiences with the performers. at the same time, a struggle ensued within each voice through verb endings marked as past and punctual, particularly –(n)ae; here reality-testing took each image and burst it apart. this short passage from melvi’s lament suggests how finely the two temporalities were woven together. mano, oko daobasa serebuya makina eku, my brother, we were making boards together in the sawmill, ama ihi mamoae diana. now you have left me. ihi yakerakore aniaokawitu karamuyaha hatanae, when you were well you used to get up right at dawn, planta aida esohoyaha gasoi hatanae tatukamo, you were filling the large generator with diesel, oko yaotaya yoriwere dao sepeyaha, we were working alongside one another planing the wood, ihi mate yakerakore, wabanahakore, while you were still well, before you died. ama ihi momi wabae. now you died apart from me. in lines 1 and 3 to 6 we stand alongside melvi as he is watching mamerto get up at dawn and fill the generator and as the two brothers are milling lumber. melvi uses grammatical features that suspend time, placing melvi, mamerto, and listeners in the middle of these scenes. lines 2 and 7 contrastively place these memories and expectations in a past that has been sealed off from presents and futures. these features thus created the sort of struggle between multiple temporalities—lingering pasts, anticipated futures, and a harsh reality of temporal rupture—that you depicted. there is nothing either gradual or linear here. the presents that each performer constructed were not bounded points in a linear trajectory but sites in which shifting, violent, and unavoidable juxtapositions of multiple temporalities emerged. struggles and compromises also became apparent in how these words were sung. in previous work i have referred to lines 1 and 3 to 6 as “textual phrases”; the focus is more textual than musical, consisting of bursts of words that invite listeners—including other lamenters—to concentrate on their semantic content and poetic contours. refrains, on the other hand, are associated with reality-testing; here narrative elaboration gives way to bald statements about the finality of death. these moments of reality-testing provided resting spaces in which lamenters listened to other performers. the performance thus made this struggle explicit from moment to moment through both poetics and the musical materiality of voices. putting poetics and acoustics into the equation could enable us contribute to how psychoanalysts have extended your discussion of mourning. i think melanie klein added a great deal to our language for talking about mourning. she suggested that young children build internal images of external objects (particularly of mother and father), thereby possessing them inside their bodies as internal objects. this world of internalized objects is not static but changes continually through the incorporation of new people and experiences, real and fantasized. klein echoed your insightful comments on the terrible pain of mourning, arguing that it is produced by losing the person in the real world, which induces distrust of the external world in general and a shattering of this carefully constructed internal world. klein suggested that the work of mourning requires mourners “to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing.” although klein referred to “the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning,” seemingly subscribing to a gradualist view, she emphasized the conflicting emotions that emerge in juxtaposing “passing states of elation … due to the feeling of possessing the perfect love object (idealized) inside” with intense sorrow, distress, and hatred. klein thus productively left room for iterability, arguing that grief moves in waves, much as we saw in the laments. klein’s formulation captures how each mourner began to rebuild her or his internal world, which initially fell apart after the death of mamerto’s younger brother, dalvi. the poetics of lament are crucial here in suggesting how mourners repeatedly took images from a shattered external world and imbued them with wholeness, immediacy, and a sense of the real, as jacques lacan might put it. if the crucial process, following klein, is reconstituting the mechanism by which internal and external objects are co-constructed, then the poetics and acoustic/bodily materialities of laments provide an impressive cultural form that simultaneously models how this process can be accomplished and demonstrates its precarity. i think you might appreciate the work of juan-david nasio, an argentine-born student of lacan. nasio followed you in tracing how love progressively dominates our internal world by taking in the image of someone we love in such a way as to “cover him or her over as ivy covers a stone wall.” i would add that in grief we seem to painfully retrace how our love for a person has attached itself “in very particular places of the wall, in its cracks and crevices,” revealing how deeply and minutely our lives became intertwined. the lament verses were like vines that extended simultaneously into the performer and into mamerto, tracing how these experiences linked them psychically, thereby resulting in intense pain and disorientation when they suddenly seemed to have been severed. psychoanalytic accounts of mourning and these laments similarly point to how we lose parts of ourselves as we lose an other. in analyzing the element of the imaginary, nasio complements the ivy metaphor by describing how internalizing the loved person in the unconscious enables us to see reflections of other internalized objects, including images of ourselves, not like “the smooth surface of a lens, but as a mirror broken up into small, mobile fragments of glass on which confused images of the other and of myself are reflected.” poetic and musical features of laments suggest how memories are fragmented, as in the ivy and mirror metaphors, but also linked by virtue of their inclusion within a poetic and musical structure. laplanche productively charted the complexity of temporality in his evocation of penelope in homer’s odyssey. she famously embodied her mourning for odysseus by weaving a shroud for his father, frustrating her suitors for three years: “young men, my suitors, now my lord is dead, let me finish my weaving before i marry . …” so every day she wove on the great loom— but every night by torchlight she unwove it. laplanche used this metaphor to disagree with your account: “penelope does not cut the threads, as in the freudian theory of mourning; she patiently unpicks them, to be able to compose them again in a different way.” laplanche suggests that this work requires time, is repetitive, and, thinking about lacan’s account of how prohibiting the use of the names of the dead constitutes a linguistic reserve, he argued that “it sets aside a reserve.” my rereading of temporality in your essay suggests that laplanche provides us with a rich metaphor less for challenging your account than for extending it. acoustics and affects in the collective work of mourning reworking these issues through the lens of poetics, kristeva suggested that mourning and melancholia can result in a dramatic disruption of meaning. she argued that when the “symbolic” (semantically based) process falls short, the “semiotic” process, which does not center on referential meaning, gains ground: “melody, rhythm, semantic polyvalency, the so-called poetic form, which decomposes and recomposes signs,” are crucial. kristeva further opened up space for poetics and acoustics in taking up the relationship between beauty and mourning you discussed in “on transience.” “when we have been able to go through our melancholia to the point of becoming interested in the life of signs, beauty may also grab hold of us to bear witness for someone who grandly discovered the royal way through which humanity transcends the grief of being apart: the way of speech given to suffering, including screams, music, silence, and laughter.” the anthropologist renato rosado similarly explored connections between poetics and grief through poems he composed after the tragic death of his wife, michelle zimbalist rosaldo. an essay by the sociologist erving goffman, “response cries,” seems particularly revealing here. he suggested that such utterances as “ouch” or “whoops,” exclaimed suddenly after some kind of mishap, signal a temporary loss of control. providing what appear to be natural, involuntary indexes of the emotional and/or physical state of the person who uttered them, they seem to provide listeners, even strangers, access to our internal states. nevertheless, “response cries” are conventional signals whose expression is shaped by our perception of those around us: children learn to emit different response cries when they drop something in the presence of peers, grandparents, or teachers. goffman’s formulation captures how such expressions seem to convey transparently what is happening within individual bodies and simultaneously to engage social relations, asking overhearers to interpret signs of internal distress as constructing both utterers and overhearers as particular types of social beings. despite his genius, goffman was given to anecdotal examples. attending to acoustic features of the laments for mamerto can open up goffman’s concept and help us see how acoustics forms part of the work of mourning. in laments, pain adopts the acoustic features of crying, of moans and wails, yet at the same time it is stylized. warao lamenters use “creaky voice,” low pitch, high volume, and a special, affectively charged timbre, the suppression of the “singer’s formant” between 1.8 and 3.8 khz. these features are not read as consciously stylized, as in storytelling, but as involuntary, transparent embodiments of internal, affective states. this construction of acoustics/affect relations is said to generate their compelling effects on listeners: “what they’re crying is entirely true; they couldn’t cry lies.” goffman located response cries in words; thinking about lamentation would point to the centrality of acoustics. i found previously that if women use the same poetic structure but do not invest their words with these acoustic features, particularly the special timbre, they elicit a different response in listeners—they can be accused of faking it. goffman’s work might lead us to imagine this projection of internal states as emerging accidentally. kristeva, given the depth of her explorations of psychoanalysis, language, and poetics, unsurprisingly has much to teach us about how we are constantly providing iconic, in charles s. peirce’s terms, constructions of internal processes. her distinction between semiotic and symbolic processes opens up a space for rethinking goffman’s response cries. the subject does not enter into the semiotic process with a clearly defined identity shaped prior to and independent of the discourse; it is rather emergent through semiotic features. poetics enters into both semiotic and symbolic processes; through the semiotic, poetic dimensions intersect with acoustic ones in providing extensive modes of constituting and voicing selves. i think, dr. freud, that given how referential content, poetics, grammar, bodies, music, and other acoustic dimensions come together in laments, they provide one of the contexts in which semiotic and symbolic processes come closest to merging. this, i think, constitutes part of the tremendous affective and social power of laments, and it suggests why they have interested anthropologists concerned with the relationship between acoustics and embodiment. reflecting on the work of mourning vis-à-vis these laments provides us with a new way of thinking through what has been framed as the problem of the limits of language in relationship to mourning. eric santner takes paul de man to task for “turning death into a purely linguistic operation,” which leads de man to preclude “the possibility of distinguishing one victim from any other.” bringing in specificities of historical circumstances, deaths, and acts of mourning, of bodies and materialities, of affects, of the social and psychic productivity of mourning seems to position it beyond the limits of language. but thinking about these laments suggests that the problem might rather lie in the adoption of a limited, referentialist view of language, in its reduction to kristeva’s symbolic process. taking lamentation for a model of language in mourning would leave such binaries behind by linking symbolic to semiotic dimensions, to the specificities and materialities of bodies, acoustics, and poetics. i think that we can bring goffman’s and kristeva’s analyses together productively, albeit keeping their differing approaches in mind. although goffman seemed to view response cries as pointing to broader dimensions of speech and social interaction, he framed them as accidental, unusual features. reflecting on spirit possession, vincent crapanzano suggested that such outbursts can be therapeutic when their expression is structured. elaborately and multiply patterned, laments are prolonged performances of response cries that provide seemingly unmediated reflections of internal states and yet simultaneously model how listeners should hear them and what they should feel. kristeva characterized semiotic process as a ubiquitous dimension of everyday speech, and her concept pointed in the direction of broader acoustic, poetic, and musical patterns. goffman suggested that the projection of internal states is social and interactional, always more than an internal splitting of the self. in talking about laments, listeners feel that these acoustic features create similar bodily and psychic responses within them, saying that they “cry along behind” lamenters; we could say, in nasio’s terms, that they, like fellow performers, are reflecting on the particular vines that extended between them and the deceased. here i hope you will find a powerful similarity between lamentation and psychoanalysis. lacan defined psychoanalysis as practices of listening. he was struck by “the subject’s relation to his own speech, in which the important factor is rather masked by the purely acoustic fact that he cannot speak without hearing himself” and by “the fact that he cannot listen to himself without being divided as far as the behaviour of the consciousness is concerned.” in analysis, patients learn to listen to their own speech, including its silences and the multiple voices that constitute it, just as the analyst’s role revolves around practices of listening. the locus of performativity and the possibilities for transforming the subject lie in listening as much as in speaking, in an interactive setting in which psychoanalysts are listening too. the lamentation process similarly requires performers to listen closely to their own voices—as echoed in the words and acoustic features of the voices of their fellow performers. what i am suggesting, dr. freud, is that the effects of lamentation in splitting subjects and doubling processes of listening impact overhearers powerfully as well, pointing to crucial collective as well as individual and intrapsychic dimensions of the work of mourning. mamerto’s relatives performed laments collectively. one person took the lead at any given moment, contributing themes that were then taken up by others. the remaining lamenters did not voice the same words or sing at precisely the same time or with identical pitch or voice quality; rather, other singers transposed these lines, reflecting their own relationship with mamerto and the most affectively charged aspects of their experiences. in musical terms, this relationship is called polyphony. voices were coordinated in terms of pitch, volume, affective intensity, and timbre, as well as content, but these features never precisely coincided: voices never gave up their individuality. composing, transposing, performing, and listening thus emerged together, with the emphasis shifting from one process to another from moment to moment. in these laments, the orientation toward overhearers in the construction of internal states, which goffman elucidated, extended beyond fellow performers. in muaina, houses largely lack walls; accordingly, other residents were thrust into the acoustic space of mourning. even if mamerto was not their relative, the pain was inescapably inside everyone as their eardrums vibrated with the frequency of the affects generated by florencia macotera and other lamenters. as nadia seremetakis argued for greek laments, listening engages a broader sensorium and interpellates the body. as my colleague charles hirschkind suggested for islamic sermons on cassettes, listening requires listeners to locate themselves in affective and ethical soundscapes. those in earshot could not avoid being interpellated by the sensory, ethical, affective, and bodily demands of the laments for mamerto. accepting enrique’s invitation to the meeting thus entailed becoming an overhearer of the lamentation. by the time macotera crossed the dock from her house to take her turn in the white plastic narrator’s chair, we had been listening all morning to how she moved between reinternalizing powerful images of her two sons to announcing the finality of their deaths. macotera walked slowly, as if in a trance. all eyes shifted from the previous witness, who wrapped up swiftly; everyone stepped aside. macotera was wearing a white blouse and a light green skirt. her hair, hanging haphazardly in front and back, and her look of exhaustion inscribed mourning on her body. the force and passion of the ritual wailing did not diminish but seemed to move toward a crescendo as she began. her three-year-old daughter hovered around her, listening intently while alternately wrapping around herself the dress that she was carrying, and twirling it. macotera focused her lament on mamerto, but she wove in verses that evoked the prior death of her younger son. the effect was to heighten the iterative qualities and the affective surplus of fear, frustration, and determination she experienced as dalvi’s symptoms seemed to leap from his dead body into that of her oldest child. in the narrative she told at the meeting, macotera recounted how dalvi first grew feverish at the wake of a cousin, muaina’s first fatality in the epidemic. she weaves the story of the progression of dalvi's symptoms into that of efforts by the local nurse and healers to diagnose and treat him. given your training as a physician and your interest in poetics, dr. freud, you might not be surprised to learn that the narrative climax seemed to mirror the increasing severity of symptoms, particularly strange neurological manifestations. arriving in a larger community where both doctors and more experienced healers were available, dalvi seemed to be fighting cartoon villains regularly beamed into muaina via directv satellite dishes; as death drew near he declared, “mama, the monsters have killed me, they have taken my heart.” his voice began to fade: “mama, i am leaving without you now, i’m going now. my dead cousin eduardito has come to get me, he’s with me, i'm going now, we’re going now.” note how dalvi’s reported words seem to provide macotera with lines for the lament that she would soon be singing. attempting to hang onto dalvi, macotera pleaded, “don’t die yet son, wait a little longer for me.” moved, he comforted her, “ok, i’ll stay, i won’t die. i’m not going to die, mama.” but she could see that his eyes were closed, his body growing cold, his voice fading away. “mama, mama, i won’t die, i won’t die, i won’t die mama, for you i won’t die. my body will grow cold, but i won’t die. i’m going to come for you, mama, wait for me, mama. when i die, don’t cry for me, don’t cry for me.” “and then,” concluded macotera, “he grew silent. my son dalvi died.” at that moment macotera shifted quickly to recounting how mamerto’s symptoms began even as the family was returning from dalvi’s burial. before she could finish telling of mamerto’s death, the grief became too intense, and she suddenly rose up, retraced her steps across the dock, and transformed her words back into lamentation. the rich detail in macotera’s testimony helped us in the diagnostic process. the dying words of a nine-year-old boy, moving between fantastic battles with cartoon villains and a remarkably sensitive and articulate attempt to shield his mother from mourning, signaled to us that the disease might have a crucial neurological dimension. macotera’s emphasis on the emergence of identical symptoms—fever, headache, a feeling of itching in the feet that turned to numbness, then paralysis, and then ascended upward, along with hydrophobia, a fear of water— provided us with a major clue. given your training as a neurologist, dr. freud, i bet you have already figured out that rabies was behind the epidemic. as she was leaving, clara asked macotera if either son had been bitten by an animal. when macotera replied that both had received bat bites about a month before they developed symptoms, meaning that they had been bitten nocturnally by vampire bats, a hypothesis regarding the means of transmission emerged. listening sideways to macotera’s lamentation shaped how we subsequently heard her narrative, producing an involuntary doubling. the affective intensity of her narration, simultaneously etched onto her body, was doubled by the superimposition of the remembered acoustic features of her lament. her narrative was overlaid yet again by the acoustics of the laments still emerging next door. even the less charged words of other witnesses, such as those of reflections by muaina’s nurse and other residents, were shot through with the acoustic features of the laments in ways that we would never be able to disentangle, even as we transposed them into written documents for transport to distal sites. toward a politics of specificity given your stress on specificities in the work of mourning, i would have liked to see you analyze particular cases, as you do elsewhere. you rely on two general figures, “the mourner” and “the loved person” (geliebte person) or “love object” (liebesobjekt). i miss here the personal introspection that provided such poignant moments in some of your other work. matthew von unwerth suggests that beyond psychoanalytic disputes that resulted in the loss of friendships, “reflection of the current affairs of a world gone mad” during world war i sparked a return “to a problem that had long been the subject of his interest—the fate of pain and loss in human memory.” because i am an anthropologist rather than a psychoanalyst, please allow me to return to the encounter with mamerto’s mourners in reflecting on the importance of whose pasts are remembered, whose futures lost, and which realities tested. subsequent conversations with mamerto’s parents and brother melvi taught me much about the nature of the reality-testing that had taken place. mamerto was wheeled into the intensive care unit on the fifth floor of the uyapar hospital in puerto ordaz, a city in neighboring bolivar state. there a guard escorted mamerto’s father and wife through a strangely vacant waiting room. they noticed a large clock with red digital numbers of the same sort that seemed to proliferate in every corridor. the date and hour portions were strangely blank; to the right of flashing dots it read “:82,” as if time had been erased or was out of whack. the guard’s gesture forced them onto the landing, a space of about 2x4 meters in which around fifteen people were standing, sitting on the floor, or leaning against a mound of coolers, thermoses, pillows, and satchels. two dozen more people were distributed in the stairwell leading to the fourth floor. rather than welcoming elbia torres and her father-in-law as two more worried relatives of poor patients in a public hospital, people stared at them as if they were foreign objects. a boy of about eight pointed to them, looked up at his mother, and said “look, mama, indians!” this detail brought me back to the psychiatrist franz fanon’s reflection on a boy’s remark, “’look, a negro!’” fanon wrote: “my body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning.” after a sleepless night in a rural clinic, each step of the journey—a boat trip at dawn, anxious hours in the tucupita hospital, and two long ambulance rides—seemed to dislodge mamerto’s wife and father progressively from all that was safe and familiar. being unwelcomed into this disorderly space in a modern, orderly hospital was just too much. retreating to the next landing, which had fewer occupants, elbia sat in a corner and slept while pizarro remained vigilant. at 5:00am, a nurse appeared, leading people to jump up and push toward the entrance. she called out “indalesio pizarro.” following her, a physician standing in the middle of the corridor told pizarro matter-of-factly, “your son is dead.” pizarro recrossed the waiting area slowly, its digital clock still reading “:82.” awakening elbia on the landing below, he seemed to mirror the doctor’s curt, unfeeling words: “my son is dead.” “what are we going to do?” she asked. “we have to wait.” did macotera’s and pizarro’s reality-testing begin then, and were the multiple forms of symbolic violence that organized space in the stairwell part of that reality? seeing mamerto hooked up in the icu, pizarro sensed that death was near: “everything fell on top of him. the machines failed him there—everything failed him.” did reality-testing begin then? did the succession of medical technologies—and the clock’s capacity to disjoint time—constitute the reality that was shaping this testing? did it begin when macotera first declared that mamerto’s symptoms were “just the same as his younger brother’s”? dalvi felt sick during the wake conducted for his cousin, eduardito, whose symptoms had appeared as he returned from the funeral of a cousin in another community. and the deaths in muaina were not the first: thirty-four children and young adults had already died. did reality-testing begin when “warao radio,” as regional word-of-mouth transmission is called, brought stories of the first death to muaina? or did reality-testing begin when two of the couple’s children died as infants? in the eyes of health officials, losing just under 30 percent of one’s children (prior to dalvi’s and mamerto’s deaths) was considered “normal.” but mamerto did not die as a child, his death was not a “normal” death, and his life had been infused with important specificities. enrique had particular reasons for launching the investigation next to mamerto’s body. muaina, you see, was established by one of the most charismatic and creative indigenous leaders in venezuela, enrique’s and conrado’s brother librado, who was one of my closest friends. a socialist long before chávez became president, librado founded muaina as a model socialist community. paulo freire would have loved it: librado, an educator, created a critical pedagogy that juxtaposed indigenous knowledge production with access to spanish, literacy, and “western” forms of knowledge. librado also helped create the indigenous university of venezuela, hoping to train a new set of national leaders who could challenge anti-indigenous racism. facing terminal cancer, librado sensed a potential leader in mamerto and enrolled him in the university. mamerto quickly distinguished himself by his intelligence, dedication, and vision; within three years he had written two short book manuscripts and translated portions of the bolivarian constitution into warao. with mamerto’s death, reality-testing thus jumped scale: as pizarro and macotera were mourning their firstborn son, muaina was lamenting the death of its socialist dream yet again. enrique and conrado were mourning the demise of their brother’s dream anew. circulation: on the politics of indexicality and erasure our recruitment was doubled that day in muaina, dr. freud; having been asked to join conrado’s and enrique’s investigation, we were called to participate in the work of mourning for mamerto. both tasks involved practices of listening, but they were not focused solely on these genres or on the contexts of their performance. i have pointed to the importance of circulation, to how words, acoustics, and affects moved between performers, overhearers, and narrators. processes of circulation were modeled multiply through poetic and acoustic features of lamentation narratives and frequent references to how news of the epidemic had been moving for more than a year and was circulating at that moment. crucially, this modeling of past and present circulations was transformed into projected futures and distal contexts from the moment we arrived: lamenters charged the team to “take our words to chávez!” carrying out this charge required that the team, consisting of clara, conrado, enrique, norbelys, tirso, and me, document the epidemic and take our findings to national officials and journalists in caracas. in the remarks with which he opened the meeting, enrique anticipated the verbal and visual materialities that would be required to make this jump in scale by asking muaina residents for permission to record and photograph the proceedings, providing “a base, a support, a force to enable us to convey this painful situation that is taking place.” he similarly told us after the fact what agreeing to join the investigation had entailed: collectively taking a report to caracas. the boldness and the potential political effects of this circulatory project struck us immediately. the projection of an indigenous/nonindigenous chasm that sorts human beings into two vastly unequal categories lies at the heart of everyday practices in delta amacuro’s state government, including its ministry of popular power in health branch. the stereotype of “the warao,” despite five hundred years of evidence to the contrary, suggests that “they” lack political agency and cannot rise above immediate material interests. one way that the racial status quo—and the viability of this feeble but enduring racial construction—is maintained is through the unstated rule that people classified as indigenous can only report problems and demand actions in private meetings with state officials in tucupita, but they can never take their petitions to caracas. worse yet, reporting an epidemic of an infectious disease would challenge the rhs’s monopoly over the circulation of epidemiological discourse—backed, the rhs often asserted, by law. starting in september 2007, the rhs had struggled to keep news of the strange disease from circulating; epidemiological reports were carefully guarded internal, rather than public, documents. no wonder officials became enraged when conrado, after closed-door meetings failed to prompt effective action, went public about the epidemic in february 2008. unless sympathetic national officials overrode the angry reactions of regional subordinates, we were in for trouble. making the work of mourning mobile raises complex issues. the sociologist john urry has suggested that casting such phenomena as walking, bicycles, cars, and airplanes as immanent embodiments of mobility required broad transformations of bodies, landscapes, the built environment, and social relations; he reminds us that the same processes produce immobilities. mobilizing scientific and medical objects entails specific requirements. the science studies scholar bruno latour has argued that scientific facts and concepts are often projected as “immutable mobiles”—as capable of traveling anywhere without changing their significance. given that these should rely on a single body of “gold standard” evidence and common diagnostic categories, a doctor’s pronouncement “this is rabies” should mean the same thing in delta amacuro as in the united states (where people die periodically of bat-transmitted rabies too). geoffrey bowker and susan leigh star have suggested that rendering diagnostic categories and statistics mobile requires two things. particular assemblages of practices, epistemologies, and technologies emerge at each site they are (re)produced. for example, reducing some five hundred cholera deaths in delta amacuro in 1992–1993 to the official count of thirteen involved inadequate health infrastructures, a “case definition” that rejected clinical in favor of laboratory evidence, limited laboratory testing facilities, racial profiling, and political pressure. nevertheless, epidemiological discourse would be unlikely to travel if these complex assemblages remained attached to statistics and diagnostic categories. accordingly, bowker and star suggest, indexical histories must be erased for categories and statistics to become mobile. herein lies a fundamental contradiction the six of us faced in carrying out the parents’ charge to carry their words to chávez. neither the laments sung over mamerto’s body nor the narratives unfolding in the adjacent house were likely to travel beyond the rain forest or to interpellate epidemiologists, health officials, or journalists—none of whom could speak warao or would accept these genres as conveying scientifically valid knowledge. we were asked to construct a classic epidemiological formulation, “n people died from x disease over y period in z area,” one that would have the mobility to reach national officials. suddenly, we were not medical anthropologists who exposed other people’s indexical histories or critically engaged their erasures. we documented thirty-seven deaths in fourteen localities in meetings that created a complex knowledge-production process, one that drew on political oratory, indigenous medicine, dispute mediation, personal narratives, epidemiology, and clinical medicine. the long days of our investigation were punctuated by daily visits to elbia torres, mamerto’s wife, whose symptoms began while returning to muaina from the urban hospital. recognizing that her symptoms were identical, knowing that all patients had died, and remembering acutely the symbolic violence that she and mamerto’s father had experienced in the uyapar hospital, she decided to die in her parents’ home. the indexical history we built thus included clara’s detailed examinations, norbelys’s provision of palliative care, and the photographs that the family asked me to take of her illness, wake, and funeral. in preparing a report, we made painful decisions about what to erase. we had spent time listening to discussions of bad medicine (which anthropologists often refer to as “sorcery”). nevertheless, enrique stated: “after deep reflection, i reluctantly propose that all references to ‘witchcraft’ be erased from the final report—they shall remain with us.” no one spoke; we understood all too well. any allusion to bad medicine would render our efforts, to use the anthropologist arjun appadurai’s phrase, incarcerated by culture: our report would be dismissed as reflecting superstition, not science. nevertheless, the cost of creating mobility would be too high if we severed indexical links to bodies, laments, and narratives. figure 1. elbia torres rivas, an hour before death, with her mother, anita rivas. (photo by charles l. briggs) despite the risks, we made the journey. all of us supporters of the revolution, we framed our work as bolstering government efforts to confront health inequities and overcome discrimination against indigenous venezuelans. nevertheless, caracas officials initially refused to accept our report, denying its mobility. “you should have stayed in delta amacuro and delivered it to officials there,” they insisted, thereby reinscribing the racialization of space and speech. “we told them over and over again,” conrado countered, “and they didn’t listen.” a three-hour standoff ensued in the ministry’s lobby. the team held its ground. the situation attracted the attention of national health reporters and of simon romero of the new york times. when the photographer for el nacional appeared, enrique handed out several of my photographs. as they were being pictured, enrique held up a photograph of anita rivas watching her daughter die (figure 1), tirso a portrait of elbia’s grandfather (figure 2), and norbelys one of arsenio torres performing a lament over his daughter’s corpse (figure 3). in recirculating their account of the epidemic, they wanted to keep the images and laments attached to the account that the team had transported to caracas, thereby preventing them from becoming abstract words and numbers or further “proof” of indigenous stereotypes (figure 4). figure 2. elbia’s grandfather, tito rivas, at the time of her death. (photo by charles l. briggs) conclusion: psychoanalysis, anthropology, and the work of mourning when asked why they had come to caracas, conrado, enrique, norbelys, and tirso repeatedly pointed to the regional government’s failure to respond adequately to the deaths. when the photojournalist’s camera seemed to pose the same question, they took out photographs of a dying elbia torres, her family’s grief, her father’s lament. the el nacional photograph would take viewers back to the contested act of witnessing these deaths in the ministry’s lobby. the psychoanalyst jed sekoff’s reflections on a family photograph that includes a dead child seem particularly illuminating: “looking at a photograph places us at the edge of a certain time. … the dead are somehow conjured into life. and yet again, this very magic makes their death all the more certain; our loss stares us in the face.” in addition to multiple edges, the el nacional photograph pictures several uncertain times: one of the encounter in the ministry, another of a life slipping into death, and a third moment in which arsenio, elbia's father, attempted to acoustically conjure a death into a life. if photographs are indexical icons, as peirce argued, tying images not just to what they reflect but to the moment of their creation, both reflections and points of origin get multiplied here in complex, unstable, and productive ways, especially when, to return to nasio’s metaphor, the mirror has been “broken up into small, mobile fragments of glass.” figure 3. arsenio torres performs a lament over his daughter’s corpse. (photo by charles l. briggs) butler suggested that in the face of pronounced inequalities, “certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized,” adding that “if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life.” in opening the muaina meeting, enrique projected how racialization differentially values lives and deaths: “if this community was a criollo [nonindigenous] community, or of the upper class, i have no doubt that health authorities would have already taken charge of the situation. it seems as if the lives of us warao … aren’t worth anything to the criollo world.” the photograph multiplied claims to the grievability of elbia’s life, refracted through images of mourning and the trip to caracas. in the el nacional article, enrique interpellates the body politic through the figure of chávez: “we invite the president to come to our funerals,” thereby ambiguously including deaths past and future. figure 4. el nacional photograph taken during confrontation in ministry’s lobby. (courtesy of el nacional, photo by omar vegas) this photograph and its interpellation of readers into the work of mourning might signal the end of our story, telling us wherein lies the work of mourning. but the issues you raised, dr. freud, suggest that the photograph might rather deepen our engagement with questions of grievability than effect their closure. you wrote that what distinguishes melancholia from mourning is “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings,” suggesting that “it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost.” can mourning and melancholia be neatly separated in the wake of mamerto’s death? the literary scholar anne cheng has suggested that melancholia structures racialized inequalities in such a way that it “conditions life for the disenfranchised and, indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity.” a decade before your essay appeared, w. e. b. du bois traced how racism complicated grieving for his infant son: “all that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame me not if i see the world thus darkly through the veil, — and my soul whispers ever to me, saying, ‘not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bound, but free.’” fanon famously stressed the individual and collective depersonalization that structures the violence and social death produced by colonialism. enrique frequently disrupted epidemiologists’ ahistorical interpretations of the deaths by citing five hundred years of colonial violence in the delta following columbus’s arrival in 1498. in such a situation, is it possible to speak of “normal grief” or to distinguish it neatly from melancholia? i am also left with questions about the anthropologist lurking in the background of the photograph. how am i participating in the work of mourning? if the laments and their circulation can inform psychoanalytic understandings of mourning, what might they contribute to anthropology? ethnography, as classically framed, involved imagining a research object, usually an ethnos (“the x”), a journey to what was defined as the space of a culture, and a trip home, data in hand. although this formulation has been widely critiqued, one of its central elements—interviewing—remains central. interviews help anthropologists create and control the discursive events they use in producing knowledge and asserting rights to circulate their interlocutors’ words and images. despite limits imposed by institutional review boards, once consent is granted, anthropologists largely shape what becomes mobile and how it travels. which is why the epidemic provides such an interesting and troubling site to reflect on anthropology. i had not gone to the delta to do research, and i did not conduct interviews. nevertheless, i was asked to participate in the investigation that conrado and enrique organized because i am an anthropologist, and i was constantly told what it means to do the work of anthropology. as i have suggested, the meeting juxtaposed modes of knowledge production associated with political discourse, dispute mediation, alternative healing, testimonies, epidemiology, and media documentation, which all got overlaid with the poetics and acoustics of lamentation. i was not granted control over the circulation of words and images; i was rather interpellated by lamenters and leaders into a circulatory process, placed both behind the camera and in front of it. the way i contributed anthropologically to the investigation of the epidemic and the trip to caracas was shaped from the start by how my participation was constructed as part of the work of mourning. juxtaposing your essay and the laments has led me to think of anthropology as the work of mourning. i am not trying to universalize a single model of the work of mourning—your call to attend to specificities is crucial. nor would i want to privilege these lamentations as a sort of ur-mourning or archetypal mourning; i think that there is much to be learned from the narratives, home altars, facebook pages, grief groups, and other forms of the work of mourning that are woven into everyday life and death in the united states, not to mention the home funeral movement that nostalgically resituates corpses, wakes, and funerals in family homes. nor am i suggesting that anthropologists should be fixated on physical death; du bois, fanon, das, pandolfo, and others have clearly suggested that we should think just as seriously about social death. indeed, my interest here focuses more on work than on mourning per se. framing anthropology as the work of mourning evokes the work that anthropologists do in making images collaboratively and placing them in circulation, and it unsettles the usually unstated techniques we use to infuse images with particular sorts of affects. it can also help us think more complexly about how our work responds to and participates in other people’s efforts to make and understand worlds, including viral and noctilionine ones. anthropologists might read this statement as suggesting that all anthropology must be engaged, activist, or community-based, but i think that framing anthropology as the work of mourning would challenge this interpretation in two ways. first, i have not presented the particular contours of how i was interpellated in the epidemic as providing some sort of general model for anthropology; i have rather focused on how attending to the poetics and acoustics of laments can extend the ways that anthropological research and writing are imbricated in the specificities of worldings, an issue that kathleen stewart has recently addressed. second, “mourning and melancholia” demonstrated how attending to the specificities of memories and expectations, hyper-cathexis and reality-testing require reflecting on persistent and productive conceptual puzzles. the work i was called to perform has required a collective process of rethinking knowledge production, poetics, cross-species relations, epidemiology, and circulation, and this work is by no means finished. reframing anthropology as the work of mourning would thus require surrendering the engaged versus conceptual binary as a means of classifying anthropologists and projects. perhaps paraphrasing karl marx’s famous statement in the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte might help me clarify what i mean by anthropology as the work of mourning: anthropologists make their own stories, but they do not make them just as they please; they do not make them under circumstances entirely chosen by themselves. crossing the threshold in muaina called me to make knowledge anthropologically under circumstances that i had not chosen but that i did have a role in shaping. i was asked to make images, to build on klein, as a part of collective efforts to (re)create mechanisms for building and connecting internal and external worlds that had been shattered through the colonial violence quintessentially embodied in thirty-eight gruesome deaths. i was asked to participate in creating pasts that would challenge the social death that preceded mamerto’s physical demise and in projecting futures that imagined the end of colonialism’s violent grip on the delta. the precarity of these futures was painfully evident in the chilly reception we received in the ministry lobby’s marbled interior and the government’s steadfast refusal to confirm the rabies diagnosis or to provide an alternative. the lability of futures and the affects attached to them was underlined subsequently when the roles that enrique projected were reversed: it was chávez who died and the six of us who witnessed his funeral. as i finish this letter in february of 2014, the bolivarian revolution seems to be seized in a precarious work of mourning as president nicolás maduro’s efforts to sustain chávez’s image are tested by realities shaped by his corporeal and political absence. nevertheless, the power and the precarity of making pasts and futures, images and realities was signaled from the start in each verse of the laments sung for mamerto. the rhythms and acoustics, polyphonies and affects of the laments, the way they turned listeners into overhearers but made demands on them nonetheless are what i want to capture in recasting anthropology as the work of mourning. rethinking this notion through a dialogue between psychoanalysts and lamenters has suggested to me how anthropology as the work of mourning captures connections between the precarity of anthropologists’ constant movements between image making and reality-testing and the precarity of the worlds they engage, of anthropology’s specificities, struggles, and compromises. you might conclude that i am trying to get psychoanalysis on the cheap by writing a letter to a deceased analyst, one whom i cannot pay. here, i think, you would be wrong. i have done my work of mourning, and some psychoanalysis as well. but that’s another story, equally unfinished and uncertain. your friend, charles notes acknowledgments i write in memory of feliciana and bill, of elbia and mamerto. my debt to florencia macotera, indalesio pizarro, melvi pizarro, conrado and enrique moraleda, and norbelys and tirso gómez runs as deep as my esteem for them. the school for advanced research and the lichtenberg kolleg at the university of göttingen provided fellowships that supported this project. jed sekoff helped me confront my own work of mourning, suggested crucial sources, and provided insightful comments on a previous draft, as did vincent crapanzano and steven feld. maureen katz pointed me to laplanche and offered friendship and encouragement. bill bell shared lunch and insights in göttingen. monica stoian and deniz göktürk provided invaluable assistance on translation issues. audiences at columbia university, the university of california, santa cruz, the societé internationale d´ethnologie et de folklore (sief), princeton university, and the university of göttingen provided excellent comments. two cultural anthropology reviewers posed productive critical challenges. clara mantini-briggs, as always, was a harsh critic and insightful interlocutor. 1. given that i am writing a letter, i do not include citations in the text. a list of sources follows. my text revolves around retranslations of a number of key terms and phrases. when the translations are my own, i have included the german. quotations not accompanied by the german are taken from the translation in the standard edition; an editor’s note suggests that is was based on joan riviere’s translation of 1925 but “has been very largely rewritten” by james strachey and his collaborators (freud [1917] 1957, 239). the translations from warao and spanish are my own. sources “warning against any over-estimation of the value of our conclusion” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “is not at all easy to explain”; “is taken as a matter of course by us” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “we look upon any interference with it as useless or even harmful” (freud [1917] 1957, 244) “through the medium of a hallucinatory wish-psychosis” (freud [1917] 1957, 244) “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “reality-testing” (freud [1917] 1957, 244) “each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy … the object no longer exists.” (freud [1917] 1957, 255) “so intense that a turning away from reality takes place” (freud [1917] 1957, 244) “extraordinarily painful”; “compromise” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “implied a certain interchangeability … a kind of promiscuity of libidinal aim” (butler 2004, 21) “was essential to the task of mourning” (butler 2004, 20–21) “the freudian theory of mourning” (laplanche [1992] 1999, 251–52) kristeva (1987) 1989 cheng 2000 garcia 2010 “when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “respect for reality” (freud [1917] 1957, 244) “orders”; “cannot be at once obeyed”; “are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy.” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “er wird nun im einzelnen unter großem aufwand … des verlorenen objekts psychisch fortgesetzt” (freud [1915] 1946, 430) “they are carried out bit by bit … the lost object is psychically prolonged” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “jede einzelne der erinnerungen und erwartungen” (freud [1915] 1946, 430) “is carried out piecemeal” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “why this compromise … should be so extraordinarily painful is not at all easy to explain in terms of economics.” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) freud (1905) 1960 and (1900) 1965 crapanzano 1981 briggs and mantini-briggs 2003 on the cholera epidemic briggs and mantini-briggs 2009 on health programs and the bolivarian revolution villalba et al. 2013 provide child mortality statistics. “kompromißleistung”; “einzeldurchführung”; “realitätsgebotes” (freud [1915] 1946, 430) osborn 1967 presents a useful analysis of warao verbal morphology. with respect to the analysis of melvi's lament, line 6 uses a different form, -kore, which similarly places the utterances in the middle of an unfolding time before illness and death gripped mamerto. on the textual and musical structure of laments in delta amacuro, see briggs 1992, 1993. “to rebuild with anguish the inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing”; “the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning” (klein [1940] 1948, 321) “passing states of elation … due to the feeling of possessing the perfect love object (idealized) inside” (klein [1940] 1948, 322–23) “cover him or her over as ivy covers a stone wall” (nasio 2004, 29) “in very particular places of the wall, in its cracks and crevices” (nasio 2004, 31) “the smooth surface of a lens … of the other and of myself are reflected” (nasio 2004, 34) robert fitzgerald (homer 1963, 22) provides the translation of penelope’s lines. “penelope does not cut the threads … in a different way” (laplanche [1992] 1999, 251) “it sets aside a reserve” (laplanche [1992] 1999, 252) “melody, rhythm, semantic polyvalency, the so-called poetic form, which decomposes and recomposes signs” (kristeva [1987] 1989, 14) freud (1915) 1957 “when we have been able to go through our melancholia … including screams, music, silence, and laughter” (kristeva [1987] 1989, 99–100) rosaldo 2014 goffman 1981 kristeva (1974) 1984 peirce 1932 some sources on affect, acoustics, and embodiment in lamentation: feld (1982) 2013, 1990; nenola-kallio 1982; seremetakis 1991; urban 1988; wilce 1998; briggs 1992, 1993 “turning death into a purely linguistic operation”; “the possibility of distinguishing one victim from any other” (santner 1990, 29) crapanzano 1973 “the subject’s relation to his own speech”; “the fact that he cannot listen … the consciousness is concerned” (lacan [1966] 1977, 181) seremetakis 1991 hirschkind 2006 “reflection of the current affairs of a world gone mad” (unwerth 2005, 5) “to a problem that had long been the subject of his interest—the fate of pain and loss in human memory” (unwerth 2005, 10) “my body was given back … in mourning.” (fanon 1967, 113); see also pandolfo forthcoming urry 2007 latour 1987 bowker and star 1999 briggs and mantini-briggs (2003) document the cholera epidemic. appadurai 1988 “looking at a photograph places us … our loss stares us in the face” (sekoff 1999, 110) peirce (1932, 142) “broken up into small, mobile fragments of glass” (nasio 2004, 34) “certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized”; “if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life” (butler 2004, 34) “‘we invite the president to come to our funerals’” (weffer cifuentes 2008) “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings” (freud [1917] 1957, 244) “it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost” (freud [1917] 1957, 245) “conditions life for the disenfranchised and, indeed, constitutes their identity and shapes their subjectivity” (cheng 2000, 24) “all that day and all that night … ‘not bound, but free’” (du bois [1903] 1990, 154) fanon 1963 on the violence of colonialism briggs 1986 on interviews hagerty 2011 on the home funeral movement stewart 2012 on precarity, specificity, and worldings references appadurai, arjun 1988 “putting hierarchy in its place.” cultural anthropology 3, no. 1: 36–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1988.3.1.02a00040. bowker, geoffrey c., and susan leigh star 1999 sorting things out: classification and its consequences. cambridge, mass.: mit press. briggs, charles l. 1986 learning how to ask: a sociolinguistic appraisal of the role of the interview in social science research. cambridge: cambridge university press. 1992 “‘since i am a woman, i will chastise my relatives’: gender, reported speech, and the (re)production of social relations in warao ritual wailing.” american ethnologist 19, no. 2: 337–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1992.19.2.02a00080. 1993 “personal sentiments and polyphonic voices in warao women’s ritual wailing: music and poetics in a critical and collective discourse.” american anthropologist 95, no. 4: 929–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1993.95.4.02a00080. 2007 “mediating infanticide: theorizing relations between narratives and violence.” cultural anthropology 22, no. 3: 315–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.2007.22.3.315. briggs, charles l., and clara mantini-briggs 2003 stories in the time of cholera: racial profiling during a medical nightmare. berkeley: university of california press. 2009 “confronting health disparities: latin american social medicine in venezuela.” american journal of public health 99, no. 3: 549–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2007.129130. butler, judith 2004 precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. london: verso. cheng, anne anin 2000 melancholy of race: psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. cary, n.c.: oxford university press. clifford, james 2013 returns: becoming indigenous in the twenty-first century. cambridge: harvard university press. crapanzano, vincent 1973 the hamadsha: a study in moroccan ethnospychiatry. berkeley: university of california press. 1981 “text, transference, and indexicality.” ethos 9, no. 2: 122–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/eth.1981.9.2.02a00020. das, veena 2006 life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. berkeley: university of california press. derrida, jacques (1972) 1977 limited inc. translated by jeffrey mehlman and samuel weber. evanston, ill.: northwestern university press. du bois, w. e. b. (1903) 1990 the souls of black folk. new york: vintage. fanon, franz 1963 the wretched of the earth. translated by constance farrington. new york: grove press. 1967 black skin, white masks. translated by charles lam markmann. new york: grove press. feld, steven (1982) 2013 sound and sentiment: birds, weeping, poetics, and song in kaluli expression. 3rd edition. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 1990 “wept thoughts: the voicing of kaluli memories.” oral tradition 5, nos. 2–3: 241–66. freud, sigmund (1900) 1965 the interpretation of dreams. translated by james strachey. new york: basic books. (1905) 1960 jokes and their relation to the unconscious. translated by james strachey. new york: w. w. norton. (1915) 1946 “trauer und melancholie.” in werke aus den jahren 1913–1917, vol. 10 of gesammelte werke, 427–46, edited by anna freud. frankfurt am main: s. fischer verlag. 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(1929) 1963 civilization and its discontents. translated by joan riviere and james strachey. london: hogarth. garcia, angela 2010 the pastoral clinic: addiction and dispossession along the rio grande. berkeley: university of california press. goffman, erving 1981 “response cries.” in forms of talk, 78–123. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. hagerty, alexa s. 2011 “composing and decomposing the dead: politics and ethics in the american funeral home movement.” ma thesis. university of california, berkeley. hall, stuart 1980 “race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance.” in sociological theories: race and colonialism, edited by unesco, 305–45. paris: unesco. hirschkind, charles 2006 the ethical soundscape: cassette sermons and islamic counterpublics. new york: columbia university press. homer 1963 the odyssey. translated by robert fitzgerald. new york: anchor. klein, melanie (1940) 1948 “mourning and its relation to manic depressive states.” in contributions to psycho-analysis, 1921–1945, 311–38. london: hogarth press. kristeva, julia (1974) 1984 revolution in poetic language. translated by margaret waller. new york: columbia university press. 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papers of charles sanders peirce, edited by charles hartshorne and paul weiss. cambridge: cambridge university press. rosaldo, renato 2014 the day of shelly’s death: the poetry and ethnography of grief. durham, n.c.: duke university press. santner, eric l. 1990 stranded objects: mourning, memory, and film in postwar germany. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. sekoff, jed 1999 “the undead: necromancy and the inner world.” in the dead mother: the work of andré green, edited by gregorio kohon, 109–27. london: routledge. seremetakis, c. nadia 1991 the last word: women, death, and divination in inner mani. chicago: university of chicago press. stewart, kathleen 2012 “precarity’s forms.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 3: 518–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01157.x. unwerth, matthew von 2005 freud’s requiem: mourning, memory, and the invisible history of a summer walk. new york: riverhead. urban, greg 1988 “ritual wailing in amerindian brazil.” american anthropologist 90, no. 2: 385–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1988.90.2.02a00090. urry, john 2007 mobilities. cambridge: polity. villalba, julian a., yushi liu, mauyuri k. alvarez, luisana calderon, merari canache, gaudymar cardenas, berenice del nogal, howard e. takiff, and jacobus h. de waard 2013 “low child survival index in a multi-dimensionally poor amerindian population in venezuela.” plos one 8, no. 12: 1–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0085638. weffer cifuentes, laura 2008 “en los últimos dos meses han fallecido dieciséis waraos por enfermedad desconocida.” el nacional, august 7. wilce, james 1998 eloquence in trouble: the poetics and politics of complaint in rural bangladesh. new york: oxford university press. “the taste no chef can give” “the taste no chef can give”: processing street food in mumbai harris solomon duke university photographers wound through booths draped in white linen, while men in orange shirts lifted crispy spheres out of sizzling oil. on a dry november evening in 2008, an elaborate festival celebrating the vada pav—mumbai’s quintessential street food—belied the food’s humble constitution of a chickpea-battered, deep-fried, spicy mashed potato patty (the vada), tucked into a slightly sweet soft bread roll (the pav). the evening festival, called the vada pav sammelan (vada pav convention), was sponsored by the shiv sena, a regional political movement that promotes the rights of hindu marathi-speaking people born in the state of maharashtra, whose capital is mumbai. since its founding in 1966, the shiv sena has isolated the marathi manoos (native-born maharashtrian) as the focus of its politics. the party works through a variety of performative political acts, including violence against “outsiders” ranging from tamils living in the city to migrants from the northern states of bihar and uttar pradesh. the festival took place in shivaji park, a symbolic center of the party’s power in the city. as an influential bloc in mumbai’s municipal government, the shiv sena consistently lobbies for “reservations” (reserved job vacancies) for the marathi manoos. in 2008, the party took the vada pav into its own hands as a potential street-side job creation project in light of disappointing progress toward this end. the shiv sena teamed up with coke and mcdonald’s and announced the shiv vada pav. however, the shiv sena was not alone in this intensified focus on the food. a company named maza had begun to sell branded vada pav in mcdonald’s-like outlets, claiming that street food was dangerously unhygienic and that mass-produced, uniform versions of it would be cleaner and safer. both remade versions of the vada pav attempted to isolate the street and to amplify and dampen its desired or decried qualities. both versions grappled with the transformative relations between the food and mumbai’s streets. casting these efforts as food processing, this article asks: how does food become street food? and accordingly, how do food politics relate to urban politics? one approach to these questions is to engage food as an element of the city’s streets, with street as a locative descriptor. this suggests that food is just one of many infrastructures that make up a city, like water or housing, which ethnographers of mumbai and other urban settings have generatively detailed as constitutive of urban politics (anand 2011; anand and rademacher 2011; björkman 2014; de boeck 2011; prakash 2010; varma 2004). in a frame of location, the relation between food and urban politics is based on the idea that food is a material located in city streets. however, the street in this framing remains just the scenery—an empty container inside which food is placed for sale and consumption. by contrast, i argue that food becomes street food not only out of a politics of location but also out of a politics of processing. studying the processing of the vada pav illuminates how the differences in transforming what comprises food produces differences in how food politics comprises urban politics. when food is processed into the emblem of a political party, or into a hygienic mass-produced form, what has been changed? what precisely has been processed? food processing calls forth an apparatus of industry focused on changing discernible ingredients and distilling contaminants from a pure product. processing also can be understood as a mode of value transformation, as raw elements become food through craft and industrial food sciences (paxson 2012; paxson and helmreich 2014; weiss 2012). i define processing in this light: it is a transformation that imparts value. differences in possible transformations allow for guesses about how one thing transforms into another. the particular relationship of the vada pav to the street shapes what kind of guesswork is necessary to understand processing’s political and social effects. the street marks efforts to transform the vada pav, and, accordingly, ideologies and acts of processing must move beyond a focus on location to accommodate how the street generates possibilities for urban life. figure 1. vada pav. photo by flickr user deepatheawesome. processing an urban pattern if the street is both the substance and site of food processing, as i argue here, then it cannot only be understood as a location for food’s consumption. such a framing often occurs in food studies, where location is a backdrop for eating, or a “consuming geography” (bell and valentine 1997). this framework is suggestive, but it risks producing stories with predictable arrangements of eating and place. as brad weiss (2011, 443) notes, anthropological studies of food must reckon with “the force of the politics of space entailed in appeals to locality.” locality is made, not given. scaling the local of food to the local of city politics must also be recognized as a process that is speculative and does not always concern eating. several ethnographies of food offer insights to further this aim. they show complex and lively resonances between food and space (farquhar 2002, 2009; janeja 2010; paxson 2010, 2012; ries 2009; sutton 2010; weiss 2011, 2012). these studies explain what qualities situate food appropriately in place (douglas 1991), but importantly, also what sensory-spatial qualities define the place of food. claims to locality also anchor a rich body of research on food and substance in south asian studies, which deem food exchange central to everyday life in terms of identity and geography (alter 2000a, 2000b; appadurai 1981, 1988; baviskar 2012; conlon 1995; khare 1992; marriott 1968; mukhopadhyay 2004; iversen and raghavendra 2006; roy 2010; srinivas 2007; nandy 2004; osella 2008). however, studies of street food tend to cast the street as the bit part, with food as the charismatic lead. this approach leaves the street’s transformative potential underexamined. by approaching the street from the vantage point of food processing, i bring urban ethnography into conversation with scholarship concerned with the material-semiotic changeability of food (alter 2000b; atkins 2010; dupuis 2002; janeja 2010; meneley 2008; tracy 2010). this analytical move reveals different combinatorial possibilities between street and food—combinations that involve but also transcend parameters of location. the “force of the politics of space” is a concern shared by studies of the shiv sena’s comprehensive reach of power in mumbai across local and regional articulations of hindu nationalism, gender, and urban consumerism, both before and after india’s economic liberalization (appadurai 2000; bedi 2007; hansen 1999, 2002; katzenstein 1979; masselos 2007; mazzarella 2003; prakash 2010; rajagopal 2001a, 2001b; sen 2007). for such scholars, the street constitutes a central ground for claims to space (anjaria 2006; mcfarlane 2011). the decline of mumbai’s textile mills has proven integral to the party’s power dynamics, and mill owners, union leaders, and workers have had tangled relations with the shiv sena (finkelstein forthcoming). malls and movie theaters have replaced many of the mills, providing ample sites to examine the dynamics of investment capital and consumer desire for india’s new middle classes (fernandes 2006; lukose 2009; rajagopal 2001a; sundaram 2010).1 these dynamics implicate the street’s more and less viable arrangements with persons and things. for instance, street-hawking regulations and local policing converge with middle-class efforts to rid the streets of entities deemed foreign and a nuisance (anjaria 2009, 2011; benjamin 2008; phadke, khan, and ranade 2011; shah 2014). collectively, these studies narrate the shiv sena’s physical and ideological claiming of streets through neighborhood-level events and agitations. they show the efforts of the shiv sena to isolate specific qualities of the street in order to stabilize it enough to launch schemes like the shiv vada pav. i add to this work an analysis of processing, which necessarily bridges materiality with events and experience. from this perspective, the symmetries between “the food in mumbai” and “the mumbai in food” are not given. rather, their differences materialize through efforts to transform the boundary potentials of food and street. these efforts at processing can inform analyses of how materials and locations rearrange each other, and focus attention on differences between rearrangements. my thinking about processing draws on the work of gregory bateson (2000, 413), who considers a process to be a pattern, something that is “an aggregate of events or objects which will permit in some degree such guesses when the entire aggregate is not available for inspection.” bateson wrote at length about evolution and enculturation, and he often used banal examples such as trees or packs of cigarettes. he considered these objects as a process rather than an effect of culture. processes are always changing and generate the unexpected (“stochastic,” in his terms). “we have been trained to think of patterns,” bateson (1979, 13) writes, “with the exception of those of music, as fixed affairs. it is easier and lazier that way but, of course, all nonsense. in truth, the right way to begin to think about the pattern which connects is to think of it as primarily (whatever that means) a dance of interacting parts.”2 isolating one element from this dance is difficult if not impossible; the conceit that one could do so runs contrary to the premise of an interactive pattern. at the junction of politics and food, then, it makes more sense to speak of ingredients as interactive patterns: an aggregate of events and objects. patterns generate the unexpected via their combinatory potential. in my analysis of the vada pav, i examine investments in changing that potential, and do so in terms of processing. if for bateson process entails pattern, my analysis of processing explores the ideas, actions, and consequences of tinkering with patterns, because the shiv sena and maza focus intently on isolating, exaggerating, and even deleting certain parts of the vada pav’s pattern. what is a recipe, after all, if not a pattern? this article is based on eighteen months of ethnographic field research in mumbai broadly concerned with relations between food, the body, and the city. the article’s sections each reflect a site of research on the vada pav.3 the first section describes the genealogies of the vada pav and its entanglements with city streets. the second returns to the sammelan to explore the development of the shiv vada pav. the third section describes how vendors situate the vada pav as a means of livelihood amid violence and competition. the fourth part discusses how maza marketed “the taste of risk” to give the vada pav the aura of chaotic, microbe-laden street life, with city politics and health risks both neutralized by a shell of global fast-food aesthetics. each section illustrates the possibilities and limits of processing, and the porous milieu of food and street entailed therein. the scent of the soil although the shiv vada pav convention made the food seem like a natural member of the shiv sena family, both published and oral histories of the food point to a more complex ancestry. vikram doctor, one of india’s most influential food writers, traces the origins of the pav (the bun) to either the portuguese who first settled the islands of bombay, or perhaps later to goan and irani immigrants who opened bombay’s first bakeries. doctor explains that the vada (the potato ball) most likely comes from maharashtra, and notes that potatoes themselves are of british origin dating back to the nineteenth century. over time, potatoes spread to the city, and “sliced thin or mashed they were dipped in chickpea batter and deep fried as a snack” and then served in a bun (doctor 2008, n.d.). doctor also echoed a popular story: “the real inspiration” of joining potato and bread came from a street vendor named ashok vaidya, who lived in central mumbai in the 1960s. shiv sena officials took note of vaidya’s popular snack, and encouraged party members to set up vada pav stalls around local party outposts (shakhas). a city-beat journalist, dhruv, anchored the origin point of the vada pav in earlier events that linked potatoes to partition. during partition, he explained, large numbers of hindus from sindh province in pakistan were relocated to a temporary settlement a few hours from bombay. the settlement became ulhasnagar, now also known as sindhunagar, because so many sindhis remained in the ensuing years. sindhi rail commuters bound for the city often carried spiced potatoes and bread, staples back in sindh. vada pav was born out of the contradictory needs of these commuting refugees: the need for a mobile snack composed of a comforting, if crumbly, staple. crumbling spiced potato balls would often fall from the bread. a clever vendor began to batter and fry the balls. with improved structural integrity, commuters could enjoy a mobile potato snack without worrying about a stained kurta. “you can still get a vada pav without the batter in ulhasnagar, even today,” dhruv told me. once this battered potato ball sandwich took up residence in mumbai, the city’s diverse residents changed it over and over again with different chutneys, spices, and chilies, especially with the maharashtrian staples of garlic, peanut, and chili. “that food has the scent of the soil in it” [khane mein mitti ki khushbu hai], he said. “a taste of the people it comes from.” in narrating the food’s history, dhruv distilled the soil of maharashtra from the pattern of the food. although different at the outset, dhruv’s and doctor’s histories converged at a moment of intensified power of the shiv sena. when the city’s textile mills closed in the 1980s and people needed income, they sold vada pav outside the mills. according to dhruv, because the remaining mill workers would pass their former colleagues on the streets selling vada pav, to buy it from them meant, “here is my brother, laid off, and i will support him”—an effort of unity in times of aloneness. the shiv sena stepped in and offered unlicensed hawkers protection from city officials and police, for a price. it began as a few rupees each day, but over time would indebt street vendors to the shiv sena in amounts of hundreds or even thousands of rupees a week. protection (sanrakshan) could bring a street cart or a business under the watchful eye of the local shakha. the shakha would monitor any potential vandalism and forestall official fines during raids by the local police, further solidifying everyday patterns of how persons in india get by in between the virtues and vices of policing (jauregui 2014). it was this milieu that gave birth to the shiv sena’s own origin story of the vada pav: the authentic snack that sustained workers in times of labor trouble. on several occasions, food has exemplified the iconographies essential to the shiv sena’s public performances (bedi 2007, 1535). a friend explained to me that in the 1960s, some shiv sena protest signs read “idli dosa bagao” [stop idli and dosa], referencing the two iconic snack foods of tamil nadu, as senaiks attacked south indian udipi restaurants because the party founder, bal thackeray, accused south indians of taking jobs that “rightly” belonged to the marathi manoos. later, in the 1990s, the shiv sena created an employment scheme based around zhunka bhakar, a rural maharashtrian porridge-and-bread dish. that effort has largely been understood as a failure in terms of popularizing the food, with many zhunka bhakar outlets in the city now serving chinese food instead (as an employment scheme, however, it was moderately successful). these complex histories of the vada pav and its culinary forebears illustrate how neither the vada pav nor its political valences were simple matters of food and street.4 as the next section details, with the advent of the shiv vada pav, the party would protect its own not only through claims to historical originality but also through the purity of the processed street itself. spelling out the ingredients at the shiv vada pav sammelan, both potatoes and carts took center stage. the son of the shiv sena’s leader, uddhav thackeray, invited twenty-seven of the city’s vendors to the sammelan at shivaji park to fry up thousands of free vada pav, advertised the event widely, and garnered extensive media coverage.5 the winning recipe would become the official one of the shiv vada pav. the shiv vada pav would be the bellwether of taste and hygiene, prepared in gleaming, sanitized stainless steel food stalls by hundreds of shiv sena–employed vendors. the publicity team hyped this party-line brand using the narrative of the vada pav as the food that had nourished party members during violent protests in the 1960s and energized shiv sena constituents during harsh economic times. but they also recruited the pinnacles of food processing to attest to the food’s purity. the team invited marketers from mcdonald’s and coca-cola to lend slick consumer appeal to their logo and food-cart design, an interesting development since the shiv sena had famously protested mcdonald’s in 2001 over allegations that the company was using beef extract in its french fries (the hindu 2001). figure 2. shiv vada pav publicity. photo by harris solomon. inside the sammelan’s billowing cloth walls, vendors struggled to balance the forces of standardization and conformity with their own diverse recipes and preparations. booths lined the perimeter of the grounds, each representing a different vada pav vendor. i started from the corner booth, and moved down the line eating three vada pav in quick succession: one tasted stale, another fresh and crunchy, and a third, my favorite and the eventual winner, exuded a citrusy sweetness. each booth was uniquely decorated; one especially creative vendor spelled out “shiv vada pav” in devanagari script using green chilies, and “chav maharashtracha!” (taste maharashtra!—a key shiv sena slogan) using garlic cloves. the ingredients spelled out the patterned political commitments at hand. figure 3. chilies and garlic. photo by harris solomon. a sudden boom of fireworks reverberated through the space. hindustani musicians began a concert on the stage at the front of the festival grounds. amid chants of “jai vada pav!” speeches commenced and guests of honor took the stage: senior executives from mcdonald’s, coca-cola, and uddhav thackeray himself. the program’s emcee asked the mcdonald’s and coke execs to stand, and unveiled the official shiv vada pav cart in gleaming stainless steel. behind the cart, mcdonald’s and coke logos interspersed larger-than-life photos of uddhav and his father, the party founder bal thackeray. two speeches wrapped up the event. mumbai’s mayor, dr. shubha raul, extolled the vada pav as the city’s cultural treasure whose added benefit came in the form of its nutritious mix of vitamins and carbohydrates. next, uddhav thackeray explained that india’s regions are best characterized by their food, and that the shiv vada pav would do that work for mumbai and for the people of maharashtra. fireworks exploded, and above the stage a giant sign made of sparklers reading “vada pav!” in marathi burst into flames, officially concluding the event. the spectacle illustrated the shiv sena’s tactics of corporatism, taking the party beyond mere communal politics and rudimentary violence (eckert 2004). the stainless steel cart mattered here as the site of craft and technology that would ensure predictable profits. it removed the street’s microbes and enforced hygiene, connected transnational agribusinesses to the shiv sena’s employment scheme, and mixed biomedical health, transnational capital, and urban purity into one tasty mouthful. figure 4. shiv vada pav cart unveiled. photo by harris solomon. the aftermath of the sammelan proved rocky. during the following year, the shiv sena fought battles with the municipal government, which decreed that vada pav carts would violate street hawking regulations (desai 2009a, 2009b). city news columns mocked the scheme as just another shiv sena publicity tactic. the opposition congress party announced plans for the “congress poha,” a traditional spicy snack made from beaten rice flakes (desai 2009c). others followed suit: the leader of the republican party of india (athavale), ramdas athavale, said that if the shiv sena would have shiv vada pav, his party would have bhim vada pav to honor the dalit intellectual and political leader dr. bhimrao ambedkar (uni 2009). a son of a state minister began his own chhatrapati vada pav outlets to compete with the shiv sena’s shiv vada pav (anandan 2011). i asked a shiv sena official, sanjay, about the alliance with fast-food companies.6 he dismissed my question with a wave of the hand and a laugh: “the vada pav is not fast food! it’s got mirchi [green chili], haldi [turmeric], and kothimbir [coriander]—it’s healthy food!” my intention in asking the question was to learn more about corporatization, but like the vendors in the booths at the sammelan, sanjay spelled out the ingredients for me. that which sustained the marathi manoos, even when processed, could hardly be unhealthy. and indeed, the shiv sena did link up with fast-food companies—a linkage between hindu nationalism and corporate consumerism that scholars have pointed out as characteristic of the party’s work (appadurai 2000; rajagopal 2001b). yet these links still had to reckon with the street in the vada pav’s recipe. as sanjay suggested, its potential for health may have emerged from processing raw ingredients in hot oil in the name of urban hygiene (chakrabarty 1991; kaviraj 1997; mcfarlane 2008). but the shiv vada pav scheme would eventually place its winner back onto mumbai’s streets. even poststerilization, the street would again be amplified in the food. the stainless steel cart might attest to global iconicity even as it announced the vernacular (ghosh 2011), but no matter how hygienic and how global, the cart would be nothing without the streets of the marathi manoos. “the tiger still roars” i wondered how stall owners themselves expressed a relationship between their own vada pav and the demand to transform the food. if the shiv sena aimed to protect the marathi manoos through the shiv vada pav, how—if at all—did the sellers themselves engage these aims? the shiv vada pav promised them a spot of entrepreneurial ascendance on the mumbai streetscape by participating in a project of processing; all they needed to do was follow the party’s calculation. what happened when stability and speculation converged? for one seller i met, the problems of isolation and processing materialized as he sold his own family’s classic recipe. a friend had mentioned to me that an elementary school classmate, mahesh, had taken over his father’s long-standing vada pav cart. we linked up over the phone; mahesh told me that he would be happy to tell the family’s story. his father, alok, had some health problems that might make communication difficult, he said, but i would see for myself that these challenges did not stop his father from assuming his post behind the vada pav cart, as he had done for forty years. on the first of my visits, mahesh picked me up on his motorbike at the shiv sena headquarters and angled through alleyways to his home, a low building in the heart of the neighborhood of dadar. his father sat on the couch in the living room, but stood up to shake my hand before leaving the room, passing three enormous trays of potato vadas that circled the television. as alok walked outside to check on the cart, mahesh rummaged through a cabinet and brought out laminated newspaper articles about alok and the vada pav cart to help narrate their linked history. mahesh started helping his father sell vada pav when he was eight years old. being the son of a street vendor meant taunts and mockery in the schoolyard, but mahesh had persevered and, after completing his bachelor’s degree, eventually followed his father into the family business. he discussed his plans to open his own shiv vada pav stall. his move toward selling shiv vada pav was a relatively recent one, even though his family had been longtime supporters of the shiv sena. a few men from the shiv sena’s higher ranks contacted him and asked if he wanted to help lead the effort to popularize shiv vada pav. he agreed to serve as a vice president of the initiative and helped organize the sammelan by sorting through thousands of applications from vendors hoping to make it to the final cut of twenty-seven who would compete. yet mahesh harbored doubts about the party’s scheme. he was not opposed to changes. if he opened his own stall, the shiv vada pav was certainly the likely product. mahesh was thus not wedded to his father’s precise recipe, the same one that fed his family’s livelihood. nonetheless, mahesh had his own idea about what differences made a difference. he thought it made more sense to sell the masala, or spice mix, instead of commodifying the shiv vada pav itself. “that way,” he said, “housewives could make it at home, and because the masala stays fresh for a long time, it will turn a fast profit.” he led me back into the kitchen and opened a stone urn underneath the stove. it was filled with a green-yellow masala paste, the centerpiece of the family’s vada pav recipe. the organizers had nixed the idea of selling a spice paste. these ingredients were indeed crucial, but they were not the ingredients of success. mahesh explained that the shiv sena wanted to train people to make the food and sell it on the street. this came with risks: “the minute that person leaves the job, someone else has to be trained. if they had chosen to market the masala packet, it could have netted more profit.” for the shiv sena, vada pav carts furthered their claims over the street, but for mahesh, the movement of workers in and out of that street undercut the plan. mahesh saw the masala packet—the raw ingredients of the vada pav, ready to go—as the best way to make the food. upholding the street as central was shaky business. by contrast, he felt he had the solution to the problem of guessing the correct kind of processing. but his masala packet was a venture that intended to bypass the street, and thus proved untenable for the shiv sena. mahesh deftly navigated the conflicting positions that resulted: son of a longtime party supporter; chosen vp of the new shiv vada pav initiative; detractor from the details of that initiative and from the wishes of party leaders; and engineer of a potential vada pav of his own design. amid these differing investments, his daily routine still included helping with his father’s vending practice. in the early afternoon, we went outside to help alok push the cart down the street toward the main road. we paused at a collection of small hutments across from the nearest shiv sena shakha, where, in a rented, closet-sized room crowded with a fuel tank and black cauldron, alok’s longtime assistant fried the vadas. we continued to push the cart to the main road until we reached the corner. mahesh hung signs on either side of it: bright orange, with the shiv sena name and its official logo of a snarling tiger. it was alok’s original cart from 1968, with a few tune-ups. “the tiger still roars,” mahesh said cheekily, anchoring the vada pav as the transmitter of occupations delineated through kin. figure 5. alok’s cart. photo by harris solomon. alok readied the cart with shaky hands. he unlocked the moneybox, made of weathered wood and covered in gold and red swastikas. he straightened his orange hat that had the shivaji bow and arrow embossed on it. the cart’s preparation surface was carefully organized: a pile of newspaper squares for to-go orders; a small katora (bowl) for string to wrap the newspaper packets; larger bowls for the wet green chutney and the dry red chili chutney; and a tray for the pav, which alok pulled from a burlap bag and stacked neatly. he silently motioned for me to touch them, grabbing my hand by the knuckles to nudge it into a pav: still warm. the cart officially opened at 3 p.m., marked by the arrival of alok’s assistant who walked the half-block length with the first batch of vadas. there was already a short line of people waiting. alok prepared the vada pav, gave it to the first man in line, and blessed the money he received in a ritual that consecrated the day’s first business. i stayed with alok as mahesh ran back and forth between the cart and the house to ensure a smooth flow of supplies for the onslaught of customers. schoolgirls begged alok to rush their order in the seconds before their bus arrived (they need not have worried, because on its arrival, the driver himself bounded out of the bus, cut the line, and called out, “jaldi jaldi ek dena!” (give me one quickly!). several people were on their way either to or from the nearby hindu siddhivinayak temple. men and women, across classes, faiths, and age groups clustered around the cart. “you feed everyone,” mahesh said, and this seemed to be the case, as some pavement-dwellers also approached the cart with coins in hand. mahesh pointed out the corner’s geography of street food: “there’s a guy selling sev puri there, across the street. down the block, there are sandwich guys . . . they’re bhaiyyas [north indians], and to some extent it’s affected my business, but i let it go.” if people wanted a sandwich or sev puri, and the money went to the bhaiyyas, so be it—“it’s their money,” mahesh said. on this busy street, even in the face of competition, there would always be someone lining up for vada pav. a few hours later, mahesh led me across the street to visit the pav bakery. around the corner from one of the city’s better-known sugarcane juice stalls, a wooden half door led to the small main office of the bakery and, past it, to a structure with two glowing rectangular ovens cut into the back wall. it was a warm day outside, but inside the room, crowded with fifteen young men, the heat seemed positively searing. we helped a few of the men pack the fresh pav in sacks, and then carried the bags back down the alley, across traffic, and down the block to alok’s cart. mahesh remained silent as we walked, but then he began talking about the 1992 bombay riots that pitted hindus and muslims against each other: “i saw horrible things. a man lit on fire in front of the train station, at 10 a.m. in broad daylight. street kids that took knives and were stabbing people. horrible, horrible things. it was a dark spot on the city. but dad was out there with the cart, after the curfew ended. no one had food, and so people lined up for vada pav.” surely the tiger roared on the cart, but it struck me during exchanges like this that the roar also permeated the street and isolated it as a critical technique of survival. mumbai’s cosmopolitanism might seem self-evident on any given day at alok’s stall, surrounded as it was by vendors from different areas of india selling other regional specialty foods. yet time had not erased memories of the brutal violence on his street corner or the close connections of family to street food. in times of violence, which meant singling out that which did not belong, “no one” had food, according to mahesh—no one except those like his father who could feed the street to others. processing worked even in exceptional times, and in these moments the vada pav offered stability when life’s basics were up in the air. two years after this conversation, i returned to the corner where alok kept his cart. mahesh was there, doling out vada pav during the afternoon rush hour. he never started his own shiv vada pav cart after all. he had gotten married, and was starting a catering business. alok had fallen quite ill, and mahesh needed extra money to pay the hospital bills. “business is stable, but everyone’s struggling,” he said. “thankfully, dad built up the business for so long, so everyone knows him and comes here.” his father had fed the city during one of its darkest hours, and everyone knew that. for mahesh, making and selling his father’s vada pav offered a combinatory technique ready at hand. tinkering with its pattern would be a risky move. alok’s time-tested version turned the street into life and money, an arranged process that unfolded one sale at a time. the taste no chef can give when mahesh had described his own soon-to-open (but ultimately never-opened) shiv vada pav stall, i asked if he worried about the number of small corporations that had branded their own versions of the food. he scoffed: “they have an expiry date! i want fresh food, not food with preservatives.” “those” vada pav were anonymously sourced, pre-frozen, and laden with preservatives. another shiv vada pav seller i had interviewed, nitin, who like mahesh came from a family of vada pav vendors stretching back decades, had expressed the same sentiment. “that’s not the way,” nitin had said of corporatized versions. “freezing them, having expiration dates . . . it needs to be fresh, and homemade. the taste changes when you keep it on the shelf.” no corporation could fabricate a pattern in which the street was at the crux of change. corporate brands of vada pav have become an increasingly regular sight in mumbai’s train stations, malls, and on the streets in the past five years. by appealing to fears about poor hygiene historically and presently attributed to the city’s streets, the companies that produced them did include streets in their recipe, but in a version sanitized via a standardized taste. like the shiv vada pav, these products extolled standardization; but unlike the shiv vada pav or the regular versions of the food, they were offered in stalls off the street, not in carts. fans of vada pav could enjoy eating the city while avoiding the health threats that lurked in its corners. corporate versions of vada pav needed the street. its isolation was crucial for processing the final product. the endgame, however, aimed to remove the street entirely after its isolation—a tactic that ran up against unanticipated friction. one day in my neighborhood i noticed that my locksmith had an outside wall of his store painted with an advertisement for a new vada pav brand called maza, with the tagline “vada pav no. 1.” i began asking friends and neighbors about their thoughts on the matter, and, thanks to a neighbor’s connections, a few weeks later i walked into maza’s head office through a bright red door at the back of a sprawling suburban industrial complex. parth, the marketing director, ushered me into a conference room. in mass-producing street food, he explained, maza sold “the essence of mumbai,” which the vada pav exemplified. “the first thing visitors to bombay want to do is see the gateway [of india] and to eat vada pav,” he explained. food and the city made for an immersive itinerary. the head of operations, mr. anand, soon joined us in the room with an “original” maza vada pav for me to try. it was unusually sweet, thanks to chutney rich with dates and gur (jaggery). mr. anand laundry-listed some common ingredients—chilies, garlic—but many were unique to the “company special recipe” that took six months of testing to develop. mr. anand narrated the maza story as i chewed, introducing it by proclaiming that “the vada pav has graduated from the street corner, and has grown up.” the marketing team wanted to embrace how indians were “experimenting” with unusual flavors, like “szechwan,” that would lift the vada pav out of mumbai’s streets. the drive to isolate the street dated back to maza’s founding and continued to structure the company’s operational rationale. mr. anand’s involvement in the company came from his desire “to do something for the middle class” and “to make people into entrepreneurs.” people were to be processed along with the food. maza’s emphasis on employment and training meant that vada pav sellers could contribute to social cohesion. “it’s just like mcdonald’s,” he said. “you give food to the masses. you generate employment. and if you don’t employ people, they’ll get led to crime, to terror—they’ll go and plant a bomb somewhere.” in 2004, he and his business partner had wondered about doing something with street food, after feeling “disgusted” by the lack of cleanliness they saw daily. to answer the central question of their business plan—“can we make it like mcdonald’s?”—they turned to food processing. this was maza’s unique contribution to a broader project of cleaning the streets, mr. anand claimed. “there are no food laws in india,” he complained. “filthy is the vision for foreigners who come here.” maza’s innovation was to isolate and remove the street’s contagion by linking up with osi, a multinational food-processing company, to bring in the machinery and expertise of global industry. a standard logic of industrial processing, however, did not predict the difficulty of removing the street from the vada pav. this was a risky venture, mr. anand explained. it required an inventive approach to processing. one cannot simply process the street into a product of pure sterility because the microbes that cause food-borne illness also give the vada pav flavor. in the home, he said, microbes multiply in food, but not enough to make you sick. by contrast, the street posed a more serious problem, “because bacteria multiply more there.” indians were well aware of this, he claimed, and could taste it: “with street food, even if it’s vegetarian, those bacteria give the food a taste of non-veg, a taste that no chef can give.” the challenge, then, was to corral the disorder of the infectious streets without sacrificing taste.7 he felt that maza was unique among all other vada pav enterprises in accomplishing this feat: “that non-veg taste in the food, that’s the taste of risk. we market that. we give the street taste, without the danger.” maza wanted to remove the street from the vada pav, but still faced a twofold challenge. first, it had to isolate the right quantity of the street for taste without risk. second, and relatedly, it had to navigate the gendered dimensions of vegetarianism. the essence of “non-veg,” a quality of food often attributed to masculinity and to islam (alter 2000a; donner 2008; ghassem-fachandi 2009; roy 2010), had to be isolated as much as the microorganisms that would be removed. this work required processing the vada pav into something that all bodies of the city could enjoy because they could anticipate authentic taste without the harm of contagion. yet a bit of the street had to stay in the food for it to taste right. as mr. anand pointed out, no chef could do this without maza’s approach to processing. “even some political parties have become interested in vada pav,” mr. anand said, to emphasize the craze around the food. as he changed the subject to discuss the machinery they used to process potatoes, i cautiously explained that i had attended the sammelan in shivaji park. he sighed. “it’s been a challenge, a controversy,” he said. “we are avoiding certain parts of the city. basically, we’re staying away [from the shiv sena].” maza did not have the name recognition and media magnetism of mcdonald’s, but it also did not seek to amplify the street, making it as untenable a strategic link for the shiv sena as was mahesh’s masala packet idea. to grow business, maza focused on “new markets” in maharashtra’s interior untouched by shiv vada pav—away from the city streets. maza signaled its appeal through nationalism instead: the brand logo included colors indicative of the indian flag and the company’s guiding philosophy: orange for garam (hot/freshly fried); green for mirchi (spicy); and white for clean. parth took me into an office cubicle to show me a dvd recording of maza’s processing workflow. in a dark warehouse, men and women in green rubber suits and galoshes hosed down open crates of potatoes. they tumbled the crates of potatoes into a mechanical peeler, which carried the peeled potatoes to another machine that steamed, boiled, and cubed the potatoes. the cubes rattled along a conveyor belt under the watchful eye of men standing on either side of the belt who pick out “the bad bits” for quality control. the quality cubes fell into industrial-sized mixers, and a woman poured in a cauldron of spice paste. after the mixture cohered, she transferred it to a die-cutting machine that punched the mash into uniform disks, six at a time. the disks moved onto another conveyor belt, received a wash of besan (chickpea flour) batter squirted out of hoses, and the excess dripped through a grate. the coated vadas then entered a vat of hot oil for a par-fry process. after another quality check, they moved into a box to be cold-blasted (an element of the individual quick-freeze food preservation process). more workers parceled out the quick-frozen vadas into plastic bags, counted the bags into cartons, and then moved the cartons into a cold room. the cartons would be shipped to maza stores for the final step in processing, whereby employees would reheat the vadas and dress the pav with chutneys. maza made hygenic perfection its rationale for processing, but like the shiv sena, the company had to grapple with food and street in a complex and unexpected pattern. when i recounted these experiences to mahesh and nitin, they remained unimpressed—maza’s attempts at isolation and deletion were foundationally anathema to real vada pav. dhruv, the journalist, felt similar about maza’s corporate version: “it’s not real vada pav,” he said. “the chaos of the street, the individualized taste of each vendor, that’s vada pav. that’s street food. you can’t make it uniform everywhere.” processing was risky in matters of taste and in its possibilities to consolidate the city’s critical differences. as infighting beleaguered the longevity of the shiv vada pav, a portal of opportunity opened for maza. when i spoke with parth in july 2012, he noted that maza had expanded to 150 outlets throughout the country. i asked about the rise and fall of the shiv vada pav. he politely noted that maza “was not in the business of competing—we’re in the business of meeting demand.” maza, he said, wanted to bring the taste of mumbai to the rest of india, and was now expanding its stores to chennai, hyderabad, and bangalore. its success hinged on processing a vada pav that could transcend vernacular squabbles as it wound its way from factories to the streets of other cities. conclusion: the slash of the street on saturday, november 17, 2012, bal thackeray died from cardiac arrest, according to the doctors tending to him at his home. the following day, thackeray’s body was wrapped in the indian tricolor flag and brought to shivaji park, the site of the shiv vada pav sammelan and so many of thackeray’s speeches over the years concerned with isolating the marathi manoos and its others. here, in shivaji park, uddhav thackeray lit his father’s funeral pyre. “what was the magic or the charisma that attracted people towards him?” asked the journalist kumar ketkar (2012) of the scion of the shiv sena. one possible answer might come from the vada pav, whose instantiations illustrate what thomas blom hansen and oskar verkaaik (2009) call “urban charisma”—the affective myths and corresponding political relations emanating from the city’s iconic sites, materials, and characters. the vada pav proves urban charisma to be a pattern, and further, a pattern difficult to disaggregate. streets and foods pattern into livelihoods, community injuries, dreams of urban renewal and belonging, and transnational enterprise. these arrangements complicate easy identifications of eater and eaten, of location and dislocation, and of desire and risk. i have focused attention on attempts to parse these distinctions across both tenuous successes and outright failures to transform the vada pav. to return to bateson’s thinking about process as a pattern of guesses, it strikes me that the register of the guess is important in light of the successful and not-so-successful attempts to isolate the street from the vada pav. bateson writes of a “slash mark”: the limit line of an object (human or nonhuman) at which an observer can guess about what lies on the other side. slashes concern predictability. at the base of a tree, an observer can guess that the pattern of the tree above ground means that the roots lie below. or, “from how the boss acted yesterday,” bateson (2000, 131) notes, “it may be possible to guess how he will act today.” slashes “may be spatial or temporal (or both) and the guessing may be either predictive or retrospective.” for the vada pav, the slash of the street calls forth past and future guesses aimed at isolating and transforming parts of a greater complex. studying these guesses yields insights into patterned interfaces between food and politics. more generally, it opens conversations about predictions based on a small glimpse of a material’s transformative potential—predictions that ethnographers and those they study with make constantly. through different efforts to materialize the vada pav, i have argued that the street must be understood as a street food’s semio-material slash-marker. this argument raises questions about how food relates to the breaking and reshaping of urban patterns through isolation, amplification, and deletion. it attunes ethnography to the materials and techniques sought after to gauge and stabilize patterns suffused with differences. as heather paxson and stefan helmreich (2014, 173) note in their work on microbes, “microbes embody potential not because of their brute materiality, but because they can be enrolled in modeling, and thereby shaping, new food science and politics.” the stories of the vada pav interrupt a smooth scan over the field of street food that may mistakenly identify efforts to transform food as easily predictable and thus easily translatable into politics. the differences in these stories clarify what kinds of arrangements between foods and politics are bearable amid efforts to conserve or strain patterns. circumstances that define when predictions for food’s politics carry through and when they fail are matters of what can and cannot be processed. they are circumstances of what must be absorbed or unleashed at slash marks to make politics cohere. and most important, they challenge ethnographers to pursue the patterns of material difference that people can and cannot live with. no one chef—whether political party scion, street vendor, or aspirational businessman—could undertake speculative ventures into the patterns of the vada pav without working on the slash of the street. but their attempts to do so illustrate the guesswork at play in a politics of processing. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to my interlocutors in mumbai who patiently unraveled and respun the vada pav with me on the city’s streets, especially vikram doctor, yogesh pawar, and ketan vaidya. this research was funded by the national science foundation, the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, and fulbright-hays. the names of persons and companies i encountered are pseudonyms. i thank catherine lutz, lina fruzzetti, daniel jordan smith, sherine hamdy, lawrence cohen, diane nelson, priscilla wald, jonathan shapiro anjaria, brad weiss, ian whitmarsh, jennifer ashley, kathleen millar, maura finkelstein, and gabriel rosenberg for their imagination and insight, and express my gratitude to dominic boyer, james faubion, cymene howe, and the anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology for their critical feedback and guidance. 1. in the case of mumbai, which long had a maharashtrian middle class (centered around shivaji park and in the neighborhoods of lalbaug and parel for the more working classes), such distinctions matter. 2. see marcus (1985) on bateson’s reception and resonance. 3. the limited appearance of women in this article has much to do with the forms of ethnographic access i found open or closed. as phadke, khan, and ranade (2011, 136) note, the act of going to and eating at street-side vending stalls in mumbai is already masculinized because of the gendered politics of respectability governing access to public spaces. such politics conditioned the very possibilities of my routes of access during fieldwork. in the broader project that encompasses this article, i address these contingencies directly. see bedi (2007), shah (2014), and sen (2007) for studies of the complex ways that gender and sexuality inflect mumbai’s streets and civic politics. 4. certainly, mumbai has many street foods that might be known as the favorite. this is the case for many of the city’s forms of chaat, or snacks: bhel puri, a puffed rice and chutney snack, and sev puri, a snack of fried vermicelli atop chunked potatoes and fried dough disks, mixed with chutney. the vada pav is claimed by some as a maharashtrian food, and bhel puri has a lineage connected to groups ranging from gujaratis to others as far away as west bengal. to call the vada pav mumbai’s favorite food is in some senses to claim maharashtra as the natural root of mumbai’s street food, although the influences from other regions are readily apparent. 5. see, for example, allen 2008; koppikar 2009; mumbai mirror 2008; pti 2009; and srivastava 2008. 6. see lawrence cohen (2010) on the politics of recognition and relation at stake in publicizing injury in india, and hansen (2001, 16) and sen (2007) on reflexive field methodology in researching the shiv sena. 7. see paxson (2012) on the concept of “microbiopolitics” in this light. references allen, jonathan 2008 “shiv sena 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jim 2007 the city in action: bombay struggles for power. new delhi: oxford university press. mazzarella, william 2003 shoveling smoke: advertising and globalization in contemporary india. durham, n.c.: duke university press. meneley, anne 2008 “oleo-signs and quali-signs: the qualities of olive oil.” ethnos 73, no. 3: 303–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141840802324003. mcfarlane, colin 2008 “governing the contaminated city: infrastructure and sanitation in colonial and post-colonial bombay.” international journal of urban and regional research 32, no. 2: 415–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00793.x. 2011 “the city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space.” environment and planning d: society and space 29, no. 4: 649–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d4710. mumbai mirror 2008 “engineering vada pav!” november 8. mukhopadhyay, bhaskar 2004 “between elite hysteria and subaltern carnivalesque: the politics of street-food in the city of calcutta.” south asia research 24, no. 1: 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why loiter? women and risk on mumbai streets. new delhi: penguin books. prakash, gyan 2010 mumbai fables. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. pti 2009 “shiv sena launches the poor man’s burger shiv vada pav.” dna mumbai, june 18. rajagopal, arvind 2001a politics after television: hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in india. cambridge: cambridge university press. 2001b “the violence of commodity aesthetics: hawkers, demolition raids, and a new regime of consumption.” social text 19, no. 3: 91–113. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01642472-19-3_68-91. ries, nancy 2009 “potato ontology: surviving postsocialism in russia.” cultural anthropology 24, no. 2: 181–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01129.x roy, parama 2010 alimentary tracts: appetites, aversions, and the postcolonial. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sen, atrayee 2007 shiv sena women: violence and communalism in a bombay slum. bloomington: indiana university press. shah, svati 2014 street corner secrets: sex, work, and migration in the city of mumbai. durham, n.c.: duke university press. srinivas, tulasi 2007 “everyday exotic: transnational space, identity and contemporary foodways in bangalore city.” food, culture and society 10, no. 1: 85–107. http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/155280107780154141. srivastava, nimisha 2008 “mcvada: what’s cooking between shiv sena and macs.” cnn-ibn, august 6. sundaram, ravi 2010 pirate modernity: delhi’s media urbanism. new york: routledge. sutton, david 2010 “food and the senses.” annual review of anthropology 39:209–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104957. tracy, megan 2010 “the mutability of melamine: a transductive account of a scandal.” anthropology today 26, no. 6: 4–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2010.00768.x. uni 2009 “rpi will have bhim vada pav if sena has shiv vada pav: athavale.” oneindia.com, may 17. varma, rashmi 2004 “provincializing the global city: from bombay to mumbai.” social text 22, no. 4: 65–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-4_81-65. weiss, brad 2011 “making pigs local: discerning the sensory character of place.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 3: 438–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01106.x. 2012 “configuring the authentic value of real food: farm-to-fork, snout-to-tail, and local food movements.” american ethnologist 39, no. 3: 614–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01384.x. the blue years the blue years: an ethnography of a prison archive angela garcia stanford university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6438-3771 in the spring of 2009, i visited bernadette martinez in the one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her mother and daughter. the last time we had seen each other was in the crowded visitation room of the women’s prison where bernadette had been an inmate. recalling our conversation that day, bernadette admitted that she hadn’t yet done any of the things she said she would on her release, such as enroll in community college, get a job, maybe even join a gym. although she laughed when she said this, she seemed distracted and sad. i suggested we get out of the apartment and take a drive somewhere, perhaps into the mountains. but bernadette said no—it was too cold and she didn’t want to be away when her daughter returned from school. i first met bernadette while conducting fieldwork on intergenerational heroin addiction in northern new mexico. bernadette’s mother, eugenia, had struggled with heroin addiction throughout bernadette’s childhood, and bernadette began using the drug herself when she was a teenager. the splintering and repair of the martinez household had been a focus of my ethnographic research, and i remained in touch with the family well after i completed the fieldwork that formed the basis of my book. at the time of my visit in 2009, i thought that the research phase of my relationship with bernadette was over. in fact, a new phase of research was about to begin. this article tells the story of the emergence of this research and reflects on its implications for the writing of ethnography. it describes the creation of a prison archive and the ways it is productive for conceiving ethnography as a kind of archival endeavor that connects and unfolds affective, material, and temporal fields. the story begins with an exchange that occurred as i prepared to leave bernadette’s apartment that spring afternoon. i was already at the door when bernadette asked me to wait—she wanted to give me something. i watched as she disappeared into the bedroom she shared with her daughter, only to reemerge moments later with a large cardboard box. she carried it easily and asked me to store it for her, explaining that she didn’t want the contents around her any longer, but didn’t want to lose them either. sensing my reluctance to say yes, bernadette set the box on the floor and ripped off the tape that sealed its worn edges. she reached inside and pulled out handful after handful of paper, and let it fall at her feet. “they’re just letters,” she said. “nothing illegal, nothing to worry about.” bernadette had been a patient at the drug detox clinic where i once worked as an ethnographer and staff member, and where i had witnessed her being subjected to drug searches. standing above the box, letters spread before us, i had the feeling that we were back in the clinic and that she was being searched again. i helped bernadette gather up the letters and place them back inside the cardboard box. we said goodbye and i took the box back home with me to california, for what bernadette called “safekeeping.” for several months the box sat undisturbed in my office. then one morning i opened it, only partly by accident. the first letter i drew out was undated. written by bernadette and addressed to eugenia, it reads, “as long as you keep writing back i’ll be ok. pero los días que no me escribes se sienten lonely. se sienten azules [but the days you don’t write me feel lonely. they feel blue].” bernadette’s description of waiting and longing assumed the form of a haunting image—the image of lonely days, blue days. it was an image that carried excruciating affective and representational intensity for, to write the letter, bernadette needed to purchase the blue-tinted paper from the prison commissary. at about five cents per sheet, writing was expensive; she earned less than twenty dollars a month working six-hour days. in this sense, the blueness of days seemed more than a melancholic account of bernadette’s interior world. it was also a manifestation of the carceral economy that structured her writing of despair. toward the end of the same letter, bernadette asks about her daughter and tells eugenia, “cuídala bien, mamá. cuídate bien [take good care of her, mom. take care of yourself].” she closes with, “i know you can’t come. but send me a little something so i can buy paper, stamps, a phone card. . . . please don’t forget about me.” i wanted to read more letters, felt i shouldn’t, but did. after my period of passionate reading, i called bernadette to admit to her what i had done. multiple phone messages went unanswered. eventually, i flew to albuquerque and made the familiar drive north, to the española valley. after a couple of unsuccessful trips to bernadette’s apartment, i finally found her inside, the letters far from her mind. correspondence this article offers an ethnographic account of an archive of prison letters written by three generations of women: bernadette, her mother eugenia, and bernadette’s daughter, ashley. it describes my engagement with the archive, which is a product of my ongoing ethnographic trajectory in new mexico, and my relationship with the authors of the letters. in narrating this encounter, i record the context through which the letters emerged, as well as the desires, preoccupations, and practices that transformed them into an archive. a particular focus is the ways in which dislocation and connection manifest themselves in the letters and shape the kinds of narratives the archive tells. isolation, loss, and forgetting constitute the thematic core of many of the letters, all of which take place within a wider context of social and political history. the function of ethnography, as i see it here, is to integrate narrative, history, and analysis to open up questions about social life. to this end, the story of the archivization of the letters helps pull together and frame these threads.1 the process by which i have come to preserve, organize, and study the letters is neither direct nor simple. i am not trained in archival methods, so i use the term archive with some reservation. but the idea of the archive lies at the heart of this ethnographic project because i am concerned with the materiality of the letters (bennett 2010; stoller 2015), the processes and spaces of their preservation (steedman 2002), and the way they sit within historiography (stewart 1996). these are all defining features of archival work, and they are clearly visible in institutions of memory where archivists work. they are generally less visible within marginalized or excluded communities where stories are often told through supposedly ordinary sites, such as correspondence between kin (burton 2005). yet these are precisely the sites that serve as evidence of, and work against, historical erasure. writing about her efforts to create a postcolonial digital archive with her indigenous friends in australia, elizabeth povinelli (2011, 149) asks, “when we evoke the archive, what are we conjuring by way of inclusion and exclusion? what, for instance, is the difference between an archive and a collection or between an archive and a hoard or between an archivist and a collector and a hoarder?” these are the sorts of questions that i have also asked while thinking about the kind of relationship i might establish with the letters bernadette entrusted to me. indeed, bernadette posed a similar question once when she asked me to define archive, a term she was unfamiliar with. it was shortly after i had admitted to her that i had read the letters, and i was excited by the idea of organizing them into an archive. how quickly i jumped from shame about having read the letters to excitement about structuring them! bernadette’s question served as a powerful reminder of how the materials and languages scholars use to build narratives that question unequal power relations are often products of that very process (dirks 2002). i tried to answer her difficult question: what is an archive? it’s like a place for things you want to save, i said. not like the self-storage units people rent (which were ubiquitous in the española valley), but more like a photo album. i recalled the plastic, wallet-shaped album that bernadette had shared with me during her stay in detox. the photos were organized chronologically, beginning with a picture of ashley swaddled in a hospital blanket and ending with an image of her at three or four years old, seated on bernadette’s lap. most of the album’s sleeves were empty. what differentiates an archivist from a hoarder or a collector, povinelli (2011, 151) suggests, is that she or he is charged to find “lost objects, subjugated knowledges, and excluded socialities.” from this perspective, the letters become material remains that condense affective and social relations. as an ethnographic site of inquiry and a methodological praxis, conceiving the letters as an archive has helped me to explore the historicity and narrativization of these relations. bodies of correspondence, especially letters written by and for kin, have long served as a source of historical records or knowledge-making. this article engages not only with letters but also with the authors who produced them. these ongoing and vital interactions limit the tendency toward closure and univocal meaning. like bernadette’s photo album, the prison archive uncovers the singularities, preoccupations, and discontinuities of the correspondents’ lives. in the sections that follow, i trace the social conditions and forces of desire through which the archive was constituted, and provide an analysis of how it embodies them on the levels of content and form. much of the critical analysis of the archive focuses on its role in the development of the modern liberal state (derrida 1996; joyce 1999). the spatial arrangements of archival institutions, and their role in constituting subjects and historical narratives, are key areas of inquiry (bennett 1995; dirks 2002; foucault 2002; mbembe 2002). but rather than embodying a monolithic discipline or ideology, the archive also constitutes a space of “promiscuous and mutually contaminating contiguity” (gonzález echevarria 1990, 153; see also edwards 2001). inscribed with counterdiscourses, the archive may open up the possibility of new historical narratives and modes of subjectivity that are not reducible to the power of the state. such possibilities are explored in recent anthropological studies that call attention to the archive as a complex nexus of presence and absence, the intimate and the global, affect and aesthetics (taylor 2003; stoler 2009; stevenson 2013; zeitlyn 2012). they are also explored in feminist historiography that seeks to bring women’s private experiences more fully into the purview of history and politics (chaudhuri, katz, and perry 2010; hemmings 2011; dave 2012), and in diverse forms of scholarship concerned with the experience of people traditionally excluded from historical accounts, sometimes glossed as “history from below” (dunbar-ortiz 2014; thompson 1966). building on these studies, i explore the archive of letters with the goal of shedding new light on the authors’ arts of existence within the carceral system that characterizes law and ethical life in contemporary society (foucault 1979; rhodes 2001). i also read the letters as texts that embody the key meanings of loss and survival located at the heart of hispano experience in northern new mexico.2 on the level of ethnography, i attend to how these meanings are embedded in both the rhythms of daily living and in the longue durée of colonial history. i explore these different registers through the interplay of the letters’ narrative elements and the archive’s material production. the prison archive is composed of more than three hundred letters. they begin in june 2005 and end in may 2008, although many are undated and may extend beyond this period. i do not know how many letters were lost or destroyed, underscoring the archive’s fragmentary nature. bernadette wrote most of the surviving letters, but there are a few dozen written to her by eugenia and ashley. structured thematically rather than chronologically, this article focuses on a handful of letters between bernadette and eugenia, primarily because of the particular story these letters tell. the selection of some letters always involves the discounting of many more, including ashley’s letters, which are mostly drawings. ashley’s picture-letters raise important practical issues with regard to editing, transcription, and translation, which i am unable to discuss fully here. i should note, however, that i reproduce many features of manuscript originals (e.g., emphases, spanish language, paragraph breaks). this is not to imply verisimilitude, but to provide interpretation and intertextual engagement with particular correspondences within the broader framework of ethnography.3 about half of the letters in the archive are written on the blue paper purchased from the prison commissary, with the other letters on white or yellow paper. many of the pages are torn, creased from folding, or missing. all are handwritten, and bernadette’s sprawling script often proves difficult to read, especially during her periods of illness. there are envelopes too, almost all of which are addressed to eugenia, who lived at three different addresses during bernadette’s period of incarceration. bernadette had only one address during this time, and all of the letters addressed to her show evidence of inspection by prison officials, usually in the form of an institutional stamp or code. a housecleaner once mistook a portion of the letters i was studying for trash. consequently, some of the letters exude the odor of rotting fruit. “nothing could be at once more intimate and more alienable,” terry eagleton (1982, 54–55) writes; the letter is “part of the body which is detachable: torn from the very depths of the subject.” eagleton’s metaphor of tearing resonates with my own ambivalence in being the keeper and curator of the archive. indeed, i have struggled with the idea of writing about the letters, sharing a fear that roland barthes (2010, 23) describes as “making literature” out of private grieving. that this danger seems more threatening to me now—that is, when writing about the archive—than it did when i wrote about bernadette and her family without reference to it, speaks to the kinds of “seductions” inherent in archival research (freshwater 2003, 734).4 it also raises critical questions about the varying sensibilities we bring to different genres of ethnographic documentation and writing, and the different insights they enable (biehl 2013; clifford and marcus 1986; stewart 2012). over the years, i have written about bernadette and her family without saying anything about the letters, feeling that a key resource for my thinking remained hidden from view. in these works, i give much attention to cultural, economic, and personal histories of dispossession and i draw, in part, on these histories to account for bernadette’s desire to preserve the letters. the letters make tangible connections between history, loss, and desire. i hope to show that they are not simply representations of this relationship but material traces of it.5 the archival subject i moved to northern new mexico in 2003 to conduct fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation. for more than three consecutive years, i lived in a small village in the española valley, a rural network of villages that extend out of the present-day town of española. for more than two decades, this economically depressed region has had one of the highest per capita rates of heroin addiction and heroin-induced death in the united states, a phenomenon that disproportionately affects the region’s hispano population (garcia 2010). among hispanos, heroin addiction often exists across multiple generations of kin. i was born in new mexico and have roots in the region. i returned there as an adult because i wanted to understand multigenerational heroin addiction and its relation to colonial history. a central focus of this work is the contrary potentialities of addiction, especially as they are realized within multigenerational households. let me reflect on these potentialities briefly and consider how they are organized and haunted by a legacy of colonialism, for this legacy also bears on the archive. the española valley was settled by spanish families beginning in the seventeenth century through a system of land grants from the spanish monarchy. community grants provided individuals and families a small parcel of land on which to build a home, irrigate, and cultivate. the remainder of the grant consisted of a far larger parcel reserved for the common use and benefit of all settlers.6 during the time new mexico formed part of spain, and later part of mexico, the community land grant was central to the creation and maintenance of affective, material, and social bonds. these bonds were radically disrupted following the loss of land tenure for hispanos after the mexican-american war (1846–1848), and deteriorated further under the economic and legal culture in territorial new mexico (dunbar-ortiz 2007).7 yet within hispano families, stories about “lost” or “stolen” lands survive and are passed down the generations. sometimes these stories are accompanied by historical records related to them, such as property deeds, maps, and surveyor reports. these stories and records mobilize profound affective connections to a past that today’s heirs can neither possess nor escape. the multigenerational heroin-addicted household must be understood in this light, as it also contains a sedimented history of connection and disconnection. indeed, addiction might be understood as the symbolic surrogate for, and memorial of, severed genealogical bonds that now reside within the addicted family bloodline (garcia 2014). the affective and symbolic significance of this “property” transfer becomes especially apt in the way secondand third-generation heroin-users describe heroin addiction as la nueva querencia, the new inheritance. addiction is an inheritance that animates past traumas, but also one that aims to keep connection alive and unfinished. the archive of prison letters offers another way to conceive of this history of rupture, displacement, and connection experienced by hispano families. the letters i draw from in this article deal explicitly with these experiences, all of which take place within a wider historical context and the experience of carcerality. yet the archive can be seen as an attempt to counteract the dislocation that results from these processes. like the multigenerational heroin-addicted household, the archive is a site of tension between what is lost and what remains. as liz stanley (2004, 209) notes, “the letter exists because of the absence of the writer and the distance (literal or figurative) between them and the addressee.” considering its materiality, the letter leads us to think about how, as an object, it might signify the absence of something or someone else, and the relationship itself. by weaving together the content of the letters with an ethnographic account of archival practice, i hope to navigate the tensions the archive embodies. my goal is not to make a coherent narrative out of the letters, but to think through them as a genre of living that is at once unique to this particular family and also illuminates the realities of contemporary hispano life.8 dislocation excerpt from a letter to eugenia april 7, 2006 i am doing my best to keep my mind so it means a lot to know that you are doing ok. everything is the same but i have blisters on my wrist. my skin hurts. i was upset at the c/o for not taking me to the infirmary. she ignores me everyday. i told her the yard had no shade and my skin was burning. i walked up to her and showed her my arms. she ignored me and looked the other way and i started yelling and waving me arms. i didn’t hit her but my mind was saying stop but i couldn’t stop. she ignores me. i need my cream. can you please let them know? please. she ziptied my hands behind my back. she made me sit in the yard even when everyone else was called inside. she separated me. i was afraid i would go to level 5 because she threatened. i just had to sit in the sun like that for hours. even though it was cold the sun burned. i feel like i’m shouting and no one hears. it’s hard to write because it hurts. i have to be honest with you. it bothers me my cellmate gets more visits from her family even though they live in window rock. i think that is further away. that’s what she said but maybe she’s just trying to get me. she seems pretty nice though. she reminds me of piñon because she is so short and round. why don’t you come? you can ask laura to give you a ride. her sister is in level 3 and i heard from brenda who is here too that she comes at least once a month. you are in my prayers. please keep me in your prayers. please don’t forget me. bernadette was charged with a drug-related offense shortly before we met. prior to her trial, she was court-ordered to the rural drug recovery program where i worked. my official job title was detox attendant, and i observed bernadette’s month-long stay during my work on the night shift. i also attended to her basic needs, like providing food and medication, or dialing the telephone for her outgoing calls. part of my job involved recording these activities in the clinic’s daily log, a cheap spiral notebook with wide-ruled pages. although detox attendants were directed to record everything that took place during their shift, the vast majority of entries merely recorded the time and offered neutral statements like “no unusual activity” or “all patients treated as indicated.” i followed the lead of my coworkers and jotted down such statements, thinking as i wrote that the daily log revealed nothing of life in the clinic. on later reflection, what it did reveal was the highly constructed nature of the archive, whether through fabrication or omission. this is a point carolyn steedman (1998, 67) makes when she writes, “in the archive, you cannot be shocked at its exclusions, its emptiness, at what is not cataloged” (see also hull 2012). far from being complete or trustworthy, the daily log remained empty. yet it still constituted a source of power and authority in the clinic, and it confirmed these qualities, at least in theory, on the detox attendant charged with recording the day’s events. from about six in the evening to six the following morning, i was that person. having been a patient at the clinic before, bernadette was used to the routine of rehab. we talked casually in the evenings and sometimes late at night. from these conversations, i learned that bernadette’s mother was also addicted to heroin and suffered from depression, a condition that seemed to predate her drug use. bernadette worried about eugenia and often asked me to check in on her. from our talks, i also learned that bernadette was the mother of a young daughter, ashley, whom she clearly loved and deeply missed. she knew that she would not be reunited with her daughter after completing detox. instead, she was legally confined to her trailer until her trial date, and ashley was placed in the care of another relative before moving in with eugenia. i visited bernadette regularly during that period and she told me stories about her life. often these stories centered on “another time,” when she and eugenia lived in their ancestral village, in the ancestral home. bernadette would have inherited it had eugenia not sold it during a period of financial desperation. bernadette spoke lovingly about the home, and often shared with me memories of the kind of occasions on which family photographs are usually taken. but there were very few photos that she could draw on in her narration, perhaps because of her other stories, such as her mother’s addiction and depression, their worsening poverty, and her own deepening loneliness. the painful loss of the home was entangled with these stories, and with bernadette’s lonely confinement in the trailer. after eugenia sold the ancestral home, she left the village and moved with bernadette into a rented trailer in town. this was in the late 1980s, a time when heroin was abundant in the española valley and health services were few. eugenia and bernadette thus crafted their own services by caring for each other. this often meant that bernadette obtained heroin, or medicina (medicine), to relieve her mother’s physical and emotional pain. during our conversations, bernadette described the reparative nature of heroin in her relationship with her mother, how it nourished and sustained their connection, especially after they began using the drug together. “it brought us closer together,” she said. materializing memory excerpt from a letter to eugenia undated i hope you are ok. how’s mi hita? i miss her so much. so much. so much. i am just trying to stay out of people’s way so i can get back home. it’s turning winter already. sometimes i can smell firewood in my mind. thanksgiving is coming. we’re making decorations like we did when i was a kid, but they don’t let us touch scissors. all the ladies are trying to make the best of it. what else can we do? in 2005, bernadette was sent to the state’s women’s prison in grants, a former uranium-mining town that has come to rely on prison work. several women i came to know during my research landed there, while others had relatives incarcerated there. over time, the prison became a key site of inquiry for me. one of the correctional officers i interviewed, a single mother from grants, described the challenge of working there. “it’s a decent living. but my mom’s inside and she don’t deserve it.” she went on to tell me that her mother “had a disease,” that is, she was addicted to drugs. “most of the inmates, they’ve got it, too. if they didn’t have it, they’d probably be working here like me.” her comments speak to the exclusionary potential of addiction in a radically unequal world. the prison works to ensure this potential, the consequences of which are felt among inmates and their families alike.9 new mexico’s women’s prison was established in 1989, a time of unprecedented growth within the u.s. prison system.10 it is the first privately run women’s prison in the united states and is run by the corrections corporation of america, which contracts with state and county governments, as well as with u.s. immigration and customs enforcement, to house inmates. in many cases, these contracts include so-called lock-up quotas—a guarantee that states will either provide a certain number of prisoners or pay for their empty beds. the contract for the new mexico’s women’s prison includes a 95 percent occupancy quota, which it has never failed to meet.11 currently, the prison holds more than six hundred women, with plans to add another two hundred beds. about 90 percent of its inmates are nonviolent drug offenders, two-thirds of whom have children. shortly after bernadette’s incarceration, a communications representative gave me a tour of the prison, accompanied by a male correctional officer. the prison is divided according to level of security risk, and i was permitted to see its minimumand medium-security units. these units were subdivided into so-called pods that appeared to reflect and reinforce racial, ethnic, and religious hierarchies, as well as expectations for inmate performance. for example, the god pod was a cell-free dormitory designed to “build the character” of women through religious training, support groups, and prayer. unlike the other areas i visited, the god pod had radios, televisions, microwave ovens, and other prized possessions made available through christian ministries. in contrast, women assigned to the pod for mentally ill inmates, known as loco town, lived and ate in their cells alone and had restricted access to movement and visitors.12 when i asked the correctional officer where bernadette resided, he replied “somewhere in between.” although i visited bernadette in prison, sent letters, and wired money at her request, i never received a letter from her. so i was surprised when i first saw her broad and looping script, how her words shifted back and forth from print to cursive, english to spanish, fashioning an intimate, bilingual language that simultaneously increased and narrowed the distance between writer and addressee. for example, in a letter to eugenia, she writes, “por qué no me visitas? ¿por qué no aceptas mi llamada? este silencio me preocupa tanto [why don’t you visit me? why won’t you accept my phone call? this silence worries me so much].” then, switching to english, “i feel like shit. you haven’t written in a long time. i think they have it out for me. someone here doesn’t like me. or maybe you are forgetting me?” on my last visit with bernadette in prison, she was noticeably heavier and upset. she told me that she couldn’t sleep and was anxious. her mother and daughter hadn’t written her back in a long time, and she worried that they had moved away without telling her. at the same time, she imagined that her mother was desperately trying to reach her through letters that were being intercepted—by whom, she didn’t know. she asked me to find out why the flow of letters had stopped. my first impulse was to write bernadette more frequently, as if writing from me might ease her sense of isolation and anxiety. but i also worried that letters from me might exacerbate the absence of the writing she longed for. writing in the prison context, whether creative writing or letter writing, is often assumed to have intrinsic therapeutic value for inmates (jacobi and stanford 2014). the past decade has seen an increase in prison writing projects, as well as in creative writing programs for individuals in the “free community” wanting to teach writing behind bars (bernstein 2010). such efforts may be transformative for prisoners and instructors alike, and they may also be socially and political powerful, although it is unclear how such programs translate to the need for, and complexity of, large-scale prison reform. but the focus on creative writing, and the attendant possibility of the educability of inmate-writers, tends to ignore the unequal power relations and colonial discourses on which such initiatives are built.13 like any genre or text, prison writing is far from self-evident and open to numerous functions and interpretations. by considering it outside of its specific location and following its dispersal though other sites, such writing can be more capaciously understood. my long-term ethnographic work in the española valley, and my engagements with bernadette, have enabled me to recognize other stories and scenes that clustered around the recurring theme of unrequited communication in her prison letters. leaking into and animating her worries about the possible interception of the letters were past experiences of separation and disconnection, including the loss of a beloved home, the precariousness that accompanies being the daughter of an unstable mother, and the absence of the thing (heroin) that made connection to her mother (and, by extension, her daughter ashley) possible. these moments seemed to collapse as bernadette narrativized her feelings of displacement. excerpt from a letter to eugenia undated nada hay nuevo debajo del sol [there’s nothing new under the sun]. i’m just working and waiting. every day the same day. i don’t even know if i am even writing this to anyone anymore since i don’t get anything back. when did i get to be so alone? when did you stop caring about me? no se puede sacar agua de una piedra [you can’t get water from a stone]. in this fragment, bernadette draws on two spanish dichos—sayings or proverbs rooted in latino cultural and familial discourses. cultural analyses of dichos tend to emphasize their pedagogical role in shaping normative behaviors and expectations (espinoza-herold 2007). however, in this context, these commonly told dichos become a mode of relating the emotional and temporal contours of bernadette’s life. the first dicho, nada hay nuevo debajo del sol, conveys a sense of repetition that constitutes life in prison, and likely extends beyond it. i interpret it as a repetition connected to bernadette’s growing loneliness, which she attributes to her unrequited letters. the second dicho, no se puede sacar agua de una piedra, seems to express bernadette’s deep disappointment with eugenia’s lack of response, which might be interpreted as a deficiency of maternal love and care. but this expression of disappointment, of surrender, might also be an invitation for her mother to respond, which she eventually does.14 letter to bernadette january 2007 mija, i know you are angry. ashley is too. it is a long way and the pressure on me is heavy. juntas 2 o 3 veces a la semana. estoy tratando de ganarse la vida. no seas duro conmigo mija [two or three recovery meetings a week. i’m trying to get a hold on my life. don’t be so hard on me, my child]. i have a new job. it isn’t much but i am hoping to buy us a car to make travel easier. you’re so far. hopefully you will be out soon right? that’s what i hear. no había celebraciones después de que murió mi madre . . . por eso soy una mala madre. lo siento [after my mother died there were no celebrations . . . that’s why i’m a bad mother. i’m sorry]. ashley knows she has a mother. it’s not the same. she made a pretty card for you, it’s very pretty and she can write now. i want to send it but you think you will not receive it so i am saving it for you for when you return. unless you want me to send it. lo siento por todo el dolor mija. me comprometo a escribir y visitar más. fuerza! siempre estás en mis pensamientos [i’m sorry for all of the pain, my child. i promise to write and visit more. be strong! you are always in my thoughts]. relating narratives early in 2010, i returned to new mexico to carry out research in the department of corrections collection in the new mexico state archives, located in santa fe. the focus of my research was the territorial penitentiary, which was established in 1884. the penitentiary was one of several institutions, including the indian school and the insane asylum, representing new mexico’s transition from spanish colonial and mexican systems of governance to an american one. at the time, i was broadly interested in the penitentiary’s female inmate population, a preoccupation shaped by my relationship with bernadette and the archive. i spent a month in the state archive, reading materials associated with female inmates. these included intake reports containing demographic and sentencing information, warden reports, medical and punishment records, and digital scans of inmate photographs. from what i could gather, there were fewer than a hundred female inmates between 1885 and 1920, the majority of whom were young women of “spanish” descent. a few of them were also described as “addicted to morphine” or “mentally insane.” most were mothers charged with property crimes or adultery. significantly, adultery was considered a federal crime under the new legal system, and people of spanish descent were typically married in the church, not in civil (i.e., legal) ceremonies. american legal authorities aggressively prosecuted new mexico’s “illegal inhabitants” (i.e., domestic partners not married in a civil union), ostensibly to improve their morals. as a result, many families were separated and their historic property claims delegitimated (montoya 2002). my time in the archive revealed striking parallels between territorial-era inmates and today’s prison population. then as now, female inmates tended to be young, poor, and had children. they were often convicted of “crimes against morality” that carried lasting personal and economic consequences. the tragedies of the past seemed to extend into the present. during my period of research in the state archive, i also began interviewing bernadette about the prison letters. i wanted to understand the circumstances of writing, circulating, and preserving the letters, and the limits of what could be expressed and shared in the prison setting. in one of our interviews, bernadette spoke about living in an environment that resounded with women talking, swearing, yelling, and crying. she recalled the sounds of metal doors clanging shut, keys jangling, alarms buzzing. while sitting in the quiet of the state archive, perusing the corrections collection, i often imagined her reading and writing in the midst of such noise. in another interview conducted during the same period, bernadette relayed the events surrounding the discovery of the letters, which occurred shortly after her release from prison. “they were under the bed,” she recalled, “wrapped up in shopping bags, little piles of them.” prior to this encounter, bernadette didn’t know that the letters she sent home had been saved. i asked if eugenia had saved them, but bernadette said no, it was ashley, who hadn’t yet learned to read. the revelation visibly pained bernadette. in her essay “the melancholic imagination,” julia kristeva (1987, 5) writes, “it is being separated from his mother, despairingly, with no going back, that prompts [the child’s] attempts to recuperate her, along with other objects, in his imagination and, later, in words.” from this psychoanalytic perspective, ashley’s safekeeping of bernadette’s letters from prison might represent her recuperation of her mother via words and dreams. this recuperation may have afforded ashley sorrowful pleasure at a time of painful separation. but the letters also served as a witness to the loss enveloping her. by collecting and preserving the traces of her mother, ashley was preparing the archive for itself, opening up a future for the history i write here. as it turned out, ashley wasn’t the only one to recuperate and imagine, for bernadette also saved many of the letters that eugenia and, eventually, ashley wrote to her. but as prisoners are only allowed to keep a limited number of personal items, bernadette was forced to part with many of them to make room for new ones. bodies of correspondence that work as relations and history were thus curtailed, pointing again to the inherently partial and political nature of any archive (steedman 2002). in another interview conducted during this period of research, bernadette described the fraught practice of sorting through letters and determining which ones she might part with: i had two piles. one was letters i would trade in. they were old or maybe seemed unimportant. or i memorized them and didn’t think i needed them. . . . the other pile i wanted to keep no matter what. . . . i checked those two piles all the time. i worried i put one in the wrong place, you know, the wrong pile. like i accidentally was getting rid of something that i really wanted to keep, and when i checked through the piles i was always changing my mind about the ones i thought i could get rid of because they all seemed important again. referring to the constant sorting and self-doubt, bernadette described feeling like she was “going crazy.” at the same time, the ritual of sorting may have been a means of preserving her lost connection, and perhaps even her mind. after several months of anxious sorting, a more experienced cellmate suggested that bernadette instruct family members to write on only one side of each sheet of paper, thereby leaving the other side blank. in this way, bernadette could respond on the blank side, send the letter back, thereby saving precious money and, perhaps, both letters. but this epistolary practice raised different anxieties, such as whether her unstable mother would ever write to her, or keep the letters she hoped to preserve. (at the time she did not know her daughter was saving them.) still, bernadette tried this new method, so that many of the letters in the archive are in fact two. in the shared gesture of writing and saving, narrative is always double narrative, and the relation between authorship, time, and emotion is entangled. ashley’s and bernadette’s appropriation of the archive expands the signifying capacities of language and endows new meaning and significance to these texts. i, the most recent curator of these letters, am implicated in this process too. shortly after my time in the state archive, i began my own process of sorting. i separated the letters by author, followed with several weeks of closely reading the three bodies of writing. while reading, i began identifying or extracting major themes. initially these themes were motherhood, childhood, home, and prison—topics i was grappling with at the time. on subsequent readings, it became apparent that these categories were insufficient, even crude. i added addiction, distance, and depression, but neither did these categories capture the complex embodiment of history and emotion that adhered in the letters. the more i read, sifted, and pondered the letters, the more they seemed to exceed the limits of their thematic placement. i called bernadette a few times during this period with the intention of seeking her advice about how to organize the letters, but she had more pressing concerns. she couldn’t find a full-time job, her relationship with her mother was tenser than usual, ashley was struggling in school, and the man she was dating had a difficult ex-wife. when i finally managed to ask bernadette about the letters, she cut me off and told me that i could “do whatever” i wanted with them. but i knew that wasn’t true. eventually, i hired an undergraduate student to work as my research assistant, which i really didn’t need. i’m not sure if i did this because i craved companionship in the process of archiving, or if i wanted the letters to acquire scholarly legitimacy, or perhaps both. in any event, the assistant’s first task was to photocopy each letter three times. she neatly coded each duplicate in pencil based on the faulty chronological and thematic system i devised, and began filing the duplicates accordingly. watching her handle the letters (that is, their duplicates), i grew panicky and possessive and soon had her do unrelated work. my feelings were stirred less by her misreading or misplacing the letters, but by her encountering them physically. it was as if the letters were alive, vulnerable to a stranger’s touch. anthropological studies that explore the agency of objects open a line of inquiry on the affective dimensions and social relations that letters embody (belting 2011; gell 1998; pinney 2001). the materiality of the archive can thus be explored as a confluence of these processes, and provide the basis for conceptualizing a tactile sense of history and sociality. these complex sensory responses to the letters are related to the way in which they have been dispersed through evolving social fields—from political histories of dispossession, the specific forces of dislocation and desire, and attenuated kinship ties to the actualities of daily life.15 these fields, and the constellation of scenes and narrations that accompany them, are embodied in the letters’ sheer materiality. extending beyond their textured surface, they give rise not to a precise explanation or narrative, but to a profound connection. it is the nature of this connection, and what it might mean for an ethnography of the prison archive, that i would like to explore in the final section. archiving connection writing about the forces that return him to catarina, the protagonist of vita, joão biehl (2013, 577) notes, “ethnographic subjects allow us to return to the places where thought is born.” for biehl, the return to catarina constitutes more than his ongoing commitment to any one individual or site, but to the possibilities for thought that are opened up through time. the people and places that we circle back to in the ethnographic endeavor—hence in space, time, and writing—are critical practices integral to the making of new forms of knowledge. from this perspective, the work of return becomes a thought experiment, one that emphasizes new beginnings and futurity. bernadette also adopts the figure of return as a kind of impetus, but an impetus for something beyond thought. in nearly all of her letters to eugenia, she asks for a response—don’t forget me, write back, come and visit. the futurity of bernadette’s letters is thus oriented to the reply of the addressee, which inevitably entails a return to memory and loss. one letter to eugenia makes this especially clear. written midway into bernadette’s prison term, the letter begins with casual updates about her daily activities. then the letter seems to turn with a critical realization: sometimes when i’m writing you i forget that you don’t me write back. i forget that you cant or wont tell me a thing. i forget that i am the only one who hears me. the letter then moves into the past and records a series of accusations, betrayals, and painful scenes that involve bernadette and eugenia. it also expresses the unfinished grief that accompanies them. in this way, the letter becomes an archive in which hurt is materialized and recorded, as well as in which it is felt, anticipated, and comprehended. toward the end of the same letter, bernadette writes: then it hits me [the repeated absence of eugenia’s response]. i stop writing you and push it all out of my mind. 2, 3, 4 days go by and i start writing you again. . . . i forget you’re not here, are you? please write. the letter’s ambivalence toward writing her mother interweaves processes of memory and forgetting. this double gesture resonates with jacques derrida’s (1996) sense that the archive is the site where the past and its claims on the subject are called into question.16 bernadette’s writing conveys this sense of uncertainty and traces the trajectory of a return to forgetting that nevertheless becomes the impetus for connection. in this way, bernadette’s letter refracts temporally just as derrida conceives of the archive as containing a link to futurity. for her letter ends with a question—i forget you’re not here, are you—and the request for a response—please write. this question and request have made claims on me. six years after bernadette entrusted them to me, the letters remain in my home, transforming it into the place where the martinez history is housed; that is, into an archive. multiple copies of each individual letter are stored in folders that hang in a wood filing cabinet.17 the placement of the letters in their respective folders is not permanent but changes according to the context in which they are encountered and understood. and this context is shaped more by my ongoing relationship with bernadette than it is by the documents themselves. in addition to the letters, hundreds of other documents that broadly relate to them are stored in the filing cabinet’s drawers. these include handwritten notes, transcripts, newspaper clippings, visitor applications for the prison, photographs, epidemiological reports, funeral and prayer cards, photocopies of old property deeds, and the like. these documents are like the connective tissues between discursive fields that provide the structure of the archive. they also expand its interpretive and material possibilities. as for the originals: both the letters and their surviving envelopes are preserved in plastic sleeves bound in heavy, three-ring folders. currently, the folders sit in a bookshelf positioned beside the filing cabinet. both the shelf and the cabinet are in view of me as i write this article. there have been times when i have been unable to bear this proximity, which induces a feeling of being observed. more than once, i’ve had to move to another room, or leave the house altogether, to work in a less encumbered environment. in the space of literature, maurice blanchot (1983, 22) speaks of an “essential solitude” that accompanies writing. this solitude doesn’t refer to the celebrated aloneness that is supposedly necessary for creative composition. instead, it’s characterized by the shadow of infinite thought that encloses the writer. it’s also the permanent estrangement of the writer from thought once it’s been transfigured as words on a page. the writer’s solitude adheres in the work, demanding that “whoever reads it enter into an affirmation of the work’s solitude, just as he who writes it belongs to the risk of this solitude.” but what is the nature of this risk and what can it tell us about why one writes? might the risk of the writer’s solitude be that it’s precisely that which puts him or her in contact with the world?18 i pull the metal rings of a binder open and slip a letter out of its plastic sleeve. it is thin and wrinkled, torn-edged, yellowed. the letter “pricks me . . . bruises me” like a photograph whose detail stirs personal pain in the viewer (barthes 1981, 27). it’s not just the text but also the image of the text—the uncertain print script, the misspellings, its isolation from the other letters, which seem similarly isolated. yet the letter functions as “a connector between two distant points, as a bridge” (altman 1982, 13) that plots links between affective and social fields. i consider taking the letters out of their sleeves, tossing them into the air, letting them fall where they may, just as bernadette did on that spring afternoon. an intricately entangled web of hurt and hope; a closer approximation, perhaps, to the complicated story the letters weave. but this is not a story of chance. rather, it’s a story of fragmentation and dispersal; and desire for, and impossibility of, cohesion. it’s a work about history and memory, separation and return, four female writers seeking to connect disparate events, locations, and lives into a meaningful, albeit incomplete and unfinished, whole. notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to the martinez family for their engagement with this project and for their continued trust. i benefited greatly from discussion as i presented parts of this article in the “sensing precarity” session at the 2011 annual meeting of the american anthropological association, and in the 2013 seminar “literary anthropology” at the school for advanced research. i wish to express gratitude to anne allison, lauren berlant, joão biehl, michael jackson, stefania pandolfo, lisa stevenson, and kathleen stewart for their critical insights on different versions of this manuscript. i also thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, and cymene howe for her superb editorial work. 1. the authors of the letters have given me permission to study, write about, and quote the letters in this article. they have offered continuous support—sometimes directly, sometimes tangentially—on all aspects of this research, and i attribute any strength of this article to their essential role in its development. any weakness in the article’s analysis is my own. 2. the hispanos of northern new mexico trace their ancestry to the spanish colonists. they comprise the majority of the region’s population, and the spanish language is still spoken in many hispano households. 3. liz stanley (2004) provides a helpful discussion of these complex editorial practices when working with the epistolary form. 4. helen freshwater (2003, 9) describes “the allure of the archive” as, in part, voyeuristic pleasure and, in part, the sense of accessing authentic material: “the archive grounds claims of truth, plausibility, authenticity. for the researcher utilizing archived material, the temptation of making a claim to the academic authority conferred by undertaking ‘proper research’ may prove irresistible.” 5. valentina napolitano (2015, 47) writes that traces “signal the limits of representation; they are the materials of knots of histories at the margins, as well as auratic presences.” as such, they are significant sites for anthropological study. 6. in 1821, after gaining its independence from spain, mexico continued to adhere to the land policies adopted by the former colonial power. these community grants were built on lands used by native pueblos at various times and the resulting violence and conflict between hispanos and pueblo indians is deeply embedded, but often overlooked, in new mexico’s land-grant history. 7. as roxanne dunbar-ortiz (2007, 5) writes, “land tenure based on cooperation characterized the poor communities of new mexico, while individualism and competition for material gain characterized the capitalist mode in the united states.” 8. for lauren berlant (2008, 4), a genre “locates real life in an affective capacity to bracket many kinds of structural and historical antagonisms on behalf of finding a way to connect with the feeling of belonging to a larger world, however aesthetically mediated.” 9. it is widely understood that the united states’s correctional system assures the maintenance of a growth of prisons and the permanent disenfranchisement of citizens convicted of felony offenses. instead of preparing prisoners to successfully reenter society, the correctional system’s prisons, post-release court-mandated classes, drug screenings, meetings with probation officers and addiction-recovery meetings, among other requirements, prepare parolees for reentry into prison. indeed, two out of every three prisoners released will be rearrested within two years, and half of those released from prison will be incarcerated again within three years. the vast majority of prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders, primarily african american and latino, housed in for-profit, privately run prisons; see http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/incarceration. 10. between 1980 and 2010, the number of women in u.s. prisons increased an astonishing 648 percent. in new mexico, women account for more than 10 percent of the total prison population, and their numbers are steadily expanding, while the male inmate population has remained stable. 11. in 2013, the internal revenue service reclassified the corrections corporation of america from a standard corporation to a “real estate investment trust,” effectively making its inmates “renters” (popper 2013). this tax-savings scheme is designed to expand so-called growth opportunities in the prison marketplace at a time when incarceration rates are finally declining for the first time in forty years, partly due to problems with overcrowding and an increased awareness of the failure of the war on drugs. 12. according to a national study of mental illness in the prison population (glaze and james 2006), 73 percent of women in state prisons, the majority of whom suffer from substance abuse, have at least one mental health problem. 13. i am thinking here of civilizing efforts, be they psychoanalytic or religious, to cultivate the apparent irrationality of the so-called primitive. 14. although i have juxtaposed them here, the sequence of correspondence is unknown. 15. alfred gell’s (1998, 221–23) notion of the distributed object is pertinent here. such an object is created through different temporal and spatial relations and exists in material form and as an idea and an intention. 16. jacques derrida (1996, 11) writes that the archive “will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. on the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of said memory.” 17. allan sekula (1986) observes that the filing cabinet constitutes the primary site of archival rationalization. but it’s also an artifact itself, and its documents can be mobilized for an endless variety of reasons. 18. for blanchot (1983), the risk of solitude is not the separation of the writer from the other, but of the self from itself. references altman, janet gurkin 1982 epistolarity: approaches to a form. columbus: ohio state university press. barthes, roland 1981 camera lucida: reflections on photography. translated by richard howard. new york: hill and wang. originally published in 1980. 2010 mourning diary: october 26, 1977–september 15, 1979. translated by richard howard. new york: hill and wang. originally published in 2009. belting, hans 2011 an anthropology of images: pictures, medium, body. translated by thomas dunlap. chicago: university of chicago press. originally published in 2001. bennett, jane 2010 vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bennett, tony 1995 the birth of the museum: history, theory, politics. new york: routledge. berlant, lauren 2008 the female complaint: the unfinished business of sentimentality in american culture. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bernstein, lee 2010 america is the prison: arts and politics in prison in the 1970s. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. biehl, joão 2013 “ethnography in the way of theory.” cultural anthropology 28, no. 4: 573–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12028. blanchot, maurice 1983 the space of literature. translated by ann smock. lincoln: university of nebraska press. originally published in 1955. burton, antoinette 2005 archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history. durham, n.c.: duke university press. chaudhuri, nupur, sherry katz, and mary elizabeth perry, eds. 2010 contesting archives: finding women in the sources. urbana: university of illinois press. clifford, james, and george e. marcus, eds. 1986 writing culture: the politics and poetics of ethnography. berkeley: university of california press. dave, naisargi n. 2012 queer activism in india: a story in the anthropology of ethics. durham, n.c.: duke university press. derrida, jacques 1996 archive fever: a freudian impression. translated by eric prenowitz. chicago: university of chicago press. originally published in 1995. dirks, nicholas 2002 “annals of the archive: ethnographic notes on the sources of history.” in from the margins: historical anthropology and its futures, edited by brian keith axel, 47–65. durham, n.c.: duke university press. dunbar-ortiz, roxanne 2007 roots of resistance: a history of land tenure in new mexico. norman: university of oklahoma press. 2014 an indigenous peoples’ history of the united states. boston: beacon press. eagleton, terry 1982 the rape of clarissa: writing, sexuality, and class struggle in samuel richardson. oxford: blackwell. edwards, elizabeth 2001 raw histories: photography, anthropology, and museums. new york: berg. espinoza-herold, marielle 2007 “stepping beyond sí se puede: dichos as a cultural resource in mother–daughter interaction in a latino family.” anthropology and education quarterly 38, no. 3: 260–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aeq.2007.38.3.260. foucault, michel 1979 discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. translated by alan sheridan. new york: vintage. originally published in 1975. 2002 archaeology of knowledge. translated by a. m. sheridan-smith. new york: routledge. originally published in 1969. freshwater, helen 2003 “the allure of the archive.” poetics today 24, no. 4: 729–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/03335372-24-4-729. garcia, angela 2010 the pastoral clinic: addiction and dispossession along the rio grande. berkeley: university of california press. 2014 “regeneration: love, drugs, and the remaking of hispano inheritance.” social anthropology 22, no. 2: 200–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12070. gell, alfred 1998 art and agency: an anthropological theory. oxford: clarendon. glaze, lauren e., and doris j. james 2006 “mental health problems of prison and jail inmates.” special report, bureau of justice statistics. washington, d.c.: department of justice. http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=789. gonzález echevarria, roberto 1990 myth and archive: a theory of latin american narrative. new york: cambridge university press. hemmings, clare 2011 why stories matter: the political grammar of feminist theory. durham, n.c.: duke university press. hull, matthew s. 2012 “documents and bureaucracy.” annual review of anthropology 41: 251–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104953. jacobi, tobi, and ann folwell stanford 2014 women, writing, prison: activists, scholars, and writers speak out. lanham, md.: rowan and littlefield. joyce, patrick 1999 “the politics of the liberal archive.” history of the human sciences 12, no. 2: 35–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09526959922120234. kristeva, julia 1987 tales of love. translated by leon s. roudiez. new york: columbia university press. originally published in 1983. mbembe, achille 2002 “the power of the archive and its limits.” in refiguring the archive, edited by carolyn hamilton, verne harris, jane taylor, michele pickover, graeme reid, and razia saleh, 19–26. dordrecht, netherlands: kluwer academic publishers. montoya, maria e. 2002 translating property: the maxwell land grant and the conflict over land in the american west, 1840–1900. berkeley: university of california press. napolitano, valentina 2015 “anthropology and traces.” anthropological theory 15, no. 1: 47–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499614554239. pinney, christopher 2001 “piercing the skin of the idol.” in beyond aesthetics: art and the technologies of enchantment, edited by christopher pinney and nicholas thomas, 157–79. new york: berg. popper, nathaniel 2013 “restyled as real estate trusts, varied businesses avoid taxes.” new york times, april 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/business/restyled-as-real-estate-trusts-varied-businesses-avoid-taxes.html. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2011 “the woman on the other side of the wall: archiving the otherwise in postcolonial digital archives.” differences 22, no. 1: 146–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1218274. rhodes, lorna a. 2001 “toward an anthropology of prisons.” annual review of anthropology 30: 65–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.65. sekula, allan 1986 “the body and the archive.” october 39: 3–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/778312. stanley, liz 2004 “the epistolarium: on theorizing letters and correspondences.” auto/biography 12, no. 3: 201–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1191/0967550704ab014oa. steedman, caroline 1998 “the space of memory: in an archive.” history of the human sciences 11, no. 4: 65–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/095269519801100405. 2002 dust: the archive and cultural history. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. stevenson, lisa 2013 life beside itself: imagining care in the canadian arctic. berkeley: university of california press. stewart, kathleen 1996 a space on the side of the road: cultural poetics in an “other” america. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. 2012 “precarity’s forms.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 3: 518–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01157.x. stoler, ann laura 2009 along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. stoller, paul 2015 “the bureau of memories: archives and ephemera.” visual and new media review, cultural anthropology website, march 20. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/647-the-bureau-of-memories-archives-and-ephemera. taylor, diane 2003 the archive and the repertoire: performing cultural memory in the americas. durham, n.c.: duke university press. thompson, e. p. 1966 the making of the english working class. new york: vantage. zeitlyn, david 2012 “anthropology in and of the archives: possible futures and contingent pasts. archives as anthropological surrogates.” annual review of anthropology 41: 461–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721. muddy labor muddy labor: a japanese aid ethic of collective intimacy in myanmar chika watanabe university of manchester the smell of mud the first japanese aid worker that i met from the organization for industrial, spiritual and cultural advancement (oisca) told me that oisca was an ngo that “smells like mud” (dorokusai).1 yamada and i were sitting in a coffee shop in yangon, the largest city in myanmar, and she had just given me an overview of oisca’s training activities teaching rural youth techniques in organic farming. although she described in impressive ways oisca’s training programs around the asia-pacific, its cooperation with international agencies such as the world food programme (wfp), and the organization’s prominence as one of the oldest ngos in japan, her conclusion boiled down to oisca smelling like mud. working in the paddy fields alongside trainees and villagers constituted an important approach to aid work for oisca staff members. echoing other oisca staffers that i met later on, yamada explained that the training courses throughout the asia-pacific aimed not only to teach techniques in organic agriculture and animal husbandry to asian rural youth but also to cultivate particular dispositions among trainees and staff, so that they may become leaders of sustainable development in their communities. an important way to accomplish this was to conduct the trainings in an environment of long-term communal living, and to emphasize the need for trainees and staff to struggle through the intimate relations created in this setting. the myanmar training center was run in the same manner. living together for a year, sharing work as well as meals, baths, and collective duties did not come easily to participants, but i later came to understand that both japanese and burmese staffers considered living alongside each other a meaningful aspect of their work. the quality of being dorokusai, yamada indicated, pointed to both of these forms of collective work: physical and relational labor. in this article, i examine how japanese and burmese aid workers in oisca constructed, experienced, and negotiated what i call the ethics of “muddy labor” at the myanmar training center, which was constituted through an emphasis on collective physical labor and close social relations in a communal lifestyle. it is based on twenty months of ethnographic research that i conducted from 2009 to 2011 in oisca’s tokyo headquarters, its training centers in japan and myanmar, and at other japanese and burmese aid organizations throughout the two countries. in the sections that follow i describe how participating in a communal lifestyle and shared physical labor—what yamada described as dorokusai, muddy labor—produced what i call a form of collective intimacy among japanese and burmese aid workers and trainees. these intimacies with each other and with the soil in the agricultural fields did not concern an individual’s interiority or practices of intimate recognition as in liberal traditions (povinelli 2002). by describing intimacy as tied to collective physical labor and relational struggles, i point to the ways that the analytic of intimacy here is inseparable from the materiality of bodily activity and the labor of constructing a collectivity (cf. parreñas 2012). collective intimacy in this sense did not depend on whether one could attain and exhibit an interior emotional state with another person; rather, it hinged on bodily participation in shared labor and the unmaking of individual subjects in the process of making a collectivity. but neither did it concern the other side of individual intimacy, namely, the genealogical imagination of inheritances and social status (povinelli 2002, 2006). i argue that the formation of collective intimacy aimed to unmoor oisca’s aid actors from both individual intimacy and genealogical grids, promoting a collectivist ethic that emphasized communal labor, covered in mud from the fields, and relational entanglements that would create persons committed to a new collective defined by the boundaries of the training center and the global imaginations of oisca’s senior japanese staff. in the strict sense of the term, oisca is not a humanitarian organization—it mostly does not engage in life-or-death emergency situations, except when major disasters strike its project sites—but neither does it fit squarely into the popular definition of a development ngo. although oisca, like a development organization, aims to alleviate poverty and implement schemes of community or national improvement (edelman and haugerud 2005; li 2007), it focuses on training programs within the confines of a training center. as such, it follows more specifically a pillar of japanese aid policies called “making persons” (hitozukuri).2 the term hitozukuri became central to the japanese government’s aid policies in 1979, when then prime minister masayoshi ōhira (1979) gave a speech at the general assembly of the united nations conference on trade and development (unctad). he stated that the japanese state had historically emphasized education and human resources as central factors in the development of the country. he called this “hitozukuri,” and announced that one of the most important tasks in japanese international aid was to nurture the “unlimited potential of young people” through technical training based on japan’s recent experiences of development. subsequently, japanese aid policies, as well as the japan international cooperation agency (jica) and ngos such as oisca, have adopted hitozukuri as one of their core missions. nevertheless, the concept has remained ambiguous, often pointing to training-based programs with widely varying goals and methods. staff members at oisca did not seem to agree on a precise definition of hitozukuri, but there was a general understanding that the training programs aimed not only to teach agricultural techniques but also to develop trainees’ character—that is, to “make persons.” an important fact to keep in mind here is that local burmese staff at the myanmar training center are former trainees. after finishing the training course, participants who wish to become staff are sent to japan to train for a year and hired as full-time employees on their return. as much as the courses thus meant to produce leaders of sustainable development, the program also aimed to create aid workers out of aid recipients, and specifically oisca ones, by circulating them from myanmar to japan and back to myanmar. thus hitozukuri was intended for staff as well as trainees, and this work of making persons occurred through an emphasis on collective labor that applied to all participants in the training center. in fact, the point was that everyone was subject to this organizational principle, which ultimately sought to create a collectivity that would unmoor people from familial and other existing social attachments and would, theoretically, transcend national and cultural borders. thus oisca does not implement programs to save lives. the literature on humanitarian moral sentiments nevertheless provides a useful analytic from which to explore hitozukuri aid because it offers critical insight into the ways that particular forms of transnational governance produce global moral actors (bornstein and redfield 2011; fassin 2012; ticktin 2011; see also feldman 2007). the collective intimacy produced through shared labor, as i describe below, constituted an instance of such moral subject-making, as the relations and bodily experiences of communal labor and belonging defined burmese and japanese aid actors’ understandings of the ethical basis of aid work and personhood. the scholarship on humanitarian sentiments has largely conceptualized moral impulses as arising in response to the distant suffering stranger (boltanski 1999). in contrast, i suggest that the morality underlying japanese hitozukuri aid emerges from the production of proximity with cultural others, with the aim to create a transnational collectivity. this aid ethic of collective intimacy has its own political effects. while burmese and japanese aid workers and trainees in oisca found meaning and a sense of belonging in shared labor, these affective experiences also masked the unequal relations on which the feelings of this form of solidarity were based. in this modality of aid, racial and cultural hierarchies are embedded in the notion of oneness, and as such, the affective sense of belonging and closeness to others renders the challenge to existing structures difficult. at the end of the article, i explore how such ambiguities might complicate aid workers’ and anthropologists’ capacities for critique. japanese aid in myanmar since 1962, a military junta has ruled myanmar. in the past few years, however, political changes have taken place, and the country is opening up in unprecedented ways. amid these changes, ngo activities have been growing as well. yet contrary to common perception, a number of local and international organizations have been active in myanmar for the past decade or more (heidel 2006; tegenfeldt 2001). with japan serving as the largest aid donor to the country for many years (holliday 2005; nemoto 2007), a handful of japanese ngos have also been active since the mid-1990s. in fact, given the restrictions on japanese official and commercial engagements in myanmar since the military regime’s rise to power, humanitarian projects and ngos have played an important role in representing japan in myanmar, despite their limited scope. japanese aid workers in the country agree that oisca, in particular, stands as one of the exemplary ngos that reflect japanese positions of engagement in myanmar. the myanmar training center, established in 1996, is one of oisca’s newest project sites. the ngo conducts training programs at four training centers in japan and at sixteen others in eight asia-pacific countries. each training center outside japan has one or two japanese staff members and dozens of local staff, overseeing trainees that could number from twenty, as in myanmar, to hundreds, as in papua new guinea. about forty staff members at the tokyo headquarters manage these projects. in addition to its training courses, oisca runs environmental projects such as mangrove reforestation activities in southeast asia and the pacific islands, which are also conducted out of the training centers.3 the organization was established in 1961 by the founder of a shinto-based new religion called ananaikyō, and it is one of the oldest and most prominent ngos in japan. the founder, yonosuke nakano, created oisca after realizing that religious leaders alone could not bring about world peace. in an effort to forge a movement that would transcend both religion and secularism through what he saw as shinto values, he established oisca as an organization that would promote a new world in which humans lived in harmony with nature (see watanabe, forthcoming). he preached that this shinto ecology and “nonreligious” worldview would enable forms of development that did not undermine the natural environment, cultural traditions, and human relationships as the process of rapid development in japan had done. the training centers served as microcosms of this utopian vision, and the communal lifestyle centered around organic farming was meant to produce ripple effects through the trainees and staff into the larger world. while this philosophy, which oisca’s japanese staffers called “earth ethics” (chikyū rinri), constituted a universalistic idea, it was also framed in nationalist terms, as staff members understood this ethic of “living in harmony with nature” as a fundamentally shinto and therefore japanese value. the organization’s first staff members who joined nakano’s movement in the 1950s and 1960s embraced this nationalist-universalist philosophy, and powerful conservative politicians, such as the former prime minister eisaku satō, also supported the ngo based on its vision of japan’s role in international aid (watanabe 2013).4 as one of the first ngos in japan with powerful political backing, established even before jica, oisca significantly influenced the definitions of hitozukuri aid, sustainable development, and ngo work among politicians, policy makers, and the public in postwar japan. although oisca’s mission was particular in its shinto ecology and spiritual orientations, i therefore contend that the approach to sustainable development and aid work among oisca staffers—such as the emphasis on collective labor and intimacy with local communities—had considerable impact on wider official discourses of aid. the myanmar training center was also the product of oisca’s political clout. in 1996, a japanese official of the united nations development programme (undp) invited oisca to begin projects in myanmar, and with the support of the japanese and myanmar governments, oisca initiated activities in the semi-arid region of the dry zone in central myanmar. the goal was to create a training center that would serve as a model farm for nearby villagers and nurture new generations of community leaders in sustainable development. the facility is technically co-operated by oisca and the myanmar agriculture service (mas), a department of the myanmar government—its official name being mas-oisca agro-forestry training centre—although oisca is responsible for daily operations. the first cohort of twenty trainees arrived in 1997. most trainees are in their early twenties, hail from middle-income rural families, and many of them have connections to local mas officials. one of mas’s activities is to spread new agricultural techniques to farmers around the country through the human resource development of agricultural extension workers (jica 2010). although smaller in scope and without mas funds, the myanmar training center seems to fit into this general policy, as well as into japanese policies of engagement with the myanmar government. all training centers, including those in myanmar, follow a similar schedule that leaves little time for rest or privacy. every day, staff and trainees share meals, communal baths, and collective duties such as cooking and cleaning. morning exercises and regular roll call punctuate the day, all of them conducted in brisk, militaristic form. japanese staff members explained to me that these routines were an important way to teach young trainees throughout asia the value of discipline and harmony in creating a collectivity. burmese participants often echoed this message. “the most valuable thing that i learned from oisca is the importance of punctuality and discipline,” a former trainee told me. he now works for another japanese ngo, teaching organic farming. “the oisca spirit (oisca seidat) is about working hard to overcome challenges, never giving up,” he added. life at the training centers required adherence to disciplinary standards that nurtured tenacity and hope in trainees, among other qualities. participating in the daily life of the myanmar training center, i quickly realized what yamada meant when she spoke of the quality of “smelling like mud” in oisca’s approach to aid work. staff and trainees spent most of their time working together in the vegetable fields, rice paddies, and animal sheds. covered in soil from the same farmlands and inhaling the smell of manure from the same animals they cared for together, staff and trainees told me that sharing the physical labor strengthened their sense of belonging and oneness. when i asked burmese staff members what they liked about oisca, a common refrain was, “because we don’t have any divisions amongst us” [a:loun: hkwai cha: ma shí ló]. many of them thought that trainees and staff getting up at 5 a.m. every day to clean and participate in the same agricultural labor gave evidence to this oneness. “even sakurai [the japanese director] cleans the bathrooms with us!” one of them explained. figure 1. morning roll call, 2010. photo by chika watanabe. staff and trainees also shared an understanding of the hardness of the soil in the semi-arid region during the dry months, its sudden transformation into a slippery mass that oozed between our toes during rainy season, and the relief of washing our bodies together in the collective (though gender-separated) open bathing areas. japanese staff members often described life at the training centers as “eating rice from the same bowl, sweating together” [onaji kama no meshi wo kutte, issho ni ase wo nagashite]. the material and visceral qualities of collective labor and communal life in “the field” constituted important forms of immediacy that fortified the sense of belonging—and thereby defined understandings of aid work as the making of a particular collectivity. japanese and burmese staff imparted to trainees and to each other the importance of prioritizing the collective over individual interests, and of becoming persons who cared about others’ well-being and who committed to sharing physical labor regardless of status. the oisca aid workers hoped that the hitozukuri activities would create persons with certain moral qualities and good skills in organic farming, people who would lead not only the community’s development in sustainable ways but also a world transformation. this emphasis on collective forms of life, at first glance, seems to stand in contrast to liberal ideologies. following michel foucault, among others, it is now conventional to see liberalism as a spectrum of ideologies ultimately founded on the idea of autonomous individual subjects that rules through the freedom of these empowered, self-governing subjects (barry, osborne, and rose 1996; cruikshank 1999; dean 2009). recently, anthropologists have developed ethnographic analyses that oppose these liberal assumptions, noting that the liberal ideals of an individual free from subordination cannot help us understand certain phenomena around the world. for instance, they point to how persons in certain cases can be formed and given meaning through pursuits of “unfreedom,” obligation, socially prescribed forms of behavior, or dependence (borovoy 2005; englund 2008; ferguson 2013; mahmood 2005; robbins 2007, 295). in such circumstances, people might strive not for individual freedom but for belonging in a community, for dependence on others, and even to be part of the social and political machine subjugating them in structures of inequality. the aid ethics of collective intimate practice in oisca precisely concerned such aspirations for dependence, obligations, and prescriptions of communal living. rather than constituting a debilitating condition, i contend that participating aid actors experienced it as an ethical domain of meaningful everyday action and sentiment (lambek 2010; mattingly 2012; see also das 2010). at the same time, despite this ontological orientation toward material and relational entanglements, acts of judgment that entailed “discerning when to follow one’s commitments and when to depart from them” (lambek 2010, 28) also proved central to aid workers’ experiences, as i show in the concluding sections. in a way, what i call “muddy labor” therefore also describes an ethic of muddiness in such processes of discernment amid belonging, one neither quite free nor prescribed. arguments about moral obligations and dependence are often made in contrast to liberal and neoliberal modes of government (see, e.g., englund 2008; ferguson 2013), but recent analyses show that what we conceive as liberal and nonliberal might not necessarily be mutually exclusive. in europe, the increasing “humanitarinization of the public sphere—a process whereby depoliticized forms of sympathetic action become paradigmatic acts of citizenship” (muehlebach 2012, 133)—shows that even liberalism and neoliberalism can foster moral and collectivist propensities of “disinterested love” (feher 2009, 35) and fellow-feeling such as compassion and charity (see also redfield 2013). according to andrea muehlebach (2012) and her study of the moral dimensions of neoliberalism in northern italy, the discourse of solidarity has played a particularly central role in this humanitarinization. pertinent for the purposes of this article is that, as muehlebach (2012, 194) points out, solidarity makes for a versatile concept mobilized by liberals as well as nonliberals, by the left as much as by neofascists (see also holmes 2000). given this slippage, the distinction between the liberal and the nonliberal might be more tenuous than one might imagine (see also hindess 2001). thus, for instance, we might see some traces of nonliberal orientations in aid efforts such as the peace corps, which has promoted the importance of american volunteers “working on a village level with their hands in the dirt,” echoing the japanese notion of being dorokusai (peterson 2011, 236). the ethic of proximity and solidarity can also be found in a number of western ngos such as partners in health. even in an organization such as médicins sans frontières (msf), which “shuns commitment to place” (redfield 2012, 359), the effort to inhabit and negotiate social and physical proximity with local people becomes central to international aid workers’ understandings of their tasks (see also feldman 2010). while we cannot call these organizations nonliberal, particularly since i view them as still validating the free individual as the privileged locus of morality, i suggest that the moral and affective value placed on relations, proximity, and solidarity hint at the impossibility of neatly distinguishing the liberal from the nonliberal even in ngos hailed as bastions of western liberalism. my point here is more sobering than muehlebach’s: while she concludes her monograph with hope for the progressive political potentiality of solidarity, i am concerned with the non-emancipatory aspects of solidarity, namely, its appearance in collectivist forms. as a boundary concept, solidarity is always already both of the liberal and of the nonliberal, thereby muddling the distinction itself. i make this observation not to simply reveal the interconnectedness of the two ideological orientations but also to indicate that a study of the ethics of unfreedom and a collective type of intimacy, such as this one on oisca, can offer important insights into the politics of aid ethics that ostensibly promote emancipatory aspirations. the flood that never came japanese staff members in oisca defined aid work as the workers’ and recipients’ full bodily commitment to labor in the “the field” (gemba) of aid. many of them did not consider tasks at the offices of the tokyo headquarters as “true” aid work. a senior japanese staffer once told me: “the oisca spirit [oisca seishin] is about staff, trainees, and local communities working hard together, amid the muddiness [dorodoro] of the field [gemba].” this “working hard together” referred not only to the materiality of the soil in agricultural work but also to the labor of human relations in proximity. another japanese staff member wrote in oisca’s monthly magazine that no manual existed for oisca’s activities. the “textbooks” were the visceral experiences of being “tossed about in the field” [gemba de momarete], which he described in terms of the hard work required in negotiating intimate relationships in the training centers (shibata 2006). this value of relational labor was evinced in an incident during my stay at the myanmar training center, when two male burmese staffers got into a fistfight. the immediate reason was small, but it was an eruption of a long-term disagreement brewing between the two men who shared a bedroom and the same agricultural tasks. sakurai, the thirty-something japanese director, mediated a conversation between them, after which he told me: “the training center is not just a place that teaches skills but also a place that nurtures people. . . . it is in instances like this [fight] that staff and trainees in the field can learn about oisca.” the struggles of creating and living amid relations in a communal environment seemed as important as the physical labor of agricultural work in producing the sense of collective intimacy that defined aid work. figure 2. staff and trainees working in the field, 2010. photo by chika watanabe. although this insistence on physical and relational labor permeated the daily routines at the oisca training center, i found that intermittent emergency situations also helped strengthen the sense of collective intimacy. on october 23, 2010, cyclone giri hit the western coast of myanmar. although we were about two hundred miles away from the eye of the storm, heavy rains and strong gusts swept across the region. by midday the rains had subsided, but winds continued to rip through the area, knocking down a tree behind the office building. as we stood by the windows, a staff member came running into the room to relay the rumor in the village: the dam upstream from us was about to break. people gasped. someone told me that a few years ago the dam had cracked, flooding the training center and damaging tons of rice stored for the wfp program. sakurai feared a repetition of this disaster. as soon as he heard the rumor, he called on all staff and trainees to prepare for the possibly imminent flood. i noticed that the women had gone to the other side of the courtyard to shovel sand onto a tractor. i quickly joined them. most of the time in oisca, neither staff nor trainees told others what to do, and this case was no different. people were expected to notice what was needed and to take initiative. i looked around anxiously to figure out how i could help. seeing one of the staff briefly stop her task, i quickly picked up her shovel and took over the job of hauling sand onto the tractor. moments later, i saw that some people had gone inside one of the storage houses to start packing bags with corn. there were two rooms, about thirty by forty feet, filled with kernels of corn piled chest-high. we were to put all the corn in bags and move them above ground. more staff and trainees joined us, and we split into the various tasks of bagging, shoveling, sealing, and hauling. the bags could hold fifty-five pounds each, which meant that i could not lift them once full. so i helped hold the bags open or put the corn inside. this was also no easy task, as the continuous crouching and bending strained my joints in ways that i had never experienced before. once in a while i looked up to see that the mountains of corn looked the same, no matter how many bags we filled. i had to fight the urge to stop; everybody else was moving at least double my speed, including sakurai. it felt endless. the dust was starting to become unbearable, weighing down our breath, leaving all of us wheezing and coughing. some of the men had wrapped their shirts around their faces. finally, three hours into the labor, all the corn had been bagged stacked securely from floor to ceiling in one of the adjacent rooms. it was dark outside, and the rain had started again. after washing up, we dragged ourselves to the dining hall for a very late meal. the large flood never came. but the stream nearby did overflow, and water surrounded the pig sheds for a couple of days. we all went to see the following day, and staff and trainees waded through the muddy water to save the animals from the flooded sheds. aside from the help given these pigs, most of the preparations turned out to be unnecessary in the end. nevertheless, the collective effort and our shared literal muddiness seemed to have strengthened our sense of solidarity at the training center. from our perspective downstream from the dam, the crisis on the horizon, not yet arrived, seemed unpredictable. we were uncertain what actions would ultimately help us, but that all of us exerted ourselves in labor anticipating the worst bound us in a sense of mutual commitment. figure 3. saving pigs from the flooded sheds, 2010. photo by van lian ceu. shared muddy labor created a collective form of intimacy among aid actors in oisca, showing how this aid ethic depends on physical and geographic proximity, as well as on contingent conditions and material effects for its actualization. without the sweaty, backbreaking collective labor, no sense of oneness would have existed among oisca aid workers. the bonds of collective intimacy might not have been so strong without the unfortunate yet fortuitous emergency of cyclone giri. such intimate, visceral, and circumstantial experiences defined the concept of aid work and shaped aid actors in oisca. the moral sentiment of collective intimacy had to be enacted through the close social relationships in the training centers and the contingent practices of collective labor. but this also meant that social and cultural others beyond immediate relations and shared experiences rarely received oisca’s hitozukuri aid. this pattern had significant ties to japan’s colonial legacies in the asia-pacific, and it might explain why oisca did not have training centers beyond those former colonial borders. as i describe below, as much as collective labor had the affective appeal of belonging and solidarity among aid actors in oisca, the ethic of muddy labor also relied on certain structures of inequality, ones almost reminiscent of japanese imperialist ambitions. the hierarchies of oneness cyclone giri mobilized everyone at the training center from sakurai to the trainees. a sense of solidarity emerged from the experience, but at the same time, it was impossible to ignore the hierarchies on which the day was based. sakurai made the decision to prepare for a potential flood, and staff members instructed trainees what to do, not the other way around. there was no overt coercion, but the collective effort had unfolded according to the hierarhical structures underlying the training center, even though no one commented on it.5 the hierarchical structures behind practices of collective intimacy emerge clearly in wider japanese official discourses of so-called soft aid (non-infrastructural aid). in many ways, oisca’s activities since the 1960s foreshadowed what i perceive as a wider emphasis on the importance of the field in current japanese views of soft aid. scholars have criticized earlier official japanese aid philosophies for focusing too heavily on matters such as national economic interests, developmentalist policies, and trade (johnson 1982; rix 1993). the rise of soft aid, japanese ngos with an international reach, and volunteerism, especially in the 1990s, indicated a shift away from such growth-oriented principles. i propose the foregrounding of another aid ideology at that moment, one that coupled assertions of “japanese values” with the principles of working intimately with local communities in the field. thus, for example, we find tarō asō (2006), the minister of foreign affairs at the time and the current finance minister, stating in a speech (official english translation): “this is based on my observation during those two years [in sierra leone] in which i did not see many europeans or americans who worked hard together with the local people contrary to japanese people. while i should refrain from generalizing, i can say that it was only us japanese who had taken an approach to work together with the local people, eye-to-eye.” in this statement, asō highlighted a supposedly fundamental japanese value—superior to western approaches—that current japanese aid workers also exhibit. his view reflects a popular moralization of japaneseness that emphasizes sweaty, diligent labor as an ethical-cultural practice (kondo 1990; rohlen 1974). at the same time, by appealing to the idea of “working hard together with the local people,” asō sought to advocate this japanese ideal as an instantiation of a common humanity, manifesting simultaneously a commitment to a universal solidarity and to a particular japanese ethic. in this perspective, “local people” appeared simply as objects of this japanese ethical project. during my fieldwork, i frequently heard such conflations of the idea of solidarity and japanese superiority in official japanese discourses of aid. in june 2010, i visited one of the training centers of the japanese overseas cooperation volunteers (jocv), the japanese version of the peace corps, in nagano prefecture, where government-sponsored japanese volunteers were preparing for their overseas dispatch. one day, jocv staff invited a jica official, tanaka, to give a speech to the volunteers. about two hundred young people assembled in an auditorium, and tanaka stood at a podium on an elevated stage. a powerpoint presentation projected onto a large screen behind him. “what is a volunteer?” he asked rhetorically. “to be a volunteer is to take initiative in doing things.” quoting jocv’s foundational concept, he added: “but another definition is the effort to ‘become one with the local people’ [jūmin to ittai to naru]” (see ban 1978). he explained that the work of a volunteer was not simply a job but something that involved daily life, conducted from the same perspective as the other person, and with respect for the other person’s culture. he added that the power of human emotions constituted an important element in this work. “becoming one” with local communities meant sharing emotions with them, which tanaka argued was an important attitude for the young japanese volunteers to adopt. yet if the principle of becoming one pointed to an ethos of solidarity, what came next in tanaka’s speech made for a sudden shift in register. a slide appeared in front of the audience that asked, “what does ‘developing country’ mean?” another slide followed, and it contained statements such as inconvenience, difference in values, and the fact that people in such countries would most likely fail to keep promises and always arrive late to appointments. tanaka had written on another slide: “these are the reasons why developing countries are developing countries, and if they could be different on their own, then they would have been a developed country by now.” he concluded: “it’s important to take a step back and see things from a wider perspective, which is what makes you [the japanese volunteers], different from them [local people].” on one level, tanaka emphasized the importance of constructing proximity with aid recipients, to the point of “becoming one.” but in the same breath, he spoke unequivocally about the superiority of japanese people in these aid relations. he implied that non-japanese people inherently did not have the proper work ethic, and that close relations with japanese volunteers and aid workers would help local people learn, by emulation in proximity, the necessary dispositions to develop themselves and their countries. the japanese aid workers at oisca echoed this view, indicating that the importance of becoming one with aid recipients also meant advancing the idea that japanese values could serve as models of progress for other countries.6 in an interview, one senior japanese staff member in the tokyo headquarters said: in the end, i think that oisca’s activities are about teaching and learning about japan. that means, taking care of nature, of things—to have them understand our traditional culture. foreigners often tell us that they like their interactions with japanese people, and they praise the japanese people’s spirit and attitude toward work. we want them to understand how japan was able to develop to this degree. . . . the training is not only about techniques, but also about coming into contact with the daily habits, communal lifestyle, and kindness of japanese people. senior japanese staff members upheld communal living and collective labor as methods of transmitting what they believed to be japanese values that would show trainees and local communities how they could cultivate themselves and develop their countries. as such, the emphasis on oneness in japanese soft aid relied on a hierarchical worldview in which japan emerged as the model of development. although this conflation of solidarity and national superiority exists in other aid activities such as the peace corps, the japanese case has specific historical implications. from japanese popular culture (iwabuchi 2002) to japanese fascination with bolivian andean music (bigenho 2012), scholars have shown how intimacy and distance, as well as similarity and difference, often constitute two sides of the same coin in japanese relations with other parts of the world. michelle bigenho (2012, 139) describes how japanese people speak of their intimate connections with indigenous bolivian music, which were in fact “articulations of intimate distance, where the indigenous ancestor with whom one claims intimacy is usually safely beyond the nation’s borders and outside specific histories.” she situates this discourse in the historical context of the making of modern japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when japan was ideologically constructed as a racially homogenous nation. this racial myth accounts for the fact that bigenho’s (2012, 140) japanese interlocutors spoke of connections with indigenous peoples in bolivia, whereas continuities with the ainu, for instance, remained completely absent. this simultaneous existence of intimacy and difference regarding cultural and racialized others is reminiscent also of japanese imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century. yet if indigenous people in bolivia remained safely “outside specific histories,” the same cannot be said of japanese relations with myanmar.7 ann stoler (2002) has shown in her studies of european colonialism in southeast asia that intimacy and care proved central to the imposition of racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies in colonial rule. she examines how questions of intimacy demonstrated the “tensions of empire” between “the discourses of inclusion, humanitarianism, and equality that informed liberal policy at the turn of the century in colonial southeast asia and the exclusionary, discriminatory practices that were reactive to, coexistent with, and perhaps inherent in liberalism itself” (stoler 1997, 198). yet if european colonial authorities policed intimate relations and problematized the blurring of distinctions between colonizer and colonized, japanese imperialism in asia imposed policies of assimilation that instrumentalized proximity for colonial rule, thereby “concealing the gap between political and economic discrimination and cultural assimilation” (ching 2001, 106; see also dikötter 1997). assimilation and asian commonality constituted important ideologies of proximity that confounded intimacy and rule, discrimination and “becoming one” (uchida 2011). as such, the ideology of intimacy in japanese imperialism did not only concern the regulation of sex as an instrument of colonial policy but also described a wider principle of closeness, familiarity, and collectivity that was nonetheless defined by racial and moral ideas of japanese superiority. in this sense, the ethic of muddy labor among japanese aid actors in myanmar was more than just an ideology of intimate distance. taking the colonial historical connections between the two countries into consideration, the aspirations for collective intimacy in hitozukuri aid appear eerily similar to colonial dreams of assimilation, or as naoki sakai (1991, 190) has stated, to imperialist ideologies of absolute totality. when i asked the former director of the oisca myanmar project (1996–2008) how the training center became oisca’s most successful project overseas, he replied: “myanmar is the country that japanese people can feel most familiar with” [myanmar wa nihonjin ga ichiban shitashimi yasui kuni dato omou]. he explained that people in myanmar were hardworking because of their strong buddhist foundation, a quality resembling japanese people—familiarity and similarity to the japanese constituting the reasons for success.8 conversely, differences threatened this ethos. sakurai once chided a burmese staffer who had failed, despite repeated instructions to do so, to send a thank-you letter to a particular japanese donor, by telling the staffer: “that’s what still makes you a burmese person!” [soko ga mada myanmar-jin dane!] this exasperated comment suggested that sakurai saw the work of hitozukuri aid to be, at least in part, about making persons in his image of the japanese. according to such discourses, relations between japanese and burmese people were thus not only about closeness but also about similarity. given the colonial history, i would be remiss if i ignored that the idea of oneness promoted in official discourses of soft aid, as well as the sense of collective intimacy produced in the training centers, in many ways recalled japanese imperialist projects that simultaneously upheld intimacies and inequalities. yet i never heard burmese or japanese aid workers say explicitly that their work was based on unequal relations, much less on neoimperialist designs. during and after cyclone giri, no one ever questioned the hierarchical structure in which sakurai made the decisions and passed them down from staff to trainees. neither did burmese staffers ask why the training center was run with such an emphasis on communal living. they took for granted the suspension of their individual interests for the good of the collective, as defined by oisca’s tokyo headquarters, and aid workers and trainees seemed to cherish the elimination of distances and the resultant feeling of collective intimacy. nevertheless, sometimes certain burmese staff members did question the ethics promoted in the training center. a senior burmese aid worker, ko naing, had been with oisca for more than ten years. he believed in the oisca model of hitozukuri aid and praised the values of discipline, hard work, and communal living that he had learned at training centers in myanmar and japan. he often remarked that the training center felt like “home” to him. yet one day, when i asked him about the connections between the training centers in the two countries, he replied: japan is japan, and myanmar has myanmar culture. if our ways of thinking here [at the myanmar training center] are completely different from those of the villagers in the area, it’s not going to work. it’s about incorporating what’s good about japan into myanmar, but not about doing everything like japan. . . . if you just copy everything in the way that outside people do it, the country will be destroyed. you have to do things according to that country, that culture, just as we have to bring about democracy in our own ways. as meaningful as the feeling of collective intimacy was for burmese aid workers in oisca, many of them did not overlook that it was, after all, a japanese organization implementing activities in their country, myanmar. the two countries and their people differed. several other burmese staffers made similar comments in which they distinguished their work in myanmar and their training experiences in japan. it was never clear how they reconciled their belief in doing things “in burmese ways” and the fact that japanese staff members had determined the importance of collective labor and communal living in the trainings, but burmese aid workers did seem to feel that the collectivity of the myanmar training center was ultimately theirs. if physical and relational labor created a sense of collective intimacy, the experience of oneness remained unstable, as it also fomented such moments of recognized difference and divergent nationalist understandings of global and social order. conclusion many aid workers might argue that both humanitarian and development aid should be based on an expectation of eventual withdrawal, whether in the short or long term. even in oisca, japanese staff members in tokyo and sakurai himself talked about the ultimate goal of “self-reliance” (jiritsu) and of handing over the training centers to local aid workers. the ethic of muddy labor rendered this difficult to achieve, however, as hitozukuri aid activities were predicated on the inseparable relationships between japanese and burmese aid actors. yet i have argued in this article that this difficulty of establishing self-reliance also makes japanese hitozukuri aid compelling for its participants. foregrounding the ways in which aid workers and trainees in oisca engaged in shared labor, i have described how this ethic created what i call a feeling of collective intimacy. this sense of belonging among aid workers and trainees reproduced, in turn, the importance of collective physical and relational labor in hitozukuri aid. nevertheless, discourses among japanese government officials and senior japanese staff members in oisca indicated that the value of collective labor and proximity with local communities in conceptualizations of japanese soft aid buttressed particular arguments of japanese superiority that were in some ways reminiscent of japanese imperialist projects. these views suggested that claims of intimate relationality and bodily experience could generate sentiments of solidarity as positive affective and social conditions, but that they could also produce political effects. as governments and transnational actors increasingly reference ideas of human connectedness in humanitarian, ecological, and other projects (feldman and ticktin 2010), we must examine the mechanisms by which such moral and affective appeals of solidarity can advance particular politics and inequalities, while also encouraging people to participate. although this problematic in high-level rhetoric did not seem to negate burmese aid workers’ daily practices and experiences of collective intimacy, it did pose limits to this intimacy. most of the burmese staff members did not question the hierarchical structure in which they worked, though some of them voiced their desires to define the training center in “burmese ways.” as such, the ethic of muddy labor remained ambiguous, producing an incomplete sense of oneness as underlying differences and inequalities surfaced from time to time. anthropologists have examined the role of ambiguity and ambivalence in the production of institutional knowledge and ethical practices (elisha 2011; holmes 2000; miyazaki 2007; whitmarsh 2008; zaloom 2003). elucidating how particular regimes are created and negotiated through multiple meanings, inconsistencies, and experiential uncertainties constitutes an important endeavor that complicates monolithic views of, for example, international aid systems. the ambiguities of the ethic of muddy labor also show that discrepancies between the politics of official discourses and aid actors’ experiences can challenge the anthropologist’s capacity for critique. in other words, one can identify the politics of discourses of aid, trace how particular practices produce governmental and neocolonial regimes, or examine the embodied experiences of aid work, but the work of critical intervention becomes difficult when two or more of these perspectives seem to generate incongruent effects. in the case of oisca, the point is not that burmese staffers are blinded in a kind of false consciousness about solidarity. rather, we must question how practices and experiences of collective physical and relational labor can simultaneously constitute a collectivist, seemingly neoimperialist aid regime and serve as the grounds from which to launch an internal critique or judgment (lambek 2010; also see muehlebach 2012). as ko naing indicated, the collective intimacy in the training center proved meaningful for burmese aid workers as much as it provided the basis for a hierarchical structure of aid and perhaps ironically, also constituted the framework for their critiques of japanese authority in the organization. in other words, the ethic of muddy labor and the consequent communal sentiments of collective intimacy formed both the foundation of hierarchical relations and the basis of critique against such structures. to be sure, this constitutes an unstable point of ethnographic intervention, but perhaps all that the anthropologist can do is to depict the ambiguous and tenuous possibilities for change that arise in such fleeting moments of ethical struggle and judgment. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to the staff and trainees at oisca in japan and myanmar who made this project possible. the research was supported by the social science research council, the cornell east asia program, and the department of anthropology at cornell university. i also benefited enormously from the time that the inter-asia initiative at yale university’s macmillan center for international and area studies gave me to finish the manuscript. feedback from anne allison and charles piot and from the anonymous reviewers has been critical in improving the article. my deep thanks also to the following people for their comments on various versions of this piece: erica bornstein, kate goldfarb, sarah grant, gökçe günel, saida hodžić, peter redfield, david rojas, and saiba varma. 1. i conducted research in japanese and burmese. 2. hitozukuri is a term used widely in other sectors of japanese society, such as in companies, government agencies, and schools. 3. some oisca project sites do not have training centers, such as those in cambodia and china, where local staff members conduct environmental activities. there is also an affiliated global network outside of the ngo itself, called oisca-international, which is composed of local groups that carry out activities of their own. 4. although oisca received government subsidies from 1972 to 2004, thanks to satō and other politicians’ support, it has been funded mainly by membership fees from people across japan (mostly ananaikyō members), 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robin bush, michael feener, and philippe fountain. london: palgrave macmillan. whitmarsh, ian 2008 “biomedical ambivalence: asthma diagnosis, the pharmaceutical, and other contradictions in barbados.” american ethnologist 35, no. 1: 49–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00005.x. zaloom, caitlin 2003 “ambiguous numbers: trading technologies and interpretation in financial markets.” american ethnologist 30, no. 2: 258–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2003.30.2.258. the charge against electricity the charge against electricity mike anusas university of strathclyde tim ingold university of aberdeen electricity has become such a ubiquitous feature of modern life that most of us would have no idea how to manage without it. interruptions in supply are experienced as unsustainable moments of crisis. the possibility that the supply of electricity might eventually run dry is every government’s worst nightmare and underpins the global politics of energy. do we blame electricity for having brought us to this state of dependency? can we hold it responsible for the disempowerment of citizens, for the entrapment of their lives within a state-sponsored grid maintained by corporations? or does it, on the contrary, hold the potential for emancipation? is electricity guilty or not guilty? in what follows, we begin with the case for the prosecution. then we present the case for the defense. you, our readers, are the jury, and we leave the verdict for you to decide. the case for the prosecution your honor: we charge electricity with gross deception. aided and abetted by its corporate sponsors, who stand to profit greatly from the illusion, electricity has—we allege—been complicit in the construction and marketing of a counterfeit reality.1 this is a world divided on itself, turned outside in and back to front—a world in which the energies, forces, movements and material flows that are necessary for the continuation of life have been alternately imprisoned or expelled, locked into black boxes, behind white walls or under gray pavement, so as to leave a space of consumption purified of all traces of vitality and populated by lifeless and neutered objects, mere simulacra of their real-life counterparts.2 in this make-believe world, things work without calling for productive effort on the part of their operators; these efforts are applied without bodily contact with materials at the point of application, and are perceived without sentient engagement in the act of perception. figure 1. the appearance of a switch and the gesture entailed in its operation give no clue as to the convoluted and volatile human and machine work required to bring light to a room. photo by mike anusas. placed in this world, the human being is configured as an individual consumer whose life is carried on within a bubble, protected from any direct interchange with the environment. outside the bubble, however—and largely beyond the awareness of the consumer—there lies a massive apparatus of power generation and transmission on which the sustenance of the illusion depends. here, some of the most gigantic feats of human engineering grapple with the elemental forces of nature—with earth, air, fire, and water—in the combustion of coal mined from the depths, in the damming of great rivers, in huge turbines set up against the wind, and in reactors that unleash the very energies condensed in matter. the more the illusion has taken hold, the greater the scale of the interventions required to sustain it, to the point that the consequences of these interventions could inaugurate a new geological era in the history of our planet, one of untold destruction.3 we draw attention to four key entailments of electrification. these are remoteness, conduction, insulation, and sensorial subtlety. the first—remoteness—signifies a radical transformation in the relationship between generation and application. once fused in the same site, they have been cast to the two extremities of a line. consider one obvious example. the coalor wood-burning locomotive carries an onboard fire that heats the water in its boiler, creating the steam pressure that drives its pistons and wheels. to keep the fire burning, the locomotive’s fireman has continually to be shoveling coal or logs from a tender at the rear. as it hurtles along the tracks, the engine is like an ever-exploding bomb in which fuel, fire, pressure, and kinetic energy are all rolled into one. when steam power gave way to diesel, the fireman’s job was rendered obsolete; nevertheless, the locomotive was still tanked with its own supply of fuel, the controlled ignition of which took place deep inside the bowels of the engine. the electric locomotive, by contrast, is like the mobile and executive arm of a vast apparatus whose tentacles extend throughout the rail network. fires still burn, but in place of a great many small fires, one in each engine, there are now a few enormous fires, consuming fuel (principally coal) on a previously unimaginable scale in colossal industrial complexes known as power stations.4 yet the colossus has been dismembered, for with its generative body severed from its limbs at their multiple points of application, it responds only clumsily to their machinations. connecting body and limbs—that is, the station and all the engines that it powers—are overhead cables from which every locomotive picks up current as it moves. these are lines of conduction. conduction is a corollary of remoteness. if the sites of generation and application are removed from one another, then they must be connected by lines physically capable of conveying power from the generative source to the point of consumption. figure 2. the conduction of electricity is concealed not only by covering up but also by remote positioning. electricity lines often run high overhead across unpopulated areas so as to be as far as possible from the sphere of everyday perception. photo by ian britton, https://www.flickr.com/photos/freefoto/4635123089/in/photolist-84adbk-6j6gcu. while on the railway these connecting lines are cables, or sometimes conducting rails; for stationary applications they are more commonly wires. thus the consequence of electrification has been the wiring of those black-boxed interiors and whitewashed, gray-paved exteriors that bound the simulacral spaces of consumption. but as wiring became a condition for maintaining these latter spaces, so they, in turn, were rendered wireless. the wires that sustain the bubble the consumer inhabits remain largely out of sight, for were they to be seen, the bubble would immediately burst. that is why corporate design and architectural practice have gone to such lengths to hide them. it may be that we have to plug our appliances in, but what takes place on the other side of the socket is, for the most part, beyond our awareness or comprehension.5 in the design of appliances, too, the wiring is generally hidden within opaque and often smooth, shiny coverings. thus the world the consumer perceives is one of surfaces rather than lines, of occlusion rather than entanglement, of objects rather than things. the thing is a gathering of forces, energies, and materials; it draws us in. but the object turns its back to us, shielding our perception from the messier aspects of the world.6 electrification thus brings about a division between lines of conductivity and surfaces of occlusion. as the latter shine in the limelight of a theatricalized space, the former lurk behind the scenes, beneath the floorboards, in the plastering of walls or in the hidden compartments of objects.7 figure 3. here, in a modern office environment, lines of electrical conductivity are hidden in an overhead void. we only catch sight of such lines when maintenance is needed, briefly revealing a world of threaded currents. photo by mike anusas. if electricity is to be contrived to flow along lines, however, then these lines must be insulated or—failing that—suspended or supported in such a way that they can have no contact with the earth. like blood from the dismembered body, electricity would spill out and be lost were it not channeled within arterial walls that constrain its lineal flow and block its lateral escape. in this regard, conduction and insulation are two sides of the same coin. but like conduction, insulation also has a broader significance, for it sets up a barrier that prevents material contact of any kind, within the spaces of consumption, between users and the world beyond. in effect, it is insulation that seals the walls of the bubble. any breach is considered a threat to life and limb, while every sealed space or manufactured appliance comes with warnings, accompanied by zigzag icons, of the dire consequences of disobeying instructions not to tamper with the inner workings of things or to trespass beyond approved limits. electricity fences us in, and through its capacity to shock it enables the power at the center, which controls the supply, to exert an invisible grip on our activity. this grip is commonly known as security. anyone who breaches security risks electrocution.8 figure 4. for electricity to reach populated destinations, its lines must often descend from the sky, settle into the grounds of everyday habitation and transform its state prior to going underground on its way towards and into dwellings. however, the settling process can be volatile; life must be warned off, or risk extermination. such warnings often employ a high contrast graphic depiction of a human meeting their demise under a merciless icon based on the image of the lightning strike. photo by mike anusas. to keep safe, consumers must remain within the insulation of their bubbles, on their own, locked into the individual satisfaction of their private passions. electrification may not be the cause of the feeling of personal isolation that is so pervasive in modern life. our charge, however, is that it has at least contributed to this feeling by freighting with danger any contact with materials beyond the artificially sustained compartments in which lives are contained. before electricity, human lives were conducted with and through materials. but postelectrification, the more conductive materials are, the less we should have contact with them. it is its sensorial subtlety that allows electricity to exert its hold so imperceptibly and with such precision. not only can its material apparatus, wrapped in insulation, be readily hidden from view; it can also be rendered all but impervious to other senses of hearing, touch, and smell. this is partly due to the property of remoteness, for just as the site of application is removed from that of generation, so it is also removed from the sights, sounds, and smells of the industrial power station. thus electricity is odorless because the noxious fumes released, for example, through burning coal are concentrated at their source, far from the point of consumption. it is noiseless, again, because the churn of turbines echoes not in the home or the office but in distant hills and dales or remote coastlines where wind, hydroelectric, or nuclear facilities are typically located. electric current makes no sound as it passes down the wire; put your ear to a cable and you hear nothing—until a sudden, sharp crack warns of an escape, short circuit, or lightning strike. as for touch, insulation militates against it. there are things we might avoid touching—shards of broken glass, hot coals, the rotating blades of a motorized cutter—because they give either visual or auditory warning of the dangers they present. but electric current does not draw attention to itself. the live wire gives no hint of the charge it carries. electricity is treacherous, deceitful. thanks to its sensorial subtlety, it can hold us fast within the grid without our knowing. and precisely because electricity is so insensible, it is hard if not impossible for consumers to trace its currents. we see ourselves as users of equipment, not of energy, concentrating on obsolescence and wear and tear rather than on the flows that sustain our engirdled lives. with that we rest our case. the case for the defense your honor: electricity is not to blame for the deception with which it has been charged. it is a property not of corporations but of life—of life, moreover, that is not confined to the organic domain but that brings vitality to the entire material universe. indeed, by reclaiming it from the corporate sphere and by creatively retracing its influences on and confluences with our everyday practice, we would discover that electricity actually has the potential to undo the very division between real and counterfeit worlds for which the prosecution holds it responsible, restoring an enhanced awareness of the flows of materials and energy in which all practice necessarily subsists. here we enlist anthropology to our cause. with its unique perspective on the past and present in the continual reshaping of life, anthropology has a critical role to play in the restoration of this awareness. we urge you to step back and consider where electricity comes from. was it conceived in corporate boardrooms to facilitate deceptive intentions, as the prosecution alleges? was it engineered into the world to buttress these intentions? absolutely not. electricity has no point of origin, either in design or execution: rather, it is fundamental to the constitution of matter, of energy, indeed of life itself. from the astrophysical plasmas of the universe to the neurological synapses of living organisms, electricity is abundant and continually so. with or without the presence or existence of human beings, it is intrinsic to the sensory perception and skilled action of countless nonhuman animals, whether in the form of electroreception—the ability to detect electrical stimuli in the environment, which many animals use for finding their way around and for detecting the presence of other organisms of the same or different species, or of bioelectrogenesis—enabling them, for example, to defend themselves or to stun prey by means of electrical pulses that they have themselves produced.9 throughout the long dawn of human prehistory, our ancestors would have encountered electricity in guises quite different from the wired and gridded networks of today. far from being channeled along narrow lines, it was suffused throughout earth and atmosphere, born of the friction of materials. of course electricity still makes its presence felt in these guises: for example, in the lightning of a storm or the conflagrations that can result when a bolt strikes the ground.10 figure 5. the occurrence of an electrical storm is a vivid reminder that the atmospheres around us are always full of electrical potential. photo by j. p. marquis, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:lightning_over_quebec.jpg. yet as real manifestations of electricity, such phenomena have been expunged from modern consciousness, leaving a trace only in their iconic representations, such as in the lightning-like zigzag that represents live current, or in the suite of horizontal lines, diminishing in length with depth, by means of which we signify the earth. electricity, we contend, is first and foremost a property of materials, as in their movement they rub against one another. it was in the course of the inquisitive movements of human beings, in rubbing up against the materials they worked with, that electricity began to play its part in histories and geographies of culture. recall that the term itself comes from the classical greek elektron, meaning amber. it was the physician and natural philosopher william gilbert (1958), in his treatise of 1600 entitled de magnete, who introduced the term electricity to mean “amber-like.” gilbert had noticed that lumps of amber, when rubbed, emit a kind of effluvium that attracts other objects to them as if glued to their surfaces. what he did not know was that this effluvium—which we now recognize as electrostatic charge—is common to all materials whose surfaces, observed up close, are not in fact homogeneous and impervious but rather intricately meshed, open to exchange and transformation. whenever materials of any kind are thrown into a frictional engagement, there is an interchange across their thresholds and dispersal into the surrounding medium; in this, amber is no exception. like other electrostatic materials, it holds the potential to transform across states of matter and energy. beings equipped with nervous systems—including human beings—can sense these transformations in the confluence of bodies, materials, and media in the concerted movements of feeling, foraging, and forging their ways through the environment. in this practice of life electricity has been active throughout the eons of organic evolution. on such an evolutionary time-scale, the period of electricity’s incarceration within the grid amounts to no more than the blink of an eye.11 for the most part, as a freely distributed property of the material world, its effects have been close to rather than remote from its generative sources. it could not be conducted over any appreciable distance and, unconfined by insulation, it was readily available to be picked up by the senses of living organisms primed to do so. thus remoteness, conduction, insulation, and sensorial subtlety are not properties of electricity as such, but only of the way in which it has been engineered during the machine age to support projects of large-scale control over people and resources. thus it is not electricity that has created a counterfeit world, but the co-optation of electricity in the service of corporate industry and the neoliberal state. moreover, even if we accept as our point of departure the conditions of today’s wired world, there is no reason to suppose that wiring must have the consequences that the prosecution attributes to it. to be sure, if current is to be passed along wires, then this requires both conduction and insulation. but electricity does not determine that these wires should be hidden or that the spaces of dwelling should be made to appear wireless. on the contrary, the wiring of the world makes it possible to follow the paths of conductivity—of material exchanges and energy flows—to a degree unparalleled by other forms of energy. we can trace these paths as they cut through surfaces and weave in and around objects. as we do so, we undergo a radical change of perspective. objects begin to unravel as their contents spill forth; walls, floors, and ceilings appear permeable rather than solid as wires pass through them unimpeded.12 plugs and sockets come to mark connections along a circuit, not impenetrable interfaces between inside and outside. even outdoors, in the town or city, the lines of electrical conduction wend in and around houses, above and below streets. figure 6. this wending of wires is particularly apparent in countries prone to earthquakes. here, electrical cables continue to be looped through the sky, rather than underground, on their way towards dwellings. photograph by ray lucas. as they approach more open landscapes they rise up through the ground surface, which also seems less hard and impermeable than before. they go their own way, unhampered by obstacles and supported by high-level structures at the periphery of everyday perception. these are power lines, and we can follow them to their sources in the pulverization and combustion of coal, the ignition of natural gas, the fission of subatomic nuclei, and the harnessing of the aerial flows of wind or the gravitational flows of water over dammed falls. all these physical processes are directly descended from the most fundamental processes of life: whether the intense compression of once-living organisms over geological time or the channeling of planetary forces and media or the constitutive processes of matter itself. in tracing the material lineages of energetic conduction, we weave in and out, both spatially and temporally, crossing the boundaries between persons or objects and environment and between living and nonliving. we begin to perceive the material world as consisting not of discrete entities with bounded interiors, but rather of knots or nodes in an energetic weave that crisscrosses different states of matter and life, without beginning or end.13 in defense of electricity, we contend that all of the most important utilities of our industrial age—heating, cooling, lighting, transportation, and telecommunications—rely on the human skills, proficiencies, and materials of an energetic weaving. far from reducing everything to objects, electrical wiring gives us a world that is more comparable to a woven textile.14 if there are objects in this world, they are but auxiliary to the primacy of the textilic. to be sure, these objective and objectified auxiliaries may be far more evident to our perception than the energetic textility that sustains our everyday life. nevertheless, electricity makes us realize that in its forms and in form-making practices, the world is not so much built from blocks, as commonly supposed, as it is woven.15 it is the idea of block-building that leads us to think of the built environment as an objective superstructure erected on an infrastructural base. in our defense of electricity, however, and in consideration of the perceptual richness of its material apparatus, we wish to lead a charge against the very idea of infrastructure. for in both the idea and its realization, infrastructure establishes an ultimately controlling apparatus, which secretly and inconspicuously organizes and directs the course of corporatized life from beneath (infra) the realms of everyday awareness, revealing itself to our experience only in the form of our dependency upon it.16 in our charge against infrastructure, we advance a design agenda that would have the potential to engage our perceptual participation in the energetic lineages of everyday life. it is still the norm in industrial product design to think in terms of enclosed forms or walled-in spaces, which refer back to object-oriented perceptual frameworks such as those of perspective and orthographic drawing. the same is true of mainstream computer-aided design systems, which generate a geometry based on closed-boundary volumes and part-assembly structures. moreover, prototypes are often made by working with raw materials supplied in block or cylindrical forms, cut to component shapes, and assembled by connectors and surface-to-surface adhesion.17 indeed, it is difficult to escape such block-like thinking in industrial practice. electricity, we propose, offers an escape route. for in place of the block, it affords a topology of lines, a fluid space defined by currents and circulations rather than by surfaces and volumes.18 such a topology, transgressing the perceptual and material boundaries of the object, might allow for the realization of radical new forms of material practice—for example, in the weaving of textiles whose very threads are conductive fibers—so as to create compositions of electronic beauty and utility.19 with that we rest our case. summing up guilty or not guilty? do we side with the prosecution in regarding electricity as an industrial phenomenon, largely shaped in the corporate sphere, or with the defense, in asserting that it is no less than a pervasive property of the material world and of life itself, awaiting its intellectual reclamation as creative traces within our own lives? do we follow the prosecution in highlighting the distance between terminals at the points of generation and application, or the defense in drawing attention to the lines that run between them? where the prosecution emphasizes surface occlusion, the defense emphasizes entanglement; for one the consumer is enclosed in a cornucopia of objects, while for the other the consumer is at the same time a producer in a weave of things. where the prosecution links safety and security to insulation, for the defense it is the continuity of lines that affords the possibility for life to carry on. the prosecution charges electricity with deceit; the defense counters that electricity has the capacity to reveal the true extent of our energetic entanglements, even as they launch an alternative charge, against infrastructure, for having kept these revelations under wraps. whereas for the prosecution, the electrical world is always already hard-wired, for the defense the very idea of hard-wiring is the source of the problem. in truth, they argue, the wiring of the world is perpetually in progress; its continual connection, disconnection, and reconnection mirrors what happens in minds in their ongoing neurological configuration, and in bodies in their endless probing of the nooks and crannies of quotidian life. finally, where the prosecution holds electricity responsible for holding us captive in the grid, it is the very sensorial subtlety of electricity and the precision with which it can be delivered—according to the defense—that underpins the emancipatory hope of reactivating the creative potential of the energetic trace. ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we await your verdict! notes 1. according to vilém flusser (1999, 17–21), deception and illusion are of the essence of design. 2. elsewhere we have described such a world through detailed case studies (anusas and ingold 2013). 3. this era has come to be known, in popular writings, as the anthropocene (crutzen and stoermer 2000). 4. on the transition from steam to electrical power, see warren devine (1983); on the creation of the network, see thomas hughes (1983). 5. on the domestic, social, and political history of the electrical plug, see fred schroeder (1986) and damon taylor (2015). 6. on this point, see tim ingold (2013, 85–86). this distinction between thing and object is drawn from the philosophy of martin heidegger (1971). 7. as stewart brand (1994) argues, this arrangement causes complications for maintenance and renewal and goes against the grain of social and ecological regeneration. 8. breaches of security may also, in extreme cases, be punished with lethal, state-sanctioned electrocution. here, see mark essig (2009). 9. on electroreception and bioelectrogenesis, see günther zupanc and theodore bullock (2006). 10. on the electrical nature of storms, see donald macgorman and w. david rust (1998). a classic early study is by joachim kuettner (1950). 11. this chimes with the perspective of the long now foundation and its ten-thousand-year clock project, which reveals how even the most taken-for-granted and embedded technologies are but passing moments within the expanse of geological time (brand 2000). 12. or, as vilém flusser (1999, 82–83) puts it, cables have knocked as many holes into the roofs, walls, windows, and doors of the home as in a swiss cheese. “home-as-one’s-castle has become a ruin with the wind of communication blowing through the cracks in the walls,” thus disrupting the illusion of a solid and settled architecture. 13. this perception is vividly realized in the work of the japanese architect akihisa hirata. “architecture,” hirata (2011, 17) declares, “is the creation of tangles.” 14. on this point, see tim ingold (2010). this way of apprehending the world is made beautifully tangible in artist maggie orth’s electronic textiles (http://www.maggieorth.com/e_textiles.html). 15. tim ingold (2015, 13–17) discusses the implications of thinking of the constitution of the material world in terms of lines and knots rather than blocks, chains, and containers. 16. here, see paul dourish and genevieve bell (2007, 416–17). infrastructures, they argue, “drive and maintain standardization, reflect and embody historical concentrations of power and control, and are instruments through which access is manipulated” (see also star 1999). in his philosophy of photography, vilém flusser (2000, 55) has stressed the capacity of infrastructure to remain invisible and to evade the attention even of its critics. 17. for some insights into these techniques of drawing, computer modeling, and making in industrial product design, see idsa (2003). 18. kengo kuma (2008) strives for such an “anti-object” approach to architecture as he works towards a way of designing that is responsive to material relations, fluidity, and movement. on the idea of fluid space, see annemarie mol and john law (1994). 19. see, for example, susanne küchler (2003). references anusas, mike, and tim ingold 2013 “designing environmental relations: from opacity to textility.” design issues 29, no. 4: 58–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00230 brand, stewart 1994 how buildings learn: what happens after they’re built. new york: viking. 2000 the clock of the long now: time and responsibility. new york: basic books. crutzen, paul j., and eugene f. 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183514557765 zupanc, günther k. h., and theodore h. bullock 2006 “from electrogenesis to electroreception: an overview.” in electroreception, edited by theodore h. bullock, carl d. hopkins, arthur n. popper, and richard r. fray, 5–46. new york: springer science and business media. inhabiting media inhabiting media: an anthropology of life in digital speed vincent duclos mcgill university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7064-3154 the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. —blaise pascal by the grace of modern technology, the journalist alexander nazaryan (2013) writes in an essay on anxiety, we can fill some of those infinite spaces whose eternal silence once terrified pascal “with the luminous procession of tweets and shares and updates.” from his own existential anxiety, nazaryan reports that he has found a digital solace, taken in hours scrolling through facebook news feeds, watching youtube videos of dachshund puppies, looking at places on google earth that he will never visit in person, and perusing recipes he will never cook. the stimulation of an always-on, connected existence, nazaryan suggests, is not a mere distraction or capture of attention. the appeasing energies or soothing currents of digital seas, by contrast, provide him with shelter from the terror of the outside world, turning it into somewhere more bearable. through excessive, repetitive exposure, nazaryan immunizes himself against dreaded, inexorable death—“all of it inconsequential, all of it wonderful.” while the suggestion of a serene harmonization to the frenetic rhythms of networked time has become almost commonsensical, nazaryan gets provocative when he candidly admits neglecting his wife and newborn baby in his longing for the comforting effect of brainless, compulsive browsing. as the most popular of the numerous reader comments on his essay suggests, the author should walk to a local playground, watch parents engaged with their devices, and then watch kids desperately trying to get their attention. he would get a sense of how depressing, and downright insane, his solace looks to an outside observer. in what sort of a bubble, commenters ask, is a man living who prefers the fraudulent safety of an illusory world to spending quality time, empty-handed, in the vicinity of the real? building on nazaryan’s dramatization of connected existence, this essay approaches digital speed not only in terms of mediality—speed as circulation and transmission—but also of habitability: speed as shock and habituation. my aim is to conceptually and practically explore the articulation of digital speed and of specific life forms. i understand digital speed as an intensive exposure to, and immersion in foreignness—in an otherness that is more than the otherness of another person, and that affects and constitutes oneself. to inhabit media, then, is to inhabit a margin of contingency and indeterminacy, which is not fully simultaneous or coincident with itself (mackenzie 2002, 17). the viability of life in media should not be taken for granted. to inhabit media is to ceaselessly shake off excessive energy and implications. it implies cultivating shared spaces of nonindifference, and of relative opacity, in the midst of nonstop reporting, exposure, and irritation. life in media thus constantly comes with immunitary responses and skillful mediations—be they semantic, normative, commercial, technical, or otherwise—that require anthropological attention.1 as this essay will suggest, the distinction between life-nurturing and life-negating habitation is, here, as crucial as it is elusive. a key challenge in this regard is to critically diagnose the effects of speed on the degradation of waking life, while insisting on the recalcitrance of a foreignness that will not be contained and that keeps life moving in the first place. an anthropology of life at digital speed can be understood as a careful experimentation with untamed forces and protective supplements as they are engaged in processes of humanand world-becoming. *** in the 1980s, wrote the media theorist marshall mcluhan (1980, 32) at the beginning of the decade, a general awareness would emerge that “perhaps man was not intended to live at the speed of light.” adapting to an excessive speed of change, for mcluhan, isolates already fragmented individuals and drains vitality out of communities. the result is a prevailing state of insecurity and resentment, with anemic individuals exhausted by the demands of an overwhelming awareness of and involvement in a new information environment, which mcluhan referred to as an ecology. this notion of a vitality-denying involvement in an information environment can also be traced back to mcluhan’s better-known, and generally more optimistic, thesis that casts all technologies as extensions of the body. for mcluhan (1994, 42–45), these extensions both accelerate the environment in which we live and protect us by “amputating” organs as a response to increased environmental pressure. what makes electronic media unique is that they increase the power and speed of the central nervous system itself. hence, mcluhan diagnosed that when confronted with stress generated by technological acceleration and sensory overload, the central nervous system reacts with auto-amputation: “we turned turtle. the shell went inside, the organs outside . . . . but when an organ goes out (ablation), it goes numb” (mcluhan 1970, 42). speed-induced stress thus leads to a numbing of perception, both at individual and collective levels—at once an effective protection against environmental pressure and a negation of life through self-enclosure. mcluhan’s concerns with the impact of electronic speed were soon taken to whole new levels by paul virilio’s combative critique of accelerated modernity and its effects, which include the annihilation of space, the erasure of subjectivity, the rise of cybernetic social control, and an all-out war on human temporality. virilio is particularly vehement vis-à-vis the effects of real-time interaction. the connected, interactive being, he suggests, is “doomed to inertia” by the devices that have replaced its “natural capacities for movement” (virilio 1997, 16). by overstimulating the senses, speed immobilizes bodies into a state of “frenetic standstill” (rosa 2013, 15). the empire of speed, virilio suggests, can only lead to global foreclosure, confinement, and lockdown. while mcluhan considered the possibility of overcoming the numbing effect, virilio is not so confident. for him, accelerating technologies are doomed, exhausted technologies. although i am sympathetic to mcluhan’s and, to a lesser extent, virilio’s attempts at thinking the absorption of the shock of digital speed, both come with real limitations. most importantly, both mcluhan’s quasi-theological insistence on maintaining unity and virilio’s linear history of a war against subjectivity are premised on anthropocentric accounts of lived temporality. by contrast, thinkers as diverse as jacques derrida, donna haraway, bruno latour, gilbert simondon, peter sloterdijk, and bernard stiegler have shown how humans and tools continually modify each other, and how technicity is from the onset constitutive of human temporality. “technics,” stiegler (1998, 27) contends, “far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time.” such an originary technicity of time disqualifies all withdrawal to a natural, uncontaminated interiority to be protected against the assaults of technological speed. quite the opposite, according to derrida (1994, 177): to protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself, it is necessarily led to welcome the other within so many figures of death: differance of the technical apparatus, iterability, non-uniqueness, prosthesis, synthetic image. anthropological inquiry into digital speed, then, should not be too concerned with the acceleration of exchanges between self-sufficient entities or points. by contrast, when taking seriously the suggestion that the protection of life is contingent on welcoming the other within, the problem of speed can be framed in terms of energies that accentuate the “eccentricity of the self to itself” (peters 1999, 29). digital speed engenders an exposed self, radically open to and opened by the world. it destabilizes and provokes a crisis of meaning. at high enough speed, representation itself seems to lose its appearance of organic unity. in the words of gilles deleuze (1994, 42), representation rediscovers the infinite within itself. it “discovers within itself the limits of the organised; tumult, restlessness and passion underneath apparent calm. it rediscovers monstrosity.” *** monstrosity, as the introduction to this collection suggests, lies in an incommensurable foreignness that pervades everyday life in the most intimate way. and monstrosity demands to be endured. there is no stress-free exposure to a dissolved, unformed reality, even or perhaps especially at the highest of speeds.2 inhabited media are systematically given extension and relative duration. they are stratified. mediations keep intervening, connecting, translating, reducing, simplifying, domesticating.3 media are medial and poietic forces that imprint a form on “the amorphous compulsion of dionysian forces and the chaotic multiplicity of the individual” (sloterdijk 1989, 81). high-speed calculation, for example, transforms the unknown, or infinite character of existence—with its affects and feelings, its forms of knowing and thinking—into a source for preemption and capitalization. in slowing down the instabilities of human collectives, however, mediations may also contribute to assuring their viability. and yet there is always a remainder, a powerful absence, an opacity that undermines any possibility to think of mediation in terms of a reconciliation of subject and object, or of an appropriation of the foreign by the self. an anthropology of speed complicates dreams of a convenient habitation—remember nazaryan’s solace—by drawing attention to contradictions, disjunctions, and overflows that compose life in media. it may, for instance, render visible the human and energetic cost required to endure life at digital speed. this cost includes, but is not restricted to, the raw materials and resources of the earth that make technology happen, the exhausting efforts involved in suppressing the pull of electronic solicitation, or the bodily and psychosocial effects of staying on at all times—which themselves include hyperactivity, a narrowing of sensory responsiveness, and addiction to digital stimulation. ethnographic inquiry can contribute to making explicit how digital speed is generated, and how its demands are channeled, managed, absorbed, or shaken off. in his ethnography of newsmaking in the digital era, for instance, dominic boyer (2013) has suggested that a dialectical oscillation between the praxiological and the mediological allows for a management of the chronological imperatives of digital time. tom boellstorff (2008, 102) has also shown how “internet time” can also “lead to the form of deceleration experienced in virtual worlds as lag.” in my own ethnographic work, i have suggested that global ehealth networks point toward new horizons of intelligibility within which human lives come to take shape as objects of knowledge and intervention (duclos 2015). this remote engendering of the human is deeply enmeshed with living and technical systems, at the articulation of networking and clinical practice, modeling patterns, and chaotic forces. specifically, i have shown how things like technical glitches, failures to communicate, boredom, wasted time, political passions, and absent users are not external to, but rather constitutive of network connectivity and speed (duclos 2016). all in all, ethnographical inquiry can contribute to mapping a “rich seam of conjunctions” in which the speed of computation “meets with its ostensible outside” (fuller 2008, 5). by bringing the background or outside of digital networks into the open, it is possible to give them back some volume—to bring them back down to earth, we might say, in all its turbulence, splendor, and inadequacy. *** an anthropology of speed, as the introduction to this collection suggested, is concerned with the relationship between the prevailing resentment against the future and the experience of a contracted, accelerated present. this certainly applies to nazaryan’s solace, in which nonstop reaction to digital stimulation encloses a perpetual, just-endurable present. nazaryan inhabits a private bubble without walls, ubiquitously connected and yet actively insulated from the world. when, one might ask, does overexposure to the world turn into a loss of world? to inhabit media is to inhabit uncertainty, together. it comes with a vulnerability that has to be nurtured in the face of the entirely-other. life in media speaks to the constitutively exposed character of existence, and to immune reactions to it. the challenge, then, is to design spaces that are creative and yet provide a source of security for themselves. the challenge is to find a bit of breathing room, for instance via strategic demobilization or selective refusals to participate. the challenge is not to create oneself out of nothing, free from all constraints, but rather to “stray afield” of oneself, to use michel foucault’s (1990, 8) phrase, by carefully experimenting with stress forces and pressures out which new life forms might emerge. notes acknowledgments i thank tomás sánchez-criado and vinh-kim nguyen for their insightful comments. thanks also to members of the translating vitalities collective, with special mention of william mazzarella, stacey langwick, sue cochrane, judy farquhar, and clare twomey for rich discussions that have helped me craft this essay. 1. for related writings on space, media, and immunity, see the “magic words” glossed in duclos et al. 2016. 2. it was deleuze (1994, xviii), whose philosophy of pure difference is often associated with neoliberal, feel-good slogans of self-creation, who perhaps provided the most prescient warning in this regard: “there are certainly many dangers in invoking pure differences which have become independent of the negative and liberated from the identical. the greatest danger is that of lapsing into the representations of a beautiful soul: there are only reconcilable and federative differences, far removed from bloody struggles. the beautiful soul says: we are different, but not opposed.” 3. this is something that anthropologists of science have known for quite some time. remember bruno latour’s (1999, 144) famous argument: while louis pasteur did not invent the lactic acid ferment, “the more work pasteur does, the more independent the lactic acid ferment becomes . . . . the lactic acid ferment now exists as a discrete entity because it is articulated between so many others, in so many active and artificial settings.” references boellstorff, tom 2008 coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. boyer, dominic 2013 the life informatic: newsmaking in the digital era. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. deleuze, gilles 1994 difference and repetition. translated by paul patton. new york: columbia university press. originally published in 1968. derrida, jacques 1994 specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. translated by peggy kamuf. new york: routledge. originally published in 1993. duclos, vincent 2015 “global ehealth: designing spaces of care in the era of global connectivity.” medicine anthropology theory 2, no. 1: 154–64. http://www.medanthrotheory.org/read/4925/global-ehealth. 2016 “the map and the territory: an ethnographic study of the low utilization of a global ehealth network.” journal of information technology, april 5. https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2016.3. duclos, vincent, judith farquhar, volker scheid, and suzanne cochrane 2016 “magic words: a numbered list.” somatosphere, march 21. http://somatosphere.net/2016/03/magic-words-a-numbered-list.html. foucault, michel 1990 the history of sexuality, volume 2: the use of pleasure. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage books. originally published in 1984. fuller, matthew 2008 “introduction.” in software studies: a lexicon, edited by matthew fuller, 1–13. cambridge, mass.: mit press. latour, bruno 1999 “from fabrication to reality: pasteur and his lactic acid ferment.” in pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies, 113–44. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. mackenzie, adrian 2002 transductions: bodies and machines at speed. new york: continuum. mcluhan, marshall 1970 counterblast. london: rapp and whiting. 1980 “living at the speed of light.” maclean’s, january 7: 32–33. 1994 understanding media: the extensions of man. cambridge, mass: mit press. originally published in 1964. nazaryan, alexander 2013 “in the soul’s dark night, a digital solace.” new york times, june 10. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/in-the-souls-dark-night-a-digital-solace. peters, john durham 1999 speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. chicago: university of chicago press. rosa, hartmut 2013 social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. translated by jonathan trejo-mathys. new york: columbia university press. originally published in 2005. sloterdijk, peter 1989 thinker on stage: nietzsche’s materialism. translated by jamie owen daniel. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. originally published in 1986. stiegler, bernard 1998 technics and time, 1: the fault of epimetheus. translated by richard beardsworth and george collins. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. originally published in 1994. virilio, paul 1997 open sky. translated by julie rose. new york: verso. originally published in 1995. editing the times editing the times anne allison charles piot duke university every editorship is faced with constraints and possibilities, ones arising from the world and times in which we live and others embedded in the practice and politics of the publishing medium we are tasked with stewarding. as editors of cultural anthropology between 2010 and 2014, we oversaw a historic moment of movement and flux, but also of uncertainty and constriction. it was a time of global precarity and financialization, of state pullback and ngo-ization, of migration and stuckedness. it was also a time of rapid change and challenge in the academy when publishing was becoming digitized, the classroom was going online, and the humanities and interpretive social sciences were increasingly under attack and at risk. cultural anthropology, from its inception, has been a journal that has attempted to capture and resonate with the times. as editors, we sought to remain true to the journal’s experimental and dynamic history—its commitment to innovative scholarship and brilliant writing, to pushing the anthropological envelope in form as well as content, and to publishing pieces that conjured that magical mix of theory and ethnography—while also ensuring that the journal’s pages gave voice to the distinctiveness of the times in which we were living. to begin, we embraced the important work begun by kim and mike fortun of enhancing the journal’s web presence (see fortun and fortun 2015) by migrating significant amounts of journal content online—supplemental pages (of author interviews, photos and videos, and suggested reading), curated collections of already-published articles, teaching tools, and much more. over 1,400 pages of content are now available online, thanks to the tireless labors of our two managing editors, ali kenner and tim elfenbein, and of dozens of graduate student interns from departments around the country. one of the more gratifying aspects of editing the journal was discovering the ways in which cultural anthropology has become a collective project of present and past board members of the society for cultural anthropology (sca), former editors, authors, reviewers, and graduate students. we also added new features to the website. one of these in particular, hot spots, became an instant hit and a source of unending surprise. these sets of short essays addressing politically volatile events—the greek debt crisis (papailias 2011), the ebola epidemic (moran and hoffman 2014), the occupy movement (juris and razsa 2012), self-immolations in tibet (mcgranahan and litzinger 2012), the soviet land grab in ukraine (ries 2014), japan’s post-tsunami nuclear meltdown (slater 2011), the protests at tahrir square (elyachar and winegar 2012) and gezi park (yıldırım and navaro-yashin 2013), among others—were an attempt to get anthropological voices out into the public sphere in a quick, timely fashion. since we insisted on compressed (one-thousand-word) pieces and no more than fifteen contributors, an entire series could be assembled in a few weeks and published within days of completion. remarkably, given contemporary speed-up and work fatigue, few of those we approached to curate or contribute to these series turned us down. this would seem to indicate a strong desire on the part of anthropologists not only to have a more immediate say in ongoing events, but also to embrace the short essay format. moreover, these hot spots features had vastly larger readerships than regular journal articles, as well as audiences far beyond the academy. perhaps our signature intervention as editors was taking the journal open access—leaving wiley-blackwell, the american anthropological association’s (aaa) commercial publisher, to become our own publisher, while making the journal freely available to anyone anywhere who has access to our website. among other things, going open access meant an enormous amount of additional labor upfront. while continuing the job of curating the journal—reading hundreds of manuscripts a year, selecting and publishing around thirty—we had to get up to speed on the open access movement, convene working groups to discuss its pluses and minuses, write memos, politick, and then (when wiley and the aaa approved the move) oversee the building of the infrastructure necessary to become a publishing organization (see elfenbein 2014). we also spent much time on the key issue of funding—how to finance the journal when it could no longer rely on a revenue stream from subscriptions—an issue that we continue to work on. again, we had an army of helpers and supporters—kim and mike fortun, chris kelty, jason jackson, the sca board, the graduate student interns, and the brilliant, brick-by-brick infrastructural labor of our managing editor tim elfenbein. open access took us deep into the politics of publishing, and we found it surprising that there was so little general awareness of it among the aaa’s membership—a constituency that is otherwise politicized and activist. today’s world of academic publishing is scandalous in at least two senses. first, academics produce articles that are the product of the intellectual commons of which we are all a part—of colleague and student input, of reading group and seminar vetting, of constructive criticism by journal reviewers and editors. it is these (unremunerated) labors that make journal articles into objects of value. we then freely hand them over to a commercial press, which adds a small amount of value—typesetting and distribution (all form, no content)—before selling them back to the same universities who produced their value to begin with, at exorbitant rates, while making obscene profits (often over 40 percent) and bankrupting university libraries in the process. why are we hurting universities and helping publishers like this? second, how can we justify a practice in which our publications are accessible only to those who can afford to get behind the commercial press’s firewall, either because they are faculty or students at a university that can pay or because they can purchase the article themselves? this means, of course, that most of those among whom anthropologists live and work, and about whom we write, will be unable to access our writings. neither of these concessions makes any sense in a profession that prides itself on ethical conduct. another signal feature of our editorship was our attempt to ensure that the journal captured the changing present of the times in which we live—which we regularized through an annual feature called futures of neoliberalism. this stimulated, but also responded to, what we found to be a marked tendency in the submissions we received throughout the four years to treat subjects struggling and innovating with uncertainty, insecurity, risk, and stuckedness. exemplary cases came in various forms during our editorship—of pyramid schemes in albania (musaraj 2011), garbage pickers in brazil (millar 2014), soldiers laboring at war in sierra leone (hoffman 2011), and suicidal youth in kerala (chua 2011). needless to say, there is nothing necessarily new about unpredictability and risk. but the shape and effect(s) of insecuritization today, entangled as it is with globalization, affected by privatization and state deregulation, and conditioned by a temporality that is sped up for some while remaining interminably stagnant for others (those waiting—forever, it seems—for citizenship, or just to find shelter and food), also bear very specific qualities that harbor particular constraints and possibilities for anthropologists working in these times. the demand on the anthropologist is that we encounter and study who/what/where we work in both a timely and untimely fashion—this latter, in the sense suggested by paul rabinow (2009), is what distinguishes our work from that of journalists. this double challenge—remaining timely and untimely—must be taken up first as ethnographic method, as we found in the innovative field designs of submissions that ranged from diagnosing a particular mode of being among bored and homeless men in romania (o’neill 2014) or the everyday politics of members of the occupy movement (appel 2014) and welfare volunteers in italy (muehlebach 2011) to documenting the survival strategies of a kidnapping victim in iraq (al-mohammad 2012) or a nicaraguan woman who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning (nouvet 2014). other submissions tracked the temporalities of anthropological fieldwork, whether in venezuelan mourning rituals (briggs 2014) or the pacing of filmmaking in south india (pandian 2012). all of these submissions were marked by a method of untimely timeliness that remains attuned to stories told by the ethnographer as well as those among whom she works, and that goes beyond the surfeit of information—and, now, of data and sound bites—that walter benjamin (1969) decried as standing for “news” in the modern era. these articles and others like them exemplify a method that speaks to what akhil gupta and james ferguson (1997) call location rather than (bounded, grounded) locale, to unknown futures, dislocated pasts, and presents characterized by the implosion of the everyday into the materiality of well-being/getting by/speculation and risk. but how to theorize life lived increasingly under conditions of insecurity and disjuncture? how to be not only ethnographers but also theorists of the times and worlds in which we live? the two projects are connected, of course, and what we saw during our tenure as editors was theorizing driven by ethnography that—in grasping, excavating, and sensing the complexities and murkiness of a time of uncertainty—offered what might be considered an immanent theory of temporality, materiality, hope and despair, value, and the social, all inflected by capitalist fetishism and the everyday freneticism of living in precarious times. theorizing, then, is also a possibility yielded by the times—and the challenge is how to better realize and promote it. to wit, how to use our skills as ethnographers to understand how people are living the times and to build this into a theoretics and politics of the moment? we immensely enjoyed our editorship of cultural anthropology. but we were also happy to pass this role on to the next editorial team: dominic boyer, cymene howe, and james faubion. under their stewardship, the journal is sure to flourish in new and exciting ways. references al-mohammad, hayder 2012 “a kidnapping in basra: the struggles and precariousness of life in post-invasion iraq.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 4: 597–614. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01163.x appel, hannah 2014 “occupy wall street and the economic imagination.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 4: 602–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.4.02 benjamin, walter 1969 “the storyteller: reflections on the works of nikolai leskov.” in illuminations: essays and reflections, translated by harry zohn and edited by hannah arendt, 83–110. new york: schocken books. originally published in 1936. briggs, charles 2014 “dear dr. freud.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 312–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.08 chua, jocelyn lim 2011 “making time for the children: self-temporalization and the cultivation of the antisuicidal subject in south india.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 1: 112–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01082.x elfenbein, timothy w. 2014 “cultural anthropology and the infrastructure of publishing.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 288–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.06 elyachar, julia, and jessica winegar, eds. 2012 “revolution and counter-revolution in egypt a year after january 25th.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, february 2. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/208-revolution-and-counter-revolution-in-egypt-a-year-after-january-25th fortun, kim, and mike fortun 2015 “an infrastructural moment in the human sciences.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 3: 359–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca30.3.01 gupta, akhil, and james ferguson, eds. 1997 anthropological locations: boundaries and grounds of a field science. berkeley: university of california press. hoffman, daniel 2011 “violence, just in time: war and work in contemporary west africa.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 1: 34–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01079.x juris, jeffrey, and maple razsa, eds. 2012 “occupy, anthropology, and the 2011 global uprisings.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, july 27. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/63-occupy-anthropology-and-the-2011-global-uprisings mcgranahan, carole, and ralph litzinger, eds. 2012 “self-immolation as protest in tibet.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, april 9. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/93-self-immolation-as-protest-in-tibet millar, kathleen 2014 “the precarious present: wageless labor and disrupted life in rio de janeiro, brazil.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 1: 32–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.1.04 moran, mary, and daniel hoffman, eds. 2014 “ebola in perspective.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, october 7. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/585-ebola-in-perspective muehlebach, andrea 2011 “on affective labor in post-fordist italy.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 1: 59–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01080.x musaraj, smoki 2011 “tales from albarado: the materiality of pyramid schemes in postsocialist albania.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 1: 84–110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01081.x nouvet, elysée 2014 “some carry on, some stay in bed: (in)convenient affects and agency in neoliberal nicaragua.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 1: 80–102. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.1.06 o’neill, bruce 2014 “cast aside: boredom, downward mobility, and homelessness in post-communist bucharest.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 1: 8–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.1.03 pandian, anand 2012 “the time of anthropology: notes from a field of contemporary experience.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 4: 547–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01161.x papailias, penelope, ed. 2011 “beyond the ‘greek crisis’: histories, rhetorics, politics.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, october 10. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/243-beyond-the-greek-crisis-histories rabinow, paul 2009 “foucault’s untimely struggle: toward a form of spirituality.” theory, culture & society 26, no. 6: 25–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276409347699 ries, nancy, ed. 2014 “ukraine and russia: the agency of war.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, october 28. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/610-ukraine-and-russia-the-agency-ofwar slater, david h., ed. 2011 “3.11 politics in disaster japan: fear and anger, possibility and hope.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, july 26. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/416-3-11-politics-in-disaster-japan-fear-and-anger-possibility-and-hope yıldırım, umut, and yael navaro-yashin, eds. 2013 “an impromptu uprising: ethnographic reflections on the gezi park protests in turkey.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, october 31. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/391-an-impromptu-uprising-ethnographic-reflections-on-the-gezi-park-protests-in-turkey “too fat to be an orphan” “too fat to be an orphan”: the moral semiotics of food aid in botswana bianca dahl university of toronto kefilwe was twelve years old when she became an orphan upon her mother’s death in 2003.1 her father had never been in the picture, so the girl moved to the home of her maternal grandmother in lentswê, a village in southeastern botswana. like many other orphans in botswana, kefilwe was uprooted and sent off to live with a poor elderly relative who admitted having no desire to feed another belly, much less the seemingly bottomless one of a growing child. fortunately for kefilwe’s family, however, lentswê was home to an institution that i call bathusi orphan day care center, part of botswana’s then nascent industry of foreign-funded feeding programs for orphaned children. it did not take long for kefilwe’s arthritic grandmother to make her way to bathusi and register her grandchild for the free meals, recreational activities, school support, and day-care services that the organization provided exclusively to village orphans. in 2006, three years after kefilwe had first arrived at bathusi bearing a shy demeanor and thin, pinched face, the girl had a second homecoming to lentswê. in the intervening time, kefilwe had been sponsored by a generous european donor who paid for her to attend a boarding school in another part of botswana, and she had only recently returned home for the summer. one afternoon, i passed by her grandmother’s place to catch up. sitting on a flattened piece of cardboard in front of their two-room house with a casual assortment of other visitors, i watched a middle-aged neighbor approach the home and call out a salutation. kefilwe slowly got up and strolled over to clap the woman’s hand in greeting, looking every bit the part of a “cool girl” in her pink bandana and matching velour tracksuit pants. the older woman let out a raucous laugh, slapped the teenager on her rear end, and hooted in a mixture of setswana and english, “kefilwe! oooeeee! look at this girl. nowadays, you are too fat to be an orphan!” everyone watching burst into laughter; even kefilwe rolled her eyes to hide her smile and managed to slowly, regally, turn around—showing off her growing figure to full advantage—and regain her seat in the shade, every bit the icon of unscathed. i offer this anecdote as an entry point into my larger concern in this essay: an examination of the moral semiotics of children’s bodies,2 during the peak of what is often referred to as botswana’s aids orphan crisis.3 according to the third botswana aids impact survey, 16.2 percent of all children under fifteen in botswana are orphans like kefilwe (bais 2009)—comprising well over 130,000 youth (unicef et al. 2009), or one in five children under the age of seventeen (unaids 2010).4 this growing population of parentless young people is the long shadow aids has cast over a country where one in three pregnant women still tests positive for hiv (unaids 2010). foreign-funded aid organizations like bathusi flooded botswana following a plea for social and medical aid issued by then-president festus mogae to the united nations in 2001, in which mogae famously claimed his people were “faced with extinction.” in many ways, botswana has become a hotspot for humanitarian aid during the hiv epidemic, and much of that aid has centered on orphans. kefilwe’s neighbor’s teasing comments—although obviously playful as well as disparaging—echo critiques that circulated in lentswê after the founding of bathusi, when villagers began to voice concerns that orphaned children were growing plump off of overly indulgent foreign aid for children during the epidemic. this article seeks to explore why these supposedly fat bodies of orphans have become idioms for what tswana people see as a moral predicament: through well-intentioned humanitarian programs, orphans are problematically gaining access to resources that other villagers do not have, and—as i will argue—these same orphans are pushing back against normative ideas about the provision of resources and forms of patronage at the heart of how tswana people enact good kinship (durham 1995). bathusi’s targeting of resources directly to orphans has transformed these children’s social status from being pitiable indices of strained kinship to being enviable indices of even more profoundly strained kinship. when bathusi’s program began to attract an abundance of foreign donations in the early 2000s, many villagers—in joking comments like those of kefilwe’s neighbor, as well as in more serious gossip criticizing the children—suggested implicitly that a new structure of inequality and excess was being written in flesh on the most public of objects: the body, specifically the bodies of orphans. this article untangles villagers’ ambivalent feelings about excess, privilege, and entitlement of orphans by tracing symbolic discourse in lentswê about two kinds of food aid for children: that provided by the botswana government, and that provided by foreign-run ngos like bathusi. i will show how aid initiatives’ and tswana villagers’ constructions of orphans as a category defined by its lack (lack of both food and love) at first converge and then diverge through the politics surrounding feeding programs. fat and skinny bodies provide conceptual fodder for villagers, aid workers, and orphans alike to negotiate the changing forms of resource provision and individualistic consumption practices that tswana elders blame the aids epidemic for importing. focusing specifically on the moral dimensions of the semiotic signaling occasioned by children’s bodies, this essay frames local discontent about aid through its simultaneously corporal, ethical, and representational dimensions. by recognizing how moral anxieties intersect with semiotic representations of “victims,” and by following the changing public discourse around orphans’ bodies (both how their bodies appear and what those bodies do), i offer revealing examples of how the moral and the semiotic converge to produce powerful reactions to humanitarian aid. theorizing bodies and idioms of excess two decades ago emily martin (1992) argued that the proliferation of attention to bodies in anthropology resulted from rapid social changes in how bodies are configured, experienced, and felt during the era of globalization. despite this widely remarked-on scholarly focus, the bodies of children have remained relatively understudied in both theoretical and ethnographic discussions (see hirschfeld 2002). yet children provide a particularly relevant locus for exploring the ways in which bodies are conceptualized, shaped, and politically mobilized in the context of africa’s hiv pandemic and of course more generally, for they at once engender heightened anxiety about proper forms of care, and carry a rich range of semiotic meanings. it is not simply what children’s bodies look like that prompts such discourses; by attending to moral semiotics i also seek to retain a focus on how those bodies act. in an era in which principles of globalization have spread from the market economy into the realm of aid, pressures to conform to international standards of child wellbeing are ever-increasing, both as a prestigious marker of modernity and as a necessary precondition for full participation in the global marketplace (cheney 2007; cole and durham 2008). moralizing representations of children’s bodies are significant sites for discourse about and contestation over the reconfiguration of local caregiving practices in the name of larger sociopolitical projects. the political stakes surrounding control over bodies are central to humanitarian organizations more generally (ticktin 2006; nguyen 2010). interventions targeted at children’s bodies in particular are becoming a hallmark of aid initiatives; several scholars have noted that the presumed suffering of children calls forth a strong affective response in the western donor world (bornstein 2005; malkki 2010; wark 1995). the broader literature on humanitarian ideology tends to focus on how aid organizations imagine and delineate recipients’ physicality in terms that emphasize their desperation and lack of agency—in other words, by depicting recipients as susceptible to the toolkit of humanitarianism (fassin and rechtman 2009; redfield 2005). to legitimate interventions in the name of crisis response, aid relies on a spectacle of misery, which renders recipients as pure victims and authorizes engagement (fassin and vasquez 2005). drawing on such insights, i am also concerned with the moralizing ways in which tswana villagers, not just aid organizations, utilize bodies as conceptual and semiotic material. while exploring how the corporal dimension can become a locus of contestation over the (presumed) subjectivities of aid recipients, i move toward janelle taylor’s (2005) proposition that anthropologists should seek to destabilize more systematically our treatment of bodies qua objects. through analyzing bodily surfaces as represented and contested by aid recipients in idioms of fatness, this article exposes the local moral-political stakes in humanitarian intervention targeting children—stakes ultimately grounded in tswana villagers’ deep-seated fears about aids destabilizing kinship. the concerns about bodies that i discuss below are important because they index wider anxieties about forms of social change at the present moment. these changes—including the perceived materialism of youth, the possibility of girls bartering their bodies for survival or social status, the weakening of bonds of kinship amid rural-to-urban migration, growing disparities between the rich and poor, and the like—are often discursively associated with the epidemic, though of course in many ways they precede it. amid these social transformations, fatness and skinniness are loaded metaphors in much of africa, made all the more so by the specters of illness and inequality. jean comaroff (2007, 203), in calling attention to the “everyday signification” practices embedded in how south africans talk about hiv, suggests that “adjectives such as fat or thin . . . prime the delicate labor of framing identities and broaching futures in the shadow of the pandemic.” in other words, such language forms the building blocks of how individuals identify, interpret, and signify aids, as well as of other social changes about which people are ambivalent. specifically with regard to the epidemic, these idioms of fatness and skinniness delineate the common redistributions of body fat characteristic of both hiv and antiretrovirals. but the meanings reverberate well beyond biology. in nigeria, igbo people complain of the proliferation of new nongovernmental organizations arising to “feed fat off aids”—marked by enterprising individuals who create and divert funds from hiv-related ngos as a means to devour their share of the so-called national cake (smith 2014, 103). helen epstein’s (2007, 27) account of hiv in the subcontinent offers a story relayed to her by a doctor in uganda, who claimed that ugandans talked about two types of aids: slim aids and fat aids. people with slim aids just waste away until they disappear. fat aids, on the other hand, “afflicts doctors, bureaucrats, and foreign-aid consultants with enormous grants and salaries; they fly around the world to exotic places and get fatter and fatter and fatter.” in this tongue-in-cheek example, slim aids results from contracting hiv; fat aids marks the industry arising to profit from the virus. it’s no surprise that this would be the case. fat, of course, is an idiom of excess. appropriating the ugandan example, fat aids describes the complex that gives rise to fat orphans. the embodiment of excess reflects widespread preoccupations with the bodily signs of aids: both the disease and the ngo industry that appears to profit from it are linked by the moral tone of bodies. relations of patronage and responsibilities of kinship are called into question around metaphors of fleshiness and dependence on aid. contestations over children’s skinny and fat bodies in turn lead to reconfigurations of the very ideas of orphanhood and kinship. further, it is worth noting that that even bodies of children who did not appear fat to me—or certainly not any fatter than non-orphaned peers—often came to be cast as such by villagers, signaling deeper concerns about dependence on aid and problematic kinship relations. the analysis that follows begins with the aesthetics of fat in botswana, linking it to a national preoccupation with orphans’ bodies during the aids epidemic. through an exploration of villagers’ reactions to the government’s food basket initiative, i show how orphans have entered the social imaginary in ways overdetermined by collective fears around the waning role of kinship. moving on to describe concerns emerging from bathusi’s foreign-funded feeding and day-care program, i argue that the institution’s practices produced behaviors on the part of orphaned children that exacerbated preexisting fears about threatened kinship structures. drawing on more than forty months of ethnographic field research conducted between 2003 and 2012, i seek to disentangle the social and semiotic stakes in the cultural politics surrounding children’s bodies during botswana’s era of aids. the moral tone of fatness arguably the best-known authority on the aesthetics of fat in botswana is, perhaps ironically, a scottish fiction writer. over the past decade, alexander mccall smith rose to international fame for his best-selling novels in the no. 1 ladies’ detective agency series, set in a whimsically parochial portrayal of botswana’s capital city, gaborone. readers familiar with these stories associate tswana people’s physiques with the novels’ heroine mma ramotswe, whose generous proportions mccall smith euphemistically memorialized with the catchphrase “traditionally built.” certainly many people in botswana value an ample body size for both genders. at the same time, in the era of superslim global pop stars and the dissemination of american televisual standards of beauty, botswana, like many societies, has also bought into a skinny aesthetic. in botswana, beauty in adults has multiple standards; village boys frequently whistle at the sight of round young ladies sauntering past, just as there are now scores of slim sirens leading the ranks of local beauty pageants. children figure differently in this range of attractiveness. the local preference has long favored plump children, and unlike the case with adult women, these standards in children have proven resistant to change. this is partly because slim and fat take on loaded social meanings when it comes to young people. indeed, the story i aim to relay does not concern beauty. it pertains to the moral tone that a fat child’s body takes on. people in botswana see obviously well-fed children as indisputably well looked after. their corpulence, their charmingly chubby cheeks, are touted as the outward manifestations of good caregiving on the part of relatives who provide ample food to ensure a child grows strong and stout. while adults might prefer a slim physique, a skinny child aesthetically pleases no one in botswana. as deborah durham (2005, 201) notes, in botswana, “a well-cared-for body, bathed and clothed, is reciprocal evidence both of being the object of positive sentiment and of creating that sentiment in others.” a fat child is therefore rather like a clean one: such a body must be read metaphorically as a sign of social value, of full integration into the reciprocal labor that characterizes how tswana people “do” kinship in its ideal-type form (durham 2005, 1995). adults provide food and other necessities to children, who in turn help with household chores as their part of the cycle of domestic life. julie livingston (2008, 305) has further argued that in botswana, “bodily aesthetics operate as signifiers in the dense web of practices that either build up or threaten sociability”; in other words, tswana people presume that the nature of social relations and the practice of both good and bad kinship manifest in people’s physical appearances. as such, a suitably plump child is one who is well fed, well loved, and not overworked—and therefore a presumably happy and satiated member of the family and the community. at least in theory, a chubby child serves as the ambassador to society of a good, moral household. given that fatness signifies being loved, it merits noting that tswana villagers (much like international humanitarian aid campaigns, as i discuss below) ascribe to an ideology about who might be expected to grow fat. by this definition, orphans and other so-called vulnerable children,5 as supposedly less well-cared-for members of society, can be expected to bear the traces of their disadvantage on their (emaciated) bodies. to return to epstein’s metaphor, in the social imaginary of sub-saharan africa, orphans are widely presumed to index a version of slim aids—the embodiment of malnutrition, disease, and neglect. indeed, staggeringly high aids seroprevalence since the 1990s6—which was the second highest in the world during my fieldwork—and deaths concentrated in the adult (read parental) generation, have normatively configured the orphan in botswana as a starving body in need, both in everyday conversation and in government policy. food baskets and threatened kinship although botswana is not plagued by widespread hunger, the country invests tremendous resources in feeding orphans (and, to some extent, other citizens deemed vulnerable). many of those food resources have national sources, taking the form of a countrywide orphan food basket initiative that makes registered orphans eligible for generous monthly food rations from the government. since the program’s full national rollout in 1999, a growing number of families have come to depend on their orphans’ food rations to provide nourishment to the entire household. the feeding program has the stated aim of offsetting the additional burden placed on individuals who care for the children of their dead relatives, so that orphans are not turned onto the streets, neglected, or abused. at its inception, and now, it constituted an ambitious biopolitical project, aiming to register all orphans with the department of social services for official oversight. crucially, the department of social services describes the food baskets as for the entire household, not simply for the orphans (although the local interpretation holds that the food should be reserved for orphans). botswana’s government made the early and proactive decision to support families directly, rather than investing in residential orphanages or care centers. the legacy of this decision remains palpable today, in that almost all funding for day-care institutions like bathusi comes from foreign sources. that the government’s intervention has focused on feeding has precedent, however. jacqueline solway (1994) has written extensively on botswana’s drought relief programs in the 1980s, which included extensive food aid and were widely hailed as a political success, despite ultimately undermining the long-term production capacity of farmers and exacerbating inequality. not coincidentally, the government introduced the orphan food baskets around the same time as a national old-age pension scheme offering financial support to the elderly and destitute. in documenting the public response to old-age pensions, julie livingston (2005) has shown that elderly tswana welcomed the financial autonomy and intra-household power the pensions afforded them in an increasingly wage-based economy, but livingston also argued that these pensions resulted in a reduction of consumable gifts and food provided by juniors to their older kin. while regular tswana people and politicians laud the orphan food baskets for their cultural sensitivity—ensuring that kin can fulfill their familial obligations of caring for needy orphans—the program also ran into almost immediate criticism similar to that aroused by the old-age pensions. people across botswana expressed discomfort with a system in which relatives appeared to require a kind of governmental bribery to provide a supposedly cherished responsibility—the raising of their families’ children. the program drew attention to the limits of “cultural safety nets” (as kin-based child rearing is often euphemized). that the program worked so effectively, encouraging reluctant kin to house orphans, seemed only to heighten many people’s laments about what they described as the “failures of [tswana] culture,” as one official in the ministry of local government explained to me in 2004. yet unsurprisingly, the demographics of kin-based care reveal a different tale. although the discourse surrounding orphans has highlighted their vulnerability to the vagaries of unmotivated relatives, with few exceptions, orphans in the villages in which i conducted fieldwork were cared for within extended family networks. botswana continues to host but a handful of residential orphanages, with no formal fosterage system beyond family. the ngo focus on orphan care further obscures that both orphans and non-orphans have long been circulated within tswana familial networks or raised collectively in shared households. for many of the children i worked with, the deaths of their parents occasioned no shift in residence, as they had long lived within an extended family compound. instead, the discourses about failed kinship reflect an underlying anxiety about perceived moral shifts, rather than demographic changes, in family life. as an example of these moral negotiations, in the wake of new modes of government provision of food to orphans, i witnessed numerous rivalries emerge between relatives who began competing to exercise their right to raise orphans in their families. villagers often blame this phenomenon on the introduction of food baskets. in one typical case, the twenty-five-year-old half sister of two young girls constantly fought with their grandparents for custody, forcing the children to bounce back and forth between households. neighbors and other kin usually describe competitions like this in scathing terms, claiming that the prospective caregivers are not fit guardians with pure motives, but instead are motivated only by greed for the food baskets. newspapers and village gossip abound with tales of relatives who sell off the orphans’ food baskets to buy beer for themselves or special luxury items for their own children, leaving the orphans to “starve.” the discourse surrounding such relatives reveals tswana people’s underlying—and often contradictory—sentiments toward the government’s provision of resources more generally. even as villagers seem to feel that the food baskets help protect children, they also express concern about the ways in which the program has failed to achieve its stated moral ends of bolstering kinship through food. although i have encountered few children who appeared worrisomely underfed in my more than ten years’ span of fieldwork in different regions in botswana, the continued belief that orphans are starving derives at least in part from the discomfort with kin who require food bribes to fulfill their obligations, and from the moral significance of metaphors of skinniness and starvation. due to concerns over whether relatives provide adequate love, and due to the commensurability of care and fatness, tswana people have represented even orphans with food baskets as on the verge of starvation. the omnipresence of gossip about selfish relatives is grounded in people’s sense that kinship is not functioning normally, and so they seize on dramatic examples like greedy kin and starving orphans to illustrate their concern about shifting ethics. such apprehensions about kinship undeniably have a far deeper history, and lamentations about youth splintering from the moral values of their parents also constitute a more general preoccupation in botswana. yet in the time of aids, the figure of the starving orphan has emerged as a central social anxiety. in criticizing their neighbors, villagers utilize a moral semiotics to distinguish themselves as good, ethical, and proper individuals—and thus they strive to uphold the same cultural order they see as failing. actions perceived as treating children like mere commodities with a particular (food basket–sized) value attached to them are inimical to the ethos of proper caregiving at the heart of tswana kinship. the politics of foreign-funded feeding programs given the ambivalence about the government’s food-basket initiative, one might well expect that foreign-funded programs like bathusi, which emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s and transparently gave food and material resources directly to orphans instead of to their relatives, would have been welcomed. to an extent, they were. tswana people lauded and still laud many ngos for providing an admirable corrective to the feared shortcomings of greedy kin. at my tally in 2008, almost every orphan-care organization in botswana (well over two hundred then) provided meals for needy children as arguably the foremost of its services. when bathusi orphan day care centre first opened in lentswê in 2002, villagers were suspicious of its aims, but soon praised the project for helping orphans whose kin may not have been caring for them adequately. children would attend programs like bathusi during the day but return to sleep in the homes of their extended family members, thus remaining “connected to their kin and culture,” as bathusi’s website proclaimed. relatives like kefilwe’s grandmother sought the service for the additional food it gave orphans, which also freed up their food baskets for the rest of the household to consume without guilt. for the first year and a half, while bathusi remained a modest enterprise (little more than a glorified feeding program), i found that most villagers saw it as a largely positive intervention. the preoccupation with starving orphans appears to be just as pronounced in transnational aid organizations as among tswana villagers, and their moral semiotics converged around the bodies of supposedly starving orphans. yet despite an emphasis on cultural sensitivity, foreign donors are driven by what at times seems like a context-blind desire to provide a specific variety of services to needy children. the iconography of the african aids orphan, captured in national geographic–style images of what catherine lutz and jane collins (1993, 181) call “starving ungendered children”—that is, wide-eyed toddlers with distended bellies and flies buzzing around their orifices—constitutes the motivating stereotype behind much of the well-intentioned flow of money from the west toward organizations like bathusi. such institutions operate on the presumption of poverty, neglect, and/or abandonment of orphans by their relatives. as james ferguson (1990, xiii) has suggested, in western perceptions “the bloated bellies of african children are the signs of social as well as nutritional deficiency.” despite partial convergence between donors and locals about the needs of orphans, discontent began to arise in botswana when ngos started to provide a quantity of these material services that far exceeded the mere avoidance of starvation. their mandate extended to empowering children through educational support and self-esteem-building activities, and increasingly gifting orphans not just food but also fashionable clothes, toys, and even cell phones. here i turn to examine what happened when bathusi began complicating the already fraught social scene by giving resources directly to orphans themselves, circumventing their kin. gossip in lentswê about relatives’ questionable motives continued to coexist alongside new discourses, practices, and concerns associated with bathusi. villagers often criticized the motives of orphans’ kin in the same conversations in which they pitied those relatives for new difficulties arising in the wake of bathusi’s influence. just as feeding can move from being laudable to damaging, kinship can also seem to crumble from many angles simultaneously. had bathusi remained focused on food and education, it may not have become the object of discontent in lentswê. yet the european man who founded bathusi had a particular knack for fund-raising, and he began to market the stories of hungry orphans (and greedy relatives) to donors. growing international support came from sponsors as high-profile as the president’s emergency plan for aids relief (pepfar) and the gates foundation. bathusi soon turned into the pet project of several foreign embassies, and quickly became a favorite stop for international media doing stories on aids in botswana. the brightly colored buildings and laughing children created an appealing contrast to tales of orphans’ hardship and loss that the director and a steady stream of foreign volunteers provided to visitors. in 2004, after two years of operation, bathusi’s fund-raising successes had enabled the ngo to grow into something of an orphan paradise—but herein lay the problem for villagers. by the time that kefilwe had become “too fat to be an orphan,” the program’s modest origins as a feeding center had evolved into a sprawling property with a computer lab, a music room complete with a full band kit and imported “traditional” drums from south africa, a swimming pool, and an awe-inspiring collection of kung fu dvds. the children not only had two meals a day at bathusi but were served fresh meat and a regular intake of junk food, as well as hamburgers at restaurants in the capital city paid for by overseas donors who wanted the children to enjoy the special outings that children in their own countries took for granted. in ngos like bathusi, orphans were not just being fed to offset their presumed immanent starvation—they were overfed, literally and especially metaphorically, as recipients of this growing excess of aid. donors were moved by accounts of children living in three-room houses with twelve relatives—not realizing, of course, that these numbers do not offer a reliable measurement of destitution by local standards. even the village chief (a “big man” in many senses of the term) shared with a dozen family members what was by western standards a modest cinderblock home. as bathusi’s policies changed, the meaning of orphans (usually referred to by the setswanified english term diorphans) in lentswê village also began to shift from being a vulnerable category to a privileged position. at the same time, the children began to redefine what their rights to being equal, empowered, and entitled meant. they often accomplished this redefinition by excusing themselves from their responsibilities vis-à-vis their extended families, refusing to contribute to household labor in their homes. for example, fourteen-year-old phenyo informed me in 2005 that he no longer fetched firewood at his grandmother’s home; as he put it, “i don’t really eat their food anymore, so why should i be the one to fetch the wood to cook it on?” in a later conversation i had with his relatives, his aunt complained about phenyo’s invocation of his so-called human rights to justify what she saw as simply laziness. the government-sponsored food basket program had precipitated widespread discontent with perversions of duty and dependence within families; bathusi’s program served to exacerbate villagers’ concerns and take the problem to a new level, as children themselves began to reject the norms of reciprocal caregiving—from a newly formed position of privilege. of course, not all orphans behaved this way, but the more outrageous examples of bad behavior infused village discourse and contributed to significant semiotic shifts in the connotations of diorphans as a category of person. the behavior of disrespectful orphans was augmented by more general concerns about today’s youth being influenced by trends associated with urbanization and consumerism. further, as many orphans stopped helping at home, some relatives used this to justify selling off the food baskets. the insertion of foreign aid into village life perpetuated a feedback loop of threatened kinship. when orphans act fat one saturday afternoon in 2005, i passed by the home of a fifteen-year-old orphan named tumelo and called out to ask if she was home. her grandmother roused herself from her seat under an acacia tree and muttered something about how tumelo was nowhere to be seen, and had not fetched water or done any household labor in weeks. one of her aunts joined in the conversation, telling me that they were concerned about tumelo, who was running around with a number of bathusi kids, and that they were no longer able to control her or make her “hear” (in the sense of obey) them. as the aunt pointed out, bathusi gave the girl everything she wanted. according to her, tumelo would respond to their requests for her involvement in household chores by asking them: “why should i listen to you?”—a question her relatives felt unable to answer. in the aunt’s account, the girl’s kin had lost whatever influence they had, given that “nowadays, we don’t feed her any more.” feeding, it was understood, served as a metaphor for the provision of material support more broadly. this concern about feeding also reflected tumelo’s physical and geographic movement away from the collective hearth where the family would eat together. her body was always elsewhere, and so she did not receive sustenance—care—from her relatives. although resource provision and feeding form a fundamental part of caregiving, the exchange of food and other necessities is supposed to stand for a more selfless, loving, mutually respectful relationship in tswana morality. much as women measure their lovers’ affections by the gifts the latter give (durham 2002), so things, including food, are not supposed to be sought after as an end unto themselves, but should rather stand in for intimacy in relationships (durham 1995). relatives condemned tumelo’s materialistic attitude, which kept her going to the bars (one of which was tellingly nicknamed “bathusi bar” after the frequency with which orphans congregated there when the ngo closed at night) or strolling around the village with friends instead of investing in her familial relationships. relatives saw tumelo’s appetite for material resources as standing in the way of good kinship. i tracked down tumelo the following afternoon. dressed in tight white jeans, new track shoes, and a pretty silver necklace from one of bathusi’s donors, she was undeniably fetching. she had always had a pouty expression and curvy figure that attracted boys; wearing nice clothing, she was even more striking. when i asked tumelo about the problems at home, she dismissed them with a wave of the hand. “they tell me i am lazy and just sitting around, getting fat, but the problem is really them, not me,” she insisted. according to tumelo, her relatives wanted her as their slave. when i asked if that was really true, she nodded vehemently, then abruptly changed the subject—asking me with a hopeful expression if i would give her my wristwatch. not long after that exchange her grandmother forbade her from attending bathusi, claiming it was too negative an influence. this decision went against the family’s material interests, as they now had to allocate more food and resources to tumelo, but neighbors praised their efforts to regain authority over her as a sign of their good kinship. as bathusi grew, villagers in lentswê began to comment on orphans’ fat bodies with greater frequency. like kefilwe’s neighbor’s playful banter, much of this dialogue had the valence of relatively lighthearted teasing. while fatness in tswana youth may have held general value, no one considered being spoiled and materialistic positive traits. as in tumelo’s story, these allegations formed the subtext of comments like kefilwe’s neighbor’s “too fat to be an orphan,” linked as they were to bathusi’s services. orphans considered too fat by implication enjoyed an excess of material support. young attendees at bathusi themselves began to self-consciously play with the stereotypes of starving versus fat orphans. on one afternoon in 2006, i visited a north american expatriate named jennifer who had once worked at bathusi and now served as a consultant for botswana’s government. jennifer continued to live in lentswê and mentor a sixteen-year-old orphan named masego, whose relatives approved of their friendship. on that particular occasion, i brought masego and jennifer each a small bag of the potato chips they loved. in typical fashion, masego devoured her snack in fistfuls, licking the salt off her fingers when she had finished. she then turned to jennifer to watch her slowly savoring her chips one by one. after a few moments, masego begged jennifer to share. jennifer merely raised an eyebrow and continued to eat her chips with exaggerated, pointed slowness, a picture of restraint: her controlled body language clearly and humorously indicated that she had no intention of indulging masego’s gluttony. masego slouched for a moment, then brightened and began to rub her belly in the gesture of hunger used by street children begging in the capital city. she opened her eyes wide, affected a melodramatic pout, and began to whisper theatrically, motioning to her stomach, “orphan, i’m an orphan! i have no mother—i’m starving! please feed me!” jennifer and i burst into laughter. although jennifer did not relent and share the chips, masego was pleased with the reception of her joke. by alluding to the cultural conception of orphans as starving, masego openly called attention to her full belly and evident greediness. in making fun of herself, masego revealed that she recognized that she was too privileged to be the kind of orphan who deserved pity and favors. she was, like kefilwe, too fat to be an orphan. and yet unlike kefilwe, such fatness perhaps ironically served as a source of pride, even as it widely evoked in their community the kinds of moral concerns detailed above. reading fat: the paradox of plump orphans this leads me to raise more directly the perhaps obvious question: if chubby children constitute the cultural ideal, what exactly is the problem with fat orphans? should the villagers not feel gratified by such a population, as a mark of their conquest of aids? or, by extension, what difference lies between a foreign organization providing resources to children and the botswana government providing food to families? mark graham (2005, 178) uses the term lipoliteracy to indicate the ways that fat gets read as simultaneously a gauge of people’s health and of their morality; for fat is, as don kulick and anne meneley (2005, 7, 1) have written, a “supremely cultural fact,” that is “larded with meaning”—pun no doubt intended. skinny orphans are presumed to be the lamentable lipo-index—the living, embodied, pitiful proof—of overburdened relatives who struggle to provide for all their children, or who selfishly appropriate food baskets for themselves. skinny orphans offer a straightforward morality tale about the challenges of kinship during the epidemic. their postulated emaciation justifies the resources spent on feeding them, while also providing conceptual and semiotic fodder for tswana villagers to voice concerns about social changes more generally. both fat and skinny orphans point toward the moralizing semiotics of how bodies are categorized. in tswana culture, diorphans by definition are not supposed to manage to get fat in the first place. fat orphans constitute a contradiction in terms, a category violation in the semiotic sense, and a moral transgression given the means by which they became fat (through an ngo that seemed to undermine kinship structures). talking about orphans used to be—and to some extent continues to be—an acceptable way of bemoaning the deleterious effects of aids on kinship, and villagers appear invested in the moral tale that skinny orphans tell. but fat orphans force a different moral tale—one in which these abandoned children fall even further afield from the moderations imposed through good kinship practices in their extended families. no longer the objects of pity, well-fed and well-clothed orphans worryingly became objects of envy in lentswê. as such, they could not possibly be diorphans; they had entirely exceeded their category meaning. when bathusi opened its doors in 2002 and began showering children with ever more generous gifts, toys, and food, villagers started seeing orphans less as the innocent victims of greedy relatives who exploited kin ties for their own material gain; instead, children like tumelo were increasingly indicted as themselves rejecting the ethos of kinship. when bathusi began giving resources directly to orphans, in many cases it was the kin who were pitied for losing the authority that accompanies the responsibility of providing food and other necessary items to dependent orphans. children’s assertion of their empowerment—and, eventually, entitlement to resources—became a driving force in exacerbating the fraught nature of social reproduction in lentswê today. as one high-ranking official in the department of social services put it, “botswana has the fattest orphans in africa”—a comment that simultaneously points to the excesses of feeding programs as a whole and to the forms of entitlement embedded in the paradox of a fat orphan. conclusions bodies, however, are far from silent. they express stories in many and complex ways. —asha persson, “incorporating pharmakon” bodies are public things, and particularly the bodies of children, which people in botswana presume to be the outward and mobile manifestations of care invested by adults. in the wake of bathusi’s campaign to provide material resources, fat orphans became signs of a growing sense of entitlement among children, and of their lack of incentive to engage in building good kinship ties with extended family members who could never give them anything comparable. it is not surprising that a neighbor called kefilwe fat when she was dressed in trendy clothes, playing up her composed sense of superiority outside her grandmother’s humble home, or that tumelo’s family mentioned her laziness and her plumpness in the same breath. although fat orphans could have appeared pleasing to the general populace as a sign of revitalized kinship networks, the way that orphans grew stout—as the recipients of aid that countered the logic of reciprocity in tswana families—made these children a semiotic category violation. the moral dimensions of these corporal signs exceed the merely symbolic: problems arose precisely because of the material, relational, and concrete realities that the children’s bodies indexed. these youth did not reflect happy, well-functioning homes, but rather the opposite—they seemed to further indicate the breakdown of good kinship in a time when foreign organizations invested more in children than could their own families. one last point is crucial to emphasize here: although i did not weigh the children during the years of bathusi’s influence, my photographic evidence supports my impression that the lentswê orphans did not actually gain weight—at least not significantly more than their non-orphaned peers. what changed during the early years of the past decade was less their actual bodies than the social relations for which fat served as a meaningful metaphor and for which feeding constituted a moral activity. popular anxieties about excessive foreign influences on children aligned with an uneasiness about familial breakdown that has a much deeper history in botswana; the similarity of these concerns about excess led to their idiomatic expression in corporeal terms—to what i am calling a moral semiotics. what we see in botswana is not simply a form of lipoliteracy that reads bodies in a straightforward way for the interior subjectivity they presumably “surface” (taylor 2005) but also a discourse surrounding bodies as material things whose meaning ultimately derives from what those bodies do, and from what gets done to them. it matters that the bodies in question were youthful ones, bodies still being shaped by the social relations in which they were embedded and which they also represented. and so it was that kefilwe’s well-clothed and ample rear end rendered her a teaseable and somewhat discomfiting figure. by dressing and eating well, kefilwe had graduated out of the class of orphan. as for masego and her potato chips, she showed remarkable perceptiveness when she began to mock herself, calling somewhat ironic attention to the distance she had traveled from being a true orphan. adeline masquelier (2005, 5) has suggested that the surface of bodies “can simultaneously mediate the ‘self’ and the ‘social’ and exclude one from the other. it is precisely this paradoxical potential of the bodily surface to signify inclusion in the community as well as separation or deviation from it that makes it such a powerful vehicle of moral contestation.” the surface of the body as a division between self and social appears particularly fraught in the case of young people, whose bodies are so malleable and whose socialization is presumed incomplete. such bodies become even more contested in the context of humanitarian endeavors to provide support according to a set of priorities that do not fully map onto those of the local population. the reckoning of orphans in idioms of fatness and skinniness constitutes at once a social commentary on changing values and a recognition of help gotten out of hand. in a now classic essay, jean-françois bayart (1989) described african politics as quintessentially a “politics of the belly”—drawing on a west african metaphor for corrupt officials colluding with elites to “eat” the resources of their nations. in botswana, the politics of the belly (and its temporal extension into the politics of fatness) have been appropriated with a new twist: the metaphor continues to stand for disparities of power and wealth, but in an even more uncomfortable fashion, as they are produced and made public through the impossible bodies of fat orphans. while bayart concerned himself with forms of patronage characteristic of african states, vectors of resource provision within kinship appear doubly important in botswana, where material exchange is strongly believed to reflect and build relations of affection and love (klaits 2010). for tswana villagers, behaving like loving kin also requires controlling and disciplining children. the modes of affiliation that the children transferred onto bathusi—coming as these did with no expectation of children’s reciprocity through performing chores at the institution—undermined the normative ways in which tswana people believe that good people are produced. these fat orphans, problematically, were not well-loved orphans—but neither did they make themselves particularly loveable. and so we return in the end to idioms of excess and lack. skinny orphans and slim aids make for significant tropes because they both reflect and reinforce local ideologies about the challenges to and for kinship amidst the hiv epidemic. in other words, these tropes are valuable because they fit in with a larger set of concerns commonly articulated by tswana people during the time of aids and even prior to it, about how kinship cannot be relied on, marriage rates are plummeting, life courses are disrupted and sped up, modern gender identities are leading to dangerous forms of sexuality, and social reproduction more generally is threatened in ways that can feel just as palpable and troubling as the demographic ravages of the epidemic itself. in the loaded context of slim aids and skinny orphans, fat aids and fat orphans therefore disrupt an already destabilized moral order. yet we must remember that idioms of excess also, perhaps ironically, constitute hopeful complaints. we must recognize the role of fat orphans in villagers’ calls to fine-tune the services of a government that actually—remarkably—feeds its needy children; fat aids also reminds us to focus our analytic attention beyond what has widely been called the aids industrial complex and instead to recognize a medical system that helpfully fattens up its hiv patients through free antiretroviral drugs and food supplements. in a world where kinship may feel destabilized by humanitarian intervention and demographic change, the wry and insightful humor demonstrated by masego’s self-mockery, kefilwe’s neighbor’s teasing, and the ability to refuse certain forms of humanitarian aid demonstrated when tumelo’s relatives withdrew her from bathusi, all show how kinship and moral values can be symbolically and semiotically buttressed through a discourse about their demise. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to catherine bliss, marcy brink-danan, bambi chapin, paja faudree, jessaca leinaweaver, christine nutter-el ouardani, daniel jordan smith, two anonymous reviewers, and fellows of brown university’s cogut center for the humanities for their suggestions on earlier drafts. this article has also benefited from helpful conversations with jennifer cole, frederick klaits, koketso makaka, koreen reece, and jacqueline solway. the research was generously supported by grants from the social science research council, fulbright-hays and the u.s. department of education, the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, and the national science foundation. 1. all names of individuals, villages, and organizations (except those whose relevant involvement is a matter of public record) are pseudonyms. 2. i generally refer to orphans as “children,” following ngo and government practice, even though many could be termed “youth.” in utilizing the term children (bana), ngos, the government, and villagers are clearly emphasizing a position of dependency. 3. for example, “children orphaned by hiv and aids,” avert website, march 27, 2014, http://www.avert.org/aidsorphans.html, accessed september 1, 2008. 4. an orphan in botswana is a child who has lost both parents (if they were married) or the primary caregiver if the parents were not married, which holds true for the majority in lentswê. 5. the phrase orphans and vulnerable children became increasingly popular in the early 2000s. vulnerable children comprise an ill-defined category including hiv-positive kids and those with terminally ill parents. 6. the aids impact survey of 2009 identified prevalence for adults in the most affected demographic, ages thirty-five to forty-five, at about 40.6 percent of both sexes (bais 2009). this cohort with high hiv prevalence is also a group highly likely to have children, who are orphaned on their parents’ deaths. references bais iii (botswana aids impact survey iii) 2009 stats brief: preliminary results from the botswana aids impact survey iii, 2008. gaborone: bais iii. bayart, jean-francois 1989 l’etat en afrique: la politique 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http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935318. ironies of laboratory work during ghana’s second age of optimism ironies of laboratory work during ghana’s second age of optimism damien droney stanford university in the pharmacology laboratory at the centre for scientific research into plant medicine in ghana, i was evaporating the alcohol out of herbal tinctures so that the remaining plant extract could be freeze-dried. this was a necessary step to prepare the samples for administration to animal models, part of the process of approving herbal products for human consumption in ghana. when the workers employed in this laboratory returned from lunch, they found me reclaiming used plastic bottles, which had previously held commercial herbal decoctions, for reuse in the lab. this was the kind of locally specific improvisation i had been taught to help manage the laboratory’s scarce resources. i was holding one of these reclaimed bottles, struggling to read my own writing on a piece of masking tape that had gotten wet, when gifty appraised the situation and said with a sigh, “oh, damien. african science!” in the present article, i consider this kind of uncomfortable humor about africa as a site of lack and embarrassing peculiarity as it manifests in the laboratories of the centre for scientific research into plant medicine (hereafter csrpm, or “the centre”), a large herbal medicine research center about an hour’s drive north of accra.1 the centre is in many ways a legacy of ghana’s independence era, the proud embodiment of a period of high optimism about modernizing africa that has weathered the disastrous economic decline that followed. when i began the bulk of my fieldwork in 2011, ghana once again appeared to be on the rise. touted as one of africa’s “rising stars” and “lion economies” in the international press, the country had become part of the general narrative of an “africa rising.” today, it serves as an example for afro-optimists who point out that some african nations are experiencing marked socioeconomic progress. kofi annan (2013) has declared this “ghana’s second chance,” an echo of the expectations that characterized the independence period of the 1950s and 1960s. yet if ghana is indeed once again experiencing an age of optimism, this one is not a mere repetition of an earlier boom in hope for the future. young workers at the centre—research officers, laboratory technicians, interns—frequently made casual and ironic jokes about “african science.” they pointed out what was lacking in their laboratories and mocked the ways in which their workplaces appeared peculiar. at times they directed these comments toward me, or at least made them for my benefit, as if to demonstrate their awareness that science might be done differently elsewhere. at other times, however, these comments simply arose during the usual chatter that formed the humdrum experience of daily working life. this is the kind of talk that achille mbembe (2001, 1) calls “negative interpretation,” where african social life is described through what it is not. african society is therefore interpreted as a poor copy of, or marked by the absence of, modernity as it should be. the idea of africa as synonymous with lack is not just a feature of an orientalist discourse in europe or north america, but in fact structures the experience of social life for many africans themselves. this negative interpretation formed a normal part of daily experience at the centre, but it was always expressed in an offhand manner. it was an aside, an awkward companion that seemed to hang around scientific work, a sarcastic passenger on the voyage to national development. here, i give a fair shake to these throwaway comments and asides to consider what they might mean for the laboratory workers who express them. anthropologists have described this phenomenon elsewhere, noting instances when the discourses of (under)development and (a lack of) modernization are employed by peasant agriculturalists or laid-off mine workers (gupta 1998; ferguson 1999). by pointing to local inadequacies, these anthropologists argue, marginalized people thrust material inequality into focus. the sort of talk discussed in this article differs, however. precisely because of its apparent disjuncture with the image of an emergent ghana, the sense of frustration and disappointment i encountered at the centre illustrates a historical shift in scientific vocations in africa and in the identity politics of african professionals. african scientists have moved from seeing themselves and their work as part of the project of african science—where the building of scientific institutions, the training of african scientists, and the practice of scientific research are representative of the promises of african modernity—to instead seeing themselves as scientists working in the context of africa. the young professionals i worked with are living after african science. they are carrying out their studies and making sense of their professional lives in a time when the ideas that animated the vocation of science in the independence period no longer have purchase. independence and the emergence of african science the centre for scientific research into plant medicine was founded in the 1970s by dr. oku ampofo, a retired medical doctor. ampofo was a member of what ghanaians refer to as the “flag-bearer” generation who came of age under colonialism and went on to shape the nascent nation in the independence period. the product of the best schools on the gold coast, including mfantsipim and achimota teacher’s college, ampofo counted many of ghana’s future leaders among his classmates. these schools expected their graduates to constitute the first wave of the africanization of modern professions. they therefore fostered in their students a sense of pioneer leadership, as well as the comportment and propriety befitting their important position. after graduating from achimota, ampofo accepted a government scholarship to pursue medical school in scotland (osseo-asare 2014, 158; addae 1996, 279). under colonialism, becoming a medical doctor had represented the height of african achievement, but medicine was also one of the professions most resistant to racial integration. indeed, the government scholarships given to ampofo and his colleagues were meant to address a perceived racial bias in the gold coast medical establishment (patton 1996, 158). after several years abroad, ampofo returned to ghana in 1940 with a medical degree, expecting to take up work at a government hospital, but he was refused. instead of going to work in highly regarded government service, ampofo started a private clinic in his hometown of mampong. by all accounts, ampofo felt deeply spurned by his rejection from the ghanaian public health system, something he understood to be a result of colonial racism (osseo-asare 2014, 135). like that generation of medical doctors elsewhere on the continent (iliffe 1998, 60), ampofo and his cohort felt embittered by their subordinate status and unrewarding work conditions. while operating his private practice, ampofo became interested in traditional medicine. facing chronic drug shortages during the second world war, ampofo began to chronicle local herbalists’ knowledge about medicinal plants, recording his observations in copious notebooks that still form the basis of csrpm’s experimental research. after independence, kwame nkrumah supported ampofo’s activities. scientific research into herbal medicine fit the spirit of the age in the young, nonaligned nation of ghana, redirecting science to address human needs rather than cold war military goals. the coup that removed nkrumah from office marked an end to this period of idealism, but under the military rule of ignatius acheampong, ampofo was able to officially establish the centre for scientific research into plant medicine in mampong, identifying several local healers as his collaborators. at the same time, the world health organization (who) was beginning to valorize traditional medicine as a resource for global health provision, and many other such national research centers emerged around the world in the same decade (hayden 2003, 113–14). in 1980, csrpm became a who collaborating center for traditional medicine. the centre’s employees remember the establishment of the research center as a stubbornly defiant, even a revolutionary, anticolonial act in opposition to euro-centric biomedicine. it is recalled as a reaction to ampofo’s experience of racism and as an announcement of the arrival of modern african science. as abena dove osseo-asare explains, “ghana’s participation in global scientific activity was in itself a cause for rejoicing” (2014, 141). ampofo initially conceived of csrpm during the 1960s, the high watermark of faith in modernizing africa, when the state and its institutions were expected to guide transformative national development. in the end, africa would grow into a more significant global role. as james ferguson describes it, africa was expected to be on an inexorable path toward social, economic, and political “convergence,” in which “poor countries would overcome their poverty, share in the prosperity of the ‘developed’ world, and take their place as equals in a worldwide family of nations” (ferguson 2006, 177). at the same time, “the mood of the 1950s and 1960s, directed by the last colonial rulers and the first african ones, shifted toward opening a european conception of social order to people of all races” (cooper 2002, 89). ghana’s independence was particularly symbolic of these aspirations. nkrumah had been instrumental in organizing the 1945 pan-african congress, and under his leadership ghana became the first sub-saharan country to achieve independence, well ahead of the schedule anticipated by britain. it subsequently became a focal point for pan-africanist and anticolonial movements. the aspirations of an independent ghana represented the hopes that the world could be remade with the end of colonialism. ampofo’s activities carried the spirit of the time, eventually leading to the establishment of the centre for scientific research into plant medicine in 1975. the centre shared in what paul wenzel geissler (2011) has described as the “project” of mid-twentieth-century science in africa, in which science was able to evoke a sense of shared progress and a future imaginary. the centre was a project in this sense, something in progress toward a better, more democratic, and more dignified future. as stacey langwick (2011) and osseo-asare (2014) have shown, the scientific study and development of traditional medicine in africa were associated with decolonizing reforms following independence. the development of scientific institutions therefore constituted a major part of the symbolic arrival of african modernity, representing especially its intellectual dimensions. science was spectacularly modern. that it was focused on studying herbal medicine made it an especially potent marker of africa’s emergence on the global scientific scene, and of a reordering of the values and hierarchies of research. while historical, philosophical, and ethnographic studies have insisted on the plurality of the sciences (e.g., kellert, longino, and waters 2006), science as a signifying term still holds great sway, in this case indicating an even broader set of abstractions: the status of “modernity” in “africa.” in this spirit, ampofo presented himself both as a practitioner of modern science and as an embodiment of african modernity. a prominent sculptor and actor, he founded the gold coast arts council and acted in the groundbreaking 1952 colonial film the boy kumasenu. in that film, he played a medical doctor and sculptor who became a paternal figure to a wayward gold coast youth, figuratively sculpting the new nation (garritano 2013, 42). as a public figure, ampofo appeared to epitomize the modern african at a time when “the african doctor himself embodied progress, as the recipient of transferred technology” (kusiak 2010, 227). in this sense, he followed in the footsteps of africanus horton, a sierra leonean who was one of the first africans to obtain a medical degree nearly seventy years before ampofo. born as james beale, horton took on the name africanus to make explicit that he saw himself as evidence of what he called a “vindication of the african race” (fyfe 1993).2 both ampofo and horton regarded the person of the scientist as just as important as the work being done. ampofo, like horton, sought to embody african modernity as both a practitioner and a specimen of it. as a renaissance man, he represented an african modernity guided by western institutions but developing its own arts, cultures, and sciences. his identity as a black scientist formed an essential part of his efforts to reorient and reinvigorate modern institutions after decolonization. his most visible legacy was the centre for scientific research into plant medicine, a demonstration of the emergence of modern african science. decades later, introducing absence “this is not a modern lab,” ebenezer, a laboratory technician, told me by way of apology before we entered the pharmacology department. this was february 2011, thirty-six years after the centre’s founding. though these decades included some of ghana’s most turbulent, csrpm had grown and thrived. after a few years as its director, oku ampofo had stepped down because of his declining health. meanwhile, the who had provided the funds for the institution to move to its current location, a large building set against the hillside in mampong-akuapem, across the road from its previous home in a community center. by the time the centre officially opened its doors in 1975, ghana had already weathered two military coups and a traumatic devaluation of its currency. as the turbulent 1980s unfolded and the country touched bottom in its particular narrative of failure of the postcolonial developmental state, the centre expanded and professionalized its workforce, linking with local industry to become a regional leader in herbal medicine research. by the time i arrived, ghana was once again touted as an african success story. the 1992 constitution, the discovery in 2007 of offshore oil reserves, and the imminent attainment of world bank “middle-income” status prompted kofi annan (2013) to declare that ghana had been given a “second chance.” at the centre, i fell in with those my own age: the young laboratory technicians, research officers, and various interns and temporary visitors who did the bulk of the bench work. only some of these bore the title “researcher” that marked them as “scientists,” but all of them were making a vocation of the work of science, making a career and a life out of the opportunities it afforded. the technicians did much of the laboratories’ repetitive daily work. most of them had a degree from one of ghana’s three-year technical colleges, and they were often interested in furthering their schooling. research officers focused on long-term research projects, like producing phytochemical profiles for different parts of medicinal plants, or testing plants for safety and efficacy. many of them had bachelor’s degrees from the university of ghana, ghana’s top-tier institution of higher education. others had graduate degrees, or were graduate students. in addition, a number of other people worked at the centre for short periods. this included national service volunteers and students completing internships. many of them were graduates of a university program in herbal medicine, where i had also done research. all of them supported the centre’s mission and agreed that studying herbal medicine formed an important component of national development that must be done by ghanaians. however, apart from the interning herbal medicine graduates, the centre was staffed by people who identified with their particular disciplines more than with herbal medicine research as such. the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the original herbalists who collaborated with ampofo still found employment at the centre, but now in a number of modest administrative positions. once representative of one man’s intellectual and political project, the center now serves a diverse set of technical aims and individual goals increasingly detached from an independence-era ethos of pan-african pride. though the centre had expanded and improved since its founding, ebenezer nevertheless felt the need to prepare me for what i would and would not see as he introduced me to the laboratory. for ebenezer, the condition of the research bench, the age of the equipment, and the absence of hoped-for pieces of technology required an apology. this type of introduction pointing out material lack characterized my introduction to other laboratories at the centre as well. in phytochemistry, i was first told what the laboratory could not do, which was to elucidate molecular structures. “there is only one [nuclear magnetic resonance] machine in all of africa,” explained paul, a research officer. “it is in south africa.” in the medical laboratory i was quickly told not to understand the laboratory in terms of what i was seeing. it would all soon change. there was a plan to remodel the lab, nana told me, and if i returned in a year i would see a new bench and a number of new pieces of equipment. it will be “more modern,” he assured me. in each case, the laboratory was presented through its differences from other laboratories, and my understanding of the laboratory was deferred to other places stocked with better equipment. the anthropologist claire wendland similarly describes the sense among malawian medical students that “real medicine was what happened elsewhere,” and that malawian medicine was “somehow less than real, or second-rate” (wendland 2010, 135). this sense of being out of step with laboratories elsewhere made the centre, as ebenezer pointed out, “not modern.” at least not completely. i became accustomed to hearing about the lack of technology at kwame nkrumah university of science and technology (knust), the university where i did fieldwork for one semester. there were useful pieces of technology in the teaching labs at knust, but the state of much of the older equipment and infrastructure significantly affected the ability to successfully execute practical lab assignments. during the week in which we were supposed to perform what the faculty characterized as the two most important laboratory procedures we would learn, we were unable to do the experiments. after failing to complete the first assignment because of a faulty oven, we were thwarted in our attempts to complete the second when the campus experienced a power outage. we all went home with a poor understanding of how these procedures would have been done had we had electricity and a functioning oven. the following week, when it became clear that the results of the group lab experiment would again be inaccurate, ernest approached the blackboard and wrote what many seemed to be thinking: “i hate lab.” at the same time that students were grappling with the infrastructural limitations of their university, they were acutely aware of a relative abundance of technology abroad. two young faculty members had recently returned from a ten-week program at the massachusetts institute of technology. standing in front of the posters detailing the program and the research they had accomplished while there, patience pointed to a photo showing the two faculty members inspecting banks of computers with multiple monitors. “that is where the real difference is,” patience said. “if we had all this equipment here we could do a lot more.” patience described specific research methods—x-ray fluorescence, for example—that they learned about in class but would not be able to do in ghana. when i asked one first-year student who was telling me about his applications to u.s. universities why he was so determined to leave ghana, he described the lack that characterized his experience of campus. “we have a pharmaceutical chemistry lab,” he said with a plaintive look on his face. “you go in there and there’s nothing there.” “there’s nothing here,” echoed a researcher at csrpm, explaining why he wanted to leave ghana. “i could accomplish in two years in the u.s. what it would take me five years to accomplish in ghana.” samuel was young, smart, and well educated, all of which he saw as a curse. “it’s a curse to have a good idea in ghana,” he declared, “because you know you will take it to your grave.” indeed, many young scientists questioned the viability of their careers in ghana, and leaving the country was the most common reason for dropping out of the herbal medicine program at knust. while many ghanaians have recently returned to ghana after living abroad (frequently, it seems, to open one of the many scientific herbal clinics popular in the country), formally trained scientists who seek public-sector employment often feel that they are better off leaving. samuel pointed to a number of real and practical challenges in his department—no running water, an unpredictable electric supply, a lack of consumables—that he said made it “not a standard laboratory.” to him, this was the same as saying “there’s nothing here.” he could have compared the laboratories to other research centers in ghana with relatively better equipment, but in his explanation he specifically mentioned the united states. to do work as he felt it was meant to be done he had to leave the country. during my four months as an intern at the centre, i continued to observe various visitors being taken on lab tours. one day after we had straightened up the medical laboratory in preparation for a government inspection, efua, an interning graduate of the herbal medicine program, gave her appraisal of the events to come: “if this was a private institution, they would just close it down.” when i asked her to elaborate, she explained that the lab was “not up to standard.” she continued, “there’s no running water, which is really bad. the place is dirty and there should be a different place for handling the [blood and urine] samples. because it’s a government institution, they will just give them a warning, but this place is so bad!” during a tour of the centre by a group of nursing students, mr. ahorlu, a research officer in his forties, pointed out the two fume hoods in the laboratory. these are essentially large boxes with ventilation to blow the fumes up and out of the building, providing a safe space to work with reagents. mr. ahorlu pointed out that the one on the right, identical in all respects to the one on the left, had been built here in ghana, reverse-engineered from the original that had been imported from abroad. “this one was brought from denmark,” he said pointing to the one on the left. “and this one was made in ghana. but unfortunately,” mr. ahorlu decided to explain, “there is a problem with the fan, so we are no more using that one.” the nursing students whispered to each other. one male student in the back asked knowingly, “the ghana one?” everyone laughed. one person took a picture. the condition of laboratory science was furthermore felt as a temporal lag. noémi tousignant (2013) describes the tempo of waiting in a contemporary senegalese university laboratory, and the nostalgia for science that “fills up time” and signifies progress. laboratory workers at the centre characterized the present period as having a productive tempo, where more and better work was done than in the past, but this did not necessarily imply satisfactory progress. “by this time” was a common phrase used to discuss the state of science and technology in ghana, as when an intern named isaac said to me, “by this time, we should have gone much further.” it refers to lateness, as in, “by this time of the day, the traffic will be bad.” according to isaac, the centre should have progressed to more sophisticated types of research not currently available. another time, as i was telling ebenezer how impressed i had been with the nearby noguchi memorial medical research institute, he responded, “yes, that is a modern lab. this lab is 1957.” the apparent lack of progress made ebenezer feel that he might as well be working in the year of ghana’s independence. at times, i sensed a grim satisfaction in pointing out these inadequacies that came from a world-weary expectation of disappointment. during a visit by a chemistry class from the university of ghana, the lecturer leading the group asked laboratory workers whether they identified contaminating organisms. a woman working in the lab responded that while the identification of organisms would be ideal, it would drive up the cost of the tests, for which there was no money. the lecturer grinned and repeated to the students, “do you hear that? they should identify the organism, but because of what they can pay.” later, when the lecturer learned that the students practiced mouth pipetting in their classes rather than using the auto-pipettes available at the centre, the smile returned to her face. “this is how they do it in the developed world.” there was a certain sense of pleasure at finding technological disparities mapped onto geopolitical inequality. in discourse about the continent, africa “stands out as the supreme receptacle of the west’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being’” (mbembe 2001, 4). yet this is not only true for an interlocking set of representations about africa but also for the material realities, the experience of social life lived with the symbolic weight of being asked to represent what it means to be african. herbal medicine researchers were asked to imagine their practices as being the essence of modern africa. because of this, they felt that their realities came up short. the absence of certain pieces of equipment and infrastructure constituted a palpable presence, a constant reminder of an unfinished modernization. ghanaian laboratories were therefore defined through what they did not have, and they appeared as obstacles to careers in science that might flourish elsewhere. modern talk these laboratories were of course engaged in an eminently modern enterprise. the people making these statements were practitioners of modern science, investigating medicines as part of a modern state bureaucracy that regulates local medical markets. there is no absence of modernity here, in the analytical sense used by contemporary social science. rather, ebenezer was clearly using modern in a different way. “modernity,” as jean and john comaroff point out, is notoriously difficult to locate. it is “a (more-or-less) pliable sign,” that “attracts different referents, and different values, wherever it happens to land” (comaroff and comaroff 1993, xiii). being “at large” (appadurai 1996) and seeming to define everything everywhere in contemporary times, “modernity” lacks analytic precision. cooper (2005) suggests that it is important to specify what concept of modernity is being mobilized when the term is salient to empirical explanation. in contemporary africa, and elsewhere in the so-called developing world, the concept of modernity has been indelibly linked with the sort of modernization theory that characterized postwar social science (ferguson 1999). there, the concept of modernity as inevitable telos has faltered, but modernity continues to be the benchmark of social standing. modernity has therefore come to signify status, being of the social stratum that enjoys material wealth and recognition (ferguson 2006). as the comaroffs clarify, “it is not that people in the global south ‘lack modernity’” in the sense used by contemporary social theory. it is that “many of them are deprived of the bounty of modernization” (comaroff and comaroff 2012, 11). those who work in the centre’s laboratories understand the poor state of science in ghana as representative of ghana’s position in a hierarchical world. saying that a laboratory, one of modernity’s most emblematic signs, is “not modern” is therefore to claim a specific instance of material inequality. it puts the laboratories of the centre on a common plane of comparison with laboratories elsewhere, just as patience did when he pointed to the poster and said, “this is where the real difference is.” it draws attention to obstacles in the way of producing relevant facts, advancing careers, and being recognized as a colleague on par with researchers elsewhere. it is an act of pointing to imbalances in the means of attaining dignity, worth, and influence. the material conditions of the laboratory provided an obvious and accessible means for making this comparison. as brian larkin (2008) has argued for nigeria, material infrastructure often forms the ground for political claims. by pointing to a piece of broken infrastructure, a citizen has the ability to mark a specific instance of disjuncture between how it should and does function. at the centre, material infrastructure provided the basis for claims to greater global equality and justice. young laboratory workers used the material infrastructure of the laboratory to make claims about the conditions of their work. in this sense, the cynical remarks i observed at the centre do not signify the death of the postcolonial modernist project carried out by ampofo and his compatriots, but rather its continuing resonance. when the young laboratory workers pointed out the lack of specific machines, or maligned the malfunctioning technology and said that it was “not modern,” they were measuring their surroundings, at times explicitly, by the promises and aspirations of the 1950s and 1960s. judged by the expectations of that period, their workplace had come up short. this type of dissatisfaction and comparison to other places is not limited to ghana’s laboratories. i have heard ghanaians make similar comments lamenting the state of many things in their country. malfunctioning street lights, potholes, or commercial trucks driving through city centers can provoke negative comparisons between ghana and the countries of europe and north america. by focusing on the laboratory, however, the discourse of local inadequacy attached itself to a powerful symbol of postcolonial africa. similarly, these comments may not have been voiced in the same way had i been in a clinical setting, as recent africanist ethnographies have shown. jokes in those contexts often serve palliative functions (livingston 2012), and medical students speak of having the “heart” to keep going (wendland 2010). similar kinds of narratives circulated at the centre, especially among the young interns with more clinical interests, but these were less frequently voiced than the expressions of exasperated disappointment described here. the centre was meant to be both spectacularly modern and obstinately african. for ampofo’s generation, an african identity was critical to the hope and expectation invested in modernity. identity was a core component of the project of african science. when ampofo established csrpm, he was thumbing his nose at all those who did not respect african knowledge and capability, and his science thrust a modern africa into global awareness. ampofo’s generation invested the status of africa in its signs of modernity, but those material signs had worn out and broken down. the test tubes and white lab coats that had once represented hope and pride had grown torn and dirty. when smart and capable scientists sat in a room meant to embody a world-historical change and found that the lights would not turn on, sometimes all they could do was laugh. if today modernity is a disappointment, then this reflects on the status of africa as well: “africa” as a sign, as a focus of hopes and aspirations, and as a beacon around which to organize an identity, has suffered from the disappointments of its postcolonial history. ironic africa during my time at csrpm, those employed there frequently expressed the idea of an “african science,” always in the ironic sense described in the opening vignette. in the pharmacology lab, a national service volunteer named gifty asked others if, for want of a proper container, she should be weighing samples on the lid of the jar in which they were stored. “african technology,” one of the lab technicians chuckled. on a different day, i was trying to pour fehling’s solution “a” from a large bottle into a small test tube without a funnel, tilting the bottle very carefully to avoid spillage. osei, a national service volunteer, laughed at me and said, “this is the indigenous way!” eventually these jokes started to come out like second nature. struggling with an apparently faulty microscope to examine some blood samples for malaria parasites, an intern, george, sighed, “oh, africa.” barely looking up from her book, efua responded with an overtone of melodrama, “cry, the beloved country!”3 the research center was usually described as “african” in relation to a lack of common and necessary items. for example, when the director of one laboratory pointed out that they depend on supplies brought by collaborating partners, he glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and said, “it is only damien who came empty handed.” after the laughter subsided, efua chimed in, “africa and charity. they go together.” positive and empowering uses of the adjective african were largely absent. i did not hear a valorization of african ingenuity or creativity, or a celebration of improvisation. an obvious class dimension clung to this banter. “when i was in school at university,” said samuel, “there was this course, ‘appropriate technology for rural development.’ so you improvise everything.” samuel started laughing: “that is what we are doing here! we more or less improvise everything.” for samuel, a research officer and a graduate of ghana’s top public university, improvisation in the face of material lack was something he had learned about in sociology class as a thing rural people had to do. he could not help but laugh to find himself in that very position, improvising just like the subjects of his readings. the obstacles that laboratory workers encountered were real and troubling. one morning, a powerful chemical smell suddenly pervaded one of the laboratories. a technician and i only fully appreciated the seriousness of the situation when we realized that the fumes had made us too dizzy to do an interview. those of us working in that lab searched with great frustration for the source of the smell until isaac discovered that someone had poured reagents down a nonfunctioning sink. they had pooled in the plumbing and had begun dripping onto the floor. some of the laboratory technicians had breathed these fumes for hours before the mess was thoroughly cleaned. after they began feeling pain in their lungs, the centre’s resident medical doctor escorted them to a nearby hospital for evaluation. when one researcher was questioned about the spill, he grew defensive and insisted that he had been to japan and knew proper laboratory procedures. he knew that how they disposed of reagents at the centre (by pouring them into the bush) was wrong, and he certainly would not pour them down the sink. even the laboratory animals did not seem quite right. the centre purchased sprague dawley rats from the noguchi memorial medical research institute in accra, where they had a breeding program. the centre did not, however, have access to transgenic rats that were born with high blood pressure or diabetes, so they had to induce these chronic conditions. when he told me about rat models born with diabetes, ebenezer remarked, “your people have done incredible things.” the rats that lived and died in the pharmacology department carried geographical referents, it seemed, and the ones in the lab were not quite as incredible as others might be. time and again, the way the rats were handled was referred to as peculiarly african. researchers mentioned the rights of animals that held true outside of africa, but that were suspended in african research centers. eunice in particular had qualms about the ways the animals were used. one day while explaining how to do a peridermal injection, she paused midsentence and grimaced. “the animal rights people. … but this is africa, so we don’t have to worry about them.” during a “sacrifice,” eunice laughed uncomfortably and said, “i’m glad none of the animal rights people are in here.” indeed, the worry about the seemingly imminent arrival of animal rights activists was discussed by the director of the centre (“the animal rights people are coming to africa!”), as well as by professors at knust. that there was neither an animal oversight board at these institutions nor a national body to regulate the use of laboratory animals in ghana was considered both a significant ethical issue in its own right and a worrisome opening for judgment by others. these pervasive negative comments were cast in the terms of modernization and development, but they were counter-discursive as well: they contested the interpretive frame of afro-optimism for which ghana has become an important site of reference. if afro-optimism focuses on hope deferred to the future, and emphasizes modest innovation, improvisation, and making do, then the negative interpretations offered by the employees of csrpm insisted on maintaining global inequality as the relevant frame of reference. at times, the centre’s employees noted that ghana was doing well compared to other african nations and pointed out that the centre was the only one of its kind in the region. when i was introduced to the production department, the medical herbalist interns with whom i was given a tour were not satisfied. efua asked where they did quality-control testing, to which kofi, the gregarious production manager, responded that they did it in the phytochemistry and pharmacology departments. they should have their own quality control laboratory, but “this is ghana,” said kofi. “you shouldn’t say that!” responded efua. “oh, come on,” said kofi. “this is sub-saharan africa. you know sub-saharan africa? it’s a big, big place, and is the poorest region in the world. so we just don’t have the cash for that.” kofi paused and reconsidered, noting the reputation for a special status that ghana had developed in the past decade or two. “ok, ghana, we are a bit of an exception. in west africa there is no other place like this where they are producing in this way, and producing medical herbalists in the universities and all those things. we are teaching ethiopia to produce like we are, to set up something in the same way that we have it here. but still.” while during the independence era ghana’s signs of modernity were indicative of the new africa, kofi’s assessment of the good work done in ghana did not embrace the “africa rising” narrative. instead, he disavowed african identity and african cultural nationalism as central to new development projects. something similar was evident when jacob zuma recently advised south africans not to “think like africans in africa” and to pay their road tolls. “ghana” is a marker of progress and hope, but this despite a set of generically african problems that it must overcome. ghana is an “exception.” but still. these jokes about african particularity circulated outside the laboratory as well, in reference to all sorts of things. “african office” and “african time” each referred to things seen as comically proper to africa. more broadly, jokes about “local” or “indigenous” forms of common practices were also frequent. a typical example occurred when an herbal medicine student, abdulai, invited me to share a seat with him by patting the chair and saying, “damien, sit small.” the use of west african pidgin mirrored an improper or undignified use of the chair. things signaled as “african” were localized, parochial, and embarrassingly out of step. afro-engineering referred to making do with locally available materials, like using smooth river stones instead of antibumping granules in a dean-stark apparatus. (when a taxi driver rolled up the windows of his car by touching two wires together, he said to me, “afro-engineering!”) the phrase african electronics referred to a joke about witchcraft that circulated during my fieldwork. in some ways, the sort of humor apparent at the centre is typical of the jokes characterizing public institutions anywhere (“good enough for government work”). dissatisfaction with institutional processes and the resources available to employees is certainly not restricted to ghanaian places of employment. jokes about technological lag and the incompetence of national leaders circulate in many different contexts (i have heard the same political joke attributed to soviet russia, fascist portugal, and postcolonial namibia). yet in the laboratories of ghana during its twenty-first-century ascent, these jokes marked a transition in the identity politics of modern professions. i want to draw attention to the object of these jokes in the lab: the things that drew the signifier african. when researchers repeatedly made jokes about doing science in africa, they focused their scrutiny on the state of the equipment and the reliability of the processes. what made science “african science” was tied to infrastructural, material, and technological particularities of place, especially its shoddy quality, not to the scientist. when “africa” stood for a cheaper, improvised, or else degraded version of whatever was being described, the state of the equipment or the improvised research processes were the objects of this sardonic scrutiny. what was african here seemed to have little to do with professional identities or research priorities (as it would have done for ampofo’s generation), but rather with the rusting, malfunctioning equipment and the locally specific ways of managing it. putting africa in its place africa as a discursive category became the subject of jokes because it seemed to crystalize diverse aspects of the work environment that were disappointing. yet the people making these jokes were not universally or consistently cynical about all things african. rather, what makes jokes about africa funny is the disjuncture between the expected and the actual referent. africa, like modernity, continues to be the ground for certain hopes and aspirations, which is why these jokes resonated. certainly, they would not have been funny had everyone been pervasively pessimistic about africa, nor would they if a non-african had made these jokes. the continuing attachment of the signifier africa to a project, to a call for progress and improvement, allowed for the humor. if these africa jokes indicated that the project of african identity is still alive in some sense, they also signaled that it had been transformed since ampofo’s time. while a generation of african scientists worked on the project of developing national and pan-african scientific institutions and professional identities to which they could belong, young researchers today work to disentangle themselves from them. they mark off certain things with which they are dissatisfied—the context in which they work—as disappointingly african while positioning themselves as world-class scientists managing in frustrating circumstances. the adjective african as it pertains to science has to do with a lack of equipment and chipped test tubes rather than with a romantic identity to which researchers necessarily belong. james ferguson describes a similar scenario from his fieldwork in the zambian copperbelt during a period of dramatic economic decline. young cosmopolitan men called lambwaza referred to the staple cornmeal food of nshima as “culture,” thereby displaying their own distance from the particular scenario that they found themselves in, which was classically “traditional” in a way dissatisfying to them (ferguson 1999, 223). they were consuming “culture,” but that was not what they were all about. scientists in twenty-first-century ghana are dealing with the conditions of doing research in africa, but that does not define them. in both cases, irony mediates identity, creating distance from that which is at odds with a desired presentation of self. the ability to craft a professional scientific identity not easily summed up in the phrase african scientist had important consequences. during my fieldwork, csrpm was involved in a research collaboration with a university in japan, which provided some state-of-the-art equipment. typical of the interplay of inclusion and exclusion that characterizes the “archipelago” (geissler 2014) geography of medical research in twenty-first-century africa, these new and expensive pieces of equipment could only be used by one of the three employees of the centre who were directly employed by the project. the equipment, off limits to most employees, therefore retained more than simply a sense of its foreign associations. each item had a sticker that said either “japan international cooperation agency” or simply “japan.” the laboratory had nonfunctioning sinks, chipped test tubes, and chemical spills. it also had top-of-the-line equipment that was literally labeled as belonging to another place. the japanese associations of the collaborative project and the equipment that came along with it were magnified by the project employees’ travels to japan. one at a time, each of the three participants traveled to japan for several weeks. their ability to utilize the equipment that other employees coveted, as well as the experiences of japan that they conveyed to others, marked a connection between the ability to leave ghana and the ability to have and use necessary equipment. the exclusive availability of this markedly foreign technology underlined the dual ability of the laboratory to offer researchers “chances for inclusion and scientific opportunity even as it threatens to marginalize them” (crane 2013, 107). furthermore, this travel abroad constituted a personal milestone. when gilbert returned from his trip to japan, he had cut his hair, grown a beard, lost weight, and bought all new clothes. with his new look, his new skills, and his research reports in hand, gilbert cut the impression of a new man. eunice kept repeating, “jica has made you!” she pointed out the nice apartment they had lived in, the new skills they had gained, and the self-rewarding experience of travel. she concluded, “you need to thank them for all they have done for you.” gilbert and michael, another young researcher who had gone to japan, responded quickly that they did not owe anything to anyone. were they not employees? were employees not expected to receive training and benefits? did not foreigners who came to ghana to work also live in company apartments? gilbert and michael insisted that they were not beholden to anyone. it is hardly a radical move to suggest that you have earned what your employer has given you, but it formed part of the creation of a more individualized professional identity. their identities as ghanaians engaged by a japanese enterprise was temporarily dissolved. they became upwardly mobile, professional-class employees on a global market who enjoyed the benefits of employment in a well-respected enterprise. for gilbert and michael this was a necessary move, one based on a sense of human dignity. they had shaped professional identities quite different from those of ampofo’s day, but ones equally attuned to the attainment of status and dignity on a global stage. conclusion young researchers at the centre for scientific research into plant medicine, those aspiring middle-class ghanaian professionals at the heart of new narratives of afro-optimism, express what achille mbembe (2001, 1) calls a “negative interpretation,” in which social life is understood primarily in the ways in which it differs from an assumed western standard. what seemed to be the most relevant aspect of life in ghana’s laboratories for those who worked there were the absences that appeared to characterize these workplaces. following mbembe, i have considered how this discourse forms a significant part of social life. the negative interpretation evident in young researchers’ casual discourse at the centre recalls an earlier generation of african scientists and their era’s approach to science as a manifestation of african nationalism. scientists of the independence period constructed the scientific and medical infrastructure of ghana to provide for the needs of their people, as well as to represent the status of the african nation of ghana to the world. the researchers, technicians, and interns with whom i spent time are working in the shadow of a narrative of an emergent postcolonial science that never arrived—and yet which still acts as a benchmark, and is still a foil for defining their place in the world. scientists working on herbal medicine research continue to use the symbolic resources of an earlier era in postcolonial ghanaian history, but this time to articulate a new way of presenting themselves, as global scientists not contained by the label african. they mock the idea of “african” science, and in so doing disentangle their identities from its project. for these young researchers today, african refers primarily to things in their environment, the trappings of a class identity to which they do not belong. that they made these jokes and bitter comments during a period of optimism and economic growth suggests that the identity politics of african professionals have undergone a shift not tied in a simple way to the political and economic status of the nation. if ghana is indeed experiencing its second chance, a historical echo of the optimism of the independence era, then the discourse of lack, absence, and peculiarity highlights both continuities and disjunctures with this earlier period. in pointing out lack and absence, in expressing a negative interpretation that always hung around even where it seemed the least welcome, the students, researchers, and technicians working in ghanaian laboratories are reiterating a demand for the promises of modernization. yet this time they will not be satisfied by a rosy emphasis on hope, or an inspirational tale of making do, or some deferred promise of an emergent africa. they still think of scientific institutions as representing national achievement, and that national achievement reflects on the status of africa. yet they no longer wish to base their professional identities on the politics of representation. modernity and africa remain concepts around which to organize hope and a desire for progress, but they are decoupled from individual aspirations and careers except when these happen to overlap with narratives of national development. if contemporary afro-optimism, like the independence era discourses before it, places the middle-class ghanaian professional at the heart of its narrative of an emerging africa, then the difference today is that those young professionals do not want to stand as symbols of a hope deferred. they want the best careers they can achieve—in ghana or elsewhere. notes acknowledgments thank you to the employees and interns of the centre for scientific research into plant medicine, mampong, as well as to the students and faculty of the herbal medicine department at the kwame nkrumah university of science and technology. i hope they feel that i have done justice to the sentiments they shared with me. various excerpts and iterations of this article were greatly improved after readings from tanya luhrmann, james ferguson, lochlann jain, sylvia yanagisako, jennifer blaylock, mark gardiner, patrick gallagher, lisa poggiali, aisha ghani, marissa mika, erin pettigrew, lauren adrover, the editors of cultural anthropology, and two anonymous reviewers. thank you as well to audiences at the 2013 american anthropological association meeting in chicago and the “is there a new development?” conference at the university of california, berkeley, including abena dove osseo-asare. 1. i interned part-time at the research laboratories of the centre for scientific research into plant medicine from january to march 2011, and then full-time from january to april 2012. this article also draws on an additional four months of ethnographic research at the herbal medicine department of the kwame nkrumah university of science and technology, as well as seven months of research in and around accra. 2. this is the subtitle of one of horton’s publications, west african peoples, british and native: and a vindication of the african race (2011 [1868]). 3. cry the beloved country is a 1948 novel by alan patton that describes the structural injustices of south african society. references addae, stephen 1997 the evolution of modern medicine in a developing country: ghana 1880–1960. bishop auckland: durham academic press. annan, kofi 2013 “ghana’s second chance.” daily graphic, june 28. appadurai, arjun 1996 modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. comaroff, jean, and john l. comaroff 1993 introduction to modernity and its malcontents: ritual and power in postcolonial africa, edited by jean comaroff and john l. comaroff, xi–xxxvii. chicago: university of chicago press. 2012 theory from the south: or, how euro-america is evolving toward africa. boulder, colo.: paradigm publishers. cooper, frederick 2002 africa since 1940: the past of the present. cambridge: cambridge university press. 2005 colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history. berkeley: university of california press. crane, johanna tayloe 2013 scrambling for africa: aids, expertise, and the rise of american global health science. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. ferguson, james 1999 expectations of modernity: myths and meaning of urban life on the zambian copperbelt. berkeley: university of california press. 2006 global shadows: africa in the neoliberal world order. durham, n.c.: duke university press. fyfe, christopher 1972 africanus horton, 1835–1883: west african scientist and patriot. oxford: oxford university press. garritano, carmela 2013 african video movies and global desire: a ghanaian history. columbus: ohio university press. geissler, paul wenzel 2011 “parasite lost: remembering modern times with kenyan government medical scientists.” in evidence, ethos and experiment: the anthropology and history of medical research in africa, edited by paul wenzel geissler and catherine molyneux, 297–332. oxford: berghahn books. 2014 “the archipelago of public health: comments on the landscape of medical research in twenty-first century africa.” in making and unmaking public health in africa: ethnographic and historical perspectives, edited by ruth j. prince and rebecca marsland, 231–56. athens: ohio university press. gupta, akhil 1998 postcolonial developments: agriculture in the making of modern india. durham, n.c.: duke university press. hayden, cori 2003 when nature goes public: the making and unmaking of bioprospecting in mexico. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. horton, james africanus beale 2011 west african countries and peoples, british and native: and a vindication of the african race. cambridge: cambridge university press. first published in 1868. iliffe, john 1998 east african doctors: a history of the modern profession. cambridge: cambridge university press. kellert, stephen h., helen e. longino, and c. kenneth waters, eds. 2006 scientific pluralism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. kusiak, pauline 2010 “‘tubab’ technologies and ‘african’ ways of knowing: nationalist technopolitics in senegal.” history and technology: an international journal 26, no. 3: 225–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2010.498638. langwick, stacey 2011 bodies, politics, and african healing: the matter of maladies in tanzania. bloomington: indiana university press. larkin, brian 2008 signal and noise: media, infrastructure, and urban culture in nigeria. durham, n.c.: duke university press. livingston, julie 2012 improvising medicine: an african oncology ward in an emerging cancer epidemic. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mbembe, achille 2001 on the postcolony. berkeley: university of california press. osseo-asare, abena dove 2014 bitter roots: the search for healing plants in africa. chicago: university of chicago press. paton, alan 1948 cry, the beloved country. new york: scribners. patton, adell, jr. 1996 physicians, colonial racism, and diaspora in west africa. gainesville: university press of florida. tousignant, noémi 2013 “broken tempos: of means and memory in a senegalese university laboratory.” social studies of science 43, no. 5: 729–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306312713482187. wendland, claire l. 2010 a heart for the work: journeys through an african medical school. chicago: university of chicago press. indirect activism indirect activism: graffiti and political possibility in athens, greece othon alexandrakis york university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1993-907x when considering resistance or political responsiveness to neoliberal governmentality, researchers often focus on efforts that push directly against the compromise of well-being, precaritization, and abjection. in this essay, however, i consider another mode of responsiveness, attuned more directly to the politics of neoliberal regulation, especially the effacement of agonism and critique that underpins advanced capitalist power. by examining the formation of resistant subjectivities among a group of young graffiti writers in athens and the activities they undertake in response to changes that threaten to restrict or undermine the social imprint they might have on everyday life, i sketch an understanding of resistance and the making of political possibility in terms of indirect connections between diverse groups, multiple interests, fears, and the reverberations these produce across political realms and scales. a case in point: thomas reached up, shook the can of spray paint in his hand sharply, and released a blast of purple. he put the can down, grabbed black, and reached up the wall again. thomas and his friends, aris and tassos, were working on a complex mural at the entrance to an alleyway near a busy intersection in athens. i had come along to observe. my interlocutors were painting the side of an old apartment low-rise—one of many buildings hastily repaired in the lead-up to the 2004 olympic games that were now, a mere four years later, crumbling once again. thomas used the handle of a screwdriver to enlarge a section of broken plaster, which he then shaded with black and gray. aris contributed a figure of a municipal worker texting on a phone with one hand and blindly hammering on the wall with the other. tassos painted an ornate frame around the piece. he explained: “this is something different. people have to think.” indeed, as i watched the frame take shape, i began to think about the piece’s relationship to its context: a run-down neighborhood in which two of every three storefronts were shuttered, where dumpsters were surrounded by opened garbage bags picked clean of salvageable contents, where local residents complained about exhaustion and the mounting uncertainties in their lives. the piece seemed unnecessary to me, and perhaps even a touch cruel in this neighborhood; thomas and his friends had further broken a crumbling wall to put up a piece that did little more than evoke a familiar narrative of injury caused by state ineptitude. then it struck me that the graffiti crew had offered a mocking view of the state, while telling a local story in a way that prompted viewers to reflect on the situation. taken this way, the graffiti was as much about the troubling familiarity of broken plaster on the ground as it was about the little absent-minded figure in the frame. this scene took place in the months leading up to 2010, when the greek state declared sovereign debt crisis and began to implement an aggressive austerity program in exchange for economic aid from the european union (eu), the european central bank (ecb), and the international monetary fund (imf). during the coming years, successive governments dismantled public services and oversaw a series of salary and pension reductions, increased taxes, and layoffs that resulted in sudden mass impoverishment. the greek middle class was devastated and the lower class came to struggle further, while the so-called reforms protected financial institutions. this was also a period in which the athenian cityscape became covered with graffiti. the usual tags and anarchist symbols (the encircled “a”) proliferated, but commissioned works and other, more skillfully rendered murals and pieces put up by independent graffiti writers and crews also increased. among these latter works a new form of graffiti emerged, one that expressed a critique of neoliberal governmentality but also engaged with such troubling trends as increasing violence against migrants and other groups, working for little to no wages at barely viable businesses, and the abandoning of the elderly. in other words, this graffiti communicated a demand for a better life while holding a mirror to the mainstream public. here i consider this form of graffiti—a public manifestation of dissent and reflection—as one mode of political response to the material and symbolic violence of what is arguably among the most coercive exercises of neoliberal governmentality, at least in the developed regions of the world. it constitutes a response distinctive of, if not confined to, individuals on the periphery of the social mainstream. during the past six years, it has become part of a thriving ecology of resistance that also includes traditional organized protests, experimental solidarity movements, and everyday acts of camaraderie. even as other champions of resistance express dissent directly or offer disruptive alternatives to neoliberal regulation, the artists of the graffiti on which i focus encourage critique and agonism even as they seek to shore up the social fabric that precaritization threatens to undo. figure 1. a young migrant man digs through an open garbage bin. the graffiti behind him depicts a drug-addicted woman with sunken eyes and cheeks and blood flowing from her lips. the caption (mostly obscured) reads: “this year, stay far from the sea! it will be a difficult year. seal lips.” this piece alludes to the arrival of migrants by sea, and was described by one resident as a comment on greece’s multiple “moral crises.” photo by othon alexandrakis. tracing the activities of a group of three graffiti artists in athens, both before and during the years of the crisis, this article analyzes the role of street art as a mode of political resistance and as an illumination of, or at least the provocation to consider concrete alternatives to, the politico-economic present. addressing the fear of abjection and the experience of existing at the social margins as a stimulus to critical agency, i consider the graffiti my interlocutors write as indirect activism. put simply, it is the manifestation of a mode of resistance whose critical agents attempt to bring about their ambitions and visions by activating other groups to undertake resistance of their own. my interlocutors aimed to preserve a desirable state of difference from the social mainstream, even as they sought to encourage the mainstream to resist the forces of precaritization that threatened to reduce all middleand lower-class athenians to individuated, economized, and thus disposable subjects. none of the crew thought that his graffiti directly related to collective action on the ground (cf. graeber 2009; juris 2008). rather, the sense of possibility i trace in this article has to do with the writers’ conviction that graffiti sustain the potential to bolster critical reasoning and thereby lessen the capacity of neoliberal governmentality to manufacture consent to policies that worsen their lives. i begin in the 1990s and with the intensification of generational conflict between my interlocutors and their parents, which accompanied the slow collapse of greece’s economy at the time. this conflict, combined with their political disenfranchisement and the closing off of a desired future, intensified among my interlocutors a sense of their isolation and abandonment on multiple fronts. as the neoliberal reform agenda began to change athenian lives in 2010, my interlocutors began to fear that they were, once again, being abandoned. this time, however, they understood abandonment as an effect of their becoming integrated into an economized social mainstream—a threat they articulated in terms of becoming ordinary (kanonikós) or lost in the crowd (omalós). in response to these fears, they undertook a campaign of graffiti writing. with this intervention they did not seek to contextualize what was happening, plot solutions, or place blame (knight 2015; theodossopoulos 2013). rather, they wrote graffiti to awaken the broader mainstream population to what they understood as the normative forces structuring the process of becoming precarious. i conducted fieldwork for this project on and off between 2007 (when i was doing research for my dissertation) and 2015. i have changed the names of my interlocutors in this article and avoided references to the exact locations within and around athens where these individuals live and write graffiti. in addition, except for the final image in this article, the graffiti that appears here is not the work of my interlocutors. at the request of my interlocutors i have not included their graffiti, since doing so would expose their identity within certain circles. crisis and critique thinking with janet roitman (2014) that crisis is an apparatus of power and knowledge, i want to offer an approach to understanding the emergence of critical subjectivities and political responsiveness among young athenian graffiti writers. roitman explains that one of the normative impulses of neoliberal regimes is to depoliticize crisis, that is, to efface agonism, critique, and ultimately, dissent. indeed, in 2010 the greek state deployed a crisis narrative along with neoliberal austerity policy, effectively reducing political discourse to concerns with economic management and focusing political action on safeguarding the pervasive functions of the market. yet as athenians began to suffer austerity-driven injuries such as poverty, growing shame, and deepening demoralization, innovative if sometimes unconventional resistance actions such as alternative economies, solidarity collectives, and barter networks (rakopoulos 2014) began to proliferate. far from effecting a total inactivation and depletion of agency, sites of intense precaritization also became sites of mobilization and the politicization of shared suffering (roitman 2014, 12). my interlocutors were also motivated to act as precaritization began to change their lives. the action they came to pursue, however, had less to do with the mobilization of shared suffering and more with the fear of becoming interpolated into a mainstream of suffering others: rather than collectivize, they sought to maintain what they felt was good in their lives. michel foucault’s (1997) thinking on critique, specifically his emphasis on the subject’s own critical agency in constituting her or his subjectivity through acts of resistance, provides a useful framework as we examine my interlocutors’ perspectives and eventual actions in response to precaritization. in a 1978 lecture at the french society of philosophy, foucault argued that the norms governing knowledge, morality (legality), and aesthetic experience (pleasure and desire) are transgressible by subjects who experience crisis within the epistemological field in which they live. these subjects—individuals whose lives have become disorganized or unintelligible or who, we might say, are unable to produce meaningful explanations based on established truths—find themselves in a position (often an urgent one) to critique, to ask, as foucault suggests, not whether a situation is good or bad, but why evaluation has failed. the experience of exceeding the limits of the epistemological horizon within which normative practice is formed may put the subject in a position of self-formation that stands in relation to the normative, rather than being obedient to it. crisis exposes the limits of the normative (see also roitman 2014, 65–66). individuals faced with crises may become authors of themselves—they might self-author—at, beyond, and relative to these limits. judith butler helps us connect foucault’s thoughts on critique and politics to resistance and to the present case more directly. butler (2002, 222) explains that “critique begins with the presumption of governmentalization and then with its failure to totalize the subject it seeks to know and to subjugate.” questioning norms, as part of an ongoing project of the definition of the self that exceeds the state’s capacity to totalize subjects, despite expectations to the contrary, makes possible a transgressive “desubjugation.” the ways in which subjects undo themselves in the process of desubjugation yields critical agency beyond the normative violence of subjection itself. this project may give root to counternormativities (butler 2002). among my informants, critical agency was activated by an experience of desubjugation effected by the undoing of the normative principles within which they experienced and understood their abjection. by late 2010, my interlocutors were increasingly troubled by a growing public sentiment that graffiti writing—the creative and social practice through which they performed and maintained the otherness at the heart of their understanding of themselves—was both normal and justified (cf. jusionyte 2013). among the people they encountered, graffiti was becoming a natural part of the changing cityscape, part of the process of austerity-driven decline and renewal, echoing government narratives about the course of the crisis and the benefits of reform policies. the media depicted graffiti writers as ordinary young people. even the moral language around graffiti shifted from the negative “graffiti as vandalism” to the more neutral “graffiti as a means of expression.” sensing what they understood as their interpellation into the normative construal of the crisis, the group took action against the slow-motion undoing of the social and moral sites that provided their lives with stability and meaningful direction. specifically, they took action by writing graffiti that exposed the processes of precaritization that were changing everyday lives and popular perceptions of graffiti. between december 2010 and the time i concluded fieldwork for this project in 2015, my interlocutors changed the way they talked about graffiti writing, from committing acts of defiance to putting up guerilla social commentary that “plagiarized” (to use aris’s word) state logics and caricatured their effects. this was not a situation in which peripherally engaged, disappointed (greenberg 2014), or exhausted (berardi 2012) subjects became politically active or otherwise involved. rather, as they began to fear the negative possibility of their becoming mainstream, my interlocutors engaged with the political sphere indirectly, from one step away, exposing the totalizing normativities that were impoverishing athenian lives and setting the conditions for social abandonment. i use indirect to describe aris’s and his friends’ interventions to flag an important difference between their actions and other forms of activism, including so-called new activism (juris 2012). we can understand indirect activism as a politics that puts identity into question. specifically, unlike collective political action grounded in identitarian forms, indirect activism does not appeal to a shared sense of being or having in common. instead, indirect activists communicate across exclusionary forms by which people demarcate established communities to bring about broad collective responsiveness. this responsiveness offers a vision of social cohesiveness that poses a challenge to established identities while demanding change. thinking with gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1986), we might consider my interlocutors’ intervention in terms of a minor literature: a space within the mainstream of experimentation that exceeds canonical models or normative expression. writers of minor literature are engaged in the invention of becoming other, or the invention of a “people to come” (deleuze 1997, 90). they effect variations from the mainstream. in the case at hand, my interlocutors create pictographic messages that place them one step away, or in a position that is exceptional to, the normative violence to which the neoliberal governmentality subjects the mainstream population. the active self-authoring and subversion of the normative in the production of an intervention is immediately social and political. indirect activism is thus a politics built not on common identity but on interconnectedness. graffiti writing and becoming other my three interlocutors grew up in kifissia, an upper-middle-class suburb of athens, during the 1990s. their generation missed the german occupation during world war ii, the civil war (1946–1949), the military junta (1967–1974), and periods of political violence during the late 1970s and 1980s. instead, they enjoyed a relatively long period of political and economic stability and benefited from the increased buying power that came with greece’s adoption of the euro in 2001. aris lived with his parents and brother in a large house near a small park on a quiet street. his father was a steadfast supporter of the conservative party new democracy and held a well-paying government job, which he had secured through the influence of his uncle; his father never hid the fact that clientelism made this position possible (mouzelis 1978; sotiropoulos 2004). thomas’s father also held a government job, which he had secured through a family friend. thomas lived with his parents and sister in a large apartment down the street from tassos. tassos lived with his mother in a small apartment. his mother worked at a nearby supermarket. the two of them lived off her modest salary and the money tassos’s grandmother would save for them from her pension. the three boys went to school together and their families knew each other. the adults in my interlocutors’ lives would become nostalgic for this early period as crisis and austerity set in, the everyday became messy, and their futures became increasingly uncertain. as my interlocutors moved into their teenage years, they began to spend more and more time with their paréa (a local social category describing close groups of friends and/or kin; see cowan 1990; kirtsoglou 2004; papataxiarchis 1991), outside of the local community. the boys’ parents did not approve of this behavior or of their friends. their parents also began to complain about how they were spending money. the fathers put their sons on strict allowances and often questioned them about their purchases. both aris and thomas accused their parents of trying to control them by restricting and monitoring their spending. tassos’s mother fell ill and stopped giving him money altogether. he blamed both his mother and her employer for her failing health and, generally, for their lack of money. his mother would in turn accuse him of caring more for his paréa than for her. when tensions exploded into fights, aris and thomas would point to their fathers’ employment, questioning their morality to undercut their authority. as aris put it: my father would tell me to work harder at school or to stop spending time with my friends. why? he and the rest of his generation were just handed jobs—my father failed to complete high school and he oversees an entire department within the government! it’s ridiculous! in his last year of high school, aris hardly spoke to his father, and thomas had an actual physical altercation with his own father. tassos, however, fought less frequently with his mother during this period. according to him: after years of fighting i began to pity her. she worked very hard for very little money at a job that was obviously killing her, and she still defended her boss. she was brainwashed! she wasn’t a free, rational person! i couldn’t take the things she said seriously. for my three interlocutors, recurring episodes of conflict in the home and finding solace among friends informed their thinking about morality, authority, and a desirable life. the group began to imagine a future without the socioeconomic entanglements and consumerism they saw as definitive of an older generation caught up in the post-1981 national political work of inventing a european middle class. instead, my interlocutors wanted a life in which they could be free to make choices and do the things they liked: a life they would flirt with on the streets and among their paréa. in so doing, the group began to demarcate a positive social field of practice. aris’s father did not see the situation this way. he began to call his son alíti—a negative term referring to a “punk” or a homeless person, generally, someone offensive. aris accepted the label. in fact, his friends came to also self-identify as alítes and began performing alitiés, that is, doing things that asserted their independence from the various milieus and specific structures claimed or shaped by limiting authority figures: an entanglement of parents, police, government agents, and big business. it was around this time that my interlocutors began to play with spray paint. the group became invested in graffiti writing as its members began to understand the social life behind the pieces they admired and as they came to develop a style of their own. they also began to see graffiti as more than just a medium through which to assert their independence from authority. my interlocutors explained that watching graffiti be put up, sprayed over, modified, and fade gave subtext to athens. they began to read the claiming of space and working to earn respect on walls as a drama played out between individuals who would act according to their desires and by developing skills against the various figures (both within the graffiti scene and beyond it) seeking to limit them. figure 2. an example of layered graffiti. there are at least four different pieces in this photo. new pieces rarely obscure the graffiti underneath completely, allowing viewers to trace a history of covering. space on walls is limited in athens, and only the works of respected writers and crews remain uncovered for any length of time. photo by othon alexandrakis. figure 3. here, a work by sonke was modified with two small figures and text. by modifying sonke’s piece with writing of lesser quality, the modifiers have made the entire work vulnerable to covering by other, less respected artists. this kind of covering, or modifying, is considered disrespectful among most athenian graffiti writers. photo by othon alexandrakis. they began also to read an unfolding narrative in and of particular streets and neighborhoods written by individuals and groups acting free of convention and expectation. as their lives worsened at home, graffiti became increasingly legible to the group as a nonmainstream discursive site where participants could express themselves, be acknowledged, and contribute to a meaningful dialogue. they took up writing as a group rather than individually, as thomas explained, “for greater protection against police, and to speak with one, louder voice.” the strong bonds graffiti writing engendered among the friends came to inform an affective geography connecting what we might consider the interiority of my interlocutors’ self-authoring with the streets of athens (navaro-yashin 2012). figure 4. the different pieces on this wall, located in the exarcheia neighborhood, tell a local story of ruined futures and political dissent. the two largest works (the top one of which was created by renowned artist wd) were put up at different times. the small tag in the middle of the wall, which reads “no justice, no peace,” captures the spirit of this small cluster of works. photo by othon alexandrakis. with time, however, my interlocutors focused less on trying to win respect and space on walls, and although they continued to follow local narratives, the impulse to contribute to the conversation waned. in part, this change had to do with the group’s suspicion of the state’s growing interest in highlighting graffiti as a cultural form in the lead-up to the 2004 olympics. the group had become wary of the growing number of graffiti festivals and commissioned works, which they took as signs of the institutionalization of graffiti. as some of the more talented graffiti writers in their area began to participate in festivals and agreed to take commissions, my interlocutors feared that the subtext of athens would become “thinner,” to use aris’s word: writing would become more random, and less responsive and aware. this thinning signaled to my interlocutors that something larger was changing in the graffiti scene, that the free discursive quality that had defined it was undergoing erosion (cf. císař and koubek 2012). between 2002 and 2005 the group began developing the style and quality of their graffiti. they found this move empowering: not only were they freer to experiment with graffiti as a form; by doing graffiti differently from others (who they felt were now jockeying for recognition from the mainstream), they also developed a sense of critical perspective on the form itself. this marked an important formative period for my interlocutors. according to tassos: i think we all realized that graffiti is a way of saying “fuck off,” of saying “i love you,” “wake up, moron”—and absolutely nothing at all. we used it to express anxiety, arrogance, passion, destructiveness, and, and, and . . . our graff became us once again. my informants’ sense of being alítes changed from an identity defined as “being bad” to being outside the social mainstream, and now to indexing an outside view looking in. this positionality came to define their sense of social selfhood, which would in turn inform their alterity. by 2005, aris had moved downtown to attend university. thomas moved in with him, while tassos remained in their old neighborhood, living at home (he did not pursue further schooling, although he registered at a local technical college to avoid military service). they all met in the city regularly to write graffiti. rather than stay within one neighborhood, they adopted a new territory. asked how they came to determine where they would write within this territory, aris explained it was about a feeling: certain places felt more open to their writing, while other places did not; some places felt like they needed alitiés, while others did not. a sentiment of interventionism in this reply foreshadowed the more direct interventions they would undertake post-2010. aris explained that the quality of the surface, what it looked and felt like, related to the area. the constellation of surface, area, and sketch (graffiti plan) would either work or not. thus their territory was informed by the crew’s “active sensing” (feld and basso 1996, 7) of local stories (istories: see herzfeld 1987, 41–46) that captured fragments of social experience and intimate social knowledge; local power dynamics read in terms of visual silences (lack of graffiti); the style and quality of architecture and urban planning; the limits of their artistic skills; and the group’s vision for their work. my interlocutors’ thinking around what it meant to be alítes consolidated during this period. they found themselves completely dispossessed of a predictable future and typical kin relations, disillusioned with the graffiti scene, but fully engaged and committed to experimenting with writing graffiti that communicated critique. the group members began to refer to themselves as a crew—a designation common among graffiti writers internationally but which, in this case, also marks a more intimate subset of the paréa, rather than a distinct social or corporate entity. they developed a new tag for themselves and began putting it up with new pieces they wrote. they used the tag for the first time with a piece that captured their outsider perspective and relation to the social space in which they lived and wrote. the site was typical of precrisis athens: an old single-family home, uninhabited due to competing inheritance claims, had been sold off to a developer who—according to locals—had bribed officials to approve the construction of a low-rise apartment building that would cover every square inch of the once green property. citing a need to respond to the power the developers exercised, the sense of entitlement with which they seemed to operate, and to the greed they perceived at the root of the legal dispute that had led to the situation in the first place, the crew came up with a plan. on a late saturday night, aris, tassos, and thomas entered what would become the front foyer of the building and painstakingly shifted a stack of bricks that had been piled against a wall facing the front entrance. they proceeded to paint a large image of a woman dressed only in fishnet stockings, holding a cigarette and surrounded by cloudy euro symbols. the crew then painted euro notes on each brick before replacing them in front of the image of the woman in such a way as to leave only her head visible. it took my interlocutors more than six hours to complete this piece. the next week, as the bricks were used up, workers slowly uncovered the naked woman. tassos chuckled as he explained the friends’ thinking: there’s a hooker in all of us, but money brings her out more in some people than in others. you can figure out the rest—it’s all about motivation and violation! we had such a laugh with this one . . . we still laugh whenever we see someone go in through those doors and is greeted by the hooker under the paint! the social valence the crew occupied, the valence of difference or otherness with which the alítes self-identified and which set them apart from the social mainstream and other writers, was an effect of the outsider’s perspective on normative (bourgeois) values that they cultivated, the sites and terms of their self-authoring, and the histories of abjection and coping they shared. their self-identification as distinguishable from some mainstream public preceded, i will argue, the emergence among them of a kind of reflexivity we might associate with a subject who exceeds social regulation, thus becoming open to (and capable of) a relation to alterity (butler and athanasiou 2013, 69–70). in other words, the crew’s understanding of themselves as somehow beyond the formations of power that enacted subjects—and as distinguishable from the subjects this power enacted—both grounded and capacitated their becoming other. it is tempting to revert to stereotypes when describing my interlocutors at this point in their lives. local non-academic commentators were discussing the idea of a “wasted youth” or “lost children” (hamena pedia) of athens.1 the media portrayed this population as made up of young people of socioeconomically diverse backgrounds who had little to no interest in politics of any stripe, who were not preoccupied with their financial future, were minimally invested in the lives of anyone beyond their close kin relations and friends, and who expressed general antiauthority attitudes. these individuals were often depicted as living on the edge of the kind of anomie described by émile durkheim (1951), in a state of being disconnected (allison 2009) from their fellow citizens and even from their broader peer groups. they were bored (mains 2007). they did drugs. they vandalized property. they wrote graffiti. analysts and politicians engaging in crisis talk typically vilified the lost youth. in casual conversations at cafés and in living rooms throughout the city, citizens lamented and condemned this population, deeming it both a shame (dropi) and shameful (cf. herzfeld 1985): a population trapped in a state of political impotence and depressive hedonia, as mark fisher (2009) would put it. some of my contacts at the time went so far as to suggest that becoming lost was an innate risk particular to the greek character: an embedded, magnetic possibility that must be resisted if one is to participate in the modern european political economy (see herzfeld 2005). clearly, that characterization manifests several problems, not the least of which is the romanticization of individuals like my interlocutors either as wayward outsiders without a cause or as passionate greeks unable to resist their baser, unmodern impulses. it is also tempting to locate my interlocutors at this point in their lives within particular greek political trajectories. for example, as with other greek youth who wrote graffiti, who appeared in public wearing hoodies, and who appeared to be delinquents, my interlocutors could be placed within a complex political genealogy of students who undertook what christos giovanopoulos and dimitris dalakoglou (2011, 93) have described as the continuous breaking of greek political structures following the end of the military dictatorship in 1974 (see also panourgiá 2010). indeed, and for what it is worth, my interlocutors’ actions fit within the broad spectrum of possible expressions of disaffection and anger this population experienced and made public. i say “for what it is worth,” however, because the crew rejected even this broad characterization. according to my interlocutors, they were not anarchists, antifascists, or antiauthoritarians (antiexousiastes), not urban guerrillas of any kind or hooligans. they may indeed have contributed to a history of politically disruptive youth behavior, but suggesting this to them elicited scoffs and the accusation from thomas that “anyone who thinks this does not understand what we write and why we write it.” by the mid-2000s the crew rejected standard identifiers available to athenian youth searching for an identity, including the various versions of “lost youth” or “radical youth.” rather, they described themselves as “graff artists.” indeed, graffiti writing came up again and again in conversation as a “commitment,” “inspiration,” “obsession,” an “escape,” and ultimately a “way of life.” notably, it did not come up in terms of a community. the members of the crew shared a sense of being other, even from their fellow graffiti writers. the process of self-determination aris, thomas, and tassos engaged in fostered among them a sense of belonging to society, albeit as outsiders, rather than a sense of having-in-common with other graffiti writers. in other words, their sense of belonging was based on the actualities (and contingencies) of their association as active and willing coproducers of their own otherness to the mainstream. among my interlocutors, this coproduced otherness was observable in the world; it was grounded on the rhetorical terrain and valuations they produced and reproduced over and again in graffiti and by way of graffiti writing, and each member of the crew felt it. this feeling provided the skin of the crew qua (politically distinguishable micro-) collective (see ahmed 2004). this feeling indexed their otherness to the mainstream while providing the internal terrain that signaled their collective productions unique—if not necessarily in form, then in meaning. this feeling was also found at the heart of their advocacy, as i show in the following section. writing alítico i met aris at a café near omonia square in athens on a warm morning in the late summer of 2011. athenians were beginning to experience the effects of the troika austerity measures, but the café—a notably pricey establishment, my interlocutor suggested—was bustling. having just told me a funny story about his adventures with the crew the night before, aris stared down at his nearly empty glass of whiskey (his attempt at fending off a hangover) and said in a surprisingly matter-of-fact tone, “i fuck life. i ride in stolen cars, smoke heavy cigarettes,2 and work hard at getting laid, like most people my age. but i also write graffiti.” breaking the silence that followed aris’s statement, a waitress came by with a second round of drinks, served with the bill rolled up in a small shot glass, as is the convention in athens. i reached for my wallet, but aris was quicker with his, folding a €20 note and placing it in the glass before i had a chance to do the same. he explained, “this cash is from my father. he doesn’t really care what i do or where i go anymore—i just take money from his wallet whenever i go home. he knows i do this, but he doesn’t say anything. he has his problems and i have mine.” aris’s father’s problems had recently changed. as with many other athenians facing uncertain futures but holding on to the last gasps of their preausterity lifestyles—like many people at the café, i suspected—aris’s father had received notice of termination but was living on as he had before. the creep of precarity, however, was beginning to produce new silences in the household, the turning of blind eyes, awkward smiles, and other everyday changes that hinted at the situation to come (stewart 2007). moving away from home provided aris, as it did thomas, distance from and perspective on his still strained, if changing relationship with his father. tassos was gaining new perspective as well. his mother’s failing health—a combination of a worsening repetitive strain injury and barely controlled diabetes—meant the time he now spent at home was taken up with little other than helping her through her mornings and evenings so she could continue to work, lest she be fired. tassos came to observe a change in what we might call, following sianne ngai (2004, 28–29), the tone of his relationship with his parent as she made requests of him, but was no longer interested in his life or willing to argue. this signaled to tassos that a change was underway: his mother was seeing things differently. she was seeing him differently. all three of my interlocutors noted the turning away of their parents from an understood promise to support their well-being. so all three of the young men came to be preoccupied with figuring neoliberal governmentality and its effects on individuals. this marked a return, once again, to a concern with authority and how authority shapes lives. in this case, their concern was with how authority incited or coerced individuals to govern themselves. by 2011, my interlocutors had become alarmed not only because the crisis moment had effected a change in their parents and, ultimately, in their relationships with their parents, but because they saw this change as symptomatic of a broader social transformation. the crew had noticed an explosion of graffiti across athens, which they understood as evidence that growing numbers of individuals were responding to alienation and abandonment by a state that has historically promised its citizens the maintenance of their welfare from birth to death. yet this broader transformation did not appear alarming until one morning, in the early months of 2011, when the crew was caught painting a large toilet on the shutters of a luxury furniture store beside a bank (part of a larger design connecting the two businesses). rather than becoming angry, tassos explained, the owner of the business put his arm around him and said something to the effect of: “finally, you’ve made me part of the neighborhood. it’s about time someone put graffiti here.” tassos recalled this interaction with a shudder: “it was like we did him a favor . . . like we did a commission for free.” he explained that graffiti had become so common in the city—quite literally covering almost every surface of athens—that it was also becoming ordinary. my interlocutors feared that as the crisis intensified, or rather, as neoliberal governmentality was consolidated and impoverishment spread, the crew was becoming mainstreamed and interchangeable with the masses of others who were being abandoned (an unfortunate agglomeration that included novice graffiti writers as much as their parents). indeed, in this case, fear registered an awareness of a real threat to the integrity, as it were, of the writing group (ahmed 2004; massumi 2010): to the dissolution of the social forms, valuations, and even rhetorical base from where it emerged. accordingly, the issue for my interlocutors was not with some “high-minded concern” (as thomas put it) over public well-being or the plight of vulnerable populations; rather, it concerned the preservation of the crew’s own position of otherness within the social milieu, of its own mattering. the threat of becoming ordinary, of becoming one of the crowd of individuated, increasingly competitive, and necessarily self-reliant athenians, activated among them a kind of reflexivity that enabled my interlocutors to sustain themselves despite forces that would have changed them, and so preserved and kept open a relation to alterity (butler and athanasiou 2013, 69). seeing the change in their parents and realizing that it was symptomatic of a threatening emergent present stirred among my interlocutors a desire to respond. inspired by the work of famous disruptive street artists like banksy and shepard fairey, and by talented local artists like dan, wd,3 and aptemhs, the crew began to experiment with a mix of stencils, tags, and witty captions. according to aris, the mixed style gave their graffiti a “cleaner look,” helping it stand out. the items they created were lighthearted and immediately understandable. their intended audience was regular people, quite literally, on the street. they wanted to challenge viewers to see themselves, their surroundings, and their situation differently—in other words, to effect a progressive deterritorialization of an emerging ordinariness by offering a view of the social self from the perspective of the crew (cf. sweeney 2011). aris referred to this perspective as alítico. figure 5. this piece, made by a combination of stenciling and freehand painting, was put up on the wall of a day care center. the (misspelled) caption is meant to read: “we live like lost children of the incomplete adventure.” photo by othon alexandrakis. cedar lewisohn (2008) explains that street art constitutes a subgenre of graffiti that challenges one’s experience of urban space. street artists use stencils, murals, and even one-liners to provide critical social and political commentary. here, street art challenges the normative “regime of visibility” (rancière 2004, 22) ultimately calling into question the underlying formations of space, variously construed. alítico graffiti can be considered a style of street art. by depicting the effects of governing through crisis management, my interlocutors created surfaces that challenged the normative principles coming to enact neoliberal subjects. the crew developed careful pieces depicting precarity in the form of hunger, displacement, job insecurity, illness, and so on as normal: a pastoral scene of an emaciated farmer sitting on a new mercedes benz, watching his equally emaciated goats (located across from a bank); a middle-aged man driving a moped with his feet and arms bound in a body cast, setting off to deliver a pizza (on a wall surrounding a hospital); a figure of a young woman bent into a dumpster, nietzsche in her pocket (near a university building). aris and tassos characterized this form of graffiti as “the aggressive transformation of the world into a scene,” which calls into question “the new relations in the situation.” their graffiti writing became a critical engagement with, and push against, the aspects of the emergent normative order they found curious or outright disagreed with. we may think of this work as producing heterotopia (foucault 1986): real and localized sites of contestation that engage with and invert the socioeconomic hegemony and its (un)ethical underpinnings. the crew’s graffiti was not reproductive of the normative or productive of deviance, not politically leftor right-leaning, complacent or indifferent; rather, it was something different (cenzatti 2008), something reflective. through graffiti they curated the ongoing story of a public being remade. conclusion: i am coryphaeus! aris made this declaration one evening in 2014 as he took off his paint-splattered surgical gloves, tossing them vaguely in the direction of a nearby open dumpster. a still-wet stencil and tag dried a few meters away. paint fumes and cigarette smoke lingered in the night air. he smiled and lit another cigarette as thomas folded paper into his backpack, glancing up at the nearby apartment building and down the street. aris was flying high: it was very late at night and he was with the crew; the stencil was sharp, and its colors popped. janet roitman (2005, 2014) suggests that crisis can be the starting point for narration. in attic drama, the coryphaeus, or head of the chorus, spoke for the chorus whenever it took part in action. the term is also used to describe the head of a company or group, broadly defined. if democracy is a mode of communication that has been interrupted by the crisis, aris, in this moment, saw himself as the head of a chorus providing a critical, guiding narrative to an audience struggling to understand the new conversation. this chorus was made up of more than just the crew, but of all crews and writers creating sites of dissent and reflection or, to my interlocutor, alítico graffiti. of course, his high was also brought on by the thought of what the crew’s intervention might preserve. on january 25, 2015, greeks voted the coalition of the radical left (syriza) into power. the syriza government survived a divisive referendum on the continued implementation of austerity policy, a split within the party, and fresh elections on september 20 of the same year. for many, these events represented the culmination of five years of social resistance and dissent punctuated by the occupation of public squares in 2011 and actions in solidarity with employees of the public broadcaster, which the previous government had shuttered in an unexpected move in june 2013. my interlocutors did not vote in any of the elections or participate in these or any other actions. asked why, tassos explained that voting and protesting were always already “too late.” the intervention my consultants sought to make aimed to precede, or rather seed, these actions and events. alítico graffiti made the suffering endured by everyday subjects legible as abnormal and shared. it bolstered a politics of critical relationality and, ultimately, manifold mobilizations against neoliberal policy. my interlocutors looked hopefully on such changes as the rise of a reconstituted political left and the protests and other forms of resistance not because they bought into the promise each communicated, but because these effected, the crew expected, the reinscription of my interlocutors’ difference from the mainstream. tassos explained: “we’re looking for a change in the graffiti scene. we’ll know something good is happening when people chase us again for writing in their neighborhoods!” it was now very late and i was sitting with aris on a bench in a small playground near his apartment. i mentioned, offhand, that i was struck by the ethnographic qualities of the graffiti the crew were writing: they were interpretive, critical, and engaged. aris simply nodded. i lamented that i could not show any of their current writing in my published work. at this, aris perked up and pointed to a nearby play structure. we walked over and he gestured toward a word written in permanent marker ‘cayapω,4 “i love you,” scribed in an amalgam of french and greek terms. he explained: this is mine . . . just mine. i’ve been writing this everywhere, low, you know, so kids will notice it. my crew doesn’t know i’ve been writing this, nobody does—i mean—it’s not a secret, but i just didn’t tell anyone. . . . it came to me one day and i started putting it places. it sends a message. it’s an important thing to tell kids these days. come back tomorrow and take a picture. there’s no risk with this one, it’s just positive, for the future. figure 6. a small tag my interlocutor had been writing in permanent marker on playground structures across athens. photo by othon alexandrakis. we might understand this small intervention in terms of a son speaking to a father blinded and silenced by slow-motion undoing, or an activist shoring up the good in his life by guiding others to understand the dangers in theirs. for aris, this word—a stand against abandonment in location, form, and meaning—held the potential to start a dialogue with others who might benefit from talking. whatever connections and reverberations it might cause could only be beneficial. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to aris, thomas, and tassos for their trust, tolerance, and for allowing me to collaborate in their graffiti writing. i also want to thank heath cabot, ramah mckay, peter locke, salvatore poier, elizabeth anne davis, and elizabeth mertz for their insightful comments on a very early draft of this essay (shared in the context of heath cabot’s writing workshop for postdoctoral fellows at princeton university); anne meneley and paul manning for their helpful comments on a later draft; as well as cymene howe, dominic boyer, james faubion, and the anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology. early versions of this essay were presented to the greek studies group of the center for european studies at harvard university, the department of anthropology speaker series at mcmaster university, and the casca plenary “unsettled politics and radical potential: figuring the impulse to act.” i thank michael herzfeld, yannis ioannides, tristan carter, andrew gilbert, daphne winland, antonio sorge, maya shapiro, albert schrauwers, and zulfikar hirji for organizing these events, neni panourgiá and michael herzfeld for their encouragement and invaluable comments as my discussants, and the participants for their helpful questions and feedback. research and writing for this essay were supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada and by the seeger center for hellenic studies at princeton university. 1. this term was made popular by the 2011 film wasted youth, directed by argyris papadimitropoulos and jan vogel. 2. the term heavy cigarettes generally refers to cigarettes laced with marijuana and/or hashish. 3. wd (wild drawing) was born in bali, but has been living and writing in athens since well before the economic debt crisis. some local graffiti writers consider him a foreigner, but most regard him as a local. 4. aris intended the “ca” at the beginning of this word to be pronounced “sa,” and the “y” stands in for the greek gamma. thus the word reads “s’agapo,” or “i love you” in greek. we might think of this as a one-word tone poem or an aural trope. references ahmed, sara 2004 the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. allison, anne 2009 “the cool brand: affective activism and japanese youth.” theory, culture & society 26, nos. 2–3: 89–111. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276409103118. berardi, franco “bifo” 2012 the uprising: on poetry and finance. los angeles: semiotext(e). butler, judith 2002 “what is critique? an essay on foucault’s virtue.” 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mcmaster university mita is sixty two and strong on the good days: on the days her kidneys don’t feel like they’re on fire, cutting her inhalations short and turning her face to ash.1 mita grew up in the city, helping her mother earn a living by taking in laundry, doing seasonal plantation work, and gathering firewood. when mita began to have children, she continued to live at home. her “husbands” were “malos” (rotten), coming and going as they pleased. like herself, mita’s children started working at a young age to help sustain the family, never attending school. when mita’s mother died in the mid-1980s, the small family home went to mita’s older sister. after squatting in the city for several years, mita was finally granted a subsidized mortgage from the municipality for a plot of land in barrio los heroes. today, mita has made ten cordobas (us$0.50) doing laundry for a neighbor. it is 1 pm. she doesn’t have enough for dinner. she is hungry and worried about her grandchildren. her muscular legs walk steadily down the road that is cut like a river between fields. she knows each farm she passes. mita has worked on most of them, planting and picking cotton. now the big business here is peanuts. machines, not people, work the land. she arrives by 2 pm under a scalding sun. there are only two other women sifting through the adjacent fields. she scans the line of eucalyptus trees to the east. no sign of any guard. mita kneels at the beginning of the first row. she slides her fingers through the dusty sand-like earth, expertly scanning with hands and eyes for good peanuts the machines have left behind. they can’t be too light or they’re dry and bitter. they can’t have discolored shells or they’re rotten. slowly, methodically, mita shuffles down each row on hands and knees. there is enough. a few dried branches, half buried, yield a dozen bulbous peanuts each. they’ll be good with salt and chili tonight. when the sun’s light is golden, mita’s hair, clothes, and skin are swept with the earth’s dust. her back, neck, and knees are sore. she sits back on her heels for a moment. her lungs ache and she coughs hard. then, she raises herself up, pushing hard on her knee for momentum. standing, she looks excitedly into the rice sac. it’s a good-fifth full. four, maybe three pounds? she twists the bag shut and places it on her head. surrounded by the evening calls of songbirds, she takes her time making her way back, picking up some dead branches for the fire along the way. figure 1. scavenging for peanuts. all photos by the author. from april 2008 to march 2009, i conducted fieldwork in barrio los heroes, a shanty in what leon’s city officials and ngo workers refer to as the city’s cinturón de miseria, or belt of misery.2 i had begun doing fieldwork in nicaragua in 2000, at the height of neoliberal restructuring in the country. through the ensuing years, as i returned to the country for further research, documentary film projects, and to visit family, i was struck by the constant experience of hardship, menace, and pain in day-to-day life for the working poor and unemployed. the nicaraguans i met were often angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, anxious, and exhausted as they struggled to survive in the category many defined in their everyday conversation as that of the jodido (fucked up) poor.3 i set out to explore the social impact of the restructuring on entire segments of the country—families, but also neighborhoods—feeling pushed to the limits of what they could take. neoliberal life is hard “if you pay the beans you don’t pay the tortilla. if you pay the tortilla, you don’t have for the rice. either way, we are screwed!” —roland, barrio los heroes resident, june 2008 twenty-one years after the publication of roger lancaster’s (1992) award-winning ethnography, life is hard, life remains tough in nicaragua. as one critic caustically put it, nicaraguans “lead democratic lives on less than one dollar per day” (fischer 2006, 127).4 at the time of my research in barrio los heroes, fifty-five percent of nicaraguans were unemployed (inide 2006). estimates put illiteracy in the country at twenty-two percent between 2005 and 2008 (unicef 2009), or nine percent higher than thirty years ago (fischer 2006, 57). wages, for those who earned them could not keep up with inflation, which hit eighteen percent in 2008 (pérez solís 2008, a1). food has become increasingly inaccessible to the urban poor in the new millennium (ibid.). with the country’s economy focused on producing exports, small industries have suffered (babb 2001), and nicaragua has grown dependent on expensive imports for its food needs. the struggle for survival weighs heavily on women in the country. many nicaraguan women work double or triple shifts and have done so for much of their lives, in accordance with cultural expectations that responsibility for the family’s well being is a woman’s natural duty (bradshaw 2002; lancaster 1992). this is not only to satisfy their family’s increasingly unaffordable basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing, but also to compensate for the state’s crumbling social infrastructure (fernández poncela 1996, 55). for over two decades now, loans and development aid to nicaragua from the international monetary fund, the inter-american development bank, and the world bank have been conditional on the nicaraguan state reducing social spending. affecting healthcare, daycare, education, and water services, these cuts have hit women the hardest (bickham mendez 2005; cornia, jolly, and stewart 1987; cupples 2005; fernández poncela 1996; unicef 1988). approximately 1061 families and 9500 inhabitants live in barrio los heroes (asb 2005, 4). life here is exemplary of nicaragua’s seemingly permanent state of crisis in the post-revolutionary neoliberal period. this is a place where eighty percent of men are unemployed. the majority of women work but on the black market, earning about two dollars per day, a sum that does not come close to satisfying basic household needs for food and clothing. the literacy rate, when last measured systematically, was fifty percent. there is no sewage system in the shanty and toxic water flows in small streams through the streets. twenty percent of homes are made of plastic and wood (ibid.). many homes experience leaking at best, and total collapse at worst, during the rainy season from may to november. only a handful of residents can afford legal water-connections in the face of an exponential rise in fees over the last fifteen years, with the result that enacal, the national water company, provides some water daily to all residents but on an irregular basis. families and neighbors are acutely aware of each others’ shortages and suffering: a brother feeds his baby powdered milk in secret while his sister and her four kids have had no milk for days; kidney problems flare up forcing a grandmother to lie still in bed when her daughter was counting on her for childcare to go to work; a tortilla maker lets her niece and nephew “steal” pieces of raw dough off her work table knowing there is no dinner for them at home. poverty and structural inequality characterize the everyday for the residents of barrio los heroes. in nicaragua, how those who are economically and socially marginalized live this marginalization is of particular historical and political importance. nicaragua is famous for its collective, grassroots organizing and struggle for social justice. this is a country where, in 1979, a massive, largely popular, insurrection defeated a brutal forty-two-year dictatorship that spanned three generations of the somoza family. in the decade that followed, nicaragua underwent dramatic political, economic, and social restructuring aimed at uprooting historically-entrenched class and social inequalities. it was only in 1990, when the fatalities and economic ravages of a u.s.-funded contra-revolutionary war could no longer be borne, that the sandinista party and its leader, daniel ortega, were voted out of power. nicaragua continues to boast a well-documented contemporary landscape of community movements and activists (bickham mendez 2005; guevara 2008). that said, many nicaraguans are not involved in any community movements. this is the case for the majority of residents living in barrio los heroes. here, the work of survival seems to consume residents’ energies and days. i did not meet a resident of the barrio that did not find the country’s inequalities unfair and cruel, but very few found the time or the energy to join a social organization or group that overtly critiqued and worked to transform inequalities in nicaragua. what is made possible and/or impossible in nicaragua’s urban landscapes of pervasive hardship? is there potential for social critique and social transformation when one is pushed to one’s limits and surrounded by others pushed to their limits? how does chronic suffering animate or undermine imaginings and related potential for social transformation in today’s nicaragua? what do affective formations materialized in contexts of structural violence do to power? in other words, how is agency—which i approach here following elizabeth grosz (2005, 72), as “the capacity to make the future diverge from the patterns and causes of the present”—generated, blocked, or otherwise impacted in nicaragua by the stressful precariousness of urban life? what qualifies a mode of living, pushed to the limits in a context of social suffering, as “critical” of the status quo or as fodder for political transformation? at the heart of these questions is the body pushed to its limits, and the implication that this materiality under duress matters. my work is influenced by the scholarship on social suffering in anthropology, with its focus on the unequal geography, and social and political work, of distress in particular contexts. i depart from this scholarship, however, by approaching corporealities of structural violence as material and affective forces: formations that give form to and (re)create the grounds for their emergence in the “folding-in of external influences and simultaneous unfolding-outwards of affects” (braidotti 2007, 156). while focused on social formations of suffering, i draw on elizabeth povinelli’s (2006, 2010; povinelli and difruscia 2010) theory of carnal materialities and affect theory to open ways of thinking about the relationship of bodies under pressure to social change. affective corporealities of structural violence over the past twenty years, many anthropologists have approached bodies in distress as cultural idioms or roadmaps to social tensions and inequalities (see for example, adelson 2005; bourdieu et al. 1999; bourgois 2003; desjarlais and kleinman 1994; farmer 1997; green 1999; janes 1999; kleinman 1986; kleinman, das, and locke 1997; quesada 1998; scheper-hughes 1992). this work on social suffering has emphasized that states of distress—including mental and physical pain, stress, medically-diagnosed illness, unemployment, and discrimination—are never equally distributed in society: they are overwhelmingly present among economically or socially marginalized individuals. whether or not particular bodies gets pushed to their limits, and how persons and groups live, communicate, and recognize (or ignore) these exertions, reflects and often reinforces social inequalities. following from this analysis, understanding what forms of distress mean in a particular context implies studying how discourses of power form incidences, experiences, and responses to suffering. the suffering body is socially significant in this scholarship as a discursive object: it crystallizes, and is a window into, culturally and historically specific power relations. the feminist/queer scholarship on which i draw sustains this focus on corporealities of violence, but it adds to the analysis new ways of thinking about the social importance of the body under duress. in a recently published interview, elizabeth povinelli (povinelli and difruscia 2010) argues that, too often, post-essentialist analyses of the body have been so focused on bodies as power effects and discursive objects that the importance of the body as materiality has been neglected. as povinelli elaborates, the body of an aboriginal australian that is chronically sick, whose life is shortened due to the biological effects of living in a system of racism and inequality with increased exposure to disease, malnutrition, poor healthcare, as well as psycho-social distress, is not reducible to the discourses it embodies. the sickened body of an aboriginal australian in this context also matters because it can block or enable disruptions of power. carnalities are fleshed forms as well as discourses, and as such “matter forth” inextricably-connected environments and social relations (povinelli 2006, 7). the notion that bodies, weakened through structural inequalities, may non-discursively (re)generate social relations, is integral to several queer and feminist studies of affect. affects here are preand trans-individual bodily formations arising through the contingent connection of a range of micro-agencies—bodies, things, events, and places (grosz 2005, 6). there are two principal reasons affects are socially significant: first, they are contagious formations, and second, affects impact whether or not “the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked” (spinoza 2002, 278). an explosion of affect-informed ethnographies over the last decade has drawn attention to the ways dominant power relations and political systems rely on, construct, and often intentionally orchestrate, contagious affective states such as fear, apathy, (in)security, and confusion (i.e., auyero and swistun 2010; biehl 2005; caldeira 2000; skidmore 2003; taylor 1997). feminist and queer affect scholars stress the power of affects to disrupt the operations of power, as they register the abnormality of normative social relations (ahmed 2010; braidotti 2007; clare 1999; cvekovitch 2007; gordon 2008; grosz 2005; nelson 2009). i have taken my cue from povinelli and this work on affect, when i ask how various forms of distress—depression, exhaustion, hunger—may transform relations of power, not “below” or “above” their physicality but through their physicality: as affective formations that may (or may not) impact “the power of action” of other bodies. i focus on two residents in barrio los heroes, mita and juana, and the visibly distinct ways these women’s grinding poverty is corporealized. the contrast between these two women compelled me to question what actions and affects of bodies pushed to their limits in zones of social and economic marginality count as productive of social change. no life is discounted as socially insignificant in this process: rather, my emphasis is on increasing understanding of how the body pushed to its limits may mold the social by contributing to a sense of what feels doable or impossible, right or wrong, in need of transformation or not, in this particular nicaraguan context. exploratory rather than conclusive, this research inserts itself within a growing body of scholarship exploring the affective dimensions of social relations in central america (dickson-gómez 2002; guevara 2008; jenkins 1991; little 2009; moodie 2006; nelson 2009; reed 2004; rodgers 2006a, 2006b; wright 2001, 1999). this article is based on nicaraguan research, but its questions may be relevant to other communities in the global north and south where life is marked by structural violence. * * * juana, mita’s daughter, lives off the sale of chewing gum, mints, caramels, and lollipops. it’s 8 am. she should be at work already but feels so tired. the kids’ school pants are filthy. all her laundry needs doing. there’s no soap. her stomach churns. there is no money for breakfast. juana stares at the black plastic ceiling of her shack. the boys might find some firewood to sell for food but she needs soap too. two-year-old wilma looks for her breast in her sleep. juana complies, then gets up, still holding wilma, who slumps heavily on her shoulder as juana walks across the yard. mother is up. she sits silently, eyes glazed in apparent exhaustion. juana sets wilma down on the log next to mita. “you going then?” asks mita. “yes.” juana washes her face in the rusty barrel that is the sink, retrieves her basket from a hook in the tent, and starts walking towards the town center. juana has walked the bus platform in downtown león since age twelve. seventeen years selling enchiladas, water, then soft drinks, now candy. four children ages eleven and eight, six and two. two men who, like her father, abandoned the kids and left her. “there are mornings i just don’t want to get out of bed.”   figures 2–3. candy sales at the bus terminal. juana was not hopeful about her future. every couple of months, juana felt she might get ahead. a few times over the course of 2008–2009, when juana had made a killing at some religious festival, or when her gambling husband was back and seemed on track, she felt she might fix the tears in her black plastic shack or buy some new zinc for its leaky roof. she would talk about moving out of candy sales into undergarments, and plan, perhaps for the sake of my audience, to send her two-year-old to daycare. she would laugh at her boys’ invented games, and walk fast. but mostly, juana felt and acted like her life was the pits. she did not like her work. when she went, she shuffled along the bus platform, looking bored, annoyed, and sad. at home, she often slumped on the log in the yard or looked absently over her kids playing in the street. between long silences, she would tell me stories—invariably bad news from the barrio: the lady down the street who’s baby was born on the clinic floor and died … the neighbor who threw rotten bread over the fence into her yard: an insult … the nurse at the healthcare center, who, when juana went to request her lot be sprayed for mosquitoes, told her she wouldn’t have mosquito problems if she kept her lot cleaner … anyone i asked in barrio los heroes who worked on the black market selling bread, cigarettes, hairclips, or water would tell me business was bad. “that’s nicaragua.” they were broke and screwed. but the next day, many, especially women, would start again. back up at 5 am, collecting their goods, arranging water bottles, or making a corn drink, walking the two kilometers to the market. not juana. on many days, often several in a week and several in a row, juana would not leave home. “what difference does it make? i spend five hours, seven hours. i earn twenty, thirty cordobas. i don’t even make enough for a meal.” while her two year old resorted to breastfeeding, juana and her three children would not eat on these days. * * * wednesday, it is sunny. i meet juana at the terminal and her basket is almost empty. i ask her if sales have been good. she says no, gestures angrily at the empty bus platforms, is evasive. later, her sister-in-law tells me it’s the “good for nothing” husband. he came by high and angry. he woke the babies, beat the boys, threw things. he called juana a whore and when juana’s mom tried to tell him to get out, he pushed her down. all the neighbors saw. juana told them after he’d left that he took the candy, but the sister-in-law thinks she must have given him everything. “stupid!” the sister in law judgmentally adds. “that one, he likes to gamble. he won’t be back.” juana has not been out to sell for three days this past week. on the first day, i found her doing the laundry, taking advantage of rare blue skies. on the second day, she had not gone because it looked like rain: “bad sales” she explained. the third and fourth days, i did not ask why she hadn’t gone, nor were explanations offered. sitting on the log in the yard, she seemed remote, her eyes avoiding mine. the kids looked sad. they sat quietly in the yard instead of playing, waiting for the fruit i had brought to be divided round. cristofer, the most skeletal of the three, kicked his broken flip flop up and down, eyes glazed, sitting like a ghost in the corner of the yard. the first time juana refused or could not get up and go to work for 3, 6, 11 days in a row, i felt myself growing dizzier and dizzier with stress with every passing day. at the front of my mind was one thought, illuminated like on a neon sign, predictable and moralistic: the kids! there are kids! i wanted to yell at juana: “isn’t it better to get them something to eat, however little? isn’t it better to try?” but another thought was wrapped around my throat. is there a difference between carrying on or staying in bed in a context of acute structural violence? is one action more productive than the other? of what? on what basis? for nine months, i spent part of almost every day with juana and mita. i was convinced their corporealizations of life in the barrio were exemplary of the impact of social suffering on the lives of residents in the barrio, but i was unsure how to categorize the social impacts and politics of their corporealities. i did know that juana’s depressed withdrawal did not match up to what i realized were my expectations of the agent-ful social actor of the global south. there is a division in much socio-cultural scholarship between “positive” affects, such as joy, pleasure, and enjoyment, and “negative” affects including resentment, anger, cynicism, or suffering (i.e., brown 1995; hage 2002; grosz 1999; thompson 2009). those who stand by this division cast positive affects as a crucial energizing force of social change. negative affects, in contrast, are to be overcome, set aside, or even forgotten: these are black holes that drain personal and social energies for affirmation and transformation, inducing passivity rather than activity (an assertion i will revisit shortly). juana was not a happy, particularly disciplined or determined person. in this sense, she presented as a sort of anti-hero of the global south. she did not, could not, at the age of twenty nine, muster the energy to forge a way for herself in the world against all odds: to be hopeful in the face of a life over-determined by poverty, lack of opportunity, violence, the pressures of motherhood, inequality, and class-based discrimination. juana was not alone in her days of near paralysis in the face of countless challenges. her disengagement from the social realm through exhaustion and depression did not fuel social and political change in any direct way, and yet, i felt unconvinced that her (dis)engagement was less significant than the bootstrap agency of other residents, such as that of her mother. neither the drive to survive nor the lack of such a drive in a context of chronic structural inequality is clearly disruptive or convenient to the dominant operations of power. juana, curling up in bed exhausted, does present a case that flies in the face of two dominant social ideals in nicaragua: that of the mother as the primary provider of subsistence to her children, and that of the active citizen who exhibits privatized responsibility for their well-being and survival. since 1990, nicaragua has been subject to the ravages of imf-mandated structural adjustment plans. in the absence of safe healthcare, free education, livable wages, access to affordable water, food, and housing, the good, female, nicaraguan citizen assumes the moral and practical responsibility for her children and family’s bodily integrity. neoliberalism touts “a return to a primitive form of individualism,” one based on modern notions of free will to succeed or fail (ong 2006, 11). its ethic of privatized responsibility casts the individual, rather than the collective nation or community, as wholly and morally responsible for their economic success or failure (harvey 2007). this ideology upholds a utilitarian myth of meritocracy in which hard work is cast as leading to economic, but also moral, rewards. juana shows no indication of buying into the promises of the current neoliberal ideology or the nicaraguan gender system, that hard, constant work, sacrifice, and self-reliance are inherently rewarding (bradshaw 2002; lancaster 1992; fernández poncela 1996). suffering fatigue: what difference does it make? “i feel so tired sometimes,” juana admits as she prepares her basket of caramels for the morning of selling. “i wake up sometimes, like this morning, and i lie there thinking: i go all the way downtown for what? i work four hours, maybe five, before i have to be back to the kids, and i earn sometimes 10, 20, 30 cordobas. business is so bad. it’s not like last year. it’s rare i earn 100 cordobas (us$5) and so i’m not refilling the basket. this work doesn’t provide anything. “but you are going to keep going?” i ask, with a tone of expectation. juana shrugs looking down at her goods that she keeps arranging and rearranging. juana’s knowledge of marginalization as a constant, heavy weight undermines the normality of the system and its expectations. her depressed states highlight a neoliberal economic system’s failure to provide for the poor, and makes explicit the violence of a system that can suck anyone dry. at the same time, juana’s social status makes it difficult for the critical potential of her disengagement to disrupt the status quo. like many of the poor throughout latin america, juana is economically, socially, and politically insignificant to the state and the global economic system through which it operates. she lives on the margins, in every sense, of nicaraguan society. in her contact with the health clinic, with wealthier residents of the city, and even amongst her own children, she is assigned a low social value. this social value emanates from her social position in a hierarchy of worthiness. juana’s illiteracy, her lack of buying power, her plastic shack, her children’s ripped clothes and empty stomachs embody the structural violence of her context, but also renders her structurally vulnerable. already a de facto insignificant and undesirable being according to a neoliberal system in which value is associated with one’s economic productivity and power of consumption, whether juana speeds up her biological and social disappearance matters little for the continued reproduction of nicaragua’s current moral and economic order. in a context of normalized privatized responsibility and cultural notions of motherly responsibility, juana’s lack of enthusiasm for work, the only means she has of providing food and other basics to her children, could serve to reinforce the idea of nicaragua’s poor as a lost cause, morally justifying misery in nicaragua’s margins. how carrying on impacts relations of inequality in this context is no easier to qualify. mita’s ingenuity at finding food, close supervision of her grandchildren, and her efforts to feed and keep them clean, contradicts negative stereotypes of the poor as lazy and irresponsible. her refusal to disappear, in the face of very challenging odds for survival, including the lack of safe medical attention, food, and adequate shelter, might in itself be read as resistance. at the same time, mita’s self-sufficiency is consistent with the neoliberal ethic of privatized responsibility that maintains citizens should accept and assume individual responsibility for their well-being (harvey 2007). although she accepts the charity of missionaries when they visit her street, mita does not actively seek or expect help from anyone or any organization. she gets up every morning to work for that day’s basic necessities, even if she has gone to sleep without food, even if she is feeling ill, even as her daughter sometimes lies exhausted by life in bed. it is important to underline that mita’s resilience is necessary, rather than intentional. mita, like many of other residents of the barrio, applies her energy and time to the hard work of survival. devotion to survival in a context of structural violence does not equal complicity with the unequal economic, social, and political distributions of power in this context, but it does mean these inequalities are not challenged outright by mita and others who carry on like her in the barrio. when managed and survived, life pushed to its limits is also, arguably, normalized. * * * mita looks over the yard in time to see that wilma, juana’s only girl, is trying to sweep underneath the clothes mita has just washed and hung to dry. mita is outraged: “aie! you’re going to dirty the clothes i just washed! i’ll whip you!” she makes as though to rise but the threat works quickly. wilma slips away, down the foot-wide alley of plastic and sheet metal between her mother's and uncle’s shacks. juana is at work. mita’s patience is much shorter when exhausted by the fever and back pain that she says comes from her kidneys and for which she won’t see a doctor. “for what? they’ll stick me with needles and leave me dead.” mita’s son, like many of the barrio residents, died of kidney failure in the hospital. sitting on the log in the yard, mita coughs, heaves, and remembers. things were better for her before her son felix died. felix used to pass her money whenever he could or whenever she needed it. he’d walk out into the countryside to collect firewood for sale like don bertram and, not being married, he’d usually have something for her. but now, felix is dead. her other son is married, with a kid who is often sick. it’s expensive to get sick! on that note, mita pushes herself up. the color drains from her face. i ask if she’s all right and she answers: “no, but the kids are going to be bothering me to eat.” she checks to see if the laundry is dry, then disappears into her tent. when she reemerges, grasping a ten-cordoba note in her hands, she yells for juana’s oldest son: “edwin! go get ten breads from the store.” all residents of the barrio with whom i worked faced common difficulties, including hunger, insecure housing, isolation, and illness. but, even within one household, the affects and power effects of these circumstances were neither determined nor uniform. corporealities that emerge in contexts of structural violence are not readily analyzable as either resistant or reproductive of dominant structures of power. what living pushed to one’s limits does in the context of the barrio often contains potential to both undermine and (rather than or) reinforce dominant relations. carrying on or failing to do so can be convenient or inconvenient to a nicaraguan and global class-system that reduces the life of the poor to bare life or survival. and yet, i want to propose that formations of social suffering in barrio los heroes do matter. these contribute to an affectively charged landscape of suffering in the barrio whose political consequences cannot be defined but cannot, i believe, be discounted. in barrio los heroes, residents are often visibly and sensibly agitated—angry, anxious, sad, pain-ridden, desperate, depressed—as they negotiate the hardships of their lives. the violence of the everyday is distressing to people here, not normalized. in this context, juana’s corporealization of grinding poverty, her mother’s, and that of all the residents, arises through and builds onto what seems endless layers of suffering for the poor in the barrio. this field of suffering materializes life in this place. in nicaragua, as this weight of the everyday is felt, and as what is wrong for the poor in the barrio multiplies in countless concrete examples, so does a sense that life could be otherwise. approached as affective entities, states of distress are formed and reverberate through bodies and spaces long before and after semblances of “resolution.” this is not just a question of the “resilience” of violence’s effects (green 1997; feldman 1994; taylor 1999). the body, pushed to its limits and thus distressed, expands across both space and time because it is recognizable to others who share conditions of marginality as distress. that juana and mita give form to the poverty that determines their lives in such distinct ways potentially augments the affective power of their corporealities. whether a resident stays in bed or sets out to find food, these doings are animated by, and generative of, a sense that life for nicaragua’s poor is pain. considering affective forces means pursuing the possibility that even idiosyncrasies of the everyday can increase, decrease, and shape the power of action of a body, and in this manner make a difference to social relations (braidotti 2007). while neither a plan of action nor a set of demands, juana’s depression and her mother’s carrying on in the face of pain are social events that materialize a sense of pain that is unsettling. affects are trans-personal formations, gathering energies across, and multiplying impacts through, all sorts of persons, events, actions, spaces, and times (grosz 2005). to grow affected involves, as noted at the outset, a “folding-in of external influences and simultaneous unfolding-outwards of affects” (braidotti 2007, 156). in accordance with this understanding of how affect emerges from and forms the social, i do not propose that juana or her mother are exerting agency. agency cannot be found, or lamented as absent, in particular social actors within this framework. however, no resident’s giving form to their poverty in the barrio is insignificant. these formations build a field tense with human and non-human particularities: persons and opportunities, events and weather conditions, food prices, neighbors’ luck, and illnesses. the sensing of these particularities qualifies these as “micro-agencies” (grosz 2005, 6), and in turn impact/form capacities to act. that some stay in bed and others carry on is symbolic and representative of life in this place, but these corporealities of violence are also socially important because these are affective—they feed off and into a landscape tense with pain and yearning for less of it. there is an old man who heads out of the barrio without fail at 6 am every day to collect firewood: many residents hold him up as an example of life’s cruelty in nicaragua. an old water vendor who works with juana never fails to depress juana when she comes by asking for a loan for food. when juana stays in bed, her mother has to work twice as hard to secure a meal. the community leader, an ex-sandinista, cannot stand the current government but what seems to fuel him even more as he marches off to meetings two-kilometers away or hitches rides to national congresses are all the folk in the barrio who to him appear “resigned” and “satisfied.” most of these people grew up like him; dirt poor, exploited on cotton plantations, trucked around from farm to farm, “herded and fed like dogs” in his words. for this leader, the ones who do not join in collective struggle only exacerbate his sense that those who can must. * * * juana sets out at 7 am under clear skies, but it starts raining at 9. she returns with only forty cordobas. this is enough to buy some beans, rice, and ten tortillas, but not enough to buy soap for the laundry or provide breakfast the next day. juana is tired. her white, sleeveless blouse is crisp, she dons a little purple eye shadow, her black curls are neatly pinned up, but there are dark circles under her eyes. she puts the basket down on her lap and lets her shoulders sag. her head hangs to one side. juana’s brother walks by as he heads to his welding station at the back of the lot. juana gestures towards her brother’s home angrily: “they might get wet but no matter what happens there’s this.” she flips her hand towards her mouth, making the sign for food. she leans in towards me. “he just bought three huge bags of milk. huge! three! they have,” she rubs her fingers together, making the sign for cash. she follows her brother with her eyes. he has resumed his work welding cages for fighting cocks. if we recognize how a wide range of acts blur into one another in their affective constitution, we can usefully broaden our imaginings of when and how political transformation may arise. whether occurring in the space of seconds, minutes, or days, to animate places and bodies with the sense of things being wrong, without necessarily saying how these can be righted, constitutes a stretching away from the grip of structural violence and inequalities. the social work of juana’s and mita’s corporealities of violence is ambiguous. affective corporealities are live with “ands,” “what ifs,” “what abouts,” and “what could be.” depression, hunger, and pain matter to social relations not because of their measurable outcomes or failures, but because of the way they materialize life in the barrio, and “charge up” spaces, bodies, and the current historical period in nicaragua “by the sheer surge of things in the making” (stewart 2000, 1016). is this affective charging up of a nicaraguan shanty, or even of a hundred or a thousand shanties, a precondition for political transformation in nicaragua? it may or it may not be. the question more readily answered is, should we ignore orientations to hardship such as carrying on or staying in bed on the basis that these corporealities resist translation into acts or words that clearly support or challenge structures of power? trans-personal agencies and the body pushed to its limits agamben (1998) and rancière (2004) both suggest that states and zones of exception are the grounds for new political possibilities. these scholars underline the political potential within the cruel production of humans reduced to mere survival. for rancière, it is in the act of rising up, of speaking out, that those excluded from politics can disrupt the normalcy of their separation from the state. agamben, in his theory of bare life, is less specific about what a political action emerging from the no-go zones of the world will involve in terms of organization and expression, but is more specific about the significance of the location of emergence of this politics. for agamben, the fungible subject, or the subject of prolonged dying, can become a particularly subversive and effective political agent—where agency is defined as the potential to “make the future diverge from the pattern and causes of the present” (grosz 2005, 72)—because of the subject’s location in zones of politically-defined erasure, invisibility, and indifference. these sites or zones, where life is at once heavily subjugated by structural violence but also left alone (to die), allow rare opportunities for imagining and experimenting with political transformation. while rancière and agamben usefully unbound ideas of where and through whom political imagination can be reinvigorated, neither acknowledge that the pushing of bodies to their limits may itself imply new formations of agency. in their writings, it is the body as symbol, the metaphysical body, rather than the living of bare life, that fuels or will fuel social transformation. political imagination, as the fuel of political transformation, has nothing to do with flesh, blood, and nerve beyond how these represent a violent post–second world war biopolitical order. the dying, killeable body does not, as a physiological reality, matter. thus, the political imagination directly shapes biowelfare on the political and economic margins of society, but not vice versa. they do not acknowledge that living reduced to bare life plays a role in whether or not, to what extent, and how, political re-imaginings of the status quo emerge in zones of marginality. bare life and its attendant suffering—psychological, social, biological—is in this sense ignored: the political agency of bare life assumes a form that is no different than the political agency of the human who escapes such sacrificial status, save that according to agamben and rancière, it may be more effective in impacting the social order. it would be too lengthy a digression here for me to take issue with rancière’s and agamben’s apparent suggestion that the most downtrodden are our hope for a new world. what i want to draw attention to within such an assertion is the idea that the only political hope for the oppressed lies in their exhibition of what povinelli (2010) calls “bootstrap performativity”: the lauded capacity of the oppressed to overcome crushing conditions of violence to assume the role of “anywhere” political agents. i share povinelli’s concern with the expectation of, and perhaps even search for, a carpe diem attitude among subjects of ethnographic research whose lives are marked by structural violence. such an expectation is consistent with another generalization about how socially-transformative acts take shape in the affect literature. although this is changing (ahmed 2010; butler 2004; cvekovitch 2007), recent theorizations of affect are replete with the equation of positive affects with positive agency. for example, wendy brown (1995, 54–55), whose analysis of subaltern politics in the mid-1980s was seminal in its recognition of affects as central to politics, critiques the fetishization of the wound among marginalized groups as limiting political horizons. ghassan hage (2002, 171), in his highlighting of the political potential of hope, suggests that not being joyful is reactionary, as such a state reproduces the endless deferral of happiness in a capitalist system. james thompson (2009) suggests that only the affects of pleasure, passion, and enjoyment can inspire social change as they connect us to one another in new ways. elizabeth grosz (1999, 21–22) writes against cynical predictions of the future by scholars, and urges more attention be granted to the critical affirmations enabled by the “joyous open-endedness of the future.” joyousness, hopefulness, pleasure, and enjoyment: through this scholarship, there appears to be an implication that certain affective corporealities harbor stronger potential than others for social transformation. the association between positive affects and positive social outcomes in this strain of affect-informed writings has never sat well with me. my unease stems, at least in part, from working in a country where widespread suffering, lived day-to-day as exploitative labor-norms, severe class-discrimination, and political oppression, exerts a powerful force, alongside hope and joy in the making of the sandinista revolution. ethnographically, it does not make sense to foreclose the possibility that the subject who lives in pain might contribute to social-political transformation, at least to some degree, through their pain rather than in spite of it. as affect theorists such as butler (2004), braidotti (2007), ahmed (2010), and cvekovitch (2007) have warned, there is no natural correlation between positive social or personal outcomes and specific affects. hope and happiness can facilitate structural inequalities and violence (ahmed 2010), but these can also negate an apathetic resignation to the status quo (hage 2002). shame can reproduce oppressive social divisions, but it can also empower us “to repair the failings or limitations of our human endeavors” (braidotti 2007, 200). pain can suck us in, produce a collapse into oneself—disconnecting us from the world and therefore from the possibility of political action. but pain is also often, if not normally, an indication of connection to the world. in judith butler’s (2004) work on mourning, she exposes the connections between our capacity to remain unmoved by violence done to others, and our capacity to do violence. “coming undone,” according to butler, is crucial to political consciousness, as it is in the act of feeling vertigo in the face of violence done to others that we can and do break through senses and discourses of otherness to form political community. i have no definite conclusions to offer regarding what a sense of pervasive hardship will accomplish, politically and socially, in the context of my research in nicaragua. my conclusion is that there is no inherent politics to carrying on. there is no inherent absence of politics in feeling painfully overcome by the weight of the world. bootstrap efforts at survival versus depressed withdrawal from life struck me at one point in my ethnographic research as containing radically opposed potentials for social transformation, but on careful consideration, the differences between such engagements have grown blurry for me. still, the inconclusive impacts of juana and mita’s corporealities do not justify my excluding their lives from an account of social transformation in nicaragua. understood through an affect-informed lens, how juana and mita exist in the world is more than a representation of social relations: what these women do and feel contributes to the constant (re)generation of what feels, and thus might become, doable or impossible. regardless of what nicaragua’s political and social future holds, that future will be shaped by the corporealities of countless residents such as juana and mita who are angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, anxious, aching, and alarmed in the face of their day-to-day lives. as these nicaraguans take in and leak hardship in innumerable ways, they make present and feel an anarchic sense that their lives of constant hardship do not make sense. their suffering is not strategic; it is not a plan. nevertheless, it is possible that feeling pain and seeking relief—some food, more rest, less insults, less rain—even when the body is not literally speaking or organizing, speaks to power as it desires, and thus insists another better existence is possible. such non-discursive, non-strategic carrying on and curling up may hook into more traditional forms of social critique, stirring others to public and collective political action. or they may not. they may generate new apathy and normalize the violent casualties of global, national, and local inequalities. either way, materializations of the poor’s jodido life in nicaragua cannot be discounted in an analysis of when, how, and why political and social change may or may not occur. notes acknowledgments i would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their detailed suggestions, and the editorial team at cultural anthropology. special thanks to the residents of “barrio los heroes” (“juana,” “mita,” and others) who shared their lives with me in 2008–2009. the research for this article was funded by a social sciences and humanities research council doctoral fellowship. 1. all place and personal names in this article are pseudonyms. 2. this research complies with aaa ethics guidelines and was approved by the sponsoring university’s research ethics board. 3. i was commonly told, or heard in conversations between poor nicaraguans, that “nosotros los pobres somos jodidos” (we the 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for example, by such colossal events as the collision of black holes or the detonation of supernovae. listening to hughes’s .wav representations of black holes spiraling into one another, i heard washing-machine whirs, theremin-like glissandos, and cybernetic chirps—noises reminiscent, i mused, of mid-twentieth century sci-fi movies (see taylor 2001 on space-age music). audio 1. circular inspiral, spin 35.94% of maximum, orbital plane 0° , 0􏰘° viewing angle. created by pei-lan hsu, using code written by scott hughes. audio 2. generic inspiral, eccentricity e = 0.7, inclination i = 25°􏰘. created by pei-lan hsu, using code written by scott hughes. these were sounds that, as it turned out, had a family resemblance to the actual detection signal that, come february 2016, would be made public by astronomers at the laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory (ligo), an mit-caltech astronomy collaboration anchored at two massive antennae complexes, one in hanford, washington, another in livingston, louisiana. the sonic imprint of that detection, described by astronomers as a “chirp,” had arrived in september 2015, and, before making its way into the media, had been double-checked and sonically streamlined. the audio file that then circulated was joined with an evocative graphic, a paired set of left-to-right waveform readouts, aligned with bright spectrogram swoops (suggesting nothing so much as ghostly nebulae against a space-dark background). video 1. a visualization of the chirp pattern detected on september 14, 2015. created by ligo. what are gravitational-wave detection sounds, predicted and actual? how do they operate as auditory evidence and argument in today’s astronomy and what can they tell us about the cultural valences of astronomical and other scientific audition? there are historical answers: astronomy has long been tuning its observations to different wavelengths—to optical, infrared, x-ray, radio, ultraviolet, and gamma-ray radiation (see munns 2013 on radio astronomy). gravitational waves open a sonically accessible channel of apprehension, though they also promise to take astronomy into a novel realm, since these waves are not, as are electromagnetic and acoustic waves, vibrations that travel through space-time. rather, they are warpings in space-time. there are sociological answers: such sounds bear the imprint of community debates about what can count as a proper machine registration of gravitational waves (collins 2004). there are philosophical and technical answers: fixing gravitational waves as part of the ontology of the universe has required well-structured and well-elaborated wave analogies and correspondingly calibrated technologies of waveform capture (kennefick 2007). there are answers to be sought, too, by approaching these sounds anthropologically, as i do here. i ask: how do established and up-to-the-minute metaphors, models, and machines shape how such cosmic vibrations come into audibility? what symbolic significance does listening to the universe hold for scientists? how do encounters of humans with a cosmically scaled phenomenon—an encounter with what philosopher timothy morton (2013, 1) would call a hyperobject, a thing that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”—summon up cognitive, practical, and affectual strategies for grappling with the gap between cosmic and human scales? in this essay, drawing on conversations with a few ligo scientists at mit and on popular representations of gravitational-wave sound, i sketch the outlines of a gravitational-wave science acoustemology, which the anthropologist of music steven feld has defined as a “sonic way of knowing and being” (feld and brenneis 2004, 462; see also feld 1996). astronomers have been scouting for gravitational waves for decades, first in small-scale experiments in the 1960s, famously conducted by the physicist joseph weber, and then, starting in 1992, at ligo with the support of the national science foundation (bartusiak 2000; collins 2004; levin 2016). although these waves are not acoustic pressure waves (like ordinary sound waves in air)—but are theorized, rather, as squeezes and stretches in the very stuff of space-time—their frequencies, captured by detection instruments, coincidentally map onto the human auditory range (though, by the time they arrive at earth, at vanishingly low amplitudes, one one-thousandth the diameter of a proton, much diminished from their initial, gargantuan sizes).2 scientists like hughes have employed acoustic analogies to anticipate what gravitational waves might sound like to a detector, and have been creating audio simulations of possible discovery events. in this way, the black hole collision sounds i heard though headphones in may 2015 might be described as mathematically precise sonic science fictions, audio animations of scenarios derived from einstein’s theory of general relativity. in 2016, the ligo team described the sound of their gravitational-wave detection as a “chirp,” a sound wave speedily swooping up in frequency. much was made of this auditory representation. as the ligo scientist szabolcs marka framed the matter in the new york times (overbye 2016), “everything else in astronomy is like the eye. . . . finally, astronomy grew ears. we never had ears before.”3 or, as the physicist gabriela gonzález, the ligo scientific collaboration spokesperson at louisiana state university, elaborated when the detection was announced, “the frequencies of these waveforms are in the human hearing range. . . . we are not only going to be seeing the universe, we are going to be listening to it” (nsf 2016). how do scientists turn gravitational-wave detection into sound and meaning? to preview: gravitational-wave scientists do not take detection sounds to be acoustic emanations of the cosmos. rather, they take these sounds to be encodings—mediations—of vibrations, even as these sounds, for some astronomers, also make “visceral” for them the detection of gravitational waves; such detections thus have an emotional charge. thinking through the meanings of these sounds often sees scientists reaching for analogies to do with auditory experience. some suggest that interpreting these sounds requires them to develop a “vocabulary,” a trained judgment about how to listen for the meanings behind particular waveforms. gravitational-wave detection sounds, i argue, are thus articulations—articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of physical phenomena. following stuart hall, i take an articulation to be both a speech act and a linking together of entities, a form of “connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions” (grossberg 1986, 53). mike fortun and herbert j. bernstein (1998, 39) offer a science-studies elaboration, writing that a linguistic articulation seeks “to give words to, to try to express, describe, or invent something that wasn’t previously a part of language or thought” and that a physical articulation operates as a “corporeal, an organic or mechanical . . . structure in which different parts meet and rub up against each other” (compare kockelman 2013, 57, 143 on “inferential articulation,” an articulation that emerges when people interpreting a network of signs agree that relations among signs are bound by infrastructures of logical inference). gravitational-wave sounds emerge from semiotically and technologically specific articulations of humans with machines with nonhuman phenomena. a recap of what scientists claimed the ligo detection indicated: a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a pair of black holes that had been orbiting each other for billions of years hurtled into one another, releasing in a fraction of a second a train of gravitational waves—the conversion into energy of much of the mass that these former stars jettisoned as they combined into one enormous black hole. when this energy arrived to earth on september 14, 2015, 1.3 billion years after its cataclysmic origin, it interfered with beams of laser light ricocheting off mirrors in the ligo apparatus. that phase displacement was translated into a sine wave sound that slid in two tenths of a second up from 35 hz to 150 hz. this was the chirp (see hughes 2016). when caltech’s ligo laboratory executive director, david reitze, announced the detection on february 11, 2016, at the national press club in washington, d.c., he offered an explication at once clarifying and poetic: what ligo does is it actually takes these vibrations in space-time, these ripples in space-time, and it records them on a photo-detector, and you can actually hear them. so, what ligo has done, it’s the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves. and this is remarkable. up till now, we’ve been deaf to gravitational waves, but today we are able to hear them. (nsf 2016) reitze’s announcement makes clear that gravitational-wave signals require a chain of mediations to appear, even as their sounded translations also invite more informal acoustic descriptions (the word spoken here suggesting that gravitational-wave sounds are already articulations). if the analogy of gravitational waves to sound waves is secured instrumentally in ligo’s techniques of signal registration, it permits commentators, scientific and popular, to glide toward more fanciful metaphorical accounts.4 the mathematico-computational formalisms and technological forms through which gravitational waves are known and made audible—einstein’s equations, interferometric observatories, sound files—thus operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical similes and metaphors, which i will call informalisms. those informalisms can then bounce or reflect back on the original articulations, leading to a kind of rhetorical reverb, in which articulations, amplified through a range of similes, metaphors, and analogies, become difficult to fully isolate (for scientists as well as their ethnographers) from the rhetorical reflections they generate. i tell a three-part story. in the first section, i discuss the rhetorical and technical apparatuses that have over the last half-century or so prepared scientists to imagine (and, through the mediation of their instruments, experience) the cosmos as a sounded space. in the second, i work through hughes’s premonitory gravitational-wave simulations, developing the claim that these predictive sounds are articulations and audio animations of models and theory in physics. in the third section, i zero in on the detection event of 2015, asking how its sonic aspect bolstered gravitational waves’ claim to reality. i report on conversations with scientists who told me that they used the infrastructural rumbling and buzzing of ligo as a “diagnostic” of whether the detectors were working, and that hearing the chirp on top of this noise made the event “visceral.” gravitational-wave sounds are not the unvarnished sounds of nature. even as they tell a story about the cosmos, i conclude that they are also the articulated sounds of human-technological-ahuman assemblages. preverberation for centuries, space was either a zone of the harmonic, cosmic sublime or of vast silence. the stage for a modern, noisier cosmos was set in the middle of the twentieth century, in the years around the theorization of the big bang. in making noise: from babel to the big bang and beyond, hillel schwartz (2011) suggests that the big bang, emerging from the thinking of georges lemaître and george gamow on the (backward-in-time) implications of an expanding universe, was of its cultural moment, echoing anxieties about what oppenheimer called the “big bang” of the atom bomb, as well as keying in to a world ever more saturated by sound, static, distortion, and noise (the term “big bang” was coined in 1949 by the astronomer fred hoyle, and is often understood to have been a jibe at theories of cosmic evolution, which hoyle found unpersuasive). schwartz (2011, 823) writes, “the big bang became such an audicon of astrophysics and so constant a cosmological figure in popular discourse because of the omnipresence and every howness of noise.” schwartz listens back before the full arrival of the big bang theory, too, reporting on metaphors describing cosmic rays, in, for example, harvey lemon’s 1936 book, cosmic rays thus far, in which lemon wrote, “now and then, here and there, in the great solitudes and silences of interstellar, intergalactic space, an atom, perhaps of hydrogen, is born of radiation . . . [cosmic rays are] the wail of newborn atoms” (schwartz 2011, 818). as the universe became imaginable in sound, it became populated with noises—pops and chirps against the hum of the cosmic microwave background, that field of radiation left over from the early universe. schwartz (2011, 827) also offers a 1980 quotation from a reflection by rudolf kippenhahn, the director of the max planck research institute for astrophysics in munich: at a lecture i gave around 1960, i asked the audience to imagine an instrument capable of transforming all the incoming radiation from space into audible sound. we would hear the constant rushing of the starlight and the radio eruptions of the sun as well as the rushing of the radio waves. . . . [now, twenty years later], we could hear the heterodyne ticking of the pulsars—the low humming of the cancer pulsar for instance, emitting pulses of very high energy from a spherical star cluster. . . . there is not only rushing to be heard in space, there is ticking and drumming, humming, and cracking. the idea of a universe available for technical audition, then, was in place by at least the mid-1960s. a proper historical accounting would track the technical choices, institutional infrastructures, and funding regimes that enabled kippenhahn’s call to “imagine” “radiation from space” as “audible sound” to be realized in detection techniques that can in fact produce sound as one of their outputs. sonic descriptions of cosmic phenomena—and of gravitational waves in particular—now suffuse popular representations. in her history of gravitational-wave science, einstein’s unfinished symphony: listening to the sounds of space-time, marcia bartusiak (2000, 9) writes that since gravitational waves have a “frequency [that] happens to fall in the audio range,” their detection “will at last be adding sound to our cosmic senses, turning the silent universe into a ‘talkie,’ one in which we might ‘hear’ the thunder of colliding black holes or the whoosh of a collapsing star.”5 bartusiak’s scare quotes, particularly around the word talkie—a term used after the era of silent film to refer to motion pictures with sound—make evident that the universe is not itself a movie or sound object, but is rather apprehensible as such only through technologies of representation. as alexandra supper (2014, 37) writes in her study of scientists turning data from sunspot detections into sound, it is important to be cautious about “the usage of metaphors to suggest that the sounds are inherent to the phenomena being sonified rather than the outcome of a series of human-technological interventions.” the columbia university physicist and cosmologist jenna levin (2011, 9:32–12:12) makes manifest how such metaphors may sometimes collapse toward the literal. in an online ted talk originally delivered in 2011, she navigates through thickets of mixed metaphors to guide her listeners toward an intuition that gravitational waves are real sounds: “the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum. it can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold.” gravitational waves, levin proposes, are: literally the sounds of space ringing. . . . if you were standing near enough, your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space. you would literally hear the sound. . . . i’d like to play for you the sound that we predict. . . . imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole. the sound you’re hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close. it . . . comes in like a mallet and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum. and we can predict what the sound will be. we know that as it falls it gets faster and it gets louder. [plays sound, a rhythmic tapping that speeds up until it ceases] . . . and it’s gone. now, i’ve never heard it that loud—it’s actually more dramatic. at home it sounds kind of anticlimactic. it’s sort of like “ding, ding, ding.” . . . now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging—that it chirps up at the end. . . . but the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear. levin here compresses an explanatory map onto empirical territory—her repeated use of the word literally presents sounds as research findings rather than as mediated data or interpretations, setting up a rhetorical reverb that requires a certain listening through or past to get at the more staid technical claims that she and her colleagues might otherwise articulate when talking among themselves. the rhetorical reverb here reinforces a sense of space as sounded, as a transductive medium (cf. helmreich 2007), full of signal and noise (a sense of reality as a suffusing space of vibration, from the body to the cosmos, gathers force with wave theories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; see beer 1996; trower 2012; brain 2015). whether the sound of the universe is imagined as loud—kippenhahn’s “eruptions”—or quiet—“low humming”—adds an additional dimension to cosmic listening. the sober solitude culturally associated with astronomical enterprise resonates aesthetically with the relatively modest sounds delivered by gravitational-wave astronomy (overbye 1991; see also aubin, bigg, and sibum 2010 on the quasi-monastic space of the observatory). levin’s remark that she usually hears gravitational-wave audio simulations “at home” as “anticlimactic”—she is impressed at her ted talk by hearing a simulation “that loud”—points to the affects awakened by gravitational-wave sounds (see thompson and biddle 2013 on sound as affect). as cleaned-up sounds never to be played back too loud, gravitational-wave sounds are not terrifying cosmic roars, but subtle and well-mannered sounds of precise science. the quiet that follows them becomes an invitation to contemplation. as the sound studies theorist jonathan sterne (2003) argues, sound has, at least in european and american epistemological settings, long been associated with embodied, even intimate, knowledge. sterne (2003, 15) describes the contrasting associations between hearing and vision that have animated this acoustemology. whereas “hearing is concerned with interiors, vision is concerned with surfaces . . . hearing tends toward subjectivity, vision tends toward objectivity . . . hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, vision is a sense that removes us from it.” the prospect of listening to gravitational waves thus offers for persons invested in this acoustemology a meeting place between subjective and objective, a way of making inhumanly scaled phenomena experientially available to the bodies of hearing scientists and their audiences. there is an aesthetic component to informal descriptions of space sound. when writers deliver depictions of the universe as a piece of symphonic music, they bring the science into the realm of elevated intellectual appreciation. bartusiak, in her book, offers an extended comparison of einstein to a great german composer. at a later moment in her text, the “talkie” universe morphs into a kind of modernist symphony, perhaps one written by stravinsky: the ligo detectors on each coast are best receptive to frequencies from 100 to 3,000 hertz. on the musical scale that roughly extends from an extremely low a note to a very high f-sharp. . . . given the audio range of the signal, there might be single cymbal crashes from exploding stars, periodic drumbeats from a swiftly rotating pulsar, and extended glissando—a rapid ride up the scale—from the merger of two black holes, as well as a faint background hiss. (bartusiak 2000, 153) the “background hiss” is suggestive of the noise of a recording medium, pointing to the fact that hearing cosmic music happens against an infrastructure, which itself has a noise. bartusiak’s phrasing may remind readers of a certain age cohort of “tape hiss,” the background sound made by magnetic cassette tapes, indicating that sonic metaphors key closely to their historical moments. consider albert lazzarini, a 1974 mit graduate with a physics degree, whose comments on a recording of a possible gravitational wave bartusiak (2000, 165) quotes. lazzarini’s words track the aesthetics of tape-recorder noise and make a canonical countercultural reference to nonhuman sound: “it sounds like a hiss. . . . actually, a hiss with warbles in it, due to the suspension. it’s eerie, in some ways like whale songs.” in these framings, the universe is variously a romantic composition or a nonhuman song; consider janna levin’s (2016) book black hole blues and other songs from outer space (by now, we have been through most of the master metaphors for organized sound in the west: symphonies, compositions, instruments, soundtracks, background noise, the blues . . .). notably, the black-hole universe is almost never imagined in the key of menacingly noisy heavy metal—or, better, ambient death metal—which one could imagine as fitting, given the cosmic catastrophes that something like the chirp is meant to index. simulation when david kaiser and i listened to scott hughes’s simulated gravitational-wave sounds, hughes (n.d.) pointed back to his website, which provided an analogical warrant for posing gravitational waves as akin to sound waves: the waves that [gravitational waves] generate will have wavelengths of thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers. we cannot even in principle use this radiation to form an image of its source; thinking about what gws can help us “see” is just not a well-posed analogy. a more fruitful analogy can be formed based on sound. the sounds that our ears are sensitive to have wavelengths that can be many meters or tens of meters, far too long to form images of the sources that generate them. listening to hughes’s sounds, i recollected einstein’s unfinished symphony, in which bartusiak (2000, 199) described what these sounds might resemble: “a sort of whine, a series of waves that rapidly rise in pitch, like the sound of an ambulance siren that is swiftly approaching.” what, though, was i listening to when i listened to sound files meant to portray gravitational-wave detections? take this auditory anticipation of what a detection might sound like if it were to capture gravitational-wave vibrations generated by a small black hole spiraling into a massive one, something not too far from what ligo captured: audio 3. circular inspiral, spin 99.8% of maximum, orbital plane 20°􏰘, 0°􏰘 viewing angle. created by pei-lan hsu, using code written by scott hughes. hughes and an undergraduate physics major, pei-lan hsu, created this simulation in 2007. what is this .wav file?6 to begin, such gravitational wave files are not: recordings (direct, pitch-shifted, amplified, or otherwise) of actual events; synthesized waveforms created from scratch, in the mode of the electronic synthesizer, using the manipulation of electronic oscillators, voltage-control filters, and envelope modulators; or sonifications that map the numerical to the sonic in arbitrary, if calibrated, ways (as sonifications of, say, the stock market might; the stock market is not itself a waveform, even if its rises and falls can be mapped as one). hughes’s audio waveforms are, rather, sonic indexes of ideal-typical events—they have relations of analogy, of close contiguity, to waveforms that might be produced by gravitational waves. a file like “circular inspiral” is an index—in charles sanders peirce’s semiotic sense—of a simulation, an impression of the coming into being of a physical object (of course, for nonphysicists, hughes’s sounds might still be reminiscent of synthesizer sounds, or they might be experienced as what the musique concrète composer pierre schaeffer in 1966 called acousmatic: sounds without an apparent cause in the common-sense world [see kane 2014]). david kaiser and i asked hughes how the simulated sound artifact was made. the recipe involves theoretical abstractions, mathematical formalisms, computational simulations, and translations of all these into sound (rather than into images). the steps go like this: start with einstein’s general relativity equations. employ equations from this set to model a scenario that creates gravitational waves (in, e.g., a binary star system in which stars spiral into collision with one another). translate the equations describing this system into a computational formalism in fortran 90 or c++ that can be moved forward step by step, in computational time, and that can thereby simulate the propagation of gravitational waves. transduce the wave frequency value outputs into audible data in the audio spectrum. format this data as a digital sound file (mp3, aiff, .wav). in the making here is not only a sound simulation but also, more foundationally, an animation, in sound, of a theory of gravitational-wave phenomena.7 hughes agreed that such sounds were “not theory-agnostic”—and, indeed, as daniel kennefick (2000) has shown, there have been battles in gravitational-wave science about what it is that theory should and can predict about black hole coalescence. hughes’s files are, i suggest, audio animations: stepped, frame-by-frame representations (audifications) of a system meant to be captured by a one-to-one mapping between an ideal or empirical reality and a schematized, moving depiction.8 the sequence of events that makes this animation is a chain of what the media scholars jay bolter and richard grusin (1999) call remediations, transformations in the media that carry information from one domain to another (from scientific papers to computers to speakers). these transformations also follow what the historian of science stephanie dick (2014) would call a series of reformalisms: changes in the form of inscription across formats (from nonlinear equations to computer languages to those transduced vibrations that many of us define as “sound”). there exist for these files, then, what jonathan sterne (2012, 19–21) would call a “perceptual technics,” a format that assumes a particular kind of listener, just as the mp3 format instantiates a specific psychoacoustic model. as the sound studies scholar tara rodgers (2011) would also point out, these waves have been cleaned up, made pure, and as such emerge from an audio-technical tradition that has treated sounds as individuals—individuals whose lifetimes can be graphed, whose properties can be purified (think sine wave), and whose growth and decay can be formally known and represented (think heartbeats in electrocardiograms) through the narrative form of the waveform. this purity is consequential—it makes the sounds sound like mathematical abstractions. no wonder these files make me imagine sci-fi movie oscilloscopes—and remind me of what james wierzbicki (2014), in his taxonomy of sounds in science fiction films, calls the sounds of “futuristic” technologies, “made up of bleeps and blips that cover a wide pitch range and are devoid of recognizable rhythmic patterns” (see also taylor 2001 on space-age sounds, which taylor tracks not only in labs, but also through histories of hi-fi recordings meant to appeal to audiophiles). hughes’s simulations await a prepared—or trainable—listener. they provide information to those who know how to listen. when he was interviewed in the atlantic just after the gravitational-wave detection, hughes offered that detection sounds could be understood as parts of something like a language: “i like to think of it in a linguistic way,” he said. “the vocabulary of the [event] is imprinted on the wave” (adams and chapman 2016). in an audio accompaniment to the atlantic piece, hughes used his voice to imitate detection sounds: “if the two black holes are nonspinning, you get a very simple chirp: whoop! if the two bodies are spinning very rapidly, i have that same chirp, but with a modulation on top of it, so it kinda goes wooooo woooo wooo woo re ri! it’s the vocabulary of spin, imprinted on this waveform.” earlier, hughes had offered a similar account in my own conversation with him: “it’s this idea that the spin causes this sort of rrrr rrrr rrrr. i consider that to be almost like a vocabulary. and that is telling me a lot about the evolution and the dynamics of this system.” audio 4. excerpt from an interview with scott hughes, conducted by stefan helmreich. i hear evidence in this clip from my ethnographic interview with hughes of how he thinks in a material and semiotic way about what i have been describing as linguistic-technical articulation. his voice becomes a medium for thinking about listening. hughes’s recurring metaphor of vocabulary suggests, to underline the point, that sound representations are articulations, not just findings (recall miller’s [1993, 379] definition of metaphor as “a comparison statement with parts left out”; here, parts are added, as linguistic comparisons are swapped in for mathematical ones). if levin poses her wave sounds as “literal,” as data, hughes offers his as indexical sounds that emerge where signals meet an articulatory apparatus (thereby taking for granted that gravitational waves exist, which is the datum that levin seeks in her talks primarily to establish). elinor ochs, patrick gonzales, and sally jacoby (1996, 330), in their linguistic-anthropological account of how physicists use hands and voices to explain their research, can help us understand how scientists like hughes use gesture and sound both to “express their subjective involvement . . . by foregrounding their role as practitioners of scientific activity” and to “express involvement more extremely by taking the perspective (empathizing with) some object being analyzed,” thus “involving themselves in graphic (re)enactments of physical events” (see also myers 2015 for examples of gesturally made knowledge in the life sciences). hughes’s enactment offers a sonically embodied inferential articulation, saturated with rhetorical reverb. what might be learned from gravitational-wave soundings? one question that comes up in discussions of transforming data into sound is whether this adds anything epistemologically novel or offers merely a popularization (see supper 2014). hughes offered an argument for sound as more than an impressionistic tool: we have two ears, and i can make these sounds in stereo. i put one polarization in the left ear, one in the right ear. and you can hear in some of these sources, they evolve in slightly different ways, which turns out to be connected to the orientation of the source with respect to line of sight, or line of hearing. stereo can help illustrate what information is being carried by these polarizations. in other words, assigning the two polarizations of gravitational waves to the two sides of a stereo mix takes advantage of the two-earedness of humans. the twoness of gravitational-wave polarization and the twoness of human ears, however, as david kaiser helped me understand, is a serendipitous coincidence.9 what results is not a sound image of gravitational waves (as levin might have it), but rather a sound graph or diagram—one you have to learn to read through listening, one for which you need what hughes calls a “vocabulary” (cf. rice 2010, on learning how to hear through stethoscopes). as hughes put it to me, “it’s a new dimension of hearing.” hughes’s strategic stereophony now demands abstractly formalist rather than indexical listening (cf. hirschkind 2004, 137 on pious listening, in which sermon audiences use “disciplined ears” to hear divine truth not in but through the words of religious orators). placing x coordinates in one ear and y coordinates in another makes this file not really a stereo image at all, but a file with different aspects of the same sound piped to different ears—as if one had, analogously, glasses that let one see only blue in one eye and only red in another. listening itself becomes a kind of articulation. realization when ligo delivered the detection news, the signal presented sounded much like hughes’s audio anticipations. work of the sort hughes did turned out to be essential for scientists to know what they were listening for. the detection was informed by audio animations. as a team of researchers who simulate black holes explained, “scientists develop possible waveforms that could be detected in their instruments. each of these ‘template’ waveforms is then tested in a computer against the detector data to see if the template rings sympathetically” (sxs n.d.). or, as the physicist kip thorne put it when the news arrived: the colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time. . . . we have been able to deduce the full details of the storm by comparing the gravitational-wave forms that ligo saw with the wave forms that are predicted by supercomputer simulations. (nsf 2016) the use of so-called matched filtering evidences what science-studies scholars might term theory-laden observation (see hanson 1958; kennefick 2000), with theories necessarily built right into detection tools.10 in an older anthropological idiom—giving gravitational waves something of an animist spin—a template might also be understood as a trap, “both a model of its creator, the hunter, and a model of its victim, the prey animal. . . . the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space” (gell 1996, 27).11 although much of the discussion of gravitational waves operated in the domain of the auditory, images were far from absent.12 indeed, the sound was often explicated using left-to-right graphs, with time along the x axis and amplitude (of strain) along the y. figure 1 of the detection paper (abbott et al. 2016) looked like this: figure 1. in the top row, the gravitational-wave event gw150914 as observed by the ligo hanford and livingston detectors. gw150914 arrived at livingston first and then at hanford 6.9 ms later. to permit comparison, hanford data are visually superimposed on the livingston data, but shifted by 6.9 ms and, to account for the detectors' physical orientations, inverted. in the bottom row, an ideal-typical projection of gravitational-wave strain onto each detector, mapping a numerical relativity waveform consistent with gw150914 parameters. as with gravitational-wave sounds, these gravitational-wave graphics reflect the neatening up and articulation of data. created by ligo. in the wake of the detection, i contacted two mit players in the ligo story: nergis mavalvala, a macarthur prize–winning astrophysicist who has spent her career developing and implementing technological innovations for the ligo detectors, and who has spent many years at the washington and louisiana sites, and matthew evans, an astrophysicist specializing in the making and testing of the ligo apparatus, involved in engineering and troubleshooting the instruments. when i met with mavalvala, i saw she had stereo speakers in her office. “i have a good amplifier and good speakers,” she explained, “because sometimes someone will just send me a signal file. and i can look at it on my screen as a graph, or i can encode it as a sound.” although she emphasized that gravitational-wave phenomena were not themselves acoustic, she said translating them into sound could aid in judging a signal significant: some compact stars can be spinning at frequencies we can hear. you could have one sitting right at middle c. and you would just hear a single tone, mmmmm. sometimes you might have a companion star that’s near enough to slightly perturb its orbit. and then you’ll get exactly the same thing, but you might get a little envelope as the star feels its gravity a little bit. and then you’ll see the same single tone, but modulated, mmnnmmnnmm, like that. all of those things tell us about what the source is. it’s actually vocabulary, within the language of signal. so, while similar information could be extracted from a visual reading of the data, audification adds another dimension. mavalvala went on: “the very first thing that happens is a computer algorithm tells you, ‘i hear something loud.’ and then you say, ‘oh, what do you hear?’ to the computer algorithm, and then you plot it, and then if it looks interesting, then you might do the right filtering, and put it into sound.” of the detection, she said, “it’s very viscerally a thump, compared to seeing a squiggle on a screen. graphs may have all kinds of frequencies, and then somehow our ears, because of the way that filtering happens, pick something up that our eyes didn’t pick up.”13 mavalvala’s account of such articulate listening suggests a question: who or what is doing the listening in gravitational-wave astronomy? at some moments, scientists will propose that it is a discipline or field—recall ligo scientist szabolcs marka remarking that “finally, astronomy grew ears.” at other moments, it may be the ligo experimental system as a whole, tuning to the “epistemic thing” (rheinberger 1997) of the gravitational wave. at still others, the listener may be a computer program—as when mavalvala gives voice to a computer algorithm: “i hear something loud.” and, of course, in many instances the listeners are scientists, plugged into an articulated listening relay, making sense and sensibility from signals. for such signals to be discerned at all (by machines or people), the ambient hums and noises of the detector have to be controlled, held steady, if not fully quiet. the detector, a massive device distributed across two physical sites—washington and louisiana—is constantly vibrating owing to seismic, ambient, and quantum fluctuations. before a signal can be registered, matt evans told me, scientists must draw up a “noise budget,” a catalog of all the sounds that need to be listened through or filtered out. a graphical representation of such a budget hung on evans’s wall: figure 2. noise budget for ligo. figure from “the advanced ligo gravitation wave detector, by s. j. waldman, https://arxiv.org/abs/1103.2728. evans played me, in succession, the different “noises” of the ligo detector at work, the frequencies that had to be accounted for in a noise budget. he played me the following files: audio 5. seismic noise. created by ligo. audio 6. thermal noise. created by ligo. audio 7. quantum noise. created by ligo. the first, seismic noise, was “just sort of a low rumbling.” the second, thermal noise, was “like waves on a beach.” and the third, quantum noise, was “like hard rain on a sidewalk.” he also played me the sound of the ligo machine at the ready, resonating with what he called “violin modes.” audio 8. violin modes. created by ligo. these resonances were so named because the thin glass fibers that suspend the central interferometer mirrors oscillate, when at rest, with a clear string tone at around 500 hertz. all these sounds inform ligo operators’ embodied sense of whether the instrument is working properly (cf. mody 2005). as mavalvala told me: we use this not just as an analogy, we actually use this in our work. when we’re sitting there diagnosing our detectors, we will encode sound into a loudspeaker or headphones. and the different kinds of sound allow us to diagnose what’s troubling the detector. we can assemble a vocabulary of maladies. evans elaborated: we listen to the sound, and when the detector is “locking” to get the control system operating, it thumps in a particular pattern—clicks and bumps and things like this, going through various transitions. and then at some point you get the nice humming sound of the detector. that’s sort of a peaceful moment, when you know that you have the thing operating and in a happy state, and you can hear the violins going. “we use our ears,” he emphasized, “to diagnose the interferometer performance. we listen to the output of the detectors on the speakers in the control room. that came naturally to me. i used to have an old ’67 camaro and i would never turn on the stereo when i was driving the car.” evans and others frequently walk around the ligo facility searching for sources of unwanted vibration. one source of scattered light, he told me, “sounded like these big howler monkeys or apes.” the louisiana observatory is built on a swamp, which gives it distinct resonant frequencies in the seismic register. it is also close to truck and train traffic. as rainer weiss (2016), a key mit scientist behind ligo, put it in a recent colloquium talk, “noise comes from the earth, from anthropogenic things . . . mostly people.” once noise is stabilized, it becomes possible to operate with a background against which to detect a signal. and the “noise” is noisy—staticky, buzzy, hummy, a fuzz against which to pick out a clean signal. ligo observatories, evans told me, are “like giant hearing aids.” just like mavalvala, evans thought detection could be aided by listening: your ears are roughly equivalent to a fraction-of-a-second fast fourier transform. so, rather than opening up a program and looking at this thing, and trying to figure out what the features are, your ears just pick all those things out without any trouble. there are things which happen in the spectrum that are there if you know what to look for, but without thinking about it or learning how to do it, you can listen to it, and hear very obviously the clicks and bumps. evans’s metaphor of the hearing aid might be tweaked. ligo may be more like a cochlear implant, a frequency analyzer that anticipates what those phenomena are that these devices need to capture and then builds these deeply into the infrastructure of machine listening. in this light, ligo director david reitze’s comment about astronomy having been “deaf” can be understood as flagging a disciplinary condition that requires a technical fix (see friedner and helmreich 2012 on the acoustemology of cochlear implants). that vibratory capture, then heard by hearing humans, has a phenomenological dimension. the rumble that accompanies detection provides a sense that something is happening. scientists are not listening against digital silence, but rather against a hum that tells them that the detector is on. as ragnhild brøvig-hanssen and anne danielsen (2016) argue in their book on digital sound, each recording and playback medium—wax, tape, vinyl, digital—has its own distinctive silence, usually a characteristic set of whirrs, clicks, hisses, and pops. it is no different with ligo. the noise/silence, i suggest, adds reality to the signal. the chirp—a clean, abstract, mathematically streamlined sound, like a theremin whoop—is juxtaposed, emerges from, and therefore acquires the reality effect of the rumble, roar, and hiss that ligo is always creating and that is always being sonically documented. why is the signal sound called a chirp? the term originates in radar research, describing a pulse-compressed signal that shows a sweeping increase (or decrease) in frequency, a sweep that radar engineers in the 1950s likened to the chirp of a bird, bat, or insect (the oxford english dictionary defines chirp as “the short sharp shrill sound made by some small birds and certain insects; a sound made with the lips resembling this; a chirrup”). the term was coined in 1951 in a bell lab memo entitled “not with a bang, but a chirp,” a reference to the final line of t.s. eliot’s 1925 poem “the hollow men,” which famously reads “not with a bang, but a whimper” (see klauder et al. 1960). by the time ligo scientists used the term, it had a formalized meaning and measure in signal science—though these are not in fact carried over into the gravitational-wave usage, which has a different mathematical form, making the use of the word chirp here more metaphorical than exact. gabriela gonzález presented the sound at the 2016 detection announcement, guiding listeners in how to hear: i wanted to play the gravitational wave for you to hear, but it’s so short that it’s just a thump. so, what we have done is taken the real signal and shifted a bit in frequency, but it’s still the real signal. did you hear the chirp? there’s a rumbling noise, and then there’s a chirp. . . . whoop! that’s the chirp we’ve been looking for. this is the signal we have measured. (nsf 2016) gonzález’s account starts by identifying the gravitational-wave detection event with the gravitational wave itself, but then explains that the low thump extracted from the observational apparatus had to be pitched up in frequency so that humans could hear it well. her next step was to make sure her listeners knew what they were listening for: “did you hear the chirp? there’s a rumbling noise, and then there’s a chirp.” thinking back to hughes’s suggestion that gravitational-wave sound signatures offer a “vocabulary,” we can think of the chirp—with its reference to bird vocalization and to organized radar signals—as an articulate sound, a sound that emerges from a structured source (and one that has already been anticipated, since the word chirp was used to describe candidate signals even before they were detected).14 this may explain why gonzález vocalizes along with the data playback: “whoop! that’s the chirp we’ve been looking for.”15 alexandra supper (2015) calls such performances “data karaoke.” on the day of the announcement, the youtube user unruly curiosity posted a video of people voicing the chirp sound, performing this sound as a human-nonhuman articulation (a reading reinforced by the fact that some chirps were offered by guinea pigs and dogs; see fortun and bernstein 1998, 40 on material-semiotic scientific articulations as “lobsterlike entities made out of disparate, heterogeneous elements”). video 2. chirp for ligo supercut trailer. created by unruly curiosity, uploaded to youtube on february 11, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uzicc9qujg. this practice of listening through vocalizing has something in common with what steven feld (1990) has described among the kaluli of papua new guinea: a practice of listening by singing along, as when someone sits by a river and sings along with it as a way of hearing it (see also eidsheim 2015). it underscores what the ligo detection sound is: an index of human apprehension (see also connor 2014 on sobs, hums, and stutters). at the same time, the inarticulate, animal character of the chirp offered by scientists embodies an argument that human imitators are aping or parroting a phenomenon beyond the human.16 the fact that the chirp is funny when humans and animals make it emphasizes the uncanniness of the science—“a hybridization of machine and organism that, inevitably, makes one laugh” (doyle 2003, 24). reverberation in gravity’s shadow, his sociology of the search for gravitational waves, harry collins (2004) chronicles a long history dating back to the 1960s of scientists’ attempts to capture signs of gravitational waves. thomas pynchon’s novel gravity’s rainbow—on which the title of gravity’s shadow plays—grappled with the unsteady character of human scientific and social mastery over forces atomic and subatomic. gravity’s shadow details how setting thresholds of gravitational-wave detection has been a scientific and social balancing act, ever shadowed by the prospect of high-stakes failure or success. what i call “gravity’s reverb” in the title of this article points to a less grand subject. reverberation is “a propagation effect in which a sound continues after the cessation of its emission. reflections of the sound on surfaces in the surrounding space are added to the direct signal” (augoyard and torgue 2006, 111). the reverberations i listen for in this article are echoes and reinforcements of auditory analogies, echoes and reinforcements of explicit similes and implicit metaphors that can both add to and blur the “original” human-machine articulation of the sounds of gravitational waves. in echo and reverb: fabricating space in popular music recording, 1900–1960, peter doyle (2005) suggests that reverb originates in attempts to render in sound the emptiness of vast landscapes, particularly the frontier american west (as in such pieces as vaughn monroe’s 1949 “ghost riders in the sky”). gravity’s reverb, of the sort astronomers reported detecting from the universe, might be a sign of the vastness of the universe, making of the cosmos an echoing space of waves. but such reverb also echoes the history of astronomies dedicated to transposing data across wavelengths, the history of purifying sound, and the history of cleaning up sound recordings. there is something incongruous, then, about the match between the outsized scale of gravitational waves generated by black holes and the delicateness of a chirp sound, which, with its evocations of little birds, is almost an audicon of sonic smallness (cf. mowitt 2015 on pings, whispers, and gasps). the modesty of the detection sound becomes a sound of sensible, not sublime, science. gravitational waves, then, are not precisely what morton calls hyperobjects, outsized entities like climate or the anthropocene that are, in his terms, viscous, nonlocal, temporally undulating, and phasing. gravitational waves, at least as scientists know them through sound, are not fully beyond-the-human. they are articulations of human, technological, and cosmological vibration. while the cosmic time that ligo speaks to may be vast and vibratory, the history that ligo records is a human history—of instruments, institutions, and technologies fashioned as sensory adjuncts and extensions (see weiss 2016).17 human apperceptions of gravitational waves are articulations, formalisms suffused by reverberating informalisms. gravity’s reverb is the sound of humans, listening. notes acknowledgments i thank my mit physicist interlocutors, matt evans, scott hughes, and nergis mavalvala, whose work with ligo and on gravitational waves has made epochal contributions to astronomy. for close readings and commentary from colleagues in anthropology, sound studies, and science and technology studies, i thank stephanie dick, steven feld, graham jones, lisa messeri, heather paxson, sophia roosth, nick seaver, alma steingart, jonathan sterne, and trevor pinch. audiences at the university of california, santa barbara (particular thanks to david novak) and at “periods and waves: a conference on sound and history,” held at stony brook university (and organized by ben taussig and erika honisch), made many useful observations about this material. thanks to claire webb for key transcriptions. i thank dominic boyer and cymene howe at cultural anthropology for soliciting this article, as well as two anonymous reviewers of the piece. finally, i thank david kaiser, physicist and historian of science, for his guiding wisdom in getting me properly tuned into these spacey topics. 1. apologies to douglas kahn (2013, 1), whose earth sound earth signal: energies and earth magnitude in the arts opens with the sentence, “radio was heard before it was invented.” 2. different detectors are sensitive to waves in different frequency ranges. for outer space–based detectors, sought-after frequencies will be much lower, from 10 millihertz to one-tenth of a hertz. 3. metaphors of astronomical listening appear earlier with radio telescopes (munns 2013), but this is the first instance in which the captured frequencies sat in a human audio range. 4. i take analogy to be an alignment of two objects or domains for comparison. simile and metaphor are expressions of analogy. following a glossary of rhetorical terms offered by the department of modern and classical languages, literatures, and cultures at the university of kentucky, i take simile to be “an explicit comparison between two things using ‘like’ or ‘as,’” and metaphor to be “implied comparison achieved through a figurative use of words.” a metaphor may also be defined as “a comparison statement with parts left out” (miller 1993, 379). in practice, of course, these rhetorical devices shade into one another. if, as marilyn strathern (1992, 47) writes, “culture consists in the way people draw analogies between different domains of their worlds,” it also consists of how those analogies often operate in incomplete and unanticipated ways. 5. bartusiak (2000, 126) writes of the gravitational wave scientist rainer weiss, whose “career began with a determination to get rid of the noises in a hi-fi system, only to transfer that interest to reducing the noises that could mask a gravity wave, whose wavelength happens to be in the audio range.” not all metaphors are sonic. the french physicist thibault damour has gone culinary, likening gravitational waves to wiggles in jellied veal: “finalement, il faut voir notre univers plutôt comme du ‘veau en gelée,’ comme aime à le dire thibault damour, professeur spécialiste de relativité générale à l’institut des hautes études scientifiques” (larousserie 2016). thanks to noémie merleau-ponty for this reference. 6. .wav is the waveform audio file format, employed on pcs for uncompressed audio (sampled 44,100 times per second with sixteen bits per sample). microsoft created it for windows 3.1 in 1992. 7. for arguments about theories, animated, in the life sciences, see kelty and landecker 2004. 8. the audio animation i have in mind does not immediately apply to sequenced music, whether created using piano rolls (see seaver 2011) or electronic sequencers. such music, while unfolding frame by frame, automates abstract, conventional representations of musical notation, not sound analogs/indices of continuous phenomenological events (though this distinction would get muddied if audio sampling were thrown into the stew). 9. in personal communication with the author, david kaiser explains that, “in ‘pure’ general relativity, gws [gravitational waves] have precisely two independent polarization states. but alternatives/generalizations of general relativity exist in which gws have up to five independent polarization states. in general, gws are understood to be represented by a spin-2 tensor field, which in general has 2×2+1=5 independent degrees of freedom, but in the limit that the mass of the particles associated with the field vanishes—as it does in general relativity—several of these degrees of freedom (polarization states) become indistinguishable, leaving only two independent polarization states. so gws needn’t have only two independent polarizations; they happen to have exactly two in general relativity.” 10. david kaiser observes that, in this particular case, the signal was strong enough to detect without template matching. inferring the source of the waves (the collision of two black holes of specific masses and orbits), however, did require matched filtering. gravitational-wave detections that pinpoint signal origins might be seen as technologies that make place in outer space (see messeri 2016). these locative operations can be contrasted with the disorientation that often accompanies experiential encounters with the cosmos (see battaglia, valentine, and olson 2012). 11. i am indebted to nick seaver, alberto corsín jiménez, and rane willerslev for this metaphor. 12. seeing sound explicated through image reminds me of ferdinand de saussure’s (1916) founding text in linguistics, in which he explains that language should properly be imagined as a set of contrasts in sound, but makes the claim stick by offering diagrams of how sounds might differ from one another. for kindred ethnographic work on remote sensory apprehensions and embodiments of otherworldly phenomena—work that focuses on technologies of vision—see vertesi 2015. 13. mavalvala continued: “i don’t know if i would ever think of sound as part of the discovery process. it’s part of diagnostics.” by this, i take it that she meant that the discovery was the result of the complex tuning of various instruments and that listening, even if informative, may not in the end be necessary to confirming signals. 14. compare sophia roosth’s (2009) analysis of sonocytology, in which scientists listen to cells and then report on them as “screaming” or otherwise voicing their agency. 15. the oxford english dictionary defines whoop as “a natural exclamation consisting of a voiceless w followed by an o or u sound, concluded by closure of the lips. the phonetic significance of some early forms is uncertain.” 16. this expert vocalization is not akin to the statements of hyperarticulate wine connoisseurs, whose translation of one sensory mode, taste, into another, sound, means to evidence a refined human capture of nature, rather than a tongue-tied wonder before it (see silverstein 2006). 17. the temporality of a black hole collision from 1.3 billion years ago thus does not demand that we theorize a billion years of music (playing here on the title of tomlinson 2015, which seeks the origins of music in the worlds of homo erectus). gravitational waves only exist as sound when there is someone or something to hear them. references abbott, b. p. et al. 2016 “observation of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger.” physical review letters 116, no. 6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.116.061102. adams, allan, and sasha chapman 2016 “what 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123327. simulating extreme spacetimes (sxs) n.d. “needles in the haystack: hearing the cosmic symphony.” http://www.black-holes.org/the-science-gravitational-waves/gravitational-wave-astronomy/needles-in-the-haystack. sterne, jonathan 2003 the audible past: cultural origins of sound reproduction. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2012 mp3: the meaning of a format. durham, n.c.: duke university press. strathern, marilyn 1992 reproducing the future: anthropology, kinship, and the new reproductive technologies. new york: routledge. supper, alexandra 2014 “sublime frequencies: the construction of sublime listening experiences in the sonification of scientific data.” social studies of science 44, no. 1: 34–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0306312713496875. 2015 “data karaoke: sensory and bodily skills in conference presentations.” science as culture 24, no. 4: 436–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2015.1052390. taylor, timothy d. 2001 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observation in sociotechnical collaboration anthony stavrianakis centre de recherche médecine, sciences, santé, santé mentale, société (cermes3) “did you see that paper in nature or science about the glowing pig? they got the pig to express green fluorescent protein.” sven was agitated. “why did they do it?” we were sitting in the lounge on the top floor of the laboratory building positioned between several multinational pharmaceutical firms, other university research buildings, and a swiss telecom office on the kleinbasel (“little” basel) side of the rhine. the light of early summer glowed through metal and glass, filling the room. sven was testing me. i responded to his question with a question, asking him what he thought was the scientific significance of the glowing pig experiment. “no, no,” he insisted, “in terms of your expertise, tell me why they did it.” i stumbled a little, slightly taken aback, and suggested it was probably curiosity, that i would want to know what kind of problem it was addressing, and then what institutional affiliations the scientific team maintained. before i could form another thought, sven interjected, announcing the answer: “they did it because they could; because it was fun!” i asked him whether he thought there was in this instance, or in his work, a need for any further justification. his reply was immediate: “i don’t need any justification.” he took out a cigarette, picked up his coffee, and left the table. * * * i was in basel in order to collaborate. the fieldwork was made possible and framed by a three-year project funded by the national science foundation (nsf) based at arizona state university (asu): the socio-technical integration research project (stir). the enterprise involved ten researchers working in laboratories around the world, including regular discussions and workshops among the participants about the shared endeavor. the stir project itself was administered from within the center for nanotechnology in society (cns), one of a number of flagship endeavors of the consortium for science, policy and outcomes (cspo) founded and chaired by asu’s president michael crow. the cspo forms an integral part of asu’s endeavor to forge a “new american university,” one appropriate to the twenty-first century, as well as to the position of the united states in global configurations of science, technology, capital, and values. the stir project was part of efforts at asu to design forms of collaboration between (among others) the social and natural sciences. the stir project was furthermore partly invented as a response to prior efforts to name social and ethical challenges in new scientific domains, especially genomics. an important precursor and counterpoint to stir was the ethical, legal and social implications (elsi) model of the human genome project. briefly stated, for the designers of stir, the critical limitation of elsi in the united states (fisher 2005) was its position “downstream” and “external” to the practice of scientific inquiry. research in this mode was advisory and limited to pointing out issues (cook-deegan 1994). these limitations produced several responses as to how social scientists might better design upstream and midstream engagement with natural science and engineering. upstream means deliberation prior to the commencement of projects, while midstream refers to the effort to introduce and work on questions during ongoing inquiry. the stir project was a response to this challenge and was built around a core methodology—a dialogical protocol that aimed “to modulate” the “midstream.” the method aimed to inflect laboratory scientists’ reflexivity to augment their capacity to integrate sociotechnical issues into their practice through the redescription of scientific practice and the demonstration of contingency. furthermore, the use of such a method aimed to increase (mutual) capacities for (ongoing) collaboration between natural and social scientists. the use of such a method might be considered unanthropological. it was, however, intriguing as an object of participant observation insofar it drew not only from literature in the philosophy of technology (mitcham 1994) and critical science policy (lindblom and woodhouse 1993) but also from a methodological and conceptual strain of work that has been crucial to burgeoning anthropologies of science and modernity in the past three decades: the material semiotics of actor-network theory. for michel callon (1980, 198), a core question of material-semiotic inquiry in the 1980s was how to describe socially and materially heterogeneous systems in their malleability as well as intransigence. the arizona project sought to use such descriptions within collaborations to perturb the practice of science in one way or another: the anthropologist, in other words, was to be an engaged actor in the production of a self-reflexive socially and materially heterogeneous system. such an endeavor appeared intriguing as both an object and a practice of anthropology. the project made for a lively testing ground for everincreasing promises of new forms of post-elsi collaboration among social scientists and emerging technoscientific endeavors whose future directions are indeterminate. their futures are indeterminate not only because of the endeavors’ heterogeneity and contingency as material practices or artifacts, but also in their ramifications and significance. precisely the question of significance with respect to material-semiotic heterogeneity justified such collaboration. taking stir as an object of anthropological participant observation, my aim is twofold: to observe the project from within the terms of its own practice—the terms and practices of the project’s director, other participants, as well as myself—to characterize the problem of collaboration experienced in the project. i then turn back to the project from an adjacent position to account for the problematic character of the experience of collaboration. i take up this second aim to pose a diagnostic question for anthropology: how, why, and to what end do anthropologists and other social scientists engage laboratory scientists in forms of collaboration (a question and a practice distinct from the stakes of ethnographic observation)? such a diagnostic question, intimately connected to the first descriptive task of understanding the project of—and method for—collaboration on its own terms, offers a necessary antidote to a priori or ex post claims about either the necessity or the contingency of impasses and blockages experienced with efforts at collaboration. such an antidote is furthermore necessary in light of an abundance of commentators willing to make epochal diagnoses about the relations between the sciences, humanities, and social sciences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (snow 1993; kagan 2009). claims about the necessity of impasse, such as epistemic or ethical incommensurability, unduly put an accent on a determinative conception of socialization, while claims of the contingency of impasse frequently meander into the domain of personality as an explanatory factor (see barthe et al. 2013, 190–93). rather than seeking to diagnose problems in collaboration in terms of individuals and their socialization, i seek instead to show the second-order character of the indeterminations and discordances experienced by the director, other stir researchers, and myself, which were produced, i suggest, by the mode and positions made available in this project. i show this to indicate specific characteristics of impasses to collaborative engagement between modes and forms of contemporary knowledge, so as to bring into relief a sharper problem of collaboration for anthropological inquiry. i argue that an effect of stir’s dialogical technique, though aiming to modulate scientific reflexivity through purported collaboration, served instead to entrench scientific reflexivity within the norms of scientific practice that are external (and unpropitious) to collaboration with social scientists. the redescription of scientific reflexivity and the demonstration of the contingency of research practice, which may enable a scientist to “take more into account,” left no place for the reflexivity of the anthropologist within the engagement. what was not in question in the stir project was whether or not scientists are reflexive about what they do: they are, insofar as reflexivity can be understood in a pragmatic sense as the capacity to render describable how one goes about an activity. the dialogical protocol made such a capacity visible and sought to enable actors to act on the range of things rendered visible. the issue that motivates my argument is the effect of such a dialogical protocol for the collaboration meant to be fostered through the work of modulating reflexivity, and what such effect signifies for the practice of anthropological inquiry, as well as for the available positions for anthropologists within offers of collaboration. problems of position: to be affected and to affect “problems of position” in anthropology have been captured and honed by jeanne favret-saada (1977, 1992) in her anthropological inquiries into forms of accusation. when she went to rural northwest france, for example, and began to ask locals, in her capacity as “anthropological expert,” about “witchcraft,” her inquiry yielded little other than some stories about what happened in the old days, or vague claims about witchcraft accusations displaced onto other villages. by contrast, once she accepted to leave her given place as the anthropologist, something could happen in terms of anthropological knowledge: she allowed herself to be interpolated into the discourse of witchcraft. interpolation, in this case, involved accepting the possibility that she herself could be subject to witchcraft, as well as accepting the invitation to occupy the place of the one who could un-witch (désorceler) the bewitched. such a transformation allowed her to understand the character of the problematic experience of witchcraft accusation and how such a problematic experience is constituted by a system of relations between subject positions. in terms of collaboration discourse and practice, the challenge of everincreasing calls for anthropologist participation in collaborations is not only the capacity for the anthropologist to be affected (favret-saada 2009) but also the capacity to affect situations of participant observation. to affect a situation appears all the more problematic when the objective is set within systems at the heart of modernity, such as scientific institutions, and to affect such institutions through collaboration, in one’s capacity as a collaborating anthropologist. drawing on anthropological works treating the problem and practice of collaboration, and drawing on my work with paul rabinow and gaymon bennett in the anthropological research on the contemporary (arc) collaboratory, the constitutive concept of collaboration in this article, and the constitutive hypothesis orienting the fieldwork, is that a worthwhile collaboration is one in which two kinds of participants, in their engagement, are able to name a problem or do a practice that in their position as participants (prior to engagement) they would not have been able to do (rabinow and bennett 2012, 6–7; cf. riles 2013, 563; strathern 2000, 296). an anthropology of anthropologist–natural scientist collaboration would therefore be attentive to the character of the means of engagement, as well as to the character of the problems that could be named by such means; problems that should differ in kind from those that natural scientists or anthropologists could pose about the scientific activity in question outside of such engagement. collaborative participation presupposes an endeavor of transformation (rabinow and stavrianakis 2013, 33). to diagnose the significance of this particular case of stir for an anthropology of collaborative practice, i briefly situate the case of stir within a broader configuration and a comparative instance of social scientist collaboration with scientific expertise: vololona rabeharisoa and michel callon’s (1999) engagement with the french muscular dystrophy association (afm). a turn to a comparative instance helps highlight the following conclusion: though aiming to occupy the subject position of a collaborator, one in which to think with collaborative counterparts, i describe how the stir method served to transform the anthropologist into occupying the position of an actant, in a strict sense—a mechanism of modifying people and things through the attempt to modify actions (latour 2004, 75). the ethical and epistemic limits to such a position and mode of practice offer a negative and perturbing conclusion for anthropology: in situations in which anthropologists continue to pursue collaborations, there is a need to remediate how demands for practical intervention are connected to the possibilities of opening up shared problems (see rappaport 2008). such a diagnosis indicates the need for more reflection on the power relations at play in such forms of collaboration and what such relations both facilitate and block. furthermore, in situations where such a binding of objectives seems to lead to impasse (demands for practical intervention and opening up shared problems), there exists a problem of the disaggregation and interconnection of distinct orders of intervention and observation. i conclude by characterizing some ethical and epistemic characteristics of such disaggregation, objectivation, and interconnection (cf. friedman 2013; rabinow and stavrianakis 2013, 34–37). boundary work in a boundary organization today, asu constitutes a frontier of the so-called new american university. in the outskirts of the remediated desert of tempe, the replication of a nineteenth-century german scholastic ideal has been jettisoned for the design of a new organizational form to pursue “knowledge and values.” when we met in 2009, the director of the stir project, erik fisher, had completed a transition from a phd at the university of colorado, where he had also been a humanities advisor to the college of engineering, to a permanent position at asu. at the university of colorado erik had worked with a thermal engineering laboratory to develop the “engagement protocol” we were to use in the stir project. he had searched during his thesis work for a manner of participant observation that could attempt to maximize the effects of observation on observers (cf. luhmann 1988; langlitz and helmreich 2005). at asu, the project was understood as part of the university’s growing arsenal for conducting “real-time technology assessment” (guston and sarewitz 2002). such techniques and the organizational form for their actualization have been designed to produce a specific kind of “boundary work.” whereas in some strains of science and technology studies boundary work as a concept functioned to lay out the ideological codes and power relations that produce distinctions between science and non-science (gieryn 1983, 1999), some science policy scholars took the distinction of science and politics as an organizational one and then worked to show how a different organizational form might serve to rework this boundary (guston 2001, 2014). such organizations, their objects, and objectives reorder relations of science and politics through consent to what the cns calls “a productive cooperation,” a commonplace that indicate a confidence in capacities to manage the power relations traversing these boundary conditions. boundary organizations facilitate collaboration between scientists and non-scientists, and they create the combined political and social order through the generation of boundary objects (guston 2001, 401). a boundary organization generates its own authority by assembling agents in this frontier to stabilize the relation between principals to whom the organization is then accountable (in our case, the national science foundation as funders and bioscientists in laboratories as the object of intervention). at cns, this authority and capacity is named specifically in relation to a “shared problem” with a political imperative: democracy. if the diagnostic starting point for the cns was a politically remediative one, set within the possibilities of boundary work, erik was nevertheless realistic about the institutional constraints faced by scientists. in what erik calls the constraint of autonomy (below), we can follow györgy márkus (1987, 6) in calling the monologic character of science: that is, signification within scientific practice is determined by the domain of inquiry to which it refers. the parameters of this domain are no doubt open. the ease with which concern for patents entered molecular biology after the 1980s, along with molecular biologists trained with juris doctor qualifications, is exemplary of such malleability. nevertheless, the degree of openness and the character of pertinence are not limitless and constitute empirical questions. in early 2009, prior to leaving for switzerland, i participated in an introductory workshop held at asu. erik explained the scope, mode, and aims of the enterprise. we sat in a halogen-lit, windowless room, somewhere in the vast expanse of the campus, sheltered from the january heat. “we’ve pitched this project as an alternative to viewing the scientific method as non-problematically applied.” erik was talking to the ten of us, all ph.d. researchers, participating in his project. “we’ve hemmed ourselves into a highly constrained space, the laboratory, by highly constrained actors, and the question is: what is possible? what are we able to bring about?” erik started by suggesting that the natural and technical sciences were caught between monologic self-assurance and the dialogical possibilities of boundary work. his tone was both serious and upbeat. “this project is realistic in recognizing that scientific actors are highly autonomous and that’s what we’re dealing with.” “so,” he asked, “what does it take for self-governance to change on some practical or structurally significant level?” in the design of his project, an operator of reflexivity (the stir researcher) would provide the medium and action for reflection by scientists within the milieu of their work. erik’s design of a protocol furthermore constituted a response to “outside” manners of attempting to control science. as he indicated to us: “it is not that those outside and top-down approaches aren’t good, or are bad, guided or misguided, it’s just that they were ineffective.” as such, the stir project brought together two methodological postulates that were critical to the manner in which engagement could be afforded: on the one hand, stir partook of the framing of the boundary organization. on the other hand, it is important to note how erik’s observation and diagnosis of the constraints of working within the space of the laboratory, along with his aim to perturb the quality and quantity of questions taken into account by scientists, precluded naming by right and in advance the character of the problem or the mode of justification for entering into such collaboration (as in democracy for the cns). as such, the autonomy of the scientific actors, as well as the scope of their quotidian and medium-term concerns, constrained the starting point of the engagement. as i will show, this constraint had consequences for its open telos. as such, we could characterize stir as a form for boundary work positioned internally to the activity of science. we could not presuppose a shared problem or goal other than what was pertinent to laboratory scientists vis-à-vis their own thought and work. a scene of instruction at the heart of the stir project lay a “decision protocol,” (figure 1) that erik had designed during his ph.d. research. his thesis had posed the following question: how to put into practice u.s. legislation mandating the “integration of social considerations” into nanotechnology research? during the course of two and a half years he conducted multiple forms of participant observation, which resulted, in part, in the development of a mechanism for such integration. the protocol meant to describe any given research decision in generic terms. materially, it was a simple sheet of paper divided into quadrants. the “code” of the protocol was explained to us at the january training session in arizona: opportunity meant any situations characterized by the need to make a decision, where decision means commitment to a course of action; considerations meant any parameters of a decision; alternatives meant available courses of action; outcomes meant the response to the opportunity, by means of selecting one or more alternatives, in light of one or more considerations. the purpose was to find moments with opportunities present, to map the process using the tool, and to see if recursive use of the protocol made any difference to research practice. the tool aimed to make visible latent concerns otherwise invisible. figure 1. stir decision protocol. we listened to erik narrate an example, one i would hear subsequently repeated, which would function as a model for the use of the protocol. a researcher with whom erik had been working had made a comment about a material he worked with being “messy.” this observation became the starting point for discussions between them, about the inadequacy of an experimental material. this starting point generated further questions about possible alternatives. they began to name different considerations and possibilities, probing the status of the experimental material. after a few weeks of discussion, a better alternative was chosen, one experimentally and environmentally more sound. several things are important in this situation: erik was working with a ph.d. researcher who had received the overall experimental design from his laboratory director. this design specified using the first material and no other. the challenge for the dialogic pair was to take enough time and to lay out reasons, considerations, and alternatives at each step of the research. the work between erik and the nanoscientist led to a change in the research setup, and their dialogue opened a new line of inquiry for the whole laboratory, based on the selection of this alternative experimental material. in our seminar room at asu we were presented with an exemplar and proof of concept. the efficacy of the protocol was thus demonstrated in its capacity to redirect the technical and creative motion of scientific practice through an internal modulation. a normative parameter in the design of the stir project and method was thus its capacity for any scientific system to withstand this form of environmental “irritation” (luhmann 1996). as erik would repeat, one of the collective goals of the endeavor was to “give the lie” to the idea that letting social scientists into laboratories slowed down or impeded research. boundary work and a shift to a dialogic mode of engagement with social, ethical, and political questions, in other words, could be shown as productive for the scientific pole of the engagement. in the exemplar offered to us, erik’s position in the midstream and the practice of modulation was parameterized by the (self-) creative movement, and goal, of the scientific side of the dialogical pairing. such a position, and such a practice, presupposes a dialectical commitment to the becoming of the scientific domain (qua scientific domain)—a domain that, as erik indicated to us from the outset, is nonisomorphic with a domain of collaboration that one might wish to create and occupy. such a diagnosis shares in a mood of realism about what the scientific domain will and will not tolerate. such a commitment to the ethical becoming of scientists in the domain of their work then further presupposes a weakly dialectical relation of the homeostatic reproduction of values and norms, with breakdowns and transformation in values and norms within that domain (faubion 2011, 114). such a relation is, indeed, presupposed. there is, however, a problem. following james faubion’s systems theoretic articulation of an enlarged set of parameters for inquiry into ethical domains, and taking the starting point from niklas luhmann, we must recognize that systems are both structured and organized (faubion 2011, 6–7). a structure is the combination of how institutions are arranged (their divisions of labor, material arrangements, etc.), the parameters and metrics relative to which decisions are made, and the habits and dispositions of individuals formed by the institution (their socialization). structured systems are open (i.e., not closed systems of semiotic oppositions). unlike luhmann’s systems theory, however, those of us in the stir project had to assume the possibility of organizational openness in addition to such structural openness. the organization of systems, for luhmann, has as a requirement the closed differentiation of a system relative to its environment. the problem probed by these stir studies could be formulated in the following manner: in addition to the possibility of reformulating the practices of scientific systems, can such structured systems reorganize themselves (open themselves) relative to their changing environments, and can the structural changes be calibrated to this organizational openness? such calibration is supposed in the boundary work of the stir mode and its capacity to modulate the form and practice of scientific reflexivity. a more prosaic thing six months after our first collective meeting at asu, i traveled to switzerland to conduct a study using the stir protocol. i had contacted the head of a bioprocess laboratory based in europe’s pharmaceutical capital, basel. the group specialized in engineering diverse biological pathways and systems within cells, as well as in cell-free biosystems. the team comprised a range of specialists who worked together on the identification of problems and solutions for which their individual techniques were insufficient. computer modelers, electrical engineers, protein engineers, biochemists, and molecular biologists labored to invent means for producing “high-value-added chemicals.” members of the laboratory assured me that they recognized the importance of social and ethical questions in science, coded under the banner of stem cells. since they worked on bacteria, however, or else on cell pathways reengineered in cell-free artificial environments, in their judgment no ethical issues weighed on their research. as one of my interlocutors ironized one morning, “am i violating nature when i mutate these proteins?” the laboratory director was more forthcoming in articulating a narrative of justification for the kind of application-oriented and still basic research science in which his lab engaged. he explained to me that in germany especially, and to a degree in switzerland, a delicate relationship existed between theoretical knowledge and the practical application of methods: this is tricky when it comes to connecting them, what can seem a somehow more prosaic thing, earning money with it . . . i think that people simply lack the connection, also the motivation. so, if you go through a typical german degree, unless it’s economics, then the one thing that you will never encounter is a monetary drive to do something. after all, this is humboldt’s idea of the university. humboldt did not have the idea to make university a money-generating institution, right, so the concept that the application of something is an important piece in your overall chain of value generation which in the end also keeps our society going, this is something that simply has to grow and it can best grow in a company. we can do our part here in making people realize that there is a second angle to what we do here, but we cannot really, or i don’t want to create this idea of money as all-important. so i think then this is also why i see that ph.d. students, i guess, are very easily motivated by things like working on antibiotics, because it’s a very clear problem, it’s not necessarily related to money, but it’s related to saving lives. he was referring to a then ongoing project that he had started a few years earlier with a ph.d. student named giovanni. their goal had been to design a bioprocess in which to produce the precursor molecule for a type of antibiotic that has the capacity to treat infections from gram-positive bacteria. currently this class of antibiotic is not in clinical use due to the absence of a platform for the cheap, efficient, and scalar production of a bioprocess. the problem was clear: multidrug resistant pathogens indicate a serious need for new drugs; therefore developing a platform for synthesis is a logical and worthwhile health intervention. giovanni had returned to the lab for a postdoc to see whether he could improve the final stage of the bioprocess. on a particular occasion, giovanni and i met to discuss the progress of his work. it was clear from preceding observations and conversations that he was approaching a critical juncture in refining the production process for the molecule of interest. we met one afternoon and i took out a blank protocol sheet and turned on my recorder, a gesture that i had repeated more than a hundred times during my time in basel. he was preoccupied with the interconnection of the processing problem and the movement of the drug from lab to market. under “opportunity” i noted, “how to bring the drug to market?” “which markets?” “what are the problems?” he named an important parameter, which i noted under “considerations” in our protocol: “right now not many pharmaceutical companies invest in antibiotics, while future antibiotic resistance is both a looming health challenge, and when it gets serious, it will promote investment.” i heard giovanni narrate this statement in a double diagnostic register: the fact that pharmaceutical companies are not investing in this serious global health problem constitutes both a crisis and an opportunity. the double diagnostic register was synthesized into a calm statement of fact: “when it gets serious”—in the estimation of an unnamed actor—“it will promote investment.” logically, when that moment arrives, those who moved first would have an advantage to advance the technology and the health benefit it might provide. giovanni’s narrative mood was whiggish to the degree that scientific progress and the vagaries of industrialization were synthesized in a voice between the active and the passive and projected into a simple future: “it” will promote investment and will be promoted; the health crisis; the laboratory success; the relations that could be created between the lab and the pharmaceutical companies only a stone’s throw away. “we will need synergies and not just competition to find a good solution to the problem,” he explained. giovanni was demonstrating for me the distance between the norms and forms practically enacted in his bioprocess lab and the (naive) figure of the nineteenth-century german romantic narrated for me by the director, a figure who would never use money as a justification for a life’s work. “part of the challenge in biotechnology,” giovanni continued, is “the formation of synergies to overcome resistances, both biological and institutional.” he was pragmatic to the degree that any outcome, or solution, would be preferable to no outcome. thus, moving from the top right quadrant of our protocol, “considerations,” to the bottom left, “alternatives,” i asked him what he was going to do. given the institutional blockages, what could he do? his reply was swift: “we could produce an amount of product necessary for clinical trials, so as to be able to look for partners from the pharmaceutical industry. we can also involve cosmetic companies, as the drug has also as antiacne function.” relative to goals of health and wealth, and given the drug’s utility, the possible outcome of involving a cosmetic company was just as plausible as involving a pharmaceutical company under considerations of lacking investment. thus we see here an ordinary and characteristic situation. the original justification and goal was to remedy a significant global health problem. given real structural limitations in the institutional relationship between molecular biology and global health, and given the demand to produce value and utility, switching justification from the amelioration of global health to one of individual well-being through cosmetic applications produced no tension or conflict. in line with the demands of the method, i dutifully typed up our protocol and gave giovanni a copy in the hope that it would provoke or perturb further reflections. a week or so later, he told me that he had been recruited by a large local pharmaceutical company. enlightenment? the aim of the stir project fits squarely within what luhmann has called “second-order observation” (luhmann 1995, xxxiv; rabinow 2008, 64–65). if the work of observing a particular object is what he called observation of the first order, then observation of that work of observation is of a second order, that is, how an observer is observing his or her object. the stir method was particular insofar as it used a tool to attempt to capture observations of the second order. the results of the protocol could be conceived as a boundary object constituted from a threshold between firstand second-order observations: a threshold between a narrative of what happened and a reflection on how it happened, as well as how else it could happen. to some degree this would be a process of “enlightenment” in a strict luhmannian sense: the making manifest of latent structures and functions (luhmann 1995, 343). such alternatives may be as “liberating” as they are “confusing” or “risky” (langlitz and helmreich 2005, 20). in erik’s framing of the project, our formal goal was to render manifest the “latent content” in the system of laboratory work and decision making to reconfigure and integrate sociotechnical elements into the scientific work. in his formal schema, the use of the protocol over time could render latent norms observable, thus making them available for reflection, and then possibly producing goal-directed modifications. what was striking was the extent to which naming alternatives, as well as naming the complex environments in which particular scientific work is practiced, proved to be neither liberating nor risky. to take the example above, giovanni was well aware of the constraints of his position, of the available possibilities, and of the different temporal horizons of the work, as well as of the practical horizons he faced, such as needing a stable job and wanting to produce a result (any result) from his work. he was adept at performing a functional description and synthesis, simplifying and thus protecting his position from that complex environment. here, then, lies the trouble: a possible goal and use of the protocol is to render more complex the field and action under observation, to reflect on that complexity within tolerable limits. in practice, however, the tool served observers to both describe and then manage the complexity of the relation of first to second orders of observation. i will now show how this problem of the relation of first to second orders of observation within the scope and aims of collaboration was raised as a problem among stir researchers. contest in the summer of 2010, the ten stir researchers met for a workshop to discuss our preliminary results. it offered me a chance to compare my experience of using the protocol with other researchers. there were a number of presentations as well as small group exchanges, of which one in particular struck me: a dutch philosopher, daan, presented examples from his work in which he mobilized a distinction between “first-order and second-order reflective learning” to parse out the responses he had gathered through his stir studies. our discussion of his work was a catalyst for me subsequently to probe the problem of our position and practice as stir researchers with respect to our fields of engagement. daan explained the distinction he was using: first order is within boundaries of a value system and background theories, so in science and technology this would be improved achievements of a scientist’s own interests in a network. whereas second-order reflective learning involves taking the background theories and values as the object of learning, so second-order reflective learning is a form of reflection on the research system itself. what is important is that this is symmetrical, and in that sense reflective learning is not therapy for the scientist because it can also happen to me. so . . . i don’t want to go into my examples of first order, which are examples broadly speaking of health and safety and responsible conduct of research. his first example of second-order reflective learning was one in which a researcher discussed integrating a human gene into a mouse. the student decided against cloning a human gene and opted for the alternative of using a mouse gene, because “where it comes from is a bit ethical.” a second example was of daan following erik’s rhetorical injunction to shift to a subjunctive mood when conversation seemed blocked. during a discussion of the considerations around the development of gene synthesis technologies, daan tried to create a hypothetical decision space in which a researcher could map out what the future considerations might be, if it were the case that construction of whole organisms became routine using gene synthesis. he described his interlocutors’ earnest profession of considered reflection in a nonironic mood. erik’s response to the presentation was immediate, vigorous, and important relative to where we had come in our collective difficulties in thinking together about the practice we had engaged in and the ends toward which we wished to work. to capture it succinctly, he asked daan to discount the second example, “because all that shows is that there is some utility perceived in doing this activity. it begs the question, well, what are you doing?” the first example, of the human and mouse genes, was “potentially interesting,” in erik’s evaluation, because within the narrative one could see how “latent concerns that were not otherwise expressed were stirred up.” instead of labeling them as “ethical” and then moving on, he asked daan to dwell on the example: “so then the next question is, so what? did this stick with someone? did it get taken up later? we’re waiting for the other shoe to fall, and i was thinking that, i was thinking, do we have to go back to first order so as to see a change in practice? that might be the interesting thing about why, you know, we care about first order.” agitated, daan responded: “i’ve got hunches; i mean, i’ve been following them around, but that’s all highly speculative.” erik: “unless you’re going to speculate, you’re leaving me hanging, all you’re doing is saying, well, anyone could go into the lab and say [adopting an ironic tone] ‘what do you think about this?’ and the response would be ‘well, i don’t know,’ and i say, ‘well, think more about it,’ and they say, ‘err, ok, i guess it could scare me?’ that’s not in itself enough to make me think, you know, you’re using a method, you’re systematically applying it, you’re studying it carefully, you have these questions that are both practical and theoretical, where practical might mean political or it might mean ethical, and now you’re giving me some information, some data, to analyze with respect to these things. i’m not completing the loop; i’m not seeing what the point is or why i should care. “if i happen to be critical i could say, you haven’t told me anything. i’ll be critical now: i’m not convinced in any of these cases we have second-order reflective learning. in your [written] narrative, i was convinced, now i’m not.” author: “is that insofar as you don’t think that there is a learning component?” erik: “i don’t even see that there is second-order reflection.” daan: “second-order reflection was defined as reflection on the research system. now you’re asking, and that needs to have consequences.” erik: “no, i’m not asking that. i’m saying, first, i need to be convinced. you could show me a sign that says the research system exists, and you could prove that i just reflected on the research system and therefore it’s second order, and i might have to agree with you logically, but somehow it doesn’t seem very relevant. so that’s my first question. the second question is: just proving that reflective learning occurred, i’m wondering, why should i care? if there are consequences, i care, if there is a problem, i care. consequences would be a surefire way to do it. there has to be something more.” the actor, the actant, and the problem erik’s intervention indicated a problem at the heart of the protocol regarding the relation between the use of the protocol as a means for modulating scientific practice and the intellectual work and stakes of the one enacting the protocol. there is an indetermination shown in this experience that is significant for a broader question of anthropological practice within collaborations: how to produce a mode of intervention that can systematically move observers, social and technoscientific, from a first-order engagement to a second-order engagement with the objects and objectives of their epistemic practice? as daan indicated, second-order reflection is characterized as second order precisely insofar as it is also something that could happen to him (or us.) and yet, this is precisely the location of discordance and impasse: the protocol did not prove to be a medium for the creation of a shared problem of a second order. erik was well aware of this problem. his solution: a justification of work and worth through first-order changes. that is to say: a justification of social scientific participation in terms of the amelioration (by one measure or another) of the scientific system’s capacity to function in achieving its practical aims; a binding of secondto first-order observations. the critique of elsi research and researchers as being overly parameterized by their position outside scientific systems is mirrored here: our position on the inside of the first-order norms and practices of the scientific system was ultimately restrictive with respect to the hoped-for aims of collaboration at a second order of observation and reflection. during the last two decades (at least), there has been growing attention to this problem of position, mode, and form of engagement in which diverse actors might participate in expert domains, including social scientists. an ever-growing literature examines how boundaries of authority, as well as the objects and objectives of such authority, are delegated from political to scientific domains (and back) (callon, lascoumes, and barthe 2001). many of the people at the institution that housed the stir project are principal voices in just such a (growing) literature. such reconfigurations of authority, knowledge, and (other) power relations are often parameterized by a specific issue or object. to take the example of sociological engagement with the french muscular dystrophy association (afm), the object in question is a disease around which knowledge claims, power moves, and translations are arranged. a “shared problem” emerged when “framings” and “overflowings” (callon and rabeharisoa 2003, 250) incited responses from those affected in one way or another, or who wished to affect a field of relations. a recent paper by michiel van oudheusden and brice laurent (2013) is important on this point. the authors outline a typology of normative commitments and practices for social scientists in terms of how they engage in “public participation” between publics and scientists. the authors explicitly take up the work of rabeharisoa and callon with afm to explicate a modality of engagement and position for sociological-anthropological participation in collaboration found in “articulating social identities not previously considered or clearly formulated” (van oudheusden and laurent 2013, 13). in this modality, the sociologist functions to help configure identities for patients, doctors, and scientists in which boundaries and forms of knowledge are moveable and shareable. such a mode takes up the specific ethical and political first-order stakes of the disease as a parameter in shaping their manner of engagement and the form given to overflows and the responses incited. by contrast, the practice of a project such as stir took a different form and position. given its scope, scale, and mode, the project was also more ambivalent about the order at which observation operated. in practice, the protocol was a tool for managing frames and overflows within the scientific system. its range of applicability was vaster than the specificity of the politics and ethics of specific problematic experiences and knowledge (such as of a disease). the protocol is itself entirely formal; its object domain could be anything. its designer boldly pushed a method of dialogue to its logical conclusion—that anyone, anywhere, in any domain, through a technique of questioning, methodically tracked, could have consequences for the system in which the tool is used. the ethics of the method resided precisely in the conviction its designer placed in the separation of efficacy and subjectivity. such a separation in stir is what distinguishes it from the ethical stakes of a project such as callon and rabeharisoa’s engagement with afm. for the latter, their first-order engagement was precisely, if only partly, a question of the ethical subjectivation of the engaged actors, that is, becoming an ethically marked subject by virtue of collaboration, which involved clarity about the stakes of the problem—a point of ambivalence erik himself came to recognize in our discussions of daan’s case. researchers with the stir project were not representatives of another domain, such as the law or a biosocial group. we were not bringing society, an identity, law, or anything else into the lab. as erik described our role, we functioned to reflect back what is already there latently in the scientific system, to assist in the operation of self-observation of scientists by scientists. reflecting on how i practiced this operation, i observe that i produced a mirror function, which is precisely the condition of the mere actant. the question for the anthropologist becomes: why do this? our justification in stir was to modify research in some way—but relative to what purpose? as erik previously described it, his diagnosis of the current historical conjuncture of institutionalized science, one that oriented what would be actualized in the stir endeavor, was of a means-ends displacement, in which the means of doing science became the end. erik responded by accepting this situation as fact and then working from within it for the purpose of transformation. his diagnosis was one of goal displacement due to the fact that the scientific urge to conduct curiosity-driven inquiry requires resources; the means to conduct inquiry becomes the goal. reflecting on his diagnosis of science and putting the lens back on stir, he asked a question that had had a spectral presence during my fieldwork: “so why then bother to do what we’ve been doing? why collaborate? this is the tragedy; it may come back to this: that we’re simply doing the modern project better.” exiting impasse? in trying to do the modern project better through supposed collaboration, the contours of a configuration of impasses were made visible, impasses that left the social scientific collaborators little room for maneuver. positioning the form of boundary work within the scope and scale of laboratory practice ultimately constituted an excessive constraint for the possibility of collaboration—even if it may have been an appropriate position for other forms of observation. a critical parameter of the problem of collaboration is thus how and where such boundaries are positioned, how actors are assembled around such boundaries, as well as (crucially) reflection on the different ends to which such work is oriented, including ends that may be justified in terms other than first-order (scientific or political) intervention. this impasse indexes power relations at play and showed limits to how a pluralism of forms of expertise can be given an organizational arrangement, one in which social scientists could form part of the transformation of the scientific field. collaboration—and its impasses—indicated the need for capacities and means to interconnect firstand second-order observations. a critical parameter of the problem of collaboration is whether the position and mode of the anthropological inquirer permits collective work at a second order of observation, analysis, and diagnosis. the stir case provided a negative result, creating a resource for further reflection on future anthropological inquiries as part of collaborations. collaboration as a practice entails occupying a position marked by a heterogeneity of demands; this subject position is an ethical one insofar as it takes work on oneself to occupy it and to take on the demand of collaboration. the occupation of such a position may, however, be at odds with the other epistemic and ethical demands made of subjects—as for example in the dutch philosopher’s indignation that second-order observation could count only as such if it had first-order effects. it may also be at odds with the uses scientific actors make of the opportunities that so-called collaboration affords—as in my experience with giovanni. experiments in collaboration, perhaps especially the impasses and breakdowns in such experiments, offer a testing ground for anthropological participation in the transformation of modernity’s well-documented separations (politics/science, nature/culture). collaborative projects index both a demand for and the logical possibility of reconfigurations of the structure and organization of institutions and practices, as in the work of boundary organizations. showing the heterogeneity or contingency of boundary objects, however, does little by itself. one may well be able to redescribe science. such redescriptions, however, may either prove inefficacious, or else, even if “efficacious” by one consequentialist measure or another, dissatisfying as an anthropological engagement with problems of science and modernity. how then to take up collaboration as an anthropological problem, and how to take up the ethical stakes of this anthropological work (cf. rabinow and stavrianakis 2014)? at a minimum and with due diagnostic caution, the self-cancelling experience of collaboration in stir, buttressed by an example from a different domain (afm), indicates the importance of attention to anthropological mode through which problems of collaborative engagement can be identified, problems in which power relations and ethical stakes of the anthropological position and practice must be taken seriously. acknowledgments i acknowledge the financial support of the national science foundation programs in science, technology and society and the fondation maison des sciences de l’homme (paris) bourse fernand braudel, which enabled the fieldwork for and the writing of this article. i also acknowledge the support and the critical readings received in preparing this text from gaymon bennett, dominic boyer, carlo caduff, pierre 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studies 9, no. 1: 3–22. our master’s voice, the practice of melancholy, and minor sciences our master’s voice, the practice of melancholy, and minor sciences matthew wolf-meyer binghamton university we’re sitting in a small office, some 10 by 15 feet, located on the second floor of a converted home in the bay area in northern california. there are four of us, all men, three in their late forties and early fifties, with me some fifteen to twenty years their junior. we’re reading from jacques lacan’s the ethics of psychoanalysis (1992). we take turns reading from the text, although harry and i do most of the reading, since we are the two students in the room. harry is a professor at a local parochial university and, like me, has enrolled in this psychoanalytic training program as part of a research program. for harry, it is his interest in existentialism and its relation to lacan’s psychoanalytic apparatus; for me, it is my interest in the alternatives to dominant neuroscience in the twentieth century, one of which is psychoanalysis—born from sigmund freud’s (1966) interest in neurophysiology in the late nineteenth century.1 our two teachers are therapists, both with long histories as professional psychiatrists in the united states and elsewhere. nev is syrian, and has taught at universities in the united states and syria, but he has spent most of his time as a therapist in community health centers, paid by the state to consult with individuals on state support programs. it might seem strange for the state to pay a lacanian analyst to serve such a function, but nev wears multiple therapeutic hats, and in his professional life, lacan has only a spectral presence; in his public persona, he is more likely to embrace cognitive behavioral therapy, in no small part because that is what is expected of him by his peers and the state. our other teacher, arturo, practices psychoanalysis, and is a devout lacanian; our meetings are held in his office, arranged in a mock psychoanalytic scheme, with a couch to lie on and a chair placed perpendicularly, so the analysand and the analyst cannot meet eyes. but during our seminars we sit on the bed as if a couch, which causes harry and me to slouch, prop pillows behind us, and fidget as we try to stay comfortable. the prized spot is a love seat across from the bed, too small for two adult men, and whoever arrives first inevitably claims it to lounge in for the duration of the meeting. arturo asks harry and me to read, and only when i have a cold or harry is absent do nev or arturo take turns. throughout our reading, arturo interrupts us to pose rhetorical questions, offer exegeses, and, in arturo’s words, “free associate.” we read one chapter each week, not prior to attending class, but in class. we sit together from 7 until 9 p.m. every thursday, and take nine months to read seminar vii, taking one week each month to read the other side of psychoanalysis (lacan 2007). this slow pace means that during the four-year training program, we will read eight books, the majority of lacan’s work translated into english. but there is no plan, and we do not read the books in chronological order—at the end of reading seminars vii and xvii, we decide to read seminars xi and xxi the following year. the pace is possibly meant to reproduce the actual pace of lacan’s seminars, although this is never explained. our teachers expect that each week we encounter the text—and lacanian thought—for the first time; again and again we return to first principles. it is almost as if we are tabula rasae, attending class each week to receive the wisdom of lacan through our reading of his words. my frustration with our slow pace, with arturo’s incessant free association, is soon sublimated in my ethnographic curiosity: why are we learning lacan the way we are? is it that we are meant to be voicing lacan, and, in so doing, becoming lacanians? why are these experts in this field enacting its reproduction in this particular way, and what kind of expert do they expect to make of me? i sit on the couch across from harry, who is currently reading, and think of myself in that old rca logo, thomas edison’s dog, head cocked, listening to his master’s voice on the phonograph player. is lacan my new master? at first i am taken with this idea: that i am meant to be voicing lacan, possessing myself with his language and thought. but i have adverse reactions. the more time i spend with lacan, the more i return to gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s (1983, 1987) critiques of his work. instead, i begin to consider that this voicing, this revisiting of lacan, constitutes a mourning practice, one particular to what deleuze and guattari (1986, 1987) call minor sciences. i have been drawn to their conceptualization of minor sciences and literatures through my work on alternatives to dominant american forms of neuroscience, in no small part because the category of minor science provides a means to think through knowledge production and practice and their relation to power; the concept of minor science provides a means to take seriously the expertise of those who are sometimes cast as nonexperts by those in power. relegated to counterpunctual positions to dominant sciences, practitioners of minor sciences are characterized by the marginalization of their forms of knowledge production and practice. because of the threat of their disappearance, minor sciences often struggle to assert their vitality against sciences that see them as sometimes intensely political, sometimes absurd. those who identify with them rarely have interest in making a minor science a dominant one; rather, minor scientists are invested in their own perpetuation, in keeping the science alive, even if the science remains marginalized. while it may be possible for a minor science to attain a dominant position, it is unlikely, and most minor scientists conduct themselves with this unlikeliness in mind. more likely, minor scientists practice their minor sciences as experts in a field disavowed or discredited by those in power, and articulate their scientific conceptions of the world in comparative and sometimes conflicting fashion with dominant sciences. as much as i am drawn to minor science as a rubric, i have also bastardized it. first, i collapse deleuze and guattari’s conceptions of minor science and minor literature into one theoretical framework, working with the assumption that science is always a textual practice—science is also always literature (wolf-meyer and cochran, forthcoming). moreover, i am interested in further perverting the category of minor sciences, much as deleuze has claimed to do to his philosophical forebears, by putting minor science into dialogue with psychoanalytic attention to mourning and melancholia. this is not because i assume a freudian ontological position, but rather because deleuze and guattari are more interested in elaborating minor science and minor literature as theoretical schematics and only secondarily attend to them as the basis for subjectivity. the existentially neurotic franz kafka provides them with the embodiment of the minor litterateur, but focusing on these lacanian practitioners as minor scientists shows how mourning and melancholia form part of their scientific and social practice. in this article, i first outline the relationship between mourning, melancholia, and minor sciences, which is exemplified in the lacanian psychoanalytic group i participated in. i then turn to the pedagogical efforts of my lacanian teachers. this is succeeded by a discussion of how my lacanian teachers systematically undermine the ability of lacanian psychoanalysis to become something other than what it is—how they invest in its persistent marginalization. in so doing, i am interested in tracking three features of minor sciences as outlined by deleuze and guattari, namely, their eminently political nature, their challenging of dominant sciences through “improper” utilizations of language, and their disenfranchisement. i end by considering how the temporality of melancholia and its irresolution constitutes the ongoing practice of minor sciences, as emblematized by this particular group of psychoanalysts. extrapolating from this case, i argue that minor sciences constitute themselves through their investment in inward-looking practice; that is, they come to constitute themselves for themselves, rather than for others, leading to their continued, if not perpetual, status as minor. the form that this melancholic practice took was an individual and collective investment in the if only; that is, if only psychoanalysis could be a dominant science, then the problems of individuals, institutions, and society could be fixed in ways in which contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry are ineffective. but this if only was nonspecific, serving as a generalized, vague form of melancholic longing. the group i am discussing is quite small and idiosyncratic. in the bay area, there are other, larger groups of psychoanalysts, but i was drawn to this one for its less institutionalized status, its focus on lacan, and the profile of its members, many of whom work in various kinds of psychiatric community outreach. this latter feature proved particularly attractive to me, as the broader project of this fieldwork focuses in part on félix guattari and jean oury’s experimental group home, la borde, as an alternative model to conceptualize the care for neurological disability in contemporary north atlantic societies (genosko 2002; guattari 1984). psychoanalysis has a varied status throughout the united states and the world, with parts of latin america and europe still offering psychoanalytic forms of treatment for a variety of complaints (lakoff 2005; lloyd 2008). in the united states, psychoanalysis struggles to maintain itself as a robust clinical practice, as kate schechter (2014) has recently shown. i do not see this small group of lacanians as representative of psychoanalysis in the united states or globally, but rather suggest that it represents a class of minor scientists who are disenfranchised from dominant scientific institutions through their practices and beliefs—in this case, both american psychiatry and neuroscience, and also more mainstream forms of psychoanalysis. this is due, in part, to the marginalized status of psychoanalysis in the united states, and is compounded by the tertiary place of lacanian psychoanalytic practice in the country.2 mourning and minor sciences deleuze and guattari outline their thinking about minor sciences and literatures throughout two texts, kafka: towards a minor literature and a thousand plateaus. by way of a necessarily reductive summary, minor science possesses three qualities. first, minor science is deterritorialized, meaning it speaks from a field not its own. instead, it stretches or bends the meanings of concepts of the field that it challenges, and often uses theories in “incorrect” or “unfair” ways from the point of view of the dominant position (deleuze and guattari 1987, 108). the relationship between theory and evidence is not concretized in minor sciences insofar as the minor science’s theory signifies an impasse or gap in the dominant theory and intensifies it (deleuze and guattari 1986, 26). this can be seen in the ways that the same language is used across psy-disciplines—mind, brain, feeling—to mean radically different things depending on the speaker and the scientific context. deleuze and guattari (1986, 26) construe this as variance in the “intensive utilization” of language. second, minor sciences are intensely political (deleuze and guattari 1986, 17). through their posing of questions disruptive to dominant science, minor sciences politicize themselves through their very practice. this is not to say that they constitute resistant sciences, but rather that in their coexistence with dominant sciences they provide alternatives, escape plans, and countergenealogies that destabilize the objective and teleological status of dominant sciences. the third feature is that of “bachelorhood” (deleuze and guattari 1986, 71), the positioning of minor sciences as isolated, nomadic, and estranged—yet in waiting of eventual inheritance. while this seemingly external position might exclude minor sciences from widespread adoption, it instead aids in the construction of their very powers. minor sciences’ disenfranchisement frees their practitioners from the material and social constraints of the dominant sciences, even as they are exposed to risks beyond those of dominant sciences (deleuze and guattari 1987, 368). the idea of minor science allows heterodoxy to proliferate, like parasites or symbiotes that feed off and feed on one another (serres 2007). rather than being pluralist, moreover, with the naive assumption that their practices are treated equally or that one scientific practice will eventually supplant the other, minor sciences are pneumatic in their operativity: they make manifest that pressures are always exerted between practices, communities of thought, and knowledge itself (deleuze and guattari 1987, 486). ruptures are always nearer at hand than might be expected from the position of dominant science; hence the frequent dismissal of the minor sciences by the scientific powers that be. i generally agree with deleuze and guattari’s outline of minor sciences, but i want to add one more feature, borrowed from and explanatory of the lacanians i worked with, namely, the experiences of mourning and melancholy. in an essay titled “mourning and melancholia,” freud (1997) differentiates between mourning and melancholy, the first often interpreted as marked by its apparent teleological aspect, the second by its self-perpetuation. in pairing deleuze and guattari with freud, i intend to expand them both—to add a feature to the lived practice of marginalized expertise in minor sciences, and also to expand ideas about mourning and melancholia beyond lost objects qua objects. for freud, mourning and melancholia are idioms of grief, predicated on a lost object—a lover, a family member, a friend. the process of working through one’s grief is fundamentally about reclaiming the investment placed in the object. central to this process is the acceptance of the ambivalent role of the object, embracing both the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between the griever and the grieved (freud 1997, 164). mourning, in its normative course, results in the full return of this psychic investment, and relies on an embracing of ambivalence. melancholia differs quite markedly. it is characterized by the inability to fully disinvest the griever in the relationship with the grieved. at its most intense, it can be marked by sadomasochism, with the griever harming himself or the other (or the memory of the object), potentially leading to suicide or the desecration of the object’s memory (freud 1997, 165). i find deleuze and guattari’s conception of minor sciences helpful in identifying particular kinds of communities interested in knowledge production and practice, but their portrayal of a minoritarian figure is that of franz kafka, whose experiences are exemplary rather than generalizable. attending to the affective states that freud focuses on helps flesh out minor sciences, as well as highlighting a feature that dovetails with more general anthropological interests in expertise and the experience of loss. mourning, and to a lesser degree melancholia, have played significant roles in the anthropological study of death and ceremonial practice. charles briggs (2014) has recently suggested that mourning is not so much about its resolution, but instead about the complex social relations fostered through the act of loss and the interpellation of others into that loss, often through overt ceremonial practice. mourning, going back to freud, is characterized by a diminution of the world: the world is less due to the mourning individual’s loss. for briggs, by suturing mourning to ethnographic practice, we can build new social connections by drawing others in through the performative powers of mourning. in contrast, and as addressed by thomas blom hansen (2012, 16–17), melancholia is characterized by the diminution of the individual, characterized by self-reproachment and blame. mourning, moreover, is specific in its association with a particular loss; melancholia is more diffuse, often incapable of specifying a particular loss, but instead characterized by longing. anthropologists have long focused on mourning instead of melancholia. melancholia proves a difficult empirical experience to capture, although some anthropological studies of depression may approach it (marlovits 2013; martin 2007). mourning, in contrast, is explicitly social, often enrolling others in relationships with the mourner that establish new investments for the mourner and for social others (hollan 1995; o’rourke 2007; woodrick 1995). in the case of minor sciences, mourning and melancholia do not constitute separate processes, but rather two faces of the same coin: at the same time, sites like the seminar i participated in concentrated on mourning the now marginal status of psychoanalysis and served as a window onto the melancholic practices of individual participants. this mourning was not teleological; it did not seek its own end, allowing for new investments. instead, it served as a form of group melancholia, enrolling others into a collective participation in conceptualizing lacanian psychoanalysis in the united states as a resolutely and inevitably minor science. it also trafficked in anger and discontent, often projected at those in power, as well as at society more generally, which helped isolate this group of lacanians and perpetuate their status as minor. our mourning voices; or, citation as melancholic practice i sit next to arturo, looking at his copy of the ethics of psychoanalysis (lacan 1992). i have perched myself at the end of the long, uncomfortable mattress that doubles as a couch on seminar days, all the way at the end, next to arturo’s chair. as we converse and read from the text, i make a point of looking at each of the pages in arturo’s well-worn copy of the ethics; they are frequently dog-eared, underlined throughout, and filled with marginalia—cluttered and defaced to the point of near illegibility. this might be one of the root causes of displacing the burden of reading the seminars aloud to other participants; but doing so also allows arturo time to write in new marginalia, to re-underline particular parts of the text as it is being read. many of the passages are underlined in pen or pencil, highlighted, and accompanied by marginalia. for a while, i try and copy his underlining, but, given the burden of reading and taking my own notes, i quickly begin to slip. my own copy of the ethics is spartan in comparison: i read it once as a graduate student in a seminar on psychoanalysis, and very little of lacan’s thought about the ethics of psychoanalysis seemed novel enough to warrant underlining. but arturo’s approach is talmudic, and every rereading of lacan provides a means to find new insights, new connections to the contemporary world, new opportunities for elaboration. here, i am interested in the intensive utilizations of language spawned by reading lacan. these practices are not lacan’s: lacan is circumspect in his own citations, often limited to a core of continental thinkers whom he engages with, although he digresses often and refers obliquely to seminar participants, contemporary politics, and key psychoanalytic thinkers. instead, the use of intensive language as readers, and especially by arturo and nev as instructors, link lacan’s thought to the present, thereby reviving what might otherwise be considered historical thought. on their face, these intensive utilizations of language work to enliven lacan. but as a function of a minor science i see them as operating in a more destabilizing fashion, taking common terms and altering their definitions. arturo especially, but nev to a degree, uses the text at hand to free associate and reflect on words or ideas in the text and their resonance in their lives as practicing therapists. glancing mention of a word or concept would often provoke a digression from textual exegesis to a more general conversation about lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic concepts, or their recent everyday experiences. in so digressing, their intensive utilizations of language attempted to insinuate lacanian thought into my and harry’s conceptions of the world. reading lacan aloud gives me a sense of double vision, or, more appropriately, echolalia. i am very aware as i read that lacan either read his lectures or improvised them (or, by all accounts, something in between), that they were transcribed by his students, then edited, translated into english, edited again, and now i am reading them. this long chain of mediation would seem to constitute an insurmountable barrier to actually voicing lacan, to materially invoking his presence in our meetings. add to this my intermittent colds, nev frequently forgetting his glasses, henry’s occasional stutter, and the restaging of lacan proves anything but graceful. the dramaturgy aside, the purpose of reading lacan seems less about understanding lacan and more about providing the basis for free association. let me provide an example: we are reading from chapter four of the ethics of psychoanalysis, titled “das ding.” harry has taken on the reading duties for the second section of the chapter, and halfway through page 51, he is interrupted. harry: in other words, it is to the extent that the signifying structure imposes itself between perception and consciousness that the unconscious intervenes, that the pleasure principle intervenes. yet it is no longer in the form of a gleichbesetzung or the function of the maintenance of a certain investment, but insofar as it concerns the bahnungen. the structure of accumulated experiences resides there and remains inscribed there. arturo: wait, harry. what is it that lacan means here by “signifying structure?” is he talking about the nature of reality? is he asking us, “what the fuck is reality anyway?” is there a psychic reality and another reality we cannot perceive? are our moods and feelings hiding something? what we need to understand is that there is a productivity between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. we need to understand that the imaginary serves as a mechanism for reaching a zero level between reality and the symbolic. you cannot not go through the imaginary and symbolic. you must go through the symbolic to reach the unconscious, see? nev: but what’s the purpose of the good? the psychic? reality? what’s the purpose? civilization isn’t pedagogical, it isn’t there to teach us something. it’s just built up history that we live in. it’s the symbolic too. we must get through the symbolic to get to the psyche. but if you lead your patient away from civilization, then what does he have to hold onto? if it’s all a facade, that’s terrifying. this is the ethical quandary of psychoanalysis. should you take away your patient’s security blanket to cure him? arturo: yes, of course! this is the nature of the good that lacan is pointing us towards! you must be functional, you must be normal! let’s get you back to that. all this fucking reality that you hold onto, that’s the lie. you need to come to terms with your own being, with the kernel of your anxiety, of your fear, all that shit that makes you the human that you are—even if you’re all fucked up. that is what we are doing here, getting people into their shit. and it’s because psychoanalysts will do this that they are the ethical subjects, they are the ones who tear down society and say to a patient: “look: the world fucked you up! it’s not you, it’s them!” all of freud’s discontents are the ethical products of society, they’re the ones who stand apart and know that the edifice of society must be exposed for what it is—just bullshit! psychoanalysis, now more than ever, stands against the state and its apparatuses. the state asks “what do we do with all these discontents?” and psychoanalysis is there to say these are the state’s problems, and these are the psychopathologies. these are the things that are the real problems, and these are the things that are just a problem for the state. but this depends on our patients being ignorant of themselves. they know they have a problem, they know they need help. but they don’t know what the problem is. they don’t know that the problem is society. so they come to see us and we slowly show them how it is society. society fucked you up! it fucked up your parents! and their parents! it’s been fucking people up for centuries! it goes on for much longer, and strays even further from the text under scrutiny, as nev suggests that the silence of a practiced psychoanalyst is the key to his or her ethical practice, and that it is precisely through silence that an individual patient can come to understand the edifice of society. it might seem that nev and arturo, especially, are angry about their marginalization, but their tone was less angry than emphatic, attempting to rally harry and me to their position. given that we only have two hours each week, and these interruptions are frequent and lengthy, it should come as little surprise that our progress through the ethics moves very slowly. arturo uses harry’s reading of “signifying structures” as the prompt for a digression that carries us from the nature of reality through civilization as a concept and ends with a consideration of the eminently political nature of psychoanalysis in contemporary society. throughout, the intensive utilizations of language that arturo employs work to attach everyday concepts like “reality” and “society” to psychoanalysis; in so doing, they recontextualize already existing language in ways that unsettle students’ assumptions about the world, colonizing it with lacanian conceptions of the symbolic. more important, they work to extend our collective understanding of psychoanalysis in the contemporary moment to the level of necessity, that it is only psychoanalysis that can free us from the constraints of society. moreover, the psychoanalyst is one of the very few positioned to help others extricate themselves from society’s hold. to accomplish this counterinterpellative feat, arturo casts a net to capture the “discontents” (freud 1961) that he associates with those drawn to psychoanalysis, potentially in tension with the freudian understanding of discontent as the suffering of those who experience the friction between their biological instincts and the social repression of sexuality and murder. freudian conceptions of the pathological individual become conflated with the ethical psychoanalyst, thereby colonizing freudian thought with arturo’s reading of lacan. arturo’s and nev’s intensive utilizations of language work to deterritorialize both everyday understandings of particular terms and historically important psychoanalytic concepts. two additional features of arturo’s and nev’s interjections are worth focusing on here. first, the very structure of their interruptions and the length of their digressions mean that our collective work of mourning will be drawn out. second, arturo and nev posit psychoanalysis as what we can now recognize as a minor science, an eminently political yet disenfranchised practice in relation to dominant practices associated with the state. in terms of the duration of our seminar, it is worth noting that the ethics is just over three hundred pages in length, and with weekly meetings for forty weeks, sparing christmas and new year’s, we need only read ten to fifteen pages each week to stay on schedule. so how else might two hours be filled than with discussion? but the presumption is that the students in the seminar are so novice as to be unable to participate in the conversation; instead, the burden of filling those two hours of course time is relegated to arturo and nev, who take the lead in showing the students what is important in the text, not by attending to it, but by moving from the text to everyday and theoretical contexts through their intensive utilizations of language. the purpose, then, is not just to extend our conversation, but to lead it in very particular ways that focus on the social life of lacanian thought and the power of psychoanalysis; that is, they stress the liveliness and radical potential of psychoanalysis for us to embrace what they project as the political project of lacan himself. this extension of our consideration of the ethics dovetails with the status of psychoanalysis as a minor science. the casting of psychoanalytic practice as ethically imperative in contemporary society is based on the assumption that it alone can successfully disabuse individuals of the conceits of civilization. does it matter that those in a minor science make this claim to political power? for deleuze and guattari, it is unclear whence this claim arises. in any event, the practitioners of that science assume their political power and use it to guide their actions. in this case, arturo and nev act as if lacanian psychoanalysis has the potential to radically remake the lives of individuals and society itself—if only it could achieve a more dominant position in society. this is one of the most recurrent themes in our discussions of the texts, as we return repeatedly to how psychoanalysis is marginalized as a set of theories and practices, and that it alone has the potential to see through “fucking reality” and remake society in line with the demands of civilization’s discontents. more often than he free associates with the texts, nev is likely to use arturo’s metatextual flights to fuel his own reflections on the status of his practice. as mentioned above, nev is employed in a community health clinic where he relies largely on cognitive behavioral therapy (cbt) to treat individuals with complaints of addiction, domestic abuse, and neurotic tendencies. additionally, he uses these opportunities to reflect on his experience as a psychoanalyst in syria, which he often idealizes as outside of the neuroscientific paradigm he finds himself beholden to in his cbt practice. nev speaks slowly; english is his second language, and he speaks it with a heavy accent. he is often self-conscious about his word choice, and will often pause to make sure he is selecting the right word. as he gathers momentum in his speech, he speaks with less precision. this reminds me of a patient i saw this week, a woman. i was in my office, and she came in and slumped down in the chair. shump! into the chair. she sits with her chin resting on her chest. her hair is messy, and down in her face. she doesn’t make eye contact with me. so we sit there for a few minutes in silence. “why are you here?,” i ask her. she mumbles something. so we sit there quiet for a while. “did your case worker send you to see me?” she mumbles something. we sit there quiet for a while. finally, i say “i can only help you if you talk with me. does your husband beat you? are you addicted to heroin? do you hit your kids? don’t you take showers? i don’t know what your problem is unless you talk to me and tell me about it.” so she slaps my desk. [nev slaps the arm of the chair he is sitting in.] she tells me she lives in her car. she lost custody of her children, who now live with her husband, and he won’t pay his support. so she sees her social worker because she wants to get the kids back, she wants to get the money from her husband, and she looks like a homeless person. and her social worker tells her, “you need to see a therapist,” so she comes to see me. does she want help? no. she just wants me to sit with her for an hour each week for ten weeks and tell her social worker that she’s making progress. that she’s getting her life together. and i tell her, “no. this is serious business. you come to see me, we do the work you need to do. do you want your kids back? then you get to work. you take this seriously.” it makes me think of this, how lacan discusses the work of psychoanalysis. i sit there in my office after she leaves, and i think how lacan would do this. not the cbt that i have to do at the clinic. would he just sit there for the hour with her in silence? would he just sit there for ten weeks in silence? the standards are so different. but she’s got to get her shit together. she wants her kids back, let’s get to work, let’s figure that out. does lacan have an answer for that? i don’t know. but in ten weeks her social worker will call me, and should i talk about the symbolic order? no, i have to tell her that this patient is living in an apartment. not in her car. i have to tell her she’s got a job. that she’s not anxious. not depressed. nev is acutely aware of the marginalized position of his preferred form of psychiatric treatment, but he finds himself forced to obey the demands of the institution that he works for. his invocations of “work” and “serious business” index his willingness to use cbt and non-lacanian forms of psychiatric treatment despite his preferences, but, at the same time, he invokes lacan and psychoanalytic forms of practice to suggest his desire for the situation to be otherwise. at the heart of his displeasure lies the tension between the ethical practice that he sees psychoanalysis as embarking on and the expedient and state-sponsored practice of cbt and related treatments. psychoanalysis, nev suggests, would take longer than the woman’s social worker would care for the treatment to take, in defiance of state mandates, but might also be more effective in its alleviation of the woman’s concerns. this tension between what is and what could be, between what the state and society demand of nev and what the scientific dominance of psychoanalysis in american society might offer is the melancholic experience of psychoanalysis as a minor science: nev’s experience of the ethical quandary he faces in his office presents him as an individual with the nonspecific future promised in the minor science of lacanian psychoanalysis—things could be so different, for him, for individual patients, for society, if only psychoanalysis could move from being a bachelor minor science, perpetually in waiting, and ascend to a position of scientific dominance. instead, nev, his patients, and the science itself remain resolutely minor, and in part this is due to the very practices of the seminar we participate in. disenfranchisement and the politics of minority about halfway through the lectures that comprise the other side of psychoanalysis, lacan (2007) opens the floor of the seminar to a question-and-answer period, reproduced as chapter 10. in the wake of the riots in france in 1968, lacan takes the opportunity to think through the relationship between the university and society, juxtaposing it to the role of psychoanalysis and the analyst and patients and society. “what use has the university been?,” lacan (2007, 148) asks, positing that it has largely been reproductive in its aims, only reproducing social norms rather than critiquing them. arturo: let me ask you this, since i have two university professors in the room: when was the last time someone talked about psychoanalysis at your university? when was the last time you taught a class about psychoanalysis? do your psychology professors talk about freud and lacan? me: me, personally? i haven’t really had the opportunity to teach psychoanalytic concepts, mostly because i don’t teach relevant classes, but other people at my university, in my department and elsewhere, teach classes on psychoanalysis. i know someone who teaches a class just on freud to undergrads— harry: i teach a lot of freud in my philosophy classes: civilization and its discontents— arturo: yes, but do you teach psychoanalysis or do you just teach this stuff as belonging to some dead guy, a history lesson? lacan is pointing to the problem being that the university cannot embrace psychoanalysis because it is too radical—the university is too conservative. you teach everything like it is an animal in the zoo: you keep the dangerous stuff locked up! students see freud not as a scientist, not as the radical thinker he was, but as a castrated bull, a rhino without his horn! harry: i’m not sure that i agree. i mean, my students read freud and it’s like a, like a revelation to them. if i ask them what they know about freud before we read any of his work, all they bring up, if they bring up anything at all, is the oedipus complex. they just have no idea who he is these days. and so when we, when we read books like civilization, they’re just shocked at what he’s talking about. it’s not like they’re going to become freudians, but they start to see him as a philosopher, like the other philosophers we read. arturo: but that is precisely what i’m saying: he’s just another historical figure, he has nothing to say about today. if you want to radicalize your students, you turn them into freudians, into lacanians! they will go home to their parents, and nothing will be the same—[harry and i laugh] me: i’m not sure most parents would appreciate that— arturo: that’s it exactly: you must produce students who parents will not appreciate. they will appreciate them in time because they will be their own persons, they will be able to see through all the bullshit in front of them! that’s what parents want, not regurgitators! like nev’s awareness of psychoanalysis’ marginalization in relation to mainstream american psychiatry, arturo points to how psychoanalysis has been marginalized within one of its other possible homes, the university. on the same occasion, later in the conversation, i argued that the university is the one home of lacanian thought in the united states and that if one compiled the publications in any given year about lacan, that most would be written by university professors, which arturo dismissed. his desire was, much like nev’s previously, to displace contemporary science-based psychiatric practices in the form of classes taught in psychology departments, and, instead, to install curricula in psychoanalysis. such an interest played on psychoanalysis as a minor science, with no true home in the contemporary american university; instead of being seen as a form of psychological theory and treatment, it is seen as, as arturo argued, “just a way to interpret films and books.” weeks later, we are reading the chapter “the function of the beautiful,” which occurs about two-thirds of the way through the ethics. lacan (1992) is working in his lectures to separate the good from the beautiful, and, in so doing, sets up the structure of jouissance in everyday life. lacan’s (1992, 239–40) definition of the beautiful depends on a masochistic relation to the self, where one at once desires an object or individual but is simultaneously foreclosed from its absolute possession. this runs parallel to his conception of women as the object of sexual desire, in which they serve as a screen for male projections of desire, which in turn obscures women as individuals to men. furthermore, because of the symbolic order of western cultures, women are strangers to themselves, foreclosed from being subjects; they are always other in the masculine symbolic order. it is in this context that the following digression occurred: arturo: what does lacan mean by the beautiful? is it a beautiful woman? but my beautiful woman isn’t yours, is it? mine has a round butt, is not too tall. [harry and nev laugh; arturo remains serious.] but we can all agree that women are beautiful. even gay men believe women are beautiful. they don’t want to fuck them, but they know they are beautiful. that’s why some of them dress up as women. we live in a society where women are the most beautiful thing, and we want to possess them. who hasn’t fallen in love with a beautiful woman who only did us harm? she’s so beautiful, but so fucked up. she ignores us, she doesn’t call us back, she looks at other men. but we do everything to make her happy. and we lie in bed in the middle of the night thinking “what the fuck am i doing to myself?” but that is the structure of the beautiful: it makes us do stupid things in order to attain it. it is not the good. the good is something we think about, and we think, “i should do this, i should not do that.” the beautiful is something we fixate on. it defies logic. it drags us along— nev: we all see those beautiful women on the street and our eyes follow them. there are all of the other women we don’t even see, but then there is one with long hair and big eyes, and we follow her with our eyes. other people are too—men and women! we would follow her all the way home if we could, but we have to go to work, we have to go shopping, we have to do good things. arturo: and this might make you think that the beautiful is evil, that it is something we should avoid. but lacan’s point is that you need both the good and the beautiful to get people to do anything. if you only had the good, you would have no means to motivate people—who does good work just because it is good? we do good work because it supports our beautiful family, we do it because it impresses beautiful women! harry: but this makes me think that beauty is a distraction—that it isn’t what we really want, just what we’re made to think that we want by society . . . arturo: let me put it to you this way: if you could have everything you want, nothing would be beautiful. this is what lacan calls permissive societies. if you can have anything you want, if you can fuck anyone you see, then none of it is pleasurable. jouissance decreases in permissive societies. you need prohibitions to find pleasure. it might sound perverse, but you have better sex in a prohibitive society. this has to do with the relation between the id and the superego: desire needs to be mediated. desire needs the symbolic. why love your neighbor? you need the symbolic so you can think of this guy as your neighbor, and that you can think of that act as good—loving your neighbor is a good thing. but fucking his wife is prohibited! which is why it’s so tempting! who doesn’t want to fuck his neighbor’s wife? or, better yet, his daughter? she’s the girl next door! but you cannot! it is against the law! nev: the law, it makes us crazy. we see something we want, but we can’t have it. it is so close, but the law says “no!” and this makes us want to transgress the law. we want to break the law, so that we can get back to pure pleasure. we want a natural high. but the law makes us crazy, it creates psychosis. and you see this in patients: they go off their meds because they want to be outside of the law. but then they exist in pure jouissance, they are psychotic. and what happens? they burn out, they go crazy, they die. and the analyst steps in to say, you must obey the law—you must be a patient and take your meds, you must come to your appointments. nev’s and arturo’s portrayal of male desire polices who may belong to psychoanalysis as an analyst, both in their language but also in their tone, which is consistently emphatic in an evangelical fashion. women have a troubled status in lacan’s work (lacan 1998), and this may hinder participation by women in the training seminar (see irigaray 1985). moreover, that nev is a divorcé and arturo middle-aged and single may lend a particular edge to their assessment of gender and desire. yet what occurs in the seminar is a policing of gender that reinforces existing disenfranchisement in lacanian thought and practice, which focuses on heterosexual portrayals of women and homosexual male desire.3 lacan’s work slips between the symbolic and the material. he uses terms like the phallus to denote symbolic forms, but in so doing, he also trades on cultural understandings of the male sex organ and its dominance as the positive basis for understanding sex, as women are known negatively through their castrated status. similarly, what nev and arturo effect through their exegesis on beauty and sexual desire is a slippage between the beautiful as a concept and the experience of it in everyday life; while their language might be lewd or bordering on sexual harassment in the presence of a woman, that they partake in such digressions is facilitated by the virtual exclusion of women from the group. i can only imagine that a homosexual male would feel similarly excluded by such conversations. in both cases, the seminar helps reproduce a space and practice for men, particularly heterosexual men, who marginalize themselves through such linguistic productions. these two cases, the discussion of the foreclosure of psychoanalysis from the modern university and the seminar’s difficulty in integrating other subject positions, point to the ways that minor sciences perpetuate their marginalization, depending on melancholic practices to foster a collective desire for the if only promised to an ascending science. arturo and nev are able to insinuate lacanian thought in my and harry’s everyday lives through their intensive utilizations of language, but they are also intensely critical of the institutional worlds they hope to colonize: the contemporary psychiatric clinic, the university, and society itself—all seem to be hostile to the elaboration of psychoanalytic practices. this perceived hostility is returned to the space of the seminar, characterizing participants as “discontents” outside of society who know the truth and can see through the symbolic edifice of the masculine order. but only some individuals are recognized as subjects within this symbolic order, both by lacan and by arturo and nev: men, and particularly heterosexual men. women are left out: they can only be patients in need of clinical care. there may be ways forward for psychoanalysis in american society, but rather than pursue those routes, and rather than create a more ecumenical space within the seminar, arturo and nev, and harry and i, become invested in perpetuating lacanian psychoanalysis as a minor science, marginalized but in waiting for the opportunity to ascend to dominant status. conclusion anthropologists have often discussed mourning in the context of the loss of an individual, but mourning also undergirds other experiences of loss: the loss of power, the loss of cultural centrality. for some practitioners of minor sciences, like the lacanian psychoanalysts i spent time with, the possibility of mourning proves vexed: they were never engaged in their science as a dominant science. instead, they have only ever known it as a marginalized set of practices and thought. this produces a mourning of potentiality, a mourning that operates in the idiom of if only, which might be more properly characterized as a form of melancholia, except that rather than focusing on self-reproachment, it participates in a debasement of the world and an elevation of the individuals focused on the promotion of their minor scientific practice. by directing our ethnographic attention to the margins of contemporary scientific practice, by attending to science’s losers, the anthropology of science stands to enrich our understanding of the everyday lives and enculturation practices of scientists and the complex social fields in which science operates (martin 1997)—both as an institutionalized form of power and as a set of marginalized expert practices. by adopting minor science as a frame to think about expertise and its practice among marginalized individuals and groups, what can be seen throughout contemporary society is that many scientific paradigms linger outside of dominant scientific institutions—as well as many scientists who continue to practice marginalized sciences, whether it be psychoanalysis or another historically disenfranchised practice. about nine months after i finished my year of fieldwork with the lacanians, i was retracing my commuting route on my way to the oakland airport. i was struck, somewhere around highway 92, with the old somatic feelings of being in the training seminar. fatigue, frustration, that feeling of pre-daydreaming, as if i am simply waiting for lacan’s text to be put before me, so that i can begin to wander in my attention. i get to the airport, rush through security, and sit down to begin to write this. lacan’s voice has long been washed away from my active memory—i no longer have immediate, adverse reactions to thinking about lacanian psychoanalysis or that small office in which the seminar was held. instead, like nev, lacan has become a spectral presence for me, haunting my writing about other minor sciences, particularly guattari’s experimental group analysis at la borde outside of paris, and i return to the space of mourning. lacan and his successors do not need to be saved. if arturo and nev are representative of the status of lacanian psychoanalysts in the united states, neither they nor the science itself are in need of saving. like other minor sciences, relegated to the margins of thought, the ongoing existence and practice of lacanian psychoanalysis deterritorializes the dominant sciences it stands in relation to, regardless of how widespread its practice is. its mourning unsettles dominant sciences and their practitioners, as dominant scientists struggle with influences that are acephalous, spectral, and haunting, buried in minor sciences at their periphery. i write in airports, airplanes, in my hotel while i attend a conference, in an effort to shake myself free of this mourning of lacan—but i know, somehow, that this mourning will never be complete. psychoanalysis could be otherwise; it could be a dominant science again, full of other potentials than those embedded in contemporary neuroscience and psychiatry. this is the melancholia of minor sciences at work, unsettling me despite my best efforts; if only . . . notes acknowledgments this research was supported with funding provided by the university of california, santa cruz’s division of social sciences. my thanks to the editorial staff of cultural anthropology for their intensive, generative comments and for their assistance in finalizing this article; thanks also to the anonymous reviewers who read an earlier version of the manuscript and provided helpful insight for its further development. special thanks to gretchen bakke, who read the earliest version of the manuscript, and to my partner katherine martineau for her intellectual and editorial support. 1. for a history of psychoanalysis and its relation to dominant neuroscientific trends in the united states, see zaretsky 2005 and schechter 2014. for a more general history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, see rose 1990. 2. from 2003 to 2007, i conducted sustained ethnographic fieldwork with neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and clinicians interested in the brain. this led me to develop an interest in neurological pathologies and how they have been conceived throughout the twentieth century. in 2009, i began conducting research on alternative genealogies of the brain in the twentieth century, in part due to conversations i had with my neuroscientific and psychiatric interlocutors, many of whom were interested in unpopular or obscure texts and thinkers from the twentieth century. as part of this project, i enrolled in the lacanian training seminar, which i participated in between 2009 and 2010. in parallel, i began research on special education facilities focused on neurological differences that were cast as disorders, even as i continued research with neuroscientists and psychiatrists. i was guided to study late twentieth-century psychoanalysis in part as a response to one of my psychiatric interlocutors, who, trained in the 1970s, claimed his education as the last of the hybrid approaches between psychoanalysis and scientifically focused modern psychiatry. in a conversation over lunch one day, he asked me “whatever happened to psychoanalysis?” i offered an initial answer based on my familiarity with post-lacanian thinkers, but the question lay dormant until i relocated to california and had the opportunity to enroll in the lacanian training program i found there. my initial questions concerned ethics and neurological disability, but as i participated in the lacanian training, my questions became more focused on psychoanalysis as a science and a set of practices that have largely been marginalized and rendered minor in the united states. in the larger version of this project, i consider lacanian and post-lacanian psychoanalysis alongside mid-twentieth-century cybernetics as outlined by gregory bateson and what i refer to as “materialist neuroscience,” those neuroscientists who consider consciousness as an immanent effect of the functioning of the nervous system. 3. desire, for lacan, is predicated on fantasy as it applies to a particular object. but the object of desire is produced through the narcissistic attachment of the desirer to what he or she perceives the object as seeing in the desirer. that is, the desirer projects onto the object of desire a reflected fantasy that the desirer has the ability to fulfill a lack in the object of desire. this projection is fundamental in all desirous relationships, and in its most severe expressions can lead to what lacan thinks of as pathologies associated with the sex drive resulting in perversion. homosexual relationships are expressly considered a perversion in lacan’s thinking, but because of the structure of desire, heterosexual relationships are also prone to perversion and other psychotic forms. one of the practical implications for lacan’s conception of desire is that it forecloses participation by particular individuals—especially women and homosexuals—because it casts them negatively. for a concise discussion of desire in lacan’s thinking, see žižek 1992. for an overview of homosexuality in psychoanalysis, including lacan’s perspective, see dean and lane 2001. references briggs, charles l. 2014 “dear dr. freud.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 312–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.08 dean, tim, and christopher lane, eds. 2001 homosexuality and psychoanalysis. chicago: university of chicago press. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari 1983 anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by robert hurley, mark seem, and helen r. lane. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 1986 kafka: toward a minor literature. translated by dana polan. minneapolis: university of 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cambridge, mass.: mit press. anthropology and open access anthropology and open access jason baird jackson indiana university ryan anderson university of kentucky while still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (oa) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, oa frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. cultural anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. the move to transition it toward a gold oa model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate more ethically and sustainably with global and diverse publics. on the occasion of this significant shift, we build on the history of oa debates, position statements, and experiments taking place during the past decade to do three things. using an interview format, we will offer a primer on oa practices in general and in cultural anthropology in particular. in doing so, we aim to highlight some of the special considerations that have animated arguments for oa in cultural anthropology and in neighboring fields built around ethnographic methods and representations. we then argue briefly for a critical anthropology of scholarly communication (including scholarly publishing), one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which cultural anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. our field’s distinctive knowledge of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena should also—but often has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars. ryan anderson: my first question is basic: what is open access all about, and how is it any different from standard academic publishing? jason baird jackson: when i am asked to recommend an explanation of what oa is about, i usually point colleagues to the basic introductory documents assembled by philosopher and oa strategist peter suber. his one-page “very brief introduction to open access” is a great place to start. it begins, “open-access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. two things make this possible: the internet, and the consent of the author or copyright-holder” (suber 2004a; see also suber 2012). there is much more that scholarly authors, societies, publishers, and libraries need to know about oa, but this is a good start. the features that suber notes in this sentence comprise the basic differences that you are searching for. open access evokes different things for different people and interest groups. we will touch on some of the range of concerns that these actors bring to the topic. a decade ago, when anthropologists first started exploring oa, it made sense to speak of oa as an alternative to standard academic publishing, but i do not think that this framing works any longer. while oa represents a significant set of transformations in what we might think of as the inherited scholarly publishing domain, oa is now at the heart of standard academic publishing. that does not mean that there is agreement about the issues, or about emergent practices, or even about the definition of basic terms. my “it’s-all-one-system-now” view just acknowledges such facts on the ground as the reality that all american anthropological association (aaa) journals are now oa in the sense that they offer provisions for legal and technically responsible “green oa” deposit and that we now have senior anthropologists publishing in “gold oa” journals such as hau: journal of ethnographic theory without fully realizing that such a nameable kind of publication exists as such. the move of a well-established, high-impact journal such as cultural anthropology into the gold oa category is a very clear illustration of the change that i am evoking (budryk 2013; weiss 2013, 2014). while oa may still seem to be the concern of activists, the largest commercial publishers (wiley among them) are fully, if sometimes begrudgingly, involved in oa through their having acceded to public, university, and funder demands for what is called “green oa” and via their enthusiasm for author-pays approaches to gold and “hybrid oa.” while people like me tend to talk about oa as a means toward a dramatic transformation of scholarly communication, one aimed at making it more useful in service of human needs—sustainable, accountable, ethical, public, etc.—commercial publishers increasingly describe oa as just another business model (fister 2011). we are debating and rebuilding the same publishing system even if, at times, and in some senses, it seems like oa advocates are creating an alternative infrastructure for the discovery, circulation, evaluation, and reuse of scholarly research outputs. i want to stress that convergence in practices is very different from convergence in goals. cultural anthropologists advocating for oa strategies because they better address an ethical need to ensure that our scholarship is as accessible as possible to research subjects are very different from high-energy physicists motivated by a need to accelerate the research processes to speeds that older publishing strategies could not keep up with. chemists eager to harness data-mining techniques are very different oa advocates from librarians who recognize that the current journals system cannot be sustained unmodified and without them becoming hopelessly unable to fill their public obligations in democratic societies. student oa advocates concerned about the contribution of publishing costs to skyrocketing student debt in american universities are different in turn from academics in the developing world desperate to gain access to a larger slice of the scholarly literature. patient-advocates seeking as much health information as they can about loved ones' medical conditions are different in turn from social workers, teachers, and other professionals unable to access the literatures in their fields of practice. as in the societies well known to ethnographers, communal practices can and do often vary less widely than the personal motivations and interpretations that actors bring to those shared engagements. open access right now is very much like this. open access practices can contribute to a range of goals, even when many of those aspirations are not recognized, or are even actively discounted, by one or another group of advocates. it can be treated as a different topic, one that we need only acknowledge and not discuss, but i used the terribly clumsy phrase “research outputs” above as a way of highlighting the parallel transformations that we are experiencing in the system of scholarly genres. running alongside the oa transformation, the canonical genres—journal article and scholarly book—are being remixed and destabilized in countless ways. for cultural anthropology, these generic changes are different from those that followed the field’s writing-culture debates—debates that, interestingly in the present context, were so formative in the establishment of cultural anthropology (marcus 1986; starn 2012). earlier, we wondered what we could say in a book. now we wonder what, in a digital environment, a book is. in your own corner of the new territory, i could ask: is your anthropologies project a journal, a scholarly website, a weblog? do your authors know? such genre questions arose most obviously in the digital humanities and they are increasingly present in many fields (see fabian 2008). they point to what a time of experimentation we are in. open access advocates in anthropology have been particularly attentive to this related-but-not-the-same issue of genre. that said, the core of the oa discussion has been about the journal article largely as we have known it, and few would deny its continued centrality as a key currency of the wider academic realm. ra: these are really fascinating questions, and i’d like to explore them further. this whole subject of genres and different media or publication outcomes is crucial in my view. in some senses, i think that anthropology is trapped in a very old model—we all just look to produce books and articles in top-rated journals that are only read by a very limited, insular audience. as for your questions about what the anthropologies project is—i wonder about this all the time, but am not sure what to tell people (see smith 2011; jackson 2011c). what i have noticed is that calling it a blog can potentially lead people to take it less seriously—as in, “oh, it’s just a blog you’re working on, i see.” the irony, of course, is that the free blog platform has the same potential as the american anthropologist does to display words, ideas, and images. the difference between them is really a matter of social convention: we are used to seeing a publication like the american anthropologist as a legitimate source of academic knowledge. the same words show up in either medium, so the limits are actually self-imposed. if a leading anthropologist publishes a groundbreaking new article, does it truly matter whether it appears in an elite journal or on wordpress.com? so, i have two sets of questions that come to mind with all of this. first, what’s the difference between green and gold oa? does this difference really matter? second, what’s the difference between the just-another-business-model view, on the one hand (i.e., the way that some publishers are looking at this), and the position of oa advocates in anthropology who are rethinking what you call scholarly research outputs? are these positions fundamentally at odds with one another? jbj: your first question, about green and gold oa, is a good place to start, because it represents the kind of basic factual information that all academic authors need to know. we can learn a lot from resources easily found online. suber’s (2004b) slightly longer “open access overview” is one great resource among several. understanding green and gold paths to oa is one of several key distinctions necessary for making sense of the shifting academic publishing landscape. i have used the phrase terms of art when talking about such key concepts previously, and i fear that my anthropology colleagues have not realized that i was making a specific point in describing them in that way. the phrase terms of art refers to words or phrases that have, in a legal sense, a very precise meaning within a subject area. to not know them—or to have vague understandings of them—stops or derails conversation and effective action. we see such counterproductive slippage when our friends in anthropology use the phrase open source (a software development strategy) synonymously with open access (an approach to the circulation of scholarly research). when i am at my most frustrated, i think that an unwillingness to master the basic terms and concepts has contributed to the mess that conversations on anthropology publishing have tended to become. then i calm down and try to go back to trying to learn more as a student of such things, and to teach better as an interested community member. suber (2004b) notes that there are two main vehicles for “delivering oa to research articles, oa journals (‘gold oa’) and oa repositories (‘green oa’).” the journal that i presently edit—museum anthropology review (mar)—is a gold oa journal. every item published in the journal is openly available online at no cost. there are many issues in the mix, but for now it is enough to note that in a gold oa journal, the content is born digital and, more relevantly, born open. when people speak of an oa journal, journals like mar, first monday, and now happily, cultural anthropology, are what people have in mind. like their “toll access” counterparts, oa journals usually engage in peer review (for articles), have editors and editorial boards, regular publication schedules, and all the rest of the inhered apparatus of scholarly journal publishing. they have different business models (of which there are several) than toll-access journals because they do not rely on restricting access and collecting subscriptions, pay-per-view fees, and other tolls. contrary to a common misunderstanding, being a gold oa journal is not synonymous with being an author-pays journal. the universe of green oa centers on a kind of database known as a repository. repositories are usually organized around a discipline (arxiv [physics] and pubmed central [medicine] are examples) or a research institution (dash [harvard university] and topscholar [western kentucky university] are examples). repositories could be created by funders or other interested parties, but for technical reasons that i will set aside, institutional repositories are the most prominent and promising type. when university faculties impose open access mandates on themselves (as harvard’s faculty and hundreds of others have already done), or when a funder makes oa deposit a condition of acceptance for a grant, these actors are not insisting that a scholar-author must publish in a gold oa journal such as cultural anthropology, hau, or museum anthropology review. they are insisting that the scholar-authors make their work freely available online via a repository. what does that mean, literally? it means that some version of the scholar’s journal article is uploaded (as a file with associated metadata) and permanently archived in a central digital database (repository). such repositories make the work discoverable and accessible to interested readers. the metadata associated with such works can be harvested by broad search tools like google scholar and narrower projects such as open folklore (the oa promotion and portal project for folklore and ethnology that i work on). such search tools lead users to the actual work where it lives and is accessible in its home repository. what does the archived or deposited work look like? here we go again with some unavoidable terms of art, but first i need to make clear that green oa articulates with the toll-access journal landscape. when we say that subscription-based journals such as comparative studies in society and history, ethnohistory, or economic botany support oa, we mean that they have policies that allow their authors to make their work openly available. however, this is on an individual basis, and it takes place outside the main publication channel provided by the journals themselves. the normative (and best) way to do this is via repository deposit. here come the key terms. the phrase green oa means that some version of the article can be made available in oa form via a repository (or some other means, such as a personal website). to make sense of what is and is not allowed under the terms of individual journals' author agreements, one needs to know the difference between a pre-print and a post-print and a publisher’s version. my favorite source for explicating these differences is the informational page accompanying the romeo database (sherpa/romeo 2014). romeo is a resource for learning about the copyright and oa policies of different journals. in a nutshell, a pre-print is the version of an article as it exists in manuscript form prior to its being peer-reviewed and accepted by a journal. a post-print is an article manuscript as it has been modified by its author(s) on the basis of peer review. the post-print version is typically the final version that an author submits to an editor in anticipation that the work will then enter the journal’s production processes, which will include such steps as copyediting and typesetting. if you look at a pre-print or a post-print, it has the hallmarks of (and usually is) an author-produced document. these versions look and feel different from the publisher’s version, which is the final document that is actually published. to look at publishers' final documents, such versions have been typeset or formatted according to journal standards. in a digital context, such versions have often been marked up with technical coding that allows for various enhancements. underneath, they may also carry digital rights management (drm) technologies that prevent, or seek to hinder, unauthorized uses (piracy). if you download an article in pdf form from jstor, project muse, or wiley online library, you are looking at a publisher’s version. a journal is “green” if an author is allowed to freely circulate at least their accepted post-print. some journals also allow authors to freely circulate and deposit the publisher’s version, but this is uncommon. most publishers see all of the work that they put into turning a post-print into a published article as their investment, and they are not inclined to give it away. in contrast, some publishers (again, the minority) ask authors to deposit the publisher’s version because they see it as the version that will best reflect on the quality work done by the press in question. it is my understanding that this view is behind the oa policies of the university of california press journals program (university of california press 2014). the important thing to note here is that two toll-access journals can both be green but can allow or not allow different things vis-à-vis repository deposit by authors. i have touched on it elsewhere, but i want to stress again that many nice people in anthropology are breaking the law (i.e., are contractually out of compliance with their signed author agreements) because they have made publisher’s versions of their articles available online via personal websites, departmental websites, and commercial services (such as academia.edu) when they are not allowed to do so (golub 2013; jackson 2011b, 2013b). what is the difference, then, between green and gold? we can answer that question from the perspective of different actors. for an interested would-be reader with internet access but without access to the information resources paid for by a major research library, both paths are great. everything in a gold oa journal is readily discoverable and available in neat and tidy form. if an author publishing in a toll-access journal has made her work accessible via the green oa path, then that work too is available to our interested reader. in post-print form, it may not look as tidy as the published version, but the ideas are there and usable, which is worth a lot. if our author is employed by a university that has imposed an assertive oa policy, then increasingly vast amounts of valuable information are being made available. because so few academic authors know about these processes, our reader is much less likely to be able to gain access to writings by authors affiliated with non-mandate institutions. still, one need not (as an author) be subject to such a policy in order to participate in oa publishing along either path. for an author, the differences between green and gold are likely to seem very significant. if a junior author has been told, in unambiguous terms, that she needs to publish in journals x, y, and z in order to be favorably evaluated for tenure and promotion (and i am simplifying and exaggerating for rhetorical purposes), then she is likely to aim for those journals regardless of whether they are gold, green (or even yellow [pre-print only] or white [no oa allowed]). much here depends on the journal landscape within a field. if well-established journals in a field give up their subscription-based business model and convert to gold oa (as cultural anthropology has now done), then the status of those journals is usually not diminished by this move. after 157 years, the proceedings of the american philosophical society are no more or less prestigious because the aps allows the whole world to now read its content for free. still, many gold oa journals are start-ups, and authors may have anxieties about journal stature. here, the passage of time is sorting out the quality questions. all the old evaluation criteria like acceptance rates, editorial boards, and “is this content any good?” still apply. despite the rise of bibliometrics, different fields still have different attitudes about journal prestige. cultural anthropology, and folklore studies even more, have historically been very flat relative to other fields in which there is a clear pecking order. few of us would want to defend an argument that the journal of anthropological research is somehow categorically better or worse than anthropological quarterly. they have their own communities, traditions, and histories, but they belong to a broad peer group that would include numerous other titles. cultural anthropology’s relative indifference—or resistance—to impact-factor rankings stems from such perceptions.1 be that as it may, for authors, where you publish usually matters a lot, and for a variety of reasons. if a stressed-out, tenure-track anthropologist is working under the shadow of journal-hierarchy talk, she is going to choose accordingly (friedman 2012). if she is committed to oa for ethical reasons (like social justice) and/or for selfish reasons (like self-promotion), she may need to publish (for the present) in toll-access journals. she can usually choose those with green oa policies and then utilize a repository at her home institution to make available post-prints of her work. in the absence of a repository at her home institution, she can hopefully turn to one at an institution at which she can muster some kind of secondary affiliation. alternatively, she may be able to find a subject repository suitable to, and willing to take, her work. (for anthropologists in this situation, social science research network’s anthropology and archaeology research network [supported by the aaa] would be a logical choice.) in a worst-case scenario, she can make her post-prints available on a personal website (up until the time when she can gain access to a repository).2 for publishers and libraries, the green–gold distinction is huge. if, and how, a publisher engages with open access is fundamental to that publisher’s business model. there are a growing number of different ways that publishers, both for-profit and not-for-profit (including scholarly societies) are making it work. publishing costs money, hence every kind of publisher has to have some workable business model. i will just note that under present conditions, green oa (as we have it now) is seen as compatible with the preservation of the older subscription-based toll-access journal system. even with more and more oa mandates, we are not presently at a stage in which green oa has made scholarship sufficiently accessible (i.e., free to end users) in ways that directly result in subscription cancellations by elite university libraries. the latter possibility is why toll-access publishers are generally so opposed to oa mandates. letting the occasional author post a stray article here or there has not been a game changer. if everyone everywhere started doing it, the story would probably be different. i cannot do justice to what we might call the deeper structural issues that are visible from the vantage point of the two great parties whose relationship can now be fairly characterized as antagonistic—libraries and publishers. my indiana university colleague david lewis (dean of libraries at indiana university–purdue university indianapolis) has authored a very interesting analysis of oa journal dynamics in light of these structural issues. i recommend his paper (and an update on it) for an account of these issues and some predictions on where things are headed (lewis 2012, 2013). one last set of points about green and gold. while it is not perfect, the directory of open access journals (doaj) is the main resource for discovering gold oa journals across disciplines. to learn about, and compare, the oa policies of various toll-access journals, the place to look is the sherpa/romeo database. (among other things, sherpa/romeo tells you whether a journal is green or not.) to find out what universities, departments, research institutes, etc., have adopted oa mandates, consult the registry of open access repositories mandatory archiving policies (roarmap) database. to find the oa repositories that exist in the world, the place to look is the directory of open access repositories (opendoar). ra: so what are the major stumbling blocks holding up a transition to oa in your view? what’s keeping most people from making this jump? lastly, what do you think about the system employed by the social science research network (ssrn), where authors can post working papers? the ssrn seems especially relevant now that it is partnering with the aaa. jbj: at the author level, one key stumbling block is a pervasive lack of basic knowledge about these issues among scholars and policy makers within our field (and in most fields). i am sympathetic to everyone’s plight. it is all very complicated and uncertain; doing what we have always done has proven the easiest path. most of us do not understand copyright or the creative commons system. most of us do not understand journal business models or how it is that librarians have made so much (expensive) information so easily available to those of us with the luxury of university affiliations. in the face of much confusion and anxiety, just following the disciplinary habitus and sending our manuscripts to the editors and journals that we know in the way that we have always done has seemed sensible and prudent. related is the situation in which we perceive that we understand the changing landscape better than we do. a clear instance is when we post the final published versions of our writings online because we wrongly believe ourselves to have the right to do so. the increasing prevalence of such accidental piracy fosters the misunderstanding that such practices are the right way to do open access. such piracy is counterproductive on many levels, and is unnecessary given that there are legal and technically better ways to pursue oa (golub 2013; jackson 2011b, 2013b). such author-centered issues are the major stumbling block for green oa. the fact that many scholars do not have direct access to a home institutional repository is another factor. i have tried to suggest that there are work-arounds to this problem. as you note, the social science research network represents a solution that anthropologists need to learn more about now that the ssrn has partnered with the aaa in establishing the anthropology and archaeology research network—a subject repository for our field. i commend the aaa for supporting this project. my only concerns center on permanence. i have not studied ssrn closely, but note that it is a for-profit business with all of the change over time that such a status entails. it is not as if libraries do not change, but librarians are striving to develop the most reliable preservation frameworks that they can, and they have a history of success as long-term stewards of the scholarly record. hopefully ssrn will develop plans for and gain trusted repository certification or some similar measure of permanence. for the time being, anthropologists should use ssrn for all of the good that it can do them, but i think they should do so without presuming that it is built for the ages (aaa 2013; ccsds 2011; crl 2014; clr and oclc 2007; golub and commentators 2011; gordon 2012; gordon and schmidt 2012). the biggest factor driving green oa are funder and especially institutional oa policies (touched on above). those who are most eager to promote open access in anthropology can work locally to establish mandates in their home institutions (harvard open access project 2013; kelty 2013).3 when a faculty such as at the university of kansas, in a college such as oberlin, across an entire research university system such as california, or when a research institute, applied anthropology agency, or museum establish a green oa policy, this has the almost immediate effect of educating the entire research community at such an institution about the issues that we have been talking about. this goes beyond the obvious direct benefit of bringing a large portion of that institution’s future research output into the oa domain. such policies can be established at the school or department level in instances where an institution-wide policy cannot yet be achieved. as the leaders of the society for cultural anthropology know increasingly well, on the gold oa front, the problems center on the business-model question. publishing costs money. in a reoriented scholarly publishing system emphasizing open access, where will that money come from? alongside some misleading fud (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) campaigning on the part of commercial publishers and their allies, there is a lot of hard work going into finding ways to address the business-model issues. the money issues are real, and i do not know of any serious advocate for change in scholarly publishing who does not acknowledge the need to address them. there is much work to do in many domains, but no scholarly field needs to reinvent the wheel alone. there are many allies to be found and many solutions are already well under way. we now have actual gold journals—some quite prominent—about which we can ask questions like: how are you making this work? who is paying your bills? what are your submission and acceptance rates? how much labor or money goes into formatting your articles? what is your preservation plan? your succession plan? your intellectual-property strategy? as chris kelty stressed early on, and most prominently, and as the aaa leadership also increasingly seems to understand, the changing publishing system is forcing scholarly societies to reconsider their roles in intellectual and public life, as well as the ways in which they support themselves financially—beyond their work as publishers or copublishers (asher 2013; kelty et al. 2008; nichols and schmid 2012). scholarly society leaders really have no other choice but to do the hard work of thinking about the future in a world in which much is going to be different. this is not solely about publishing, but because so much of the life of scholarly societies has been wrapped up in publishing—as an activity of substantive importance and as a source, for some societies, of basic operating revenue—the future of scholarly publishing is deeply entwined with the future of scholarly societies. this relates to oa but is not limited to oa. for instance, separate from open access considerations, the aaa sections are seeing shifts in membership that are surely due in part to the restructuring of the aaa’s publishing program in the digital era. what benefits, beyond access to a journal, will a scholarly society provide? are these rich enough to motivate individuals to join and remain members? how do they interact with growing economic precarity among scholars? these are the leading-edge questions for scholarly societies now, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. i teach at a major research university where folklorists and anthropologists effectively no longer have any access to funding to support professional travel. fewer and fewer have access to resources with which to attend professional meetings. how much longer can physical meetings and print journals be the center of gravity for any scholarly society? i do not want to suggest that society leaders are unaware of these dynamics. as a former board member and current publications committee chair of the american folklore society and as a person who follows the aaa and several other societies closely, i know that they are. i am just echoing kelty in observing that it is not possible for society publishers or copublishers to tackle publishing in isolation from other dramatic transformations of the present moment. even with aaa annual meeting attendance currently on the rise, the increasingly toxic environment of north american higher education should be motivating hard conversations in all of the societies that we care about. partnerships with for-profit publishers such as sage and wiley, as well as with not-for-profit organizations like jstor and project muse, have made journals an important revenue stream for those who publish or copublish them. this is the sticky wicket. while i believe strongly that a group of dedicated individuals (such as, say, the society for cultural anthropology) working with the backing of a publishing society or organization (such as the aaa) along with library partners (such as duke university libraries) could sustainably move a major-legacy journal (such as cultural anthropology) out of the toll-access column and into the gold open-access one, my present efforts and advocacy have mainly focused first on the easier-to-solve problems and on experiments designed as proof-of-concept efforts (jackson 2011d). for instance, at nearly no cost, the open folklore project has made the section journals published by the american folklore society (along with other journals in the field) openly available through a number of means, including through the hathitrust digital library (fortun 2011; jackson 2012a). those journals had not yet been turned into revenue-generating machines, thus it was much easier to make them more open without any financial consequences. other societies have similar scholarly content that could be made open without any organizational consequences (golub 2014; jackson 2011d). the state-level anthropology society journals are finding their way into open-access collections in this way. an example is the rich and important journal florida anthropologist published by the florida anthropological society and now made available via the university of florida libraries. in the proof-of-concept space, museum anthropology review is very much a thriving experiment designed to learn how gold open-access journals in anthropology and neighboring fields can work. i have learned a lot from mar and, with what time i can spare, i am trying to use that experience to help other journals that are trying to make gold oa work in a sustainable and responsible way. such project-by-project work can bring together pragmatists and ideologues of various stripes in the common work of increasing the amount of the scholarly literature that is openly accessible. we do not need to solve the most difficult problems first (jackson 2011d; lende 2012). let me return briefly to your special interest in the prospects for using the social science research network. i am not an ssrn advocate or critic. but i can observe that even before the launch of the aaa-sponsored ssrn network, anthropologists were already making use of it. because of its status in law scholarship, legal anthropologists like annelise riles were already there, making available their work in post-print form. thus ssrn is not a potential stepping-stone to oa; it is one extant, working means of doing oa now. i am uneasy with the ssrn business model and technical infrastructure, but it is the main way that green oa is getting done in some institutions and disciplines. it is a prominent part of the green oa ecology that we talked about earlier. ra: can we return now to the second part of my earlier question about the difference between the just-another-business-model view, on the one hand (i.e., the way that some publishers are looking at this), and the position of open-access advocates in anthropology who are rethinking what you call scholarly research outputs? are these positions fundamentally at odds with one another? jbj: many commercial publishers are now engaged in what are called hybrid open-access projects. these are based on providing authors with the option of purchasing full gold-like open access to their articles on behalf of their readers. there are also numerous journals in other fields that are fully gold open access that are built around the collection of author’s fees. some of these author fee–based journals are non-commercial journals that use fee revenue just to cover expenses, while others are for-profit publishers. in the latter case, author-fee revenue contributes, beyond expenses, to the overall profitability of the firm. in both the hybrid and commercial gold oa cases, authors are paying additional sums (separate from the older practices of paying page charges that began in the pre-digital era) for the purpose of making their work openly available in final form while also publishing in the particular journals in question. this is all rather foreign to most anthropologists. page charges were (and remain) rare in anthropology (economic botany is the only journal for which i was ever assessed page charges), and the costs associated with hybrid and author-pays gold open-access publishing are beyond the capacity of almost all anthropologists to pay. this system is predicated on a large grant, big lab system of scientific production that is rare in anthropology and impossible in the humanities. recognizing this, some major universities have developed funds to subsidize such costs, but this is also not a complete solution for anthropology. anthropology, and folklore studies even more, are fields to which many different people working in many different settings can and do contribute regardless of ability to pay. so for commercial publishers, author-pays forms of oa are increasingly seen as another viable/profitable business model, but for most anthropologists and folklorists, it is a business model that does not seem to make sense for their fields, even if in other fields it has produced remarkable and largely positive effects. not all oa advocates in anthropology think alike about which changes are inevitable and/or desired in scholarly communication. they possess a diversity of motivations and experiences and they sometimes advocate different goals. some are more reform minded and some are more revolutionary. some are animated by technical, intellectual, or organizational interests, while others are driven by questions of fairness, research ethics, or social justice. my own engagements touch on a mix of concerns and experiences, but my greatest partners and teachers have been librarians working on scholarly communications issues and projects. as an ethnographer working in historically disadvantaged communities, i am very sensitive to the ethics of oa, but i am also very much aligned with librarians and the work they do for scholars and in the public interest. my open-access work aims to reduce (rather than increase) the ways in which large (and ever more consolidated) multinational corporations control the dissemination of our work (golub and commentators 2011; jackson 2011a, 2012a, 2012b, 2013a; kelty 2012; striphas 2010).4 somewhat separate from oa, i want to strengthen those university press publishers who have long supported our fields, and i am especially eager to champion those university presses who are experimenting with open access themselves. this has been a particular focus for me for the past two years as a participant in the restructuring of the indiana university press and its closer alignment with the publishing work of the iu libraries. i have long cared about the serials crisis, and now that the world is thinking more critically about student debt, i want us all to realize the direct relationship between the scholarly communications system, and the scholarly society system, and the neoliberalization of the american research university (anderson 2013; jackson 2012b). skyrocketing tuition is a consequence of public disinvestment in public universities like mine and yours. leasing (we no longer purchase) toll-access scholarship at ever higher costs from exceedingly profitable commercial firms (and their society partners) is not helping close the inequality gap in higher education. it is hardly the only factor involved (e.g., think health care costs), but it is one of the few factors in which faculty and graduate students have a direct role to play—as authors, as disciplinary policy shapers, as peer-reviewers, as editors, etc. as contributors to the scholarly publishing system, we have choices available to us. we can make our work open in a number of ways, and we can support and encourage those whose values and commitments align with our own. as i noted in my remarks to the 2010 academix conference on open access, the main problems that we face now are not technical; they’re human-factor problems of the sort that we have been discussing (jackson 2010). as i have sought to explain in my aaa presentation on the open folklore project, librarians remain among our greatest partners and allies in this work (jackson 2012a).5 ra: i think this last point you make about the direct role that faculty and graduate students play in all this is really important. we all have choices, and ultimately the publishing and communication system is what we make of it. so, as a final practical question for you, what advice do you have for people who are interested in these issues but unsure where to start looking for others who share similar concerns, values, and commitments? jbj: the open-access community is by its very nature open. in north american and european contexts, finding individuals eager to help students and established scholars negotiate these questions is pretty easy. if one is at a university with a research-oriented library, there will be one or more librarians specializing in these issues. such librarians often lead workshops on such topics as author’s rights, copyright issues for scholars, and open access. librarians have a strong service ethic and are usually very eager to help scholars get their bearings on these topics. they are so eager to find faculty allies on these questions. if you give them a moment, they will also passionately explain why oa matters so much to the future of the library and its public service mission. while research libraries at larger universities are often a center of gravity for information and resources on these topics, librarians at teaching colleges are often just as energized and knowledgeable about these matters because, given their scale and budgets, oa is even more important to them as they seek to serve their campuses. the librarian barbara fister at gustavus adolphus college is a great example. she writes wonderful columns on these topics for inside higher education and library journal. she is the kind of thinker, activist, and explainer who is very accessible online. i have already mentioned peter suber and the explanatory resources that he has assembled with the help of the larger community. he and mit press have made his book open access available in oa formats as well as in a classic print volume (suber 2012). there are organizations working on the creation of educational resources and tools that scholars should know about. in addition to the organizations and databases that i have already mentioned, i would want anthropologists and folklorists to know about the creative commons and its work in this area. the creative commons website is a place to begin. there one can find great explanatory videos and other resources. of special relevance within the creative commons organization are its science efforts, including the science commons project and the scholar’s copyright project. also relating specifically to open access, sparc (the scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition) is a great organization with great resources. open access week, held each fall, is a major opportunity for educational projects and efforts worldwide. sparc tools are particularly useful for authors navigating access questions (sparc 2014a, 2014b). the work of the roy rosenzweig center for history and new media (chnm) at george mason university is also vital to the development of this sector. the center works at the point where scholarly communications issues meet the digital humanities and open-source software development. they make invaluable software tools like zotero and omeka and have organized innovative projects such as the oa book hacking the academy (cohen and scheinfeldt 2013). it is good for scholars to better understand the actual links connecting open-access scholarship and open-source software. available itself in an oa edition, kelty’s book two bits: the cultural significance of free software (2008) addresses this link anthropologically. open-source software platforms such as open journal systems and dspace are crucial for open access. in some ways, technical protocols that allow open-access projects to talk with one another and share information are even more important. the most crucial of these right now is the open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting (oai-pmh). just as i wish more of us were working to understand who pays the bills for the current scholarly communications system, i also wish more of us appreciated the ways that technical systems and choices were alternatively closing down or opening up opportunities for the circulation and preservation of our scholarship. talking about software development and metadata protocols is probably the most boring part of our conversation. if our colleagues would like to be introduced to this world in a more fun way, there are many very accessible videos that have been produced to address the issues we have been discussing. among my favorites are a great series of five one-minute videos produced in german and english by oa advocates in germany and a really hilarious critique of commercial scholarly publishing by alex o. holcombe called “scientist meets publisher” (open-access.net 2011; holcombe 2011). phd comics (2012) has produced an accessible and fun open-access overview video. in our corner of scholarship, there is a vibrant community of anthropologists and folklorists working toward the goals of open access. there are new journals and projects coming online all the time. the circle of scholars joining the conversation is expanding and thus we have more and more colleagues to turn to for help and more opportunities to contribute meaningfully to the effort as individuals. given the relationship between much of our scholarship and the (often disadvantaged) communities within which we work, our fields have an extraordinarily good set of reasons for making oa work. if the physicists can find a way to do it, certainly we can as well. the move of cultural anthropology from toll to open access will hopefully be a key inflection point in a history that is ultimately positive. there are no guarantees, of course, and the vital signs for higher education and in scholarship—particularly in the humanities and social sciences—are very troubling. ra: worrying as it is, that point prompts us to give some final attention to the larger anthropological and human contexts of open access. what should a robust anthropology of open access attend to? jbj: i think that some other oa-focused contributors to cultural anthropology on the occasion of its shift to gold oa are likely to take up that daunting question. our task has been the nuts and bolts of oa, but as you imply, we would not be anthropologists if we did not try to consider the theoretical and contextual stakes. despite your obligations as a doctoral student, you have helped limn them in anthropologies and at savage minds (hart and anderson 2012; anderson 2012a, 2012b). among other global themes, oa articulates with neoliberalism and contemporary global conditions in complex ways that are hard to sort out but that demand the best anthropological analysis we can muster. in advocating for open access, i have been accused of contributing to the devaluation of scholarship and of willfully working in such a way as to accelerate the demise of valued institutions (such as beloved journals) and practices (such as peer review). given my human commitments and my individual practices, this sort of criticism is irritating, but oa and its contexts have changed over the past two decades. being an advocate for oa has become both easier and harder. i have sympathy for, and share, the anxieties of many colleagues and other supporters of the scholarly tradition. the ways that the publishing industry, for instance, has shifted in response to oa are telling and relevant. it is easier to see, perhaps, if we use open education as the parallel illustration. many early open-education initiatives began out of the same gift-economy impulse that deeply motivated early oa advocates. the impulse was (and, for some, remains) something like, “we have useful knowledge to share and access to technology with which to share it beyond our campus or museum walls—why wouldn’t we want to do that?” a diversity of experimental and modestly scaled projects (and they still exist, of course) have been pursued under the banner of open education, but—as happens in these times—things have quickly changed. over the objections of many open-education advocates, so-called massively open online courses (moocs) became the signature open-education project. as the forces of the reputation economy (particularly among elite english-speaking universities) came to the fore, solutionism (dow chemical company 2014; morozov 2013; schüll 2013) and market disruption became the dominant discourses, and everyone involved was suddenly taken to be a potential entrepreneur—instead of sharing scholarship and learning opportunities beyond campus contexts, the focus became a radical reboot of formal higher education along neoliberal and politically conservative lines. as a result, many working academics think of moocs with much dread and deep skepticism. suspicion of all open-education projects sometimes logically follows and is not unwarranted in the context of what you called “the neoliberalized, debt-plagued, low wage, corporatized university” (anderson 2013). open access increasingly suffers the same fate of being misunderstood, co-opted, rebranded, and transformed. we see signs of this in the damaging conflation of oa practices (of which there remain many) with author-pays gold and hybrid oa. an open access system built on author fees is the last thing that i want for anthropology or for folklore studies, but the large commercial publishers, of course, want to do oa in a way that keeps them at the profitable center of a still lucrative industry. following them across multiple scenes of engagement—lobbying, technology development, scholarly-society relations, dealings with librarians, author rights, etc.—provides key information on the world in which anthropologists live and work, but even if we cannot spare the attention to study them, we can watch our colleagues react to the larger changing scene. ambivalence about oa used to take the form, “we want to, but cannot find a way to do this.” increasingly it takes a new form: “open access sounds good at first, but like everything, it will have unintended consequences that will leave all but the most elite actors further impoverished.” while it is possible to use practical projects in the present as a response to the older concern (“if hau can do it, surely cultural anthropology can too …”), it is very hard to marshal evidence-based arguments in the present to offer assurances about the future. put another way, it is easier now to talk about oa on practical grounds (as we have above), but it is harder to talk to a colleague about the larger implications in social, theoretical, political economic, or ethical terms. no one can guarantee that someone else’s worst-case scenario will not transpire. open access backlash can be seen everywhere now—anger over the rise of predatory journals, deep suspicion of megajournals, arguments about the unfairness of oa mandates covering dissertations and articles, and anger that altmetrics will aid the advance of audit culture even more than the journal-impact factor has. closer to the present and to the ground, the move of cultural anthropology toward open access might not just fail, it might trigger worse things. anthrosource was very well intentioned, but the unfolding of human events and harsh economic forces, in its case, nearly crippled the aaa and precipitated the association’s partial enclosure in the wiley ecosystem. as anthropologists know well, things do happen. my own argument is that we are better prepared to face and understand our challenges if we seriously engage with what is happening to us. i do not mean to be disrespectful to our many talented anthropology colleagues who have thought about and written about scholarly publishing and experimented with, lobbied for, and confidently implemented successful and unsuccessful open-access projects. i hope that i am in that group. there is another group, though, and it is surprisingly small. i have in mind anthropologists (and cultural and linguistic anthropologists seem most relevant here) who have made these matters objects of full-time, full-attention research. there is great anthropology work on the edge of this space (on social media, for instance, or global finance), but kelty (2008) remains really unique as a researcher of, not just knowledgeable practitioner-discussant of, open access. we cannot do justice to the bigger issues until this changes. (i know that the distinction that i am drawing is too sharp. it is hopefully heuristic.) to address your question directly in this context, i argue that we need a critical anthropology of scholarly communication, one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which cultural anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. critical, anthropological studies of scholarly communication would offer a new, productive, and professionally essential vantage point on such wider interests and concerns as neoliberalism, infrastructure, risk, economic precarity, income inequality, regulatory capture, audit and assessment, media consolidation, gift economies, the casualization of labor, intellectual property, digital culture, common pool resources, globalization, mediascapes, corporate enclosure, appropriation, disciplinarily and interdisciplinarity, public culture, and social justice. our field’s knowledge of these issues should also—but largely has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars. while we have paid a needless disciplinary price for keeping our research on these themes largely separate from our practical work as publishing scholars, we now have new opportunities. just as cultural anthropology has played (and will continue to play) a significant role in refiguring key themes and debates in english-speaking cultural anthropology, i have hope that it will play a powerful role in bridging anthropological research on the global situation and the practical, but theoretically informed, choices that anthropologists and other scholars have to make individually and collectively. our field is capable of powerful insights into the human condition. i wish that we could have channeled more of that power into our publishing debates of the past decade. thankfully, through the efforts of many—you among them—we have a chance to work smarter and achieve more in cultural anthropology’s new era. (in thanking ra here, i am highlighting the fact that he solicited, edited, and published in anthropologies, kim and mike fortun’s [2012] influential blueprint for the gold oa transformation of cultural anthropology. this is the basic plan that the society for cultural anthropology has pursued). ra: a critical anthropology of communication for me means that we take a closer look not only at what we’re doing but also at what we’re producing as scholars. i mean this in more than one sense. i’m referring to production in terms of our communicative output via various forms of media, and the kinds of scholars we produce, year after year. both of these aspects are the result of a long, entrenched socialization process—students of anthropology have to learn the “proper” ways to be an anthropologist—in communication, writing, and scholarly output. if we’re going to undertake this critical anthropology of scholarly communication, we should start on our own doorstep. anthropology talks a big game when it comes to public engagement, speaking for and with wide audiences, having a broad empathy for humanity, and so on. but where does all of our information really go? where does it end up? who is it produced for? by and large, it’s all for us (anderson 2012c). look at all scholarly communication in anthropology in the larger sense. what do we produce? from the undergraduate level on, we seem to create an endless series of documents, presentations, papers, and proposals that rarely do much more than serve our own internal social worlds and political economies. undergraduate students learn to write papers so they get good grades and build favor with professors, who in turn are expected to write letters of recommendation for graduate school. prospective graduate students take gre tests and write personal essays in order to gain acceptance into another level in the machine. once in graduate school, the socialization continues in the form of proposal writing, essays for seminars, preparation for qualifying exams, and so on. they write a dissertation and defend it to satisfy the requirements necessary to move out of student/apprentice status. upon graduation (and often much before these days), new phds are expected to publish or literally perish in the academic ecosystem. young scholars need to publish articles and books to maintain their (tenuous) positions in the academy. throughout this whole process, a mass of media gets produced—but where does it all go? we send students around the world to experience an unbelievable range of human experiences, and the end point of all this is a book, journal article, or fifteen-minute conference presentation that a ridiculously small number of people will be able to access. i agree with you about the power and potential of anthropology. you raise a vital point when you question why we haven’t channeled that power into conversations about how and why we publish. these are not trivial issues, and we need to look deeply in the mirror to understand why we ended up where we are today. we write for ourselves. we talk to ourselves, closed off as we are in our little silos (taylor 2013). we promote the discipline of anthropology as an endeavor that addresses a tremendous range of human concerns, problems, and issues. i have no doubt that anthropology can in fact do all of these things—but it’s not going to happen if we allow the current status quo to continue. if we want the stories we tell about ourselves to truly carry meaning, then we have to start thinking more critically about the choices we make—to put it in your terms—as global actors and publishing scholars. in this light, oa isn’t just some fad or trend or superficial issue. it gets to the heart of what we’re doing—and why we’re doing it in the first place. a critical anthropology of scholarly communication, in my view, should be geared toward assessing these kinds of questions, and then finding ways to bring about the changes that we deem necessary based on our own disciplinary morals, principles, and ideals. as it stands now, our scholarly output doesn’t even come close to achieving the potential that anthropology holds for humanity in the twenty-first century. this is a sad statement. but things do not have to be this way. change begins when our scholarly efforts begin to reach the kinds of diverse audiences that anthropology is meant to address. above all else, this is why we must literally open anthropology to the world that lies outside our self-imposed pay walls. thank you, jason, for this wonderful conversation. jbj: thank you for opening and extending the dialogue. notes acknowledgments an earlier version of this interview, now substantively altered and extended, was published in three parts on savage minds. as in the case of a key and related article published earlier (kelty et al. 2008), an actual dialogue conducted electronically provided the raw material for collaborative reworking. the final results, while obviously still weighted toward anderson as the questioner and jackson as the responder, should be understood as a collaborative coconstruction. anderson’s labor and intellectual investment in the project has been significant throughout. the authors wish to specifically thank cultural anthropology’s editors charles piot and anne allison, the anonymous peer reviewers who carefully assessed our manuscript, and all those colleagues and friends who have helped us better understand open-access practices and principles. the authors assume responsibility for any infelicities. 1. the growth of research assessments and a broader academic audit culture looms over this discussion, as does the changing nature of the academic prestige economy (shore and wright 1999; bakkila and kendzior 2013). such issues impact oa but are not taken up here. 2. if a journal’s author agreement does not automatically allow for green oa repository deposit, she or he can still negotiate for such rights individually using free and easy-to-use legal tool like the scholars copyright addendum engine from science commons. 3. establishing a campus green oa policy is not in itself sufficient. these policies are all still new on the campuses that have adopted them and the whole framework requires further refinement to achieve the oa goals motivating their establishment. the problem becomes visible, for example, in high non-compliance rates, indicating that individual faculty members often do not, as expected under their campus policies, deposit articles in local repositories. solving the social, educational, technical, and practical issues underpinning this problem is a pressing need. 4. many open-access advocates are not at all focused on such macroeconomic concerns. 5. sources for the crises in higher education are abundant. i find the writings of the anthropologist sarah kendzior particularly compelling. illustrative are: kendzior 2012a, 2012b, 2013a, 2013b. references american anthropological association (aaa) 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http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2012/03/we-are-one-percent-open-access-in-era.html. 2013a “getting yourself out of the business in five easy steps.” in hacking the academy: new approaches to scholarship and teaching from digital humanities, edited by daniel j. cohen and tom scheinfeldt, 13–14. ann arbor: university of michigan press. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/dh.12172434.0001.001. 2013b “notes on thoughtfulness in scholarly publishing (3): in this, i support elsevier.” shreds and patches, december 19. http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2013/12/19/in-this-i-support-elsevier/. kelty, christopher m. 2008 two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2012 “the disappearing virtual library.” al jazeera, march 1. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/02/2012227143813304790.html. 2013 “open access success, california style.” savage minds, august 15. http://savageminds.org/2013/08/15/open-access-success-california-style/. kelty, christopher m., michael m. j. fischer, alex “rex” golub, jason baird jackson, kimberly christen, michael f. brown, and tom boellstorff 2008 “anthropology of/in circulation: the future of open access and scholarly societies.” cultural anthropology 23, no. 3: 559–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00018.x. also available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/9pz8d25x. kendzior, sarah 2012a “the closing of american academia.” al jazeera, august 20. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/08/2012820102749246453.html. 2012b “the price of inequality in higher education.” al jazeera, december 23. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/20121223122216817378.html. 2013a “the immorality of college admissions.” al jazeera, october 29. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/10/immorality-college-admissions-2013102945841711416.html. 2013b “academic funding and the public interest: the death of political science.” al jazeera, april 2. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/20134265610113939.html. lende, daniel 2012 “american anthropological association changes opposition to open access—plus a proposal to do more.” neuroanthropology, february 4. http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/02/04/american-anthropological-association-changes-opposition-to-open-access-%e2%80%93-plus-a-proposal-todo-more/. lewis, david 2012 “the inevitability of open access.” college and research libraries 73, no. 5: 493–506. http://crl.acrl.org/content/73/5/493. 2013 “the inevitability of open access: update one.” paper in the iupui scholars work repository. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/3471. marcus, george e. 1986 “a beginning.” cultural anthropology 1, no. 1: 3–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1986.1.1.02a00010. morozov, evgeny 2013 “the perils of perfection.” new york times, march 2. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/opinion/sunday/the-perils-of-perfection.html. sherpa/romeo 2014 “romeo: publisher’s copyright policies and self-archiving.” database, accessed january 6. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/. nichols, deborah, and oona schmid 2012 “the state of the aaa publishing program: what we have learned and next steps.” memorandum, american anthropological association. open-access.net 2011 youtube video series about open access. http://www.youtube.com/user/openaccessnet. phd comics 2014 “open access explained!” youtube video embedded in “what is open access?” phd comics, october 24, 2012, accessed january 7, 2014. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1533. natasha dow schüll 2013 “the folly of technological solutionism: an interview with evgeny morozov.” public books, september 9. http://www.publicbooks.org/interviews/the-folly-of-technological-solutionism-an-interview-with-evgeny-morozov. shore, cris, and susan wright 1999 “audit culture and anthropology: neo-liberalism in british higher education.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 5, no. 4: 557–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2661148. starn, orin 2012 “writing culture at 25: special editor’s introduction.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 3: 411–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01150.x. striphas, ted 2010 “acknowledged goods: cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing.” communication and cultural/critical studies 7, no. 1: 3–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14791420903527798. preprint available at http://hdl.handle.net/2022/6939. smith, michael e. 2011 “new online anthropology “journals”: semiquasior pseudo-?” publishing archaeology, october 27. http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-online-anthropology-journals-semi.html. scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition (sparc) 2014a “author’s rights.” youtube video, accessed january 7, 2014. http://youtu.be/e8yssrcgx0a. 2014b “author rights: using the sparc author addendum to secure your rights as the author of a journal article.” sparc website, accessed january 7, 2014. http://sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum. suber, peter 2004a “a very brief introduction to open access.” earlham university website, accessed january 2, 2014. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/brief.htm. 2004b “open access overview.” earlham university website, accessed january 3, 2014. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. 2012 open access. cambridge, mass.: mit press. accessed january 2, 2014. multiple formats available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/hoap/open_access_(the_book), accessed january 2, 2014. taylor, erin b. 2013 “busting apart the silos of knowledge production.” anthropologies 16. http://www.anthropologiesproject.org/2013/01/busting-apart-silos-of-knowledge.html. university of california press 2014 “posting articles to institutional or subject repositories,” in “information for authors.” university of california press website, accessed january 2, 2014. http://ucpressjournals.com/info.php?p=authors#6. weiss, brad 2013 “cultural anthropology will go open access in 2014.” fieldsights, cultural anthropology website, march 11. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/142-cultural-anthropology-will-go-open-access-in-2014. 2014 “opening access: publics, publication, and a path to inclusion.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 1: 1–2. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.1.01. condition—suspension condition—suspension timothy choy university of california, davis jerry zee university of california, berkeley a curious thing, this anthropocene. the term hails the age of the human—that is, an age characterized by an inconvenient truth, an inescapable fact of life, that humankind has pressed itself into the earth’s very workings, that anthropos has become a world-geological actor. perhaps that trucks with too many definite articles—not the human, we should say, not humankind, but particular humans, maybe capitalist humans, or maybe an anthropogenic assemblage of industrial and postindustrial production and consumption. regardless of how general or specific we make that human, however, we are faced with the proposition of an anthropogenic predicament, a world-geological change whose genesis is man. this emphasis on anthropogenesis, on the human origin of this creation, seems curious. not only because, like victor frankenstein’s abandoned creature/creation, this world-geological order lives on, autonomously, turning to its makers for a care they may no longer be able to provide. but also because, unlike the creature who might be spurned when seeking victor’s touch, the monster/creation of the anthropocene continuously holds its creators in suspension. their changed air: it is their life support. it is their turbulent medium. the question of suspension conditions our provocation. this question is offered as a dilution of anthropocenic preoccupation: a shift of concentration. suspension turns attention from the powers of the makers to the powers of their monster: the contents and discontents of modern atmosphere. to pursue a condition of suspension is a way of posing the question of the present as an atmospheric condition rather than the expansion of anthropogenic powers. inquiry into suspension is to wonder what it is, in changed times, to be in this air, held and distributed differentially through it as particulate in a medium, thrown into the mix of its compositions. what kind of message inheres in this medium, what kind of subject/particulate? scenes in which air’s qualities, composition, or movements come to be of concern are easy enough to find: mobilizations around an area’s atmospheric load of particulate or sand; questions into how specks of substance may drift before settling to the ground or in a lung; experimental explications of weight, diameter, composition, toxicity, or climate-changing activity of potentially and potently airborne matter. in such scenes we discern a growing form of thought and being. we call this form atmospheric, and we think it merits attention. it is, perhaps, an exhortation to a form of attention that is also a mode of relation, a way of being suspended. this form of thought looks up and around, at plumes, clouds, and sky.1 it looks inward through the vital interiors that render bodies channels, containers, and filters for airs and the things they hold. more significant than the directionality of its gaze, however, is its manner of attunement to the potentials of substances to shift from states of settlement or condensation to ones of airborne agitation, to settle again in time, or to activate a reaction, somewhere else. the wrong air of the anthropocene trains our attention to the mechanics of suspension, to how things lift and settle in mediums, to how things exist in atmospheres. we can discern growing concern in the social sciences and humanities with questions of atmosphere. much of it has been an accounting of atmospheric violences, fast and slow.2 increasingly explicative attunements to the air track its defilement from gas warfare and gas chambers through a roster of toxic airborne events wherein atmospheres are forced into explicitness in a thanatopolitics of compromised life: cold war mushroom clouds, windblown radioactive isotopes, chemical leaks, nuclear accidents, tear gas assaults on an agitating crowd; these and others compose a repertoire of atmospheric trespasses, mapping a proliferation of airspaces filled with danger.3 these resonate closely with students of, and agitators for, environmental justice, for whom the differential distribution of good and bad air has long mattered in a socio-atmospherics of power.4 attuned to atmospheric endangerment, these works together might be understood as an array of explicative responses to a changed feeling of life in the air.5 taken with declarations of the anthropocene as a geohistorical thematization of life and time in changed air, they imply not only an attention to the air but an investment in considering the identification of our long contemporary as a material and existential embroilment in atmospheres.6 yet, in a history of damages, might there lurk other ways of exploring atmosphere? the question of the atmospheric anthropocene might thus be reframed—from who holds responsibility for the air’s contents to what it means now to attend to those contents, to conditions of and for being held and moved in air. so we take this occasion to ask, what is it to be in suspension? we offer the term suspension as a way to orient in an atmospheric problem-space, taking several of the word’s valences, as well as several of the physical and chemical properties of the mixtures that it names, as pivots. this space, like the air and its quiet or roiling mixtures, contains volumes. suspension here tethers to the ethnographer’s method, a procedure that works to render staid common sense into an opening of possible worlds: ethnography constitutes a work of suspension, of assumptions and disbelief, one that not only describes worlds but holds them in such a way as to allow them to settle into different arrangements, possibilities.7 but suspension can also be an injunction to an art of noticing, of living in and thinking with atmospheres, their capacities and contents.8 figure 1. gran vía 2, from the architect nerea calvillo’s project, in the air, visualizes madrid’s cityscape as an embroilment of atmospheric concentrations. with air explicated as an undulating topography of suspended matter in time, calvillo’s city is a shifting composition of architectural, particulate, and meteorological things. source: http://www.intheair.es/. in what follows we offer two stagings of suspension, ways of grasping toward being clasped in a gaseous medium. each of these urges an attunement to the moment of phase shift, where physical bodies disperse into the particulate populace of air. in the chemical sciences, suspension names a form of mixture in which particulates are carried as a distribution in the fluid body of something else, their moving medium. suspension is a becoming-atmospheric, a capacity elicited in effective atmospheric relation. among mixtures, suspensions, as opposed to colloids, are unstable once formed; particles in suspension will eventually settle out of their medium. though the threshold between colloid and suspension can dim—it requires a judgment and a scaling of temporal measure—atmospheric suspension denotes both a condition and a process with a tempo proper to its specific mixes: first, the event in which particles are dispersed into medium, agitation, and next the eventual re-separation of medium and particles, settlement. up, out, and down. and maybe up again. here then, in this opening to “life above earth,” suspension serves as a reminder that the upness of a particular air of concern has a duration. the moment may be long or short. to attend to conditions of suspension is to orient not simply to vertical location, but to what potentiates substances to disperse, to shift state, relation, and relative concentration so one might become held in another. to ask after subjects of suspension is to ask what beings are in becoming in thickening atmospheres. of sands and smells in the wind tunnel of the chinese academy of sciences’ desert research labs in lanzhou, aeolian physicists prepare to build a dust storm. they load samples of sandy soil, gathered during field research in their desertified sites across china, into one end of the long, plexiglas tunnel.9 with a special rake, they shape this pool of sand into a flat sheet, the bed of a tiny purpose-built desert, a metonymic enactment of the potential dust storm source area that the sample comes from. activated by computer from an adjacent room, the wind tunnel’s large wooden fan begins to turn, gaining speed as it pours air in a flowing stream over the carefully prepared dirt. at first, this fan-driven wind passes over the sandy bed, a sheer force skimming and scraping its surface. this is an in-between time, where the earth and air of this experimental desert remain a terrestrial and an atmospheric volume, adjacent and separate at the sand’s surface. as the fan-blown air continues to work over this represented desert, however, the sand begins to quiver as particles entrain in the air’s traction. in motion, the air and ground shift from discrete spaces into interacting substances, and the horizon that divides them becomes a site of geo-atmospheric activity, of aeolian processes. at this turbulent surface, sand and wind organize as particles in a fluid medium, a flowing substance that the physicists call blown sand.10 while the larger particles in the sand fan along the tunnel’s bed, moving forward in a chain of dry waves, or bouncing and crashing frenetically in the air, the finest dusts pour forth as an emission off the fluid microtopography of blown sand. this suspension of particles in the mechanical air is a tiny dust storm rolling through the conditioned airspace in the wind tunnel’s clear walls. its plume is a material enactment, in elegant miniature, of the massive dust storms that have, in recent decades, drawn political attention in china and places downwind as a fretted harbinger of the northeast asian springtime; preempting their formation depends on modeling it as the phasing of sand and dust into mobile, particulate clouds. tracing their trajectories reveals sites at which the earth is revealed as a mass of latent particulates, ready to distribute into the atmosphere. in the wind tunnel, the genesis of a dust storm is given as a matter of suspension itself, a relationship between soils and airs as interacting things. where the wind tunnel makes the air appear as a medium that holds the earth, the solidity of sandy lands appears as one phase of a substance that can creep like a liquid or disperse into dusty atmosphere. wind makes terrestrial things into atmospheric ones. while the tunnel’s air blows dusts in coursing suspension, the earth becomes a virtual plume whose propensity to suspension might become activated in proper and problematic relationship with the wind. forestalling dust storms emerges politically and technically as a matter of intervening in the conditions and interactions in which land and air become interacting substances. in suspension, the earth is above ground. it is a matter of controlling the conditions of suspension through, to borrow an ecological construction slogan in desertifying inner china, blocking wind, holding sand (fangfeng gusha), the determination of an environmental politics geared toward the relationship between earthy and airy things. chinese dust-storm politics organize against the phases of suspend-able earth, organized around a politics of materials aimed at preempting the moment at which dust and wind become a suspension, lifting up in a perversion of the boundaries between things on and above the ground. they cast the surface of the earth, the horizon, not as the break between terrestrial planes and atmospheric volumes, but as a fluid and susceptible interface between fine geological particles and their airy medium, to be locked in place, lest the earth become a sky. the wind tunnel as experimental apparatus focuses and forces attention to the moment at which wind and sand arrange, physically, into medium and dispersed internal phase. in creating a condition of suspension—a state of hanging and holding in medium—sand and metonymized land become evident as suspension’s preconditions. the tunnel as a suspension-machine forces an atmospheric recognition, drawing attention to the powers of wind to phase sand into blown sand. it is an attunement to a susceptibility of things to their vaporization in the proper air conditions. subjects of suspension are agitated into atmospheric recognition by proximity, into episodes and dealings with the condition of being surrounded and filled with the particles with which they share a medium, as well as with others who share this condition. becomings-atmospheric are multiple and unequal—some are urgent, others are chronic, some hurt, some delight. some pass unnoticed while others arrest the senses. some sense connection or the politics of atmospheric difference in a planetary airscape, others become trained to discern the movements or qualities of very small things. these beings and doings are aesthetic in that they pertain to sensing and sensation. in a laboratory at ewha university in seoul, scientists are getting ready to vaporize a mushroom. they aim to characterize the chemical composition of the matsutake mushroom’s ineffable aroma, but first they need to reduce the mushroom body.11 reducing here means concentrating. concentrating to be able to concentrate on the mushroom’s aroma. this is one way of dealing with an atmospheric object, one that wants to disperse: to increase its density. the chemists identify exemplars of different grades. they freeze them. they slice them, and they broil some of the slices. these slices of mushroom, cooked and uncooked, are then dipped in liquid nitrogen. after the slices harden, the scientists grind them to a fine powder. the freezing manages hardness, the grinding reduces size and maximizes surface area. the mushroom has been pulverized, rendered powder. the powder is swirled in dichloromethane to make an infusion, a mushroom tea. the tea is then filtered, to leave behind the mushroom solids, the grounds. the elixir is now subjected to explicit atmospheric attention: a vacuum draws out the air above the tea and, crucially, what that air comprises. that is, it claims the volatiles, whatever tends to vaporize from the matsutake extract. the vacuum pulls fragrance from the extract that was itself pulled from ground slices of the solidity of the mushroom body. now this matsutake air is dehydrated, evaporated, and concentrated still more, yielding an even richer extract. this extract will be vaporized again in a gas chromatograph, injected into a carefully heated chamber through which a stream of helium runs at a constant velocity. the sample vaporizes—becomes dispersed and suspended in a streaming mixture. the chemists have cut, seared, frozen, pulverized, steeped, and filtered to get here: a concentrated and contained mix of volatiles. fragrances are volatiles. volatile organic compounds. volatiles evaporate easily, they tend to vapor, passing easily into gas at a relatively low temperature. volatility denotes a chemical situation where substance tends toward vapor, tends skyward.12 while volatiles, like the compounds to which sensations of smell are attributed, conventionally gloss a category of substances that disperse into the air, as if spontaneously, volatility as a measure of something’s tendency to escape liquid or solid state, upward and outward, is always asserted in relation to given conditions, the pressure and temperature of the atmospheric surround. the distances and heights volatiles may be transported before they dissipate, to make or break another chemical being, depends on the size and movement of an air’s volume. these are emergent and relational potencies of substances and air conditions. the careful reduction of matsutake mushrooms into a volatile tea is, like the fanning of sand in lanzhou, the preparation and anticipation of an atmospheric condition. unlike the sands before liftoff, fragrance already tends to suspension, but, as a negative atmospheric pressure meets a concentrate, the vaporization of fungal fragrance accelerates. cleaved and reduced from its solid aspect, the mushroom becomes pure, concentrated atmosphere. anthropology in suspension attention to suspensions and volatiles draws focus to the moment in which airs become mediums, where dusts lift off the earth as a stream or mushrooms become a vapor for the smelling. notice how substances, exposed to felicitous air conditions, are drawn into relation with their atmosphere, how they disperse and distribute into its hold. how phases shift and bodies become vapors, particles arrested into their atmospheres. notice, too, the care of building apparatuses of attention elicited by the lure of atmospheric sensing.13 if we began this opening with suspension tethered to ethnographic method, we release it by considering how anthropology might enter suspension. for the scientist-historiographers of this humanized age, the declaration of the anthropocene might itself be a claim that filters through an atmospheric attunement forced by the substances that comprise modern air. if “the global-scale transformation” to which the anthropocenic moment is tracked is “nowhere more evident than in the atmosphere” (steffen, crutzen, and mcneill 2007, 616), this massively circulating designation of a human moment can be read not simply as the act of a sovereign and anthropocentric science but as a painstakingly developed attunement to an air condition. what and who are becoming in such an air condition? in asking this, we turn the agitation of the fretted self-interpellation of a too-powerful species to a contemporary attunement to the mediums and mixtures in which life is clasped. at this place where geology and history converge, to respond grandly to the epochal gesture,14 we endeavor to witness a vaporizing of the human. not an obliteration, but a shifting of phase, a distribution into concentrations, burgeoning spheres of sensitivity. who are these vapors rising, falling, thrown in this place above the ground? suspension is an opening—not a portal nor an exit that trades the ground for that above it, but a becoming-open. the condition of suspension is one condition of an aeolian, atmospheric anthropology. it attends to the techniques, experiments, and practices animated by the problems and potentials presented by living as an element among others in the turbulences and volatilities of a ubiquitous air. the scenes of acceleration that we have noted reveal intervenings as followings, moments of suspensive mimicry and concentration. scenes at once of atmospheric subjectification and objectification, they yield sensing bodies and machines coming ever closer to rendering suspended states. in such moments, training the attention is an entrainment in which one is moved and pulled with the air. suspension holds more, though, than this contemporary—more than these geological and chemical forms in their changes, more than spectators moved into noticing it. the air has never been unoccupied, its suspensions never limited to particle, droplet, vapor, and volatile. it suspends microorganisms and insects, carries sonic vibration,15 and holds us, too, as one thing among other mixtures, dispersed and maintained in a particulate fellowship with suspended and suspensible others. becoming-atmospheric is a susceptibility and embeddedness in airs through being gathered in a shared medium.16 in suspension, i am diluted, part of an ordinary and exceptional composition. to think and pause with suspension might open something different for inhabiting a populous airscape. but how a condition of suspension opens a redefinition of the constitution of a critique,17 or portends a decolonial planetary politics to come, will depend on how the freighting of an expansive medium comes to settle, in configurations and susceptibilities of elements in an atmospheric admixture to the air and to each other.18 this would be an anthropology in suspension, one subject to dilution and arrest in the power of mediums that might hold us otherwise, drawn together as travelers and constituents of a mixing atmosphere. notes acknowledgments thanks to cymene howe and her fellow editors of cultural anthropology for inviting this piece and providing an opportunity for us to think and write together. 1. see eyal weizman (2012), especially in his discussion of the “politics of verticality,” as well as vivian choi’s (2015) discussion of securitization in post-tsunami sri lanka, where attending to the skies for potential meteorological disaster and attending to possible military insurgency by so-called terrorist organizations are held together in modes of state and everyday anticipation, so that reading the sky becomes part of an island security apparatus oriented toward various emergent threats. 2. see michelle murphy (2013) on latency and the distributed conditions and effects of chemical infrastructure. see also kim fortun and mike fortun (2007) on epigenetics and asthma. on time, duration, and violence, see lauren berlant (2007) on slow death, rob nixon (2011) on slow violence. 3. see peter sloterdijk (2009a) on gas warfare and the weaponization of air, and joseph masco (2006) on the nuclear uncanny and afterimages of bomb testing, as well as on the tracking of isotopes (masco 2009) wherein the air bears a nuclear signature that gestures at various atmospheric vulnerabilities. see kim fortun (2009) on bhopal, and adriana petryna (2013) on chernobyl. and of course, see don delillo’s (1999) harrowing literary rendering of the chemical cloud of the airborne toxic event in white noise. 4. see julie sze (2007) on environmental inequity and air quality in new york and gregg mittman (2007) on the social and spatial conditioning of pollen allergy in the united states. 5. air, in peter sloterdijk’s (2009b, 63) account of modernity, is subject to increasing explication, especially through its weaponization; in its transformations, he suggests, “we trace a historical arc of increasing explication in the problematization of human dwelling in gas and radiological milieus.” dwelling in an explicated and dangerous atmospheric milieu spurs emergent problematizations of dwelling to create new sites of atmospheric urbanism. for techniques and technologies of atmo-respiratory sheltering in polluted air conditions, see jerry zee (forthcoming). on sun, wind, and sky as objects of longing in a changing cityscape, see nicholas d’avella (2012, chapter 3). 6. elias canetti (1979, 11, 12), writing after the horrors of gas warfare during the first world war, thinks through his friend, the author hermann broch, to consider the revelation of the atmosphere as, among other things, an incitement to a “literature of the atmospheric,” in which characters become airy points that the author “has to float away from,” as if characters become gradients of diluting concentration in splintered airspaces. 7. we think of and with kathleen stewart’s (2011, 447) “atmospheric attunements” in this opening. though we approach the problem through a different ambient—atmospheric matterings through air’s substantiations (choy 2011, 2012)—we too follow and write the gathering of atmospheric sensation as a compositional process. we draw ourselves across the problem-space of sensing atmospheric affects and affective atmospheres (maccormack 2009), where “writing and theorizing . . . tries to stick with something becoming atmospheric” (stewart 2011, 454), streaking it with modes of atmospheric suspension. “things hanging in the air,” we agree, “are worth describing” (stewart 2011, 447). 8. on noticing as an anthropological orientation, see anna tsing (2010, 193). 9. for a description of the tunnel, see xue-yong zou et al. (2001). 10. the study of blown sand was inaugurated in the monumental work of the british army engineer and self-described “amateur” r. a. bagnold (1941). 11. thanks to the matsutake worlds research group (mwrg), including tim choy, lieba faier, michael hathaway, elaine gan, miyako inoue, shiho satsuka, and anna tsing, for trainings and experiments with the richness of matsutake smell, some capacities of which are noted in mwrg 2009a and mwrg 2009b. our love of the smell is poached here. on poaching as collaboration, see faier 2010. 12. the experiment is cho et al. 2007. also see cho et al. 2006. for a treatment that follows the volatiles on through the establishment of instrument-sensory correlations, see choy n.d. 13. on apparatus, we think with chris kortright’s (2013) c4 growth chambers, karen barad’s (2007) diffractory apparatus, hans-jörg rheinberger’s (1997) experimental system, and giorgio agamben (2009, 14), for whom an apparatus is “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” our thinking on sensing moves through natasha myers and joe dumit (2011), rachel prentice’s (2012) work on visualization and haptics, as well as through nerea calvillo’s work on air-pollution sensor data and visualization (see the in the air website, http://www.intheair.es/) and stefanie graeter’s (forthcoming) work on lead exposure and embodiment in peru. 14. see dipesh chakrabarty (2009, 2012) on the challenge of humankind’s new status as a geohistorical agent for a philosophy of history, and then, for postcolonial studies. for a more rakish reflection on historiography in climate change, consider naomi oreskes and erik conway’s (2013) sci-fi history of the future after the collapse of western civilization. and jerome whitington’s (2013) consideration of several epistemic figures in climate change as an opening into a speculative anthropology offers a take on this apparent convergence of geology and history. 15. heather paxson’s (2012) writing on microbiopolitics in cheese production reveals the air as part of the conditions and atmospheric substrate for microbial action. hugh raffles (2010) notes how in surveying vertical columns of air, the apparent emptiness of air becomes a living density of insect matter. histories of air are proliferating. peter adey (2014) charts air’s course through western science and art. certainly, too, noticing the air is not a modern condition; if air is coming to a specific explication, this is part of a history of shifting attentions and orientations to it. for instance, shigehisa kuriyama (1994, 33), in his discussion of wind in chinese medical conceptions of the body, notes, “the nature of the self that slipped out of phase was ultimately the same as that of the environment it emerged from: the self was itself windlike.” 16. mel chen’s (2012, 202) account of toxicity characterizes it most immediately as an attunement to the atmosphere as the medium of a material continuity. people and other constituents of the landscape become sources of particulate effluents to which one is exposed, and which, in order to negotiate, one “must follow the moment-to-moment changes in quality of air” (see also chen 2011). 17. hirokazu miyazaki (2006, 165) urges a willingness “to redefine radically and imaginatively the constitution of a critique rather than defend one’s own critical practices in a morally empowered manner.” miyazaki calls for an approach to critique as a practice of reimagination rather than an extension of given critical techniques to new objects and situations. continuing with this sensibility, the critical task at hand is not simply the mobilization of an attention to atmosphere as a new object in an untransformed practice of critique; it calls instead for working through atmosphere, perhaps by allowing atmosphere to work on us. 18. our examples in this essay channel suspension sciences, but airy attunements precede and exceed the technical explication of atmosphere as a recent technoscientific phenomenon. the ethnographic catalog is replete with such atmospheric attunements. among others, we think with shigehisa kuriyama’s (1994) account of ancient greek and chinese theories of winds, qi, and bodies and jessica cattelino’s (n.d.) recent account of wind’s necessity for bird and panther clans to lead and heal in seminole political theory. references adey, peter 2014 air: nature and culture. edinburgh: reaktion. agamben, giorgio 2009 what is an apparatus? and other essays. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. bagnold, ralph alger 1941 the physics of blown sand and desert dunes. minneola, n.y.: dover. barad, karen 2007 meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, n.c.: duke university press. berlant, lauren 2007 “slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency).” critical 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276413509114. weizman, eyal 2012 hollow land: israel’s architecture of occupation. new york: verso. whitington, jerome 2013 “fingerprint, bellwether, model event: climate change as speculative anthropology.” anthropological theory 13, no. 4 (2013): 308–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499613509992. zee, jerry forthcoming “breathing in the city: beijing and the architecture of air.” scapegoat. zou, xue-yong, zhou-long wang, qing-zhen hao, chun-lai zhang, yu-zhang liu, and guang-rong dong 2001 “the distribution of velocity and energy of saltating sand grains in a wind tunnel.” geomorphology 36, no. 3: 155–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0169-555x(00)00038-6. occupation bedbugs occupation bedbugs: or, the urgency and agency of professional pragmatism e. summerson carr university of chicago it is hard for man to understand [that he and the external sign are identical], because he persists in identifying himself with his will, his power over the animal organism, with brute force. now the organism is only an instrument of thought. but the identity of a man consists in the consistency of what he does and thinks . . . —charles sanders peirce, some consequences of four incapacities peter is a case manager at a supportive community housing program dedicated to the principles of harm reduction. in practice, this means that peter and his colleagues are charged with providing an array of easily accessible, or “low-threshold,” services to active drug users, many of whom also have chronic physical and mental health problems, as well as histories of unemployment, incarceration, and/or homelessness. peter’s program—an arm of a large, urban social service agency i call “u-haven”—provides state-subsidized apartments to residents who are required to contribute thirty percent of their income to housing, which is almost invariably some form of public aid (supplemental security income [ssi], veterans benefits, etc.). his office sits at the end of a hallway of apartments where program “participants” live, though unlike some of the other residential programs u-haven runs, peter’s is not staffed twenty-four hours a day. although his participants are considered high-functioning relative to others on u-haven's social service landscape, peter is nevertheless charged with administering psychotropic medications, accompanying clients to court or medical appointments, and assisting with tasks of daily living. furthermore, peter devotes significant time learning new techniques of engagement, including participating in u-haven’s yearlong training program in motivational interviewing,1 where i first encountered him. prior to his arrival at u-haven, peter traveled extensively and taught english overseas, before establishing himself as a salesman at a high-end bicycle shop in one of the city’s affluent neighborhoods. with a master’s degree in sociology, focusing on social theory, peter differentiated himself from his coworkers with graduate degrees in social work (msws)—and not because he valued theory more than practice. rather, peter thought that his new job required a kind of flexibility that any single professional moniker simply failed to capture. during a sit-down interview, he explained: “i mean, we are doing everything [in this job]. i’m a secretary, technician, exterminator—all of these things. i just believe it is completely unprofessional to go beyond one’s role.” in other words, at u-haven, preserving the boundaries of a professional role means occupying any number of others. after all, at u-haven, there is no discrete or stable object—like the titanium-framed, single-speed bicycle or its consuming hipster-rider—on which to focus. to inhabit a professional role at u-haven, peter had to learn to diligently recognize and fluidly respond to an ever-evolving and only semi-predictable set of circumstances. furthermore, as both peter and i eventually realized, learning “to do everything” at u-haven not only requires the acquisition of an expansive set of technical and practical skills so as to act in appropriate ways; it also means embracing a certain way of thinking about acting, with a special attention to the limits of any one act’s or actor’s efficacy. proper action—in the conceptual ambit of u-haven—is reaction: the ability to respond in the myriad ways that the dynamic environment requires. for peter’s more seasoned coworkers, the parameters of professional practice are indeed demarcated by the observable demands of the residence and of the diverse residents they oversee. and while peter eventually grew accustomed to this professional way of thinking about acting, responding to matters that may have initially seemed far afield from his job description, he frequently found himself sidetracked by one party’s incessant demands. perhaps in part because they are barely detectable to the naked eye, and yet are seemingly always and everywhere lurking, the bedbugs that infested the residential program where he works became, at least for a time, peter’s preoccupation. given u-haven’s estimate that three-quarters of their human caseload lives with bedbugs, it is little wonder that these non-human residents are so potentially distracting— extending professionals’ attention from their already elaborate professional charge. after dousing their bodies with chemical sprays, only some of which promise non-toxicity, peter and his colleagues engage in daily “room checks,” flipping mattresses and rifling through boxes and bags filled with private, and sometimes unsavory, belongings. they set up bedbug traps in every room, precautionary devices that betray their inefficacy each time staff are forced to spray or bomb. they discard donated couches and haul in new ones. with infested clients in tow, they marshal endless streams of laundry and industrial-strength detergent through the hot cycle of tired washing machines. consider that these already unforgiving frontline engagements are to be implemented in accordance with the latest bedbug policies and protocols. according to one such protocol, workers are not only to escort infested clients through a fifteen-part compulsory procedure; they are also to document each bedbug-busting action, the date of its completion, and its discernable outcome (figure 1). on the one hand, “bed bug checklists” are an example of the end-driven, solution-focused charge of contemporary american social work, a field increasingly faced with administrative mandates, backed by state audits, that compel workers to document even the most chaos-prone and reactionary aspects of their daily practice as clear, unfettered professional trajectories toward specifically articulated results. indicating that the frontline worker is the primary agent responsible for bedbugs’ ends, a professional signature is required next to each “outcome.” figure 1. tracking responsibilities. on the other hand, the checklists reveal a dissemination of responsibility among frontline workers and their affected clients whose room numbers—and, by extension, identities—are recorded at the top of the forms. furthermore, the fact that clients are identified by room number rather than by name suggests that domestic space, as well as the human who dwells there, is a responsible host and therefore a proper target of intervention.2 bedbugs eventually implicate program managers, as well, as they collect and file what is meant to be evidence of extermination in an ever-growing dossier that reveals instead that bedbugs are thriving. almost as if carried away by bedbugs’ furtive scurrying, even formal efforts to definitely locate responsibility with single, goal-driven agents are troubled, if not ultimately defied. consider, too, the tensions inherent in bedbug pedagogy: u-haven professionals devote chunks of their workweeks explaining to program participants what kind of creatures bedbugs are, how to identify signs of their presence, and how to reduce the possibility of infestation. in line with a familiar liberal logic, they emphasize the importance of each individual taking specific actions to bring about bedbugs’ ends. invariably, these lessons emphasize that bedbugs are commonly introduced by friends, neighbors, and other visitors, and may therefore serve the double purpose of enlisting participants in the patrol of the residence at large. yet precisely in light of the recognition that no one (human) party can ever fully control these non-human invaders, these lessons also spawn anxiety, paranoia, and stigma, causing tensions among residents that workers must help manage. at u-haven, the collective imagination is as infested as the old, often decaying structures where the social workers toil, with community meetings frequently overtaken by talk of the specter—if not the detectable presence—of bedbugs. no wonder that in one of the staff rooms, alongside the takeout menus from local restaurants, fliers detailing medicaid updates, and notices of community meetings, a plush red and pink bedbug hangs as a humorous reminder that even when evading immediate professional detection, bedbugs nevertheless loom. if peter and his coworkers at u-haven are preoccupied with bedbugs, they are certainly not the only ones. during the past ten years, bedbug infestations in chicago, los angeles, and especially new york have drawn national attention. the critters also frequently make local news in smaller cities like denver, houston, grand rapids, san francisco, and cincinnati—which recently held the dubious title of bedbug capital of america. throughout the country, bedbugs reportedly frequent hotels, department stores, movie theaters, dorms, airplanes, and university libraries, where they either settle down and in, or select human travelers who might provide them with an even cozier home. american bedbugs are just about everywhere, at least in potentia. they have even given rise to a new american genre, with which a widening range of urbanites is familiar. the bedbug narrative typically begins abruptly with a well-rehearsed, first-person account of shock and horror: the discovery of blood-speckled sheets or patterned welts on a young child’s arms. it transitions into a keen, almost clinical analysis of the bugs’ arrival, which almost invariably implicates now distant companions—whether human or otherwise. then, there is the breathless account of the frantic, initially fruitless attempts at extermination. yet the most distinguishing characteristic of the american bedbug narrative is its troubled denouement. for even as the narrator assures her audience that she has finally emerged from the ordeal bug-free, signs that she is haunted are nevertheless palpable: the vague scratching of a long-healed welt on her hand, a deep shudder at key moments of the story, a gaze searching for reassurance that the bugs are really, at last, gone . . .?3 as notoriously evasive as they are pervasive, bedbugs trouble the institutional integrity of the places they inhabit and the quotidian affairs of their fellow inhabitants. even those who have not yet themselves directly encountered the critters are nevertheless haunted by the prospect of infestation. mass-mediated stories of bedbugs abound, projecting the scale of the problem and every viewer’s proximity to it, by dramatically magnified imagery of the insects (figure 2). frequently, these images portray bedbugs as having distinctly human habits—smoking in bed after a potentially reproductive romp (http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-09-27 [blitt 2010]), or chatting at cocktail parties (http://empirewire.com/images/bedbug.jpg [marquil 2006]) —suggesting that bedbugs have plans, desires, and behaviors that mirror our own. for instance, the new yorker’s mike singer (2005) writes, “when they’re not feeding or dozing, adult bedbugs evidently enjoy having sex.” similarly, one chicago-based commentator warns, “as you slumber, the bug feasts, treating your body like an all-you-can-eat buffet” (chicago tribune 2013). and, as if bedbugs digest the democratic sensibilities of the public on which they feast, the journalist jennifer lee (2009) dryly notes: “the pests do not discriminate.” one particularly prominent theme in the media coverage revolves around how the new generation of bedbugs crosses otherwise well-fortified class boundaries, from the tenements they were once imagined to favor to the well-appointed co-ops of the upper east side (http://nymag.com/news/features/65733/ [sella 2010]). setting up shop at the flagship bloomingdale’s and enjoying staycations at the waldorf astoria, bedbugs threaten to stain the reputations of the places where they squat and the people they encounter there. these human-like, human-defying actors destabilize social structure, (re)distributing stigma wherever they roam. even mayor bloomberg once reportedly confided to a new york city councilwoman: “all my friends have bedbugs; what am i going to do?” (hernández 2010). american bedbugs are a question without an answer, even for those whose authority hinges on the rhetorical crafting of definitive solutions. indeed, bedbugs prove especially challenging for the legions of american political actors who emphasize that social problems can be definitely resolved by way of individual responsibility. figure 2. the scaling of the bedbug crisis. “bed bug cases in big apple decrease, bedbugsprayreviews offers help to continue abatement.” bedbugssprayreviews press release, january 5, 2012. http://www.prlog.org/11764767. to be sure, american bedbugs have become a distinctly political problem, infesting debate about the conditions of urban living and spawning dozens of municipaland state-level ordinances now adopted or under formal consideration across the united states and canada. arguably, some politicians are building their careers on the backs of bedbugs. for instance, the new york city council speaker and recent mayoral candidate christine c. quinn took to the front steps of city hall in july of 2010, armed with the city’s freshly penned bedbug “battle plan,” and shouted: “to bedbugs in the city of new york. . . . drop dead. your days are over, they’re numbered, we’re not going to take it anymore, we’re sick and tired” (quoted in hernández 2010). what is most striking is not that quinn employs distinctly militaristic terms—declaring the war on bedbugs much as her predecessors launched the war on drugs and the war on terrorism—but rather how she addresses the bedbugs themselves as if they are right there to respond. in figuring bedbugs as the immediate addressees of her declaration, quinn indicates a respect not commonly afforded non-human actors, suggesting that while the critters’ end is in (political) sight, the battle will play out on a strikingly level field. thinking with bedbugs and the anthropology of agency during the past decade, a growing group of anthropologists have fruitfully engaged in multispecies ethnography, an approach especially well equipped to take bedbugs seriously as actors in their own right. this literature has bemoaned anthropology’s persistent centering of the human amid the “lively knottings that tie together the world [we] inhabit” (haraway 2008, vii) and has demonstrated how organisms “co-evolve” and “become with” each other as they come into and act within the world. a number of compelling and especially beautiful ethnographies have emerged from the attempt to both recognize the human’s entanglements with other organisms and to decenter the human as the point and perspective from which to understand various systems. for instance, eduardo kohn (2007, 2013) proposes a theory of semiosis that does not begin and end with the human through his ethnographies of “how dogs dream” and “how forests think.” an increasing number of americans, including the social workers in focus here, have no choice but to take bedbugs as their “companion-species” (haraway 2003, 2008). those who have lived and worked with bedbugs are also quick to acknowledge that human agency is neither innately superior nor more efficacious than that of their six-legged companions. as every professional effort at elimination is met with bedbugs’ seeming multiplication, u-haven workers quickly recognize the practical impossibilities built into their charge. it is not simply that they regard bedbugs’ presence as “ongoing” and “everywhere”—the most common descriptors of u-haven’s infestation—it is also that bedbugs apparently defy even the most scrupulous attempts to banish them. as one of peter’s coworkers succinctly put it, “you can do everything right and still have bedbugs. you know? it’s a problem.” u-haven’s bedbugs symbolize that the sheer magnitude of some problems exceeds social workers’ abilities to resolve them. however, in recognizing no end to the bedbug problem, peter’s coworkers neither succumb to horror nor sustain a sense of futility. rather, the bedbug infestation provides especially fertile grounds to formulate ideas about the nature, limits, and possibilities of human agency and responsibility, in ways that ultimately bolster their professional practice. as we will see, this formulation diverges from the familiar portrait of the sovereign actor, at the heart of american liberalism, who stands before, envisions, and plans for certain ends. after all, u-haven professionals work in a world in which human intentions and plans—whether those of professionals or program participants—rarely seem to find coordinate ends and goals, despite the ubiquity of state and agency mandates. faced with these practical dilemmas, u-haven professionals develop alternative philosophical framings of how and why things happen. and while their formulations of agency resonate with american pragmatism, intersect with american systems theories, and are particularly well developed in some circles of american social work, they are revived and sharpened in interaction with bedbugs. at u-haven, one works as if the world is an ecology comprising a wide variety of human and non-human actors whose actions are fundamentally reactions to others’ (re)actions in the system. accordingly, u-haven professionals invest in the means rather than in the ends of their work, and acknowledge bedbugs as part of a world in which agency—or the capacity to act effectively or meaningfully—is infinitely distributed, not only between professionals and participants but also between human actors, non-human actors, and various elements of the system (that are themselves endowed with the ability to act). it follows, normatively speaking, that any one actor’s intentions have little to do with whatever actually happens, since action is always necessarily a product of a system of interaction. thus, to be an ethical professional working within such an ecology is not to be a more intentional actor. it is rather to be a more attentive one. that said, counter to the urgings of some multispecies ethnographers, attentive social workers rarely wonder about what bedbugs think, how they see the world, or how they interpret human stratagems. they retain their human perspective as the central point from which to view the multispecies system in which they work. and, as it turns out, bedbugs are good for people to think with.4 specifically, and as i argue below, bedbugs help u-haven social workers understand the possibilities and limits of their own actions, and to refine their operating theories of agency. in other words, bedbugs infest not only the spaces where these people physically work but also their symbolic labor, ultimately showing how other species mediate human reflection. to develop these points, i follow peter as he is habituated—with some evident ambivalence—to this way of thinking about acting. peter makes for an especially interesting actor on whom to focus, for whereas many of his coworkers were formally trained to think ecologically during their academic training in social work, peter received on-the-job training from bedbugs. as we will see, peter vacillates between trying to conquer invading bedbugs (with the pugnacious determination of an ambitious mayoral candidate) and accepting that he must learn to live and effectively work with the critters. this suggests that people’s ideas about agency shift as they are offered up different possibilities for effective and meaningful action, in part because they are always interacting and reacting to a whole host of other agents and agencies, some of which initially surprise them. some might argue that peter’s (pre)occupation with bedbugs reveals a felt tension between a liberal and an ecological conception of agency in the contemporary united states. this resonates with claudia strauss’s (2007) claims that contemporary americans have multiple models of human agency, aside from the much commentated (neo)liberal one, and that alternative conceptualizations tend to be more evident in times of collective crisis. such models may be particularly prominent in professional life, as american and non-american professionals alike not only have disciplined habits of action but also specific ways of conceiving of and portraying these habits, which are crucial to the establishment of their expertise (carr 2010). this essay aims to elaborate one such working theory of agency revealed during u-haven’s bedbug outbreak—that is, the orientation of some frontline american social workers—suggesting that those who work in the vein of harm reduction, in particular, construe logics of agency and responsibility that have clear, if easily overlooked, historical roots. yet my argument has significance far beyond the claim that ideas about agency in the united states are far more heterogeneous in their genealogies and contemporary expressions than commonly recognized. the broader point is that although people’s operating ideas about agency may have specifiable historical roots, these ideas emerge in social interaction with a wide variety of actors, including non-human ones, and shift as individuals learn how they can effectively and meaningfully (re)act in their evolving circumstances—as peter will show us below. in other words, there exist not so much models of agency, which are indelibly mapped onto cultural milieus or cognitive schemas (cf. d’andrade and strauss 1992), but rather ways of thinking about action that continuously derive from actors’ reflections on why and how things happen. while these ways of thinking are commonly institutionalized by professional, political, or intellectual projects, there is fluidity, and indeed some functionality, to how people take them up so as to orient themselves in their worlds. thus, in chronicling peter’s interaction with bedbugs, i am not simply, nor even primarily, interested in identifying popular formulations of agency in the contemporary united states and tracing their relative genealogies. instead, i work to contribute to the anthropology of agency (e.g., d’andrade and strauss 1992; keane 2007; latour 2005; jackson 2005; johnson 1988; mahmood 2005; rosaldo 1982; strathern 1988) by shedding light on the relationship between the conditions of action, as people experience and make sense of them, and the way that they formulate—or practically model—working theories of agency. the ecological invitation and infestation of frontline social work early in our acquaintance, peter frequently likened his former sales position at the bicycle shop to his new job at u-haven. persuasion—he insisted—was key to success in both settings. there are so many reasons why one might forgo buying that long-coveted bicycle, he once explained, just as there are multiple reasons why one might not take prescribed medications or blow an ssi check on drugs. peter’s assumed task, in both cases, was to say or do something that made a difference in his clients’ ongoing calculations. in our first interview together, soon after he transitioned to his new job at u-haven, peter articulated what many americans would recognize and themselves espouse as a choice-driven formulation of human agency, commonly associated with american liberalism: “i don’t think we’ve talked about it much, but i also come from a sales background, and i think there’s—i mean there are a lot of similarities [to my job here]. um, you, you can make certain choices about how you interact with people, and that has a lot to do with outcome, in my opinion.” although he vehemently opposed “telling other people what to do”—as he later underscored in the very same interview—he was ever on the lookout for what he saw as less violent means of persuasion that could coordinate his professional intentions with program participants’ outcomes. yet in acclimating himself to the world of social work, peter was exposed to a new way of framing his professional actions in relation to his clients’ actions, and to what happens more generally. it was not simply the recognition that, whether professional or participant, the unfolding of one’s plans, intentions, or desires into actions proved far more constrained at u-haven than at the bicycle shop. after all, many of what we might call “structural impediments” to effective action were immediately obvious: his participants had spotty-at-best employment and educational histories, unreliable kin networks, prison records, histories of severe trauma, and any number of chronic physical and mental health conditions. moreover, he and his coworkers had not nearly enough resources, including sheer time, to meet participants’ resulting wants and needs. at u-haven, people seldom did what they wanted, at least according to plan. yet rather than viewing agency as a property and potentiality of human individuals more or less constrained by “structure,” as a crass version of practice theory would have it, seasoned u-haven professionals tended to see agency—or, the capacity to effectively act—as the sum total of complex, non-linear transactions among program participants, staff, drugs, monthly checks, visitors, medications, policy mandates, psychotic symptoms, aspects of the built and crumbling environment and, of course, bedbugs. and while they sometimes bemoaned their inability to manage the bedbug problem, they rarely pinned responsibility on the program participants who happened to host them. to do so, they reasoned, would fail to recognize the systemic reasons why—not to mention the dynamics of how—things actually happen. an understanding of social life as ecological has long characterized american social work; it is the way the field distinguishes itself from psychology, on the one hand, and political science, on the other. in fact, several strains of ecological thinking—all of which stress the dynamic reciprocity between human actors and their environments, and conceive of action as adaptations to a complex set of social stimuli—have found a welcome home in american social work, particularly with the rise of systems theories in the 1960s. for instance, cybernetics, especially as developed by gregory bateson, laid the intellectual foundation of family systems therapy, a therapeutic modality that offered a generation of social workers a conception of the families they treated as an ensemble of events, in which “behavior of [one actor] is determined . . . by behavior of other parts of the system, and indirectly by its own behavior at a previous time” (bateson 1972, 317). according to this way of thinking, any human being is part of a larger trial-and-error system that does the thinking, acting, and deciding in concert. a particularly prominent theme in the 1990s version of ecological social work is the idea—adopted from developmental psychologist urie bronfenbrenner (1979)—that individuals are products of their “meso” and “macro” environments, and that their behavior should be understood accordingly (see, for instance, hepworth, larson, and rooney 2002). in contrast to bateson’s cybernetics, which not only recognizes a whole host of agencies (not all of which are humanly housed) but also attacks the epistemological privileging of the human perspective on the system, bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective is concertedly anthropocentric. although he and his interlocutors in academic social work are keen to point out that the relationship between person and environment is reciprocal, “the aspects of the environment that are most powerful in shaping the course of psychological growth are overwhelmingly those that have meaning to the person in a given situation” (bronfenbrenner 1979, 21). that is to say, the ecology is always viewed from the perspective of the developing person putatively shaped by it. while peter was studying hegel and horkheimer, many of his coworkers had been exposed to ecological perspectives in textbook form, having earned master’s and bachelor’s degrees in social work. new to ecological thinking, peter was initially prone to cite characteristics that supposedly rendered program participants more susceptible and less cognizant hosts. for instance, during one recorded exchange with his coworkers, peter once haltingly offered: “getting rid of bedbugs is difficult anyway. and with the people that we work with, um . . . with the symptoms of schizophrenia and such and . . . hygiene, they can make it . . . difficult and frustrating from their perspective and our perspective.” here, though peter acknowledges the inherent difficulty of bedbugs, he seemingly pins responsibility on the symptomatic and unhygienic participant “they” who frustrate his anti-bedbug efforts. however sympathetic with his plight, peter’s coworkers were swift to correct his framing, which stubbornly locates a (human) source of the problem and suggests that the problem persists because some people fail to work toward rational ends. they insisted instead that even the “cleanest people” can host bedbugs; that—moreover and “in fact”—“anyone can get bedbugs”; and, that it can be perfectly reasonable to overlook a bedbug infestation because “some people, physiologically, simply don’t react to bedbug bites.” such rejoinders are more than just defenses against casting bed-bugged participants as types of people. they are also expressions of a conception of the world of work as an ecology wherein what happens is conceived as the outcome of interconnected (re)actions, distributed among many kinds of actors—and not just human ones. for instance, in this formulation of agency, objects (like bug traps and mattresses) and settings (like urban single room occupancy units [sros] and shelters) are endowed with the ability to effectively act (cf. johnson 1988; latour 2005).5 furthermore, u-haven workers dismiss the assumption that, among all these actors, humans are sovereign. so when peter’s coworker, libby—who had practiced social work for ten years after receiving an msw from a top-ten school—was asked about “what sorts of conversations” she has with participants who have bedbugs, she replied without hesitation: “in my experience, it’s something that is beyond their control. they live in a shelter, you know, and they just have to deal with it.” according to libby, participants are not failed actors who have passively allowed bedbugs to run amok. rather, participants interact in an environment—and not just in terms of their literal shelter—in which matters simply exceed individual control. by extension, libby suggests that when there are problems untethered to discrete sources of responsibility, staff “just have to deal with it” too. understandably, at first, peter found it difficult to accept these lessons, and not primarily because they were offered up by bedbugs rather than bronfenbrenner. indeed, recall peter’s operating theory of agency, carried over from his sales training and articulated during his first interview with me, that people make choices, including choices about interaction, and that these choices “ha[ve] a lot to do with outcome.” in the philosophical vein of american liberalism, where the individual mind theoretically precedes and conquers all other matter, he initially believed that he could persuade his participants to take certain steps to rid themselves of bugs. (recall that peter once characterized himself as an exterminator, one who could achieve certain ends.) but over time, peter acclimated himself to the ecological imaginary of u-haven, recognizing that since there was no end to the bedbug crisis, it made sense to invest in the dynamic circuit of (re)action that his colleagues envisioned. for instance, consider this exchange between peter and karl, a well-traveled case manager who visited his clients in sro apartments and nursing homes scattered across the city. karl prided himself as a “doer,” and more particularly, as a “do[er of] things no one else will do”—a characterization borne out in my travels with him. in reference to the bedbug infestation, karl offered peter some sympathetic but direct advice: karl: it’s tough. i mean, some [participants] will work with you on it (long pause) and some won’t. you have to start with laundry. you’ve got to do the, the bed and all that stuff. it’s hard. and then . . . a month later they’ve got ‘em. peter: they’ve got ‘em again. right. karl: ‘cause even if they’re clean, someone comes in their apartment. peter: well, and the building that we’re in, they, uh . . . their neighbors are rarely participants from our program. and so they may be infested. and so we go through this whole thing. it’s just this idea of talking to somebody about something that affects everyone. . . . and with some people it’s somewhat effective, but and that’s why the time thing comes back in. [voicing a participant] “well, we sprayed my room. now everything’s fine.” well, it’s not. we have to keep on the laundry thing. we have to keep on, (long pause) you know, all these other . . . other aspects. karl begins with a typification of participant-actors as those who are more or less willing to “work with” professionals. however, quickly thereafter, he dutifully lists the tasks that the bedbugs precipitate regardless of the human agents involved and states, unequivocally, that the effects of such actions are inevitably short-lived. peter then joins karl in scaffolding together a social work vision of a bedbug ecology wherein the professional persuasion of human conduct is clearly insufficient. now, there are neighbors, the building itself, bug spray, talk of bug spray, more laundry, and “all these other . . . other aspects.” later in the very same conversation, peter indicated a growing sympathy with participants who “say, well, i did everything that i was supposed to do and now i’ve got them again anyway.” acknowledging that even the most “motivated” participant cannot reign supreme in a bedbug ecology, peter volunteered: “it’s not just their motivation. it also becomes, in a sense, the community’s motivation. ‘cause they’re not isolated. you know?” u-haven’s ecology was conceived in part as a spatial configuration, like a mapped web of connections between actors and “aspects.” consider, too, the temporality of the bedbug ecology that karl and peter envision—a system of action where, inevitably, “the time thing comes back in.” when asked how they respond to the frustration of participants who repeatedly find themselves living with bedbugs after taking all prescribed steps to evict them, they noted in concert: karl: you start all over again. peter: just keep the conversation going. karl: yeah, it’s an ongoing battle, you know. as such comments make clear, acquiring an ecological sensibility required u-haven workers to reset their conceptual clocks from a linear temporality that connects means to ends, intentions to outcomes, and problems to solutions. to work well at u-haven meant to envision oneself as participating in a circuit of action that was, itself, ever evolving. following in jane addams’s footsteps, peter’s coworkers operationalized john dewey’s (1998) idea of “a universe whose evolution is not finished.”6 accordingly, they abandoned the fantasy of finding final solutions to static problems. the ecological vision of social work provided a way to temporalize professional transactions, projecting—among other things—that social work is never done. as i show below, as peter began to realize that there was no foreseeable end to the bedbug battle, he focused far less on his powers of persuasion and far more on cultivating provisionally useful ways of knowing and acting. and although peter’s coworkers, like karl and libby, offered informal tutelage in this mode of analysis, we should not underestimate the efficacious pedagogy of the bedbugs themselves. bedbugs not only helped teach peter that any one of his acts is always already a reaction to many other acts in an ever-unfolding ecology of action; they also eventually trained him in a style of analysis that has roots in american pragmatism. harm reduction and bedbug abduction: from intention to attention early one friday morning, my research assistant, marianne, visited peter as he was initiating his daily routine. that day, he had eighteen residents to visit in their respective single-occupancy rooms, spread across a twelve-story, one hundred-plus unit building. typically, during these rounds, peter checks to see if there is enough food to eat in refrigerators, if the rooms are dangerously hot or cold, if gas pilots and running water have been turned off, and if troublesome visitors have been turned away. aside from these indicators of serious harm, and perhaps most intently, peter checks for bedbugs. peter likes to conduct these sweeping room checks before he begins daily “med checks,” which involve participants filing into his office and filling their pillboxes with prescribed medications. on the friday in question, dressed in khaki shorts and a button-down shirt, peter moves fast while marianne trails behind him. (“like a man on a mission, he lugs his bedbug sprayers from room to room, jogging up and down the stairs,” marianne wrote in her field notes.) peter’s “mission” is to hunt bedbugs, less, it seems, to kill them than to determine where they are currently lurking. in vern’s room, he lifts a mattress, exposing about twenty pairs of shoes underneath. as soon as the lights hit them, small german cockroaches emerge from the shoes. peter is not fazed. the building sprays for them, peter tells marianne, if apparently unsuccessfully on this occasion. and besides, he adds, in the food-chain hierarchy, roaches eat bedbugs. cockroaches, for peter, are agents that have certain ends. aside from pointing out the “nefarious” reputation of the building as they travel its stairs, peter plies marianne with lessons about bedbugs. he shows her what they look like, teaches her to discern the difference between a mild and a serious outbreak, and explains various ways to kill them. in each room, he quizzes participants: “seen any more?” . . . “what does ‘not really’ mean: one or two, or none?” he slips into socratic mode, prompting participants to recite the steps they should take when encountering the critters. as marianne and peter head back to his office, he casually mentions that, aside from bedbugs, he looks for everything from “dead cockroaches to dead bodies” during such room checks. finding a participant dead from an overdose or an untreated medical condition is not unusual at u-haven. it is, some workers confided, the dark side of the harm-reduction modality in which they work. if social work training generally constitutes an effort to inculcate an ecological way of thinking, the harm-reduction model arguably requires an even deeper commitment to it. most frequently associated with needle-exchange programs that originated in northern europe, harm reduction is an increasingly prominent model of social-service delivery to active drug users in major u.s. cities. in contrast to contingency-based programs, which require drug users to abstain from drugs and attend drug treatment while receiving case management, shelter, or ancillary services, harm-reduction programs focus on providing such resources to all clients in need of them, regardless of whether or not they abstain from drugs. this means that u-haven professionals regularly interact with clients who are high, inebriated, hung over, in withdrawal, or otherwise suffering the effects of drug and alcohol use. and while u-haven offers a number of treatment options—including individual counseling, group therapy, and referrals to inpatient and detox programs—peter’s coworkers have little leverage in utilizing these services. rather, charged with reducing harm, they work to assure that participants have a safe place to live, receive monthly ssi or va benefits, stay out of prison, visit doctors, and take their prescribed medications, thereby reducing the risk of harm associated with homelessness, untreated health conditions, and so-called open-air drug use. in practice, harm reduction challenges and facilitates the relinquishing of two ideas fundamental to a classic liberal construal of human agency. first, in acknowledging that people sometimes act in ways counter to their self-interest, harm reduction radically questions the idea that individual behavior is internally guided, at least in any straightforward way. drugs, for example, sometimes lead people to do things that are against their will, at least as many theories of addiction propound. second, rather than construing externally motivated action as an aberration, harm reductionists accept and adopt it as a professional principle. so rather than trying to control what their clients do, u-haven professionals position themselves to effectively react to what happens. if they are to continue working at u-haven, they eventually come to accept that this is all they can (and should) do. to the extent that it demonstrated the limits of professional control, the bedbug crisis proved symbolically productive, providing an opportunity for u-haven workers to resolve the ambivalence they felt toward harm reduction and the implications about human agency embedded within it. after all, professionals’ inability to control bedbugs resonates with their inability to control other residents’ behavior, and new workers periodically complained that they were simply “along for the ride,” unable to fulfill what they initially saw as their professional charge. yet, over time, most make peace with harm reduction through a pragmatist focus on means rather than ends. as they relinquish the fantasy of sovereign control, they become all the more invested in the real-time dynamics of their (inter)actions, rigorously attending to the effects of what they and others do, rather than evaluating the inherent integrity or efficacy of any one action. this eventually held true for peter as well. although u-haven’s harm-reduction model was a large part of what attracted him to the agency in the first place, it was because he initially aligned harm reduction with a classically liberal formulation of self-determination. “it is not my job to tell other people what to do,” he told me during our first interview, suggesting that his participants should be free to pursue their own chosen ends. yet as time went on, peter became acutely aware of how his participants’ intentions rarely unfolded into self-determined action (i.e., participants generally didn’t do what they wanted, wished, or planned). he was also continually confronted with the omnipresence of bugs that he desperately wanted to exterminate—and by extension, the limits of his own self-determination. having worked so hard only to have bedbugs reappear, he came to fully accept his colleagues’ maxim that “you can do everything right and still have bedbugs.” indeed, peter critically refocused on his participants’ and coworkers’ seeming lack of curiosity about bedbugs’ whereabouts, indicting those who did not share his preoccupation. for instance, after flipping one newly purchased mattress to find a whole colony of bedbugs, he proclaimed in the form of a maxim and to no particular addressee: “what you don’t look for you don’t see.” and as he continued his work, peter came to believe that the presence of bedbugs at u-haven called for a mode of investigation, akin to what the american pragmatist charles sanders peirce (1997) called abduction. if induction is inference from a sample to a whole, abduction is inference from an observed body of data to an explanatory mid-level hypothesis, which need not be true, nor even verifiable, but merely provide promising guidelines for further action and investigation. like a good pragmatist, peter began to undertake these rigorous bedbug searches not so much to come to definitive conclusions but rather to inform his ongoing conduct, for as peirce (1966, 7.562) put it: “to act intelligently and to see intelligently become at bottom one.” in this sense, abduction was an exercise in analytical control at precisely the time peter was ceding the idea that he could control other aspects of his practice. indeed, as peter began to accept the limits of what he (and others) could effectively do, he grew ever more invested in what he (and others) could provisionally know. his encounters with bedbugs in the past helped him generate instinct-driven, tentative theories about where bedbugs could now be lurking (cf. haraway 2008, 38). he soon learned that bedbug abduction offered no guarantees, but simply a promise that one guess was probably better than another in terms of where he should look and what he should do next. after all, abduction is a process of knowledge seeking that, while ever attentive, has no definitive end (cf. helmreich 2007).7 * * * in search of economical explanations that can serve as the basis of future professional reactions, peter’s daily work was shot through with bedbug abduction, which employed verbal techniques to collect the data that he could not observe firsthand. although participants tolerated, or at least found it difficult to avoid peter’s morning visits, there were tacitly agreed-upon limits as to how often he could enter their rooms and what he might look for/in once there. thus, in addition to his direct observation of bedsheets, box springs, cardboard boxes, electrical switch plates, unlaundered undershirts, floorboards, area rugs, closets, or plastic bags of winter clothing, peter tried to cultivate bedbug awareness in his participants and elicit verbal reports of any sightings. so when peter’s participants filed into his office for med checks, they came to expect a line of questions that focused not only on side effects or psychotic symptoms but also on encounters with bedbugs. bedbug inquiries sometimes began as soon as a participant took a seat next to peter’s med cart, where all residents’ medications were stored. legally unable to handle the medications himself—a fascinating dispersal of responsibility in its own right—peter shook, opened, resealed, and called out the name on the label of each prescription bottle before handing it over to participants to fill their plastic pillboxes under his watch. for some, this task was straightforward, having already committed to memory their weekly medication routines, however byzantine. for others, whose hands chronically trembled and whose memories regularly failed, med checks required considerable concentration. yet multitasking was a must as peter plied participants with questions about bedbugs, all the while monitoring whether they correctly dropped the right number of the variously sized capsules and tablets into pillbox compartments labeled with days of the week. impressive indeed was peter’s smooth management of these practically challenging encounters, which required both careful observation of the complex transactions of hand-bottle-pill-pill box (and sometimes floor, pocket, and mouth) and simultaneous inquiry into an entirely different, if similarly conceived, state of affairs. still, these hybrid med-bug checks were unsettling to witness. to be sure, peter capitalized on the conditions of his inquiry: his respondents’ dependence on him for necessary medications, the markers of professional authority that adorned the office, and the conventions of the clinical interview, which facilitated peter’s inquiry into matters that most americans would consider private. yet if peter’s bedbug inquiries were ritualized exercises in professional power, they were also expressions of one professional struggling to accept and cope with the limits of what he could see, know, and do. consider, for instance, eileen’s encounter with peter as he begins a familiar line of questioning. standing over her, he asks: “so . . . [chuck, a case manager] was down there spraying—any more problems? do we need to spray again?” eileen responds affirmatively, adding that she thinks the bugs may be coming through the floorboards and woodwork. peter, however, suspects the unpacked boxes in eileen’s room are the most likely host, asking, as he has many times before: “what about the boxes? do you want me to look in them?” clearly uninterested in further discussing the issue, eileen retrieves her room keys from the table, a sign she is ready to go. grabbing hold of her pillbox, ostensibly to assure she has filled it correctly, peter persists: “what about a bomb? how about i spray again on friday?” eileen refuses, saying she will buy a bomb herself when she has the money to do so. peter is still inquiring about bedbugs as eileen and her repatriated pillbox disappear through the door. a bit later, sandy—an older woman who reportedly lived a relatively normal life until her husband hit her in the head with a baseball bat, causing severe brain damage—arrives for her meds. weeks before, peter had turned over sandy’s mattress while searching for bedbugs, causing sandy evident distress. now, sandy sits down at the med table, with peter still seated at his desk, facing her. as if upping the ante on the encounter with eileen, peter begins his inquiry with particular ferocity. peter: have you seen any more? sandy: not really. peter: what does “not really” mean? do you need me to come and look? sandy: no, no. [they’re] just baby roaches. peter: i don’t care about those. have you seen any bedbugs? sandy: no. no. peter: you want me to check? do we need to spray again? sandy: [silence] peter: it’s ok, it’s ok, i believe you. you’ll let me know if you see any. peter helps a now clearly rattled sandy close her pillbox, and hands her a plastic drawer filled with equipment to self-check her blood sugar. he ends the interaction where he began, asking, “so . . . if you see any more bugs, what do you do?” sandy dutifully assures, “i’ll call you,” eliciting knowing laughter from peter’s more seasoned coworker. as a sympathetic, if sometimes amused, witness to his bedbug inquiries, peter’s coworker watched as he teetered between the fantasy that he might indeed one day glean enough information about the bugs’ insidious habits to exterminate them and the realization that since there was no end to the u-haven’s bedbug problem, it was his responsibility to fastidiously trace—or abduct—their current whereabouts. all the while, of course, peter worked to attend to the human participants in his program, many of whom were also remarkably recalcitrant to his directives. to work at u-haven without succumbing to burnout, which surprisingly few of peter’s coworkers did, one had to resist tethering professional intention to professional action and instead calibrate a careful way of seeing with a provisional way of knowing. and while his inclinations were clearly frustrated by his various residents, they eventually helped cultivate peter as a more attentive, if less intentional, actor. * * * at the end of one long friday, peter noticed pieces of paper tucked partially under every door of the building where he worked and his participants lived. without his or his coworkers’ knowledge, the building manager had scheduled exterminators to spray the following tuesday. the freshly delivered notices to this effect listed all the actions required of the tenants to prepare during the weekend: sealing belongings in tight containers, taking everything off the floor, removing all infested furniture (without mentioning where people were to sleep and sit in the meantime). peter was furious. “how are our people going to do this?!” he exclaimed, “how is anyone?!” incensed at the impossibility of it all, he turned to his coworker and clipped: “we can’t be responsible for this; they have to pack up their own stuff.” yet soon peter calmed down and into the recognition that his job was precisely to do the impossible. as he reflected, it was not the herculean effort that the notices required that he found so infuriating, though he rightly anticipated a harrowing weekend for all involved. rather, peter repelled the now-foreign mode of professionalism that he read into the lines of the notice’s text. the building manager, according to the reflective peter, did not understand the limits of what his residents could effectively do, in part because he had never taken the time interact with or carefully observe them. invested only in the fantastical ends of their labor, the exterminators would sweep in and spray, as they do in any other place and with no special attention. on top of it all, neither party seemed to have any specific interest in or working knowledge of the bedbugs they pretended to target, actors that peter now understood as having particular habits and haunts. in reference to both sets of professionals, peter remarked with disdain, “they will do this so they can say they have done their duty,” knowing full well that the bedbugs would be back and his duty would be to continuously attend to them. conclusion: doing good as good enough for anthropologists, the theorization of agency as “difference that makes a difference” harkens to gregory bateson. in active alcoholics who believe they can “handle their liquor,” bateson claimed to have identified a particularly virulent variety of what he considered the fundamental “epistemological error” in occidental thinking—that is, the fallacy of mind over matter. alcoholics anonymous (aa), bateson further argued, offered a corrective in its insistence that the alcoholic surrender to a “higher power,” which bateson glossed as “the system.” indeed, aa provided a convenient articulation of bateson’s theoretical program, cybernetics. taking from a well-known aa maxim, he wrote: there is a power greater than the self. cybernetics would go somewhat further and recognize that the “self” as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding. this system includes all the informational path-ways which are relevant at any given moment to any given decision. the “self” is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger field of interlocking processes. cybernetics also recognizes that two or more persons—any group of persons— may together form such a thinking-and-acting system. (bateson 1972, 331) elsewhere in his writings, including the very same essay, bateson acknowledges the equally important role that non-human actors, like axes, bottles, and canes—if not bedbugs—contribute to the continual (re)generation of the system. in their interaction with bedbugs, u-haven social workers revive these principles of american systems theories as they strive to make sense of how and why things happen, and react accordingly. as detailed above, they also take up, if quite implicitly, american pragmatist ideas about the possibilities of effective, meaningful, and ethical (re)action given the circumstances of their work. to be sure, there is more than one model of agency that has been institutionalized and made historically available for american actors to think with. yet my larger point is that rather than being mapped onto cultural milieus, occupational ethics, or cognitive schemas—or being adopted whole cloth—ideas about agency evolve in the course of people’s everyday practice, as they interact with a whole host of other agents and agencies. we see this as peter shifts his thinking about agency and responsibility as he engages with bedbugs. indeed, if peter felt ambivalent about his acclimation to u-haven and social work more generally, he eventually appreciated his engagement with bedbugs, eventually likening himself to a close relative. “as a worker bee,” peter once said, “i see my job as just reducing suffering. there is no magic bullet. . . . and people do not make it long in the field who are all uptight about particular methods of practice. because they get upset, then, when their magic intervention doesn’t do the trick; when people do not improve quickly.” stubbornly defying professional intentions and interventions, bedbugs help workers like peter cultivate a rigorous, sustained attention to the means of their labor. specifically, they come to appreciate that every action of every actor makes a difference in what actually happens, if always in indefinite ways. in chronicling peter’s encounters with bedbugs, i have worked to make several interrelated points about folk theories of agency. first, contemporary americans—including american professionals—are hardly bound to the liberal vision of the actor who stands before, envisions, and plans for certain ends, as many analysts commonly charge or assume. this familiar formulation of agency is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain in the practice of social work considering its infestation by problems that can only be managed but never resolved. there are likely many other social arenas in the contemporary united states, aside from academic circles, where (neo)liberal formulations of agency are subjected to sophisticated critique and revision, and where a host of actors and agencies are seen as contributing to what happens. although they certainly acknowledge bedbugs’ agency, u-haven workers hardly take their companions as intellectual equals. in this, haraway (2008, 20) may charge that they “failed a simple obligation . . . to become curious about what the [bedbugs] might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or making available to [them].” yet peter’s (co-)evolution suggests that one thing that bedbugs do make available is a heightened curiosity, an attentiveness to the actions of other actors in the system, even while retaining a resolutely anthropocentric perspective on it. at u-haven, bedbugs are good for people to think with: they inspire habits of human reflection and reasoning, as well as reformulations of (human) agency. more particularly and quite significantly, the infestation of bedbugs allows workers—on an itchy and uncomfortable, but relatively less dire conceptual terrain—to relinquish the fantasy of controlling the life-and-death matters that characterize their professional charge. consider that on the first day i shadowed karl, i watched as he witnessed a longtime participant draw his last breaths, on a bare mattress in a spare nursing home, with no other companions, let alone family around. “i did all i could,” said a shaken karl on the train ride back to the office. consider too that on the last friday of every month, a good portion of u-haven workers, who serve as “representative payees,” hold their breath as they hand over ssi checks, waiting to see if the recipients make it back to u-haven having avoided serious harm to themselves or others. bedbugs remind u-haven staff that they work in an ecology and that there is only so much they can do. this may be why it is not uncommon to find professionals at u-haven who have worked at the agency for well over ten years, all the while facing trenchant, chronic, and practically irresolvable problems. although unionization, the relatively good work conditions it helps secure, and an investment in the human-rights mission of the organization are certainly factors in the equation, u-haven professionals’ formulation of agency, cultivated in their engagement with bedbugs, allows them to stay productively focused on the here-and-now of their daily work, holding at conceptual bay the possible outcomes of their labor and thereby avoiding the enervation that comes with work directed toward impossible ends (cf. brodwin 2011, 2013). indeed, in peter’s and his coworkers’ formulations of agency, one finds a reworked temporality of action alongside a redistribution of responsibility, derived from the experience of encountering the limits and possibilities of acting effectively. as a veteran social worker named hector once counseled peter, coping with bedbug infestations resembles “fighting the tides” only from an ends-driven perspective. rather than futilely working to eliminate bedbugs, hector advised, one should react to them, just as one does in relation to the other actors and agencies in the ecology of harm-reduction social work. almost as if setting an example, hector then recited the continuous circuit of action one must follow when encountering bedbugs, almost as if reading it off a bedbug checklist that had been purged of a column for definitive “outcomes”(see figure 1). with no expectation that their ongoing action and inquiry would lead to such conclusions and without evident hint of futility, hector helped convince peter that bedbugs are “just part of life now.” in this way, u-haven workers refocus on the means rather than the ends of their work, and measure their responsibility in terms of attention rather than intention. so, rather than doing good, with good understood as a discrete goal to which meaningful action is intentionally directed, u-haven social workers invest in doing good and thereby operationalize a professional ethic in which doing itself is good and certainly good enough. thus, in their intensive engagements with bedbugs, peter and his colleagues demonstrate the ethical as well as practical benefits of abdicating the cultural imperative of intention-driven agency by instead abiding by what peirce (1997) called the pragmatic maxim. this means sustaining a reflexive attention to one’s own sensory reactions, carefully observing the reactions of a wide range of relevant actors, and responding in accordance to what is provisionally learned, without regard to how many legs interactants may have. notes acknowledgments many agents populate this essay, though i assign them no responsibility for its remaining flaws. julie chu, jennifer cole, kimberly cole, ilana gershon, constantine nakassis, and patricia round are here, as are members of the u.s. locations workshop at the university of chicago, especially emily bock, who served as discussant. faculty and students of the anthropology department at the university of wisconsin-milwaukee, especially paul brodwin, helped grow the ideas here when presented with an earlier, oral iteration. the editorial team at cultural anthropology, as well as the three anonymous reviewers they selected, proved invaluable in clarifying the article’s arguments and contributions. i extend special thanks marianne brennan, whose astute participant observations are folded into this essay. and to “peter,” his coworkers, and cohabitants i owe my endless gratitude for demonstrating a wonderful and brave mode of engagement. 1 this article draws on fifteen months of fieldwork at u-haven, which began with participant observation of a yearlong training initiative in motivational interviewing (mi) and continued as my two field assistants and i shadowed twelve training participants, including peter, observing their daily work. during the course of this work, we encountered many other actors at u-haven, including—of course—the bedbugs that occupied our key interlocutors. 2. one of the most interesting things about this version of the bedbug tracking protocol—which was regularly revised as the date at the bottom of the sheet indicates—is the off-loading of human responsibility onto the built environment. this is a definitive shift from other institutional documentation, which lists clients’ full names when evidence of their bedbug companions has been found. 3. as a particularly eloquent bedbugged acquaintance once noted, “when you have had bedbugs, you can’t imagine the world without them.” 4. responding to jacques derrida’s account of his naked encounter with his cat, donna haraway (2008, 20) writes that “derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning.” this is the epistemological variant of the human exceptionalism that multispecies thinkers and ethnographers tend to bemoan. yet, as i suggest below, haraway also advocates a kind of human curiosity, consistent with what peirce called abduction, which focuses on how we humans might think with and what we might learn from our engagements with non-human critters. and it is in this somewhat narrow sense that this essay interacts with multispecies ethnography, as it shows people “standing naked” before bedbugs and, in seeing their own reflections, engaging in a process of learning. 5. much like gregory bateson’s famous example of the lumberjack—who overlooks the distributed agency at work in felling a tree and erroneously proclaims: “i did it!”—animated his program of cybernetics, bruno latour’s “sociology of a door closer” illustrates what he would later call actor network theory (ant). writing under the pseudonym jim johnson (1988), latour walks readers through the different agencies involved in a door closing, suggesting that “the most liberal sociologist . . . discriminates against non-humans” and that social analysis must recognize the thick associations between the human and the non-human. in this case, the hydraulic door closer is moral not only because it has been humanly crafted to serve as delegate for the doorman, and does it effectively if in sometimes unpredictable ways, but moreover because it prescribes certain types of behaviors back to humans. 6. well before social work’s eager uptake of systems theories in the 1960s and 1970s, ecological ideas influenced the profession—by way of american pragmatism. consider the ethnographic portrait of halstead street in jane addams’s forty years at hull house (addams and wald 1910), which attends to the complex transactions between people and urban environment. as some scholars have argued (see in particular greenstone 1979), this sensibility was derived from her pragmatism—and, indeed, addams and john dewey had a significant mutual influence on each other. for more on the role of pragmatism in contemporary social work, see borden 2013. 7. in his commentary on stephan palmié’s (2007) discussion of race, divination, and personalized genomic histories, stefan helmreich (2007) reads peirce’s definition of abduction—a mode of justification that is the “only possible hope of regulating our future conduct rationally” (peirce 1998, 299)—as more end-driven than i do. though abduction seeks to resolve the question, “what shall i do next?,” the answers it arrives at are never definitive, with next steps initiating the question again in an ongoing loop of action and inquisition. to be sure, this very process can abduct the actor, in the more colloquial meaning of the term, which helmreich usefully puts into dialogue with peirce. in clinical terms, peter was obsessed. in peircean terms, he was inspired and preoccupied by a pragmatic method of reason. references addams, jane, and lillian d. wald 1910 forty years at hull-house: being “twenty years at hull-house” and “the second twenty years at hull-house.” new york: macmillan. bateson, gregory 1972 steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. chicago: university of chicago press. blitt, barry 2010 “bedbugs and beyond.” cover art, new yorker, september 27. http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-09-27. borden, william 2013 “experiments in adapting to need: pragmatism as orienting perspective in clinical social work.” journal of social work practice 27, no. 3: 259–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2013.818942. brodwin, paul 2011 “futility in the practice of community psychiatry.” medical anthropology quarterly 25, no. 2: 189–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01149.x. 2013 everyday ethics: voices from the fronts line of community psychiatry. berkeley: university of california press. bronfenbrenner, urie 1979 the ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. carr, e. summerson 2010 “enactments of expertise.” annual review of anthropology 39:17–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948. chicago tribune 2013 “the bedbugs are biting.” opinion, february 14. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-14/opinion/ct-edit-bedbugs-20130214. d’andrade, roy, and claudia strauss, eds. 1992 human motives and cultural models. new york: cambridge university press. dewey, john 1917 creative intelligence: essays in the pragmatic attitude. new york: h. holt. 1998 “the development of american pragmatism.” in the essential dewey: pragmatism, education, democracy, edited by larry a. hickman and thomas a. alexander, 3–13. bloomington: indiana university press. greenstone, j. david 1979 “dorothea dix and jane addams: from transcendentalism to pragmatism in american social reform.” social service review 53, no. 4: 527–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30015778. haraway, donna 2003 a companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm. 2008 when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. helmreich, stefan 2007 “induction, deduction, abduction and the logics of race and kinship.” american ethnologist 34, no. 2: 230–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.230. hepworth, dean, ronald rooney, and jo ann larsen 2002 direct social work practice: theory and skills, 6th edition. pacific grove, calif.: brooks cole. hernández, javier c. 2010 “in the war on bedbugs, a new attack strategy.” city room, new york times website, july 28. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/in-the-war-on-bedbugs-a-new-attack-strategy/. jackson, john l. 2005 real black: adventures in racial sincerity. chicago: university of chicago press. johnson, jim 1988 “mixing humans and nonhumans together: the sociology of a door-closer.” social problems 35, no. 3: 298–310. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/800624. keane, e. webb 2007 christian moderns: freedom and fetish in the mission encounter. berkeley: university of california press. kohn, eduardo 2007 “how dogs dream: amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” american ethnologist 34, no. 1: 3–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3. 2013 how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. berkeley: university of california press. latour, bruno 2005 reassembling the social: an introduction to actor network theory. new york: oxford university press. lee, jennifer 2009 “city establishes bedbug advisory board.” city room, new york timeswebsite, march 19. http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/city-establishes-bedbug-advisory-board/. mahmood, saba 2005 the politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. marquil [mark wilson] 2006 “bedbugs love ny.” cartoon, empirewire.com, september 28. http://empirewire.com/images/bedbug.jpg. palmié, stephan 2007 “genomics, divination, ‘racecraft’.” american ethnologist 34, no. 2: 205–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.2.205. peirce, charles sanders 1966 the collected papers of charles sanders peirce. edited by charles hartshorne and paul weiss. cambridge, mass.: belknap press. 1997 pragmatism as a principle and method of right thinking. albany, n.y.: suny press. 1998 “pragmatism as the logic of abduction.” in the essential peirce: selected philosophical writings. vol. 2, 1893–1913, edited by the peirce edition project, 226–41. bloomington: indiana university press. rosaldo, michelle 1982 “the things we do with words: ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy.” language in society 11, no. 2: 203–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0047404500009209. sella, marshall 2010 “bedbugs in the duvet: an infestation on the upper east side.” new york magazine, may 2. http://nymag.com/news/features/65733/. singer, mark 2005 “night visitors.” new yorker, april 4. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/04/night-visitors. strathern, marilyn 1988 the gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in melanesia. berkeley: university of california press. strauss, claudia 2007 “blaming for columbine: conceptions of agency in the contemporary united states.” current anthropology 48, no. 6: 807–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/520975. the thing in a jar the thing in a jar: mushrooms and ontological speculations in post-yugoslavia larisa jasarevic university of chicago several years into the new millennium, bosnian kitchens excitedly trafficked in a sort of a fungal surplus. submerged in recycled glass jars, slimy worlds of opaque, liquid hyperactivity oversupplied homes with medicinal brews. unsealed but covered with gauze—to allow the plump, slippery, fizzy collectives of yeast and bacteria to breathe—the jars were stashed casually in kitchens, among the common pots of african violets or between pots and pans. they sat fermenting next to other invisible fixtures—an old souvenir, a salt-and-pepper shaker. i barely noticed the jars while investigating health and wealth in bosnia from 2006 to 2007, precisely because they were almost everywhere and so randomly placed. i also missed them every summer i traveled back until, in 2013, i started voicing a persistent health complaint. in response, teaand milk-based fermented drinks came highly recommended and with my troubles as a password, the obscure jars emerged from everywhere to animate conversations and interactions, pluripotent and therapeutically promising. the jars of the ready-made drink or the starter cultures passed as gifts through neighborhoods, offices, marketplaces, classifieds in the local newspapers and many post-yugoslav online spaces as therapeutic interventions into health complaints from digestion to high blood pressure, from cancer to stress. somewhat less reverently, people translated and mixed stories of the medicine’s proper name, calling it tibetan mushroom, mushroom from the caucasus, japanese mushroom, kombucha, tea or kefir mushrooms. some were explicitly concerned with the microbiological nature of the cultures responsible for the fermentation, but even among the microbe-savvy, the mushroom and, endearingly, the little mushrooms (gljiva; gljivice), remained the favorite terms. the casual naming and frequent confusion between teaand milk-based homebrewed remedies suggest that in popular practice, it was less certain where the mushroom came from and what kind of a thing, essentially, it was. the claims about what the mushroom could do were taken, trustingly, at the word of those passing along the curative gift—and then put to trial in one’s own kitchen and diet. those convinced of its benefits fed it to the near and dear in a loving, meddling, ongoing experiment of care. this care readily reached further away from one’s kitchen, for the guts and comfort of those who could not be readily spoon-fed to wellness: strangers who happened to confide their health issues in passing, anywhere, online or in the waiting lines of medical establishments. those who doubted or had specific questions turned to others for reassurances. in one online post, a woman addressed a kefir forum with sudden misgivings about the milk-fermenting mushroom, which she cultivated and eagerly distributed—“it spreads like mad”—until her husband wondered aloud one day: “who knows what we are drinking! it looks sickly.” her panicked post affirms a basic knowledge about practical matters—how to care for the milk kefir grains—and admits a keen desire to continue fermenting, if only someone more knowledgeable would confirm the benefits and advise on the frequency of use.1 recommendations about the medicinal jars and instructions on how to care for the mushrooms tie together fermentation and non-commercial circulation, human and fungal connections. “when the mushroom doubles [in volume] we split it and give half of it away,” reads the tail end of one online post.2 similarly, the following online announcement cites the remedial properties of home cultivation and gifting dispositions: “i have enough [tea-based mushroom] to share. i noticed some internet sales. that is simply wrong, because these are mushrooms that are passed on, i.e. gifted.”3 i begin with fermenting jars to think the effervescence and generativity of what sits inside them. the jars in pantries and kitchens host but barely contain a thing that multiplies further and fast, that brews billions of lively biotic forms, urging the giving onward and producing surplus and waste. whatever lies behind the translucent glass is unclear, though speculations about its origins and nature abound. the remedy is recommended, while the claims about what it does are personally tried and tested: incorporated into diets and, in time, evaluated with the help of biomedical imaging and laboratory tests or firsthand observations on how they make someone look, sleep, digest, or feel. the thing in the jar is known through handling, tasting, and testing. it remains precisely unknown, but it is guessed, imagined, and worked out through varied forms of contact and relation. wondrous and popular, vague and effective, it urges us to think more creatively about the kinds of things that act and inspire inquiry within the spheres of medically plural circulation and social relation. the thing in a jar this essay is concerned with objects of experiential knowledge and collective speculations. it joins current conversations on the agency of matter, but does so in the spirit of home fermentations, preferring cues from the sites of brewing over the latest terms of ontological inquiries, from object-oriented to neo-vitalist (e.g., harman 2005; bennett 2009). in thinking matter, i foreground the question of the efficacy of homemade medicine, emphasizing its varied and unpredictable course, its generativity beyond the medically measurable difference to the signs or experience of illness, while at the same time asking how fermenting cultures, human bodies, and affective associations are substantially formed through popular trials. the jars peddle a lively, quotidian surplus, coproduced through microcultures’ appetites and the popular culture’s investment in health and informal exchange. fermenting and producing medicine at home, economizing, sharing, and caring are concerned with banal, bodily matters: with the gut flora and digestive capacities, with gallbladder secretions, good mood, lubricated joints, and clear skin. banal efficacies that make life easier and better are highly desirable but impossible to achieve on one’s own, especially given the compromised state of postsocialist public and private health care. medicinal jars, like other informally obtained therapeutics, occasion and depend on shared bodily experience and collective, curative, and intimately transactional practice. someone’s affliction or bodily discomfort mobilizes concerned others around practical tasks of recommending and procuring the remedy, instructing on its applications and cultivation, and exchanging tips and observations. the mushroom jars, therefore, are phenomenally generative, and not just of fizzy fluid and fermenting agents. they foster and ferment bubbly zones of connection and relational innovation, especially since their vagueness begs questions: how best to relate to the mushroom? with whom to relate via the mushroom, and how? they raise such questions in a bosnian state that has been constitutionally and electorally trapped within the politics of ethnonational essence since the 1995 dayton accords ended the genocidal war by sanctifying distinctions between ethnic serbs, muslims, and croats. what is more, the mushroom remedies casually traverse the polarized borders of former yugoslav states as simple items in an informal economy of gifts, medicine, and advice that negotiate logistical hassles rather than ideological hurdles. the mushrooms, moreover, are not merely handled: they variously inspire and direct forms of contact, circulation, and speculations on nature and relation. the slippery, pink blob that passes in sugary tea and the grainy clots that curdle milk embody obscure potencies that flow through recycled jars, generous hands, and mixed stories of origins and substances while altering the encountering matter, from visceral to domestic, from virtual to spatialized. the mushrooms’ thingly obscurity and patent exuberance, their puzzling appearances and famed performances, are anything but incidental to this subtle sort of efficacity. lately, things have exercised the scholarly imagination. some thinkers are interested in things’ very thingliness, which remains beyond the grasp of human thought and experience, a metaphysical given, if obliquely so (heidegger 1971), an object of an “alien phenomenology” (bogost 2012), or a “hyper-object” (morton 2013): an engulfing presence at a mind-boggling scale. other scholars attend to how things are and how they act (harman 2005; latour 2005), how they come into being and pass away (daston 2000), what force resides in or moves through them (ingold 2006; bennett 2010), who decides whether they are at all and what power issues from such deliberation on the material design of the world (langwick 2011; stengers 2010; povinelli n.d.). significant theoretical differences aside, scholars of things have collectively exposed the extent to which non-humans compose the social worlds from which humanist political thought and democratic practice consistently exclude them, or else include them reductively, as dumb utilities or accessories. moreover, thinkers of things have proposed we consider, sometimes shaming us into doing so, the various political achievements of stuff. from the political ecology of things (bennett) to the parliament of things (latour) to cosmopolitics (stengers), the new materialisms affiliate with divergent political philosophies that are attuned to what matters potentially and what moves laterally—forming knowledge and experience—at least as much as to what is actually itemized on the agendas of formal politics. collectively, the turn to things adds fuel to thinking politics, and indeed to dreaming of change, in a postfoundational mode, collecting the vibes of emergent energies, converging dispositions, and new media and mobilizations across the predictable lines of affiliation. such political propositions frame a compelling volume edited by bruce braun and sarah whatmore (2010). political matter troubles the reductive idea of “intransigent,” reactive objects to focus instead on the elastic, eventful, active, and affective qualities of various “things that matter”—from rubbish to plastic to metal. on behalf of the featured authors, braun and whatmore call for a more robust engagement with materiality while voicing a shared question: how does stuff ground, pervade, and transform political life, which always already includes more than human collectives? more specifically, the contributors to political matter are attentive to the sway of stuff taken for granted that infiltrates the air as much as political agendas, that inserts itself snuggly in the midst of social gatherings. they find powerful agents at work in the midst of everything that humans arrogantly consider their own business and attune to the powers that furtively flirt with each accessorized subject, one earphone at a time. put simply, the authors assume that being and being social are the primary political concerns of civic life that have never been strictly nor solely human. recognizing plural and shared fields of consequential action makes for a first step in reconstituting public relations and responsibilities. i take to heart the volume’s accent on forcefulness and the participation of all sorts of seemingly random and easily missed things, but with the mushroom in sight, i finally hesitate to call it political: because, i fear, other kinds of practical significance would be blanketed by the muscular connotations of a generalized power and because highlighting the politics of matter would hide equally transformative and subtly constitutive potencies at work through (medical) knowledge and (health) experience. moreover, while the contributors to political matter are mostly focused on technoscientific and industrial objects or items of capitalist consumer economies,4 the mushroom constitutes a life-form thriving in and fomenting terrains of knowledge that only occasionally confer with science. they are mostly otherwise occupied. they busy themselves with the practical and experiential sense more fitting for the tasks of cooking and home treatment, more in tune with informal and etiologically plural medical advice. the mushroom forms part of the therapeutic lexicon often critical of biomedical and pharmaceutical authority, though inconsistently so, skeptical of industrial food technologies, and dashingly inventive and improvisational. this essay thus wonders about the efficaciousness of matter on bumpier grounds, where scientific controversy mixes with common sense and wonder, where concepts have never quite achieved the consensual status of fact—which bruno latour (1988) calls a “black box”—but are instead open and bursting with colorful propositions, speculations, and claims. unlike braun and whatmore, i am not particularly frustrated with the scholarly fixation on the thinking-feeling human, but rather interested in how mushrooms shape and are formed by the explorative and experimental imagination. i describe processes whereby the reality of a remedial body is linked with ingesting and inventing, trying and knowing, handling and wondering about what the acting and affecting thing might be. in other words, while braun and whatmore are interested in what things do, the mushroom, i suggest, urges us to think more about the nature of what is, especially when the thing remains elusive and open, and its definitions propositional, partly fictive, enchanted, and playful—but no less influential for that. as i will show, it matters that the mushroom is not really or only a mushroom. nor is it simply a curious vernacular shorthand for tea and milk probiotics. the mushroom is a preferred ontological speculation about a liquid, unstable thing on the brink of exceeding, multiplying, spreading, and sporing; a form slippery to grasp that invokes conflicting properties and inspires wonder; and an aliveliness unlike human or plant, and synonymous with fortuitous, found, and gifted. the mushroom translates imprecisely but earnestly between strange life-forms that alter their allies, hosts, and consumers. it tasks its cultivators and consorts with courting interspecies, interethnic intervention, except that neither species nor ethnicity form a part of the fermentation vocabulary. speculations are spontaneous, sometimes explicit, and selectively informed by the established rubrics of life and relation, and they are rarely intimidated by the received or disenchanted criteria for what counts as real, fictive, and possible. ontological speculations are popular inquiries that point to the unclosed, underdetermined state of the matter, be it a fungal-yeast collective or human viscera, allowing outlandish interactions between ailing bodies and promising cures. inquiries prime and take cues from the matter, giving rise to the possibilities that an event may take place outside the realm of a reasonable assumption. the essay proceeds by situating the jars within the tradition of domestic food and medicine in postsocialist circumstances. i spend time describing the terms of practical knowledge that handle and evaluate the mushrooms according to the vital signs of difference that these remedies promise to compromised bodies. the circuitous channels of banal power point to plural efficacies and causalities of things and suggest that we consider the mushrooms’ and the mushroom growers’ receptiveness to varied forms of handling and explanations. seemingly confused therapeutic practices have real effects but a different grasp on medical matters, both the suffering body and the medicinal object. the rest of the essay fleshes out, bit by bit, the natures and forces perched in the jars that are superabundant, irreducible to a single explanatory frame or therapeutic efficacy, leading to many points of origin and suggesting multiple and undecidable forms of proper contact and care. i show how the surplus that issues from the jars practically contributes to the popular imagination about the mushroom and to the tender, connective feelings it stirs in and among others. the jars guide collective action in the direction of (non)economic value and medical intervention into subjective and shared bodily experience under the conditions of a perceived health emergency and diffused medical expertise. postsocialist health, homemade medicine the medicinal thing at hand is related to the agents of fermentation that have attracted attention among global health-conscious, medically curious publics as well as researchers of traditional medicine: kombucha and dairy kefir.5 the transnational careers of probiotics and home-fermented drinks offer a number of parallels with gljiva itineraries, but the postsocialist and post-yugoslav conditions of the jars’ handling urge a more hesitant comparison between contexts of practice and an ethnographic investigation of what the jars in bosnia enclose and do. the regional markets for probiotic drinks and dietary supplements are relatively small, especially in bosnia, and home fermentation takes place largely outside the probiotic frames of reference and within a longer tradition of homemade medicinal meals. the mushroom here thrives under the conditions of a quiet, ongoing public health-care crisis. the world health organization (who) describes bosnia as challenged by unequal access to health care.6 seventeen to thirty-five percent of the population remains without the health insurance that provides access to public health facilities and a few subsidized pharmaceuticals. as elsewhere in postsocialist eurasia, even the insured rely on payments and personal connections to expedite the provision of care and to secure medical attention by whatever means (see rivkin-fish 2005). the who report on bosnia underscores regrettable institutional fragmentation, inefficient service delivery, and financial unsustainability. at ten percent of the country’s gdp, according to the who, public and out-of-pocket expenditures for health care lie above the european average in one of the region’s poorest states. bundled together by the who under the rubric of “complex political environment,” these three issues constitute for the principle impediment to bosnia’s health development. the report’s euphemism refers to the constitutional arrangements that split bosnia into two administrative entities, the serb republic and the federation of bosnia and herzegovina, and within the latter, further into two entities, ten cantonal health ministries, and municipal institutions with unclear divisions of labor, overlapping authorities, varied health benefits, and steep operational costs. the administrative and legal framework that emerged from the difficult peace negotiations of the 1990s has been amply discussed and criticized (see, e.g., bougarel, helms, and duijzings 2007; kurtovic 2013), not least because it locks the state in a tripartite ethnic scheme. and while the ethnonational paradigm is certainly making bosnian lives more difficult, it does not overdetermine them nearly as much as it does policy or scholarly analysis of bosnia. scholars interested in health and medicine have been preoccupied with forensic investigations and war trauma, issues that are, unsurprisingly, moored in the ethnonational rubric (e.g., wagner 2008; but see jansen, brković, and čelebčić forthcoming). what eludes these studies as well as the who becomes apparent when one looks at medicine sideways, attending to places and practices that shift a sense of therapeutic care and efficacy beyond strictly professional or pharmacological action. since 2006, i have been visiting clinics, pharmacies, health centers, and alternative and traditional medical practices across northeastern and central bosnia, interested both in how people are collectively imagining, pursuing, and waiting for proper medical attention and in the kinds of health care they receive. i learned that while searching and waiting for treatment, people tirelessly discuss therapeutic options and each other’s symptoms and tests, swap complaints, advice, and treatment histories, evaluate health practitioners and medicinal brands. their therapeutic repertoires commonly include items of more global fame (from noni juice to royal jelly) and the stock of homemade or homegrown (domaće) substances: those that are collected, cooked, fermented, dried, and mixed at home, in a country house or in someone’s yard, often over an open fire. by 2013, the mushroom jars had lost the currency of the latest fad and entered into the inventory of domaće. while yugoslav modernist socialism invested in public health and hygiene, in pharmaceuticals and industrial foods, it never quite compromised the venerable standing of domaće staples, or of folk medicine more generally. cookbooks, women’s magazines, and domaće producers circulated recipes and advertised the health benefits of fermented and homemade foods, while widely read herbalists made little distinction between meals and medicine (see sadiković 1988; mijatović 1982; pelagić 1972). domaće is not a kind of gustatory nostalgia that, according to elizabeth dunn (2008, 246–48), begrudgingly compels georgians to can vegetables, both because of distrust in the postsocialist food industry and to indulge in cravings for pickled vegetables once supplied by the soviet state. considering the high rates of foodborne botulism and a public health emergency, dunn (2008, 255) regards the pickled jars as sites abandoned by the state and capital and as zones of unpredictability and danger. like georgians, post-yugoslav producers of domaće often doubt the state’s food quality control, but they equally mistrust the confidence the state and industrial capital have in mass-produced foods with a long shelf life and a brief consumption span. moreover, the domestic production of food and medicine regained value in bosnia during the 1990s wartime shortages, when domaće recipes were excavated, retouched, or ingeniously invented for anything from herbal shampoos to coffee substitutes to meals from weeds. domaće, however, is not a mere survival tactic but a robust preference for the handmade, preserved, natural (prirodno), and perishable. melissa caldwell (2004, 2010) finds similar pleasures attached to summer garden foods and foraging, especially for mushrooms, in postsocialist russia. caldwell (2014), however, finds russian dietary ethics rooted in an ecological nationalism that attunes citizens’ bodies with the ideas of russian mother nature and ties rural escapes to state-oriented engagements. similarly, in postsocialist bulgaria, the national flavors certain foods (yatova 2013). as japanese dairy market campaigns designate bulgaria as the homeland of yogurt and their images repatriate to that country, maria yatova’s interlocutors taste the sourness of dairy as the authentically ethnobacterial quality of local fermenting culture, lactobacillus bulgaricus. in short, yatova argues for the bacteria’s symbolic capacity to feed and form bulgarian ethnonational memories and myths. in both postsocialist contexts then, the political careers of homemade foods seem to have particularly ethnonational orientations. in north america, on the other hand, food and value entanglements shift toward concerns with safety and sanitation, as well as to artisanal and do-it-yourself responses to industrial foods. not surprisingly, microcultures here exercise different associational stunts, which heather paxson (2013) captures under the rubric of “microbiopolitics”—regulated and contested relations between microbes and humans that mark the consumption as well as the production of foods and tastes. within the pasteurized food culture of the united states, artisan cheesemakers cultivating the microbial complexity of their cheeses while sorting out, meticulously, the good bacteria from the potential “biohazard” (paxson 2008, 33). in contrast, home fermentation occupies a more precarious position in north american food politics. radicalized by food regulations and marginalized by the mass appeal of antibacterial reason, home fermentation is an ideological stance. sandor katz (2003, 2006, xiv) includes live-culture foods within a range of unorthodox, sometimes fringe, food activisms whose countercultural potential he increasingly appreciates as his writing moves from practical guides on wild fermentation to a description of broader practices of “culinary mutiny,” from seed saving to scavenging, which he collectively terms america’s underground food movement. paxson (2008, 37) reads katz as an oracle of the “post-pasteurian” trend, which owes much to lessons on hygiene and bodily defenses while it fashions forms of self-care around collective, biologized identities. a comparative gesture here is multiply instructive, showing that regional trends and global regimes are inevitably implicated in local affairs, but never predictably so. put simply, neither biopolitics nor ethnopolitics neatly contain the mushroom story. domaće foods, and the mushroom jars in particular, circulate a medicinal rather than an ethnonational value. moreover, it is not the microbes but, rather, the mushroom that organizes fermentations, that materializes and banalizes oppositions to the industrial and pharmaceutical commodities, and that engenders broader connections beyond fringe or national solidarities. people carry out comestible trials with the flair of seasoned cooks or spontaneous inventors, encouraged by countless examples and trusting collective common sense. brewing within the jars is an acute sense that the history of the war and the postsocialist present have altered local bodies and pluralized afflictions, thus calling for revised and reinvented therapeutic responses. i whittle a critical point from popular inclinations toward medical experiments and stray away from the language of ethnonational symbols and of microbes to the more promiscuous descriptions of fermented drinks. people call it the mushroom online venues were often determined to get to the heart of the fizzy medicinal matter. some authors differentiated between tea and milk fermentations, while emphasizing that there was no mushroom in kefir, kombucha, tibetan mushroom, japanese mushroom, the mushroom from the caucuses, or “whatever else people like to call it.”7 instead, they pointed to the symbiotic composition of the cultures responsible for herbal and dairy fermentation and further catalogued their micro-organic and biochemical properties. references recycled a handful of international academic papers in english on tibetan mushroom and kefir. nonetheless, even the online author who pedantically listed dozens of resident species and subspecies of yeast and bacteria in kefir ended the text with a reference to the “little mushroom :d.” a smiley signs a playful invention—the mushroom, it turns out, is what people like to call it. on the other hand, health circles on the ground seldom worry about the proper name for mushrooms. the cultivators’ attention is nearsighted, fixated on familiar and immediate links in the broader and convoluted logistical networks that handle popular medicine. the vernacular knowledge that frames homemade medicine, however, is extensive and curious. it registers the certain ease with which the tradition of domaće embraces the new and the exotic, entertains seemingly improbable suggestions, and fans a more general curative and economic significance of domestic production. one family i visited on the outskirts of tuzla, a northeastern bosnian town, traced their fermented medicine to a hairdresser. a jar of black tea with the mushroom, translucent layers floating like a trapped jellyfish, was among twenty remedies in this family’s pharmacy that mina and her husband, hariz, fetched to show me one afternoon. the surface of the garden table filled with herbs and weeds, freshly plucked or dried in the storeroom; a jar of gluey cream for bone pain (crushed aspirin, gelatin-based soap, and homebrewed brandy); concoctions of herbs, seeds, and honey; fruit and flower infusions and vinegars. mina’s mother-in-law had passed along many recipes. instructions on how to make the aspirin-gelatin-alcohol cream came from the neighborhood car mechanic to whom mina’s husband had complained, in passing, of incapacitating and mysterious leg pain. whereas other herbal remedies had failed, the cream marvelously restored hariz’s mobility and rid him of pain, inspiring his orthopedic surgeon to analyze a sample and interpret the mechanics of its action. the couple was thrilled to report this formal medical interest in and vindication of folk remedies. mina’s hairdresser brought the mushroom after hearing the neighborhood talk of her upcoming breast surgery appointment. other remedies were simply the common stock of knowledge that, supposedly, “people talk about [pričaju ljudi]” and “everyone knows [svak’ zna].” the home production of medicine saves money and assures the highest medicinal quality of ingredients: “it’s better than chemistry,” mina says confidently. one often hears such misgivings about synthetic medicine in bosnia, although pharmaceuticals are commonly selfand overprescribed. except for an occasional tranquilizer and a daily dose of heart medicine, she disregards her doctors’ prescriptions and autonomously manages her blood pressure and cholesterol levels, treats her headaches and chronic stomach aches, keeps her skin youthful and cleansed. moreover, she has revitalized her liver, minimized her surgery scars, regulated her bowl movement, and kept her spirits up through two chemotherapies, a hysterectomy, a duodenum and heart surgery, as well as a partial mastectomy. given her health record and the fact that she has had recurrent cancer since 2003, mina has been a regular visitor at health centers and the regional clinic. she thanks home remedies, however, for prolonging her life beyond her doctors’ expectations. it is the oral orientation of popular medicine that invites collective interventions and improvisations that adjust recipes according to the user’s taste and particular bodily responses. in the words of cvita, who advertises a surplus of kefir and tea mushrooms in the municipal yellow pages, “you have to monitor how [the mushroom] affects your health. perhaps you need to start with a shorter fermentation . . . the effects are still there but more subtle.” cvita reports that the tea mushroom and milk kefir regulated her cholesterol levels and curbed her appetite. mina, conversely, thanks the tea mushroom for regulating her digestion after her hysterectomy. another woman, ismeta, praised the tea mushroom for its calming effects—“it sooths the nerves”—but noticed that, sadly, it made her gain weight. the sheer variety of bodily responses that the mushrooms produced did not bother the users, who expected the medicine to affect them singularly and considered the cure to reside not in the predictable pharmacological formula or dosage but in the fortunate coincidence between the irreducibly singular patient and a particular medication. it is perhaps no surprise that a number of home and herbal remedies come recommended with vague statements such as “it cures everything.” considering that bosnians otherwise provide minute descriptions of their medical routines and that each remedy is promoted with reference to exemplary cases of its efficacy, vagueness regarding the mushroom cannot be dismissed as typically pragmatic inattention to detail. rather, practitioners of popular medicine know and “monitor” experientially, collectively, and with the aid of diagnostic technologies, a kind of bodily being that is particular and unpredictable, continuously baffling, and promisingly responsive to different forms of care. responsive bodies folk optimism about the mushrooms indexes a hands-on familiarity with the body, worked out through trials of natural, traditional, and home medicine. such medically experimental communities gather elsewhere and particularly around chronic and poorly understood conditions or unorthodox therapies. chloe silverman (2012) describes joint pursuits of north american parents and physicians allied in their search for alternative understandings of autism. the members of dan! (defeat autism now!) conduct and discuss home-based trials of unconventional therapies. home treatments, silverman (2012, 373) suggests, are cautious and involve reading anything from children’s faces to feces for subtle clues of physiological and behavioral changes. the same holds true with mushroom gatherings. nothing is too trivial to mention, guts are spilled when listing problems—constipations, discharges, bad odors, skin rashes—and no condition seems untreatable. “people, have no doubt, this mushroom is for real,”8 says one post on coolinarka, a self-declared online food community. the writer demonstrates “the real” with blurry ultrasound images of gallbladder stones nearly disappearing thanks to the tibetan mushroom. the testimonial advises a reader to “think twice before [deciding on] surgery.” coolinarka is registered in croatia but, as many web venues in the bosnian, serbian, and croatian languages, it attracts users from throughout the ex-yugoslav states. like dan!, those advertising the mushrooms speak the language of care, except that they advertise its benefits to no particular diagnostic affiliation. comparable are also multiple scales of efficacy: some consumers are perfectly content to report finer transformations, such as feeling energized or refreshed, while others wish to account for these precisely. one parent’s endorsement of milk kefir reads: “our child is drinking it and the results are notable in the blood count, c-peptid blood test, and the child’s entire biochemistry.”9 but here lies a significant divergence between dan! and the mushroom cohorts, between silverman’s and my own analytic ambition. to avoid charges of credulity and charlatanism, the north american parents and doctors indignantly translate alternative and home treatments into the language of biomedical procedures. dan! members’ reflexivity perhaps informs silverman’s (2012, 370) disclaimer: “i do not want to suggest a process of indoctrination or induction into ‘irrational’ nonscientific belief systems, but rather a secular community that is acutely aware of the social context of systems of reason, and difficulties inherent in translation and proof.” rather than concede to the normative expectations of rationality (= allopathic = secular = credible) or presume that affiliation with something non-scientific implies a belief in lieu of access to legitimate evidence and a clinical trial that can never be had, the therapeutic repertoire of the mushroom prompts a second look at the notion of medical efficacy. to most mushroom cultivators, biomedicine speaks the official language of reason, but they nevertheless question its competence and wonder about the limits of its arbitration outside of pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. people rarely chafe at the fact that the value of any medicine, be it herbal, pharmaceutical, or homemade, is figured out not in the scientific trials that guarantee a straightforward relationship of cause and effect, plus an expected surplus of adverse effects, but gradually and circumstantially during a personal treatment where multiply causal forces are at work and sometimes at odds with each other. causality is often a sort of matchmaking, whereby biographical dispositions, the imagination, and quotidian habits, as well as numerous, variously positioned, deceptively small and trivial agents—say three leaves of sage freshly plucked from a garden and chewed on an empty stomach, first thing in the morning—play out in an infinite number of singular cases of therapeutic recovery or protracted failures. likewise, efficacies are experientially proven even if they remain formally or biometrically unintelligible and open to numerous and fantastic interpretations. on the other hand, given the formal sway of modern medicine, it is no surprise that popular health experiments, including with the mushroom, earn some stern commentary. for instance, in response to buoyant claims about the mushroom available on the forum doctor.rs, one dr. ivica provides a mock list of the drink's pluripotent therapeutic benefits that starts by singing praises and swerves off into unlikely and unrelated uses and effects: “it removes stains, eliminates odors, polishes wood floors.”10 dr. ivica’s edgy joke and the dan! members’ self-consciousness bring to mind isabelle stengers’s (2003) thoughts about the particularly “polemical accent” on rationality in medicine, which she traces to the emergence of the experimental method as the authoritative statement on illness and its proper treatments. medicine, stengers (2003, 14–16) suggests, is stalked by the figure of the “charlatan,” with a long lineage including dr. mesmer, whose magnetic-fluids therapy was famously included in medical trials in 1784 that were to model a distinction between medicine proper and putatively improper cures, which worked, but for “the wrong reason.” in short, the efficacy of magnetic fluids could not be isolated and was dismissed as a “power of the imagination,” a power worked up between a compelling charlatan and his allies: the impressionable bodies (stengers 2003, 15, 23). the same power has been since controlled for in clinical trials that aim to turn bodies into “reliable witnesses” for a rational medicine’s predictions under the conditions of an experiment. stengers (2003, 25, 29) argues that “there is nothing mysterious or spiritualist in supposing that a living body may not satisfy experimental requirements,” since beings irreducibly embody imaginative, meaningful potential and so cannot ever “authenticate the ‘real doctor’ as against the ‘charlatan.’” she predicts “a radical disjuncture” between evidence-based medicine, at war with lay irrationalities and charlatanism, and sites “where it is a matter of curing rather than proving.” instead, my ethnography finds some fungal spheres where the polemic is unsettled or informally resolved through partial translations, where lay publics are invested in turning their bodies into evidence via biomedical measures or imaginative technologies. a body’s bold responsiveness to unpredictable, subjectively experienced, collectively praised, curative things is made exemplary through narratives and their circulation with whatever remedies are put on trial. significantly, promising cures are never strictly medical objects, but things therapeutically cultivated, preserved, and charged in the course of (non)economic circulation and redistribution. fungal present the mushrooms’ efficacies have much to do with the therapeutic economies that the jars presume and invigorate. this is another clue about fungal nature that i picked up in the field, not least by following an advertisement in the municipal yellow pages for a surplus of “tea and dairy mushrooms” and, with the help of my older sister, found cvita. cvita gifted her tea culture but told us, apologetically, that she usually takes whatever money people are willing to give in exchange for the kefir grains. my sister gave 10 konvertible marks (around $7) and, after we left, protested: the advertisement read “mushrooms to give”; “those things” should not be sold. cvita, a retired kindergarten cook, received both the tea and the dairy mushrooms as gifts from her sister, a migrant care worker in germany who in turn got them for free from her employer, an elderly lady. cvita produces tea and dairy kefir for her daughter and has passed the gift of mushrooms on to all her daughters’ colleagues, physical therapists working in a public clinic. put simply, the mushrooms circulated to and from cvita through multiple spheres of exchange: sometimes a gift and other times a tentative commodity, given without a price, for the present of “however much” money. even the multiple and conflicting histories of the mushrooms written on the internet converge at the mythical point of departure, which is a present. tibetan mushroom is said to have arrived in europe from russia as a gift; to have traveled from india or tibet, with a german (sometimes polish) professor whom tibetan monks cured of grave liver illness (sometimes liver cancer) and dispatched with a bacterial gift. the kefir grains are sometimes traced to a caucasian legend of the prophet’s gift. more than one article shifts geopolitical coordinates of generosity to draw in the unlikely figure of ronald reagan, retired and undergoing cancer treatment when, the story goes, he received kombucha from the japanese government.11 the gift is incorporated into the very nature of probiotic cultures. whatever else it is, the mushroom is giving. before launching into “more precise, microbiological descriptions,” one article introduces kombucha as “the mushroom that is selflessly shared.”12 both tea and dairy mushrooms are described as life-forms that reproduce themselves while producing a boundless surplus (višak) whose management becomes an explicit concern for online and other collectives. grounded in the region-wide economies of debt, limited liquidity, informalized and irregular employment, minimum pensions and depressed wages, those attending to health and life cultivate vital surpluses and handle it lavishly, not as a nostalgic form of socialist public property but as a postsocialist revolving gift that was never owned so much as received to be redistributed. the mushrooms arrive to engender excess not entirely due to the labor of their hosts but owing to their own fecundity, their ferocious penchant for being (more). mushroom growers steer this surplus away from monetary exchange. sites devoted to milk kefir issue solicitations, such as: “is there anyone who has a surplus to gift? i am from belgrade.” “if someone has surplus, please let them share. i am from sarajevo.”13 while each post locates the offering or a request onto a map that simultaneously flags geographical proximities and political distances between, say, belgrade and sarajevo, the capitals of serbia and bosnia, they seem to be read in mostly logistical modes. responses are followed by further arrangements, to pick up, drop off, or send via an intermediary batches of live cultures, or to mail dried kefir grains to addresses throughout post-yugoslav states. boundless advertised with the gift is a tacit predicament of hosting a mushroom whose procreative ambition exceeds one’s relational resources. whatever else it is, the mushroom is a kind of a thing that is too much, that grows madly. one post issues from the threshold of an imminent fungal oversupply: “they reproduce so fast that soon you’ll have enough to feed the entire town!” while another publishes the moment after the gifting capacities have been exhausted: “i have run out of people to gift but i would feel sad to throw [the mushroom] away.”14 medicinal surplus turns into waste because of one’s own social limits, the ability to extend influence far enough and long enough to accommodate the booming biotic aggregate. some online cultivators are explicitly concerned with preserving the liquidity of the mushroom, so as to prevent the priceless but economical and “super” medicinal domestic remedy from disappearing; “it would be a shame.”15 others are unnerved by the mushrooms’ evident aliveness. one woman spoke to me of throwing kefir grains into a stream, and the memory sounded a sense of failure years later. her turning to the stream, instead of a trashcan, resonates with a wider resistance to dumping the mushroom, nesting ethical concerns in affective registers: “i have a surplus but have no heart to throw it away.” or, “i can send it if anyone wants it; i would be sad to have to murder them, i.e., trash them.”16 online venues thus become a mode of achieving what anthropologists of the gift, following nancy munn (1986), understand as a spatiotemporal extension of one’s otherwise limited, embodied reach, except that here the expansion of one’s influence responds to the vital demands of the bacterial-yeast, fictively fungal collective. gifting announcements effectively seek human recipients to present to the mushrooms. in both chat rooms and by word of mouth, a kula ring of sorts is established to peddle the mushroom jars, spreading their fame and rolling out the spirit of this medicinal gift. a spirit indeed: of mimetic generosity inspired by the superabundant form, trying and potentially exhausting [the] humans; of domestic ventures in nourishing, bottling, delivering, and mailing biotic associations to others. whatever else it is, the mushroom is spirited, invigorating curative flows. kefir fans are not entirely abandoning industrial food or commodity mediations, but in the service of the stunningly alive and generative fungi-bacterial populations, they valorize non-capitalist common sense. they do so regularly from within the virtual domains of corporate capital. coolinarka, so vigorously involved with the mushroom, is an online subsidiary of podravka, a croatian food giant with transnational ambitions that grew out of yugoslav pedagogies of socialist consumption. the mushroom here feels at home, although the logic of domaće is at odds with podravka’s line of instant soups or its famous brand of seasoning—vegeta—which is irreplaceable in dishes throughout the ex-yugoslav region, packed with monosodium glutamate (msg) and a touch of historical flavoring, sedimented, a spoonful at a time, in the course of televised episodes of little secrets of great kitchen chefs on socialist tv. commodity, too, seems to mushroom: it overgrows, discreetly and indiscriminately, the quotidian terrains on which other ways of being and exchanging thrive. however, it is not merely a socialist memory or lapses of transitional economy that allow the mushroom to grow non-commercial expectations: an online search for kombucha, tibetan mushroom, or kefir grains in english, italian, or spanish will also yield gift offerings.17 the gifting announcements speak to a broader viability of the fungal present, renewed in the acts of cultivation and sustained through gifting dispositions employed to distribute and exhaust the surplus, at a hurried pace and toward indirections that make the calculus of reciprocity neither practical nor equitable. accidental and wondrous the mushroom thrives under the conditions of amateur handling. whatever else it is, the mushroom is a contingent medicinal thing. it arrives with microbiological and social traces of its previous hosts. it dwells, resonant with the ever-changing microclimates of its surroundings. people report its reactions to humidity or noise. it changes in discernable ways—the drink becomes more sour, fizzier, thinner, or gooier, sometimes infested with worms. the tea mushroom can turn sluggish, tend toward the bottom, grow long whiskers, or change its pink body pleats for boggy browns. the kefir grains relax, turning flaccid and soupy. and experienced palates detect many more imperceptible but somehow consequential alterations or imagine them to be at work when the drink is served, imbibed, or when cultures pass onward. instead of the infectious disease that elizabeth dunn, ever an ethnographer as well as a consultant for the u.s. centers for disease control (cdc), traces to home canning in georgia, an undecided contagion is at work in the bosnian kitchens, a metaphysical sway swirling with the gift, vaguely and indeterminately, energizing the already promising capacity of the gummy clusters and their restless fungal, bacterial, and cellular resident worlds, foreseeing biochemical blasts in the encountering bodies. the accidental is precisely the medicinal. for cultivators like cvita or mina, home medicine means taking special care with the ingredients and patiently waiting through the fermentation—sometimes up to five days or a few weeks—while relying on the unknown potencies of the mushroom to enliven the rest. some advocate wild fermentation in the idiom of probiotics, claiming that pasteurization disrupts the spontaneous and secondary fermentation and that store-bought products circulate a reduced and controlled bacterial stock. many online authors emphasize that the symbiotic bacterial-yeast composition of the home-cultivated mushroom is a mystery, found nowhere in nature and impossible to reproduce in a laboratory. the value of the accident is more generally appreciated among fans of fermentation, be they in ex-yugoslavia or in north america, and most vividly praised in the writings of sandor katz. katz (2003), who has been on antiretroviral drugs for years, is especially fluent in the microbiotic and biomedical lexicons, but he also pitches the relationship with microbes in terms of transformative magics and mundane wonders. he professes a fermentation fetishism. citing webster’s definition of fetish as anything “supposed to posses magical powers” and drawing on his cooking practice, he celebrates low-tech, primitive kitchen techniques as ancient rituals and credits non-experts with awesome powers. fermentation is an irresistible, gentle force, the fetishist writes, that slowly makes a difference in the ingredients, in consuming bodies, and in the wider ecology of relationships. he presumes that his readers are apprentices and encourages them to connect to the magic of the natural world, to trust “your instincts—you don’t need chemical analysis to tell whether food is healthy” (katz 2003, 7). such language, no doubt, can make a cautious anthropologist wary of romantic ideas about magic and instinctive knowledge. with public health concerns in mind, paxson (2013, 2) also worries that the post-pasteurians tend to “exaggerate the natural goodness of microbes grown in the wild.” the north american soft drinks industry, which has capitalized on the probiotic trend, is gingerly dancing between katz-style fetishism and antiseptic public health policy. kombucha wonder drink and some of its competitors develop poetic narratives analogous to the mushrooms’ internet histories, tracing their beginnings to accidental discoveries of secret knowledge in ethnic places, far away, gifted to the companies’ founders, who brewed it at first in their own kitchens.18 nonetheless, kombucha wonder drink clearly advocates pasteurization, choosing sides in the microbiopolitical controversy over controlled versus wild fermentation.19 designated by beverage world magazine as the “breakout brand” of 2013, kombucha wonder drink wants to dispel the “biggest misconception” that kombucha is either curative or mushroom-related. invoking an unnamed authority (“a biologist” who “studied extensively”), the trendy business ventriloquizes science and responds symmetrically to lay skepticisms of science and industry: there is no scientific basis (“no evidence,” “no original research”) for kombucha’s reputed health benefits. promoting something he calls “real-speak,” the company’s cofounder nevertheless wants to keep wonder as part of the brand’s identity, which is “aspirational—who doesn’t want to ponder the promise of a ‘wonder drink?’”—for as long as all are clear that wonder is not “a magic cure-all.”20 rooting the brands in amateur wild fermentations, denying the medicinal or fungal nature while invoking “an elderly woman’s secret,” and proliferating vague statements on the tea’s “restorative effects” and “acids,” “tickling” with a promise that “something magical is about to happen,” the company participates in popular enchantments but does so in a supposedly reasonable, disenchanted manner. it gains critical distance and commercial value from wonder by settling on a scientific measure (“no evidence”) for what there might be in the fermented tea: nothing vaguely medicinal but acids that feed into “our normal energy producing metabolism” and, possibly, increase energy and improve digestion. anthropologists who still believe in the appeal and salience of magic—the analytic we so readily abandoned—could savor the charmed production of ambivalence and confidence in the corporate, spellbinding “real.” in bosnian kitchens, conversely, wild fermentations are brewing ontological speculations on fermenting agents and on cultivating and consuming bodies. since home trials have inspired me with confidence that dietary experiments are often effective or adjusted, but in any case attuned to multiple causalities and therapeutic possibilities, and that experience is a trustworthy therapeutic guide, my approach to popular enthusiasm for fermenting mushrooms is less cautious than curious, indeed excited, about the nature of the thing that compels wonder—from bosnia to north america. substantive speculations throughout bosnia, fermentation and the circulation of remedies in a jar thrive in the shadow of a mushroom, gljiva. typically a conditional sort, growing wildly at random places, given the season and the right weather, gljiva is a synonym for vigorous, unpredictable growth, as in the saying that something or someone “grows like a mushroom [raste ko gljiva].” the edible kinds hide in forests or fields, too easily confused with their poisonous doubles unless one knows better or relies on other experts to tell the difference. they are ideally foraged or received from friends, neighbors, and family. otherwise they are bought from foragers in precious bundles. on the other hand, stories of fatal fungal poisoning resurface each season, and the medical staff of the clinic for infectious diseases reproaches their patients for daring to eat wild mushrooms, even as they roll in from the ambulance, vomiting and shivering, losing their grip on consciousness. a fear of poisoning keeps some avid collectors from consuming and cautions some cooks to stick to the plainest, farm-harvested, store-bought champignons. interestingly, fungal toxicity is not a part of the regional imaginaries of the mushrooms that are selectively repurposed and redirected to take new form as a medicinal pseudo-mushroom in a jar. whereas gifting in bosnia is typically a precarious affair, demanding a tactful steering away from insulting and hurting, smuggling in irrevocable, reciprocal debts (see jasarevic 2012), poison is not readily suspected in the mushroom gift. anna tsing (2012, 141) prompts us to “consider mushrooms.” she finds fungi thriving in symbiotic associations, huddled “defensively in neglected margins,” and spreading through accidents and interrelationships, not always benign. with other species mushrooms grow largely outside the schemes of domestication, they are the unearned gifts of a local, ecological bounty or unintended escorts to human ventures, from colonial seafaring to radioactive contamination (tsing 2012, 149, 151). while the history of grain production mythologizes human independence from other species and clearly inscribes private property and specific purposes to the land, the mushrooms’ growing and foraging takes place in diverse landscapes, companionate relations, and overlapping sovereignties. in short, mushrooms, according to tsing (2012, 141, 151), model the universal nature of interspecies relation and sustain a different economy, be it of foraging or global commercial mushroom picking. they afford a critical insight into associative possibilities and biological diversity at the unruly edges and in the seams of what, i think, tsing here means by “an empire”: manifold, historically wielded forms of domestication and discipline of the biological species, framed by persuasive property relations that confine love and care to family while prescribing economic rationality toward strangers. the medicinal mushrooms in jars, on the other hand, are affecting economic and relational practices from within domestic spaces. fostered rather than domesticated, the mushrooms are grown with hopes that they will overgrow their humans’ bodies and are fed and sent onward, with much optimism, to associates and strangers. and this gesture onward—a gifting forth of a surplus—is itself endorsed by the mushrooms’ giving nature. importantly, the mushroom in this corner of the balkans is not only a (micro-) organic, fungi-bacterial form but also a collective, sustained fiction, signed with jest— :d. the fictive form of the mushroom provides cultivators with a handle on the biotic companions but does not decisively steer a relational imagination toward the thing itself. nor is this a sensible kind of wonder packed in a handy commodity form that demands no contemplation beyond consumption: choosing the right flavor for the right price or favoring a brand. rather, how to properly attend to the mushrooms was an ongoing problem, constantly pondered and collectively tackled. there is plenty of advice on reading mushrooms’ moods and states: is it healthy when it “floats” or “sinks”; is it “sick” when the grains are overly slimy, and how then to cure it? the cultivators shift between registers of familiar relations—human to human, human to plant or animal, being to being in general—considering and recommending suitable forms: “it is alive”; “treat it as any other living being”; “it’s another member of your household”; and, a kindred post: “if there is no two-legged company nearby, dance with your bacteria.”21 the author neither says nor knows how you could disco with the microbes, and i want to read his unfinished prompt as more than being cute: it registers buoyancy (the “racing acids” of real-speak) that is not simply human but coauthored by a human-animal-biotic-fungal digestive embrace. the handling problem recurs, rehearsing the unresolved questions: what is the object of contact and a form of connection? how do you touch the mushroom to preserve its vitality and potency or, indeed, to please it: immediately, fingers to its body, or through intermediaries, and then of what kind? warnings about touching include suggestions to “gently massage” the kefir grains, “which, according to some, like to be patted.”22 related is the question of cultures’ cleansing. one alan asserts that “washing is torture for the [kefir] grains. they have to contaminate milk with their bacteria and yeast.”23 contagion is courted and the production is thoroughly caught up in the care of the undecided aliveness in the jar. whatever it may be in the jar, it is earnestly made up as the mushroom. a microbiologist would tell us that the yeast in the symbiotic composition of the mushrooms is, in fact, a fungal organism and that mushrooms are associated microbes made visible to the eye. but i am not interested in establishing a formal symmetry between the vernacular and the microbiological take on the things in the jar. my point is neither that popular stories about nature are meaningful if there exist poetic flourishes to the real, microbiotic composition of the thing, nor that, essentially, nothing substantial exists but, à la bruno latour, that we find only exteriority of horizontal, natural-cultural actants assembling and reassembling, all on the surface, into black boxes or propositions. rather, the fiction of the fungus, the yeast, and the bacteria, the delicate influences of the surroundings, and the many clues about the stuff in the jar—giving, excessive, accidental, spirited, wondrous—effectively, logistically, and inconclusively make up this therapeutic thing, which, whatever else it is, is fermenting. fermentation brings up from obscurity a fizzy potential, a curative promise, a relational riddle, putting the cultivators to work, to share, to ponder. things fermenting are especially effectual. while the jars themselves enjoy eventful careers of recycling, the stuff inside them is more intensely alive. it is both original, issuing forth, and historical, having arrived from places, with traces, known and mythical. it manifests being as obviously plural: composed of grains, folds, and microbes, responding to many names and ailments. it models promissory potencies, mostly undisclosed, of an agent capable of interacting in infinitely varied ways, depending on the singular consuming-cultivating bodies and landscapes of circulation. it stimulates practically philosophical speculations, not always explicit but proposed and tested in the course of fungal-human coconsumption. the inquiries are conceivable only because the bodily capacity of the mushroom-minding humans is as unresolved as the matter of the mushrooms, and so their natures are substantially worked and worked out through trials. i want to insist on the widely consequential power of amateur trials and on forms of guessing and knowing that are elaborate or enchanted rather than experimentally sensible. in other words, my challenge is to think with things that are logistically hyperactive, socially voracious, therapeutically potent, and not just vague but other than what they are said to be—mushrooms—while analyzing, all along, how they matter and what matters to them, from guts to utensils, from borders to the relational imaginations of their hosts. home trials and practical inquiries, as well as the playful pretense about the mushroom, play out in the domain that stengers (2003, 23) calls “imagination” and that she wants to reclaim from the stock of forces and attributes suspected by rational medicine in its struggle against charlatans and treacherously susceptible bodies. imagination, stengers suggests, is a vital responsiveness of all living organisms that can be neither predicted nor controlled for. since mushrooms and humans respond to each other differently but insistently, cuing the interventions and improvisations, shaping experiences and effects, imagination stirs the very flesh of the things in the jar, which remains essentially unsettled, and keeps bubbling. in conclusion: banal efficacies the mushrooms in the jars prompt us to think more playfully with and about the kinds of things that exist, affect, and inspire wonder, that are cultivated and made up broadly across social spaces and, particularly, in post-yugoslav terrains. home fermentation rings, online and on the ground, span the region, transformative and transactional. they nurture and distribute mushroom jars with a reverence for the regional tradition of domaće foods and medicine. if the lively jars are abandoned by the state and capital, they are also found, and doubly so: discovered by chance, through advertisements and other people’s offerings. they are established and tended with devotion as a preferred course of medical and economic action. the mushroom tenderly translates alien forms to the more familiar strangeness of the uncontained vitality, which figures and cues anew the perennial problem of being social. the fictive fungus precisely trespasses the affective limits of the home economy or of some default (species, ethnic, or national) collective. they mobilize their cultivators around issues of health care, but in so doing, they nurture extensions across post-yugoslav regions in manners not anticipated by more formal visions of postconflict cooperation. sometimes glossed as the “yugosphere,”24 the understated economic relationships between the former yugoslav states are either condemned as nostalgic and politically reactive or credited with a political promise of facilitating integration and the region’s accession to the european union. the ontologically speculative biotic collectives are busy outside this model of economic pragmatism, but they are economizing, gifting, and distributing surpluses, wielding considerable power without an overly ambitious project. they are not isolated examples of useful, ground-level exchanges between the former states, but are remarkably intimate, given the consensus on the gift and the swaps of delicate traces of bodily and kitchen ecologies. favoring banal effects over ethnonational matters, pursuing obscure natures rather than multiethnic essences, they intervene in matters of being and experience, affecting life-forms and gathering subjects, practically minded and invested in bodies and therapeutic objects. what gathers them, however, are new and thrilling forms of being together that claim attention, urge generous action, and ferment the imagination around the abundance of unlikely things. notes acknowledgments i offer my sincere thanks to many people who exercised their patience, imagination, and editing talents on this piece. thanks especially to caryn o’connell, aleksandr prigozhin, owen kohl, andy graan, larisa kurtovic, jim hevia, michele rivkin-fisch, and erin koch. judy farquhar, as ever, inspired. a grateful nod to my fermentation teachers across bosnia, as well as to the participants of the 2014 soyuz (research network for postsocialist cultural studies) conference who tasted the kefir: jointly they showed the way to truly thinking with things. in bosnia, slavica ibrisimovic, mirza muftic, azra jasarevic, and my parents got exceedingly involved with the mushroom and sustained this project; without nerka, however, the mushrooming affairs would have turned tragic. finally, my deepest thanks to cultural anthropology’s anonymous readers, the editorial team, and most of all, to the generous and insightful cymene howe—without all of you, this would have been simply a nice try. 1. oraščić, in conversation thread “kefir,” forum.hr, may 2, 2009, http://www.forum.hr/showthread.php?t=452470. 2. sminka95, in conversation thread “tibetanska gljiva i spas u njoj” [tibetan mushroom and cure within it], alternativno liječenje-vutra organizacija, march 6, 2013, https://www.vutra.org/topic/10132-tibetanska-gljiva-i-spas-u-njoj/. 3. “čajne gljive” [tea mushrooms], cvijet.info.forum, http://www.cvijet.info/forum/forum_posts.asp?tid=5054&title=ajne-gljive. 4. isabelle stengers’s (2010, 3–19) contribution, however, is concerned more broadly with nonhumans and especially those without experimental validation, the designated creatures of imagination. also, bennett’s (2010, 35–63) attention spans literature as well as roadside trash, but the speculative onto-stories she presents are mostly of her own making, which is a strategy that poses different theoretical risks than the ethnographer’s. similarly with hawkins: while he is interested in domestic trash, plastic bags more specifically, his proposed re-enchantment of plastics’ agential and affective potentials are framed by the “we,” which is the source of hawkins’s (2010, 119–39) insights: euro-american consumers and recyclers, with a shared if not consensual sense of environmental guilt and consciousness. 5. most cited in english are books by gunther frank (1995) and sandor katz (2003), as well as the website kefir!, http://users.sa.chariot.net.au/~dna/kefirpage.html. among many online sources in italian and spanish, the following two are typical: giuseppe limido, “kombucha,” chapter 3 of “prevenzione e cura del cancro in medicina naturale e alternativa” [prevention and treatment of cancer in natural and alternative medicine] (thesis, istituto riza, milan, 2007), http://www.giuseppelimido.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cap.-3_il-kombucha_pag-78-110.pdf; and “fermentación: ¿qué demonios es la kombucha?” [fermentation: what the hell is kombucha?], eva muerde la mongana, may 8, 2013, http://www.evamuerdelamanzana.com/2013/05/fermentacion-que-demonios-es-la-kombucha. online texts also cite a handful of academic publications on the results of medical trials of kombucha, tibetan mushroom, and dairy kefir. most cited are papers by maalouf, baydoun, and rizk (2011) and by diniz, garl, schneedorf, and carvalho (2002). 6. world health organization, “bosnia and herzegovina: country cooperation strategy at a glance,” april 2007, http://www.who.int/countryfocus/cooperation_strategy/ccsbrief_bih_en.pdf. 7. anita šupe, “tibetanska gljiva koja to nije,” [tibetan mushroom which isn’t], posted in blogspot istine i laži o hrani, http://istineilaziohrani.blogspot.com. 8. harka, “moja žučna kesa nakon tibetanske gljivice,” coolinarka, december 9, 2010, http://www.coolinarika.com/slika/435334/. 9. duskoo, in a conversation thread “tibetanska gljiva, dijabetes” [tibetan mushroom, diabetes], doktor.rs forum, october 7, 2005, http://www.doktor.rs/forum/dijabetes/tibetanska-gljiva-t3198.html. 10. dr. ivica zdravkovic, in a conversation thread “tibetanska gljiva, dijabetes,” doktor.rs forum, july 26, 2006, http://www.doktor.rs/forum/dijabetes/tibetanska-gljiva-t3198.html. 11. iskra, “kombucha—ljekovita čajna gljiva,” slobodni.net, march 18, 2011, http://slobodni.net/t61051/. ronald reagan is mentioned in the english web sources about kombucha as well. 12. “tibetanska gljiva i spas u njoj” [tibetan mushroom and cure within it], alternativno liječenjevutra organizacija, march 6, 2013, https://www.vutra.org/topic/10132-tibetanska-gljiva-i-spas-u-njoj/; see also niandeka, in conversation thread “kombucha—ljekovita gljiva” [kombucha—medicinal mushroom], magicus.info magazin, n.d. 13. senad causevic, comment on “kefir-ljekovita gljiva sa kavkaza” [kefir –medicinal mushroom from the caucuses], alternativa za vas, march 12, 2012. zorana, comment on “kefir-ljekovita gljiva sa kavkaza” [kefir –medicinal mushroom from the caucasus], alternativa za vas, march 12, 2012, http://alternativa-za-vas.com/index.php/clanak/article/kefir. 14. stipo popic, “tibetanska gljiva–lijeci sve moguce bolesti organizma,” in response to anonimno’s blog comment, savjeti za zdrav zivot i ljekovito bilje, november 13, 2012, http://www.ljekovitasvojstvabiljaka.blogspot.com/2012/02/tibetanska-gljiva-lijeci-sve-moguce.html. 15. popic, “tibetanska gljiva.” 16. zak srem and martina, in conversation thread “tibetanska gljiva koja to nije” [tibetan mushroom which isn’t], blogspot istine i laži o hrani [truths and lies about food], april 3, 2013; june19, 2013, http://istineilaziohrani.blogspot.com. 17. see the kombucha journal, www.kombu.de. 18. “at a tender age of 15” in the case of the founder of gt’s kombucha, gt dave: a genius. see “a message from gt,” gt’s website, http://synergydrinks.com/index.php/our-story/#a-message-from-gt. 19. “the 21st century kombucha debate: pasteurized vs. raw,” november 16, 2010, kombucha wonder drink, http://www.wonderdrink.com/news/kombucha-raw-vs-pasteurized/. 20. jennifer cirillo, “wonder world: kombucha wonder drink intrigues consumers and has cemented its place in a niche category,” beverage world, june 6, 2013, http://www.wonderdrink.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/page2-beverageworld-june2013-wonder_world1.pdf. 21, papa romeo in conversation thread “tibetanska gljiva i spas u njoj” [tibetan mushroom and cure within it], alternativno liječenje—vutra organizacija, march 6, 2013, https://www.vutra.org/topic/10132-tibetanska-gljiva-i-spas-u-njoj. the last quote came from a post on the magicus.info forum, which has since been erased. the forum still archives some kombucha articles and conversations. see, for instance, rea’s post on “ljekoviti napitak od tibetanske “kombuche,” [curative beverage of tibetan kombucha], magicus.info, september 14, 2010, http://www.magicus.info/hr/magicus/tekst.php?id=53860. 22. marcopolo in a conversation thread “tibetanska gljiva i spas u njoj” [tibetan mushroom and cure within it], alternativno liječenje—vutra organizacija, march 6, 2013, https://www.vutra.org/topic/10132-tibetanska-gljiva-i-spas-u-njoj/. 23. alan_sp, in a conversation thread “kefir,” forum.hr, march 31, 2009, http://www.forum.hr/showthread.php?t=452470. 24. tim judah coined the term in 2009 in an article for the economist. references bennett, jane 2009 vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2010 “thing-power.” in political matter: technoscience, democracy, and public life, edited by bruce braun and sarah whatmore, 35–63. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bogost, ian 2012 alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bougarel, xavier, elissa helms, and ger duijzings 2007 the 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duke university press. stengers, isabelle 2003 “the doctor and the charlatan.” cultural studies review 9, no. 2: 11–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v9i2.3561. 2010 “including nonhumans in political theory: opening pandora’s box?” in political matter: technoscience, democracy, and public life, edited by bruce braun and sarah j. whatmore, 3–35. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. tsing, anna 2012 “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” environmental humanities 1:141–54. wagner, sarah 2008 to know where he lies: dna technology and the search for srebrenica’s missing. berkeley: university of california. yatova, maria 2013 “‘it is the bacillus that makes our milk’: ethnocentric perspectives on yogurt in postsocialist bulgaria.” in why we eat, how we eat: contemporary encounters between foods and bodies, edited by emma-jayne abbots and anna lavis, 169–86. aldershot: ashgate. refusal and the gift of citizenship refusal and the gift of citizenship carole mcgranahan university of colorado boulder http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5187-4769 refusal is a political stance. it is an effort, at least minimally, to redefine or redirect certain outcomes or expectations or relationships. it is, maximally, to reject anticipated reactions or responses, and thus to challenge authority or structure or the rules of engagement in the first place. this we know. we know refusal can be a political move, but it can also be an ethnographic one. since 1959, tibetan refugees have collectively refused citizenship in south asia. this refusal disrupts and bypasses established post–world war ii political possibilities for refugees in favor of different ontologies of becoming and belonging. in so doing, tibetans posit citizenship as a claim rather than a status. in tibetan as in english, refusal can be both active and passive (as can its opposite, acceptance; khas ma len/khas len). she refused. she was refused. both are political and ethnographic acts. in the context of refugee life, the ethnographic and the political are codeterminative. in a tibetan buddhist sense, they are interdependent, one informing the other, one impossible without the other. the political is power, force, and authority. for an anthropologist, it must be understood ethnographically rather than in abstract or universal terms. here the ethnographic is the gritty domain of lived expectations, complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of any given cultural group. as a working concept, refusal is not so much fixed as in formation, arising as practice and effect in relation to both ethnographic grounds and political projects (stoler, forthcoming; see also da col and graeber 2011). curiously undertheorized in current political and social theory, refusal was addressed almost a century ago by marcel mauss (1967) in the gift. in positing that a gift economy was more prevalent over the course of human history than a market economy, mauss argued that the giving of gifts and thus exchange, rather than self-interest, was key to human relations. giving involves receiving, with social obligations to give, to receive, and then to give in return. key in these exchanges is the creation, maintenance, or deepening of personal or collective bonds between givers and recipients. to refuse is to cut social relations, or as mauss (1967, 11) puts it, “the equivalent of a declaration of war; it is a refusal of friendship and intercourse.” or is it? mauss continues to detail possibilities for refusal in various societies. in some instances, refusal was never possible, but in others it was only prohibited at specific times. for yet other societies he notes that there were circumstances in which a refusal could be “an assertion of victory and invincibility” (mauss 1967, 39). in times and places where refusal was allowed, it led to other sorts of obligations and necessary rituals. it is these other obligations and rituals i find especially interesting. what if to refuse can be an element of group morality, a generative act, a rearrangement of relations rather than an ending of them? i believe such a reading of refusal is both optimistic and possible. optimism, writes lauren berlant (2011, 14), is ambitious. it is “a social relation involving attachments that organize the present.” refusal is optimistic. refusal involves attachments, connections to a goal, relations to ambitions. it is a no committed to generating a yes. it is ambitious with respect to the possibilities, and not just the ambiguities, of both dissent and consent. the attachments that organize the present also organize pasts and futures. yet for tibetan buddhists, attachment is to be avoided. attachment signals the worldly in a mundane sense, the world of suffering in which humans are trapped until they reach enlightenment. attachment is to be defeated and tamed, and yet attachments define human life. refusal is one form of attachment. gifts are another. to many, citizenship is a right. to refugees, it is often posited as a gift. citizenship is heralded as a gift in that it confers the privileges and safety of a new home, or perhaps the reclamation of one’s original home via the gift of return. such a gift should be accepted. one should graciously accept the gift of citizenship, of home, of belonging. yet this is not always the case. tibetan refugees in south asia, for example, have long refused citizenship as a nonnegotiable political claim. refusing citizenship “we refused it. we didn’t accept citizenship here.” when i began research on citizenship in the tibetan refugee community, exile government officials told me this, told me that the exile government had refused citizenship in india and nepal. they had rejected it, i was told, so as not to cancel out their claims to tibet, to tibetan sovereignty, to citizenship in their own country rather than in a foreign one. since 1959, three generations of tibetans have lived in india and nepal without sufficient, or even any, legal status. tibetans did not receive citizenship and its accompanying documents and rights, but they were allowed to stay as refugees. other claims followed: they had been refused rights and papers by the governments of india and nepal. it was thus not just a matter of refusing, but also of being refused. tibetans refused citizenship, but were they ever offered it? we do not know. negotiations between the dalai lama and jawaharlal nehru remained private. transcripts and other documents from the discussions have never been released, neither by the government of india nor by the exile tibetan government that the dalai lama headed from 1959 through 2011 (and which is now led by a democratically elected leader). in nepal, the u.s. government strongly encouraged king mahendra to let tibetans stay there. and tibetans did stay in both countries. in the past six decades, the tibetan refugee community in south asia has grown to more than 100,000 individuals. but neither india, nor nepal, nor any other country in south asia is signatory to the 1951 un convention relating to the status of refugees or to the 1967 protocol that updated the convention. tibetans’ political status is thus not subject to the protections, privileges, or pretenses of international refugee law. this is really not so much a status as it is an absence of status. such a presence in india and nepal is insecure and fragile, resting on the benevolence of successive host government administrations, as well as on earlier british colonial conventions. it is also subject to contemporary interference from both the chinese and u.s. governments. in india, the political identification and documentation of tibetan refugees is based on the date of entry into india. most tibetans who entered india between 1959 and 1979 (or those whose parents did) have official foreigner’s registration certificates, but those who came to india after 1979 are not eligible for any form of state documentation from the government of india. in nepal, the government has never had an official program to identify and provide documentation to all tibetan refugees, although prior to 1989 they sporadically issued identity documents to some tibetans. complicating the story is that some tibetans have gained citizenship in india or nepal. these are mostly politicians, diplomats, aristocrats, and businesspeople, although there are also individuals who were resident in india prior to the 1950s and those who have fallen afoul of the exile government for some political reason or other. this situation comprises a broad range of statuses, from undocumented and unapproved residence to legal resident noncitizen to full citizen. these are paired with voluntary, citizenship-style membership in the tibetan refugee community as marked by the possession of an exile government–issued passport-sized “green book.” the green book signifies that one is a tax-paying member of the tibetan community, and thus truly a tibetan refugee (mcconnell 2013). membership in the refugee community has long signified that one was not a citizen of india or nepal. this is a claim, not a status. this is belonging as refusal. however, this stance was challenged when tibetan refugees began to migrate to north america in the 1990s. although a small number of tibetans had settled in canada in the 1970s (and an even smaller number in the united states in the 1960s), a u.s. government program brought over several thousand tibetans from india and nepal in the 1990s and gave them a legal path to citizenship. thousands of tibetans followed unofficially, some settling in the united states and others traveling on to canada, home now to many of these unofficial migrants, as well as to a new group of official government-sponsored immigrants. in south asia, refusing citizenship created a normative lack of legal status across multiple generations of tibetan families. the national morality embedded in this claim outranked the potential legal and material advantages of citizenship, such as statesecured rights, legal documentation, the ability to vote, have a bank account, own property, seek employment, and the like. following the lead of the exile government, tibetans collectively refused these advantages in favor of a claim to being tibetan, that is, a claim to be refugees temporarily and tibetans permanently. however, while such a claim could replace the need for status in south asia, it could not in north america, where one needed legal documents alongside political claims and where legal refugee status could be pursued. as such, citizenship in the united states and canada became something for tibetans to pursue and accept, rather than refuse. this is how a change in citizenship refusal is explained, not as conditional on the political promise or power of any given country’s passport, but as a condition of living one’s life, and as a possibility present only in some places. what does this mean for refusal as political stance? in india, some tibetans have made new claims to citizenship. for its part, the tibetan exile government now assures its subjects that acquiring citizenship is acceptable, but not all tibetans are convinced this assurance is genuine. others continue to assert the necessity to refuse citizenship in favor of claiming a once and future citizenship in tibet. at stake are not only individual political statuses but also the sense of nation that refusal produces in articulating a shared political project, one that now needs retuning as the diaspora spreads. this sociality of refusal is rooted in “the idea of the nation-state as a producer and distributor of hope” (hage 2004, 108). yet hope for tibet might not rest on just one type of refusal. refusal as a politics of hope if anger is the first political emotion (critchley 2013), then might hope be the first anthropological emotion? in these initial decades of the twenty-first century, hope appears repeatedly as an important concept in social theory. isabelle stengers’s contention that hope is the difference between probability and possibility (see zournazi 2002) resonates in anthropological scholarship (crapanzano 2003; hage 2003; miyakazi 2006). refusal is hope that things will be different. even more, it is the insistence that they will be. this generative aspect of refusal might lie in its willfulness. being willful signifies the possibility of deviation, of struggle within and between subjects, and of a refusal to be aspirational in the right way. in sara ahmed’s (2014) hands, willfulness becomes queer, material, and affective; in tibetan refugee terms, these combine as a political and social claim on the world, a claim to a denied history and subjectivity. refusing citizenship constitutes one means of asserting a right to sovereignty, of producing a state history and a subject-body, and thus of generating desired political effects at the level of the individual and the collective. to refuse is to hope for a different tibet, one to which you may go home, regardless of your politics—of either independence/rang btsan or autonomy/dbu ma’i lam. citizenship is not the only thing tibetans have refused. during the summers of 1990 and 1991, i worked as an intern at cultural survival, an anthropology human rights organization founded by the late david mayberry-lewis at harvard university. cultural survival had a small tibet project that coordinated with the washington, dc–based international campaign for tibet, which at the time was connected to the dalai lama’s tibetan government-in-exile. due to mayberry-lewis’s longstanding research in the brazilian amazon, indigenous peoples were (then as now) cultural survival’s primary focus. more than once, colleagues in the tibetan activist world explicitly told me not to use the word indigenous for tibetans. specifically, i was told that tibetans did not consider themselves indigenous, as they were people with their own country, a country they had lost within the living memory of many exile community members. indigenous was thus interpreted by tibetans to mean a small-scale group of people incorporated into a larger state who were fighting for rights vis-à-vis the state, but not for their own state sovereignty. at the time, tibetans framed their struggle as one of a sovereign people against an occupying state. this refusal of indigeneity is one some tibetans now reject three decades later, especially young tibetan activists in canada aligning with indigenous activists on issues of sovereignty and decolonization (coulthard 2014). tibet is now in a time of self-immolations. so far over 150 tibetans have self-immolated, set themselves on fire, and refusal is again operative. now refused are the chinese terms of political engagement. chosen instead, or rather created anew, is refusal in a tibetan idiom. chosen is a religious framework, in this case the giving of one’s body as an offering of light and fire. this is religious practice repurposed for political protest. self-immolation involves communicating to the chinese government, to the international community, and to fellow tibetans about what actions are needed at this current moment (mcgranahan and litzinger 2012). tibetans overwhelmingly consider the self-immolations to be selfless acts designed to help bring change, and thus to end the suffering of others. this is not to say that these are acts devoid of pain; pain most likely compels and comprises the act, as well as defines it visually. as understood by tibetans, self-immolation constitutes a moral act, a refusal of the chinese presence, and a sacrifice of the individual for the collective. in many of the testimonies self-immolators leave behind, this is the language used. consider the words of lama sobha, a reincarnate lama who self-immolated on january 9, 2012: “i’m giving my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness, to free all beings from suffering” (international campaign for tibet 2012). such testimonies compel the witness to respond, to do more than acknowledge, but rather to receive and then to transform in some way. return to the gift tibetans collectively (albeit in a decidedly top-down manner) refused and were refused citizenship in south asia. this marked a refusal of what was supposed to be, a refusal of how refugees’ stories are supposed to end, with a durable solution of either citizenship in a new country or repatriation to their home country. neither of these has yet happened for most tibetan refugees. positing their lack of status as a refusal of citizenship stakes a political and ethnographic claim to community, and makes these claims to both themselves and to the broader world. refusing citizenship, however, also creates a different relationship with the governments and people of india and nepal. rather than one of dependence or assimilation or acquiescence, tibetans assert this relationship as one of interdependence and connection and hospitality. this is a refusal of the modern expectation that all peoples have a place, an attachment, a status named and known under international law, or that they will acquiesce to political occupation or other disaster. it is a refusal that is lived daily as possibility and burden, an embodied politics of refusing and being refused, and a practice that does indeed lead to other obligations. one cannot receive a gift that is not offered. whether or not citizenship was offered to tibetans in india or nepal, we do not know for sure. however, what was offered and what was accepted is refuge. refuge in spiritual, political, and geographic senses: refuge was offered, and refuge was accepted. and yet: “we refused citizenship.” in this move, we can recall mauss’s (1967, 77–78) argument for studying systems in their entirety. he argues that in studying the complete and the complex rather than the abstract, we are able “to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation as regards others.” the refusal of citizenship is paired with the acceptance of refuge, and this tells us about tibetan society and the precariousness of its situation regarding others in a very particular moment, one its members hoped would be more fleeting than it has turned out to be. acknowledgments researching and writing this essay involved the gift of many people’s company, stories, thoughts, and critiques. i consider it part of an ongoing exchange. thank you to those who offered comments on drafts: dominic boyer, hugh gusterson, ben joffe, dawa lokyitsang, john quintero, the excellent anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology, and the refusal writing collective: audra simpson, elisa sobo, and erica weiss. what a pleasure to work as a group on this project. at the heart of this essay (and of my larger project on refugee citizenship) are tibetan refusals of others’ expectations of them. my thanks to everyone in the community who has long taught me about this and so much more, but especially peldon ambhutsang, kesang tsomo, and the late lobsang tinley ambhutsang. references ahmed, sara 2014 willful subjects. durham, n.c.: duke university press. berlant, lauren 2011 cruel optimism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. coulthard, glen sean 2014 red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. crapanzano, vincent 2003 “reflections on hope as a category of social and psychological analysis.” cultural anthropology 18, no. 1: 3–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.2003.18.1.3. critchley, simon 2013 infinitely demanding: ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. new york: verso. da col, giovanni, and david graeber 2011 “foreword: the return of ethnographic theory.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 1, no. 1: vi–xxxv. http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau1.1. hage, ghassan 2003 against paranoid nationalism: searching for hope in a shrinking society. annandale, australia: pluto press australia. hage, ghassan, in conversation with dimitris papadopoulos 2004 “migration, hope, and the making of subjectivity in transnational capitalism.” international journal for critical psychology 12: 107–21. international campaign for tibet 2012 “harrowing images and last message from tibet of first lama to self-immolate.” ict reports, february 1. https://www.savetibet.org/harrowing-images-andlast-message-from-tibet-of-first-lama-to-self-immolate. mauss, marcel 1967 the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. translated by ian cunnison. new york: w. w. norton. originally published in 1925. mcconnell, fiona 2013 “citizens and refugees: constructing and negotiating tibetan identities in exile.” annals of the association of american geographers 103, no. 4: 967–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.628245. mcgranahan, carole, and ralph litzinger, eds. 2012 “self-immolation as protest in tibet.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, april 9. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/93-self-immolation-as-protestin-tibet. miyakazi, hirokazu 2006 the method of hope: anthropology, philosophy, and fijian knowledge. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. stoler, ann laura forthcoming duress: imperial durabilities in our times. durham, n.c.: duke university press. zournazi, mary, with isabelle stengers 2002 “a ‘cosmo-politics’—risk, hope, change.” in hope: new philosophies for change, edited by mary zournazi, 244–72. annandale, australia: pluto press australia. bread, freedom, social justice bread, freedom, social justice: the egyptian uprising and a sufi khidma amira mittermaier university of toronto the taxi driver hesitated for a moment when asked to let me out by the narrow staircase leading down into the city of the dead. “are you sure? here?” i sensed worry mixed with a hint of contempt. why would a foreign-looking woman be so foolish as to wander into cairo’s cemetery-city in which over a half-million people live in and amongst tombs? in the urban imaginaries of many, the area is off-map, dangerous, and full of robbers or worse. by the summer of 2011, security had become a central concern across cairo and rumors were running wild. things were said to be—and often felt—unsafe. this was also a time when many egyptians had begun to deeply worry about the fate of the revolution. uncertain and increasingly skeptical, those still protesting continued repeating three central demands—“bread, freedom, social justice” (‘aīsh, hurriyya, ‘adāla igtimā‘iyya)—yet with more and more friction around what these demands meant and mounting concern that they might have become empty slogans. to overcome, or at least bracket, this pervasive sense of uncertainty, all i needed to do was take the narrow staircase, step over feces and syringes, and push open a large metal gate on which is written allāh karīm (“god is generous”). no need to call beforehand; no need to come at a certain time of day or day of the week. the gate is always open, even at two or three in the morning. it leads into a khidma, which literally means “service” and in an egyptian sufi context refers to a space, often close to a saint’s shrine, where food and tea are served and guests find a place to rest or sleep.1 khidmas are most noticeable at mawlids, celebrations of saints’ birthdays or death days that can last up to a week. individuals, families, and sufi orders set up tents, put out carpets on the sidewalk, or rent apartments to offer free meals and a resting place. other khidmas are open all year round. though less than five-kilometers away from tahrir square, throughout 2011 the khidma in the city of the dead seemed largely unaffected by what was happening downtown—by ongoing protests, sit-ins, clashes, violence, and deaths. life at the khidma is about sharing a meal, drinking tea, and telling or listening to stories about the prophet’s saintly descendants (ahl al-bayt). it is about being enmeshed in relations of giving and service to god. and yet, while seemingly far removed from the revolution, daily life at the khidma in 2011 continuously reminded me of stories many egyptians were telling about tahrir square during the eighteen decisive days of protest—stories that open up a space for imagining alternative forms of relationality and modes of being in the world.2 in the hope of initiating an unlikely conversation, i show in this article how the khidma can help illuminate what people found so extraordinary about being at tahrir square in early 2011. what characterizes both the khidma and the square during that time, i argue, is an ethics of immediacy. i use this term to refer to a range of embodied practices that revolve around attending to those in front of us, those around us. at the khidma, this ethics finds expression in the simple act of serving food to whoever walks through the door. stories of tahrir square similarly highlight acts of sharing along with an openness toward people one might have never talked to in one’s previous life. egyptians took to the streets to fight for a better future but, according to many, the protests and sit-ins themselves turned out to be more than a means to an end: they also offered a taste of alternative modes of togetherness. while i highlight a resonance between the khidma and tahrir square, i simultaneously point to tensions between an ethics of immediacy and political calls for social justice. an ethics of immediacy is radically oriented toward the present. social-justice discourse, by contrast, may fluctuate between different temporal horizons: sometimes it seeks to address present need at a societal level; other times it calls for long-term structural change and economic growth. because of its malleable temporal orientation, social justice as a goal can coincide with the call for bread but can also be highly critical of food distribution—a seemingly shortsighted and ineffective response to structural inequality. below i dwell on such different temporal horizons and their implications. i call for a critical rethinking of the continuous orientation toward the future by highlighting the ethical and political potentials inherent to traditions of giving, sharing, and hospitality that are fundamentally oriented toward the present. i focus on the khidma and tahrir square not because these are the only spaces in which food is shared in egypt but because they epitomize a particular kind of giving and togetherness. generally, as soon as you enter someone’s home in egypt, tea is offered, and making eye contact with someone who is eating will result in the invitation to join in (itfaddal/i). many egyptians cite a hadīth (prophetic saying): “he is not a believer whose stomach is filled while the neighbor to his side goes hungry.” though food is shared widely in egypt, the kind of giving that is practiced at the khidma differs from everyday acts of hospitality in that, i argue, it runs counter to the logic of reciprocity. as such the khidma exemplifies an alternative mode of relating to others, of living an implicit form of justice. at the same time, i hope that ethnographic glimpses of the khidma can more broadly alter our view of the simple, seemingly apolitical acts of sharing food and space. i suggest that the egyptian uprising (along with similar ruptures elsewhere) invites us to think anew about the political potentials of seemingly apolitical spaces and practices.3 conversely, i hold that, though disinterested in long-term social, political, and economic change, khidmas invite an “anthropology of the otherwise” (povinelli 2012, 10). this article draws on fieldwork in cairo between 2010 and 2012, and is part of a larger project that examines islamic practices of giving against the backdrop of the egyptian uprising. at the heart of the article lies the khidma to which i return throughout. interwoven with the ethnography are reflections on the temporalities of giving and different articulations of social justice in egypt. although i problematize a broad tendency towards abstraction and temporal displacement in many political visions of social justice, my critique is primarily directed at the ways the term has become subsumed within the call for economic growth and individual productivity. i propose that a close look at everyday practices of giving can point to alternative—obscured and emergent—meanings of justice. last, i turn to stories about tahrir-as-utopia to highlight resonances between khidma and square. by bringing these three elements into conversation—the political call for social justice, a sufi khidma, and stories about tahrir square during the uprising—i hope to invite a rethinking of giving in relation to social justice. in doing so, it is not my intention to argue against the hope of, or desire for, a better tomorrow and a revived egyptian economy. nor do i seek to undermine the fight for structural transformations. rather, by tracing how an exclusive focus on the future can obscure present need, i seek to make space within social justice for the here and now. such a reorientation and opening is all the more critical at the current moment—a time of frictions, exclusions, and violence in egypt, and a time when older structures of inequality continue to be rewritten as well as transformed.4 at the khidma stepping through the large metal gate in the city of the dead, guests enter a spacious courtyard with two doors on the side leading to rooms that offer blankets and a place to sleep. on warm days, they sit on a reed mat in the courtyard, often surrounded by cats who, too, never go hungry at the khidma. on hot or cold days, guests enter the main building, a house with high ceilings, its walls partially painted green. inside the house are six bedrooms; the largest is reserved for female guests. whenever guests arrive, nura disappears into the kitchen and reappears shortly thereafter with a large tray filled with food: vegetables, rice, mulūkhiyya, cucumbers, bread; a complete meal.5 a bit later nura, one of her children, or one of her long-term guests serves tea. figure 1. nura’s khidma. photo by mona hein. now in her late forties, nura has lived in the city of the dead most of her life. she inherited the khidma from her mother who originally started it because all her newborns died. nura’s parents performed dhikr (recitations praising god and the prophet) to ask god for help, repeating particular phrases hundreds of thousands of times, splashing cold water onto their faces to stay awake longer to keep reciting. nothing helped. then a shaykh instructed nura’s mother that it is not enough to pray to god: you need to do something; you need to give. he told her, “open your home, give food to people, give them something to drink” (iftahi baytik, akkili, sharrabi). the mother followed the shaykh’s advice, started the khidma, and ended up with thirteen healthy children. when i asked nura why she, and not one of her siblings, has taken over the khidma, she explained that this is fate; it comes from god. she knew from early on that it would be her because she had seen it in a dream-vision.6 since the day, seven years ago, when her mother had a stroke and became partially paralyzed, nura has been fully in charge of the khidma. she cooks for her guests every day. in the morning, she might offer beans, cheese, falafel, and bread. later in the day, she might serve pickled eggplants, bread, and green beans, or, on a different day, rice and white beans or potatoes in tomato sauce. sometimes there is meat. if a guest arrives with a cold, nura serves peppermint tea with cumin. regardless of what time of day it is, guests are always served tea, lots of it. like many sufis, nura takes the practice of giving food (it‘ām al-t‘am) to be the very core of islam. as one guest at the khidma put it, “lu’mat ‘aīsh ahamm hāga fi-l-islām” (“a bite of bread is the most important thing in islam”), or, as another guest noted, citing a hadith: “feeding a hungry person is better than building a mosque.” nura’s attention to the here and now affected me too. i recall a hot friday afternoon at the khidma. we are sitting inside the house. nura’s cell phone rings; she answers. i use the opportunity to briefly close my eyes. it has been a long day; we’ve been chatting for hours, with my recorder resting between us, going over details of the khidma’s sixty-year history. i lean my head against the wall, dozing off. as nura shuts her phone, she turns to me: “amira, i want to show you something. follow me.” she takes me by the hand, leads me into a room with two beds and tells me to lie down. my craving for a nap overrides my desire to keep going with the interview. i accept the offer. nura says, “al-sarīr yas‘ad bīkī,” which roughly translates to “the bed is delighted by your presence.” i smile and close my eyes. over time i learned in the khidma to stop at least for a short while worrying about the future and my own productivity. nura’s attention to the present (and those present) does not mean that she never thinks about the future. she hopes for a place in paradise, and occasionally she wonders about the khidma’s future in this world. she assumes that hussain, her son, will eventually take over. although nura also has a daughter (and although hussain, twelve years old at the time, told me that he wants to become a police officer), nura says that, when hussain could barely speak, he told her the khidma would grow one-hundred-times bigger, and she has seen in a dream-vision that he will eventually be in charge. thus, the future figures at the khidma, but relating to the future here means trusting in god and being in a continuous relationship with others. the temporalities of giving spaces of food distribution are often subsumed under the label “charity,” although in the case of khidmas, this framing is misleading.7 as i will show shortly, the khidma does not divide the world into those able to help and those in need. nura does not understand her daily work as charitable. nevertheless, the khidma is one of the places in cairo where people can turn for free food and shelter. when situated within a broader landscape of giving, soup kitchens and khidmas exemplify a radical orientation toward the present. food differs from gifts given with an eye to the future—gifts understood by many to be more effective.8 although arguably we live in an “age of compassion” (berlant 2004; bornstein 2011; fassin 2012) that has brought about a renewed appreciation for instant aid and relief, development agencies and philanthropists worldwide tend to insist that a good gift is one that creates productive, independent citizens. as in many other places, in egypt, the chinese proverb is often cited: “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”9 critics might say that nura does nothing but give a few men a few fish. whereas food is generally a present-oriented gift, microloans are the quintessential neoliberal gift—closely tied to efforts to turn the “shadow economies of the poor” into spaces of enterprise (roy 2010). in egypt, ngos, international players such as usaid, and the egyptian government for years have been encouraging egyptians living in slums to start small enterprises (atia 2012; elyachar 2005).10 in line with the neoliberal ethos of individual responsibility, microloans are expected to create jobs and entrepreneurial citizens. they displace but also subsume the hopes tied to development.11 although it continuously places the future out of reach, neoliberalism is a deeply utopian project (harvey 2007).12 many ngos in egypt have followed the shift from present-oriented to future-oriented forms of giving. instead of distributing alms or food, they now offer microloans or fund development projects. scholars have interpreted this shift in muslim ngos as part of a broader neoliberalization of islam (atia 2012; hafez 2011).13 to receive a microloan, petitioners need to fulfill certain conditions and prove that they are, or are willing to become, productive citizens. taking a microloan can be risky. a number of women living in cairo’s slums told me that, unable to pay back their loans, they now live in fear of arrest and imprisonment. more broadly, neoliberalization has led to a “shift away from the needs of the poor … to the responsibilization of the poor for their impoverishment” (atia 2008). attention to the future and productivity is neither exclusively modern nor is it always subsumable within a purely capitalist logic. a number of egyptian ngos, concerned with long-term transformations, have turned to resources from the islamic tradition, and not only to craft industrious citizens. some ngos seek to revive the concept of waqf, religious endowments, which aim to benefit future generations by building schools, hospitals, or wells. others encourage donors to give alms in the form of sadaqa gāriya, literally “running charity,” which provides lasting benefits by planting palm trees or providing poor families with a milk-producing animal. while the gaze to the future is not new, it has arguably become more pervasive in the eras of national development and neoliberalism. even almsgiving, traditionally understood as a response to immediate need, is increasingly reconfigured so as to prioritize the “long run” (guyer 2007). thus zakāt, obligatory alms, can now also be channeled into development projects. a 2011 fatwa (non-binding legal opinion) issued by al-azhar, the authoritative institution of sunni islam, asserts that, “using zakāt and sadaqa [obligatory and voluntary alms] money to build big projects that will help with the economic recovery is permitted with conditions. the money may go to building factories that will create jobs, to institutions that directly engage with the needy, to hospitals (in the form of medical equipment, medicine) that offer free services to the poor, to schools, mosques (also in the form of supplies, etc.).”14 while concerns with sustainability, job creation, and free healthcare resonate with most progressive political sensibilities, focusing attention on future aims can lead, if inadvertently, to the neglect of the present. the more emphasis is placed on strategic giving and increased productivity, the more stigmatized the simple act of giving food to a hungry person becomes. the detrimental effects of a continuous displacement of the present in favor of the future are highlighted by elizabeth povinelli (2012), who shows how late liberal imaginaries tend to justify current suffering through reference to a future anterior: “it will all have been worth it.” erica bornstein (2012) traces tensions in new delhi between a future-oriented, strategic kind of philanthropy and what she calls an immediate “impulse to give.” as she points out, in discourses of human rights and social justice, an abstract notion of society or humankind sometimes obscures, or takes priority over, immediate need and suffering. the tension between present and future also figures in the call of egyptian protesters for bread, freedom, and social justice. the demand for bread points to present need. bread (‘aīsh) in egyptian arabic literally means life. bread is a staple food in egypt that has been state-subsidized for decades. international monetary fund–enforced cuts led to bread riots in 1977, and rising food prices are today often associated with the looming danger of a “revolution of the hungry” yet to come. at the same time, while symbolically calling for bread, activists in egypt often dismiss food distribution as “anti–social justice.” many claim that egypt’s widespread “culture of charity” is in fact the primary reason why a revolution did not happen sooner. the argument is familiar: handouts allow the poor to get by and keep them quiet but will never lead to true change. in this sense, the prioritizing of the future has affected not only the work of ngos but also shaped (and narrowed) visions of social justice. figure 2. a woman ripping up bread for a dish at a khidma in alexandria. photo by hala nammar. on social justice the concept of social justice emerged in the late-eighteenth-century as the child of the industrial and french revolutions. originally it had a strong distributive meaning in that it “explicitly aim[ed] to redistribute resources to those disadvantaged by a market distribution” (jackson 2005, 358). in its “willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle” (harvey 2007, 41), social justice seems to run counter to the neoliberal celebration of individual responsibility. unsurprisingly, however, the term has come to absorb all kinds of meanings and ideologies. when protesters at tahrir square called for ‘adāla igtimā‘iyya (a literal translation of “social justice”), they were calling for many different things. socialist, communist, liberal, neoliberal, and religious trajectories converged in their demand, along with others for which we might not yet have a language. just as “justice” is not a monolithic, unambiguous term in western traditions (macintyre 1988), in egypt, “social justice” evokes multiple histories and genealogies. in the tradition of the left, the communist movement, and nasserism, social justice has a distributive meaning, related to ownership of the means of production. a more neoliberal understanding foregrounds the value of equal opportunity, rendering one’s life chances into a personal responsibility. in the writings of muslim thinkers such as sayyid qutb, social justice stands for an alternative to both capitalism and socialism.15 most significant about the use of the term during the 2011 protests was its malleability and openness. the demand for social justice was effective precisely because it worked on so many different registers. since the uprising, the concept has been recycled across the political spectrum. the national salvation front, an alliance of parties coordinated by mohamed elbaradei, noted that “social justice is built on equal opportunities and an increased minimum wage to afford a decent life for all egyptians.”16 the muslim brotherhood, which held nearly half of the seats in parliament and whose candidate, mohammad morsi, won the 2012 presidential elections (but was ousted in july 2013), declared as one of its key goals, “structuring a comprehensive social justice system that will provide the different social classes with equal opportunities in residence, work, medical treatment, and in exercising their political rights.” the constitution passed in december 2012 states that the national economy shall be organized in accordance with a “comprehensive, constant development plan,” which shall “establish social justice and solidarity, ensure equitable distribution … and safeguard the rights of workers” (article 14). although most of these formulations seem to point to the future and address present need, many activists have criticized the constitution’s approach to social justice, pointing out, for instance, that it links rising wages to production but not prices.17 the revolutionary socialists attacked the muslim brotherhood more broadly, claiming that “the words ‘social justice’ are not even in your dictionary. you’ve forgotten the minimum and maximum wage. you’ve raised prices and left the poor eating mud.”18 the former presidential candidate khaled ‘ali accused all political parties of “forgetting the poor.”19 the large anniversary protests on january 25, 2013, were organized under the same banner as the protests two years earlier—“bread, freedom, social justice”—and when activists and media channels began mobilizing citizens against morsi in june 2013, his failure to have brought about social justice was a central claim of their campaign. infused with multiple meanings, social justice continues to be a pressing and unfulfilled demand in egypt. what i want to highlight here, however, is not the failure of the post-uprising governments to achieve social justice but rather a narrowing of what social justice is taken to mean. there have continued to be protests and strikes calling for minimum and maximum wages and against privatization, yet for the most part, the goal of social justice has become subsumed within the push for economic growth and productivity in the discourse of almost all political parties. at the same time, on the ground, many egyptians continue to engage in distributive practices that do not mesh with the logic of neoliberalism, microenterprise, and productivity.20 individual believers go into slums or low-income neighborhoods to hand out food, money, or blankets; many give their alms directly to the poor. and nura continues to cook every day. not only are these practices integral to social and economic life in egypt, they also can bring to light what is obscured in a continuous orientation toward the future. in everyday acts of distribution an implicit form of justice is lived and embodied, even if this is not the language the practitioners themselves would use. extending johannes fabian’s (2007, 117) insistence that “anthropology’s present and future task is to become a human science of presence,” we might ask what khidmas can teach us about being in the present—and being present to others. the giving of food is not immune to being subsumed within the capitalist market’s concern with productivity. companies like google and facebook provide free lunches to allow employees to socialize and generate ideas, and ngos justify food distribution through a language of calories and energy needed to craft industrious subjects.21 yet when development-oriented ngos in egypt hand out food, they are generally reluctant to do so, acknowledging the reality of “basic needs” but ultimately considering this act to be shortsighted: a bandage but not a solution. in khidmas, by contrast, the logic of sustenance and productivity is absent. here food is connected to baraka, divine blessings, and sharing food means becoming enmeshed in social relations and spiritual communities. the food that is shared is neither regulated nor calculated. it is about the here and now, not a better future. in this sense, the khidma and its mode of giving can help elucidate a different meaning of justice—one that “relate[s] to and stem[s] from human practice” rather than eternal truths (harvey 2009, 15). justice here does not mean that the rich ought to give to the poor but rather proceeds from acknowledging the profound dependency and interdependency of humans. we are all in need marcel mauss (1967) famously argued that no gift is truly free. each gift demands a counter-gift, enwrapping the recipient (and donor) in a relation of reciprocity. like her mother, nura is seemingly enmeshed in a relation of reciprocity with god. yet, she also emphasizes that one’s fate in the afterlife depends on god’s mercy (rahma), not one’s deeds.22 in this sense, giving at the khidma is a way of emulating god’s generosity rather than a way of attracting god’s generosity. nura draws on a qur’anic ethics according to which believers ought to try to imitate god who “made a gift of his surplus (fadl) and sustenance (rizq), without ever expecting it to be returned” (bonner 2005, 392). the problem with our “traditions” (taqālīd), says nura, is that people invite you because you invited them: they feel obligated. “what we do here is very different. we don’t expect anything in return. we do all this for god, li-llāh.” ultimately oriented toward god, in her everyday interactions nura gives without any conditions or expectations. thus, whereas many other egyptians, too, share food with neighbors, relatives, and beggars, the khidma implies a different kind of giving—one that disrupts the logic of reciprocity and obligation.23 at the same time, nura’s giving highlights our profound dependency. while food is central to the khidma, hunger (as physical need) is not nura’s main concern. when i asked her whether she thinks that most of her guests are poor and hungry, she pointed out that being in need (miskīn) does not mean lacking possessions. we’re all in need (masākīn), she says, and means that we all long for the divine. faqīr and miskīn are among the eight categories listed in the qur’an (9:60) as legitimate recipients of alms. faqīr is usually translated as “poor”; miskīn as “in need” or “destitute.” some muslim scholars take the terms to be synonymous (al-qardāwī 2006, 556). according to others, faqīr refers to the “passive poor, those who ask for nothing,” whereas miskīn refers to those who beg. others hold that faqīr refers to the “inner poor,” those whom we know, whereas miskīn refers to “the unsettling, ambiguous poor whom we may or may not know” (bonner 2005, 339, 402). in egypt today, the category of “the poor” is largely understood through an economic, material paradigm. employees at charity organizations define faqīr as someone unable to earn a living (e.g., someone with a physical disability) and miskīn as someone who merely lacks the resources to earn a living (e.g., someone unemployed). often, internationally recognizable standards are evoked: someone who makes less than three dollars a day is faqīr.24 nura draws on a different qur’anic understanding according to which poverty refers to the human condition more broadly. one qur’anic verse (35:15) calls humans those “in need of god” (literally, “poor toward god,” al-fuqāra’ illa allāh), whereas god is rich and self-sufficient (al-ghanī). nura insists that it is not economic need that drives people to the khidma. rather, her guests are drawn to the place because of its high level of spirituality. walking into the khidma differs drastically from turning to charity organizations for help. to become a registered recipient at a charity organization one needs to perform one’s poverty, present stacks of papers, and answer many questions. a successful applicant will receive about fifty egyptian pounds (us$7.50) per month or, at a different organization, might be offered a microloan to start a small business. nura, by contrast, serves food to whoever walks through her door. she expects nothing in return, not even gratitude. a retired army general who runs a khidma in sayyida zaynab, a low-income neighborhood in cairo, explained it this way: the main role of a khidma is giving food to whoever asks. regardless of who he is. [a large charity organization] came here once with clothes that they wanted to distribute, and they wanted a place here in sayyida zaynab. they told me “we sell our clothes to specific people, with a reduced price, so for example if someone in a car came down to buy something we would not sell it to him.” i told them i do the exact opposite: anyone who comes and asks me for a plate, i’ll give it to him. i don’t ask him whether he is an engineer or a doctor or whatever. it is enough for me that he tells me “give me [food] because i’m hungry.” so i feed him. although nura backgrounds hunger, she, too, never asks where her guests come from or why they do not work. everyone is welcome. many of the people who come to eat at nura’s house are dervishes, people who have left their home, dedicate their lives to a spiritual path, and often only own a couple of gallābiyyas and maybe a cell phone.25 dervishes visit khidmas to eat, sleep, and smoke shīsha (and sometimes hashish). many middle-class egyptians look down upon dervishes because they do not work, and friends repeatedly warned me not to talk to “people like that.” nura devotes most of her time to cooking and caring for such people. figure 3. a regular at nura’s khidma: a self-proclaimed dervish, illiterate, seventy-eight-year-old, previous owner of a coffee shop. photo by mona hein. the dervishes at the khidma are joined by guests from the countryside who are visiting saint shrines in the city. others have a home in cairo but enjoy spending time at the khidma because it is a place of dhikr, devotion to god. sometimes guests stay for weeks. the most long-term guest nura ever had stayed for twenty-five years. “and then?” i asked. “then he went home (rawwah),” said nura and shrugged her shoulders. nura never lays claim on her guests. they can come and go as they please. whereas charitable giving is often criticized for perpetuating structural inequalities, encouraging laziness, and placing the recipients in an inferior position (e.g., corbett and fikkert 2012; lupton 2012),26 nura’s insistence that we are all in need (masākīn) implies radical equality. along with the obligation to reciprocate, nura does away with the distinction between donor and recipient. “we are all in need” means that everyone is dependent. in nura’s view, moreover, when we give, the gift does not come from us but from god. both the donor and the recipient are mediums for divine distribution, obviating the very structure of reciprocity. allāh karīm, the writing on the gate, reminds visitors of who is really providing: “god is generous.” nura grows zucchinis and lemons in her garden, raises chicken and pigeons in an interior courtyard, and uses her father’s pension to pay for part of the khidma’s expenses but ultimately, she says, she relies on god. she never worries about what food she will serve the following day. when she runs out of supplies or money, she trusts that god will provide, concretely in the form of one of her guests bringing fruit, vegetables, bread, cigarettes, or tobacco to the khidma. other guests bring tapes with inshād music by sufi performers that everyone will then collectively listen to in the courtyard. others clean the bathrooms or sweep the floors. some help when a room needs to be renovated. whenever food items are brought to the khidma, they are immediately used and offered to guests. the embodied ethics that is put to work at the khidma does not negate the importance of addressing structural inequalities but throws into relief the deeply ethical (and political) potential inherent to the simple act of serving a meal to someone who is hungry—or someone who is simply there. tahrir utopia guests at the khidma eat, sleep, and drink tea. they talk. often they tell stories of miracles and divine interventions. how no birds can fly over the kaaba. how an astronaut saw two beams of light from space, one extending out from the al-aqsa mosque in jerusalem and one from the kaaba: he converted. frequently, in stories about saints, their generosity is highlighted, offering a model for emulation. one guest told me that hassan and hussain, the prophet muhammad’s grandsons, “did exactly what [nura] is doing. they had a house, gave out food, offered people a place to sleep. for three days in a row they gave food away to people without having anything to eat for themselves.” yet saints and miracles are not the only conversation topics. inevitably, in the months following the uprising, guests at times also started talking politics. they were, without exception, highly critical of the muslim brotherhood and worried about the effects of wahhabi influences on their religious practices.27 during the second round of the presidential elections in 2012, many people at the khidma expressed their strong support for ahmed shafiq, former commander of the egyptian air force, a veteran of the mubarak regime, and at that point the only rival candidate to mohammad morsi. sometimes at the khidma, the revolutionary and the miraculous merged. many of the dervishes emphasized that the 2011 uprising was god working through the people. others spoke of dream-visions they had seen before or during the uprising that reveal its spiritual dimensions. at other times, the political discussions were this-worldly and pragmatic. whenever nura’s guests talked politics (sometimes extensively and loudly), she remained silent. she never voiced an opinion on the revolution or the elections, and when i asked her whether she had been to any of the protests, she shook her head. da mish magālī; magālī al-akl wa-l-shurb. “that’s not my field; my field is food and drink.” nura’s practices do not aim to undermine class distinctions or to bring about structural change. her mode of being in the world is not oriented toward society but toward those who walk through her door.28 and yet, the kind of giving that nura practices and cultivates at the khidma resonates with what people found so extraordinary about tahrir square during the uprising: mutual care, sharing, openness, generosity, and an attunedness to others. stories about tahrir square and everyday life at the khidma are less about economic growth and more about a mode of togetherness in the present. tahrir—located today somewhere between nostalgia and utopia—is difficult to capture in words.29 but a number of egyptians from different class backgrounds and age groups, male and female, spoke to me in the summer of 2011 about feeling completely transformed by the protests and feeling connected to others in entirely new ways.30 many recall acts of sharing and solidarity: how people unable to join the protests delivered food, water, and blankets to the square; how women from the countryside distributed onions to help protesters recover from tear-gas attacks; how doctors volunteered their labor at field clinics; how young people swept the streets; and how, if someone ended up with a sandwich in her hands, she would share it with whoever was around her. an egyptian psychiatrist and activist commented to me on the irony of how questions that endless panel discussions and academic debates had been unable to solve—such as the question of whether islam is compatible with democracy, or how to build a pluralistic society—were resolved (or dissolved) at tahrir: people lived the answers. hamid, an activist in his thirties, told me that for him, tahrir is a “state of mind” and that he hopes that people will soon return to “living tahrir.” many noted that at tahrir they were getting a taste of the kind of society they were fighting for. tahrir square has continued to be a site of protest until recently, but its revolutionary potential has gradually become overshadowed by violence, frictions, sexual harassment, rape, and increasing polarization.31 over the months, the square has been witness to protests by different factions: muslim brotherhood supporters, liberals, and in july 2013, those cheering on the military. during the violent clashes in august 2013, tahrir square was eerily empty. the experience of openness and togetherness at the square today seems a distant memory. many have come to think of the original protests as “exceptional and singular”; a “moment out of the ordinary” (schielke 2012b, 201). nura’s day-to-day practice invites us to imagine a reversal: what if the togetherness practiced at tahrir were the norm, not the exception? according to hanan sabea, the experiences at the square enabled the imagining of “other modalities of being—in this case of the political and the social.”32 in the context of the occupy movement, the street has similarly been theorized as “a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines.”33 central to the occupy movement was the coming together of bodies “as both an effective protest tactic and a model of an alternative, directly democratic world” (juris 2012, 268). the new social and political forms that were being imagined—and made—at tahrir square seem to have to do, at least partially, with a new kind of togetherness, solidarity, and community beyond divisions related to class, age, gender, geographical background, religious affiliation, and lifestyle. concretely, the being-with at tahrir square found expression in the simple act of sharing food with, and attending to, others. and yet, the tahrir spirit was quickly erased after hosni mubarak’s fall in february 2011. hussein agrama notes that the egyptian uprising “opened up a space for people everywhere to actively imagine different possible futures and a new range of democratic possibilities. it is interesting then that despite the unprecedented nature of the egyptian protests and the enormous shake-up that they effected, egypt’s possible futures became so quickly circumscribed within a highly conventional, and narrow, narrative framework.”34 in the context described by agrama, a narrow framework imposes the question of whether egypt will be a secular or religious state. a similarly narrow framework reduces the protesters’ call for social justice to the call for a welfare state or economic growth. to redeem the sense of possibility, agrama draws attention to what he calls an “ethos of democratic sensibility,” which encompasses “mutual care, attunement to pain and distress, concern for truth, nonjudgmental disposition, and a tendency toward inclusion.”35 in trying to establish such an ethos, agrama suggests, one should be careful not to reinscribe the state’s monopoly on politics but instead listen carefully to what the revolutionary moment can teach us. building on, and extending, this invitation, i suggest that the khidma articulates an ethics of attunedness through practice. intimately related to this attunedness is an ethics of immediacy. while nura’s practice of giving does not sit easily with calls for economic growth or the return of a welfare state, it resonates with the tahrir utopia. in suggesting such resonances, i do not mean to imply that the egyptian uprising was inherently or secretively islamic (or that nura is a revolutionary without knowing it). nor do i want to revive the stereotypical notion of an all-encompassing egyptian (or arab or muslim) culture of hospitality.36 i am here less interested in the origins of sufi khidmas than in their effects—in what they do and offer in the present: the resources they can provide for reimagining. sufi khidmas have limitations too: their disinterest in structural inequalities, for instance, or the fact that not everyone knows that such spaces exist or where to find them. many middleand upper-class egyptians would never set foot in a khidma, let alone the city of the dead. sufism is often dismissed as “lower-class” and “not true islam.” dervishes are dismissed for not working. nura at times seemed to narrow the openness of the khidma by suggesting that only those spiritually pure enough are directed to her home. the differences nura highlights here are not tied to material concepts of wealth or productivity, and they are generally not discernible. regardless, the khidma is not for everyone but whoever shows up is welcome. more abstractly, an ethics of immediacy is limited because it is by definition not about society (or humanity) as a whole. the khidma is thus not about a perfect utopia per se but about a practice of care and mode of togetherness that resonates with tahrir-as-utopia. significantly, i do not predict that khidmas will become spaces of political mobilization. my point is rather that practices that occurred long before, during, and after the uprising can offer us resources for reflecting on the bounded experience of tahrir square, as well as on similar experiences at occupy or, more recently, taksim square. some of what tahrir square called for—togetherness in difference, justice, sharing, openness, possibility—already existed and still exists in spaces such as the khidma. conclusion a few months after the ouster of president mubarak, mysterious banners in black, white, and red appeared all over cairo. they announced in english (and less frequently, arabic), “from egyptian to egyptian: work is our only solution.” some bloggers compared the banners to nazi propaganda, recalling a line inscribed over the gates of the auschwitz concentration camp: “arbeit macht frei!” (work will set you free).37 although no one knew who had put up the banners, they echoed a common sentiment. almost without exception, egypt’s political parties in 2011 were emphasizing the importance of work, stability, economic growth, and foreign investments. many activists agreed that work is the only solution as only work could help egyptians reclaim their dignity. numerous egyptians had first joined the protests to demand the right to work and make a decent living. yet the call for work also came to be used by those wanting to quell the protests, most poignantly in demanding that the protesters should be working or looking for jobs instead of protesting. when i pointed out that the large protests usually happened on friday, a day off for many, i was told that even then these people should volunteer their work at factories instead of lingering at tahrir square. tracing a similar emphasis on productivity in social justice discourses, i have suggested that what prevented the tahrir utopia—and an according ethics of immediacy—from proliferating after the uprising was in part that visions of social justice had become too suffused with, or usurped by, a neoliberal ethos of individual empowerment and the call for economic growth. looking at the uprising from a sufi khidma reminds us that an emphasis on productivity can distract from questions of distribution. focusing on the future can distract from the present. spaces such as the khidma point to alternative temporalities, communities, modes of giving, and embodied practices of justice. they are helpful resources for a reimagining, especially at a time when “the prospects of achieving that which ‘tahrir’ stood for may seem precarious and under attack, and yet the cracks, the potentials and the imagination are even more important in egypt today, much as they are world-wide.”38 recall, then, that nura aims for a giving that demands nothing from the recipients. recall that she invites, and allows, others to participate in this giving. recall that she never asks the dervishes why they do not work. this does not mean that nura is against work. she, too, works when she cooks, and her guests work when they help her clean the space, chop garlic, and arguably even when they tell miracle-stories. yet the work that is performed at the khidma occurs outside of the market economy and is not understood as a sacrifice for the sake of a better future. the cooking, cleaning, and sharing are rather the very stuff of which the khidma is made. whereas many in egypt insist that economic growth has to come before justice, nura gives today without worrying about tomorrow. justice, let alone social justice, is not the language she would use to describe her practices, and yet justice is embodied in her very practice of giving. the kind of gifting enacted by nura is provocative because it evades the logic of reciprocity so often highlighted in the anthropology of the gift. while marcel mauss (1967, 66) called for a society in which “the rich should come once more, freely or by obligation, to consider themselves as the treasurers, as it were, of their fellow-citizen,” nura’s embodied ethics is even more radical by refusing the very distinction between rich and poor. to her the point is not attending to the other as an other, but being enmeshed in social and spiritual relations. underlying the ethics of immediacy at the khidma is the recognition that no one is autonomous and everyone is in need. by emphasizing that ultimately god gives through us, nura decenters the goal of building a society composed of self-sufficient, autonomous, productive individuals, or one divided into donors and recipients. giving is not based on an endless growth of the market but relies on god’s generosity (baraka). i have taken the liberty of bringing nura’s practices into conversation with tahrir-as-utopia. admittedly, many middleand upper-class egyptians would be reluctant to turn to khidmas for political-ethical inspiration. and yet the conversation that i have set up—between non-revolutionary spaces and the revolution—resonates with a line of exploration pursued by at least some egyptian activists. hamid, the activist who hopes people will return to “living tahrir,” at first was drawn to a language of development, rebuilding, and entrepreneurship but subsequently found this language too pre-scripted and began looking for alternatives. since the uprising he has been traveling throughout egypt to learn about local customs, art forms, and modes of storytelling. he and his friends have begun thinking about how local practices might contribute to imagining a different kind of society. hamid was deeply impressed by the hospitality that he encountered in places such as aswan and the siwa oasis. when i told him about nura and her always open doors, he was delighted to learn that such spaces exist in cairo too. it might be precisely in the seemingly most apolitical spaces that we can hear an echo of the openness resounding in the protesters’ original calls for social justice—an openness, not yet confined by party programs, calling for something altogether different. notes acknowledgments field research in egypt on which this article is based was supported by the wenner-gren foundation and the social sciences and humanities research council. the jackman humanities institute at the university of toronto supported the writing of the manuscript. naisargi dave, laura-zoe humphreys, katie kilroy-marac, and xochitl ruiz, as well as audiences at johns hopkins university, queen’s university, and memorial university provided critical feedback. i owe special thanks to alejandra gonzalez jimenez and julia elyachar. last, i am grateful to editors anne allison and charles piot, as well as cultural anthropology’s anonymous reviewers, for their constructive suggestions and encouragement. 1. whereas khidma (in the broader sense of service) is also central to coptic christian communities, this article focuses on muslim—and particularly sufi—practices of giving. sufism is often translated as islamic mysticism. in the egyptian context it refers to a range of practices centered on love for the prophet muhammad and his saintly descendants. sufism is widespread in egypt through and beyond sufi orders but is also widely dismissed as “not true islam.” historically, sufi orders have run various spaces of hospitality, sometimes only for their members but often also for travellers, students, or the general public. names for such hospices or lodges in different geographical contexts include khanqa, zāwiyya, and takiyya. 2. tahrir square is not simply the physical location in cairo where many key protests took place between january 25 and february 11, 2011 (and after that). tahrir is also a “state of mind,” as a young egyptian activist put it, and was evoked at protests elsewhere, such as when trafalgar square was performatively renamed london’s tahrir square. for anthropologists’ reflections on tahrir square from other locations, see winegar (2012), abu-lughod (2012), and ghannam (2012). 3. saba mahmood (2005) widens our understanding of politics by describing the political efficacy of an egyptian piety movement generally considered apolitical. asef bayat (2009) argues that practices of “quiet encroachment”—such as squatting and other attempts to acquire the basic necessities of life in unassuming, illegal ways—for a long time were politically more effective in the middle east than unions, political protests, or social movements. the khidma is neither linked to a social movement nor is it a form of quiet encroachment. yet, it too points to an “art of presence” (24) with ethical-political consequences. 4. i completed this essay in late august, 2013, after the military had ousted president mohamed morsi and killed over eight-hundred pro-morsi protesters. 5. nura is a pseudonym. i do not use the real name to honor the understanding that giving is best done in secret. mulūkhiyya, one of the food items listed above, is a staple food in egypt. it is a vegetable similar to spinach and is usually served in soup form and eaten with rice or bread. 6. i use the term “dream-vision” to translate the arabic ru’yā, which can refer to waking visions or divinely-inspired dreams. on the importance of dream-visions in sufi circles and beyond, see mittermaier (2011). 7. more broadly, many muslim thinkers reject the label “charity” and highlight differences between islamic responses to need that understand alms as the “right of the poor” (haqq al-faqīr), and christian models of charity that evoke the connotation of caritas, love, and generosity. nevertheless, the term charity is used widely in academic literatures to refer to muslim ngos, the practice of almsgiving, and the actual alms that are given. 8. bourdieu (1977) and derrida (1994) draw attention to the interval between gift and counter-gift. i highlight the temporal vector inherent to the gift itself—whether it is given with an eye toward the present or the future. 9. this chinese proverb is cited widely in egypt to justify future-oriented, strategic modes of giving. despite its gender bias, in actuality much strategic giving is geared toward women in egypt. 10. on different neoliberal processes in egypt, see dennis (2006), elyachar (2012), and hanieh (2012). notably, some called the egyptian revolution a revolution against neoliberalism (armbrust 2012); others pointed out that protesters themselves used a neoliberal language (maya mikdashi, “neoliberalism’s forked tongue,” jadaliyya, may 17, 2011, http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/1606/neoliberalisms-forked-tongue). 11. to the extent that it dictates deregulation, the restriction of public spending, and the erosion of the welfare state, neoliberalism seems by definition opposed to national development (edelman 2013). as julia elyachar (2002, 494) points out, the critique of development is accordingly no longer the exclusive domain of anti-globalization activists. by the year 2000, the world bank had itself taken on an anti-development stand and turned its attention to microloans, which function as the “inverse of development.” 12. in their reflections on a “millennial capitalism,” jean comaroff and john comaroff (2000) describe a seeming shortening of time brought about by high-speed transactions, the disruption of long-term strategies of capitalist accumulation, and the seemingly magical emergence (and disappearance) of wealth. 13. see also yasmin moll, “building the new egypt: islamic televangelists, revolutionary ethics and ‘productive’ citizenship.” hot spots (blog), may 23, 2013, cultural anthropology online, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/231-building-the-new-egypt-islamic-televangelists-revolutionary-ethics-and-productive-citizenship. 14. dar al-ifta’s online fatwa collection, “in support of the egyptian economy which is currently facing difficulties,” september 20, 2011, http://www.daralifta.org/viewstatement.aspx?id=384. my translation. 15. see qutb (2000) and shepard (1996). more recently, the theologian yusuf al-qardawi (2006, 900) notes that the point of obligatory alms-giving in islam is “not to provide a temporary solution to poverty but to achieve just distribution.” other muslim thinkers explicitly advocate an islamic socialism: see chapter three in tripp (2006). 16. provisional program of national salvation front, april 2013, p. 14. my translation. 17. for example, see haytham mohamad, “egypt two years after the revolution: social justice … poverty is still the same,” january 21, 2013, https://www.alsharq.net.sa/2013/01/21/684195. my translation. 18. statement by egypt’s revolutionary socialists, “no to dictatorship, no to trading on the revolution and the martyrs,” november 26, 2012, http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=30081. translation by anne alexander. on the revolutionary socialists’ views on differences between liberal, islamic, and socialist understandings of social justice, see dina ‘umar, “the concept of social justice and the conceptions of the political forces,” june 24, 2001, http://www.e-socialists.net/node/7047. my translation. 19. mustafa ‘arisha, “khaled ‘ali: the idea of social justice among the revolutionaries only means bringing back to trial the symbols of the previous regime,” april 2, 2013, http://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/157721. my translation. 20. soup kitchens, along with other informal spaces of distribution, can themselves be subsumed within the analytical framework of neoliberalism—as the inevitable effect of, and as complicit with, the state’s increasing withdrawal of social services. reading such practices through the lens of neoliberalism, however, erases the complex ethics at work—ethics that might be partially shaped by, but also exceed, the current historical moment. 21. on google, see james b. stewart, “looking for a lesson in google’s perks,” new york times online, march 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/16/business/at-google-a-place-to-work-and-play.html. 22. on the pervasive idea of working one’s way into paradise, found in other contexts in egypt, see mittermaier (2013) and schielke (2012a). 23. comparatively, for discussions of dan as a non-reciprocal gift, see bornstein (2012), laidlaw (2000), and parry (1986). 24. on the making and management of “poverty” as a category in egypt, see mitchell (2002) and elyachar (2005). for histories and ethnographies of poverty in egypt, see sabra (2000), singerman (1995), and wikan (1996). 25. a gallābiyya is a loose, full-length gown with wide sleeves, worn by working-class men and peasants. 26. see also slavoj žižek’s critique of charity, “rsa animate: first as tragedy, then as farse,” rsa website, august 4, 2010, http://www.thersa.org/events/rsaanimate/animate/rsa-animate-first-as-tragedy,-then-as-farce. 27. wahhabism is a conservative, literalist reform movement, originating in saudi arabia and spreading throughout the muslim world. emphasizing the oneness of god (tawhīd), wahhabi reformers tend to denounce sufi devotion to the prophet and his descendants. 28. housewives and parents might similarly say their care is not oriented toward society as a whole but toward those in their home. the difference is that nura’s ethics of immediacy extends to guests and strangers. this kind of care is not clearly gendered in egypt. men as well as women run khidmas. 29. see reem saad, “reflections on the egyptian revolution.” hot spots (blog), april 23, 2013, cultural anthropology online, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/241-reflections-on-the-egyptian-revolution. 30. i draw on conversations, from the summer and fall of 2011, with egyptians who participated in the uprising. many of these conversations took place at tahrir square, which was re-occupied in july and for part of august. interlocutors told stories while strolling through the square, as if inspired by the space and the memories it holds. 31. in other words, the emphasis on communitas at tahrir should not blind us to (later) frictions and exclusions. see the reflections by the egyptian blogger sandmonkey, “tahrir: an exercise in nation-building,” rantings of a sandmonkey (blog), july 16, 2011, http://www.sandmonkey.org/2011/07/16/tahrir-an-exercise-in-nation-building/. 32. hanan sabea, “a ‘time out of time’: tahrir, the political and the imaginary in the context of the january 25th revolution in egypt,” hot spots (blog), may 9, 2013, cultural anthropology online, http://culanth.org/fieldsights/211-a-time-out-of-time-tahrir-the-political-and-the-imaginary-in-the-context-of-the-january-25th-revolution-in-egypt. 33. saskia sassen, “the global street comes to wall street,” occupy movement (blog), november 22, 2011, possible futures website, http://www.possible-futures.org/2011/11/22/the-global-street-comes-to-wall-street/. 34. hussein agrama, “asecular revolution,” immanent frame (blog). march 11, 2011, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/03/11/asecular-revolution/. 35. ibid. 36. the arab culture of hospitality has become a token in guidebooks and is evoked in philosophical and orientalist writings. see, for instance, derrida’s (2001) discussion of massignon. 37. see margaret litvin, “‘work is our only solution!’” send down the basket (blog), october 3, 2011, http://margaretlitvin.com/2011/10/03/work-is-the-only-solution/ and elaine ursula ettmueller, “egyptian to egyptian: work is our only solution!” egyptian letters (blog), september 24, 2011, http://egyptianletters.blogspot.ca/2011/09/from-egyptian-to-egyptian-work-is-our.html. 38. sabea, “a ‘time out of time.’” references abu-lughod, lila 2012 “living the ‘revolution’ in an egyptian village: moral action in a national space.” american ethnologist 39, no. 1: 21–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01341.x. al-qardāwī, yūsuf 2006 fiqh al-zakāt: darāsa muqārina li-ahkāmiha wa-falsafatiha fi daw’ al-qur’ān wa al-sunna. cairo: maktabat al-wahba. armbrust, walter 2012 “the revolution against neoliberalism.” in the dawn of the arab uprisings: end of an old order?, edited by bassam haddad, rosie bsheer, and ziad abu-rish, 113–23. london: pluto press. atia, mona 2008 “building a house in heaven: islamic charity in neoliberal egypt.” phd dissertation. university of washington. 2012 “‘a way to paradise’: pious neoliberalism, islam, and faith-based development.” annals of the association of american geographers 102, no. 4: 808–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.627046. bayat, asef 2009 life as politics: how ordinary people change the middle east. cairo: american university in cairo press. berlant, lauren, ed. 2004 compassion: the culture and politics of an emotion. new york: routledge. bonner, michael 2005 “poverty and economics in the qur'an.” journal of interdisciplinary history 35, no. 3: 391–406. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/0022195052564270. bornstein, erica 2012 disquieting gifts: humanitarianism in new delhi. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. bornstein, erica, and peter redfield, eds. 2011 forces of compassion: humanitarianism between ethics and politics. santa fe, n.m.: sar press. bourdieu, pierre 1977 outline of a theory of practice. new york: cambridge university press. comaroff, jean, and john l. comaroff 2000 “millenial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming.” public culture 12, no. 2: 291–343. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-2-291. corbett, steve, and brian fikkert 2012 when helping hurts: how to alleviate poverty without hurting the poor … and yourself. chicago: moody publishers. dennis, eric 2006 “cairo as neoliberal capital? from walled city to gated communities.” in cairo cosmopolitan: politics, culture, and urban space in the globalized middle east, edited by diane singerman and paul amar, 47–72. new york: american university in cairo press. derrida, jacques 1994 given time: i. counterfeit money. chicago: university of chicago press. 2001 acts of religion. new york: routledge. edelman, mark 2013 “development.” in handbook of sociocultural anthropology, edited by james g. carrier and deborah b. gewertz, 259–79. oxford: berg. elyachar, julia 2002 “empowerment money: the world bank, non-governmental organizations, and the value of culture in egypt.” public culture 14, no. 3: 493–513. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-3-493. 2005 markets of dispossession: ngos, economic development, and the state. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2012 “before (and after) neoliberalism: tacit knowledge, secrets of trade, and the public sector in egypt.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 1: 76–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01127.x. fabian, johannes 2007 memory against culture: arguments and reminders. durham, n.c.: duke university press. fassin, didier 2012 humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. berkeley: university of california press. ghannam, farha 2012 “meanings and feelings: local interpretations of the use of violence in the egyptian revolution.” american ethnologist 39, no. 1: 32–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01343.x. guyer, jane e. 2007 “prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time.” american ethnologist 34, no. 3: 409–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409. hafez, sherine 2011 “women developing women: islamic approaches to poverty.” feminist review 97, no. 1: 56–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.38. hanieh, adam 2012 “egypt’s orderly transition: international aid and the rush to structural adjustment.” in the dawn of the arab uprisings: end of an old order?, edited by bassam haddad, rosie bsheer, and ziad abu-rish, 124–36. london: pluto press. harvey, david 2007 a brief history of neoliberalism. oxford: oxford university press. 2009 social justice and the city. athens: university of georgia press. jackson, ben 2005 “the conceptual history of social justice.” political studies review 3, no. 3: 356–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-9299.2005.00028.x. juris, jeffrey s. 2012 “reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation.” american ethnologist 39, no. 2: 259–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x. laidlaw, james 2000 “a free gift makes no friends.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 6, no. 4: 617–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.00036. lupton, robert d. 2012 toxic charity: how churches and charities hurt those they help (and how to reverse it). new york: harperone. macintyre, alasdair 1988 whose justice? which rationality? notre dame, ind.: university of notre dame press. mahmood, saba 2005 politics of piety: the islamic revival and the feminist subject. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. mauss, marcel 1967 the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. new york: w.w. norton. mitchell, timothy 2002 rule of experts: egypt, techno-politics, modernity. berkeley: university of california press. mittermaier, amira 2011 dreams that matter: egyptian landscapes of the imagination. berkeley: university of california press. 2013 “trading with god: islam, calculation, excess.” in a companion to the anthropology of religion, edited by janice boddy michael lambek, 274–93. oxford: blackwell. parry, jonathan 1986 “the gift, the indian gift, and the ‘indian gift,’” man 21, no. 3: 453–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2803096. povinelli, elizabeth 2012 economies of abandonment: social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. qutb, sayyid 2000 social justice in islam. translated by john b. hardie. oneonta, n.y.: islamic publications international. roy, ananya 2010 poverty capital: microfinance and the making of development. new york: routledge. sabra, adam 2000 poverty and charity in medieval islam: mamluk egypt, 1250–1517. cambridge: cambridge university press. schielke, samuli 2012a “capitalist ethics and the spirit of islamization in egypt.” in ordinary lives and grand schemes: an anthropology of everyday religion, edited by samuli schielke and liza debevec, 131–45. oxford: berghahn. 2012b the perils of joy: contesting mulid festivals in contemporary egypt. syracuse, n.y.: syracuse university press. shepard, william e. 1996 sayyid qutb and islamic activism: a translation and critical analysis of social justice in islam. leiden: brill. singerman, diane 1995 avenues of participation: family, politics, and networks in urban quarters of cairo. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. tripp, charles 2006 islam and the moral economy: the challenge of capitalism. cambridge: cambridge university press. wikan, unni 1996 tomorrow, god willing: self-made destinies in cairo. chicago: university of chicago press. winegar, jessica 2012 “the privilege of revolution: gender, class, space and affect in egypt.” american ethnologist 39, no.1: 67–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01349.x. occupy wall street and the economic imagination occupy wall street and the economic imagination hannah appel university of california, los angeles as occupy wall street took root in lower manhattan in the fall of 2011, those opposed to it, or merely skeptical, would often ridicule participants: but don’t you like your iphone? twitter seems to be working pretty well for you. their derision echoes cynicisms directed at abolitionists: but you wear cotton clothing; you put sugar in your tea (moore and gihon 1843; hochschild 2006).1 in these taunts, the enslavement of africans and the financial services industry both “attach their moral legitimacy to productivity” as karen ho (2012) puts it. in other words, taunts regarding the utility and ubiquity of cotton or ipads mean to suggest that the existence of these commodities is inextricable from their respective economic systems, inferring that commodities central to nineteenth-century life—cotton, sugar—were unimaginable without enslavement, while twenty-first-century ipads depend on short-term, derivatives-heavy finance. we now know that it is possible to produce cotton and sugar without enslavement. and yet, despite both scholarly and popular analyses showing that finance’s focus on “short-term shareholder value and large-scale gambling has actually diverted, transferred, and extracted wealth from productive enterprises,” the ridicule directed at occupy betrays shared doubt about the possibility of producing useful commodities or technological innovation without predatory finance (ho 2012, citing davis 2009; krippner 2011; ott 2011). the taunts, then, are directed at what we might call our economic imaginations; they aim to shape the possibilities and alternatives, foreclosures and deferrals through which we have come, unevenly, to understand capitalism in the present moment. this article explores the making of an expansive and expanding economic imagination in disparate occupy sites—the alternative banking working group of occupy wall street (ows), the daily life of lists in zuccotti park and beyond, and the work of strike debt. in particular, i focus on transformative possibility in unanticipated places. where anthropology and critical theory have often sought out capitalism’s otherwises for inspiration and potential, the expansion of the economic imagination i trace in this essay suggests that the centers constitute zones of possibility as well—that the unpredictability and indeed tactical overdetermination of mortgage-backed securities and those who trade them, of secondary and tertiary debt markets, even of the contract form itself, make room for alternate possibilities and futures. in the article’s first section i juxtapose the expertise-laden space of the alternative banking group with the work of j. k. gibson-graham, david graeber, and eric olin wright. by following some of the alt banking participants from their pre-crisis understandings of their work in finance through their personal experiences of 2008 and its aftermath into their participation in occupy wall street, i aim to show the conditions of possibility for a certain kind of imaginative work in the dense and seemingly definitive spaces of financial expertise. in the second section, with a playful mashup of milton friedman and anna tsing, i turn to what these conditions of possibility produce—the opportunity to proliferate “ideas lying around,” in friedman’s words. the conclusion turns to a question that has preoccupied occupy since the beginning—what does direct action on the financial system look like? what does it mean, in finance, to act as if the tools were already your own? put another way, once the economic imagination is opened up, where does it go? what might a radical reimagination or democratization of finance look like? alt banking the alternative banking working group of occupy wall street meets every sunday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. in a seminar room in the department of economics at columbia university.2 though attendance varies, most weeks see a group of about twenty or so gathered around large tables to discuss topics proposed by participants in advance—sovereign debt, libor (london interbank offered rate), the mortgage settlement, mf global, usury laws, fractional reserve banking, the consumer financial protection bureau, private equity continuing to gobble up foreclosures, and, at a recent meeting, the action-oriented topic “let’s make a point to challenge isda [international swaps and derivatives association], shall we?”3 meetings are tightly organized and thick with often arcane financial content.4 concurrent breakout discussions spin around value at risk modeling, the difference between prop desks and flow desks, or the eminent domain issues that would arise if mortgages became dischargeable in bankruptcy. some of us lob questions into the fray—what does it mean to say that the financial sector is an overhead cost and should not be considered productive income toward gdp? why were the shortcomings of basel 1.5 integral to bank failures? meetings end with each breakout group reporting back, and a discussion of who will bottom-line the action items that emerged at the meeting—who is going to find a developer for the move your money app? who is revising the financial system 101 flier for may day? who has committed to disrupting the mortgage settlement hearing? who is going to the jay street puppet guild to build the mf global puppets? cathy o’neil, the group’s de facto leader, received her math phd from harvard in 1999, after which she taught briefly at mit and barnard. unhappy in academic math, she soon moved into the private sector to work as a quantitative analyst and risk modeler, first at a boutique hedge fund, and later at a market risk analysis firm.5 though membership has evolved during the group’s now three-year span, many of its early core participants had industry backgrounds similar to cathy’s—current and former mortgage-backed securities traders; financial accounting and risk-management experts; bankers, bank analysts and data crunchers; a bevy of economists and economics professors; securities and tax lawyers; and so on. between them they have worked for arthur anderson, banker’s trust, chase manhattan, citibank, deutsche bank, de shaw, drexel burnham, goldman sachs, hsbc, moody’s investor services, salomon smith barney, riskmetrics, société générale, swiss bank, and a variety of private equity firms, law firms, universities, and colleges. of course there are others of us in the group too—the curious anthropologist ever-willing to take minutes, small business owners, labor activists, retirees, freelance writers and journalists, a credit union activist, educators and students, an architect, a professional figure skater, quite a few unemployed folks, and so forth. i foreground the finance insiders here because the experiences of disenchantment and radicalization that led them to occupy wall street lead us into the unexpected—surprising collaborations, openings, fissures, and potentials. on this unexpected terrain of occupy meetings with a wide array of finance insiders in the columbia university department of economics, we find the unpredictability of the actors and forms of expertise we have come to associate with euro-american capitalism’s contemporary center—derivatives and those who structure them, risk and those who model it, mortgage-backed securities and those who evaluate them. this in turn suggests that the conditions of possibility for an expansive economic imagination lie not only in an otherwise but can also emerge from surprising lines of flight out of the very center. this anti-essentialist understanding of capitalism must then be added to the work of gibson-graham, graeber, and wright, among others, each of whom asks us to look to capitalism’s interstices for zones of possibility or prefigurative institutions and practices. in the end of capitalism (as we knew it), gibson-graham (1996, 260) aimed to give capitalism an anti-essentialist identity crisis. they asked, “if categories like subjectivity and society can undergo a radical rethinking . . . where a presumed fixity previously existed, can’t we give capitalism an identity crisis as well?” the book aims to incite this crisis discursively and empirically, partially by pointing out that what we call capitalism is always already constituted by noncapitalist forms of economy found within it—state allocations; the household; cooperatives; unions. in drawing attention to these noncapitalist forms within capitalism, gibson-graham locate possibility and potentiality for radical change in capitalism’s constitutive others. graeber (2011) too, in revolutions in reverse, reminds us of archipelagos of occupied factories in paraguay or argentina, self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in india, autonomous institutes in korea, and whole insurgent communities in chiapas or bolivia. finally, in envisioning real utopias, wright (2010, 367) draws our attention to wikipedia, linux, mondragon, participatory budgeting in porto alegre, or unconditional basic income programs, noting that “economic structures are always hybrids.” he goes on to insist that “all actually existing contemporary economic systems are complex configurations of capitalist, statist, and socialist forms. . . . within such configurations, to call an economic structure ‘capitalist’ is to identify the dominant form of power within this configuration.” each of these authors draws our attention to hybridity, constitutive outsides, and the transformative possibility found in the full analytical and political recognition of this diversity-within-capitalism. in complement to that approach, attention to the trajectories of alt banking participants demonstrates that the imagined centers around which this hybridity is arrayed are themselves porous, unpredictable, and full of potential energy. alt bankers i found it difficult to choose whose stories to tell more completely of the participants i came to know in alt banking: that of suresh, the ivy league anarchist economics professor? of cathy, the feminist quant-jock risk modeler and mother of three? or robert, the gay black private-equity ceo who began one of our shared meals by declaring, “you cannot cannot cannot continue to have scruffy, unwashed pierced kids as the face of this movement! you need black ladies with pocket books and industrialists and shopkeepers!” ultimately i chose participants i will call andrew and patrick, largely because of their professional trajectories in the pith of contemporary finance and its discontents—mortgage-backed securities and market-risk reporting, respectively. however, because both andrew and patrick identify as white males, i risk furthering the figuration of finance as a white male face framed by a gray suit. as with the figure of marx’s manchester worker (see tsing 2009), “the banker” or “the financier” is most often imagined as white, male, and straight. and indeed, demographically, this holds true for certain categories of finance professionals (ho 2009). yet in alt banking meetings, rather than a room full of the straight white men who inhabit our figurative imaginations, participants are mostly women. the men who participate are often gay, and certainly not always white. as cathy once remarked to me, “there are very few women in finance, but there are a lot of women in alt banking, and there are a lot of gay men. originally it surprised me . . . but then i thought, of course, they are outsiders. the very thing that kept us from fully integrating into that mind-set is exactly what motivates us to be occupiers.” while i focus at length on questions of gender in alt banking elsewhere (appel 2014), andrew’s and patrick’s stories become interesting in part because their gendered and racialized positions could have allowed them to “fully integrate into that mind-set,” and yet they too found themselves around the table at columbia on sundays. karen ho (2012) and caitlin zaloom (2012) both point out that those who work in finance consider it an ethical field, defined not by greed or reckless immorality, but by individual and collectively held visions of social purpose, including, though not limited to, the financing of useful goods and services (the cotton/ipad argument), the support of innovation, and the embodiment of market efficiency itself.6 andrew and patrick inhabited these ethical fields and worked conscientiously on their behalf, but they found themselves disillusioned in the wake of financial crisis. some in alt banking initially responded to their disillusion with nostalgia for a spectral past—when investment banks were still partnerships and not corporations; when the glass-steagall act still separated commercial and investment banking; when no one had ever heard of a leveraged super senior tranche of a collateralized debt obligation. andrew and patrick, however, reacted less with nostalgia than with something resembling a loss of faith. they experienced anguish, certainly, but also the accompanying glimmer of transformative possibility. theirs are stories of loss and transformation; of isolation, searching, and eventually finding solidarity. they are stories about the conditions of possibility for a certain vitality of the economic imagination. andrew andrew is a securities lawyer in his late forties, white, and straight. in alt banking meetings he appeared quiet and watchful, though when he chose to speak, he was among the group’s most insightful participants. after i had come to know him during months of meetings, andrew began our first interview by stating, unsolicited, “i’ve been conservative most of my life.” in the late eighties, immediately out of law school, andrew was hired by a firm that specialized in what was then an obscure area of law known as mortgage-backed securities (mbs). as he explained, mbs “is real estate law, commercial code, bankruptcy law, and securities law all rolled into a single deal. in a very wonky way, it was very interesting stuff to be involved in.” echoing ho and zaloom, andrew was not only involved in mbs for intellectual stimulation, however. “early on, i thought about what kind of work i was doing and why. it was my sense that there’s a lot of stuff in finance that doesn’t create value, that’s paper pushing back and forth. but mortgages are helping people buy homes. an efficient mortgage market lowers rates for borrowers and makes ownership more widely available; mbs enabled this.” understanding his work in ethical terms, andrew differentiated mbs from financial practices that, in his estimation, did not create value. he conceived of securities as a tool that made the mortgage market more efficient, which in turn lowered costs to home buyers and democratized home ownership. during the following two decades andrew stayed in the mbs line of work, and by the 2000s he was senior management at a bond insurance firm. by this time mbs was no longer obscure, but had been growing steadily—and then exploded with the subprime industry. as institutional investors poured 401k and pension-fund money into the mbs market starting roughly in 2004, bankers began talking about a “wall of money” serving to insure the viability of subprime investments. as a consequence, the insurance services that andrew’s company sold became less popular and company profits dipped. during that time the board pressured andrew to do more mbs deals, and to overlook his findings that, despite their aaa ratings, 10 to 20 percent of any mortgage-backed pool would likely default. three years later, when new century declared bankruptcy in 2007, andrew said, “that was the end.” i quote him at length: for six months we ran around telling each other and our investors that everything would be fine. but by september 2007 i told the ceo that we should tell everyone we’re going to take a $500 million loss and we’ll be ok and move on. the ceo looked me in my face and said, “we can’t do that.” from that point on the company was engaged in a series of falsifications and half steps, as was everyone else. it was an awful position to be in. i was totally devastated. i showed up for my daughter’s birthday party, and my friends said i looked like a terrorist. i was being told to lie, which i didn’t. everyone in my world knew by september 2008 that structured finance and commercial paper were frozen. they knew well in advance of it actually blowing up, and they told lies all along the way. until today, my industry is in denial. “we didn’t do anything wrong. it was fannie and freddie.” no, it wasn’t. it was you. i know it was me. that’s how i know it was you. when it all came crashing down, andrew felt both personally responsible (“i know it was me”) and terrified: “i didn’t have any idea what i was going to do or how i was going to support my family.” at the same time, however, he was incredulous at the responses of those around him, which listed toward dishonesty, denial, and outright ignorance. “people in my business said they were so smart. they told us they’d find a way out. they lied to employees, outside parties. they learned how to couch their statements in ways that are not actionable lies, but lies nonetheless.” at work, andrew increasingly voiced his opinions—that the company needed to confront what was happening, take the loss openly, and move on. his bosses targeted him for his openness: everyone who worked for him was fired, and eventually andrew lost his job as well. out of work and shocked at the responses of those around him, andrew reached out to former colleagues to make sense of what was happening, but noticed that “once i lost my job, most didn’t call me. they couldn’t even talk to me. it was that palpable, as if i was contagious and they would catch it.” eventually, outrage and isolation led to what andrew described as radicalization. “the first step in my radicalization was watching bankers blaming reckless borrowers for the actual crisis, which struck me as total bullshit. the lenders made the decision to lend. the borrowers had just asked.” andrew began to write articles, the first before tarp (troubled asset relief program) was allocated,7 saying that it should be used to pay down mortgages (which of course it was not), and a second about the need to enforce the law against industry insiders perpetuating fraud. though in his estimation his articles said “sensible and informed things, conservative things,” conservatives in fact rejected his ideas with vitriol. “people flipped out at me. that’s when i left the republican party.” writing in isolation, andrew waited a long time to find people with similar views. “i felt like i had been occupying for a while,” he explained. “i went by liberty square a bunch of times. it was awesome to see people. . . . by 2011 things were worse than they had been, and occupy gave me a sense that something was coming.” andrew’s intimate experience of the crash shows the anguish that accompanies such profound rupture, but also the situated emergence of certain forms of opposition, critique, and resistance. as was common to other alt banking participants as well, he recontextualized the assumptions and uses of his expertise, making them newly available for debate and repurposing. as he recounts it above, andrew initially tried to share his understanding with his colleagues, but to no avail. his expertise and insider positionality then edged into the public domain as he started to write articles about tarp and the need to prosecute the white-collar crime to which he was witness. when that first move toward the public was greeted with hostility by its intended audience, andrew found himself in zuccotti park, and, later, a member of the alt banking working group. now, as i describe briefly below, he is an activist lawyer working to expose the “systemic holes in the private property regime.” this trajectory of andrew’s expertise follows an argument timothy mitchell (2011, 241) has recently made, that “democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private,” including those issues once thought determined by market laws. andrew’s experience of the financial crisis moved his expertise to the other side of the private/public demarcation, and into a realm in which he confronted the unimaginable, or what he describes below as “the end of the world”—the extent to which private property in the united states can now be called into question. andrew’s radicalization eventually led him beyond reformist advocacy for the allocation of public funds to struggling homeowners and the call to prosecute white-collar crime to a more radical approach in which his expertise could expose extant fissures in the u.s. system of private property. as he explained, in the mbs/subprime blitz, lenders and servicers paid no attention “to the details that i had worked on for twenty years. they were bringing foreclosure actions in the wrong name, the wrong parties, for the wrong amounts.” andrew described the contractual veracity of mortgage-backed securities as “vapor”—“no one owns what they think they own. not investors, not banks. we have so severely screwed up the property records that we don’t know how to sort them out again.” as he began this work, andrew met with the inspectors general of fannie mae and freddie mac to discuss the property records situation, and reported that “everyone says the same thing: acknowledging the systemic holes in the private property regime is the nuclear option, the end of the world.” based on this precarity of private property nationwide, andrew is now using his expertise, alongside other lawyers, to bring a class-action suit, the breadth of which could easily render most of the tbtf (too big to fail) banks insolvent, among other transformative possibilities. as andrew’s ethical field melted around him, his tools became newly available for contestation and alternative mobilizations. just as the ethical embodiments of finance are dynamic and subject to rupture, so too are the legal and other infrastructures we often take as central to capitalism itself—here, private property claims refracted through a speculative, reckless securities market. once we recognize the fragility and multivalence of finance’s ethical and infrastructural landscape, we can start to see it as a realm of unpredictability and possibility, not only one of rationalization and foreclosure. we can start, as andrew has done, to imagine. patrick patrick also regularly participated in the alt banking meetings. unlike andrew, who was socially reserved and who closely guarded his time and personal life, patrick was a bon vivant who routinely joined the group for drinks after meetings, where he would laugh and joke openly about what he called his “messy little life” as an irish catholic, once-married-to-a-woman parent, now single and gay in manhattan. patrick worked for more than twenty years at a number of wall street banks in financial accounting and market-risk reporting, and like andrew, he understood his work in ethical terms. running new products committees throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when structured finance was just gaining popularity, patrick felt that derivatives would transform banking by leading to the democratization of credit. recalling hard economic times in his own childhood, patrick explained, in the sixties and seventies, it was so hard for my parents to get a credit card or a loan to tide them over. we were six kids. what do you do when you can’t afford a car? derivatives created new sources of funds to make loans available to normal people, which i thought was a good thing—and i still do. before this kind of credit there was a tyranny of the banks. my mother was so worried that we were going to get thrown out of the house because she was behind on the mortgage and someone had to go to the dentist. [the credit enabled by derivatives] was a release from tyranny. ironically, now we’re in the opposite situation. patrick found his initial ethical footing in finance amid ideas about the democratization of credit, but as his time in the industry continued, he described himself as increasingly jaded. after being laid off in 2000, for example, he rented an office in midtown manhattan and spent a year trading options on his own. at first, he experienced this work as simply boring; with time, it grew to horrify him. “my most profitable day was september 11th. i was short going in, and all my positions paid off. that made me feel like shit. irony on top of irony; it never ends.” after 9/11, patrick went back to work for a variety of firms, and developed a straightforward, critical grasp of both the ever-changing instruments in structured finance and of the bankers who use them: “you can do anything in the world and call it a swap. you’re making a new structure from an existing structure. [you can say,] ‘i want all the non-hispanic borrowers in queens.’ anything you want you can get. [leading up to the crisis] regulators looked the other way because they didn’t understand.” patrick watched as bankers used these instruments against those he had imagined they would benefit—people like his mother and father struggling between dental bills, mortgages, and car payments. he watched his coworkers scream and jump for joy, celebrating “how they fucked those stupid rubes.” patrick came to recognize this level of intentional exploitation as normal. “it’s not evil to them. that’s the business. [it’s as if they say,] ‘i’m lying and if you’re stupid enough to believe me, then fuck you, you’re fair game.’ this isn’t a radical observation,” patrick continued. “that’s the way it is” (see also chirls 2013; smith 2012). over the years patrick routinely cast around for an ethical position in a line of work that he found intellectually stimulating, lucrative, and deeply problematic all at once. after the enron scandal erupted and toothy federal legislation on corporate accounting emerged in its wake,8 patrick began to get involved in compliance, work he described as “the closest thing to the good side in banking.” from 2006 to 2009, patrick worked for one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations—also among the largest subprime lenders—in accounting and fraud compliance. “when things started to melt down,” he recalled, “i became the go-to guy in my group about what the hell was going on in the portfolio.” like andrew, patrick had real knowledge about the precise investment vehicles suddenly at issue. as the crisis unfolded, he realized that others trading these instruments had no idea how they were structured, and to what possible effect. “instruments that no one had ever heard of were crashing the markets. [people were coming to me and asking,] ‘what the fuck is an lss tranche?’ it was so arcane, and most people didn’t know what these things were.” also like andrew, patrick’s intimate experience of the crisis mixed personal loss with disbelief at the responses of those around him, an environment in which he described “people walking around as if everything is normal when the world is crumbling around you.” he analogized the experience to m. night shyamalan’s 1999 film the sixth sense, implying a plot in which the world had actually been crumbling for a long time, but people simply had not recognized they were already dead. because of his position in accounting and compliance, “accountants were immediately coming into my office, trying to figure out how to reclassify these things, so they could avoid instant losses.” in other words, as the firm hemorrhaged money, people came to patrick to ask how to move money out of trading books, how to transfer deals into other categories to defer or simply obscure the losses: “you’re cooking your books elegantly, and with the full support of the accounting community.” as accountants “elegantly” cooked their books, much like those in andrew’s firm who told nonactionable lies, patrick described his personal experience as one of “unmitigated disaster. it felt like life as i know it will come to an end over the next decade. i’m going to be broke and out of work. my grandparents’ great depression fears are coming full circle. it felt like chaos, melting, like things were going to completely break down.” given the profundity of his own experience, patrick expected riots, panic in the streets. he was shocked when this did not happen, when the general public seemed to swallow the narratives they were told and to go on with life as usual. patrick speculated that “it’s overwhelming for people to understand the magnitude of what is still happening. today government programs are keeping this edifice from crumbling completely, but it’s shaky.” in the absence of the massive public response he was expecting, patrick began to look for others who knew what was going on and wanted to talk about it in what he understood to be honest and critical ways. when he found yves smith’s blog naked capitalism, he began an extensive online dialogue and eventually a friendship with her, and it was yves—herself an active early member of alt banking—who eventually brought patrick into the group. “i went to zuccotti park one afternoon. i walked around. i was inspired. i wanted in, but i wasn’t sure how to do it. yves called me one day because they were working on the volcker rule, and we went to work. philosophically, alt banking fit with what i was doing my whole career. . . . i wanted to do something good and useful. something i could be proud of, that i could tell my kids. they think it’s so cool. i know this is the right thing to do.” in introducing andrew and patrick, i suggested that their stories trace the conditions of possibility for a certain vitality of the economic imagination. theirs are stories of crisis—personal and professional, certainly—but rather than wading into the anthropological literature on crisis (mbembe and roitman 1995; roitman 2011, 2014), i use these narratives to trace what became possible in the lives of specifically situated individuals. i trace where their experiences moved them—from privately held and rewarded expertise through morphing ethical fields where their own rationalities began to melt around them, out into the public, and finally toward radicalization and transformative possibility. most narrowly, their experiences led them to the alt banking group of occupy wall street, where they participated every week in lively debates about what it would take to unwind the bank of america, whether or not iceland really was an alternative model for approaching financial malfeasance, or what, precisely, we meant when we envisioned the radical democratization of finance. more broadly, however, andrew’s and patrick’s experiences produce a public, not only by their presence in zuccotti park or weekly alt banking meetings, but in hannah arendt’s sense of the spaces of appearance.9 the polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. . . . it is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where i appear to others as others appear to me. . . . wherever people gather together, [this space of appearance] is potentially there, but only potentially. not necessarily and not forever. (arendt 1998, 198–99) as andrew and patrick, among many others in alt banking and beyond, brought their expertise across the line limned by mitchell above, they created a new kind of public, one in which it was possible to act and speak together about new things or old things in new ways—the fragility of private property, the vulnerability of the bank of america, the overlap of multiple ethical worlds in which nonactionable lies, accounting tricks, and the intentional exploitation of “stupid rubes” drain pension funds of value, kick people out of their homes, and subject entire municipalities to radical austerity programs as manipulated bonds lose all value. where finance as a professional field is already constituted by experimentation and imaginative thinking, that expansiveness is bounded by the private pursuit of profit and attendant forms of ownership—proprietary experimentation, and creativity closely guarded by the exigencies of competition. bringing that experimentation across the line into the public, into dialogues with new participants, ethics, and desired ends, introduces new possibilities of the polis in arendt’s sense. it is in this acting and speaking together, and in these ideas-in-the-world—questions, tactics, strategies, debates, and wonderments—that an immanent notion of the economic imagination lies, an imagination “entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects in the material world, and as such, [are] always changing and adapting” (graeber 2011, 53). arendt’s idea of the polis as the spaces of appearance, and the proliferation of ideas that become possible there, bring us out from alt banking into the wider ecology of the economic imagination as it emerges in occupy. ideas-in-the-world become possible, alive, and full of new urgency and anxiety as unlikely groups meet to form and reform the polis from zuccotti park to columbia’s economics department to strike debt’s debtors’ assemblies in new york, california, or illinois. it is to the ethnographic life of the ideas proliferating in these spaces that i now turn. on lists; or, ideas lying around in the margins of friction, anna tsing (2005, 162–70, front matter) transcribes a conservation-inspired list of local life-forms she made in collaboration with uma adang, a friend and mentor in the meratus mountain region of borneo. “list making,” tsing (2005, 162) writes, “is eclectic to the extent that it draws on multiple, fragmentary sources. . . . any list made by two or more people is a negotiated, eclectic project. to acknowledge this eclecticism . . . allows us to imagine the list within historically changing conversations, rather than as transcendent knowledge.” in a slightly different context, milton friedman (2002, xiv) inferred the utility of his own kind of list: “when crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. that, i believe, is our basic function, to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”10 the list-making practices of both tsing and friedman speak to a kind of conservation, a keeping alive of the lists’ contents. friedman’s keeping alive is prospective—attuned to a moment of imminent political possibility. tsing (2005, 157) and adang’s list, on the other hand, has an “incipient nostalgia,” an acknowledgment and anticipation of ongoing species loss, and a desire to conserve and remember. in the lists and list-making practices i explore below, both of these forms of keeping alive are present. my notes from liberty square, née zuccotti park, are a jumble of notebooks falling apart, scribblings on the back of dirt-smudged handouts and pizza-stained papers. on one greasy piece of paper, which i folded and unfolded so many times it now feels like cloth, i wrote, “2011—service member’s civil relief—jp morgan foreclosed on active duty troops. misdemeanor. 1 year in jail.” in another corner of the same sheet, but upside down, a note reads “postal service banking in japan and france.” in part, the folds and grease and topsy-turvy writing reflect the materiality of those days spent outside in the crush of bodies, food on paper plates, lower manhattan cement as desk and seat. other notes i can barely read, as i scribbled them in the encroaching dark of evening general assemblies, seated on the ground crowded with hundreds of others, struggling to hear, participate, and annotate as the jackhammers inevitably began at 9 p.m. if some of my notes are semi-legible, however, far clearer in the collection is my eagerness, even urgency, to collate, to collect, to list the ideas lying around. i remember the anxiety with which i wrote on whatever paper i could find, stuffing loose sheets in my backpack, hoping that i would find them again. part of my anxiety was elicited by the imagination-attenuating acronyms of the day—tbtf (too big to fail), sifi (systemically important financial institutions)—discourse still so regnant in late 2011 that it felt as if the ideas emerging in such concentration in the park might dissolve once they hit the air, as if by the acid of a political moment. i was making lists to militate against ideological closure, against the attenuation of the imagination. it was an intentional act of conservation, of keeping alive, and even salvage of a kind, not of a past, but of a potential future.11 i was not alone in my urgent list-making. as people streamed into the park, whether for an hour after work or to set up camp, many came with personal manifestos—books, xeroxed fliers, or carefully handwritten thoughts. “the economy is a reflection of the connection between us,” read the title of one; “what is the federal reserve?” provoked another. a self-identified wall street trader came down one lunch hour with a ream of goldenrod paper containing six ideas “from the minds of gainfully employed wall street economists and traders,” as the heading read: ban private campaign finance; restrict time spent on political campaigns; redesign the tax code; fix the revolving door between wall street and regulators and make lying perjury; clean up the mortgage mess; shake up the banking system. many people had their lists ready, ideas they had kept alive, awaiting an opportunity to bring them into the spaces of appearance. in the months after the forced dispersal of liberty square, this list-making did not stop so much as it spread out, changed form, and took route. indeed a congeries of ideas has coalesced in the post-park moment, ideas that have gained precision, traction, and that have been co-opted here or there in often surprising lines of flight. below, i share my own ongoing collation of this list from within a wider occupy ecology, before turning to the remarkable but largely unrecognized consensus on many of these ideas far beyond occupy. in the spirit of both tsing and friedman (if such a hybrid is possible) i share here a partial, eclectic list-in-conversation with alt banking, strike debt, and others. as with tsing and adang’s list, i offer this one not as transcendent knowledge, and neither naively as a solution nor cynically as fodder to debunk, but rather as a situated collation of ideas lying around, of imaginative economic possibilities as i have encountered them. also like tsing and adang, i don’t transcribe these in any sort of recognizable taxonomy, but rather let them unfold here as they do in the field—one on top of the other, some in identifiable clusters and others on their own: open-source credit-score modeling alternative credit rating methods and institutions a general reevaluation of the uses and misuses of mathematical modeling in finance and consumer credit fundamental challenges to neoclassical economic doctrine at the level of undergraduate education and below, including the efficient market hypothesis, perfect information, and reviving the distinction between earned and unearned income blocking foreclosure auctions through song physical reclamation of vacant homes challenging title through where’s my note? programs a national moratorium on foreclosures foreclosure debt becoming dischargeable in bankruptcy student debt becoming (again) dischargeable in bankruptcy principal write-downs mortgage securitization jubilee break up or unwind too big to fail/too big to jail banks utility banks; post office banks; public banking move your money out of big banks, including institutional money (churches, schools, pension funds) radical crowd sourcing of banking services free check cashing at public libraries, cafés, bookstores public option credit cards revisiting state-by-state usury laws and the south dakota loophole reviving fraudulent conveyance laws rethinking fractional reserve banking debts do not have to be repaid; contracts are negotiable and indeed, breakable the debt resisters’ operations manual consumers’ unions, debtors’ unions, debt strikes mass strategic default on medical debt, student debt, mortgage debt, municipal debt, credit card debt citizens’ debt audits the rolling jubilee—an existing program in which strike debt buys defaulted debt on secondary markets for pennies on the dollar just as a debt collector would, but rather than collecting it, abolishes it widespread financial literacy including radical economics 101 teach-ins and the free university reconceptualizing finance as an overhead cost. this does not presuppose that everything finance does is harmful, only that finance, even where necessary, is a cost of doing business, similar to having a lawyer. among my most remarkable experiences in collating these ideas and practices through various occupy meetings, actions, listserves, and conversations has been running into them again in utterly distinct and indeed unexpected comities of practice. if it was the 1998 merger between citibank, travelers insurance, and salomon smith barney to form citigroup that hailed the fall of glass-steagall and the rise of tbtf banks, many of the architects of that union now declare it a failure. john reed, the former ceo of citicorp has called the merger a mistake; sandy weill, who was the ceo of travelers, has called for a restoration of glass-steagall, while richard parsons, the former chairman of the citigroup board, attributed the events of 2007–2008 to the fall of glass-steagall and the creation of tbtf banks. beyond the clarity of hindsight, the international monetary fund (imf) released a white paper (benes and kumhof 2012) that revisits the question of 100 percent reserve banking and thinks through separating the monetary and credit functions of the contemporary banking system. the philadelphia federal reserve bank held a conference in april 2013—fixing the banking system for good—on the same topic,12 and the opinion pages of the new york times (2013) recently featured a forum on public banking. in 2011, post office banking was a barely legible scrawl on my soiled notepad, but three years later the united states postal service released a white paper (office of the inspector general 2014) detailing a proposal to offer basic banking services including savings accounts, debit cards, and simple loans out of post offices, a public option explicitly proposed to break the stranglehold of check cashers and payday lenders on financial services in poor communities. on the ongoing mortgage crisis, the federal reserve system released a white paper of its own (board of governors 2012) calling for, among other remedies, extending mortgage terms, payment deferral without penalty, and principal reductions. the paper also recognized interlocking forms of debt that contribute to foreclosure, including medical care and elder care. in noting that certain forms of loan modifications will be socially beneficial but detrimental to lenders, it recognizes the potential need to “override private contract rights” (board of governors 2012, 20). the cities of richmond, california, and newark, new jersey have initiated such a process via a novel use of eminent domain law first proposed by the cornell professor robert hockett (2013). and the first in what could be a series of lawsuits acknowledging what andrew called “the systemic holes in the u.s. private property regime” has just been decided on behalf of the borrower in a california court of appeals as of this writing (glaski v. bank of america, 218 cal. app. 4th 1079 [2013]). the discipline of economics too has faced challenges to its reproduction in unexpected places. harvard students walked out of their compulsory economics 10 class, for the course’s failure, in their words “to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics.” “we are walking out of your class today,” the students wrote, “both to protest your inadequate discussion of basic economic theory and to lend our support to a movement that is changing american discourse on economic injustice” (concerned students of economics 10 2011). another alt banking participant whose story i have not chronicled here was a recently graduated economics major at harvard, an experience she described as “a period of intellectual trauma [in which] i was being given a theory and told it was true.” what i want to point to here is a remarkable, but largely unrecognized, consensus. in the lists emanating from occupy and beyond we see resonant forms of porosity and uncertainty not only in capitalism’s interstices but in places we often consider its dense centers and sites of reproduction—the imf, the federal reserve, harvard’s department of economics. where annelise riles (2012; emphasis mine) has recently written that “we could have a vibrant and exciting public debate about what the contours of [a new consensus around markets and states] would look like,” i suggest here, instead, that we are having this debate, and we overlook, dismiss, or merely fail to participate in it at our peril. we are in a moment of experiment, imagination, and surprising accord, not merely from the same old places often glossed as the left but, as i have suggested, far more widely than most people imagine. in short, there is a proliferation of ideas lying around; the once politically impossible is listing toward the inevitable. the economic imagination is at work, often in the most unexpected places. conclusion in envisioning real utopias, wright (2010, 151) gestures toward twin dangers that often emerge in imagining radical change: wishful thinking, on the one hand, and “the great cachet among intellectuals of debunking naïve enthusiasm,” on the other. “what is needed, then,” he continues, “are accounts of empirical cases that are neither gullible nor cynical, but try to fully recognize the complexity and dilemmas as well as the real potentials of practical efforts at social empowerment.” this is the spirit in which i intend this article; the imagination at issue is immanent in form and movement, “caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects in the material world, and as such, [are] always changing and adapting” (graeber 2011, 53). i have drawn on tsing and adang who seem similarly motivated in their eclectic, collaborative list-making as it took shape in historically changing conversations about conservation. in this article, too, the list-making on offer takes place in a moment of changing conversations, transformative possibility, and unexpected accord. but it is also motivated by my own anxieties and compulsions to salvage—that these lists will be lost, that people won’t realize we are having these conversations already, that people will remain marooned between wishful thinking and reflexive debunking. but more important, perhaps, i worry that people will simply remain marooned, crafting personal lists in private without at the same time seeking out, creating, and bringing their lists to arendt’s spaces of appearance. democratic struggle, in mitchell’s (2011) formulation, is the work of redistributing issues once thought of as private—here, finance writ large—into matters of public concern. here, andrew’s and patrick’s stories prove instructive. both imagined the ethics of their pre-crisis work in finance in terms of democracy: for andrew, mortgage-backed securities allowed more people to buy homes; for patrick, derivatives allowed more people access to credit. it was this peculiarly neoliberal imagination of democracy-as-market-efficiency-and-access that the financial crisis so radically ruptured. if andrew and patrick imagined a form of private democracy through market-making before 2008, then the financial crisis, and their subsequent involvement in occupy, transformed not only their economic imaginations but their political imaginations as well, as each took his expertise and experience into zuccotti park, alt banking meetings, and new identities as occupiers.13 as andrew and patrick move their expertise from a matter of private concern into the public, they also begin to move the dense infrastructural centers of capitalism as we have come to understand it. private property suddenly seems more vaporous as the veracity of contracts melts into air, a position echoed (if faintly) by the fed itself, noting the need to override contract rights in the mortgage crisis, and more strongly by the nascent programs in richmond and newark. as markets and the technical-legal devices on which they rely (like contracts) get pushed into matters of public concern, the porosity and multivalence of the financial landscape emerges. if, for example, distressed debt is available for sale on secondary and tertiary markets (where debt collectors buy it) for pennies on the dollar, why not buy it and forgive it (see http://rollingjubilee.org)? if student debt data is collated on large centralized databases, and over one million students are already defaulting on their debt individually, why not use the data (who is the loan originator? who is the servicer? what are the relevant state laws?) to organize these students to default collectively, as a union (see http://debtcollective.org)? as ho (2012) puts it, “active and direct efforts to use financial boldness, innovation, and experimentation to reconstruct the very terms, assumptions, and organization of finance to democratize its very institutional underpinnings are indeed worthwhile and gaining momentum.” the point is not then, merely, that financial insiders are repurposing their expertise. rather, the current glimmer of transformative possibility in unexpected places pushes us beyond a broader and particularly obdurate imaginative impasse (see also malkki forthcoming). it is a question that has preoccupied occupy since the beginning—what does direct action on the financial system look like? historically, much of the radical imagination has concerned itself with how to change the ownership structure of capital. if, as eugene v. debs (a founder of the international workers of the world) put it, “the capitalists own the tools they do not use, and the workers use the tools they do not own,” then at stake in strikes, work stoppages, or factory sabotage, is the choice to act as if the tools already belonged to the workers (quoted in graeber 2009, 207). the contemporary imaginative impasse has been what to do with this paradigm as capitalism shape-shifts. how to identify the tools of contemporary capitalism if they no longer primarily sit on factory floors? and even if we can identify the tools—derivatives; debt in the form of mortgages, student loans, and the securities they back—how on earth can we act as if they are already our own? this is the experimental question at stake right now, when we look toward capitalism’s contemporary centers for moments of possibility, rupture, and creativity. if we aim to move finance over the line into the public—if we aim to radically democratize finance—then manifold tentative ways of making the tools our own prove central to the work required of today’s emergent economic imagination. notes acknowledgments i thank the committee on global thought at columbia university for supporting my sudden departure for the field of occupy wall street in october 2011. i am particularly grateful to mamadou diouf and saskia sassen, who were exceptionally supportive under difficult circumstances. i also thank biella coleman, michael ralph, david graeber, and yusuf al-bulushi for the aaa 2012 panel for which i first drafted a version of this article and for the ensuing conversations. karen ho was an inspiring discussant on that panel, and has encouraged and improved this work at multiple stages. a ciriacy-wantrup postdoctoral fellowship at the university of california, berkeley, gave me time to write this essay in full. i am so grateful to the geography department, and to michael watts and louisa lombard, who nurtured me and this piece of writing. anne allison and charles piot greeted this article warmly and offered both their own helpful insights and those of two excellent reviewers. i thank them for that, and for open access. finally, obviously, i thank my fellow occupy elves. i would be thrilled to hear from readers interested in getting involved in any of the projects discussed in this article. 1. “the abolitionists ‘down east,’ seem to be making much ado recently, in regard to the liberation of the southern slaves. . . . we venture that these zealous ministers will neither dispense with the use of sugar, nor cease to wear cotton clothing. we once printed for a notorious abolitionist, an abolition paper. he came into the office on one occasion, when we were engaged in tying up a bundle of his papers with a cotton string, and he immediately protested most vehemently against the act. he would not allow a cotton cord to be used! not he. it was the manufacture of slavery! poor man! the papers that we were tying up were all printed on cotton paper, and this was used because it cost much less than linen. we were reminded of the fact that it was possible to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel” (moore and gihon 1843, 181). thanks to suresh naidu for alerting me both to this historical parallel and this text. 2. the alternative banking working group started in october 2011, about a month into occupy wall street. after a series of initial meetings, the group decided to split in two. the first, now called occupy bank, explores and, if possible, seeks to establish alternative banking systems, starting with a single alternative institution. the second group, now simply referred to as alt banking, attempts to understand and educate people about the current financial system, as well as to come up with shortand long-term plans to improve and reimagine it. i participated in the second of these groups between january and june 2012, at which time i left new york. i remain in touch with several participants on mailing lists and the like. the group continues to meet as of this writing, in september 2014, though participants have changed. see http://altbanking.net/ for current information and a list of projects. 3. for information on the international swaps and derivatives association (isda), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/international_swaps_and_derivatives_association. 4. i intentionally include lists of financial jargon without definition to invoke the expertise-laden milieu of the alt banking meetings. i had no idea what these terms meant when i first joined the group and had to pay close attention and ask questions over many meetings. i still do not understand many of them. the domestication of these terms and others like them—stripping them of their intimidating qualities—is one of the intentions of alt banking. 5. cathy requested i use her real name, as did a handful of other participants. for the rest i use pseudonyms. 6. as i understand them, ho’s and zaloom’s formulations of ethics refer to the immersive narratives, moral constellations, professional obligations, and official representations that differentially structure the daily practices and self-perceptions of finance workers. ho (2012) in particular explicitly includes the contradictions and disconnects between these ethical fields and the effects in the world of the practices informed by them. she writes that these official representations are “deeply believed and understood, despite their contradictions or how they are belied through [finance workers’] own cultural practices.” this is the sense in which i use ethics here—as a fraught and internally contradictory space at once deeply believed and subject to rupture. 7. the troubled asset relief program (tarp) was signed into law by then president george bush in 2008. under this program the federal government purchased 418 billion dollars of troubled assets from failing financial institutions, based on the understanding that without this intervention, the economy would collapse (thus the label “too big to fail”). that tarp was allocated only to financial institutions, and not to struggling homeowners, as andrew advocated, proved more controversial among people across the political spectrum than it appears in retrospect (see nocera 2011). 8. the sarbanes oxley act of 2002 has eleven central provisions related to corporate accounting transparency, including legal requirements for ceos and cfos to take personal responsibility for financial reporting, auditor independence, enhanced disclosure of off-balance sheet transactions, and beyond. 9. thanks to chad kautzer for bringing arendt’s formulation of the polis, and its resonance with occupy, to my attention. 10. friedman claims this at the beginning of capitalism and freedom, a book he wrote in the early 1960s and that went on to sell half a million copies. capitalism and freedom is a rejoinder to the expansive government programs under the eisenhower and kennedy administrations, and in it, friedman makes an argument for a return to his understanding of enlightenment liberalism in contrast to the keynesian liberalism that had taken hold in the united states in the wake of the great depression. 11. juris (2012, 273) notes other list-making practices within occupy that leverage social media to move across geographic space and political scale: “many occupiers have been hard at work developing both online and offline systems for aggregating and synthesizing the manifold experiences, proposals, and ideas being generated by occupiers and sympathizers around the country, ranging from the we are the 99% tumblr to handwritten messages on paper banners, declarations such as the one released by the #occupy wall street general assembly, and various wikis that have sprung up on #occupy websites, including one on the #occupy boston wiki dedicated to creating a statement of purpose.” 12. david graeber, e-mail message to the author, april 18, 2013; see also shedlock 2013. 13. on occupy and the expansion of the political imagination, see razsa and kurnik 2012. references appel, hannah 2014 “finance, figuration, and the alternative banking group of occupy wall street.” signs 40, no. 1: 53–58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/676893. arendt, hannah 1998 the human condition. chicago: university of chicago press. benes, jaromir, and michael kumhof 2012 “the chicago plan revisited.” international monetary fund, working paper no. 12/202. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=26178. board of governors of the federal reserve system 2012 “the u.s. housing market: current conditions and policy considerations.” white paper, federal reserve system, washington, dc. http://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/other-reports/files/housing-white-paper-20120104.pdf. chirls, nicholas 2013 “my time at lehman.” thoughts from brooklyn, ny blog, april 9. http://nickchirls.com/my-time-at-lehman, accessed march 4, 2014. concerned students of economics 10 2011 “an open letter to greg mankiw.” mrzine, march 11. http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/harvard031111.html. friedman, milton 2002 capitalism and freedom. chicago: university of chicago press. gibson-graham, j. k. 1996 the end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. graeber, david 2011 revolutions in reverse: essays on politics, violence, art, and imagination. new york: minor compositions/autonomedia. 2009 direct action: an ethnography. oakland, calif.: ak press. ho, karen 2009 liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2012 “occupy finance and the paradox/possibilities of productivity.” in “finance,” theorizing the contemporary, cultural anthropology website, may 17. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/340-occupy-finance-and-the-paradox-possibilities-of-productivity. hochschild, adam 2006 bury the chains: prophets and rebels in the fight to free an empire’s slaves. new york: mariner books. hockett, robert c. 2013 “it takes a village: municipal condemnation proceedings and public/private partnerships for mortgage loan modification, value preservation, and local economic recovery” stanford journal of law, business, and finance 18, no. 121. accepted paper available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2038029. juris, jeffrey 2012 “reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation.” american ethnologist 39, no. 2: 259–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x. malkki, liisa forthcoming the need to help: the domestic arts of international humanitarianism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mbembe, achille, and janet roitman 1995 “figures of the subject in times of crisis.” public culture 7, no. 2: 323–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-7-2-323. mitchell, timothy 2011 carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. london: verso. moore, asher, and john h. gihon 1843 “can there any good thing come out of nazareth? . . . come and see.” the nazarene and universalist family companion. vol. 4. philadelphia: gihon, fairchild & co. new york times 2013 “should states operate public banks?” room for debate, october 1. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/10/01/should-states-operate-public-banks. nocera, joe 2011 “sheila bair’s bank shot.” new york times magazine, july 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/sheila-bairs-exit-interview.html, accessed april 25, 2013. office of the inspector general, united states postal service 2014 “providing non-bank financial services for the underserved.” https://www.uspsoig.gov/story/white-papers/providing-non-bank-financial-services-underserved, accessed february 5, 2014. razsa, maple, and andrej kurnik 2012 “the occupy movement in žižek’s hometown: direct democracy and a politics of becoming.” american ethnologist 39, no. 2: 238–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01361.x. riles, annelise 2012 “is this capitalism? if not, then what is it?” in “finance,” theorizing the contemporary, cultural anthropology website, may 15. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/360-is-this-capitalism-if-not-then-what-is-it. roitman, janet 2014 anti-crisis. durham, n.c.: duke university press 2011 “crisis.” political concepts 1. http://www.politicalconcepts.org. shedlock, mike 2013 “explosive video on ending fractional reserve lending and bank corruption at philadelphia fed conference.” mish’s global economic trend analysis blog, april 19. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2013/04/explosive-video-on-fractional-reserve.html, accessed march 3, 2014. smith, greg 2012 “why i am leaving goldman sachs.” new york times, march 14. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html, accessed april 25, 2013. tsing, anna 2005 friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. 2009 “supply chains and the human condition.” rethinking marxism 21, no. 2: 148–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935690902743088. wright, eric olin 2010 envisioning real utopias. london: verso zaloom, caitlin 2012 “the ethics of wall street.” in “finance,” theorizing the contemporary, cultural anthropology website, may 17. http://culanth.org/fieldsights/363-the-ethics-of-wall-street. totalitarian tears totalitarian tears: does the crowd really mean it? william mazzarella university of chicago the death of the north korean leader kim jong-il hit the world headlines on monday, december 19, 2011, two days after the fact. a black-clad female newsreader announced his passing on state television with, she said, “the gravest emotions” (las vegas badger 2011). kim jong-il, known in his country as dear leader, had, it was reported, died of heart failure on a train at 8:30 in the morning on december 17 as a result of “physical and mental over-work” (jones 2011; huffington post 2011). in grand state socialist style, kim’s body was wrapped in red cloth and put on display in a glass coffin, with rows of medals and a pair of gold epaulettes at his feet, not far from the embalmed body of his father, the founder of communist north korea, kim il-sung, otherwise known as great leader. a border made of hundreds of white chrysanthemums surrounded the coffin with, closer to the younger kim’s body, two strips of a specially hybridized red begonia known as—what else?—kimjongilia (silver 2011). judging by the images and reports pouring out of north korea, the announcement of kim’s death triggered a veritable hurricane of public grief. the north korean state tv network described the people as “engulfed in incredible sadness” and “convulsing with pain and despair” (jones 2011). much was made in western news media of the mourning’s corporeal intensity. mourners seemed to be losing control, racked, collapsing on the streets and in the offices of the capital, pyongyang, in a manner that one journalist described as “both moving and incredibly unnerving to witness.” this was, by one account, “wild-eyed, shaking grief . . . scenes of near-chaos: sobbing, tearing at hair, gulping for breath” and—again—“convulsing” (chivers 2011). the persistent sense among commentators outside north korea was one of utter incredulity. as one typical article demanded, by way of introduction: “do they really mean it?” (carpenter 2011). i will not be trying to answer that question. i will be asking, rather, why it was so insistently repeated. why should the sincerity of these tears have become such a pressing concern? what kind of sense can we make of the acute blend of fascination and unease that the spectacle of these north korean crying crowds seemed to produce in the deluge of articles, blog postings, and incidental comments that flooded the internet in those final days of 2011? my argument, in outline, will be that the repetition of the question “do they really mean it?” marked an attachment to an impasse—that is to say, an investment in asking the question in such a way as to render it infuriatingly, tantalizingly, but also reassuringly unanswerable. or to put it differently: an itch in the liberal imagination, un/pleasurably aggravated by the very act of scratching. an itch in the liberal imagination what liberal imagination? i am referring here to a set of assumptions about human nature and its relation to public life that moved into something like their present-day constellation in the eighteenth century and that continue, today, to provide a basic matrix for mainstream political discourse, on both the left and right, in liberal democracies.1 two axes within this constellation interest me here. the first axis is what elizabeth povinelli (2006) has usefully characterized as a tension between the autological and the genealogical dimensions of the liberal subject. or to put it in different language, the tension between autonomy (the subject as self-made and self-determining) and heteronomy (the subject as dependently made through ties of kin, clan, nation, culture, etc.). the second axis of interest here is the tension between reason and affect as definitive indices of sincerity (what lionel trilling [1972, 2] calls the relation “between avowal and actual feeling”) and spontaneity (non-calculated signs of self). these two axes of the liberal imagination come together in the eighteenth century. so, for example, immanuel kant ([1784] 1986) imagined public reason as mediating between our human capacity for autonomous deliberation and the promise of a rational civil society in a way that would fundamentally inform twentieth-century theories of the public sphere (habermas [1962] 1989; koselleck [1959] 1988). but kant ([1790] 2009) also suggested that our visceral apparatus, our capacity for raw response, could, if properly cultivated as a faculty of taste, provide a sensible (as opposed to an intelligible) ground for the good society. it is certainly no accident that these delicate and complex relations between autology and genealogy, between reason and affect, and between self-discipline and sensibility, should, in the eighteenth century, have become inextricable from the political potentials of democratic revolution and the emergent mass society. protestant ideals of plain-speaking sincerity (keane 2002) bumped up against the blandishments of performance and sentiment in a society of strangers. david hume’s ([1739–1740] 2000) and adam smith’s ([1759] 1984) ruminations on sympathy were driven, to an extent perhaps not sufficiently acknowledged, by the problem of how to scale up the spontaneously empathetic responses we might have to familiar people, places, and things in such a way as to provide an affective compass for a more impersonally public morality.2 citizenship required a recipe for the rational mediation of public affect. and this generally involved cultivating a new kind of secularized vigilance against the seductions of theatrically and rhetorically insincere forms of public persuasion (roach 1993; trilling 1972). now why should images of crying north korean crowds, beamed around the globe at the end of 2011, activate these tensions so acutely, so compulsively?3 in the eighteenth-century constellation i have sketched here, tears are symptomatic in that they appear as both an involuntary index of self and as a potentially manipulative medium of communication. jean-jacques rousseau ([1762] 1979, 65–66) noted that an infant’s helplessly spontaneous tears of need were “the first link in that long chain of which the social order is formed.” but as soon as the child itself realized the agentive power of crying, its tears deserved to be greeted with the utmost suspicion as to their in/sincerity, the “secret intention which dictates the gesture or the scream.” but can a crowd, as opposed to an individual, be sincere? can a crowd have secret intentions? crowds are inseparable from our basic images of democracy: from the demos physically gathered in the athenian agora, the face-to-face prototype of the public sphere, to the multitudes of the arab spring and the occupy movement.4 but the figure of the crowd sits uneasily between, on the one hand, the familiarly grounded affective circuits of kin, clan, and neighborhood and, on the other, the impersonally principled commitments of civil society. as mob, the formidable energies of the crowd run fast and loose; as mass, they appear rationalized to the point of no remainder. the point is not simply that crowds are both the germinal plasma out of which upstanding autological liberal subjects emerge, as well as the solvent in which they come apart. the point is also that if crowds are both constitutive and destitutive of liberal subjectivity, this is because they embody, quite concretely, the unstable play of autology and genealogy, of reason and affect (borch 2012; jonsson 2008, 2013; mazzarella 2010; schnapp and tiews 2006). crowds may be demonized as terrifying harbingers of public disorder, or, in the shape of the multitude, they may appear redeemed as postliberal crucibles of common creativity (hardt and negri 2001, 2005, 2011). however they are figured, crowds remind us of the uncanny mimetic ground of the social. and as such, they call into question all the basic psychological categories commonly attached to the liberal subject—categories like individuality, intention, and sincerity—through which we are wont to distinguish between autonomy and influence, reality and theater. on the one hand, the crying north koreans seemed, pathetically, not to have realized that the cold war had long since passed. on the other, they evoked not so much a past as a past future, an alternative project of mass industrial utopia that once constituted the telos the so-called free world had to resist at every cost (buck-morss 2000; koselleck [1979] 1985; see also ferguson 1999). the cold war’s sibling rivalry had of course at one level been pursued in terms of supposedly objective measures like gdp, industrialization, scientific advancement, athletic prowess, armament, space exploration, and so on. more important for my argument here, the cold war allowed the liberal-democratic world to project all the anxieties that inhered in modern publics—anxieties about autology, genealogy, sincerity, spontaneity, and anonymity—onto paranoid figures of mass manipulation (brainwashing, subliminal advertising, etc.) that could then be quarantined as totalitarian tendencies against which a healthy liberal public sphere could and should inoculate itself (acland 2012; lemov 2005; melley 2012). one might suppose, perhaps, that north korea’s persistence as the last actually existing bastion of stalinism would give rise, in the west, only to weary exasperation: when will they give up? certainly some of those who asked, “do they really mean it?” seemed, on the face of it, incredulous that such a self-evidently anachronistic regime should still inspire any kind of intensity at all. but i will be arguing here that, on the contrary, it was precisely north korea’s status as one last outpost that made it so itchy—that is to say, at once so infuriating and so vital to the liberal imagination. don’t forget to pack your long johns: a note on method i am, to put it mildly, no expert on north korea. that being the case, some might wonder why i have chosen to rely on online postings by largely euro-american observers, the vast majority of whom themselves appear to have no firsthand knowledge of life in north korea. such a strategy would appear to offer me no ethnographic ground from which to escape the feedback loop that i am trying to analyze. should i not, rather, have heeded the advice of one online commentator: “if you really want to know what’s going on, i’m afraid you’re going to have to head straight to pyongyang, ready for a long stay. and don’t forget to pack your long johns” (shaw 2011, comment by michael)? but where, really, is my field? the real barriers that limit physical access to north korea do, of course, make it something of a special ethnographic case. still, in researching this essay i did read a number of journalistic accounts and memoirs of life in north korea, variously based on firsthand experience and defector testimony (demick 2010; harrold 2004; kang 2005), as well as some illuminating political and historical studies (armstrong 2004; cummings 2003; kwon and chung 2012). as absorbing and often disturbing as this literature is, i realized early on that the integrity of my analysis demanded that i rigorously resist any temptation to mine it for the truth about north korea.5 at the risk of stating the obvious, and out of respect for actually existing north koreans, i must emphasize that i made this choice because my essay is not about north korea. it is, rather, about how a set of narratives and images, popularly identified as north korea, activate and trouble the liberal imagination in particularly acute ways. having first become alerted to the phenomenon of the crying crowds by an article on the new york times website, i built an archive by means of internet searches in the days immediately following the death and funeral of kim jong-il, using a small number of keyword combinations like “north korea crying” and “north korea tears.” the deluge of articles this produced, most of them written within just a few days of each other, confirmed my initial intuition that the passing of the dear leader had touched a nerve in the blogosphere. my digital archive, the main body of data for this essay, amounted to the record of an event: not the death of kim jong-il, not the crying as such, but rather the efflorescence of a certain anxiety, as indexed by a repetitively posed question. the speed with which these reports and reactions emerged, and the relatively offhand quality of the reader comments quickly appended to them, gave this archive a strongly reactive aspect, which seemed particularly well suited to a symptomal reading. indeed, my archive differed from a hard-copy equivalent primarily because of these freewheeling, generally pseudonymous reader comments. the relation between the more formally composed articles and blog posts and the informality of the reader comments seemed, oddly, to recapitulate the distinction between sincerity and spontaneity that the debate on the tears itself thematized. and there was, it seems to me, a fitting irony in the fact that many of those voices most ardently presuming to distinguish sincerity from theatricality in the tears of north korean mourners themselves relied, for the would-be immediacy of their sometimes quite scabrous brand of plain speaking, on the anonymizing artifice of usernames. so why were these same commentators so obsessed with whether the north koreans really meant their tears? monstrous swelling, qi pool veena das (1996, 70) notes, drawing on ludwig wittgenstein, that an expression of pain “makes a claim asking for acknowledgment, which may be given or denied. in either case, it is not a referential statement that is simply pointing to an inner object” (see also asad 2003). perhaps because the politics of acknowledging the north korean tears seemed so fraught, the commentary pushed back so insistently toward precisely the inner object that might give rise to this kind of crying, that is, the enigmatic condition of totalitarian subjectivity. if these crying crowds had suffered so much under kim, then why would they mourn the passing of their oppressor? but there they were. “they wept, they wailed, they doubled over in apparent pain,” remarked the daily mail, on the occasion of kim’s funeral, and concluded: “not a bad show for a tyrant who subjected his country to 17 years of torture, repression and mass murder” (mail online 2011). how could all this be explained? was there any rational explanation? time magazine commented: “as the rest of the world has watched these scenes, most people are asking a very reasonable question: are these people nuts?” (powell 2011). brainwashing lay ready to hand as an explanation. this was a story of thwarted citizenship, of reflexivity smothered at birth, of interiority utterly absorbed and exhausted by the magnificent leader. facing the neatly subservient ranks of his subjects, childlike in their tutelage, the leader reserved to himself the exclusive right to capital-s subjectivity. in all his blinding obscurity, the leader was the progenitor of his people, the master signifier, the symbolic sine qua non of his subjects’ very existence as subjects. no wonder that his death would seem a kind of ontological crisis. quoting an “asia expert,” the bbc remarked: “learning about their leader’s death raises questions for the north koreans about their identity, their security and their ability to survive” (geoghegan 2011). one article quoted a song regularly performed by way of tribute to kim jong-il: “without you there is no country. without you there is no us” (carroll 2011). there was apparently no way for the people to repay the infinite gift of existence that their leader had bestowed on them. all they could do was offer him, in death as in life, an intensity of affect that outside commentators—perhaps not entirely without envy—could only call irrational and immature. “it’s embarrassing. they’re like children,” remarked one long-distance witness to the weeping ranks (silver 2011, comment by jd). ruling party members and ordinary mourners reinforced the impression of infantile dependence by crying out “father!” and demanding of journalists from the state news agency: “how can he go like this? what are we supposed to do?” (park 2011; jones 2011).6 what could be more titillating to liberal publics than a spectacle of thwarted enlightenment in which the forced retardation of these childish citizens fed a monstrous swelling of the leader, whose overstuffed, singular subjectivity was directly proportionate to the massification of the people? in this picture, the north korean tears might well be sincere, but they also had to be pathological—equivalent, as one response had it, to “the wailing of a beaten dog at its cruel master’s demise,” (friedman 2011, comment by bala don 2) or, as others suggested, to the misplaced loyalty of an abused child or spouse (shaw 2011; silver 2011, comment by jojo). formally similar to the brainwashing argument was a more affirmative culturalist line of explanation, invoking various versions of the stereotype of asian collectivism, a trope familiar all the way from oriental despotism via eastern communism to neoliberal asian values (suwarto 2011). by this logic, the crying crowd easily appeared entirely overdetermined: korean confucianism joined hands with state coercion and a totalitarian cult of personality in a fertile union of ritualized expressiveness and mass regimentation (carroll 2011; favet 2011; friedman 2011; martin 2011; park 2011).7 one self-styled expert who had admittedly never been to north korea but claimed to have spent several years applying the insights of neuro-linguistic programming to asian mass emotion, concluded that “asians (especially from india --> japan) breath [sic] in unison (and probably have similar heart beats) after being in close proximity for at least 20 minutes,” thereby collectively entering “the qi pool” (shaw 2011, comment by davemclean). others identified similar tendencies in the middle east—professional funeral mourners found mention in passing—and, indeed, in so many other locations around the world that, in the end, it was pretty much only northwestern europe and the white anglo-saxon protestant population of the united states that was exempt from this alleged cultural syndrome.8 inner skeptic, paid with hamburgers swiftly, sanely, one no-nonsense blog respondent tried to lay the qi pool argument to rest: “i wouldn’t get too tangled up in the mysterious asian mind-meld thing. it’s another western trope” (shaw 2011, comment by tinwoman). so it was. but then so was the available alternative, the trope of the inner skeptic, the idea that behind the seamless public facade of totalitarian conformity, each individual in the crowd harbored private seeds of self-determination. as alexei yurchak (2006) has pointed out for the late soviet context, liberal analyses insist on dividing state socialist societies into a front stage and a backstage, a fictional public world of ideological enthusiasm and a real private world of cynical pragmatism. accordingly, when it came to north korea, the globe and mail insisted: “these scenes of grief do not tell the entire story of how north koreans, in spite of the myth-making, viewed the leadership of kim jong-il” (chowdhry 2011). in a sense, the whole point of the trope of the inner skeptic was to save reflexive subjectivity from the pull of the crowd, to give it a little island of immunity to stand on in the midst of the contagion. as elias canetti famously noted: “everyone belonging to such a crowd carries within him a small traitor who wants to eat, drink, make love and be left alone” ([1960] 1984, 23). presuming the existence of the inner skeptic meant that the crowd crying could be reimagined as pragmatic adaptation rather than helpless surrender to the imperatives of tyranny. it was widely surmised that the first person to stop looking sad would summarily be shipped off to one of north korea’s infamous gulags if they were not simply shot on the spot (mead 2011; watson 2011). or perhaps the people seen crying in the streets were not representative of north korea’s starving millions; they were the pyongyang elite, kept in a relatively cushy state by the regime, well aware on which side their bread was buttered. or they were a section of the starving millions, but they had, as bill o’reilly of fox news put it, been “paid with hamburgers” for their tears (hartenstein 2011). some speculated on sinister dramatic incentives: “mourn or we’ll kill you! add enough histrionics and we’ll double your rice ration to 300 grams!” (mead 2011, comment by drang). still others proposed that the north koreans really did mean it—as long as what they really meant was either their despair at having been forever denied a chance at stringing up kim jong-il from a lamppost or their displaced grief at the suffering that so many of their relatives had undergone at the hands of the regime (mead 2011, comments by kris and martin berman-gorvine). the peculiarity of the crying-crowds debate was not so much that it insisted on purified stereotypes of influence and autonomy, but that it required both of these to be true at the same time. even as all north koreans were presumed, in their heart of hearts, to maintain an inner reserve vis-à-vis the regime, totalitarianism itself by its very nature had to be imagined as, well, total: completely hegemonic, rationalized to the point of no remainder. many articles described north korea as completely self-contained, a hermit kingdom entirely lacking cell phones, satellite television receivers, and computers—despite plenty of evidence that the fortress was no longer, if it ever had been, quite that impregnable. a morbid fascination with what it would be like to live in such a world—a kind of precontact dystopia—joined hands with the presumption that totalitarianism could only work if, in fact, it was total and the slightest chink in the structure would send the whole brittle spectacle crumbling in on itself. a polity, in other words, of complete command; a state form in which, as a bbc article neatly expressed it, “everything that isn’t forbidden is compulsory” (geoghegan 2011). all over the world, observers scrutinized the crowd images for signs of the inner skeptic. wasn’t that person in the far upper-right-hand corner of the picture looking oddly unmoved? why were the people in front more upset than the ones behind? and yet the obscene excess of crying in these same images was also taken as proof of the state’s seamlessly totalizing propaganda apparatus. the obstacle to knowing what north koreans really thought was not just one of limited physical access, of not being able to get backstage to verify what was actually going on. rather, north korea–watchers demanded at one and the same time that there had to be a backstage zone in which north koreans had real, critical thoughts and, because the regime had to be characterized as completely totalizing, that this backstage zone could only be imagined as a kind of kantian ding an sich: a thing-in-itself, a presumed reality that, by definition, lay beyond representation. here, then, lay the core of the itch. on the one hand, the north koreans were being forced to cry—and the fact that they needed to be coerced meant that they were not entirely brainwashed, because if they had been, they would have cried spontaneously. on the other hand, the uncanny intensity of their tears was taken as proof of the fact that the north koreans had been entirely and comprehensively brainwashed. and if the tears were spontaneous, whatever their perverse origin, then presumably no coercion was necessary. one blog discussion comment perfectly encapsulated the contradiction, saying of the mourners both “that they’ve been entirely conditioned to give the proper response to the regime” and, in the very next sentence, “i’m sure many of them are inwardly smiling, though” (carroll 2011, comment by mckftw; emphasis added). as a “physical mattering forth” (povinelli 2006, 7), these totalitarian tears hovered enigmatically between naive spontaneity and cynical design. who could really know whether these tears were sinister proof of just how far the governmentalization of affect could go or, conversely, whether they made for a hopeful index of the persistence of the seeds of self-determination even here: “even people who genuinely feel sad about kim’s death might wake up tomorrow, or next week, or a year from now, with an epiphany about their own power and their relation to the state, the germ of which was the tiny sense of empowerment and release that came from weeping in the streets” (kennicott 2011). bad b movie, heaven’s grief accusations of theatrical insincerity have long been a standard feature of liberal critiques of both feudal and totalitarian regimes.9 stagecraft and acting, the argument goes, become necessary to divert attention away from the absence of real legitimacy—that is to say, a state grounded in the freely given consent of enlightened citizens. totalitarian polities, qua theater states, hold themselves aloft, by this reading, on the twin struts of regimented performance and unhesitating brutality. spectacle stands in for civil society, acclamation for assent. north korea was, many suggested, one big potemkin village performing as much for itself as for export. if a civic ethics existed there, outsiders argued, then it took the form of a cradle-to-grave commitment to acting. “many of the residents of pyongyang double as actors to impress visiting foreigners,” wrote a journalism professor. “they start as little children performing in events such as the arirang ‘mass games’ that have been the regime’s main tourist attraction in recent years. they’re good at their work. so if you see a video showing more sobbing and tearing of hair a week from now, and are inclined to believe the mourners are really and truly torn up, you may want to think again” (martin 2011). in this analysis, acting skill amounted to a cunningly concealed insincerity, a skill perfected through years of participating in mass ornament-style state spectacles involving the exquisite coordination of tens of thousands of bodies (kracauer [1927] 1995). again, the very intensity of the crying triggered doubts outside north korea. why were these mourners on the streets of pyongyang laying it on so thick? were they auditioning for a spot in the forthcoming funeral show, set to hit screens some ten days later? (koffler 2011, comment by sadie). even the odd celebrity felt moved to evaluate north koreans’ histrionics. mia farrow tweeted: “north korea: ppl sobbing, wailing & thrashing about—as an actor i can say, they would never get hired” (jones 2011). the idea that north koreans were in fact embarrassingly bad actors was, again, linked to a narrative of coercion: the very exaggeration of their extravagant crying proved that they were not really feeling it; that they were, in effect, laughing up their sleeves even as they were whimpering under the gun. one blog reader remarked: “cry, or we’ll shoot you. the video sure looks fake to me. some of the worst acting i’ve seen, like a bad b movie” (favet 2011, comment by bob). either way, good or bad, commentators here invariably understood acting as the opposite of sincerity. likewise, both good and bad acting could only appear within this discourse as evidence of totalitarian oppression. the possibility, propounded by drama theorists from diderot to stanislavski, that an activity might be “repeated so often that it becomes automatic and therefore free” (roach 1993, 214) was simply not compatible with an ideology of autological citizenship in which artifice could never be the royal road to truth. at most, commentators on the crying crowds were prepared to concede that the act of pretending to cry might, through some combination of dogged repetition, autosuggestion, and crowd contagion, lead to a (deluded) collective belief in the reality of the grief, effectively—but not actually—turning fake tears into real ones. as a theater state, the regime, too, could only be accused of deploying repetition and ritual against history, insofar as history was presumed to be at once the terrain and the product of the self-making liberal subject. the north korean equation, it seemed, asserted a simple string of equivalence: state = history = nature. now of course any political formation with aspirations to universality at some point or another claims to be naturally grounded. indeed, the classic enlightenment discourse on the autological subject from rousseau to kant asks, “given what we are, what can we become?” but the north korean regime seemed to specialize in creating affect-intensive spectacles out of the proposition that the state was always already the fulfillment of a destiny in which politics, history, and nature marched—like those goose-stepping north korean soldiers—in lockstep. roland barthes ([1957] 1972) once wrote, and i paraphrase, that one of the definitions of ideology is history dressed up as nature. when it came to the life of kim jong-il, it appeared as if nature itself had decided to take barthes at his word. kim’s birth in the early 1940s had been foretold by a swallow appearing at the foot of a sacred mountain and marked by a double rainbow and a new star. at his death, state media proclaimed that the people’s “wailing voices are rocking heaven and earth” (friedman 2011). the heavy snow that blanketed kim’s funeral was a sign of “heaven’s grief,” a theme that continued in the days and weeks following, as suddenly cracking ice, glowing mountains, and unusually vivid sunsets were all greeted as hieroglyphs of cosmic loss (choe 2011; rundle 2012). this quite literal naturalization of the kim regime was greeted with predictable derision outside north korea, even though it drew on many of the same mythical motifs that, precisely as myth, were also standard elements of the south korean nationalist repertoire. myths may of course, within the liberal imagination, quite legitimately serve as founding charters for modern nation states (anderson 1991; hobsbawm 1990; schopflin and hosking 1997). politicians mine their poetic potential on the campaign trail, and government archaeologists assist the official extrapolation of sovereignty claims from mythical narratives by anchoring them in the ambiguous material indices of the distant past (abu el-haj 2002; kohl and fawcett 1996). perhaps, then, precisely the unsteady interdependence of myth and history in liberal regimes requires the compensatory counterimage of totalitarian regimes that flatly deny the difference altogether. the uncanny endurance of the embalmed bodies of dead leaders has long been a standard state socialist mode of laying a political claim to eternity (verdery 2000; yurchak n.d.). and when kim jong-un, until recently the rather obscure son of kim jong-il, was installed as his successor, the state news agency kcna dubbed him “the eternally immovable mental mainstay of the korean people” (friedman 2011). but here it is significant that western critics, even as they tirelessly called for the end of north korea, also seemed strongly invested in arguing that the hermit kingdom was a land in which standard conceptions of historical time simply did not apply, where everything happened exactly as it had happened before, and exactly as it would happen again. indeed, one might well be forgiven for wondering who was really more anxious at the prospect of the disappearance of the last bastion of actually existing stalinism. who was really more attached to the repetition of these mythical images of totalitarian sovereignty? what if there was also a liberal anxiety embedded here, an anxiety that the hermit kingdom might actually come to an end, and with it the mirror in which the liberal subject could, time and again, consider itself? as the third kim, kim jong-un, moved into the limelight, the western media marked the transition by dutifully posing the obligatory question, “is there any hope for change in north korea?” but then they almost immediately relaxed back into the reassuring relief of being allowed to regret that, no, things would stay exactly they way they had been—right down to those cozily anachronistic mid-twentieth century aesthetics of state socialist dictatorship. so do they really mean it? one might say that the iron curtain that sequestered north korea from the rest of the world revealed by hiding. to extend the theatrical metaphor, it created the illusion of a fourth wall, but one that was at once opaque and transparent, at once mirror and window. was north korea an enclosed dramatic space, performing for itself? or was the intended audience the rest of the world, looking in, by means of carefully selected images, on a self-contained fictional environment?10 the peculiar structure of attachment manifested in the debate on the crying crowds seemed to require that both hold true at once: that the structure of the spectacle should be understood as essentially self-referential, unaffected by the presence of the liberal gaze and, at the same time, that it should be reliably available to the outside world as a kind of inexhaustibly enigmatic ritual performance. the very question “do they really mean it?” captures something of this double relation, since it seems to inquire about both the sincerity of the north koreans’ intentions within their own lifeworlds (behind, as it were, the fourth wall) and, at another level, about the address of their tears to spectators in the outside world. it is perhaps not surprising that such a double relation should take the form, on the part of those viewing the north korean crying crowds from outside, of a complex amalgam of contempt and fascination, of outrage and desire, in which ethical and aesthetic impulses often seemed hard to disentangle. commentators expressed outrage at the arrogance with which the kim regime kept its people, so to speak, out of time. and yet responses to its mass ornamental spectacles veered unsteadily between a post-soviet nostalgic attachment to communist kitsch (barker 1999; erjavec 2003) and the queasy anti-erotics of the recently outmoded (benjamin 2002). if north korea served as a mirror/window for the liberal imagination, then it was by no means simply a reassuring one; perhaps it would be more adequate to describe it as reassuringly bewildering. one blog respondent in the debate on the crying crowds noted that totalitarian regimes hardly had a monopoly on propaganda, and that all the “awkwardly theatrical puzzlement and speculation about grieving north koreans” was really “an opportunity to retell our own mythology and show that it is, when we compare ourselves to a place like north korea, at least somewhat true” (shaw 2011; comment by robert e). but the point was not just that the misery of north korea helped shore up the american dream. again, part of the unease of the north korean mirror/window was the ambiguity of its address. what if the kims’ deployment of mass communist kitsch was not only or even primarily intended to deceive their own subjects, but was just as much a diabolically skilled manipulation of foreign liberal observers, quite deliberately designed to put pressure on that tender spot between disgust and desire? that there was no way of knowing, no way to tell the difference, was perhaps not indicative of totalitarian pathology so much as of a crisis in contemporary liberal political culture, where the line between sincerity and parody has become increasingly hard to discern (boyer 2013; boyer and yurchak 2010). as slavoj žižek (1989) notes, the point is not that totalitarian authority is helpless in the face of laughter. rather, it is the discourse of liberalism that rigidly requires totalitarianism to involve earnest ideological commitment. consequently, the uncertainty as to whether the north koreans really meant their tears disclosed how deeply western commentators needed the north koreans, qua national collective, to be what žižek (1998) calls “the subject supposed to believe”—and how mercilessly the crying crowds evaded that desire. žižek, riffing on peter sloterdijk’s critique of cynical reason ([1983] 1987), argues that in today’s western liberalism, the fundamental disjuncture occurs not between publicly professing sincere ideals and privately behaving with cynical self-interest. rather, žižek suggests, the postideological liberal subject is in fact publicly cynical, agnostically distanced from all forms of earnest belief, but this public cynicism finds its compensation in a desperate private investment in the belief of another subject, the subject supposed to believe, whose earnest belief must be protected at all costs, even as it is publicly dismissed as naive and regressive.11 the western relation to the north korean crying crowds, however, seems to suggest a further turn of the screw: the attachment is not to a subject who is presumed to believe, but rather to a subject whose belief, given the rules of the game, simply cannot be evaluated. throughout this essay, i have argued that the debate on the north korean crying crowds seemed attached to a paradoxical stance, insisting at once that the truth of these tears might be found behind the scenes of the spectacle and that, by totalitarian definition, such a backstage space could only be inferred but never actually reliably known. we are now, perhaps, in a position to situate that paradoxical stance vis-à-vis a larger structure of liberal desire. as uday mehta (1999) has shown, the liberal imagination has generally expressed imperial condescension toward the purported backwardness and irrationality of other lifeworlds. this condescension has come coupled with a paternalistic pedagogics of patience, expressed in the colonial nineteenth century as the white man’s burden and in the postcolonial twentieth as development and structural adjustment. the crying crowds of north korea fit only uneasily within this formation. on the one hand, they certainly prompted, as i have shown, the standard liberal insistence that here, too, one might find the seeds of liberal redemption (the inner skeptic, etc.). on the other hand, the spectacle of these tears also and at the same time seemed to trigger a parallel fantasy of a totalitarian world utterly and perpetually closed both to internal transformation and to outside intervention. the pedagogical-imperial impulse of liberalism—the vista of a world remade in its image—is sustained by making the world available to its interventions. but the north korean tears seemed to prompt a different kind of liberal activation, one that, despite itself, clung almost desperately to the continued existence, somewhere in the world, of an utterly irredeemable polity. but what, in the end, explains such a perverse attachment? why should the north korean crying crowds appear, if i may borrow a psychoanalytic phrase, as the symptomal point of the liberal imagination? here, i think, it may be instructive to line up the compulsive incredulity that greeted the north korean crowds with the ecstatic reception of those other mass-mediated crowds of 2011: the crowds embodying grassroots democracy, reclaiming the agora all across the world from tahrir square to zuccotti park.12 the perceived political potential of the north korean tears was, as we have seen, close to zero. by contrast, the widespread investment in the pure democratic immanence of the arab spring and the occupy movement proved so intense that their considerable charisma seemed in danger of wilting as soon as someone brought up something as boring as concrete political demands (graeber 2011). in one panel of this polarized crowd diptych, political subjectivity was always already thwarted; in the other, it was never quite allowed to move from virtual vitality to actual form. this, then, is where the figure of the crowd, whether as mob or as mass, whether as myth or as multitude, embodies a deadlock of liberalism insofar as liberalism claims hegemonic status as a theory of democracy. the rigidly schematic division of the diptych is the symptom of this deadlock. from a liberal standpoint, the crowd, in all its face-to-face potentiality, constitutes at once the origin and the nemesis of democracy, though never its permanently indispensable lifeblood. in the imagined biography of the liberal subject, understood both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, the crowd represents a childish moment of savage indistinction: corporeal, affective, and irrational. insofar as the autonomous subject is the archimedean stable point of a liberal conception of democracy, the fact that the crowd is at once constitutive and destitutive of this autonomous subject can only appear as an intimation of the birth and death of democracy per se, rather than of the autonomous subject as a recurrent moment in an dialectical dynamic of collective and democratic becoming. the problem that absorbed the enlightenment philosophers still very much remains with us: namely, how to come to grips with the corporeal grounds of political subjectivity in a society of strangers. and the crowd, in all its actuality, remains the mobile and enigmatic rebus of this relation. for an actual crowd, full as it is of virtual potentials, really meaning it is not, in the end, a problem of authenticity, immediacy, or sincerity. it is not a matter of surface matching depth, or of appearance coinciding with essence. rather, it is, perhaps, a commitment to continuing to grapple with making collective sense out of a world in which we are strangers together across particular places, body to body. notes acknowledgments for invaluable interpretations and illuminations, thanks to mark anderson, mayanthi fernando, laura-zoe humphreys, don reneau, danilyn rutherford, and alexei yurchak. i am especially grateful to the cultural anthropology editorial collective (dominic boyer, jim faubion, and cymene howe), along with three anonymous reviewers, for pushing me to step up my game. 1. i have toyed with giving the liberal imagination i am discussing here some kind of specification by calling it, say, western or northern liberalism. while doing so might help forestall an impression of breezy universalism, it would also efface the fact that while political discourse in the west has certainly claimed this liberalism as its own (even as it has insisted on its universal validity), its norms and forms actually arose, to a much greater extent than generally acknowledged, out of attempts to make sense of and to manage encounters on the colonial and protocolonial periphery. 2. hume ([1739–1740] 2000, 345) remarked, “there is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote, and makes us desire objects more according to their situation than their intrinsic value.” adam smith’s ([1759] 1984) well-known reflections on the figure of the “impartial spectator” were intended to overcome this problem by recommending a divided self-relation that would allow us to observe our own sympathetic responses as if from a neutrally impersonal standpoint. 3. for that matter, shifting the emphasis, why should images of crying north korean crowds activate these tensions so acutely? there is, after all, no reason to presume that visual images are in themselves more affect-intensive than, say, sounds. i would argue, however, that the images of the crying crowds powerfully partook of the ability of photographs to be at once iconic and indexical—that is, to appear to be both full of (iconic) meaning and at the same time indubitable (indexical) traces of an event whose meaning could not be firmly established. 4. i should clarify that i am here using crowd as the generic, unmarked term, with variants like mob, mass, and multitude standing for differently moralized visions of what crowds might be or become. for an extended discussion of the politics and potentials of these terms, see mazzarella (2010). 5. there is, of course, the added complication that north korean defector testimonies, like those of soviet bloc dissidents and defectors in the 1960s and 1970s, play an overdetermined part in organizing western public affect around the critique of antiliberal authoritarian regimes. the exposé stance of this genre, whatever the factual accuracy of the details it reports, renders it complicit with the complex that i am trying to analyze here. 6. the theme of communism involving a state-citizen relation understood as paternal or parental is variously explored in dunn (2004), kwon and chung (2012), and verdery (1996). 7. it was not as if dramatic examples of collective mourning in the liberal west were not also invoked (jfk, elvis presley, john lennon, lady diana—even steve jobs—were all mentioned). and the comparison was always uneasy, since it was never quite clear whether this meant that liberal mourners were just as susceptible to mass grief as totalitarian subjects or that liberal grieving was in fact even more irrational since it happened voluntarily. 8. see especially the spirited and freewheeling discussion that follows shaw (2011). 9. a locus classicus of this strategy may be found in thomas paine’s ([1791] 1998) and mary wollstonecraft’s ([1790] 1993) defenses of natural human rights in the wake of the french revolution, in the course of which they found it necessary to impugn what they saw as the sentimentality and theatricality of edmund burke’s ([1789–1790] 2006) critique of the revolutionaries. 10. luc boltanski (1999) observes that the distances involved in mass-mediated images of grief have, inter alia, the effect of heightening the sense of suffering as a kind of fictional performance, all the more available for aestheticization. 11. one of žižek’s more playful examples of this dynamic is that of the parent desperately invested in his child’s sincere belief in santa claus. but of course we can recognize it as a structural feature of what anthropologists, following michel-rolph trouillot (1991), call the “savage slot”—the structural position of primitiveness that is at once reviled and romanced for its horrifyingly/charmingly naive attachments. 12. alexei yurchak, in a personal communication, points out that, from a crowd-dramaturgical standpoint, kim 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and authenticity cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. trouillot, michel-rolph 1991 “anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness.” in recapturing anthropology: working in the present, edited by richard g. fox, 17–44. santa fe, n.m.: school of american research press. verdery, katherine 1996 what was socialism, and what comes next? princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. 2000 the political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change new york: columbia university press. watson, paul joseph 2011 “north koreans: the most enslaved people on earth.” infowars.com, december 19. http://www.infowars.com/north-koreans-the-most-enslaved-people-on-earth/. wollstonecraft, mary (1790) 1993 “a vindication of the rights of men.” in a vindication of the rights of women and a vindication of the rights of men. new york: oxford university press. yurchak, alexei 2006 everything was forever until it was no more: the last soviet generation princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. yurchak, alexei n.d. “lenin’s two bodies: the hidden science of communist sovereignty.” unpublished ms. žižek, slavoj 1989 the sublime object of ideology new york: verso. 1998 “the interpassive subject.” http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-interpassive-subject/, accessed june 26, 2013. refusal as act, refusal as abstention refusal as act, refusal as abstention erica weiss tel aviv university http://orcid.org/0000-00002-7047-6712 to refuse is usually thought of as saying no, but is it possible to refuse by saying nothing at all or by averting your eyes? can you refuse by tossing a summons in the trash bin? how would these acts change the political implications of refusal? before i arrived in the field to work with israelis who refuse to serve in the military for reasons of conscience, i thought that i understood who belonged to this group. the israeli and international media had profiled many refusers, who themselves were equipped with web sites and promotional literature. but i found that in addition to these public refusers, there were also those who evaded military service without ever formally declaring their refusal. in fact, those who declared their refusal constituted only a tiny percentage of those who refused military service. the public refuser movement was, and is, only the tip of the iceberg, the visible part of a practice whose invisible proportions dwarf its public face. with time, i also came to appreciate that while declaring refusal is an act of defiance against the state, silent refusal is a form of abstention. here, i argue for the radical potential of refusal as abstention. while public military refusal can be understood as resistance, refusal as abstention should be understood as an affirmative investment in another possibility. in my understanding, abstention is calculated passivity, and it is no coincidence that abstention likewise characterizes all the cases of refusal raised in this openings collection, be it not showing up at the voting booth, the passport office, the doctor’s office, or the military enlistment center. abstention, a tense stillness that hopes to avoid the state’s gaze, is a kind of “playing dead” to avoid the traps of citizenship. in israel, public military refusal carries the potential for social transformation by being cast as a political and moral act of the individual. public declarations of refusal receive significant attention from the media, and as a result become known to the broader society. such declarations can influence public discourse. israelis have been able to use public refusal as a stage for political intervention and activism. they have managed to create doubt in the israeli mainstream about the ethical and legal legitimacy of the israeli military and state’s actions. in addition, they have attracted international attention. public intellectuals such as susan sontag (2004) and slavoj žižek (2002) have written admiring accounts and philosophical reinforcement in support of israeli military refusers. “resistance to crimes of state, and refusal to participate in them, has been and remains one of the most significant achievements of people of decency and courage throughout history. the israelis who have undertaken this honorable course merit the greatest admiration and respect,” wrote leftist pietist noam chomsky in praise of a collection of refusenik writings (kidron 2004, back cover). in contrast, those who evade military service, whose refusal remains below the surface, do not have the same public impact. they stay unadored, uncelebrated. their refusal is, rather, a quiet groundswell of abstention. these refusers’ motivation resembles that of other groups considered in this openings collection: the decision to invest their hopes and energies elsewhere. in contrast to public military refusal, abstention avoids the state’s resistance trap, which dooms public refusal to be claimed and co-opted by the state. unintentional conscription any individual who publicly refuses is subjected to a military evaluation of his or her claims. but first, all refusers are put into military uniform and sent before a sentencing officer. this signals the state’s declaration that the individual is not a citizen refusing to enlist, but rather a soldier refusing an order to complete the recruitment process, an offense against section 122 of the military code of 1955. by sleight of hand, the military defines the default position as conscription, against the intentions of the refuser. this move simultaneously represents a cunning conscription into the state project itself. the israeli state sends the order to enlist in the military through the national postal service. the state desires that the young person will respond positively to this request for consent. the public military refuser’s intention is to reject the state and deny its authority. but the state appreciates better than the refuser that any response to its order to enlist, whether yes or no, constitutes an explicit recognition of the state’s right to request consent. thus the declaration of “no” falls into the state’s well-laid trap. despite the opportunity for more effective political intervention, public refusal places a particularly heavy burden on those who practice it, and actually provides the state with the opportunity to nullify its intended effects and conscript the refuser into the purposes of the state project. individuals have sparse opportunities to refuse consent, and while the intent of public refusal is to reject state authority, the state proves very sly. audra simpson (2016) demonstrates how the state often manipulates interpretive possibilities in its own favor. in the case of israeli military refusers, the state uses the moment of refusal as an opportunity to conscript individuals into recognizing the authority of the state, even if they are not ultimately conscripted into the military. though those who declare their refusal to serve in the israeli military imagine their act to constitute the ultimate rejection of the state, in some ways they are also pulled into unintentional identification with the state project. the self-sacrificial aspect of public refusal in particular often forms part of this unintentional affiliation with the state. in contrast to those who evade service, those who refuse publicly generally serve time in jail. this time in prison is understood as an act of sacrifice, ultimately for the national good. serving in jail, even if to protest the state’s actions, recognizes the state project and is often understood by the israeli public as a patriotic act because the refusers willingly sacrifice for their political beliefs (weiss 2014). on inspection, we find that the recognition is mutual: the refuser recognizes the state project, while the state recognizes the refuser as worthy of jailing. as we will soon see, many groups are not asked to serve, and thus do not have access to the position of a public refusal. thus, the punishment refusers receive constitutes a kind of state recognition of social worth, demonstrating the problematic entanglement of public refusal in state forms of recognition. tests of autonomy state forms of recognition entailed in public refusal also include submission to an assessment of one’s capacity for moral autonomy. moral autonomy is not at issue when one consents to state authority. however, a declaration of refusal is an act of dissent that requires a person to demonstrate his or her conformity with liberal expectations of self-authorization. freedom of conscience, the main claim of those who publically declare their refusal, relies on the principle of self-authorization. conscience is understood as an internal guide only accessible to the individual through reflection. as such, the social expectation is that one must be accountable to one’s own moral insight. yet this freedom from external injunction comes with several caveats. when one finds oneself in a moment of public refusal, one’s capacity for moral autonomy, something taken for granted before refusal, is interrogated intensely. this interrogation is conducted through a synergetic partnership of the military and the mainstream media, both examining the lives and histories of refusers in search of disqualifying evidence. the public evaluation of one’s capacity to take such a stand can be affected by any number of conditions, which do not need to rise to any legal threshold to find one lacking in the court of public opinion. a medical condition, past or present drug use or illegal activity, a disability, being a woman or a gay person—all of these are reasons for people to conclude that one’s motivations for refusal are not ethical. (“it’s not conscience, she’s just crazy!” [he pashut meshuga’at]; “he’s from a weak population/unstable family,” “economic reasons,” “drugs,” etc.). so it is no coincidence that only the most hegemonic of israeli citizens become public military refusers. this group is composed of able-bodied, clean-cut, wealthy ashkenazi jewish males with stellar personal records and nary a parking ticket among them. of course, this group constitutes a small minority within israeli society, yet they represent nearly every single public refuser. thus, one of the privileges of cultural hegemony is the possibility of performing refusal as an act. some groups are exempted simply because the military does not want them: disabled people, those with medical or psychological issues, the poor, and the uneducated. most palestinian citizens are not asked to serve. many women, even those who try to make public refusals, are simply sent home on the basis of another, often fictitious, exemption such as psychological instability (weiss 2014). when less archetypal citizens try to make ethical interventions similar to public refusal, they are often besmirched, defamed, racialized, sexualized, and criminalized in a collaboration between the state and the media.1 the burden of state recognition also includes satisfying liberal requirements of autonomy and integrity to be considered a genuine case of conscientious refusal. in life’s dominion, ronald dworkin (1993) claims that the key to defining a choice as autonomous is its consistency with past choices made by the same individual. this understanding widely informs both liberal legal and colloquial understandings of someone’s right to take a moral stance on an issue. if a doctor or nurse refuses, for religious reasons, to perform abortions and seeks to have their right of refusal recognized, in the liberal understanding of rights, their claim will be considered invalid if they are found to have performed abortions in the past, or supported a woman’s right to choose, or regularly change their stance on the issue. so, too, are israeli military refusers subject to this liberal test of integrity. for public military refusers, committees, trials, appeals, and hearings are convened to evaluate the sincerity and consistency of moral claims.2 these dynamics could be thought of as a resistance trap. while sherry ortner (1995) has pointed to the flattening effects of resistance studies, here i intend to call attention to the ensnaring properties of resistance to the state. public refusal allows the state to latch on to this act of resistance to its authority through practices of co-optation and appropriation. refusing the state aloud unwittingly permits the state to control the terms of engagement, bringing in legal and bureaucratic logics, as well as the normative expectations of citizenship, such as loyalty and sacrifice. much as in quicksand, when operating on the state’s terms, the harder you struggle, the deeper you sink. it is this trap that silent refusal avoids, revealing abstention to be a more radical alternative to resistance. refusal as abstention while public refusal is the more visible part of the military refusal phenomenon, it is dwarfed by what i am calling refusal by abstention. while public refusal is infrequent and has involved only a few thousand soldiers in peak years, annually nearly half of all israeli youths do not serve in the military. some of these forms of refusal are legally accepted. the refusal of palestinian citizens of israel is allowed because their service to the jewish state is generally seen as a contradiction. religious youths are exempt from service as well, due to a controversial early agreement with the government. but many israeli youths subject to the draft simply avoid service. these refusers do not declare their refusal; instead, they submit some paperwork, they don’t respond to enlistment orders, or they make themselves scarce and wait for further attempts to enlist them. they respond minimally and with as little effort as possible. eventually, almost everyone who wants to be released is able to avoid service (weiss 2014). with time, exemptions are handed out that cite such reasons as medical conditions, disability, and generalized incompatibility, though these are often fictitious to varying degrees. sometimes these refusers by abstention first attempt public refusal but remain unsuccessful. in 2001, a group of high-school seniors got together and collectively wrote a letter of refusal, intending to become public refusers. in the end, the young men were jailed, fulfilling their intended goal, while the young women were released from service, unintentionally joining the silent majority of refusers by abstention. for many of the female signatories, this was a watershed moment in which they recognized the trap of state recognition behind refusal. in abstention, one avoids the liberal tests of autonomy that generally serve to pass negative judgment on the individual, rather than on the state as intended. one of these young women, ruti, told me that she came to see no difference between serving in the military and being a jailed refuser. both are joining the military system. the true refusal, she told me, would be to avoid the military altogether. another told me that serving in jail would be a “waste of time,” an implicit recognition that public refusal constitutes an investment in the state project. instead, these women sought to avoid all interaction with the state, and in doing so also avoiding the unintentional nationalism of publicly declared refusal. the calculated passivity involved in this type of refusal is not the same as being passive, however. silent refusers see the same abuses as their public counterparts, but they ultimately seek to act through channels other than resistance to the state. these ethical efforts are inevitably more local than public refusal: educational exhibitions drawing attention to the ubiquity of militarism in daily life in israel; moral and legal support networks for those seeking to refuse through abstention; discussion groups and forums; and other initiatives. these interventions seek to create a parallel public unencumbered by the normative entailments of citizenship in general, and of israeli citizenship in particular. the proponents of these initiatives do not hold themselves accountable to the state and do not seek to influence matters of policy. abstention avoids the state rather than challenging it directly. while refusal as abstention from both military service and public proclamation takes place on the individual level, it cannot be measured or valued on the individual level. this is due to the overwhelming numbers of those who abstain, despite their lack of collective organization, as well as the radical potency implicit in their act, despite their lack of manifesto. a different activist grammar in his classic book the structural transformation of the public sphere, jürgen habermas (1989) theorizes a public sphere as a kind of democratic utopia in which individuals can discuss national issues. this idea of the public sphere has been challenged on many fronts, including its normative bourgeois character and its dubious claims to emancipatory potential. indeed, we see these problems manifested in the case of public refusal, as most voices are excluded from this platform, and those who are granted entry are subject to impossible liberal tests of character. state forms of recognition are hegemonic norms that dilute the radical intentions of the refuser. moreover, the state’s use of public refusal as a backdoor conscription strategy serves to further bind the refuser to the state despite his or her intentions. i argue that, by contrast, refusal as abstention offers a more radical opening. first, these refusers avoid participation in violence. by playing dead as far as the state is concerned, israeli youths also avoid conscription to the state project, hegemonic liberal tests, and state forms of entrapment. avoiding the state allows them to invest their ethical intervention elsewhere than in state policy. like other contributors to this collection, i find that refusal is generative of affiliations not based in citizenship. this can be seen in the nascent bonds of alternative ethical affiliation forming between ruti and her female cohort, who tried to become public refusers but were sent home as undesirable. the opening toward other modes of politics begins with the recognition that even in dissent, the public sphere is often only available to the state’s most hegemonic citizens. this has sparked an ethical investment in unlearning norms of activism that replicate the problematic politics described above, as well as in building an alternative activist grammar and practices that bypass the state and its demand for self-sacrificial demonstrations ultimately serving state goals. refusal as abstention has yet to receive odes from international intellectuals, but it has to some extent avoided the rigged norms that activists face in engaging with the state, thus forging a different kind of political space. such refusal constitutes an antipolitics in the sense that it seeks to bypass the state. it is a refusal to participate in forms of organized oppression or dissent, rule or revolt, repression or resistance. refusal as abstention, rather than as struggle and opposition, rejects the hegemonic claim that one must make any ethical intervention through the state and state-level policy. it implicitly yet powerfully rejects the idea that one must speak through one’s citizenship. it does not flatter the state by assuming that it is the default source and determinant of just social relationships. it claims that there are publics and ethical life beyond the state, in places that the state cannot reach. as such, abstention avoids the resistance trap of public refusal, which even in its harshest form only reaffirms the state’s gravitational pull. notes 1. the case of tali fahima is a prime example of this process. fahima, a mizrahi woman from a poor town in the periphery, challenged the state narrative regarding palestinian terrorism by initiating contact with a wanted palestinian in the west bank. she was eventually charged with “assistance to the enemy at time of war.” while military refusers are accorded recognition of their position as a form of ethical stance-taking, fahima was extended no such recognition. her sanity was questioned frequently in public discussions, and many attributed her actions to a pathologized sexual relationship with the palestinian man, despite their mutual denial. 2. the case of yonatan ben-artzi is a prime example of this process. ben-artzi was a military refuser who claimed that he should be exempted from service because of his pacifist beliefs. over the course of several years, committees, trials, appeals, and hearings were convened to evaluate the “secrets of his heart,” in the words of one israeli supreme court justice. references dworkin, ronald m. 1993 life’s dominion: an argument about abortion, euthanasia, and individual freedom. new york: knopf. habermas, jürgen 1989 the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. translated by thomas burger, with the assistance of frederick lawrence. cambridge, mass.: mit press. originally published in 1962. kidron, peretz, ed. 2004 refusenik! israel’s soldiers of conscience. london: zed books. ortner, sherry b. 1995 “resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal.” comparative studies in society and history 37, no. 1: 173–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500019587. simpson, audra 2016 “consent’s revenge.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 3: 326–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.02. sontag, susan 2004 “foreword.” in refusenik! israel’s soldiers of conscience, edited by peretz kidron, xi–xvii. london: zed books. weiss, erica 2014 conscientious objectors in israel: citizenship, sacrifice, trials of fealty. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. žižek, slavoj 2002 “are we in a war? do we have an enemy?” london review of books 24, no. 10: 3–6. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n10/slavoj-zizek/are-we-in-a-war-do-we-have-an-enemy. wild goose chase wild goose chase: the displacement of influenza research in the fields of poyang lake, china lyle fearnley nanyang technological university on a damp december day in 2007, an american wildlife veterinarian named scott newman stood in the cultivated fields near poyang lake in southern china. neck craned upward, he watched a flock of swan geese circle overhead. poyang lake, located just south of the yangtze river, is an important overwintering site for migratory birds, and each winter many ornithologists and bird-watchers travel to the lake’s bird refuge to observe rare species of waterfowl. during the past decade, however, poyang’s flourishing bird life has acquired an aura of danger, for the lake has been placed at the center of research on the avian viruses that may cause the next influenza pandemic. newman himself was at the lake to capture and mark migratory birds for an international project investigating the origins of the highly pathogenic avian flu virus known as h5n1. during the ongoing avian influenza epizootic, scientists have come to locate pathology in ecological and multispecies arrangements in addition to the virus proper. anthropological accounts describe scientists situating influenza within a “biology of context” (caduff 2012, 344), at the “frontiers between species” (keck 2014, 59), or amid a “multispecies cloud” (lowe 2010, 626).1 as a result, scientific research into avian influenza is now as likely to be conducted in wetlands as in “wet” labs, and often includes wild-bird specialists alongside virologists. assessing influenza in its milieu rather than analyzing influenza under the microscope, contemporary influenza research is shifting the setting of experiments from the laboratory to field sites like poyang lake. this article asks how this relocation of flu research is changing scientific knowledge production, a transformation that challenges anthropological concepts of scientific practice drawn from the model of the laboratory sciences. at poyang lake, newman and his team surgically attached transponder tags and antennas to migratory birds, including swan geese, planning to track them by satellite when the birds flew north to siberia in the spring. the team designed the study to better understand how, where, and when wild birds come into contact with domestic poultry. according to their hypothesis, contacts at what they called the “wild bird–domestic poultry disease interface” (xiao et al. 2010, 1) may encourage the emergence of pandemic flu viruses. distinguishing birds into two opposed categories—wild and domestic—the hypothesis suggested that viruses develop into more dangerous forms when they pass from wild to domestic bird populations, or vice versa. as he watched the flock of swan geese flying above him, newman felt puzzled, he later recounted to me. swan geese (anser cygnoides) are an endangered species of wild waterfowl. but according to what a poultry breeder had just told him, the geese above him were not wild at all. indeed, these swan geese belonged to the breeder, who had bred, incubated, raised, housed, and fed them in preparation for slaughter and sale. then again, newman found that they were by no means simply domestic fowl either. at least, the breeder kept insisting that precisely their wildness made their meat delicious and highly valuable. and newman agreed that they resembled wild swan geese so closely that even true wild birds would be unable to recognize the difference. newman had come to poyang lake to study the interface between wild and domestic birds. but he found that poultry breeders were actively recomposing the qualities of wildness and domesticity in their husbandry of swan geese. despite the apparent contradiction in terms, they were breeding wildness. in this article, i describe how newman and his research team brought their experiments to poyang lake, as well as their subsequent encounter with wild goose breeders. i then examine the cultivation of wildness by swan goose breeders, drawing from my own participant observation at farms around poyang lake, and show how breeding wildness creates new forms of bird that cannot be categorized as simply wild or domestic. finally, i explain how the encounter with this anomaly brought about a shift in the way influenza scientists conceived of the transmission of disease across the boundary of wild and domestic. based on the evident significance of the field encounter in reshaping the trajectory of flu research at poyang lake, i argue for the need to examine and modify current anthropological models of scientific knowledge production. these models have focused on the role of the experimental apparatus and of scientific intervention in the production of new knowledge, but they have done so largely on the basis of ethnographic studies inside laboratories. the encounter in the field moves research along different pathways, and it demands a distinct model of how new scientific knowledge is made and who participates in its making. rather than translating the world into the laboratory, the production of scientific knowledge in the field relies on recognizing how the practices of others rework the objects of experimental inquiry. from lab to field my argument builds on a contrast between lab and field sciences suggested by recent anthropological and historical research. the historical emergence of the laboratory is central to the rise of modern science and medicine (shapin and schaffer 1985; cunningham and williams 1992). equally important, ethnographic studies of laboratories transformed anthropological understandings of science, because fieldwork inside labs showed how new scientific knowledge is constructed, produced, or manufactured. the foundational laboratory studies established the concept of science as practice (cf. pickering 1992),2 a model later extended to analyze scientific inquiry in many other sites, applying the concept of laboratory practice beyond the physical “site which houses experiments” (knorr-cetina 1992, 134). in this view, science undertaken in other settings, such as farms and fields, necessitates the detachment and translation of the outside world back into the laboratory “centres of calculation” (latour 1987, 215), or at least onto a lab-like ground, a controlled or purified site that allows for the “reproduction of favourable laboratory practices” (latour 1999, 166). historians, however, have pointed out that the laboratory is only one among many sites of scientific inquiry, and that these differences matter for the way in which knowledge is produced (livingstone 2003). historians of the field sciences show that as the laboratory rose in epistemic status, “‘the field’ was simultaneously reconstructed as the residuum of messy, complex, and uncontrollable nature” (vetter 2010, 2; cf. kohler 2002; schneider 2000). henrika kucklick and robert kohler (1996, 4) argue that field sciences are distinctive because “unlike laboratories, natural sites can never be exclusively scientific domains.” the field experiment takes place within a “working landscape” (white 1995). according to these historical studies, scientific knowledge of the field does not fully detach objects of inquiry from the forms of life and modes of production that are practiced in and on the scientific site. in this article, i follow contemporary influenza scientists as they move their experiments from the lab to the field. this movement from lab to field not only brings new working objects into view but also calls forth new methods and norms of scientific practice (schwartz and krohn 2011; cf. bachelard 1984). in particular, i argue that the encounter with the field gives shape to a distinctive trajectory of scientific production. opposing both whig histories of progressive discovery and theory-centered accounts of revolution (kuhn 1962), laboratory studies emphasized the role of experimental practice and material infrastructure in the production of new scientific knowledge. the historian of science hans-jörg rheinberger’s concept of scientific displacement, which draws from historical and ethnographic studies of laboratories, provides a particularly sophisticated model. rheinberger (1997, 134) argues that “unprecedented events”—the surprising occurrences traditionally glossed as scientific discoveries—are in fact engendered by experimental practice and the laboratory apparatus: “they come as a surprise but nevertheless do not just so happen. they are made to happen through the inner workings of the experimental machinery for making the future.” although made by experimental practice, they also “commit experimenters to completely changing the direction of their research activities.” the paradoxical “research object,” (rheinberger 1997, 28),3 the object of scientific inquiry, is constructed by the experimental system yet remains irreducibly vague, embodying the unknown rather than the known and enabling the concerted creation of the unexpected. rheinberger (1997, 11) describes the production of scientific knowledge as a process of displacement rather than discovery, one in which the sciences “reshap[e] their agenda through their own action,” but without foreknowledge of how their objects will take shape. when situated in the field, however, the scientific research object is also the object of other modes of creative practice that already inhabit the field site. this essay articulates how these other modes of practice rework and transform scientific research objects, causing displacements that cannot be attributed to the inner workings of the experimental system. in flu research at poyang lake, the wild bird–domestic poultry interface constitutes a research object whose forms, the wildness and domesticity of the birds themselves, are at the same time being transformed by poultry breeders. i argue that displacements, the primary source of scientific change or discovery, can therefore result as much from an encounter with a poultry breeder’s techniques as from the apparatus of the experimental system. in what i describe as “field displacements,” scientific knowledge in the field develops through encounters with the outside of the experimental system. contemporary scholars have heralded such fissures in the autonomy of the laboratory as evidence of an important historical shift in the relation of science to society. in their influential diagnosis of what they call “mode 2” science, for instance, helga nowotny and her colleagues observed that the sciences, once exclusive and autonomous domains, had now been “superseded by a new paradigm of knowledge production, which was socially distributed, application-oriented, trans-disciplinary, and subject to multiple accountabilities” (nowotny et al. 2003, 179). previous studies have focused on political or ethical drivers of this transformation, such as patients’ organizations (epstein 1996; callon and rabeharisoa 2003), risk assessments (wynne 1998), and ethics regimes (strathern 2003; rabinow and bennett 2012). these studies describe new actors entering into the previously circumscribed space of scientific expertise and collaborating in, or contesting, the production of knowledge. what has been overlooked, however, is how the shifting sites of scientific research reroute the trajectories of knowledge production, adjusting science’s relation to nature rather than to society. the process of field displacement suggests that the production of scientific knowledge in the field depends on, and works within, a natural world already given form by other productive engagements. following the movement from laboratory to field, encounters with wild bird breeders forced influenza researchers to study the natural world as an artifact of human practices.4 making scientific knowledge in the field does not bring society into the laboratory in response to a politics of participation, but rather demands that scientists exit the laboratory and build new methods for understanding the creative practices transforming the natural world. viral traffic (in the lab) newman first visited poyang lake while attending the 2006 international living lakes conference, an environmental conservation meeting held in the nearby city of nanchang. speaking on a panel about “avian influenza, wildlife, and environment,” newman focused on “integrated fish farming” in china as a possible mechanism for virus transmission from domestic poultry to wild birds. these integrated fish farms “directly use fresh poultry waste as a production input,” that is, as an inexpensive fish feed. high quantities of virus are known to be excreted by birds infected with the h5n1 strain of influenza virus. newman concluded that “in such systems with little or no biosecurity measures in place, the likelihood of multiple wild species interaction and possibility of disease . . . transmission could be considerable” (newman et al. 2006, 57). in itself, the hypothesis that multispecies interactions in china’s wetlands, rice paddies, and poultry systems may contribute to pandemic emergence was hardly new. after the second world war, the world health organization’s (who) global network of laboratories traced the appearance of the 1957 asian and 1968 hong kong pandemics to southern china. kennedy shortridge, the director of a who reference laboratory at the university of hong kong, subsequently hypothesized that southern china could be an “influenza epicentre” (shortridge and stuart-harris 1982, 812). in a 1982 paper, shortridge and his coauthor argued that the region was a likely “point of origin for pandemic viruses” due to the intensity of “interchanges of virus” between animals and humans. “the closeness between man and animals could provide an ecosystem for the interaction of their viruses,” they wrote. for an influenza pandemic to arise, a new form of the virus is necessary, one able to escape the immune responses cultivated by human populations during previous flu outbreaks. the american robert webster had previously shown that such new viruses can be experimentally produced in the laboratory: taking viruses derived from different species, he co-infected a single animal host, a process that webster and his coauthors observed had encouraged the two viruses to swap genetic material and create “recombinant” forms (webster, campbell, and granoff 1973, 318). shortridge simply added that the multispecies associations webster simulated in his lab already flourished in the actual villages of southern china. but shortridge never brought his experiments out into the paddies and villages, nor did he design a research program to study the ecology of these landscapes. instead, shortridge tracked influenza viruses from inside his hong kong lab. the lab collected thousands of samples from poultry-processing plants and duck farms in hong kong and southern guangdong. the samples were first filtered and assayed for influenza viruses, then classified in terms of their phylogeny. hong kong proved to be “an extremely fruitful source of influenza a viruses” (shortridge, alexander, and collins 1980, 260). as frédérick keck (2014) has argued, shortridge constructed his laboratory as a “sentinel” for pandemic influenza viruses, a device able to isolate new viruses as they emerged in southern china but before they spread to the world (cf. macphail 2014). warwick anderson (2004) has described a minor tradition of “ecological vision” among twentieth-century infectious disease researchers. desiring a more “integrative” understanding of disease processes, scientists such as f. macfarlane burnet argued that microbes are situated in ecological relations among organisms and environments. yet as anderson (2004, 51) points out, the concepts of ecology employed by these researchers were more “metaphoric resource” than “analytic tool,” and drew little on contemporary advances in the scientific field of ecology. although shortridge located the hypothetical conditions of pandemic emergence in particular natural environments and “age-old” cultures, he too never turned them into research objects. his characterizations of southern china drew from personal communications, travelers’ reports, and joseph needham’s classic historical series, science and civilization in china. he spoke of the “ecology of influenza viruses,” but his investigations took place at a microbiological or even molecular scale, and always inside the laboratory (shortridge and stuart-harris 1982, 812). in 1997, shortridge’s lab attributed the cause of a boy’s death to an avian influenza virus (typed as h5n1) that was causing concurrent outbreaks on hong kong’s poultry farms. scientists widely saw the interspecies transmission from poultry to humans as a confirmation of the influenza epicenter hypothesis and raised alarm about an imminent pandemic (jong et al. 1997). avian influenza became an exemplar of an “emerging infection,” a powerful new object of public health that has attracted substantial research funds from wealthy donor countries and international organizations (king 2004). developed primarily by u.s.-based researchers in the early 1990s, the concept of disease emergence proposes that changing ecological relationships are responsible for the production of new diseases from hiv to ebola. the virologist stephen morse (1990), who coined the term, describes disease emergence as the transfer of disease-causing pathogens into novel host populations, and argues that this “viral traffic” should form the special object of infectious disease research. the historian nicholas king (2004) has called attention to the “scale politics” of the “emerging diseases worldview.” on the one hand, the emerging diseases worldview narrated local configurations of nature and society, often in the developing tropical regions, as sources of disease that threatened the entire globe. at the same time, the worldview figured environmental crisis and social dislocation as problems that could be solved at a laboratory scale. as king (2004, 66) puts it, “since the ‘laws of viral traffic’ were universal, monitoring and intervening need not be bound to the same scale as either cause or consequence. addressing ‘global’ risks meant making ecological change legible to laboratory investigation or information processing at multiple locations, often far removed from the specific site of disease outbreaks.” through the logic of disease emergence, china’s local multispecies ecology came to stand in for the avian influenza virus and the threat of future pandemics. although this framework reaffirmed shortridge’s model of monitoring china’s virological landscapes from the sentinel laboratory, the growth in scientific attention and funding also set the stage for moving flu research out into the fields of the influenza epicenter. victims or vectors (in the field) the mass mediated “fascination” with the specter of global pandemic (macphail 2014), alongside models of pandemic futures elaborated in scientific journals and military preparedness plans (lakoff 2008), led to an enormous growth in funds for research on the emergence of flu viruses. the who—along with its animal health counterpart at the food and agriculture organization (fao)—adopted an interagency framework known as one health to coordinate the growth in flu research (chien 2013; porter 2013). according to one health principles, disease-causing pathogens are often shared among wild animals, domestic livestock, and human populations. as a result, the framework of one health has become a resource for encouraging a wide variety of experts not typically involved in influenza research, including wildlife specialists, to begin unprecedented field investigations into the disease.5 a 2005 outbreak of avian influenza h5n1 on china’s northwestern plateau crystallized the movement from laboratory to field around the figure of the migratory bird. during that spring, chinese park rangers found thousands of dead birds on an island in the middle of the remote qinghai lake. scott newman later declared the outbreak “the single largest h5n1 wild bird mortality event that has ever occurred” (jiao 2010). in its sheer scale, the qinghai epizootic indicated sustained transmission of the virus among wild birds. influenza researchers began to suggest that wild birds might play an unexpected role in the long-distance transmission of highly pathogenic flu viruses. as newman and his research collaborators aptly captured it, everyone wanted to know whether wild waterfowl were “victims or vectors” of the virus (takekawa et al. 2010). as funding for wild bird studies grew, the fao hired newman to coordinate international research on the role of wild birds in avian influenza. in 2006, he helped organize a study of wild bird migration at the qinghai lake, along with collaborators from the u.s. geological survey and the chinese academy of science. the researchers hoped to find out, among other things, how the h5n1 virus had arrived in this remote region of china. recently published research from chinese and hong kong virology labs brought their attention to poyang lake, far to the east in the richly cultivated plains of the yangtze delta. lei fumin, an ornithologist from the chinese academy of sciences institute of zoology, plainly stated their reasoning: “qinghai strains can be traced to one early strain from poyang based on the genomic analysis” (jiao 2010). when newman and his colleagues organized research at poyang lake, however, they were no longer concerned only with wild bird migration. to understand the role of migratory birds in the emergence of the h5n1 virus, they believed they needed to find out how flu viruses passed from domestic poultry populations to wild birds in the first place. they designed what they called an “integrated pilot study” at poyang that drew together, or integrated, a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. funded by a grant from the u.s. national institutes of health (nih), the pilot study included a spatial analysis of landscape and land use from satellite imagery; surveys of domestic poultry density and market chains; and virological sampling of both wild and domestic birds, among other projects. population ecologists, livestock veterinarians, geospatial analysts, and geographers hailing from the united states, europe, and china joined the wild bird specialists. i refer to this scientific collective as “the nih group” in accordance with their own colloquial reference to their funding source. members of the nih group described their integration of a wide variety of disciplines around a common question as a “one health approach” (e.g., newman, siriaroonat, and xiao 2012), and they wrote of adopting an “ecological research perspective” (takekawa et al. 2010, 3). they contrasted this perspective with what a geographer participating in the nih group called “reductionist” understandings of influenza focused on the virus alone. for example, the nih group criticized previous studies conducted at poyang lake for a “lack of detail in identifying migratory waterfowl to species level [that] precludes analysis of ecological aspects of the disease” (takekawa et al. 2010). as an nih-group bird migration specialist told me: a lot of the [virus] sampling has been done without designation. now, it’s fine if you can get to species level, its better than you started, i mean initially it was just like “duck.” and there’s like huge differences in species, right? and so all this is to us [wild bird specialists] common in that you look at a bird and you know that “well, that’s a different bird, and its different from this one over here, cause its doing this bit of behavior, its completely, its not going to be found in that habitat, all of those things you automatically know, and you hardly think about it, you don’t realize that over there a virologist is thinking, “that’s a duck.” you know? a tree’s a tree. and that redwood and that oak tree, it’s all the same. with the concept of viral traffic, influenza experts had already blamed ecological and multispecies relationships for the emergence of pandemic flu viruses, it is true. yet this traffic had been studied at the scale of the virus, mostly by virologists, with little or no research on the multispecies ecologies that host and transmit viruses. the nih group, rather than analyzing and classifying viruses in the laboratory, investigated the ecological relationships that contributed to the transmission of flu viruses into new populations—relationships that one might call the highways and bridges of viral traffic. although the nih-group pilot study at poyang lake included a large number of distinct projects, its members integrated the study as a whole around a common research object: what they called the “wild bird–domestic poultry disease interface” (xiao et al. 2010). situated at an ecosystem, rather than a molecular, scale, this research object aimed to uncover the highways of viral traffic between wild birds and domestic poultry. the scientists believed that this transmission of viruses across the wild–domestic interface was a “key factor integral to the evolution of lpai [low pathogenic avian influenza] into hpai [highly pathogenic avian influenza]” (takekawa et al. 2010, 4). by describing the contours and pathways of the wild bird–domestic poultry interface at poyang lake, they believed they would map the route along which avian flu viruses emerged into pandemics. when he arrived at poyang lake with equipment in hand, however, newman discovered to his surprise that poultry breeders did much more than raise domestic poultry. the poultry breeders at poyang also qualitatively transformed the interface of wild and domestic itself, mixing and recombining the qualities of wildness and domesticity in the breeding of wild birds. the nih group had derided virologists for their inability to recognize the differences between mallard and pintail ducks. but they came to realize that their own distinction of wild and domestic kinds of bird was equally inadequate. breeding wildness just inside one of the large embankments that keep the flood waters of poyang lake at bay, on the outskirts of his natal village, wang fenglian raises his wild swan geese (da yan). i first visited his farm in the summer of 2011, brought there by one of the nih group’s jiangxi province collaborators, and was fortunately welcomed as a frequent guest by wang and his son. they own a moderately sized plot of land that contains a house where wang, his family, and employees live; a few sheds for the wild geese and ducks; and a pond where the birds often swim. born into a family of rice farmers, wang fenglian had risked a wide range of enterprises since the beginning of economic reforms: he had raised fish in a small pond; he had bred dogs; he had even done business in the provincial capital. some of these enterprises had brought great profits, others great losses. in 2001, he began to breed wild swan geese and incorporated the po lake wild animal breed co. ltd, which now ranges among the largest wild bird farms in the area. china’s post-mao reform policies simultaneously expanded wildlife conservation and promoted agricultural commercialization, trends that frequently came into direct conflict (hathaway 2013). at poyang lake, a large section of wetland was set aside as a migratory bird refuge in 1983, while other sections were designated as an “agricultural production base” focused on duck breeding. as early as the 1980s, jiangxi province officials suggested that wild bird breeding could help resolve conflicts between social and ecological interests by meeting demand without poaching from the wild (studies 1988). the breeding of wild swan geese began to grow rapidly about a decade later, encouraged by expanding elite consumption. an exemplary article, published in a henan province agricultural extension journal in 1999, promotes the activity as a timely response to unprecedented markets in the quickly growing coastal cities: “swan goose is a special poultry that our nation has only recently begun to breed from the wild [xunyang], and in some coastal cities there is a rather large market for its consumption. . . . as a result, the prospects are good for the development of swan goose breeding” (chen 1999, 21; cf. sichuan 1999). a chinese newspaper has described the rapid increase in the breeding of wild animals in the past two decades as a contemporary “fever” (re), drawing on a term often used to depict the cultural trends of the post-mao period (li 2001; cf. ellis and turner 2007). this feverish growth is itself a symptom of the even more dramatic expansion in domestic livestock production, and in particular of layer and broiler chickens. the breeding of domestic poultry was one of the first sectors opened to market sale in rural china following deng xiaoping’s reforms of the planned economy, and during the 1980s, poultry breeding quickly became an important source of rural livelihood and entrepreneurship. however, during the 1990s, large industrial poultry enterprises, organized as vertically integrated “dragon-head corporations” (longtou qiye), began to steadily increase market share. statistics show a rapid drop in smallholder poultry farms (ke and han 2008). during fieldwork, i discovered that many of these smallholders have not necessarily abandoned poultry production altogether, but instead now specialize in local or unusual breeds. one manner of specializing production, which aims to meet the growing demand for distinctive foods among wealthy elites, is to breed wild animals. china’s administrative system includes a category of “special type husbandry” (tezhong yangzhi) devoted to the management of wild animal breeding. this category defines wild animals bred under human management as still wild, thereby placing them under the jurisdiction of the state forestry administration rather than the ministry of agriculture. as an article in the newspaper peasant daily explains, “wild animals [yesheng dongwu], even when they are under conditions of human-directed husbandry, no matter how many generations they have been bred, as long as they have not passed through human directed cultivation [dingxing peiyu], nor produced new hereditary characteristics, that raised animal still is classified as a wild animal, and cannot be called a domestic poultry or livestock” (li 2001). according to the policy, the impact of breeding practice on an animal can be ignored if the practice does not actively cultivate new traits in the animal. much like the nih group’s wild–domestic interface, the policy presumes a stable distinction between wild and domestic animals. yet i found that for the wild goose breeders at poyang lake, the wildness (yexing) of the geese could not be presumed as a stable characteristic that passively maintained itself. rather, the traits of wildness themselves became direct objects of hereditary cultivation. the wildness of their birds, breeders claim, constitutes the key site of distinction from industrial poultry, and therefore the primary source of market value. maintaining this wildness requires technical interventions of both symbolic and material kinds, a practice that i describe as breeding wildness. birds raised in this manner, i argue, can no longer be grouped into existing categories of wild and domestic, because the breeders recompose wildness and domesticity to produce the novel and distinctive forms that carry higher value on the market. in doing so, these techniques of breeding wildness displaced the research object of the nih group, an object grounded on a presumed categorical difference separating wild and domestic birds. on wang’s farm, i first recognized the importance of these practices of recomposition when i observed the effort the breeders put into demonstrating wildness to their clients. when a prospective buyer expresses interest in purchasing chicks, wang invites them for an “inspection” of the farm, billed as a complimentary course of instruction in the special techniques required to raise wild geese (feeds, housing, etc.). wang’s son haohua acknowledged that otherwise customers might not believe the birds were actually wild, and he repeated a popular saying about fake goods to drive the point home: “hang up a sheep’s head outside the shop, but sell butchered dog meat [gua yangtou, mai gourou].” wildness, according to the wang family, is embodied primarily in three traits: general external appearance, such as coloring and shape; the absence of a growth on the base of the beak that appears on domesticated geese; and above all, the ability to fly. promotional materials, including the wang family’s website, pamphlets, and packaging materials, draw a close symbolic connection between the birds’ ability to fly and their wildness. for example, one pamphlet praises “wild taste,” while images of bred wild geese in flight are cut and pasted over pictures of undeveloped sections of poyang lake. in addition to this symbolic work of marking wildness, though, the wang family is also concerned to ensure their geese physically embody the traits they identify as wild. and this is not as simple as selecting a species of goose from the wild or one broadly categorized as wild and then raising it on the farm. wang found, to his chagrin, that after four or five generations of human breeding, the geese lose their distinctive wildness, growing knobs on the base of the beak and losing their ability to fly. his son described this loss of wildness as degeneration or regression (tuihua). as a result, techniques of cultivating wildness lie at the center of the wang family’s breeding practice. first, they carefully manage the breeding of the geese. they blame the degeneration of the geese in part on inbreeding (jinxing fanzhi), that is, the reproduction of offspring in sexual relations between individuals too closely related. in explaining their practice to me, haohua drew on an analogy of the incest prohibitions in classical china: those of the same family line cannot have sexual relations if they are within three generations of relatedness. the geese are divided into families (jiating), and during breeding seasons the male offspring are kept in pens separate from their ancestral family. at the same time, the wang family also works to enhance the wildness of the geese by managing the influence of the environment. in a promotional brochure that i helped hand out at the china international forestry exposition in 2011, wang describes such environmental management as his innovation (chuangxin). “our company courageously seeks innovation,” the brochure reads, “bravely explores frontiers, in the whole nation the first to free-graze wild geese and wild ducks in the natural wild [tianran yewai fangyang].” in addition to the main farm, the wang family also established what they call an experimental base much closer to the shore of poyang lake’s open waters. whereas the main farm is on the inside of the embankments that keep flood waters from human settlement, the experimental base is on the outside of the embankment, exposed to the lake’s untempered force. as haohua put it, by compelling the birds to accustom themselves to a wild living environment (yewaide yi ge shengcunde huanjing), their wildness will grow and intensify. for swan goose breeders like the wang family, wildness is not a quality opposed to human touch, for it is through specific techniques of breeding that they ensure their geese embody the qualities of wildness. wildness is a collection of qualities, both symbolic and material, that can be cultivated or lost. yet this breeding practice also differs quite markedly from domestication. where domestication seeks to transform a wild animal into one oriented toward human benefits (such as greater meat production, tame personality, and so on), the swan goose breeder takes wildness as a form that can itself be cultivated. seeking to achieve market values by raising distinctive forms of bird, they breed wildness in a manner that escapes simple substantive classifications of the wild and the domestic. anthropologists from marilyn strathern (1980) to phillipe descola (2013) have urged attention to variation in the conceptual and practical arrangements of wild and domestic across different forms of life. similarly, environmental historians and geographers emphasize the particularity of the idea of wilderness and wildlife as untouched by human activity, an idea particular to the modern histories of europe and the united states (cronon 1996; benson 2010). these works emphasize that differences in the ordering of the wild and wilderness are practical as much as conceptual. certainly, wild bird breeders are not enacting a static chinese conception of wildness. for one thing, they are engaged with a contemporary configuration of the wild and the domestic shaped by china’s recent postsocialist transformations, including the rise of industrial broiler farming, the revaluation of wildlife (coggins 2003; zhan 2008; hathaway 2013), and emergence of new consumer lifestyles (farquhar 2002). second, and more important, the wild goose breeder takes these distinctions not as rules to enact but as the object of strategic practice, a matter to be reflexively reformulated in the effort to mark products with distinctive value. not content to remain producers of domestic poultry, the breeders manipulate the distinction of wild and domestic itself to produce new forms and new values. field displacements in the design of their research object—the wild bird–domestic poultry interface—the nih group presumed wild and domestic birds are two distinct populations. the wild goose breeders, on the other hand, saw the wild–domestic distinction very differently—as a value differential that could be practically exploited through techniques of breeding wildness. when the nih group encountered the swan goose breeders during field studies at poyang lake, they quickly saw the limits of their own concepts and developed new research objects. yet this process differed from rheinberger’s model of laboratory displacement. for rather than deriving from the infrastructure and design of the experimental system itself—rheinberger’s (1997, 134) “machine for making a future”—the research object was displaced by poultry breeders whose breeding techniques and values reconstructed the interface of wild and domestic. during their initial migratory bird studies at poyang lake, newman and other members of the nih group stayed at the migratory bird refuge in the town of wucheng, surrounded on all sides by the poyang wetlands. newman recalls that each day they set out to capture and mark wild birds in the refuge van, to drive anywhere, from any point a to point b, you see lots of duck farming. we started talking to people, and then you get to know some of the local people, get to know some of the people at the wildlife reserve, and start talking, in those broader discussions, asking them about what was being raised, what kinds of species? so they started going into different species of ducks. and some of these were pretty unusual species to be raised, so we were wondering. later, after they asked their driver to stop by some farms, newman encountered the swan goose breeder and his wild swan geese in the moment i described at the beginning of the essay. this encounter “led us over to farmed wild birds, [a] whole new level of interest,” newman told me, explaining that the encounter completely transformed the nih group’s understanding of “connectivity and interface between wild and domestic birds.” the shifting conceptual terms used by the nih group to describe how connections form across the wild–domestic interface make visible the contours of this displacement. before research at poyang was begun, newman coauthored the fao technical manual introducing field research on wild birds and avian influenza. in a section explaining the hypothetical role of wild birds in influenza transmission, the authors point to the importance of what they call “‘bridge’ species.” they write: several bird groups without particularly strong ties to wetland habitats, but with a high tolerance for human-altered habitats, have also been known to become infected fatally from h5n1 [including crows, sparrows, mynas, and pigeons]. . . . these species may serve as links between wild birds in natural habitats and domestic poultry, acting as a “bridge” in the transmission of ai viruses from poultry to wildlife or vice versa. (whitworth et al. 2007, 27–28) following the encounter with the wild swan goose breeders, the nih group developed a new concept: “farmed wild birds.” clearly drawing on the earlier notion of bridge species, newman explained to me in 2012 that farmed wild birds “could be the link between wild and domestic birds. they are the perfect intermediary. because they look identical to their conspecifics, when they are foraging, a wild bird would come right up to them, because phenotypically they are the same. but then, they go home at night, and there are other poultry around at the farm. so there’s your transmission!” yet despite resemblance to the earlier notion, the new concept subtly displaced the form of the nih group’s working object, the wild–domestic interface. in the original design of their pilot study, the nih group understood the interface as a spatial setting in which contacts between wild and domestic bird populations took place, such as the fish ponds described in newman’s presentation to the living lakes conference. a diagram of the original plan for the pilot study (xiao et al. 2010) depicts white boxes marked “migratory birds” and “free-ranging ducks/geese” on either side of a blue oval identified as “paddy rice fields/natural wetlands/fish ponds.” the bridge species was an existing wild bird species that frequented such settings of interface, birds such as pigeons able to tolerate both natural and human-altered habitats. with the concept of “farmed wild bird,” on the other hand, the researchers transposed the conceptual boundary between wild and domestic from a spatial setting or habitat to the bird itself. in doing so, they drew attention to the breeding practices that cultivate birds able to double as either wild or domestic, practices that internalize the wild–domestic interface within the farmed wild bird. the subsequent research projects the nih group conducted at poyang lake made the significance of this displacement clear. following the discovery of the farmed wild bird, the nih group focused inquiry on the human practices responsible for breeding wildness: they counted and mapped the households that farmed wild birds, conducted surveys to understand vaccination regimes, and followed the market chains along which farmed wild birds were traded. and when the nih group updated their diagram of the wild–domestic interface to include farmed wild birds (newman, siriaroonat, and xiao 2012), this new vector of human agency was also added, a new white textbox containing the words “production, market, trade, transport systems, vaccine, movement control, culture, behavior.” conclusion in this article, i do not argue that the field has entirely replaced the lab in influenza research: indeed, laboratory analysis of viral samples remains an important component of flu research at poyang lake. rather, the movement to the field displaces the predominance of laboratory practice as a model for understanding the process through which new scientific knowledge is made. for the classic laboratory ethnographies, the lab was a tactical site where science could be studied as a cultural practice, thereby calling into question the importance of theoretical structures and mental cognition as sources of scientific knowledge and change. yet this focus on experimental practice, the significance of which is so evident inside the laboratory, has obscured from view the more variable trajectories of scientific discovery. based on my analysis of encounters between flu researchers and poultry breeders at poyang lake, this essay proposes an anthropological investigation into the diverse routes along which scientists adjust their research objects and come to know new things. without denying the important insights provided by the model of laboratory practice, the anthropology of science i propose goes beyond analyzing the detachment of inscriptions and their accumulation in laboratory centers. nor do i presume that the field is a simple externality of the laboratory, a messy or complex inversion of the purified lab. instead, i draw attention to the specific moments at which scientists depart from laboratory protocol and encounter the others who shape the world outside. to be sure, the defining features of laboratory practice could be found in the initial setup of the migration study at poyang lake. transponders attached to wild birds sent signals to orbiting satellites, transforming migratory movements into detached “traces” (knorr cetina 1992, 116) available for scientific manipulation and analysis back in laboratory centers (cf. benson 2010). in the end, however, the traces detached from the flights of birds did not displace the nih group’s research object: an encounter with poultry breeders did. when newman first told me about farmed wild birds, he laughed and recalled how he had posed as an american poultry buyer on his first trip to a poyang lake farm. whether or not he was fooled, the breeder went along with the performance, asking which seaports would be most convenient for shipments to the united states, proudly describing the wildness of his birds, and sending a whole, fresh-killed swan goose to newman that evening. the insights about the farming of wild birds that shifted the nih group’s research objects came not from an extension of his laboratory to the lake, but rather from newman’s momentary abandonment of the subject position of scientific expert. by taking on the pose of the buyer, newman came to understand the concept of wildness guiding the practice of wild goose breeding, an understanding that the “inner workings” (rheinberger 1997, 134) of his experimental system could not provide. shifting influenza research to the field constructs research objects on sites of already ongoing labor and production. this colabor on the same sites can cause unexpected field displacements to scientific research objects. when both scientists and breeders work on the same birds, as described in this article, breeding techniques become as important as experimental design for the production of novelty that lies at the heart of scientific change. but recognizing these field displacements, and thereby incorporating them in the trajectory of knowledge production, requires a shift away from the laboratory practices of detachment and purification. in his encounter with the breeder, newman relied on techniques more familiar to the human than the natural sciences (dilthey 1989). viewed as part of external nature, the geese flying above him looked like any wild swan geese, anser cygnoides. playing the part of a participant in the breeder’s world of food markets and gourmet tastes, on the other hand, newman learned that the birds are human works, and he strove to understand the ideas and values driving the cultivation of wildness. influenza research at poyang lake describes an anthropological arc of sorts, one in which knowledge of natural objects first passes through an understanding of human engagements with the natural environment. of course, this is not to say that the harmonious integration of the human and the natural sciences is at hand (rabinow and bennett 2012; rabinow and stavrianakis 2013). though i did collaborate with nih group researchers as a consultant in anthropology, i found that they sought an expert knowledge of culture that few anthropologists today would uphold (cf. helmreich 2001).6 still, the trajectory of influenza research at poyang lake carries significant epistemological implications, if not such epochal ones. many studies have shown that the sciences today are forming new relations with society through patients’ organizations and bioethics regimes, transforming how knowledge is made in the process. in this essay, i argue that the changing sites and objects of contemporary influenza research are shifting the epistemological relation of the sciences to nature as scientists in the field come to see natural sites as human artifacts. laboratory ethnographies exposed the material infrastructure and scientific labor required to construct the spaces where scientists encounter nature and take its measure. the field displacement of influenza research at poyang lake reflects a different epistemological question: how do scientists account for the practical engagements, such as poultry breeding, that creatively transform the natural sites where field experiments are undertaken? similar field displacements can be found, i suggest, in a range of scientific domains—from biodiversity conservation to climate change—in which nature is increasingly understood as anthropogenic, as a product of human works (lowe 2006; tsing 2005; whitington 2013). when poultry breeders cultivate wildness and factories change climates, scientific knowledge about wildlife or atmosphere relies on more than experimental infrastructure and laboratory practice. natural knowledge is also constructed on understandings of the human engagements that reshape the natural world; engagements that, through techniques of breeding or production, displace the objects of scientific research. notes acknowledgments i am particularly grateful to scott newman and other nih group researchers, as well as the wang family (a pseudonym) and other breeders in the poyang lake region, for inviting and assisting my inquiry. i am indebted to paul rabinow, andrew lakoff, frédéric keck, xin liu, dorothy porter, liu ying, emily chua, laurence tessier, ruth goldstein, bruno reinhardt, leticia cesarino, bharat venkat, anthony stavrianakis, and my colleagues in the humanities, science and society research cluster at nanyang technological university for incisive critiques and advice along the way. i thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology, james faubion, dominic boyer, and cymene howe, for invaluable comments and suggestions. research and writing were supported by fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research abroad and chiang ching-kuo doctoral fellowships. 1. see also lakoff 2008; hinchliffe and bingham 2008; porter 2012, 2013; chien 2013; hinchliffe and lavau 2013; macphail 2014. 2. the foundational works are knorr-cetina 1981; latour and woolgar 1986; traweek 1988. for a review, see knorr-cetina 1995. 3. rheinberger’s neologism is epistemic thing, but he indicates that the term is synonymous with the more widely used research object, scientific object, or working object. see rheinberger 1997, 28. 4. on nature as artifact, see haraway 1991; rabinow 1996; descola 2013. 5. previous scholarship is divided about the import of one health models on influenza research and control programs. while porter (2013) describes an emerging “‘one health’ paradigmatic order” implemented in vietnam that redefined the risks of interspecies contacts in spite of resistance from “local knowledge hierarchies,” chien (2013) describes extensive disagreement among transnational scientists about the meaning of one health and warns that the concept could become “merely ceremonial.” both presume that one health models are produced largely at global centers such as manhattan or geneva, and disagree only about the extent to which these models applied a unified vision of multispecies order. in this essay, i document the field implementation of a one health research project. in doing so, i show how scientific knowledge production in the field can displace one health models of disease transmission and suggest the need for new concepts of scientific practice that highlight the importance of such field encounters. 6. and to the extent that attention to culture and behavior may result in scapegoating poultry breeders for influenza emergence, the consequences of this anthropological turn may be troubling. see zhan 2008 and porter 2012. references anderson, warwick 2004 “natural histories of infectious disease: ecological vision in twentieth-century biomedical science.” osiris, 2nd ser., 19: 39–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/649393. 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open-access option for our flagship publication, cultural anthropology. the decision was not up to the sca alone, as we are a section of the american anthropological association (aaa), which maintains a contract with wiley-blackwell to publish the journals of more than twenty of its sections. in august 2012, the aaa director of publications, oona schmid, proposed that one of the publishing sections be permitted to become open access for the duration of the wiley-blackwell contract, which expires in december 2017. our board formed a task force, including some real experts on publishing and open access, and the group determined that it would be worthwhile to pursue this possibility. as it happened, we were the only aaa section that raised its hand, so we were authorized to make the transition. what you see before you is the result of the collective work of a diverse set of actors interested in producing cultural anthropology as an open-access journal. the effort to relaunch cultural anthropology as an open-access journal is not without its difficulties. in effect, the sca must now become a publisher, responsible for its own publishing systems, production processes, and relationships with external service providers. among other important tasks, we must ensure that the journal will be indexed and cataloged properly, so that it can readily be found by the many readers we know will be searching for it—connecting with new readers is, after all, the primary aim of open access. the aaa has agreed to help subsidize some of these new publication costs, but, as you might imagine, this is not an inexpensive proposition. the sca will be diligent about evaluating the costs of open access even as we remain uncompromising in our commitment to rigorous editorial review and exceptional production quality. these have been the hallmarks of cultural anthropology, and they will remain so in the future. a transition of this magnitude undoubtedly will bring unanticipated challenges—we look forward to them. the economic impact of open access is very difficult to gauge at this point. the sca is fortunately well positioned to handle even major expenses in the years between now and the end of 2017. beyond that, the sca hopes to show that a major journal can remain viable through a combination of grants, institutional sponsorships, and, crucially, membership support. even more important, the sca is extremely interested in developing a model that might be taken up by other sections of the aaa, and perhaps even other scholarly societies that share our vision of the production and dissemination of knowledge. it is our sincere hope that our experiments in seeking funds, setting-up infrastructure, and arranging labor will allow us to develop a model that will move scholarly publications forward in the coming years. by giving an ever wider community of scholars greater control over their time and resources—as they provide the essays, peer reviews, and other contributions that constitute our journals—we seek to help democratize our academic institutions. this is an ambitious goal but one that we hope each of you reading the first open-access issue of cultural anthropology is as eager to pursue as we are. life above earth life above earth: an introduction cymene howe rice university this began as a wondering about wind, how it mattered, how it materialized across lives, and how it seemed to refuse to be represented—only becoming visible through its effects on other beings and other things: branch, bird, cloud, kite, sail, smoke. wind finds itself with no terrestrial home, no borders to maintain, no ownership to be claimed.1 its pressured and oscillating gases are the kinetic energy of the sky. wondering into the wind leads us upward. it is an invitation to lose one’s footing. the curatorial force behind this first openings and retrospectives is to release our discipline from the earthly domains it has historically occupied, to float us to new ethnographic spheres and spaces untethered to worldly surfaces. if eduardo viveiros de castro (2014) has called for a “decolonization of thought,” this collection is meant as a deterrestrialization of thought. life above earth is an exploration of vitalities, materials, and movements that are skyward, spacey, and atmospheric. * * * we are air-born. from our infant inhale, throughout our respiratory lives, and to our last gasp. life above earth has us thinking in the atmosphere and being in its midst, its volume turned up around us.2 multiple themes are afloat here. in theorizing human engagements and explorations of space and off-planet life, we find ourselves at the intersecting extremes of technology that bears life and the possibilities of being in-atmosphere. to occupy non-earthly places means to encounter the unencountered and to be pushed toward the edges of the imagined non-life beyond the bounds of our technologies and biospheres (battaglia, valentine, and olson 2015). the life of airborne materials, particulates, and the attunements of breathers delivers atmospheric forms—ways of being suspended and captivated by modes of thought that see through clouds and sky, while also looking to bodily interiors that channel, contain, and filter air and the things it holds (choy and zee 2015). our discipline has long been alive with birds,3 and more recently insect intensities have animated anthropological thought (raffles 2011), flying us closer to analytics that account for multispecies attachments. struck by birds, pathogens, and vectors that flutter, drift, and dive, we are compelled to ask how wild and tamed creatures, as well as our coeval diseases, create complex relationships between freedom and care, and between humans and animals (keck 2015). and if weather was once a conversational topic on which it was safe to linger, that holds true no more. as we have altered flows of energy from sun to surface and destabilized conditions through our collective (if differentially distributed) actions, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore the climate. unrelenting fossil-fuel hunters and international negotiations appear as protracted exercises in failure, and climate now conjures vortexes and superstorms, refugees and the melt of ages. what are the sky’s prospects, and should we consider prospecting it? if we humans have long farmed the earth and ocean, what might it mean to cast our cultivational selves up and to think of “atmospheric cultivation” (hulme 2015) as the next domain for life above earth? these theoretical cartographies of space, sky, atmosphere, and air are moved by anthropology’s ongoing turn toward posthumanisms, ontologies, things, mattering, and new materialisms. they are an attempt to take seriously, but not without question, the suggestion that material contingencies are “as much wind as thing” and that in such effluences we may find unintended trajectories (bennett 2010, 119). as we contemplate life above earth, however, we also recognize that our discipline has long been shaped by the human desire to document interpretations of the ineffable aboves and out-theres around the globe. the anthropological record is founded on cosmologies and religious evocations of the sky, heavens, and spaces beyond human reach; they designate venerable and mysterious places inhabited by gods and forces and powers that both capture and exceed human imagination. turning attentions upward, often in wonder and sometimes in woe, has been a universal preoccupation. but this is a different call to airs, asking how a new generation of anthropological work might see old habits in novel domains, find habitats where we thought none existed, and mesh, entangle, and infuse our theorizing with intraconnective potential (barad 2007; morton 2012). where atmospheres and climate, birds and other airborne things, wind, weather, and off-planet potential come together, we see this as a test launch for meta-atmospheric perspectives. * * * figure 1. aerosol particles analyzed under a scanning electron microscope, from “what is in the air?” u.s air quality: the smog blog, june 5, 2005. http://alg.umbc.edu/usaq/archives/001044.html. we are air-born, but we are also dense beings. we float only through our buoyancy in water or, for a few, when a gravity suit permits us to inhabit extraterrestrial space. likewise, our theoretical work has remained largely earthbound. inasmuch as we aspire to experience life above earth, our access is limited to vehicles such as jet flights or climate models. we are dependent on technological prosthetics to extrapolate extraplanetary potential. and yet there are intimate forms of gaseous interactions. beijing’s airpocalypses and other toxifications preoccupy us with the recognition that we are never fully separate from our poisons and their affective impact (chen 2012). loads of chemical and particulate matter thus become an anticipatory apparatus. atmospheric deviations appear to work as predictive signs for skyborne disasters such as hurricanes and superstorms (choi 2015). if climate and air feel increasingly perilous, this is surely the doppelgänger to our securitized skies as biopolitical zones or clouds (lowe 2010) that brim with mechanisms of surveillance and signal. airspace itself represents the upper reaches of weaponized modernity, a domain of atmosterrorism. or, as peter sloterdijk (2009, 63) would have it, the sky should remind us that we humans are truly “dwelling in gas.” histories of surveillance, security, politics, poisons, and particulates demonstrate how life on earth has consequences above it, now and in the future. but to analytically inhabit life above earth requires that we move beyond simply charting the space above us and instead seek out gaseous and spacey constellations of liveliness and forms of porous mutuality. sometimes these are questions of phenomenological dwelling, being in weather-worlds (ingold 2007), or being attuned to atmospheric movements not as inert context but as a force field affectively shaping human life (stewart 2011, 452). life above earth cannot simply suggest air, sky, and space as new ethnographic opportunities; it must instead indicate how lives and materialities in these suspensions represent specific forms of human and non-human being. it is to see these spaces—their pneuma and their prāna—as constitutive, not simply as contextual. ultimately, and last on the horizon, is the fact that life above earth is seeded by the anthropocene—a time of unprecedented human imprint on the planet’s bio-, litho-, cryo-, aqua-, and atmosphere. the detritus of our carbonized practices bind sky and earth life together, opening us up to a redrafting of the future. thus, life above earth draws our attention to life on earth. we live in the reformation: displacements and realignments of matter with consequences of uncertain degree and scale. while climate change is a relatively new charge for anthropologists, our work has been concerned with the role of climate, seasonality, weather, and environmental conditions for a long time. earlier thinkers—such as e. e. evans-pritchard, marcel mauss, or julian steward4—were attentive to how ecology, seasons, and weather shaped cultural life. now the polarity is reversed. it is human habits and social life that dramatically, perhaps irreversibly, affect climate, seasons, and weather. human-generated deviations from our climatological norms require a different game than that played by our anthropological ancestors. if the anthropocene is auspicious of anything, it is to cast our concerns and our conceptualizing skyward. anthropocenic times demand an ascendant orientation as we become conscious climate inhabitants living within weather-weathered political economies. the anthropocene—however unsettled, and unsettling, the term may be—trains us to look to our climatological commons and our off-world lives just as we dig deep to conceive of what comes next. notes 1. a collaborative research project on wind energy in oaxaca, mexico, is one important impetus for my thinking about wind and power. see howe and boyer forthcoming; howe 2014. 2. or, as luce irigaray has written, any philosophy of being ought to begin with a philosophy of breathing. if heidegger prioritized logos and earth over the philosophical value of breath and air, irigaray’s (1999, 315) corrective questions whether “we can live anywhere else but in air?” 3. think of the needle-case designs that enthralled franz boas (1908), or lévi-strauss’s (1966) homology between bird and human socialities and the mythical hierarchy of birds in the savage mind, as well as steven feld’s (2012) pathbreaking, pre-posthumanist work on bird songs and sentiment. 4. e. e. evans-pritchard (1940) was concerned with nuer seasonality and cattle, resources, and social structure, while marcel mauss and henri beuchat (1979) looked to seasonal conditions among inuit peoples and non-human populations as indicative 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cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. raffles, hugh 2011 insectopedia. new york: pantheon. sloterdijk, peter 2009 “airquakes.” environment and planning d: society and space 27, no. 1: 41–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/dst1. stewart, kathleen 2011 “atmospheric attunements.” environment and planning d: society and space 29, no. 3: 445–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1068/d9109. steward, julian 1955 theory of culture change: the methodology of multilinear evolution. urbana: university of illinois press. vivieros de castro, eduardo 2014 cannibal metaphysics. edited and translated by peter skafish. minneapolis, minn.: univocal. an urban frontier an urban frontier: respatializing government in remote northern australia daniel t. fisher university of california, berkeley in 2007 australia’s commonwealth government announced the northern territory emergency response (nter), a militarized intervention that aimed to transform the government of aboriginal people and to address what its designers understood as a social crisis in aboriginal australia. colloquially termed “the intervention,” the nter followed closely on the heels of, and purported to respond to, a report commissioned by the northern territory government, titled ampe akelyernemane meke mekarle (little children are sacred) (wild and anderson 2007).1 this report described the widespread abuse of children in remote aboriginal communities and sketched the outline of a humanitarian emergency that, designers of the nter argued, required a radical and immediate response. for aboriginal people living in the seventy-three remote communities targeted by the nter this meant a wide range of disciplinary measures, including the prohibition of pornographic material; restrictions on alcohol; the governmental management of welfare-supported spending; mandatory health exams for young children;2 the transfer of authority over community spending to commonwealth-directed government business managers (gbm); enforced school attendance; and the compulsory leasing of community land heretofore held as inalienable under an array of land rights and native title provisions.3 crafting legislation that so overtly targeted the lives and behaviors of aboriginal people also required the suspension of the racial discrimination act 1975, australian legislation which prohibits inequitable treatment on the basis of racial criteria.4 the nter was followed by a separate redrawing of the spatial logics of northern territory local government, in which eight newly established shire councils (now termed super shires) joined the nter’s government business managers in displacing local aboriginal community councils as loci of decision-making. taken together, these measures went far beyond the immediate crisis by consummating a broader shift in aboriginal policy away from a focus on the autonomy and self-determination of aboriginal people and toward efforts to amplify economic participation and so-called mutual obligation.5 so although the nter led to no prosecutions for child sexual abuse, the state of emergency it named endures, as many of its specific programs have been extended beyond the intervention’s original five-year term. the immediate reaction in the northern territory was strong and characterized by both anger and anxiety as aboriginal people responded to governmental pronouncements and an alarmist, scandalizing press. newspaper headlines oscillated between figures of social pathology, in which a grog-sick population found itself helpless in the face of an epidemic of child abuse, and accounts of disarray in remote communities: “terrified families flee in panic” read one headline in the days following the intervention’s inauguration, describing the alarm at uluru and other communities in the central australian desert as aboriginal people speculated on the possible outcomes of such radical interference (murdoch and peating 2007). though alarmist, this headline registered a perhaps unsurprising anxiety in central australian communities that the intervention, with its overt focus on indigenous children, could lead to a new stolen generation—a return to policies of prior decades in which the australian state removed children en masse from communities and kin groups (see haebich 2004; read 2007). although the intervention was widely understood to affect aboriginal people living in remote and bush communities, its restrictions and jurisdictional mandates also applied to those living in and traveling through the northern territory’s cities and towns, including darwin, its capital. on the one hand, the intervention included legislation around behavior and land tenure that directly implicated indigenous town camps held under an array of freehold and communal lease agreements. these camps also became subject to the same prohibitions on grog, pornography, and the controls over welfare expenditure experienced in remote communities.6 on the other hand, the intervention has been understood to amplify the migration of remote-living aboriginal people into towns as people seek respite from the increases in disciplinary surveillance now operative in remote communities (fisher 2012; holmes and mcrae-williams 2008). although there is some dispute around the demographic analysis of indigenous urban migration, with some seeing little substantive change in quantitative terms (taylor and carson 2009; but see fisher 2012; lea 2012a), in darwin indigenous people and settler australians alike experience these camps and bush spaces as much more crowded today than a decade ago, and the town itself as overrun with these seemingly “homeless” indigenous campers. this essay draws on research with such aboriginal campers and their advocates in darwin to argue that governmental initiatives associated with the nter and their mediatization in a broader settler-australian domain as scandal and humanitarian anxiety both legislate and elicit the wild status that now accrues to such urban camps and settlements.7 to do so, the essay brings an ethnographic lens to the sociospatial complexity of government in the northern territory, placing an ethnographic critique of emergency response and intervention into dialogue with spatial dimensions of sovereignty and alterity. a broad scholarship on the spatial politics of indigeneity has described the ways that multiple spatial regimes become entangled in contests around sovereignty and belonging in settler-colonial domains (jacobs 1996; gelder and jacobs 1998; kuhlenbeck 2010; razack 2002). i also underscore that the deployment of governmental power in the social production of space is not the prerogative of the settler-state alone (see also moore 2005; simpson 2014). in the northern territory, for instance, indigenous groups such as the larrakia endeavor to be “seen as the state” through assertions of both sovereign interest and humanitarian concern vis-à-vis darwin’s broader indigenous population (cf. scott 1999), and as i suggest here, aboriginal campers themselves produce distinct kinds of spaces within the city through forms of movement, occupation, and oppositional enframings of social space.8 yet disarticulating governmental power from the settler state can be difficult in a context so manifestly shaped by the nter and in which commonwealth and territory governments present themselves as linchpins of a single, unchallenged sovereign order. as i suggest below, commonwealth policies powerfully inflect other indigenous agencies, which must reckon with the statistical creatures, financial interests, and broader disciplinary forces engaged by the state in its efforts to produce governable space. from this perspective, the nter can be seen to mediate multiple sovereign claims on and social interests in the definition and production of space. my account pivots around such sociospatial reckoning to explore the fractured character of sovereign authority, its multiplication and contestation even in those places where the state’s claims seem most secure. the intervention, in part created for a settler-public audience by a liberal party coalition in the weeks before a charged election, was also always already a mediatized event taking shape in the domain of mass-mediated publicity (hinkson 2010; howard-wagner 2012). this involved news stories, television documentaries, public protests, op-ed pieces, and at times impassioned academic debate for a public audience (see altman and taylor 2007; morris and lattas 2010; toohey 2008). i suggest here that such media are thus constitutive factors of the intervention and its consequences for darwin—ingredient to the categories of experience and spatial politics the nter entailed in this city, from its governmental materiality to its contestation in the street. weaving together media accounts of aboriginal social pathology and ethnographic accounts of camp life can suggest the complexity of governmental endeavors in northern australia, and the different ways these animate understandings of and anxieties around remote australia and aboriginal camps. at this essay’s core is an ethnographic exploration of transformed understandings of remote australia and their implications for urban aboriginal places and intra-indigenous relations in the cities and towns of the northern territory. to analyze such issues in contemporary australia requires asking after the changing character of the government of aboriginal people, as interventions based on imperatives of justice and equity so prominent in the era of land rights activism give way to a durable state of emergency built on discourses of compassion and humanitarian concern (lea 2012a; povinelli 2011; cf. fassin 2012; zigon 2013). this embrace of figures of crisis and emergency, a phenomenon with worldwide analogues (see fassin and pandolfi 2010; roitman 2014), here takes shape as the respatialization of australian governmental logics and the mediatization of aboriginal violence and despair. in describing the ways in which such mediatized enframings of social crisis propel the government of space in northern australia, i seek to illuminate something of what audra simpson (2014, 154) terms, writing of kahnawà:ke mohawk sovereignty, the productive power of juridical efforts that fail to contain their object. in australia, however, the durable state of emergency ascribed to indigenous northern australia produces both the state’s authority to craft policy and distinct forms of spatial and social alterity. my aim here is to shift discussions of policy and its indebtedness to a contemporary politics of suffering (fassin 2012; cf. sutton 2009) away from broader discursive poles of neoliberal critique or humanitarian necessity, and to underscore the nter’s deep imbrication with and instigation of those forms of alterity and turmoil that settler institutions seek to order. policy in this perspective is not simply a neutral instrument applied (appropriately or mistakenly) to a social problem that can then be assessed in terms of transparent rubrics of efficacy. it is instead, i argue, animated by forms of imagination, mediatized narrative, and desire, forces that in their mobilization in the northern territory take material shape in and as space. this essay thus provides ethnographic coordinates for understanding how powerful figures of emergency and crisis acquire temporal durability and spatial form, and for understanding how that form is lived, contested, and occasionally refashioned. caring for campers “a lot of our families too are out in the streets here, you know? you come across your family members here.” gt,9 a night patrol officer in darwin, underlined his investment in his work by reference to the frequent presence of his relations among the people he encounters over the course of an evening. night patrols, as they are known throughout northern australia, are non-police-based patrols, often but not always staffed by aboriginal people, established to remove aboriginal people from harm and conflict abetted by alcohol consumption. this night patrol, run by the area’s traditional owners, the larrakia nation, has two trucks patrolling darwin and the neighboring town of palmerston each night. it was established in 2008 in response to the larrakia’s concern with the large numbers of campers then in darwin, a rise in population tied directly to the nter. night patrol officers have no capacity to arrest or otherwise restrain campers, and they are instead dedicated to providing assistance and care. their work should also be understood, however, alongside the larrakia’s broader efforts to be seen like a state. larrakia-issued identity cards, forms of social assistance, and the night patrol all function as performances of larrakia sovereignty over this country vis-à-vis other aboriginal people and the australian state itself. patrol officers, most of whom are not larrakia, thus mediate relationships between darwin’s traditional landowners, aboriginal campers, and the state. their work registers the difficulties of camping as well as a broader process that renders indigenous camps an irruption of remoteness within the city. in more immediate terms, however, the patrol aims to keep aboriginal campers and drinkers from the more radical intervention of the northern territory police, which can entail arrest, incarceration, and conflict with police officers. patrols thus endeavor to provide people with safe exit from situations where they might cause themselves or others harm, driving them to a city apartment, or more frequently, to a camp or a northern territory government-funded “sobering-up shelter.” if people are shouting and fighting, gt suggests simply driving up to the group can “settle things down”—“people stop and think,” he says. and while such policing does occasionally put night patrols and campers at odds, i found a strong sense of identification and compassion between patrol officers—some of whom have spent their own time in the long grass—and campers. in 2013 i accompanied patrol officers through the camps and small communities that exist amid the suburbs and light industrial districts of the city. i know these camps through my long-term research with some of their regular residents, locally referred to as “long-grassers” or “long-grass campers,” named for the tall spear grass found throughout darwin. my research with the patrol sought to better understand the forms of intra-indigenous negotiation through which campers make an urban place into aboriginal country (see also fisher 2012). country in this use contrasts starkly with most settler-australian understandings of the term, and in darwin it serves among campers as a widespread gloss on the sociospatial matrix of cosmology, law, and kinship on which aboriginal understandings of autonomy and autochthony are based (myers 1986; povinelli 1994). what night patrol officers must accommodate, and what is amplified as scandalous in the mediatized constitution of camping as a focus of governmental concern, is widespread and extensive alcohol consumption, overcrowded aboriginal housing, a corresponding surplus of people in parks and beside walking trails, and the frequent intervention of the territory police. together these phenomena contribute to making darwin’s town camps a turbulent, often violent frontier, shaping the problem space of what can be figured as a permanent state of emergency in the northern territory. the city is home to many camps, from long-established communities to informal clusters of people at the edges of parks, most folded cheek by jowl amid the growing settler-occupied suburbs. one mile dam, a three-decades-old indigenous town camp, lies just steps away from the stuart highway in darwin’s city center, directly across the road from newly constructed suburban development in stuart park and mere meters from darwin’s central toyota dealership. other established places of aboriginal residence in darwin include bagot, minmarama, and kulaluk further north along darwin’s harbor coastline. these latter are also held under forms of freehold lease with homes rented to householders, and they were the focal point of a charged land claim begun in the early 1970s. the bagot community, from whose acreage kulaluk and minmarama were later carved, sits between the airport and darwin’s harbor. colonial authorities initially established bagot in the late 1930s in an effort to police aboriginal people’s movement in darwin and to restrict the congress of so-called full-blood and half-caste aboriginal people. in spite of such racializing discipline, the area later became identified as aboriginal territory within the city, recognized by the territory government but ultimately reduced in size from its initial allotment. aboriginal movement to and through towns has thus been a perennial focus of governmental concern and public anxiety, and this has been amplified in the period of policy shift that informed the intervention. as some predicted (altman and taylor 2007), the nter had the effect of increasing the number of campers in darwin as people sought respite from the intervention’s disciplinary apparatus and a resulting increase in oversight in their home communities. demographers and others thus claim that there are a larger number of campers in darwin today, gathering in parks and bush spaces throughout town and living under greater pressures of surveillance and suspicion, than in preceding decades (holmes and mcrae-williams 2008; lea 2012b; prout 2008; cf. taylor and carson 2009).10 driving by darwin’s airport, gt pointed out a vast area of dry gum trees and bush to our left, stretching a kilometer or more before the fenced runways. “a lot of people get killed just here, trying to cross the road. people don’t see them,” he said. aboriginal people camp in this wide stretch of bush land, and then try to cross the road to and from a large pub just on the other side of four busy lanes of roadway. invisible both socially and to the headlights of fast cars, they are hit frequently by trucks and other traffic hurtling along toward darwin’s city center.11 gt thus patrols the bush by the airport, encouraging campers to move somewhere safer. but other options, such as government-managed apartments, have their own limitations. gt sketched the dilemma many campers face, foregrounding familial obligation: you can’t stop your families coming in from the bush, you know what i mean? and the housing commission, with these new laws and no drinking signs on the places. if you run amok, what happens is a lot of the families get kicked out, because of their families. one of me mates, he’s come from groote eylandt, his wife’s come from groote eylandt. and them people are with their traditional laws and are very powerful. they’ll use it on anyone if they want to pay ‘em back you know? and me mate, what happened to him, he refused his wife’s family ‘cause they’re drinking, coming around here. but he couldn’t stop them. they’re older than him, and that’s his wife’s family, and they affect him, “i’ll sing you!” you know? and he did go mad in the head. the difficulties facing campers who seek government housing are, minimally, twofold. from one side, there is police oversight and state discipline in such housing. from the other, the imperatives of kinship press some up against the strictures of the state, entailing unavoidable transgression and its consequences. lm, a camper i knew well, often left her apartment for the long grass—finding there freedoms to drink and socialize, and from the “humbug” of kin, that elude her in state-managed housing. and in gt’s story, older men punished the transgressions of their affinal junior by “singing” him, a local gloss on the ways that sorcerers curse others. here, a younger man’s refusal to house his elders resulted in serious punishment. throughout darwin, places that may look barren from the window of a passing car, an apparent suburban or light industrial “non-place” (augé 1992), in fact constitute sites of ongoing indigenous occupation and of deeply sedimented political aspiration and social imagination. stopping briefly to look out over the beach at darwin’s casuarina reserve, gt suggested, as many others have before him, that zones of demarcated aboriginal space within the city could provide alternatives to what he has come to see as the “sure death” of long-grass camping: “i’ve thought about it a lot. i reckon like around here, on the beaches here, for long-grass people, they should set up tropical sheds. a barbeque place, a fireplace, a security officer there so that if you’re too intoxicated, well you can’t come back you know? [if] they got a shower and a bed, [they can] start being a bit independent. but you got to be close to the sea.” gt’s answer to the problems caused by drinking, occasional conflicts within kin groups, and the proximity of bush camps to traffic arterials is to nominate three areas near darwin’s coast for different groups that come to darwin, places where people might sleep, socialize, fish, and even drink if they want to. this mode of imagining the aboriginal occupation of darwin has offered a recurrent utopian promise, a figure in which aboriginal people craft spaces of autonomy and possibility, complete with infrastructure and policing, in areas of bush and foreshore within the city. indeed, many of today’s recognized camps and communities began as efforts to establish such spaces, or to transform older sites of confinement such as darwin’s bagot reserve into sites of aboriginal autonomy and security (day 1994). gt and the long-grass campers i introduce here, however, cannot themselves claim traditional ownership of this territory. gt’s imagining stems from his perspective as an indigenous resident of darwin, a onetime drinker, and now an employee of an organization run by darwin’s traditional owners. and these owners’ imaginings of darwin’s indigenous future often differ from the image offered by gt’s utopian reflections. recent efforts to secure recognition of larrakia status as owners include suburban development and a range of performative iterations of larrakia sovereignty—of which the night patrol is itself one of the more visible manifestations. efforts by activists in support of the long-grass occupation of darwin’s bush spaces must thus reckon with multiple forms of sovereign authority and governmental care. while gt’s imaginings partake of a broader historical effort to secure land rights, they also take shape in a mediatized world, as speech acts imbued with the publicity that accrues to long-grass camping. an imagined audience inheres in such comments and conversations that includes settler australians, aboriginal campers, and larrakia landowners. aboriginal camping receives regular, anxious press attention and has also entangled larrakia in opposing views on how to remediate the problems associated with long-grass camping. the antinomial categories of the remote and the urban themselves partake of the auratic penumbra such mediatization entails, and inflect accounts of bush and town even in the material absence of a camera or a crowd (cf. butler 2012; weber 1996). these categories and the stories they inform are a charged focus of public anxiety that, in their circulation, shape how aboriginal and settler australians come to know the city. aboriginal campers and their advocates know this well, and have come to understand themselves through such media even as they often contest such damning accounts in their daily comportment and demeanor (lea 2012b), in the ways they narrate their biographies and account for their occupation of darwin (fisher 2012), and in the narratives they address to one another, to reporters, and to anthropologists. another frequent interlocutor in my early research was both a camper and a vocal advocate for aboriginal rights to live in darwin’s bush spaces unmolested by police. jb, in partnership with non-indigenous activists and larrakia friends, had turned to the small media of the photocopied magazine kujuk, to public speaking at protests, and to community radio to publicize campers’ right of occupation. jb and many other campers filled kujuk with their testimonies, often angry at fines and the confiscations of property that could occur when intoxicated campers were taken to darwin’s sobering-up shelter, locally termed the “spin dry.” such efforts should be seen as coextensive with gt’s more recent comments to me, and as part of a broader effort to reclaim the terrain of publicity around camping. as such they highlight and contest the regard of a media apparatus that produces camping and a broad aboriginal social pathology as a mediatized object of settler concern, registering crisis and trauma in a remote north while foreclosing the possibility of campers as interlocutors themselves.12 darwin’s different camps and settlements have thus in part resulted from past efforts to assert distinctly aboriginal forms of belonging and autonomy within darwin, and they remain the focus of diverse forms of governmental intervention and media attention. figure 1. kujuk lampoons the spin dry, cover of the kujuk photocopied newsletter. reverse asks readers to copy and redistribute, to “share kujuk.” aboriginal country in the city darwin is a small city at the top end of the northern territory and figures in national discourse as itself a remote northern city—a place far from the rest of australia and existing just outside the norms of urban civility found in southern cities and towns. “closer to singapore than to sydney,” goes a well-worn aphorism that places northern australia at a remove not just from australia’s south but from anglo-australian cultural norms as well. many settler australians encounter darwin through media representations before, if ever, they experience the city itself. the headlines of the murdoch-owned northern territory news frequently feature aggressive wildlife such as crocodiles and snakes; aggressive aboriginal people drinking, gambling, and fighting in the city’s parks; and an aggressive capitalism turning a resource-rich frontier into enterprise, possibility, and a settler-australian future. darwin’s remoteness thus receives an ambivalent gloss, one at times anxious, at other times celebratory. darwin is also a place to which aboriginal people from throughout the northern territory travel. that movement is often toward the freedoms darwin offers, not (or not only) as a zone of urban anonymity but also as a place governed less intensely by both community-authored and commonwealth-imposed provisions against drinking, in which one’s ability to move across the city’s bush spaces and parks lessens the oversight of one’s immediate kin and community. darwin is also an administrative center to which aboriginal people are compelled to come to visit a hospital, attend a corporate meeting or court hearing, or participate in a cultural event. as indigenous metropole and regional center, then, darwin is filled with people from the remote communities and small towns that dot the top end. they might stay with relatives or they may visit one of the city’s numerous camps or settlements. a shopping mall, a clutch of mangrove by the harbor, a beach, or a suburban football oval all provide places to sit and socialize, drink and laugh. and aboriginal people simply travel through darwin too, using its airport or bus station en route elsewhere—to communities to the south along the stuart highway, or to catch flights to alice springs, sydney, melbourne, or perth. when aboriginal people come to the city, they bring a range of spatial logics grounded in an understanding of ancestrally given autochthony, locally glossed in terms of “law” and “country.” indeed, in the city one hears frequent indigenous reference to darwin itself as country—as in “this here is my country,” or “this place is the home of my countrymen.” this particular way of talking about darwin mobilizes country as a claim of origin and ownership, which can be heard to talk back to figures of darwin’s wildness with a sense of authority and responsibility, as country has become a widely recognized, intercultural assertion of indigenous ownership, legible to both aboriginal and settler australia.13 such aboriginal understandings of country as a medium of social relatedness and belonging also shape indigenous senses of the city, providing widely understood points of reference that order relations and expectations and that can shape forms of intra-indigenous difference and social discipline. this is a widespread and long-standing phenomenon informing aboriginal movement through and to town space. in katherine, for instance, francesca merlan (1998) describes how country affiliation orders town life, providing spatial markers of social identity within the town itself. in basil sansom’s (1980) account of darwin campers in the 1970s, relations that in remote places were ordered by originary law were refashioned around knowledge produced in the daily life of darwin’s fringe camps: the day’s happenings joined access to resources and white sources of work as a currency through their restriction and selective circulation. in today’s darwin, as in the 1970s, country affiliation provides a means of understanding who camps where and with whom. as sansom documented, campers often sought forms of protection from other aboriginal people in the form of cultural brokers who could navigate the labor markets and regimes of policing in darwin’s aboriginal fringe camps. that protection could still be mobilized in 2004, when one of my primary interlocutors sought to assure me that he could protect me from other law men and aboriginal people living in the long grass who, he suggested, might wish to do me harm. historically darwin’s hinterlands and the territory’s cattle stations promised meaningful work for aboriginal people. for men, work on horseback with cattle and sheep provided a site of difficult labor and inequitable labor conditions, but also a highly valued domain for the cultivation and display of masculine achievement. a broad campaign for equal wages in the early 1960s, and the lifting in 1964 of laws that prohibited aboriginal drinking, paradoxically led to a dearth of work for aboriginal stockmen, who then looked to towns such as darwin and katherine for alternative opportunities and for affirmation of their newly earned rights and autonomy. and they came to towns not simply as unemployed migrant labor but as men and women who reckoned their relations to each other through systems of hierarchy and patronage built on accumulated knowledge and mediated by country found elsewhere. such forms of relating based on distant country remain significant today. gt calls david timber, a camp organizer and leader whom i introduce more fully below, his cousin-brother. they each have kin-based ties to neighboring country south and west of darwin. gt’s family fishes on timber’s family’s coastal country, and gt’s family built a small tin shed there for the purpose. timber, meanwhile, gets fresh water from gt’s inland country. no matter that timber gets to visit his country only rarely, or that gt has long made his primary home in a suburb of darwin. each understands his relation to the other through the ascription of country affiliation. further, gt’s employers in his work as a night patrol officer are the larrakia, the socially recognized owners of darwin’s country, while gt is not. his mother, a member of australia’s stolen generation, had been taken from her country in the daly river region as a child, while his father was a white orphan from newcastle in new south wales who moved to the northern territory as a young man in search of work. his claims to country, then, are complicated and made meaningful by a series of historical relations within darwin proper but also reliant on his ownership of a remote outstation. country here appears in the midst of the city much as it does in the bush—at once as a kind of claim to emplaced identity and as a medium for relations between people. one mile dam: wildness in town the ambivalent investment of settler australians in complex categories of the remote, however, has obscured the visibility of such intra-indigenous relations in town. in the context of governmental aboriginal policy, remoteness today means removal from centers of economic possibility and indexes a disadvantage figured primarily in market terms. policy arguments emerging from a series of labor and liberal coalition governments during the past decade have emphasized remoteness as a major obstacle to remediating aboriginal communities’ dependence on welfare payments, and have argued that people must move closer to urban centers. one outcome has been the proposal of planned “growth towns” across northern australia, which would concentrate service delivery, employment, and educational opportunities for aboriginal people (fisher 2013; morphy and morphy 2013). such logics partake of an intensified, statistical production of remoteness as a measurable demographic classification. the australian bureau of statistics’s (abs) remoteness classification index, for instance, was created in 2001 as a way to differentiate and define remoteness in terms of distance from goods and services, on the one hand, and from concentrations of population, on the other, overtly distinguishing aboriginal from other australian populations in its assessment (see abs 2003; cf. aihw 2004). the territory government itself, however, also attracts vast amounts of commonwealth support based on its own remoteness from southern population centers and on the need to administer an “aboriginal problem” that itself has become figuratively tied to remote communities. tess lea (2006) thus notes the irony that in a context problematizing aboriginal people’s remoteness, the northern territory’s capacity to receive large amounts of commonwealth financial support—much of it targeted to infrastructure and aboriginal services—depends on its own remoteness from australia’s southeastern states.14 there is, in short, a shift in the imagining of the remote away from a space of possibility, as it figured in earlier efforts to support aboriginal self-determination (rowse 1992), and toward a situation of disadvantage. such logics make remoteness at once a diacritic of indigenous social pathology and that pathology a powerful argument for attracting financial support from the commonwealth for the settler-australian occupation and administration of northern australia. aboriginal communities throughout northern australia also frequently figure in news reporting as sites of a social pathology born of alcohol abuse, boredom (cf. musharbash 2007), or an economic malaise that often seem to derive directly from these communities’ distance from sites of economic productivity. such truisms drive efforts to encourage urban concentrations of aboriginal people in growth towns as well as efforts to shift aboriginal land toward forms of marketable title in the service of capital accumulation (altman and russell 2012; howard-wagner 2012). remote lands won by aboriginal people over the course of decades of legal contest have thus been placed under forms of long-term compulsory lease in the interest of their exploitation and incorporation into a putative mainstream economy. as a diagnostic of social suffering and violence, remoteness thus becomes a sociospatial rationale that can explain disparities of possibility and life circumstance and a biopolitical metric of racialized alterity. indeed, remote aboriginal communities are iconic sites of violence—against women and children, between aboriginal family groups, and between police officers and aboriginal men.15 the highest profile index of such violence in recent years occurred in far north queensland’s palm island in 2004. following an altercation with white police officer chris hurley, an indigenous man was arrested and taken to the police lockup. there he was beaten severely and then died from his injuries, the death recorded by police security cameras. in a book-length, journalistic analysis of the events and hurley’s subsequent trial, the novelist chloe hooper (2008) canvasses the ways in which many police and residents of such communities see this violence as a product of remoteness. palm island has a widespread reputation as troubled and violent, and it was historically a place to which aboriginal people were moved from other communities in mainland queensland. in hooper’s account, hurley appears beguiled by this image of remoteness, at once victim and master of a particular form of colonial bluster. in her essay of the same title, hooper (2006) asks the question baldly, and with only a hint of irony: “in a community of extreme violence, must you become violent? if you are despised, as the police are, might you not need to be despicable sometimes?” in hooper’s rendering, hurley not only understood the rough character of these communities, he embodied it, becoming a kind of monster himself. local people called him “the tall man,” a naming hooper associates with a local bogeyman, tall as a lamppost and with shriveled white skin. much like palm island and other beset remote places, town camps also have become storied sites of violence and despair. for several decades, such camps were seen as zones of potential security and autonomy, cognate spaces to the remote outstations and homelands to which aboriginal people began moving from more concentrated settlements in the latter half of the 1970s. this view began to change as aboriginal disadvantage came to be seen primarily through the lenses of economic participation and humanitarian intervention, rather than through those of political participation and cultural autonomy. the nter ratified this broad perception in 2007, and in the years following the intervention’s initial unveiling, its broader policy directions have been continued under successive governments, with new plans to centralize people in aboriginal growth towns to enable easier access to a “real economy”—jobs, education, and managed housing. as part of this broader recentralization, the government has ceased to fund housing in outstations and homeland communities (morphy and morphy 2013, 183). in this new climate, aboriginal camps within towns are generally off of the experiential grids of non-aboriginal residents, but they remain ever-present as sites of discursive, public, and tabloid anxiety. one mile dam, for instance, sits on crown land, granted in a special purpose lease to the aboriginal development foundation in 1979 after several years of land rights activism. although title to one mile dam is held by the aboriginal development foundation (adf) as a freehold lease, the camp is managed by david timber, a local aboriginal man from the daly river region. one mile dam is also almost impossibly urban—its very name evokes its proximity to darwin’s commercial center. across a dammed creek from the city center, it shares boundaries with some of darwin’s priciest, newest high-rise realty as well as with the industrial relics of a working seaport. this proximity to the touristic, government, and business precincts of darwin make the land on which the community sits highly valuable, coveted by developers. it is also a storied place. here aboriginal fringe dwellers made one of several claims to land, demanding that it be reserved for aboriginal people. it is for some still understood as an aboriginal reserve in the heart of darwin, won by and for aboriginal people. sitting at the boundaries of darwin’s city center, one mile dam nonetheless often figures as remote—a bush space within the city. settler australians regard the open, rusting corrugated sheds housing some of the campers as the visual icon of the camp’s disrepute. such indices of despair act as what roland barthes (1981) might term a punctum in the broader image of aboriginal crisis, a wounding detail that draws attention and elicits a kind of concern grounded in the subjectivity of the viewer (cf. lea and pholeros 2010; mazzarella 2013). a news report of june 2013, titled “our village of the damned” (a nod to the eponymous genre film of 1960), traffics in this broader apprehension of violence, despair, and grog-sickness, underlining that though the camp is less than a kilometer from darwin’s center, its conditions typify a “remote community” (northern territory news 2013). it tells the story of one mile through two white campers who had been living there, one who drowned, and the other who now fears for his safety. the story suggests that the cause of death was suicide but nonetheless relates an alternative account, quoting the surviving white camper extensively. in this second account, the camper fears his aboriginal neighbors and blames them for his mate’s death: “i went to the toilet for two seconds and when i came back i found his hat just sitting there.” and though the police ruled the drowning a “non-suspicious” death—a term the reporter calls “police-speak for suicide”—the surviving camper tells the reporter that he sleeps with a knife: “i’m sitting here ready for the same deal. i just live here day by day.” here an atypical white camper registers camping as trauma for the audience of the northern territory news. in 2013 i visited david timber at one mile to talk about the pressures of city development on this aboriginal space. entering the community i drove past a tin placard posted at the head of the paved road that runs into and through the center of the one mile lease, announcing the nter’s restrictions. the sign tells readers that the camp is a prescribed area that prohibits alcohol, drugs, and pornography. opposite this index of negatively valued difference, another, older sign advertises the site as the “association one mile dam community,” a historical remainder of the camp’s incorporation during a more optimistic governmental moment. a young man ambled over to meet me as i got out of my car, parked just outside timber’s tin house, and asked, “can i help you?” for a moment i grew apprehensive, and found my own wariness disconcerting. perhaps i briefly fell victim to tabloid headlines from the northern territory news. after i asked for timber, i was greeted with exaggerated manners, friendliness, and interest. figure 2. corrugated iron sheds, one mile dam. photo by daniel fisher. in 2013 i found one mile much more crowded than i had on my last visits a decade earlier. some of one mile’s residents live in the long grass as an alternative to the institutional discipline of a shared house or apartment. though frequently identified as homeless and as living on an urban fringe, just as often these are people keeping away from the house or flat of a relative in order to keep drinking. if they are intoxicated and unable to return home at the end of the night, they often ask the night patrol to bring them here. as timber and i talk, i begin to see more and more people, people i had not noticed on my arrival. there are several groups sitting along the edge of the camp just under the shade of the bush and mangroves along the creek. a man and a woman walk past timber’s porch where we sit chatting, moving slowly across a lawn. over the course of twenty minutes they build a fire in a shallow pit in front of a corrugated iron shed. the smoke floats across the lawn, transforming the camp into a still more welcoming space. i came to see timber to learn about the recent efforts to close the camp and a story i had read that the government-owned provider of power and water had turned off the electricity the previous year and was now asking (reports varied) for between $50,000 and $100,000 to restore it. the power company had left one mile truly remote, cut off from the broader power grid and infrastructure surrounding its sheds. the press described this as purposeful neglect and drew a figure of callous disregard in its portrait of a camp marked by mass death and the miserly restriction of basic infrastructure. timber himself saw the situation as more than a struggle over a utility bill, however large, and understood the restriction of the camp’s access to electricity in the framework of urban gentrification. “they want,” he said, “the land.” this is now valuable, inner-city real estate. as a prescribed area it holds no development potential, but were it abandoned, its market promise might be realized. i first visited one mile in 2003 to see a film screening put on by advocates and campers then living at the camp. at that time i accompanied jb and an anglo-australian activist and advocate for long-grass campers, vaughn williams, who brought a generator, projector, and video player and hung up a sheet on the exterior wall of the camp’s ablution block to serve as a screen. in this improvised theater i sat with perhaps twenty people, watching the bicentennial documentary australia daze (1988) with campers, their children, and their advocates as images of australian icons, royals, and landmarks (princess di, dog races, beer-sculling contests, and the opera house and harbour bridge) glowed from the screen. a decade later in 2013, timber reckoned that 150 people live at one mile, pointing out tents in the bushes, camps by the water, and moving through a register of occupation. before leaving i asked timber about the whitefella who drowned in the dam. “a lot of people died back there, a whole lot of people,” he answered. it was a matter-of-fact pronouncement, one that registers the extent of violence and death afflicting the camp’s aboriginal occupants, but one that also refuses scandal and further commentary. i could understand timber’s evident fatigue here as the consequence of living in what is, officially in northern australia, a constant state of emergency—a perpetual crisis that can register as the exhaustion of affect (fassin 2012, 181–99; howard-wagner 2012). but perhaps timber was tired of the need to think through the possible audiences his comments might address, tired of accounting for the publicity that continues to interrogate long-grass camping and one mile dam’s viability. as he pointed out, it was not just one white man, but many, many people who had lost their lives in that camp to suicide, violent conflict, accidental drowning, and illness. living in the midst of so much death surely takes its toll on those, like timber, who make the camps a focus of long-term, concerted advocacy. but so too does living with the presence of a settler-australian media that sees but does not register its own effects on the scene it helps constitute (cf. weber 1996). figure 3. film night at one mile dam. photo by daniel fisher. a few days later i ride with the night patrol again. gt talks extensively of his own life in darwin, and describes fishing, hunting, and aimlessly moving around the city and nearby bush land before finding the work he does now for the patrol. he is proud, he says, because it makes his children glad to see him working and because he can now take them to his own outstation, to his own traditional country in the daly river area to the southwest of darwin. there he has a house, “much nicer than any of these houses you see in the camps here.” and yet spending time there requires money for gas, food, and travel. having the job allows him to live on that country, to claim it as a kind of estate. he is also angered at the poor accommodation in places like kulaluk and one mile, and joins timber in seeing the cause as state neglect. like timber, gt avoids a scandal-based narrative, evoking not the remote “space of death” (see taussig 1987) that often appears in camping’s mediatized iterations but, rather, aboriginal country; if grog is a fact of life, there may yet be room for aboriginal people themselves to remedy the concerted neglect of an encompassing settler australia. the trucks from the larrakia night patrol spend the latter hours of their shift picking up drinkers from around darwin and nearby palmerston, ferrying them back to one mile and similar camps to sleep it off away from the eyes of the police. these returning campers often bring back the wildness of their grog-fueled arguments, which does not always suit other, non-drinking campers. campers can turn on gt in such moments too, though their anger arises not in response to his intervention but rather from not receiving assistance. a new regulation prohibits the patrol from taking children in the back of their trucks, which lack legally required child restraints. this means that on occasion the patrol has had to leave children with their parents, in spite of the latters’ efforts to have them removed from harm’s way.16 i wondered more generally about how people responded to his interventions, and asked gt, “do people ever get angry?” he answered by expressing frustration at the new law: yeah, well, with that new law, we used to help people with children you know, give them a hand or whatever. and because their parents are intoxicated you want to help the children get back to their home as well. so we used to give them a hand. but a few families have asked us to help [since the new law took effect] and we had to refuse them, and they end up being wild with us. the parents you know? and sometimes you do get abused, they’ll get knives and guns, you know, and all this and that. we’ve got one that was a job last week—got abused a bit. and then we picked up a few old ladies that were intoxicated and just wanted to get home. and when we dropped them off they said, “thank you very much and good night and god bless you!” and it made us feel real good, you know! we toured through stuart park, driving slowly through the parking lot in front of the shops on westralia street, where a small food store, a doctor’s office, and a chemist line a short strip mall across from a city park. there we found a few people sitting in the grass. they waved and gt called out to them, “you mob alright?” “yo!” they shouted back,17 “yes, thank you! can you mob come back later?” this group often spends the evening in the park, sometimes drinking or gambling if there is money for it, but otherwise just talking, watching people move in and out of the chemist and doctor’s surgery across the street. “where else can they go?” gt asked, putting a rhetorical, melancholic spin on their situation. we came back later and found an older man in a wheelchair. “hello uncle, you alright?” gt asked. the man was sick with a bad infection on his leg. poorly bandaged, the infection weeping, he was in pain and needed medical help. we loaded his things into the back of the night patrol’s utility truck and drove out to the royal darwin hospital. there gt helped the man into the hospital’s emergency room, assisting him with the intake process. later that night gt’s truck was called back to the hospital to collect him. they drove him, newly bandaged, through the darkened suburbs back to one mile dam. conclusion: spatial transformation and compassionate government one way to understand the course taken by the northern territory emergency response, and, i argue, a broader shift in aboriginal policy, is to see these as closely tied to a respatialization of governmental practice. australia’s department of social services lists the broad areas described as “prescribed” as follows, including most of what counts as aboriginal land in the northern territory: aboriginal land defined under the aboriginal lands rights (nt) act 1976 roads, rivers, streams, estuaries or other areas on aboriginal land areas known as aboriginal community living areas (a form of freehold title issued to aboriginal corporations by the northern territory government) town camps declared by the minister for families, housing, community services and indigenous affairs (the minister) under the northern territory national emergency response act 2007 any other area declared by the minister to be a prescribed area. (government of australia 2011, 56–57) during the past decade, these efforts to redraw the political and administrative map of northern australia have made the homelands and outstations distant from the nt’s towns and cities politically invisible and practically unfundable (altman and hinkson 2007; morphy and morphy 2013; musharbash 2010). starved of funding, legitimacy, and basic resources such as electricity and water, town camps are rendered remote through both sociospatial ascription and systematic neglect. large signs mark their entrances, warning of proscriptions against alcohol and pornography in the prescribed areas. these policies and their performative iteration through signage and the routine presence of white police officers enforcing these exceptional legal restrictions make structurally explicit the juridical equation of town camps with remote communities. such equation does other work as well, producing a racial ontology of space in which the domesticated and suburban sit just beside the dangerous and violent. amplified by intertextual linkage with a cult horror film, camps become icons of an urban frontier in crisis, “villages of the damned” that require suspending discussions about equity and justice and demand forms of government built on emergency. there are echoes here of hurley’s colonial bluster, both in the “decisive” response to crisis that this policy was meant to perform and in the figures of wildness that provide its rationale. that settler-australian policy conjures the very violence it seeks to govern registers today in the tabloid anxiety that continues to attend media reporting on these shifts in policy and their consequences for aboriginal campers. the story i draw out here thus suggests analyzing the imbrication of mediatization, the politics of suffering, and the production of space in forms of humanitarian emergency; the processes by which such forms of emergency gain momentum and attain both a temporal and spatial durability; and the ways in which forms of crisis thus seem to both elicit and shadow intervention.18 assertions of crisis or emergency might then be seen to create, through the government of space and the mediatization of intervention, their own referent and the grounds of their own reproduction. importantly, one can tell different stories about darwin’s camps. indeed, the equation of town camps with an unruly, remote wildness in need of urgent remediation ignores other ways of living in the city and caring for campers, other ways of reckoning with and responding to illness, violence, and death. that camps may yet house forms of utopian hope, and a sense of aboriginal belonging in the city, might be glimpsed in the care with which timber and gt approach their work with campers, performing both larrakia sovereignty and long-grass belonging. it may also be seen in the image of one mile dam’s movie night in 2003 (figure 3). this is where one might understand darwin’s night patrol and other long-grass advocates to work a kind of critical and actual magic against the violence of intervention. under an open invitation to the rest of darwin, campers, their children, dogs, and advocates socialized at dusk to engage, together and on indigenous terms, with a cinematic australia. this still typifies today’s aboriginal efforts—larrakia and long-grass alike—to invoke a different australia through the everyday recognition of aboriginal country in the city. notes acknowledgments the research on which this essay is based would not have been possible without the generosity of my many interlocutors living and working in darwin’s long grass. i thank the night patrol officers, long grass advocates, and campers themselves who all took care to help me make some sense of life in darwin’s camps. a wenner-gren dissertation fieldwork grant, an nsf dissertation improvement grant, an ssrc international dissertation research fellowship, and an ssrc fellowship in the arts supported the early research on which this essay is based. conversations with tess lea in sydney and james pilkington in darwin assisted my thinking greatly. three anonymous reviewers also provided invaluable comments to my initial drafts and i extend to them my sincere gratitude. i also thank cymene howe for her insight and assistance as i completed the article, as well as the other members of the cultural anthropology editorial team, dominic boyer and james faubion, for their collective expert guidance. 1. the title is in arrernte, a language of central australia. 2. military doctors were meant to perform these mandatory examinations for children, but they were, in fact, never implemented. in the face of resistance from health professionals, the commonwealth soon conceded that the physical examination of so many children entailed insurmountable practical, ethical, and legal hurdles. 3. altman and russell (2012) chronicle seven areas for reform implemented in the months following the nter’s announcement. in addition to those listed above, other reforms included increased policing; housing and tenancy reform; and dissolving the permit system that required visitors to receive permission through regional land councils prior to traveling to remote communities. 4. specifically, quarantining indigenous welfare payments was considered construable as discriminatory. the act was reinstated in 2010, with the expansion of such quarantine provisions to some non-indigenous recipients. 5. noel pearson (2009), an aboriginal lawyer and activist, has thus achieved renown in part by arguing that policies of self-determination have become a kind of “passive welfare” and by suggesting their replacement with governmentally encouraged economic responsibility. 6. in the years since 2007, the original seventy-three prescribed communities have been joined by more than five hundred additional outstations, pastoral camps, and town camps (altman and russell 2012, 5). 7. when coming to darwin, people often stay with family members already living in the city in government housing or in one of several historically durable aboriginal communities established just north of the city’s center. they may also stay, however, in a “long-grass camp,” a euphemism for sleeping rough in a bush camp amid the spear grass of darwin’s parks, suburban sports fields, and undeveloped bush space. many see the long grass primarily as a place to drink and socialize, and may take up residence in a family home in town when not drinking (see fisher 2013). 8 kuhlenbeck (2010, 78–87) and musharbash (2010) provide analogous accounts of the relational production of indigenous space in remote australia. 9. i use pseudonyms here to preserve anonymity and to accord with a widespread proscription against the use of deceased persons’ proper names. i make exceptions for highly public figures. 10. campers sustain themselves in these settlements largely (though not exclusively) through commonwealth-derived welfare income, paid fortnightly through the offices of australia’s centrelink, a national benefits payment bureaucracy that administers a range of social welfare payments to all australians. while a percentage of such income is quarantined in the northern territory, dedicated to food purchases through a plastic basics card, individuals retain some money that can be spent on alcohol or drugs. other sources of income include busking, begging, sex work, royalty payments (for those with claims to mining royalties in their home communities), and work for aboriginal organizations in darwin (see fisher 2013; holmes 2011). 11. such invisibility is something practiced by both campers themselves, avoiding the oversight of legal intervention, and other darwinites, who also learn to not see campers in the parks and trails of the city (cf. lea 2012b). 12. while i draw this figure from samuel weber (1996, 103–6), indigenous activists have attracted a substantial scholarship interested in their long-standing efforts to craft space in the australian media (fisher 2009; ginsburg 2012). 13. the widespread significance for aboriginal australians of what merlan (2007) calls “landedness” has itself taken center stage in both anthropological writing and in australian public culture as native title and land rights have become paramount arenas for securing aboriginal autonomy and recognition (see also merlan 1998; myers 1986; povinelli 2011). 14. this has an individualized component in the remote zone tax offset provided by the australian tax office to workers spending more than 183 days per year working in remote australia and in salary bonuses and subsidies for individuals who must work in such remote locations. 15. cowlishaw (2004) provides a book-length analysis of such iconicity and its significance for a new south wales town. 16. here, on a smaller scale, i see an analogue of the nter, insofar as it is a legal precaution aimed at the protection of children that seems instead to leave them more vulnerable. one might extend the analogy to view such interventions within the economy of risk as marking a limit to the state’s liability in its oversight of the larrakia night patrol. 17. yo is a yolngu affirmative from the dialects of north east arnhem land. it also has broad currency in nt kriol and aboriginal english. 18. roitman’s (2014) analysis of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2009 and the ways in which “crisis” more generally achieves self-evidence offers a provocative analogue here. both in northern australia and in the north american financial and property markets roitman examines, crisis becomes a durable, temporally extensive social qualification, one that signifies the truth of a situation and a moral need for transformation, yet one that obscures the ground on which that qualification itself rests. references altman, jon 2010 “what future for remote indigenous australia? economic hybridity and the neoliberal turn.” in culture crisis: anthropology and politics in aboriginal australia, 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http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0411-959x this essay was written for simultaneous watching of a video and reading of a text. the original cultural anthropology version showed both text and film simultaneously. this version of the cultural anthropology site does not support this technology. as a result, we offer you the video and the text separately. we recommend that readers open two windows duplicating this page: one with the video and one with the text. alternatively, please print the pdf before watching the video so that it can be read at the same time as watching. the video makes no sense without the text, and vice versa. please work with both video and text at the same time. how can visual and textual materials gain equal weight in an article? this was the challenge we set ourselves in contributing to cultural anthropology’s sound + vision initiative. searching the archives for good examples, we felt distressed. most everywhere, either visual or textual materials dominate: the other is just an add-on. many articles use visual materials as exemplification. many films have explanatory texts. but how might we create a text-and-film document in which both lead—though perhaps sometimes in different directions? in working through this question, we thought about music-and-text synchronization, as in an opera, where sound and story augment each other, creating a combined effect. neither dominates; neither makes sense without the other. in this spirit, we have written a sort of opera: a script intended to be read along with a film. yilan, our setting, is the home of taiwanese opera, which is quite different from european opera in ways that support our conceit. like the friendly farming we describe, it is grassroots, amateur, and infused with a queer sensibility. still, we do not use the traditional form; we have more kinship with the newer taiwanese o-pei-la (胡撇仔), in which aesthetics mix and mingle. we’ve taken percussion from yilan opera, but we combine it with the noises of snails, water, birds, and other beings. our filmic “music” forms a dialogue with, rather than an accompaniment to, the script, which combines material from interviews, participant-observation, and our analytic imagination. the script and the video tell different but related stories; we ask the reader to perform them together while appreciating their difference. through video and text, various beings of the rice fields offer their enactments of living in common. the piece was composed to be read aloud, whether by an individual, using multiple voices, or by a group. however, we have arranged it here so that a silent viewer might also enjoy it. the film runs throughout the text, but sometimes readers are asked to stop reading to just watch film before continuing. we ask readers to watch for the following synchronization signs in both the text and the film; the open-book symbol means “begin reading,” and the crossed-out book means “stop reading; just look at the film”: when you see one of those signs in the text, check that you see it in the film and vice versa. if you do not, pause the video or your reading until the signs synchronize. when the film gets exciting, we stop the text, signaling when it is time to read again; do not stop the film when you are reading, though. our aim is to create a dialogue between script and video in which each gets its times to be dominant. so that they do not interrupt the reading, we have gathered explanatory notes and citations at the end. our story has three voices: farmer, a member of yilan’s friendly farming community; pedant, a fixture of the archives; and wanderer, a roaming ghost. for those who would like to perform the script aloud, one person can read all three voices; or, several readers might join to read together, as at a party or in a classroom. note that many other modes of responding to changing ecologies are represented through the video. for example, we have used time-lapse photography to show rice responding to weather and animals, growing, and flowering; these are subtle activities, invisible to many nonfarmers. we challenge viewers to notice: those who can find the rice shooting out flowers win our special respect. (hint: check minute 49.) the video and the text make complementary—but only rarely mirroring—arguments; we ask reader-viewers to attend to both. in the text-free segment that opens the film, for example, viewers are asked to notice how both snails and farmers are keen observers of the conditions of paddy farming, but each toil without the clarity of transcendent knowledge. this argument frames our article but is not repeated in the script. older yilan o-pei-la performers liked to say what they did was kún koa-á (滾歌仔), which meant “roll the yilan opera.” so instead of rock ’n’ roll, let’s “o-pei-la ’n’ roll.” prologue begin the film. farmer: they say that the emperor yao, who is now a god in the temple, long ago began the merit-based promotion system for officials in china. grandpa chang told this story about him: when it came time for him to pass his rule to a successor, he passed over his own son to choose shun, a farmer known for his extraordinary filial piety. shun was so filial that when he went to the fields, the animals joined his work. grandpa chang was commenting on a 1950s green revolution film on how to use chemical fertilizers and pesticides for rice farming in taiwan. he remembered that during transplanting season, in those days, the world was completely silent, without the sounds of animals or birds. now, with the coming of a new generation of “friendly farmers,” he said, the sounds had begun to come back. as they did for shun, the animals are joining the work. but not all the animals support the farmers. some do everything they can to thwart the harvest. pedant: perhaps you’ve heard of the golden snail. some call it “apple,” or pomacea canaliculata. during the high times of twentieth-century development, the snail was imported from argentina to taiwan as a potential food-production project. they called it the “golden treasure snail,” but no one would eat it. abandoned, it spread across the countryside, attacking rice seedlings as its favorite food. this sequence was repeated across asia and beyond. in southeast asia, the golden snail threatens wetland ecologies. native snails dwindle. everywhere, it consumes the young rice. a poster child of progress, again, became a dangerous pest. much has been written by development experts on what to do, from deadly-poison molluscicides to labor-intensive hand-picking, especially at night. have you ever wondered how small farmers deal with this rising new pest? do you imagine they follow the experts or traditional knowledge? our group found something else: a set of experimental natural-history practices in which farmers try out interventions that might change the dynamics of the multispecies landscape. science, folk religion, tradition, community debate, social media: all are worked together in such experiments. many creatures are new here, including the snails; farmers check out how other creatures check out each other. the result is a shifting multispecies choreography. perhaps the best way to show you is this text-and-image multi species opera. scene one: a breath of wind wanderer: i came to this place alone, uprooted, and hungry. i had lost my sense of direction. the rain infused me. the river tugged at me. i had no house to rest and no kin to feed me. they called me “lonely spirit, wandering ghost” (孤魂野鬼; guhun yegui). no one noticed me. i crept up behind you until you felt my nudge. “caught you,” i cried, but you never heard. i was put out. i tossed the civet cat in front of a car; i swerved that truck into your motorcycle. with all the accidents, you noticed; you felt a nagging. you gave me food, clothes, and money. and so i came back to the mud where my bones rested for so long. i discovered a circuit of life to haunt and to possess. if you give me stuff and talk to me, i’ll help you out a bit. but don’t think you own me! i’ll fart in your face and take off just when you want me close by. my kind, we’re not just with you; we are many. we rise with the rice, but we are also the weed. we are the rasp on the tongue of the snail. and we are the hand of the farmer that removes it from its feast. i am still hungry; feed me. farmer: it’s a hot day here, yet i feel cold air on my neck. maybe it’s sweat, but i think it’s the ghosts. i feel their presence. do you know how the old farmers here found them? in the 1950s, those farmers discovered their bones when they improved this area for farming. it was during the u.s.-sponsored land reform, when hills were flattened and remade into fields; here, there were bones. we think they are the victims of the american bombing during world war ii, when taiwan was a japanese colony. these people were running for shelter to the deep ditch from which this village gets its name. they never made it. they died here in the fields. we don’t know who their families are. after experiencing so many traffic accidents, we realized we had to be better neighbors. old farmers made a temple for their bones, but we new farmers have only begun to learn about them. we still don’t know how much to sacrifice to them, or what kind of currency they spend. but we do our best to respect them, since it is we who invade their places. pedant: ghosts: they need to eat. and others too: snails and frogs; birds and leeches; the vegetables on the bunds and the weeds. the questions the friendly farmers are asking—and our research team with them—have to do with how each of these creatures conducts itself while making a living. how do they each interact with the others? are there differences between newcomers, such as golden snails, and old residents? and are there ways to insert one’s own goals without exterminating everyone? the farmers are learning, and so are the other creatures who make a living here. we watch them; we work toward privileged angles; we join in. these are our natural-history experiments, at four levels: the paddy-field creatures encountering and negotiating with us and each other; the farmers testing new ways to live in common; the research project of the team; the performative script and film. all this matters at four levels too. first, friendly farming is a response to the high-input, high-output green revolution, which dominated agriculture in taiwan since it was instituted in the 1950s. the green revolution segregated crops from ecological communities to make them reproductive machines. loving the crop meant wiping out everything else. friendly farmers have tried to bring back wider ecologies in which rice might respond to more than the industrial mandate. friendly farming’s natural-history experiments nettle the agro-industrial legacy to open possibilities for more-than-human livability. friendly farming is a movement as well as a means of livelihood. wanderer: movement: it flows, like drowned souls in the water. water carries pasts. it seeps across containment and refuses directions, mixing what comes in and what goes out. industrial chemicals linger, blended in water, thwarting the best intents. snails travel with water, and so do minerals and microbes. water is the flow of violence … and the flow of blessing. pedant: what’s that? nothing? well, let me continue. second, those experiments contradict much that social scientists tend to say. farmers, according to so many of my colleagues, either follow modern scientific knowledge, or, alternatively, stick to traditions. the green revolution gave us that most unhelpful dichotomy. lately, it’s been updated, but the differences are subtle. villagers are either part of western hegemonic science, with its “one-world world,” or else they practice arts of indigenous ontology. yilan’s friendly farmers can’t be dumped in either sack. some are old farm residents, but some are newcomers from the city with a lot to learn. some pride themselves on their interest in science, reading professional literature, devising experiments, and designing small-scale engineering—such as traps for snails and electric-powered sluice gates. but these farmers, too, acknowledge the ghosts, learn from the elders, and try their hands at multiple ways of living with paddy-field creatures. nor are they content with prepackaged organic dogmas. they encourage curiosity, alerting each other about the often changing conditions of multispecies paddy life. third, by attending to paddy-field creatures in an open, experimental way, friendly farmers raise questions about the ontological worlds of nonhumans—not just the forms assigned them by varied human perspectives but also the ontic status of their practical interactions with each other and the world. such questions rarely arise in the discussion of radical cosmopolitical difference, yet they are at the forefront of friendly farmers’ engagements with other creatures. the farmers want to know how they might realign their practices and those of other species; this requires attention to the others’ ways of noticing—and of being. farmers watch other creatures’ performances of livelihood; so did the research team, which we thought to show you through film. this brings us, fourth, to the research collaboration, involving, in four bodies, the experience of two friendly farmers, two filmmakers, and two anthropologists. the team has built a performance format for multispecies performances. wanderer: hey, notice me. pedant: what? my notes just disappeared. aah! scene two: becoming many wanderer: watch me. i am plastic; your field is my challenge. those snails’ forebears knew another world, but here they watch and learn. they flourish with your seasons; they become anew. in the winter we bury ourselves in the mud for the slow undeath of sleep. when i feel the warmth return, they rise with me and we eat. young weed, young rice: we take you all. we saw the stems of seedlings and let them topple into the mud. then we smell our companions and join them in a heap for hours of copulation. we are many. i am the mud; i am the seasons; i am the snail; i am the rice stalk on which they lay their eggs. i do them and i do them in! notice me. i am the would-be mother crawling, heavy, up into the burning air to offer my pink eggs a home above the waterline, where few will touch them. i place those hundreds slowly, one by one; i do not rush. and when she descends, i rest within those masses, one day, one week, two weeks. i am the tiny snails that hatch, fall, and float, and then eat and eat and eat. i am those tiny snails, and i am not them. i am many. falling in your field: we are many. we have learned this place; we have made it a place for our increase. what kinds of neighbors will you be, you farmers? who is more fearsome, you or we? scene three: the flow of violence and blessings farmer: my village has a long history, and when i say long, i mean really long. yilan was once a section of the okinawa trough, slumbering at the bottom of the pacific ocean. the lanyang plain emerged through the gradual deposition of sediment over many years. from this muddy beginning, yilan has always been mercurial, blessed with an ever-changing landscape. an archaeologist friend told me that the sand dune on which people lived and collected shellfish some four thousand years ago is already five miles from the sea. today’s hills and valleys only emerged some two thousand years ago. our region is in the records. in 1650, the dutch east indies company recorded nine thousand aboriginals in yilan who called themselves kbalan. then, in the early nineteenth century, one hundred thousand han chinese poured into the plain. this was the first large-scale ethnic rout in yilan history. you might think it’s strange. since it only takes one hour to travel from taipei to yilan these days, why did it take the early chinese settlers in taipei a whole century to make it to yilan? between yilan and taipei, lie the datun (大屯) and the xueshan (雪山) mountain ranges. for a thousand years, the austronesians rowed from yilan to taipei. the qing government cleared a footpath, shortening travel to three days. in 1916, the japanese built a public road, but it wound treacherously through the mountains. when i passed through as a child, the roadside was filled with spirit money placed to comfort lost souls. in 2005 the first eastward highway out of taipei was finally completed. it was this infrastructure that suddenly transformed yilan into a rural playground for the urbanites of taipei. since then, seven thousand minimansions have sprung up on the lanyang plain, an average of two a day. the highway brought urban sprawl and land speculation, but also new people and fresh rural-urban dialogue. we, humans, like the lanyang river, continuously remake the plain. pedant: farmer blames the highway for the commodification of yilan’s land, but frontier capitalism dawned in yilan much earlier. among the nineteenth-century wave of immigration, aside from hokkien armed settlers, there were the indigenous pazeh pingpu from central taiwan, and the wealthy hakka landlords from the west. the han immigrants brought two hundred years of capital and expertise from opening irrigation canals in western taiwan, in addition to dirty tricks in dealing with indigenous people. oh, i don’t mean only infectious diseases. the han chinese settlers were like anthropologists—skilled at discovering cultural differences. they learned that the kbalans considered the corpses of animals filthy, so the kbalans began to find dead cats and dogs in their gardens. they heard that the kbalans left their fields while mourning a death, so on their return, the kbalans would find han rice-paddy bunds moved several cùn into kbalan gardens. the kbalans fell into desperate poverty. in half a century, the kbalan were pressured southward. today, the kbalan presence is heard most often in the name of a bus company and a whiskey brand, which echo people long forgotten. wanderer: the living imagine themselves all powerful, but there are also the dead. among us, han and aboriginal intertwine, and even human and animal, confusing identities. we are the formless ones; we reside in water, stones, and fields. there are many of us among the meandering waterways of the lanyang plain, where water catches even the most adroit; we gain by their drownings. han and aboriginal people drowned in different ways. there aren’t many kbalan ghosts from the river. drowned kbalans died in the ocean, near which they had lived by fishing and swidden rice-farming. han occupied the banks—and drowned every time the river shifted. villages were established, and villages were forced to move, each time adding to us the formless. the geographical borders of shengou village were not fixed until the japanese built a levee near neicheng in 1936. but the levee often broke when typhoons rising out of the tropical western pacific visited yilan each summer. one summer—1962, they say—there were three major typhoons. by the time the third one hit, the village heads knelt atop the levee praying for mercy from us. this is why, to this day, we enjoy a special boar feast every year in the twelfth lunar month. but this also makes a wanderer like me truly wonder: why do those humans with the power to break new land bother to seek our protection? why do the humans pray to us ghosts as much as they pray to the deities, if not more? would it be too daring to say that when the lanyang river comes rushing in, even the gods have trouble protecting themselves? with all due respect, i remember an yilan proverb: “ông-kong [‘war god’] took leave before everyone else (王公走代先)” when a flood destroyed his majesty’s temple and village some 150 years ago. here is my humble theory: when it comes to dealing with water, ghosts of our kind can be more useful than gods. because water ghosts call the lanyang river home, we are a better go-between. a hundred years ago, the sage yang shifang (楊士芳) prayed to the lāu-tuā-kong, the “old masters” (老大公), allowing floodwaters to pass around the village. today, he still leads the ceremony on the levee. instead of relying on the heavenly decree of the gods, villagers recruit the ghosts to support their cause. we best top-down command; we are the formless. scene four: offerings and calendars: sources for local action wanderer: we settled here because we found it good. even the new farmers learn to offer us incense; in fire and smoke they make ready for us the things we use: our clothes, our fine materials, our cash. from us they learn propriety, lest we disrupt their harvests. “don’t toss your tools around,” old people tell the new set, worrying that they will disturb us ghosts. “don’t use coarse words in the paddy,” they advise. they say, “a good farmer checks on the paddy every day,” and who but we are there to notice whether or not they do? farmer: we learn to observe tseh-khuì (節氣), the twenty-four solar terms. grandpa chang says that when it comes to retransplanting seedlings, you must finish before tshing-bîng (清明). auntie qiao says: if you want to make preserves, ferment soy sauce, you must finish before pe̍h-lōo (白露) or the yilan sun won’t be hot enough and the soy sauce will be more likely to mold. before moving to the village, my taiwanese nationalism led me to believe that the twenty-four solar terms was the stuff of mainland chinese ideologies, irrelevant to taiwanese agriculture. only later did i learn that taiwanese farmers long ago created their own methods, localizing the twenty-four solar terms, creating a convenient set of standards for yilan’s agricultural work. for us new farmers, there is a lot of learning. we observe, experiment, and dig up old farmers’ knowledge. over the years and through the course of each growing season, our efforts gradually accumulate. in 2015, the idea circulated that snail picking is most effective at night. some people started making dates with the snails every midnight. after they reported their success, other farmers followed. by 2016, it was standard to pick at midnight. one farmer even affirmed the point with a japanese academic publication. but while the japanese scientists say the snails are most active from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., some farmers disagree, saying shengou snails come out as early as 6 p.m. grandpa chang says there is no general rule: temperature makes the difference. “when it is chilly during the day and suddenly gets warmer at night, the frogs are croaking loudly, the bird calls join in chorus, and the dogs bark incessantly. this is when the golden snails are the most active. there are so many snails it will scare you!” when the season comes, golden snails invade our work and jokes, and even our dreams. from community kitchen to social media or random conversation while checking on water levels in the fields, snails multiply in every encounter. from kenn-tit (驚蟄) (“awakening of the insects”) to li̍p-hē (立夏) (“beginning of summer”), we continuously ask, “how shall we save rice seedlings from the ferocious appetite of those snails?” snails unite us. wanderer: as for me, i predate these communities. i am local, but i exceed local dreams. they ask for permission to live in this place, and, yes, we give it to them, but they never fully know us. scene five: science: snails and seasons farmer: we’re not afraid of science in our village. two of my farmer neighbors are credentialed scientists. they keep track of the snails, studying ways to keep them at bay without poison, and inventing snail traps and baits. after testing cabbage leaves, bananas, fish food, and pineapple, they concluded that rice bran is the best at attracting snails. rice bran is also the most affordable for us farmers; some city researchers suggested bananas, but who besides a government-funded lab is going to buy bananas for their snails? these scientists, my neighbors, inspire us to try new ideas. sometimes the rest of us jump to conclusions. they do a test. “really, i think knowledge is so important,” one said to me; “otherwise, just relying on hearsay can be really dangerous.” we all make observations, but they verify what we notice. of course there are different kinds of science. during the green revolution, science seemed so grand; it was part of a package with chemicals, machines, and earthworks. everything that wasn’t part of that package was old-fashioned, and no one was supposed to do it anymore. there was a wall between the old and the new. but a lot of criticisms have been directed at that package; the pieces have fallen apart. friendly farmers pick up some things and leave others alone. we watch the snails, we read about them, we ask our neighbors, and we try some small trials that might show if our ideas are right. one of my farming partners noticed something this year: when a conventional farmer nearby put poison in his field to kill the snails one afternoon, by the next morning the cement bunds around the field were covered in snail eggs! at that time, it was still cool. my field didn’t have any eggs at all. we read about it, and it seems that stressed golden snails lay eggs. the poison killed adults but led to many more snails-to-come. snails have their seasons for us; we’ve given up on killing them all, so we learn to live with at least a few. we watch them—learning from our elders and our scientists as much as from our peers. when the rice is older, we’ve found, the snails can’t break the stem. then, suddenly, the snails can be our friends. we use them to keep down weeds. here’s what grandpa chang said: “i collect the large ones, but i don’t collect the fourth and fifth generations. once the seedlings have grown for forty to forty-five days, those snails will have grown big and will start eating weeds. don’t worry about that generation, they are there to help us. we are making use of the golden snails.” we change our strategies; we make them anew. we use our senses, our tests, and the experiences of older farmers. you might call one science and another superstition, but for us each opens a door, alerting us to the challenges of a season. of course, we come from different perspectives; we fight about which kind of knowledge is better. “foreign scientists don’t know about our situation,” said another of my neighbors. but none of us dump the options. pedant: burned by the science wars of the 1990s and excited by the possibilities of indigenous cosmopolitics, many anthropologists and science-studies scholars in the twenty-first century began searching for alternative world-making practices that could bring them outside “science.” in contrasts between science and indigenous or vernacular forms of knowledge, the logic of science looks suspect: science convinces us that only one kind of knowledge is correct; it refuses multiplicity and alternative formulations. in these accounts, science is identified with the problems of the modern world. such analytic work is accomplished through contrasting concepts. “imagine the world through indigenous concept a versus scientific concept b,” the analyst requests. this technique works well where the analyst aligns herself with local contrasts between our way and theirs. the sharper the indigenous contrast, the better the analyst’s contrast works. where local people do not begin with such contrasts, however, the situation offers analysts a different gift: the possibility of working with local practices through which many kinds of concepts, frames, and philosophies mix, overlap, compete, and otherwise jostle each other. such an approach does not abandon the work of separating strands, but here it is the beginning of the investigation rather than the end. the goal is to watch how people work across frames, negotiating when one kind of frame might best be applied and when another. science looks different in such an investigation. science joins other kinds of claims, including those of ghosts and deities. to learn about golden snails, one cannot be afraid of reading science. but it need not be applied with the authority of faith. scientists’ claims join those of personal observation, public debate, and ghostly interventions. wanderer: they are always talking about me, but they can’t hear a thing i say. all they hear is the rain, which sweeps my words away. still, i’ll tell them about snails: they are hungry like me. if the farmers miss a single night of snail picking when the rice is young, they lose an entire section of the field. should i pity the farmers or the snails? so much life! it scalds me. scene six: debate: the bird disruption wanderer: what do the water birds say as they search in the paddy-field mud? i listen to them all, and not just the farmers’ white ducks. there are spot-billed ducks, painted snipes, white-breasted waterhens, and moorhens. birds are active souls. i know them; they are hungry like me. they stick their heads in the mud that took my bones. i’m in those sediments, which layer algae, bugs, and seeds, but also other times and other arguments. watch me splash some up. then you might notice me. pedant: development experts suggest that farmers tackle the golden snail infestation of their rice fields through keeping ducks, which eat snails. indeed, yilan was once famous for duck herding. alas, when humans transformed themselves from dog eaters to dog lovers—and some to dog deserters—bands of roaming dogs wagged their ways into the new rural ecology. the empty minimansions strewn across the lanyang plain provide the gangs with splendid, marbled shelters. they prey on ducks and chickens and harass lone joggers. duck-rice farming in yilan makes for great pr but bad farming sense. now ducks are kept in fenced commercial farms, which buy snails hand-picked by farmers. and when we consulted those ducks about helping with our natural-history experiments, they vehemently refused us. farmer: but there are other birds—and they are a big problem! this year, the moorhens (tsuí-ka-līng) have been terrible. they forage in the mud, pecking at the roots of the rice seedlings, leaving the seedlings in disarray. they don’t even flinch at my screams when i shoo them. what are we to do? moorhens are not a new bird, but somehow this year they have become such a pest. “green beautification” projects converting riverbank wetlands into lawned parks might be the cause, but we are not sure. what is certain is that moorhens stir big discussions in the village. one farmer says we are overreacting: just leave the flattened rice seedlings alone, he says, and the rice will straighten itself out. another farmer says that guy can only say that because farming is not his main source of income. farming is her living, she says; she has spent a fortune this year replacing flattened seedlings. the debate has possessed the whole village; every day we hear more opinions. as for me, i replaced the seedlings the moorhens flattened, three times. i also set up a simple string device in my paddy, hoping that it would somehow deter the visits. a few days after i tried the red string, two neighbors told me that it wasn’t going to work. they explained: the birds learn where the trip wires were, and they just walk over them. grandpa chang is probably right about the birds. here’s what he said: “ah, the birds! it’s the biggest challenge. the problem is, the birds are smart. all of the tactics people have tried—scarecrows, lights, flags, strings, fireworks—work for three or four days at most before the moorhens figure out there’s no danger.” “the moorhens thin out once their favorite seed hull treats are gone,” he continued, “but that’s when the spot-billed ducks come, breaking the seedlings in half with their raucous play.” if it’s not one bird, it’s another. if it’s not birds, it’s weeds. how can we keep the rice out of trouble? at least, we’re paying attention. scene seven: surviving the green revolution farmer: our farming feeds our bellies, but it also puts forward an ambition: to live well with others. we can’t make that dream by ourselves. we draw in many kinds of others. every season we have short-term volunteers. despite their lack of experience, their enthusiasm keeps us from falling too far behind with the busy spring labor. we’re also part of a larger movement to remake lively relations between city and countryside. city people come to experience farming. we want them to get their feet dirty, so we show them how to transplant rice seedlings or pick up golden snails. they are squeamish and clumsy, and sometimes they make a big mess. but we want them to know there’s no food without farmers, no cities without the countryside. sometimes we romanticize ourselves a little in the process. we might fail to point out that when they aren’t around, we transplant seedlings with machines. still, for them the point is the farming experience. they can’t have that without stepping in the mud, which we do every single day. we also can’t make our farming work without other beings, and both the living and the dead. some animals promote our cause. everyone in taiwan knows the song about the pond loach, a little fish of the paddy fields that reminds us of the innocent pleasures of children. but pond loaches started disappearing with the modernization of irrigation, the replacement of dirt bunds with cement, and the rise of agricultural chemicals. maybe pond loach nostalgia can help us explain friendly farming. some animals help us because they help the rice. there is a leech that eats golden snails; we need it. those leeches aren’t interested in human blood. they specialize in water snails—all kinds. but we’ve learned to draw lines: we love the native snails. when we are picking golden snails, we put native snails back into the water. our native snails don’t eat rice seedlings; some help us out by clearing algae. even golden snails become our friends when the rice is old enough to resist them. the snails help us keep the weeds down. so instead of trying to kill off all those animals, we pay attention to them, learning the ways we just might live together. pedant: what’s involved in paying attention to others? there’s a method to it. we call it natural-history experiments to foreground the importance of observation in a broad sense. many senses and sources are tapped: farmers count off calendrical rituals; they listen to birds, pick snails at different hours of the day, and use their bodies as tools; they watch for social-media postings and read scientific journal articles. natural history, more conventionally, refers to a european practice that, following the enlightenment, brought observers out in what they knew as nature. we refuse that narrow definition to include all kinds of world-watching practices, and particularly those in which the social relations of other kinds of beings are explored not through rote learning but through bringing personal observation into socially guided interpretation. in this expanded sense of the term, yilan’s friendly farmers are masters of natural-history practice, using their ever-growing repertoire of knowledge about paddy life to inform their farming. each observation inspires others. farmers are not trapped in a static cosmology, whether science or tradition; they explore the peculiarities of the world. while such an expansion of the term loses the particularity of the european elite experience with its colonial frame, it gains the possibility of attention to what many kinds of noticing share. it breaks up a priori distinctions between vernacular and professional, and the west versus its others. it allows us to consider sets of practices that—crosscutting many lines—allow farmers to work with ontological difference, making it their ally rather than being held in its sway. farmers, like anthropologists, appreciate that there are many kinds of world-making, and, like anthropologists, they know how to switch, combine, and juxtapose. yilan friendly farmers’ natural history is in dialogue with other natural-history conventions—and yet exceeds them, finding its center of gravity in local farming practices. in expanding the definition of natural history, it seems useful to consider whether other living things might also be involved in similar observations (at least if observation is expanded to refer to many forms of sensual experience). golden snails are new residents of taiwan’s paddy fields. they explore: they taste many plants, and even animals, developing their diets. they try cement bunds, rice stalks, election-campaign flags, and research cameras as egg-laying platforms. they come into contact with native snails, leeches, and farmers, among others, as they find their way. conversely, the animals and plants around them reacquaint themselves with a world in which their presence looms large. this expansion again loses particularity, here of human practices, but it gains the possibility of asking what humans and other beings have in common. if humans are not alone in exploring and making the world, we have a basis on which to work at living together. and what of ghosts? yilan’s ghosts are capable of observation. they cause calamities; they save people from floods. they demand being noticed and object when they are not acknowledged. it seems difficult to ban ghosts from the annals of those doing natural history, as well as of those being observed—even as ghosts, the formless ones, never emerge into form. this, of course, messes with european enlightenment notions of nature, but isn’t that part of the point? opening up what counts as nature allows analysts to look at patches of practice in which ontological frameworks are worked out by humans and nonhumans alike. dividing such frameworks by their genealogies is just one step of the analysis, not its endpoint. all of this, too, has a politics. friendly farmers acquaint themselves with all kinds of other beings for a reason. the policies put in place during the second half of the twentieth century—in both city and in countryside, in both elite enclosures and impoverished wastelands—threaten the livability of the earth. to recapture the possibility of livable landscapes, friendly farmers must learn something about those beings that the green revolution and the commercialization of land blocked. instead of making their fields into monocrop deserts, they expect other life forms in their paddies. instead of working to exterminate adversaries, they accommodate them. it doesn’t sound like a grand program, but—in aiming to survive the green revolution—it’s our best hope. wanderer: “hope,” he says. ha! there’s no hope for me; i’m already dead. i persist in this world in both your terrors and your blessings, and you don’t know which ones i’ll bring. shall i bring on the apocalypse or waft a good harvest in your direction? you won’t know. after all, our numbers grow from your hubris and your violence. we are as happy to accept your newly found u.s. dollars as your old-fashioned clothes and combs. our mystery has the last word. i humbly suggest: feed me. abstract combining video and performance-oriented text, this genre-bending o-pei-la is a multispecies enactment of experimental natural history. our players consider the golden treasure snail (金寶螺; kim-pó-lê; pomacea canaliculata and relatives; golden apple snail), first imported to taiwan from argentina in 1979 for an imagined escargot industry, but now a major pest of rice agriculture in taiwan and across asia. whereas farmers in the green revolution’s legacy use poison to exterminate snails, a new generation of friendly farmers (友善小農; youshan xiaonong) in taiwan’s yilan county hand-pick snails and attempt to learn enough about their lives to insert farming as one among many multispecies life ways within the paddy. drawing on a variety of knowledge sources, including personal experience, international science, social media, traditional calendars, and local understandings of ghosts and deities, these farmers construct an experimental natural history of both new and old paddy-field denizens. their experiments self-consciously intersect with the investigations made by other species of the paddy field. our article offers an ethnography of both kinds of experiments, human and nonhuman. video and text together show the performative features of cross-species acquaintance. in the process, we contribute to debates about radical alterity, showing how anthropologists can do more than sort for difference: we can identify vernacular patches of practice that mix and juxtapose many ontological alternatives. [experimental film; multispecies ethnography; friendly farming; golden apple snail; multiple ontologies; taiwan] notes grassroots, amateur, and infused with a queer sensibility: in traditional taiwanese opera, actors and musicians perform outdoors in an informal setting, under a tree or in front of a temple, while the audience snacks and cheers for their friends. in contrast to european opera, it is a grassroots creative form, not high art. performances deploy just a few amateur actors and musicians. the “queer sensibility” we mention refers to the importance of cross-dressing and of plots full of mistaken identities and wild claims to be someone other than who one is supposed to be. once men played female parts as well as male ones; more recently, women play all the major roles, male and female. recent attempts to make the form an official icon of taiwanese culture have led to professionalization, but the grassroots legacy remains clear. in which aesthetics mix and mingle: the newer o-pei-la was born under japanese colonial rule when traditional genres were forbidden and the modern west was to be the guide; troupes switched between portraying themselves as japanese kominka subjects (when colonial police came by) and taiwanese cross-dressers. the genre that flowered from these restrictions mixes all kinds of convention. (one contemporary o-pei-la troupe mixes greek tragedy and taiwanese opera plots.) the friendly farming we describe also pulls materials, genres, and perspectives from many kinds of sources. the script, which combines material from interviews: mandarin chinese is the official language of taiwan, while taiwanese is the predominant local language among the older generation. taiwanese romanization is used where our informants were likely to use taiwanese. quotations are translations from interviews. this argument frames our article but is not repeated in the script: lucien taylor’s (1996) phenomenological approach argues for consideration for an image-sound based anthropology, different from the discursive and representational aspects of written anthropology (see also macdougall 1997). we have been doing written anthropology with images and sounds, rather than exploring the full capacities of cinema as experience and discourse. as taylor (1996, 80) argues, “films should not so much illustrate as actually embody anthropological knowledge.” anna grimshaw (1997) argues that participant-observation is already inherently a visual practice; visuality should be a framework for understanding anthropology. ethnographic film presents information that is beyond the capabilities of the page. it is a physical and intellectual act of seeing, not just data. neither a recapitulation of a foreign vision nor the first-person expression of the filmmakers, it is an act of translation.in this spirit, we present our video footage and sound recordings without full explication, hoping that viewers will notice the mysteries of snails clicking inside their shells, dogs smelling, and rice flinging out thin flowers. our first film footage is taken with a microcam carried by a giant african snail (an invasive pest in taiwan) who observes the paddy from its muddy margins. the underwater snail is our golden snail protagonist. golden snails’ sounds were recorded by an underwater contact microphone. by recording the snail, but not explicating its sounds, we hope to convey the friction (see tsing 2005) of contact across radical difference; this is also our aim in presenting only partially translated human talk. here, we join multispecies ethnographers, but rather than searching for humanlike morality and consciousness, our performance piece stresses relational curiosity and the ecological consequences of living in common.fieldwork for this article was conducted by anthropologist-farmers tsai from 2013 to the present and chevrier from 2016 to the present. tsing’s contribution was to spark the opera, much of which was conceived in epic-length telemediated team discussions. video footage and sound recordings were made between march and august 2016 by carbonell and chevrier via time-lapse, micro spy cameras, waterproof sony cyber-shot, gopros, a sony a7rii, and a canon 5d (see haraway 2008 on the multiple agencies of the crittercam). the film’s soundscape is of two kinds. we begin and end with yilan opera percussion, recorded by tsai and chevrier. our other sounds were recorded by carbonell and chevrier in the farming landscape, and, in the case of snail sounds, in an aquarium. carbonell edited the video footage in a continual conversation with the team, as we wrote and rewrote the text and video. prologue some call it “apple,” or pomacea canaliculata: the golden snail we describe is mainly that identified as pomacea canaliculata. the term golden refers to the amount of money entrepreneurs hoped to make. the snail is also called “fortune-longevity snail” (福壽螺; fushouluo). pomacea are hard to differentiate; their shells, through which snails are most easily identified, show a great deal of variation within species. adding to the confusion, several species were inadvertently imported to taiwan from argentina (hayes et al. 2008). like morphology, life-cycle traits have proved to be plastic; golden snails make use of this plasticity to become rice paddy pests. as nestor cazzaniga (2006) puts it, golden snails are “harmless and useless” in their native argentina; by contrast, they have become major ecosystem engineers in asia. rather than to the commonly expected predator escape, many researchers look to the plasticity of snail growth and reproductive rates to explain this difference (lach et al. 2000). golden snails grow faster and reproduce much more frequently in warmer climates. a useful introduction is joshi and sebastian 2006. for both intentional and unintentional introduction across asia between 1980 and 1990, see naylor 1996. for ecological destruction, see carlsson, brönmark, and hansson 2004. scene one maybe it’s sweat, but i think it’s the ghosts: ghosts are less confined to individual identities than subjects of living states. after all, they have lost their names. we take advantage of their indistinct status to allow wanderer some species and numerical flexibility. see wolf 1974 on ghosts. friendly farming is a movement as well as a means of livelihood: friendly farmers work toward nonindustrial alternatives, but outside the rigid institutional organic certification system. some friendly farmers mix techniques from varied versions of farming. one farmer, for example, experiments by dividing plots between those farmed through state-approved chemical inputs versus those farmed in the friendly style. another has tried planting the government-approved rice variety using friendly methods. since the government pays guaranteed premium prices for that variety, usually grown with high chemical inputs, it is a sacrifice for farmers to experiment with alternatives. alternative marketing networks are necessary. for alternative networks and rural revitalization in taiwan, see lo and chen 2011, j. chen 2014, wo 2015, and tsai 2016. or else they practice arts of indigenous ontology: scholarly attention to radical difference has developed at the intersection between anthropology and science and technology studies. two modes contrast. some scholars show how practices of expertise, such as in science and medicine, diverge from vernacular practices (e.g., mol 2002; law and lien 2013). other scholars have turned to indigenous world-making (e.g., viveiros de castro 2012; escobar 2011). the felicitous term one-world world comes from law 2011. the work of helen verran (2001) is exemplary in bringing these conversations together. science and an african logic opens much of the analytic territory explored here; she offers conceptual contrasts, but then messes with them by introducing practice and history. the ontic status of their practical interactions with each other and the world: verran’s term ontics allows a discussion of practical enactments of ways of being, rather than merely of philosophies. this concept opens the door to an exploration of nonhuman perspectives and enactments; ontics do not require practitioners to embrace philosophical canons. there is no reason that snails and plants might not have them.ontics are not essences tied to identities. the green revolution changed the nature of rice, as well as the ecologies in which rice was embedded. friendly farming offers rice the opportunity to respond differently: not as a segregated reproduction machine but rather as a privileged co-resident of the paddy. even as we show rice moving more slowly than dogs and snails, we challenge the reader to see this as activity. our goal is to watch historical transformations in which plants—and other beings—make worlds (see tsing 2015, forthcoming). here, we join other scholars of plants (e.g., hustak and myers 2012). scene three today’s hills and villages only emerged some two thousand years ago: chihhua chiang contributed archaeological material to this article in personal communication with the authors. in the name of a bus company and a whiskey brand, which echo people long forgotten: for early yilan history, see shih 1996, w. huang 1998, w. huang 2000, and w. chen 2010. for rivers and ghosts, see c. huang 1999, zhang 2003, ku and tan 2004, wu 2014, and y. chen 2014. scene four one farmer even affirmed the point with a japanese academic publication: the publication mentioned is wada and yoshida 2000. scene five friendly farmers pick up some things and leave others alone: postcolonial approaches to science have stressed translation, in shiho satsuka’s (2015) sense, which involves not only linguistic but also conceptual and material reworking (tsing 2015, 217–26). science must be translated into village idioms to be effective in friendly farming; a heated discussion in our village recently took place on whether science or local knowledge best constitutes a common language for farmers. scientists are not the only translators here. since new farmers had previously neglected offerings, grandpa chang gives classes on how to best make offerings to ghosts. grandpa chang is equally a translator, bringing an earlier layer of village practice into the world of younger farmers. it seems that stressed golden snails lay eggs: for snail reproduction under conditions of stress, see cartwright 2006, 16. science is identified with the problems of the modern world: two major figures in anthropology and science studies, bruno latour (2013) and eduardo viveiros de castro (2013), have argued passionately that science has been at the heart of environmental destruction. this article joins that conversation. latour’s conviction that scientific ideology contrasts with science in practice is a useful starting point. yet further: when scientists are involved as participants in particular worlds of practice (here, small farming), they bring science and local cosmologies into workable confusions and juxtapositions. science as an enterprise becomes fragmented and infused with vernacular knowledge. divisions between ideology and practice may or may not hold, depending on the conversation. to remain clear that some kinds of science have been dangerous to life on earth yet acknowledge others as necessary to a toolkit for collaborative survival, it is important to recognize this process of local imbrication. mix, overlap, compete, and otherwise jostle each other: in personal communication with the authors, marianne lien helped clarify the difference between contrast of concepts and analysis of practices. they are hungry like me: according to alejandra estebenet and pablo martín (2002), golden snails go into a period of dormancy when conditions are cold or dry. reproduction is seasonal in cooler areas but continuous in tropical regions. some females spawn up to 3.7 times per week, on average, for their whole lifetimes, with a measured high of 10,869 and a mean of 4,506 eggs per female. intercourse lasts from ten to twenty hours, and each incident of egg laying lasts five hours. although the snails live in the water, eggs are laid above the waterline. the snails eat vegetal, detrital, and animal matter, but they prefer standing and floating water plants. scene seven a little fish of the paddy fields that reminds us of the innocent pleasures of children: wo (2015, 30) translates hou dejian’s 1975 song “loach-catching.” they specialize in water snails—all kinds: the predatory leech described is whitmania laevis. it smells the mucus trails of aquatic snails, which form its prey (lai, chen, and lee 2010). they watch for social-media postings and read scientific journal articles: we use the term experiment not to require professional rigor but rather to note the open-ended, trial-and-error ethos of their work. farmers are willing to be wrong. it gains the possibility of attention to what many kinds of noticing share: much has been written about european natural history from the seventeenth century to the present, ranging from inquiries into universal cognition (atran 1993) to explorations of the imperial politics of botanizing (pratt 1992; brockway 2002). the latter is key in considering whether and how to expand the term natural history to other projects and places. it seems important to avoid generalizing too quickly about what e. o. wilson (1984) called “biophilia,” that is, human love of other living beings. instead, projects of watching, naming, describing, or involving oneself among other beings should be considered in the cultural and political milieu from which they emerge. with that caveat, however, the exploration of such projects is an exciting field (see nelson 1986 for an indigenous natural history from alaska; kohn 2013 on runa communication with animals in ecuador; marcon 2015 on early modern japan). in such historically grounded exploration, natural history can encompass both elite and vernacular projects, and in varied times and places. such scholarship moves beyond the too common stereotype that only western scientists care about the practical details of nonhuman worlds, while vernacular and indigenous others traffic instead in cosmologies. with a world in which their presence looms large: agricultural experts often say that golden snails can only be controlled by pesticides because they have no natural enemies in taiwan. but farmers have noticed that paddy rats, painted snipes, moorhens, and predatory leeches have learned to eat golden snails. both farmers’ observations and the animals’ exploratory diets are natural-history experiments, in our sense. we would also include friendly farmers’ experiments in cooking and eating golden snails, despite their reputation as a poor food. we have a basis on which to work at living together: expanding natural history breaks open conventional senses of both nature and history to the friction of quite different explorations. even in its most conventional senses, natural history took europeans into many forms of temporality (e.g., gould 1987). further expanding the term will require sensitive attention to multiple temporalities of appreciating the world. recent european explorations of the temporal experience of other animals (e.g., foster 2016) open the door to such attention, even as they also show the limits of elite european conventions. references atran, scott 1993 cognitive foundations of natural history: toward an anthropology of science. new york: cambridge university press. brockway, lucile h. 2002 science and colonial expansion: the role of the british royal botanical gardens. new haven, conn.: yale university press. originally published in 1979. carlsson, nils o. l., christer brönmark, and lars-anders hansson 2004 “invading herbivory: the golden apple snail alters ecosystem functioning in asian wetlands.” ecology 85, no. 6: 1575–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/03-3146. cartwright, leah 2006 “apple snail (pomacea canaliculata-complex) feeding selectivity, reproductive potential, and environmental impact on texas gulf coast ecosystems.” master’s thesis, stephen f. austin state university. cazzaniga, nestor 2006 “pomacea canaliculata: harmless and useless in its natural realm (argentina).” in global advances 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故鄉的河慢慢的流: 宜蘭河生命史討論會論文集, edited by huang yu-ling (黃于玲) and li su-yue (李素月), 139–63. yilan, taiwan: cultural affairs bureau yilan county. what is a situation? what is a situation?: an assemblic ethnography of the drug war jarrett zigon university of amsterdam what do certain military missions in afghanistan, police violence in the united states, therapeutic interventions in russia and denmark, torture and rape in an indonesian police station, and stop-and-frisk policing in new york city all have in common? they are just a few of the local manifestations of the situation named the drug war, which is responsible for thousands of deaths a year globally, and the social and political death or exclusion of thousands more. but the drug war has potential effects that go well beyond these numbers. for whether by means of military interventions, policing and incarceration strategies, international and national surveillance, and the overblown budgets to pay for them, or by means of biopolitical therapeutics, national and international legislation, and the normalization of labor regimes and discipline—all of which and more constitute aspects of what i call the nontotalizable assemblage of the drug war—this is a war that potentially affects every human on the planet. how can the drug war have such widespread effects, and how do we conceptualize it? in this article i hope to begin to offer an answer to this question. i will argue that the drug war should not be conceived as something like a singular issue or a totalized strategy, and neither should it be limited, as it often is in public discourse, to its localized manifestation in parts of colombia, mexico, or american inner cities. rather, the drug war is best conceived as what i will call a situation. i hope to show that the concept of situation significantly adds to anthropological knowledge because it allows us to consider that which is widely diffused across different global scales as a nontotalizable assemblage, yet in its occasional and temporary local manifestation allows us to understand how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and culturally distributed get caught up in the shared conditions emerging from the situation. becoming caught up in the shared conditions of a situation, in turn, significantly affects the possible ways of being-in-the-world of those persons and objects that get caught up. the concept of situation, then, allows us to analytically recognize that in the current global configuration, complexity is at least as knotted nonlocally as it is locally, and thus increasingly—so i contend—local complexity emerges within the shared conditions set by this diffused complexity (see bennett 2010; connolly 2013; morton 2013). although they do not describe it quite like this, this is how the anti–drug war movement, with which i have been doing assemblic ethnography, views the drug war and the movement’s own political activity. anti–drug war politics is a politics of agonistic and creative experimentation in becoming otherwise, and as such it has had to define well what it opposes and what it intends to transgress (cf. laclau and mouffe 2001). unlike many post-1968 political movements that self-define as addressing issues or identities tending to be conceived as closed and located (brown 2001; connolly 2013), anti–drug war politics has defined its political agonist as a globally diffused phenomenon that locally manifests differentially and temporarily. in this article i explore how what i learned from this movement—in terms of what its participants address, how they address it, and their form of organization—may help anthropologists rethink their own objects of study. in so doing, i hope to go beyond a notion of globalization and the tracing of global connections. instead, i seek to explore how situations as widely diffused assembled phenomena that are differentially distributed participate in the ontological conditioning of our contemporary world (cf. connolly 2013) and yet, as assemblages, always hold potential to become otherwise (e.g., povinelli 2011; allison 2013; zigon forthcoming). the drug war is one such situation. what is a situation? by situation i mean a nontotalizable assemblage widely diffused across different global scales that allows us to conceptualize how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and culturally distributed get caught up in shared conditions that significantly affect their possible ways of being-in-the-world. this becomes clearer if we consider what we normally mean when we say something like “we found ourselves in this situation,” or ask, “what can i do, this is the situation i’m in?” these are ways we articulate the recognition that to be in a situation is at one and the same time something that falls upon us, or perhaps better put, that we get caught up in, and something that to a great extent provides the conditions for possible ways of being, doing, speaking, and thinking within that situation. thus, this is recognition that a situation is both a singularity of which one has become a part, and a multiplicity that preexists one’s participation in it and, as already having been, exceeds this localized instance of it. the multiplicity of a situation, however, denotes more than its durative and widely diffused existence. it also indicates its multi-aspectual nature, for a situation is not a closed and totalized occurrence that appears as if from nowhere. rather, a situation is constituted by diverse phenomena that become intertwined and emerge temporarily as localized manifestations. it is in these ways, then, that a situation can be described as a singular multiplicity that provides widely diffused but shared conditions. in addition to the drug war, i would argue that such phenomena as global warming, trafficking, and even global capitalism are examples of situations. recently some scholars outside anthropology have also recognized the significance of widely diffused phenomena with localized effects and have reconceived analytic and political concepts accordingly (e.g., barad 2007; bennett 2010; connolly 2013; morton 2013). timothy morton, for example, has thus addressed global warming, which he conceives as a hyperobject. morton (2013, 1) defines hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” as a result, hyperobjects are nonlocal because any local manifestation of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject itself, or at least not the totality of the object. a hurricane or a tsunami, for example, may be a local manifestation of the hyperobject of global warming, but it is not global warming as such. similarly, and as i will show below, although the drug war locally emerges differentially in various forms, these forms do not constitute the drug war as such. despite this and other similarities, however, real differences remain between hyperobjects and situations as i am trying to articulate them in this article. the most significant difference is that morton conceives a hyperobject as a real object, or a unit unto itself that withdraws from other objects as well as itself, and thus can never be fully known or touched by another object. this is how the object-oriented ontology to which morton subscribes defines objects, and within this perspective everything and everybody, including humans, are objects with just these qualities. but this raises the question: if objects cannot touch or influence each other (e.g., morton 2013, 149–54), except for perhaps in aesthetic ways, then what are we left to do politically when confronted with a hyperobject such as global warming? although the notion of a hyperobject as “massively distributed in time and space” is compelling and in some ways similar to a situation, it is difficult to imagine the kind of politics to be done by those who cannot touch and against that which itself cannot be touched. in contrast, because situations can be described as flowing and assembling emergent multiplicities, they can and do slip into one another. this makes situations ripe with sites of potentiality, and thus open for political activity. a similar concern arises with alain badiou’s notion of situation. in the most recent explication of his ontology, badiou (2013) replaces the concept of situation with world, but for our purposes, we can still think of this as his rendering of situation. for badiou, a situation/world comes into existence, maintains that existence, and is recognizable as such because it has a particular and unique logic ordering it. if for badiou (2013, 37–38, 101) “being qua being is thought by mathematics,” then situation/world as “appearing, or being-there-in-a-world, is thought by logic.” indeed, as he goes on to phrase it, situations/worlds are not simply thought by logic, they are logic. and this logic is not a procedure that a human subject utilizes to understand a situation/world, so argues badiou, but rather this logic that fundamentally is situations/worlds “is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution.” a situation/world for badiou (2013, 113, 118–19), then, is the local emplacement of a logical operation that occurs regardless of human existence. this is clearly not what i intend by a situation, and, in fact, it is precisely the kind of metaphysical humanist thinking and politics i am trying to argue against. if the concern of these and other contemporary ontologists is the explication of a posthumanist politics, it seems odd to do so in logico-mathematical terms or by simply reversing the subject/object distinction, thus perpetuating a metaphysical humanist approach. in contrast, the critical hermeneutic approach begins with martin heidegger’s notion of phenomenon (“what shows itself in itself”) and through analysis discloses that humans are always already intertwined in various situations. this intertwining both precedes and exceeds any possible humanist projection onto it. to be in any world at all, and in the situations that emerge within them, is always already to be so intertwined—and as such always becoming that which situations make possible (e.g., heidegger 1975; merleau-ponty 1997). but this alone does not make a situation a more compelling analytic and political concept. in the rest of this section, then, i consider further the concept of situation as it “shows itself in itself.” in so doing i delineate the fundamental characteristics of a situation which, in turn, will set the background for the following sections in which i consider some of the political activity of the anti–drug war movement. so as to make this analytically clear, i will delineate the various characteristics of situations in numbered subsections. 1. a situation is a nontotalizable assemblage the drug war situation is an assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages such as global militarism, state-based surveillance and control, border security, carceral political economics, national and international inequalities, and biopolitical therapeutics. what is called the drug war, then, is no thing in itself, but rather assembled aspects of other assemblages that together create a widely diffused situation that is differentially distributed and has very real effects in worlds. here we can begin to see how the concept of assemblages can prove helpful for thinking the complexity of situations. anthropologists are likely most familiar with the notion of assemblage through aihwa ong and stephen j. collier’s (2005) rendering of it. to the extent that ong and collier’s global assemblage articulates the basics of a general theory of assemblages most fully developed, for example, by gilles deleuze and félix guattari, bruno latour, and manuel de landa, there are similarities with what i am calling a situation, which is a nontotalized assemblage. i differ significantly from ong and collier (2005, 11), however, in that despite claims to the contrary, they seem to conceive global assemblages as supplements to what they variously refer to as “social and cultural situations,” “spheres of life,” “environments,” and “context.” in contrast, i argue that the very notion of nontotalized assemblages entails that they not be thought in terms of a supplement to our worlds. rather, our worlds are nothing other than densely intertwined knots of several much more widely diffused and nontotalizable assemblages that constantly flow together and slip apart in a potentially infinite number of combinations. this flowing and slippage of the singular multiplicity of situations defies totalized categorization or identification, which is why, as nontotalizable assemblages, situations cannot be thought as supplements. thus, for example, the diverse aspects of the drug war situation can easily slip into other nontotalized assemblages and thereby defy easy identification with either. as we will see in the next section, the global militarism aspect of the drug war can be foregrounded and reconceived as the war on terrorism or defense against communist insurgents, and police militarization and carceral political economics can be repositioned as being tough on crime. as a result, a situation proves quite slippery, since it never can be fully grasped in its entirety: the capacity of its constitutive aspects to be temporarily refigured forms part of its nature. such refiguration can occur naturally, as it were, since aspects of situations take on different signification when represented, experienced, or considered differently. or this refiguration can be done intentionally and strategically, as certain persons may wish to emphasize one particular interpretation of an aspect over others; for example, mandatory-minimum prison sentencing as being tough on crime, rather than judicial procedures with clear racial and class prejudices. indeed, it is just this slipperiness that gives situations their robust complexity, and which an assemblic ethnography seeks to disentangle. i am thus trying to argue that we must begin our anthropological analyses not at so-called global assemblages that supplement a preexisting context, but instead with the situations making evident that we are always already caught up in singular multiples that provide the widely diffused yet shared conditions significantly affecting our possible ways of being-in-the-world. 2. a situation is not singularly locatable because a situation is never isolable and only exists as a singular multiple, that is, as always intertwined with other assemblages, a situation is never located. rather, a situation becomes temporarily localized. thus, for example, the drug war is not simply located in the veins of heroin users crouched under american highway overpasses, in the jungles of south america, the borders between the united states and mexico, or in the poppy fields of afghanistan. nor is the drug war simply located in a substance called heroin that actually represents a range of potentially infinite kinds of beings as opium derivatives get cut with more contaminants with every step it moves through the underground commodity chain. the drug war is equally not simply located in american, russian, or thai prisons, or in the infectious disease wards of hospitals around the globe. rather, the drug war emerges—at times but not always—in all of these locales and beyond. notice, however, that these locales are not always and only caught up in the drug war situation. for example, there are people in prisons, infectious disease wards, and under bridges who are there for reasons unrelated to the drug war. thus, only by attending and being attuned to each of these locales and their unique, similar, and shared potentialities and emergent actualities of the drug war can this situation be effectively politically addressed or anthropologically analyzed. it is precisely this attunement that characterizes an assemblic ethnography. 3. sites of potentiality for political activity arise from the interstices of situations the conglomeritic and flowing nature of assembled situations leaves them with interstices of noncohesion. these interstitial sites disrupt any possibility for an actually existing totality of a situation, and therefore any possibility for thinking or articulating the totality of a situation. at these interstices, problematics of a situation likely occur and sites of potentiality can be found, from which possibilities for political activity emerge (gupta and ferguson 1992, 18; critchley 2007; povinelli 2011, 109–10). this differs significantly from the “untouchable” hyperobjects of morton, or even the bounded issues or identities that dominate most contemporary politics. to some extent this rendering of situations as sites of potentiality resembles max gluckman’s (1940) classic articulation of situations as moments of paradox, confrontation, conflict, process, and potential change (see also evens 2005; kelly 2012). despite this similarity, however, i entirely reject the gluckmanian claim that they disclose social structure conceived as a transcendental. indeed, the argument i am trying to make is that situations allow us to begin to conceive shared conditions that are widely dispersed across various levels, horizontally and vertically, as it were, without the necessity of any transcendental at all, whether this be thought in terms of social structure, culture, badiou’s logic, or ong and collier’s “context.” in the final section i will spend some time showing how the anti–drug war movement is currently addressing such sites of potentiality in its experimental political activity without the need of such bannisters. the situationists similarly conceived of situations as nontranscendentally structured sites of politics, at which experiment and play could be done in the attempt to bring about the otherwise (e.g., vaneigem 2001). but if situationists saw the first political task as the construction of situations from which political experiment and play could begin (e.g., debord 2006), then the anti–drug war movement begins by disclosing already existing situations that must be permanently transformed so as to build new worlds in which drug users can dwell. the conceptual, analytic, and methodological problem that the complexity of situations presents, then, is how precisely to trace and articulate the movement, force, and limits of the intertwining so as to initiate this transformation. similarly, i submit that these problems are central to anthropology and the other human and social sciences today, as they struggle to address the increasingly complex contemporary global configuration of things. i am therefore attempting to delineate the concept of situation and the method of assemblic ethnography as possible ways of addressing this complexity. widely diffused complexity in october 2013 while doing research with anti–drug war agonists in the downtown eastside of vancouver, i attended a public anti–drug war event.1 such events quite commonly occur in the downtown eastside, as it has become the location of the most intense anti–drug war activity in the world. the successes of the politics of world-building (zigon 2014, forthcoming) that have been achieved there are known around the globe and have become a model for the global anti–drug war movement. every year participants in this movement flock to the few square blocks of the downtown eastside to meet with local agonists, do internships and trainings at the various services, social enterprise businesses, and housing complexes, or just to attend events like this one. this evening’s event, in fact, had several participants and audience members from other countries, and was to be followed the next day by a film on safe injection sites in copenhagen, denmark. this event, then, was an indication of the widely diffused nature of the drug war and the global political movement that has arisen to address the dehumanizing shared conditions this situation disperses. as i sat there that evening i could not help but notice an absence in the otherwise-overcrowded hall. about four years earlier, my assemblic ethnography had taken me to new york city, where i eventually started doing fieldwork with the users union there. i had come to know one of the union’s leaders, terrance, quite well, and one evening about five months prior to the vancouver event, we were having dinner together when he told me that the union was planning to send him to vancouver for an internship and training. as it turned out, however, international travel restrictions imposed on him because of a prior incarceration on drug-related charges kept terrance from going to vancouver. that is, as a consequence of having been caught up in a drug war situation, terrance is not allowed to travel internationally. although i missed terrance as a friend, his absence from vancouver, and particularly at this event, did open the possibility for assemblic analysis. it occurred when bud osborn, the vancouver-area user-agonist-poet and one of the founding members of that city’s users union, opened the event with a short poem depicting an encounter he once had with police while hitchhiking in california.2 the poem describes bud being stopped alongside a california highway by police, threatened at gunpoint as he empties his bag, told that they could take him into the desert and kill him without anyone ever knowing, informed that the police could plant drugs on him if they wanted, shoved into the police car, where they jammed a flashlight into his ass under the pretense of searching for drugs, then leaving him on the side of the road with his pants still down, his belongings blowing in the wind trail of the departing police car, and passersby slowing down to rubberneck. the final lines of the poem make the point clearly: “threatened with execution, raped, reduced to nothingness. the drug war.” whether or not bud’s poem depicted an actual experience matters little, for what it disclosed was a shared condition recognizable to everyone who attended the event, and, i suspect, any other person who has ever been caught up in a drug war situation. it certainly would have been recognizable to terrance, for it was having been caught up in just this situation that ultimately resulted in his inability to come to vancouver. listening to bud’s poem in a room full of people who may never have found themselves in that kind of singular situation but who nevertheless recognized it as part of the multiplicity that constituted their shared condition of being-in-the-world, i could not help but hear the poem as a deconstructive political activity that disclosed the complex and widely diffused nature of the drug war. as bud’s poem and terrance’s absence both revealed that evening, this is a complexity that goes well beyond a closed issue defined by policy and legislation, or that is located in some fixed place like supposedly isolated drug wars in mexico and colombia or isolated drug addicts in u.s. inner cities. rather, bud and terrance each in their own way that evening disclosed that the drug war is an assembled situation constituted by aspects of other assemblages such as global militarism, state-based surveillance and control, border security, carceral political economics, biopolitical therapeutics, and international and national inequalities. this disclosure also reveals how the concept of situation as i am delineating it in this article opens up analytic possibilities that allow us to move between located manifestations and the assemblic relations of widely diffused phenomena that provide the conditions for this emergence. in other words, bud’s poem and terrance’s absence can both only be understood in terms of the shared conditions set by a widely diffused assemblage potentially distributed differentially anywhere. in the rest of this section i trace some of the various assemblic relations of the drug war as they revealed themselves in the convergence of bud’s poem and terrance’s absence. although assemblic ethnography makes the larger claim that a tracing of these assemblic relations potentially leads us to any place on the globe, due to space limitations i focus particularly on how these assemblic relations become manifest in and contribute to the contemporary conditions (connolly 2013) of the united states, especially new york city. thus, i focus on the shared conditions differentially distributed in the united states that allowed both for the singular situation bud describes and for terrance’s absence. despite this focus, i hope it becomes clear that these local emergences—or what some might call the drug war situation’s reterritorialization—can never be preknown in terms of location, form, affect, or temporality. nevertheless, they provide a range of possibilities for a globally diffused shared condition that becomes differentially distributed. *** recall that bud ends his poem with these words: “threatened with execution, raped, reduced to nothingness. the drug war.” reduced to nothingness indeed. but, in fact, bud and the many drug users i have come to know have already been reduced to nothingness prior to such encounters. as i have been told in the various places my assemblic ethnography has taken me, drug users around the globe are considered as, for example, “rubbish,” “waste,” and “shit.” in the drug war situation, drug users do not count as a recognizable part of whatever it is one feels a part of—society, culture, nation, family, or whatever. drug user agonists and social scientists generally refer to this exclusion as stigma. but it is more than stigma; it is exactly what bud calls it: a reduction to nothingness. it is this nothingness, this nonbeing, that opens up the possibility not only for the police violence bud experienced but also for the lack of awareness, care, or general interest by those who stare at bud as they pass him standing pant-less on the side of the highway. although spectacularly disturbing, rape, torture, and other such forms of police violence may not be the most insidious manifestation of the drug war revealed in bud’s poem. for the intertwining of the carceral political-economic and the surveillance and control aspects of the drug war situation are most clearly disclosed in the very fact that the police stopped bud in the first place. it describes a variant of what has come to be called stop-and-frisk, which essentially means that police officers with so-called reasonable suspicion can stop any individual to question and frisk him or her. the very fact of bud being stopped by police also allows an assemblic ethnographer to trace the assemblic relations of the intertwining of the carceral political-economic and surveillance and control aspects and find that stop-and-frisk, which was initially aimed at getting weapons off the streets, has morphed into a means of controlling and watching populations and has now become one of the drug war’s primary police tactics. indeed, these assemblic relations that emerge as stop-and-frisk have contributed considerably to the shared conditions of a substantial number of americans. this holds especially true in new york city, where the drug war situation has affected peoples’ life trajectories in deleterious ways, particularly those of african american and latin american persons, who are systematically watched by this and similar forms of surveillance (alexander 2012, 63–71). this is precisely how it came about that terrance was absent the evening of bud’s reading, and missed out on the internship opportunity in vancouver. for it was through such forms of surveillance that terrance, a fifty-year-old african american man from the bronx, came to be incarcerated, as a result having his life trajectory negatively affected and his life possibilities significantly reduced. just one of the effects terrance has experienced is the inability to dwell in his world. for example, he once told me that stop-and-frisk tactics make him feel as if “i’m trespassing in my own neighborhood.” he continued with the following description of his experience: i’m coming out of my building, like i been many times, and stopped and frisked because i’m a person of color and i don’t have my sneakers tied or i’m wearing, you know, or i have clothes on that are related to gangsters or whatever, which are the clothings that a lot of people in the neighborhood wear, you know, and i’m going to work and i’m still being stopped. and i got my bag and everything, my id is out, you know, come on. you’re not giving me no freedom to walk in my own neighborhood. such experiences are pervasive in certain new york city neighborhoods. in 2012, for example, more than 500,000 individuals were stopped and frisked in the city alone, 87 percent of whom were either african american or latino. perhaps most disturbing about this form of surveillance is that 89 percent of these interventions turned up nothing. yet the highest number of those arrested (more than 5,000) held possession of personal-use quantities of marijuana, which under new york city law is not an offense unless shown in public, which it becomes when a police officer asks you to empty your pockets. those stopped, frisked, and arrested are overwhelmingly young african american and latino men, and the tactic is predominantly carried out in the neighborhoods where these men live (see new york civil liberties union n.d., 2013). having to live every day with the very real possibility of stop-and-frisk means that many black and latino americans no longer feel that they can dwell in their own neighborhoods, streets, or even their own front stoops. stop-and-frisk is responsible not only for a significant amount of the surveillance the drug war situation allows to be placed on communities and individuals but also, as a result, it has become a key factor in the vast increase in incarceration rates in the united states, particularly for small, personal-use amounts of marijuana. in the past thirty years, for example (or since the militarization and law enforcement aspects of the drug war have become fully knotted, as we will see shortly), the prison population in the united states has increased by 500 percent, and in 2012 alone, 1.55 million people were arrested on nonviolent drug charges.3 this is what some in the anti–drug war movement call “the drug war gulag,” and is a significant factor in what they call a “war on people.” the effects of such incarceration rates on shaping individual, familial, and social trajectories are substantial, and they can be traced by following the various assemblic relations that have become knotted in the drug war situation. terrance, for example, has had his life possibilities significantly narrowed as a result of his drug-related imprisonment. for example, the only steady job he has been able to find in the past twenty years has been part-time work at a local harm-reduction center in the bronx. because every job application asks whether or not the applicant has ever been arrested, terrance is systematically excluded from any job beyond the harm-reduction or drug-policy sector. even within the harm-reduction career trajectory, however, terrance finds himself limited. as a peer counselor, he has been extraordinarily successful and recognized throughout the region for his work. his boss has talked to him several times about a promotion, but this requires further education and training that terrance cannot afford. as a formerly incarcerated person he is ineligible for student loans or other funding, and he therefore cannot get the education that he now wants and needs. and, as we already know, when the new york users union offered to send him to vancouver for an internship and further training at some of the programs about which i will write in the penultimate section of this article, he was not allowed to leave the country because of his incarceration record. terrance is trapped. he has been, as bud puts it at the end of his poem, reduced to nothing—at least socially—as a result of the drug war. so too have entire neighborhoods. as michael, another leader of the new york users union, put it, “tough on crime, that whole thing, i mean, that is really code for getting rid of, you know, drug users and their communities.” parts of the bronx, where terrance lives and works, are just one such community that has become a zone of uninhabitability because of the drug war (zigon 2014), leading to what the policy director of the users union calls the “incarceration mind-set that the drug war helped extend into all these other areas of life beyond the prison. so it’s part of housing, it’s part of all, just, walking down the street and the stop-and-frisk type of stuff.” as a peer and community development associate, terrance, in fact, attempts to disrupt the perpetual circle of the incarceration mind-set by recruiting and training drug users, many of them formerly incarcerated, to become peer-outreach workers at the harm-reduction center. unfortunately, the stipend pay for this work is so low that it often does not lead to the kind of “development” terrance and his fellow agonists hope for. to describe the above another way: terrance, those he recruits, and to a large extent the entire neighborhood have experienced a social death as a result of being caught up in new york’s drug war situation. globally the drug war produces nearly 200,000 deaths a year, and the number of social deaths well exceeds this number. this, of course, hardly seems surprising when we consider the war of the drug war not metaphor but an actually waged reality, one result of which is the production of internal enemies whose lives are rendered ungrievable (butler 2010). indeed, if we follow the assemblic relations of the drug war situation from these local manifestations of stop-and-frisk through mass incarceration and its personal and social consequences back to the hyperaggressive act depicted by bud in his poem (where he writes that “both cops pull their guns and aim them at me”), we can disclose how such policing, which may take the form of intense violence, intrusive surveillance, and excessive incarceration, is intertwined with global militarism, another aspect of this assemblage. as michael put it, “all of this is connected to militarism.” the assemblic link between these localized police tactics and global militarism is the militarization of the police, which began in the 1980s as part of what was called a “total war” against drugs that resulted in both the close cooperation between the military and the police and the militarization of police equipment, training, and tactics (marcy 2010, 88; alexander 2012, 74). as was recently revealed by the events in ferguson, missouri, american local police are now armed with machine guns, tanks, and military-style surveillance equipment, and trained in military-style siege, combat, and interrogation tactics, enabling them to control and occupy entire neighborhoods and regions in military fashion. this capacity has its origins in the 1980s militarization of the drug war, despite the overwhelming media claim that it is an offshoot of the war on terror. to the extent that the latter holds true, police militarization is best understood as an intertwining knot of the surveillance and control, carceral political-economic, and global militarism aspects of the drug war situation. beginning from this intertwining knot of police militarization, a tracing of the assemblic relation of global militarism discloses just one of the ways that the drug war situation exceeds the united states and reveals itself as a widely diffused, differentially distributed phenomenon. the global militarism aspect of the drug war has been significant from the war’s declaration by richard nixon in 1971, and neither the drug war nor most global military activity during the past forty years can be understood separately. this is especially so since the reagan and bush years, when the drug war situation became partially constituted by an intertwining of national and international legislation, economic aid and development, and military aid and eventually intervention, all of which rested on the international inequalities that characterized cold war politics (marcy 2010; tate 2013). as the 1980s came to an end, it became increasingly difficult to discern precisely the distinction between drug war and cold war military operations. this held particularly true throughout central and south america as the u.s. military became fully entangled with counternarcotics operations. by the late 1990s and early 2000s, this late–cold war entanglement would morph into that of counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and counterterrorism (kenney 2003; felbab-brown 2013), such that today counternarcotics and counterterrorism often intertwine and emerge in the form of either military intervention (such as in afghanistan and special-operations and militarized drug enforcement administration agents in latin america, southeast asia, and africa) or of militarized police in the united states and elsewhere. in other words, much of the military activity around the world during at least the past thirty years is inextricably linked to the drug war. this is the “drug war” that gets most of the media and other public-discursive attention—think mexico or colombia. in this section, however, i have used the assemblic convergence of bud’s poem and terrance’s absence from vancouver as a way to disrupt this narrow public discursive focus and to disclose the nonlocalized complexity that is the drug war situation. beginning with this assemblic convergence as a hermeneutic entrée, i have tried to trace the assemblic relations of the drug war situation to show that it goes well beyond any of its localized emergences, and that any comprehensive analysis of the drug war must recognize it as a widely diffused and complex assemblic phenomenon. in other words, in this section i have tried to show that the drug war can only be understood as a complex assemblage of, among other things, state-based surveillance and control, mass incarceration and its personal and social consequences, militarized police violence, and global militarism in its various forms during the past thirty to forty years, and that, as a consequence, all of these can only be understood in terms of their relation to the drug war situation. despite space limitations, then, i hope in this section to have offered a glimpse at just one of the benefits of an assemblic ethnography, that is, the analytic description of complex and widely diffused thickness. assemblic ethnography the study of widely diffused assembled phenomena requires what i am calling assemblic ethnography. as method, assemblic ethnography chases and traces a situation through its continual process of assembling across different global scales and its temporally differential localization in diverse places. just as one never knows if, when, and where they will get caught up in a situation, so too the anthropologist doing assemblic ethnography can never know beforehand where the research will lead and when it will do so. for example, eight years ago i began research at a rehabilitation program in russia run by the orthodox church (zigon 2011), during which i became attuned to the political struggle there for harm-reduction services. this exposure led me to the central role of user unions in this struggle, which had been initially funded by the soros foundation based in new york. while in new york researching that initiative, i became acquainted with the new york users union and how it politically addresses the drug war, which, i came to learn, was partly informed by the successes in vancouver, where i then went, and so on to copenhagen, denpasar, and elsewhere. unlike the traditional ethnographer, then, the assemblic ethnographer realizes that singularly focused research on any one site results in a decomplication of the situation under study. this is so because the assemblic ethnographer recognizes that complexity is knotted nonlocally at least as much as it is locally. perhaps most significantly, to do an assemblic ethnography means to recognize that this knotted complexity results from the temporary emergence of nontotalized assemblages. a primary characteristic of this method is therefore tracing the various assemblic relations that constitute the assemblage. thus, my research did not simply move from one site to the next, but rather moved along diverse assemblic relations of the drug war. for example, when the aspects of carceral political economics and state-based surveillance revealed themselves in new york, i traced those assemblic relations and their differential distribution to denpasar and back again to russia; or when the aspect of biopolitical therapeutics revealed itself, i traced it from russia to new york to vancouver to copenhagen. the research unfolded, then, along assemblic relations as they become differentially distributed, and not at sites. to anthropologically consider the contemporary condition, it is therefore not enough to note the various frictions (tsing 2005) that constitute local complexity; we must instead ourselves travel along the assemblic relations constituting the nonlocal complexity that sets the shared conditions for ways of being in diverse locations throughout the globe. assemblic ethnographic writing seeks to mirror this method in that it describes horizontal thickness, as it were, just as much as vertical thickness. in other words, assemblic ethnographic writing gives as much attention to tracing the widely diffused complexity of a situation across its various assemblic relations as it does to localized complexity. in the previous section i tried to show some of the widely diffused complexity of the drug war situation by briefly tracing some of its various assemblic relations as they become manifest in the united states, and particularly in new york city. in the final section i turn to vancouver for a closer analysis of one localized and rather intense manifestation of the drug war situation and the political response that has emerged from its interstices. a politics that begins from a situation bud read his poem at a public anti–drug war event held at a university annex that is part of a recently constructed public-private housing complex on the border of the downtown eastside neighborhood in vancouver, where what i have called a politics of world-building (zigon 2014, forthcoming) has been going on for twenty years. by 1997, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 drug users, more than half of whom were hiv positive, were concentrated in just a few square blocks: more than 6,000 persons lived in single-room occupancy hotels, a constant police presence resulted in regular and random harassment and arrests, and the death toll was mounting. the potential for a situation-focused politics was all around, and in fact had already begun emerging in 1993 when what would eventually become one of the key housing and drug user organizations in the neighborhood was formed, and made harm reduction—and particularly the provisioning of clean syringes and other equipment or “works”—an inseparable part of their political activity related to housing. as one of the cofounders of the organization put it, at the time this was quite radical and experimental, although now it is fairly common practice. the point, however, is that these anti–drug war agonists recognized that in the downtown eastside the housing problem, drug use, police harassment, and hiv and other infectious diseases were inextricably intertwined, and that, therefore, addressing only one in isolation would be more or less not addressing anything at all. here we have the recognition of the necessity of a politics that addresses situations rather than isolated issues. indeed, well beyond vancouver the global anti–drug war movement is one that mirrors the characteristics of the situation it addresses. just as the situation of the drug war is an assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages, so too the anti–drug war movement is an assemblage of diverse collaborators (cf. laclau and mouffe 2001) that mobilize to address, for example, local, national, and international antidrug legislation and policy, fatally dangerous therapeutics, carceral political economics, and punitive policing, among others. the kind of politics done by the anti–drug war movement, then, recognizes the multiple ways in which the drug war situation touches and affects their and most others’ ways of being, and it mobilizes accordingly. this is the kind of political movement william connolly (2013, 11, 137, 41) argues is needed today to address what he calls the “contemporary condition,” a movement he describes as “anchored entirely in no single class, gender, ethnic group, creed or generation” and taking “the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states.” this is precisely what the anti–drug war movement is, and it takes this form because it addresses one of the most widely diffused situations shaping the contemporary condition, no matter where one might be and whether or not one uses drugs. despite these early attempts by vancouver agonists to initiate a situation-focused politics, throughout the 1990s overdoses in the neighborhood continued to increase—two hundred in 1993 alone. finally, however, in 1997 a kind of tipping point—an event—occurred that issued a demand from this world that could no longer be avoided. a public health survey of drug users in vancouver revealed that the downtown eastside had the highest hiv rate in the world. this report, which articulated something that many of those living in the neighborhood already felt and experienced, entered the world and motivated some to act. bud was just one of those who did. he approached the housing organization mentioned above, and together they organized the political event that would become known as 1,000 crosses. this event for many marks the true beginning of the experimental political activity that has come to make the downtown eastside famous the world over among anti–drug war agonists. it derives its name from the one thousand crosses erected in a neighborhood park to commemorate each of the drug users who had died in british columbia since 1993, the vast majority of them in the downtown eastside. but the event went beyond commemoration. drug users also occupied parts of east hastings street—the main street running through the neighborhood where all the commuter buses run—and stretched a steel chain across the street with a sign reading “the killing fields.” the users of the downtown eastside thus began to respond to the political demand that had emerged from the interstices of their drug war situation. motivated by an ethics of dwelling (zigon 2014), the users and inhabitants of this neighborhood began the long and difficult political process of transforming their “death zone,” their killing fields, into a world where they could once again dwell. in just a few months, bud and others would form the by now globally famous vancouver area network of drug users (vandu), and this union, along with housing and other allied organizations, would begin a political process ongoing today. the result has been the transformation of the downtown eastside into an attuned world in which drug users not only no longer die at extraordinary rates but also where they can now actually dwell in a world designed for them as drug users. this world consists of, among other things, a neighborhood bank organized specifically for the needs of active drug users and those with precarious housing, social enterprises that employ drug users and adapt to their schedules, art studios and galleries where users and other neighborhood inhabitants can create and show their works, and increasing amounts of public housing, some of which is combined with private housing. each of these is networked with the others, as well as with various health and therapeutic services in the neighborhood, such as the safe-injection site that vancouver has become famous for, a trial heroin prescription program, a health and dentistry clinic, and a detox clinic. the agonists have, in other words, built a world attuned to itself and its inhabitants, and as a result it remains open to ever-new possibilities for becoming as it continually maintains this attunement (zigon forthcoming). in this new world of the downtown eastside, for example, a bank is no longer an exclusionary profit-driven establishment, but a place open to anyone no matter his or her credit history, residence status, how they smell, or what they say. as we will see below, it is also a place where one can get a crack pipe. in this new attuned world, drug users are no longer excluded from employment possibilities; rather, the social enterprise employers negotiate and adjust their hiring and work expectations to the vicissitudes of users’ semistable lives. in this new world created by experimental, situation-focused politics, drug users no longer die at extraordinary rates because, as i will make clear below, the entire neighborhood has essentially become a “safe zone” for drug use. all of this and more has become possible, i suggest, because the vancouver agonists were able to, as other anti–drug war agonists elsewhere are beginning to as well, tap into the sites of potentiality of their drug war situation. as i hope is clear, this form of politics under way in vancouver is beginning to allow new conditions of existence to emerge that challenge and counter those of the drug war situation. this experimental politics has become possible because of the sites of potentiality these agonists have actively disclosed within the interstices of their drug war situation. this is perhaps most clearly seen in the way that they have mobilized political action around harm reduction, which sits right at the interstice between the state-based surveillance and control aspect and the biopolitical health-management aspect of their drug war assemblage. in nearly every country, the drive to manage the normalized health of a working population by controlling what can and cannot be put into a body has increasingly resulted in the institutionalization of harm-reduction programs once organized by people who used the drugs themselves. this change has shifted what was once a political project of drug users and their allies to a state-funded therapeutic intervention run by bureaucrats, college-educated managers, and public health therapists, thus largely taking it out of the hands of drug users, who are now mostly left in the position of docile beings who must normalize or wait until they are able to do so. additionally, the attempt by both international and national harm-reduction organizations to convince governments to accept harm reduction is regularly posed in terms of supporting security and economic development (zigon 2013). harm reduction, then, falls directly in the interstice of biopolitical therapeutics and state-based surveillance and control. whereas this institutionalization of harm reduction has in most cases led to the isolated clinic as the only location where a drug user can acquire clean works, the political activity in the downtown eastside has resulted in an entire neighborhood that is now essentially a safe zone of harm reduction. as one user agonist in vancouver described it to me, unlike the typical harm-reduction model that is linear and isolated, the downtown eastside is networked, so that there is nowhere a person can be such that clean works or a safe-injection site are not close by. a crack-pipe vending machine in the bank lobby, a safe-injection site in the geographical center of the neighborhood, syringe exchanges in numerous community centers, clinics, and housing units—no matter where one finds oneself at any given moment, it is nearly impossible to be more than a minute or two away from harm-reduction services. unlike in many of the other places my assemblic ethnographic research has taken me, harm reduction in vancouver is beginning to disentangle from its biopolitical therapeutic and surveillance and control aspects to simply become part of ordinary life. as a result, vancouver has become a model and inspiration for anti–drug war agonists around the globe. no matter where i go or with whom i talk, everyone asks if i have been to vancouver, and they always compare themselves negatively with the successes there. increasingly, though, these other user agonists are mobilizing to wrest control of harm-reduction practices from state-based and -funded institutions. consider the example of safe-injection sites, which is one of the most radical initiatives enacted by anti–drug war agonists around the globe, and what vancouver is best known for. safe-injection sites are locations where people can use drugs—initially conceived for heroin injectors but increasingly so for smokers and snorters of various kinds of drugs—under the supervision of trained personnel. where officially sanctioned, such as in vancouver, amsterdam, and copenhagen, safe-injection sites are statistically recognized as responsible for significant decreases in overdose. globally, however, many safe-injection sites are run underground, and although no official statistics exist to confirm this, hearsay suggests that these have proven just as successful in reducing overdose as the sanctioned sites. despite the clear evidence that safe-injection sites work, the political tactics for enacting them vary at different localizations of the drug war situation. in copenhagen, for example, where the national union of drug users and allied organizations convinced the government to fund and support a range of initiatives—safe-injection sites just one among them—the tactic tends to be engagement with legislators and the strategy is quickly shifting toward decriminalization. in moscow and st. petersburg, on the other hand, in a country that has one of the fastest growing hiv rates in the world, a rate driven by heroin use, and yet where the government, along with police and medical personnel, persecute, imprison, and leave many drug users to die (zigon 2011), this drug war currently is more effectively fought—though dangerously so—using illegal and underground tactics to offer such things as safe-injection sites. in new york city, i have found that combinations of these two tactics are regularly used, depending on the relata or aim being addressed. for example, legislative and judicial tactics are utilized for policing issues, illegal and underground tactics for safe-injection sites. i have offered just a few examples of how the transformative possibilities available at this interstitial site of potentiality have been recognized by user-organized groups. inspired by the transformations underway in vancouver, these groups and their allies have begun to politically experiment as they respond to the particular situational emergence of the drug war in their locale, some of them by necessity acting outside the law. the consequences have been real and include, among other things, communally run safe-injection sites, housing, and health care. such an experimental politics has become possible, i have shown, because of the way the anti–drug war movement conceives its political agonist. unlike the bounded issues and identities addressed by many contemporary political movements, the anti–drug war movement has recognized the drug war as an assembled situation that at one and the same time discloses its widely diffused complexity and its openness to becoming otherwise. for unlike an isolated issue that can only be won or lost, and unlike morton’s hyperobject that seemingly cannot be touched, situations always hold sites of potentiality at their interstices, from which experimental political activity can begin to transgress the situation, and as such remain open to becoming otherwise by means of those and that which are already intertwined. vancouver has shown the global anti–drug war movement how such a politics is possible, and this movement as a whole, i hope, has shown anthropologists how reconceiving our analytic concepts may do more than simply make our worlds more understandable: it may also reveal how we can begin to engage in the becoming otherwise of these worlds. a closing word on anthropological engagement in this essay, i have followed the lead of the anti–drug war movement i have been researching and conceptualized the drug war as a situation widely diffused across different global scales and differentially emerging in various worlds, thus affecting those and that which get caught up in the situation. as such, the drug war situation is best considered a nontotalizable assemblage constituted by various aspects of other nontotalizable assemblages such as global militarism, state-based surveillance and control, carceral political economics, biopolitical therapeutics, and international and national inequalities, among others. conceiving the drug war as such helps make it more analytically clear for both intellectual and political purposes. this article, then, has been a response to recent concerns both within and outside anthropology that new and creative attempts must be made in the analysis of the worlds we engage as researchers and intellectuals, as well as the concepts and models we might offer for further engagement in these worlds (e.g., bennett 2010; povinelli 2011; morton 2013). if anthropologists seek such engagements in an attempt to participate in the becoming of an otherwise, it behooves us not only to research those inclusively excluded communities, groups, and peoples that may point to such a becoming but also to discern the potential hidden in these worlds and activities. in contrast, however, to those anthropologists who call for a political ontology with a “primitivist ethos” (hage 2012) or a turn to the “nonmodern” (see blaser 2009) as the only possible alternative, i have shown that political potentialities for becoming otherwise, and the ontological basis for such politics, are already right here in the midst of globally diffused shared conditions that can potentially affect anyone. i submit that the concept of situation discloses this fact and that the anti–drug war movement shows us how a politics of a situation might be done. notes acknowledgments the research and writing of this article was made possible by grants provided by the netherlands organization for scientific research and the european research council. a heartfelt thanks goes out to sylvia tidey for having read several instantiations of this article, and for recommending the concept 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suitcase, and headed for the bank. the argentine economic crisis of december loomed on the horizon, and although widespread fears about the solvency of the banking system were just beginning to set in, mariela decided to follow her gut and get her money out of the bank. it wasn’t easy: we got to the branch and they told me, “fill out this form, and in seventytwo hours we’ll give you the money.” so i filled out the form, and in seventy-two hours we went back, and they told me that i would have to wait another day. the next day we went back again, and again they told me, “your money isn’t here.” so i started to make a scene. “this is a fraud! i’m going to the consumer protection agency, to the public advocate’s office! you’re going to give me back my money!” the manager came out and told me, “your money isn’t in this branch. the only way to get it is to go to the main office. you can take a bit from what’s here, but you’ll have to get the rest there.” but mariela had had enough of the runaround, of chasing her money: “i said to him, ‘absolutely not. i put the money in here, and you are going to give it all back to me tomorrow.’ and the next day, i went back with my friend and the suitcase. they made me go into a reserved room, where the bank’s accountant practically threw the money at me.” ten days later, strict limits on bank withdrawals were put into place to stem the bank run of which mariela was a part. called the corralito—the “little corral” or “crib”—the embargo on withdrawals was part of the dramatic unraveling of a decade-long relationship between the argentine peso and the u.s. dollar, to which the peso had been pegged throughout the 1990s. as the rich moved their money offshore and wall street vulture funds began to speculate against argentine debt, the ban on bank withdrawals cut people off from their savings at a time when they most needed them: a period when, after a decade of neoliberal reforms, the economy was falling apart, and unemployment had soared above fifty percent. weeks later, amid the events that today are referred to simply as la crisis (the crisis), deposits trapped in the corralito were forcibly converted to a devalued peso, losing three-quarters of their value overnight. by getting her money out of the bank, mariela had escaped devaluation by the skin of her teeth. ten years later, i asked mariela if she had regained her faith in banks. she leaned back in her chair and let out a long laugh. she had not. this article examines how people like mariela work to save their savings in the aftermath of the crisis, focusing particularly on how historical experiences like the 2001 crisis shape current investment practices.1 through forty years of economic crises, currency devaluations, and capital flight, argentines have developed quotidian practices that draw upon different media of savings to cobble together investments on a constantly shifting economic terrain. like many others i spoke with a decade after the crisis, mariela kept a mix of dollars, euros, and gold in a safe deposit box, and she was looking to buy an apartment—colloquially called ladrillos, or bricks. in this article i develop the concept of an ecology of investments to describe this diverse field of argentine savings practices. thinking ecologically means attending to the “emergent web of relations among constitutive and constituting parts, such as when one shifts attention from a particular organism to the entire ecology” (choy 2011, 11–12). dollars and pesos, bank accounts and cash, gold and bricks: these are not just abstract values seamlessly convertible from one to the other; rather, they are particular forms of investment related to each other in complex ways. these relations must be taken into account by people like mariela, who don’t treat any one investment like any other, but attend to the particular capacities and relational webs of which each investment is a part. the ecology of investment speaks both to relations between diverse things and to relations between people and things. marilyn strathern (2012) describes this relatedness when she writes that ecology marks the difference between a “metaphysics of having” and a metaphysics of being. strathern follows eduardo vargas’s (2010, 212) reading of gabriel tarde, which elucidates the contrast: while “the verb ‘to be’ concerns identity … in the mode of having, relation is alter-a(c)tion.” this implies, in viveiros de castro’s (2003, 17) words, an “intrinsic transitivity and an originary opening towards an exteriority.” dollars, bricks, and pesos, in other words, are not things in themselves, but things constituted through their relations, both with each other and with those who have them. as bruno latour (2005, 217, cited in strathern 2012) puts it, “to possess is also being possessed; to be attached is to hold and be held.” like possession and attachment, investment speaks to both investing and being invested. investments, as reciprocal relations through which people and things become together, make both those people and those things. rather than isolated units (being), ecologies point to this constitutive relationality. when mariela moves her investments from bank deposits to cash, she is not only changing the stuff of her investments but also the way she relates to and is entangled with her world. investments are not only a means of relating people with things but also of relating people to one another. gift exchange, in which relations between giver and recipient are dependent upon the gift, is one classic example. in the cases i consider here, investments draw people from disparate worlds into relation. the banking crisis and devaluation that mariela faced were not just relations between argentines and their bank deposits; they also were tied up with the investments of hedge funds and currency exchanges on wall street that, under certain conditions, can make the value of the peso rise and fall. similarly, a dollar that now sits in mariela’s safe deposit box is related to the decisions of politicians and technocrats in the united states, although it is not determined only by them: if people like mariela and governments across the world weren’t invested in the dollar today, u.s. monetary policy would look quite different.2 just as argentines string together a diverse field of investments and are thereby tied up with them, investments draw together people from diverse worlds. thinking ecologically about investment places in tension conceptual frameworks of the economy that imagine a smooth movement of money and goods within a global space. as latour (2004) has noted, the global, like the globe itself, is an invention—which doesn’t mean that it is not real, but that its reality is under construction. in this light, one way of reading the number of recent ethnographies of finance is as studies of the production of infrastructures—human, technical, legal—that allow for the possibility of a global economy in which flows can seem effortless (ho 2009; lépinay 2011; miyazaki 2013; riles 2011; zaloom 2006). thus, while global finance may not always live up to the hype of smooth and seamless exchange that financiers attribute to it—and that often makes its way into critical analyses of globalization (ho 2005)—it is nevertheless a fact in the making, albeit one whose trajectory is far from certain or linear. like scholars who have highlighted the frictions, excesses, and infrastructural entailments of the global economy, argentines are careful about treating different investments as equivalent forms of abstract value in which one is like any other. mariela is acutely aware that even the dollars she keeps in her safe deposit box are not equivalent to the dollars she used to have in her bank account. dollars are only equivalent to dollars under certain infrastructural conditions. as careful as argentines have learned to be about equivalence, experience has also helped them see the ecology of investment as a world rich with potential, and at times risky, connection. consider, for example, the 2012 case of the argentine naval frigate libertad. the ship was detained for nearly six months in ghana at the behest of the cayman islands-based hedge fund nml capital, whose parent-company’s ceo, the american billionaire paul singer, was unsatisfied with the terms of argentina’s sovereign-debt restructuring following the default in 2001. as a result, a frigate docked outside of accra made a curious appearance in the middle of legal battles in a manhattan district court over the payment of argentine debts to wall street vulture funds. the global is rich with these diverse (and at times surprising) gatherings of people and things. an ecological approach thus requires care before attributing equivalence, but promiscuity in seeing potential connections. thinking ecologically allows us to follow the troubled connections not just between dollars and dollars, or dollars and pesos, but also between frigates, bricks, and other materialities that are caught up in and make up part of these ecologies. finally, while poor in teleology—one never knows what connections might become relevant next—the ecology of investment is rich with history. in argentina, there is an awareness that the past can provide important clues about how to live in an ecology prone to abrupt and surprising changes (visacovsky 2010). as a result, the history of argentine economic life is under a constant process of (re)narration as argentines reflect upon their rocky economic past in films and documentaries; comic strips and comic monologues; and memoirs, art, and stories told among family and friends (e.g., page 2009; kovensky 2002; langer and mira 2006). stories such as mariela’s become part of this popular economic historiography, in which argentines engage in a praxis of memory not unlike those practiced with regard to the country’s violent political history (taylor 1998; taylor 2003; see also bonilla 2011). anthropologists such as anna tsing (2005) have described the dense imbrication of materialities and knowledge in the lives of people like the meratus dayaks, who develop rich taxonomies of relatedness as a means not only of knowing but also of living with the forest around them. in a similar way, argentine narrative practices are a central means of both understanding their ecology and also of guiding its future formation. they contribute to the development of an ecological sensibility honed to troubled histories in the interest of building promising futures. argentines, then, are not only invested in pesos, dollars, gold, and real estate. they are also invested in the past. these stories make good investments, and entangling anthropology with them is one way to develop our own sensibility about economic lives rife with risky relations. it is an investment i share here as i describe the ecology of investment to capture this entanglement of people, things, and the very present histories argentines use to find ways to live in a world unsettled by the movements of finance capital. investments in the past: ecological histories of money and banking two narrative threads are central to the composition of contemporary argentine investment ecologies: the history of argentine currency fluctuations and argentines’ troubled relationship with banks. in this section, i describe the history of money and banking from the late 1980s through the crisis of 2001 using newspaper retrospectives, memoirs, and comic monologues that not only tell a story but also highlight the diverse ways argentines invest in their economic past through the stories they tell. my own historical narrative here thus overlaps with and draws on the media that argentines themselves use to hacer memoria—to “do memory” or invest in their past. these historical narrations, then, are ethnographic in a double sense: they both attend to aspects of quotidian life in the past (to past investments) and indicate the diverse media through which these pasts are engaged in the ethnographic present (current investments in the past). monetary ecologies: inflation and argentine currencies, 1975–2001 histories of inflation are central to argentine knowledge about the ecological relationality of investments. as a fall in the purchasing power of money, inflation marks the slippery relationship between money, other currencies, and things. although inflationary episodes have a long history in argentina, they became particularly frequent and severe in the mid-1970s amid the financial deregulation, fluctuating presence of foreign capital, and liberalization of state economic policy that have become hallmarks of neoliberalism. punctuating this history of inflation were measures aimed to deal with it, which included both brusque and severe devaluations (e.g., the rodrigazo in 1975) as well as scheduled devaluations designed to strike at inflation’s underlying “psychological factors” (e.g., la tablita in 1979). the reconfiguration of the relationship between the peso and the dollar in 2001 (of which mariela’s story is a part) is one moment in this longer history. today, argentines invest in this history in many ways. for example, a recent newspaper retrospective noted that if someone had gone to sleep with one-thousand dollars in local currency under their mattress in 1975 and slept through the series of hyperinflations and devaluations, she or he would wake up in 2009 to find those savings worth $0.0000027 dollars (guariano 2009; see fig. 1). moments of high inflation, such as the period in the late 1980s known as la híper (short for “hyperinflation”), had powerful effects on daily life and helped to change the relationship between people and their money at the deepest levels. during its worst moments, prices went up sharply even from hour to hour. osvaldo soriano (1989, 42), in his well-known essay “living with inflation,” remarks: “while i am writing this article, the cigarettes that i’m smoking in front of the typewriter have passed from 11 to 13 and then to 14 australs.”3 during times like these, people developed quotidian practices to make their rapidly devaluing salaries stretch to provide the basic necessities of life: mariela recalled rummaging through store shelves and looking for prices that had yet to be raised, as well as her tactics to avoid the attendant who waited near the checkout counter, poised to raise the prices of the goods in her cart. soriano recalls asking a waiter for his bill; the waiter threw up his hands in response and said, “give me ten thousand and we’ll see if it’s right tomorrow!” (40). figure 1. inflation money grinder. from a newspaper article on inflation, 2010. la nación. alongside inflation came a series of changes in the national currency. a monologue from the early 1990s by the comedian tato bores (1990) dramatizes argentine currency shifts using the strange, otherworldly mathematics that characterized monetary relatedness in popular experience. rifling through bills from the panoply of currencies of the previous twenty years, bores does some math: let me tell you something, look here: this peso moneda nacional, they dropped two zeroes from it when they introduced this other peso, the peso ley 18.188 [in 1970]; they dropped another four zeroes with this peso argentino [1983], and then, as if that weren’t enough, they took off three more zeroes with this austral [1985]. and so, since they took off nine zeroes from this little peso here in front, then this austral is worth one billion of this little peso here, this peso moneda nacional. [a grin spreads across his face as he continues, now slowly:] and since back then you could buy one dollar with 83 pesos moneda nacional, that means this austral is worth: 12 million dollars! the crowd ooos in amazement as the logical magician grins with pride at his discovery. “which would be a joke, if it weren’t a fuck-over as big as a house!” he concludes, as the crowd erupts in laughter and applause. these reflections on argentina’s economic past paint a picture of a world in which the value of currency slips in unpredictable ways, producing a sense of surreality surrounding money in argentina that extends into the present. argentines did not live such shifts passively, however. instead, they developed complex linkages with other currencies or financial devices, producing and navigating a rich ecology of relations between diverse monetary forms. in contrast to classical depictions of modern money, then, argentines do not live in a world dominated by a single, universal-exchange currency in which all things are rendered equivalent on one scale of value. instead, they have incorporated complex calculi that mix currencies, bonds, and international price indexes into their everyday economic lives (fridman 2010; neiburg 2010, 2006). as soriano (1989, 42) explains regarding la híper: nobody negotiated the price of contracted services in australs, but in dollars. since the law obligated the use of the national currency, at least in appearances, whatever agreement to be realized within six months would include a clause that stated, for example, “the sum will be paid in australs equivalent to x dollars in bonex value [an argentine bond that paid in dollars] according to its valuation on that day as reported in the oriental republic of uruguay.” australs, dollars, bonex bonds, uruguay: argentine currency was a signifier floating particularly high, and people sought to stabilize it by establishing relations with other scales of value (see maurer 2005; guyer 2004). they did so not only through the contractual intricacies described by soriano but also, less elaborately, by converting their cash to a more stable currency, buying dollars and converting them back to pesos as the need arose, a practice that would install itself firmly in the investment practices of the middle classes. in 1991, the rich monetary ecology of la híper became both less diverse and more institutionalized when the argentine state took the drastic measure of scrapping the austral and pegging a new peso to the u.s. dollar to end hyperinflation. this epoch is called convertibilidad (convertibility) or uno a uno (one to one): a peso was said to be equivalent to a dollar, an era that lasted from 1991 until the devaluation of 2002. prices stabilized, and alongside that stability argentines became increasingly integrated into the banking sector, opening dollar-denominated accounts, buying dollar-denominated cds, and taking advantage of stable interest rates to take out dollar-denominated loans. those argentines who held onto their jobs in this era of neoliberal restructuring, with an exchange rate highly unfavorable to national industry, enjoyed a decade of life with monetary stability. by the mid-1990s, however, the social cost of monetary stability became increasingly clear. convertibility had altered the weight of actors tied into the relational networks of argentine currency. pegging the peso to the dollar meant that argentina had no control over monetary policy, and could only cover fiscal expenditures by taking on foreign loans rather than by expanding the monetary base or increasing competitiveness in trade through a devaluation, both important tools normally at a state’s disposal for encouraging economic growth.4 at the same time, the structural adjustment policies demanded by international lenders in exchange for the loans that made convertibility possible began taking deeper and deeper tolls. by the end of the 1990s, it became difficult for the government to obtain sufficient foreign currency reserves to meet both its payment obligations to foreign lenders and its conversion obligations to local savers. neoliberal economists both at home and abroad advocated further cuts to public spending and more privatizations, but these policies had become politically untenable with a large population out of work and state services increasingly tenuous. as the international monetary fund (imf) began to drag its feet on new loans, new currencies began to flourish as both provinces and the federal government began to issue quasi-monedas, official bonds in bill form, which were supposed to stand in for the national currency: patacones in buenos aires, lecors in cordoba, quebrachos in the chaco, huarpes in san juan, and the federal government’s own lecop (see fig. 2). initially used to pay public employees and pensions, quasi-monedas were estimated to account for up to forty percent of currency emissions between july 2001 and the end of 2003, when they were removed from circulation. quasi-monedas circulated in ways similar to, but not quite the same as, the national peso. as mariana luzzi (2010) explains, they existed within a hierarchy defined by the credibility of the province issuing the bonds and various situational criteria of use. cordoba, for instance, reached agreements with supermarkets to ensure that quasi-monedas would be accepted at face value through a program to convert lecors into federal lecops, which could in turn be used by the supermarket chains to pay federal taxes. alongside these officially sanctioned circulations, informal exchanges emerged in which argentines could trade quasi-monedas for pesos at fluctuating exchange rates, or buy them at a discount for paying taxes or buying groceries. a diversity of monetary forms had returned to an ecology that for the previous ten years had been dominated by the peso–dollar convertibility, and argentines again began to navigate a complex ecology in which quasi-monedas and the official currency existed alongside one another with situated values and divergent uses—all in the shadow of the u.s. dollar. figure 2. the patacón, a quasi-moneda issued by the province of buenos aires. centro numismático buenos aires. circulatory asymmetries: banks and the crisis of 2001 by march of 2001, large amounts of capital had left the banking system as people began to doubt the solvency of the argentine state. large companies and wealthy individuals were the most effective at getting their money out, developing what a congressional panel called a “highway” of money leading out of argentina (comisión especial de la cámara de diputados 20012005). a final bailout package from the imf in june would forestall the crisis, but by the end of the year default was deemed imminent, and the imf refused further loans (blustein 2005). in early december, to prevent a full-scale run on banks, the government instituted strict limits on the withdrawal of bank deposits—the corralito from which mariela made her narrow escape. people could take out $250 convertible peso–dollars per week, and the near impossibility of feeding a family on such a budget led to the proliferation of barter economies. meanwhile, the rest of people’s money sat in the banks. what wasn’t at all certain was for how long that would be the case. the unpegging of the peso from the dollar was by this time a very real threat, despite government promises to the contrary. the two currencies had shared a long road together, but that journey, everyone seemed to realize, was coming to an end. people with money in the bank felt their life’s savings hanging in the balance. those who had kept their savings in cash, on the other hand, were in a far better position. the difference between having money in the bank and having money in cash—these two different material manifestations of what was purportedly the same underlying value system, the dollar—was brought into stark relief. the two forms of saving were divided by a sharp circulatory asymmetry: people could move and change their cash, but their deposits were stuck in the bank. banks thus formed part of a monetary ecology that posed particular problems for small savers, who saw their money circulating in ways that were not at all favorable to most argentines. the corralito drove middle-class argentines to the streets in large numbers, where they joined the unemployed piqueteros who had been blockading highways since 1997 to protest neoliberal austerity measures. this revolt was directed not only at the government but also at the banks (see fig. 3). in scenes from the documentary film the take (2004, directed by avi lewis), middle-aged men and women dressed for the office are shown hacking away at the screens of atm machines until they shatter, or kicking in the glass walls of banks as the employees peer out from the second floor in fear (see also solanas 2004; chronopoulos 2011). figure 3. protest against fortified bank branches during the crisis of 2001. © barcex / wikimedia commons / cc-by-sa 2.5. on december 20, the crisis claimed its first major political casualty. the president fled the presidential offices in the casa rosada in a helicopter as angry crowds maintained vigil outside. a succession of interim leaders began that would make the succession of currencies of the previous forty years seem slow in comparison. in late december, the government announced that the country would default on its loans—the largest sovereign debt default in the history of the world. several days later, the government announced that all bank deposits would be converted to an unpegged (and devalued) peso. as the country emerged from the crisis, it had become clear that the diversity of monetary forms in argentina was characterized by sets of asymmetries not only with regard to the stability of their value (dollars vs. pesos) but also with regard to their capacities for circulating or staying put (bank savings vs. cash). previously subtle distinctions between digital and print—bank deposits and cash—had been brought into stark relief. protests against banks would continue until long after the political situation had settled, as small savers continued their struggle to recover their deposits in the courts (see fig. 4). the signs of the protesters read, “bancos = estafadores, ladrones”; “bancos, chorros, devuelvan los ahorros!”; and “nunca más bancos!” (banks = fraudsters, thieves; banks, robbers, return our savings!; and banks: never again!). figure 4. “banks, robbers, return our savings!” uncredited image circulated in a viral message of unknown authorship through e-mail and on websites for the 10th anniversary of the corralito. colchonismo: saving savings after 2001 the ecology of investments in the years following the crisis has been marked by a form of savings divorced from the banking sector and its unpredictable flows, known as colchonismo. a colchón is literally a mattress, and colchonismo translates as something like “mattressism”—people keeping money under the mattress. colchones are said to be “green” in argentina, meaning that people save in u.s. dollars. while it’s difficult to know exactly how much money or how many people keep money buried in their garden, hidden in their house behind false walls, or in their freezer or safe deposit box, estimates in 2011 placed the total quantity of u.s. currency in argentina at $145 billion, or about thirty-five percent of gross domestic product (sticco 2011). although argentines are not alone in using dollars to mitigate local currency instability, this makes them an extreme case. compared to brazil, where there were estimated to be us$6 per person in the country in 2012, in argentina the estimate was $2,000 per capita (zaiat 2012). argentina shares with the former soviet union the distinction of being the largest foreign destinations for u.s. currency in the world: currency sent to these two regions more than accounted for net shipments to all foreign commercial banks between 1995 and 2008 (judson 2012). if buried money is dead capital, then argentina is an economic graveyard. “what do i do with my savings? i buy dollars, i buy dollars, i buy dollars,” juan, an entertainment planner, told me nearly a decade after the crisis of 2001. business is going well for him now, and one of the challenges he faces is what to do with the money he earns. “i’m terrified of banks. i have a checking account; i put the money i need to cover expenses in there. but the rest of it i save in dollars. where? in my house. i say to my wife, ‘ana, there’s $2,000 here, don’t forget. and over here there’s $2,000 more,’” he told me. martín and mariela buy a mix of dollars, gold, and euros, and keep them in a safe deposit box. sabrina buys dollars and keeps them in a shoebox in her apartment, hidden behind a ceiling panel. nadia’s father keeps them buried in the backyard. “saving in the long-term in argentine banks is unthinkable,” daniel, a real estate investment expert told me. “the fact is that the average argentine with a capacity for saving today disbelieves in any vehicle of investment linked to finance, be it argentine or foreign.” colchonismo did not emerge solely as the result of the devaluation of 2001. it has, in popular language, “always” existed. but 2001 did mark a transition away from the bancarización (the “bankization”) of the 1990s, when argentines were drawn into the banking sector in large numbers. colchonismo, then, was a revival of old savings repertoires (guyer 2004) that had largely gone dormant during the bank-centered 1990s. diego, the manager of his father’s small meat-pickling business, told me his own story of the corralito. his family lives in a humble house in lanús, a suburb of buenos aires, and like juan’s, their family business has been growing. they, too, save in cash dollars. when i asked diego about banks, he emphasized the contrast between the 1990s and post-crisis argentina with respect to bank saving: there are stories like ours that half of argentina could tell you. before 2001, there were ten years in which people gained confidence and put money in the banks. and when the economy stalled, all the money from the banks was stolen. the majority of people only recovered a quarter of their money. do you know what happened to the rest, nico? i don’t know either, but that’s what happened. the government said it was these other people; these other guys said it was those other people. but what we all know is that three quarters of what we had disappeared. and i have that experience saved here, inside me. today, colchonismo is driven by stories told among argentines about the crisis, stories that revolve around the dynamics of this ecology in which the circulatory asymmetries between savings held in banks versus those in the colchón were taken to epic proportions, and the dynamics between the dollar and the peso shifted abruptly out of sync. the stories cut both ways, marking the bare escapes of those who were wise enough to distrust banks and the tragedies of movements between different media of savings that went horribly awry. when mariela got her money out of the bank, she put her cash dollars into a safe deposit box. in so doing, she became one of the people about whom i would hear stories, those who made fabulous gains through their distrust of banks since after the crisis dollars had a substantially increased buying power in the local economy. there were others who were not so lucky. juan, the entertainment planner, told me about his aunt, a teacher, who had had her savings invested in cds that got caught in the corralito. after the devaluation, she got her money out and immediately went to buy dollars—unfortunately doing so at exactly the wrong time, when the exchange rate was ar$4.20 to the u.s. dollar. first, her savings were turned from dollars into devalued pesos; then she lost again by rushing to buy dollars when they were “overvalued.” the timing in her jump from digital bank account balance to cash peso, and then again from peso to dollar, had gone all wrong. but how could she have known the corralito was coming? or that the dollar would later settle at ar$3, or that it wouldn’t go to five or even seven pesos, as many analysts were predicting? the crisis, then, was in part a taking to the extreme of this contrast in materialities, between the numbers in people’s bank accounts and the paper bills in their mattresses, and the reemergence of a contrast between dollars and pesos that had for ten years been subdued through convertibility. of the many consequences that would unfold from the crisis and the considerations of argentina’s past that it helped to consolidate, one of the most central was the installment of a profound distrust in anything but the most solid, tangible assets people could acquire. colchonismo was one outcome of reflection on this contrast in materialities. yet in the aftermath of the crisis and the unraveling of the decade-long relationship between dollars and pesos, between bank account and cash, there emerged in the post-2002 investment ecology another contender for the privileged medium in which to invest one’s savings, an investment that would compete with the dollar in the colchón and would in fact lure many of those dollars from their mattresses to transfigure the face of buenos aires: undead money would find a new vehicle for life in real estate, which argentines refer to in its full materiality, as ladrillos, or bricks. bricks came to represent everything that money in banks did not: stability, security, and safety through concrete materiality. from banks to bricks real estate prices, like everything else, fell sharply in 2002. but by 2004, the construction sector had recovered, and the boom in building that began that year has continued into the present with only some lulls. as an investment, real estate in argentina is not centrally about profit but about stability. even though real estate prices have continued to rise with only brief interruptions since 1982, the people i spoke with did not focus on an increase in monetary value when they talked to me about their desire to buy an apartment. while they would of course prefer that the value of an apartment go up, what they sought was a long-term investment that, even if it were to fall in value, would not disappear. the solidity of bricks was an important part of what made them good investments. “it’s about the physical presence of the thing,” daniel, the real estate market analyst, told me. “they can see it; they can walk through it. they know it’s there.” juan, the entertainment planner, like diego, mariela, and nearly everyone else i spoke to, was weighing the possibility of buying an apartment. he reinforced daniel’s point, telling me about his brother, who drove past the apartment he had bought several times a week to check on the progress of construction: “a house, maybe sometimes it’s going to be worth more, maybe sometimes it’s going to be worth less, but it’s yours.” so even when people stand to make next to nothing renting out an apartment, apartments sell well, daniel continued, because they are considered the best refuge for money available: “the average argentine understands a fixed term deposit in citibank—whether it’s the argentine citibank or a citibank in the exterior—as more risky than buying an apartment. buying an apartment, whether the profitability is a lot or a little, whatever—the apartment is still there.” there is nothing transhistorically solid about bricks, however. rather, their solidity was due to their specific place in post-crisis ecologies of investment. and one critical ecological characteristic of bricks post-crisis was their disentanglement from banks. in the wake of the crisis, mortgage financing has dried up, and all home purchases have since been conducted in cash. mid-size developers dependent on bank financing went bust, and small entrepreneurial architecture studios began selling unbuilt apartments to small investors using down payments to fund construction. in this way, the disappearance of bank financing that might have spelled doom for an industry instead became one of its primary selling points: unlike their u.s. counterparts that were integrated into the global financial system’s mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations (and thus not solid at all for many u.s. homeowners), bricks in argentina became disentangled from banks—which was exactly what small savers were looking for. this characteristic of ladrillos was both exploited and reinforced by developers in the years following the crisis. on a visit to rosario, argentina’s third largest city, i saw buildings in construction bedecked with enormous banners evoking this place of the ladrillo in argentine investment ecologies: “ladrillos: refugio seguro,” (bricks: the safe refuge) (see fig. 5). echoed on the web page was a cartoon (fig. 6). the image, featuring three little pigs huddled comfortably next to a fire, bore the caption: “while the crisis blows outside, our investment in ladrillos is a safe refuge.” variations on this theme have become common in the phraseology associated with real estate in contemporary argentina, and are meant to amp up the contrast with banks: “el ladrillo nunca traiciona,” “el que apuesta a ladrillos no pierde,” and “el ladrillo no defrauda” (“bricks never betray you,” “he who bets on bricks never loses,” and “the brick does not defraud”). figure 5. “bricks: the safe refuge,” 2009. photo by author. figure 6. “while the crisis blows outside, our investment in bricks is a safe refuge.” refugiomasseguro.com.ar. it was not just their disentanglement from banks that made bricks good investments, but also their unique entanglement with dollars. ladrillos have held this peculiar place in argentine investment ecologies since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when, in the face of economic instability brought about by the early liberalization of the economy under the dictatorship-era economic policies of martínez de hoz, the price of real estate began to be denominated in dollars, especially in major cities like buenos aires. unlike economies in which dollars circulate alongside national currencies, in argentina dollars have never been used for everyday transactions. aside from foreign travel, they are exclusively used for savings and real estate. this special relationship serves to shelter real estate from the fluctuations of the national currency. while exposure to national economic twists cannot be fully mitigated (people’s earnings still have a bearing on the dollars they can access), it does grant the real estate market a strong degree of stability in pricing. equally important, the affiliation between bricks and dollars means that the movement from dollar to ladrillo becomes an easily identifiable form of conveyance from one medium to the other. bricks are able to hold value in a way that is more like the dollar and less like the peso (see figs. 7 and 8). this relationship between ladrillos and dollars is elaborately staged in the purchase of a property. when juan’s brother bought his apartment, he and his brothers went to the bank, took us$60,000 in cash from his safe deposit box, strapped it to their bodies, and rode the subway across town to the seller’s bank. there, they sat in a reserved room for hours as each party recorded the serial numbers of every bill in the event that any should turn out to be counterfeit. figure 7. the conveyance of value from dollars to bricks. image from a report on real estate, 2011. elinmobiliario.com. figure 8. bricks hold value in a way that is more like the dollar and less like the peso. image from a news report on real estate, 2007. la nación. this history of bricks provides a good illustration of how the ecological sensibilities that argentines have developed for tracing connections between investments have their own effects on economic life. narratives about currency and banks are not separate from the ecology but are integral to its formation, producing not just knowledge about but also new ways of living in ecologies of investment. as masses of small savers bought apartments in the years following the crisis, the dip in real estate prices rapidly turned around, making real estate and construction the first sectors to regain their footing after the crisis. although monetary value was not the main thing small savers were looking for in real estate, their collective conviction that bricks were good investments made their value increase, drawing still more money from under mattresses to transform the streets of the city. in so doing, argentines helped to make their knowledge about bricks into a reality. stories about the economic past—and the sensibilities about connection that they produced in argentine considerations of the ecology of investment—literally made good investments.5 the place of bricks in argentine ecologies of investment, then, has a lot to do with their material solidity, and what that means for their capacity to stay put. but it is not about their materiality alone. rather, it is about the relations that those bricks have with other actors in the ecology of investments, and how those relations get read and remade by argentines in light of their economic pasts. it was not bricks-in-themselves that were valued, but bricks situated in a particular ecology of relatedness. their insulation from banks, alongside their particular relation with dollars, made them special—and even more solid than their materiality alone ever could. stories make good investments during the past several decades, argentine small savers have learned to navigate a complex investment ecology, cobbling together a diverse set of investments to try to save their savings. their relationships with national currencies are permeated by inflation and the diverse monetary forms that emerged to deal with it. in the 1990s, the pegging of the peso to the dollar formally institutionalized convertibility and suspended the need for more complex relational maneuvers. but the peso’s rigid relation to the dollar, alongside other neoliberal reforms, brought new problems to the national economy, and when convertibility began to fall apart, a diversity of investments sprang back to life in the form of quasi-monedas. the crisis added another layer of experience to this ecology of investments, drawing out the contrast between digital and print media, between bank-account balances and cash. in the wake of the crisis, new domains of convertibility unfolded, drawing together dollars in colchones and bricks in buildings. during these years, argentines have continued to invest in their history, telling stories, reading newspaper retrospectives, writing memoirs, and telling jokes about money. they turn over past events, analyzing steps mistaken, dispossessions perpetrated, or gains attained through luck and cunning. in the process, they themselves have been reconfigured, developing sharply tuned sensibilities about relatedness and connection. “every argentine is an economist,” diego the meat-pickler grinned, as he waxed theoretical about argentine economic history. he meant it as a joke, a self-effacing jab at what he saw as a peculiarly argentine arrogance about their own economic expertise. but he was also serious, articulating the extent to which knowledge about economic pasts are objects of concern for so many argentines. turning over the past guides their investments in the present and helps to construct possible futures, as knowledge becomes bound up with materialities to reconstitute the ecology of investment in new ways. in this paper i have made the case for the ecology of investment as a means of describing current argentine economic life. as i mentioned at the beginning, it is also a mode of attention that could be useful for anthropologists, especially those compelled to look beyond global descriptions of the economy. while global investment banks might hype up a series of seamless, sublimated flows in which all that is solid has melted into air, there are also depositions or desublimations (maurer 2000) in which the atmospheres of global investment banks become less gaseous. recall the frigate libertad, impounded in ghana at the behest of a wall street investment fund, suggesting that investment banks might share with argentines an ecological sensibility of a world full of possible and opportunistic connection. anthropologists, as narrators of the often-untold stories of global connection, should take such sensibilities seriously. if all that is solid has not quite melted into air, then thinking ecologically about investments allows us to follow the troubled connections not just between dollars and dollars, or dollars and pesos, but also among frigates, bricks, and other materialities that are caught up in and therefore part of these ecologies.6 if argentines are right in maintaining that the stories we tell about the economy matter in the construction of possible futures, an ecological approach might help anthropologists to tell other stories and open up new ways of imagining those futures. taking the ecology of investments seriously means following argentines in slowing down before attributing to investments (even currencies) a status as stable arbiters of value that circulate through a geography that is everywhere the same. instead of stable entities that circulate through a common world, investments remake connections, making worlds and being remade as they go. the dollar in the united states both is and is not the same dollar that appears in argentina, because the ecology in which it exists, and which constitutes it, is not the same. dollars, bricks, and other investments are partially connected (strathern 2004) to multiple worlds, and the specificity of their articulations make all the difference in helping us slow down before calling them equivalent. one dollar is only equivalent to another in very defined circumstances with the right infrastructures—infrastructures that always bear the possibility of breaking down, a fact well known by argentines and others in parts of the world where people have felt the earth move beneath their economic feet with a particular degree of frequency. indeed, such an ecological sensibility has become particularly crucial in argentina in the past year, when a major shift in the ecology of investment came into being, a shift which casts a long interrogative shadow over the fate of both dollars and bricks in argentine investment ecologies. in 2011, capital flight (which includes the purchase of dollars) reached near-record levels of $21.5 billion. such flight, even to colchones, places an important drag on the national economy and on state fiscal accounts. to stem these adverse effects, the government instituted sharp restrictions on the purchase of u.s. currency at the end of 2011, an attempt to pesificar—to “pesify” (i.e. de-dollarize)—argentine thought and the argentine economy (not necessarily in that order). the repercussions for contemporary ecologies of investment remain unclear. in preventing capital flight, the measure seems to have been largely effective (dropping to us$4 billion in 2012). for small savers, however, saving in dollars is no longer an easy option. although a new breed of dollar, called the dólar blue (a euphemism for black-market dollars), has sprung into existence, it is a dollar that must be bought in a relatively small, clandestine market rather than on official exchanges, making its rates especially prone to manipulation and speculative bubbles. accounts of the effect on the real estate market vary. initial reports suggest that while the market in new housing could adapt since many of its costs are in pesos, the brunt of the effect will likely be felt in the secondary property market (what would the seller of an apartment do with such a large quantity of pesos in an inflation-prone economy?). so far, though prices do not seem to have dropped, sales of residential real estate fell by twenty-seven percent in 2012. real estate professionals report that most sellers want either dollars or a quantity of pesos that would allow for purchase of dollars on the black market. the price of real estate thus hovers between its price in green dollars and blue dollars—referred to as the dólar ladrillo, the dollar’s value for real estate (see fig. 9)—a shifting middle ground complicated by the often rapidly changing value of the blue. ladrillos thus maintain a tenuous hold on the stability of the green dollar that they used to have; the newly complex ecological relationship between ladrillos, the blue, and the peso has undermined pricing stability and made it difficult for anyone to decide on a good price or to get their hands on dollars to buy ladrillos. to try to address this problem (and giving a nod to the special place of real estate in argentine investment ecologies), in may 2013, the government added a new actor to this already complex ecology when they introduced the cedin, a new bond strictly for the purchase of real estate and exchangeable for dollars at official rates. figure 9. the dólar ladrillo. image from a report on the dollar's value in real estate, 2013. dolar-hoy.net. how new ecologies of investment will emerge from these changes remains the object of much speculation. the government hopes people will invest in the national economy, in productive enterprises that will create jobs and prosperity in the future. to those ends, it is working on still other mechanisms through which to channel savings in this direction. but this is a future about which many argentines remain skeptical. will the state succeed in forging a new relationship with the peso in which argentines can invest? in such contexts of change, the ecology of investment as a sensibility and a practice looks to dangerous and hopeful new connections, and ponders past events to help ask the questions that might help people build promising futures. there is nothing eternal about ecologies of investment; if anything, as i have argued, it is an awareness of volatility and the possibility of relational change that defines the ecological sensibilities i have described. living in the ecology of investment is the art of not knowing, done well—of not knowing what connections might make themselves relevant, of which configurations and conversions will become possible, of what their dangers and promises will be. as in anthropology, history serves as a guide, but not one that brightens a clear path into the future. it is, rather, a sustained openness to the possibility of relations yet to be made, not teaching us what the future will be, but about the art of asking questions. stories—told by argentines and anthropologists—can be the investments that help us ask those questions well. notes acknowledgments this article has benefited from the feedback of colleagues at the university of california, davis, the american anthropological association annual meetings in 2011 and 2012, the estudios de la economía collective, and the university of california, berkeley. i especially thank marisol de la cadena, donald donham, timothy choy, cori hayden, leslie salzinger, taylor nelms, kregg hetherington, vivian choi, madeline campbell, william stafford, timothy murphy, rossio motta, rima praspaliauskiene, ignacio farías, josé ossandon, daniel fridman, mariana heredia and mariana luzzi, as well as anne allison, charles piot and two anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology for their feedback and encouragement. i gratefully acknowledge research funding from the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, the fulbright foundation, the university of california, and the acls/andrew w. mellon foundation. 1 my description of investments here draws on two and a half years of fieldwork i conducted studying real estate investment and the shifting lives of buildings in post-crisis argentina. the people i worked with were pequeños ahorristas, or “small savers,” people neither so poor as to not have savings nor rich enough to engage in more elaborate off-shore banking practices. they included pensioners, small business owners, and professionals. mireille abelin’s work (2012) offers a fascinating perspective on argentine elites. 2 tactics such as quantitative easing, for example, would have little hope of success if u.s. bonds and other instruments were not purchased by a global set of investors. for consideration of argentine investments with particular respect to the question of space, see d’avella (2012). 3 the austral was argentina’s national currency between june 15, 1985 and december 31, 1991. all translations are my own. 4 a similar issue confronts indebted countries in the european union today because they cannot devalue the euro. see 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sociality of cattle, described as “metonymic.” metaphoric and metonymic are linguistic terms describing distances and proximities in relations between humans and animals. birds, he writes, “form a community which is independent of our own, but precisely because of this independence, appears to us like another society, homologous to that in which we live: birds love freedom; they build themselves homes in which they live a family life and nurture their young; they often engage in social relations with other members of their species; and they communicate with them by acoustic means recalling articulated language.” this description in the language of early 1960s ethnozoology may retain its relevance for current biosecurity practices in the management of diseases transmitted between animals and humans, or zoonoses. true, the savage mind is a book about different strategies for making sense of an event. by claiming that structural anthropology constitutes another way to practice philosophy, lévi-strauss opens an alternative to jean-paul sartre’s existentialism in connecting social organizations and subjective freedom. when a being appears, such as diseases or newborns, humans have to twist their classification to give it a name. following this method, one might ask: what is the difference between the sociality of birds and the sociality of cattle in regard to emerging infectious diseases? how do new diseases recast complex entanglements of freedom and care in the relations between humans and animals? does the anthropomorphic, highly political notion of freedom capture the aerial sociality of birds threatened by emerging diseases, or is it too affiliated with the human space of domestication? lévi-strauss himself provided answers to this question when he wrote about the case of mad cow disease in 1996. following the public announcement of the transmission of a new variant of creutzfeldt-jakob disease from cows to humans, he reflected on the idea that cows had been turned into “cannibals” by the recycling of animal foodstuff, considered a major factor in the spread of the disease. he used the term cannibal—coined in the sixteenth century to give meaning to the unforeseeable encounter between europe and america—to suggest a feeling of disgust: if cows had been turned from herbivores to carnivores, mad cow disease revealed a monstruous shift away from nature. but lévi-strauss had no interest in crude juxtapositions between cannibal cows and natural cows. in his 1974 lesson at the collège de france, he argued that cannibalism constituted the opposite of communication in a gradient of sociability, and that ingesting the other was a way of identifying with him or her in the inverse of communication. this led him to claim provocatively in 1993 that “we are all cannibals,” meaning that cannibalism, as a form of identification with the other, represented an ordinary phenomenon. the distinction he makes between two kinds of cows as a utopian solution to mad cow disease can therefore be understood. some, considered as machines for the production of meat, would return to a vegetarian diet. others, still fed with animal proteins, would be used for the “surveillance of sources of energies and machines,” and eaten with the same respect as the enemies that american indians considered custodians of wild animals (lévi-strauss 2001, 13). in place of the mediatic opposition between natural cows and monstruous cows, lévi-strauss suggests a continuity in modes of identification between humans and cows. i want to follow this provocative suggestion when thinking about the relations between birds and humans. it is striking that avian influenza emerged in asia at the same time as mad cow disease broke out in europe. as a new pathogen, h5n1 raised the same catastrophic scenarios as the prion, whose uncertainty was mitigated by the use of the precautionary principle. the media showed similar images of carcasses, animals killed to eradicate the reservoir of zoonoses, raising the same complex feeling of compassion and disgust. pathogens crossing borders between species reveal identities and differences between humans and other animals. from the perspective of eradication, the life of a human has more value than the life of an animal confronted with the same pathogen, but animal life can take on new value if we consider it from the perspective of surveillance. taking the ambivalence of pathogens crossing species barriers as an invariant, i ask how these pathogens are perceived in different societies and for different species. the comparison between europe and asia constitutes a methodological step to shift perspective on the same phenomenon: from mad cows to birds with flu, and then to birds monitoring flu. following eduardo viveiros de castro (2014), i ask: can we look at pathogens from the perspective of birds that transmit them to humans? working on societies of the tupi-kawahib area, viveiros de castro follows lévi-strauss’s intuitions on cannibalism. when humans become the animals they eat, they can take those animals’ perspective on the relations between living beings. much like jacques derrida and gilles deleuze, viveiros de castro claims that this poststructuralist shift takes place in the savage mind, when lévi-strauss moves from systems of classification to lines of identification and transformation. in societies that viveiros de castro calls “animistic,” animals may be considered shamans’ partners, or even shamans themselves, if they have an abnormal capacity to perceive invisible beings (stépanoff 2011). indeed, lévi-strauss’s analysis of mad cow disease through the perspective of “cannibal cows” can be considered as an amazonian view on the spread of pathogens. there is no separation between “good natural cows” and “bad agri-culture,” but a series of small differences—machine-cows, cannibal-cows doing surveillance of the machines, humans—in how the microbes affect these entities. this position can be called multinaturalistic: every species operates discontinuities in a continuum of perception. following this method, it is possible to ask what difference birds make in the spread of emerging pathogens in comparison to cows. clearly, an immediate difference appears in categorization: birds are categorized as wild or domestic, while cows are more often referred to as traditional versus industrial. this is a way to reframe lévi-strauss’s distinction between birds having “metaphoric” societies while cows live in “metonymic” ones: birds offer perspectives on the threshold of domestication, while cows induce us to differentiate within that process of domestication. when pathogens emerge from wild birds, as can be the case with avian influenza, we do not regard the birds as cannibals, but rather as terrorists bringing threats from the sky. “nature is the greatest bioterrorist threat,” influenza experts often claim. to read through the various perspectives on infected birds with a poststructuralist agenda, it proves useful to place the work of philippe descola (2013) into dialogue with that of viveiros de castro (2014). while viveiros de castro marks a contrast between two “ontologies” that can be called “naturalism” and “animism,” descola adds a third ontology, which he calls analogism and describes as a proliferation of properties that can be connected through correspondances and fixed through sacrifice. rather than as an arbitrary classificatory game—why have four ontologies combining two terms?1—we can see this process as a demultiplication of critical positions. lévi-strauss opened a critical perspective on mad cow disease when he proposed an animist view of cannibal cows. but what if we take an analogous view on the spread of avian influenza in asia? can we describe more differences in the same process: the transmission of pathogens between species? descola raises two questions that shed light on the anthropology of avian influenza. first, he asks how different ontologies, such as animism and analogism, orient the process of domestication. animist hunters and analogist pastoralists will handle the same species differently: hunters need to take the point of view of the animals they trap, while pastoralists consider a flock as a set of properties to manage. second, descola claims that sacrifice is available only in analogism, and not, as for viveiros de castro, in animism. the hunter who identifies with the prey cannot take all perspectives on the ritual scene of identification, while the pastoralist can take a perspective from above on the properties of the flock that need to be fixed. poststructuralist anthropologies of human-animal relationships shed new light on the biopolitics of avian influenza. michel foucault (2003) introduced the notion of biopolitics in 1976 to describe a form of power that targets living populations through techniques of individualization. this description resonated with a shift in the management of public health by liberal forms of governance. yet it appears striking that in the same year, 1976, the first cases of ebola alerted international health authorities to the emergence of pathogens caused by transformed relations between humans and animals, such as the deforestation that brought central african bats closer to human habitats. foucault’s notion of biopolitics therefore needs to be completed by a consideration of the ontologies of coevalness between living species. we could also argue that foucault left aside the question of wilderness in the management of public health: bats and birds constitute the animal reservoir of many infectious diseases, creating new relations between the wild and the domestic. the distinction foucault makes between sovereign power and biopower, however, takes a specific meaning for an anthropology of human-animal relationships. if he describes biopower as the power to “make live and let die”—and many criticisms have been raised about populations “left to die” because of “neglected diseases” in new models of global health governance (farmer 1999)—sovereign power is the power to “make die and let live.” while it is easy to see that the eradication of the animal reservoir affiliated with emerging infectious diseases has led to massive forms of “making die”—millions of cows and poultry by the end of the 1990s—little attention has been paid to what foucault meant by “let live.” what does it mean to let live animals in a world where they could potentially transmit pathogens to humans? if foucault’s question has always concerned the possibilities of freedom in different regimes of knowledge and power, it is fascinating to think of the freedom of animals under the biopolitics of zoonoses. and here, lévi-strauss’s intriguing analysis of mad cow disease sheds light on foucault’s concept of surveillance. if cannibal cows operate surveillance on machine-cows, however utopian this hypothesis might appear, then animals are considered free inasmuch as they intensify the human perception of other cows. freeing cows from domestication does not mean releasing them into the wild, but transforming them into humans’ allies in the population’s management—in other words, into subjects of neoliberal governance. paul rabinow (1996) has coined the term biosociality to describe the formation of groups under the production of biological knowledge, as on the genes engaged in rare diseases. following his later work on biosecurity, it is possible to ask: what is the biosociality of animals when biological knowledge is produced in conditions—ecological or genetic—under which pathogens cross species boundaries? andrew lakoff and i have proposed to call the non-human beings that send early warning signals of catastrophes still invisible to humans “sentinel devices” (keck and lakoff 2013). birds infected with avian influenza raise an alarm about the emergence of a new pathogen that might cause a pandemic if it is not stopped at the human-animal interface. what does it mean to let live sentinel animals? contrary to those killed because they are considered a reservoir for zoonotic pathogens, sentinel animals are not sacrificed: they do not die for a higher purpose such as the sovereign’s good health. they are used as surveillance operators, as overseers: the word sentinel comes from sentire, which indicates acute forms of perception, an intense form of vigilance comparable to viveiros de castro’s shamanic perception. but if sentinel birds are released and yet are still used for surveillance, their let live also becomes a way to make live. they are situated at the crossroads of sovereign power and biopower. or, to borrow terms from the anthropology of nature, they circulate between different ontologies: animism (souls that can enact revenge), analogism (proliferating entities that must be fixed by sacrifice), and naturalism (bodies carrying pathogens). the anthropology of nature pluralizes the analysis of biopower and multiplies the perspectives on sentinel animals. could it be that birds leave space for a wider pluralization of emerging infectious diseases because they introduce aerial life into contemporary biopolitics? when i started my research on avian influenza in hong kong, i was struck by the images of chickens killed in regular culling operations. avian influenza was presented as a threat coming from the skies and spreading through industrial farms and live poultry markets. since it is impossible to prevent wild birds from flying, killing live chickens presents a way to stop the disease at the densest site of interaction between humans and birds. in france, where i had started my research on mad cow disease, the first cases of avian influenza in 2006 clearly opened new lines of blame and suspicion: it came from wild birds, from asia, and industrial breeding simply amplified the problem.2 in hong kong, the first cases of avian influenza in chickens in 1997—five-thousand chickens infected, twelve humans infected, eight of whom died—were traced to previous cases in geese in guangdong: the virus supposedly came from across the border, either through migratory birds or smuggled chickens. killing chickens around infected farms and markets was considered a way to mitigate the threat. farms were confined, which meant that instruments of biosecurity strengthened their borders with the outside world: nets, ponds, boots, vaccines. material equipment reaffirmed the distinction between wild and domesticated birds. the head of the public health department of the hong kong government, margaret chan, who was later to become the head of the world health organization, announced to the media, “i eat chicken, you can eat chickens too.” a similar gesture occurred in europe during the outbreak of mad cow disease, when prime ministers performed eating beef as a media spectacle. at the borders between hong kong and mainland china, posters showed that it was forbidden to smuggle poultry, and trucks carrying chickens from mainland china underwent severe controls. the management of avian influenza by the hong kong government clearly marked sovereignty. at the time of hong kong’s handover to china, when many uncertainties remained concerning the frontier between the two territories, blaming birds for a disease and killing them to protect humans could appear as a way to fix the borders. it was not the border between humans and animals, or between culture and nature, that required restoration, as in the case of europe’s management of mad cow disease, but the border of the territory under the gaze of the new sovereign. i was struck by the public visibility of the slaughter of potentially infected chickens in the central market of cheung sha wan, while in europe the killing of cows had remained hidden from the media. at the same time, poultry breeders i interviewed seemed to identify with their chickens: “hong kong people live like chickens in a cage. that’s why they are so stressed.” the slaying of chickens did not appear as a return to nature but as a necessity in an economy premised on the dense circulation of living beings. renliu wuliu means the intense trafficking of persons and things during the chinese new year, and liu is the term both for circulation and for influenza. the political meaning of the culling seemed to be: act on animals to show humans that the government cares for them—or as the saying goes, it was a matter of “killing the rooster to frighten the monkey.” as i looked for other perceptions of birds, i met tik-sang liu (2008), who had worked as an anthropologist on traditional poultry breeding in the new territories of hong kong. chickens, he showed, were considered as symbols of completeness. that is why hosts present them live to a guest before cooking them in a soup for special occasions such as chinese new year. liu recommended that i go to a jiao taoist festival in lam tsuen to see how local people handled diseases. for three days, members of the village gathered for vegetarian meals and offered prayers and food to the gods of the mountains. a rooster was to be slaughtered at the beginning of the festival, its blood spread at the four corners of the village. but due to the risk of avian influenza, this practice was forbidden. the vegetarian meal and the territorial logic of the ritual appeared as an alternative to sacrifice following genealogical lines in traditional clans: it was a form of letting live rather than make die: a respect for the forces in the environment, for which birds act as intermediaries. yet this cosmological description, juxtaposing local knowledge of the environment with the global norms of biosecurity, remains too structuralist or too totalizing. it can be described, following descola, as developing possibilities of analogism, with its opposite poles of sacrifice and proliferation. but how, in a poststructuralist mode, to consider birds as actors of surveillance? how, in other words, to introduce an animist perspective into this analogical cosmology? i found an intriguing controversy between birdwatchers and buddhist monks on what it meant to let live birds in the context of avian influenza. the hong kong birdwatching society had published a map showing that most cases of h5n1 in wild birds within the territory of hong kong were found not in the natural reserve of mai po—a traditional shrimp-harvesting location administered by the world wildlife federation as a feeding site for migratory birds—but around the bird market of mong kok, one of the densest places in hong kong. they explained that buddhist practitioners bought illegally traded birds, often from distant places, to release them in natural parks around the market for spiritual purposes. most of the released birds, they claimed, died of stress or infectious diseases.3 this map produced a shift in the spatiality of avian influenza: dangerous wildlife—nature as a bioterrorist threat—came not from the border but from the center. figure 1. bird release in hangzhou, june 2009. photo by frédéric keck. after the map’s publication, discussions ensued on how to change the practice of bird release (called fangsheng, literally, “let live”) to make it compatible with public health and environmental risks. buddhist officials proposed different compromises. some practitioners released birds with a mask, implying a contradiction between the good of the birds’ souls and the threats of their bodies. some officials advised replacing the birds with turtles, frogs, fish, crabs, or shells, so that the possibly lethal outcome of the release would remain hidden in the depths of the sea. some published leaflets explaining how to release wildlife in a proper environment. these different suggestions revealed an attention to the harmful potentialities of a practice intended to do good, or to the lethal outcome of aerial spatialities. how to think that releasing life could turn into releasing death (fangsi)? but the birdwatchers themselves proposed the most interesting compromise. they invited buddhist monks to their own bird releases. when illegally traded birds are caught at the border under stressful conditions, environmentalist groups take care of them and return them to the wild with a gps to follow their movements via a satellite tracking device. while this technique of “wired wilderness” has a long history in environmental movements (benson 2011), it has a distinctive meaning in the controversy involving the buddhist practitioners. while buddhists believe a bird’s suffering limits the movements of its soul, birdwatchers see the death of a bird as a sign of the extinction of its species. these different interpretations are compatible within the same gesture of liberating a bird equipped in such a way that it communicates with humans from the sky. the terms equipment and communicate must be taken here in both their technological and ontological meanings. if environmentalists take care not to hamper the flight of birds by the gps, buddhists will take care to release the animals in the proper environment. here, different ontologies (that we can call, following descola, animism and naturalism) become compatible at the level of the gesture of releasing a threatened bird. these ontologies do not just constitute “constructions in the sky”; they are ways to make sense of the contradictions of a gesture that connects humans on earth and birds in the sky. a bird released with a gps is a paradoxical figure as a sentinel device. half-wild, half-domesticated, the wired wild bird gives indications about the evolution of a population, much as a “sentinel chicken” indicates the presence of an infectious disease in, or around, the farm. by shifting between different scales of threat—the extinction of a species or the eradication of humanity by a pandemic—sentinel birds act as operators of translation. we can say, following thom van dooren (2014), that birds really act when they die of a threat that affects other members of their species, and that the loss of individuals therefore becomes meaningful in environmental narratives. the point is how to build a narrative of species extinction that makes sense of a gesture connecting subjects in a space of freedom. rather than saying that people in hong kong identify with the birds killed en masse by their government during a time of emergency, or that the birds symbolize the completeness of their clans and villages through the image of poultry, it seems more accurate to say that hong kong people become like sentinel birds, equipped with systems of information that produce early warning signals about global threats. tim choy (2011, 26) thus shows that the notion of endangerment opens spaces of comparison between hong kong people and natural species in ways that are “good to think with,” because it connects forms of life that “threaten to become extinct in the near future.” finally, we can contrast the sentinel bird with the cannibal cow in lévi-strauss’s meditation. while cannibal cows produce surveillance on machine-cows and are eaten with respect, sentinel birds send warnings about the fate of their species and must be handled with care. the main difference between birds and cows confronted with emerging threats is that, as lévi-strauss noted, “birds love freedom.” in the practice of liberating birds potentially infected with avian influenza, in the equipment used to transform them into sentinels communicating with humans about the fate of their species, there is a self-reflection on threats to our freedom and the use of our freedom to produce knowledge about threats: freedom is both the cause and the remedy for those threats. the biopolitics of avian influenza constitutes more than the control of living beings that fly across continents—as is implicit in popular sayings such as “viruses know no borders” or “dead birds can’t fly.” in the biosociality of sentinel birds, a paradoxically equipped freedom produces signals on threats that range from trans-individual contagion to species extinction, and in practices that simultaneously connect and distance humans and birds. notes acknowledgments i wish to thank the editors of cultural anthropology for this opportunity to present a condensed version of my ethnographic work. 1. descola (2013) adds a fourth ontology, totemism, which appears as symmetric to analogism. it remains to be seen how “totemic societies” perceive pathogens crossing species, for instance in australia. this is one of the objectives of a project supported by the axa research fund at the laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale. 2. many questions have been raised about specific locations in mainland china where a range of migratory birds mixed with domestic birds, particularly ducks, such as the qinghai or the poyang lakes (see fearnley 2013). 3. the justification for this long-known practice was to “increase merits” by producing mercy in a cycle of psychic metamorphoses (handlin smith 1999). references benson, etienne 2011 wired wilderness: technologies of tracking and the making of modern wildlife. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. choy, tim 2011 ecologies of comparison: an ethnography of endangerment in hong kong. durham, n.c.: duke university press. descola, philippe 2013 beyond nature and culture. chicago: university of chicago press. farmer, paul 1999 infections and inequalities: the modern plagues. berkeley: university of california press. fearnley, lyle 2013 “the birds of poyang lake: sentinels at the interface of wild and domestic.” limn, no. 3. http://limn.it/the-birds-of-poyang-lake-sentinels-at-the-interface-of-wild-and-domestic/. foucault, michel 2003 “society must be defended”: lectures at the collège de france, 1975–1976. translated by david macey. new york: picador. handlin smith, joanna f. 1999 “liberating animals in ming-qing china: buddhist inspiration and elite imagination.” journal of asian studies 58, no. 1: 51–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2658389. keck, frédéric, and andrew lakoff 2013 “sentinel devices.” limn, no. 3. http://limn.it/preface-sentinel-devices-2/. leach, edmund 1970 lévi-strauss. paris: seghers. lévi-strauss, claude 1966 the savage mind. london: weidenfeld and nicolson. 2001 “la leçon de sagesse des vaches folles.” etudes rurales, nos. 157–58: 9–14. http://etudesrurales.revues.org/27. liu, tik-sang 2008 “custom, taste and science: raising chickens in the pearl river delta, south china.” anthropology & medicine 15, no. 1: 7–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13648470801918992. rabinow, paul 1996 essays on the anthropology of reason. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. stépanoff, charles 2011 “saillances et essences: le traitement cognitif de la singularité chez les éleveurs de rennes tožu (sibérie méridionale).” l‘homme, no. 200: 175–202. van dooren, thom 2014 flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. new york: columbia university press. viveiros de castro, eduardo 2014 cannibal metaphysics. translated by peter skafish. minneapolis: univocal. genetic diaspora genetic diaspora: producing knowledge of genes and jews in rural south africa noah tamarkin ohio state university i met hilda mpaketsane in december 2005 at a wedding in a small village in the greater sekhukhune district of the limpopo province of south africa. hilda lived nearby, worked as a cleaner for the local municipality, and was a cousin of the bride, at whose elderly parents’ house we were celebrating. it was after dark but still hot out; the ceremony and meal were finished and music played from speakers set up outside while some danced and others sat in groups enjoying cold drinks and beer, both store-bought bottles and libations home-brewed by the bride’s mother. hilda walked up and joined a conversation that i was having in english and sepedi with a group of women about what it means to them to be lemba people, an ethnic identity made internationally famous after geneticists looked for and found a link between the lemba and jews.1 one woman explained to me that she was proud to be lemba because of their cultural uniqueness and reputation as business people. another said that her parents had told her from an early age that the lemba were part of the jews. hilda agreed that they had always known their unique history and culture, but she elaborated that they had only recently learned that they were the black jews and that this would connect them to other jews in the world. she told me, “we discovered [it] after the arrival of [tudor] parfitt.2 he was doing the research, he took the saliva. you go to the laboratory. after that he came back and told us you are the jews, the black jews in africa.” wanting to understand further, i told her that i was a jew and asked if there was a relationship between us because of that. she explained, “the research made that relationship. because we didn’t discuss that we were the jews. after [the research] we discovered that we are the jews.” the genetic test to which she referred was the second of two dna studies that investigated potential links between the lemba and jews; parfitt collected saliva samples for the study in 1996, just two years after the first postapartheid democratic elections had taken place and nine years after blood samples had been collected for the first lemba dna study beginning in 1987 (spurdle and jenkins 1996; thomas et al. 2000). in the eighteen years between the beginning of the lemba dna studies and my conversation with hilda, much—but not everything—had changed. in south africa, especially in the rural areas that had been designated as homelands under apartheid and where my research took place, political landscapes had transformed, though economic precarity remained the norm for many, including many of the women at the wedding with whom i spoke. in molecular biology, the mapping projects of genomics had partially given way to postgenomic epigenetic inquiry, rendering these types of studies more peripheral than cutting edge (abu el-haj 2007). and internationally and especially in the united states, the study of genetic ancestry had transformed into a robust industry, marketing the idea of scientific certainty to individuals seeking personal connections to their unknown pasts. in the wake of the lemba dna studies, the bbc, nova, and the history channel had produced television documentaries that featured prominent lemba leaders alongside scientists and other scholars. unlike hilda’s assessment that the genetic research newly produced a relationship between jews and the lemba, these media representations encouraged an approach to lemba people as a newly discovered lost tribe of israel. prompted by this representation, american jews had traveled to south africa beginning in the late 1990s to connect with lemba people on the basis of the presumed commonalities of a shared jewishness. by the time i met hilda, she and many others strongly identified with their knowledge that they were the lemba people, black jews genetically certified as such. but lemba concepts of jewish genetics and diasporic connection do not simply mirror discourses established elsewhere, and hilda’s repetition of parfitt’s message to the lemba that they were jews does not necessarily replicate his meaning. consider, for example, the perspective of another lemba woman who was part of our conversation. she told me that my own jewishness “means you are a lemba.” how does her framing, which reverses which group might be incorporated into the other, challenge the ideas of diaspora, dna, and agency that create an image of the lemba as a lost tribe of israel? brought together by the idea of genetic connection, how do lemba people and their jewish interlocutors navigate their different understandings of the biological and cultural commonalities they hope to have with one another? finally, how do divergent genomic knowledges articulate with the politics of belonging and the pursuit of citizenship in south africa and transnationally? i frame hilda’s and others’ assertions about their identities in terms of knowledge production rather than history or categories like “genetic jews” because it was knowledge—both its source and its implications—that was at stake. following hilda’s insistence that the genetic research created a relationship between lemba people and jews, in this article i contend that genetic data has enabled a novel way of imagining and enacting diaspora. i use the concept genetic diaspora to theorize how new connections, marked by inequality, are tenuously forged through national, racial, and religious differences imagined to be the same. genetic diaspora constitutes an assemblage through which knowledge and belonging are contested (deleuze and gauttari 2009; ong and collier 2005; stewart 2012). it continually re-emerges through new connections that some (but not all) participants experience as the rekindling of old ones. recent research has examined the epistemologies of genetic history, the politics of selling personal genomic ancestry, and the subjectivities of american seekers of such information (abu el-haj 2012; nelson 2008; palmié 2007; pálsson 2012; tallbear 2013). but commentators have paid little attention to encounters between american ancestry seekers and those they imagine as their genetic kin; they have likewise mostly ignored the subjectivities, genomic knowledge practices, and political stakes of the people on the other side of such encounters. in this article, by privileging the perspectives of lemba south africans and the historical and ethnographic contexts through which lemba genetic data emerged and circulated, i offer an alternative reading of the social and political significance of dna. drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research conducted in south africa between 2004 and 2006 and two additional months of research in 2010 and 2013, this article examines the lemba dna studies, the media archive they have enabled, and a series of lemba encounters with american jews, including myself. i include myself in this way because most lemba people read my presence as a researcher equally as my presence as a jew. i demonstrate that those implicated in genetic studies transform dna into a resource that authorizes their own histories and politics of race, religion, and recognition. i argue that dna and diaspora converge to create new sites of political belonging, ones marked by precarious connections that balance on the production of knowledge and its refusal. lemba dna and genetic diaspora american jews and lemba south africans have become imagined as two parts of one whole through a series of mediations: the genetic data mediates the possibilities of representation; the lemba media archive mediates the projected desires of lemba leaders, filmed researchers, and television hosts; and different lemba and jewish interpretations of genetics mediate their desires for jewish diasporic connection. deborah heath, rayna rapp, and karen-sue taussig (2004) introduced the idea of “genetic citizenship” to describe the blurring of state and civil society, and of public and private spheres, evident in the lobbying efforts of parents of children with rare and debilitating genetic diseases. their idea of genetic citizenship as a new kind of public within a nation-state enables me, by contrast, to examine a public—what i am calling genetic diaspora—that is organized through genetics but that falls outside any concrete recourse to states and claims of citizenship. for the lemba, south african citizenship was indeed at stake in lemba dna, but genetic diaspora instead organizes a public in which it was hypothetical israeli citizenship, both undesired and unrealizable by lemba people, that was at stake. the dna studies newly thrust the lemba into a transnational spotlight, but the studies’ premise was more reiterative than novel. all lemba origins studies, including those involving dna, relied on the words and bodies of lemba informants, and lemba authors repeatedly asserted themselves: knowledge production about lemba origins was always multidirectional and interconnected. in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, for example, christian missionaries wrote about the lemba as potential “semites” possibly descended from jews or muslims. they based their analyses on oral history, embodied cultural practices like circumcision, endogamy, and dietary laws, and in one instance, comparisons of lemba and jewish noses (jaques 1931). in 1936, manasseh n. mphelo published his own account of lemba history and culture, adding to and critiquing earlier missionary writings and identifying his grandfather maphangwa as jaques’s informant “moshe,” whose knowledge and nose provided much of jaques’s evidence (mphelo 1936). later work by nicolus j. van warmelo, south africa’s chief government ethnologist from 1930 to 1969, played a critical role in the apartheid legal status of the lemba; lemba researchers in turn played an important role in van warmelo’s access to and interpretation of african culture and history. during this period, essays by the lemba author m. m. motenda were in direct conversation with van warmelo; like mphelo, motenda (1940, 1958) critiqued the work of others while supplementing it with his own knowledge and analysis.3 missionaries, ethnologists, lemba authors and informants, and geneticists and their coauthors each pursued inquiries into lemba origins for different reasons and with different effects. the dna studies built directly on earlier interconnected forms of knowledge production, emerging from already established relationships between researchers and lemba leaders.4 both of the lemba dna studies that supported links to jews were published in the american journal of human genetics, the first in 1996 (spurdle and jenkins 1996) and the second in 2000 (thomas et al. 2000). it was possible for trefor jenkins in the first case and tudor parfitt in the second to collect lemba biological samples because lemba leaders, who had for decades sought ethnic recognition from the south african state, felt that genetic data could potentially corroborate what they already knew in a way that might help their cause. my reading of these studies builds on recent work in race and genomics that highlights the production and political implications of research involving genetic ancestry (abu el-haj 2007, 2012; duster 2003; fullwiley 2008; hartigan 2013; montoya 2007, 2011; palmié 2007, reardon 2005; reardon and tallbear 2012; royal et al. 2010; tallbear 2013). my point in what follows is not to call lemba identity into question by calling genetic data into question. rather, i aim to illustrate that lemba dna is not one fixed thing but rather continually co-constituted, emerging as labeled samples in laboratories, reported findings in published studies and documentaries, and through encounters among lemba people and between lemba people and jews.5 from the perspective of lemba leaders, both studies succeeded in scientifically substantiating their oral history; however, each study relied on different categories to do so. duana fullwiley (2008, 727) argues that the racial categories used in genetic research design are not given or fixed; rather they reflect which social categories are meaningful to researchers. these categories will therefore change depending on researchers’ objectives; analyzing them suggests the politics of knowledge production at work within a given study. in the lemba studies, different ideas of race and political belonging converged, positioning the lemba in two distinct analytic frames. the first compared lemba genetic samples to “caucasoid,” “negroid,” and “khoisan” samples and found that a greater percentage of lemba y chromosomes had caucasoid than negroid origins (spurdle and jenkins 1996). the second study found that lemba samples were significantly similar to so-labeled “ashkenazic israelites” and “sephardic israelites”; they differed significantly from, among others, samples labeled “yemeni” and “palestinian arab” (thomas et al. 2000). the lemba were thus drawn into two distinct racial-political imaginaries that exceeded their own desired test outcomes. in the first study, the categories that researchers used mapped onto apartheid categories of racially defined citizenship, but they disrupted the idea of known, fixed, and developmentally significant racial difference that formed apartheid’s ideological core. the second study, in contrast, implied a measurable difference between jews and palestinians, an idea of consequence in zionist projects (abu el-haj 2012). i have no interest here in the overt intentions or politics of the researchers, but rather in how lemba dna emerged through these studies as three distinct racial-political objects that nevertheless became unevenly conflated for lemba people, researchers, and visiting jews. the studies’ different conclusions, both markedly cautious, were not only conflated in the media archive, they were also transformed—sometimes by the studies’ coauthors themselves—into proof that the lemba are a lost tribe of israel. consider the most recent documentary featuring the lemba, produced in 2008 by the history channel. parfitt narrates: the lemba were convinced that they were a lost tribe of israel. the problem was that no one believed them. they appeared to be completely african. but i discovered a number of mysterious legends and customs that were very un-african. men from other tribes were not allowed to marry into the lemba, they refused to eat pigs . . . they practiced the ritual slaughter of animals with a special knife, and they circumcised their male children at an early age. i had become convinced that the lemba claim that they were of jewish origin could be true . . . but final proof only came when the science of genetics was applied to lemba oral history. (kemp 2008)6 parfitt conflates the lemba dna of oral history (they were “convinced that they were a lost tribe of israel”), south african racial categories (“they appeared to be completely african”), and jewish genetic essentialism (genetics provided final proof that they were of jewish origin). here and in other documentaries, two images exist in tension: on the one hand, the lemba are shown as already practicing jews, while on the other, they are represented as genetic jews whose knowledge about judaism is of the past rather than of the present. through the lost tribes discourse, these documentaries trafficked in familiar tropes about africa as spatially and temporally isolated. the lemba are presented as long-forgotten and now-reconnected members of a jewish diaspora that is at once ancient and contemporary and that has normative histories and traditions, which can—indeed, must—be learned to facilitate a jewish “return.” from 1999 to 2002, the american jewish organization kulanu attempted to bring about exactly such a return: informed by media reports about the lemba as a lost tribe of israel, it sponsored so-called recapture seminars to bring the lemba back to judaism. kulanu’s choice of name for their activities with the lemba, recapture seminars, implied a double meaning: that the lemba might recapture their judaism, presumably lost over the years, and that they might be recaptured for judaism, in a spiritual as well as a biopolitical sense. but the seminars did not proceed as planned. several of these seminars were led by leo abrami (2009), an arizona-based, reform-ordained, “post-denominational” rabbi who had survived vichy france as a child by disguising himself as catholic. he framed his work as “a mission to the lemba tribe,” part of his larger lifelong mission to return secular jews, or ones otherwise adrift, to jewish religious practice. abrami initially expressed enthusiasm about lemba recapture, but he suspended his involvement after lemba leaders included their own christian prayer services at a weekend session during which abrami had planned to teach judaism to lemba youth. he had imagined lemba christianity as an artifact of colonialism that only persisted because of isolation from jews, and he was dismayed when confronted with lemba resistance to giving up their religion. for abrami, the lemba remained lost jews because they would not commit to learning and practicing judaism as a religion necessarily distinct from christianity (abrami 2009). for their part, lemba leaders at first enthusiastically welcomed abrami and others as emissaries, there to exchange knowledge and form new connections. but in retrospect, some viewed the seminars as missionary encounters instead: they resented the implication that current lemba practices were not jewish enough, especially the suggestion that if they wanted to be recognized as jews, they would need to convert to judaism.7 genetic diaspora, as it emerged through kulanu’s recapture seminars, was full of hope and frustration all around. lemba dna prompted seminar teachers to believe that they were saving lost jews; but while it prompted lemba leaders to consider jewish visitors as potential kin, it also renewed their conviction that their own knowledge about their history surpassed the expertise and understanding of others, missionaries and scientists alike. dna, race, and culture: lemba jewishness reframed initially, three men carefully managed my research with the lemba cultural association (hereafter lca). i was hosted exclusively by ephraim selamolela, who facilitated meetings for me with him, samuel moeti, and f. c. raulinga. the lca began in the late 1940s as a way to formalize already extant gatherings and burial societies among lemba families and clans, and to link them into one coherent group. the lemba author m. m. motenda had founded the lca and presided over the organization until his death in 1982. by the 1950s, the lca had become the dominant space through which lemba south africans could make claims as lembas on each other and on the state, and it subsequently became the dominant lemba site of genomic knowledge production. selamolela presented himself as the third-most expert in lemba history and culture, after moeti, who ranked first, and raulinga who ranked second. moeti at the time served as the lca’s leader and the executive mayor of his municipality. raulinga had long been the lca’s secretary; he was also a member of the state language board and had translated biblical texts into tshivenda on behalf of the catholic church. selamolela was a successful businessman with the means, the time, and the desire to be a gracious host to me, as he had been to others in the past. these three men by then had a long history of working with researchers, journalists, and visiting jews. from them i learned how lca leaders had represented themselves to visitors and what lessons from visitors they had found most resonant. the instruction i received from them about lemba history, genetics, and jewish connection provided me a window into the context and content that had informed the production of knowledge about the lemba during the previous decade. every day for two weeks, i accompanied selamolela as he drove his truck between his home in a village not far from machado and the bhubha game lodge, where the recapture seminars had taken place. the lodge was an event venue and farm that selamolela had built in the 1990s as a resort for american jews who he hoped would continue to visit south africa. bhubha was selamolela’s clan name; his use of it for his resort constituted an important part of his marketing strategy that played on presumed american jewish knowledge about the details of the second genetic study, published in 2000. that study pivoted on the presence within lemba y chromosome samples of a genetic sequence called the cohen modal haplotype (cmh), named for its presence among cohenim, or jewish priests. the significant finding was that the cmh was present in seven of the thirteen samples collected from bhubha clan members, a rate similar to the fifty percent of self-identified cohenim found to have the cmh in an earlier study (thomas et al. 2000).8 selamolela’s vision for the lodge stands as an example of the kind of identity-based self-promotion for tourist consumption examined by john and jean comaroff (2009) in ethnicity, inc. yet the resort was strikingly empty of visiting jews. its emptiness raises an important question with a broader significance among economically marginalized groups throughout africa and elsewhere who have turned to cultural tourism as a means of income generation: what happens when this kind of product is on offer, but nobody is buying? in this case, selamolela recouped his losses by marketing his lodge to locals as a wedding venue, and much of the surrounding land was a working farm. he also continued to hope for future visiting jews. selamolela, moeti, and raulinga greeted me as a fellow jew, informed me of plans to build a synagogue, and instructed me at length about lemba history and culture. the tone of instruction was set by my youth and their status as elders but also by my role as a researcher and their roles as star informants who had previously appeared on television: raulinga in particular asked his own questions, which he then proceeded to answer. he included references to the torah and to hitler, as well as explanations of kosher laws, lemba endogamy, and lemba migration into africa after the destruction of the temple in jerusalem in 586 bce. through this instruction, i was assumed to be already enacting a jewish connection with these three lemba men, and i was also prompted to extend that sense of connection outward in both directions, so that it was not just between me and the three of them, but between all jews and all lemba. this was genetic diaspora in its lemba institutional emergence: as raulinga explained to me, people do not become lembas by circumcision, language, religion, or by their place of residence. people become lembas by blood, which for him slipped easily into dna. he explained: “dna will show you who you are. that is blood. at least fifty percent of the lemba genes are of jewish blood. … we had the test. we are one. the jews have said openly color is not the issue, it is the blood.” his message was clear: we shared the same blood, the same dna, and therefore regardless of ritual, linguistic, religious, geographic, or phenotype differences, we were one. the ground of our common jewish identity (boyarin and boyarin 1993) was dna, understood as shared blood, while everything else was variable. in her work on assisted conception in israel, susan kahn (2000) has demonstrated emerging halakhic distinctions of jewishness by birth and by blood: jewishness is conferred at birth when one is born to a jewish mother, and not at conception, when the jewishness of the sperm and egg donors cannot confer or deny jewishness to a resulting child. but the stakes here differed from the jewishness of populations to the gender of jewishness. rather than the differential power of birth and blood to determine jewishness in a context where gametes are sparse but increasing a jewish population is paramount, what emerged here is a lemba/jewish blood essentialism not linked explicitly to gender, even though it follows from the dna of lemba men. this idea neutralizes concerns that abrami had raised at the recapture seminars that modern jews determined descent from the mother, while lemba jewish dna was derived from men only. the extent to which i was implicated in ideas of a physical, essential jewish connection perplexed me, partially because my personal trajectory as a feminist and a transsexual had led me to embrace ideas of anti-essentialism and indeterminacy. it was also partially because i knew that the y-chromosome tests that formed the basis of our supposed genetic commonality could not include me personally, nor any women: jewish, lemba, or otherwise. and it was partially because i wondered, if our supposed point of connection dated back 2,500 or 3,000 years as the cmh hypothesized, why not 5,000 years, or 10,000? for me, diasporic time as enacted through genetic data fell off the grid of intelligibility. subsequent conversations with other lca leaders after months of fieldwork actually did reframe the time scale of genetic diaspora in a way that also reframed the origins, content, and authenticity of the concept of jewish diaspora informing the genetic studies and documentaries. moeti told me that all original jews had been black and that intermarriage had turned european jews white. m. j. mungulwa, now the lca’s president and at the time an executive board member, explained to me that the lemba were “original jewish, not nowadays for the changing things for the reform and the christianity and the orthodox … we’re african jewish, because all jews are from africa, even the white … we’re not the same as the white jew because we don’t change, we stick on the law!”9 in his framing, the lemba sustained jewish ancestral pasts, and reform judaism, orthodox judaism, and christianity were all equally divergent; it was not the old that needed to be brought up to date, but the new that needed to reconnect with what had been lost over time. ephraim selamolela inverted mungulwa’s ideas of race and jews. he was deeply invested in judaism and in israel, and for him, our supposed genetic connections were also racial. he told me that jews were white, and because we shared the same blood, he was also white despite his dark skin. he enjoyed immensely having greater economic success than the white afrikaners from whom he could demand service when we went to town to buy groceries or plants for the farm, and on several occasions he took my hand as he told these white workers, “look, he is my son, he is my white son.” in this way, he conflated whiteness, jewishness, wealth, and power. in our time together, selamolela made a point of eating only at nandos and not at kfc because the chicken at nandos was halal, which he explained was just the same as kosher. over meals, he told me about his childhood under apartheid as a laborer on white-owned farms, and how everything he had, he had built himself through becoming a businessman. like many other lemba people who told me that being lemba meant success in business—although many of these same people worked as miners, cleaners, teachers, nurses, or lived entirely on government pensions—selamolela felt that his jewish ancestry was directly responsible for his business acumen. he linked this explicitly to dna when he explained his personal success through his membership in the bhubha clan, which meant, as he said, that he had “the best gene,” by which he meant the cmh. selamolela’s pride at having “the best gene” is in two ways an unexpected outcome of the dna tests in which he participated. he took personal pride in his result from a test that aimed to determine population frequencies rather than individual genetic profiles, and he inverted the studies’ underlying logics of biology and culture by attributing his own business success to genetic predisposition and his own jewishness not to a matter of culture or choice but rather to an incontrovertible fact.10 his understanding of the test’s purpose and the meanings of the results demonstrates that the reception and interpretation of genetic data by specific audiences can significantly alter their meaning. the biological and cultural commonalities that these lemba leaders expected to have with me included a blood connection that demonstrated either our common black african ancestry or our common jewish whiteness. despite this divergence, i was widely assumed to share whichever jewish cultural attributes or practices each lemba person held personally important, whether business success, torah and prayer, or not eating pork. in our interactions, i felt claimed through genetic diaspora by lca leaders and others as a former african who had over time become racially and religiously less authentic, although i was still connected to them by blood, which in turn defined me as part of a lemba nation in south africa, especially to the extent that i could learn about and know lemba culture. this point about me learning lemba culture, as opposed to the idea that they should learn jewish religion, was the unintended result of the recapture seminars. these encounters had prompted a serious rethinking and a formal decision about the relationship between being a lemba and being jewish. by 2005, most lca members referred to the partially built “synagogue” as the “cultural center,” and the lca had issued an executive decision separating out religion from what it meant to be a lemba, concepts that documentaries and visiting jews had conflated. the decision was entered into the lca minutes as follows: “it was agreed that lembas are a nation and not a religion. the lembas may belong to different religions, but are unified by their culture.”11 the decision hinged on the need to reaffirm lemba ideas about religion, culture, and nation through the lca, so as to not alienate the very people whose consolidation was the reason for the organization’s existence. the lca stance of one culture, many religions inverted the logics of one religion, many cultures that had motivated lemba inclusion among jews invested in genetic ideas of jewish diaspora. as they brought me into their production of genomic knowledge, they also inverted the flow of knowledge production: no longer the recipients of others’ expertise, they expected me to circulate their own. demonstrating jewish and lemba leadership: the exchange of knowledge and its refusal the recapture seminars had stopped in 2002, but occasional jewish visitors continued to attempt to connect with the lemba on the basis of assumed religious commonality. one such visitor was roby simons, who had grown up as a member of the american conservative movement and many years later became modern orthodox. roby had heard about the lemba dna tests, as well as about other jewish genetic studies, and he felt that they proved his own and the lembas’ irrefutable and essential jewishness, and therefore their diasporic connection. in 2005, roby and i were both in south africa conducting research funded by fulbright. he had heard about my project and wanted to know if he could visit one of my field sites. i was reluctant, but when i mentioned the possibility, people expressed interest. at the time, i was in the midst of following the chieftaincy struggles of kgoshi mpaketsane: the south african state refused to acknowledge his status as a traditional leader. mpaketsane was one of the 136 lemba men who had offered a dna sample to researchers in 1996. postapartheid south africa has an ambivalent relationship with chieftaincy, now renamed “traditional leadership” (oomen 2005; williams 2010). on the one hand, many south africans hold up traditional leadership as a symbol of precolonial power—and therefore, also, of postcolonial strength (ray et al. 2011). but others see it instead as a symbol of apartheid (mamdani 1996; ntsebeza 2006). mpaketsane’s village intensely supported chieftaincy, all the more so because four traditional leaders—two middle-aged men and two elderly women—each claimed the status, while the government only recognized one of them. in the 1950s, with the support of the lca, mpaketsane’s father had petitioned the apartheid government to recognize his chieftaincy. the younger mpaketsane carried these efforts forward after his father died in 1989. as the lca was busy articulating the difference between culture and religion, kgoshi mpaketsane was preparing his claim to a newly convened commission for traditional leadership disputes. his submission included several published accounts of the lemba as genetic jews, including the first dna study (spurdle and jenkins 1996). his logic in including the article with the rest of his claim was that proof of lemba biological difference would support his contention that they were culturally distinct from their neighbors—and therefore necessarily subject to their own traditional leader. since the only legally recognized traditional leader was not lemba, he reasoned that evidence of lemba difference would compel the south african government to acknowledge the legitimacy of his claimed position. during his visit, roby asked many people about lemba jewish practices and beliefs, and in turn he shared his own. when it became clear that most people were members of the zion christ church, roby pointed out that jews don’t believe in jesus—but unlike rabbi abrami, he did not dwell on it. instead, he instructed, both verbally and by example. his two-day visit involved frequent conspicuous prayer. roby traveled with his prayer book, yarmulke, tallis, and tefillin.12 he prayed outside, chanting softly in hebrew and swaying back and forth, while the chickens, goats, and dogs ran around him and people stared and wondered. many asked me about it later because they knew i was a jew like him (white and american and presumably religious); they hoped i might be able to explain his prayer, wondered if i prayed similarly, and considered his presentation against their own religious practices. roby’s visit culminated with his encounter with kgoshi mpaketsane. roby wanted to hand-deliver the leather-bound torah he had brought as a gift, and he wanted to demonstrate directly to mpaketsane as the resident lemba authority how to properly pray as a jew. when he explained about kosher laws, mpaketsane interjected that the lemba knew about that, and that he had written about it in his application to the government for recognition. when roby explained that when a boy has a bar mitzvah at thirteen, “for a while he’s a chief, he’s the leader,” mpaketsane seemed a bit put out, since his entire adult life had been dedicated to securing that status for himself. but he let it pass. and when roby put on his tallis and yarmulke, wrapped his tefillin and started to pray, mpaketsane chuckled uncomfortably. roby saw the lemba’s genetic jewishness as a point of departure leading into judaism. identifying with the lemba, he imagined that they might choose to become observant, much as he had in his adult life. but mpaketsane and most other lemba south africans considered jewishness something they had, not something they had to prove, choose, or learn: dna had simply reinforced their certainty. many people in the village and elsewhere, including mpaketsane, had told me that they were bajuta amaso (black jews). but their politics of identity and ethnicity were not primarily directed at any recognition of jewishness, and their jewishness was not primarily understood as a religion. although roby’s religious instruction failed to resonate with mpaketsane, the american left the encounter feeling connected, and mpaketsane left feeling properly recognized because of the gift, though disconnected from roby’s idea of jewishness. their encounter demonstrates how much must be overlooked for american jews and lemba south africans to experience connection as two parts of one jewish whole. furthermore, since this was something roby experienced but mpaketsane did not, it demonstrates that one person’s experience of disconnection could go completely unrecognized in another’s experience of profound connection from the same encounter.13 the connection that they did have hinged on both men affirming their own and each other’s positions as leaders—roby as prayer leader and mpaketsane as traditional leader. roby’s leadership was affirmed through mpaketsane’s polite, though ultimately detached attention, and the lemba man’s leadership was affirmed through roby’s jewish presence in his home and its potential to affirm his cultural difference. ultimately, their connection proved contingent on a precarious balance between the exchange of knowledge and its refusal. the precarity of connection and the productiveness of disconnection the diaspora literature suggests that its power as a category of belonging lies in its articulation of cultural, racial, and/or religious commonality over distance, often in the face of more proximate experiences of exclusion and discrimination. diaspora invokes common history, common culture, or common identity, but in the encounters that i have described, these do not exist. it is precisely under such conditions of absence that dna becomes significant as a diasporic technology, and diaspora re-emerges as a necessary site of analysis. diaspora is made, not given, and as such it is always being remade; furthermore, it is remade within and across global hierarchies (brown 2005; patterson and kelley 2000; thomas 2009). african diaspora and jewish diaspora, each the focus of genetic ancestry studies, provide a productive comparison: both are entangled in global hierarchies in which americans are the seekers and africans the objects of projected desires.14 like the jewish connections i have explored here, the articulation between african diaspora and genomics can be theorized through genetic diaspora: both phenomena hinge on a desire to find one’s past in africa’s present, reiterating a trope of african belatedness and isolation that is a primary object of postcolonial critique (comaroff and comaroff 2012; cooper 2005; ferguson 2006; mbembe 2001; piot 1999). but it is the differences rather than the similarities that most interest me here. genomics has emerged as a technology through which jewish diasporic belonging is explicitly expanded, bringing entire populations into its newly imagined parameters. in contrast, in african american ancestry testing, people seek ethnic differentiation through dna and then find meaning in learning about their specific newly found possible ethnic group (nelson 2008; palmié 2007). this difference turns diaspora on its head: research about diaspora that considers it a critical alternative to exclusive or coercive practices of belonging within nation-states, and as a critical analytic to denaturalize the nation-state form, assumes that diaspora is desired and chosen as an alternative site of identification (boyarin and boyarin 1993; clifford 1997; gilroy 1993; ho 2006; thomas 2009). but lemba people, including lca leaders, did not use the concept of diaspora to explain their connections to each other or to jews. lemba people regarded their new jewish connections not as ends in themselves but rather as means toward two ends not shared by their jewish interlocutors: lemba ethnic recognition in south africa and lemba communication of their own knowledge production about genes and jews. but dna enables the lemba to be claimed by the idea of diaspora, which demands both their difference and their assimilation. this is, to borrow michael montoya’s term, a kind of “bioethnic conscription” through which the lemba are brought into a story about jewish diaspora via media dissemination of scientific data (montoya 2007). crucially, however, it is a conscription that lemba people speak through and against, using the connections it conjures to further their own politics of recognition and to disseminate their own truths about their histories. nadia abu el-haj (2012, 217) introduces “diasporic zionism” to name the power of the israeli state as a point of reference for american jewish questions about who is a jew. she demonstrates this power in part through american jewish debates about whether the lemba should have to undergo orthodox conversion to be granted citizenship in israel as jews, or whether the genetic evidence should be considered “proof” enough. this american jewish use of genetic data to imagine potential israeli citizenship not for themselves but for a group of black south africans, who they mistakenly imagine desire it, underscores a need to revisit the ideological work of diaspora. genetic diaspora points to a space beyond diasporic zionism and beyond genetic citizenship—a space where the rights at stake and the rights imagined to be at stake slip past each other completely, in two separate conversations imagined to be the same. only two other american jews visited the lemba while i was conducting ethnographic research in south africa. this suggests that genetic diaspora is a failed project of connection. but despite the almost complete absence of jews, lemba production of genomic knowledge thrived among themselves, while the image of jewish connection continues to be promoted to american jews in television documentaries, on the internet, and through speaking tours that emphasize a lemba jewishness that is both genetic and religious. ephraim selamolela’s hopeful business vision of a thriving bhubah game lodge and the ongoing international promotion of the idea of the lemba as jews demand an understanding of genetic diaspora as a partially failed, and yet also always potentially emergent, project of connection. the convergence of diaspora and genomics examined here is a complex site of aspiration for social and political belonging. actors like jewish teachers and researchers and lemba leaders and their constituents each attempt to communicate their divergent, situated knowledge (haraway 1988) of what they understand to be a collective, trans-situational self, and in doing so reconstitute relationships between biology and culture while also reconfiguring the possibilities and the politics of precarious connection. the ongoing interplay between failure and potential emergence that i have illustrated illuminates a wide range of attempts at connection, genetic and otherwise, in which identification and difference entwine. we can thus think of genetic diaspora as one example of the precarity of connection on unequal ground. for lemba south africans, both the disconnections and the connections of genetic diaspora mattered. whether i was being asked or being told about our jewish connections, i was also invariably being asked to reexamine my own knowledge about jews to account for lemba histories. ultimately, disconnections like those between my existing knowledge and theirs provided possibilities through which new knowledge about genes and jews could be produced and circulated. diaspora emerges here as a site through which knowledge is contested, and dna as an opportunity to rewrite the meaning of race, religion, and culture. months after i met hilda mpaketsane at the wedding, and after i had stayed at her home with her family, we had the following conversation: hm: “you say you are a jew; what tribe are you from?” nt: “i don’t know which tribe, just that i am a jew.” hm: “is that like black … or like being pedi?” nt: “it is complicated because it is more than one thing. … what is lemba? is it like pedi?” hm: “not exactly. you see, we did not come from this place and now we are scattered.” hilda then recounted for me how lemba people came to be where they are: they followed a star, and each time the star rested, they stayed and settled there. for lemba south africans, having jewish blood confirms their oral history of migration, and it also confirms their distinctness as an indigenous african people, different from other ethnic groups but also belonging along with them to the continent of africa and to the south african state. so while the genetic tests have aimed to determine the jewishness of the lemba, i found that lemba south africans actually feel more compelled by the africanness of jewish history, culture, and identity. notes acknowledgments this article would not have been possible without the generosity and patience of those who shared with me their accounts of and visions for lemba–jewish connections. i thank those mentioned by name in the text, as well as the many others who facilitated and participated in my research. the leadership of the lemba cultural association graciously gave me permission to conduct research, as did kgoshi mpaketsane. john mpaketsane and his family hosted me throughout my research. research and writing for this article was supported by fulbright iie, the wits institute for social and economic research (wiser) at the university of the witswatersrand in johannesburg, south africa, the african and african diaspora studies program at boston college, and the penn humanities forum at the university of pennsylvania. members of the life (un)ltd. workshop at ucla’s center for the study of women, duke university’s department of anthropology, the university of pennsylvania’s penn humanities forum and the race and empire working group, as well as brandeis university’s department of anthropology provided generous and generative discussions and commentaries on versions of this article. for their careful engagement, i thank juno parren˜as, kamari clarke, deb thomas, john jackson, lisa rofel, mark anderson, carolyn martin shaw, eric worby, rhacel parren˜as, celine shimizu, rita barnard, monica kim, elidor mehilli, laurent dissard, rosen djagalov, nichole carelock, jerry miller, david byers, ellen schattschneider, janet mcintosh, elizabeth ferry, harris solomon, randy matory, rachel lee, and kim tallbear. i also thank the two anonymous cultural anthropology reviewers for insightful and productive suggestions, and the editors anne allison and charlie piot for their support and guidance. 1. the bride’s brother, john mpaketsane, was also present for part of this conversation. 2. tudor parfitt is a jewish studies scholar who began researching the lemba in the late 1980s. he collected samples for the second lemba dna study and is listed as the second author of that study (parfitt 2000; thomas et al. 2000). 3. as a government ethnologist, van warmelo compiled language and cultural surveys of africans to facilitate colonial rule. the discrete groupings that he described formed the basic units of apartheid policies of separate development (lekgoathi 2009). although van warmelo included the lemba as a distinct group in his surveys, he also noted that they did not have chiefs, no longer spoke a distinct language, and were few in number (van warmelo 1935, 1937, 1974). under apartheid, manipulations of chieftaincy escalated, and the idea that language and nation were one became part of the ideological apparatus of the homeland system (beinart and dubow 1995). the lemba became ethnically subordinate within homelands designated for the venda and the pedi, both demographically larger groups with distinct languages and hierarchical structures of chieftaincy (tamarkin 2011). see lekgoathi (2009) for a detailed analysis of the coproduction of cultural and political knowledge between van warmelo and the africans with whom he worked. van warmelo worked closely for decades with the lemba researcher w. m. d. phophi (van warmelo and phophi 1967), and motenda’s first publication occurred in one of van warmelo’s edited collections (motenda 1940). 4. the ethnomusicologist margaret nabarro facilitated the first genetic study; she had been working with the lemba since the 1960s (william masala, interview with the author, sinthumule, south africa, october 16, 2005). parfitt facilitated the second study after nearly a decade investigating lemba origins (parfitt 2000). 5. see donna haraway (2008) on co-constitution and sheila jasanoff (2004) on coproduction. my point here is twofold: it is not just that science and society coproduce one another but also that scientists and those they rely on for samples and stories co-constitute genetic data, which i understand as material-semiotic (haraway 1997). 6. these are the same lemba characteristics noted by missionaries and others as proof that the lemba might be jews. the assertion that these practices are un-african tethers culture to place, while also erasing african practices of endogamy, food taboos, ritual slaughter, and circumcision. 7. dr. rudo mathivha, interview with author, johannesburg, south africa, september 1, 2013. 8. a haplotype is a group of alleles with a distinct mutation; they become “modal” through their presence at a greater frequency in any given group when compared to any other group that has been deemed relevant within a particular study. as a measure of relative frequencies, modal haplotypes thus say more about the classificatory interests of the researchers than they do about biologically or historically significant relationships in and of themselves. haplotypes have been useful to geneticists looking to measure ancestry probabilities, because they represent a very small, and therefore easily measurable, amount of genetic data, often with no discernable biological significance per se. nevertheless, once haplotypes are identified, they are imbued with classificatory power, which easily slips into claims about biological or historical significance. it is thus necessary to interrogate a methodology that has the effect of granting disproportionate importance to such a small amount of genetic data to find a statistically significant link among certain populations that also marks them as different from others. for example, while the cmh has been used in the lemba study and in earlier studies to highlight similarities among jews and differences between jews and others, other genetic loci could demonstrate opposite results, and would have if researchers had been interested in demonstrating other relationships. the small number of samples also lends itself to potentially misleading interpretations. in this study, 136 lemba samples were collected, and 108 of those were labeled according to clan affiliation. about half of the lemba clans are represented by 10 samples or more. the bhubha clan is one of these, represented here with 13 samples, 7 of which showed the cmh as it was defined in this study. in total, the cmh was found on 11 lemba y-chromosomes. see also abu el-haj (2012) on the significance of the cmh in the larger context of jewish genetics, and palmié (2007) for an analysis of tautological research design in genetic ancestry testing. 9. m. j. mungulwa, interview with the author, thohoyandau, south africa, november 2, 2006. 10. nadia abu el-haj (2012) argues that in the view of its practitioners, genetic history reinterprets the relationship between biology and culture: from their perspective, instead of culture being biologically determined, biology inadvertently retains historical evidence. 11. minutes of lca executive meeting, august 5, 2005, f.c. raulinga personal archives. 12. a yarmulke is a head covering, and a tallis, also spelled tallit, talit, or tallith, is a shawl wrapped around one’s shoulders. tefillin are small black boxes containing written prayers that are fixed to one’s body with leather straps. 13. i draw here from anna tsing’s friction (2005), specifically on how different actors can come together through and for a social movement that is 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hammond-tooke, 56–84. london: routledge & kegan paul. van warmelo, n. j., and w. m. d. phophi 1967 venda law. pretoria: government printer. williams, j. michael 2010 chieftaincy, the state, and democracy: political legitimacy in post-apartheid south africa. bloomington: indiana university press. taking love seriously in human-plant relations in mozambique taking love seriously in human-plant relations in mozambique: toward an anthropology of affective encounters julie soleil archambault university of oxford http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1216-6801 behind the tall palm-leaf fences that compartmentalize domestic space in inhambane hide luxurious gardens. home to bougainvillea, hibiscus, crotons, impatiens, aloes, and other succulent plants,1 these gardens are valued for their aesthetic qualities. “we grow plants because plants are beautiful, to embellish the yard,” i am told. some gardens have flower beds lined with coconut shells or empty beer bottles buried neck-deep into the sandy soil. others are bedecked with wind chimes made of old compact discs and hanging nuts and bolts that jingle in the breeze. jack goody (1993), who once observed that there were no flowers in africa, would have been impressed had he made it to this sleepy town in southern mozambique where ornamental plants are a visible feature of the urban landscape, albeit one that blends in more than it stands out. in the city center, the front lawns of government offices, schools, churches, and gas stations have all undergone some degree of landscaping, and most institutions have their resident gardeners. the private gardens i am interested in are usually also under the care of a specific individual who answers requests for cuttings and who seeks out, in everyday meanderings, new species to add to his or her collection. indeed, plants are also inconspicuously present as moving objects that traverse the city from a workplace, the yard of a relative, or straight from the bush to one’s own yard, and, every so often, from several yards to the graveyard. plants in inhambane are remarkably mobile for things with roots, and they are often kept in bags, for want of flowerpots, in part to facilitate this circulation. plants inspire deeply romantic commentaries that speak of authenticity and attachment. in fact, gardeners articulate their engagement with plants as guided by an overriding principle: “the love of plants” (o amor das plantas).2 they also construct their human-plant relations as markedly different from their interpersonal relationships. unlike intimate relationships between lovers and relatives, which are seen as tainted by ulterior motives, human-plant relations are understood as far more authentic. what makes human-plant relations in inhambane even more ethnographically intriguing is that the most romantic gardeners tend to be either young men or older women. figure 1. kenneth’s garden, winter 2013. photo by julie archambault. when i first met kenneth nearly ten years ago, he was living with his mother and younger sister, taninha, on a small piece of land belonging to a distant relative. kenneth had recently graduated from high school and was, at the time, “not doing anything,” as he himself put it. like other young men in the neighborhood, he felt idle and restless. he did, however, devote much time and affection to looking after his garden. “my plants are my lovers [minhas plantas são minhas damas],” he liked to say, with a straight face. kenneth would start the day by doing a spot of gardening, dead-heading wilted flowers or straightening the trellis used to prop up his climbers and watering the garden before it became too hot, though he sometimes entrusted the watering to taninha. at the time, the household still relied on the public tap a short distance away for its water needs, and carting water was taninha’s job. tucked away behind a tall palm-leaf fence, kenneth’s garden was strikingly beautiful. most afternoons, young men from the neighborhood would congregate under the shade of his acacia to hang out, smoke marijuana, and lift weights. i initially found it endearing that this young man had such a soft spot for ornamental plants. kenneth’s love of plants, like that of other young men in the neighborhood, added nuance to the mainstream model of masculinity with its expectations of virility and financial independence (archambault 2013). what i found intriguing was not so much the fact that these young men enjoyed gardening, but more specifically how they experienced and constructed their relationships with plants as profoundly affective, as driven, as i said, by love. to make sense of human-plant relations in inhambane, i engage with the growing posthumanist literature on multispecies ethnography (kirksey and helmreich 2010) and the questions it raises about human exceptionalism and how we approach our entanglements with other-than-human beings. my analysis of human-plant relations in inhambane is informed by my wider interest in affective encounters, in the transformative potential of everyday engagement with the material world. i also draw on debates spawned by the ontological turn, namely, the renewed interest in anthropology’s commitment in taking seriously the propositions of others. matei candea (2011, 147), following eduardo viveiros de castro, describes taking something seriously as “a self-imposed suspension of the desire to explicate the other, to verify the other’s possible world.” for example, in her work on indigenous cosmopolitics in the andes, marisol de la cadena (2010, 361) proposes to take peoples’ relationships with the mountain ausangate seriously, by which she specifies that she means “literally, rather than metaphorically.” the ontological turn thus calls for an exploration into the literal rather than the metaphorical, for a suspension of skepticism. it proposes a radical rethinking of alterity by encouraging us to consider the possibility of other worlds and therefore to move beyond the more classic recognition of other worldviews (carrithers et al. 2010, 175). what would it entail, then, to take the love of plants in inhambane seriously? in this essay, i frame my analysis of human-plant relations around the following question: should the statement “my plants are my lovers” be understood as an ontological proposition or as a metaphorical one? in other words, should the statement be taken literally or as speaking of something else? as i show below, human-plant relations in inhambane deserve to be understood as ontological relations in their own right, even if these relations are not always with particular plants but rather with plants more generally. gardeners may love specific plants more than others, and such preferences may vary over time, but they also see themselves as plant lovers in a more general sense. gardeners also commonly highlight aesthetics over utility, by emphasizing that they cultivate ornamental plants for their beauty, for the love of plants, rather than for their commercial value, or for their medicinal or nutritional properties. gardening, in other words, is pursued for its own sake. my ethnography does, however, suggest that the love of plants is also constructed as a response to the commodification of intimacy. when kenneth described his plants as his lovers, he also meant it as a critique of the politics of love and intimacy in a postsocialist, postwar economy marred by deceit and growing inequality. indeed, ontology and politics need not necessarily be mutually exclusive (see also holbraad, pedersen, and viveiros de castro 2014). taking the love of plants seriously therefore implies understanding the statement “my plants are my lovers” both literally and metaphorically. i start by positioning my analysis within posthumanist debates and multispecies research, and define what i mean by affective encounters. i show how the form and texture of human-plant relations in inhambane has to be understood against the backdrop of the region’s particular social and historical geographies. one section, “cultivating affect,” therefore looks at human-plant relations as ontological relations, while the next section, “unearthing the roots of love,” approaches the love of plants as a response to, and critique of, the commodification of intimacy. in the final section, i show how the love of plants is also productive of new social relations among fellow gardeners which are themselves modeled on human-plant relations, and conclude by proposing wider applications to the notion of affective encounters. my broader aim is to offer insight into how new intimacies, new ways of being and relating, emerge and take shape. taking propositions seriously one of anthropology’s responses to the critique of human-centered epistemologies has been to start paying careful attention to everyday engagement with other-than-human beings and things (de la cadena 2010) and to promote “multispecies ethnography” (kirksey and helmreich 2010). insects (raffles 2010), forests (kohn 2013), plants (degnen 2009; hitchings 2010), and other beings that stand at the edges of animacy, such as fungi (tsing 2010), toxins (chen 2011), marine microbes (helmreich 2009), and the microorganisms that participate in the making of raw-milk cheese (paxson 2008), have inspired an “anthropology beyond the human” (kohn 2013) that proposes a radical rethinking of human exceptionalism. multispecies ethnography, and posthumanism more broadly, raise pressing questions about the future direction(s) of anthropology. these are exciting times: while the move beyond human-centered epistemologies is gaining traction in the social sciences, discussions around the anthropocene have placed humans at the center of environmental change. interrogating our multispecies existence, donna haraway (2008) highlights the intrinsically relational nature of processes of becoming and points to how engagement with other-than-human beings inspires new ways of relating. building on haraway’s insights, and writing against science and technology’s object-oriented ontology, eduardo kohn (2013, 132) insists on the distinction between objects and other-than-human beings for, unlike objects, other-than-human beings including plants are “selves, that is, beings with a point of view.” my understanding of human-plant relations is very much inspired by this literature. like kohn (2013, 221), who writes that “that which lies ‘beyond’ the human also sustains us and makes us the beings we are and those we might become,” i am also interested in how we “become with” (haraway 2008, 3), in how our engagement with the material world makes us who we are. i do, however, depart from this posthumanist literature in two significant ways. first, i make a case for the continued relevance of anthropocentric analysis. gardeners in inhambane recognize that plants have an effect on them and on the environment—they bring them joy and inspiration, and they purify the air—and experience their engagement with plants in profoundly affective ways. yet although they love their plants very much, they have no interest in trying to see the world from a plant’s-eye view—and nor do i, for that matter. my inquiry into human-plant relations remains focused on human experience and by no means attempts to offer insight into the plants’ perspective(s). i prefer to bracket, as others have done when looking at interspecies interactions, questions of intentionality and agency (candea 2010; gell 1998; haraway 2008). second, while i find the distinction between other-than-human beings, or selves, and objects descriptively significant, it is, in my view, analytically more useful to consider affective encounters with plants alongside affective encounters with things. the anthropology of affective encounters that i wish to put forth not only takes everyday engagement with the material world seriously; it also pays careful attention to the product of such encounters to better understand emergent and entrenched ways of being and relating. affect, according to contemporary readings of baruch spinoza’s ethics, is the “power to ‘affect and be affected’” (massumi 2015, ix; see also deleuze and guattari 1988). affect scholars understand affect as a “shared” (berlant 2011, 15), autonomous force (massumi 2002; but see ahmed 2010) that exudes transformative, or at least productive, potential (mcgrail, davie-kessler, and guffin 2013). in kathleen stewart’s (2007, 128) words, affects are “moving forces.” a focus on affect addresses certain aspects of posthumanist critique by challenging the deep-seated view of the self-contained individual (brennan 2004). it also opens up possibilities for thinking about the effects of other-than-human beings and things without having to engage in uncomfortable discussions around agency. much of the literature on affect recognizes that the capacity to affect and be affected becomes manifest through particular encounters (stewart 2007).3 for example, in his work on tamil films, anand pandian (2011, 52) explores the “autonomous powers of landscape and affect” to explain what makes some films more moving than others. for pandian (2011, 54), affective encounters—between filmmakers and potential frames, as well as between films and spectators—are in part the product of the affective qualities of the landscape, which, as he shows, “exceed and escape the intentions of their makers.” plants, like landscapes, also generate a particular affect. that said, not everyone is moved by plants; in fact, some are left entirely indifferent. affect, in other words, may move different people differently. massumi’s (2002, 61) distinction between affect as an autonomous force and emotion as a “recognized affect” offers a useful way of addressing this conundrum. i propose to explore these recognized affects through a focus on encounters. a study of affective encounters is concerned with the product of human engagement with this autonomous force. it recognises what sara ahmed (2010, 22) describes as “the messiness of the experiential” to explore “how we are touched by what comes near.” an encounter, a meeting with someone or with something, is affective when it triggers some sort of effect; when it inspires, unsettles, troubles, moves, arouses, motivates, and/or impresses. if some affective encounters remain trivial, others can be life-changing. encounters, in other words, are punctual events that can have enduring effects. gardeners in inhambane talk about how they came to love plants, about how they encountered plants—often after being introduced to gardening by a fellow gardener—and they also talk about more specific encounters with particular plants. like any kind of encounter, affective encounters never take place in a vacuum. rather, affective encounters are shaped by the particular sociohistorical geographies within which they are embedded. an anthropology of affective encounters takes everyday engagement with other-than-human beings and things seriously, while also paying careful attention to what such encounters produce. gardening in inhambane: the legacy of a particular colonial encounter gardening has been understood as an outlet for the display of status and as a site for the crafting of gender and class identity (bhatti and church 2001; chevalier 1998), as epitomized by the manicured lawns of suburban america (jenkins 1994). in inhambane, gardening is performative of a particular urban sensibility traced back to portuguese influence. when jack goody (1993) stated in the culture of flowers that there were no flowers in africa, he meant that there were, to his knowledge, no african societies with an indigenous culture of flowers and that the rare cases of flower cultivation he had identified were the result of foreign influence. although his thesis on the absence of flowers in africa was deeply problematic, it did rest on a valuable empirical observation. the cut-flower industry in kenya (dolan 2007; hughes 2000), like the uptake of ikebana in kinshasa (lambertz, forthcoming), to give only two examples, point to foreign influences. in inhambane, gardeners readily recognize having inherited their love of ornamental plants from the portuguese. inhambane’s wide, acacia-lined avenues and decaying art deco buildings stand as reminders of more prosperous days when the city was home to a sizeable population of portuguese settlers. prior to mozambique’s independence in 1975, the city also had a relatively high number of assimilados, or africans who had acquired assimilation status.4 many of the assimilados were domestic servants working in portuguese households, in which they would have come into contact with european gardening practices. as i attempted to trace the history of gardening in the region, the people i spoke with emphasized not so much the transmission of gardening knowledge and skills as the inculcation of an aesthetic sensibility. even young people born after independence defined themselves as profoundly marked by this particular colonial legacy. “the portuguese taught us many things,” one man said, echoing others, “one of which was to appreciate beautiful things.”5 the portuguese fought hard, as part of a “biopolitics of improvement” (de la cadena 2010, 346), against the use of roots for medicinal purposes and promoted instead a purely decorative approach to plants that was embedded in broader ideas about household aesthetics and the promotion of the nuclear family. as such, although gardening requires a range of knowledge and skills—and there are scraggly gardens to prove it—gardening is understood as the expression of an aesthetic sensibility that can be learned and cultivated, just like one could, during the colonial period, learn to assimilate. gardening became both constitutive and symbolic of a civilized subjectivity. shortly after independence, a protracted civil war (1977–1992) brought wide-scale destruction, abandonment, and resettlement that, in turn, generated new forms of cohabitation, along with unprecedented pressure on urban centers. together with the nationalization of land under the banner of socialist modernization, the war further exacerbated the uncertainties of land tenure. when gardeners recount the history of gardening, they usually go back to the colonial period and gloss over the socialist/civil war period, which, with its displacement and destruction, as well as its emphasis on productivity, proved far from conducive to the culture of ornamental plants. but this omission also speaks of claims to a privileged genealogy, to a civilized status inherited from contact with portuguese settlers. today, gardening takes on new affective qualities in a postsocialist, postwar context marked by rising inequality, state retrenchment, and the ever important role of consumption in the realization of self. just like romanticism’s connection to the industrial revolution and to the scientific rationalization of nature (oerlemans 2002), the love of ornamental plants needs to be understood in relation to wider unsettling socioeconomic transformations. the city of inhambane now acts as both an administrative center and a tourist hub provisioning the nearby coastal resorts that have sprung up during the past decade. it is a quaint little town nestled into palm tree groves lapped by the indian ocean that prides itself on being the cleanest city in mozambique. even the suburbs are remarkably tidy. having absorbed most of the refugees who fled the countryside during the civil war, as well more recent waves of migrants attracted to the city in search of work and education opportunities, or simply “in search of life” (à procura da vida), the suburbs are, however, much livelier. it is in one such suburb that my research is based.6 cultivating affect like other young people throughout sub-saharan africa and beyond,7 the young men i worked with were struggling to become able and respectable adults, and more specifically, to live up to mainstream ideals of masculinity that cast men as providers. excluded from the labor economy despite holding high school diplomas, their dreams of securing an air-conditioned office job, building a house, getting married, having children and perhaps a lover or two on the side were, at best, delayed (archambault 2013). among male gardeners, aspirations for a better future were manifest in the ways in which they cared for their plants. figure 2. kenneth doing a spot of gardening, 2012. photo by julie archambault. kenneth was frustrated but nonetheless confident that he would eventually manage to move out of his mother’s household. all he needed was patience and a bit of luck. meanwhile, he kept most of his plants in plastic bags, to “control their roots,” he explained. by this, he meant two things. on the one hand, controlling roots was designed to prevent plants from spreading and taking over in the present. this was understood as good for the plants themselves. on the other hand, plants with contained roots would also be easier to move to a new location in the future. he said: “when i move out of here, i’ll want to take my plants with me.” in some cases, however, the mobility of plants in bags turned into a serious disadvantage. mundo, another young man from the neighborhood who also kept most of his plants in bags, regularly fell victim to plant theft. “guys from the neighborhood just come in my yard when they know i’m out and take a few plants [that they then sell] to buy gin,” he told me. the image of inebriated men peddling plants in the dead of night in the hopes of making a few meticais is rather uncanny. i never came across any of them myself, but i did witness how the memory of recently stolen plants lived on through the empty spaces they had left behind in mundo’s garden. gardening may not spontaneously conjure up ideas of mobility, as engagement with the landscape tends to be tied to place-making and belonging, but plants in bags, in this case, spoke of the uncertainties of land tenure and of desires of domestication, ownership, and aspirations.8 the way in which gardeners cared for their plants thus offered insight into how they positioned themselves socially, spatially, and temporally. it also pointed to the ways in which human-plant relations were envisaged as long-term relationships. “my plants are my lovers,” literally when kenneth said “my plants are my lovers,” it was meant as a critique of the intimate economy in which women peddle love and affection and from which young, unemployed men like himself found themselves excluded. rather cynical about his limited financial prospects, kenneth used to say that he could not afford a lover. in a sense, “my plants are my lovers” was a joke. yet at the same time, as i came to appreciate the affective bond between kenneth and his plants, i also understood that when he described his plants as lovers, he meant that his plants commanded the same sort of time, attention, and affection that lovers normally would. the plants, in turn, loved him back through beauty and growth. in other words, his plants were quite literally his lovers. when kenneth left a few years ago to take up a job in the capital, he entrusted the care of his plants to his sister, taninha, who later told me: “whenever kenneth calls, the first thing he asks, even before inquiring about mother, is ‘how are my plants? are you watering them every day?’” taninha found it unusual, but also endearing, that her brother would ask about his plants as one would inquire about one’s relatives. she also took the responsibility very seriously. when i visited kenneth in maputo on my way back from inhambane last year, he pressed me to report back on the state of his garden. he insisted that his plants remained in his heart despite the distance. the love of plants becomes manifest through the time and energy that gardeners devote to their gardens, which often include decorative elements such as wind chimes and shaded seating areas amid the plants. i should note, however, that although gardeners commonly potter around the garden every day, gardening is not a particularly labor-intensive activity. in fact, most gardens are well looked after and tidy, but far from manicured. gardeners will also go through phases of more intense gardening and, sometimes, through phases of neglect. the last time i visited paito, a young gardener i had worked with in the past, i found his garden in an awful state. a number of his plants had died, and the place simply looked and felt unkept. “i’ve been really busy with school,” he said, to justify the state of his garden. for a plant lover like paito, an unkept garden was shameful and unfortunate, but it was not the end of the world. paito knew that when things settled, he could collect cuttings from other gardeners and start over. meanwhile, his love of plants remained unscathed. seductive plants and the question of personification inhambane gardeners are not the only ones to personify their plants. the literature suggests that personification is rather common (degnen 2009; rival 1998; gell 1998, 41). like kenneth, who described his plants as his lovers, other young male gardeners invariably dipped into the register of love to describe their relations with plants. for example, one said that he would never sell any of his plants, even in times of financial hardship, because he loved them all too much, while another explained that he was unable, when i pressed him on this, to identify his favorite plant because he loved them all equally. love is, in fact, a key trope in trans-species relations (e.g., candea 2010; degnen 2009). love, in this case, turned plants into inalienable possessions. figure 3. paito and pajo in front of paito’s garden, 2014. photo by mia strack van schyndel. one of the most romantic gardeners i had the pleasure to work with was pajo, a man in his mid-twenties whose situation was less precarious than that of other male gardeners in the neighborhood, mainly because he had inherited a piece of land from his father, on which he was living with jenny, the mother of their two children. still, with little more than a few years of primary schooling between them and no reliable source of income, the couple was struggling to get by. people in the neighborhood agreed that jenny, a feisty, well-connected young woman, nicely complemented pajo, a man of few words famous for his lovely garden and for his love of gin. pajo felt his plants had a soothing, almost therapeutic, effect on him. “when i’m upset, say after having an argument with jenny,” he explained, “i just go and spend time with my plants.” pajo used verbs such as amar (to love) and gostar (to like) in ways that spoke of profound attachment and affection to describe how he felt about particular plants. little contraptions such as hanging baskets and raised potholders were material evidence of his labor of love. like kenneth, pajo could often be found in the garden in the early morning, focused and content. when i offered him shears to thank him for collaborating in my research, his eyes welled up. he then showed me the rusty pair of scissors he had relied on for his pruning until then, and assured me that his garden would become even more beautiful. gardeners would recount their first encounter with plants as a conversion, as a process that could be traced back to a particular point in time, but which then evolved and developed its own momentum. most gardeners with whom i collaborated were initially introduced to gardening by a plant-loving friend or relative, often an aunt, who offered them their first plant. but, as they recalled how they fell in love with plants, these gardeners insisted that, although the initial interest may have been sparked by another gardener, their love of plants had soon taken on a life of its own. they also emphasized being self-taught, commonly using the word curiosity (curiosidade) to gloss over the acquisition of gardening skills and knowledge. plants were “autobiographical” (degnen 2009, 162–63),9 as particular plants became associated with specific events in a person’s life such as a move or the beginning of a new friendship; with a time when one regularly frequented a place such as a school or an office with a garden from which cuttings were harvested; with a particular state of mind when a certain plant was acquired. plants mapped out the passing of time. at the same time, gardens turned into repositories of social relations. each plant had its own story, even if some were remembered more vividly or fondly than others. as they talked me through their gardens, my plant-loving friends revealed a lot about themselves. i learned about a brother who was working in zimbabwe, the one who had brought these rose bushes on a visit a few years ago; about grandparents who came from guiua, a fertile area on the river mutamba, where these impatiens were found; or about a fellow gardener who lived on the other side of town. if plants were invested with any form of agency, it was their power to elicit wonder, their capacity to seduce—in a word, their affect—that gardeners emphasized, rather than the idea commonly found among gardeners in england, for example, that plants have a mind of their own (degnen 2009). this was evident in the language used to describe plants as shining, for example, in the sense of standing out from the crowd, not unlike how one would speak of a beautiful woman. detailing his love of plants, pajo told me: “i know the plant i love the most [at any one time], because it’s the one i look after the most, the first one i notice when i get up in the morning. at the moment,” he concluded, pointing to an average-looking plant, “it’s this one. i like it because it has heart-shaped leaves.” in some cases, like in the one mentioned above, specific plants were singled out as particularly special, but in other cases, gardeners emphasized the love they felt for their plants in general. more often than not, they spoke of plants in the plural. plants were understood to seduce the person who cared for them, and to compete for his or her attention simply through their beauty. but unlike the temptress, plants had no ulterior motives. as discussed below, the question of authenticity proved a key concern for young male gardeners excluded from the intimate economy for financial reasons. gardening in inhambane can thus be understood as an affective pursuit that men and women genuinely engage in for the love of plants and human-plant relations, as ontological relations in their own right. kenneth’s plants were literally his lovers; they seduced and commanded his love and affection. yet as i show in the next section, human-plant relations can also be approached as a response to the commodification of intimacy. unearthing the roots of love unlike in other locales where human-plant relations are modeled on social relations between people (fox 1971), in inhambane, gardeners viewed their relationships with plants not only as fundamentally different but also as better and overall more genuine than their relationships with people. while plants were described as inspiring love, people, especially intimates, were commonly described as arousing suspicion and distrust (cf. geschiere 2013). there also appeared to be a connection between the gender and generational fault lines of the “intimate economy” (archambault 2013, 89) and the uptake of gardening. on the one hand, partially owing to the unequal distribution of wealth along gender and generational lines, this intimate economy, in which sex and affection are exchanged for some sort of material gain, encourages transgenerational relationships between young women and older men (cf. hunter 2002). on the other, the most avid gardeners—young, unemployed men and middle-aged female household heads—were also among the social categories that commonly find themselves excluded from the intimate economy. if the former lacked the financial capital of older men, the latter lacked the “bodily capital” (wacquant 2004, 127) of younger women. the commodification of intimacy is part commentary about rising inequality, part commentary about gender and generational hierarchies (cole 2010; hunter 2002; thomas and cole 2009). in a place like southern mozambique, where money, sex, and affection are entangled in a complex web of expectations and obligations, young men’s exclusion from the labor economy directly impinges on their ability to participate in the intimate economy (archambault 2013). i mentioned earlier that kenneth complained that he could not afford a lover. another young man spoke of a similar experience in these terms: “there was a time when you could get a girl for a piece of candy, but girls these days want flashy cell phones and designer clothes. they only have eyes for older men [who can offer them all these things], and us youths, we just can’t compete.” despite being significantly undermined, the man-as-provider ideal, consolidated by the region’s integration into the migrant-labor economy in the twentieth century, has proven particularly resilient (ferguson 2015). the young men did not lament the ideal’s premise—they saw providing for women as undeniably part of being a man—but rather that the material component had become so central as to supersede, instead of participating in the crafting of, genuine intimacy. i repeatedly heard paraphrased a classic portuguese text taught in the primary curriculum: “nowadays there are no longer women to marry” (sebastião 1999, 50). “there are women [mulheres],” i was told, “but no woman [mulher].” women were described as “materialist,” “corrupted,” and as privileging material gain at the expense of “true feelings” (sentimentos verdadeiros). such accusations conflated women’s perceived transgression of two competing ideals of femininity: that of the respectable african woman suitable to become a wife and mother and that of the foreign-inspired girlfriend, the woman with whom one imagines building a relationship based on true love and aspirations of exclusivity, resembling anthony giddens’s (1992, 6) “pure relationship.” underpinning this yearning for genuine intimacy are competing ideals. on the one hand, young men were nostalgic of a not-so-distant past, before women became “materialist,” when marriage was believed to be a genuine and lasting union between two individuals and their families, if not always one initially based on love. on the other, they were also nostalgic of a genuine intimacy that could have been: one built on feelings of true love between a man and a woman—these are undeniably heteronormative ideals—rather than on negotiated agreements between male elders (archambault, forthcoming). young people found intimate food for thought in brazilian telenovelas, pentecostal sermons, ngo slogans, party politics, and everyday dealings with tourists and expatriates. although men were, by far, the most vocal, they were not the only ones to express unease with contemporary intimate relationships. in this social environment marred by profound suspicion and deceit, people agreed that it was impossible to know with certainty whether someone’s sentiments were genuine or simply driven by ulterior motives, whether one loved “for real” (se ama de verdade) or whether he or she was only pretending to love (disfarçar). while men complained that women pursued material interests above all else, women, for their part, felt that men were always trying to lure them into bed under false claims of true love. young people emphasized the importance of proceeding with caution, of concealing one’s feelings, especially if these were genuine, as transparency would place one in a position of vulnerability. they worried that intimate relationships were inevitably characterized by deceit, as feelings were downplayed, falsified, or altogether fabricated so as to gain some sort of benefit. while critics have argued that the commodification of intimacy need not necessarily translate into a diluted or counterfeit form of intimacy (bernstein 2007; constable 2009), it certainly feels this way for young people in inhambane, especially for men too poor to play the game. commodification unsettles intimacy in various ways and, as peter geschiere (2013, 67) writes, it “seems to trigger a search for new intimacies.” this is where gardening comes in. what i argue is not that the commodification of intimacy has led young men, in their search for new affections, to fall in love with plants—falling in love with plants is contingent, not reactive—but rather that human-plant relations are not only experienced and constructed in contrast to commodified forms of intimacies. they also, in turn, offer a template for new interpersonal intimacies. debates around the commodification of intimacy in sub-saharan africa have a long history. as lynn thomas and jennifer cole (2009, 23) write, “africans have long forged intimate attachments through exchange relationships. they have also long grappled with the ways in which monetization strains this practice.” but the shape and texture of these debates is changing as young people borrow from new repertoires to redefine understandings of intimacy. gardening, as a profoundly affective activity, is inspiring different ways of relating and being intimate. “my plants are my lovers,” metaphorically when taken as a metaphor, the statement “my plants are my lovers” truly captures the challenges faced by young men “too poor to afford a lover.” but what, then, is in a metaphor? in his work on sorcery, harry west (2007, 36), following the linguist david sapir, argues that “the metaphor works not only because it links two separate semantic domains . . . but also because it calls attention to the chasm between the[m]” (see also kohn 2013, 141). the metaphor of plants as lovers offers a cynical take on men’s experiences of exclusion from the intimate economy. but it also conjures up alternative visions of intimacy. plant intimacy, then, is not so much a substitute for interpersonal intimacy as an idealized form of intimacy. this idealization of human-plant relations also applies to relations between kin. for example, vivi, a widowed woman in her late fifties, told me in no uncertain terms that she loved her plants more than her children, not like her children. she explained that the privileged relationship she had with her plants was a source of contention among her children, who expressed feelings of jealousy. “mother,” she quoted them saying, “you care more for your plants than you care for us.” unlike children who easily turn against their parents and accuse them of being witches (see also geschiere 2013), and unlike lovers who inevitably deceive, plants seem to offer a more authentic form of intimacy, an innocuous intimacy untainted by ulterior motives. human-plant relations are what gardeners wish their relationships with people could be. gardening thus not only creates meaningful human-plant relations; it also inspires novel templates of intimacy. gardens are “bloom-spaces,” following gregory seigworth and melissa gregg’s (2010, 9) apt formulation of affective spaces charged with promises (and threats). gardens are also heterotopic spaces (foucault 1986), spaces of affective encounters from which the contours of reality become, through contrast, more visible, and from which alternative ways of being and relating are imagined and tested. nor does it end here. gardening also creates social relations among fellow gardeners drawn together by the love of plants and by a shared refusal of commodification. constantly on the lookout for new plant species, gardeners keep a mental inventory of those grown by fellow gardeners. there is a small network of plant lovers across the city whose members exchange seeds and cuttings among themselves. on a recent trip to inhambane, i visited paito, a young male gardener who, like the other gardeners introduced above, was living as a dependent in a female-headed household. it was still early in the morning, and i noticed a large sack full of fresh cuttings propped up against the kitchen wall. “i just got these from my aunt,” paito explained, preempting my question. “i already have a space reserved for them, right here,” he added, pointing to the front of the yard. “i want to create a new aspect [um novo aspecto], something beautiful,” he continued, before adding: “i wish i could cover my entire yard in plants . . . the entire neighborhood, even.” back from his gardening daydream, paito gave details of how he had first fallen in love with plants. “it was pajo who gave me my first plant a few years ago. but since then, i’ve acquired many varieties,” paito went on to specify. both paito and pajo were also friends with maria, a woman in her late forties who lived on the other side of town and was well known for her beautiful garden. whenever they visited her, the young men would come back with a few cuttings to transplant to their own gardens. paito was planning to offer maria cuttings of a plant he knew “was missing from her garden,” as he put it. this small network of individuals who shared the love of plants brought together young men and older women in like-to-like exchanges. the contrast with transgenerational relations between older men and younger women characteristic of the intimate economy was not lost on anyone. in a sense, the template for a more authentic form of sociality forged through human-plant relationships was being rehearsed among gardeners themselves. gardening thus created social relations inspired by the affective bond between gardeners and their plants. authenticity above ground the love of plants was not only imagined in contrast to the commodification of intimacy; it also inspired a refusal of the commodification of plants themselves. in this final section, i bring the two previous ones together by showing how gardeners’ unease with the sale of plants constitutes both an affective, authentic response and a stance in favor of authenticity. not everyone in inhambane loved plants like kenneth, pajo, and paito. in fact, many could not have cared less about gardening. in contrast to her boyfriend’s love of plants, jenny’s take on gardening was much more pragmatic, far less affective. in fact, she wished pajo would agree to sell a plant or two every now and then. “i can never convince him to sell any of his plants,” she told me. “even when people come knocking, wanting to buy, he refuses.” in his defense, pajo interjected: “you see, each plant is unique, so if i sell one, or if someone steals one, for sure i’ll end up missing it. that’s why i much prefer to give out cuttings. that way i don’t have to part with the whole thing. if you sell your plants, you’re selling your inspiration. and a cutting, well, you just can’t sell a cutting.” although selling a plant or two every now and then would have made financial sense, it was, for pajo, simply inconceivable to do so. his love of plants trumped his love of gin in a powerful way. adopting an uncompromising position against the commodification of plants, gardeners like pajo insisted that plants should either be offered as gifts or exchanged, cutting for cutting, seed for seed. figure 4. pajo and jenny, 2014. photo by mia strack van schyndel. the “commodification of nature” (bhatti and church 2001, 365) instigated by the garden industry in the north atlantic world, and which is also visible in some parts of south africa (comaroff and comaroff 2001), has made little headway in mozambique.10 in recent years, however, a growing number of people have started selling plants for an emerging market fueled mainly by the municipal government and by a growing expatriate community. although passionate gardeners like pajo and paito felt that running a plant business was a noble idea— “better than robbing for a living,” they agreed—both insisted that those who sold plants did not “grow plants for the love of plants,” as they put it. that said, plant sellers were not seen as antisocial or as morally misguided. they were understood simply to operate in ways similar to fruit and vegetable sellers. in other words, what plant lovers emphasized was not so much the transgression of a discrete sphere of exchange (ferguson 1990; shipton 1989) as the reaffirmation of a personal stance, one driven by an affective connection with plants that was experienced and imagined as based on true love and that therefore precluded seeing plants for their commercial value. in the rare cases when plant lovers did end up exchanging plants for money, they turned to the language of the gift to palliate this transgression. tania, a woman in her early fifties who described herself as a florist, had a garden with various flowering varieties, including several rose bushes and carnations of different colors and sizes. whenever there was a death in the neighborhood, people would come knocking on her door, asking for flowers to take to the cemetery.11 aware of the demand and feeling the strain on her own plants, tania eventually started growing flowers in a machamba, a small field normally used to grow vegetables, specifically for this purpose. before long, she was catering for much of the local funerary demand in flowers. she insisted, however, that people gave her money to thank her (para agradecer), and that she was therefore not technically selling flowers (não é vender). figure 5. a grave shortly after the deposição de flores at the municipal cemetery in inhambane, 2014. photo by mia strack van schyndel. sueck, a man in his thirties who had recently started a small plant business, spoke of a similar unease with the thought of selling plants. he told me: “i can’t really say that i’m selling plants, you see, because a seed is something natural that has been passed from generation to generation. instead, people give me what they can afford, money for bread [dinheiro de pão].” the expression “money for bread” is commonly used to render certain transactions morally acceptable, socially sensitive, and to distance them from the crude logic of market principles. for example, the money a man gives his lover is usually constructed as money for something specific—money for breakfast, school fees, medicine for an ailing relative, or simply money for bread—rather than as a payment that would make the exchange feel like a transaction and therefore too much like prostitution (archambault 2013). for romantic gardeners like pajo, however, plants were simply meant to evade, as affectively charged other-than-human beings, these sorts of falsified exchanges. if selling plants was out of the question, so was growing plants for anything other than their aesthetic qualities. the medicinal value of plants stood out as a key fault line separating those who shared the love of plants from those who had a more instrumental, less affective, relationship with plants. and while plants left someone like jenny indifferent, it triggered a sense of danger among others who saw the introduction of something “from the bush” (do mato) into the domestic space of the yard as fundamentally transgressive. osvaldo, a young man originally from massinga, a rural district north of inhambane, who grew up in the city, spoke of his unsuccessful attempts at converting his cousins back home to the joys of gardening. he told me: “whenever i visit, i bring them cuttings of my own plants as gifts, but they don’t want to know.” to osvaldo’s dismay, his cousins’ appreciation of plants was essentially pharmacopic, an affordance that they could easily tap into by harvesting wild plants without having to transgress the boundary between the home and the bush. although some of the ornamental plants found in inhambane have medicinal properties, gardeners emphasized that they grew them first and foremost for their aesthetic qualities. “i grow plants because plants are beautiful” or “i grow plants because i love plants,” were the most common responses to questions about the rationale behind the culture of ornamental plants. by downplaying, negating even, a utilitarian rationale, gardeners made claims of authenticity and highlighted more specifically that their love of plants was free of ulterior motives. gardeners not only experienced human-plant relations as affectively genuine but also felt compelled to honor such authenticity through practice. there are interesting dualisms at play here. unlike ornamental plants whose aesthetic potency lies visible, above the surface of the earth, the medicinal and/or occult properties of plants are usually contained in their roots, hidden underground.12 in a sense, the impenetrable world of interpersonal intimacy—with its suspicion, distrust, and deceit—shares features with the invisible realm of the occult. in the visible world of ornamental plants, in contrast, things are what they seem. or, at least, things are closer to what they seem. they are above ground, authentic. conclusion when kenneth describes his plants as his lovers, should he be taken literally or metaphorically? should human-plant relations be understood as ontological relations in their own right or as a response to the commodification of intimacy? how one answers these questions depends on one’s theoretical inclinations. in my view, however, and as my ethnography of human-plant relations suggests, these two perspectives need not be mutually exclusive. in inhambane, gardening is simultaneously constructed as evidence of a particular aesthetic sensibility inherited from the portuguese, imagined as a response to the commodification of intimacy, and experienced as a profoundly affective and genuine pursuit. indeed, a cumulative approach (cf. navaro-yashin 2012) not only offers a richer analysis of human-plant relations in inhambane but it also stays true, or truer, to the ethnography. kenneth would agree: his plants are his lovers both literally and metaphorically. it is no coincidence that the losers in the intimate economy are also among those who take up gardening most passionately. gardening is, to some extent, redemptive for the young men who struggle to live up to mainstream ideals of masculinity. it also offers an outlet for their desire to provide and care for others, while conferring a sense of authorship. having said this, i believe that there is more to human-plant relations in inhambane than a form of response to, or protest against, the commodification of intimacy. my ethnography suggests that falling in love with plants is far too affective to be reduced to such an interpretation. people in inhambane do not fall in love with plants to fill a void. love emerges though contingent affective encounters, albeit ones that are socioculturally inflected. these affective encounters inspire novel ways of being and relating that are articulated and contrasted with experiences of commodification and exclusion. the city’s recent history, from a portuguese settler town to a place wrestling with growing inequality and the commodification of intimacy, has participated in the construction of gardening as a purely aesthetic and intrinsically affective pursuit. human-plant relations in inhambane are not only ontological relations; they also offer a template for alternative, more genuine ways of being intimate, while fostering social relations based on this alternative ideal. as living beings, plants are particular kinds of things that possess, as eduardo kohn (2013, 92) points out, “distinctive characteristics that make them selves.” while i agree that the shape and texture of human-plant relations is influenced by the very nature of plants as living things, the anthropology of affective encounters put forth here is more interested in the product, the affect, of such encounters than in the task of classification. in my view, the transformative potential of plants, the affect they generate, makes them comparable to other nonliving but also moving, affecting things. i side with bruno latour (2004, 205) who writes that “to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans.” new intimacies can emerge from various forms of encounter. for example, mass media inspires new ways of thinking about love and intimacy (thomas and cole 2009; ginsburg, abu-lughod, and larkin 2002; larkin 1997), while digital media open up virtual spaces within which alternative forms of intimacy can be negotiated (archambault 2012; bernstein 2007). but inspiration can also crop up in more unusual places, through affective encounters with things and other beings such as cuddly animals (candea 2010), a particular australian shepherd (haraway 2008), or toxic toxins (chen 2011)—even if some encounters are arguably more affecting than others (cf. stewart 2007). indeed, it is often through affective encounters that new (and sometimes not-so-new) ways of being and relating are imagined and explored. an anthropology of affective encounters focuses on the transformative potential of everyday engagement with the material world, with moving things and other-than-human beings, to explore what it entails, or might entail, to be human. notes acknowledgments earlier versions of this paper were presented at the european conference on african studies in lisbon in 2013 and at a workshop titled “technologies of transformation,” held at the university of oxford in 2014. i thank the organizers and participants for their useful comments. i also wish to thank karin barber, jonny steinberg, elizabeth ewart, morgan clarke, and claudio sopranzetti, as well as cultural anthropology’s anonymous reviewers, for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. special thanks to dominic boyer for his insights and thoughts on how to improve the essay. the project was funded by a leverhulme early career research fellowship (ecf-2013-443), and i am grateful to the leverhulme trust for its generous support. 1. most households rely on some form of urban agriculture to make ends meet. comestible plants for personal consumption are, however, rarely grown at home. instead, they are cultivated in vegetable gardens (machambas) situated away from residential areas. 2. these gardeners would not define themselves as gardeners, since the term jardineiro is usually used in reference to professional gardeners. some male gardeners preferred to call themselves o homem das plantas (the plant man). i nonetheless refer to the individuals who partake in artisanal gardening as gardeners, mainly for the sake of clarity and flow. 3. some have explored affect as animated through human encounters (brennan 2004; stewart 2007) or as a force that arises between humans and the built environment (navaro-yashin 2012; stoler 2008). 4. the qualifying requirements for assimilation included conversion to catholicism, monogamy, employment, and mastery of the portuguese language (o’laughlin 2000). 5. others have similarly shown how assimilated africans, or évolués as they were known in francophone africa, were encouraged to appreciate flowers (hunt 1990; lambertz, forthcoming). 6. this article is based on ongoing ethnographic research in the city of inhambane since 2001, during which time gardening was a side research interest, as well as on two months of fieldwork carried out specifically on this topic in 2013 and 2014. although my analysis draws on research among both female and male gardeners, i focus here on the perspectives of young men. 7. the plight of young people struggling to live up to ideals of adulthood is the subject of a wide literature (cole 2010; dewey and brison 2012; jeffrey 2010; mains 2012; masquelier 2013; vigh 2006). 8. tenants are less likely to plant plants into the ground than land owners. tenants are also forbidden to plant trees. 9. trees are also important players in people’s biographies, especially owing to their role in staking claims over land. 10. nature is, however, very much commoditized through the extraction of natural resources, especially since the recent discoveries of oil and gas in the north of the country. my thanks go to one of the reviewers for pointing this out. 11. the christian funerary rite known as the deposition of flowers involves covering new graves with freshly cut flowers. a week later, when the deposition of flowers is repeated, some of the first flowers will have wilted and died, while others will have started taking root. 12. raizes, the portuguese word for roots, is used a generic term to refer to traditional medicine. references ahmed, sara 2010 the promise of happiness. durham, n.c.: duke university press. archambault, julie soleil 2012 “mobile phones and the ‘commercialisation’ of relationships: expressions of masculinity in southern mozambique.” in 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chicago: university of chicago press. the future of price the future of price: communicative infrastructures and the financialization of indian tea sarah besky brown university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2353-0074 surrounded by sprawling gardens and statues of horse-mounted british dignitaries, kolkata’s victoria memorial is perhaps the most iconic relic of colonial power in a city filled with them. today, in what once was the center of the raj, the kolkata police arrange diesel-stained metal road barricades to create a buffer between the capaciousness of victoria memorial’s grounds and the congestion of kolkata’s streets—from the honks of motorbikes and ambassador taxis to the smells of horse-drawn silver phaetons and fresh puchka. each of these barricades is adorned with hand-painted advertisements. these advertisements, for everything from snacks to steel, are usually unmemorable, but while i was doing fieldwork on kolkata’s tea trade in 2008 and 2009, one stood out. the lettering read “teauction.com,” and it was embossed with a little teapot. figure 1. road barricade outside of victoria memorial, december 2008. photo by sarah besky. teauction.com named an attempt to change the way indian tea was traded. tea—unlike other major commodity crops, including coffee, cotton, and sugar—is still bought and sold in open-outcry auctions, held in former imperial centers from kolkata to colombo to mombasa.1 in 2002, indian state and industry reformers launched teauction.com in hopes that its online platform would take the place of outcry auctions. for reformers, online auctioning was a first step toward the financialization of the tea market. supporters of teauction.com promised that with the implementation of digital technologies, trade would soon revolve around the buying and selling of futures contracts, not individual lots of tea. but the shift to digital auctioning, which began with the launch of teauction.com, has yet to spark the transformative break that industry reformers envisioned. among my field materials, the photo of the teauction.com advertisement on the kolkata police barricade sits amid a slew of unfulfilled pronouncements from the indian and international press about the imminent revolution that finance capital would bring to the market for the world’s most popular beverage. at the time of this writing, tea sales have not only not been fully digitized, but the indian tea trade has resisted all associated attempts at financialization, including the creation of a futures market. the global financial system is more powerful than many nation-states and individual corporations (lipuma and lee 2004, 32), but that so prominent a commodity as tea has yet to be financialized provides a unique opportunity to examine the how of financialization—the governmental and technical steps that precede futures and other kinds of derivatives trades. in this essay, i describe how, in 2009, tea brokers in kolkata experienced a renewed effort by the tea board of india, the government regulator of the tea trade, to convert auctioning from a face-to-face outcry process to a face-to-computer digital one. the goal was to break the control that brokers had over the trade. outcry brokers—a small group of well-educated middle-class men—embodied a hidden authority that seemed at odds with free and open trade. anthropologists have documented the cultural and economic volatility of financial markets, tracing the sociopolitical impact of digital trading technologies and new kinds of speculation (d’avella 2014; ho 2009; miyazaki 2013; zaloom 2006). financialization does not take the same form everywhere; sometimes, it does not really take form at all. as donald mackenzie (2006, 13–15) has argued, following william cronon (1992) and michel callon (1998), the futures market is a key site for seeing how theories about the disentanglement of commodities—a stripping away of the particularities of quality based on production—get put into action. futures markets rely on a standardized notion of price and of the things (e.g., grain, cotton, or coffee) being priced. this disentangling brings commodities into a rational trading infrastructure. the story of indian tea’s resistance to financialization shows how such standardization requires not just a disentangling of commodities at the level of productive infrastructure but also a reworking of the communicative infrastructure of trading itself. i am drawing here on julia elyachar’s (2010, 452) notion of a “social infrastructure of communicative channels.” elyachar describes women’s everyday behind-the-scenes communication and movement through cairo as constituting an infrastructure that is as important to economic life as roads and bridges. similarly, the outcry auction and its attendant tasting and valuation practices constitute a communicative infrastructure that has proven central to the circulation of indian tea for more than 150 years, if also largely hidden from public view. it is this infrastructure that indian tea industry reformers seek to reconfigure, in a process similar to caitlin zaloom’s (2006) account of how digital trading in the chicago and london financial spheres was introduced to rationalize pit trading, with its hand gestures and aggressive hypermasculine posturing. the shift from outcry to digital trading i describe here, however, is also distinct from that identified by zaloom. while zaloom’s brokers contemplated a move from outcry to digital trading in already-financialized commodities, the indian tea brokers with whom i worked were trading a commodity that was in the process of being converted, through a combination of applied economic theory and state intervention, into a commodity open to speculation. as i show below, in kolkata, financialization depended on an understanding of tea as more narrowly commensurable than brokers had previously allowed. in indian tea, the digital transition was meant to foment commensurability by reforming the ways traders produced numbers—how they, in jane guyer’s (2009) terms, “composed prices.”2 it is this change in price composition—a change that occurs in historically, technologically, and politically situated ways—that brings commodities into global financial markets. after the failure of teauction.com, the tea board of india hired a consulting firm to identify ways to ensure the long-term viability of the industry. in the firm’s own words, the role of an auction was to effect “natural price discovery” (a. f. ferguson 2004). in what follows, i describe the tea board’s rocky attempts to implement the consultants’ recommendations. in kolkata’s outcry auctions, knowledge about tea is held and cultivated in a guild-like community of brokers. the brokers who buy and sell tea are nearly all middle-class men, trained through years of apprenticeship and registered with the calcutta tea traders association (ctta). they compose price through what julia elyachar (2012) has elsewhere described as a cultivated corpus of “tacit knowledge,” ranging from tasting to soil chemistry to a specialized vocabulary for describing tea’s flavor, geographical origin, and method of production. in the space of the outcry auction, brokers collectively refine this knowledge through shared cups and clipped discussion. brokers compose price through what i call price stories, narratives about value that are tuned to specific lots of tea. by the time my fieldwork began, the fate of this colonially rooted system, like that of other more recognizable monuments to british imperialism in india, such as the victoria memorial, had become a topic of heated debate. the persistence of the outcry auction had come to represent the tea board of india’s failure to use the bureaucracy to maximize economic growth. the cloistered interpretations of the tastes and provenances of teas by a relatively small group of well-educated indian men were difficult to regulate. for tea board officials, there was no logical explanation for why some lots were aggressively fought over while others needed an auctioneer’s coaxing. brokers’ carefully crafted, guildlike pricing methods—enmeshed in what elyachar (2012, 85) calls “secrets of the trade”—seemed anathema to free markets, much less complex financial systems. their friendly personal relations indicated an entrenched, even corrupt elite capture of a potentially lucrative global market. while secrets of the trade are classically associated with a bygone era of (precapitalist) guild-based knowledge communities, in india’s tea auctions (as in those of east africa and sri lanka, which have also resisted financialization), these secrets emerged within the colonial system of capital accumulation. in place of stories, the digital auctioning platform set up a method for composing price through scenarios. scenarios limit the kinds of information available and the kinds of communicative exchanges that can take place. in price scenarios, brokers would deploy not trade secrets but the kind of tacit knowledge that, according to elyachar (2012, 86), liberal market theorists imagine as conducive to quality price discovery (see also zaloom 2003, 2006). this form of tacit knowledge is held individually, rather than collectively, and applied not to specific lots of tea, but to broad categories that encompass many presumably commensurable lots. this change in the relationship of tacit knowledge to price was a key step to financialization. reformers wanted to reassert public control over the auction—still a vestige of colonial infrastructure. like victoria memorial’s manicured gardens, the outcry auction’s esoteric language and embodied practice had to become a public good. ironically, reformers asserted this public control by embracing a free-market logic based on behavioral economics: a logic that saw a rationalized price system as the key to translating unspoken, embodied knowledge into fungible information (elyachar 2012, 86). price and the obstacles to financialization beginning in 2008, i observed the digital transition and interviewed actors on all sides—tea board bureaucrats, corporate players, multigenerational small tea businesses, and brokers. the tea board’s claims that it was creating transparency in price composition were met with brokers’ counterclaims that the digital platform itself constituted a corrupting force. these arguments reflect wider anxieties about the shift to market-oriented democracy in south asia. as william mazzarella (2006, 476) notes, digital technologies in india deployed in the project of stemming corruption are often productive of their own kinds of opacities (cf. gupta 1995; hull 2012). putting the anthropology of markets and finance into conversation with an analysis of how other colonial forms of enumeration and value stubbornly persist in the present, i underscore a struggle to come to terms not just with the legacy of colonial commodities but with the embeddedness of the colonial order in sensory regimes of gender, race, and taste (stoler 1995, 2002). that the outcry auction has been a major target for tea industry reform in india may appear somewhat surprising. explanations for tea’s resistance to financialization can easily be found in its continued entanglement in a colonial infrastructure of production (see mackenzie 2006, 13). the vast majority of indian tea is still grown on plantations, from kangra to kerala to assam. as in east africa and sri lanka, tea exported from or sold within india is not a raw commodity (like, for instance, green unroasted coffee beans). instead, it is a fully finished product. unprocessed leaves are highly perishable. each indian tea plantation contains a factory in which workers wither, ferment, roll, dry, and sort teas to give them particular flavors. a multiplicity of factory finishing methods yields a multiplicity of teas, broken down by geographical location, grade, and season. further complicating this process is the fact that tea is not an annual or seasonal harvest. tea is plucked and processed every day for ten or more months of the year. this variability leads to volatility, both in price and taste. volatility can of course be desirable in finance, but the sheer variety of different styles and grades of tea has created a sense of confusion among would-be speculators. the tea board of india’s interest in the auction can be explained in part as an effort to save it. increasingly, indian tea is sold outside the auction system. to date, direct trading or private sales have encompassed mostly specialty, fair-trade, or single-origin teas (besky 2014a).3 auctions remain the trading point for most mass-market tea. in auctions, tea is subjected to a complex method of valuation, controlled by professional brokers. the anxieties of tea board officials about the potential of this valuation process to hinder market competition can be linked to a key aspect of trade liberalization in india, namely, the tendency of the state to take an active role in the country’s move into a global speculative economy (see sunder rajan 2005, 25). the tea board, in other words, wanted to keep a hand in the composition of price. to do so, it needed to intervene in the auction: to establish that this “time-tested system” still had “inherent advantages” over private sales, including efficiency, timeliness of payment, regularity of supply, and centrality of organization (a. f. ferguson 2004, 4.4.05). the consultants were explicitly tasked with establishing ways to get more tea into auctions. much of the ethnographic material in this essay comes from india’s oldest and largest auction center, nilhat house, located a couple of miles north of the victoria memorial, in the heart of old kolkata. at nilhat house, a material plantation infrastructure converges with a communicative infrastructure of trading (elyachar 2010). for more than 150 years, most tea grown on plantations in northeast india has been sold in weekly outcry auctions in kolkata. three weeks in advance of each auction, tea plantation companies contract representatives of brokerage firms registered with the ctta to taste and evaluate their individual lots of tea. after tasting and evaluating the lots, these seller-brokers distribute a list of valuation prices, along with tea samples, to buyer-brokers from firms also registered with the ctta.4 buyer-brokers do their own tasting and evaluation to determine whether they want to bid on behalf of retail companies across the world and at what price. since its inception, the auction at nilhat house has been a closed performance, regulated at first only by the ctta, and after indian independence in 1947 by the ctta and the tea board of india. the tea board and its consultants determined that the auction was creating a barrier to financialization: that outcry trading was producing unnatural prices. according to jane guyer (2009, 203), the observation—rooted in karl marx’s (1976) notion of the commodity fetish and karl polanyi’s (2001) subsequent analysis of “fictitious commodities”—that price is not a “singular amount,” but a “composite,” a “fiction” resulting from acts of “creation, addition, and subtraction,” is now widely accepted by consumers and traders. the task of anthropological analysis, then, is to decompose price: to reveal what prices keep “hidden in plain sight” (guyer 2009, 205). classically, these hidden terms, following a polanyian analysis, would include land, labor, capital, and the state—the trappings of the tea production infrastructure that might easily be foregrounded as the main hindrance to tea’s financialization. in indian tea, these hidden terms also include the communicative infrastructure of brokerage. as an ideology, price “circumvents . . . moral and political commentary” about these elements of composition, naturalizing their arrangements (guyer 2009, 204). proponents of both the old outcry system and the new digital system freely acknowledged that prices were compositions. they differed in their view of how the human capacity to taste and judge—to act on nonquantitative knowledge—should go into those compositions. while outcry brokers mobilized a set of collectively held trade secrets, proponents of digital auctioning favored a cultivation of individually held knowledge. what michael polanyi (2009) called “tacit knowledge” needed to move from the collective, storied world of outcry auctioning to the atomized, scenario-based world of digital trading (elyachar 2012). as elyachar (2012, 80) explains, liberal market orthodoxy presumes that “quality prices”—a prerequisite for the elaboration of free markets as well as complex financial transactions—only emerge insofar as private individuals, not collectives, wield tacit knowledge. the ideal trading sphere is not a place to cultivate and share ideas about value but act on already-formed ideas. in her description of the shift from pit to digital trading, zaloom (2006, 136) notes that the market became not something a trader worked with but something he reacted to (see also preda 2006). the indian brokers with whom i worked rarely spoke directly about the market. they spoke about tea brokerage as a trade: a cultivated craft that deserved to be updated, not abolished. while rationalization and efficiency were certainly on the minds of indian reformers, outcry tea brokers saw themselves working not so much with a generalized market as with specified kinds of tea. the financialization of tea entailed work by state and industry actors to reconcile the sensory legacies of colonialism with the demands of a fast-moving global financial system. outcry auctioning and price stories mr. dey, a seller-broker with thirty years of experience, swoops into the auction room, flipping his tie over his shoulder and draping a brown-speckled white apron around his neck. working his way down a line of cups, he first lifts a saucer filled with steeped tea to his face, burying his nose in the damp aromatic leaves to breathe in the delicate essences. he slams the saucer down, reaches for the cup filled with lukewarm tea, takes three aerated sips—slurp, slurp, slurp— and spits the tea in a thin, arching stream out into a dented aluminum bucket. he then turns to his assistant. drawing from a controlled list of english adjectives that date back to the formation of the auction system in london in the seventeenth century (e.g., “cheesy,” “wiry,” “biscuity,” “knobbly”), he describes the tea’s qualities. in addition to this specialized vocabulary, he translates the sensation of that tea—the taste, touch, and smell—as well as his recollections about the color, aroma, and texture of teas that have come up for auction before, comparing this week’s lot to last week’s, grade by grade, plantation by plantation, to reach a singular number: a valuation price. the assistant follows him, pushing a large easel on which he records these qualitative and quantitative evaluations. mr. dey kicks his spit bucket down the line and repeats the procedure with the next cup. mr. dey tells me that tea is unlike coffee or wine, which are annual vintages. in tea, vintages do not correspond to years. instead, each plantation, or often section of a plantation, on a given day, constitutes a kind of vintage. each tea, from day to day and season to season, might be fired at different temperatures or fermented for variable amounts of time. this variability ensures that each lot of tea, each week, tastes differently. as a seller-broker, mr. dey’s job is to narrate this variability to make different lots of tea commensurable with one another through the metric of valuation price. university-educated and a member of several social and sporting clubs, mr. dey is a connoisseur of tea as well as of scotch whisky (he prefers laphroaig). company profiles of tea brokers tend to include brokers’ interests in cricket, football, and badminton, as well as theater and travel. while some younger brokers avoid alcohol, cigarettes, garlic, and onions for fear of damaging their palettes, mr. dey remains a committed gourmand. he has no doubt about his abilities. a broker’s work is ongoing. tastes and valuation prices fluctuate dramatically throughout the year because of what people in the tea business refer to as “flushes,” or seasons: first flush (mid-march to mid-april), second flush (mid-april to may), monsoon flush (june to august), and autumnal flush (september to november). there are several grades of leaf tea, all yielding different prices, from the highest grade, sftgfop (super fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe), and descending to ftgfop (fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe), tgfop (tippy golden flowery orange pekoe), gfop (golden flowery orange pekoe), fop (flowery orange pekoe), to op (orange pekoe), bop (broken orange pekoe), and “fannings” (tea typically found in tea bags and in many cases swept up from the factory floor). further complicating the price of tea are two production processes. there is leaf-grade, or “orthodox” tea, to which these categories apply, and ctc, or “cut-tear-curl” tea, which is rolled into little balls and sold mostly within india and the middle east (and graded using a set of terms different than those applied to orthodox tea). after tasting and valuing the long line of teas, mr. dey goes downstairs to the auction room. there, lot by lot, mr. dey—now as auctioneer—attempts to fetch something close to the valuation price he set upstairs, a number that he sees as a “natural” reflection of quality and desirability. he sits at the front of what resembles a small university lecture hall, before dozens of buyer-brokers who bid by crying out offers. the valuation price is just one of several numerical devices brokers use to distill the qualities of tea. in addition to the circulars outlining that week’s valuation prices, auction catalogs sent out by each brokerage firm connote the grade, age, warehouse location, and number of packages of each lot. the numbers in this thick paper booklet structure the interactions between seller-brokers like mr. dey and the buyer-brokers who represent retailers. the paper catalog organizes tea-producing landscapes distant from kolkata into an order that corresponds to those of grade and flavor. one by one, mr. dey brings up lots for bidding. the sale of two lots of tea sounds something like this. he calls out: “let’s move on to the clonal tip, lot 24.” a call comes from the crowd: “800.” “no, i need 1200,” mr. dey replies. “1100.” “fine. i will start at 1150.” “1150” . . . “1200” . . . “1300” . . . “no more bids?” the gavel slams. “any interest in the china?”5 “650.” “no good.” “7, sir, 7 . . .” “not on this tea, sir. let’s start the bidding at 8. 800?” in the front, a buyer nods. then another raises his pen. nods again. pen. the nodding man stares and then subtly shakes his head. the gavel slams. the fact that british merchants devised this entire auctioning and valuation system (first in london in the seventeenth century and, later, in kolkata in 1861) is well known and even celebrated. in 2012, a journalist profiling the 150th anniversary of j. thomas and company—the largest brokerage firm in kolkata and the company that managed the first tea auctions held in india—noted that “recruitment to the profession [of brokerage] is based on sound background, schooling and sportsman-like qualities. the job is generally learnt hands-on” (priyadershini s. 2012). as j. thomas’s vice-chairman told the hindu, “tea tasting even today remains the single most reliable method of evaluating a tea.” mr. dey and his colleagues trade on their ability to taste in both of pierre bourdieu’s (1984) formulations: to apply a biological sensibility as well as a social capacity to discern flavor. taste, historically embedded in the trading system of nilhat house, constitutes an obstacle that the financial system has trouble surmounting. brokers understand taste, like price, as a compositional, transactional practice that is integrated with histories of materiality as well as ideology (atkin 2010; janeja 2010). the article in the hindu refers to tea auctioning as “the gentleman’s trade,” replete with “the romance of colonial hangover” (priyadershini s. 2012). the storied price composition of outcry auctioning requires that indian brokers perform british taste (that they both belong to the right clubs and can translate sensory experience into the right vocabulary and with the right panache), but also that they cooperate—that they work with tea—to see that as many lots as possible find a buyer. brokers on both sides of these transactions are motivated to see them come to a satisfying end. buyer-brokers and seller-brokers collect fees and commissions for completed sales, but there are other motivations. despite the vagaries of weather, season, and provenance, companies demand a consistent taste in the tea blends they distribute. a tea bag of tetley always has to taste like the last bag of tetley you had. to produce consistent blends, buyer-brokers must find teas with certain qualities. most mass-marketed teas are blended in this way. a given bag of tetley has different kinds of tea in it. if you were to take two bags of tetley, the teas that go into it could be from completely different regions and completely different seasons, yet they taste the same. the seemingly abstract numbers in the auction catalog present buyer-brokers trained to read them with the ability to tell the stories of particular teas, to link the differential regime of taste with the abstract regime of price. numbers and stories distill social life into order, making things and concepts commensurable and comparable, and they allow people to make normative judgments. by giving tea a story—a chronicity—brokers come to care about each tea’s ultimate fate. chronicity, as kirin narayan (1989, 243) has argued, “gives narrative an impression of lifelikeness that can recruit imaginative empathy.” without the stories behind the catalog numbers, seller-brokers and buyer-brokers cannot arrive at a satisfactory (and lucrative) ending: a successful sale. outcry auctioning is a performance of differentiation whose object is to bring lots of tea from field to cup (callon 1998). because of the need for particular tastes, lots are often split between two or sometimes three buyer-brokers. this is achieved by calling out to the current high bidder during the auctioning of that lot to strike an amicable division of the lot, which is broken up into a certain number of packages of variable weights between parties. lot splitting ensures that each bidder gets at least some of the taste that he wants. buyer-brokers and seller-brokers know one another by name. the community of tea trading is a small one, relationships have typically been collegial, and trading decorum has been reserved, unlike the combative and even violent trading pits of chicago (zaloom 2006, 111). the gentlemanly repartee of tea brokerage is hidden from those outside nilhat house. whereas ideas about the places of production like darjeeling or assam have been made increasingly translatable outside the space of the auction, the complex set of descriptive english adjectives, weights, and measures seem opaque to outsiders. catalog numbers, then, circulate alongside terms like cheesy and biscuity. to those inside nilhat house these adjectives and numbers reflect the nature of tea, understood by individuals with a shared embodied sensibility and lexicon. they reflect a composition of price in which the sensory qualities of tea—all the things that make it taste—matter. to those outside, they reflect an archaic and colonially rooted system of secrets, of price-fixing and meddling. pricing and colonial enumeration the style of pricing i observed at nilhat house has roots not only in colonial tea trading but also in broader colonial practices of enumeration. in his work on the colonial census in india, bernard cohn (1996, 8) examines how the “enumerative modality” of colonial rule created “a particular form of certainty” by putting fluid categories into concrete form. numbers were used to chart the colonial project of improvement in an array of contexts, from health statistics to literacy rates to agriculture (arnold 2005; see also drayton 2000). census numbers, labor ledgers, and health statistics were effective in charting improvement because they rendered india’s melange of cultures, languages, and ethnicities—a melange that was, from a colonial viewpoint, wholly natural—commensurable. a discourse of improvement in colonial enumerating practices had a clear temporal component: bringing the colony out of a backward past and into a suitably modern present. as arjun appadurai (1996, 117; emphasis added) suggests: “numbers gradually became . . . part of the illusion of bureaucratic control and key to a colonial imaginary in which countable abstractions, of people and resources at every imaginable level and for every conceivable purpose, created a sense of a controllable indigenous reality.” thus, while it is possible to see the colonial project as one of cold ordering, colonial numbers can be more usefully understood as analogous to jane guyer’s (2009) price compositions, numerals that leave the conditions of their production hidden in plain sight. like prices, colonial numbers turned a differentiated population into an abstract, improvable object. as appadurai notes, these attempts at ordering and abstraction, elaborated and re-elaborated in spaces like nilhat house and its analogues in other imperial ports, became their own kind of unruly profusion. the tea auction catalog is thus one site in which the doubling of abstraction and differentiation, opacity and transparency, becomes apparent (mazzarella 2006; cf. john 2011). numbers continue to be powerful signifiers. sally merry (2011) describes global human rights indicators as increasingly popular tools for assessing social justice. these numbers represent everything from economic development to women’s rights, and they distill social phenomena into discrete, commensurable forms (see also espeland and sauder 2007; guyer 2010). these distillations have local effects, as andrea ballestero (2015) examines in the “calculation grammar” involved in water pricing in costa rica, and as harris solomon (forthcoming) notes in his critique of popular reliance on a global body mass index for the definition of obesity in india. such numbers also mask the conditions of their own composition. practices of enumeration reinforce dominant ideas about the capacity of individuals, rather than of collectivities, to manage and mitigate risks, while hiding collective histories of vulnerability. this conversion from collective yet particular forms of vulnerability to individualized abstract risk, calculable in numbers, is a hallmark of so-called market democracy, in which health, environmental, and even political behaviors have been technically and discursively divided into measurable, reflexively felt categories (elyachar 2005; paley 2001; moodie 2010; beck 1992). capitalism, too, depends on numbers to produce a sense of abstract and objective knowledge (zaloom 2006, 142; marx 1976; simmel 1978). in financial markets, numbers attest to the commensurability of both tangible things like corn and intangible things like emissions (mackenzie 2009; fourcade 2011; cronon 1992; espeland and stevens 1998). such markets allow speculation on the future values of commensurable things. speculation, however, is not a natural outgrowth of commensuration. it must be learned, as i suggest below, through the enactment of scenarios, particularly on digital platforms. the tea board saw digital auctioning as a means of opening and freeing the tea market. just as colonial bureaucratic enumeration was based on the ideal of rendering a mix of races, ethnicities, languages, and cultures transparent, digital trading technology promised to make the opaque world of valuation transparent. in south asia, the concepts of transparency and opacity have been threaded into discussions of democracy and corruption (gupta 1995; mazzarella 2006). transparency continues to be an objective of postcolonial bureaucratic governance (hull 2012). paradoxically, the tea board—a government bureaucracy—used the transparency and free markets promised in the digital auction to reassert regulatory control over the tea industry. the challenge of financialization—made all the more acute in contexts like india’s tea industry—becomes one of how to disentangle economic behavior from (gendered, ethnicized, racialized) affective sensibilities when the very thing being traded (that is, an imperial commodity like indian tea) is so deeply implicated in the sensory colonialism that paralleled the elaboration of the bureaucratic state. it is the abstractness and numerical legibility of economic categories that makes them seem democratic, yet as analiese richard and daromir rudnyckyj (2009) have shown, collective affective sensibilities drawn from religious and kinship practices consistently make regional and cultural differentiation central to the making of neoliberal subjects. in asia, colonial enumeration—from census numbers to ledger books—was entangled not just with religion and kinship but also with colonial ideas about intimacy and embodiment (stoler 1995, 2002; bear 2007). tea plantation production provides a ready example of this. discourses about the sexed and raced bodies of women plantation workers remain woven into discourses about the taste of tea (chatterjee 2001; besky 2014b). the cultivated ability of marginalized yet exoticized women laborers to coax flavor from indian tea sits in direct relationship to the cultivated ability of male elites to properly consume and judge it (bourdieu 1984). the proposed digitization of the tea auction, to which i now turn, can thus be usefully characterized as a new permutation on an old project of improvement (cf. drayton 2000). auction reform and the futures of indian tea in a may 2009 interview with a tea board bureaucrat in charge of the rollout of the online auction, the bureaucrat explained: “we need to establish a more robust price discovery mechanism, because at present, the price discovery is not actually the real price discovery.” she pulled the thick, spiral-bound consultants’ report from the shelf behind her. “it’s all in there,” she continued. “they say the outcry system is completely inefficient—against basic auction principles. the auction needs to be transparent. they said go for the electronic auction.” the transition i witnessed in 2009 was not the tea board’s first attempt to institute an electronic auction. in 2002, the tea board had created teauction.com, a voluntary, alternative system to which they had hoped traders would gradually gravitate. even after years of investments, the online platform failed. in 2004, in the wake of that failure, the tea board’s hired consultant, a. f. ferguson, issued a report that described the problems with the outcry system and argued that mandatory, rather than voluntary, digitization would facilitate a move toward futures trading. the freeing of the market in kolkata required strong government intervention. the report details how the outcry system was not an auction at all in (free-market) economic terms. the outcry auction’s very chronicity—with lots coming up one at a time and choreographed by an auction catalog and a list of valuation prices—allowed traders to buy “with market trends” (a. f. ferguson 2004, 2.4.03; cf. zaloom 2006). the report pointed out that buyers not only knew other bidders but also that during the auction, buyers knew who the highest bidder was and at what price he was bidding. the tone of the report is one of uncovering the secrets of the trade, which kept outcry transactions gentlemanly and cordial, but which also kept prices low and “worked against auction principles.” in our interview, conducted soon after the mandated reintroduction of digital auctioning, the tea board official explained how this latest incarnation was certain to work. beginning in 2007, the tea board contracted the indian national stock exchange information technology (nse-it) department to redesign the digital auction. the first attempt, she said, had been run by a private it company that did not have the correct vision for real price discovery: one should not drive the proposed auction system on an overwhelming desire to get a consensus, because there are so many different stakeholders. we have the producers [plantations]. then we have the brokers, or the auctioneers. we have the warehouse keepers. we have the buyers. and after buyers, post-auction, we have a system of traders. and different parties have different conflicting interests. the interest of the sellers [plantations] is completely different from the interest of the buyers. so, there will never be a consensus. . . . the focus on price was never their concern. echoing the suggestions of the a. f. ferguson report, the official repeated that “real prices” were not being “discovered” in the outcry auction system because of this complex network of social relationships. the outcry structure, with buyer-brokers making purchases for any number of international retailers, splitting lots with one another, and sharing tea and cigarettes with seller-brokers working for indian plantation companies, conspired against the discovery of high prices. the official was sure that this attempt at digitization, five years after the initial failed attempt, was going to work, even if it had to be unilaterally imposed by the tea board: these buyers . . . they can’t accept change . . . and they are unscrupulous. the computerized system will be inherently better because it will be impartial. these buyers all go to lunch with each other, and then come back into the auction room. how can that lead to fair prices? they are far too friendly with each other. [the brokers] say that the auction is so personalized; that it is vibrant, exciting. but it needs to be impersonal. the computer is impartial. for the tea board, rich, vibrant social relations constituted the ultimate obstacle to the realization of price. the express objective of the digital auction was to turn a collective process of storytelling into an individualized one of scenario-enactment. as a. f. ferguson’s (2004, 4.4.04) report noted, the “qualitative factors” that went into auction trading could not be ignored: not everything could be done by computer. brokers had to act on knowledge about the taste and provenance of the tea they traded, but they needed to learn to keep such knowledge tacit. while such knowledge remained vital to the trading infrastructure, it had to be seen as existing prior to rather than emergent within the transactions themselves. the introduction of computerized trading would cultivate such a shift in price composition in three ways. first, it would alter tea’s commensurability. for the digital auction to succeed, tea grades had to become universal standards. a. f. ferguson’s report criticized the wide variation in grades and types of tea as idiosyncratic and opaque, calling for a more streamlined relationship between grades and prices. brokers would still buy and sell sftgfop tea, for example, but one lot of sftgfop should be commensurable with all other lots of the same kind. there should be no need to know each lot’s story. a discourse of natural price discovery trumped discussions of a tea’s terroir, or its seasonal and regional variability. second, the introduction of computerized trading would change the temporal orientation of price composition. whereas price stories were oriented to the collective past experience of teas that had come up for auction before, digital price scenarios would be oriented to individual feelings about tea’s future. from millenarian christianity to disaster management, scenarios are communicative infrastructures and technological practices for tuning individuals to uncertainty. scenarios are, as melinda cooper (2010, 170) describes with respect to weather risk markets, the elaboration of “multiple future worlds, attendant on alternative actions in the present.” scenarios work imaginatively as much as they do technically: they force participants to prepare for events, from crop failures to pandemic emergencies, that have not yet happened but that potentially could (lakoff 2008; briggs 2011; samimian-darash 2013). third, it was clear in my discussions with bureaucrats that if the digital auction worked as planned, buyers would not need to be in the space of nilhat house at all. since tacit knowledge was individually held, they could be anywhere. this constituted the ultimate aim: opening up the auction to more participants. in a process similar to those that zaloom describes during the digital transition of financial spaces in chicago and london, trade was opened to any individual with a computer through which they could tap into an externalized market. this was one of the express objectives of the scenarios i witnessed in kolkata—to make trade look and feel like it does for other commodities. but how technologies touch down, and how they produce imaginative and communicative states, varies with context. the tea board’s attack on the auction system as unnatural and corrupt elicited a countercritique from traders directed at the artificiality and opacity of the tea board’s vision. what was being corrupted, they insisted, was the taste and value of indian tea. tea needed their collective skill as storytellers to translate between the material and communicative registers that compose price. the digital transition the first day of the digital ctc auction in may 2009 started like any other. a few minutes before 8:00 a.m., i walked up to the iron gates of nilhat house and passed dozens of buyers huddled around the tea stalls, cigarettes in one hand, earthen cups in the other. i greeted each of the guards while the brokers and other officials streamed up the marble steps to the auction rooms. but the large ctc auction hall remained almost empty, except for two unfamiliar young men standing where the auctioneers should have been. at each empty seat stood a black laptop. brokers were milling about outside. “what’s going on?” i asked a few buyer-brokers, who were standing in the corner and lighting fresh cigarettes, right at 8:00 a.m., when the auction always punctually started. “we will go in when we are ready,” one responded with a harrumph. “they are trying to replace us with . . . with . . . those things!” he said, motioning back to the auction room with disgust. the lanky, soft-spoken, and well-respected director of the calcutta tea traders had rushed over from his office a few blocks away to usher everyone inside. the brokers tried one last time to convince him that the digital auction was a waste of time. they should just start the analog auction. but the director said that neither he nor they had a choice. this change had been sent down from the tea board. the buyer-brokers went in but would not sit down. two young technicians from the national stock exchange (nse) it department tried to reassure the crowd: “it will work this time. . . . we have worked out the kinks.” with eye rolls and crossed arms, the sea of middle-aged men sat down. i sat next to two older buyer-brokers. without prompting, one of them said: “years of experience and knowledge, just tsssss!” he blew air through his teeth, making a sound like steam hissing from a kettle, and flipped his hand in disgust toward the open computer in front of him. after the technicians had gone around and ensured that each of the brokers had signed in with his unique password, the auction began, just after 10 a.m. immediately, thirty-six lots came up at once. screams and hollers came from the audience: “what?” “why is the whole catalog up?” “just take your time and bid,” the technicians reassured. “i don’t know how to bid!” “it won’t take my bid!” “who’s the highest bidder?” the older buyer-broker i was sitting with was trying to buy tea. he put in a high bid, but didn’t get the lot he wanted. he called the technicians over. “it’s not me! it’s not me!” he pointed to the screen. “it’s new tea centre [another ctta-registered firm]. where did my bid go?” the other man who he was sitting with shut the hood of his laptop and pulled out a snack bag of bhuja, offering his companion some. “it’s like bidding in a vacuum. nobody knows what is going on and that is the way they want it. this is what they mean by transparency.” the digital auction replaced the linear structure of the auction catalog and the one-lot-at-a-time sequential order with a website that flashed multiple random lots at one time, for which buyers had one minute to bid. this led to outrage in the auction hall, but according to tea board officials i interviewed, the randomness had been instituted to prevent buying with market trends. “it has been proven,” one tea board official told me, drawing on behavioral economics theory, “that when people don’t know what is coming up next, they buy more, and at higher prices.” in the digital scenario, brokers were being asked to take individual responsibility for their bids and, in a very real sense, to bid in a vacuum. the aleatory nature of the bidding process undid the social infrastructure of communicative channels. with no time for open discussion, brokers’ knowledge was rendered tacit in a new way. that new form of tacitness was punctuated by the crunch of bhuja, the imitations of tea kettles, and the spontaneous outbursts of emotion. later in the proceedings, a roar of laughter came over part of the room. the high bid for a lot of low-grade ctc was currently at 10,000 rupees (about $225) a kilogram, instead of the 100 rupees at which it was valued. the current high bidder screamed: “i withdraw the bid! i withdraw the bid!” this plea, however, could not be answered, as there was no longer an auctioneer physically mediating the proceedings. despite sitting in his seat at the front of the room, the auctioneer could do nothing except raise or lower the reserve price. the usually suave and commanding man just looked up from his lectern and shrugged. what upset the brokers at nilhat house was that digital trading scenarios violated an aesthetic and ethical connection between a style of trading, a style of production, and a style of consumption, as well as the very space of nilhat house. unlike futures traders in chicago and london, who had little material connection to the products they moved, tea brokers knew tea—and tea plantations—on intimate terms (zaloom 2006, 97). the sensory aspects of soils and waters, as well as of aromas and flavors—were as important as the embodied process of calling out lots, splitting lots, and jockeying for particular grades. brokers felt that tea’s idiosyncrasies (the flushes, regions, and grades that caused daily differentiation and took them a career to master) made it a bad fit for a valuation practice based on the spontaneous and individual, rather than collective and recursive, application of tacit knowledge. tea’s particular sensory qualities created a material barrier between india and the global market to which the digital system was supposed to link the nation. when the tea board attempted to replace the open-outcry auction with digital trade, tasters and buyers felt not so much a disembedding (see k. polanyi 2001) as a change in the relationship between knowledge, thing, and price. knowledge about tea was no longer arbitrated within the transaction, but outside of it. in a reversal of what caitlin zaloom describes, tea traders in kolkata experienced the digital transition as one from storied, sober, collegial interaction under the open-outcry system to adversarial combat under the computerized one. such a difference in the social experience of financial technologies illustrates how the communicative infrastructures that preexist digital market transitions create variability in the infrastructures resulting from those transitions. while the storied price composition of the outcry system depended on a polite rendering of an agreed-upon past (of provenance, origin, and embodied memory), the pricing scenario of the digital auction reoriented traders to an uncertain future: a future in which traders were still dealing with actual tea but faced the risk of buying too much or not enough. whereas outcry brokers learned to participate in the crafting of price stories through a slow apprenticeship and a social infrastructure based on gentlemanly camaraderie, the imagined participant in the digital auction was not an apprentice, but a trainee. just as the digital auction was being revived in 2009, private firms began to offer aspiring young brokers a new product: training in tea tasting and valuation. in institutions from the birla institute of management and futuristic studies (a subsidiary of the birla tea company) to assam agricultural university, students can now purchase lessons in the secrets of tea tasting, preparing to enter a reformed auction system, based on standardized scenarios, that would welcome a greater number of participants, imagined not as colleagues but as competitors (cf. elyachar 2012, 88). whereas particular price stories draw a small community together within a discrete, shared social and ecological space, generalized price scenarios organize large numbers of people over a vast scale. these people need share nothing but a desire either to buy or to sell. conclusion it appears, then, that brokers’ collectively honed knowledge has been repackaged as a commodity unto itself. yet as julia elyachar (2012, 90) notes—in line with jane guyer’s (2009) suspicion of facile narratives of commoditization—the repackaging of knowledge as a fungible commodity is rarely so seamless. while neoliberal theorists have drawn on michael polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge in science to argue that rational economic orders must emerge through spontaneous actions, i have shown in this essay how a move to foment a spontaneous relationship between price and knowledge actually requires a great deal of governmental and nongovernmental planning. through an account of an attempt to financialize tea in india, i have shown how digital technology puts the theories of behavioral economics into action (mackenzie 2006; zaloom 2006). ideas about the transparency, impartiality, and rationality of digital systems reveal how visions of india’s economic future depend on the elimination of cloistered expertise and its replacement by a distributed, democratic knowledge, acquirable through training rather than apprenticeship. this elimination replaces what i have called the collective, embodied story of price with the enactment of standardized, individualized scenarios. this shift appears to allow numbers to speak for themselves, because participation in their production is radically distributed, while the possible actions taken to produce them are radically limited. the shift to scenario-based price discovery links indian tea-industry reform to broader discussions of the social contexts of technological change in global finance (zaloom 2006; mackenzie 2006; preda 2006; miyazaki 2013), as well as to other technoscientific changes in the global economy of nature and numbers, from bioterrorism to epidemiology to climate change models (lakoff 2008; samimian-darash 2013; edwards 2010). putting models into practice through scenarios is a prerequisite to the implementation of new forms of surveillance and control in the future, but it is also central to the elaboration of new kinds of market relationships in the present. price scenarios work to turn environmental commodities like tea—fickle, particular, and shifting like pathogens, air, and water—into potential financial instruments. to conceive of finance as an anthropological object, then, we must think about the physical dismantling of auction houses as much as about the physical opening up of goldmines or hydraulically fractured shale formations. at an even broader level, attention to the technologies of market opening puts the anthropology of finance into dialogue with ethnographic approaches to modernity and infrastructure, which are already rich in attention to how planning accounts for (or ignores) spontaneity and “leakage” (anand 2011; see also appel 2012; larkin 2013). leakages, whether they are what literally flows out of pipe crevices or the outbursts of traders who “don’t know what’s coming up next,” are as common in price compositions as in city water systems. efforts to reform india’s tea industry are ongoing. obstacles to financialization in the tea sector exist in multiple locations within the colonially derived production infrastructure. since 2009, tea brokerage in india has become a hybrid system, with digital technologies wedged awkwardly into the old outcry model. the seller-brokers and buyer-brokers still gather in the auction rooms of nilhat house. the long list of grading and tasting terms continues to confound attempts to commensurate tea grades for rapid digital trading. still, the push for digitization in the auction continues, not least because online sales have taken off elsewhere during the past five years. a growing number of direct traders, who use the internet to cultivate buyers in europe and america, have managed to circumvent the auction. direct traders are threatening the status of the tea trade as a national institution. the tea board is trying to meld the ethic of speed and seamlessness that marks digital trading with the quality assurance offered by the auction. to do so, the tea board has marshaled a new kind of expert authority. the savvy, young (but still overwhelmingly upper-middle-class, english-speaking, and male) it expert has started to replace the wizened, middle-aged taster-broker. the push for digitization is part of a broader attempt to keep tea palatable in india, both politically and socially. digitization has come along with bold pronouncements about the beginning of the end of the plantation system, with its variable geographies, esoteric factory processing procedures, and archaic labor process. the taste of tea in the broadest sense—its association with refinement but also with enlightened liberal values—is at stake. yet as i have argued in this essay, to understand efforts to financialize fields and factories, we must understand how those efforts resonate with similar moves to transform a more hidden communicative infrastructure of price composition in places like the tasting and auction rooms of nilhat house. such an analysis enables the anthropology of finance to join studies of environment and development by critically engaging megaprojects that do not take the form of dams, roads, or other modernist structures. notes acknowledgments thanks to dominic boyer, the cultural anthropology editorial collective, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this manuscript. many other people have also provided comments on it during the past few years, including nicholas d’avella and paige west at a 2012 panel on enumerating environments at the annual meetings of the american anthropological association, nikhil anand and anuradha sharma at the 2012 annual conference on south asia, martha lampland, daniel hirschman, caroline schuster, alex blanchette, matthew hull, and colleagues at brown university, north carolina state university, university of cologne, university of edinburgh, university of michigan, and the 2014 biennial meeting of the society for cultural anthropology. special thanks to alex nading for his detailed responses to this article’s multiple incarnations. funding was provided by the fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research abroad program, the american institute of indian studies, the land tenure center at the university of wisconsin–madison, the andrew w. mellon foundation, the american council of learned societies, and the michigan society of fellows. all errors are my own. 1. there are seven auction centers in india. in addition to the largest in kolkata (west bengal), there are centers in guwahati (assam), jalpaiguri (west bengal), siliguri (west bengal), cochin (kerala), coonoor (tamil nadu), and coimbatore (tamil nadu). 2. in caitlin zaloom’s (2003, 259) case, the digital transition forced traders to change how they reacted to the numbers that constituted the market. 3. as william roseberry (1996) and paige west (2012) have shown, the neoliberalization of agriculture allows for the creation of specialty markets in which taste—in both of its bourdieuian senses—is more important than ever. 4. for the sake of clarity i use the term seller-brokers to describe people who taste and auction tea and buyer-brokers to describe people who 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extremist.1 we had come from the city’s southeast for a secretive encounter with a nongovernmental organization that helps young neo-nazis exit the scene. gino was known throughout his district as “ss-gino” owing to the hass (“hate”) tattoo that decorated the fingers of his right hand, with its final two letters styled after the illegal symbol of the ss.2 he was a slim twenty year old of medium height and trimmed dark hair. on his arms, back, and chest he boasted various other illicit images, including renderings of the iron cross, of a leitwolf,3 and of a flag with the inscription deutsche widerstand (“german resistance”). silver hoop earrings and a thick gilded chain complemented the tattoos. gino came of age in the district’s poorest neighborhood, locally known as “the ghetto,” with his alcoholic mother and her frequently violent partners. he had never completed high school and subsisted on various state remittances. his involvement in right extremist organized political activism had been minimal and erratic. in contrast, his criminal record presented an impressive assortment of offenses for his young age, including (but not limited to) shoplifting, vandalism, agitation of the people (volksverhetzung),4 violent assault, and possession of banned symbols and illegal weapons. our visit to the train station took place shortly after he completed his latest period of incarceration, the last of seven separate sentences—each lasting from a few days to a month—that he had already served at detention centers, juvenile delinquent reformatories, and prisons. this was no mean feat, for germany’s youth law, under which he had so far been tried as a minor, only reluctantly incarcerates offenders. when not in prison, gino had spent much of the past few years under legal probation, struggling to comply—though then again, never too vigorously—with various court-mandated stipulations, including divesting himself of his weapons, moving into an apartment of his own, finding a job, and attending alcohol therapy sessions. gino finds himself at the peculiar intersection of two very distinct logics. first, his repeated internments and conditional living place him under the disciplinary and biopolitical power of modern penology, where he appears as that amalgamation of pathological predispositions and anti-social habits conventionally known as the delinquent. this first disciplinary regime links up with a labyrinthine web of legal codes, juridical norms, law enforcement procedures, and pedagogical strategies that, together, make up a field as immense and politically salient as it is fuzzy and uneven; an expansive terrain of praxis and knowledge that carries the fight against right extremism in germany as its banner. both the crusade against right extremism and the penal regime associated with it, in turn, are inscribed within neoliberal modes of governance invested in “the ‘responsibilization’ of subjects who are increasingly ‘empowered’ to discipline themselves” (ferguson and gupta 2002, 989), or, as foucault (2008, 226) famously put it, in forging out of each subject a consumptive-productive, autonomous “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.” this first penality is therefore economistic in nature. it shows its face in the prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation procedures that come to bear upon right extremists and that seek to instill the sorts of affective dispositions, normative investments, and modes of reasoning that would create self-controlling individuals, rather than costly lifetime targets of penal and welfare regimes. as part of such political rectification, authorities seek to bind right extremist delinquents to the mores of upright citizens by inculcating presumably heretofore absent social virtues and normative habits, such as a principled labor-routine that would repair a faulty work ethic or dwelling practices that would fortify traditional distinctions between public and private and bolster acceptable notions of property and propriety. the particularly neoliberal form of this penal regime is evident as well in the state-like, state-sponsored, and state-activated organizations that it calls into existence and in the sorts of highly-localized agents that such organizations in turn recruit to perform governance functions. but while these mechanisms of neoliberal penality transform the menace of a quasi-fascist criminal class into a particular species of delinquency—a peculiar political deviance for which a special place is reserved within the german penal apparatus—a second logic is also at work here. beyond the rationality of modern penology within which it takes shape, the right extremist delinquent comes into being also as the contemporary incarnation of the national socialist specter. this article is concerned with some of the excesses and anxieties that manifest themselves in the production of this figure. such excesses, i argue, betray not so much the follies of governance, but, more significantly, its inscription within cultural and historical aporias—such as the political memory of national socialism in germany—that belie biopolitical rationalities. the multiple procedures of governance that come to bear on gino and others like him, a number of which i will describe in what follows, labor to reveal the location of the right extremist thing; to signify it the better to control it. but the sense of frustration that this relentless quest seems to generate suggests that the political delinquent maintains a certain externality to the legal and penal order of the federal republic, that something in it defies its signification and localization. its unlocatability, and the frustration that it creates, has often reminded me of evans-pritchard’s (1937, 1–3) exasperated search for the precise corporal site and physical substance in which, according to the zande, witchcraft resides. in a similar way, the techniques of governance i consider below hunt for the right extremist thing upon the bodies, minds, and souls of gino and his peers, without ever quite laying their hands on it. in this article, i analyze the operations of this particular form of governance, in which neoliberal penality comes together with national socialist specters. i argue that the penal regimes of right extremist criminality present us with excesses that “no amount of political, economic, and social causality, of rational aims, goals, and interests can explain” (artexaga 1999, 47). far from the calculated governmental modalities of risk and control, such seemingly irrational excesses would seem to point “not to a place but to places from which nothing acceptable can issue” (siegel 2003, 152), that fail to bring closure and that fall short of performing the ordering function that one might attribute to them. my argument here is in line with a number of other scholars (aretxaga 2003; cf. mazzarella 2010) who have insisted that governance serves as a site for much more than mere optimization or efficiency, as notions of control, risk, or governmentality have often been understood to imply. instead, governance will be shown to reference a social field for the elaboration and mediation of cultural and political projects—from banishing illicit nationalism as a political force to fabricating a tolerant and cosmopolitan nation—that are wrought of affect and uncertainty. in germany, we see the fusion of these two logics patently in a peculiar penal regime that generates a specific kind of social deviancy—the neo-nazi, the right extremist—that i have elsewhere called political delinquency (shoshan 2011). the once provocative notion that the category of delinquency, rather than descriptively referencing an objective social reality, instead constitutes a “political operation” (foucault 1995, 277), hardly requires mention in our post-foucaultian age. mindful of the distinct historical co-figurations of crime and politics, my use of the concept of political delinquency is not meant to disavow the political nature of the category of delinquency as such, but rather to specify an articulation of the two in which a relatively explicit political project (unlike, e.g., the crude resistance of social banditry) comes together with a strong sense of delinquency in its conventional meaning (unlike, e.g., in the case of political prisoners).5 in contemporary germany, gino and his friends stand at once for a political agenda deemed sufficiently menacing to warrant intensive state persecution (a racially pure nation, third reich anti-democratic authoritarianism) and for the sorts of criminal forms that commonly characterize the figure of the delinquent. from gino’s first encounter with the law, for nothing less than unlicensed fishing, to his later, brutal assaults on train station passersby or his taste for illegal neo-nazi paraphernalia, the biographical trajectories of gino and his friends defy any neat distinction between the criminal and even the narrowly political. at a broader scale, political delinquency pertains to a field of knowledge/praxis that seeks to govern the affective relation of german (and, arguably, european) publics to cultural, ethnic, and religious difference.6 this field, which i term the management of hate, includes not only the penal governance of political delinquents, but also a whole range of practices and institutions that seek to foment tolerance and curb cultural anxieties in the so-called mainstream. in germany, however, the management of hate can only be understood in relation to the country’s very particular twentieth century as a collective mode of “learning to live with ghosts” (derrida 1994, xviii): a reflexive process of national becoming that stands between life and death, between past and present, between spectral presences (traces of nazism and communism, to be sure, but also of the turbulent weimar years) and the geopolitical and cultural projects of the post–cold war moment, including the rebranding of the federal republic as a cosmopolitan country of immigrants. below, i consider three modalities through which the management of hate governs and, more specifically, aims to reform young right extremists. each of the three locates the political delinquent in a different site: states of resentment within the affective self; cognitive incoherencies within the rational individual; and corporeal deviance within the physical body. though other sites may well exist, the affective subject, the rational subject, and the corporeal subject emerged as particularly salient domains for affective governance in my research.7 i draw on fieldwork, conducted in east berlin in 2004 and 2005 with young right extremists and in the organizations charged with their governance, to examine the political delinquent as a composite laboratory for the germination, testing, and honing of various remedial technologies and theoretical models. serving as a terrain for both scholars and practitioners in the field to experiment empirically with diverse conceptual frameworks, the political delinquent appears interchangeably as a reservoir of frustrated desires, as the rational consciousness of communicative action, and finally, too, as an anatomical corporeality of bodily comportment. at the same time, as the figure that menaces the post-1989 project of a rejuvenated yet inoffensive german nationhood, the political delinquent serves to conceal (though, no doubt, never to resolve) the inexorable contradictions that mark this very same project, including its relation to the nation on the one hand and immigration on the other. the right extremist thing emerges from the painstaking procedures of its management, not only as a special species of modern delinquency created by the german penal state but simultaneously as the effect of cultural and political antinomies that have bedeviled post-war germany, foremost among which have been the memory of the war and the taboo on nationalism. my analysis thus reveals sites of governance as arenas for the elaboration, negotiation, and contestation of such historical stakes. the obsessive-compulsive circumscription of the political delinquent should therefore be understood as a constitutively indefinite effort to evacuate contemporary german nationalism of its discontents. in absorbing, distilling, and containing the dirty bathwater of german nationalism, the figure of the right extremist keeps the baby—a contemporary national project—safe and sanitary. to paraphrase james siegel (2006, 210), it says that society is innocent.8 rendering the truth of the right extremist—what it says about society—articulable demands its signification, its subjugation to the symbolic order. nevertheless, a residual excess about the right extremist thing that eludes and frustrates signification always seems to remain. and it is this indelible surplus, which escapes representation, that time and again kindles exploratory journeys into the therapeutic sciences of affective management. facing the facts the southeastern district of treptow-köpenick, where gino lives, and especially its southern half, treptow, has traditionally been home to the industrial working-class of berlin. in the aftermath of reunification and following rapid deindustrialization, certain neighborhoods in the district have suffered from particularly high unemployment and socioeconomic decline (see shoshan 2012). gino and his friends are in this sense second generation “transition losers” (wendeverlierer), a term used derogatively for those east germans who have fared badly under the new economic and political order. the federal headquarters of the national democratic party of germany, several local clandestine neo-nazi fraternities, regular political marches, a concentration of business establishments that cater to young nationalists, and a number of brutal incidents of racist violence have won the district a certain reputation as a stronghold of right extremism over the past decade.9 in response, more than a few organizations and initiatives have focused their efforts on curbing the gains of right extremists in the district. these have included, for example, several state-sponsored coalitions of municipal service providers, ngos that consult schools and other institutions on strategies against racism and political extremism, youth work organizations that provide cultural offerings in high-risk areas, and special police squads dedicated to political and racist violence among young people. not least among those is the team of street social workers that served the groups i studied and facilitated my access to them. while themselves an integral part of the governmental apparatus that i term the management of hate, they are crucial as well in mediating between their young clients and other agencies of governance. much like other organizations within this apparatus, the approach of street social workers to the challenges they encounter is informed by distinct scholarly perspectives on the problem of right extremism. these perspectives populate a contested terrain of explanatory frameworks and interventionist procedures, each with its own intellectual and political genealogy, that are expounded and brought to bear upon young political delinquents in today’s germany. for each perspective—indeed often for each of their many variants—there corresponds an assortment of techniques, strategies, and experts, from individual psychological therapy to the generation of group solidarity, the promotion of participatory experiences, or democratic experiments at school (schubarth 2001). taken together, they provide a set of orientations for professional practitioners in the field. at the risk of simplification, we may describe a fourfold general classification of these approaches. first, personality-structure theories, strongly influenced by adorno’s theory of the authoritarian personality (adorno et al. 1950), typically locate the pathology in the psychological individual understood as the outcome of biographical histories. second, political-culture theories stress how societal norms determine responses to racism or violence and may result in “democratic deficits” in particular contexts (carlsson 2006; jaschke 2001). third, research on youth has often prioritized the local dynamics of belonging, consumption, and fashion over properly political convictions or formalized institutions (hafeneger and jansen 2001). fourth, a range of sociological explanations has focused on large scale political-economic processes to account for right extremism, linking late-capitalist individualization, marginalization, or anomie to the emergence of xenophobia and political extremism (butterwegge and meier 2002; steinmetz 1994). of course, such theories rarely appear as monocausal explanations in the literature. accounts of right extremism in the former east, for example, have variously described a scarcity of democratic civil society structures (political-culture theories), rigid institutional discipline and traditional parenting styles (personality-structure theories), a lack of appealing cultural alternatives for youths (youth theories), and the impact of epidemic unemployment and social marginalization (sociological theories). in recent years, sociological models in particular have provided the salient paradigms in the field. within scholarly debates, such sociological models have been successful at avoiding the labeling of the east as particularly hospitable to national socialist ideologies by grounding its especially harsh circumstances within globally documented shifts. as importantly, they have allowed for the elaboration of critical perspectives on contemporary social processes. but for practitioners, critical-theoretical engagements with neoliberal capitalism address the concrete needs of their clients tangentially at best. instead, when translated into practice (for example, in the daily grind of street social work), these models suggest two possible and not mutually exclusive routes: alleviating social marginalization by facilitating access to welfare services and mediating processes for workforce integration on the one hand, and taming unrealistic expectations and aspirations on the other. implicit in these practical translations is a view of a disintegrating social fabric as the site from which the national socialist menace spawns and as the terrain in which the battle against it would have to be waged. the right extremist thing is rendered as frustration and helplessness; obsolete aspirations that collide calamitously with reality to produce a politics of resentment. attempts to unwind it must seek to collapse this chasm between aspirations and reality. they become a reality check, an imperative to face the facts of life as they really are. and they evoke a moment when twentieth-century european working-class aspirations must be brought in line with twenty-first-century economic relations, when european states struggle to clean up the debris left behind by fordist-keynesian social democracy, and where people mourn the loss of a sense of futurity, of what was imagined to have once been plausible (berlant 2007; muehlebach and shoshan 2012; shoshan 2012). to illustrate how such approaches often turn out to incite the very affective forms they presume to target, allow me to return to that frosty afternoon at the friedrichstraße train station. as gino and i descended onto the thick afternoon rush hour crowds in search of our designated rendezvous point, a portly man in his mid-fifties dressed in a worn gray suit approached us and led the way to a nearby espresso bar. herr tomasky worked for the berlin-based organization, “exit deutschland,” modeled after its scandinavian cognates to facilitate a way out of the right extremist scene for those weary of its lifestyle or disillusioned with its politics. founded in 2000 by former officers of the east berlin police who specialized in youth violence and criminality, exit has relied on funding from diverse sources over the years—federal programs, eu initiatives, civil society foundations, corporate philanthropy, and private donations. its representatives talk to school classes and participate in media campaigns, but assisting repentant right extremists remains the core of its activities. it operates on the not entirely unfounded assumption that its business is better kept concealed to protect its clients from possible retributions by their peers. gino’s appeal to the organization, about which he learned from his parole officer, no doubt reflected his desire to score points with the justice system in the run-up to his court hearing. he was summoned for a clandestine encounter in the city’s center, an alien terrain for him, and so the social workers requested that i accompany him on this rare voyage, as guide and confidant. we sat around a small table on the ground floor of the train station. as gino looked around somewhat anxiously, clearly concerned about the possibility that some acquaintance might walk past, herr tomasky inquired about his ascent into the right extremist scene, the crimes he had committed, and the dangers he could face as a deserter. tomasky’s barrage of terse questions, his dismissive offhand interjections, and his bossy tone of voice all suggested a well-rehearsed but mechanically and disinterestedly executed script that left little room for gino’s personal narrative. interrupting gino’s speech, he would scoff at replies that failed to satisfy him, repeat his question, and demand an alternative response, which he would sometimes provide himself. his was a sermonizing discourse that time and again pontificated about how poorly executed and morally reprehensible gino’s entire life had been. gino, for his part, explained he was “just having fun” with his friends without thinking too much about it, which, he hurried to add, is what you do when you are young. but tomasky judged this account as inadequate. gino mentioned that, as a child, he had experienced domestic violence from several of his mother’s boyfriends. “i externalized the violence i had internalized at home,” he said. still unsatisfied, tomasky argued that most victims of domestic violence never became neo-nazis. this went on for some time, until gino appeared to remain entirely drained of ideas. tomasky came to his aid, inquiring whether his right extremist sympathies could have emerged from frustration and despair, from the outlook of a life without prospects, from a sense that he was not in control of his future. gino nodded indistinctly, neither confirming nor refuting—nor for that matter even indicating he had quite grasped—tomasky’s hypothesis. tomasky continued his interrogation, asking about gino’s educational record, employment situation, and professional aspirations. gino, bemoaning the dearth of decent jobs and vocational training opportunities, clarified he had never finished school, held no diploma, and had always been unemployed. tomasky’s patronizing gaze transmuted into a ridiculing grin when gino professed his desire to someday become an electrician. this clear attempt at modest pragmatism on the part of gino, who often reported far more inflated life goals—from movie stardom to military glory—nevertheless appeared patently absurd in the eyes of tomasky, who commenced on a tirade against delusional hopes and a sermon on the indispensability of facing the facts. his diatribe interlaced a vindictive appraisal of gino with a bleak vision of the present to advocate an ethics that hovered between despair and resignation. gino’s dismal educational record and appalling criminal history would already set him for an abysmally disadvantaged start, he proclaimed. but even if their repercussions could be attenuated—say, if gino conjured the willpower to resume his schooling, or if exit vouchsafed his repentance to potential employers—they only exacerbated the already disheartening realities of the contemporary labor market. pickiness, he warned, was a luxury gino couldn’t afford. the coupling of a dire reality and his particular background ruled out any ambitions as illusory fantasies and permitted only the lowliest of expectations. this obliged him to gratefully accept whatever offers the employment office could make him. indeed, tomasky added, gino should consider himself extraordinarily fortunate if any chances at all came his way. on the train heading home, gino brooded glumly over the meeting. no, he said, he found nothing particularly demoralizing in tomasky’s harsh pronouncements. he had heard it all many times before. his precarious despondency and the urgency of facing reality without delusions had already been impressed upon him on countless occasions by social workers, parole officers, government bureaucrats, and judges. what brought him down was precisely the fact that, as far as he could see, tomasky had nothing new to convey, much less to offer. whatever fantasies gino had entertained about his appointment with exit aside, there was more than a grain of truth to his disillusionment. tomasky’s textbook performance invoked a particular diagnosis of the affliction of right extremism as rooted in a space of resentment that extends over the gap between implausible expectations and rough realities; and it prescribed, too, the appropriate advice. recall that tomasky offhandedly rejected gino’s accounts of his ignominious trajectory. gino initially delineated his ingratiation into the “scene” as motivated by social happenstance and juvenile notions of fun. tomasky’s dismissal of this narrative repudiated the youth-phenomenon approaches to right extremism. gino later suggested, in a language i had not heard from him before and that smacked of therapeutic contexts like his anti-violence seminar, that it was perhaps the violence he had absorbed at home that he later came to externalize. this narrative, in turn, tallied with authoritarian personality-structure theories. but it was ultimately a losers-of-modernization account that tomasky more or less coerced gino into. in this hailing of gino as the locus of resentment and frustration, we find more than the interpellation of individuals as passive, docile citizens bereft of expectations and resigned to unsavory futures, rather than, say, as entrepreneurial, autonomous agents of a neoliberal imaginary. more importantly, through tiresome repetition (“i have heard it all before”), a certain mode of governance seeks to inculcate forms of post-fordist affect (muehlebach and shoshan 2012) and fabricate a particular figuration of lack. this mode of governance incites precisely the sorts of frustrated attachments that allegedly stand behind xenophobic violence and ultra-nationalism in the first place. within the management of hate, then, a discursive incitement of resentment appears to emerge, tautologically, as explanation, in the process reaffirming its own claim to truth. the very attempt to exorcise gino of his specters reveals itself as the moment of their summoning. the rational kernel the propagation of the right extremist thing as post-fordist resentment and, simultaneously, of that very resentment itself as an affective form, is not uncommon. but it is not the only framework for elaborating understandings of, and strategies against, xenophobic hatred in today’s germany. nor is it the only manner in which such efforts would seem to undermine their own tenets. by way of contrast, i consider a set of approaches particularly (though not exclusively) popular with educators and youth workers that posit political delinquency not within the affective self but rather as anchored in what is considered to be the cognitive, (ir)rational subject—the subject capable of comprehending logical arguments, of evaluating the validity and coherence of predicative statements, and of formulating them on their own. examples of these approaches include “argumentation training workshops,” where guides lead exercises and simulations of actual or possible debates; expert-led seminars, where specialists arm participants with information that would help them disprove right extremist statements; or booklets with extensive lists of ultra-nationalist arguments, each complemented with an appropriate response. usually provided free of charge by municipalities, political parties, ngos, or government bureaus, such efforts at rational enlightenment target not only wayward adolescents but also—and perhaps more often—certain at-risk practitioners (teachers, youth workers, local politicians), parents of young nationalists, and the general public. they are particularly invested in transforming the pedagogical cultures of educational institutions where, so their proponents claim, exclusion, silencing, or disregard rather than earnest debate commonly characterize responses to expressions of right extremist sympathies. for those who practice or preach these methods, critical-rational debate (auseinandersetzung) with national socialist and other racist, ultra-nationalist ideologies is vital for preventive work with politically rightist youths. only the careful pedagogical dismantling of susceptibilities to elements of such nationalist ideological frameworks can make extricating young, vulnerable people from their politically delinquent social milieus possible. hence, such approaches insist on the importance of taking the political stances of these young people seriously and literally, as referential predicates about the world, and of confronting them with the contradictions of their beliefs. under the auspices of a foundation associated with the social democrats and supported by both the federal and the berlin governments, one of the street social workers with whom i collaborated and i were invited to share our praxis-honed opinion on one variant of this approach. a professor of law and social work and his assistant had prepared a draft version of a documentary, produced to be a pedagogical weapon against right extremism. the film was conceived as the first in a series of documentaries that would question distinct aspects of national socialist and contemporary right-extremist ideology, and that together would provide a handy toolbox for educators under the heading “subversive destabilizing pedagogy” (subversive verunsicherungspädagogik). the screening took place in a spacious room in a building in central berlin that belonged to the foundation. seated with us in a half circle in front of a large television screen were the professor and his assistant, the director of a street social work ngo, the director of a youth work ngo and his assistant, the manager of a youth sports club that specialized in offerings for young right extremists, and a representative of the foundation that hosted the meeting and her intern. it was, hence, an assembly not only of experts but also of the professional audience for the film. the documentary bore the title globalization and xenophobia (globalisierung und fremdenfeindlichkeit). divided into five sections, it looked at the world trade organization (wto), international trade and global markets, trade wars and protectionism, the globalization of the extreme right itself, and the historical relation between foreigners and labor. it wove together the damning pronouncements of gordon reinholz, a prominent, young, and charismatic right extremist cadre and the explanations of an elderly economics professor; footage of military parades and mass spectacles from the third reich; praise for the globalized free-market from industrial leaders; and images of the contemporary extreme right, from websites to demonstrations and rock concerts. each of the sections provoked a range of skeptical responses from the small group of invited critics. before long a manifest sense prevailed that, while well intentioned, the film was glaringly misguided, albeit without consensus on why precisely this was so. with a look of indignation, the sports club manager insisted that the problem hardly lay with opposition to globalization as such but instead with xenophobia (fremdenfeindlichkeit) in and of itself. he took issue with the construal of rationality as the discursive prerogative of market-friendly specialists and attacked the message implicit in the film, namely, that any struggle against the dictates of global capitalism could only signal irrational political extremism. according to this critique, in its substitution of an opaque rule of experts for political debate the film betrayed its alleged democratic aims. like the narrative tomasky delivered to gino, the film construed global capitalism as an inescapable reality. it called, however, not for passive acquiescence with a regrettable yet inevitable future but rather for the active embrace of that future.10 the directors of the youth work and social work organizations expressed alarm about what they considered the film’s imprudent use of images. sequences on the dependency of the wehrmacht on foreign trade included propaganda footage that showed the full glory of national socialist military might and the fascist aesthetics of mass spectacle: armored divisions, fighter jets, and thousands of soldiers marching in formation. the section dedicated to the contemporary globalization of right extremism featured depictions of large neo-nazi gatherings, thriving far right movements, white-power heavy metal concerts, massive marches and political events, and charismatic leaders of right extremist parties in europe and beyond it. “if i were a nazi,” the director of the social work organization said, “i would surely find such images thoroughly inspirational.” their concerns, i would argue, rested on an implicit binary distinction between the rational, predicative transparency of linguistic communication on the one hand, and the irrational, affective force of the image on the other (cf. horkheimer and adorno 2002, 17–18). the film, in other words, let “decoration distract from the statement” (brecht 1996, 231). in failing to subjugate the sensuous force of its images to the rationality of its discourse, the film’s verbal content condemned what its visual form simultaneously glorified (cf. žižek 1989, 188). it overestimated and thus undermined the pedagogical sway of its own discursive rationality, failing to recognize the “reality effect” of its images (bourdeiu 1998, 21; feldman 1997, 26).11 helmuth, the social worker with whom i arrived at the meeting, squirmed and frowned as the screening progressed. “it’s one to zero for the nazis,” he sighed several times. on the one hand, he began once his turn finally came to share his thoughts, there was gordon reinholz, youthful, fashionable, and charismatic, passionately weaving nationalist and anti-globalization slogans in the idiom of his young public. on the other hand, there was the economics professor, aged and heavy, with his old-fashioned moustache and his bald top, his dull suit answering the grayness of his office, monotonously explicating the nature and importance of the wto. utterly irrespective of the content of their enunciations, the former would unquestionably command a far greater authority than the latter for the people whom helmuth served. even worse, he continued, in elevating reinholz’s rhetoric to the same discursive level as the professor’s, the film fortified rather than dismantled his claim to authority. helmuth’s comments betrayed how the fundamental premise of the film, predicative discursive rationality, rested on an ultimately irrational groundwork, and this in three ways. first, helmuth’s comments called attention to the rhetorical conventions and performative stylistics—a poetics of speech—that, beyond denotational meaning, endow certain enunciations (e.g., a young cadre’s) with efficacy (caton 1990; sebeok 1964). second, they exposed how certain voices (e.g., a professor’s) rest on socially-institutionalized power differentials that authorize them and not others (bourdieu 2001), rather than on their coherence or truth-value. third, in describing a radically divergent mode in which young right extremists would interpret the film, the comments took aim at the assumption of a uniform discursive universe, exposing its unevenness and openness to variation (bakhtin 1998). helmuth’s comments unraveled the language ideology (woolard 1998) within which the film could appear legible and efficacious, thereby shattering the very premises of “subversive destabilizing pedagogy”: rational deliberation within the framework of pure communicative action and an ideal speech situation operative within the uniform discursive universe of a homogeneous public sphere. this framework would have been the ground from which right extremism could appear as cognitive error, the effect of obfuscation, a lack or distorted knowledge that required rectification. but it turned out to be no ground at all. all three critiques voiced unease with the film. the first more or less accepted the assumption of an irrational kernel at the heart of the right extremist thing, yet located this irrationality in xenophobic racism rather than in anti-globalization politics. the second commentary identified a tension between a predicative rationality of text and an affective irrationality of image. the third critique pointed to an irrationality inherent to discourse as such. taken together, the critiques left no doubt that, in the eyes of the participants, through its uncritical embrace of free-market idioms, the force of its images, and its appeal to discursive authority, subversive destabilizing pedagogy undermined its own foundations in a manner that was all but certain to invigorate, rather than enfeeble, right extremist ideological commitments. if it walks like a nazi the approaches to governing hatred, whether they orient themselves toward a rational cogito or an affective self, seem to undo their own logics, inciting resentment by interpellating individuals as post-fordist subjects, or provoking the irrational with claims to discursive rationality. within each of these domains—the affective soul and the rational mind—a certain self-defeating, tautological thrust marks the projects of governance. at a different level, however, the excesses and apparent irrationalities that haunt the management of hate make themselves evident in the very proliferation of its domains, in the fabrication of ever more peculiar methods and targets. in order to illustrate this point, i want to shift from the relatively conventional approaches of rational debate and “facing the facts” discussed above to a more outlandish instance of therapeutic intervention that targets the corporeal subject. this is the method of “body-language therapy,” which seeks to treat political delinquents through their corporeal habitus. specifically, the method consists in identifying extreme-right-typical bodily styles and training young right extremists to move differently. the social workers with whom i collaborated in my research were once invited to a presentation of the body-language-therapy method.12 to their disbelief, the demonstration video screened at the meeting starred none other than gino. at first, a guide instructed him to act naturally and pace around the room as he normally would, while the camera followed his posture and movements. gino was then asked to describe how he felt and responded with “tired” and “stressed.” next, the guide coached him in how to adjust his pose, gestures, and gait so they would become more “relaxed.” the film documented his newly learnt demeanor as he moved about. after he tried out this novel fashion of bodily mobility for some time, he was asked if he now felt better, to which he replied with a mumbled “yes.” members of the body-language-therapy team reported that gino had been delivered to them by his parole officer, and had punctually and consistently shown up to all his scheduled appointments. the parole officer, with whom the social workers were closely acquainted, later elucidated that gino had been receiving a hefty remuneration for each session he attended. gino’s investment in the profitable business of body-language therapy could, no doubt, thus be accounted for relatively straightforwardly in financial terms. in allowing gino to capitalize on his political delinquency and translate it into lucrative transactions, this therapy was, to be sure, not exceptional. on other occasions, gino reaped direct financial benefits from the attention of journalists and, less directly, from the heightened investment in his case by state institutions. however, the remuneration he received from those advocating the body-language-therapy method for leasing himself as guinea pig signaled a particular (and, arguably, particularly disturbing) valorization of the capital that his racist violence had won him. in leasing himself in this way, gino simultaneously enabled the flourishing of a specific scientific knowledge: the elaboration of theoretical hypotheses, experimental procedures, typological classifications, and modes of representation and dissemination, all of which ultimately referred to his bodily presence. the scientific project of identifying illicit bodily composures might evoke the biological-anatomical determinism of early positivist criminology, in which “a set of distinguishing physical features were stigmas of criminality” (laclau 2005, 37), and in which social deviance therefore appeared as inscribed upon and readable from the body. yet it differed from the latter insofar as it focused not on anatomical compositions but rather on locomotive habits that, most importantly, could be reformed. this science’s investment in the micro-management of corporeal movements could also be inscribed within the normalizing regime of disciplinary power and docile bodies. but its logic, instead, articulated deviance—and its rectification—with an embodied aesthetics of laxity. this science of the body becomes a key for accessing and engaging with deviant subjectivities as neither deterministic physiology nor disciplinary praxis, but as style. the menace of an illicit nationalism is rendered into a pliable corporeal habitus, a locomotive aesthetics of posture and comportment that can be purged of its rough contours and substituted with more refined—or better yet, more “relaxed”—physical mannerisms.13 viewed in this light, the body-language therapy did more than tweak surface appearances. consider, by way of contrast, the meeting that the social workers had arranged for gino a few months earlier with a tattoo artist who provided her services free of charge for those who wished to remove their right extremist tattoos. after missing a couple of appointments—perhaps because he would not be financially compensated—gino finally had his illegal ss tattoo, which he had increasingly come to view as a liability, skillfully transformed into a tattoo of innocuous playing cards. while this surgical intervention was equally corporeal and corrective as body-language therapy, it could hardly be described as therapeutic. the philanthropic transfiguration of tattoos sought to help right extremists remove illicit signs from their bodies, while also expunging them from the visual landscape, not unlike how anti-fascist activists remove far right graffiti and posters from the streets. it posited the skin as canvass, without postulating some other essence beyond, beneath, or within the skin as its real target. it thus genuinely collapsed appearance and essence. in sharp contrast, the “depth model” (jameson 1991, 12) of body-language therapy conceived of physical style as the depository of political substance, at once the telltale symptom of pathological deviance and the secret to its undoing. side by side with its financial valorization of political delinquency as profitable business, the body-language therapy therefore at once reduced delinquency to a matter of style. conclusion: governing hate the sense that something is awkwardly amiss with this body-language therapy, i suggest, reveals the untamable nature of the right extremist specter, its refusal to give in to its various domestications, and the sorts of excesses to which it gives rise: all of which characterize—if less conspicuously—the two other rehabilitative methods i examined in this article as well. whether collapsed into styles of movement, written off as the whimsical unruliness of adolescents, traced back to the authoritarian formation of a pathological ego, or sited in a space of resentment between implausible aspirations and immutable realities, the right extremist thing obstinately defies its varied localizations. the operations of affective governance that labor to pin it down reveal themselves, their claims to scientific rationality notwithstanding, as haunted by cultural anxieties and historical apprehensions to a far greater extent than either scholars or practitioners would care to acknowledge. these operations mediate and enable the articulation of such anxieties as intelligible models and offer themselves as sites for their signification, all the while falling short of providing them with a viable and sustainable resolution. each of the construals of the political delinquent entailed by the remedial procedures i described in this article—as a forlorn casualty of neoliberal capitalism, as the subject of rational deliberation, or as malleable bodily habitus—could also, looked at differently, imply a distinct contemporary rendering of politics. in diagnosing and treating a “political” malady, these rehabilitative efforts effectively collapse politics itself into an ethics of resignation and affective states of resentment; into the scientific discourses of institutionally-authorized expertise; or into aesthetic style. perhaps the key for understanding these divergent modes of therapeutic knowledge is to be found less in the different answers they provide and more in the similar questions they pose: what precisely is the right extremist thing about the political delinquent? where, within the right extremist subject, is the locus of this malady? along what contours do symptoms and causes carve up this subject? such questions are of obvious concern to a project of governance that seeks to manage hate. they sustain a compulsive drive to locate and root out the right extremist thing within the political delinquent, giving rise to ever more innovative attempts to capture and contain it. the ways in which these modes of therapeutic knowledge subvert their own efforts just as much as their relentless proliferation bespeak an excess that defies any reassuring significations: the political delinquent is never merely a socially disaffected youth, a hardened corporeality, an irrational mind. in their keenness to subjugate the specter of an illicit and genocidal nationalism, these therapeutic sciences fall short of bringing historical closure or restoring the social order. instead, by reaffirming the truth of the right extremist thing and implanting it within the operations of governance, they reinscribe it in the very heart of contemporary german nationalism. the sorts of enchantments that unsettle these efforts to crack open the political delinquent suggest more than a secular project of governance. they indicate a deep concern with understanding how good might turn into evil—for example, how working-class resistance might express itself as bigoted, violent resentment, or how domestic violence could turn an innocent child into a brutal neo-nazi. the governance of hate appears as an arena for making the national socialist specter, which still haunts germany today as the sign of pure evil, legible and hence manageable. it provides a space for articulating the need for domestication itself—that is, for domesticating the very possibility that domestication is impossible—within concrete discourses, practices, and institutions. the vigorous and constantly expanding spectrum of reformative sciences that flourish today around the political delinquent amounts to a project of signifying, elaborating, and circumscribing this urgent need within a corpus of therapeutic procedures and disciplinary techniques. and yet this project of signification responds not simply to the shadow of national socialist evil in some general sense. rather, it seeks to negotiate the myriad ways in which this sinister past hovers over the contemporary dilemmas of german nationalism, and particularly its troubled relation to immigration and cultural difference (see shoshan 2008b). in this sense, the management of hate addresses not only—perhaps even not primarily—the political delinquent. if its concern is the working through of a present national aporia, its addressee is the far wider, national public. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to the university of chicago, the social science research council, the hannah holborn gray mellon fellowship, and the josephine de kármán fellowship for their generous support of the research on which this article is based. i would also like to thank matti bunzl, alejandra leal, andrea muehlebach, rihan yeh, and participants of the entre espacios colloquium at freie universität berlin for their invaluable insights on previous drafts of this article. finally, i thank anne allison and tim elfenbein for their help with the final manuscript and the two anonymous reviewers for their astute suggestions. 1. “right extremism” is a politically and culturally charged category in germany, which i examine critically elsewhere (shoshan 2008a). its broadly acknowledged weakness as an analytical concept contrasts with its resilience and salience as a local category in both lay and expert discourses, where it is used to designate political postures that transgress the culturally and politically tolerable. 2. all names in this article have been modified to protect the confidentiality of my subjects. 3. the leitwolf is a lonely wolf, the leader of the pack, and a favorite iconic image among many right extremists. 4. section 130 of the german criminal code, “agitation of the people,” defines as criminal the incitement of hatred or violence against groups, assaults on the dignity of groups, or the approval, denial, or downplaying of national socialist crimes (bundesministerium der justiz 2008). 5. foucault notes the central importance of the need to graft criminality onto popular leaders and social struggles for delinquency to emerge (1995, 273–75). in turn, eric hobsbawm (1969) famously coined the phrase “social bandits” to capture the slippage between a certain figure of rural criminality and a crude mode of political resistance. the category of political prisoners has likewise indicated a certain articulation of criminality and politics (e.g., feldman 1991). from a different perspective, jean comaroff and john comaroff (2006, 223) have insisted on the fundamentally political stakes of “crime talk.” 6. specifically in europe, political delinquency seeks to govern affective relations to muslim immigrants, as anthropologists have shown (asad 2003; bunzl 2005). 7. what i call affective governance can be described as affective in a double sense: first, in view of its objects (the xenophobic, racist, nationalist, or other feelings and sensibilities it seeks to orchestrate and regulate). second, specific affective investments—a political economy of historical memory and an emergent project of national rejuvenation, both saturated with hopes and anxieties—inflect the aims pursued by such governance, just as much as the strategies and technologies it employs. in this article, i understand affects as attachments and investments that, while perhaps often not entirely conscious or explicit (berlant 2007, 277), nevertheless are not unstructured intensities or indeterminate potentialities (massumi 1995). instead, affects are always already socially mediated and configured structures of feeling that may, for example, attach to or circulate between extensive publics, institutional practices, forms of social belonging, or pervasive normative aspirations (berlant 2007; mazzarella 2009). affect in this sense is a social effect (martin 2013) but is not merely epiphenomenal—it effectively shapes and motivates projects and commitments (see also muehlebach and shoshan 2012). 8. unlike siegel’s witches, however, right extremists cannot be conceived as victims or their crimes compared with alleged sorcery, nor can their adversaries be compared with witch-hunters. 9. the nationaldemokratische partei deutschlands (npd) has been the most prominent among germany’s right extremist parties over the past two decades. 10. both tomasky’s sermon and the film could be taken as paradigmatic of the contemporary “shrinkage of existential time” (jameson 2003, 708). and yet, their apparent incapacity “of framing immediate alternatives” (704) would seem to be less the result of the waning of a critical substantive relation to the present (jameson 2004), and more of a moral incitement to political conversion, a condemnation of alternative aspirations as at once heretic and irrational (cf. guyer 2007). 11. the philosophical reductio ad absurdium of this critique can be found in adorno’s (1997, 207) insistence that the object can only be grasped in the absence of its image. a more historically sensitive understanding of this bilderverbot (ban on images) refers to the longstanding cultural prohibition in post-war germany on public representations of nazi imagery and the holocaust (huyssen 2010). this taboo hasn’t ceased to exercise its force, if now as regulation and discomfort rather than blanket censorship. tellingly, the reactions to “globalization and 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—winnie mandela, 1986 faku and i stood surrounded by billowing smoke. in the shack settlement of slovo road,1 on the outskirts of the south african port city of durban, flames flickered between piles of debris, which the day before had been wood-plank and plastic tarpaulin walls. the conflagration began early in the morning. within hours, before the arrival of fire trucks or ambulances, the two thousand households that comprised the settlement as we knew it had burnt to the ground. on a hillcrest in slovo, abahlali basemjondolo (an isizulu phrase meaning “residents of the shacks”) was gathered in a mass meeting. slovo was a founding settlement of abahlali, a leading poor people's movement that emerged from a burning road blockade during protests in 2005. in part, the meeting was to mourn. five people had been found dead that day in the remains, including faku’s neighbor. “where there is fire, there is politics,” faku said to me. this fire, like others before, had been covered by the local press and radio, some journalists having been notified by abahlali via text message and online press release. the red cross soon set up a makeshift soup kitchen, and the city government provided emergency shelter in the form of a large, brightly striped communal tent. residents, meanwhile, took up tools for several days of hard labor, digging foundations and hammering nails to construct new shacks. by midday, local officials in luxury vehicles rode down the winding dirt road of the settlement, leaving piles of blankets and stacks of canned food. a slovo resident with a megaphone shouted that those seeking the goods first had to display african national congress (anc) membership cards. a riot nearly erupted. figure 1. slovo road shack fire, which left 2,000 homes destroyed, 2008. photo by kerry ryan chance. fire is a familiar sign of life in the sprawling shack lands that populate the margins of durban’s city center. behind securitized suburban landscapes, glossy shopping plazas, and beachfront tourist attractions, residents like faku routinely use fire as a source of light and heat at home, and as a weapon of protest on the streets. since the election of nelson mandela in 1994, the ruling anc has endeavored to redress inequalities inherited from a colonial past while demobilizing the “ungovernable” street politics that characterized the late liberation struggle, in part by cultivating participation in formal democratic institutions, such as participating in elections, joining local ward committees, and applying for housing subsidies.2 the anc has championed new social grants, including old-age pensions, disability, and child support. yet more than twenty years after the fall of apartheid, with an unemployment rate estimated at nearly thirty percent, millions living without formalized housing, and a top-ranking gini coefficient that reflects a yawning gap between rich and poor, south africa remains one of the world’s most unequal societies.3 dissatisfaction with the slow pace of socioeconomic transformation has been consistently expressed through urban unrest from street protests to labor strikes to xenophobic pogroms, particularly among those who still struggle to make life viable and secure in historically race-based communities. this article examines the unruly force of fire in state-citizen struggles. by tracking interactions between state agents and activist networks in south africa between the mid-1980s and the present, i analyze how residents of townships and shack settlements leverage the material properties of fire to secure techno-institutional claims to energy infrastructure, and more broadly to political inclusion and economic redistribution. as i demonstrate, residents are deploying the distinct destructive and productive capacities of fire through practices, borrowed from liberation movements, which have been criminalized during south africa’s celebrated democratic transition. by approaching fire as intertwined with power, my study illuminates how the urban poor, those living on the margins of the city, come to inhabit political roles that transform and are transformed by material life in emerging liberal orders. my primary research into fire (umlilo in isizulu) was conducted in townships and shack settlements affiliated with abahlali basemjondolo beginning in 2006.4 the activities claimed and sponsored by this activist network have been the work of unemployed youth, church leaders, veterans of the liberation struggle, pensioners, and women. abahlali grew out of the kennedy road settlement, where about seven thousand african families live in homes of scrap metal, wood, and plastic sheeting (see also patel 2008; pithouse 2006; gibson 2011; selmeczi 2011).5 now a national movement claiming about 25,000 members, abahlali spans historically indian and coloured (or mixed-race) townships with large hindu and muslim constituencies. along with maintaining its own website, listserve, twitter, and facebook accounts, the movement appears in a spectrum of news outlets from al jazeera to the economist. abahlali also operates within cross-regional and transnational networks of lawyers and grassroots activists, in part powered by digital media technologies, from chicago to rio de janeiro to port-au-prince. my research included abahlali members of various ages, genders, and ethnic and racial identifications, as well as residents not aligned with the movement, in the cities of durban, cape town, and johannesburg. figure 2. abahlali basemjondolo website, asking “why are the poor left to burn?” accessed march 18, 2008. i tracked fire and its material properties through ethnographic participant observation in abahlali-affiliated communities outward to the city streets and the courts, as well as through the analysis of relevant archival materials, including nongovernmental reports, policy documents, texts produced by residents, and statements by officials, especially agents of local law enforcement, the city government, and the national legislature.6 fires occur because of household accidents or deliberative political acts. official statistics suggest that shack fires happen ten times per day throughout the country, with one death resulting every other day. a shack fire is estimated at once per day in the city of durban alone (birkinshaw 2008, 1). the south african safety and security minister counted 881 “illegal” protests in 2005 (wines 2005), and the national average has been estimated to be five protests per day in the following years (news twenty-four 2014).7 these fires, as i found, are regular fodder for local tabloids, national television, and social media, ensuring that news of flames spreads quickly through south african mediaspheres. to analyze the intertwining of fire and politics (ipolitiki) in urban south africa, the first section of this article combines theories of liberal governance, studies of material life in so-called slums, and research on popular politics. the second section illustrates how liberation movements and apartheid state agents made use of fire during the ungovernable years of the mid-1980s, searing it into the life histories of the next generation of activists in townships and shack settlements. the third section, focusing on burning barricades, suggests how abahlali members are adopting and redeploying practices of liberation activists, which have been recast in the post-apartheid period as the work of “electricity bandits” and other shadowy “criminal elements” (maluleka 2010; enca 2013).8 the last section, returning to shack conflagrations, suggests how forms of endangerment attributed to a lack of electricity and the promise of infrastructure have become a platform for innovative forms of political mobilization in poor communities. liberal governance, material life, and popular politics to best examine the politicization and criminalization of fire, i bridge theoretical concerns in political anthropology, urban studies, and african studies. modern political theory often relies on fire as a metaphor for political power. it is thought to be at once a natural and a human force, necessary and dangerous to social order (hobbes 1998; rousseau 1992). more literally, this theory identifies the manipulation—and monopoly—of fire as authorizing rule: scorched earth as a military tactic (machiavelli 1958), the steam engine as a means of industrial production (marx 1978), or burning barricades as an instrument of revolution (foucault 1991). in taken-for-granted material ways, then, modern theory addresses fire’s role in enacting or upending liberal governance through the distribution of sovereignty (schmitt 1996), state–civil-society relations (hegel 1949; gramsci 1971), and civic participation in public life (arendt 1994; habermas 1984). touching on these classic debates and emphasizing that fire is a social and historical as well as a chemical process, anthropologists illustrate how democratic power has been differently shaped by existing cultural traditions and prior colonial regimes, affectively embodied through diverse rituals and representations, and reconfigured by civil strife and global neoliberalism (ferguson 2006; hansen 2008; harvey 2005; mbembe 2003; mcdonald and pape 2002; marais 2011). a growing number of scholars have attended to how energy systems—from the installation of electricity grids to the burning of fossil fuels—have become enfolded into bio-power and other forms of late modern governance to constrain or open up democratic institutions (mitchell 2009; boyer 2014; winther 2008; murray 2009).9 my work explores how fire and other elemental forms of material life congeal political practices, interactions, and identities through time. in these ways, we can see fire as intertwined with power in a double sense: as transformable energy and as dynamic social relations. i aim to show how fire, in this case deployed by the urban poor, demarcates politics in liberal democratic transitions. by doing so, i illustrate how fire cuts across persistent dichotomies in social analysis between materiality and semiosis, the chemical and the historical, and the economic and the political. scholarship on post-apartheid south africa has established that “the political” in public discourse is often opposed to the antidemocratic or the criminal, expressed, for example, in racialized condemnations of violent protests and in fears of rising crime rates (comaroff and comaroff 2006; morris 2006; steinberg 2001; gillespie 2008; jensen 2008). as part of my research in abahlali-affiliated settlements, i considered how and what practices of the urban poor state agents name as criminal or antidemocratic, particularly focusing on burning public and private property or illicitly connected electricity. conversely, i interrogate how and what practices of state agents the poor consider illegitimate, such as banning street marches or disconnecting services for alleged non-payment. i therefore theorize how the interactions of residents and state agents constitute contested demarcations of the political, most generally through a much-remarked relationship between crime and democratic state-making (siegel 1998; kosek 2006). fire, a hermeneutic and technology of state-citizen struggles, shapes this relationship in the townships and shack settlements that continue to be hotbeds of criminalized popular unrest. in addition to looking at interactions between residents and state agents, my research examines how fire’s material properties are used in everyday tactics of community building among the urban poor. an emerging literature on global slums documents their explosive urban growth around the world (pieterse 2008; simone 2014), as well as how residents survive on the edges of legality and state delivery without access to basic infrastructure (appadurai 2006; gupta 2012; rao 2012; roy 2011; ross 2010; huchzemeyer 2011). while an earlier wave of slum studies have cast these communities merely as “human dumping grounds” (davis 2006), and therefore rarely as places of thriving politics, anthropologists have demonstrated how residents gain rights, resources, and recognition through appropriating state technologies (von schnitzler 2013; ong 1999; langford et al. 2013), encroaching on urban space (holston 2008; bayat 2000), and refashioning themselves as biopolitical subjects of care (chari 2010; li 2007; chatterjee 2004; redfield 2012). with few exceptions, scholars have placed less emphasis on how residents render their material lives ungovernable to reconstitute their interactions with state agents.10 by transforming a burning match into a conflagration, the urban poor also transform themselves. using fire as a platform to redirect power, they become legible to state agents, not as the governed but as the ungovernable. even if fleeting or momentary, fire rarely leaves those involved wholly unchanged: a conflagration could result in bodily injury or collective solidarity. africanist scholarship, often critical of liberal governance’s theoretical antecedents, shows how fire has long been used, be it through war or witchcraft, to injure or terrify enemies, to regulate territories or social hierarchies, or to adjudicate punishment and disputes in the realms of customary or colonial law (geshiere 2013; evans-pritchard 1976). this work, focusing on the transformative nature of fire, also has explored its role in medicine and religion to heal the body and speak to ancestors, to protect local ecologies, and to make useful and necessary things, such as food, pottery, or coal (comaroff 1985; mavhunga 2013; pooley 2012; lévi-strauss 1983). to better understand how these productive and destructive—or even disastrous (bank 2001)—properties shape democratic politics in south africa’s urban shack lands, i analyze what residents of abahlali-affiliated communities refer to as “living politics,” or ipolitiki ephilayo in the isizulu vernacular. members characterize living politics as eventful public dramas, such as street protests and burning road blockades, as well as mundane domestic activities, including cooking with fire or reading by candlelight. in this way, living politics transmutes the boundaries between the home and the streets to make the poor seen and heard in the city through means that residents ground in their own communities and contrast to expert, elite, or technical languages of formal state institutions. living politics intersects with an emergent anthropological literature on the infrastructural imagination (anand 2011; appel 2012; fennell 2011; harvey and knox 2012), but it emphasizes informally constructed domains, where residents make their material life and platform for politics by any means necessary. for that reason, in my analysis of fire, i consider how the urban poor collectively mobilize and identify with each other. studies of the past two decades have sought to capture the growing cross-regional and transnational nature of activist networks and to distinguish them from other forms of effervescent collective activity and assemblages (nash 2005; bertelsen, tvedten, and roque 2013; heller 2001). along with noting the use of fire in riots or uprisings, they have emphasized the role of spatial and organizational structures, the composition of crowds and multitudes, and the content of issue-driven action and public campaigns (castells 1983; paley 2001; hardt 2010; badiou 2012). many theorists have argued that liberal democratic governance, which formally accompanied decolonization, has shifted popular movement politics away from the class-based struggles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toward identity, whether ethnic, religious, or national (benhabib 1996; laclau and mouffe 2001). well before the financial crisis and the arab spring prompted a reappraisal of this view, south african scholars observed that the primary self-identification of protesters in south africa has shifted from “african” nationalism to loose activist networks of “the poor” (desai 2002; bond 2004; seekings and natrass 2005). to consider how the poor came to inhabit this primary, but by no means singular or uncontested, collective identity, one premised on shared and often criminalized material life, i consider the ways residents mobilize across historically african, indian, and coloured communities. i show how the poor have melded old and new practices, for instance, by working within long-existing civic organizations and previously segregated state structures. by analyzing how residents of townships and shack settlements make a platform for their lives and politics, be it in the streets, the courts, or global media flows, this article aims to show how political spaces are redefined, power is forcibly enacted, and new forms of citizenship and identity congeal at the intersections of race and class. living memories of fire: insurgency in 1980s kwazulu-natal prior to the election of nelson mandela in 1994, fire was linked to the atrocities of apartheid, counter-revolutionary activities, and the very possibility of liberation. during the 1952 defiance campaign, a young mandela and other activists torched their passbooks, the notorious identity documents that regulated and restricted the mobility of african, indian, and coloured people under apartheid. the campaign, which swelled membership across ethnic and racial lines by the tens of thousands, would mark the anc’s birth as a mass movement. by transforming a tangible symbol of apartheid into ash, mandela showed up the illegitimacy of the race-based state’s power to divide and rule, while issuing a performative claim on inclusive non-racial citizenship within a new democratic polity. the anc had been inspired by mahatma gandhi’s 1909 nonviolence campaign in kwazulu-natal, when south african indians likewise broke the law to burn their passes—which prohibited crossing into unauthorized zones—in defiance of british colonialism, suggestive again of fire’s potential power to destroy and redraw lines of difference. in 1986, winnie mandela famously said that matches had become harbingers of liberation, in words that captured the spirit of those turbulent times and helped make her their controversial icon. her phrasing also suggests how the properties of fire constituted its threat to state security and its importance to urban insurgency. unlike guns and other weapons that required a supply chain and orders from above, fire was always within the grasp of ordinary men and women, made from ordinary, on-hand materials found inside the home. the primary tools of its ignition, matches, are not only affordable and accessible to all, and in this sense highly democratized, but they are also highly mobile, easily transported from place to place; they can be secreted if necessary, hidden away in one’s palm, pocket, or kitchen cupboard. once set, flame spreads rapidly and consumes what it touches, making its illuminant effects highly visible, but leaving the agents who have lit the match often invisible, mysterious, or unknown. abahlali members often point to the defiance campaign as a fiery precursor to post-apartheid civil disobedience, but as they and archival materials suggest, it was really the insurgency of the mid-1980s that seared fire into memories and practices of the liberation struggle. persuaded that the time had come “to submit or fight” (mandela 1964), the anc established umkhonto we sizwe, the mk or “spear of the nation” in 1961, following the sharpeville massacre, in which sixty-nine people were gunned down during a mass gathering against pass laws. the mk’s guerrilla military cells, by way of matches and petrol bombs, set alight government buildings and blew up electricity pylons. by the mid-1980s, with many of the earlier generation of fighters such as mandela in prison, the anc called for the townships to be rendered “ungovernable,” thereby expanding and popularizing the role of militant activities beyond the rigid hierarchies of the mk. oliver thambo, then president of the anc, referred to the militant operations of the party as “the terrible but cleansing fires of revolutionary war” (african national congress 1996). fire during this period served not only as a popular political metaphor but also as a choice weapon for youth come of age during the struggle, who notably set about blocking roadways with fiery barricades and burning the homes of despised local councillors. yet as the south african truth and reconciliation commission (trc) revealed in gruesome detail, apartheid state agents harnessed some of the same properties of fire during the mid-1980s, usually for their most shadowy operations. security forces were known to burn the bodies of the disappeared, which along with preventing proper burial, destroyed evidentiary traces of the identities of both victim and perpetrator.11 inkatha warriors, zulu nationalists known as “the third force,” were armed by the old regime to target their neighbors during the liberation struggle and made a practice of burning rural homesteads, a memory that lives on for many in durban shack lands. burning homesteads dually served as retribution for supporting anc operatives and as a sovereign claim on disputed territories. all sides—the apartheid state, inkatha, and the anc—deployed so-called necklacing, setting alight a rubber tire around the neck of a suspected impimpi (spy, colluder in isizulu and isixhosa), who would slowly burn to death. necklacing as punishment for political disloyalty was a practice viewed by some in the anc as evidence that populist violence had run amok. one of the earliest recorded cases of necklacing was brought to light by the trc, which documented the 1985 burning of a young girl, maki skosana, who was accused of being an informant. dramatically, while attending the funeral for one of the young comrades she had supposedly had a hand in killing, she was set alight. necklacing, along with the torching of shops and homes, would reemerge after apartheid in the wake of what became known as “xenophobic attacks” targeting ethnic and national minorities, as well as in acts of vigilante justice aimed at suspected witches and criminals (comaroff and comaroff 2001; hickel 2014)—including at sites where i conducted research.12 in kennedy road, a founding settlement of abahlali, fire was used during ethnicized armed attacks by anc supporters, which were aimed at movement members in 2009 (chance 2010). as the above outline suggests, during the mid-1980s, while apartheid state agents cultivated fire to fuel the counterinsurgency, residents cultivated it as a guerrilla weapon. these interactions are relevant not simply because practices of the mid-1980s continue to be enacted in present-day shack settlements but also because fire conjures powerful living memories of organized warfare. many residents of abahlali-affiliated settlements were involved in various capacities with liberation movements, including the anc, whether through military operations, churches, or trade unions. others, especially young people, characterize their political activities and involvement with what they even now call “the struggle” (umzabalazo), as beginning with the fall of apartheid and battles emerging over adequate housing, work, and access to infrastructure in the newly desegregated cities. all residents i spoke with who lived through apartheid were subject to state violence, frequently mediated by fire: forced removals, political killings, and military occupation. the racialization, and indeed ethnicization, of social spaces and subjects implied by this violence highlights fire’s ability to draw lines of difference. life histories of abahlali members and other residents i spoke with clarify how fires, past and present, punctuate life in settlements. a resident named siboniso and i sat in plastic, apartheid-era school chairs at the movement’s then–national headquarters in the kennedy road settlement to speak about his memories of fire. with the din of children playing in the crèche next door, we talked about bellcourt, where he grew up. bellcourt is a small town amid the rolling green hills of northern kwazulu-natal, a land of sugarcane and indentured labor. siboniso moved to durban in 1998 to find work and study law at the local university. when he first arrived in kennedy, the shack conflagrations brought back memories of his rural hometown. he would awaken at night screaming, uncertain why or from what nightmare, but certain it had to do with the fires. while staying with relatives in a nearby township, he landed a job as a gas station attendant filling tanks. he was arrested and tortured in police custody because of his association with abahlali. soon after his employer learned of these events, siboniso lost his job. after two years of university, no longer able to afford his tuition bills, he was ejected from the university. while popular national histories draw the battle lines of apartheid-era civil war between the old regime and the new dispensation led by the anc, there remain at the regional level other powerfully felt fields of conflict and other actors that tell of fire. in the mid-1980s and the early 1990s, bellcourt was a hot spot for battles between the zulu-nationalist movement inkatha (also known as the ifp) and the supposedly nonethnic nationalist forces of the anc.13 the area of bellcourt in which siboniso’s family lived was an inkatha stronghold. siboniso, like others in the province, characterizes his hometown as divided, homestead by homestead, into two camps of opposing party affiliation. “party politics,” he said, “was one being an enemy to the other,” with fire being of deadly importance to this distinction: “[as a child] i did not understand party politics, other than as an opportunity to learn to shoot well. if you are ifp, then the anc would kill you; if you are anc, then the ifp would kill you—your house would be burned down or you would be shot to death.” siboniso and other residents i have spoken with liken the process of acquiring status in an activist movement to gang initiation, a violent and masculine rite of passage. but where guns took aim at men, fire took aim especially at women and children. the deployment of fire targeted the home, the site of the domestic sphere, of social and biological reproduction. against this stark picture of civil war, siboniso joined the boy scouts, whose activities—not perceived as a threat to inkatha territorial sovereignty—proved a permissible, if feminized, refuge. often drawing parallels between the boy scouts and abahlali, siboniso suggests that the organization contributed to a prominent formulation of his movement’s politics, a living politics (ipolitiki ephilayo) or a “home politics” outside nationalist party structures. busisiwe, another kennedy resident, grew up in an anc stronghold called nortown, a hundred kilometers inland from bellcourt. we first talked at length about fire while visiting her relatives in a township adjacent to a dusty, abandoned main street, which in earlier days had drawn holidaymakers to nearby hot springs. along with her mother and two siblings, busisiwe moved to durban and the kennedy settlement in 2003 in search of decent schools and upward mobility in the city. in contrast to the concrete-block house her family had built in nortown, their shack in kennedy was a one-room affair with the basics—a few pieces of furniture, a paraffin lamp, and wallpaper made of a mixture of juice and milk cartons. busisiwe particularly loved the wallpaper for the childhood memories it evoked. in nortown, her family had lived along a contested road, where inkatha and anc operatives targeted each other with arson and petrol bombs. “every time these two were fighting. they would just come and camp by the corner of our house. one would shoot up the road, the other would shoot down the road.” after one long day of fighting on the road, busisiwe’s family received news that her uncle had been killed. as a known anc loyalist, he had apparently been the target of a “plot.” what emerges in siboniso’s and busisiwe’s narratives in two distinct party strongholds is the mediating force of fire in the spatio-political configurations of rural towns in late apartheid-era kwazulu-natal. alleged arson, a fire with a suspected yet obscured agent, hinged on “operations” aimed at designating suspected impimpi. “if your house is set with fire,” said siboniso, “then that would mean it would have been planned. there would have been a conspiracy. there would be a lot of people knowing that you were a suspect, so you would not retaliate.” intervention in the public designation of impimpi could risk perceived affiliation with the suspect. under apartheid, amid the banning of activists and organizations and police crackdowns on public gatherings, funerals took on a strong political valence as potential sites of mobilization. but funerals also were sites where kith, kin, and organizational loyalties could be identified by opposing factions. “i had family members and friends whom we couldn’t even bury,” said siboniso, echoing a sentiment shared by many who lived through these years. “if your family member or friend in the area was a suspected anc operative or sympathizer, you could not be buried under the ground of an ifp stronghold.” many would be too fearful to attend the funeral. as siboniso and busisiwe suggest, territories were regulated by violence tied to talk of shadowy secret colluders, their plots and alignments with one or another enemy party. street protests and shack conflagrations: politicizing energy and endangerment in post-apartheid durban if the mid-1980s marked the popularization of fire in street politics against apartheid, the turn of the millennium marked its unanticipated return in street politics against neoliberal policy reforms and ongoing inequalities in poor african, indian, and coloured communities. activists deployed fire, as they did in the mid-1980s. they capitalized on fire’s highly mobile and affordable qualities to render visible spaces ordinarily hidden from view in the city, while disrupting urban activities by blocking roadways, and therefore the circulation of traffic, goods, and people. residents of townships and shack settlements torched sites tied materially and symbolically to the state (uhulumeni in isizulu),14 including old targets such as local councillors’ homes, but also new sites of techno-institutional management, such as the offices of nongovernmental organizations (ngos). police and private security forces have officially condemned these acts as “criminal” and “counter-revolutionary” (agence france presse 2005), meeting them with arrests and violence (alexander et al. 2012; chance forthcoming). protesters, at times, have been referred to as impimpi (spies, colluders). the deployment of fire by activists in south africa in the post-apartheid period has thus become a distinguishing criterion between civil and uncivil society, the former associated with ngos aligned with state or international institutions, and the latter associated with movements of the poor or populist community-based mobilizations.15 a public dispute over fire, for instance, erupted between abahlali and a leading ngo for those living with hiv. though they at times work together and share members, the ngo, echoing official discourse, posited burning barricades as criminal acts. abahlali in cape town responded that fire formed part of daily life in the communities that are the locus of living politics: “we are not a professional organisation with millions of rands of donor funding that can operate in the middle class world. we are a movement of, for and by the poor. we therefore have to struggle where we are and with what we have. if that means burning tyres on lansdowne road then that is how we will struggle.”16 the press statement emphasizes the enduring power of fire to galvanize collective anger into concrete political action when other means of civic action remain unavailable.17 often less visible to middle-class publics, but pivotal to making living politics, are political mobilizations within settlements. in abahlali-affiliated settlements, shack fires are the subject of summits and gatherings attended by thousands. routine practices have emerged to respond to the aftermath of fire, including collective rebuilding, organized distributions through aid organizations, and making a registry of families requiring the replacement of school uniforms, id books, and other items often lost to flame. abahlali members characterize fire, and the activities that surround it, as an existential condition of living in shacks. flame leaves inscriptions on the homes, belongings, and bodies of the poor, an identification in contemporary south africa that is rendered through intersections of race and class (ballard, habib, and valodia 2006; seekings and natrass 2005; hart 2014). an abahlali member named mnikelo makes this point saying, “when a white man lights a candle, it is supposed that he is being romantic. when a black man lights a candle, it is supposed that he is poor.” the stereotyped race/class identity of the poor, as mnikelo suggests, is inscribed in fire. for abahlali members, the use of candles and the routine quality of fires in infrastructurally bereft settlements distinguish the poor from the middle or upper class, categories that are themselves racially marked.18 the opposition posited by mnikelo also points to post-apartheid reconfigurations between race and class, for the ranks of the white political and economic elite have not so much been displaced by the collapse of colonial orders as joined by a small, but growing black elite. by self-identifying as the poor, abahlali members emphasize a racialized status tied to ongoing experiences of lived material conditions in shack settlements, while recognizing the persistence of racism across class lines. an allegory, frequently heard at abahlali meetings and in day-to-day talk, captures how these race/class reconfigurations map onto urban dwellings, and more broadly, onto spatial arrangements of the city: imagine yourself accidentally falling asleep with the light on. if you live in a shack and your light is a candle, it could mean the destruction of life and limb, community and property. in the wealthy suburbs, it is of little consequence other than perhaps a higher household electricity bill. an estimated three times as many deaths occur in shack settlements than in formal dwellings (birkinshaw 2008, 1). inasmuch as fire has everyday productive capacities—in the making of food, light, and politics—inside homes of the poor—unlike in those of the rich or the middle class—its destructive capacities are injurious, even deadly. while burning barricades have been criminalized with reference to counter-revolutionary activities in the post-apartheid period, shack conflagrations have been criminalized with reference to another sort of power: so-called electricity banditry. i visited the kennedy road settlement for the first time almost a decade ago, on invitation by local activists to attend a funeral. hundreds of residents from various durban shack settlements—including faku, busisiwe, and siboniso—had gathered at kennedy road for a memorial service for zithulele dhlomo, a seventy-year-old man who had died in a sudden shack fire. broken windows allowed the chilly night air to seep into the community hall where the memorial was held. mourners lit candles and sang reformulated anti-apartheid struggle songs, intermittently dancing and toyi-toying (a militarized dance). they shouted: “amandla awethu!” a popular apartheid-era call-and-response, meaning “the power is ours.” dennis brutus, a veteran activist who had served a sentence on robben island with nelson mandela, spoke to the circumstances of dhlomo’s death. “tonight,” he said, “we are talking about two kinds of service: a memorial service for the man who died, and service to the people for housing, water, and electricity. the people were told that when we have freedom, services would be provided. but we know that tonight there are people shivering in the cold and darkness.” figure 3. shack fire at the kennedy road settlement, 2008. photograph by s’bu zikode. “baba” dhlomo, as he was known, lived in kennedy road for twenty years. he was one of the longest-residing members of the community. he shared a two-room shack with four other families and was in the back room when a candle, used for light after dark in the unelectrified settlement, set alight the plastic sheet walls. unable to escape quickly enough, he burned to death. he is survived by his children and grandchildren, whom he helped support by collecting scrap metal for resale. emergency services at the scene of dhlomo’s death did not completely remove the body, despite pleas from family and neighbors. dhlomo’s lower arms and a leg, burnt almost to the bone, were found in the ash and rubble the following day. as residents suggest, such treatment of the dead can be dangerous, even in the afterlife. some say that those who die in shack fires cannot rest properly, and that their spirits have been known to twist fitfully in the winds of the settlement years later. speakers at dhlomo’s memorial raised concerns about the criminalization of shack dwellers by municipal officials and police, who blamed the community for an “irresponsible” use of candles or cooking fires, as well as “illegal” electricity connections. speaking on services and criminalization, one resident said, “better to lock us up in jail—in jail there is light, in jail there is water, in jail there is a toilet.” instead of basic infrastructure, which would prevent fires, he said, ngos came to “workshop the poor” on fire safety. in response to dhlomo’s death, abahlali planned to hold mass demonstrations across durban to demand the immediate electrification of the shacks. residents i spoke to mobilized numerous overlapping, and at times conflicting, explanations for shack fires, including witchcraft, winter winds, and lovers’ quarrels. the most commonly cited source is tipped-over candles. as brutus suggests, however, residents in kennedy and slovo roads most broadly attribute fire to a lack of electricity. in recent years, shack fires have been a cause for alarm among state agents, at various levels and offices, in the city of durban. at times, city officials propose that shack fires are a natural phenomenon, brought on by dry weather and exacerbated by the geographical terrain of settlements. yet in press statements and off-the-record interviews, the most readily mobilized explanation for shack fires by durban officials is so-called illegal connections (ngcongco 2011), wherein residents connect themselves to energy infrastructure, at times under the banner of poor people's movements. activists call it “operation khanyisa” (“let there be light”), a slogan since appropriated by state agents for programs aimed at stamping out illicit energy. within settlements, those who do the technical work of connections are often called “guerrilla electricians” or “people’s electricians.” the result, crisscrossed wiring, can be seen throughout south african townships and shack settlements, which officials regard as “electricity theft” (mchunu 2008), an illegal seizure of power by the poor from the legitimate monopoly held by the state and its often-multinational corporate partners. if shack fires and protests are posited as symptoms of criminal agency, the force of technical and legal interventions by the state is framed as their cure. when another fire tore through a settlement near slovo road, durban’s mayor called for a citywide investigation, warning that if “illegal electricity connections” were involved, “criminals”—those caught connecting and those using the electricity—would “soon be brought to book” (khuzwayo 2011). as abahlali responded in an online press statement, “when self organized [electricity] connections are done safely they protect us from fires. but when we connect ourselves in a safe and carefully disciplined manner we are called criminals” (abahlali basemjondolo 2011). the measures to control illicit connections in the city of durban include a heady mixture of armed raids and surveillance, both of which establish settlements as de facto zones of criminality. at slovo road, police disconnect shacks almost every night, only to find electricity cables repaired the next morning. the removal of illicit connections would be enacted, said one municipal statement, by deploying “contractor teams” to regularly patrol “identified areas.” in practice, these contractors and armed security forces are outsourced private labor. police often accompany or participate in the work of these teams. in addition to reconfiguring electrical cabling and installing “anti-climb devices” to electrical poles, the municipality promises the use of “forensic investigation” including surveillance cameras and photographs (mdlalose 2009). the municipality does not frame electrical service theft as an act against the corporate interests of eskom, the parastatal that operates with private and multinational partners to supply south africa with its power. rather, eskom and the municipality emphasize that this supposed theft makes for a quantifiable incursion on the private property of consumers. as one television advertising campaign put it: “electricity theft is not a victimless crime. the victim is you.” the advertisement plays on racialized and class-based post-apartheid fears of crime. residents of shack settlements illicitly connecting to the electricity grid have been blamed for the increasing frequency of rolling blackouts, a measure taken by eskom to conserve energy to prevent a total loss of power. at times, the municipality, in newspapers and press statements, boasts a record of successful arrests of shadowy “electricity thieves” (mchunu 2008). in january 2011, the city reported that twenty-five people had been arrested for alleged electricity connections near siyanda, an area home to many abahlali supporters (ngcongco 2011). the endpoint of these investigations, ultimately, is to ensure the electricity disconnection of unauthorized households, but also to submit “electricity bandits”—those connecting and those connected—to the might of the law through the courts and the prisons. the municipality further calls for residents “to follow the right steps” by applying for an electricity connection and providing phone numbers to the metro customer services centre (ngcongco 2011). the call charges a technocratic state with the recuperative possibility of curing fires by connecting potential customers, if not to the electricity grid, at least to the realm of law and order. it is, however, a fictive connection—while steps may be in place to apply, the provision of electricity in shack settlements, including slovo road, was suspended in 2001. the 2001 policy states: “in the past (1990s) electrification was rolled out to all and sundry. because of the lack of funding and the huge costs required to relocate services when these settlements are upgraded or developed, electrification of the informal settlements has been discontinued” (birkinshaw 2008, 4). since then, with the implementation of slum-clearance initiatives, shack settlements have been recast as temporary dwellings and earmarked for removal. liberal state discourses on fire elide the politicization of bodily endangerment among residents in abahlali-affiliated settlements. in durban’s shack lands, scars on bodies tell stories, often about fire. there are three common injuries associated with fire: the first is to livelihoods, the second to the burning of the body, and the third is death. in 2008, in the same month slovo road was swept away by flames, abahlali convened a shack fire summit in the community hall where baba dhlomo’s funeral had been held. there, with a candle lit in vigil on the floor, busisiwe spoke about a time when her family’s one-room shack in kennedy had been set alight. it happened when she arrived from school and began cooking supper. while chatting with her mother, busisiwe moved back and forth to stir and stare at the pot. suddenly, she said, “smoke was coming out and it was smelling nasty. i said to mom, ‘what is wrong with this stove?’” the stove was brand new: an ngo had been selling new ethanol gel stoves hailed as “safer than paraffin” in kennedy road. busisiwe’s family purchased one, knowing the hazards of paraffin—an expensive substance, a hassle to acquire, and easily combustible. aside from its foul smell, the clear liquid was sometimes accidentally ingested by young children, resulting in death. ethanol gel, a renewable resource often made from sugarcane, is regarded as a “green,” eco-friendly alternative. while busisiwe wondered what might be wrong with the new stove, she again stared at the pot. then, “poof!” the stove exploded: the flames caught my clothes. my clothes: that is how i got burned. it just burst into flames. i only saw the flames and nothing else, and i ran away. i just ran outside. i wanted to get rid of the fire, and so i was rolling down on the sand. my neighbors, seeing me run out of my shack with the flames, ran to remove the stove, so that the fire would not catch the other homes. i rolled outside, and then [my mother and neighbors] poured me with water. once back inside, busisiwe sat down on the bed, when suddenly she began “feeling the heat.” she saw that the only objects burned were the duvet cover and the milk-and-juice-carton wallpaper. her mother called the ambulance, but after more than an hour, it had not arrived. eventually, she was given a lift to addington, a public hospital that serves as the main access point to medical care for poor residents in the city, where she underwent two skin grafts. they did not take: the fire left her with permanent scars across much of her arms, legs, and torso. busisiwe’s mother told me that thereafter the younger children would awaken at night, shouting: “there’s a fire! there’s a fire! there’s a fire!” i asked busisiwe if she too had nightmares. she said, “no, i just take things i see into my eyes—not into my head.” but it did reorient her future. after spending months in recovery, she was prevented from taking a scholarship that would have allowed her to go to a private school. she said, “it wasn’t only me that burned down; all my plans were burned down in that fire.” through the body, the injuries sustained by fire extend indefinitely into the future to shape life and politics inside the home and on the streets. the measures taken within settlements to prevent fires are emblematic of the complex entanglements of energy and endangerment. in 2009, i went with kennedy residents—including busisiwe, siboniso, and faku—to a mass meeting to prepare the memorial of sixteen-year-old sakephi zenda. with the illicit electricity supply cut by private security earlier in the day, the nighttime meeting was conducted in complete darkness, save for a single electric lamp. suddenly, a police helicopter appeared shining bright spotlights on the residents gathered below. flying low in the sky, the helicopter swung back and forth like some deus ex machina, recalling the thematic of criminalization at baba dhlomo’s service. the newspapers at the time had announced that kwamashu had been named a “murder capital” of the world (waza online 2010), according to international crime indexes for the statistical prevalence of gunand gang-related deaths. zenda, however, had not been killed by a stray bullet but by electrocution from a poorly made electricity connection. perhaps, said his neighbors, zenda had attempted to repair the broken live wire to ward off shack fires. or, as most thought, he absentmindedly stepped on the wire, his head full of school or of his grandmother’s recent passing, while he walked home to his family’s modest shack. while zenda’s body was transported for burial at his family’s farm outside durban, abahlali issued a statement online and via text message criticizing the municipality’s policy suspending energy installation in durban shacks: “electricity could have saved sakhephi zenda’s life just as it could have saved baba dhlomo’s life. . . . we will do what ever it takes to make sure that every life counts [in this city and this system]. if that means going to court we will go to court. if that means going to the streets we will go the streets. . . . if that means resisting disconnections we will do that” (abahlali basemjondolo 2009). while it is difficult to know what influence residents had in the halls of power in the city, after nearly a decade, the electricity policy in durban was overturned. conclusion: agents of fire under liberal democratization i conclude by suggesting that there is a double edge to the promise of infrastructure. electricity protects against shack fires, and connects people to a world that increasingly relies on energy to access information and participate in politics. as mnikelo put it, “we do not need electricity, but electricity is needed for our lives.” yet licit or illicit infrastructure also can enable unwelcome state interventions, such as policing settlements as criminal zones. by promising “life”—or, the health and integrity of the body and community—infrastructure becomes a staging ground for injuries that map onto longstanding configurations of urban space at the intersections of race and class. that is not an argument against the installation of electricity, but for better understanding its power dynamics. when prepaid electricity boxes began to be installed in kennedy road shacks, it exacerbated tensions between community members by redrawing lines of difference: between those who could pay for electricity and those who could not; between those who had a job and those who were unemployed; between those who could access state patronage and those who could not. at times, these lines were perceived as marking age, ethnic, or national difference as well. as kennedy residents found, even with electricity installed, connections are likely to break, be disconnected, or become interrupted over time, particularly if prepaid electricity meters cannot be fed with a steady supply of cash. electricity raids to switch off households have frequently led to violent clashes. in other words, there is no endpoint to the installation of infrastructure, for it promises what it cannot fulfill. endangerment to the body and community do not depend only on whether residents are connected to energy but rather, more broadly, on the place still accorded to racialized bodies in distributions of political and economic power. the promise of liberation—or, what liberation movements fought for—is to fundamentally transform these distributions, which cannot be achieved by infrastructural interventions alone. figure 4. “empty promises” sign adjacent to a new housing project, and laundry hanging from a street lamp. photo by kerry ryan chance. my research focuses on how the urban poor transform material life into innovations in community-building and collective politics. this politics reimagines, leverages, and even redirects power within the compromised confines of liberal democratic transition. as i have demonstrated, residents are politicizing fire by retooling old practices of liberation activists, such as burning barricades and mass gatherings. the politicization of fire also serves as a site of cultivating new practices, for instance, through the courts and digital media technologies. along with building shelters, occupying land, and illicitly connecting to the electric grid, these are forms of community organizing that constitute what abahlali calls “living politics.” this politics, while aiming to make urban life viable and secure by accessing infrastructure, also seeks to make visible and audible those whose very appearance is deemed illicit (gordon 2012). mapping the production of political and criminal agents through fire points to a need for understanding the infrastructural imagination at multiple scales. while embedded in local practices, interactions, and identities, fire circulates as a globally intelligible icon and idiom of popular discontent in broader geographies of anger (appadurai 2006). fire is being taken up by a new generation of activists beyond south africa who find themselves formally included, but effectively shut out of mainstream politics and waged work in the context of liberalism. as mass unemployment relegates more and more people to the shadows of urban life, flames on urban streets appear where ungovernable populations threaten power; in urban homes, fire is evidence of poor communities lacking infrastructure. activists are sharing their street politics cross-regionally and transnationally as previous generations did, but through novel channels and circuits. through networks in part made possible by internet-enabled cell phones, abahlali members have real-time linkages to activists taking to the streets in countries such as egypt, haiti, and the united states. residents of an abahlali-affiliated community can upload photographs of a burning barricade to their website, which may be viewed nearly instantaneously by affiliates in russia, the united kingdom, or turkey. abahlali shares news of shack conflagrations in india, brazil, and kenya, where many poor residents rely on open flame and where some delegates of the movement have traveled for invited lectures, workshops, and conferences. these exchanges suggest how street politics, like the dynamics of power they mirror, are locally enacted yet globally entangled. ultimately, for abahlali, fire asserts a line between rich and poor, white and black, global north and global south—which maps onto urban space.19 that does not suggest that nothing has changed since 1994 in south african townships and shack settlements, but rather that from the vantage point of the shacks, it is clear who burns and dies in fires and who does not. here, between life and death, fire draws its ultimate line of difference. what i want to capture by analyzing multiple deployments of fire is the contradiction and ambivalence in the ways that people experience the post-apartheid world, and how people use the materials of their lives to respond to its conditions. some residents i talked to are saving money to send a child to an elite school, something previously not allowed. others are protesting electricity disconnections and yet see themselves as benefiting from previously unavailable social grants. many feel alienated from mainstream political parties, and yet they do not deny their ability to vote as a real and recent gain. as this suggests, future nostalgia, longing for a foreseeable time that “replaces untoward pasts” (piot 2010, 20), has been replaced by a critical reappraisal of the material forms that have made south africa a globalized liberal democracy. notes acknowledgments this research was supported by the fulbright foundation, the social science research council, the wenner-gren foundation, the american council of learned societies, the american philosophical society, and the hutchins center for african and african american research. thanks to those who read previous drafts, including jean comaroff, john comaroff, judith farquhar, susan gal, ajantha subramanian, joão gonçalves, clapperton mavhunga, richard pithouse, sharad chari, xolela mangcu, richard ballard, laurence ralph, and george mieu. thanks to dominic boyer, james faubion, and cymene howe for their critical insights, and to the anonymous reviewers. thanks to workshop participants at the university of witwatersrand, the university of chicago, harvard university, the university of kwazulu-natal, especially to s’bu zikode, mnikelo ndabankulu, zodwa nsibande, and shamitha naidoo. thanks to those in abahlali-affiliated settlements. 1. most names appearing in this article are pseudonyms. with the exception of kennedy road, which is widely known as the founding settlement of abahlali, place names have been changed as well. 2. by “late liberation struggle,” i am referring to the mid-1980s until the official fall of apartheid in 1994. 3. the gini coefficient is a widely used metric of economic inequality that represents statistical distributions of income. 4. the isizulu word for fire is causally dependent. if you set a fire, it is ubasa umlilo, but if something catches fire without anyone knowing the cause, it is iyalumatha. a shack fire could be described with either term, but more often the former would be used. the substance of fire itself is umlilo. 5. in the black consciousness traditions from which abahlali draws, the term “black” includes african, indian, and coloured (or mixed-race) people. depending upon the context, however, black may also exclude those historically classified under colonial and apartheid rule as indian and coloured. these racial classifications, moreover, are ethnically heterogeneous. i use the terms most common in the settlements where i conducted research. 6. i approach fire, methodologically, as an assemblage (deleuze and guattari 1987). 7. some scholars, citing police reports, reckon as many as ten thousand protests per year nationwide (lee 2009). shack fires and street protests are difficult to measure, especially as some are not statistically recorded even if police arrive on the scene. 8. “electricity banditry” is a term used in south africa in reference to illicit energy. 9. biopower, as formulated by michel foucault, operates through disciplinary mechanisms aimed at bodies and regulatory mechanisms aimed at populations to maximize social control by centering on life itself. here, the urban poor use life itself to mobilize social unrest. 10. “ungovernable” is the term used by the african national congress (anc) during the 1980s to describe the mobilization of popular unrest as a means of political liberation. ungovernability, however, is characteristic of contemporary urban politics beyond south africa. 11. notably, the vlakplaas police unit (african national congress 1996). 12. on necklacing, see mackay 2012. 13. the inkatha national cultural liberation movement was founded in 1975, later to become the inkatha freedom party (ifp) in 1990. 14. the state, here, is not a unified totality but a varied set of hegemonic institutions, discourses, agents, and tactics that must be understood in its absence as much as its presence (fanon 1965; foucault 1991; gramsci 1971; rancière 1998). 15. as the movement noted in a press statement: “abahlali does not condone violence by its members. we define violence as harm to persons. we do not consider burning a tire in the street, or forming a road blockade to be violence.” see abahlali basemjondolo 2010b. 16. on this exchange between the treatment action campaign and abahlali, see abahlali basemjondolo 2010a. 17. fire on the streets also serves to make visible fire in the home, caused by a lack of electricity. many activists view burning road blockades and shack conflagrations as interrelated insofar as both arise from constrained political and economic mobility. 18. in response to previous drafts of this article, presented at a seminar in durban, abahlali members commented that fire is associated with forms of political and spiritual consciousness arising from conditions of—and threats to—life in shacks. s'bu zikode used the motif of “invisible fire” to describe popular anger “that burns within us, inside every poor person.” resonating both with black consciousness and christian theology (gibson 2011), zikode suggests that “invisible fire” signifies that “our humanity is not rated the same as a middle-class person.” 19. it might also be added between zoē and bios, which giorgio agamben (1998) proposes as a fundamental distinction in modern politics between bare life, or the biological man-as-species, and the citizenry, or those who belong to a common political community. here, by contrast, the urban poor use life itself to contest naturalized demarcations of modern politics. references abahlali basemjondolo 2009 “memorial service for 16 year old sakhephi emmanuel zenda.” abahlali basemjondolo website, july 31. http://abahlali.org/node/5571/, accessed june 9, 2015. 2010a “abahlali basemjondolo of the western cape replies to the treatment action campaign.” abahlali basemjondolo website, october 13. http://abahlali.org/?s=abahlali+of+the+western+cape+replies+to+the+treatment+action+campaign, accessed june 22, 2012. 2010b “fact sheet: abahlali laying false rumors to rest.” abahlali basemjondolo website, 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singing, and the same young woman—radmilla cody—performs a traditional “skip dance” song in the navajo language. but something makes her performance different. as radmilla’s voice carries across the fairground, she adds melismas, or vocal flourishes, note glides, and a bluesy inflection to the more nasal sound of traditional skip dance songs, which are typically sung by men (mcallester 1954). onlookers cock their heads to listen more closely, and they hear for the first time the singer who will become known as the “navajo whitney houston.”1 the crowd responds ecstatically; radmilla, a twenty-one-year-old from grand falls, navajo nation, is publicly crowned the forty-sixth miss navajo nation, 1997–1998. when i introduced myself in navajo to radmilla in 2011 at a cd signing (for i had long been a fan of her music), she seemed amused to hear an anglo, a bilagáana,2 speaking her language. she joked that we try performing some skip dance songs together in a perhaps improbable duo—a white woman and she, a half-black, half-navajo one, performing old navajo standards. as she autographed a glossy poster for my friend’s nine-year-old niece, who is of mixed navajo, korean, and french descent, she wrote in flowing cursive: “beautiful you are! many blessings to you. always remember that, and walk in beauty.” figure 1. sheep butchering, miss navajo contestants, september 2012. (image from “celebrating leandra thomas, the 2012–2013 miss navajo nation,” by sunnie clahchischiligi, indian country today media network.com, september 29, 2012) radmilla dramatically broke the mold in more ways than one. there was, most obviously, her distinctive, hybrid singing at the intersection of navajo tradition and african american rhythm and blues; that style reflected radmilla’s own mixed heritage: she was the child of a navajo (tł’ááshchí’í clan)3 mother and a naakai łizhinii, or african american, father. in the documentary hearing radmilla (2010), she recalled being singled out as a child living on the navajo reservation for her african american appearance, being perceived as different from other navajos. there was also the later denouement to radmilla’s story, her arrest in 2003 for aiding an abusive, drug-selling boyfriend and her subsequent attempt to rehabilitate her public image as a good citizen of the navajo tribe. fully fluent in navajo and a citizen of the navajo nation, she embodied a unique story, and radmilla’s voice became a lightning rod for reflection and debate about the twenty-first-century politics of race,4 blood, music genre, and belonging in navajo country. figure 2. radmilla cody, miss navajo nation, 1997–1998. (image from miss navajo council, inc. http://www.missnavajocouncil.org/history/missnn/1997-1998.htm) what, then, does radmilla’s story reveal about the relationship between sound, racial identity, and blood quantum on the navajo nation? and what, in particular, can be said about the role of the singing voice in the politics of indigeneity? in this article, i use two case studies to show the tensions still surrounding black-native parentage in native american communities such as the navajo (or diné)5 and analyze reactions to radmilla’s voice as a partial reflection of larger racial stereotypes about blackness and criminality that permeate u.s. society. these ideas tie crucially into issues of tribal citizenship in native north america in the era of casinos, where the affective and political stakes of belonging have been dramatically raised, and citizenship and enrollment have come to signify more rigid demarcations between who belongs and who does not. second, i demonstrate how sound itself becomes an “ethnic trope,” defined as symbols constructed as “allusions toward an ideal that has no living model” (fast 2002, 23), where voice, musical genre, phenotype, and heritage-language skills index a speaker as more or less “authentically” diné. here, i distinguish sound from music, defining sound as a broader framework encompassing both music and language, which allows me to talk about the singing and speaking voice within a single frame. in radmilla’s case, the supposedly black dimensions of both her phenotype and her traditional singing were used to single her out as less than fully navajo. and, both in her crowning and in her run-in with the law, radmilla’s identity as a celebrity gained what daphne patai (qtd. in starn 2011, 123) has called “surplus visibility” about racial matters, “always put on the spot when controversy arises.” using my own fieldwork singing and playing with the navajo country-western group, native country band, as a counterpoint to radmilla’s experience, i examine how individual and collective voices become marked by racial identities. on the one hand, her voice, perceived racial identity, and idiosyncratic singing style designated radmilla as a cultural outsider. at the same time, in other contexts and because of her ability to broker generational differences in her choice of recorded material, her voice was celebrated as being quintessentially navajo, securing her insider status as a diné citizen. bringing sound into conversations about blood, belonging, and indigeneity, i show how racial identities become marked and investigate the role played by voice in this marking. music and language both reflect and reinforce ideas of inclusion, exclusion, and communal reckoning in contemporary navajo communities and in u.s. society at large (harkness 2010; feld et al. 2004). my larger contention becomes, in the case of radmilla, the navajo nation, and the u.s. nation, that aesthetics—and voice and sound in particular—matter in relation to politics, albeit often in divergent ways and on differing scales. * * * there are four navajo reservations, and the largest one spans parts of arizona, new mexico, and utah. the three satellite reservations of tohajilee’,6 ramah, and alamo, all located in central new mexico, have their unique histories, dialects, and identities as diné people living apart from the “big rez.” yet the four reservations together comprise the political entity known as the navajo nation, and citizens of each reservation vote in navajo national elections. with more than 170,700 self-reported fluent navajo speakers, the navajo nation has the largest number of native-language speakers (united states census bureau 2007) of a single tribe within the continental united states. in the 2010 census, for example, there were 332,000 enrolled navajos, 83.3 percent of whom self-reported as speaking their heritage language, navajo or diné bizaad (henson 2008, 283–84). thus, not all navajos speak navajo, and those who identify as navajo include heritage-language speakers and non-heritage-language speakers. further, mirroring radmilla’s own life, not all diné people live on reservations, and the navajo nation is as internally diverse as the u.s. nation that surrounds it: approximately two-thirds of navajo residents live on one of four navajo reservations, while the remaining third live in southwestern urban centers, elsewhere in the united states, or abroad.7 like all federally recognized tribes, the navajo nation is also a sovereign indian nation, with its own government, judicial system, tribal police force, council delegates, and tribal president.8 the navajo nation exercises its sovereignty in myriad ways, for example, by negotiating water rights at the federal, state, and tribal levels; by taxing navajo citizens (at 4 percent) for retail sales made on the reservations (associated press 2012); and by determining its own tribal membership. in fact, although a beauty contest might not seem like a conventional marker of nationhood, the miss navajo pageant is also a contemporary expression of navajo sovereignty, and specifically reflects diplomatic relations between the navajo nation, the states with which the navajo nation shares overlapping jurisdiction (arizona, utah, and new mexico), and the united states. yet the politics of tribal belonging are far from simple. the legal criteria used for contemporary tribal membership conflict, in fact, with other definitions dine’é used and use to assay navajo identity and tribal citizenship, and some scholars today (see dennison 2012) see legal criteria such as blood quantum as a direct affront to tribal sovereignty and the future of indigenous polities.9 using a certificate degree of indian blood (cdib or cib) card as proof of legal recognition as an indian is a fairly recent phenomenon in navajo and indian country. significantly, this shift in the legal definition of indian disregards historical and community-internal criteria—such as kinship (k’é), maternal clan, and number of years lived in a navajo community—in determining indigenous belonging and social authenticity. radmilla herself comes from leupp chapter, in the reservation’s southwest corner on the arizona side. after finishing her studies at coconino high school in flagstaff, an off-reservation border town, radmilla was encouraged to enter the miss navajo contest by her maternal grandmother and her mother (naylor 2006). other federally and state recognized u.s. tribes also host similar hybrid beauty-culture pageants, open exclusively to their female citizens, including the seminole tribe of florida, the lumbee tribe of north carolina and the white mountain apache tribe of arizona. in most cases, these native pageants began in the 1950s and 1960s (jenkins 2010; schröder 2004).10 unique to these pageants is their dual emphasis on both contemporary and traditional skills (including singing, food preparation, heritage-language abilities, and sheep butchering). thus, successful contestants must demonstrate their knowledge of the global world around them but must also be deeply grounded in their respective cultural traditions; however, the latter might be defined by the pageant and the host tribe. more specifically, miss navajo “must exemplify the essence and characters of the navajo deities first woman, white shell woman and changing woman” (cartwright n.d.).11 the winner of the miss navajo pageant then becomes the official ambassador to the navajo tribe for one calendar year. notably absent from these pageants is the archetypal category of traditional western beauty competitions, the swimsuit contest. but the navajo pageant is by no means entirely different from its counterparts around the globe. echoing the familiar gender politics of conventional contests, miss navajo contestants are expected to be single and “available.” as one diné critic has noted, “although miss navajo nation embodies navajo cultural values associated with ideal womanhood, we must also acknowledge that beauty pageants are rooted in white middle-class values that present femininity as values of chastity, morality, and virtue” (denetdale 2006, 20). we can observe these values at play in the miss navajo pageant itself, which awards its runner-ups trophies for miss congeniality and miss photogenic (bitsoi 2011). radmilla’s mother, margaret cody, met her dad, troy davis, and had radmilla when she was eighteen (cartwright n.d.). shortly after giving birth, margaret moved to georgia, leaving radmilla to be raised by her maternal grandmother (her másání), dorothy, in grand falls. troy was a driver for a ford dealership in flagstaff, and had very little contact with his daughter as she grew up (banks 2011). radmilla attended leupp boarding school, a bureau of indian affairs school on the reservation, and during her elementary school years lived without running water or electricity, two salient indices of rural reservation life. she was taught to herd sheep and weave, the latter an art form predominantly associated with navajo women. at age seven, she also began attending a christian church with her grandmother and began singing in the choir there. by junior high, radmilla had decided she wanted to be a professional singer; she met her uncle, the noted singer and composer herman cody, at a miss navajo engagement in 1997–1998, and they have been collaborating since then. figure 3. navajo nation fair golden anniversary magazine, 1996 commemorative edition. note banner behind: “traditional queen” and “modern queen.” (image from the website for the film teenage, dir. matt wolf. “miss navajo,” posted by kelly rakowski, http://www.teenagefilm.com/archives/tube-time/miss-navajo, used with permission) because she was raised in the navajo way (dinék’éhjí), it was not until high school that radmilla became more conscious of her african american identity, learning about malcolm x, martin luther king, jr., and gaining a black political consciousness as it related to her own identity (gordy 2011). as she frequently notes in interviews, she has since often been asked to choose between these two identities. these larger cultural expectations specifically came to the fore in mandates about what a miss navajo should look and sound like, as well as in op-ed pieces in the main navajo newspaper, the navajo times, and in press reviews of the pageant.12 radmilla has largely responded by refusing these mandates, insisting, like her late maternal grandmother, that k’é, or kinship, determines navajo belonging and identity. for example, building on her ability to successfully claim an audience, radmilla is now on a linguistic mission to eradicate usage of the term zhinii, a form of navajo slang referring to african americans and an elided version of the term naakai łizhinii (black mexicans) from everyday parlance.13 as she explained in navajo to the elderly women sitting in the audience after a screening of hearing radmilla, zhinii is a term that has brought a lot of hurt over the years, always singling her out and making her feel less navajo and, ultimately, less human. instead, she is calling for the introduction of the word nahiłii, a more descriptive and, to her ears, respectful term denoting african american peoples, which translates to “the black ones that came across, persevered and have become one.”14 at the chinle high school graduation on may 18, 2013, where she was a featured performer, radmilla refused to self-identify in navajo using the standard term naakai łizhinii, introducing her four clans instead as: tł’ááshchí’í nishłį́ [i am of the red ochre on cheek people], nahiłii báshíshchíín [i am born for the african american people], naakai dine’é dashicheii [my maternal grandfather’s clan is mexican] dóó [and] nahiłii dashinálí [my paternal grandfather’s clan is african american].” figure 4. radmilla cody and her másání, the late dorothy cody, in 2006. (image from contreras 2010. photo by john running) black/native parentage: k’é and blood quantum throughout native north america, indian-white and indian-black parentage has been understood in dissimilar and contradictory terms (brooks 2002; miles and holland 2006). while navajo–african american relations date back to the spanish colonial period, these relations are today sometimes selectively depicted as a phenomenon of the past fifty years. as scholars of u.s. racial politics and the one-drop rule have shown (sanjek and gregory 1994; starn 2011), whiteness is often depicted as a tabula rasa, while blackness becomes the marked racial category (gillborn 2009; mcintosh 1990; omi and winant 1994; sullivan 2006, 22). in other words, whiteness in relation to blackness is understood as a mere “absence of pigmentation,” with blackness—and black “blood” in particular—read as that which overdetermines one’s racial identity regardless of one’s total racial mixture (roediger 2002, 326). thus, within the logic of the one-drop rule, “it may take one drop of blood to make a black person, but it takes a lot of blood to make an indian” (arica coleman in schilling 2013, 1). while navajo citizenship is determined by a minimum blood quantum of one-quarter navajo blood and having at least one enrolled parent on the 1940 bureau of indian affairs base roll (spruhan 2008, 5, 11), sometimes diné citizens with mixed navajo-black ancestry are expected to prove their native identity in ways that so-called full-bloods, and those of indian-anglo mixture, are not. indeed, this held true for radmilla, as the legitimacy of previous miss navajo winners of indian-anglo parentage was not questioned to nearly the same extent as was radmilla’s. thus, while anthropologists understand race as a social construction and not a given, natural fact, perceptions of race and racial identities profoundly influence the day-to-day lives and sense of belonging for navajo citizens. as thomas biolsi (2005, 400) has noted, “race is a concrete abstraction, and to be black in the united states, for example, is to live on the receiving end of the fiction of ‘race’ in deeply brutalizing ways. and, as scholars have only recently come to recognize, to be white is to inherit racial privilege in profoundly material ways.” determining the blood percentage of a given individual, native or not, is only pseudo-scientific, measured based on ancestry, rather than by a dna test or actual percentages of indian blood. in the navajo context, assessing blood quantum presents an additional challenge because it is determined in part by who is present at a child’s birth to sign the birth certificate. for example, a child’s degree of indian blood is calculated based on lineal descent but relies on the birth certificate as the starting point to calculate a child’s blood quantum (begay 2011, 21). this means that if a (navajo) father is absent at the birth or chooses not to sign the birth certificate for any other reason, the child’s blood quantum will be calculated using only the mother’s indian blood. thus, “the child may legitimately be a full-blooded navajo, but due to the father being absent, the child is considered one-half or less depending on the mother’s blood quantum” (begay 2011, 22). additionally, navajos have long intermarried with non-navajos, and numerous navajo clans—a matrilineal kinship system used to determine systems of obligation and reciprocity—are so-called adopted clans. these adopted navajo clans include the mexican people clan (naakai dine’é), the tewa clan (naashashí), that is, the tewa-speaking peoples of new mexico, the mescalero apache clan (naashgalí dine’é), and the chiricahua apache clan (chíshí dine’é). about fifty clans continue to be important in contemporary navajo society (san juan heritage 2003), influencing everything from who a person can marry, to who one socializes with or calls “brother” or “sister,”15 to the profession one chooses. clans and the incorporation of non-navajos into navajo society also predate colonial forms of reckoning and belonging, which, importantly, based their criteria on k’e or kinship systems rather than blood quantum. adopted clans thus are no longer considered separate and are subsumed under the navajo clan system, losing their separate status as an indicator of an ethnic or racial group. further confounding these demarcations, the bureau of indian affairs (bia) and the navajo tribe count these adopted clans as navajo when it comes to issuing cib or tribal id cards to navajo citizens.16 for example, someone with three non-adopted navajo clans and one adopted clan such as naakai dine’é is considered a full-blooded navajo according to his or her cib. but debates about who belongs and who is authentically navajo are not limited to diné individuals with a lower blood quantum. indeed, assessing citizenship, belonging, and policing identity are questions that citizens of many indigenous nations within and beyond the united states grapple with today (beckett 1988; dennison 2012; perdue 2003; povinelli 2002; smith 1999; sturm 2002, 2011).17 in the u.s. context, the stakes of indigenous belonging have been raised particularly in the casino era (1979–present), where tribal citizenship can signal additional benefits such as per capita payments for casino-owning tribes and has caused some tribes to further restrict their enrollment criteria (painter-thorne 2010; debenport 2011). as a matrilineal society, clans and land in navajo society are passed down through the mother’s line. using even the strictest criteria, a child whose first (the mother’s) clan is diné, as in radmilla’s case, is navajo. as theda perdue and others have noted for the cherokee and other matrilineal native nations, these earlier forms of determining belonging and indigenous citizenship preceded the federal government’s implementation of blood quantum (perdue 2003; kauanui 2008). indeed, in the cherokee and navajo contexts, categories of citizenship and belonging were more inclusive and allowed for affiliation based on cultural identity, community connection, and in-depth knowledge of cultural practices. thus, although blood quantum can be traced to english common law as a method for determining inheritance and “long predates the question of mixed-race ancestry” (spruhan 2006, 4), its specific legal application in determining legal recognition as an indian and citizenship in a tribal nation dates only to the early 1900s (spruhan 2006, 4, 39). thus, blood quantum and kinship are irreconcilable when used together to assess navajo identity and belonging for two reasons. first, because blood quantum is based less on one’s actual percentage of ancestral blood and more on what was or was not administratively (and often arbitrarily) recorded (laroque 2004; spruhan 2006; tallbear 2003). second, blood quantum does not determine how one is or is not socialized—linguistically, culturally and politically—into indigenous identity. in radmilla’s case, phenotype, blood quantum, kinship, and culture held a precarious balance, with some commentators arguing that phenotype was more important, while others, like radmilla herself, arguing that culture trumped phenotype. by claiming her identity as a diné woman, singer, and a former miss navajo, radmilla shows how voice is a uniquely malleable form of expressive culture. at the same time, voice can become fixed and rigid when categories of race, blood quantum, and expectations about musical genre are superimposed onto it. radmilla’s singing foregrounds tensions about how voice—the way we hear it, interpellate it, categorize it, project it—can stretch ideas of phenotype and, at the same time, show how vocal tone color, diction, and register can mark and calcify expectations about phenotype. sound as a marker of authenticity while blackness marks navajo individuals such as radmilla, sound, and music genre in particular, can also mark diné identities. this is something i frequently witnessed during my fieldwork, where i studied the navajo language and sang and played lap steel guitar with navajo country-western bands. even within the narrow confines of country music, the type of country (old or new) that a band such as native country band played often determined our ability to get a gig on the reservation; it also influenced who would come and dance to our music. most musicians in navajo country-western bands are male,18 as are most vocalists of traditional navajo skip dance and round dance songs.19 since country is the hegemonic genre of popular music on the reservation, especially for those forty and older, branching outside of this musical genre, singing in public, and being a female performer can elicit surprised or shocked responses from older dine’é in particular. thus, music genre selection is understood as a performance of a navajo cultural identity in its own right. figure 5. radmilla cody singing “spirit of a woman” at central navajo fair, piñon, arizona (image from patterson 2009. photo by donovan quintero) musical genre also dictates the types of physical spaces, radio stations, and built environments (on the reservation versus off it; chapter house or outdoor parade versus a bar) where one performs, and thus music genre itself is understood as a performance of a navajo cultural identity. for example, when seeking airtime on a reservation radio station, one highly skilled navajo blues band, chucki begay and the mother earth blues band, learned from the radio announcer that it “didn’t sound navajo enough,” and was refused airplay.20 in the case of my main band, native country band, composed of four full-blooded diné men born and raised on the navajo reservation, questions of navajo identity and belonging frequently undergirded casual conversation during band practice, particularly because of my non-native identity. for example, because the name native country band implies indigenous origins, early on in my fieldwork the bandleader suggested we tell audience members that i was a lumbee indian, as i had been living in north carolina (where the lumbee tribe is located) and because, according to the bandleader, some lumbee indians “look white.” at the same time, the drummer for native country band, miguel, was quick to note that he considered those with a lower blood quantum—he often referenced citizens of tribes “back east”—to be “less indian,” exemplifying how some navajo nation and u.s. citizens put an asymmetrical emphasis on blood versus culture or other markers of identity. descriptions of radmilla’s voice also mirror this polarization, couched as a distinction between a black blood essence (“soul”) and a navajo cultural essence (“spirituality”). radmilla herself, employing language that reflects the earlier anthropological debate regarding nature versus culture (ortner 1974), links vocal tone color (timbre) to racial ideologies about voice. speaking about her own voice, she notes that “the soul comes from the black side” and says that the “spiritual” side of songs springs from her navajo side (qtd. in contreras 2010). for the latter she cites her own ability to showcase the beauty and sound of the navajo language, diné bizaad. similarly, her recording label, canyon records, in its most recent press release describes her voice as “soaring vocals that deliver both traditional and contemporary sounds with a hint of gospel and soul” (rodgers 2011). such descriptions stem perhaps from how radmilla collapses a tone color and a singing style indexing soul and rhythm and blues female vocalists—popular genres historically associated with african american singers—with a genre of male-dominated traditional navajo songs.21 in songs such as “frybread song” (precious friends, 2007), we can also hear the musical influence of her grandmother’s church choir and traces of a classically trained singing voice. in her performances of “kéyah baa hǫ́zhǫ́” (“my country ‘tis of thee”), “chidí nayiiłniih” (“buy a vehicle”),22 or the national anthem sung in navajo,23 we hear how these different styles undergird the expressivity and unique sound quality of radmilla’s voice. in contrast to more typical performances of social dance songs, radmilla employs a generous amount of vibrato (the signature sound of many opera singers and also used in slower soul, r & b, and pop ballads) and also glides between notes, as did her childhood musical idols, whitney houston and diana ross. further, many social dance songs are typically performed in a nasal, compressed voice, described by some listeners as “a monotone, with almost no flourishes” (contreras 2010). radmilla employs less nasality than these male voices, and, as the cultural critic felix contreras (2010) notes, “radmilla projects more and uses techniques like bending notes: common among blues, jazz and pop singers.” in contrast to other navajo performers singing social dance songs in a traditional vein,24 radmilla also sings with a breathier style, punctuating the beginnings and endings of phrases with anticipatory in-breaths and slower, more audible exhales and releases. these breathing techniques have become part of the stylistic aesthetic of many r & b singers as well. at the same time, radmilla’s style also encompasses some of the most salient markers of the navajo language. navajo as a spoken language privileges the manipulation of wind or air (witherspoon 1977, 30–31) through the correct use of glottal stops (marked as |’| in written navajo) or, according to merriam-webster online, the “audible release of the airstream after complete closure of the glottis,” as heard in the english sounds “uh oh.” we can hear this in particular in her rendition of “kéyah baa hǫ́zhǫ́,” where she sings expressively using uniquely navajo phonetics such as the glottal stop and the alveolar or lateral l.25 a conscious attention to breath and air is also a prominent feature of artful country singing (fox 2004a). we hear this most prominently in what urban (1988, 389) calls “icons of crying,” or the simulation of crying within the frame of a song or a lament, where a vocalist “breaks” between her or his head and chest voice. a stylized manipulation of air is also heard in what aaron fox terms the “ravaged voice,” a pharyngealized singing style that the lead singer for our band, tommy bia, sometimes employed. this held especially true in songs that were affectively charged or, at the end of a long night, when his voice would start to give out from singing in a barroom clouded with cigarette smoke. yet many listeners identify radmilla as a quintessentially navajo singer precisely because of her singing style and how it reflects the complexity of contemporary navajo experience. in her ability to reach multiple generations through a wide variety of musical genres and through her performances in english, navadlish,26 and navajo, radmilla’s choice of songs—social dance songs, patriotic songs, rap, and traditional songs composed by her uncle herman—indexes the breadth of her navajo and native identity. perhaps most important, radmilla herself consistently identifies first as a diné woman. descriptions of radmilla’s voice by canyon records perpetuate the idea of navajo cultural continuity while also marking and marketing her voice as “different” or “exceptional.” for example, even though her albums feature songs influenced by western art music, gospel, country, hip hop, and rap, including the spoken-word performance of “old school sheepherder’s rap” (precious friends, 2007), canyon records describes the songs on her most recent album (shí kéyah or “my land/country,” 2011) as “sung in the traditional style of the diné.” in her bio, the label also speaks of her as a “traditional navajo recording artist.”27 race and musical genre: country music and whiteness while black musical styles are sometimes marked in and through radmilla’s voice, other musical genres remain initially unmarked when performed by navajo musicians, only to become re-marked when they become identifiably navajo again. take country music, what are locally referred to as “rez bands,” and how whiteness and navajo identity intertwine. in an unsettling moment revealing the impact of internalized racism and settler colonialism (wolfe 2006) on navajo senses of self and musical ability, francine, a driver for the crownpoint, new mexico, dialysis clinic, mentioned to me she had heard me singing with native country band on the local radio station. after announcing to those in the waiting room how much she liked my singing in the song “it wasn’t god who made honky tonk angels,” she lowered her voice and said confidentially, “i could tell it wasn’t a navajo singing.”28 when i asked her to explain, she said she just “knew” the vocalist had to be an anglo because the voice sounded more professional and i did not sing with a “rez” or navadlish accent. what does this ascription mean, and what can we actually learn about racial identity through listening to voices on the radio? francine was linking her perception of musical skill with sociophonetic ideologies of whiteness and upward mobility. here, to tell someone they sound “white” is meant as a compliment. for francine, who knew i was singing with a navajo band and had been actively listening for us on the radio, my whiteness became correlated with a cultural capital, diction, and singing style that she associated with places beyond crownpoint and the reservation. my own role in the bands in which i played also factored into these and similar assessments. as an anglo female lap steel player and vocalist, i auditioned for each of the bands i played with. although the members of native country band expressed some hesitation about the research portion of my band membership at the outset, my anglo identity, my education level, and ability to play an instrument that few musicians on the reservation knew how to ultimately led them to include me as a full band member. in a strange twist, my membership in the band also gave it the cultural capital needed to help us get off-reservation gigs. from a marketing perspective, the contrast between four navajo men and one anglo woman in the band, a rarity in native bands, became an informal branding strategy that marked our band and made our gigs memorable for many fans, even if merely to suggest new band names such as native country and bilagáana band (native country and the white girl band). yet the same things that made me a potential asset also at times made me a liability, particularly in off-reservation musical spaces where fans, bar owners, or managers might have been expecting an all-native or all-anglo band and felt invested in policing racial and cultural boundaries in fraught border-town environments. the unexpected (deloria 2004) element of my membership in the band thus foregrounded not only others’ expectations for our band but also various audience and music-management investments in maintaining these expectations. but francine’s comment may also reflect a dominant cultural and musical narrative, something we “tell ourselves about ourselves” (geertz 1973, 448), that correlates whiteness with country music and blackness with genres like jazz, blues, and gospel (roy 2004; pecknold 2007; 2013). these correlations, which date back to the division between so-called race records and hillbilly records in the early 1920s, continue to affect our perceptions of music, race, and genre today.29 in a provocatively titled article, “why does country music sound white?” geoff mann (2008) shows how country singing styles have historically indexed primarily white, working-class identities. many successful native, african american, and mexican american country singers notwithstanding,30mann (2008, 75) attempts to denaturalize the supposed link between whiteness and country music, arguing that whiteness is not reflected in country music so much as it is consciously produced and reinstantiated by it through the entertainment industry and by early hillbilly records moguls targeting white audiences in particular (jensen 1998; pecknold 2007, 2013; peterson 1997). this production of whiteness depended on thematic material, instrumentation, the consistent use of a southeastern u.s. dialect in singing, and the utilization of an instrumental and vocal “twang” (fox 2004a; samuels in feld et al. 2004). defined as “gliding a single vowel sound to give it two audibly distinct segments,” twang is so consistently used in country performance as to have become a “virtually substitutable marker of ‘country’ and ‘racial’ identification” (mann 2008, 79). * * * in my own experience playing, teaching about, and singing country music in both native and non-native spaces, twang is also the element of country that elicits the strongest reaction from listeners, becoming an easy target for what people either love or hate about country music (fox 2004b, 29–46; samuels in feld et al. 2004, 339). as mann notes, tongue-in-cheek, about the cultural politics of race and musical genre in the united states: “there is little in contemporary american popular culture more ‘obvious’ than the ‘colour’ of music. we simply ‘cannot fail to recognize’… the blackness of hip-hop or soul, the whiteness of heavy metal or country” (mann 2008, 77–78).31 the point is thus to inquire into “the american-born social grounds of racially attributable stylistic procedures,” since the “perception of musical difference [has] grown so thoroughly racialized that music [has come] to epitomize racial differences generally” (radano 2003, 8, 9). the racialization of musical genres stands in for perceived racial difference, marking its performers in limiting and sometimes stigmatizing ways (radano and bohlman 2000, 8; bigenho 2012, 21). this racialization is what perea (2012, 9) refers to as “sound quantum,” or the racialized understandings of what counts as native music, which relies in part on a performer's blood quantum. just as clean corollaries between identity and race need to be complicated and unpacked, so too do ideas of musical genre, race, and perceptions of social difference. less evident in discussions of race and musical genre is the long and deep history of dine’é performing country music in reservation spaces, as evidenced in names like garth brooks yazzie, george strait begay, shelby lynne henry, and shelby lynne arviso, all common navajo surnames appended to the stage names of famous country vocalists. because of its long history in diné communities dating back to the 1930s, musicians and music fans in the navajo nation also frequently reference country music as a “traditional” genre of music (jacobsen 2009), one that resonates deeply with rural navajo lifestyles and ranching in particular. such appellations of course complicate our ideas of tradition and its link to time depth and supposed native authenticity. at the same time, they also point to another long-standing navajo practice, that of ranching and rodeo competition (downs 1972; iverson 1994). in navajo spaces, then, country singing indexes not only whiteness but also a generation-specific navajo and even indian identity. in contrast to the sometimes stigmatizing responses to radmilla and chucki begay singing supposedly black styles of music, navajos singing allegedly white musical genres such as country do not elicit strong responses among the diné citizenry. in fact, bands performing country music are considered fairly commonplace—there are currently more than fifty country bands active on the navajo nation—and unremarkable. yet when musicians begin to sing in a thick rez accent, employ a monotone nasal singing style, or use older public address systems with low-fidelity speakers or no monitors, these bands re-mark their music as sounding explicitly navajo. when choosing to perform in this older style, in a sound that explicitly indexes the first navajo country bands of the 1950s, fans often approvingly comment that it sounds “navajo,” “mono,” or “rez” again. sounding navajo and playing country correspond, but often only when country is played in a certain way and when a narrow canon of older country songs is performed. country can be both white and navajo, but these racial identities are specific to a generation. similar to the u.s. racial identities discussed earlier, white musical styles such as country are more easily subsumed into indianness than are black musical styles such as hip hop, soul, and blues. although radmilla herself classifies her music as native american, those who listen to her, market her, and describe her music for the press consistently mark it as black first and native american second. this parallels the description and understanding of black-native parentage in american public culture. just as “sounding navajo” can be overdetermined in and through the performance of older country music, blackness becomes equally essentialized through its assumed links to musical genres and singing styles historically associated with african american performers but long since integrated into the domains of vocalists from various racial identities and expressive cultural worlds (radano 2003, 8). conclusion on returning to the reservation from prison,32 radmilla once again met with trepidation and some anger, much of it stemming from the sense that she had not lived up to the role model responsibilities of a miss navajo and, by extension, of white shell woman, first woman, and changing woman. since then, she has largely been rehabilitated within the navajo nation: she is a recent grammy nominee,33 in addition to being a public figure, having an active recording career, and pursuing a master’s degree in sociology. she has also started a domestic-violence nonprofit for teenagers, the life is beautiful campaign, and stars in the recent documentary hearing radmilla.34 like many other national celebrities and politicians from bill clinton to tiger woods (see starn 2011), radmilla sought public forgiveness and in her case found redemption through her public activism, her singing, and her recording career. as i have shown with both radmilla and my own fieldwork, how we hear the singing and speaking voice is informed by deeper cultural expectations surrounding racial identity, gender, and differing assumptions about blood and sound as this relates to navajo, african american, and anglo identities. when voices do not match our expectations or when identity and musical genre appear not to align, we are challenged to broaden our understandings of self in relation to society and aesthetics in relation to politics. radmilla’s voice does this work because of the aesthetic and cultural mixture it represents, but also because it is both socially inscribed and simultaneously inimitable, unique to one singer and one body. as auditory creatures socialized into sound, we are uniquely vulnerable to sound and voice: including voice as part of our ethnographic inventory is essential not only because of how deeply and unconsciously we internalize sound but also because voices represent the meeting point between the individual and the social. if words are the “sign of the voice” (frith 1988, 121), then voice and vocality are “among the body’s first mechanisms of difference” (feld et al. 2004, 341). sonic differences carry social differences because sound is laden with value, socially embedded, and often inextricable from ideas of genre, nation, and identity. sound and voice matter to a politics of indigeneity because voice indexes identity almost instantaneously; through this process, voices cement and challenge our expectations for how native peoples “sound” and signify their own varied attachments to being indigenous. voices stretch and change our expectations of phenotype because, ultimately, we are more forgiving and open to experimentation in the world of aesthetics than we are in our cultural politics about race. thus voices carry weight because “recognition” itself—at both the individual and tribal levels—is often on the line. aesthetics and politics matter because they mutually inform how we hear sound and how we assess belonging to a given social body. fusing musical elements from navajo traditional culture, christian hymnody, and popular genres of music preferred by a younger generation of navajos, radmilla’s voice in many ways epitomizes and unifies contemporary navajo experience, cultural influences, and listening practices. as radmilla (qtd. in cordova 2012) recently noted: “people forget that there are more similarities than differences. … they get caught up in trying to dissect and break things apart when it comes to race and culture, and they wind up separating people rather than bringing them together.” building on this, she articulated a tenet of her own life philosophy to graduating seniors at the 2013 chinle high school graduation ceremony: “when someone gets in your way or tries to put you down, bless them and move on.” notes acknowledgments my deepest thanks go to the bands who allowed me to play with them—native country band, re-coil and the ramblin’ wranglers—and to my navajo language teacher, shirley bowman. the wenner-gren foundation dissertation fieldwork grant, the jacobs research fund, and the lynn reyer award for tribal community development supported the research on which this article is based. permission to conduct research was granted by the duke university internal review board, the navajo nation historic preservation department (class c ethnographic permit c0807-e), and former crownpoint chapter president, mcgarrett pablo. i am grateful to orin starn, louise meintjes, and kerry thompson for making helpful comments on drafts of the manuscript. 1. chip thomas, “on the road with miss navajo nation,” ruminations blog, may 27, 1998. http://www.chipthomasphotography.com/ruminations/miss_navajo_97.htm. 2. this is the navajo word for an anglo or white person. 3. red ochre on cheek clan. 4. the american anthropological association’s project race states: “physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them” (smedley 1998). while i want to acknowledge that race is indeed a social construct, for the purposes of this article, i foreground what biolsi has termed the “social fact” of race, or the way that race is assigned social meaning in its lived, everyday contexts (biolsi 2005, 400). 5. pronounced “dineh.” diné is often the preferred ethnonym for the navajo people, meaning “the people.” plural dine’é, pronounced “dineh-eh.” 6. formerly cañoncito. 7. for example, the 2000 u.s. census reported navajos living in every state of the union with the exception of vermont, rhode island, and delaware (begay 2011, 29). 8. currently ben shelly (president) and rex lee jim (vice president), sworn in january 11, 2011. 9. blood quantum means the percentage of indian blood. 10. miss navajo, 1952; miss florida seminole, 1957; miss lumbee, 1968; miss white mountain apache, 1954. 11. in navajo, these deities are ałtsé asdzą́ą́, yoołgai asdzą́ą́, and asdzą́ą́ nádleehi, respectively. 12. see these letters to the editor in the navajo times: “interracial marriages have deep ties” and “sense of identity,” december 30, 1997; “what’s your beef?!” january 22, 1998; “superior disgust,” april 2, 1998; “mothers love their children, who they are,” april 16, 1998. 13. for a view outlining the pros and cons of banning racial epitaphs, see kennedy 2002. 14. in an e-mail from radmilla (e-mail to author, march 1, 2011), she writes that “the new term that i now use for african americans is nahiłii which is broken down in the following way: na (across), hił (dark, calmness, have overcome and persevered and we’ve come to like), ii (oneness).” 15. in the navajo kinship system, if two people share the same maternal, or first, clan, they consider themselves brother or sister. 16. officially called cdib (certificate degree of indian blood) cards, in navajo reservation discourse these cards are typically referred to as simply “cibs.” 17. for some of the more acrimonious debates regarding the policing of native identity, consult churchill 2001; red shirt 2002; byrd 2007; harjo 2007; and bernstein 2013. 18. for example, out of about fifty actively performing bands on the navajo reservation in 2011, i knew of five female musicians: three lead singers, one drummer, and one bass player. 19. these are songs comprising the public portion of navajo ceremonies or so-called sings. as a whole, they are often referred to by mcallester 1954 and others as “social dance songs.” 20. charlene “chucki” begay, interview with the author, march 1, 2010, gallup, new mexico. 21. the term rhythm and blues (r & b) was attributed to the billboard writer jerry wexler in 1947. by 1949, r & b replaced the billboard chart category of “race” records, or music that was marketed to a primarily african american audience (scaruffi 2003). 22. to listen, visit rhapsody, http://www.rhapsody.com/artist/radmilla-cody/album/precious-friends/track/buy-a-vehicle (accessed february 19, 2014). 23. to listen, visit youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nuj_w38fnm (accessed february 19, 2014). 24. well-known singers of this genre include jay begaye, the tódí néésh zhéé singers, the navajo nation swingers, and the chinle valley boys. 25. for a recording online, see radmilla’s my space page, http://www.myspace.com/radmillacody/music/songs/keyah-baa-h-zh-my-country-tis-of-thee-46518311. 26. this is the local term for a code-mixed version of navajo and english. 27. see the canyon records website, http://store.canyonrecords.com (accessed june 13, 2013). 28. francine chishchillie, conversation with the author, october 10, 2010, crownpoint, new mexico. 29. the record industry used the names “race” and “hillbilly” to market their music to black and white audiences, respectively. 30. examples include the performers stoney edwards (cherokee nation), charley pride, and baldemar huerta (aka freddy fender). 31. the internal quote is to althusser (1971, 172). 32. at the risk of cementing a discourse i am critiquing, radmilla was caught smuggling cocaine through sky harbor international airport in phoenix, arizona; she was convicted as an accomplice to a large international drug smuggling ring and, in january 2003, sentenced to twenty-one months in a federal prison (gallup independent, december 11, 2002). radmilla would later assert that her longtime boyfriend, the drug kingpin david dwight bellamy, had habitually abused her and that, to avoid physical punishment, she had been commandeered into trafficking drugs as his accomplice. 33. she was a nominee in the 2013 “regional roots” category. 34. to watch the trailer for the film, please visit vimeo.com/13113380 (accessed february 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. discography cody, radmilla 2000 within the four directions. canyon records. 2002 seed of life. canyon records. 2005 spirit of a woman. canyon records. 2007 precious friends: songs for the children. canyon records. 2011 shi kéyah: songs for the people. canyon records. the wild indoors the wild indoors: room-spaces of scientific inquiry ann h. kelly king’s college london http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4658-2133 javier lezaun university of oxford http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5483-3628 each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention. —william james in the basement of the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, along the narrow outdoor passageway where students and staff store their bicycles, a series of small vaults run beneath gower street. designed as coal bunkers and briefly repurposed as bomb shelters during the blitz, these low-slung, arched rooms house the mosquito colonies used in the school’s scientific investigations. on the door of a corner vault marked 21, a mock traffic sign warns: “mozzies next 5 km.” parting the thick plastic sheets, blinking in the sticky heat, it takes a moment to grasp the surroundings—the fluorescent lights and worn gray linoleum flooring; the tightly packed shelves of mesh cages, water-filled basins, pipettes, and tubing; the heavy hum of humidifiers and mosquitoes, rising in pitch as a tiny black body floats just overhead. part storeroom, part vivarium, an unruly arrangement of stuff, surfaces, and barely perceptible movement, vault 21 has the feel of an experiment gone to seed. after spending time in insectaries around the world, one comes to expect the airless intimacy associated with the breeding, rearing, and sorting of mosquitoes. it is, instead, the reliably idiosyncratic organization of these spaces that continues to surprise, the litany of micromaterial adjustments and technical quirks that overwhelm description and cloud any effort to render an illustrative vignette. for what might appear incidental—a cage propped up at an awkward angle against a wall, the larval-feed concoction of dog biscuit and green bean powder—often betrays a fastidious appreciation of what it takes to make mosquitoes thrive in captivity. “they die when you look at them the wrong way!” is how the director of this insectary describes the hypersensitivity of one of his colonies, an expression of exasperation reminding us that, in a facility designed to support efforts to kill mosquitoes, the survival of the species under observation still represents the most crucial and most difficult achievement. this article is motivated by our interest in the spaces in which mosquitoes are scientifically observed, and by a fascination with the constant calibrations and adjustments such observations demand. in pursuing mosquitoes and the scientists who study them, one must enter an array of odd locales—insectaries of the most diverse ilk, experimental huts and semifield stations, field cages of different sizes (some big enough to contain the scientists and their equipment), and, finally, the seemingly unbounded territory entomologists describe as “the field” or “the outdoors.” by operating within these purposefully arranged spaces of inquiry, researchers seek to intensify their powers of attention to the intricate, infinitesimally complex world of mosquitoes, hoping to gain a better understanding of their behavior in order to assist in efforts to kill or repel these vectors of infectious disease. despite their role in advancing an adversarial, often insecticidal mission, these spaces of inquiry entail a bewildering diversity of mutual accommodations between observer and observed, captor and captive, host and vector. they are sites of cohabitation, arranged and ordered through the experiences of sharing space, of living together in proximity. for scholars engaged in social ecology, environmental anthropology, or the posthumanities, the formative role of other-than-human animals in placemaking will be a familiar theme. analyses of predation, domestication, interspecies companionship, and cosmopolitics have all, albeit in different ways, parsed spatial categories through the proxemics of multispecies coexistence (e.g., choy 2011; hodder 1990; fuentes 2010; kelly and lezaun 2014; kohn 2013). in the specific context of scientific inquiry, however, human-animal relationships acquire a further reflexive spin: interactions between species are here strategically organized as an engine of knowledge production. the transformation of the animal into a suitable object of scientific inquiry is a process rich with reciprocity and emotional attachment, whether this process seeks to habituate the animal to the presence of the researcher (candea 2010) or involves its sacrifice and transfiguration into an analytical object (lynch 1988). mosquitoes are not the sort of charismatic creature that tends to populate accounts of multispecies conviviality (lorimer 2007): they stretch the category of animal beyond the comfort zone of any vision of shared vulnerability, entangled empathy, or interlocking gazes (nading 2014; raffles 2010). yet the scientific investigation of their world still requires a process of reciprocal attunement, the emergence of what vinciane despret (2013) calls “partial affinities” between species. this building of affinities, we will argue, is an explicitly constructive practice; it involves fabricating settings in which the interaction of researcher and researched can yield a moment of experimental immediacy. whether a repurposed bunker, a mesh cage, or a model hut, these entomological facilities serve to insulate and accentuate their living objects of study, and thus can be characterized by the peculiar mode of interiority they express. this mode of interiority is not reducible to the resolution of the inside/outside distinction, but requires a kind of interior design, the arrangement of space and its furnishing with things and artifacts, to create a place-bound form of scientific attention to the patterns and peculiarities of mosquito life. to explore how a particular mode of interiority substantiates an interspecies encounter, we will approach the settings of entomological inquiry as room-spaces, a term we borrow from t. j. clark’s studies of cubism. “the room,” writes clark (2013, 150), “was cubism’s truth condition.” yet room did not necessarily designate a space physically contained within walls, but a new kind of spatial matrix that suppressed depth and reassembled disparate and heterogeneous elements to produce a novel form of immediacy. the essence of cubism was its ability to wreak havoc on preexisting notions of inside and outside, foreground and background, the enclosed and the extrinsic—“a landscape can instantiate a room-space . . . and a genre scene posit an unbounded world” (t. clark 2013, 88). the cubist room-space provided scaffolding for light to pass and flatness to materialize, a centering of gravity that granted a self-evident coherence to odd arrangements of persons and things. the most daring instantiations of this form—pablo picasso’s guernica is clark’s destination—could fully encompass the outside with all its “monsters” (t. clark 2013, 237), making them tangible inhabitants of a new spatial order. to grasp how mosquitoes are interiorized in the context of scientific work, we will visit three room-spaces of entomological inquiry: the insectary, the semifield station, and the outdoors, illustrating each space with an example drawn from our combined fieldwork. our journey begins in the inherently ambiguous space of the semifield station, an enclosure designed to enable the observation of captive mosquitoes within their own natural habitat. next we visit the release area, the territory where entomologists liberate mosquitoes in the course of an experimental open release. we show how this particular “open” is carefully arranged and demarcated, and is better understood as a sort of “great indoors.” we then return to the insectary, the laboratory where live mosquitoes are observed and manipulated under conditions described in terms of “biosecurity” or “high containment.” after introducing the three facilities and the research practices that unfold in them, we flesh out the notion of room-space in relation to the intensification and orientation of attention in situations of interspecies contact. we conclude by arguing that the room’s intimate inflections help nuance our understanding of how we come to know mosquitoes and the threats they pose. semifield station: the art of arrangement as its name suggests, the semifield station trades in an inherent ambiguity. this setting—a variety of the many mesocosms used in the scientific study of living organisms (odum 1984)—is located in the field, but it is not quite of the field; it is designed to absorb certain features of its environment without being overwhelmed by it. the term is best understood in a negative sense: it is neither a lab nor the field, but combines characteristics of both. perhaps entomologists refer to it as a semifield station because the alternative designation, semilab, would sound oddly pejorative. the first use of such a facility in medical entomology goes back to the 1930s, when lewis hackett and marston bates (1936, 507) report the use of “a large cage of wire netting” during their studies of anopheles mosquitoes in albania. the cage in question was 10.5 meters long, 5 meters wide, and 6.2 meters high, and it was supported on telegraph poles. within this structure they built “a miniature albanian farm” (hackett and bates 1938, 114) including a one-room house, a cement pool, a garden, a tree, a calf stable, and some rabbit hutches. placing mosquitoes in this “enclosed outdoor environment” (hackett and bates 1936, 507), as they called it, led to a series of fascinating and often bewildering observations. this was, for instance, the place where entomologists witnessed for the first time captive male anopheles exhibit the characteristic swarm that precedes copulation. hackett and bates (1936, 507) were struck by the fact that this mating ritual seemed to always occur in the same location, “about half a meter beneath the top of the cage, directly under one of the cross beams.” this peculiar and ultimately mysterious preference (“we should consider it to be fortuitous,” they wrote, “were it not repeated so frequently” [hackett and bates 1936, 507]) gave a first hint of the complex and still poorly understood three-dimensional geometry of mosquito reproduction. semifield systems grew in size and importance in the 1950s with the development of techniques of insect sterilization. at the time, the release of large quantities of irradiated mosquitoes was seen as a promising new tool for the control of mosquito-borne diseases (knipling 1955). the ability of the sterile specimens to reduce the density of resident mosquito populations hinged, however, on their ability to survive in the area of intervention, and, especially, on their capacity to mate successfully with wild-type counterparts. large field cages, located in surroundings that resembled as closely as possible those the sterilized mosquitoes would have to occupy, allowed the assessment of their capacities prior to a final and irreversible release. semifield stations have again come into vogue. over the last decade, permanent stations have been built to support entomological research into tropical disease vectors, particularly species of anopheles and aedes mosquitoes. inside these enclosed field environments, researcher can investigate fundamental aspects of mosquito ecology, test the efficacy of novel mosquito-control interventions, or gauge the fitness and field competitiveness of laboratory-reared strains. these facilities are also essential to the evaluation of genetically modified mosquitoes, serving as a crucial transitional space between the laboratories in which they are bred and the open spaces to which they will eventually be deployed (facchinelli et al. 2013). figure 1. exterior of semifield station, ifakara. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. our ethnographic introduction to the landscapes of the semifield is the facility built a decade ago at the ifakara health institute (ihi), in the kolombero valley of southeastern tanzania. founded in 1959 by rudolf geigy of the swiss tropical institute, ihi is a public health research organization with world-leading expertise in the control of tropical infectious diseases. this particular semifield station was built on the main ihi campus in ifakara, and offers a microcosm of what a free-ranging mosquito might encounter during a typical life cycle in the region—including mud houses with thatched roofs, warm-blooded animals (cows and human volunteers, brought inside the facility to provide female mosquitoes with blood meals), local soils and vegetation, aquatic habitats for oviposition, and plenty of resting places. since its establishment, the facility has been used to test the efficacy of new repellents and insecticides, the feeding success of mosquitoes on different kinds of host, or to study the conditions necessary for the establishment of a self-replicating population of anopheles arabiensis mosquitoes, the dominant local vector of malaria. like every other semifield station, the facility in ifakara resolves the inside/outside distinction in an idiosyncratic manner. using as its frame a modified greenhouse structure (28.8 x 21 meters), the station is raised 1.6 meters above ground level to prevent flooding and limit access to ants and other crawlers. its roof is covered with polyethylene—a “deviation from complete naturalness” (ferguson et al. 2008, 4) in the words of its designers, justified by the need to protect the interior from the intense seasonal rains. the walls are made of pvc-coated polyester netting imported from the united kingdom. the density of its filaments (346 holes per square inch, twice the standard for bed nets) determines the porosity of the enclosure to airflow and light, creating a microclimate that is unique to this facility but hopefully resembles the ambient temperature, humidity, and shade distribution that a local mosquito might encounter in the wild. these screens and filters give the station a distinctive look. seen from the outside, the facility still recalls its greenhouse origins—many of the interior details are hidden from view, perceptible only to the researchers who operate the station and to the mosquitoes that are released in it. from the interior, however, the outdoors appears with striking vividness and immediacy, a picturesque tropical landscape framed by the scaffolding of the facility. figure 2. looking out from the semifield station, ifakara. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. establishing a distinction between the inside and the outside is not simply a matter of designing an architectural structure or creating a physical enclosure; the boundary must be renegotiated on a daily basis in relation to who and what can access the facility and inhabit or furnish the experimental space. researchers and human volunteers—but also cows, mosquitoes, scientific equipment, and a multitude of construction materials—are routinely introduced into (and extracted out of) the experimental system. regulating these flows is no small feat. the decision to locate the station on ihi’s campus is explained by the need to guard the facility and regulate access to it twenty-four hours a day, a task that can be accomplished with some effort in the vicinity of the town, but becomes more much difficult in the bush. a depiction of the facility by the artist mohammed wasia charinda captures well this constant traffic, while also reflecting the opaqueness of the facility to an external observer. in typical tingatinga style, the painting is packed with characters and full of humorous detail. a white woman in a white coat directs animals into the enclosure, while shoeless local men work hard around it. the station appears surrounded, if not under siege, by local flora, fauna, and livestock. a strange kind of chrysalis, the structure radiates a pristine vitality, insulated from the incursions and depredations of other forms of life—most importantly, the swarm of native mosquitoes hovering over it. figure 3. painting by mohammed wasia charinda. photo courtesy of heather ferguson. these multiple dimensions of containment—of light and rain, materials and artifacts, human and nonhuman visitors—make the very idea of a semifield system possible. yet what gives this particular place its distinctive identity, and what ultimately allows it to support and sustain an experimental mosquito population, is not so much the qualities of its container—its semiporous perimeter of mosquito netting and the polyethylene roof—but its interior decor, the assortment of devices, built structures, plants, animals, and ready-made objects scattered across the facility in an attempt to help mosquitoes feel “at home” in it. the facility contains a variety of local vegetation (growing in soil transported from nearby locations), buildings (replicas of a traditional mud-walled house, a cow shed, and a chicken coop), human artifacts (locally made clay pots to be used by mosquitoes as refugia, buried plastic pans to serve as breeding grounds), and animals (in this case, a calf living in the purpose-built shed). the selection and arrangement of these components has resulted from a piecemeal, iterative process, driven by an indistinguishable mixture of scientific and aesthetic criteria. artifacts are placed and displaced until the interior conveys a certain “field” quality that, researchers hope, would encourage mosquitoes to behave in a stereotypically natural manner.1 producing this effect is never simply a matter of replicating the local habitat, however, because researchers will often be uncertain as to which features of the natural environment influence mosquito behavior, and therefore cannot define a priori what aspect of the interior decor will affect them to act in a wild-like fashion. this uncertainty is compounded by the ever-present awareness that whatever occurs within the facility remains irreversibly artificial—that the task is to create de novo an environment supportive of the mosquito’s life cycle.2 ultimately, the mosquitoes themselves will validate the success of these interior design efforts by settling and thriving within the semifield setting. that success can also be measured by the degree of comfort this experimental interior creates in the researchers themselves. after a long process of trial and error—“a lot of problem solving on the ground,” as one of the entomologists puts it—the space will remind them, in critical respects, of a real tropical place, bristling with lifelike detail and able to support the complex patterns of mosquito flight, rest, feeding, mating, and oviposition. what emerges from this laborious fabrication of a new interior is thus the sense of having produced a credible totality, a version of the outdoor environment that is plausible and, above all, close at hand.3 release area: the great indoors if the semifield station aims to provide a hospitable context for the close observation of mosquitoes in captivity, the release area represents the space of maximum freedom for the organisms under investigation, a seemingly unbounded territory in which they can display their true nature without the constraint of walls, nets, or research apparatuses. yet freeing mosquitoes into the outdoors is not an easy thing to do—at least not if one hopes to use that act of liberation as a means of generating entomological knowledge. for the operation to stand a minimal chance of success, two kinds of manipulations are needed: of the mosquito, to enhance its traceability, and of the surroundings into which the mosquito is to be released, to facilitate observation and, possibly, recapture. figure 4. experimental release of transgenic mosquitoes. photo courtesy of christiaan de koning. the idea of turning the release of mosquitoes into an experimental operation was first introduced during the campaign against malaria and yellow fever that accompanied the construction of the panama canal (1904–1914). unfamiliar with the habits of mosquitoes—up to that point, entomological research in the united states had been concerned primarily with agricultural pests—the entomologists recruited by the isthmian canal commission devised a range of ingenuous methods to learn more about the behavior of the local anopheles and aedes populations. a critical variable in planning adequate sanitation zones around the canal works was the length and directionality of mosquito flight. multiple methods were tried to answer this question—including the eye-straining one of positioning observers at regular intervals from known breeding places to watch (or squint at) mosquitoes in flight—but reliable evidence proved elusive. as joseph le prince, the commission’s chief sanitary inspector, noted: “although long flights of mosquitoes on the isthmus were known to some of us, we were unfortunately unable to trace any individual mosquito and find out by actual observation how far it went, and in what direction” (le prince and orenstein 1916, 109). it was james zetek, a young entomologist from chicago, who pioneered what would become the standard technique for recording the flying patterns of free-ranging mosquitoes. zetek’s most pressing concern was to ascertain whether the mosquitoes known to breed in large quantities in the salt marshes northwest of the town of gatun were able to reach the barracks where canal workers were housed. his investigations involved collecting mosquitoes in the malarious lowlands and spraying them with an aqueous solution that contained an aniline dye. the mosquitoes were subsequently freed at dusk, with the color of the dye identifying the day of release. traps were placed in and around the town of gatun, and the isthmian canal commission organized “a daily search through all buildings, made by expert negroes equipped with a wide-mouth vial containing a cotton plug saturated with chloroform” (zetek 1915, 256). when dyed mosquitoes were discovered in the town, zetek was able to offer compelling evidence of the insects’ ability to travel the distance. “the number of recovered mosquitoes is not phenomenally large,” he wrote, “but it is conclusive proof that the mosquitos seen flying from the marsh toward gatun, actually entered that town” (zetek 1915, 257). zetek’s reports abound with details about the relative merits of different methods of mosquito marking. his abiding preoccupation was to make sure that the dye applied to the mosquitoes, and the technique used to spray it, would in no way impede their ability to fly. yet the more striking aspect of zetek’s method is the means by which he managed to capture vast quantities of mosquitoes for his experiment. after attempting the large-scale rearing of larvae and pupae to adulthood—“a tedious and often disappointing method”—he decided to change his approach and seize adult mosquitoes “directly” (zetek 1915, 255): mosquito bar nets were stretched out at the breeding place, three sides of which were in close contact with the ground while the remaining side was raised about a foot or so from the ground. at about 5:00 p.m. a negro was placed inside of each net, with instructions to prevent as far as possible mosquitoes biting him. within an hour mr. negro shared his net with a thousand or more noisy mosquitoes. (zetek 1915, 255) the casualness with which zetek discusses the use of “mr. negro” as bait suggests that he had seen worse during his years of service in the canal zone. this was, one must remember, the scene of an extensive program of racial segregation and racist exploitation in the service of u.s. “tropical triumphalism” (sutter 2007, 726). yet the image of an incarcerated man sharing his imprisonment with hundreds of mosquitoes clearly left an impression on zetek: “the noise made by these dens of voracious, unrestful culicids, their persistent, unceasing attacks, and the endurance of the willing and patient negroes, are things that can never be forgotten by those who had witnessed them” (zetek 1915, 255). zetek’s use of “willing and patient negroes” to lure mosquitoes belongs to the long history of horrors committed in the name of tropical medicine. we cite this episode from the entomological archive to underscore an obvious but essential fact: the experimental release of mosquitoes is never simply a matter of freeing or letting loose. for these acts of calculated liberation to carry any epistemic value, they must be thoroughly intertwined with parallel practices of capture and containment—and not only of mosquitoes. zetek’s study is the forebear of what has become known as the mark-release-recapture method, a genre of entomological research common in vector-control campaigns around the world. new techniques of mosquito rearing have made the standard protocol more ethically palatable and entomologically efficient: it is now possible to harvest large quantities of eggs or larvae and develop them to adulthood in insectaries, allowing entomologists to dispense with the need to capture large quantities of adult mosquitoes. the postrelease recapture of marked specimens has been similarly facilitated by ever more ingenuous attraction traps, while the development of easy-to-use fluorescent dusts and powders has eased the task of marking and detecting released mosquitoes. in the case of transgenic mosquitoes, techniques of genetic manipulation allow the insertion of marker genes that enable the precise identification of captured specimens. in fact, the development of genetically modified mosquitoes has reinvigorated the field of mark-release-recapture studies. now sometimes called limited open-release experiments, pilot open releases, or staged open field releases, the method helps ascertain the longevity and dispersal of transgenic mosquitoes in the environment, as well as their ability to copulate with wild-type counterparts and pass the relevant transgenic trait to their offspring (who 2014). as was evident in zetek’s original study, the outdoors into which mosquitoes are released must be carefully modified and arranged to make entomological observation feasible. these alterations begin with a multitude of mundane interventions that aim to make the release area readable to the researchers. in the case that illustrates this section—a release of transgenic aedes aegypti mosquitoes in west panama—the legibility of the territory is enhanced by marking release points on the roads and paths of the area, as well as on the maps used by the release teams, allowing researchers to free mosquitoes at exactly the same point at regular intervals. figure 5. number marking a mosquito release point. photo courtesy of christiaan de koning. the careful placement of traps—ovitraps for mosquito eggs, adult traps for flying mosquitoes—constitutes another visible transformation of the surroundings. entomological traps come in an immense variety of sizes, formats, and appearances—killing and nonkilling, attractant and nonattractant, baited and nonbaited, stationary and movable—and display a wide range of visual and olfactory cues known or suspected to influence mosquito behavior. counterflow geometry traps, for instance, assume that mosquitoes orient themselves toward their hosts by navigating the top of the plumes of carbon dioxide that humans and animals release with their exhaled breath, but that, at the same time, they will avoid flying in a direction of increased carbon dioxide concentration. thus counterflow traps release carbon dioxide downward, but incorporate a second fan that produces airflow in the opposite direction, thus entraining the mosquito in a current that sweeps it toward the trap’s entrance. the device is thus adapted to the complex flight maneuvers of the targeted mosquitoes, using their own avoidance behaviors to facilitate capture. the choice of location for these traps represents a sort of entomological art of placing, combining a rough scientific understanding of species-specific habits and an intuitive appreciation of where local mosquitoes might prefer to rest and in which direction they are more likely to fly. sentinel traps like the ones used in this experimental release are generally installed near shrubs and bushes, in places sheltered from rain or direct sunlight. yet researchers must also make sure that the trap remains visible to patrolling mosquitoes, so that its visual cues—in this case, the black/white color contrast that the trap offers when seen from above—can influence the trajectory of their flight. because aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the object of this particular release, are highly anthropophilic, and their feeding and reproductive choices are intimately associated with patterns of human habitation, the best location for the traps is generally in close proximity to homes. porches and other peridomestic spaces prove ideal, especially if they are used to hang clothes, a known mosquito attractor. in this way, the distribution of trapping devices not only creates a series of potential interfaces with free-ranging mosquitoes but also entangles the human residents of the release area in the research process. residents must grant regular access to the collection points, and are expected to look after the traps in between the researchers’ visits. in fact, entomological research often requires the presence of breathing, moving, environment-modifying humans to sustain a naturalistic form of inquiry. human presence in the release area is so critical to the replication of the mosquito’s natural habitat that when, due to biosafety concerns, transgenic mosquitoes are released in uninhabited or very sparsely populated areas, a quantum of humanness is often introduced artificially. traps, for instance, can be designed to produce convection currents similar to those created by a human in motion, emit chemicals that mimic human skin emanations, or release carbon dioxide in bursts that replicate the rhythm of human breathing. if there are no actual humans around, the mosquitoes can still be baited with human odors collected on worn clothes. these practices of simulation sometimes involve the construction of makeshift houses within the release area in an attempt to replicate the built environment of a human settlement (kelly 2012). in some cases, the simulacrum goes to the point of creating fake versions of human-made breeding grounds, carefully constructed replicas of the sort of aquatic habitats (puddles, tire tracks, abandoned containers) that humans normally create inadvertently in the course of their daily lives. figure 6. installing a sentinel trap. photo courtesy of christiaan de koning. the release area comes together through all these interventions. this is, in other words, a fully experimentalized outside, a field of observation circumscribed and delineated by the perimeter of traps and observation points. it is also a furnished space, even if the furnishings in questions—sentinel traps, road markings, artificial tire tracks—are more sparingly arranged or less densely packed than those of the insectary or the semifield station. finally, like the semifield station or the insectary, this is a space of simulations: acts of imitation and mimicry directed at making mosquitoes feel at home in this peculiar setting of scientific inquiry. insectary: “everything is a crisis” finally, we arrive back at the insectary. the first impression on visiting such a facility is one of overwhelming closeness; the humidity and temperature suggest an effort to enclose a tropical environment within the walls of a laboratory. the density of occupation—shelf upon shelf stacked with trays of water-bound larvae, piles of boxes full of buzzing mosquitoes—reminds us that in addition to a space of inquiry, this is also a factory dedicated to the rearing of mosquitoes on an industrial scale. in the particular insectary we will use to illustrate this section, located on the east coast of the united states, colonies of anopheles mosquitoes are constantly grown to produce a surplus of insects ready to be shipped to other laboratories for research on malaria transmission. this insectary is an old one, and it looks its age. it was established in the 1950s, and has been in operation ever since. when it was built, it was expected to play a central role in the development of the first malaria vaccine. at the time, the most promising route to this goal involved inoculating humans with radiation-attenuated sporozoites, the form of the malaria parasite that is present in the mosquito’s salivary glands and is injected into humans through the mosquito bite. rearing mosquitoes en masse was, and continues to be, the only way of producing large quantities of sporozoites, since no method of culturing them in vitro existed or has been developed since. figure 7. mosquito cage and rearing trays. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. the fundamental achievement of the insectary is to sustain an uninterrupted cycle of mosquito reproduction under laboratory conditions—a process commonly known as the colonization of a certain mosquito strain. a multitude of methods can be used to encourage mosquitoes to mate in an insectary, including labor-intensive ones such as manual insemination, but a population of mosquitoes will only be considered properly colonized when the insects manage to complete their reproductive cycle on their own. a common environmental manipulation used to encourage this process is the calibration of lighting conditions to create a day/night cycle in the insectary. little is known about how different patterns of luminosity affect the circadian rhythms of anopheles, but it has long been established that they, like many other mosquito species, prefer to mate in the early evening. in the 1970s jacques charlwood and mike jones achieved the laboratory colonization of an anopheles gambiae strain by exposing the mosquitoes to an artificial dusk, which they created by gradually lowering the light intensity in the insectary. “in the artificial ‘dusk,’” they wrote, “virgin males became active at approximately 5 lx, performing a pre-swarming flight, characterized by wide looping flights, near the ceiling of the cage. at this time they were positively phototactic, flying towards the lightest side of the cage” (charlwood and jones 1980, 317). suddenly able to coordinate their flying patterns despite the small size of the cage (1.7 m3), the males swarmed long enough to allow a female mosquito to fly through it and emerge, in copula, a few seconds later. once a cycling population of mosquitoes has been established in the insectary, selection pressures will conspire with environmental constraints to make the mosquitoes increasingly stenogamous, or able to mate in small, restricted spaces. the price to pay for this exceptional reproductive capacity is a radical reduction of genetic diversity. as these captives become able to thrive within the extreme environment of the insectary, they lose much of their original adaptability. this inversion of fitness in laboratory colonies—unusually well adapted to the singular conditions of the insectary, uncommonly unfit to survive anywhere else—is the source of much entomological humor. staff at this insectary tell a joke about a hypothetical meeting of insectary-bred mosquitoes, originally captured in africa but long acclimatized to laboratory life, and transgenic specimens, engineered in the laboratory and now bound for experimental release in africa: “these lab mosquitoes, real african mosquitoes, just laugh at [the transgenic mosquitoes], because they don’t know about anything.” compared with what the transgenic mosquitoes will be up against when they arrive at their destination, life in the insectary is blissful. the irony here is that in exchange for the abundant food, controlled temperature, and lack of predators, laboratory colonies have lost their ability to live in the very environment from which they originated: they may laugh, but ultimately they would fare worse in the wild than their transgenic counterparts. this and similar jokes underscore the heuristic limitations of applying any simple natural/artificial distinction to the phenomena of the insectary. nowadays, one can hear the paradoxical phrase wild-type laboratory strain to describe mosquitoes that have been colonized for decades. they are wild-type, of course, only to the extent that the recent creation of transgenic varieties has introduced a new axis of distinction: that between the laboratory-bred and the laboratory-born. figure 8. adult insectary mosquitoes. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. if the insectary manages the routine feat of sustaining mosquito life indoors, it also produces a second, equally critical accomplishment: to infect female mosquitoes with rodent malaria parasites. in this particular facility, this feat is achieved by placing an anesthetized, malaria-infected mouse on top of a fine-mesh box full of hungry anophelines. after being ingested in the mouse’s blood—and provided the temperature, humidity, and diet of the mosquitoes are kept to the correct standard—the plasmodium protozoa will evolve inside the insect’s body and find their way to the salivary glands, where they will briefly persist in the sporozoite form, ready to be harvested by researchers or transmitted to a new mammalian host. females receive further blood meals to encourage egg production. in this insectary, two rabbits are used for this purpose; insectary staff have made attempts to replace live rabbits with more manageable artificial membrane feeders (and rabbit blood with cow or human blood), but these efforts have so far proven unsuccessful—mosquitoes seem displeased with any radical change in their diet. the inscrutable predilections of mosquitoes and their resistance to change shape the routine operation of the insectary. each insectary technique has been preceded by extensive efforts to calibrate how the intervention affects the vitality of the colonies until researchers find (or stumble upon) a method that appears to satisfy their colonies. many of these procedures are never formalized or stated in written protocols; they are often referred to as tricks and are embodied by technical staff with long years of exposure to the quirkiness of mosquitoes. the key technician in the insectary under discussion, for instance, has no formal scientific training but has been working there for more than twenty years and is considered indispensable to the smooth running of the operation. similarly, the technician in charge of the mice is the latest in a long line of colombian women recruited to the job, each one of them recommended by a friend previously employed in the insectary. perhaps this marks the most striking feature of the insectary, the tension implicit in a form of practice that may appear repetitive, even boring, yet relies on very limited standardization or technical closure. the lack of black-boxing is evident in the insectary’s equipment, much of which is tailor-made or has been recycled and repurposed in situ by the staff. empty tubs of ice cream, for instance, are here the preferred container for adult mosquitoes. when the ice cream company that produced these tubs decided to discontinue the format, the insectary had to scramble to find an alternative container of the same size, shape, and texture—a situation that prompted the director to exclaim: “everything is a crisis!” in other words, the physical, atmospheric, and energetic conditions that support the continuing survival of mosquitoes in the insectary—the life-sustaining processes that mike anusas and tim ingold (2013, 58) describe as infrastitial—are never fully routinized in standardized protocols or equipment built to specification. the counterpoint to this lack of closure is a strong sensorial and more specifically tactile quality to insectary operations. the handling and manipulation routines of insectary staff display a constant attunement to the preferences and eccentricities of mosquitoes: an attunement that echoes in the careful exposure of mosquitoes to the materials, surfaces, fabrics, temperatures, and luminosities most favorable to the completion of their life cycle. one could argue, then, that over the years the insectary has become a unique ecosystem, one unusually conducive to keeping captive mosquitoes alive, infected, and breeding. describing such an ecosystem as more (or less) artificial than those encountered in the release area or the semifield station is beside the point. this is simply a setting where, as the result of decades of interspecies cohabitation under the same roof, the web of biological and epistemic connections has grown particularly dense and finely poised, creating a rare and precarious symbiosis of mosquito life and scientific work.4 despite this long process of familiarization with, and adaptation to, the changing dispositions of mosquitoes, key features of this fragile symbiosis remain opaque to the researchers, a fact that comes into relief in times of transition. a few years ago, a new facility was built in the same building, one floor above this insectary. the plan was to transfer the colonies to new, state-of-the-art rooms, built from scratch to meet higher hygienic standards. the staff applied all their hard-earned expertise in an effort to replicate in this new location all the elements of the old facility that they thought were conducive to the comfort of their colonies. the planned move was never completed, however. for unknown reasons the mosquitoes did not seem as “happy” in the new environment as in their old premises. the reproductive capacity of the colonies declined steeply, and the mosquitoes were returned to their dilapidated but familiar residence downstairs. captivating insects entomologists occupy a peculiar place in the history of the modern sciences. throughout the nineteenth century, not only was the study of insects foundational to evolving understandings of the natural world, human society, or technological futures (e.g., j. clark 2009; parikka 2010); it also came to exemplify a particular kind of devotion to detail that embodied the fundamental virtue of the new scientific age. describing a species demanded scrutiny of anatomical particulars and life-cycle dynamics, a mode of observation that, as lorraine daston (2004, 114) has argued, yielded “copious and minute” descriptions rather than abstract generalizations. discerning behavioral continuities (asserting a seemingly simple pattern, such as “cicadas breed in summer”) required repeated observations under varying conditions over long periods of time. insects bred new standards of empiricism, and these standards were sustained by new regimes of attention. attention is never epiphenomenal to the objects that form its focus or to the spaces where it unfolds. as william james implies in the epigraph that opens this article, what we notice and attend to is also who we are and where we want to be—a composite of memory, will, sensation, and desire that defines each one of the worlds we inhabit. james understands attention as that which brings coherence to the transient and chaotic plurality of experience; it creates pools and eddies in the stream of thought, “resting-places” and “perchings” (james 1890, 243) for our consciousness. reality inheres in what excites our interest and incites our passion—“we are all seeing flies, moths, and beetles by the thousand, but to whom, save an entomologist, do they say anything distinct?” (james 1890, 286). the semifield station, the release area, and the insectary are all carefully built to allow mosquitoes to say something distinct. these are “knowledge traps” (rheinberger 2015, 169), epistemic contraptions designed to capture phenomena whose specific contours remain to be determined. yet here, as with any experiment that hinges on the manipulation and observation of captive animals, one first has to parse, then recombine, the literal and phenomenal facets of the trap. for the facilities we have discussed so far are not just “lethal parodies of the animal’s umwelt,” to borrow a formulation from alfred gell’s (1996, 27) study of the aesthetics of trap-making. they are also, as gell emphasizes, the material embodiment of a nexus of complex intentionalities, a physical interface for human and nonhuman actors and their respective representational capacities. in the three spaces we have described, mosquitoes are seen—apprehended, handled, interpreted—as creatures both delicate and resilient; finicky organisms that are also highly opportunistic and able to perceive and react to a seemingly endless number of cues in their environment. malleable and equipped with prodigious powers of adaptation, the mosquito can find a suitable niche in the most adverse circumstances. the three locales make a bid to capitalize on this protean quality, creating surrounds rich with potential stimuli in the hope that insects will secure a new umwelt amid the apparatus of scientific inquiry. at the same time, each locale hopes to arrest that phylogenic fluidity long enough to substantiate a series of scientific observations—to discover new regularities in mosquito behavior, even if each of those regularities is inextricably linked to the space where the behavior in question unfolds. suspended in these traps—held, albeit briefly, in place—a species acquires specificity, habits emerge from habitats, relationships surface and take shape against the boundless expanse of ecological dynamics and evolutionary change. entomological facilities thus bind, “reciprocally though not symmetrically” (despret 2013, 51), deliberate scientific designs and highly adaptive animal agencies. this binding materializes phenomena that can neither be anticipated nor modeled in advance, for these experimental systems are always articulated—one might say, cultured—through the iterative accommodations of scientists and their living objects of study. attention, in sum, describes here a double movement: granting attention to and capturing the attention of (cf. hennion 2007). the ability of entomologists to observe mosquitoes scientifically and to immerse themselves in their lifeworlds hinges on the construction of spaces able to foster new modes of proximity and propinquity between researchers and their elusive objects of study. at the same time, mosquitoes’ sensory capacities are activated by settings that are purposefully arranged to make them feel “happy” or “at home”—to use terms often employed by entomologists—in the hope that they will then settle into describable patterns of behavior. transforming the mosquito into such a “captivating captive” (hayward 2012, 162) makes for a painstaking craft of composition. it depends on the creation of forms of interiority that allow entomologists experimental access to their object of study while excluding all the dynamic contingencies that threaten to overpower that encounter. the result is a kind of fragile belonging together in the transitional spaces and momentary times of scientific inquiry. making room how to understand this precarious interiority? in his discussion of the cubist room-space, clark (2013, 214) recounts a famous saying by picasso. asked why he never painted landscapes, the artist replied: “i never saw any.” his challenge, and that of cubism more generally, was not to depict what could be made to seem naturally out there, but to create a new kind of immediacy or presence for objects and things that might be notionally external to the physical location of the viewer but could suddenly be put on the same plane of reality as that which appeared closest at hand.5 when it comes to creating moments of experimental immediacy between researchers and mosquitoes, we have argued, space might not always be contained, but it is always room-bound. room is to be understood here as a space for being in, “a surrounding whose shape and extent we can enter into” (t. clark 2013, 281). even when entomologists release mosquitoes into the open, the space in question must be rendered palpable and forthcoming, tangible to the experimenter. alterations in the genetic makeup of the mosquito and the furnishing of the release area with devices of observation and capture achieve the specific form of nearness that grants this interspecies encounter its epistemic value. nearness, then, is not a measure of distance, nor an effect of scale. for clark, room-spaces cultivate comfort and intimacy; they provide a bearing, a center of gravity, a place for the eye to rest. in a room, the world is close, but not necessarily within arm’s reach. interiority belongs to the coherence and specificity of the surroundings—an achievement of light, composition, and, critically, contrast, for “an inside becomes vivid only in relation to an outside” (t. clark 2013, 104). this opposition of inside and outside is not primarily architectural, but perceptual—it is phenomenal, one could argue, rather than literal (cf. rowe and slutzky 1963). the exterior is what remains remote, just beyond the field of vision. against that backdrop, the interior feels intense and immediate, a space where “nothing important is far away” (t. clark 2013, 27). in an epistemic register, the room-space engenders salience. bounded within a habitable geometry, objects and figures strike the viewer and command her or his attention. the production of salience is critical for entomologists, because their investigations unfold against a background of limitless ignorance. not only are basic dimensions of mosquito behavior poorly understood or simply unknown; any advance in their knowledge of these creatures is constantly offset by their relentless biological evolution—the speed of processes of speciation, of ecological and behavioral divergence, generate an endless stream of new surprises for the researcher. without a framework allowing certain objects to materialize and others to fade, the overdetermined nature of mosquito behavior would quickly overwhelm observation. the interior design of each space of inquiry—the design of each experimental space as an interior—thus serves to constrain and narrow the range of interpretation. room-spaces provide the necessary holds for the entomologist’s grasp—a focus, margin, and fringe to orient commitments and order concerns (james 1890). seen as idiosyncratic room-spaces, then, semifield station, release area, and insectary represent more than physical sites; each facility provides entomologists with a unique medium of experience. for entomology, in this interpretation, is not simply multisited but also multimodal; the task of the entomologist is not just to connect or align disparate locales of investigation but to weave together different evidentiary registers. as stefan helmreich (2009, 233) writes of oceanography, entomology is “cobbled together from different genres of experience, apprehension, and data collection.” each room-space provides a spatial matrix in which the world can be real after its own fashion—not in relation to an ideal degree of naturalness or a universal style of realism, but according to the specific shape reality takes within each space of inquiry. by foregrounding the achievement of each investigative interior, the concept of room-space helps us pose anew the question of how entities are arranged to be encountered, which elements of their worlds are internalized and which are held at bay (cf. carter 2013). this question extends well beyond entomology. as a means of apprehending the interplay between the inside and the outside of inquiry—the oscillation of observation and encompassment, presentation and representation, here and elsewhere—the room-space has theoretical mileage for anthropology itself. the field—our discipline’s most enduring and precarious methodological device—belies an aesthetic of interiority that, if no longer always site-bound, continues to cultivate a sense of setting whereby ethnographer and informant encounter each other in time and space (candea 2013; strathern 2004). recent efforts to design fieldwork unencumbered by, as george marcus (2010, 275) puts it, “the mythic mise en scène,” have experimented with juxtapositions of sites, perspectives, and media to stretch the affordances of ethnography beyond the thick descriptions of the solitary fieldworker—working his or her way “into” a culture from the “outside”—toward the recursive articulations of subjects that are internal to the concerns and relationships the anthropologist seeks to describe (kelty 2008; clifford 1981). the room-space adds to this conceptual arsenal by offering new coordinates for the kind of investigative intimacy that constitutes anthropology’s central intellectual operation. it prompts us to interrogate the composition of our ethnographic ground, our ability to stage encounters that are, in kim fortun’s (2012, 459) words, “productively creative, creating a space for something new to emerge, to think outside and beyond what we know presently.” conclusion: a world of interiors in this article we have explored some of the spaces entomologists construct to produce scientific knowledge about mosquitoes. the semifield station, the release area, and the insectary exemplify the diversity of facilities in which researchers attempt to apprehend the predispositions of mosquitoes and capture regularities in their behavior that might assist in the control of mosquito-borne diseases. inspired by entomologists at work, we have sought to articulate the qualities that allow these spaces to create moments of experimental immediacy between the human and the nonhuman, the researcher and the researched. in these room-spaces, as we have called them, entomologists try to align a precise scientific purpose with the bionomic flexibility of animal agencies. the routine activities of these facilities illuminate the multiple accommodations necessary to produce such alignment. filing insectary trays with evian water to mollify a prickly colony, arranging and rearranging the potted plants and clay pots in a semifield station hoping to facilitate mosquito breeding, selecting the most appealing corner of the porch to hang a trap—these minute operations underscore the labor but also the intense optimism that sustain the effort to fix mosquitoes, albeit momentarily, into objects of scientific attention. in our discussion of these room-spaces we have resisted the urge to rank them along a scale of naturalism or containment, instead pausing long enough in each of them to appreciate its unique form of realism. avoiding a hierarchical or sequential classification of research settings does not make for an easy task, as it requires circumventing both the discourses of biosafety that pervade contemporary understandings of scientific work with pathogen-carrying animals and traditional epistemological justifications for the validity of scientific, and by extension entomological, facts. understood through the lens of biosafety, spaces of inquiry are defined by a single measure, namely, the degree of physical containment they provide, the porosity of the respective enclosure to unpredictable inflows and outflows (caduff 2014). this notion of containment is highly amenable to scalar quantification, most explicitly in the classificatory system that ranks research settings according to a numerical biosafety level. heterogeneous spaces of inquiry can then be placed on a linear trajectory, with the insectary providing the highest level of containment and the open field providing none. the same sort of ordering emanates from epistemological reconstructions of scientific fact-making, which characterize each research setting by how thoroughly it subjects the object of inquiry to the intentions of researchers. the result is a compelling narrative arc, extending from the artifice of the laboratory to the naturalism of the field and tracing a stepwise inversion of stability and relevance in between. both biosecurity considerations and epistemological justifications are at play in the three room-spaces we have described. since they house mosquitoes capable of carrying human pathogens, these facilities must comply with an array of biocontainment rules that shape the architectural and procedural organization of scientific work. similarly, if entomologists hope to turn their experimental observations into scientific facts that can circulate beyond the location of their production, they must be able to place individual settings of inquiry along a linear trajectory of increasing naturalism or faithfulness to the natural world. and yet the successful operation of these facilities, we have argued, rests on a form of constructive spatial practice that is poorly articulated by the concept of containment, and involves a degree of mutual adjustment between scientists and mosquitoes that languages of control tend to disavow. the notion of containment articulated in biosafety discourses describes an essentially negative intervention, an effort to neutralize space or inactivate some of its productive qualities; it refers us to the ability to segregate an inside and an outside, but not to the particular ways in which the two can be fused or overlaid to uncover novel relations, to learn something new. entomological facilities are indeed constrained and constraining, but they are also capacious and accommodating (cf. corsín jiménez 2003). from the humid airs of the insectary to the layout of traps along the side of the road, they are adapted to the sensory capacities of mosquitoes, and seek to generate knowledge through a delicate grasp of their evolving existence. similarly, characterizing each space of inquiry on the basis of the degree of control it affords over experimental objects leads to exceedingly narrow accounts of the animal agencies involved in the research process, reducing them to a mere offshoot of the scientists’ (in)ability to constrict their behavior. this is a radical simplification of the patterns of mutual attention that the room-space nurtures, and leads to impoverished descriptions of what the researchers themselves contribute to the staging of successful, epistemically productive encounters. while the insectary might be designed to facilitate human intervention into the lives of mosquitoes, that does not make it a controlled space. it is rather a complex and fragile habitat, an ecosystem grown out of decades of reciprocal adjustments in a shared physical setting, an example of what donna haraway (2016, 32) calls the sympoiesis of “multispecies muddles.” at the other end of the conventional spectrum, the release area might be more sparsely populated with human artifacts than the insectary, and its limits are perhaps demarcated in a less obtrusive or more distributed manner, but that does not make it any more unconstrained or less artificial. in fact, as we have seen, when the ratio of human presence falls below a certain threshold, it has to be recreated or simulated. finally, it is easy to think of the semifield station as being somehow in between—its very name conveys the sense of transition, a halfway house between proper scientific establishment and natural environment. yet its value as a space of inquiry does not derive from its position on an abstract continuum spanning the laboratory and the field, or even from its location in a “border zone” connecting landscapes and labscapes (kohler 2002, 20). rather, this value arises from the configuration of its interior—from its configuration as an interior—and its capacity to create a new spatial matrix linking researchers, mosquitoes and their respective lifeworlds. in other words, as a room-space the semifield station is as specific as any other. it is neither a miniaturized version of the outdoors nor a scaled-up insectary; it is just one of the many natures researchers build to meet mosquitoes in pursuit of scientific knowledge. each of the facilities we have described provides the scaffolding for a distinct interspecies encounter. this encounter might be more or less ephemeral, depending on the timeline of the research endeavor in question, but even in locations, like the insectary, where the process of scientific work extends uninterruptedly over decades, the intensity of attention and the precariousness of standardization suggest a conviviality in need of constant renewal. redescribing the settings of entomological inquiry as room-spaces has implications for how we understand the nature and purpose of the public health interventions they are meant to support. not only does it force us to reconsider the complex dialectics of contact and separation, approximation and distance, that characterize scientific work with pathogenic organisms. it also helps expand our imagination of the ways in which humans can relate to mosquitoes. this imagination is thoroughly constrained by the exigencies of vector control and leads to a set of standard choices among a traditional set of insecticidal strategies: indoor residual spraying, insecticide-impregnated nets, areal fogging, larval control, the introduction of mosquito predators, and the like.6 the work of entomologists is almost always oriented toward achieving a more efficient way of killing or repelling mosquitoes, but the experience of observing them at close quarters over extensive periods of time has often left them with a sense of healthy skepticism, if not despair, about the reach of human action in the face of the bionomic adaptability and the breakneck genetic evolution of insect vectors. mosquitoes, as we have seen, are almost as hard to keep alive and breeding within experimental facilities as they are to kill outside them. this paradox triggers a complicated dialectic of caring and killing: acquiring the knowledge necessary for a more efficient extermination of mosquitoes requires forms of attention grounded in an exquisite, almost amorous adjustment to their preferences; the promise of eradication is kept alive through ever-new forms of experimental cohabitation.7 yet the affective oscillations evident in the entomological room-space rarely percolate into the domain of public health or the practices of vector control, nor do they inflect the way we imagine human-mosquito relations more generally. if we were to carry the values of the room-space into the world at large—if we were to look for room-spaces everywhere, so to speak—we might find ourselves attending to new forms of knowing and doing in science, and impressed by a rather different set of achievements. notes acknowledgments this article has resulted from the generosity of a number of entomologists who introduced us into the intricacies of mosquito worlds, and, in some cases, opened the door of their facilities to our research. in particular, we thank prosper chaki, jacques charlwood, christina due, luca facchinelli, heather ferguson, seth irish, gerry killeen, matthew kirby, mara lawniczak, steve lindsay, james logan, silas majambere, robert miamba, sarah moore, kija ng’habi, fredros okumu, and ana rodriguez. our gratitude, as well, to the friends and colleagues who took the time to read and provide comments on previous versions of this essay: nerea calvillo, fernando domínguez rubio, michael fischer, michael guggenheim, steve hinchliffe, shamus khan, christiaan de koning, andrew lakoff, sheila jasanoff, emily martin, alex nading, natalie porter, rayna rapp, nick shapiro, alice street, and three anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology. conversations with joan richardson—and her interpretation of the “room of the idea” in american pragmatism—were the initial spark for our inquiry. we also owe a particular debt to bob and bridget lyons, whose close reading of the argument and insightful discussions on the finer points of t. j. clark vastly improved the article. finally, we want to acknowledge the support of the cultural anthropology editorial collective, and especially cymene howe’s help in stewarding the manuscript to its final publication. this article has benefited from exposure to diverse and engaged audiences. it was first presented in the “life after the anthropocene” seminar series, convened by jamie lorimer at the oxford research centre in the humanities, and subsequently at the science studies seminars at new york university and harvard university’s kennedy school of government, and in the department of thematic studies at linköping university. fieldwork by ann h. kelly for this project was initially supported by the wellcome trust (grant no. 081507/z/06/z) and later by the u.k. economic and social research council, as part of an open area in europe research grant in the social sciences (grant no. es/i014535/1). research by javier lezaun was supported by the european research council, under the european community’s seventh framework programme (grant no. 263447: bioproperty). 1. the trial-and-error quality of these arrangements extends beyond the example of the semifield station, or other entomological room-spaces for that matter, to what hannah landecker calls the surrounds of biological inquiry: the media, chemical or otherwise, that allow organisms to grow in experimental captivity. these media, landecker (2016, 150) argues, often express “an accidentally accurate capture of the biology of life in man-made conditions.” 2. marston bates (1949, 379), who pioneered the use of semifield stations in the 1930s, urged entomologists to abandon any pretensions of naturalness inside their field cages, however large these might be: “one still cannot be sure that the reactions of the mosquito are ‘natural’ because there is always the barrier of wire liable to be encountered on extended flights; and when the flight of a mosquito has been interrupted by this wire barrier its further activity may be definitely unnatural.” 3. researchers at ihi have recently created two larger facilities: the vectorsphere, which includes a free-living area (see http://ihi.or.tz/the-vectorsphere/), and a mosquito city encompassing a variety of semifield environments (see http://ihi.or.tz/the-mosquito-city/). 4. the web of interspecific relations extends beyond humans, mosquitoes, parasites, mice, and rabbits to include long-term microscopic inhabitants of the insectary. this insectary, for instance, includes an entrenched population of mites. “we have decided we will live with them,” the director notes, “try to keep them at a low level. they don’t kill the mosquitoes, or the parasites, if they are under control.” not only would it be extremely laborious to eliminate these mites completely, but the level of hygiene required might have a negative impact on the liveliness of the mosquito colonies. 5. tellingly, the window is often the ultimate device for achieving this effect, the object whose resolution makes or breaks the impression of absolute immediacy. a successful window allows the outside to enter the room and become part of the scene up front. a failed window, in contrast, is one that posits the outside as a source of light, context, or validation for the objects presented within the literal enclosure of the physical room (t. clark 2013, 89–91). 6. this repertoire has recently expanded with a radical new addition: what if we were able to eradicate a whole mosquito species, maybe even to create “a world without mosquitoes” (fang 2010)? this vision is empowered by the development of so-called gene drives, synthetic pieces of dna that can spread through wild populations and entrench in them a desired trait—for example, pathogen incompatibility or sterility. this form of insecticidal utopianism capitalizes on the mosquitoes’ own opportunism and promiscuity to trigger the self-annihilation of the species (regalado 2016). 7. this combination of registers is not unique to scientific research. it recalls the “regimes of violent care” (van dooren 2014, 92) that characterize the conservation of endangered species, or even the “double perspective” (willerslev 2004, 630) of prey common in hunting societies. references anusas, mike, and tim ingold 2013 “designing environmental relations: from opacity 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university of new york http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8252-9239 through industry and ruination, a human body and a landscape compose a life tenuously holding together. the monarch trailer lies in the dirt off the side of the road, surrounded by a swarm of objects. a tube lodged in its back issues short, charcoal-black breaths. tired and heaving. a filthy man appears at the door. he descends the stairs, moving with agility. flapping winter rags trail just behind. the baggy clothes are not hand-me-downs from someone else’s life; they once fit him. they slacken, twist and gather up, in sync with the movements of his spindly limbs. tenaciously holding onto their reverie of a bigger, more robust man—a john deere or nascar man—they ghost him. a figure indistinct like some underimagined protagonist in a fever dream.1 an allegorical figure tenuously holding together. the man pauses when he reaches the ground. he turns his face—a stale dried apple—toward me. his eyes, outrageously magnified by dirty glasses as if to spite his shrunken head, fix on me inquisitively. things can go any way. no signboard beckons or welcomes, just the objects. i hitch onto their pulse and let my enthusiasm take over. “hey, lots of stuff here. can i look around?” “go on ahead. everything’s for sale except for my tools,” says the man toothlessly. he doesn’t ask what i’m looking for. he knows i just want to be in the middle of things. “why not your tools?” “cause that’s how i do my work,” says the man with a choreographed cadence, unlike the jerking and lurching that carries him off into his thousand-thing garden. * * * jesus, hollow and plastic, stands unmoved. winter is warm for january on the edge of iberia, missouri. population 138. driving unnumbered miles i pass startled bare cottonwoods and pastures of fescue with creeping rootstocks. cows stare at me, aware. lone clapboard farmhouses with blind windows stubbornly hold their ground in mud fields. in the town many homes sleep long into the afternoon, not wanting to bother anymore. santa lies stiff on his back near the front door of a split-level. jesus, hollow and plastic, stands unmoved. two houses put in their notice: american heritage realty and sale by owner. somewhere a burn pile of sycamore flavors the air. all of it goes unremarked by fords and chevys barreling over asphalt. at the convenience store denim and flannel-clad men in work boots buy beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. sandpaper hands lined with dried grease hold anheuser-busch. women wait in idling vehicles. a cashier receives customers with moderate solicitations, her smile less jubilant than the red-hot mouths that advertise crunk!!! energy stix on the packets that dangle from the counter display rack. * * * my fata morgana. and beyond the edge of town where the humming motors fade into the hush-hush of the cottonwoods there irrupts all at once . . . abundance! it’s as if most of the town’s objects have shipwrecked here, urged on by some mesmeric charm. in this roadside encampment, the small and the big congregate, exuberant multiples—valve spring and valve spring and valve spring—playing counterpoint to the gravitas of monumental singularities: a mccormick farmall tractor. textures and densities, liquidities and radiances.2 a wild litter—acres of objects in heavy rusted iron, thin aluminum, hard bright plastics, corroded steel, damp polyester. children’s toys mix promiscuously with the powerful toys of adults. spools and wheels of wires and lights. steel drums filled with nameless hard brittle things. aluminum rods and steel spokes touch. shattered glass and shredded insulation rejoice. the bristling rust pities the soggy lumps of cardboard and cotton. the faded plastics, knowing nothing but their simpleminded delights, giggle idiotically at the hulking, creaking machines. there is agitation, anticipation. my fata morgana. the man zigzags back toward me. “i’m just trying to make a living.” then he veers off into the incomprehensible, pattering across the yard, object relations breaking out everywhere. there are, in fact, assemblies of objects that demonstrate extraordinary levels of articulation. they are expansive, although at times their claims seem exaggerated or altogether far-fetched. general motors meets headlong, front grill to front grill with coachmen—an irresolvable collision interminably taking place. nearby an upholstered armchair lies facedown on top of a humiliated ford galaxy. objects join to produce sense-fictions—provocations to bewilderment and speculation about the sense of their assembly.3 at other moments the yard is ebullient. ten weedwackers dangle from a tree. the exhilaration of sheer quantities—a barrel of rusted broken coils, a bouquet of mangled garden umbrellas—blurt out expletives, an object-tourette’s. on occasion there is true eloquence—deliberate prosodic structures with meter and repetition. stacks and upright rows of windows rhyme with screens. frost king. a huddle of black rubber car tires modulate the pitch. goodyear. michelin. a shawl draped over the handlebars of a wheelless lawnmower. haiku. a decapitated tree trunk leans against the front bumper of a ford pickup, shouldering none of the burden of the open hood. a battered delivery van halfheartedly declares designed kitchens and interiors. * * * occulted ways of mattering in a late industrial landscape. mattering.4 i am looking for methamphetamine. when i do fieldwork in the form of a community study in an eastern missouri county, i don’t only connect with poor, white cooks and users, treatment and law-enforcement professionals, and the protagonists of an industrial-chemical apparatus, its proliferating products, and its unassimilable hyperobjects.5 i also bond to meth, wherever it is in the field. after years steeped in matters concerning meth in a single county, i have taken up a materialist sensibility for a kind of world-compositioning that for two decades has landscaped much of rural missouri and other small-town regions in the united states.6 sometimes, when fieldwork doesn’t work, i leave the years-long community study i’ve been carrying out to go on rural dérives. i’ve spent so much time with tweakers that i think i can sense them in object gatherings and dispersions in any small town anywhere. i’m moved along the passional object terrains they inhabit, and i’m drawn into peculiar augmented psychogeographies, like a contact high.7 meth bonds with the molecular unconscious.8 it invites thinking-feeling experimentally, desirously, and i feel the transmutation of matter. i sense occulted ways of mattering in a late industrial landscape. meth is worked from the landscapes it embellishes—the secrecy of wooded ridges and the engineered ecology of monsanto seed-sown plains, the open pits of rock quarries and the blast furnace of the primary lead smelter, the commodity castles of walmart and their surrounding paved flatlands, teetering homes, and wayward crowds of objects, some melted or charred by acid and fire.9 meth is entangled with a more familiar repertoire of industrial and homegrown material arts—mining, ironwork, cement work, carpentry, cleaning. meth is a performance enhancer that gives you more hours and motivation. it helps you make ends meet, or better. you get more work out of life. meth cooking is late industrial alchemy. alchemy means to carry to its end something that has not yet been completed.10 among meth cooks, late industrial alchemy is the prevailing way that a body, experience, and a landscape all come to matter. a body is liberated as energy,11 experience gets charged with the not-yet, and things start taking place. it’s the hope of transmutation. meth is the philosopher’s stone, the white, yellow or orange-brown powder that can transmute industrial-chemical and mass-consumer base matter into gold. sudafed. energizer. drano. coleman. walgreens instant cold packs. no sooner do you hold them in your hand than you appear inspired by them and seem to look through them into their distance, like an augur.12 it makes you the demiurge slowing and speeding the work of production, making your world anew. you get more life. * * * it leads the way out of workaday failures while lapsing back into them. meth cooks in small-town missouri, like alchemists, take an allegorical approach to their arts. meth cooks often invoke religious tropes to interpret the ecstatic successes and the catastrophic failures of cooking. some describe their operations as ministries and their users as parishioners. some interpret their survival of explosions as god’s exhortation to quit and to get others to do the same. church marquees allude to the struggles of meth addiction or metonymically to the struggles of post-fordist precarity—materialized as landscapes checkered with dollar trees and walmarts, inhabited rundown trailers, piles of objects, and abandoned or unsold homes—and the quandaries of people caught in its throes. god tells them, tough problems? strategize less and pray more, and do not let us mistake necessary evils for good, and jesus was born for sinners and you qualify. oscillating between intoxication, withdrawal, detoxification, and abstinence, people associate meth with treacherous sorcery, sacrificial devotion, and righteous religiosity. occult, evangelical, and mass-consumerist matters mingle promiscuously in an unstable composition. allegories are alluring because they promise to light up inchoate objects, trace unimagined connections, and resolve ambiguities and paradoxes of human—and more-than-human and abiotic—life.13 at the same time, modern allegories reveal their own failure to cohere. whereas symbols present themselves as organic forms indivisible from their transcendent ground, allegories disintegrate in the excessive polysemia of their heterogeneous fragments.14 meth cooking similarly throws into relief the unstable composition of a life. meth cooking is an aporia. it leads the way out of workaday failures while lapsing back into them.15 this allegory is inseparable from these objects in this small-town missouri landscape, but it also points at postindustrial machinic life elsewhere, including cognitive capitalism at the academy and the objects proliferated by its theorizing machines.16 concepts pop into mind like consumer products. they are capitalized through observational architectures like citation indices and impact factors, reducing creativity to market shares in attention economies.17 like many academics and students, i use attention deficit disorder amphetamines to be alert to conceptual risks and opportunities. i make jury-rigged constellations with any combination of these objects to access an encounter and its occulted potentials.18 doing ethnography on meth in missouri feels like a tweaker project. this ethnographic allegory is not a pastoral about an other america in a present becoming-past, but a tale of desire and dispossession cast in the time of now, when trashed promises of a better life have the possibility of being fulfilled.19 this time is at turns crystallized and expanded with matters that cannot be contoured to fit progressivist-industrialist or romantic-naturalist narratives. * * * save money. live better. my walmart. when i wayfare in rural missouri, i cross affective landscapes charged with toxic dreams and precarious compositions. sometimes i start at walmart, the largest retailer in the world and the largest private employer in the united states. walmart reports annual earnings in the tens of billions of dollars. a single walmart superstore—hundreds of thousands of cubic feet containing tens of thousands of consumer products like electronics, clothing, foods (generic, brand-name, organic), tools, furniture, auto parts, guns, toys, wedding rings, pharmaceuticals—can employ more than five hundred people who can help you service a complete life. vlasic pickles. huggies. depend. long, wide aisles flanked by shelves upon shelves holding rows of objects that repeat flat incantations about life laid out from birth to death.20 the repetitions count object time toward a vanishing point, the dwelling place of an unfathomable magnanimous source.21 sam walton, the late founder of the company, was driven more by competition than by money. walmart’s mission has always been to keep prices low by controlling costs, which walton achieved by spreading a benjamin franklinesque pragmatism guided by industry and frugality. products are often astonishingly cheaper at walmart than anywhere else. the company thrives on sales volume, operating on a mere 3 percent profit margin. drawing all things into its hallowed hangars of merchandised life, walmart has dwarfed the world outside. competing retailers fail, walmart’s monopsony power grows, and the monolith turns “even its largest suppliers, and entire oligopolized industries, into extensions of itself.”22 walmart has literally shelved the free market to preside over it. sam’s club. shoppers get more for less and, from the point of view of the customer, you want everything.23 save money. live better. my walmart.24 sudafed. energizer. drano. coleman. walgreens instant cold packs.25 some shoppers sense in some of the most banal products the promise of metamorphosis in exchange for all-consuming surrender. the products serve methamphetamine synthesis, their sale subject to surveillance and controls. pseudoephedrine. lithium. sulphuric acid. ether. ammonium nitrate. meth cooks extract the base elements of late-industrial abiotic life to make the philosopher’s stone. emblems. part-objects. transformational objects.26 * * * energy arises from the unrestrained expenditure of energy, and a crystal moment dilates with supernumerary events. meth is the center of an alchemical cottage industry where cooks rouse the spirit in everyday products and in the process are themselves transformed. meth intensifies novelty-seeking and reward-seeking, which is experienced as an anticipatory high. this feeling is distinct from consummatory pleasure; it is instead the thrilling sense of alertness, heightened interest, motivation, ability, and power that primes the body to forage and seek objects of desire.27 meth activates the seeking system, and in missouri it fires up bodies to play, fuck, or be more industrious at the factory, construction site, and ironworks. or in the meth lab, where walmart products are yet again enlivened, flooding the mesocortical, mesolimbic, and nigrostriatal dopaminergic pathways to dysregulate affect.28 over time the repetitions can yield the ultimate difference machine: schizophrenia.29 desiring-production has no object: it is the production of production. desiring-production has no subject: a subject is made with each lived state. desiring-production feeds capital’s craving for value-extractive innovation. but without an incorporating telos, by being more nervous than system, it leads capital to the conclusion of its deepest tendency, its own undoing.30 in small-town missouri economies, reined in by the norms of accumulation, the progressive producer-consumer-self-producer routine is save more. live better. you get more for less. but meth cooks reel in a general economy.31 commodities decompose and recombine, routine production-consumption-self-production exceeds itself, energy arises from the unrestrained expenditure of energy, and a crystal moment dilates with supernumerary events. more life. meth cooks burn up.32 out of joint, time begets prodigal years that grow a thirteenth freak month.33 * * * i’ll give you five dollars or a thousand dollars to make it work. back outside the trailer, the rattled man looks at me reveling in things. “last chance incorporated,” he declares, baptizing the wild litter of objects as his own détourned walmart. “i’ll give you five dollars or a thousand dollars to make it work,” he says, mimicking his phantom customers. “that’s why i call it last chance incorporated.” drew, as he tells me he is called, weaves off toward a galvanized steel barrel that has an electrical wire snaking over its rim and down to a generator on the ground. i follow him to the contraption and look inside. attached to the basin end of the wire is a rusty air conditioner grill, submerged in water. when he jiggles the wire, dark leaden socks stir in liquid copper. “it’s cold water. gotta heat it and do my warsh.” meth’s alchemical landscapes are often embellished with tweaker projects. when people tweak, they get amped and get onto something—an object of interest or fear, the materiality of an object, or materiality itself—and won’t let it go.34 they become beside themselves, dispersed across the media that make them.35 objects, especially mechanical devices, fire up exploratory desires that may find their expression in foraging, hoarding, and tinkering, repeated and repeated with nonteleological fervor. forms of stereotypy characteristic of dopaminergic surging.36 tweaker projects are diy artifacts, jury-rigged designs that sometimes approach rube goldberg machines. the monuments of desiring machines. a tweaker project is a bricolage of materials and modalities with—from a mass-consumer perspective—oblique aesthetics of use and uncertain efficacy.37 but it holds alchemical promise. meth cooks are shade-tree mechanics of all things.38 machinic life.39 they perform a détournement of industry, an allegory of late industrial world-compositioning with interchangeably human, more-than-human, and abiotic quasi-objects.40 they step up the cycle of mass-production–consumption–self-production and speed toward its ultimate effects. * * * the excrescences of that great garden of arcana. “you know how to make meth?” “well i might know where it is, but i don’t know you.” he directs my attention to the jail to our left. part of the field and its objects are hemmed in by a tall chain-link fence. “it reminds me about prison,” says drew. drew comes from the ozarks, further south by the border with arkansas. he lived there until he was thrown in prison for seven years. “for cocaine. it’s good i remember,” he mumbles and then fades into silence. suddenly my question returns to him, snapping him out of his reverie. “i like the shake-and-bake method.41 i got all three ingredients right here, somewhere.” he flings a hand at the thing terrain spreading before us. “let’s go over there.” he moves toward the horizon where the lively topography is given over to a macabre setting. some objects in their arrogant sense of self-importance have taken up playing house. a sofa, la-z-boy, tv, and bookcase assume their positions in the remains of a clapboard home. the house bears a wound for a wall and patches of sky where the ceiling was blown off. the furnishings nevertheless insist on conjuring a half-baked reality. they refuse to assist in the conscripting scenarios of jc penney and better homes and gardens. instead, they enact a design noir where things—not objects struck dumb—look back at, turn away from, or simply ignore people, their ultimate opacity causing puzzlement and sometimes uneasiness.42 outside the house on a paint-scaled retaining wall, bloated generatio aequivoca hold their breath while waiting suspended in a dozen foggy pickling jars.43 it seems these formless things are the excrescences of that great garden of arcana.44 culled from the retracted lives of objects, the embers burning somewhere among the parts of vacuum cleaners, barbies, chevys. kenmore. the objects have broken away from the town’s metronomic routine—home, work, store, home, and myriad variations in between—to this halfway house of the untimely.45 they flee from a world that still adheres to form and order.46 a migration of forms.47 larval subjects.48 * * * a flickering, imaginal life where objects shimmer, only to slip into slumber once again. i follow drew inside. broken sunlight slashes the living room. he crouches before the moldy plaid sofa. untwisting a piece of plastic wrap that he produces from a determined fist, he lays out two shaky lines of yellowish powder. “meth is good and it’s bad.” he feels deeply what he’s saying. he leans down and snorts one of the lines. meth blasts a life, freeing it from the metronome of history.49 but it’s a flickering imaginal life where objects shimmer only to once again slip into slumber, leaving you too dispirited.50 “i cry like a baby every night. i cry for my momma,” says drew as a drizzle of dopamine wets his receptors. he looks at me with hazy anticipation, waiting for me to snort my line. each time desiring-production gives itself over to ecstatic abandon, more life feels as if forever on the threshold of concrescence. expenditure begets its own energy. a general economy swells. and for a crystal moment . . . until the exuberance is lassoed as addictive consumption, an exaggerated producer–consumer–self-producer desire caught in perpetual ratcheting repetition.51 last chance incorporated. * * * the leavings of late industrialism and a gluttonous accumulation of concepts. holding tight with lattice force, the yellowish crystals keep to their crooked line, the one line remaining. my seeking system. when i look for meth, i don’t pick my way through the ruins of uneven geographic development, rogue industry, dysregulated consumption, despoilation, and dispossession only to tell an allegorical tale, and certainly not one that makes theory its privileged register and words its privileged marks.52 immersed in a field of objects—the leavings of late industrialism and a gluttonous accumulation of concepts—i am trying to feel my way back, through the unreserved use of metaphors, parataxis, the pathetic fallacy, images and allegory, to a fleeting encounter with a person and a place out of time, yet still here.53 this ethnographic allegory is not only textual, but a textualization of an already allegorically inscribed material-affective geography. through industry and ruination, a human body and a landscape compose a life tenuously holding together.54 intermittently fanning the spark of an obsolete hope to hold off getting snuffed out.55 i too am sometimes intoxicated with hope—that the alchemical work of redemptive criticism can inscribe an abandoned promise in the lineaments of the present and affect it.56 that ethnography can matter. but the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot, more tentative than real.57 notes all photos by jason pine. 1. see gay 2006, 253. 2. see anderson and wylie 2009, 326. 3. anthony dunne (2005, 43–45) calls a sense-fiction a design with “para-functionality,” that is, it is “within the realms of utility,” but it also “embodies provocative or poetic qualities,” where individual elements are recognizable but their combination is bewildering. 4. for karen barad (2003), mattering is matter-as-phenomena enfolding “to matter” in both its senses in an epistemological and ontological becoming of things. in this case, mattering is also an undoing. 5. a hyperobject, for timothy morton (2013), is an object so large and so impinging on human experience that its dimensions are unfathomable yet demand reckoning. 6. ben anderson and john wylie (2009, 3) call this a “materialist imagination” based on the principle that “matter potentially takes place with the capacities and properties of any element (i.e., earth, wind, fire, air) and/or any state (i.e., solid, liquid, gaseous). the question of materiality therefore far exceeds any invocation of ground or physicality.” home meth labs are discovered in most parts of the united states. the phenomenon of small-scale production was most concentrated on the west coast, hawaii, and in the midwest before it gradually moved southward and eastward to all the states. methamphetamine originating from large-scale superlab production comes, since the 1990s, predominantly from mexico. 7. see debord 1956. tweaker is slang for meth user. passional terrains are guy debord’s situationist renderings of space through movements of attraction, play, and unregulated pleasure—in other words, the live situations of dérives. additionally, see ingold 2007; coole and frost 2010; lee and ingold 2006. 8. different from stable, representational-structural forms of the higher-order molar level, the dynamic synthesis of the molecular makes molar life possible. for the molecular unconscious, see deleuze and guattari 1983, 283–96. 9. missouri is the location of the lead belt, which until recently produced nearly threequarters of the lead used in the united states. before it closed in 2013, the doe run plant in herculaneum, missouri was the largest primary lead smelter in the west. 10. see paracelsus 1999. 11.see baudrillard 1993, 102. 12. see benjamin 1999, 207. 13. see truitt 2015. 14. see jameson 1986, 73; benjamin 2003, 56; kelley 1997, 11. 15. see de man 1979, 275. 16. yann moulier boutang (2011, 55) defines cognitive capitalism as a type of accumulation based on the valorization of knowledge and innovation, writing that “cognitive capitalism produces knowledge by means of knowledge and produces the living by means of the living.” andré gorz (2010, 52) refers to cognitive capitalism’s primary means of production as “self production.” 17. as a recent editorial in urban geography (2014, 785) observed: “when communication and attention are commodified, debates over meaning and significance cannot even take place until ‘the market’ has allocated a minimum value of the currency (the attention measure purporting to reflect what it helps to create, heisenberg style) to the matter in question. the quickening cycle of closure between genuine creativity and observational capitalization undermines the historical legitimacy of citation as a means of recognizing others’ work and tracing the evolution of ideas, fostering bizarre competitive dynamics in which even the harshest criticism enhances a charlatan’s citational stardom.” thus, the high ranking of cultural anthropology might implicate me as a member of the cognitive-capitalist elite. 18. following karen barad (2003, 814), this nonrepresentational approach emphasizes “a causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than ‘words’) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather than ‘things’) . . . apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced.” 19. see clifford 1986, 115. for an “other” america, see stewart 1996. for the time of now, or now-time (jetztzeit), when a moment from the past becomes, in a flash, recognizable, outside the narrative of progress, bringing the past into its (belated) timeliness, see benjamin 1968. 20. in 2009, walmart began selling coffins and urns online. 21. see baudrillard 1998. walter benjamin might have called this the mythic time produced by capitalism. 22. see lynn 2006; fishman 2006. 23. see walton 1992, 221. 24. walmart’s motto is “save money, live better” and one of its slogans is “my walmart.” 25. these are common products containing the complete array of precursor ingredients needed for making methamphetamine. 26. transformational objects bear projected desires and in the process are themselves made sacred. see bollas 1979. 27. consummatory pleasure refers to pleasure experienced in the midst of enjoyable activity. see panksepp 2004. 28. norepinephrine and epinephrine are also involved in the biochemical and physiological effects of methamphetamine; see zametkin and rapoport 1987. see also casper 2006 on the potential relationships between anorexia nervosa, the nor/epinephrine and dopamine systems, the foraging gene, alertness, and the drive for movement—a set of relationships suggesting that meth users’ reduced food intake may enhance the drug’s effects. 29. see panksepp 2005; deleuze and guattari 1983. 30. see deleuze and guattari 1983, 35. elsewhere on the same page: “the schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. he scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire.” 31. on restricted economy and general economy, see bataille 1991. 32. see baudrillard 1993, 102. in georges bataille’s words, this burning up is the nonlogical difference (a difference that is nonoppositional, that is, it undoes oppositions and boundaries) of a general economy that escapes all containment (and freedom/sovereignty that exceeds all control). 33. see schulz 1977, 125. time out-of-joint, for gilles deleuze and félix guattari (1983), refers to the future anterior, arriving at a destination without having taken the journey. 34. see pine 2014. 35. see rotman 2008. 36. see panksepp 2004; previc 2009. stereotypy refers to repetitious thought or movement (behavior), a symptom correlated with excessive dopamine levels in the brain. 37. see dunne 2005. 38. a former eastern missouri meth cook described, in these terms, his propensity to “fix” things. his wife interjected, “yeah, but usually it was working when you started.” 39. machinic, in this instance, refers to gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s notion of a difference machine, an assemblage, which george marcus and erkan saka (2006, 103) describe as “the causally productive (machinic) result of the intersection of two [or more] open systems.” 40. for frédéric vandenberghe (2008, 885), capitalism is made machinic “by producing the subjects that produce and consume the products they have produced. . . . when subjects are incorporated by the system as components of its own machinery, the subjects have become its living medium and mediation.” michel serres (1987) writes that quasi-objects are part subject because subjects cannot exist without objects. bruno latour (1993, 96) writes that quasi-objects and quasi-subjects proliferate in the nonplace between the “nature pole” and the “subject pole” where “the work of mediation emerges.” 41. in the past decade, a new meth recipe circulated, which required only a few ingredients and a bottle. in 2011 and 2012, so-called shake-and-bake labs, in which all the ingredients are mixed in a single bottle, were discovered in two walmart stores, one in tulsa, oklahoma, and the other in boaz, alabama. in the tulsa incident, the culprit stated that she set up shop in the store—using drain cleaner, lithium from aa batteries, and pills containing pseudoephedrine—because she could not afford to buy the ingredients. see huffington post 2011, 2012. 42. see dunne and raby 2001. for the distinction between the familiarity of objects and the elusiveness of things, see brown 2001. 43. generatio aequivoca is the medieval western theory of spontaneous generation. 44. matter without form or formless (l’informe) is georges bataille’s (1985) antiphilosophical base-material emphasis on that which cannot be made to cohere, in both senses of the word. see also bois and krauss 1997. 45. routine movements were the object of the situationists’ active unmaking. elizabeth grosz (2004, 11), interpreting friedrich nietzsche, writes that “the untimely is that which is strong enough, active enough, to withstand the drive of the present to similarity, resemblance, or recognition, for the untimely brings with it the difference that portends the future.” out-of-time difference is also what emerges through repetition, according to gilles deleuze (2001a). paul rabinow (2009, 27) writes that an untimely event is one in which “the things of the actual and existing world can be made into something appropriate as well as inopportune . . . appropriate at least retrospectively in that it reconfigures existing things and relations, and inopportune in that it disrupts those existing things and relations and changes their tone, register and directionality.” drawing on deleuze, rabinow further characterizes an untimely event as a “counter-movement.” 46. see gay 2006, 141. 47. bruno schulz (1988) explains the transience of form as the “migration of forms.” 48. drawing on gilles deleuze’s (2001a, especially chapter 2) notion of the larval subject, levi bryant (n.d.) writes on his blog that larvae are creatures in formation, which includes “philosophical larvae” that are “without determinate positions or commitments.” kim fortun (2012, 452) argues that these protoformations are possible when “discursive gaps” are addressed and creative responses provoked. 49. see benjamin 1999, 474. 50. anhedonia, or the loss of hedonic capacity, including deficits in the reward processes of anticipation, motivation, and reinforcement learning, is associated with dopamine; see der-avakian and markou 2012. anhedonia is commonly named a symptom of methamphetamine withdrawal and, according to some addiction-treatment professionals, can last for as long as two years, dramatically increasing the likelihood of relapse. yet this medical explanation of postchronic methamphetamine use can be only part of the story. often users return to lives that are unfulfilling, and they are unfulfilling precisely because they cannot seem to prime people to anticipate rewards. catherine malabou (2012) explores the relationship between biology and the social by way of the connections between neuropathological disaffection, or affective barenness, and disaffiliation, this last a concept developed by robert castel (1995) to refer to a social condition of marginalization. malabou (2012, 157–59) specifically makes the connection to lack of integration in the “work world.” her title, “the new wounded,” refers to a new paradigm in which the neurologically wounded are now also considered to be psychically wounded. 51. on addictive consumption, see reith 2004. 52. the material and moral ruin that troubled walter benjamin and his contemporaries in interwar europe arrived, in a sense, in the united states decades later in late industrial geographies wracked by a different kind of violence, which kim fortun (2014, 310) describes as the “continuing productivity of industrial culture and desire, with high throughput of consumers who love and depend on toxic products” despite and because of the fusion of “natural, technical, political-economic, social, and discursive systems, all of which are aging, often overwrought, ossified, and politicized.” 53. on anthropomorphism, see bennett 2009, 98–99, who argues that imputing agency to matter is a clumsy and risky way to begin to think and perceive ecologically, throwing into relief isomorphisms across apparent ontological divides. this text also performs what timothy morton (2006) might call dark ecomimesis through parataxis (a series of successive independent clauses without coordinating conjunctions) and ekphrasis (rendering in words the qualities of objects and phenomena and the affective force of those qualities) to create the ambience of an ecological noir, as well as what ian bogost (2012, 61–67) calls alien phenomenology by way of “exuberant metaphors” that imagine and relate to objects’ experience of phenomena. for this last technique, i use the writing of bruno schulz as inspiration for his attention to the messianic in worldly disguise in poland’s postwar everyday capitalism. schulz equates matter with the substance of language and valorizes the imaginative interpretive work of reading as the alchemical work of redemption. to this end, his texts are richly allegorical, embracing an “aesthetics of overfulness” that, rather than providing mere decoration, prepares “the ground for the unexpected metamorphosis of reality” (underhill 2011a, 149). i also draw from don delillo (1985), who amplifies the “white noise” of uncorrelated information and commodity incantations. the allegory offered here exaggerates “the overdeterminations of description” (i.e., “theory” and “poetics”; see fortun 2012, 452–53) with the hope of addressing a discursive gap and provoking new ways to respond to it. 54. “a life,” for deleuze (2011b, 29), “is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given lived objects: an immanent life carrying with it the events of singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects.” on landscape as a site for gathering up and dispersal, see rose 2006 and wylie 2009, respectively. 55. see benjamin 1968, 255. 56. see löwy 2005, 41. for an elaboration of the connection that walter benjamin makes between alchemy and redemptive criticism, or the arrest of historical time by addressing objects piled up in the detritus of history to critique that history, see rabinbach 1985; underhill 2011a, 2011b. 57. see schulz 1977, 125. references anderson, ben, and john wylie 2009 “on geography and materiality.” environment and planning a 41, no. 2: 318–35. 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ourselves: the alphabet, ghosts, and distributed human being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. schulz, bruno 1977 the street of crocodiles. translated by celina wieniewska. new york: penguin. originally published in 1934. 1988 “an essay for s. i. witkiewicz.” in letters and drawings of bruno schulz, with selected prose, translated by walter arndt and edited by jerzy ficowski, 110–14. new york: harper and row. serres, michel 1987 statues: le second livre des fondations. paris: françois bourin. stewart, kathleen 1996 a space on the side of the road: cultural poetics in an “other” america. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. truitt, e. r. 2015 medieval robots: mechanism, magic, nature, and art. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. underhill, karen c. 2011a “bruno schulz and jewish modernity.” phd dissertation, university of chicago. 2011b “next year in drohobych: on the uses of jewish absence.” east european politics and societies 25, no. 3: 581–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0888325410388270. urban geography 2014 “please do not cite this article.” unsigned editorial. 35, no. 6: 783–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2014.949122. vandenberghe, frédéric 2008 “deleuzian capitalism.” philosophy and social criticism 34, no. 8: 877–903. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0191453708095696. walton, sam 1992 made in america: my story. new york: doubleday. wylie, john 2009 “landscape, absence, and the geographies of love.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 34, no. 3: 275–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00351.x. zametkin, alan j., and judith l. rapoport 1987 “noradrenergic hypothesis of attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity: a critical review.” in psychopharmacology: the third generation of progress, edited by herbert y. meltzer, 837–47. new york: raven. a magical reorientation of the modern a magical reorientation of the modern: professional organizers and thingly care in contemporary north america katie kilroy-marac university of toronto scarborough http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1673-217x fran is a quick-witted and energetic woman of about fifty who recently launched her own professional home-organizing business in toronto.1 one morning, as we sat drinking coffee together, she told me about a regular client of hers—a woman she’d just seen again earlier that week. the woman was far from rich, fran said, “but she’s got, rough guess, four hundred pairs of summer shoes and more clothes than she could ever wear, not to mention loads of other stuff. the first time i walked into her place, i felt like was going to hyperventilate. . . . there was absolutely no sound in there because it was so full of stuff. you know, it was like walking into a cathedral, or a womb—i think, to her, that’s what it was.”2 professional organizers (pos) like fran are keen observers of how people relate to and manage their material possessions. many express an almost anthropological desire to understand their clients’ attachments to things and, more broadly, to reflect on the stuff of contemporary north american life. it’s not just the extreme cases of acquisition, accumulation, or excess that pos find interesting or worthy of discussion, but also the mundane, ordinary things that settle into our daily lives—the paper clutter (receipts, tax documents, letters, junk mail), the plastic goods, the useless kitchen gadgets, the kids’ artwork, the new-but-soon-to-be-obsolete electronic devices, and the things we inherit when a parent or loved one dies. a seemingly simple question had led me to seek out and talk to pos in toronto: how, in north america and at this particular historical moment, are we to manage and be with our ever-expanding world of material things? already i had come across a strong prescription about how not to be: according to the newly defined hoarding disorder diagnosis in the fifth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-v; american psychiatric association 2013), pathological hoarding has as much to do with the improper management and organization of objects as it does with excessive accumulation. here consumption remains a late capitalist raison d’être, but it must, above all, be properly managed. one must not only know what to keep and what to discard, but how to arrange and store objects in their proper place. by way of a close engagement with the dsm-v, popular home and lifestyle magazines like real simple, and the burgeoning occupation of professional organizing, this article attends to things in excess and in disarray, and looks critically at how order is made out of disorder in discourses about stuff in contemporary north america. drawing on insights offered by the anthropologist mary douglas (1966) in purity and danger, i take as a point of departure the idea that disorder is a far from natural or absolute category. rather, the practice of naming disorder and making order is both instrumental and highly symbolic; it serves to distinguish social and moral categories and draw boundaries between different kinds of people, not just through an appeal to hygiene, health, or self-improvement but also through the production of specific structures of feeling and affect—fear, disgust, vigilance, revulsion, pity, and self-righteousness—that in turn serve to maintain these distinctions. discourses of order and disorder, i suggest, carry within them strong judgments about virtue, affluence, and class (bourdieu 1977, 1984). my investigation begins with a discussion of how certain forms of material disorder have, in the north american popular and psychiatric imagination, come to stand alternately as evidence, symptom, or potential cause of mental disorder. showing how the logic of late capitalism is both reflected and enforced through cultural idioms of mental health and illness (cvetkovich 2012; kleinman 1988; littlewood 2002; martin 2007), i unpack the various regimes of order that underpin these discussions to reveal a specific set of directives about what constitutes appropriate object management and thingly care in contemporary north america. i then turn my attention to the question of ordering as both a practice and a process, continuously undertaken and again undone, never fully complete (law 1994). drawing on interviews and fieldwork encounters with twenty-one pos in toronto and throughout southern ontario, i describe how they aim to reorient their clients materially, morally, and affectively by reordering their habits and things.3 in theory, pos endeavor to bring people’s overpowering relationships with their material possessions into line with a specific regime of caring for, with, and about things that is predicated on an absolute distinction between subject and object. in practice, however, many pos find themselves immersed in a reality that is more vibrant-materialist than it is cartesian. the organizers fully recognize the complex ways that people become attached to, intermingled with, and even dispersed in things, and their work requires them to regularly plunge into and manipulate this world of “vibrant matter” (bennett 2010). here, i suggest, pos emerge as a new species of healer whose interventions endeavor to excise objects from subjects and vice versa, and who by extension seek to transform dividuals into individuals (lipuma 1998).4 from this angle, pos and their interventions appear to be resolutely disenchanting. and yet, a paradoxical double movement also animates their work. for just as pos act to disrupt the “secret sympathy” (frazer 1906, 53) their clients share with their material things, they nevertheless operate within a realm of magical correspondence where matter and mind are imagined to reflect and affect one another, and where bringing order to a client’s possessions means also bringing order to his or her mind. a word about anthropology’s things to investigate regimes of material order and disorder is also to probe objects and things.5 the idea that material objects are “closely tied to humans and their ways of knowing” (hodder 2012, 14) is certainly not new to sociocultural anthropology—the social significance of objects has been central to the discipline’s own history and development. since the 1980s, studies of material culture in anthropology have examined the “social lives” or biographies of things (appadurai 1986; kopytoff 1986), as well as the way subject and object may come to coconstruct one another (miller 1987; tilley 1999).6 others have gone even further to challenge the distinction between subjects and objects. through the lens of actor network theory (ant), things—and especially human-created technologies—are scrutinized for their capacity to enable or restrict human action, sociality, and even ethical behavior while nevertheless fading into the apparently neutral infrastructure of our everyday experience (e.g., latour 1987, 1992; law 1992).7 even more recently, the new materialist movement has built on and extended the work of ant to approach things in their “vibrant” materiality (bennett 2010; see also ingold 2011 on the “vitality of materials”) and as having an agentive force (knappett and malafouris 2008) all their own.8 critiquing the ontological division and privileging of subject over object, humans over nature, and living things over nonliving things, this movement is as much a political project as it is a philosophical one, for it insists that “disregarding materiality and material capacity for agency leaves humanity enduring its own myth of exceptionalism, with the political costs of the continued purveyance of economic, gendered, racial, and further ideational inequalities” (poe 2011, 154; see also coole and frost 2010; haraway 2003). though i myself am less swayed by the call to attribute agency to things than i am by the idea that personhood (strathern 1988) and even human agency (gell 1998) may be dispersed into or extended through things, i am nevertheless fascinated by what jane bennett (2004, 349)—building on the work of gilles deleuze, baruch spinoza, and henry david thoreau, among others—has referred to as “thing-power” materialism, an approach that “figures materiality as a protean flow of matter-energy” and “emphasizes those occasions in ordinary life when the us and the it slipslide into each other.” while the tension between strathern’s distributed personhood and bennett’s (2010, 31–32) theory of “distributive agency”—which “does not posit a subject as the root cause of an effect” but instead “points to a swarm of vitalities at play”—may be unresolvable, it is nevertheless productive, and i endeavor to hold them in the same frame here. it is the slip-sliding of the us and the it, as well as the enduring attachments that may grow out of such encounters and the way people may see themselves in or as their stuff, that sits at the center of my inquiry, as well as of the interventions of pos that aim to detach people from their things. i turn to the techniques used by pos later in this article. first, however, i consider dominant north american cultural discourses about the appropriate (and inappropriate) ordering and accumulation of everyday things, looking specifically at how ideas about mental health and illness are grafted onto or derived from these discussions about our daily practices with stuff. material disorder as evidence of mental disorder within early psychoanalytic discourse, hoarding behavior was linked to the notion of the “anal character” (abraham 1997; see also freud 1959; jones 1950) and described as a “regression to a childlike state (as is the fascination with excrement) or an attempt to stop time or bring up the past” (lovell 2007, 326). folded into the earlier versions of the dsm, hoarding behavior stood as a sign or symptom of mental illnesses like obsessive compulsive disorder, dementia, and schizophrenia; in the revised dsm-iv, compulsive hoarding was listed as a diagnostic criterion for obsessive compulsive personality disorder (mataix-cols et al. 2010). it was with the 2013 release of the dsm-v that hoarding disorder (hd) took its place as a disorder in its own right. and yet, looking more closely, we see that hd doesn’t really stand alone at all: an estimated 75 percent of individuals diagnosed with hd are said to have a comorbid mood or anxiety disorder (frost, steketee, and tolin 2011), and hoarding behavior is still listed as symptom of numerous other disorders. the question of how and in what instances hd (as disorder) can be disambiguated from hoarding behavior (as symptom) plays an important role in my larger research project, as does the question of why both popular and professional conversations about hoarding—not just as mental illness but also as public health hazard and as media spectacle—have emerged with such vigor in north america during the past fifteen years, amounting to what susan lepselter (2011, 920) has termed a “collective fetish for the hoarder’s fetishes.” hoarding, we are told, affects between 2 and 5 percent of the population (mataix-cols et al. 2010); according to these sources, the myriad physical and psychological dangers of the condition should not be underestimated (steketee and frost 2003). the urgency and ubiquity of this crisis are constantly reaffirmed by popular hoarding tv shows, as well as by regular news reports of hoarding-related fires and deaths. the evolution of hd as a veritable psychiatric diagnosis is a curious thing, as is the dsm-v itself. from the negative space of the manual, a kind of ideal personality emerges that appears to be universal and unmarked, but is, of course, culturally and historically situated. particularly interesting about hd is that because it hinges on stuff, it serves to distinguish supposedly normal late capitalist practices of accumulation, organization, and divestment from pathologized forms of being-with-things. the disorder bears the mark of what ian hacking (1998) has described as a “transient mental illness,” meaning not a disorder that comes and goes within a single person, but rather one that appears suddenly—and sometimes quite dramatically—within an “ecological niche” (hacking 1998, 13) of a given culture and location, has its moment, and then may just as readily recede. this is not to say that transient mental illnesses like hd are caused or created by, say, late capitalist consumer culture (and the social relations it encourages or inhibits), or by a neoliberal restructuring of subjectivities, or that such disorders are the confabulation of overeager psychiatrists or pharmaceutical companies, or that they are the product of media sensationalism, though all of these elements and many more have played a part in the making (and the making recognizable) of hd. it is also not to say that people in hoarding situations and their families do not endure suffering, alienation, and distress, for many certainly do.9 however—and this is an important point—hoarders tend not to identify excessive accumulation and/or material disorder as the primary source of their suffering. in psychological terms, the hoarding behavior at the heart of hd is described as being more or less egosyntonic (that is, generally acceptable to—and in line with—one’s self-image). in practical terms, this means that for many people who hoard, it’s not the stuff itself, but the threatened or actual removal of stuff and the discarding of things that causes the most distress (gibson et al. 2010). in other words, the intervention is often experienced as distressing, while the things are not; hoarders have to be convinced that their stuff is the true cause of their suffering. an example of the extreme anguish and dread felt by hoarders when faced with the idea of parting with their stuff—even apparently nonsentimental items like junk mail and magazines—is illustrated in debra’s story, recounted by randy frost and gail steketee (2010) in their book stuff: compulsive hoarding and the meaning of things. debra describes her things as “fragments” or “extensions” of herself, explaining: “whatever comes into my life has come for a purpose. i’m supposed to have it. it’s a part of me—an extension of me” (frost and steketee 2010, 116). she goes on to speak of the anxiety she feels about being separated from her stuff in more relational terms: “it’s like asking me to throw out my children. they’ll be dead. i’ll kill to prevent that” (frost and steketee 2010, 116). debra also expresses a profound desire to hold on to and “contain” any item with which she comes into contact: “picture a cartoon with thought bubbles. i have a hundred million bubbles. junk mail is one of them. if i throw it away, it’s out there without me, out of containment. i want a bubble around me and all my stuff to keep it safe” (frost and steketee 2010, 113). contact with things, for debra, is always a slip-sliding—things become part of her and she, in turn, is (re)constituted by (and also extended and dispersed in) these parts. the mere thought of being separated from her things, akin to losing a part of herself or losing her own children, causes debra overwhelming distress. a final noteworthy feature of the hd diagnosis is that one simply cannot imagine the diagnosis being assigned without some evidence of material disorder coming first—hd is simply not verifiable as a psychiatric condition in the absence of the stuff. this material proof—whether by way of photographs, documentation from city agencies or service providers, or a home visit—must necessarily precede the diagnosis (mataix-cols 2014). extreme material disorder thus appears to stand as evidence, physical projection, and mimetic expression of the mental disorder that is its cause. disorder is the disorder, in a very real sense. material disorder as a symptom of mental disorder the same period that saw the emergence of hd as a mental illness gave rise to other strong reactions to excessive accumulation and material disorder as well, including the birth of a booming clutter-management industry and a multitude of consumption-critical and so-called simple-life movements. within the former, and specifically within the domain of professional organizing, a condition known as chronic disorganization (cd) was first described by the renowned po judith kolberg during the 1990s. the term (and its cognate, “challenging disorganization,” which in 2011 was “selected to replace ‘chronic disorganization’ because it was seen as less clinical sounding, less confusing, more inclusive and more hopeful”; see http://www.challengingdisorganization.org/content/resources-overview) enjoys great currency with pos throughout north america. in the united states, organizations like the board of certification for professional organizers and the institute for challenging disorganization have begun to train and accredit pos and aim to standardize the field worldwide; titles include cpo (certified professional organizer) or cpo-cd (certified professional organizer specializing in chronic disorganization). the profession remains to a large extent unregulated, however. in toronto, some pos are long established and accredited in their field, others have learned through mentorship, and still others begin without much prior experience at all, taking an entrepreneurial risk in opening their own po company. i must emphasize, as pos always do, that chronic disorganization is not a medical or a psychiatric diagnosis. rather, pos describe cd as a behavior set or an orientation toward stuff that makes it difficult for those who experience its symptoms to keep their material possessions in order. while cd is not itself a medical condition, pos note that it does sometimes arise from—and, in fact, stands as a symptom of—other mental or physical health problems. barbara, a certified cpo-cd who has been working as a professional organizer in southern ontario for nearly fifteen years, explained to me that most of the clients she works with “have some kind of impairment of their executive functioning abilities. i have clients with add; i have clients who have suffered brain injuries. their brains just don’t work in an organized way, and they need a lot of help with what lots of people take for granted.” describing her client base, ellen, also a cpo-cd, told me that she has “very few clients who haven’t been diagnosed with depression.” denise, another cpo-cd in toronto, told me that most of her clients suffer from depression, fibromyalgia, or other physical challenges. some of their clients have sought treatment for their condition, and a few take medications, but many others are self-diagnosed. according to barbara, clients with cd tend to have struggled with stuff their whole lives; many of her clients have tried to “get organized” on their own many times over, but with great difficulty and often to no avail. for others, the pos explain, cd may stem from a life event, sometimes traumatic, that led to a period of “situational disorganization” that was never resolved. professional organizers often describe chronic disorganization as a spectrum, where hoarding is imagined as an extreme version of cd that occupies a place on the spectrum’s far end. but, pos say, hoarders and persons with cd are easy to distinguish from one another. a toronto po named corine explained to me that, in contrast to hoarders, persons with cd tend to be distressed by the state of their living spaces; they have a certain degree of insight into their situation, and they recognize that the accumulation and disorder of stuff in their lives is detrimental to their well-being. unlike hoarding, chronic disorganization could be described as egodystonic, or in conflict with the needs and goals of the ego. people with cd want to change their habits and behaviors around stuff, but they often don’t know how to do it on their own. they are much more likely to enlist the help of a po; they welcome intervention. material disorder as a cause of mental disorder: pursuing the aesthetic of the simple the latest edition of real simple magazine was waiting for me in my mailbox when i got home last night. now, i tell myself that my interest in this magazine is purely research-related—after all, i approach it primarily as an ethnographic object. and yet this magazine is so enticing, so hard to resist. here is a house full of clean surfaces, ingenious storage systems, and closets that don’t spill out at your feet when you open their doors. and because of this beautiful, functional, and clutter-free domestic order, the people depicted within the magazine clearly have more free time, more meaningful relationships, less anxiety, better general health—they have achieved a more highly evolved sense of well-being. as i leaf through the pages, i am assured that by implementing even a few of its organizing tips i will feel better, be better. the catch, of course, is that the real portrayed in this magazine is an intricately manufactured and carefully produced image, and the aesthetic of the simple itself takes a huge investment of time, energy, and even (despite the emphasis on frugality and saving that runs throughout the magazine) money. here, simple is highly cultivated; it emerges as the product of ongoing vigilance and the relentless labor of ordering. it is also an undeniable marker of class status. in an interesting twist on thorstein veblen’s (1899) conspicuous consumption, what is most conspicuous and—given the centrality of consumption in daily north american life and the fact that “clutter . . . is an almost inevitable feature of consumption” (cwerner and metcalfe 2003, 236)—most remarkable about these well-ordered domestic spaces isn’t the careful staging of luxury items, but rather all the things that aren’t there. it’s not just the meticulous arrangement of these interiors, then, but the obvious absence of clutter that signals a new form of affluence. we imagine that the inhabitants of these domestic spaces have precious time, energy, and money to devote to ordering; they are able to keep on top of the in-and-out flow of objects, mail, garbage, toys. or perhaps they hire someone else to do it for them. in any case, a close look at the not-there renders visible the practices of organizing and divestment that often contain within themselves their own practices of consumption. one need only call to mind the clutter-management industry that has emerged over the past several years—from pos to cleanout services and self-storage companies that will bring your storage pod right to your front door. or think about retail chains like the container store, which sell objects whose sole purpose it is to hold, carry, or keep other objects (shoes, laundry, wrapping paper, thumbtacks) in their place. as the visible absence of clutter signals affluence, it may also signal virtue; the two are, in fact, closely intertwined. in the pages of home and lifestyle magazines like real simple and in larger public conversations about consumption these days, there exists a strong moralizing discourse about the merits of moderation, self-regulation, and self-discipline amid endless possibilities for acquisition and accumulation. in this there are many parallels with public conversations about obesity in north america that have emerged with the progressive medicalization of weight during the past twenty-five years (campos et al. 2006; greenhalgh 2012). as with talk about thinness versus fatness, talk about the proper and improper accumulation of stuff plays into a “virtue discourse” (halse 2009); those who consume too much or cannot manage their object worlds are seen as being out of control, lazy, and undisciplined. several pos i interviewed made explicit connections between material accumulation and excess weight, on the one hand, and material order and weight management, on the other. allie, a young po who has been working in the toronto area for about four years, described it like this: “stuff tends to weigh you down. if you have a lot of stuff around you, you feel heavier. as you let things go, you feel lighter. there have even been studies showing how, when people let go of stuff, they are actually able to lose weight. holding on to stuff and not letting go of it, it weighs on people and holds them back.” the increasing tendency to medicalize material disorder by framing it as either a physical projection, symptom, or cause of mental illness does not dissolve the virtue discourse around stuff, but rather builds on the moral model in new ways, as do discourses surrounding the current so-called obesity epidemic in the united states (greenhalgh 2012; see also boero 2007). the idea that certain forms of material order—especially those that can be brought into line with this aesthetic of the simple—can engender happiness and well-being plays into what laurence kirmayer (2002, 316) has described as a larger “global monoculture of happiness in which we are all enjoined to work to achieve the good life, which is understood to reside in being pain-free [and] completely comfortable.” however, while kirmayer (2002, 316) also described the “good life” as being “ready and able to acquire and consume the greatest quantity and variety of the newest goods and fashions,” the new aesthetic of the simple depicts this good life not in terms of one’s ability to accumulate but to resist—and even reject—accumulation and keep order. the central idea here has a double valence: just as simplicity and order can bring happiness, material excess or disorder can cause mental or emotional distress (cwerner and metcalfe 2003). this is a core belief shared by numerous consumption-critical lifestyle movements in north america and europe. these include the minimalist movement, a u.s.–based group that espouses a radical downsizing of one’s possessions as the key to a saner, more rewarding life (see millburn and nicodemus 2011) and the tiny house movement, which over the past ten years or so has advocated simple living in architecturally innovative small-scale homes (generally under five hundred square feet). movements like these mark a shift to what journalists and consumer reporters have noted as a turn to “inconspicuous consumption” among the affluent; that is, a turn toward spending money on experiences, services, and personal enrichment rather than material goods. consumption is still central to the good life, then, but it is a particular form of consumption that is weary of accumulation, critical of disorder, and most visible in the conspicuous display of what is not there. professional organizers as healers barbara told me that when she began organizing some fifteen years ago, “there was this idea that organizing was something you do to your clients. you went to their house, you organized their stuff, and then you left.” things have changed a lot since then, she explained. professional organizers described their work to me as coaching, acting as a sounding board, lending focus, setting goals, teaching, transferring skills, modeling behavior, acting as a mirror, and helping clients establish new habits. several pos also noted that their work resembled therapy, though it appears that the more formal accreditation a po has, the more reluctant that po is to think of professional organizing in those terms. professional organizers work with people on all points of the “clutter spectrum.” sometimes they assist with simple projects that take only a few days—redesigning a home office or flipping seasonal gear—or they help clients downsize for a move. for pos who work with chronically disorganized clients and those who hoard, however, the visits may stretch over a period of months or even years. in these cases, pos get to know their clients very well, and their relationships can become intensely personal. over time, their clients open up to them—they reveal their disappointments and dreams, their dysfunctional relationships, past traumas, wishes, and fears—and these conversations often bubble up around the things that the po and client sort through together. these things, some of which have not been actively handled or manipulated for years, stand not just as souvenirs or aides-mémoire, but as repositories of deeper memories and expectations that may trigger, like marcel proust’s madeleine, a rush of past experiences, images, and feelings. “all these things that have been held onto—these are the material remains of a person’s life,” a po named jean explained to me. and even beyond linking a person to his or her past or being imagined as constitutive fragments of memory or identity, there is the undeniable physicality of the stuff itself. “they really are connected to their things—they are part of them,” jean told me. “it can get intense. i have to listen attentively and be responsive, but i also have to keep gently bringing my clients back to the present, back to their goals. it isn’t easy. you can get pretty deep.” what kinds of things are pos brought in to sort and organize? across the board pos talked about the ubiquity of paper clutter that overwhelms their clients’ lives. for fran’s clients, whom she describes as financially comfortable and not “full-blown” hoarders, the big things are clothes, host gifts, and items purchased to be gifted but that somehow “stuck” and never made it out of the house. fran notes that many of these items remain unused, and many still have their original price tags. barbara and ellen, whose clients often exhibit cd or hoarding behavior, point to newspapers, magazines, pamphlets and leaflets, rescued objects, food wrappers, used bottles, and things that are beyond repair. while some of their clients’ things—photos, journals, souvenirs, and mementos—do have obvious sentimental value, pos explain, most do not, and yet their clients are attached to their things in powerful ways. i now turn to describe two techniques used by pos to intervene in the complex affective attachments their clients have with their things. interestingly, these techniques seem to work in opposite directions but toward the similar end goal of “letting go.” this key phrase and aspiration in the world of professional organizing (as well as in self-help literature, life coaching, and healthy-lifestyle movements) carries multiple meanings and is construed as a central component of decluttering, as well as of relieving distress and achieving well-being. the first technique, which was described to me in detail by denise and reiterated by several other pos, is one that involves blocking the “tactile sympathy” that clients have for their possessions. “sometimes we don’t like clients to touch their stuff,” denise told me. “if i’m trying to get a client to decide on whether or not we’re going to keep this mug,” said denise, gesturing toward and then picking up a yellow, herbal tea-filled mug that sat between us on a café table one afternoon, “well, if they touch this mug, they’re going to keep it. so very subtly, if i can hold the object, and let them look at it, and let them talk through what they think and feel about it without letting them touch it, that’s one of the strategies that can be very useful in working with some clients.” by putting physical space between clients and their stuff and disallowing touch, pos attempt to shift them away from a tactile, sensuous mode of being with things and into a visual mode, thereby imposing a supposedly appropriate distance between subject and object that will ostensibly loosen their clients’ attachments to and identification with the things in question. from denise’s perspective, this distance allows for a rational assessment of the mug; it allows the owner to “see” the mug’s key attributes more clearly and act toward it in a more intentional way, thus choosing to “let go” of the mug (which generally means giving it away, donating it, or throwing it out), to keep the mug for daily use (as one of a chosen few that will be kept in circulation), to display the mug (which means that it will be selected for its special attributes or value that set it apart from the rest), or to store the mug away. the second method used by pos works in a seemingly opposite direction but toward the same key objective of letting go. here, pos encourage clients to think with and as their thing; they ask their clients to consider the situation from the thing’s point of view. hoarders and people with cd tend to personify things, acting as if they have “a life and a soul,” explained ellen. “so one of the strategies we use . . . is to go with [it]. what the heck! why not? if it will help the individual stay better organized, then use it!” jean told me a very similar story and walked me through how she presents this to her clients: i say, ok. this toy that belonged to your son, who’s now forty-five and doesn’t have kids of his own: what does this toy want? where would it be happiest, most fulfilled? is it happy at the bottom of a pile, not being used, collecting dust? i don’t think it is. let’s figure out where it could be happy, where it could have a life, and let’s get it there. sometimes this does the trick. they want their possessions to be happy, too.10 in each of these techniques, pos attempt to intervene in the close affective relationships their clients have with their things and may even physically insert themselves between client and object. in their effort to loosen these deep attachments, however, jean and the other pos must first arouse and evoke them. much more than simply referencing the “social life” or “biography” of an object to separate these from their clients’ own (appadurai 1986; kopytoff 1986), pos’ interventions suggest that the boundaries and distinctions between subjects and objects are not so natural after all—that we are always already part of our things and our things part of us, and that these connections are not the exception but the rule. professional organizers necessarily recognize this world of powerful attachments, where persons are embedded in things and things are extensions of people; they dive into and attempt to hold at bay this world constituted by a vital materiality in which “non-human others (whether stones, trees, or human produce; axes, knives, mobile phones, coffee mugs and the air surrounding them all)” may “take on appearances quite different from that of the human, [but] are [nevertheless] understood to be of the same essence, animation and intentionality—that is, they are alive” (clarke and mcphie 2014, 9). many pos themselves thus take on something of a vibrant-materialist perspective, which proceeds not from the idea that their clients “have lost the ability to distinguish between person and thing,” but instead that they “have an exceptional [and perhaps too acute] awareness of the extent to which all bodies can intertwine, infuse, ally, undermine, and compete with those in its vicinity” (bennett 2012, 256). in this immanent materiality, boundaries between subjects and objects are always artificial and must be externally imposed, and it is the work of the pos to help perform the task.11 conclusion: in the realm of magical correspondences professional organizers, armed as they are with the language of self-improvement and well-being, are sometimes described as “enforcers of order” (denegri-knott and parsons 2014, 89), scornful of—and hell-bent on correcting—their clients’ apparently “irrational” object relations. my ongoing involvement with pos, however, has revealed an orientation much more akin to that of a healer who acknowledges the slip-slidiness of people and things, and who intervenes in this domain—and in those private domestic spaces that, as fran observed, are like cathedrals and wombs—to establish a different kind of order that they take to be neither natural nor pregiven. professional organizers work to insert distance between clients and their material possessions by dissolving or rerouting attachments, and where personhood has been distributed or extended into things, pos work toward excision and extraction. as erectors of boundaries, pos, we might say, endeavor to transform dividuals—heteronomous, dispersed actors for whom personhood is primarily constituted in and through relationships with things and people external to the self—into individuals, persons who are autonomous subjects in relation to external objects and who thus appear to be self-contained, singular, whole, and complete-in-themselves (lipuma 1998). but if the work of pos appears to be a disenchantment of sorts, there is also a re-enchantment. in a brilliant recent article about storage practices in the united states, sasha newell (2014, 187) has suggested that a close look at these “practices reveals . . . a magical mode of thinking that typically goes unnoticed in public life.” so too, i argue, does the work of professional organizers. at the same time that pos attempt to sever connections between people and things, they also hold tight to another form of magical correspondence based on the belief that mind and matter may mirror, project, and affect one another—that a cluttered house might stand as evidence for (or result in) a disordered mind, and conversely, that a disordered mind may lead to a cluttered house. operating according what james frazer (1906, 52) dubbed as homeopathic or imitative magic and the principle that “like produces like,” pos adhere to a pervasive cultural logic, described earlier, that reads material disorder as evidence, symptom, or potential cause of mental disorder. it is this very logic that animates the work they do. as pos manipulate the objects and boundaries of their clients, they aim to reorient them not just materially but also emotionally, morally, and affectively. because they hold as true the existence of a profound connection between the relative order or disorder of a person’s domestic space and his or her state of mental health and well-being, the sorting and reordering work they do with their clients’ possessions is imagined to have a similar effect on their clients’ minds. from this perspective, pos themselves operate according to the principle of mimetic sympathy and the belief that “like acts upon like, and in particular, cures like” (mauss 1972, 68). my ongoing fieldwork among pos has thus led me to understand them less as enforcers of a rational, disenchanted order of object management, or even as “witchfinders, [who] systematically . . . overturn . . . the contents of a home to reveal its irrational interiority” (newell 2014, 203), than as agents of a kind of magical reorientation of the modern. for as pos aim to bring their clients’ relationships with stuff into line with an order predicated on a controlled passion for objects and the maintenance of an appropriate distance between people and their things, they also offer their clients a magical promise: that ordering their material possessions according to these premises will bring about an ordered mind, and by extension, a happier and more fulfilled life. it appears, then, that pos intervene into one kind of “secret sympathy” to manipulate another. the work they do with their clients illuminates the magical correspondences between objects and people, matter and mind, that are alive and well in the contemporary north american popular and psychiatric imagination. notes acknowledgments this research is funded by a connaught new researcher award from the university of toronto. a heartfelt thanks to kristen drybread, sarah hillewaert, amira mittermaier, and jenny sime for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. audiences at mcmaster university and the university of toronto scarborough also provided critical feedback. finally, i am grateful to editors dominic boyer, james faubion, and cymene howe, as well as cultural anthropology’s anonymous reviewers, for their constructive suggestions and encouragement. 1. in many ways, fran fits the typical profile of a professional organizer working in the united states or canada today. the vast majority of those affiliated with the national association of professional organizers, based in the united states, and professional organizers of canada, which boast upward of four thousand and five hundred members, respectively, are anglo/white middle-class women between the ages of forty and fifty-five. 2. fran also noted—about the space, the silence, and her work with the client—that “it was very relaxing, actually, once i got used to it, because it was so quiet.” 3. initial interviews with pos took place between october 2014 and april 2015, with three follow-up interviews taking place in may and june 2015. my interest in the work of professional organizers has grown out of a project that examines the emergence of hoarding disorder as a mental illness, public health hazard, and media spectacle during the past fifteen years. for this project, a key site of participant observation from 2013 to the present has been the toronto hoarding coalition, a working group that was created in 2011 to bring together social workers, therapists, first responders, legal service providers, eldercare/child protective services, members of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, law enforcement officials, and cleaning specialists to address local hoarding cases and provide a clearinghouse for information. 4. marilyn strathern (1988) makes a strong case for the absolute distinctiveness of melanesian (dividual) versus western forms (individual) of personhood, an argument that edward lipuma (1998, 56–57) has strongly challenged, insisting instead that “in all cultures . . . there exist both individual and dividual modalities or aspects of personshood” and that “the foregrounding . . . of individual and dividual aspects of personhood will vary across contexts . . . within a given culture.” in lipuma’s view, it is the tension between the two aspects that is the most productive site of investigation. 5. my use of the terms objects and things throughout this piece follows the retooled articulation of martin heidegger’s distinction that was elaborated by bill brown (2001, 5): “we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture—above all what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things. we look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. a thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. . . . you could imagine things . . . as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence.” in this distinction, all things are objects, but not all objects are things. my usage also reflects the language used by pos and service providers, who most often refer to their client’s material possessions as “their things” (when the items are somewhat individuated) and “their stuff” (when the items are being considered as a group). 6. in his introduction to the social life of things, arjun appadurai (1986, 5) shook material objects from the tree of anthropological convention by challenging the discipline’s “tendency to excessively sociologize transactions in things.” insisting that things have social lives and even biographies (see kopytoff 1986), he incited anthropologists to follow them as they enter and exit distinct regimes of value and are swept up in alternating processes of commoditization, singularization, and care. around the same time, an approach dubbed material culture studies emerged out of the university college london. rooted in hegelian dialectics, this group was less interested in tracing the social lives of objects than in interrogating how “things create people as much as people make them” (tilley 1999, 76; cf. miller 1987). 7. bruno latour (1992, 232) describes the automatic seatbelt safety feature in his car that renders impossible his ability to drive without buckling up as a telling example of our “delegat[ing] to nonhumans . . . values, duties, and ethics. it is because of this morality that we, humans, behave so ethically, no matter how weak and wicked we feel we are.” 8. carl knappett and lambros malafouris’s (2008) strong position in their attribution of agency to things has not gone uncontested, however. tim ingold (2007b, 1), for one, has insisted that this line of thinking obscures more than it clarifies: “things are active not because they are imbued with agency but because of the ways in which they are caught up in these currents of the lifeworld.” ingold (2007a) instead looks to the ways that people, animals, and things are always already enmeshed and entangled with each other, and within themselves. 9. here i follow the astute argument put forth by ian hacking (1998, 12) in his answer to the question of whether (or not) multiple personality disorder is a “real” disorder: a “presupposition that we should reject,” he writes, is “that there is an important contrast between being a real disorder and being a product of social circumstances.” 10. this technique shares common elements with—but also inverts—the kondo or konmari method, a novel tidying method that has become spectacularly popular in north america during the past year. based on the japanese professional home organizer marie kondo’s (2014) best-selling book the life-changing magic of tidying up: the japanese art of decluttering and organizing, the key to this method is to contemplate each possession while asking yourself, “does this item spark joy for me?” if it does, kondo says, you must treasure the thing by treating it gently and kindly, by folding or arranging it with care, and by giving it a comfortable place to rest when not in use. if it does not, you must thank the 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1056/nejmcp1313051. mataix-cols, david, randy o. frost, alberto pertusa, lee anna clark, sanjaya saxena, james f. leckman, dan j. stein, hisato matsunaga, and sabine wilhelm 2010 “hoarding disorder: a new diagnosis for dsm-v?” depression and anxiety 27, no. 6: 556–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/da.20693. mauss, marcel 1972 a general theory of magic. translated by robert brain. london: routledge/kegan paul. millburn, joshua fields, and ryan nicodemus 2011 minimalism: live a meaningful life. columbia, mo.: asymmetrical. miller, daniel 1987 material culture and mass consumption. oxford: blackwell. newell, sasha 2014 “the matter of the unfetish: hoarding and the spirit of possessions.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 4, no. 3: 185–213. http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.013. poe, andrew 2011 “review essay: things—beyond objects.” journal of french and francophone philosophy 19, no. 1: 153–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.5195/jffp.2011.484. steketee, gail, and randy frost 2003 “compulsive hoarding: current status of the research.” clinical psychology review 23, no. 7: 905–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2003.08.002. strathern, marilyn 1988 the gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in melanesia. berkeley: university of california press. tilley, christopher 1999 metaphor and material culture. oxford: blackwell. veblen, thorstein 1899 the theory of the leisure class: an economic study of institutions. new york: macmillan. on the problem of the namesake on the problem of the namesake marcel laflamme rice university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7489-4233 names and persons stand in an uncertain relation to one another. a person may use more than one name over the course of a life, and more than one person may be called by the same name. take my own name, for instance: while it is uncommon in the united states, there is a mining engineer at université laval in quebec who also bears it. when i am vain enough to google my name, i find his (mine?) among the results: traces of his career at natural resources canada, the research project he has launched with the aim of developing a new tool for on-site mineral analysis. if the mining engineer and i lived among the orokaiva of papua new guinea, it is likely that we would count each other as saso or namesake (see iteanu 2009). as long as both of us were alive and on good terms, we would be considered embo wahai, the same person. as my elder, he would be consulted at every stage of my ritual life, and i would be expected to furnish him with firewood and other provisions as he grew old. if he died before resolving matters of inheritance, it would fall to me to settle them with his family. our entanglement at the level of a name would thus knit our kin groups together in a network of mutual obligation. in the world of scholarly publishing, though, the fact that the mining engineer and i share a name is a liability: even though we are unlikely to be writing for the same journals, multidisciplinary databases will display our publications side by side. unless one of us has been scrupulous about publishing with a middle initial (and we can imagine a case in which these, too, would coincide), scholars searching for my work will have to sift through our respective publications and guess at who is who. the reputational politics of scholarly publishing thus encourage me to stabilize an authoritative version of my name early in my career and to distinguish it from anyone else’s name. a namesake, in this context, is more bane than blessing. following a meeting held in cambridge, massachusetts, in november 2009, some twenty-three publishers, scholarly societies, and other organizations agreed to work together on a solution to what had become known as the name disambiguation problem. the result is the open researcher and contributor id (orcid; pronounced like “orchid”), a string of sixteen digits that scholars can use to uniquely identify themselves in publications and other research outputs. orcid is administered by a member-based nonprofit organization that is committed to privacy and interoperability, and scholars can create orcid identifiers free of charge. to date, more than 1.8 million researchers around the world have signed up, and publishers large and small are beginning to incorporate orcid identifiers into their production processes. starting with this issue, cultural anthropology will require authors with an article accepted for publication in the journal to provide us with their orcid identifier and will display that identifier in all published versions of the article, including web, pdf, and print on demand. as much as the editorial team believes that orcid is an important innovation, our commitment to what jason baird jackson and ryan anderson (2014, 236) have called “a critical anthropology of scholarly communication” means that we do not advocate approaching orcid as a self-evident good. this editorial opens with the example of the orokaiva name system to make the point that the so-called name disambiguation problem is not universally understood to be a problem at all (see also pina-cabral 2012). even as we have come to recognize it as a problem in scholarly publishing, we also want to honor and engage with feminist efforts to challenge norms of individual authorship that involve writing under the sign of pseudonyms and collectives (e.g., gibson-graham 2006, xli–xlii). we welcome such work at cultural anthropology and, indeed, we would love to see the journal serve as a catalyst for discussion within the orcid community about the implicit theory of personhood at the heart of the project. finally, we recognize the linkages between orcid and audit culture: even as the benefits of a unique, persistent identifier have been framed in terms of seamlessness and convenience, there is no doubt that orcid also renders research outputs more easily countable and, therefore, amenable to assessment. our position is that contributors to the journal are likely to be subject to these proliferating regimes of assessment regardless of what we decide to do about orcid, and that orcid may make it easier for our contributors to document their productivity in administratively sanctioned ways. however, if orcid ever starts to become a more active instrument of audit culture (for instance, serving as a mechanism for prescreening authors or grant applicants on the basis of research assessment metrics), we reserve the right to discontinue our participation. although the society for cultural anthropology is not joining orcid as an institutional member at this time, we have been given orcid’s blessing to incorporate author identifiers into cultural anthropology. in doing so, we stand to improve our website’s search functionality and to strengthen our integration with key infrastructures for data sharing. yet our aim is also to boost the visibility of orcid within anthropology as a discipline. the american anthropological association’s member database now includes an optional field for orcid identifiers (liebow 2014), and the unified manuscript submission system that is currently being developed would be a logical point at which to implement orcid associationwide. for now, though, keep an eye out for the green orcid icon in the pages of cultural anthropology, and consider taking thirty seconds to register for an identifier yourself at https://orcid.org/register. the sooner that anthropologists adopt this emerging standard, the more say we are likely to have about where, when, and how it is used in the future. references gibson-graham, j. k. 2006 the end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. originally published in 1996. iteanu, andré 2009 “why the dead do not bear names: the orokaiva name system.” in the anthropology of names and naming, edited by gabriele vom bruck and barbara bodenhorn, 51–72. new york: cambridge university press. jackson, jason baird, and ryan anderson 2014 “anthropology and open access.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 236–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.04. liebow, ed 2014 “nuts and bolts of promoting scholarly exchange.” anthropology news 55, nos. 5–6: 19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2014.55503.x. pina-cabral, joão de 2012 “the functional fallacy: on the supposed dangers of name repetition.” history and anthropology 23, no. 1: 17–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.649273. relational space relational space: an earthly installation debbora battaglia mount holyoke college david valentine university of minnesota valerie olson university of california, irvine when we were approached to curate an anthropological opening about life above earth, we asked ourselves: what if we think about this piece as a mock-up installation, made to scale, pointing to particular and also to general values (strathern 2004), exposing anthropological questions, concepts, and debates to the environments of outer space and space-on-earth, a piece not anchored or stratified, but zooming in and out, coming and going from earth, multisited from the start? continuing along these lines: what if we think about earth as itself an exhibit to the cosmic, a performative complex, exceptional (as far as we know) in the universe? of course, the conventional anthropological response to exceptionalism is to historicize and contextualize the object. but thinking with whole earth, in particular, presents us with a problem—and a provocation—in regard to context since, until recently, human attachments to the planet’s surface have been the ultimate grounds of their actions, ideas, and relations, as well as of anthropologists’ analyses of these. this is not to say that humans were grounded before sputnik: since émile durkheim, we have understood that humans incorporate entire universes in their worlds. the totem is a cosmic figure; shamans travel in ways that defy gravity, atmosphere, and physics. but as some humans have increasingly used robotic and remote explorations of the solar system and universe, from earth’s present and its surface domains and from craft more aligned to the ordinary world’s order, openings are emerging to imaginative engagements with radical new ways of world-making and a reimagination of the planet as embedded in a wider space ecology. and as some people begin to leave earth on spacecraft built to withstand and even embrace what they have learned of space, they are also faced with new sets of relations, new kinds of becoming, new natures. about 540 humans from thirty-five nations have left earth in this manner (we’ll get back to this), but these mostly-low-earth-orbit forays have also activated enormous cultural and engineering productivity toward far more expansive visions of large-scale human settlements on the moon, mars, or in rotating free-space colonies. these journeys—real and imaginary—compel critical revisits to familiar frontier narratives and new ethical guidelines for peaceful and environmentally accountable approaches to extraterrestrial collaboration by spacefaring entities (private and state-based). in short, outer space is being tentatively engaged by (and engaging) cultural values and varieties of sociality, in ways that require new anthropological questions. this very human openness to new horizons of inquiry may not seem immediately apparent. space’s preponderance of lifelessness appears from an earth-bound perspective not to be ecology without nature (morton 2007) so much as environment without ecology. but we would argue that emphasizing the overwhelming absence of life in “space itself” (battaglia 2012a) only naturalizes claims about the political and ecological irrelevance to earth of outer space, despite its material, ecological, and technological connections to and relations with earth. to highlight this point, we can take a detour out to where earth’s last wisp of life-impacted spherical atmospheric layer ends and infinite, polymorpous space—and its multiple natures—begins. this point seems to present a hard material and theoretical boundary between the earth-space environment. terrestrial life forms that travel into space via earth-made spacecraft live as ecological outliers. humans and select species in built vehicle environments in low-earth orbit are tethered to earthly life-support supplies; terrestrial microbes that ride off with robotic spacecraft die or survive under siege from the force fields of other cosmic natures. the search for extraterrestrial life becomes also a search to see whether biology can ever be theorized as non-terrestrial and fundamentally relative (helmreich 2009, 2012; messeri 2011). as a proposition, life beyond earth sits at the intersection of the technologically extreme, the impossible, the imaginable, the unencountered, and the terrestrially irrelevant. in space, life and death lose an equivalent presence with the non-living (clark 2011; farman 2013). yet some people and other living subjectivities have gone to space—are on orbit right now—and they, and the visions of space settlement that their activities activate in others, ask us to start raising new questions, ahead of time (just google spacex, mars one, the 100 year starship program). these questions are prompted in part by new considerations of scale—spatial, temporal, and quantitative—that mark a shift in register of anthropological concerns with particulars and universals (choy 2011), expanding our discipline’s ongoing epistemic experiment. our qualification above—“some humans”—is a case in point, as those who have traveled to space so far have clustered (racially, geographically, culturally) with those elites formed in the violent crucibles of colonialism and capitalist globalization. one consequence of this phenomenon for anthropologists is a suspicion that the move to space, now and in the future, constitutes a movement of terrestrial stratified and spatialized socioeconomic and political relations into the cosmos. and of course, the desire for a “settlement” of the solar system cannot escape those histories. but this is not a simple translation (battaglia 2012b); these formations and relations are thrown open in imaginations of space habitation by the radically different and multiple natures of space and by massive distances where earth becomes a blue dot in other skies—or in imaginaries of travel to far-distant planets like mars, not directly visible at all. whatever sociopolitical arrangements may take shape in putative future occupations, outer space makes a difference. for example, the upper limits of the physical universe prohibit the collapsing of time into space, so fundamental to the development of globalized capitalism. on the other hand, critical considerations of planetarity (spivak 2003) in relation to globality invite us into a scalar temporal frame in which, by engaging earth’s 4.5-billion years, all human histories—evolution, the internet, colonialism, tea time—can easily be collapsed into a metaphorical blink, threatening their wholesale erasure as discrete and ordered events. the urgency of thinking through whole earth (this time from both the real and the discursively produced perspective of anthropocenic concern) also inevitably provokes idioms of quantity: billions and trillions of tons, dollars, liters, organisms, locations—and people. this means that at the planetary scale, species (human and non-human) become relevant again, reformatting human histories—individual biographies, the troubled histories of communities, racial classification—into actuarial facts (malm and hornberg 2013). thus a space-inclusive anthropology, and the scales and relations it reveals, requires questioning how the anthropological, social, biological, environmental, and ecological relate conceptually, but also how they scale with and against one another. instead of assuming that the relationship of the anthropological and the ecological ends at earth’s high atmosphere because it is a natural boundary for earthly life forms, our data open to the ways in which earth and space are connected through non-living spatial, environmental, and ecological connections, and provoke new ways of seeing terrestrial arrangements and imagining how they may work out in space—without presuming their outcomes. from this point of departure, seeing earth through human eyes or other human-designed apparatuses of perception from outside its atmosphere should indeed put us on alert for any trace of the renaturalization of humanness (and human difference) through the frame of species, potentially eviscerating the hard-won recognition of the sorting work done by species as a concept in the long history of terrestrial migrations and colonialisms. further, it can open up possibilities for different forms of difference, a reconfiguration of what may seem alike, of what we might understand as particular, and what could emerge as universal. the challenge we see is both to hold onto what our analyses of racialization and colonialism, for example, have shown us, while allowing ourselves, simultaneously, to imagine, critique, and engage those new forms—liberatory or exploitative—that could emerge in the encounter of humans and the ecologies on which they depend in the multiple natures of outer space (anker 2005). all this is ethnographic through and through—not simply a new context to be accounted for, but one starting point among many in estrangement from home—and even the creation of new kinds of homes where earth becomes only one of multiple places from which to look to other subjectivized places, no longer privileged by its status as an origin site. again, these stances enable us to think anthropologically through and beyond the limits of our planet’s cultured-natural atmosphere and what it has produced. in effect, people’s investments of intellectual, affective, and material resources for moving off earth—embodied, via remote-sensing, or in dreams—provoke, in no uncertain terms, a recasting of central (and deeply connected) arguments concerning discourses of inter-being relations of nature (where space natures bring cultures up against limits of sovereignty, colonization, resource management, even human material attachments to the sun and its environments) or of the human (as post-earthling kinship across species figures alternatives to the “human-machine partnership” [vakoch 2011] of orbital space stations’ life-support systems). figure 1. working on the international space station. photo by terry w. virts, posted on his twitter account (https://twitter.com/astroterry), february 21, 2015. further, as the anthropological environment opens out to high atmospheric ecologies where humans, animals, plants, technologies, chemistries, and generativity in its broadest senses travel, interact, and loop (e.g., choy 2011; raffles 2011; lahsen 2004), we are moved to query the limits of our disciplinary methods and models, indeed, to ask how method or model come to make sense in space environments in which varied natures open up the terrestrial presumptions of theory itself. the phenomena of inhabited-space-station interiorities make the point. there, the posited ontological turn in anthropology is productively challenged by crew members’ descriptions of the work of living onboard an “artificial planet” (lebedev 1988) where technoscientific curiosity and “sci-aesthetic” tinkering (pettit 2012) reveal the limits in situ of prototypes, analog environments, and engineering ontologies. it follows that philosophical speculations presenting orbital space stations as archetypally mediatic life-support systems for a speculative future (sloterdijk 2009a, 2009b) are historicized and personalized by evidence of the value added by local extraterrestrial knowledge. that system’s artificially produced microgravity interior activates a de-exoticized perspectivism (viveiros de castro 2012)—complexifying human wayfinding. further, international scientific programs that skyhook the work of the united nations and other international bodies charged to craft legal guidelines for peaceful uses of outer space, explicate anthropology’s argument for hospitality’s place at the core of ethnographic theory (candea and da col 2012), properly in tune with “hostipitality” (derrida 2000) for recognizing space-normal conditions of nature-culture exchange. politicized and gendered cosmologies move into range of one another from as far away as the moon and an island in the southwest pacific, provoking negotiations of irreconcilable understandings of “geontologies” (povinelli 2014) and positioning the “cosmos as commons” (battaglia 2014a), though without the easy presumptions of planar coordinates. in addition, some of anthropology’s hardest-working conceptual tools—context, identity, kinship—are submitted to the irritations of fluidist terms of reference (connolly 2011; helmreich 2009), as humans who recognize themselves as “no longer an earthling” (linenger 2003) form affective attachments (hustak and myers 2012) to things like space-based plant biology experiments and other living species, making an argument in favor of “analogic affect” (battaglia 2014c) by exposing the mutual vulnerability of both parties to the conditions of experimentation. a cosmopolitical concern (cf. latour 2004) with purity and pollution activates differently when what, on earth, may be predictable pollutants become different kinds of unpredictable agents that act in unexpected ways—as, for example, in the parasitic relations of human moon walkers and moon dust and the technology-imbricated stories they perform of forward-and-back contamination. that said, terrestrially life-threatening outer space is physically and socially connected with terrestrial spaces and extends anthropological research environments. anthropologists have examined how socially remote space-based technologies shape earthly spatial and environmental politics (redfield 2000; lahsen 2004); how cosmos, universe, and exoplanets become experienced as places in astronomical and geological sciences (messeri 2011; hoeppe 2012; valentine 2012); how asteroids, comets, and space weather become targets for environmental regulation and global political-ecological action (olson 2012); and how multinational plans for cleaning up and establishing accountability for orbital debris in an increasingly polluted low-earth orbit produce new innovations around notions of property, pollution, and agency (battaglia 2014b; rand 2014). taken together, these examples point to the bonding agents that intertwine and strengthen between the environmental and ecological problems of earth and space infrastructure building. engineers and scientists in both domains must contend with managing invisible but powerful fundamental features of cosmos-as-environment that impact living–non-living dynamics as infra-ecological conditions: gravity, pressure, non-anthropogenic radiation. moreover, in considering these linkages, anthropology is drawn into new relations with the biomedical and political dimensions of human spaceflight engineering and design (olson 2010; de monchaux 2011) and the politics of controlling pressure and gravity in water engineering (de laet and mol 2000; anand 2011; ballestero 2012). moving back in toward earth, closer to the ways in which the everyday terrestrial world is drawn into relation with space, anthropology is also uniquely poised to address how increasing numbers of telecommunication satellites—capable of slipping from their assigned orbits and colliding, or of becoming objects of a new space arms race—position us in new ways. we are drawn to consider the world from a perspective that does not presume ground to attend to (state and local) space-based satellite apparatuses of in/security, and to cold war holdovers for managing extreme weather (masco 2010) or theaters of war (berland 2009). anthropology is poised to consider how the operation of commercial and state programs of technoscientific exploration, resource extraction, and surveillance seek to find both permission and accountability for their activities. funding institutions, the fine print of insurance and space-law documents, heritage-site claims to the moon and other extraterrestrial treasures, are enmeshed by pressures to ensure both the peaceful uses of outer space and—from the perspective of space entrepreneurs—the useful pieces of outer space. as the possibilities of space exploration intensify along these lines, we are moved to reevaluate homo faber’s capacities for making worlds differently (latour 2002), focusing anthropology on questions of which values are being translated into space and back again. the gaps in knowledge that emerge from such realms of inquiry—and in the theories and questions we employ to produce knowledge—point to a space that resists a simple reduction to terrestrial analogs even as we must recognize their analogic power. they move us beyond exceptionalist cold war narratives of (white) settlers on the frontier, or beyond u.s. american fears of soviets (or nowadays, china or india) out to conquer the solar system. they ask for more than critiques of “the right stuff” posturing of american cowboy astronaut individualism, of the “new soviet man” (gerovich 2007) embodied by cosmonaut hero archetypes or, in more recent times, of corporatism (launius 2008) and “capitalism in space” (valentine 2012). in doing so, an encounter with the different natures of space reveals how people might model human-machine relations in ways demanded by space, and thus foreground the creative excess of curiosity and innovation. both conceptually and materially attending to space-in-itself—and not presuming that terrestrial models and theories can do so without undergoing their own translation—launches an epistemological challenge to anthropology (corsin-jimenez 2013). but it also offers fresh possibilities of a new multisited anthropology by way of conceiving and taking seriously the “as if” futures of human and non-human entities and relations, on and off earth. we finished our first draft of this essay only days after the deadly crash of virgin galactic’s spaceshiptwo, a vehicle designed to take well-heeled tourists to the kármán line, the edge of space one hundred kilometers above earth’s surface. part of a much broader commercial space flight industry (that includes asteroid mining and mars settlement alongside tourism), both virgin galactic’s plans and this accident, not surprisingly, activate many of our traditional anxieties—about colonialism, exploitation, stratification, overreaching techno-optimism—and calls on our theoretical models to account for them. such concerns simultaneously spiral out from and link to debates circulating among the earth’s many publics, from concerns about social networking’s demands on people’s everyday lives to how to scale environments and shape policies in the age of what is being called the anthropocene to the contexts and consequences of space-enabled state surveillance. these tensions drive imaginations of escape from earth as much as they call for staying put and living within our ecological means, figured both by speculative fiction and by actual nasa film footage and scientific data (battaglia 2012c). all these responses call for an anthropology that remains mindful of its earthly origins while opening itself up to thinking about life and non-life above earth as differences that make difference—figuratively and actually. references anand, nikhil 2011 “pressure: the politechnics of water supply in mumbai.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 4: 542–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.x. anker, peder 2005 “the ecological colonization of space.” environmental history 10, no. 2: 239–68. 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cosmological perspectivism in amazonia and elsewhere. hau masterclass series 1. http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/masterclass/issue/view/masterclass%20volume%201. financing open access: introducing friends of cultural anthropology financing open access: introducing friends of cultural anthropology anne allison duke university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8626-9550 dominic boyer rice university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-406x charles piot duke university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9166-9935 while cultural anthropology’s move to open access has been positive in an abundance of ways, challenges remain. foremost among these is finding alternative sources of funding in the current publishing environment, which is dominated by a small number of commercial presses that profit from leasing academic journals to university libraries. how, in cultural anthropology’s case, do we cover the approximately $50,000 that it costs to publish the journal each year? to address this pressing challenge, a group of society for cultural anthropology (sca) members has created a nonprofit to explore new avenues for fundraising. called friends of cultural anthropology (foca), this 501(c)(3) counts former editors, sca officers, and other friends of the journal among its board of directors: george marcus, michael fischer, chris kelty, kim and mike fortun, judy farquhar, bruce grant, danilyn rutherford, brad weiss, marisol de la cadena, bob foster, and the three of us. moving forward, rather than relying solely on sca dues and support from the universities that host the journal’s editorial office, foca will explore a range of new revenue streams to support the journal’s operations. some of our initial ideas include: using crowdfunding platforms like kickstarter to sponsor particular projects. for example, if cultural anthropology were to undertake a substantial redevelopment of its website to improve the journal’s publishing infrastructure or if it were to develop new features (like sound and vision, slated to launch later this year), crowdfunding could be an excellent way to pay for onetime projects. applying for foundation grants to support larger, multiyear initiatives that might involve collaboration with other journals. bringing back a recurring subscription to the journal’s print edition, which is currently available for purchase on an individual issue basis, at a price point somewhat above the cost of production (perhaps $150 a year). this would allow print subscribers to support cultural anthropology’s open-access transition, while receiving a beautiful material object in return. establishing an endowment. the experts with whom foca has consulted have unanimously advised that an endowment is, by far, the best way to stabilize cultural anthropology’s financial situation in the long term. to raise these funds, our idea is to look beyond anthropologists and other scholars who are already supporting the journal through section memberships and donations. we know there are many individuals out there who value their undergraduate or graduate training in anthropology, and who would like to support innovative efforts to make research in our discipline more widely available. we also know that open access speaks to the core values of many who care about freedom of information, not least in places like silicon valley. as foca develops, university libraries will also be key partners. since libraries are the ones suffering the most from the current, commercially driven model of overpriced journal subscriptions, these institutions are often avid open-access supporters. one new proposal for partnering with libraries—originating elsewhere, but running parallel to foca’s efforts—is already in the works. alberto corsín jiménez (the sca’s open-access advisor) and giovanni da col (editor-in-chief of hau), among others, are creating a multistakeholder publishing cooperative called libraria, which would look to libraries for financial support of a dynamic portfolio of open-access journals. if this experiment succeeds and more journals continue to join the cooperative—ideally, including all of the journals published by the american anthropological association—it would secure a predictable, ongoing source of income for cultural anthropology and the other journals in the libraria portfolio. since open access is, above all, a collaborative venture, we would welcome your help in building out friends of cultural anthropology into a sustainable, vibrant organization. please write to us directly or visit our website at www.friendsofca.org to share your comments and ideas. practicing uncertainty practicing uncertainty: scenario-based preparedness exercises in israel limor samimian-darash hebrew university of jerusalem http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2659-5829 eyal barak,1 an official responsible for writing and directing the israeli emergency-preparedness exercise known as turning point (nekudat mifne), explained to me how scenario narratives are selected: “we are talking about a serious and reasonable scenario, this is what we design, not a worst case, but plausible and serious. i’m not saying this is what’s going to happen, but that this is what we need to prepare for. this is not a prophecy, it’s a decision, and we need to be ready for it.” turning point is an annual scenario-based event that involves all government ministries, local municipalities, and essential infrastructure units, as well as all citizens. it is the largest scenario-based exercise of its kind. preparations for each exercise are extensive; some units start preparing more than five months ahead of execution. the last two months before the exercise involve the most intensive preparations, and, then—for a specified number of days—all relevant units practice the scenario and its implications. scenarios include preparedness for natural disasters as well as war and terrorism. the exercise has been conducted since 2007, following the country’s second war with lebanon. it is overseen by the national emergency management authority (nema; the hebrew acronym is rachel), a unit of the ministry of defense. though the organization responsible for civilian preparedness in israel has changed several times over the years and remains an unsettled issue, the need for a comprehensive national-preparedness exercise has never been disputed. in this article, i examine the scenario-based exercise as a central technology within israel’s preparedness apparatus. drawing on my ethnographic research in nema and the turning point administration, i analyze how the scenario event works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and, especially, in its enactment. as barak argued, the exercise narrative is a chosen event, one that does not replicate the past or attempt to predict the future. though designed to challenge responders, the scenario represents not a worst-case event but a plausible one. moreover, although the scenario is based on a preselected, well-designed event, i argue that once practiced, it is actualized as a multiplicity of subevents, or incidents, that the various participants sometimes enact with unexpected consequences. with this technology, the israeli preparedness system is directed neither toward producing specific responses nor toward discovering the best solutions for an unknown future. rather, the technology generates uncertainty through its execution, from which new problems are extracted.2 analytically, i draw primarily on michel foucault’s (2007) concept of security and its associated security apparatus. this form of governing has usually been highlighted in studies of insurance, statistics, and risk-based technologies that rely on the assessment and calculation of possible events. the analysis of turning point scenarios adds to more recent studies that track the emergence of forms of securing the future that speak to a nonquantifiable mode of governing, one that responds to the problem of uncertainty rather than risk (o’malley 2004; samimian-darash and rabinow 2015). however, rather than focus solely on how the scenario, as an uncertainty-based technology, conceptualizes the future and approaches that problem (samimian-darash 2013), i examine how it works in practice. i explore how, in its execution, the scenario actually generates uncertainty as a form of action. that is, i examine both the discursive and the dispositional aspects of the turning point scenario, approaching it as a narrative put into action. i thus go beyond the conceptualization of the future underlying this technology and address how it practices uncertainty. security, preparedness, uncertainty foucault (2007) identifies three forms of governance: sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitics. each emerged in response to a specific governmental problem and was enacted to achieve a certain aim through determinate practices. yet the rationalities underlying these forms were not mutually exclusive, and the emergence of one technology did not imply the negation of another. biopolitical security apparatuses emerged in response to the problem of circulation and freedom, that is, to the need to regulate and secure the population. security is thus “a biopolitical problem of the protection and betterment of a population’s essential life processes in an indeterminate world, rather than a geopolitical matter of prevention and exclusion” (grove 2012, 140).3 many studies discuss risk as a central thematic of the biopolitical security apparatus, grounding an approach to governing the population through the calculation and assessment of its conformity to or deviation from established welfarist norms. françois ewald (1991, 199–200) explains the rise of insurance in the nineteenth century in terms of this technology: “by objectivizing certain events as risk, insurance can invert their meanings: it can make what was previously an obstacle into a possibility.” insurance thus uses risk in effecting a distinctive mode of governing: converting events into possible accidents that can be assessed and managed. risk, then, “builds on the premise that [threats] can be classified, quantified and to some extent predicted” (aradau, lobo-guerrero, and van munster 2008, 147). this form of governing appears in many areas of research beyond insurance (ewald 1991; grove 2012; lobo-guerrero 2011), for example, in the fields of old age (kaufman 1994), psychiatry (rose 1996), pregnancy (lupton 1999), aids (elbe 2008), crime prevention, and drug use (o’malley 2004). recent studies have discussed a new problematic of governance emerging from a disposition toward future threat as immanent and as exceeding calculation and risk. in relation to this development, i have proposed the concept of potential uncertainty, which “derives from the variety of actualities that can emerge from the virtual event rather than from the lack of knowledge about the content of any specific possibility” (samimian-darash 2013, 3). as is the case with risk, the basis for one dispositif of governing (aradau and van munster 2007), the problem of uncertainty requires careful analysis to identify the multiple ways in which it is conceptualized and governed. thus, rather than view uncertainty as a feature of the relationship between the past, present, and future, or as an outcome of the actions of society (e.g., beck 2009; giddens 1999), i examine how the conceptualization of the future engenders uncertainty, to which the application of certain technologies is deemed appropriate. several scholars have recently highlighted a new form of governing that deals with noncalculable, unassessable risks, a form they usually identify as preparedness (cooper 2006; diprose et al. 2008; lakoff 2008; lakoff and collier 2008; samimian-darash 2009; stephenson and jamieson 2009). andrew lakoff and stephen j. collier (2008) argue that preparedness goes beyond national security and population security and is directed to the security of vital systems vulnerable to events “whose probability cannot be calculated, but whose consequences are potentially catastrophic” (lakoff 2008, 403). the rationality of preparedness addresses a seemingly inevitable future disaster that can only be managed once it happens. intervention is aimed at reducing resulting damage rather than at preventing particular threats (lakoff and collier 2008).4 others have drawn on françois ewald’s (2002) work and use the term precaution. claudia aradau and rens van munster (2007, 102), for instance, argue that “the precautionary dispositif would apply to terrorism where the scientific technologies for ‘representing’ the world find themselves surpassed by reality itself.” melinda cooper (2006), meanwhile, presents the term preemption to conceptualize a mode of governing catastrophic future risk that denies the idea of prediction or representation. rosalyn diprose and colleagues (diprose et al. 2008, 269) describe a new paradigm of prudence, one in which “the assumption [is] that the risks and threats are incalculable, unpredictable, but always imminent.” though many studies discuss preparedness (however labeled) as a rationality of governing beyond the biopolitical security apparatus and risk-based technologies (see also de goede 2008), this problematization has yet to be translated into a distinctive concept, that is, a problematic of uncertainty rather than risk, or into an investigation of the kinds of techniques devised to govern uncertainty (see also o’malley 2004; samimian-darash 2013).5 if the problem space has shifted from one of knowledge-dependent possibilities, manageable by means of risk-based apparatuses, to one of uncertainty, paradoxically deriving from new knowledge and technological developments, what are “the concepts, technologies, and modes of governing appropriate to uncertainty” (samimian-darash and rabinow 2015, 203)? the current article presents an anthropological inquiry into the practical dimensions of such technology. some scholars provide a more nuanced analysis of the practice of uncertainty-based technologies (see amoore 2009 on visualization in the war on terror; samimian-darash 2013 on syndromic surveillance systems and flu pandemics; schüll 2015 on gambling software; zeiderman 2015 on environmental hazards). studies specifically of scenarios and simulations (adey and anderson 2012; collier 2008; lakoff 2008; schoch-spana 2004) provide baseline observation and analyses of these forms. yet most look at scenario narrations only. through an anthropologically detailed empirical account and in-depth analysis of actual scenario practices, here i examine both the discursive and the dispositional aspects of the scenario; that is, i approach the scenario as a narrative in action. i thus go beyond the conceptualization of the future underlying this technique and address how the scenario practices uncertainty. the evolution of turning point exercises in july 2006, during the war between israel and lebanon, hezbollah launched around four thousand rockets (about one hundred per day) toward israel. about 25 percent hit urban areas, shutting down the northern part of the country. one million israelis took cover in bomb shelters, and 300,000 sought refuge in the south (inbar 2007). both the israel defense forces (idf) and the government were perceived as performing poorly during the war, and the impact on home-front morale was significant. intense public debate erupted over the country’s lack of preparedness, with calls to investigate the government’s and the military’s performance. for officials and civilians alike, the war became a turning point, highlighting the need for a fundamental makeover of home-front defense. the winograd commission was appointed to examine related political and military issues, and the state comptroller was directed to examine home-front preparedness. both inquiries found that defects in preparedness long predated the war and recommended, among other things, the establishment of a national institute to coordinate all israeli military and civilian preparedness units and authorities. in 2007, nema was established to coordinate national civil defense. the following year, when the first turning point exercise took place, prime minister ehud olmert said: “today we start a national exercise for the defense of the home front. this is a direct follow up to the conclusions of the 2006 lebanon war” (sofer 2008). turning point 1 played out over two days, after several months of extensive preparation. turning point 2 took place in 2008 and extended over five days. the first two days were dedicated to training headquarters personnel and to bringing the political establishment into the scenario. a meeting was convened in which cabinet ministers enacted a scenario involving “thousands of rockets and missiles . . . launched towards cities in israel, civilian casualties and the impact of non-conventional warheads” (ravid et al. 2008). the broad outlines of the 2008 scenario continued the 2007 theme: a multifront war guided the field exercises, which included responding to rockets targeting cities around the country, an attack on chemical plants in haifa, hospital treatment of chemical wounds, and the rescue of wounded from collapsed buildings. on the third day, a new element was added: at 10 a.m., sirens sounded throughout the country, and people were asked to go to the nearest bomb shelter. schools were called on to take part in the exercise, and students practiced emergency procedures, including evacuating to shelters; state workers and employees of other bureaucracies did likewise. turning point 2 was truly a nationwide exercise, involving both state agencies and the entire civilian population. figure 1. students evacuated a school when the siren sounded during turning point 15. photo by limor samimian-darash. during turning point 3 in 2009, economy and finance were clearly major issues in the scenario, with the participation of emergency economy (melach), the body charged with ensuring economic continuity during crises. as in 2008, the 2009 campaign asked the whole population to voluntarily participate. if the previous year’s scenario was based on an event in which schools were under attack, it was now a scenario in which access to schools was impossible, triggering contingency plans for e-learning. turning point 3 was also an international event. some seventy military and diplomatic observers from the united states, turkey, japan, france, germany, and other countries attended the exercise (international observation has been part of subsequent exercises as well). in turning point 4, in 2010, one of the highlights of the exercise was a cyberattack on and subsequent shutdown of israel’s biggest electrical-generating station. additionally, special attention was given to training local governing councils, and thirty municipalities practiced providing improved emergency services to civilians. the entire israeli banking system joined the 2011 exercise. that exercise also saw more involvement of the civilian population: two alarms were sounded, at 11 a.m. and at 7 p.m., to encourage people to practice emergency procedures both in their workplaces and at home. the focus shifted dramatically in 2012. rather than responding to a military threat, that year’s exercise was designed to test the country’s ability to cope with a devastating earthquake and tsunami. the emphasis on comprehensive readiness to meet diverse threats continued in 2013. that year, the chief of the home front command, eyal eizenberg, said, “[the exercise will be conducted] from the level of the individual . . . up to the governmental level. . . . our premise is that preparedness reflects resilience, and the security reality requires us to be in constant readiness. . . . today, the front and the home front have become a unified front” (idf 2013; emphasis mine). every year since 2007 a new scenario has been initiated, and each year the numbers of participants and possible hazards have expanded. in both continuity and scope, turning point speaks to israel’s security and securitization context, concerns and processes that have elevated protection of the home front to a paramount issue. in its sixty-eight years of existence, israel has been involved in seven wars and ongoing conflict with its palestinian neighbors.6 consequently, scholarship on the military and militarization in israel has proliferated, especially since the 1980s. studies range in focus from the political and sociological functions of the idf (e.g., cohen 1995; horowitz and lissak 1989) to examinations of specific processes of militarism and militarization (e.g., ben-eliezer 1995, 1998; kimmerling 1993; lomsky-feder and ben-ari 2000; maman et al. 2001; sheffer and barak 2010). though i do not frame the current case within theories of militarization and securitization, i am fully aware that in israel those processes have contributed to creating a supreme security space, within which the emergence of the preparedness assemblage is not questioned either by government officials or by the population at large. moreover, israel’s civil–military connections have contributed to the successful cooperation of civil units and citizens in the annual scenario exercises. turning point is a unique nationwide program: comparable events of this scale have not been attempted outside israel (but see viktorin 2008 on a large-scale military exercise in sweden). this unique context provides a novel opportunity to observe a full-scale scenario-based exercise, an event in which national agencies, local municipalities, and the general population all participate voluntarily in enacting a shared master script. configuring the narrative february 3, 2015, early evening. i attend a dinner meeting at the home of turning point administrative head michael yair. i’m the first to arrive and find michael in the kitchen preparing dishes for his guests. he tells me he has invited the team assembled to write the 2015 scenario and help with the initial design of the exercise. ten people subsequently arrive and we sit around the dinner table on the porch and eat and talk. those present are close friends, most of whom have known each other for a long time, and the atmosphere during the meal is relaxed, the conversation peppered with personal jokes. an administrative group will continue to meet weekly but will grow over time. by the week of the exercise, it will include approximately two hundred people. after we have finished eating, we re-enter the house and sit in the living room on chairs and sofas arranged in a circle facing the tv screen. there, the lighthearted banter that had accompanied the meal gives way to serious, focused deliberation. the discussants represent the exercise operation team: the police, internal security, nema, the medical community, government ministries and local authorities, population logistics, and national infrastructure. these participants will oversee the practicing units the week of the exercise. michael and alon kedem, another senior exercise administrator, give a powerpoint presentation. the presentation constitutes a first draft of the story outline of the main exercise narrative, what is termed series b. the two men present thirty slides, which consist almost exclusively of verbal descriptions. no graphs. no charts. tables, when they appear, are text-filled. though just an initial outline, the presentation is comprehensive and richly descriptive. the first slide addresses key security trends in present-day israel. subsequent slides focus on international concerns and the political and military situation vis-à-vis each of israel’s neighbors (lebanon, syria, jordan, egypt, and the palestinian authority). some slides describe the attitudes of the israeli public and media reactions to current concerns. i am surprised by how seriously those in the room treat the presentation. their attention riveted on the tv screen, they are not just going through the motions; they are engaged in reality. an argument ensues over whether series b should be written as a textual narrative only or whether it should include a graphical timeline. participants also struggle with the idea of how to interest trainees in the story, so that they do not skip over the first few pages. creating a scenario thus involves narrative techniques: how to build a story and the tension needed to keep participants involved. the meeting goes on for more than three hours. at one point, michael summarizes what all present agree on: “events of the scenario are a natural extension of [the real] reality. the reality of the exercise and the real reality should not be very far apart.” preparations for each turning point begin with an organizational directive (series a) that determines the scenario’s central theme (war, terror, earthquake, etc.) and identifies those who will participate. the exercise is designed by a private security company hired each year by nema to test the entire state apparatus, as well as nema’s own readiness. as noted, institutional participation in turning point has grown over the years. all ministries now take part, as do all national infrastructure authorities (energy, water, etc.). other participants include the knesset, the state comptroller, and the bank of israel. although most municipalities fully participate, some do so only virtually (a member of the exercise administration stands in for a given municipality and responds to events on its behalf). all participating entities are represented in the administration, and their representatives are responsible for training their respective units in coordination with the administration and in accordance with the general scenario instructions. after completing series a, the central administration produces the national narrative of the scenario (series b). this will eventually be transformed into a detailed scenario event (series c), a process that takes months and yields hundreds of pages documenting multiple scenario incidents. the scenario is based on an integrated perception of threats to the state of israel, taking into account political issues in the middle east as well as wider international issues. series b is “the outline, the opening scene for the assignment exercise [series c] . . . a fictional story with a concrete purpose,” alon kedem explained to me. the series b program is distributed to all participants and, on the basis of its narrative, they begin their preparations for the exercise. these include management role-playing, simulations, round tables, and interorganizational training programs. series c includes the specific events that take place during the week of the exercise, which are tailored to the training needs of individual participating units (in response to their requests) and must also meet national objectives. a central computer system, the “event generator,” assigns incidents to participants. the system activates the event that the administration has chosen and notifies each unit of specific “occurrences” in its area. incidents may include missile strikes, hazardous materials spills, terrorist attacks on schools, population and casualty evacuation, and damage to national infrastructure (e.g., electricity shutdown) or to emergency economy entities. worst case vs. plausible and reasonable case israeli ministry of transport situation room, turning point 15, 2 p.m. there are ten people in the room. the walls are covered with lists of telephone numbers, incident schedules, and maps of key transportation routes. two big-screen tvs hang from one wall, their data displays continuously updating. the situation-room staff sits around a desk monitoring laptops and telephones. as information comes in from a variety of sources, the staffers relay it to one another. while no one appears apprehensive, the sense of pressure is palpable. concentration is written across the faces of all the staffers as they struggle to keep up with the incoming reports. staff member 1: rocket attack in haifa port. two containers hit. another rocket hit the passenger terminal. a fire broke out and people were injured. staff member 2: so, is the port closed? staff member 1: there is damage, but the port is still functioning. staff member 3 (looking at a tv screen): there’s a bombing in the azrieli towers! staff member 4: there’s another report coming in: a direct hit on an ammonia tank! reaction in the room: thousands could die . . . that’s many kilometers of damage . . . population evacuation. staff member 1: there’s a warning regarding a cyberattack. media representative (playing a news flash): one hundred twenty killed. rocket hits. many casualties. number unknown. a group of terrorists invaded from the shore. reserve forces mobilized. in many areas the sirens are inaudible. staff member 2: ok. there is a new event coming . . . reaction in the room: what?! a new event? we aren’t done dealing with the previous ones!7 the turning point 15 scenario was unprecedented: twenty-four thousand incidents were written in advance, representing an all-front war. it presented the country with an emergency situation unlike anything it had experienced before. during the months of narrative writing, however, the administration officials insisted: “we shouldn’t overdo it with the number of events [that the units request]. let’s not overdo it. it’s a blow, but not an unreasonable one.” though acknowledging that the scenario involved an extraordinary event, authorities did not conceive of it as a worst case. a worst-case scenario, in their view, was fiction, impossible. a scenario, they contended, should be serious but plausible, situated between what is known and has already occurred and what is an imaginable eventuality. yaron weiss, a nema official, argued: it can’t be something abstract, too high . . . that i can’t reach in terms of preparedness. otherwise it’s just a hollywood script, it’s not a basis for a work plan. on the other hand, it can’t be built in such a way that i already know how to deal with it because then i’m not reinforcing my ability. . . . the attributed scenario should be what is called the serious plausible level. it’s serious enough so that i need to prepare for it . . . and be proactive, but it’s plausible so that i have the option to reach it and deal with it. so the game is not where i am now, but it’s also not in a place i can never reach. monica schoch-spana (2004, 12) argues that bioterrorism-response scenarios operate in a milieu of emergency and apocalyptic future perceptions. hence, scenario narratives are usually written as worst cases, in which “everything that can go wrong does go wrong.” joseph masco (2008, 2014) has described a similar approach in his studies of cold war scenarios and biosecurity threats. however, as several authorities explained to me, turning point scenarios are selected and designed to create a plausible event. similarly, ben anderson and peter adey (2011) have found that, in the uk, specific scenarios are chosen over others not because they represent an apocalyptic future but because they are reasonable. why, then, are scenarios designed to seem real and plausible? michael yair reflected on a worst case and a plausible case in these terms: “when i build a scenario for an earthquake, i need to build it so that the people who are training feel that they are able to deal with the scenario, and i won’t always give them the most extreme exercise. i will aim a little lower than the plausible. even that could be too much.” eyal barak told me that during the exercise itself, his job is to control uncertainty that exceeds the limits of the original scenario. this control, he asserted, is essential for the exercise to succeed. specifically, he emphasized that, unlike scenarios such as operation dark winter, conducted in the united states in 2001 as a worst-case event, turning point aims for plausibility: six months ago, i prepared a huge excel table that determined . . . the rocket trajectory, how many buildings would be damaged, how many people evicted, how many injured, how many people with special needs would result from this, and how many injuries—serious, light, etc. . . . everyone worked according to this table. . . . otherwise, suddenly anyone can add injuries and we have no control over it, i mean the control is, again—we wanted to set the number of injuries in specific regions so that the health system in some places can’t deal with it, in other places it can, for each detail we thought what . . . we want the trainees to gain from the exercise. because if we collapse all of the systems, and hit all of the hospitals . . . this is what happened in dark winter, they just chose the extreme and that’s it [everybody died]. during preparation meetings for the exercise, particularly while they were writing the narrative, exercise authorities emphasized the importance of creating an event that would look real and reasonable. only then, they reasoned, could full collaboration of the trained units be achieved. at one administrative meeting during the narrative design phase, a discussion among participants centered on whether the outline they were building was realistic and would be convincing in the eyes of the participants, making them act as they would in a real emergency. one senior team member, yoel lapid, said that “many people will say that it’s not realistic,” leading a colleague to ask, “which events should we add to make it realistic?” the point was to shape a credible story to elicit real reactions from participants. at one point during that meeting, the administration head looked at me and said, “you see? we are designing reality. amazing, isn’t it? we are designing reality. a harsh reality.” that combination of both designing something new and keeping a sense of realism was evident throughout the entire exercise. attributed threat vs. attributed scenario another central element in the scenario narrative is its temporality. narratives are usually presented either as prophetic or as a way to better know or anticipate the unknown future (e.g., aradau and van munster 2007; lakoff 2008; lentzos and rose 2009; schoch-spana 2004). stephen collier (2008, 225) adds that, via scenarios, knowledge about the future is sometimes produced through the practice of “acting [it] out.” thus the scenario is not simply the realization of the future but also a way of creating knowledge about it by practicing it. before administration officials create the national scenario (and multiple local incidents), they review information regarding potential threats to the state. israeli intelligence agencies amass data, map possibilities, assess probabilities, and recommend a future threat that the government should consider. this map of attributed aggregated threat is distinguished from what will eventually become the attributed-scenario event created for the current year’s preparedness event. yaron weiss explained: “the ‘attributed threat’ takes a specific type of threat and breaks it down to details: duration, day/night, scope . . . in a way that requires a more specific definition of the resources required and the manpower needed in order to be prepared for that threat.” during preparatory meetings, i repeatedly asked about the concepts of external future threat and attributed threat, wanting to understand the way the administration team narrates the scenario event. i was consistently told that the important issue was not the “real” future threat “out there.” although officials create a scenario on the basis of the attributed threat constructed through intelligence gathering, the scenario is not limited to that threat. once a scenario narrative is chosen, what is important is the reality of that scenario, rather than any actual future reality. as eyal barak said, it is “not a prophecy but a decision.” i once asked the turning point administration head to articulate the goal in organizing and conducting the scenario event, and he answered that it was to “simulate reality as closely as possible.” i pressed for clarification: “as close as possible to actual future reality?” he responded, “no, to the scenario reality.” in other words, the attributed scenario is not simply distinguished from the attributed threat. it also does not attempt to simulate a future reality. while the attributed threat is linked to the real uncertain future and to knowledge based on past events to enable better assessment of the future, the attributed scenario is separated from the future (the attributed threat) and is not merely driven by what has happened in the past. once a scenario is assembled, it becomes a reality in itself, for which preparedness measures are put into practice. the scenario addresses future uncertainty by putting an event into action—that is, by actualizing it. the practice of scenario-based exercises: actualization and the unexpected evaluation meeting at a municipality in central israel, turning point 15, day 3, 11:20 a.m. the municipality emergency center is open for the purpose of the exercise. staff at the center receive reports (by phone and computer) and forward specific information (see figure 2) to the municipality situation room, where the municipality chief executive officer (ceo) and main coordinators are stationed. at 11:20 a.m. a situation evaluation meeting begins. the heads of teams charged with monitoring the effects of the scenario event on local infrastructure and services present their reports. the seriousness with which they approach the evaluation is striking. ceo: this is an emergency state, but the system can function this way for a long time. the public should obey the directives of the home front command, and when a siren is heard, everyone must enter a protected space. these are not easy times, but we can deal with this threat. the blackouts are a problem, and we need to know how to deal with them. engineering team head: there are power crashes; we spoke to the power company and they are aware of the problem and said that the power should be back within four hours. population team head: two people were injured during this morning’s rocket attack, one low and one medium in severity. we received a notice from the manpower team and are in touch with the hospitals. a team was sent to the location where the incident took place. health team head: there is a shortage of physicians. we turned to the ministry of health and they said they would send physicians. especially pediatricians. additionally, 40 percent of the social workers haven’t arrived to work, and 805 elderly caretakers left their patients alone. the broad virtual event presented in series b is actualized and translated into practice through multiple incidents with concrete repercussions.8 many subevents emerge, each with the potential to develop in unexpected ways depending on participants’ reactions and on how those incidents interact with other incidents. for example, an electricity shutdown can affect pharmacies’ ability to operate and physicians’ ability to get to work, thus compromising medical aid to the injured. actualization involves difference: such incidents are not and cannot be written in advance but emerge only upon actualization. hence, once the scenario is enacted, new uncertainty emerges, as the following scene illustrates. figure 2. turning point achieves reality through specificity; a handwritten note reporting on incidents in an israeli municipality. it reads: “(1) at 24-26 yitzhak rabin street, there is no electricity and generators are not working. we asked the house committee to ask why the generation was not working. (2) at noam house, generators are not working. i asked the iec [israel electric corporation] if they can assist with providing a generator, because in noam there are people with disabilities. (3) 8 prophets street is without electricity. i contacted the iec. we’ll see why there’s no electricity.” photo by limor samimian-darash. some of the planned events in the 2015 scenario were evacuation drills. while the broad outline of the drills was written in advance, the specific logistics were determined by scenario participants. several schools in central israel were chosen to serve as the reception centers for evacuees from the north after rocket attacks in that area. on the second day of the exercise, i visited one of these schools to watch an evacuation drill. reception desks, staffed by personnel from different fields, were set up in the schoolyard to address evacuees’ varying needs upon arrival at the center. figure 3. a schoolyard serves as an evacuation center. photo by limor samimian-darash. at 11 a.m., the drill started, and evacuees began to arrive at the reception desks. as the scene became more hectic, the reception staff continued to welcome evacuees with calm, brisk efficiency. an evacuee approached the social work and welfare desk and said that his daughter was claustrophobic. the representative at the desk asked, “is she diagnosed as claustrophobic? what are her difficulties?” the evacuee described his daughter’s situation and the kind of anxiety from which she suffered. the representative (playing the role of psychologist) agreed the girl could stay outside the school building. another evacuee approached the public information desk, where a representative greeted him warmly and asked, “did you arrive alone?” the evacuee responded, “no, i arrived with my wife and four kids. my wife is gluten-sensitive and needs a gluten-free meal.” the representative wrote down the request and told him, “if there’s a gluten-free meal, they will contact you. enjoy your meal and have a pleasant stay.” later, this representative explained that he was operating partly according to guidelines he received prior to the exercise, but that he was mainly improvising on the basis of his common sense. one turning point official described the way the scenario was enacted in terms of “children events, grandchild events, and great-grandchild events” that emerge from a “parent event.” once the parent event is activated, a multiplicity of actual descendant events follows. these descendant events cannot be fully written in advance because they change and shift as they emerge. hence, planning for and controlling them is impossible. eyal barak explained the challenges: how do we produce the general superscenario? the challenge that we took upon ourselves . . . was to build a scenario that’s as realistic as possible, but at the same time—and that’s more difficult—completely closed. what do i mean by closed? when a rocket lands in frishman street, let’s say that the fire service knows it’s in frishman, and the municipality also knows it’s in frishman, and magen david adom [the israeli red cross] evacuated people from there, so they also know where it was. how do you make sure all these organizations know that a rocket landed in 32 frishman street? now, if you have twenty rockets like that each day [of the exercise], you can write a story for each of them, but we’re talking about two or three thousand rockets a day, you can’t really write everything down. i was often told by turning point headquarters officials that “every rocket has an address,” underscoring the level of specificity and detail they aim for in writing the scenario narrative. however, as the national scenario event is actualized, it has unexpected repercussions that affect the contours of the parent event. situation report: extracting problems the turning point administrators convened at least twice a day during the week of the exercise to compile all situation reports they received. these meetings were held in a room whose glass door had a sign reading “no entrance” posted on it. in attendance were all functionaries of the central administration and those in charge of the operation of government offices and local municipalities (though only twenty or so members of the exercise administration actually presented updates in those meetings). they were seated at long desks, their places marked by nameplates. each presenter reported on the main incidents that had occurred in his or her sector that day and the actions taken by training personnel in response. after reviewing these presentations, turning point officials reshaped the scenario event on the basis of unexpected trainee reactions, as the following example shows. exercise administration headquarters, turning point 15, day 2, 10 p.m. all relevant administration personnel are present in the operation room to discuss the current day’s situation reports. the various representatives summarize what has occurred in their respective areas of oversight: public security representative: the training forces are responding seriously all over the country. another representative: do they manage to get to every rocket? public security representative: no, not to every rocket. there are a lot of traffic problems. a lot of population problems. the security forces cannot get to all the rockets and the public is very upset because of this. infrastructure representative: the issue of the electricity blackouts isn’t working well [isn’t being taken seriously]. there were many blackouts since this morning. fifty-five blackouts. some of them lasted four to five hours. but only one was treated. government representative: at 11 a.m. the prime minister ran to a protected space along with all of israel. he made a video call to nema to get a situation report. medicine representative: a hospital director in the north called me and asked not to bring in any more injuries. he has high occupancy rates. there’s a mission here—how do we evacuate these injuries? i ask that the number of injured in the exercise be reduced. it should be a kind of reward for the people training. we need to respond to what the training forces are doing and if there is a need to change and update the exercise, we should do it. cyber representative: every event that is not a rocket is understood as a cyber event. there is too much background noise surrounding the actual cyber events that i have prepared for the exercise. during the meeting, many officials complain either about an insufficient response (e.g., to the electricity shutdowns) or about an over-response (e.g., the translation of every event into a cyber event). because training forces’ reactions are sometimes unexpected, officials deliberately aim for a dynamic, adaptable administrative approach that allows them to change the central scenario during the exercise. here, for example, given the severity of the rocket attacks in the north, two municipalities order the precautionary evacuation of their towns on the second day of the exercise. as a result, the central administration must change the targets of the next day’s rocket attacks to other cities that have not been evacuated. throughout the meeting, there is no hint that the participants are treating the exercise as anything other than reality. figure 4. the situation room for turning point 15. photo by limor samimian-darash. situation reports have a purpose beyond aiding scenario enactment: they enable more comprehensive assessment. after the national scenario is actualized, the various units are expected not only to respond to multiple emerging incidents/actualities but also to be able to see the broader picture of the event. michael yair used the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle to describe the work of doing so. michael yair: when we let our children assemble a jigsaw puzzle, we show them the picture on the box and the pieces of the puzzle. . . . [in the exercise] they don’t have the picture and not all the pieces of the puzzle. they will never have all the pieces, that’s the premise. . . . sometimes very important pieces will be missing. i mean, in the final analysis you don’t need to produce pieces of a puzzle, but a story. whoever produces pieces of a puzzle could only provide a partial solution. [they must] create a picture and complete the missing pieces based on experience. the challenge is to produce a situation report that’s close to [scenario] reality. . . . every single [unit] produces a situation report according to their level. one of the central problems is that people don’t know how to define the situation report elements that they need . . . to make decisions. now, every second the elements change, because the event itself is dynamic. that’s the greatest challenge, that’s the greatest uncertainty. limor samimian-darash: if i use your metaphor, not only do we not have all the pieces of the puzzle, the pieces we do have are constantly changing. michael yair: constantly, and [exercise participants] don’t understand that they are constantly changing. the various participants in the exercise are expected to extract the broader event, the national scenario, from what they have locally experienced as multiple incidents. they are asked by the turning point administration not simply to respond to the incidents that confront them but also to conceptualize and recognize emerging problems beyond specific manifestations. during situation report meetings i attended, participants were explicitly instructed not only to discuss specific incidents and responses but also to focus on the larger dilemmas those incidents evoked. in one such meeting, the head administrator responded to the police representative’s report by asking, “what are the problems? the fact that the police initiated a committee to examine the jurisdictional status is what’s important. i don’t care about conclusions of that committee.” the goal of the practicing units, then, is to extract problems from multiple actualities and understand the big picture beyond specific incidents. doing so does not lead them back to the original scenario, what the administration terms “god’s vision,” but it enables them to understand what is significant beyond their local experiences and to decide how to proceed from that understanding. producing a situation report from the experience of a multiplicity of actual events is thus a key phase in the exercise, but it is not an end in itself. as eyal barak stressed, “the situation report is not the purpose. the situation report is a tool for us to know what the problems are for which we need to find solutions; these are the implications of the situation report.” thus only when a situation report is assembled does understanding begin to emerge of the problems that must be prepared for. how to prepare for future uncertainty, then, paradoxically involves the generation of more uncertainty (multiple changing actualities). once actualized, the well-written scenario, one with an hour-by-hour resolution, creates new incidents and unexpected reactions that affect the original scenario event. moreover, in putting together a situation report on the basis of the specific incidents they encounter, the participating units can never replicate the scenario event created by the administration. once that scenario is actualized, it triggers subevents that alter its contours. the practicing units are then expected to reveal the broader events beyond the specific incidents presented to them, to extract the larger picture from multiple actualities, and to pose new possible problems. conclusion: scenarios, uncertainty, and critical limitations marieke de goede (2008) argues that the scenario is not merely about capturing future uncertainty or knowing the unknown. as the current case demonstrates, scenarios involve practices of both remediation of already known events and premediation of a future. at the same time, they refer neither to a specific past nor to a predicted future event. as richard grusin (2004, 28) explains, “premediation is not only a creation of possible futures in a videogame logic of algorithmic possibilities (if this choice is made, then this and that happens), as is the case with risk-based technology. instead, premediation works through the virtual as understood by the bergsonian deleuze, that is, a governing of the future-present as a multiplicity that is brought about.” elsewhere, grusin (2010, 59) asserts that, “while premediation often takes the form (as in the run-up to the iraq war) of the proliferation of specific possibilities, or particular scenarios, the generation of these specific possibilities entails the remediation of potentialities or virtualities out of which future actions, decisions, or events might (or might not) emerge.” scenarios create a multiplicity of actual events that invoke uncertainty through unexpected reactions and interactions. moreover, through its actualization, the scenario event is remediated; that is, the multiplicity of events it creates feeds back into the parent event. this dynamic evokes the unexpected, derived not from the unknown future—uncertainty—but from the practice of the scenario itself, that is, its performativity. in other words, uncertainty is involved not only in the way the future is conceptualized, in the discursive level of narrative, but also—perhaps primarily—in a scenario’s dispositional effect, its actualization. additionally, the unexpected effects generated through exercises like turning point enable the extraction of new problems the system needs to prepare for. the current case analysis may move us from one mode of governing, via biopolitical security apparatuses and risk-based technologies, to another mode, of preparedness and uncertainty-based technologies, but this change should not be idealized; that is, the scenario has its own problematic externalities and critical limitations. in designing human practices, paul rabinow and gaymon bennett (2012, 52) distinguish between three modes of expert engagement in diverse problem spaces. each mode of engagement has externalities and critical limitations. if externalities are produced through a particular mode but are not taken explicitly into account, they can become “critical limitations—that is, they can introduce structural incapacities.” that is, if externalities refer to what is excluded by a particular mode of thought, critical limitations refer to that which cannot be thought through this mode. the scenario, as an uncertainty-based technology, takes into account the critical limitations of risk-based technology and its modes of assessing and controlling the future through past experience. moreover, as expressed in action, scenarios not only conceptualize the future differently from what risk-based, actuarial reason licenses but they also enable a distinct form of action. consideration of real threats is important when constructing a scenario to make it appear plausible and serious to participants and thus to evoke the unexpected through its actualization. in this regard, the rationale of the scenario sidesteps a logical fallacy underlying many strategic planning approaches, what henry mintzberg (1994, 239) famously identifies as the fallacy of predetermination. in his words: the process of strategy making usually takes place precisely because the world does not hold still. because planning, in the absence of an ability to control the environment, must rely on forecasting, and because forecasting amounts to extrapolation of known states, existing trends, or recurring patterns, planning typically works best under conditions of relative stability. similarly, and more broadly, anthropological studies criticize the fallacy of control assumed by planning experts. this body of work examines the other side of planning processes, their elusive promise, the failure and messiness of governing and planning. however, rather than considering modes of governing that differ from or go beyond risk and risk-rationality–based planning, these studies confine themselves to presenting their critical limitations. one can argue that risk-based technology is still the primary focus of their anthropological analysis. as simone abram and gisa weszkalnys (2013, 22) argue, “at all levels of state and local planning, gaps between what is designed and what is built, theory and practice, or what is said and what is done have tended to constitute a major object of concern for local actors and ethnographers alike.” my analysis adds to the discussion of planning and, particularly, to the idea of failure in planning by considering a distinctive option for governing and by demonstrating a form of governing that is not intended to design a future of controlled specified possibilities. on the contrary, generating the unexpected forms part of the process of constructing problems of preparedness through the scenario exercise. rather than taking failure as an external object of concern, as a critical limitation to governing, this modality addresses it internally. what, then, are the critical limitations of uncertainty-based technologies, particularly the scenario? if risk-based technologies convert reality into tameable possibilities, and thus provides the appearance of control, how does the proliferation of the unexpected in the scenario affect the reality of participants in turning point, and of preparedness in israel more broadly? when i asked eyal barak about how the exercise has evolved from year to year, he answered: first, the scope has changed. at first we talked about dozens of missiles, then we talked about hundreds, and now we are talking about thousands. secondly, the content; for example, the scenarios at turning point 5 and 6 were on the matter of chemical threats, and we dealt with how long the batteries of the masks would hold, and those who have and those who do not have masks, or a biological threat. today, the scenario is completely different. [lastly,] the change stems not only from the scenarios themselves; the change stems from the fact that seven or ten years ago the number of government offices that had a body that deals with emergencies was relatively small. for example, the ministry of health already had an emergency department, it always had a strong department, but all other ministries were barely aware of civil emergency preparedness. not only do the types of threats in the scenario vary from year to year but the fronts and the number of participating units are also expanding. in addition, the system that deals with civil preparedness has changed and continues to do so. more governmental ministries are establishing emergency-response departments and engaging more frequently in emergency-preparedness activities. hence the chronic uncertainty manufactured during preparedness scenarios, through events that are written to seem as if they are real, has over time produced a real reality of emergency. in other words, a scenario designed to prepare for an uncertain future in practice feeds notions of uncertainty and revives it from year to year, through the exercise itself and then in reality. thus the narrative becomes action, that is, both the means and the end of this technology. in june 2016, after turning point 15, i met with the head of the exercise administration to discuss my observations. i shared my reflections on the exercise and the scenario’s mode of action. at the end of our conversation, i asked him, “what’s next?” i wanted to know what the scenario for the next exercise would be and how its narrative would differ from earlier ones. specifically, i was interested in how the future would be narrated and how emergency and uncertainty would be designed into the next year’s scenario. he responded only that there would definitely be another turning point and that preparations would start in a few months. the scenario modality, then, creates a chronic mode of preparedness. it leads to continuing preparations, generates more uncertainty, poses new problems, and eventually results in repetition of the exercise every year. thus, by practicing uncertainty, the scenario not only invokes difference but also—by its very nature—repeatedly constitutes a turning point for the next event to come. notes acknowledgments this research was funded by the israel science foundation (award no. 1635/15), with initial support from the levi eshekol institute at the hebrew university of jerusalem. i am deeply thankful to eyal ben-ari, don handelman, and avi shoshana for their constructive feedback on drafts of this article. i am especially grateful to paul rabinow for insightful conversations that helped me develop the ideas expressed in it, for hosting me at the university of california, berkeley, and for providing a congenial environment for completing this work. i thank dominic boyer, james faubion, and cymene howe—the editors of cultural anthropology—and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. i am also grateful to linda forman for helping me bring the manuscript into its current form. 1. all names are pseudonyms. 2. since 2014, i have conducted fieldwork on turning point. data presented in this article derive from fifteen months of participant observation of preparations for the 2014 and 2015 exercises, as well as from a review of documents and publications from previous exercises. 3. in michel foucault’s (2007) final iteration, governmentality is an umbrella term for those “arts of government” that include the domain of ethics, plus more directly coercive modes of governance—exploitation, domination, and subjugation. biopolitical governmentality is thus one sort of governmentality among others. 4. the israeli case is interesting in combining elements of both schemata—the biopolitical security of the population as well as the security of vital systems. 5. åsa boholm (2003, 168), for example, concedes that “many of the risk issues facing late modern society fall into the [unmanageable] category” for lack of relevant knowledge, but asserts that “in those instances we could expect the development of other, more culturally informed strategies to cope with risk.” 6. conflicts include the war of independence (1948), the sinai war (1956), the six-day war (1967), the war of attrition (1969–70), the yom kippur war (1973), the first lebanon war (1982–85), and the second lebanon war (with hezbollah, 2006). three military campaigns against hamas, not designated as wars by the government, have occurred along the gaza border (2008, 2012, and 2014). 7. this dialogue and others presented in the article are taken directly from the author’s field notes. some of the contextual information has been condensed, but participants’ statements have not been altered beyond obvious insertions and deletions. 8. gilles deleuze’s (1994) concepts of the virtual and the actual can help explain the relationship between the event and its 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anthropology of uncertainty.” current anthropology 54, no. 1: 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/669114. samimian-darash, limor, and paul rabinow, eds. 2015 modes of uncertainty: anthropological cases. chicago: university of chicago press. schoch-spana, monica 2004 “bioterrorism: us public health and a secular apocalypse.” anthropology today 20, no. 5: 8–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0268-540x.2004.00293.x. schüll, natasha dow 2015 “the gaming of chance: online poker software and the potentialization of uncertainty.” in modes of uncertainty: anthropological cases, edited by limor samimian-darash and paul rabinow, 46–66. chicago: university of chicago press. sheffer, gabriel, and oren barak, eds. 2010 militarism and israeli society. bloomington: indiana university press. sofer, roni 2008 “olmert mollified the syrian: it is only an exercise.” ynet, april 6. http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,l-3527991,00.html. stephenson, niamh, and michelle jamieson 2009 “securitising health: australian newspaper coverage of pandemic influenza.” sociology of health and illness 31, no. 4: 525–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01162.x. viktorin, mattias 2008 exercising peace: conflict preventionism, neoliberalism, and the new military. stockholm: department of social anthropology, stockholm university. zeiderman, austin 2015 “spaces of uncertainty: governing urban environmental hazards.” in modes of uncertainty: anthropological cases, edited by limor samimian-darash and paul rabinow, 182–200. chicago: university of chicago press. better weather? better weather?: the cultivation of the sky mike hulme king’s college london what are humans doing to the earth’s atmosphere? changing it, yes, as was acknowledged in the first international political meeting on climate change, held in toronto in june 1988, called the changing atmosphere: implications for global security. but are humans also damaging or destroying the atmosphere, as implied in the 1980s narrative of the depletion of the stratosphere’s ozone layer? are we polluting the atmosphere with excess carbon dioxide or, as some would have it, fertilizing the atmosphere with an essential plant nutrient? and when considering the objectives of climate policy, what metaphors are used to describe the project: is the earth’s climate being controlled, enhanced, protected, preserved, or restored? in an essay written a decade ago, the environmental theologian willis jenkins (2005) argued that it is important to pay careful attention not simply to metaphors used to describe nature. scrutiny is equally important of metaphors used to describe human agency with regard to the natural world. writing from an environmental ethics perspective, he offered two guiding criteria for evaluating metaphors of agency. well-chosen metaphors should, first, capture the complexity of there being various degrees of the natural and the artificial, and, second, they should accommodate a productive role for human interventions while remaining alert to the degenerative potential of such actions. thus perfecting or caring for nature would, he argued, win out over preserving or managing. so what are humans doing to the earth’s atmosphere and hence to the weather that it yields? are we cultivating or polluting the atmosphere, enhancing or destroying, caring or abandoning, conserving or depleting it? in this essay i want to use the specific metaphor of cultivation—which i think meets jenkins’s two criteria—to reflect on the human relationship with the atmosphere and its weather. after all, humans quite happily cultivate the land and ocean; why should they not cultivate the sky? human cultivating practices throughout countless generations have yielded agricultures, horticultures, aquacultures, silvicultures, and permacultures. is it fruitful, is it possible even, to think in terms of weathercultures? what weather might humans be cultivating? the trouble with weather to start this brief investigation, we must think some more about weather. humans have always had a problem with their weather—the fruit of the sky. weather never quite performs to desire or expectation. it is constantly in flux; weather is always both passing away and in renewal. it brings blessing and danger, offers comfort and fear. weather can lay the conditions for both life and death. it is always unruly and yet in some way, as the atmosphere moves through the seasons, also regular. given this otherness about the weather, its importance for human well-being yet its uncontrollability, it seems unsurprising that the sky became an obvious home for the gods—the gods of thunder, lightning, rain, and wind. supplications were, and still are, made to these gods, and to others also, entreating them to bring benign or beneficent weather, to show mercy on crops, homes, rivers, and seas. many ancient mythologies or religions viewed the sky as “the domain of the gods” (donner 2007). similar animistic sentiments have been held in relation to forests, oceans, swamps, deserts, and mountains, all of which have been for many—and remain for some—the dwelling place of the gods. but through practices of human cultivation over many generations, these other spirit-dwelling domains have become disenchanted and naturalized. forests and the ocean deeps are no longer feared, but felled and fished; swamps are drained, deserts irrigated, mountains conquered. landscapes have become cultivated. but while this has not happened in quite the same way with the sky, i want to suggest that the idea of climate has in a different way marked an attempt to cultivate the atmosphere (cf. hulme forthcoming). the idea of climate introduces a sense of stability or normality into what would otherwise be for humans too chaotic and disturbing an experience of unruly and unpredictable weather. although the weather often fails to meet human expectations, the fact that we do have expectations derives from the idea of climate: “climate is the ordinary man’s [sic] expectation of weather . . . there is a limit to the indignities that the weather can put upon him, and he can predict what clothes he will need for each month of the year” (hare 1966, 99–100). as a normalizing idea, climate offers humans some sense of security. it allows us to put weather in its place, so to speak. or as lorraine daston (2010, 32) explains in her essay exploring the boundaries of nature, “without well-founded expectations, the world of causes and promises falls apart.” climate serves such a purpose and so should be understood as performing important psychological and cultural functions. climate offers a way of navigating between the human experience of a constantly changing atmosphere with its attendant insecurities and the need to live with a sense of stability and regularity. humans look to the idea of climate to offer an ordered container—a linguistic, sensory, or numerical repertoire—through which to tame and interpret the unsettling arbitrariness of the restless weather. this container creates daston’s necessary orderliness. climate may be defined according to the aggregated statistics of weather in places or as a scientific description of an interacting physical system. climate may also be apprehended more intuitively, as a tacit idea held in the human mind or in the social memory of what the weather of a place should be at a certain time of year. but however defined, formally or tacitly, it is our sense of climate that establishes certain expectations about the atmosphere’s performance. the idea of climate enables the possibility of a stable psychological life and of meaningful human action in the world. put simply, the idea of climate allows humans to live culturally with their weather. as with other cultivational practices, the stabilizing idea of climate has developed, produced, and even, in some sense, improved the weather by giving it cultural meaning. in following this line of thinking, the trouble with weather thus emerges as threefold. first, our gods have abandoned us—or rather, many of us have largely abandoned our gods. we have stopped believing in anyone wiser or more benevolent than ourselves. our fates are left to the inanimate and cold mercy of the skies and the weather it leaves us with. but now this disenchantment of the skies is compounded—a second unsettling—because the protective defenses we have built using the idea of climate as a stabilizing and ordering scheme have been breached. the past two hundred years of scientific inquiry have shown us that the atmosphere and its weather turn out to be deeply unstable across all time scales (woodward 2014), much more so than we would like. ice sheets wax and wane, ocean currents slow and quicken in the deep, volcanoes wreak havoc with the skies, and ocean and atmosphere are coupled in a bewildering variety of rhythms and dances. the idea of a stable climate is a chimera, not least during the recent past of the holocene, with its little ice ages, mega-droughts, and volcanic winters (fagan 2004). so after evacuating the atmosphere of the gods, the fictitious idea of climate has failed to pacify and harness the weather to satisfy human ends. furthermore, the past fifty years of scientific inquiry have shown us something else about the weather, the third component of our now disturbing condition. these unstable atmospheric conditions are exacerbated by the consequences of cumulative human actions. through our consumption of energy and our acquisition of food we are changing the flows of energy from sun to surface, from atmosphere to ocean, from land to sky. we now find ourselves in a triple bind. we have abandoned our dependence on the weather gods, and our manufactured idea for bringing order to the weather, namely climate, turns out to be not only illusory—nature is not so easily tamed (clark 2011)—but also compromised by our own prolific behavior. projects of atmospheric cultivation with this context established, it is possible to reflect on the range of human projects of atmospheric cultivation. by these i mean intentional, but not always sagacious, projects of improvement through which the sky becomes cultivated, that is, the atmosphere bears the imprint of considered human thought, design and action (szerszynski 2010). modernity has been alive with projects seeking to cultivate the sky, projects that have aspired to an atmosphere modified in some way so as to yield more desirable weather. i have no space here to give a proper account of these projects, but good summaries of them can be found in the following texts. thus richard h. grove (1995) describes the emergence of projects of the european colonizers that through cultivating the land (e.g., draining swamps, plowing soil, felling forests) in fact sought to cultivate the sky. fabien locher and jean-baptiste fressoz (2012) describe political projects of social cultivation that sought indirectly to cultivate the sky through their progressive and emancipatory goals. and in james rodger fleming (2010) one finds a history of projects of great technological ingenuity and sometimes hubris (e.g., diverting rivers, seeding clouds, diverting hurricanes) that sought to cultivate the sky by directly intervening in the atmosphere. figure 1. panel at the 2008 united nations climate conference, from “the biggest talking club in the world: un climate conference ends today,” greenboard blog, december 12, 2008. http://eurotope.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the-biggest-talking-club-in if the above might be regarded as the cultivational projects of modernity—and with limited success in many senses and in most cases—we now in the twenty-first century have to come to terms with a new generation of imagined projects of atmospheric improvement. there is no hiding from the extent to which the atmosphere has been inadvertently altered with the byproducts of industrial processes (e.g., cfcs [chlorofluorocarbons], fossil carbon dioxide, sulphate aerosols) and of land practices (e.g., methane, smoke, aerosol particulates)—inadvertent cultivation one might say, if this is not an oxymoron. and so our anxieties have multiplied. weather is no longer just wild—humans have always known wild weather—but for some it is now “weird,”1 while others deem the prospects of further changes frighteningly dangerous (schellnhuber et al. 2006). and so new practices of late modern atmospheric cultivation have been invented to un-weird the weather or to rescue it from its dangerous transgressions. thus scientists are seriously contemplating, if not researching, stratospheric aerosol injection, injecting particles into the sky to cultivate a more benign climate (hulme 2014a), while technologies of carbon dioxide removal are being developed and trialed. these new projects of atmospheric improvement—in fact cultivation, as i am suggesting—are not, as in the case of anthropogenic global warming, inadvertent. nor are they piecemeal, as in the earlier works of modernity that sought to cultivate the atmosphere. these new projects aim to be systemic. they aim to recondition the entire atmosphere as one cultivated by humans and reimagined through eco-machinima such as google earth (gurevitch 2014). cultivators of the sky? so what are humans doing to the earth’s atmosphere? using the metaphor of cultivation through which i have framed this essay, what sort of cultivational aspirations and practices is humanity on the verge of implementing in the atmosphere? since we recognize that the material reach of human agency now extends to the skies—that is, what we do on and beneath the land has consequences for the weather—our choices must consider this knowledge. in this sense, humans cannot escape being cultivators of the sky in one way or another (weitzman 2014), and so we need to think critically, ethically, and politically about the implications of this fact. it seems to me that as a response to the passive human cultivation of the atmosphere in past centuries, two forms of active future cultivation might usefully be distinguished: de-cultivation and re-cultivation. de-cultivating practices would be those activities that seek to remove substances from the sky, to put the atmosphere back to what it was. this follows a narrative of purification or naturalization, and the range of putative carbon dioxide removal technologies exemplifies such an aspiration. there are parallels here with the idea of rewilding (e.g., monbiot 2014) or ecological restoration (e.g., marris 2011), both of which of course constitute deliberate forms of cultivation. can the atmosphere be so cultivated as to re-create wild or natural weather, to cleanse the atmosphere of its human additives and return it to some prehuman (or at least less human) condition? there is fruitful work to be done in thinking this through; many of the same challenges and controversies may well face the atmospheric and the ecosystem cultivator. re-cultivating practices, on the other hand, would be those activities seeking to add substances to the sky, to remake the atmosphere to be what it can. this follows a narrative of enhancement or improvement, and technologies such as stratospheric aerosol injection exemplify such an aspiration. there are parallels here with the aspiration of human enhancement (e.g., hauskeller 2013, whose title i borrowed for this essay), again a form of cultivation, but in this case exercised on the human body. as with the atmosphere, humans are changing their bodies inadvertently through a wide range of sociotechnical practices, and so projects of human enhancement, correction and improvement abound. as these human-enhancement technologies multiply, so too, i believe, will calls for the creation of willfully cultivated, corrected, and enhanced weather (keith 2013). similar questions concerning such enhancements may emerge: how benign for the body/weather are such interventions?; how can one distinguish between the enhanced and the unimproved condition? (see hulme 2014b); and how far do we desire to become masters of ourselves/the skies? michael hauskeller’s apologetic for the importance of retaining a certain givenness or giftedness about the human body applies equally, it seems to me, with respect to the atmosphere. i have suggested that the projects of both atmospheric purification and atmospheric enhancement constitute forms of cultivation. they resemble agricultural practices: progressive projects of development and supposed improvement through which new forms of weather will be produced. but though we cannot avoid making choices between the above forms of cultivation—including the option of our continued passive cultivation—we also need to recognize a limit to the cultivating powers of the human. as nigel clark (2011) explains in his book inhuman nature, the weather will always retain a powerful otherness. it will never be tamed by humans’ cultivating powers, just as in the past it was never fully tamed by supplications to the gods or through the protective idea of a stable climate. the weather to a substantial degree will always exceed attempts at its cultivation, just as does the soil, the ocean, or indeed the human body. god’s judgement on adam was that “the ground is cursed because of you. all your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. it will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains.”2 just as we toil on the land and struggle to make it yield to human needs and wants, so, too, now we are committed to toiling in the sky. cultivating better weather in the skies above our heads will prove a precarious task, yet a task, i believe, that now—for good or ill—will be never-ending. notes acknowledgments the writing of this essay benefited from the award of a carson writing fellowship, held over the summer of 2014 at the rachel carson center at the ludwig maximilians universität in münich, germany. part of this article has drawn on the author’s essay written for the sage major reference work on climates and cultures, forthcoming in 2015. 1. for example, friedman (2010) writes, “i prefer the term ‘global weirding’, because . . . weather gets weird. the hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous.” 2. gen. 3:17–18, new international version. references clark, nigel 2011 inhuman nature: sociable life on a dynamic planet. london: sage. daston, lorraine 2010 “the world in order.” in without nature? a new condition for theology, edited by david alberston and cabell king, 15–34. new york: fordham university press. donner, simon e. 2007 “domain of the gods: an editorial essay.” climatic change 85, nos. 3–4: 231–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-007-9307-7. fagan, brian m. 2004 the long summer: how climate changed civilization. london: granta. fleming, james rodger 2010 fixing the sky: the checkered history of weather and climate control. new york: columbia university press. friedman, thomas l. 2010 “global weirding is here.” opinion, new york times, february 17. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html, accessed september 14, 2014. grove, richard h. 1995 green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island edens and the origins of environmentalism, 1600–1860. cambridge: cambridge university press. gurevitch, leon 2014 “the digital globe as climatic coming attraction: from theatrical release to theatre of war.” canadian journal of communication 38, no. 3: 333–56. hare, f. kenneth 1966 “the concept of climate.” geography 51, no. 2: 99–110. hauskeller, michael 2013 better humans? understanding the enhancement project. durham: acumen. hulme, mike 2014a can science fix climate change? a case against climate engineering. cambridge: polity. 2014b “attributing weather extremes to ‘climate change’: a review.” progress in physical geography 38, no. 4: 499–511. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0309133314538644. forthcoming “climate and its changes: a cultural appraisal.” geo: geography and environment. jenkins, willis 2005 “assessing metaphors of agency: intervention, perfection, and care as models of environmental practice.” environmental ethics 27, no. 2: 135–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics200527227. keith, david 2013 a case for climate engineering. cambridge, mass.: mit press. locher, fabien, and jean-baptiste fressoz 2012 “modernity’s frail climate: a climate history of environmental reflexivity.” critical inquiry 38, no. 3: 579–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/664552. marris, emma 2011 rambunctious garden: saving nature in a post-wild world. london: bloomsbury. monbiot, george 2014 feral: rewilding the land, sea, and human life. london: penguin. schellnhuber, hans joachim, wolfgang cramer, nebojsa nakicenovic, tom wigley, and gary yohe, eds. 2006 avoiding dangerous climate change. cambridge: cambridge university press. szerszynski, bronislaw 2010 “reading and writing the weather: climate technics and the moment of responsibility.” theory, culture & society 27, nos. 2–3: 9–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276409361915. weitzman, martin l. 2014 “the geoengineered planet.” in in 100 years: leading economists predict the future, edited by ignacio palacios-huerta, 145–64. cambridge, mass.: mit press. woodward, jamie 2014 the ice age: a very short introduction. oxford: oxford university press. playlists playlists: cinematic anthropology paul shankman lauren berlant steven robins charles hirschkind anand pandian paul shankman (university of colorado, boulder) this visual playlist is an eclectic mix of one documentary that pushes the envelope of the genre, two that examine climate change in the pacific, two that are historical remembrances of the civil rights era, and one cult movie that is a guilty pleasure. sweetgrass (2009): this exceptional film by ilisa barbash and lucien castaing-taylor is an evocation of a summer sheep drive through the montana wilderness. yes, a sheep drive. the exquisite imagery must be seen on the big screen to be appreciated. there once was an island (briar march, 2010) and sun come up (jennifer redfearn, 2011): documentaries about the wrenching dilemmas facing people on tiny islands in the pacific that are threatened by climate change and related problems. their poignant stories are great for courses. freedom summer (stanley nelson, 2013): set in mississippi in the summer of 1964. college students from the north risked their lives to join local african americans in supporting summer programs for kids and voter registration drives for adults. think you know this story? think again. freedom riders (stanley nelson, 2010) is another excellent documentary about civil rights activists and their harrowing experiences, this time desegregating interstate buses in the deep south in 1961. joe versus the volcano (john patrick shanley, 1990): need a break? try this quirky comedy about a down-on-his-luck ordinary joe (tom hanks) who volunteers to save people on the tropical island of waponi woo by jumping into their volcano (known as the big woo). as he voyages by yacht across the pacific with meg ryan, things get complicated. not for everyone. note that director john patrick shanley had already earned a screenplay oscar for moonstruck (1987). lauren berlant (university of chicago) here is a list that isn’t curated except by the metric of recency. i hope that the impulse toward taste-curation that might be implied here will not here be implied. i have been sitting with these for work and have learned a lot from them over the years, and recently, etc. their resonance with the present moment will be pretty clear, i think, which happened accidentally and unfortunately, as well as fortunately. finally got the news (1970): a documentary by the league of revolutionary black workers evidencing its fight against big auto and the united mine workers too, as well as its struggles to understand and overcome barriers to white–black working-class solidarity. wattstax (mel stuart, 1973): a concert film of a concert that commemorated the 1965 watts riots. richard pryor offers much inset comedy/commentary. it is very political. it is very sentimental but with an edge that historicizes the politics of uplift, of optimism, of revolutionary consciousness, and ordinary political instruments. let the fire burn (jason osder, 2013): a found-footage documentary of the philadelphia police’s assassination of the move neo-african organization—police brutality, white clueless, racism, empathically stunned media and the like. frank rizzo, monster. other bureaucrats, banality of evil. a resonating intimate other to john edgar wideman’s philadelphia fire (new york: henry holt, 1990). in the year of the pig (emile de antonio, 1968): a found-footage documentary of the mediated exposure of and numbness toward the vietnam war, a teaching in the relation of the numb to the unbearable (each expanding in its own way) and the politics of disbelief. born in flames (lizzie borden, 1983): another film of the violent, police-brutal, racist, homophobic, hetero-normative, imperialist present, shot in and thinking about documentary style but not a documentary—science fiction, actually, in its own way, sometimes, a genre of disbelief. it produces more pleasure that feels like pleasure than the films listed above. what faroki taught (jill godmillow, 1968): a remake of harun farocki’s black and white, german film inextinguishable fire (1969), about vietnam, napalm, bureaucracy, the centrality of conversation to politics, the question of state violence as counter-revolutionary and what that means for revolutionary imaginaries whose reparativity involves destruction. steven robins (stellenbosch university) roger and me (1989): michael moore’s classic agitprop documentary, with a difference. its strength is its ethnographic rootedness in moore’s hometown, flint, michigan. moore really knows this town well and his personal connection to it gives the documentary its filmic power. capitalism: a love story (2009): roger moore’s polemical and racy critique of contemporary capitalism. it is a useful complement to roger and me and usually generates much student discussion. screening the film along with good readings on late capitalism enhances its pedagogical value. ochre and water (2001): craig mathew’s thought-provoking ethnographic film that focuses on the namibian government’s plans to construct a dam that would flood the land of the semi-nomadic himba community. the film tracks the efforts by the himba, and their anthropologist and ngo allies, to challenge the dam’s construction. it also draws attention to a complicated cultural politics of “strategic essentialism” that indigenous communities sometimes deploy in struggles against powerful states. death by myth (2001), the fifth and final part of john marshall’s kalahari family series (1951–2001): a powerful ethnographic film that captures marshall’s own role in san rural development interventions in namibia. it is somewhat of an autocritique by a filmmaker who has been central in producing ethnographic representations of the san over a number of decades. it can be complemented with texts relating to the great kalahari san debate, for example, the writings of edwin wilmsen and richard lee. city of god (fernando meirelles and kátia lund, 2002) and waste land (lucy walker, joão jardim, and karen harley, 2010): two brazilian films that provide powerful graphic imagery of contemporary urban life in brazil and elsewhere in the global south. both of these films can be complemented by ethnographic texts by teresa caldeira and john holston. charles hirschkind (university of california, berkeley) a cinematic introduction to the discipline of anthropology: caché (michael haneke, 2005): as close an analysis of france’s postcolonial psyche as can be found. postcards from tora bora (wazhmah osman, 2007): a woman returns to the war-scarred country and city of her childhood, tracking down her memories in the fragments of a once hospitable world now in ruins. the enigma of kaspar hauser (werner herzog, 1974): a wild child, there at the birth of anthropology. safe (todd haynes, 1995): a tale of self-fashioning and survival in the toxic suburbs of los angeles. battle of algiers (gillo pontecorvo, 1966): a story of anti-colonial resistance in algeria, or is it palestine, iraq, afghanistan …? anand pandian (johns hopkins university) everything these days looks and feels so much like cinema—what to do for footing in the midst of this slippery stream of images? plastic earth, the movie so you’re trawling the feed like you always do when the kids are in bed and the dishes are done, and you notice something else making the rounds about the world’s troubles, a tale of “plastiglomerates” washing up on the beaches of hawaii, composed of molten plastic and volcanic rock (1). ever more baroque reasons to worry over the fate of this earth, you think to yourself, the flickering life of this “great ball on which we live” (2). there was a time when everyone thought such images would suffice to set things right, a bit of perspective, like all of us sailing together on a small blue marble through the vastness of space (3). now, it’s more like that movie you once saw, the one where sam rockwell plays a helium miner stranded on the moon—now, it’s the earth itself that feels so far from reach (4). you remember that fable by calvino, the one where the earth passes so close to its lunar companion that people could lean out with buckets to scoop the fermented milk pooling in its craters (5). islands grown from taro-wrapped bundles, stones that whirl with the spirits of the dead, bones laid out as pipestem corals—you wonder what it would take to grasp the plastic promise of such myths once again (6). corcoran, patricia l., charles j. moore, kelly jazvac. 2014. “an anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record.” gsa today 24, no. 6: 4–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/gsat-g198a.1. agee, james, and walker evans. 2001. let us now praise famous men. boston: houghton mifflin. originally published in 1941. poole, robert. 2008. earthrise: how man first saw the earth. new haven, conn.: yale university press. jones, duncan, director. 2009. moon. culver city: stage 6 films. calvino, italo. 1968. cosmicomics. new york: harcourt. leenhardt, maurice. 1979. do kamo: person and myth in the melanesian world. chicago: university of chicago press. beyond copyright and technology beyond copyright and technology: what open access can tell us about precarity, authority, innovation, and automation in the university today christopher kelty university of california, los angeles this interview was conducted in february of 2014, by e-mail, among christopher kelty (ck), anne allison, charlie piot (aa/cp), ali kenner (ak), and timothy elfenbein (te). aa/cp: why do you think anthropologists have been slow to embrace open access? after all, the politics of oa—democratizing access, returning ownership of scholarly production to the intellectual commons—is compatible with the political orientations of most anthropologists. it is an area where political investment can make a real difference, so it is surprising that there hasn’t been a massive social movement within anthropology around oa. ck: i think anthropologists have actually been rather enthusiastic supporters of open access—at least compared to some other disciplines in the humanities that have ignored it completely or adopted stances toward it that are even more conservative. but the question is a good one, and it does seem that the principles of oa are in line with what anthropologists value: public interest, anticorporate concentration, academic freedom, collaboration with informants, intervention in public debate. it should be low-hanging fruit. but open access, and copyright wars generally, have two major disadvantages: they are maddeningly complex and ultimately very boring. i think most folks, quite rightly, just want to focus on other things, and let professionals handle the problem of scholarly publishing. but it is precisely this indifference that has enabled the publishing industry to take greater advantage of and extract enormous profit from our generally well-meaning labor. what’s mysterious, though, is why anyone in anthropology might have time to be opposed to open access—that would seem to be a cause for concern. but it is not academic anthropologists who are opposed—it is the people in the american anthropological association (aaa) who run the publishing program who have been the only really vocal opponents. they see themselves as defending the interests of anthropologists, and it seems to them that open access is a threat. but what they are defending are the interests of the scholarly publishing industry and its extractive business model. john wiley and sons regularly provides the aaa with a nice, large check and a handful of poorly designed, intransigent, cookie-cutter services. but what many anthropologists do not recognize is that that check comes from their own libraries (and hence has a direct effect on the money available at their home institutions) and the services are built on their own labor as editors, reviewers, copyeditors, etc., for which they are not compensated in any direct way. it’s as if wiley had hired anthropologists as employees for no pay, then pickpocketed them, taken half the money from the billfold, and then given it back to them via the aaa. i fail to see how anyone can perceive this as a viable relationship, either with the scholarly publishing industry or with their own scholarly society. perhaps one should say that the aaa is just being conservative and careful. but this makes no sense: in the past they have been more than willing to subject themselves to radical experimentalism when it comes to large, profit-hungry (wiley) and small, innovative (university of california press, anthrosource) firms alike—why not in the case of open access? making cultural anthropology open access is at last some proof of a willingness to change. aa/cp: are certain disciplines better oriented (intellectually, politically) to open access than others? why have the natural, rather than the humanistic, sciences been quicker to get on board with oa? shouldn’t we imagine a natural fit between anthropology and oa, given our ethical and intellectual commitments, including long-standing critiques of bourgeois notions of property and ownership? ck: to me, the question of the difference between disciplines comes down to scale, not substance. it’s worth reminding ourselves that even though we are relatively numerous (over ten thousand members in the aaa! over twenty publications!), we are miniscule compared to the health sciences. the university of california alone probably employs twenty thousand health scientists, and medline currently indexes over five thousand journals. biology is similar, the physical sciences also—there are just a lot more people in those disciplines, a lot more competition, and a lot more money. but because i have spent a lot of time over the last three years working on open access within the uc system, i feel reasonably confident saying that every discipline takes all kinds—fervent supporters and bloody-minded obstructionists were delivered equally to all the disciplines by whatever loving god populated academia. but being large and being small can have their own different effects. and in fact, this mirrors innovation in scholarly publishing generally—good ideas get traction when there are large audiences and large(r) dollars, making it hard for small venues like cultural anthropology to experiment. but smaller disciplines can sometimes benefit from these innovations—essentially riding along for free on the risks taken by larger disciplines. there is a tendency in anthropology—and in the humanities generally—to suggest that open access is a problem of the sciences and engineering, and that we are somehow victims of this juggernaut on the other side of our campuses. aside from being a form of ressentiment, this claim fails to recognize that the financial problem is the same across the disciplines—the larger humanities disciplines (history, literature) are going to have more power than the smaller ones (classics, women’s studies)—and the same is true in the sciences. making common cause with folks in the sciences and engineering is far more effective for everyone than manning some culture-war barricade that is irrelevant to the larger dynamics of the economy of publishing, research funding, and university revenues generally. aa/cp: how, for a journal like cultural anthropology, to weigh the democratizing against the anti-democratizing implications of going open access? the move to oa puts even more pressure on the journal to maintain its reputation as a producer of rigorously peer-reviewed articles by people at top-tier universities. meanwhile, 75 percent of instruction in u.s. universities (and in anthropology departments) is carried out by precarious laborers often without the time (or means) to produce the type of article that will be accepted by the journal. ck: this is an unacknowledged elephant in the room. i was at a scholarly publishing conference (publish or perish 2014, university of california, davis) recently where the issue of precarious labor, unionization, “alt-ac” positions, adjuncts, and the question of assessment and reward for non-traditional forms of faculty labor crept into every single panel, regardless of its official topic. administrators are still rewarding faculty—tenured or not—based on publications, and most are simply counting them. review committees fall back on publishing metrics and journal reputation, which drives scholars to be desperate for that “credentialing” article in a major journal. in reality, just over the horizon from the debates about open access, is the question of the casualization of academic labor—how is it affecting research quality? how is it changing the dynamics and demographics of what gets published? open access could never solve this problem (indeed, eric kansa [2014] recently titled a wonderful short article on this topic “it’s the neoliberalism, stupid!”). what open access can do is limited: if it is successful it might staunch some of the hemorrhaging of money to the largest publishers. right now, a significant chunk of change is leaving the system and we are not getting anything like an equivalent value in return for it. massive open online courses (moocs) also threaten to suck money out of the university system, as do the growing number of administrative positions created in order to deal with the fact that there are not enough faculty to share the burden of work required for oversight, audit, increasing enrollments, and decreasing public funding. much of what is driving this is what yochai benkler (forthcoming) recently referred to as the “tyranny of the margin”—the relentless competitive drive to seek out opportunities to lower costs or extract more value—primarily amongst actors just outside of the university: scholarly publishers, educational start-ups, pharmaceutical and engineering firms, etc. but if we could solve the problem of open access within the university—that is to say, prove that the economic equation of doing research, reviewing it, and making it freely available for everyone works, then we could prove that the tyranny of the margin need not operate everywhere. it is a daunting problem to be sure, and it’s something that everyone involved—administrators, tenured faculty, and precarious labor alike—is challenged to deal with. at a practical level, going oa actually opens up new opportunities—alongside that vaunted quality that is the core of what cultural anthropology provides, it is now possible to experiment with other kinds of content, other forms of validation that recognize diverse kinds of work, and perhaps a clearer, more transparent discussion of the labor of editors, reviewers, and others in the production of the journal and the research. major scholarly publishers are terrified of oa for exactly this reason: that it threatens their brand equity in both known and unforeseeable ways. on the one hand, a bit more competition and a bit less entrenched hierarchy is a good thing; on the other hand, we don’t really understand how value and quality work in academia, and so we should mess with the system as little as possible. small steps, deliberately chosen. ak: what is not being said about open access? if we map out the issues and perspectives that have become dominant in this conversation, what corners of the issue have been neglected? what are the possibilities and pitfalls of digital forms and infrastructure? sometimes i wonder if oa reinforces and reifies dominant modes of thought and practice on what is valuable production in the social sciences and humanities. what is our focus on oa forcing us to give up, or how might it be detracting us from other issues? ck: i think open access is quite conservative, to a large extent; but many of the folks in the scholarly publishing world are experimenting with more radical changes to the ecosystem—new forms of peer review, new forms of assessment and metrics, new forms of executable papers (e.g. papers with data, software, or other code in them that can be read or transformed by software). academic blogs are also an innovation of this sort—something that often has clear value to the discipline and community, but which has no clear home on a cv or merit-review form. similarly, i have been to a host of conferences recently with alternative formats, alternative products, and far wider accessibility than in the past. so i don’t think open access is necessarily reducing the amount of experiment in the world of publishing—but it is probably a kind of conservative mode, interested in preserving the quality and authoritativeness associated with the traditional article, but simply making it more accessible. you can see the tensions inherent in this in a lot of places—in the sciences, there is anxiety about reproducibility, conflict of interest, and the accessibility of both data and software code. in cultural anthropology and the humanities, the crisis is one of cultural authority, and as such has a much longer history and other dynamics at play. but the example i often use is this: the accessibility of our work is directly related to whether wikipedia is a high-quality resource for the billions of people who now rely on it. if our work is hidden inside the university, then it will only seep out in tiny amounts to the most persistent seekers. but if it’s on display to the world with no barriers, it becomes something that not only our peers might cite, but lots of other people might come to rely on, refer to, or argue with. for many kinds of articles, that will not be relevant—but for a few, it can make the difference in how debate is conducted in public. so i think that we have a duty to maintain that authoritativeness in whatever ways we can—and it is not just peer review, it’s the hard work of the editors of the journals as well; it’s the commitment of the authors to revising and improving their work; and it’s the job of scholarly publishers to get that work out in front of people, make it easy to find, and easy to connect up with the massive network of other scholarship and ideas that we have created. if achieving open access gets in the way of maintaining or improving the quality and authoritativeness of our work, then that is a problem, and we should be on guard against it. but the fact that it is conservative won’t stop other people from experimenting with more radical forms of scholarly production. ak: do you think the digital publishing forms and infrastructures that emerged over the last decade have the potential to shift the culture of scholarly communication? where do you see this happening, and what more is needed to intervene in the entrenched practices i describe above? ck: entrenched practices are definitely changing in some disciplines more than in others. in biology, for instance, and for some biological anthropologists and archaeologists, the changing data landscape is opening up new opportunities for collaboration, new kinds of research, different forms of demonstration and experiment, and so on. for cultural anthropology, i think the issues have more to do with how we associate with each other and how we debate and discuss our work. for a lot of graduate students today, the department and the scholarly society are only two possible forums within which debate and pedagogy around research questions are happening. i am not sure those of my generation or older are completely aware of what is happening, and the younger generation doesn’t understand what the implications are. but consider that a great deal of debate and discussion is happening on blogs, social networking sites devoted to anthropology, and in new forms of interdisciplinary spaces beyond traditional departments and societies. the forms of communication, practice, and research valorized in those new forums are not governed by the departments or the scholarly societies anymore, which used to do so simply by virtue of being the only places to gather. as a result, there is a kind of crisis of authority—the places that traditionally validate work (by admitting and advising students, by hosting conferences, workshops, giving prizes, etc.) are now supplemented by an unregulated array of competing alternatives. my sense is that established academics look on this with a mixture of patronizing interest and a vague, inarticulate terror. on the other hand, younger academics are the proverbial kids in a candy shop—excited about everything, amazed and enthused about the possibilities for change, but with perhaps little appreciation for the continuity that builds academic and disciplinary solidarity around problems and approaches. how can this situation not change the nature of scholarly communication? indeed, how can it not change the meaning of disciplinary research itself? it is not that things aren’t changing, or aren’t changing fast enough, but that there is the potential for a fragmentation and dissolution of the authority and quality associated with traditional practices. there is danger in assimilating this change to technology, when it is also a generational one—involving a retiring generation that saw the discipline completely transformed in a matter of decades (i am thinking of the 1970s–1980s challenges to anthropology), a middle generation dealing with the reconstruction of the discipline, and a new generation at home with not just new technology but interdisciplinarity and an increasingly naturalized precarity. disentangling these things is not easy. ak: open access is commonly understood to be about use and access for readers, but at this point, these issues—access and use—seem secondary to me, subsumed by the political economy of scholarly publishing, the (undervalued) position of university libraries, and innovations in software and information science. i think most conversations about oa reproduce certain logics, interests, and concerns, but there is a lot more we can say about oa, i think, and i wonder what it says about the contemporary moment? ck: i completely concur here—much of my activism around open access has very little to do with what i perceive to be as dead obvious: academics want their work to be more available than it is—and much more to do with the broken economy of scholarly publishing that prevents this in the first place. i frequently find myself frustrated that the conversation circulates back to petty concerns about individual academics’ rights or anxieties about copyright ownership when there is so clearly a larger system in need of diagnosis. why aren’t we better, as anthropologists with a clear reflexive sensibility, at diagnosing the structural, organizational, and economic conditions that make open access seem necessary? this circles back to charlie and anne’s questions above about precarious academic labor, as well as to a more general question about the changing political economy of the institutions of academia. in the case of the former, oa doesn’t address the problem of the (suffer a bit of marx here) proletarianization of the academic labor force that is happening at a large scale. in fact, in deflects interest toward a very specific component of that: intellectual property rights in our articles. what good, though, is it for adjunct faculty members to own the copyright in the articles they write when they can barely cobble together enough shamefully underpaid teaching gigs to reach the poverty line? this leaves no time for what actually makes an article valuable—time to do research, a network of people with time to read and assess each other’s work, an infrastructure that supports that activity rather than relentlessly chipping away at it, and so on. what oa can help diagnose is that at least some of the money leaving the university is going to scholarly publishers, and they are very good at finding ways to get more of it. open access does not necessarily stop this money from leaving though, it just insists on finding ways to get a better value for it—namely, better services and guaranteed free accessibility for readers and authors alike. libraries get this, and have gotten it for years—they are the true leaders in oa—but they aren’t very good at painting this larger political economic picture for the faculty and students they serve. we need a better diagnosis of the big picture, not just the library’s perspective on the economic harms of publishing. indeed, in the political economy of our institutions, open access is one issue among many—the growth and mission creep of institutional review boards, compliance offices, and other forms of audit; the (expensive) need for universities to more aggressively defend themselves from politically motivated public records requests; the growth in the administration of diversity initiatives (at least in california, thanks to proposition 209, this has meant the proliferation of administrative programs designed to get around that law to address the admirable, but expensive, goal of increasing diversity); the increase in the number and requirements for course evaluations by students; immense time and energy spent in the accreditation and review of programs by external groups; the new fashion (and the third in my memory) for online courses, distance education or moocs; the administration of benefits … the list goes on and on, and each of these necessitates either the creation or expansion of the administration or more involvement by already overcommitted faculty members. what is clearly not expanding in any rational way is the research infrastructure, which grows only through federal research funds, foundations, and privately donated money. so i’m not sure people should look to open access as anything other than a solution to a specific subset of problems—but if you pay attention to it, it certainly gives you a terrifying look into the machinery of this system, and the political economy of the university today. te: from your experience with projects such as connexions, arc (the anthropological research on the contemporary), and limn, in what ways are new publishing infrastructures (platforms, editors, automated document markup, etc.) sufficient or insufficient to replace human labor? what kind of labor can be automated and what requires human judgment? how has the automation boundary been arranged or pushed in different directions in the projects you have been involved with? do (or did) these arrangements affect the success or modifiability of the projects? ck: it’s interesting, i’ve never really thought of these projects as a trade-off between human and automated labor—that seems very 1960s in some ways. but it is a perceptive way to put the question—what is being automated by the internet is the labor of distribution and circulation of content, the labor of association, indexing, or correlation and to a lesser extent, the labor of promoting or marketing it. if that is true, then various forms of labor remain central: authorship, judgment, review, curation, design, evaluation. there are aspects of automaticity that are clearly of interest to anthropologists today—i am thinking of the vogue for machine learning, recommendation algorithms, and the general spread of software that automates aspects of our work, often without our recognizing that it does so—how is this changing what happens to scholarship, if at all? each of the three projects you mention teach something different about this. connexions taught me that even if you build a really awesome technological system that completely blows your mind—and i still think it does this—it will mean nothing in a context where people are not looking for a mind-blowingly different way of creating what is essentially a textbook.1 if academics are content to write and teach in the way they always have, and if students are not really agitated about doing it differently, then there really isn’t any way around that inertia. connexions, like a lot of technological projects, was too proleptic and not diagnostic enough: it imagined a world in which all sorts of problems were solved: automated markup, easily transformed documents, remixability of content, a centralized repository of freely available teaching modules. but these weren’t (and perhaps still aren’t) the problems most teachers face. ask the folks at hewlett, sloan, or other foundations spending loads of money on education—it is not clear that open educational resources solved a problem that people were having, even though we can all agree how awesome the solution is. the anthropological research on the contemporary (arc) research collaboratory, on the other hand, was a bizarre experiment in the limitations of the purportedly limitless new tools of social media, publishing, the internet. it too was proleptic in its imagination of a world in which conceptual work,2 collaboration, and the pursuit of research could be radically transformed. in reality, the result of that experiment was that it is expensive, time-consuming, and hard to achieve such transformations, and that collaboration is a fragile object, difficult to maintain without the active work of the people involved. arc mirrored other attempts to recreate a research infrastructure outside of the broken political economy of the university—blogs, social networks devoted to anthropology, etc.—but that fragility made it unsustainable outside of its otherwise stable locus at the university of california, berkeley. limn was a kind of response to the fragility of internet-mediated collaboration—and indeed on the surface it might look like a reactionary one—it is a print magazine and could appear quite conventional.3 but both the style of work it enables and the technologies it employs speak to the changing nature of how we can engage in scholarly communication today. limn creates a growing network of authors, an editorial process that juxtaposes different forms of research, or finds conceptual connections across them and tries to display that—something that the journal model cannot do except in the case of a special issue. it communicates large research projects (the kind generally destined to appear in a book after a few years) in a short, accessible, and timely manner—not dissimilar to the reasoning behind the scientific research article, which is rarely more than a glimpse into a larger research project or experimental system. technically, limn takes advantage of an array of services that are free or very cheap, especially at small scale—something that mirrors the general trends coming out of it and software innovation focused on redesigning the infrastructure of organizations. tools for publishing print versions, for managing subscribers, for spamming people (excuse me, i mean marketing), for keeping amazingly detailed data (thank you nsa + google), for managing a workflow, for paying and being paid—all these tools are easy and cheap today, begging the question of why scholarly publishers all insist that publishing is so expensive. it isn’t. don’t believe anyone who tells you it is. it is, however, extremely time-consuming to do well—and if your time is money (as it is for editors, designers, photographers, illustrators, copyeditors, etc.), then it can be expensive. but scholarly publishers do not employ those people—they just expect academics to do all that labor. so limn does pay, and we pay people a living wage, and we are always asking for more money from universities, foundations, and others to do so. te: from my understanding of your work and that of others on different copyright regimes in scholarship, the focus is authorship and the remixing of the products of authors. can you say something about work for hire: the product of authors whose legal authorship is subsumed by the hiring institution? this seems to me to have a direct bearing on the current situation of free software, as you discuss in your work. does the success of open source/access rest on a particular legal arrangement within institutions such as universities? if work for hire is an ascendant relationship between authors/coders and the institutions that fill their stomachs, does this point to an important limit of alternative copyright regimes like creative commons? ck: this is a great question, but i actually think that work for hire is not ascendant—at least the narrow legal version enshrined in copyright law—at universities. to give a concrete example, consider the university of california. the work of people at uc is governed differently if patents or copyrights are concerned. in the world of patents, everything is basically conceived of as work for hire, and there is very little room for individuals to control what they invent unless they do so outside of the university. but in terms of copyright, work for hire is limited to a pretty narrow band of staff members. faculty—both tenured and not—and academic appointees of all sorts usually own their copyrights and have the flexibility to do what they want. students are a funny, fuzzy category, but for the most part, universities default to a position that privileges academic freedom and the rights of individual authors. so, actually: yes, oa depends on a very particular regime in place in our universities—one that has forsaken the challenge of exploiting copyright in favor of exploiting patent. copyright is not worth the trouble for most universities. ironically, this state of affairs came about because in the 1970s and 1980s, universities started to insist that their presses become independent centers of profit, which they often did, if only in a minor key. as a result, copyright became a profit center for quasi-independent university presses and their competitors, independent scholarly publishers. academics fed this system by systematically signing over their copyrights to these entities, and universities fed it indirectly by writing copyright policies that either encouraged this transfer of rights or implicitly gave up on trying to retain or negotiate those rights. so quite ironically, if universities had in the past taken a more aggressive stand and insisted that everything we did was work for hire, then they might now be in a much stronger position to insist on the availability of that work. as it stands, the fact that most academics own their own copyrights means that it is that much easier for publishers to demand that they hand them over. it is also the reason why open-access policies take the form they do today, which is to say, it has created the need for academics to collectively reserve non-exclusive rights in their publications, rather than handing them over to the publishers completely. a different answer to your question, however, concerns open-source software. here, indeed, there is far more work for hire today than in the past, but this is only because corporations have embraced open source. so now, if you have a nice, cushy, paying job at google, facebook, or any other firm where open source is embraced, the work you do is both initiated by and owned by your employer—but because it’s open source, you can go to a different firm and work on the same thing, rather than having to reinvent the wheel. you may not be able to determine what you work on or when, which was one of the original purported advantages of open source (voluntary task choice increases engagement), but you at least can be certain that it won’t be boxed up and disappeared by your employer, and that you will get a certain kind of credit for it because your name will likely be associated with it. again, not true in the case of patents. for cultural anthropologists this is likely irrelevant—but for biologists, physicists, engineers, and others, the ability to do the same thing with software, code, or other modular reusable research outputs is essential (we move universities all the time, we want to take our work with us), and so the liberal copyright regime in place actually facilitates that for the most part. ck: if i had to ask myself a question about open access today, it would be this: is it working? is it obvious that scholarship should be openly accessible, and how do we know that this is the right way to orient power and knowledge? ck: a lot of people harbor this concern—it is actually quite easy to find critiques of the ideology of openness today, and they become more intense the closer one gets to silicon valley. but i find that they are never clearly articulated—they tend to devolve into accusations of libertarianism or misrecognition of some kind. but it is a concern. in science studies, for instance, it is routine to criticize the separation of science and society—anything that appears to maintain or reinsert the divide between science and politics is treated as suspicious. openness does just this—it suggests that by making everything open and accessible, politics and science can operate properly—nothing can be deliberately hidden from view or obscured, and the open circulation of scientific knowledge will allow politics to operate without distortion, restoring balance and order to the operation of science, on one side, and society, on the other. but to my mind, this focus on the open in open access misses the point, and i think our discussion here has really identified a different set of problems related to the political economy of the university, the state of precarity in academia, the problem of making work authoritative and high quality, etc. these things have to do with freedom, with money and power, and with the still-political process of producing knowledge. open access is best seen not as a solution to some problem, or as a utopian desire for a perfectly open scholarly record, but as a tool for remaking the environment of scholarship in a very particular, albeit limited way. i think such politics occur through the making of university policy, the crafting of organizational relationships, the creation of software and new communications tools, as well as through critical discourse itself, and as long as open access is perceived that way—and not as some universal libertarian panacea—then i think it is changing things. what we do with those changes is up for grabs. notes 1. connexions is an early attempt to apply open source to scholarly textbooks by encouraging the creation of modular open educational resources. see http://cnx.org and https://openstaxcollege.org/. 2. arc was and remains paul rabinow’s project, beginning in roughly 2006, and emerging out of innovative ideas for rethinking graduate pedagogy in anthropology. it is partially documented in rabinow 2013. 3. limn (http://limn.it) is a scholarly magazine that is published as an open-access online publication, but also as a nicely designed print version costing between $10 and $15. it draws material from networks of experts in the social and human sciences and is intended to be timely, diverse in perspective, authoritative, well written, and beautifully designed. the focus is on contemporary problems in our global, politically interconnected, technologically intense culture: problems of infrastructure, ecological vulnerability, economic interdependence, and relentless technological invention. references benkler, yochai forthcoming “peer production and cooperation.” in handbook on the economics of the internet, edited by j. m. bauer and m. latzer. cheltenham and northampton: edward elgar. kansa, eric 2014 “it’s the neoliberalism, stupid: why instrumentalist arguments for open access, open data, and open science are not enough.” impact blog, impact of social science project, london school of economics and political science, january 27. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/27/its-the-neoliberalism-stupid-kansa. rabinow, paul 2013 the accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. chicago: university of chicago press. theorizing refusal theorizing refusal: an introduction carole mcgranahan university of colorado boulder http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5187-4769 to refuse is to say no. but, no, it is not just that. to refuse can be generative and strategic, a deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. refusals illuminate limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions. and yet, refusal cannot be cast merely as a response to authority, or an updated version of resistance, or a concept to subsume under already existing scholarly categories. instead, the contributors to this openings collection find refusal to be about the social as much as the political, to be a concept in dialogue with exchange and equality. in the gift, marcel mauss (1967) discusses refusal as the cutting of social relations, or in some instances as the raising anew of obligations and rituals. we seek to theorize refusal in this collection as concept to both think with and think about. we approach refusal as ethnographic subject and mode, recognizing each as making its own set of moral claims, including claims about how we receive, make sense of, and present (or not) ethnographic worlds. yet why the concept of refusal now? why not just use the term resistance (see theodossopoulos 2014)? a quarter of a century ago, lila abu-lughod (1990, 41) wrote of how the concept of resistance enabled a more complex recognition and theorization of “the nature and forms of domination.” we now feel a similar need to recognize and theorize refusal as an element of social and political relations, and to do so in ethnographically specific contexts, rather than positing an a priori landscape of domination and resistance. in our research, we collectively find refusals of both formal and everyday relations, including between claimed equals, in ways that redirect levels of engagement. we see individuals and collectives refusing affiliations, identities, and relationships in ways that are not about domination or class struggle (scott 1985; sivaramakrishnan 2005), but instead about staking claims to the sociality that underlies all relationships, including political ones. in that sense, we see refusal as genealogically linked to resistance, but not as one and the same. we can also see refusal in earlier or other concepts in anthropology. certainly refusal can be part of inclusions and exclusions, of self/other distinctions, and of the categorical and material denials generated in the wake of such divisions. we might also consider creative refusal on the scale of world history in rethinking cultures as “not just ways of being and acting in the world, but [as] active political projects which often operate by the explicit rejection of other ones” (graeber 2013, 1). refusal is often a part of political action, of movements for decolonization and self-determination, for rights and recognition, for rejecting specific structures and systems. or refusal can be of politics itself, as in the case of médicins sans frontières, which articulates refusal as both troubled conscience and rejection of status quo conditions and apologies (redfield 2005, 2013). refusal marks the point of a limit having been reached: we refuse to continue on this way. we can also find refusal in refutations of theoretical models, decisions to withhold rather than share certain data by anthropologists and subjects alike, refusals of certain types of funding, and, of course, the realities of being refused, denied, and rejected as an expected part of academia. is refusal negative? at times it might be. in her article “resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal,” sherry ortner (1995, 187–88) posed ethnography as the solution to what she saw as thinness in interdisciplinary resistance studies. specifically, she argued against “a kind of bizarre refusal to know and speak and write of the lived worlds inhabited by those who resist.” an ethnographic approach, she argued, would enable an understanding of “the internal politics of dominated groups . . . the cultural richness of those groups . . . [and] the subjectivity—the intentions, desires, fears, projects—of the actors engaged in these dramas” (ortner 1995, 190). this was to write against a sort of 1990s academic politics in calling for attention to practice and contradiction as opposed to a privileging of discourse or text. this was to make a case for ethnographic knowledge as unique, and for our understanding of certain types of social worlds as incomplete without it. we now find ourselves in a different time, engaging with a different sort of ethnographic refusal, a time in which interpretive refusal might actually illuminate ethnography rather than flatten it (simpson 2007, 2014; see also tallbear 2013). predecessors to the current moment were earlier ethnographic writings on violence, including refusals to write, narrate, or interpret pain (e.g., daniel 1996; das 1995, 2006; visweswaran 1994). in her recent book mohawk interruptus, audra simpson (2014, 107) considers how refusal and disengagement structure possibilities, as well as produce subjects, histories, and politics. she writes of refusal as shedding light on something we’ve missed: “there was something that seemed to reveal itself at the point of refusal—a stance, a principle, a historical narrative, and an enjoyment in the reveal.” refusal appears in her scholarship as both subject and method. it is the story of kahnawà:ke mohawk refusals of canadian and u.s. state sovereignty, along with their histories of being refused by both governments. it is also a political and methodological stance presented as an accounting, a cartography, an analytical strategy, and a writing style. our collective of scholars writing on refusal for cultural anthropology includes audra simpson, and it also builds on her work. ethnographic object, historical possibility, methodological form—refusal occupies a vast swath of conceptual ground. in this openings collection we offer four theses on refusal. these theses are not discrete, but instead blur and blend into one another despite being generated out of four distinct cases—military refusal in israel, vaccine refusal in the united states, citizenship refusal by tibetan refugees in south asia, and ethnographic refusals by kahnawà:ke mohawks in north america. erica weiss’s (2014, 2) scholarship centers on israeli conscientious objectors, whose refusal of military service challenges state primacy in the political sphere as well as liberal ideas about rights, and posits “the palestinian other [as] the ethical object of refusal.” in elisa sobo’s (2015) work, the objects of refusal are pediatric vaccines, refused or delayed by highly educated parents acting in socially valued and legitimated, responsible ways for their children. questions about individual rights and broader society present in both weiss’s and sobo’s research also arise for tibetan refugees in debates over citizenship. my research on tibetans’ refusal of citizenship in india and nepal since 1959 asks how we might see this not merely as a form of resistance or lack but also as an insistence on a certain sort of grounding in the world. audra simpson’s (2007, 78) signature contribution is the idea that people’s refusals, a community’s refusals, are theoretically and methodologically generative, or that ethnography “can both refuse and also take up refusal in generative ways.” our theses sketch out four of them: refusal is generative. refusal might be thought of as a stoppage, an end to something, the breaking of relations. and it might be just this. however, the ending of one thing is often the generation of something new. this creative, productive aspect is evident in each of the four essays in this collection. in erica weiss’s contribution, for example, she differentiates between the publicly declared refusal of military service in israel and silent, private refusal. classifying private refusal as abstention from rather than engagement with the state, weiss argues that refusal as a form of abstention forges a new kind of political space, one that bypasses the state. seeing refusal as generative moves away from default negative connotations into spaces that might be more social than antisocial. refusal is social and affiliative. what does refusal create? in both my and elisa sobo’s essays, refusal produces or reproduces community. i argue that tibetan refugees forge community in exile by refusing citizenship, collectively staking a political claim to tibet rather than formally planting roots in india or nepal. this suggests belonging as a refiguring of community, a conceptual partner to refusal’s role in animating sociality among vaccine-cautious parents in california. in her study of pediatric vaccine practices in a waldorf (steiner) school, sobo finds that refusal cements social relations, enabling new and meaningful affiliations among parents. these parents demonstrate a shared belief that they are making the best, most responsible decisions for their children’s health. this choice concerns insistence, not resistance. refusal is not another word for resistance. we are not lacking anthropological critiques of scholarship on resistance (e.g., abu-lughod 1990; ortner 1995; sahlins 1999; seymour 2006), and yet a theorizing of refusal does not constitute a revamping of resistance to accommodate critique. instead, refusal is a critique. in audra simpson’s essay, it is the revenge of consent. approaching kahnawà:ke mohawk refusals as both stance and theory of the political, simpson argues that available concepts of resistance or recognition remain insufficient in that they often overestimate the place of the state. refusal as revenge, then, rejects external state and institutional structures. for the kahnawà:ke mohawk this can be to call forward “the prior,” that is, all that preceded, and desires now to succeed, settler colonialism. this stance challenges the presumption and enactment of inequity in, for example, state-society relations. if resistance involves consciously defying or opposing superiors “in a context of differential power relationships” (seymour 2006, 305), then refusal rejects this hierarchical relationship, repositing the relationship as one configured altogether differently. each of our four essays moves in this direction, refiguring social and political relations as an aspirational move toward change. refusal is hopeful, refusal is willful. refusal is insistence on the possible over the probable, and thus in isabelle stengers’s terms, is aligned with hope. as she explains in an interview with mary zournazi (2002, 245), “if we follow probability there is no hope, just a calculated anticipation authorized by the world as it is.” hope combines with will to refuse authorized anticipations, thus moving away from the probable into the possible. the willful aspect of refusal brings us back to transformation and generation, to the possibility of acting to spark change. for tibetan refugees in india and nepal, this means belief in the possibility of returning to a tibet no longer ruled by china. or, for parents who refuse pediatric vaccines, it is the insistence that this decision will keep their children healthy. as with those who abstain from performing state-endorsed expectations of public military refusal in israel, these acts of willfulness generate both political alternatives and ethical critiques. together these four essays work toward opening new theoretical conversations on refusal. the current political moment demands it. as we find our bearings in the present, it is clear that social and political terrains have shifted for many around the world. occupy. black lives matter. idle no more. the umbrella movement. the sunflower student movement. the bds movement. 350.org. decolonizing the academy. the list could go on and on. the list does go on and on. if refusal is continually appearing in the present moment as creative and potent, then our job is to consider how and why. we invite you to join us in the work of thinking through refusal as ethnographic concept and practice. acknowledgments thank you to my collaborators in this openings collection—audra simpson, elisa sobo, and erica weiss. opportunities to think and write side by side are too infrequent in our discipline, and thus our sharing, reading, and commenting on each other’s drafts as part of this joint project was invaluable, and a real intellectual pleasure. thank you also to the cultural anthropology editorial collective for the invitation to theorize refusal here, and to dominic boyer and the stellar anonymous reviewers for astute critiques and suggestions for this introduction. references abu-lughod, lila 1990 “the romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through bedouin women.” american ethnologist 17, no. 1: 41–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1990.17.1.02a00030. daniel, e. valentine 1996 charred lullabies: chapters in an anthropography of violence. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. das, veena 1995 critical events: an anthropological perspective on contemporary india. delhi: oxford university press. 2006 life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. berkeley: university of california press. graeber, david 2013 “culture as creative refusal.” cambridge journal of anthropology 31, no. 2: 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ca.2013.310201. mauss, marcel 1967 the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. translated by ian cunnison. new york: w. w. norton. originally published in 1925. ortner, sherry b. 1995 “resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal.” comparative studies in society and history 37, no. 1: 173–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500019587. redfield, peter 2005 “doctors, borders, and life in crisis.” cultural anthropology 20, no. 3: 328–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.3.328. 2013 life in crisis: the ethical journey of doctors without borders. berkeley: university of california press. sahlins, marshall 1999 “what is anthropological enlightenment? some lessons of the twentieth century.” annual review of anthropology 28: i–xxiii. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.28.1.0. scott, james c. 1985 weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven, conn.: yale university press. seymour, susan 2006 “resistance.” anthropological theory 6, no. 3: 303–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499606066890. simpson, audra 2007 “ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue, no. 9: 67–80. http://junctures.org/index.php/junctures/issue/view/11/showtoc. 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sivaramakrishnan, k. 2005 “some intellectual genealogies for the concept of everyday resistance.” american anthropologist 107, no. 3: 346–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.3.346. sobo, elisa j. 2015 “social cultivation of vaccine refusal and delay among waldorf (steiner) school parents.” medical anthropology quarterly 29, no. 3: 381–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/maq.12214. tall bear, kim 2013 native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. theodossopoulos, dimitrios 2014 “on de-pathologizing resistance.” history and anthropology 25, no. 4: 415–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2014.933101. visweswaran, kamala 1994 fictions of feminist ethnography. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. weiss, erica 2014 conscientious objectors in israel: citizenship, sacrifice, trials of fealty. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. zournazi, mary, with isabelle stengers 2002 “a ‘cosmo-politics’—risk, hope, change.” in hope: new philosophies for change, edited by mary zournazi, 244–72. annandale, australia: pluto press australia. making art from uncertainty making art from uncertainty: magic and its politics in south african rugby joshua d. rubin bates college in 1986, the historian herman giliomee, working in collaboration with the rugby player tommy bedford, published an essay in die suid-afrikaan exploring the ideological similarities between south africa’s predominant rugby style and the political style of the ruling national party. writing during the country’s so-called state of emergency, the seeming fact that the apartheid state responded to south africa’s international isolation with increasingly conservative positions troubled the authors. could the same, they wondered, be said about the nation’s rugby? “in south africa,” they decided, “the whole approach is: there is a crisis; we cannot take any chances, [we must] be disciplined, [and] follow the authority figure. this is how we operate our politics, this is how we play our rugby” (bedford and giliomee 1986, 56). though they offered their answer tongue in cheek, it did claim an explicit connection between the performance of rugby and the performance of politics in apartheid south africa. in this claim, the authors were hardly alone. a number of scholars have noted that, while the sport of rugby may have arrived in southern africa as a british colonial practice, it quickly became a preferred (even privileged) avenue of expression for the white, male, afrikaner identity characteristic of the apartheid regime. multiple social institutions produced and confirmed this association, including the country’s segregated educational system, its military, police, and correctional services, and the dutch reformed church (coetzee 1988; grundlingh 1994; holdstock 1990; morrell 2001). if many state-sanctioned rugby teams in south africa adhered to the mandate to “follow the authority figure,” then the young men who played on these teams encountered this approach both on and off the field. this passage from bedford and giliomee, however, includes a second connection—arguably more provocative than the first—between rugby and politics. on both sides of the authors’ formulation, the condition demanding conservative response is “crisis.” for the apartheid regime in the 1980s, the sociopolitical crisis was clear: the state faced opposition, violent and nonviolent, from groups both within south africa and beyond its borders. the call to make south africa “ungovernable,” issued by the african national congress in 1984, meant to produce precisely this condition. the source of rugby’s crisis, in contrast, goes unarticulated. what produced rugby’s crisis situation? what new analytical possibilities emerge if we explore the crisis that rugby seemed to entail? with such questions in mind, this essay argues that rugby’s crisis emerges not from any particular moment of play or opponent on the field, but from conditions inherent to the sport itself. the actual performance of rugby, as participants well know, is marked less by certainty and deliberative action than by unpredictability and spontaneous responses to rapidly changing circumstances.1 players, coaches, and teams must negotiate this unpredictability if they wish to participate at all, and these negotiations grant the sport the capacity to influence the world around it, shaping possibilities and entering into existing political conversations with its own voice. with this dialectic in mind, i draw inspiration from the writings of claude lévi-strauss and franz boas, as well as from theodor adorno’s reconsideration of walter benjamin’s famous notion of artistic aura, and propose that we can describe rugby’s inherent crisis in just these terms: art and aura. if rugby does elevate unpredictability as its defining structural principle, then unpredictability can likewise be reframed as the sport’s unique aesthetic problem, one with which all parties involved must contend. by opening this small space of uncertainty, i therefore suggest, we can gain insight into not only the political salience of rugby in apartheid and post-apartheid south africa but also into how we might theorize sports in relation to other forms of creative expression. in particular, this perspective shows that rugby’s layering of unpredictable instant atop unpredictable instant produces not only occasions for violence and injury in south africa but moments of magic thick with political significance as well. *** nominally representing the city of pretoria and northern gauteng province in south africa’s professional rugby geography, one team—called the bulls—has gained a reputation for playing what in afrikaans is termed maak vas (perhaps best translated as “secure,” implying both safety and tightness). this sort of rugby is premised on a strategy of efficient organization and physical dominance, and the coaches have composed strategic sequences of action, called patterns, to guide their teams. all bulls players are expected to learn these coordinated actions designed to be equally useful on all parts of the field. within a given pattern, the player holding the ball can choose between two or three preconceived options, but the strategy discourages breaking from the pattern and trying something completely new. coaches deem such off-the-cuff actions problematic because the team will struggle to organize itself into a functional whole if its members operate independently. plus, one particular coach added, a prepared action is inherently superior to a spontaneous reaction, because prepared actions allow players to anticipate the future movements of their teammates. with this knowledge in hand, a player can act more decisively than one who must recognize and accommodate a teammate’s independent decision. in response to the spontaneous, unprecedented situations that rugby continually offers up, then, bulls players are instructed to respond with safe, predictable actions. in addition, when a team chooses to run tightly controlled patterns, novelty becomes damaging. teammates do not expect spontaneity from each other, so that which surprises the opposition also surprises one’s teammates, perhaps even more. as a result, once an organization has embraced patterns and dominance, it effectively forecloses all other styles of play. maak vas perpetuates itself. this commitment to patterns manifests in every bulls practice. indeed, this is necessarily the case, because this strategy requires the team to run its patterns as perfectly as possible. players spend the majority of their field sessions performing a very small range of tasks over and over again. they practice their patterns repeatedly, running into teammates holding cushioned bags, so that they can identify and eliminate errors in form. this kind of repetitive action, coupled with the recruitment of players considered well prepared (physically and mentally) for this particular strategy, seeks to school players in coordination. it is no coincidence, then, that the words bulls players and management use most regularly to describe their style include dominant, precise, and structured. one coach told me bluntly that the bulls attempted to “control everything,” and that “people know it’s coming but it’s how we execute that makes the difference. with the bulls we dictate. if our opponents try to play [a free-flowing] game, we kill it and bring it back to our style.” another coach, who spent much of his rugby career as a bulls player, refers to his players as masjiene, machines. this description of players as machines may be more significant than the coach intended. the bulls management feels confident that its strategy, properly executed, will reliably produce identical results. they assume this to be the case not only at the level of the final result, but in every discrete action on the field as well. the same sequence of patterns, run on different fields against different opponents in different weather conditions, should nevertheless look and unfold identically. the players are expected, in effect, to train and perform mechanically with the hope of someday becoming (literally) automatic. though spontaneous actions may seem like problematic thorns in the hooves of the bulls, professional rugby matches have become so tightly contested that spontaneity can prove vital to success. teams no longer play five to ten matches each year, but twenty to thirty. each is televised and all are immediately dissolved into statistics, allowing teams to analyze each other for their tendencies. if the bulls introduce any sort of innovation, all their future opponents will have recognized and prepared for it within a matter of days, quickly negating its advantage. in this competitive environment, the tiniest errors grow in significance, because unexpected opportunities arise in the moments immediately following those errors. one bulls coach recalled such a situation, describing how an opposing player made a mistake and “suddenly the whole field was open.” this phrase captures something of the power of the surprising creation of possibility out of nothingness that makes uncertain moments so crucial. in response to such open situations, the bulls coaches have concocted a special strategy that (temporarily) permits their players to make their own spontaneous decisions. they call this strategy “magic.” this term, articulated by a team that wants to produce masjiene, is significant. it indicates that the bulls could do everything perfectly, control the game entirely, but that a window of possibility inevitably remains. the right player, with the right skills, in the right situation, and equipped with every additional qualifier, can still take a moment of rugby and build something incredible and improbable out of it. as alfred gell’s work suggests, this notion of magic is hardly unique to this particular south african rugby team. considering gardening as a technical activity, gell (1992, 57) writes, “the idea of magic as an accompaniment to uncertainty does not mean that it is opposed to knowledge, i.e. that where there is knowledge there is no uncertainty, and hence no magic. on the contrary, what is uncertain is not the world but the knowledge we have about it. one way or another, [the garden] is going to turn out as it turns out; our problem is that we don’t yet know how that will be.” rugby will likewise “turn out,” and the bulls find magic only in the precise instant when that turning out escapes their grip.2 when the bulls acknowledge magic in these moments, they give a name to the same element of rugby that bedford and giliomee termed a “crisis” at the beginning of this essay. magic, in effect, is how they respond to rugby’s inherent uncertainty—its capacity to act on them, to shape them, and to disrupt their plans.3 in these respects, magic shares a fundamental similarity with theodor adorno’s definition of artistic aura. unlike walter benjamin (2003, 253), who found aura in an artwork’s unique physical existence and in its singular movement through history, adorno (1997, 33) argued that aura emerges during the process of the artwork’s making, when it first forces us to distinguish between itself and our seeing of it (see also buck-morss 1977, 154). in a western european artistic tradition, this constitutes the point when an artwork begins to take shape as a monad distinct from its creator. artworks may be human-made objects, but they are also, as fredric jameson (2007, 204) has noted, uniquely blind to the world. they are blind, he writes, “both because we see [them as objects] and because [they] cannot look back at us, or indeed out at any empirical reality.” as such, they stand in defiance to our gaze (cf. taussig 1993, 265n9; buck-morss 1989, 194), demanding a measure of autonomy as social and historical productions. we can feel something of this defiance in singular pieces of material art (such as paintings and sculpture), but it is perhaps even more apparent in works recreated from a template (such as a theatrical script or a score), because we can watch as aura transforms these templates into something discrete and new in every performance. this is what adorno (1997, 79) means when he writes, “artworks have the immanent character of being an act.” howard becker (1984, 302) has put this situation even more clearly when he observed, “similar artworks also have differences: no two play performances are alike, and they may have different characters as a result”; “ignoring the changes does not mean that they do not persist.” paintings and dramatic performances are united in their ability to exhibit themselves with the suddenness of an act—that is, with the suddenness of their coming into existence—whether that act appears in a congealed form (as in a painting) or in an apparently immediate one (as in drama). this openness and contingency of objectification for adorno (2007a, 41) protects a live beethoven symphony from appropriation (see also bernstein 2001, 115). once the openness of artistic production can be repeated over and over mechanically, however, artworks “become vulgarized” (adorno 2007a: 40). mechanical reproduction destroys the artwork’s aura; the act loses its immediacy. given the similarity between this conception of aura and the bulls’ notion of magic, it is no surprise that adorno’s pessimistic reading of mechanical reproduction captures well the political dimensions of the bulls’ postmatch video sessions. in such sessions, coaches call to account players who deviated from an expected sequence of play. a coach will often play the footage of an error through to the end and then show it again, pausing just before the spontaneous decision was made. this freezing of time is designed to reproduce the feeling of possibility in the instant of its emergence, and the player is expected to justify his actions to his coach and teammates. generally, of course, the player will have no ready response (because he, and everyone else, realized his impulsive choice as a mistake moments after he made it), and he will sit back in his chair, chastened. in this way, and with the aid of increasingly precise video technology, coaches can both police mistakes and splice successful sequences of play into new fantasy performances that offer glimpses of a fully realized maak vas script. while it might be tempting to analyze these video sessions, and the bulls’ response to magic, in terms of rugby’s increasing professionalization, bedford and giliomee’s observations invite a more nuanced argument. rugby union only became an officially professional sport in 1995, but the bulls have played some variation of maak vas strategy since the early 1960s. then known as the northern transvaal rugby union (ntru), the team drew its players on an invitation-only basis from the strongest amateur clubs in and around pretoria. until the early 1990s, three of the most consistently successful clubs in the region were the army, the police, and the correctional services. given that the apartheid state required a massive police, military, and prison system to keep its policies afloat, the strength of these teams during this period is not surprising. not only did these teams provide the ntru with many of its most famous players; they also shaped its response to the sport’s uncertainty. following the institution in 1967 of two years of mandatory military service for white males over the age of eighteen, and even more so after the declaration of a state of emergency in 1985, potential players flooded these clubs. high schools from around the country sent young white men to pretoria for training, and those talented at rugby often received preferential treatment from their superiors. as more than one former soldier-cum-rugby player told me, the most skilled players in the army were never sent to south africa’s border for active duty, and few players left base at all. in one often-repeated story, a veteran player approached the coach of the ntru in the 1970s, a brigadier general in the police named buurman van zyl, to tell him that he planned to retire from rugby. van zyl listened to the player’s story and, when he had finished, responded with a question: “do you want the long grass or the short grass?” the player took his meaning: did he want the long grass of serious military service, combating an unknown insurgent threat in angola or south-west africa (namibia), or the short grass of the rugby field? the player chose the short grass and continued to play. as this example shows, not only was rugby in some ways exchangeable with military service but the sport was also used as leverage to keep players in certain regions of the country. pretoria, home to the afrikaans university of pretoria, as well as of the headquarters of the army and the police, emerged as the epicenter of this logic.4 as institutions, the police, the correctional services, and the army could not tolerate uncertainty or spontaneity. both in terms of geography and individual bodies, apartheid ideology coded spaces of uncertainty and fluidity as dangerous. these order-keeping institutions had the express purpose of controlling such spaces and limiting the actions possible within them. setting aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not such spaces could ever be controlled or limited in practice, not to mention how these institutions of order actually operated (cf. cock 1991; cock and nathan 1989), this ideological relation to uncertainty governed the manner in which these clubs, and by extension the ntru, encountered uncertainty on the rugby field. sporting spaces, like social ones, required control and stabilization through dominant force. described in these terms, maak vas rugby has received a detailed theoretical explication elsewhere—in franz boas’s primitive art. in this work, boas (2010, 10–11) posits that anthropologists might consider technical mastery, rather than formal “sophistication,” a universal index of artistic accomplishment, and he argues that mastery lies in the artist’s ability to execute an abstract, mental model in a particular, material work of art. consider the similarity between this notion of the artist and that of the authority figure described at this essay’s beginning: the authority figure, a coach-artist, seeks to impose his mastery on the production of rugby by controlling the resources on which the sport depends, disciplining his performers and shaping their production toward an ideal maak vas performance. furthermore, boas (2010, 148) theorized that ideal forms—be they perfect lines, geometric patterns, or figurative works—did not stem from inherent racial capabilities, as evolutionists generally supposed. instead, these ideals derived from a group’s specific cultural history and the habits of movement and dexterity in which that history adhered. we might say the same about why the bulls privilege maak vas. the team’s social history provides many of its players and coaches with an apparently logical response to the problem of rugby’s magic. technique may be culturally and historically situated for boas, but masterful artistic production is only desirable because the uncertainty of that process allows raw artistic materials to resist their own perfect objectification. as boas (2010, 156) writes, the work is laid out in the mind of the maker before he begins and is a direct realization of the mental image. in the process of carrying out such a plan technical difficulties may arise that compel him to alter his intentions. such instances can easily be discovered in the finished product and are highly instructive, because they throw a strong light upon the mental processes of the workman. this striking quotation may indicate the place of uncertainty in boas’s theory of art, but it also contains an even more important point: namely, it suggests that anthropologists may find it rewarding to study the space between an ideal form and its material realization, because artists leave behind traces of human creativity as they negotiate between their preferred mental images, the uncertainty of artistic production, and the raw materials on which they work. like imprints made in clay, we can use these traces to reconstruct the minds that produced them. maak vas rugby, as i show below, can be analyzed in a similar way. first, however, we must reckon with the ideal maak vas script. considering maak vas in terms of technical mastery, it becomes apparent that there is something persuasive, comforting, and perhaps even beautiful about the bulls at play. when everything goes by design, the team overwhelms its opponent, and makes no mistakes, the performance can unfold so smoothly that it appears preordained. such a performance manages to represent, if just for a few moments, the utopian dream of dominating uncertainty—the possibility of complete human control over a fundamentally unpredictable world. so influential is this aesthetic among the bulls staff and players that the team has a second strategic response for the most chaotic and unpredictable of situations: a plan called “default.” this strategy, in direct opposition to magic, targets uncertainty and destroys it, transforming the openness of possibility into the safest and least complex of the bulls’ strategies. in doing so, it trusts in the promise of maak vas in even rugby’s most desperate moments. opting for default in the face of rugby’s inherent uncertainty may reinforce the bulls’ particular ideal form, but the inevitable gap between ideal and execution raises an important question: what should we make of magic? not only does a complete commitment to maak vas render magic difficult to rehearse, but the very existence of magic seems to belie the bulls aesthetic as well. specifically, naming magic appears tantamount to admitting both that uncertainty is actually inherent to rugby—rather than a stylistic gesture that can be added or subtracted—and that players can never truly become masjiene. each action by each player continually produces a new unpredictable situation, demanding another novel response, and no amount of discipline and precision can bring maak vas to permanent fruition. more damning still, if the bulls did try to squeeze uncertainty from rugby’s live performance once and for all, they would alter the sport’s fundamental character. rugby, in effect, would perform its own magical flourish and escape, transforming itself into an entirely different sort of activity. bulls matches would look like video sessions performed live, with players of both teams carefully synchronizing and tempering their actions to ensure that the bulls’ patterns unfolded exactly as planned. with this in mind, why does magic exist? why is default not the only response for all eventualities? why recognize a condition that, for ideological purposes, might better remain unnamed? though magic might appear problematic, because it hints that the performance of maak vas entails its own failure, boas’s reflections on the limits of technique help us appreciate the ways that the south african state turned rugby’s uncertainty to its advantage. first, if we consider magic from the perspective of the institutions that built the ntru’s rugby, it becomes clear that rugby’s inherent uncertainty made the sport into a subtle barometer of a player’s ability to follow commands and perform under stressful conditions. he would encounter a barrage of uncertainty and violence during each practice and match, and coaches would identify and discourage any irresponsible and spontaneous actions. adorno (2007b, 89) noticed this dimension of sport as well, writing that apparently “free” sporting moments are examples “not [of] play but [of] ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection. they parody freedom in their readiness for service, a service which the individual forcibly exacts from his own body for a second time.” in the interstices of order, in moments of magical possibility, a commitment to order could be demonstrated most definitively.5 second, because each decisive action on the field produces new uncertainty, every moment became an opportunity for the apartheid state to perform, and thereby renew, the spectacle of its own authority. if state power is itself never stable or certain, one can see why this continual subduing of uncertainty would have some value—it continually realized the apartheid state’s particular and particularly brutal “state effect” (mitchell 1991). if rugby could be depended on to reliably offer up small doses of uncertainty, the team from the northern transvaal would systematically crush it out.6 several other ethnographers of the apartheid state have recognized its dependence on the dialectic of certainty and uncertainty as well, albeit in other respects. deborah posel (2001) and leo kuper (1954), for example, observe that it was the capriciousness of apartheid’s racial categorization—its inconsistencies and its subjectivity more than its immoral bureaucratic rationality—that produced its mystique, and stephen ellis’s (1998, 275) account of the rise and fragmentation of the state’s so-called third force demonstrates this dialectic on two distinct levels: first, the existence of the third force itself, which conducted in relative silence the state’s dirtiest work, and second, the discursive “cultivation of ambiguity,” which allowed senior apartheid officials to convey illicit orders to their underlings without explicitly implicating themselves in the process. taussig (1992, 16), who recognized a similar phenomenon during colombia’s state of emergency, carries this line of analysis further still. he argues that states do not simply use uncertainty but need and produce it for themselves. it is this intimate relationship with uncertainty, he suggests, that gives state terror its particularly “sinister quality.” if this holds true, and extrajudicial uncertainty sustains the authority of any state, then it comes as no surprise that the apartheid regime’s policemen, soldiers, and prison guards were supplied with a strategy that played with the boundaries of discipline and order. claude lévi-strauss, however, has shown us that the seed of magic that maak vas requires is fecund enough for us to grow alternative aesthetics. for lévi-strauss, technique marked only the beginning of art’s significance. responding directly to a boas essay about the aesthetic significance of split representation, lévi-strauss (1967, 255) observes that objects and their masterful embellishment often take shape simultaneously. a vivid example of this phenomenon, he argues, comes in the patterning of facial tattoos in the maori tradition. the tattoo is, of course, tailored to the shape of the face and the experiences and family history of the person tattooed, but lévi-strauss recognized that the face is conceptually tailored to the tattoo as well. the face, he writes, is “predestined” to be tattooed because it realizes its social existence only through tattooing (lévi-strauss 1967, 256). this element of contingency, he suggests elsewhere, obtains in any object’s decoration. a wood carving, for example, takes shape as a result of “the size or shape of the piece of wood the sculptor lays hands on, in the direction and quality of its grain, in the imperfections of his tools, in the resistance which his materials or project offer to the work in the course of its accomplishment, in the unforeseeable incidents arising during work” (lévi-strauss 1966, 27). this contingency (resulting not just from the limitations of human technical ability but also from the intersection of human, raw materials, and productive situation) proves vital to lévi-strauss’s supposition that art is situated between scientific and mythological thought. he demonstrates this by means of his famous analogy of the engineer and the bricoleur. in the savage mind, lévi-strauss characterizes the engineer as a figure representing a mode of scientific thought that uses cognitive structures to produce events in the manner of an experiment. this resembles boas’s conception of art: an artist has an ideal form in mind, locates the proper tools and raw materials, develops the necessary skills, and attempts to realize that form in a piece of recalcitrant material. for his theorization of art, however, lévi-strauss (1966, 22) places the artist between the engineer and the bricoleur, who cobbles together structures from an experienced series of contingent and particular events.7 this marks a crucial shift, because it allows the artist to draw on the engineer’s mastery and deliberation, as well as on the bricoleur’s willingness to engage the sensible world in a series of open encounters. it is this tension and synthesis that makes artworks cognitively potent for lévi-strauss (1966, 25), capable of expressing mythological thought in a semi-deliberate fashion. art, then, is contingent because of the materials used, but also because it is only possible to know what one has been making when one finally finishes it, having traversed the process of artistic creation. in other words, this critique of boas suggests that the gap between ideal and material, abstract and particular, is precisely what distinguishes art from other human endeavors. this is why boas finds such a rich vein of analytical possibility in the attempts of artists to rescue their projects of technical mastery: the magic of artistic creation, for lévi-strauss, lies in exactly those imprints in clay. danie, a man who coached rugby in the western cape—a provincial hotbed of liberal opposition during apartheid—approached the sport in just this way. he called magic rugby’s “mysterious character,” and he argued that magic gave rugby the capacity to resist the implementation of an outside structure by a coach. at its worst, danie said, an imposed structure becomes a barrier between the player and his or her abilities. the player will want to perform some action only to be consciously restrained by a responsibility within the team. rugby, danie reminded me, demands spontaneous decisions. time and space take shape simultaneously on the field, and the time it takes a player to recall and implement a set structure can result in lost space and a missed opportunity. the intuitive move, he had therefore decided, might (for all its spontaneity) be more effective in the moment than the one that a coach had imposed. to teach his teams to react spontaneously, danie envisioned a one-meter-by-one-meter square surrounding each of his players. danie described what a player could do within this “magical space” as the player’s “skill set,” and he saw it as his responsibility to both expand this skill set and improve each facet. his practices, rather than focusing on repetition to perfection as the bulls’ sessions generally do, emphasized creativity and inventiveness. this became most clearly articulated in one particular exercise, in which two offensive players responded to each other’s instinctual reactions as they confronted a single defender. rather than the offensive players deciding in advance which pattern to use to catch the defender unawares, danie told them to answer to each other’s improvised decisions. during the exercise, he urged players to employ whatever little individual tricks or feints they liked. if they wished to try something new, he asked them to do so—even if it resulted in failure. danie advocated no overarching structure and taught neither offensive nor defensive patterns. instead, he recognized and embraced the uncertainty of the game’s inherent conditions, its magic. training players to build their performances from a series of open encounters may have satisfied danie, but the bulls coaches dismissed his strategy outright. rejecting it as “not winning rugby,” they observed that this approach seemed to increase both possibility and risk. in an environment with already small margins of error, they argued, coaches had to mobilize all available physiological, statistical, and economic resources to stack the deck in their favor. danie, by contrast, questioned whether the metaphorical deck could ever be stacked. what other coaches saw as his strange unwillingness to control his players—that is, to impose on them an ideal aesthetic form—in his mind amounted to a recognition of the true state of things: no control was to be had in the first place. all danie could do was prepare himself and his players to recognize magical moments and turn them to their advantage. while the bulls management tends to believe that the only way to ensure success is to preempt uncertainty with coordinated actions, danie’s perspective is notable because it accepts failure as a real—perhaps unavoidable—possibility. as a result, danie and the players who share his mind-set seem to regard spontaneous acts on the rugby field as situated, creative acts. two young players expressed this clearly as they watched a particularly inventive and open match on television. after pronouncing excitedly how much he was enjoying the game, one explained that he liked the style because it “gives the players the freedom to do what they want.” just as he was enunciating the word freedom, though, his friend sat up on the couch and pounded a fist against his chest. “freedom of speech, yo!” he quipped, interrupting his teammate’s statement. in maneuvering from freedom in rugby to freedom of speech, the player in question did more than riff on his friend’s word choice. more likely, his statement marked an earnest (and spontaneous) sentiment: he considered rugby a form of self-expression. such a connection is possible, however, only if one re-imagines actions on the field as spontaneous reactions emerging from the body, emanating from (and producing) the author’s embodied conception of self. rather than trying to eliminate uncertainty, then, this creative logic depends on it. this is sporting performance as contingent, uncertain, and dependent on context, rather than stable, structured, and abstract. this is athlete as artist not athlete as master technician. like the strategy adopted by the bulls, this perspective also bears the weight of social relations and history. many of the players and coaches who espouse this style were once affiliated (or knew their fathers and uncles to be affiliated) with nonwhite leagues under apartheid. teams in these leagues often played on run-down fields, in front of large and politically conscious crowds. describing the situation in one region of the country, abdurahman booley (1998, 206) writes, “after matches, players (leaving their rivalry behind on the field) would sit with administrators to strategise ways of overcoming the oppressive regime, particularly after the banning of people’s organisations. in this way an easy transition was made from the sporting arena of the playing field into the political arena of the struggle against apartheid.” as this quotation suggests, anti-apartheid protests often transformed rugby participation into an unavoidably political act. the aesthetic shape of that participation was no less of a concern. one of my informants presented this phenomenon to me in terms of a binary distinction: first there was the village club that affiliated itself with the apartheid regime. it practiced what he, derisively, called stampkar—“bumper car,” another term associated with maak vas—rugby. the team was unimaginative and conservative, he told me, and it relied on structure and violent domination to compete. its players, he explained, “were boere boeties [little brothers to the afrikaners]! they did what the whites did!” in opposition to this stampkar style stood the style adopted by this man’s team. not only did it play a free and open style, taking risks and using the strengths of individual players to its advantage; the team saw it as politically significant to do so. the rugby field offered a stage on which these men could perform their freedom.8 whether they became aware of the politics of rugby’s magic by choice or coercion, it is precisely this perspective that parents have handed down to their children. as a result, many young players of colour recognize, in ways that few white south african players can, the extent to which the patterns they run, the tactical options imposed on them, and the manner in which they are coached draw their inspiration from the political logic of apartheid. furthermore, these legacies chafe most in moments of extreme uncertainty on the field, when a player feels that an organization’s response to magic forbids him from expressing himself creatively. it is not surprising, then, that players who feel strongly about their rights to self-expression and ones who are drawn (whether by professionalism or upbringing) toward maak vas often antagonize each other at the level of style. one young player told me that his primary school taught him an open and expansive style of play, but that this style “clashed” with that of his white teammates several years later. what started as a difference in aesthetic preference grew, during each uncertain moment and game, into a full-blown conflict as teammates continually operated at cross-purposes. players inclined toward creativity took chances their more dominance-oriented teammates thought unwise and selfish, and those dominance-oriented players would ignore their teammates’ calls to pass and played it safe in return. ultimately, this player said: one guy just started yelling at us, all the coloureds. then the coaches just walked away and told the captain to sort this out, and we came together and talked. our captain is coloured, and this white guy, he says to my captain, “i don’t want to be a part of this team.” so i said to him, “well you don’t have to be a part of this team, just f-off,” you know? and then he starts to cry, and then [another white player], he wants to hit our captain, and so there was a big fight. without a theory that accounts for rugby’s uncertainty and the social conditions of its production, one might dismiss this disagreement as a conflict between south african racial stereotypes. indeed, many at this player’s school remembered it as such, describing the groups of players either as selfish thugs or as conservative racists, depending on their politics. this, of course, does little more than naturalize race in the bodies that rugby puts into motion. such a conflict could similarly be blamed on the way that rugby’s physical violence “raises emotions,” or the excessive emphasis that south african society places on rugby performance. these latter explanations prove nearly as unsatisfactory as the first, however, because they overlook the fact that both physical violence and rugby’s popularity themselves result from the uncertainty that the sport offers up for display. when rugby is awarded a measure of autonomy, or a capacity to shape the historical and social sentiments that enter into and emerge from it, it becomes clear that rugby’s own conditions drew this historically and politically overburdened conflict to the surface. *** while people often assume that sports contain little in the way of true political possibility, these conflicting responses to rugby’s uncertainty suggest that, if rugby cannot necessarily depict the content of political possibility, it can perhaps represent its form—its openness and deep contingency. a painter, in this regard, may stand before a blank canvas and try to conceptualize a novel political arrangement—certainly a daunting challenge—but that arrangement often congeals when it comes to fruition in paint. the next moment in a rugby match, and a moment five minutes to come, by contrast, is entirely unknowable and cannot be determined until the instant prior to its realization; each player, coach, and spectator must address these open possibilities using whatever social, historical, and economic resources they have at their disposal. though it would be uncritical to claim that such representations of political possibility can bring us closer to a truly open political moment than any other form of representation, i close this essay with the suggestion that rugby may offer a different and often-overlooked lens through which to analyze how south africans represent, debate, struggle over, and manipulate those magical moments as they come into existence. the bulls, and players schooled in their tradition, try to overcome this uncertainty and use it to demonstrate their capacity to shape the world to reflect an ideal image. sometimes, for a few intoxicating moments, they are successful. on such occasions, the bulls seem to be a step ahead of time itself, authoring events and controlling their own destiny. more often, though, the bulls’ patterns fall short of this ideal script. rugby’s magic intervenes, with physics inviting all manner of injuries and small miscues doubling themselves again and again, until even the semblance of structure has collapsed. in such magical moments, the bulls’ coaches and players find that they have to contend with what ian hacking (1990, 10) has called “the ancient and vestigial” presence of chance in the world. the bulls may disavow this sort of chance when they turn to default, but history suggests that they willingly acknowledge it in magic when it is politically expedient to do so. it is this residue of chance that undergirds both the bulls’ magic and adorno’s aura, because magic and aura both constitute attempts to name (and thereby represent) the world’s inherent uncertainty. for hacking and the bulls, this uncertainty makes for the deep contingency that becomes quantitatively knowable when human action seeks to control or eliminate it. in adorno’s work, this quality—which, as in benjamin’s formulation, first made itself known in religious ritual—is precisely that which exceeds the artist’s plans during the making of art. given this underlying similarity, it seems appropriate that hacking (1990, 10) suggests that this ancient element found “its most subtle and many-layered expression” in an artistic work: stéphane mallarmé’s poem, “un coup de dés” (“a throw of the dice”). mallarmé’s answer to chance, hacking (1990, 10) notes, is not to try to tame it, but to “transcend” it. we could describe danie’s coaching strategy as transcendence as well. rather than acknowledging rugby’s magic only in the moments when he has nowhere else to turn, danie builds his team around it. if rugby is nothing but a series of open encounters that enjoin urgent responses, he reasons, then his players must learn to react quicker, smarter, and more confidently. in committing himself fully to this strategy, though, danie actually adheres to a far more dogmatic aesthetic theory than the one the bulls employ. danie demands allegiance neither to himself nor to a final result, but instead to rugby and its inherent conditions, and both he and rugby refuse to compromise. the dogmatism of this strategy, in fact, provides yet another reason why it resonated so widely among those players who sought to challenge and undermine the apartheid state. not only does this aesthetic allow players to play with creativity, inventiveness, and a kind of freedom but it also disdains the compromises that sustained that brutal regime. for danie, there is no last-minute retreat to the safety of default. there is only magic, and the acute absence of any default form renders uncomfortably transparent the politics of south africa’s historically dominant aesthetic. in this respect, danie’s aesthetic theory aligns particularly well with adorno’s own. as adorno (2007c, 180; emphasis added) writes in his essay on art and political commitment, “it is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” notes acknowledgments i thank kamari maxine clarke, william w. kelly, daniel magaziner, mike mcgovern, melissa runstrom, david walker, susanna fioratta, kathleen mcdougall, dana graef, and ryan sayre for their thoughtful (and, in several cases, repeated) comments on past iterations of this essay, as well as charles piot, anne allison, my anonymous reviewers, and the talented staff at cultural anthropology for their challenging suggestions and editorial guidance. i am also grateful to helen siu, radhika govindrajan, atreyee majumder, sahana ghosh, loring danforth, steven kemper, rania sweis, and charles carnegie for their insightful responses to versions of this essay that i shared at colloquia held at yale university and bates college. finally, i send my thanks to danie, the bulls, and many other people and organizations in south africa. without their patience and tolerance of my questions, this essay would have never been written at all. research for this article was funded in part by yale university. 1. a number of other scholars have remarked on the structural importance of uncertainty to the sports and related forms of embodied practice they study. writing in terms of the relationship between uncertainty and sporting participation, for example, heather levi (2008) has noted of lucha libre that professional wrestling is generally regarded as more scripted than it actually is. the lingering presence of uncertainty in fact makes wrestling both difficult and dangerous. similarly, rebecca cassidy (2002, 166) has observed that the thoroughbred industry in newmarket, uk, “can be extrapolated from the basic uncertainty that governs which horse will finish first, second and third (and last!).” greg downey (2005, 123) has shown how “cunning” (“a combination of wariness, quick wit, savvy, unpredictability, playfulness, viciousness, aesthetic flare, and a talent for deception”) takes shape within the performance of capoeira; and eric worby (2009) has directed our attention to the play of unpredictability in post-apartheid johannesburg and its soccer fields. others have highlighted the importance of sporting uncertainty to spectatorship. thomas carter (2008) and roger magazine (2007), in particular, draw our attention to the ways that fan narratives about the teams they support emerge from conditions of social instability in cuba and mexico, respectively. in doing so, these important works offer tantalizing hints about why sports draw spectators during unpredictable times. 2. this notion of magic resonates with other influential definitions as well. while e. e. evans-pritchard (1937, 439) characterized witchcraft as the social force that produces unfortunate events, for example, he also proposed that magic both prevents such situations and neutralizes their effects. witchcraft, then, may name the cause of misfortune, but magic (for the azande as well as the bulls) allows its socially permissible redress. michael jackson, meanwhile, has carried this resonance to its logical conclusion. elaborating on michael taussig’s (1980) analysis of the figure of the devil in colombian folk magic, jackson (1998, 54) has suggested that magical medicines should be theorized as one of a broad range of strategies that human societies deploy in response to crises of “control and closure.” in this regard, he, like max horkheimer and theodor adorno (2002), considers magical and scientific reason to address similar concerns about causality, certainty, and chance. 3. george gmelch (1971) has made a similar point about the proliferation of “magical” rituals in baseball. he notes that pitching and hitting, aspects of the sport heavy with chance, seem to attract many more protective rituals than fielding, which is comparatively more reliable. though i take my cue on the relationships among chance, sport, and magic from gmelch’s influential essay, i will complicate his analysis in three specific ways in the coming pages. first, the present article suggests that on some occasions, activities like fielding—which, gmelch observes, is performed successfully more than ninety percent of the time—can be rendered all the more magically problematic for their apparent certainty. second, while gmelch notes that rituals of magic are common even among groups that regard themselves as scientifically rational, i will examine some of the ways that this rationality draws on magic in order to sustain itself. third and finally, i take magic as an indicator of the structural necessity of uncertainty to rugby’s live performance. this structural magic, which gmelch acknowledges but does not examine in detail, constitutes sport’s artistic aura. 4. as one anonymous reviewer of this essay rightfully observed, it would be an exaggeration to claim that every player who passed through the ntru (to say nothing of every player in south africa) was equally committed to this maak vas philosophy. the inclusion of university of pretoria players alone would seem to undermine the influence that these institutions of order held over the team’s preferred strategy. one player who represented both the university of pretoria and the ntru, for example, stressed to me that the university played what he called open and creative “student rugby,” influenced by their student tastes and interests. perhaps more significant than this observation, though, was the fact that this same student player, when invited to play for buurman van zyl and the ntru, was told that the “games were over” and that he was going to play “proper” northern transvaal rugby or not play at all. given this example, it seems appropriate to conclude that, despite important exceptions, maak vas gave (and still often gives) vivid and coercive expression to the preferred aesthetic of the apartheid regime. 5. though such a project lies beyond the scope of this essay, an investigation of rugby’s contribution to a white, male “habitus” (bourdieu 2007) in south africa under apartheid might find the sport’s magical uncertainty a useful starting point. 6. if the ntru did seek to quell uncertainty in this spectacular fashion, then encounters with rugby’s inherent unpredictability would seem to resist theorization as an emergent “structure of conjuncture” (see sahlins 1981). players and coaches within the bulls organization are well aware of the challenges that rugby’s inherent conditions continually pose, and maak vas, magic, and default are specifically designed to address them. only because the sport offers a structured encounter with uncertainty, then, can these historically and socially situated responses be arranged and, in the case of maak vas and default, practiced ad infinitum. 7. if art sits squarely between the bricoleur of myth making and the engineer of scientific thought, lévi-strauss (1966, 32) suggests that games are explorations in a purely scientific mold. though his analysis may reflect the final result of a sporting contest, viewing a game as an uncertain process shows its similarity to lévi-strauss’s artist. also, while we may recognize that sporting rules do shape the form that this uncertainty takes, we might also argue that those rules operate much like the artistic genres that organize the latent uncertainty present in art. in both instances of production, uncertainty continually challenges and even threatens the constraints of genre until genre boundaries break down or change altogether (see becker 1984; fabian 1998; williams 1977). yet because the rules of sport are more or less explicitly codified, because an appointed expert generally polices those rules during the act of production, and because team sports are collaborative products that require at least superficial acknowledgment of these rules, sports may exhibit stronger tendencies toward fixity than many artistic forms. 8. though this dichotomy may prove persuasive in theory, it likely became overdrawn in practice. if this informant’s neighborhood club did play a stampkar style, such a choice did not imply that they were “brainwashed” (as this informant also claimed). many coloured players on apartheid-affiliated teams, for 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routledge. williams, raymond 1977 marxism and literature. oxford: oxford university press. worby, eric 2009 “the play of race in a field of urban desire: soccer and spontaneity in post-apartheid johannesburg.” critique of anthropology 29, no. 105: 105–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308275x08101030. toward an anthropology of landmines toward an anthropology of landmines: rogue infrastructure and military waste in the korean dmz eleana j. kim university of california, irvine http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7553-0773 “this is the saying you hear all the time: ‘if you run, it’ll take five minutes; if you walk, it’ll take ten.’” this is how mr. hong, a farmer and resident of cheongjeon-ri, a rice-growing village located in cheolwon county, gangwon province, south korea, explained the distinctive habitus of people living just five kilometers from the korean demilitarized zone (dmz).1 this seemingly mundane phrase proved to be more like a riddle, whose answer was connected to a weaponized, postwar landscape in which landmines, as mr. hong put it, “continue to go and lie in wait” (kyesok maebokharŏ dŭrŏgayo). he went on to explain that when the swampy wetlands of cheolwon freeze over in the winter, the landmines become “useless objects,” since their trigger mechanisms won’t be able to detect human footsteps. with the frozen ground holding them in place, it doesn’t matter if one runs or walks through a minefield to cover the same distance. this conversation took place in march 2015, after the spring thaw, so mr. hong offered to accompany me across a frozen minefield the following winter, personally guaranteeing my safety. the next day, driving north from cheolwon toward the civilian control zone (ccz), a militarily restricted area south of the dmz, i was in a minivan with urban south koreans who had heard mr. hong’s statements. we joked about running across the minefields, visible along the side of the road. in the three years that i had been traveling to the ccz and neighboring areas with ecological researchers and others, mine warning signs and information notices had rarely warranted a second glance. especially as i became accustomed to the scenery, they rapidly receded into the background, reduced to visual static that had become as unremarkable to me as they were to my colleagues, who, when i asked them about landmines, would say, “oh, yes, there are so many mines around here,” without further elaboration. now, instead of being no-go zones or abject wastelands, minefields had transformed into tantalizing spaces of human crossing, predicated on an understanding of mines as actants whose agency could be anticipated and even overcome. this bit of local knowledge altered the landscape and opened up alternative ways of seeing and understanding movement and mobility in the border regions of south korea. through my travels in the dmz borderlands and conversations with residents of cheongjeon-ri, i began to understand landmines, in their persistent, if hidden, existence, as infrastructural, albeit emitting a different kind of ambient noise or background hum than that of conventional infrastructures.2 mr. hong’s description of mines “lying in wait” invoked their agency as predators seeking to ambush their human targets, and yet the local saying he cited also obliquely pointed toward the entanglements of landmine-predators and human-prey, in which the former’s seasonal behaviors and ecological affordances affect how the latter navigates its everyday surroundings. even as the notion of landmines as lying in wait could be dismissed as an anthropomorphic projection, by taking into consideration the mine as an actant, which operates with a simple mechanism that is precisely calibrated for a human trigger, this essay asks how ethnographic attention to mines and humans as cohabiting and coconstitutive of a shared ecology might contribute to an anthropological analysis of landmines and explosive remnants of war (erw). instead of presupposing the suspension of human agency so common in scholarly and humanitarian approaches to landmines, i argue that a science and technology studies–inspired framework can offer a more complex view of how mines are “enacted in practice” (mol 2002, 152). i develop the concept of rogue infrastructure to capture the volatile materiality of mines and their heterogeneous natural, cultural, technical, and political entanglements, which can generate unexpected agencies and affects among the humans they exist alongside. there are obvious physical risks involved in conducting an ethnography that takes the materiality of landmines seriously, and i have yet to take up mr. hong’s offer to cross a frozen minefield. i nevertheless suggest that a materialist-discursive approach to landmines may be indispensable to understanding the coexistence of mines and humans, productively complicating both humanitarian approaches that frame them as toxic remnants of war and postcolonial critiques that frame them as traces of imperial power and ongoing violence. despite a wide engagement with militarism and militarization in anthropology (e.g., gusterson 2007; lutz 2007), few anthropologists have focused on mines (or weapons, for that matter) and their materiality.3 one exception is david henig (2012, 23), who, based on research in mine-infested areas of postconflict bosnia, calls for anthropologists to attend to “military waste,” including landmines and erw, suggesting that “an anthropology of military waste can shed light, not just on the ways that mines and military debris pose a hazard of explosion and other dangers, but also on the emotional distress that the waste provokes in people who dwell alongside it.” in a similar vein, yael navaro-yashin’s (2012) ethnography of life in northern cyprus analyzes the ruins of war through the lenses of abjection and melancholia, asking how war’s detritus and debris become affectively charged, while christina schwenkel (2013, 137) describes erw in vietnam as “ambiguous, abject matter out of place.” i depart from these melancholic and abject framings by attending to the posthuman performativity of mines as actants in human-nonhuman networks, in which the material-affective relations of mines and humans prove to be volatile and even counterintuitive. humanitarian and postcolonial analyses that trace histories of mines as “imperial debris” (stoler 2008) of u.s. empire and its “slow violence” (nixon 2011) are certainly not to be discounted. villagers who live among mines see their own experiences in this light, linking everyday anxieties and mine deaths to u.s. empire and unending war. yet, theoretically and politically, this constitutes only part of the story and, as i will argue, reduces the politics of mines to one in which mines act as proxies of state violence to which local residents are passively subjected. my analytical approach draws on karen barad’s (2003) “posthumanist performativity” to suggest how life in militarized ecologies entails human-nonhuman intra-actions that defy straightforward moral evaluation. for barad (2003, 812), intra-action constitutes a “new understanding of causality itself,” an imminent approach that views subjects and objects through a “relational ontology.” thus, rather than agency being distributed through objects that mediate a self-knowing subject’s intentions, subject and object come into existence through their concrete, performative relations. to think of landmines through a relational ontology means refuting the notion that either mine or human are ontologically pre-given. rather, landmines, which were emplaced as an articulation of sovereign power, become, over time, unpredictable and deterritorialized through their ecological entanglements and evolving relations with humans and nonhumans. in some respects, alfred gell (1998) in art and agency anticipated my attempt to theorize the agency of mines. he famously used the example of pol pot’s soldier laying mines to illustrate his theory of distributed personhood, in which the primary agency of the soldier was distributed to the secondary agent of the mine. for gell (1998, 20–21), the antipersonnel mine presents a particularly suitable analogy because, although it may seem to be a “mere lethal mechanical device” that “could not help exploding,” it is, in fact, what makes pol pot’s soldier a “very malign” agent. gell’s model of agency, however relational and recursive, still depends on a linear and hierarchical connection between primary agents and secondary agents, in which “social agency manifests and realizes itself, via the proliferation of fragments of ‘primary’ intentional agents in their ‘secondary’ artifactual forms.” in this framing, the political and moral implications of mines are presupposed in that they constitute extensions of the evil intentions of pol pot’s soldiers. the multiplicity of mines and their heterogeneous agencies i am interested in are better captured by bruno latour’s (1999) model of distributed agency than in gell’s distributed personhood. the former does not grant moral responsibility to particular actants in the network, whereas gell (1998, 21) turns to an extreme example of violence to illustrate how mines are “moral entities” whose secondary agency, literally scattering violence across the landscape, “turned [pol pot’s soldiers] from mere men into devils with extraordinary powers.” shifting from gell’s hierarchical distributed personhood to latour’s symmetrical, distributed agency introduces other relations beyond gell’s narrowly circumscribed soldier-mine nexus. in particular, the fact that an antipersonnel mine has an average lifespan between fifty and a hundred years, introduces us to the uncertain spatiotemporality and historicity of mines, in which their distributed agency can be redistributed over time. following a brief overview of the south korean dmz region, i trace the performative intra-actions of humans and landmines but am less concerned with the normative intentions of mine layers and more with how the persistence of mines in postwar landscapes generates unanticipated affects and relations. rogue infrastructures foreground the spatiotemporal contingency of mines and their accumulated effects. the roguishness of mines is related to their status as matter out of place and their ability to deprive humans of agency—but also, and more significantly for my argument, to their unintended affordances and ecologically embedded ontologies. rogue infrastructure attempts to capture the multiplicity of mines in their intra-actions with humans as area-denial weapons, indiscriminate and antihumanitarian political agents, military property, useless waste, and valuable natural resources. as i explore, mines may be implicitly connected to sovereign power and imperial geopolitics, but they can also exceed expected technological and political determinations. pure nature or polluted nature? this essay is based on ethnographic research from october 2011 to september 2012, as well as shorter periods of research in july 2013 and march 2015, with ecologists and local residents that focused on the social, ecological, and political transformations of the south korean side of the dmz, which has, since the end of the cold war, become identified as a haven for biodiversity.4 fieldwork entailed trips into what is referred to by south korean bureaucrats as the “dmz region,” which encompasses the dmz as well as the adjacent ccz and the border area, two administrative zones defined in relation to the dmz and historically characterized by high concentrations of military activity and economic underdevelopment. in the village of cheongjeon-ri and the surrounding areas of cheolwon county, nature has become an explicit matter of concern for various parties, including state bureaucrats, environmentalists, ecologists, and tourist developers. figure 1. the dmz borderlands. figure adapted from “status and ecological resource value of the republic of korea’s de-militarized zone,” by kwi-gon kim and dong-gil cho. reproduced with permission from springer. residents of cheolwon have been suspicious, if not hostile, to the ways in which politicians and environmentalists have recast the dmz as a site of rare ecological value. in south korea and internationally, a narrative of the dmz as having “returned to nature” has gained currency, even as its contamination by more than 1 million landmines is the precondition for its purported ecological purity. since 2009, through the branding mechanism of the so-called peace and life zone, or plz, the central and regional governments have been investing in ecotourism projects capitalizing on the dmz’s associations with untouched nature and the fact that it has become a sanctuary for dozens of rare and endangered species. these projects exist in tandem with efforts on the part of policymakers who have sought to establish a peace park or ecological preservation zone in the dmz for at least two decades.5 in conjunction with these efforts, villagers are effectively being asked to frame themselves as “local people” (chiyŏk chumin) with local culture, which can lead to economic development in the form of ecotourism. among the state representatives, environmental ngos, and local people who comprise the network of actors engaged in the dmz’s ecological futures, a predictable pattern of competing interests has evolved. these were readily apparent to me at a public hearing regarding plans for a bicycle path across the eastern part of the dmz region. convened by the dmz peace forum at the south korean national assembly in october 2011, the opening panel featured bureaucrats, academics, and environmentalists who discussed the pros and cons of the proposal, reproducing conventional discourses of conservation and development. three male villagers from hwacheon county, gangwon province, had come to attend the meeting, but they were not included on the expert panel of speakers. in the presentations, an official from the ministry of the environment presented the centrist position by foregrounding plz tourism as a “win-win” opportunity for both conservation and development interests. this market-based vision proved anathema to the deep-ecology views of the activist presenters, who insisted that the cycling route was not only illogical and difficult to traverse, given the area’s mountainous terrain, but also threatening to habitats of endangered mammalians like the goat-like amur goral (sanyang). these male activists in their thirties, who represented the dmz research teams of seoul-based environmental ngos, warned that naive desires for economic development among local residents would lead to dire ecological consequences. one environmentalist concluded his presentation by deploying the charged creole word nodaji to describe the ccz as a natural “bonanza” (nodaji), and admonished locals and the state to abide by the rule of “no touch!”6 during the discussion period, the older men from hwacheon were incensed by the environmentalists’ declamation, in english, of “no touch!” these villagers, who identified themselves as local people, asked with heightened emotion: “are the sanyang more important or the humans living in these areas?” they took offense to the ecologists’ summary discounting of their intimate knowledge of nature (chayŏn), as well as to the condescending insinuation that the locals were “ruining” nature out of ignorance. as i came to understand, the category of “local people,” which may have once been a technocratic vehicle to include villagers as stakeholders in dmz schemes, now also serves as a politicized identification for residents of the dmz region, who are critical of state and ngo projects that seek to capitalize on or conserve the dmz’s nature. yet even as local people rejected the notion of an untouchable or pristine dmz nature, many could not deny that the dmz’s amplification in the national and international ecological imaginary had brought significant economic investments to border area communities. agricultural profits have been declining due to free-trade agreements and ecological stresses attributed to climate change, and some locals have begun to align their views with provincial and county officials who actively promote the dmz brand. cheongjeon-ri itself was dubbed an “eco-peace village” in 2007, and its proximity to the winter habitats of endangered cranes and to the korean war battleground of baekmagoji, along with its signature rice variety, form part of bureaucrats’ visions of how dmz tourism can cater to multiple tastes and interests—military, historical, ecological, recreational, and even agricultural, in the form of pastoral farm stays. landmines and unconfirmed minefields have no place in these market-driven visions, except as part of the aesthetic frisson of the dmz as a forbidden zone. mine warning signs are ubiquitous fetish objects in the visual culture of the dmz, but the actual existence of mines in tourist areas is barely remarked on, and mine-risk education nonexistent. figure 2. "“the dmz is a gold mine of nature.” (the korean reads, “the dmz is nature’s treasure trove.”) still from promotional video shown at the 2012 world conservation congress, jeju island, south korea. photo by eleana kim. in dmz tourist venues, actual mines are relegated to the past, much as they are sidelined in bureaucratic models for the peaceful utilization of the dmz. this despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that clearing the more than 1 million landmines from the dmz would take an estimated 489 years. in addition, although the activism and research of ngos like the peace sharing association (psa; formerly korean campaign to ban landmines) has gone on since the late 1990s, few south koreans are aware of the existence of mines in so-called rear areas, south of the dmz, where, by south korean government estimates, there are 1,100 “planned” mine fields (meaning laid by the south korean military, and therefore documented) and 208 “unconfirmed” ones. according to the expert deminer kim kiho, when u.s. forces were drawn down in the 1970s, they left behind as many as 200,000 mines, the locations, types, and numbers of which were never shared with the south korean military (korea landmine removal research center 2008).7 comprehensive government statistics on landmine casualties do not exist, but estimates by the psa count 1,000 civilian casualties, and 2,000 to 3,000 military casualties. south korean activists and ngos associated with the psa have brought increasing attention to landmine victims in recent years, victims who, they argue, have suffered in silence for too long. in a 2011 survey––the first of its kind––three-quarters of the 228 respondents who had survived mine accidents said they did not report the incidents to the government because 1) they didn’t know how to seek compensation; 2) they feared retribution from the local military battalion; or 3) they were led to believe that landmine accidents were their own responsibility (lee 2013). in response to dominant narratives of the dmz’s nature, locals frequently mobilize examples like the u.s. use of napalm defoliants during the war, the annual spring burnoffs set by both north and south korean militaries in the dmz (to ensure clear sight lines), and landmine pollution to illustrate the fallaciousness of any view of nature in the dmz area as pristine or originary. as one elderly resident of cheongjeon-ri insisted, the dmz should be viewed as a “new ecosystem” (saeroun saengt’aegye) rather than a restored one. and, evoking the ubiquitous conflation of peace and nature when it comes to the contemporary dmz, another resident suggested that “someone should research how it is that a place brought about by war has become connected to peace. in cheolwon, this connection to nature is considered nonsense.” mr. hong echoed these and other residents in his description of the miserable (hansimhan) conditions and victimization of local people whose lives at the front lines of the unending korean war have been excluded from south korea’s highly celebrated modernization. discourses reinforcing these themes have been well rehearsed during the past decade by residents and ngos who highlight the sacrifices of local people in the face of state indifference. these collective histories of restriction, marginalization, and death are also often cast in an anti-imperial register that locates mines and their victims in a broader framework of the cold war and u.s. political and economic hegemony. one farming couple told me, after reminding me that the united states used napalm not only in vietnam but also in korea, “if you ask the local people, they’ll say, ‘what nature?’” and, “everything’s been ruined, frankly. america has ruined everything.” they link u.s. culpability directly to president bill clinton’s refusal to sign the international mine ban treaty of 1997. since then, each subsequent u.s. president has invoked clinton’s “korea exception” as justification for maintaining a stockpile of antipersonnel landmines in the event of another war on the korean peninsula. this position is premised on the false assumption that mines exist only within the dmz, and not in civilian areas, and is morally buttressed by the u.s. commitment to “humanitarian mine action” in developing nations. yet border residents view the korea exception as tacitly underwriting the south korean state’s longstanding indifference to civilian mine victims, whose rights to compensation were only legislated in late 2014.8 for these reasons, residents’ accounts and ngo narratives depict the dmz borderlands as a space of exception in which national division and cold war politics render mine victims a kind of bare life, neither recognized by the state as war victims nor as citizens deserving of compensation (agamben 1998). recent developments are transforming the border area from a static space of cold war–era walls to a site of potentially global flows in anticipation of a unified peninsula. even if the flows northward across the dmz are not yet realizable, the branding of “peace and life” has generated new circulations of capital between seoul and the economically depressed border villages. developments in cheolwon in particular entail the building of new infrastructures and the reconnection of old ones, designed to bring more metropolitan koreans (and international tourists) to the border, as well as to improve rail and road links between gangwon province and the megalopolis of seoul. these linkages are now bringing more civilians into proximity with the military infrastructures of the ccz and dmz, which constitute integral parts of national security but are also framed as tourist spectacles. they include military observation posts expanded into tourist observatories, former u.s. army barracks converted into overnight hostels, and underground tunnels dug by north korean soldiers to cross into south korea opened to organized tour groups. although mines and minefields may be more difficult to package as tourist attractions, they are, nevertheless, infrastructurally foundational to the dmz region and its militarized naturecultures. landmines as rogue infrastructure recent anthropological scholarship on infrastructure has tended to focus on urban or cybernetic systems, and less frequently on military infrastructures, despite the military roots of the term (petroski 2009). a central premise of these studies is that infrastructures constitute and reflect fundamentally modern projects, entailing the construction and maintenance of systems and exemplifying human mastery over nature, with attendant aesthetics of modernity, progress, and futurity (larkin 2013). if we take this to be true, then landmines might easily be seen as anti-infrastructural in their intended, normative function as explosive devices categorized as “area-denial weapons,” in u.s. military terminology. they are often laid to destroy or prevent access to critical infrastructure and to disrupt, block, or divert flows of people, resources, supplies, or commodities. mines are at once singular and multiple, with one mine suggesting the existence of others, and their discovery typically leads to the sequestration of space, in the form of minefields. thus, in postconflict settings, mines and the suspicion of their existence continue to restrict human mobility and land use and impede or prevent the repair or maintenance of basic infrastructure in what jon unruh, nikolas heynen, and peter hossler (2003, 858) call a “switch from an intentional to an unintentional remaking of nature.” in this way mines foreclose, especially for people living among them, the economic, social, affective, and aesthetic possibilities afforded by infrastructure. landmines’ long lifespans can affect the health, livelihoods, and economic development of postconflict societies for generations. moreover, the political economy of mine contamination and mine removal depressingly reinforces global patterns of environmental racism and inequality, starkly illustrating not only the uneven distribution of economic resources to clear mines but also the disproportionate physical and psychic burdens shouldered by the most politically, economically, or racially marginalized groups (nixon 2011).9 a view of mines as merely anti-infrastructural, however, would fail to account for the unintended effects of mines, especially as mines and minefields persist and change over time in specific ecologies, generating novel configurations among humans and nonhumans. following brian larkin’s (2013, 329) definition of infrastructure as “matter that enable[s] the movement of other matter,” i emphasize how landmines may disable systems, but also how they, like other infrastructures, “produce environments” (carse 2014, 6) and come to enable the movement of other matter. my invocation of roguishness highlights mines’ aberrant and unpredictable behaviors, which can seem arbitrary and volatile (see also dawdy 2008). i focus less on their illegitimacy in relation to normative or sanctioned operations and more on their inherent instability and indiscriminateness, something that renders them abhorrent in humanitarian terms and also potentially undermining of sovereign legitimacy. roguishness in my usage also draws significance from the notion of rogue states that became integral to the ideological consolidation of u.s. power in its post–cold war imperial formation. the rogue moniker vilified states viewed as nonconformist, and operated to exclude and delegitimize sovereign powers so as to reassert the norm of u.s. hegemony, even as, under its own terms, the united states and its allies must be viewed as the first rogue states (derrida 2005, 102). moreover, identifying such supposed rogues justified the proliferation of militarization in the name of global security. rogue states are also importantly associated with so-called blowback, in cases such as afghanistan and iraq, where covert operations, the arming of cold war allies, and shifting political priorities ultimately lead to those very arms being used against the former benefactor (johnson 2001). we can interpret landmines in south korea as rogue in precisely these terms. laid by the united states during the cold war and subsequently abandoned, mines are disavowed by the united states, even as the country continues to stockpile them for future use on the korean peninsula. uncontrollable, indiscriminate, and antihumanitarian, mines are also proving to be environmental blowback, in the form of a weaponized nature that repels human passage and occupation, as well as undermining the moral legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence. the insecure and uncertain environments of the dmz borderlands exemplify for residents the limits of south korean state sovereignty and the rogue power of u.s. empire, but they also exceed political and ideological designs. in the more-than-human natures of the dmz, wild boars may be at the top of the food chain (next to the apocryphal siberian tiger), but landmines in fact supersede them, while simultaneously rendering the environment safe for nonhuman flourishing.10 in rogue infrastructures i locate unforeseen agencies and affects of human-mine intra-actions among humans who may avoid, harvest, disable, dismantle, and circulate them and mines that can lie in wait, freeze, corrode, move, explode, or self-neutralize. weaponized landscapes in the civilian control zone cheolwon county is located in gangwon province, where the vast majority of mine accidents and deaths have taken place in areas close to the thirty-eighth parallel. during the latter half of the korean war, after the chinese people’s army entered the conflict, the most brutal battles for position were waged in places like baekmagoji (white horse hill), leaving behind tons of spent artillery, landmines, and other military waste. in february 1954, the area later designated as the ccz was secured by the eighth u.s. army to house the heavy artillery and armed troops disallowed in the dmz proper. oversight of the ccz was handed over to republic of korea (rok) forces in 1958, and since that time, the majority of the 600,000 south korean troops and the roughly 50,000 u.s. troops (now 28,500) have been housed in the ccz, along with military facilities and training grounds. between 1959 and 1973, the south korean government moved civilians into the ccz for both economic and ideological purposes, allowing some former residents to return to extant villages and assigning others to reclaim land in new settlements. these propaganda villages were established under the rubrics of “ccl north-facing villages” (mint’ongsŏn pukbang maŭl), “strategic villages” (chŏllyak maŭl), and “reunification villages” (t’ongilch’on) (kim 2011). cheongjeon-ri, established in 1967 by 150 former soldiers, was one of 111 such ccz villages intended to counteract propaganda villages in the north and to reestablish agricultural production, particularly in the central area of the peninsula, korea’s historic rice bowl. these first settlers were lured with promises of land and secure livelihoods and found themselves subject to a strict screening process to ensure their patriotism and ideological commitments. that the farms established in the ccz took the form of israeli kibbutz-style collectives is a fact celebrated in official narratives, although residents in cheongjeon-ri explained that it was necessitated by the state’s control of land and the settlers’ lack of prior agricultural experience. at a time when south korea was less economically developed than its northern nemesis, these farms were meant to serve as visual displays of south korean prosperity and wealth for the workers in the socialist farms visible across the border. in cheongjeon-ri, military training exercises and war-game operations took place around and often in farmers’ rice paddies. residents endured relentless loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts between north and south, as well as mandatory curfews and lights out at dusk. the village was not electrified until 1975, and any change to the buildings or infrastructure of the village required explicit permission from the military authorities under the military installments protection law. most significantly, residents signed memoranda of understanding (mous) with the local battalions indicating that any injuries or deaths would be the sole responsibility of the victim. those who complained or defied this order were at risk of expulsion from the village. once the war-ravaged territory had been securely reclaimed, the state reneged on its promise to reward the sacrifices of the first settlers with land ownership, in light of complicated land disputes that arose in the 1980s between locals and title holders who came back to claim their property. today, local residents own less than 30 percent of the land in cheongjeon-ri, meaning that the majority are tenant farmers unable to benefit from the boom in real-estate prices in the ccz and border area, especially during the optimistic sunshine policy decade just after the end of the cold war (1998–2008), when reunification seemed on the horizon. in conversations with long-term residents, the “huge sacrifices” they had made were explicitly linked to this betrayal on the part of the state and its refusal to compensate landmine victims. as mr. bae, who moved to cheongjeon-ri with his parents as a fifth-grader in 1968, explained to me, “when we came in, they gave us these conditions—even if you are to die, don’t say a single word––and we signed the mous. if a landmine accident occurred, we agreed not to ask about government responsibility. that’s what we signed. but if you think about it, we locals were totally ignorant and scared of the military. therefore, even if someone died from a landmine, we’d promised not to say a word, and no claims were filed.” with the end of the authoritarian regimes in the 1990s, and the village’s release from the ccz in 1998, residents no longer felt obligated to keep silent about mine accidents and deaths, especially because the promise of land ownership had been broken by the state. they sought monetary compensation for themselves and their deceased relatives, but the courts determined that the statute of limitations for filing a claim had passed, leaving already impoverished survivors without legal recourse. this troubling history has fueled the oppositional yet ambivalent politics of residents in cheongjeon-ri, who are at once staunchly patriotic anticommunists, proud of the role they played in south korea’s agricultural revival and nation building, but also deeply resentful of the state and its broken promises. as this brief account attempts to convey, in the south korean borderlands, especially during the cold war, territorial security took precedence over human security in a decidedly illiberal space. the infrastructure of the border is organized around containment and comprises checkpoints, road blocks, tank barricades, dams, reservoirs, defunct rail lines, barbed wire, and landmines, as well as well-guarded military service roads, barracks, and training grounds. residents of ccz villages like cheongjeon-ri were held captive to disciplinary, militarized modes of sovereign power that rendered them internal primitives excluded from the nation’s rapid and highly celebrated capitalist successes. since the 1980s, many of the checkpoints have moved northward, shrinking the ccz by half, and freeing the villages from the most onerous militarized restrictions. although cheongjeon-ri is now administratively part of the nonmilitary border area, minefields and military infrastructures continue to be salient features of the landscape. the materiality of mines the uncertainty of where mines are, their ability to “lie in wait” and ambush their victims, and their volatility as explosives produce psychic effects that render them effective area-denial weapons. mines are, however, also technical objects, composed of physical materials that have specific qualities, characteristics, and values. not only can they become “useless objects” when siberian winds bring a deep freeze to the central plateau of cheolwon, but their mechanisms can also erode, rust, or become defective, depending on variables such as time, weather, soil composition, and exposure to water. the expert deminer kim kiho showed me m3, m2, and m16 antipersonnel fragmentation mines, which are encased in steel and feature pressure pin triggers at the end of a fuse rod, which is about the diameter of a thick marker. when triggered by a tripwire or by the pressure pins, the m16 “bouncing betty” is designed to launch about one meter into the air and explode shrapnel to a radius of thirty meters. if the steel fuse rod has been weakened by rust and corrosion, however, it is easy to sever it from the body containing the explosives, effectively disabling the mine. in the late 1960s, u.s. forces laid about 310,000 mines of this kind in the dmz area. kim kiho estimates that only 20 percent of these mines have a lifespan of more than twelve years. the m14 antipersonnel mine, also known as the “toe-popper,” has a very different technology. at four centimeters in diameter with plastic housing, it contains a tiny amount of metal, making it difficult to detect with a metal detector (though later models include a washer that allows for easier detection). if it is buried more than a few inches under the ground, it is unlikely to be triggered by a human footstep, yet it is buoyant in water and therefore can travel within the many wetlands, streams, and irrigation channels of the dmz borderlands. these are the mines that kim kiho finds hidden in the reedy banks of rice paddies, and they are the most widely distributed mines in the dmz and surrounding areas. the plastic casing grants the mine a lifespan of one hundred years, and weighing only three ounces (whereas steel mines weigh a pound or more), they are more mobile, especially during the korean monsoon season (changma), which brings torrential rains, runoff, and mudslides to the peninsula in july and august. in august 1998 alone, seven incidents of mines accidentally carried away by floods were reported at both u.s. and south korean military sites (kcbl 1999). mine accidents are also more frequent during the summer months, sometimes involving m14 mines but also north korean “schu” mines that are encased in wood and easily carried downstream across rivers and streams that transect the border. in addition to the estimated 300,000 m14 landmines, antitank mines are also widely distributed in the dmz area, including older steel-encased mines (m15 and m6) and the newer plastic m19. given their large size (thirty-three centimeters in diameter) and weight of four to six pounds, they are relatively easy to detect and disable, but antipersonnel mines are strategically planted around them to deter their removal. kim kiho explained that, despite his preliminary findings regarding the longevity of steel fragmentation mines, south korean military authorities are loath to approve more extensive research because of the implications: either they would have to replace the defective mines or they would have to remove them completely. the lack of knowledge concerning mines’ locations and technical efficacy, even as it undermines the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of antilandmine activists and local residents, constitutes a crucial aspect of the mines’ tactical efficacy for the state, which uses them and their fearful consequences to limit human mobility and agency. the persistence of landmines in the dmz region highlights the ambiguous heterotopia of the south korean dmz, which is at once a site of military skirmishes as part of the ongoing war and a postwar emblem of peace and life. even as soldiers clear minefields for the building of tourist sites and the reconnection of prewar infrastructures, south korea does not engage in humanitarian demining, nor does it offer risk education for local residents or tourists visiting the ccz in increasing numbers. from reclaiming land to harvesting mines according to cheongjeon-ri residents, the first settlers cleared more than 18,000 mines, losing twenty-five people within the first few years. in total, between forty and fifty residents suffered death or maiming from mine accidents between 1968 and 1999. some of these occurred while clearing mines and reclaiming land, others during daily activities like gathering firewood or food. these two activities were also related, as during the first few years, before people learned where the landmines were concentrated, it was common for women collecting wild herbs and mountain vegetables for mine victims’ funerary banquets to perish from landmines while foraging. in 2012, i spoke with four residents for whom landmines were indelibly connected to kinship, loss, and landscape. for one resident, mrs. kim, her father-in-law’s death in 1998 suggested that local knowledge of landmines was not sufficient to avoid being ambushed by them. he was killed gathering firewood on his way back from visiting his father’s tomb. even though he followed the same path every year, he was unaware that the local battalion had laid fresh mines the previous autumn. a powerful explosive scattered his remains across the landscape, leading his relatives to surmise that a plastic antitank mine killed him. the plastic casing would have been more difficult for him to detect with his walking stick, and the load of firewood would have made his weight heavy enough to set it off. mines can function effectively as area-denial weapons when their existence is discovered, most tragically after someone has been killed or injured. then, as now, when residents discover mines, they are required to report them to the local military battalion, which cordons off the area with barbed wire and mine warning signs. as these “unconfirmed minefields” (mihwag’in chiroebat) proliferated across the dmz region, they became infrastructural over time, since, due to the army’s limitations of equipment, manpower, and expertise, they remain uncleared and legally off limits. yet the ability of mines to deter human trespass is also viewed as a form of social control, surveillance, and dispossession, which some villagers resist, especially as they are loath to let perfectly good land remain uncultivated. according to a recent news report, in another border village, local residents are considered “foolish” (pabo) if they report mines to the local military battalion, because it means that the unconfirmed minefield will remain unproductive for an indeterminate amount of time (yoon, ch’ae, and kwon 2014). villagers sometimes breach the boundaries of these fields to cultivate them, entering into a tug-of-war with soldiers who reinforce the barbed wire or attempt to fine the farmers for trespassing. these fields might then be considered the “negative space” of the dmz region, where mines or the suspicion of them restrict movement and land use. some unconfirmed minefields have become literal wastelands, where residents or visitors dump trash and junk, creating what one ngo calls a “ticking time bomb,” with literally tons of discarded consumer goods, including refrigerators, car engines, and other detritus, at risk of creating a massive shrapnel explosion if the mines underground are set off (green korea united 2010). thus, although landmines are precisely designed for human triggers, once emplaced, their ontological instability creates opportunities for the reterritorialization and deterritorialization of space. landmines as rogue infrastructure not only affected the spatial organization of the border villages but also created other infrastructural relations, especially during the early years of the settlement in cheongjeon-ri. according to residents, the idealism of president park chung-hee’s israeli kibbutz-style farms did not suffice to overcome the challenges of establishing regular crop production. in the absence of government support and on the brink of starvation, most people struggled financially and supplemented their income by collecting sintchu—a residual loan word from the japanese colonial era that came to refer to brass artillery shells, as well as any kind of military waste, including steel, barbed wire, or the metal parts and explosive compounds of landmines—to sell on the black market.11 as one resident described it: “if you sold those things, like spent shells, barbed wire, you could bring in a lot more than from farming. and if you cleared mines, there were explosives inside, and sintchu. if you took it all apart, then you could go somewhere and sell it and that was more than you could get from farming. so farming took a back seat.” whereas the first settlers were hailed as heroes for their sacrifices in the name of state-sanctioned land reclamation, after a few years, those very same acts of mine clearance became criminalized when locals began harvesting and selling military waste for their exchange value. sintchu and scrap metal served as currency and commodities in poor communities, and especially around the dmz borderlands in the postwar period, when people traded brass artillery for alcohol or rice, or turned artillery shells into cigarette ashtrays and other household containers. scrap metal of all kinds was also currency for children who bartered their findings with traveling peddlers in exchange for taffy (yŏt). thus, in conditions of extreme poverty and resource scarcity, especially during the south korean developmentalist period, the political ecology of the borderlands was one in which military waste became a kind of natural resource gleaned from former battlefields. harvested metals, especially steel, were melted down and eventually molded into the steel bars and i-beams that reinforced the concrete high-rise buildings emblematizing the rapid urbanization of south korea in the 1960s and 1970s. mines connected people and economies through commodity exchange and the reclaiming of land that had been enclosed by the state. whereas misery and tragedy may have constituted the affective core of many mine stories i heard, mines also appeared at unanticipated moments, pointing toward their relational ontologies. these dynamic entanglements of mines and humans were most strikingly evoked by mr. lee, whose account of crossing into a minefield conveys how “human agency itself may be derived in significant measure from things” (puskar 2014, 519). in contrast to humanitarian accounts that foreground victims and their restricted agency, here minefields constitute the literal ground for an expanded sense of personhood, spatial control, economic possibility, and psychic deterritorialization. mr. lee described the moment that he first trespassed into an active minefield: i was sharpening a scythe nearby and suddenly i heard an explosion. two men had gone into the minefield, and i thought, “aah, they stepped on a mine.” i went out to see, and one was down, and the other was thrown behind him. with those two people injured like that, suddenly i’m walking in the minefield. i went in just like that, and i ask myself, “am i ok?” i looked up just like that, and “yeah, i’m ok.” the person who had been thrown backwards is up and walking. [i ask him,] “are you ok?” [he says,] “yeah, i’m ok.” at that moment, my overwhelming fear turned into ecstatic joy [hwanhŭi], and i helped the one who had been injured out of the field. it was plastic—he had a plastic prosthetic leg, so i gave him $30 to get a new leg, and i cleared the remaining one hundred meters of the field. mr. lee’s father was an original settler who died from a landmine blast in 1970, when mr. lee was eight years old. the majority of landmine victims in ccz villages were adult men, and their households’ primary breadwinners. without compensation from the state, their surviving relatives became even more impoverished. the irony of his turning to clearing landmines after having lost his father to a landmine accident was not lost on mr. lee, who described his condition as “deplorable” (hansimhan). but, as the eldest son and head of his household, conditions of extreme poverty led him and many others to clearing mines and collecting scrap metal to survive. mr. lee’s transformative moment, in which his “overwhelming fear turned to ecstatic joy,” however, casts his supposedly pathetic narrative in a different light. rather than considering mine removal an abject activity to which poor people are “reduced,” mr. lee’s testimony describes a moment of expansiveness, of opening up to other modes of existence, suggesting how an “armed and dangerous” landscape (nixon 2007, 169) can not only be disarmed but can also serve as a source of magical empowerment—a different kind of life—transforming a fear of death and trespass into ecstatic joy and spatial liberation. a framework of abjection might view the mine as “matter out of place,” a transgressive object that psychically transforms the subject by dissolving boundaries between self and other. in contrast, rather than the mine as an ontologically pregiven object, it was the intra-action of mine and human—mr. lee’s entering the minefield, “just like that,” without consequence, the mines not detonating—that constituted this moment of joyful liberation. this was a transformative moment in which the enactments between mr. lee and mines became reconfigured and multiple, generating new political and economic possibilities. many of the mines that mr. lee cleared were plastic ones, which had no exchange value and were considered by residents as especially insidious, given the difficulty of detecting them. new infrastructural affordances and human-mine intra-actions emerged in the 1980s with the state’s promotion of industrialized farming. mr. lee described how, with the arrival of a high-capacity backhoe that could dig up one cubic meter of earth at a time, he considered burying the plastic mines he had cleared. with the backhoe, it would be easy to bury the mines to a depth of two meters, where their ability to ambush their human targets would be mitigated. but given the unpredictability of mines and their long lifespans, mr. lee could not be certain that they would not eventually cause problems. he decided to report the mines to the local battalion, despite knowing that he might be cited for destruction of military property. mr. lee did not disguise his disdain for the soldiers who arrived, outfitted in specialized equipment, in contrast to his simple farm tools and well-honed wits: “these fifteen guys show up, well-built soldiers. they are in full military gear, wearing metal helmets. then they start trying to intimidate me, asking me where i got these mines from.” as mr. lee continued his story, it became clear that clearing landmines, for him, was an extension of the nation-building project, which he framed as an act of patriotic dedication. yet the state criminalized this expression of nationalism. that he was ultimately acquitted and even received a formal apology from the local military battalion was a vindication of his efforts, but, as he put it, rather than an apology, he should have received an award. mr. lee, like the mines that i frame as rogue, embodied roguishness in his disregard for legal sanction and his insistence on the legitimacy of his own actions. as he put it, “i followed the proper procedures . . . who are they to tell me to follow the rules?” the violence of mines and the south korean state’s failure to protect its own citizens under its subordination to u.s. empire delegitimized the state in his mind, thereby justifying his own violation of the law. by learning how to live with mines mr. lee earned a sense of personhood connected to social and ecologically embedded enactments of mines’ multiplicity, as economic (mines as scrap), political (mines as military property), and moral (mines as indiscriminate weapons). mr. lee’s roguish exhilaration and vindication are therefore difficult to reconcile with a model of subaltern resistance to the state or the transgressive potential of abject matter. in fact, mr. lee considered clearing mines to normalize his status as a citizen and patriot, whose labor contributed to the nation rather than threatening its security. from being criminalized to pardoned by the military, receiving this apology also served as a confirmation of his moral personhood, masculinity, and economic agency. the normalization of this militarized citizenship became, in the course of mr. lee’s testimony, closely tied to a vision of the united states as a rogue power, articulated in a forceful critique of bill clinton’s ignorance of u.s. mines existing in areas outside of the dmz. part of the affective charge in mr. lee’s story of mine removal certainly had to do with the rush of having a near-death experience, but this experience is ultimately framed by the korea exception and the residual thanatopolitics that lie at the heart of u.s. imperial relations with south korea. conclusion the south korean journalist and dmz chronicler hahm kwang bok (2007, 161) depicts landmines in the dmz area in a posthuman register, calling them “living creatures, intelligent, higher forms of life” (chiroenŭn saengmul, chinŭng’ŭl katch’un kodŭngsaengmul). if landmines think at all, however, they do so in a binary way, as automated switches that respond to a certain degree of pressure, indifferent to the identity of the body producing the weight. less like cyborgs than jakob von uexküll’s tick, the landmine can lie in wait for years for the right trigger to set off its mechanism, which, when it is working properly, ignites an explosive precisely measured to blow off human toes, feet, or legs. the mine’s agency is attuned to its victim’s actions (stepping on it), and its effects are amplified by a victim’s sudden evacuation of agency, that is, his or her inability to evade the instantaneousness of the mine’s explosion. rather then advocating an anthropomorphic depiction that risks fetishizing mines as intelligent or alive, i have offered a performative anthropology of landmines that attends to their ecological embeddedness and relational ontologies. more generally, i have presented rogue infrastructures as a contribution to a broader literature on militarized environments (tucker and russell 2004), to move beyond the empirical question of how war and militaries affect nature and instead to ask how military infrastructures, including waste and weapons, are natural, cultural, social, and technical things that become constitutive elements of ecosystems. this question proves increasingly relevant as militaries around the world are identifying decommissioned sites as ecologically valuable spaces of wilderness (masco 2006). as peter coates and his colleagues (coates et al. 2011, 468) note, after the cold war, militaries, particularly in the united states and western europe, embraced “military environmentalism” in their attempts to remediate heavily polluted areas, oftentimes by “trumpet[ing] ecologically flourishing features to counter the negative image created by toxic waste dumps, decaying military hardware, and deeply buried explosives.” these examples recall what joseph masco (2006, 302) calls “mutant ecologies,” and are sites where environmental despoliation, accumulation by dispossession (harvey 2004), and global security converge (see also kuletz 1998). if mutant ecologies are “cold war survivals” (masco 2006, 311) of contaminated nature in the nuclear age, rogue infrastructures, instead of reconfiguring biological matter at the level of the molecular or the species, form part of the material transformation of landscapes that become infrastructural over time. they become significant naturalcultural elements whose multiple affordances divert and recompose human-nonhuman worlds. mines produce boundaries, lie in wait, and continue to create spaces of prohibition by fostering terror and inflicting trauma. they mediate relations between residents and military authorities, but they also can connect residents to broader networks of capital and offer for some “the possibility of economic productivity” (schwenkel 2013, 137). more than this, they are technical objects in living ecologies whose meanings and affordances emerge through their intra-actions with humans whose adaptations to mine-infested landscapes can also generate unexpected affects, values, and political subjectivities. when i met mr. lee, he was mayor of district one of cheongjeon-ri, a position of prestige that he had earned despite, or perhaps because of, his criminal activity. his elected leadership suggests not only the shifting politics of the borderlands, from “propaganda villages” to normalized ones, but also a liberalization of citizenship for residents in the post–cold war era. in the face of this trend, mr. lee insisted that, more than monetary compensation, mine victims deserved recognition as war heroes, with merits of honor bestowed by the state, for their sacrifices at the front lines of an unending war. indeed, as mine stories proliferated within conversations purportedly about the dmz’s nature, i began to understand how the volatile, risky, and sometimes transcendent relations of mines and humans were not just about identifying the unethical and antihumanitarian nature of mines as indiscriminate weapons of war but also about acknowledging the complex political and historical subjectivities of people in civilian-military, supposedly postwar, de/militarized spaces, sometimes running, sometimes walking across unconfirmed minefields. notes acknowledgments i thank audiences at cornell university, the university of texas at austin, and c21 at the university of wisconsin-milwaukee who helped me think through early versions of this article. i am especially grateful for the insightful feedback from the editors of cultural anthropology, particularly dominic boyer, and the anonymous reviewers. special appreciation to nikola bagic, julie chu, michael fisch, eunhyei kim, gloria kim, andrew mathews, jun mizukawa, bettina stoetzer, leah zani, and adria imada. my research and writing was supported by an acls/ssrc/neh international and area studies fellowship (2011–2012), as well as a richard carley hunt postdoctoral fellowship from the wenner-gren foundation (2015). 1. cheongjeon-ri and the residents’ names are pseudonyms. i use the mccune-reischauer transliteration system except for proper nouns. 2. the “dmz region” is a south korean bureaucratic invention that refers to the dmz, ccz, and the border area. in this essay, i refer to the “dmz borderlands” to designate a geographic and cultural space where militarization and the national division have heightened significance for social, ecological, and political life. 3. jon unruh, nikolas heynen, and peter hossler (2003) provide a useful literature review of work in other disciplines, which tends to focus on humanitarian mine removal. see bolton 2015 for an analysis of mines in the context of the revolution in military affairs. 4. there is an extensive literature in korean on the dmz. for english-language works on the dmz’s political and ecological value, see, for instance, kim and cho 2005 and kim 2001. 5. north korea has demonstrated intermittent interest, but typically insists that a peace treaty must precede any substantive discussion of establishing a peace park. 6. the invocation of nodaji/“no touch!” by the environmentalists connotes a complex, polyvocal set of relations, rooted in a history of foreign resource exploitation. nodaji (translated as “gold” or “bonanza”), originated in a japanese or korean transliteration of the english words “no touch.” donald clark (2003, 231) describes how foreign concessions at the turn of the last century brought american engineers of the oriental consolidated mining company to northwestern korea who disciplined korean miners not to pilfer mined gold: “bullion boxes bore the words ‘no touch’; and in fact, the frequently shouted words ‘no touchee!’ were so well known at unsan [gold mining country] that they soon became part of the language.” 7. the korean dmz contains at least 600,000 mines in the southern half and a reported 500,000 in the northern half, which ranks it among the highest concentration of mines in the world. u.s. and un forces first deployed them during the korean war, and chinese and north koreans captured and reused them before bringing in their own soviet box mines. south korean ngos estimate an additional 600,000 mines outside of the dmz, which include mines planted in the ccz by u.s. forces, at least 120,000 of which were unrecorded and scattered hastily during the korean war (westover 1987), as well as those laid by republic of korea (rok) battalions to heighten national security during the 1980s. with the softening of tensions between the two koreas during the decade of the sunshine policy (1998–2008), the south korean joint chiefs of staff began a process of mine clearance, especially in areas deemed militarily appropriate or prone to floods. today, the south korean state spends about $1 million on mine removal and has reportedly cleared 69,000 mines since 1998. even though military and civilian accidents and deaths have numbered less than a dozen per year for the past decade, they continue to occur, as recently as august 2015. 8. after eleven years of lobbying by ngos and national assembly member han ki-ho, the first legislation to support (but not compensate) mine victims passed the south korean national assembly in december 2014. victims began filing claims in early 2015, and their histories of trauma are entering into the public sphere, drawing further attention to the landmine issue. more recently, the maiming of two south korean soldiers in august 2015 by a north korean mine also brought public scrutiny to inadequate medical coverage and compensation for south korean soldiers injured by mines. 9. according to the united nations, mines can cost as little as $3 to produce, and an estimated $300 to $1,000 to remove. 10. it is widely agreed by locals and experts that only wild boars, and sometimes deer, can set off mines, 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chiroe, 3: hŏsulhan kwŏlli [the silence of landmines, no. 3: careless oversight].” kyŏngin daily, november 6. http://www.kyeongin.com/main/view.php?key=914198. reason, risk, and reward reason, risk, and reward: models for libraries and other stakeholders in an evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem paolo mangiafico kevin l. smith duke university libraries scholars have always sought ways to share their research with others and, especially, to register the priority of their discoveries against other potential claimants. galileo famously encoded his discovery of the moons around saturn and mailed it to johannes kepler, authorizing its publication only months later, when further observations had confirmed his findings and he feared that some other scientist might announce a similar, albeit belated, discovery (wooten 2010, 120–22). such publications came in the form of limited-circulation pamphlets at the time; the scientific journal per se did not begin until 1665, more than two centuries after the invention of the printing press. significantly, this first true scholarly journal, the philosophical transactions of the royal society, also began the evolution of peer review; its first editor, henry oldenberg, initiated the practice of sending submitted manuscripts, which often took the form of letters, to other scholars for comment before he published them (hall 2002, 153). much has changed in the 450 years since the founding of philosophical transactions. throughout the world, the publishing of scholarly articles today is a multibillion-dollar industry. but it is also an industry in the midst of huge transitions, mostly brought about by the rapid development of digital communications technology. the underlying technology of scholarly publishing remained relatively stable for four centuries, but it has undergone radical change in the internet era of the past three decades. clay shirky (2012), a well-known writer, teacher, and consultant in matters of the internet, once said that “[publishing] is not a job anymore. [it’s] a button.” the remainder of the interview makes clear that shirky is speaking of publishing as the process of disseminating works of the intellect; he goes on to say that parts of what we now consider the publishing enterprise, such as editing, fact-checking, and design, are still needed. and, as the examples from the early history of scientific publishing have shown us, other functions remain important to scholars regardless of the medium by which their works are disseminated, such as the registration of priority and peer evaluation. shirky’s comments point us toward a consideration of the various facets of the process we call publishing. traditionally, publishers of academic journals and monographs have performed at least these functions—filtration (the selection of works that merit greater attention, and perhaps more important, saving readers time that might be wasted on those that don’t), registration (staking out the priority of an author to a particular set of ideas and expression), validation (the peer-review process, intended to establish that a work is not just interesting but also intellectually or scientifically sound), editing, dissemination, and marketing. some of these functions have become much easier in an age of instantaneous digital communications—this is shirky’s point about dissemination. in an environment where mass distribution really does require not much more than the click of a button, the dissemination aspect of traditional publishing takes on less importance relative to other parts of the process. likewise, it is much less necessary to have an organization that can identify and reach selected markets when it is possible to reach much larger groups with much less effort. the other four facets we have identified, however—filtration, registration, validation, and editing—still seem necessary to maintain both the standards of scholarship and, frankly, the promotion and tenure system that relies on it. this mention of promotion and tenure also serves as a reminder of another function that academic publishers have traditionally provided, which we could call branding. that is, the name and reputation of specific journals and specific publishers carry significant implications that the scholarly community relies on. evaluations of the quality of a particular scholar’s work often begin, and sometimes end, by noting the reputation of the journal or the publisher through whom it was distributed. the development of an industry around impact factors is an acknowledgment of the importance of this aspect of the publishing industry, but it also calls into question how effectively such branding actually serves as a surrogate for quality.1 the obvious implication of this brief analysis is that we need to think about the different facets of the publishing process separately, both in terms of the degree to which they are still needed and in terms of how they can most effectively be accomplished where they are still necessary. in other words, we need to consider unbundling the publishing process and thinking creatively about each of its aspects.2 it is to that task that we now turn. unbundling the publication process because all the functions of scholarly publication are joined, in traditional models, into a single process, the financial support for the whole operation (including many subsidiary or tangential activities) depends on a single transaction that happens only at the end of the process—a subscription payment or a sale. such transactions are only possible, of course, if the final product can be withheld from a consumer unless payment is made. in the age when journals were published only in print, this exclusivity or scarcity was essentially a technological necessity, enforced by the legal regime of copyright, which is a limited and state-created monopoly. as publishing moves online, the technological reasons for scarcity have vanished, and copyright by itself constitutes an increasingly tenuous way of exclusively controlling academic work. the possibilities and economics of online publishing have made it unnecessary—and perhaps even undesirable—for all the functions required to create a journal to be bundled together, and for funding of the whole process to depend on only one source. if the cost of making available ten thousand copies only marginally differs from the cost of making one copy, and the bulk of the cost—research, writing, editing, filtering, branding, and so on—lies in the creation of that first copy, how might we change the funding model so that the focus is on how best to meet those costs, rather than on dissemination being a cost barrier at the end of the chain? this question does not apply, of course, if the primary goal of authorship and publishing is to maximize the economic value of the work as a commercial product, where that value is primarily indicated by how many people are willing to pay to get it, and how much they’re willing to pay—in other words, to earn royalties or other payments that depend on sales counts. but since academic authors make little or no money from journal articles and monographs that they write, it is clear that there are other motives to write and publish research. if the primary goal of academic authors is to have their work disseminated as widely as possible—read by the largest possible audience who might learn from their insights and benefit from their work—and to build reputation, influence policy, or stimulate further discussion, then the toll barrier that limits potential readership becomes counterproductive. here it might be useful to make a quick aside to address the question of whether “information wants to be free,” as this is a straw man often raised to denigrate as naive those who argue for changes in models of scholarly publishing. clearly, there are costs associated with every step of the research and publishing process, so it’s not free in the sense that no one will ever have to pay. some of these steps can be made more efficient—in quite significant ways—by new technologies or processes, and costs can be dramatically reduced. for other steps there are few efficiencies to be gained, or costs might increase to cover new services such as enhanced linking and indexing, encoding for multiple reading platforms, or other tasks unnecessary in the print world. the more salient question is: who bears the costs? and are they in a position to manage those costs, to decide the relative value of different aspects of the process, and to compensate for them commensurate to the value they provide? the answer to this question is that universities typically cover all the costs of the scholarly publishing process, usually through their library and research budgets, but that the practice of bundling—both of a variety of publishing-related services and of a variety of publication products—hides the true costs of any particular part of the system. all we know is that if universities fail to continue to pay what is being asked, the final product, which is essential both to academic authors and to the community of readers, will be withheld. there is a very strong incentive to keep things bundled—the major players have invested heavily in the current system, and the sustainability of their business models and profit levels rely on preventing disruptive changes. similarly, many authors and readers, at least at research universities who have invested significant sums in both producing scholarship and purchasing access to it through their libraries, are fairly well served by the current model. the potential benefits of a more open and disaggregated model are becoming obvious only slowly to many researchers and authors, and university systems that have been developed over time around the older model further obscure the value of change. it’s difficult to imagine a different model because we are so reliant on the present one, and because the present one has been resistant to change for a wide variety of reasons. almost everyone in the system benefits in some way from it, and fears potential disruptions. it is true that professionally run publishing services can be expensive. large publishers have built significant added-value services that benefit from aggregation. we should not underestimate the value of the work they’ve done to set and maintain quality standards, to layer useful tools over online articles, to make the tools consistent across large bodies of work, and to integrate them into broader standards-based systems that make them searchable in library and commercial indexes. yet it’s not clear that the current major players are necessarily those who might provide these services best. right now, they are the only ones able to provide these kinds of services because they have monopoly control over the core content—the articles themselves—through the copyright transfer agreements that authors typically make before publication. they in turn might contract with or authorize third parties to provide services around “their” content, but in general, they tend to keep a tight grip on it and allow only uses that support their own interests in preserving the financial viability of their business models. the vertical integration of scholarly publishing—putting ownership of all aspects of the process in a single organization—has led to efficiencies, but it has also conferred monopoly powers, and monopoly powers have many undesirable side effects, of course. among these are the ability to avoid or stifle competition, and with it the ability to set prices at a level higher than the product or service merits. ultimately, the issue is one of control. academic authors, in exchange for the bundle of services a journal provides, typically sign contracts with their publishers that give the latter ownership and control over their work and of the terms under which it may be used in the future. this may seem like a fair trade because of the benefits an author obtains by having his or her work featured in a particular journal. but it forecloses a number of options the author might otherwise have wanted to keep, limits the potential for the work to be available to a much broader audience, and in any case, is unnecessary. let’s imagine a model where we still expect that each of the services scholarly journals currently provide are still desirable and provided, though not necessarily by the same entity or through the same bundled process. let’s suppose authors kept ownership and control over their own work, rather than giving it away to a single organization, and instead granted the ability for any number of service providers (including, but not limited to, their current preferred publishers) to use their work in a broad range of ways (such as through a creative commons attribution license). what might be gained? one advantage might be the possibility for more competition; lower economic barriers to entry would mean that if several different providers are able to offer similar services, authors, readers, and the universities or other agencies that pay the costs would be able to choose the ones that provide the most value for the least cost. also, a greater degree of experimentation might be possible, because different experiments could be tried on different facets of the process without putting the whole enterprise at risk. innovation might likewise increase due to the greater flexibility that would come from freeing scholarly materials from monopoly control. this is not just a fanciful idea. it is, essentially, what has happened in the software world, with the rise to prominence of open-source software since the mid-1990s. the world wide web, and many of the systems that make the internet work, are based on code released with open licenses, and the openness of the code, and ability to build on top of it without asking anyone’s permission, has been one of the principal engines supporting the growth of a broad variety of innovative internet services. it has not, of course, led to the collapse of big players like microsoft or apple, but has enabled a flourishing ecosystem of small players who can innovate, experiment, and take risks in ways that the larger players can’t or won’t. and when they do succeed, much of the ecosystem can benefit from the new services, learn from them, and potentially compete with and improve on them. there are, of course, risks in this kind of scenario. small, fast-moving startup businesses usually have a narrow focus, and while they might meet some specific needs better than big players, they are unlikely to be able to meet all needs. big, disruptive changes that come as a result of innovations by new players can also result in the loss of things we truly value because they can no longer compete. some other potential risks that might arise from a more competitive scholarly publishing ecosystem: attrition of service providers. small new players will not necessarily have the stability or staying power to sustain even positive contributions. the failure of service providers might leave gaps, though if the services they provided were truly valuable, and ownership of the core materials were not bound to the one provider, the valuable aspects are likely to be picked up and provided by other players. established and trusted brands might be diluted. new players might provide valuable services, but without an established reputation, it will be difficult to make shorthand assessments of their value. at the same time, brands that have been known and trusted for some time, and that were shorthand for quality, might lose that sheen, without something as big and obvious replacing it. more uncertainty about how to interpret different indicators of value and quality. as bad as the current indicators (such as h-index or acceptance and rejection rates) are, they are commonly understood, as are their limitations. with new indicators, there are dangers around ignoring their potential but also in overstating their value. potentially more complicated funding models. the current model relies on relatively simple transactions of buying and selling products, with a relatively small number of buyers (libraries) and sellers (publishers) with long-established and well-understood practices. opening up the market to a variety of new players and paying for a variety of unbundled services rather than comprehensive products introduces the potential for a number of new and different transactions that might be difficult to explain and justify to funders. given that the end product might be free to access, and that the services that created it are what we’d be paying for, it also changes the nature of the transaction and requires new models of showing value and determining appropriate levels with which to compensate for it. the potential benefits of a changed model for scholarly publishing are compelling. the potential risks are serious, though in a situation where the most essential components of the ecosystem—the articles themselves—are unfettered by restrictive licensing schemes or technological barriers, the opportunity to have new or established actors step up to address the risk is greater than in the current situation, where only a small number of entities control so much of the ecosystem. the ecosystem metaphor is not incidental—if we think about scholarly publishing in ecological terms, we can think of a movement from a monoculture (of a small number of big publishers with a sustainability model built on a particular business model) toward a greater variety of interconnected smaller players—each of whom might be more vulnerable in small ways, but the loss of any being less likely to upset the whole system. and this brings us to a discussion of another major player in this ecosystem that we have not yet addressed—a set of organizations that are mission driven, rather than market driven; that are widely distributed and independently operated, and therefore less vulnerable to single points of failure, and that were designed to be stable over long periods of time; that are catholic in their scope, strong supporters of intellectual freedom, and opponents of censorship and other restrictions on access to knowledge; and that are in full alignment with the mission of learning, teaching, and research that constitutes the primary reason why authors write academic articles. we are, of course, talking about libraries. the role of libraries in academic publishing academic libraries have always played a significant role in the system of scholarly communication. it is part of the core mission of such libraries to provide the resources necessary for teaching, learning, and research on campus to flourish. the role of academic libraries has never been entirely restricted to simply purchasing the resources used to create new knowledge. rather, the role of libraries has included the collection of both commercially available resources and unique materials, through so-called special collections, the description and organization of resources for easier location, and instruction in the use of various types of materials, especially so that students learn the canons and criteria of good research. these large roles will persist even as the technological and economic models for scholarly publishing change, while new roles may also be assumed by library staff. because libraries have always had a role in the academic publishing ecosystem—both in supporting research that leads to articles and books and in providing those (and other) resources to serve as inputs for the next stage of knowledge production in a given field—it is perfectly logical for libraries to embrace and take leadership in the movement toward more open access. open access, including a variety of new ways to present and disseminate the results of research, has become a part of the scholarly communications landscape, and it would be a failure of their core mission if libraries were not active in this space. as that landscape shifts, it is vital that libraries play a role in the changes because they have a rare opportunity to gain more control over the way research is disseminated and, therefore, over the ways they spend the money entrusted to them to act on behalf of the researchers and academic communities they serve. the best means, after all, for avoiding an unpleasant future is to take an active role in crafting the transition. libraries simply do not have the option to ignore new models of publishing if they wish to continue to pursue their basic, long-standing mission in this new environment. what is new, and exciting, for academic libraries, is the opportunity to be more deeply involved in the research and publication process. instead of being confined to the two ends of that process—the provision of inputs for research and the purchase of outputs—libraries are now looking at the different aspects of the whole process and seeking places where they can help. one activity that is rapidly gaining great importance, for example, is digital curation—assisting with the planning, management, and preservation of scholarly materials that are not traditional publications: data sets, digital projects, informal writings in venues like blogs, and course materials. when we look at the publication process, and consider the disaggregation of functions already discussed here, several new opportunities for libraries emerge, as well as needs that they can fulfill. the types of publication that academic libraries primarily seek deeper involvement with are usually open-access models. there are both practical and mission-based reasons for this. on the mission side of the value equation, libraries recognize that great accessibility is a better return on investment than limited access. since part of the mission of most libraries is to make resources available to those who need them, the potential that scholarly works supported by libraries will reach unexpected audiences or readers who will themselves use those works to foster new knowledge and creative projects represents increased value. more practically, the technological infrastructure libraries already have in place really is designed for maximum openness. restrictions are costly in the digital age; it is easier and cheaper to make digital scholarship open, and the capacity for restricted access that libraries do have—an authentication system for faculty and students that is necessary to keep access to commercial products we license closed to the public—is not very granular and difficult to extend to external populations. so imposing subscription-access barriers would be both unnecessarily expensive and contrary to the basic calling of libraries. the involvement of academic libraries in the publishing process, broadly defined, focuses on three types of open-accessing publishing that, using distinctions now widely accepted, can be called green, gold, and pure gold roads to open access. at a basic level, we can observe that green open access, defined as authors making openly available some version—usually the final, post–peer review manuscript—of an article in a disciplinary or institutional repository, is a very easy step for academic libraries. in many cases those libraries already have the necessary infrastructure in place because of projects involving theses and dissertations or the digitization of unique materials from library special collections. in other cases, already existing consortia of libraries can pool resources to deploy repository software for their members to use. when libraries offer to extend these repositories to faculty for scholarly articles they have authored, the principle cost resides in the time it takes the staff to communicate a process to faculty authors and to assist them in navigating the complexities of the various publication agreements they have signed. in green open access, the various facets of the publication process that we have discussed essentially remain bundled together in the hands of traditional publishers. the provision of a green self-archiving option simply adds an additional layer to the dissemination and market services; in addition to making the work available to subscribers, it will become available to a much larger audience and discoverable through some additional channels. registration and branding still occur under the auspices of a publishing house, and the peer review remains unchanged from the process followed by traditional articles that are not self-archived. it is because these functions remain bundled and external to the campus that this option is so lightweight for academic libraries, but it does have a significant drawback. the costs associated with publication remain undifferentiated and largely invisible with green open access; neither the libraries nor the authors gain any control over cost with this model (in fact, there is an additional modest cost to provide this access, but it is justified by the significant increase in access to broader audiences). but as we have seen, greater awareness of costs and some level of control may be essential to really transform the scholarly communications ecosystem. the situation is slightly improved with that form of gold open access that requires the payment of article-processing charges (apcs)—which in effect means paying up front for a set of services that result in a freely available journal product. but that model raises other concerns that cause academic libraries to proceed cautiously in this space. a significant number of academic libraries have established funds, sometimes called cope funds, for compact for open-access publishing equity,3 that are used to pay or reimburse author-side article processing fees in whole or in part. this form of support for open-access publishing also leaves all the facets of the process bundled together, and existing journal brands and delivery mechanisms remain intact, just without subscription barriers to access. however, apcs vary quite dramatically, from as low as $800 per article for some hindawi published journals,4 to $5,000 per article for publication in cell reports, an open-access journal from cell press.5 so it is difficult to be confident about the relationship between these fees and the actual costs of publication, and those costs remain as much beyond the control of those paying the apcs as traditional journal costs are outside the control of subscribers. this uncertainty about apcs is also a reason for concern to those libraries that support this type of publishing model. a fundamental question remains about the sustainability of the open-access business model based on apcs. as commercial publishers with, presumably, higher overhead costs, move into open-access publishing, we are seeing apcs begin to rise. libraries have an obligation to ask themselves if this model is any more sustainable that the subscription model has become; how high can apcs go before authors object, and what limits should libraries place on the expenditure of their limited cope funds? many publishers of apc-supported journals assume that most authors will use grant funds to pay the fees and that those without grants will receive assistance from the institutions. but grant-funded researchers are often loath to spend limited funds on apcs, and steady increases will make that reluctance much stronger. on the other hand, cope funds are (at this point) usually quite limited and cannot support the level that some fees are reaching. one potential factor in the level of apcs is the emergence of non-profit open-access journals such as plos (public library of science), elife, and elementa, which were started by academics to promote more openness and lower costs for scholarly publishing. while many gold journals are part of profit-making companies, whose goal is presumably to seek the highest fees that the market will bear, these more mission-driven publishers are likelier to seek the lowest cost that will enable them to meet their goals. another wrinkle in the author-pays model of open-access publishing is the so-called hybrid journal, which publishes most articles in a traditional subscription format but offers authors an option to “bail out” a specific article by paying an author-side apc. libraries that administer cope funds often decline to support this type of fee because they are usually already paying for a subscription, and these one-off apcs seem like double-dipping. there is little evidence that these fees actually reduce the subscription costs to libraries or to individuals, or that the articles themselves, open but hidden among many closed articles in a journal otherwise available only by subscription, can be found by a significantly larger set of readers. thus the relationship between apcs and the actual cost of the publication process versus the potential benefit achieved is even more obscure for this type of open access, and the incentive for libraries to support it is negligible. the most common form of gold open access supported by libraries (and that is part of the open-access landscape in general) is what we call “pure gold”—where there is neither a subscription fee nor an apc, and all articles are available to anyone with an internet connection. the organization that developed the most commonly used software platform for publishing such journals—the open journal systems (ojs) from the public knowledge project—reports that more than twenty thousand journals are being published using that platform. it is safe to assume that some portion of those journals is published with the support of academic libraries.6 often these journals are modest publications that serve academic niches and would not be considered profitable if offered to large academic publishers or even university presses. thus this is an opportunity for libraries to support open access in a way that uniquely serves scholars and broadens the audience for journals that might otherwise struggle to reach their readers. it is more unusual, perhaps unique, for an academic library to take on publication aspects of a major journal with an established reputation after years of traditional publication, as is happening in the case of the duke university libraries and cultural anthropology. in this case, the libraries provide technological support—both infrastructure and some defined amount of staff effort—so that cultural anthropology can use the duke installation of ojs for article submission, editorial functions, and archiving. this is a relatively low-cost way for the duke university libraries to support a potentially groundbreaking experiment while both serving its own mission and helping the journal better serve its own. the need for cultural anthropology to reach the diverse audiences for whom it is intended correlates well with the libraries’ commitment to improving our services even for unexpected readers. with this experiment we begin to see a more robust example of the disaggregation of functions we have been discussing. selection and editorial functions continue to reside with the scholars who volunteer their efforts to produce cultural anthropology, but they are separated from the branding of a commercial publishing house and from the platform by which initial dissemination occurs. of course, because cultural anthropology is a well-established and respected journal, it can stand on its own as a brand, and the registration and certification functions for articles are not impaired by its independence. thus the transition to open access is facilitated by the reputation the journal has developed, as well as by support from the american anthropological association (aaa) and the society for cultural anthropology. cultural anthropology will of course now face the challenge of finding sources of funding other than subscription revenue to continue the operations of the journal, and it will need its community to make the transition along the aaa path of thinking of the journal as a service the society provides rather than as a product it sells. from the libraries’ perspective, this is a rare opportunity to support a high-profile transition to open access and to assist with controlling the costs of producing the journal, which remains perhaps the biggest issue for open-access publishing. financial transitions for libraries, the questions about how they spend their money and the value they get for the investment that academic institutions make in library collections and services are paramount. so the fundamental question that must underlie these efforts to support new forms of publishing and scholarly communications in academic libraries is how they are going to be paid for. initially, many academic libraries made small steps toward supporting open access. these first steps included improving the technological infrastructure for digital dissemination. even at institutions where the library does not maintain that infrastructure, the need for these improvements has become obvious. libraries also began to task staff with paying attention to new forms of scholarly communications and to seek out efforts that libraries could support. for many libraries, these undertakings resulted in embryonic repositories, often focusing on theses and dissertations, working papers, research reports, and other kinds of so-called gray literature. modest as these efforts were, they represented the beginning of investment in open access and created a technical and human foundation for more robust initiatives. as this movement developed, the next stage meant some new hiring in libraries. many academic libraries began to add positions that would not have been necessary before the birth of digital scholarship. there was and continues to be an interest in hiring copyright specialists, sometimes attorneys and sometimes experienced non-lawyers, to address the growing need to manage legal issues that arise around digital production, dissemination, and curation. as repositories have increased their profile, it is now common for libraries to have full-time repository managers. this is a janus-faced role, requiring both technical expertise and the ability to relate well with faculty authors. finally, many libraries are adding staff to support digital scholarship, a position that requires a similar set of differentiated skills. while many of these positions have been created by repurposing vacant jobs within the libraries, they represent a growing commitment to spending money to support important changes in scholarly publishing. this new hiring essentially indicates new positions needed in order to support an older mission. the transition to support digital scholarship, open access, and library publishing is simply the current mode with which libraries are adapting their mission to support teaching, learning, and research to the digital age. for the libraries that have created them, the cope funds that support author-pays gold open access have been the most noticeable change, if not the most significant one. that is because they have required either the redirection of budgeted funds or new sources of funding. many libraries have taken cope money from their collection budgets, while others have combined several sources, usually including at least some collection dollars. at a few institutions, new money for this purpose has been provided from academic and research entities other than the library. with these cope monies the most vexing question about funding for open access and library publishing comes in to play. how can we transition the millions of dollars that large academic libraries spend on the purchase of toll-access materials to support for the production of open-access scholarship? can we imagine a future in which far less money is dedicated to buying access to commercially produced resources and more—much more—is spent to support the creation and dissemination of scholarship accessible to all? three points about this process are important: there is lots of money in the system to fund this transition. the 125 large research libraries that make up the association of research libraries spend more than $1.4 billion dollars on materials; the total for all academic libraries is naturally much more than that.7 so if a large-scale transition could be accomplished, there would be plenty of money with which to support non-profit presses, scholarly societies, library publishing operations, and other new services to support scholarship and scholarly publishing that have yet to emerge. open access envisioned this way—as multiple efforts undertaken by many different groups and supported by repurposed collection funding—would almost certainly be less expensive than the current system, where a large portion of the expenditures go to purchase journal packages from large commercial enterprises. elsevier, which is one of the largest such publishers, consistently reports profits of more than 30 percent, representing billions of dollars. as heather morrison (2010) of the university of ottawa points out, these profits alone could fund all 1.5 million scholarly articles published each year at a rate parallel to what the open-access publisher hindawi charges for open access.8 the difficulty lies in making this transition. demand for access to subscription-based journals is not diminishing, so it is difficult for libraries to cancel these big deals to repurpose money to support open-access models. the painful reality is that universities will probably have to spend more money in the near term to eventually spend less in a predominantly open-access environment. but the advantages of moving toward an environment where universities and academic authors themselves are more in control of the scholarly publishing process, including the potential for economic savings, are undeniable. the future we imagine is one in which libraries and their parent institutions redirect financial resources to support the kind of publishing models that offer the greatest benefit to the scholarly ecosystem as a whole, and that align best with the values and goals of academics and universities. most often the recipients of this support would likely be university presses, scholarly societies, and non-profit publishers like the public library of science.9 the shift would be toward supporting the mission of these organizations directly, to enable and sustain the services they provide. this is a bold vision, and a difficult one to realize. at this point, academic libraries and other organizations are just beginning to engage in experiments about how to fund a newer, more open form of scholarship. a few of those experiments are worth mentioning in detail: unglue.it (https://unglue.it/) is an effort to crowd-fund the release of traditionally published books for greater access using a creative commons license. the project solicits funds in several ways and offers rights holders remuneration for releasing an openly licensed electronic version of their book(s). unglue.it has a program that allows libraries to create an account and an unglue.it library web page to publicize the project and manage titles that have been “unglued.” as a for-profit company, unglue.it represents an innovative approach to serving a broader public mission within the profit-making framework, and it is an experiment that academic libraries should watch carefully. knowledge unlatched (http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/) describes itself as a “collaborate initiative enabling open access books. knowledge unlatched is helping stakeholders to work together for a sustainable open future for specialist scholarly books. our vision is a healthy market that includes free access for end users.” knowledge unlatched has negotiated with academic publishers to create a collection of potential open monographs and has set a price on that effort. the organization then solicits commitments from academic libraries to raise the necessary funds. when enough libraries commit to pay a set amount, so that the target is reached, an open electronic edition of the book is published. these are new or relatively new academic titles, and the price is equivalent to or less than normal print-purchase prices, so it is an attractive model. knowledge unlatched announced in late february 2014 that they had reached the target commitments for their first batch of scholarly books. scoap3 (http://scoap3.org/) is the most ambitious and most costly effort to date to transition scholarship to open access. it represents a partnership of thousands of libraries who committed funds to flip about a dozen journal titles in the field of high-energy physics from subscription models to open access by paying for open-access journal services rather than buying limited-access journal subscriptions. once it gathered commitments, it negotiated the cost of the transition with publishers and is making articles from these highly regarded titles open access beginning in january 2014. one of the most interesting aspects of the scoap3 project is its potential, as a consortium that controls the funding of the project, to begin to get some control over the actual cost of publication, while providing continuity for journals that have developed excellent reputations over a long period. looking at these experiments—and there are many others—one striking thing is that the transition of cultural anthropology to open access could serve as a catalyst for a scoap3-style flip of journals in the social sciences. critics sometimes express the concern that the transition we have described from a predominantly commercial, subscription-based model of scholarly publication to one that is open, focused less on profitability, and controlled by scholars and scholarly institutions would create a complex environment. this is undoubtedly true. but one thing libraries know that is sometimes hidden from scholars working in a specific discipline is that the scholarly ecosystem is already very complicated. each publisher has a different model for distribution, access, and purchase. each contract—and the duke university libraries are party to nearly a thousand different contracts—has different terms and approaches similar issues in different ways. on the level of library consortia, there are again a multitude of different ways in which cost-sharing is managed, purchases negotiated, and resources managed. one of the reasons why academic libraries are poised to lead this transition is precisely because they have extensive experience with the complexity of the current system and the synoptic vision to manage a radical change. next steps academic libraries, like scholarly societies, presses, and individual authors, are part of a complex and evolving ecosystem. the difficult challenge facing all these stakeholders is how to change a whole ecosystem. no single action or actor will be able to achieve this transformation. and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. indeed, the risk of unintended consequences is higher with rapid, dramatic change. but there are things that individuals and organizations can do that will contribute to broader changes. returning to the ecological metaphor, we can call up the old maxim, “think globally, act locally.” here are some ideas of what individuals and groups can do: authors insist on keeping rights to your works. do not agree to contracts that give up ownership to your work, and the ability to decide how it might be used in the future, and to whose benefit. grant rights to those who you think are doing or might do useful things to increase your readership and the potential impact of your work, and to enable potential uses of it that you or your original publisher might not have considered. make it easier for others to build on what you’ve done by providing for that possibility up front with an open license. journal managers/editors reassess what your real goal is—putting out quality research or running a business—and don’t confuse means with ends. investigate whether there are models that would support your ultimate goal through different means. encourage your authors to keep their rights, and only require from them what you need to make the journal work. look into competitive services for the different aspects that go into the product you provide, and don’t assume that they must all be bundled into a single service provider’s product. scholarly societies investigate other options for funding your operations that will not be reliant on a single commercial entity, which is using your members’ work to extract monopoly prices from the community and from funding sources that support you (universities and funding agencies). talk to libraries and funding agencies about sponsorship of your mission, rather than about the purchase of your products. your members are at the institutions that could help make the case for this funding transition. publishers think of what you’re doing as providing services rather than selling products, and show your customers why the services you provide are worth the cost you charge. even in a marketplace where your customers are free to take their business elsewhere, if your services are good and the price is reasonable, you won’t lose them. diversify into other revenue sources. there are opportunities for you to grow and prosper by doing new things, not just by continuing to try to extract higher prices for the same old things, or through enclosing greater amounts of scholarship behind walls. libraries don’t be afraid to experiment and make investments in new models. you hold the biggest funding source for the ecosystem, and have the greatest potential to promote change by deciding where you spend your money. explain to your community where the funding is going, and how opaque the bundling and pricing model is. ask them if they’d prefer the money to be spent in different ways, like sponsorships of non-profit, open-access society journals. universities invest in the transitional moment. the current model costs you more than it should and gets you less than it could. you are the ones who are the intellectual home and financial supporters of all the key players in this space—you have more power over this market than you think, if only you would put your mind to using it. partner with peers to lessen the risk of change by promoting and funding the transition in concert. we probably all have a sense that the scholarly publishing ecosystem could work better, and should work better. we understand that as technology changes, scholarly practices change, as do the ways we communicate and want to communicate scholarship. the way we publish probably ought to change too. now is a good time to ask: what are we really trying to accomplish? if we were starting from scratch, and without the constraints of precedent, how would we go about achieving this? and only then, finally, how can we start moving toward that from where we are now? in most discussions about scholarly publishing, we start from the premise that the way it is now is the way it has always been, and must continue to be. this is not only false but self-defeating—or maybe just lazy. we are where we are because we, or our predecessors, made it this way, and we can un-make it or re-make it to meet changing needs, and perhaps more important, to take advantage of new opportunities. the inertia to continue on the current path is strong, and the risks of change to the current established patterns and its beneficiaries are great. but in the end we have to ask whether our goal is to protect established patterns and interests or to serve the goals of scholarship, and where these are not in alignment, whether we are willing to make the effort toward making the system better serve the goals of academics and academia, as well as the public good. ultimately, we can either control and manage these changes ourselves or be beholden to, or even become victims of, those who do control and manage them. as those who produce the essential components of this ecosystem and who are their primary users—authors and readers—as well as those whom this ecosystem was primarily designed to serve, academics should reassert themselves in the scholarly communication and publishing system, and ensure that the ecosystem returns to its original goal of serving scholarship first. notes 1. for a critique of the utility of the impact factor, see priem et al. 2010. 2. an earlier discussion of this possibility can be found in priem and hemminger 2012. 3. an explanation of the duke libraries cope fund can be found at http://library.duke.edu/research/openaccess/cope. more detail is provided by stuart shieber (2009) of the harvard office for scholarly communication. 4. a list of the fees charged by hindawi can be found on their website. see http://www.hindawi.com/apc/. 5. the fee for publishing in cell reports can be found on the cellpress website. see http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/faq. 6. the recently formed library publishing coalition published a directory in 2012 that lists almost 600 library-published journals, which is available at http://www.librarypublishing.org/resources/directory-library-publishing-services. 7. see http://www.arl.org/about. 8. morrison’s post is part of an ongoing series on the transition to open access. 9. for more information about the public library of science (plos), see http://www.plosone.org/. references hall, marie boas 2002 henry oldenberg: shaping the royal society. oxford: oxford university press. morrison, heather 2010 “elsevier 2009 $2 billion profits could fund worldwide oa at $1,383 per article.” the imaginary journal of poetic economics blog, april 27. http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2010/04/elsevier-2009-2-billion-profits-could.html. priem, jason, and bradly hemminger 2012 “decoupling the scholarly journal.” frontiers in computational neuroscience 6: article 19, http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2012.00019. priem, jason, dario taraborelli, paul garth, and cameron neylon 2010 “ altmetrics: a manifesto.” http://altmetrics.org/manifesto. shieber, stuart m. 2009 “equity for open-access journal publishing.” plos biology 7, no. 8. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000165. shirky, clay 2012 “how we will read: clay shirky.” findings.com, april 5. http://blog.findings.com/post/20527246081/how-we-will-read-clay-shirky. wooten, david 2010 galileo: watcher of the skies. new haven, conn.: yale university press. herding species herding species: biosecurity, posthuman labor, and the american industrial pig alex blanchette tufts university in the late spring of 2013, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (pedv) first emerged on the great plains and swept through north american hog herds. within a year, it had taken a toll of some seven million animals, or 10 percent of the pigs in the united states (eisenstadt 2014). one of the disease’s rumored ground zeroes was near the factory farms where i had previously conducted twenty-four months of ethnographic research, tracing the making of the industrial pig across all stages from prelife to postdeath. moving across this multistate region on the great plains, the disease would hop over the midwest’s pockets of concentrated porcine life that stretch all the way from rural missouri to utah.1 i returned shortly after the first outbreak, as alarmed rumors were circulating that the town’s slaughterhouse might shut down. in its first wave through dover foods’ animals, pedv exhibited a near–100 percent piglet kill rate. a friend who worked for this pork corporation—one of the world’s largest—grimly recounted how they had lost some 190,000 piglets in that week alone. across the united states, the sheer amount of diseased pig carcasses became a source of environmental risk, the seepage from mass burial sites threatening groundwater (strom 2014). traveling via aerosolized manure over a still-uncertain number of miles, pedv left few of dover foods’ 1,400 confinement barns unaffected. in areas such as this one—a hundred-mile radius region where some seven million pigs are annually raised and killed—contact with the virus has become almost unavoidable. for example, a recent study describes how floors from fifty convenience stores in rural pork-intensive iowa were swabbed for pedv. they all returned positive for the disease (thaler 2013). for those initial weeks of the outbreak, at least, pedv dramatically changed the tenor of farm labor from forcefully maximizing life to solemnly caretaking death. an acquaintance told me how her son, who worked in farrowing (the delivery of piglets), was returning home in tears. his days were a blur of pushing full wheelbarrows of small corpses into dumpsters. as i visited breeding farms, the acrid smoke of black incinerators saturated the summer air. yet the present urgency of containing pedv—framed by the pork industry as a foreign disease agent that appeared out of nowhere—elides more quiet crises of reproduction that have long been endemic to the factory farm’s routine operations. prior to pedv’s appearance in the united states, far-reaching but mundane, almost unnoticeable biosecurity regimes were deemed necessary to maintain porcine proliferation. and these modes of corporate governance, developed through porcine vitalities, subtly redefine what it means to be human for those who work in a world saturated by concentrated animal life. in response, this essay will chart a political economy of speciation—a critical articulation of the making and ranking of species—to analyze how an ambiguously postanthropocentric politics of class and value is emerging in pockets of the rural united states organized around fragile capitalist life forms. in so doing, my aim is to describe how we can grasp the factory farm as a project that—in spite of being built to take animal lives—comes to reverse the typical hierarchy of species and attempts to confine people in porcine worlds. the story begins near the end of my workplace-based research, when i first sensed the microbial textures that invisibly surrounded me, jolting my assumptions about the forms of routine labor and subjectivity that underlie the industrialization of the american pig. i was standing with my coworker, cesar, in the corner of a barn’s concrete workshop as he took a cigarette break after working the artificial insemination line of a 2,500-sow breeding farm. this one barn alone births almost one thousand piglets per week for a pork corporation called berkamp meats, one of dover foods’ regional competitors. cesar carefully balanced on the ridges of a door frame while making sure his sanitized black rubber boots did not come into contact with the outside dirt surrounding the barn. his posture exhibited traces of the biosecurity-based discipline we learned in training, hinting at his tacit biological proximity to the animal (see shukin 2009). as we casually discussed his life as a migrant to the united states, cesar pointed his blue latex-covered hand outside at a white truck that veered over the gravel roads around the dozens of hog barns on the horizon. he guessed his father or brother were passengers. they formed part of the itinerant medical crews that visited dozens of hog barns every day, checking on the status of automated feeders while injecting vaccines and antibiotics into growing animals after they left breeding barns. making idle chatter, i asked if his whole family worked for berkamp. he shrugged: “me and my family, we have no choice because of biosecurity.”2 figure 1. company-supplied boots and coveralls. as part of biosecurity protocols, farm employees shower at each worksite and wear laundered uniforms. photo by sean j. sprague. originally from guatemala, cesar had migrated with his parents and siblings to the great plains around 2000, when he was in his early twenties, after hearing of gainful employment in slaughterhouses, on hog farms, and at feed mills. sharing a trailer on the outskirts of town, the family plugged into the large k’iche’-speaking community and eventually found work on dover foods’ breeding farms. in so doing, they joined a workforce of four thousand migrants—from twenty-six different language backgrounds—whose invisible labor underlies the mass-production of life. the family worked on dover foods’ sow farms for years, increasing their experience, until berkamp offered cesar’s father a supervisory position in the company. but there was a significant catch: on learning this news, dover’s managers insisted that cesar and his siblings must either live separately from the father or that all the children would have to quit and find work with another company. managers at dover foods were concerned that microscopic particles of hog saliva, blood, feces, semen, or barn bacteria from another company, or from another stage in dover’s own meat production process, might get lodged in workers’ ears, fingernails, and nostrils despite worksite-mandated showering protocols.3 the corporation’s theory was that prolonged physical proximity between workers—across firms and across farms—could result in disease transferring over human bodies and, in turn, rippling through untainted barns of swine. a few years earlier, managers had allegedly started monitoring addresses on payroll forms to map overlaps between regional domestic living arrangements and the corporation’s division of labor across its vertically integrated network of boar studs, sow farms, growing barns, feed mills, and slaughterhouses. intrigued, i inquired with employees in an esl class and after church events in the town of dixon, a small and at times tight-knit rural community of some fifteen thousand people that is home to dover foods’ central slaughterhouse. many residents shared a similar story of how biosecurity subtly disrupted their lives. for example, a newlywed was disappointed that she had to abandon her job at a dover breeding farm. she took pride in caring for newborn piglets, but she had to quit because her husband held a monotonous yet better-paid position cutting meat on the slaughterhouse disassembly line. another maintained an old mailing address since he worked as an assistant manager in nursery barns for young pigs, while his new roommates were in breeding. there was little overt outrage directed at these protocols. more often than not, people expressed a shrug of befuddlement as to why they existed. but these stories have stuck with me, for they suggest subtle changes in terms of how agribusinesses are coming to understand the nature and needs of the industrial pig. even more striking were the ways that senior managers were not immune to the social repercussions of their own biosecurity protocols. at an anniversary party for dover foods, a slaughterhouse manager felt frustrated that he barely recognized the faces of his colleagues from the “live side” of the company. he knew them primarily as names on a spreadsheet because, he claimed, principles of biosecurity suggested that the two sides should not socialize outside work except on these rare occasions.4 managers such as this one appeared to be living out protocols even stricter than those imposed onto workers. this man was anticipating and modeling his sociality on an imagined future where public space beyond the domestic household—such as bars, churches, or clubs—is biosecure. the vertical integration of the hog—controlling all phases of the species’ life and death, while creating specialized sites and organization for each type and age of pig—was spawning forms of social reorganization as the corporation mapped out-of-work human relations onto the fissures of industrialized animal life cycles, creating microbiopolitical ruts in regional circuits of sociality (paxson 2008). the result is a region where both managers and workers—albeit in profoundly unequal ways, each with different relationships to the industrial hog—are induced to consider their relation to a form of life that redefines people, wind, and terrain as carriers of disease threatening the productivity of breeding stock. over the years, i have read many scholarly studies and journalistic exposés of factory farms that describe how manure-laden winds and nitrogen-loaded wells degrade quality of life in surrounding communities (e.g., thu and durrenberger 1996; kirby 2010; genoways 2014). the neighbors interviewed in these writings suggest how pork production remains porous, drawing our attention to the shared mediums—air and water—that continue to bind pigs and people in spite of the animals’ confinement indoors. but biosecurity here requires another kind of attention to the invisible copresence of the pig in everyday life, a different kind of multispecies atmospheric attunement.5 since its founding as a global locus for hog production in the mid-1990s, this region has become a zone that locals describe as one of the “red meat capitals of the world,” where hogs outnumber humans by more than fifty-to-one. in this context, cesar’s story hints at how a concentrated form of porcine life swells across the region, microscopically saturating human bodies, while potentially buttressing novel forms of discipline and consciousness of one’s relation to surrounding ecologies, kin, and socialities. his story depicts a place where efforts to sustain the waning vitality of the industrial hog are provoking the industrialization of many other forms of social and biological life that exist in this animal’s ever-expanding orbit. granted, industrial extension beyond the factory floor is not new.6 feminist social scientists have long shown the dynamic ways that domestic households and unwaged work are intertwined in the reproduction of capitalist industry. the household has always been essential to the (re)production of labor power, socialization, and the very meaning of wage labor (see rubin 1975; weeks 2011). similarly, efforts to rationalize laborers’ domestic sociality for the improvement of workplace morale date back to fordism’s founding moments. henry ford’s sociological department infamously inspected employees’ homes, hygiene, and spending habits in exchange for earning the five-dollar day (meyer 1981). yet biosecurity, in this instance, is not about biologically or socially reproducing human labor power. nor does it form part of a humanist industrial morality, of creating the ideal (white, male) worker who can stand on and withstand the assembly line. instead, these interventions into human spheres are premised on reproducing animal reproduction. they suggest an imminent orientation where the value of routine action—from showering at home to sharing a bottle of wine in a park—could be indexed and appraised in terms of its potential effects on pigs’ numerical proliferation. figure 2. breeding sows in individual gestation crates. photo by sean j. sprague. much recent scholarship and political commentary probes possibilities for renewing life in the anthropocene, of finding ways to coexist with beings beyond the human. on the one hand, we could continue to practice the fantasy of human exceptionalism by pretending it is possible to maintain a pure separation between human and “animal” worlds (raffles 2010, 330). as celia lowe (2010) articulates in a study of avian flu’s viral (dis)entanglements, agricultural biosecurity figures as a central site for generating (impossible) anthropocentric ideals of rigorously ordered, perfectly planned, and purely human biosocial worlds. on the other, a broadly more-than-human scholarship has taken up the urgent political task of opposing such narratives of disembodied and autonomous human omniscience by articulating how species are relationally entangled at their core (nading 2012; porter 2013), living with and making each other up in interactive everyday flow (haraway 2008; kohn 2013), and shaping each other in codomesticated exchanges across deep history (cassidy and mullin 2007; tsing 2012). but projects like the factory farm—seemingly a straightforward site of human domination—suggest the need for still another approach. these anthropocentric projects, to the extent that they revolve around satisfying human diets and livelihoods by taking the lives of other species (wolfe 2012), conjure fantasies of an ahuman landscape. such fantasies are not an idiosyncrasy of industrial hog production. similar tendencies are visible in the body-breaking, pesticide-laden fruit farms of the u.s. west coast (holmes 2013), amid paraguay’s deathly soy fields (hetherington 2013), and from the factory farm itself as a key contributor of greenhouse gas emissions (weis 2013). industrial agriculture is manufacturing cheap food for human consumption by overtaking swathes of territory in ways that prioritize the value of its singular organisms over other forms of life.7 what cesar’s seemingly innocent family story suggests, then, are the ways that the working human, in both its social and embodied aspects, is becoming suspect. this, too, is not necessarily new. the farm laborer’s body has recently emerged as a site of risk in public health studies that fret about its ability to carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria off farms (nadimpalli et al. 2014), or how it could serve as a transmission point for zoonotic swine influenza viruses (gray et al. 2007). but what is jarring about this postanthropocentric biosecurity protocol is its reversal of the typical ranking of species. human labor is framed as a threat to industrial pork—albeit, at this moment, a necessary one given that machines cannot raise hogs alone—and it is the industrial pig whose vital safety requires intervention. this constitutes the reverse of the standard anthropocentric fears of public policy, such that wild animals’ suspect movements or leaky bodies will come to infect human populations through zoonotic illness (davis 2007). the indoor confinement of farm animals is itself often justified in the face of the viral threat of unpredictable contact with beings such as wild geese, whose risky biologies make for key natural reservoirs of zoonotic disease (fearnley 2015). instead this rural space, which is given over to making industrialized organisms, suggests how the laboring body and its unpredictable rhythms is engulfed by porcine illness in such a way that human sociality is now marked as the central virtual reservoir sheltering porcine disease. this reversal marks a zone where the protection of the porcine species is broadly privileged over the cultural lives of the corporation’s four thousand employees, in spite of individual pig bodies being radically killable as a nondescript biomass in the slaughterhouse. or, more precisely, such securities suggest an avowedly biocapitalist landscape whereby individual porcine lives may be expendable as cheap meat, but intensifying the generative potentials of swine as a species—the vital processes of birth and growth (helmreich 2008)—trumps classic humanist ideals of autonomy, freedom, and privacy. this distinction between individual hogs and the porcine species, in turn, is the ground on which corporations are remaking classes of people. this essay follows the foundational lead of scholars who have developed ethnographically specific ways of framing how vital governance extends across species, and how people are made to “work on [themselves] in relation to” other, often anthropogenically weakened beings (porter 2013, 144). what intrigues me about the factory farm’s intimate biosecurities is how they mark an attempt to convert personal or private actions that seemingly have no bearing on others, such as looking for an apartment, into what we might label a posthuman form of labor in the service of maintaining industrial porcine life. such emerging subjectivities in the factory farm suggest a managerial-capitalist zone where the value of routine or previously unnoticed human activity is increasingly measured by how it is taken up by, and expressed in, other kinds of animals. there are many ways that one might develop the notion of posthuman labor, extending the discourse of posthumanism—which aims to decenter humanity as the bearer of autonomous value and uniqueness in the world (wolfe 2009)—into a type of practice. these might involve theorizing how nonhuman beings can also be said to “work” (white 1995), recognizing distributed worldly agencies such that humans never labor with other humans alone (bennett 2010), critiquing the exceptional value of human labor (weeks 2011), or paying attention to how artists and activists work to reveal interspecies entanglements (see kirksey 2014). in this essay, however, my aim is not to develop a philosophical posthumanism that critiques liberal capitalism from outside, but instead to trace how this sensibility—however disfigured or co-opted—manifests itself in capitalist practices. for the site of the factory farm does not so much call for an effort to positively decenter the human as it requires us to grasp the work—especially that of managers—which enables the porcine species’ vitality to mediate a region. this perspective enables us to see interspecies power relations anew, and it has consequences for how we interpret the founding myth of industrial agriculture as an efficient organizational form that uses less land and labor to feed the world. how, then, did the industrial pig come to embody a regionally exceptional status; how did this animal species become the central optic through which regional human action is potentially appraised? how did the pig become such a fragile organism, both in terms of its physical frailty and of agribusiness’s perception of its weakness, while at the same time it is so privileged and worthy of protection? what, in short, is the shifting industrial pig (as opposed to the timeless natural pig) as a form of life? rather than reducing posthuman labor to an automatic outgrowth of biocapital or the commodity form, the remainder of this essay follows managers as they construct the pig as a world-defining creature that quietly overdetermines the lives of regional residents (cf. sunder rajan 2012 on overdetermination). in describing this political economy of speciation, i am appealing not to the classic taxonomical definition of species in terms of reproductive capacity and difference, much less searching for a stable essence of pig and human in a context where these beings mutually (re)constitute each other.8 instead, i trace managers’ ongoing efforts to know and inhabit the porcine species in its totality, even as they rank and remake classes of people through this pig. the expanding boundaries of the herd managers have learned to intervene in the great plains’ saturated microbial ecology by analyzing how it becomes statistically indexed to the bodies of breeding stock, using an organizational technology they call the herd.9 the herd is invisible outside of spreadsheets, computer tabulations, scroll charts, or other abstract representations. yet it productively mediates managers’ experience of not only the industrial pig, but also of surrounding socio-ecologies from trucking routes to wind patterns. in practice, the herd operates as a species-making device—a means for managers to abstract from the material, embodied expressions of individual porcine lives or types such as boars, sows, or piglets. treating their pigs as a herd, as i will show, is what makes managers into proper managers of vertically integrated life. a worker in the boar stud experiences only boars, a person in finishing barns works only with grown meat hogs, and a given employee on the cut floor might interact with thousands of left hams every day.10 senior managers, by distinction, are the only people in the factory farm who can work across all manifestations of the pig; the herd is an organizational device that helps them work on the totality of the species. figure 3. identification cards on farms identify the breeding performance of a given animal. this information is relayed to administrative offices to provide data for developing a numerical portrait of the herd as a whole. photo by sean j. sprague. the herd is a complicated icon for the factory farm as a whole. it is at once a rationalization for the rise of factory hog farms, a class-based mode of grasping the porcine species as a singular whole, and, in turn, one that helps form regional classes of people through their relation to hogs. at its simplest, the herd turns dover foods’ 180,000 breeding animals—which annually produce five million 285-pound market hogs—into a statistically derived unit of life that is used to appraise the status of the total factory farming process at a given point in time. such a status, expressed as the “herd health,” is signaled through measures of the breeding animals’ average productivity in terms of pig output. depending on the position from which it is articulated—say, voiced from a growing farm versus a slaughterhouse—herd health might relate to either the average amount of pigs or pounds of meat produced per sow per year. once forming this virtual mean-sow, the most senior managers spend their days inspecting material and microbial factors in farms that are producing starkly less (or more) than the rest of the herd. but the herd, as i will argue in some concluding notes, is also a powerful means of forming species to achieve disciplinary control—and perhaps foreclosing more complicated ethics—not only over disease-ridden ecologies created by the factory farm but also over the moral character of farm laborers. “the old farming mentality was to manage individual pigs,” one senior manager named barry memorably stated over drinks. “but our mentality is that we manage the herd. . . . the old farmer used to like some boar or sow and he’d say, ‘that’s a good animal, i’m gonna keep it.’” dover foods did not favor any animals, he went on to explain, instead grasping high-performance sows as part of “natural variation.” they cull and replace their genetic stock of breeding animals at regular intervals of age or litter sizes regardless of a given animal’s history. rather than managing single pigs, then, they articulate themselves as managing abstracted genetics and probability across the whole of the breeding stock.11 the herd is a matter of managing the species as a single mean-sow that is conceptually standardized, even if individual sows vary in productivity. in this sense, we might initially read the herd as an industrial abstraction, because it enacts a conceptual negation of productive differences across sows by making them disposable and interchangeable in farm practice (see braverman 1974). but if the herd is a quantitative figure for making sense of epochal shifts in pork production, it also operated in managerial circles as a discursive term for establishing managers’ own identity and, in turn, tethered regional class difference to how people relate to animals. senior managers repeated an identical stock phrase whenever i asked them to define their role: “we work on the herd,” they would claim, “while hourly employees and farm managers work with the herd.” such a proposition of identity does capture a felt reality, especially for senior managers whose daily experience with pigs is in statistical, sampling, tour-based inspection, or paper-based forms. but what interests me is the blurring of difference in the oppositional identity—a seaming of human labor and hog life—once senior managers narrate from the position of working on the herd as a whole. “working on” the herd is best translated as improving the quantitative output of all the breeding animals, irrespective of given animals’ qualities. this can make everything from the animals’ feed regimen to workers’ actions become a legible input toward improving the total herd. we can glimpse in this stock phrase how the boundaries of the herd are open; the herd is a mode of reading a territory through the lens of the porcine species in such a way that it incorporates everything from microbes to terrain to human bodies. and without access to the category and attendant practices of working on the herd as an abstract species whole across workplaces, workers can only relate to (or “work with”) animal beings through experiences with concrete manifestations, stages, and specific types of hog life such as boars, sows, piglets, grown pigs, or carcasses. in other words, social class (and race) become regionally mediated through the type and scale of animality that people can sense and inhabit.12 efforts to monitor this region’s socio-ecological landscape through the herd thus differ from what biosecurity has tended to signify in anthropological theories and human-centered situations that problematize it as a virtual or future-oriented trope of governmentality, technoscience, and health planning (see lakoff and collier 2008; caduff 2014). biosecurity here forms a more banal present-tense, enacted regime of corporate governance, alongside a subtly inculcated ethic for living amid industrial animals. while its implied consequences may be significant, it is rarely remarked on in everyday life. indeed, if a resident was not employed by these corporations, he or she might not know the protocols even exist. the herd is a quiet matter of sustaining porcine life amid regional microbial degradation, rather than a robust preemptive transformation of the social contract in anticipation of a catastrophic state of crisis such as a bioterror attack (see cooper 2008; lakoff 2008). and since the pig diseases that these biosecurity protocols address do not affect human health—and, unlike in sarah franklin’s (2007, 174) analysis of the similarly innocuous foot-and-mouth disease, they do not impact international trade and the global circulation of meat—the state and its public health apparatuses are not present. indeed, while the latter, under the auspices of a one health approach, often struggles in the face of anthropocentrism to “incorporate the well-being of non-human animals in the purview of [public] health policy” (lezaun and porter 2015, 101), the value of human livelihood in the factory farm is subordinated to the porcine species, and it is the unruly social lives of laboring humans that must be monitored to protect porcine proliferation. absent the all-or-nothing public imperative of protecting human life from zoonotic infection, these private biosecurity protocols are often framed by managers as mere economic inputs subject to ethically innocuous cost-benefit analyses as to whether they achieve returns in terms of breeding animal productivity.13 but not everyone saw such protocols as justifiable ways of comprehending the improvement of animal life. many managers at competing companies steadfastly refused to enact the domestic protocols. as one explained: i favor a commonsense approach. i don’t think we should be worried about what people are doing when they aren’t at work. it’s, it’s . . . intrusive. i mean, we know that prrs [a particularly rampant hog virus] can travel in wind for three miles and we’ve got a lot of pigs here. what’s next? trucks spraying the air all over town? will we put foot baths [iodine buckets] at every gas station entrance and make people disinfect their boots? where does this end? this manager is describing future techniques for disciplining the region’s ecology, which requires expanding securitization of the great plains once managers open the pandora’s box of moving biosecurity beyond the barns. he makes a simple moral claim, one premised on a classic agricultural biosecurity that aims to exclude disease from barns (allen and lavau 2015, 347). as private businesses, he states, pork companies should manage pig disease on the confines of their own farm property. he projects an imminent future of biosecurity interventions run amok where working country and residential town collapse together via the circulation of pig disease. at the same time, though, this manager’s refusal to enact the protocols in his company highlights that this is not a finished project, a totalized form, or an inevitable future; great plains biosecurity remains actual and virtual (collier, lakoff, and rabinow 2004, 5). on the one hand, unlike large-scale, purely anticipatory biosecurities, it forms part of an everyday infrastructure—a routine regime, however incomplete. on the other, i noted how some workers refuse these biosecurity protocols, and how some managers themselves enact interventions more extensively in their own lives than they do in those of their employees. from church gatherings to birthday parties, from sharing a fork to sitting on a sofa with a coworker, there are as many potential bio-insecure spaces in this region as there are social relations. yet as the manager here suggests, such is the power of the herd’s expanding boundaries, signaled by arrangements like the domestic housing biosecurity protocol. once enacted, such arrangements can illuminate the multitude of bio-insecure practices that stand to impact the pig.14 a greenfield the situation was not always like this. elements of the great plains’ natural ecology initially attracted companies to the region, hoping its relative dearth of precipitation and deep groundwater could mitigate ecological concerns with respect to waste management emerging out of north carolina in the 1990s, which was the first region in the united states to experience the growth of new industrial hog farms. north carolina was addled with hurricanes that caused dramatic overflowing of concentrated manure lagoons. witnessing the public outcry that ensued, corporations—from north america, western europe, and east asia—shifted their focus for new pork development to parts of the u.s. midwest. they were drawn by the region’s moderate temperatures, higher evaporation rates that eased how often they would need to apply manure from the lagoons onto surrounding fields, sharp winds that blow lingering smells onto neighboring property, and the availability of grain-based feed. moreover, economically depressed counties offered tax breaks and other incentives for feed mills, barns, and slaughterhouses to decrease the cost of construction, while many states have adopted “right-to-work” laws that limit the efficacy of labor unions. by the late 1990s, corporations were reshaping the animal ecologies of the rural great plains—from missouri to manitoba, and from nebraska to texas. but the crucial attraction for corporations to the great plains—at least outside of the traditional hog belt that extends from iowa to minnesota—was its scarcity of pigs. in 1993, for example, one of the counties that forms part of this study annually produced only a few thousand hogs. by 2010, it would annually raise and slaughter millions of animals. the lack of hogs on the landscape proved crucial for two reasons. the first was the near-total absence of swine disease in the microbial ecology, an advantage that has clearly diminished during the past twenty years. but the second was the concurrent lack of independent hog farmers contracting to raise pigs, the standard form of risk-sharing and horizontal integration in the corporate pork industry (rich 2008).15 this enabled these corporations to attempt full vertical integration by purchasing the land and buildings themselves, operating entirely on the labor of migrant workers who were said to have little background in agriculture. as dover’s ceo recounted in an interview, the company was “a start-up, a greenfield,” where “we could design a core system from scratch.” greenfield is business-speak for underdeveloped territory, marking a vision of this region as pure in its absence of pig disease, pig farmers, or preexisting claims on the land. the result of this frontier-like agricultural space was a series of experiments. one company imported managers from across the globe—including ukraine, japan, russia, and south africa—to pool global swine knowledge. others installed barns with cutting-edge technologies such as (relatively) ecologically benign manure composting, or electronic sow feeders that deliver precise quantities of food read off computer chips implanted into animal ears. dover foods created a closed-loop network of industrialized hog energetics; their system now includes 1,400 barns, feed mills, one of the world’s most advanced slaughterhouses, and a series of value-added ventures that recycle blood from slaughtered pigs into plasma for piglet diets, or manure into biogas to power the slaughterhouse. they developed a company region economically and socially constituted by industrial pigs. the aging of the herd on a midsummer monday, i was waiting under the black 3:30 a.m. sky for my management guides to arrive in their company-branded van. for months, i had been shadowing managers from various stages of porcine life across their routine working days and joining them in evening classes on japanese manufacturing theory designed to rethink the “biological system” (their words) of pork production. on this day, we would be driving out to a boar stud facility where collections begin at 5 a.m. to ensure a steady supply of semen for morning inseminations on sow-breeding farms. since many of the most devastating pig diseases are communicable through the semen that underpins and conjoins (sow) breeding farms, the boar studs are the most pivotal sites of biosecurity. my twelve companions on this tour might be best glossed as pod managers. they were geneticists, nutritionists, veterinarians, and executives who fill their working days on farm tours analyzing the most problematic strands of the herd within dover foods’ system, usually those undergoing a disease event. inspecting the interiors of barns do enable forms of diagnostics—perhaps the farmworkers were being slack in cleaning farrowing rooms—but much of the pod managers’ time is spent driving in a cramped van while diagnosing the external or environmental causes of symptoms witnessed on a set of pigs. such banter revealed a hard-earned familiarity with the great plains’ ecology as they described how terrain gradations around a given site might explain disease rates, or how an area’s wind patterns could seam microbial networks across barns. they learned, for example, that national data on the spread of disease in highly wooded areas such as north carolina did not apply to the midwestern terrain. where i saw flat grain fields, they saw invisible traces of porcine life totally, yet differentially, spread over an uneven landscape. highly respected in the pork industry, this group of managers came together after working separately in corporations across the united states, chile, the philippines, england, and canada. graham, the head of live-production operations, grew up in north carolina during the first wave of industrialization in the late 1980s. a working-class kid unable to afford college, and not academically inclined, he started out as an entry-level power washer in hog barns and jumped across corporations as he moved up the ranks. barry, a senior regional manager, went to agricultural college in the 1980s, planning to take over his parents’ beef cattle ranch. he soon found his family bankrupt in the midst of a farm crisis. recruited by a pork corporation, he became a global expert in emergent methods of artificial insemination. gregory was the company’s lead veterinarian. though initially skeptical, he found himself enjoying the relative stability of corporate agribusiness after years of treating pigs in his private practice during farm crises. he recounted walking into a private barn where emaciated, dying pigs had not been fed for days because their owner was too broke to cover the cost of feed. these men entered the corporate pork industry under conditions not purely of their choosing, but they also strove to create the most profitable and ethical pork corporation possible in an industry with very low margins of return. though they had become tight-knit over the years, they were not unified in their beliefs. the pod managers—especially those trained in the veterinary mission—would often bicker behind each other’s backs over who was more “health-centered” versus “production-centered.” during the 1990s, they mainly worked apart in different corporations during what they called growth mode, when corporations rapidly expanded barn sites before states placed moratoria on new hog farms and competition that would start to bite into profit margins. the current goal, in polishing mode, was to maximize porcine value in the vertically integrated system, searching, as they often put it, “now that there’s no more low-hanging fruit,” to “find new money” in the porcine species. the promise of vertical integration is twofold: it aims to produce a more standardized porcine body to increase the value of the species in global wholesale markets, while attempting to make more pigs per sow (blanchette 2013). yet the grim sights on these farm tours hinted at the ways that vertical integration’s promises of total control over porcine life remained unfulfilled, reflecting how life constitutes an excessive entity that cannot ever be standardized (cf. hinchcliffe and ward 2014; allen and lavau 2015). growth mode’s end occurred at the same time that, as another veterinarian put it, “the health system started to erode.” one example of the many endemic illnesses afflicting the modern hog is porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (prrs). it first emerged globally during the intensification of pork production in the late 1980s (cho and dee 2006), it disproportionately affects fragile lean pigs (rich 2008), and it tends to get lodged in confinement barns (harris 2004). the industry frames prrs as its most economically significant illness (prior to pedv), costing u.s. farmers some $560 million per year (johnson et al. 2012). though prrs weakens pigs’ immunity, it rarely kills them directly. it causes miscarriages in gestating sows and decreases weight gains in market swine. prrs is an economic disease—we might call it a species disease—because it throttles the herd’s vital proliferation. a couple of pod managers lamented how the severity of outbreaks can increase as the concentration of animals deteriorates the ecology, resulting in what they called an “aging of the herd” that worsens with time as strains of viruses mutate and compound with other illnesses. in these conditions, the demand to make the herd’s sows into corporate life forms (cooper 2008)—expected to continually increase in numerical productivity, increasing in biocapitalist growth in spite of microbial aging—proves vexing even to managers who ostensibly control the system. as one veterinarian declared in frustrated opposition to my insistence on their agency: “no. the herd is everything [that is, it is bigger than them]. we are slaves to the herd.” figure 4. grown hogs in a confinement barn, shortly before being transported to the packing plant for slaughter. photo by sean j. sprague. such, at least, is the herd’s-eye view of disease rendered into a shifting statistical portrait of its effect on animal reproduction. the daily tours of barns reminded everyone of a more visceral sense of pig disease as we walked past rows of animal cages, fixated on symptoms that might indicate prrs or some other illness. one day the veterinarians would point at coughing animals, or hogs’ rumps streaked brown with scours, or diarrhea. on another, piglets were emaciated with a condition called “suck-in,” their stomachs taut against their ribs, or “thumping”—a respiratory condition that makes pigs loudly wheeze. low-level farm managers, working extra hours to handle an outbreak, would nervously recount how many “aborts” (miscarriages) they found on the floor during morning inspections. during hundred-mile drives across barn sites, pod managers often discussed animal scientists’ research into the spread of hog illness, revealing how porcine materials saturate everything. scott dee et al. (2002) has conducted experiments that demonstrate how viruses such as prrs can blanket a region, creating an “area spread.” it can infect pigs via wind transmission, through mosquitoes, semen, blood, saliva, feces sprayed as fertilizer, rodents, workers’ clothing, trucks that ship pigs, and in delivery containers. as a dover manager informed me, “we don’t know how productive the genetics of our sows might be. we can’t see the pure healthy animal.” invocation of academic research on disease, however, would often lead to disagreement over managers’ own values of efficiency, animal welfare ethics, culpability, and limits to containing the herd’s degradation. in the mid-2000s, dover tried to eradicate prrs. beyond the economics, most managers agreed that eliminating prrs was an ethical imperative given how it causes pig illness. they invested millions of dollars into cleaning barns, relocating farm sites, installing so-called biocurtains on barn ducts, and initiating new biosecurity protocols. for three months, there were no reports of prrs symptoms. the disease then broke out in genetic multiplier barns—the nucleus of vertical integration, where they make the sows that then make meat animals for commercial slaughter. the vector of transmission was tracked to a hobbyist’s show pig a few miles upwind. once the genetic heart of the operation was infected, the disease spread through the downstream barns with crippling force, because the new lines of pigs had no inbuilt immunities. since this time the pod managers, like most corporations, have pursued an endemic “prrs-positive” production strategy. they manage and quarantine the virus as it appears in a barn, stabilizing its quantitative effects in terms of seasonal pig output and building immunities in the herd as a whole.16 the veterinarians also became production-centered, perhaps partially leaving behind the health-centered perspective learned in school. the totalizing quality of disease appeared to lead to the adoption of a herd-based cost-benefit approach to health, one that frames decreases in sow productivity as the vital symptom. making biosecure subjects amid this sense of invisible but dense porcine material, boar studs offer onlookers a much more disciplined aesthetic of life and labor. the boar stud is an icon of biosecurity; it is a destination for company investors and wholesalers hoping to witness a variation-free architectural image of precise control. isolated from human activity by twenty miles and the dividing line between two states, there are no lights on the horizon save for the stars. the building is nested within a thirty-foot perimeter of gravel that tamps out plant life. enclosing this dead zone is a twelve-foot-high, password-locked fence topped with barbed wire. even the specially selected species of grass that extends beyond the perimeter is maintained to ensure that there are no weeds to attract rodents. nonetheless, these aesthetics of security could be described as a spectacle—a performance—because the interiors of barns always teem with nonporcine life. mice dart out to nibble at pigs’ feed, and birds line the perimeters of the manure lagoons. clouds of mosquitoes hover over the animals during warm months, leading to a measurable summertime decrease in slaughterhouse carcass yields from cutting out the bites on skin. i once saw a fire extinguisher encased in what appeared to be a centimeters-thick weave of grey cobwebs. i checked its date, thinking that it had not been changed for a decade. it had been inspected a few months earlier. this spectacular aspect, however, does not mean that on-farm biosecurity is futile. its performativity is the overarching point. as a food and agriculture organization (2010, 3) publication for hog farms states, agricultural biosecurity is not only “the implementation of measures that reduce the risk of the introduction and spread of disease agents” but also “requires the adoption of a set of attitudes and behaviors by people to reduce risk in all activities involving . . . animals and their products.” these aesthetics are what we might call doubling biosecurities. they excise “disease agents” while demanding workers’ psychosocial recognition of their corporeal intimacy with the animal. this doubling mode of biosecurity becomes logical in sites where prrs and other diseases are rampant, when the scale of production is so large—and human interaction outside of work so unruly—that it leads managers to see working humans’ socialities as reservoirs for animal illness. doubling biosecurities abound, from the tedium of power-washing farrowing rooms to the human food allowed in barns. the standard process of showering in and out at barn sites constitutes the prime example, a ritual that i would repeat as many as six times per tour. workers undress on “the dirty side” and put their clothes into a bank of lockers. the first step is to take a regular shower, washing the body and hair using liquid company soap from a dispenser on the wall. the second is to scrub unusual parts of the body such as the fingernails, the ear’s curves, and nostrils. cotton swabs are available for drying these body parts on “the clean side,” prior to donning the company’s socks, brief-style underwear, t-shirts, blue coveralls, and rubber boots. this five-minute ritual made me question my actions during the past hours, recalling the animals and people that i had met. i initially felt paranoid about whether missed flecks would be responsible for pig illness, once confessing that i had been with workers the previous evening. such accounting of one’s corporeality is more pedagogical than it is enactive of actual biophysical security. it aims to turn workers into biosecure subjects who monitor their habitus despite managers’ inability to watch their actions at all moments, such as when they are in the shower. by making workers fear their potential to harm animals, learned from past experiences of a disease outbreak in a barn, the shower enlists moral subjects to work with the herd. or, these biosecurities enable managers to maintain their identity as statistically production-centered by improving the output of the pigs that they confront abstractly—working on the herd—while turning workers into health-centered subjects deemed culpable for the suffering of the actual pigs that they work with in a tactile manner.17 biosecurity protocols create new kinds of classes of people, tethered to concrete manifestations of the vertically integrated pig—boars, sows, growing hogs, or carcasses—and fixed in single barn sites, while letting pod managers dwell outside any single type of animal and work on the species as a whole. managers have developed a series of sensory technologies that enable them to powerfully experience a species in its abstract entirety, and which make evident the need for the off-farm biosecurity protocols that initiated this essay. on farm tours, as we departed the boar stud and moved across sites in the van, we were performing a (managerial) form of biosecurity, which i once heard someone call “walking the pods.” pod managers are the only people in the factory farm who can travel across distinct types of hog farms. a production manager, in distinction, might manage six sow farms but would not set foot in any growing barns. senior managers work on the herd because they are not locked into working with only one strand or type of pig; they practice a management of the pig in all of its possible expressions or manifestations, of a species in potentia. a pod consists of a lineage of all animals from genetic sows (that make sows), to commercial sows (that make meat animals), to piglets, to hogs for the market. the pod (also known as a genetic flow) is a genetic grouping or family of pigs that moves through predetermined sets of barns as the flow grows in weight and age. managers begin their tours at a boar stud because these sites sit at the apex of the so-called biosecurity pyramid through which pod managers organize their means of safely monitoring and physically entering a strand of the herd without introducing disease. managers cannot have contact with pigs in any form lower on the pyramid—commercial sows, piglets, grown hogs, carcasses—for one to three days before entering a boar stud, genetic sow farm, or otherwise moving up. they can, however, move down the pyramid in a single day if they stay in the same pod. the system is designed so that a given pod will (ideally) never make contact with other lineages of pigs, especially not in forms mediated by human bodies. the set of barns through which a given pod moves (or “flows”) can also be changed over time, such as when a given barn or region of the great plains landscape appears to be saturated with disease. figure 5. the biosecurity pyramid, an example of a planning document used to manage movements through the herd. on any given week, it is updated to denote the farms currently under quarantine. illustration by alex blanchette. these are technologies for translating statistical impressions of the herd into embodied perception as managers “walk [down] the pods” by inspecting conditions across sections of a genetic flow in a day. when managers walk the pods, they imagine themselves as moving down the spatiotemporal flow of life to physically witness all the historical conditions that a lineage of pigs has experienced. the model requires standardized control of minute conditions over time. it presumes that young pigs downstream the flow in, say, growing barn #239 once experienced identical microbial and environmental conditions in upstream parts of the flow with their maternal sows in breeding barn #10. the essence of the pod is that it enables managers to isolate variables outside the herd’s genetics—focusing on all of the animate and inanimate beings that make up fleshly hogs in the actual everyday. the model maintains a sense of static temporality such that pigs in pod #4, growing at day 108 of their lives, are identical to those of the same pod #4 at day 32. since trucks move these pigs across similar spatial ecologies, geographies, and sets of barns, managers hypothesize that if a barn of pigs started exhibiting poor performance numbers in terms of, say, converting feed into flesh at day 92, then the piglets at day 14 will also develop identical problems unless managers intervene and diagnose problems in the environment that these pigs will flow through on day 92. the pod constitutes an organizational device to interpret the microbial ecology of the great plains, because it frames all external forms confronting pigs—barns, workers, wind patterns, terrain gradations, or perhaps even towns on trucking routes—as inputs affecting the lineage of pigs trickling down from the upstream genetic sows. as a flow moves through space, managers can see it as filtering all the material things it confronts. moreover, the need for the standardization of all forms of life that orbit around the barns is embedded into this mode of multispecies organization. conditions across the biosecurity pyramid and the flow must remain identical for managers to travel down pods and assume that pigs on day 14 will experience identical conditions on day 92, or that pod managers’ bodies are not carrying new diseases from upstream farms into downstream barns. increasing degrees of standardized control over time—over life and labor—is the condition on which the model depends. these tethered sensory technologies—the herd, the pod, and the biosecurity pyramid—enable workplace practices that materialize industrial animality as a form of life in potentia. recall, as one manager put it earlier in this essay—in distinction to old-time farmers who managed individual animals—“our mentality is that we manage the herd.” this abstract industrial animality temporarily manifests as forms of appearance in boars, sows, piglets, and grown meat pigs in a continuous flow of becoming that is absorbing the materialities of a region. one result of such embodied ecological perception of animal life is that it becomes clear how pigs are no longer raised in barns alone, but across the region as a whole—including, potentially, in gas stations, churches, or cesar’s family living room. indeed, such a mentality allows them to perceive a kind of swine that exists as a theoretical abstraction and an animating vitality outside of concrete forms of animal appearance such as boars, at the same moment that it offers a class-based mode of ecological perception arguably required to sustain the modern pig and its diseases. this is a particular kind of capitalist animal species. it undergirds regional policies, but it is only perceptible to those managers who (unlike workers) are not tethered to working with a single type of hog. its effect is to license managers to speak for the industrial pig as a whole, and to interpret a region through it, while illustrating the powerful forms of knowledge that underlie any act of trying to materialize, sense, and value a species in its entirety. conclusion: porcine worlds the standard notion of biosecurity is, at root, founded on a fantasy of separation—of “enclos[ing] humans and animals in specific, sterile, and segregated spaces” (lezaun and porter 2015, 100). in this essay, i have suggested how the factory farm pushes beyond logics of hog confinement to the point where managers feel they have to learn how to sense industrial animality as copresent with and defining every facet of a region, including workers’ bodies. pursuing such a project of speciation—tracing the postanthropocentric making and ranking of species—has been my central concern in this essay, unpacking the forms of species-level managerial work that allow the industrial pig’s vitality to gradually mediate a region’s ecology, class relations, and laboring subjectivities. unlike anthropocentric public health efforts that aim to control animality within human worlds—that police unruly animals’ and insects’ movements to buttress a hope for a purely human biosociality (see lowe 2010; nading 2012)—what is striking is the partly enacted fantasy that underlies this corporate regime: it signals an impossible desire to confine humanity in animal worlds. this process is not so much a matter of regional dehumanization as it is, in ways that remain hard to articulate given the tendency to grasp agrocapitalist projects such as the factory farm in terms of anthropocentric domination, a matter of reading and controlling territory and populations through the porcine species. in closing, then, i want to return to the troubling core of cesar’s family story—that the industrial pig somehow exists in his home—that jolted my settled sensibilities concerning the factory farm. in theory, capitalist agriculture is supposed to produce carnal abundance with minimal space and effort. like all industrial projects, it concentrates labor and land use—even if, as critics are quick to point out, its externalities saturate the globe by polluting waterways and the atmosphere (weis 2013; wallace and kock 2012). this efficiency is why it is deemed ethically necessary to feed the world in the face of growing populations. this essay has suggested in response that the factory farm is not a straightforwardly anthropocentric project of reducing labor and land at the expense of increasing harm to animals and the environment. the species forms that managers are summoning in the wake of the waning vitality of the modern hog—perhaps as a feature of lively capital more generally (see dumit 2012)—are better described as devices that convert human activities into labor and that reveal how the industrial pig saturates an ecology. they mark the ongoing creation of a being whose sustenance requires emerging quantities and qualities of work by managers and workers alike. once the human becomes sensible as a reservoir of disease—a necessary threat to the porcine species—forms of mundane sociality, such as starting a new relationship, have the potential to be deemed bio-insecure, changing into a form of labor in service of maintaining fragile animal vitalities. many potent ironies exist here: the anthropogenic creation of a postanthropocentric landscape; some managers’ species ontologies restricting their own autonomy; the industrialization of life maintained through increasing amounts and forms of (albeit unpaid and underrecognized) labor; and, most obviously, the fact that it is individual pigs who are most burdened by their species’ ascent to the position of a region’s dominant organism. but in a zone marked by such contradictions—and perhaps in other parallel landscapes given over to making capitalist species—what seems clear is the need for a language that goes beyond the currently isolated political imaginaries of animal or worker rights, once the health and liberty of individual pigs and people are affected by the state of vitality in which they are mutually embedded. notes acknowledgments primary thanks are owed to the many residents of the town of dixon whose insights and work are the basis of this article. this essay was initially developed for the anthropology and environment society’s 2011 rappaport student prize panel, and i thank lisa cliggett for organizing that forum. a wide range of comments and critiques—both sustained and off-the-cuff—took the writing in new directions. i thank james brooks, jessica cattelino, summerson carr, tatiana chudakova, judith farquhar, kathryn goldfarb, bridget guarasci, elayne oliphant, natalie porter, gabriel rosenberg, caroline schuster, rosalind shaw, ageeth sluis, brad weiss, kara wentworth, and most especially joseph masco. comments by three anonymous reviewers, the cultural anthropology editorial collective as a whole, and cymene howe in particular, greatly strengthened the article. the research and writing was supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, and the school for advanced research. thanks also to sean j. sprague for his company and significant photographic skills, and to the wenner-gren foundation’s osmundsen initiative for providing funding for this visual dimension of the project. 1. all company and place names in this essay are pseudonyms, intended to provide a measure of anonymity to individuals in the four pork corporations where i conducted research. i am unable to specify with precision the exact locale where most of my fieldwork took place, as the five largest pork corporations in the united states are each centrally located out of a single state. colorado, illinois, iowa, kansas, missouri, oklahoma, texas, and utah all contain major corporate pork installations that resemble the operations i will be describing in this article. 2. the bulk of this conversation occurred in spanish, but shifted to english as technical workplace terms such as biosecurity became the subject of discussion. this was the norm on farms, where the primary spoken languages were spanish or k’iche, mixed with the english farming phrases taught during training. at the time of my research, a complicated racial division of labor extended across the factory farm’s various worksites. for example, the people who i encountered in breeding were of mexican, guatemalan, or cuban descent, while migrants from burma tended to staff the slaughterhouse’s overnight sanitation shift. with a few exceptions, the most senior managers tended to be white and united states–born, and they spoke english as their primary language. 3. public health researchers have started to find evidence that hog farmworkers can carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria on their bodies for several days in spite of showering protocols (nadimpalli et al. 2014). this form of human-to-human infection is considered rare and is labeled “tertiary exposure” in the pork industry biosecurity literature, as distinguished from the relatively more common forms of hog-to-hog (primary) or hog-human-hog (secondary) exposure (morrow and roberts 2002). but this biosecurity protocol is not unique to dover foods. for example, an australian biosecurity organization suggests that all hog farm employees sign a declaration that includes, among other stipulations, a pledge that they will not live with other animal farmworkers (aha 2012). 4. there is no formal rule, to my knowledge, dictating that managers across different nodes of porcine life and death cannot socialize. there remain situations at work—such as planning meetings—when some managers must be copresent. still, this burgeoning consciousness and rule-of-thumb was further made clear to me when a couple managers expressed uncertainty about how (or whether) to interact with my embodied self, as a researcher who spoke with different social classes and spent time in multiple firms. 5. see timothy choy and jerry zee (2015) for an account of an anthropology of suspension wherein beings are diluted, intermingled, and held together through the shared medium of the atmosphere. the term atmospheric attunement was first used by kathleen stewart (2011). 6. nor is it unprecedented in animal agriculture. in her remarkable study of small-scale slaughterhouses in minnesota, kara wentworth (pers. comm.) describes how farming families would strip off clothes outside their homes and between house and barn after attending community events such as high school basketball games, church, or 4-h competitions, where they would have encountered other agriculturalists. 7. for this reason, i characterize the factory farm as ambiguously postanthropocentric: neither fully anthropocentric in its local realization on the ground, and quite obviously not purely porcine-centric given that it is a matter of making life and death for human consumption. 8. emily yates-doerr (2015, 309) has called for a multispecies scholarship that rejects the taxonomic urge to preemptively classify things into fixed natural categories, and that instead illustrates the ongoing work of enacting species needed to make “an occurrence of coherence situated amid ever-transforming divisions and connections.” 9. while farmers have called groups of owned hogs a herd for centuries, i refer to the herd as an organizational technology that is specific to industrial animal production. 10. in a parallel way, timothy pachirat (2011) vividly renders how each worker in the slaughterhouse experiences animal death differently based on their position on the line. 11. see henry buller (2013) for an insightful philosophical analysis of farm animal massification, which focuses on how seeing in mass affects off-farm apparatuses such as animal welfare science. 12. my focus on the workplace division of labor leads me to emphasize class as an analytic in this article. but one could just as easily characterize this as a process of racialization through industrial animality. those who are hired to “work with” the herd are almost all people of color, while those who are employed to abstractly “work on” the herd tend to be white. 13. see javier lezaun and natalie porter (2015) for a different—arch-anthropocentric—kind of privatization of public biosecurities through the development of transgenic animals that would not shed disease and would require no modification of contemporary human activities. 14. see joseph masco (2014) and carlo caduff (2014, 115) for important analyses of what the latter terms biosecurity’s infelicity, or how “security . . . has itself become a significant source of insecurity.” 15. in north carolina, for example, meatpacking corporations tend to contract with ostensibly independent farmers to raise pigs for the slaughterhouse. this limits the amount of land, buildings, and supply of labor that the corporation must supply. see ronald rich (2003, 2008) for a detailed study of the ways that contracting played out in the state of illinois, as well as how the biological fragility of lean hogs served as the impetus for certain indoor-confinement technologies and forms of production contracts. 16. steve hinchliffe (2014) and steve hinchcliffe and kim j. ward (2014) discuss building immunities in hogs and managing endemic illnesses, noting how supposedly disease-free barns would only result in the emergence of new illnesses. 17. while disturbing videos of workers beating animals have been picked up by the media to create the impression that employees are alienated from and indifferent to pigs, i found the opposite. workers would often go to incredible lengths—almost jarringly so—to intimately heal pigs with which they worked (see blanchette 2013, chapter 3). references allen, john, and stephanie lavau 2015 “‘just-in-time’ disease: biosecurity, poultry and power.” journal of cultural economy 8, no. 3: 342–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2014.904243 animal health australia (aha) 2012 “employee biosecurity declaration template,” accessed august 9, 2015. 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american ethnologist 42, no. 2: 309–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/amet.12132 errance and elsewheres among africans waiting to restart their journeys in dakar, senegal errance and elsewheres among africans waiting to restart their journeys in dakar, senegal jonathan echeverri zuluaga universidad de antioquia when i met jim for the first time, a venezuelan visa was the main obstacle preventing him from leaving dakar.1 because it was fake, this same visa ended up prolonging his stay in dakar for about two years. during this time, jim experienced the difficulties of a moneyless african: he spent his time roaming, idling, and trying various strategies for obtaining money and getting out. after some meetings during which he told me about dakar, how he had arrived there, and his plans for leaving, i asked jim why he did not return to nigeria. he answered: i can say that before i came out to . . . i lost everything in nigeria, whatever, everything i had, you know, because i was duped in visa stuff, you know, all i have i sold it to get the money for the visa. as i am here now, i don’t have anything, ticket or money. no money to go back. you know, so that’s why. but even if i had the money, i have nothing in nigeria to go for again, except my people. so i don’t know where to start. i say let me just see how i cope with stuff for some time so i can have something to do with my life. if i raise money, i can find any other way, you know, any other country, better than where i am. but this place is ok . . . is ok for me? if i find something ok to do here, it is ok for me. unlike other nigerians whose journeys had been interrupted in dakar, jim was quiet, introverted, and cautious. our conversations took place early in the morning because, a few months after i met him, he started working as a jack-of-all-trades at the same hotel where he had stayed just after landing in dakar, when he was a well-to-do traveler. jim commonly spoke in parables. he was stubborn, but his hopefulness was his most defining quality. it surprised me that jim had chosen as his destination venezuela, rather than a european country or the united states. after talking to him several times, though, i realized that it might as well have been brazil, colombia, or any other place brimming with stories of wealth and fellow compatriots, which in his case could have been a variety of destinations throughout the world. under the right conditions, this place could have even been dakar. for jim and others, a destination was not the only reference that was hard to pin down; their time of departure was also an ever-postponed moment in the future. they would stay in dakar for an indeterminate time: while some people’s journeys had been interrupted for a few months, others’ had been stopped for more than ten years. it was also hard to know if, once they arrived at their destination, new obstacles would appear on the horizon. africans i met in dakar came from neighboring countries and other corners of africa, as far south as rwanda or as far east as sudan, with different nationalities, ethnicities, and religious beliefs. they hailed from both anglophone and francophone countries. most of them were young, but some were older. most of them were men, but there were women as well. distinct reasons had made them stop in dakar: the draw of long-distance kinship ties, the presence of consulates and international organizations, deportation from europe or north africa, the promise of an easy gateway, or simply random chance. in jim’s case, an agent in lagos had told him that it would be cheaper to fly out of dakar and that it would be simpler to deal with customs officials there than in nigeria. conducting research among these africans seeking greener pastures away from their countries of origin for me marked the beginning of a long and ongoing reflection on errance. the indeterminacies that surrounded their journeys could not be appropriately grasped through the conceptual lens of migration, bound as it is to ideas of national sovereignty (papadopoulos, stephenson, and tsianos 2008). such a lens frames movement in terms of discrete trajectories between points divided by national borders: movement starts at point of origin a and ends at destination b; it assumes that cultural differences found at each point come mainly from allegiance to the nation-state; and it designates a “systemic push/pull market logic” (andrijasevic 2010, 157) as the main driving force for movement. errance instead powerfully alludes to the sense of aimless wandering that characterized my interlocutors’ journeys, journeys that get suspended, make loops, and take divergent paths. errance also makes space for thinking about connections between here and there: current location and desired destination shape one another in creative ways. this mutual shaping also produces an experience of time constituted by uneven rhythms in which solid chances vanish and wishful plans suddenly become reality. as a whole, the experience of moving is pervaded by uncertainty. the term errance is a transliteration from french. it does not exist in english proper, but there are cognates such as errant and errantry, err and error that are used with some frequency. these words connote adventure, travel, deviance, mistakes, and a journey without a predetermined end. i first came across the word errance in writings by the novelist and poet alan mabanckou. in his novel bleu-blanc-rouge (mabanckou 1998), he tells the story of moki, a young african man, and his attempts to reach france in a world where his compatriots, who travel back and forth between france and their home, nourish moki’s and his friends’ cravings to travel abroad. the émigrés tell amazing stories of success, wear fancy, brand-name clothing, and display wealth by distributing money among their families and close friends. once moki embarks on the journey that leads him to france, and various challenges endanger his chance of staying, he refers to these circumstances as the river of errance: “on ne peut plus regarder derrière soi une fois qu’on se trouve au milieu du fleuve de l’errance. il faut nager à grandes brasses, nager encore pour atteindre la rive” (“once you are in the middle of the river of errance, you can’t look back. you have to swim with great strokes, and swim some more to reach the shore”; mabanckou 1998, 74). my interlocutors gave different reasons for leaving their home countries than moki, but the journeys on which they embarked, the difficulties they encountered, and the ways in which they sought to restart their interrupted journeys resonate with the image of struggling against the stream to reach the shore. in this article, i analyze the experience of interrupting one’s journey in dakar through the lens of errance. i focus on the ways errance shaped my interlocutors’ experience of space: elsewheres not only produced images of future destinations (a there and then) but ways of engaging with the current location (a here and now). i examine how tensions between current location and future destination pervaded my interlocutors’ daily lives with spasmodic rhythms. i look at how finding routes dislocated the common links between people and national identity documents, namely, passports. lastly, i examine how everyday life was marked by uncertainty, which was in part the effect of larger social trends prevalent in west and central africa, and in part the consequence of my interlocutors’ unpredictable circumstances of travel. this state of uncertainty turned choice into practices of trial and error, which sometimes allowed africans to pierce borders and put an end to their stay in dakar. searching the academic literature, i found formulations of errance in francophone aesthetics and art. authors (e.g., laumonier 1997; berthet 2007; depardon 2003) have defined errance as the quest for the acceptable place (lieu acceptable) and take the notion of elsewhere to be a mechanism fueling errance. following the thread of elsewhere, i came across studies within anthropology and related disciplines that analyze the tension between here and there for would-be travelers at home. some of these studies resonate with the view of elsewhere as fuel, while others instead emphasize a dimension of suspension and boredom. in what follows, i show that these notions constitute two ends of a spectrum of possibilities for exiting the social site to which one is assigned. the time of errance: spasmodic movement while i conducted fieldwork in dakar (2008; 2009–2010), immobility emerged as a common topic during my first conversations with people i met. i heard about the harshness of life in dakar: about exclusion and hopelessness, about no luck finding money, no asylum. “life in dakar is hard,” people would say. most people did not consider dakar the place they wished to stay, because life conditions were as harsh or even harsher than “at home.” dakar was safe but bereft of money. my interlocutors engaged with the city and its native dwellers in ways similar to the “strangeness” that bruce whitehouse (2012) describes for west africans in brazzaville. however, unlike them, my interlocutors were always on the verge of restarting their journeys. zafiya, whose husband was killed by rebels in her country of origin, had found peace in dakar, but after living there for two years, she realized that peace alone did not suffice, and that to educate her two daughters and not worry about food and shelter she would need to go to a wealthier country. she had fulfilled all the requirements to receive asylum from the office of the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) except for obtaining official documents or a newspaper obituary confirming her husband’s death. she spent a substantial part of her days inquiring about her case and waiting for an answer from the unchr and other institutions, including the commission national d’eligibilité and the bureau d’orientation sociale, which deal with procedures regarding asylum in senegal. even those who had lived in dakar for more than a decade kept making plans for leaving. doctor william akroffi, well-known in the rebeuss neighborhood for his natural plants healing center, a kiosk adjacent to a four-story tenement house that hosted mostly guineans, complained about how hard it was to earn a living in dakar. his patients, instead of paying for their treatment, often asked him for money. he had been away from ghana, his home country, for fourteen years. he had spent time in mauritania, guinea, senegal, and the gambia trying to get a visa to join his family in canada. his visa application had been rejected for the second time seven years before, and since then he had been in dakar trying to save enough money to restart the journey. every time we met, he had plans brewing to leave dakar. when the next deadline expired, he came up with new plans. sometimes he considered returning to ghana, but he would not do so with empty pockets. anthropological literature on economic crisis and migration often emphasizes suspension as an effect of the incitement that globalization spreads among those who lack economic means and legal status for traveling. suspension can be understood as circumstances that prevent people from crossing social and geographical borders. it refers to the interruption of social ties (at home, on a journey, at a point of destination), as well as to a temporal slowing manifest in the absence of plans in the present, plans deferred to the future, prolonged waiting, and the inability to improve one’s life conditions. it is linked to the blurred legal spaces produced by immigration laws, which, in everyday life, mean obstacles to acquiring passports, visas, legalized certificates, and other bureaucratic documents (navaro-yashin 2007; yngvesson 2006; menjívar 2006; khosravi 2011). literatures on suspension come mainly from studies based on ethnographic work in africa (e.g., ferguson 2002; mains 2007). however, ethnographies from other regions (jeffrey 2010; xiang 2007; faier 2008; chu 2010) suggest similar processes taking place worldwide. although these works recognize suspension, the concept is not theorized in much depth. interestingly, most literature on the topic of suspension focuses on time, a dimension that, according to sandro mezzadra and brett neilson (2013), studies of globalization and capitalism too often neglect. a common figure of time in these literatures is a crisis of narratives of progress and modernity, where the future—understood as the prospect of a better life—does not actualize. for example, as the possibility of experiencing progress in time becomes implausible, movement emerges as a powerful alternative in order to achieve a better life (mains 2007, 2013). suspension also appears as narratives of other times and spaces that translate into an emptying of the present: doomsday prophecies among evangelicals that turn the near future into a time in which action to transform current living conditions is not encouraged (guyer 2007); stories shared among youth about lands with greener pastures located beyond the african continent (melly 2011); or feelings influenced by religion about ejection from a space of life and a sense of being thrown into an “out-of-this-world” temporality (pandolfo 2007, 347–48). many of these works share two common elements: they come from ethnographies conducted at a place of origin, and they emphasize the alienating dimension of incitement to move. from this perspective, places of origin come to be perceived as stagnant, while destinations become synonymous with realizing a prosperous life. other studies analyze suspension at a point of destination. francis nyamnjoh (2005) describes how, both in the views of those who stay at home and of those who leave, draining, zombie-like labor and living conditions turn destination into an out-of-this-world temporality. henrik vigh (2009) provides another example, in which the feelings of aimlessness that pervade life at home are reproduced after arrival in north atlantic destinations. still other works describe twisting relations between home and destination, movement and stasis. they pay attention to different rhythms that obtain both at points of departure and arrival, which are akin to the ways in which africans experience the interruption of their journeys in dakar. for instance, julie chu (2010) analyzes how semi-rural fouzhounese who seek to leave connect to a larger world, mobilizing networks and resources for travel, but also feel displaced and stagnant as they perceive their successful neighbors’ changing lifestyles and swift movements between china and the united states or europe. tensions between movement and stasis produce different rhythms for those who stay in china yet seek to leave: “for most villagers, time teetered unsteadily between lagging and lurking forward” (chu 2010, 258). another example of different rhythms, but this time at a destination point, is the practice of so-called benching (xiang 2007, 70–80), by which indian it workers perform unskilled labor while they wait to be rehired within their area of expertise. drawing from the work of xiang biao (2007) and rutvica andrijasevic (2010)—the latter looking at the pace of irregular migrants’ flows in e.u. detention centers—mezzadra and neilson (2013) argue that when studies of capitalism and globalization pay attention to time, asynchronous rhythms of detention, transit, prolongation, and acceleration become visible. unlike that of other studies i mention here, my own approach focuses on spatial and temporal dynamics as they are experienced in an already-started, but interrupted, journey. yet the experiences of time that i describe resonate with works that detect uneven rhythms juxtaposed against one another at different stages of the journey. most of my interlocutors dedicated a good part of their days to waiting: to find a job, to be assisted by ngos, for friends and contacts to send money, or for papers to be delivered. dakar was not the place to see their aspirations fulfilled, and in that sense they experienced an emptied present. this dimension of life in dakar resonates with the postponed aspirations that literatures on suspension describe. however, coming up with destinations and finding strategies that allowed for departure entailed relations to time different from this emptied present. intense negotiations were required, ones contingent on individuals’ abilities to imagine and reimagine themselves. spasmodic movements—cycles of time contracting and expanding—characterized the lives of africans-in-errance in dakar.2 people’s aspirations to move “proceeded in fits and starts, alternating interminable waiting and short bursts of chaotic rushing” (chu 2010, 258). errance conjures up both rash movements and a sense of empty time. the space of errance: heading elsewhere in principle, my interlocutors’ expectations differed from one another as much as their backgrounds and imaginaries; the extent to which these imaginaries became true varied as well. yet they shared aspirations that they located in their desired destination: achieving wealth, finding a safe haven, and having one’s dignity respected. kc, like jim, came to dakar looking for an easy gateway. he lived in parcelles assainies among a community of nigerians, most of them waiting for a chance to leave. their main point of encounter was the neighborhood catholic church. among devout catholic nigerians, kc was especially devoted, and he had a contagious, sparkly laugh. kc made a distinction between whiteman kontry and blackman kontry. in whiteman kontry, the minute he landed at the airport, someone would approach him and offer him a place to stay and a job. bribes would be unnecessary to obtain a job, and he would be willing to humble himself because he would earn a lot of money. in blackman kontry, in turn, he had to have an “upper hand” (powerful acquaintances) to get what he needed. unlike kc, the main concern of peter dwumfuo, a tall, strong man in his forties, was reaching a christian country far away from “heathens.” he had escaped religious persecution and hoped to dedicate himself to writing his memoirs at his intended destination. camara vamba, a trendy, always well-dressed, short, and energetic young man, expected to have access to the culture and lifestyles to which he had attuned himself as he grew up in his home country. he wrote fiction, had been in a hip-hop group, and owned a small designer clothing shop. however, the materialistic values prevalent in his social milieu back home prevented people from recognizing his abilities. in his destination site, he would find recognition for his skills as a writer, singer, and fashion purveyor. for only a few people i met dakar had turned into something other than an ever-prolonged interruption of the journey. they seemed to have found their acceptable place. peter the barber, for example, had tried to reach europe from dakar with a visa that he had purchased from an agent. for a few years, he tried to leave, and while he waited for the right chance to appear, he started working as a door-to-door barber to survive. one client from the national telephone company, who liked peter’s work, hooked him up with his colleagues and other civil servants. working within this network, peter realized that barbering would allow him to earn enough to pay his daily expenses and save money. when i met peter, he was expecting to go back to ghana after a few more years of cutting hair in dakar. europe did not lie on his horizon anymore. ossondu, too, had stopped dreaming of going to europe or the united states. he had come from nigeria, and after different plans for leaving diluted throughout the years, he decided to stay. he owned two different businesses: an all-in-one shoe store and barbershop and a nigerian restaurant. unlike peter, ossondu had decided to settle in. he had married a senegalese woman and had two children with her. these divergent expectations around destination suggest that, as much as it entails an experience of time made up of uneven rhythms, errance refers to particular ways of experiencing space. the notion of elsewhere gathers these expectations. anthropological literatures have addressed this idea of elsewhere, but they have not theorized it in depth. however, notions such as heterotopia (foucault 1986) and liminality (turner 1969) that derive from reflections about social space provide elements to help understand elsewhere. building on the concept of heterotopia, i understand elsewheres as linking the actual lived space (here) with other spaces (there), mirroring each other but also transforming or subverting the relations that define that lived space. trinh minh-ha’s (2011, 2) idea of elsewhere resembles this perspective. she understands elsewhere as “living in two and many non-opposing worlds—all located in the very same place as where one is.” such a view emphasizes that tensions between here and there or now and then are inherent to any experience of displacement.3 i draw from victor turner’s concept of liminality to think about how a relation to elsewhere sets one neither here nor there, or at the same time here and there. this situation results from the fact that social ties to a current location (home or a transit point) and to a desired destination are either temporarily put within brackets or not yet set. as turner (1969, 95) puts it, one is “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” elsewhere refers then to different ways of exiting the social site to which one is assigned through imagining or actually traveling to other spaces.4 a means of exiting one’s assigned social site would be linked to the quest characteristic of errance analyzed in francophone aesthetics and art. there, one finds errance defined as a quest for an acceptable place (lieu acceptable) and elsewhere conceived as the fuel that invests the journey with purpose, and allows the possibility of fulfillment (laumonier 1997; berthet 2007; depardon 2003). a dimension of quest is also central to the ethos of adventurers, for whom a desire for elsewhere constitutes a force shaping their journeys. in the african context, sylvie bredeloup (2013) has argued, the emergence of adventure is a process simultaneous to the growth of african cities in the second half of the twentieth century. in contemporary times, the figure of the african worker (encouraged to travel because of a demand for labor) fades with staggering economic crises, while the adventurer becomes a more prominent figure. congolese sapeurs who want to reach paris are emblematic examples of african adventurers.5 living in paris provides them with the impulse to leave the congo as it shapes the image of a possible life (thomas 2003; gondola 1999). according to dominic thomas (2003, 963), “the dimension of displacement locates the transportation of the individual in what is a quest for self, for the exploration of the individual—and this is where the journey’s impulse is actually enacted.” a second way of relating to elsewheres, adventurous but not predicated on actual physical travel, would be the “imaginary exile” (fouquet 2007, 114–15) of young senegalese women who engage in sexual economic transactions with wealthy senegalese and foreigners. these practices allow them to gain access and appropriate a world of cosmopolitan meanings and practices, while at the same time they estrange themselves from the constraints and realities of the communities to which they belong without physically traveling to a “global world” (appadurai 1996, 44). a third way of relating to elsewhere would be closer to immobility and boredom than to adventure and actual travel.6 for instance, stefania pandolfo (2007) associates elsewhere with the feeling that young moroccans experience of being ejected from the space of life at their place of origin. she describes elsewhere as a liminal space in which depression and boredom prevail. for his part, henrik vigh (2009, 92) focuses on the effects of elsewhere both at home and at a destination, but he also associates it with suspension. he describes how, among bissau guineans that wait for a chance to travel abroad, elsewhere produces the sensation of a “truncated existence.” technology helps imbue elsewhere with images of progress, just as it renders home a place of exclusion. in the case of africans waiting to restart their journeys in dakar, a relation to elsewhere was built through physical displacement. among my interlocutors, elsewhere sometimes meant boredom and suspension, but mostly it played the role of fueling movement. when elsewheres seemed distant (that is, when there were no means to enhance departure), the present turned into something empty and boredom crept in. yet for the most part, my interlocutors had a seemingly endless capacity for seeking new ways of reaching elsewhere. they constantly came up with routes, mobilized resources, and were alert to cracks that opened and potentially allowed them to depart. this made everyday life busy with strategic moves to actualize departure. another characteristic of my interlocutors’ relation to elsewhere was malleability: instead of being predetermined and fixed (like the destinations of businesspeople, vacationers, or academics on their way to a conference), destinations proved ever shifting. as i will show, a geography of routes contingent on a history of connections from precolonial times and stretching beyond cosmopolitan centers in europe and north america forms part of the spatiality of errance. when the desirable is not available jim asked me to think with him about options for finding a way out of dakar. i suggested that we try to get a visa at a consulate. besides the venezuelan embassy, the brazilian embassy was the only south american diplomatic body with a presence in dakar. at the brazilian consulate, i knew someone we could at least ask for clarification about the procedures, so one morning we went there. the embassy was located downtown, but we did not know exactly where. we took a cab that left us at the place de l’indépendance and walked from there. as we passed the marché kermel looking for the embassy, i asked him why he had decided to go to venezuela in the first place, rather than another country. he told me he had heard about people he knew who were doing good business there. he said that his top destination was south america. that was the desirable, but if the desirable was not available, then what was available would become desirable. if god gave it to him to do business in dakar, he would do business there, he told me, but in dakar things “moved small, small.” he would not make good money there. the landscape into which jim and other africans arrived in dakar, the interruption of their journeys, and the field of connections that potentially took them elsewhere resulted from the intersection of different forces. in the configuration of these landscapes, encroaching e.u. borders play an obvious role (mezzadra and neilson 2013). the european union has begun to encourage african countries to increase border surveillance; e.u. member countries have also adopted selective requirements for granting visas. senegal is strategically located at the fringes of these swollen borders. on a coastal land route toward the maghreb, it is also the northernmost country of the economic community of west african states (ecowas) free-circulation space.7 as such, it receives both africans going north toward the maghreb and people being deported back from this region. however, we should not overemphasize the extent to which e.u. migration reforms at the turn of the twenty-first century shape africans’ ways of moving. to explain how routes emerge for africans-in-errance, an analysis of e.u. controls remains insufficient; other elements must be taken into account. two such examples are ancient kingdoms and the diffusion of islam dating from precolonial times, which established routes for religious pilgrimage and trade. later on, during the colonial period, division between french and british territories carved corridors and imposed barriers for movement, at times favoring movement within colonies, and at other times movement across them. as a consequence in the present, while nigerian citizens require a visa for morocco, ivoirians—like moroccans, citizens of a french ex-colony—do not. after independence, the development of diplomatic relations with countries outside former colonial spaces within and beyond the african continent further shaped this landscape by establishing travel requirements (sometimes rigid and sometimes flexible) for particular destinations. since the 1970s, agreements fostered by regional organizations like ecowas have given continuity to forms of movement within west africa. economic downturns and the increasing instability of making a livelihood, along with state inefficiency and the abuse of power (smith 2007), play important roles in the configuration of these geographies, setting the stage for civil servants to request extra money from certain nationals for services such as issuing travel documents. through their extra-legal activities, civil servants turn switching nationalities into a versatile business. finally, the constant recreation of these geographies depends on the knowledge, stubbornness, capacity for mobilizing networks, and culturally rooted spirit of adventure (see bredeloup 2013) of africans-in-errance. the intersection of these multiple forces bring to the fore geographies that transform as people struggle to find better horizons and as forms of controlling movement actualize. as trinh minh-ha (2011, 3), reflecting on the strengthening of the u.s.-mexican border puts it: “you close down, we walk around. you erect, we dig. you dig, we dig and dig further. bind and soon, you’ll be tearing madly at the wall, and the bonds you’ve created.” as the borders of the european union swell, people shoot themselves like darts to pierce it. for a long time europe, canada, and the united states have loomed in africans’ horizons of travel. one of alain mabanckou’s childhood memories provides a good example: growing up in the congo-brazzaville in the 1960s, the first thing he learned about europe was that it lay on the other side of the atlantic, and it replaced south america in the mental cartography of his childhood (mabanckou and merlin 2009). in the twenty-first century, horizons of travel are multiplying. among africans stranded in dakar, routes are forged that lead not only to europe, the united states, or canada but also to other unexpected destinations in asia and south america (minvielle 2013; uriarte bálsamo 2009; monkevicius and maffia 2010). in the case of south america, some of these new destinations were initially conceived as mere stops on a longer route to north america that would circumvent maritime and air controls. but places like buenos aires and quito are also themselves becoming destinations. building on my interlocutors’ expectations, it is possible to outline a geography of elsewhere. sometimes, elsewheres were imagined centers of cosmopolitan production, as in the case of the congolese sapeurs who desire and imagine traveling to france. at other times, elsewhere was back home; in yet other circumstances, elsewhere was anywhere as long as people could find compatriots and prosperity. elsewheres, then, can be either wealthy north atlantic destinations or ex-centric destinations in africa or other continents. camara vamba wrote and spoke french probably better than many frenchmen; he dreamed mostly of traveling to france. kc wanted to go to some country like spain or italy (differences between these countries were irrelevant), but he also wondered about the bahamas, a neighbor of the united states with easily fulfilled visa requirements. peter dwumfuo was deciding between cuba and jamaica. i warned him about the strength of santeria in cuba, but he insisted that a caribbean country would give him enough peace for writing. when peter had the strength to deal with the refugee aid system, he spent long hours at the immeuble ferdinand colli, the headquarters of the unchr in dakar, and navigated the internet seeking information on private sponsorship in canada. zafiya felt uneasy about going to a country where she did not know anybody. she wondered where her religious beliefs would be respected. as for doctor william, when home did not lie on his horizon, he wished to go to costa rica, where ala—his online girlfriend and soon-to-be wife—lived. mohamed wished to continue his studies and researched fellowships in malaysia and japan. he also tried to find private sponsorship in australia and canada. chosen destinations had to fit the stringent reality of visa requirements for most africans, which were in turn shaped, as mentioned earlier, by the history of routes carved by ancient kingdoms, colonial powers, and postcolonial diplomatic agreements. visiting the brazilian embassy in dakar with jim made me aware of just how intricate and narrow the routes within this geography are. the embassy was located on the top floor of an old building, more than ten stories tall, dating from the 1970s. we were not allowed to enter the hallway because we did not have identity cards with us. we did, however, manage to obtain instruction guides for student and business visas. when i read the requirements, i understood why jim had processed his venezuelan visa with an agent. to apply for a visa directly at the consulate through the official conduit, jim needed a business card and a bank account if he was traveling as a trader; if he traveled as a student, he would need admission to an educational institution in brazil. so against the kafkaesque world that one would need to deal with if one were to follow the official procedures, jim’s venezuelan visa proved a powerful alternative. except that it was fake. three months after i returned to colombia, my home country, from senegal, jim and i chatted online. he told me that he was seriously planning to leave senegal. he was looking for a passport of another nationality, since his nigerian passport had since expired and the fake venezualan visa inside it constituted a potentially controversial element. i asked why he did not obtain another nigerian passport, to which he answered that it would be hard and expensive to get. at the time, the nigerian embassy in dakar did not have the equipment to print passports. the alternative was to apply for a passport in nigeria, but that would entail traveling back, and because of abuses and inefficiency within the nigerian state, jim would have to pay a bribe. either way, it appeared less expensive and more convenient to “apply” for another foreign official passport than for a nigerian one. additionally, sometimes passports from other countries offered a wider spectrum of visa-free destinations. for example, ghanaians can travel to singapore without a visa; once there, immigration authorities review their cases and decide to grant or deny the visa. a second example is south korea, which does not require visas for liberians for stays of three months or less. lastly, until 2010, barbados was one of the few countries outside the african continent for which nigerians did not need a visa. according to engseng ho (2006, 324), passports allow individuals to borrow the personality of states and remove “ambiguity about where their bearers . . . belong.” in jim’s case, this act of borrowing is not necessarily contingent on someone’s actual place of birth: jim’s country of nationality, nigeria, denied him a passport, and the passport that would allow him passage across states did not correspond with the country to which he belonged. one crucial element to the logic of the nation-state is the circumscription of the rights of citizens within specific political borders defined in opposition to a foreign other who lacks these rights (balibar 2002). another element entwined with the first is the right to have permission to cross such borders. migration commonly operates within the same logic, as it establishes conceptual differences between moving within and across national borders and takes for granted the links among people, documents, and national identity. errance points rather to the dislocation of these elements. it takes into account the importance of states, visa requirements, and the range of visa-free destinations available to each nationality. this is precisely what makes finding elsewheres an intricate task. however, in errance, to borrow from julie chu (2010, 105), identity and travel documents are less “natural entitlements of certain state subjects” and, more often, “achievements of personal skill and social networks.” navigating uncertain choices the day the venezuelan visa failed to take jim out of the continent was in september 2008. at a travel agency in downtown dakar, jim had booked his flight to caracas with transportes aéreos portugueses, paying $1,600 for it. he arrived at yoff airport two hours before the flight, crossed the airport’s main entrance, found the counter for check-in, and stood in line. while he was waiting, customs officers requested his travel documents and, after a prolonged inspection, told him that his visa was false. he protested but did not achieve much, especially since he knew neither french nor wolof, senegal’s most commonly spoken languages. after some time arguing, he figured that the only remaining options were either paying for passage through customs or staying in senegal. although he was out of money, he could have collected the necessary funds through his friends in nigeria. however, after having landed in caracas, how would he manage to enter venezuela? most likely authorities there would deport him back to senegal or nigeria. jim was angered and frustrated. he had paid 300,000 naira (roughly $2,500) for his visa. he contacted a friend at the independent corrupt practices and other related offences commission (icpc) in nigeria, who told him that he could file a petition online against the agent who had brokered the visa, but that the case would not develop if he did not return to nigeria to follow up with it. going back meant undoing the trek, so jim decided to stay in dakar. for almost two years, during the dry season he slept in a tent compound next to the marché malien. every rainy season, the compound dispersed because the area flooded. jim once described this place as “the bush.” during that time, he went twice to banjul hoping that a gambian passport would take him away. the first time, jim paid $350 to an immigration official, but he never got anything back. he ended up being arrested and deported to senegal. after some weeks, he went back and paid a different immigration official. seven days later, the passport was delivered, but when he checked its validity at the airport, the passport turned out to be fake. every time he ran out of money, his horizons shrank. he stopped concocting plans for leaving in the upcoming weeks and had to worry, instead, about finding money for his daily meals. constraints that weighed on africans-in-errance (lack of institutional recognition, frail ties with local senegalese, scams that translated into economic losses) made what they deemed solid chances likely to disappear, but they also made wishful plans suddenly materialize. as sasha newell (2012, 5) puts it in the case of the ivorian bluffeurs, “illusion sometimes participates in the construction of reality.” departure or the prolongation of one’s stay in dakar would depend on such factors as money, airline tickets, identity and travel documents, job opportunities, and people (women, managers, friends, refugee sponsors). sometimes these resources turned out to be false or unreliable and made plans vanish. sometimes, under auspicious circumstances, even if they were forgeries they could take people to their destination. these kinds of circumstances often surround the journeys of underprivileged travelers. shahram khosravi describes a similar situation among iranians trying to reach wealthier destinations in europe and north america during the 1980s. during that period, iranians’ networks were marginal compared to those of other larger and more well-established communities living abroad. “for those of us who lacked access to such migration networks,” khosravi (2011, 51) recalled, “decisions were made under conditions of uncertainty and migration more or less followed a trajectory of wandering.” uncertainty also resonates in academic works that analyze how instability permeates everyday life in contemporary africa (mbembe 2001; simone 2008; larkin 2008). the decreasing capacity of the state apparatus to ensure health, education, and employment (mains 2007), as well as the rise in unemployment as an effect of no-longer-competitive industries in globalized markets (ferguson 2002), rank among the factors that have contributed to a climate of social instability in africa. brian larkin (2008, 193), looking at the aesthetics of nigerian films, captured the extent to which this climate creeps into everyday life: “things seem to be one way, and then change utterly for no apparent reason.” uncertainty pervades state institutions. when jim told me about the icpc, i looked it up on the internet. i found the commission’s website, which at the time warned the public about scammers who deceived people pretending they were icpc agents. the warning read: scam alert: icpc does not compensate scammed victims and icpc does not collect money no matter how little to investigate a case. if anyone tells you or sent you an email that icpc is going to compensate you or demands money to investigate your case, please, do not send any money. report the person to icpc via our contact page. both deepening inequality in the larger african context and being in errance contributed to this sense of uncertainty. uncertainty evokes two meanings of the word errance and its cognates: traveling without a predetermined end and making mistakes. these meanings relate to africans-in-errance’s constant change of destinations and the situations of fraud to which they are constantly exposed. looking for ways to leave meant submitting to the dynamics of trial and error, in which the chances of making the right gamble were thin. mohamed, for example, had gotten a cuban visa for himself and his wife through one of his in-laws, a powerful politician in guinea, but he did not have the full amount for the airline ticket. a friend in conakry put him in touch with a sierra leonean man in dakar who would lend mohamed the missing amount. mohamed traveled to dakar, where the sierra leonean man welcomed him. mohamed trusted the man and gave him his money to buy the ticket. but he never bought it. he duped mohamed with an airline reservation, telling him that it was the ticket. when i met mohamed he had been in dakar for two months with his pregnant wife about to deliver, looking for a job or new possibilities for leaving. after investing his money in the airline ticket to cuba, mohamed tried a dutch electronic visa, which he later realized was counterfeit. another time, he almost ended up paying a fee for an online job application for a humanitarian ngo. but even with slim chances, departure sometimes became possible. if jim had saved up enough money to pay his way through customs in dakar and caracas, he might have made it through with his fake venezuelan visa. my interlocutors learned to gamble within this risky game and to seize opportunities as they presented themselves. until a crack opens the current system of global mobility is highly unequal. globalization fosters fascination with goods and lifestyles that generate an incitement to move. one of the consequences of the concentration of wealth and the establishment of a transnational labor system (xiang 2007) is that for many, economic opportunities can only be achieved through traveling abroad. but the current system assigns different kinds of people to different realms of possibility, producing a hierarchy of travel. it is crucial to create awareness about the flaws of the current global mobility system and the halo of fluidity that it is falsely thought to wear. overarching narratives of flow (appadurai 1996) or acceleration (harvey 1989) prevent us from seeing the disparate temporal effects of global circulations of goods, people, and capital. ethnographies of suspension draw attention to those who, in different corners of the world, stay at home or at their destination, excluded from these flows. they show the sense of empty time that pervades their everyday lives as they realize their inability to improve their life conditions. however, emphasizing suspension blurs another side of the picture: the stubborn capacity to cope with adversity that i found among my interlocutors in dakar. errance acknowledges the spasmodic ways in which these travelers experienced time. in their daily lives, a sense of empty time characteristic of suspension alternated with moments in which they deployed multiple strategies to actualize their aspirations. although these attempts often resulted in failures, this did not discourage people from trying to leave. imagining or actually heading elsewhere allowed them to exit the social sites to which they were assigned. errance also represents a change of scope with respect to the conceptual lens of migration shaped as it is through the logics of national sovereignty. errance makes visible potential and actual geographies made up of loops, prolonged waiting, and moments of acceleration beyond linear movement from one nation, point a, to another, point b. it also accounts for disconnections between documents, people, and national identity. reflecting on the drive to increasingly secure national borders, trinh minh-ha (2011, 7) observes: “the incessantly fortified line dividing here from there may turn out in the end to be an ‘optical illusion.’ always lurking are the cracks and fissures whose invisibility may at any time turn visible with a dice of destiny.” in jim’s words, divine hands would enhance these dice of destiny. he often says that god is the only one that turns things around. cracks open for very brief moments when forces randomly align, but as trinh minh-ha underscores, they are always lurking in the background. most of the people i met in dakar are still there; some of them have improved their life situations. once in a while someone pierces the walls, asserting their right to move as they look for a place to fulfill their aspirations. mohamed, for example, traveled to morocco, where he managed to enroll in film school. camara vamba traveled to morocco as well, and has since tried unsuccessfully several times to cross the mediterranean by boat. as for jim, one day in april 2011, he called. he told me that he had bought a passport of another nationality. he promised that soon he would be in south america. i was happy for him, but also skeptical. later on he called announcing a departure date. this date came and went without any further news from him. two weeks later he called from quito. although his passport was official, he had had to pay to get out of dakar. he has a new name and nationality now, a new date and place of birth. things are better in quito than they were in dakar, but still hard. i guessed he had a new destination in mind for himself, but i did not dare to ask where it was. notes acknowledgments i thank my interlocutors in dakar, who were willing to share their life stories with me. i especially thank jim, who revised this essay and suggested adjustments. i thank the reviewers and editors of cultural anthropology for thought-provoking feedback and nicholas d’avella for patient proofreading. 1. some of the informants i mention in this article asked to be rendered anonymous, so i have changed their names and omitted their nationalities. others who have written about their lives, like peter dwumfuo and camara vamba, invited me to use their names so that readers could seek out their own work. 2. i build on lieba faier’s (2008) idea of runaway time, but i emphasize different temporal dimensions. as i will show throughout this article, errance entails different rhythms. 3. shahram khosravi (2011, 74) also expresses this tension when he refers to the predicament of exile: “my body is physically here and now while my heart is there and then.” 4. in the case of errance in dakar, immigration laws, with their partial and selective forms of recognition, contributed to defining my interlocutors’ social site as well as their options. 5. la sape refers to a movement of young men in brazzaville and kinshasa who have adopted french designer clothing and other icons of french culture as a way of countering colonial and postcolonial domination. sape is an acronym for société des ambienceurs et des personnes elegantes (society for ambience-setters and persons of elegance) as well as a french slang term for dressing. bluffeurs in abidjan have similar ways of locating paris at the center of their cosmologies (newell 2012). 6. sylvie bredeloup (2013) defines adventure in opposition to boredom, two states of mind that correspond with two ends of a spectrum of possibilities for experiencing elsewhere. 7. ecowas was created in 1975. today it is constituted by fifteen member states: benin, burkina faso, cape verde, côte d’ivoire, the gambia, ghana, guinea, guinea-bissau, liberia, mali, niger, nigeria, senegal, sierra leone, and togo. a protocol permitting the free movement of people within ecowas was signed in 1979. all member states approved stays without a 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2006 “backed by papers: undoing persons, histories, and return.” american ethnologist 33, no. 2: 177–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.177 an anthropology of electricity from the global south an anthropology of electricity from the global south akhil gupta university of california, los angeles while completing my phd at stanford university during the 1980s, i was able to support my doctoral studies with a part-time job at the electric power research institute (epri). i worked at epri both before and after my anthropological fieldwork in an indian village. as a consortium funded largely by electric utilities, epri’s charge was to take the industry’s pooled resources, fund research on specific issues important to electrical utilities, and then feed the research results back to the utilities in order to improve generation, transmission, distribution, and end use. thirty years ago, epri was funding research that has only today become reality, like electric cars, or that is still not in common use, like smart meters, smart homes, the smart grid, and appliances that “talk back” to the grid and adjust their power usage. in some sense, then, i am returning full circle in this essay to ask a question that i never thought important while i was working in the electrical power industry: what can anthropology contribute to the study of electricity, and what can electricity contribute to the study of anthropology? why do we need an anthropology of electricity? of all the forms of energy that fuel our modern world and its lifeways, electricity is perhaps the most pervasive and also the most interesting. more than other infrastructure, the ubiquity of electricity may indeed have hindered an appreciation of its biopolitical importance. timothy mitchell (2011, 12–42) has urged social scientists to pay greater attention to the specific material properties of fossil fuels, properties that shape the manner in which these fuels can be stored, transported, and used. electricity is unlike petroleum, coal, or wood in that it is not itself a form of stored hydrocarbon energy. it has no existence in nature. rather, it is a purely artificial form of energy that can be produced from diverse sources like hydropower, nuclear fuel, or solar power. compared to petroleum or coal, it is relatively easy to transport and transmit across vast distances through wires. unlike those other fuels, it is lost during transmission, and the greater the distance that it has to be transported, the greater the losses. another very important feature of electricity is that the technology to store large quantities of it effectively does not yet exist.1 the production and use of electricity thus have to be carefully synchronized: any mismatch between supply and demand creates problems, from potential grid instability to inconvenience for the end user. other properties of electricity are important: unlike fossil fuels, electricity is an immaterial object. it cannot be seen, smelled, or heard, and for all practical purposes, it cannot be tasted or touched without lethal consequences. there is thus no sensual way to experience electricity. of course, we can see the plants where it is generated, the wires through which it is carried, the appliances or machines that make use of it, and the effects it has on the body. electricity is always mediated, and thus is from the very beginning a social and cultural thing, not something that belongs to the natural world, however that might be construed. as such, the word electric itself arises from science experiments around 1625; it has no greek or latin etymology. there are two other features of electricity to which i want to draw attention. the first is that it is a historically young form of power. thus, when in 1894, friedrich engels complains about the difficulty of taking up his pen in “artificial light” (marx 1981, 91), he is talking about a relatively recent phenomenon.2 secondly, this historical footnote also draws attention to the fact that electricity gained a decisive advantage over other forms of power mainly through the advantages it provided for lighting. internal combustion engines fueled by oil and coal continued to supply most machines and cars with power, and residential and office spaces were largely heated by burning fossil fuels. but lighting was an area where electrical power had a clear advantage: it supplied steady luminescence without generating noxious fumes or creating a fire hazard. electric lights opened up a “second day” for consumption, recreation, and schooling (through homework), made it much safer to illuminate tight urban spaces and the interiors of homes, enabled public spaces to be safer and more family-friendly (nye 1999; winther 2008; pereira et al. 2011), and by opening up extra hours after the sun had set for domestic life, enabled longer working hours on the factory floor. electricity also enabled shiftwork, such that production units could be open twenty-four hours a day, facilitating the manufacture of goods and the turnover of capital (woolf 1984). when they are functioning as intended, infrastructures tend to disappear into the background: they become invisible. in homes, pipes carrying water, waste, electrical wires, and phone and telecommunication wires are all hidden inside walls; in cities, these infrastructures are often hidden under streets. they become visible only when they break down—when the walls have to be broken because of a leaking pipe, or when roads have to be dug up to install new high-speed telecommunication cables. unlike consumer objects like cars, refrigerators, and television sets, infrastructures are not intended to be displayed and aestheticized.3 infrastructures have been critical to the biopolitical project of managing the welfare of the population, especially in the global north, and yet they have been completely invisible to the population being managed and largely neglected by social scientists studying the management and control of populations. in this regard, electricity is a typical infrastructure—electrical wires are usually hidden in homes, while electrical and telephone poles are increasingly being replaced by underground connections in cities. but what makes electricity different from other infrastructures is its role in lighting. the centrality of lighting has meant that the biopolitical project has been especially visible in the form taken by electricity infrastructures. lighting helped to realize a certain vision of private life by enabling the particular form of domesticity found in the nuclear family, centered around the extension of the school day through homework, the making and consumption of family meals, the supply of entertainment and leisure through radio, television, and magazines, and the regulation of fertility implied by all of those activities (wilhite 2012; peters and vance 2011). thanks to lighting, nonproductive activities relating to relaxation, rest, and reproduction were pushed into the margins of the day (winther 2008). there was life after dark and it could be devoted to useful activity, even if that activity was not related to work. lighting also permitted the use of public spaces after sunset. thus, street lighting and the lighting of public squares allowed those spaces to become safer for families to traverse, extending possibilities for shopping and consumption, mass entertainment, and public and private transportation (pereira et al. 2011; jacobson 2007). lighting, in turn, led to the use of electricity for a whole range of domestic appliances, from toasters and vacuum cleaners to washing machines, stoves, and ovens. once people were connected to the grid, the focus of utilities was on ensuring that there was adequate supply, since demand seemed to grow endlessly due to new uses for electricity.4 the more electricity became part of the lives and lifestyles of consumers, the greater the emphasis on its quality, reliability, and uninterruptedness. the norm for electric supply in the west became continuous, reliable power, twenty-four hours a day. living in the dark the normative in social science is often that which is presupposed, rather than being manifest in consciously held beliefs and explicit evaluations about what is good and bad. in the case of electricity, the normative is smuggled in through the idea that all individuals should be connected to a grid, which supplies them with a continuous flow of electricity. so much is it taken for granted among “us moderns” (latour 1993) that people will be connected to the grid, the larger question about why it is desirable is not up for discussion. even from a radical environmental perspective on climate change and the anthropocene, the necessity and desirability of life on the grid are seldom questioned. what would it be like to live in the dark? the only experience most people have of life off the grid is when they go camping, ironically to regenerate their senses and bodies after getting used to the comforts of modern, urban life, made possible in part by electricity. in the mid-1980s, i lived in a small village in uttar pradesh in northern india where homes had not been connected to the grid. in official parlance, the village had been “electrified,” which conveyed the image of being jolted into modernity. in reality, though, the wires reached only the tube wells in the fields, not the homes of villagers.5 there were no streetlights, and the few television sets found in the village drew power from diesel generators. in most development trajectories, the absence of electricity would be seen as a source of deprivation. yet the lack of electricity in this village was conducive to the creation of a lively social and political sphere. after dark, once all of the day’s chores were done and before going to sleep, there was time for amiable sociability. small groups of men would gather on the porches of homes, while women would gather at each other’s homes, exchanging information, gossip, and news. children would play in the streets. the whole village was abuzz with sounds. with no other entertainment and with no light to elongate the working day, this time was spent in creating and maintaining a public sphere. the darkness, paradoxically, enabled a sense of community to be built in the village. the contrast with larger villages that did have electricity was striking: there, people retreated to their own homes and were entertained by (centrally controlled) television and radio. a young man explained to me how much he had hated life in the city where he had gone to live with a relative. “here,” he said, “if you want to meet a young woman discreetly, you just step off the main road leading to the village, and you have all the privacy you need. in the city, there are lights everywhere, and you dare not speak to a young woman without everyone coming to know, and gossip spreading like lightning.” far from seeing electricity as a form of liberation, some villagers experienced it as increasing the possibilities of surveillance and control. however, i do not want to give the impression that living in the dark was a positive feature of social life for all segments of the population. for example, when women had to go out to the fields at night to irrigate fields or to defecate, they faced an increased risk of sexual violence. the darkness hid the trysts of lovers, but it also hid forms of gendered violence that made everyday life much more difficult for women. if a village was electrified, government statistics recorded all of the people who lived there as having access to electricity, and by this measure almost all of india had electricity. however, a new method of calculating access based on household-level data discovered that more than three hundred million people in india had no electricity, more than any other nation-state in the world. for a large share of india’s population, life off the grid was the normal condition of everyday life. however, even those on the grid seldom had electricity. being connected to the grid and having electricity are two different issues. in a typical day, most rural consumers who were on the grid received power for a few hours. to refer to the period of no power as a blackout or brownout makes little sense when the lack of power constitutes the major part of the day, unless one assumes a baseline of uninterrupted power for everyone. since the majority of indian consumers have never had access to uninterrupted power, its presence, not its absence, is what would surprise in the indian context. many indians were mystified when a blackout in 2003 in the eastern united states, including new york, made front-page news. they could not understand why people were so exercised over not having power for a couple of days, and what exactly was newsworthy about something that, to them, was an everyday occurrence. what this makes clear is that although the focus of government policy and popular perception is on whether people are connected to the grid, this fact alone is less important than the quality of electricity to which people have access. quality refers to reliability, but also to whether the current can be maintained within strict limits. one may have electricity, but if the power keeps tripping every few minutes, it may ruin appliances connected to the grid and may prevent one from operating electrical stoves to cook dinner or using washing machines to clean clothes. the introduction of mass electronic consumer goods forced electrical utilities in the global north to focus on the quality of power, which meant keeping variation and fluctuations in the quality of electricity within very tight parameters. years after my village fieldwork, when i was living in a small town in uttar pradesh and doing research on state development bureaucracies, the variability of power remained noticeable. as soon as dusk approached, the voltage would drop alarmingly. hundred-watt light bulbs would glow as feebly as candles, and tube lights stopped working altogether. the elements in the electric heaters that i used to keep warm were barely visible. around ten at night, when the illegal connections that people used to tap into the main to draw electricity for cooking and other activities were no longer drawing power, the voltage would shoot up. the same light bulbs that had barely been emitting light became blindingly bright and frequently burned out due to the excessively high voltage. the same heaters would provide plenty of heat for the night. power to the people? why were people in uttar pradesh tapping into the electric mains illegally? more importantly, why were they allowed to tap into the mains without the fear of official retaliation? the relationship between electric power and the poor is a particularly vexed one for states in the global south. the problem is compounded by corruption, which muddies the water as to who is using electricity illegitimately without paying for it. as antina von schnitzler (2013) shows in her study of prepaid meters in south africa, while connecting all citizens to the grid might be an index of the modernity of the nation-state, the problem remains how poor people can afford to pay for this relatively expensive product. in a highly stratified society like south africa, the result has been paradoxical. on the one hand, post-apartheid government policy has promoted access for everyone, especially for poor people living in townships and homelands. on the other hand, neoliberal government policy has prevented a more vigorous redistributive agenda. many poor africans who were off the grid now have access to electricity, but do not have the money to pay for its use. the only way to benefit from a good that has supposedly been provided to them is to doctor the meters so that they can use electricity for free. however, the state utility considers this to be cheating and has invented prepaid meters that cut off supply if the consumer cannot pay for electricity. thus, we arrive at a paradoxical situation where the poor are connected to the grid, but cannot use electric power. modernity has arrived without delivering on its promise: it has not made the lives of the poor easier. moreover, people may end up paying a significant proportion of their income for a good that is considered a basic right for a citizen of a modern nation-state. for very different reasons, a similar situation exists for poor people in urban and rural india. since the large majority of the urban poor live in unauthorized settlements—that is, slums—they cannot officially be granted electrical connections. once such connections are officially granted, they can be leveraged to prove residence and thereby to convert unauthorized hutments into legal occupancy. therefore, power companies refuse to give official connections to residents of slums. however, they recognize that people need electricity to live in an urban environment. thus, they unofficially allow slum residents to tap into power lines. politicians, police, and bureaucrats are all complicit in this lawbreaking, going so far as to collect rent from residents for unauthorized access to electricity. for their part, residents do not pay for the electricity they use, even if they pay an equivalent amount in bribes. playing on the different meanings of the term, the urban poor can thus be said to have precarious power.6 for the rural poor, the situation is very different. power in india is controlled not by the federal or central government, but by the twenty-nine individual state governments (kale 2014). electoral competition, populist politics, and the organizational abilities of rich peasants have made the provision of free power an important electoral platform. however, providing free power to farmers has many undesirable consequences, apart from its impact on the bottom line of power companies. it encourages farmers to pump groundwater excessively, leading to a lowering of the water table. it encourages them to grow water-hungry crops even in arid environments. and it increases inequality in rural areas, because richer farmers are able to afford the cost of tube wells and pumps more easily. since power companies cannot afford to supply electricity around the clock for free, they regulate demand by shutting off supply. as a consequence, most people in rural areas receive electricity for only a few hours every day, if at all, and the supply is in most cases erratic and unpredictable. most states began by charging farmers a flat fee for electricity that was indexed to the size of the motor being used in their tube wells. however, the trend in recent years has been away from collecting even that nominal sum. so, because farmers are not charged for electricity, most state electricity boards have simply stopped measuring how much electricity is lost. this practice, in turn, makes it impossible to estimate how much of the power that is lost is given away and how much is stolen. the reason why this practice is important is that on average, 40 percent of the power produced in india cannot be accounted for (bhalla 2000), and is presumed lost or stolen. transmission losses are a well-known property of electricity, but comparing india to other countries—where transmission losses are less than 10 percent—makes it clear that massive quantities of electricity are being stolen. not counting how much power goes to rural areas enables utilities to mask other forms of stealing under the convenient rubric of free power to farmers. in fact, we do not know how much power is stolen through the connivance of utility officials and politicians colluding with industrial users. in exchange for bribes, companies can be underinvoiced for their power consumption and overcompensated for any “excess” power that they put into the grid from their own captive power plants. the anthropology of electricity i want to come back to a question that i posed at the beginning: why is an anthropology of electricity important now? and why are such studies particularly critical in the global south? in the anthropocene, the issue of how we use energy is one of the central questions facing humankind. which energy sources we use and how much we use will determine the rate of climate change. since the fastest growth of demand is due to consumers in the global south who are becoming middle-class, it will be particularly important to understand what states in the global south are doing to produce and consume energy. as social scientists, we know almost nothing about what consumers in the global south are doing with energy: what sources of energy they use in daily activities, what they use them for, how, when, and why they switch from one source to another, and so on.7 electricity is particularly important because it is seen as clean and modern, and because it mitigates existing local air pollution caused by the use of petroleum, kerosene, and wood for transportation, cooking, and heating. the anthropology of electricity can help us understand the relationship between sources of energy and social and political arrangements, as timothy mitchell (2011) suggests. how electricity is generated, transmitted, distributed, and consumed is fashioned by existing social arrangements, but also profoundly shapes political and social structures (shamir 2013). following mitchell, it is important to pay attention to the specificity of the properties of electricity to see how it has altered and reinforced existing hierarchies and inequalities in institutions and practices. the fact that electricity can be transmitted easily over vast distances, the fact that it cannot be stored easily, and the fact that supply and demand have to be instantly coordinated have profound implications for electricity’s dialectical relationship to social infrastructures and political institutions.8 energopolitics is also closely linked to biopolitics (boyer 2014). the manner in which electricity is generated and distributed has a profound impact on daily life. with the availability of affordable electricity, new consumer desires arose and new forms of consumption became available. starting with lighting, the radio, and the electric iron, a whole host of new appliances made their way into people’s homes and lives. as the supply of electricity became more predictable and its quality more reliable, new consumer goods began to compete for the attention of consumers. in urban india in the 1970s, the only electrical appliances in many middle-class homes were mixers, irons, sewing machines, heating coils for hot water, and—for the upper segments of the middle class—refrigerators and a window air conditioner in the bedroom. since then, hot water tanks or geysers have become commonplace, but so have refrigerators, microwave ovens, television sets, air conditioners, washing machines, and computers. the supply of electricity is unable to keep up with demand, and there is a persistent shortfall of approximately 11 percent at peak power (cea 2012). the biopolitical uses of electricity—its role in lighting streets and homes, in creating and regulating the desire for commodities involved with entertainment and domestic work, in shaping design and architecture by heating and cooling indoor spaces, in making life more comfortable for the population—have received almost no attention in anthropology and thus constitute a fecund subject for future research. so much of the lives of people around the world is shaped by infrastructure and its absence or partial presence—for example, getting a few hours of electricity or water a day—and almost all of it has escaped the attention of social scientists. our accounts of the everyday lives of people in the global south are incomplete because they do not pay attention to the different ways in which people encounter the partial presence of modern infrastructure. electric futures the dystopian future embodied in the eco-suicidal age of the anthropocene makes it clear that nation-states in the global south cannot emulate the developmental trajectory of the global north. furthermore, it is equally clear that nation-states in the global north cannot continue on the trajectories they have followed until now. for both the global south and the global north, the past is not a good guide to the future. more importantly, futures past are of little help in thinking about the future in the present (koselleck 2004). the problem of sustainable futures requires a complete recalibration of energy use with social and political life. we thus have to reimagine electricity use in the future that does not simply seek to extend the patterns of the present. bringing more people to the grid so that they can consume more electricity is neither feasible nor desirable. yet this is precisely what so many solutions to climate change seek to do. generating and using more electricity is taken as a foregone conclusion: the question is merely how to do it with the least impact on the environment. it is for this reason that nuclear power has once again found favor with many policymakers, despite the unresolved question of how to dispose of nuclear waste. i want to be clear that i do not think people in the global south who are rapidly joining the ranks of the middle class should not be allowed to do so. rather, the real question is how the quality of people’s lives in the global south can be improved, not by emulating the destructive patterns of the global north, but by pursuing new, sustainable developmental paths that have not yet been taken. there is a real opportunity to leapfrog the carbon economy and life on the grid to establish future-oriented, sustainable ways of living. figure 1. stitching under smart power lamp. photo by robin wyatt, used here courtesy of the rockefeller foundation. what are other possible electric futures? as a latecomer to development, the global south can become a model for the rest of the world by experimenting with different ways of using electricity. it is a fact that the grid still does not reach many people in the global south, and that many areas of the world are not connected to a central system of electric power. could one take advantage of this “disability,” and instead of expending enormous resources in connecting people to a central grid, experiment with using distributed sources of energy rather than concentrated ones, living off the grid completely, or relying on local networks of power-sharing in the form of small-scale grids? one of mahatma gandhi’s critiques of electrical power was the worry that it would bring centralized control over the lives of people in remote villages and prevent communities from becoming self-sufficient for their energy needs (kale 2014, 28). a combination of wind, solar, biomass, and electric power could meet all of a community’s energy needs and, whether we like it or not, that is the future of energy sustainability on the planet, since we cannot continue to burn the energy stored inside the earth. in most cases, people who are off the grid are already living sustainable lives, although this is not universally the case.9 the question is how new technologies can make the quality of life higher without reproducing the steps taken by the growth of the carbon economy, and the forms in which electricity has been historically incorporated into the lives of people. the first step towards such a model of sustainable energy use is to match the quality of energy to its end use. the availability of cheap electricity has led to its misuse. it is thermodynamically inefficient to convert low-quality forms of energy like solar and wind power into electricity and then to use that electricity for low-quality uses such as heating, cooling, and cooking. electricity is needed for very few functions and, by carefully matching energy quality to use and through better demand-side management, a high quality of life could be attained with a fraction of the energy that we use today. what is at stake here are different ideas about the future. that the aspiration of the emerging middle class in the global south is to become more like the rich citizens of the global north is an index of the colonization of their imaginations of the future. the failure of development discourse lies in the fact that it seeks to replicate globally the condition of the global north, even as it is increasingly evident that such a condition is unsustainable and leads to eco-suicide. gandhi was prescient about the unsustainability of modern developmental models when he reportedly said: “if it took britain half the resources of the world to be what it is today, how many worlds would india need?” (tolba 1987, 118)10 electric futures have to contend with these aspirations among the emerging classes in the global south and struggle to realize notions of development and progress that are sustainable. notes acknowledgments i wish to thank stephanie santos, sumita mitra, and kaitlyn ireland for research assistance, and sunila kale for detailed and stimulating questions. 1. battery storage technology is improving rapidly, and tesla’s recent announcement of a battery that will store enough power to supply a home’s energy needs in the evenings promises to have an impact on electric end-use patterns. 2. by 1898, only 5 percent of u.s. households had electricity. according to david nye (1999, 166), “the major shift to electricity in the home occurred between 1915 and 1929.” 3. the exceptions here would be transportation infrastructure such as bridges, railway tracks, subway and railway stations, buses, and trains, which, despite their visibility, are often not subject to aesthetic refinement. 4. historically, utilities in the united states did not worry about demand. it was assumed that demand would grow at a steady pace, and the problem was always how to ensure that there was enough supply of electricity—that there were enough power plants to generate the energy that was needed by industrial and residential consumers. 5. tube wells are small-bore pipes that are powered by electric pumps and used to draw water from the ground. when i started my fieldwork in 1984, the pipes had to be sunk just thirty feet to reach the water table. 6. access to other infrastructures, such as water and sanitation, is equally precarious. unlike water or electricity, the problem of sanitation is not easily solved and leads to intolerable situations for poor people. 7. the work of tanja winther (2008) in zanzibar and harold wilhite (2012) in kerala are notable exceptions. 8. ronen shamir (2013, 6), for example, writes that “the grid is a maker of groups and a generator of political and economic difference among groups and individuals.” 9. sunila kale (pers. comm.) has pointed out that people dependent on firewood may, in fact, be employing unsustainable sources of fuel. firewood and cow dung cakes used for cooking in many parts of rural india emit particulate matter and smoke that constitute real dangers to women’s health. 10. tolba does not give us a citation from gandhi’s writings; see ramachandra guha (2006, 231) on the quotation’s provenance. references bhalla, m.s. 2000 “transmission and distribution losses (power).” proceedings of the national conference on regulation in infrastructure services. new delhi: energy and resources institute. http://www.teriin.org/upfiles/pub/papers/ft33.pdf boyer, dominic 2014 “energopower: an introduction.” anthropological quarterly 87, no. 2: 309–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0020 government of india central electricity authority (cea) 2012 “performance review of thermal power stations, 2011–12,” accessed august 12, 2015. http://www.cea.nic.in/reports/annual/thermalreview/thermal_review-2011.pdf guha, ramachandra 2006 how much should a person consume? environmentalism in india and the united states. berkeley: university of california press. jacobson, arne 2007 “connective power: solar electrification and social change in kenya.” world development 35, no. 1: 144–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2006.10.001 kale, sunila s. 2014 electrifying india: regional political economies of development. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. koselleck, reinhart 2004 futures past: on the semantics of historical time. translated by keith tribe. new york: columbia university press. originally published in 1979. latour, bruno 1993 we have never been modern. translated by catherine porter. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. marx, karl 1981 capital: a critique of political economy, vol. 3. translated by david fernbach. originally published in 1894. mitchell, timothy 2011 carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. london: verso books. nye, david e. 1999 consuming power: a social history of american energies. cambridge, mass.: mit press. pereira, marcio giannini, josé antonio sena, marcos aurélio vasconcelos freitas, and neilton fidelis da silva 2011 “evaluation of the impact of access to electricity: a comparative analysis of south africa, china, india and brazil.” renewable and sustainable energy reviews 15, no. 3: 1427–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2010.11.005 peters, jorg, and colin vance 2011 “rural electrification and fertility: evidence from côte d’ivoire.” journal of development studies 47, no. 5: 753–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2010.527954 shamir, ronen 2013 current flow: the electrification of palestine. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. tolba, mostafa kamal 1987 sustainable development: constraints and opportunities. guildford, u.k.: butterworth scientific. von schnitzler, antina 2013 “traveling technologies: infrastructure, ethical regimes, and the materiality of politics in south africa.” cultural anthropology 28, no. 4: 670–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12032 wilhite, harold 2012 “a socio-cultural analysis of changing household electricity consumption in india.” in tackling long-term global energy problems, environment and policy: the contribution of social science, edited by daniel spreng, thomas flüeler, david l. goldblatt, and jürg minsch, 97–113. dordrecht: springer. winther, tanja 2008 the impact of electricity: development, desires and dilemmas. new york: berghahn. woolf, arthur g. 1984 “electricity, productivity, and labor saving: american manufacturing, 1900–1929.” explorations in economic history 21, no. 2: 176–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0014-4983(84)90024-x photography and photo-elicitation after colonialism photography and photo-elicitation after colonialism liam buckley james madison university with the growing interest in colonial photography, researchers—often anthropologists and museum curators—routinely take artifacts of this work back to the site of their original production to elicit data on the content and response to the images (e.g., day and leizaola 2012; geismar and herle 2010; young 1998). this scholarship attempts to present local and alternative knowledge of the history of colonialism recorded in the photographs. with this in mind, i approached my fieldwork in the gambia, west africa, expecting to gather historical narratives and subaltern commentary on the politics of the colonial past. i received nothing of the sort. instead, i listened to extended commentaries on the appearance of the photographs—how they looked “old”; evaluations of the people and objects depicted; guessing of the brand names of the cars and bicycles in the images; and criticisms of photographic composition. instead of narratives, i received steadfast lists—denotations of objects rather than evocations prompted by the photographs. these comments never developed into an interest in or commentary on the colonial culture that i considered to be represented in the photographs, which caused me to question the ability of photo-elicitation to depict colonial life or to connect people to the past. instead, photo-elicitation appears to offer us information about the aesthetic values governing the present. this essay draws on ethnographic research into the relationship between photographic aesthetics and postcolonial studies. i analyze a series of interviews centered on photographic images of life in the gambia colony in the 1940s and 1950s (see buckley 2008, 2010).1 rather than interpreting the images historically, in terms of the politics and socioeconomics of colonial life, the interviewees resolutely focused on the photographs’ aesthetic details. this attention to the surface features of the photograph suggests the viewer’s disconnection or distraction from the colonial history depicted in the images. the interviews generated data not so much on what was shown in the photographs but on the question of how photographs visually record and display their images. the viewers were interested in the photograph as a type of object, crafted according to specific aesthetic techniques, practices, and formalities of composition. these viewers make no attempt to salvage or excavate the meanings of an image’s political history. the visual encounter is one of aesthetic evaluation and admiration rather than a perception of historical data. viewers describe, offering the opposite of a “forensic” or “submerged” reading (see edwards 2001, 87). it is, in fact, not a reading but a viewing. method and context photo-elicitation is a method of interviewing in which researchers ask respondents to talk about a set of photographs. john collier (1957) first described this technique in an article published in 1957 in american anthropologist.2 much of this discussion appeared again in 1967 in visual anthropology: photography as a research method (collier and collier 1986). photo-elicitation has a straightforward goal: “when native eyes interpret and enlarge upon the photographic content, through interviewing with photographs, the potential range of data enlarges beyond that contained in the photographs themselves” (collier and collier 1986, 99). photo-elicitation solves “memory problems” and “evokes responses” (100–101): “photographs sharpen the memory and give the interview an immediate character of realistic reconstruction” (106). this method works within a cultural context. the production of data is itself subject to a set of social norms, understandings, and expectations regarding the status of the colonial images on view and of the practice and products of photography in general within that locale. that subjects are deemed “experts” in their ability and authority to speak about the images also influences the data (see, e.g., bell 2006, 198; and kratz 1996: 62–63). verbal interviews and those also making use of images differ in the type and range of elicited responses (harper 2002, 13). two types of analysis occur during interviews with photographs. direct analysis identifies the content of the photos and provides commentary on the context for that content—for example, the circumstances leading to a particular arrangement in the image (m. collier 2001, 45). the “encyclopedic value” of the photograph stems from its assumed ability to provide a realistic reconstruction of the site, people, and objects in the depiction (lapenta 2011, 203). indirect or projective analysis produces data that concern highly subjective responses and may have little formal relation to the actual content of the images. these responses may instead result from evocation, the “vivid memories, feelings, insight, thoughts and memories” triggered by the act of looking at the image (m. collier 2001, 46; lapenta 2011, 203). photo-elicitation studies ordinarily use photographs produced either by the researcher or by the respondents (edgar 2004, 94). an additional method, and the one that i used, involves acts of so-called photo repatriation or visual repatriation, in which respondents view and comment on images produced during the colonial period that are housed in museums or archives. these respondents presumably have some connection to the original site, people, and contents of the images in question (see dudding 2005). photo repatriation has an explicitly postcolonial goal: “by freeing photographs from their immersion within european cultural expectation, visual repatriation allows other ways of seeing to emerge … [enabling] new spaces for the preservation and exploration of identity, history and culture” (bell 2006, 192). the images used in my photo-elicitation interviews were originally produced by a group of local photographers in the early 1940s who worked for the public relations office (pro) of the gambia colony. the pro hired photographers to produce visual media specifically tailored to local interests and trends. in turn, the participation of these photographers in colonial public relations formed part of a wider increase in the participation of gambian colonial subjects in the governmental and civic life of the colony. the photographs depict new forms of participation at events such as parades, sporting affairs, the visits of dignitaries, and the opening of legislative sessions (buckley 2010). the interviews themselves occurred in somewhat of a vacuum of popular interest in colonial life. while colonial photographs appear frequently on the international scene in public venues such as galleries and exhibits (banthall 1992; thorner 2008), there has been little contemporary gambian interest in the colonial period. the national archives do hold a large collection of colonial-period photographs, but these do not appear in gambian museum exhibits (buckley 2005, 263). gambian archival photography features images of urban life, while the gambian national museum has chosen to emphasize precolonial rural life, displaying traditional and indigenous artifacts that “survived colonialism” (bellagamba 2006, 41). the television talk show sunu coosan (our tradition) occasionally focuses on urban colonial topics such as the police band and the “band tonight” dances in the capital during the 1940s. the cultural organization banjul demba (banjul yesterday) also stages annual festivals in banjul that include celebrations of urban colonial life. and the electronic bulletin board “bantaba in cyberspace” often includes exchanges of background information on famous persons and buildings in the city. other than these sparse occurrences, colonial life remains publically invisible. the main context for contemporary photography in the gambia is that of the portrait studio. since the country’s independence in 1965, portrait work has become part of a highly aesthetic cultural domain that also includes the decorative professions of tailoring and hairdressing. studios are usually established in vicinity to beauty salons and dress shops. in addition to offering photographic services, studios also sell cosmetics and women’s clothing accessories, such as purses and shoes (buckley 2013, 293). portraiture forms a central component of the realm of personal adornment and elegance. in terms of local concepts of material culture, photographic portraits belong to a set of objects and practices that exist in jamano, a wolof word that describes existence in a state of ever-change, of being fashionable and up to date. as such, photography has no place in the realm of coosan, tradition, and of those aspects of life that do not change (see buckley 2000). this distinction between jamano and coosan increases the perceived distance between the photograph and ideas of history. my interviews made use of a selection of images from the ten albums of colonial-era photographs in the gambian national archives, consisting of 2,231 photographs in total. the albums are large objects, each one covering an entire tabletop when open flat. i was usually the only researcher in the archive, and the archivists often visited to see what i was examining. when i asked them questions about the content of the photographs, they responded by providing me with the names of people they felt more qualified than themselves to talk about the images. in one way, this first attempt at photo-elicitation with archivists produced no data about the photographs—no one would answer my questions. on reflection, however, their responses were appropriate and helpful. the archivists were in fact pointing out that they did not consider themselves suitable collaborators in this method of data collection. in their deference, they assisted me in redefining my approach to photo-elicitation based on a more local standard of expertise. the archivists suggested people who had a privileged connection to the imagery—members of the family circles of persons who had participated in the events depicted in the imagery. furthermore, some of them were related to people who had served, from the mid-1930s onward, on the cinematograph board of control. this board had advised the colony’s administration on matters related to visual media and reviewed all imported imagery including still photographs, films, posters, and advertising material (buckley 2010, 149). these people would have been children aged five to ten when the photographs were taken, and in their early twenties at independence. they were all banjulians—wolof and aku men and women from families well established in the capital city of banjul. the local term for such families is gourmet, recognizing their claims to sophistication and urbane manners. these families had a visible presence as bureaucrats in the colony’s civil service, and they maintained these posts through independence (mahoney 1963; vidler 1998, 63). they were mostly christian and active in the catholic and anglican churches of banjul. the aku families descended from freetonian creole communities in sierra leone (see aspen 1986; cohen 1981). i could not conduct the interviews in the archive itself because the persons i sought were busy during the workweek and the archive’s public hours. using a camera on a copy stand with lights, i photographed and printed up a selection of images to use away from the archive. sometimes i would take the selection of photographs to the house of one of the interviewees, while at other times people met me at my host’s house in serrekunda, a suburb of banjul. the archivists were correct—my interviewees readily answered my opening sets of questions regarding the details and names of people, locations, and events in the photographs. on these occasions, my consultants would simply start to identify aspects of the photograph as soon as they saw it. they seemed to presume that since i came from elsewhere, i would not know anything about these images, and that this was why i wanted to ask questions about them. their presumption was, of course, correct. the interviews i usually began an interview with the question, “can you tell me about these photographs?” i hereby intended to elicit some factual information about the images and to initiate and develop a conversation. in photo-elicitation interviews, questions are routinely open-ended and non-directed (lapenta 2011, 201; see also edgar 2004, 46, 52; el guindi 2004, 476; kratz 1996, 67). the photographs mean to enhance the respondent’s engagement and active participation in guiding the direction of the interview. compared with other forms of interviewing, photo-elicitation is “driven” by the respondents; they have the authoritative voice in interpreting the materials before them (lapenta 2011, 206). as francesco lapenta (2011, 210–11) notes, the “turn-taking” system of asking questions and giving answers organizes a set of hierarchies and asymmetries between the interviewer and the interviewees. in contrast, in an open-ended photo-elicitation interview, photographs provide “a tool to break the directive nature of verbal questioning … unlike verbally delivered questions, images are not generally part of a turn-taking system.” an image looked at during an interview does not belong to an established discourse such as that of the spoken question. it is thus not subject to particular forms of interpretation and resolution. while talking about the photographs, my consultants focused on the following themes: the sepia tint of the photographs’ black-and-white coloring; the names of the objects and the clothes appearing in the photographs; the compositional style of the photograph; and the question of whether they—the interviewees—might have themselves been in the photographs. each photograph elicited the same opening response in wolof, “yagga na torop” [it is very old]. it was the appearance of the photograph rather than the content itself that made it look old. specifically, it was that the imagery was printed in black and white. for people born in the first decade of independence, black-and-white (b&w) images have negative connotations related to a perceived lack of modernism and cosmopolitanism. some follow-up interviews with people born in the early 1970s, using the same set of photographs, similarly began with “yagga na torop.” but this statement was always followed by a laugh and “dafa local” [it is local]. local, borrowed directly from english, means something clearly produced locally and not imported. for older photographers, speaking of the days before color film in the late 1970s, to say that b&w photography was local meant that they could develop and print the images themselves in their own darkrooms (buckley 2006, 71). unlike color film, b&w did not need to be sent away for processing and printing in labs in the senegalese capital of dakar, or even in london. for an older photographer, local evoked the sense of pride in the autonomy of one’s craft. clients of the photographers, however, considered these b&w photographs local when the new processing and printing technology of color film revealed the provinciality of established portraiture. in this context, local meant out of fashion, without any of the positive implications of the term classic. i sometimes saw “old pa” photographers and young “upstart” photographers spar in friendly and humorous terms about b&w imagery’s moral worth or lack thereof. on one occasion, outside a studio, a group of men sat in the shade of the veranda passing the day. the older photographer talked about the “old days” and the process of developing and printing b&w photographs. a young photographer, just starting out, interrupted, stating that he opposed b&w, then proceeding to purposely misconstrue the meaning of the word film: “because, in the old films, in the black-and-white films, you see no black people. like in all the war films—you would think only white people fought in the war. but with color film, you get to see black people. color film is better.” everyone laughed, even the old pa. each photograph’s discussion included a lengthy listing of the elements within the frame: “this is cameron street … this is buckle street … this is where the methodist bookshop is … this is wellington street … this is where the uac [united africa company] was … this guy is smoking … this guy must have been in his seventies … this is the wife of the governor … nearly all banjulians went to this school.” occasionally, conversation veered away from the photographs to people’s memories of the types of scenery depicted in the images. for example, when looking at images of transportation during the late 1940s, one man spoke about riding his new bicycle out of the city to see and impress friends at yundum vocational college; about being offered and taking long rides in cars with europeans; and about the trucks bringing people and goods to celebrations and feasts. yet in each instance, the discussion would quickly return to the respective photographs on view, describing images and appearances rather than individualized experiences and events. in front of the photographs, people listed brand names— the names of the bicycles, “hercules … solex,” the names of the cars, the trucks and their characteristics—the luster of the chrome, the dull matte of the unpolished leather seats, the worn-leather steering wheel, the shiny surface of the bicycle’s bell. similarly, images depicting people participating in the rites of colonial civic life (empire day, remembrance day, the king’s birthday, etc.) elicited comments on how things looked rather than how the people may have thought or felt. the boys in the photograph of a wolof woman selling poppies in maccarthy square on remembrance day 1948 were wearing amulets. the man in the photograph of veterans outside the british legion office hailed from the provinces “up country”—he sported a plain, light-colored jacket (see figure 1). the children in the photograph of a king’s birthday parade were wearing malfa creek school uniforms, and those in the photograph of an empire day parade uniforms from st. mary’s school. the commentary focused on the clothes that people wore “back then,” but it dealt less with the past than with how children looked wearing their uniforms, the look of medals worn by veterans, how people raised their arms to hold flags, or with how one man held his cigarette. the surface realms of dress and appearance dominated viewers’ perceptions. figure 1. photograph produced by the public relations office of the gambia colony. property of the national archives of the republic of the gambia, filed under pho1 (formerly cso51), “photographs, bathurst buildings and various others in photograph albums” (1942–1957). people showed much interest in the composition of the photographs, including in the arrangement of the scene, the physical location of the photographer, and the aesthetic qualities of the setting. these observations suggest a finely tuned sensitivity to the deliberate, performative aspects of photography. i point here not so much to the notion of “photographs as performance” developed by elizabeth edwards (2001, 16–22), which analyses the social biography of photographs as material things and the agency of images in making meaning in a variety of contexts—archives, albums, exhibits, and collections, for example. rather, i am thinking of johannes fabian’s (1996, 261–62) discussion of painting as performance: the image records and shows, within its materiality, its accomplishment as an aesthetically composed object. the gambians i interviewed were interested in the photograph’s production craft. it is this performative aspect of photography that david macdougall (2006) examines in his analysis of the photography of jean audema, who worked for the colonial service in what was then the french congo between 1894 and 1905. macdougall (2006, 185) makes his sociopolitical interpretation of audema’s images contingent on their compositional and photographic qualities. so what might look, for example, like an anthropometric arrangement of people in a photograph is better understood as a result of the photographer’s interest in “achieving a balanced and varied composition of human forms. … there is a conscious interplay of diagonals.” for macdougall, audema’s compositional aesthetics are so clearly present that the viewer can see “theatricality” in the depicted scenes. the image clearly presents itself as the fabricated product of a creative and collaborative encounter between the photographer and his sitters—“only the most naïve viewer could ever interpret audema’s group photographs as pure reflections of reality” (204–5). similarly, the gambian photographs demonstrated obvious aesthetic arrangements for the camera. viewers quickly pointed out oddities in composition: the placing of an especially short man in a group portrait of cricket players; a jacket that appeared too short on the arms of a man in the portrait; a lineup for a race in which some of the runners were not on their marks. shown a photograph of canons firing a salute at maccarthy square, the viewers mostly wondered whether the photographer had been in danger taking the photos (figure 2). similarly, a photograph of a man pole-vaulting at a sports day also raised the question of the photographer’s location. the twist of the body and the turned angle of the photographed athlete appeared particularly eye-catching. the viewers described not what made the photographs historical, but what made them visually engaging. the visual encounter with these photographs thus did not lead to the intellectual perception of the presence of embedded information; rather, it constituted a form of aesthetic contemplation and admiration. figure 2. photograph produced by the public relations office of the gambia colony. property of the national archives of the republic of the gambia, filed under pho1 (formerly cso51), “photographs, bathurst buildings and various others in photograph albums” (1942–1957). in addition to weighing the aesthetic composition of the images, interviewees often imagined actually being in the photographs. for example, after describing the aesthetic composition of the photograph on view, one respondent wondered whether he himself might be one of the people depicted in it. because the image had been taken before his birth, i replied that this was not possible. he disregarded this comment—he could still imagine being in the photograph, that is, being dressed and composed for the photograph by wearing the amulets, feeling the weight of the hat on his head, and the rub of the shirt’s fabric on his skin. he saw himself turning his attention away from the finely dressed wolof woman selling poppies on his left toward the photographer and his camera in front of him (see figure 3). in this case, photo-elicitation provided an occasion to wonder about fabricated childhoods and what it might have been like to have appeared and been photographed in that way. such descriptions posit a relationship between individuals and colonial life based on reverie as opposed to memory— dreamy recollections of the past that require no preconditions or antecedents (bachelard 1971). indeed, the discourse of daydreaming regularly emerges in the practice of photography in the gambia, giving rise to a style of portraiture using double-exposure techniques—allowing the viewer to see the sitter at multiple superimposed angles (figure 4). this style of portrait is known as xool sa bopp—to day-dream (lit., to look at one’s head) (buckley 2000, 84). figure 3. photograph produced by the public relations office of the gambia colony. property of the national archives of the republic of the gambia, filed under pho1 (formerly cso51), “photographs, bathurst buildings and various others in photograph albums” (1942–1957). photo-elicitation and colonial photography based on other postcolonial studies of photography, i had expected to hear narratives in which the interviewees used photographs to assert their sense of political lineage. these elicitations would suggest a point of departure from a eurocentric and imperial view of the photographs’ content. this belief that the colonial photographs might serve as vessels for postcolonial histories—as opposed to being objects of aesthetic contemplation—has its roots in the way that colonial photographs first emerged as objects of academic inquiry. the study of colonial photography initially developed within a discourse founded on foucauldian concepts of power/knowledge and the imagery’s genealogy within imperial systems of domination and ideology (see, e.g., alloula 1986; faris 1992, 1996; gordon 1997; ryan 1997). figure 4. xool sa bopp. photographer: doudou jeng, new millennium image hunters, brikama 2000. from the collection of liam buckley. this hermeneutic opens up with the question of whether colonial photography is actually able to offer any verifiable data about the scenes and persons in the depiction. it identifies the biases encoded within the imagery and formulates archival strategies for managing these biases in the collection and the analysis of visual data (viditz-ward 1985, 1987; scherer 1990). in this context, colonial photography depicts lives full of tension, ambivalence, and complexity rather than monolithic political domination (see geary 1988; gable 1998; pankhurst 1992; prins 1992). the focus on archival method also becomes evident in visual studies centered on the materiality of colonial photography and its engagement with colonial life through procedures such as image storage, transmission, handling, display, and collection (edwards 2001; edwards and hart 2004). these developments express the overall goal of describing colonial photography according to the vantage points of the subjugated and those in ambivalent and hybrid positions of power. research based on photo-elicitation best illustrates this postcolonial turn—taking colonial photographs back to the locale of their first production as interview instruments. the resulting data are the stuff of postcolonial commentaries, offering historical and substantiate alternative accounts of colonial life (edwards 2001, 87–96, 98): “contrasting, and even ultimately competing, historical refigurations, creating … plural frames of history.” for example, photo-elicitation among australian aboriginal peoples typifies the postcolonial approach to the inventory of colonial material culture as a means of accessing the history of the colonial past. these studies examine the viewing of colonial photographs as an occasion for recuperating historical knowledge and aboriginal identity (see edwards 2005). the photographs testify to losses in the past and provoke acts of history-telling in the present. the telling of the history encoded in the image constitutes “a grounded empowerment, repossession, renewal and contestation” (edwards 2005, 29). as such, photographs themselves serve as a “form of extended personhood in that they constitute a sum of relations over time” (edwards 2005, 31). the emphasis on the historical consciousness evoked by colonial photography fits with the importance accorded to memory work in the wider context of postcolonial studies (see, e.g., kuhn and mcallister 2006). both fields of inquiry constitute efforts in “reclaiming the shadows” (edwards 2001, 84) and in recognizing the extent to which local political consciousness differs from state-oriented and official memorializing (cole 1998, 105; van dijk 1998, 169–70). in the australian aboriginal examples, colonial photographs elicit a sense of continuous identity derived from memory work and a claim to historical knowledge of a particular place. knowing the place depicted in a photograph becomes the basis for geopolitical tenure. in front of the photographs the tellers re-establish and reclaim relations with their ancestors and the land. in light of this politically charged analysis, the rather mundane data i collected in the course of many interviews surprised me. if i wanted to respect the need to enhance interviewees’ agency in the process of generating data, my thwarted expectations could be interpreted as a mark of legitimate methodology. for example, joshua bell (2006, 200), in his study of photo repatriation, describes a similar situation in which his respondents focused on the discussion topics that interested them—topics that did not correspond to those that bell had original found worthwhile. in some ways, this situation validated his work. the telling of gambian colonial photographs made by my interviewees belongs to a genre of performance and to a set of expectations different from those described in the account of australian aboriginal photographic culture. the difference centers on the way the scene depicted in the photograph is viewed and engaged. in his phemenological study of the experience of viewing photographs, camera lucida, roland barthes (1981, 38–40) describes the contemplation of a photographed place. he suggests that images are compelling when they engender in the viewer a desire not just to visit but to inhabit the place in the photograph. edwards’s account of australian aboriginal responses includes an attempt on the part of the respective respondents to articulate what it might take to imagine living in the place depicted in the photograph. yet my data on gambian imaginations of the same type differ in how the photographic imagery invites a sense of belonging to the place of the photograph (see magee 2007). in the case of the australian aboriginal studies, the sense of belonging has a juridical basis, centered on the salvaging of a historical continuity for land rights and kinship relations. data from the gambian photo-elicitation, on the other hand, suggest a sense of belonging based on judging the look of life in the depicted scene—it has an aesthetic basis. a critical difference obtains between these two senses of belonging. edwards’s studies suggest that viewers experience a direct and political connection with content of the photographs. gambian data offer no such clear connection. while the data about the look of the clothing may concern colonial history, they do not resolve into any experience of a clear link to that history. here the sense of belonging is not politicized—instead, it remains unresolved, imagined, sometimes fabricated and highly aestheticized. this sense of belonging attends to the fashion and architectural details of the colonial past, but it does not constitute a form of colonial nostalgia (see bissell 2005). nostalgia involves a longing for some lineage with an idealized past. furthermore, the discussions and evaluations of the clothing and style in the imagery do not suggest a “technique of the self,” whereby the viewers of the photographs construct and intensify an attentive sense of their own selves as they review the photographs (see behrend 2002, 57–59). their lists of clothes and places proffer a straightforward aesthetic critique of beauty, fashion, and intelligent photographic craftwork. modern parallels in trying to understand my interviewees’ almost purely aesthetic approach to photographs of the colonial past, i found it useful to compare their comments to what they said about contemporary photographs. for barthes (1981, 87), the essence of a photograph, that which distinguishes it from other expressive objects, is its status as a “certificate of presence.” as such, culture imbues the photograph with a powerful certainty—what barthes (107) refers to as the certainty of the this-has-been—the uncontestable fact that at some point a photograph was taken of something that existed and was in front of the camera at the moment of the shutter clicking. in photo-elicitation, the question of what postcolonial viewers feel they share with those depicted in the photograph—other than posing or appearing similarly—remains open. that the people photographed existed in the past does not posit a relationship with them. the aesthetic evaluations that dominate my photo-elicitation data are not limited to the viewing of colonial photographs or images of the past. the same aesthetic is active when gambians judge photographs of modern nationhood—for example, identification cards, school admission forms, or job and bank account applications. in particular, the photographs on elementary school application forms elicited extended commentary as to how long the images would resemble the children in the photograph. hollywood, named after his portrait studio in serrekunda, showed me a photograph of his fiveand seven-year-old daughters. in the picture the girls stood next to each other—one taller than the other. both wore the same type of dress and shoes—small, crisply white sports shoes, the loops of the large thick laces almost touching the floor. they both held the same kind of lunchbox. the backdrop was a beach scene with palm trees—the one hollywood was using for all his portrait work at the time. as is typical of the gambian practice of transforming portraits into identification images, hollywood was about to cut out the two faces to make them the size required for passport images. the girls were entering the school system and needed photographic identification to accompany their admission paperwork. as we looked at the photograph, hollywood began to discuss whether these photographs would bear any resemblance to future photographs of the girls when they had grown up. hollywood doubted that we would we be able to discern that the same two individuals inhabited both sets of pictures. he was not alone in discerning the vagueness of the supposed certainty offered by children’s identification photographs. i met many parents similarly bemused by the state’s request to have their children photographed for official purposes. the fact that these children existed in a photograph would, with time, become irrelevant. this questioning of the a photograph’s capacity to identify its content for its viewer runs contrary to presumptions about the modernism and rationalism of photography’s representational qualities and about its capacity to generate the experience of particular types of personhood: how many thousands of days passed between infancy and early childhood vanish beyond direct recall! how strange it is to need another’s help to learn that this naked baby in the yellowed photograph, sprawled happily on rug or cot, is you. the photograph, fine child of the age of mechanical reproduction, is only the most peremptory of a huge modern accumulation of documentary evidence (birth certificates, diaries, report cards, letters, medical records, and the like) which simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory. out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it cannot be “remembered,” must be narrated. (anderson 1991, 208) hollywood’s critique of a photograph’s capacity to maintain identification with its subject resembles the detachment obvious during the interviews on colonial photographs. in both cases, a disposition toward photography emerged that is mostly concerned with the ways in which a photograph visually represents, rather than with what a photograph represents. this form of evaluating photographs indeed provides a point of departure from a eurocentric and imperial view of photographic content. yet it does so not by generating alternate or competing views on the content of the image, but by offering a critical assessment of the core indexical value of photographs—that is, of photography’s capacity to craft and evoke a definite and persuasive link between the image and the actual people and objects appearing in it (see wright 1992, 26–27). distraction my gambian consultants seemed distracted from the historical content of the photographs by the surface details of the images and their method of production. they would provide a litany of brands and place names and descriptions. this way of looking and showing uses “tactile optics,” touching and grasping at the details on the surface of the image and lingering there (see taussig 1991; marks 2000, 163). this distracted way of seeing focuses on the aesthetic features of the photograph, rather than on any message it might have to offer. states of distraction have become central to the analysis of subjectivities—moral and political—in postcolonial african life. these studies routinely focus on sacred states of spiritual and physical ecstasy and spirit-possession when persons “tune into” forms of radical alterity (see werbner 2002). the insights expressed by gambians looking at colonial photography more resemble walter benjamin’s (1979, 229–30) concept of “profane illumination,” by recognizing the arbitrary and provisional nature of everyday life. significantly, both these forms of distraction— sacred and profane—challenge the dominance of state-centered, secular accounts of rationality and modernity. in her examination of okiek reactions to photographic portraits, corrine kratz (1996, 67) notes that her respondents “looked though” the actual image in front of them to focus on the content of the imagery depicted. they had no interest in the photographic techniques of fabrication. in marked contrast, my data demonstrate a great interest in photographic production. why this discrepancy? it may have to do with the persons chosen for the interviews—those people my archival consultants deemed experts. all of them had themselves experienced the act of photography within a portrait studio setting. they understood the importance of arrangement, perspective, and aesthetic detail that dominates the production of studio photographs. for my photo-elicitation research interviewees, the craft of photography constituted an undeniable, everyday presence. a distracted way of seeing attends to so-called residual data—those impressions created by style, arrangement, conventions of dress, and other apparent trivialities. these cannot be understood as monuments to a notion of the “archaicized past” (see feldman 2004, 164–65). i was left with the question of how to understand and position my data in a theoretical field dominated by ideas of political identity and resistance. was my data useless, shallow, and arbitrary? or did it question the theoretical expectations of photo-elicitation to produce politically significant or subaltern responses? can the photograph even do what we take for granted—connect the present with the past and effectively represent the past to the present? my interviewees did not seem to feel connected to the colonial past as the result of viewing these images, nor did they have any comments or criticisms related to the imperial situation that had produced the images. instead, they wanted to talk about those same details of appearance and arrangement that concern them as they go to have their own photographs taken today. ultimately, a sense of mystery surrounds the notion of a connection between the viewing self and the visual content of a photograph. the fact that the past happened remains certain. yet the way gambians engaged colonial photographs suggests that any proximity between the past and the present relies on aesthetic rather than political concerns. conclusion: photo-elicitation after colonialism the data presented in this article—products of an extended attention to aesthetic details— create a theoretical challenge. as clifford geertz (1976, 1475) recognizes in his “art as a cultural system,” “the chief problem presented by the sheer phenomenon of aesthetic force … is how to place it within the other modes of social activity, how to incorporate it into the texture of a particular pattern of life.” is it necessary to force aesthetics into a conversation with political concerns for it to be considered relevant data for postcolonial studies? kris hardin (1993, 9–10) notes that “until very recently the arts have been seen only as a reflection or mirror of culture, something that occurs after the fact. researchers have tended to ask questions about what an object means, symbolizes, or represents.” is it possible to conceptualize a relationship between aesthetics and politics, for example, that does not make the relevancy of aesthetic detail contingent on its relevancy to politics? one alternative is to consider aesthetic force its own mode of social activity. as the interviews discussed in this essay suggest, the experience of viewing the surface details of photographs actually constructs—rather than simply illustrates—its own social critique. this critique, however, is rooted in questions such as “is this fashionable? is this up to date? does it look good? how were the subjects in this photograph arranged?” that the ubiquitous practice of photography in africa would lead to a skilled and discerning artisan viewership, sensitive to the plasticity of the art of photography, should come as no surprise. it defies the presumption that the images’ viewers and sitters have been wholly specimen-like and passive, uncritical, and disinterested in the technique of photography happening in front of them. it displays “good taste.” the views expressed by my interviewees were neither archival nor curatorial in type. instead, they exhibited sensitivity to the artisan and vernacular aspects of photography as a craft-technique. this craft has a primarily aesthetic goal—gambians want to look good, elegant, and up to date (see buckley 2006). are gambians unusual in their preoccupation with the aesthetic when viewing a photograph that may seem obviously political in nature? the type of data examined in this article may well have appeared in the field work of other researchers without having been prioritized for analysis. for example, during her photo-based work with okiek people, kratz (1996, 69) notes several instances when her own photographic practices became interview topics: “selena: ai! cory photographs anything!” researchers may not have developed analyses of these types of data because of a social scientific approach wedded to the representational ideologies of photography. photo-elicitation studies have prioritized and normalized political over aesthetic interpretations of photographs, attending to the politics of representation at the expense of aesthetic evaluations. while political criticism may have as its goal to make life more honest or fair, righting colonialism’s wrongs, aesthetics remains aloof from these concerns. instead this approach is fully cognizant of and engaged by craft, arrangement, and beauty, remaining wary of or at least unmoved and unimpressed by the politicized agenda that has driven photo-elicitation studies. notes acknowledgments this article draws on fieldwork in the gambia supported by the wenner-gren foundation. i presented an earlier version of this work at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association in washington, dc. many thanks to those who hosted me and assisted my research in the gambia: cornelius gomez, bob mcewan, bakari sidibe, andrew evborakai, vera prom, kekuta kamera, wassa njiete, giddom mballow, isatou conteh, redmond tobin, pa segga gaye, and stephen amat bahoum. thanks also to carroll ann friedmann, anne allison and charlie piot, and to the anonymous reviewers of cultural anthropology for the intellect, challenge, and encouragement with which they invigorated the writing and revision of this article. 1. following common usage, “the gambia” refers to “the gambia colony.” after independence (in 1965), the gambia became “the gambia,” as in “the republic of the gambia.” 2. collier was not the first to use photo-elicitation techniques. franz boas used photographs of museum objects to gather data from his haida consultants (brown, coote, and gosden 2000, 266–67). lila m. o’neale (1932) similarly 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richard, ed. 2002 postcolonial subjectivities in africa. new york: zed books. wright, terence 1992 “photography: theories of realism and convention.” in anthropology and photography 1860–1920, edited by elizabeth edwards, 18–32new haven, conn.: yale university press. young, michael 1998 malinowski’s kiriwina: fieldwork photography 1915–1918. chicago: university of chicago press. export-quality martyrs export-quality martyrs: roman catholicism and transnational labor in the philippines julius bautista kyoto university sencho is a forty-year-old technician from the philippine province of pampanga who, for most of the past fifteen years, has whipped his own back to a bloody pulp in a ritual commemorating jesus christ’s passion on good friday. when i spoke to him in 2012, he told me that he began self-flagellating on behalf of his mother, meling, who worked as a domestic helper in hong kong to earn enough money to service a family debt. sencho’s flagellation was a way of appealing for god’s help in alleviating his family’s financial situation. after several years of this kind of self-sacrifice, sencho too had taken up employment in the middle east, an endeavor he took on with a self-confidence extending from the ritual experience. “no problem,” he recalled; “if i could flagellate, i knew i could handle saudi.” narrating this experience brought back memories of his mother, who had since passed away because of illness. “my flagellation is painful. . . . but that’s nothing compared to how she sacrificed for us in hong kong. she’s the [real] hero . . . she’s the martyr.” one of the more enduring legacies left behind by the late philippine president corazon aquino is her valorization of the heroism of overseas filipino workers (ofws) like sencho and meling. in april 1988, meling may well have been among the many ofws who gathered at hong kong’s saint margaret’s church to hear aquino tell them that “it is not only your relatives who are grateful for your sacrifices but also the entire nation.” the president reiterated her government’s absolute support for their welfare, noting that ofws were more than just overseas workers. she called them bagong bayani—the “modern-day heroes” who, through the economic benefits generated by their “sacrifices,” ensured the very survival of the philippine nation (rppms 1992). it might seem counterintuitive that the heroism evoked both by aquino and by sencho does not emphasize a physical rootedness in the nation, but rather a dislocation from it. but as the historians vicente rafael (2000) and reynaldo clemeña ileto (1998) have argued, the discourse of heroism in the philippines is not simply a matter of exemplary patriotism. the rhetorical force of heroism is premised on the example of exilic filipino nationalists like jose rizal, and the president’s own late husband, the former opposition senator ninoy aquino. in dying for the nation, as rafael (2000, 211) put it, these men and women “merge into a single narrative frame that harked back to the themes of the [passion of christ]: of innocent lives forced to undergo humiliation at the hands of alien forces.” it is not surprising that this idea of sacrificial heroism finds broader expression in the policy agendas of subsequent filipino heads of state, many of whom have endorsed a rhetorical equivalency between the sacrifice of ofws and that of hero-martyrs. for to do so means to leverage a highly valued cultural and religious idiom in which a filipino brand of the heroic and the soteriological trope of christ-like martyrdom constitute two sides of the same coin. several scholarly works have discussed the hero-martyrism of ofws by analyzing how specific ideological notions of race and gender condition their experiences (aguilar et al. 2009; choy 2003; constable 2007; guevarra 2010; d. mckay 2013; ong 2006; parreñas 2008; pertierra 1992; tyner 2000). other works have highlighted the process by which state policies on labor migration craft, or even compel, specific commitments to the nation (franco 2011; hau 2004; rodriguez 2006; tadiar 2009). relatively fewer works have gone into detail about how the filipino transnational economy is a domain for the expression and deployment of religious agency, particularly among men. there exists a crucial need to add to two analytical currents in particular: scholars such as kale bantigue fajardo (2011), steven mckay (2011), and alicia pinggol (2001) have generated momentum in the analysis of the “masculinization” of ofw heroism, while filomeno aguilar (1999), mark johnson and pnina werbner (2010), and mario lopez (2012) have considered the ofw experience with respect to the affective and religious aspects that condition the workers’ socioeconomic motivations. in this article i pursue a convergence of these two currents of research, focusing on the religious lives of male ofws through the lens of an anthropology of roman catholic capitalist ethics. andrea muehlebach (2013, 455) has recently described a “catholicized neoliberalism”: an economic ethic among italian volunteer workers that draws on catholic social doctrine in a way that “couples the market to moral sentiment, and economic rationality to the emotional urgencies of caritas.” but rather than focus on the ethics of domestic economies, i am interested here in the affective dynamics of the state-endorsed outward deployment of labor power. i focus on ofws as export-quality martyrs: transnational economic agents trained to internalize and deploy modes of ethical docility toward what is promoted as the martyric pursuit of both spiritual and economic ends. i argue that the philippine state cultivates this idea of productive, ethical transnationalism in the explicit linkage of the sacrifice of ofws with the legacy of exemplary hero-martyrs. i emphasize here the corporeal dimension of this linkage by examining ofw labor in terms of embodied comportments of self-discipline, particularly those inculcated in the process of recruitment and predeployment training. i then consider how roman catholicism, both as a formal institution and as a ritual practice, coalesces with this ethos of hero-martyrism. i intend to show that like the philippine state, the roman catholic church as a formal institution exerts forms of foucauldian governmentality whereby ofws are physically and discursively encouraged to craft themselves into ethical agents modeled after exemplars of the most pious and most esteemed kind. in this governmentality, filipino clerics have deployed official edicts and proclamations that depict the necessary demands and contingencies of transnational capital as coterminous with the soteriological ideal of christian salvation. echoing what valentina napolitano and kristin norget (2009) have called “economies of sanctity,” i describe how an increasingly translocal roman catholic church emplots ofw labor within a global, exemplary catholic imaginary, one characterized by an export-oriented mode of production that publicly valorizes ofws as virtuously suffering, de facto missionaries. in this sense, i will show how acts of transnational ofw sacrifice—in their associations with christ-like martyrdom—are effectively endorsed by prominent voices from within both the church and the state as a form of pious mimesis. the corporeality of export-quality martyrdom has a ritual dimension, particularly when we consider how church and state forms of governmentality coincide with the religious lives of ofw catholic men from pampanga. these are men like sencho who have physically embodied christ’s own act of sacrifice as a means of negotiating the demands of the catholicized neoliberal economy. it may well be intuitive to assume, as many do, that such passion rituals simply constitute manifestations of blind mimicry, or imitatio christo (see zialcita 1986), which is effective only when performed under certain sacralized conditions. instead, i describe how filipino catholic rituals of the body are channeled toward the confrontation with overseas work. i argue that roman catholicism and transnational labor coalesce because ofw work involves the reconceptualization of the logic of sacrifice itself, in which economic decisions are ethical not because they are an exact imitation of martyric life trajectories, but because they constitute arenas for what is known among flagellants in pampanga as darame—a form of intersubjective empathy in which the body is both the object and the vehicle for achieving both spiritual and practical ends. in this vein, i examine passion rituals as they are enacted in a domain that maya mayblin and magnus course (2014) have called the “other side of sacrifice,” in which the logic of ritual piety applies even outside local performative contexts.1 martyric bodies in an economy of sacrifice on june 21, 1988, two months after her hong kong speech, president aquino issued proclamation no. 276, which established the bagong bayani awards: an accolade meant to “underscore the emerging form of heroism which could only be attributed to the overseas contract workers’ consistent contribution to the country’s foreign exchange earnings and the efforts in employment generation” (bbfi 2015). in december 1990, the president delivered another speech that again commemorated the voluntary sacrifice (pagsasakripisyo) and suffering (pagmamalasakit) of ofws in spite of harsh conditions. bagong bayani were explicitly lauded for the economic returns of their efforts, with the president proclaiming that, by and large, the economy most benefited from their sacrifice (tigno 2012, 25–26). in this vein, the awards form part of the state’s regime of governmentality in which a wide range of mechanisms—institutional, structural, and discursive—are deployed to not only regulate the mobility of working bodies but also to valorize them as “moral neoliberals” (muehlebach 2012) who work for the well-being of their loved ones amid great physical and emotional tribulation. for the past few decades, the export of labor has proven a significant source of revenue for the philippines. the country ranks among the highest exporters of foreign labor in the world, a trend that has seen a steady increase during the past forty years (iom 2013). there are more than 10 million ofws around the world (cfo 2012), with 2012 official surveys estimating their rate of remittances as high as usd$21.39 billion (alegado 2013; ericta 2013). the rationale behind this burgeoning remittance economy is founded on the historically contingent washington-consensus premise, which views the accumulation of foreign capital as the key to national social development and thus mandates the government to facilitate supporting institutional mechanisms (williamson 1990).2 as such, the rhetorical force of aquino’s statement relied on the implication that ofws were not forcibly driven out by a systematic failure of domestic governance, but were instead virtuous individuals voluntarily pursuing their vocations in an open, democratic labor market. and while aquino linked these pursuits with the prospect of religious transcendence in the afterlife, it was simultaneously a reiteration of the state’s ideological promise that overseas work would yield material and economic reward in this life, provided that ofws maintained their roles as drivers of the remittance economy. the conflation of the material and soteriological returns of overseas labor, one that forms the basis of a filipino brand of catholicized neoliberalism, is premised on ofws voluntarily devoting themselves to the pursuit of capital. muehlebach (2013, 461) describes a market-driven welfare system that depends on the volition of “hypermoralized” neoliberals who operationalize the virtues of love, caritas, and volunteerism in the domestic economy in lombardy, italy. in the filipino setting, catholicized neoliberalism makes for an ethic whose agents are lauded for their willing capacity to channel their sacrifice into modes of transnational labor power, which the state monetizes for the greater good of the nation. the extent to which this monetization can be justified relies on the state’s obfuscation of its own role in contributing to the volatility of transnational work and in its failure to mitigate the need for labor export in the first place (franco 2011; tadiar 2009; tyner 2000). this obfuscation, more significantly, can only be achieved if the casualties of overseas labor are valorized as the paragon of the highest civic and pious virtues. there are many examples of ofws who have paid the ultimate price in the course of their overseas deployment. to name but a few, there is maricris sioson, a twenty-two-year-old entertainer, who died under mysterious and contested circumstances in japan in 1991, and flor contemplacion, a domestic helper in singapore, who was tried, convicted, and later executed for double murder in spite of mitigating evidence (franco 2011, 140). in filipino catholicized neoliberalism, the plight of victimized individuals like these was discursively packaged as the unfortunate but necessary cost of pursuing a greater socioeconomic and moral ideal. the state’s evocation of sentiments of pity and empathic solidarity attempted to reiterate the nobility of their overseas deployment, in spite of the real dangers associated with such work. for to perish in this moral neoliberalism does not constitute a failure, but pays tribute to ofws as the inheritors of the legacy of fallen martyrs. contemplacion and sioson, like the hero-martyrs, devoted themselves to overseas work amid the threat of death, personifying the radically ascetic logic of self-sacrifice. under this logic, the heroic body of the ofw is measured not according to major revolutionary or miraculous deeds, but in the everyday toil of fulfilling one’s transnational vocation even at the pain of death. cultivating the disciplined body of export-quality sufferers the efforts of the philippine state to legitimize the overseas deployment of ofws do not derive their persuasive force solely from appeals to the worker’s duty of financial providership. i am arguing that the legitimacy of transnational labor is contingent on the state’s capacity to promulgate an idiom saturated with both patriotic and pious meanings—one in which capitalist accumulation is rhetorically promoted as an arena of ethical and moral subject formation. beyond the level of the discursive, however, it is instructive to ask how ofws come to internalize and embody such ethical subject positions in the pursuit of transnational work. james faubion (2011, 52) cites caroline humphrey (1997) in reminding us that “there is more to the ethical conditioning of a subject than its relation to duty, to which the ethical relevance of exemplars (known in much contemporary ethical discourse under the pale rubric of the ‘role model’) cannot be reduced. one’s duties are one matter; one’s values and the ideals to which one might aspire are often quite another.” faubion here outlines the contours of an anthropology of ethics based on a kind of nurturism, one that channels an aristotelian position in its emphasis on pedagogy and embodied practice. i provide empirical specificity to this position by focusing on the process of crafting what could be termed “export-quality martyrs.” by this i mean ofws who have not just been convinced of the normativity of transnational suffering but have been physically disciplined to deploy certain ethical and moral values of christian humility onto translational domains. this occurs as part of a process of labor brokerage, which—drawing from the ethnographic work of anna romina guevarra (2010) and robyn rodriguez (2006)—refers to the activities of nongovernmental institutions working in concert with the state in molding ofw bodies into productive economic units. labor brokerage involves the regimented implementation of corporal techniques in the process of predeparture training to enhance the ofw’s competitive advantage. the training provided, however, does not merely impart job-specific skills and knowledge to the prospective ofw but also inculcates certain attitudes and dispositions in the application of those skills (lindquist, biao, and yeoh 2012). most often, this involves an embodied pedagogy of bodily disciplines that encourages ofws to physically deploy what faubion refers to as autopoesis, or acts of self-regulation and self-cultivation. the pedagogical and practical aspects of export-quality martyrdom were explained to me by sencho, who recalled that in his predeparture training, he was asked to familiarize himself with several thick manuals on various kinds of machinery that he would likely encounter. most of the seminars, he recalls, served to remind him about strict policies against misbehavior. “even though our employers would push us to the limit or even be unfair . . . they said that i shouldn’t be too macho, too aggressive . . . and picking fights would not only be stupid, it would be useless because that’s not our country, we’re just employees.”3 the predeparture training emphasized the “christ-like” physical suppression of instinct in favor of a self-enforced deference to hierarchy. indeed, it required “playing down your manly arrogance [kayabangan].” even in the face of emasculation, workers ought to just “bow your head, take it in, and just think about your family.” in the training he received he not so much acquired new skills but had reiterated to him modes of religiously inspired corporeal repression, which were needed to endure what he already knew from ofw relatives and friends was a harsh and tumultuous working environment. failure to embody this discipline meant that one was simply “not cut out for ‘making it’ overseas.” the scenario drawn here brings faubion’s ideas about the ethics and pedagogy of autopoesis in conversation with what daromir rudnyckyj has called a “spiritual economy.”4 rudnyckyj (2009, 106) refers to the assemblage of programs and projects among indonesian muslim workers that “seek to simultaneously transform workers into more pious religious subjects and more productive economic subjects.” similarly, ofw labor brokerage comprises formal institutions that act to reconfigure the idea of work (with its attendant occupational hazards) as an arena of religious piety. whereas a spiritual economy for indonesian muslim workers involves the inculcation of ethics of accountability, transparency, and rationalization for middle-class workers, export-quality martyrs are mainly unskilled workers made to embody modes of docility, obedience, and subservience. granted, the indonesian workers with whom rudnyckyj has engaged occupy different class positions from the ofws i have interacted with. but the processes are similar in the sense that both groups are physically conditioned to internalize and self-regulate those attributes that are deemed commensurable with both their faith and neoliberal ideals of capital accumulation. muehlebach (2013, 459) similarly describes the training of the lombardian moral neoliberal, who is made to go to training courses fostering the “concrete production of a normative moral subject governed by a particular moral style—a citizen responsive to suffering in ways reminiscent of catholic demeanor and disposition.” james tyner (2000) and jean franco (2011, 53), meanwhile, describe the embodied disciplinary regimes of filipina migrant workers, who were instructed to literally contort their bodies—hands folded, head slightly bowed, and holding neutral, reticent expressions. these postures imply not just the ofws’ possession of a specific skill set but also of the cultivated, domesticated, and disciplined will deemed desirable by potential employers. it is these disciplines of corporeal self-regulation that manifest what guevarra (2010) calls the ofws’ “added export value,” underscoring the filipino worker’s autopoetic edge in the competitive global political economy. from the perspective of state governmentality, then, ofws are heroic not simply because they acquire certain skills of the trade. somewhat the opposite actually holds true. the training regimes, in inculcating modes of humility and self-surveillance, effectively encourage a downplaying of the worker’s agency, or at least a tempered exertion of aptitude and skill. these programs produce a unique form of labor power in which workers are coached to internalize the idea that good employees are deferential and humble, not just in their ability to follow orders but also in “not acting better” than their supervisors (guevarra 2010, 146). in this sense, the capacity for self-effacing humility is thought of as a learned form of self-regulated bodily circumscription, attenuated specifically by the inspiration of faith and the demands of the potential employer, regardless of one’s natural instincts or intuitions. labor brokerage contributes to the efforts of the state to reconfigure sacrifice into a monetizable ethics of self-discipline, one that sees heroism as the ability to “discipline [workers] to comply and accept what is supposed to be this ‘natural’ situation, of being maltreated by their employers” (guevarra 2010, 148). what other factors contribute to the rhetorical persuasiveness of the state and its brokers in promulgating this reconfigured ideal of voluntary sacrifice? religious organizations, i argue, prove crucial in this process, and i will now turn to their role in providing the doctrinal and ideological scaffolding for catholicized neoliberalism. church governmentality and the sweat of the martyrs father martin is a roman catholic parish priest from manila whom i spoke to about the relationship between catholicism and ofws. while he expressed interest in discussing the nature of the ofw economy, our conversation often shifted to official church views on the corrosive effect of wealth on the moral and spiritual lives of ofws. father martin narrated some scenarios in which ofw families had disintegrated as a result of migrant workers succumbing to the allure of financial empowerment. “why did [he] buy all that iphone and things for himself . . . are you not going to put [the money] to your children? why not save the money, or at least put it to a sari sari [provision] store?” these were rhetorical questions not meant to encourage ofws to commit to monastic self-denial. rather, his views pointed to an idea of martyric virtue no longer premised on the necessity of death, but on the very act of struggle and perseverance in the tumultuous transnational domain. “the bagong bayani,” he clarified, “it is about sweat.” father martin’s sentiments resonate with the larger institutional philippine catholic church position, which equates the ethical pursuit of material wealth with soteriological reward. even just a few weeks before aquino’s bagong bayani speech in hong kong, the then-president of the catholic bishops’ conference of the philippines (cbcp), archbishop leonardo legaspi (1988), associated the pursuit of overseas labor with divine reward in stating that “for every pain, there is also joy. for every sacrifice, there is a corresponding good. migration of peoples, in whatever form or for whatever reason, has always foreshadowed the unfolding of greater designs of god.” the association of transnational work and spiritual virtue corresponds to the church’s official mandate as it was promulgated in the second vatican council held in rome in 1963–1965, and reiterated during the cbcp second plenary council (pcp-ii) held in manila in 1991. in these gatherings, filipino clerics emphasized the church’s responsibility to develop the “total human person,” which referred not just to matters of mysticism or spirituality but also to its role in facilitating economic self-reliance among its flock. as such, the church has provided material support to ofw deployment through its pastoral care institutions, which not only lobby for workers’ rights but also offer assistance in fostering conditions conducive to capital accumulation. as robert ellwood (1988, 137) put it: “the idea that poverty could be a state of blessedness in itself, a favorite of preachers as recently as a century ago, is now hopelessly discredited . . . even the most conservative pulpiteers nowadays exhort their poor to get ahead, but to do it by nonviolent means.” that the catholic church would invest in the preservation and enhancement of ofw labor power is itself an expression of specific forms of religious governmentality, which napolitano and norget (2009, 253) describe as “economies of sanctity.” by this they refer to how roman catholic institutions actively promote processes of “recirculation, mimesis and relocalization” to foster an “embodied sense of belonging and allegiance to a larger, global catholic community and project.” the filipino catholic church’s endorsement of an economy of sanctity is undergirded by (1) the identification of transnational domains as a new spiritual frontier in the global mission of roman catholic expansion; and (2) the valorization of ofw work as mimetic martyrdom by way of effort, rather than death. first, in roman catholic governmentality, ofws do not simply constitute economic units but serve as de facto missionaries who, even in the pursuit of economic uplift, contribute to spreading the faith. the 1991 pcp-ii indeed lauded the dispersal of filipino workers as a solution to the challenges of declining rates of sacramental adherence. far from emphasizing a prosperity gospel in the conventional sense (koning 2009; wiegele 2005), official cbcp pastoral letters, as well as published opinion pieces from well-respected catholic bishops in the early 2000s, are explicit about “the missionary potential of filipino migrant workers abroad” (quevedo 2000). in his “pastoral letter on the church’s mission in the new millennium,” archbishop orlando quevedo (2000), then the cbcp’s president, reiterated this potential with clarity: “our overseas workers have in so many instances become missionaries, bringing the gospel and faith where these have not been present, renewing and reactivating christian life and practice where these have been in decline.” second, the missionary potential of ofws is legitimized through their valorization as exemplary sufferers in foreign contexts—a theme strongly resonant in cbcp pastoral letters between the late 1980s and mid-1990s. in 1995, for example, the “pastoral letter on filipino migrant workers” endorsed the migrant workers and overseas filipinos act, affirming the relevance of the words of pope pius xii who, in 1957, had reiterated the virtue of persevering through hardship as a way of acquiring the fruits of salvation. the 1995 cbcp letter characterized the experience of overseas labor within a logic of persisting through moral and physical tribulation as a form of transnational mimesis, pointing to the example of “our migrant saint” san lorenzo ruiz, the first filipino martyred while serving in overseas mission (morelos 1995). father martin echoed the spirit of this mimesis: “we should look to [san lorenzo], for he was, in a way, an ofw too [in] helping with the church mission overseas.” for cbcp clerics, both high-ranking and at the pastoral level, to rhetorically anoint the ofws as exemplary sufferers and de facto missionary martyrs resembles what mayblin (2014) described among roman catholics in brazil, who are singled out for public praise and respectful treatment as sofredors (sufferers). mayblin (2014, 356) construes such recognition as forms of “consummation,” in which “a person’s hidden sacrifices are acknowledged and, as such, made productive.” my contribution here is to argue that religious institutions, in their consummation of idealized ofw sacrifice, act like the state in encouraging the self-cultivation of export-quality martyrdom. but unlike the state, which relies on the facility of labor brokers, the effectiveness of the catholic church in depicting transnational labor as a process of pious mimesis draws from the performance of certain rituals that, ironically, are conducted in ways that the cbcp itself seeks to circumscribe and prohibit. in the next section i describe the relationship between ofw work and embodied ritual agencies performed outside of the church’s jurisdictional purview in pampanga. by “ritual agency,” i refer to ritual as an arena in which distinct subjective and intersubjective states of affect are cultivated (asad 1983). with marcel mauss (1973), i refer to rituals as “body techniques,” which means to say they constitute forms of embodied practical reason oriented toward intentions and outcomes outside the sphere of formalized performance. self-mortification and transnational ritual agency pampanga is a province located in the region of central luzon in the philippines. this region has the second-highest number of ofws, 14.1 percent, according to a survey conducted by the philippine national statistics office in 2012 (ericta 2013). pampanga has ranked as high as third on the list of highest ofw deployments by province, surpassed only by manila and quezon city (psa 2012; pavia 2012). aside from being a major source of ofw manpower, pampanga is also well known throughout the country as one of the few places in which rituals of self-mortification continue to be performed. it would make for a conservative estimate to say that hundreds of catholic penitents publicly self-flagellate every good friday, while many others engage in a reenactment of the passion story, culminating in the nailing of tens of devotees.5 given the high density of both ritual and transnational energy in the province, i want to discuss the intersection of these two domains in asking how rituals condition the pursuit of overseas work. how are the embodied, pious subjectivities crafted in passion rituals relevant in ofw strategies to confront the challenge of transnational labor? to the extent that the rituals channel those virtues of humility and self-effacement that, as i have shown, are inculcated in the disciplinary regimes of church and state discourses of governmentality, in what ways are self-mortifiers particularly responsive to the brand of hero-martyrdom endorsed by politicians and clerics? the first point to establish is that passion rituals are performed beyond the official jurisdiction of the church institution. in the sixteenth century, converts throughout the philippines were encouraged to seek penance and atonement through spanish friar-supervised exercises of pain infliction collectively known as disciplina (barker 1998; bräunlein 2009; zialcita 1986). disciplina, according to talal asad (1987, 159), emphasized the repression of bodily comportments to cultivate “the conditions within which obedient wills are created.” yet although the colonial catholic church in the philippines at one point had served as the main facilitator of these rituals, all forms of physical disciplina have, since the eighteenth century, been deemed illicit by filipino clergy (blanco 2009). church proscriptions against passion rituals revolve primarily around their presumed capacity to undermine the church’s sacerdotal function. since passion rituals were being performed in ways that did not involve clerical authority or mediation, they were denounced as diminishing the primacy of the liturgy and the sacraments in the spiritual and theological formation of filipino roman catholics (bautista 2010; cannell 1999). quite apart from these counterarguments, church clerics pointed out that the illicitness of flagellation lies in its skewed teleological orientation. rather than focusing on the curbing of subjective will as a form of radical, ascetic transcendence—something that the church fathers had earlier seen as a testament to pious virtue—flagellation in pampanga concentrates on an appeal for divine intervention in the here and now. its orientation is immanent, not transcendent. in any case, the great majority of self-mortifiers do not think of flagellation as a theological or doctrinal act aimed at achieving or imitating the full consummation of the passion episode—that is, christ’s exemplary, martyric death. it constitutes, rather, an offering of the flagellant’s own body-in-pain as a way of appealing for direct divine intervention in the here and now. to the extent that self-mortification does not need sacramental or clerical involvement, flagellation is tantamount to a renegotiation of the soteriological promise of christian salvation channeled into transnational domains. elsewhere (bautista 2011, 2014) i have indicated that self-mortification is most commonly associated with sentiments of empathy, referred to in pampanga as darame. while one might intuitively think of empathy as a dialogical process between empathizer and empathized, to perform flagellation as darame means to create a tripartite mode of intersubjectivity, one that triangulates affective connections between the flagellant, the suffering jesus christ, and a third party (in most cases, a sick relative). this triadic empathy is a reorientation of christ’s sacrificial telos—that it is not merely christ who is suffering for others. flagellants also participate in the passion through the investment of their emotions and their bodies in the alleviation of the suffering of a third party. the emotions (or passions) evoked in darame are not simply inner states. in a phenomenological sense, darame are emotions-in-the-world, channeled outward in such a way that ritual protagonists perceive themselves, christ, and others as feeling bodies. darame, then, is not conventional empathy in the sense that the aim is to go beyond a vicarious participation in others’ experiences. darame means to take a proactive part in the other’s predicament, using the body to make that experience coterminous with one’s own. while the ritual itself is only conducted during holy week, the affective motivations and outcomes of darame are not restricted to the temporal and geographical milieu of its performance. in three scenarios below, i describe how self-mortifiers in pampanga have thought of darame in relation to their transnational self-fashioning, or autopoesis. this process has had two main affective consequences: (1) the cultivation of modes of interiority through which ofw men have managed to confront the physical and emotional challenges of the labor economy; and (2) a reframing of sacrifice according to a logic of reciprocal exchange, associated sentimentally with the moral duty of familial providership. darame and transnational labor sencho identified the practice of flagellation as that which imbued ofws like himself with a particular kind of inner fortitude (lakas ng loob) to confront the challenges of overseas work. “the [predeparture] training was ok,” said sencho as he described the years before his work abroad, “but it’s a good thing that i’ve been doing flagellation for years—you learn to have confidence and strength of inner fortitude. you know, in a way, being an ofw is just like flagellation . . . you have to be disciplined and committed to finish it to the end, even though it hurts. in the end, god will answer your suffering by benefiting your family.” while labor brokerage involves the disciplining of bodies for the purposes of maximizing their economic capacity, in sencho’s case, it was thinking about transnational labor as an extension of flagellation that enabled him to confront the harsh demands of the ofw experience. given that his ritual agency provided a form of empowerment, it would be inaccurate to assume that his export-quality martyrdom constituted a curbing, if not a complete loss of agency as stipulated by his brokers. the lakas ng loob that enabled him to persevere was not derived from embodying docility and subservience, but rather from his previous experience of ritual performance—particularly, of the infliction of pain—that emboldened his confrontation with the demands of labor brokerage. these sentiments are not sencho’s alone, but resonate with the experience of a host of other self-mortifiers in pampanga referenced in the work of other ethnographies in the region (e.g., barker 1998; zialcita 1986). i consider the case of another self-flagellant and ofw, the twenty-eight-year-old laborer miguel, who was hired, along with several other men, by a large car dealership in saudi arabia. miguel often had conflicts with his employer and some of the saudi workers. “they were arrogant,” he said, “and didn’t appreciate how i could do things in a creative way (diskarte). they couldn’t really teach me anything either.”6 this situation made his job extremely tense, as he was constantly high-strung. but he persevered and concentrated on his work, complying with his employer’s orders in a manner that was not recalcitrant per se but just short of confrontational. could this be seen as the deployment of the subservience and docility he was taught to embody in predeparture training? miguel explained that he persevered because he “needed to show my family that i was [a capable man] . . . that i could withstand the hard times, that i was strong enough to sacrifice.” like sencho, he did not identify the labor training as that which offered him the means for engaging in the challenges of work. rather, he pointed to the actual, physical practice of ritual itself. “[my saudi employers] didn’t know it,” he said, “but i’d done flagellation for years. can they do that? my buddies know it, and that gives me confidence to bear the hardship of the job.” miguel never mentioned his flagellation to his saudi employers in keeping with the directives of his predeployment training that he was to curb his arrogance. in this sense, miguel’s transnational experience was one that mayblin (2014, 342–43) would consider under the “quieter, less bloody forms” of sacrifice. his having performed the rituals of self-flagellation provided miguel with a source of silent strength, one that proved potent because it showed, at least to his companions, that he was capable of a feat that reasserted his “hegemonic masculine privilege” (s. mckay 2011). that inner fortitude (what sencho called lakas ng loob) came not from the formal discursive acknowledgment or endorsement by the state or by the church, but from affirmation acquired from sharing his experience with his companions (“my buddies know it”). in that sense, a vocalization of his ritual agency—that he had “done flagellation for years”—not only demonstrated his prowess as a ritual protagonist but also further emboldened him to craft himself, in an autopoetic sense, to endure the emasculating demands of transnational work. we see a different aspect of this process in the case of ramon, who started self-flagellating at the age of eighteen, years before he met and married ditas, a twenty-nine-year-old medical technician. while ramon had few means of earning sufficient income, ditas’s administrative skills in the medical industry offered the prospect of higher earning potential overseas. ditas managed to secure a job as a medical administrator in a hospital in the middle east. “our children are the only reason why we decided that it was i who should go, instead of my husband,” ditas explained. saying so was not so much a statement about moving location. it was, rather, an expression of awareness that her leaving reformulated the traditional roles of financial providership. she knew that she was leaving behind the responsibilities of a mother expected to nurture the home. ramon echoed this sentiment; he felt disappointed about his relative inability to earn sufficient income. nonetheless, he did not feel that his role of providership had been completely eroded. ramon felt that his own ritual suffering approximated the pain his wife undergoes, constituting an expression of darame with her, who was “martyr-like” in embarking on transnational labor. “it pains me, as a father and as a man, that i can’t earn enough for my family. . . . but never mind, i will still contribute in my own way and help her. if god can look favorably on my darame, then i will be able to help support my family. having god’s favor is better than money, right?” for ditas, ramon’s flagellation emboldens and inspires her to handle the vicissitudes of ofw dislocation. “if ramon can handle [flagellation] for me,” she says, “then i can be ok in saudi. it is a kind of family endurance of sacrifice.” she remains ever worried about the safety of ramon’s participation in the ritual, given that he is the one who takes care of the children. yet she has learned to take this fear in her stride, preferring to think of how her husband’s voluntary act of pain-infliction has resulted in a change in his inner fortitude: “since my departure overseas, he has become responsible . . . i guess his flagellation shows that too, since he’s doing it for us, right? . . . now i trust him to spend the money i send home wisely for our kids’ medical treatment, and even for their future.” through the performance of flagellation, ramon and ditas reframed sacrifice according to a specific logic of reciprocity and autopoetic, ethical cultivation. in this logic, traditional means of the generation of familial income are supplanted with acts embodying the expectation that god would provide due acknowledgment of the ritual act. ramon’s flagellation was an act in which he could “contribute in my own way” by appealing for god’s favor, which is “better than money.” the corporeality of ramon’s sacrifice, one with resultant changes in his own ethical selfhood, situates empathic ritual against a backdrop of the moral duty of providership—of being a good husband and a good parent in spite of the emasculation resulting from the reversal of traditional modes of breadwinning. conclusion: the reconfiguration of sacrifice in transnational domains the ethnographic portraits i have provided in this essay encourage a more concerted emplotment of corporeality into an anthropology of ethics and affect. self-flagellation among filipino ofws is not only a way of piously inhabiting the world. it conditions the production of transnational personhoods and provides a channel toward the formation of intersubjective relations of empathy between and among ritual protagonists and overseas workers. in a broader sense, examining this interconnection brings to light how politically and economically motivated discursive formations—whether those of the state or of other formal institutions—inflect the operations and felt immediacies of ofw bodies. this inflection holds whether the body is performing a passion ritual or is engaged in demanding or dangerous transnational work. in both scenarios, ofw men have conveyed a reconfiguration of the very idea of sacrifice and martyrdom in ways that resonate not only with a transcendent soteriological ideal but also with the immanent demands and contingencies of global capital. in a catholicized economy, rhetorical endorsements of the positive value of sacrifice rationalize the cultivation of export-quality economic martyrs. in the state’s discursive linkage of capital to bagong bayani heroism, filipino catholicized neoliberalism becomes operationalized as an affective space in which the generation of remittance capital is branded as a legitimate return on the ofws’ physical, moral, and ethical investments. in this scenario, the roman catholic institution exerts a complicit governmentality. but instead of solely encouraging the calculative pursuit of capital as a way to fulfill the economic duty of familial providership, the real export-quality value of ofw sacrifice lies in the contribution to a church-endorsed economy of sanctity, in which ofw labor power constitutes an extension of the catholic church’s translocal missionizing mandate. it may well be redundant to underscore the weberian resonance of this phenomenon—that economic decisions are based not just on a calculative rationalism but on a set of internalized values consistent with christian ethics. nevertheless, the ethnographic cases i described offer empirical specificity to max weber’s (2001) broader insights, wherein the distinctions between religious networks and state-endorsed brokers, patriotic heroes and pious saints, missionary and economic agency, ritual and financial agency become coterminous with one another. i do not wish to make a claim of direct causation between the domain of christian praxis and economic decision-making. but i would say that there exists an elective affinity, to evoke weber’s own concept, between extant religious vocabularies of sacrifice and the way ofws confront and negotiate the challenges of their transnational predicaments. i have argued that these elective affinities arise through mechanics of corporeality, whether in the crafting of obedient and servile wills as forms of commodity in labor brokerage (asad 1987; foucault 1986), or in the forming and channeling of empathic agencies, or darame, in foreign domains. labor brokerage and passion rituals constitute complementary arenas of embodiment in which the body is treated as both the object and the vehicle for the cultivation of ethical and pious dispositions. but while both emphasize christian values of suffering, sacrifice, and humility, they differ in a very important respect. in labor brokerage, corporeal techniques of self-effacement emphasize a curbing of agentive will as a specifically exportable form of commodity. passion rituals, on the other hand, cultivate an empowerment of affect, so that a certain extraliturgical understanding of empathy emboldens male ofws to craft themselves into resilient, empathic subjects—what the state and the catholic church incidentally valorize as heroes—in the transnational economy. with regard to this latter theme, i have not argued that participating in the transnational catholicized economy is physically tantamount to ritual pain infliction. i have argued, however, that ritual agencies can have profound affective consequences that condition working and living overseas in ways that cannot be explained solely by the efficacy of governmentality. at least for the cases of sancho, miguel, and ramon, the ethical subject of passion rituals is an empathic subject who derives inner fortitude from a community of fellow sufferers (whether family back home or coworkers). in all three cases, ritual acts cultivate affective interior states consistent with mayblin’s (2014, 347) observation of the orientation of sacrifice to future gains. “in each case,” she argues, “the sacrifice is guided by a logic of exchange.” export-quality martyrdom is not a matter of skills or propensity for self-effacement. the new martyrdom lies in the conscious decision to expand the range of corporeal empathy, moving it away from the realm of formal ritual space toward practical ends in the transnational domains of overseas work and capital exchange. in this sense, this ethnography of darame contributes empirical variety to the development of an anthropology of empathy, which has only recently gained momentum in such projects as that of douglas hollan and c. jason throop (2011) in the context of oceania. perhaps ironically, the pervasiveness of the discourse that extols the economic and ethical normativity of sacrifice is contingent on a reframing of the meaning of sacrifice itself. in this reframing, actions are not oriented to a perfect mimesis of the life trajectories of fallen ofws, but to the cultivation of states of inner fortitude—ethical and empathetic—that resonate with a religious idiom of exemplary providership. to give one’s life—an act traditionally considered a prerequisite to heroization and martyrdom—has been taken out of the equation in the fulfillment of the ofw’s act of sacrifice. the ofw’s hero-martyrism is of export quality precisely because it operationalizes a new teleological outcome of sacrifice, one in which the monetization of labor and the moral duty of providership become indistinguishable from each other notes acknowledgments i am most grateful to the residents, city officials, and church leaders in pampanga. although i cannot thank them individually in order to preserve their anonymity, i must acknowledge the patience and hospitality they have extended to me during the course of my research. i offer my deepest thanks to robby tantingco and the staff at holy angel university’s center for kapampangan studies for their support of my research in many crucial ways. a great portion of this article was written while i was a visiting research fellow at the center for southeast asian studies of kyoto university, and i acknowledge its continuing support. versions of this essay were presented at the national university of singapore, the city university of hong kong, hiroshima university, michigan state university and georg august university göttingen. i am grateful for constructive criticism and insightful comments provided by filomeno aguilar, peter j. bräunlein, bernardo brown, prasenjit duara, james faubion, r. michael feener, jean franco, chiara formichi, philip fountain, caroline hau, masao imamura, karin klengke, andrea lauser, mario lopez, justin mcdaniel, michelle miller, itaru nagasaka, vicente rafael, koki seki, hiromu shimizu, and mark thompson. i have received helpful comments from the anonymous reviewers of the asia research institute’s working paper series, as well as some very detailed critiques from the three reviewers of cultural anthropology. these reviews have shaped the present article in many important ways, although i take full responsibility for any flaws that remain. 1. the case studies in this essay are based on ethnographic research conducted from 2010 onward in the province of pampanga. interviews were conducted with around forty individuals involved with self-mortification rituals, some of whom were also cast members in a holy week passion play. i also draw from in-depth interviews with religious clergy throughout the philippines, including high-ranking clerics from the archdiocese of pampanga. the names of those mentioned have been changed. 2. developments outside the philippines, namely, the middle east oil boom in the 1970s and the rapid growth of east and southeast asian economies in the 1980s, opened up demand and opportunities for filipino labor, particularly during the marcos-era regime of “developmental authoritarianism” (hau 2004, 230). by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ostensibly temporary solution to the government’s inability to formulate sound economic, political, and social solutions to poverty became a cornerstone of its development plans (hau 2004, 231). 3. an emphasis on the notion of one’s pride (kayabangan) is discussed in the research of arnel de guzman (1993, 24), who observed among technicians in saudi arabia that “here you really must eat your pride,” and in accounts of female domestic workers who mention that they must be “willing to swallow their pride” (palma-beltran 1991, 50). 4. rudnyckyj (2009) was, in turn, responding to jean comaroff and john comaroff (1999), who have described the persistence and increase in “occult economies” in south africa. but rather than assume that the intensification of occult economies constitutes a regression to a traditional appeal to enchantment, comaroff and comaroff (1999, 284) construed it as the production of new forms of consciousness that express discontent with modernity and its corrosive effects. 5. there are no official statistics that account for the exact number of self-mortifiers. in the midto late 1990s, nicholas barker (1998, 8) had observed that in the province of pampanga “tens of thousands of filipino men scourged themselves during holy week.” in the nearby province of bulacan, meanwhile, peter bräunlein observed that “hundreds of flagellants and other penitents can be seen in [the town of] kapitangan, especially on good friday” (bräunlein 2009, 898). 6. this resonates with the observations of john smart, virginia teodosio, and carol jimenez (1986) who observed that the migratory experience actually resulted in forms of deskilling. a sample survey conducted among workers in the gulf region showed that as many as two-thirds of those sampled did not acquire any new skills (smart, teodosio, and jimenez 1986, 111; aguilar 1999, 124). references aguilar, filomeno 1999 “ritual passage and the reconstruction of selfhood in international labor migration.” sojourn 14, no. 1: 98–139. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41057014. aguilar, filomeno, john peñalosa, tania liwanag, resto cruz, jimmy melendrez 2009 maalwang buhay: family, overseas migration, and cultures of relatedness in barangay paraiso. quezon city: ateneo de manila 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http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8373.00112. weber, max 2001 the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. translated by stephen kalberg. los angeles: roxbury. first published in 1905. wiegele, katharine l. 2005 investing in miracles: el shaddai and the transformation of popular catholicism in the philippines. honolulu: university of hawai'i press. williamson, john, ed. 1990 latin american adjustment: how much has happened? washington, dc: institute for international economics. zialcita, fernando 1986 “popular interpretations of the passion of christ.” philippine sociological review 34, nos. 1–4: 56–62. cast aside cast aside: boredom, downward mobility, and homelessness in post-communist bucharest bruce o’neill saint louis university a college student sits on a bench with a half-zipped hoodie, a few days’ stubble, and a pile of books. coeds gather around him. they chat with friends. he sighs, not because he is half-awake or aloof or even alone, but because he is bored. the television advertisement, moments later, explains as much. to beat back boredom, the student pours nescafé instant coffee into his life. a catchy pop song drops with his first sip, propelling the student off his bench and into the quad. his excitement proves contagious. how could it not? his classmates shoot to their feet, forming a well-choreographed flash mob. an impassioned voiceover then closes the commercial: “învinge plictiseală! alege pasiune! alege nescafé 3in1!” (defeat boredom! choose passion! choose nescafé 3-in-1!). in romania, during the summer of 2010, the nescafé corporation battled boredom. învinge plictiseala! “boredom is, for many romanians, one of their greatest fears,” the campaign’s creative director explained. “they are not worried about their career or even about money but about being bored. and they want to eat so much, to consume so much, that every pause causes them boredom.” “this is why,” he continued, “we positioned the product as a stimulus, like a spark, that helps you avoid those awful pauses that lead to boredom.” and a consumerist spark nescafé did ignite. the nescafé corporation paired its coffee product with regular drawings to win nokia smart phones and €1,000 cash prizes. hugely successful, by industry standards, the promotion solicited 1.7 million entries over fifty-four days (pr romania 2010). in this battle over boredom, nescafé offers itself to romanians as their first line of defense. it is a product pitch to which romanians are remarkably primed to receive. two decades after the fall of communism and in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, romanians are bored, and they describe themselves as such. yet, the boredom that bombards this country (and i suspect other similarly positioned societies) does not attack only its leisure class. while the nescafé commercial and literary greats from charles dickens (1853) to david foster wallace (2011) represent boredom as a passing affliction of slowed time endured by the wealthy (spacks 1996; goodstein 2004), boredom’s most vulnerable victim is in fact romania’s homeless population. chronic under-consumption leaves the homeless defenseless against this everyday affect. much of this vulnerability has to do with the novelty of homelessness in romania. prior to december 1989, when a mob executed romania’s dictator on christmas day, the romanian communist party guaranteed every family a home and a job. these state guarantees ensured the baseline wellbeing of the population. it was only after the fall of the communist government, in the wake of liberalization, that people fell out of work and ended up on the streets. labeled “homeless” by western reformers, a new shelter system quickly codified their status. and with this new status came new modes of being, such as boredom. practically speaking, boredom captures for romania’s newly minted homeless a sense of alienation from work and home, but more saliently, boredom references their exclusion from an urban life that increasingly unfolds through practices of consumption. it is a brutal kind of boredom. take liviu (image 1). an unemployed construction worker in his fifties, he sleeps in parks, stairwells, and the waiting room of the gara de nord train station. when he can find work, liviu earns less than €13 per day off the books. the day we spoke, however, was not one of those days. instead, liviu sat with me, for lack of anything better to do. gazing at the floor, his eyes trained just beyond our feet, liviu confided: i feel bored (plictisit) quite a bit. i feel bored when i think about the kind of life that i have to live here in romania. i mean it’s an ugly life on the streets. you have neither perspective nor peace of mind (linişte sufleteasča). you look at your watch and see that night is coming, and you wonder “where should i go? what should i eat? who can i sit and talk to?” … i mean, at times i just feel useless. i think to myself “why should i go on living?” there is nothing for me to do here that makes me happy. i do not have money in my pocket to buy something to eat or anything else that i might want … and in these moments i feel an overwhelming dissatisfaction with life. it is like my organs don’t sense anything around me (organele nu se implică). don’t get me wrong—i am a religious man and i believe it is a sin to kill yourself; but sometimes i just feel like i want to die, or perhaps that it would be better to be dead. these feelings of boredom are very, very terrible for me.1 image 1: “sitting at asistenţă.” photograph by the author. a troubled economy, compounded by the global financial crisis, pushed a glut of unwanted laborers onto the streets. pressed to the margins of the city with little expectation of ever returning to regular employment, romanians such as liviu do not fit any of the usual scripts. they did not become hustlers in the informal economy (bourgois 2003; rodgers 2009), overrun by addiction (bourgois and schonberg 2009; garcia 2010) nor did they become mentally ill (biehl 2005; luhrmann 2001). instead, these men became bored, and as liviu’s account suggests, this boredom is something to fear. this essay, in response, takes this fear seriously by approaching boredom as an everyday affect (stewart 2007) structured by the politics of consumption in post-communist bucharest. at the center of this study sits not simply the inability to consume but also the feeling of being cast aside, of being downwardly mobile in a neoliberal era of supposed ascent. in an increasingly consumer-driven society, boredom, i argue, is an affective state that registers within the modality of time the newly homeless’s expulsion to the margins of the city. in this sense, boredom is a persistent form of social suffering made possible by a crisis-generated shift in the global economy, one that has forced tens of millions of people the world over to come to terms with diminished economic capacities (jeffrey 2010; ralph 2008; mains 2007; ferguson 1999), as well as the all too depressing sense that boredom’s antidote, the very answer to it all, is a warm mug of nescafé. idleness under communism romania is not a wealthy country. it was for a moment, but only briefly. between the two world wars, romania experienced a boom that earned bucharest the title “paris of the balkans.” stalls and stoppages, however, have punctuated the romanian economy ever since, leaving romanians unable to work and, at times, with little to consume. in the 1980s, widespread inactivity in the realm of production and consumption became more than a fact of life. inactivity became a matter of social policy. it was then that the communist dictator nicolae ceausescu simultaneously undertook two costly initiatives. the first was to pay off romania’s $11 billion foreign debt within a decade (petrescu 2002). ceausescu believed this aggressive fiscal policy was necessary to limit foreign interference in the development of socialism in romania. the second initiative was a major redevelopment of central bucharest to herald the victory of socialism. costing $1.5 billion, this was a fantastic expenditure for a country whose gross domestic product (gdp) at the time was about $17 billion (o’neill 2009). to fund these initiatives, the romanian communist party heightened the exportation of food and durable goods while severely limiting imports. these planning and policy decisions led to the development of what liberal economists call a “shortage economy,” whereby the systemic misallocation of resources prevented factories from producing at full throttle (kornai 1986). factories, for example, failed to receive the necessary raw materials to meet their production quotas. when inputs ran short, production stopped. in these moments, workers stood idle on factory floors (verdery 1996, 22). these inefficiencies contributed to a lack of consumables. food grew scarce, homes went dark in the evening, and in the morning romanians drank ersatz-coffee. real coffee, when it could be found at all, was reserved for bribing officials and administrators (chelcea 2002). coupled with aggressive exportation policies, consumer demand soon outpaced retail inventories. as store shelves ran empty, romanians had to spend inordinate amounts of time queuing for replenishments (verdery 1996). breadlines soon defined most of romanians’ non-working hours. life in romania, according to the novelist dragoş vociu (2009), turned into an unending line for chicken scraps.2 entire days became preoccupied with waiting in breadlines, forcing social relationships of almost every kind to take place within, and conform to the restrictions of, the breadline. what was the alternative? “no person in power would dare to take the place of a nine-year-old kid or surrender his place to an eighty-year-old,” wrote the romanian sociologist pavel câmpeanu. “disabled persons are treated the same as the healthy, there exists no difference between a young man with a rucksack on his back and a young woman with a restless baby in her arms; well-dressed administrators with briefcases in hand stand without hesitation behind street sweepers dressed in dirty overalls and holding brooms” (câmpeanu 1994, 41–42). a series of short films, entitled comunism pe burta goală (communism on an empty stomach) (2009), further memorialized the difficulties of the breadlines. produced by romania’s twenty-four-hour news station, realitatea tv, the series broadcasted the testimonies of everyday workers who completed 12-hour shifts only to spend the remainder of the day standing in long lines for bread, milk, and meat. black-and-white photos juxtaposed empty store shelves with long lines that stretched outside and around grocery stores. “in the 1980s,” summarized the romanian journalist and critic, paul cernat, “queuing for products was an everyday experience and a familiar expression of underdevelopment. … you just waited indefinitely” (cernat 2004, 191). in the era of communism, deprivation thrust romanians into a state of idleness. romanians regularly spent long hours standing around on the factory floor and in breadlines unable to produce or consume. the stalled economy left romanians with little to do. “there were lines day and night,” sandu, a homeless construction worker, recalled to me in 2011 as he lit a fresh cigarette. we sat in his squatter camp with some of his neighbors (see image 2). “let’s say you needed milk. you had a bottle, and you waited in the evening in front of the creamery, and you stayed there until morning when the car came with milk. you’d stay up all night to get 3–4 kilograms of milk to give to your children. all night you would wait there.” tomas, who lives in the same encampment, recounted the rhythm of delivery: “often shipments arrived in the afternoon around 3 p.m. you’d need to stand in line from dawn until 4, 5, 6 p.m. by 8 p.m. the stores closed, so that was it. you and your family needed to schedule for this … you’d go to work while your wife stood in line. then when your kids came home from school they’d stand in line for your wife. and then when you came home from work, you’d stand in line for your kids.” image 2: “squatter camp.” photograph by the author. breadlines absorbed much of the non-working day, yet romania’s present homeless population does not recall the idleness of the queue as having been boring. this is because the breadline was not without a sense of solidarity and forward progression. as sandu attested, “standing in line took a long time, but it wasn’t stressful at all. it was a pleasant atmosphere actually. we’d sit with people from the neighborhood and read, play checkers, cards, chess. …” “yeah,” tomas interjected, “and we drank hard!” as the others in the encampment laughed, tomas continued: “there was almost always beer nearby—it didn’t matter that it was 2 a.m. or 5 a.m. you could get beer at any hour. and you didn’t lack for wine or ţuică (plum-brandy).” “and there wasn’t much else to do otherwise,” another neighbor, ionel, added. “it wasn’t like today. there weren’t so many televisions, and even then there were only two hours of tv programming each day! the lines were long, but you at least got to bring something to eat home to your apartment.” romanians endured curbed consumption in a moment of stalled production, leaving romanians idle for long periods of the day. this idleness, however, was not boring. this is because idleness in communist-era romania was collectively shared. stuck in the line, workers preoccupied themselves with friends, games, and alcohol; and however slowly the line moved, each passing moment brought people closer to something that they needed. idleness, in this instance, was both collectively shared and tied to state efforts of caring for citizens (kideckel 2004). from communism to consumerism the shortage economy, and the breadlines that went with it, came to an end in 1989 with the execution of nicolae ceausescu. a new government soon followed that sought to open up romania’s closed borders and to reincorporate romania into what is commonly described as the global market. these efforts at liberalization sought to replace the idleness that characterized romania’s economy under communism with the steady buzz of market-driven production and consumption (demekas and khan 1991). between 1990 and 1995, the romanian state sold roughly 4.3 million housing units into the ownership of private individuals (stan 1995 429–30). the state also sold majority shareholder status in all of its non-essential industries, creating by 1994 no fewer than forty-thousand joint ventures with foreign partners, totaling about $964 million in foreign investment (stan 1995: 431–35). peasant markets were completely liberalized to increase the supply of food, and land was distributed from agricultural cooperatives to peasants for long-term use (demekas and khan 1991, 18; verdery 2003). while romanian politicians and western consultants waited for liberal reforms to shift romanian factories into gear, romanians themselves became acquainted with global consumerism. store shelves stayed stocked for the first time in memory. from sugary snacks to blue jeans, increased imports and improved domestic goods provided romanians with more and better options, even if persistent poverty compelled shoppers to choose the cheapest option among them. foreign companies repurposed bucharest’s main piaţe (public squares)—such as unirii, romană, and victoriei—shifting them from aesthetic testaments to the strength and rationality of romanian socialism to convenient backdrops for advertising newly available goods. neon billboards for coca cola, nike, and sony competed for public attention in the evening sky. advertising extended into now-private homes, prompting romanians to buy products like nescafé in new hypermarkets such as carrefour. the introduction of cable television expanded programming from two hours of rhetoric a day under communism to hundreds of 24-hour news and entertainment channels. cinemas provided uncensored and unrestricted access to foreign films, while developers transformed socialist-era buildings into “american style” shopping malls.3 these malls exposed romanians to foreign retailers, but also to a distinctly western shopping experience—one that tethered the acquisition of new shoes to the ingestion of fast food, pop music, and carefully stylized spaces. within this heightened awareness of consumerism, consumption not only emerged as a site of self-stimulation but also came to compete with production as a means of ordering social relations. as consumer possibilities expanded, consumer capacity and choice became ever more communicative, marking vertical distinctions between emerging classes (veblen 2007), as well as horizontal distinctions within them (bourdieu 1987). still miles away from the capitalist “dream worlds” of nineteenth-century paris or twentieth-century new york (laermans 1993), these developments nevertheless converged to raise hopes that life in post-communist countries like romania would soon achieve parity with western europe (fehérváry 2001; drazin 2002). the rise of capitalism aroused within the starved, communist-era worker a desire to consume that seemed to be stimulated everywhere (humphrey 1995; patico and caldwell 2002). as residents of krakow, moscow, and east berlin transitioned into full-fledged consumer citizens, the average resident of bucharest could not help but think that his or her moment would also come soon.4 anticipation gave way to a sense of endless waiting. it is now well documented that while a small cadre of romanian elites enjoyed an improvement in their quality of life, the impact of romania’s move towards privatization was generally disastrous. the privatization of factories, rather than accelerating their output, caused them to stall almost entirely. just four years into romania’s transition to capitalism, real gross domestic product fell by 15.4 percent and industrial output fell by 23.3 percent; around one-million workers—a quarter of the industrial workforce—exited the labor market (harris 1994, 2861). these broad economic forces rendered ever less affordable the basic things associated with everyday life, such as housing and utilities. if in 1989, for example, purchasing a one-bedroom apartment cost the equivalent of 40 average yearly salaries, the value of that same apartment in 2003 inflated to 120 average yearly salaries (dan and dan 2003, 5). in 2000, when romania made a major push towards eu accession, analysts noted with distress that forty percent of romanians lived on less than one u.s. dollar a day; that romania had the lowest gdp of all candidate states, the highest inflation, and the least foreign investment; and immediately before eu accession, analysts pointed out that the country’s significant economic reforms still left romanians with an average monthly wage of under $350 (o’neill 2010, 257). european union accession in 2007 provided a boost to romania’s economy that was all but erased by the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis. by 2009, the world bank reported that the romanian stock market lost 65 percent of its value, the romanian currency, the leu, depreciated 15 percent against the euro, and romania’s overall gdp dropped by over 7 percent (world bank 2009, 9). in an effort to stabilize the nation’s finances, the romanian government turned to the international monetary fund for a $27.5 billion bailout that instigated a radical series of austerity measures. these measures cut public wages by 25 percent, increased the value added tax to 24 percent and slashed social services (bbc 2010). while the rise of western-style consumption fueled the desire for a european standard of living, the onset of the global financial crisis rendered a growing number of people unemployed, out of money, and with fewer government protections upon which to rely. increasingly, romanians found themselves cast out of their houses and onto the streets. cast aside “we are the sacrificed generation—those born in the fifties and sixties,” radu started as he struggled to shield his eyes from the summer sun with his hand. in his mid-forties, radu lost his home and his construction job two years prior, in the wake of the global financial crisis. now separated from his wife and children, radu spends his nights alternating between monasteries, squatter camps, and the stairwells of apartment blocks. he has nowhere to call his own. having failed to get work earlier that morning on bucharest’s market for informal day labor, piaţa neagră, we opted to spend the afternoon at asistenţă—a day center in bucharest where the homeless go to access a social worker, take a shower, or just sit in peace. with only the daily tabloids to read, our regular meetings at asistenţă left us with ample time to reflect on the experience of being cast aside. “we did alright until communism ended in ’89–90 … but now we spend our days waiting at churches and ngos for a plate of food. and that’s all the help we get. we cannot speak of social aid [from the state].” too old to compete successfully for manual labor positions, too young to qualify for a pension, and lacking in marketable skills, radu was unable to find work and was no longer able to make rent. he described how, once on the street, life grew ever more precarious: “a lot of people come here to find work from other cities like constanta, timisoara, brasov—too many people are looking for work and there are not enough jobs.” the problem, radu went on to admit, was larger than simple math. aside from a swelling pool of low-skilled workers tilting the labor market to the employer’s advantage, there was also a larger shift in the type of work on offer in bucharest. heavy industry, the base of urban employment under communism, collapsed after the revolution. “i mean, look around you,” radu continued. “the work we were accustomed to under ceausescu no longer exists. you had a job, you had a salary, and you had them indefinitely. you were not at a loss for work. everyone had his fate and he went about his day with a purpose.” a manual laborer under communism, radu was always in demand. the economy, after all, was structured around universally guaranteed employment, housing, and food rations. there were idle moments during communism to be sure, but this idleness was momentary and passing. idle workers stood around on reserve. whether on the stalled factory floor or in the slow moving breadline, romanians under communism knew they would ultimately be called back into the service of the economy. their labor was always framed as necessary, and bread for dinner always came, if not later rather than sooner. “that’s not the case anymore,” radu assessed. “the passing from communism to capitalism was sudden—my generation got caught staring into the sun.” radu’s friend from piaţa neagră, emil, agreed. as he emptied the contents of three nescafé packets into an empty water bottle recovered from the trash, emil explained, “many things have failed us. the government sold the factories, they made people unemployed in ’90–91. that’s when unemployment started. it didn’t exist in ’89. then, if you didn’t have a job, the securitate would come around and find you in the street. they would put you in jail for 6 months if you weren’t working. you went to jail for not having a job.” emil emphasized that his present state of unemployment was, not so long ago, widely considered to be criminal.5 “now, i know that’s not the case anymore. the state no longer has any work. you’re responsible for what you do in life. you have to find your own place to work, a house, an income. i don’t have a job but i dream of having one again—to have something to do. to be occupied. to help my family, my children.6 but for now, my dreams are shattered. … it’s tough with this job market here in bucharest.” raised under socialism and the glorification of the worker, and now subjected to the competitive pressures of a liberal market, romania’s homeless understand the importance of regular, hard work and the harsh consequences of unemployment. neither the state nor the private market, however, offers these men, as unskilled laborers (muncitor necalificat), opportunities to put their work ethic to consistent use. as the romanian economy shifted from industry to services, manual labor became increasingly flexible rather than a full-time occupation. normative expectations of a nine-to-five job cut against the uncertainty of occasional day labor. as radu explained: “now there is very little work, and the work you can find is for a definite period—a few days, a week, maybe a month. if you get a month of consistent work then enjoy it, because otherwise there is no continuity. you no longer have certainty about tomorrow or the day after.” while workers in their twenties and thirties could leverage their relative youth and strength to manage growing economic precariousness, the middle-aged came to understand themselves as not merely displaced into the informal economy, but rendered, in zygmunt bauman’s (2004) terms, redundant: an unusable remnant of a bygone era. “i know i have to adapt,” radu explained to me. “i readjusted myself and i try to learn new things along the way. i’m trying to reapply my knowledge elsewhere, to change my entire mentality. i know i cannot expect something from the state above, and i don’t want to sit around all day doing nothing. but what can i do? at my age, who wants to hire me for physical work? even if you’re educated, employers prefer the young.” marius, who often sits and talks with radu and emil at piaţa neagră, bluntly concurred: “no one wants to hire me. my legs aren’t well—i have water in my knees. there is no work for me to do. at fifty-three my life is over. there’s work for a handful of younger men, but the rest are finished. we sit on the streets, unwanted and empty handed, while everyone else waits for simple biology to take care of us.” in a state of redundancy, inactivity for romania’s homeless became decoupled from the industrial notion of the reserve army of labor. radu, emil, marius, and the others no longer believe they will be called back into the service of production in any substantive way. they have little reason to think otherwise. in the absence of an income, much less government aid, no one is investing in them. like a still-functioning typewriter in the digital age, it is not quite clear what purpose they still serve. temporary idleness under communism gave way under neoliberalism to near-permanent unemployment and new levels of deprivation; and unlike with the breadline, relief from this deprivation no longer comes with time. afternoons spent sitting in the parking lot of asistenţă do not bring the homeless closer to food rations or a job or a home. while their productive value has passed, their capacity to consume never came. while under communism, bucharest’s homeless joke, idle workers had money to spend but nothing to buy, there are now things to buy but the homeless have no money to spend. at the surface, the homeless’s joking suggests that their life circumstances did not change after the dramatic fall of communism. they continue to do without. yet this joking points to a fundamental shift in the structure of deprivation. surrounded by restaurants and shops, the newly homeless can only stand on the outside since they lack the means to participate in the consumer practices that others enjoy within. this inability to consume does not affect the neighborhood, as communist austerity once did, nor does it tie the homeless to a paternalistic state. instead, deprivation now identifies the homeless as unnecessary producers and articulates their exclusion from social spaces and practices of consumption. rather than idleness, deprivation in a moment of heightened consumerism leaves those thrust to the margins feeling bored to death. bored to death “there is nothing to do here but eat, nap, and do your paw (fac labe),” vasile, a twenty-something resident of magazie, a state-administered shelter in bucharest, quipped while making a jerking motion with his left hand. although run by one of bucharest’s central districts, magazie existed outside of the city’s municipal boundaries.7 the layout of magazie called to mind its former usage as an army barracks. a combination of walls and chain-link fences marked the perimeter. fences also cut through the complex, spatially affirming population segments invented by the staff. in this way, the shelter kept apart the infirm from the healthy, the elderly from young families, and the well-behaved from the disruptive. a private security firm enforced these demarcations, questioning beneficiaries living in one zone about their request to visit a medical office, for example, located in another. guards used their own judgment to deny or permit such requests. in addition to the guards and the doctors, the shelter kept social workers, a kitchen, and a custodial staff. empty fields, a public cemetery, and a kennel that housed stray dogs collected from the city streets neighbored magazie. the dogs’ barks echoed throughout the shelter, inviting homeless beneficiaries to make the obvious and uncomfortable parallel between the two spaces. a nescafé machine sat at the shelter’s front gate, providing residents with one outlet for treating themselves. otherwise, a single public bus serviced magazie. a gas station existed just off the first stop, providing a place to buy cigarettes or the occasional beer. otherwise, even with light traffic, it took an hour and a half to reach the city center. by all accounts, the complex felt removed from city life. “i’m very bored! terribly bored! each day i’m bored! but what can i do?” lamented bogdan, a divorced and unemployed worker a few years away from his pension eligibility. “i walk around the shelter’s courtyard as a way of keeping busy. i’d like to go out, but to leave the shelter you must have money in your pocket. you need ten lei (a few dollars) in order to leave and come back with something: a cake, a drink, a nes[café], or whatever. … as it is, i feel better when i am asleep in bed—when i cannot think about anything.” sleep was a common escape from the confines of shelter boredom. bogdan’s neighbor, elena, for example, slept fourteen hours a day on average. “what else is there to do?” elena asked me rhetorically. “all i have to look forward to each day are coffee and cigarettes. when i run out, i try to go back to sleep.” amidst tight budget constraints, magazie did not offer educational, vocational, or entertainment programs for its two-hundred homeless beneficiaries. rather than reform or retrain the homeless for new types of employment (see desjarlais 1997; hopper 2003; lyon-callo 2008), magazie only offered basic accommodation. shelter residents often gathered in the hallway to share cigarettes and mugs of nescafé. conversation, however, was sparse and punctuated by long silences. new topics of discussion were hard to find. about five televisions existed among the complex’s homeless residents, affording access to spanish soap operas and american action films to the lucky few. bogdan was not one of the lucky. “i sit here in this shelter, staring at the walls and thinking about my troubles. and that only makes life harder.” though bored with shelter life, residents hardly ever left; it was free from the costs of the outside world. “sure, i could go and visit one of the parks in the city center: herăstrău or cişmigiu. it’s beautiful there,” acknowledged ivan, an unemployed father of five living at magazie. “but if i go i’ll have to take my kids, and kids just ask and ask for things. there are go-carts, food, and games at the park, but you need money to buy tickets for these things. if you don’t have the money, then it is better to just stay in the shelter. … without money nothing is possible.” unable to afford a hot meal, much less a carnival ride, ivan, bogdan, and the others concurred, it was better to stay indoors. stuck at the margins of the city without much work and with even less to spend, shelter residents could only repetitively cycle through a set of activities—sleeping, masturbating, drinking instant coffee, pacing, and reading the papers. they also listened to the dogs barking next door in their cages; and in these moments, shelter beneficiaries came to understand as self-evident what giorgio agamben observed so profoundly: “the man who becomes bored finds himself in the ‘closest proximity'—even if it is only apparent—to animal captivation” (agamben 2003, 66). both the bored individual and the captivated animal are stuck in spaces lacking in meaning and purpose. to be sure, boredom also exerted a deathly dull force upon homeless persons living on the street. not confined to a shelter, bucharest’s street homeless are mobile in a way those living in the shelter could only dream. they reported walking between fifteen and twenty kilometers per day. sometimes this movement was directed, such as between soup kitchens, public bathrooms, and black markets. at other times the direction was arbitrary, moving only to avoid police harrassment. in sharp relief to the fences enclosing the shelter, the street extended in all directions. the open-ended quality of the street did not relieve boredom, as those in the shelter imagined, but rather rendered boredom into a free-floating mode of being. “let me give you an example of what i mean,” radu started. “you wake up at 6 a.m. [at the monastery], you eat, have some nes[café]. in exchange for your stay, you have to do some cleaning, so you grab a broom or a mop and make the place clean. at 8 a.m. you have to leave. you are not allowed to stay any later, but where are you going to go? you look this way and then that way, and then you slowly move where your eyes settle, because there is nowhere else to go. eventually you find yourself at a park. again, you look left, and then you look right. you read the newspaper, smoke some cigarette butts you found on the sidewalk. it’s the most boring thing that one can do. you see what you can do for food. when it rains or it’s cold in winter, you sit on the bus. you pace in the supermarket. you do that and wait for night when you can re-enter the monastery, if you have a spot, or you find a stairwell in a block to spend the night. the next day you have to do the same thing. … and so my life is saturated with total boredom. i am bored with life (plictisit de viaţă). i no longer have desires. … it’s a situation in which you have nothing to do and nowhere to go. it makes you want a sudden death, or if i could, to die by a lethal injection so that i could be done with this life.” marius concurred: “i walk through the city everyday and everyday i’m bored with it. i probably walk fifteen kilometers a day, but what else can i do? i walk here and there and try to forget my problems, but my problems follow me. my entire day is spent walking like this. it’s boring, but it leaves me tired. at night, i fall down from fatigue and get to sleep like wood.” shorn of the bourgeois connotations of walter benjamin’s flaneur, this endless walking appears neither as a distraction nor a mental stimulant, but as an expression of boredom itself.8 the redeeming quality of this walking is that it brings about sleep—a deathlike state in which existence is, quite mercifully, it would seem, reduced to wood. there are, the homeless quickly learn, limitations to where they can walk. while bucharest is not a city of walls (caldeira 2001), class distinctions keep the homeless pacing the margins of the city. bucharest’s struggling working class mobilize a set of distinctions based upon hygiene to keep the homeless outside of their view. given that only a few steady paychecks separate the one from the other, these moments confirm pierre bourdieu’s observation that micro-distinctions are the most adamantly upheld (bourdieu 1987). the yellowing of the homeless’s whites, dusty hair, or a sour odor often trigger visceral and very public outbursts from working class romanians.9 the stakes of such transgressions crystalized for me when i accompanied catalin, a thirty-something-year-old man living on the streets, onto a minibus. we were headed to cernica, a small monastery just outside of bucharest, where the homeless often go for food or a night’s rest. filled to capacity, with grown children sitting on the laps of their parents, catalin and i had to stand in the aisle. shortly after the door closed and the minibus got rolling, riders began to yell at catalin. a woman in her fifties asked catalin with a disgusted tone, “where did you sleep last night? i can smell you! you smell awful! you’re stinking up the bus! oh, i want to vomit!” others in the minibus nodded in agreement as i stood momentarily speechless, both at the woman’s visceral tone, but also because catalin did not strike me as particularly un-fresh. although it was summer and one could not help sweating in the city’s heat and humidity, catalin made an effort to bathe daily. he either climbed into the dămboviţa river that runs through bucharest or washed up in public restrooms. the outcry in the minibus continued as another man yelled, “why did they ever let a homeless man (unboschetar) on the bus! you make me want to vomit! someone open a window!” as the windows opened, riders in the middle of the minibus begged to switch seats with those sitting next to a window. as bodies shifted begrudgingly, catalin popped open an emergency hatch on the minibus’s roof to improve airflow, prompting the minibus to erupt in cheers. reddening eyes betrayed catalin’s stern face as he spent the remainder of the ride looking away from me. such scenes regularly played out on buses and in metros, in public squares and parks, rendering catalin and other homeless persons into personae non gratae of the city. while catalin’s unemployment can be overlooked easily enough, his severe under-consumption cannot. it emanates from the stains on his clothes and the sweat on his skin. these elements quite publicly convey his inability to consume washing machines and showers, detergents and deodorants. the public’s condemnation of this basic failure to consume is unforgiving. along the open space of the street, the (barely) better off yell at the homeless. they call them filthy (jegos), dirty (murdar), and lazy (leneş), and the homeless are told their presence induces the desire to vomit. such condemnation over the failure to consume prompts homeless persons to place themselves outside of the public’s view and firmly in the margins of the city. routing themselves away from public condemnation, bucharest’s street homeless have little more to look forward to than their sheltered counterparts. radu, marius, catalin, and others spend their days “standing around,” “reading a paper,” or, they say with a simple shrug of their shoulders, “doing nothing.” boredom and the continuum of violence “there is a general boredom that is now in romania, which is a kind of resignation,” the creative director for the nescafé advertisement mentioned. “maybe you were twenty when the revolution came and you were full of hope, but now you have this sense that politics has disappointed a lot. now you are pretty bitter with society because this is it. communism was better. now you just have to cope and wait to die.” because it lacked in marketable appeal, the creative director did not structure his commercial around this face of boredom. nevertheless, the general boredom that he described widely resonates with bucharest’s homeless population. “my life is a disaster. it’s humiliating,” radu assessed. “the world looks at you, everyone sees that you don’t have money, good clothes, a place to wash up, and it changes a man. you come to understand that there’s no god, you don’t feel anything—pure and simple. your life gets spent waiting unendingly for nothing. it’s profoundly boring.”10 at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a new economy has brought about a new engagement with boredom that is particularly visible in post-communist romania but that resonates well beyond romania’s borders. this boredom articulates a violent shift in the relationship between the self, the city, and broad socio-economic processes. no longer a sense of disenchantment weathered by the upwardly mobile upon their assent into the middle class (lefebvre 2008; benjamin 2002), boredom is now tied to downward mobility and the experience of exclusion from practices of consumption (ferguson 1999; bauman 2004; sassen 2010). boredom is a traumatizing social relationship born out of having been cast aside, and it materializes through the practices and shelter infrastructure that keeps homeless persons sitting at the margins of the city.11 again, boredom abounds amongst the homeless because they are excluded from the consumer-based activities and spaces that are now central to contemporary city life.12 it is little wonder that the trauma of downward mobility in romania takes meaningful shape around the denial of consumption. as daphine berdahl pointed out, consumption was the organizing metaphor for the end of socialist rule in eastern europe (2005, 239). long waits in interminable breadlines for rations of unpredictable quality evidenced for many the perceived failure of socialism to provide for its citizens. liberalization, by contrast, appealed through its ability to supply coffee, cigarettes, and televisions in abundance. market reform, romanians and others across eastern europe hoped, was to bring a materially better life marked by the end of austerity. two decades of neoliberal reforms invited communist workers to imagine themselves as consumers in a planetary marketplace (comaroff and comaroff 2000, 304). as the act and aesthetics of consumption gained importance in shaping one’s sense of self and one’s relationship to society, bucharest’s homeless found themselves consuming less than they had in the darkest moments of communism. in a city where everything seemed to be for sale, the right to the city, in any substantive sense, became dependent upon discretionary spending.13 the bored subject emerged as the result of a new process of social stratification within neoliberalism that is made knowable though patterns of consumption. at its depths, boredom proves to be a place where the inflicted entertained death; after all, as radu, marius, tomas and others insist, there does not appear to be anything to do in what is left of life. massive economic change unleashed a traumatized structure of feeling (williams 2005), one that held those at the margins in limbo between a nostalgia for a brutal past and a resignation toward a hopeless future. this bottomless boredom only begins to make sense when situated within what some have called a “continuum of violence”: the overlapping structural, symbolic, and normalized violences that wreak havoc upon the everyday lives of the vulnerable (scheper-hughes and bourgois 2004). the homeless’s boredom speaks to a distinct set of economic and historical relations that drove them to, and keeps them at, the margins of the city. there, the homeless struggle to stimulate senses dulled to the core. examples abound. “one night, about three years ago,” augustin, a resident of magazie (image 3), recounted to me, “i tried to drink a whole canister of nes[café]. what else was there to do? i mean this shelter is a filthy place.” augustin spoke while making a broad gesture with his outstretched arm that seemed to reference the flickering halogen lights above, the mildew-and-graffiti-stained walls, and the cockroaches scurrying across them. “i just wanted to feel something! so i drank three large mugs really quickly—as fast as i could, one right after the other. i then kept drinking nes for four more hours. by then my heart was pounding really hard. my entire body was shaking with powerful tremors (şoc puternic).” augustin shook himself to illustrate. “my wife took me to the hospital, and i got pills to help me calm down. the doctor said i might have had a mild heart attack. i’m supposed to feel lucky to be alive.” image 3: “drinking nescafé in his room at magazie.” photograph by the author. to be sure, the trauma of homelessness leaves its mark upon the body: underfed, exhausted, and over-exposed to the elements, romania’s homeless suffer from malnutrition, tuberculosis, and gangrene, among other ailments (see stillo 2011). yet poverty also devastates inner worlds. social exclusion, unmet desires, and a lost sense of belonging corrode all that once animated the homeless’s sense of personhood. this affective suffering is not inflicted by spectacular trauma but wrought through the mundane (yet persistent) grind of life without work, without home, and without the ability to participate in a social world that increasingly unfolds through practices of consumption. rather than partaking in a european standard of living comprised of ikea furniture, smartphones, and evenings spent drinking at terrace bars, as middle-class romanians aspire to do, romania’s homeless spend their days sitting empty-handed (stau degeaba) at the margins of the city. there, without socially meaningful ways of passing the time, the homeless come to fully realize what it means to lose one’s foothold in a competitive global economy. amidst the quiet moments of the day that never seem to pass, a feeling emerges. mă simt plictisit. i feel bored. punctuating the darkness is the occasional mug of nescafé—a modest spark that bucharest’s homeless have come to rely almost entirely upon in their uphill battle against boredom. it is pitched as the antidote but should be seen as part of the problem. notes acknowledgments this article draws upon approximately three years of fieldwork in bucharest, romania, supported by the fulbright-hays ddra, the national science foundation, the student fulbright program, the institute for romanian culture, and the department of anthropology at stanford university. i presented versions of this article at stanford university’s center for russian, east european and eurasian studies (creees), the sociocultural anthropology workshop at the university of michigan, ann arbor, the russian and east european institute (reei) at indiana university, bloomington, the department of sociology and anthropology at saint louis university, and the annual meetings of the american anthropological association in san francisco, california. many thanks to hannah appel, liviu chelcea, craita curteanu, james ferguson, helen human o’neill, kevin l. o’neill, lisa poggiali, and dennis rodgers for offering comments and encouragement at various stages of the writing process. thanks also to the cultural anthropology editorial board, especially anne allison, and the anonymous reviewers for their incredible insight and support throughout the revision process. 1. bucharest’s homeless, importantly, do not identify as depressed (deprimat) but as bored (plictisit). rather than pathologize their boredom as depression, homeless persons attributed their existential crisis (as does this study) to a series of social and structural conditions. (unless noted otherwise, all translations are by the author.) 2. voicu’s book received the 2008 award for debut fiction and was heralded on romanian literary blogs as an “x-ray of the psycho-social form” (radiografie psihosocială) of the breadline in ceausescu’s romania (miheţ 2009). 3. the bucharest mall is a case in point. a turkish development firm reopened, in 1999, a communist-era pantry (circ al foamei) as the first mall in romania to “meet international standards for retail and leisure” (bucharesti anchor group 2005). 4. roughly ten years after the fall of communism, global media accounts depicted berlin, moscow, and krakow as the centers of robust economies in line with western europe, evidencing the success of the transition (economist 1999; riding 1999; stephen 2007). 5. for a broader discussion of the politics of romania’s communist-era prisons and labor camps, see o’neill (2012). 6. emil separated from his wife soon after becoming homeless. she lives with one of emil’s adult children. emil visits the household about twice a week to wash up and have a hot meal. such visits to housed relatives and friends are common weekly occurrences amongst romania’s homeless. 7. shelter policy permitted each beneficiary to stay indefinitely until the shelter abruptly closed on march 15, 2011. the complex later reopened as a convalescence home. 8. the flaneur is a typically male and well-educated figure poised to develop his own experience of the city through walking (frisby 2001, 31; benjamin 2002). to be sure, class distinctions exist among bucharest’s homeless, and flaneurie evidenced them. those who worked as day laborers abroad often walked through certain neighborhoods in bucharest that reminded them of their travels, offering this segment an escape into a distant mental world that was not available to all on the streets. 9. better-off romanians, by contrast, are not vocal. when confronting the homeless, the well-to-do move around the homeless with dramatically wrinkled faces or rolled eyes. these exaggerated gestures are performed for other middle-class romanians who wink or chuckle as they pass. 10. despite boredom’s centrality to the experience of homelessness, boredom has received only passing analytical attention. see orwell (1933), desjarlais (1997), and bauman (2005). 11. rodgers and o’neill (2012) develop the term “infrastructural violence” to theorize the regular harm that comes about through the planning and development of collectively shared infrastructure, such as water pipes, roads, and cemeteries. this also applies to the unbearable boredom felt by bucharest’s homeless once placed in state shelters developed outside of the city limits. 12. this center–periphery interpretation of boredom is inspired in part by saikat majumdar (2013), who conceives of boredom in colonial-era literature as a sense of lack as compared with life in the imperial center. 13. the right to the city, in the tradition of henri lefebvre, is “the right to 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the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. –walter benjamin “we don’t map those,” kyale stated emphatically, gesturing to the spigot jutting out of a makeshift mud structure from which women were collecting water in plastic jerry cans. his gps unit dangled from a cord wrapped around his wrist, and it swayed in step with his measured gait as we passed by the water point. a flicker of confusion must have swept across my face, and kyale leaned over and whispered to me: “that water point is not by the government, but by the community. it’s illegal, so we don’t map it.” it was nearing the second hour of our data collection expedition in kyale’s neighborhood, an informal settlement of nairobi, kenya, that i will call muhimu. a few moments later, kyale paused in front of a different water point—this one with a nairobi city water and sewage company (ncwsc) meter attached—and recorded its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates with his gps device. later, taking respite from the heat of the day, he would retreat indoors to upload these coordinates to a computer using the software platform java openstreetmap editor (josm). by aggregating his data with those collected by other volunteer mappers over the span of a few months, he would help create a digital map of muhimu; it would be the first publicly circulating map of any kind to acknowledge the settlement’s existence. “it’s good to be recognized; people should know the real muhimu,” kyale told me, explaining his devotion to mapping. that muhimu could be known by outsiders at all was a novel idea. as one of nairobi’s informal settlements, it was considered illegally occupied; as such, its villages, roads, hospitals, and schools were depicted on government paper maps and digitized google ones alike as a vast swath of empty space, a large blank spot. the project that kyale was volunteering for—muhimu mapping project (mmp)—was one of many techno-utopian digital mapping projects that formed in the wake of kenya’s 2007–2008 postelection violence, when politically motivated conflict led to more than 1,200 deaths and 660,000 displaced citizens. the managers of mmp—sarah, a canadian, and miroslav, a russian—believed that mapping muhimu’s infrastructure would encourage local political leaders to bring resources to the neglected area. if muhimu’s resources and needs were highlighted on digital maps, sarah and miroslav reasoned, the neighborhood could no longer be ignored. bringing government attention to the settlement’s well-being had recently also become a means to ensure its survival. the citywide displacement of so-called informal areas had become increasingly commonplace as kenya attempted to fulfill its ambitious long-term development plan, vision 2030, which mandated infrastructural upgrading (dolan 2012). this plan was eerily silent about nairobi’s settlement residents, who comprised more than half of nairobi’s 3.1 million people (amnesty international 2012). during a presentation at the africa geospatial forum, an annual conference celebrating the past achievements and future possibilities of geospatial technologies in areas of governance, development, and economic growth on the continent, then director general of vision 2030, mugo kibati, had stated brusquely that “vision 2030’s vision on informal settlements is to get rid of them. plain and simple.” but what was “plain and simple” about erasing more than 50 percent of the bustling capital’s residents? “the whole point of this mapping thing,” miroslav told me the first time we boarded a matatu van and journeyed from the freshly tarmacked roads of nairobi’s central business district to the potholed, chaotic eastern portion of the city, is “to make the invisible visible.” political recognition, according to miroslav, followed from visually witnessing data about the neighborhood. for mmp, more information was imagined to lead to more substantial political engagement in the settlement. at the time of this interaction, i had been following the digital mapping activities of kyale and his colleagues for almost a year. after countless days spent chatting with muhimu residents and observing their technical training and data collection, i had developed what i thought was a solid grasp of the politics of service provision in the slum. i thus interpreted kyale’s carefully calibrated mapping practice—choosing to map official water points, while deliberately leaving community ones undocumented—as a reflection of his unwillingness to disrupt the micropolitics of slum life and invite unwanted attention from the notoriously corrupt ncwsc.1 despite these selective mapping practices, however, residents consistently justified their work by arguing, as kyale had, that their digital maps displayed the real muhimu. “transparency is a good thing,” sam, another mapper, told me unequivocally when i asked him about his desire to map his neighborhood. the mappers imagined that the maps could be mobilized as visual evidence to counter negative perceptions that circulated about the area. “muhimu’s name has been tarnished,” explained peter odondo, a mapper in his twenties. “most people are afraid and think it’s a very insecure place.” using the words real and transparent interchangeably to explain their mapping work, kyale and his colleagues expressed faith in the maps as unmediated visual truth, on the one hand, and knowingly produced highly selective representations, on the other. this tension at the heart of transparency discourse—that revelation is always shadowed by concealment—has been well documented by social scientists (strathern 2000; hetherington 2011; mazzarella 2006; levine 2004; maclean 2014; morris 2004). less frequently considered, however, is how transparency-seeking practices are informed by the subject positions of those who produce them. this issue, i suggest, was brought to the fore by the muhimu mappers’ work. how does the mapmakers’ status as urban slum-dwellers color the production and reception of the information they produce?2 by bringing attention to a group of people—the urban poor—not typically imagined to be the producers of either technology or transparency, i uncover an irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the mapmakers’ sociotechnical engagements: while mappers like kyale attempted to strategically produce and document transparent representations, they first had to prove they had the authority to do so. the mappers thus struggled to commensurate two desires: first, to be recognized as kenyan citizens in the face of social and political exclusion, and second, to be recognized as technical experts, whose work was legitimated only when the maps superseded the presence of those who produced them. the mappers, i argue, aimed to be visible and invisible at the same time. how were these incommensurable desires shaped through mapmakers’ engagements with geospatial technologies? and what new aspirations and anxieties were produced in and through mapmakers’ attempts to establish belonging in silicon savannah, a term widely used in kenya and beyond to position the country’s information and communications technologies (ict) sector as the digital technology epicenter of africa writ large? to answer these questions, i draw on more than two years of ethnographic research on nairobi’s emergent digital technology sector. specifically, this article focuses on the desires and practices of a group of slum-dwellers who showed enthusiasm for geospatial technologies, which led them to join mmp. i explore how, through making their neighborhood visible through digital mapping work, the mappers also attempted to make themselves visible as technical experts. in this sense, making their physical location (muhimu) known through mapping became a strategy to change their social location:3 as their neighborhood became legitimized, so did they themselves. i thus suggest that while the goals of muhimu’s technologically savvy residents were partly strategic—that is, they were careful not to expose features like community water points that might cause internal conflict in their neighborhood and, as i show below, they were frequently preoccupied with generating income—these strategies were bound up with a broader desire to fashion an aspirational identity. i thus consider the digital mapping activities of nairobi’s urban poor not as purely technical operations aimed at illuminating previously invisible peoples and places, but rather, as sociotechnical practices that produced subjects and places in and through the process of depicting them. digital maps, i suggest, are thus not merely tools whose utility can be analyzed separately from the subjects who create and use them (cf. de bruijn, nyamnjoh, and brinkman 2009). rather, they are objects whose meaning can only be apprehended when considered as part of a broader representational economy (cf. kelty 2008; coleman 2009; keane 2006; miller 2005). while producing and tinkering with digital maps cultivated aspirational identities, such practices at the same time generated unease, as the mappers feared that they would be unable to adequately capitalize on the technologies’ potential.4 residents were intensely worried that competitors with better images or more professional credentials would outpace them. social scientists have pointed to the socially and politically generative quality of mapmaking as key to the modern state’s consolidation and assertion of power (scott 1998; mitchell 2002; winichakul 1994; anderson 1991). through acts of classification and quantification, the colonial state produced “deep social and institutional roots” as it “multiplied its size and functions” (anderson 1991, 169). indeed, during the colonial era in kenya, the british used mapmaking to regulate the living and working space of africans (cooper 1997; elkins 2005, 16; zelaza 1992). today, however, despite the kenyan state’s growing interest in geospatial technologies’ governmental potential, these new forms of visualization have thus far not led to new forms of surveillance (cf. burchell, gordon, and miller 1991; strathern 2000; anderson 1991). rather, digital mapping technologies have been primarily used in citizen-led movements to counter existing versions of state record keeping. in focusing on how digital mapmaking was bound up with the production of personhood, i foreground the ways in which subjectivity and social relations of power inform understandings of transparency, enabling the value of information to shift. the process through which mapmakers and maps fashioned one another influenced whether the information produced—the maps themselves—would be interpreted as useless noise, credible data, or something in between. here, pace the dominant narrative in nairobi’s techno-utopian social world, more information did not lead to more transparency (cf. maclean 2014; hetherington 2011). indeed, what was at stake was the degree to which particular kinds of information became coded by various actors as transparent at all. below i briefly discuss how digital technologies came to embody the shared dreams that animated kenya’s ambitious development plans, while at the same time they also expressed and reproduced class-based hierarchies. next, i explore how slum-dwellers themselves narrated the relationship between geospatial technologies and visibility to understand how the mappers connected visibilization to the cultivation of expert selves. finally, i discuss how ideologies about technology, transparency, and mediation structured beliefs about the maps and mapmakers, and how the symbolic and material qualities of the digital form alternately enabled and challenged muhimu’s mapmakers’ self-actualization. fetishizing the digital, fetishizing the poor kenya’s flirtation with digital technology began in the early 2000s, after the telecommunications sector was deregulated and the country’s sole wireless provider, safaricom, morphed from a state-owned subsidiary of telkom kenya into a private company. state-corporate partnerships, which financed kenya’s first underwater fiber optic cable to the tune of $130 million, ensured that ict would become a major political focus. in the years after the cable’s completion in 2009, fiber-optic infrastructure linked kenya to international communication networks, decreased the price of bandwidth, and drove foreign investment. with respect to the local market, safaricom grew its customer base exponentially by offering cheap mobile phone packages and an sms-based money-transfer system, m-pesa. mobile phones enabled kenyans to circumvent the country’s limited banking infrastructure and high transaction fees that barred most citizens access to formal savings plans. safaricom became emblematic of technology’s potential, as national and international press praised the company for contributing to free-market economic growth and also helping kenya’s poor save and invest in businesses. in a particularly brazen statement of support, the economist (2008) went so far as to claim that safaricom had probably done “more to help kenya than decades of aid” and encouraged would-be investors that they could “pay to bet on the poor.” stretching across 182 acres to the east of nairobi’s central business district, muhimu’s land is owned partially by the city council of nairobi and the government of kenya (pamoja trust 2009) and partially by absentee landlords, who acquired title deeds under highly ambiguous circumstances. muhimu was also one of the worst affected areas of nairobi during kenya’s 2007–2008 post-election violence, owing to its large population of unemployed youth, its history of protracted conflicts over scant resources, and its high degree of segregated ethnic diversity. that mmp chose muhimu to conduct its mapping work was thus not coincidental; alongside others in kenya’s growing technology sector, the organization’s founders promoted digital technology, with its supposedly neutral, equalizing digital code, as a tool to foster peace and pan-ethnic cooperation in the slum (poggiali n.d.). mmp was one of many geospatial projects that emerged in nairobi’s informal settlements after 2008; these projects were variously organized and funded by transnational media ngos like internews, international development organizations like usaid and plan international, educational institutions like emory university, and geospatial activist groups from places as far afield as italy and brazil. most mapping projects were implemented with local partners—community health workers and organizers active in the settlements.5 maps are “close to that internet thing, [which] people are crazy about right now,” njoroge told me, trying to explain why mapping had become so popular in muhimu. “for us,” njoroge said, speaking about slum-dwellers like himself, “when you see a computer, you see english.” we were sitting in the community center that served as the central gathering place for mmp’s technical trainings and organizational meetings. the blips and bleeps of incoming instant messages in the room next door served as a fitting soundtrack for his thoughts on the symbolic significance of digital technology in the slum. while the mappers celebrated the narrative of technology-fueled success, they also had to fight continuously against the growing anxiety of being excised from it and the persistent reality that they were not full participants in it. shimba technologies’ mbugua njihia—a member of kenya’s elite technology sector—exemplified this attitude at a presentation at the demo fall 2011 conference in santa clara, california. he implored the audience to think of kenya as an emerging market that had different characteristics from the united states. “think long distances,” he said. “think poor infrastructure, but then again think opportunity” (njihia 2011). like the sharp business minds at safaricom, njihia invoked the idea that the poor could drive investment to silicon savannah, but that they themselves were not its authors. rather, they were stepping-stones to others’ economic growth. njihia’s comments invoke a double instance of fetishization: of technology as a magic-bullet solution to the problem of poverty and infrastructural lack, and also of the poor themselves as a ground on which technological experimentation could best occur; software coders and web designers constructed the poor as the constitutive outside of kenya’s technological takeoff.6 their views reflected a tension between what they saw as the intrinsically sociopolitically equalizing qualities of digital maps and their circulation in a milieu premised on free-market capitalism, in which ethics gave way to market calculations. in the first discourse, poverty was a technical problem to be solved, while in the latter it was an opportunity for foreign venture capitalists to grow their investments. this discursive exclusion of the urban poor from the realm of technological production reflected both a socioeconomic and political gap that existed between the epicenters of silicon savannah and the informal settlements. aside from the technologists who worked directly on mapping projects in the impoverished sections of nairobi, coders and web designers rarely (if ever) engaged in outreach with nairobi’s urban poor.7 this lack of interest was reinforced by a material exclusion. nairobi’s technology epicenter, the ihub, a multilevel coding/social/event space reminiscent of google’s offices in the united states, was located in the western portion of the city in the upper-middle class neighborhood of kilimani. here, technologically curious kenyans were welcome to attend free catered events, such as the google mapping party, where participants competed for prizes by adding sites to kenya’s current google map. outside of event times, kenyans could use the ihub’s lightning-speed wireless connection for free. kilimani, however, was on the other side of the city from the majority of nairobi’s slums, including muhimu, and the approximately $1 public transport fee was prohibitively expensive for most residents. indeed, only one of mmp’s volunteers visited the ihub during my time in nairobi. despite the spirited interest in technology expressed by settlement residents, and the excellent technical skills exhibited by many of them, their access to the broader community of software coders and geospatial experts remained beyond their reach. the inclusive rhetoric of kenya’s technology sector was shadowed by its own exclusions. “you can’t just sit there because everything is computerized” the settlement residents who joined mmp were representative of the demographic that generally joined ngo projects in their neighborhoods: mostly male “youth” (aged eighteen to forty) with good english skills, limited domestic responsibilities, and diversified sources of income, which afforded them the ability to volunteer for indeterminate amounts of time and uncertain economic benefit. michael omolo, a thirty-three-year-old mapper who was supporting a wife and a six-year-old daughter, described obtaining income through a most unlikely combination of sources: repairing machines for pharmaceutical companies, collecting garbage, and selling rabbits. despite spending much of their time “hustling and bustling” for money, none of the mappers were financially secure. when the creators of mmp—who lived in the united states—swooped into nairobi for a week and called a meeting downtown to discuss the future direction of the organization, many of the mappers expressed frustration when they were not given fare for public transportation from muhimu (approximately ksh60, or less than $1). “some people walked to town and back,” elisa, a mapper, told me, explaining how she and her colleagues negotiated the economic obstacle; this trip took an hour and a half each way. indeed, the mappers’ interest in mmp was informed by their hope that it would be a stepping-stone to potential future economic opportunities. “nowadays people have to acquire more skills and knowledge,” explained elisa, of her desire to join mmp. “not just sit in one place. for example, say that i’m a farmer, i should [explore] other arenas such as fishing and business to add to whatever i have. . . . so i decided to join [mmp] to get knowledge for the future. you never know where your luck lies.” in a socioeconomic milieu where steady, secure work was a luxury afforded to a select few, mmp was thus part of a broader employment strategy. in this respect, it was not dissimilar to other money-generating activities, such as carrying a heavy load for a construction company or attending a unicef training that promised a monetary stipend. “you cannot depend on one thing, you must have many avenues,” peter odondo confirmed, echoing elisa’s comment above. as a digital technology project, however, mmp constituted a specific kind of income-generating activity: it reflected the surge of interest in information and communications technologies for development (ict4d) projects more generally in nairobi since 2008, and the sentiment expressed by young kenyans across the class spectrum that digital technology was a pathway to a better future life.8 “nowadays it’s a world of technology,” elisa told me. “you can’t just sit there because everything is computerized . . . you can’t do things manually.” doing things manually meant failing to live up to the modernist vision invoked by digitality, and the mappers, like others in kenya, did not want to be left behind. indeed, in addition to slum-dwellers, kenyan and expatriate software developers, web designers and bloggers, and the kenyan state all discussed new technologies as a harbinger of kenya’s socioeconomic development. the technologies’ meaning was deeply influenced by their material form, which caused their advocates to perceive them as unmediated by human action. witness lands cabinet secretary charily ngilu’s statement regarding the lands ministry’s decision to digitalize the lands registry: “i must admit that all has not been well at the lands ministry because of cartels, which engage in shady deals that have defrauded kenyans of millions of shillings. that will soon end once we digitize all records” (mbaka 2013). digitization, in this commonly articulated discourse, was understood to solve endemic bureaucratic corruption because of its powers of immediation, an issue i discuss further below. muhimu’s mappers echoed this discourse, expressing in more concrete terms the potential political possibilities inherent in digitally manufactured visibility: “mappers can say ‘this is a children’s playing ground’ and put it on a [digital] map,” njoroge, mmp’s community coordinator, told me. “for a government to put a playground where there is a playground, it has to go through a legal process. and in the process somebody comes in and manipulates [the situation], and grabs the land.” both ngilu and njoroge imagined that the speed and immediacy of digital technology would forestall the malevolent activities considered an everyday part of social and political life in kenya. immanent to the digital form, in other words, were notions of ethics, truth, and prosperity, qualities that exceeded the technologies’ seemingly banal function on the streets of muhimu, that is, as part of a diversified economic strategy. producing expertise “this is what you need to know,” miroslav said, pointing to a sheet of paper with “need to know” scrawled at the top in black magic marker; he had taped it to the bright blue walls of the community center in muhimu where mmp held regular meetings. underneath it, he had written: “1. gps setup (tracks, time, map, waypoints, units); 2. data transfer (gps babel); 3. josm (editing; uploading, downloading).” this was day one of three days of testing the mappers on their knowledge of geospatial technologies. those who passed the test would receive printed certificates attesting to their expertise and would be invited to continue volunteering for the organization. those who failed would have to retest, and if unsuccessful, would be asked to leave. one by one, miroslav called each of the mappers outside the organization’s headquarters; they stood abutting a large pile of trash that had been caked into the ground by the ravages of weather and the continuous imprint of residents’ footsteps. the mappers answered the questions as best they could, occasionally raising their voices over the brief snippets of reggaeton that punctured the air from passing cars. the testing ended inside, with the mappers using one of three laptops, property of mmp, to upload points using gps babel, and plot them on a map using josm. through such testing practices, mmp constructed digital mapping as an expertise-producing activity. months later, miroslav and sarah invited the mappers to an elaborately staged party at a restaurant not far from muhimu. after noshing on mbuzi choma (roasted goat meat) and tusker, the local beer, they called each of the mappers to the front of the space to receive their printed certificates, which stated that they were “proficient in gps data collection, basic editing with josm, and openstreetmap data entry.” crucially, these certificates also displayed the insignia of both mmp and a large health-related ngo that had sponsored the trainings. the mappers proudly displayed their certificates, and all parties paused to ensure that the multiple cameras documenting the event captured the exchange of documents, hugs, and hearty handshakes. the certificates substantiated what the day of testing had initially suggested—that the mappers were now geospatial experts. as their desire to be photographed made evident, the mappers reveled in this status. “nowadays . . . [there are many people] teach[ing] computer lessons to students, [but] they can’t award you a certificate, so you can’t be recognized anywhere like you know anything about computers,” elisa said, comparing mmp’s training program to others she had encountered in the area. such comments revealed certificates to be one pathway to recognized expertise, which promised the possibility of future work and a better life. emmanuel, another mapper, concurred: there was some ngo . . . dealing with hiv status. they wanted guys who had reached a certain level in school. but when i showed them the certs [certificates] that i had, they took me for work. they said, ‘ah, this guy has been participating in many events, so let’s go with him.’ my level of education, they didn’t see it as law, but what i’ve been doing to improve myself, [they saw it as] vital. emmanuel’s story suggests that the visibility of the certificate made the self visible in a new way. that is, it conferred expertise that enabled one to bypass more traditional channels to employment, such as education. being able to show the certificate to others, to have them recognize it, was crucial for this demonstration of expertise. the mappers’ preoccupation with receiving the certificates makes clear that despite the pervasive discourse that associated digitality with unmediated truth, the mappers were aware that becoming proficient in digital mapping was not a channel unto itself; the digital maps were mediated by another document, which had been authorized by ngos. mappers themselves linked the practice of making muhimu visible to two main outcomes: the ability to recalibrate sociopolitical relations with neighborhood authority figures, and the ability to make social connections that could lead to work. indeed, the digital served as a shared grammar through which local government leaders and mappers could position themselves as equals in kenya’s race toward modernization. “does mapping increase transparency in muhimu?” i asked one mapper, maurice. yes, it made a big awareness . . . the mapping did a very unique thing. the do [district officer], the chiefs . . . they are now starting to trust the youth. [we took] the first map to the do and he asked, “who did this?” we said to him, “we ourselves did this.” he said, “you are doing a very good idea. even those mzees of kijijis [elders in the villages] who are saying you are thieves, i cannot believe it from now.” [they believe] that [the youth] can do something. here, the technological expertise conferred by transparency-seeking effected a political shift: their status vis-à-vis local government improved. in his research on campesinos’ struggle to claim land amid sweeping political and economic changes in contemporary paraguay, kregg hetherington (2011, 151) suggests that retaining control over the circulation of documents related to land titling had political consequences more profound than mining the information contained within them. though the maps in muhimu were consistently referred to by mappers and project managers alike as evidence to improve service provision in the slum, government officials rarely, if ever, used the maps’ content in urban planning or service distribution. yet the maps hung on the walls of the offices of district officers and local chiefs, the only documents displayed save for tattered calendars marking the passage of time. the documents’ generative effect, i suggest, was not to inspire civil servants and political figures to assume their formal duties as democratically elected representatives, as miroslav and sarah envisioned, but rather to signal that they understood and formed part of the world in which the maps circulated, both symbolically and materially (see larkin 2013). that the maps, pointillist conglomerations of dots and dashes, had traveled through the cavernous heart of a computer before transmogrifying into the banal, tactile documents familiar to government officials everywhere only underscored the extent to which “the medium of objectification matter[ed]” (miller 1987, 129) in this case. indeed, the maps’ close affiliation with the computer, which njoroge, ngilu, and others purported would translate human folly and malfeasance into sets of quantifiable, and therefore neutral and objective, standards, made them desirable. given muhimu’s recent violent history, residents and foreigners alike contrasted cold, calculated computer knowledge with what the local press had characterized as an excess of affect that led to the 2007–2008 violence. when the chiefs and dos prominently showcased the maps, they signaled their convergence (see mazzarella 2006) with those they were expected to govern, slum-dwellers, without having to substantively engage with them, implement policies, or distribute services. indeed, njoroge’s eyes lit up on recounting how a do or chief had taped a printed map to his office wall, corroborating mark’s account that the maps caused local leaders to reimagine the youth of muhimu in a positive light. furthermore, through including the maps, technical objects associated with modern, prosperous kenya, local government officials also sent the message that they were custodians of technical knowledge. in this way, the maps served not “as the end point, but as the site of possibility, not a store of information as a static thing but as a tool for making a political effect” (hetherington 2011, 166). for local political authorities and the mappers themselves, transparency was not a presumed effect of the content of the maps—more or better information—but rather an imagined by-product of their material and symbolic association with digitality. transparency, technology, and expertise transparency emerged as a major discourse of governance in kenya in the early 1990s, amid shifting global politico-economic configurations in the post–cold war era. no longer dependent on kenya strategically, donors, whose aid contributed nearly 30 percent of the gdp (throup and hornsby 1998), began focusing their attention on economic and governance reforms. in 1991, for example, the paris group of donors threatened to withhold $350 million in aid unless president daniel arap moi deregulated the economy and opened its budgetary data to outside scrutiny (githinji and holmquist 2011, 12; world bank 1991). while used as a rallying call by the plethora of kenyan ngos that formed in the 1990s, transparency gained new traction as a political buzzword in the early 2000s. it reemerged with ict4d, an ideological framework that presumed poverty could be solved by granting the poor access to technology. the framework, as william mazzarella (2010, 785) argues in a global context, “was sold as a reconciliation between neoliberal capitalism and the interests of the poorest people in the world.” driven by quantifiable calculations and rapid speed, kenya’s urban coders and web designers viewed technologies as magical vectors of transparency, which promoted both democracy and market efficiency by bringing large amounts of information to a broad scope of people instantaneously (cf. dean 2002; mazzarella 2010). “we are all part of a sea change in news and information flow and transparency,” commented erik hersman (2009), the cofounder of the kenyan digital mapping platform ushahidi and founder of the ihub. “the barriers are finally so low that anyone can tell their story, and the whole world can see it. there is no stopping this change in information dynamics, there is only harnessing it in ways that add more value. . . . the more data that is collected, the less chance that bad data can have an adverse effect.”9 social scientists (e.g. mazzarella 2006; hetherington 2011) have criticized ict4d discourse for joining a functionalist argument about poverty with a political one about the failures of the state. if given unfettered access to the information economy, ict4d—exemplified by hersman’s comments—presumes, individual citizens can both lift themselves out of poverty and throw off the shackles of dictatorial regimes (hetherington 2012, 242). instead of tackling inequality, it produces “individualistic, market friendly, and measurable entities” (ballestero s. 2012, 160) and has thus been described as the ethical alibi of neoliberal governance (marcus and powell 2003; west and sanders 2003; mahmud 2012). such criticism is helpful in exposing transparency and its attendant projects as ideologies. yet in treating transparency as a smokescreen that conceals hidden machinations of power, these critiques elide the concrete cultural practices and social relations through which transparency discourse is produced (strathern 2000; mahmud 2012); transparency is instead imagined to act on, yet stand above, social life (cf. west and sanders 2003). these critiques also implicitly presume that there is a fixed relationship between the purported producers of transparency (e.g., ngo workers, state bureaucrats, software developers) and those who, the wool pulled over their eyes, are (falsely) assumed to benefit from it (e.g., the uneducated and/or poor). the ethnographic data i have presented here resists such a reading by showing that, like the archetypal elite transparency-seeking subject, slum-dwellers, the so-called benefactors of transparency-producing technologies, are also invested in transparency discourse and strategically enact transparency-seeking practices. thus my research interlocutors in muhimu compel me to consider transparency discourse as a form of claim-making about technological expertise, which indexes a range of other desires, including economic mobility and political recognition. while critics might suggest that this focus elides how powerful actors exploit the economic depravity of slum-dwellers by coercing them to use hegemonic discourse, i suggest that these very discourses “can be deployed against the exclusions and inequities that have historically been associated with them” (cooper and stoler 1997, 35). marilyn strathern’s (2000) research on social audit in british higher education rigorously explicates the schism between transparency as an ideal and as a culturally produced practice. she explores how both academics and auditors tolerate the incongruity that the audit produces—between representation and reality, visibility and knowledge—to advance a shared abstract value of institutional transparency. by challenging state-authored cartographic depictions of muhimu, in which the area is formally portrayed as a piece of land devoid of people and place, the mappers reconfigured existing representations of territory and authority. in that muhimu mappers’ work was driven by the desire to assess, question, and correct the cartographic practices of the state, we can think of them as auditors in their own right. they claimed, through their work, to produce a transparent representation of their neighborhood, which sharply contrasted with the government’s version. however, while transparency was an abstract value that guided their work, it was not the presumed effect of that work. like the education auditors in strathern’s research, the digital mappers, too, struggled with the incommensurability of representation and reality, abstract ideology and technical practice. yet because of the mappers’ differential socioeconomic position and their desire for sociopolitical visibility, the information produced through their transparency-seeking work was received and processed differently by its intended audience. foremost, the educators’ authority as auditors was never questioned. the auditing process, i suggest, was driven by a desire for what william mazzarella (2006, 476) calls the “politics of immediation”; that is, “a political practice that, in the name of immediacy and transparency, occludes the potentialities and contingencies embedded in the mediations that comprise and enable social life.” mazzarella points out that technologies are externalizations of the mediations that constitute sociality; they are material forms whose effect is to reduce the irreducibility of everyday experience.10 following this rationale, in strathern’s case, audit is a technology that succeeds in its mission to objectively assess educator performance because it presumes to rely on formalized standards, as opposed to subjective human action. thus its logic relies on a denial of the social practices and subjective decisions necessary to enact it. the auditors succeed because their presence as acting subjects fades into the background, allowing the audit to take center stage. in the case of muhimu, widespread faith in the digital form, which technology enthusiasts believed would eliminate graft by removing human action from the process of monitoring, led many to claim that digital maps offered a more exact optic of place than ever before. however, unlike in strathern’s example, muhimu’s mappers had yet to be acknowledged as authoritative auditors; they were socially invisible. indeed, while the mappers attempted to both produce and document transparent representations to bring sociopolitical attention to themselves and their neighborhoods, they first had to prove they had the authority to do so. as a material expression of the politics of immediation, the maps expunged human presence from the narrative of their creation; they signified an absence of the social relations of mundane bribery that lubricated the circulation of resources in the slum. at the same time, because muhimu residents physically brought paper versions of the maps to the district officers’ and chiefs’ offices, the socially mediated quality of their production could not be denied. in that powerful leaders in muhimu chose to display the maps, these digital products transformed slum-dwellers into subjects with the capacity to produce expertise, a heretofore unrealized capability. “before, the elders just thought youths were doing drugs and hustling,” kyale told me. “now they see we are doing good things too.” the slum-dwellers’ potential credibility as experts emerged as an effect of the maps, simultaneously indexing digital fetishism and a persistent (post)colonial faith in the political authority communicated through paper documents. beyond the sociopolitical world of muhimu, however, settlement residents found it difficult to leverage their expertise and make the information they produced matter. owing to a dearth of computers and an unreliable electricity supply in muhimu’s offices, these maps lived offline, separated from the computers that made them possible. over the course of my time in muhimu, their edges began to fray, and their borders slowly changed from white to yellow. away from the radiant light of digital code, their symbolic power slowly weakened as the maps’ material fragility began to mimic the insecurity of the settlement and its residents (cf. larkin 2013). indeed, for the residents of muhimu, the maps embodied the duality of precarity and promise that characterized kenya’s technological takeoff. the maps were a potent metaphor for the uphill battle the mappers fought when they attempted to shift their subject positions through their engagements with digital technology. in their struggle to become socially visible, their status as technical experts and the credibility of their digital data were thrown into question. how could data that was so obviously mediated be trusted? for the mappers, the semiotic-material economy of computers, like the physical space of the ihub, proved to be just out of reach. the temporality of technology if speed was a capacity of digital code, then immediation was not only an ideology driving the mapping work but also a potential material capacity of the maps. “if the community is the one who is mapping their own area, they legitimize a space,” njoroge told me. according to him, digital maps’ speed made them a viable solution to bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. as i mentioned earlier, by codifying the presence of a playground on a digital map, the mappers could prevent others from grabbing the land during the lengthy legal process required to obtain an official title. time, for njoroge, was a negative unit that invited the possibility of nefarious action, a period during which ruthless outsiders could wrongfully claim land that did not belong to them. njoroge’s concerns elucidated a world of law and paper, one structured around temporal gaps that encouraged the breach between representation (a legal land-use document) and reality (the act of land grabbing) to deepen. njoroge explained digital technology—frequently discussed by scholars as a malleable, disembodied form (e.g., mitchell 1996)—as a stable anchor in this uncertain world. it not only alleviated the anxieties slum-dwellers felt around government officials’ potentially nefarious plans, but it also instilled new hope that the slum-dwellers might finally be able to outwit them. “when you have people put it on digital,” njoroge continued, “there’s something to fall back on, to say, ‘in 1980, [the land] was like this.’” here, muhimu’s digital maps physically embodied the immediacy they were presumed to bring about, merging the ideological and the material into a cohesive narrative. in this case, the political potential of the maps was tied to digital code’s ability to visualize a situation quickly. digital technologies’ speed was not always a positive attribute for settlement residents, however; in fact, it often generated new fears about potentially being left behind. “it’s high time we take advantage of [the fact that much of the world is not mapped],” ronald, one of the most technically proficient mappers of the group, relayed to me, with a sense of urgency in his voice. “we are the pioneers of [digital mapping]. and we should grab that opportunity to be recognized. we should expect competition from organizations like google. google are coming in. if we are not creative, we will be locked out of all these things, and our idea will be stolen,” he continued, gesturing to the narrow window of time they had before their own talents would be eclipsed by outsiders with more established credibility. one day, frustrated, njoroge told me that usaid had recently initiated a digital mapping project in muhimu. they wanted geospatial experts to mark properties where they were planning to establish voluntary counseling and testing clinics, part of a larger project to combat hiv. previously, usaid had funded mmp’s technical training, but they did not approach any of muhimu’s residents about the mapping project. “if we were working in partnership with them,” njoroge lamented, “we could easily have done the mapping of the houses for them in a very professional and a very good way.” the problem he identified was that, despite their technical expertise and cultural familiarity with the area, usaid failed to take the mappers seriously. ronald and his peers had already experienced such competition firsthand. an established muhimu community organization was “hijacking [their] idea,” ronald told me. rather than involve the mappers in their work, they hired two people from kenya polytechnic, a local university, “to do the gis. soon they will be producing their own maps with a platform,” ronald bemoaned. he started rattling off ideas for new platforms, one of which involved tracking vulnerable children in the neighborhood. “it’s a high time we start embracing other new technologies,” he said, gesturing to one of the ways the mappers could respond to the competition. here, ronald revealed the uneven geography of power in which the digital maps circulated. rather than evening out the technological terrain, mappers’ sociotechnical work created a pervasive sense of disquiet as they realized that their technical capabilities and the information they collected was far from enough to secure their future. digital maps’ material capacity for speed gestured to the broader temporality of development itself, and of vision 2030’s ambitious goals. for settlement residents, the gleaming surfaces of high-rise luxury apartments being erected all over town, and the expansive highways—sturdy monuments to progress built at breakneck speed by chinese and japanese contractors—signaled both the abstract promise of a grander future and the terrifying threat of impending physical eviction, in which racing ahead always also implied leaving something, or someone, behind. while nairobi’s ict4d advocates championed digital maps in part because of their association with an apolitical world of numbers and code, ronald’s comments show how establishing transparency was a profoundly political activity. at its heart was a struggle over not merely how the neighborhood would be represented, but also over who would have the opportunity to make the neighborhood visible. these moments of tension highlight the degree to which mappers’ subject positions informed both how they strategically mobilized the technologies and, just as crucially, how the technologies shaped them, invigorating them with both exciting new dreams and nerve-wracking nightmares. conclusion: seeing (from) digital peripheries technology in its many guises has long been touted as part of the solution to africa’s problem of so-called underdevelopment. the moralizing missions of the colonial era, for example, figured africans as peoples whose dangerous proximity to nature could be radically transformed through the technological advances of the modern world; the (religious) book and the map became crucial elements for effecting such changes. electric lights and roads, water taps and bridges expressed the contradictions of colonial governance in their very materiality; these technologies’ conspicuous presence in (some) africans’ everyday lives communicated both the accessibility of modernity and the political costs that accompanied it (larkin 2008). the policy literature of powerful institutions such as the world bank has also framed debates about technology in postcolonial africa, discursively constructing african poverty as a technical, rather than a political or a structural, problem (ferguson 1990). read in the context of this history, one could argue that kenyans’ fetishization of the digital as an index of the modern represents nothing more than a current iteration of familiar colonial logics. yet the digital in nairobi was not merely a symbol of modernity; it was also a material form that shaped social life, subjectivity, and understandings of expertise. as a new way of seeing (berger 1972), digital maps enabled muhimu residents to produce self-representation, rather than relinquish it to a negligent or oppressive state, or to foreign development workers.11 this speaks to the new political capacities introduced by icts and the institutional mediators such as mmp that have emerged to provide a means for slum-dwellers to engage with them. by weaving a political argument about visibility, recognition, and belonging into the spaces between their strategically collected gps coordinates, the mappers used technologies to challenge the kenyan state and elite technology sector’s discursive separation of politics and technics. however, the channels for sociopolitical engagement carved by these new technologies were not unobstructed. just as submarine fiber-optic cables can be cut and rendered inoperative by vandals, bringing communications networks to a grinding halt, information in silicon savannah, too, can be intercepted, rerouted, or impeded. to understand how and why, we must consider transparency as a claim about expertise; it can be embraced or dismissed, trusted or not. in muhimu, being able to see the neighborhood through the eyes of its residents was contingent on not only the mappers’ relative adeptness at framing that information but also on a high degree of trust, what rosalind morris (2004) calls “intimacy,” between representer and observer.12 observers had to actively ignore the secrets that transparency-seeking practices attempted to conceal (as with kyale’s mapping activities, mentioned at the outset). nairobi’s techno-utopian discourse implies that digitality itself makes data credible. what the story i have told suggests, however, is that the politics of seeing is inextricably entangled with the subjects and technologies that create the possibility of the picture. the mappers found themselves in an unfortunate double bind: their desire for visibility and recognition in the face of sociopolitical exclusion became a liability in their struggle to change their subject position through digital mapmaking. in this case, the socioeconomic position of muhimu’s mappers profoundly informed the perceived credibility—or lack thereof—of the information they produced. at the same time, their dream of being recognized as legitimate technical experts, a dream activated by their engagements with geospatial technologies, became a site of struggle, as they experienced both internal and external competition in their uphill battle to convince outsiders of their expertise. recent anthropological work has demonstrated acutely how marginalized groups have been included in and excluded from narratives of national technological progress and promise (burrell 2012; larkin 2008; horst and miller 2006; mcintosh 2010). this article contributes to that dialogue, while also exploring how marginality can be reinforced through the very techno-utopian discourses to which the urban poor aspire to belong. in celebrating the digital as a vector of unmediated truth, slum-dwellers also worked to effect their own exclusion, raising questions about the relations of power that structured all aspects of data collection and representation. in muhimu, the digital form cannot be extracted from dreams about development and expertise, practices of transparency-seeking, and perceptions of truth, which, for the neighborhood’s residents, both generated and denied access to the promises of silicon savannah. the example i present here thus indexes not a disjuncture between techno-utopian ideology and the lived reality of nairobi’s urban poor, but rather a dense entanglement. it suggests that future ethnographic attention should focus not only on how new media technologies generate novel social relations or economic opportunities at the margins but also on how they produce new explanatory models that both precipitate and conceal relations of inequality. to see the inequalities (re)produced through technological imaginaries and sociotechnical engagements, we must analyze new media technologies as both potential vectors of sociopolitical recognition and as battlegrounds on which the urban poor’s claims to transparency are affirmed or ignored, heeded or disregarded. notes acknowledgments this article draws on more than two years of ethnographic research in nairobi, kenya, which was funded by the national science foundation’s doctoral dissertation improvement grant (award no. 1023337), the social science research council’s international dissertation research fellowship, the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research’s dissertation fieldwork grant, the fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research abroad program, and the department of anthropology at stanford university. i thank all of these institutions, whose generous support enabled me to plant roots in kenya and to explore my research questions deeply and broadly. i am also grateful to the program on democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism at the university of pennsylvania––in particular to rogers smith, michael x. delli carpini, and greg urban––for giving me the necessary time and space to complete this article. i presented versions of this piece at the american ethnological society spring conference in boston, the annual meeting of the american association of geographers in chicago, the nanotechnologies for development conference at maastricht university in brussels, and the annual meeting of the american anthropological association in washington, dc. i am particularly grateful for the incisive comments provided on drafts of this article by hannah appel, james ferguson, kregg hetherington, becca jensen, sarah ives, dillon mahoney, bruce o’neil, jessica ott, and sylvia yanagisako. the editorial collective at cultural anthropology and the anonymous reviewers improved this article greatly, and i thank dominic boyer in particular for his patience and encouragement throughout the revision process. of course, my deepest debt is to the countless people who shared their worlds with me in kenya; they continuously enlivened the connections between research and everyday life. 1. the nairobi city water and sewage company (ncwsc) provides water to muhimu residents at metered public taps. locals commonly reroute the water to set up their own free water points, like the community one kyale left unmapped. these points are often controlled by neighborhood cartels, which interrupt the water flow and sell it to residents at a steep profit. 2. i use the term slum-dweller deliberately; first, it was how my interlocutors in muhimu self-identified (excepting one mapper, who referred to muhimu as “the ghetto”). second, this self-identification was bound up with their frustrations about their failure to be recognized as technical experts by outsiders such as politicians, civic leaders, and ngos. 3. here, i distinguish knowability from legibility. 4. this does not so much index the power of new technologies to signify fantasies of progress at certain moments (for instance, when initially created) and feelings of abjection at others (for instance, when they break down or decay) (e.g., larkin 2008, 2013; kaika and swyngedouw 2000). rather, it highlights how slum-dwellers’ lived experience of social precarity informed their affective relationship to new technologies. 5. despite the settlement’s illegal status and corresponding lack of an official map, then, muhimu was nevertheless heavily governed, as it was an important node in transnational networks of care and aid, as well as of resource and knowledge extraction (see ferguson 2006, 40; ferguson and gupta 2002). 6. of course, corporations do not hold a monopoly on fetishizing the poor. academics and ngos have long celebrated poor peoples’ creative acts of bricolage in the face of dire economic circumstances (e.g., koolhaas et al. 2000); this focus on the poor’s alterity advances a politics that obscures the structural violence and institutional relations of power that create and sustain inequality. 7. on most digital mapping projects, digital coders and development practitioners performed different roles; the former hunkered down at the ihub to produce new software, while the latter administered technical training directly to settlement residents. 8. while anthropologists have pointed out that enthusiasm for digital technology in kenya is not universal (mcintosh 2010; mahoney 2009), in the capital city of nairobi, it is extremely widespread. in my more than two years of fieldwork between 2010 and 2013, i rarely heard anyone speak of it negatively. i attribute this in part to the fact that my research subjects—both the urban poor and elite—were involved in technology projects. yet i heard similar enthusiasm expressed colloquially by friends, taxi drivers, service workers, and civil servants. 9. the ihub created an m-governance project in september 2011 with the intent to “evaluate how mobile phone technology [could] be used to improve kenyan governance, especially in enhancing transparency through access to water information, service charters and effective communication amongst the different stakeholders” (ihub research n.d.). it hoped to replicate this project in other sectors, including education, health, and infrastructure. 10. in a similar vein, recent anthropological scholarship has drawn attention to the material mediations of infrastructure, highlighting how citizenship and the public sphere are produced in and through the tangible world of pipes and grids as much as through the discourse and publicity foregrounded in liberal conceptions of political life (anand 2011; appel 2012; von schnitzler 2013). 11. of course, this does not mean that the representations muhimu residents produced were unmediated by such actors. nevertheless, the maps arguably conferred the possibility of greater autonomy and control over one’s image than residents had previously experienced. 12. this is a suggestion also made in the critical accounting literature on the social power of numbers (e.g., bloomfield and vurdubakis 1997). references amnesty international 2012 “speaking up from the slums.” news article, april 24. http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item/speaking-up-from-the-slums. anand, nikhil 2011 “pressure: the politechnics of water supply in mumbai.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 4: 542–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01111.x. anderson, benedict 1991 imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. revised edition. london: verso. appel, hannah c. 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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-29/the-do-good-startups-of-nairobi. west, harry g., and todd sanders, eds. 2003 transparency and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order. durham, n.c.: duke university press. winichakul, thongchai 1994 siam mapped: a history of the geo-body of a nation. honolulu: university of hawaii press. world bank 1991 “consultative group for kenya paris, november 25 and 26, 1991: chairman’s report of proceedings.” report no. 64570. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/932051468272358163/consultative-group-for-kenya-paris-november-25-and-26-1991-chairmans-report-of-proceedings. zelaza, tiyambe 1992 “the colonial labour system in kenya.” in an economic history of kenya, edited by william robert ochieng and robert m. maxon, 171–99. nairobi: east african educational publishers. consent’s revenge consent’s revenge audra simpson columbia university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6392-8055 what is it in the way that we imagine the political that might demand or suggest an easy answer? by “easy answer” one might think of a diagnostic, a characteristic of action, a statement of effect, rather than analysis that may course to the unthinkable. recognition, repair, resilience, resistance, revolution—all diagnostics, all characterological, all containers for describing the political. and in this, for grasping at intent and at outcomes. the political describes distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility, the imagination of how action will unfold to reach back to that distribution for a re-sort, but also for a push on what should be. for anthropologists this is a record of the observed and of the political, rendered objectlike. and this rendering of complexity is far from new. the early africanists like e. e. evans-pritchard (1940) took structure and function to constrain action, and even americanists like lewis henry morgan (1851) saw governance and hierarchy converge into stages of civilization that one could sort people into, seamlessly, in a global project of naming and sorting. morgan’s gaze on material culture operated as an anthropological and political magic wand of sorting, ordering, and ranking. the context for both was the colonial and imperial project, and the very occasion of their anthropology owed itself to indigenous dispossession (morgan) or imperial governance (evans-pritchard). the paradigmatic work in political anthropology was itself inherently political, and yet what was defined as “political” in these texts was presented as an order outside of the ordering context itself. the people; the place; their culture—all orderable, ranked, discernible, and ultimately (it was thought) governable. meanwhile, these colonial encounters were and still are a mess of disorder, of so-called transformation, of dispossession of people from land and culture. the easy answers for the emergent field were the ethnological grid; the kinship chart; the orderly, predictable clan unit1—categories that contained difference and controlled for the nightmare many indigenous people were thrust into as they came into anthropological purview. when i first conceived of the project that would become my book mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states (simpson 2014), my plan was a study of nationhood and citizenship among an indigenous people in north america who are resolutely committed to jurisdiction over territories of various forms. their own object was and is territory in a material sense, their land—but also ideas, the past, the present, the future, their membership within the polity itself. they make all of this effort as they travel across various borders and boundaries on their inherited and their claimed territories. they assert their histories in the face of the bordered contestation of those claims by liberal, democratic, and still-settling states. because these are my own people, i had a very strong, a priori ethnographic sense of what was going on. however, i was paying attention differently for years before my formal fieldwork began. our band council (tribal council) was evicting non-native people from the community, the evictions were of a piece with a 50 percent blood-quantum requirement for membership that was vigorously debated, contested, embraced, defended. these processes were symptoms of something more than intolerance or liberal subject failure, and i wanted to know why. i looked for linkages between land, law, and governance within and beyond the reserve. the project turned into something else when i got into the archive and when i conducted interviews—when supposed observations and materials from the community took form in dense, identifiable lines of argument, of stances, of theories themselves. suddenly i had something else, and that something was no easy answer. in fact, before me was a study in difficulty, a study of constraint, of contradictions, and i had no way to describe or theorize what was crucial. what was crucial were the very deliberate, willful, intentional actions that people were making in the face of the expectation that they consent to their own elimination as a people,2 that they consent to having their land taken, their lives controlled, and their stories told for them. refusal was a stance but also a theory of the political that was being pronounced over and over again. it emerged in my own writing through observation of kahnawà:ke action, but also through their words. i would hear “enough is enough,” “it’s not us, it’s them,” “the white man put that there, not us”—on the international border. the people of kahnawà:ke used every opportunity to remind non-native people that this is not their land, that there are other political orders and possibilities. this meant longer waits at borders, awkward (to say the least) interactions with cashiers, as well as difficult personal decisions. i also saw that these matters of moral and political habit were articulated quite perfectly to larger actions by the iroquois confederacy through time, to broader efforts to demand recognition of existing agreements, as well as refusals to play various games. among these games is citizenship: voting, paying taxes—actions that would move mohawks out of their own sovereignty into settler citizenship and into the promise of whiteness.3 all of this pointed analytically to the deeply unequal scene of articulation that people were thrown into and remaking through the quotidian and the grand. this deeply unequal scene of articulation that i am describing may be understood as the settler-colonial present.4 how, then, do those who are targeted for elimination, those who have had their land stolen from them, their bodies and their cultures worked on to be made into something else articulate their politics? how can one articulate political projects if one has been offered a half-life of civilization in exchange for land? these people have preexisting political traditions to draw from—so how do they, then, do things? they refuse to consent to the apparatuses of the state. and in time with that, i refused then, and still do now, to tell the internal story of their struggle. but i consent to telling the story of their constraint. this relationship between refusal and consent became the point to needle through and then stitch with. part of the context for this argument is “let’s not pretend that there is an even playing field for interpretation, let’s not pretend that the iroquois are not already prefigured, that their actions are going to be interpreted fairly or that we do not push on all of these processes in a full-court press.” so i refused to be that thick description prosemaster who would reveal in florid detail the ways in which these things were being sorted out. as such, my ethnographic refusal operated at the level of the text: it was deliberate, it was willful, it was—like the people i was working with and the process i was documenting—very aware of its context of articulation. that context includes a settler suspicion of indigenous peoples, and at times, as we saw during the so-called oka crisis of 1990, a deep hatred for mohawks.5 how then to describe or theorize that which is cognizant of its own space of articulation? the history that governs apprehension? this was also a way of listening that opened up a theoretical possibility for imagining and writing the political ethnographically.6 here was a writing strategy and an analytic that stood outside the repetitive stance of resistance, which again overinscribed the state with its power to determine what mattered (abu-lughod 1990), which treated domination as an all-encompassing frame for action and treated engagements with it as one-up events, or concealed acts of sly, double-meaning subterfuge (scott 1990). here refusal offers its own structure of apprehension that maintains and produces sociality through time, manifest in a political posture of acute awareness of the conditions of this production. settler colonialism is not eventful; it is enduring, it has its own structure and logic and refusal as well, operating like a grammar and posture that sits through time. it is a politics deeply cognizant of its own production, of the never-ending nature of inequity and the need to stay the course. so refusal availed itself through the research and helped as well in thinking beyond what counted through the channel of recognition (coulthard 2014; povinelli 2002; simpson 2014) while pointing to the overly determined, effective capacity of the state. the people i worked with and belong to know all this, and of course they know this in stratified ways. the condition of indigeneity globally is to know this. indigenous peoples are grappling with the fiction of justice while pushing for justice. so this is not particular to kahnawà:ke or to haudenosaunee peoples (mccarthy 2016) and can be found in indigenous ethnography and cultural criticism elsewhere. in her book the white possessive, aileen moreton-robinson (2015) revisits the interpretive debate between gananath obesekeyere and marshall sahlins on the right way to think about captain cook’s interpretation by kanaka maoli—was he a god, was he an invader? how did “the natives” think about him? this was a tired exchange that met on the terrain of questions of structure. moreton-robinson revisits it with those that saw cook and their stories of his arrival on another indigenous coast. her presentation and analysis of the narratives offer a gorgeous triangulation between accounts and a variance in interpretation. she centers the bubu gujin elder hobles’s version, as told to deborah bird rose: “i know you been stealing country belong to mefellow. australia. what we call australia, that’s for aboriginal people. but him been take it away. you been take the land, you been take the mineral, take the gold, everything. take it up this big england” (moreton-robinson 2015, 117). suddenly “how ‘natives’ think” (sahlins 1995) is not a presumptive claim of interpretive ownership; it is a statement of theft, in raw form. what does one do with this sort of knowledge? if such histories animate the consciousness of your people, do you then consent to notions of just law, of just governance? of the lawful theft of your land? it is just this sort of cognizance of differing social and historical facts that make for the posture of refusal. refusal holds on to a truth, structures this truth as stance through time, as its own structure and comingling with the force of presumed and inevitable disappearance and operates as the revenge of consent—the consent to these conditions, to the interpretation that this was fair, and the ongoing sense that this is all over with. when i deploy the term revenge, i am hailing historical consciousness. as such it is a manifestation of deep awareness of the past, of, for example, theft, in raw form. we see this with hobles, who asserts this knowledge against the grain of presumed fairness, of justice, of settled affairs. as such this consciousness avenges the prior—the deep inequities of interpretation that structure the sense of settlement, of matters that are done. revenge does not mean individuated harm inflicted on a perpetrator in a transaction that renders justice. in my usage here, i mean avenging a prior of injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present.7 this refusal to let go, to roll over, to play this game, points to its presumptive falsity of contractual thinking. with this, the notion of two parties knowingly abstracting themselves out of their own context to contract into an agreement.8 so-called treaties are the paradigmatic imagination of the social contract in the new world (north american variant) and are in many cases the foundational document of colonial recognition, the mechanism by which indigenous nationhood is first recognized and affirmed. the matter of postcolonial frankly eludes the north american case: “they” never left; the native never disappeared. treaties are central to contractual thinking in native history and politics, regardless of the fact that most treaties were for land cessions, and many were signed under duress. these conditions were sometimes so forceful that if they were actually conditions of equal standing, they probably still would not have been signed in the first place.9 yet they represent legal forms of incontrovertible rights to land, to resources, to jurisdiction. regardless of intent, regardless of interpretation, they represent agreement and recognition; they are forms of covenant-making that bind. and that is where consent is bound with recognition and its refusal, symptomatic of truth itself and a mechanism for other possibilities. i want to turn now to a different anthropological case to define and theorize refusal further. in barrio libre: criminalizing states and delinquent refusals of the new frontier, gilberto rosas (2012) takes on the structuring role of neoliberalism and capitalism in the production of criminals. his interlocutors are mexican youth who are pushed and moved through borders not of their making. they move through sewers, through filth, in passages that are dangerous, and which hold nothing for them, it seems, but uncertainty on the other side. yet they move, and their posture is one of nonconsent, as well as, at times, flagrant and ostentatious cruelty. they call themselves barrio libre, denizens of the free neighborhood. this is a space without constraint under conditions of “neo-liberal sovereignty-making” (rosas 2012, 100), a sovereignty-making that is incomplete, that in its commitment to free trade and not people, cooks people in the desert. this militarization and violent precarity of life’s passage (and possible death, horrible death, body-slicing death through or beyond the border) is what rosas (2012, 105) names neoliberal sovereignty’s incomplete but “violent affirmation.” in spite of the precarity of life through the border, the youth with whom rosas worked feel freedom—deeply, linguistically, behaviorally. their own force on others is a manifestation of this unvanquished and internal script of refusal. here rosas (2012, 109) describes their geopolitics, their mapping, and their stance: “barrio libre was more than a free-floating geography, superimposed over a dominant one . . . to belong to it was an expansive, furious refusal of normativity, an enraged subversion of the respective sovereignties of the u.s. and mexico that seeped from under the new frontier.” what of these politics? is this an agreed-upon resistance? is this resilience, with lives and bodies contorting to withstand and accommodate pain and structures of injustice?10 they inflict pain. they walk through shit to get to where they are going. they get arrested. they get deported. they run and climb and get killed, fleeing from officers. their refusal to see this condition as anything other than a state of freedom is a refusal for us of the easy answer, of a structure of consent, of ease. there is nothing easy in what i have charted out in this brief thesis on refusal. rosas’s interlocutors smash these categorical imperatives—what i want to call “the easy answers.” the people i work with refuse the eliminatory efforts of the state. they operate as nationals in a scene of wardship and dispossession. they differ from rosas’s interlocutors, but they operate from a similar and flagrantly self-assured position, and from an impossible-to-record, or to-analyze, easy answer. my ethnographic prerogative is to make the practice of ethnography itself a refusal in time with theirs. notes acknowledgments thanks are owed to robert nichols for reading and offering comment. thanks, as well, to carole mcgranahan for not only proposing this project but also for shepherding us and writing the introductory essay. erica weiss, elisa sobo, carole mcgranahan, and i have commented on each other’s essays in the course of writing and submission. the concerns of external reviewers improved the final version. any mistakes are my own. 1. here, i am indebted to mark rifkin’s (2011) crucial argumentation. 2. see wolfe 2006 for exposition on this key definitional point on settler colonialism (contra other colonialisms). what is desired is land, not labor (although this can be amended with recourse to data)—indigenous people are “in the way” and so must be eliminated as it is their land that is desired. 3. please note that all four essays in this openings collection point to the deep sociality that is also tied to the act of refusal. 4. for a book-length examination of the temporality of settler colonialism, see veracini 2015. 5. haudenosaunee means “people of the longhouse” (people who build a house, mohawk). this was heard and translated into french and popularized through time as “iroquois.” haudenosaunee or iroquois refers to the confederation of six nations (tuscarora, seneca, cayuga, onondaga, oneida, mohawk). kahnawà:ke mohawks are of the easternmost nation, whose role was and is imagined as keepers of the eastern door of the metaphoric and geographical longhouse that extended across what is now the northeastern united states. 6. see simpson 2007, which was an earlier attempt to name and document this ethnographic practice. the article was heavily revised and appears as the fourth chapter of my book mohawk interruptus (simpson 2014). 7. thanks to elisa sobo for pushing me on this. 8. i am deeply indebted to both robert nichols (2013, 2014) and sherene razack (2002) for their thinking on the coloniality of the contract. i am taking it in a different direction here, but their work has led me to this point. 9. for conditions of starvation and the so-called numbered treaties in canada, see daschuk 2013. for an important interpretation of the treaty-signing moment as imperfect but manifesting the best intentions (for indigenous signatories), see lyons 2010. 10. see fennell 2012 for an important analysis of the production of affects of pleasurable vulnerability and resilience in discussions over a chicago housing project museum. references abu-lughod, lila 1990 “the romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through bedouin women.” american ethnologist 17, no. 1: 41–55. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1525/ae.1990.17.1.02a00030. coulthard, glen sean 2014 red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. daschuk, james 2013 clearing the plains: disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of aboriginal life. regina, sk: university of regina press. evans-pritchard, e. e. 1940 the nuer: description and modes of livelihood and political institutions of a nilotic people. oxford: clarendon. fennell, catherine 2012 “the museum of resilience: raising a sympathetic public in postwelfare chicago.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 4: 641–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ j.1548-1360.2012.01165.x. lyons, scott richard 2010 x-marks: native signatures of assent. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. mccarthy, theresa 2016 in divided unity: haudenosaunee reclamation at grand river. tucson: university of arizona press. morgan, lewis henry 1851 the league of the ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or iroquois. rochester, n.y.: sage. moreton-robinson, aileen 2015 the white possessive: property, power, and indigenous sovereignty. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. nichols, robert 2013 “indigeneity and the social contract today.” philosophy and social criticism 39, no. 2: 165–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0191453712470359. 2014 “contract and usurpation.” in theorizing native studies, edited by audra simpson and andrea smith, 99–121. durham, n.c.: duke university press. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2002 the cunning of recognition: indigenous alterities and australian multiculturalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. razack, sherene 2002 “the murder of pamela george.” in race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society, edited by sherene razack, 121–47. toronto: between the lines. rifkin, mark 2011 when did indians become straight? kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty. new york: oxford university press. rosas, gilberto 2012 barrio libre: criminalizing states and delinquent refusals of the new frontier. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sahlins, marshall 1995 how “natives” think: about captain cook, for example. chicago: university of chicago press. scott, james c. 1990 domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. new haven, conn.: yale university press. simpson, audra 2007 “ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue, no. 9: 67–80. http://junctures.org/ index.php/junctures/issue/view/11/showtoc. 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. veracini, lorenzo 2015 the settler colonial present. new york: palgrave macmillan. wolfe, patrick 2006 “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8, no. 4: 387–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. circulating ignorance circulating ignorance: complexity and agnogenesis in the obesity “epidemic” emilia sanabria ecole normale supérieure de lyon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5595-7905 i log into skype with the usual hesitancy—is 2 p.m. gmt noon or 1 p.m. in france? i am joining the monthly executive committee (ec) call of the world public health nutrition association (wphna), along with colleagues in australia, brazil, ghana, norway, south africa, and the united kingdom. the agenda is full, owing to the upcoming international conference on nutrition (icn2).1 for nearly a year, the association, along with others, has been engaged in the delicate exercise of proposing modifications to the draft framework for action that united nations (un) member states will endorse at icn2. today we discuss the loss of a footnote pertaining to the technical definition of a “healthy diet.” one prominent anti-sugar advocacy group wants to see this defined as a diet in which only 5 percent of calories come from added sugar.2 there are a few weeks to go still, but icn2’s political reach already feels compromised. agenda point 3 of our meeting asks whether the association should sign a letter to appear in the lancet expressing its support for a global convention on nutrition, one modeled on the global framework convention on tobacco. the hope is that icn2 may lead to a legally binding international framework to address global malnutrition, which in the twenty-first century includes competing rates of hunger and obesity. today, our discussion turns on how the term nonstate actors adopted by the un lumps together bigfood corporations, health agencies, patient associations, and civil society organizations defending small-scale farmers or human rights. “business,” one senior member of the ec notes, is being granted “inappropriate access” to the meeting, and using this undue influence to lobby against a legally binding framework convention. everyone shares anecdotes about behind-the-scenes lobbying they have observed in their various positions. much of it pertains to semantics: pushing for individual responsibility where market regulation is discussed, advocating a need for “just more food” when nutritional quality or changes to the food system are invoked.3 the wphna is fairly unique in its approach. although it is mainly constituted of medically trained nutritionists, it subscribes to a vision that sees nutrition as a political as much as a biological phenomenon. for the wphna executive, this implies critically engaging with the way in which scientific evidence is deployed in the field of nutrition and questioning the role bigfood plays in addressing global malnutrition. ignorance, designed and pervasive this article examines the things that are said to be un/known about obesity and the way in which attributions of knowledge or ignorance circulate within the field of public health nutrition. i have been struck by experts’ focus on knowing more and building better evidence bases, even as they reflect on how much is not known about obesity. what does this focus on knowing obfuscate? the knowledge constructed in expert meetings and scientific forums provides the contours of possible public health interventions addressing obesity. such framings recast not just what is known (or not yet known) but also what is knowable. my article draws on recent work on the social construction of ignorance (croissant 2014; geissler 2013; kelly and beisel 2011; mcgoey 2012; pinto 2015; proctor 2011) to argue that the field of evidence in obesity science is fashioned in a way that deflects attention (and responsibility) away from questions of food production, distribution, and marketing and continues to frame the problem as one of individual responsibility. i analyze the variegated forms of un/knowing that arise from my observations concerning the operational problems of contending with complexities and uncertainties in the field of obesity science to attend to the politics at stake in the maintenance of distinctions between knowledge and ignorance. recent work in social theory has turned attention to how unknowing is not simply the absence of knowledge; rather, it may be actively produced by social practices. the term agnotology has been coined to refocus attention away from what we know and how we know to what we do not know and why (proctor and schiebinger 2008). it broadens the focus given to the social construction of knowledge to include analyses of the social production of ignorance. linsey mcgoey’s (2007) analysis of “strategic ignorance” shows, for example, how willful blindness on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry constitutes a strategy used to exonerate it from the need to take action. uncertain, complex, contradictory, or competing scientific facts may be mobilized as political capital or rhetorical tools that shift blame, as those communicating ignorance are excused (oreskes and conway 2011). earlier analyses of agnogenesis, or the production of ignorance (pinto 2015, 296), focused on the instrumental production of ignorance for corporate profit. while important in revealing the impact of the neoliberalization and industrialization of scientific research (hess 2015), such studies implicitly assume that this is bad science and that transparency would reduce scientific ignorance (frickel and edwards 2014; pinto 2015). yet ignorance is a somewhat inevitable and at times positive feature of scientific activity and organizational labor (croissant 2014; gross and mcgoey 2015). the more guileless production of ignorance resulting from organizational processes is—or can be—thoroughly embroiled with willful intent to create strategic opportunities from this decoupling of facts (heimer 2012). recent work on ignorance departs from the normative assumption that science deals in certainty and points to the fact that the very process of scientific research, from experimental design to data analysis and publication norms, have been shaped from within by decades of industry-funded research. ignorance reigns not (only) because transnational corporations secretly produce doubt but also because the epistemic form that science has acquired—its evidentiary norms, reductionist underpinnings, and emphasis on causality and quantification—render many relations invisible (kleinman and suryanarayanan 2015). david hess (2015) proposes the notion of “undone science” to move past accounts that locate the instrumentalization of uncertainty in vertical relations between scientific elites and disempowered publics or their governments. undone science refers to those known unknowns that civil society organizations highlight as having potential public benefit but that industrial elites may actively seek to elide through their influence on what hess (2015, 142) calls “the political opportunity structure of research funding.” as manuela pinto (2015, 310) notes, at stake is a discussion of the epistemic and social goals of science, against which practices of ignorance construction can be measured. governments, corporations, or international agencies often appeal to available evidentiary regimes to support their actions, but such appeals to the neutrality of evidence prove highly problematic. critical scholars are calling attention to the fact that scientific evidence concerning public health interventions constitutes only one voice in a much larger conversation. they systematically review the repertoire of actions adopted by corporations to mold or landscape the field of evidence and strategically orient scientific debate and policy options (hawkes and buse 2011, moodie et al. 2013; proctor 2011; stuckler et al. 2012; ulucanlar et al. 2014). the intricate links between transnational food corporations and nutrition experts in key governmental and un decision-making roles across the globe are well established (e.g., gornall 2015; moodie et al. 2013). what is more difficult to ascertain is exactly how this connection shapes the knowledge that researchers are producing or inflects the decisions they make as experts. one analysis found that industry-funded studies (or those reporting conflicts of interest) were five times more likely to report a conclusion of no positive association between soft-drink consumption and weight gain than those with no declared industry funding (bes-rastrollo et al. 2013). robert proctor (2011) documents how the tobacco industry has not just corrupted scientific knowledge about tobacco risk but shaped it from within, through decades of ties between industry and research. each piece of industry-sponsored research may appear perfectly unbiased at the micro level, but the scale of the tactic becomes evident when such “purchased engagement with public health” is multiplied globally (gornall 2015). similarly, writing on the pharmaceutical industry’s use of scientific ghostwriting, mario biagioli (forthcoming) shows how, taken individually, each peer-reviewed piece is technically not fraudulent, though the net cumulative effect shifts the knowledge base in a direction favorable to corporate interests. rather than discrediting the veracity of the evidence produced in industry-research partnerships, this article shows how the consensus forged in conferences and policy spaces concerning the uncertainty and complexity of obesity’s determinants creates a continued deflection of responsibilities back to the purported knowledge deficiencies of individual eaters. there are stakes in narrating these forms of ignorance—those imputed or strategically kept out of public debate by agrofood business lobbies—together. keeping the stories apart produces an absence that obscures the labor of making them appear unrelated. i bring together a series of ethnographic observations from policy spaces, scientific forums, and international advocacy groups in which the downplaying of industrial responsibilities and the overemphasizing of individual responsibilities to know about healthy eating becomes particularly clear. by bringing these variegated forms of nonknowledge together, the article examines the deflections of responsibility at play between individuals deemed ignorant and a food industry highly active in downplaying its role in the obesity epidemic. i present a range of analyses arguing that this represents a deliberate strategy on the part of corporate actors. my intervention here also means to move beyond this observation to show how the structuring of the field of evidence, the possibility of reliably showing causal relations between the political and socioeconomic determinants of malnutrition and measurable health indexes is largely compromised not simply by the absence of good evidence but also because the existing parameters of good science cannot straightforwardly reveal such relations. this is because the configuration of the knowable is increasingly defined in terms of whether knowledge is actionable (as determined by the logic of evidence-based medicine eloquently described by vincanne adams [2013]). obesity, like many of today’s complex problems, results from phenomena spanning multiple scales and determined by myriad nested interactions, from the political economies of market regulation to the modes of agricultural production, the biochemistry of appetite regulation, urban planning, changing family structures, meal patterns, and labor forms. yet despite growing recognition of the problem’s heavy overdetermination (e.g., u.k. government office of science 2007), public intervention—and the science produced to guide or validate such intervention—remains wedded to a mode of reading and intervening that has limited purchase on the complexity with which it contends. the epistemic regimes that dominate the field of public health (and many other areas of public policy) frame complex problems in a manner that reduces them to what is manageable, even when such framings are contested or shown to be inadequate. complex conditions resist explanation within extant modes of knowing. writing on how it is that we continue to ignore many of the effects of toxics, kim fortun (2012, 452) suggests that this inattention derives from a tendency to rely on established idioms and ways of thinking, although these do not grasp the problems at hand. for example, ignorance is produced when the idioms and thought styles of mechanics are imposed on toxics. no evidence of harm emerges “because the evidence deemed necessary is at odds with the condition it is meant to represent.” this state of affairs demands our urgent and critical engagement with the specific meaning of evidence. obesity and the french paradox obesity rates did not rise as rapidly in france as elsewhere. in the wake of the so-called globesity epidemic, many experts puzzled over this seemingly french paradox: how could the french remain slim despite their gastronomic traditions, three-course meals, hundreds of cheeses, and boulangeries full of irresistible pastries? yet over the last decade, french obesity rates have caught up with those of france’s european neighbors. as a consequence, three major public health initiatives were launched to tackle noncommunicable chronic diseases associated with high body-mass indices (bmis). such initiatives often revolve around the idea that controlling weight involves willpower and choice; they also tend to focus on nutrition education and information. within this model, people receive information, are expected to understand it, and to change their behavior accordingly. as deborah prentice (2015, 266) puts it: “ignorance is a popular explanation for dysfunctional behavior.” health education interventions are often limited to a fairly unidirectional process of information transfer from a knowledgeable educator to a purportedly ignorant individual. this approach implicitly assumes that knowledge makes for a sufficient condition to bring about modified behavior, overlooking the possibility that economic conditions, work rhythms, access to healthy foodscapes, or the commensal dimension of eating might constrain the application of knowledge about nutrition. obesity has been made into a highly visible issue globally. think of the news reports and documentaries depicting the headless obese bodies thought to populate contemporary landscapes or the exponential growth curves depicting global obesity trends and rising rates of cardiovascular disease. the bmi surreptitiously provides a numerical valence to what is apparently plain to see. it provides clinicians with a tipping point, albeit one whose global standardization led millions to move from overweight to obese overnight, without gaining so much as a pound. as elsewhere, french public health programs targeting obesity characterize it as an epidemic, although the epidemiological data to support this claim remains disputed (gard 2011). the surveillance tools at work in french preschools now enable health workers to identify “future obèses [obese persons]” even before they move out of the normal weight range. this feat of making the future obese child visible is accomplished with a simple measurement tool with which all french children are now screened. it involves mapping the so-called adiposity rebound, which is a rise in bmi that occurs between the ages of three and seven years. an early adiposity rebound is said to constitute a risk factor for obesity later on in life. as one school nurse told me: “it’s a marvelous tool; you can literally see the future obèse before he gains the weight.” but what do such representations obscure? clare herrick (2009, 57) points to the disjuncture between the complexity and uncertainty surrounding obesity’s etiology and the apparent display of confidence in advancing evidence of ever-rising rates of obesity, making for a unique health crisis that has attracted hyperbolic public attention. i draw on materials gathered in the context of my research on alimentary health in france (sanabria 2015; sanabria and yates-doerr 2015) and on a retrospective ethnographization (see ingold 2014) of my encounters with colleagues at the wphna and in my (french) workplace, where i was hired to carry out anthropological research in the field of health education. this article refracts a series of global questions concerning the circulation of ignorance in the construction of evidentiary regimes of nutritional interventions through a range of materials collected in france and through my participation in global forums such as the wphna. as such, i do not purport to provide an ethnographic description of obesity in france as much as to situate the problem within a specific ethnographic setting.4 the issue i attend to is difficult to locate as it is raised by a subgroup of vocal but globally dispersed critical public health nutrition advocates, with some of whom i have been collaborating since i joined the wphna’s executive committee in 2013. if anything, what is specific to the french situation is the absence of the debate from the public arena. my article draws on observations gathered at numerous french policy meetings, expert workshops, and conferences on how to change les comportements alimentaires (eating behaviors), as well as on a review of published literature on public health nutrition interventions. beyond knowledge and its absence: health education and behavior change the french national program for nutrition and heath (pnns) identifies “information education communication” (iec) as its main strategic lever to shape food behaviors. yet despite considerable investment in such campaigns, obesity rates continue their progression, leading some to suggest that this represents a weak strategy in the face of our strong biological drive to seek out and enjoy calorie-dense foods (brownell and gold 2012; kessler 2009). today, the idea that education through the conveying of messages could impact health behaviors seems quaint. traditionally, health education was premised on a hierarchical model of knowledge transfer in which ignorant individuals were deemed incapable of making appropriate health decisions. the who’s 1986 ottawa charter highlighted the importance of making all governmental policy—from urban planning to housing, employment, and transport—“healthy.” yet the majority of governments have taken the easy (and cheaper) route of reducing health promotion to health education and social marketing (bergeron, castel, and nouguez 2013; nutbeam 2005; whitehead and irvine 2011). despite the emerging recognition that informing has not worked, iec models of health education remain entrenched and continue to mobilize attention among experts. in the absence of a magic bullet, targeting health behaviors through education is seen as the sole option. this point was put quite bluntly to me during a research meeting that explored possible lines of collaboration to identify, in one senior nutritionist’s words, how best to éduquer les comportements alimentaires (educate health behaviors) to prevent obesity. the meeting followed a tour of a ward in a major hospital in the south of france where “morbid” obesity is tackled. with little success, as the intern noted, given that the patients “qui échouent là [who wash up here]” return to the same real-life problems after the ward, where they cannot apply health recommendations. more used to working in brazilian public hospitals than french ones, i was stunned to observe contrasts not unlike those i had so often witnessed in brazil: the blatant disparities between thin, well-to-do, white middle-class health professionals and the patients on the wards, who were of mixed rural and immigrant origins and whose stories and bodies attested to lives lived in precarity. “until we get better epidemiological support for bariatric surgery, all we can do is éduquer nos obèses [educate our obese persons],” the chief consultant (who receives, as many french nutritionists do, funding from the fondation nestlé and other, less explicitly named corporate entities) concluded. the medical team is acutely aware of the social dimensions of the problem. “some [patients] don’t even have a dining table!” the intern exclaimed. these patients just microwave their food and eat in front of the television (which, in france, is often referred to as an americanization of eating). social inequalities, maximizing the calorie per euro ratio, and lack of education constituted the main determinants of the issue, in the medical practitioners’ view. this insight in some respects represents a positive step, laying the groundwork for better cross-disciplinary understanding between medical professionals and anthropologists. but as my colleague and i returned to the stories we had just heard, which revealed more patient knowledge of nutritional recommendations than doctors often recognize and which pointed to the challenges of eating a balanced home-cooked diet when working les trois-huits5 or struggling to resist foods that were simply everywhere, we were cut short by the consultant: “it’s all well and easy for you to evoke the endless determinants and say it’s more complicated, but we have people dying of obesity and we need answers we can put into practice.” one series of answers sought by nutritionists surrounds how to motivate behavior change through education, and social scientists such as myself have been called on to help operationalize this. as might be expected, the particular set of meetings i am describing ended without us identifying a common rationale. but it made me appreciate afresh the clinician’s sense of urgency and the disjuncture between the knowledge we as anthropologists produce and the kind of knowledge that might be required in the day-to-day life of the clinic. literacy, knowledge acquisition, information, and education are relatively interchangeable in these contexts. yet changed behavior does not flow, linearly, from information transfer. critical health pedagogues have shown that reducing education to information transfer does little more than attribute ignorance to others, rendering them passive recipients of pedagogical endeavors (fitzpatrick and tinning 2014). although french nutritional health educators increasingly recognize the insufficiency of information transfer alone, developing interventions that extend beyond it risks being dismissed as cumbersome, expensive, or based on uncertain evidentiary regimes. in the schools in which i have observed nutritional education, these endeavors seldom amount to more than testing a student’s ability to list food groups and rehearse the health messages dispensed in national food guidelines (and made known to young people principally through the health warnings on the “junk” foods heavily marketed to them). “it’s a bit of a lost battle,” one school nurse told me as we discussed the challenges of nutritional education in the corridor while the students played an online game about nutrition as part of their civics and health education curricula. although growing consensus exists about the need for a change in nutritional behaviors, how it is to be achieved (according to whose definition and with what means) remains an open question. as i circulate through spaces where the work of rendering obesity interventions (measurably) implementable is carried out, i find myself further removed from the urgencies of tackling morbid obesity or navigating euphemisms to avoid stigmatizing overweight adolescents in the classroom. one morning i attend an expert meeting in paris on nutrition and chronic disease, where a senior civil servant from the assurance maladie (the health branch of france’s social security system) is giving a speech that thoroughly confuses health promotion and disease prevention. monsieur dupont spoke of promoting individual responsibility for health, “not to place the blame on obese people but to enable them to become stewards of their own health.” dupont has developed a program called active health coaching. coaching, in france, evokes to many left-wing defenders of public health the worst of neoliberal ideologies, with its individualization of responsibility and its privatization of structural and societal issues. his tone at the meeting is deliberately provocative, implicitly targeting such leftist critiques: “we spend 11 million [euros] on diabetes alone. we’re driving into a wall. that’s ok, but not while we’re honking our horn and not with me at the wheel.” active health coaching is still in its trial period, but it signals an interesting move in the french social security system. i later met with several active health coaching program managers in the pristine assurance maladie headquarters in versailles. there are blurred rationales underlying the program’s development, i realized, as we sipped oversweetened coffee from disposable plastic cups. economics transpires behind the language of empowerment; “i know it’s not politically correct to say so when you work for the assurance maladie, but we need to start saving,” dupont told me. coaching is done in groups, a local program manager explained, because it creates a “ripple effect” and because it is cheaper than individual coaching. information remains crucial: members who sign up for the active nutrition program go through a motivational interview in which they commit to four obligatory “information workshops.” the interview serves to weed out “those for whom we can’t do anything,” the manager clarified, so that they do not take up a “space that can be given to a motivated obèse; this is public money after all.” public money invested into expensive real estate, with modern shop fronts and dedicated hostesses “to shake off the dusty image of the assurance maladie,” another manager boasted. not everyone shares this vision of change, of course. as one assurance maladie employee from the much less prosperous saint-denis neighborhood noted: “they are opening flashy agencies and personalized e-coaching with dubious behavior-change experts, while closing local branches and suppressing face-to-face contact in the places where it is most needed.” as elsewhere, neuromarketing and nudging are on the rise in french public health circles (e.g., oullier and sauneron 2010). neuroprévention, as it is dubbed, draws on the “new” behavioral economics to reveal that individuals are also driven by unconscious factors (rice 2013). the “naive informational model of health education has failed,” a senior health economist stated during the opening session of a meeting of french policymakers gathered to identify new levers for change in nutrition. after a welcome buffet featuring the event’s industrial sponsor’s new “healthy,” vacuum-sealed, diabetic-friendly breakfast bar (but no fruit, another attendant noted with a wink), the meeting kicked off with a talk by a neuroscientist and the director of france’s largest marketing research institute. he presented data on the importance of unconscious processes in driving behaviors modeled on “real-life shopping experiments.” consumers make choices in a fraction of a second, he informed us, without any cognitive engagement. “to target reason is to miss the decision [making].” it is telling of the shifts underway that the meeting’s organizers would have a marketing director address an assembly of policymakers, doctors, and researchers gathered to identify levers for change in nutrition. as the director told us: “i help my clients [pepsico, danone, unilever, and kraft, according to his declaration of interests] sell more. the ethics are your bit.” unconscious drives occupy a curious place between knowledge and its absence. such an intrusion (as behavioral economists often present it) of the prerational has a complicated relation to knowledge and lack thereof. it is based on a distinction, introduced by daniel kahneman (2011), between two systems of knowing: one rational and logical, the other intuitive and perceptual. health education and most obesity-prevention strategies focus on the rational system, which processes new information against existing knowledge. yet the intuitive system takes new information at face value, such that deborah prentice (2015, 267) suggests it is an open question as to whether this system can experience ignorance. the second system always knows something, even if the knowing is biased, partial, or skewed. “misknowledge” (prentice 2015) operating at this level interferes, in the view of behavioral economists, with the rational mind’s capacity to translate knowledge into action. public health interventions have essentially targeted the rational mind, providing it with information that in the emergent competing view cannot be operationalized because of the irruption of precognitive drives. here, we have an interplay between forms of unconscious knowing, on the one hand (such as the affective drives seen to impede rational decision-making capabilities) and forms of strategic ignorance, on the other. this is all the more troubling when we consider that tools developed to sell more calorie-dense foods are now being marketed to public health experts to redress the deleterious impact of the massive increase in consumption of these foods. considering that the food industry’s budget to deploy these marketing tools is nearly tenfold that invested annually by governments in health promotion, the battle may not just be lost but in fact unwinnable. a civic (individual) responsibility for health? sheila jasanoff (2005, 258) proposes the term civic epistemologies to refer to how publics know things in common. such public knowing varies between national contexts as knowledge is presented, tested, and put to use in public arenas. the concept of civic epistemologies poses public life as a “proving ground for knowledge claims and as a theater for establishing the credibility of public actions.” the expert meetings and conferences i describe here can be thought of as theaters of civic epistemologies. they are not policymaking spaces as such, for this labor takes place elsewhere, in ministerial cabinets. nor can they really be conceived as spaces of public accountability, for the publics that they bring together consist of experts, research funding agencies, policymakers, and health professionals vested in addressing nutrition-related health issues. these spaces collectively enact a problem space around obesity, and they outline the contours of possible interventions. as such, they are spaces in which the constitutive dimensions of civic epistemologies about obesity are enacted. the knowledges that circulate here draw eclectically on various disciplines and do not map neatly onto those at work in the more formal scientific arena. claims about rendering specific interventions operational become legitimized through an active investment in such spaces. it is in and through them that a specific (french) rendition of the individual’s civic responsibility for health is constructed and enlivened. on a rainy winter morning, a group of representatives from the pnns, the plan obésité (obesity plan), the assurance maladie, and the mutualité française,6 came together with academic researchers in the parisian headquarters of a leading nonprofit health insurance company to discuss the relative costs of nutrition-related chronic conditions, as well as the contours of different strategic interventions. the mutualité française’s representative began her presentation by stating that more than 8 million french people are supported under a chronic disease regime. while this represents only 12 percent of the population, it accounts for more than 65 percent of national health costs. at stake, she poignantly argued, is the continued existence of france’s social security model: “if costs continue to rise, our system of solidarity will be called into question.” as a spokesperson for the french nonprofit mutuelle system of health insurance, she was no neutral commentator on the importance of addressing social inequalities and the sustainability of france’s model of social solidarity. from her point of view, the unsustainable costs incurred because of chronic disease made overweight people a direct threat to france’s social contract. it seemed ironic to hear this defender of social equality speak of “the problem that the obese lay on our system.” likewise, the representative from the direction générale de la santé of the ministry of health and social affairs noted the costs of obesity-related disease: “15 billion [euros] a year weighs heavily on public accounts. we can reduce this with preventative education targeting the obese.” in the long list of burdens “the obese” apparently place on society, the toll they take on solidarity and social cohesion makes for a striking addition. this language points to lines of fracture among who is amenable to solidarity, who is included, and how it is gauged. in cruel optimism, lauren berlant (2011, 98) invites us to consider the distribution of agency assumed in national instantiations of public health imaginaries. she interrogates the paradoxical coexistence of an “attrition of the subject” and of normative notions of agency that assume the subject will, can, or should care for herself. berlant describes how liberals (in the u.s. sense of the term) seek to reclaim the state as a reparative resource in the face of a deregulated market circulating unhealthy commodities, while conservatives denounce such measures as those of a “communist” or “nanny” state. this approach provides an interesting foil to the situation i am describing. viewed from france, the u.s. debates around obamacare are almost incomprehensible. in france, north american calls to charge obese persons more for their health care are often held up as emblematic of national differences in relations between the state and its citizens. this renders the statements that circulated at the expert meeting described above striking, as they point to an attrition of the french social contract in relation to obesity. in the french context, the problem is framed not in terms of paying for those who have brought ill health on themselves, but rather in terms of an intolerance toward obesity-incurred health costs threatening french social security.7 there are important stakes in how a problem and its solution are framed. what counts as part of the story of obesity is highly political. having outlined how many public health interventions continue to hold individuals responsible, i now examine how the field of evidence is landscaped to enhance the promissory value of certain interventions over others. i suggest that strategic ignorance (mcgoey 2012) may purposefully obscure or overemphasize the relative implementability or efficacy of interventions and show that this often serves the purpose of deflecting responsibilities back onto individuals. complexity, uncertainty, and the scalar logics of public health nutrition a common feature of the presentations given in policy circles on chronic disease or obesity prevention is the graphic representation of factors affecting health outcomes and the scales at which interventions should be designed. many of the models used in these contexts are variations of the socio-ecological framework of health. figure 1. one variant of the socio-ecological framework of health promotion. uncredited slide. these models give a visual representation of the classic set of categories that appear in the literature on health promotion. the models depict concentric circles and place the individual at the center of consecutive layers of interpersonal, community, organizational, or policy influences. they obscure interactions between these predefined spheres and reveal the importance of the modern, rational individual decision-maker for public health. many accounts of the complex problem of malnutrition cannot be accommodated by these models and their reified categories. one such account considers the growing availability of processed hyperpalatable foods in urban environments as a major factor in the rise of obesity. hyperpalatability refers to the fine-tuning of foods by the industry to enthrall the senses, override satiety, and motivate eaters to pursue more (kessler 2009). this phenomenon collapses the scalar relations between categories such as body, individual, environment, or political-legal regulation. here macroeconomic forces—such as trade agreements, pricing mechanisms, or the massive entrance of transnational food and beverage companies into developing world markets—directly target the biochemistry of appetite regulation. that is, they methodically elicit the irruption of what behavioral economists refer to as precognitive drives. in the cybernetic models used to think the relations between eaters and the environments in which they source foods, nutrients, fat cells, the gastrointestinal tract, brain regions, and pleasure receptors undermine eaters’ capacities to make rational choices (sanabria 2015). for example, in figure 2 (variations of which increasingly appear in the expert meetings i attend), the environment influences metabolism through mechanisms such as availability, palatability, taste, and social habits. feedback loops set by a central “metabolic brain” link it to the internal milieu, graphically represented by free-floating organs. i argue that, at present, only the first type of graphic representation informs public action. figure 2. schematic diagram of the major factors determining the neural control of appetite and energy balance regulation. figure from “neural systems controlling the drive to eat: mind versus metabolism,” by zheng huiyuan and hans-rudi berthoud, http://dx.doi.org/10.1152/physiol.00047.2007. hannah landecker (2013) asks after the “knowledge effects” of the growth of metabolic disorders such as those associated with obesity worldwide. she argues that the efforts to comprehend and treat metabolic disorders are transforming our knowledge of life. the shift she traces between industrial and postindustrial metabolism makes for one way to read the changes in the graphic representations of obesity mobilized here. “fat knowledge,” or the knowledge effects of obesity, has brought about a shift in the conceptual language of metabolic research, away from the language of manufacturing and energy toward that of regulation, signal, and information (landecker 2013, 511). landecker (2013, 516) points out that the conditions for the growth of postindustrial metabolic fat knowledge were set by the logics of industrial metabolism and the “fattening effects of industrialization.” likewise, julie guthman (2015) shows how the imbalance of food production and food consumption poses a limit to capitalist accumulation. the food industry addresses this imbalance through competitive marketing, increased food processing, and substitutionism, as well as by inducing people to eat more.8 the changes made to the material constitution of foods that exist primarily to “resolve a particular limit to capitalism” (guthman 2015, 9) have many as yet unknown effects on eaters’ metabolisms and the sustainability of local food systems. the question is whether (and how) such effects could become knowable. as we saw at the outset, obesity’s complexity spans phenomena operating at multiple scales. the problem of relating these often incommensurable scales in a manner that can guide interventions addressing obesity appears acutely at relevant scientific gatherings. a recent european congress on obesity (eco) held in france brought together more than 2,500 international delegates around a multistream scientific program that included high-profile industry-sponsored satellite sessions. the scientific program included presentations on the clinical management and prevention of obesity, bariatric surgery, adipose tissue physiopathology, epigenetics, epidemiology, psychiatry, health economics, and social psychology. attending such an event, one is struck by the complexity of the processes described at each scale. what relations are crafted between the ontologically different entities held in the various models, from brain parts to blood sugar measures, from experiences of hunger to the spatial politics of food distribution, from metabolic hormones to agrarian policies or reforms to the health-care system (both notable absences from eco)? the tangible angst surrounding obesity is linked to the nature of the problem it appears to present. putting all of these scales together gives rise to an almost absurdly complex representation. for instance, the foresight report (u.k. government office of science 2007) included the obesity system map, which attempts to represent this complexity. the map reveals the difficulty inherent in making policy on the basis of the proliferation of factors recognized as affecting dietary health outcomes. figure 3. the foresight obesity systems map. image by the foresight programme, u.k. government office of science. stanley ulijaszek (2015) remarks that the obesity systems map explicitly frames obesity as a complex issue that requires multiple sites of intervention beyond individual-focused health education. whether or not this complexity exceeds that of other health problems (which also span biochemical, social, behavioral, and environmental phenomena), what is notable about the field of obesity is the way in which the arena reflexively grapples with its own complexity. in his analysis of the obesity systems map, ulijaszek draws on chunglin kwa’s (2002) analysis of the ways in which science has approached complexity. kwa differentiates between two models of complexity in science: the romantic and the baroque. in this schema, romantic framings of complexity are founded on the idea of hierarchical levels of organization integrated into a functional whole. romantic complexity thus aims to provide a coherent model of complex systems by mapping the relations between constitutive elements. the baroque sensibility, on the other hand, views complexity as endless and impossible to know fully (law 2004). within baroque complexity, it is not possible to arrive at an emergent overview of the determinants and factors affecting a complex system given the lack of final coherence and the existence of only partially mappable connections and uncertain relations between different factors. in kwa’s (2002, 47) words, uncertainty in the baroque reading of complexity is ontological rather than epistemological. ulijaszek shows how the complexity of obesity’s determinants became reduced to a romantic framing, which places the energy balance at the center of the model, obscuring or displacing other possible framings (such as gene-environment interactions, food production, and distribution or macroeconomic factors influencing food choice). in his view, this resulted from the british government office for science explicitly charging the foresight project with producing a view of obesity control that could be politically tractable (ulijaszek 2015). this makes evident the relation between framings of complexity, definitions of the knowable (and, by extension, what is not known or ignored), and the (state) politics of operationalizing knowledge. at stake is how to make emerging knowledge—overburdened by its own complexity—operational. this requires rendering the effects of interventions calculable in accord with the logics of bureaucratic management. for example, charlotte biltekoff (biltekoff et al. 2014, 22) argues that “charismatic nutrients” have helped render nutritional problems (such as micronutrient deficiencies, excess lipids, or simple carbohydrates) calculable. charismatic nutrients index more than nutrition, in that they also carve out an evidentiary space for advocates to rally (wittingly or not) behind specific nutritional interventions in a context where nutritional experts need to “satisfy increasingly quantification-oriented parameters.” much of the scholarship in the area of evidence-based policy focuses on the difficulties of knowing complex realities, but less has focused on the way in which complexity and uncertainty are both productive and actively produced. in the final section, i examine how certain facts concerning obesity or public health nutrition interventions come to rally more support and visibility than others. from scientific uncertainty to strategic ignorance in their analysis of the effects of corporate behavior on public health, moodie and colleagues (moodie et al. 2013, 671) propose the term industrial epidemic to refer to the spread of disease caused by “corporate disease vectors.” the authors express concern over the call for multisectoral action, to include the private sector and industry, by the un’s high-level meeting on non-communicable diseases. this call makes public-private partnerships central to the development of public health policy. public-private partnerships are often heralded as holding the potential to improve health globally, but moodie and colleagues (moodie et al. 2013, 670) point out that the unhealthy commodities actively promoted by the private partners constitute major drivers of global noncommunicable disease (ncd) epidemics. they therefore conclude that these industries should play no role in the formation of ncd policy and that “public regulation and market intervention are the only evidence-based mechanisms to prevent harm caused by the unhealthy commodity industries.” likewise, a group of 150 organizations made a declaration (public interest civil society organizations and social movements forum 2014) at the aforementioned international conference on nutrition in rome, urging member states to ensure the proper regulation and accountability of transnational corporations whose practices interfere with the enjoyment of the human right to adequate food. in particular, they called attention to the fact that agroindustrial food systems have contributed to various forms of malnutrition at stake in their discussions and argued that there is a need to protect the policy space of governments against conflicts of interest introduced by inappropriate relationships with “powerful economic actors.” corporate influences on public policy have become the object of an emerging subfield of public health concerned with systematically analyzing the effects of corporate behavior on health. moodie and colleagues (moodie et al. 2013) methodically review the ways in which industries avoid regulation and shape policy agendas through a range of techniques. these include biasing research findings, co-opting policymakers, lobbying to oppose public regulation, circulating blame-the-victim approaches to health promotion, and denouncing so-called nanny-state interventions. “as an alternative to regulatory measures,” moodie and colleagues (moodie et al. 2013, 674) explain, “industries promote ineffective individually-targeted information and educational approaches.” examining the incursion of market actors into french public health programs, henri bergeron, patrick castel, and etienne nouguez (2013, 285) note that the framing of obesity in the current version of the pnns proves even less unfavorable to industrial interests. as the communications director of one agroindustrial health promotion partner told them, “education about consumption behaviors” is a positive solution to public health problems, while “regulatory or legal constraints,” such as “abusive taxation or the banning of advertisement,” do not prove effective. such a statement is astounding and points to how the notion of efficacy has itself been transformed by the kind of evidentiary regimes that are in place after decades of industry-funded research. in a workshop hosted by lille’s institut pasteur nutrition service in 2013, the then-director of the french advertising regulation authority was invited to a roundtable discussion on childhood obesity. he stated that the industries he represented awaited solid preuves scientifiques (scientific evidence) linking product advertisements to children with increased rates of obesity. in the absence of such causal demonstrations, he saw no reason for industry to unilaterally assume the responsibility for “all of society’s ills.” obesity is primarily “an educational problem,” he concluded, alluding to parental responsibilities. while the director’s position was entirely predictable, what surprised me was the complete lack of response from his copanelists and from the assembly of more than 150 health professionals and educators. as my colleagues at the wphna often remark, the burden of proof weighs more heavily on the side of those who contest the status quo around how evidence is mobilized for policy. selda ulucanlar and colleagues (ulucanlar et al. 2014) propose the term evidential landscaping to describe how transnational tobacco corporations misrepresent scientific evidence. they systematically review strategies deployed by the tobacco industry to change the evidential landscape within which the policy debate is conducted, which include misquoting published evidence, mimicking scientific critique, and introducing and promoting alternative research, in particular behavioral studies of individuals rather than assessments of population-scale interventions. examples of evidence landscaping in the field of obesity research include the recurrent tipping of the balance of blame toward sugars, fats, or sedentary behavior. these research agendas have been linked, respectively, to dairy or sugar consortia that fund research programs downplaying the deleterious health impacts of their products, as one senior nutritionist explained to me in an interview. in a presentation given at the annual conference of a large french public-private research consortium on the levers for nutritional behavior change, a senior civil servant from the direction générale de la santé outlined the changing role of the pnns since its inception in 2001. while “informing” and “educating” remain central, new policies “implicating stakeholders” (a euphemistic term for the private sector) have been added. he emphasized how this new policy instrument served as a guarantee of the “scientific validity of nutritional information.” by signing voluntary agreements to improve the nutritional profile of their products (such as by lowering salt or sugar content), industrial stakeholders can use the pnns logo in their advertisements. when questioned by a member of the audience about how health claims were assessed—given the controversial nature of such knowledge—the civil servant responded that there was “no controversy over what a good diet includes.” he added that it was essential to move past conspiracy thinking and that the pnns considered the food industry incontournables (indispensable) stakeholders in the promotion of healthy eating. the tone was tense and the chair rapidly moved the debate to a technical discussion about measuring the efficacy of pnns interventions. the voluntary pnns agreements have the advantage of being simultaneously cheap for the state and remarkably unaggressive toward the food industry (bergeron, castel, and nouguez 2013). voluntary self-regulation has been heavily critiqued for its inefficiency (see, especially, moodie et al. 2013). in french health policy circles, a widely circulating public secret (cf. taussig 1999), discussed over coffee between sessions, is that the state can do very little to tackle obesity given that the agroindustry remains the nation’s largest employer. as a cardiologist i interviewed explained: “c’est la crise [it’s a time of crisis], and governments are terrified of delocalization. they can’t do much because the agroindustrial lobbies are too powerful.” while this dilemma is not specific to france, what seems notable here is the absence of debate around conflicts of interest and lobbying practices in public health nutrition.9 the emphasis placed on measures of efficacy and quantified évaluations d’impacts (impact evaluations) in these expert circles is striking given the inefficiency of individual-focused iec interventions. take the concept of the obesogenic environment. presentations on the subject are principally concerned with the methodological difficulties of modeling how urban settings shape eating behaviors. one health geographer presented her exploratory results at the aforementioned conference on the levers for nutritional behavior change and opened with a tellingly cynical remark: “i don’t have a conflict of interest slide because industry isn’t interested in geographers yet, but i love ferrero rochers.” she went on to present research on the use of gps to “objectively measure people’s exposures to their environments.” the project purports to map people’s daily trajectories through urban spaces to evaluate the impact of food offerings on individual consumption behaviors. yet things get tricky when establishing indicators or proxies for un/healthiness. the speaker noted that, in north american obesogenic environment studies, proximity to a supermarket is taken as a proxy for healthy eating, an assumption that did not carry through to the french context, in which supermarkets remain associated with unhealthy eating. beyond revealing the at times arbitrary nature of such indicators, particularly as they travel, the case of this presentation demonstrates the promissory value that quantifiable interventions hold, even when they are founded on methodologically dubious frameworks. conclusion risks caused by individual behaviors have been an overstated concern in public health. individual behavior has been identified as a critical locus of intervention, largely because these interventions are cheap and comparatively easy to implement. but this approach obscures a range of things, such as the contested nature of the knowledge transferred and the ways in which uncertainty may not simply be an inherent product of complexity but can also be strategically produced. i have highlighted the disproportion between exhortations to healthy eating aimed at individual consumers and the remarkable laissez-faire that characterizes how the food and drink industries are invited to voluntarily limit fat, sugar, or salt in their products. in a world of uncertainties and contested knowledges, knowing does not constitute a clearly identifiable endpoint. knowledge does not proceed linearly from the absence of knowledge (or ignorance) to knowing. the focus on knowing latent in health education is based on a presumption of ignorance that overshadows the variegated forms of not-knowing at play in the field of public health nutrition. new social marketing versions of health education emphasize individual responsibility to consume in particular ways. these campaigns tend to be conducted at the expense of truly multisectoral regulatory interventions across agricultural and nutritional policy domains. interventions in public health nutrition often operate on a mechanistic model of goal realization. at stake here is the capacity to intervene in an operational manner, as well as to define the kinds of knowledges that enable intervention. where the public health response to the problem of obesity is concerned, the difficulty of implementing measurably effective interventions is both a problem for action and an endless resource to fuel further action (sanabria and yates-doerr 2015). carlo caduff (2014, 304) argues that while the attempted escape from the “knowledge machine” of late liberalism constituted an important move, simply turning to its underside— unknowing—locks social science into a dialectics of the un/known. i have traced the loopings that operate between regimes of knowing and unknowing not so much to know more about unknowing as to reveal the politics of ascribing knowledge or its absence to specific groups or evidence-making practices. i have also aimed to consider how such circulations affect possible registers of public action. in mapping the relations between complexity, uncertainty, and knowledge in public health, my concern has been to consider the spaces for intervention carved out in the field of obesity. the problem of obesity’s complexity conceals an assumption about the possibility of developing efficient interventions through the accumulation of evidence and the computing, scaling up, or translating of this evidence into replicable practices of prevention or care. the implicit idea here is that we need more evidence, more knowledge, and more powerful computational tools and models to link the types of evidence produced, from the genetic to the individual to the community scale to the realm of global policy. an important epistemological question remains concerning the kinds of things that can be known and the relation between knowledge and action. interrogations along these lines have much to gain by considering not only what can be known and what can be established as a valid regime of proof, but also what is actively made unknown or unknowable. the evidentiary exigencies around the implementation and evaluation of public health nutrition interventions are such that crucial phenomena are ignored or rendered irrelevant. this is not because we do not know enough, as is often claimed in public health nutrition conferences, but because existing forms of scientific evaluation make it impossible for certain things to be known, for certain relations to be causally established. rather than questioning the forms that evidentiary practices have taken—as in the request for preuves (proof) of causal linkages—we are witnessing a diffuse, but increasingly consensual rhetorical move toward the language of uncertainty. working alongside my colleagues at the wphna, i find myself wondering about their desire to build sounder scientific evidence for the socially and environmentally sustainable alternatives that we hope to see reshape the current profit-driven food system. how, i wonder, can a knowing specific to ethnographic practice be leveraged to inflect how the knowable is framed in public health? i have argued here that making noncausal and nonlinear relations visible is something that the practice of ethnography is uniquely equipped to do. ethnography can see through contemporary habits of framing complex conditions, untangling with its exacting specificity the tightly coupled technical (and ideological) systems typical of what kim fortun (2012) has called late industrialism. notes acknowledgments my thinking on scientific evidence, complexity, conflicts of interest, and strategic ignorance owes much to the exchanges in which i am lucky to be engaged with colleagues at the world public health nutrition association. the ideas developed here germinated in the context of the “producing knowledge, governing populations” conference held at the ecole normale supérieure de lyon in september 2013, and i am particularly grateful to charlotte brives and frédéric le marcis for the sustained conversations that grew out of this event. the argument was much improved thanks to the feedback i received at the centre de sociologie des organisations seminar, sciences po, paris (october 2014) and the “knowledge/value, dark data and absences” workshop held in exeter (december 2014). i am particularly grateful to the insightful and engaged comments that dominic boyer, anita hardon, kaushik sunder rajan, and emily yates-doerr provided on earlier drafts of this article. 1. this meeting of the food and agriculture organization and the world health organization was held in rome in november 2014. it brought together united nations representatives, civil society organizations, and the agrofood industry. 2. this footnote, along with others that provided technical definitions of healthy diets, were scratched in the final ratified declaration after the united states and several european delegations raised concerns about wording. 3. these were the words of the nigerian minister for agriculture at icn2. 4. situating the french response to obesity within a comparative analysis of international policy responses to the issue lies beyond the remit of this article. such a project would need to engage with the imaginaries produced through geographically localized representations of national specificities (think of the “mediterranean diet,” the “french paradox,” the “americanization of the food system,” and so on) as they circulate in international spaces. 5. les trois-huits refers to a system of three eight-hour shifts that enables factories to function twenty-four hours a day but is deeply disruptive to chronobiological systems as workers oscillate between day and night shifts several times a week. 6. mutuelles are not-for-profit organizations that provide health insurance to meet health costs not covered by the state national security system. 7. even the extreme-right party le front national defends access to national health services for all “french.” the concept of social security itself is not questioned. 8. substitutionism involves substituting farm-based commodities with manufactured ones. it has been taken to new levels as emulsifiers, transfats, and high-fructose corn syrup stand in for plant and animal foods, lowering quality and cost while increasing profit margins (guthman 2015, 8). 9. the french political system is founded on the ideal that no institutions come between the state and its citizens. this has impeded the development of transparent consultation procedures by which the roles of intermediate organizations that do lobby parliamentarians are spelled 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and mythical signature. it must have been 2011 or 2012 when i first heard these words, and the images they provoked have stayed with me ever since. i was mesmerized. it had never occurred to me that guerrilla architectural collectives might have developed a project management tool with a view to registering every action, every bifurcation, every photograph and drawing and sketch, every failure and insight garnered during a community project. at once a self-made archive and a social design interface, an organizational program and an urban directory, here was a tool that architects were using for auto-constructing the city (for building social and material relations) at the same time as they auto-constructed their methods. the project in question was autobarrios (literally, auto-neighborhoods), a social community initiative led by the guerrilla architectural collective basurama in san cristóbal de los ángeles, one of madrid’s poorest and most disenfranchised neighborhoods.1 first initiated by juan lópez aranguren and sarah fernández deutsch, the former a member of basurama who had himself grown up in the community, the project signaled a departure from the collective’s history of participatory and critical art interventions. on the cusp of the financial crisis, aranguren took on the project when the very existence of basurama was under threat. the art and architectural collective, which only a year back had curated madrid’s white night (the preeminent summer arts festival in the city), was undergoing a profound personal, economic, and professional crisis. basurama had measured up to the challenge of curating the event with a sardonic, yet constructive proposition for engaging the ludic pulsations of (the) capital. “place your bets!,” as they called the festival, took residence in the city’s main arteries and public spaces by employing trash and discarded materials (the signature of basurama’s artwork) in the transformation of the cityscape into a gigantic open-air playground and amusement park. the installations thus built were designed to be dismantled and recycled for future use in the auto-construction of urban equipment in peripheral and marginal communities in madrid’s hinterland (see figures 1 and 2). however, the responsibility for curating white night—a symbol, if there ever was one, of the “process of branding-based urban regeneration . . . complicit in the neoliberal attitude to the city” (mcguirk 2014, 15) that characterized the architecture of spectacle and capital of recent spanish urbanization—had split the collective. taking place in september 2010, just as the first wave of the financial crisis had sunk in and the miracle bubble of the spanish real-estate economy burst, basurama’s playful romance with the economics of desire drew little sympathy and took far too many punches, not least from radical and countercultural collectives who viewed basurama’s involvement as a disappointing sellout to the seductions of capital. the city placed its bets, knocking basurama out. in the event’s aftermath some members left the collective, while others took a break and those remaining faced a glum horizon of precarity and depression. in this context, aranguren set out to san cristóbal with a project that was part therapy, part desperation, part calling. autobarrios was conceived as a free-fall immersion into the conditions that shape autonomy as a practical design and political challenge in contexts of marginalization—where the use of the auto label gestured to the vague promises of both community and material self-emancipation. figure 1. giant swing, la noche en blanco, september 2010. photo by zuloark. figure 2. giant swing recycled at el gallinero, december 2010. photo by zuloark. as it happens, i never got to see the processgram, although i encountered different versions of it over the following five years. i never saw the object, but i became party to the method. the method basurama developed for autobarrios became an important practice for their work elsewhere, in abandoned sites and allotments, working in collaboration with schools and neighborhood associations, in partnership with cultural institutions, other architectural collectives, or indeed academics such as myself. the method seemed to travel widely. over time, however, i came to question this perception of the method as a traveling object. there seemed to be too much method everywhere. what if it was not the method itself that traveled as much as a particular cultural sensorium and material aesthetic? what if it was an emerging experience of the city as method that one encountered everywhere—if method was an infrastructure of feeling for the city?2 this article develops an ethnographic argument about the experience of method as a modality of relationality in madrid. building on more than six years of fieldwork with guerrilla architectural collectives, community activists, artists, and neighborhood associations in the city, i report on the use that these collectives make of the method of auto-construction as a perceptual and material system for sharing resources, knowledge, and experiences. the method of auto-construction has become a placeholder for how grassroots projects think and feel and grab hold of the city as a horizon of hope and responsibility, of intimacy and action. at a time of crisis and desperation, auto-construction has provided a faithful and intuitive idiom for movements of aspiration and autonomy, for shifting (terra)formations of impatience and capability, for eclectic and wilding investigations into and out from the material depths of precarity. these manifold projects—which include community projects in open-source architecture, so-called do-it-with-others educational platforms, or copyleft social squat centers—speak about a city that accrues and proliferates through various languages, media, and interfaces of description; through archives, archaeologies, and technologies that deposit but also help visualize and trace its memories and hopes; and through systems of apprenticeships, guesswork, and assay that exfoliate its various nervous systems. i aim in this article to provide some glimpses into how auto-construction has surfaced and circulated as a habitus and a habitat—an infrastructure and a sensory organ—for an experience of living-with and -along in madrid. as i use it here, the concept of auto-construction undergoes an important conceptual migration: from its original use in designating self-help housing in the global south (auto-construction as object), to more recent usages signaling the inventiveness and resourcefulness of self-organized initiatives (auto-construction as process), to my own proposal for thinking of auto-construction as a method and platform of inquiry and exploration. in justifying such a transition, i set up a conversation with the comparative literature on urban auto-construction. this is a risky strategy, i am aware. the literature on auto-construction in the global south is often a far cry from the community projects in political autonomy and democratic experimentation that i report on. there is a vast expanse between the cultural geographies and political economies of the peripheries of the urban south and madrid’s own vectors of peripheralization. yet i believe the comparison is one worth pursuing because of what it can teach us about the status of the ethnographic method today, in particular about the consequences of its co-inhabiting, along with other methods, complex worlds of partial and interdependent descriptions. the literature on auto-construction has proven exquisitely attentive to the insightful and resourceful ways through which people furnish environments of desire and anticipation, action and existence for themselves. in this sense, it has equipped us with a certain sensibility for unpacking how people’s urban navigations function simultaneously as methods for questioning and experimenting, opening up new vistas on how the city auto-constructs its own theoretical worlds. this interest in the mutual and recursive auto-construction of the city and theory is my central proposition. i am interested in the purchase of auto-construction as a material metaphor for rendering visible how theory itself is auto-constructed. in this context, i want to bring some recent reflections on theory design around methods of invention (lury and wakeford 2012), prototyping (corsín jiménez 2014b), and experiments in collaborative concept work (marcus 2014) to bear on some longstanding debates about the nature of the urban question—as well as to ask some broader questions regarding the methodological venues and resources of anthropological discovery. despite some noteworthy and innovative proposals for making explicit “the strange language of urbanization” (boucher et al. 2008), the fact remains that most recent urban theory has done little to explicate its own moments of articulation. the nature of the empirical remains mostly unproblematized, and it is only the adequateness of this or that body of theory that has been highlighted for discussion. thus, to this day, investigations into how the urban is rendered visible as method and field site remain conspicuously absent from the literature. the relation between the field as empirical site and the field as theoretical project remains largely bracketed and unexplored. we have come to naturalize scholarly accounts as speaking about a place (geographical or epistemic), paying little or no attention to how such places must themselves be drawn together as empirical and pragmatic problems. the empirical problems of this or that place cover up the very operation of problematization as method. my proposal for using auto-construction as a heuristic centers on the concept’s specific (recursive) twinning of method and theory. auto-construction offers an image for understanding how empirical problems are auto-constructed into situated theories and theoretical navigations. more often than not, these theoretical designs are premised on a dynamic and collaborative accompaniment of inquiry that enlists local communities and researchers, multiple media and mediators, working with and across a variety of genres and aesthetics of description (rabinow 2011). such pragmatic and inventive exercises in design and construction also render visible the nature of the city as a problem of method. that is, the city is a method—of designs, problematizations, and theories—in constant auto-construction.3 auto-dazzle the story of don antonio is one i must have heard told dozens of times over the past three years. don antonio has his ways. now in his seventies and retired, he wakes up early in the morning and enjoys opening the doors of his balcony, which he leaves open for the remains of the day. the soundscapes and breezes of the city call on his parlor, bringing along the gaiety and liveliness of a downtown location in madrid’s historic quarter. there are the sounds of motorbikes roaring past, of children shouting, of the bulky maneuvering of trucks offloading their cargo just opposite don antonio’s building, at the popular market of la cebada. occasionally the rhythms and intonations of a musical performance or a theatrical play make their way into don antonio’s living room. in such cases, however, if the volume is too high, don antonio picks up his mobile phone and calls manuel, who will gently ask the actors or the sound mixers to quiet down their performance. figure 3. tedx madridsalon at el campo de cebada, july 2014. photo by zuloark. this is a story i have heard manuel tell time and time again. manuel is a member of the guerrilla architectural collective zuloark, which was first involved, alongside local neighborhood associations, artists, activists, shopkeepers, and schools, in the transformation of a derelict and vacant open-air site in the heart of the la latina neighborhood into a self-managed community project. we shall be hearing more about the story of this community space, locally known as el campo de cebada, shortly. the story of don antonio is one that manuel has recounted in front of multiple and variegated audiences. i have witnessed him dramatize the story before hundreds of people in an architectural salon at madrid’s guild of architects. i have also seen him deliver wonderfully colorful versions of the anecdote at various meetings with municipal delegates and policymakers. i have seen him rehearse an impassioned and charismatic version at a meeting of activists at a social squat center, and produce slightly different variants for talks at cultural centers and museums. he has also retold the story on camera for a video documentary, and of course he has staged endless similar performances for friends and colleagues. the story also exists in print, in texts that zuloark has written for architectural journals and magazines, as well as design portfolios the collective has submitted to industry prizes and awards. for manuel, the story of don antonio exemplifies how grassroots community projects must continuously adjust and reproblematize the designs of method. in the case of el campo de cebada, it shows in the collective’s design of an ecology of practices that attends to the interests and concerns of neighboring residents, including don antonio’s particular sensibility toward the acoustics of the vicinity. members of el campo will often say that theirs is an approach that habita la controversia, that does not shy away from dwelling in controversy, and which calls, correspondingly, for designing habitats for each and every problem. in this light, the story of don antonio rehearses many of the narratives and tropes that have become common ploys in the classic literature on auto-construction: about the inventiveness, resilience, and resourcefulness of urban relations; their ability to operate under the radar of standardized market or state practices by sounding out horizons of mutual feeling and complicity, circuits of give-and-take that consolidate—sometimes erratically, sometimes fleetingly, yet sometimes sustainably too—spaces of convergence and productivity. yet i trust that there is another, complementary transcript to don antonio’s story. as noted, the story has circulated widely, in a variety of media forms, registers, and venues, as a story about methods, about the auto-construction of these methods, as well as the method of auto-construction more broadly. moreover, this story is only one of many other stories and anecdotes told about emerging experiments in auto-construction elsewhere in the city (such as the autobarrios project with which i opened this article). therefore, in print and in auditoriums, in public oratory and private talk, these stories seem to function as both vehicles and anchors for an infrastructure of feeling for the city. the circulation of auto-construction as story, as metaphor, and as method surfaces as a distinctive and consequential economy and repertoire of urban skills, senses, and sensibilities. borrowing a term from abdoumaliq simone (2006, 359), we may say that auto-construction is slowly, gradually, taking shape as a “perceptual system” for the city, a sensory organ that functions as at once an economy of attention and an economy of resources, and that finds tentative anchorage in the city as a method for other methods. yet if auto-construction works as a method for other methods in the city, where does that leave ethnography? what does an ethnographic effect look like amid such a dense panoply of methodological effects? does ethnography itself get to be auto-constructed? these are important questions that go to the heart of the anthropological project. as noted above, they point to the difficulties that haunt the design of ethnography as a field of inquiry: how do we construct our methods side by side with other people’s construction of their own methods? are not our methods (ours and theirs) auto-constructed through each other? the literature on urban auto-construction provides an especially poignant place for exploring these issues because, as noted above, it has traditionally been framed as a reservoir of cultural ingenuity and resilience. auto-construction has provided scholars with an apparently natural metaphor for sociocultural creativity, thence justifying subsequent claims to analytical and epistemic innovation. there is a wonderful passage in marilyn strathern’s (1999, 6) well-known reflection on “the ethnographic moment” that captures this slippage beautifully, noting how our capacity for ethnographic description is often preempted by our (euro-american) expectations concerning what counts as an epistemic effect in the first place. one “could refer to it as auto-dazzle,” strathern (1999, 20) says: “knowledge involves creativity, effort, production; it loves to uncover creativity, effort, production!” scholars are intent on staging the products of research in terms of “discovery and re-discovery,” where our capacity to reveal something mirrors the “revelatory practices” that we encounter in the field itself (strathern 1999, 20). put somewhat differently, we might say that the care with which we construct our ethnographic descriptions aims at dazzling (surprising, confusing, mystifying) our readers in terms symmetrical to how that moment of dazzle took hold of us and our informants in the ethnographic encounter. yet this symmetry is itself problematic and should not be taken at face value, for otherwise we risk falling in love, as strathern puts it, with our own anticipations of consequence. we risk auto-constructing dazzle as an epistemic effect by auto-dazzling how the ethnography and the analysis construct each other. auto-construction in his now classic cultural anthropology article on auto-construction,4 james holston (1991) introduced the concept as a heuristic for thinking about the complex dynamics that subtend processes of peripheral urbanization in brazil. these processes, he noted, are at once capitalistand state-driven, for through the process of building their homes, the inhabitants of peripheral and informal communities self-fashion a seemingly paradoxical type of political subjectivity for themselves as at once rights holders and consumer citizens: house building becomes for them an arena for the contestation and struggle over entitlements and rights to home ownership (and the matrix of public services and infrastructures wherein these are located, such as water sanitation, sewage, etc.). it also becomes a template for drawing on and expressing a wide array of consumer desires and aesthetics, for example, in matters of interior decoration or material culture. the vitality of auto-construction—the desideratum that the house incarnates as a life project, the vibrancy and energetics of family and community commitments that underwrite it, the space of political urgency and fundamental needs that it indexes—bulges onto the political landscape of the modernist city, which otherwise crumbles and falls to pieces in the background. self-built and auto-constructed, the city-yet-to-come advances, encroaching on, if not wholly in defiance of, the fatuous landscapes of modernity. the destruction and the auto-construction of the city as theory: few concepts can say so much with so little. while originally deployed to describe a specific modality of housing projects in developing countries (e.g., arecchi 1984; banck 1986), auto-construction has today become very much a staple of urban theory. from do-it-yourself urban designs to self-help housing, from community architectural projects to open-source urban infrastructures, from the right to the city to the right to infrastructure, auto-construction has become a sine qua non of the descriptive repertoire and analytical vocabulary of the informal city, if not its most promissory and fertile conceptual reservoir (e.g., iveson 2013; mcguirk 2014; eizenberg 2012; purcell 2013; corsín jiménez 2014a). under one guise or another, the literature on auto-construction has borne witness to the birth and rebirth of the city, time and again: as a source of vitality and improvisation; of skill, craft, and tacit knowledge; of political acuity and community values; of autonomy and resistance; of resilience and resourcefulness; of perseverance, defiance, and irreducibility. auto-construction and its proxies have been used to map and trace manifold topologies of epistemic overflow, where technical, environmental, and political relations fly below the radar of market and state practices, or generate unsuspected and yet productive displacements and reconfigurations between them. they have provided a conceptual sensibility for framing the messy entanglements of material energies, affective relations, political capacities, and social creativity that make up city life. there is a specific geopolitical history, however, to our contemporary state of enamorment with the informal, the energetic, and the auto-constructed. in a recent and important piece on “slum as theory,” vyjayanthi rao (2006) has taken issue with some of the epistemological assumptions subtending how we have come to grasp the urban condition. “what,” she asks, “counts as knowledge of the urban?” (rao 2006, 225). she lays out her argument through a critical engagement with mike davis’s (2004) well-known essay on the planetary urbanism of slums (see also davis 2006). davis’s work has been criticized for presenting an apocalyptic and dystopian vision of urban development, where the reality of empire, global capital, and neoliberalism condemn a “surplus humanity,” in davis’s (2006, 174–98) creepy formulation, to a future of misery, disease, crime, and desperation. apropos of auto-construction, davis (2006, 70–94) dedicates one chapter of his book planet of slums to criticizing what he calls the “illusions of self-help” that informed the world bank’s philosophical and programmatic approach to housing policies starting in the 1970s. he traces the world bank’s vision to the ideas of the english anarchist architect john turner who, after living in the squatter settlements of lima from 1957 to 1965, developed an understanding of community self-organization and autonomy that led to various writings and proposals defending self-building as a policy alternative—so-called sites and services programs designed to provide land and basic infrastructural services that people would occupy to develop their own housing projects (turner and fichter 1972; turner 1976). yet while, for davis (2006, 72), this “amalgam of anarchism and neoliberalism” did little but legitimate the state’s retreat as a provider of public services and infrastructure, turner’s work has otherwise been recuperated as a precursor to a type of activist architecture born out of the experience of latin american informality that may hold global lessons for all: “if there is one area where latin american experience contains a global lesson . . . it is its attitude to the informal city. what do we mean by ‘informal’? the short answer is slums . . . [which] are far from chaotic. they may lack essential services, yet they operate under their own self-regulating systems” (mcguirk 2014, 25). the latin american slum thus stands as a metonym of entrepreneurial pragmatism—optimist, extrovert, hands-on—operating as an epistemic space: “active forms: systems, networks, connections, infrastructure—all of these are more important arguably than the dumb object-housing of the modernists” (mcguirk 2014, 33). indeed, what draws rao herself to the debate is the way in which davis deploys the slum as a theoretical construct whose geographical and historical axes rest “upon the ‘city of the south’ as its proxy subject. a new understanding of the global emerges by situating the spaces of these cities at the epicentre of a certain catastrophic appetite of global capital flows and turning those spaces into a new territorial principle of order” (rao 2006, 227). in its place, rao (2006, 232) offers an alternative theoretical figuration for the slum, where rather than a proxy for locating the pressure zones of empire and capital, the “slum becomes an epistemological shorthand for tracking the cracks . . . and for locating the mutations of the modern state.” slum as theory, slum as pragmatism: from the slum as an aftershock of capital to the slum as the auto-dazzle of theory? auto-peripheries the 2008 financial crisis pushed the spanish economy into the darkest corners of the european periphery. by 2011, the meltdown of the property market had dragged the urban middle and working classes into an abyss of precariousness and desperation. between 2006 and 2010, income inequality increased in spain more than in any other developed economy (ilo 2015, 23), with the top 20 percent of society 7.5 times richer than the bottom fifth (cáritas 2013, 3). in 2011, unemployment hit 21.4 percent of the working population, or 5 million people, rising to 42.3 percent in the case of workers under twenty-five.5 while between 2007 and 2011 the incomes of the poorest 10 percent had dropped by 13 percent per year, this amounted to less than 1.5 percent for the richest 10 percent (oecd 2015, 24). as the right-wing partido popular government set the benchmark for austerity policies, the poverty rate doubled to 18 percent, “with young people replacing the elderly as the group most at risk of poverty” (oecd 2015, 25). on may 15, 2011, following a public demonstration over the political management of the economic crisis, a group of protesters set up an encampment at madrid’s puerta del sol, the city’s historic central square, that in a matter of days grew into a complex infrastructure and social movement, in due time transforming the nature of municipal politics in the city. the image of the encampment—rugged, provisional, auto-constructed—circulated around the globe and became an emblem of the spanish indignados movement (see figures 4 and 5). the encampment organized itself into a “city in miniature,” as people rejoiced in saying. it provided temporary food and shelter for campers; there was a kitchen and a refectory, a nursery, a library, as well as an open-source infrastructure of solar panels and wireless networks. protesters came together in a variety of assemblies and working groups, on matters such as long-term politics or feminism, a respect and care commission, and a task force dedicated to curating and preserving the movement’s archives. methodologies popped up everywhere—for assembling, for mediating conflicts, for cultivating the hospitality of strangers (corsín jiménez and estalella 2014). figure 4. occupation puerta del sol, may 2011. photo by julio albarrán. figure 5. acampada sol, may 2011. photo by julio albarrán. having taken up residence at the very geographical and political heart of the spanish state, from day one the encampment faced up to its eventual dismantling and worked toward its future reappearance in more than a hundred popular assemblies across madrid’s neighborhoods. therefore, when the encampment finally came down, a month into the inaugural occupation, it was the energy of this auto-peripheralization—a proliferation of assemblies, centros sociales autogestionados (self-managed social centers), urban community orchards, and commons networks across the city’s hinterland (walliser 2013)—that took over and kept the momentum. the peripheries took center stage and resumed the work of—nurturing the capacity for—self-peripheralization. in her recent writings on subaltern urbanism, ananya roy (2011, 227, 231) has suggested that social theory may be at risk of fetishizing the slum as an epistemic and topological vector, noting how the metonym of the slum has become a conceptual reservoir from which to justify speaking of both “self-organizing economies of entrepreneurialism” and the “habitus of the dispossessed.” the slum, as roy rightly observes, has become a dazzle for theory, which is why she calls for developing a more nuanced and subtle heuristics of subalternity, which, for her, includes an appeal to thinking with and across the zones of exception, gray spaces, and processes of urban informality inhabiting the interstices of the territorial, juridical, and legal/lethal regimes of capital and state sovereignty. one other such notion is the periphery, which, following abdoumaliq simone (2010), roy (2011, 232) defines as both “a space in the making and a form of making theory.” i am taken by roy’s (2011, 224) “intervention in the epistemologies and methodologies of urban studies.” her outlining of the metonymic cul-de-sacs that slum urbanism has got us into is most pertinent and valuable. but let me pause for a moment with her focus on the periphery as heuristic. in the double sense that roy attributes to the term—that is, as designating both a geographic and an epistemic space—i take it that the promise the periphery might hold for description lies in the fact that the two spaces (the geographic and the epistemic) do not, in fact, wholly coincide. the periphery, as i see it, is what holds both descriptive spaces together and, simultaneously, apart. the periphery works as a descriptive and epistemic figure insofar as it can keep the tension in place—such that one can imagine, for instance, what the work of auto-peripheralization might entail.6 for this reason, i believe it is important to be able to specify under which conditions the periphery as a genre of description can describe the periphery as urban process: how does the operation of problematization for which the periphery stands as method inhabit its field site? what work goes into the auto-construction of the periphery (by scholars and residents) as a method of theory for the city? these are questions, i would like to insist, that go to the heart of how ethnography takes up residence in a field site—how it draws itself together as an inventive and pragmatic design, how it auto-constructs itself, and therefore how it relates to other methods of auto-construction and exploration. let me be more specific. in her deployment of the term as a double heuristic (now geographical territory, now concept), roy recalls the work of james holston and teresa caldeira (2008, 21), who make use of the ethnographic category periferia (periphery) to describe the “settlements of people beyond a city center’s perimeter of urbanized and legalized services” characteristic of brazilian urbanization. as noted above, the periphery does not signal a stable territorial demarcation but a shifting geo-epistemic operator: it is a dynamic vector that indexes the relations of mutual dependence—a social production and circulation of space—in which centers and peripheries each define the other through an apparatus of domination . . . comprising political, legal, social, economic and infrastructural components whose interrelations constantly change. as a result, peripheries as both place and concept shift in location and meaning through time. (holston and caldeira 2008, 21; emphasis added) holston and caldeira (2008, 21) go on to show how urban experiences of peripheries sparked a variety of neighborhood-based social movements and grassroots mobilizations, whose claims and demands helped “mark a decisive moment in the constitution of a new conception of citizenship” in the history of brazil. although the processes through which such experiences of what they call insurgent citizenship came to the fore were many and complex, the claims that residents have made to the city over time have often been specifically grounded in and through the experience of auto-construction: “insurgent citizenship depends,” holston and caldeira (2008, 22) tell us, “on a sense of self-worth undeniably connected to property ownership and the autoconstruction of houses.” auto-construction thus provides a material and volitional locus for the self-expression of the city as an affective and political desideratum. in his earlier work on auto-construction, however, holston (1991, 456) goes even further in specifying the “aesthetics of autoconstruction” animating and styling such expressions of self-worth. according to holston, the question of aesthetics proves central to understanding the personal investments and challenges that people mobilize when projecting their houses as outward manifestations of their selves and markers of their relations to others. as he puts it, houses are “‘good to think’ because they channel personal experience into a public idiom, architecture. . . . this idiom is a visual calculus of appearances—a particular style of facade, certain decorations, the display of appliances, a specific finish or material, and so forth—widely intelligible as symbolic notations about self and society, present and future” (holston 1991, 456). a crucial dimension of this visual calculus, he observes, relates to the repertoire of aesthetic designs and styles that people draw from to achieve “an intended effect” (holston 1991, 460). the goal is to bring to fruition a sense of innovation, to showcase one’s mastery of an idiom that will justify general approbation and the recognition that one’s house has “personality” (holston 1991, 460). one is almost tempted to say that such designs are aimed at dazzling one’s neighbors. yet if dazzle is much sought after, no little amount of effort goes into controlling the effects of auto-dazzle as well. as holston notes, it is of utmost importance to avoid imitation and, above everything else, to deflect any hint of suspicion that one may have been copying: people usually refuse, to the point of real irritation, to admit that they derive their house designs or decorations from any source other than pure inspiration. yet, i have seen them exchanging house plans, perusing fashion and home-life magazines, taking field trips to shopping centers and elite neighborhoods, and making careful observations about the upper-class habits and décor presented in tv soap operas. moreover, they have to use the same construction materials and household goods to make meaningful statements in the sign system of autoconstruction. the problem is that they must, and do, avidly copy. (holston 1991, 461) this is why, as holston (1991, 461) underscores, “to question their sources is to tarnish their sense of personal distinction in which they have so heavily invested.” this is not therefore simply a question about what auto-construction accomplishes or what it stands for. it is not a question about auto-construction as object (housing) or auto-construction as process (self-help, self-organization). rather, what we see here is how the city advances surreptitiously, as it simultaneously gropes and touts its way through waves of informality and trickery, of seduction and allure, glamor and imitation, production and predation. the city auto-constructs itself as a complex economy of urges and aspirations, a contradictory hide-and-seek of lure and abandonment, desire and affectation that impedes any definitive formalization of what the periphery does to the city or how it works. the city fares here as “a kind of perceptual system, a way of seeing” (simone 2006, 359): an evanescent landscape whose outlines—the tricks and trades of mimesis and camouflage, of splendor or deception—one must constantly learn to see. we may think of auto-construction, therefore, as a sort of auto-heuristics for the city, a device that can help us adumbrate, but also inhabit, the tensions and elisions that we all inevitably encounter between the city’s moments of dazzle and our moments of auto-dazzle with the city. auto-construction as method. auto-heuristics residents of the la latina neighborhood remember the date of may 15, 2011 (the date of puerta del sol’s occupation) for a different, if related reason. on that day, a group of neighbors, community activists, and artists took to the streets to occupy three thousand square meters of land that had been lying vacant ever since plans for a sports complex were brought to a halt in the aftermath of the economic crisis. the reasons for the occupation were celebratory. the neighbors had been granted the management of the space after eight months of negotiations with the departments of citizen participation and inland revenue and with their local borough representatives from the municipal government. the residents had proven swift and perspicacious organizers. back in september 2010, the government had authorized a makeshift occupation in the context of a weekend cultural festival—the white night curated by basurama. with the event over, and the site locked up and abandoned again, some neighbors “found” a copy of the key to the gates fencing in the space. the festival had proven a success, and it took little imagination for the neighbors to realize the formidable community potential of the vacant lot. they organized an asamblea (assembly) that soon entered into negotiations and concerted action with a variety of neighborhood stakeholders, including the two local neighborhood associations, local schools and shopkeepers, nearby squat social centers, and a variety of artistic and countercultural collectives. impressed by the agility of the mobilization, and at any rate with no alternative plans for the site, the municipality agreed to an acuerdo de cesión temporal (temporary management permit) for the space. it was an opportunity not to be missed. the neighbors moved swiftly, in a variety of registers and media. they set up an email distribution list, a twitter account, and a facebook page. they experimented with a variety of organizational formats—a neighborhood assembly, a commission for economic affairs, and an operations commission—as well as a self-branded (if short-lived) hybrid governance structure that included representatives from the municipal government and delegates from the neighborhood assembly. within weeks the space acquired strange urban properties: this was a plaza, three thousand square meters in the heart of madrid’s old town no less, that had suddenly become an espacio público de gestión ciudadana, a public space managed by citizens. the space had been salvaged by the neighbors, and displayed proudly the ruggedness and urgency of its salvage methodologies. i do not mean this derisively. on the contrary: el campo boasts wooden planks and construction materials used by guerrilla architectural collectives in urbanism workshops. passers-by, architecture students, and local neighbors have imagined, designed, and made unorthodox pieces of urban equipment later used in community gardening, in book fairs and organic food markets, in theatrical productions by local schools and political rallies by slumbering anarchist formations. el campo stores paints, brushes, chairs, plastics, and urban waste with which children have improvised playgrounds and battle scenes on its patio, with which scenographers have traced the outlines of impossibly allegorical cities, and amid whose forensic archaeologies teenage lovers have sought refuge from the violent transparency of the society of control. salvage methodologies have “liberated the space” (liberar el espacio), as neighbors proudly observed, and turned it into something at once more and less than public space. figure 6. theatrical performance at el campo de cebada, july 2012. photo by zuloark. on any sunday morning, coinciding with a flea market next door, hundreds of thousands of people may walk past or into el campo. the atmosphere is festive and joyous, libidinous and reminiscent of a bazaar, an exuberant public space. but it is also less than a public space, for the state is disappeared, an auctoritas in absentia. as a result, el campo has taxed the patience, resourcefulness, and intellectual powers of its citizen-managers. the scarcely twenty people who assiduously turn up at the weekly assembly meetings are overwhelmed and overworked. the daily chores of maintenance (opening the gates, dusting and arranging the space, kicking people out when closing time approaches), going through email correspondence, and keeping a lively digital community presence—for these chores, there never seem to be enough people. on some occasions the space has remained closed, for no key-holders were around to open its gate. events have had to be postponed or cancelled, people have become angry, and discussions have flared at the assembly, which in turn has seen members leave, as well as new ones arrive. three thousand square meters of open-air space can take anyone’s breath away. that el campo has somewhat failed as a representational space, as a space of political participation and autonomy, has not prevented it from working in many other ways, for it remains a venue where things happen. while it is, perhaps, incapable of centering itself as an urban locale, of finding a language for itself as an urban form, el campo has otherwise succeeded in providing a platform for an “intensive urbanization of outlook,”7 a method, if i may put it so, for the city’s self-peripheralization. for example, el campo has hosted numerous debates and forums about the role of the academy and its relationship to the city, including the organization of a popular university now in its third year. one of the most interesting projects in this respect has been the educational collective #edumeet. the initiative first met at el campo in september 2011, following a twitter exchange over matters of education and the city. the meeting brought together a group of some twenty people, including some of the original community activists and architects who had occupied the site some months earlier, as well as newcomers to el campo, such as teachers, designers, and information technology consultants. the group convened thereafter every second thursday evening, in meetings organized via twitter, although without any expectation of attendance. the conversations at #edumeet gravitated toward a concern with the nature of learning in the modern city, and in particular with the conditions—the built environment, the rhythms of capital, the social and technical forms of experience—that enabled or discouraged the awakening of the city’s pedagogical capacities and affordances (see figure 7). people would often express concern with the fragility of a meeting that took place after hours, in the open air, not infrequently perambulating the nightly hospitality of bars or squat centers. it was a strange hospitality for which the meetings seemed to be groping. yet it was also this transience and urban wildness that people most treasured, as they navigated and sounded out the landscapes, the penumbras and the promises of shared learning. at the meetings, attendees voiced their dissatisfaction with formal education, not least with the role that the university played in the standardization and slumbering of urban experience. there was considerable discussion, for instance, about the kind of stance that research takes when it comes to the city: what does it mean to investigate the city? what types of relationships and bodies do the action of research elicit vis-à-vis the aesthetic inscriptions of artists, the nurturing accompaniments of teachers, or the literary curiosity of journalists? how does research take residence in the urban fabric, what sorts of traces does it leave, and what memories and awakenings does it excite? some people would occasionally turn to me in my role as ethnographer with these and similar questions, curious to understand how ethnography shapes itself into a presence in the city, how it constructs a space of inquiry amid the vicissitudes and turmoil of a world in crisis. where and how, they wanted to know, did ethnography fit into this budding, yet precarious infrastructure of feeling? these were pressing questions for many participants, some of whom felt compelled to leave testimony, to “make visible” (hacer visible) that these discussions were being had, that they were taking place: indeed, that there were specific places in the city for them, or at least specific arrangements and possibilities. for instance, it became an established practice for attendees to report the discussions live on twitter, embedding drawings and photographs of the group, excerpts from notes, images from the surrounding environment, and the like. attendees would also write up the evening’s discussions in blog posts or produce summaries for online architectural and urbanist forums; some would even venture theoretical forays into the discursive realms of so-called peer-to-peer and do-it-yourself urbanism. these arrangements signaled specific distributions of presence and action, of bodies-in-place and bodies-across-space; directions to and swells of movement, excitement, expectation, and reward. they deployed summative systems and methods for intuiting and tracking, for knowing and acknowledging, for witnessing and learning. “the city,” people would hiss to each other with sparkling eyes, “surges.” figure 7. el campo de cebada, may 2013. photo by zuloark. as time went by, #edumeet became a reference for discussions on free culture and the city. by 2012, arquitectura viva, spain’s most prestigious architectural journal, published a special issue on emerging architectural collectives that included an entry on #edumeet. the entry was self-curated by #edumeet’s twitter followers and read thus: #edumeet / learning ambiances, autonomous and temporal / people that talk about education at la cebada every second thursday / or in bars / . . . affective space around learning / . . . a #hashtag that belongs to no one / may well be happening right now without us knowing about it / . . . un-learning by meeting new people who do not share your interests / every new tweet is a new rendering of #edumeet. (edumeet 2012, 26; author’s translation) there is another sense in which witnessing and learning became important operators in the organization of experience at el campo. ever since the space was liberated in february 2011, basurama and zuloark have been organizing so-called handmade urbanism workshops at the site, where students of architecture, passers-by, and neighbors are invited to design and construct pieces of urbanism for the city (see figure 8). as the architects like to say, “today urbanism is brico-urbanism, a handmade job [el urbanismo es brico-urbanismo, se hace con las manos].” a central pedagogical dimension of these workshops is that all designs are documented following what the architects describe as an “open-source philosophy.” this requires participants to make not just technical notes and instructional diagrams for every object or installation, but also explanations regarding the types of materials used, their affordances, how and where they are sourced, and the like. the documentation includes photographs, diagrams, videos, or 3-d renderings, which are then uploaded and made available online, in the hope that they will become methods or “prototypes,” as members of zuloark like to put it, for the ongoing investigation of the city as an open-source environment. some of these prototypes will travel to other parts of the city, such as when the prototype for an urban bench is disassembled and later used in the construction of community-garden beds or used for furnishing a local school’s playground in auto-construction workshops with students. the travels of these various objects and resources entangle the city in a thick texture of social and material relations, which people have started to speak of as metodologías para hacer ciudad, methods for eliciting the city’s capacities. figure 8. handmade urbanism workshop at el campo de cebada, july 2012. photo by alberto corsín jiménez. however, the documentation that participants produce at the workshops is erratic and inconsistent. some relish the opportunity to document exhaustively their work, and might even carry out interviews with local neighbors in an attempt to substantiate a design or aesthetic choice, while others get away with little more than a couple of photographs or drawings. such unevenness has troubled the architectural collectives. i have had long conversations with manuel regarding the urbanness of these designs and objects, given that one can hardly speak of them as having standards of any kind. on one occasion, manuel probed deeper than previously on the specific inflection that open-source designs brought to the relationship between knowledge and acknowledgment, between learning and witnessing in urban affairs: “the thing is,” he said, “that when the municipality speaks of ‘participatory design,’ they are thinking how to embed representative voices into infrastructures and standards, say, for designing children’s playgrounds or urban equipment for plazas and parks. we, on the other hand, are thinking of pedagogy and learning: how to design spaces and infrastructures so that communities can learn from one another.” he continued: “so when we say that el campo is una infraestructura para la ciudad, an infrastructure for the city, we don’t just mean to say that it provides the space or materials for the community to carry out activities that were previously unimaginable. rather, it is the learning processes that it enables and sets in circulation that we are interested in. it is the circulating economy of learning that is the infrastructure: the auto-construction of the city as an infrastructure of apprenticeships.” aurora, another member of zuloark, chipped in: “everywhere you look, from urban community gardens to #edumeet or the 15m neighborhood assemblies, there is an explicit effervescence and consciousness regarding the apprenticeships that the city is deploying [los aprendizajes que se despliegan por la ciudad].” but, she added, “one also senses that much of it passes unnoticed, that we have no place from where to make all those learning processes learnable: what does it mean to make an urban apprenticeship legible? what kind of learning is the city?” (cf. mcfarlane 2011).8 conclusion auto-construction has a long tradition in urban studies and anthropology. by 1984, alberto arecchi had pointed out the significance of auto-construction as an empirical system of problem-solving in african cities, although he likewise alerted readers to the risks of invoking auto-construction as a romanticized, neocolonial trope for indigenous self-empowerment: “where auto-construction is a traditional symptom of poverty, where new governments are anxious to modernize, to make slums and huts a thing of the past, one sometimes risks sounding neo-colonialist when propounding the advantages of auto-construction” (arecchi 1984, 575–76). the allure and the perils of auto-construction have remained with urban theory ever since. the metonym of the slum, in ananya roy’s description, remains a powerful placeholder for both dystopian and inventive accounts of the urban: for the retrograde, the resilient, and the resourceful. inspired by recent scholarship that seeks in the periphery, the informal, and the subaltern new perceptual systems for thinking (with) the city, in this article i have offered an argument for the use of auto-construction as a double heuristic of method and theory for the urban condition. “rather than the city being somehow read through particular schemes of power,” morten nielsen (2011, 352) has written in his study of auto-construction in maputo, mozambique, the lens of inverse governmentality (as he cleverly describes such self-help housing projects) offers a perspective in which “the city consequently reads itself.” similarly, i have tried to show how auto-construction may work as an auto-heuristic, not just for urban theory but also for anthropological theory at large. i have offered an account of the challenges and difficulties faced by a variety of countercultural and guerrilla architectural collectives in madrid in attempting to recuperate a vacant site in the heart of the city. the work of auto-constructing the site, of furnishing both a material and social ecology for it, also became a method for describing the political and epistemic liberation of the space. the inhabitants of el campo experimented with various technologies and genres for registering the obligations and requirements, as well as the aspirations and expectations, that they deposited on the site as a space of autonomy, learning, and mutual witnessing. their auto-construction thus functioned as a method of description and a design for theory, of the city they have at hand and of the city they would like to build: a city-specific and a city-in-abstraction. let me close, then, with some reflections on the place that ethnography occupies amid the panoply of methods inhabiting, intermediating, and upending how the city-specific and the city-in-abstraction relate to one another. few distinctions have drawn as engaged and exhaustive scrutiny and criticism as that between the specific and abstract qualities of conceptual reasoning. no lesser text than the savage mind famously opens with a disquisition on the spurious differentiation between specific and abstract thought when applied, respectively, to primitive and scientific reasoning (lévi-strauss 1966, 1–9). as is well known, claude lévi-strauss suggested that the savage mind is fueled by bricolage, an operation of inventiveness that draws on a heterogeneous, yet limited set of tools and materials for laying out novel arrangements with which to navigate the world. the operation of bricolage exemplified, for lévi-strauss (1966, 16), “a science of the concrete,” where the abstract or specific qualities of conceptual maneuvering are superseded by a method of empirical pragmatics and potentiality. the image of the bricoleur recalls the method of brico-urbanism that guerrilla architectural collectives single out as characteristic of their practice in madrid. however, if for lévi-strauss (1966, 18) bricolage makes for an operation that lies “half-way between percepts and concepts,” it has been my purpose in this article to show how in the context of guerrilla urbanism, the method of bricolage is itself auto-constructed in an operation that recursively problematizes the very status of the city as method. thus, when people summoned the ghosts of the economic crisis at the puerta del sol’s city in miniature or when they speculated on the oligarchic alliance between real-estate interests and corrupt politicians that haunted the future of el campo, they were invoking an image of the city that made itself felt as both a specific and a generic presence in their lives. the generic and the specific appear entangled and muddled, and the experience of navigating and moving between them is rendered as an experience of method, of sharing-with, moving-toward, mobilizing-for, immersing-in, systematizing-out-from—for example, through the use of specific languages and interfaces of description, archival and documentary technologies, or systems and infrastructures of apprenticeship. we may say that the city appears as “a figure seen twice” (riles 2001, 91)—an object at once specific and abstract—yet it does so only while in motion as a method in auto-construction.9 the city as method affects ethnography too, for it gets entangled in now specific, now generic recursions, with other methods and other systems of problematization. how to discern, then, what an ethnographic effect looks like today? ethnography’s own entanglement in this dazzle of recursions, i have noted, is often perceived, appropriately, as a moment of auto-dazzle, when our methods double back mischievously on their presumed efficacy. when the city is at stake, the dangers of auto-dazzle loom large in the footsteps of informality and the periphery: the discoveries of ethnography reveling in the informality of discovery. yet what if it is the auto rather than the dazzle that the ethnographic should go after—its moment of self-construction rather than its moment of self-revelation? this is not unlike what james holston’s informants did when focusing on the culture of distinction and personality invested in each house, while keeping an eye on the dangers of copying that haunted each project. quite literally, they seemed to be auto-constructing their own auto-dazzle. in this context, as i noted above, auto-construction functioned not as an object (housing) nor as a process (self-organization) but as a method for the city. for some scholars, this rehearses and invites reformulations of the problem of the epistemology of the urban—the categories and concepts with which to apprehend the city. instead of lingering with this problem, though, i would invite us to consider and explore the methods, designs, and “trajectories of apprenticeships” (pignarre and stengers 2011, 44) through which the city and its stories auto-construct one another. notes acknowledgments when i returned to madrid in 2009 after a seventeen-year absence, the city i got to know was very different from the city i remembered having grown up in. over the past eight years, i have been extremely lucky to find myself in the company of a group of people whose capacity to rediscover every corner of the city as a space of wonder, surprise, and possibilities is unfaltering, as is their capacity to get up every time they get knocked down, which unfortunately has happened more than a few times in the wake of the neoliberal austericide that has struck us. this text would therefore be simply unimaginable without the inspiration and accompaniment i have received from them. in particular, i want to express my deepest sympathy and gratitude to juan lópez-aranguren blázquez, manuel polanco pérez-llantada, rubén lorenzo montero, and alberto nanclares (basurama); manuel palacio and aurora adalid (zuloark); diego peris (todo por la praxis); jacobo garcía fouz and jorge martín (el campo de cebada). tomás sánchez criado read a first draft of this essay, and his comments and suggestions provided much-needed direction and finesse. with characteristic wit and lucidity, morten nielsen engaged with an early draft of the text and invited me to rethink the scales, the structure, and the temporalities of an argument that was, up to that point, hardly recursive itself. marilyn strathern dazzled the text with her usual generosity as she reassured me that there was indeed scope for auto-dazzling our languages of description of the city. i would also like to express my appreciation to the cultural anthropology editorial collective for their critical encouragement and support throughout the editorial process. the final text has benefited enormously from the generous and attentive reading of reviewers and editors. if i leave for the end my mention of adolfo estalella, it is only in recognition of his magisterial role in the intellectual and methodological auto-construction of our joint ethnographic journey through madrid during these past years. 1. the unemployment rate in san cristóbal is 17.85 percent, madrid’s highest. less than half of the neighborhood’s population has any formal education, with only 4.8 percent having completed a higher education qualification. average income in 2015 reached €15,594. 2. here, i am inspired by raymond williams’s (1961) well-known description of the cultural vectors—the structures of feeling—shaping class dynamics, but also abdoumaliq simone’s (2014, 84) recent reappropriation of the term to describe the “urban majorities” that come together and take shape as a “densification of techniques . . . calculations, impulses, screens, surfaces . . . tears,” such that “things get their ‘bearings’ by having ‘bearing’ on each other.” 3. in this guise, auto-construction helps us move away from questions of representation in urban theory (see also thrift 2008), not just by drawing attention to the vectors of affect, desire, or vitality that traverse city life (gandolfo 2009; simone 2010), nor by focusing on the complex, heterogeneous, and fuzzy assemblages that constantly compose and recompose the urban condition (farías and bender 2010; mcfarlane 2011), but by paying attention to the ecologies of practice through which the city is auto-constructed as method of inquiry and exploration. 4. i hyphenate this term, although scholars like holston do not, to highlight its recursive logic: a language of the city that does double duty as a language for the city. 5. unemployment would keep rising to peak at 26.09 percent, or 6 million people, in 2013. 6. note how the periphery is made to work in this context as a figure seen twice: now territory, now concept. annelise riles (2001) uses this phrase to describe the complex heuristics of the network age, where social and analytical forms often substitute for each other. significantly, strathern (1999, 262) uses the image to characterize the ethnographic moment itself, in which “either observation or analysis, either immersement or movement, may seem to occupy the entire field of attention. what makes the ethnographic moment is the way in which these activities are apprehended as occupying the same (conceptual) space.” later in the essay, i argue that it is also necessary to examine how such (conceptual) spaces are designed and auto-constructed. 7. i owe this phrase to one of the article’s anonymous reviewers. 8. aurora’s final question, in the original spanish, was “¿qué significa aprender ciudad?” aprender ciudad and hacer ciudad, learning and making cityness, have become two of the most popular idioms in use among grassroots community projects. 9 on recursion as a method in motion, see holbraad 2012. references arecchi, alberto 1984 “auto-construction in africa.” cities 1, no. 6: 575–79. https://doi.org/10.1016/0264-2751(84)90065-9. banck, 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381–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2013.858059. corsín jiménez, alberto, and adolfo estalella 2014 “assembling neighbors: the city as hardware, method, and ‘a very messy kind of archive.’” common knowledge 20, no. 1: 150–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2374808. davis, mike 2004 “planet of slums: urban involution and the informal proletariat.” new left review, no. 26: 5–34. https://newleftreview.org/ii/26/mike-davis-planet-of-slums. 2006 planet of slums. new york: verso. edumeet 2012 “edumeet.” arquitectura viva, no. 145: 26. eizenberg, efrat 2012 “actually existing commons: three moments of space of community gardens in new york city.” antipode 44, no. 3: 764–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00892.x. farías, ignacio, and thomas bender, eds. 2010 urban assemblages: how actor-network theory changes urban studies. new york: routledge. gandolfo, daniella 2009 the city at its limits: taboo, transgression, and urban renewal in lima. chicago: university of chicago 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eds. 2012 inventive methods: the happening of the social. new york: routledge. marcus, george 2014 “prototyping and contemporary anthropological experiments with ethnographic method.” journal of cultural economy 7, no. 4: 399–410. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2013.858061. mcfarlane, colin 2011 learning the city: knowledge and translocal assemblage. malden, mass.: wiley. mcguirk, justin 2014 radical cities: across latin america in search of a new architecture. new york: verso. nielsen, morten 2011 “inverse governmentality: the paradoxical production of peri-urban planning in maputo, mozambique.” critique of anthropology 31, no. 4: 329–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x11420118. organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) 2015 “in it together: why less inequality benefits all.” paris: oecd publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264235120-en. pignarre, phillipe, and isabelle stengers 2011 capitalist sorcery: breaking the spell. translated by andrew goffey. new york: palgrave macmillan. purcell, mark 2013 “the right to the city: the struggle for democracy in the urban public realm.” policy and politics 41, no. 3: 311–27. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557312x655639. rabinow, paul 2011 the accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. chicago: university of chicago press. rao, vyjayanthi 2006 “slum as theory: the south/asian city and globalization.” international journal of urban and regional research 30, no. 1: 225–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2006.00658.x. riles, annelise 2001 the network inside out. ann arbor: university of michigan press. roy, ananya 2011 “slumdog cities: rethinking subaltern urbanism.” international journal of urban and regional research 35, no. 2: 223–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01051.x. simone, abdoumaliq 2006 “pirate towns: reworking social and symbolic infrastructures in johannesburg and douala.” urban studies 43, no. 2: 357–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500146974. 2010 city life from jakarta to dakar: movements at the crossroads. new york: routledge. 2014 jakarta, drawing the city near. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. strathern, marilyn 1999 property, substance, and effect: anthropological essays on persons and things. new brunswick, n.j.: athlone press. thrift, nigel 2008 non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. new york: routledge. turner, john f. c. 1976 housing by people: towards autonomy in building environments. new york: pantheon. turner, john f. c., and robert fichter, eds. 1972 freedom to build: dweller control of the housing process. new york: macmillan. walliser, andrés 2013 “new urban activisms in spain: reclaiming public space in the face of crises.” policy and politics 41, no. 3: 329–50. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557313x670109. williams, raymond 1961 the long revolution. london: chatto and windus. geology, potentiality, speculation geology, potentiality, speculation: on the indeterminacy of first oil gisa weszkalnys london school of economics in december 2011, televisão santomense, the state-run tv channel of são tomé and príncipe, dedicated its chat show portas abertas to the topic of petroleum. one of the stylish young hosts posed the following question to the experts who had been invited to discuss the issue: “how can we, the santomean people, the palaiês [women fish vendors], fishermen, journalists, lawyers, and taxi drivers who are not part of the state, benefit from petroleum?” she continued: “how can people know whether são tomé and príncipe has any petroleum?” the first expert to reply was the chemical engineer osvaldo abreu, whom i knew well from my fieldwork in the african atlantic island state. osvaldo had previously been a technical director at são tomé and príncipe’s national oil agency, but he had since moved to work for an international company offering scientific data services for the oil industry. now osvaldo summed up the riddle of fifteen years or more of inconclusive oil exploration: we are dealing with a scientific matter that is complicated because it happens out of our sight. we are dealing with a geological matter that is found in the subsoil while we are here, above ground. we are dealing with petroleum in an imagined form. and people keep imagining, predicting, and hoping that what we hold in our minds or in our imagination or in the results of the studies we have done is true. what can this quotidian instance of television entertainment tell us about the nature of petroleum exploration on the periphery of established zones of extraction and global markets? osvaldo’s response reflects a vibrant concern with the potentiality of matter that lies at the heart of petroleum production. but realizing this potential has been touch and go. my research in são tomé and príncipe (stp) started in 2007, a decade after the santomean government had signed an ill-conceived agreement for petroleum exploration with the u.s.-based environment remediation holding company (erhc). during extended fieldwork and follow-up visits, i talked to ordinary santomeans, international advisors, industry representatives, and the mid-level bureaucrats of stp’s national oil agency, including osvaldo. at a time when the gulf of guinea was consolidated as africa’s petroleum frontier and global oil prices peaked, there was much bafflement that stp’s oil exploration had not taken off as initially expected. this article seeks to work out a partial answer to this apparent contradiction by drawing on ethnographic observations and archival research. but rather than asking why there is no oil in stp, i query the persistent notion that there might be. i use what the oil industry calls “first oil” as a heuristic to examine how a notion of petroleum potential is generated and sustained in the face of the contradictory dynamics of contemporary oil exploration. i show that first oil is a protracted and precarious achievement based on a speculative epistemology and reliant on specific technical, legal, and commercial practices and devices with surprisingly incongruous effects. instruments that aim to facilitate petroleum production—such as contracts, exploration zones, and test wells—thus become gestures of resource potentiality without compelling a predetermined outcome. they give shape to a dispersed matter whose existence, in stp, has continued to be doubted. first oil the phenomenon of first oil makes the notion of indeterminate potential readily apparent. first oil barely needs defining. in the jargon of petro-industry experts, first oil refers to the initial oil pumped from a newly commercialized exploration well. it acts on forms of speculative knowledge—knowledge that is necessarily incomplete, based on uncertain and partially obscured evidence, and that occasionally makes “less than rational connections between means and ends” (comaroff and comaroff 2000, 310). it signifies the transformation of zigzags of geophysical measurements, fuzzy stratigraphies of seismic surveys, well logs, and drilling cores into economic value. it engages one or more capital-, technology-, and knowledge-intensive investment projects that are the indispensable but inherently risky “motor[s] of capitalist wealth creation” (røyrvik 2011, 5). its associated myths of serendipity, sweaty labor, and persistence provide a measure of the high risk involved and the abundant capacity for failure. significantly, a growing number of discoveries of conventional hydrocarbons are now made in deepwater offshore reserves, such as those presumed in the maritime zones surrounding stp, at depths between 1,500 and 4,000 meters (iea 2013).1 offshore oil, as hannah appel (2012) argues, promises to render profit “frictionless” through the deployment of specialist personnel, infrastructures, and contractual regimes that, however imperfectly, seek to disentangle industry operations from local ecologies, social inequalities, and violent conflicts (see ferguson 2005). however, current deepwater offshore success rates lie anywhere between 10 and 15 percent (nelson et al. 2013). buried deep under the ocean floor and humanly accessible only with costly technologies, the precise location, size, and quality of oil prospects are notoriously difficult to pin down. many wells end up as dry holes (that is, technical but not commercial discoveries), as indeed they have in stp, where nearly two decades of oil exploration by both small independent companies and multinationals such as chevron texaco have not yielded any significant results. in engaging the “concrete specificity of the industry” (appel 2012, 693), my analysis is therefore concerned with how offshore can imply loss as much as profit. oil’s successful valorization has been largely taken for granted in the interdisciplinary literature on hydrocarbons, despite an increasingly pervasive sense of their uncertain future. the anticipated lack of hydrocarbons, or indeed their carefully concealed abundance, has given rise to anxious projections in the industry (labban 2010). in addition, scholars have highlighted oil’s illusory effects, that is, the mirage of prosperity oil may generate in the economies of producer states, where fantasies of progress are displaced by deception and violence (apter 2005; coronil 1997; watts 2009). these effects have often been associated with oil’s ready transubstantiation into monetary wealth. oil rents, alongside oil extraction’s low requirement for labor and its marked separation from other domestic economic activity, may create the impression that “riches reside directly in nature” (coronil 1997, 389). this quality of oil appears to have intensified as petroleum markets and global financial markets become fused ever more tightly (appel 2012; labban 2010). from this perspective, oil now supports national and global economies less as an artifact of productive labor than as rents, petrodollars, and speculative gain, and as a result has “ceased to be identified as a material substance” (coronil 1997, 390). first oil, however, complicates this view. a central aim of this article is to demonstrate that oil is both a measure of value in a globalized economy and a geologic matter that can defy precision prior to, and even during, its extraction (barry 2014; mitchell 2009; watts 2009). it is an industry truth that oil reserves are composites of economic probabilities, technological feasibilities, and geological potentials (mitchell et al. 2012): an imaginary of complexly distributed agencies folded into each other. future oil demand, engineering advances, and geoscientific assessments of rock porosity, viscosity, and temperatures come together in industry practices, such as the so-called risking of reserves, which estimates the probability of success. my analysis registers these multiple types of materials, calculations, and modes of speculation mobilized here and how they can generate, prolong, and obstruct petroleum’s potential. specifically, first oil adds an understanding of resource exploration as an uneven and hazardous project. i trace this unevenness through the long periods of dormancy characteristic of the industry and their specific temporal regimes, which have rarely been the sustained focus of social scientific analysis. in an opinion piece written for a santomean newspaper, osvaldo analyzed the winding road to first oil (abreu 2012). a look at some of the country’s oil-rich neighbors, he explained, showed that the type of risky investment that characterizes stp today could bring spectacular success. however, in many cases, including equatorial guinea and ghana, large-scale commercial production had been preceded by decades of work by exploration companies willing to take a gamble, a multitude of dry holes, and lost (though eventually regained) capital. later i will examine stp’s own protracted quest for oil, starting in the nineteenth century. here it is important to note that first oil constitutes an expansive moment in which the circulation of hydrocarbons gets readily overtaken by the circulation of facts about them. the story of stp is not unique. from somaliland to the arctic, notionally recoverable oil is being explored at massive expense and with uncertain results, leaving entire populations in a state of expectation. insufficient capital, labor, and expertise, political and institutional weakness, geological and ecological conditions, as well as burst commodities bubbles rank among the factors that historically have hindered or halted resource booms (dean 1987; nolan and thurber 2010). because oil prices are so volatile, all investment in petroleum production is also speculation. finding oil anywhere makes for a protracted undertaking, but this holds especially true in areas without prior exploration and infrastructural investment. so-called wildcatters, often the first to open new exploration zones, may take years to attract financial backing or larger companies willing to share the risk. meanwhile, suitable drilling sites need to be identified, concessions demarcated, land cleared, roads built, drilling barges hired, and exploratory wells dug. geological knowledge has to be recalibrated with seismic surveys, well logs, and core sample analyses. blockages and delay, as i will show, threaten at multiple points, from the negotiation of contractual terms to the delineation of concessions and the actual drilling. oilfields whose so-called prospectivity is only inadequately known or that are too small to warrant investment may be left orphaned or stranded. achieving first oil may take years, decades, or might even face indefinite postponement.2 first oil’s dramatic suspense recalls what karl marx, in volume 2 of capital, analyzing the circuits of productive capital, referred to as an “excess of time” or “pauses” integral to certain industrial processes. time, translated as human labor in capital’s historical ontology, would ordinarily function as a measure of value (osborne 2008). marx demonstrated the obstruction posed to capitalist value expansion and accumulation, for example, by laborers’ need for rest, by seeds sprouting in the soil, or by a shortage of necessary tools in the market. as a result, productive capital is held “in readiness” but remains fallow, although this fallowness “is a requirement for the uninterrupted flow of the process of production” (marx 2013, 647). the pause thus is the tacit driver of an accelerating capitalist temporality: a problem to be avoided through managerial and technological change as well as credit systems in the interest of higher turnover rates and profits. yet from another perspective, as a type of temporal deferral, pauses are partly generated by the multiple contradictions inherent in the dynamics of capitalist production (harvey 1989, 181–83; labban 2010). i am interested here in how we might open up the pause’s analytic possibilities ethnographically. instead of charting capital’s inexorable progress, i ask how the pause reorients our gaze toward the technologies of speculation, contingencies, obstructions, and material specificities intrinsic to the capitalist project. arguably, first oil does not constitute a marxian pause in any straightforward sense. its time is not empty, not devoid of labor per se, even if the material transformations this labor generates can remain somewhat invisible. for example, they may be about ascertaining potentialities, thus constituting geologic substances as a resource. what’s more, the growing financialization of oil markets has led to a steady emancipation of value creation from material production and the circulation of substances in physical space, observable, for example, in the dissociation of oil availability and global oil prices, or the privileging of short-term returns over trade and investment in corporate decision-making (labban 2010).3 yet these developments have not made the pause analytically obsolete. first oil’s long lead-up time and decades of dormancy are still experienced as a rupture of ordinary productive processes.4 they, too, can hold capital investment in suspense—sometimes for a given period a company might spend on the waiting list for a sought-after drilling barge, sometimes indefinitely. at the very least, an analysis of first oil underscores the persistent “intimate relationship . . . between productive enterprises or assets” and the creation of speculative and promissory value (ho 2009, 181; see also appel 2012; guyer 2009; labban 2010, 2013; røyrvik 2011). i argue that first oil’s marxian pause is filled with what i call gestures. industry-specific instruments intended to realize petroleum become gestural in the absence of significant commercial discoveries. i take my cue from giorgio agamben (2000), who provides one of the most compelling discussions of the gesture as a philosophical concept.5 he points to a subtle distinction between the gesture’s latin root, gerere, meaning to carry, manage, or conduct, and related action verbs, including facere (making, creating) and agere (acting, performing). the gesture, agamben (2000, 57–58) notes, is where “nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported.” it is “means as such.” in the case of first oil, gestures keep the pause prised open by materializing an absent potential and promising future gain. they partake of capitalism’s generalized speculative epistemology, which can be retrospectively justified by reference to profitability (harvey 1989, 344). by thus anticipating future value, they provide reassurance and maintain the confidence that prevents investments from turning into outright failure. this article will examine a series of such gestures: the contract, the exploration zone, and the test well. looking at the precise nature of these instruments of first oil makes my inquiry into the pause a somewhat more tractable project. but the necessary preliminary task is to explore how first oil becomes a possibility in the first place, based on the observation of resource potential. i begin by sketching two historical junctures—first, in the portuguese colonial empire and, subsequently, in the newly independent santomean state—at which oil’s potentiality was envisaged through the speculative techniques of entrepreneurs, scientists, and state officials. the substance of speculation for the philosopher graham harman (2010), potentiality is a somewhat lazy objectification of a propensity, that is, the not-yet-actualized capacities of things. harman, and others before him, have challenged us to pinpoint more precisely the ontological status, say, of the lethalness of a piece of plutonium lying in the desert, or indeed the capacity of crude oil to be a resource. in what ways, harman asks, can potentiality be said to be animated by the possible relations in which things are entangled and yet to exist independently of them? to approach potentiality empirically and ethnographically differs quite markedly from contemplating it philosophically. ethnography leads me to explore how potentiality, specifically the potentiality implied by first oil, is constituted historically and implicated in social praxis (fortun 2008; mazzarella 2010; svendsen 2011). i will focus on a specific set of techniques, the speculations of entrepreneurs, scientists, and state officials that, from the nineteenth century onward, summoned a notion of petroleum potential. since its inception, petroleum exploration has combined the bold assessments of oilmen with the speculative fantasies of urban financiers and the hypothetical inferences of a new breed of geoscientists in what an oil executive of the time called “the gamble of drilling for oil” (zimmermann 1933, 500; lucier 2008). speculation, in this sense, exceeds its narrower, contemporary definition of a type of behavior pertaining exclusively to the domain of finance (de goede 2005; ho 2009; ouroussoff 2010; zaloom 2004). instead, it comprises a heterogeneous set of practices that suggest possible modes of existence for the geological matter observed while it excludes others. speculation, here, is an observation of potentiality, both in the sense of remarking on potentiality’s existence and of producing new facts about it. in the following, i will examine the successive speculations of a portuguese colonial financier, a daring south african entrepreneur, state officials, and industry geologists. i highlight, first, the historical depth to their acquisitive guesswork, and, second, the way that liquid samples, drilling cores, and other geophysical materials gave it substance. “a new source of wealth” in one of our first interviews, i asked luís dos prazeres, then the director of stp’s national petroleum agency, to run me through the beginnings of oil in stp. prazeres, or kapala as he is widely known, had been the agency’s director since its founding in 2004. originally trained as a pilot, kapala became the country’s first minister of natural resources in 1999 and had worked in the oil administration ever since. his response to my routine question surprised me. instead of pointing to the year 1997, which is often taken as the birth date of stp’s era do petróleo when the government signed its fateful contract with erhc, kapala claimed that oil had already been identified as one of the islands’ hidden treasures in the late nineteenth century. he pulled a pen drive from his pocket, stuck it into his computer, and clicked open a document that turned out to be his manuscript of a chronicle of stp’s oil. “i am writing a history of these developments,” he told me. kapala’s account embeds the santomean quest for first oil in a local history of things where the conjuring of resources out of “wild nature,” so deftly analyzed by anna tsing (2005), had long been a condition of being. alongside the other eastern atlantic islands colonized by the portuguese from the late fifteenth century onwards, são tomé and príncipe played a dual role in portugal’s colonial project, first, as entrepôts for the flourishing cross-atlantic slave trade and, second, as prototypes for the agro-economic exploitation of tropical nature in the form of sugar, coffee, and cocoa (mintz 1985). diverse resource potentialities were routinely envisioned, exploited, and just as quickly dissolved or moved elsewhere in ways that tied the archipelago into a globalizing economic system. oil surged into this extractive environment when older forms of land-based potential seemed increasingly untenable. in his manuscript, kapala referred to a letter sent to the portuguese ministry for maritime and overseas trade by francisco de oliveira chamiço (1876), the founder and governor of the banco nacional ultramarino (bnu), portugal’s first colonial bank. in sprawling handwriting, blue ink on thin paper, chamiço claimed that analyses of water samples taken from a brook in água izé, one of são tomé’s struggling agricultural properties, contained 70 percent óleo. the letter requested the ministry’s support in investigating this petroleum mine. “opening for exploitation a new source of wealth of this order,” the governor asserted, would be crucial for maintaining the prosperity of the colonial state. the bnu would be covering the costs of such an investigation. figure 1. portrait of francisco de oliveira chamiço, founder and governor of the banco nacional ultramarino. image courtesy of the arquivo histórico da caixa geral de depósitos. the governor’s letter documents the “conjuring aspect of finance” (tsing 2005, 57), where enterprising actors stake out claims from material possibilities, summoning new commodities in a process of market making. yet it also underlines the precariousness of this project and, thus, of value realization on the capitalist periphery. chamiço’s conjectures were steeped in uncertainty about the future of portugal’s colonies. the bnu was a private bank aiming to foster economic activity in portugal’s overseas territories. following brazil’s independence, the profitability of the remaining colonies had become a central concern of the portuguese government. more those of a colonial company than of a commercial bank, the bnu’s operations already merged finance with productivity. the bank furnished vital services and infrastructures, in addition to providing loans to the ailing landed estates in são tomé and príncipe (nunes et al. 2010, 7). accusations of embezzlement in the bnu’s own ranks and a portuguese banking panic aggravated its predicament. most significantly, one year prior to chamiço’s letter, a slave-led revolt resulted in the hasty, if long-promised, abolition of an increasingly indefensible labor system, thus threatening portugal’s plans to revive its island territories with capital injections (clarence-smith 2000; eyzaguirre 1986, 181–82). in this context, new geological observations, though as yet unproven, were intended to mobilize both state resources and capital investments with the expectation to counteract colonial deficits. chamiço’s letter invoked a vision of verticality that, as bruce braun (2000) has shown, helped re-site economic value from the surface (land) to the subsoil. from baku to pennsylvania, a novel scientific epistemics inferred geological relationships and promised commercial opportunity. água izé’s muddy specimens similarly gave visible and olfactory evidence of óleo as an absent presence that could be indexed to hidden geological strata and source rock formations. a bnu envoy was sent to são tomé to pursue the matter, his findings now lost from lisbon archives. yet within two years, chamiço (1878) concluded: “petroleum is a myth.” shifting global tastes and skillful political maneuvering had rather diminished the appeal of obscure subterranean potential. land owned by the portuguese crown and leased to so-called forro (native creole) families, often without title, was sold to colonists for export-crop production (eyzaguirre 1986, 151; seibert 2006, 40–41). ever larger numbers of imported contract labor subsidized by the portuguese state provided a way around abolition. once again, the lush rain forest that santomeans call ôbô fell victim to sharp-edged machetes wielded by former slave traders and other investors in search of new profit bases, and a cocoa boom catapulted são tomé and príncipe, in spite of themselves, into the twentieth century. “getting warm?!” aside from chamiço’s letter, the dusty box files in lisbon’s arquivo histórico ultramarino also shelter the expectant applications for petroleum exploration filed by portuguese and foreign entrepreneurs in the 1920s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond independence in 1975. they constitute an extended meanwhile in which potentiality is reassured—first oil paused rather than wound up. on long evenings in one of são tomé’s popular snack bars, aíto bonfim, a respected lawyer, would relate to me fragmented memories about his teenage self offering budding english skills and local knowledge to ball & collins, a british company engaged in onshore prospecting a few years before the portuguese empire’s demise. fifteen years or so later, now freshly returned from portugal with a law degree in hand, aíto landed the job of reviewing future exploration plans for the newly independent socialist state in which nationalization and shifting markets had brought the cocoa plantations to near collapse. in the late 1980s, drilling concessions were granted to christian hellinger, a south african entrepreneur with existing business interests in the island. i met with hellinger in são tomé in 2007. now in his sixties, he came across as somewhat supercilious and intimidating with stories of his african exploits. hellinger had owned diamond mines in angola and, during the civil war, used stp as an evacuation platform for his staff. how did he get into oil, i inquired. the geologists from his mines had nothing to do while on evacuation, hellinger explained. he kept them busy with investigations of the petroleum hidden in stp’s rain forest. flicking through hellinger’s archives, i picture him chatting over a glass of whiskey with the men that claimed to govern stp, beckoning oil riches buried deep under layers of volcanic rock, and promising perhaps a hotel or two for foreign tourists, or an improvement of the president’s villa. i find among telefaxes, contracts, and maps a clipping from an industry magazine dated april 1990 and reporting on an upcoming sale of offshore oil licenses in nearby equatorial guinea. a scribble in the margin—“getting warm?!”—indicated that the quest for santomean oil may have been more than a pastime for underworked staff. hellinger commissioned various surveys and, with technology shipped in from south africa, drilled two wildcat wells. when the drilling shafts collapsed, hellinger had run out of money. figure 2. pedro inspecting the remains of hellinger’s exploratory well, ubabudu-1, near vila celeste, são tomé. pedro helped construct the well in 1990. photo by gisa weszkalnys. by the mid-1990s, structural adjustment and privatization, instead of reviving the plantation legacy, had tied santomeans into new bonds of both debt and profit. the santomean state had entered a financial crisis and increasingly embraced risky investment proposals. the islands’ no-longer wild nature was up for grabs. land was distributed to former plantation workers, but a self-consolidating political and business elite snatched up the best plots in collaboration with investors (seibert 2006, 348), partly curtailing the reach of the reform. the country’s governors and leaders were envisioning new resources to exploit. the “.st” internet domain was made commercially available, and companies marketing adult content were given access to the country’s +239 telephone code. there were plans to establish a free trade zone. meanwhile, the atlantic sea could be remade as an extractive space, beyond the islands’ narrow littoral fringe, beyond the habitat of scalloped hammerheads, snappers, and flying gurnards, and beyond where fishermen from stp had ever ventured. *** in sum, speculation about resource potential thrives at historical junctures characterized by the foreclosing of previous material possibilities while it opens up others alongside new markets (see tsing 2005). it comprises a tangle of things, including economic crises, ideological struggles, epistemic and technical shifts, but also human actors sensing new commercial opportunities. the abolition of slavery prompted a brief search for less labor-intensive alternatives; the oil crisis and the decline of established oil fields led to a move into unexplored territory; technologies such as 3-d seismic, floating production facilities and ultradeepwater drilling units, as i discuss below, improved the quest for oil offshore. successive speculations about petroleum, though not overdetermined by its geophysical and geochemical qualities, were not unsubstantiated. they were observations based on what people know, and on what they know they do not know (walsh 2004), summoning fragmented knowledge and bits of partially obscured geological matter. data, cores, and samples of muddy water have been the stuff that held out promise and gave substance to the possibility of first oil. for those involved, it is what separates risky investment from mere wagering. it is the stuff from which material potential is manufactured, engaging “vast faculties of anticipation, creation, innovation . . . and technology” (røyrvik 2011, 95, 129; see also bowker 1994). figure 3. hellinger’s drilling equipment, which is being stored in a warehouse in são tomé. photo by gisa weszkalnys. as an observation of potentiality, speculation offers a mode of participation in the opportunities that obscured matter portends. it goes along with a distinctive temporal disposition that creatively contemplates possibilities, while excluding others, temporarily suspending a need for certitude in the desire for disproportionate gain. in stp, speculation about future resources generated fresh alliances between public and private actors. from chamiço’s proposal to salvage an ailing colonial territory to the wildcatter hellinger’s ambitious venture, which appealed to cash-strapped officials unversed in either petroleum geology or global markets, different expectations readily converged on an idea of oil and its enabling capacities, both collective and individual. in the face of mounting debt, oil has promised to give a recognizable, sovereign shape to a weak postcolonial state struggling to fulfill its functions. however, the developmentalist vision of oil offers only a deceptive alternative to other, increasingly prominent types of speculative planning, such as the financial speculations of public deficits that have restructured state-society relations in india (bear 2011). oil provides a powerful but risky form of economic integration, marred by the disjunctive temporalities of state, science, geology, and markets. it ties collective hopes to the “ethics of probability” of corporate actors (appadurai 2013, 295), whose capacity to tolerate market volatilities, interruptions, and pauses so common to the first oil process is, usually, vastly superior to that of a struggling african nation. gestures many things have sustained the expansive moment of stp’s first oil since the collapse of hellinger’s venture. kapala’s chronicle teems with a range of legal, commercial, and technical devices that have thus filled the marxian pause (prazeres 2008). since the late 1990s, maritime boundaries have circumscribed the new national asset, now located principally offshore; three licensing rounds allocated access to it;6 mechanisms for good governance and transparency have been implemented; and a series of agreements have defined the obligations of the country’s various industry partners. the national oil agency, directed by kapala, formed part of this effort as the body charged with managing the technical aspects of future hydrocarbon exploration (weszkalnys 2011, 2014). these largely standardized devices constitute a composite sociomaterial arrangement of measurement, connection, and qualification characteristic of the global oil industry (barry 2006). they reflect a double logic of contemporary capitalist expansion, which in addition to creating new sites of investment speculates as to their inherent problems and failures. in the context of first oil, such devices and the epistemic practices associated with them acquire complex salience. first, they supply the tangible scaffolding to the drama that attracts investment to what is largely a speculative endeavor (tsing 2005, 63; see also fortun 2008). second, they thus provide an “informational enrichment” (barry 2014, 141) of geological matter, making it amenable to the exploitative fantasies of states and their economic partners (braun 2000). third, in the face of a sluggish exploration process, they become gestural. like measurements of a fetal heartbeat, they furnish hope by signaling dormancy, not death, thus preventing first oil’s pause from turning into a failure or loss. doubtless, the industry instruments i examine here—the contract, the exploration zone, and the test well—have been implemented at huge cost and with the specific aim of generating real productive value. they are neither unintentional nor insignificant (“just a gesture”). as noted earlier, what i seek to emphasize is the gesture’s sustaining, rather than performative or creative, force (agamben 2000). the instruments i describe may well contribute to an experience of blockage and deferral in the exploration process, and to date, they have failed to fulfill their stated aims of transforming prospectivity into economic assets. all the while, they have continued to signal things to come. the contract “volcaniclastic rocks, igneous rocks, supermature rocks . . . rocks uplifted and intruded in the neogene by the growth of those volcanic islands . . . sandstones, shales, deep marine sediments deposited from the late cretaceous to the oligocene . . . oil-prone source beds lying deeper, away from the islands with their modest porosity and poor permeability . . . traps found in tilted fault blocks surrounding the islands, requiring further seismic survey.” and finally: “conditions that are likely to result in the presence of oil accumulations in the lower tertiary in the offshore areas of both islands, although their possible size, and to some extent reservoir quality, are at present speculative.” these are renderings of the earth’s subsurface gleaned from the report of a british geologist hired by hellinger, which mediate between profit expectations, national interests, and the analysis of geological structures and processes (barry 2014, 142). they are speculative because they reference imperfect empirical proxies, unfit for scientific publication, but providing a baseline for calculated risk. to geologists, they speak of petroleum potential, maybe not on the island itself but certainly offshore. to risk-taking entrepreneurs, they provide an encouraging base for estimations of likely gain. on may 27, 1997, the santomean government signed a memorandum of agreement (moa) with the little known oil company erhc, which had no experience in offshore drilling but had acquired hellinger’s geophysical data, drilling cores, and claims that stp’s crude was of the desirable bonny light grade.7 the moa accompanied a contract between the two parties, with a validity of twenty-five years and renewable thereafter. the contract underscored oil’s divisibility, as financial asset and physical substance (labban 2010). rather than providing a course for action, it established a promissory value, shaped by assumptions of finitude and competition over access. the moa granted erhc some extraordinary allowances in the exploitation of stp’s hydrocarbon resources. for a fee of us$5 million, it assigned the company 40 percent of the revenues from future oil. erhc promised to raise the funds necessary to kick-start exploration activities. it would act as negotiator with any other company wishing to explore santomean oil, and earn a 5 percent fee from any payable bonuses. the double obscurity of stp’s oil—both geologically obscured and its worth not yet revealed by the market—thus allowed erhc to adopt multiple roles vis-à-vis the santomean state. despite the company’s limited expertise and financial resources, erhc staff convinced the santomean officials of their ability to carry the project through. the company’s chief operating officer sported a stetson hat and cowboy boots on his visit to the islands when promising the santomean government to raise us$100 million in seven months. gestural moves supplemented these promises: a maritime boundary claim was filed, diplomatic passports were issued to the supposed owners of a montenegro bank, and in 1998 another contract was signed with mobil, later exxonmobil. it granted the multinational concessions in return for initiating seismic research in offshore territory, where the key prospects were now expected to be located (seibert 2006, 372). in addition, erhc and the santomean government established a joint-venture oil company to manage the upcoming petroleum activities. during the following few years, erhc and the santomean government broke off, revised, and entered into new agreements. accusations of bribery and corruption flew through the air. in 2001, the company was acquired by the nigerian businessman emeka offor, a close ally of nigeria’s president olusegun obasanjo.8 erhc’s new nigerian identity has added to the company’s reputation as a dubious collaborator. more established multinationals have allegedly refrained from bidding for oil blocks in stp’s offshore territory to avoid forcible cooperation with erhc, which still holds preferential rights in several santomean oil blocks. imperfectly quantified oil potential began to produce some value for the company.9 but for the santomean state, erhc’s involvement is deemed responsible for a substantial loss of possible earnings, and critics now view it as a liability. however, such argument benefits from hindsight, i was reminded by afonso varela, the national oil agency’s former legal director. after all, he argued, erhc had effectively turned stp into a petroleum frontier at a time when nobody paid attention. it had indirectly generated 2,723 kilometers of 2-d seismic data of stp’s oil prospects, which proved indispensable in attracting additional investors (see seibert 2006, 372). the zone petroleum geologists have a special way of inferring oil. they call it a seismic survey. such surveys involve a large boat towing air guns and a set of microphones across the seabed. as they explosively void their air chambers, bubbles of energy are sent out, propagating outward, hitting the seabed, bouncing up again, and producing noisy traces. “boom—boom,” osvaldo aped the sound of the air gun when recounting his experience of interning on such a mission conducted by petroleum geo-services (pgs), a norwegian oil services company.10 some energy penetrates the seabed and returns, and some goes down and is never heard of again. “boom—boom.” the echo’s force vibrates through the vessel’s body twenty-four hours a day, registered by osvaldo’s skin, ears, organs, making it difficult to sleep. physical encounters and measurements of time lapsed become images at the geologist’s hand, like cut scans of a human body, slices through the earth’s crust. they are images of temporality, density, porosity, latency, and odds that may reveal themselves to the discerning eye. “they are at most like photographs of the moon,” explained a scottish geologist, who had once advised the santomean government. no perceptible features, only light and dark. you can de-risk prospects by interpreting seismic probabilities. but until you take a sample, you cannot know what you have. when erhc took stp’s prime minister raul bragança to the united nations law of the sea commission in new york city to file a request for the establishment of maritime boundaries, it was a nontrivial piece of technical assistance. filing boundary claims, as a legislative act, has important consequences for the demarcation of new resource frontiers, as well as for the identification of owners and their legitimate partners. since the mid-twentieth century, the delineation of exclusive economic zones (eezs) has become an urgent undertaking to control national “aquariums” of exploitable nature (pálsson 1998). here, the transformation of nature into economic value depended on the capital of corporate partners, but promised the extraction of rents and revenue by the state (coronil 1997; labban 2008, 41). law no. 1/98, the outcome of the new york trip, inscribed stp’s sovereignty over a series of living and non-living things down to the exact geographical minute and second. fish, metals, and hydrocarbons found above, on, and under the seabed were recast as national assets to be cared for and mined. dreams of sovereign substances and petroleum-based national self-sufficiency soon met with challenges. while equatorial guinea and gabon readily accepted the suggested boundary of a santomean eez based on a principle of equidistance, nigeria proved recalcitrant. it questioned the principle’s appropriateness on the basis of its much larger coastline. seismic surveys of stp’s offshore hydrocarbon potential, carried out by a subsidiary of the global petroleum-services provider schlumberger (paid for by exxonmobil), had located the most valuable prospects in areas bordering nigerian waters (seibert 2006, 372–73). three years of protracted negotiations ensued. a first, second, and third meeting between the parties was scheduled to put the technical arguments on the table. however, as kapala recounted, by may 2000, the negotiations reached deadlock. illustrious u.s. lawyers specializing in boundary disputes were called on to prepare a proposal that they hoped would bring a truce. more legal research, more discussions, more cups of coffee, and a final long meeting lasting from morning till midnight led to a critical item of bilateral jurisdiction: a zone managed jointly, but unevenly split between the two states, with nigeria receiving 60 and stp 40 percent of any revenues possibly generated from it. figure 4. map of the nigeria-são tomé and príncipe joint development zone, 2007. image courtesy of ihs. the delineation of the joint development zone (jdz), covering 34,450 square kilometers, proved a critical gesture, sustaining a notion of exploitable potential and opening up possibilities for anticipatory gain from substances not yet extracted. now, exploration blocks could be delineated and allocated in more transparent licensing rounds. the proximity of nigeria’s rich oil fields seemed to reflect well on its prospects. some people saw benefit in nigeria’s own vast experience of oil, with 2.2 million barrels per day extracted from more than 1,400 wells located in around 150 oil fields. staggering and impressive numbers that cannot conceal what many santomeans know about their big neighbor. seemingly lopsided and deceitful, the partnership has fed into a broader cultural perception of nigerians as worldly but cunning business operators. the auctions for exploration rights in the jdz provided empirical fodder for this truth. especially the second licensing round held in 2004 turned farcical the conventional wisdom that auctions are foolproof instruments for establishing a fair and real price. instead, it resulted in a report by stp’s attorney general—a document that is probably stp’s most public embodiment of transparency to date (procuradoria geral 2005). the report alleged, among other things, clandestine decision-making involving nigerian and santomean government figures and their advisors, as well as the awarding of contracts to a series of nigerian-owned companies without credentials, and called for the annulment of the licensing round.11 yet it would be wrong to think that the jdz has rendered the santomean state completely inoperative. rather, it has plotted out fresh networks of transboundary relations. the authority managing the zone, the jda, which has its headquarters in abuja, is the go-to agency for anyone wishing to invest in the jdz. it is a fitting enactment of stp’s absent oil—an inflated bureaucratic apparatus with a budget of several million dollars per year, eating into stp’s limited petroleum revenues.12 the well “to find oil, you have to drill,” runs the slogan on the website of schlumberger, the oil-exploration technology pioneer. tearing and chipping away at the rock, the reserve is spudded, pressure released, and, with luck, crude emerges in a great surge. schlumberger perfected this prospecting technique in the first few decades of the twentieth century, thus giving scientific backing to what had previously been a fairly intuitive endeavor. test wells made the world into a laboratory, creating order out of unruly terrain whose “space and time could then form the x and y axes of schlumberger logs” (bowker 1994, 109). wells can increase companies’ stock-market value by turning possible and probable into proven reserves; but the geological conditions they reveal may also disrupt a project previously deemed technologically feasible and economically sound.13 at the start of 2006, encouraging early signs from obo-1, the first exploration well in block 1 of the jdz drilled by chevron texaco and the lowest-risk target according to the company’s technical expertise, made erhc share prices shoot up.14 thousands of feet of steel had been lowered to perforate the icy-cold sea floor, a drilling riser bringing up the mud, people busy operating the equipment, measuring, analyzing, and ascertaining that the technology remained stably connected in this floating environment. a press release broke the news. at 1,720 meters, obo-1 “logged a cumulative total of at least 150 feet (45 meters) of hydrocarbon pay in multiple reservoirs and provided important reservoir rock and liquid samples, which need to be evaluated and integrated into the interpretation of the obo area” (chevron 2006). chevron’s expat representative, tim parsons, recommended caution before commercial viability was proven: “it is too soon to speculate about a date for the first barrels” (macauhub 2007). with data so insufficiently analyzed and confidential, it would be unethical for company reps to even start guessing what they might reveal. for the moment, the reservoirs were deemed not to “justify economic development on their own” (macauhub 2007). geological facts are easily drowned out by the cacophony of voices that say otherwise. tim, chevron’s representative, was notably exasperated when we talked in 2007 just after yet another article in a local paper quoted a santomean official at the jda disputing chevron’s assessment of its drill results. yet for tim, the people to blame were not just irresponsible politicians trying to capture votes and stave off international monetary fund (imf) technocrats with myths of impending wealth. only recently, imf economists themselves had published what was, in his view, an equally irresponsible study that predicted millions of barrels of oil in stp’s water (segura 2006).15 they forgot about the geology. any announcement of “no oil” has been swiftly rephrased as “no oil yet.” in 2010, chevron withdrew from the jdz for reasons likely to have included a careful balancing of geological prospects, technological possibilities, assessments of future oil markets, and the company’s need to satisfy both shareholder expectations and long-term crude supply for an integrated business. hundreds of millions of dollars can be written off when corporate portfolio management and financial markets seem to demand it (labban 2013; nolan and thurber 2010). the disappointment was temporarily relieved when the french multinational total promised a us$200 million investment to explore block 1 of the jdz in conjunction with its adjacent nigerian projects. a changed constellation of technology, economy, and science was expected to entail a new ability to create commerciality. osvaldo, kapala, and others shared the hopeful news with me in late 2012. an imf representative i talked to during this time felt confident that the country would start producing oil within the coming five years. only a few months lay between my listening to these reassurances and total’s eventual abandonment of its jdz acreage. some observers suggest that total’s withdrawal, alongside that of other companies, might spell the end of santomean oil hopes (seibert 2013). by contrast, osvaldo was unabashedly optimistic when speaking, in a more recent capacity as stp’s minister of natural resources, to a local newspaper in september 2013: “companies have their politics, their profit margins and other [considerations], and they act in accordance with their expectations. . . . we have confirmed reserves [of hydrocarbons] in sufficient quantities to make [block 1] viable” (veiga 2013). conclusion first oil is a highly uneven phenomenon forged from contingent associations of state, capital, science, and nature. to understand its unevenness, i have looked to the periods of dormancy, what i call pauses, characteristic of petroleum exploration, especially in frontier regions where scientific knowledge is incomplete, geological conditions challenging, and local regulatory frameworks and know-how limited. instead of portraying stp as a fait accompli overdetermined by models derived from established oil producer states, i highlighted the indeterminacy at the heart of petroleum production. full-blown oil nations like nigeria or venezuela and their historical idiosyncrasies would make poor analytical lenses for understanding the goings-on here. despite first oil’s apparent suspension in a vast sociospatial assemblage of hydrocarbon production, each instance of it remains, like all capitalist production, a highly localized phenomenon (braun 2006, 214; watts 2009, 83). one aim of this account has been to show that first oil’s unevenness in part results from specific material constraints posed by geologic matter whose precise contours remain largely opaque. in part, it results from the incongruous effects of a distinctive speculative epistemology. state and corporate actors, independent entrepreneurs and technical consultants, global legislators and financiers have gathered around diverse yet interrelated modes of framing the sort of potentialities required by capital’s desired expansion (harvey 1989, 343). they include conjectures about exploration precedents, seismic measurements, and other “immeasurable uncertainties” that have been a historical condition of corporate profit (ouroussoff 2010). a dispersed sociotechnical arrangement of instruments designed to determine oil’s political, economic, and geoscientific parameters seeks to reduce such uncertainties, for example, by establishing obligations between contractual partners, geopolitical jurisdictions, and productive capacities. yet these instruments may inadvertently upend their stated goal of realizing hydrocarbon potential and, instead, turn into gestures of absent oil. such gestures are unlike the “white elephants” that have come to embody the ambivalences of petroleum economies as the purveyors of “a ‘sensing-is-believing’ ontology that disguise[s] the absence of a productive base” (apter 2005, 14). they also differ from the spectacle of fraudulent evidence that props up the economy of appearances (tsing 2005). neither purely symbolic nor instrumental, gestures rather show a specific temporal ethics that attenuates or postpones failure. importantly, for all its tangible effects, stp’s first oil has also threatened to remain unrealized. contracts have created unsubstantiated value in lieu of liquidity. maritime economic zones inscribe not sovereignty but geopolitical power play. wells reveal not resources but a lack of viability. the outcome, however, has not been the collapse of stp’s first oil, but its continuing suspension, in other words, a sustained pause. disruptions and deferred achievement color not just stories of resource exploitation in distant times and places, inhibited, for example, by geographical inaccessibility and complex local colonial relations. the contemporary entanglement of productive and financial capital in the extractive sector has made the pause an ever more relevant analytical consideration (laban 2010, 551). the recent slump in oil prices translated, almost instantaneously, into extensive cost-cutting, sell-offs, reduced exploration budgets, and the postponement of production across the sector (adams 2015), affecting both established oil-producing zones and hopeful new producers in africa, where governments and ordinary people continue to build their hopes on hydrocarbons. it has also had ripple effects for copper, gold, and other minerals, where the huge capitalization required for operations, along with the depletion of existing mines, typically long and uncertain project lead times, and intensified price volatility in commodity markets already anticipated such developments (lee et al. 2012). no doubt similar instances of pausing and gesturing can be traced beyond the extractive sector. a quite different case in point comes from my earlier research about an attenuated development project for a central square in post-unification berlin (weszkalnys 2010). nearly twenty years after the project was first proposed, the square still lingers in a sustained pause. the primary gesture, here, is the legally binding construction plan—a key bureaucratic artifact in the development process. first formalized in the late 1990s, the plan was soon deemed unfit for berlin’s underwhelming real-estate market, and there were calls to adjust it to present expectations. yet developers seem desperate to cling to it while constructing halfhearted proxies of the original. in a similar way, a host of conceptual aids give shape to an envisaged aluminum plant, although the project’s success cannot be judged until the plant has reached full production (røyrvik 2011, 122). special economic zones—proliferating from india to the philippines and stp—have been preceded by the erection of billboards, the dispossession of local landowners, and the bulldozing and fencing of plots, which may or may not achieve their potential in the future (cf. cross 2014). and biomedical data is collected, marketed, and mined in anticipation of future health benefits and financial value (fortun 2008). one might examine such processes of gesturing for their material consequences, including the ways in which they bring substances and money into circulation, conjure novel institutions, and reorder access to a wide variety of resources. they may also generate a new politics feared, by investors, for producing its own disruptions and delays by spotlighting shortcomings of development projects or their unstable embeddedness in networks of global finance. if as anthropologists we want to contribute to a more refined understanding of how the ethics of possibility become caught up in the ethics of probability (appadurai 2013, 298), the pause is not a bad place to start. i end here still in the midst of that expansive (and expensive) pause of stp’s first oil. i am mindful that the moment i have described marks only the briefest episode in its long existence. it is a moment when stuff, not yet extracted and largely cut off from human interference, finds its many possible modes of being (including its geochemical versatility, high-energy density, and ready transubstantiation into monetary form) already anticipated by social practice. this is not to essentialize the geologic matter. it is to distinguish the expansive moment of first oil from discovery or invention as a moment of transformation (harman 2010). whether stp’s oil is a speculative entity, primary commodity, or corrupt currency is not encoded in hydrocarbons per se, but suggests a complex encounter of geologic matter with technoscientific, economic, and legal arrangements through which resources are made (richardson and weszkalnys 2014). potentiality, here, presents itself both as “futures fold[ed] into presents” (fortun 2008, 285) and as something stymied, marked by blockages and setbacks (røyrvik 2011). it is the result of a process simultaneously ethically charged, materially grounded, and temporally extended into an uncertain future (svendsen 2011). recent efforts to open up stp’s exclusive economic zone to commercial exploitation with seismic research, a licensing round, and production-sharing agreements continue to act as gestures of the prospect of oil. in lieu of productive value, they too hold out the promise of a profitable future. they invite us to critically re-examine contemporary capitalism’s persistent claims to boundless creativity. instead, they highlight a multiplicity of speculative forms and temporal-material realignments that emerge when things slow down while everything else keeps moving. notes acknowledgments this article is based on fieldwork made possible by the generosity of many individuals and institutions in stp and by funding from the british academy and the john fell research fund. it was further developed during a leverhulme research fellowship (2012–2013). different versions were presented at the university of oxford, the university of durham, the school of oriental and african studies, the zentrum moderner orient, and the 2013 annual meeting of the american anthropological association. i am grateful to the many people who provided excellent comments on earlier drafts, including laura bear, eeva berglund, james blair, max bolt, charlotte bruckermann, william clarence-smith, matthew engelke, stephan feuchtwang, dena freeman, david hughes, deborah james, kärg kama, jonathan parry, tanya richardson, mitch sedgwick, gerhard seibert, andrew walsh, and especially the editorial team and anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology. 1. more than half of new discoveries globally between 2000 and 2009 were deepwater offshore (iea 2013). 2. the production sharing contracts (pscs) governing stp’s joint development zone with nigeria stipulate between eight and sixteen years of research and evaluation. 3. oil also challenges conventional accounts of financialization. first, aspects of what is now labeled the logic of finance—including, for instance, a dominance of joint-stock companies (lucier 2008)—have been constitutive of the oil industry from the start, thus unsettling narratives of linear economic evolution. second, oil constitutes a raw material that remains fundamental to a vast number of life processes, while it simultaneously presents itself as a finite substance whose non-renewability seems to place it beyond the capabilities of productive capital (huber 2008; labban 2010, 542; mitchell 2009). third, like industrial investment projects more generally, oil exploration has also necessarily sought to resist subsumption by a financial logic (nolan and thurber 2010). one might even argue that oil, in the form of material assets and the labor needed to produce, continues to be the irreducible bedrock of corporate financial value expansion (labban 2013). 4. pauses extend to processes of extraction, transportation, refining, and so on. 5. the “formless” gesture constitutes a critical element of agamben’s ethics of encounter (ten bos 2005). i develop the concept quite differently from agamben’s philosophical project. 6. the first two licensing rounds in 2003 and 2004 pertained to the jdz with nigeria; a third round was held in 2010 for stp’s eez. 7. a third party, the south african procura financial consultants, which had previously investigated opportunities to establish a free trade zone in stp, later withdrew following disputes over contractual terms (brümmer 2007). 8. erhc was battling bankruptcy and an investigation by the u.s. securities and exchange commission (sec) regarding its role in a bribery case involving congressman william jefferson (brümmer 2007). proceedings regarding erhc were formally closed in april 2012. 9. though overall a loss-making operation, erhc sold some of its participating interests in santomean oil blocks in 2006, making us$45.9 million. it also received us$51.8 million from jdz signature bonuses. 10. the mission resulted from a contentious 1999 agreement granting pgs exclusive rights to conduct seismic research in stp’s eez during a ten-year period (seibert 2006, 375). 11. still, several pscs regarding blocks 2, 3, and 4 were signed in 2005. 12. signature bonuses from the jdz licensing rounds have amounted to us$324 million, of which stp received approximately 40 percent. the jdz’s total budget from 2004 to 2013 has been us$92,464,297, of which stp’s nominal contribution has been a little more than a third. however, us$22 million of this amount has been loaned to stp by nigeria (eiti 2014). 13. the sec defines proved reserves as those “which geological and engineering information [obtained usually by drilling] indicates with reasonable certainty can be recovered from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions” (mitchell et al. 2012, 30). possible and probable reserves are calculated to exist with some reduced probability. 14. this development coincided with erhc’s sale of assets to addax and sinopec and the signing of pscs indicating future plans for test drills in the jdz. 15. the report estimated oil production to start in 2012, with a future production of 70,000 barrels per day for twenty years, and annual receipts of up to us$396 million. references abreu, osvaldo 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that’s what got me here,” said silvia during our interview at the psychiatric clinic of the catalonia university hospital (cuh).1 silvia was a fifty-something financial trader who had been diagnosed with gambling disorder, an entrepreneurial woman who, after quitting her job in a medium-size bank, set up shop as a freelance trader in her small hometown near barcelona.2 when i interviewed silvia in early 2013, she was under clinical treatment for gambling disorder and had various pending lawsuits for defrauding former clients and friends of more than half a million euros. this article concerns itself with silvia and the clinical economy of her transformation from financial trader to problem gambler. in examining the medicalization of trading as gambling disorder during the spanish financial crisis of 2007 to 2015, i show that the mobilization of clinical resources was not simply a matter of regulating financial markets. in the process, new lines were being drawn around the concept of proper speculation. this article develops the concept of a clinical economy of speculation, which refers to “the exchange of symptoms for diagnosis and treatments” (davis 2010, 155) through which the category of the problem gambler is repurposed to include financial traders. this focus brings into view the redefinition of credit and debt within the domain of trading to make an intervention into the anthropology of finance (knorr cetina 2003; zaloom 2006; lépinay 2011; loussouarn 2013; miyazaki 2013; allon 2015; sabaté 2016). my main argument is that the pathologization of trading in spain has taken place against the backdrop of a multiscalar process of credit and debt surveillance implemented in response to excessive financial leverage. this regulatory process begins at the european union (eu) level, passes through the spanish state, and reaches everyday people through gambling diagnosis and treatment. in this context, mental disorder is what separates true traders from problem gamblers, and financial failure becomes the tipping point between speculation and gambling. put differently, i argue that gambling disorder is part of an expansive postcrisis credit and debt regime that puts the blame on the individual while protecting the financial system at all costs. in the spanish context, the pathologization of trading coincided with the so-called great recession, a never-ending crisis in banking that turned a foreclosure crisis into a sovereign debt crisis through an aggressive taxpayer-backed bailout policy. as jaime palomera (2015, 42) puts it, “what had begun as a private debt problem became a public debt crisis.” the hinge institution between these two crises was the fund for orderly bank restructuring (the spanish acronym is frob). created by the spanish government in 2009, it transferred more than fifty billion euros to cash-starved banks swamped with mortgage defaults. while foreclosures and evictions soared, leaving millions highly indebted (suarez 2017, 24), frob officials requested a one-hundred-billion-euro rescue package from the european union to recapitalize the spanish banking system. as the crisis in banking intensified and escalated, frob measures kept burdening the government budget, which slipped from recording a surplus (2.2 percent of gdp) to recording a deficit (11.2 percent of gdp) in four years. meanwhile, public debt nearly tripled between 2008 and 2014 (charnock, purcell, and rivera-fumaz 2014, 111). to put it briefly, the frob’s approach to the great recession seemed to postulate that the larger the bank, the greater the bailout should be. the bailout policies of the frob take on a different significance when we compare them to the medical model of trading. in that model, clinicians teach insolvent traders to see their actions as antisocial and irrational, even though their debt-fueled speculative practices emulate those of banks and other financial institutions rescued by the central government. for instance, the frob spent 4.5 billion euros to partially nationalize spain’s fourth-largest bank after a fraudulent stock market listing that involved its chairman rodrigo rato, a former high-level politician and international monetary fund (imf) director. however, until 2015, no indictments were issued.3 this starkly differential distribution of punishment calls for an exploration of widening inequalities across the field of investment in spain, between institutions and individuals as well as between women and men. what can silvia’s diagnosis and treatment as a disordered gambler tell us about the regulatory mechanisms of credit and debt implemented during the spanish financial crisis? and what can her life history teach us about the male-dominated world of trading in spain? as i argue in this article, the medicalization of trading in spain can initially be understood in light of nineteenth-century politico-legal debates about stock-market gambling. this approach offers a particularly advantageous position from which to interrogate whether and why gambling disorder came to be another way of blaming citizens for systemic failures in banking and finance. is the medicalization of trading a way of depoliticizing financial speculation in a country ridden by bank scandals? or is the pathologized trader an exemplary figure of postcrisis politics of credit and debt? by looking at the process by which silvia became a freelance trader and her later clinical encounter with her therapist nuria, my ethnography analyzes the relationship between financial leverage, austerity measures, and gambling disorder in spain. the clinical economy of speculation is not a gender-neutral development. it soon became evident to me that female traders were subjected to greater control than men. i focused on silvia in my research because she stood out in a highly masculine industry. there are few female traders in barcelona; the majority work in sales and other customer-service jobs. in this regard, silvia decenters “the straight white men who inhabit our figurative imaginations” (appel 2014, 55) of financial markets. her story makes apparent the gendered register of the crisis concept that janet roitman (2013) has called into question for being a blind spot that “obscures more than it reveals and produces as much as it represents” (davis 2015, 1032). for example, silvia defies the so-called female solution that emerged from the 2008 global financial crisis and regained momentum three years later during the eurozone debt crisis. as james brassett and lena rethel (2015, 3) point out, “ideas about angela merkel as the good wife have been mobilized to support policies of austerity and fiscal rectitude in the eu.” if merkel represents the epitome of the “good wife” who can save the eurozone, then silvia embodies the subversive female whose actions unfold against “the belief that women are more risk averse than men” (maltby and rutterford 2014, 516). the second sibling of a wealthy catalan family of three sisters and two brothers, silvia was also the only daughter who never married. she grew up in a small industrial town near barcelona, surrounded by kin and friends. silvia was frustrated with her situation when she spoke into my audio recorder, flinching every so often as she reran for me various episodes of her life in a pastiche-like manner. silvia felt that her story remained untold. she kept wondering about when exactly her life had gone astray, caught in a spiral of debt and receiving clinical treatment for her gambling disorder while awaiting a possible prison sentence. a clinical economy of speculation nuria was the head of the pathological gambling unit in the psychiatry department at cuh and silvia’s chief therapist. nuria was a widely published academic involved in long-term research on stock-market investment as a form of gambling.4 she had grown into a leading expert in the field after the 1990s machine-gambling boom.5 nuria was working on two papers: a study of the increase in online gambling expenditure during the financial crisis—approximately 30 percent in 2011—and a comparative analysis of problem gamblers and financial traders under clinical treatment.6 she saw stock-market gambling as a problem of the future. although the occurrence of gambling disorder among traders was still relatively low, nuria expected the phenomenon to continue to grow.7 “we must take into account that new technologies allow ordinary people full access to financial markets . . . and online trading has become a widespread fad in spain,” said nuria, adding that she and her colleagues at cuh believed there existed a significant “underdiagnosis” of gambling disorder among traders. nuria’s studies indicated that pathological gamblers and traders under treatment presented similar clinical profiles. however, socioeconomic characteristics and personality traits differed. as nuria put it, “in general, traders are better off than gamblers and often have higher levels of education. i’d also say that narcissistic traits are more readily recognizable in traders.” another common characteristic among traders was their acute level of insolvency. “silvia is my most indebted patient by far; her level of indebtedness is very, very important,” said nuria, before framing silvia’s insurmountable debt as a symptomatic expression of her severe gambling disorder.8 although nuria and other psychologists and psychiatrists at the hospital with whom i spoke knew little about how credit and debt worked in trading, financial terms gradually became part of their diagnostic repertoire. i observed how their clinical assessments started transitioning from an idea of commercial gambling that clearly distinguished between lending and betting toward an idiom of speculation that conflated the two. this transition entailed the adoption of a context-specific definition of debt as leverage in lieu of the more common perception of debt as a debilitating burden (peebles 2010; gregory 2012; allon 2015; james 2015; stout 2016). the key point here is that the redefinition of debt in terms of leverage presupposes “the disappearance of any real distinction between debt as liability and debt as asset” (allon 2015, 702). leverage refers to debt-fueled financial speculation. in the spanish stock-market scene, leveraged trading was synonymous with speculating at a low cost. in barcelona, for example, there was a famous sales trader who promoted leverage as “free credit to make money.” among the network of freelance traders with whom i interacted regularly, the use of leverage to magnify potential profits (and potential losses) was but a second meaning of trading. everyone knew that the higher the leverage, the greater the risk. the catch was that leverage came attached to most financial instruments that were available to retailers. as fiona allon (2015, 694) puts it, “profits are to be made not by investing money, in production or other productive activities, but rather by lending it.” the way leverage became factored into the diagnosis of gambling disorder among traders is at the center of what i call a clinical economy of speculation. this clinical economy accounts for the process of medicalizing speculative forms of credit and debt. it also recycles deep-rooted antigambling ideologies that have long shaped spanish financial institutions. finally, it organizes the aftermath of financial market failure at the individual level. drawing from medical anthropology (conrad 1992; castellani 2000; davis 2010, 2015; kitanaka 2012; crowley-matoka and true 2012), the anthropology of debt (peebles 2010, 2012; gregory 2012; graeber 2011; han 2012; weston 2013; allon 2015; james 2015), and the anthropology of gambling (klima 2006; rizzo 2004; reith 2007; schüll 2012; cassidy, loussouarn, and pisac 2013; cassidy, pisac, and loussouarn 2013), i suggest that the clinical economy of speculation extends postcrisis regulatory regimes of credit and debt to the general population. from this perspective, i observe how common speculative practices are seen as sick and unsafe when people instead of banks perform them. earlier research on medicalization focused on how social dysfunction and deviance became pathologized (rosecrance 1985; conrad 1992; castellani 2000). this scholarship characterized therapeutic models as a tool of biomedical control that ends up subjecting people to further surveillance (kitanaka 2012). more recent anthropological analyses of medicalization (han 2012; kitanaka 2012; crowley-matoka and true 2012) have explored the agency of pathologized individuals and the everydayness of mental illness and addiction. important critiques of medicalization also exist (biehl and moran-thomas 2009; davis 2010; fassin 2011). particularly relevant for the purposes of this article is elizabeth davis’s (2010, 160) remark on the problematic divide between the medical and the political. as she puts it, “mental illness may appear primarily as an index of political crisis, while political crisis takes the social form of mental illness.” although i follow davis (2010, 160) in viewing gambling disorder among traders “as a failure of the distinction between medical and political causes and effects,” i retain the concept of medicalization because it allows me to analyze how traders become invested, alongside clinicians, in pathologizing financial speculation. in doing so, however, i do not treat “medicalization itself as a symptom of social inequality and social dysfunction in modern states” (davis 2010, 160). rather, i make the case for understanding medicalization in dialogue with recent anthropological studies of gambling addiction (schüll 2012; garriott and raikhel 2015). this scholarship sees gambling addiction as a distributed phenomenon across individuals, technologies, and therapeutics. for instance, in studying how financial trading mirrors certain aspects of machine gambling, caitlin zaloom (2014, 179–80) shows that the former practice also has “addictive qualities, and requires remedies that address the particular features of technology and money that drive forward destructive habits.” what i am interested in depicting here is how the pathologization of trading is simultaneously a mechanism to regulate leverage and an emerging medical field of research and treatment. alan klima (2006) gives us a way to understand how deleveraging mandates imposed by the troika of the european commission, the european central bank, and the imf on the spanish financial sector trickled down to freelance traders via gambling therapies. exploring the lives of habitual gamblers, funeral casino dealers, and small-time moneylenders, klima discerns the symbiotic relationship between imf discourse about postcrisis asian economies and the criminalization of informal credit and debt systems across rural villages in northern thailand. klima argues that government officials repurposed imf moral condemnations of the 1997 asian financial crisis to denigrate and dismantle credit and debt instruments that reached beyond national control mechanisms. from this vantage point, monetary moralities trickled down from the imf to local thai policies (klima 2006, 34). likewise, credit and debt regulations on a global scale can trickle down and spread into seemingly unrelated social fields such as mental health. for example, in response to the eurozone crisis, the european union created what was called postprogram surveillance to ensure that lending demands were being met by borrowing countries like spain.9 we should not downplay the term surveillance here, as it qualifies the implementation of eu austerity programs across the entire region, underscoring the troika’s ability to blame the crisis on nation-states while leaving the eurozone monetary system untouched. in spain, the model of austerity surveillance reached the general public through various narratives, particularly those portraying citizens who han vivido por encima de sus posibilidades (had lived beyond their means) due to “a cultural curse associated with the spanish character, preventing them from becoming true europeans” (alonso, fernández rodríguez, and ibáñez rojo 2016, 25). in such a context, where all spaniards are guilty of excess, surveillance discourses attracted a significant audience, finding supporters across the social and political spectrum. at the hospital, for instance, clinicians often remarked on the lack of the oversight of trading as the most pressing problem for timely diagnosis and treatment. in diagnosing traders with gambling disorder, clinicians in barcelona employed the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders—dsm-4 for short (american psychiatric association 1994). this checklist approach to mental disorder already situated the activity of excessive gambling within the medical domain in its third edition, published in 1980 (castellani 2000). the dsm-3 constituted the first step toward what came to be known as the medical model of gambling. the category of pathological gambling, as it appeared in the dsm-3, placed the diagnostic emphasis on debt and fraudulent financial operations.10 however, this list of symptoms had a relatively short life because “diagnosis was too often misused as an insanity defense” (castellani 2000, 54). although the dsm-4 erased the idiom of debt from the diagnostic criteria, the tension between the medical and the legal over debt liability remained. as nuria intimated to me, “when i served as expert witness in silvia’s trial, the plaintiff lawyer kept discrediting my report because, according to him, i was trying to help silvia’s defense. i had to request the judge to put on record that i was a public servant summoned by the court and not an expert witness for hire.” david graeber (2011) offers us insight into the friction between mental health and criminal law around issues of debt. in his view, discourses of debt turn violence into numbers in order to moralize otherwise exploitative and oppressive relationships between creditors and debtors. in spain, clinical diagnosis and criminal litigation constitute competing yet mutually imbricated ways of defining debt liability. spanish jurisprudence, for instance, has recognized pathological gambling as a mitigating circumstance since the early 1990s, but the código penal (criminal code) does not include it explicitly. this legal void makes the dictamen pericial (expert report) a decisive factor in mitigating the conviction of guilt for fraud and other financial offences (echeburúa odriozola, amor andrés, and yuste garcía 2000).11 from this vantage point, the disappearance of debt and debt-related notions from the gambling section of the dsm-4 suggests an ongoing struggle between psychopathology and criminology over which framework regulates the relationship between creditors and debtors. during the period of my fieldwork, another tension between the medical and the legal came to light. the dsm-4 was to be replaced with a new edition of the manual in may 2013.12 the dsm-5 removed the criterion of “illegal acts” from the list of symptoms. some psychiatrists saw this as a step forward because it detached diagnosis from crime. others disliked it precisely for that reason. as peter conrad (1992, 218) would have it, the debate revolved around the pros and cons of having a “medical-legal hybrid.” for instance, nuria considered the elimination of illegal acts from the diagnostic criteria to be “important but not determinant.” she recalled that silvia met that specific criterion but also presented “more significant” symptoms such as “lack of risk calculation” and “high levels of sensation-seeking.” nuria remarked that the new checklist reduced the threshold for diagnosis from five to four symptoms, which balanced out the missing one. in her view, illegal behavior was a consequence of severe gambling disorder rather than a diagnostic symptom. the illegal-acts criterion in the dsm-4 included “forgery, fraud, theft, or embezzlement to finance gambling” (american psychiatric association 2000, 674), and was introduced as a diagnostic criterion to establish a clear distinction between pathogenic elements and ensuing gambling-disordered behaviors (see also granero et al. 2014). most clinicians recognized that the recalibration of diagnosis could affect the legal definition of gambling. however, no one had a clear picture of how this would unfold, given the limited research on the subject. one shortcoming of graeber’s theorization of debt is that it fails to take into account those whom gustav peebles (2013, 712) calls “inveterate debtors.” in a series of articles about credit and debt regulation throughout europe and the united states, peebles (2012, 431; see also 2013) addresses what he calls “the dialectic development of debt-evasion and debt-forgiveness” over a period of two centuries. he examines various legal infrastructures such as the debtors’ prison, bankruptcy law, and offshore havens to show how debt evasion and debt forgiveness feed one another in suspending, or even eliminating, debt liability. his analysis challenges graeber’s theorization in shifting emphasis away from structural violence to individual agency, and by doing so, brings into view the options available to debtors, whose failure in the stock market forces them to seek out a respite from the suffocating everydayness of debt default. peebles’s approach to the debtors’ prison and other spaces outside exchange sheds light on a key aspect of the clinical economy of speculation, that is, the potential to use one’s pathologized status to fend off creditors for some period of time and, in certain cases, to evade incarceration.13 graeber and peebles help us recognize the stakes of debt and the alternatives for debtors. however, both overlook the transformation of debt into a means of profit. as fiona allon (2015, 702) puts it, “these are ‘debts’ that exist as much more than a simple sense of obligation or liability: the commodification of debt in securitized financial instruments facilitates ever-growing webs of profit-generating interconnection.” in the next section, i depict the clinical economy of speculation from silvia’s point of view to show how the commodification of debt imposes new challenges on the clinical understanding of problem gambling. i focus on a single trader to underscore the phenomenological interplay of debt, trading, and gambling. like hirokazu miyazaki’s (2006) ethnography of tada’s dreams, which shows us japanese traders’ hopeful quest for meaning and profit, silvia’s story makes apparent the liminality of freelance trading in spain.14 becoming a bolsera through on-screen markets according to the terminology of the european securities and market authority (esma; 2016, 4), silvia was a “retail client” who “speculate[d] on the short-term movements in the price of financial instruments.” like most freelancers, silvia traded online in cfds, an abbreviation of “contracts for difference,” financial agreements between buyers and sellers to profit from price variations (loussouarn 2013).15 in 2013, esma issued an official warning about cfds in response to the mass marketing of this financial instrument since the beginning of the financial crisis. the document alerted retail clients to the dangers of speculation and leverage (esma 2013). in the late 2000s, when silvia became a freelance trader, the stock-market retail sector was still embryonic, so the assortment of online trading platforms was not as broad as it was only a few years later when i entered the field in 2011. as silvia and other freelance traders explained to me, most people signing up for online platforms at the time came from investment clubs within the barcelona stock exchange, which had an atmosphere more amateurish than professional, like a game before it became a sport.16 silvia became involved in trading at a young age. after college, she had landed a job in a local bank as assistant account manager. for years, she occupied the workstation closest to a cream-white wall in a row of cubicles adjacent to a marble counter. silvia liked the coziness of the place, its studied unpretentiousness, and most of all, as she said, “the very fact that it was my first paid job ever.” her branch hosted silvia’s first encounter with her trading mentor, a seventy-five-year-old local businessman who approached stock trading as a pastime. “he was among the richest people in my town,” silvia emphasized. this trading hobbyist taught silvia the nuts and bolts of financial markets and gave her a handful of tricks with which to start speculating. five years later, silvia was relocated to the bank’s headquarters in barcelona. she was appointed sales trader in charge of retail clients. this time, her workspace was a standard small office with an eighth-floor view; like any other located in an edifice with bottomless elevators, it was sleek and soulless. silvia joined the investment division during the rise of the housing bubble, which propelled the spanish economy to grow around 5 percent each year between 1998 and 2000 (lópez and rodríguez 2011). this was a time when the spanish banking industry was busy catching up with american-style financial engineering in the context of market deregulation brought on by the creation of the eurozone (palomera 2015). as irene sabaté (2016) argues, through the process of titulización (securitization), spain replicated the u.s. subprime mortgage model. securitization, in this context, meant to slice and dice mortgages into debt-freight bundles of assets to be sold to swaths of investors worldwide. on the ground at the time, alberto corsín jiménez (forthcoming, 3) depicted the “emotional exuberance” of spain’s mortgage momentum as an affective mix of confidence, optimism, and greed. this heady mix contributed to the “in-construction” character of urban geographies and cityscapes across spain in those years. the exuberance came to an end in 2007, when the spanish financial system was smashed flat by the burst of the housing bubble. that year, an italian financial group bought the bank where silvia worked. silvia disliked the new management and, as karen ho (2009) might put it, silvia had reached the gender ceiling of high finance, which in spain included not only the higher echelons of the banking ladder but also the trading floor. under these circumstances, silvia negotiated a layoff package and took with her a thick address book of clients (see lépinay 2011). she returned to her hometown to set up shop as a freelance trader. in the following months, silvia did well on the market and her confidence grew. she had rearranged her home to have her workstation next to a guest bathroom and an area where she could meet with clients. however, this adjustment left her two-bedroom apartment without a dining room. her workstation occupied the whole space with a carapace of screens and a laptop surrounded by piles of newspapers. silvia had turned her home into a trading room that extended her life into two bodies, which were not always in concert (see lépinay 2011). on the one hand, she became a chiringuito (unlicensed broker).17 on the other, she lived in a digital landscape where she interacted with the market. in her research with financial traders, karin knorr cetina (2014, 129) conceptualizes trading floors as “attentional regimes” in which on-screen markets surround traders to enhance their focus and create the illusion of the market as a robust reality. in her view, trading floors supply the institutional and organizational means for traders to become enthralled by market flows. from a somewhat different perspective, caitlin zaloom (2014) juxtaposes trading rooms and casino floors to compare the daily work of financial traders with the experience of machine gamblers. in a rich, cross-pollinating dialogue with natasha schüll (2012), zaloom argues that financial traders, like machine gamblers, seek out the zone—a technologically engineered mind-state of complete absorption through which money becomes temporarily detached from conventional circuits of value. like casinos, trading rooms constitute an enclosed world where traders “lose any sense of space, time, and self” (zaloom 2014, 179). this scholarship resonates deeply with the experience of freelance traders in barcelona. these traders also stitch their attention to on-screen markets, unflaggingly tracking prices that yo-yo up and down in psychedelic colors. they too develop trading habits around idealized states of awareness. silvia, for her part, lived in a quiet neighborhood near a park, but rarely left her apartment to wander. her routine was carefully organized around the opening and closing times of the german and spanish stock exchanges. she woke up very early in the morning, had breakfast, read every single financial newspaper, and sat at her workstation. by 9 a.m. she was placing her first round of trades. a couple of hours later, depending on what was going on with her trading orders, she took a short break to make phone calls and reply to emails, often communicating with her clients and her broker while drinking cup after cup of coffee to keep her mental processes in motion. she took another break at noon and did not resume her on-screen activity until 4 p.m. for the closing session, when markets “gave [her] some game again.” as silvia noted, underscoring the rigor of her timetable, “i had to schedule my meals and snacks—otherwise i forgot to eat.” silvia recalled that her trading behavior became more erratic and sloppier with time. “i started acting like a bolsera,” she said. in spanish market argot, the label bolsero/a has negative social and behavioral connotations. it indicates lower class status, on the one hand, and an almost irrational approach to financial markets, on the other. bolseros are not difficult to recognize in spain. they are mostly middle-aged men who take high risks on a daily basis, setting them aside from the majority of small investors, who are long-term, risk-averse clients in a still-developing retail market. according to the banco de españa’s (2014, 83) family financial survey of 2011, only 11 percent of households owned tradable securities, of which 30.7 percent belonged to higher-income families with heads of household between fifty-five and sixty-four years old. their average investment fluctuated between seven and ten thousand euros. the term bolsero was also employed to emphasize financially unsound behaviors. as one sales trader told me, “i have clients who have lost everything on the market and kept on trading with their unemployment benefits or even by getting personal loans.” during my fieldwork, i attended more than a dozen of mesas de trabajo (teach-ins) for freelance traders. at these events, i observed how sales traders opposed the term bolsero to the anglicism trader in an attempt to detach some of the negative attributions that went along with stereotypes surrounding bolseros, particularly their association with gambling. jugar a la bolsa, which in spanish literally means to gamble on the stock market, was a common expression among freelance traders in accusing each other of acting irresponsibly. my interlocutors disliked the label bolsero, except when they used it of themselves to underscore their disadvantageous position vis-à-vis institutional traders. an alternative hermeneutic horizon for the term bolsero, however, “stitch[ed] together specific moments in time, paying little attention to temporal distance” (knight 2016, 34). this other interpretation of freelance trading was less tainted by marketing, and yet it also evoked fears of gambling. as an experienced trader pointed out, freelance trading had been associated with gambling since the very inception of stock exchanges in spain. drawing on daniel knight’s (2016) analysis of the multiple temporalities of crisis in greece, in the following section i explore early associations of trading and gambling to highlight how certain moments of the past remain relevant and proximate in providing a sense of direction to people and institutions. in doing so, i reveal a deeply rooted antigambling ideology that reverberates within the medical model of trading today. histories of debt and stock-market gambling in her analysis of leverage in the world of hedge funds, marieke de goede (2005, 48) argues that “the ambiguity between credit practices and gambling . . . has been a recurrent debate that has shaped the laws and institutions of modern finance.” for de goede, credit has been the underbelly of a prolonged politico-legal struggle to separate gambling from finance as two distinct modes of speculation. indeed, in the united states and the united kingdom, speculation constitutes a longstanding gray area between bets and trades. ann fabian (1990) has shown that gambling metaphors helped nineteenth-century moral reformers in the united states to imagine a dystopian economy run by devious speculators whose actions harmed society as a whole. in conversation with fabian, pat o’malley (2004) claims that it was commercial law rather than morality that made thinkable the separation of gambling from finance in the united kingdom. in spain, gambling has rarely been perceived as a valuable activity. the dictator and prime minister miguel primo de rivera banned it in 1928, and the ban remained in effect throughout the second republic and until the fall of francisco franco’s dictatorship in 1975 (gómez yañez et al. 2014). spanish debates over gambling and finance in the nineteenth century, however, dealt neither with morality nor commercial law, but instead with the governance of public debt (rojo cagigal and houpt 2011). in the united states of the nineteenth century, gambling was a morally denigrated transaction. in the united kingdom, gambling constituted a legal conundrum. spanish lawmakers of the same period saw gambling as a mal necesario (necessary evil), which could threaten the nation-state if not kept in check. speculation was not “an uneasy middle ground” (de goede 2005, 48) between gambling and finance, but part of a nested structure in which gambling, speculation, and finance were placed one inside the other like a russian doll. any element of the triad could evolve into a danger for a nation-state that was (and still is) constantly defending itself against the threat of secession. catalonia’s pro-independence movement, with its focus on economic issues, is but a convenient example of the never-ending struggle over political and financial control between the central government and the most economically developed regions of the country (mcdonogh 1986; pujadas 2013; crameri 2014).18 in 1831 pedro sainz andino drafted the first spanish stock exchange law, replicating a state-centered french model more concerned with governance than commerce. this legal framework understood stock exchanges as a hinge between public and private interests, which were to be balanced by the state. in an 1845 essay, andino complained about unscrupulous speculators who had turned financial markets into casinos, making reference to unregulated stock exchanges in such major cities as barcelona (bermejo cabrero 1997). as jaime vicens vives (1969) explains, catalonia’s rapid industrialization and railway construction allowed it to develop its own financial institutions, including the establishment in 1840 of a self-regulated stock-exchange system. this evolved into barcelona’s stock exchange in 1912, which remained operational until the spanish civil war (1936–1939), resisting repeated efforts at financial unification. more recently, jaime palomera (2015, 4) has argued that catalan capitalism emerged from the industrial revolution of 1830, when “new steam factories and colonies configured a model of small and medium-scale development mostly based on textile production—cotton in particular—and other industries such as leather and paper.” during this period, juan carlos rojo cagigal and stefan houpt (2011) have traced the creation of a new profession within finance: the agente de cambio (exchange agent), a literal translation of the french term agent de change. according to rojo cagigal and houpt, the professionalization of trading had a clear political purpose: keeping freelance traders away from public debt. for spanish lawmakers like andino, freelance traders represented the opposite of public interest, and public debt and public interest were interchangeable concepts. freelance traders were necessary middlemen to keep the system in motion. yet they were also dangerous “stock market gamblers” (bermejo cabrero 1997, 1820). nonetheless, barcelona’s stock exchanges never deterred freelance traders from dealing in public debt or in any other sorts of transactions. freelance traders populated outcry pits without restriction, even if they were acting outside the law. ultimately, these traders succeeded in breaking up the monopoly that official brokers held in the spanish state. this historical detour is relevant because the temporal distance between professionalization and the pathologization of trading makes apparent the processes of figuration (see weston 2013) through which an ideal freelance trader comes to life within the spanish financial system. the spanish bolsero, like the manchester worker or the wall street banker, offers a convincing protagonist for the narratives of capitalism (appel 2014, 53). indeed, the freelance trader has been the exemplary figure around which the lines of proper speculation have been drawn throughout spain’s history. what marks off the present time is the way in which these lines are established through clinical practices rather than bureaucratic certificates. building on anna tsing’s treatment of capitalist endeavors as imaginative projects, hannah appel (2014) calls attention to the gendered and racialized nature of these figurations of finance. the figure of the spanish bolsero offers a case in point: a white male who “at least partially allows finance a narrative wholeness unmarked by difference and exclusion” (appel 2014, 53). in the last section of this article, i focus on how the paradigm of the problem gambler offers traders a zone of debt evasion and forgiveness, but in doing so, confines women to the household economy and the traditional role of caretaker, thus contributing to their exile from the heights of finance. leveraging problem gambling: speculation and gender by 2009, silvia was accepting quasi-deposits from clients. “i traded on their behalf in exchange for a small commission,” silvia said, explaining her financial scheme. unlike institutional traders who followed a game plan (lépinay 2011) and whose losses were covered (zaloom 2014), silvia’s job was to shoulder the risks of speculation while milking the market on a daily basis, suffering firsthand the attendant consequences of her mistakes. “me apalanqué demasiado [i leveraged too much]. that was my problem,” she said in introducing the beginning of her failure. she had her first major setback during the summer of 2010, when she cashed out her mother’s retirement savings to weather the storm and buy herself some time, making it last long enough to avoid a panic run of clients. “i thought i’d be able to recuperate my mother’s money soon. but things started to fall apart,” silvia said. this was not the only time silvia sacrificed familial wealth to keep her business afloat. a few months later, silvia’s business was without liquidity again. this time her sister was dragged into one of her lawsuits, because she was the co-owner of a piece of real estate that silvia had used as collateral to access cash. after that, silvia struggled for several months, but was never able to recover. following the first lawsuit, many others started to pile up. “her sister sent me a desperate email requesting an urgent appointment. silvia had made a gesto autolítico [suicidal gesture] during a fight with her,” said nuria, in recalling how silvia became her patient. “according to her sister, silvia rushed toward a window to jump out.” by then, silvia had begun treatment at a clinic in her hometown, but “she did not feel comfortable with the doctor,” nuria said. it was not until several months after her bankruptcy that silvia started treatment at cuh. at the time, she was unemployed and had five lawsuits pending against her. “silvia was in very bad shape during our first appointment,” nuria recalled. silvia and nuria became very close. “we continue to meet every week for therapy, even though she has been ‘officially’ discharged. she says she doesn’t have anyone to talk to,” nuria told me the last time we spoke in 2015. the way silvia engaged with therapy is arguably a form of leveraging problem gambling. initially, she resisted medicalization. “silvia is not completely conscious of her gambling problem,” nuria said during our first formal interview. “other patients accept that they are addicted to trading, just like a drug user develops an addiction to cocaine or any other substance, but silvia continues to tell me her problem was lacking enough money to stay in the market.” silvia remained ambivalent toward blame throughout much of her subsequent treatment. even two years in, nuria told me, “silvia feels bad for those who lost their savings, but not so much for those who knew the stakes. she thinks those people are rich anyway, so they don’t need the money.” in the end, however, silvia came to accept her clinical personification, and in doing so, found ways to take advantage of being a pathologized trader. for instance, nuria became instrumental in helping her to cope with the aftermath of bankruptcy, not only as a medical expert in pending lawsuits but also as a peacemaker in family squabbles. nuria spoke regularly with silvia’s sister about her patient’s behavior. “when silvia has any problem with her sister, she asks me to talk to her. she uses me as a channel of communication with her family,” said nuria, reflecting on how “well-adjusted to therapy” silvia had become with time. “she hasn’t missed a single visit in all these years,” nuria added. recall that gustav peebles (2012) conceptualizes debt evasion and forgiveness as zones outside of exchange, where insolvent debtors find a sanctuary from market demands. as peebles (2012, 440) puts it, “debt forgiveness and debt evasion need to be seen as providing the debtor with two different modes of freedom. debt evasion provides freedom from the domestic credit and debt system in exchange for the loss of freedom of movement, while debt forgiveness lashes one back into the credit and debt system in exchange for continued freedom of movement.” in this light, silvia’s status as a problem gambler has indeed offered her a small space in which to organize her life and deal with financial failure. however, compared to peebles’s (2013, 712) depictions of the debtors’ prison, where “by day, prisoners played squash and gambled, prior to singing and carousing at night,” silvia’s daily life was suffocating, laborious, and lonely. when i met her, she did not have a bank account, which made it impossible for her to manage basic utility bills by herself. she had moved in with her mother and had become her main caretaker. she was economically dependent on her siblings, and her sister had her under strict monetary surveillance. silvia’s everyday life was a sort of training camp for the actuarial self, as natasha schüll (2012, 247) describes “the calculative self-inspection that gambling addicts are encouraged to undertake.” all her expenditures were evaluated and approved by a family member. she had to justify all of her outings and purchases, even mundane little things. “sometimes i don’t see a euro for weeks,” silvia told me. she had only sporadic access to a computer and the internet, because “the markets are online,” as she put it. she took care of her elderly mother around the clock, and accompanied her sister to buy groceries. she cleaned the house and watched over her nephews without compensation. silvia felt alone: “i have three friends left who don’t even come to visit me at home. whenever we want to meet, we do it at the beach in barcelona, almost in hiding. they don’t want to be seen with me in public.” silvia perceived domestic labor as a way to make amends for her actions, “to pay back what i took away from my family,” as she phrased it. yet she hated housework. her former home looked like an office. in nuria’s words, “for many years, silvia lived the life of a high-ranked executive in barcelona.” what nuria had in mind with this depiction was the figure of a male banker during the years of the financial bubble. this and other gendered constructions of finance infused the clinical imagination of trading in spain. thus, when i spoke with nuria about gender differences in problem gamblers and traders, she characterized silvia as “an independent, self-attentive, self-sufficient woman, who likes to play the dominant role, to make more decisions.” according to the psychopathology of gambling, nuria indicated, men and women differ. women “start to gamble later to regulate negative emotional states, and not to obtain the gratification or excitement that winning entails,” nuria told me. “if we think [in terms of] stereotypes, silvia behaves more like a man than a woman. she has a more masculine profile . . . her interpersonal relationships and her relations with male partners make me think she’s an unconventional woman. she doesn’t want a long-term partner. in fact, she’s never had one and she doesn’t want children.” i asked nuria if her male patients also saw the household as a space for redemption. they did not, nuria said. most looked for a job while in treatment and tried to stay occupied, often with sports. there are many ways to interpret nuria’s remarks. for the purposes of this article, i focus on what nuria characterizes as masculine in order to highlight that silvia had lost precisely her capability to be an “independent, self-attentive, self-sufficient woman, who likes to play a dominant role [and] make more decisions.” the problem-gambling model offered silvia sanctuary—but at a very high price. in exchange, she had to accept the female gender role of caregiving, which she had never wanted or appreciated. compared to peebles’s prisoners, silvia had to give up more than her freedom of movement to get a respite from indebtedness. she had to comply with the gendered figurations of contemporary capitalism. why? because silvia embodied the antithesis of the good wife mentioned previously, and therefore represented a double danger to the politics of finance (brassett and rethel 2015). silvia was not only an insolvent trader; she was a woman insolvent trader. attention to gender corrects a serious problem with the long-term view of credit and debt—its tendency to create a totalizing illusion of capitalism (gibson-graham 2014; bear et al. 2015). to avoid characterizing the clinical economy of speculation as a pathologized area of speculative finance, i have traced silvia’s story over time and across places. in doing so, i have depicted the clinical encounter between silvia and nuria as a medico-financial project around which new lines of proper financial speculation were being drawn. as anna tsing (2000) might put it, the clinical economy of speculation is a scalar endeavor with its own concrete sites of encounter and definitional struggles. silvia’s story thus offers one way of showing how “small facts” speak to “large issues” (gibson-graham 2014, 148), namely the postcrisis regime of credit and debt surveillance. in this article, i have made the case that the clinical economy of speculation represents an extension of european financial discourses meant to control credit and debt relations in postcrisis spain. in doing so, i have depicted how the market manifests itself in social phenomena beyond its traditional financial configurations. more specifically, i have suggested that diagnosing traders with gambling disorder has become a constitutive practice in terms of what we know and perform as the market. at stake here is the capacity of financial markets to penetrate into our daily lives in multiple ways and forms. in this light, the dsm-5’s treatment of gambling disorder sets both diagnostic and regulatory guidelines for the improper and proper management of credit and debt. a psycho-juridical approach to finance, i argue, can help us to observe societal dynamics that are simultaneously the market and something else.19 i have also argued that the medicalization of trading illustrates how the master trope of gambling still operates in spain through the figure of a necessary evil that lurks at the margins of stock exchanges. i suggest that nineteenth-century gambling metaphors have reappeared in the spanish context to draw new lines around proper financial speculation. this time, however, instead of public debt and its politico-legal associations with the public interest, what generates and activates control mechanisms within the market is the effect of financial leveraging on mental health. the medical model of leverage control serves as evidence of the manner in which gambling metaphors continue to scaffold a particular mode of accumulation based on credit and debt. moreover, the pathologized trader embodies the impropriety of the overindebted subject, one who inhabits the expanding medical space of debt evasion and debt forgiveness.20 finally, i have highlighted gender inequalities within the field of trading to show that credit and debt are not neutral financial instruments. the gendering of finance is key to understanding the generative aspects of capitalism without turning the market into a determining structure or an unmediated calculative device. in my view, the market is multiple and heterogeneous, inflecting perceptions of the real beyond economistic renderings of social dynamics (see bear et al. 2015). from this perspective, silvia’s experience as a freelance trader does not end with her being diagnosed with gambling disorder. on the contrary, as a pathologized trader she begins to transit uncharted territories of finance, where certain transactions of credit and debt are perceived as symptoms of mental disorder. to conclude, i believe that the clinical economy of speculation offers an alternative hermeneutic horizon through which to view silvia’s actions historically and politically, rather than as intrinsically antisocial and irrational. this is particularly important in a country like spain, where the great recession has bred more new millionaires than ever before, with bankers and politicians dodging corruption scandals by claiming to have made their riches in trading and investing. at the same time, individuals like silvia, who represent the smaller fish of the economy, are being medicalized and sometimes even incarcerated. notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to silvia for sharing her story with me, and to nuria for her trust and engagement with my ethnography. for my approach to theorization i am indebted to my dearest friend and mentor, alan klima. i want to express my gratitude to joe dumit, cristiana giordano, jim smith, smriti srinivas, and joan pujadas for their continuous advice and useful comments. for their generous feedback on previous drafts, i thank maka suarez, rebecca cassidy, salomon cuesta, natalia buitron-arias, gregory deshoullière, laura meek, and jennifer fleetwood. i am also very grateful to susana jimenez-murcia, juan carlos uríszar, monica martinez, montserrat clua, marta ausona, and eduardo kingman. their help and support in the field were invaluable. i thank mateo martínez and milton reyes for their ideas and interest in my work. this essay greatly benefited from the insightful comments of three anonymous reviewers and the editorial collective at cultural anthropology, particularly james faubion. grants from the wenner-gren foundation and the national science foundation supported my fieldwork in barcelona. 1. i use pseudonyms for all my respondents and have changed some personal details to conceal identities. unless otherwise indicated, phrases in quotation marks are my translations from interviews conducted in spanish. finally, i have changed or omitted names of institutions and businesses for the purposes of anonymity. 2. i use the term financial trader as a general category that includes institutional and freelance traders. i translate the term gestor de cartera as sales trader, and both bolsero/a and the anglicism trader autónomo as freelance trader. 3. in february 2017, rodrigo rato was convicted for embezzlement and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. 4. stock-market investment patient is a clinical term used by spanish clinicians in english-language publications. 5. machine gambling was legalized in spain in 1981. 6. in 2011, all forms of gambling expenditure decreased except for online gambling. 7. nuria’s research sample relied on data regarding eighteen patients with trading as a primary gambling problem and seventy-six patients with trading as a secondary gambling problem. 8. silvia gave nuria explicit permission to discuss her case with me. both silvia and nuria agreed that silvia was capable of consent in this capacity. 9. postprogram surveillance was implemented in spain to oversee the financial sector adjustment program of 2012. the last review was issued in 2016 (european commission 2016). 10. five of the seven diagnostic criteria in the dsm-3 made reference to monetary mismanagement. in this edition, anyone who met three or more criteria was diagnosed with pathological gambling. 11. the dictamen pericial (expert report) is a comprehensive clinical diagnosis for the judge to consider in her ruling. 12. the dsm-5 replaced the term pathological gambling with disordered gambling and relocated it from the category of impulse control into the category of addiction (schüll 2012, 324). as my research respondents did during my fieldwork, i use pathological gambler and disordered gambler interchangeably. 13. a gambling disorder is a mitigating circumstance. in certain cases, depending on the judge, it can prevent imprisonment. 14. a more recent example of a study structured around a single subject in the social studies of finance is marieke de goede’s (2015) analysis of the trial for securities fraud of former goldman sachs employee fabrice tourre. 15. cfds are highly leveraged products; traders never actually buy or own the underlying asset. they make a profit from the difference between the purchasing price and the price at the time of selling. these transactions take place over very short periods of time, less than one day (esma 2013). 16. investment clubs usually had less than fifty members and each participant could not invest more than €12,000. the barcelona stock exchange went from having 1,500 investment clubs in the 1980s to 278 in 2005. 17. chiringuito is a colloquial term for unlicensed brokerage firms. they were a high-priority concern for the comisión del mercado de valores (2012), which published a booklet on the issue aimed at the general public. 18. i do not engage with catalonia’s pro-independence movement here, due to space limitations. elsewhere, i have written about the relationship between public debt and catalan nationalism (núñez 2017). 19. the need to pay attention to things that are simultaneously a market and not a market was eloquently articulated by bill maurer at the 2016 annual meeting of the american anthropological association, during a session entitled “offshore economies: new markets, new pressures, new questions.” my argument strongly resonates with maurer’s commentary on the copresence of the market inside and outside economistic renderings. 20. i thank james faubion for his insightful comments in this context on the all-too-material metaphoricity of discourse. references allon, fiona 2015 “everyday leverage, or leveraging the everyday.” cultural studies 29, nos. 5–6: 687–706. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2015.1017140. alonso, luis enrique, carlos j. fernández rodríguez, and rafael ibáñez rojo 2016 “entre la austeridad y el malestar: discursos sobre consumo y crisis económica en españa.” revista española de investigaciones sociológicas, no. 155. https://doi.org/10.5477/cis/reis.155.21. american psychiatric association 2000 diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 4th edition, text revision. washington, dc: american psychiatric association. appel, hannah 2014 “finance, figuration, and the alternative banking group of occupy wall street.” signs 40, no. 1: 53–58. 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stopped desiring queer theory. —elizabeth freeman to do anthropology, i venture, is to dream like an ojibwa. as in a dream, it is continually to open up the world, rather than to seek closure. . . . it is the constant awareness of alternative ways of being. . . . wherever we are, and whatever we may be doing, we are always aware that things might be done differently. it is as though there were a stranger at our heels, who turns out to be none other than ourselves. —tim ingold what is queer in queer anthropology today? i remember first reading eve sedgwick in a queer theory course in graduate school at duke in the late 1990s. i remember the pleasure i took in her now indispensable definition of queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (sedgwick 1993, 8). i had come to graduate school fresh from analyzing gay and lesbian coming-out stories, and i was desperate to think sexuality and gender and power off the well-trod paths of identity and orientation. queer theory provided an opening, a possibility, a way to think differently—exactly what had drawn me to anthropology. but now, almost twenty years later, it is a good time to rethink queer. almost every year since graduate school i have taught queer theory to undergraduates, and each year i open by insisting, in increasingly strident tones, that queer is not an identity—it is a critique, an analytic. each year more strident, because each year more of my students insist that queer is an identity—their identity. a radical one, one that might be poly or genderqueer or kinky, but an identity still. and really, how can i argue? queer is my identity too—personally and professionally: i occupy a queer studies tenure line at wesleyan, where i created and direct a queer studies cluster. i think about this whenever i teach judith butler’s (1994) essay “against proper objects”: we ought, butler (1994, 21) writes, to resist “the institutional domestication” of queer, “for normalizing the queer would be, after all, its sad finish.” but it’s not finished—not yet—and that is where i want to begin this story about queer anthropology. queer, from its start, was meant to point beyond or beside identity—specifically gay and lesbian—and instead signify transgression of, resistance to, or exclusion from normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity. thinking this way, queer is less an object of study (a who that we might study) and more an analytic (a how to think sexual/gendered norms and power). but for all this, queer has never quite moved beyond identity.1 and queer has not quite been the site of resistance we had hoped, as the story of queer studies’ academic institutionalization might portend. still, i am not writing a eulogy for queer. instead, in this retrospectives essay, i resist finding—if only to lose—a new proper object of queer anthropology and suggest, rather, that it is the frustration of the desires we invest in our objects that makes for a queer anthropology—and that makes anthropology queer. i also refuse to offer a next/new/now queer anthropology—our future, our new vanguard. instead i return to a past that, i suggest, we are not after, in the sense of over, in order to flesh out what it is we are after, in the sense of desiring. i locate these dynamics first in queer anthropology’s move away from identity, then in its turn from antinormativity, and finally in the future-facing queer of speculation or possibility (what i call desire) that marks much recent work. but while i proceed linearly, i do not want to provide a progressive timeline, where we reject identity for antinormativity, antinormativity for desire, and so on, each new turn moving us out of intellectual naïveté toward a new and better queer. instead, i argue that these three concepts—identity, normativity, and desire—are constitutive tensions in the past, present, and future of queer anthropology. they are our stumbling blocks and our goads, the limits that beg to be transgressed; they are, in the end, incitements to a queerer anthropology, an anthropology that keeps us queer. you and me and identity i’ll start with a just-so story set in 1993, the year that sedgwick (1993) published tendencies, the year that butler’s (1993) bodies that matter came out, and the year that kath weston (1993) first reviewed lesbian and gay anthropology for the annual review of anthropology. in that essay, weston charts the development of an anthropology of (homo)sexuality from early precedents through the groundbreaking work of the late 1970s and 1980s (esther newton’s [1979] mother camp; gilbert herdt’s [1984] ritualized homosexuality in melanesia; evelyn blackwood’s [1986] anthropology and homosexual behavior) to the nascent queer 1990s. as weston (1993, 341) argues, much of the work predating the 1990s—especially the comparative and typological studies—was what she calls “ethnocartography”: the search for “evidence of same-sex sexuality and gendered ambiguity in ‘other’ societies.” ethnocartographic work relies on the assumption of sameness: that it is relatively easy to identify gay (and trans and occasionally lesbian) people elsewhere in the world, study them, and bring home this knowledge to expand our storehouse of cross-cultural same-sex sexualities. this should not discount the crucial role anthropology has played in decentering western bio-sexological arguments and showing that sexuality is culturally constructed. but still this work tended, as weston (1993, 344) argues, to assume “‘homosexuality’ as a universal category with readily identifiable variants.” and so, while ethnocartography provided rich examples of same-sex sexuality and gender-nonconforming practices around the globe, it tended to rely on understandings of homosexuality or of gay people that unintentionally bolstered western (perhaps especially u.s.) universals of sex, desire, and subjectivity. to get around this problem, anthropologists experimented with using so-called native terms (to avoid concept/translation problems) and distinguishing identities, such as “gay,” from acts, such as “same-sex practices” (to avoid ascribing subjectivities to behaviors).2 still, these work-arounds skirt a more fundamental epistemological problem: debates over what to call various practices come too late to challenge the knowledge practices that searched for and supposedly found them in the first place (weiss 2011b). and so the issue remains: “by setting out in advance to look for sexuality, the anthropologist cannot help but reify the object of (ethnographic) desire” (weston 1993, 347). this epistemological crisis precipitated a paradigm shift from gay and lesbian to queer, and weston’s essay might mark its date of inception. in contrast to ethnocartography, a new queer anthropology would not posit a self-evident sameness between ethnographic subject and object. instead it would offer a provocation, a critique of “fixed sexual identity” or a “‘thing’ called homosexuality” (weston 1993, 348). i see in this moment the birth of what we now call queer anthropology—an anthropology concerned not with gay and lesbian identities but with, as weston (1993, 348) puts it, the “transgressive aspects of gender and sexuality.” indeed, after this first queer turn, earlier gay and lesbian anthropology would look like (imperial and projected) identity politics—taking as its object ourselves, gay and lesbian people elsewhere, who are like us. but before we put identity to bed, we might take a second look at this tale of getting beyond identity. for queer is, of course, only a partial substitution: not only do we continue to recognize work that concerns gay and lesbian (and bisexual and trans) identities and subjectivities as queer, we also continue to assume a correspondence between ourselves and our objects. working in the other direction, i don’t think it was ever the case that what anthropologists saw when they got to indonesia or melanesia or even kansas city was themselves—or even what they thought they were looking for. the problematics of sameness and difference, us and them, that moved us to study “gay,” “homosexual,” and even “sexuality” remain active and fruitful. and so while we might agree that our queer anthropology is decisively postidentity—has been for some twenty-odd years—we might try to resist the tendency to imagine that queer could be everything that gay and lesbian was not, and instead keep our focus on the ways new objects might be less a moving beyond and more a reflection of our queer identifications and desires. transgression and the new normal like the parallel shift in feminist studies from women to gender recently analyzed by robyn wiegman (2012), the shift from gay and lesbian to queer was motivated by a desire for more expansive, supple analytical concepts that could dislodge false universalizations. but as wiegman (2012, 42) argues, the hope that a new object might save us, conceptually and politically, relies on a “transferential idealism” that “gender [read: queer] will be capable of giving us everything that women [read: gay/lesbian] does not,” that it “will be adequate to all the wishes that are invested in it.” this wish is a constitutive component of queer anthropology—there from the very start. in our story, queer anthropology would analyze neither identity nor acts, but transgression and normativity: “queer,” weston (1993, 348) writes, “defines itself by its difference from hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality.” this is the queer that i was taught: that which is, in michael warner’s (1993, xxvi) oft-cited phrase, resistant “to regimes of the normal”—not only heteronormativity, but “a wide field of normalization,” including “normal business in the academy.” and certainly by the time tom boellstorff (2007b) penned an annual review essay on what he (albeit not entirely comfortably) called “queer anthropology,” this was the dominant definition of queer. widening our object to sexual/gender normativity and its transgressions opened up new topics for queer anthropology: other modes of sexualized marginality, other ways to think sexuality/gender with nationalism, capitalism, globalization. this more expansive queer might herald a return to gayle rubin’s canonical essay “thinking sex,” which, back in 1984, sought to galvanize a new critical sexuality studies that would examine sex not as identity, but as “a vector of oppression” (rubin 1993, 22). it finds expression in contemporary work like noelle stout’s (2014) after love, which explores queer and straight cubans, sex workers, hustlers, tourists, and others caught within the contradictions of a mixed market, post-soviet economy that pits socialist ideals against new material inequalities. similarly, my own techniques of pleasure (weiss 2011a) fits into the rubric of queer anthropology not because all the practitioners with whom i worked identified as queer (or lgbt), but because bdsm practitioners are, as rubin (1993, 22) put it, “erotic dissidents.” but as weston (1993, 348) herself notes, what counts as transgression might—as much as gay—rest in the ethnographic eye of the beholder. as boellstorff (2007a, 15) reminds us, insisting that queer is antinormative is often less of an analysis and more “a self-congratulatory exercise” where we know the conclusion—it’s queer so it’s transgressive!—in advance (see also jakobsen 1998). i found this in my own work: once i began to connect bdsm to circuits of capital, commodities, and neoliberal ideologies of gender and race, i could no longer endorse the by then dominant queer arguments about bdsm—that it is radical or transgressive. instead, i was led to a more dialectical reading, resisting the either/or of condemnation and celebration as political positions one might take vis-à-vis bdsm, and sex politics more generally. i am, of course, not alone in challenging queer as a prescriptive project—one that a priori assumes that all queer objects are antinormative (and anti-straight). feminist and queer of color critics have long made this point; almost two decades ago, cathy cohen (1997, 438) argued that queer theory—despite a proclaimed deconstructive program—tends to “reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything queer” and, in the process, sidelines racialized (and classed and gendered) forms of nonnormativity, such as the “welfare queen” of her essay’s title (see also ferguson 2004). and since the early 2000s, queer’s complicity with power has been difficult to ignore. in the united states, gay and lesbian absorption into american neoliberalism, settler/state nationalism, and racialized state violence gives a political-economic context to queer studies’ turn away from a critique of heteronormativity to homonormativity (duggan 2002), homonationalism (puar 2007), settler homonationalism (morgensen 2010), and, most recently, queer necropolitics (haritaworn, kuntsman, and posocco 2014).3 this more intersectional approach to queer resonates with anthropology and our often more materialist analysis of not only antinormativity, but also the workings and limits of social intelligibility (see, for instance, engebretsen 2013). still, when pressed, many of us give some version of “nonnormative sexualities and/or genders” as the central definition of queer. i know i do in the classroom, and the same holds true for most of the new essays and monographs in queer anthropology (for a review of new queer anthropology, see weiss 2016). the editors of the recent routledge queer studies reader define queer studies as the “critique of normative models of sex, gender, and sexuality” (hall and jagose 2013, xvi), lauding queer studies’ “commitment to non-normativity and anti-identitarianism,” as well as “its refusal to define its proper field of operation in relation to any fixed content.” yet this insistence proves doubly ironic given the academic institutionalization of queer studies. in the marketplace of ideas, queer difference is too easily absorbed through an embrace of multicultural diversity that re-entrenches and bolsters, rather than unseats, the everyday workings of the neoliberal university (ferguson 2012). in this context, we might ask not what comes after antinormative queer theory, but rather why we romance the antinormative, oppositional, or transgressive queer (see wiegman and wilson 2015). it is my suspicion that we substituted political identification for identity, finding in queer studies the political possibilities and desires we have for ourselves (weiss 2015). for this reason, even as work in queer studies has increasingly challenged queer (as) transgression, and even as queer does not deliver on our hopes for resistance or oppositionality, we continue to invest in it because queer—in a kind of “our objects, ourselves” wishful thinking—weds our professional investments and careers to our political desires (see wiegman 2012). in other words, queer unites the nonnormative object of analysis with the antinormative critic, analysis with politics—perhaps telling us more about our own scholarly desires than about the objects we mean to analyze. but at this point, i am not—as you may have guessed—going to propose a new object that might resolve these political and conceptual dilemmas. instead, i am drawn to the parallel between the way we generate convergence between ourselves and our objects (via identity), and between our politics and those we ascribe to our objects (identification). this parallel is our desire—a desire that links us to our objects—and it is this desire that, more than cant definitions, motivates our queerness and our ethnographic practice, while bifurcating queer anthropology from the start. objects of desire in 2012, i was sitting with reina gossett in the light-filled conference room at the sylvia rivera law project in new york city. i was talking to reina as part of my fieldwork for the book i am writing now, a book on how queer left activists cultivate a radical political imagination—one that is both critical and utopic—at a time of economic precarity and imaginative scarcity. reina is an activist, writer, and artist whose work centers low-income trans people of color. at one point in our conversation, she described her frustration with the “check your privilege” kind of activism (where one might say, “as a person with white privilege, i need to be accountable to people of color by doing xyz”). based on a kind of balance-sheet reckoning, this activism recenters the white (or wealthy, or cisgendered, or straight) person. instead, reina told me, “i would love for folks to shift away from this politics of privilege” toward a “politic of desire,” where “you’re engaging through desire.” everyone needs to ask, “what do i want?” this question is central for the activists with whom i worked, as it is an invitation to imagine or envision otherwise. but i think this question is a useful one for us anthropologists, too, since it is our desire that leads us to our objects. indeed, it is a queer desire that, i suspect, lies at the core of anthropology itself—not the ethnocartographic project of describing, but the anthropological project of seeking “a generous . . . but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit” (ingold 2008, 69). as knowledge projects, anthropology and queer studies both desire a “space for thinking differently” (hall and jagose 2013, xvi), with and alongside others. my enthusiasm for rethinking desire in these terms might be prompted by my field research—i think ethnographically, as anthropologists are wont to do. but this queer of desire, of possibility, is also the queer josé muñoz (2009, 21, 25–26) reaches toward in his work on utopia: a queer of emergence, potentiality, the desire for something not yet, something yet to come (see also rodríguez 2014).4 resonating with what elizabeth povinelli (2011) terms an “anthropology of the otherwise,” queer (as) possibility appears in new queer ethnographies like naisargi dave’s (2012, 20) on the emergence of lesbian activism in india as an “ethical aspiration” to create a new world. in my own work, queer is not so much an object—proper or not—and more a stake in a shared project, a future imagined. queer names not only the messy realities of peoples’ sexualities and genders as they intersect with class, race, disability, and nation; not only impossible dreams, or visions, or desires for something better. queer also points to our own desires—our desires to know and inhabit a different way of thinking, a path of solidarity that does not rely on facile identity (that we are both queer) or identification (that my own politics in the academy might be shored up through my interlocutors’ activism, say), but on the more vulnerable and queerer work of trying to know another. queer is not only how i might conceptualize and categorize the activism and world-making projects of my interlocutors but also how i reckon with my own. for this, we need a dialectical queer—a queer marked at once by epistemological closure and intellectual potentiality, complicity and solidarity. bound to the social field we occupy together, this queer cannot avoid contamination. but perhaps that is a strength, not a weakness: queerness, like anthropology, not as “a study of,” but “a study with” (ingold 2008, 82, 83), a way of asking questions in a world constituted by who (and what) we think alongside (see also povinelli 2012). it is this queer that, i think, characterizes our work in anthropology—anthropology that is less about the study of an object, less about gaining “knowledge about the world” and the people in it, and more about opening “our eyes and minds to other possibilities of being” (ingold 2008, 82). anthropology as a way of attending to, inhabiting, and thinking an otherwise. to know another is, in some senses, the most intimate act, and the queerest—as “a way of knowing it is also a way of being” (ingold 2008, 83). this queer, this anthropology, depends on our desires to learn an/other way alongside others. which leaves us where we are, today—in what we might think of as post-antinormative queer times. for institutionalization has not been the end of queer, even as queer doesn’t carry the transgressive promise it once had. instead, it is precisely the limitations of our ways of knowing, the frustration of the (political-analytical) desires that motivated the field to begin with, that push us toward and link us with new objects, new analyses, new horizons. this fracturing has produced a wider than ever range of queer work—work on nonhuman animals, on temporality, on affect, on objects and vitalities that uncouple queer from sexuality/gender (see, for instance, holland, ochoa, and tompkins 2014, 2015; chen and luciano 2015). i say this not to herald a new queer vanguard, but rather because i think it shows that we are still after queer—still seeking it, investing in it, desiring it—even though, no, because we don’t know what it is. for this reason, i have not offered a queerer (better) queer that might finally overcome queer anthropology’s frustrating attachments. for it is our queer desires that motivate our search for an otherwise, for an object and a mode of analysis that could do justice to our hopes and dreams—political or analytic (or both). that this may never be achieved is, i think, the point. and so i think we should acknowledge our desires; indeed, i think it is our erotic, political, and intellectual desires that make our work queer and, i’m wagering, that make anthropology queer. queer as a wanting to know, to know more—“a commitment to a wondering curiosity,” rather than “disciplinary certainty” (mcglotten 2012, 3). queer as a provocation to think otherwise, think anew. aren’t those our desires? they’re certainly mine. notes 1. indeed, sedgwick (1993, 8) herself never intended it to: on the same page that she writes about queer’s “open mesh,” she insists that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression,” displacing same-sex desire “from [queer’s] definitional center would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.” 2. take, as one well-known example, the debates around the sambia practices gilbert herdt (1984) so famously first described as “ritualized homosexuality,” before shifting to “boy inseminating rites” in 1993. yet as deborah elliston (1995) argues, such terms still draw our attention to sexuality and gendered erotics. she calls the rites “semen practices” (elliston 1995, 850) and urges us to connect them not to same-sex practices elsewhere (no matter how much cultural context we give the fellatio), but to other ritualized fluid exchanges in melanesia. 3. queer and feminist marxist scholars have made related arguments about queer’s imbrication with capitalist social relations (hennessy 2000; floyd 2009). 4. this is not an entirely new queer; queer as a hope for an otherwise appears in the very first use of the phrase queer studies in 1991. teresa de lauretis (1991, iii, xi) proposed that queer might provide a “conceptual and speculative” opening, asking: “can our queerness act as an agent of social change . . . and our theory construct . . . another way of living the racial and the sexual?” of course, de lauretis (1994, 297) also registered the characteristic failure and frustration of queer studies, turning away from queer a mere three years later because, in her words, it had become “a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry.” references blackwood, evelyn, ed. 1986 anthropology and homosexual behavior. binghamton, n.y.: haworth press. boellstorff, tom 2007a a coincidence of desires: anthropology, queer studies, indonesia. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2007b “queer studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 36: 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094421. butler, judith 1993 bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of “sex.” new york: routledge. 1994 “against proper objects.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 6, nos. 2–3: 1–26. chen, mel y., and dana luciano, eds. 2015 “queer inhumanisms.” special issue, glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 21, no. 2. cohen, cathy j. 1997 “punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: the radical potential of queer politics?” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 3, no. 4: 437–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3-4-437. dave, naisargi n. 2012 queer activism in india: a story in the anthropology of ethics. durham, n.c.: duke university press. de lauretis, teresa 1991 “queer theory: lesbian and gay sexualities.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 3, no. 2: iii–viii. 1994 “habit changes.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 6, nos. 2–3: 296. duggan, lisa 2002 “the new homonormativity: the sexual politics of neoliberalism.” in materializing democracy: toward a revitalized cultural politics, edited by russ castronovo and dana d. nelson, 175–94. durham, n.c.: duke university press. elliston, deborah a. 1995 “erotic anthropology: ‘ritualized homosexuality’ in melanesia and beyond.” american ethnologist 22, no. 4: 848–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.4.02a00100. engebretsen, elisabeth l. 2013 queer women in urban china: an ethnography. new york: routledge. ferguson, roderick a. 2004 aberrations in black: toward a queer of color critique. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 2012 the reorder of things: the university and its pedagogies of minority difference. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. floyd, kevin 2009 the reification of desire: toward a queer marxism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hall, donald e., and annamarie jagose, eds. 2013 the routledge queer studies reader. new york: routledge. haritaworn, jin, adi kuntsman, and silvia posocco, eds. 2014 queer necropolitics. new york: routledge. hennessy, rosemary 2000 profit and pleasure: sexual identities in late capitalism. new york: routledge. herdt, gilbert h., ed. 1984 ritualized homosexuality in melanesia. berkeley: university of california press. holland, sharon p., marcia ochoa, and kyla wazana tompkins, eds. 2014 “on the visceral.” special issue, glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 20, no. 4. 2015 “on the visceral 2.” special issue, glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 21, no. 1. ingold, tim 2008 “anthropology is not ethnography.” proceedings of the british academy 154: 69–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.5871/bacad/9780197264355.001.0001. jakobsen, janet r. 1998 “queer is? queer does? normativity and the problem of resistance.” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 4, no. 4: 511–36. mcglotten, shaka 2012 “always toward a black queer anthropology.” transforming anthropology 20, no. 1: 3–4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2011.01140.x. morgensen, scott lauria 2010 “settler homonationalism: theorizing settler colonialism within queer modernities.” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 16, nos. 1–2: 105–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2009-015. muñoz, josé esteban 2009 cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press. newton, esther 1979 mother camp: female impersonators in america. chicago: university of chicago press. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2011 “routes/worlds.” e-flux, no. 27. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/27/67991/routes-worlds/. 2012 “the will to be otherwise/the effort of endurance.” south atlantic quarterly 111, no. 3: 453–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1596236. puar, jasbir k. 2007 terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rodríguez, juana maría 2014 sexual futures, queer gestures, and other latina longings. new york: new york university press. rubin, gayle 1993 “thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality.” in the lesbian and gay studies reader, edited by henry abelove, michèle aina barale, and david m. halperin, 3–44. new york: routledge. originally published in 1984. sedgwick, eve kosofsky 1993 tendencies. durham, n.c.: duke university press. stout, noelle m. 2014 after love: queer intimacy and erotic economies in post-soviet cuba. durham, n.c.: duke university press. warner, michael 1993 “introduction.” in fear of a queer planet: queer politics and social theory, edited by michael warner, vii–xxxi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. weiss, margot 2011a techniques of pleasure: bdsm and the circuits of sexuality. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2011b “the epistemology of ethnography: method in queer anthropology.” glq: a journal of gay and lesbian studies 17, no. 4: 649–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1302451. 2015 “queer economic justice: desire, critique, and the practice of knowledge.” in global justice and desire: queering economy, edited by nikita dhawan, antke engel, christoph h. e. holzhey, and volker woltersdorff, 79–95. new york: routledge. 2016 “discipline and desire: feminist politics, queer studies, and new queer anthropology.” in mapping feminist anthropology in the twenty-first century, edited by ellen lewin and leni m. silverstein, 168–87. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. weston, kath 1993 “lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 22: 339–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.002011. wiegman, robyn 2012 object lessons. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wiegman, robyn, and elizabeth a. wilson, eds. 2015 “queer theory without antinormativity.” special issue, differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 26, no. 1. writing the implosion writing the implosion: teaching the world one thing at a time joseph dumit university of california, davis i have taught a course called science and politics for a number of years and one year in particular, it was very early in the morning, a big lecture class at 8:00am. to get to the lecture hall we all passed this little shop that sold good coffee and chocolate croissants. … and just as a way of waking up in the morning, i would ask people to unpack objects, to take a chocolate croissant and lead me through flour and chocolate and butter and sugar and coffee and connect us to world histories that way. i would ask people to pick an object, the t-shirt that the person sitting next to them was wearing, what was printed on it, the label, the very fact of labeling, the fibre composition. if it’s got polyester, then take me through the history of purity hall and research labs at du pont; you know, back me up into nitrogen chemistry. if it’s cotton, then back me into pesticides and the california water projects and where cotton is grown and the length of the fibre and what about what you are wearing on your chest? i would ask people, as a way of talking about science and politics, to take a pencil, a piece of paper, the architecture of the lecture hall that you walked past; pick something and get the class started by giving me an account of it. —donna haraway, in live theory (emphasis added) waking up to connections . . . coffee is not enough, alas. necessary for some of us, but not enough to properly wake up to the connectedness of the world, to our connectedness to world histories. but why not? how do t-shirts, croissants, and pencils contain their histories without our being aware of them? why does even donna haraway, a historian of these particular connections, need to wake up each day to them again? the everyday, it seems, conspires against us, or with that part of us that wants to live in an everyday in which objects are mere parts of the world and it all makes a certain kind of sleepy sense. the connections haraway instigates in the coffee shop may strike one as outrageous, certainly so early in the morning. they require promiscuous knowledge; they seem to accuse one of not having done enough homework. anxieties arise, some look for an exit. even worse, the connections may threaten the well-made world one lives in. one senses a potentially dangerous demand in them. the dormant activist stirs, “if i find out that t-shirts contribute to environmental degradation or coffee to poverty, how am i going to get out of bed at all?” how to live, how to know, how to be comfortable. how did comfort get wired in anyway? published in the same year as haraway’s “manifesto for cyborgs,” gilles deleuze’s cinema 2 considered post–world war ii cinema and described a similar opposition between films that use the everyday to “make us grasp something intolerable and unbearable” and those that “no matter how violent, are directed to a pragmatic visual function which ‘tolerates’ or ‘puts up with’ practically anything” (deleuze 1989, 19). the words intolerable and unbearable may seem overblown for t-shirts and coffee, but i ask your indulgence with this matter to understand how deleuze (in dialogue with michel foucault) wants to use these terms to signal an embodied form of politics aspiring to something different, opposed to a commonsense body and business as usual, a politics that indicates a (perhaps grudging) acceptance of the order of things and people.1 i want to put deleuze’s cinema 2 in dialogue with haraway’s work on connections, because working through the former helps me unpack the process of haraway’s inquisitive implosion method and some of its aims better.2 following this exegesis, i offer a homework project for putting this method into practice. haraway wakes up to connections precisely to rewire her common sense that every day conspires against this new physiology. for both haraway and deleuze, it is in our bodies that we are most vulnerable to comfort. neither everyday nor limit-situations are marked by anything rare or extraordinary. … it is just a factory, a school. … we mix with all that, even death, even accidents, in our normal life or on holidays. we see, and we more or less experience, a powerful organization of poverty and oppression. and we are precisely not without sensory-motor schemata for recognizing such things, for putting up with and approving them. … we have schemata for turning away when it is too unpleasant, for prompting resignation when it is terrible and for assimilating when it is too beautiful. it should be pointed out here that even metaphors are sensory-motor evasions, and furnish us with something to say when we no longer know what to do. (deleuze 1989, 20) hovering about, haunting all sides of our everyday worlds are other stories, other accounts, other connections that we may suspect, yet that paralyze us sometimes due to their enormity. writing about cutting-edge films for their formation of new concepts, deleuze does not analyze the processes of sensory-motor enculturation produced by more popular media. haraway’s primate visions takes on this challenge, examining the excruciating ways in which “nature stories” about primates, primitives, women, and civilization are produced in post–world war ii films and scientific articles. she explains how the processes of iconically and categorically dividing nature from history both give us our common sense about the neat world and therapeutically inoculate us against worrying about the loose ends. in summary, in all of these stories humans from scientific cultures are placed in “nature” in gestures that absolve the reader and viewer of unspoken transgressions, that relieve the anxieties of separation and solitary isolation on a threatened planet and for a culture threatened by the consequences of its own history. but the films and articles rigorously exclude the contextualizing politics of decolonization and exploitation of the emergent third world. …3 instead the dramas of communication, origin, extinction and reproduction are played out in a nature that seems innocent of history. … it is precisely to renaturalize “man” after the calamities of advanced industrialism, and especially after the bomb, that apes and (white) people are placed together in both the “natural” world of the forest and the “cultural” world of language-users and pet-keepers. (haraway 1989, 156) key to war movies featuring bands of brothers and heroism are bits of complex threads about even horrific events, used in ways that isolate them into nice nuggets. the universal myth here is that most comfortable of epistemic objects, a cliché, a story that should be redundant yet whose enjoyment and function is to be repeated: the comfort of a mcdonald’s in times of peace and war. and weaving though our lives from start to finish, clichés are part of us. the image constantly sinks to the state of the cliché: because it is introduced into sensory-motor linkages, because it itself organizes or induces these linkages, because we never perceive everything that is in the image, because it is made for that purpose. … civilization of the image? in fact, it is a civilization of the cliché where all the powers have an interest in hiding images from us, not necessarily hiding the same thing from us, but in hiding something in the image. (deleuze 1989, 21) thus we are not awake when we are awake. our eyes are open, but we perceive only clichés, “only what we are interested in perceiving” (deleuze 1989, 20). even if we read newspapers, watch cable news (cnn, bbc, or fox), or follow and resend facebook posts, the war-torn, povertyand disease-stricken, unequal, unbearable world is tragic—but somehow tolerable. a problem shared, i would argue, by haraway and deleuze, is how to disrupt our own tolerance, how to see the intolerable in the everyday. “if our sensory-motor schema jam or break, then a different type of image can appear” (deleuze 1989, 20). deleuze detects in cinema a potential to shock thinking, beyond imagination (for imagination is precisely what popular cinema aims to reproduce). “for it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures the intolerable in this world, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself” (deleuze 1989, 169–70). deleuze points to another kind of thinking, another kind of politics to come, as something to be invented that does not already make sense.4 while haraway looks to science fiction for ways of imagining how the world could be otherwise, her primary method of analysis is resolutely empirical.5 by looking differently, through other eyes—human fleshy, mouse murine, cyborg—she confronts intolerable and unbearable worlds within everyday objects. “vision is always a question of the power to see—and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. with whose blood were my eyes crafted?” (haraway 1988, 192). in this double practice, seeing and the apparatus of seeing are both interrogated and held accountable. this is not a reflexive practice of the seen and the seer, because reflection implies a self-presence, a comfortable sense of one’s identities and stakes. rather, it is diffracted. one only sees at all through eyes that are themselves devices with histories of their own. haraway (1988, 192) continues: “these points also apply to testimony from the position of ‘oneself.’ we are not immediately present to ourselves. self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology linking meanings and bodies. self-identity is a bad visual system.” non-innocence and complicity are necessary if one is to confront world histories as histories that one is a part of and accountable to. without these stances, one easily falls into some incarnation of a god-trick, claiming to see the world from nowhere in particular. situated knowledge as a method begins at this point of bloody eyes seeing a violent world and not turning away because that would only add to the violence: commitment. one will pursue connections like a bloodhound to try and make better stories, fuller world histories, stronger objectivity.6 one fights for one’s own eyes as well as for those of others. “struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see. … [o]bjectivity cannot be about fixed vision when what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about” (haraway 1988, 194, 195). this commitment to investigate is something we come to have to do. deleuze described franz kafka’s commitment similarly: “the impossibility of not ‘writing,’ the impossibility of writing in the dominant language, the impossibility of writing differently” (deleuze 1989, 217).7 for haraway (1997, 68), the stakes are always high, but they are also everywhere: the relations of democracy and knowledge are up for materialized refiguring at every level of the onion of doing technoscience, not just after all the serious epistemological action is over. i believe that last statement is a fact; i know it is my hope and commitment. this position is not relativism; it is a principled refusal of the stacked deck that forces choice between loaded dualities such as realism and relativism. take a walk on the wily side … when my students read haraway, they are often struck by the density of descriptions that span centuries and cultures, corporations and identities, without ever being nonspecific. her stories of the bomb, gene, brain, mouse, vampire, and the like are not generic stories of mice, for instance, but of oncomouse™, and even of particular oncomice™ at specific labs. students complain sometimes about the too much information that inhabit them, and worry that the stories are biased. they often voice as criticism what haraway (1997, 68) takes as a principle of research: “stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places.” the actual liveliness, the wiliness of nature and culture as natureculture is what i wish to point to and respond with. but often this does not convince them. instead i have found that the best way to get my students to appreciate haraway’s necessary work is to give them an assignment. i call it the “implosion project,” after her most productive methodological image. implosion is a concept whose first dictionary definition is “a violent collapse inward,” as when a star collapses on its own gravity to form a black hole. analogously, world histories are not just found inside objects, and objects do not “point” to them; in important ways each object is made of imploded histories: “any interesting being in technoscience, like a textbook, molecule, equation, mouse, pipette, bomb, fungus, technician, agitator, or scientist can—and often should—be teased open to show the sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual threads that make up its tissues” (haraway 1997, 68). haraway’s lists are always important constructions. here, facts, media, things, people are equally all implosions, all material-semiotic actors, all unpackable, all full of different threads that “can—and often should” be teased out. the list of threads—“economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic, and textual”—appears in more or less similar forms, with economic, labor, epistemological, and other dimensions appearing. haraway (1997, 68) also defines implosion as a force bringing multiple dimensions together, connecting them, and as “a claim for heterogeneous and continual construction through historically located practice, where the actors are not all human.” so the first part of the assignment is to see how many dimensions of a particular object one knows about, to explore the vastly different stories that one can tell about it. the multiple dimensions that make up objects also make up ourselves, as well as our categories. telling the stories of an object therefore begins unpacking our own clichés, our certainties, our affects. writes haraway (1997, 68): “the point is simple: the technical, textual, organic, historical, formal, mythic, economic, and political dimensions of entities, actions, and worlds implode in the gravity well of technoscience—or perhaps of any world massive enough to bend our attention, warp our certainties, and sustain our lives.” following connections is thus the only way to proceed, no matter how worrisome the result. the physics here is serious: the world itself is warped and the straight lines we see between categories may be twisted, but those twists must be carefully followed. only in this manner can we confront the histories and the intolerable not just in objects but in ourselves, in our identities as partial, in our senses, our worries, and our common sense. as does deleuze, though in an implosive, grounded register, haraway seeks other ways of thinking, writing, and doing politics. “we do not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible” (haraway 1988, 196). the implosion project is designed to guide one through the arduous homework required to write an implosion with awareness and commitment. it consists of a series of questions, organized by dimensions to explore the tissues of an object. following these is a set of analytic twists, each one turning the implosion on oneself, one’s common sense, and on the world. the project originated while i was a teaching assistant for haraway’s “science and politics” class at the university of california, santa cruz. i came to see that it helped generate more interesting projects, ones that mattered to the writer, and at the same time helped explicate some aspects of haraway’s unique style and power. i have continued to experiment with it and assign it in almost all my classes. i will explain how after i outline the process. implosion project: the assignment implosion projects are attempts to teach and learn about the embeddedness of objects, facts, actions, and people in the world and the world in them. the emphasis is on details and nonobvious connections, as well as on the many dimensions with which we can analyze them: labor, professional, material, technological, political, economic, symbolic, textual, bodily, historical, educational. pick an artifact, a fact, a process as “it.” make sure it is as specific as possible (not just fluoxetine, but one of those colored, branded prozac pills that is in your medicine cabinet; not just the fact that a monkey can use sign language, but the materialized, stated claim in a 1999 journal article). how can it be conceptualized? what is it to different groups of people and individuals? how is it situated in the world and how is the world situated in it? following is a hastily put-together, quite incomplete, yet apparently excessive list of possibly relevant aspects of any artifact (whether it be a social movement, a name, a grouping, a set of actions, or a process in the form of a thing, a grain of rice, a mouse, a mouse pad, an ad about a mouse, you, a fact of life, a book, a statistic, an event, a story …). with your specific artifact, fact, object, or process in front of you, brainstorm: go through the list slowly and try to answer each question as best you can. diagram or make a chart if you need to. it may seem hard to know where to put different answers, as the questions are indiscrete. “potent categories collapse into each other. analytically and provisionally we may want to move what counts as the political to the background and to foreground elements called technical, formal, or quantitative, or to highlight the textual and semiotic while muting the economic or mythic” (haraway 1997, 68). note your form of certainty as well: whether you feel you know the answer in detail, have a good idea about it, a guess, or no idea. take your time. it may take more than one session. don’t do any extra research at this point. type it in so you can add more later. if there are more dimensions that strike you as needing inclusions, add them and iterate questions for them as well. these questions are only hints, but remember that almost any answer provides a cluster of new artifacts (try not to go more than three levels down). the object of this project is to explore the real complexity of specificity and situatedness. these words only mean something in the context of specific knowledges and matter, and in contests over what matters. in these contexts they allow us to get at the world in an effective and affective way; they help show us how the world matters and how it might be otherwise. following this is a set of analytic twists, each one turning the implosion on oneself, one’s common sense, and on the world. how is the world in “it” and how is “it” in the world? labor dimensions: how was it produced and who is involved in its production? are there stages in its production? where has it traveled to and from? what are the histories of its productions? who maintains these processes of production? where are they maintained? how is it used and how is using it seen as labor, or not? what forms of labor and work incorporate it or make use of it? is it used up? if not, how is it passed on, transferred, communicated? what routes do these processes take? what kinds of actors (human and nonhuman) are involved, and what kinds are excluded? professional/epistemological dimensions: how is knowledge of the process and its production demarcated and professionalized? what kinds of knowledge count in talking about it? what kind of professionals are involved in making expert decisions regarding its development, production, and dissemination? how are each of these stages funded? in projecting its future use? what kinds of controversies of this knowledge are happening? who is involved? in what kinds of institutions do they work? how is it articulated by medical, legal, governmental, religious, psychological, engineering, military, economic, academic, new age, and educational professionals? what are the political-economic histories of this? material dimensions: what materials are involved in its production and maintenance? where have these materials come from? how are they disposed of? what hazards are considered among these materials? what are the labor dimensions of these material productions? what are the global, economic, and political dimensions of their use? what are the histories, sciences, and political dimensions of these materials? how do these help constitute it? technological dimensions: what kinds of technologies and machines enable it to be produced and maintained? what technologies are joined with it? who has access to these machines and technologies? what are their histories? what sorts of information technologies are involved? what are the political, economic, bodily, labor, and historical dimensions of these technologies? how do they help constitute it? context and situatedness: where does it appear in the world? how does it appear and next to what or in what? what activities or ways of life enable one to come across it? what kinds of audiences is it addressed to? who is excluded in these addresses? when can it appear? what is the rhythm of its appearance? how does this matter? political dimensions: what kinds of local, national, and international bodies claim jurisdiction over it? what bodies play a part in approving it (e.g., lobbyists, patents, corporate sponsorship, etc.)? what are the histories of regulations concerning it? how do these regulations help constitute it? how is it understood in terms of political positions in the world? how can we articulate the ways it is understood with political discourses? how is it hegemonic—in what ways can we see it as marshaling our consent to dominant orders? what kinds of legislation affect it? how do political considerations make use of it? what are the political positions as seen through the lens of this artifact (they often vary by artifact and moment)? how does this matter? economic dimensions: the process as commodity: how is it marketed, purchased, consumed? where and by whom? how is it involved in a world marketplace? what kinds of capital, debt, credit, and labor relations are involved in producing, marketing, and circulating it? who sells it? how are costs calculated? how are risks calculated? by whom and when? what are the histories and materialities of those relations? who is involved at each stage and how are differences in power situated? how do these help constitute it? textual dimensions: what texts are involved in it? what texts refer to it? what kinds of texts? who produces them and who reads them? where and in what organizations and institutions are the texts produced and read? what are the histories of these texts and how are they funded? what kinds of textual associations can be made? how does this matter? bodily/organic dimensions: how are bodies related to it? what forms of attention, affect, emotion, and cognition are involved? are there particular ways in which we think of ourselves that also involve or sustain this process? what kinds of bodies, including nonhumans, and bodily relations are involved in producing it? what kinds make use of it? how are these bodies and relations gendered? are there racial, gendered, differently abled, or other group identifications that help construct these bodies? what ways of life are involved? what are the histories of all these relations? how do these help constitute it? historical dimensions: what concepts refer to it? what are the histories of these concepts? was it invented, when and by whom? are there different and competing versions of its histories? who tells these histories? how has it traveled historically? repeat the above dimensions for each aspect of its history. how do these help constitute it? particle dimensions: how can the process be divided up? what are its parts? what are its stages? treating each part or stage as a process, repeat the above analysis. educational dimensions: how does it appear in our socialization? when do we learn about it in school? during the rest of life? what kinds of people/bodies get to learn about it? how much do we learn about it? what aspects of it are avoided? what are the histories of teaching about it? how does this matter? mythological dimensions: what roles does it play in fantasies? what kinds of national narratives make use of it? how does it appear in entertainment? what other grand narratives, stories, and strong associations involve it (e.g., progress, risk, joy, fear, science, militarism, success, decline, horror, self-improvement, financial security, nuclear family, motherhood, fatherhood, independence, adolescence, democracy, origin stories, stories of difference, privilege, death, pornography, sports)? how do these matter? symbolic dimensions: what are the many different ways in which it can be taken as a symbol? how does this process serve in symbolic systems? what sorts of ideas, metaphors, movements, ideologies, and the like are associated with it? for whom are these relevant, to whom do they matter, and what contests over meaning are they involved in? what are the histories of these meanings and contests over meaning? how do they matter? walkthrough twist 1: brainstorm → knowledge map when you are done, you have a map of your knowledge on the subject, of your common sense as well, of what you have felt worth knowing, and of what you have learned to attend to in your life, every day and academically. the brainstorm is thus really a braindump. the braindump is also a story dump, getting all the stories you have learned to tell about the subject, with all their plots and forms and tropes, out in the open. hopefully at some point you ran out on certain questions and really started thinking about connections in new ways. i have noticed when i conduct ethnographic interviews and oral histories that people usually have at least one to three hours of canned stories—honed, carefully put-together stories—that are fascinating and designed to be so. this is understandable and necessary as people have to explain themselves to others repeatedly and stories are mnemonic condensation devices for meanings and facts, representing the experience of badly told tales and misunderstandings. but after those initial one to three hours, if one keeps asking questions about specific connections, people, and events, a vast land opens up of forgotten memories, tentative and alternative explanations, and new understandings and formulations of meanings. while brainstorming, you hopefully find ways to exhaust your stories about what is interesting about your implosion and come to see their limitations. despite “knowing that everything is connected,” there are limits to the connections you are able to make. these limitations can be considered the mundane, at the mundane level of that which you didn’t know you knew. new patterns, relations, and actors come to mind. twist 2: gap map → ignorance map now if you imagine that each question on the assignment is a patch on a big chart colored by your degree of knowledge-attention-care about it, then you might also see some metapatterns: dimensions or subdimensions where you know a lot, and others where you are quite ignorant. this should be thought of as your gap-map. start reflecting and writing about how you came to know the areas you do. here is my wittgensteinian probe: “how specifically did you come to know those answers? and how did you come to care to know about the questions?” again, specificity often comes with resistance. did you learn it in a particular grade or class, as a result of what curriculum? did you become curious through a friend who had become interested how? did you always seem to know it, or find it on the web, or on tv—why was it there? here you are mapping another dimension, your personal politics, your personal, political, economic, institutional, historical, religious, and regional forms of attention and understanding and how they have come to matter for your world. i am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position—a phd in biology for an irish catholic girl was made possible by sputnik’s impact on us national science-education policy. i have a body and mind as much constructed by the post–second world war arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements. there are more grounds for hope in focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal american technocrats, which also produced large numbers of dissidents, than in focusing on the present defeats. (haraway 1990, 173) if you turn the gap-map inside out, reversing the figure-ground relationship, and imagine as colored in all the areas where you know the least, you now start to pay attention to patterns of ignorance. science studies scholars like robert proctor have begun to study this realm of “agnotology: the cultural production of ignorance.”8 here you should consider the explanations that come to mind to explain (even defensively) why you do not know these things. these stories about unimportance, difficulty, obscurity, inefficiency (too little time or bang for the buck), and exhaustion speak to the ways in which your knowledge and attention and caring have been shaped. are there also counterstories about this ignorance, accounts of others who know and care so you do not have to? your assignment for this phase is to imagine how and where you could get the answers you are missing. even if time, money, effort, and intimidation would keep you from getting some of them: what are the places that might have answers? who could you talk to? who obsesses and collects this knowledge? twist 3: archives, experts, counter-memory, gaps we have to tear [statements] away from their virtual self-evidence … they themselves pose a whole cluster of questions: what are they? how can they be defined or limited? —michel foucault, archaeology of knowledge now with resources and research tools at hand, try to answer more questions. if possible keep track of where the answers are and where they are not. note which answers turn out to be harder to get than you anticipated. perhaps some statistics you assumed were regularly collected have not been for decades. perhaps they were never collected because no one was interested, or they were specifically not interested. who controls these answers—what persons, institutions, databases, experts, disciplines? each answer is also an implosion with its own dimensions: the history of its coming to be posed, the disciplinary formations that made it askable in the first place, the material infrastructure that made it visible, and the archive that preserved it. foucault’s (1972, 50–52) archaeology of knowledge is exemplary in analyzing this process for every question and answer: who is speaking? who, among the totality of speaking individuals is accorded the right to use this sort of language? … it involves a system of differentiation and relations with other individuals … medical statements cannot come from anybody. … we must also describe the institutional sites from which the doctor makes his discourse, and from which the discourse derives its legitimate source and point of application. … and the positions of the subject defined by situations: questioning subject, listening subject, seeing subject, observing subject. foucault emphasizes seeing each statement you discover as part of a material archive: it has survived its initial production and been transformed and preserved so that you could find it. your task is to attend to the specific archives about the implosion you are studying as a way of thinking about how they are connected to it. the task consists of not “treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. of course discourses are composed of signs, but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. it is this more that renders them irreducible to language and to speech. it is this ‘more’ that we must reveal and describe” (foucault 1972, 49). in haraway’s work, the archives are active participants in the implosions she studies; they are often appendages (e.g., rockefeller) of the institutional missions that produced the implosions, and the archives are often part of the mission itself. the smithsonian institution’s mission to archive itself helps shape the collecting projects that generate animal knowledge and types. as you answer your questions, you can start to see the contours of knowledge and attention that maybe help explain how you came to know and not know. as haraway (1997, 218) puts it, “discourses are not just ‘words’; they are material-semiotic practices through which objects of attention and knowing subjects are both constituted.” this notion of how our world can “bend our attention [and] warp our certainties” (haraway 1997, 68) and sometimes productively be called ideology if we use it to see how materially specific it is and how productive it is in giving us some stories to tell, even while disabling others. twist 4: exhaustion—isn’t this incredibly messy and time consuming? i cannot follow here each of my stem cells, much less the much larger set that would be needed for the excessive account of technoscience that i crave. but i try to work out at least some of the knots. —donna haraway, modest_witness the reaction many of my students have to the messiness and overwhelming data this process generates itself requires examination. do we think that stories of objects and facts and practices should be straightforward and not imploded? how much do we value efficiency and condensation over partial connections, extra accountability, and more homework? why have we been shaped so that we know the things we do and are ignorant to various degrees about so much else? the process so far has been diagnostic. if you are seriously considering a topic for a research project or, cyborg forbid, a dissertation, and you get sick or bored of it after a week of imploding it, then you definitely need a different topic. the implosion process is designed to daunt and to lure. if you already know your story, then you will do no more than repeat common sense. ideally the process will reveal connections that you did not know and that you did not know you cared about. thicker weaves of dependence, accountability, and care are part of the result of this process. “commitment after the implosions of technoscience requires immersion in the work of materializing new tropes in an always contingent practice of grounding or worlding” (haraway 1997, 113). teaching implosion i have taught the above assignment in graduate classes where each step took a whole week. students involved in dissertations or still figuring out their topic were instructed to braindump the first week, then comment on others the second week. the third week each individual constructed a gap map (some in color, all revealing of both “personal” preferences and the cultural, societal, and educational shaping of those preferences), and the following week everybody tried to see where they could find information and where they could not (or how expensive it would be to obtain). attending to this process sometimes mutated students’ prior arguments and sometimes deepened them; it also nuanced their understanding of how every argument persists within a field of knowledge threads that are themselves “analytical, imaginative physical, and political choice[s]” (haraway 1997, 129). from my reading, they became more careful writers, aware of the dimensions they were ignoring and of the limitations of the threads they depended on. those going into the field reported that the process exploded their topic’s apparent coherence and the common sense that they brought to it, creating opportunities for connections and especially for gaps, generating a state of readiness to pay attention to surprise in the field. in undergraduate classes for the google generation, i developed a quicker and less intense artifact assignment aimed at learning to see connections—the world in the object (as multiplicities), and the object in the world (as lines of circulation and as a biography of things). students were asked to first try and answer the questions without search, and then to use search, and in both cases to map the ways in which everything is not connected, and many connections are nonobvious even in the search bar. another version of this applied the same set of questions to wikipedia entries, challenging students to ask which dimensions were left out of the entries and to see whether they could discover them and add to wikipedia (a process that quickly reveals the ongoing politics of wikipedia knowledge). other versions have been used in a writing class as a one-shot two-hour brainstorming activity—go, go go! a quick map of present thinking, jogging other thoughts, and then returning to writing. we also used a version in an sts (science and technology studies) workshop, asking participants to make their answers into a map to post on walls and to bring others in on, finding inspiration in other maps, additional lines, and ways of following dimensions one had not thought of. i want to end by recalling the humor, the pleasure, the joy with which haraway writes and works on the world. this is due, i think, to the homework side of the implosive project i have emphasized. once one has worked on all of this, analysis continues with renewed vigor, writing flows, new tables and classifications can be elaborated. i try never to forget haraway’s (1997, 128) wry admonishment: “both people and things have a nonreducible trickster quality that resists categories and projects of all kinds. yearning is fed from the gaps in categories and from the quirky liveliness of signs.” deleuze (1986a, 67) similarly explained, “what interests me is a rather special discipline, taxonomy, a classification of classifications, which, unlike linguistics, can’t do without the notion of a sign. … nothing is more fun than classifications!”9 and he explained of foucault’s work, “all this did not prevent him from sometimes treating the intolerable with great humor; we laughed a lot. because it was not a matter of feeling indignant, but of seeing something not visible, of thinking about something almost at the limit of thought” (deleuze 1986a, 1).10 writing anew thus emerges from the encounter of our commitments with the liveliness of their objects. “what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself?” (foucault 1986, 8). haraway (1997, 129) provides a pedagogical guide to staying with this encounter: objects like the fetus, chip/computer, gene, race, ecosystem, brain, database, and bomb are stem cells of the technoscientific body. each of these curious objects is a recent construct or material-semiotic “object of knowledge,” forged by heterogeneous practices in the furnace of technoscience. to be a construct does not mean to be unreal or made up; quite the opposite. out of each of these nodes or stem cells, sticky threads lead to every nook and cranny of the world. which threads to follow is an analytical, imaginative, physical, and political choice. i am committed to show how each of these stem cells is a knot of knowledge-making practices, industry and commerce, popular culture, social struggles, psychoanalytic formations, bodily histories, human and nonhuman actions, local and global flows, inherited narratives, new stories, syncretic technical/cultural processes, and more. (emphasis added) notes 1. michel foucault and daniel defert initiated the group for information on prisons (gip) that included deleuze and others; the group published a newsletter, intolerable, instigating change in talk about prisons. “foucault … was in some fashion a seer. he saw things, and like all people who know how to see, who see something and see it deeply, he found what he saw to be intolerable. for him, to think meant to react to the intolerable, to something intolerable he had seen. and the intolerable never was the visible; it was something more. … but the intolerable was not a matter of ethics. that is, his ethics were to apprehend or to see something as intolerable, but it was not in the name of morals that something was intolerable. … if thinking did not reach the intolerable, it was not worthwhile to think. to think always meant to think about the limits of a situation. but it also meant to see” (deleuze 1986b, 1). see also foucault 2000; foucault and deleuze 1977. 2. i learned to work with deleuze’s words through attending john rajchman’s seminars at mit (from 1997 to 2004). rajchman’s approach to the experimental and empirical practices of deleuze and foucault, in dialogue with my training in attention and writing from haraway and susan harding, shaped the empirical methods and teaching forms i now employ (see rajchman 1985, 1988, 2000). 3. the full sentence reads: “but the films and articles rigorously exclude the contextualizing politics of decolonization and exploitation of the emergent third world, obligatory and normative heterosexuality, masculine dominance of a progressively war-based scientific enterprise in industrial civilization, and the racial symbolic and institutional organization of scientific research” (haraway 1989, 156). 4. “the modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. we do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. it is not we who make cinema, it is the world which looks to us like a bad film” (deleuze 1989, 171). see also rajchman 2000. 5. of course, science fiction is also a form of radical empiricism. 6. on “strong objectivity,” see harding 1991. 7. see deleuze and guattari 1986. 8. see the conference by the same name for other agnotologists, http://www.stanford.edu/dept/hps/agnotologyconference.html (accessed february 27, 2014). steve hilgartner has also been exploring non-knowledge. 9. see also rajchman’s discussion of deleuze’s humor (2000), and deleuze’s discussion of the stoic’s humor versus platonic irony (1987). 10. foucault (1985, 4) described his relation to humor, writing, and struggle like this: “the bourgeoisie is not at all what baudelaire thought, a pack of stupid and sluggish fools. the bourgeoisie is intelligent, lucid, calculating. no other form of domination has ever been so efficient, and subsequently so dangerous, so deeply rooted. it won’t suffice to call the bourgeoisie villainous; it won’t simply disappear like the flame of a blown-out candle. this justifies a certain sadness; it is thus necessary to bring into the struggle as much gaiety, lucidity and determination as possible. the only really sad thing is not to fight. … basically i don’t like to write: it is a very difficult activity to master. writing interests me only in the measure that incorporates the reality of combat, as an instrument, a tactic, a spotlight. i would like my books to be like surgeon’s knives, molotov cocktails, or galleries in a mine, and, like fireworks, to be carbonized after use.” references deleuze, gilles 1986a cinema 1: the movement-image. translated by hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 1986b “the intellectual and politics: foucault and the prison.” interview with paul rabinow and keith gandal, history of the present, no. 2: 1–2, 20–21. available at http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/publications/2009/05/hotp1986.pdf. 1989 cinema 2: the time-image. translated by hugh tomlinson and robert galeta. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. deleuze, gilles, and felix guattari 1986 kafka: toward a minor literature. translated by dana polan. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. deleuze, gilles, and claire parnet 1987 dialogues. translated by hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. new york: columbia university press. foucault, michel 1972 the archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. translated by a. m. sheridan smith. new york: pantheon. 1985 “an interview with michel foucault.” interviewed by jean-louis ezine, translated by renée morel, history of the present, no. 1: 2–3,14. available at http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/publications/2009/05/hotp1985.pdf. 2000 power: essential works of michel foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, edited by james faubion. london: allen lane. foucault, michel, and gilles deleuze 1977 “intellectuals and power.” in language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews, edited by donald f. bouchard, 205–17. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. haraway, donna 1988 “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14, no. 3: 575–99. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.0499697.0014.310. 1989 primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york: routledge. 1990 “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century” in simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature, 149–81. new york: routledge. originally published as “a manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s,” socialist review, no. 80: 65–108. 1997 modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman©meets_oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience. new york: routledge. 2008 when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. harding, sandra 1991 whose science? whose knowledge?: thinking from women’s lives. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. rajchman, john 1985 michel foucault: the freedom of philosophy. new york: columbia university press. 1988 “foucault’s art of seeing.” october 44:89–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/778976. 2000 the deleuze connections. cambridge, mass.: mit press. schneider, joseph 2005 donna haraway: live theory. continuum. the tragic denouement of english sociality the tragic denouement of english sociality daniel miller university college london this essay, both an ethnography of an english village and a study of a hospice, demonstrates how people may be both highly sociable and philanthropic in the public domain and circumspect and reticent with regard to the private domain. using historical evidence, the article also demonstrates that this characterization of english sociality may have held true for centuries. changed are the consequences for elderly individuals, whose autonomy may now lead to isolation in their own homes. why is this of more than parochial interest? when studying anthropology, or indeed any social science, students are expected to gain some familiarity with at least some of the foundational thinkers who helped create modern social science. these might include émile durkheim, marcel mauss, karl marx, georg simmel, ferdinand tönnies, or max weber. all these writers may be associated with what we might call the grand narrative of social science. it tells the story of how, once upon a time, people lived in systems of intense social relations within communities usually underpinned by some system of kinship. during the past two centuries, a combination of forces that might include capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization caused a decline in the fabric of these social groups allowing for the development of new forms of personal autonomy and individualism, on the one hand, but also loneliness, isolation, and social fragmentation, on the other. the result of these processes was the traditional domain of sociology. initially anthropology had the task of confirming this grand narrative by painting portraits of community retained in supposedly more traditional societies, which could then serve as more holistic rebuttals to contemporary individualism. this grand narrative is more central to some of the ancestral figures mentioned above than others. it is foundational to the work of durkheim (1997), for example, his concept of anomie, where a decline in social integrity leads to a loss of normativity and, among other consequences, to a rise in suicides. it proves equally central to tönnies’s (1957) description of a shift from the more community-focused gemeinschaft (community) to the individual instrumentality of gesellschaft (society). the grand narrative is a consequence mauss (1966) draws from the decline of the solidarity of the gift/debt relationship and its replacement by the asocial and individualized transaction of commodities. it also lies at the heart of simmel’s (1950) portrait of the isolated individual in the modern urban crowd. a clear parallel exists to weber’s (2002) emphasis on an inner-directed, more individualistic protestantism and its affinities with modern capitalism. this narrative was not necessarily a lament. marx (1975) recognized the oppressive character of what he would have considered premodern forms of sociality and looked forward to its transcendence in a non-alienated sociality of the future. one of the reasons students in the social sciences have little difficulty accepting this narrative is that it accords with the folk beliefs of most of today’s global populations, as they can found throughout the media and in everyday conversations. in popular discourse, the narrative emerges in the rather more judgmental form of nostalgia for ideals of sociality now deemed lost. in my own recent fieldwork in england, i would hear some version of this nostalgia almost every week. but that was also true of my previous field studies in places as diverse as the philippines and india. in england, the most popular version of this grand narrative contrasts the assumed retained sociality of the traditional small english village with the isolation and societal breakdown associated with metropolitan regions such a london. i discuss examples below. the wider significance of this article rests in the argument that perhaps our grand narrative has remained unchallenged for too long. we only need ask the material is derived from an eighteen-month ethnography of a dual village i call the glades and an associated applied study of a large hospice serving people with terminal conditions. initially, i set out to write an ethnography of the impact of new media, alongside a policy report to the hospice (miller 2013) exploring the potential of webcams (miller and sinanan 2014) and other new media for patients. the principal aim of the village ethnography was to assess the use and consequence of social media as part of our global social media impact study.1 in addition to our ethnographic engagement, we interviewed more than 350 individuals at least once. most of the hospice patients had terminal cancer but lived at home supported by hospice staff. the unexpected finding was that living in villages was no impediment to some patients becoming tragically isolated, including individuals who had been born, educated, lived most of their lives, and were now dying in these villages. some had remarkably few, sometimes no, friends in their village, at least none that came to see them or helped to care for them. this finding required an explanation, which i sought from the wider village ethnography. the glades boasts an unusually homogeneous population, lending itself to an anthropology of englishness. informants had their own version of the grand narrative that assumes isolation is a result of modernization, urbanism, or the state. yet contrary evidence suggests that the cause lies in the historical character of traditional english sociality that has remained relatively unchanged within the village—but with unprecedented consequences today. my ability to obtain the relevant data was partly happenstance. to confront terminal patients with evidence of their isolation and loneliness would have been crass and insensitive. i interviewed fifty patients and thirty-five staff and carers, alongside my colleague kimberley mclaughlin, a senior hospice manager interested in genograms and well-being (mcgoldrick and gerson 1985). these interviews comprised a relatively systematic examination of each available form of communication, including landline telephones, face-to-face visits, e-mails, webcams, texting, and facebook. by exploring how each medium was used, who patients communicated with and how often, the evidence for isolation emerged vicariously as data on media usage, although many patients did in the end elect to discuss issues of isolation and loneliness directly. this isolation applies with respect to neighbors, the wider community, and also family. particularly poignant were cases where informants insisted that they did indeed talk with others, while detailed investigation revealed that those others were merely retained commercial contacts. for example, robin told us that his wife, who serves as his carer, has regular face-to-face conversations, but it turned out that this was because she went once a week to have her hair done and talked to her hairdresser. others referred to their gardeners and, commonly, the hospice nurses as evidence of their continued engagement in social communication. john, an elderly cancer patient and still a farmer, has a full-time female relative as his carer, a woman he mercilessly dominates. otherwise he had only seen one relative in the past year. typical remarks include, “my brother. not in contact with him. i saw him last year, i think. his son’s wedding. but i haven’t forgiven him for my parents.” “we know the local village characters ‘cos we’ve been involved in the village for years.” “personal friends? i don’t go drinking, so that’s excluded. some of the things i used to do, i used to go riding and things like that. all those are gone. village people don’t come and visit me ‘cos they never have.” as is often the case, an almost an aggressive assertion of autonomy often accompanies such statements. “i wouldn’t see anybody, i’m not interested, i’m just a loner.” another eighty-five-year-old patient has lived in a very small settlement since 1954. in reference to his son he states, “he come around for sunday lunch once a month and that saves a lot of bother. he lives with a partner who has three children by her previous husband. … we have someone who helps with the gardening, does all the gardening. an odd maintenance man would be in. i don’t think there are many people that come in regularly.” the grandchildren “come round for various occasions like easter day or christmas day.” with regard to family in general, he says, “we don’t wish to impose. … we avoid it. if they need help i’d go to any lengths to do it. but generally speaking we don’t interfere.” with regard to friends, he says, “some people are perpetual chatters and entertainers, and we aren’t. i don’t know why, but we’ve never been very socializing people. i don’t go round courting visitors ‘cos i feel isolated at this time, i spend more time asleep than i used to.” he is particularly infuriated when the phone rings and it is some commercial call, which affronts his canons of decency and respect for privacy. finally, a villager in his eighties who has also lived his entire life in this village, retained an active social presence with people he had gone caravanning and camping with. but with regard to people visiting him in this house, he says, “in practical terms, probably only a couple. but there’s a lot of people out there who have said if you need any help, give us a call. so they’re offering the help. but for actually coming in and seeing me. probably they want to have a chat when i go outside. yeah, people don’t like to intrude. i mean, ‘cos with me, this illness has come on so quick, i imagine they’re finding it a bit difficult to handle what’s happening to me. you know, daren’t ask really.” despite the assertive way patients claim they do not want or need help and like their own company, they clearly feel lonely and would enjoy more company if only it could come about without breaking the social norms that make it impossible. included in my research were services and institutions that reinforced my ethnographic findings. indeed, hospice staff contributed even more extreme stories about children not turning up for their parents’ funerals. whether working with churches, pubs, or welfare services, i found the ethnographic material consistent with these insights. it is therefore not surprising that similar results are manifest in broader national surveys. the uk secretary for health gave a speech on october 18, 2013, at the national children and adults services conference entitled “the nation’s shame of the forgotten elderly,” citing sources suggesting eight-hundred-thousand people in england are chronically lonely (bbc news 2013). one of the reports the speech drew on was research by ageuk (2013, 29–32), specifically on rural areas. many other studies examine the more general conditions behind loneliness and isolation among the elderly in the united kingdom (e.g., bolton 2012; victor 2003). paradoxically, however, i also have considerable evidence that the same informants share a positive image of the contemporary english village as a by and large extremely friendly place, which they believe to stand in stark contrast to the coldness and unfriendliness of metropolitan areas. surprisingly, my ethnography found that the largest settlement within the glades, leeglade, with eleven-thousand residents, was viewed as the friendliest. people who have lived there for any length of time speak of the near impossibility of walking in the village without being greeted by others, at the very least with a smile and “good morning.” frequently people stop to chat. most people assume they will talk with, and not just buy from, the local shopkeepers. in one of the smaller settlements, all my informants suggest they know all the other people who live there, at least by sight. although these villages are located within the london commuter belt, most people walk rather than drive to the local shops. local events include an impressive carnival. in addition, there are an extraordinary number of local societies, including five active amateur theater groups. as an ethnographer i spend a considerable amount of time in public spaces such as coffee shops and pubs, and it is easy to see how many people are greeted by name and known to each other. in public spaces the village corresponds to the ideals of traditional friendliness and warmth. even more impressive is the level of philanthropy and voluntary service. the best testimony to this is the hospice itself, one of several in the area. the hospice is almost entirely supported by charitable donations, most of the time from local fund-raising. as a result, all its services are all free to patients, and i have never heard a terminal patient raise the topic of money in relation to his or her care needs. the hospice employs 120 staff and has more than 1,000 local volunteers. most of the older villagers that i have worked with turn out to be directly involved in some kind of community or charitable work. some elements of an older, class-based philanthropic tradition remain. for example, working women are demeaned for not volunteering at their children’s school by women with higher incomes and more spare time. but class issues have declined markedly, as has the previously central role of the anglican church as the center for charitable work. furthermore, one of the most common phrases in patient interviews with regard to local people is, “oh yes, and they would certainly help you if you asked.” in short, patients are well aware that support and care are readily available and that many people are more than willing to provide it. so abundant evidence exists for altruism, though these volunteers are generally modest and reticent about making claims for their labor. how, then, can we reconcile such evidence of undoubted generosity and ubiquitous friendliness to the isolation of the terminal cancer patients? the two forms of evidence could hardly appear more opposed. to explain the discrepancy, we need to consider these two situations as two distinct modes of sociality. the ethnography shows that the preferred mode always takes place within what is regarded as the public domain. people greet and chat in the street or when shopping. they socialize at village events such as the annual carnival or a cultural society’s performance. some people use the sports clubs, others the pub. two primary catalysts allowing strangers to converse were babies and dogs. both elicit enthusiastic compliments followed by subsequent discussions that sometimes move on to other topics. the villagers themselves joke about having babies or dogs as a means to elicit social communication. people also confirmed a classic trope of english sociality, namely, that neighbors really do talk over the garden fence in both front and back gardens. again, this is something i have observed. this friendliness in the public domain contrasts with a powerful normative rule that respects the autonomy of what is considered the private domain, reflecting traditional sayings such as “an englishman’s home is his castle.” especially working-class informants or those living in the smaller villages avoid going into each other’s homes. the one exception is people with young children: children happily invade private space, bringing the parents together and initiating a period of intense inter-domestic sociality. this can and does result in lifelong friendships, but even these may move back to the public domain after a while. there is a consistent fear of being seen as imposing oneself on the time or interest of others, especially of being viewed as a nosy or inquisitive neighbor. the english assumption is that other people have better things to do than be interested in oneself, with a common fear of seeming boring or boorish if one imposes on the other. the core characteristic is social reticence. looking at the subsequent loneliness of the elderly, we can see a common trajectory. men, for example, used to have many friends at the pub, but when illness meant a decline in mobility or that drinking was no longer possible, the people they drank with would not subsequently come and visit the home, leaving the individual largely to himself. a similar pattern follows with regard to the golf club or the other areas and institutions of public sociability. informants told me how as they reached retirement, they deliberately engaged with new activities such as golf or amateur theater because of their fear of isolation. i constantly checked this finding and have many versions of what amounts to the same observation about the failure of male external relations to follow through back into the home. these friendships work temporarily while everyone can actively participate in the shared hobby, but not once people become too frail or ill to come out. i am focusing here on the cases of isolation. in many others, friends and family do follow through to help at home, more commonly women than men, but there was sufficient evidence for isolation to suggest that we cannot always assume such retention of friendships. there is a gradation; an attempt to tabulate degrees of isolation would over objectify the evidence. what remains from prior patterns of sociality are proffers of continued help. people are constantly assured that if ever the ailing individual should need anything at all by way of help, they should feel free to ask. the phrase “we only need to ask” almost became a mantra during this fieldwork. these offers of assistance seem entirely sincere. they come to nothing simply because of the next step required: to be proactive in giving any help, without having been specifically asked, suggests intrusiveness. similarly, to be proactive in actually asking for specific help is equally considered intrusive. as a result, in many cases the isolated individual cannot approach or be approached by others, even when both sides wish for contact—which is typically the case. this scenario seemed true for women as well as men, if not to the same extent. no such embarrassment is involved when the care comes through formal channels. so the same neighbors feel free to engage in public support through volunteering. indeed, they may thereby end up giving support through the hospice to people they might have otherwise cared for informally. ideally, however, the volunteering results in caring for strangers, since there is no embarrassment involved. primary carers such as husbands, wives, or siblings often become just as isolated as the patients, for precisely the same reasons. finding that someone has cancer or a terminal condition can lead to two opposite responses. on the one hand, neighbors or friends may break through these barriers and insist on helping, for example, driving a patient to a hospital appointment. yet equally common is the opposite response, which leads english people to feel that it would be especially intrusive to interfere in what is an intimate and private matter. hospice staff confirmed that people commonly back off, rather than become involved, when a person has cancer, and that this may also apply to family. if merely friends and neighbors turned away it would not cause the degree of isolation found among the hospice patients because it is generally assumed that the primary carers would be family. yet, as the patient statements provided earlier show, relatives as well as friends “back off.” the assumption is often one of a sort of natural attrition, as in the following statement from an elderly male hospice patient: grandchildren—as they get older, get in contact less, i think that’s often the way. the little eight-year-old from the glades school, she’s in to see me occasionally. yes, we’ve got quite a close relationship. and i have with all my grandchildren, but as they’ve grown up. the eldest one is now married, so i hardly ever see her, you know. john, he’s twenty-two now, he’ll occasionally zoom up on his motorbike and come and see me, but not a lot, they’re so busy working you know, he’s in retail. they’re forever at work. don’t think i’ve seen linda now for six to nine months. next one down i saw a couple of weeks ago, he might come every two to three months. then the other one who’s now fifteen, she’s gradually dropped off seeing us; she would only come if her mum or dad were bringing her, ‘cos it’s out of the way for her. don’t speak to them on the phone, no, as they get older; just less closer. these conversations show that the problem works in both directions. it is not merely that relatives may not visit often. in many of our interviews the patients also constantly indicate their desire to be left alone. despite being sick, indeed dying, they have a horror of becoming a burden on their family, whose members should be free to get on with their lives. good parenting is identified as the achievement of successful autonomy for one’s children. and yet even as patients express pride in this separation, there is an underlying longing for care and comfort, especially from one’s children. but such care has to be the voluntary expression of love by those relatives, and not something one demeans oneself by having to request. in effect, patients want to tell their family not to come and visit, but for the family to reject this rejection and come anyway. as grahame allan (1996, 63) puts it, typically “connivance is quite likely from both sides in this to ensure that there is no explicit expression of increasing dependence.” the primary reason why most patients are not entirely isolated is the persistence of family, rather than friends, as carers, although in these cases of extreme isolation the families have failed to acknowledge these responsibilities. sometimes a major rift in the past had caused the lack of contact between family members, and informants reported that even siblings, or parents and children, had not spoken to each other “for years.” many families had at least one instance of this complete rupture in relationships. but still more common was the way the elderly simply accepted, and indeed empathized with the conditions of their own neglect—oh, yes, they loved each other, but the grandchildren were terribly busy in their own lives and one didn’t ever want to impose on them by suggesting a visit. rather, one passively accepted that they might occasionally visit of their own accord. our initial work was with the individual hospice patients. during the later stages of the village ethnography we worked more with institutions and services, coming to realize how the isolation of the elderly had become central to the role of the village churches and many of the village societies that in effect only recruit through retirement. our first encounters were with patients who explained the role of the hairdresser and the gardener as their only points of social contact. as the fieldwork expanded into the village itself, the ethnography came to include the actual hairdressers and gardeners who could thereby confirm these conclusions. for example, one of my last encounters was with the village gardener who told us how he and his wife had gradually come to terms with the degree to which they were hired, not to garden, but to provide conversation over tea with people who had no other company and knew no other way to bring people into their homes. anthropological and historical evidence although there is extensive anthropological work on english society, it has traditionally focused on different issues. plenty of writing exists about english identity, but the orientation has been to relations with other populations, such as minorities, reflecting a history of empire and colonialism or, more recently, immigration (e.g., rapport 2002; tyler 2012). this article does not engage with the core of anthropological work on kinship as summarized recently in the magisterial work of maurice godelier (2011), which shows how such studies tackle kinship’s wider consequences for organizational and conceptual modes of relational encounter. of concern here are only the much narrower issues of expectations around visiting and communication in family relationships and the degree to which these may not be realized in practice. however, i will argue below that the historical sources possibly explaining the patterns described are the same as those employed by marilyn strathern (1992, 98–102) when examining the autonomy of english individualism in relation to english homes and gardens. a sustained literature on community and neighborhood exists within sociology, but it tends to focus on urban and policy issues, since an idealized concept of community remains central to political debate in the united kingdom (see summary by crow 2012). a similar argument pertains to the difficult question of how appropriately to use terms such as public and private. my ethnography argues that, rather than an abstract concept of public and private, my informants made a very specific and clearly meaningful distinction, which contrasted the home interior, respected as autonomous space free from outside intrusion, with the outside world. sometimes the outside might even include the garden fence, or any place where a failure to acknowledge others would be considered wrong. this distinction is central to my wider study, because, as others have noted (see gal 2002, reflected in lange 2007), the advent of social media has made an already problematic differentiation far more complex. anthropologists have contributed to studies on community and village life (e.g., frankenberg 1973; robin 1980; strathern 1981; williams 1956). nigel rapport (1993, 312–42) notes that in general, they have succumbed to the popular portrayal of the rural village as some kind of community idyll, something he himself attempted to contest. the rural village he studied was characterized by close relationships between proximate peoples as reflects historical economic interdependence. the latter can lead to friendship and marriage, but also feuds and resentment. in some cases, “neighbours compete and try to sell each other dud products. they rebel, gossip, are spiteful and rude, and do their best to ruin each other’s businesses” (rapport 1993, 97). jeanette edwards’s (2000) study of bacup and marilyn strathern’s (1981) study of rural elmdom shows more concern with kinship and claims to long-standing residence than found in the glades, which is effectively a suburb of london. in northern england neighborliness may be more sustained, but similar concerns around autonomy and nosiness arise (edwards 2000, 128–34). at least for southern england there seems little difference in such behavior between rural and urban areas. strathern (1981, 125) found for a traditional rural village that people expected neither cousins nor neighbors within their home, only very close kin. in my ethnography of shopping in north london (miller 1998), i worked on typical urban working-class housing estates. there i found salt-of-the-earth housewives who had lived in adjoining properties for several decades but had never seen the inside of each other’s apartments, even though they were obsessed with keeping up interior appearances just in case any outsider should ever come in. my key point is that the findings suggest that the behavior i have described here is not specific to the elderly. indeed, my arguments have only a partial relationship to the more general anthropology of the elderly. this essay’s specific remit is the way aging leads to isolation within a person’s own home and its consequences, but it does not suggest that this isolation relates to the issues that typically concern anthropologists of the elderly, such as found in the work of jenny hockey and allison james (2003). i am not concerned with the topics found in the ethnography by catherine degnen (2012) and the recent interest in cultural gerontology (twigg and martin 2014), since these concern the experiences and conceptualization of the elderly. most of these studies do share a general observation that the elderly in england prefer independent living within their own homes (e.g., andrew blaikie 1999). ironically, the achievement of this autonomy, thanks to increasing affluence, has changed the consequences of english patterns of sociality for this specific demographic group. there is no reason to think these attitudes to sociality are particular to the elderly. they correspond precisely to wider studies of english behavior. an example would be what kate fox (2004, 401) terms the english “social dis-ease,” which includes embarrassment, insularity, and awkwardness leading to a sense of discomfort and incompetence in the field of social interaction. my ethnography provides greater specificity by showing how this social embarrassment can actually create more of a problem for people the english know quite well, rather than just concerning their interactions with strangers. my informants gave many grounds for legitimizing their reticence. a common argument goes back to foundational assumptions about reciprocity. if you give or do something for a person, it imposes an expectation of reciprocity, leading to a fear of being indebted to someone else. less predictably, some of my informants seemed deeply concerned about revealing how fundamentally uninteresting they themselves supposedly were to others. in accordance with the grand narrative of social science and popular discourse, people in my fieldwork commonly asserted that domestic loneliness was a new phenomenon, since sociality within the traditional english family and neighborhood would have been more intensive and supportive. the turning point is often assumed to have been the 1950s, prior to the eruption of modernity in the 1960s and following what has been termed the “myth of the blitz” (people’s supposed support for each other during the second world war) (calder 1992) as the icon of idealized english social solidarity. fortunately, the 1950s also provided the context for one of the few precedents to fox’s work, exploring english character by the anthropologist geoffrey gorer (1955, 51). based on a questionnaire sample of five-thousand people, he describes a situation that sounds very familiar. isolation might be greatest in london, “but what is perhaps surprising is that the next loneliest type of community, judging by this criterion, are the small towns and villages.” with respect to neighbors, gorer (1955, 53) notes, “the typical relationship of the english to their neighbours can probably best be described as distant cordiality. some two-thirds know most of their neighbours well enough to speak to; but not one in 20 know them well enough to drop in on without an invitation; and it is very exceptional for neighbours to entertain one another for a meal or to spend an evening together. two-thirds of my respondents pay no formal visits to neighbours in this fashion.” only eight percent felt they could entirely rely on their neighbors (gorer 1955, 55). the main response was a litany of complaints about neighbors, though william morgan williams (1956, 153–54) gives a more benign image of neighbors in a small village, focusing on nostalgic tales of deterioration. in england, the idyll of rural life is matched by a romance of traditional urban working-class life, forming the basis for the most popular tv soap operas. at the same time as gorer, michael young and peter willmott (1957) carried out the most famous study ever undertaken of a british community, subsequently published as family and kinship in east london. this population represented the heartland of working-class community. yet here too we find the same pattern—people immensely friendly on the outside but avoiding home visits, except to kin (young and willmott 1957, 107–10). furthermore, people in the 1950s had a similar nostalgia for the supposedly true sociality of an undefined previous period, a pattern that repeats itself as one goes back in time. a recent book by emily cockayne (2012) examines the history of neighbors. she writes of a social worker named nellie benson in the 1880s who bemoans the standoffishness of neighbors and sees this as a decline from an imagined sociality of the past (cockayne 2012, 210). cockayne (2012, 39) notes that even historians of the early eighteenth century suggest an unwillingness to burden neighbors with one’s own concerns. in sum, she suggests that historically neighbors saw far more interaction than today, though this was due to necessity and mutual dependence based on poverty, and was not an expression of sentiment. we thus have no historical evidence that the ideal of domestic sociality was ever contemporary practice, though it always seemed present as an expression of nostalgic loss. this history of neighborhood and community may be matched with key debates on the history of english kinship. contemporary policy reviews assume a decline in family support, citing as the main cause children living at an increased distance from their parents (e.g., ageuk 2010). but gorer (1955, 43) suggests that even in the 1950s children in south england were least likely to live with their parents, and a similar discourse circulated about the breakup of the family again nostalgically assumed to have been closer at some prior time. this leads to one of the most passionate debates about english history, which brought together both historians and anthropologists. in an excellent and comprehensive survey of the history of these debates, naomi tadmor (2010, 17–18) notes that they begin from the same master narrative regarding the assumed historical decline of the family: “one can trace this ‘master narrative’ to key nineteenth-century thinkers such as sir henry sumner maine, ferdinand tönnies, friedrich engels, and max weber, and on to emile durkheim and twentieth-century social scientists such as talcott parsons.” the challenge to this narrative comes from many, including historians and demographers (e.g., laslett 1977, 1983). another key influence was the anthropologist alan macfarlane (1978), whose book the origins of english individualism suggested that unlike those in continental europe, english families seem to have been largely nuclear in orientation even prior to any form of modernity. macfarlane has been a core influence on strathern’s work on english individualism. furthermore, “even relief for the elderly poor, historians emphasized, was provided through parish support, rather than primarily through the support of kin” (tadmor 2010, 19). historians of the family assume support must have come from the community, while historians of community assume it must have come from the family. actually, then as now, it seems the english preferred institutionally provided support. tadmor also shows that historians subsequent to macfarlane provide a more nuanced and diverse picture, with less of a dualism between nuclear and extended families, or individualism as against kin. one of the clearest critiques of the assumption that the family has declined or that we have lost family values once prevalent is found in john r. gillis (1997, 51), who points out that in some ways english individualism probably dates all the way back to medieval times, when the fragility of life made families highly transient. the combined evidence from anthropological and historical research suggests that my ethnographic findings from the glades reflect a long-standing phenomenon. villages in the 1950s could create the same conditions for isolation because english sociality has not changed in nature. the potential autonomy of kin and circumspection with regard to neighbors goes back centuries. in a parallel argument (miller 2007), i have contested the suggestion, argued by anthropologists such as janet carsten (2000, 2004) and sociologists such as janet finch and jennifer mason (2000), that contemporary english kinship has shifted toward a system based on ideals of choice and negotiation. in that case i employed evidence from contemporary patterns of family inheritance. there clearly are changes in english kinship, including the acceptance of more varied relationships such as step-parents or same-sex relationships, but the historical evidence just reviewed also shows that kinship and friendship in the united kingdom has always shown a strong degree of voluntaristic and reciprocal elements. so how does this essay simultaneously argue for historical continuity and allow for the possibility of contemporary change? i argue that the fundamental traits of behavior seem highly resistant to change. but their consequences can alter radically, because the context itself is constantly dynamic. for example, the elderly live longer and have the money to retain their own homes. my results are confirmed by more general surveys of english society. a recent report by relate (sherwood, kneale and bloomfield 2014, 31) confirms the problems english people may have in making friends, which leads to around ten percent claiming they have no friends at all. again, this is not particularly correlated with age. yet as gillis (1997) notes for earlier historical periods, people simply did not live as long and grandparent relations were relatively rare. increased affluence proves crucial here as well, as it means that hospice workers generally attend to patients able to remain in their own homes. increases in isolation may therefore have nothing to do with changes in attitude or behavior, but simply constitute a consequence of the elderly’s growing incapacity, which puts them at greater risk of loneliness (bolton 2012). clearly it is this same reticence and concern for privacy that in turn drives the increase in elderly singles and couples living alone (qureshi and walker 1989, 27). what has also changed are the political considerations surrounding the situation of the elderly. this combines their increasing numbers (more than 3 million older than eighty in the uk) with evidence that the older electorate is more likely to vote than young people. there is also increasing acknowledgment of the vast amount of care that kin and friends do provide on a regular basis, which historically had remained unvalorised and unrewarded (qureshi and walker 1989). perhaps the biggest and most positive change, at least for terminal patients, has been the huge increase and improvement in hospice services. these changes in context should lead us to expect changes to the consequences of behavior that has itself remained constant. it is also possible that the effects themselves have changed less than we might expect. christina victor (2003; see also victor, scambler and bond 2009) claims that the number of elderly people in england reporting loneliness or isolation has not significantly increased since the previous major survey of 1948. indeed, the figures show remarkably little variation over time. either way, at the basis of much of this discussion has been the presumption of ever-increasing loneliness resulting from the loss of formerly prevalent family and community values, here viewed as an example of our grand narrative regarding the fall from authentic and proper sociality. this essay has demonstrated, however, that the problem that needs to be faced is not the loss of english tradition—the problem is english tradition. conclusions and consequences the conclusion of this research is that elderly people dying of cancer can often become isolated and lonely even when they live in small villages. the main reason is not some condition of modernity and fragmentation, but the deep-rooted contradictions of english sociality that divide an acceptable public sphere of friendliness from a horror of intruding into the private domain. this applies to community and neighborhood but also to a surprising degree to family. these findings clearly do not accord with the presumptions that follow from one of the most foundational narratives of social science. the result is more a caveat than a rebuttal. first, it applies to only one example, that of english society. second, the historical evidence suggests that neighbors were in closer contact in the past, though out of economic necessity rather than preference for such close sociality. obviously forces such as industrialization and urbanism have had a huge impact. but even as a caveat this article may prove helpful in opening up a narrative that has become a standardized story within our textbooks and teaching. it suggests the need for more critical consideration and the re-examination of evidence from other regions. in the short term these results proved invaluable to the larger project from which the evidence was drawn. it helped rethink both the applied project and the larger project on social media. anthropology has shown considerable immaturity in trying to differentiate more theoretical from more applied work, as though the latter represented less of an intellectual challenge. in my experience, being forced to ground one’s findings in practice makes for more of a critical engagement, rather than a simple alignment within the rarefied discourse of theory. this project resulted in a report written specifically for the use of hospices (published on my staff website, miller 2013), and many of the wider theoretical implications became evident because of the necessity to make clear recommendations, which have subsequently been taken up by the hospice movement and are, we hope, going to become an example of how anthropological findings can have direct impact on the welfare of patients. keeping a dialogue between applied and theoretical work is important also because otherwise we fail to acknowledge the way our intellectual discourse may have direct applied consequences. recently tony walter, one of the leading sociologists of dying, suggested that the hospice should indeed care for the dying but curtail its more proactive involvements in creating a wider sociality, because this becomes a form of institutionalizing or professionalizing social relationships, which he fears could come at the expense of the more organic community constituting the proper basis of support (walter et al. 2011; see also abel et al. 2011). this sentiment may reflect the continued influence of the social sciences, grand narrative on modern politics with its strong affirmation of community care as the natural condition of society. my conclusion would be the opposite. carers for terminal cancer patients often say that the only time they ever speak to other people about their work is at monthly meetings with carers organized by the hospice. community is not something that existed prior to and is subsequently diminished by institutionalization. on the contrary, for these carers, community exists only to the degree that it is created by the institution. equally important, working for the institution gives them license to break through the barriers of tradition and enter into each other’s homes to give support and care. through our interviews and through listening to the experiences of hospice staff, i have learned that patients feel even more embarrassed by their disease and the awkwardness that follows from their situation than the carers. these english patients often consider the loss of dignity one of the most difficult consequences of illness. as a result, they much prefer institutionally based professional care. in talking about their condition they prefer the company of other patients who suffer from similar kinds of cancer and who can therefore discuss with much less embarrassment their commonly experienced problems of bodily disfunctionality, which they know others would find distressing and embarrassing (see also lawton 2000). as noted above, isolation is as much caused by the patients themselves trying to attain distance from their family and friends as it represents a failure to connect from the other direction. so my findings clearly support the hospice in this proactive stance through which they institutionally create wider sociality. although his work is of the finest quality, in this instance walter may have been influenced by his intellectual roots in a shared grand narrative. the evidence also sheds a different light on the study of social media, which constitutes this study’s overarching project. so far we have assumed that people use social media largely to find, maintain, and extend relationships, both with family and friends. it was only through an appreciation of this contradiction of english sociality that i came to realize that at least the english may use social media for a quite different purpose, namely, to keep family and friends at a distance. for example, villagers admitted that when sites such as friends reunited first appeared, they often used social media to reconnect with people they had lost contact with. but on many occasions i also heard of their regret at this choice, since reconnecting often reminded them of the reasons they had not kept in touch in the first place. facebook became the solution to this problem: connecting with people on facebook meant they didn’t actually need to see these people in person. villagers could satisfy their curiosity about the lives of old acquaintances, extended family, and others, but as largely passive facebook friends, without any further intimacy. before social media we mainly had either dyadic and private communication, such as the telephone, or public broadcast communication such as the television. social media has colonized the group space lying between these two options. this makes it pertinent to the dualism of english sociality. on the one hand, it reveals the huge potential for the hospice making proactive use of social media precisely to bridge this gulf between private and public sociality, an effect that was already becoming evident in my study of some of the younger hospice patients. at the same time, most english people use social media as a tool to more perfectly control their social relationships, so as to maintain what they see as the requisite distance. social media provides many ways of adjusting the temperature of friendship. you can like or comment on friends’ postings, you can have them in a whatsapp group, consider dating them on tinder, you can private-message them, you can send them a snapchat, you can follow them on twitter, you can acknowledge them in their professional capacity on linkedin, all on top of whether or not you phone, e-mail, and visit them. this goes well beyond the prior distinction of merely a public domain versus people coming into one’s home. in my more extended analysis of social media in the village (miller forthcoming, ch. 4), i examine the way english people appropriate social media to make it quintessentially english in this sense of creating a comfortable distance from others. some of the best insights into the nuances of positioning come from discussions about the use of social media after a divorce. suddenly everyone becomes aware of what should not be shared with whom, and who might take offence if an individual extends greater warmth to one side than the other. each platform is becoming calibrated within a larger polymedia that includes all these different channels to find its niche in the spectrum from intimacy to distance (miller forthcoming, ch. 2). for young people, snapchat establishes trust for close peers. facebook acknowledges family and more distant friends and thereby becomes no longer appropriate for many kinds of posting. instagram allows the posting of crafted pictures that can be seen by strangers. yet the realization that social media may primarily serve as a mechanism for distancing people, one suited to the particular nature of english sociality, emerged largely through the present study of hospice patients. only in retrospect did it become apparent why a study of hospice patients originally conceived as an entirely applied project, tangential to the main work on social media, should take center stage with regard to the overall conclusions of the research. for one, most traditional ethnographic studies might have missed these more extreme cases, since such hospice residents live outside the community contexts in which anthropologists usually meet informants. but cancer does not select on the basis of social attributes and social inclusion. we all die. as a result of their automatic referral to the hospice by medical services, patients might equally belong to society’s most isolated or most sociable groups, allowing anthropologists to meet a representative, if happenstance, collection of villagers to study. this was the mechanism through which the tragic denouement of english sociality came to be revealed. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to all the anonymous informants for this study, especially those terminal patients who agreed to give their precious time to these discussions. i am indebted to kimberly mclaughlin who worked with me on all the hospice interviews and commented on this article, and to dr. ros taylor, the director of the hospice. i thank amelia hassoun and sabrina miller who worked as interns, and especially ciara green, my coresearcher on the village ethnographic study. the essay has been improved by the helpful and critical comments of the journal referees and the project team. the project forms one part of the global social media impact study (www.gsmis.org), dedicated to understanding the use and consequences of new and social media. it consists of nine simultaneous fifteen-month ethnographies and is funded by the european research council grant erc-2011-adg-295486 socnet. 1. for additional findings, see the global social media impact study blog, http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media/. references abel, julian, jon bowra, tony walters, and glennys howarth 2011 “compassionate community networks: supporting home dying.” bmj supportive and palliative care 1, no. 2: 129–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjspcare-2011-000068. age uk 2010 “loneliness and isolation evidence review.” http://www.ageuk.org.uk/documents/en-gb/for-professionals/evidence_review_loneliness_and_isolation.pdf. 2013 “later life in rural england.” http://www.ageuk.org.uk/documents/en-gb/campaigns/rural%20campaign/later_life_in_rural_england_report_lr.pdf. allan, grahame 1996 kinship and friendship in modern britain. oxford: oxford university press. bbc 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university in his “letter to a harsh critic,” gilles deleuze (1997, 7–8) describes two ways of reading a book: “you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. . . . [or] you see the book as a little non-signifying machine and the only question is ‘does it work, and how does it work?’ . . . this second way of reading’s intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. there’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. it’s like plugging into an electric circuit.” this openings collection is similarly curious to find out what happens when we plug anthropology in. does it work? this is not an idle question because electricity already works us. the anthropology we practice today would, frankly, be impossible without it. we inhabit artificially illuminated campuses and classrooms; we carry laptops and video cameras and smartphones with us into our fieldwork. our professional lives are enabled in countless ways by orderly flows of electrons. at a time in which the politics of energy are becoming an acute “matter of concern” (latour 2004), when the effects of increasing energy consumption are transforming planetary ecology in deeply troubling ways, it seems timely to inquire more deeply into those powers, to interpret not only what they signify in various settings but also what work they do. electricity is a fascinating subject of inquiry because it is in many respects the foundational apparatus upon which the experience of modernity has been constituted since the late nineteenth century. electricity offers artificial light, coolness, and heat—cultivating environments that correspond to human desire—while it powers countless subsidiary appliances and conveniences upon which modern habits have come to depend, not least every single technology participating in the digital revolution. and yet, electricity remains remarkably invisible and inaudible to anthropology, as to the rest of the human sciences. these days, beyond spectacular weather events or spectacular failures like blackouts, electricity hides in plain sight, whether stored in batteries or flowing in the electrical wires that festoon our social landscapes. we conveniently ignore whole electroscapes until something goes awry. the blindness is ancient but also cultivated; being a modern child involves repeated parental warnings to avoid sticking fingers and other objects into electric sockets. most of us quickly realize that the less direct contact we have with this dangerous, urgent force, the better. and yet, as deleuze testifies, the lure of electricity somehow never entirely recedes, remaining slyly available as a metaphor for a power that defies metaphorization. this openings collection aims to edge anthropology a little closer to that power, to pay attention to the soft hum of electric currents, to the charges and fields we both produce and trans-sect. electricity, as commonly understood, is always already social. it culminates a centuries-long project of science, engineering, and design to capture the earth’s electrical phenomena and domesticate them through generation, conduction, and insulation, taming something like the sudden explosive power of a lightning strike or electrostatic shock into something steady, reliable, and unremarkable. if brian larkin (2013, 329) has defined the “peculiar ontology” of infrastructures as being “things and also the relation between things,” then the contemporary enabling power of electricity—channeled through grids, power lines, and substations—is infrastructure par excellence. inspired by recent pushes to bring the material and nonhuman more securely into political theory (barad 2003; bennett 2010; stengers 2010), i hope a turn toward electricity will also help open a way to rethink all-too-human histories of power and enablement. cymene howe and i (howe and boyer 2015) have found in research on wind energy and energy transition in mexico that a material politics of electricity flows through state power. these politics make entities like electrical utilities into hypercritical nodes of governance, buttressed by cultures of electrical expertise that help to guarantee smooth operation. a conventional national electricity grid enabled by carbon and nuclear fuel, for example, incorporates the logic of baseload electrical supply. baseload thinking responds to the mass-ness of electrical demand at the level of a region or nation; it also centers a norm that electricity must be available to flow anywhere, reliably, at the moment a switch is thrown. but this constant at-the-readiness also means that baseload supply must be constantly exhausted lest the grid’s own infrastructure be damaged. grid, then, is an apparatus subtly inclined to encourage demand, to expand itself, to solicit further dependency on its powers, which then grow in response. grid helps to groove political efficacy, subjectivity, and affiliation; it is not just a state instrument, in other words, a tool invented to accomplish a governmental agenda. rather, grid must be understood as the organization of enabling power that allows any invention of statecraft to occur in the first place. figure 1. grid, la ventosa, mexico. photo by dominic boyer. nonnuclear, low-carbon energy transition is a threat to grid. wind and solar energy sources are intermittent and most effective for hyperlocal use. they are thus feared as agents of de-growth and grid disintegration, as opponents of reliability that quite literally (in the case of wind) import turbulent energy into grids, a turbulence demanding recompense. as such, renewable energy production is quite openly coded as threat and disturbance in the baseload discourse of grid engineers and administrators; the resistance of grid and its cultures to renewable energy forms a relatively invisible frontline of energopolitical conflict in the struggle to escape the anthropocene. this is just one example among others of how electropolitics infuse governance (see also macdonald 2009; von schnitzler 2013). taking inspiration from timothy mitchell (2011), we may wish to further investigate “electrical democracy” and electrical statecraft more generally. my interest in an anthropology electric emerged from earlier work on knowledge and media, perhaps somehow imitating the fact that communicational infrastructure was the first great success of modern electrification via the telegraph. while doing background research on news journalism’s digital revolution (boyer 2013), i was struck at first by the absence of anthropological research on electricity and electrification (but see winther 2008). over time, though, i came to realize that we have been thinking with electricity in anthropology for longer than we might imagine. like deleuze’s metaphor, however, this electric “charge” has largely been conducted through displacements—that is, we have received it only in disguise and often through insulated analogies to electrical science and engineering. i briefly discuss here three epistemic currents that have flown into and through twentiethand twenty-first-century anthropological knowledge. the first is freudian metapsychology. working at the juncture of neurology, psychology, and clinical practice in the last decade of the nineteenth century, sigmund freud became deeply interested in schematizing flows and states of energy. indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that freud’s model of the psyche was designed specifically to explain energy flows and states. his last unfinished work of neurology, the entwurf einer psychologie (sketch of a psychology; freud 1950) and his first major work of metapsychology, die traumdeutung (the interpretation of dreams; freud 1899), belong to this period. both works articulate a model of psychic operation as a largely homeostatic energy system managing exogenous and endogenous stimuli to maintain a tolerable load of excitation. in both texts, the crucial interrelationship of primary process and secondary process is defined in terms of energy flows. in the entwurf, freud discusses the excitation of neuronal tissue by a mysterious force known only as quantität (quantity) and defines primary process as an organism’s effort to maximally reduce excitation (generated, for example, by hunger and sexuality) through action. secondary process, meanwhile, is the capacity of behavioral conditioning to maintain states of excitation for environmentally approved reasons. in the traumdeutung, freud moves away from charged tissue toward a more abstract conception of stimulus and energy flow. nevertheless, primary process continues to represent the psychic apparatus’s effort to reduce excitation to maintain homeostasis. but now this is explained as matter of the charging (by what will later become freud’s id and drives) of memories into hallucinatory identifications. the psychic apparatus, irrational to its core, strains to repeat past acts of needs satisfaction, reducing pains of want through the pleasures of imaginary discharge. yet this primary process is interrupted by the secondary process of socioenvironmental conditioning, which seeks to channel the search for pleasure through the intricacies of language and custom. the fact that the secondary process must continuously seek to repress and deflect the primary process creates a fundamentally entropic condition in the psyche. in instances of psychosis and dreaming, freud argued, we see how the weakening of secondary defense mechanisms allows the energy flows of the primary process to more directly excite the systems of consciousness and perception (often taking the form of hallucinatory imagination). we thus find that freud’s model of mind is energic to its core. but were freud’s psychic energy system, its flows and quanta electrical in nature? this was never clear, least of all to freud himself. electricity was certainly in the air, so to speak. during the same decade, nikola tesla was perfecting his wireless telegraphy, speculating publicly about drawing down electricity from the ionosphere and about wireless electric transmission between superhigh-voltage towers set hundreds of miles apart. closer to freud’s home, the first electric power company had begun operating in vienna just a few years previously, with all the public cultural fascination with electricity and artificial illumination seen elsewhere in the world (hughes 1983; nye 1990). terms related to electrical research such as energie (energy), system (system), ladung and entladung (charge and discharge) appear with frequency in both texts, but freud stops short of claiming that what he is describing is a form of endopsychic electrical current traversing a neurological or psychological circuitry. freud was troubled, notably, by the absence of later scientific research that showed how charge could carry between neurons. but he was obviously fascinated by early electrophysiological experiments, which had shown how organic tissue conducted electrical charges. we could take this ambiguity as a sign of poor concept work. but i would prefer to see it as a symptom of the latent epistemic influence of electricity in the human sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. endopsychic electricity may well have been the force that freud was striving to understand. but even if it was not, the science of electricity offered freud a method of understanding. electrical energy charges, flows, and systematicity became key analytic analogies for freud as he designed his metapsychological schema. and these analogies passed into anthropology through the many researchers, not least several boasians, who engaged the freudian model of mind. a second and more obvious case of electric currency is the impact of cybernetic theory upon concept work in anthropology and other disciplines in the latter half of the twentieth century. cybernetics emerged from the context of electronic computational engineering in the 1930s and 1940s and was popularized during the now-famous macy conferences of 1946–1953, which involved both gregory bateson and margaret mead as core participants. the cybernetic imagination centered on a model of feedback-driven adaptive systematicity that took shape in wartime experiments on automating artillery systems and cryptography (pias 2003; boyer 2013). the key computational problem was how closed machinic systems could manage dynamic, real-time environmental inputs and react accordingly. adaptive control systems were the solution. cybernetics generalized this breakthrough in computational engineering, porting the idea of adaptive systematicity over to biotic, social, and cultural forms of order. it fit well with the logic of keynesian technocracy and became an influential way of understanding and designing forms of social control. by the 1960s, signs multiplied that anthropology was borrowing from the cybernetic imagination as well. claude lévi-strauss, for example, was obviously thrilled by the promise of cybernetic analysis to reveal the metastructures of language and the computational powers and operations of minds both savage and modern (e.g., lévi-strauss 1951). in his 1966 essay “the impact of the concept of culture on the concept of man,” clifford geertz (1973, 44), guided still by parsonian systems theory, proposed a model of culture not as concrete behavior patterns but rather as a “set of control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call ‘programs’)—for the governing of behavior.” culture thus became for geertz something like (note, again, the analogical move) an adaptive software program that governed the behavior of homo sapiens hardware. i have discussed elsewhere how much anthropological culture theory of the 1960s and 1970s exhibited a kind of cybernetic unconscious in which electronic computational models simmered just beneath recognition (boyer 2013). but it is important that we understand that the intuitiveness of adaptive systematicity also belonged to a distinct era of electronic computation—an era in which electrified machinic engineering and imagination made it somehow plausible to consider culture also operating like an artillery system, inputting external signal data and readjusting its semiotic armaments accordingly (e.g., sahlins 1976). as a final example, one can connect the decline of culture theory in anthropology to the emergence and institutionalization of new environments of electronic computation and information. the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s witnessed the rise of personal computation, the internet, browsers and search engines, mobile communication devices, social media, wi-fi, and cloud computing. such developments in electronic media have guaranteed that our informational “systems,” such as they are, overlap and bleed into each other continuously. like arjun appadurai’s (1990) famous “scapes,” there is complexity and motion but no longer the presence of a clear position outside of electronic information that would justify thinking in terms of bounded systems. put another way, our informatic sensibilities are now also ecological—the system has been overwhelmed by environment and flow. as deleuze (2004, 270) put it elsewhere, “the system is leaking all over the place.” we might ask why the writings of figures like deleuze and michel foucault have been so influential and intuitive in anthropological concept work over the past three decades. why do we routinely plug into their thinking? i argue that they illuminate contemporary anthropological knowledge so widely because they were among the first philosophers to attempt to think with the new electronic information environments, to critique cybernetic systematicities in favor of “open systems” of operation, code, force, and flow (deleuze 1992). marshall mcluhan (1964) had already made this connection explicit. for mcluhan, it was impossible to think any longer outside the servomechanisms of electronic computation and the cool, participatory flows of multisensory electronic experience. the “post” in poststructuralism gestures in this direction; it is precisely the difference of seeking to think beyond the bounded systematicities of early electronic computation and toward the transversal orbits, hyperlinks, servers, and networks of digital information. these are snapshots of how one might rethink the evolution of anthropological theory through its changing electric environments. they could contribute to a broader effort to explore how electricity has come to enable particular aspects of anthropological method. meanwhile, each of the contributions to this openings collection helps us to see how paying attention to electricity advances anthropological analysis now. mike anusas and tim ingold examine the “charge” against electricity, asking us whether we should restrict our analytical engagement with electricity to its co-optation by corporate industry and neoliberal statecraft or whether we must think more expansively about electricity as a phenomenon of matter and life for which “the period of electricity’s incarceration within the grid amounts to no more than the blink of an eye.” akhil gupta turns his attention to the global south, where the fastest growth in electrical demand is coming from expanding middle classes whose path toward development appears poised to accelerate the “eco-suicidal” path paved by the global north. among other issues, gupta explores the potential of the south to constitute innovative new approaches to sustainability that better “match the quality of energy to its end use.” tanja winther and hal white also argue for bringing material-social entanglements of electricity more fully into discussions of modernity and development. they offer fine-grained insight into the effects of electrification, particularly how the arrival of electric light creates new conditions of possibility for social power, the geography of everyday movement, and relations between states and communities. finally, canay özden-schilling examines several cultures of expertise surrounding electricity, discussing her research with electricity traders, economists, and electrical engineers and revealing how the material and infrastructural qualities of electricity alter conventional understandings of commodities, economics, and markets. as implied by the prospect of an opening, i view these contributions as sparks toward a broader conversation regarding electricity in anthropology and the human sciences. i hope we convince you to plug in. acknowledgments this collection began as a panel organized for the 2013 annual meeting of the american anthropological association in chicago, illinois. i would like to thank joe dumit, cymene howe, and brian larkin for their participation in that conversation, as well as members of the cultural anthropology editorial board for providing excellent commentary on earlier drafts of these essays. special thanks also to baird campbell, ellie vainker, and than vlachos for copyediting the final manuscripts. references appadurai, arjun 1990 “disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy.” theory, culture & 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psychoanalyse, edited by marie bonaparte, anna freud, and ernst kris, 371–466. london: imago. originally published in 1895. geertz, clifford 1973 the interpretation of cultures. new york: basic books. howe, cymene and dominic boyer 2015 “aeolian politics.” distinktion: scandinavian journal of social theory 16, no. 1: 31–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910x.2015.1022564 hughes, thomas p. 1983 networks of power: electrification in western society, 1880–1930. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. larkin, brian 2013 “the politics and poetics of infrastructure.” annual review of anthropology 42: 327–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522 latour, bruno 2004 “why has critique run out of steam? from matters of fact to matters of concern.” critical inquiry 30, no. 2: 225–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421123 lévi-strauss, claude 1951 “language and the analysis of social laws.” american anthropologist 53, no. 2: 155–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1951.53.2.02a00010 macdonald, david a., ed. 2009 electric capitalism: recolonising africa on the power grid. cape town: hsrc press. mcluhan, marshall 1964 understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw hill. mitchell, timothy 2011 carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. london: verso. nye, david e. 1990 electrifying america: social meanings of a new technology, 1880–1940. cambridge, mass.: mit press. pias, claus, ed. 2003 cybernetics–kybernetik: the macy conferences, 1946–1953. zürich: diaphanes. sahlins, marshall 1976 culture and practical reason. chicago: university of chicago press. stengers, isabelle 2010 “including nonhumans in political theory: opening pandora’s box?” in political matter: technoscience, democracy, and public life , edited by bruce braun and sarah j. whatmore, 3–35. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. von schnitzler, antina 2013 “traveling technologies: infrastructure, ethical regimes, and the materiality of politics in south africa.” cultural anthropology 28, no. 4: 670–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12032 winther, tanja 2008 the impact of electricity: development, desires and dilemmas. new york: berghahn. the currency of failure the currency of failure: money and middle-class critique in post-crisis buenos aires sarah muir barnard college “it was terrible, and it was all summed up in the devaluation,” selene, a forty-five-year-old nurse asserted. “suddenly, money wasn’t what we thought. and we have been trapped by that realization ever since.” “that’s just it,” replied víctor, a thirty-eight-year-old hardware store owner, “to wake up and discover, all of a sudden, that a peso wasn’t worth a dollar. . . . it was incomprehensible. we argentines are still learning what that meant.” “we must do so,” selene interjected. “those who refuse are clinging to a neoliberal fantasy.”1 it was 2006, and selene and víctor were sitting with me in a placid buenos aires café, discussing “the crisis”—that period in 2001–2002 when the nation’s economic and political institutions seemed to many on the brink of collapse and people felt that they were living in historical times. those momentous events were “summed up,” as selene put it, by the devaluation. unhinged from the dollar for the first time in a decade, the peso began to float on international currency markets and promptly lost two-thirds of its value. recounting those events, my friends described “the horror” and “the trauma” of that time: families scrounging for food in garbage bags on city streets; statistics enumerating unprecedented levels of poverty; news stories of malnourished children dying in the rural interior; massive street protests, police violence, and political instability. they also described less spectacular but nonetheless deeply felt “traumas”: the impossibility of transforming one’s credentials into steady employment; the unpredictability of paychecks; the difficulty of calibrating non-monetized exchanges like barter transactions, neighborly favors, or family obligations. at the center of their descriptions was money: the sudden lack and plummeting value of the peso, to be sure, but also what they considered its suddenly visible but long-standing failure “to reflect the true worth of the country’s wealth,” “to encourage a trustworthy community,” and “to let us build a real future.” in short, they argued, argentine currency had failed to fulfill the political-economic, sociomoral, and spatiotemporal functions of money. and, they went on, that failure had undermined other stores of value, subjecting alternative currencies and family heirlooms, job titles and educational credentials to “a general and unpredictable process of devaluation . . . [in which] our ‘a peso is worth a dollar’ revealed itself as a fantasy.” disavowing that “fantasy” had not proved a straightforward matter. during the heady days of 2001–2002, selene and víctor had been convinced that argentina would never be the same (cf. goddard 2006). yet some four years after the fact, they described the world in the register of clear-eyed resignation. “we middle-class people now know what the poor have always known,” selene asserted: “things are fucked.” in many respects, this conversation will not surprise anthropologists of monetary value and its crises. anthropologists have long engaged with the capacity of money to mediate not only processes of abstraction and commodification but also concretely meaningful projects of signification, solidarity, and even dissent (see bloch and parry 1989; coronil 1997; gregory 1996; hart 2000; maurer 2005; pedersen 2002; peebles 2011; zelizer 1997). surveying this lengthy disciplinary engagement with money as a pluripotent semiotic form, bill maurer (2006, 27) remarked recently, “it is not news . . . that money is a social relation, a symbolic system, and a material reality . . . [just as] it is not news . . . that people freak out when the apparent hegemony of money’s fictionality and abstraction is newly revealed.” nonetheless, there is a sort of “news” here, and it lies in the particularities of that freak-out. a long tradition of analyses posits that, in revealing the constructed nature of money, crises “denaturaliz[e] the taken-for-granted monetary order,” thereby opening up spaces for critique and social transformation (maurer 2006, 28). the argentine case troubles that postulate. people like selene and víctor argued that the crisis had indeed unveiled the “fictionality and abstraction” of money. what is more, they declared that revelation to have compelled them to engage in profound critique. yet they proclaimed that it had not delivered any answer to the old problem of “what is to be done?” to the contrary, they found themselves “trapped” by a mode of suspicious critique that they experienced as compulsory and revelatory, but also interminable and ineffectual. in other words, the devaluation deepened their proclaimed commitment to money’s reality as a material form demanding theoretical interpretation while eluding practical control: the revealed fictionality of monetary value strengthened the imperative of acquiescing to its facticity. such a paradoxical experience of crisis has implications that extend far beyond a specifically middle-class argentine mode of historicity, for it challenges our most fundamental intuitions about the emancipatory potentials of crisis and critique. how did such a paradoxical experience of crisis emerge? what were the consequences of these ambivalent, suspicious critiques? as with other financial crises, the shifting grounds of social life elicited commentaries that comprehended those shifts as incomprehensible. such a framing inheres in the deployment of crisis as an analytic and calls forth practices that mobilize experiential categories of illusion, loss, and chaos (see roitman and mbembe 1995). within latin america and beyond, anthropologists have documented the mobilization of those categories—in confidence games (apter 1999), talk of crime (caldeira 2000), inverted sacrifices (lomnitz 2003), fantasies of transparency (morris 2000), intuitions of secrets (pedersen 2002), remediated currencies (strassler 2009)—in response to crises in the linked regimes of monetary and representational value. i do not aim to offer another example of the disorienting nature of crisis. rather, i ask how that disorientation was constituted in the particular form that it assumed, and with what ramifications. it is precisely in those formal qualities—and especially in the structuring logic of suspicion—that the argentine case suggests broader implications for anthropological understandings of crisis. as janet roitman (2014, 5) has argued, crisis operates as a “historico-philosophical” concept that regiments interpretive narratives and political responses to economic loss by conjuring a mode of historical time characterized by the play of continuity and rupture. in buenos aires during the years following 2001–2002, my middle-class interlocutors mobilized crisis as just this sort of organizing concept, albeit in a rather unfamiliar way: encapsulating national crisis in the figure of the devalued peso, they engaged in fraught exchanges marked, on the one hand, by the configuration of crisis as a revelatory experience and, on the other hand, by the proclaimed insufficiency of the critical knowledge born of that experience. my friends’ “horror” in the face of generalized impoverishment and avowed rejection of their own “neoliberal fantasies” typified a broadly shared perspective. it grounded public policies and private practices alike and proved central to the consolidation of a post-crisis regime of common sense—the shared, taken-for-granted grounds on which so much was predicated (including the reconsolidation of a middle-class public during the period i describe in this piece). neither the construction nor the implications of that perspective were straightforward or inevitable, and what follows forms part of a larger project that interrogates its conflictual entailments. here, i focus on the devaluation in order to trace the mutual constitution of an event, the 2001–2002 financial crisis, and a public, the post-crisis buenos aires middle class, through the interpretive and material practices of the devalued peso.2 the devalued peso served as a key site for critiques that drew on two interpretive genres—psychoanalytic and conspiracy theories—that have long served as complementary and readily available tools for the analysis of self and society in argentina. attending to the generic logics and particular deployments of those hermeneutic analyses, i argue that they circulated as a privileged currency of middle-class distinction predicated on the assumption of ongoing crisis and the necessity of suspicious critique. throughout, my principal concern is to engage with the ambivalences of these critical practices, which combined demystification with resignation. perpetual crisis, perpetual critique three key financial interventions marked the crisis: “the little corral,” which froze bank accounts for a year; the devaluation, which decoupled the argentine peso from the u.s. dollar and led to its swift depreciation by two-thirds; and “the big corral,” which converted dollar-denominated deposits and bonds into fiveand ten-year certificates of deposit denominated in the newly devalued peso. aimed at halting a run on the banks and salvaging the country’s ability to service the foreign debt in a context of spiraling capital flight and a global market contraction, these measures failed in both respects: in early 2002, a number of banks went bankrupt and argentina defaulted on its $100 billion debt, the largest sovereign default in world history. the measures also temporarily removed more than 37 billion pesos from circulation, thereby exacerbating the plummeting gross domestic product (gdp) and rising unemployment rates. the illiquid market compelled federal, provincial, and local governmental agencies to pay their debts in alternative and complementary currencies, all of which also depreciated quickly, thereby intensifying the sense that an entire regime of value had come undone. these measures also effectively meant that millions of argentines lost three-quarters of their life savings; in a very real sense, their money simply disappeared. argentines grappled with the generalized, if highly uneven, experience of economic loss by elaborating a broad repertoire of critical practices. for years, groups of unemployed factory workers had blockaded highways to protest economic precarity during a lengthy and profound recession (see svampa 2003). with the banking restrictions, middle-class argentines suddenly protested as well, pouring into the streets, banging empty pots, and declaring, ambiguously but vehemently, “down with them all!” (see briones, fava, and rossen 2004). in the ensuing months, people forged neighborhood assemblies and interclass alliances predicated on a general condemnation of politicians and an embrace of the principles of direct democracy (see pérez, armelino, and rossi 2005). barter networks sprang up around the country as people struggled to meet their daily needs without monetized exchange (see bombal 2002). meanwhile, confronting a cascade of newly shuttered businesses, workers occupied their places of employment and reopened them as cooperatives (see faulk 2012). these “horizontalist” genres of politicking continued throughout 2002 and 2003, but with diminishing intensity, as the vertiginous collapse of political and economic institutions gave way, fitfully, to a period of reorientation.3 the banking freeze abated in early 2003, and the new kirchner administration increased spending on social welfare programs; both measures allowed pesos to circulate more freely. a boom in global commodities prices coincided with and amplified the effects of president kirchner’s neo-keynesian economic and social policies. during the following four years, the gdp grew at more than 9 percent annually, the gini coefficient dropped from 0.53 to 0.47, and poverty rates decreased from over 50 percent to less than 24 percent (undp 2009). at the same time, unemployed workers transformed themselves into durable and sophisticated political organizations, and worker-cooperatives either abandoned or began solidifying their legal and practical claims to their businesses. meanwhile, neighborhood assemblies stopped convening, middle-class street protests became rare, and barter networks dissolved. this process of reorientation (the period of this paper, roughly 2003–2007) hinged on the popular acceptance of the devaluation and its attendant economic losses. to be sure, a vocal minority denied the legitimacy of those losses. calling themselves ahorristas (“savers”), they sought monetary restitution through street protests and lawsuits. however, they failed to garner much popular support. a lawyer in her mid-thirties offered a typical appraisal: graciela had lost tens of thousands of dollars in savings during the crisis, and that pecuniary loss precipitated a cascade of material and interpersonal losses, including divorce and the loss of her home. although she lamented that she “would never build the future [she] had planned,” she had only harsh words for the ahorristas, telling me, “those people are crazy. they think they can recuperate something that doesn't exist. it’s as if they’ve lost any sense of reality. that money is gone. it never really existed to begin with. it was all based on an illusion.” the delegitimation of the ahorristas’ claims is striking. despite the impressive macroeconomic gains of 2003–2007, major economic indicators had barely returned to the levels of the late 1990s, when impoverishment, inequality, and unemployment had already reached historically unprecedented levels (see svampa 2011, 25). what is more, the devaluation had amounted to a massive redistribution of wealth away from pensioners, savings-account holders, and the citizenry in general, and toward large-scale debtors (see lópez 2005; cf. lim 1999). nonetheless, the socialization of private debt in a context of persistent economic insecurity was accepted not merely as unavoidable but, remarkably, as legitimate. what accounts for that legitimacy? in the telling of graciela and so many others, the devaluation did more than deprive individuals of a goodly portion of their personal wealth. it also revealed that past wealth to have been illusory all along. in other words, the devaluation may have proved revelatory, but it was not necessarily liberatory. for people like graciela, it did not lay bare a straightforward reality; it did not clear a space for empowered experimentation. instead, it imposed what selene in the café had called an “unsatisfiable and paralyzing demand” to interpret its “meaning” and to recognize “the fact that we are not a normal country.” in other words, for many, the devaluation appeared as simply the most recent instantiation of a longue durée of crisis, in which disruption and abnormality lurked at all times, even within moments of apparent continuity and normality. as a result, they insisted that the crisis disallowed the kind of critique that could be satisfied by either horizontalist experimentation or monetary restitution. it demanded a mode of critique that brooked no satisfaction, and opened up a field of interminable interpretive labor folded into a sentimental structure of inevitable national failure. clearly, we are not confronting the same sort of crisis that roitman (2014, 13), in her engagement with reinhart koselleck (1988), interrogates as a privileged “blind spot” of modern historicity. as roitman (2014, 46) points out, crisis and critique are twinned historico-philosophical concepts, animating the notion of morally grounded, agentive historical transformation (cf. boltanski 2011, 134–35). the crisis i am describing functioned as this sort of productive blind spot, and it maintained that intimate connection with moral critique. however, the terms emerged subtly altered. in the argentine case, crisis figured as both a singular event and, simultaneously and paradoxically, as a persistent state of dis-ease. critique, meanwhile, appeared as the ineffectual revelation of that previously obscured chronic condition. as for the possibility of morally grounded, agentive historical transformation, my interlocutors were decidedly unconvinced.4 how should we understand the chronotope of post-crisis middle-class buenos aires? what does it mean to understand one’s self as part of an abnormal country that (in the words of an elderly lady speaking to me in 2003) is “always in crisis”? and, why did these declarations circulate so broadly among participants in a national middle-class public? in what follows, i argue that these declarations indexed a social world in which people defined their relationship to progress, history, modernity, and normality as a foreclosed one. it is that foreclosed relationship to futurity that my friends in the café brought into view by describing interpretation as compulsory but interminable. money and the usual suspects selene and víctor responded to the “unsatisfiable and paralyzing demand” of interpretation by employing well-worn discursive elements, drawn from psychoanalytic and conspiracy theories and familiar to even the most irregular participant in argentine public discourse. selene described the devaluation as “the ultimate victory of the reality principle over the pleasure principle,” and argued that the previously overvalued peso had resulted from the argentine “psyche’s” tendency toward self-aggrandizing misrecognition. víctor agreed, but cautioned against overlooking the “systems of power and influence” that had led to the devaluation. “the speculators and the imf, the u.s. and the eu—they plotted to manipulate the market and subvert the peso for their own interests,” he countered. as for the ahorristas, selene declared that although they were “victims of a mentality” imposed by “north american and imperialist interests,” they embodied the worst aspects of a “morally depraved nation” and proved that argentina “will never be a modern country.” for his part, víctor considered the ahorristas trapped “in a melancholic relationship to their lost money,” which they had “perversely incorporated as an essential part of their selves.” continuing in this way for a good half hour, my friends agreed with one another by continually reasserting and intermingling two counterpoised approaches: one explored the contradictory impulses of the national psyche, while the other tracked a conspiracy in the opaque machinations of foreign actors. it was no accident that selene and víctor drew on psychoanalytic and conspiracy theories. (this is fitting, of course, since neither psychoanalytic nor conspiracy theories allow for the accidental.) a financial crisis is structured as a series of revelations, in which markets are suddenly understood to have overvalued some good. it therefore conjures the categories of apparent and real value and demands that market actors and news consumers alike participate in the semiotic process by which these two levels are repeatedly reconstituted with respect to one another. speculative profits (accrued by positing a gap between the apparent and the real) evaporate overnight in a movement of material loss and representational disorder that bears little resemblance to the rational corrections of an efficient market. opposed in their conceptualizations of agency and in their localizations of responsibility, psychoanalytic and conspiracy theories address that process as antinomically linked genres of interpretation (bakhtin 1986, 60). elaborating themes of loss in a style of savvy didacticism, they posit a world bifurcated between the manifest and the latent, and unfold through a revelatory structure that frequently subverts sociomoral orders (see turkle 1992; marcus 1999). that psychoanalytic concepts are ready-to-hand for members of the argentine middle class is a cliché, and historians have charted in detail the emergence of a so-called psychoanalytic culture dating to the 1920s (plotkin 2001). psychoanalytic therapy is so commonplace that buenos aires boasts the world’s highest per capita number of psychoanalysts; lacanian approaches perhaps dominate, but a wide range of models enjoy institutionalized legitimacy. analysts figure regularly in mass media, offering up probing insights into everything from women’s sexuality to market instability. as a result, elements of psychoanalytic theories circulate broadly, albeit often in deracinated form, removed from a fully articulated theoretical architecture (see visacovsky 2009). in a context in which psychoanalysis connotes european sophistication, these elements infuse everyday conversation, providing interpretive tools while simultaneously granting speaker and addressee alike a modicum of “cultural nobility” (bourdieu 1984, 1). conspiratorial knowledge also circulates continually through the middle-class argentine public and is rarely out of place in an environment long defined by ostensibly open but practically restricted systems of exchange and influence (see gonzález 2004). politicians, writers, and people-on-the street all participate fluently—in talk of plots and counterplots to be sure, but also in metalevel analyses of that talk. (after all, one speaker’s accusation is another’s plot.) of course, it is not all talk; the story of twentieth-century argentina is inextricable from plots involving extralegal military actions, elaborately orchestrated disappearances, backroom political deals, and repeated financial booms and busts. financial markets provide particularly fertile terrain for both conspiratorial theorizing and conspiratorial action, given their curtailed accountability, the capacity of individual traders to leverage gargantuan exchanges, and the specialized nature of the field’s instruments. especially relevant is the history of intimate relations between authoritarian regimes and international financial interests (see kedar 2013), not to mention the role of secretive “money doctors” in managing financial crises (see drake 1994). in this national context, popularly defined by the breach between the promises and actualities of modernity, middle-class argentines routinely perform their capacity to discern the sedimented but shifting sets of interests that lie beneath the surface of events and that have made that breach so difficult to overcome. interrogating the devaluation, speakers deployed elements of both genres, often within a single utterance, incorporating their complementary insights into a hybrid genre of crisis talk that mobilized what paul ricœur (1970) would recognize as a popular “hermeneutics of suspicion.” of course, important differences obtain between psychoanalytic and conspiratorial approaches. nonetheless, in this context they operated jointly to construct a single discursive field within which the crisis figured as a particular kind of event—one that compelled interminable, self-reflexive critique. that critique assumed a particular form, animated not only by the conviction that things were not as they seemed but also by the intuition that they could not be entirely known and that even one’s own interiority was composed of an unending play of representations (ricœur 1970, 56). people thus subverted economistic explanations and offered a self-reflexively suspicious counter-knowledge rooted in its production outside the centers of symbolic and financial capital and in its exclusion from their associated regimes of truth (cf. briggs 2004; faubion 1999). in a context of monetary devaluation, they constructed a highly valued mode of subjectivity (cf. boyer 2006; hallander 1990) predicated on sophisticated discernment. however, that counter-knowledge and its associated mode of subjectivity were decidedly ambivalent. “we have been forced to accept that we cannot control the value of the peso; only the market can do so. we cannot simply declare ourselves part of the first world,” víctor reflected, “but where that leaves us, it’s impossible to say.” claiming to reveal the interests and desires that had led to the devaluation, these widely practiced hermeneutics might have seemed to promise some solution to the problem of monetary loss. yet the vast majority converged in the conclusion that the devaluation must be accepted, monetary loss assumed, and the market acknowledged as the arbiter of monetary value. those who contradicted this conclusion seemed to be clinging to what one of my neighbors called “a neoliberal fantasy that can never come true in this country.” post-crisis buenos aires was a place, it should be emphasized, where suspicious interpretation constituted a common social practice, not only in interviews with u.s. anthropologists but also in newspaper editorials, radio programs, dinner party conversations, and all manner of formal and informal media. across these settings, discussion routinely sought to uncover the latent structure of manifest phenomena, and this style of critique stood not so much as the rarified analysis of bohemian intellectuals, but rather as a mundane modality of interpersonal interaction. a modality that promised to constitute its practitioners as quintessentially modern subjects—as knowing subjects, capable of perceiving the patterns that organize mass society, even, or especially, when those patterns revealed the speaker’s failure to fully instantiate the promises of modernity. the historicity of the peso several years after the fact, when discussing “the crisis,” people frequently offered me lengthy narratives that articulated biography and history as twinned stories, the personal standing as token of the national type. money is, of course, known for its copulative capacity, equating linen with coats under the sign of value; here, the peso equated the personal and the national under the sign of failure. speakers most commonly began by gesturing to the early twentieth century, an oft-mythologized era of european immigration and economic growth, and concluded by framing the devaluation as having exposed the impossibility of that era’s aspirations. structured by tropes of futile work, thwarted sacrifice, and downward mobility, these narratives offered a folk theory of money and a historical account of the peso’s failure to perform its normative functions. the plot was one of realization, of coming to see that one had misunderstood the nature of money, of argentina, and even of one’s self. they amounted, in other words, to suspicious retrospectives on the illusions of argentine middle-classness. guillermo, for example, told me that he was born in the 1930s to italian immigrants. once a petty entrepreneur but in 2006 dependent on his children, he lamented that he was “taking away their future possibilities.” over the course of a three-hour interview, which most closely resembled a soliloquy, he reiterated that he and his family “were always hardworking . . . middle-class people . . . [who] dedicated ourselves to sacrifice, to work, to bettering ourselves, and we idiots trusted that we would have a better future in this country.” graciela, a woman two generations his junior, told a remarkably similar (and similarly lengthy) story of having been “very middle-class, a family of immigrants . . . who worked hard and educated themselves to build a future.” the 1991 currency peg, which stipulated the legal equivalence of the peso and the dollar, marked a turning point in these arcs of upward mobility, transforming themes of work, savings, and reward into those of investment, deceit, and loss. as guillermo explained, “hard work is what i did until . . . the one-to-one, where our peso was worth the same as a dollar and that whole aberration that ended where it ended.” similarly, the currency peg convinced graciela that argentina “had finally arrived in the first world [and so] could save money and invest in a better future.” the devaluation, they both declared, had revealed the illusory nature of those promises: his lost money “was a lie,” guillermo exclaimed; “it never really existed,” graciela declared. the currency peg epitomized an era in which a recent history of dictatorship and democratization and ongoing questions of justice and social welfare were “subsumed . . . [by] the overwhelming desire for economic stability” (munck 2001, 74). following fifteen years of declining real income levels and standards of living, and a searing period of hyperinflation, the newly elected president, carlos menem (1989–1999), instituted a slew of structural adjustments, including the privatization of state industries, which threw millions out of work while temporarily flooding government coffers with foreign capital, and the loosening of trade restrictions, which allowed an unprecedented flow of consumer imports while weakening domestic production. while those measures proved controversial, the tremendously popular currency peg constituted the cornerstone of his reforms. upholding the peg was the simple, if expensive, matter of maintaining dollar reserves equal to the number of pesos in circulation. in this way, the legal stipulation of peso-dollar equivalency constructed that elusive but all-important quality of confidence by treating the dollar as the foundational embodiment of value.5 such confidence had long proved elusive in a national economic history marked by the successive introduction and collapse of currency regimes.6 sweet money and strong money, the argentine peso and the legal peso, the national coin peso and the national currency peso, the austral and the convertible peso: all were tokens of political regimes that failed to realize the dreams of pecuniary wealth conjured by the country’s very name (argentina: argentum=silver, money). menem’s policies did produce a measure of economic growth and stability, if only temporarily and if only for relatively privileged parts of society. the stable value of the peso gave a wide swath of argentines unprecedented purchasing power over imported consumer goods. travel abroad suddenly became imaginable for many, with those of comparatively modest means crossing the border to bolivia or brazil and those with more resources heading to europe or the united states (disney world being an exceedingly popular destination). it was the era of deme dos, or, “give me two of them,” a phrase supposedly uttered by argentines in shops around the world. the peg also prompted financial investment in the form of a massive influx of foreign capital. on a smaller scale, individuals put their savings in the bank and government bonds because, as they explained to me later, the peg “guaranteed it to be safe, guaranteed it to grow,” and allowed them “to contribute to the country and its future.” reiterating the claims of government and banking advertisements of the era, people described for me the promise that “the whole country [would] enter, finally, the first world” and that “secure in the present, [they] could plan for the future.” the peg, a middle-aged housewife explained to me, had offered “the dream of a stable, middle-class country, the country we middle-class people had always worked toward. the dream of prosperity, stability, everything that is modern.” in explaining how that “dream” came to seem so real, many mined the psychoanalytic premise that consciousness assumes misrecognized forms, the manifestations of an always mediated unconscious logic (freud 1989). people also availed themselves of the later freud’s (1990) model of the psyche as structured by the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, but also, and more fundamentally, by the opposition between this broad orientation toward vitality and the death drive, an aggressive compulsion to return the world to inorganic stasis. in this framing, the devaluation figured as the moment when reality finally punctured national fantasies, generating a conflict that required management, lest the country fall prey to the destructive impulses of the death drive. importantly, this understanding did not lay the matter to rest. rather, it allowed people to take up different positions regarding the precise etiology of those fantasies. a retired nurse suggested a relation of oedipal filiation between argentina and europe (freud 1960), while the waitress at my neighborhood café identified a disrupted mirror-stage identification with the united states (lacan 1977). a real-estate broker speculated about a melancholic libidinal investment in early twentieth-century argentina’s economic promise (freud 1957), and a veterinary student pointed toward the production of capitalist chains of desire (deleuze and guattari 1983). speakers rarely framed their accounts as definitive. as befits a middle-class public in which psychoanalytic therapy is an ongoing “technique of the self” rather than a one-off treatment of discrete symptoms, psychoanalytic interpretation of the devaluation was a continual dialogue about argentine identity through which participants embodied “certain aesthetic values” (foucault 1992, 11). many of the same speakers described a shadowy world of agents equipped with the arcane knowledge necessary to manipulate the financial system. leaping across scales, focusing on willful actors, and insisting on direct connections where the social sciences are more likely to emphasize systemic logics and institutional mediation, conspiratorial accounts nonetheless drew on a familiar economic model. after all, it is not only conspiracy theorists who understand financial markets as fundamentally opaque because they “detach the value, cost, and price of money . . . from the fundamentals of the economy” (lipuma and lee 2004, 2). what is more, properly positioned individuals, moving with an air of “alchemical” expertise, are indeed quite capable of executing financial maneuvers that exceed the controls of even the wealthiest nations (soros 2003). searching out the agents responsible for the devaluation, people from across the political spectrum had no trouble in identifying the international monetary fund, the european union, the united states, “the political class,” and “speculators” as the culprits. the nurse who identified an oedipal relation between argentina and europe also waxed eloquently about politicians who had secretly moved their money before the banking freeze. the veterinary student so well versed in the works of gilles deleuze and félix guattari opined expertly about the mechanisms through which speculators and officials may have conspired. again, no single theory purported to be the last word. one of my neighbors, an elderly widow with an abundance of free time, could often be found just outside our apartment building, chatting excitedly with some local resident or store clerk about the latest exposé of some heretofore unknown detail concerning the devaluation. instead of falsifying other theories, each account incorporated its antecedents, drawing together bits of evidence in an expanding web of insight. there was, quite simply, always more to know, and the pleasures of these chats lay in the conversational practice itself, not in the prospect of solving a mystery once and for all. as this elderly neighbor characterized it: “it is impossible to know the full truth. and yet, we must critique everything, ourselves included, in order to find a way to live.” it is tempting to view the dominant middle-class response to the devaluation—first protest, then resignation—as the unremarkable reaction to pecuniary loss, but such an assessment merely begs the question: what is the nature of the pecuniary in a context characterized by an understanding of money as an uncontrollable social fiction? whether elicited by anthropological queries or neighborly remarks, interpreting the devaluation invoked a specific theory of money’s normative functions. it was this folk theory that had underwritten the currency peg, which aimed to render the peso a token of the dollar so that it could finally work as money should. it would, of course, serve as a durable store of wealth and a reliable medium of exchange, but it would also serve as a temporal bridge, linking the present to the future, the short term to the long term (see bloch and parry 1989; guyer 2012). it would calibrate self-interest and social welfare by constructing mutually reinforcing circuits of economic prosperity and social connections. tied to the dollar, the peso would, at long last, function as capital, with the “occult quality of being able to add value to itself” (marx 1992, 255). in this way, the peg had promised to generate a middle-class argentina, its future grounded beyond the national territory in the stable, prosperous, and expansive space of the u.s. dollar, a space depicted variously as the first world, the modern, and the normal. abandoning the currency peg thus involved more than pecuniary losses. to be sure, the devaluation meant that, as measure and store of value, the peso became unreliable, and that, as medium of exchange, it became unavailable. but more than that, people claimed, the peso ceased to operate as a reliable medium of social, temporal, and spatial commensuration. instead of securing a predictable future, the devalued peso imperiled daily survival. instead of harmonizing individual and national interests, it rendered individual claims to monetary restitution detrimental to the financial system and repositioned middle-classness as an impossible future. instead of allowing for the self-propagation of capital, the devalued peso morphed into a sort of anti-capital, cannibalizing its own value as currency markets recalibrated their investments to account for the daily updates in the nation’s plunging country risk assessments. however, the temporality of my formulations is not quite accurate: my interlocutors insisted that these failures only appeared sudden. in fact, they declared, the peso had never truly performed those functions: it had only seemed to be real money because of the currency peg. in fact, they proclaimed, the peso had been false all along. people thus cast the crisis as an event that refigured the 1990s as a duplicitous era, during which they had been complicit in carrying out neoliberal injustices. a middle-aged schoolteacher remarked, “in some sense, maybe we wanted the crisis, because of our own deep ambivalence about menemist society. the conflict between fantasy and reality had become too great to bear; only the crisis, which is a form of social death, could resolve that conflict.” similarly, a young, struggling architect told me that the devaluation “forced us to see reality for the first time, to see the injustices that we had committed in the service of neoliberal fantasies.” a retired accountant summed up the post-crisis appraisal: “neoliberalism was a confidence game from the beginning, but the one-to-one blinded us, the middle-class, to it all—to the unemployment and the poverty, to the recession, all of it.” in other words, they declared retrospectively, the peg had not only failed to serve as a vehicle for national progress; it had also ensured national failure by disguising processes of plunder in a veneer of self-deception. loss as gain one acquaintance, a middle-aged psychoanalyst, described the devaluation in a supremely poetic formulation: “we thought we were living in the clouds, but it was a dream. we woke up and realized they were clouds of farts. our own farts. the imf had anaesthetized us with our own farts.” in describing that awakening, people framed the devaluation as the manifestation of a more generalized process, long ignored but now undeniable. in part, they were capturing a four-year-long recession that, by 2002, had generated unprecedented levels of unemployment, poverty, and inequality (see kessler 2000; minujín and anguita 2004). in part, they were describing decades of economic policies that, since the military coup in 1976, had increased the foreign debt to an unserviceable level, eroded social welfare institutions, and seen average real income decline dramatically (see beccaria 2002; lópez and romero 2005). however, they also spoke of the relentless, decades-long devaluation of other stores of value such as educational degrees (which had become less convertible into social prestige) and occupational positions (which had become less reliable indicators of salary, status, and autonomy). these more gradual devaluations had also been masked, they insisted, by the counterfeit prosperity of the currency peg. in 2002, many people had turned to barter networks for everyday commodities. they had done so out of necessity. yet they had made a virtue of that necessity by framing non-monetized exchange as the means of constructing a national community grounded in spontaneous, unmediated, and authentic relationships that would resist devaluation. at the time, they had spoken of “reinventing the market,” “even reinventing life,” according to principles of “trust and reciprocity” (bombal 2002, 100–101). within a year, however, the networks had collapsed under a wave of scandals that, in eerie echoes of the peso’s devaluation, alleged that a shadowy conspiracy had induced hyperinflation with counterfeit barter tickets.7 somewhat later, many former barter participants told me the movement had been doomed from the start, since, in the words of one, “you can’t escape money; the tickets were just like the peso, because they were ours, they were argentine.” if it proved impossible “to escape money,” people nonetheless seized on the sense of awakening to assume a suspicious stance not only with regard to money (which they had precious little of) but also to other stores of value. scores told me that they “no longer prioritized money or material goods,” because “in this country one can’t know what will happen tomorrow.” interviewees described people, themselves included, who in the 1990s had “worked like mad . . . and accumulated a ton of money, and never enjoyed it,” or who “had such pride and devotion for [their] job[s], which disappeared overnight,” or who “had truly believed in education as a way of ensuring a tranquil life, only to find [themselves] impoverished.” these sorts of errors, they explained, stemmed “from the fantasy . . . of the one-to-one,” from the belief “that argentina was a normal nation.” countless interviewees proclaimed, as did a middle-aged bus driver, that the devaluation had allowed him to see that during the 1990s, “this country, this middle class, we abandoned our emphasis on culture; we became materialist and focused on money and status.” this self-conscious anti-materialism unfolded at a moment when, despite dramatic improvements, people had not recovered from the losses of 2001–2002, much less the losses of the years prior. as a result, most people were not (yet) in a position to debate whether or how to invest their pesos (cf. d’avella 2014). instead, many explicitly rejected an aesthetic of consumerism, now associated with the currency peg, and emphasized an aesthetic of ethicized culture as the hallmark of what one schoolteacher called “our middle-class values, our morality, our culture.” this was also a moment when appeals to precisely those values played a key role in political discourse, as politicians of all stripes sought to locate themselves squarely on the right side of history by loudly rejecting the currency peg and claiming to inaugurate a more moral social order.8 whether alongside or in the absence of remunerated labor, my interlocutors juggled seemingly endless activities, from yoga and english lessons to book fairs and theater groups. advertisements for psychoanalysis appeared constantly in newspapers and even affixed to street signs and garbage cans. late-night dinner parties in the houses of family and friends, afternoon coffee breaks in neighborhood cafés, and chance neighborly encounters offered routine settings for all manner of convivial conversation, including, of course, suspicious crisis talk. undergirding all these practices was the insistence that, in the words of one young mother and amateur actor, “with the devaluation, we woke up in this country to the fact that we, the middle class, had trusted in the untrustworthy. now, it’s a moment to find what’s really valuable, to turn inwards and develop ourselves.” crucially, that self-development did not typically take on the patina of cheery optimism so common to north american self-help guides; it was more often pursued doggedly but wryly—like crisis theorizing—as a necessary way of confronting argentine reality. as another young amateur actor put it, “i feel the need to better myself since i, too, am a member of this pathetic country.” the ethicization of unremunerated activities also propelled an efflorescence of voluntarism and “solidarity-building” initiatives that aimed to construct an interclass national public grounded in the cultivation of individual ethical commitments (cf. muehlebach 2012). given the difficulty of converting a particular education into an appropriate job or a lifetime of work into a respectable retirement, it is unsurprising that the devaluation shifted the value of work, education, and money. however, rather than lose their importance, they were refigured as ends in themselves, through which people constructed their lives as projects of personal and interpersonal development. in the words of one prominent psychoanalyst and public intellectual (bleichmar 2002, 90–91), “if we have gained something, it is the loss of the shame of being poor. and that lets us start to recuperate the dignity of who we are: people who, with precarious means, not only arrived on these shores and survived, but lived in solidarity with our families . . . who continue writing, painting, making film, music, theater . . . trying to know who we are, to produce something new, to open our eyes together.” in this way, the crisis was constituted retrospectively as an event composed in equal parts by monetary loss, on the one hand, and epistemological and ethical gain, on the other. of course, buenos aires has always been a city of extraordinary busyness, and its middle class has long pursued embodied modes of cultural distinction (see galen 1999; guano 2004). precisely by recontextualizing these long-standing practices, and by repositioning them over and instead of material stores of value—the peso above all—people participated in a historically specific process of naturalization and revaluation (see briggs and bauman 1995, 584). animated by critiques of the peso as the indexical icon of a failed national history, that process allowed monetary losses to be accepted not as a matter of practicality, but of principle. the crisis thus prompted an embrace of practices of individual self-realization that, not coincidentally, reasserted a historically long-standing and geographically widespread mode of middle-class distinction predicated on ineffable morality and cultural discernment (cf. elias 1982; bourdieu 1984; o’dougherty 2002; liechty 2003). popular consensus held that the 2002 devaluation was the culmination of a decades-long process that had eroded the material grounds—monetary and otherwise—for membership in what my informants variously called the first world, modernity, the middle class, and normality. it is thus unsurprising that it prompted a search for other metrics of evaluation (and here, i mean the term in both its monetized and ethicized senses) and other modes of exchange (both material and interpretive). yet the positive revaluation of self-cultivating practices is not evidence of utilitarian maximization or instrumental strategy. rather, it is evidence of practical reasoning, through which people grappled with the logistical and interpretive problems occasioned by the collapse of the currency peg. in so doing, they generated a post-crisis middle-class “representational economy,” linking the circulation of money and goods, as well as words, practices, and other signifying media (keane 2003). within that representational economy, critiques of neoliberalism, middle-class aspirations, and even the speaker’s own capacity for self-delusion were not epiphenomenal commentary. rather, suspicious crisis talk constituted a key practice of daily life, organizing and regimenting both the devaluation of material stores of value and the positive revaluation of embodied practices of value. as such, these utterances circulated as a privileged currency within an expansive representational economy predicated on the principle of suspicion. crisis talk thus turned loss into gain and transformed monetary “failure” into the coin of the realm. of mice and traps to conclude here, however, would be to dwell in the interpretive alchemy that transformed monetary loss into epistemological and ethical gain. such an emphasis would elide the profound negativity that remained even after that alchemical transformation. i insist on concluding with that negativity, for even silvia bleichmar’s talk of recuperated dignity unfolded as a contrapuntal response within the overarching affective harmonics of decepción, a word that brings together the experience of both disappointment and disillusionment that the devaluation involved and that bleichmar’s (2002) book, entitled country pain, invoked. the acceptance of the devalued peso resulted from all manner of practical considerations. yet it also emerged from an affinity between the suspicious crisis talk i have described and the logic of monetary value. after all, money is not meant to be valuable, but to signify value. when money simply works as measure, medium, or store of value, we may overlook the predicated “gap between its material form and the ground of value it supposedly represent[s]” (poovey 2008, 62). on the other hand, speculation, capitalization, and arbitrage depend on the shrewd recognition and manipulation of that very gap (see marx 1992, 255; lipuma and lee 2004, 37). in other words, as financial tool—as capital—the monetary form refuses the possibility of definitive grounding so as to open up the possibility of profit through practices of cunning analysis. crisis, then, is simply the inversion of financial practices predicated on a posited gap between economic fundamentals and market valuations (see roitman 2014: 43). as such, the possibility (or, perhaps better, the inevitability) of crisis is built into the logic of the monetary form itself. so, too, is suspicious crisis talk, which intuits the groundless play of monetary value and engages it in a formally similar play of critique. maurer (2005, 166) argues that the recognition of money as social fiction “carries with it the moral obligation to reconstruct and remake,” as well as a pluralistic imaginary that orients the practices of the anthropologist as much as those of alternative currency practitioners and islamic bankers. within that imaginary, maurer proposes, to work on money is to play with the ideology-work of the fetish, conceptualized, following slavoj žižek, as the “(unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality” (žižek 1989, 33; quoted in maurer 2005, 114). the point, in other words, is not to dispel monetary illusions, but rather to restage money’s phantasmatic apparatus, just as the mousetrap, shakespeare’s play-within-a-play, foregrounds “not the revelation of truth [but] the particular staging of truth” (maurer 2005, 114). my middle-class argentine interlocutors would agree with this appraisal in the abstract. yet they insisted they were practically unable to meet that “moral obligation to reconstruct and remake” the peso. they told me that the market-valued peso must be accepted despite its participation in what one young plumber called “an unjust global system that relies on our fidelity to carry out its treachery.” like maurer, a thirty-year-old veterinarian also cited žižek (a familiar personage in the buenos aires mediascape even before he married his second wife, a fashion model and the daughter of an argentine lacanian): “we all know that money is a fetish, but, as žižek says, understanding isn’t controlling. our money is part of a global fantasy network. we necessarily participate despite it all.” to return to the metaphor of the mousetrap, my interlocutors insisted that we attend to the compulsory as well as the fictional and playful dimensions of the monetary fetish. after all, a key aspect of the middle-class argentine experience of monetary value was the diagnosis of the peso’s susceptibility to crisis and the supposedly clear-eyed recognition of the material limits to monetary play. as such, the historicity of the peso entailed a generalized suspicion that extended to a host of other value forms, but not to money as such. it was in the peso as a resolutely concrete historical form, and not as an instantiation of money in general, that my interlocutors diagnosed national failure. they insisted that market evaluations reflected real and unavoidable distinctions between durable currencies (i.e., the u.s. dollar) and their false counterfeits (i.e., the argentine peso) (cf. guyer 2012; neiburg 2010). the peg’s collapse, then, eroded confidence in the peso but not in the dollar, which continued, within the post-crisis middle-class public, to serve as the ideal type of the monetary form. looking beyond the configuration of post-crisis middle-class buenos aires, what are we to make of my interlocutors’ laments about the limits of critique? as i have suggested, we would do well to consider the extent to which suspicion inheres within money itself, and not simply in this particular context of so-called peripheral modernity (sarlo 1988). webb keane (2002, 65, 67, 69) argues that the representational economy of liberal capitalist modernity is predicated on sincerity as a privileged normative ideal. predicated instead on the inverted principle of suspicion, the critical practices i have been discussing illuminate the underbelly of that representational economy. as such, they offer insight not only into the experiential dimensions of money and its crises but also into that economy’s discomfiting and paradoxical resiliency. it is to that resiliency that many of my interlocutors pointed when offering me their resounding chorus that “we simply must accept the devaluation. there is no other way.” or that, in the words of the acquaintance who so eloquently spoke of clouds of farts, “now that we have woken up, we can smell all too well what has happened. but we can’t sniff our way out.” notes acknowledgments many thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers whose comments proved enormously helpful. thanks also to john l. comaroff, catherine fennell, susan gal, joseph d. hankins, kelda jamison, claudio lomnitz, joseph p. masco, sean mitchell, elizabeth a. povinelli, stephen kingsley scott, and kabir tambar, all of whom have engaged patiently with many iterations of this material. finally, thanks to the fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research grant and to multiple grants from the university of chicago for funding the research that informs this essay. 1. unless otherwise noted, phrases in quotation marks are my translations of direct quotations from spanish-language conversations with middle-class residents of greater buenos aires between 2003 and 2007. 2. in other words, i treat the middle class not as a sociological category, but as a public constituted through particular modes of addressivity and attention (see warner 2002). in parallel fashion, i treat the crisis not as a self-evident politicoeconomic event, but as a moment emplotted through particular modes of historicity (see trouillot 1997; koselleck 1985). 3. the term horizontalist emerged within these movements and has since circulated globally (see sitrin 2012). 4. that suspicion was evident, for example, in the rather dramatic decline in the political fortunes of figures like elisa carrió, who in the years following 2001–2002, fashioned herself the moral voice of a beleaguered middle class (see munck 2003). 5. because of its association with menem’s other reforms, the peg is considered in argentina to epitomize neoliberalism, despite most orthodox economists’ opposition to currency boards. 6. having maintained its neutrality throughout most of the second world war, argentina was the only latin american country not invited to participate in the 1944 bretton woods conference and did not become a signatory of the bretton woods accords until 1956. between 1956 and 1971 (when nixon abandoned the gold standard and allowed the bretton woods system to disintegrate), argentina attempted to fix its currency to the u.s. dollar. however, balance-of-payment problems and high inflation rates complicated those attempts, prompting various argentine governments to adopt crawling pegs, that is, regularly scheduled, small-scale devaluations. during the 1970s and 1980s, efforts to manage the currency exchange rate became even more vexed in the face of changing international interest rates and the massive growth of the foreign debt; those efforts took the form not only of crawling pegs, but also of dramatic devaluations and even the introduction of entirely new currencies. 7. although called “barter networks” (redes de trueque) and popularly framed as constituting a space of interpersonal trust and solidarity, exchange was mediated by “tickets” (boletos), which, like state-issued currencies, became subject to problems of counterfeiting and inflation. 8. of course, those appeals frequently ran up against robust suspicion. nonetheless, the turn to a highly moralized political discourse is in keeping with the overarching frame of crisis and critique. it should be noted that, early on, appeals to specifically “middle-class values” were voiced by members of both the newly dominant kirchner faction of the peronist party and its opposition. by 2007, however (the end of the period i am discussing), the kirchner front spoke mostly to “the people,” while the many, splintered opposition groups were mobilizing “the middle class” as an antipopulist, anti-peronist figure (see adamovsky 2009, 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http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5428-6815 over a tiny bodiless coffin in an isolated american wood, iraqi role-players are wailing inconsolably. in a cultural training simulation some military contractors call “the crying room,” the women congregate around a small wooden coffin decorated with a bouquet of fake flowers, a framed picture of a child (“the deceased”), and a black hijab-cloaked barbie, for regional flair. the women have howled with grief dozens of times, performing for three days straight, for each new rotation of training u.s. soldiers. their voices are hoarse. “i sound like a donkey,” one of the women laughs, mimicking a braying noise. the simulation always starts the same way: the qu’ranic recitation begins to play from a boom box; the role-players, clad in embroidered black dresses and veils much like the doll’s, wail and hit their thighs and the tops of their heads in synchronicity. once, when they are testing the music, a military contractor walks into the room and playfully begins to dance to the reedy lilt of the qu’ran, but one of the role-players chastises him: “that’s god music!”1 in the scenario, the u.s. soldiers had inadvertently crushed the child with their tank and now must pay their condolences, while ideally acquiring intelligence about the family’s connections to the militia. when the soldiers enter a cultural simulation, the first step in the training program is to establish rapport by assuming sympathetic postures and mirroring their interlocutors while their interpreters translate; in this particular room, they are often flustered by the cacophony of arabic and weeping and seek to regain their composure.2 several units of soldiers are training at once, and it is easy to hear the adjacent clamor: tea glasses clinking in one room; a thump and a scream in another. in each room, iraqi role-players are hired to enact mourning or bargaining, chatting or suffering, as arab others might. they act out a kaleidoscope of archetypes: corrupt mayor; insurgent; imam; mourning mother, with correlating props: kūfiyyah scarves, billowing robes, teapots, posters of militia leaders, prayer rugs. if the military personnel believe the training soldiers have engaged incorrectly with the wartime local, they pause the game to discuss the lesson; then they reset and begin again, as if within a well-coordinated machine with movable parts. in forests, fields, and deserts across the united states, in what has been called a “hidden archipelago of mini-cities” (graham 2007, 122), american soldiers arrive at mock middle eastern villages to train their bodies and imaginations for war before deployment. middle eastern role-players, many of them recent war refugees from iraq and afghanistan, are salaried for their labors and repetitively act out the contingencies of war for the training soldiers. drawing on twenty-six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the extended iraq warscape—from predeployment exercises in mock middle eastern villages across the united states to iraqi refugee neighborhoods in amman, jordan—i examine the contours of the wartime work outsourced to populations i call human technologies: individuals construed by the u.s. military as embodied repositories of cultural/regional knowledge. these individuals act as local mediators, translators, advisors, and proxies for u.s. military personnel and produce soldiers as insiders in the war zone: they are hired to augment both u.s. military access within the war zone and soldiers’ understanding of the so-called human terrain. i examine in this article how an ironic disjuncture between military prescriptions for authenticity and role-players’ experiences of inauthenticity generates moments of charged incongruency for those hired to embody constricted versions of their cultures. i argue that a charged tension manifests itself in the training apparatus: on the epistemological level, even as they experience excess, role-players work to make the simulations “look good” to retain their jobs; meanwhile, that excess manifests affective overflow—in particular, one form that a role-player called “the laughscream.” i contend that such moments of affective excess create a momentary reprieve for role-players while typically not disturbing the military structure. i focus here on iraqis, many of whom worked as interpreters or contractors for the u.s. military during the 2003 iraq war, and who, on emigration to the united states, began to work as role-players in predeployment simulations. newly arrived iraqis typically learned by word of mouth from other iraqis of lucrative contracts as cultural role-players. these jobs were highly desirable for a population trying to get economically situated in a new country, and proved especially popular among those with prior u.s. military affiliations. meanwhile, although they were employed to enact exemplars/archetypes of their cultures, these individuals conversely have inhabited a particularly precarious margin: they were frequently ejected to the peripheries of their own societies as traitors by their compatriots and as potential spies by u.s. soldiers, and in some periods during the war, the less fortunate were unable to procure the u.s. visas that would save their lives.3 weaponizing culture contemporary anthropologists of militarism have pointed to the post–9/11 expansion of the u.s. security state, in a climate of uncertainty where nonstate adversaries have been less legible to the military. amid heightened and ongoing war preparedness (lutz 2001; macleish 2015), joseph masco (2014, 19) describes the u.s. military’s attempt to “secure life from the species to the population to the individual to the microbe.” in this logic of encompassment, the u.s. military has increasingly weaponized new technologies for understanding motivations and patterns of adversaries—in this instance, other human beings. the wartime intermediaries described herein form part of what has been called the u.s. military’s cultural turn, that is, the use of culture (in the form of immersive trainings, rubrics, and local advisors) in a strategic attempt to understand, pin down, and make legible a post–cold war adversary imagined as increasingly opaque. according to military theorists, the notion of culture-centric warfare emerged after u.s. military disillusionment with its 1990s revolution in military affairs, which had focused on new technologies and conventional environments. this shift to cultural literacy to apprehend the adversary inflected counterinsurgency studies and escalated as a framework after 9/11.4 in 2006, the u.s. army and marines coauthored field manual 3-24 under general david petraeus, reconceptualizing the 2003 iraq war as a counterinsurgency and sowing the seeds for culture to serve as the new hermeneutical mechanism that separated insurgents from the general population. meanwhile, the u.s. military hired anthropologists to embed within combat units to provide so-called conflict ethnographies for the human terrain system (hts). the military analyst and hts senior social scientist montgomery mcfate (2005, 48) explained the use of cultural strategies: “the more unconventional the adversary and the further from western cultural norms, the more we need to understand their society and underlying cultural dynamics.” simultaneously, local wartime intermediaries were hired to formally or informally assist soldiers in acts of seeing, knowing, and translation: namely, differentiation between adversaries, potential allies and proxies, and the population. this twenty-first-century military focus on culture emerged in tandem with privileging posthuman technologies to extend optical reach, such as unmanned aerial vehicles and more pervasive surveillance. amid u.s. military technophilic fantasies of omniscience—what paul virilio (1989, 2) calls “ubiquitous, orbital vision of enemy territory”—local wartime intermediaries emerged as militarized bodies to see the intimate unseen, to translate and furnish otherwise inaccessible, operationally useful cultural knowledges, and ultimately to produce the u.s. soldier as an insider within the war zone. critics of the u.s. military’s cultural turn have pointed to what ann stoler (2002) calls the “intimate” gaze in the consolidation of power, particularly in neo/colonial contexts. the military’s culture projects have indeed entailed diagramming social structures and harnessing information about social patterns and motivations: the sphere of stoler’s intimate. as stoler (2002, 8) asserts, such classification is “not a benign cultural act but a potent political one.” many scholars, in particular, anthropologists, have focused on how such knowledge is used to manage populations in wartime, as well as in intelligence and adversary targeting (gregory 2008; price 2009; kelly et al. 2010), critiquing the use of culture as a “weapon system” (davis 2010, 8). maximilian forte (2011, 151) describes how anthropologists challenged the possibility of military cultural programs supporting ethical research, and contended that “counterinsurgency can never be humanitarian.” the american anthropological association executive board (2007) condemned the hts program as an “unacceptable application of anthropological expertise,” and the military terminated it in 2014. however, another facet of the cultural turn, the use of role-players in cultural simulations, continues. the human technology when i was observing military trainings, i overheard a major in charge of the exercises describe the cultural role-players as “the apparatus” to one of his colleagues. i had already noticed how these individuals were maneuvered within particular parameters—what the military called “left and right limits,” as if there existed spatial coordinates that they were not permitted to transgress. although such limits were also applied to training soldiers and to all employees, military personnel used especially mechanistic jargon to describe iraqi role-players. they were regularly referred to as an operationally useful training tool, a tool requiring limits and coaching to enable maximum efficacy. this metaphorization in relation to machines led me to consider how these individuals were conscripted as something akin to human technologies, as they alternately must constrain and produce knowledge and affect, within military parameters. i conceptualize human technologies as modern technologies in martin heidegger’s (1982, 17) sense as “standing-reserves” of extractable cultural know-how, who are “good-for” mediating, translating, and acting as proxies within unknown terrain in wartime. in this logic, as humans order, use, and exhaust the energies of nature, ultimately they are transformed into usable resources. my notion of the human technology is also inspired by karl marx’s (2011, 462) critiques of man as a cog in a capitalist machine, describing how the worker becomes a “living appendage” in the modern industrial factory.5 in this case study, human technologies are hired to extend the gaze and agency of the soldier and render him or her an insider within an unknown culture to facilitate wartime projects. kenneth macleish (2012, 7) contends that “the military body is not just a ‘tool of man,’ to use marcel mauss’s words. it also represents the transformation of men and women into tools.” soldiers too might be understood as technologies in this sense, as human resources—bodies and minds harnessed for their wartime uses—but i focus here largely on the hitherto undescribed militarized bodies and selves of their intermediaries who are deployed as cultural tools. recent anthropological literature has richly documented militarized worlds and subjectivities, with a focus on soldiers (der derian 2001; gutmann and lutz 2010; macleish 2015; wool 2015); i complement that literature, capturing the complex and overlooked phenomenology of the experiences of middle eastern intermediaries incorporated into u.s. war. in this article, i will trace the processes that unfold as military personnel seek to deploy cultural intermediaries as wartime technologies to produce u.s. soldiers as insiders in the war zone—as well as query the limits of that project. i offer the analytical conceit of the human technology cautiously, with caveats about the risks of the representation therein. i critique here the ways in which wartime intermediaries are militarized as tools, while seeking at all costs to avoid complicity in that reifying discourse. rather, these individuals are, like all others, both confined by structures and capable of making choices in the world. in cultural trainings, military personnel maneuver role-players within mechanized logics and discourses. through an examination of the epistemological and affective labors these wartime intermediaries perform, this study illuminates how the intrinsic contradiction in the term human technology—the turning of person into machine for a singular use and foreclosing other forms of being and becoming—plays out on the ground. moreover, while scrutinizing military representations and epistemologies, my intention is not to comment on their authenticity so as to modify or improve them, but rather to critique the underpinnings of the military project as a whole in an ethical, political, and epistemological gesture. in recent decades, social theorists have shown affect’s role in subjectivity, action, and agency, emphasizing the autonomy of the body in its interface with the world (massumi 1996) and how “people are quite literally charged up by the sheer surge of things in the making” (stewart 2005, 1041). william mazzarella (2009, 299) notes that any social project not driven by force “must be affective in order to be effective.” recently, some anthropologists have read affect as a means of “creating new subjects and relations between subjects,” in some instances offering the potential for “contemporary political and economic transformations” (richard and rudnyckyj 2009, 62). others have pointed instead to affect’s role in driving social reproduction and reinforcing norms (berlant 1997; adams 2013). i conversely look at an instance in which affect, in this case laughter, may enact a moment of microtransformation for the person laughing, but with little impact on the training structure—ultimately neither subverting nor reinforcing it. while affect is crucial in recuperating constrained subjectivities, the structure nonetheless appears to continue mutely, with military systems and notions about the world undisturbed. the role-players’ laughter existentially negates the possibility that human beings can truly be tools, while indicating that, in practice, they can, however, somewhat effectively serve as tools. in my conclusion, i nonetheless consider how that laugh might ripple beyond, forecasting unpredictable future possibilities. from the war theater to war as theater this study focuses on iraqi role-players in the united states, many of whom are 2003 iraq war asylum-seekers. the majority of these individuals worked as interpreters or contractors for the u.s. military at some point between 2003 and 2011 and, due to their wartime affiliations, can no longer return to an increasingly violent iraq. current estimates suggest that somewhere between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand iraqis worked directly for the u.s. military, government, media, contractors, and subcontractors during the 2003 iraq war as interpreters, contractors, fixers, and bodyguards.6 many more iraqis assisted the americans informally by giving them tips or stabilizing their districts and villages as government functionaries. iraqis chose to work for the u.s. military in iraq for a panoply of ethical, political, and economic reasons, which were compounded by more contradictions as popular resistance to the war increased. these iraqis were usually young and somewhat educated, motivated by a complex range of ideological and economic interests. many described experiencing political or sectarian marginalization under saddam hussein’s regime: some hoped to contribute to political change under the americans, while others spoke of pain at the occupation, but admitted to still needing the work. one former interpreter explained: “i had a mixed reaction to the invasion. the saddam period was bad for everyone.” most described enthusiasm about new work opportunities, the possibility of visas, and a better future. according to many, as u.s. military promises remained unfulfilled and iraqi resistance to u.s. presence grew, their own positions, increasingly perceived as those of collaborators, became more dangerous and complex. another former interpreter elaborated: “i feel betrayed by my country. they feel like i’m a traitor, that i betrayed them. but i feel betrayed. i was trying to help them. i thought i was changing [iraq] for the better.” for jean-paul sartre (2008, 57), the collaborator suffers from “historicity” and “ratifies events simply because they occur,” seeking to side with the victor and thereby ascend after the war. in contrast, i believe that many of the iraqis employed by the u.s. military lived a more morally complex form of history, often imagining making a contribution to a thriving future iraq. nonetheless, as iraqi resistance to u.s. occupation grew, the iraqis i interviewed described how they faced increased accusations of being informants to the u.s. military. my interlocutors described how this climate of accusation imperiled them, especially amid heightening sectarian violence in 2006, eventually propelling the departure of many from the country. in 2011, i began formal fieldwork in what i describe as the extended iraq warscape, stretching from u.s. military simulations to iraqi refugee neighborhoods in amman, and crisscrossing through military institutions of washington, d.c. i eventually honed my study to focus on iraqis who first worked for the u.s. military in iraq and then served in predeployment simulations as role-players in the united states. as in their prior work in iraq for the u.s. military, they were drawn to simulation jobs for a range of reasons: the majority whom i spoke with, trying to get established in a new country, were lured by well-paying contracts available to arabic speakers. as one role-player explained: “it’s really good money, and we’re trying to get settled in the u.s.” some expressed a double patriotic impetus, hoping to serve their new country by assisting the u.s. army with middle eastern knowledge, and thereby helping the middle east—and meanwhile working to counteract american stereotypes: “i want to give them a real picture of us. we’re not bad. we’re a peaceful people.” others expressed internal contradictions about their chosen work, which i explore in other writings (stone 2016). most sought military contracts while holding down other jobs, from construction labor or work in the service industry to teaching arabic on the side. some sought to establish themselves in the united states, while others imagined returning to the middle east after securing the privileges of u.s. citizenship. epistemologies as military personnel mobilized cultural knowledge as a means of understanding human terrain in the war zone, there was an ongoing commitment to preparing soldiers for “the real thing,” or what they called the “ground truth: downrange.” one military instructor explained of the training: “you must make it real.” another involved in crafting simulations who had previously been deployed in iraq noted: “the other night with the arabic music going and people talking and the fire going, it transported me back to iraq. it was dark. i was reaching for where my weapon would be.” given this imperative, cultural representations of the middle east were shoehorned into specific conceptions of authenticity. in some cases, these representations subtracted history and politics from lifeworlds, mirroring talad asad’s (1983, 251) critique of clifford geertz for forging “an a priori totality of meanings, divorced from the processes of formation and effects of power.” one afternoon, a military contractor invited me to the prop warehouse. as i waded through apparently bloodied knives and shimmering middle eastern cloth, the contractor described his philosophy behind cultural training: “you do the best you can to make it look the part. but the inside, what the role-players are trying to replicate (language, culture, norms), that’s the most important.” i asked him if these performances, this inside, happened organically. he replied: “over time, the role-players are further away from being in-country. people come to us and they are trying to assimilate here, and we want them to act like they haven’t assimilated. you have guys like [our cultural advisor] to take them back.” amid this interest in authentic—or, indeed, synchronic (apolitical/historical)—cultural knowledge, military supervisors also frequently emphasized the importance of keeping all aspects of the simulations within objectives, or in the previously noted military lingo, “left and right limits.” role-players were coached to operate within these limits and not to add anything extraneous. thus, although role-players understood themselves as subject-matter experts on the middle east, granular cultural knowledges often remained exterior to the parameters of tactical military training objectives, creating ongoing confusion for some about expectations. as they were instructed on left and right limits, those mechanistic parameters for action, iraqi intermediaries were asked to supply only the particular cultural representations solicited by military personnel—and nothing in excess—for consumption by the training soldiers. role-players receive preparatory materials to help them hew to these simulation objectives, for instance, a country or village study, describing the geopolitical situation of the fake (middle east–inflected) world they are about to enact. the specificity of the scripts varies. role-players with supporting roles are often just given their name, tribe, place of origin, profession, and sympathies (pro/anti-american), and sometimes a list of requests to put to the americans (e.g., water or medicine). those cast as key leaders, such as the people embodying a mayor or an imam, typically receive more detailed scripts, with specific lines. depending on the base and the exercise, scripts are typically written by outside contractors (many of whom are former military personnel), by the majors running the exercises for their teams, or in collaboration; scripts were balanced between specific training objectives and a desire to incorporate lessons learned from military personnel in the field. scripts were also always in motion: for example, if trainees made an error, such as failing to identify an adversary, their instructors would turn up the heat to teach them a lesson, adding extra hours of explosions the next night. one of my military interlocutors who helped devise scripts explained the parameters for role-players: “role-playing is an effective training tool, as long as it’s used appropriately and in accordance with the training objectives and doesn’t get off to something crazy, which happens.” in another instance, a contractor overseeing the role-players announced: “this should be real but controlled. not spontaneous ad-libbing. we can turn up the heat and complexity, but that must be controlled.” i demonstrate here that although cultural intermediaries were construed by american military communities as sources of authentic cultural knowledge, in practice, role-players were maneuvered as cultural tools within military left and right limits that emphasized being over knowing. meanwhile, role-players were continuously reminded that they are in fact not “being themselves,” but rather embodying specific constructions of their countries of origin. i show how the role-players negotiated their positions, as well as the ultimate military production of compliant human technologies—that is, individuals who were meant to enact middle eastern knowledge in a particular way and for a specific purpose—without injecting disruptive excess into the military training. american military leadership and training soldiers frequently emphasized the importance of learning about middle eastern culture as a component of their preparations for war. when asked why middle eastern role-players were necessary in this pursuit, many described those individuals as a metonymic access point to the region: “the role-players are a whole group of arabs in order to understand the arab world at large.” a captain helping his team train explained: “the role-players are just playing themselves! they’re just being a different culture!” despite the ontological primacy the military assigned to them, many role-players described the ambiguity of their epistemological position as proprietors of culture—but not on their own terms. in this constellation, role-players became embodied technologies of being arab, rather than of knowing or translating anything particular about the middle east. in this sense, the position of the role-players echoes a colonial logic of cultural translation, wherein the actual knowledges of the other are not necessarily pertinent. following edward said (1978), western knowledge production about the east demonstrates more about the paradigms of the seer than about those of seen. military cultural logics fluctuated from converting fluid forms of cultural difference, such as tribe or islam, into ossified cultural categories to imagining highly contingent, unpredictable, yet ultimately containable behavior (e.g., that of the “wily” arab). talal asad (1986, 163) notes the epistemic violence intrinsic to the metaphor of cultural translation, explaining that the practice is “enmeshed in conditions of power,” and thereby usually occurs unidirectionally, from east to west, to be consumed by western readers. likewise, cultured bodies were hired to help the military culturally translate others—that is, imagine, categorize, and manage them. as cultured bodies required to operate within left and right limits—more akin to translated texts than cultural translators—role-players wrestled with uncertainty about their epistemological positions. one role-player, mahmood, explained: “sometimes [the soldiers] don’t listen to me. you’re trying to teach them culture, and you have no say in it. [the culture is] mine. i’m here for you. not for myself.” role-players alternately described culture as “their own” and as a “product” they were offering to the military, trying to understand what this ambiguity meant for the roles they were expected to enact. this tension between proprietorship and the offering of a service continuously coalesced around questions of representing culture authentically. meanwhile, the finer points of culture were often subsidiary to the efficient practice of tactics for military personnel, in some cases creating the impression of troubling cultural inauthenticity for the role-players. in fact, ultimately and ironically, role-players hired for their cultural authenticity were required to act in ways they considered inauthentic. one role-player, salem, described culture as a product they were offering, and expressed frustration when the roles and scenarios the military gave them impaired that product: “we have to provide service the right way. you have a customer. the customer wants it perfect. why is a kurd role-playing an arab? even his arabic language is not correct.” in another instance of compromised authenticity that startled the iraqis, they were hired to role-play afghans, as the military contractor could not locate enough afghans. another role-player, lubna, shared her indignation over the inauthenticity of the settings of the simulations, as well as the hiring of role-players across nationalities: “there is no resemblance. even the rocks are different. this place is full of egyptians. why don’t they make a better resemblance? i was angry about this. i told the captain.” another role-player spoke of her frustration from the confines of her particular role: “i had so many things i wanted to say to them, and i couldn’t! i wanted to say: there are no services—no electricity, no water; there are explosions. we are afraid. if you have experience, you should be able to say it!” yet amid these frustrations, role-players most typically focused on image management, making the simulation run smoothly and “look good” even as they recognized inauthenticity—in order to retain their work. for example, yusuf cautioned other role-players not to diverge from the script: “sometimes you can add a little, but be careful. if you add one word, you could change the whole scenario.” indeed, when role-players found scenarios incorrect or artificial, they often kept silent. yusuf told me: “i wouldn’t tell them they’re doing something wrong. i would cover for them if there’s a mistake. that’s why they promoted me to sergeant in the scenario.” hussein added: “no one speaks up. no one stands up for anyone but themselves. we want to keep our jobs.” in certain circumstances, military and/or contractors did welcome interventions into the simulations. sometimes a role-player was appointed cultural advisor and took on a range of roles, from procuring props to assisting in role-player hires. one such individual, when asked if he relayed the other role-players’ suggestions to his boss, explained: “i take ideas. i go with it if it’s right. i have to confirm with the army.” occasionally, the cultural advisor would become an informal advisor to military personnel and was urged to intervene when he believed the scenarios were incorrect. one such cultural advisor, ghaith, sought to improve the scenarios within the simulations whenever he could. he recounted: in one scenario, there was a fake election. an elderly role-player walked in—the soldiers didn’t search him. i asked, why didn’t you? the soldier said, “they told us not to because he is older and needs respect.” i said: “i don’t give a damn about culture when it comes to safety. does this guy have a [suicide] belt on him?” ghaith spoke from a perspective attuned to military concerns, suggesting that overemphasis on cultural details might blind soldiers to tactical or security issues. he explained that he felt affirmed in his correction by that same soldier, who later returned from a deployment: “the soldier told me he benefited so much from [the simulation]. he was in iraq for nine months afterwards.” ghaith was confident in the utility of his knowledge, emphasizing the importance of the training in preventing the soldiers from making mistakes: “in each [training], the commander must sign off if a unit is ready or not to deploy. sometimes they have to repeat the training. this stuff is not a joke.” ghaith was proud of his role: “the scenarios were not accurate, and that’s why we were there.” ghaith had the ear of an american commander, but such relationships were rare. more commonly, role-players were reticent to interject their own knowledge. indeed, there are consequences for exceeding left and right limits. for example, although religion and politics were regularly woven into the scripts in precurated forms (the object of many simulations was to determine the adversary), role-players were told to “never bring religion or politics into the box” on their own. this prohibition made the boundary between inside and outside “the box,” and the contrast in behavior in each space, all the starker. a military contractor told me that this was because the soldiers were being videotaped and should not be prompted to express political opinions while in uniform. however, role-players at one of the bases told me that this rule had been more firmly enforced after fistfights prompted by religious and political provocations had broken out among them. in one instance, while i was role-playing a villager in a fictional middle eastern country, i sought to test those parameters. i was dressed like the iraqi role-players, in a long robe and a hijab. we were told to practice modern standard arabic with the soldiers and engage in basic conversation, entailing more free play than usual. we were given a description of the fake middle eastern country that had been occupied by the american military and the basic story line: we were meant to discuss the needs of our village with the soldiers. i was cast as a teenage girl who wanted to study abroad and was seeking information on furthering my studies from the soldiers. during the role-play, i brought into conversation one religious and one political topic. i first asked the soldiers if there were muslims in america, and if they were religious. salem, the iraqi cultural advisor, hissed “cut” from the corner, whispering to me in arabic ṭā’ifi (sectarian), even though nothing in my query had actually referred to sectarianism. he then summoned me, explaining: “there is no religion in the scenario.” i next asked a soldier why the united states could have nuclear weapons but no other countries could. salem again called me out of the role-play: “no politics in the scenario.” at this point, everyone took a break, and the role-players cautioned me never to bring up “real topics” in the simulations—that is, to keep things running smoothly, or otherwise imperil one’s job. thereafter, i sat on the steps of the collapsible home with hussein, another role-player, and, following our usual pattern, we immediately began to discuss religion and politics. he recounted how religio-political dynamics, in the form of a sectarian death squad, had nearly cost him his life. he was on a bus in baghdad when a militia stopped the vehicle and asked everyone their sect: “my friend was standing in front of me. he didn’t know the right answer to the question. he replied shia. but it was the wrong answer: the men shot him.” hussein, who has a classically shia name, but is in fact half-shia and half-sunni, answered that he was sunni. when they asked why he had a shia name, he replied: “well, i really am sunni.” he recounts: “then they said, well, you’re white [noting that sunnis from baghdad were often pale-complexioned, while shia from the south often had darker skin], so we won’t kill you.” after this harrowing story, hussein and i returned inside for the “cultural lunch,” which functioned as an ongoing portion of the simulation. as a female role-player, i spooned out the soldiers’ couscous. we then sat in a circle and volleyed benign questions in formal arabic to the soldiers, asking about what they liked or did not like. the surface of the scenario was taut, a translated text neutered of danger. hussein offered to the circle: “do you like grapes?” (hal ta’jibūn al-‘anib?). such banality and controlled discourse coexisted with the intensity on the stairs. as the role-playing individuals cleave to military parameters, they must efface the surplus of their experience and knowledge, assimilated as regulated and functioning technologies made docile, and through which military discourses flow. yet ironically, amid the military hiring of cultured bodies to perform themselves, these individuals enacted cultural constructions they often considered inauthentic: in these instances, they stood not within themselves but beside themselves, observing the effacement of their own lived experiences: culture in its pure version, extracted out of history and politics. affective maneuvers i have argued that military constructions of the middle east generate moments of epistemological excess and incongruency for role-players, even when they do not express these disjunctures. i now trace the quite different outcomes when they experience affective surplus. as in their mediation of role-players’ knowledge, military personnel provide certain parameters for affect, encouraging some affective intensities as registers of the authentic and dissuading others as charged distractions. yet whereas military personnel largely curtail or even efface role-players’ epistemological excesses in favor of more rigid cultural translations, charged affective surpluses take on a range of other contours. in some instances, affect seems to act, jolting into a controlled field, and offering a changed experience for the person experiencing it. the present loss of iraq exists in constant tension with the iraqi role-players’ daily lives in the simulations, spaces of uncanny and often mechanical repetition, which can evoke the real for some. this continual affective experience occasionally generates a surplus, which erupts in multiple potential vectors, through the tears of falling into the simulation or else laughing against it, especially via what one role-player called “the laughscream.” for example, enacting a fake funeral, as a group of role-players carries the mock coffin, quite suddenly their performed lamentation morphs instead into screaming commingled with suppressed laughter. the affect is contagious, but if their supervisors are watching, they return to more stylized mourning or cover their faces with their veils. the laughscream, as i will later describe in more detail, resituates the role-plays as artifice and acts as a charged refusal for the role-player: both of a mechanistic form of action and of a continued inhabitation of wartime precarity. as noted, the performance of affect, like that of knowledge, is subject to military left and right limits. similarly, authenticity is viewed favorably, and military personnel and contractors ask role-players to perform storylines as authentically as possible. indeed, intense performances are seen as authentic and applauded by military employers, and some role-players assert that such performances enable them to get rehired. lubna describes generating emotion among the others: “once i got everyone crying. i told them, pretend it’s someone you love. we began to cry, all of us. amal began to cry and couldn’t stop.” she was rewarded for this intensity by her employer: “they gave her a special coin to thank her.” while military coins create an economy of honor and gratitude, the moment also inscribes affective performances into a commodity logic. meanwhile, although such intensities are encouraged by military contractors in the putatively safe expression of grief, in some instances, they are interrupted if they move into the volatile expression of rage. for example, amal cried earnestly without being able to stop and was honored. on a different occasion, in a role-play, ahmed stared at an american soldier with apparent fury, causing a spontaneous fistfight between the two. rather than inscribing the moment within the plausible simulacral, he was told by his employer to control himself. although anger and violence were essential within a number of the role-plays, they had to be enacted in predictable ways and could not become real. amid these parameters, a range of affects were performed and experienced by role-players with varying past experiences in iraq. i frequently asked role-players if they were emotionally affected by enacting their own deaths so recently after having lived through a war that had taken so many lives. the typical reply invoked a habituation to death because of iraq’s history: “no, we are iraqi. we are used to it.” but some, who had endured the most acute war trauma, such as death threats and near death experiences, noted that simulations could prove emotionally perilous. when a role-player embodies a role with convincing intensity, the others call this ‘aīsh bi-dūr, or living in the role. yet sometimes a role-player is entered, or lived by, the role: possessed by it and reliving his or her dangerous wartime past. during a mock funeral, sumayya, a role-player who had been kidnapped in iraq when she worked as an interpreter, had been role-playing an interpreter. encountering a costume she associated with insurgents in iraq left her deeply shaken. i asked hussein what he thought had happened to her and he replied: “she was living it. her reaction then would be the same as now. she was shaking.” although such moments of witnessing someone being lived by the role occurred occasionally during my two years of fieldwork, role-players more typically dealt with the simulations with calculated remove. rather than tumbling into entry points of verisimilitude, they more often deflected, sometimes through laughter. during the simulations, i argue, the seemingly recognizable and real (the referents of the middle east: war, death) become laughably, uncannily fantastic through repetition and artifice: laughter acts as a response to the gap between alive and dead; moving and frozen; the hyperartifice of simulated iraq and the painful real of an iraq to which these iraqis cannot, at present, return. most crucially, laughter decisively resituates the role-plays as mechanized artifice, enabling role-players to create their own real amid that artifice. as military architects of the mock villages seek to enact authenticity, they often mire the spaces in artifice, sometimes creating comedic disjunctures for the role-players. fredric jameson (1991, 18) describes pastiche as an imitation of something idiosyncratic yet “amputated of the satiric impulse. pastiche is . . . blank parody. . . . a statue with blind eyeballs.” in the instance of the mock middle eastern village and its inhabitants, the copy is created as pastiche by its fabricators. yet it is sometimes experienced as parody by those who have been there. indeed, at the larger training exercises, military contractors furnish a “village in a box,” which can come equipped with everything from fake vegetables and middle eastern swag (prayer rugs, posters of militia members) to ethnicized corpses, all arranged against the backdrop of a cartoonish mosque dome. amid this artifice, role-players have been hired to enact middle eastern villagers authentically—not by their own measures, but rather within prescribed military terms. role-players are asked to be exemplars of their cultures and those cultures must be synchronic, pruned of their excesses and any relationship to the outside: iraqis, as it were, in a box. however, as previously described, the iraqis who worked for the american military first as interpreters and contractors in the 2003 iraq war and subsequently as role-players are a somewhat unique subset of the population; indeed, they are often quite far removed from the u.s. military’s imagined characteristics of a prototypical iraqi. not only are many of them educated, they are also particularly versed in american culture and critical of iraqi politics. they typically bear an ambivalent relationship to both countries as they negotiate past accusations, allegiances, and the prospect of assimilation. many show little trust for outsiders and even less for each other, and because of their dangerous affiliations in wartime, they have learned to chameleon in most circumstances. as they are turned into stereotypes inside an archetypal village, and as they act out wartime precarity so often that their homes and their losses turn into even more estranging archetypes, they laugh. the machine thus turns out to be made of flesh. role-players inject new ways of being, in part through laughter, into their performances. those interjections indicate the limits of a military fantasy that believes human beings can be wholly resourced and turned into technologies. yet as i will demonstrate in the following section, they may have little impact on the military’s training structure itself. the laughscream as role-players repetitively embody market-goers, prisoners, beaten wives, mourners, and militants for the training soldiers, the ossified postures, characters, and interactions they stage sometimes trigger laughter—thereby interrupting those postures. henri bergson (1914, 10, 25) explains that a certain kind of laughter is provoked by “mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect the wide-awake adaptability and the live pliableness of a human being.” for bergson, “really living life should never repeat itself”; practices of stylized repetition risk, for instance, sealing the human face into a machine or a death mask. ironically, however, such archetypal faces produce laughter, interrupting their tendency toward stasis: “some faces seem to be always engaged in weeping, others in laughing or whistling, others, again, in eternally blowing an imaginary trumpet, and these are the most comic faces of all.” laughter thus acts not only as a reprieve but also as a partial crack in that mask: eruptions both caused by and capable of interrupting the archetypal and mechanized face. there is a crescendo of sobs and arabic in the crying room. each team of soldiers reacts differently to the cacophony, their captain maintaining calm or becoming flushed and anxious. for the soldiers to succeed in this simulation, they must first establish rapport with the mourning women, then notice that the house might be connected to the town militia and procure intelligence. meanwhile, the hubbub rises in the simulation: sometimes one of the women runs up to a soldier and entreats him furiously in her own dialect of arabic, which he typically cannot understand. amid the clamor, the captain tries to build a relationship with the women. but the role-players have been screaming all day. amid the ennui of the endless mechanized repetitions, hoarse throats, and the gap between this coffin and the coffins they saw in iraq, the role-players sometimes stop wailing the classic words of grief. in such moments, muffled laughter can commingle with their cries as a role-player conceals her faces with her veils. in one instance, one role-player shouted in arabic: “how long until lunch?” lubna tells me: “say anything as long as it’s in arabic! once i yelled: ‘i want a hamburger,’ forgetting the soldiers would recognize the word, and i clapped a hand over my mouth.” similarly, in the middle of a simulated mass-casualty event, another role-player, salma, jokingly yelled out the perpetrator: “that’s my uncle!”—precipitating suppressed laughter amid the screaming. indeed, the work shifts are long and taxing, as the role-players act out war wounds, their mouths frozen into os of grief, their voices nearly gone from crying. but wanting the shift to be over, craving a hamburger, and saying it constitutes an injection of the alive, actual body as a retort to the mechanical body. making a dark joke about one’s uncle within a narrative in which all iraqis are potential adversaries also constitutes a refusal: the uncanny role-play restitches itself into a moment of rebuke. indeed, dominic boyer and alexei yurchak (2010, 213) point to the possibility of satire in generating an “alternative aesthetics and practice of political critique.” without overthrowing a political order, such moments of laughter fusing with screaming might do “real political work, fostering the development of new subjectivities” (bernal 2013, 306). judith butler (2006, 127, 169) notes that such subversion may occur “from within the terms of the law,” while still offering the potential for the “parodic redeployment of power.” the law, in this instance, might be understood as the archetypal face imagined by military scriptwriters, a face required to repeat itself so many times that it becomes mechanical, turning the person into a cultural tool. indeed, these wartime intermediaries are being asked to enact, without rupture or divergence, a military fantasy of a range of readable and usable middle eastern individuals in wartime. within the training, each character encompasses a recognizable type and a lesson. in the crying room, for example, there are mourning mothers and sisters who might be willing to offer intelligence if that made their villages and children safer. the soldiers must establish a relationship with them, evince pathos when they weep, and convince them to offer assistance to the u.s. mission. in military logics of counterinsurgency, all local individuals in wartime are good guys, bad guys, or fence-sitters. fence-sitters can be wooed over to the american cause and co-opted as what hillel cohen (2010) has called “good arabs.” in this exercise, the women are potentially the good arabs: the soldiers’ success depends on their co-optability. in this constellation, the women must be willing to appreciate the rightness and justness of the american cause, the appeal toward a universal good, posited as implicit in the u.s. occupation of the mock middle eastern country. that archetype marginalizes the much more complex position and personal and familial stakes for the actual middle eastern individual in the middle of this geopolitical and ideological battle. in the scenario, the men of the house are affiliated with the militia. for the u.s. soldiers to be effective, they must procure social information and intelligence from the women. yet for those women to share information for them means risking everything and potentially finding themselves accused of betrayal by their own families. given their own wartime histories, many of the iraqi role-players are intimately familiar with those stakes. perhaps at least in part for that reason, rather than remaining wholly compressed into a military archetype, something else happens. lubna displaces the archetype of mourning mother/good arab, and instead yells out that she is hungry. salma, meant to act out an iraqi woman potentially affiliated with the terrorists, jokes about her uncle. these momentary eruptions in which laughter and screaming commingle are caused by the act of embodying the archetypal face—but they also interrupt it. just when machine-like repetition seems to refute the variability of the human being, living life itself returns in full force. through laughter-infused wailing, role-players find momentary means to comment on that artifice, creating a rebuke both to being turned into automated archetypes and to inhabiting wartime wounds. the outburst is something akin to donna goldstein’s (2003) “laughter out of place,” where humor forms a retort to suffering and precarity. through laughter, the role-players insist on a changed form of being alive after war’s injuries, effectively refusing to robotically enact the perfectly co-optable intermediary. one role-player, hussein, coined a name for this subversive affect. he described how role-players had reacted during a simulated funeral: “they brought him on the stretcher. some people were screaming and moaning. others were laughscreaming.” in this moment of affective surplus, the role-players distance themselves from embodying military archetypes and becoming slotted into the violent fixity of military categories. the person knows or feels more than the military narrative of their experience can accommodate, exceeding the constricted functions prescribed for a hired cultural tool. additionally, the laughscream acts as a refusal to be lived by the role and the role-players’ fraught wartime pasts. for those accused of betrayal and marginalized by their compatriots, pursued by iraqi militias and not always trusted by the u.s. soldiers whom they worked for, that past is painful. as one role-player explained, reflecting on the harshness many iraqis had endured: “we are turned inside out. at the same time, we can laugh and cry.” indeed, for iraqis who worked with the u.s. military, it is presently prohibitively dangerous to return to their former home, particularly amid the ascendance of the islamic state. meanwhile, due to their wartime choices, many now negotiate ongoing ambivalence and feel stranded between nations: although they were frequently ejected to the peripheries of their countries for working with the americans, many strongly identify with iraq and are ill at ease with full assimilation in america. as they continue to work for the u.s. military, some conceal that work from their families in iraq, grappling with how they might be perceived. amid these tensions, the laughscream functions in part as an actor, an agentive vector out. laughter rises to confirm that, for the role-players at least, the iraq of the simulation is not the iraq of their homeland. as fake guns sound, role-players repeat themselves, becoming increasingly estranged from the original object. yet, through laughter, the archetypal and mechanical face of country and person give way to iraqis who live impossibly hybrid and ambivalent lives in the united states to which they have aligned at such great cost. in the parodic redeployment of power as judith butler has conceived it, the mechanical performance of death becomes a complexly subversive act that momentarily insinuates life into the playing of a role. the role-players’ laughter matters—perhaps it can even be described as self-preservation for them—but what does this affective moment mean in the context of the military project? arguably, the military structure is neither undermined nor reinforced through affect: rather, it continues seemingly unchanged. even as role-players experience incongruities in middle eastern representations, or even as they laugh, little appears to change for the users of that cultural technology, the training soldiers. in my observation, the soldiers seem not to notice such momentary disjunctures and are quickly shuffled onward to the next simulation: that is, feelings do not appear to structure anything. when role-players laugh briefly, they veil their faces and the moment passes. when salma yelled that her uncle was a terrorist, i looked at her wide-eyed, laughed briefly, and the simulation continued unchanged. meanwhile, when role-players experience epistemological surfeits, they often keep these moments to themselves, unwilling to risk their jobs if they disagree with military supervisors. as heidegger (1996, 68) notes, a tool only truly “breaks” when it becomes “conspicuous” to its user. but these moments of disjuncture were not readily apparent to the soldiers. while acknowledging the potential agentive importance of such moments for the role-players themselves, i propose that there may be little impact on the military structure itself—or on the training soldiers, who are a step removed from these moments of surplus experienced by the role-players. reversing raymond williams’s classic formulation, analiese richards and daromir rudnyckyj (2009, 7) ask “not what structures feelings but what feelings structure.” conversely, i offer a case study where feelings may offer an altered possibility for those experiencing them, but may structure little within the military training itself. theoretically and on an existential level, such affective interruptions throw into question the contradictory assemblage of the human technology, and the extent to which human beings can be resourced in this manner. however, i contend that ultimately these individuals, harnessed as cultural tools, largely remain working within the terms forged for them. that is, their affective overflow may bear little relationship to the continuance of the military training project, as soldiers go on rehearsing the operationalization of culture. bill, a retired american soldier involved in the trainings, explained: “unless something interrupts the goals of the training, then whatever is done by the role-players, who gives a shit?” in his opinion, it seemed unlikely that the training soldiers even noticed such moments of disjuncture: “think about where their mind is [sic] at. you think they’re going to catch those little nuances? they could not care less. those things [the iraqis saying something extra or laughing for a minute] have no value.” john, another soldier involved in crafting and supervising trainings, agreed that moments of role-player disjuncture did not interrupt the training, but proposed that such instances might “in some cases reinforce training objectives.” moments of puzzlement might cause the training soldier to “wonder if he had redirected the cultural exchange in an uncustomary way.” however, he too concluded, by way of a question, that “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” i asked john about the possible relevance of role-players’ internal experiences in the role-play. i described the periodic jokes within the simulation, noting that they were particularly ironic and complicated if one knew the role-players’ backgrounds. some struggled with working for the u.s. military, given their mixed feelings about american interventions in the middle east. some even hid the work from their families back home. john found my observations tangential: “if there’s trauma behind it or it’s just sass, who cares? what’s the ‘so what?’ it’s surreal, i’ll give you that, but that may be all.” bill explained: “all that matters in the training is the soldiers get to practice rapport. all the rest is background noise.” within this logic, the training mechanism essentially remains undisturbed for the soldiers. indeed, we might conclude that the role-players might be used seamlessly as wartime technologies, without disrupting military systems or notions about others in the world. the soldiers enter the crying room, enact empathy for the mourning women, extract information with varying degrees of success, walk into the back room and find the weapons, confirming that the women are exactly who they suspected all along. reset. in the training machines of the cultural turn, both the middle eastern role-players and the soldiers are tools, part of a military system that resources humans in the service of empire. conclusion are affective forces capable of overthrowing discursive regimes and initiating new modes of living in the world (see guattari 1995)? without negating such momentary agentive possibilities for the individual, i follow recent anthropologists’ reminders that we must locate affect within power relations, inequalities, and violence (biehl 2013; adams 2013; berg and ramos-zayas 2015). in this instance, affective maneuvers recuperate subjectivity; they do not modify structures. still, a last ironic kink persists. military cultural trainings, at bottom, seek to prepare the soldier “for the real thing.” yet the simulations embody a charged irony, such that those who are militarized as human technologies, in part, to be themselves, know that they are anything but. this gap suggests that the military edifice itself is perhaps out of order, even on its own terms. namely, a training mechanism to render human terrain legible and containable, which effaces its own moments of excess, may well encounter its own limits when the soldiers arrive in the war zone. as one interlocutor, who problematized the fixed categories of some of the cultural trainings, cautioned by reading me this line from a william meredith (1987, 76) poem: “things are not orderly here, no matter what they say.” the laughscream is the hiccup in the machinery, one that may be imperceptible at the time of the training, but that may signal the structure’s potential breakability in the war beyond. notes acknowledgments my tremendous appreciation goes, first, to my writing group, stephanie savell and jennifer tucker, and also to elaine stone, for having so generously read many iterations of this article. my huge gratitude to dominic boyer, the anonymous peer reviewers, marcel laflamme, and petra dreiser at cultural anthropology, who all contributed to the trajectory of this article. thank you especially to my advisors and mentors at columbia university: nadia abu el-haj, brinkley messick, and marilyn ivy. and thank you to the many other friends and colleagues who offered essential input along the way: kenneth macleish, zoë wool, catherine trundle, emily sogn, and can açiksöz at the military bodies workshop at the university of michigan, as well as sameen gauhar, amelia boulware, allison titus, and john paul molenda. my deep gratitude goes as well to my iraqi and american interlocutors in the field. the research presented here was funded by the wenner-gren foundation, the osmundsen initiative, and the social science research council’s international dissertation research fellowship program. 1. the data for this article is drawn from observing cultural training exercises at three military bases and one military academy in the united states, which largely focused on counterinsurgency-related preparation, as well as interviews with iraqis in diaspora throughout the united states and jordan. i relied on participant-observation and conversations, as well as on more than ninety interviews with a combination of military personnel and the iraqis who worked with u.s. soldiers or companies. i was also occasionally cast in role-plays. interviews with role-players typically occurred in arabic. access to the military spaces came incrementally and was likely born of a particular geopolitical moment: the military was strategically engaged with culture, the province of my own academic discipline. i located myself as an outside observer interested in future academic jobs who did not plan to work for the military. my goal in this article is not to comment on any specific training exercise, protocol, or unit. instead of closely following one training exercise at one base, i chose to look at patterns at multiple bases across a range of different military units. this also allowed me to obscure the identities of my interlocutors and other particularities. 2. trainees typically use interpreters within simulations, and practice working with interpreters is seen as essential. although they have typically received some language training by this juncture (of varying duration, depending on rank and mission), soldiers i observed typically did not appear to understand the role-players (who were speaking in their own dialects), nor did they try to converse with them in arabic within or outside simulations, but generally relied on their interpreters. 3. a range of programs facilitated the entry of iraqis into the united states. in 2007, at the height of sectarian violence, only 6,000 iraqi refugees had been admitted to the united states. larger-scale processing was initiated at that juncture, focusing on the especially vulnerable, such as those impacted by sectarian violence or affiliated with the u.s. government. between 2007 and 2013, 84,902 iraqi refugees were admitted via the u.s. refugee admission program. the special immigrant visa program, which stipulated the admission of 5,000 affiliated iraqis each year between 2008 and 2012, rarely met quotas, in fact issuing fewer than 5,000 visas during the entire period. 4. in 2007, patrick porter (2007) described a “cultural turn” in the military’s field of counterinsurgency studies. the term entered the anthropological lexicon soon thereafter; see gregory 2008. 5. the metaphor of the human machine dates back to aristotle, was developed by rené descartes, and took on various permutations, from taylorism to the marxist critique of man’s estrangement from his own labor-power. the conceit of the human technology is inspired by this genealogy, as well as heidegger’s (1982) pivotal essay on technology. 6. this number is probably on the low side; a report from the congressional budget office 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after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tentacles of modernity tentacles of modernity: why electricity needs anthropology tanja winther harold wilhite university of oslo in recent years, there has been a rekindling of anthropological interest in energy and its relationship to economy, culture, and society, mainly motivated by two global crises: the approaching end of the oil era and global warming (strauss et al. 2013; mitchell 2011; huber 2013). as dominic boyer (2014) points out in a recent special issue of anthropological quarterly, while anthropological interest in energy is in the process of rebounding from a mid-twentieth-century lull, leslie white (1943) drew energy to the center of debates on human development in the 1930s and 1940s. white’s evolutionary theory of development was controversial, but his insights on the importance of energy in the development of modern capitalism stimulated new thinking that incorporated energy into discussions surrounding political economy and societal development. this legacy—critiqued and furthered by laura nader (1980, 2010) over the past three decades—features prominently in several new books and articles on the deep integration of energy, political economy, and development. in carbon democracy, timothy mitchell (2011) proposes that classic political economy treated energy and environment as exogenous to society. he argues that energy, development, and political power are integrated at local, national, and global levels. this integration constitutes “socio-technical worlds, in which what we call social, natural and technical processes are present at every point” (mitchell 2011, 239). matthew huber (2013), writing about oil and economic development in the united states, contends that oil has not only enabled capitalist political economy, but has permitted householders to incorporate capitalist principles in the ways they create and manage the home and household. anthropologists who have engaged with energy and society have mainly concerned themselves with fossil fuels and the role of these in global politics—specifically, around issues of climate change, energy security, and oil depletion. as to the societal impact of introducing electricity, which constitutes a radical shift in terms of harnessing, transporting, and consuming energy, there have been several noteworthy contributions over the past decades on the drives for and implications of western electrification (cowan 1983; hughes 1983; schivelbusch 1988; nye 1990). however, few contributions address the implications of the ongoing global extension of electricity. there is currently a global initiative to provide universal access to electricity, which promises that in the next fifteen years, 1.3 billion people will get access to electricity for the first time.1 this is likely to have enormous societal and cultural impacts. the tentacles of electrification can be regarded as a central element of “modernity at large” (appadurai 1996), and as we will show in this piece, electricity’s arrival in new places initiates a complex interaction between local ways of doing things and the multiple potentials for change that electricity brings. this interaction infiltrates virtually all of the traditional subjects of anthropology: senses of place; perceptions of risk; discourses of modernity; community and household practices; rituals and ceremonies; local economy and politics; and social relations of various kinds, from citizenship, kinship, and gender to generational dynamics and people’s relationships with occult forces. we argue that the study of electrification is essential to understanding not only the transformation of local cultural experiences but also an increasing translocal interconnectedness and its human implications. building on our previous empirical work in zanzibar,2 we will illustrate how the study of an electrification process and its social impacts yields translocal insights, and we will argue for a mobilization of anthropology around the processes and impacts of electrification. electricity makes marvelous things happen and its capacity to produce bright, radiant light makes an especially striking impression. electricity’s introduction thus tends to be associated with progress and modernity. this was the case in 1879 when thomas edison displayed an incandescent lamp for the first time in menlo park in new jersey, in 1886 when the sultan’s palaces in zanzibar town were lit, and from the 1920s onwards as electricity was extended to u.s. and russian villages and farms through rural electrification programs (coopersmith 1992; nye 1990). electricity is also associated with the provider, normally the state, and the arrival of electricity affects the state-citizen relationship in crucial ways. for example, with the coming of the electricity grid to rural zanzibar in the 1980s and 1990s, the government gained an efficient new mechanism for strengthening its political control over the population—a not uncommon desire for authoritarian regimes (scott 1998). when the grid arrived in uroa village, zanzibar, it triggered a tense local political conflict. as is common in zanzibar, uroa was divided into two main groups: the village administration and its opponents. the opposing group, skeptical about who would pay the costs of grid connection, was said to have run a campaign against electricity. they were described by the village administration as old and “backward” men who were afraid of electricity and were opposed to any change suggested by the administration. the debate continued for a year and included accusations that the opposing group was performing evil magic. several public protection rituals, partly led by islamic leaders, were organized in the village before electricity could finally be introduced. the arrival of electric light can change the meaning of place. in uroa people began to speak of their village (kijiji) as a town (mji) on the day the streetlights were turned on. by conceptually and materially bridging the gap between center and periphery, the electrified village redefined its position within discourses of modernity and development, thus elevating the status of this electrified place vis-à-vis neighbors who continued to live in darkness. conversely, james ferguson (1999) has used the deterioration of the electricity system in zambia as an icon of how people’s expectations of modernity came to falter. the sense of centrality brought on by electricity is further intensified by people’s newfound access to mass media and communication, enabled through such devices as televisions and mobile phones. electricity literally connects various localities in new ways and modifies perceptions of belonging. an older man in ikisaya village in kenya expressed his expectations that electricity and television would bring with them a feeling of inclusion and national identity: “when i have seen what the president looks like, i will also feel as being part of kenya” (winther 2015, 160). the coming of electricity also provides a medium for strengthening the social power of existing institutions. in uroa electricity strengthened the standing of islam, the villagers’ religious practices, and their affiliation with global islamic networks (winther 2008). amplifiers and speakers ensured that people would wake up for the 5:00 a.m. call for prayers, tape recorders and television programs conveyed the messages of grand religious leaders, and electricity-driven water pumps ensured access to clean water. overall, the bright, fluorescent light radiating from the village mosques at night testified to the purity and omnipresent power of islam in this place, evoking henrietta moore’s (1996) observation that the organization of the material world does not reflect social relations per se, but their representations. because electricity’s infrastructures are physically heavy, costly, and enduring, their configuration continues to remind observers of who holds power. conversely, women’s productive interests were not taken into account during electrification: female institutions in the village such as the mill and kindergarten were never electrified, reflecting women’s subordinated status in uroa. at the same time, the introduction of new technologies set negotiations of cultural values into motion. electricity was quickly integrated into funeral and wedding ceremonies in uroa by providing light for cooking and other activities at night, as well as powering the amplifiers and speakers to be used during religious talks and for music. electricity was regarded as so indispensable at funerals and weddings that the electricity company made allowances for increased electricity use during these ceremonies. similarly, the company allowed husbands with several wives living in separate buildings to save costs by connecting their various houses to the same electric meter, which is against formal regulations. a striking feature of the arrival of electricity was that the practices associated with many institutions and ceremonies were modified; nevertheless, access to electricity reaffirmed rather than changed existing ideologies and power relations. figure 1. uroa at night. photo by tanja winther. the zanzibari case exemplifies electricity’s potential to modify the geography of everyday movement, affecting everyday practices and relationships along the way. the desire to watch television prompted men to come home in the evening instead of spending time outside the house with friends. living rooms were restructured to allow for gender-mixed settings of television viewing while still keeping a proper moral order. due to the prestige of the modern couple hosting television-viewing time, the former gender hierarchy was temporarily challenged, elevating the female host’s social position above that of male guests. in general, people would socialize more in the evenings and go to bed later, leaving spouses with less time for intimacy. moreover, outdoor space was regarded as safer to humans because spirits were thought to prefer darkness and tended to withdraw from (en)lightened villages. with electric light, villagers reclaimed outdoor spaces at night that were formerly the domain of occult forces. after a decade, electricity was normalized in the village in a double sense; one-third of households had obtained a connection, and electricity was now considered something a house should have. one’s ability to meet the cost of a connection to one’s house (representing five months of income) became a new criterion for measuring men’s success as providers. before electrification, male status had been evaluated mainly based on the number of children and wives, but now a man might be ridiculed if he married a second or third wife without being able to provide the first wife with access to electricity. because it is vital for a man to treat his wives equally, the expectation that electricity would be provided became a barrier to marrying several wives. this shift, together with other new criteria for judgment of success that referenced development, led us to the conclusion that electricity’s arrival had contributed to establishing the modern realm as a third knowledge system (see barth 1993), working in parallel with islam and occult knowledge, including witchcraft and spirit knowledge. these snapshots of electrification’s multiple impacts in one site underscore the importance for ethnography and anthropological theory to take more seriously the place of electricity in maintaining and challenging social orders, an effect that tends to be overlooked in current assessments of electrification projects in the global south (winther 2015). these impacts also reveal what appear to be more universal qualities of electricity that are worthy of further anthropological reflection as they might illuminate and bridge different sites across the world. for example, the striking visibility of electric light helps electricity to effectively mark differences between places and groups, and due to the cost of connection, only the most privileged private homes in places like zanzibar tend to be connected. moreover, electricity’s materiality is fast. electric light can be summoned with a switch and thus more quickly than with kerosene, which entails finding matches and lighting a lamp. despite this high speed, the advent of high-voltage electricity systems also meant that the location of the production of electricity (and the pollution it generates) would most often be geographically distant from the points of consumption. the arrival of large-scale electricity grids led to a geographical and conceptual separation between production and consumption, reducing the control and know-how related to resource management and the environmental consequences of everyday practices. the sources for electricity’s production (e.g., hydropower, solar photovoltaic systems, or fossil fuels) may nonetheless affect people’s perceptions of the electric current. in principle, the closer consumers are to the production end (whether physically or mentally), the more significant the source of production is in terms of how they perceive electricity. the electricity in zanzibar was imported from the mainland of tanzania through submarine cables, and people were not concerned with its sources. in contrast, people in norway and france are highly concerned about their countries’ main sources of production (hydropower and nuclear, respectively), and this awareness influences people’s perceptions of the nature of electricity (winther and bouly de lesdain 2013). in norway, electricity is perceived to be cheap, safe, and clean, and is associated with the rivers providing the energy, which are natural and regarded as common resources. in france, electricity is perceived to be risky, both economically and in a physical sense. various “electricity cultures” are contingent on both sociocultural and sociomaterial factors. whatever perceptions people may have, the physical links between production and consumption invites the social study of electricity as chains of technologies (shove et al. 1998). electricity’s physical dangers also make themselves felt when electricity is new. poor insulation and secondhand appliances may trigger minor electric shocks (as one of the authors frequently experienced when living in zanzibar) and fuel the debate on electricity’s physical hazards. the theme of danger was most strikingly brought up in uroa by groups who opposed electrification and among ordinary men and women when discussing the potential use of electric stoves in the village. finally, electric light brings with it a fundamental impact on the distinction between day and night. instead of depending on the natural cycles of sun and moon, daily activities can be shifted in time and space. in this sense electricity enables people to overcome “natural” limitations and to experiment with new practices. in uroa this had the effect of speeding up the pace of life to the extent that many people felt that they had too little time. many referred to this effect when telling us about the changes brought by electric light and television, complaining that they now had “no time” (hamna time). also due to the new range of activities and resulting time constraints, women in uroa had cut down on the number of meals they cooked to two per day, contrasting with the continuing practice in nonelectrified villages of preparing three meals per day. thus not only was electricity perceived to be fast in itself, but it led to a new relationship to time that was detached from natural cycles and accelerated the pace of everyday life. correspondingly, people’s time management and concerns changed, often in unpredictable ways. the arrival of electricity in a new place is a moment when habitual practices are challenged and new practices form in the interaction between the close and the distant (wilhite 2008). electricity enables and conditions people’s access to light, television programs, mobile phones, fans, freezers, and other appliances, each of which have the capacity to transform social life in important ways. electricity is essential for virtually every form of modern media and is thus an important subject for ethnographic studies of temporality, distance, and translocal connectedness. new technologies require new solutions for organizing social life, triggering negotiations, conflict, and potentials for social transformation, but may also be used by groups in power to further strengthen their positions. at the same time, electricity forms a central element of contemporary existence and the sense of modern belonging. this is why the study of electrification as a social phenomenon is likely to provide food for thought in conversations about modernity, materiality, and sustainability. identifying the changes electrification brings to social relations, cultural practices, and human-nature relationships raises new theoretical and empirical challenges for anthropologists, yet the sociocultural dynamics of electrification have not yet drawn the attention they deserve from anthropology. conventional conceptions of electricity and electrification meanwhile propose that electricity-dependent technologies are silver bullets that will promote development and satisfy the needs and desires of consumers (wallenborn and wilhite 2014). there is a general need to bring experiential (situated) knowledge, cultural practices, material agency, and political economy to theories of development and electrification. this would imply, as the case of uroa illustrates, paying close attention to instances of electrification and how these impact both the social construction of needs and the mediation of social relations within the household and beyond. notes acknowledgments we thank dominic boyer and our two reviewers for valuable comments on earlier drafts. 1. the sustainable energy for all initiative (www.se4all.org) is a partnership of the united nations and the world bank. 2. fieldwork was conducted in rural zanzibar in 1991 and 2000–2001, with return visits in 2004, 2005, and 2006, totaling fifteen months of fieldwork. uroa village was the main village of study. zanzibar is a semiautonomous state that forms part of tanzania. see tanja winther (2008) for more details about methodology. references appadurai, arjun 1996 modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. barth, fredrik 1993 balinese worlds. chicago: university of chicago press. boyer, dominic 2014 “energopower: an introduction.” anthropological quarterly 87, no. 2: 309–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0020 coopersmith, jonathan 1992 the electrification of russia, 1880–1926. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. cowan, r. s. 1983 more work for mother: the ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave. new york: basic books. ferguson, james 1999 expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the zambian copperbelt. berkeley: university of california press. huber, matthew t. 2013 lifeblood: oil, freedom and the forces of capital. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hughes, thomas p. 1983 networks of power: electrification in western society, 1880–1930. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. mitchell, timothy 2011 carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. london: verso. moore, henrietta l. 1996 space, text and gender: an anthropological study of the marakwet of kenya. new york: guilford press. originally published in 1986. nader, laura 1980 “energy choices in a democratic society.” report of the consumption, location, and occupational patterns resource group, synthesis panel of the committee on nuclear and alternative energy systems, supporting paper 7. washington, dc: national research council. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18632 2010 the energy reader. oxford: wiley-blackwell. nye, david e. 1990 electrifying america: social meanings of a new technology, 1880–1940. cambridge, mass.: mit press. scott, james c. 1998 seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. new haven, conn.: yale university press. schivelbusch, wolfgang 1988 disenchanted night: the industrialisation of light in the nineteenth century. translated by angela davies. oxford: berg. originally published in 1983. shove, elizabeth, loren lutzenhiser, bruce hackett, simon guy, and harold wilhite 1998 “energy and social systems.” in human choice and climate change, edited by steve rayner and elizabeth l. malone, 291–325. columbus, ohio: battelle. strauss, sarah, stephanie rupp, and thomas love, eds. 2013 cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies. walnut creek, calif.: left coast press. wallenborn, grégoire, and harold wilhite 2014 “rethinking embodied knowledge and household consumption.” energy research & social science 1: 56–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2014.03.009 white, leslie a. 1943 “energy and the evolution of culture.” american anthropologist 45, no. 3: 335–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1943.45.3.02a00010 wilhite, harold 2008 consumption and the transformation of everyday life: a view from south india. new york: palgrave macmillan. winther, tanja 2008 the impact of electricity: development, desires and dilemmas. oxford: berghahn. 2015 “impact evaluation of rural electrification programmes: what parts of the story may be missed?” journal of development effectiveness 7, no. 2: 160–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19439342.2015.1008274 winther, tanja, and sophie bouly de lesdain 2013 “electricity, uncertainty and the good life: a comparison of french and norwegian household responses to policy appeals for sustainable energy.” energy and environment research 3, no. 1: 71–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/eer.v3n1p71 you-will-kill-me beans you-will-kill-me beans: taste and the politics of necessity in humanitarian aid micah m. trapp university of memphis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0741-4586 praise restaurant and fast food, your satisfaction is our concern rice and soup dried rice and fried fish fufu and soup tea—oats—soft drinks spaghetti, malta & cow meat —cook shop menu board at the buduburam liberian refugee camp the sumptuous pleasure of kiss meat comes from sucking the juices through its briny shell. although they require a massive amount of labor to harvest, clean, and prepare, the small river snails that liberians call kiss meat taste sublime and are touted as being able to enhance one’s kissing skills. although the tiny gray snail can be prepared in many ways, including barbecued with peanuts and hot pepper, kiss meat stewed in the buttery red fruit of the palm tree is particularly rich. an american journalist encountering liberians eating river snails during the civil wars that wracked the country between 1989 and 2003 called these creatures “iron meat”; her designation was intended to highlight the resilience of liberians devastated by war, and to position those who were willing to scavenge for such small, difficult forms of protein and sustenance as worthy subjects of aid in the humanitarian landscape that the hostilities had created. however, the harsh conditions of the wars, captured in the new moniker iron meat, removed the river snails from their sensual aesthetic as kiss meat and marked them as an undignified, rote, and compulsory form of subsistence. kiss meat was no longer desirable; it was, as iron meat, merely edible. figure 1. preparing palm butter. photo by micah trapp. the primary objective of many humanitarian projects is to save lives that have been deemed worthy of salvation (fassin 2012; fassin and rechtman 2009; redfield and bornstein 2010).1 sensory pleasure, or a focus on the taste of food provisions, often remains obscured by conditions of scarcity, the caloric demands of aid, and the imperative to provide adequate nutrition and sustain precarious lives. in the biopolitical domain of the refugee camp, food is a site of gustatory discipline. in 2002, for example, the zambian president levy mwanawasa was accused of allowing his people starve when he refused to accept genetically modified food aid from the united states. mwanawasa’s decision marks a demonstrable critique of the politics of necessity (annear 2004). but many humanitarian subjects—including refugees—do not often have such political powers. in my work in the buduburam liberian refugee camp, located forty kilometers west of accra, ghana, i have sought to understand how refugees’ demand for food with what they consider to be good taste is configured in equations of who is deserving, or in need of, humanitarian aid. my questions have centered on how the politics of necessity shape food provision as humanitarian aid. central to these inquiries are the critical opportunities afforded to refugee subjects by the aesthetics of taste—how cooking and taste reveal forms of refugee subjectivities that counter the humanitarian politics of necessity. the dominant humanitarian logic that seems to demand tasteless subjects reflects the broader narrative of loss surrounding notions of modern food supply in sub-saharan africa (freidberg 2003). but at buduburam, liberians did not simply reject or assimilate to the tastes of aid. rather, taste was a fundamental component in the humanitarian struggle. building on ten months of research in the camp between 2005 and 2008–2009, i argue in this article that liberian refugees have challenged the humanitarian politics of necessity by producing biographies of food aid and a public accounting of the historic and contemporary conditions of humanitarianism. by prioritizing the taste of refugee food, camp residents have challenged the reason of humanitarian reason by expanding the sensibility of food aid and repositioning recipients as essential figures in humanitarian aid. a taste for suffering taste occupies a contentious place in humanitarian food aid. as guests at the humanitarian table, refugees are expected and assumed to adapt to the most economical foods, those that provide the most caloric content and nutritional components at the lowest possible price. the “tastes of necessity,” as pierre bourdieu (1984, 168) put it, become a politics of necessity that pivots between economic and humanitarian logics regarding what the qualities of food aid should be and to whom it should go. anthropologists have understood that food practices shift to accommodate and incorporate new, less desirable foods during periods of war and migration (macbeth 1997; mintz 1996). however, analyses of specific cooking techniques have demonstrated that managing and manipulating foods is not simply a matter of assimilating to new cuisines or products, but can be in themselves acts of contestation and critique (wilk 2006, 109). elizabeth dunn (2011, 140–41) found, for example, that georgian refugees rejected food aid such as macaroni, claiming they were “foods of sorrow” and “anti-artifacts.” these provisions were not capable of sustaining social connections, meanings, and practices. foods of sorrow reflected the propensity of humanitarian aid to produce nothing of social value, to foster passivity, and to entrench a form of taste-less misery. physical and psychological suffering, as moral and bodily conditions, often function as the central justification for humanitarian intervention, and refugees are expected to produce grateful, embodied performances of the “mute victim” (redfield and bornstein 2010, 17–18; see also malkki 1996; ticktin 2011, 13). in casualties of care, miriam ticktin (2011) outlines the antipolitics of care that lies at the core of humanitarian aid to demonstrate how the moral dimensions of compassion and care carried out by humanitarian aid workers remain linked to the oppressive measures that prevent others from receiving aid, often on the basis of normative morality. for ticktin (2011, 5), “armed love” reflects how the protection of and care for suffering subjects are accompanied by and mask the violence toward and containment of those who have failed to meet the standards expected of a worthy recipient. what ticktin rightly finds is that the human universals reproduced by the moral pursuit of compassion reenact gender and racial inequalities. in humanitarian reason, didier fassin (2012, 226) looks beyond humanitarianism’s biopolitical technologies of management and care and focuses on the “politics of life” that “bring into play differentiated meanings and values of human lives.” with a politics of life, fassin refers to the public manifestations and negotiations of humanitarianism’s moral logic, which he locates in the concept of humanitarian reason. humanitarian reason may aim to save lives, but it must also determine which lives are worthy of salvation. premised on a christian theology that places biological life at the apex of value—what fassin (2012, 249) calls “biolegitimacy”—humanitarian reason asserts a single moral economy in which all human life is rendered equal. in practice, moral concern for human suffering fuses with the politics of governing the lives of precarious subjects. the principled language of humanitarian reason has shifted from a vocabulary of social critique to a supposedly self-evident application based on moral sentiment and compassion: injustice reappears as suffering, violence manifests as trauma, and domination becomes a matter of misfortune (fassin 2012, 6–7, 247). socially structured inequality between humanitarian benefactors and humanitarian recipients ensures the reproduction of inequalities; the altruistic impulses of the giver have precedence over the rights of the receiver (fassin 2012, 253). humanitarianism compels its subjects to mimic the tropes of suffering and redemption to reproduce its reason (agier 2010; fassin 2012; feldman 2012; knudsen 1995; mckay 2012; ticktin 2011). in response to the ever-suffering victim created by humanitarianism, miriam ticktin (2014, 283–84) has called for a conceptual shift away from focusing all attentions on abject misery. but as a field, the study of transnational humanitarianism has clear applied implications for the practice of humanitarian aid. to evacuate suffering is to challenge an ever-present and sensitive point: the humanitarian apparatus requires suffering, and refusing to focus on need in the refugee camp can imply its lack of care and therefore undercut the reason and pursuit of humanitarian intervention.2 at the buduburam camp, where the emergency phase of humanitarian aid had ended and residents remained plagued by chronic inequalities and poverty, i decentered the suffering body, as well as the enlightenment preference for voice, vision, and reason.3 my intervention is not about individual action or resistance to the humanitarian apparatus; rather, my work takes issue with the reason of humanitarian reason and shifts the focus from suffering to tasting subjects, ones who do not simply mimic and take on the language of humanitarianism but collectively engage and critique its reason. in his well-known introduction to the taste of ethnographic things, paul stoller (1989, 19–21) tells the story of djebo, a young songhay woman who prepared an especially disgusting sauce, fukkho hoy, to express her discontent with her marginal social position within the household. djebo was not simply a bad cook, or lacking in ability to taste; rather, in an act of “calculated distastefulness,” she utilized her cooking as a tool for social critique.4 in the refugee camp, food aid was both disgusting and delicious, but the biopolitics of food aid positioned disgust and tastelessness as the unmarked norm, while delicious foods appeared as an impossible contradiction, matter out of place. to tease out the nature of social critique embedded in the culinary work invested in food aid, i focus on the sensual interplay of taste to show how refugees rejected the biopolitics of necessity. in this article, i argue that liberian refugees used taste as a tool to interpret and respond to the conditions of humanitarian aid in ways that challenge the logic of humanitarianism. david sutton (2001, 89–90) has argued that smell and taste, as emotionally charged senses, “evoke what surrounds them in memory” but elude discursive formation: that is, humans react strongly to the sensory memories, but they struggle to articulate the dimensions of both smell and taste. drawing from the treatment of the social life of things (appadurai 1986), i trace biographies of taste to reflect how the classification and treatment of food provided to refugees produced a powerful, public accounting of the history and contemporary conditions of humanitarianism that challenges two foundational assumptions of humanitarian reason: first, the inevitable inequality between the giver and receiver that prioritizes the humanitarian giver; and second, the unquestioned valuation of biological life above all else. through the creation and categorization of refugee food, liberians rejected the reason of humanitarian reason and repositioned the recipient as an essential figure in humanitarian aid. i begin my argument by tracing a historical biography of taste from liberia to buduburam to set the stage for a critical inquiry into the politics of necessity. following this discussion, i draw on my own sensory engagements at buduburam to demonstrate the potential of taste to shift and critique the language and reason of humanitarianism. focusing on the politics of necessity, my analysis of corn, an emblematic refugee food, reveals the ways in which refugees did not inherently acquire a taste for necessity, but relied on taste as a necessary tool for collectively navigating and responding to humanitarian aid. i then turn to the ways in which refugees privately struggled to maintain tasteful seasoning and exchange of food and suggest that the sensual experience of food aid destabilizes the authority and privilege of the humanitarian giver and repositions refugees as critical figures of humanitarian aid. moving between the tastes and exchanges among refugees, i return to the public, collective form of refugee food to demonstrate how taste further disrupts the reason of humanitarian reason. here i discuss two biographies of taste—drip and you-will-kill-me beans—that counter the preoccupation with biopolitics in contemporary humanitarian aid. as previously mentioned, this article is based on ten months of research in the camp between 2005 and 2008–2009. in 2008–2009, i collaborated with a team of liberian community health workers from the children’s nutrition center, a program run by the national catholic secretariat (a charitable arm of the catholic church in ghana) and subcontracted by the united nations high commission for refugees (unhcr). together, we conducted twenty-eight household food economy interviews with refugees, eleven interviews with key humanitarian aid stakeholders, three focus groups on social status, and two daily household food-economy logs for one month. we also administered 135 household food-economy surveys, including an ethnographic measure of household food-security status and social resource mapping (see schiffer and waale 2008).5 as a medium to contrast and bring my own phenomenological reading of buduburam’s food, i describe how my daily encounter with the smells, tastes, and sounds of the camp became a central component of my analysis, comprising a “sensory ethnography” (pink 2009). smell-no-taste on the way to monrovia there is a town called smell-no-taste; it is a place where the intersection between humanitarianism and taste takes on a biopolitical life. the town acquired its moniker during world war ii when the u.s. government built an airport in liberia as a humanitarian gesture, though the project was brokered with the agreement that the united states would also maintain military use of the facility (dunn 2009, 70).6 while it preceded formalized institutions of humanitarian aid, smell-no-taste foreshadows the ambiguities and violent potential of contemporary aid. with the launch of the new airport project, many liberians moved near the site in search of temporary construction work. as some have explained to me, the labor migrants lived so close to the american military base that they could smell the cooking of american food, though they were never able to taste it. the smell of the american food passed into the nostrils of liberians, but the american soldiers did not deign them worthy of a taste. according to testimony given to the liberian truth and reconciliation commission, the american soldiers instead abused liberian civilians who ventured near the american base (republic of liberia truth and reconciliation commission 2009, 120).7 while the liberian laborers were eager to engage the american soldiers in hospitable relations, the soldiers appeared to disregard the liberians as undeserving guests. in naming the town smell-no-taste, liberians emphasized the dehumanization of this act and, at the same time, leveled a critique of the american soldiers’ presence. moreover, the town presents an enduring sensory record of the tasteless american inhospitality now codified on a map and illustrates the historical legacy of humanitarian sentiment and intervention to perpetuate, rather than alleviate, suffering. figure 2. side entrance to the buduburam camp, with a path leading up through the market. photo by micah trapp. located forty kilometers west of accra along the busy international road stretching across the southern portion of ghana rests a site of contemporary humanitarian intervention: the buduburam liberian refugee camp. it emerges from the landscape as a massive sprawl of concrete buildings and unpaved dirt pathways. a busy car park, police station, unhcr trailers, a barbed-wire–protected camp manager’s office, and a market where ghanaian and liberian vendors peddled fresh, dried, fermented, and prepared foods, used clothing, and an array of household goods all marked the entrance to buduburam. after the outbreak of civil war in liberia in 1989, the ghanaian government, with support from unhcr, opened the buduburam camp in august 1990 to accommodate the thousands of refugees who arrived in ghana due to the hostilities. over the course of more than two decades, the unhcr and humanitarian aid organizations provided official support in the form of refugee protection, food aid, health care, and educational programs. the world food program (wfp) initially provided wet (prepared) food aid at buduburam, but this was soon replaced with dry (commodity) food rations, which consisted primarily of corn and soy products supplied by industrialized monocropping. food aid followed a targeted assistance plan directed at refugees deemed “vulnerable,” and by march 2009, fewer than six thousand refugees—of the projected twenty-four thousand official refugees residing at buduburam—were eligible to receive rations, despite widespread, chronic poverty. each eligible individual was allowed to acquire the prescribed monthly rations: maize (12.6 kg), beans (1.5kg), a corn-soya blend (1.5 kg), vegetable oil (0.9 kg), and salt (0.15 kg) (unhcr 2009, 196).8 the standardized wfp rations were calculated based on minimum daily caloric requirements; in focusing on calories, humanitarian projects take the refugee camp as a site of culinary absence, minimizing the importance of taste in food aid. nonetheless, for refugees to survive, the raw food rations need to be transformed into edible forms. in other words, refugees must cook. liberians possess a rich history of culinary innovation. the segment of the west african coast that now constitutes the liberian nation used to be called the grain coast, given its prolific production of rice. in black rice, judith carney (2001) countered more than a century of scientific racism that attributed the ingenuity of rice production in the american south to plantation owners. in fact, it was those who crossed the middle passage that possessed the knowledge and skill of cultivating rice.9 in the caribbean, sidney mintz (1996, 37) argued that the cooking practices and preferences of slaves expressed human potential, creating the foundation for freedom. however, as the colonization and founding of liberia attests, cooking practices and tastes more frequently facilitate exploitation and exclusion. in the early nineteenth century, before the end of the transatlantic slave trade, the american colonization society (acs) launched a colonization plan that eventually resulted in the founding of the liberian nation in 1847. members of the acs felt threated by the presence of freed blacks from the americas and justified their plan as a benevolent process of returning home (burrowes 2001). however, many of the black settlers—primarily middle-class, free black men and women who had experienced pervasive racism in the united states—did not identify with the indigenous population on the west african coast. instead, they formed an elite group of americo-liberians and perpetuated their authority through embodied practices of distinction (moran 1990, 58). daily rituals of cleanliness, wearing western dress, speaking english, eating with a fork, and baking bread in an oven became markers of being “civilized” (fraenkel 1964, 270).10 figure 3. pig feet at the market. photo by micah trapp. limited written accounts of food in liberia have resulted in the glossing of diverse cuisines as “african food” or “west african food,” but the variety of regional cooking practices and tastes in liberia, alongside the incorporation of processed foods such as spaghetti, oats, canned goods, and certain vegetables—cabbage, carrots, green beans, lettuce, and potatoes—and baked goods (e.g., shortbread; cornbread) from the american south as “civilized” foods points to a distinct cuisine reflective of centuries of migration.11 like many cuisines, liberian food is premised on a core staple consumed in tandem with a wide range of fringe foods, such as a sauce, soup, or stew prepared on a daily basis (mintz 1986).12 rice has endured as the preferred staple and life source for liberians: most will say they have not eaten unless they have consumed rice. cassava also contributes significantly to the caloric and nutritional base of the diet, but liberians also boil, roast, and fry other starch crops, such as plantains, eddoes, yams, and corn.13 while starches are the foundation of a meal, a variety of sauces, including palm butter, groundnut stew, potato greens, palava sauce (made with jute or okra leaves), cassava leaves, pepper soup, beans, okra, garden egg (eggplant), and pumpkin (butternut squash) are made spicy through the liberal use of scotch bonnet peppers, and they are made rich through the addition of vegetable or red palm oil and multiple protein sources, including dried and fresh fish, chicken, turkey, pig’s feet, cow meat, crabs, shrimp, river snails, land snails, bush meat (such as dried monkey or wild boar), and spring chickens (frogs). stews often exemplify regional food preferences: torborgee—a spicy stew prepared with bitterballs (pea eggplant), baking soda, and fermented red palm oil—is especially favored in the northwestern region of lofa, while palm butter remains a specialty of the southeastern county of maryland.14 with the founding of liberia, regional variations in cooking were roughly cobbled together with cooking traditions from the american south to create a liberian cuisine, a paradigm against which the new foods, tastes, and cooking practices of humanitarian aid were evaluated when liberians were forced to occupy refugee camps following the war. the art of eating in 2005, my first and only experience with eating wfp food rations in buduburam introduced a new line of inquiry into my study of food aid: the simple act of eating demanded a critical engagement with the practice and reason of humanitarianism. at the time of my tasting, i lived with mary, a liberian woman who was an exceptional cook. one night, the heavy sound of the rainy season on the tin roof woke mary and me to discover the rumbling of our bellies. we heard the tiny feet of mice scurrying about the small indoor cooking area as mary lit a candle and searched for some of the leftover ground corn-soya blend (csb) rations that her neighbor had given her earlier in the day. though many liberians regarded csb as tasteless, we sat on the floor, spooning into our mouths the hot porridge that mary had made creamy and delicious through the addition of sugar and milk powder so that we could again fall asleep. if i had not been so hungry, i would not have joined my liberian host in eating what i felt were precious rations, unintended for my consumption. however, this unexpected feast allowed me to taste the delicious potential of humanitarian aid transformed by a skilled cook. when i returned to buduburam in 2008, i encountered csb again as i chatted with elizabeth, an elder at the camp. she spooned csb—which she dry-toasted over the fire until it had taken on a deep, amber color—out of a small glass jar. the csb smelled pleasantly nutty, and i was intrigued by the new flavor profile that elizabeth had achieved without the addition of the fatty, expensive ingredients that mary had used years earlier. elizabeth’s innovation was in fact indicative of the contractions and ambiguities of the changing scope of aid: the unhcr was eager to close the camp, and humanitarian aid had all but crawled to a halt, leaving refugees to manage in an even scarcer terrain.15 the move to reduce humanitarian aid was politically motivated to encourage repatriation to liberia, but liberians placed a great social importance on sharing food and resisted the taste of necessity as they called out “let’s eat!” to those who arrived or passed by when food was being consumed. their exhortation “let’s eat” demonstrates the openness and generosity of liberians to both friends and strangers, and although living conditions were difficult at buduburam, one man proclaimed that liberians always knew that they would be able to get food because everyone shared. while hospitality played a significant role in liberian society, this characterization of food sharing was idealistic: my household food-economy survey data revealed that 7 out of 135 surveyed households (5 percent) had taken to the troublesome and stigmatized act of regularly begging for food, while another 78 households (58 percent) had begged for food at least once while living at buduburam. liberian hospitality suffered in the refugee camp, and the invitation to eat took on additional meaning as liberians managed a landscape of scare resources and hosts were frequently overextended. circumstances such as these amplified the dissonance between the tastes of necessity and those of luxury as refugees balanced their capacities and roles as both guest and host, a matter further magnified by my presence (serres 2007). my appetite and taste for liberian food was not without complications: i hailed from “america,” the wealthy, privileged colonizer and sometimes benevolent benefactor, and i had an appetite in a refugee camp, where access to and distribution of food were measured, controversial, and laden with social meaning and inequality. in this environment i had to balance whether or not to accept food (this proved especially challenging when visiting a household with very limited means), how much i should eat (or could, if i was hungry, which i often was), where i ate, and whether i would contribute food to a household. when offered food, i usually ate a bite or two unless doing so would overextend the capacity of the host, but at mary’s house i felt freer to eat, given her access to resources and the depth of our social relationship, which allowed me to offer both food and money as a treat rather than as aid. mary set aside food for me, and though she was an incredible cook, i rarely finished it, because doing so would imply i was not satisfied. however, one evening i was so hungry and the dry rice that she had prepared with okra, kittaly (dried bitterball), peppers, canned luncheon meat, and red palm oil was so delicious that i could not stop eating. mary commented with surprise and slight irritation at my unexpected hunger. she revealed to me then that she relied on my observance of the social norm of leaving food, so that she could have a snack before sleeping. in this moment my hunger became both a nuisance and a methodological tool. mary eventually allowed me to cook alongside her, often outside. neighbors were amused by my interest in the arduous task of cleaning kiss meat, while others were concerned i would take this culinary knowledge back to america and make a profitable business out of it, leaving liberians with nothing. though initially befuddled by this hostility, i came to understand my interest in cooking as a contemporary iteration of deeper histories of exploitation. decentering the authority, privilege, and power i embody as a potential humanitarian giver presents an opportunity for hostility to become a matter of critique and sets the stage for understanding how cooking and taste became a means of countering humanitarian reason. inhospitable refugee food liberians often used the term refugee food to describe what they were able to access, prepare, and eat at buduburam, and they generally used the phrase to refer to foods that were primarily functional—the tastes of necessity responsible for filling the stomach—and not liberian food. liberians ate corn prior to exile, but at buduburam it became an emblematic refugee food as it took the form of banku—a fermented and mashed mixture of cassava and corn similar to liberian cassava fufu—and replaced rice when resources were limited.16 one afternoon, on entering the house of a husband, wife, and five children, i immediately inhaled the powerful, sour scent of fermenting corn. cecelia, the mother, explained that she had been soaking their ration of corn for the past few days, but had delayed in preparing it because they had managed to get a few cups of rice. the corn-based food rations were consistent with ghanaian dietary preferences, but they clashed with liberian tastes. the notable blending—a process of creolization incorporating known and unknown foods—of corn into the dough produced a rough texture that significantly changed the taste of the staple (wilk 2006, 114). corn, or banku, more specifically, as an emblematic refugee food demonstrates the ways in which refugees did not inherently acquire a taste for necessity, but relied on taste as a means of collectively navigating and responding to humanitarian food aid. liberians differed in their preferences for banku; many ate it privately, primarily out of economic necessity, while for others, the public preparation of banku reflected the complex and contested relationships between cooking, taste, and humanitarianism. when i first met gloria, a liberian woman who had lived at buduburam since 1990, she insisted that she was hungry and that i, as a foreigner, should be able to help her get food. adhering to my informed consent procedures, i told gloria that i was prohibited from influencing food rations, but my compliance with bureaucratic protocol was taken as ridiculous: i certainly had the private resources to offer food and, therefore, should. gloria’s request nagged me, and so on christmas morning, i went to the market and purchased the ingredients for the “rich” (delicious) palm butter she had described during our interview. when i arrived at her house, gloria was astonished and, with a laugh, said that she did not actually expect me to bring food. her request had been a statement about the conditions of scarcity at the camp, which she wanted me to document in my research records. gloria positioned herself as an active participant in constructing my ethnographic account, and even though she did not expect or even want me to bring her food, she continued to ask me for food, reifying the humanitarian reason of the deprived moral subject. weeks later, gloria extended an invitation to share a meal of banku and grilled fish, since i had not tasted her christmas palm butter. as i enjoyed the sour, gritty tang of the banku—with crispy grilled fish, hot pepper sauce, and the surprising bite of raw onion—gloria confided that we would need to hide the fact that she had prepared banku from her neighbor. gloria had already offered food to several guests that day and her small pot of banku could not be stretched further. though her neighbor was a skilled cook and loved to eat banku, she did not prepare it because it was not liberian food. the blending of corn into cassava fufu could privately be tasty, but the public taste of corn transformed it into a refugee food. gloria’s neighbor was a respected elder, talented cook, and comparatively well-off: preparing banku would potentially give other liberians further grounds to question her solidarity with the plight of refugees at buduburam. by consuming a refugee food, gloria’s neighbor would unwillingly promote the assumption that refugees should adopt the taste for necessity. it was these sorts of public demonstrations surrounding the taste of banku, and refugee food more generally, that pointed to the inhospitable condition of refugee life in ghana, where food had the potential to nourish, but was not inherently nourishing. in this environment, cooking and taste were a necessity. rosaline, a young mother of six, prepared her food outside her front door in a charcoal cookpot. she was a deft cook and could quickly pull a boiling pot from the fire with only her bare hand. we chatted one afternoon as she prepared banku, which she then offered to a group of male neighbors sitting nearby. they promptly declined her offer with a colorful response that evoked their sense of disgust with banku and the overall inhospitality of the ghanaian refugee food system. the outright, public rejection of banku as a disgusting ghanaian food compressed corn into a symbolic iteration of refugee food, removing the nuance and deliciousness of its preparation (wilk 2006, 118). the tastelessness of banku prevented rosaline from being an adequate host while the collective creation and negotiation of refugee food induced a consciousness of, rather than consensus with, the tastes of necessity and humanitarian reason. through private and public constructions, exchanges, and refusals of refugee food, liberians revealed and engaged the reason of humanitarian reason. their taste laid the foundation for its critique. seasoning aid liberians remained proud of their well-seasoned, complex cuisine and their generous attitudes toward providing delicious food for all guests; but at buduburam, refugees struggled to maintain tasteful seasonings and exchanges of food within the parameters humanitarian necessity. buduburam was host to many foreigners: volunteers working for fledgling aid organizations, researchers, and officially dispatched aid workers. collectively glossed as “white,” foreigners were considered a necessary but indistinct part of the humanitarian aid system. foreigners frequently dismissed liberian food as unpalatable and unhealthy: it was too spicy, too salty, or too oily. in initial interviews with refugees, i inquired about nutritious foods, but research participants did not understand what i meant by nutritious. nourishment, for liberians, was more frequently evaluated in terms of “richness” and the sensory pleasures of taste. betty, a woman who regularly struggled to feed her family, described it this way: “my heart can’t satisfy. . . . i want those things [plantains] today, but no hand [no money]. so i will not get it. so it will make me hungry. it will make me to be full when i cook it. . . . oh, it can make me fat! my stomach can get full . . . so i can get fat. but now, now i can’t get the thing i like, that what make me dry [skinny] like this.” what was good for the body was synonymous with what tasted good: food was a sensuous encounter, not simply a matter of sustaining biological life. but in the refugee camp, nourishment favored the embedded caloric norms of humanitarian reason. aware that liberians regarded maize with a kernel of disgust, aid workers were often defensive about the limits of donor-based aid. a wfp program officer explained the challenges of accommodating refugee tastes: “even though we try to make sure that taste, the beneficiaries’ tastes and so on [are taken] into account, we can’t afford to give the rice. you understand? . . . it’s very, very difficult for an agency, for wfp, to do rice. . . . rice is a very expensive commodity. and if we want to reach as many beneficiaries, you know, as you would like, you cannot afford to do rice.” the program officer continued to grapple with the cultural significance of taste in her comparison between liberians at buduburam and liberians at the krisan refugee camp in the volta region of ghana. like in krisan, the people don’t have any other sources of getting food. they all have fish. they love the maize. in buduburam they don’t like the maize much. . . . because you see, people in buduburam have tried to keep their liberian-ness about them, even though they have been here for nineteen years, and that’s not a bad thing at all. . . . but i think that in terms of adapting to what’s available in ghana, they haven’t been able to do it so well. whereas the other caseloads have been more open to what ghana has to offer. while the officer attempted to laud liberians at buduburam for maintaining their cultural preferences, her implicit questioning of buduburam liberians’ inability to adapt to ghanaian tastes speaks to the challenges of aesthetic intolerance (bourdieu 1984, 56). the moral undertone of needing to adapt “to what ghana has to offer” deflected the limits of humanitarian aid onto the cultural landscape of ghana and the palates of liberians, which should adjust to the tastes available. focusing on sensual experiences and the seasoning of food challenges the prioritization of the obligations (and tastes) of the humanitarian giver and repositions refugees as essential figures of humanitarian aid. in response to this, a u.s.–based christian aid organization operating at buduburam attempted to accommodate the liberian taste for rice by providing fortified rice for malnourished children. one morning i worked alongside the cooks at a children’s feeding school that received this special rice. the cooks were preparing garden eggs (eggplant) for lunch, and it was my responsibility to pound the cooked vegetables into a sauce. once i had finished, the cooks instructed me to open the rice sent from the united states. the packets were unusually small—just one pound—and contained pussava, a parboiled rice much favored by liberians, but they were also fortified with textured soy protein, mushrooms, dehydrated vegetable bits, vitamins, and a seasoning mix. while rice and bouillon seasoning were consistent with liberian tastes, several of the children had become sick after eating the rice, so much so that the weight measurements of the children dropped for two months following the introduction of the rice. while the offering of fortified rice maintained a commitment to the obligations of the humanitarian giver, the necessity of seasoning food to make it palatable situates the recipient as an active consumer of humanitarian aid. bouillon, also called “chicken soup” or simply “cube,” was one of the most widespread seasonings in liberia and at buduburam. bouillon came in many brands, shapes (cube, rectangle), and flavors (chicken, shrimp, crawfish, pig) and was typically sold in quantities of one or three. cooks combined multiple flavors of cube in one pot, simmering with crawfish while finishing with a crumble of chicken. the technique of submersion incorporates one ingredient into another, so that each is rendered ambiguous, unknowable (wilk 2006, 115), and the cooks at the feeding school had desperately tried submerging the taste of “that ugly rice” through cube, but to no avail. the headmistress of the school had appealed to the program director to alternate the nutritional fortified rice with the more popular butter rice, but her request was denied. the u.s. organization had strict requirements for the use of aid: do not distribute it dry, prepare it according to the instructions, each package feeds six students, and take weekly weight measurements. when i returned to the united states, i visited the aid organization to interview one of the international program directors, who understood that rice was the favored staple of liberians and aimed to provide food that would be both nourishing and delicious. while the rice reflected the refugees’ tastes, the organization’s attempt to control the preparation and consumption of the rice nonetheless relegated refugees to the tastes of necessity. however, when faced with the prospect of “running stomachs” (diarrhea), the cooks countered the logic of humanitarian reason by instructing me to carefully remove the dried vegetables and soy before dumping the rice into the boiling water. figure 4. varieties of cube and other seasonings for sale at a small market table. photo by micah trapp. the seasoning of food aid to make it both palatable and safe challenged the nutrient-based logic of humanitarian aid, but other contested acts of seasoning extended the critical capacity of taste to more directly impact refugee subjectivities and to dislodge the embedded prioritization of the humanitarian giver. on the afternoon that gloria had invited me to eat banku, she had returned from the hospital where she had been under supervision for a heart problem. as her son prepared the banku, a young woman in the neighborhood came by the house to tell them to set aside food for her. after she left, gloria and her son complained about the woman’s frequent requests for food, but nonetheless set some aside. when they called the neighbor to eat, she tasted the food and immediately exclaimed in disgust that it needed cube. gloria, her son, and their neighbor became quickly embroiled in a debate about the correct seasoning of the sauce. gloria urged her son to put cube in the food, but he adamantly refused in silent defense of the doctor’s orders that gloria consume a low-sodium diet. the neighbor insisted the food did not taste good, and gloria begged her son to add cube. at his continued refusal to do so, gloria explained to her neighbor that white people did not eat salty food, with a notable glance in my direction. my presence only further angered the neighbor, who pointed out: “i’m not a white woman. i’m a black woman.” trying to calm her neighbor, gloria urged her to get cube from inside the house, after which the woman stormed into gloria’s kitchen, took part of a cube, and crumbled it on top of her sauce. in this instance, the sensuous experience of taste revealed and challenged the whiteness and privilege of humanitarian aid; the insistence on cube repositioned the refugee—and the right of the guest to be satisfied—as a central and worthy subject. dangerous and delicious aid the taste of food aid acquired collective force as refugees embraced and constructed biographies of the sensuality of refugee food: two accounts—of drip and you-will-kill-me beans—challenged the embedded biopolitics of humanitarian reason. liberians who needed to stretch their food money ate kokodolo, or koko—a ghanaian corn porridge—in the morning and often at night to fill the stomach.17 one to two heaping spoons of sugar were poured into a plastic bag, followed by steaming hot, smooth liquid corn. the bag was tied tightly and one would simply bite off a corner of the bag and let the koko slide into the mouth. although liberians had consumed corn and oat porridge for breakfast prior to exile, at buduburam they had taken to calling the porridge “drip,” a renaming that highlighted its functional role as a mere “hunger killer” (mintz 1986). the koko acted as an iv, allowing for the stomach to be filled with corn and sugar before sleep. drip embodied a stylized form of presentation, serving, and eating: it was sold in a plastic bag that had to be raised above the head to allow the liquid to effortlessly slip down the throat. by acknowledging and embracing drip for its functional necessity, liberians used the stylization characteristic of the tastes of liberty (bourdieu 1984, 6) to produce the discursive innovation of drip. by bringing attention to its function as a hunger killer, drip highlights the conflation of the refugee figure with the taste for necessity. the creative and facetious ingestion of drip as a life-support system challenged the medicalized approach of humanitarian aid. by dislodging humanitarian reason from the experience of being a refugee, refugees challenged the expectation to assimilate to the tastes of the humanitarian aid system. liberians “interpret[ed] . . . the scarcity on offer and counter[ed] . . . it with an abundance not merely as compensation but as if to show the inanity of the very premise of scarcity it comports” (abbas 2014, 518).18 in preparing, serving, and even relishing the abundance of corn, refugees revealed the inanity of a humanitarian aid system premised on the restrictive and inhumane expectation of the refugee as a tasteless subject. food aid at the buduburam camp adhered to a supplementary food program; provisions added nutrients to an existing base of food. as one step beyond the bare caloric minimum, proteins occupied an ambiguous position in food aid and the informal classificatory scheme of refugee foods. as protein sources, beans introduced through humanitarian aid were rendered both delicious and disgusting. as provisions of humanitarian aid, beans became a commentary on the taste for necessity and a critique of humanitarian reason. in a food-ration basket containing primarily starches, beans provided a vital source of protein, but they also confused the distinction between the tastes for necessity and luxury. liberians prepared beans in a variety of ways—bean gravy, beans torborgee (a variation on the preparation of bitterballs [pea eggplants] with baking soda and fermented red palm oil)—and the presence of beans in the refugee camp did not automatically signal a refugee food. the ambiguity of beans required more explicit classificatory work for taste to operate as a critique of humanitarian reason. prior to exile in ghana, liberians were exposed to humanitarian tastes when the wfp introduced lentils in liberia during the war. lentils, as a legume, were fairly flexible, and many liberians incorporated them into their diet by preparing them in the same way that they prepared beans. according to richard wilk (2006, 116), the incorporation of new foods usually occurs alongside shortage or hardship. although the transformation of food may include renaming the food to distinguish it from its previous form, in many cases, the substitution attempts to conceal the change. yet when incorporating lentils into their diets, liberians did not attempt to hide the substitution, but instead renamed lentils “you-will-kill-me beans.” liberians shared a number of explanations for this particular designation with me. in one account, you-will-kill-me beans arrived in liberia during the war and tasted so “sweet” (delicious) and heavy that one would eat them, fall asleep, and be killed by rebels in one’s heavy sleep. in another interpretation, a man cooked four cups of beans and four cups of rice, ate it all, and went to sleep. he never woke up. in a third narrative, you-will-kill-me beans were one of the first foods provided by the united nations to refugees. because there was no other food available, liberians ate the beans until they were full and would be killed by the monotony of eating the beans. in a final account, a man was said to have been eating the beans every day because he did not have enough money for rice. the man said, “if these beans don’t kill me, i will kill them.” the accounts of you-will-kill-me beans utilize the preparation and taste of the beans to tell a story about how liberians understood and responded to the politics of necessity. in each case, the narrative confronts the prioritization of biopolitical life. in the first narrative, the deliciousness of the beans distracts the humanitarian subject from the threat of war and points to the danger of blindly accepting and ingesting aid or expecting that it will alter the conditions that prompted the need for humanitarian aid in the first place. it reproduces the status quo of armed love. but the narrative also critiques the prioritization of biological life embedded in humanitarian reason: tasting the sweet deliciousness of the beans becomes worthy of the sacrifice of life. in the second narrative, the deprived humanitarian subject encounters the delicious and dangerous potential of the beans and consumes it with abandon: the abundance results in a gluttonous biological demise. the third narrative similarly highlights the monotony of food aid, but exclusively points to the disgust for and dangers of the beans. the explicit hailing of the unhcr in this narrative holds the united nations and humanitarian aid more generally accountable when the abundance and accompanying monotony of the taste of necessity becomes unbearable, producing a direct critique of the contradictions of humanitarian reason as both prioritizing and destroying life. the final narrative also foregrounds the disgust and displeasure of the beans, but instead of succumbing to the violent potential of humanitarian aid, the man exclaims that he will kill the beans before they kill him. he rejects the taste for necessity embedded in humanitarian aid. these diverse etymologies of you-will-kill-me beans direct attention to the dual force of humanitarian aid as a life-sustaining, as well as life-threatening force. more significantly, these narratives collectively produce biographies of taste to counter the reproduction of the biopolitical politics of necessity. conclusion: sensible aid in his article “alimentary agents: food, cultural theory, and multiculturalism,” ben highmore (2008) presents the chili pepper as an agent of alimentary pedagogy. the proclivity of british men toward the “aggressive consumption” of vindaloo in england presents a contested moment of multicultural exchange in which the food object resists domination: as the chili takes its forceful leave from the body, it teaches the colonizer a powerful lesson. “aggressive consumption” and the alimentary journey of the spicy curry contrasts starkly with both the liberian laborers who longed for a taste of the delicious food prepared by american soldiers and the liberian refugees who were relegated to the monotonous consumption of bland food aid. but in each case, the sensuality of food expands our perception of social relationships and power. in the first instance, liberians were not able to taste the food and became the subjects of abuse, but in turn, they used their sensory experiences to mark their exclusion through the moniker of smell-no-taste. at buduburam, the sustained alimentary encounters with food aid positioned refugees as humanitarian subjects, but the cooking and eating of refugee food also became a means for refugees—as guests and subjects of the politics of necessity—to engage and counter the logic of humanitarian reason. in situating food as an alimentary agent and central figure in the creation and exchange of both knowledge and power, highmore (2008, 393) draws on jacques rancière’s notion of aesthetics as “the entire ‘distribution of the sensible,’” where “sensible” does not simply refer to reason or common sense, but is a matter of perception, “what is perceived and perceivable.” by tracing food aid through sensuous biographies of taste, i have argued that refugees do not inherently have, or acquire, a taste for necessity. rather, taste is a necessity in humanitarian aid. refugees blended, compressed, submerged, and substituted food rations into refugee food, producing a palatable and politicized cuisine. at buduburam, the alimentary and aesthetic acts associated with refugee food defied the reason of humanitarian reason by expanding the perception of humanitarianism from the biopolitics of salvation to a more complex terrain of sensual subjectivities. rather than swallow the taste of necessity, liberians sensed and articulated biographies of food aid that recount and resist the violent potential of humanitarian reason. the act of tasting, sensing and articulating either good or bad flavors and effects, was not simply an account of a particular food, but rather a biopolitical statement about how refugee subjects understood their relative precarity. taste constituted a way to overcome the abject reason of humanitarian interventions and to instead prioritize sensual subjectivity over rationalized biopolitics. tracing the biographies of taste in buduburam shows us the articulation and legibility of refugee food for those who give to their neighbors but do not receive, or palatably taste, humanitarian aid. encounters with rice, corn, and beans emerged in the discursive forms of ugly rice, drip, and you-will-kill-me beans to shift the fragments of individual tastes into a collective aesthetics that challenged two foundational assumptions of humanitarian reason. seasoning and the alimentary experiences of ugly rice and a cube-less sauce positioned refugee guests as central subjects in humanitarian aid, where tastelessness surfaced as a lesson about the assumed depravity of humanitarian subjectivity. in the private exchanges and refusals of food among refugees, liberians maintained the right to be satisfied and to resist the nutritional logic embedded in humanitarian aid. the sensuality of porridge transformed drip into a demonstrable refugee food and hunger killer. it expanded the perception of aid from one of biopolitics to an alimentary experience laden with geopolitical power. the diverse etymologies of you-will-kill-me beans became pedagogical agents that demonstrated the life-sustaining and life-threatening force of food aid, revealing moments in which the biopolitics of being a humanitarian subject were unbearable. taken together, the collective biographies of taste performed through refugee food expand the distribution of the sensible—what is perceived and perceivable—within humanitarian aid, as well as the sensibility, the logic and the reason, of humanitarianism. notes acknowledgments thanks to cymene howe, the cultural anthropology editorial collective, and the anonymous reviewers for their generous comments and feedback. numerous colleagues have also provided support and review at various stages in the development of this work. dolores koenig, david vine, and geoffrey burkhart provided valuable input on the early stages of this project. katherine lambert-pennington, jennifer simpson, and erin trapp have read and encouraged numerous drafts of this work. i am also grateful to discussions with fellow panelists at the 2012 american anthropological association meetings, where i presented the seeds of this work. my liberian collaborators at the buduburam camp were tireless in their efforts to help me unravel the meaning and impact of food aid. this work would not have been possible without the generosity and candor of those who opened their homes to me at the buduburam camp; i am deeply grateful for many meals and conversations. this research was funded by a doctoral dissertation improvement grant (award no. bcs-050719) from the national science foundation. i take sole responsibility for any misrepresentations, errors, or omissions. 1. in this article, i use humanitarianism to refer to a moral ethos that manifests outside formal institutions of aid, while humanitarian aid refers to the formalized institutions of aid. 2. see malkki 1995, 216–17, on the “problem” of rich refugees. 3. in the democratic republic of congo, nancy rose hunt (2010) attended to acoustic memories—the sounds of laughing and crying women—to confront the dominance of the humanitarian apparatus and to articulate the possibilities for repetition and difference in the production of humanitarian subjectivities over time. 4. in contrast to culinary art, where “whether or not a cook is successful, a cook trie[s] to serve only foods of superior flavor to a guest, that is, foods prepared with the highest technical skill possible” (adapon 2008, 47). 5. i used social resource maps to collect data on an individual’s social relations and resource exchanges in the form of money, food, provisions, labor, and emotional/spiritual support. participants used a bean allocation method to evaluate the weight or significance of each relationship. 6. this is a historic example of the characterization advanced by didier fassin and marielle pandolfi (2010, 12) that sees contemporary humanitarianism as “the politics of military intervention . . . now played out in the name of humanitarian morality.” 7. eyewitness testimony presented in the final report of the republic of liberia truth and reconciliation commission (2009, 91) suggests that american soldiers stationed near smell-no-taste went beyond abuse and even killed liberian civilians, but this testimony has not been investigated or confirmed. 8. vulnerability was defined as: individuals sixty years and older, including their dependents; malnourished children and their immediate family members; individuals with disabilities; individuals with chronic or terminal illnesses (hiv, tb, cancer) and their dependents; unaccompanied minors; and socially vulnerable individuals. 9. plantation owners sought slaves from specific ethnic groups because they possessed knowledge and techniques of rice cultivation (carney 2001, 80). 10. education (moran 1990) and salary (tonkin 1981) were prominent “civilized” characteristics. 11. existing accounts of liberian cooking include liberian cookhouse cooking (keenan 1997), produced by the friends of liberia (mostly former peace corps workers), and kwi cooking (d’azevedo 1962), created by the wife of the anthropologist warren d’azevedo. kwi is a kru word that refers to “civilized” or “westernized.” 12. at buduburam, many households were unable to cook daily and relied on an often-unrefrigerated pot of soup for two or three days. 13. cassava is prepared in a variety of ways, as fufu (dried and fermented cassava, boiled and beaten), gb (peeled and boiled cassava, beaten into a dense substance), dumboy (peeled and boiled cassava, beaten less than gb to provide a softer texture), gari (dried cassava, pounded to small flakes, prepared with hot water or eaten dry), and deepa (dried cassava, pounded to dust and cooked with hot water). 14. maryland county was initially settled by the maryland colonization society. 15. after nearly two decades of existence, buduburam had acquired the bureaucratic label of a “protracted refugee situation,” which reflected a shift away from humanitarian interest to support for the repatriation of refugees to liberia. 16. judith carney (2001, 73) has argued that on the upper guinea coast, maize “became indelibly associated with slavery in africa.” this may have contributed to the negative reception of corn among liberians. 17. kokodolo was sold at street stalls by ghanaian vendors and was not necessarily made with food rations. 18. i thank erin trapp for pointing me to this 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buttons, too—but how do we get there? miles stand between a vision for digital infrastructure (i.e., the many scales, materials, and dynamics that produce the digital tools that we interface with, such as websites) and a functioning platform; the majority of us have limited knowledge of what exists behind interfaces used every day, publishing platforms included. yet our scholarship increasingly becomes digital—produced, circulated, and discussed in electronic and online formats. cultural anthropology (ca) partakes in this broader socio-technical transition; for more than eight years now, the journal has been incrementally moving to a digital format, and in experimental ways (fortun 2003). far from going open access (oa) overnight, the society for cultural anthropology has been building digital infrastructure around ca since 2007. while other articles in this special collection stay close to the core debates and dynamics of oa, this essay considers issues, relationships, and materials that have been made, in my view, peripheral in our oa discussion, albeit perhaps for good reason. the infrastructure described is not specific to oa, but it makes open access possible. thus, by tracing the long-term socio-technical work that made it possible for ca to go gold oa earlier this year,1 this essay works to make visible some behind-the-scenes details that should be considered by organizations thinking about going oa. as we move discussions around publishing forward and adopt oa models, social scientists need to consider how digital infrastructure opens and closes possibilities for scholarly production and engagement. we need to learn digital infrastructure, much like other forms of infrastructure that shape our lives and communities. this means attending to pathways and structures that connect communities and materials. in the context of scholarly publishing, for example, how publication bundles give access to members of some organizations and not others; how metadata attached to a particular webpage—one of ca’s article supplementals, for example—will allow connections between themes, theories, and relevant citations, both within the site and beyond it; how the robustness of a site’s search engine can draw in or frustrate users; or how information systems privilege and prioritize certain kinds of information over others, thus shaping knowledge paradigms (bowker 2000). for most of us, our relationship to digital infrastructure is defined by consumption, even as these systems provide context for our work and shape the circulation of our scholarship. our production in digital formats might best be characterized as passive, rather than as constitutive. yet the increasing use of digital systems comes with new labor roles, forms, and conditions. editorial workflows and tasks have shifted, sometimes requiring a different kind of technical skill set, executed in a more open-ended time frame. web developers, it specialists, and computer scientists also become part of the mix as the context and form of publishing is informated in a time of big data. these modes of production are often absent from conversations on scholarly publishing and its future. attention to changes in publishing infrastructure—which, like most infrastructure, is often rendered invisible—is needed, not only because it allows us to make sense of socio-technical transitions at various scales and for differently invested communities but also because we need more informed participants; users who can question the system in ways that make it more robust and usable. or as susan leigh star (1999, 379) writes, “study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.” thus, this essay aims to describe ca’s digital platforms, the work involved in creating them, and how they support the journal’s activities. these introductory comments are designed to provide basic information on how digital infrastructure supports ca’s experiments in scholarly engagement, experiments intended to (1) shift how scholars engage with ca’s archive, (2) expand the range of materials and modes of ethnographic representation beyond traditional print essays, and (3) facilitate discussion of both timely and long-standing anthropological concerns in digital format. the narrative provides a nuts-and-bolts overview of ca’s digital projects and infrastructure, information i have shared in bits and pieces in conversations, meetings, and presentations during the past four years. think of the following as blueprints that might inform other professional societies and academic organizations as they take their work and communities online in more formal ways. although these comments are situated within a conversation specific to oa and digital publishing, they are also relevant for other social science and humanities projects that involve digital infrastructure. the first section describes the two digital platforms that support ca, open journal systems (ojs) and typhoon, the framework that ca online is built on. the second section, “digital labors,” highlights the different kinds of work practices and experts needed to initiate and sustain ca’s digital infrastructure. section three details the work of the society for cultural anthropology’s (sca) social media team, and very briefly considers how circulation and community matter for scholarship in digital form. the final section underscores the need for multiple forms of expertise and the value of cross-institutional collaboration; the section documents ca’s original oa project, shareca. my discussion of these four components is meant to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of the digital infrastructure work that ca has undertaken over the years. although the examples described are not oa journal specific, they are designed to show that (1) oa is part of a larger trend whereby scholarly communication moves and expands in digital spaces, and that (2) the development of digital infrastructure, in a broad sense, can enable the move to open access. platforms in 2006, when kim fortun and mike fortun took over as editors of ca, the editorial office adopted two digital platforms to support the journal: an online review management system (called electronic workflow system, ews) and a public website (hereafter referred to as ca online to differentiate the website from the print publication) created using drupal, an open-source content management platform.2 here, platform refers to websites that make digital publishing possible, everything from blogs to peer-reviewed journals. content management systems (cms) are the most common type of platform used; well-known examples include wordpress and drupal, both of which are open-source projects. these platforms exist on a spectrum that starts with a simple out-of-the-box setup—you could have a very basic, generic website in an hour—and that scales up to more advanced customization and structural flexibility. simple options allow platform administrators to create sections, categories, and different types of content, and to place these features in relation to each other. the organizational possibilities are not infinite, however, and programming skill is needed to adapt out-of-the-box frameworks to project needs. the first version of ca online (v.1) was built with drupal, for example. our current online review management system, open journal systems, is another kind of open-source web-based platform, not a cms. knowing what platforms are available, however, and what they do, is still secondary to determining what you need from the platform. although ca no longer uses either of these two platforms (ews or drupal), what we learned from the systems’ limitations—technical and structural—informed decisions about next-generation platforms. the next section will discuss ca’s use of online review management systems, followed by the design and development of ca online v.1 (2006–2012) and v.2 (2012–present). online review management systems electronic workflow system (ews), cultural anthropology’s first online review management system, was a proprietary platform provided by the university of california press, at the time the publisher of aaa’s portfolio (2006). like other review management systems, which are now ubiquitous in peer-review journal production (fenner 2009), ews served as a portal for manuscript submissions, organized the review process, allowed us to build an extensive reviewer database, and stored editorial notes and decisions. the system was organized around a scheduler that helped editors and reviewers stay on track—perhaps you have received an automated message, “gently reminding” you that a review is due? the platform allowed multiple editors to work together, and indexed a large pool of potential reviewers according to generic and editor-crafted criteria; our files were all in one place, and time-stamped. those who have experience editing academic journals have a sense of the need for good organization, particularly when annual submissions exceed 250 manuscripts, as they do for ca. when aaa announced that the portfolio would be transitioning to wiley-blackwell (wb), cultural anthropology was informed that we would no longer have access to ews. no more access not only meant that we wouldn’t be able to use the platform but that we wouldn’t have access to our submission files either. manuscripts, reviews, editorial notes and decisions could be printed out and stored in filing cabinets, and the database could be zipped, exported, and archived, but we would no longer be able to access and use the journal files in the same way; we wouldn’t be able to use the materials from ews digitally. this was an early lesson on the details of digital transitions and the interoperability of platforms, one that got us thinking about data management in the long term, and in greater detail: will you be able to access and use data (i.e., manuscripts, reviews, and editorial decisions) in the same way beyond the system it was created in? in the case of ews, the answer was no. of course, this also meant that there was no need to migrate data from ews to ojs; migrating data from one platform to another can be technically challenging and labor intensive. our new online review management system would be empty—no messy or incomplete files to manage—and we could reorganize the editorial process based on lessons learned within the previous system. despite these conveniences, the sense of (data) loss dominated the transition process. as ca’s editorial office prepared to transition the journal from the university of california press to wb, we decided the new online review management system needed to deliver on three criteria: (1) the editorial office would have control and ownership over the platform, (2) the platform would be open source and supported by a robust development community, and (3) the system would have the capacity to assist with journal production and dissemination as well as review management (ews only provided review management). open journal systems met these criteria. an open-source software project designed for open-access academic publishing, ojs is considered the most widely used publishing platform in the world. first released in 2001, the software was created by public knowledge project (pkp), a nonprofit initiative involving a number of universities and many researchers. according to pkp, in 2013 more than 5,500 journals were using ojs to publish content, and as many as 24,000 organizations were using ojs for testing and publication development.3 cultural anthropology’s editorial office began using ojs in september 2007, several months before we would be shut out of ews. transitions take time and overlap is advantageous—another lesson learned from working on ca’s multiple platforms and through platform transitions over the years. it bears mentioning that these kinds of practices—how to structure a system transition and how to think about data management—are conditions that web developers are trained to think about and plan for; it’s part of their expertise. those of us who adopt open-source platforms in a diy fashion need to learn these things through trial and error, unless, of course, you are fortunate enough to have a developer on staff (something i often recommend). although ojs has met the criteria of ca’s editorial team, or at least the initial criteria, ojs is not always the most user-friendly platform—for authors, reviewers, editors, or administrators. user difficulty derives mostly from interface design, not the architecture of the system itself, for example, an author struggling through the online submission process or reviewers unable to figure out how to upload a review. this impacts the work of editors and site administrators, but in different ways than that of authors and reviewers. cultural anthropology has kept a running tab of user troubles over the years, hoping to identify points in the interface that seem particularly difficult. admittedly, beyond documenting user difficulty and providing one-on-one support for each issue, without in-house technical support for ojs, cultural anthropology has done little to improve the platform’s functionality. the system seems to function well enough for most users most of the time. with dedicated technical support, however, ca may have been well positioned to contribute to broader efforts to advance ojs as an open-source publishing platform. the flexibility, openness, and ownership of digital self-publishing platforms need to be paired with expertise; in-house technical expertise wasn’t required when ca used a proprietary platform whose range of possible modifications was almost nonexistent when compared with the potential of ojs. although pkp provides extensive documentation, some technical literacy is needed to set up and customize the platform. there is a trade-off at play: organizations who adopt ojs—and perhaps any open-source platform—must recognize that the price for ownership is technical support, a component of digital infrastructure often taken for granted. yet most of us will recall experiences of patiently waiting for technical assistance while our digital lives are put on hold. with ojs, rather than on-call technical support, there are discussion forums and faqs to be consulted.4 thus, the transition from ews to ojs meant that ca needed to have a designated person who could provide technical support.5 review management platforms make editorial workflows efficient, but some of this work is displaced (to technical staff) or requires new skill sets (from the editorial team). cultural anthropology maintained ojs in house from the time it was adopted in august 2008 until august 2013. when the decision was made to convert to a gold oa publication, ca’s editorial team approached duke university libraries to see if ojs could be housed within their system. duke hosts several oa journals, all of which use ojs for publishing. the advantages of moving cultural anthropology’s ojs installation to a university library include better technical support, more routine maintenance, better security and data management, and connection to a suite of other oa publications within the same institution. we are benefiting from and (hopefully) contributing to the well-established infrastructure of the university library system, organized by its own digital infrastructure, which includes many different kinds of expertise. since august 2013, cultural anthropology’s ojs platform has been technically maintained by duke university libraries. this move is an example of self-publishing made more robust through institutional partnership. significantly, ca has only used ojs for review management, as opposed to leveraging the platform for the entire publication process, which includes editing and dissemination. open journal systems has the capacity to orchestrate journal production as well as review management. one need only look at hau: journal of ethnographic theory or any of the sample ojs journals highlighted by pkp to see how organizations use ojs from start (submission) to finish (dissemination). as ca continues to grow and refine its publication practices, it is likely that the editorial office will use more of ojs’s publishing features. at various points in recent years, ca’s editorial team considered whether ojs continued to be the best review management system for the journal, but despite its limitations and skill requirements, the answer has always been yes.6 ca online and content management systems cultural anthropology’s public website, ca online, is built on a completely different software platform. until ca went open access, ojs and ca online were not connected beyond links that pointed users to the other site—visitors to ca online were directed to ojs to submit manuscripts, and ojs users could find their way to ca online through the site’s submission instructions. there was little need to link the two before ca went open access; ojs was used to manage peer review, ca online handled presentation. wiley-blackwell coordinated the various stages of journal production in between. wiley-blackwell also managed the dissemination of quarterly issues by hosting published issues on its website. now that ca is self-publishing, however, ojs and typhoon (the open-source platform built for ca online v.2) have become integrated beyond these referential links. journal articles are hosted on ojs, but they can only be accessed through ca online (or anthrosource or wb’s website, depending on your access point). cultural anthropology online v.2 complements ojs by providing a better user interface, more content options, and html5 standards (html is one of the primary languages that structure and provide internet content; html5 is the fifth revision of the language). a logical follow-up question, however, is, why have ca online at all? why not use ojs for the entire operation? the short answer is that ojs, as a platform, is designed to manage and deliver peer-review journals in relatively traditional form. it is not designed to support experiments in other formats and forms of scholarly communication, an aim that has always been central to ca’s vision. cultural anthropology online v.1 launched in 2007 with kim fortun and mike fortun’s first issue as editors. the site was designed to provide the journal with a web presence in three ways: with expanded information about the review process; by providing supplemental resources for published articles (a practice found in other science disciplines); and through a well-designed archive that thematically indexed previously published articles. casey o’donnell, at the time a phd candidate and the fortuns’ first editorial assistant, built the site using drupal, a common open-source content management system. by the time ca online v.2 launched in 2012, the legacy site had more than seven hundred pages of content. yet many anthropologists, it seems, are unaware of this disciplinary resource. at the outset and throughout the fortuns’ editorship, ca online was organized around three sections: a section with basic information about the journal; an indexical section, which provided lists of ca articles by theme and geographical areas; and an article supplemental archive, which came to be the largest section of the site. providing detailed information about the journal’s vision and review process was foundational; more than an “about” section, which could easily be provided through wiley and the aaa’s website, the journal’s info section had a pedagogical edge. it was designed to help authors, reviewers, and readers think about ca’s vision, as well as how to engage with texts. it also provided basic information about copyright, permissions, and reprints, a move intended to increase publishing literacy among ca’s readers. what have come to be known as ca’s supplemental pages, and the theme and area indexes, however, are what set ca online apart from other social science and humanities publications. the vision for ca’s supplemental pages came from work in the digital humanities, as well as from publications in the physical sciences, which also make supplement material available with published articles. in the physical sciences, supplement material often comes in the form of data sets, represented visually. such content is outside the scope of what is published in peer-reviewed articles, but still valuable for readers trying to make sense of arguments and study design. cultural anthropology's supplemental pages work from the same logic, but they follow from work undertaken in the digital humanities. these pages include author bios, editorial footnotes (links to conceptually or empirically relevant ca articles), discussion questions, images and videos, website links, and when possible, author interviews. together, ca (the journal) and ca online go beyond what other peer-reviewed publications do. cultural anthropology online’s aim is part pedagogical, part ethnographic, and partly aimed toward a public anthropology. it is designed as a publicly accessible archive of ethnographic materials that helps users engage with the timely and politically important work that anthropologists do. thus ca online leverages digital infrastructure to communicate anthropological scholarship at a time when the relevance of the discipline is questioned both within and beyond the academy. figure 1. guidelines for authors and reviewers during kim fortun and mike fortun's editorship, 2007. https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-419/20140303213133/http://classic.culanth.org/?q=node/1. when anne allison and charlie piot took over as ca editors in 2010, we conducted a review of ca online and proposed to expand the site in several ways: by building a multicolumn blog, fieldsights, and adding a photo-essay section. we also agreed that the site had become difficult to navigate and use. the interface design no longer accommodated the quantity of content and its expanding forms. for example, in 2009, we began to feature “curated collections,” sets of five to six previously published articles that addressed a chosen theme. early themes, such as security, kinships, and water, were chosen because they spoke to current debates and could be easily promoted by wiley-blackwell. in fact, the original structure of ca’s “curated collections” derives from a wb marketing campaign, whereby the publisher will un-gate five articles for sixty to ninety days, similar to a free sample issue of the journal, but thematically curated. another alternative forum for scholarship, called “hot spots,” was launched on our site in the summer of 2011; a second of the same genre but with a different analytic focus launched in 2012, called “theorizing the contemporary.” these two sections featured editor-reviewed collections of twelve to twenty-four short essays organized around a timely theme. in the case of “hot spots,” forum topics addressed events geographically situated; our first “hot spot” forum documented japan’s earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. subsequent forums addressed the financial crisis in greece, revolution in egypt, and self-immolations in tibet. as we experimented with different forms of scholarly engagement—short, bloglike essays, commentaries, and author interviews—ca did not adapt drupal in parallel to meet our expanding needs. our data was growing and changing; our data model (our digital platform) was not. the website redesign project began by thinking about three issues. first, we made the decision to move ca online from drupal to a different open-source cms framework called ruby on rails. second, we considered the organization of the site—what would it include, and how would we balance using the same website for the sca, cultural anthropology, and our new blog, fieldsights? and finally, how would the site contribute to the broader field of digital scholarship through advancements in interface, metadata, and the continued development of a disciplinary archive? after considering cultural anthropology’s and the sca’s vision for ca online, and the state of v.1, the decision was made to retire the drupal platform and migrate the existing site to a new platform built using ruby on rails. unlike drupal, an out-of-the-box cms, ruby on rails is an open-source framework, with applications and language used to build platforms like drupal. if drupal resembled a mobile home structure, ruby on rails is closer to the modular home catalog. whereas drupal could be set up, left alone, and updated periodically, ca needed to actually build a platform using ruby on rails. once created, however, it too could be left alone, maintained mostly by periodic updates. to move the redesign project forward, we formed a committee comprising sca board members, ca editorial interns, our developer cj bryan. the committee would oversee the development of the new website—everything from the look of the interface and its functions, to what content would be available and who could add/edit it, to how ca online would borrow and build from existing systems, such as dublin core (a standard for metadata terms used to describe web resources) and html 5. the project took more than two years—from the time the committee was formed to the launch of ca online v.2. digital platforms are ecosystems that support certain forms of work, play, and interaction while making others impossible. platforms, software, and other material components should be selected after identifying not what features they can provide, but after and alongside discussion of how digital infrastructure can support, extend, and/or improve an organization’s mission and work. it does not make sense to have a blog that no one reads or social media buttons that don’t get used. think about how the platform can mirror the practices of the current user base (member and non-member audiences); digitize the familiar first. get feedback from users. make design and development iterative and incremental. many of us could quickly come up with a list of vacant and/or outdated websites, both ones designed well and ones not. the ghost-town effect is a symptom of infrastructure development that lacks systems thinking (larkin 2013), design that overlooked socio-technical intra-action (barad 2007) or mismatched organizational culture, community practices, and the platform’s data model with site features. in relation to oa journals specifically, ojs seems to be the best platform for publishing projects to date, yet many ojs users could suggest possible system improvements. if organizations are to adopt ojs, consider how your project might support the further development of ojs through pkp’s projects or the work of other groups, such as libraries that are building infrastructure around ojs. if your organization opts to go with another platform or to customize extensively, as ca has, carefully consider how your software, data models, and content fit with other systems and trends in digital publishing, and what kinds of sociality and institutions this supports. digital labors two modes of labor are needed to sustain the digital infrastructure that supports cultural anthropology: technical support (i.e., a web developer) and content managers/editors. the need for a developer and content manager will vary according to a number of factors—what kind of maintenance is needed, and how often; if a site feature breaks, and whether it’s a technical or textual issue; and when organizational events demand different features and forms of content. those who filled these roles for ca in the past were often needed at specific moments, rather than consistently. as ca online expanded, however, the amount of time required for content management also increased. the need for a web developer, on the other hand, has less to do with increase in content and traffic than with augmenting and/or maintaining the platform’s technical features. these labor dynamics have been recognized and supported by the sca throughout the years; appropriate support for digital labor is how ca online has been sustained and expanded. existing support for digital labor has also made ca’s relatively seamless oa publishing transition possible. cultural anthropology online—a cms platform—can be used by anyone familiar with e-mail clients or word processors; the logics and interfaces share the same structure and features as everyday communication technologies. yet the initial design of a cms platform and future troubleshooting typically require technical skill sets (as described in the above section, in relation to the development of ojs, drupal, and typhoon). although the need for technical support does decrease after the platform is established and the site has been launched, routine upkeep is needed. one only need go a month or two without updating personal computer software, managing e-mail, and closing down applications to get a sense of the importance of caring for information systems. the difference here is that, while personal computer software, e-mail, and applications are designed for everyday users with little technical expertise—updates are automatic, one only need click a button and restart the system—digital platforms require skilled labor for maintenance. kevin fodness, ca’s former editorial assistant under the fortuns, continued to contract with ca for an additional three years to run software updates and back up our database, as well as to troubleshoot when an issue emerged that our editorial team could not solve. our conversations about scholarly publishing and the digital infrastructure necessary for its future require that we value the skilled labor of those who design, create, and maintain these platforms. if we have digital platforms, we must have technical support. professional societies that believe they can have a digital presence—whether an oa journal or a website—without appropriate technical support are ill prepared to take on any such projects. it signals a lack of knowledge and a devaluing of the labor of digital infrastructuring. in addition to the technical expertise required for digital platforms, online publishing also requires content editors who are responsible for editing and formatting material. when we first established ca’s website, this was a fairly simple process that only required familiarity with the content editor interface and knowledge of a few formatting work-arounds. cultural anthropology’s editorial interns needed to be trained on the content editor, but after learning the basics, they could use it much like a word processor. in the first few years, ca did not consistently generate much digital content; the website seemed like a small addition to existing editorial work. what started out as one more thing on a weekly checklist, however, turned into a significant part of the managing editor’s responsibilities. cultural anthropology online is now a digital archive with more than one thousand pages of content; as the site grows, ca online demands more editorial time and oversight. we now publish content weekly instead of monthly or bimonthly. links need to be updated, videos replaced, and comment feeds checked. when ca online first launched in november 2012, we needed to manage spam on the site’s comment feed daily. for two to three weeks, while we experimented with various spam solutions, the first ten to twenty minutes of each day focused on spam removal. after a few weeks, we implemented an inexpensive application called akismet, which effectively blocks 99 percent of the spam that would otherwise appear in our comment feeds. this is an example of a technical fix realized by our current developer, ryan schenk. most content management labor, however, is manual. of course, cultural anthropology would not have a digital presence at all if not for the work of editorial interns, who are the primary content editors for ca online. in the early years, from the time the intern program was established in 2007 until the launch of ca online v.2, intern work focused on creating supplemental pages for current and past articles, and on creating theme or area lists that indexed the print journal’s archive. in 2009, interns began building “curated collections” as well. these collections featured supplemental pages for each of the articles, interviews with article authors, and guest commentary. with the launch of ca online v. 2, intern work expanded beyond its focus on the print journal to include work on fieldsights. a select group of interns now propose, coordinate, and format content for this section under the guidance of the editors. even ca’s social media team is governed by editorial interns. at base, cultural anthropology owes its digital presence to the work of our interns. editorial intern positions—which are structured as twelve-month long, project-based positions—are unpaid. the program functions like an apprenticeship where graduate students learn how to create or curate online content using digital platforms, conduct author interviews, and structure projects (a skill not to be underestimated). they also learn to think about the labor of editing publications and have the opportunity to engage with faculty scholars whose research informs their own graduate work. more recently, interns now have the opportunity to join ca’s social media team, where they can learn how to circulate content, mount campaigns, and engage an online community through different platforms (twitter and facebook specifically). cultural anthropology’s managing editor has always coordinated the intern program, which is an important task in itself. yet collectivity and collaboration define the intern program; the tone is one of project building rather than assignment. interns, for example, propose their own projects as part of the application process. this gives students the opportunity to work on ventures that can advance their research interests while also contributing to ca’s digital archive. while ca online is more than an oa publication, and thus has more extensive digital labor needs, digital infrastructure requires care and attention that is similar but distinct from print modes of publication. we still need to coordinate, edit, and market content, but these activities may look or work differently in digital form. digital does not make editorial labor obsolete, although i would expect that some of the labor involved in publishing an oa journal differs a little from that of a print publication. the point is that digital forums and platforms do not produce themselves. organizations transitioning to oa and going the self-publishing route need to keep production details in mind. the ghost-town effect reflected by vacant and outdated websites may also signal an inability to sustain the platform or publication. this is almost always a labor problem. before starting digital projects, oa or otherwise, think about the expertise and labor available to your organization. all too often, someone with a little bit of programming skill and experience will volunteer or be appointed to the task of setting up and sustaining our websites. while in some cases this works well and is appropriate to the platform and the organization’s needs, in too many cases it leads to frustration on both sides—a web master who lacks a skill set adequate to develop the dreamed-of platform, and an organization that fails to appropriately value digital labor. organizations need to think about websites and their platforms as infrastructure that demands financial and socio-technical resources. before looking into (and certainly before choosing) a digital platform, organizations should identify available resources and acknowledge that limited existing resources will shape what is possible. in other words, good websites take time and money in some form or another. the other issue relates to sustaining platforms. this implies software updates and technical troubleshooting—work that likely needs to be performed by a developer—but also sustaining a flow of digital content, material that needs to be written, edited, and uploaded. cultural anthropology online works because of the labor of editorial interns, the managing editor, and authors who contribute content. it is a lot of work that requires a lot of coordination. even if we all recognize the benefits of scholarship made digital, it can be difficult to get contributors or broader participation in digital forums (of course, we often face the same challenges getting article reviewers for the print journal). knowing that scholarship made digital is advantageous has not meant that this work is acknowledged; digital labor in support of scholarly production typically does not count, institutionally, for your academic career. as we increasingly adopt digital formats for scholarship, we need to make sure that these modes of production are valued as academic labor, formally and in institutionalized ways. new and/or existing websites can easily render the amount and kind of digital labor required invisible. more people need to acknowledge that digital infrastructure is not created or sustained with the push of a button. circulation organizations spend much money and time trying to reach audiences, users, and customers; academic publishers face the same challenges, although they are able to utilize existing organizational or digital infrastructures. perhaps you receive content alerts for journals that you read regularly? or maybe you follow publication titles on facebook or twitter? as an sca member, you might rely on a quarterly e-mail from our editorial office. all three examples employ existing, multiuse digital infrastructure—e-mail and social media. these channels are increasingly used to reach scholarly audiences, a trend supported by a more general shift toward digital consumption practices. think about the adoption of tablets and the rise in mobile phone use, and how the adoption of these technologies impacts academic work practices. here is a well-known narrative at this point, but one that bears repeating: broader trends in digital infrastructure and digital life shape ca’s audience, how our audience learns about and consumes content. emergent forms of digital life and associated consumption practices orient ca’s social media team, a collaborative project that works to connect and cultivate online community around anthropological scholarship. i like to think of the social media team as part of a community that builds off the work initiated by the creators of savage minds, as well as off the digital anthropology initiatives spearheaded by aaa members. thinking about how cultural anthropology circulates today also means thinking about how new forms of digital infrastructure, and in particular, social media platforms like facebook and twitter, might be leveraged for scholarly engagement. cultural anthropology initially created social media accounts—on facebook and twitter—in april 2010, during the year of overlap between the fortuns’ and allison and piot’s editorship. the social media accounts received little attention between 2010 and 2012, mostly due to time constraints, a lack of regular content to circulate, and lack of experience with how social media platforms can be used to cultivate an audience. during this time, posts were made when a new issue launched, or when a “curated collection” or other content feature went live. the accounts were also used around the annual aaa meeting and the biennial sca meeting to promote conference events. the journal’s facebook and twitter accounts were linked to each other, so whenever a new post went up on facebook, it was mirrored on the twitter account. while this linked feature was convenient—no one ever needed to log into twitter—it was not optimal for building an audience or engaging the existing anthropology community on twitter (itself an active and robust community). facebook and twitter, as social media platforms, are two distinct spaces, with different modes of communication, communities, and practices. even today, the social media strategies differ for the two platforms: twitter has a more dynamic space characterized by feedback loops (hayles 1999), whereas our facebook feed tends to be more one-sided and less participatory. three factors led to the creation of ca’s social media team. first, the launch of ca online v.2. in the short term, ca wanted to expand its media outlets to drive readers to the new site; establishing a social media team was one part of this larger effort. second, there was a general feeling that ca online did not receive as much traffic as it should; we had an extensive archive of supplemental material, essay collections, and indexes, but the site was still relatively unknown, even within the aaa community. thus the social media team would work to make ca’s existing digital archive more visible. finally, ca had a core group of editorial interns who were interested in learning how to use social media platforms as scholars. in this sense, ca’s social media project is as much about learning and building skills in digital communication as it is the cultivation of a scholarly network and the promotion of ca content. cultural anthropology’s social media team was constituted in november 2012, at the time of the relaunch of ca online. the team itself comprises half a dozen editorial interns—our core group includes neal akatsuka, darren byler, grant jun otsuki, michal ran-rubin, fayana richards, and jonah rubin—plus the managing editor; the group meets every other week to review and coordinate a social media strategy. the team’s strategy is oriented around content in three ways. first, by identifying what new content will be launching on ca online in the coming weeks—new fieldsight posts, “curated collections,” podcasts, articles submitted to shareca, or, of course, new issues of the print journal. news about the sca and ca is also circulated by the social media team. the second way in which the team organizes its work is by identifying current events or stories emerging from the broader anthropology community, and then selecting content from ca’s archive that speaks to or lends insight into these stories. finally, the team participates in the circulation of content from other scholars and organizations through reposts. this component is practiced on twitter only, not on facebook. social media activity is coordinated by one team member at a time; each week, one social media team member volunteers to act as the handler; he or she is responsible for ca’s daily posts on both social media platforms. without the work of the social media team, it is unlikely that news of ca’s transition to oa would have had such a broad reach. in cultural anthropology’s first week as an open access journal, ca online received more than 17,500 visitors from 159 countries. in the past fourteen months, the social media team has learned much about how online networks and media work. they have also grown ca’s digital community base substantially. since launching ca online v.2, monthly visits to the website have grown from 1,950 in november 2012 to 25,174 in october 2013. as of march 2014, ca’s twitter following has grown to nearly 5,500 users and just over 5,000 likes on facebook. one thing we are learning from the social media team’s work is that cultural anthropology has two different audiences—those primarily consuming the journal through traditional means and those engaging with ca content primarily through our website. one challenge has been figuring out how to balance the needs and interests of these two groups, which i suspect map across social and institutional differences in higher education: sca members and non-sca members; tenure-track faculty and students; u.s.-based readers and international readers. the social media team participates in the broadening and diverse digital community composed of anthropologists, social scientists, and supporting organizations; its work builds networks that make for robust infrastructure development. social media, of course, is not everyone’s game, for a range of reasons. yet these platforms are reaching new audiences, contributing to a growing digital community of anthropologists, and making ca content more publicly accessible. in many ways, the social media team’s work directly supports oa by cultivating increased access and use of peer-reviewed scholarship, albeit in ways not yet measurable. part of expanding access means creating new spaces, channels, and modes of engagement with scholarship. taking down pay walls may be the first step; pushing scholarship beyond the websites where articles are hosted is the next. collaboration another takeaway from the project of building cultural anthropology’s digital infrastructure is the importance of collaboration, with web developers as well as with experts in other fields and organizations that support scholarly publishing. cultural anthropology’s success in developing a digital platform (ca online) depended not only on the technical skills of our developers—casey o’donnell, kevin fodness, cj bryan, and ryan schenk, each of whom built parts of the digital infrastructure and sustained different components over the years—but also on their participation in decision-making and system design.7 both bryan and o’donnell served on sca’s website design committee from 2010 to 2012. schenk, although not formally a committee member, did much to advise the committee on site design. in many regards, ca online v.2 stands out as a digital platform collectively designed, informed by a committee whose members represented different knowledge sets and interests. rather than hand a vision over to our designer and developer, the committee worked iteratively, conversing with and providing feedback to bryan and schenk through the entire process. site testing was also conducted by committee members, as well as editorial interns, who, as content editors, represented one of our primary user groups.8 thus the process of creating ca online v.2 was likely more collaborative and collective than website projects undertaken by other types of organizations. beyond internal conversations with the developers hired to build ca online, we also benefited from many conversations with librarians throughout the years. these conversations ranged from informal consultations to more material collaborations that garnered institutional support. one example can be found in the recent move to host ca’s ojs platform at duke libraries. cultural anthropology’s original open-access project, shareca, is another example. led by grant jun otsuki, with support from alex golub at the university of hawaii and john russell at the university of washington, shareca was launched in 2012 with ca online v.2. it leveraged the green oa publishing model—which grants article access through repositories, unlike gold oa, which refers to oa journals—as well as the efforts of a small collection of ca authors who were already self-archiving versions of their articles on their faculty webpage or on platforms like academia.edu. available through ca online, shareca is a directory of links to repositories and websites where ca authors have made either the final version or a pre-proof version of their article available. the project began by building from and within the mana’o collection in the evols repository at the library of the university of hawaii. this was initially coordinated by alex golub, john russell, and grant jun otsuki. articles were collected in one of two ways: for current journal issues (from november 2012 forward), authors were notified of the option to contribute to the repository when they were asked to sign aaa’s official author agreement; for past issues, authors were systematically contacted by otsuki, editorial interns, and staff members. in some cases, authors already had a version of their manuscript posted online and it was just a matter of gaining permission to include a link to it in our repository. in other cases, where authors did not have a version posted online, an e-mail was sent explaining the project and options for contributing to the repository: to post a final pdf version on their personal or faculty webpage, or to contribute a pre-proof version to the mana’o collection at the university of hawaii. in addition to hosting a directory of links to oa versions of ca articles, we also built access options into article supplemental pages. within an article’s metadata box (see figure 2), we included a link to wiley-blackwell’s website (which provides access to an html and a pdf version of the article); for articles listed in the shareca directory, we also included an oa button, thus allowing users to choose where they accessed articles from: the publisher’s site or shareca. figure 2. metadata box on nikhil anand's article supplemental page. image shows two options for article access. http://culanth.org/articles/64-pressure-the-politechnics-of-water-supply-in. of course, not every effort to cultivate collaboration or community, broadly conceived, has always worked for ca. one example of failed collaboration, collectivity, or community can be found in the discussion forums from ca online v.1. when the site was first established, we imagined the discussion forums as a space of rich conversation and engagement with theme lists, supplemental pages, and anthropologically relevant topics facilitated by guest discussants. the discussion forums (see figure 3) never took off as intended, despite several attempts to stage or seed conversation in this section. initially, we believed this was due to site design—the forums were buried within the site and difficult to see and access. yet the absence of online discussion has been reproduced on ca online v.2; commenting happens, but it is variable and seems to coalesce around content where conversation is seeded. figure 3. discussion forums from ca online v.1. https://wayback.archive-it.org/org-419/20140303200008/http://classic.culanth.org/?q=forum. despite building comment feeds into supplemental and fieldsights blog pages, we continue struggling to generate discussion in these digital forums. circling back to digital labors, it may be the case that more work is required to foster the kinds of engagement that have been a defining feature of sites like savage minds. the need and desire for digital infrastructure—often seen as a format that can extend the reach of our work—creates opportunities for collaboration with experts from other knowledge domains. as indicated in the interview with kelty (2014), thinking about the economics of publishing and the industry of academia should go hand in hand with thinking about the broader organization of higher education. designing and developing digital infrastructure is one place where we can cultivate relationships with partners outside our disciplinary or knowledge domains—librarians, computer scientists, and designers, for example. bringing together people from different fields of expertise can present challenges, but ultimately, our digital projects will be more robust when informed and supported by knowledge sets and resources from other fields. the increase in open-access journal–university library partnerships (such as in the case of shareca and ca’s move to place ojs at duke libraries) is a crucial step towards reconfiguring the political economy of scholarly publishing, and potentially towards shaping the future conditions of higher education. figuring out what kinds of relationships we want to cultivate, and how these relationships can support more equitable and open participation in academic culture, as well as more robust research practices, should be principles that guide the design of digital infrastructure. conclusion as brian larkin (2013, 330) suggests, the defining of infrastructure is “a categorizing moment … that highlights the epistemological and political commitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural.” this essay argues that more attention needs to be given to the digital infrastructure required for scholarly publishing futures, open access and otherwise. digital infrastructure refers to the many layers of electronics, institutions, code, paradigms, experts, networks, service providers, information systems, standards, and texts assembled to bring scholarship online. in particular, i highlight the labor of those who work on digital platforms—review management systems, public websites, and social media—because infrastructure itself is often designed to render production and resources invisible. another essay should take up the technical decisions that need to be made in the design and development of digital infrastructure for publishing. this essay suggests that digital infrastructure design and development should be organized around (1) platform affordances, (2) support for labor, (3) emerging circulation practices, and (4) opportunities for collaboration. but beyond that, oa discussions and other online projects need to attend to what digital infrastructure makes possible, what it prohibits, and what relations and principles it supports. work undertaken to develop digital infrastructure for cultural anthropology, and by extension the sca, showed that these projects take time, care, and money, and often more than imagined at the outset. it could be otherwise, i think. my hope is that lessons learned through our work at ca can help other organizations—professional societies, scholarly groups, universities, or subsets of universities—as they think about transitioning to oa or as they take other forms of academic work online. this also means thinking about the logistics and details of digital infrastructure in relation to the principles, relationships, and forms of scholarly community they support. the issue is not that we don’t know how to think about infrastructure and design, but that we don’t always see the multiple and varied scales of changing publishing practices—such as establishing an oa journal—as part of the large-scale infrastructural shifts now happening within the field of anthropology, in the social sciences and humanities, and in higher education itself. notes acknowledgments many thanks to cj bryan and ryan schenk for the many conversations that led to this essay. and to ami diallo, nathan fisk, kirk jalbert, grant jun otsuki, chris kelty, fayana richards, jonah rubin, and katie vann for their helpful readings of this essay. 1. since 2012, ca has maintained a “green” oa repository called shareca through the university of hawaii libraries. this repository, and other public ones, allowed ca authors to self-archive their articles, thus providing a means of barrier-free access. these oa options were then listed in the shareca directory. for a nuanced discussion of the oa spectrum, see peter suber’s (2004) open access overview. 2. open source here refers to software whose source code is publicly available for use and modification; it also implies the existence of a development community whose work improves on the original code. for more on the history and culture of open-source software, see kelty 2008. 3. see the public knowledge project website, http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ojs-usage. 4. it should be noted that pkp does provide publishing services, which include tech support: https://pkpservices.sfu.ca/content/journal-hosting. 5. at the time, casey o’donnell served as ca’s technical support. while ca was located at rensselaer polytechnic institute, during the fortuns’ editorship, the journal was able to draw on the technical skills of science and technology studies (sts) phd students who worked as editorial assistants. after o’donnell, the journal hired kevin fodness, another sts doctoral candidate, who continued to provide tech support for ojs until august 2013, at which time our system was transferred to duke library. 6. a recent survey by a committee formed through the aaa’s committee on the future of print and electronic publishing (cfpep) found the same (admittedly, i was part of this committee). 7. it bears mentioning that each of these developers came to the project with expertise specific to ca’s mission. casey o’donnell and kevin fodness from the field of sts; both engage in research that intersects with communication, media, and digital culture. cj bryan came to us after working on numerous open-source projects. ryan schenk was a software architect and developer at the woods hole marine biology library for more than four years. 8. the identification of user needs and groups is an essential part of cms design and administration. references barad, karen 2007 meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bowker, geoffrey c. 2000 “biodiversity datadiversity.” social studies of science 30, no. 5: 643–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/030631200030005001. fenner, mark 2009 “editorial manager: interview with richard wynne.” gobbledygook, plos blogs, http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2009/03/25/editorial_manager_interview_with_richard_wynne. fortun, kim 2003 “ethnography in/of/as open systems.” reviews of anthropology 32, no. 2: 171–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00988150390197695. hayles, n. katherine 1999 how we become posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press. kelty, christopher 2008 two bits: the cultural significance of free software. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2014 “beyond copyright and technology: what open access can tell us about precarity, authority, innovation, and automation in the university today.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 203–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.02. larkin, brian 2013 “the politics and poetics of infrastructure.” annual review of anthropology 42:327–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522. star, leigh susan 1999 “the ethnography of infrastructure.” american behavioral scientist 43, no. 3:377–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00027649921955326. suber, peter 2004 “open access overview.” earlham university website, accessed april 10, 2014. http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm. the work of waiting the work of waiting: love and money in korean chinese transnational migration june hee kwon harvard university everybody is gone wife is gone, husband is gone, and uncle is gone, everybody is gone, to korea, to japan, to america, to russia, to make more . . . everybody is separated and crying, what does life mean? we are all broken down. why are we sick from missing each other? we are waiting to be together again, someday. “everybody is gone” is a popular song in yanbian, the korean chinese autonomous prefecture in the province of jilin, china, on the border with north korea. its lyrics capture the shifting demography and emerging socioeconomic landscape formed by massive korean chinese migration to south korea beginning in the early 1990s, in the wake of china’s economic reforms. the fashion of and passion for going to korea is called the korean wind,1 throughout and beyond yanbian. the korean wind has driven yanbian’s rapid urbanization and dramatic economic development in the past two decades. it has also brought about multidimensional mobility—not only physical but existential (hage 2009), as seen in korean chinese upward class mobility and an unprecedented self-reinvention from farmers to city dwellers to transnational migrant workers. in yanbian, where “everybody is gone” to korea, there are also many people waiting for those who are abroad. the single parent or waiting partner is called a botoli, a yanbian term that connotes someone who is waiting and suffering from long-term loneliness due to the conditions of the contemporary transnational, migratory landscape. in response to an increasing number of botoli, many yanbian residents have identified loneliness and waiting as a source of social illness, exacerbating high divorce rates and juvenile delinquency. yet i also found multiple social groups—hiking clubs, writers’ workshops, bowing teams—that formed part of a secure emotional safety net. during my dissertation research in 2008 and 2009, i joined a hiking group as a way to get to know everyday life in yanbian. here i met many korean chinese botoli. on one of our regular trips, we reached the top of a mountain, and some of the hikers opened up about their anxieties and concerns as botoli. mr. ho: after my wife went to korea ten years ago, i became so lonely i started drinking—almost every day. in yanbian, there are so many lonely husbands without wives. what can we do? nobody is there waiting for us. hiker 1 [enviously]: but your wife sends the remittances on a regular basis, right? how many houses do you own now? two or three? hiker 2: nowadays, we should be happy if we’re not divorced, if we own a house or two, if our kids have grown up without causing serious trouble, and if the remittances are still being sent. mr. ho: you guys are right. but waiting for my wife for more than ten years is not an easy task. i don’t hope for anything more except that my wife eventually returns. after waiting so long for my wife, i happen to believe that, as long as money is being sent back to china, there might still be love [he laughs]. these hikers capture the uncertainty and vulnerability they feel about living as botoli for the sake of economic betterment and survival in a rapidly developing china. they also express anxious feelings toward partners who might have an affair or try to obtain a divorce, which would cause the influx of remittances to come to a sudden halt. the temporality of everyday life, in general, entails not only the passing of time but also the necessity of waiting (adam 1991, 121). to korean chinese migrants and their family members, waiting has emerged as an essential activity that requires the capacity to endure loneliness to maintain a stable love life and the flow of remittances. in yanbian, “waiting properly” or heroically “waiting out,” as ghassan hage (2009) critically highlights, comes into play as a valorized quality and manifestation of governmentality that shapes an orderly and self-governed subject within an uncertain context. what, then, makes waiting a necessary life condition for korean chinese transnational migration? what is the actual role of waiting as a link between intimate life and economic conditions? what pushes korean chinese to endure these long, lonely vigils? my analysis of waiting is related to, but different from, recent accounts and scholarship on korean chinese transnational migration. these studies have tended to focus on the rampant mobility, displacement, and social issues commonly reported in everyday korean chinese life (kim 2008; park 2006; lee, lee, and kim 2008; seol 2002). they describe such symptoms as “money fever” (noh 2011) and “faking and making kinship” (freeman 2011), and characterize “going to korea” as an inevitable life phase, one that must be endured to arrive more quickly at the next stage of life. despite their aspirations to migrate to south korea, korean chinese face the implementation of a restrictive entry policy by the korean government. the regulations have fostered a market for illegal migration, including a sizeable production of counterfeit documents. at least until the mid-2000s, with the rise of chinese economic power still inchoate, this rampant korean chinese transnational migration was mainly driven by a strong belief in mobility as a necessary condition of a modernity that was more about movement than staying put, and more about work than leisure (felski 2000). i came to witness, however, that the perception and practice of transnational migration to korea has diverged sharply in response to chinese economic advances. in particular, since the global financial crisis hit the korean economy in 2008, many korean chinese migrants have begun returning to china in hopes of benefiting from new economic opportunities. during my research in 2008 and 2009, along with follow-up work in 2011, 2013, and 2014 in both china and korea, i saw that the widespread phenomenon of waiting did not subside even in the dwindling korean wind. i focused my attention on increasingly tighter interconnections between those on the move and those left behind. as julie chu (2009) compellingly portrays it in her account of the massive emigration from longyan, china, mobility in a (mostly) human-smuggling context has led to the “emplacement” of those who have stayed put, as well as of others who were moved around. those who remain at home feel displaced and marginalized, as their surroundings change rapidly due to remittance-driven development. waiting at home, as longyan’s residents do, becomes a passive activity that produces feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, and vulnerability (crapanzano 1986). in this liminal temporality, those who are waiting experience an indeterminate boundary between the past, the present, and the future (rundell 2009), while remaining in a state of repose or inaction until something happens (gasparini 1995). yet waiting also has the potential to create a new sociality and mutuality through “a mode of being attuned to others” with whom we have relationships (minnegal 2009). thus waiting constitutes an active attempt to realize a collectively imagined future. my ethnography of how separated spouses wait pushes this analysis further by calling attention to dynamics of dependency and the intersections of mobility and immobility, money-making and waiting-for-money. loretta baldassar and laura merla (2013) have elaborated the concept of the “circulation of care” as a new perspective through which to understand the connectedness of people on the move. the transnational family, an increasingly common contemporary social form, has developed different ways to exchange asymmetrical, reciprocal care among family members and kin. this functions as a form of the moral economy of waiting for other family members who are abroad and in motion. they bring themselves “together across distance” by dealing with the challenges posed by absence and separation (baldassar and merla 2013, 40). i focus not only on the connectedness or circulation of care between separated family members. rather i highlight the vulnerability that connectedness entails in transnational families, especially in the case of spousal relationships that are susceptible to divorce. unlike waiting and caring for parents, children, and other family members, anticipating the return of a spouse is conditioned as a couple-oriented project. especially as migration and waiting are linked through the flow of remittances—as expressed in the words of a common yanbian saying, “where money goes, love is”—most separated couples would eventually prefer to be brought together in china where life’s insecurity has been increasingly elevated in the wake of rapid economic reform and an open economy. in other words, “waiting properly” for remittances and spousal return creates the possibility of mutual future economic welfare and preserves intimacy by generating and sharing a deferred temporality. and yet, the following ethnographic accounts also show that waiting can be met with betrayal or a partner’s foundering appreciation, which leads to elevated anxiety and further precariousness in relationships. in what follows, i develop two interconnected arguments. first, i argue that waiting for love and money within migratory contexts constitutes a form of unwaged affective work that can generate not only a financial safety net but also a binding commitment between the divided parties. i understand affect as a communicative “action on action” of the self and others, “the capacity to be affected,” and a medium through which intersubjective relations circulate (deleuze 1988; richard and rudnyckyj 2009; spinoza 1994). affective labor includes intimate (boris and parreñas 2010) and immaterial (lazzarato 1996) labor, which at times trades in communication and information. affective labor often aims to create a feeling of ease and well-being, as in personal and caring services (hardt and negri 2000). yet i highlight waiting as a distinct kind of affective labor that can be distinguished from wage labor in the market economy. i suggest that waiting is an immaterial, but nonetheless important, form of unwaged, profit-producing labor. taking care of money and love in the process of waiting leads to the production of a better future and the maintenance of long-term, long-distance, and (often) vulnerable transnational relationships. second, i argue that while waiting may begin as an act of love, it is susceptible to being transformed into a kind of work that requires the constant management of monetary flows and, in turn, remakes the expectations and realities of transnational spousal relationships. by analyzing narratives of waiting, we are able to unravel the complex nature of remittances as promises of love, and to see them as an affective medium that mitigates uncertain and vulnerable intimate relationships. my ethnography of waiting among the botoli, who could be romantically betrayed, financially abandoned, or treasured by their partners, elaborates on the experiences of those who do not migrate but nonetheless sustain a critical dimension of migratory practice. the work of waiting enables mobility and helps perpetuate the circulatory routes and returns of migration. the condition of waiting the widely shared interest in “going to korea” among residents of yanbian springs not only from personal aspirations but also from rapid structural changes generated by chinese economic reforms beginning in the early 1990s. as in many other regions of china, in yanbian the economic reforms were expedited through the privatization of work places (danwei) previously run by the local government.2 this resulted in many workers being laid off and leaving for larger cities in search of economic opportunities.3 farmers seeking an improved financial situation have moved from the countryside to urban centers, becoming a “floating population” that has found work in manufacturing or in the booming service industry (mackenzie 2002; pun 2005; yan 2008; zhang 2002; zheng 2009). what is specific about korean chinese migration in contrast to that of han chinese, however, is the intersection of urban migration and transnational migration to south korea, a country portrayed as an enemy homeland during the cold war. by rejuvenating long-neglected kinship ties and recuperating their linguistic and cultural similarities, korean chinese came to consider migration to south korea as a strategy for navigating a rapidly changing china of the early 1990s. as many korean chinese recount, the idea was to go to korea “to have a better life at a faster pace than is possible in china.” this aspirational, catch-up mentality drove the korean wind. alongside the immediate urgency of fleeing a privatizing china, korean chinese have responded to the korean market’s growing demand, from the early 1990s onward, for cheap sources of labor for the service, caretaker, and construction industries (lim and hwang 2002). in this context, korean chinese and korean labor markets have mutually promoted a unique identity among korean chinese as almost korean, but not quite,4 based on their ethnic similarity as koreans and their national difference as chinese citizens. this unique ethnic relationship has enabled korean chinese to undertake specific kinds of labor designated by the korean government (restaurant workers, caretakers, and construction laborers) while also marking “korean chinese” as an ethnic underclass who often face discrimination in south korea. despite mutual ethnic recognition based on market needs, however, korean chinese have, during the past two decades, considered south korea both an inaccessible homeland and also, paradoxically, a land of opportunity. under the obvious push-and-pull relationship between china and korea, the korean wind has brought nearly 600,000 korean chinese to live or work in korea as of the end of 2014, out of a total population of about two million korean chinese throughout china.5 ms. kang is one of those korean chinese migrants. she used to be a yanbian factory worker who made wooden tables and chairs, but she lost her job when her factory went bankrupt in the mid-1990s. i first met her in korea in 2004 in a church office that advocated for korean chinese labor and residential rights in korea; she was anxious about the constant danger of being deported as an undocumented worker—a longtime talented cook working around multiple restaurants in seoul. although ms. kang wanted to return to china eventually, at that time she still needed to earn more income in korea because all the money she had acquired in her first three years in the country had gone to pay off debt to the illegal broker who facilitated her migration. ms. kang missed her family—her husband and two sons—and communicated with them using international phone cards once every week or two. she could have tried to use internet messenger or web-camera chats to better stay in touch, but she wasn’t familiar with the technology. one day, she asked if i could help her with an instant messaging program with webcam capability so that she could actually see her family. i said yes and she called to arrange for her family to be sitting in front of her son’s computer at a predetermined time. through msn messenger, a commonly used but previously inaccessible medium to her, she was finally able to see her husband and two sons. i vividly remember how emotional the encounter was; she smiled broadly, her eyes moist with tears, through the whole conversation. her younger son asked, “mom, when are you coming back?” “as soon as i make enough money,” she answered. yet nobody seemed to know how much money would be enough, or how long it would take to accumulate this unknown amount. her husband did not show much affection and said little on camera. but it was obvious that all family members desired to see each other not virtually but in person, sometime soon. until 2005, the sort of waiting endured by ms. kang’s family prevailed among korean chinese. their often-undocumented legal status did not allow these workers to freely move back and forth between china and korea. ms. kang and more than 200,000 other undocumented korean chinese were held in limbo while the korean government granted them amnesty through revisions to the overseas korean act, which ultimately defined legal status for korean chinese in korea.6 the act identifies those belonging to the category “overseas korean” and determines which benefits they can receive in the “home” country (korea). by instituting rights nearly equal to those of korean citizens (park and chang 2005), the act granted a quasi-citizen status to overseas koreans. overseas korean, however, did not include korean chinese because of their socialist associations and possible political conflicts that might ensue with china regarding questions of dual citizenship. this exclusion turned most korean chinese toward illegal immigration brokers who charged high fees, equal to one or two years of average income—from $10,000 to $20,000. because of the exorbitant costs, couples usually had to decide who would go and who would remain behind to take care of the children and the family’s property. in part structured by korean immigration law and the illegal work regime it engenders, spouses increasingly separated so that they might send one spouse to korea. in this configuration the waiting party has become an essential part of korean chinese migration in constituting a new form of intimate relationship and financial management that heavily relies on the flow of remittances.7 since korea’s constitutional court declared the overseas korean act unconstitutional in 1999 because of its discriminatory characteristics, until 2004 the law was pending to be revised to include those it had previously excluded. the new act granted the same rights to all overseas koreans—except those who engaged in menial physical labor, the sort of work that most korean chinese did. as a result, korean chinese already working in the service and construction sectors could not take advantage of the revised act’s benefits. instead, the korean government issued h-2 visas, the overseas korean working visit visa, to these workers, requiring them to transmigrate between korea and china for set periods of time both in korea and china to maintain their working visas. this peculiar visa system, designed to prevent korean chinese from settling in korea, now controls both the working and waiting of korean chinese, a temporal governmentality that structures the flow of their remittances and the cadence of their movements. under this visa-structured temporality, ms. kang eventually returned to yanbian and remained there with her family for a year. she soon realized, however, that she could not keep up with the skyrocketing cost of living using only her earnings from korea. as she told me anxiously in yanbian in 2008, “i can’t buy much of anything with 100 yuan—not like seven years ago, before i went to korea. everybody seems to be much better off than me as they spend money like water.” after all those years of backbreaking labor in korea, she felt she was experiencing downward mobility and relative poverty at home, and this caused her to return to korea. when we met once more a year later in that country, she kept worrying about her husband: “we are not that close and we do not talk much over the phone.” equipped with an h-2 visa, she continues to move back and forth between yanbian and korea, faithfully sending her remittances. her husband, who earns no income himself, continues to seek out another apartment to buy so that he can secure rent as an extra source of income. this couple in their late fifties, onetime factory workers with very little in the way of pensions, are preparing for retirement: one by making money, the other by waiting for money in two different countries, both together and separate—“together across distance” (baldassar and merla 2013). waiting for love beset by multiple forms and periods of waiting, yanbian is like a place of “dwelling-in-travel” (clifford 1997, 2), with everyone always on the verge of moving. in the waiting stories i collected, i found that the most common question among korean chinese migrant spouses waiting for their partner was, “what if my partner has an affair?” (paramnada in korean), with either a korean or a fellow korean chinese migrant. in numerous cases korean chinese migrants have stopped sending remittances and broken off contact after beginning another life with a new partner in korea. in this context, a breakup can be a critical, life-threatening event for the waiting partner, as it results not only in the loss of the relationship but also in exposure to economic vulnerability. in addition to the anxiety emanating from undocumented status in korea, moral and sexual anxiety can become intense, especially when love becomes a means of transacting and transferring money. marriages of convenience, mainly between korean men and korean chinese women, are one of the common methods illegal migration brokers utilize to channel middle-aged korean chinese women in search of entering korea.8 caren freeman (2011) captures the new moral climate that belies the legal restriction by illustrating the unpredictable and unreliable nature of the entry process to south korea. immigration officers frequently found it hard to recognize counterfeit documents based on false kinship through so-called paper marriage, and thus allowed fraudulent visa holders to bypass customs. at the same time, those who held legal visas based on kin relations were sometimes denied entry. instead of merely being subordinated to the capricious visa regulation that kept korean chinese dangling, korean chinese migrants continued to confront the state’s policy designed to constrain their entry and long-term residence. they were able to unsettle moral and legal norms by both making and faking kinship. the pursuit of transnational marriage has been characterized by other anthropologists as a “global self-making” process that strengthens transnational ties through international marriages and remittances (faier 2007) or, alternately, as “global hypergamy” (constable 2009). both in china and korea, however, marriage has become a contentious topic not only because it enables entry into korea but also because it is stigmatized as instrumentalizing women’s bodies for the sake of monetary gain. marriage “as transaction” serves as both a survival and an advancement strategy, allowing an escape from economic precariousness (brennan 2004). despite wide variations, korean chinese international marriages illustrated a strong tendency, especially at the early stage of korean chinese migration from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s: marriages usually occur between lower-class korean men (rural farmers and urban low–working class) who cannot find korean brides, and korean chinese women who seek a way to enter and work in korea. in this marriage, love is a key term used to judge the nature of the marriage—whether it is real or fake—within and beyond legal definitions in both china and korea. love becomes “the new gold” (constable 2007; ehrenreich and hochschild 2004; parreñas 2001), a means for the production of value and new conditions of possibility. international marriage is ambivalently accepted as “global self-making” or “global hypergamy” predicated on the ability “to eat and live,” as one yanbian expression puts it. especially for those who have undertaken marriages of convenience by divorcing their real korean chinese husbands to marry fake korean husbands, the anxiety about the high divorce rate and the nasty endings of relationships is more elevated in the wake of the korean wind. however, my focus is not limited to the frequent moral laments heard in yanbian about the commodification of love. rather, i want to push my questions in a new direction, and to emphasize the conflation of money and love in remaking transnational couples. how have korean chinese couples who are separated developed ways to manage their anxiety about potentially losing their partner to transnational migration? what kinds of transactions have been made between the separated parties? and what is the reward for the couple that has successfully endured long periods of waiting, deferment, and isolation, in addition to the precarious relationship maintenance? one day in march 2009, i had lunch with a number of “waiting people” whose partners had been working in korea for several years. in the midst of a lively conversation, i saw ms. li looking sad. then in her late forties, she had been a farmer before her marriage to a korean chinese man. she was at that time working in a japanese plastic bag factory in yanbian, a job she disliked because of the long working hours and low wages. but there was no way for her to escape the factory—unless she left for korea, she could expect little improvement in her life. ms. li’s husband had gone to korea seven years earlier, promising that he would return in three years and that they would have a happy life together afterward. he was heavily financially indebted to the illegal broker on whom he had relied to get to korea. ms. li and her husband had believed the debt to be a worthwhile investment in a better future for them both. the broker helped the husband secure a temporary, two-week business travel visa to korea. thus very soon after he had arrived in korea, mr. li became an undocumented person. his illegal status prevented him from moving back and forth between china and korea, so he determined to stay in korea until he had earned a satisfactory amount of income. things looked tough. but ms. li was willing to endure this struggle as long as her husband returned to china with the money that he had promised her. for the first two years of his stay, her husband sent money to ms. li every other month. she took good care of it, saving all of the won (money) in her bank account to purchase a modern apartment in the city of yanji, yanbian’s capital city, where many yanbian korean chinese hope to end up living. the remittances definitely helped, and she felt as if they were making financial progress. in her husband’s third year abroad, however, the remittances began arriving later and less often, and the amounts became smaller and smaller. eventually, they stopped altogether. her husband did not call or send word to ms. li. she could not reach him. he had literally disappeared from her life. there were rumors about ms. li’s husband, suggesting that he had met a new woman or had gone broke. she had been waiting seven years for his return and he had betrayed her, making her feel as if she had wasted her life for nothing. unlike her relatives and friends whose korean dreams came true, ms. li still had neither a house nor financial resources, typically the visible evidence and reward for waiting for one’s husband. she wanted badly to leave yanbian and to go to korea, even through a fake marriage if necessary. ms. li told me that she would use whatever means she could to get to korea. and yet she was still married to the disappeared husband and could not divorce him, meaning that even a fake marriage to a korean man was not an option. “i’m getting old and sick of waiting for my husband,” she said. “i’m really stuck. there’s no way out for me.” if we consider promises as an ordering of the future to make it predictable and reliable (ahmed 2010), the broken promise disordered ms. li’s future. her husband’s disappearance all but destroyed her life, and left her with few escape routes. i’ve been dying to go to korea—not only for money, but also to find my husband. at first i worried about him so much when he didn’t call me. but when i understood that he had intentionally cut off contact, i wanted to kill him! now i’m just so exhausted from waiting for him, and then from hating him. i’m just one of a lot of unlucky people swept up by the korean wind. what’s the use of revenge? still, i need to divorce him officially, so that i can start my life over again. i am really stuck. ms. li’s long-term and long-distance relationship with her husband started with a mutual promise, one that was given a time limit: “i will return in three years.” however, once her husband stopped sending money and calling her, their bond to each other and their commitment to a common future dissolved. since then, her wait has transformed into a chronic, hopeless vigil. the longer it goes on, the more vulnerable she becomes. in fact, ms. li could have made ends meet in china without relying on the remittances sent by her husband. although the wages were not as lucrative as they would have been in korea, she could feed herself and her daughter following a tight budget. what made her more miserable, however, were her ceaseless attempts to travel to korea and her ongoing hope to make more money there. “if i went to korea, i could get paid ten times more than now.” but, as her visa requests were repeatedly rejected, her life seemed to float, not in her present, but in an imagined future somewhere else—perhaps korea. the anticipation seemed poisonous, making her feel desperate to escape from the present. furthermore, the discrepancy between her present life and her anticipated future resulted in a suspended life that was much more painful, especially when she compared herself with someone who had realized the korean dream. once she ceased to hope for a rosy future with her husband, her mental and physical health deteriorated remarkably. she was sick but had to work. she was weak but still wanted to go to korea. until she succeeded, her desperation and angst would not go away. at the same time, she believed that there was not much for her to do except wait for the day she could go to korea. now, ms. li told me “i’m no longer anxious because i’ve lost hope.” at that point, she still desperately wanted to go to korea—not to exact revenge on her husband, but to be rewarded for her lost time. beset by this internal struggle, ms. li felt miserable both economically and in terms of her sense of time and possibility. she was becoming a mere spectator in her own life—she saw herself increasingly lagging in rapidly changing yanbian. in fact, ms. li came to profoundly understand that she did not reflect the prosperous yanbian that enjoyed the fruits of the korean dream. she could not brag to her friends and relatives who had seized their chance and whose husbands had not failed them. her long wait had been a hard task, but, worse, it had turned out to be futile, breaking her heart as well as plunging her life into a kind of suspended animation. her prolonged waiting—promised in love—did not produce any value, and she was left empty-handed. ms. li continued to wait, not now for her husband, but for her imagined departure to korea. remittance as transformative power even as most korean chinese remained undocumented in korea and thus were prohibited from moving freely between china and korea, korean chinese families expected remittances to continue to flow to yanbian, even if there was always the risk that they might be interrupted or cease altogether (as in ms. li’s experience). in yanbian, talk of remittances is everywhere. remittances not only meet the economic needs of transnational families but also build connections and convey shared meanings between family members (baldassar and merla 2013). in other words, remittances are a personalized form of money dedicated to supporting the family back home, in the name of love. remittances are also an impersonal form of economic value used to buy houses and things such as new cars, big flat-screen tvs, high-end refrigerators, or luxurious furniture. in either case, remittances require special treatment; they need to be wisely saved, spent, and invested to create more wealth and a better future. remittances transfer not only the actual value of their monetary equivalent but also an affective sense of care toward the partner and the relationship itself, which is seen to be sustained through the flow of remittances. here we can see that, coupled with deferral and waiting, remittances emerge as a dubious medium of affection and support. it provides a means to practice moral responsibility for one’s family and its future—but it can also constitute a source of tension, forcing couples to separate for long periods of time. in what ways have senders and receivers negotiated their remittance transactions? what kind of money is a remittance? in numerous botoli waiting stories, full of frustrations, betrayals, and breakups, money and love can become intermixed and interchangeable. mr. ho’s story exemplifies the complex relationship between money and love in a context of transnational mobility. mr. ho was a dedicated communist party member in yanbian whose wife had been working in korea for twenty years. as a factory worker in a printing unit, he married and had a child in the mid-1980s. but when the chinese government began privatizing both housing and education in the early 1990s, the cost of living soared, and his income quickly became insufficient to support his family. as part of the process of privatizing the housing market, mr. ho’s work unit provided him with a new apartment at a lower-than-market price. he bought the apartment thinking it was a great deal. but he had to go into debt to do so. then, in 1992, the critical year in mr. ho’s life when he became an apartment owner, china normalized its diplomatic relationship with south korea. the door to korea suddenly opened wide. many of his friends and relatives hurried to depart for korea to seek better economic futures. mr. ho and his family were no exception. his wife, a factory worker, quit her job and went to korea, while mr. ho concentrated on earning further promotions and extending his social network in yanbian. given that mr. ho had a prestigious position in a good work unit, the couple believed that her departure for korea would be a rational choice as a long-term plan. however, mr. ho did not want to let his wife go. he was worried about the truth of a popular expression in yanbian: “once your wife is gone to korea, she will be lost in the korean wind.” at the same time, he had to let her go if he wanted to pay off the debt he had incurred when purchasing the family’s new apartment. after his wife left for korea in 1993, mr. ho underwent an internal struggle as a patriarchal male breadwinner whose wife was now earning more money than he was. he filled his time waiting for his wife with familial duties: taking care of his son, saving the remittances she sent, and transforming the money into tangible properties. his wise management of the remittances allowed his family to achieve material prosperity. despite his and his wife’s accomplishments, mr. ho remained anxious about her absence. “in order not to ‘lose’ my wife and to manage our common future,” he reflected once, “i have had to develop my ‘secret method’ to keep my wife for the past twenty years.” his secret method was based on a belief that “taking care of money is more important than making money.” in economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844, karl marx (1998, 138) writes about both the constructive and destructive force of money. as an impersonal but objective medium of value exchange, money is intimately mediated by human attachments. it directly transforms human bonds through its dramatic intervention into relationships between subjects. yet we cannot know what changes money will foment in human bonds; the uncertainty of money arouses anxiety about its uncertain consequences. mr. ho, for instance, described the creative power of money in transforming his wife into a controlling figure. thanks to her income, mr. ho’s wife gained power over many aspects of their marriage. for example, when mr. ho bought a new apartment with the remittances he had saved, his wife asked somebody else she knew to verify the actual price and conditions of the home. apparently, she never fully trusted the way mr. ho spent her money. although mr. ho felt horrible about his wife’s suspicion, he knew that it was the consequence of her labors and the sacrifice of her body and youth. he believed that the money in fact belonged to her. thus there was little he could say against her. at the same time, mr. ho grew incredibly anxious about his wife’s growing freedom as a sexually independent subject. mr. ho always feared that his wife might have affairs with korean men, whom he imagined as “cooler” and more sophisticated than korean chinese, based on his experience viewing korean soap operas. his wife’s increased freedom meant increased anxiety for him. despite his loneliness and frustration, however, he could not imagine having an affair with another woman. “if i had an affair, i would lose my wife, my money, and all that i have made. how could i dare think of such a thing?” after observing many cases where waiting partners’ extravagant spending of remittances ended in divorce, mr. ho was convinced that his proper financial stewardship was the core element strengthening his long-distance marriage. mr. ho’s anxiety reached its peak when he visited korea. he was eager to see the capitalist country, but even more eager to see his wife for the first time in three years. mr. ho was excited about the trip, and he imagined how emotional, moving, and arousing the encounter would be. he repeatedly practiced the right words to express his love for his wife. however, when he met her in seoul, mr. ho was utterly disappointed. all she talked about was money. “my wife was very cold toward me. i had dreamt intensely about having sex with her. but she seemed to have no interest in me. she ‘gave’ herself to me only once, and was in fact very reluctant. we had not seen each other in three years. i wondered what had happened. is this because of capitalism?” his wife, mr. ho believed, had developed a strong attachment to money as a result of her long and harsh labors, more than twelve hours a day for years and years in exploitative conditions. mr. ho believed his wife worried about neither her husband nor her son. all she seemed to be concerned about was money—the way in which her “blood money” should be spent, saved, and managed. she had been living for money. i see her obsession with money from two different angles. first, mr. ho’s wife’s strong attachment to money reflects her desperation to claim a hidden relationship between her work and its outcome. money is an emblem of her investment of time, health, youth, and loneliness, a biography of her labor during the past twenty years. these financial objects act as her alter ego and a manifestation of herself, which needs to be well-managed and preserved in whatever forms it takes. second, money demonstrates its transformative power in reshaping the couple’s relationship and subjectivity. mr. ho’s wife converted herself from a docile wife working in a low-level factory job into a controlling breadwinner who directed the family’s financial fortunes. at the same time, mr. ho—a self-defined patriarchal korean chinese man—dedicated himself to “caring work,” normally considered the province of the wife, all the while catering to her directives. despite the material affluence he was able to achieve because of his wife’s remittances, mr. ho had to develop a “secret method” to tame the transformative power of money and the unpredictable desires of his wife in more creative ways. he did this by overseeing the expansion of the family’s wealth and the maintenance of their home to which his wife would (hopefully) want to return. remittances have their own agencies and act both as an end and as a means. remittances as promises of love whereas marx highlights the transformative potential of money, marcel mauss (2000) emphasizes the anxiety that follows from the mutual obligation implied by the gift—the requirement that it be reciprocated in time (gregory 1982). jacques derrida (1994) also considers the “time limit” as a condition for a gift to become a gift: only if there is a deferral between exchanges and only if waiting is experienced can something be considered a gift. under the gift exchange, the wait between receipt of the gift and its reciprocation creates anxiety, because failing to return the gift or breaking the promise could result in the destruction of the relationship. due to this kind of waiting two parties expect promises to be fulfilled in time. yet i would like to push the analytical meaning of waiting beyond its gift-return relationship by thinking further about the role of the promise for a separated, transnational couple. in reality, people must cope with broken promises, as we saw when ms. li’s husband betrayed her both emotionally and economically. when waiting is conditioned by factors far beyond individual control, such as state policy changes, evictions, or new housing developments, it becomes more oppressive because it undermines the individual’s or the family’s ability to plan economic and social activities (harms 2013). an overabundance of unstructured waiting time indicates a form of precarity, social suffering, and social exclusion. as recent ethnographies have highlighted, those who are waiting experience boredom and suffer from high unemployment because of postsocialist development and neoliberal economic restructuring (harms 2013; jeffery 2010; mains 2007; o’neill 2014).9 yet waiting is not a completely passive, powerless, and unproductive condition, or a mere consequence of structural violence. as craig jeffery (2010) points out, waiting can be transformed into an opportunity to make social connections. instead of anxiously waiting for something to end or to happen, those who wait can actually create economic value by producing not things but social connections that turn possibilities into realities (harms 2013). in fact, “skillful waiting” produces a subject suited to the speed and contingency of late capitalism (chua 2011). following the narratives of korean chinese, i have argued that affective deferrals and vulnerable socioeconomic conditions demonstrate waiting as a key element of value production in transnational migration. here, waiting is work; korean chinese who wait in yanbian do not work directly for money, but rather for the potential of making or receiving money as they sustain the affective thread between the mobile and the immobile. waiting is work because the act of waiting constitutes a means of motivating two parties to remain together and committed as part of a larger circuit of migration and remittances. but the work of waiting is not always appreciated, nor is it necessarily monetarily rewarded as a form of waged labor. mr. ho’s story tells us how waiting and remittances represent a coeval embodiment, both promise and love, in support of a family’s future through a deferral of togetherness. mr. ho had to effectively reimburse his wife by providing competent care for the money she sent; this was a way of showing his appreciation for her labor. as mr. ho told me, “i have always felt indebted to my wife. but i know my wife and i are mutually indebted to each other.” the mutual debt between mr. ho and his wife must be reciprocally returned to each other at a given time. that is because the debt, which generated waiting by manifesting the desire for possibility (han 2011), provided the condition for continuing their marriage relationship. mr. ho was waiting for his wife’s return home, and his wife was waiting to return to china. they had each endured distinct kinds of waiting in different places, and they had each engaged in particular forms of attending to financial resources. waiting bound these two parties together, conditioning their interpersonal subjectivity. caring for money, however, did not prove sufficient for mr. ho to sustain his long-term, separated relationship. in part, this resulted from the fungible quality of remittances: they are of ambiguous ownership, never fully belonging to anyone. mr. ho’s wife’s control over their money proved more powerful than he imagined. one day i lent some money to my mother because she needed a security deposit to buy a new apartment. i did not tell my wife because i thought it was a trivial matter. yet when she found out, she became incredibly furious. she could not stop crying for several days and did not talk to me for a week. i had simply lent money to my mother! wow! since then i have realized how important the money is to her, and also that i’m not supposed to touch the money under my control. i thought it was our money that needed my caring and management. after discovering that the remittances could not be spent without her permission, mr. ho felt powerless because the situation gave him the sense that he did not have the right to use the money, even though he was responsible for safeguarding it and increasing its value. i have never been selfish about the money. thinking of her, i have done so much work here in yanbian waiting for her to return. is waiting easy work to do? i have had to play multiple roles to fill her absence as a mother, father, and teacher. waiting has killed me for the past twenty years. loneliness has been the source of all my diseases. i say to myself, i deserve better than this! even though he managed their money and properties over the years, mr. ho’s obligation seemed to remain unfulfilled. he felt cheated by his long waiting period because his wife was never satisfied with his efforts. waiting, for him, entailed the sensation of being stuck. it is also hard work that requires “an ability to await events” and “the full acceptance of the other’s time” (gasparini 1995). but as mr. ho found, waiting is a kind of labor that often goes unappreciated. mr. ho believed that he had paid back the hardship of his wife’s labor. but his wife apparently did not agree. in her view, the transaction was never fully completed, thus leaving both of them with a seemingly unpaid debt. mr. ho kept emphasizing to me that his waiting as a botoli should be recognized in economic terms as well, because the remittances required his efforts if they were to expand as property and wealth. he asserted that the insufficiently recognized labor of waiting made him feel feminized and undervalued by the market and his wife. even though mr. ho was not the person earning the money, he was the one responsible for spending it. and yet his expenditures were subject to the supervision of his wife, who claimed that the money belonged to her. the enjoyment of remittances is, then, always deferred from the present to the future. the ability to imagine a common future is contingent on a mutual promise, one that is breakable and fragile. in the context of this uncertainty, mr. ho’s secret method proved a reasonable response: preserving and investing these financial resources was the only technique and tangible evidence that could demonstrate his love and appease his anxious waiting. mr. ho believed that “where money is saved, my wife returns.” money comes to appear as the true binding force for love. at the same time, this bond is fragile, since the flow of money might stop whenever the love does. money and love can thus be connected as well as separated in a vulnerable spousal relationship navigating a transnational, migratory, and remittance-inspired setting. the work of waiting by furnishing ethnographic details of the deep but vulnerable interdependency between two remittance-linked spouses,10 i have argued that waiting is often unappreciated and largely unrewarded affective work even though the act of a spouse’s waiting facilitates the flow of love, money, and people. i have also argued that waiting forms part of an intersubjective couple-project, a kind of future-making strategy necessary to survive life in an increasingly competitive china. here, i emphasize the future not as a stable temporality or psychological state, but rather as a malleable set of possibilities that waiting partners actively manipulate to overcome uncertainty and despair. two parties—sender and receiver—exchange and share not only economic value but also a particular responsibility for the future of their family, which is sustained through the deferral of present togetherness. although the two parties may be eager to create a mutual futurity and sociality through the labor of waiting, their affinities may draw them into precarious conditions. these precarious conditions extend beyond the personal level. remittances have played an obvious role in enabling migrant families to acquire material affluence: new, modern apartments, their own businesses, expensive cars, and the ability to educate their children in beijing, shanghai, or other large, cosmopolitan cities. what becomes crucial in this context is how to maintain this affluent, urban lifestyle. yet, as many korean chinese migrants have testified, “however much money i have earned in korea, my hands are still empty.” china has rapidly become a much more expensive place than the country they left in the early 1990s. the necessity to survive in china pulls korean chinese migrants back into the circuit of migration; they must return to korea to keep apace with economic development in yanbian. the work of waiting continues not only under the pressures of visa regulations but also under the obligation to maintain new lifestyles and expectations in china. korean chinese transnational migration suggests that the bifurcation between mobility and immobility, making money and waiting for money is not easily separable. rather, spousal waiting at home forms part of migration; with no waiting there is no intimate bond and, in turn, no monetary circulation. returning to mr. ho’s secret method, his proposition that “taking care of money is more important than making money,” i believe that the essence of the work of waiting lies in the vulnerable interdependency between (remittance) money and love, between waiting and working. it is this im/mobile unwaged affective labor that continues to drive circuits of migration today; as the yanbian saying goes, “where money goes, love is.” notes acknowledgments my gratitude goes to korean chinese migrant workers and their families, as well as to the many scholars, writers, journalists, and friends willing to share their stories and time with me both in yanbian and in seoul. my fieldwork and writing were supported by numerous institutions at duke university (a research fellowship from the department of cultural anthropology, the evan frankel dissertation write-up fellowship, the john hope franklin dissertation writing workshop, and the asia pacific studies institute), as well as the ssrc korean studies dissertation workshop, the ssrc korean studies junior faculty workshop, and the japan-korea postdoctoral fellowship at the university of pittsburgh. for careful readings and productive comments, many thanks to nancy abelmann, anne allison, gary ashwill, christina chia, leo ching, nicole constable, arianne dorval, jatin dua, koonyoung kim, ralph litzinger, gabriella lukacs, lorien olive, seo young park, charlie piot, senghwan shin, orin starn, rebecca stein, kathi weeks, and katya wesolouski. i appreciate the comments and feedback on this article presented in the departments of anthropology at johns hopkins university and stanford university. i am especially thankful for anne allison’s multiple readings of different versions of my manuscript, and for ralph litzinger’s critical insight and stimulation for lively ethnography. thanks also to three anonymous reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology, especially cymene howe, who offered incredibly insightful comments and great support throughout the revision process. 1. i use the term korean wind as a translation of han’guk param. this concept is distinct from that of the korean wave, which refers to the contemporary popularity of korean culture throughout and beyond asia. korean chinese transnational migration was initiated by the ethnic connections that gave them access to the korean labor market, with its need for cheap labor in the fields of restaurant work, child care, nursing, and construction. 2. the danwei system is the basis of the livelihood and employment security of the urban working class in china (lee 2007). some have called this system “organized dependence” (walder 1986) and “danwei welfare socialism” (gu 1999). 3. xiagang (stepping down from one’s post) is the state of no longer being employed, while still maintaining a contractual relationship with one’s enterprise (work unit) and retaining benefits (hung and chiu 2003). 4. i borrowed the idea of “almost korean, but not quite” from homi bhabha (1994, 122), who describes mimicry as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” 5. these numbers are based on the statistics reports posted on the website of the korean immigration office, http://www.immigration.go.kr/. 6. the precise number was difficult for the government to figure, given that most korean chinese workers stayed undocumented until the amnesty was granted in 2004. according to numbers provided by the department of law in south korea, as of september 2014, korean chinese represent 580,520 of 1,628,771 foreigners registered in south korea. 7. entire families can also migrate permanently to south korea, provided they can obtain household registration and recover their korean nationality. yet most korean chinese migrant workers are willing to maintain their lives in china, for children’s education and for the wide-ranging economic opportunities that the chinese economy brings about. 8. i have witnessed numerous cases of fake marriages practiced by middle-aged korean chinese women. they divorce their current husbands and marry fake husbands on paper. 9. in india, the educated young who experience “timepass” end up “being left behind” (jeffery 2010). romanians mired in lengthy periods of underemployment have suffered from “a brutal kind of boredom” without any social security net (o’neill 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minneapolis: university of minnesota press. socialities of indignation socialities of indignation: denouncing party politics in karachi tania ahmad york university the pakistani elections of 2013 boasted the highest voter turnout in twenty-five years, but a flurry of accusations of vote rigging and ballot stuffing—backed up by mobile-phone video—accompanied this success, as did demands for recounts and stories of eight-hour lineups at polling stations. in this essay, i discuss events six years earlier that stand in genealogical relation to this denunciation of party politics, focusing on indignation as an affect that both embraces and politicizes the ordinary in an explicitly moral register. examining such emergent socialities may prompt ethnographers to reconsider what we recognize as political, and what we consider depoliticized. in the aftermath of an episode of widespread political violence in karachi, pakistan, in 2007, city residents, who had retreated indoors in anticipation of the possible escalation of a political rally, produced and claimed a discourse of indignation and denunciation. i argue that their active non-participation in the political animosity, marked especially by their domestic confinement, constituted a form of political engagement. naming the specifically moral transgressions of participants in urban violence, and contrasting them to a discourse of staying at home and waiting out the worst, generated the ordinary as a category of shared experience, operating as a mode of participation, and thus as a potential political position.1 it is important not to mistake this tentative, fleeting, and in the end minimally effective sociality as a mere form of depoliticization. rather than consider the discourses of indignation, denunciation, and non-participation as evidence of a lack of engagement, i suggest that they articulate the possibility of conjuring and addressing an alternative, emergent public by recuperating the highly contingent righteousness of the ordinary. the events precipitating this staging of indignation as a morally outspoken response to violence between political opponents have particular significance when considering future developments. although ethnic animosity was conspicuously rejected as an explanation or justification for urban unrest in karachi in may 2007, in the following four years political turf wars increasingly employed an ethnic register. in addition, independent live news television was subjected to growing state regulation, and the voices of residents became increasingly palpable through what huma yusuf (2012) refers to as citizen journalism. on may 12, 2007, the visit of the ex–chief justice, dismissed by president general pervez musharraf, devolved into a series of armed altercations between opposition party supporters and those allied with the central government. violence spilled onto the main roads, and live news television channels as a renegade judiciary became embroiled in the scales of federal and city politics. in response, karachi residents claimed the position of non-participants in political violence through discursive indignation, made distinct by uttered denunciations and domestic confinement. residents articulated a rejection of party politics in favor of adamant claims for moral decency and compassionate humanity, set apart from the supposed filth of ostensibly democratic institutions. as fleeting as it was unprecedented, the open vitriol against party politics was experienced and mediated through live television coverage, which the government outlawed soon afterward. residents’ vocal critiques constituted a moment where their anger interpellated millions of others who had similarly retreated into the safety of domestic space. criticisms came from people with diverse class, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, crossing precisely those lines generally described and politicized as dividing them. the tirades proved powerful, especially given the sideways glances and oblique references that had mostly characterized critiques of political violence in the past. often, when describing political organizations, news media had feebly masked urban dynamics by referring anonymously to “a certain political party.” although after may 12 karachi residents considered with wary distaste the city’s entire elaborate party landscape, with its various ethnic and/or religious orientations, the party known as the mqm (muttahida qaumi movement, or united nationalist movement) suffered by far the most emphatic denunciations.2 live television footage had shown representatives of numerous other parties, most of which had sided with the dissenting judiciary, heavily armed as well, but the mqm occupied the most forcefully symbolic space in an imaginary of power, threats, and urban violence. in condemning the brutality of political parties in general, and of the mqm in particular, residents generated a discursive space constituted through negation. domestic confinement may 12 was a saturday, a half day of work. almost everyone i knew stayed at home, prompted not only by the “holiday” announced by the government just before midnight the previous evening but also by the several days leading up to it. news reports about concurrent rallies called by political opponents, metal containers installed along the ex–chief justice’s planned procession route, and banners painted in mqm colors draped along the same route foreshadowed a veritable showdown. staying indoors during periods of possible urban unrest was common for karachi residents, and strikes called by political parties or last-minute holidays announced by the government in anticipation of possible disturbances in the city frequently influenced the decision not to go outside. strikes had variable effects, depending on how seriously neighborhood residents took a party’s veiled threats to close shops and stop traffic. in party strongholds, strikes would be observed for at least a few hours, but in more affluent areas disregard for city politics signaled elite prestige. life generally returned to normal by the afternoons, once the symbolic point of the strike had been made, and stores opened to compensate for the morning’s losses. the declaration of official holidays meant to minimize the presence of schoolchildren on the streets also provided justification for employees to stay at home, and served as a warning that the government would not be held responsible for people venturing into public spaces despite oblique injunctions not to. for the entire evening of may 11 and throughout the following days, my relatives and i stayed glued to the television news channels, privatized since 2000, which featured live footage, looped images, correspondent reports, analysis, and ample call-in responses from viewers. video featured men in various party colors bearing arms, shielding themselves from gunfire or carrying bloody victims, as well as cars and buses burning, riddled with bullets, or otherwise damaged. reporters’ voice-overs told of violence witnessed and the security forces’ inaction in response. later that evening, talk shows took caller after caller who described and denounced the political violence they had seen and would no longer tolerate. this heavily mediated experience was complemented by a steady stream of text messages: “are you watching geo? switch to aaj. my mother won’t let me step outside. 3 dead at patel para. all of this was planned by mqm.” there were also phone conversations with relatives and friends in different parts of the city: “how is it where you are? did you see what is happening at the airport?” and a mother pleading with the two cousins who had gone to work that morning: “please come home now. why did you go? you see, no one else was that stupid.” even though our street was in a somewhat affluent neighborhood well away from the main roads, it was deserted. i saw none of the usual cars, pedestrians, vendors, or groups of children playing makeshift cricket. members of the extended family from downstairs intermittently came over to watch television with us and to share the rumors and stories they had heard from their friends and family. when i spoke with other people later, i learned that some had stayed home all day, while others had quickly returned there after encountering blockades or hearing reports and rumors while on early-morning errands. a friend had taken his father-in-law to the airport on his motorcycle, but then had found the route home closed off and himself trapped on the blockaded main boulevard for several hours. acquaintances reported failed attempts at convincing security forces to let people through. the decision to stay at home or leave often seemed influenced by relatives, and going outside could mean having to tensely navigate the disciplinary strategies of alternately authoritative and tearfully pleading household members. like other karachi residents whose relatives and friends occasionally forbade them to step outdoors, i understand my own domestic confinement on may 12 as a situated perspective and a form of participant observation. in doing so, i draw on jessica winegar’s (2012, 68, 69, 70) assertion that domestic experiences of political events are critical not only in their potential to support or impede publicly staged claims but also because excluding what she terms “the hidden majority” conflates the iconic occupation of public space with spatial assertions about “the true locus of transformative politics.” as such, considering experiences of domestic confinement during the events and aftermath of may 12 in karachi not only documents diverse experiences of political conflict but also marks what i argue was an emergent sociality, where domesticity was staged as a political claim. the very regularity of the practice of retreating indoors, relying on heavily mediated accounts of public space through television and interpersonal communication, enfolds the violence of exceptional events into everyday family relations. this observation draws on the work of veena das (1995, 2007, 2008) and naveeda khan (2006, 2012), who emphasize that the ordinary is where critical events are lived through the fabric of everyday experiences, which are informed, in turn, by the broader contexts that configure their potentialities. by this they suggest that anticipating domestic confinement as a result of publicly staged political claims, deciding when or whether to reemerge to resume routines, and negotiating with pleading relatives all shaped the quality of staying at home, waiting for the worst to be over. the centrality of television, texting, and telephone conversations mediated the experience of cautious, self-imposed restrictions on mobility.3 more than serving as a source of information, live television broadcasts marked the spectator as not being in public space. thus the particular sociality constituted by watching news television mediated a surrogate perspective, where the domesticity of viewing emphasized a boundary between those who used public space outside their homes, on the main roads, and those who watched footage of that space from the safety of the indoors. as the events unfolded, television journalists reinforced that distinction by vocally distinguishing themselves and all other “decent” people who had retreated inside from those who occupied public space and thus perpetuated violent conflict. this description of the events of may 12 is contracted because i do not wish to excavate violence as an object of analysis,4 but instead, to examine how a sociality was temporarily constituted and articulated in relation to it. this methodology builds on efforts that use spectacular crises as starting points for investigating what they exclude, occlude, and produce (e.g., daniel 1996; krupa 2009, 21; tambiah 1996). in the aftermath of may 12 in karachi, the denunciations by avowed non-participants contrasted involvement in urban unrest with staying indoors. the indignation of residents in this framework thus presented a sociality enacted and staged by claiming domestic confinement as both a shared experience and an explicitly moral position; it figured these ordinary experiences as a political stance. as such, the circulation of indignant denunciation articulated a mode of political engagement that was more than simply depoliticized, terrorized, or fearful.5 although fear might be an intuitive explanation for domestic confinement, i found that fear (khauf, ḍarr) was almost entirely absent from residents’ narratives. instead, i heard indirect attributions of actions to party workers in an explicitly moral register that overlapped with the social distinction of middle-class respectability: any involvement in politics was filthy and implicitly lower class. the scolding exhortations to exhibit decency and humane compassion (insāniyat), and to sustain civil relationships claimed a moral righteousness that i had learned to recognize as a sign of cultivated, articulate, well-mannered middle-class aspirations. here, respectability became a moral orientation invoked and addressed through what michael warner (2002, 90–96) refers to as the “social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.” although i had heard the conjuring of an “us” and a “we” through appeals to being “ordinary people” on several occasions, the claim seemed to pick up speed in the aftermath of may 12, suggesting that it was fueled by shared experiences that could be publicly staged. importantly, this sociality was tentative and emergent; it was by no means fully formed or explicitly articulated: it was a powerful, if fleeting, suggestion. as such, i limit my discussion to the word sociality, rather than committing to any one of the many stronger terms to describe solidarities, movements, or constituencies. ultimately, the foray into public discourse receded into more occasional references and everyday comments, possibly due, in part, to the government-imposed censorship in june 2007 outlawing live television, images of politically sensitive violence, and supposedly exaggerated criticism of the government. nonetheless, i suspect that the aftermath of may 12 generated a memory of how the people who stayed at home and waited for the worst to be over could imagine each other as a moral community, connected by their disapproval of, their active tactics of avoiding, and their shared subjection to political violence. context: the event may 12, 2007, was supposed to be an experiment in public national solidarity with the ex–chief justice of pakistan, iftikhar muhammad chaudhry, and the lawyers who supported him in the name of an independent judiciary, in protest against the executive branches of government under the regime of president general musharraf.6 after chaudhry’s dismissal by musharraf in march 2007, a series of rallies, each larger than the previous one, had given a loose community of lawyers and judges from associations throughout pakistan unprecedented status as a collective of politicized actors. the media carried images and stories of jubilant, defiant, and rowdy lawyers, who loudly called for chaudhry’s reinstatement as chief justice, arguing that his dismissal was unconstitutional. political opposition parties—keen to capitalize on the opportunity to contest the current government, but also supporting the principle of an independent judiciary—quickly lent their support to the former chief justice, so that footage of swelling crowds waving an array of familiar party flags became the visual mark of the momentum generated by chaudhry’s supporters. chaudhry was invited to address the sindh high court in karachi on may 12, 2007, but when he and his entourage of lawyers arrived in the city, they were prohibited from leaving the karachi airport and instead returned to the capital, islamabad, several hours later. that day, blockades were set up at the airport and along karachi’s main arteries, gunfire was exchanged between members of various political parties, and vehicles were torched as security forces looked on without interfering. violence was also reported at several widely dispersed, but symbolically key traffic intersections throughout the city. later, the government paramilitary forces stationed at many sites of unrest maintained that they had received no orders to respond to the events. city morgues officially reported more than forty casualties, but rumors and authenticated reports spoke of more scuffles, injuries, and bodies during the following week. many residents did not venture out of their homes for several days. ultimately, the events of may 12 brought about urban violence on a city-wide scale for the first time in twelve years, dredging up memories of past political violence. although in the aftermath they expressed their indignation at politically motivated violence in general, the majority of residents directed their angry words at one party: the mqm. most recently the mqm had participated in federal and provincial levels of the pakistan government, as well as in karachi’s municipal administration.7 the party has been described in terms of non-elite politics, ethnonationalism, “street nationalism” (verkaaik 2004), and “counter-nationalism” (naqvi 2006), but it has also been linked to organized intimidation and armed turf wars. until 1997, the acronym mqm (muttahida qaumi movement, or united nationalist movement) stood for the muhajir qaumi movement (muhajir nationalist movement). it is a karachi-based political party founded in 1984, with a platform aimed expressly at a middle-class urdu speakers, collapsing them, as an ethnic identity, with the historical category of partition-era migrants from india (muhajirs). the party initially focused on the alleged social disenfranchisement of urdu-speaking migrants, notably through the state imposition of quotas on government jobs and university admissions in the 1970s. these accommodations had meant to provide redress for underrepresented ethnic minorities, but the founders of the mqm and many others experienced them as discriminatory. in addition, the mqm provided a more secular and explicitly accessible, nonintellectual alternative to modernist islamic parties, such as the jamaat-e-islami, which had enjoyed substantial support from karachi’s muhajir community in the past. although the mqm claimed to address and mobilize muhajirs as an ethnic category, it did not do so consistently, exclusively, or uniformly. this became clear through a succession of often short-lived alliances between the mqm and various political groups, notably those associated with an ethnically inflected non-muhajir support base,8 as well as through the party’s more recent efforts at extending its influence beyond urban sindh. as nichola khan (2010), oskar verkaaik (2004), and others have noted in more detailed histories of the mqm, the descendants of partition-era migrants in karachi are politically, religiously, and socioeconomically diverse. their political involvement is distributed among religious and secular parties, and they show variable degrees of identification with the term muhajir as used by the mqm. yet despite the party’s name change aimed at addressing broader constituencies, the mqm’s platform continues to politicize muhajir identity in an implicitly ethnic register. from the mid-1980s through the late 1990s, mqm activities were associated with widespread popular support, gruesome turf wars, and ethnic conflict in urban sindh. several factors fueled this situation, including the availability of weaponry, factional intra-party violence and target killings, and competition over territorial rights to collect revenue from protection rackets. in karachi, the government on several occasions deployed the police and military to impose curfews, round up profiled or suspected militants, and execute extrajudicial killings to eliminate so-called street nationalists, most frequently in working-class neighborhoods considered mqm strongholds and designated no-go areas. for example, in 1992, government attempts to suppress urban violence in karachi resulted in operation cleanup, in which military forces for twenty-nine months occupied and purged the city of alleged young male party activists. following the operation, the mqm’s radicalized side was tempered by the party’s gradual incorporation into mainstream politics through a series of coalitions and negotiations with the federal government. from 2005 to 2011, the mqm led karachi’s elected city government under the local government system then in force, accruing a reputation for effective governance through infrastructural renewal and service provision, while representing the majority of city constituencies in the provincial and national assemblies. despite a newfound strategy of progressive moderation and municipal governance, the mqm continued to maintain antagonistic territorial relations with standing historical rivals.9 the resilience of these familiar tensions became increasingly apparent in the ethnically tinged, targeted violence of late 2008, which escalated to a large-scale ethnopolitical turf war in the summer of 2011. allegations of ethnic conflict in the local and transnational media failed to take into account that the violence occurred in areas where several parties competed over turf and that the claim of ethnic solidarity as a justification for violent conflict had not been consistently effective in karachi’s history. may 12, 2007, is a watershed for its failed attempt to recuperate ethnic difference as a justification for urban violence,10 and for the frank denunciations made by those who cast themselves as ordinary residents. their discourse reminds us that ethnic politics are neither consistent nor ubiquitous, and perhaps more important, that people in karachi do not always deem ethnicity a plausible explanation for political violence. criticisms of the mqm thus accused the party of reiterating violent approaches to familiar animosities between political rivals and of using its municipal resources to plan and organize a partisan conflict, rather than exerting restraint as responsible leaders of elected government. in may 2007, the mqm not only led the municipal city government but was also one of the few parties allied with the ruling coalition, and thus with musharraf’s pml-q (pakistan muslim league–quaid-e-azam).11 although the mqm was widely believed to have transitioned into a moderate and progressive party at the time, it continued to be associated with the volatility and armed street violence of the 1980s and 1990s. this situation gave the federal government a potentially threatening ally in karachi, whose presence would undermine the possibility of openly criticizing musharraf’s administration. the association between the city and federal political authority was made explicit through a central government rally held in islamabad later in the evening of may 12, where musharraf and his supporters delivered bland pro-government speeches from behind a podium protected by bullet-proof glass, despite or perhaps because of the bloodshed in karachi.12 symbolically challenging chaudhry’s visit to karachi, mqm representatives also held a concurrent rally, set up blockades preventing access to event venues, and draped banners painted in party colors over pedestrian bridges and billboards along the former chief justice’s procession route. the party’s menacing statements in the preceding days were compounded on may 12 by the presence of armed gunmen of various affiliations on the overpasses overlooking the procession route, among pro-chaudhry demonstrators, and along routes leading to the concurrent mqm rally. socialities of indignation the outrage expressed by residents who had stayed in their homes, as well as by journalists and victims caught in the cross fire of political violence, fashioned a sociality articulated on the moral ground of non-participation and domestic confinement. indignation as an affect that was recognized, shared, and communicable drew attention to the formation of a fragile and tentative public constituted through circulating expressions and reiterations of denunciation. as such, may 12 marked a significant, if short-lived, turning point where angry words became explicit, rather than remaining hidden in oblique references and abstract formulations. the direct quality of the critiques, as well as their orientation toward an unruly mqm sanctioned by the musharraf government, marked a departure for otherwise much more cautious karachi residents. television television reports seemed to instigate immediate outbreaks of street violence and shoot-outs in different parts of the city, notably along the former chief justice’s procession route and in areas considered mqm strongholds, especially at intersections near the proposed mqm rally and in neighborhoods where anp (awami national party) turf bordered mqm turf. two turning points in live media coverage intensified the explicit critiques and thus mediated the sense of indignation as a shared experience. in the first, gunmen of various affiliations, who had been shooting at each other from rooftops and alleys near a central intersection on the road from the mqm heartland to the planned rally, began bombarding the aaj tv studios as cameramen and journalists reported from the balcony. the images became iconic: a crouching journalist, filmed by a crouching cameraman, angrily describing how he felt compelled to take cover. through the channel’s coverage, tv hosts became outspoken, critical, and unguarded. the second turning point came in the form of candid commentary by geo tv’s news analyst dr. shahid masood. on the evening of may 12, he, in impeccable urdu, stated calmly and baldly that violence was not an acceptable political strategy. no fear marked his language, only the righteous moral high ground of a reprimand: violence would no longer be tolerated. denouncing the mqm although denunciations were mediated by live television, viewers used the information, images, and commentary as a starting point for their speculations and indignant critiques. the karachi university student farid bhai texted me to ask who i thought was responsible for the developments. he did not agree with my feeble poststructuralist notion of a polysemic, conjunctural causality, asserting instead: “all of this is planned by mqm.” as we watched the news on the morning of may 12, voice-overs asked about the whereabouts of the thousands of security forces who had allegedly been deployed in karachi for this day. my aunt was furious that the chief justice had supposedly refused the offer of helicopter transport to the sindh high court, where he was supposed to deliver an address. “now so many people will die,” she said; “he should have returned to islamabad as soon as he realized what was happening.” my uncle paced the hallways, remaining within earshot of the blaring television, saying that mqm people were keeping the former chief justice from leaving the airport. later, photographs of flag-bearing groups of men on motorcycles in front of the main terminal, and magazine articles about shoot-outs on the airport grounds, made this assertion difficult to refute. scathing television commercials blended tracks of the national anthem with a hopeful patriotic poem wishing pakistan progress and prosperity, accompanying looped footage of politicians, bleeding civilians, burning vehicles, and people bearing different party flags running away or beating others. most significantly, although these viewers’ reactions were shaped by media images and discourses, as well as by their self-imposed domestic confinement, their words anticipated mqm tactics that live television only suggested. they voiced targeted denunciations and vocal disgust hours before the journalists were shot at, hours before the mqm rally was televised, and hours before dr. masood bluntly reprimanded the mqm for violent tactics on screen. viewers drew on memories of political violence from the 1990s, and in the following weeks, several people commented, “yes, but it was nothing compared to 1992.” this audience combined the news provided by journalists with its own understanding of contexts. my cousin returned from his brief morning stint at work to report that several dozen of his coworkers had camped out at the office because they did not think they could get home safely. many of them lived in or near areas with reported shoot-outs or close to blockaded roads. farid bhai maintained that only the mqm, with its access to municipal resources and a long history of organized street violence, could have arranged blockades on such short notice. my uncle, who had been a journalist for the urdu press since the 1970s, made shrewd observations based on what seemed to me mere snippets of information. i realized that this audience had lived through long periods of state censorship, and was thus accustomed to reading between the lines. during the following week, i heard dozens of accounts from a wide range of karachi residents. in conversations, television call-in comments, blog posts, and news articles, critiques focused on gunfights, killings, and on the fact of addressing political confrontation through urban warfare and intimidation. although commentators widely acknowledged that workers from various parties both participated in and were victims of these activities, they singled out the mqm for appropriating organizational resources and acting as a provocateur on behalf of its federal ally. the earliest report of firing on a group of lawyers in the anp-dominated area adjacent to the airport, which was immediately followed by reports of shoot-outs in several other locations, was also widely attributed to the mqm. people shared the stories about threats, blockades, and rumors that they had heard through neighbors, relatives, and coworkers. the common thread that ran through the observations held the mqm responsible for the violence because the party had supposedly instigated it. during the eleven months that i had already spent in karachi, people had been much more wary: although they had criticized the mqm in the safety of their homes and offices, in whispers and vague allusions, their disapproval had been accompanied by furtive glances over shoulders and through windows, and comfortable conversations had abruptly stopped when someone of unknown political affiliation entered the room. now these same people shared stories that were never on television: cars on the main boulevard had been flagged down and drivers asked their political affiliation—the “wrong” answer got them shot point blank; mqm organizers had used privately owned vehicles for the blockades at the sindh high court; political animosity slid into an ethnic register pitting muhajirs against pashtuns, who were associated with the anp; mqm gunmen on pedestrian bridges had fired into procession crowds; opposition-party gunmen had returned fire with semiautomatic weaponry; party workers apprehended by rivals had been tortured; a man was told that it would be better to remove his trousers and shirt, and go home in his underwear, than risk being taken for a muhajir (this implied that everyone else wore shalwar kameez, the loose traditional garment associated, for men, with piety and laborers). farid bhai, an urdu-speaker who occasionally attended mqm rallies for fun (see verkaaik 2004) and was on friendly terms with high-ranking party members who had been his neighbors in childhood, explained why the events of may 12 came as such a shock. people thought that the mqm had changed, he said, echoing the commentary on television talk shows. for the past four years, farid bhai claimed, they had stopped taking bhattā (protection money), or at least demanded it less often than before. “i thought they changed,” he reiterated, “once they entered the city government. but i was wrong; they organized everything.” his words reflected the disillusionment of many karachi residents who, prior to may 12, had thought that armed conflict over political territory was a thing of the past. farid bhai was disappointed and, like many others i spoke to, frustrated. other karachi residents described the operation of an economy of intimidation. reiterating an assertion common in interviews conducted after may 12, a punjabi man in his sixties, who lived in a middle-class neighborhood known as an mqm stronghold, said that the party had been wrong to hold a rally on the same day as the former chief justice. he explained that the mqm got votes on the basis of dahshat (terror) and khauf (fear). he did not describe this fear as paralyzing, but instead told of how on may 12, while the bazaar on the main road had been closed, the small neighborhood shops deep inside the maze of alleys had eventually opened up. then, he said, “laṛke motorcycles pe ā gaye the” (the boys on motorcycles came) and told them to close the shops again. this happened three times—the stores would tentatively reopen and the boys would tell them to close again. he explained to me that this was the type of hold that the mqm had in the neighborhood: it could threaten to shoot people, keep them scared, and send boys on motorcycles to close shops; people were afraid. yet i noted that they had clearly grown less wary about this situation, identifying the party and its actions, by name. in previous conversations, this man had made only the vaguest allusions to the party whose turf he lived on. by now naming the party and describing the almost defiant reopening of stores, he contrasted party workers with ordinary people who shared the moral and political position of being subjected to threats and intimidation. by describing his subjection in terms of neighbors and local shops, he identified domestic confinement as something that many residents in the vicinity had shared. this was a tentative, emergent, and yet unprecedentedly articulate enunciation of an implicit sociality—it began to imagine a “we” and named an agent enforcing the common experience of choosing, but at the same time being compelled, to stay inside. in openly and directly sharing these details, sitting beside two open windows of his small home, the man contributed to the circulation of a broader critical discourse of indignation. the politics of staying out of politics the discursive contrast couched in terms of indignation should not suggest that residents and news commentators did not hold any political sympathies or affiliations. instead, as nichola khan (2012) carefully observes, it was common for neighborhood residents to draw on varied resources of social capital, even when they crossed ethnic or party lines. for example, farid bhai sympathized with the jamaat-e-islaami, but he also had several friends in the mqm. this did not stop him from indignantly asserting that the mqm had provoked and organized the political violence of may 12, nor did it stop his mother from insisting that he remain at home for two days. a muhajir woman married into a punjabi family that had historically supported the pakistan people’s party (ppp) had petitioned an mqm-affiliated coworker to intervene into neighborhood construction efforts on her behalf in time for her son’s wedding. this had not stopped her from criticizing the armed workers of the opposition party, the former chief justice, the security forces, and especially the mqm for their roles in sustaining the urban unrest. before may 12, residents who i knew had sympathies for or histories of affiliation with longtime opponents of the mqm had spoken about the party with measured optimism as the mayor initiated infrastructural changes to major traffic arteries and drainage systems, as incidences of political violence seemed to decrease, and as reports suggested the less zealous collection of protection monies. the escalation of more familiar problems—such as load shedding due to inadequate electrical supply, or inflation and unemployment—were attributed to forces beyond municipal control: privatized corporations and the federal management of the economy. thus, part of what made the indignant critiques of the mqm so notable after may 12 was not only their explicit character but also that they occurred at a moment when the party had been accruing a reputation for responsible governance. while discourses differentiating armed party activists from those who had stayed at home focused on the provocations attributed to the organizational skills of the mqm, they also presented a departure from the more fluid connections between residents with variably formalized political affiliations and sympathies. the compulsion to stay at home on may 12 differed from comparable previous instances of waiting for the worst to be over. whereas street protests against electricity cuts, road accidents, or political causes may have featured milling groups of men throwing rocks or burning tires and buses, such events tended to be highly localized and limited to particular neighborhoods or intersections. in addition, curfews called by political parties were most effectively enforced in areas considered the turf or contested turf of that group. many schools carefully observed all curfews to ensure the safety of their students, but adults could circumvent localized disruptions by changing travel routes or times, or by just trying their luck. may 12, however, differed in that it affected the entire city: tense symbolic confrontations or exchanges of gunfire occurred in multiple locations kilometers apart. moreover, the sixteen-kilometer-long blockaded procession route, the concurrent mqm route and rally location, and the several thousand security forces stationed around the city extended the spaces of potential confrontation beyond particular, contained localities. this spatial scale was heightened through equally unprecedented independent live news television coverage and mobile communications technologies, which continually mediated the territorial simultaneity of urban unrest, not only for those who stayed at home but also for party workers, who seemed to retaliate in new areas moments after an initial armed confrontation was reported. such dispersed yet mediated sites of violence justify considering the shared experience of domestic confinement in terms of an emergent public, rather than through the localized spatial lenses of specific neighborhoods. finally, may 12 was distinct from other events because it mobilized a moralized discourse that not only singled out one instigator but used indignant denunciation as an idiom of differentiation. specific references to compassion and respectability underscored the vocal othering of political violence, thus contrasting the reports and images of unrest with the implicitly middle-class decency that invoked itself as normatively unmarked. for example, an elderly, ethnically pashtun partition-era migrant who had been involved with the ppp three decades earlier and who now lived with his sons in a northern neighborhood close to contested political turf, spat out a familiar sentiment in the days after may 12: “is mulk meṅ siyāsat nahīṅ hai, ṣirf badma‘shī” (there are no politics in this country, only hooliganism). he went on to exclaim that they used guns to deal with each other, invoking a “they” consisting of delinquent hooligans. by implication, his narrative conjured a normative, more cultivated “we” who could envision politics without resorting to armed encounters. the morality of restraint that drew on manners and decency was even more explicit in a comment on an english-language blog: one bullet is fired and then nobody knows who is on whose side. every political confrontation devolves into a gang-fight and people wanting a political change stay at home to watch the massacre in their city. in all honesty, ask how many shareef [respectable] karachiites actually went outside to support one party or the other? our sharaafat [implicitly pious, respectable strata] stayed at home, in purdah [veiled, concealed by a curtain, segregated, usually women from men]. (bilal zuberi, comment to najam [2007], may 12, 2007) the idiom of respectability operationalized terms associated with piety and modesty, sharāfat and purdah, to contrast politicized violence, and even political action more broadly, with the moral position of domestic confinement. of course, this comment could also be read as a satire of subjection rationalized as implicitly pious decency. more important, however, its ambivalent quality points to the emergence of a political sensibility that is expressed through a discourse of non-participation in political violence through domestic confinement, where staying at home is both a voluntary action and an external imposition. figuring the respectability of retreating from public space in contrast to the hooliganism of political violence posits a normative order subordinated to domesticity. as lubna chaudhry (2004) and others have emphasized, “multileveled” relations of power situate the possibilities of agency and critique in urban pakistan (see also chaudhry and bertram 2009; nichola khan 2010, 2012; verkaaik 2004). nested hegemonies of generational and gendered domestic authority position young men who act without morally normative restraint, by engaging in street violence or aligning themselves with party objectives, as uncontrolled or uncontrollable, rather than directly with familial, patriarchal hierarchies. thus the complex individual relationships young male activists negotiate in relation to their families and militancy, whether asserting generational independence (verkaaik 2004) or the possibility of self-transformation (nichola khan 2010, 2012), are obscured in popular discourses that frame them as hooligans and denounce their involvement in urban unrest, by virtue of not staying at home, as a moral failing. the scolding tone assumed by critics of political violence in the aftermath of may 12 subsumed street tactics to a privatized familial order that located a moral political alternative in the shared experiences of denunciation and domestic confinement. conclusion i have discussed a sociality of indignation as tentative, emergent, and, ultimately, as the suggestion of a public constituted through three claims: that domestic confinement was a shared experience, political violence was morally reprehensible, and that the mqm deserved to be denounced for its actions. these made for an unusually explicit set of assertions among karachi residents otherwise much more cautious and oblique in their criticisms. it located the possibility of a sociality in the distinction of morally decent persons who had stayed indoors and away from inter-party conflict. as such, invoking moral norms through discourses of non-participation conjured the ordinary as a political location, positing domestic confinement as a collective experience and indignation as a mode of participation that relied on moral affect as a political stance. i would like to recuperate, rather than dismiss, this range of specifically located, if ultimately ineffective, discourses of indignation. scholars of the anthropology of democracy, notably julia paley (2001) and lucia michelutti (2008), have focused on the quality of participation as an object of ethnographic analysis. non-participation and domestic confinement are frequently taken as evidence of depoliticization, rather than as a relational mode of participation. the fleeting socialities described here may be marginalized in metanarratives of democratization, but they point toward a diversity of participatory modalities that have the potential to mobilize the moral registers of the ordinary. such powerful (though often ineffective) social formations that, according to manuel castells (2012), connect outrage with hope, draw attention to the karachi residents whose denunciations suggest a solidarity at the interstices of political action and transformation. the particular, suddenly overt condemnations of party politics in the aftermath of may 12 fashioned a sociality that interpellated imagined others through the criticisms’ circulation. yet the discourses of outrage did not develop into movements following liberal forms of collective territorial mobilization through processions and dissent in public space. the casualties and injuries of may 12 had resulted precisely from an attempt to engage such fantasies of peaceful civil society protest; instead, the indignation that followed was located in a domestic confinement framed as moral terrain that opened up the suggestion that being compelled to stay inside during moments of crisis could, perhaps, become contestable. notes acknowledgments the critical comments of the journal editors and anonymous reviewers were instrumental to the final form of this essay. for their feedback, i would especially like to thank zhanara nauruzbayeva, as well as noman baig, mun young cho, kevin o’neill, robert samet, archana sridhar, shahzad bashir, liisa malkki, purnima mankekar, and sylvia yanagisako. i am indebted to the jackman humanities institute for its support, and to the institute’s fellows, the faculty members of the department of anthropology at the university of toronto, and members of the york centre for asian research urban asia colloquium series, especially shubhra gururani, roma chatterji, malcolm blincow, and othon alexandrakis. i thank geo tv for providing access to footage from may 12, 2007. 1. anthropological interventions mobilizing the ordinary draw on the philosophical legacies emphasizing complex contextual descriptions of everyday life in the work of john austin, stanley cavell, and ludwig wittgenstein. notable efforts to grapple with this term include veena das’s (2007) astute observations that the everyday is an achievement engaging the experiential uncertainties of skepticism and michael lambek’s (2010, 3) anthology exploring how everyday ethical sensibilities “draw on and are drawn into the ordinary.” 2. the research is based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in karachi, pakistan, between july 2006 and july 2007. for more on the mqm, which will be discussed further in a later section, see, for example, ahmed 1998, baig 2008, gayer 2007, kennedy 1991, nichola khan 2010, naqvi 2006, shaheed 1990, tambiah 1996, verkaaik 1994, 2004. print journalism in the karachi-based weekly english-language news magazine herald is especially rich and informative. 3. formidable scholarship on television viewership and the politics of television in india includes mankekar 1999, rajagopal 2001, and, more recently, a. jain 2010 and k. jain 2010. for an account of citizen journalism through online blogs and cell-phone content in pakistan that traces government censorship of independent news channels through 2007–2008 but conspicuously omits may 12 in karachi, see yusuf 2012. 4. for a more detailed account of may 12, 2007, see hrcp 2007 and the june 2007 issue of newsline magazine. 5. elsewhere, i discuss the tactics of avoiding involvement in political violence that also operate as subjection in karachi (ahmad 2011). 6. at the time of writing, chaudhry holds the post of chief justice of pakistan, having been reinstated, resuspended, held under federally imposed house arrest, and eventually reinstated once more. after being suspended by musharraf, he was initially reinstated as chief justice in july 2007 by the supreme court of pakistan, who maintained that musharraf’s actions in dismissing him had been illegal. chaudhry was again suspended by musharraf under the state of emergency in effect between november and december 2007, when he and several other supreme court judges refused to support the provisional constitutional order validating the temporary suspension of the constitution. chaudhry, like other judges, was held under state-sanctioned house arrest, although in his case restrictions extended to his immediate family and were lifted only in march 2008, following the general elections, on prime minister yousuf raza gilani’s first day in office. one year later, in march 2009, chaudhry was officially reappointed as the chief justice of pakistan by the newly elected government of president asif ali zardari. the immediate context of the events in karachi in may 2007 describe a particular moment in this longer saga, which was accompanied throughout by regular and vocal demonstrations by groups of lawyers throughout the country, but most conspicuously in islamabad and lahore. 7. the mqm led the karachi municipal government from 2005 until local government was eliminated as part of administrative reforms under the zardari regime in july 2011. although in the 2013 general elections more than five hundred mqm candidates ran for federal and provincial office across pakistan, the party won seats only in urban sindh, securing nearly twenty constituencies and almost all the national assembly seats in karachi (elections.com.pk 2013a, 2013b; mqm 2013). leading up to the elections, several political rallies held by parties with historically strong representation were bombed, allegedly by the pakistani taliban. in karachi, this included the mqm (see kazmi 2013). the targeted violence followed a series of sectarian bombings in early 2013, also attributed to the pakistani taliban. these events have altered the terrain of two prior years of sustained turf wars among political party rivals, which peaked in the summer of 2011. 8. this includes, for example, bouts of cooperation with the pakistan people’s party (ppp), whose support base was long associated with sindhi identity, and with the pakistan muslim league (pml), associated with an ethnically punjabi support base. 9. long-term rival political parties include the jamaat-e-islami (ji), the pakistan people’s party (ppp), and pashtuns as an ethnic and political category through the awami national party (anp). 10. this failure is significant because it marked a new strategy to reanimate ethnic animosity that seemed to gain traction in the ensuing four years. it developed through the ongoing, if sporadic, occurrence of target killings—notably of pashtun shopkeepers—that were eventually reported in the news media in terms of ethnic conflict rather than as a takeover of resources (qabza) or a way to provoke retaliation. on the conceptual significance of qabza in pakistan, see ewing 2010, hull 2010, and naveeda khan 2012. 11. musharraf’s pml-q (pakistan muslim league-quaid-e-azam) drew most of its support base from punjab. the additional member of the ruling coalition was the pml-f (pakistan muslim league-functional). 12. the pro-government rally was the subject of much criticism mediated through the independent news outlets. appropriating resources to light an evening rally seemed extravagant when current regulations required islamabad businesses to close in the early evenings due to electricity rationing. in addition, the rally, which claimed eighty thousand attendees, coincided with an officially declared impromptu holiday for government employees. this suggested that the audience consisted of the employees who had been given the day off. the lack of audience commitment was emphasized by live television images of continually milling crowds who seemed only vaguely attentive to the politicians’ speeches, even as president general musharraf took the podium, raising his arms to gesturally acknowledge, if not interpellate, the supposed adulation of the circulating crowd. ultimately, much criticism i heard focused on the emphatic distaste for the insolence of staging a triumphalist political spectacle just hours after a full day of violence and death in karachi. references ahmed, feroz 1998 ethnicity and politics in pakistan. karachi: oxford university press. ahmad, tania 2011 “bystander tactics: life on turf in karachi.” in “rethinking urban democracy in south asia,” edited by stéphane tawa lama-rewal and marie-hélène zérah, special issue, south asia multidisciplinary academic journal 5. http://samaj.revues.org/3537. baig, noman 2008 “from mohallah to mainstream: the mqm’s transformation from an ethnic to a catch-all party.” ma thesis, university of victoria, canada. castells, manuel 2012 networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. malden, mass.: polity. chaudhry, lubna nazir 2004 “reconstituting selves in the karachi conflict: mohajir women survivors and structural violence.” cultural dynamics 16, nos. 2–3: 259–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0921374004047751. chaudhry, lubna nazir, and corrine bertram 2009 “narrating trauma and reconstruction in post-conflict karachi: feminist liberation psychology and the contours of agency in the margins.” feminism & psychology 19, no. 3: 298–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0959353509105621. daniel, e. valentine 1996 charred lullabies: chapters in an anthropography of violence. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. das, veena 1995 critical events: an anthropological perspective on contemporary india. new delhi: oxford university press. 2007 life and words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. berkeley: university of california press. 2008 “violence, gender, and subjectivity.” annual review of anthropology 37:283–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094430. ewing, katherine pratt 2010 “anthropology and pakistani national imaginary.” in beyond crisis: re-evaluating pakistan, edited by naveeda khan, 531–40. new delhi: routledge. gayer, laurent 2007 “guns, slums, and ‘yellow devils’: a genealogy of urban conflicts in karachi, pakistan.” modern asian studies 41, no. 3: 515–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x06002599. human rights commission of pakistan (hrcp) 2007 “carnage in karachi: a city under siege.” fact finding report. http://hrcp-web.org/publication/book/carnage-in-karachi. hull, matthew s. 2010 “uncivil politics and the appropriation of planning in islamabad.” in beyond crisis: re-evaluating pakistan, edited by naveeda khan, 452–81. new delhi: routledge. jain, anuja 2010 “‘beaming it live’: 24-hour television news, the spectator and the spectacle of the 2002 gujarat carnage.” south asian popular culture 8, no. 2: 163–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746681003797989. jain, kajri 2010 “imagined and performed locality: the televisual field in a north indian industrial town.” contributions to indian sociology 44, nos. 1–2: 33–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/006996671004400203. kazmi, imran 2013 “attacks on mqm, ppp in karachi; five killed.” dawn.com, april 28. http://dawn.com/2013/04/28/attacks-on-mqm-ppp-in-karachi-five-killed/, accessed may 1, 2013. kennedy, charles h. 1991 “the politics of ethnicity in sindh.” asian survey 31, no. 10: 938–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2645065. khan, naveeda 2006 “of children and jinn: an inquiry into an unexpected friendship during uncertain times.” cultural anthropology 21, no. 2: 234–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.2006.21.2.234. 2012 muslim becoming: aspiration and skepticism in pakistan. durham, n.c.: duke university press. khan, nichola 2010 mohajir militancy in pakistan: violence and transformation in the karachi conflict. new york: routledge. 2012 “between spectacle and banality: trajectories of islamic radicalism in a karachi neighbourhood.” international journal of urban and regional research 36, no. 3: 568–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01074.x. krupa, christopher 2009 “histories in red: ways of seeing lynching in ecuador.” american ethnologist 36, no. 1: 20–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.01107.x. lambek, michael, ed. 2010 ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action. new york: fordham university press. mankekar, purnima 1999 screening culture, viewing politics: an ethnography of television, womanhood, and nation postcolonial india. durham, n.c.: duke university press. michelutti, lucia 2008 the vernacularisation of democracy: politics, caste and religion in india. london: routledge. muttahida qaumi movement (mqm) 2013 “mqm candidates for elections 2013.” http://www.mqm.org/englishnews/2017/mqm-candidates-for-elections-2013, accessed may 1, 2013. najam, adil 2007 “karachi burning: clashes, violence, firing, deaths.” all things pakistan. http://pakistaniat.com/2007/05/12/karachi-burning-civil-war-firing-dead-violence-mqm-aaj, accessed january 14, 2010. naqvi, tahir hasnain 2006 “interregnal politics: autocracy and counternationalism in urban pakistan.” phd dissertation. university of california, berkeley. elections.com.pk 2013a “pakistan elections 2012–2013.” candidate list. elections.com.pk. http://elections.com.pk/candidatelist.php, accessed may 1, 2013. 2013b “pakistan elections 2012–2013.” results. elections.com.pk. http://elections.com.pk/results.php, accessed may 31, 2013. paley, julia 2001 marketing democracy: power and social movements in post-dictatorship chile. berkeley: university of california press. rajagopal, arvind 2001 politics after television: hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in india. cambridge: cambridge university press. shaheed, farida 1990 “the pathan-muhajir conflicts, 1985–6: a national perspective.” in mirrors of violence: communities, riots and survivors in south asia, edited by veena das, 194–214. oxford: oxford university press. tambiah, stanley j. 1996 leveling crowds: ethnonationalist conflicts and collective violence in south asia. berkeley: university of california press. verkaaik, oskar 1994 a people of migrants: ethnicity, state and religion in karachi. amsterdam: vu university press. 2004 migrants and militants: fun and urban violence in pakistan. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. warner, michael 2002 publics and counterpublics. new york: zone books. winegar, jessica 2012 “the privilege of revolution: gender, class, space, and affect in egypt.” american ethnologist 39, no. 1: 67–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01349.x. yusuf, huma 2012 “the convergence of old and new media during the pakistan emergency.” in sensible politics: the visual culture of nongovernmental activism, edited by meg mclagan and yates mckee, 183–211. new york: zone books. rule by good people rule by good people: health governance and the violence of moral authority in thailand daena aki funahashi aarhus university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3015-5391 yok made no effort to hide her look of disapproval. she had arranged to pick me up in front of my apartment in eastern bangkok, but had caught me outside the shrine of the neighborhood’s tree spirit, deep in conversation with praew, a street vendor who sold chilled drinks to the spirit’s devotees. as praew described her dream to me, one in which she saw this week’s winning lottery numbers in the folds of the spirit’s tangled hair, yok urged me into her sedan. the minute i closed the door, she could hold back no longer: “what idiots [man ngom ngai]! . . . what do they know?” in the privacy of the car, yok chided me for encouraging what she called “primitive country beliefs.” as we drove past the corrugated metal walls of praew’s alley, adorned with faded political campaign stickers, yok became even more visibly irritated. the stickers featured the face of thaksin shinawatra, ousted by a military coup in 2006, and his sister yingluck, prime minister at the time of my research in 2012 but soon to be deposed in another coup in 2014. “this is the problem,” said yok, pointing her finger and catching in its sweep the political stickers, the tree spirit’s shrine, and praew all at once. yok worked as a health expert for thai campaign for health (tch), a state-funded organization that had gained an expanded role in public policymaking under the military junta of 2006.1 yok and other conservative health experts at tch claimed that, in the face of increasing political polarization and the loss of confidence in national juridical and legal mechanisms to implement necessary reforms, independent and apolitical bodies such as health organizations ought to intervene in the name of the common good. as yok continued her tirade, she drew a clear link between the “idiocy” she saw in believing in the dreams sent by tree spirits and the “idiocy” of believing in the dreams of capitalist self-advancement spread by the shinawatras. according to yok: many thai people . . . still believe in spirits and don’t have wisdom [panya]. [they believe that] you can be that person you see in the movie . . . [and that] all you have to do [to become that person] is to buy the same iphone, the same car, the same whatever it is. if you don’t have mental immunity [phumikhumkanjit]2 to want . . . you are just like a buffalo [khwai] who lives only to gratify its senses. . . . at tch, we try to educate the masses, but they don’t listen! yok and other conservative health experts in the larger realm of public health blamed thaksin and yingluck’s reinvention of the nation as “thailand, inc.” for having caused negative environmental, social, and health-related consequences. for these health experts, the repeated electoral victories of the shinawatras despite these self-evident (at least to some) flaws proved that the voting majority lacked what they termed “mental immunity” to the cunning of politicians, and that, like “buffalo,” they were incapable of voting for the greater good. together with the anti-shinawatra street movements of 2013 and 2014,3 many health experts saw the military intervention as a necessary evil and demanded that the task of governance fall to “good people” (khon di). by good people, they meant those with a mental immunity to economic interests or party politics, those who could guarantee good governance from the basis of scientific, technical, and medical knowledge (or what the junta claimed as “moral truths”). more specifically, people like themselves. the junta-written constitution of 2007 gave such claims legal legitimacy. the junta, having just wrested power from thaksin, appealed to the apolitical basis of their intervention by enshrining in the new constitution the world health organization’s (who) health in all policies (hiap) initiative. the initiative redefined negative health outcomes as a natural limit to political ambition and capitalist expansion. according to the who, hiap was intended to promote good governance and social equity by making population health “an overarching goal shared by everyone” (kickbusch and gleicher 2012, vi). audit tools, such as the health impact assessment (hia), were to open new opportunities for concerned citizens to advocate for the making of “healthy public policy” (kickbusch and gleicher 2012, ix)—public policy driven by concerns for the common good, rather than by party politics or economic interests. especially significant in light of the junta’s attempts to depoliticize the political nature of their rule was the who’s advocacy of a “knowledge society [where] power and authority are no longer concentrated in government” (kickbusch and gleicher 2012, vi). in thailand, the hiap initiative as a legal mandate gave health experts jurisdiction over all aspects of public policymaking that affected national well-being. the mandate was intentionally broad, allowing for interventions in a wide variety of contexts, including anti-tobacco and alcohol campaigns, opposition to industrial development along thailand’s coast, and pressure to keep youth from violent or inappropriate television programming. yet while the who sees hiap as a globally applicable initiative that can be deployed in locally meaningful ways (kickbusch and buckett 2010), the way in which the thai junta adapted hiap into a monarchical and buddhist framework of righteous rule,4 as i demonstrate below, reveals an inherent problem in assuming that the particular local capture of a global initiative successfully preserves the supposedly global aspirations in the original. health reframed within dharmic notions of wisdom (panya) and enlightenment holds within it political implications unrepresentable in nondharmic political worlds. however, seeing the thai adaptation of hiap as an idiosyncratic diversion from an otherwise universal convergence would be to replicate yok’s dismissal of praew’s world (that is, to say that yok simply does not understand health). as akhil gupta (1998, 216) argues in his now-seminal piece on the status of indigenous knowledge, there ought to be other ways of talking about how local knowledge is imagined against the presumed universality of western science, rather than as a mere mistranslation or cultural alternative. isabelle stengers’s (2005) cosmopolitical proposal opens another frame through which to approach this problem. rather than probing into the emergence of new knowledge that forms at the interface of the modern/rational/universal and the traditional/cultural/particular as a hybrid that destabilizes these dichotomies, stengers invites us to turn our attention instead to what remains incommensurable. inasmuch as we all occupy particular ontological horizons, the problem lies not so much in pitting one perspective against another, but in opening ourselves to the possibility of a radically other idea of politics, economics, and ethics. this includes having to consider, as marisol de la cadena (2010) does, entities such as “earth beings” as having a legitimate claim to modern politics, as well as to take seriously the idea that cotton cries and beans kill (hetherington 2013). in this sense, stengers allows us to question the assumption that we can speak for a common world. finding inspiration in this approach, i take the thai adaptation of hiap as a challenge to the notion that modern science can, from a universally valid standpoint, answer “the political question par excellence: who can talk of what, be the spokesperson of what, represent what?” (stengers 2005, 995). for the who, which sees health as a global common good, health represented an apolitical basis on which to evaluate local governments. while the who makes hiap as it is mobilized by tch experts equivalent to its own initiative, the ways in which hiap is reframed within monarchical and buddhist terms by the tch manifest the radical incommensurability of these two notions of health. the disjuncture between these two different worlds, one in which health is biomedically determined and the other in which health is dharmically determined, thus opens an interstice through which we can question the basis of what we mean by “global” health and the promotion of “good governance.” based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between the years 2011 to 2014 at the tch headquarters in downtown bangkok, as well as at associated organizations, i examine the unintended consequences of assuming that positive knowledge can guarantee good governance. specifically, i examine how the notion of the good as something that exists separately from public referendum mobilizes a conservative politics that justifies the rendering of citizens into “buffalo,” as well as the use of military violence. with health as the standard measure of one’s ability to choose wisely (or healthily), experts such as yok, along with conservative political forces, leave no room for individuals like praew to speak except as those in need of care. here, contra stengers, who finds potential for radical democracy through engagement with divergent ontological horizons, the tch’s take on health as a way to define its legitimacy as “good people” in the eyes of those its members call “idiots” does not support such optimism. taking conservative health experts like yok seriously, then, means to see them as not just putting into motion health-based governance that challenges the biomedical hegemony inherent within who discourse, but also as individuals equally equipped with hegemonic powers of their own. an analysis of the thai translation of hiap within a buddhist genealogy of ethics thus reveals how the antipolitics (redfield 2012) of a global health movement unintentionally sustains the fantasies of an authoritarian regime. at the same time, the tch’s claim to be an apolitical advocate of the common good places it in a double bind. in the eyes of an increasingly skeptical public, the activities of conservative health experts who benefited from the military intervention against a democratically elected government appeared political and in the service of the ancien régime. in the face of such opposition, i see the use of slurs by yok and her colleagues to refer to individuals like praew as “idiots” with the mental capacity of a “buffalo” (a mere beast of burden to whom political agency should not be granted) as a symptom of their inability to justify their claim to goodness without appearing too self-interested or lacking the very mental immunity to politics that they espoused. in this way, the double bind points to the problem of defining what counts as legitimacy when what counts as legitimate must emerge from a strictly antipolitical register. biomedical universalism and its antipolitics in looking at how hiap as a global movement enabled thai conservative health experts to position themselves as good people unmoved by national party politics, i build on anthropological examinations of how interventions made in the name of humanitarian and/or biomedical necessity nonetheless deploy their own political and moral reasoning (fassin 2011; pandolfi 2003; ticktin 2011). whether in the form of bearing witness to psychic scars as recordable evidence of oppression (fassin 2008), diagnosing symptoms in ways that entitle individuals to new forms of biological citizenship (petryna 2002), or determining who will receive life-sustaining treatment in the face of limited medical supplies (nguyen 2010), medical anthropologists have shown how health experts claim to act in the name of a good conceived as universally applicable, but which in fact stems from a specific (i.e., liberal, western) lineage of morality (cf. redfield 2005). the explicitly antipolitical drive behind these medical interventions offers, in peter redfield’s (2012, 452) terms, a glimpse into politics “‘beyond’ politics,” an increasingly relevant form of antipolitics in the face of emergent biosecurity concerns that require global responses. we can examine hiap as one point of entry through which international organizations such as the who connect local health experts, nongovernmental organizations, and community activists in what andrew lakoff (2010, 60) calls “‘apolitical’ linkages” that allow experts to reach individuals in need across national boundaries. the creation of such links based on bioscientific authority has opened new pathways for health experts to work with different sectors of society and to take on responsibilities formerly belonging to national governments, responsibilities now recast within a global framework. bioscientific knowledge and medical expertise thus make possible an imagined community of experts united as one against the political limitations and particularisms of nationally bound public health. the who defines hiap as a framework conducive to the creation of such apolitical links, and as an approach that allows experts and concerned citizens to have a say in policy decisions in a way that “systematically takes into account the health implications of decisions, seeks synergies, and avoids harmful health impacts, in order to improve population health and health equity” (who and the ministry of social affairs and health, finland, 2013). against national governments with eyes fixed on growing gdp and local politics operating to the detriment of the population’s well-being, hiap aimed to open up a space for monitory democracy by making health outcomes the key “factor[s] defining good governance” (kickbusch and gleicher 2012, 1). moreover, the who has come to promote health as a “global public good” (kickbusch and gleicher 2012, 46), and, on the basis of this public good, health experts called on governments to review the health consequences of their goals and policies (e.g., fiscal, environmental, educational). key to providing experts with the necessary concrete data was the health impact assessment (hia), an audit tool that linked negative health consequences to specific public policy. using it, experts were expected to collaborate with other concerned actors to intervene in local decision-making processes. significantly, by making good or bad governance determinable by the assessment of health outcomes, the hia allowed such interventions to be made in the idioms of biomedical necessity. but such a notion of health carries with it certain assumptions. for one, the treatment of health as part of a universal objective truth divorced from cultural, social, and political realities belies what philippe descola (2013, xv) calls a western “naturalist” tradition, a tradition that categorizes human biology on the side of nature, the “domain of objects” against which human subjects exert their divergent influence. it is this treatment of health as a natural condition accessible via biomedicine, albeit through different institutional and national contexts, that gives purchase to the who’s idea of health as a global public good. it is, however, just when we rush into believing that our positive knowledge of the world can guarantee a definition of the common good that stengers (2005, 994) insists we “slow down.” thailand’s efforts to implement the hiap and the hia as a governance tool, while recognized by the who as part of the global movement for health governance (cf. evans 2010), promotes fundamentally different notions of health and the public good. where the who, in the naturalist tradition, treats health as a shared biological condition that bears the mark of human influence, under buddhist and monarchical readings, health outcomes matter not as mere effects, but as conditions indicative of the differential, innate capacities of individuals for political, moral, and social life. from this perspective, respective individual organs of the body politic speak through symptoms, such as the floods of 2011, environmental pollution, and farmer suicides, all of which gain social meaning as the failure of yingluck shinawatra’s administration to make healthy public policy enabling the nation to thrive. the body, rather than a mute object and effect of individual agency, takes the position of a subject that reveals to the individual person his or her own lack of wisdom necessary to make healthy/good choices. yet despite this incommensurable difference between the two frameworks of hiap, the antipolitical emphasis at the core of this initiative resonated with attempts by anti-thaksin forces in thailand to intervene in the name of the people. since the 1990s, king bhumibol adulyadej, or at least the large bureaucracy centered on promoting the thai monarchy (see mccargo 2005), has attempted to curb an ethos of reckless consumerism (associated, at least since 2000, with thaksin) by encouraging thais to rein in aspirations for self-transformation via capital accumulation and to maintain goals appropriate to their station (walker 2010). this push, officially known as the king’s sufficiency economy theory (sethakit pho phiang), demands that one be mindful of what one has in everyday life, and explicitly targeted thaksin’s attempts to run the country as thailand, inc. (with thaksin himself cast as the self-professed “ceo prime minister”). those who espoused the king’s theory framed thaksin as a self-interested plutocrat who had bought the people’s vote by sweet promises of wealth, and as an exploitative “lackey of foreign capital” (surin 2007, 349). many at the tch who saw thaksin’s policies as having increased domestic indebtedness and health problems associated with the breakdown of traditional communal ties saw the monarchy as a necessary force against the moral overreach of profit-minded politicians. and, in the logic of the king’s sufficiency theory, street protests and political demands made by thaksin supporters thus became mobs incapable of simply being happy with their lot in life. when, in 2007, the military junta rewrote the constitution, these buddhist-informed ideas of mindfulness and the ills of over-desirousness became firmly anchored to the notion of health governance as per hiap. the thai health act of 2007, a key document that articulates the junta’s elevation of health as the guarantor of good governance, clearly shows this fusion of the biological, moral, and political. the act places panya, wisdom, as a prerequisite for the attainment of health (sukhaphab; literally, “image of happiness”). the choice of the term panya is not accidental, as, unlike other terms for knowledge (e.g., khwam ru), panya is loaded with buddhist significance.5 the act defines panya as “knowing in total,” a totality here specified as a knowledge of “perfection,” a state of always already knowing what will bring “evil” before seeing ill effects. health, then, is the manifestation of one’s “knowledge of falsehood and trickery, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, [to distinguish] what will have benefit and what will cause harm, [and one’s ability to bring] this knowledge into consciousness in order to make oneself bountiful, beautiful, and good” (thailand national health commission office 2007, 1–2; my translation). in this way, the act pulls together wisdom, health, and morality as three aspects of human perfectibility. the blurring of the division between these categories has a long history in thailand. as stanley tambiah (1977, 98) argues in his now-classic work on the idea of healing, the thai buddhist cosmology makes “no separation between the workings of ‘moral laws’ and ‘physical’ or ‘natural laws’; the concept of dhamma encompasses both.”6 the power of those with panya is the capacity to act in tune with dharma, the “law of the universe, immanent, eternal, uncreated” (gethin 2004, 519), a capacity, in other words, to make good decisions that precede all constructed notions of what constitutes goodness. in the dhammacakkappavattana sutta, for instance, the buddha convinces critics doubtful of his enlightenment not through sermons, but through attaining a perfect state of well-being (crosby 2014, 36). those who can see his perfection move one step closer to understanding dharma, of how to be in line with and to think in terms of the quality of the entity that we are. attaining health, the perfection of biological life, in this sense becomes the self-evident proof of one’s all-knowing state. implicit in the explicit link between health and wisdom drawn by the act is a temporal element that sets the attainment of both on a karmic timeline. one’s past moral behavior (one’s kam [sanskrit: karma]) determines access to panya and to resources in the present. as this moral account includes the balance of one’s merits and demerits from another lifetime, health encompasses a condition that is not only the effect of one’s immediate present but of events that took place beyond the knowledge of the individual. thus, in the dharmic reading of health, human biology is not pitted against human action, but at that which lies at the core of why and how individuals have differential levels of panya, fortune, and the like. poor health, then, reveals the limited capacity of those who imperfectly follow dharmic law, the law that would, for those who could comprehend its demands, allow one to prosper. andrew alan johnson (2014, 13) describes how, in thai cosmological interpretations, these notions of karma and dharma order entities on earth, including gods and spirits, within a hierarchy of panya and enlightenment. those occupying higher levels within this stratified order of entities have, owing to their lofty position, a panoramic vision of the world that begets them more panya. for instance, the dhammaraja, the divine king—a status often attributed to the thai king bhumibol (jackson 2010) —is given a seat near the top from where he may see almost everything. thus, while those with complete access to panya know “in total,” those at lower levels have access to only limited visions of panya—that is, specialized knowledge—with those in even lower levels of the hierarchy (in with domesticated animals, recalling yok’s accusation of praew as a “buffalo”) have close to no panya. in terms of governance, nothing good can thus come from rule under individuals lacking panya. occupying lower levels of this cosmic hierarchy, they cannot see the consequences of their actions and can only cause more suffering. on the other hand, good governance comes from those with perfect health, those with mental immunity and total knowledge. their knowledge of how to be within the cosmic order of things wards off sickness, strife, and social disorder. health as a perfectible condition, albeit within the limits of one’s karmic status, thus reveals the individual as a specific cosmological entity set on a path of reincarnation that is shaped by the moral choices made in past lives. experts like yok at the tch do not necessarily consider themselves on the top of the hierarchy of panya, but rather as those knowledgeable enough to mediate between beings and people on the higher rungs of dharmic wisdom and those situated below. for instance, yok sees herself as a “coordinator,” someone who relays information between community leaders, physicians, monks, public intellectuals, and royalty to bring diverse sectors of society together to make all more mindful of how health sits at the intersection of governance, policies, and individual life choices (see also prawase 2000; rasanathan et al. 2012, 3). the implementation of hiap in thailand points to a fundamental problem inherent in the act of translation. in contrast to the who’s intention of promoting monitory democracy around the world via hiap, the translation and adaptation of hiap in the thai institutional context through the thai health act of 2007 grants legitimacy to military rule. health as it is translated within the frameworks of panya in the act reveals how divergent boundaries can be drawn in between matters of health, politics, and religion. as talal asad (2003) argues, such differences force us to rethink the secular-sacred divide built around western assumptions, and to pay attention to what the irresolvable differences between worlds express. the tch and the who meet in their reliance on the language of moral and biological necessity, reminiscent of age-old claims by health experts that “the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government” (foucault 1994, 33). it is, as i expand here, a claim that mobilizes a certain fundamentalism foreclosing the possibility of politics. where, as claude lefort (1986) argues, politics and those who speak in its register cannot self-authorize, those who speak for biology, health, and nature can. in the next section, i explore what shape good governance takes under the fundamentalism of hiap in thailand. good governance the tch is representative of many nongovernmental, semigovernmental, and royally funded organizations that formed around the turn of the millennium following a new wave in thai politics that sought to improve mechanisms for participatory democracy through decentralization (rasanathan et al. 2012). key to this new movement was the people’s constitution of 1997, one of thailand’s most liberal, and, owing to the increased role of electoral democracy in it, a central reason for the rise to power of the populist thaksin administration. many senior workers at the tch and in the larger ngo community embraced thaksin’s rise—but not for long. shortly after his first election, thaksin took an increasingly combative stance toward ngo networks, closed down media outlets, and butted heads with long-established royal patronage networks—exactly those networks that lay behind much of the ngo community. by the middle of the 2000s, many former supporters of the 1997 constitution and, indeed, of thaksin himself, backed his ouster (pasuk and baker 2009, 228). key among this group was prawase wasi, royal physician to the king, one of the 1997 constitution’s architects, public intellectual, and advisor to the tch. prawase articulated an increasingly popular perspective in the ngo community that the liberal reforms introduced by the people’s constitution allowed politicians like thaksin to abuse the system for his own political benefit (cf. tejapira 2006). pointing to how thaksin promoted family members and those under his patronage into positions of power, prawase argued that politicians “neither have the knowledge nor the competency [to rule]. . . . it is more suitable to call them election winners” (walker 2006). against politicians, he pitted independent expert bodies as those capable of returning competence to thailand’s legal, political, and juridical system. it is with this backdrop in mind that i return to yok and her open frustration at praew and the residents of her alley for proudly displaying election stickers from thaksin’s campaign. yok, like many in the health community, idolized prawase and argued that, after seeing firsthand the vulnerability of the electoral system to the tyranny of “election winners,” respect for the common good can only come from those with mental immunity against moral overreach. for yok and others like her, the problem of election winners like thaksin amounted to the fact that, when cunning and the manipulation of the public allow individuals into positions of power, nothing but the will of the politician gains representation. the voice of the people becomes merely an echo of this will. yok’s support of hiap stems from her perspective that something other than the wile of politicians ought to ground authoritative power. she often stressed to me that elections proved nothing, and that good governance could only come from those with mental immunity to self-interest, those “good people.” faced with volumes of domestic and international press that critiqued the support of such a notion by individuals like yok as “fascist,” yok characterized them all as “the point of view of those with no panya.” even as i showed up to her office armed with new clips from the media that described positions like yok’s as “authoritarian,” yok waved a hand, dismissing critical foreign press and thai voices alike: they don’t understand. they see elections and think that, ‘ok, [leaders that] come from [an] election are good.’ they are ‘demo-crazy’ [in english]. but goodness for thai people refers to something deeper than what foreigners [farang] can understand, and the evil, the corruption of thaksin is deeper [than what they think they know]. “demo-crazy” foreigners (here explicitly named by yok as farang,7 a general term for caucasians or westerners) and the thai academics who, in yok’s terms, “just follow the asses of the foreigners [tam kon farang]),8 fail to see that some votes are worth more than others. good governance, that is, good in the dharmic sense, emerges neither from the democratic rule of numbers nor from legal, social, or political definitions of what is good, but through the capacity of those who can access a notion of the good existing independently from human machination. good governance, thammaphibaan in thai, has as its root word dharma (thamma) and points to rule emerging from those cosmic laws. vibrant life, timely assurances of rain and fertility, and a peaceful public are all manifestations of a ruler consubstantial with dharma. in contrast, what characterizes bad governance is the use of amnat: “raw amoral power that may be used for either good or evil and which is accumulated and maintained by sheer force” (jackson 2010, 33). the illegitimacy of amoral power is revealed through the emergence of sickness, famine, and misfortune, as the use of force necessary to put such a regime in power inevitably disrupts the cosmic balance indispensable to the attainment of dharmic perfection. the legitimacy of good governance is couched in terms of dharmic moral terms as an a priori good, and as that which needs no a posteriori justification. the power of those with panya, the capacity to act in tune with, or be one with dharma, simply is. the historian thongchai winichakul (2008, 20–21) argues that the term democracy has been used in thailand to refer not to a contested field in which the public debates and decides based on a rule of numbers, but to the framework through which those with panya intervene in the name of the people against self-interested political forces abusing and manipulating the populace. historically, the thai monarch has served this role, cast as the dhammaraja who steps in as the moral authority above politics and as the symbolic figure who speaks for his or her people against the excesses of corrupt politicians or power-hungry generals. present-day royalist groups like the people’s democratic reform committee (pdrc) thus draw on such an image of the king as divine ruler and father of the nation against inherently untrustworthy politicians. according to thongchai, the strength of the monarchy in modern thai politics stems from the notion that, without the king as the referee, corrupt politicians will twist the spirit of democracy to their own ends at the expense of the people. the authority of health experts such as yok and others at the tch thus rides on a history of democracy that posits that, should those with panya ensure “clean politics,” the national environment and its people will be healthy and prosperous. this act of cleansing, however, mobilizes the denigration of those cast as lacking panya. how can the vote of an individual with the panya of a buffalo be counted equal to that of someone with real knowledge? the notion that there are good people who are beyond or above politics makes the contest of legitimacy that characterizes political participation unnecessary. the good people have already obtained their legitimacy from universal, apolitical sources of goodness, wisdom, and nature; they need no vote. it is easy to dismiss yok’s argument as simply a political ploy supporting class conflict (hewison 2012), a divide between rural and urban interests (fong 2013), or as the effect of a struggle between competing elite groups (connors 2012). but doing so would be to dismiss an entire cosmology of knowledge and power as authoritarian window dressing. for, as benedict anderson (1972) argues, narrowing down what counts as political theory to ideas of power in the west not only relegates all other traditional political concepts to be “cultural” variations on a general theory but also precludes inquiry into how these traditions live on to shape contemporary politics. good people the tch office sat above a small street market where vendors like praew sold snacks and drinks from their carts. owing to tch’s role as a center for networking between other organizations, the offices were small, given the breadth of programs in which tch participated. different experts (like yok) worked on community-level health-promotion programs, ranging from those specializing in the problem of drug and alcohol abuse to teams that assisted in analyzing social determinants of health at the policy level. overlooking the street and the carts was the office’s common room, with beige couches and a new espresso machine. as i sat in the room with yok and tom, yok’s colleague, i looked down to the street. the sight of the vendors so soon after the outburst over praew bothered me, and i brought praew up again. “you don’t understand,” declared yok. this time, however, she expanded on what she had said in her car that day in hushed tones. as we looked down onto the street together, she characterized those supporting thaksin as suffering from anxiety. this suffering, she said, came from engaging in risky activities such as compulsive gambling, migrating to the city to seek better wages, holding unattainable desires premised on a rise in social status or class, and pursuing profit-oriented actions destructive to their health and to the environment in general. popular religious practices associated with lottery playing also fell into this category of risky and speculative action driven by desirousness, and praew represented exactly the type of individuals the tch wanted to target in their push to promote mental immunity. tom, fiddling with the coffee in the espresso machine, piped up: “they have yet to open their eyes! they don’t understand how dangerous greed can be. caught up in this political fight, they can’t stop thinking about demanding this and that from the country without once stopping to think, ‘why am i demanding?’ they can never be happy if they can’t understand what it means to have sufficiency [pho phiang].” tom worked with environmental activists on the impact of environmental degradation on health, and he often referred to the royal sufficiency economy theory to explain how ecological crises affecting national health were fundamentally a problem of moral overreach by greedy developers or overdesirous consumers. moreover, he saw ecological damage, the loss of health, and the current political conflict as revealing how the cosmos itself—nature, biology, and social harmony—protested against the promotion of entrepreneurial greed by thaksin, and that a return to good governance by good people was of a vital necessity. in their respective programs, tom and yok both promoted panya as the basis for mental immunity against greed, as well as a means of knowing when needs have been sufficiently met. but while giving credit to the thai monarch for having already warned his subjects of the repercussions of advanced capitalism (cf. handley 2006) even before the promotion of the hiap initiative by the who, tom, yok, and their colleagues at the tch also took great pride in the fact that the who had recognized their activities as part of a global intervention in the name of the common good. yok distinguished this sort of international attention from those pro-democracy groups that, according to yok, evaluated thai forms of governance against a privileged and universalized western standard (“following the asses of the foreigners”). instead, yok and her colleagues viewed foreign who experts as “experts just like us,” experts who understood the secret of their struggle. tom summarized their position succinctly in a metaphor: “children always resist when you need to give them an injection. but all good doctors know that a little unpleasantness is necessary in order to save lives.” “good doctors know,” said tom, but such a need to declare the righteousness of his authority carried the inverse effect of calling attention to its limits. the need to keep referring to individuals like praew as “idiots” or, here, as “children” emerges at the limits of the power to convince, to legitimate tom’s and yok’s righteous place within the hierarchy of panya without themselves appearing susceptible to the desire to impress and use force (amnat) in the political realm. it is in light of such a world in which there exists correct knowledge, accessible only to those with the wisdom to see it, that i turn to the dharma gallery, where i saw an art exhibition to which yok took me in may of 2012. i had been pestering her with questions about dharma, panya, and how they affect one’s mental immunity. instead of answering my questions, however, yok offered to take me to see the gallery. yok led me up the escalator to the elevated skywalk linking the malls at ratchaprasong intersection, a walkway that led over the site where, on may 19, 2010, the military had shot at red shirts, pro-democracy protesters, who had gathered on the street below.9 the dharma gallery now occupied the place where snipers had hidden two years earlier. even so, the night before our visit, red shirts had held a rally in memory of those killed and injured, and from the skywalk, we could see red pools of candle wax, each marking a place where someone had been shot. while neither yok nor the gallery explicitly mentioned the clash, the timing of the exhibition and its location vis-à-vis the planned red shirt commemoration seemed deliberate, as did yok’s choice to take me there that day. yok followed my gaze down onto the street, but then encouraged me to read aloud the following from the plaque leading to the gallery: dharma is not just about going to the temple. it is about the everyday life of every individual. it is about happiness. it is about losing strong emotions such as want, greed, anger, and attachment. dharma is with us in a traffic jam. it is with us in the fitting room. it is with us when we decide to buy. dharma is with us everywhere, but we are not open enough to see it because we are not mindful in our everyday life. tapping at the last sentence, yok said, it is just like my king [in english] said, “the only change for the better is through mindfulness of dharma.” dharma is about feeling sufficient in yourself and not comparing what you have with your neighbor. we help individuals to be more attentive to how desire turns into suffering, and suffering into mental illness and social disorder. we try to protect the public from politicians with influence by teaching them that there are consequences to ignoring the law of dharma. yok made clear whom she meant by “the public” in need of protection by aiming her comments at the stained street below: “we don’t want to be ruled by people who only want to do so for their own political or economic advantage. when thaksin came into office, farmers and small business owners supported him because they thought that he would make them rich. but they actually got into more debt than before. wanting him back just shows you how sick they are.” yok defined sickness here as desire that “turns into suffering, and suffering into mental illness and social disorder.” thus political ambition and the frustration borne out of political disenfranchisement here manifest as symptoms of one’s refusal to accept the natural order of things. as with the effort that goes into staving off the flow of the river to create dams, to cite one of tom’s favorite examples, going against nature comes with consequences. in this sense, rule under good people who follow the proper order of things ought to produce intended outcomes with minimal effort. that effort becomes necessary therefore reveals more about the qualities of the individual expert (that is, the expert is doing something wrong) than about the fact that rule by the good, or the notion of an absolute good, is itself a political perspective. cleansing politics yok’s and tom’s characterization of legitimate individuals as those who can, with minimum effort, gain the confidence of others has its parallels in one of the most popular stories of the buddha in thailand. in this story, the buddha is meditating in a grove when a divine being, mara, approaches him. mara attempts to lure the buddha away from his meditations by promising him worldly power and a life of luxury and riches. the buddha refuses, and when an angered mara summons his minions to harm the buddha, the buddha lightly touches the ground with his fingertip. his holy touch wakens mae thorani, the earth goddess, who rises and wrings from her hair all of the lustral water that the buddha had poured in religious devotion throughout all of his lives. the flood destroys mara and his minions. this destruction comes at minimum effort. no force other than the touch of the buddha’s finger brings forth the flood, since nothing more necessitates the release of water accumulated through his own rites of devotion. it is the earth goddess in the act of wringing out her hair that is enshrined on the seal of the democrat party, the political party most fervently advocating the military and opposing thaksin. figure 1. the seal of thailand’s democrat party. links between this story and the proper workings of dharma in the present-day conflict are commonplace. the thai intellectual and thaksin opponent sulak sivaraksa made the parallel between thaksin and mara explicit in the days leading to his ouster (kitiarsa 2006, 4), and he invoked dharma as the means of his defeat (sulak 2006).10 it was a narrative that many at tch repeated when i asked about their varying positions on thai politics. for opponents of thaksin within the health community, the military coup of 2006—a coup rumored to have occurred at the behest of the palace—constituted a necessary evil. thaksin was swept aside for having resisted dharma, and the political world was washed clean, ready for a new foundation. but even supporters of the military such as yok found it hard to justify the deaths and injuries caused to so many people, as the necessity of force made all too clear that merely claiming to speak from the perspective of dharma was not in itself convincing to an increasingly skeptical public. what was to be an a priori good not only failed to speak for itself but also relied on brute force for its implementation. i see the deferrals and roundabout ways in which experts explained the philosophy and mission of the tch to me as themselves symptoms of contradictions that they cannot ignore. the struggle by experts to present themselves as those with dharmic wisdom also manifested in other ways. later, long after our visit to the dharma gallery, during a tch-sponsored information session for youth on the importance of understanding the sufficiency economy as it relates to health and immunity to excessive consumerism, yok was stunned when a participant asked her to explain again just how they were to know when need and want become moral overreach. yok had just explained the importance of mindfulness to the group, and so the response to her address in the form of “how?” visibly upset her. in front of twenty politely waiting adolescents, i saw yok’s cropped hair swerve to and fro as she turned her head from the young inquirer to her two other colleagues. when the silence became awkward, one of yok’s colleagues stepped in and stated: “when you feel the desire to buy, or feel tempted to get the latest cell phone, for instance, you should repeat the name of the buddha. saying his name, ‘bud-dha [phuttho],’ ‘bud-dha [phut-tho],’ ‘bud-dha [phut-tho],’ like this multiple times, that should help you get over your temptation and help you think of more important things.” if adolescents who came to tch through associated community projects disturbed yok’s calm, less accommodating audiences presented an even bigger challenge. later, in private, when discussing the difficulty of convincing thaksin’s adult supporters of the health dangers inherent in their political views, nui, another health expert, said in frustration: “everything is political now, and it doesn’t matter if you know the truth, they won’t listen. you can’t reason with them. if you want a buffalo to move, you have to strike it. that is the problem.” in the next and final section, i expand on nui’s supposed problem to examine in detail how what health experts took to be good governance, a governance driven by the natural necessities of health (with the backing by the who), paradoxically mobilized a conservative politics, and what the deployment of hiap in thailand might reveal about the risks of relying on health experts to speak for the global common good. the double bind of antipolitics calling someone a buffalo marks that individual as a person with minimal capacity for self-mastery who lives only to gratify his or her senses. with no wisdom to distinguish right from wrong, such persons threaten harm to themselves, the environment, and the greater world in the process of satisfying their excesses. in a context where “everything is political” (itself a political or politicized statement), nui believes that buffalo cannot be reasoned with; they follow only that which promises them the most benefits. one can only make them move in the “right” direction by striking them. this recourse to violence reveals not only what nui sees as the limit of the buffalo’s capacity for reason but also the limit of those who claim to have access to a truth beyond all social truths. only those, as hannah arendt (1972) argues, with no power to produce consent must rely on brute force to impose what they consider right. in play is a logic of exception that undermines health experts’ ability to speak from the apolitical, authoritative standpoint of public health. as beneficiaries of the regime that forcibly ousted a popularly elected prime minister and violently suppressed a popular protest, experts’ claim to speak for dharma and to act in the name of a transcendental moral law to return peace, harmony, and health to the nation has met with strong challenges. while health experts gained an expanded role in defining what counts as good governance since the interim military government of 2007 that ousted thaksin, their legitimacy falters beyond the legally given capacity to tautologically claim their authority as just (“i am just because i possess the panya that allows me to know i am just”). contrary to the global ambitions of the who to posit health outcomes as a politically neutral basis on which to evaluate public policy, the deployment of the hiap in thailand in ways that render certain segments of the population as buffalo has been anything but neutral. according to claude lefort (1986), the notion of legitimacy in democratic regimes relies on the perception that such authorizing power belongs to everyone and thus to no one in particular. power, then, comes from an “empty place” (lefort 1986, 17) that no figure could fill without the risk of appearing to be an illegitimate usurper. the legitimate is in a constant state of contestation, as this lack of authoritative guarantee at the core of democratic regimes allows for multiple claims and counterarguments. the notion of rule by an unelected council of good people elides this struggle by covering over this empty place with a transcendental notion of the good, accessible only to those with panya. health experts have long played a significant role in moments of exception when threats to population health and conditions of existence call for coercive measures to place individuals in quarantine, to regulate nutritional intake, or to enforce discipline in the name of hygiene. but the use of health to bring elected governments into check, and in the thai case, even to advocate for their removal altogether raises the political significance of experts to a new level. yet as we see, thai health experts fail to completely convince others that they speak on behalf of the common good and, when challenged, advocate increasingly violent and coercive means to convince a skeptical public of the legitimacy of their actions. where the who sees the adoption of hiap in thailand as the growing relevance of this initiative worldwide,11 failing to see the incommensurable differences that appear in the thai iteration of hiap risks giving credence to the type of rule by good people promoted by conservative political forces in thailand. following isabelle stengers’s argument, different ontological worlds demarcate the realm of politics (what entities count within it) and nature (as accessible via science or panya) in different ways, thus challenging our assumptions about what constitutes the world and how we ought to be within it for the better. difference, according to stengers, provides the possibility to imagine a radically new form of politics, an antidote to the hegemonic frameworks under which we currently live. what the case of hiap in thailand reveals, in contrast, is that the encounter with difference does not always open onto a new emancipatory horizon. different ontological horizons in which wisdom, morality, and health make sense allow us to imagine other possibilities of being, but we must not forget that this encounter with otherness can also open onto new horrors. notes acknowledgments i thank the three anonymous reviewers and cultural anthropology’s editorial collective: dominic boyer, james faubion, and especially cymene howe, who helped guide this article to its completion. i am also deeply indebted to hoon song, jeremy fernando, ulrika backebo, and david rojas for offering invaluable theoretical insights and critical commentary. finally, i wish to thank andrew alan johnson for sharing with me his wealth of knowledge on thai popular religion, and for his support throughout. 1. tch and the individuals to whom i refer on a personal basis are all protected here under pseudonyms. 2. phumikhumkanjit has become a popular concept among many ngos, mobilized in the context of anticonsumerism drives, efforts to stop farmers from being swindled by con artists selling “miracle seeds,” and as a part of the promotion of the thai king’s sufficiency economy (walker 2010). 3. these movements, in their latter form, took the name of the people’s democratic reform committee (pdrc), although the thai name literally translates as the “people’s committee for absolute democracy with the king as head of state” (khaosod english 2013). 4. while thailand is ostensibly multireligious, theravada buddhism is hegemonic. roughly 95 percent of thais identify as buddhist, the thai state casts itself as the guardian of religion (understood to be buddhism), and the thai monarch, the legal head of state, is required to be buddhist. in thai public discourse, buddhism is seen to be synonymous with being ethnically and nationally thai. 5. for instance, in everyday buddhist practice, panya represents the highest of the three steps toward enlightenment, with the others being moral conduct and the practice of meditation (crosby 2014, 55). 6. here, tambiah uses the term dhamma, which is written as dharma (sanskrit) in the pali spelling and as thamma in thai. 7. by framing this in racial terms, yok may have been attempting to establish solidarity with me, another non-farang, who might be more sympathetic. 8. accusations that those who disagree with mainstream or elite discourses are somehow inherently foreign abound in thai nationalist discourse (johnson 2013). 9. this clash between red shirt 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berkeley: university of california press. walker, andrew 2006 “prawase wasi’s sufficiency democracy.” new mandala, november 29. http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2006/11/29/prawase-wasis-sufficiency-democracy. 2010 “royal sufficiency and elite misrepresentation of rural livelihoods.” in saying the unsayable: monarchy and democracy in thailand, edited by søren ivarsson and lotte isager, 241–66. copenhagen: nordic institute of asian studies press. world health organization (who) 2010 “adelaide statement on health in all policies: moving towards a shared governance for health and well-being.” report from the international meeting on health in all policies, adelaide 2010. http://www.who.int/social_determinants/publications/countryaction/adelaide_statement_hiap/en/. world health organization (who), and the ministry of social affairs and health, finland 2013 “the helsinki statement on health in all policies.” adopted at the 8th global conference on health promotion, june 10–14. http://www.who.int/healthpromotion/conferences/8gchp/statement_2013/en/. glossary of open access terms glossary of open access terms altmetrics: “new metrics proposed as an alternative to the widely used journal impact factor and personal citation indices like the h-index. the term altmetrics was proposed as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the twitter #altmetrics hashtag. although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc. altmetrics cover not just citation counts, but also other aspects of the impact of a work, such as how many data and knowledge bases refer to it, article views, downloads, or mentions in social media and news media” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/altmetrics, accessed march 29, 2014). see also bibliometrics. author's rights: “a part of copyright law. the term is a direct translation of the french term droit d’auteur (also german urheberrecht), and is generally used in relation to the copyright laws of civil law countries and in european union law. authors’ rights are internationally protected by the berne convention for the protection of literary and artistic works and by other similar treaties” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/authors%27_rights, accessed march 29, 2013). in scholarly publishing discussions, the phrase author’s rights has been extended to encompass those rights in their work that an author retains after entering into an publishing agreement with a specific publisher. bibliometrics: “a set of methods to quantitatively analyze academic literature. citation analysis and content analysis are commonly used bibliometric methods. while bibliometric methods are most often used in the field of library and information science, bibliometrics have wide applications in other areas. many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field, the impact of a set of researchers, or the impact of a particular paper.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bibliometrics, accessed march 29, 2014) content management systems (cms): a common type of software platform used to build websites, which allow users with few technical skills to set up basic websites with relative ease. these platforms are best used for publishing, editing, and organizing digital content, and can often accommodate multiple content editors. examples of cmss include drupal, zope, and joomla. creative commons (cc): “a non-profit organization … devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. the organization has released several copyright-licenses known as creative commons licenses free of charge to the public. these licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/creative_commons, accessed march 29, 2014) digital object identifier (doi): a character string assigned by a registration agency used to uniquely identify a digital object such as an electronic document. the registry maintains location and other metadata about the object, so that the object can be persistently linked to even when it changes location. digital preservation: “in library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. it involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and ‘born-digital’ content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. the goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/digital_preservation, accessed april 8, 2014). see also trusted digital repositories. digital rights management (drm): “a class of technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders, and individuals with the intent to control the use of digital content and devices after sale.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/digital_rights_management, accessed march 29, 2014) document type definition (dtd): scheme for defining document models in xml files. the dtd defines the component parts of a document (elements), ways of differentiating between elements (attributes), and allows for the creation of separate information objects such as images (entities). the majority of scholarly publishers use a standard dtd developed by the national library of medicine (nlm dtd), the latest version of which is called the journal article tag suite (jats). drupal: a common, open-source content management system (cms). drupal’s framework is free and was used to build the first version of ca online. dublin core: a standard metadata schema used to provide information about web resources. see the dublin core metadata initiative, http://dublincore.org/. see also metadata. extensible markup language (xml): a language and syntax for annotating text with additional text to give instructions as to how the marked-up text should be processed. the resulting document is both human and machine-readable. unlike html, which is designed to indicate how text should be displayed, xml is a language for encoding models and instances of data, digital objects, and processes. standardized xml schemas enable the interchange of documents and data between systems. this mark-up language has become the standard for the production of scholarly books and journals. fear, uncertainty, and doubt (fud): “a tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, and propaganda. fud is generally a strategic attempt to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information. the term originated to describe disinformation tactics in the computer hardware industry but has since been used more broadly.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt, accessed march 29, 2014) hypertext markup language (html): a language and syntax for annotating text with additional text to give instructions as to how the marked-up text should be presented. the resulting document is both human and machine-readable. a fixed number of tags are used in html to identify elements and to give instructions for their display on screen when parsed by a graphical web browser. html5 is the fifth and latest version of the mark-up language. see also mark-up. impact factor: see bibliometrics mark-up: “a (document) mark-up language is a modern system for annotating a document in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from the text. the idea and terminology evolved from the ‘marking up’ of paper manuscripts, i.e., the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors’ manuscripts. in digital media this ‘blue pencil instruction text’ was replaced by tags, that is, instructions are expressed directly by tags or ‘instruction text encapsulated by tags.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/markup_language, accessed march 29, 2014) massive open online course (mooc): “an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. in addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, moocs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for students, professors, and teaching assistants. moocs are a recent development in distance education. although early moocs often emphasized open access features, such as connectivism and open licensing of content, structure, and learning goals, to promote the reuse and remixing of resources, some notable newer moocs use closed licenses for their course materials, while maintaining free access for students.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mooc, accessed march 29, 2014) mega journal: a very large publishing platform (publishing thousands of articles per year) designed to benefit from economies of scale. mega journals are open access and built around the collection of author fees. they typically engage in peer-review to screen out unacceptable papers while not seeking to publish only a limited number of high impact papers. metadata: “commonly defined as ‘data about data.’ the term is ambiguous, as it is used for two fundamentally different concepts (types). structural metadata is about the design and specification of data structures and is more properly called ‘data about the containers of data’; descriptive metadata, on the other hand, is about individual instances of application data, the data content.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/metadata, accessed march 29, 2014) open access (oa): “unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. open access is primarily intended for scholarly journal articles, but is also provided for a growing number of theses, book chapters, and scholarly monographs. open access comes in two degrees: gratis oa, which is free online access, and libre oa, which is free online access plus some additional usage rights. these additional usage rights are often granted through the use of various specific creative commons licenses. the two ways authors can provide open access are (1) by self-archiving their journal articles in an oa repository, also known as ‘green’ oa, or (2) by publishing in an open access journal, known as ‘gold’ oa.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access, accessed march 29, 2014) open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting (oai-pmh): “a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. data providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via oai-pmh. service providers then make oai-pmh service requests to harvest that metadata.” (http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/, accessed march 29, 2014) open education: “a collective term to describe institutional practices and programmatic initiatives that broaden access to the learning and training traditionally offered through formal education systems. the qualifier ‘open’ of open education refers to the elimination of barriers that can preclude both opportunities and recognition for participation in institution-based learning. one aspect of openness in or ‘opening up’ education is the development and adoption of open educational resources.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_education, accessed march 29, 2014) open educational resources (oer): “freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, educational, assessment, and research purposes. although some people consider the use of an open format to be an essential characteristic of oer, this is not a universally acknowledged requirement. the development and promotion of open educational resources is often motivated by a desire to curb the commodification of knowledge and provide an alternate or enhanced educational paradigm.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_educational_resources, accessed march 29, 2014) open journal systems (ojs): open-source software designed for open-access academic publishing. first released in 2001, the software was created by public knowledge project (pkp), a nonprofit initiative involving a number of universities and researchers. it is among the most widely used publishing platform in the world. cultural anthropology has used ojs since 2008 for its submission management system. open source (oss): “computer software with its source code made available and licensed with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. open-source software is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open-source_software, accessed march 29, 2014) page charges: fees charged by a publisher to authors of accepted manuscripts intended to offset publishing expenses associated with publishing a work of scholarship. the term derives from print publishing wherein a set amount per typeset page was billed to the author. pay-per-view fees: see toll access. paywall: see toll access. predatory journals: “in academic publishing, some publishers and journals have attempted to exploit the business model of open-access publishing by charging large fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services associated with more established and legitimate journals.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/predatory_open-access_publishing, accessed march 29, 2014) repository: “an online archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/institutional_repository, accessed march 29, 2014). “a disciplinary repository (or subject repository) is an online archive containing works or data associated with these works of scholars in a particular subject area. in contrast to institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories can accept work from scholars from any institution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/disciplinary_repository, accessed march 29, 2014). see also digital preservation, trusted digital repository. ruby on rails: an open-source framework with applications and language used to build platforms, such as website, using the ruby programming language. ruby on rails was used to build typhoon, the platform that houses ca online v.2. serials crisis: “a common shorthand term to describe the chronic subscription cost-increases of many scholarly journals. the prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than the consumer price index for several decades, while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. as a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining current subscriptions.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/serials_crisis, accessed march 29, 2014) solutionism: an ideology that emphasizes specifically technological solutions to diverse social, political, environmental, personal, and other phenomena identified as problems. a prominent critique of solutionism can be found in the writings of evgeny morozov, whereas the spirit of the ideology can be seen in the (ca. 2014) “solutionism” advertising campaign of the dow chemical company. toll access: in discussions of scholarly communication, the phrase toll access is used to refer to online resources for which payments must be made in exchange for access. this can, for instance, take the form of subscription charges or “a la carte” payments (e.g., pay-per-view fees) for access to a particular work of scholarship. purchased access may be more or less permanent. works for which payments must be made are often referred to as existing “behind a paywall.” trusted digital repository (tdr): “defined [by the research libraries group and online computer library center] as a repository ‘whose mission is to provide reliable, long-term access to managed digital resources to its designated community, now and in the future.’ the tdr must include the following seven attributes: compliance with the reference model for an open archival information system, administrative responsibility, organizational viability, financial sustainability, technological and procedural suitability, system security, procedural accountability. the tdr model outlines relationships among these attributes.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/digital_preservation, accessed march 28, 2014) typhoon: the open source platform behind ca online v.2. typhoon was built by cj bryan and ryan schenk using ruby on rails. xml: see extensible markup language. brotherhood in dispossession brotherhood in dispossession: state violence and the ethics of expectation in turkey kabir tambar stanford university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4724-5489 in the summer of 2013, many of turkey’s cities and provinces erupted in protest. initially sparked by a relatively small demonstration in late may to protect gezi park in istanbul from demolition, the protests grew exponentially in magnitude after police forces aggressively intervened with water cannons, plastic bullets, and tear gas. confrontations between protesters and the police continued throughout june and into july. the firing of tear-gas canisters alone killed at least two people, one individual was killed with live ammunition, and another died after being severely beaten by a police officer dressed in civilian clothes (amnesty international 2013). on august 1, 2013, the turkish medical association announced that 5 people had died, 11 had lost an eye, 106 had suffered serious head injuries, and 63 were in critical condition (türk tabipleri birliği 2013). in late june of that year, as much of the country was convulsing with these events, selahattin demirtaş, the co-chairman of the pro-kurdish peace and democracy party, addressed members of his party. he began not with the gezi events but with bombings that had taken place in roboski village in the province of şırnak in december 2011. two turkish fighter jets had fired at and killed what the government claimed were militants of the kurdistan workers’ party (pkk) crossing the turkish-iraqi border.1 it turned out that the thirty-four individuals killed were civilians, not guerrillas. they were smuggling goods, such as cigarettes, tea, and oil, and it appears that security forces were in fact well aware of these circuits of trade. despite major protests that occurred after this incident throughout many kurdish-majority cities in the southeast of turkey, the official investigation did not lead to the prosecution of the guilty parties. about ten minutes into his discussion, demirtaş (2013) indicated that this sort of state violence did not only apply to kurds. asking his audience to consider the ongoing protests in istanbul and elsewhere, he continued: “when looking from gezi park . . . roboski is more easily understood.” for demirtaş, many of those looking from the debris of gezi’s barricades were members of the turkish majority who might not have previously viewed state violence in the kurdish provinces with much sympathy or comprehension.2 to look from gezi, in the assessment of demirtaş, was to be granted the opportunity for historical insight. demirtaş was not only alluding to recent historical events or to violence against kurds; he proceeded to mention the armenian genocide of the early twentieth century and episodes of violence against alevis in the 1930s, 1970s, and 1990s. the experience of police aggression in gezi offered its participants an unmasked look at the violent underbelly of republican statecraft. demirtaş did not shy away from supporting the protesters and critiquing the government’s intransigent recourse to police violence in the face of dissent. however, in situating this violence within a longer history, his speech worked against efforts to celebrate the protests as spontaneous and novel, and he refused to identify the violence on display as a scandalous departure from the historical ideals of the republic. the scandal of state aggression against select members of its citizenry betrayed an all-too-familiar political form that repeated itself throughout republican history. rather than simply denounce state violence in gezi park, demirtaş pointed to its generative possibilities. he concluded his history of violence with a gesture toward a possible political future: “confronting all of these facts [of historical violence], confronting these truths, is an opportunity. it’s an opportunity to better understand one another.” i will return to demirtaş’s speech later in this essay; along the way i will discuss other discursive events that also sought to recast the historical significance and generative potential of the violence that dominated the protests. what interests me is less the constructed nature of historical narrative—a point long stressed by many scholars of nationalism—and more the way in which appeals to history act as interventions into imagined futures. as public statements, these contentious histories constitute acts of address that seek to provoke and discomfit those in their audiences who have benefited from the forms of state repression now called into question. these historical discourses not only challenge official narratives of state formation; they also call on those who have been interpellated by official history to question the violence that has informed their own investment in a political future secured by the state. to understand the relationship between historical pasts and political futures, i find it helpful to draw on reinhart koselleck’s (2004, 259) distinction between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. these categories are meant to conceptualize the sinews that bind memory to anticipation. experience is “present past, whose events have been incorporated and can be remembered.” expectation, by contrast, is “future made present . . . [directed] to the not-yet . . . to that which is to be revealed.” both of these terms, experience and expectation, are open to rival figurations. as anthropologists attuned to the temporal tropes of modernization have insisted, expectations are themselves both objects of political control and vulnerable to historical revision, open to competing social claims (ferguson 1999; coronil 2011; piot 2010; bryant 2012). the moments depicted here sought to rearticulate past to future in ways that both exemplified the broader spirit of state critique animating the gezi protests and that tried to establish distance from them. this estranged engagement might be understood as the tense, dialectical act of leveraging, from within the very terms that structure political life, a reflexive interrogation of its organizing categories. the commentaries i discuss in this essay revisit the history of state violence against populations labeled as minorities or threatened with that designation; at the same time, they position their own discourse as addressed to the putative majority, or those who would identify as such. what results is not primarily a set of claims to rights, resources, or recognition that presupposes the state as the site of political adjudication. rather, the encounter yields an ethical demand on the would-be majority to recognize the histories of violence that have constituted its own sense of political identity. this essay unpacks that ethical demand. i follow recent anthropological studies of ethics in emphasizing that any effort to step back from and reflexively evaluate social practice is a historically constituted practice in its own right, one that can be directed toward the task of transforming a subject’s sensibilities and dispositions (zigon 2007; faubion 2011; laidlaw 2014; keane 2014). traditions of ethical self-scrutiny are often most clearly defined in contexts of disciplined pedagogical authority, under the tutelage of moral guides or exemplars (robbins 2004; mahmood 2005). the moments i describe in this essay are ones in which a community of actors invites its addressee (the majority) to inaugurate a process of self-transformation and to disidentify from categories in which it is currently invested. however, the self-transformation in question is demanded not by a recognized authority, but by those who have been historically dispossessed, and it is addressed not to subordinates but to those who have enjoyed political privilege. my analysis explores a form of address in which those issuing the demand for transformation have lacked the authority to set the terms of speech, and where the historical privilege of the addressee manifests above all in the ability to refuse to recognize that a dialogue is even being initiated. indeed, the inability to enjoin a response from a reticent addressee is not necessarily a product of individual communicative misfires; in the cases under study in this essay, it is a structural effect of what scholars have more generally understood as the state’s symbolic and affective regulation of public life (navaro-yashin 2002; cody 2011; mazzarella 2013). the ethical mandate i am examining arises in forms of public speech that seek to reorient the conditions of the speech setting itself or what, following charlene makley (2015, 454), we might term the conditions of “mediated addressivity” (see also bakhtin 1986). the actors discussed in this essay are attempting to establish lines of communication that, while neither indifferent to nor satirical of the state’s dispensation of politics (cf. yurchak 2008; haugerud 2012; boyer 2013), nonetheless contravene its structuring conventions, even reversing its normative valences. in doing so, they challenge those who have historically benefited from the state’s governing rationalities to identify with populations that these same administrative logics have externalized as foreigners or criminalized as terrorists. with the aim of elaborating a highly charged modality of intercommunal ethics, my account pivots around certain types of ethnographic material: moral appeals that, through both admonishment and entreaty, endeavor to transform the conditions in which the claims of the speaker might be heard by his or her interlocutor. this essay, then, suggests that anthropologists would do well to interrogate the medium of speech and address that gives voice to the critique of violence. as a social practice, the act of criticism presupposes contexts and relations of address that are themselves products of the history of unequal power relations scrutinized by the critic (tambar 2012; muir 2015). the ethical force of these speech acts resides in the way they unsettle the institutional conditions of the dialogue they are attempting to commence. these dynamics are paradoxical, though productively so. they enable an ethics of expectation in which the impasses of address and nonresponse become so many indexes of a future not yet realized. throughout the essay, i speak of a would-be or putative majority to stress that it is a category of aspiration, rather than simply an empirical designation. the term türk shelters a linguistic ambiguity between ethnic identity and legal citizenship (bayır 2013). this ambiguity is itself symptomatic of a historical conflation of the demographic concept of majority, which is an ostensibly measurable quantity of population, with the normative concept of nation, which purports to unify political community in the state. the efforts by demirtaş and others whom i discuss in this essay to address the majority are precisely aimed at prying open this gap, disinterring the demographic from its normative cast to reorient its horizon of expectation. i begin by exploring how the category of minority has helped scaffold the normative subject of political modernity, the nation. the figure of the minority has been shaped by what i call a negative historicity: negative in the sense of being evacuated from the time and place of historical progression that has characterized the national subject. the symbolic space of national sovereignty, as it came to be defined with the birth of an international order of nation-states following world war i, renders the minority spatially displaced—seen as foreign to what may have constituted its historical homelands—and temporally suspended from the narrative tethering of national experience to expectation. after fleshing out the negative historicity of the minority, i return to scenes of commentary adjacent to the gezi protests, asking how their temporal interventions redirect the minority question toward an ethical inquiry into the aspiration to majority. rather than rejecting the temporal suspension of the minority from the historical narratives of the turkish nation, demirtaş and others deploying this discursive maneuver summon gezi protesters to relinquish their own sense of progressive historicity and, in effect, to embrace the negative historicity so often ascribed to the objects of state violence. they seek not so much to redeem the nation from the violence it has unleashed, as to ask whether that very violence might serve as the ground on which to produce an alternate figure of a political community to come. the minority question the minority question defined the founding of the turkish republic in 1923. i do not simply mean that, as with any nation-state, early republican leaders strove to standardize language, history, and cultural heritage in such a way as to marginalize religious and ethnic minorities. that broadly modular process was given sharper definition by the peace settlements that concluded world war i (between 1919 and 1923) and led to the emergence of the turkish republic. the historian eric weitz (2008) notes that these settlements were premised on a new conception of politics, one focused on discrete populations and the ideal of national homogeneity. he provocatively argues that this conviction enabled two seemingly contrary historical results: on the one hand, a new concern for the legal protection of minorities and, on the other hand, internationally sanctioned, forced deportations of populations from their historical homelands to new nation-states where they were now said to more authentically belong. according to weitz, the new protections for minorities did not simply constitute a humanitarian response meant to safeguard those communities from oppressive majorities. a certain violence also formed part of those protections and of that new concern for the minority. the formation of the turkish state exemplifies the conundrum of minority protection and displacement at the heart of the postwar global order. from the republic’s foundation in 1923, jews, armenian christians, and greek christians were recognized as minorities and offered legal protections with regard to the autonomy of their religious organization. and yet, in the years leading up to the formation of the republican state, armenian communities were deported or exiled from anatolia and killed, and the lausanne treaty that promised minority recognition also led to the so-called population exchanges that compelled many orthodox greeks to leave turkey. the category of minority came to index a process of dispossession—from rights to land, from political status, and from a sense of belonging. in this context, a community recognized as a minority gained certain rights and protections from the state. however, this recognition also carried the weight of an extraordinary historical judgment, one that inheres in what i am calling negative historicity. at once moral and political, the negative historicity of the minority implied that the community in question was in some sense external to the nation and its history, external to the body politic, and so also of suspect loyalty, even in cases where the so-called minority population had deep historical roots in the territory now dominated by the new nation-state. recognized as a population within the citizenry but distinct from the presumed majority, the minority constituted a figure at once included in and excluded from the biopolitics of the nation-state. if sovereignty in the republican state was constitutionally vested in the nation, those now classed as minorities would always remain ambiguously connected to this project. they were legally recognized as citizens and yet treated as suspect others. as aron rodrigue (2013, 44) argues, those classed as minorities “could remain turkish citizens, but they would never be true turks.” the ethos of suspicion was amplified by the fact that leaders of the new turkish republic came to view the very designation of minority as a symbol of western imperial ambitions: in demanding that the minority clauses be accepted by the new republic, western powers encroached on the nation-state’s sovereign autonomy in the very act of recognizing it (ekmekçioğlu 2014). mark mazower (1997) argues that after world war ii, western powers shifted their emphasis from collective rights to individual human rights. yet this change in ideological accent did not lessen the stigma attached to minorities. to consider some paradigmatic examples from the mid-twentieth century, the construction of arabs as a minority in israel and of muslims as a minority in india were broadly comparable to the process that shaped dominant forms of political subjectivity and state identity in turkey several decades earlier. the histories of state formation in israel and india were, in many respects, quite distinct: india was founded through anticolonial struggle and partitioned at the moment of independence; israel was established through settler-colonial practices and, despite u.n.-led plans for partition, never separated into two states. in each case, however, a normative narrative of national belonging was fostered through the forced expulsion and dispossession of many of those now recognized as a minority, and those among the minority who remained had to bear the burden of proving loyalty to state authorities who viewed them as foreign (pandey 1999; robinson 2013). compare also the case of copts in present-day egypt: intellectuals and organizations within the community continue to debate the risks of pursuing rights as a religious minority, because such a designation might mean their exclusion from statist narratives of national unity (mahmood 2012). the term minority (azınlık) in turkey today functions more often as an accusation hurled at socially vulnerable populations than as a strictly legal-bureaucratic category for allocating resources or ensuring communal rights. it is in this context that the jewish community, historically recognized as a minority, has anxiously debated the safety of publicly displaying religious signs, for fear of being accused of disloyalty to the state (brink-danan 2011). other marginalized groups who are not recognized as minorities are nonetheless not simply accepted as part of the majority; as a result, they frequently make strident appeals to the dominant ethnoreligious imaginaries of the nation. undocumented bulgarian migrants, working under conditions of legal constraint and social precarity, have sought avenues of limited political inclusion by claiming ethnoreligious identification with the turkish majority (parla 2011). some turkish converts to evangelical christianity, who remain largely unconstrained by the legal limits faced by undocumented migrants but who often suffer harassment and violence, also seek majority status. they socially distance themselves from the armenian and greek orthodox christian churches, which were labeled as minorities after lausanne, in efforts to present themselves as authentically turkish (özyürek 2009). alevi civil society groups have waged struggles for collective rights that are in fact offered to recognized minorities, like exemption from state-mandated religion courses in elementary and secondary schools, but they have overwhelmingly rejected overtures from the european union to claim such rights under the minority designation. they justify their repudiation of the term with the claim that they are foundational elements (asli unsur) of the turkish state (tambar 2014). these examples indicate that what appears to be a simple binary of majority-minority in fact orients a heterogeneous field of unequally positioned identities and claims. importantly, these examples also exhibit a shared underlying assumption that the category of minority functions not only or even primarily as legal protection; it operates more potently as a mode of social recognition that groups seek to evade, protect themselves against, or overtly repudiate, because it threatens to excise the community in question from the historical past and future of the nation and its purportedly unified people. for their part, kurds have long been viewed by turkish state elites as “prospective turks” (yeğen 2007)—that is, because of their predominantly muslim denominational affiliation, they have often been seen as assimilable to the social, linguistic, and political norms of belonging in the turkish nation. in moments when kurdish organizations have been perceived as raising a fundamental threat to the turkish state, especially acute in the past few decades with the onset of armed confrontation between the state and the pkk, kurdish political leaders or public figures have faced accusations not simply of committing legal crimes but of being crypto-jewish or crypto-armenian—ethnoreligious affiliations whose minority associations mark them almost self-evidently as treasonous (yeğen 2007; paker 2010). applicable even to those once considered prospective turks, the negative historicity of the minority entails a moral sensibility that sustains ideological exclusions and justifies collective violence. it is worth noting that the justice and development party (akp), which has established a dominant position within the turkish government over the past decade, describes its own history as a struggle against state repression. the leader of the party and prime minister at the time of the protests, recep tayyip erdoğan, commonly asserts that his party represents the oppressed (ezilen) who have not only been neglected but also actively marginalized by kemalist elites. the akp does not, however, define its constituency as a minority (azınlık). to the contrary, it sees itself as the authentic representative of the nation.3 prime minister erdoğan explicitly asserted this claim during the gezi protests. seeking to counter the globally circulating images of popular discontent, he organized a mass gathering of his own under the heading “a meeting that respects the national will.” in his speech, erdoğan mentioned the military interventions that led to the execution of prime minister adnan menderes in 1961 and the banning of the islamist welfare party in the late 1990s. politicians from the akp often reference these events as exemplifying state oppression against the line of parties and organizations from which their own party derives. erdoğan went on to proclaim that, on each occasion, the nation (millet) responded at the ballot box (sabah 2013). the akp’s invocation of a history of state violence contributes to its own rendering of the national subject. we will have to look elsewhere for a frontal interrogation and productive repurposing of the minority’s negative historicity. finding an interlocutor every week, a group called the saturday mothers/peoples (cumartesi anneleri/insanları) hosts a public vigil to remember individuals who were forcibly detained by security forces, disappeared, and are now presumed dead. many of the disappearances occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in the predominantly kurdish provinces of the southeast, and so the group speaks from a similar history of violence that provided a context for demirtaş’s speech described above. in most cases, neither have the bones of the dead been returned to their families, nor have the perpetrators been brought to justice.4 participants in these gatherings include mothers and other relatives of the disappeared, friends, and other supporters, including lawyers working for the human rights association (i̇nsan hakları derneği). most participants, whether kurdish or turkish, have never been formally classed as minority in turkey, but in drawing attention to the systematic nature of what might otherwise appear an aberrant practice of enforced disappearance, the saturday mothers and their supporters have struggled to expose and stage for public display the biopolitical liminality more commonly associated with minorities (bargu 2014). the group started to hold these weekly gatherings in 1995 and eventually stopped in 1999 because of repressive police force. they resumed them again in 2009, and while their gatherings these days by and large do not incur state intervention, police forces invariably arrive prior to their public rallies and make their presence felt by standing about a hundred yards away. thus, the mothers’ activities have been shaped by a history of police violence and surveillance, long prior to the gezi events. in istanbul, they gather on i̇stiklal avenue, the central pedestrian thoroughfare where the gezi protesters were also active.5 at these events, participants commonly talk about relatives and friends who were forcibly disappeared, but during the summer of 2013, they connected these histories of detention and disappearance to the authorizing of police violence during the gezi events. in reference to the latter, one participant said: “the scenario hasn’t changed; only the players have changed.” another participant commented on the fact that the prime minister had recently made a speech in a kurdish-majority province about the peace process that the ruling government was pursuing with the pkk. in that speech, prime minister erdoğan had reportedly announced: “spring has come to the mountains and mothers will no longer cry.” the speaker at the saturday mothers event responded by saying that in only one month, the police had killed five young people. “are their mothers not really mothers?” he asked. the speaker here again articulated the gezi events to a longer history of state violence, identifying continuities with an earlier era of state power that the ruling government often claims to have superseded and left behind. following one of the mothers’ events in july 2013, i found the opportunity to ask one of the founding members of the group about the current protests. her brother had been detained and killed by police forces in 1995, and her family had been among the first to begin publicly gathering in protest of the disappearances. i asked her why speakers at these events persistently made reference to the gezi protests. she responded that both cases—enforced disappearances and the current clashes between protesters and the police—involved the same phenomenon: state terror (devlet terörü). the discussion continued, as it often does, at a crowded tea garden tucked away on a passageway that extends from the main avenue. another regular participant in the vigils, whose brother had also been forcibly disappeared in 1995, indicated why the group sympathized with the current protesters: as a group that has known state violence intimately, he explained, they were calling for an end to the recent acts of police brutality. this was not the first time the saturday mothers had acted in solidarity with a movement dedicated to protesting state violence, especially violence against minorities. some members of the group reported to me that they had joined annual demonstrations to commemorate and mourn the assassination of hrant dink, an armenian intellectual who had been prosecuted several times for “denigrating turkishness” and who was gunned down in 2007 by a right-wing nationalist, ogün samast. photographs of samast in custody, flanked by police officers proudly waving a turkish flag, demonstrated to many critics that at least some members of the police supported the killer; police officers working in intelligence units have since been arrested as part of the official investigation into the murder. the connection drawn by the mothers between these different episodes, linked by the rubric of state terror, exposes a form of officially sanctioned violence against communities whose loyalty and obedience state authorities doubt. the historical sensibility evinced in the saturday mothers’ gatherings in 2013 was apparent not only in their comments on state violence and its precedents in the kurdish southeast, but also in a number of comments focused on the gatherings themselves and the mode of address they have been developing for the past twenty years. one participant exclaimed that they have been coming to this location for a long time and that only now, with the gezi protests, they were discovering to whom they had been speaking all this time. in a more muted tone, an elderly mother asked: “why have we been sitting here? no one has heard our voice. people come and go [past us], but without hearing our voice, and nothing has been done.” pressing the point further, she later merged her concerns about enforced disappearances in the kurdish southeast with the gezi protests: “what happened in gezi park? they were sitting in the shade over there. what was over there, was it a war? we say to everyone: listen to our voices. end this war. let mothers laugh a little.” in her statement, the term war references both the three-decade armed conflict between the turkish state and the pkk and the excessive response of the police to protesters in the park. undoubtedly, as with any act of public address, the speech act is heard and taken up by a range of differently positioned actors. in many respects, the mothers’ voices have reverberated more strongly in international settings than in domestic ones: amnesty international organized sit-ins in paris, berlin, sydney, and london to support the gatherings in istanbul; the international human rights association awarded the mothers the carl von ossietzky prize; and they were the subject of a documentary by a french filmmaker (baydar and i̇vegen 2006, 696–97). it is nonetheless striking that many in the group, when speaking about their reception in the domestic arena, claim not to have been heard. they indicate that the communicative setting that their vigils presuppose has by and large not been recognized by their presumed addressees in the mainstream turkish public. the issue is not only that they have struggled to motivate legislators to reform criminal law or to inspire public prosecutors to raise cases against state officials. beyond this legal impasse, they point to the fact that members of the putative turkish majority have largely failed to respond to the ethical claims that the mothers have sought to make on them. their acts of address, iterated across years of weekly speech acts, carry the burden of creating a context of interlocution that their intended addressees have refused to recognize. the speech act presupposes a context of communication it must in fact produce. this paradox of performativity, i suggest, is not simply stifling; it produces an ethical charge that enables a sense of expectation. the ethical impetus derives from the gap between the communicative impasses the mothers have persistently confronted and a dialogical encounter they posit as a possible future. to draw out this argument, it is helpful to note that scholars who have examined the saturday mothers have broached questions concerning the ethics of the group’s public presence largely by analyzing the gendered politics of motherhood. if some have argued that the group “revolutionizes the traditional maternal role” (arat 1999, 376), others have worried that the moral resonance of motherhood risks depoliticizing the gatherings (baydar and i̇vegen 2006). the idea of mothers-in-mourning seems to domesticate, within traditional gender relations, what might otherwise be taken as a deeply political protest against the violent abuses of state power. state authorities themselves appear vexed by this performance of mourning, adopting conflicting positions on its legitimacy. at certain moments, they have permitted the mothers to convene in public with little harassment. at other times, police forces have aggressively intervened, even attacking members of the group, and on occasion detaining some participants on charges of aiding terrorism.6 ignored and harassed, permitted and repressed, the gatherings prove unsettling for state authorities and much of the mainstream turkish public. the tensions elicited by the mothers at least in part result from how the turkish state has invested in the morality of motherhood. the militarized masculinity of turkish nationalism has presupposed a feminine counterpart, whether in the form of daughters, capable in some cases of participation in the military, or, more commonly, in the form of mothers, who support and “reproduce” the military nation (altınay 2004). the recursive loop that links the morality of motherhood to the politics of national sovereignty was reactivated in the 1990s when turkish media outlets began to report on a group of turkish mothers who met in a cemetery on fridays to collectively mourn the deaths of sons who, as turkish soldiers, died as “martyrs” in the armed conflict with the pkk. zeynep gülru göker (2011a, 170) notes that in nationalist media portrayals, the “mothers of the martyred” were explicitly set in contrast with the saturday mothers, in effect constructing a “hierarchy of grief.” the saturday mothers invoke recognizable tropes of motherhood—of an emotional, moral obligation toward sons—and yet repudiate militarism’s gendered narrative of national reproduction. their public vigils appear uncanny—familiar yet alien—to many in the turkish public, including state authorities, because they rely on what is conventional in them: the dissident demanding that state officials be brought to justice is at the same moment a mother calling for public acknowledgment of her moral claim to mourn her child’s death.7 the saturday mothers hold out an ethical provocation to those who would identify with the turkish majority—a provocation to which, according to some in the group, few within that majority have been willing to rise: to recognize the moral claim of the mothers’ mourning and, in doing so, to denounce the violence of the state that acts in the majority’s name. if many in the mothers group have worried about the absence of an interlocutor, the issue only in part concerns the way in which state authorities and media outlets have censored or silenced their voices. more significantly, they are suggesting that the would-be majority can only become their addressee, responsive to their moral claims, if that majority embarks on a process of self-transformation. the statement mentioned above, that the mothers are just now finding an addressee, indicates that some within the majority are beginning to constitute themselves as interlocutors for the mothers’ claims, but only after having confronted police violence in the gezi protests. the mothers’ practices of historical analogy open an explosive ethical question: what encounters with the state’s security battalions would the putative majority need to endure, and thus what would that majority need to become, to see the decades-old struggle of the saturday mothers as part of its own political experience, formative of an expectation to come? from minority to majority as the gezi protests unfolded, there was considerable commentary in turkish news outlets and blogs about the extent of kurdish involvement. some protesters, who have seen kurds rise up en masse to oppose state violence on countless previous occasions, were frustrated that kurdish cities had not displayed the bold street politics for which they are often known. many participants with whom i spoke during the protests complained that kurdish politicians were too ambiguous in their support.8 selahattin demirtaş was not dismissive of the gezi uprising, but he did not celebrate it either. rather than addressing the question of why kurds were not more forcefully joining the protests, he reversed the frame, stressing that turks were only now seeing what their state was capable of doing to its own citizens and that they were only now experiencing a historical reality that kurds had long known. this stance and the distance from the protest that it implied made for objects of considerable critique among gezi activists. several turkish protesters, a few of whom were longtime supporters of the kemalist republican people’s party, described this distance to me with some bitterness. they explained that demirtaş and the kurdish political party he represented were involved in the peace process that the ruling government was negotiating with the pkk, and that the party did not want to upset that process by openly participating in the gezi uprising. these protesters maintained that kurdish politicians, who had long struggled against state authoritarianism, were now allowing realpolitik to blunt any support they might give to an antiauthoritarian protest movement. such explanations of political maneuver are plausible, but they underestimate the social significance of this hesitancy among many kurds. it is important to recognize that this critical distance from the protests, accompanied by the historical sensibility that turkish protesters were only beginning to witness forms of violence previously applied against kurds, was not only a matter of tactical cunning on the part of a political party. it resonated with sentiments that i encountered in the course of fieldwork in diyarbakır (a key cultural and political center of the kurdish movement in turkey) with kurds hailing from a range of age cohorts and class backgrounds. i asked a lawyer in his mid-twenties to explain the political significance of the gezi protests, but rather than engage the question, he smirked dismissively, adding only that turks in the western provinces of the country were just starting to grapple with issues that kurds in the east had faced under more dire circumstances for decades. welat, a retired man in his late sixties living in a working-class neighborhood of diyarbakır, was less cynical in his assessment, asserting that people in his city supported the gezi protesters. yet he proceeded to list many of the kurdish politicians from his neighborhood alone who had been arrested by the turkish state during the past few decades, indicating that the history of oppression against kurds has been ongoing for thirty to forty years. the judgment of delal, a middle-aged woman who worked for the city’s municipal government, was more attuned to the mediatized nature of the gezi protests. she said that audiences in europe and north america were gripped by videos of police violence against gezi protesters, but that photographs of the injured and dead in turkey’s kurdish-majority cities have never been permitted to circulate so widely, nor have they been viewed with such sympathy.9 demirtaş’s (2013) speech was grounded in and emerged from this social milieu. it is worth examining the speech in more depth because demirtaş gave voice to popular sentiments in the form of an address, turning the hesitancy felt by many kurds into an ethical demand on the would-be majority. it resembled, even if it was not altogether identical with, the discourse of the saturday mothers. while demirtaş did not appeal to tropes of motherhood, he made recourse to a history of violence to recast the space of experience out of which the current conflagration around gezi park emerged. recall that he began by describing the bombing in roboski village, framing that event as a precedent to the more recent acts of state violence against gezi protesters. what makes this framing more combative is the way that it serves to ground a horizon of expectation. the contentious character of this narrative tethering of memory to anticipation became apparent in the course of the speech, as demirtaş’s tone shifted from historical description to moral admonishment. this shift was marked grammatically, as demirtaş began to directly address his audience in the second person: as with groups in power in the past, the habit of lying that we find in this [governing] power has a counterpart among the people. . . . i wish to remind especially those who support the prime minister and nourish his lies. . . . he lied that “the bdp [demirtaş’s political party] coercively gathers votes” . . . that “it pays children to throw stones,” and you believed it [siz inandınız]. . . . he said that during the hunger strike [among kurdish prisoners in 2012], “they are eating inside.” you believed it [siz inandınız]. . . . he lied in roboski, you believed it [inandınız]. . . . now it’s emerged that he lied that [gezi protesters] were drinking alcohol in a mosque [where they were given shelter and medical care], and as if this was the first time he’s lied, you started to raise objections. the repetition of the phrase you believed it functions poetically, in roman jakobson’s (1960, 369) sense: the rhythmical and patterned parallelism fosters “interaction between meter and meaning.” concentrating attention on itself, the phrase builds in importance, even as it rests on the denotationally unspecified deictic “you.” to whom is demirtaş directing this reprimand? at the start, it is clear that demirtaş (2013) is talking about supporters of the prime minister and his political party. yet as he continues, the you he is challenging assumes greater proportions. will you still believe the lie that “armenians went around from one place to another, sometimes along the way, because of some problems, a few people were killed?” or will you hear the truth that they suffered an officially [organized] genocide, they were officially eliminated? alevis in dersim, maraş, çorum, sivas, gazi were killed at the hand of official state policy. will you now believe this truth? the events he mentions—the armenian genocide of the early twentieth century and violence against alevis in the 1930s, 1970s, and 1990s—all preceded the rise of the akp-led ruling government. they involved a constellation of state authorities and political parties that embraces much of the field of mainstream politics, across a landscape of political groups that otherwise claim to oppose one another. when demirtaş alludes to “lies,” he claims to be describing official state policy, the same policy that has been part of the ascription of negative historicity to the minority. turkey’s current government, on this account, is not the originator of those lies but has continued the tradition of adhering to them. for demirtaş, the elision of these events of historical violence in public memory has been supported or tacitly accepted by secularists as much as islamists, by right-wing nationalists as much as left-leaning liberals. demirtaş’s account brings together events of violence that took place at different historical moments and, arguably, it risks flattening into a single narrative modalities of violence that are worth distinguishing—violences of different scale and acts of state repression with different mechanisms and consequences. what interests me here, however, is not simply the historiographical validity of his narrative (for instance, whether the episodes of violence against armenians, alevis, kurds, and gezi protesters constitute a single continuous history or a more heterogeneous set of agencies, interests, and effects). in line with the argumentative thrust of this essay, i want to suggest that his effort to consider these events together produces an ethical demand worth taking seriously in its own right. demirtaş’s admonishment extended not only to the akp’s electoral base but even to some of those involved in the protests, including kemalists and other nationalists. what is striking about the ambiguity of the “you” in demirtaş’s address is the lack of strong distinction between kemalists and islamists—the “white turks” that long dominated turkish politics and the “black turks” that have come to power in their stead in recent decades (on the political significance of these categories, see white 2013, 46–48). this seemingly commonsense distinction of contemporary turkish politics holds no salience here and is actively destabilized. when he says “you believed it,” the you includes anyone who identifies with a national horizon of expectation without interrogating the experiences of violence that have produced it. these events of violence were foundational to the history of the body politic. the violence against armenians mentioned in the speech occurred in the waning years of the empire, in the very years when imperial elites feverishly adopted ethnic nationalism, which proved consequential in entrenching the ideological terms of nation-state formation in the following years. the episodes of violence targeting alevis that demirtaş mentions took place later, but in the speech itself, he invokes a string of cities (dersim, maraş, çorum, etc.) immediately after mentioning the “official elimination” of armenians. the cities become emblems of those episodes of violence and they appear, in the speech, as echoes of the founding genocide of the republic. the speech offers a history of the gezi protests that begins not with the ruling party and its belligerent leader, nor with the neoliberal turn in state policy, but with the constituting moment of the republic itself. it implicates the form of the body politic as such, including its “counterpart among the people,” who have been empowered to speak as a sovereign nation. the political party that demirtaş represented was the most prominent voice in mainstream politics to speak on behalf of rights and freedoms for kurds: cultural and linguistic rights (the right to use kurdish in elementary schools, political campaigns, and courtrooms); rights for self-governance (in proposals to decentralize certain aspects of governance to provincial levels); and the granting of amnesty to political prisoners and releasing the leader of the pkk, abdullah öcalan, from solitary confinement. in this particular speech, demirtaş was not primarily concerned with these issues, which are often glossed as the “kurdish question,” but with what we might call a turkish question.10 he made an appeal to the putative majority not simply to question state violence, by for instance recognizing the killing of armenians as a genocide. his was not a project aimed at redeeming the nation in a liberal vintage that is more inclusive and less authoritarian. the persistent dilemma with that kind of liberalism, in turkey as elsewhere, is that it remains premised on the perspective of the majority, which can then offer or withhold tolerance to the marginalized (brown 2006). the often unacknowledged statist commitments of that sort of liberalism reinforce, rather than scrutinize, the split between the progressive historicity of the nation and the negative historicity of the minority. demirtaş’s demand went further, admonishing the would-be majority for failing to push the critique of violence to the point where it implicates its own constitution as an ethnic majority. he summoned those who would see themselves as part of the turkish majority to develop a critique of violence that not only condemns the ruling government but one that leads to a self-transformation, where it might question the very aspiration to majority status. a polemical ethics we have witnessed a flurry of debates about political futures after gezi, much of which have centered on how the oppositional spirit of the protest might be preserved or harnessed after its conclusion. would the uprisings yield electoral consequences damaging to the ruling party? what alternate forms of politics, aside from the ballot box, could be developed to reactivate its energy and its collaborative ethos? or, scaling up, in what ways were the protests contributing to a global movement of resistance connected to anti-austerity protests in southern europe, the occupy movement in north america, or the protests around public transportation in brazil, to name just a few (see tuğal 2013)? the materials i have been examining in this essay permit us to remain sensitive to the temporal conditions of possibility for such debates: whose experience matters and to which political future? the gezi park protests could, for instance, be interpreted as a relatively spontaneous uprising against the ruling government, its increasing controls on public sociability, its embrace of neoliberal politico-economic measures, and its intensifying hostility toward political opponents. but if, following the saturday mothers, we view the police actions in gezi park as continuous with a space of experience that includes the enforced disappearances in the 1980s and 1990s, then how would the target of the critique shift and where would the burden of responsibility for violence fall? in what ways would some of the protesters themselves, including especially those who identify as members of the turkish majority, be implicated in the tradition of state violence being renewed by the government today? if, following demirtaş, we wrote the history of the gezi uprisings by beginning with the foundational violence of the armenian genocide, how would that alter the horizon of expectation emerging from the current protests? there is an ethical contentiousness to these questions that would be elided if, with ernesto laclau (2005), we rushed to discern the chains of equivalence emerging between different social and political communities. that sort of theorization could offer a plausible explanation of the pluralistic character of the protests, in which a wide variety of otherwise distinct, sometimes rival, political communities contingently articulated their disparate demands with one another, under the sign of gezi park and against the ruling government.11 i am not, however, convinced that, when the mothers and demirtaş drew comparisons between historical events of state violence and the current confrontations with police brutality, their aim was simply to help develop a popular bloc of opposition. rather than investing in the signifier of gezi park, their queries interrogated the ethical demands that an emergent political connection should make on the majority—of its responsiveness to forms of political identification that the state has long labeled as terrorism, and its willingness to claim responsibility for acts of violence committed by the state in its name. judith butler (2009, 36) takes us somewhat closer to the matter at hand by outlining a notion of political obligation in terms of shared vulnerability to violence. she not only moves away from historically resonant notions of substantive (ethnic, religious, linguistic) unity but calls for a conception of political relationality that arises precisely when more conventionally nationalist notions of identification are put into question: “what is our responsibility . . . toward those who seem to test our sense of belonging or to defy available norms of likeness?” the commentaries that i have discussed largely avoid drawing on the worn tropes of national indivisibility as the ground of political unity. instead, they highlight the increasing impossibility for those in the would-be majority to escape the violent address of security forces. state violence is not just under indictment; it leaves in its wake the terrain on which a new political community might be identified. certain moments of protest during the gezi events in fact sought to build new forms of political connection on the basis of a shared vulnerability to the ongoing violence. after medeni yıldırım, an eighteen-year-old kurd, was killed in the largely kurdish town of lice while protesting the building of a military outpost, gezi protesters in istanbul, ankara, and elsewhere began to incorporate yıldırım and lice into their slogans. protesters in kadıköy, a neighborhood of istanbul known for its middle-class, secular-nationalist turkish inhabitants, were reportedly chanting the kurdish phrase bijî biratiya gelan (“long live the brotherhood of the peoples”), as well as a turkish-language slogan of solidarity, diren lice, kadıköy seninle (“resist lice, kadıköy is with you”) (schafers and i̇lengiz 2013). as a term meant to promote solidarity, brotherhood may be irreparably compromised by the patriarchal ethnonationalism that has defined its dominant usage. however, its invocation in kurdish and its coupling with a pluralized “peoples” suggest that critical labor is being performed on the concept itself. in a context where the public use of kurdish has been banned, censored, and discouraged, and where political officials have been accused of aiding terrorism because of their choice of linguistic code (see jamison, forthcoming), these gestures evince a sense of responsibility toward those who unsettle “available norms of likeness.” these assertions of solidarity claim a shared vulnerability, in butler’s sense, but the question that remains open to dispute is how any such claim indexes an anticipated future. the commentaries i have examined in this essay point to common encounters with state violence, but they also lay bare the historically unequal distribution of that violence. they harbor a polemical ethics whose force derives from the way they recast the temporal valence of the minority. confrontational rather than conciliatory, demirtaş and the mothers’ respective discourses convey an ethical charge because they ask the majority to see its own horizon of expectation defined anew, not in relation to the privileged past of the nation, but through an experience of state violence more commonly reserved for the minority. demirtaş and the mothers do not present the negative historicity of the minority simply as an outrageous violation of the republic’s highest ideals; that outrage stands as a precedent anticipating a political community to come. more than becoming sensitive to the plight of the minority, the would-be majority is asked to see the minority’s past as prefiguring the form of its own political future. if we were to discern in these critical discourses a nascent form of political community-in-the-making, we would have to begin with the unsettling, even paradoxical, notion that the subject of politics they project is formed on the basis of exclusions constitutive of “the people” in the republican state. this vexed reassessment of experience and expectation suggests that the oppressed minority stands as a model for the political identification of the majority. perhaps we need a figure for political thought that, evoking the dialectical tensions that animate the materials presented here, would summon the ethnic and gendered politics of the nation-state—but only to mark their negation. a brotherhood in dispossession, let us say, which can even incorporate the dominant majority, but only to the degree that it too has faced the violence of the state as a precondition for its entry into politics. notes acknowledgments this essay has greatly benefited from the criticisms of a number of friends and colleagues. i am especially grateful to joseph hankins, kelda jamison, banu karaca, and sarah muir, who generously read multiple drafts. i also thank faiz ahmed, yeşim arat, elif babül, fırat bozçalı, zeynep gülru göker, heiko henkel, cemal kafadar, david nugent, esra özyürek, öykü potuoğlu-cook, joan scott, kamala visweswaran, and jarrett zigon for their comments on the essay. sertaç kaya şen provided crucial research assistance. i presented earlier versions of this essay at boston university, harvard university, brown university, the london school of economics, the university of copenhagen, the university of amsterdam, koç university, sabancı university, and stanford university. i thank the organizers and participants at those events for their feedback. the editors and anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology provided stimulating engagement that helped me develop the arguments. research funding was provided by the institute for research in the social sciences and the hellman fellows fund, both through stanford university. 1. the ‫partiya karkerên kurdistan (pkk) is a kurdish organization that has engaged in armed struggle against the turkish state for more than three decades. 2. not all participants in the protest had previously been uncritical of the turkish state’s use of force in kurdish-majority regions. some hailed from political communities long critical of the state, including some leftists, alevis, kurds, feminists, and anticapitalist muslims. for one breakdown of class positions and political identities among the protestors, see yörük and yüksel 2014. 3. in their analysis of erdoğan’s populism, s. erdem aytaç and ziya öniş (2014, 45) excerpt an apposite quotation from one of his speeches: “my story is the story of this people. either the people will win and come to power, or the pretentious and oppressive minority—estranged from the reality of anatolia and looking over it with disdain—will remain in power.” 4. the saturday mothers saw argentina’s madres de plaza de mayo as a model to follow. on the similarities and differences between the two groups, see baydar and i̇vegen 2006. 5. other saturday mothers groups organize activities in a number of provinces in turkey, especially in the kurdish-majority southeast, where many of the disappearances took place. 6. police harassment of the mothers’ gatherings spiked in 1998 and 1999. on the two-hundredth week, the group suspended the vigils. at that point, 431 people had been arrested, with some held in custody for up to five days, and 40 participants were put on trial (göker 2011b, 114). 7. compare joan scott’s (1996) analysis of the ways in which key french feminists avowed, even as they sought to undermine, tropes of sexual difference. 8. i̇rfan aktan (2013) argues that the very questioning of the kurds’ presence in the protest resulted from and helped reinforce a political framework supported by turkish nationalists. 9. on the hesitance, even resentment, felt by many kurds toward the gezi protests, see also bozçalı and yoltar 2013. 10. to the extent that the so-called kurdish question implicates the formation of the turkish state and the policing of its material and imaginative boundaries, it is always already a “turkish question” (özsoy 2013). 11. images juxtaposing signs of turkish and kurdish nationalism became iconic of this collaborative pluralism. for instance, a frequently circulated photo showed a man holding a portrait of 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breakdown and the ethical demand: a theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities.” anthropological theory 7, no. 2: 131–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1463499607077295. to revive an abundant life to revive an abundant life: catholic science and neoextractivist politics in peru’s mantaro valley stefanie graeter northwestern university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5689-4101 i did not expect to see a scientific laboratory in the highland city of huancayo, let alone at the offices of its archbishop. in the crisp morning air of a mid-september day in 2010, i awaited the sight of more desks, file cabinets, binders, and manila envelopes (the stuff of ngos) as my guide deftly unfastened the three stiff locks of an iron-wrought door. yet when the door swung open, the room revealed an entirely different menagerie of objects. in the entranceway lay bulky pieces of air-monitoring equipment, scattered among coolers chock-full of plastic bottles. on top of black countertops, boxed rubber gloves neighbored bottles of ethanol, their red nozzles poised at right angles awaiting surfaces to disinfect. in my line of sight stood a heat-sanitizing drying rack, a vacuum-hooded counter space, and the cascading pages of safety warnings fastened to the wall. in a corner, a few too many lab coats overwhelmed a standing hanger, unfit for its task. although no one thing makes a lab a lab, at that moment i knew i knew a lab when i saw one. this article analyzes the integration of religious and scientific practitioners and practices within a catholic knowledge-making project called el proyecto mantaro revive (revive the mantaro project).1 it was this project’s lab that i encountered locked away behind a maze of offices and garden courtyards in an old missionary complex. i had just arrived by overnight bus from lima to visit mantaro revive’s organizers in huancayo, the metropolitan hub of the mantaro valley and capital of the central andean junín region. i knew little about mantaro revive at the time, only that it was connected to a transnational network of organizations campaigning against lead contamination in the nearby city of la oroya. la oroya is perhaps the most infamous case of contamination caused by mining operations in peru. the city’s enormous smelter, built in 1922 to refine mineral sludge from nearby mines owned by the u.s.-based cerro de pasco corporation, rapidly transformed la oroya’s mountainous terrain into a stark, white moonscape. the yauli and mantaro rivers, which intersect at the city’s center, became turbid, sepia tributaries deprived of the migrating trout that once populated them. figure 1. the metallurgic complex at la oroya. photo by stefanie graeter. in the late 1990s, the city also became central to a national debate over the human cost of an extraction-based economy. while the smelter’s smoke led to obvious agricultural blight (mallon 1983), its impact on residents remained largely undisclosed until 1999, when peru’s ministry of health (minsa) measured lead levels in la oroya’s residents up to eight times higher than international safety thresholds (villena chávez 1999). this triggered a series of studies by ngos, usaid, and the u.s. company doe run, who purchased the smelter in 1997, all of which revealed very high human lead levels in la oroya. concern multiplied in transnational advocacy circles about the potentially severe cognitive harm of lead, especially for exposed children. meanwhile, doe run’s environmental record grew ever more bleak: pollution worsened and extensions for promised technological upgrades to reduce emissions were repeatedly sought from peru’s congress and granted. nonetheless, by keeping the local economy humming and implementing much-needed social programs (alongside suspected bribery of state officials), doe run managed to prevent the lead studies from garnering much political influence. in 2009, however, the smelter shut down on dubious financial and legal grounds related to the 2008 economic crisis but also connected to the company’s increasingly scandalous reputation. in 2012 company supporters mounted new plans to reopen the smelter without solving la oroya’s pollution problems first. this pending decision also manifested a persistent societal disagreement in peru: does the national economy require bodies with minerals? mantaro revive’s scientific documentation of heavy-metal contamination in the mantaro valley existed as a political response to this fundamental disagreement over the governance of life and death in peru. in 2004, the project’s founders authored what became the most cited scientific study of human lead exposure in la oroya, which spurred a scientific enterprise that operated until 2013. alongside scientific measurements, members of mantaro revive held policy workshops in urban centers and remote hamlets, sustained health programs in la oroya, and attended political events in lima. throughout these activities, the project’s own scientific evidence formed the epistemic basis of its political advocacy. figure 2. members of the mantaro revive project sample the mantaro river near la oroya. photo by stefanie graeter. figure 3. farmland alongside the yauli river, a short distance from la oroya. photo by stefanie graeter. how did the catholic church become such an apt institution for the production of toxicological science in peru? seeking to understand this question ethnographically, i undertook fieldwork with mantaro revive, mostly in 2012, as part of a broader research project on lead exposure and mining politics conducted in peru over twenty months between 2010 and 2015. perhaps surprisingly, a comparative analysis of science and religion did not result from this fieldwork. while in a u.s. epistemic context science and religion are often diametrically opposed,2 my interlocutors in peru dwelled little on potential incongruities. ethnographic engagement with catholic scientists led me to put the categories of “science” and “religion” aside and to focus instead on the sociocultural conditions that brought their practitioners into collaboration. for those who cared about lead contamination in la oroya, this colaboring mattered a great deal: before the catholic church’s involvement, a “credible,” “legitimate,” or “objective” lead study did not exist, according to my interlocutors. in her research with christian advocates, candis callison (2014, 138) calls the process of “re-framing” climate change as a christian ethical concern a “blessing of the facts.” while mantaro revive undertook similar acts of translation, this article argues that the project’s institutional and ethical affiliations mattered even more for the social and technical legitimacy of its scientific data. as an institutional companion to scientific practice, the catholic church cloaked its data in trust, stabilizing the ethical uncertainty held against other, potentially corrupted sources of scientific knowledge. in turn, science, a potentially efficacious political tool, provided a field of practice to enact a catholic ethos of life that could revive the mantaro valley, as the name of the project suggests. therefore, for the purposes of this article, catholic science refers to knowledge-making practices imbricated with the ethics of the catholic church and its practitioners. like corporate science, university science, or lay science, institutional links to the production of knowledge carry both general and specific cultural meaning. the point is not to claim that all catholic science has inherently better ethics, but rather that the knowledge practices of this archdiocese took on a situated objectivity in a sphere of politics specific to its time and place. the achievement of objectivity, a collective agreement on the credibility of knowledge, generates conditions of political actionability—the ability to act on knowledge politically. such epistemic politics within ecological controversies oblige an ethnographic attunement to the sociocultural conditions through which situated objectivities come into existence within localized knowledge-making projects. this extension of donna haraway’s (1988) notion of “situated knowledges” orients us to the on-the-ground, localized pragmatics of producing politically actionable knowledge. the achievement of scientific objectivity is not a solely technical undertaking. mantaro revive’s scientific practices demonstrate the complex arrangement of actors and institutions required to achieve a socially recognized objectivity. in the sections that follow, i conceptualize the situated production of politically actionable knowledge in the mantaro valley as a process of accompaniment, a walking-with that provides scientific practices with moral credibility and trust. ethnographically detailing the achievements and failures of scientific/political projects reveals how social relations shape the production and destiny of knowledge, which in environmental politics contour ecological distributions of pain, pleasure, possibility, and ultimately life itself. here, mantaro revive’s pursuit of politically legitimate scientific evidence achieved tangible policy measures. yet beyond measures of efficacy or failure, this essay argues that within a state of ubiquitous corruption and legal dysfunction, mantaro revive’s work must also be understood as the production of a biopolitical “dissensus” (rancière 2004, 304). its scientific politics asserted the “biolegitimacy” (fassin 2009, 49) of life desecrated by the mineral industry through enactments of democratic governance, human rights, and lived abundance within a social world where such conditions do not function or exist. the noxious ash of neoextractivism on february 22, 2012, crowds of devotees packed the high-steeped nave of huancayo’s cathedral. their numbers did little to warm the icy air; few had space to sit or lean, but all listened attentively to the archbishop’s thundering oration of ash wednesday service. as i arrived and stood in the back with members of mantaro revive, monsignor barreto’s liturgy spoke to the very soil we had just left behind in the lab. barreto expounded to his congregation: “since [the smelter’s] closure in 2009, we have seen levels of sulfur dioxide and lead in the air of la oroya reduce by 99 percent. levels of lead in the children of la oroya have also dropped.” his words drew from mantaro revive’s longitudinal data, compared to recent studies by minsa, to reflect on the pending decision by congress to reopen the smelter. while the pollution reductions were “good news,” he denounced congressmen from junín for authoring a new law to extend the company’s environmental upgrades for another thirty months: “we as the church cannot support this; there cannot be social inclusion without the right to health.” figure 4. the cathedral of huancayo. photo by stefanie graeter. as the service ended, people filed to the pulpit and exited the cathedral with their foreheads marked with a cross of ash. departing too, i crossed paths with melinda gonzales, the chemical engineer who first showed me mantaro revive’s lab. we discussed the monsignor’s mention of la oroya, and melinda mused that as ash wednesday initiated a period of spiritual reflection, it made an apt moment for barreto to discuss la oroya with his congregation. the monsignor’s intervention had not been unusual; for years he had used his pulpit to “defend the right of life” (defender el derecho a la vida). we parted ways and i walked over the cobblestoned road to my hotel, adjacent to the archbishopric. as i entered the glass doorway of los balcones, i reflected further on the symbolic resonances of the ritual marking of ash, the soil samples in the lab, and barreto’s reference to la oroya. ash reminds the faithful of the dust from which they come and to which they will inevitably return. its mark recalls life’s swift gasp between states of earthly matter, the precious brevity of creation—a truth often too painful to recollect. likewise, by remembering la oroya in their cathedral and laboratory, barreto and mantaro revive enunciated another oft-forgotten truth: the desacralization of life by the national tradition of metal production. *** since the 1990s, new configurations of antimining and environmental politics have arisen in response to the rapid transnationalization and growth of peru’s extractive industries. these extractivist-resistance projects are complex and heterogeneous, including actors such as indigenous groups; campesinos; water, lagoons, mountains, and animals; apus,3 shamans, and earth beings (de la cadena 2015); local, national, and transnational ngos and missionary networks; politicians; local and foreign scientists; and so on (see li 2015; de la cadena 2010, 2015; stensrud 2016). within the layered networks of these political projects, religious figures, particularly catholic priests, occupy central nodes of leadership, social legitimacy, and ethical translation. as its laboratory so quickly clarified, however, mantaro revive did not just operate a faith-based advocacy group but also ran a scientific research program that epistemically anchored its politics. mining in the andes is nothing new: it predates the colonial encounter, fueled european imperialism for centuries, and has since gone through several postcolonial iterations (nash 1979; taussig 1980; mallon 1983). in latin america, scales of extraction have multiplied under neoextractivisms, which the argentine scholar maristella svampa (2015) describes as a process of dispossession impelling national economies (with seeming inevitability) to focus on raw, nonrenewable exports, extracted and brokered by enormous foreign corporations at a colossal physical scale. after decades of civil war and economic turmoil, in the late 1990s president-cum-dictator alberto fujimori initiated peruvian neoextractivism—privatizing older, then-nationalized infrastructure like la oroya’s smelter and facilitating new prospecting and investments, alongside greater neoliberal reforms. known colloquially as “fuji-shock,” his policies correlate with many positive economic indicators: a growth rate of 6.1 percent, more than double the regional average, and reductions in the poverty rate from 55 to 24 percent between 2002 and 2013. during this period, the twenty-fivefold increase in mining investments stood for many as the “background boom” (republica 2011) of this economic growth. the industry accounts for roughly 64 percent of annual exports, and peru typically ranks among the world’s top five producers of zinc, tin, lead, gold, copper, and silver. growing voices of dissent have simultaneously arisen to challenge the rationales undergirding peru’s neoextractivist governance. alternative development analyses, such as that of the uruguayan social ecologist eduardo gudynas (2012, 2014), contend that positive economic indicators belie massive environmental costs, the actual societal redistribution of wealth, and the inherent economic instability of an industry dependent on fluctuating global demand. the debated economics of open-pit mining, as well as their unfathomable disturbances to local socionatural worlds—whose craters can span hundreds of square kilometers—have, as fabiana li (2015) points out, unearthed not only metals but also much conflict. in 2015, the defensoría del pueblo (2016) tallied 174 socioenvironmental conflicts in peru, 69 percent of its annual count of national social conflicts, of which 113 pertained to proposed or ongoing mineral extraction.4 in latin american contexts and beyond, anthropologists and other scholars describe how impacted communities and social movements respond to harsh labor conditions, fluctuating prosperity, colossal environmental impacts, and the contentious health repercussions of extractive industries, often referred to as the resource curse (sawyer 2004; bebbington et al. 2008; welker 2014; kirsch 2014; lyons 2016). socioenvironmental conflicts in peru manifest in formations familiar to many kinds of latin american social movements—organized protests, media campaigns, blockades, and violent state repression—but also increasingly through scientific proof of chemical contamination. scientific activism responds to the centrality of technical expertise to state-industry practices that legitimize mega–mining projects (gudynas 2014). for instance, the state requires environmental impact assessments (eias) of new projects to document potential risks and to suggest methods to manage them. as fabiana li (2015, 186) argues, eias formalize accountability, but they also “prioritize mining interests and enable corporations to define the standards of performance that governments will use to establish compliance” (cf. welker 2009). alternative scientific projects demand new forms of ethical reckoning and accountability. the potential power of their articulations relies on mirroring a state–industry technoscientific vernacular, while divulging biopolitical mappings of the chemical excesses of extraction absorbed by human populations and their life-sustaining ecologies. they do not map the productive “make live” of michel foucault’s (2003, 254) definition of biopower, but instead divulge the underside of his well-known axiom, the disposable segments of society to “let die.” scientifically representing bodies with minerals points to the corporeal externalities misrepresented by documents like the eia, which ethically sanction mining projects. these alternative knowledge-making enterprises thus subvert the biopolitical logics and technical expertise that normalize distributed chemical exposures as an at times unfortunate, but necessary, material reality of an extractive economy. exposure studies, however, only quantify; significant ethico-political work is necessary to make measurements actionable within a sociopolitical field of practice. thus scholarship on toxicity and environmental (in)justice often describes how scientific credibility corrodes and lay or nonscientific facts fail to achieve political clout when their data confer blame on a resistant industry or on state actors (brown 1992; fortun 2001; murphy 2006; auyero and swistun 2007; lora-wainwright 2013; shapiro 2015). while mantaro revive’s story illustrates the disintegration of scientific authority in the mantaro valley, it also reveals how the project’s practitioners reinvigorated scientific expertise within an antagonistic social field that their venture nonetheless wished to impact. to remind the national polity of neoextractivism’s noxious dust, members of mantaro revive enacted practices of science and catholicism, which, i argue, simultaneously authorized their technical and political legitimacy. from truth to knowledge: science in the defense of an abundant life a thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; i came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly. –john 10:10 i joined mantaro revive as an ethnographer in 2012. my participation in the roughly thirty-person project—from preparing soil samples to attending health workshops in la oroya—was exclusively coordinated by juana jiménez, the project’s director and chemical engineer, often simply referred to as la ingeniera (the engineer). la ingeniera was also a devout catholic. of steely demeanor, jiménez invariably kept her hair cut very short and wore all black beneath mantaro revive’s logoed navy-blue vest. in one of our first meetings, she outlined the project’s four-tiered structure on a whiteboard. team one implemented health and economic programs in la oroya and gathered data on childhood anemia and lead levels. team two, the technical team (equipo técnico)—she paused to clarify that all the teams were “technical”—sampled water, air, and soil. their data fed into team three, public impact (incidencia publica), tasked with communicating their findings to local authorities, whose responses shaped the advocacy of team four, which sought policy impact (hence its name, incidencia politica) through legal measures. the project’s structure resulted from dialogues within the archbishop’s environmental task force, la mesa de diálogo ambiental, after the publication of its 2004 lead-exposure study. while this study established lead’s ubiquity in la oroya, its unexpected outcome pertained to the control population, in concepción. a small city renowned for its artichoke production, concepción’s relatively pristine environs made it a suitable control to compare with la oroya. the study revealed, however, that concepción’s residents also had high lead levels in their blood. revealing indelible linkages between metallurgy and human bodies throughout the region—not just in la oroya—this first study inspired the creation of a project to “revive” the entire mantaro valley. “the dream of the environmental task force of the junín region,” the introduction to its 2007 scientific report states, “is to make it possible for the mantaro basin to once again have life in plenitude [vida en plenitud]; under this premise arose the proposal for the project denominated as ‘revive the mantaro’” (mantaro revive 2007, 1). figure 5. members of the mantaro revive project prepare to take water samples in an agricultural valley downstream of a mine. photo by stefanie graeter. the catholic precept to “defend life” and the secular-humanist “right to life” often articulate the ethico-political stakes of peruvian antiextractivist politics. defending life controverts extractivism’s vital promises of progress and development, resignifying their forms of life as “emergent forms of death” instead (lyons 2008). mantaro revive, however, saw its work as distinct, though not disconnected, from antiextractivist struggles throughout peru. its oft-repeated motto exemplifies the distinction: “if we know our resources, we can transform a protest into a proposal” (cuando conocemos nuestros recursos, podemos llevar la protesta hasta la propuesta). to enact its ethics of plenitude, or what jiménez called “abundance,” mantaro revive brought its protest against mining’s immorality into the laboratory. the work of several anthropologists highlights humanitarianism’s ubiquity in international politics (nguyen 2004; ticktin 2006; fassin 2009). yet as talal asad (2003, 129) argues, despite the universalist ambitions of human rights, their application relies on national judicial institutions for enforcement. failing to achieve global human rights, international humanitarianism produces what peter redfield (2005, 329) calls a politics “focused on survival—a minimalist biopolitics.” the isolated physical body, thought to transcend politics, emerges as humanitarianism’s primary site of intervention. despite its discursive dominance, the moral framework of human rights similarly struggles to generate tangible impacts on political decisions about mining and contamination in peru. at face value, life lived in contamination is still living; bare life (see agamben 1998) remains intact. despite existing regulations, in practice mining companies are given significant license to pollute their surroundings, and little is done to care for those exposed to heavy metals. referencing this legal informality, numerous people repeated to me the adage, “in peru there are laws, but no one complies with the law!” (en perú hay ley, pero la ley no se cumple!) therefore, despite reshaping the public discourse on mining, a sense of futility can accompany protests against suspected legal breaches by industry (bebbington et al. 2008). furthermore, national authorities and media publicly dismiss such protests as “just politics”; policy remedies require technical information, not the passion of politics. while governments frequently depoliticize an issue by reducing it to a technical problem outside of democratic processes (ferguson 1994; petryna 2002), here it is an explicit government and media practice to delegitimize alternative social projects as merely political. public appeals for legal compliance, or against the deficiency or insufficiency of current statutes, at a minimum require technoscientific proof that substantiates moral claims of injustice and the infringement of human rights. consequently, the church of huancayo preferred to do its politics through science: to “know our resources” scientifically, as mantaro revive’s motto stated. within a technocratic paradigm of governance, scientific measurements translate purported toxic transgressions directly to legal pollution limits, potentially leading to fines, sanctions, or even company closures. paradoxically, then, exposure science offered a way to do politics without politics. such a political calculus, however, reflects more than just technocratic hegemony. only two decades after the fall of the shining path (sendero luminoso), peru’s political left still struggles to redefine itself in the wake of a socialist uprising. sendero diminished the moral high ground of leftist populism in peru, including andean campesino movements, making their political agendas of environmental and social injustice vulnerable to vilification by the right-of-center media and political factions. relatedly, during the militarized suppression of sendero in the 1990s, fujimori dismantled the power of the catholic church in the andes, construed as too close to the rebels’ socialist ideology. previously, peru housed a growing contingent of liberation theologians, led by gustavo gutiérrez (1988), which put structural injustice at the center of its theology. during the war, juana jiménez recalled, the catholic church grew very conservative (see schulte-bockholt 2013). now, jiménez thought, with some distance from the “period of violence” and a more liberal era of the vatican itself, a growing sector of the peruvian church was returning “closer to the problems of society.” this time, however, rather than fighting from a moral position alone and with greater distance from national leftist politics, mantaro revive relied on scientific knowledge to transform its protest into a concrete and legally binding policy proposal. in mantaro revive’s central meeting room, across the courtyard from the lab, i conversed with jiménez in february 2013 during our final meeting. knowing that i was not a catholic, she inquired curiously about what sustained me during times of hardship. unimpressed by my secular answers, jiménez informed me that she had been raised to fight for life, not just its survival, but for a “life in abundance.” resonating with the humanitarian critique of the aforementioned anthropologists, jiménez’s paraphrase of a passage from the gospel of john (see epigraph above) condemns the state’s status quo relationship to mining contamination: if no one is dying, it is not a problem. rather than a politics of bare life, a life endured in exposure to heavy metals was intolerable; for jiménez, her catholic ethics obliged her to fight for an abundant life. the thief named in this passage, who comes to “steal and slaughter and destroy,” also allegorically describes the relationship between mining companies and communities. although they are promised local economic development, many agricultural communities view mining companies as thieves of their land, leaving forever-altered landscapes in their wake. usually only provided with the company’s own environmental data, communities impacted by mining could confirm their supposedly subjective claims of dirtied streams and sick crops, livestock, and humans with mantaro revive’s studies, leveraging them during contract renegotiations or official denunciations. the project thus emulates jesus christ himself. citing perhaps the most famous line from the gospel of john, jiménez peered squarely over my notebook and stated matter-of-factly: “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” defending an abundant life, one lived without the passive absorption of life-altering chemicals, established mantaro revive’s moral intention. the technocratic landscape of peru’s neoliberal governance circumscribed the medium through which the public immorality of contamination could politically enunciate its truth: science. while science served to depoliticize mantaro revive’s politics, it also allowed the project to represent the somatic materializations of peru’s neoextractivist ethos, one which normalizes the uneven distribution of life—“bio-inequalities” (fassin 2009, 49)—to maximize its profit. to borrow further from the anthropologist didier fassin (2009, 48–49), mantaro revive’s work exemplifies a politics of life that demands more than just bare life, or life itself, but instead the biolegitimacy—a legitimacy attached to life—of a particular form of life as such, one of abundance. for fassin (2009, 45, 49), this constitutes a biopolitics beyond the art of governing populations (foucault 2008) to include the ethical systems that delineate which life may be made to live at the price of others. such a politics insists that life let to die by the state, if not made to live, at least be let to live in its plenitude. figure 6. members of the mantaro revive project select soil samples and potatoes for heavy-metal analysis. photo by stefanie graeter. mantaro revive’s science made embodied minerals public (cf. latour 2005; de la cadena 2010), disrupting the given “common sense” (rancière 2004, 304) that puts minerals into some bodies but not others, dividing the biolegitimate from the not. as i have already suggested, however, the enrollment of scientific practices by religious practitioners was not unidirectional. scientific practices also needed the catholic church. before delving further into the political implications of mantaro revive’s work, the following detour through the project’s origin story, involving the production of the 2004 lead-exposure study in la oroya, uncovers further sociopolitical contingencies that necessitated the church as an institutional accompaniment to scientific practice. “if jesus were here, he would walk with us”: objectivity and jesuit accompaniment in 2004, monsignor pedro barreto of huancayo visited the jesuit saint louis university (slu) in missouri. there, he met with a then–phd student, felipe sanchez, to discuss plans for an upcoming human lead-exposure study in la oroya. at one point, sanchez turned to the archbishop and said: “i do the science, you do the faith, and that combination will move mountains in peru.” in turn, as they discussed their ongoing challenges, the archbishop assured him that “the stars are aligning” to produce what sanchez later described to me as the first “nearly perfect” study of lead exposure in la oroya. the 2004 study functioned as an origin story for mantaro revive, and within this narrative presbyterian minister thomas connor emerged as a founding father. a member of the u.s.-based missionary organization joining hands (known as uniendo manos in peru), connor met me in st. louis in 2013 before attending a ten-year commemorative celebration for the organization’s work in la oroya. as we enjoyed a short respite from the summer heat inside a subway restaurant, connor explained that his work for joining hands began as its “companionship facilitator” in 2003, tasked with identifying local collaborators for missionary programs that responded directly to local needs. early on, he met anita gomez, the president of a small protestant organization from la oroya, named after filomena tomaira pacsi, a female miner who perished in union struggles in the 1980s. gomez implored him to visit her city and see environmental destruction “he wouldn’t believe.” shortly after, connor stepped off a bus during a pit stop in la oroya and immediately struggled to catch his breath as vapor from the air stung his lungs. this painful aerial impression compelled connor to bring a group of fellow pastors and ngo workers to experience la oroya’s air for themselves. deep into discussion at night during their visit, another pastor declared to the group, which included gomez, “brothers, just imagine if these were our kids.” to this, gomez bluntly retorted, “these are your kids, pastor.” by encouraging the group to connect themselves to la oroya’s atmosphere through u.s. offshoring of pollution onto “third-class citizens,” connor reported that gomez engendered a “theological shift” in the group. their shared respirations activated what tim choy (2015) describes as the capacity of air to make fellow-breathers “con-spire” around commitments that challenge uneven geographies of breath. before long, connor had made la oroya a central project of joining hands. as connor began consulting with locals, a group of teachers informed him that the city lacked impartial scientific data; the company still claimed that the chimney’s gaseous plumes were just water vapor. this was not for lack of studies. the minsa study had documented high lead levels back in 1999 and other research soon followed. people mistrusted these studies, however, because of potential corruption or technical inadequacies, such that the smelter’s plumes remained water vapor, despite respiratory evidence to the contrary. perhaps a new study was in order. the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) informed connor that a proper lead study would cost upward of half a million dollars, well beyond his budget and technical expertise. luckily, joining hands’s u.s. contingent had also taken a particular interest in la oroya on learning that doe run operated a sister smelter right outside of st. louis. they located felipe sanchez, who had previously studied a nearby doe run superfund site, and he accepted their request to join the venture after hearing members of filomena assert that “science was needed for a political fight.” the epidemiological knowledge of sanchez, now a policy studies professor at slu, quickly reshaped their plans. in an interview on the slu campus in 2013, he explained to me that residents originally requested he replicate minsa’s fifty-child study, mistrusted because of fears that the public institution was “in the pockets of the company.” aside from potential corruption, minsa’s study also lacked scientific rigor. for the political sway they desired, sanchez insisted, they needed an epidemiological “gold standard” study: a comparative human exposure assessment between a study population (la oroya) and a control (concepción) to statistically represent lead exposure among the city’s thirty-three thousand residents. as the study’s technical dimensions made headway, joining hands felt the tide of community support turn against it in la oroya. as other ngos had warned connor, the city was often too “beholden to the company” for outside groups to gain any traction. around this time, in july of 2004, word arrived of pope john paul ii’s appointment of pedro barreto as huancayo’s archbishop, whose archdiocese included la oroya. sensing the potential for a powerful alliance, connor and gomez invited him to visit la oroya and, surprisingly, he came to see them after only three days in office. in connor’s retelling, when the nerve-wracking meeting began, gomez greeted barreto as “brother” (hermano). both informal and unorthodox, the greeting also pegged her immediately as an evangelical. but barreto appeared unfazed and gomez continued: “hermano, if jesus were here, he would walk with us. will you walk with us?” the archbishop “paused, he got tears in his eyes, and said, ‘hermana [sister], i will walk with you and the church will walk with you.’” himself choked up, connor recalled the significance of the archbishop’s commitment: “we knew we didn’t have legitimacy and the company had succeeded in painting us as radicals, as foreigners, as environmentalists—ambientalistas, which is an insult—and then el radical [radicals], connected with sendero . . . and so [the company] had succeeded, with just a few articles, in delegitimizing the movement and we needed the catholic church desperately.” barreto’s symbolic gesture to cross interfaith lines and, in imitation of christ, to walk with them, revived the movement’s social legitimacy. barreto became the public face and mouthpiece of the study, soon appearing in many newspapers and television broadcasts. behind the scenes, his presence also enabled practical interventions, such as the approval of visas for slu scientists and other u.s. volunteers. as a jesuit archbishop, he also helped sanchez convince slu’s administration to contribute monetary support. critically, when local health bureaucrats delayed signing the study’s human subjects protocol, likely offended by its implication of their own negligence, barreto went door to door imploring them to sign. in la oroya, he dispelled rumors planted by the company that “foreign vampires” were coming to steal their children’s blood and helped with the gargantuan task of recruiting 250 participants despite continuous intimidation tactics by company supporters. after three stressful days of collecting blood samples and guarding them at night, sanchez successfully sent them to the cdc lab in atlanta for analysis, all as planned. the study’s results held no surprises: oroyan residents had exceedingly high blood lead levels (universidad de san luis 2005). as sanchez promised, however, its results have remained undeniable, as though carrying papal infallibility itself. the slu study is by far the most cited document in policy debates, media coverage, subsequent research, and everyday discussions on la oroya, serving as a baseline of human lead exposure in the city. while doe run hired consultants to reanalyze its findings—while publicly dismissing it as “just another study”—the study’s reputation remained intact. as barreto had assured sanchez in st. louis, the stars had improbably aligned to generate a study of near perfection. global health practitioners, including paul farmer, have promoted the catholic notion of accompaniment, modeled after such liberation theologists as gustavo gutiérrez, as a method of long-term solidarity and material support to counteract impoverishment and the vulnerability to disease produced by the world’s so-called structural sins (kane 2012; farmer and gutiérrez 2013). here, a diverse alliance took form—of residents, ngos, scientists, and missionaries—held together by what connor called a “catholic social ethic,” which “in its latin americanist perspective posits god as being particularly concerned for the vulnerable.” along with long-term solidarity, each accompagnateur (farmer and gutiérrez 2013, 183) in this network also provided what sanchez described as a “layer of legitimacy” to their collective project. while sanchez offered technical legitimacy and organizations from la oroya provided a local anchor to the study’s intent, the archbishop offered a layer of “ethical legitimacy” to the research. representing the catholic church in a predominantly catholic nation, barreto carried institutional power that could actually contend with the power of the company and its state allies. but relatedly, by walking with the study, the archbishop conferred a moral sanctity to the motivations underlying it. his accompaniment designated the study’s influences as emanating from a christian moral position, not from monetary or personal gains, affirming its technical credibility by purifying its purpose. following lorraine daston and peter galison (2007, 19), objectivity can be described as a set of “virtues” or “precepts” that delineate the proper relation between a scientific subject and an object of study. although the virtues that confer best practice have shifted through time, objectivity remains an achievement of technical veracity and belief in its faithful enactment. science’s epistemic stature within politically stable contexts can obscure this latent relation of faith between scientists and their publics. as steven shapin and simon schaffer (1985, 58–59) note, before modern science’s rise to prominence, experimental scientists in mid-seventeenth century europe depended on credible witnesses, esteemed for their “knowledgeability and moral constitution,” to reinforce their tenuous epistemic authority. similarly, in the divisive climate of peruvian mining politics, a range of accompagnateurs performed participatory witnessing to engender trust in the ethics of their epistemic pursuits (cf. choy 2011, 83–85). in particular, the moral weight of the archbishop, and of the institution he represents, generated faith in the technical achievements of the researchers he accompanied, allowing an objective study to emerge from a previous state of “epistemic murk” (taussig 1987, 128). even if not everyone agreed with the catholic church’s politics or science (smelter workers continue to disparage the archbishop for threatening their livelihood), its layered ethical network nonetheless achieved a widespread public for this first groundbreaking lead-exposure study. earlier, i highlighted the sociopolitical grounds on which science became an efficacious tool for the catholic church to enact its ethos of abundant life, to do politics without politics. here, the origin study of mantaro revive elucidates how the catholic church became critical for producing politically actionable knowledge on contamination in the mantaro valley. as this retelling suggests, the greatest impediment to objective, trustworthy knowledge resulted from potential political corruption. before concluding, i return to those on-the-ground contingencies in a region rife with suspicion of outsiders and misguided influences that shaped mantaro revive’s years of research. suspicion, sacrifice, and science in a state of corruption while the northern retellings of the origin study dazzled me, its miraculousness often felt incongruent with the daily toil that i observed in peru in 2012. scientific pursuits in the mantaro valley involved longitudinal ardor and sacrifice, without a miraculous outcome in sight. earlier, i described how an ethics of abundance motivated mantaro revive’s scientific practitioners: the truth, they maintained, promised to set them free. but even if the truth could set one free, the process of reaching it was a painful one. “the truth hurts!” juana jiménez insisted during our final conversation, referring to the pain of families who learned that heavy metals laced their cows’ milk and children’s blood. during my fieldwork, however, it became apparent that mantaro revive also suffered its own pain. i heard how, years before, a purported mole had absconded with the project’s funds and that office computers had also vanished. ongoing sabotage of their research led the project’s scientists to take air and water samples secretly by night to prevent companies from reducing their effluents. during fieldwork, i slept with my phone by my head awaiting calls from jiménez; she never told me the day or time of our field expeditions in advance. when i visited mantaro revive’s air-monitoring station in la oroya with melinda, i saw that the only way up to their second-floor equipment station was a rickety wooden ladder. the former staircase had mysteriously disappeared months before and acrobatic leaps were now required to download data. in february 2012, as the congressional decision over the smelter’s fate loomed, workers assaulted members of mantaro revive at a peaceful demonstration, and soon after, both jiménez and the archbishop received anonymous death threats by telephone. figure 7. the ladder to the air-monitoring station in la oroya. photo by stefanie graeter. during my fieldwork, suspicion seemed to infiltrate all aspects of mantaro revive. i too struggled to establish trust, and rumors circulated that jiménez suspected that i, as a u.s. citizen, might be a spy for doe run. perhaps because of this, mantaro revive concealed much of the project’s religious underpinnings from me, fearing, i imagine, that my future depictions could malign the project’s scientific credibility. while frustrating, their distrust was not baseless: peruvian anthropologists routinely supplement their minimal academic incomes with contract work to help companies mitigate socioenvironmental conflicts with local communities (“where the real money is,” a friend and social scientist informed me). seeming paranoia came from a very real need to protect data from theft or destruction, as well as to safeguard the confidentiality of study participants, who faced serious retribution from companies, mineworkers, and product vendors should their identities be revealed. adding to these anxieties, financial stresses also plagued mantaro revive. while radio shows in la oroya often condemned the project’s enormous budget, it worked on a fraction of what a multisited, longitudinal study usually requires. lunchtime gossip among low-rung researchers over the daily menú often bemoaned their meager or missing paychecks and the tedium of accounting for every minuscule expense. the project also lacked basic scientific instruments, such as a mechanical soil grinder used for similar research in the united states and europe, which could have alleviated countless working hours from studies that always seemed to be months, or even years, behind schedule. a few months into my fieldwork, sergio, a middle-aged chemist, taught me to prepare soil samples: a laborious grinding of rocky dirt with mortar and pestle, which we then scraped through finer and finer metal meshing. the process rattled my bones, and i perspired heavily under my lab coat and gas mask as my arms quickly grew weary. sergio seemed nonetheless pleased with my progress and returned to his sample, in its final stage of grinding. giving me a sly grin, he chuckled and said, “i have to sacrifice myself now!” and proceeded to scrape dirt reminiscent of cocoa powder through a pan of indiscernibly fine meshing. indeed, such lab work was a sacrifice, often in a very physical sense: my attempt to complete an entire sample later that month resulted in tendinitis that lasted weeks. yet such belt-tightening measures reflected sacrifices made intentionally by the project. jiménez admitted that initially many regional mining companies had made generous financial offerings of support. other christian and secular ngos accepted such corporate social responsibility funds to make a wide range of programs possible. the money would have gone to good use for mantaro revive too, but would have made the project ethically and thus scientifically dubious. figure 8. preparing soil samples by hand in the mantaro revive laboratory. photo by stefanie graeter. figure 9. a finely ground soil sample. photo by stefanie graeter. in our 2013 interview, silvio vasquez, a sociologist and the director of the archbishop’s environmental task force, implored me to consider how the lack of trust (confianza) transverses peruvian society because of ubiquitous political corruption. i recalled immediately the near-daily newspaper headlines of elected officials ousted because of suspected financial back dealings. the same dailies contained frequent laments from cultural critics who opined that corruption tainted national politics above all else. the idioms of “traffic of influence,” and also pagado, “paid off,” appeared constantly during my fieldwork, as people discussed not only government and industry dysfunction but also the disingenuous interests of ngos, local leaders, and foreign volunteers. a credible, trustworthy scientific study, according to vasquez, could never be authored by a peruvian institution—state, university, or industry: the fear of corruption ostensibly ran too high for peruvian science to be fully trusted. the scenario described by vasquez makes the achievements of the first study all the more impressive. the longitudinal research of mantaro revive, however, depended entirely on the continued trust of campesino and urban communities, who donated agricultural products, natural resources, and their own bodily fluids. i heard frequent reference to the mistrust andean communities hold against outsiders, no matter how benevolent their purported aims. this, of course, pertains to mining companies—who after decades or even centuries of conflict often create deep-seated mistrust with nearby communities—but it also applies to ngos, academics, and reporters from lima or abroad, accused of building their careers off the suffering of the poor, or, as connor experienced, discursively linked to sendero’s legacy because of their leftist politics. since the colonial era, external extraction of material and knowledge in the andes has often lacked concrete benefits for locals, making research by outside groups complex and at times impossible. mantaro revive’s affiliation with huancayo’s archbishop in a very catholic region facilitated relationships of trust that other environmental advocates struggled to achieve. the catholic church assured communities that their interests derived from a shared christian moral position distinct from that of the economic imperatives operative in relationships with other ngos, companies, or state institutions. these relationships of trust were not only an ethical necessity for their research but also fundamental to the procurement of samples and thus the science itself. were mantaro revive to be funded by a mining company, producing the very contaminants it measured, communities would mistrust both its data and its assurances of anonymity. in such a case, the entire undertaking would have lost its purpose. “it’s easy to say no,” jiménez assured me, “when your priorities are clear.” so mantaro revive made the best of its budget, funded by an italian-peruvian loan forgiveness program (el fondo ítalo peruano), while dirt samples continued to be ground by hand, among other inconveniences and stresses. such trust with communities, however, in practice required constant maintenance. before a breathtaking chartreuse landscape of high andean grasslands, i observed sergio struggle to reconvince mr. pachari, the president of an agricultural community, to allow us to take water samples from its river. about a thirty-minute drive from la oroya, the village stood downstream of an open-pit mine and the ruins of a spanish foundry. pachari expressed reluctance because he had not yet seen the results from previous samplings. the results would have helped him, he explained, during contract renegotiations with the mining company the previous month. the company had insisted that the river provided safe drinking water, despite its turbidity and the disappearance of local wildlife. the ethical protocols of mantaro revive’s research required pachari’s participation and, like the archbishop’s accompaniment, his presence distributed authorship and brought local legitimacy to the data. sergio carefully explained that water monitoring required repetition to depict pollution averages across time and, eventually, pachari acquiesced and joined us to sample the river further upstream. a few weeks later, i went on my own to interview pachari at his office. behind a typewriter at a large wooden desk, he expressed both gratitude and incredulity toward mantaro revive. while its data was his only source of information about contamination, he still had his doubts: “this is the fourth time already [taking samples], so in part this also tires us when they continue returning, returning. or perhaps it might be that mantaro revive is being bribed by the money of the mine?” i asked why he suspected such a betrayal, and he explained, “in practice, there are bribes. they buy consciences in our country, in peru.” i see pachari’s suspicion resulting from mantaro revive’s attempt to impact local, regional, and national mining politics in concert. scaling up its data necessitated long-term evidence rather than single tests tailored to a community’s particular needs. yet pachari’s concerns about the potential of bribery also reflect the pervasive state of corruption that necessitated, shaped, and limited mantaro revive’s work. alone, the catholic church was immune to neither violence nor suspicion. rather, the project maintained tenuous relationships of trust through ongoing ethical and epistemic practices, including sacrifices of time, safety, and pain. to accompany another world extractive histories, a state of corruption, and an ethos of abundance shaped the articulations of catholic science in the mantaro valley. the epistemic demands of peruvian mining politics obliged technoscientific evidence derived from normative methodology and expressions of expertise, but also the choreography of a specific constellation of practitioners and practices, to ensure incorruptibility. these are situated relations of objectivity, not quite what donna haraway (1988, 590) called for in her classic text on situated knowledges, in which novel forms of objectivity presage “better accounts of the world.” mantaro revive did not subvert the technical hegemony of neoextractivist governance, but used standard laboratory conditions and sampling methods to enact its ethics, while remaining able to act politically. yet in a state of corruption, not only standard technical methods of objectivity mattered, but also societal faith that such principles would actually be enacted. through practices of accompaniment, both physical and symbolic, mantaro revive gathered ecclesiastical, scientific, and local signatories—a synergy of expertise and ethics—to index the credibility of its research and the fidelity of its facts. mantaro revive’s ethics, however, also generated the basic preconditions for the research itself. morally compelled by a life of abundance, it generated the impetus for rigorous longitudinal heavy-metal monitoring and sacrificial forms of care to conduct research under often less-than-ideal social and technical circumstances. isabelle stengers (2010, 54–55) describes such internal and external epistemic conditions as an “ecology of practices.” for stengers, knowledge practices (not just scientific ones) form through ecologies of materially delineated “requirements” and socially configured “obligations” that constitute conditions of “best practices.” ethnographically reassembling ecologies of practices evinces the relations that constrain and engender socially legitimate, politically actionable knowledge. such a task, i contend, is critical for further anthropological inquiry into diverse ecopolitical projects that seek to subvert a future defined by the ethics of extractive capitalisms and their unevenly felt anthropogenic aftermaths. figure 10. air monitoring equipment in la oroya. photo by stefanie graeter. political actionability, the ability to act politically, is not an end in itself. the abundant future envisioned by mantaro revive continues to unfold within a mixture of political achievements and setbacks. in 2012, under increasing pressure from environmental and human rights advocates (applying the data from mantaro revive’s studies, among others), the peruvian government and doe run’s other creditors liquidated the company, installing a temporary administration as they prepared to sell the smelter. later in 2012, mantaro revive’s research and advocacy contributed to the creation of the first major health ordinance directed at mitigating heavy-metal exposure in the junín region. although it remained unclear how or whether anyone would comply with the law, jiménez saw this as a positive step forward. these achievements, however, must be considered alongside other economic and political developments in peru. when i departed in 2013, doe run had ratcheted up its case against peru’s government in an international arbitration court, demanding $800 million for a purported breach of the united states–peru trade agreement (martin 2013). when global mineral prices fell in 2014, panic grew that the nation’s recent economic growth might lose momentum. this led to new policies to increase foreign investment by relaxing timelines for adherence to, and penalties for noncompliance with, peru’s environmental laws (republica 2014). in july 2016, the peruvian state defeated doe run in court, but without a new buyer for la oroya’s smelter, workers have decided to stand behind further rollbacks of environmental standards to make its purchase more economically profitable. the newly appointed neoliberal president pedro kuszynski appears to share such aspirations. kuszynski recently argued that the smelter’s capacity to process so-called dirty copper for the nearby chinese-owned toromocho mine, which produces copper too high in arsenic to smelt in china (but not in peru), warranted an extension of the company’s liquidation timeline (reuters 2016). such developments foreclose certain political possibilities, but pope francis’s recent ecologically driven encyclical may portend novel potentials for catholic practices of accompaniment within future iterations of peruvian neoextractivist politics. while ultimately contending with uneven and shifting global, national, and local distributions of power, mantaro revive’s work cannot be reduced to what limits it. unlike the biological citizens described by adriana petryna (2002), mantaro revive’s exposure science does not serve as a means of access to existing benefits of citizenry. instead, its work enacts conditions of citizenship and democracy that do not yet function or even exist. to repeat the argument of didier fassin (2009, 49), contemporary societies are defined not only by biopower—the power over life, as described by foucault—but also by battles of biolegitimacy, “the power of life as such.” the ubiquitous exposure of life to heavy metals in the mantaro valley constitutes one such manifestation of unlegitimized life, let to die without vital possibilities of abundance. mantaro revive’s scientific evidence of mineral enfleshments exposed one such form of sacrificed, unlegitimized life. through science and policy, mantaro revive demanded biolegitimacy for those denied it, speaking in the name of rights and legal protections for those whom the law does not represent. jacques rancière (2004, 302) paradoxically describes such rights of man as “the rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that they have not.” for rancière (2004, 304), the enactment of rights by subjects for whom rights are denied constitutes a political subjectivization he calls dissensus: “they not only confront the inscriptions of rights to situations of denial; they put together the world where those rights are valid and the world where they are not.” in short, they live rights within a social world in which these rights are not rights. obliged by an ethos of abundance, mantaro revive’s practices scientifically proved the breach of laws—and generated new ones—within a country in which no one complies with the law. they accompany a world that still awaits its making. notes acknowledgments many individuals accompany this article. i am grateful for the teachings, patience, and generosity of members and participants of the proyecto mantaro revive, the arzobispado de huancayo, and joining hands. during research, i drew insight and support from letizia arneodo, marcela artica martínez, nadia meza cantalicio, and roberto tigani. along with three anonymous reviewers, many colleagues provided close readings and valuable contributions to drafts of the article. i would especially like to thank patricia alvarez astacio, tim choy, michael d’arcy, marisol de la cadena, joseph dumit, mariel garcía llorens, cristiana giordano, rima praspaliauskiene, and jerry zee for helping to shape this text. i also received important feedback from presenting this article to the program in science and technology studies at the university of california, davis; alan klima’s 2014 writing seminar; the university of california humanities research institute’s humanities studio on regulating sex/religion; and the science in human culture program at northwestern university. my research was funded by the national science foundation, the social science research council, and the american council of learned societies. 1. throughout the text i refer to the group of people and practices that composed the mantaro revive project as a project, and intentionally avoid the terminology of organization or ngo. project was the preferred terminology of mantaro revive’s organizers, who frequently emphasized that while an organization preexists its projects and practices, the project of mantaro revive existed as a direct response to the needs of civil society. this distinction between a project and organization also became important for their attempts to distance themselves from the much-maligned environmental ngos operating in the same region. 2. scientific study of the material world has a long, complex relationship to christianity and catholicism, describable as neither one of “harmony” nor of “conflict” (lindberg and numbers 1986, 6). arising alongside puritanism and its renewed attention to the earthly realm, a “secular theology” (funkenstein 1986, 3) began in seventeenth-century europe as laymen usurped the catholic church’s epistemic terrain and control of education. while early histories of science depicted the ensuing relationship between the church and modern science as warfare, more recent research has produced nuanced portrayals of an interaction both complementary and conflictual (lindberg and numbers 1986). for instance, when the viceroy put europe’s famous pedagogues, the jesuits, to work as missionaries in latin america, they also produced scientific knowledge resulting from their long-term interaction with indigenous individuals. science provided these jesuits 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term has explored resurgent sources of collective, indigenous history and power that challenge settler states (simpson and cattelino 2017), going well beyond claims to civil rights to address rights to nation-to-nation governance (kauanui 2008a). in the middle east, the most sustained and highly mediated struggle for sovereignty on those terms has been that of the palestinians. the palestinian case makes for an interesting counterpoint to discussions of sovereignty among scholars of indigeneity. among palestinians, the term for sovereignty, siyādah, is not heard as often as the obviously anticolonial tahrīr, liberation, or istiqlāl, independence. (it would be hopeful to suggest that this results from the clear patriarchal implications of the term siyādah, linked as it is to the term for master and lord.) palestinians and many others in the middle east see evidence every day of the essential violence at the heart of state sovereignty, that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (mbembe 2003, 11). in this essay, i focus on the ways in which palestinians’ predicament calls attention to important variations in sovereignty, because palestinians have experienced what ilana feldman (2008, 1) has called a “surfeit of governance.” i then discuss how palestinians and other people in the middle east have nevertheless performed popular sovereignties. unlike in some native north american examples (e.g., cattelino 2008; kauanui 2008b; simpson 2014), these popular sovereignties seem especially provisional, not resting on enforceable law or acknowledged rights, or even, in some cases, on bounded and spatialized collectivities, but rather on either insistent confrontation or quiet acts of caring for community in the face of abandonment. these emergent forms of popular sovereignty challenge the legitimacy of state authorities, create new forms of collectivity, and forge new ideas of how power should function, even though they have not ultimately restructured state power. sovereignty as sleight of hand and layers of occupation due to the multifaceted ways in which israeli colonialism has worked across—and, indeed, produced—different palestinian populations, palestinians remain, variously, under military occupation, in refugee camps, and citizens subject to systematic, collective discrimination in their historical home territory. sovereignty, in recent formulations, is not absolute but emergent, performed, nested, interdependent, even fictive (cattelino 2008; brown 2014; hansen and stepputat 2006; navaro-yashin 2012; simpson 2014). israeli and palestinian sleight-of-hand sovereignty adds to these formulations an attention to where and when states or similar authorities benefit from the appearance of sovereignty or its absence. various parties, ranging from the british mandate and egypt (see feldman 2008) to the israeli state and finally the palestinian authority (pa) administration, have with a shrewd sleight of hand at once asserted and denied their sovereignty over palestinian populations. israel is today the ultimate legal sovereign over land claimed in 1948 with the founding of the state and in the 1967 occupied territory. the establishment of the pa in 1994, purportedly designed to lead to palestinian statehood, has led only to entrenched israeli control with palestinian official collaboration. officials from the pa have done their best to assert statehood on the world stage—indeed, palestine is recognized by at least 193 states—but on the ground the entity remains unable to perform sovereignty: it lacks currency, contiguity, control over borders (hammami 2010; kelly 2006; peteet 2017), and any ability to, in weberian terms, claim a monopoly on legitimate violence (weber 1946), though it certainly enacts violence on palestinians in a variety of ways. palestinians do not need theory to feel the gaps in pa sovereignty; they see them every day. the presence of the pa has allowed israel to sometimes deny sovereignty—legally or rhetorically—over the occupied territory, even as it entrenches physical control, and this is integral to israel’s larger claims to legitimacy. israel takes on “the challenge of maximum control and minimum responsibility—with its own corollary for the palestinian authority of maximum responsibility and minimum control” (li 2006, 39). it treats palestinians—especially in gaza—as enemies rather than as subjects or citizens. israel holds onto its claim of being a democracy by eliding its sovereignty over the occupied territory. yet as the prominent israeli journalist gideon levy (2016) has written, “a state where half the subjects are denied rights can’t be democratic.” especially in the occupied territory and in refugee camps, sovereignty is layered with international ngos and donor states. humanitarian organizations have for decades delivered many of the services that generally fall under the responsibility of the state (feldman n.d.). they do this in ways that also restrict palestinians. the united nations relief and works agency (unrwa) provides education, but residents perceive it to be limiting political expression through its schools. as a palestinian refugee from the aida refugee camp in the west bank told me recently, “the second occupation is by unrwa.” other major state and organizational donors that visibly fund infrastructure like roads also signpost the gaps in palestinian sovereignty (a. bishara 2015), even as the funding of the pa’s security apparatus by the united states and other countries (see sayigh 2011) has given it attributes of a police state without the sovereignty. finally, palestinian sovereignty has been further undermined and fragmented by neoliberal policies since the oslo accords (clarno 2017). throughout all of this, israeli repression continues against palestinians in many forms (rouhana and huneidi 2017; shalhoub-kevorkian 2015; weizman 2007). in sum, the palestinian case trains us to look for multiple forms of sovereignty—of states and nonstates—while recognizing the hierarchies among them. sleight-of-hand sovereignty asks us to examine the ways in which various institutions deploy force and create hegemony, how they assert themselves and deny their own presence, and how they legitimize violence and themselves through a variety of contradictory claims regarding sovereignty. these points all underscore another way in which “the complex histories of colonialism, occupation, and discrimination to which native peoples have been subject across the globe have no single solution, precisely because each case has its own particular characteristics” (kauanui 2014, 50). popular sovereignty and protest in the middle east, popular protest has often been a means for disrupting colonial or authoritarian state sovereignty, or even for creating zones of autonomy, although these movements, like the first palestinian intifada (1987–1993) often failed to come to fruition (chalcraft 2016). whether or not they are successful in achieving ultimate goals, they create a history of protest available to future protesters. protest slogans and tactics for withstanding tear gas move from place to place over time (colla 2013). certain forms of assembly can constitute “provisional versions of popular sovereignty” (butler 2015, 16). in recent protests in prominent public spaces like gezi park and tahrir square, protesters create impermanent spaces of popular sovereignty by promoting alternative values, fending off the police or army, or providing care for each other (alessandrini, üstündağ, and yildiz 2014; noujaim 2013; rashed 2011). these relatively small gatherings become metonyms for larger collectives demanding change. they can catalyze discussions about the central violence of the state in which “appeals to history act as interventions into imagined futures” (tambar 2016, 31). still, the constitution of spaces for protest must be historicized and seen as the result of political processes (parla and özgül 2016). much popular resistance in the west bank today is structured around villages, cities, and camps (alazzeh 2014; ehrenreich 2016; jawad 2011). the localization of resistance evinces the success of israeli politics of fragmenting palestinians into camps and enclaves (peteet 2017). in this geography of protest, palestinians may act in relation to a national movement, but not in lockstep with it, since resistance reflects locally specific circumstances (a. bishara 2016). popular protest is often judged purely by its status as violent or nonviolent. meanwhile, many definitions of sovereignty hinge on mobilization of violence. what, then, does violence have to do with popular sovereignty? judith butler (2015, 187) sets forth a challenge to be “encountering violence without reproducing its terms,” even as she recognizes that defining violence is itself a political act. in contrast, frantz fanon (1963) famously saw violence as integral to the process of decolonization, precisely because of the inherent violence of colonialism. similarly, lauren banko (2016), writing about the british mandate in palestine, suggests that violence—mainly stone-throwing protests—made for a symbolic means of switching from the language of citizenship and performatively peaceful protest toward a language of anticolonial struggle. fanon was writing about national liberation, while butler is addressing popular sovereignty in a variety of contemporary states, including turkey, egypt, and the united states. the difference raises several questions. when can either violence or refraining from violence constitute a way of establishing a new kind of legitimacy, a new set of rules (and thus, potentially, new forms of sovereignty)? is there a line to be drawn between colonial or authoritarian domination and the many systems that fall under the broad spectrum of purportedly democratic states, even given the racism, militarization, and settler colonialism of many of these democracies, and the potential for dramatic changes that propel states swiftly away from democracy? rather than reifying either violence or nonviolence, we should examine the effects of different forms of struggle in particular contexts: do they successfully separate a collective from the state? who is excluded by that new form of collectivity? does a particular form of struggle reinforce patriarchy, heteronormativity, classism, or other forms of hierarchy? managing neglect, threat, and death in the everyday in situations where revolution seems distant, asef bayat (2010) describes how people in the middle east have carved out distinct spheres—according to such elements as geography, morals, religion, religiosity, class, political status, as well as combinations of these—where they seem to make their own rules under the radar of the state, but without directly defying it. still, they tacitly challenge secular or capitalist norms of state and society. bayat (2010, 18) calls these “social nonmovements,” and he argues they can lead to social change. in palestinian contexts, spaces cultivated for persisting despite the state are often based in villages and camps. um al-hiran in the naqab/negev region of israel has long been threatened with destruction (adalah 2015; s. bishara and naamnih 2011), and in fact israeli authorities finally partially destroyed it in early 2017. for years, though, villagers’ determination to stay on their lands has marked an everyday assertion of independence that required rigging up systems for electricity, roads, and water. in safuriyya, in the galilee of israel, residents continue to farm their lands even though israel has not allowed them to live on the land of their village since 1948. farming builds independence from the israeli market, cultivates a routine connection to land, and grows healthy bodies (rego 2016). similarly, and in contrast to agambenian characterizations of refugee camps as a space of bare life, refugee camps may offer “potential as grounds for new politics” (feldman 2015, 250), creating collective power that stands outside state authorities, the pa, or unrwa. even during the war in syria, certain communities have managed to operate as zones of autonomy, creating systems for governance and service provision (munif 2013; stephens 2013; yassin-kassab and al-shami 2016). as the syrian regime bombs civilians and hospitals, those providing medical care essentially wage a struggle to make life possible in the face of death at the hands of the state (einsiedel 2016). at a time when about half of syria’s population has become refugees, doing the basic work to allow syrians to stay in place maintains the possibility for alternative sovereignties to emerge in the future. for palestinians and others popular sovereignty finds its zenith as well as its limit in prisons. resistance in prison is a matter of collectively asserting the right to determine the most basic matters about food, speech, and representation. as banu bargu (2014, 2) writes of turkish political prisons, such “wards also became the foundations of [hunger strikers’] claim to an alternative sovereignty.” just as palestinian villagers make of their isolation and threatened existence a basis for solidarity and cohesion, through their isolation “political captives rebuild their collectivity at the levels of both body and community” (al-nashif 2004/2005, 54). through sumud, or steadfastness (meari 2014), and other forms of prison resistance, prisoners insist on admittedly very limited forms of control over their existence—but given the circumstances of their constraint, this kind of insistence, often performed collectively as during a hunger strike, rejects the legitimacy of the state and demands recognition and reshaping of rules. this kind of resistance has become a model for other forms of resistance, and even for black–palestinian solidarity that intermingles palestinian and black liberation voices. the palestinian case and others in the middle east help us reconceptualize both sovereignty and popular sovereignty. we must examine how claims about sovereignty can hide the actual ways in which power is exercised. in highlighting fleeting forms of popular sovereignty, are we in danger of romanticizing popular sovereignty in the same way as resistance has been romanticized (abu-lughod 1990)? one way to combat this possibility may be to look at sovereignty and popular sovereignty together, over a long term, and with attention paid to fissures and exclusions in popular sovereignty. another is to interrogate how popular sovereignty can be co-opted by the state in dangerous ways (winegar 2015). still, collective forms of power can emerge and contest state power by exposing its limits, even temporarily. thinking popular sovereignty marks a way of moving beyond individualistic concepts of rights, and of recognizing how politics can change on the ground in important ways, even when political structures do not budge. acknowledgments i wish to thank paul beran and kēhaulani kauanui for their excellent suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. i am also grateful to participants in the mellon sawyer seminar in comparative global humanities and the “native american and indigenous studies, colonialism, and the university” workshop, both at tufts university, for providing forums for developing these ideas. references abu-lughod, lila 1990 “the romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through bedouin women.” american ethnologist 17, no. 1: 41–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1990.17.1.02a00030. 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http://socialistreview.org.uk/384/syrias-revolution-behind-lines. navaro-yashin, yael 2012 the make-believe space: affective geography in a postwar polity. durham, n.c.: duke university press. noujaim, jehane, dir. 2013 the square. 108 min. new york: noujaim films. parla, ayşe, and cerenözgül 2016 “property, dispossession, and citizenship in turkey; or, the history of the gezi uprising starts in the surp hagop armenian cemetery.” public culture 28, no. 3: 617–53. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3511574. peteet, julie 2017 space and mobility in palestine. bloomington: indiana university press. rashed, mohammed abouelleil 2011 “the egyptian revolution: a participant’s account from tahrir square.” anthropology today 27, no. 2: 22–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2011.00798.x. rego, nasser 2016 “the nakba and the farm.” nakba files, august 3. http://nakbafiles.org/2016/08/03/the-nakba-and-the-farm. rouhana, nadim n., and sahar s.huneidi, eds. 2017 israel and its palestinian citizens: ethnic privileges in the jewish state. new york: cambridge university press. sayigh, yezid 2011 “policing the people, building the state: authoritarian transformation in the west bank and gaza.” carnegie papers, february. washington, d.c.: carnegie endowment for international peace. http://carnegie-mec.org/2011/02/28/policing-people-building-state-authoritarian-transformation-in-west-bank-and-gaza-pub-42924. shalhoub-kevorkian, nadera 2015 security theology, surveillance, and the politics of fear. new york: cambridge university press. simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. simpson, audra, and jessica cattelino 2017 “sovereignty, settler colonialism, territoriality, and resistance.” presentation at the mellon sawyer seminar in comparative global humanities, tufts university, april 20. stephens, joshua 2013 “syrian anarchist challenges the rebel/regime binary view of resistance.” truthout, september 6. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/18617-syrian-anarchist-challenges-the-rebel-regime-binary-view-of-resistance. tambar, kabir 2016 “brotherhood in dispossession: state violence and the ethics of expectation in turkey.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 1: 30–55. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.1.03. weber, max 1946 “politics as a vocation.” in from max weber: essays in sociology, translated and edited by h. h.gerth and c. wright mills, 77–128. new york: oxford university press. weizman, eyal 2007 hollow land: israel’s architecture of occupation. new york: verso. wilson, alice 2016 sovereignty in exile: a saharan liberation movement governs. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. winegar, jessica 2015 “love and disgust: performances of sovereignty in egypt.” paper presented at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association, denver, colo., november 21. yassin-kassab, robin, and leila al-shami 2016 burning country: syrians in revolution and war. london: pluto press. #indebted #indebted: disciplining the moral valence of mortgage debt online noelle stout new york university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8442-9087 since 2007, 14 million homeowners in the united states have lost their homes to foreclosure, the highest rate of bank seizures in national history. this massive wave of dispossessions has spawned an acute rise in homelessness, bankrupted entire cities, and caused the irreparable loss of generations of family wealth. given that homeownership has served as the foundation for american middle-class imaginaries since world war ii, it is inevitable that these inordinate rates of default have transformed the meaning of mortgaging and indebtedness within the united states. indebtedness, as david graeber (2011, 390) suggests, has become ever more tied to moral personhood in modern times, in that what he terms “the governing classes in the united states” have linked the ability to repay debt to moral standing. yet in a context in which financialization has disrupted the social contract implicit within debt ties, those carrying insurmountable mortgage debt have begun to question the meaning of indebtedness and the moral assumptions about mortgage default. these everyday debates about homeowners’ duty to pay on underwater mortgages have played out largely in the virtual world of online forums and blogs.1 these disputes about the stigma of delinquent homeownership and mortgagors’ moral obligation to repay mortgages depart radically from those that characterized previous american foreclosure crises. for example, kathryn dudley (2000) opens her ethnography of the 1980s u.s. farm foreclosure crisis with the story of dewayne berg, a farmer facing the loss of the family farm who disappeared from his midwestern home, leaving his wife and sons to suffer months of grief and speculation. berg was eventually discovered hiding out in canada, a testament to the stigma and community judgment affecting farmers confronting foreclosure. dudley observes the animosity community members expressed toward families undergoing bank seizures; instead of questioning how lenders had pushed cheap credit onto farmers, berg’s friends and neighbors concluded that anyone who lost a farm had “done something to deserve it” (dudley 2000, 5). but had berg faced foreclosure during the 2008 mortgage crash, might the image of him driving his muddy pickup truck to canada have been transformed into one of him hunched over the glow of a laptop, deciding to abandon his debt rather than his family? i argue here that homeowners confronting foreclosure in lower-middle-class and middle-class northern california neighborhoods are reconfiguring longstanding american interpretations of indebtedness through forays online. i focus on homeowners participating in interactive online forums arising in the aftermath of the 2008 crash to show how mortgagors are moralizing debt nonpayment and disciplining the politics of stigma. to map this terrain, i analyze user-generated, national online foreclosure forums and sites including advice boards, posts on social networking sites, and blogs emerging since 2008 in combination with ongoing ethnographic research among people confronting foreclosure in california’s sacramento valley. the predominantly white and latino homeowners presented here neither identified as activists nor were involved with debt-related social movements such as occupy wall street or strike debt, which emerged from the financial crisis. yet they produced and participated in what i describe as online publics of indebtedness through which they joined a broader, ad hoc social discussion in which americans question the established moral dimensions of debt repayment after the 2008 foreclosure epidemic. applying a multiattentional approach (boyer 2007, 87), which considers the technological effects of media and the ways media shape relations between people, i show how the distinct experiences of participating in anonymous and semipublic online domains proved central to shifts in homeowners’ interpretations of debt and default. i argue that unlike political activists, california mortgagors participating online reconsider the politics and morality of mortgage default for certain, but not all, homeowners. they deem specific mortgagors worthy of sympathy, offering them nonjudgmental support when they walk away from underwater mortgages, yet ultimately they do not abandon wholesale the moralization of debt. in a context of widespread foreclosure, homeowners often reframe credit-debt bonds through moral narratives in ways that invite a reconsideration of longstanding anthropological inquiries into moral economies (e.g., edelman 2005; scott 1977; thompson 1971).2 by focusing on eighteenth-century contexts or modern peasant societies, canonical anthropological scholarship on moral economies risks perpetuating the notion that late-capitalist economies function as amoral spheres in which economic activity remains untouched by ideas of propriety (griffith 2009). whereas peasants working the land are often seen as articulating utopian visions of a world in which morals determine economic fairness, the moral narratives of american suburbanites struggling with financialized mortgage markets and venturing online for assistance often go unrecognized. by relocating these moral economic narratives, so often linked to pastoral ideals of land and belonging, to middle-class suburban homeownership and online collectives, i show how contemporary hypercapitalist debt ties are complexly linked to the disciplinary regimes of moral discourses. if the ethnographic record has typically portrayed moral discourses as the power of creditors over debtors, ethnographic exceptions emerging after the mortgage crash indicate the shifting contemporary terrain of credit-debt relations (peebles 2010). these moral counternarratives regarding indebtedness respond to the rise of a contemporary capitalist context that andrew ross (2013, 11) describes as a creditocracy, where financiers wrap debt around every possible asset and income stream, requiring basic goods to be debt-financed and making indebtedness the precondition for acquiring life’s necessities. ross (2013, 32) argues that breaking the promise to repay is taboo in a creditocracy and ponders what will happen when the public psychology around debt retreats from automatic compliance with the morality of payback. an examination of homeowners in the context of the financial crisis, in which debt is increasingly defined as the moral obligation to repay (high 2012, 2), is therefore critical to understanding a shift in americans’ perceptions of debt obligations. in her research on michigan’s foreclosure crisis, for example, anna jefferson (2013) found that homeowners produced narratives of walking away from mortgage debt as a moral critique of corporate greed and government ineptitude. likewise, since the 2008 crash, many northern california homeowners with distressed mortgage debt have harnessed the authority of moral narratives to question traditional credit-debt ties, articulating online counternarratives that recast debt nonpayment into a moral stance. online publics are easily overlooked, however, when evaluating the impact of the 2008 crash, because most users participate from the privacy of their homes—sitting at desks and kitchen tables, or perched on sofas and beds. although a wealth of quantitative scholarship examines the national, familial, and neighborhood effects of unprecedented rates of foreclosure, few scholars have explored american homeowners’ experiences (jefferson 2013; reid 2010), and none have examined the discourses and practices arising from online domains in the wake of the 2008 crash. during thirteen months in the sacramento valley, one of the fastest-growing and hardest-hit regions in the nation, i studied homeowners experiencing foreclosure in neighborhoods with distinct racial and economic demographics. here, i focus on a subset of these seventy interlocutors: twenty homeowners in middleand lower-middle-class neighborhoods who consistently turned to the internet to navigate the profound daily impacts of the foreclosure crisis and who, through their online encounters, began to rethink the meaning and moral valence of indebtedness.3 i met many of these homeowners through close family and friends who had experienced foreclosure in the region, and contacted others through foreclosure counselors at nonprofit organizations with which i worked. online publics proved especially appealing to homeowners who hesitated to identify as unable to repay their debts but needed advice on impending foreclosures and wanted to participate in a broader discussion of the precariousness of economic life in the wake of the great recession. the recent rise of interactive web 2.0 media platforms, as anthropologists have shown, offers new opportunities for users to shape online dialogues and redefine public engagement (boellstorff 2008; ginsburg 2012; miller and horst 2012; postill 2012). ironically, the same speed, automation, and computer interconnectivity fundamental to the financialization of mortgage markets that spawned the recent crash (e.g., langley 2007; pinch and swedberg 2008; poon 2008) have enabled significant discussions of mortgage default among homeowners dispossessed by these trends. through interactive online modalities, for example, participants question the shame of foreclosure, critique mortgage lenders, validate others’ choice to abandon underwater loans, and advocate staying in homes without paying, forms of refusal previously considered unethical within normative models of american middle-class propriety. yet even as homeowners protest the increasing unfeasibility of post–world war ii american middle-class life projects, long defined by stable employment, homeownership, and higher education, participants in online forums redefine respectability rather than abandon the notion entirely.4 shifting moral economies of mortgage debt beginning in the late 1930s, debt became socially accepted within the middle class, as the moral dimension of owing money dissipated when consumer debt came to support but also discipline every facet of daily life for those who gained access to it (calder 1999, 20). before 1917, u.s. lenders were prohibited from charging profitable interest rates, reselling debts, or borrowing against them (hyman 2011a, 1). americans did borrow, industrial workers especially, but the stigma of debt meant that they borrowed privately from a subterranean world of loan sharks, pawnbrokers, and retailers (calder 1999; hyman 2011a). in the 1920s, consumer credit entered mainstream middle-class american social life, as business and government collaborated to enable americans to purchase the goods of the developing manufacturing economy. credit expanded further in the 1930s, with new deal policies expanding consumer credit and federal mortgaging programs after the housing crash of the late 1920s. consumer credit continued to fuel post–world war ii suburban fantasies of the good life, as financial industries offered easy credit to white men and married white women, enabling them to purchase homes, automobiles, and consumer goods (hyman 2011b). americans borrowed unprecedented amounts on the assumption that their jobs were stable and their incomes would keep growing. homeownership became central to blue-collar and middle-class class status, as those who carried so-called good debt were considered good citizens (williams 2004). whereas before the 1920s, it had been shameful to owe money, the expansion of consumer credit allowed long-term borrowing and debt repayment to become central to middle-class notions of stability and security. as government mortgage programs expanded alongside consumer credit industries, society’s disapproval shifted away from the usurious mortgage itself to the property owner who defaulted on a loan.5 failure to repay debt—rather than merely having debt—brought about social stigma and humiliation, as well as financial punishments such as bad credit, eviction, and repossession.6 hence, for post–world war ii generations, so-called financial failures such as foreclosure and unemployment presented what katherine newman (1988) describes as the “fall from grace,” the embodiment of american middle-class anxiety about downward mobility. in the case of mortgaging, government agencies and financial industries have intensified these tactics to cultivate borrowers’ fear, shame, and guilt about foreclosures (white 2010a). traditional forms of shameful publicity, such as publishing delinquent mortgagors’ names in newspapers and posting foreclosure notices on the fronts of houses, have disgraced homeowners and led them to pay even against their own financial best interests. assumptions about the value of homeownership and debt repayments have been called into question following the recent housing market collapse. in sacramento between 2007 and 2008, mortgage defaults increased sixfold, with foreclosures jumping 482 percent and one in every sixty-seven households filing for foreclosure. for the following five years, california’s capital city would consistently rank in the top ten in foreclosures per capita in u.s. metro areas (baker, stein, and eiseman 2008). despite unprecedented rates of mortgage default, the stigma against default persisted in the early years of the epidemic. by 2009, seven out of ten mortgagors surveyed who had defaulted still believed it was unacceptable to stop payments on an underwater mortgage (fannie mae 2010). local sacramento culture heightened the stigma of nonpayment, as the dominant industries of farming, manufacturing, and government fueled blue-collar aspirations for middle-class status and linked homeownership to moral personhood.7 after the crash, sacramento valley homeowners expressed fears that their friends, family, and coworkers would reject them or view them as incompetent or irresponsible for falling behind on mortgage payments. these were the sentiments they cited as leading them to make their initial forays online, where they could solicit advice anonymously. once online, many homeowners began to rethink their obligations to repay mortgage debts as they came to grasp the role of wall street investment firms in triggering the crash, a process that online participants often detailed in their posts. in the decade leading up to the collapse of mortgage markets, wall street investors took an interest in otherwise conservative mortgage markets, rapidly securitizing mortgage debt and trading debts as commodities on derivatives markets. roping mortgage debts into complex financial transactions, as karen ho (2009, 2010) has argued, enabled wall street investment bankers and traders to leverage risk to turn quick and unprecedented profits, while also outsourcing risk to individual homeowners and the government, which many financial industry architects assumed would provide a bailout when the market collapsed.8 even as mortgage lenders such as countrywide financial, lehman brothers, bank of america, and wells fargo were found guilty of illegal sales techniques and pushing through wrongful and illegal foreclosures, homeowners were still urged to honor financial obligations that often ran counter to their own financial interests (white 2010a, 972). these frustrations and resentments at lenders and the government constituted major distinctions between mortgagors who continued to pay on underwater loans and those who chose to abandon mortgage debts after the crash (white 2010a). in the wake of the foreclosure epidemic, many homeowners participating in online collectivities came to recognize a double standard in the morality of debt repayment and began reinterpreting the meaning of dispossession. media critique and counterpublics the collapse of u.s. mortgage markets inspired pundits and broadcast journalists to debate how best to regulate risk in financial markets and evaluate homeowners’ responsibility to pay on underwater mortgages.9 in the years immediately following the 2008 crash, prominent news networks demonized mortgagors who defaulted on home loans, often accusing them of immorality and a lack of patriotism (white 2010b, 999). commentators, radio shows, and op-eds frequently labeled defaulting mortgagors “unseemly,” “offensive,” and “unethical,” and they likened defaulters to “deadbeat dads who walk out on their children” or to appeasers who would “give up” and hand over europe to the nazis (white 2010b, 999).10 black-oriented media, traditionally more politicized, performed no differently than the mainstream press in terms of blaming the crisis on mortgagors’ poor decision-making (squires 2012). local news reports in the sacramento valley proved more sympathetic to families facing eviction and default, as the scope of the crisis appealed to the empathy of resident reporters and writers. yet to preserve the illusion of journalistic fairness, englishand spanish-language networks such as univision gave equal weight to the perspectives of lending executives at the expense of more in-depth analyses.11 generally, media discussions failed to analyze how rampant financialization, the targeting of complex financial products to unknowing consumers, and illegal lending practices contributed to the crash. a majority of news networks ignored how racial and economic inequalities endemic to american late capitalism contributed to the foreclosure epidemic (chakravartty and ferreira da silva 2012; roitman 2013; shimpach 2012). online forums gave homeowners an opportunity to contest these media representations, as users reposted and commented on articles and videos from mainstream press outlets like the new york times, cnbc, cnn, and the sacramento bee. for example, one article in the online news aggregator huffington post (goodman 2012), on the possibility of using eminent domain to fix sacramento’s mortgage meltdown, garnered more than three thousand comments in eight hours. in another online forum, a participant using the online name natomasucks (a riff on the middle-class suburban development devastated by the housing crash) reposted an article from the sacramento bee in which banking executives recommended loan modifications instead of mortgage default. the thread, entitled “to walk away or not walk away?,” inspired immediate commentary as another user named coakl replied: “loan executives are looking out for their interests; don’t play their game. . . . these loan executives are trying to pull one last sub-prime trick: persuading millions of upside-down homeowners to ignore the market collapse and make payments.” although the press heralded loan modifications as a source of much-needed assistance for homeowners, online posters often agreed that lenders misled homeowners by claiming that modifications would be in their interest. this discussion, suggesting that default was preferable to working with lenders to make payments, took place between 12:30 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. just days after the article’s publication, showing the rapid-paced responses that online forums allowed. online users whose days were filled with work and family responsibilities participated in public debate and critique even in the early morning hours.12 through online forums and the commentary sections of news articles, posters could anonymously and immediately challenge dominant media narratives of the crisis and debate alternatives to mortgage repayments. by countering dominant media narratives, online homeowners could position themselves as media critics and producers without having to overcome the hurdles to mainstream media participation (cf. boyer 2007, 78). in this way, online publics of indebtedness suggest an evolution of counterpublics, self-organized social spaces that depend on anonymity and an immediacy of response that empower stigmatized participants to formulate critiques (berlant 2000; fraser 1990; negt and kluge 1993; warner 2002). the lack of editorial oversight and the ready access to internet connections at all times of day or night helped online critics to circumvent the hurdles to audience participation erected by broadcast journalism. as dominic boyer (2013, 128, 136) points out in his ethnography of news production in a digital age, the technologies of digital communication associated with web 2.0 developments fuse what he describes as “lateral and radial messaging potentials” to constitute interactive publics that sharply depart from twentieth-century models of keynesian publics and broadcasting. the fragmented online collectives that erupted to critique and undermine the authority of broadcast media suggest more than a traditional public-counterpublic dialectic; they also show how digital media might be used to realize the promise of jürgen habermas’s (1989) ideal democratic public sphere, through which alternative orientations toward debt could become viable. disembodied autonomy: online autonomy and default consider jack mcgill, a thirty-three-year-old white computer programmer who had dropped out of high school and taught himself to code. mcgill married his high-school sweetheart, a latina preschool teacher, with whom he had four children and had purchased a house in a middle-class suburb of sacramento. i sat with mcgill on his sofa as he went online, guiding me to his favorite stops: reddit and the craigslist housing forum.13 after bank of america denied his mortgage modification application, mcgill discovered foreclosure-related discussion forums called subreddits, including categories such as “economy,” “personal finance,” “legal advice,” and “wtf.” according to reddit, mcgill fit the profile of their registered users, who tended to be socially liberal and interested in politics, with the slim majority of users being college-educated eighteento thirty-four-year-olds. mcgill pointed to the reddit posters who argued that speculators, not homeowners, drove most foreclosures. one user, check-please, argued that homeowners were “scammed into sub-prime [mortgages] by greedy brokers” and maintained, like many reddit posters, that the mainstream press and the public unfairly scapegoated homeowners. as mcgill pointed out, both craigslist and reddit ensure a high level of anonymity, as users’ identifying information remains private. in addition to criticizing lenders, posters on the forums recommended abandoning underwater mortgages as a response to personal hardships related to pending foreclosures, including mortgage troubles when contending with divorce, depression, suicidal thoughts, and chronic illness. alongside these confessions, users provided detailed accounts of their mortgaging struggles, including concrete figures describing their loans, income, credit card balances, home prices, savings, and standing consumer debt. they freely exchanged financial information and opinions that would be considered taboo to share in face-to-face social settings, especially among americans aspiring to middle-class status. that these novel forms of anonymous digital public-making arose in response to and shaped interpretations of indebtedness is not coincidental. debt, as janet roitman (2005, 212) emphasizes, can offer a means to affirm or deny sociability, as it forces subjects to mark critical and, at times, strategic stances within social imaginaries. rather than a negative social force, online indebtedness incites mediated forms of sociality. in similar cases, many online participants encouraged homeowners to halt payments, often describing the relief and freedom they had felt when defaulting. when renaldo suarez, a fifty-six-year-old latino veteran, faced foreclosure after his wife died from cancer, a friend guided him to online housing forums for advice. suarez had moved to sacramento from los angeles in the 1970s after securing a job as a factory manager, but he transitioned into educational services as the sacramento valley became deindustrialized in the 1980s. now suarez lived on a fixed income and owed nearly twice as much as his home was worth. after the loan counselor told him he would have to get a roommate to qualify for a modification, he posted his financial details on craigslist in an attempt to solicit an alternative perspective. many respondents suggested that he stop making payments but stay in his home: jcasetnl: i bet he could just stay in it. seriously. there’s so many foreclosures in sacramento . . . whiskey_mcswiggens: i’m not sure how, but my neighbor [. . .] has been living in his house for over a year without paying mortgage payments and it’s a bank-owned house. he’s obviously going to lose the house at some point, but not until someone buys the house from the bank. op [original poster] should look into how to do this. chadcf: there is now [sic] ‘how to do this’. it just involves not moving, until the sherrif [sic] comes to kick you out. the bank isn’t letting them stay there because they have some desire to not make people homeless, they do it because there are a ton of foreclosures and they have a huge backlog to deal with and if the house is upside down it’s not like it’s going to be any more profitable to move quickly. suarez eventually decided to stop payment on his mortgage, but he continued living in his home for two years until he was evicted. “as a man, i grew up knowing that you do the right thing. but this game is fixed. they [the banks] aren’t doing the right thing, so why would i?” in anonymous online domains, a diverse cross-section of homeowners similarly articulated the responsibility of lenders to assist homeowners and went further, even questioning the value of applying for loan modifications and encouraging mortgagors to default. while lenders shouldered no legal responsibility for modifying underwater mortgages, posters pointed to lenders’ refusals to renegotiate mortgage contracts or to halt foreclosure proceedings for worthy candidates as evidence of the illegitimacy of some mortgage debt in the context of the crash. walking away from underwater mortgages no longer suggested an unethical response to crushing debt, but a choice justified by the shifting landscape of credit-debt ties. in the aftermath of the mortgage crash, anonymous online forums encouraged mortgagors to experience a sense of freedom in that they were protected by privacy and bolstered by the immediate responses of other posters. this sense of disembodied autonomy inspired them to question other forms of subjection, namely, what they identified as unfair debt servitude. in this way, anonymous online publics resonated with northern californians dispossessed by late liberal political economies. anonymity protected participants from social stigma while allowing for a continued investment in the autological premises of late liberalism. mortgagors could engage in frank and heated discussions about personal economic hardship that still remain taboo in many middle-class social circles throughout the sacramento valley, while permitting a heightened sense of individualism. each poster could present his or her story as unique in its details but as one simultaneously linked with other participants’ narratives. the pursuit of advice online also demanded that people become active consumers of knowledge, with the pursuit of financial competency as a normative ideal—a mark of late liberal regimes. as central as the content of forums, the form and medium of online publics of indebtedness generated experiential qualities of detachment and independence that inspired a reconsideration of the duty to repay underwater mortgage debts. if the anonymity and immediacy of reddit and craigslist online forums encouraged a detachment from the social contracts implicit in mortgage debt ties, the connectedness and performativity of social networking sites generated new ways of feeling about debt, though it de-emphasized strategies for outright debt refusal, as i show in the next section. semipublic online networks and debt affect “i didn’t tell anyone what we were going through, not even my mom,” rachel leibrock, a white journalist in her thirties, told me as we sat in a coffeehouse in sacramento’s midtown district and she described facing foreclosure after she lost her job at a local newspaper.14 “i felt like i had failed as an adult.” leibrock eventually decided to tell her foreclosure story in a feature article she had written for the sacramento news & review, a weekly paper with a sizable online readership. she had been inspired to “go public” after reading a blog post in the huffington post about a homeowner who had fallen victim to dual-tracking, an illegal practice in which a homeowner pays into a trial modification program, but the loan servicer proceeds with foreclosure regardless. in her article, leibrock describes confronting a high-stakes kafkaesque world of lost paperwork and endless phone calls with bureaucrats who monitored her monthly expenditures as she attempted to modify her mortgage. ultimately, her loan administrator, coldwell banker, proceeded with foreclosure even though leibrock actively participated in its government-sponsored modification program and had never missed a payment.15 in the article, which features photos of leibrock in her home, leibrock describes how she and her husband had felt humiliated and depressed at the prospect of losing their home, but refused to “fall prey to the ‘blame the victim’ way of thinking.” “we did nothing wrong,” she wrote. “we refuse to feel ashamed.” within a week, leibrock’s article received nearly two hundred online comments, many from homeowners recounting their own struggles with lenders. after the article’s publication, leibrock heard from a government caseworker who offered to shepherd her case through coldwell’s modification process. leibrock told me they chose to pursue a short sale instead.16 “it’s like a divorce,” she said. “you go through so much that you eventually look around the house and it’s like you can’t even remember what you loved about someone.” like leibrock, not all homeowners sought the protection of online anonymity. some participated in social networks such as facebook and twitter, which often link online and offline identities by making profiles visible in a semipublic arena populated by one’s friends, relatives, and acquaintances in ways that indicate that the multivalent ability of online domains allowed them to become crucial publics in moments of upheaval. among my interviewees, some homeowners in their late twenties through early forties confessed to financial hardships on social networking sites and posted images of their homes on instagram and tumblr. for example, sara jiménez, a latina thirty-five-year-old unemployed kindergarten teacher and self-described “mom blogger,” described chronicling her foreclosure experiences on facebook as an important way to “emotionally process what was happening.” her posts often provided a sarcastic spin on her foreclosure trials. one post accompanied by a photograph showing her belongings in boxes on moving day read, “i hate moving . . . living the american dream?” the fact that social media enabled homeowners to testify to the emotional toll of financial struggles considered taboo in offline interactions suggests that users can experience catharsis just from having facebook followers to witness their suffering (miller 2011, 172). despite the public tendency to conflate anonymous and semipublic digital forums under the rubric of web 2.0 interactive media, these two modes created fundamentally distinct outlets for homeowners who faced financial hardship and underwater mortgages after the mortgage crash. the transformative potential of anonymous online publics such as reddit and craigslist allowed homeowners to abandon mortgage debt as a moral response to widespread foreclosures. participants operating from behind anonymizing monikers advocated bankruptcy, mortgage default, and squatting without payment as mimetic responses to the unethical and immoral practices of financial institutions. the anonymity of these domains enabled users, detached from any requirement to reveal their identities, to experience a freedom of collective participation and to question the dispossessions resulting from neoliberal financial regimes. unlike participants in anonymous forums, homeowners who publicly linked their online and offline identities—either through sharing their narratives and photos, like leibrock, or by posting in online social networks—focused more on the individual, affective, and sentimental qualities of debt obligations. leibrock, for example, focused on her shame, humiliation, and frustration; she compared the process to the dissolution of a marriage and found sharing her feelings cathartic. her decision to pursue a short sale held a marginal role in her story, whereas the great emotional toll of the process motivated her to go public. by publicizing personal experience, semipublic online domains appropriate the technologies of speed and automation to present an affective universe that undercuts the supposedly rational and objective domain of financial decision-making. indeed, despair becomes a central force in the formation of an alternative affective public sphere (cvetkovich 2007). while anger, frustration, and outrage are present in both anonymous and semipublic online communities, the distinct forms of publicity of each generate specific forms of contestation. we might liken semipublic online publics to the “communities of sentiment” that arjun appadurai (1996, 8) describes in his postelectronic expansion of imagined communities (anderson 1983), which, he argues, have the potential to move from “shared imagination to collective action.” whereas appadurai focuses on transnational flows of film and media as forms of electronic capitalism that create the possibility for otherwise unimaginable forms of social action, interactive web-based social networks intensify these feelings of communal belonging. the distinct forms of circulation and publicity provided by social networking sites led participants to focus on sentiment as a form of action, as participants rarely placed the same emphasis on the moral valence of canceling debts found in anonymous forums. the experience of participating within an online public that saw itself as social and connected offered novel affective orientations toward debt, but it still tethered mortgagors to expectations of debt repayment that did not directly challenge the social contract implicit in postwar mortgage obligations. when posting on social networks like facebook, homeowners remained connected to each other and upheld their duty to repay debts or, if unable to repay, felt obliged to justify themselves. one important exception to the affective dimensions and politically circumscribed nature of semipublic forums emerged on housing-activist blogs, in which participants also linked offline and online forms of identity by posting their images, but frequently advocated mortgage default as they criticized the banks and the government. for example, america underwater, an activist blog launched jointly by nonprofits rebuild the dream and the new bottom line, encouraged homeowners with underwater loans to upload images of themselves holding signs showing how much they owed, accompanied by their personal stories.17 on this blog, a diverse group of homeowners—men and women of white, african american, and latino descent, teens whose families were going through foreclosure, baby boomers, seniors, and retirees—offered their individual stories, some even signing their names, to create a collective narrative that linked their individual sentiments of despair to mishandling by the mortgage industry and government officials, to whom they ascribed responsibility for foreclosures. yet in many ways, the general principle that anonymity fostered more radical stances on debt refusal held true in these activist blogs. in their photographic posts on america underwater, for example, many homeowners used their signs to obscure their faces and left their narratives unidentifiable, indicating a desire to maintain anonymity. figure 1. an anonymous homeowner holds up a sign indicating the amount by which her mortgage is underwater. uncredited photo, http://america-underwater.tumblr.com/page/8. even those who participated in online activist publics found anonymity, rather than semipublicity, a more acceptable stance from which they could advocate for the abandonment of mortgage debts. disciplining the politics of default anonymous online users encouraged each other to default, declare bankruptcy, and squat in their homes while the banks dealt with backlogs of foreclosures. but not all posters on anonymous forums bought wholeheartedly into reformulated views arising from economic hardship. instead, many posters resisted the indiscriminate democratization of acts of debt refusal. even as anonymous online exchanges generated counternarratives of mortgage default, in many discussion threads posters suggested new forms of discipline to determine which homeowners qualified for respectable forms of default. by reframing only some forms of mortgage default as moral and ethically sound, users marked others as ethically suspect. anonymous online forums often erupted in impassioned debates and outright attacks on posters who advocated strategic mortgage default, which occurs when a homeowner can afford to pay his or her mortgage but nonetheless walks away. in one case, a reddit user called tvisforbabyboomers set off a firestorm when he described not feeling humiliated as he initiated strategic mortgage default: my wife and i are foreclosing on purpose. we live a middle class lifestyle and can afford our house, but our mortgage is “no longer sustainable.” . . . our house is $150,000 underwater. . . . we do not feel guilty about not paying our mortgage to our bank because when we asked for refinance assistance months ago, they said “google it” (seriously, they did). furthermore, our mortgage is probably insured, so they will end up getting money anyway. besides, it is business . . . the banks got bailed out, wall street got bailed out . . . and i’m middle class, this is my bail out. . . . de-occupy your home.18 while most users, like mcgill and suarez, justified nonpayment by criticizing lenders’ dishonesty, they stopped short of promoting wide-scale debt refusal. in contrast, tvisforbabyboomers politicized his decision by drawing on an occupy wall street discourse that blamed the government and banks for the crisis while, paradoxically, drawing on a financial discourse to assert that mortgage default is a business decision, not an ethical one. other commentators, however, attacked tvisforbabyboomers and others like him, accusing them of adopting an “entitlement mentality.” they derided borrowers’ unwillingness to pay despite lack of hardship, such as unemployment or health crises, suggesting that these unscrupulous homeowners were unlike themselves, who were “hit hard by the crisis” and only forced into mortgage default by uncooperative lenders. unlike mainstream media representations, which did not suggest mortgage default as a viable option, these online discourses distinguished between a universe of morally appropriate mortgage default—in which bad things happened to good people despite their best efforts to uphold their end of the bargain—and one of selfish greed and irresponsible borrowing. arguments strikingly similar to those in the reddit thread, which sought to parse deserving victims from irresponsible overspenders, were deployed across online housing forums. in another reddit thread, a homeowner who had bought a condo for $135,000 and owed $155,000 at the time of posting solicited advice on how to walk away. unamusedpunk responded, “your biggest problem is blaming everyone else for your problems, it is no one elses fault but your own that you didnt have a job for two years. it is all your fault, all of it.”19 although online forums ostensibly presented a colorand class-blind public sphere, given the anonymity of participants, the discourses produced online frequently included biting expressions of racial and class discrimination. a recurring claim in various threads was that homeowners had bought homes they could not afford, blindly agreed to subprime loans, or were already chronically unemployed before the great recession. the racialized and class-based implications of the comments become clearer when we consider that african american and latino homeowners were twice as likely as whites to be targeted by subprime lenders, even when they qualified for traditional, fixed-rate mortgages (bocian et al. 2011). likewise, working-class african american, latino, and white homeowners often needed to borrow more to cover a mortgage on a basic, modest home, given the real decrease in income and rising costs of living since the 1980s.20 on forums, as in the mainstream media, working-class homebuyers were accused of leveraging mortgages to purchase mcmansions, boats, rvs, and luxury vacations. in reality, they typically used these loans to purchase modest homes, pay for their children’s educations, and meet daily living expenses. yet when identifiably non-middle-class homeowners proposed defaulting on their loans, they were rarely supported, suggesting the re-emergence of the pre–world war ii stigma against working-class people who borrow and owe money. nonpayment was given a positive moral valence for middle-class homeowners, but debt and default were still shameful for those with the greatest need.21 the anonymity of these forums enabled commenters to express great fervor and disdain. one popular reddit user, for example, read through the archives of a new jersey poster named djspacebunny to attack her pleas for advice on an impending foreclosure. citing her earlier posts with links, he accused her of being a lazy opiate addict who was trying to scam the system through malpractice lawsuits and bankruptcy, rather than a deserving, hardworking homeowner trying to do the right thing. he implored his fellow reddit users to refuse to give her advice.22 when other reddit users criticized his rampage against djspacebunny, he eventually removed his posts, but his impulse to police which posters were respectable enough to deserve guidance speaks to a recurring theme throughout the threads. if online privacy allows homeowners to participate in public dialogue, it also emboldens attacks on users who challenge longstanding notions of middle-class propriety. through anonymous comments, online participants recalibrated the moral meanings of abandoning debts—but only to a point.23 the moral valence of debt abandonment since the start of the great recession, analysts have revisited enduring questions about the moral valence of debt, the calculation of financial risk, and the necessity of regulating against unbridled greed within american capitalism. yet many have suggested that these discussions have not gone far enough. they point out that wall street firms, bolstered by billion-dollar bailouts, have returned to business as usual, while any significant signs of social change have dissipated as occupy protesters have packed up their tents. in his recent opus on debt, david graeber (2011, 17), for example, suggests that these public debates initially promised to reveal the moral basis of market exchange, but then “sputtered into incoherence.” the online forays of california homeowners caught in the grips of the 2008 crash and its protracted aftermath suggest otherwise: the longstanding social contract implicit within mortgage debt ties is losing its hold. in the sacramento valley, homeowners who participated in online publics were influenced by others’ decisions to reconfigure the morality of default in ways that challenge established interpretations of mortgage debt as the responsibility of the borrower alone. these significant shifts occur even as mainstream media narratives deride homeowners defaulting on mortgages and frame the absence of foreclosure stigma as a “contagion” that spreads the likelihood of default through neighborhoods (chan et al. 2013, 101). homeowners turning to online collectivities likewise changed their thinking about mortgage debt as they received advice from others in similar situations. they realized how many americans struggled with unemployment, a rapid decline in home equity, and rising health-care costs, and they found the accessibility and privacy of online forums a particularly appealing means to navigate this foreboding landscape. based on this evidence, i argue that anonymous participation in online domains such as reddit and craigslist housing forums presents opportunities to attach a positive moral valence to the abandonment of debt obligations for specific homeowners, whereas semipublic participation on social networking sites and public writing on blogs create new avenues for questioning the shame and humiliation that have accompanied postwar moral judgments about default. the forms and mediums of both semipublic and anonymous online publics of indebtedness, not just their content, generated experiential qualities that inspired participants to reconsider, in different ways, the meaning of underwater mortgage debts. for my respondents, anonymous participation in online publics produced an experience of untethered freedom while still linking participants’ experiences to broader collectivities. for example, participants in anonymous reddit and craigslist housing forums could challenge the authority of broadcast news narratives, formulating alternative moral economies that included abandoning insurmountable debts. participation on semipublic domains such as facebook and blogs encouraged participants to rethink the affective meaning of mortgage debts, moving from shame and stigma to outrage. these trends suggest a complex and unexpected convergence between digital media and neoliberalism, as interactive web platforms reinforce the autological premises of late liberalism while, simultaneously, leading those dispossessed by neoliberal financial regimes to question those institutions’ role in perpetuating omnipresent debt economies.24 how do we classify the influence of homeowners experiencing foreclosure in lower-middleand middle-class neighborhoods who, online, advocate new moral and affective stances in relation to debt but do not recognize these orientations as political?25 anthropologists have shown how digital technologies have been used for traditional political aims, such as mobilizing support for the indigenous zapatista movement in mexico (castells 2001) and coordinating protests across national borders (juris 2008; shirky 2008), as was the case during the arab spring, but the transformations in perspective i am studying operate more clandestinely, making them more difficult to detect and analyze. within anonymous and semipublic online domains, homeowners generated new affective orientations toward indebtedness and revised cultural conceptions of the morality of abandoning overwhelming debts; some then carried these conceptions into other social spheres by walking away from their mortgages. while resistant to collective political mobilization in a traditional sense, mortgagors with opposing political affiliations and worldviews often joined in online dialogue in a populist-inflected counterpoint to dominant narratives of immoral defaulters that is significant in its own right. across both anonymous and semipublic domains, online publics represent a significant expansion of american middle-class milieus and narrative resources to include diverse forms of digital sociality. specifically, online publics shaped the expression and interpretation of indebtedness as a distinct part of an american lower-middleand middle-class habitus, at a moment when these social positions were increasingly precarious. participants within anonymous online publics drew on cultural capital to sort through uncensored and nonexpert online advice and to incorporate that guidance into their preexisting knowledge about debt, finance, and the moral valence of repayment. those posting in semipublic online social networks described a sense of security that allowed them to share their hardships with their friends and family members online. these forms of online connectivity not only revised middle-class ideas about the moral underpinnings of indebtedness but also reflected and reproduced forms of social inequality by extending socioeconomic disparities into a new, virtual terrain. just as the technological apparatus of subprime lending, such as risk algorithms and automated debt-to-income ratios, disproportionately affected african american and latino homeowners in low-income neighborhoods, participants managing indebtedness through these online technologies also excluded the most marginalized homeowners. indeed, more in-depth research is needed to analyze how the intersections of class, ethnicity, and race influence the appeal and efficacy of online publics. as margaret atwood (2008, 41) points out in payback, debt, like smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, has gone out of fashion—what was once considered harmless is now considered a sin to be avoided at all costs. those americans who are forced to rely on debt to finance the necessities of daily life, therefore, are once again seen as suffering a lapse in discipline and moral personhood that needs to be rectified. my examination here of the “prosaics of the digital,” or how digital media reflect and shape social practices (coleman 2010), indicates a significant reorganization of debt imaginaries that reflects and extends a nationwide kitchen-table discussion about the culpability of mortgage lenders and the morality of abandoning unfair debt burdens. although these online publics might seem fleeting, coalescing around crises and eventually succumbing to broken links and obsolete internet browsers, the ways in which they participate in a larger restructuring of debt refusal promise to endure. while online forums emboldened middle-class homeowners to resist moral responsibility for distressed mortgage debt, these homeowners also sought to rediscipline the significance and virtue of mortgage default by determining who may respectably abandon underwater loans. ultimately, the rise of such publics suggests how narratives that question the repayment of debt as central to moral personhood might gain traction through emerging technological forms of sociality and self-expression, virtual encounters that highlight the disorder of contemporary capitalism and play a significant role in redefining how americans understand the debts they owe one another. notes 1. an underwater mortgage is one in which the amount owed exceeds the property’s current value. 2. for an overview of the valuation of credit and the morally suspect nature of debt within anthropological discussions, see peebles 2010 and gregory 2012. 3. as tom boellstorff (2012) emphasizes, ethnographies of online communities require deeper involvement than isolated interviews and textual readings. 4. as scholars have recently shown, online domains hold the same social potential and problems as any arena of offline life (boellstorff 2008; ginsburg 2008; miller and horst 2012). 5. mortgaging and foreclosure reflect culturally specific and historically shifting ideas about homeownership, debt, and seizure (graeber 2011; maurer 2006; shipton 2009). 6. although the repossession of goods has long been reserved for the working poor rather than middle-class households that fail to pay debts (hyman 2011b, 204), foreclosure is a key exception to this trend. 7. this belief is found among those living in middle-class neighborhoods across the nation (heiman, freeman, and liechty 2012, 8). 8. unlike the government buyout of homeowners’ bad loans during the mortgage crash that preceded the great depression, legislators passed policies that privatized assistance programs, leaving lenders to adjudicate homeowners’ appeals and to refuse to modify distressed mortgages. 9. while there are literally thousands of examples of these media discussions, a few illustrations include lowenstein 2010, armour 2009, and harney 2009. 10. brent white (2010b) references specific shows such as fox’s your world with cavuto, “the deal: walk away from your home”; the mike gallagher show, “youwalkaway.com”; and 60 minutes, “the u.s. mortgage meltdown.” 11. as janet roitman (2013) attests, a range of pundits trace a chain of events by which the “housing market fell” and homeowners lost equity and defaulted on their mortgages. the critical question of why housing prices began to fall, roitman (2013, 57) suggests, is preemptively excluded. 12. for professionals working in office jobs, these online sessions proved appealing because they could take place surreptitiously during work hours. for homeowners with jobs in the service industries, online searches and participation were unrestricted to business hours and could commence after long workdays. 13. craigslist discussion forums also harbor a robust community, with more than 200 million users and one hundred topical forums. as of 2012, reddit, a site with over 1 million registered users, was divided into more than 100,000 “subreddits,” or topic threads, and garnered 34.9 million unique views each month. 14. due to the public nature of leibrock’s article, i have used her real name with her permission. all other names of homeowners are pseudonyms. 15. a representative from coldwell told leibrock that she should have been making her regular payments in addition to the trial modification payments to prevent default. 16. in a short sale, the proceeds from the sale will not cover the amount owed on the mortgage. sometimes, though not always, the lender might prefer to absorb a moderate loss on the sale than have a homeowner default on a loan. the homeowner’s credit is still damaged. 17. a progressive organization founded by the obama advisor van jones, rebuild the dream, draws on digital technologies to campaign for social issues. see http://www.rebuildthedream.com/support_for_homeowners. 18. the thread can be viewed at http://www.reddit.com/r/frugal/comments/sm8kr/i_got_hit_hard_by_the_crash_and_im_going_through_a_foreclosure. 19. the thread can be viewed at http://www.reddit.com/r/askreddit/comments/11dzxs/my_condo_i_bought_when_i_was_22_has_been_in. 20. by the 1980s, many americans faced a landscape less similar to the postwar era than to the 1920s, when consumer credit was used to shore up shortcomings from short-term unemployment and decreased income (hyman 2011a, 99). 21. this dynamic is apparent in the rise of what brett williams (2004) describes as “debt porn,” reality television shows in which americans are shamed for their debts, repent, and promise to change their ways. 22. the thread can be viewed at http://www.reddit.com/r/newjersey/comments/10ycis/nj_help_a_sister_out_im_going_to_lose_my_house. 23. the anonymity of the sites is not absolute, as users might post otherwise private financial information in ways that raise pressing questions about the use of these data. joe deville (2013), for example, shows how an online loan company uses “leaky data,” such as the browser and the device with which users access the site, as well as their facebook activity, to determine the risk of a borrower and the interest rate a borrower is charged. 24. my findings offer a starting point for understanding what dominic boyer (2013, 135) sees as the phenomenological juncture between digital media and neoliberalism, 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obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. his admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of miguel de cervantes. —jorge luis borges, “pierre menard, author of the quixote” the operation one day in the late fall of 2013, an ambulance with fire department logos was seen circulating in the streets of puerto iguazú, a town on argentina’s northern border with brazil and paraguay. residents noticed that the ambulance was of a different kind, unlike others that belonged to local hospitals. though a freshly painted, red-lettered “bomberos” (firefighters) sign decorated the front of the vehicle, unusual green markings in english—“fire rescue”— printed on its side doors betrayed its foreign origins. the ambulance was spotted parked near the customs office at the river port, on its way to or from paraguay. later, iguazúenses told the police (and the media) that they recognized the former fire chief, ramón “yiyo” moretti in the driver’s seat. he was no longer active as a firefighter, yet that day he was wearing his official uniform. those who saw yiyo driving the ambulance suspected that something was awry. after the vehicle left iguazú, it made a turn onto national route 12, heading south. the only asphalt road connecting the remote triple frontier to the rest of the country, route 12 is a two-lane highway that stretches parallel to the paraná river across the hilly jungle terrain of the misiones province. memories of deadly accidents haunt the road. misioneros had not yet forgotten how more than a year and a half earlier, a truck had crossed into the wrong lane and crashed into a tour bus traveling in the opposite direction, killing ten passengers and injuring dozens more. they also heard how not long ago a motorcyclist lost control of his bike, fell to the ground, and was fatally wounded when hit by an ambulance. the local media meticulously report deaths on the highway. firefighters extricating mutilated bodies of victims, rescue vehicles blocking off the road, their emergency lights flashing, are captured in photographs and featured in news headlines. but that day the ambulance proceeded without attracting much attention. a few miles south of iguazú it passed a checkpoint controlled by the argentine national gendarmerie. with jurisdiction over strategic infrastructure, including borders and highways, gendarmes have patrolled the triple frontier for more than seventy years. they used to be stationed at the tancredo neves international bridge across the iguazú river connecting argentina with brazil—a major land corridor for trade between two countries of the southern common market (mercosur), also used as a route for drug trafficking, human smuggling, and contraband originating in paraguay. to this day residents claim that gendarmes on the bridge were easily bribed: in exchange for a share in the booty or for a fixed fee they allowed illegal flows to proceed uninterrupted. when in 2001, under pressure from the u.s. government, argentina introduced reforms aimed at increasing security at the triple frontier, the control of the bridge was handed over to migrations and customs authorities. the gendarmes then retreated south, erecting a secondary checkpoint on the national highway. here, at the only exit route from iguazú, officers of the thirteenth squadron with service dogs trained to detect drugs stop vehicles leaving the border area. it is at this checkpoint that gendarmes often find bags of cocaine tucked under the seats of long-distance buses or packets of marijuana concealed in colorful schoolchildren’s backpacks. yet it is unlikely that they stopped the ambulance that yiyo was driving: the three men inside the vehicle were all known as local firefighters; yiyo was wearing his official uniform; and they were transporting a female patient. by all appearances, it was an emergency, and the officers allowed the ambulance to continue its journey. about six-hundred kilometers southwest of iguazú, in the province of corrientes, parked on the side of the road with emergency lights on, the rescue vehicle caught the attention of the highway patrol. together with a group of gendarmes from paso de los libres, a town further east on the border with brazil, they approached the ambulance to check whether its occupants needed help. surprised by an unanticipated encounter with law enforcement, and noticeably nervous, the travelers gave evasive answers to the officers’ questions. gendarmes decided to conduct a search of the vehicle, enlisting a dog named lucy, trained to detect drugs.1 hidden under false panels and inside the compartments they found 246 kilograms of marijuana and 4,000 ecstasy pills. despite a scrambled explanation that they were on their way to attend a wildfire-training course all four occupants were detained.2 “an ex-firefighter, using a rescue vehicle, . . . an imported ambulance, which did not conform to traffic law regulations, simulated an emergency, and was detained upon reaching the jurisdiction of paso de los libres,” summarized ricardo sánchez, the chief of the gendarmerie division in iguazú.3 in an interview with a local news channel he also stated that the thirteenth squadron raided the homes of the three detained men “with positive results”: in the residence belonging to the driver and his wife—the woman who pretended to be the patient—they found a packet of marijuana. concluding the television interview sánchez thanked residents for noticing the deception and for collaborating with the investigation. in the meantime, javier bareiro, the president of the volunteer firefighter commission, announced that although the ambulance carried its logos, the vehicle did not belong to the iguazú fire department—it was the former chief’s private property. he also made it clear that moretti and his companions were no longer working as firefighters. their credentials were apócrifos (false), he said. as this breaking news reached their town, iguazúenses began publicly—and with unmasked resentment—talking about their former fire chief as bombero trucho (fake firefighter). the local media called him a narcobombero (narco firefighter). the story of former firefighters using a counterfeit ambulance to perform a false emergency as a cover-up for trafficking drugs hinges on the idea of camouflage. camouflage implies the use of one symbolic and material order to protect another from being recognized by blurring the boundaries between the two. in this article i engage this concept to intervene in conversations of statecraft among anthropologists, building on analytical frameworks that illuminate the processual and performative qualities of political authority (aretxaga 2005; bobick 2014; hansen and stepputat 2001; joseph and nugent 1994; nugent 2004; nelson 2009; trouillot 2001). rather than seeking to collapse the distinction between governmental authenticity and fakery (bubandt 2009; navaro-yashin 2007; reeves 2014), i argue that the logic of camouflage reveals how the state always already disguises the violence that it pretends to be separate from. in the tri-border area, where government agents play an ambiguous role in sanctioning operations of deception and facilitating illegal exchanges, the notion of camouflage helps explain how the contraband and corruption that pervade border relationships are inseparable from formal enactments of political authority. camouflage thus helps to illuminate the aesthetic, pragmatic, and moral connections between statecraft and criminality, further enhancing our analytical purchase on how the law and its violation are symbiotically intertwined (e.g., civico 2012; comaroff and comaroff 2006; heyman and smart 1999; nordstrom 2007; roitman 2004; van schendel and abraham 2005, schneider and schneider 2003). when moretti wore his old uniform and drove an ambulance that sought to be indistinguishable from other emergency vehicles run by the fire service, the former chief was simulating the state, even as he was undermining it, which, i suggest, is not much different from other—presumably genuine—acts of statecraft and law enforcement in the triple frontier. social consensus built around protecting dirty secrets and public complicity in government practices known to be unlawful guarantee their effective concealment. state agents and non-state actors, appropriating the imagery of political authority to pursue illicit activities, frequently engage in practices of camouflage, constituting a legal-moral order that blurs the distinction between law and crime at the same time that it reinforces this difference as the foundation of statehood. in hiding the predatory and brutal under the just and peaceful, camouflage could be viewed as the modus operandi of statecraft, adding to our more general understanding of the performative character of politics and law. the narcobombero incident at least provides a glimpse into the political importance of operations of disguise at the borders of argentina, brazil, and paraguay, a region where i have been conducting ethnographic research since 2008. figure 1. iguazú is the only place other than buenos aires where the argentinean gendarmerie trains dogs in drug-detection. photo by ieva jusionyte. ambiguous heroes iguazúenses expressed dismay that this drug-trafficking case involved former firefighters. in contrast to the local police—frequently accused of brutality and incompetence, known for beating suspects and denying them medical care—firefighters are typically praised as heroic, self-sacrificing civilians, the guardians of the community. in argentina most firefighters are volunteers. their vocation is articulated in terms of duty, and their dangerous work does not entitle them to monetary compensation. indexing the nobility of their profession, an inscription in red on the wall of the iguazú firehouse boldly asserts: “nada nos obliga solo el dolor de los demas” (nothing obliges us but the pain of others). history validates this dignified narrative. an all-volunteer iguazú firefighter corps was established in 1982 and initially operated out of the private residence of its founder. the building that houses them now, strategically situated on the main thoroughfare, was originally constructed as the town’s first bus terminal and later served as a morgue, before it was turned over to the fire department. inconveniences puncture the work of local firefighters here: every time it rains, the roof leaks, causing the firehouse to flood; volunteers wear pieces of donated bunker gear, rarely using full protective equipment; engines of old mercedes fire trucks—much admired as antiquities by europeans who stop by to take pictures before or after visiting the iguazú falls, the major tourist attraction of the region—often fail and emergency vehicles need to be manually pushed onto the road in hopes of getting them to start. despite these difficulties, when the siren goes off, firefighters faithfully respond to the call of duty, ready to risk their lives. thus, when yiyo and his companions used the disguise of the fire service to transport drugs, they were not imitating just any institution but one with a particularly positive status in the grassroots political imagination. figure 2. puerto iguazú volunteer fire department: “nothing obliges us but the pain of others.” photo by ieva jusionyte. from the early days of my ethnographic fieldwork with news journalists in puerto iguazú (see jusionyte 2013, 2014), i have visited the firehouse regularly. press reporters i accompanied stopped there several times a week to inquire about emergency calls and rescue operations. once i was invited to stay at the fire station overnight with a journalist documenting the around-the-clock routine of emergency workers. as the top fire official, moretti was also in charge of the town’s civil defense coalition, and the media frequently interviewed him in preparation for and in the aftermath of severe rainstorms, floods, and draughts. in these emergency situations i saw yiyo as a prominent public figure in the community. when the town’s water-supply system failed (a regular nuisance during long subtropical summers), he used a fire tanker to deliver water to people’s homes and to restaurants. when storms hit, he toured the flooded neighborhoods to evacuate residents from their submerged dwellings and, once the rains stopped, took the initiative to cut down tree branches so they would not fall onto people’s houses. yiyo was a native iguazúense who blended his official role as an agent of the state with his informal networks of patronage. despite accusations of clientelism raised against him, iguazúenses were generally grateful to their fire chief for help in times of need. one journalist who interviewed moretti frequently on the news beat said to me after his arrest: “he was a good firefighter. he helped people. there’s no doubt about that. but he had to protect his investiture. he had to be the fire chief both inside and outside of the firehouse.” the comment hints at the difficulty yiyo faced maintaining a firm boundary between his public office and his private affairs. fire departments form integral parts of governmental systems of emergency response, but they hold a liminal position vis-à-vis both the state and the community. they often blur the lines between the civilian and the military, between paid work and voluntary service. associated with sacrifice and victimhood, firefighters occupy a specific cultural niche, providing a powerful semiotic tool for thinking through paradoxes: they are “rescuer-victims, citizen-soldiers, inside-outsiders, sentimental-officials, masculine men who cry, and more” (rothenbuhler 2005, 186). because of their liminal qualities, firefighters have been incorporated into the mythopolitics of the modern state, a process through which societies create mythic heroes as models for action and portray the “imagined behavior of these heroes as reflections of desired qualities considered useful in future actions against those who threaten the state” (donahue 2011, 6). this highly mediated phenomenon proves especially popular in the united states, but it extends to fire departments across latin america, where local communities generally hold firefighters in high regard. everywhere, however, they are glorified as sacrificial victims, seen as both part of the state and apart from it, as uniformed civil servants and as citizen volunteers—an ambiguity that is never fully resolved. firefighters are also frontline street-level bureaucrats (lipsky 1980) who, like law-enforcement officers, customs agents, and social workers, in the day-to-day performance of public service deal with contradictions between the formal rules and the pragmatics of governance and who negotiate their legal mandates against ethical and cultural values (see, e.g., chalfin 2010; fassin 2013; herzfeld 1992, 1997; heyman 2000, 2002; jauregui 2013). but in iguazú firefighters are also intricately connected to other private and public interests. all volunteers have other jobs to pay their bills: some fix domestic appliances, others work in construction, drive cabs and tourist buses, bake bread, or are employed as body guards; one is a chef at a luxury hotel. the impossibility of distinguishing between their multiple positions and of drawing a boundary between their public service and private practice has fueled people’s mistrust of higher-ranking officials in the fire department. living in iguazú, i repeatedly heard residents accuse several senior personnel of using the firehouse as a means to appropriate public resources or to cover up illegal exchanges associated with the extensive informal economy on the border. as the narcobombero incident unraveled, more people began speaking up publicly about their long-held suspicions of the former chief’s involvement in shady dealings. after he resigned from his position at the iguazú fire department in 2011, moretti continued to perform activities that resembled his earlier duties. for example, he bought a fire truck and used it for cutting tree branches and doing other odd jobs. yiyo told me that he had distanced himself from the firehouse and wanted to operate an alternative—private—emergency service. he even asked for my help in checking the prices for importing used rescue vehicles from the united states. when he purchased an american-style ambulance and began driving it back and forth across the border to paraguay, the town’s residents were further puzzled by his behavior. almost a year after moretti was arrested and as he was serving his prison sentence in buenos aires, i asked a journalist friend of mine why the press did not investigate widespread rumors of yiyo’s involvement in drug trafficking, to which she replied: “everyone was talking about it, but there was no proof.” i took part in the activities of the iguazú fire department under moretti’s command as a volunteer and a filmmaker. toward the end of my ethnographic research on the news media, i suggested to the fire chief that i could make a documentary film, showing the everyday reality of firefighters working under precarious conditions in an underfinanced and underequipped firehouse.4 moretti enthusiastically approved of this idea, hoping that it would attract donations from better-financed fire departments in europe and in the united states. for several months in late 2010 and early 2011 i spent many days and nights filming in the firehouse and accompanying firefighters on emergency calls. but at times i had to shut the camera off. everybody played a certain game of hide-and-seek: volunteers were hired and fired at the chief’s mercy; equipment and money mysteriously disappeared; and continuous disagreements between the fire chief and the president of the volunteer firefighter commission, juan carlos di dio, who was responsible for overseeing the department’s bank accounts, resulted in locked doors and suspensions, spreading mistrust among the service members. as the conflict between moretti and di dio escalated, my presence with the camera became an obvious liability, and i was forced to stop filming earlier than planned. given the multiple layers of secrecy and concealment that i observed while working on the documentary, the narcobombero incident in 2013, more than two years later, seemed nothing more than a spectacular exposure of the camouflage routine in the everyday practices of the fire department and other state institutions in iguazú. the narcobombero episode is important not because it shows how in this region, where organized crime has effectively penetrated many government agencies, the fire department, too, was co-opted by drug traffickers. it poses a much more complicated question: how can we analytically distinguish between forging the appearance of the state to commit a crime and committing a crime during the authorized performance of state functions? what would this distinction explain about statecraft in the triple frontier? by the time the former fire chief was caught, he had successfully crossed the border and passed several checkpoints on the highway. it is a public secret that security forces in the tri-border area are implicated in networks of patronage and corruption that permit contraband and trafficking. but what happens when a gendarme, a prefect, or a customs agent takes a bribe from smugglers or from drug traffickers, or when a migrations officer participates in human trafficking? are they subverting or counterfeiting the rule of law? personnel serving in the security forces embody what max weber (2004) defines as the state’s quintessential feature: the claim to the legitimate monopoly of violence within a given territory. their uniform, right to arrest, and the permitted use of lethal force all mark them as agents of the law. yet by allowing illegal flows to proceed, they routinely, if more invisibly, contravene legal norms. unlike in the state of exception (agamben 2005; schmitt 1985), these transgressions are not publicly justified by the state’s sovereign power to establish the boundary between law and crime; instead, they are carefully disguised within the daily performances of its functions. “impersonating the state,” writes madeleine reeves (2014, 14–15), wavers between enacting the state’s authority and mimicking its effects, which— depending on the situation—can be either seen as corruption or as socially legitimate lawbreaking activities. as i discuss below, corrupt officials on argentina’s borders with brazil and paraguay, rather than transgressing and thus subverting the moral-legal order, embody the raison d’être of the camouflage state. performative statecraft camouflage refers to technologies of concealment that a military applies to impede the identification of its personnel, equipment, and installations based on the principles of blending into the background and the disruption of outlines. the term was officially introduced in the military context of world war i, but the french police of the late nineteenth century already used to camoufler (disguise) themselves to apprehend criminals (king 2014, 403). as a cultural practice, camouflage requires local knowledge and performative competence to achieve its effects. in the quotidian life of the state, violence, which is intrinsic to its formation and operation, is hidden under the cover of moral-legal order by blurring the practical distinction between these formally separate dimensions of governing. the argument about camouflage that i develop in this article owes important insights to scholarship on the fictional nature of the state. echoing a. r. radcliffe-brown’s idea that the state does not exist, philip abrams (1988, 82) calls it “the opium of the citizen” and “the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.” for abrams (1988, 76, 77), the state is “first and foremost an exercise in legitimation” and “a triumph of concealment.” recognition of the state’s illusoriness and duplicity (nelson 2009), its magical modality (das 2004) and spectral forms (daniel m. goldstein 2012), however, does not obliterate the reality of its social effects. rather than simply being fictitious, statecraft is a performative process with material consequences. the appearance of its substance is, as judith butler (1988, 520) put it, “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.” to remain compelling, the illusion of the state must be bound by social sanction and taboo, which work to conceal its performative aspect. discussing the fetish power of the modern state, michael taussig (1992, 132–33) suggests that the secret takes on the burden of protecting “the epistemology of appearance and reality in which appearance is thought to shroud a concealed truth—but not the truth that there is none.” statecraft becomes contingent on the maintenance of such dirty secrets. the combination of statecraft’s magical qualities with the murkiness and ambiguity of its everyday rational-bureaucratic modalities (das 2004) allows us to talk about the state’s camouflaged makeup. building on the disemic opposition between the formal and the intimate, the official and the vernacular (herzfeld 1992, 1997), anthropologists have also shown how everyday practices of government bureaucracies are negotiated against the state’s ideal form (e.g., feldman 2008; gupta 1995, 2012; hetherington 2011; hull 2012). counterintuitively, by perpetual reference to the state code, transgressions make the official form both intelligible and relevant. grappling with the question of state legitimacy in the face of forgeries, corruption within its own procedures, and the mimesis of its structures, veena das (2004, 245) writes that this “iterability” of state practices for illegitimate purposes “becomes not a sign of vulnerability but a mode of circulation through which power is produced.” puzzled by how letters widely believed to be forged instigated violence in indonesia, nils bubandt (2009, 561) argues that they were written and read against the background of “distrust of official forms of veracity and a deep sense that the state forms of authority . . . may themselves be counterfeit.” the multiplication of fake documents points to the “fundamental opacity of state authority” (bubandt 2009, 575). even when deception is suspected and detected, the state is still authoritative enough to have real social consequences. to overcome the futile opposition between the authentic and the fake in the political reality of the state, michael bobick (2014, 7) employs the concept of “performative sovereignty” to show how, despite their tenuous claims to statehood, contested post-soviet territories of eastern europe act as if they were states. the de facto form of sovereignty has proven an enduring means of separatist governance. the notion of camouflage draws from these processual and performative approaches and elaborates on them to interrogate the relationship between statecraft and criminality. rephrasing charles tilly’s (1985, 169) important observation that states are “quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy,” dennis rodgers (2006, 326) suggests their ontological equivalence to gangs. his provocative idea finds support in a series of ethnographic studies that document how organized crime is intricately connected to the operation of states (e.g., comaroff and comaroff 2006; heyman and smart 1999; nordstrom 2007, roitman 2004; van schendel and abraham 2005; schneider and schneider 2003). these studies acknowledge hybrid forms of governance wherein state bureaucracies and criminal organizations compete and even overlap in their claims for sovereignty (bobick 2011; civico 2012; jaffe 2013; pansters 2012; penglase 2009). challenging state-centric views, according to which legal society and criminal networks are opposites, they pursue the outlaw into zones where, as carolyn nordstrom (2007, 145) writes, “legality bleeds into illegality” and “illegality enters mainstream society.” in this context, the notion of camouflage enables us to explain the symbolic, material, and performative mechanisms that combine in providing legitimacy to a state’s coercive practices, perhaps especially in a border region like the triple frontier with deep legacies of clientelist politics and contestations over power and authority. in statecraft, law and crime constitute the two sides of the möbius strip—they appear to be separate even as they exist on a twisted continuum. as john l. comaroff and jean comaroff (2006, 5) argue, criminal violence does not repudiate the rule of law and market operations but “appropriate[s] their forms—and recommission[s] their substance,” that is, “violent crime increasingly counterfeits government.” the story of the former fire chief caught driving an ambulance loaded with drugs is but an episode among many where outlaws falsify state signature to assume spotless legibility and protect themselves from discovery by becoming invisible under the veil of the law. it is a story of a counterfeit emergency, where the impersonation of the state was used as a disguise for crime. but perhaps the more troubling idea, worthy of further exploration, is that the state, both targeted by and engaged in counterfeiting, is always already based on camouflaged forms and practices. there would then be no difference between counterfeit state insignias and their presumed originals as both allow for the blending of il/legal and il/licit, the official and backstage realities of governance. comaroff and comaroff (2006, 15) note that the fetish and the fake eventually fade into each other. here i am making a similar argument by suggesting that in the triple frontier, camouflage, as the two-way mimesis between legal and criminal forms, constitutes the operative principle of statecraft. enforcement and corruption global security discourse, circulated through governmental reports and media narratives, usually portrays the border region between argentina, brazil, and paraguay as a haven for organized crime, where corrupt law-enforcement agencies fail to prevent flows of illegalized goods across the borders (hudson 2003; shelley and picarelli 2005; sverdlick 2005). contraband in everyday and luxury commodities, from cigarettes to electronics, from guns to perfume, began in earnest in the mid-twentieth century, when general alfredo stroessner founded ciudad del este as paraguay’s outpost for state-sanctioned smuggling to brazil and argentina, facilitated by the country’s significantly lower tax rates and inconsistent migration and customs control on its borders (lewis 2006). yet neither the large market of counterfeit commodities in ciudad del este, where you can find anything from pirated dvds to forged passports, nor widespread contraband precipitated the recent securitization and militarization of the triple frontier. the lens of the global security apparatus began to zoom in on the area only during the 1990s, in the wake of two terrorist attacks against israeli institutions in buenos aires, which were traced back to the allegedly porous borders (greenberg 2010). after 9/11, strengthened border control and intensified surveillance became integral components of the u.s.-led war on terror, and the triple frontier became one of its fronts. security measures in the region were justified by the need to curb terrorist financing, purportedly entangled with the triple frontier’s pervasive drug-trafficking and money-laundering economy. figure 3. parade in iguazú to mark the two-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of the naval prefecture, june 2010. photo by ieva jusionyte. before recent global efforts to securitize and militarize the triple frontier began, the argentine government had already dispatched a full array of security forces to the northern border. parallel to the system of local policing there exists an extensive network of federal agencies. in iguazú the security apparatus comprises the naval prefecture, the national gendarmerie, the federal police, the airport security police, and the ninth mountain infantry regiment of the twelfth jungle brigade of the argentine army. three of these institutions—the gendarmerie, the prefecture, and federal police—have overlapping jurisdictions over federal crimes. in an interview i conducted in 2009, the commander of the thirteenth squadron, general edgardo riva, said that the most important federal crimes in and around iguazú were drug and human trafficking. while common crimes “only affect people,” the commander explained, federal crimes “are crimes that affect the nation-state.” according to the general, the country’s geographical proximity to paraguay facilitated trafficking in northeastern argentina; other argentine security officials i spoke to equally blamed the other country’s nearness for contraband, counterfeiting, and money laundering. paraguay is the major producer of marijuana in south america, and its 367-kilometer border with misiones makes the latter province one of the key access points through which the illicit commodity reaches regional and international markets. according to the international narcotics control strategy report, most of argentina’s marijuana seizures occur in the triple frontier.5 but border officials and journalists in the region acknowledge that law enforcement captures only a small fraction of what gets across. traffickers rely on creative disguise to smuggle prohibited merchandise from one country to another. in northern paraguay, drugs are frequently wrapped in watertight bags and floated down the paraná toward argentine urban centers in rosario and buenos aires. in other instances, as the incident with the fake ambulance indicates, marijuana is hidden in vehicles and delivered across the border through official checkpoints. in fact, moretti is not the only narcobombero in the triple frontier: a year after yiyo’s arrest, the chief of another volunteer fire department in misiones was detained on the international bridge connecting the provincial capital of misiones, posadas, with the paraguayan river port of encarnación with 150 kilos of marijuana hidden in his van. in search of new routes out of the highly policed continent, traffickers also use argentina to transport cocaine: in trucks, disguised within other goods and hidden in secret compartments; by planes, which land on clandestine airstrips; or by people, known as “mules,” who tuck them into their luggage, tape them under their clothes, or swallow and carry them inside their stomachs. iguazúenses know that law-enforcement and government regulatory agencies on the border play a part in facilitating smuggling. mostly through word of mouth and occasionally from personal experience, my acquaintances knew who needed to be bribed to bring air-conditioning units or spare vehicle parts that exceeded the quota for foreign purchases into the country. it was a public secret that some employees in the customs office enabled their family members, business associates, or those who agreed to pay bribes to sidestep border trade regulations. as such, it was not easy to distinguish illegalized yet socially legitimate practices, such as small-scale contraband for personal consumption, and unlawful illicit flows, like drug trafficking (see jusionyte 2013). but it was even harder to estimate to what extent the outlawed activities intertwined with formal state institutions and practices. this intermingling of il/legalized activities explains what i initially found to be a frustrating end point during ethnographic interviews. since i began research in iguazú in 2008, residents have shown hostility to the discourse of lawlessness on the alleged frontera caliente (hot border) perpetuated in the mainstream media. they often repeated an almost formulaic answer: their town was a safe place because “all security forces were present.” i heard this from taxi drivers, media reporters, municipal employees, and others who had stakes in protecting the regional tourism economy centered on the iguazú falls against criminalizing narratives of the violent border. it was not until some years later, when people trusted me and more readily shared silent local knowledge, that i encountered a different version of this repetitive utterance: “if all the security forces are here, how come there is drug trafficking? how come there is contraband?” the answer was supposed to be obvious: corruption.6 corruption is characterized by an ambivalent dialectics of concealment and publicity and hidden continuities between the legal and the illegal (nuijten and anders 2007). this dual emphasis on legality/illegality and visibility/invisibility proves central to the camouflage state, where crime, as transgression, is always already implicit in the legal-moral order, even as it is creatively disguised. in iguazú, the presence of multiple federal agencies not only failed at preventing organized crime but contributed to its boom. in his book la frontera: viaje al misterioso triangulo de brasil, argentina y paraguay—which some locals despise as a collection of unfounded allegations, with others confirming the veracity of its account—the investigative journalist hernán lopez echagüe (1997) described how in the 1990s officers in the gendarmerie and prefecture fiercely competed for business with local traffickers, each agency trying to offer a better deal for a “blind check” on the bridge or at the river port, facilitating arms and drugs contraband. despite biannual rotations of personnel in the security forces and redrawn jurisdictions between the agencies, by the early 2000s, long-established networks and practices of corruption and clientelism remained largely intact. in 2013, on transparency international’s corruption perception index (cpi), argentina scored 34, and paraguay 24; cpi scores range from 0 to 100, and the lower the value, the higher the corruption. thus both countries ranked relatively low.7 according to sally engle merry and susan b. coutin (2014, 8), measurement systems such as the cpi constitute political technologies, inscribed by the values of those able to use them. yet everyday talk of corruption likewise abounds among the residents in the triple frontier. according to mariana, a journalist who works for a paraguayan daily in ciudad del este, “corruption is everywhere.” using the same vocabulary adopted by the global apparatus of anticorruption, she calls it “a social ill, a cancer.” mariana remembers going to interview a police captain, who mistook her for somebody else coming to collect a bribe. when she inquired about this misunderstanding, the captain showed her a print document with a list of journalists’ names and amounts of money the police paid them weekly. the evident normalcy of the situation disturbed mariana. the public visibility of corruption in ciudad del este appeared striking to her. in contrast, on the argentine side of the border, corrupt practices are carefully hidden from public sight. appearances still matter there. corruption is ingrained in structures of clientelism and supported by what one municipal employee defined as “a sense of impunity.” iguazúenses complain that the police and other government agencies do not take responsibility for crime. “what can you do if you were robbed? cry for a while, maybe. then build again, buy again,” a young mother explained to me. on a larger scale, the convergence between corruption and clientelism in argentina is often traced to the neoliberal government of carlos menem in the 1990s. menem was charged with smuggling weapons to ecuador and croatia, but the legacies of his rule have far transcended this singular high-profile case. menem’s neoliberal reforms precipitated the economic crisis of 2001 and contributed to the pauperization of the middle-class, making many argentines see their everyday lives in terms of uncertainty. anxiety became a dominant sentiment in the media and among its publics, concerned with the failures of democracy and globalization, and overcome by the feeling of insecurity (seri 2012). in popular imaginaries, violent crime traditionally characterized the lower classes, while corruption—crimen de guantes blancos (crime of the white gloves), as iguazúenses refer to it, or white-collar crime—was seen as a vice of the better-off. the restructuring of argentina’s economy and its subsequent collapse in the early 2000s, however, not only caused an upsurge in crime but a blurring of the edges of legal and illegal activities, erasing earlier class-based distinctions and exposing the previously unacknowledged links between drug trafficking and government corruption (see donna goldstein 2012). public secrets “the border creates opportunity. there are many people who have lived for years from engaging in activities that are far from innocent. the community didn’t condemn them,” a government employee in iguazú told me in an interview in early 2014. the border offers an important stage for the performance of the state, and, not by coincidence, also a space where law more visibly blends with forms of illegality. josiah heyman and howard campbell (2007, 202) note that “border culture contains significant symbolic codes and relational frameworks for melding opposites, for making ‘arrangements,’ for getting things done, for tolerating incongruities, and for pretending not to know about all of this in public.” the indeterminate character of borders, as the literal margins and spaces of creativity, enables us to better understand the state itself (das and poole 2004). rather than merely providing a descriptive portrait of crime in the tri-border region, my ethnographic investigation of practices and discourses on the edges of law and order in the triple frontier addresses the camouflage mechanisms of argentine statecraft more generally. moretti and his companions used the camouflage of a counterfeit emergency vehicle to blend in with the formal state institution. it was a double crime: using one symbolic form, a falsified legal-moral order, to hide another, the transgression of the law. why did it work? even though rumors of the former fire chief’s involvement in illegal activities had circulated in iguazú for years, the same vows of public secrecy in the community protected moretti that prohibit speaking about corrupt security forces and regulatory agencies on the border. a public secret means knowing what not to know, where not to look, what not to see (taussig 1999, 50). in iguazú, public secrets are justified and maintained by interdependent moral and pragmatic codes of connivencia (complicity) and convivencia (coexistence). not by chance is the spanish word connivencia close to a popular iguazúense concept convivencia, translated into english as “coexistence” or “collaboration” and invoking the spirit of getting along. whereas complicity has negative undertones because it constricts agency and implicates residents in the games of hide-and-seek with the town’s corrupt authorities, convivencia, which has the same effect of withholding some information from public circulation, is positive—it offers a form of protection. complicity may be forced on border residents as an informal system of control; but through convivencia, they internalize it as accountability to their community. as unspoken rules of living together on the margins of the state, these codes explain why certain issues, even when people recognize them as problematic, are not openly discussed. “there is a direct relationship among the people because everybody knows each other’s story,” said one journalist. another reporter explained it this way: “everybody knows. nobody says anything. nobody wants to get involved. that’s because it has always been: ‘yo hago lo mío y usted haga lo suyo’ [i do what’s mine, and you do what’s yours].” the following example illustrates the tight relationship between convivencia, complicity, and public secrecy in iguazú. when in the beginning of 2014 inflation in argentina was steadily rising (since banks had only limited amounts of u.s. dollars and brazilian reals) people commonly sidestepped the law to purchase foreign currency. a journalist told me how she went to a centrally located casa de cambio (currency exchange) in iguazú to buy brazilian reals. when she approached the window, the manager—who had just told a disappointed tourist that there were no reals available—offered to sell her foreign currency informally, for which the journalist had to pay the inflated black market rate. “the person at the casa de cambio sold me en forma trucha [deceitfully], and i accepted it, so i am an accomplice in this. as a journalist, i should report this acto corrupto [corrupt act]. but i didn’t. why not? because i needed the reals. what right or authority do i have to denounce the act if i am buying illegally?” the journalist said that complicity was inseparable from convivencia in iguazú. “there is complicity in many situations. for example, if i see a traffic inspector without a helmet or without lights, i don’t say anything. i don’t want them to denounce me for something that i do because i may also be wrong sometimes.” as an analytic category, camouflage transcends the local scenario of the triple frontier. the aesthetic form, the pragmatic function, and the legal-moral regime of disguise constitute, as i have discussed, essential components of statecraft at large. yet its concrete manifestations are embedded in communities, where they are also more accessible to ethnographic observation. neighbors are better able to recognize the subtle flaws in the performance of camouflage. iguazúenses were suspicious about moretti driving back and forth to paraguay in an ambulance decorated with the logos of the fire service, to which, they knew, he no longer belonged. his activities attracted less attention outside of iguazú, where the appearance of the ambulance and the embodied performance of the driver served as indicators of authenticity. an unfamiliar public will unlikely notice small flaws. but when outsiders recognize camouflage, they also more easily expose it. in contrast, in a small border town the codes of convivencia and complicity extend protection to those engaged in trafficking, contraband, or corruption, so that much sensitive and potentially incriminating information remains a public secret. during my last visit to the field in march 2014, i met a friend who worked for the government to discuss recent scandals of corruption and organized crime—by then moretti’s incident had been overshadowed by the high-profile case of carlos ojeda, the chief of investigations of the regional police, accused of taking bribes from a group of drug dealers and robbers in exchange for offering them protection. he said, “there are always some people involved in this. you learn about them when the news comes out in the papers. otherwise, they are our neighbors. we don’t know anything until we learn the news from the papers.” he compared moretti and ojeda to two branches cut from the same tree, a tree whose other branches continue to grow. public secrecy is a powerful form of social knowledge that allows camouflage to work. in a tightly knit community, the recognition of fraud might be easier, yet it is less likely to be exposed through defacement. on the national scale, where intimacy is less constrictive, there is also less familiarity. it was no coincidence, then, that when moretti’s disguise was recognized hundreds of kilometers away from home, it was by his fellow firefighters from iguazú. almost one year after the narcobombero incident, a firefighter told me privately the part of the story that the media had not reported. on that fateful day of moretti’s arrest, two members of the fire department were driving from córdoba back to iguazú in a newly acquired fire truck and ran into their former chief, traveling in the opposite direction. after this surprise encounter, the two firefighters alerted the gendarmerie that, despite appearances, the man and the vehicle had nothing to do with the iguazú fire department. gendarmes in corrientes raided moretti’s fake ambulance while he was parked near the sanctuary in mercedes dedicated to a popular argentine folk saint, gauchito gil. a regional version of robin hood, gauchito was a nineteenth-century bandit who helped those in need by stealing from the rich to give to the poor, until one day the military forces caught and executed him. though skeptics refer to the folk saint as proof that argentines idolize the figure of the outlaw, gauchito gil remains highly popular, with numerous shrines with red ribbons dedicated to him on roadsides throughout the country. in an ironic conclusion to the story, when law-enforcement officers approached the ambulance parked off the road near the sanctuary dedicated to the bandit-turned-saint, they discovered a firefighter-turned-trafficker imitating his former self. (un)covered refractions why is camouflage as a modality of statecraft important ethnographically and analytically? in this article i have shown that gendarmes and customs officers use the camouflage of authority to help smugglers, imitating their own role as law enforcement, while traffickers impersonating firefighters fabricate the veil of the legal state as a disguise for illegitimate profit. in both situations the operations of state and crime become so intertwined that they are practically inseparable. the state is both deceived by and used as camouflage. it is both subverted and upheld by forms of concealment that proliferate in response to its presence. if the state is “a set of practices and processes and their effects” (trouillot 2001, 131), to uncover what lies beneath its camouflage appears not only a futile but also a misguided effort. its criminal and legal forms are deeply entangled. in the argentine northeast, camouflage is the modus operandi of statecraft—its aesthetic form, performative practice, and moral-legal order. in the two scenarios examined here—wearing the mask of law to cover up crime and engaging in crime from a position authorized by law—investigating how state authority supplies the cover for its own deception has proved a constructive way of understanding the state’s processual and performative nature. in the tri-border area we can see what begoña aretxaga (2005, 258) calls “an excess of statehood practices: too many actors competing to perform as state.” some of these processes—the former firefighters using a counterfeit emergency vehicle to traffic drugs—are discovered to be camouflage for other forms of illegalized exchange. other state practices are formally authorized as genuine but are equally deceptive: the prefecture, gendarmerie, and customs officials, among others responsible for law enforcement on the border, facilitating and covering up contraband. camouflage blurs the arbitrary yet consequential boundary between state and crime. more specifically, this notion enables us to examine how actors other than formal institutions participate in the performance of political authority by assuming its appearance: they deceive the state by indistinguishably blending with it. thus, although in my analysis the camouflage state is deeply grounded in the social and historical context of the triple frontier, the relevance of this conceptual framework transcends this geographic and historical region. my case is reminiscent, for example, of political, economic, and social assemblages that arise through the merger of organized crime and legal order in post-soviet eastern europe (bobick 2011) and in central asia (reeves 2014), where the state is impersonated and performed without assuming that it is coterminous with the domain of the licit. it also echoes the shifting political and economic topographies of neoliberal sovereignty accompanying resource extraction throughout the african continent (chalfin 2010; ferguson 2006), as well as other infelicitous configurations of il/legality and dis/order in the centers and in the periphery of global powers, where capitalist markets thrive on maintaining degrees of lawlessness (comaroff and comaroff 2006). camouflage helps us understand why the intricate links between the state and illegalized practices can so often hide in plain sight. the story of the narcobombero as told against the background of corruption on the border reveals that state effects are created by endless refractions, which do more than blur the distinction between law and crime, between the deceived and the deceiving, between the original and the counterfeit. as taussig (1993, 47–48) writes about magical practice, here, too, “the representation shares in or acquires the properties of the represented.” camouflage does not merely blend the predictable dichotomous categories by which we approach and analyze the performance of the state, but i would argue that by obfuscating any clear distinction between the legal, the political, and the criminal, it actually enables states to happen. notes acknowledgments i dedicate this essay to the volunteer firefighters in the puerto iguazú fire department who, despite hardships, continue to honorably serve their community. i am grateful to richard kernaghan, ulla berg, martin holbraad, josiah heyman, catarina frois, mark maguire, daniel m. goldstein, and deividas šlekys for questions, comments, and advice that helped me write and revise this article. earlier versions of the essay benefited greatly from presentations at the meetings of the american anthropological association in 2013 and the european association of social anthropologists in 2014. thank you to cultural anthropology’s three anonymous reviewers for extensive feedback on this manuscript and especially to dominic boyer for his encouragement, guidance, and skillful editing. 1. “ex bombero voluntario detenido en corrientes con 300 kilos de marihuana” [volunteer firefighter arrested in corrientes with 300 kilograms of marijuana], radio cataratas, april 30, 2013. 2. “narcobombero: ‘no sabía lo que transportaba’” [narco firefighter: ‘i didn’t know what i was transporting’], la voz de cataratas, may 6, 2013. 3. “gendarmeria nacional incauto droga en la casa del ex bombero” [national gendarmerie found drugs in the house of former firefighter], cvi noticias, may 7, 2013. video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mefizjwiykm. 4. ieva jusionyte, bomberos [firefighters], documentary film, 2011, 51 min. 5. the international narcotics control strategy report (incsr) is annually published by the u.s. department of state. it is available at http://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2012/index.htm. scholars have criticized it for inaccuracies and a politicized agenda. 6. with a few notable exceptions (gupta 1995; smart 1993), corruption became an issue of interest to anthropologists fairly recently (e.g., blundo and olivier de sardan 2006; haller and shore 2005; hasty 2005; nuijten and anders 2007; reeves 2014; schneider and schneider 2003; smith 2007). rather than treating it normatively and considering it as a vice afflicting the body politic, these and other scholars used ethnographic evidence to show that corruption was in fact constitutive of legal order. 7. the corruption perceptions index ranks countries based on how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be. it is a composite index, drawing on corruption-related data from expert and business surveys carried out by a variety of independent institutions. data available at http://www.transparency.org/country. references abrams, philip 1988 “notes on the difficulty of studying the state.” journal of historical sociology no. 1: 58–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988.tb00004.x. agamben, giorgio 2005 state of exception. chicago: university of chicago press. aretxaga, begoña 2005 states of terror: begoña aretxaga’s essays. reno: center for basque studies, university of 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landscapes and throughscapes in italian forest worlds landscapes and throughscapes in italian forest worlds: thinking dramatically about the anthropocene andrew s. mathews university of california, santa cruz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6350-7533 the pine and chestnut forests of the monti pisani, only five kilometers south of lucca in central italy, feel very far from the tourist sights of the city center and from the industrial sprawl of paper, furniture, and shoe factories that spreads across the plain. as in many mediterranean places, mountains and valleys are near each other, but in many ways they constitute different worlds (braudel 1972–1973). these are certainly not the landscapes that most people think of when i tell them i am working in northern tuscany. the few human visitors are mushroom pickers, hunters, the occasional mountain biker, sometimes volunteer firefighters or road maintenance crews. although these forests are often empty of people, they are empty in a particular way; evidence of former human use is omnipresent. this is a place where people, trees, and other nonhumans have been entangled for a very long time. traces of these past relationships are visible in the forms of trees, areas of forest, banks, terrace walls, and drainage systems. through my practices of walking, looking, and wondering, i have been tracing the ghostly forms that have emerged from past encounters between people, plants, animals, and soils. from such practices of wondering, i have learned to tell stories about landscape change, which, i argue, suggest a way of engaging with the politics of global environmental change. these anthropogenic forest histories inspire contemporary environmental politics. the material traces of firewood cutting, tree cultivation, pastoralism, and plant disease are temporal rhythms that inspire projects of tree care or biomass energy production. each of these projects responds to a different sense of what these forests are, of where they might be going, and of how to act in the face of global environmental change. this multiplicity of pasts and futures can help us to make political sense of the anthropocene, the contemporary era when almost all ecosystems around the world have been in some measure affected by human activities.1 critics of climate-change policy (hulme 2012), and more recently of the concept of the anthropocene (moore 2015), have criticized depoliticized scientific accounts of global environmental change that focus on a single account of the world that is supposed to inspire political action to protect the environment. rather than recounting a single history that produced a unified landscape, in what follows i describe overlapping and interwoven throughscapes linked to multiple histories. from these storylines a different account of anthropocene politics can emerge. the first history i recount centers around the impact of international trade, which moved pathogens around the world and destroyed chestnut cultivation in this area between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. in this account, the storyline is linked to international trade, to the unintentional journeys of water-mold spores, and to the capacities of chestnut trees to develop new forms of symbiosis that halt the advance of some pathogens. the second history starts in the early nineteenth century, and it tells the tale of capitalism and industrialization. peasants and shepherds who were transformed into industrial and service workers emerge as key actors in this account.2 changing forms of agriculture and the gradual transformation of urban metabolisms caused fire-dependent pine trees to spread across these mountains when litter raking, pastoralism, and anthropogenic burning were eliminated. in the present moment, farmers, foresters, and others draw on these histories of transformation and cultivation as they imagine how they might transform parts of the landscape to bring into being different environmental futures. these landscapes are simultaneously concrete and material, historical and imaginative. they are linked to multiple histories and rhythms that can help us escape from thinking of nature or history as singular (what john law [2015] calls a “one-world world”). multiplying our understandings of possible pasts and futures, and of who might be helped or hurt by these futures, makes the anthropocene political. figure 1. monti pisani, with lucca in the background. photo by andrew s. mathews. figure 2. map of the area around monti pisani. map by fabio malfatti, using data from the regione toscana. the example of the monti pisani shows how we can learn to notice multiple coexisting anthropocenes through the mundane practices of walking, looking, and wondering at strange ontologies,3 of archival research, oral history, and drawing. these practices are suitable not only for forests, but for thinking through material politics in other parts of the world, from urban parks to river deltas and sewage systems. landscape facts, histories, and ontologies landscape is a deeply ambiguous term with a rich history. many scholars see landscape as an ideological construct, a canonical standard of elite taste that might support capitalism or state control (berger 1973; cosgrove 1985). more recently, kenneth olwig (1996, 630) has reclaimed a substantive understanding of landscape as “a place of human habitation and environmental interaction” with particular legal, cultural, and economic histories. as anna tsing (2015) points out in the mushroom at the end of the world, landscapes emerge through encounters between people and other beings, including soils, mushrooms, and disease organisms. in what follows i describe the kinds of landscapes and histories that emerge from encounters between people, trees, soils, and terraces in formerly cultivated landscapes in central italy. perhaps most important, this kind of landscape description pushes us to think about how particular forms emerge through encounters. ontologies are transformed through partial relations between these beings, and the forms of plants and terraces offer clues to the biographies of particular organisms. at a larger scale, landforms such as terraces and drainage systems tell us histories of human labor and attention to plants, soils, and weather. encounters both with individual organisms and with landscapes press us to explore or rediscover research methods of drawing and natural history. these methods prove well suited both to the open-ended nature of these encounters and to tracing the forms that result from encounters between people and nonhumans (people, sheep, trees), and between nonhumans and other nonhumans (trees, soils, disease, fire). such an ethnography of the landscape requires attention to the temporal rhythms of processes as different as rapidly moving fires and slow-growing trees, soil formation, daily cycles of weather, and the structural violence of politico-economic transformation and state formation. knowledge of the landscape, with its attention to multiplicity and scalar instability, behaves differently from the kinds of knowledge explored by much scholarship in the anthropology of science and in science and technology studies (sts). within sts, canonical work has concerned itself with how particular facts become stabilized and come to be accepted, such as the scallop reproduction described by michel callon (1986) or the pasteurization practices examined by bruno latour (1988). such approaches emerge from studies of laboratory practice, and they often describe how a single fact or version of the world is either accepted or rejected in particular locations and before particular audiences. more recent work has pointed to multiple enactments that emerge through practices linking multiple sites (mol 2002). knowledge of landscapes more closely resembles this way of thinking. in particular, thinking with enactments suggests a kind of surprise, given the indeterminacy and slipperiness of what is enacted (law and lien 2013). these qualities, as they arise from particular encounters with trees and terraces, form part of what produces the multiple coexisting and somewhat unstable histories and knowledges of landscape that i describe in this essay. knowledge of landscapes contains indeterminacy, texture, and a possibility of scale change quite alien to the kinds of facts with which sts and anthropology have mostly concerned themselves. such knowledge contains indeterminacy and fields of unresolved texture, smaller details that can become significant and change our understanding of what we take to be larger scales (or vice versa).4 this is not just a feature of the landscapes that we ordinarily think of. come close to a tree and you will see entire landscapes of relations at every scale, from the pattern of bark that tells you of an ancient tree to the tiny red fungi that show a tree to be infested by chestnut cancer (farmers notice these spores with fear) or the dry crackled callous that shows that the cancer has itself been infested by a virus that prevents it from killing the tree (chestnut farmers wait breathlessly for such signs of disease stabilization). come close to look at such details and your understanding of whether an area of forest landscape is doomed or healthy can radically change. the relations between details and large-scale patterns are always provisional: our changing understanding of a particular detail can change our perception at another scale entirely. i arrived at this kind of knowledge of landscape by moving back and forth between intimate encounters with details of tree form and landscape pattern, between interviews with farmers and visits to archives. as i moved back and forth, i gradually came to foreground two histories in accounting for some of the details, stories, and landscape patterns that had come to be significant for me. in this account of how i came to know about a landscape, i do not only draw on interviews or archival records. my own practices of noticing more-than-human relations of people, plants, and soils form part of the back-and-forth movement through which i came to settle, provisionally, on the histories and perceptions of landscape that i recount in this essay. within the sts tradition, the flourishing scholarship on infrastructure most closely resembles this way of thinking.5 like landscape, infrastructure engages with distributed patterns of material structures and the multiple local practices that sustain them. infrastructures can be (and usually are) multiple, they can lie through each other, and they can be sustained by multiple communities of use, as in jessica barnes’s (2014) account of drainage and irrigation infrastructure in egypt or ashley carse’s (2014) account of road and canal infrastructures in panama. there are important resonances between a more phenomenological approach to infrastructure (see chu 2014) and my own approach to landscape ethnography. in the forests where i work in italy, the capacities of particular chestnut trees to resist disease or to be grafted to produce fruit have given rise to tended trees, to linguistic classifications of these trees, and to an apparatus of law and property that protects the landscapes on which these trees live. linguistic terms, practices of care, and the morphologies of trees constitute a dense empirical field. words that describe enactments do not fully capture the material and imaginative surprises of the world and remain in a perpetually unstable relationship to what they denote. strange ontologies are present in the mundane and the everyday, from my meetings with shape-changing chestnut trees to my wondering whether a tree stump i encountered was dead or alive to my experience of looking up to notice the landscape pattern of flowering chestnut across a mountaintop. carla hustak and natasha myers’s (2012, 97) formulation of involutionary momentum draws attention to the processes through which i became involved with plants, trees, and terraces, to the “affective push and pull among bodies, including the affinities, ruptures, enmeshments and repulsions among organisms constantly inventing new ways to live with and alongside each other.” trees, diseases, and terraces are relational ontologies (see barad 2003) that compelled my attention and made me hesitate in disconcertment as i encountered beings that i can only partially describe. one method that is particularly suited to this experience of noticing the coming into being of perceptions through particular encounters is the use of drawings. a line gestures toward what mattered in a particular moment of perception when i noticed a partial relationship, and it explicitly relegates to the background what was not noticed or was not relevant to that encounter. in this practice of landscape ethnography, every perception is at once speculative, partial, and resolutely empirical. noticing landscape features, trees, or soils takes a double form of wondering (what is this thing that i am in relation with?) and wonder at the mysteriousness and indeterminacy of the world, where our descriptions are always provisional and partial. tim ingold (2011, 2012) has long argued that material forms emerge from ecological relations in a world of process. i would add that the unending emergence of forms of language and noticing constitute an important empirical fact about what it feels like to be human in a world of process, where descriptions are never enough and where more words might come to be needed to sharpen our capacity to notice and describe. my own changing sensorium provided data for this essay, as did the fact that my perceptions are persistent, embodied, and yet unstable. just as the descriptions of a particular organism are partial and tentative, so too are landscape descriptions partial and tentative and inhabited by many details not relevant at that level of perception. it is through a principled tacking back and forth between details and patterns that i learned to perceive new patterns and histories. in a classic article, the feminist geographer diane rocheleau (1995) draws on donna haraway’s concept of situated knowledges to argue for the use of multiple methods in political ecology. i suggest that we can expand on this insight to think of our current task as one of linking coexisting processes, histories, and ontological transformations that emerge through relations among beings. drawing on multiple lines of evidence and attending to details of plant and terrace form has allowed me to notice multiple histories and landscape patterns. these patterns are throughscapes, perceptible landscape patterns that exist in partial relation to each other and that overlap with each other but have different histories, organizations, and temporalities and are always unstable in relation to the details and textures that they only partially contain. as my colleague anna tsing pointed out to me on a forest walk, what i am calling throughscapes are also different ontologies partially linked to each other. throughscapes are intensely real, but they are also complex time machines.6 these are space-time patternings that i learned to notice through my work of linking sensory curiosity to archive and map, of linking drawings and photographs with field notes from walks and conversations with farmers, biologists, and others. reading ghostly presences in forests walking through the forests of the monti pisani with my botanist assistant francesco roma-marzio, i note what tree, shrub, and understory plant species we see and what forms they have, jotting these down as sketches in my notebook, making notes of impressions and speculations. as a botanist, francesco names understory plants for me, and the two of us provoke each other with stories of human use of landscapes. drawing on my training as a forester, i tell him how the shapes of trees and shrubs tell me stories of tree cutting and regrowth, of fire and grazing. echoes of conflicts over property and landscape are present in tree form. remnant ancient cultivated castagneti (chestnut orchards) tell us of centuries-long relationships with peasant agriculturalists who formerly sculpted chestnut, oak, and pine trees into the particular forms that produced food, timber, fodder, and fuel, while also providing pasture for sheep and goats (puccinelli 2010; giannini and gabbrielli 2013; squatriti 2013). notebooks, interviews, photographs, and sketches contain something of my phenomenological experience of encounters with shape-changing ancient trees and terrace systems. perhaps a stump is truly dead, but it may also resprout and come alive. the image below shows the first really large cultivated chestnut that francesco and i encountered. note the polloni (suckers) sprouting from the base of the tree. we guessed that the size of the polloni told us that they had been cut back five to eight years ago, but based on later experience, i would guess more like two or three years. figure 3. page from the author’s field notebook, with a sketch of an ancient chestnut tree, paired with a photo of the tree featuring francesco roma marzio. photo by andrew s. mathews. drawing is the method through which i do justice to this mundane ontological indeterminacy. the form of a cultivated chestnut tree tells me a story of its responses to encounters with peasants, diseases, fires, and soil movement processes. i draw this form in different ways, depending on whether i notice the details of disease cankers and imagine that this tree is doomed or whether i infer that it is on its way to a new symbiosis with disease-causing organisms when i notice new shoots and the scarring produced by disease containment. from these encounters i learn to produce a drawing that summarizes my perception of human–plant and plant–nonhuman interaction as they manifest in tree form. sometimes i accompany this drawing with the linguistic terms that sharpen my capacity to notice some differences and not others. my sensory apparatus is transformed by my own curiosity and by my journeys with farmers and foresters. they teach me words that change my sense of landscape patterns and my capacity to notice tree form. figure 4, below, comes from a conversation and forest walk with the young farmer stefano fazzi. stefano taught me to see the different bark textures above, below, and around a graft scar, to name the parts of the tree accordingly. stefano can recognize chestnut varieties on his apennine hillsides at a glance, something that even the most expert botanists cannot always do. my encounters with stefano’s trees and stories have permanently changed my sensory capacities. i cannot see trees in the same way now, as i learn new words and new ways of noticing texture and form. my capacity to notice is, however, not fully contained or tamed by the words i learn from stefano, francesco, or from foresters and scientists. their words are provisional, and they capture some aspect of the indeterminacy and shimmer of strange ontologies, but my perceptions may shift. i might need to tell still other stories with other words. figure 4. drawing of a cultivated chestnut tree. image and text by andrew s. mathews. multistemmed trees tell me of practices of peasant firewood cutting, known as ceduo (coppicing), and of the capacity of these trees to resprout from a stump or ceppo (see figure 5). conifer plantations at the top of the mountain tell me of struggles between the italian state and pastoralists. from the late nineteenth century onward, but especially during the fascist regime of benito mussolini (1922–1943), the national forest service saw the fires set by pastoralists as a grave threat to the forests. grazing and pastoral burning were ubiquitous and, in theory, heavily penalized, although in practice widespread and somewhat tolerated. from the late 1940s until the early 1980s, cold war and then less militarized national reforestation programs tried to redeem these contested mountain pastures. throughout this period, foresters saw tall and straight conifer trees as valuable and scientifically manageable, as a way of providing rural employment, producing timber, and halting environmental degradation. later, these plantations were seen as a solution to the rural agricultural abandonment engendered by industrialization and urbanization. for alessandra del chiaro, the daughter of a peasant smallholder, douglas fir (pseudotsuga menziesii) plantations near her farm lower down the mountain were a tax boondoggle for rich landowners, an ecological mistake. power-laden histories of natural-resource extraction and state-making leave traces on tree and landscape form. even as we notice the details of plant form, my companions and i often discuss history, politics, state-making, and global environmental change. francesco can recognize the multitude of understory plants (i cannot do this): he names native species and notices more recent alien arrivals, leading us to wonder about international trade and transportation networks. when we encounter old pastures covered with conifer plantations, francesco notices the meadow species crocus biflorus, which is unpalatable to cattle and sheep, hanging on beneath the conifers loved by the forest service. the persistence of these pasture flowers is a trace of the centuries of grazing by sheep and goats who would have avoided eating unpalatable plants and grasses. stories of sheep, grazing, and pastures launch francesco and me into conversations about the displacement of pastoralists by the forest service. he tells me of the contented outdoor life of his shepherd grandfather in puglia, who lived into his nineties. walking and paying attention to color, shape, and form press me to be alert both to textures (the background, which remains indeterminate) and to the emergent forms that come to matter (the foreground), which i highlight through sketches and drawings. a few pencil strokes can summarize the patterns that i notice when i take a picture. these line drawings can be the shapes of trees whose ontology is indeterminate, of field boundaries, or of larger landscape patches whose boundaries could be drawn otherwise, perhaps in relation to encounters with details that have come to have a larger significance. in many cases, patterns such as plant form gesture toward processes that i cannot see. a line drawing makes visible my relationship with a particular tree or terrace, my effort to show that this was a partial relation that failed to grasp other aspects of a chestnut stump that might live or die or change shape over time. a strong tradition of line drawings exists in archaeology, natural history, and field biology (canfield 2011), as well as, formerly, in cultural anthropology (evans-pritchard 1940; lévi-strauss 1955). because of the nature of their material, archaeologists have never abandoned drawings of changing animal anatomy or seed morphology as an important way of tracing histories of domestication that tell of human–nonhuman relationality. similarly, biologists continue to use drawings to highlight the key features that they track in telling stories about evolution and adaptation.7 cultural anthropologists, i suggest, might think of line drawing as a method appropriate to recording morphologies that emerge from relationalities across ontological and temporal difference, and to their own involvement with more-than-human beings. shape changers in the forest trees are long-lived shape changers; their form records biographies of survival in the face of fire, disease, grazing, and human cutting, lopping, and pruning. becoming attuned to tree form makes me notice the bizarre inventiveness of plants that change shape and move across the landscape too slowly for me to notice easily. the drawings in figure 5 make visible some of the different forms that chestnut trees can take.8 names for these forms emerged from the daily work of peasant farmers who worked with plant-soil-animal assemblages, and from conversations between peasant cultivators and the officials and literati who occasionally talked to them. in italy, a host of traditional technical terms for chestnut trees, terraces, and forests are now falling into disuse, known mainly to old people as well as historians, foresters, and anthropologists like me. old words tell of old relationships, but new words and plant varieties are also always potentially coming into existence from acts of noticing and care. in the winter of 2014, the farmer stefano fazzi, who lived in the nearby garfagnana area, told me that he had noticed that a particular chestnut variety on his land appeared immune to the invasive gall wasp dryocosmus kuriphilus, a pest that was devastating chestnut production in the region. stefano hoped to have his variety recognized and named, and to build collaborations with the academic establishment and the state. this was a speculative anthropocene political project, a way of resisting an invasive disease and perhaps also of adding to his livelihood. figure 5. a menagerie of chestnut forms. images and text by andrew s. mathews. these drawings emerged from days of walking across forest landscapes, of learning to notice the strange details that inhabit mundane perceptions, and from many conversations about these landscapes with farmers, officials, and others. the drawings come from photographs of particular trees and were often linked to the moment when i was taught a particular word. vernacchia came to me when walking with the smallholder francesca del chiaro and the plant scientist massimo giambastiani in february 2014. massimo is a biologist concerned with protecting traditional chestnut varieties. he showed me ancient chestnut trees in a final state of abandonment, mourning the loss of traditional cultivated varieties. francesca’s aged father giuseppe grows prized chestnut varieties on old olive terraces near their house on the slopes of the mountains. for both of them, histories of peasant tree care inspire a politics of caring about the shapes of trees, of maintaining plant varieties, and of respecting peasant knowledge. the drawing of ceduo came to me on a field trip with government foresters, who told me how this multistemmed plant might become a tall single-stemmed tree (ceduo affrancato).9 italian foresters love the idea of tall straight trees (ideally conifers), and historically they have tried to avoid the gnarled fruit trees or the multistemmed firewood forests desired by peasant farmers. farmers and peasants told me that to allow trees to grow too large was to risk having them classified as high forest (alto fusto), which might become bureaucratically impossible to cut and which might destabilize hillsides and terraces. my drawings are as much concepts as representations, then: they contain contested futures, they include my guess at how i can best communicate what i see (as a forester with a lifelong practice of walking landscapes) or have been taught to see by others. these drawings come from highly atypical photographs in which i have removed a tree from its context with other trees; no photograph can communicate what the skilled eye learns to see. photographs are too realistic, almost the worst way of communicating stories about form. my seeing emerges from walking, talking, touching, and wondering; each drawing is a diagram, a story, a description. like tree forms, terracing systems come in many shapes and have many names. these are easier to see in photographs (see figures 6 and 7 below). terraces and banks, which keep soil from washing downhill, are forms that emerged from peasant cultivators’ attention to plant form, a geomorphological consequence of their attention to plant morphology. when plant roots were washed clean, the plants failed to flourish; peasants responded by building terraces (mazzarosa 1846, 101). terracing came into being for many reasons, from capitalist investment to competitive display, but the most important factor was peasant farmers’ noticing the capacity of plants to gesture toward soil quality and water availability, processes that humans only dimly perceive. terrace and plant form gave rise to a rich vocabulary, to strong affective and aesthetic associations and to moral judgments. just as trees have many names for the many forms that have emerged from plant biographies, so too do terraces (pedreschi 1963). figure 6. stone terraces with olive trees, calci, lucca, 2016. photo by andrew s. mathews. figure 7. earthen terraces, san andrea del compito, 2014. photo by andrew s. mathews. terrazzamento (terrace) is a relatively recent word. older and more precise terms are now known to only a few people, as i learned when driving around the monti pisani with fabio casella. fabio is a municipal planning official who grew up in a peasant household on the monti pisani and whose lifelong passion has been maintaining pastures, terraces, and drainage systems (rizzo et al. 2009). fabio remembers firewood cutting and sheep grazing, and he names the kinds of terraces as he points them out to me. he reminds me that terraces are also always drainage systems, complex soil–water choreographies that take continual care. fabio is deeply concerned at the dramatic increase of fires and the expansion of the fire-prone pine species pino marittimo (pinus pinaster) across the monti pisani. stone firebreaks at the edge of old terraces kept fires in check, grazing kept pastures clear of trees that might burn, and litter raking made forests less flammable. for fabio the repetitive and rather monotonous landscape of pines signals loss and the threat of fire, or the landslides that might follow fire or terrace abandonment. where pines and chestnut trees mix, he and i both notice the older landscape pattern of ceduo or castagneto. fabio’s practices of terrace care constitute an anthropocene landscape politics that links the details of terracing systems and grazing to forest fires, landscape stability, and global environmental change. historical ecology: linking natural history, cadastral maps, and oral histories my natural-history observations and sketches, drawn from walking across the monti pisani and from conversations with many different companions, gave me a good sense of the present-day forest, haunted by the physical, linguistic, and imaginative traces of past cultivation. early nineteenth-century cadastral tax maps gave me a very different account, registering traces of encounters between tax collectors, landowners, and peasants who tried to manage multispecies choreographies on these landscapes. cadastral mapping projects tried to record who owned each piece of land and how the land was being used, with the aim of increasing taxation and propelling capitalist investment in buildings, infrastructure, or improved cultivation. in the tax records i found traces of encounters between landowners and the peasants who cultivated land on their behalf. we can hear something of the words they shared to talk about complex polycultural cultivation systems, ranging from chiuse (walled gardens) cultivated with mixtures of vigne a pergola (trellised vines) at the bottom of the valley to ceppato di castagno (coppiced chestnut), castagneto, pascolo (pasture), and pineta (pine forest) (catasto vecchio 1843). these descriptions emerged from a meeting between the tax assessor, who was also usually a local landowner (massoni 1999, 255–56), and the estate manager, peasant sharecropper, or small farmer who managed the land. these records preserve traces of an intimate relationship between plant mixtures and the peasant managers who described them, and between these peasants and landowner/tax assessors who estimated the value of crops. drawing on this tax register, i can compare the forms of plant cultivation in 1843 with what i saw during my walks in 2014. figure 8. comparing forests in 1843 and 2014: dominant tree forms on a transect walk from cima di vorno to monte faeta, lucca. images by andrew s. mathews. this drawing is an empirical diagram resulting from my walks and conversations with francesco, from interviews with foresters, farmers, and officials,10 and from visits to the archivio di stato in lucca. this drawing records histories of ruination, disastrous pathogen outbreaks, and the slower disaster of capitalism. in 1843 the landscape was dominated by castagneto with some pineta, a smaller area of ceduo managed for firewood, and a communal pasture at the top of the mountain. in 2014 the castagneto is almost entirely gone, pino marittimo occupies many areas, and chestnut ceduo covers most of the rest. at the top of the mountain exotic conifer plantations (pinus nigra, cedrus libani) have replaced the former common pasture. in many sections, pino marittimo has completely taken over, with scrubby stumps of ancient chestnuts lingering in an understory dominated by bracken (pteridium aquilinum), with occasional manna ash (fraxinus ornia), arbutus (arbutus unedo) and, on drier and higher areas, drought-adapted species (juniperus and ulex). often francesco and i would see ruined metati (chestnut smoking sheds) and abandoned terraces in areas now covered by pine forest. the conifer plantations at the top of the mountain are the last echo of cold war workfare programs that sought to prevent peasants from becoming communists. old people tell of the fines that the forest service used to impose on pastoralists, of the hard work of planting trees. some of the ceduo is still cut for domestic firewood, but much is destined to become wood chips for biomass energy production, an effort to stave off the slow disaster of climate change. seeing throughscapes: ink disease, industrialization, and forest fires plant forms emerge as a result of biographies of individuals and their histories of encounter with other beings: firewood cutters, fires, or epidemic pathogens. by walking across many parts of the landscape, my encounters with individual organisms taught me to perceive larger-scale landscape patterns and to wonder about the causal forces that brought these patterns into existence. i will briefly describe two throughscapes, landscape patterns that literally overlap and sit through each other. history 1: ink disease. cutting peasant-sheep-chestnut assemblages the scattered ancient chestnut stumps with emerging sprouts are the survivors of the pathogen phytopthora cambivora, which arrived here in the 1850s and destroyed low-elevation chestnut orchards, leaving only a few scattered surviving trees. plant scientists and peasants told me that phytopthora strikes like a fulmine (lightning bolt), killing trees from the roots to the crown in a matter of weeks. affected chestnut trees produced a foul-smelling black liquid in their roots, giving rise to the name male del inchiostro (ink disease), causing wholesale abandonment of chestnut cultivation at lower elevations (gibelli 1883; cipolloni 1893; bonucelli 1939) and allowing other tree species (not only pino marittimo) to colonize the landscape. by the 1930s the male del inchiostro had declined in virulence, perhaps as the ectomycorrhizal associates of trees learned to form less destructive associations with it (blom et al. 2009). chestnut ceduo and castagneto persisted at higher elevations where the pathogen did not strike. the spread of phytopthora around the world in the 1840s can be attributed to the unintended impact of nineteenth-century international trade, whose road networks and ports enabled the journeys of pathogens. in this account, peasants, trees, and soils, ectomycorrhizae and phytopthora are key actors who mutually transformed each other in unexpected ways. it would be easy to tell a history of invasive disease destroying an agro-ecological system, beginning with the arrival of the ink disease in the 1850s and ending on a note of cautious optimism inspired by the remnant chestnut trees clinging to the upper slopes of the monti pisani. this is certainly part of the story; it captures some part of the relations among people, trees, soils, and phytopthora. this storyline is accountable to the remnant low-elevation chestnut trees loved by massimo and alessandra, to the much larger areas of castagneto recorded in the tax registers, and to the ruined metati scattered across the landscape. the storyline, however, remains partial: in highlighting the material traces and absences produced by chestnut disease and international trade, it fails to notice a completely different pattern of presence and absence. history 2: industrialization and wildfire. cutting peasant-sheep-leaf-litter assemblages a different history starts fifty years earlier, around 1800, and is linked to capitalism and industrialization. this history tells of the disaggregation of the urban metabolism from the forests that formerly supplied fuel and fertilizer. it tells of the transformation from sharecropping peasants—whose care of sheep linked forest leaf-litter raking with fields, whose firewood cutting and charcoal burning supplied home heating—into industrial and now postindustrial workers. already in the early 1800s, many people in vorno, as in other towns around the monti pisani, were working in the flour, paper, paint, and gunpowder mills that clustered along the streams running down from the mountains (massoni 1999). by the 1860s, this water-powered industrialization was in full swing, not to be displaced until the arrival of oil-powered industrialization after world war ii.11 from the 1950s onward, the breakup of large estates on the lower slopes of the monti pisani allowed some sharecroppers to buy their land and become small farmers; others worked in factories. the next generation is increasingly one of postindustrial workers or workers in rural tourism. some of them maintain gardens or cut firewood, but sheep grazing and litter-raking have completely disappeared from the monti pisani. this absence also produces material presences: thick litter layers on forest floors, fire scars, burn areas, fire roads cut by volunteer firefighters or the forest service. this history tells of the long struggle of sharecroppers to scrape a living out of difficult soils in the face of sometimes oppressive landlords, of how some of these sharecroppers became smallholders (like francesca’s father) while others emigrated to cities or became industrial workers or officials (like fabio casella). this history, of capitalism dissolving peasant labor practices, which had linked trees, sheep, grass, and landscape form, has various conjunctures and moments of rapid change. perhaps the most telling conjuncture for this particular landscape was the shift from animal-plant fertilizer to chemical fertilizer.12 until the 1960s, peasants used to rake leaf litter in the forests and carry it downhill to terraces, where, combined with animal dung, it became valued fertilizer.13 one old farmer told me how the color of an entire hillside had changed from the red of his youth to the present-day green, as the backbreaking work of carrying baskets of leaf litter disappeared into memory. younger volunteer firefighters told me how large-scale forest fires arrived in the mid-1970s, about fifteen years after the abandonment of sheep grazing and litter raking. casella had collaborated with a fire scientist to experiment with restoring burning to the crest of the mountains in an effort to reduce at least the size and intensity of wildfires, which had caused the expansion of fire-adapted pino marittimo. this second landscape pattern, of the rather monotonous pine forest that dominates lower and medium elevations, especially on the southern side of the mountains, is accountable not to stories of disease and global trade, but to labor practices in fields and factories, to urban metabolism, and to the former linkages among sheep, fertilizer, leaf litter, and labor. when casella points to the deep leaf litter that makes forests flammable, he teaches me also to notice absences: of sheep, goats, and of the peasants who worked with them. a final force for landscape transformation linked to industrialization is a second disease, the chestnut cancer (chryphonectria parasitica), which arrived in this area in the 1950s. faced with this new pathogen, many farmers decided to sell the remnant higher-elevation chestnut groves that had survived the male del inchiostro to nearby tannin factories, which literally devoured ancient trees. like the ink disease, chestnut cancer was eventually slowed down by its own accumulation of relationships with other beings. in this case, the cancer acquired its own virus, which made it no longer lethal. logging for tannin production did not kill trees, but it transformed remaining chestnut orchards into ceduo. figure 9. detail from photo of monti pisani, with pine shown in dark grey and chestnut in light grey. image by andrew s. mathews. figure 10. chestnut and pine throughscapes on monti pisani. image by andrew s. mathews. in figures 9 and 10 you can see something of what i learned to see through my close encounters with pines and chestnuts and through my conversations with companions who taught me words that had emerged from practices of care and cultivation. from these encounters, i am pressed to see two different, provisionally stable throughscapes that lie through each other. by being near and close to particular trees, i learned to see color and texture so that a few days later, when i looked back at the monti pisani, my eyes were attuned to the particular reddish color of chestnut buds (light gray) and the gray-blue of pino marittimo (dark gray) (figure 9). as you can see, light and dark gray are mixed, but two landscape patterns are clearly visible, even as these patterns literally mix and lie through each other. my encounters with farmers and archives, my walking and noticing, had helped me perceive different patterns and histories. the pattern of remnant chestnut forest dominated by ancient trees and living stumps is linked to histories of international trade, peasant tree care, plant disease, and emerging symbioses between pathogens, plants, and microorganisms. the areas of pine forest are linked to the absence of sheep and peasants who formerly raked leaf litter, as well as to the recent forest fires that help young pines expand across the landscape. there is a continuous cross-talk between my close encounters with particular trees or ruins and my large-scale experiences of landscape patterns. by tacking back and forth between farmers and officials, between visits to the archive and walking, noticing, and speculating, i devise storylines linked to my perception of throughscapes, of patterns that contain multiplicities and mixtures. throughscapes overlap and lie through each other; they organize perception and anchor histories, but they are also somewhat provisional. the drawing in figure 10 could be redrawn in many ways: the lines are both perceptions and concepts that give rise to theories. conclusion in this essay i have described how i use methods drawn from natural history, oral history, landscape walks and interviews, and archival research, as well as from my own phenomenological experience of walking and noticing, to recount multiple histories of landscape change. these histories proceed at different rates in relation to different causes, and they have produced different landscape patterns in the present. i have suggested that reading landscape in this way makes visible multiple throughscapes, landscape patterns that lie through each other, are partially connected to each other, but are structured by particular more-than-human relations and proceed according to their own rhythms. as anna tsing pointed out to me, throughscapes are different ontologies and infrastructures that coexist with one another even if they have different histories. one throughscape is the rapidly changing postpeasant landscape of pine and fire, which is strongly linked to histories of capitalism and industrialization. the other is a much slower, changing postdisease chestnut landscape linked to longer histories of biological exchange and international trade. these throughscapes have considerable consistency of species composition and tree form; this repetitiveness could allow us to think of them as a kind of infrastructure (see carse 2014). much discussion of ontologies in recent anthropological debates has highlighted the incommensurability of radically different ontologies and temporalities, as in marisol de la cadena’s (2010) work on andean earth beings, which lie outside of history and are rendered unthinkable by the state. something like this noncommunication between ontologies took place in italian forestry officials’ attachment to conifer plantations and their hostility to the pastoral burning that formerly produced fire-resistant landscapes across the mediterranean (cevasco and moreno 2013). maintaining this kind of incommensurability takes ongoing political work (dove 1983; mathews 2005). in the account i give here, however, i point not to incommensurability across political-ontological differences, but to the mundane practices through which i learned to perceive multiple ontologies, histories, and the throughscapes that i could perceive at the same time. analogous methods could be used to notice multiple coexisting throughscapes in other places entirely, from urban spaces to industrial farms. each throughscape has a different storyline, a history with a different beginning, with different actors that change as a result of relationships with each other, and with spatial patterns that emerge differently at various scales. these throughscapes are not linked to a single history, but to multiple histories that emerge from my practice of attending to processes that proceed with very different rhythms, from rapidly moving fires to slower moving diseases and symbioses. landscapes are an interesting kind of thing here: they are quasi-objects, perceptual categories inhabited by a multiplicity of relations between living and nonliving beings, but they are also phenomenologically real; they have a certain color and texture and an instantly recognizable form, a repeated infrastructural pattern of abandoned chestnut groves or of fire-blasted pine forests. landscape patches are approximate, containing shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans (tsing 2015, 394). at the same time, they are concrete, recognizable, and linked to political and economic formations and histories (olwig 1996). in the account i have given of the monti pisani, histories and ontologies are multiple. each history is partial, so we can simultaneously entertain multiple histories and the provisionally stable landscape patterns to which i have linked them. these histories emerge from my practice of tacking back and forth between forest walks, scarred trees, conversations with farmers, and visits to the archive. unlike the classic facts of science and technology studies, which are stabilized by assenting witnesses and the networks in which they come to participate (or that admit to difference as realized through site-specific practices), this kind of knowledge of the landscape is inherently multiple across the same landscape and is always potentially unstable when details come to tell stories at other scales. in the monti pisani, knowledge of the landscape of large-scale patterns of ancient chestnut orchards is always potentially remade by small patterns on individual trees, such as disease or graft scars. a dying tree can change my understanding of a whole landscape; my sudden perception of blocks of conifer plantations may lead me to ask farmers and archives about these state-sponsored interventions. just as every drawing is a form that contains indeterminacy and multiplicity, so too my histories coexist with other histories and rhythms, possible patterns that are both empirically real and provisional, containing details that could change perceptions of patterns at other scales. ethnoecologists and scholars of traditional and indigenous ecological knowledge have long described the existence of rich domains of classification in areas of particular interest and practical work, as in e. e. evans-pritchard’s (1940) work on cattle or harold conklin’s (1955, 1957) work on hanunó’o farmers. other scholars have described how cultigens and the memories of their use are retained or lost (nazarea 2006). in this essay the historical depth of my evidence has allowed me to trace the emergence and disappearance of particular forms of noticing and linguistic description, as changing work practices cause words for tree form, terraces, or plant varieties to emerge or recede from common knowledge. these processes of emergence and disappearance resonate with the incomplete descriptions through which i learned to see and draw tree form and landscape pattern in the monti pisani. descriptions and classifications are always partial, both grasping and failing to grasp the world. involutionary encounters with particular beings literally draw me and my interlocutors in.14 these encounters sometimes demand particular words to refer to plant forms or landscape patterns, across local communities of practice or bureaucratic state-making. these plant forms are always partial, containing indeterminacy alongside what is resolved and perceived. in the monti pisani, different anthropocenes inspire projects of landscape restoration that draw on specific landscape histories to craft speculative, hopeful, and deeply political imagined futures. volunteer firefighters, inspired by their retelling of the impacts of the abandonment of pastoralism and litter raking, now talk of restoring burning to the crests of the monti pisani. another anthropocene politics is advocated by the biologist massimo giambastiani, who seeks to preserve low-elevation chestnut varieties that will be more resilient in the face of climate change. opponents of large biomass electricity plants in nearby bagni di lucca draw on the charisma and legitimacy of peasant firewood cutters to demand energy systems that feed local uses of heat energy, rather than supporting large plants that will power the national electricity grid. in each case, the historic forms and uses of the landscape animate future-oriented politics. each of these anthropocene political projects draws on histories of peasant experimentation and landscape use. none tries to reproduce the past; each seeks to make a livable present or prepare for future disaster. similarly, the political ecologies that have arisen in response to imperial and postcolonial projects of landscape transformation in the global south have always been political responses to one or another anthropocene. these political ecologies are not a depoliticized and singular managerial anthropocene, but multiple, deeply political anthropocenes that are linked to different landscape histories and futures. recent years have seen a heated debate about how to date the anthropocene. scholars have argued over whether the best date is the columbian exchange (when old and new world plants, animals, and diseases met each other), the neolithic origins of agriculture, the industrial revolution, or the 1945 atomic bomb test in new mexico (swanson 2017). a related discussion carried out mainly by humanists has focused on the risks and dangers of particular namings, asking whether the term anthropocene inappropriately highlights the power and imagination of humans, or of particular humans, or if perhaps it silences the role of capitalism (haraway 2016). these debates are valuable, but i argue that attention to landscapes and phenomenologies of encounter draws us toward the concept not of a singular anthropocene, but of multiple anthropocenes that coexist with each other. we can think of these anthropocenes as having multiple beginnings and storylines, each of which leaves much unseen. we can cultivate a dramatic form of attention that sustains multiple, competing stories of social and ecological change, of encounters between people, plants, soils, and diseases, while remaining alert to the limits of each account, to the excess that it fails to capture. ecological modelers, earth-systems scientists, and their humanist critics have been too hasty to assume that the anthropocene is one process and that it must begin at one particular time. if we are willing to notice multiple anthropocene temporal rhythms and overlapping throughscapes, we are closer to the kinds of events that multiple histories tell us. each history (like each ecological model) captures some aspect of the irreducible complexity of the world; each history follows the transformations and relations of particular beings while paying less attention to others; each ecological model is a partial account that encounters irreducible indeterminacy. dramatic modes of attention are good to think with here. when we watch a play, we are able to imagine that each character has a point of view, and we are willing to be entertained by a wholly unrealistic situation. drama requires and makes visible the imagination of the audience; it stages a multiplicity of coherent but partial worldviews, without demanding that the viewer choose one character as having the right vision of the world. in telling accounts of anthropocene landscapes in italy, i have drawn from the histories and biographies of particular plants, pathogens, and economic systems. i have laid out a partial but coherent account of several among many anthropocenes, while allowing myself to entertain still other anthropocene dramas. notes acknowledgments research for this article was carried out during sixteen months of fieldwork in 2013–2014, and in the summers of 2015 and 2016. earlier versions of this material were presented to the center for advanced study on arctic domestication in the era of the anthropocene at the norwegian academy of sciences in 2015 and 2016. marianne lien and nils bubandt generously and carefully read earlier drafts. i have talked through many versions of these ideas with anna tsing. 1. the term anthropocene was coined by paul crutzen and eugene stoermer (2000) and has given rise to a diverse set of responses from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. for a review of some recent approaches in the humanities and social sciences, see swanson, bubandt, and tsing 2015. 2. the term peasant is deeply loaded. in what follows, i use it to describe someone who might have identified themselves as a contadino. i use the term farmer for contemporary smallholders. 3. debates about ontologies have created much controversy during the past few years (bessire and bond 2014; blaser 2014). in this essay i focus on the ontologies that emerge through particular practices (lien and law 2011). 4. ecological and climate modelers are very familiar with this kind of scale-jumping, and seek to constrain it through practices of parametrization and tuning (edwards 2010) 5. infrastructure studies comprise a large and diverse literature (see larkin 2013). an early canonical formulation was provided by the feminist scholar susan leigh star (1999). 6. for a brilliant discussion of how we craft “time machines” by building relationships between particular nonhumans, see elaine gan’s (2017) work on rice in southeast asia. 7. i was inspired to plunge into drawing by a conversation with the biologist peter funk. 8. here, i affectionately acknowledge the drawings of oliver rackham (grove and rackham 2001). 9. affrancato literally means “freed.” it is telling that foresters see high forest as a kind of enfranchisement from servitude to peasant ceduo. 10. numerous interviews in 2015 and 2016 were carried out in collaboration with the anthropologist fabio malfatti. 11. for an account of water-powered industrialization in southern italy, see barca 2010. on hydroelectricity across italy, see armiero 2011. 12. well-matured night soil, bottino, from the city of lucca was used as fertilizer well into the 1950s. 13. litter raking was formerly ubiquitous across central and southern europe (gimmi et al. 2013). in italy this practice has passed almost unrecorded in forestry regulations, and was only picked up by ethnographic methods. 14. although coming from a different tradition, these findings resonate with scholarship on affect, which highlights attunement to “the forms and forces unfolding in scenes and encounters” (stewart 2017, 192). references armiero, marco 2011 a rugged nation: mountains and the making of modern italy. cambridge: white horse press. barad, karen 2003 “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs 28, no. 3: 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discipline has long been engaged with understanding different types of colonial orders. this hesitation results in a missed opportunity for anthropologists to learn from scholars working in indigenous studies. sovereignty and settler colonialism are frequently expressed as entwined critical frameworks that center indigenous perspectives. each has merits when considered on its own, but taken together, they offer greater theoretical insights about the nature of political authority, ones widely applicable beyond the confines of indian country. in this brief essay, i outline some of the key conversations regarding sovereignty happening in native north america, specifically within cultural anthropology, indigenous studies, and other related fields, paying particular attention to those that have proven highly productive for scholars working in the region and that hold the greatest promise for advancing intellectual debates in the discipline as a whole. in addressing native north america, or what is sometimes called indian country, i am referring specifically to scholarly debates by and about indigenous peoples subject to the authority of the u.s. and canadian states. obviously, mexico forms a significant part of north america proper, but the discourse surrounding indigenous rights in mexico is somewhat different, with claims to political self-determination often asserted in terms of autonomía and much less frequently in terms of sovereignty. autonomy and sovereignty have many similarities—a focus on self-governance or the right of indigenous peoples to maintain their unique forms of social, political, and cultural integrity, among other things—but these frameworks also differ significantly in their assumptions regarding territorial authority and statehood, differences that need careful parsing but lie beyond the scope of this essay. sovereignty has emerged as a key discursive framework for indigenous self-determination in both the united states and canada, in part because of the shared experiences of british colonialism and its successor states, and what is now a largely anglophone context that facilitates intellectual exchanges among indigenous actors across the region. the shared idiom of sovereignty is a specific discursive response to living under conditions of settler colonialism, a concept that has gained immense traction among indigenous intellectuals since the late 1990s. settler colonialism names many things, but among them it highlights ongoing attempts at political erasure while also refusing the idea that north american nation-states are in any sense postcolonial societies. although many scholars have taken settler colonialism to refer to a specifically western european form of imperialist expansion featuring permanent settlement that took place in the creation of canada, the united states, australia, and new zealand, the concept actually emerged in the israel-palestine context and can be applied to a variety of geopolitical settings.1 the australian historian patrick wolfe’s (1999, 2006) highly influential work argues that settler colonialism differs from franchise colonialism in several ways. first, the primary natural resource extracted under settler colonialism is indigenous land, a practice that leads to a second key distinction, what wolfe (1999, 27) refers to as “the logic of elimination.” although indigenous people have at times been used as a labor pool during the process of land expropriation, often their labor is eventually replaced with that of other populations, such as south asian indentured laborers in the case of guyana or african chattel slaves in the case of the united states. this replacement serves the goals of the new settler society, because the logical assumption is that the ongoing existence of indigenous peoples threatens the new social order: hence, to avoid them making an alternative claim to the land and their own political authority over it, they must be made to disappear. this process of elimination might occur via outright genocide, forced removal, or different forms of coercive cultural, social, and political assimilation. a third key difference that wolfe notes is that settlers claim indigenous lands as their own, with the intention of staying and building a new society. thus settler colonialism cannot be relegated to the past as something with only residual effects; rather, we need to understand it as an ongoing structure of oppression in which settlers actively maintain their rights to occupy indigenous territories in the present. scholars working in settler-colonial societies recognize that this oppressive relationship, as with other forms of colonialism, becomes justified via racialization, so that indigenous individuals and their collective polities are made to seem inferior to western european ones and thus to have less legitimate political claims (e.g., kauanui 2008; klopotek 2011; povinelli 2002). for scholars working in native north america, settler-colonial theory becomes especially productive when placed in conversation with giorgio agamben’s (1998, 2005) ideas on state sovereignty. agamben argues that modern state societies enact a particularly insidious form of sovereign violence by creating a state of exception, one that gives them the power to kill or make live and allows them to strip certain human beings of their political significance, reducing them to bare life and making them subject to state-sanctioned biological death. agamben’s ideas have had wide influence across various disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, including anthropology, particularly among scholars seeking to understand forms of state violence that are justified in the name of national sovereignty. his theory of sovereign power proves useful for understanding the genocidal regimes of, say, nazi germany, as well as those that have been experienced by indigenous peoples. in fact, his idea that modern expressions of state sovereignty create forms of bare life subject to extermination dovetails nicely with the logic of elimination in settler-colonial theory, a point noted by scott morgensen (2011a) in his thought-provoking article on this topic, which constitutes a major contribution to cultural anthropology. yet genocide is just one expression of the much broader eliminatory logic that characterizes settler societies, and in considering the specific context of indigenous experience, agamben’s ideas of sovereignty are challenged and pushed by indigenous studies in potentially more fruitful directions. for example, the literary scholar ewa płonowska ziarek (2008, 89–90) has noted that agamben’s concept of bare life, meaning the potential for the state to kill the minimized and liminal form of life that remains, at least as described in agamben’s original formulation, remains insufficient for understanding other forms of sovereign violence. the concept takes us only so far, because it reduces the social and political distinctions that once characterized human subjects, such as race, gender, class and sexuality—even though these differences are often the very grounds by which modern populations are targeted for bare life in the modern exercise of biopower. we can extend this list to include indigeneity as well, understood here not merely as a distinct racial, social, or cultural identity, but rather as an explicitly political subjectivity tied to the experience of living in the shadow of settler colonialism with an everyday sense of ongoing territorial invasion and dispossession (rifkin 2009).2 by maintaining these distinctions in our analyses of modern forms of biopower and following their through line, if you will, we are able to recognize not only how such distinctions are used to target particular kinds of human beings for bare life but also how they condition other forms of sovereign violence, such as sexual violence in the case of gender, slavery in the case of race, and settler colonialism in the case of indigeneity (simpson 2011).3 with indigeneity and settler colonialism as added lenses, we see that policies intent on social and political death, such as assimilation, missionization, relocation, allotment, termination, and even political incorporation via citizenship, were all designed to eliminate indigenous assertions of sovereignty over the land. and because political authority over a land base marks what is at stake in settler-colonial conflicts, scholars working in native north america have been quick to add that sovereign violence in the context of settler colonialism exceeds biopower. as such, agamben’s theories of the biopolitical are inadequate unless placed in conversation with geopolitical concerns (rifkin 2009; simpson 2011, 2014). settler colonialism offers other correctives about sovereignty not yet widely taken up within anthropology. for instance, settler colonialism insists on the need to acknowledge different forms of colonialism, including the specific version that characterizes native north america, and provides a framework by which we can understand how different colonialisms have led to multiple and competing forms of sovereignty that are messy and incomplete (bruyneel 2007; moreton-robinson 2007; rosen 2007). this fact becomes obvious in the context of u.s. federalism, where the federal government, states, and tribes all assert different forms of sovereignty and vie for political authority over the same land base. jessica cattelino’s (2008) book high stakes: florida seminole gaming and sovereignty provides an excellent case for understanding how these competing assertions of sovereignty play out on the ground. she offers two important interventions. the first moves us beyond classical debates about sovereignty that view it as either autonomous and inherent (a by-product of peoplehood or kingly authority, for instance) or derivative and dependent (as something that stems from external political recognition by other sovereigns).4 instead, she explores interdependent forms of sovereignty that are negotiated, partial, insecure, and demand diplomacy on all sides.5 in her second major contribution, cattelino explores how the circulation of capital is a sovereign force in and of itself, one that provides a key to how sovereignty functions in these more interdependent forms. she provides a neo-simmelian analysis of the ways in which florida seminoles exploit the fungibility of casino money, meaning its ability to be exchanged with other forms of symbolic and material capital, in ways that help shore up their own political authority and well-being as a community.6 the upshot of this body of work in native north america is that the state power generated by colonialism, in any of its forms, remains highly insecure and not a privileged site of sovereign authority. in fact, state sovereignty as a repressive force generates various forms of resistance to that sovereignty, including a whole slew of countersovereignties that exceed its more legal, formal, authorized, recognized, and official versions (see cramer 2005; klopotek 2011; povinelli 2002; miller 2003). anthropologists working around the world have expended a great deal of energy analyzing different cases in which state sovereignty is challenged, though often these examples focus on extralegal, criminal, and violent forms of resistance (hansen and stepputat 2006, 304–6). indigenous studies adds to this discussion an attention to the everyday forms of sovereignty generated in response to settler state authority. elizabeth povinelli’s (2006) work on self-sovereignty offers an important example, one in which she explores how intimacy is linked to modern notions of freedom and social order, becoming yet another space for everyday expressions of lived sovereignty—a point also taken up in the work of mark rifkin (2011, 2012) and scott morgensen (2011b). yet the most pathbreaking research to come along in recent years that explores extra-state forms of sovereignty is that of audra simpson (2014) in her book mohawk interruptus: life across the borders of settler states. simpson takes on the concept of resistance and offers instead the idea of refusal. theories of resistance tend to focus attention on how aspects of domination get reproduced by those doing the resisting, meaning that in countering oppression, the terms of debate and terrain of conflict are already predetermined—thus the idea that counterhegemony retains a kernel of hegemony, heterodoxy that of orthodoxy, violence begets more violence, and so on. simpson’s theory of refusal offers something else entirely: refusal is neither derivative nor reproductive, but rather an outright rejection of the externally imposed logics of settler-state sovereignty. in other words, the logic of elimination is met with the logic of indigenous continuity, and border crossings that demand settler-state passports are met with tribally generated documents that insist on mohawk nationhood. refusal is affective, material, historical, ideal, and even pleasurable—an act possibly more ontological than anything else of indigenous people insisting on their own unique way of being. simpson’s work has much to offer anthropologists working in other contexts, particularly those who want to rethink theories of power. as i have been arguing throughout this essay, such insights stem in part from a critical engagement with twined critiques of sovereignty and settler colonialism. these two analytical frameworks offer anthropology important correctives for thinking about indigenous people and their experiences. a case in point is the recent controversy surrounding the massachusetts senator elizabeth warren’s claims to cherokee and lenape ancestry, and how it reveals a particularly strong tendency in the united states and canada to minoritize indigeneity and take what should be debates about sovereignty, citizenship, political authority, and territorial jurisdiction, among other issues, and turn instead to questions of racial and cultural authenticity, or even genetic descent (franke-ruta 2012; krieg 2016).7 the controversy involves, on the one hand, senator warren, born and raised in oklahoma, who has claimed an indigenous identity for several decades, based almost exclusively on family stories of descent from a cherokee great-grandmother. on the other hand are members of the republican party, who have accused warren of both fanciful invention and racial opportunism, and then took the opportunity to ridicule her during public debates with hollywood war whoops, tomahawk chops, and derogatory taunts. lost in the controversy is any attention to american indian identity as a political status, one that rests on tribal sovereignty and the fundamental premise that tribes have the sovereign right to determine their own citizenry. lost, too, is attention to the way in which racism and white supremacy undergird settler colonialism and are both being manifested not only in the racist behavior of warren’s republican opponents but also in her narratives of indigenous decent, for these, too, are often linked to a settler desire to incorporate and domesticate indigeneity (sturm 2011). in bringing up the warren example, i am trying to draw attention to how the tendency to minoritize indigeneity elides critical differences between indigenous peoples and other minority groups (kauanui 2008, 636, 641–42). the obsessive concern with warren’s ancestry, phenotype, and dna distorts the fact that the only thing that really matters is if her tribal community claims her or her family—for this type of mutual recognition constitutes the very instantiation of tribal sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism. american indians might ask warren a very different set of questions, such as who is your family, where are they from, and are they recognized by a tribal government or community, even if informally? they might also want to know how warren practices sovereignty in her everyday life by maintaining community ties, evincing her own indigenous identity, or supporting indigenous rights. these are the kinds of questions that should be asked, and that the general public might be more willing to ask, if anthropologists were leading the way by engaging more fully with the groundbreaking work on sovereignty and settler colonialism coming out of indian country. notes 1. for more on this topic, see j. kēhaulani kauanui’s (2016) critical genealogy of settler-colonial theory. 2. race, culture, and other social categories of identity do condition indigeneity, but they do not define it. indigeneity is an explicitly political status that is recognized by the united nations, indigenous governments, and federal indian law. most scholars working in native north america are quick to foreground the political basis of indigenous status, because other aspects of identity, particularly race and culture, have often been used in the political arena to delegitimize indigenous rights claims. 3. race is a more general category here, but i wish to note that in the case of chattel slavery, the category of blackness has unique historical valences. so, although we can acknowledge that other categories of people were also enslaved, including indigenous people, the experience of chattel slavery is not equivalent to these other forms of enslavement, and it is more productive to keep different processes of racialization in conversation when challenging the white supremacy that undergirds both slavery and settler colonialism. 4. for an excellent overview of sovereignty, particularly as it has developed over time and come to be employed by indigenous people in the united states, see the introductory chapter to joanne barker’s (2005) edited volume sovereignty matters. 5. jean dennison (2012) takes these arguments a step further in her recent book on osage constitutional reform by showing how indigenous expressions of sovereignty are often entangled with settler society and its expectations regarding indigeneity. 6. courtney lewis (2012) makes a similar point about negotiated sovereignty, based on her ethnography of tribal businesses among the eastern band of cherokee indians in north carolina. 7. for a useful counter to these mainstream media sources, made from a cherokee perspective, see steve russell’s (2012) commentary on the elizabeth warren controversy in indian country today. references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. originally published in 1995. 2005 state of exception. translated by kevin atell. chicago: university of chicago press. originally published in 1993. barker, joanne, ed. 2005 sovereignty matters: location of contestation and possibility in indigenous struggles for self-determination. lincoln: university of nebraska press. bruyneel, kevin 2007 the third space of sovereignty: the postcolonial politics of u.s.–indigenous relations. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. cattelino, jessica r. 2008 high stakes: florida seminole gaming and sovereignty. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cramer, renée ann 2005 cash, color, and colonialism: the politics of tribal acknowledgment. norman: university of oklahoma press. dennison, jean 2012 colonial entanglement: constituting a twenty-first-century osage nation. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. franke-ruta, garance 2012 “is elizabeth warren native american or what?” atlantic, may 20. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/is-elizabeth-warren-native-american-or-what/257415. hansen, thomas blom, and finn stepputat 2006 “sovereignty revisited.” annual review of anthropology 35: 295–315. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317. kauanui, j. kēhaulani 2008 “colonialism in equality: hawaiian sovereignty and the question of u.s. civil rights.” south atlantic quarterly 107, no. 4: 635–50. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2008-010. 2016 “‘a structure, not an event’: settler colonialism and enduring indigeneity.” lateral 5, no. 1. http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui. klopotek, brian 2011 recognition odysseys: indigeneity, race and federal tribal recognition policy in three louisiana communities. durham, n.c.: duke university press. krieg, gregory 2016 “here’s the deal with elizabeth warren’s native american heritage.” cnn politics, june 29. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/29/politics/elizabeth-warren-native-american-pocahontas. lewis, courtney 2012 “the business of being cherokee: an examination of the transformative power and vision of small businesses on the qualla boundary of the eastern band of cherokee indians.” phd dissertation, university of north carolina, chapel hill. https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:983f1472-6ee2-43f5-ae0e-3349961d266d. miller, bruce granville 2003 invisible indigenes: the politics of nonrecognition. lincoln: university of nebraska press. moreton-robinson, aileen, ed. 2007 sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters. crows nest, australia: allen and unwin. morgensen, scott lauria 2011a “the biopolitics of settler colonialism: right here, right now.” settler colonial studies 1, no. 1: 52–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2011.10648801. 2011b spaces between us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2002 the cunning of recognition: indigenous alterities and the making of australian multiculturalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2006 the empire of love: toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, and carnality. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rifkin, mark 2009 “indigenizing agamben: rethinking sovereignty in light of the ‘peculiar’ status of native peoples.” cultural critique, no. 73: 88–124. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.0.0049. 2011 when did indians become straight? kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty. new york: oxford university press. 2012 the erotics of sovereignty: queer native writing in the era of self-determination. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. rosen, deborah a. 2007 american indians and state law: sovereignty, race, and citizenship, 1790–1880. lincoln: university of nebraska press. russell, steve 2012 “elizabeth warren: box-checking for fun and profit.” indian country today, may 17. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/05/16/elizabeth-warren-box-checking-fun-and-profit. simpson, audra 2011 “settlement’s secret.” cultural anthropology 26, no. 2: 205–217. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01095.x. 2014 mohawk interruptus: life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sturm, circe 2011 becoming indian: the struggle over cherokee identity in the twenty-first century. santa fe, n.m.: school for advanced research press. wolfe, patrick 1999 settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. new york: cassell. 2006 “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8, no. 4: 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. ziarek, ewa płonowska 2008 “bare life on strike: notes on the biopolitics of race and gender.” south atlantic quarterly 107, no. 1: 89–105. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2007-057. race, sovereignty, and civil rights race, sovereignty, and civil rights: understanding the cherokee freedmen controversy circe sturm university of texas at austin they spoke cherokee, lived among cherokees, and shared cherokee ways of life, yet they and their descendants have rarely been accepted as legitimate cherokee people. this is the long-standing situation of the cherokee freedmen, the descendants of african cherokee slaves once held by cherokee slave owners.1 despite a treaty in 1866 between the cherokee nation and the u.s. government granting them full tribal citizenship (treaty with the cherokee, 1866, 14 stat. 799), cherokee freedmen continue to be one of the most marginalized communities within native north america. in a series of court cases during the past 150 years, cherokee freedmen in oklahoma have sought full tribal citizenship within the cherokee nation, something they believe is their legal and moral right. these rights have been denied for many reasons, often because most freedmen lack a certificate degree of indian blood (cdib) and are assumed, as a class, to have no lineal blood ties to the cherokee nation.2 yet in fact many freedmen with cherokee ancestry cannot obtain a cdib because they descend from black cherokees who were racially misclassified on a tribal census known as the dawes rolls, created at the turn of the twentieth century for the purpose of land allotment. at that time, most african cherokee individuals were placed on the freedmen rolls of the cherokee census, which are now interpreted as the “black” or non-indian rolls, rather than the “cherokee by blood” rolls. whether or not they have cherokee ancestry, cherokee freedmen have encountered intense opposition whenever they have sought the full rights and benefits given other tribal citizens. that opposition has usually played out in federal and tribal courts. more recently, however, in 2006 and 2007, opposition to freedmen recognition took place on a wider scale than ever before: in public speeches, grassroots petitions, e-mail campaigns, and letters to the editor in the tribal newspaper. cherokee citizens in oklahoma publicly debated the status of cherokee freedmen because their principal chief, chadwick smith, had called for an unprecedented special election to change tribal citizenship requirements. the proposed change would amend the cherokee constitution to specify that all cherokee citizens had to descend from ancestors listed on the dawes rolls as cherokees by blood. because the freedmen were enrolled in a separate category—on what amounted to a black citizen roll that did not specify any cherokee blood quantum—the amendment would effectively deny the cherokee freedmen a place in the tribe once and for all. the political controversy surrounding the special election provides an excellent case study for exploring the intersections of race and sovereignty. the ongoing story of the cherokee freedmen’s struggle for political recognition reveals the tensions between two competing sets of rights claims—civil rights versus tribal sovereignty—that are often in conflict in indian country in ways not yet fully explored. while civil rights apply to everyone equally and are understood to be largely about individual equality and full incorporation into the nation-state, tribal sovereignty concerns collective rights and some degree of political autonomy from the nation-state. civil rights are also explicitly imagined as an antidote to racial discrimination, whereas sovereign rights are associated less with race and racism and more with the unique political status of indigenous peoples as citizens of domestic dependent nations. in fact, the uniqueness of the indigenous position is often foregrounded within native american studies, where the rallying cry has long been “american indian tribes are nations, not minorities” (wilkins 2001, 33). the same holds true for federal indian law, where “american indian” has been repeatedly upheld as an explicitly political rather than racial category (see rolnick 2011 on morton v. mancari 417 u.s. 535 [1974]; and strong 2005 on the indian child welfare act, 25 u.s.c. § 1901–1963 [1978]). this insistence on indian as a political category is understandable given that, as the chickasaw literary scholar jodi byrd (2011, 34) has so astutely argued, creating “indian” as a racial identity out of more than five hundred nations is a process of minoritization under settler colonialism that makes racial what is in fact international. furthermore, when we try to understand contemporary indigenous politics in the united states using standard tropes of racial struggle, we can find them insufficient and even distorting. as the native hawaiian scholar j. kēhaulani kauanui (2008, 636, 641–42) points out, not only do indigenous people have radically different goals than those that emerge from the project of civil rights but “issues of indigenous politics are inadequately addressed by either civil rights discourse or pluralist discourses of inclusion, even while they are misconstrued as [being] race based.” yet while the lens of racial struggle, and more specifically of civil rights, can obscure our understanding of indigenous political processes, so too can insisting that the exercise of tribal sovereignty is a strictly political process without significant racial dimensions. in this article, i want to put the racial and the political back together again, because that is in fact how they function in the world, to explore how racial dynamics can both empower and undermine tribal sovereignty. my hope is that with careful ethnographic attention to the diverse articulations of race and sovereignty occurring in the cherokee nation between 2006 and 2007, we might rethink some of the lingering effects of settler colonialism as a political project.3 blood measures: the origins of the special election controversy the origins of the special election controversy go back to 1983. that year, the cherokee tribal council annotated the cherokee national code to specify that “tribal membership is derived only through proof of cherokee blood based on the final rolls” (11 cnca § 12). for the past three decades, the descendants of cherokee freedmen have argued in cases before federal and tribal courts that this decision violates not only the treaty of 1866 but also the cherokee nation’s own constitution, and that this relatively new blood requirement places an undue burden on freedmen descendants. even those with proof of cherokee ancestry in other documents cannot satisfy the requirements for tribal citizenship because their relatives were racially misclassified on the dawes rolls in the first place—meaning they were placed on the freedmen rolls, rather than on the cherokee by blood rolls. yet the decisions reached in nearly every case before the federal courts asserted that u.s. courts have no jurisdiction over the cherokee freedmen’s citizenship status because it constitutes an internal tribal dispute and thus a matter of tribal sovereignty. the principle of sovereignty, as understood in u.s. federal indian law, means that only the cherokee nation and its people can determine its own citizenry. although the freedmen have argued repeatedly that racial bias prevents them from getting a fair hearing in the tribal courts, the federal courts have consistently upheld the principle of tribal sovereignty as something that trumps the freedmen’s call for civil rights. when the freedmen did eventually turn from the federal to the tribal courts in the 1998 case of bernice riggs, racial bias seemed to influence the final decision. using tribal and federal documents, riggs traced her lineage to a cherokee forebear who had served in the indian home guard during the civil war—evidence that the cherokee court acknowledged as valid proof of cherokee ancestry. yet because her cherokee ancestor had died before the completion of the dawes enrollment process, his descendants were listed on the freedmen rolls rather than on the cherokee by blood rolls. as a result, riggs did not qualify for tribal citizenship. the court made no allowance for the fact that dawes applicants with cherokee and white ancestry would not have faced the same potential for racial misclassification and ensuing loss of political standing. in the end, not only did the cherokee judicial appeals tribunal (jat), now known as the cherokee nation supreme court, delay the riggs decision for nearly three years but it upheld business as usual, stating that freedmen appeals for citizenship constituted a special class and would have to be heard on a case-by-case basis (riggs v. ummerteskee, jat-97-03). riggs was denied cherokee citizenship in the name of tribal sovereignty, and the long-awaited decision was in fact no decision at all, as it left unresolved the question of the freedmen’s collective rights to tribal citizenship. a turning point came in september 2004, when david cornsilk, a cherokee citizen and lay lawyer, filed another lawsuit in the cherokee courts on behalf of lucy allen, a cherokee freedmen descendant (allen v. cherokee nation tribal council, et al., jat-04-09). the facts of the case closely resembled those presented by riggs. allen had both african and indian forebears. some of her ancestors had been listed on the cherokee freedmen rolls, while others had been recorded as cherokee indians on earlier tribal rolls, but none of them appeared on the dawes cherokee by blood rolls. although allen could prove that she had both cherokee freedmen and cherokee indian ancestry, she still remained ineligible for cherokee citizenship, again because of the new cherokee blood requirement spelled out in section 12 of the cherokee national code (11 cnca § 12). the arguments in allen differed slightly from those presented in riggs in that they focused less on the bureaucratic erasure entailed in the dawes enrollment process and more on the illegality of the amended code according to the cherokee nation’s own law. this latter point—that section 12 violated the cherokee nation’s own constitution—proved the most decisive factor in changing the opinion of the cherokee court. shortly after the allen case was heard, political turmoil erupted in the cherokee nation that impacted all branches of tribal government; thus the court did not reach a decision regarding the case for another two years (sturm 2011, 147–48). eventually, on march 7, 2006, the cherokee nation supreme court determined that section 12 of the cherokee national code was indeed unconstitutional. the majority opinion, written by justice stacy l. leeds, stated that according to the 1975 cherokee constitution, “all members of the cherokee nation must be citizens as proven by reference to the dawes commission rolls. … there is simply no ‘by blood’ requirement in article iii. there is no ambiguity to resolve. the words ‘by blood’ or ‘cherokee by blood’ do not appear” (jat-04-09, 13, 3). leeds clarified that what mattered in determining eligibility for tribal citizenship was lineal descent from relatives politically associated with the cherokee nation and recognized as its citizens—whether they were white, black, cherokee, or other adopted indians. she went on to assert that because the freedmen were enumerated as citizens of the cherokee nation on the dawes rolls, they were also expressly included as citizens under the 1975 constitution, and thus continued to have rights of citizenship at present (jat-04-09, 13). this momentous decision was cause for great celebration among descendants of the cherokee freedmen, and the tribal registrar quickly moved in the spring of 2006 to create a new registration form for freedmen applicants, one with no cdib requirement. other quarters of the cherokee nation showed a less jubilant mood. some tribal citizens and political leaders immediately began questioning the cherokee ccourt’s decision, believing that even if the tribal constitution had not specified an ancestry requirement for citizenship, kinship was the fundamental glue holding together cherokee society. for them, cherokee blood constituted a critical measure of tribal belonging, and they assumed that cherokee freedmen had no kinship ties with cherokee people. however, only a week after the ruling, principal chief chad smith raised another, more inflammatory set of concerns. on march 13, 2006, he addressed the tribal council, stating that citizenship was an important matter of sovereignty that should be determined by the cherokee people themselves. he went on to say that many cherokee citizens disagreed with the court’s decision because they believed the freedmen had done nothing for the tribe in the past one hundred years and that their ancestors had received compensation through the receipt of allotments as slave reparations, unlike freed slaves in the southern united states (smith 2006; vann 2006a). by interjecting the idea of slave reparations into the contemporary cherokee freedmen controversy, smith attempted to draw a political and racial distinction between cherokees and cherokee freedmen descendants that does not exist, at least not as he has suggested. under the general allotment act of 1887, also known as the dawes act, all cherokee citizens received individual parcels of land, whether they were enumerated on the dawes rolls as cherokees by blood, as “intermarried whites,” or as freedmen. although there were differences in the size and location of the allotments, as well as in the restrictions placed on them, they were distributed to all citizens of the cherokee nation equally. thus allotments were not a means by which the cherokee nation compensated the previously enslaved for their labor, but rather a way in which the nation acknowledged the freedmen as a class of citizens with a legitimate share in tribal holdings. the argument that the freedmen were paid off is not chief smith’s unique vision but is one of several that exacerbate tensions over race and class in the cherokee nation, for it portrays freedmen descendants as a group for whom economic greed motivates their desire for political recognition. whether during the controversy the arguments against freedmen inclusion focused on blood kinship, economic greed, or some other factor, they were frequently articulated in the name of a racialized national sovereignty. in fact, from march 2006 forward, smith went from town to town in northeastern oklahoma, pressing for a vote on the freedmen’s citizenship rights and hoping to secure a constitutional amendment that would define the cherokee nation in terms of “blood” (as a proxy for both race and kinship) for the first time. freedmen opponents like chief smith had two options: the question of blood-based citizenship could be placed on the next general election ballot by the tribal council or by citizens petitioning for a referendum. a few months later, during its regularly scheduled june 2006 meeting, a majority of the tribal council voted to place the citizenship question before the cherokee people as a constitutional amendment. the vote was scheduled to take place during the next tribal elections to be held a year later in june 2007, but some cherokee citizens expressed dissatisfaction with having to wait that long. instead, they began a petition drive calling for an unprecedented special election. according to the newly revised cherokee constitution (2003), cherokee citizens can petition to amend their constitution with the support of at least fifteen percent of registered voters. because there are far fewer registered voters than the nearly 270,000 tribal citizens, the petition was approved on the basis of only 2,100 signatures. as a result, the cherokee nation scheduled a special election to decide the freedmen’s fate on march 3, 2007. several former tribal officials, including former deputy chief john ketcher, who had served under principal chief wilma mankiller, became the driving force behind the call for a constitutional amendment. in the months preceding the special election, arguments over cherokee citizenship, nationalism, and identity were often framed in terms of race, rather than ancestry, at least among those supporting the amendment. a key idea behind the push for change was that cherokees had a right to define themselves in explicitly racial terms as an indian nation, even in the face of a far more complex historical reality. i quote at length from a paid advertisement in the february 2007 edition of the tribal newspaper the cherokee phoenix, because it represents these types of arguments. the advertisement, in which ketcher addressed cherokee citizens, urged cherokees to vote in favor of the amendment: march 3 you will vote on who can be members of the cherokee nation. voting yes means that only indians will be members of the cherokee nation. this includes the cherokees by blood, cherokee shawnees and cherokee delawares. voting no means that non-indians including freedmen (former slaves and non-indians of african descent) and inter-married whites will be members of the cherokee nation. who are the freedmen? according to the dawes commission and federal law they are former slaves of cherokees and non-indians of african descent. in 1906, the dawes commission created rolls for freedmen and inter-married whites, cherokees by blood, cherokee shawnees by blood and cherokee delawares by blood. the dawes commission determined freedmen and inter-married whites had no indian blood. freedmen are not “black indians” otherwise they would be listed on the dawes roll as cherokee by blood. what does it mean if i vote yes on the amendment? it means you have to have an indian ancestor on the dawes roll to be a member of the cherokee nation. it means the cherokee nation will be an indian tribe made up of indians. the dawes roll is the base roll for cherokee membership. it will mean non-indians such as freedmen and inter-married whites will not be members. what does it mean if i vote no on the amendment? it means approximately 40,000 non-indian freedmen and inter-married whites will be eligible for cherokee nation membership and entitled to all the services and benefits cherokees received today. it means these 40,000 non-indians will be eligible to use the indian hospitals and clinics, receive housing and education scholarships and indian preference in contracting and employment. (ketcher 2007, 20; emphasis in the original) as seen in this advertisement, the call for new citizenship requirements reflects a more explicitly racialized tribal nationalism, especially if we consider the fact that throughout much of its history, the cherokee nation has been a racially and ethnically plural society, incorporating other tribes (such as the loyal shawnee and delaware), other individual indians (including natchez and catawba people), african american freedmen, african cherokee freedmen, and intermarried whites. to protect racial distinctiveness as a national property is the only reason why the citizenship amendment would explicitly include other indians, meaning the loyal shawnee and delaware, but not intermarried whites and cherokee freedmen. instead, the discourse repeatedly cast the latter two groups as non-indians (cherokee nation 2007a).4 to further challenge the case of the cherokee freedmen, supporters of the constitutional amendment also played on anti-black sentiments among some sectors of the cherokee population, ones that, again, equated blackness with economic opportunism. in the same paid advertisement, ketcher (2007, 20) explained the reason why the cherokee freedmen desired inclusion in the cherokee nation: “their leader told them they would get benefits and services such as using the indian hospital and clinics, educational scholarships, housing, social services, preference in employment and contracting, voting in elections and holding cherokee nation office.” he then summarized why cherokees should vote in favor of the amendment: when a group of non-indians wants to be cherokees, not having a drop of cherokee blood, and take away the few benefits that are left it is an issue of “enough is enough.” many cherokees don’t want non-indians claiming to be cherokee. many cherokees don’t want to stand in longer lines for services from the cherokee nation. many cherokees don’t want to have to wait longer at the indian hospital because of 40,000 non-indians using these health facilities. many cherokees want the cherokee nation to be an indian tribe made up of indians just like every other tribe in the united states. ketcher’s rhetoric implied that allowing the cherokee freedmen to remain citizens would result in a flood of opportunistic non-indian enrollments quickly transforming the cherokee nation into a welfare state. echoing the anti-freedmen rhetoric of the ketcher advertisement, darren buzzard, a cherokee nation employee, wrote an even more disturbing letter to the cherokee councilwoman linda o’leary that also circulated widely during the weeks preceding the special election. “don’t get taken advantage of by these people,” he warned of the freedmen. “they will suck you dry.” he went on to write, “don’t let black freedmen back you into a corner. protect cherokee culture for our children. for our daughter[s] … fight against the infiltration” (knickmeyer 2007; emphasis in the original). not only was buzzard labeling the freedmen as black to associate them with racial stereotypes about welfare and aggression but he also raised the specter of black indian miscegenation as a threat to cherokee women’s virtue—a sentiment that seemed to come straight from the jim crow south. his fear of miscegenation evokes not only a concern about interracial sex but also, by extension, about the potential for black indian offspring to compromise the racial integrity of the cherokee nation. this concern with racial integrity and indian identity appears ironic, given the cherokee nation’s long history of racial inclusiveness and its current enrollment policies requiring proof of lineal descent from a dawes enrollee, rather than a specific cherokee indian blood quantum. because no minimal degree of ancestry is required, current tribal citizens have cdibs that range from “full-blood” cherokee ancestry to “1/4096,” a fact well known and sometimes controversial in indian country. cherokee citizens are extremely diverse, and one would assume that the tribe’s policy of lineal descent is meant to measure kinship and historical political association rather than racial identity. yet that same policy also introduces some racial insecurity. many cherokees do conflate ancestry with race, partially because of their awareness that the broader public racializes their status as an indigenous nation. so, another concern is that the appearance of racial dilution may threaten their political recognition and eventually their sovereignty. for many cherokee, the logic of hypodescent, or the so-called one-drop rule, that overdetermines the social and racial classification of african descendants in the united states, creates a situation in which cherokee freedmen citizens threaten the cherokee nation’s status as a tribe of indians more than do cherokee-white descendants or any other admixtures. ironically, the same holds true even in cases where cherokee freedmen have greater degrees of cherokee blood than other segments of the tribal population. not surprisingly, this highly racialized discourse outraged the cherokee freedmen, and they responded with their own information campaign. they argued that casting cherokee national identity strictly in terms of blood or race ignored all other forms of cherokee social and political belonging that had previously constituted cherokee citizenship in the nation’s long history. they pointed to the ways in which freedmen had participated in the civic and social life of the cherokee nation, even as it seemed to grow increasingly hostile to their inclusion. as evidence, they named six cherokee freedmen leaders who had served on the cherokee national council: joseph brown in 1875, frank vann in 1887, jerry alberty in 1889, stick ross in 1893, and both ned irons and samuel stidham in 1895 (vann 2006a). they described how they had continued to reside within the cherokee nation proper, primarily in its original illinois, muskogee, tahlequah, and cooweescoowee districts, the same areas in which freedmen had once held elected political office, and how they had continued to participate in the newly reformed cherokee national government in the early 1970s, even though few benefits were then available to citizens with less than one-quarter of cherokee blood (feldhousen-giles 2007, 189–90). they went on to describe other forms of civic engagement, beyond formal political participation, some of which seem surprising given that anti-black racism in the twentieth century would likely compel freedmen descendants into identifying themselves as black, rather than cherokee. resisting that kind of hegemonic thinking, the freedmen continued to identify themselves in more complex ways. by their own accounts, they did so by continuing to speak cherokee and holding cherokee-language church services in primarily cherokee freedmen congregations (knickmeyer 2007). some of those who did not speak the language attended cherokee language classes alongside other cherokee citizens. others joined the cherokee historical society, taught at local indian schools, and worked for the bureau of indian affairs (bia), while still others worked at the local indian hospital as nurses and orderlies. another group of freedmen helped build the cherokee community building in south coffeyville, and until about forty years ago, when its fire was extinguished, freedman even had their own ceremonial ground in nowata county (vann 2006b). all these examples served as a direct counter to the chief’s claim that freedmen had disappeared from cherokee civic life in the past century. when they knew their rights to tribal citizenship were on the line, freedmen fought hard to challenge the negative discourse circulating in the press and in private conversations. despite their efforts, they did not manage to stop the special election that would give cherokee citizens a stark choice between including and excluding several thousand individuals. the special election and its repercussions amid rather contentious debates the polls for the special election opened on march 3, 2007. maybe the wintry weather kept people at home, or maybe it was some trepidation among cherokee voters who acknowledged the importance of citizenship to tribal sovereignty but who were put off by the apparent racial politics at play. either way, voter turnout remained fairly low for such a significant issue. whereas nearly forty percent of registered voters had participated in the previous general election, less than a quarter did so in this one (russell 2011). this spelled bad news for the freedmen and their allies in the cherokee nation. of the 8,743 voters who did participate in the election, an overwhelming majority (seventy-six percent) favored changing tribal citizenship requirements. as a result, the previous decision of the cherokee nation supreme court to recognize the ongoing rights of cherokee freedmen to tribal citizenship, a decision based on cherokee legal precedent and cherokee constitutional law, had now been undone. despite their disappointment about the election’s outcome, the freedmen immediately rallied. they held protests at the bureau of indian affairs in muskogee and at the state capitol in oklahoma city (ruckman 2007). some 250 of them also filed a temporary injunction in the district court of the cherokee nation, asking that their citizenship be reinstated so they could vote in the upcoming general election (nash, et al., vs. cherokee nation registrar, no. cv-07-40). this time the freedmen had better luck. on may 17, 2007, only six weeks before the election, john cripps, a cherokee nation district court judge, temporarily reinstated the cherokee freedmen to citizenship until the court could reach a decision regarding the merits of their case. significantly, the injunction meant that despite efforts to remove about twenty-eight hundred freedmen from political standing, they could still vote in the upcoming tribal election. this decision did not bode well for chief chad smith, who was running for reelection against stacy leeds, the former cherokee nation supreme court justice who had written the majority opinion in favor of the freedmen in march 2006. because the current chief had repeatedly lobbied against freedmen inclusion, his challenger could expect their support at the polls. even though their numbers were relatively small in comparison to the overall cherokee population, the freedmen could still sway an election, particularly if they voted as a block. ironically, the freedmen’s historic track record of actively participating in cherokee national elections may have worked against them, as they may have been perceived as a political threat that could be more easily nullified in the courts than at the ballot box. in discussions about why there had been a petition drive for a special election in the first place, many freedmen descendants and their supporters believed that it was primarily an effort to disenfranchise them before they could vote against the incumbent chief. some freedmen claimed that history was repeating itself, an allusion to the 1983 election for principal and deputy chief, when incumbents ross swimmer and wilma mankiller ran on a ticket against perry wheeler and agnes cowen. at the polls, wheeler received 3,300 votes to swimmer’s 2,437, but on the strength of a large absentee vote, swimmer came back to win the election by fewer than 500 votes. the race was so close that wheeler and cowen demanded a recount and filed cases in both the cherokee judicial appeals tribunal and the u.s. district court, alleging that the freedmen had been kept from voting because they were wheeler party allies (sturm 2002, 183). in fact, wheeler and cowen had actively campaigned in cherokee freedmen communities. yet when freedmen turned up at the polls to cast their votes during the election, they were turned away, because the cherokee tribal council had recently passed 11 cnca § 12, the amendment formally linking cherokee citizenship to cherokee blood. many cherokees, both freedmen and not, found the timing of that decision suspicious, as wheeler and cowen alleged in the courts. not surprisingly, then, the timing of the petition for the special election in 2006 was viewed in a similar light. suspicions were also raised outside cherokee country as the national news media covered the results of the special election. most of these news stories sided with the cherokee freedmen and even described the outcome of the special election as a form of “ethnic cleansing” in which black cherokee citizens had been ousted from the tribe (lee-st. john 2007; watson 2007). many journalists pointed to the apparent irony of american indians, themselves long subjected to racial discrimination, now discriminating against others. as a far-flung array of individuals and groups rallied to support the cherokee freedmen and to denounce the actions of the cherokee nation, several members of congress got involved, including the african american congresswoman diane watson (d-california). watson, representing a diverse district in los angeles county, became one the freedmen’s most vocal and prominent advocates. as soon as the results of the special election were in, she persuaded twenty-six of her fellow members in the congressional black caucus to send a letter to the assistant secretary of the bureau of indian affairs, questioning “the validity, legality, as well as the morality” of the special election (evans 2007). even more significantly, only a few days before the cherokee national election for principal chief, on june 21, 2007, she introduced a bill in the house of representatives (hr 2824) proposing to “sever united states government relations with the cherokee nation of oklahoma until such time as the cherokee nation of oklahoma restores full tribal citizenship to the cherokee freedmen disenfranchised in the march 3, 2007 cherokee nation vote and fulfills all its treaty obligations with the government of the united states.” if approved, the bill would have also prevented the cherokee nation from receiving federal funding, amounting to nearly seventy-five percent of its $300 million annual budget, and would have suspended the tribe’s authority to conduct gaming, one of the few sources of revenue that might have offset its federal losses (hales 2007). if watson and the congressional black caucus wanted to send a clear message to the cherokee nation about its treatment of the freedmen, they succeeded. the bill created an atmosphere of grave concern among cherokee citizens and other american indians around the country (barbery 2013). many of them viewed it as yet another attempt at termination and felt that the congressional black caucus had overstepped its boundaries in suggesting such a draconian measure. for example, the national congress of american indians (ncai), realizing the dangerous precedent that such legislation might set, condemned the bill and defended the cherokee nation’s decision in the name of tribal sovereignty. the ncai viewed hr 2824 as yet another abuse of plenary power, referring to congress’s ability to override tribal sovereignty in the name of collective national rights—or in this case the civil rights of a certain class of u.s. citizens who also happened to be tribal citizens. the cherokee freedmen also faced accusations of directly undermining tribal sovereignty because they had invited congressional oversight into tribal matters. although this interpretation has circulated widely throughout much of indian country, cherokee freedmen did not approach members of congress with claims of racial discrimination. rather, it was individuals working in congresswoman watson’s office who first contacted cherokee freedmen leaders to offer their support.5 once approached, the cherokee freedmen did collaborate with watson and the congressional black caucus, encouraging them to pressure the cherokee nation with hr 2824, which was referred to the house natural resources and judiciary committees in 2008. though the resolution did not make it into law in the 110th congress, watson reintroduced the bill as hr 2761 in june 2009 and continues to call for federal sanctions against the cherokee nation. on the national stage, the public outcry condemning the cherokee nation’s actions possibly trumped the significance of the potential termination legislation. in numerous media outlets, people described the cherokee nation’s decision as “racist,” although the critique itself often manifested in a racialized discourse that almost never mentioned sovereignty. many claimed that because cherokee people were not fulfilling noble stereotypes but instead “acting white”—as if racism were the sole province of whiteness—they no longer deserved recognition as an american indian tribe. for example, a few days after the special election, on march 6, 2007, a blogger named ann posted a comment regarding the cherokee freedmen controversy on the blog rachel’s tavern: “since the white indians have spoken and have shown their love of the most hated ways of the white race, they might as well go over completely to the white race, proclaim themselves white, and get it over with.”6 and in response to an editorial in the muskogee phoenix, “k” posted a comment online stating, “if the [cherokee] government is so evil, i say eliminate the estimated 300 million dollars in federal funding the cherokee nation gladly accepts each year. no more of my tax dollars for this nonsense!! the cherokee aryan nation needs to fend for themselves just like any other american citizen” (muskogee phoenix 2007). each of these examples, and hundreds of others like them, reflect what byrd (2011, 37) has described as a moment in which “calls for sovereignty by the cherokee nation are heard by the colonizing nation and its citizens as the mimesis of white southern demands for states’ rights that immorally justified jim crow segregationist policies.” we can go so far as to say that non-indian outsiders read the exercise of tribal sovereignty at the heart of the tribe’s efforts to determine its own citizenship standards as something akin to governor george wallace’s defiant stand at the little rock schoolhouse. though i agree with byrd’s interpretation, i want to push it further to explore how accusations of racism are used as a stand-in for indigenous assimilation and inauthenticity. in fact, these same examples make clear that indigenous people within liberal, multicultural states must fulfill nearly impossible expectations of cultural authenticity to maintain their political recognition (barker 2005, 17). these conditions appear to provide for tribal people’s empowerment, but they also serve to maintain asymmetry because indigenous people must continuously measure up to external expectations of authenticity, be they cultural, social, political, or something else (barker 2011, 34–35). it follows that when cherokees are viewed as acting racist, something not associated with authentic cherokee culture but rather with southern white culture, they are quickly condemned as not being indigenous enough to merit political recognition. in response to these criticisms and concerns, cherokee citizens worried about their national reputation and what might happen if hr 2824 were passed and the tribe lost its federal funding and recognition (barbery 2013). stepping up its own propaganda campaign, the cherokee nation issued a series of glossy flyers and paid advertisements picturing the cherokee nation as a liberal, multicultural nation. in one example that was handed out at the cherokee national holiday, the words “we are cherokee” appear prominently at the top of the page, followed by twelve head shots of cherokee nation citizens, including, in the words of the flyer, two “cherokee-mexicans,” two “cherokee fullbloods,” a “cherokee-ecuadorian,” a “cherokee-german,” a “cherokee-irish,” and three “cherokee–african americans.” at the bottom, the brochure defends the outcome of the special election, stating, “cherokee citizens have voted that the cherokee nation should be an inclusive indian nation, allowing anyone with an indian ancestor listed on the base rolls of the cherokee nation to be a citizen.” the flyer reframes an act of exclusion as inclusion, implicitly celebrating the new restrictions on cherokee citizenship as the cherokee nation’s greatest virtue. bringing to mind “we the people” as it appears in the preamble to the u.s. constitution, the flyer portrays the cherokee nation as an inclusive, liberal, multicultural polity, no different from the united states, except in asserting its right to be “indian.” in the summer of 2007, the cherokee nation also paid for thick brochures challenging hr 2824 that were handed out at the cherokee national holiday and in the halls of congress. the front cover featured a photo of a young, serious-looking cherokee boy staring directly at the camera. the heading asks, “if cherokee funding is cut, who will feel the pain?” the following twenty-eight pages spell out the cherokee nation’s answers to that question—cutting funds will hurt cherokees of all races, strand the most needy, erase the tribe’s culture and traditions, leave families in need abandoned, keep their brightest from fulfilling their full potential, close the doors on young minds, leave the critically ill dying for treatment, deny health care to those in need, and keep food from the elderly (cherokee nation 2007b, 4–26). each page depicts a face with a name, offering a story to bring home a carefully crafted point. the brochure denounces hr 2824 as a punitive measure concerning the new status of freedmen descendants, who are repeatedly described as “non-indians” and as people who “lack documentable proof of indian ancestry” (1–4). again, the rhetorical move equates cherokee citizenship with race—in this case with having indian ancestry—and defines indigenous identity strictly in terms of lineal descent, at the expense of other possible measures. nowhere is there mention of the abrogation of tribal citizenship established by treaty rights. given the political controversy that was swirling in the cherokee nation, tensions mounted as the general elections approached in the late spring of 2007. voters worried that if they endorsed one candidate for principal chief over another, it would have dire consequences for the nation’s political standing and possibly its federal recognition. some believed that voting for leeds, the challenger, would signal their support for reconsidering the predicament of the cherokee freedmen—a position that might be viewed as more reasonable in the eyes of congress and the broader american public. others feared that if smith were not reelected, the cherokee nation would lose ground concerning its own sovereignty by losing the right to determine its citizenship in any way it deemed necessary. despite these concerns, on june 23, 2007, the cherokee people reelected chief smith by a large margin, with leeds receiving only 5,675 votes to smith’s 8,035. the loss weighed heavily on cherokee freedmen descendants and their supporters. rejected by their fellow cherokee citizens in the special election and now, by implication, in the general election, they were running out of options. one remaining hope was for a fair hearing in the cherokee courts. though the freedmen immediately pressed their case, it would take another four years before the courts ruled on the legitimacy of the special election. in the intervening years, the cherokee freedmen controversy continued unabated, with the freedmen seeming to alternate between partial victories and painful setbacks. however, on january 14, 2011, judge john cripps of the cherokee nation’s district court finally overturned the special election, declaring it unconstitutional and reinstating the cherokee freedmen as citizens (raymond nash, et al v. cherokee nation registrar). as a result of the ruling, freedmen descendants were able to participate in the following tribal election, a contest for principal chief between the incumbent smith and a longtime tribal councilman, bill john baker. with each side representing a radically different stance on the freedmen issue, the vote was so close that the tribal election committee could not certify a final tally, and an additional run-off election was scheduled for september 24, 2011. yet a dramatic reversal of the cherokee courts took place a month before the run-off election. on august 21, 2011, the cherokee nation supreme court vacated the recent ruling of the cherokee district court, effectively terminating freedmen citizenship yet again, including their right to vote. the cherokee nation supreme court apparently did not anticipate how this 2011 decision against the freedmen would be received in the court of public opinion. many observers, including a fair share of tribal insiders, interpreted the court’s reversal as a blatant effort to disenfranchise freedmen voters who nearly all supported baker and whose numbers would likely prove decisive in determining the next principal chief. larry echo hawk, the assistant secretary for indian affairs, immediately fired off a letter to joe crittenden, the acting principal chief of the cherokee nation, saying that the department of the interior had never approved the constitutional amendment removing freedmen from the tribe and that the run-off election would be considered unconstitutional if the freedmen were prevented from voting. soon after, the u.s. department of housing and urban development suspended 33 million dollars of funding to the tribe. feeling pressured by the federal government’s reactions, the tribe agreed to temporarily reinstate the freedmen as citizens, so that they could vote in the run-off election, until the courts could reach a final judicial decision. as of this writing, baker serves as the current chief of the cherokee nation, and the freedmen are suing him in federal court because their rights to citizenship remain undecided. some observers, particularly those in the field of american indian law, believe that the freedmen case may eventually have a hearing in the u.s. supreme court, which could have a major impact on legal interpretations of tribal sovereignty. intersections of race and sovereignty in cherokee national politics and beyond though the freedmen story is still unfolding, what can we learn from those conflicting articulations of race and sovereignty that took place in the cherokee nation in the years surrounding the special election? some scholars and activists are quick to assert that indigenous identity and the sovereign rights attaching to that identity have nothing to do with race, but the case of the cherokee freedmen reveals a more complicated picture. first, let me make clear what i mean by sovereignty in this instance. sovereignty signifies different things to different people, but it almost always refers to political autonomy and rights of self-determination. yet many american indians articulate a far more complex and even contradictory version of sovereignty. on the one hand, they describe an inherent form of sovereignty that coheres to them as autonomous, self-governing peoples akin to nations, one that continues to exist even when external entities fail to recognize them as such. on the other hand, they also describe a more interdependent form of sovereignty that stems from their government-to-government relationship with the united states (sturm 2011, 151–52). as the anthropologist jessica cattelino (2008, 162–65) has pointed out, this second iteration of sovereignty requires astute political negotiation, economic reciprocity, and relations of interdependence with external powers. it also depends on various forms of external and internal recognition between federal, state, and tribal governments, as well as among tribal citizens themselves. herein lies the paradox of tribal sovereignty in the contemporary context: it is a form of political independence conditioned by interdependency, one in which rhetorical purity comingles with messy realpolitik. tribal sovereignty, then, is so highly influenced by broader social and political forces that it cannot be innocent of racial dynamics, no matter what its most rigid defenders might suggest. let me return to the story of the cherokee freedmen controversy to make my case. if cherokee national sovereignty is defined primarily in political terms—as a unique status with an accompanying bundle of rights tied to specific lands, historical experiences, and laws—then it should not matter if cherokees look, sound, and act like popular conceptions of non-indians. yet reality is infused with all sorts of unruly passions and inconvenient ideas, and if we carefully examine the case of the cherokee freedmen during this period, we can see how racial dynamics at three different levels of interaction affected the cherokee nation’s attempts to exercise its sovereignty.7 the first level took place between the cherokee nation and outsiders: as soon as cherokees voted to disenfranchise the majority of their black citizens, many outsiders perceived them as “racists” who were “acting white” and no longer authentically indian enough to deserve federal funding as a tribe. this was the very moment when the congressional black caucus intervened, challenging the cherokee nation’s sovereignty and threatening to cut its federal funding and recognition. the second level of interaction took place between the cherokee national leadership and its own citizenry. following the 2006 cherokee nation supreme court decision regarding the freedmen, the principal chief made the case that self-determination constituted the most basic attribute of sovereignty and that cherokee people should decide their own citizenship standards. the chief then used the power of his office to circulate what some considered to be anti-freedmen propaganda and to focus the vote around the question of whether the tribe had the right to remain “indian.” tribal media outlets repeatedly described the freedmen as “non-indian” interlopers. tribal media never addressed whether the freedmen had lineal ties to cherokees and were therefore kin, whether they shared in other forms of cherokee sociality, or whether they had explicit political and legal rights to citizenship according to cherokee law or treaties. rather, the vote represented an effort to link cherokee citizenship to racial distinctiveness—to an explicitly indian rather than cherokee identity. the third example took place among the cherokee nation citizenry as a whole. because of ongoing forms of historical amnesia, many cherokee citizens expressed confusion about the history and legal status of the cherokee freedmen. this collective lack of knowledge about a crucial issue placed cherokee citizens in a vulnerable position. seemingly few were able to see the freedmen as fellow cherokees, as both kin and long-term parties to the nation. the freedmen’s perceived blackness—what some have called the ocular component of race—was so supersaturated that it eclipsed their other forms of tribal belonging. when the subtle but sustained anti-freedmen rhetoric of the tribal government combined with even nastier propaganda from individual citizens, the freedmen were painted into a racialized corner outside the bounds of tribal recognition and sovereignty. all these examples—at the federal, tribal, and local levels—demonstrate how racial expectations and assumptions fundamentally shaped, and even delimited, the cherokee nation’s ability to exercise its sovereignty. such intersections between race and sovereignty should not be surprising, given that sovereignty is a specific discursive response to living under conditions of settler colonialism, a racialized project to its core. though still a contested concept, settler colonialism usually describes a specifically western european form of imperialist expansion that includes canadian, u.s., and australian versions as well. what distinguishes settler colonialism from franchise colonialism is that the key natural resource to be extracted is indigenous land. indigenous people can be used as a labor pool during the process of occupation and land dispossession, but the assumption is that they and their polities must eventually disappear. moreover, as patrick wolfe (1999) has argued, once settlers claim indigenous lands as their own, they are here to stay. settler colonialism is not some event that happened in the past, at a moment of invasion now over; rather, it constitutes an ongoing structural relationship in which settlers actively maintain forms of domination that enable them to continue to occupy indigenous territories in perpetuity. that oppressive relationship is justified via racialization, so that american indian political collectives (meaning tribes as nations) are made to seem inferior to and “less civilized” than western european nations. settler colonialism has quickly become one of the key analytics in the field of native american studies, in large part because it centers indigenous political subjectivity in an ongoing struggle for power and territory. yet the model can also prove fairly divisive in racial terms because it appears to pit indigenous people against all others. the theory suggests that even though settler colonialism is justified by a possessive investment in whiteness, and most settlers are assumed to be of western european origin, more recent immigrants of color can take advantage of the opening of indigenous lands and become settlers too. even african americans, whose ancestors were brought to american shores in shackles, are seen as part of the problem because their presence was imposed on indigenous people when the settler state used their labor to help achieve its economic and military conquest. settler colonialism does not encourage us to see the common ground of african american and native american experience. both peoples suffered land dispossession as they were incorporated against their will into the emerging u.s. nation-state; neither group initially had rights of citizenship within it; and the forms of citizenship eventually gained by both parties, at different times and by different means, have always remained partial and highly contested. the analytic limits of settler colonialism become even more apparent when applied to the cherokee freedmen whose african forebears were brought to the cherokee nation not by outsiders but by cherokee slave traders and slave owners, and to those whose cherokee ancestors may have been relatives by choice or as a result of sexual violence made possible by slavery. in this case, the settler–indigenous distinction does not prove useful for thinking through how indigenous people might mimic colonial forms of oppression and what specific indigenous identities and experiences might arise when we include the historical legacy of slaveholding in the mix. these kinds of oversights will continue to happen as long as scholars working within indian country ignore the extent to which our key analytics intersect with race. obviously, the categories of “settler” and “indigenous” are both associated with certain racial expectations, specific forms of historical experience, and different degrees of social and political empowerment. in the same way sovereignty is linked to race because it names a desire for political recognition and autonomy articulated against settler colonialism, which is an inherently racial project with ongoing racial effects.8 when we as scholars uphold the idea that sovereignty is political rather than racial, and that therefore our analytics regarding sovereignty need not attend to race, not only do we “divert attention away from racial theory in the field” but we actually do american indian communities a disservice (klopotek 2011, 7). in fact, we obscure the highly racialized power dynamics that have a real-world impact on american indian lives. as brian klopotek (2011, 268) has suggested, if both colonialism and racism “emanate from a singular ideology of white supremacy, then the struggle for indigenous sovereignty has to be a struggle against racism in all its forms as well.” moreover, i want to suggest that in positioning civil rights as something separate from, or even against, tribal sovereignty, we obscure the fact that in the lived experience of people like the cherokee freedmen, both claims exist side by side and actually depend on one another. for freedmen descendants, indianness and cherokee citizenship are sites of shared identification with other cherokees and a place from which they, too, claim rights to sovereignty (byrd 2011, 38). we need to be more attentive to the ways in which race troubles forms of sovereignty based on mutual recognition, including how accusations of racism within tribal politics invite federal interference and can set alarming new legal precedents for tribal people throughout the country. only then can we understand the actual complexity of racial dynamics within indigenous communities, and only then will our work empower tribes to act as moral sovereigns committed to protecting the civil rights of their own citizenry. notes acknowledgments this article has greatly benefited from the insightful feedback i received on earlier drafts from edmund gordon, j. kēhaulani kauanui, randolph lewis, celia naylor, pauline turner strong, kimberly tallbear, and shirley thompson. i also received helpful comments from graduate students in my “politics and conditions of indigeneity” seminar in the fall of 2012 at the university of texas at austin, and i specifically thank andrew uzendoski who argued convincingly that in criticizing a nation for its responsibilities to its own citizens, i would be reinforcing it as a sovereign. my deep appreciation also goes to the three cherokee women who stood with me during my presentation at the 2011 native american and indigenous studies association meeting in connecticut and who urged me to take a more public stand on the freedmen issue. though i am immensely grateful to all of you for your wisdom and support, i alone am responsible for the contents of this article. 1. though most cherokee freedmen have predominantly african and african american ancestry, some also have cherokee ancestors. the percentage of cherokee freedmen with cherokee ancestry is a matter of debate, with estimates ranging from one-tenth to one-third (cooper 2011). here, i describe the enslaved ancestors of cherokee freedmen as african cherokees not to suggest that all freedmen have cherokee ancestry but to highlight their cherokee national ties. 2. certificate degrees of indian blood are issued by the bureau of indian affairs to certify and quantify an individual applicant’s american indian ancestry, often using state-certified vital records. they provide a degree of ancestry by tribe, such as “1/4 choctaw and 1/8 cherokee.” important to note is that cdibs are not evidence of tribal citizenship; individuals can have a cdib and still not meet the standards for enrollment set by tribal governments. the opposite holds true as well: individuals like the cherokee freedmen may qualify for tribal citizenship, even if they do not possess a cdib. 3. although most of my examples are drawn from public records and news media sources, my interpretations are informed by nearly fourteen years of both formal and informal fieldwork that took place between 1995 and 2009, when i lived in oklahoma less than three hours by car from the cherokee nation proper. during this period, i had close working relationships with community members and political leaders both in the cherokee nation and in the descendants of the freedmen of the five civilized tribes association. 4. at the time, the homepage of the cherokee nation’s official website had a prominent link on the right-hand side titled, “freedmen press kit: questions about the citizenship status of nonindians” (cherokee nation 2007a). the press kit, while it meant to inform cherokee citizen voters about the history and political standing of the cherokee freedmen, immediately biased less informed readers. 5. personal interview with staffer in congresswoman watson’s office, washington, d.c., november 30, 2007. 6. the rachel’s tavern blog is no longer accessible online. however, ann has her own blog, beautiful, also, are the souls of my black sisters, where she has commented extensively on the cherokee freedmen controversy and has reposted her original comments from rachel’s tavern. see “the freedmen/women and the cherokee nation: part 2,” beautiful, also, are the souls of my black sisters blog, july 26, 2008, http://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/the-freedmenwomen-and-the-cherokee-nation-part-2. 7. note that because the cherokee nation does not determine tribal citizenship on the basis of blood quantum (a more obviously racialized measure of belonging), as do many tribes throughout the united states, but rather on lineal descent (a primarily genealogical or kinshipbased measure), the intersections of race and sovereignty are all the more significant here. 8. as theorists like antonio gramsci and pierre bourdieu have made clear, counterhegemonic narratives tend to unconsciously reproduce some of the ideological aspects they explicitly resist. so, discourses of sovereignty will likely reproduce some of the racial assumptions inherent in the settler-colonial project, as we have seen here. references barbery, marcos 2013 “from one fire.” this land magazine, may 16. http://thislandpress.com/05/16/2013/from-one-fire/, accessed september 21, 2013. barker, joanne 2005 sovereignty matters: locations of contestation and possibility in indigenous struggles for self-determination. lincoln: university of nebraska press. 2011 native acts: law, recognition and cultural authenticity. durham, n.c.: duke university press. byrd, jodi a. 2011 “‘been to the nation, lord, but i couldn’t stay there’: american indian sovereignty, cherokee freedmen, and the incommensurability of the internal.” interventions 13, no. 1: 31–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801x.2011.545576. cattelino, jessica 2008 high stakes: florida seminole gaming and sovereignty. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cherokee nation 2007a “freedmen press kit: questions about the citizenship status of non-indians.” cherokee nation website. http://www.cherokee.org, accessed october 22, 2008. cherokee nation 2007b “if cherokee funding is cut, who will feel the pain?” brochure. cooper, kenneth j. 2011 “citizenship deferred: descendants of cherokee slaves are still fighting for voting rights and basic services.” diverse issues in higher education 28, no. 21: 12–13. evans, ben 2007 “black caucus questions cherokee vote.” associated press, march 13. feldhousen-giles, kristy 2008 “‘to prove who you are’: freedmen identities in oklahoma.” phd dissertation. university of oklahoma. hales, donna 2007 “group questions cherokee vote to oust freedmen.” muskogee phoenix, march 16. http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/local/x2128958093/group-questions-cherokee-vote-to-oust-freedmen, accessed may 23, 2014. kauanui, j. kēhaulani 2008 “colonialism in equality: hawaiian sovereignty and the question of u.s. civil rights.” south atlantic quarterly 107, no. 4: 635–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2008-010. ketcher, john 2007 “vote yes on the constitutional amendment determining citizenship in the cherokee nation.” cherokee phoenix, february. http://www.cherokeephoenix.org/uploads/2007/2/463_2007-02-01.pdf, accessed september 1, 2013. klopotek, brian 2011 recognition odysseys: indigeneity, race and federal tribal recognition policy in three louisiana communities. durham, n.c.: duke university press. knickmeyer, ellen 2007 “cherokee nation to vote on expelling slaves’ descendants.” washington post, march 3, a1. lee-st. john, jeninne 2007 “the cherokee nation’s new battle.” time magazine online, june 21. http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1635873,00.html, accessed june 28, 2007. muskogee phoenix 2007 “rep. delays cherokee cuts.” editorial, muskogee phoenix, september 15. http://muskogeephoenix.com/editorials/x2128972743/rep-delays-cherokee-cuts, accessed october 10, 2007. rolnick, addie c. 2011 “the promise of mancari: indian political rights as racial remedy.” 86 new york university law review 958:101–83. ruckman, s. e. 2007 “freedmen supporters picket bia: the group says agency must uphold rights guaranteed by a treaty.” tulsa world, april 7. russell, steve 2011 “tsunami warning from the cherokee nation.” indian country today, september 14. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/opinion/tsunami-warning-from-the-cherokee-nation-54005, accessed september 26, 2011. smith, chadwick 2006 “citizen views fall on both sides of freedmen issue.” cherokee phoenix, april: 33. strong, pauline turner 2005 “what is an indian family? the indian child welfare act and the renascence of tribal sovereignty.” in “indigenous peoples of the united states,” special joint issue of american studies 46, nos. 3–4, and indigenous studies today 1:205–31. sturm, circe 2002 blood politics: race, culture, and identity in the cherokee nation of oklahoma. berkeley: university of california press. 2011 becoming indian: the struggle over cherokee identity in the twenty-first century. santa fe, n.m.: school for advanced research press. vann, marilyn 2006a “the cherokee freedmen story as of may 7, 2006-updated 5 29 06.” http://www.freedmen5tribes.com/cherokee.htm, accessed april 21, 2011. 2006b “the cherokee freedmen story as of may 7, 2006.” cherokee observer, july 1: 4. watson, diane 2007 “jim crow in indian country.” huffington post, october 25. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-diane-watson/jim-crow-in-indian-countr_b_69927.html, accessed june 30, 2008. wilkins, david 2001 american indian politics and the american political system. new york: rowman and littlefield. wolfe, patrick 1999 settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: the politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. london: cassell. queer anthropology queer anthropology: an introduction martin f. manalansan iv university of illinois at urbana-champaign http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4316-6345 arrival stories in anthropology have long been an integral element of disciplinary lore, as they invoke encounters with the other as well as moments of legitimation, emplacement, and emergence. to this end, has queer anthropology arrived? most people would answer in the affirmative. consider the evidence. “queer anthropology” can now be spotted in course titles and descriptions, as well as, in the past twenty years, in the contents of academic job descriptions and book titles. in addition, we can examine the standard markers of disciplinary historical shifts such as review articles (fitzgerald 1977; weston 1993; boellstorff 2007b) that showcase transitions from the language of homosexuality to gay and lesbian to queer, as well as the renaming of the organization originally known as the anthropology research group on homosexuality (argoh) to the society of lesbian and gay anthropologists (solga) and, more recently, to the association for queer anthropology (aqa). these institutional transformations not only gesture to varying conceptions of collective identities but also highlight changes in organizational orientation or mission—not just who we are, but also what we do. notice the significance of the prepositions in the section’s various names, such as on in argoh, of in solga, and for in aqa, which signify the transformation of the collective as devoted or oriented at various times to a topic, a sense of identification, and finally to an advocacy for a set of methodological or analytical optics under the umbrella “queer.” arrivals, in whatever form, are never complete or smooth. the shifts and changes i enumerate above are neither trouble-free nor total, as the various essays in this retrospectives collection demonstrate. queer anthropology, far from being a monolithic field of inquiry, is shown to be characterized by messy genealogies, incomplete and uncomfortable transitions, divergent strands, and contentious debates. but despite my initial babel-like characterization, i reemphasize one of the persistent themes in the various essays in this series: the argument that queer anthropology can be productively apprehended as an aspirational field of inquiry. as margot weiss (2016, 634) elegantly puts it in her essay, queer studies and queer anthropology are about dreaming of a utopic world(s) to enable ways to imagine, think, or desire “otherwise.” the following essays by jafari allen, ellen lewin, scott morgensen, and weiss offer trenchant, yet divergent assessments of and frustrations over the wages, travels, and travails of queer anthropology. they demonstrate the multiple itineraries and engagements in this field of inquiry. indeed, the essays in this collection ask: if queer is an opening, where does it lead and how do we get there—or are we there yet? what would the “there” look like? what are the routes and roots that have enabled us, limited us, and are still propelling us to seek projects and ideas in their names? the essays in this section limn the various ways anthropological ideas, practices, and institutions have arrived (or not) to the portal we call “queer” and the various ways in which those paths and ongoing struggles are marked by discomfort, messiness, and longing. as a way to think further about this stance, i would like to go back to the idea of an arrival. queer anthropology’s arrival story, as allen, morgensen, and weiss argue in their essays, is a renarration or reworking of disciplinary travel as marked by deferral and continuous transit. the fixing of departures and arrivals in a teleological manner will not work in this instance. the idea of queer as proposed by these authors is one that is in continuous motion. one never really arrives “there,” and arrivals are never a done deal. queer anthropological research is not about reaching and arriving in “the field,” since processes such as globalization and colonialism have put this very concept into question. indeed, the acceptance of queer anthropology as an analytical frame and methodology should not be about its comfortable emplacement in the study of cultural things. it is, rather, about the messy and uncomfortable enmeshment of both anthropologists and the communities they study in the lived realities of life and death, of suffering and exuberance, and therefore, of quotidian mutabilities and contingencies. this enmeshment, in many ways, has always formed part of the ethnographic enterprise. to put such fieldwork realities in queer motion is to heed tom boellstorff’s (2007a, 3) call to “anthropologize” queer studies, which brings the ethnographic here and a queer there into a kind of uneasy, highly mutable yet productive juxtaposition. thus, to mark the field not only in terms of what it is but also in terms of what it can be lies at the core of what i have described as the aspirational and desiring orientation of queer studies and queer anthropology. what might this mean to anthropologists, when it applies not only to people who live under the varied signs of lgbt or those who are legible sexual or gender insurgents? it would, i suggest, mean continuing to anthropologize queer studies: engaging in careful ethnographic and sensitive analytical traipsing of, and thinking differently about, messy encounters and challenges, especially in the ways that people are conscripted to go about their lives, open to the possibilities of imagining how they might live otherwise. references boellstorff, tom 2007a a coincidence of desires: anthropology, queer studies, indonesia. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2007b “queer studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 36: 17–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094421. fitzgerald, thomas k. 1977 “a critique of anthropological research on homosexuality.” journal of homosexuality 2, no. 4: 385–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j082v02n04_10. weiss, margot 2016 “always after: desiring queer studies, desiring anthropology.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 627–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.11. weston, kath 1993 “lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 22: 339–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.22.100193.002011. what if the environment is a person? what if the environment is a person? lineages of epigenetic science in a toxic china janelle lamoreaux university of cambridge http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4031-4437 the walk from the university toxicology laboratory to the children’s hospital is not far; wang bo and i have plenty of time to stop at a sidewalk fruit vendor’s stand to purchase a watermelon, a gift we will present to the staff at the hospital. today we will meet with lin ming to discuss his life as a medical student, charged with treating infants who have a variety of conditions requiring neonatal surgery. lin and i know each other from the developmental and reproductive toxicology laboratory where i conducted the bulk of my fieldwork. there, lin prepared and analyzed samples for studies on the potential epigenetic factors involved in the development of congenital disorders. while lin’s work in the lab centered on test tubes and tissue samples, his professional life in the children’s hospital rotates around distressed children and their anxious family members. wang, my colleague from the laboratory, and i maneuver through the crowds of parents and grandparents gathered around sidewalk vendors selling balloons and plastic toys for the children being treated inside. on entering the hospital, i am struck by the sheer number of family members that accompany each child. together, multiple generations sit on every available chair and bench, standing at every corner and window of the waiting room. we board the elevator, where children and infants with bandages and face masks sit on the hips of their caretakers, meeting us at eye level. this is a premier children’s treatment center for not only nanjing residents but also for those living in the surrounding areas of jiangsu and anhui provinces—it is always a busy place inside and out, i am told. as i will soon find out, it was through interactions with the parents and grandparents accompanying patients that lin developed both his commitment to becoming a doctor and his perspective on the importance of conducting research into the causal factors of birth defects. according to lin, parents of infants who suffer from congenital disorders tend to blame themselves for their child’s ill health. physicians like lin try to discourage this guilt and embarrassment, pointing to the many possible causes of the conditions their children face, ones that go beyond individualized behaviors, such as air and water pollution, food safety and availability, and changing lifestyle habits that have accompanied broader shifts in chinese daily life during the past thirty years of post–reform and opening social change. lin suggests that each of these factors—none of which are the parents’ responsibility—could have brought about the disorders he regularly treats. while lin’s list of factors may have come across as an anecdotal remedy offered to parents in need, the hospital had recently partnered with the local toxicology laboratory to more rigorously investigate the potential causes of birth defects. this local toxicology laboratory, which i refer to as the detox lab, was where i regularly conducted research in 2011, after establishing contact with the lead professor involved in the lab’s gene-environment interaction research back in 2008. while this day was my first time visiting one of the laboratory’s clinical partners, lin regularly moved between the laboratory and the clinic. at the time of my visit, he was assisting with a project investigating the potential inheritability of one specific birth defect, hirschsprung’s disease, through a study of the epigenetic mechanisms involved in its development. epigenetic research often studies the way in which dna expression is influenced by extragenetic factors that might have previously been deemed social or environmental, and therefore insignificant to genetic processes. diet, lifestyle, class, toxic exposures, and other variables once thought to be genetically noninfluential are today believed to play an important role in dna expression. epigenetics is often characterized as the study of modifications to the gene that impact gene expression without altering dna sequence. moreover, these modifications are sometimes inherited, which has led many to highlight the overlap of current epigenetic theories with lamarckian ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics (jablonka and lamb 1999; rapp 2005). neo-lamarckian theories were largely dismissed in the second half of the twentieth century, when the gene became increasingly fetishized and imbued with deterministic qualities that led dna to be interpreted as the code of life (franklin 1995; keller 2002). since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, an increasing number of scientists from many disciplinary backgrounds have moved away from a perspective that views genes as autonomous, deterministic hereditary units and toward explorations of the immediate and transgenerational impacts of epigenetic factors. as anthropologist margaret lock (2007, 62) states, such explorations “have exploded the central dogma on which molecular biology was founded,” leading to what is often characterized as the postgenomic age. conrad waddington (2012) first used the concept of epigenetics in 1942 to express interest in the complex of developmental processes between the genotype and the phenotype, which he hypothesized contributed to the unpredictability of genetic inheritance. after decades of near dormancy, in the twenty-first century epigenetics has become a catchphrase for a number of genetic processes that do not adhere to a strict notion of individual hereditary units that autonomously pass from individual to individual, contrasting with mendelian genetics. yet even with a generally agreed-on characterization of epigenetics as “a shift in focus from gene sequence to gene expression” (landecker and panofsky 2013, 335), today the term is often “a muddle” (keller 2010, 5) and at best describes a broad and somewhat ambiguous category of scientific theories and research practices. it is, therefore, helpful to think not only about what epigenetics is but also about what epigenetics does, as well as about how epigenetic research is conducted. between 2008 and 2011 i conducted fieldwork in china, interviewing and observing a small but growing group of toxicologists involved in epigenetic research at the nanjing institute for medicine and science (nims).1 these developmental and reproductive toxicologists primarily conduct what social scientists julie guthman and sarah mansfield (2013) describe as “environmental epigenetics,” or epigenetic research that studies the health impacts of xenobiotic chemicals, distinguished as foreign, unexpected, or not naturally present in an organism. in addition to environmental epigenetics, the toxicologists at nims, like many natural scientists involved in epigenetic research, also attempt to isolate the specific epigenetic mechanisms involved in bringing about alterations to dna expression. through attention to the detox lab’s studies of epigenetic mechanisms, as well as to the lab’s proposed future birth-cohort studies of birth defects, in this article i further explore the idea of the environment at work in intergenerational epigenetic studies, which often goes beyond understanding the environment as a nonhuman xenobiotic chemical, instead viewing the environment as a person. this understanding of the environment as a person, however, is not based in an idea of persons as autonomous individuals. in the detox lab’s research, and in my own usage, which follows from observation and an analysis of the lab’s epigenetic studies, the environment is a person who always stands in relation to other personal and nonpersonal environments of exposure. this definition of the environment more deeply resonates with what some anthropologists have interpreted as fundamental organizing principles of everyday chinese life, such as a more relational notion of personhood (yang 1994) and a more porous understanding of the relationship between the human and the environment (choy 2011; tu 2001; zhan 2011). in the laboratory where i conducted research, these preexisting models of transgenerational, biosocial relationality are newly configured as responses to changing economic, social, and environmental conditions. developmental and reproductive toxicologists conducting epigenetic research in china today highlight the connections between humans across generations, with and as environments, thereby reasserting a sense of intergenerational connectivity and responsibility in a moment of china’s increasing individualization (kleinman et al. 2011; yan 2009) and chemical toxicity through a definition of the environment that accounts for such complex lineages. the environment is, then, a lineage of personal and chemical exposures. recent social scientific studies suggest that in epigenetic research and media interpretations of epigenetic studies, mothers are often understood as the primary environment impacting the developing fetus through interactions with genes (pickersgill et al. 2013). many have argued that when mothers are understood as what hannah landecker (2011) calls environments of exposure, it renews and even exaggerates preexisting ideas of maternal responsibility for child health (richardson et al. 2014; warin et al. 2012). a mother’s behaviors, lifestyle, and dietary choices are now seen to impact not only the immediate development of the fetus but also the fetus’s future adult health as it relates to a number of conditions, from asthma to obesity. even more pressure is added when epigenetic research suggests that a fetus’s germ cells, the potential future gametes of the fetus, may also be impacted by the behaviors of previous generations. instead of saying you are what you eat, popular accounts of epigenetics today stress that you are what your mother, or even your grandmother, ate. while recognizing the potential for epigenetic research to increase the maternal burden of responsibility for disease, in this article i argue that some epigenetic research, such as that conducted by the detox lab, might also encourage a reimagining of disease responsibility as existing in relations and configurations that move beyond individualized notions of personhood. through an ethnographic portrayal of the research and treatment of congenital disorders in nanjing, i show how the detox lab’s studies regards people (generally mothers) not only as environments directly impacting the health of the next generation of offspring but also as environments influencing multiple future generations. furthermore, chemicals to which these generations were exposed are regarded as environments potentially having an impact on future genetic expression. the detox lab’s epigenetic research thus deindividualizes ideas of the environment as a person, and of disease responsibility, in and through ideas of transgenerational, extragenetic inheritance. such findings raise the stakes of epigenetic research for the social sciences, showing that some epigenetic studies have the potential not only to disrupt boundaries between the biological and the social but also to challenge assumptions of individuality, autonomy, and personhood that underlie some of the most strongly influential genetic and social theories of the twentieth century. is gene to individual as environment is to society? amid growing bioscientific emphasis on epigenetic research, many social scientists have expressed excitement about the potential for epigenetics and similar systems sciences to inspire a new era of integrated biosocial research (ingold and pálsson 2013; pálsson 2007). epigenetics potentially opens up the possibility of an approach that has been described as genetics’s “anthropological turn” (goodman, heath, and lindee 2003, 3). genetic explanations for characteristics, behaviors, or diseases are now being supplemented or displaced by notions of disease causality that consider the impacts of social determinants of health long studied by social scientists of medicine, such as poverty, lifestyle, and even psychosocial stress (rapp 2005). many social and natural scientists alike have expressed cautious excitement about the material and theoretical overlap of the social or environmental with the biological, and are discussing epigenetics as a new way into longstanding questions about nature and nurture. one of the first anthropologists to address epigenetics was marilyn strathern (1991, 585–88), who proposed at least two alternatives to the euro-american folk model of individual and society “replicated or miniaturized” within genetic and epigenetic thinking. first, she provided a cross-cultural reference, describing how melanesians conceive of themselves not as independent persons but as persons always in relation to other persons, or “dividuals.” second, she brought this dividual back to a discussion of epigenetics. after listening to a presentation on the revolutionary potential of epigenetics at the 1990 meeting of the british association for the advancement of science, she followed the lead of a gynecologist also in attendance to ask: what if the epigenetic environment with which the gene interacts is another person (for instance, the mother hosting the impressionable embryo)? this question disrupts the relationship commonly depicted between the isolated gene and the encroaching epigenome and between a freestanding individual and an enveloping society. it is also a question frequently asked by the reproductive toxicologists i studied. strathern’s early analysis of an emerging epigenetic science argues that no matter how revolutionary epigenetic research may seem, it relies on a theoretical foundation similar to previous modes of genetic thinking. she argues that even when thinking beyond the gene, epigenetics perpetuates a distinct understanding of the relationship between individuals and society. pointing to consistencies between epigenetic and genetic research, strathern presents an analogy: the gene is to the individual as the epigenome is to society. like the individual, the gene in epigenetic research is still thought of as a freestanding entity, impacted by (but standing apart from) what exists outside it. strathern argues that as with society, which is often understood in the social sciences to include everything that exists beyond the individual, epigenetic environments include potentially everything beyond the gene. moreover, both environment and society are abstract concepts concretized through examples of their parts, such as mountains or institutions. in the detox lab’s epigenetic research on male reproductive health issues such as male infertility, the environment is concretized in a variety of ways—as a risky occupational setting, an estrogenic food, or an endocrine-disrupting chemical injected directly into the body of an animal in the laboratory (lamoreaux 2013). in the scientists’ studies of congenital disorders, however, the potentially impactful extragenetic environment is first another person, specifically a mother who influences the fetus. social scientists have criticized such an understanding of the mother as the primary epigenetic environment for reinforcing maternal blame (mackendrick 2014; richardson et al. 2014; warin et al. 2012). however, as i will discuss in the final section of this essay, such criticisms assume that when the environment is a person, this person is an isolated individual (the mother). as i will show, in the epigenetic research on birth defects conducted by the detox lab, the environment is not just a single person; rather, it comprises a series of people embedded and embodied in the sometimes toxic human and nonhuman environments of the past and the present.2 a mother is more and less than an individual, interconnected to and instantiated through the many potentially toxic environments that surround her and her fetus. when the environment with which the gene interacts is both another person and the toxic chemicals to which present and previous generations were exposed, what models of disease causality and responsibility are reinforced and reconfigured? situating congenital disorders the detox lab’s research began in the mid-1990s by looking into how direct low-dose exposures to toxic chemicals potentially impact male reproductive health. fifteen years later, the scientists’ research has expanded in many ways, including toward a focus on how indirect exposures to toxins may be linked to the intergenerational transmission of congenital disorders, especially those thought more common in asian populations. though not known for the accuracy of its statistical data (liu 2012), the chinese government reports that the nation faces high rates of birth defects, with reported cases estimated as having increased by 70 percent between 1996 and 2010 (people’s republic of china ministry of health 2011). while the above-cited ministry of health report does not speculate as to the cause of this dramatic rise, scientists based both in and beyond china have recently conducted research that points to indoor and outdoor air pollution, water pollution, and persistent organic pollutants such as the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (ddt) as potential causal factors in china’s high rates of congenital disorders. of course, what connects each of these individually researched causal factors is the large growth in china’s economy during this same time frame. following reform and opening (găigé kāifàng) policies that officially began in 1978, china has undergone massive social and economic change, especially in eastern provinces such as jiangsu. while many indicators of health and wealth have improved during the past thirty-five years, including national gdp, literacy, maternal mortality, and longevity, new problems have also surfaced, including chronic diseases and illnesses related to environmental pollution such as cancers (lora-wainwright 2013) and infertility (lamoreaux 2013). despite often unenforced, and at times nonexistent, pollution regulation and the prioritization of economic growth over human health, in some ways the government remains committed to advancing the quality of china’s population, alongside raising its economic growth. since the early days of reform and opening, the government has focused not only on attempts at rapid industrialization but also on improving population quality (rénkǒu sùzhì) through measures of aptitude, physical form, class, health, education, and a host of other supposed quality indexes (anagnost 2004; dikötter 1998). raising population quality was institutionalized as a national goal in the late 1980s, around the same time that family-planning restrictions were put in place (dikötter 1998; greenhalgh 2008). today, government policies and citizen concerns continue to stress the improvement of the population through both social and biological measures. government campaigns aimed at encouraging parents to focus limited resources on fewer children, as well as prenatal health programs meant to increase fetal health and thereby population quality, continue to impact chinese families today (zhu 2013). the government’s funding of the detox lab’s research on congenital disorders might also be interpreted as an effort to improve population quality. if results eventually show strong associations between pollution and birth defects, the detox lab’s research would, however, highlight a negative impact of the past thirty-five years of largely unregulated industrial development, and the wide array of toxic exposures brought with it, on human development at economic, social, and biological levels. in the context of epigenetic research, the stakes of such findings are even higher, for here toxins are thought to potentially impact not only the generation currently in utero but also generations further in the future. as discussed in the introduction, the detox lab conducts investigations into the potential links between toxic chemicals and epigenetic alterations associated with birth defects in affiliation with regional children’s hospitals that treat a variety of congenital disorders. the laboratory researcher wang bo and i visited one of these hospitals, located within nanjing, to speak further with his colleague lin ming, a physician in training who assists the detox lab with its research. at the children’s hospital on a spring day in 2011, wang and i enter the neonatal surgery unit and present the children’s hospital staff with our gift, the watermelon. after quick introductions we put on white overcoats to begin our tour of the unit. in the hospital setting where lin spends most of his time, his quiet laboratory demeanor becomes that of a confident physician in training. lin is clearly in his element; wang and i are clearly out of ours. the lead nurse joins us as we move through the five or so patient rooms. in each room there are between three and five infants, accompanied by parents and often grandparents. between nine and fifteen people occupy each space—some adults sleep, some sit on makeshift and hospital beds, some cradle their babies who are either awaiting or recovering from surgery. all are there for the duration of their infant’s stay, only stepping outside and into the nanjing city streets for food or a bit of exercise. as we move from patient to patient, parents and grandparents assist in removing blankets and surgical dressings to allow us to view the infants’ bodies and fleshy traces of operations. parents and grandparents watch me as, or more, carefully than i am watching lin and the head nurse moving from patient to patient. i do my best to remain stoic, afraid i might express my sadness and fear. i save my questions for afterward and nod as i learn about each infant: their condition, whether or not surgeries have been successful, and when they will most likely be discharged. one child has recently had a mass removed from her head. another was born without an anus. many are at different stages of recovery after having been surgically treated for rectal or intestinal deformities, the most common conditions diagnosed in the unit. after our patient visit we wash our hands and sit in a small back room where the lead nurse serves us the watermelon wang bo and i have brought. the prearranged interview feels more like a conversation between colleagues; wang bo is just as interested in the discussion as i am. wang has been researching the epigenetic mechanisms of reproductive diseases for years now, but unlike lin, he does not interact with patients. since spending a summer working in the toxicology laboratory as an undergraduate, his plan to follow in his mother’s footsteps and become a doctor changed. he has now worked as a research scientist for more than five years, and in all that time this is his first trip to the children’s hospital where some of the tissue and blood samples used in the laboratory are gathered. his curiosity catches me off guard; his excited inquisitiveness seems to surprise even him. he is brimming with questions about patients, parents, and procedures. what conditions do they face? what treatments do they receive? how often do they survive? he does not ask what causes the conditions because, like lin, he knows that the answer to this question is multifaceted and largely unknown. while lin contributes to the detox lab’s epigenetic research on congenital disorders, he spends most of his time treating those patients in need of neonatal surgery. frequent patient and parent interactions seem to have created a kind of ethical commitment to his work, one that surprised lin himself and that he was not sure his coworkers shared. this came through in a story he told of a night when he was on call. a couple came to the hospital with their newborn son. desperate for some kind of answer to their child’s inability to eat, sleep, digest, or pass a bowel movement, they had traveled from the anhui countryside to nanjing. they pleaded with lin to save their child’s life. after hours of examinations and tests, lin was finally able to diagnose the child with an intestinal abnormality and rush him to surgery, where physicians performed a simple procedure. he was proud of his accomplishment, of his correct diagnosis. but he said the moment that truly changed him was when he went to tell the parents the news. on hearing what had occurred, both parents fell at his feet in what lin interpreted as the ultimate symbol of gratitude. while he told me this story, lin himself was moved. he continued reflecting: this kind of interaction made him realize he was happy to be a doctor. regardless of the low pay, long hours, and frustrating patient interactions that accompany his career, the profession brings him great joy. the elation that comes from helping others is something he hopes his generation of chinese students and professionals will also find. yet in actuality, he thinks his peers are much more concerned with making money and buying a house (practically a requirement for anyone hoping to marry, wang adds). after a pause, lin second-guesses himself, giving his peers the benefit of the doubt. many of them are from the country, he says, so the idea of buying a house in the city is so far-fetched that they feel they must put all their energy into such material pursuits. for lin, the ethical expectations of today’s youth must be couched within an understanding of the importance of geography and opportunity in china. geographic separations, which largely represent economic divisions as well, keep certain graduate students from pursuing careers for more than the financial advantages they might bring, which is seen as their only hope for fulfilling familial duties. wang agreed: without a career there is no money, without money there is no marriage, without marriage there is no child. in lin’s description of his peers, one can feel both a critique of increasing individualism, or at least of the single-minded pursuit of money, among young adults in china, as well as an understanding that such individualization (yan 2009) results from broader environments—socioeconomic circumstances and gendered kinship expectations that shape career trajectories and professional motivations. it is this second understanding of the person, as always in relation to other human and nonhuman environments, that also exists within the detox lab’s research on one specific congenital disorder, hirschsprung’s disease. researching hirschsprung’s disease hirschsprung’s disease (hd) is often described as a disconnected communication signal or power line in the intestinal tract. infants diagnosed with hd lack nerve cells in their intestines and are unable to send messages or transmit signals that should move fecal matter through the colon and out the rectum. this leads to constipation, which can then lead to a distended abdomen, malnutrition, infection, and even death. the most reliable symptom of hd is a lack of bowel movement in the first forty-eight hours of life. yet many infants with the disease do have occasional bowel movements, often making the condition difficult to diagnose. the disease can be life threatening if left undiagnosed or untreated, and it is said to affect one in every five thousand births worldwide (u.s. national institute of health 2012). it has been argued that these statistics vary by ethnicity; a taiwan-based study claims that for every 2 caucasians, 2.8 asians were found to have hd (chin et al. 2008). national concerns about the reproduction of quality chinese bodies, then, likely informed the detox lab’s decision to focus on this particular condition, as did the fact that males are four times more likely to be diagnosed with hd than females (emison et al. 2005).3 to conduct research on the possible epigenetic mechanisms involved in hd’s pathogenesis, the detox lab partnered with a children’s hospital in nanjing that treats about seventy-five hd-diagnosed infants per year. while lin seemed to regard his time working at the hospital as difficult and exhausting, on another day when i saw him analyzing specimens in the detox lab, he described the laboratory aspect of his work as a painful hardship (xīnkǔ), with long hours and much repetition. as the primary technician on one of the detox lab’s investigations into hd, lin must turn his attention to epigenetic mechanisms in this setting. epigenetic mechanisms are now thought to regulate gene expression, a process that occurs through a variety of activities including dna methylation (the addition of methyl groups—a group of atoms, three hydrogen and one carbon—to dna). methylations block the transcription of dna to rna, a necessary process in gene regulation, but a process also associated with some health conditions, such as hd. by investigating methylation patterns, the detox lab can analyze whether genes thought to be related to the production of neural crest cells (which migrate to the intestines) have been deactivated via methylation.4 the detox lab has found that genes involved in the formation of critical colonic nerve cells are turned off by specific dna methylations. once turned off or deactivated, intestinal nerves are less likely to develop and bowel motility is reduced—a conclusion the scientists reached by comparing the methylation patterns derived from their analysis of colon tissue and blood samples from patients diagnosed with hd to a control population’s samples. this research establishes that hd, and potentially other birth defects impacting infants in china and around the world, might be epigenetically inherited. it is a first step toward studies of hd that will not only pinpoint the mechanisms through which epigenetic transmission occurs but will also indicate environmental exposures that bring about such epigenetic modifications in the first place.5 to study the toxic exposures that lead to modifications such as dna methylation, the detox lab has also designed a multiprovince birth-cohort study. birth-cohort studies are often considered ethical to conduct on human populations because they are so-called natural experiments. they do not create, but instead monitor, the activities, behaviors, or physical/social/psychological attributes of their research subjects. such studies generally track individuals over the life course, claiming to observe research subjects rather than influence them through exposure to certain influences or research variables. in epigenetic research, birth-cohort studies are used to investigate the potential transgenerational impact of epigenetic inheritance in humans, both by monitoring the biological samples of multiple generations over time and by collecting detailed information about the environments in which people work and live. in the detox lab’s research, samples and their accompanying environmental characteristics have been gathered from multiple generations of individuals: infants, parents, and grandparents. blood, urine, and semen samples that will eventually be used in studies of hd and other conditions come from patients at university-affiliated hospitals in yangtze river delta provinces and beyond. when these biological samples are taken, surveys simultaneously collect information regarding occupation, residence location, and potential toxic exposures. additionally, researchers gather general air and water pollution figures for the surrounding areas. lab director zhang zhiyuan’s hope is that this broad collection of samples will eventually allow him to correlate methylation patterns now known to be involved in the development of hd with particular environmental exposures. here, as in the epigenetic research analyzed by hannah landecker (2011), environments are understood as exposures. yet instead of concentrating on environmental exposures that relate to the individual behavioral characteristics of mothers, such as dietary intake, environments come in a variety of human and nonhuman forms. data is collected in a number of ways—biological samples, written surveys, and chemical analyses—and these various versions of the environment are considered in and through one another. though publications have yet to result from this sample and data gathering, when statistically significant patterns do eventually emerge between patients with hd and past generations’ exposures to specific environments (variably defined), zhang hopes to provide convincing evidence for the inheritable impacts of environments. such epigenetic inheritance requires the understanding of environment as person, as the mother becomes a vessel through which exposures and their associated methylations travel. but it also encourages an understanding of the epigenetic environment interacting with genes as more than simply an individual. this research places the mother of an infant that suffers from hd within a context of both human and nonhuman environments. even when the environment is a person (the mother), this person will be seen in relation to the many additional environments that surround her, both personal and impersonal. these could be human relatives from previous generations, as well as industrial, water, or air pollutants, pesticides or other occupational exposures. through these concentric circles of environments, the detox lab’s research draws attention to the toxicity of china’s recent industrial, economic, and social change on many scales, going both back in time and outward from the interior genetic structure to the surroundings of the fetus. the lab attempts to address how environments of rapid social change within which ancestors lived, worked, and reproduced have epigenetically transformed the bodies of contemporary and future generations—a project not dissimilar to the work of anthropologists such as judith farquhar (2002, 17), who claims that generational differences in china exist “not so much in ideals as they are in bodily dispositions, inculcated by the conditions of everyday life in a postsocialist reform process that quietly evolved, beneath the hubbub of a much debated politics.” this quiet evolution of bodily dispositions and developments will be further researched by the detox lab in future multiprovince birth-cohort studies, offering an epigenetic interpretation of how differences and similarities between chinese generations and their environments are embodied. rapid social change, then, could be seen at the epigenetic level. lineages of epigenetics conducting such birth-cohort studies will not be easy, yet zhang states that precisely the difficulty of investigating toxic exposures in china drew him to this research. complexity—in the form of multiple, overlapping exposures with potential indirect and intergenerational effects—is his starting point, and a grounding assumption of the detox lab’s approach to disease causality. as stated by zhang, hd is understood through a non-mendelian notion of genetic disease causation, largely differing from the kind of fixed and predictable genetic relatedness that eventually characterized what evelyn fox keller (2002) has called the “century of the gene.” according to keller (2002), even after the 1900 rediscovery of gregor mendel’s rules of inheritance, which stated that inheritance works through discrete units passed from parent to offspring, the first four decades of the twentieth century were riddled with questions about what actually constitutes a gene. as the century progressed with oswald avery, colin macleod and maclyn mccarty’s 1943 identification of “dna as the carrier of biological specificity,” then james watson and francis crick’s convincing 1953 announcement that “genes are real molecules” made up of deoxyribonucleic acid (dna), consensus began building around the constitution of the gene. “thus, by midcentury,” keller (2002, 3) writes, “all remaining doubts about the material reality of the gene were dispelled and the way was cleared for the gene to become the foundational concept capable of unifying all of biology.”6 while scientists in china have certainly been conducting genetic research for much of the past century, in this section i discuss how their research reached a different understanding of what constitutes the gene, or at least came to an understanding of the gene’s centrality by different means. as historian frank dikötter (1992, 1998) has shown, after the fall of the qing empire in 1911, the republican era ushered in support for china’s modernization, particularly through science. as genetics and embryology were taken up, ideas of so-called soft inheritance gained popularity, accompanied by a burgeoning commitment to strengthen the chinese race and nation (mínzú) through eugenics and social darwinism. even as members of the solidifying nation were judged in fixed hierarchical states dependent on their supposed nature, according to dikötter (1998, 70), they were still viewed as part of a collective to which they were subordinate, “as self-disciplining cells subordinated by the larger collectivity.” the selective embrace of biological and genetic thinking expressed and reinforced a simultaneous feeling of increasing responsibility for one’s individual health and for contributing to the quality of the national population in china during the republican era. according to dikötter (1998), this shared sense of an individual self-discipline and national duty was a reconfiguration of neo-confucian ideas of self-cultivation, institutionalized through medical discourse. in the united states, neo-lamarckianism, which emphasized the plasticity of inheritance and the environment’s role in evolution, was held to be in opposition to a mendelian notion of fixed genetic characteristics (raffles 2007). while mendelian genetics dominated scientific circles, neo-lamarckianism was largely deemphasized by the beginning of world war i in euro-america (jablonka and lamb 1999; stern 2005). in republican china, however, these two approaches to genetics were not mutually exclusive. in growing explorations into the science of heredity (yíchuánxué), neo-lamarckianism was embraced alongside mendelian genetics “in a holistic approach which stressed the interdependence of nature with nurture and the subordination of the individual to the nation” (dikötter 1998, 118). this changed after the communist party took formal control in 1949, when mendelian genetics was denounced as bourgeois science and affiliated with the eugenic campaigns of adolf hitler, as well as the hegemony of western science. following soviet scientific trends, the party instead adopted lysenkoism. in his 1951 book heredity and variability, trofim lysenko (2001) described the science of heredity as a field that should include the environmental conditions necessary for a living body to develop, not just the genetic traits passed from parent to offspring. like neo-lamarckianism, lysenkoism stressed the malleability of inheritance and the responsiveness of nature to environments. lysenko (2001, 7) emphasized the “relation of an organism of a given nature to its environmental conditions.” in the late 1940s, under the influence of soviet science, lysenkoism became the primary form of research into heredity in china. the geneticist ching chun li (1950) published a short article in the journal of heredity capturing the conflict over lysenkoism from the perspective of a u.s.-trained chinese mendelianist. “even with unlimited patience,” li (1950, 91) writes, “my colleagues and i have been unable to save the science of genetics from its death in china. the situation becomes one in which one must declare his allegiance to the lysenko theory or leave. the latter has been my choice.” sympathetic to li, both for his displacement and for being on what he considers the right side of science, the historian laurence schneider (1989) claimed that lysenkoism delayed or prevented decades of china’s scientific potential.7 china’s lysenkoist history, for schneider, proved a cautionary tale through which one might see the ways in which government and party politics stymie scientific progress. the explicit and intentional intertwining of science and politics in china during this period of mendelian rejection was deeply troubling to li in 1950, as well as to schneider in 1989, shortly after china’s reform and opening. schneider argues that lysenkoism was adopted in china because this theory of hereditary adaptations to environmental changes fit in with socialist dialectical materialism. lysenkoism folded the history of the chinese people into the history of the material world that surrounded them, arguing that plants and potentially human bodies would carry histories within them (with the understanding, of course, that humans make history). schneider celebrates that since reform and opening chinese society has once again opened itself to a science driven not by politics, but by truth. yet schneider’s glorification of the return of chinese genetics to an apolitical embrace of genetic theories dominant in the west masks the more implicit political and theoretical commitments that underlie mendelian genetics.8 mendelian genetics were rejected in china not only because they were dominant in western countries but also because of the implicit values and epistemic presuppositions that this approach to genetics stresses. in particular, communist governments of the soviet union and china rejected the premise of nature outside human agency (shapiro 2001), including the mendelian premise of heredity based on autonomous units passed through isolated individuals. while the chinese state still heavily criticizes individualism today, many scholars argue that the individualization of post-mao (and post-deng) china is underway. anthropologists in particular have shown the results of china’s increasing capitalist society. market reforms and changing lifestyles resulted first in an untying of individuals from the state (yan 2009), and then in the rapid growth of desires (zhang 2015) and desiring subjects (rofel 2007) in the face of conflicted understandings of the self (liu 2002). such individualization seems to correspond with the post–reform and opening rise in genetic determinism and can be found in concerns about population quality as, for instance, expressed through government-sponsored prenatal screening campaigns for single-gene disorders. the sociologist zhu jianfeng (2013, 537) argues that such prenatal screening, which often gives vague or unreliable results, now constitutes an individualized responsibility placed on couples in china. moreover, it is a technological burden to be endured, unsurprisingly, by the woman’s body (rapp 1999; thompson 2005). here, in another reconfiguration of individual self-discipline and national duty institutionalized through science and medicine, the chinese state both invests in and disentangles itself from a collective, partially shifting the state’s burden of fulfilling national population-quality goals from the state to individual parents-in-the-making. while zhu contends that such shifts expose the increasing neoliberalization of china, the anthropologist susan greenhalgh (2009, 205) argues that “the familiar biopolitical story,” which includes an individual body/subject that emerges from capitalism, “is eurocentric” and does not capture the ways in which concerns with population continue alongside individualization in china. in the next section i explore how this simultaneous emphasis on individuals and populations, perhaps sustained since the early republican era, can be seen in the motivations and practices of toxicologists conducting epigenetic research in china. i ask how the understanding of epigenetics in a chinese context might lead to a different social scientific understanding of the kind of personhood at work in some epigenetic research. epigenetic in/dividualism now well into the first decades of the twenty-first century, social scientists primarily focusing on euro-america utilize ideas of responsibilization (clarke et al. 2003) and neoliberal science and health care (rose 2009) to critique epigenetics, concentrating on the ways in which epigenetic research reinforces individual, maternal responsibility for fetal and child health. social scientists have described epigenetics, or at least its portrayal in media and by public health practitioners, as a new iteration of a longstanding pattern that blames mothers for the conditions, abnormalities, or defects found in their fetuses. for instance, as illustrated through ethnographic work on prenatal screening (rapp 1999) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (franklin and roberts 2006), scholars have shown that mothers are often blamed for single-gene genetic disorders, which might be a by-product of such tests utilizing female bodies and bodily fluids (thompson 2005). epigenetic theories of disease causality can reinforce these patterns of maternal blame for bodies gone awry by turning individual maternal behaviors or lifestyle choices into toxic exposures that impact fetal health (mansfield 2012; warin et al. 2012). epigenetic research and its media representation in the united states and australia have depicted the responsibility for epigenetically inherited conditions as the product of individual maternal behaviors such as smoking (warin et al. 2012) or of essentialized behavioral patterns such as dietary intake (mansfield and guthman 2015). epigenetic research that draws attention to, and only to, the mother as the source of future disease causality is certainly limited by assumptions of individuality underlying such research. the material-semiotic interworkings of this logic of maternal blame (see haraway 1991) rely on an assumption of two individuals—a mother, depicted as a badly behaving vessel, and a developing fetus, the victim of the mother’s exposures and behaviors. working through an emphasis on the uterine environment, the mother is figured as the primary site of “epigenetic becoming” (mansfield and guthman 2015, 6), where and when infants simultaneously archive the past and become the future. the mother, whose diet or behavior has impacted the fetus, is plucked out of any type of context—social, environmental, national, chemical—and turned into an individually responsible being, stripped of her surroundings (landecker 2014). as stated by martyn pickersgill and colleagues (pickersgill et al. 2013, 437): “in effect women are framed as the first environment for children, potentially activating and augmenting a range of moral discourses and subjecting [women] to (increased) scrutiny.” the interpretation that women actually become the environment in epigenetic research resembles the idea proposed by marilyn strathern in 1991. however, instead of considering it problematic, strathern saw the person-environment collapse occurring in some epigenetic studies as a potential means to challenge the very concept of the individual at the heart of so much genetic thinking. i add that this collapse, where and when the environment becomes a person, also has the potential to disrupt the individualism at the heart of notions of “epigenetic responsibility” (hedlund 2012). in the chinese setting i researched, the cause and solution to epigenetically linked problems were not “narrowed to the individual” (warin et al. 2012, 370) or to the spatiotemporal coordinates of the uterine environment (mansfield and guthman 2015; guthman and mansfield 2013). instead, proposed birth-cohort studies, physician interactions with patients, and a focus on toxins that result from industrialization recontextualize the fetus in time and space, placing “it back into the uterus, and the uterus back into the woman’s body, and her body back into its social space” (petchesky 1987, 287). in terms more often used in characterizations of chinese settings, the fetus is placed at the center of concentric circles of interaction. concentric circles have often been used in classical chinese texts to describe the multiple scales of human relationships, where the self lies at the center, followed by the family, community, country, and, eventually, all of humanity at the outer limit (tu 2001). sociologist fei xiaotong’s (1992, 63) famous description of chinese kinship likens interpersonal relations in china “to the concentric circles formed when a stone is thrown into a lake.” moreover, china and east asia more generally have been long characterized by anthropologists as places that do not think of bodies in isolation (chen 2003; kleinman 1981; lock and farquhar 2007; scheper-hughes and lock 1987). instead, there exists a long history of diagnosing and treating the social causations of bodily illness through an understanding of co-constituted human-environments (tu 2001; zhan 2011). relational ideas of personhood like those found in the detox lab’s epigenetic research have characterized social scientific models of chinese life for a long time. margaret lock (2015) has even suggested that the connection between chinese understandings of the body and epigenetics could be more direct, noting that at the time when conrad waddington was developing his theory of epigenetics, he was regularly in conversation with the sinologist and fellow embryologist joseph needham. this assertion does not mean to explain the detox lab’s approach to epigenetic research as simply a product of supposed chinese thinking. the notion that there exists a singular or timeless chinese understanding of the body, self, or personhood as relational has been thrown into question, most recently by anthropological research on rapid post–reform and opening social change, which shows that individualization, consumerism, and new kinship formulations are increasingly occurring in china. but perhaps the detox lab is drawing on longstanding relational modes of understanding social life, as well as longstanding values related to the interconnection of humans and environments, to criticize this more recent individualization and responsibilization in china. i interpret the detox lab’s research as an effort to reemphasize connections between inner and outer environments, ancestors and future generations. this recontextualization of the fetus into concentric circles of multiple human and nonhuman environments is, at least, what the medical student lin hopes to communicate to the families of his hospital patients. according to lin, families who travel to the children’s hospital from rural areas of jiangsu or surrounding provinces are often embarrassed by their infant’s deformities, especially when they have no anus. lin believes this shame derives from the traditional or buddhist beliefs of rural parents, who understand their children’s birth defects as retribution for parents’ bad deeds in past lives or their lack of filial piety.9 as a physician, lin hopes that his research on the potential epigenetic mechanisms involved in the transgenerational inheritance of birth defects will encourage parents to stop blaming themselves for their children’s conditions. he and other members of the detox lab conduct epigenetic research not to bring about the responsibilization of the individual but to offer a response to china’s rapid social, economic, and environmental change by understanding how and which toxic exposures are epigenetically inherited. here, to understand the environment as a person is to understand the person as always in relation to other environments and people—and therefore only able to take partial responsibility for the health of present and future generations. lin hopes such displacement, both from the present to previous generations and from patients’ traditional beliefs to the science he practices, will ease the sense of responsibility that burdens so many parents. likely lin paints too simplistic a distance between his scientific understanding of hd and patient interpretations of their infant’s condition. yet lin’s thoughts on this issue offer a nuanced contrast to critiques of epigenetic sciences that claim such research furthers individual, maternal responsibility for fetal health. in lin’s research and treatment practices, the epigenetic environment is not individualized but multiplied (see mol 2002); it is made to speak back to feelings of responsibility expressed by his patients’ parents. such research and treatment practices show that an epigenetic understanding of disease causality can be, in some instances, a means of thinking beyond the individual. environments as persons? if the environment in epigenetic research is a person, what kind of person is it? in contrast to epigenetic research that focuses on finding evidence to prompt interventions into maternal behaviors or lifestyles such as smoking or diet, the detox lab’s research uses epigenetic research techniques to reemphasize an idea of persons as partial entities that exist across generations and intertwine with surrounding human and nonhuman environments. this formulation of the person as an environment differs from the epigenetic person-environment that feminist social scientists critical of epigenetics have to date discussed. while much important research has shown that epigenetic research and its representation in the popular press can further elaborate individualized maternal responsibility for the health of future generations, as with the term epigenetics itself, such research encompasses a wide variety of practices and approaches, taking place in increasingly varied geographic settings. in this article, and during my own ethnographic research, i have tried to remain attentive to both the ways in which epigenetic research practices and findings may continue a long line of medical practice and moral discourse that individualizes maternal responsibility for disease, as well as to the possibility that epigenetic research may simultaneously contest that very kind of individualization. this contestation proves important because the kind of persons and environments brought into existence through epigenetic research have the potential to be translated by patients, the media, and even policymakers into ideas about who or what is responsible for exposures. in the detox lab, this means responsibility for the conditions of toxicity potentially causing epigenetic alterations. by collecting multigenerational and multivariant evidence for the intergenerational transmission of epigenetic transformations, the detox lab works through an understanding of persons as dividuals, thereby emphasizing a responsibility for toxic environments that goes beyond the mother, beyond her relatives, and into aspects of the physical, chemical, and sociocultural environments that surround and compose toxic lineages of exposure. these are environments that do not simply exist as stagnant surroundings, but have been shaped and formed through the past thirty-five years of china’s social and economic change and industrial development. in the case of the detox lab’s research, an interdependent understanding of person-environment relatedness challenges the linear and individualistic trajectories of both a strict mendelian genetics and a changing post–reform and opening china. the detox lab’s hope for epigenetic research on congenital disorders and reproductive health conditions is not that it will change maternal behaviors, lifestyle habits, or even personal exposure levels. instead, the scientists pursue research to capture a much more complex picture of exposure, a more varied and elaborate toxicity linked to industrial development, and one that they fear has been and will continue to be inherited. their epigenetic research constitutes a means through which a small group of scientists critical of the conditions of toxicity that surround them are able to provide evidence for what they see as the harmful nature of relentless economic development and lax industrial regulations. furthermore, it is a scientific project figured in embodied reproductive consequences. materialized in blood and bowel, epigenetic biomarkers of disease become a means for the detox lab to relay to chinese public health officials, and others open to listening, that the quality of china’s future, and of future generations, is at stake. notes acknowledgments research for this article was supported by funding from the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, and the social science research council. this article benefited from the thoughtful feedback of many friends and colleagues at various stages, including amber benezra, carrie bond, anna jabloner, bharat venkat, ayo wahlberg, haiyan yang, and joy zhang, as well as that of my dissertation committee, cori hayden, vincanne adams, lawrence cohen, and wen-hsin yeh. i received helpful questions and comments during presentations at the 2015 european association for social anthropologists conference and oxford university’s medical anthropology seminar, especially from elisabeth hsu and amy mclennan. feedback from the 2013 council on anthropology and reproduction graduate student paper prize committee was also insightful. members of the reproductive sociology research group, especially sarah franklin, katie dow and karen jent, read and reread the manuscript in progress, providing essential encouragement throughout the publication process. the final product came together with much assistance from cultural anthropology’s editorial collective, especially cymene howe, and from two anonymous reviewers who i thank for their time and attention. of course, the article could not exist without the generosity of the scientists and physicians i shadowed and interviewed during fieldwork, and i express my sincere appreciation for their time and generosity during my stay in nanjing. 1. all names of physicians, scientists, and institutions have been changed for privacy. 2. i borrow the term embedded from jörg niewöhner (2011), who argues that epigenetics moves the biological sciences away from the dominant notion of a skin-bound, autonomous, individualized body and toward a notion of “the embedded body” or the body in context. 3. for more on male preference, sex ratio, and the contemporary impact of the historical residue of patriarchy on china’s demographics, see the extensive work of susan greenhalgh (1985, 2009, 2013; greenhalgh and li 1995). 4. neural crest cells are embryonic cells that are pluripotent, or become many different types of cells, as they migrate during embryonic development. more so than other cell populations, these cells have been shown to carry epigenetic modifications across generations and are thought to be connected to epigenetically influenced disease development, as is the case with hirschsprung’s disease. 5. this research also opens up the potential for future diagnostic technologies. if the turning on or off of certain genes is found to correlate strongly with hd, then the diagnosis of this condition may become easier. 6. one could also argue that even during this time period, many scientists examined the ways in which processes of genetic inheritance were potentially influenced by environments, including anne mclaren, who studied the uterine environment and maternal influence (franklin 2007), and barbara mcclintock, who eventually won the nobel prize for her theory of genetic transposition (keller 1984). 7. here, lysenkoism takes a position in a long line of characteristics that keep china from keeping pace with the west, from confucianism in the work of max weber (1968) to feudalism in the work of john fairbank (1953) to pseudoscience in the view of yen fu (schwartz 1964). 8. laurence schneider’s glorification of the return to chinese genetics also masks the explicit and implicit relationships between science and politics in post–reform and opening china, as more recently researched by margaret sleeboom-faulkner (2008) in the context of human cloning and stem cell research. 9. such ideas have been discussed by anthropologists 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understanding maternal serum screening in contemporary china.” current anthropology 54, s7: s36–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/670969. who’s queer? what’s queer? who’s queer? what’s queer? queer anthropology through the lens of ethnography ellen lewin university of iowa http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2911-0628 i would like to use this space to explore the utility of queer nomenclature for understanding the lives of many real-world people with nonheteronormative sexual or gender identities and presentations, asking whether a field of inquiry many choose to label as “queer anthropology” can adequately represent the full diversity of the populations we study. i respond here to what i read as the prescriptive elements of “queer” as a sensibility and particularly as a discourse of resistance, and i challenge them with a call to return to our roots as ethnographers, that is, to report on and respect people as we find them in various locations. for the most part, anthropologists have done quite well at avoiding the use of classifications from western culture, such as “gay” or “lesbian,” to label nonhetero normative sexualities/genders outside the west. instead, we have paid close attention to the way the so-called natives understand and label themselves, thereby questioning efforts to amalgamate same-sex sexualities outside the west into the western category of “homosexuality” (elliston 1995). but the ascendancy of queer analytics in studies of the west has created some difficulties not present when we work in non-western cultures. indeed, queer perspectives have had the effect of disparaging those whose sense of themselves is less antagonistic to so-called normativity than queer theorists would expect or consider desirable. in particular, the pursuit of marriage equality and the emblems of family legitimacy have set off waves of outrage at the normativity and accommodation that such yearning presumably reveals. since those seeking access to these insignia are the very lgbt people whose lives i have chronicled in my work, i find myself needing to defend the authenticity of their aspirations as i attempt to document the cultural patterns that shape their experience. i arrived at this position unintentionally. when i set out to study lesbian mothers in 1977, i was sure, based on what kath weston (1998, 145) would subsequently call “street theorizing,” that i would find novel social arrangements among a besieged population that few people even believed existed. i predicted that because of strained relationships with their blood kin, these women would form new kinds of kinship arrangements based on friendship and shared lesbian identity, what weston (1991) would later famously name “families we choose”—a term so apt that it has become part of the lgbt popular lexicon. however, as an anthropologist, i had been trained to listen to people and to analyze what they told me about how they organize their lives and what they believe in. and i learned that lesbian mothers actually were (or became) fervent adherents of biological kinship as the foundation for the formation of solidary, reliable support networks. further, they disparaged lesbianism as the main foundation for defining their selves and building supportive alliances, instead seeing motherhood as essentially trumping other aspects of their identities. one mother i interviewed put it this way: there’s a difference between people who have children and people who don’t have children. people who don’t have children, to my way of thinking, are very selfish. . . . they needn’t consider anyone other than themselves. they can do exactly what they want to do at any given time. and though i admire that, it’s not possible for me to do that and i guess for that reason most of my friends are single mothers, because it’s hard for me to coordinate my needs and my time with someone who’s in a completely different head set. “why can’t you get a sitter for the kid?”—that kind of thing . . . i just prefer being with people who have some sense of what it’s like to be me, and i understand where they are too. indeed, i found that lesbian mothers’ understandings of how to manage the material and cultural challenges of parenthood depended on an elaboration of biology both as the foundation of social support and as the explanation for their desire to be mothers. most mothers understood motherhood as intrinsically linked to their being women, as something they “naturally” desired and could do because they were women. some mothers even explained their decision to become parents as driven by some mysterious hormonal process they couldn’t account for. they situated their experience within a framework of nature, based on their beliefs about ineffable impulses that emerged from being women. at the same time, they tended to elaborate connections based on blood kinship as the most trustworthy sources of support, while denigrating alternative family forms as not naturally reliable. keeping such relationships going often entailed complex negotiations with family members, usually parents, who did not accept their sexuality, though many mothers reported that parental disapproval of their sexuality evaporated or dramatically lessened once a grandchild entered the picture (see lewin 1993). in other words, careful ethnographic observation and analysis forced me to give up my search for alternative kinship ideologies and to report on and respect what the women actually told me. as i later considered weston’s findings, which are very solidly grounded in ethnographic investigation but which mainly focus on gay people who are not parents, i could only conclude that parenthood changed the meaning of kinship for gay and lesbian people from the emphasis on the chosen-families model to something much more similar to what nongay people who had children embraced. it is not that lesbian mothers’ families were necessarily conventional—few people’s families conform to 1950s myths these days—but that they understood kinship obligations in terms of a system that was far from alternative and that maximized the significance of what they viewed as biology. my next big project focused on same-sex commitment ceremonies. i conducted the research in the mid-1990s, before legal same-sex marriage existed anywhere in the world (it was introduced in the netherlands in 2001). i was fascinated by the increasing numbers of these ritual occasions, considering that there were no important legal or material gains to be made from the public declaration of a couple’s relationship. some of the ceremonies i studied entailed great expense; others were modest affairs. but all set out to celebrate the relationships in a wider community context than that offered by lesbian and gay social groupings. couples situated their unions expansively, with participation spilling over the boundaries of gay communities as couples insisted on including family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and participants of multiple generations to whatever extent was possible. all-gay ceremonies sometimes occurred, especially when nongay relatives refused to participate or when an opportunity to stage a ceremony at a gay cultural event presented itself, but couples saw these as expedient yet not completely satisfactory ways to solemnize their relationships. although material benefits that might accompany ceremonies, primarily in the form of wedding gifts, were desirable, couples’ comments about benefits like these mainly focused on how they served as evidence of the authenticity of their claims to legitimacy. while further material advantages may accompany legal marriage (e.g., health insurance, tax benefits), i read the desirability of these as further evidence of the authenticity of the relationship, rather than as the primary motivation for choosing to marry. in other words, such benefits are nice to have, even vital for some couples, but they also signify being married in the eyes of all who encounter the couple. as i reported in recognizing ourselves (lewin 1998), some ceremonies depended on forms and symbols that echoed ordinary weddings. couples used familiar rituals, usually officiated by clergy, to present themselves as deserving of recognition on the same basis as other married couples. but their presentation of ordinariness often entailed sharp contrasts—attendants in drag along with the inclusion of familiar wedding-related texts, for instance. other weddings were replete with elements couples identified as “queer”: theme weddings, campy costuming, the reworking of ritual language, and the explicit incorporation of political concerns. yet these, too, drew on what was described to me as “tradition.” indeed, the manipulation of seeming assimilation was essential to the performance of queerness. the two strategies, conformity and resistance, were locked in a passionate embrace, despite the intentions of the celebrants. i found similar patterns when i studied gay fathers, though i did so more than two decades after completing my research with lesbian mothers. while these men experienced more public visibility and legitimation than the women i had worked with so many years before, they also tended to situate their paternal impulses in nature—and, sometimes, in the supernatural, as driven by forces that eluded simple explanations. these men also discovered that parenthood moved their social location into one that had little to do with being “gay,” as they had long understood that term. using a playful tone, one father told me, for example, “oh, we’re not gay anymore. we pick our friends by what time their kids take naps.” such comments drew on definitions of gay identity as linked to activities understood to be uncompromisingly gay—clubbing, going out to eat, attending the opera, circuit parties, and so on. my informants provided various models, but in all of them gay and parenthood were conceptually distinct. as men offered these accounts, they tended to disparage their old gay life, or whatever they imagined a gay life to consist of, as “not important.” while being fathers shaped or constrained their lives in concrete ways—for example, it became too expensive to go to the opera when one had to manage the expenses of a child; they found themselves spending time with other parents, rather than their gay friends who were not parents—i was struck by the moral judgment fathers’ comments betrayed. one father had this to say: at the end of our lives, do i want to say, “wow, we had some great trips to key west, and wasn’t the pottery barn fabulous when we furnished our house, and wasn’t my garden cute?” i mean, is that what i want the essence of my life to be? yes, there was career and friends, and all that stuff that was important, but then there’s also that bigger legacy that’s important. when you think about importance, it ties to social responsibility and making a difference and growing and raising this hopefully happy and well-adjusted and productive and caring human being. in my current project, which focuses on a coalition of predominantly african american lgbt pentecostal congregations, the fellowship of affirming ministries (tfam), the issue of labeling comes up in different ways. first, tfam members almost never use the term queer in describing their identities. they call themselves gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or often sgl, which stands for “same-gender loving.” they also identify along spiritual dimensions as “saved” or as “saints,” and understand their religious yearnings as part of their racial history. that is, worshipping in the expressive manner characteristic of many black churches in the united states and, for some, engaging in dancing, shouting, and falling out—all classic pentecostal manifestations of inhabitation by the holy spirit—constitute a way of affirming their place in a history and community and reclaiming a heritage, even if parts of the black community, especially homophobic families, churches, and clergy, have rejected them. they are engaged in a quest for spiritual enlightenment, for the holy spirit to fill their bodies and souls, that will not be impeded by their nonheteronormative gender/sexual identities. marlon bailey (2013) also worked with a population that did not use the word queer in his evocative ethnography, butch queens up in pumps. like the folks i am studying, bailey’s interlocutors rarely use the word queer to describe themselves; therefore, he refrains from labeling them with this term, instead using the term lgbt or one of the six gender categories that actors in the african american ballroom scene use to describe themselves—butch queen, butch queen up in drag, femme queen, butch, women, men/trade. his use of the term queer derives from his understanding of its usefulness in revealing how conventional binaries (male/female, gay/straight, etc.) can be understood as social and historical constructions that are used, in siobhan somerville’s (2007, 187) words, to “police the line between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal.’” bailey (2013, 23) chooses, instead, to “deploy queer theory to examine what members of the ballroom community do as opposed to who they are.” but that very sensitive usage won’t work for the people i work with, insofar as their interaction with conventional gender binaries lacks the element of confrontation present in the ballroom scene that bailey analyzes. while the parents and couples i worked with demand access to particular statuses denied to them because of their gender and sexual identities, they still embrace naturalized understandings of both who they are and what they do. similarly, the pentecostals who worship in tfam congregations are carving out a place where they can worship in a manner otherwise inaccessible to them, but they still define themselves in terms of their spiritual achievements, regardless of how transgressive their gender or sexual presentations seem to be. in other words, transgression in these contexts shrinks in significance when compared with the meanings attributed to being a parent, being recognized as a married couple, or experiencing spiritual transcendence. given the priorities of the populations with whom i’ve worked, it’s been difficult over the years not to associate queer scholarship with intolerance and the disparagement of people like my informants. at an american studies conference some years ago, i gave a paper that focused on the kinds of unexpected transformations that can follow from same-sex commitment ceremonies, intending to illustrate the power of ritual. i told the story of an upper-middle-class lesbian couple whose public behavior epitomized discretion and who had struggled to craft a ceremony that would avoid even a whisper of confrontation or public display of gayness. after the ceremony, and to their surprise, the couple found themselves taking relatively dramatic public stands in support of gay rights and outing themselves in a number of settings, including their very conservative workplaces. they experienced these episodes as spontaneous outbursts brought on by having had a wedding, even if they didn’t call it that at the time. the shift was most evocatively represented by the changing meaning they attached to the rings they had exchanged in the ceremony. they had first told me they carefully chose these particular rings because they didn’t match and, in their view, didn’t resemble wedding rings, and so wouldn’t fuel speculation about their sexuality. but during an encounter in a public setting where they were dismissed as not being married (and thus not equal to the straight couple they were with), they instantly extended their hands, displaying the rings, and said, “yes, we are!” during the q&a period after my paper, a well-known scholar of queer cultural studies stood and addressed me. “how can you study such yucky people?” she asked, abruptly sitting down to signal that no discussion of this comment could follow. there is a lot that could be said about this incident (besides the fact that it gave me a great way to start my next book [lewin 2009]), but i’d like to focus on two points. the first can be framed in terms of the aversion to real life implied by the statement. the second is more complex, but directly connected to the first. it assumes that queerness unquestionably resides in visible, intentional, and effective subversions of mainstream cultural norms and the related expectation that explicit and palpable transgression is the only sort of queerness worthy of the name. all behaviors and styles that are coded as not achieving a particular standard of transgression or queerness fall into the complicated category my interlocutor defined as “yuckiness,” disparaged as not queer, dismissed as accommodationist, and thus not deemed worthy of respectful investigation. there is more than a whiff of what sherry ortner (1995) has called “ethnographic refusal” here, a failure to consider the complexity of a situation that might be revealed by a fuller engagement with the multiple lived realities of subjects. i read ortner as calling for us to have faith in the authenticity of people’s behaviors and beliefs and to repudiate tendencies to dismiss what the analyst finds unappealing. her work, and indeed all of cultural anthropology, tells us to base our conclusions on what our informants say and do, rather than using what our informants say and do to sustain already formulated ideas. my other concern about queer as a framework for anthropological scholarship concerns the claims we might make about how we do our work, implied in the transformation of one section of the american anthropological association from the society of lesbian and gay anthropologists (solga) to the association for queer anthropology (aqa). note the shift in prepositions from of to for, implying our mutual immersion in a kind of anthropology rather than an affinity based on identity. but is there a queer anthropology? i believe that feminism presented a set of challenges to traditional ethnographic methods and representations that have had lasting effects on the entire discipline. paralleling postmodern scholarship and empowered by earlier questions about structural-functional models of cultures (mascia-lees, sharpe, and cohen 1989), feminist anthropologists did (at least) two important things. we demanded a commitment to accountability in ethnographic research, a priority that has realized itself in new standards of reflexivity in our work. who is writing this? what is her motivation? what is her standpoint? we also insisted on putting the voices of the people we studied, the informants or interlocutors or “natives,” front and center, thus attempting to minimize the extent to which we spoke for them and thereby rendered them mute. this approach was vital at the beginning of the field as we sought to discover the views of women and girls, long erased from the arena of cultural agency, as edwin ardener (1975) argued four decades ago. but the commitment to present our interlocutors as active and vocal beings also meant that we took responsibility for showing the reader how we knew whatever it was that we said we knew. in other words, an attack on male-centric cultural models also required challenging the god voice that had long been the hallmark of ethnographic writing. our conclusions, thus, were filtered through the sources of our information and through our own visible and invisible subjectivities. truth was recognized as unstable and relative, both temporally and on the basis of how and by whom supposed facts were gathered. i’m not describing anything here that most of us in anthropology are not familiar with. what i want to ask is in what way queer work offers a unique methodology or theoretical perspective that goes beyond this. aren’t those of us who dedicate ourselves to presenting the voices of persons who are otherwise erased and disparaged basically working along the lines of feminist anthropology? is there a good reason for us to attribute these innovations to the insights queerness provides or to declare ourselves practitioners of queer anthropology? aren’t we just doing ethnography? and don’t our interlocutors deserve our respect, even if they don’t embrace outrageousness or seek to separate themselves from normative social and moral standards in a way we find exciting? references ardener, edwin 1975 “belief and the problem of women.” in perceiving women, edited by shirley ardener, 1–17. london: malaby press. bailey, marlon m. 2013 butch queens up in pumps: gender, performance, and ballroom culture in detroit. ann arbor: university of michigan press. elliston, deborah a. 1995 “erotic anthropology: ‘ritualized homosexuality’ in melanesia and beyond.” american ethnologist 22, no. 4: 848–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.4.02a00100. lewin, ellen 1993 lesbian mothers: accounts of gender in american culture. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. 1998 recognizing ourselves: ceremonies of lesbian and gay commitment. new york: columbia university press. 2009 gay fatherhood: narratives of family and citizenship in america. chicago: university of chicago press. mascia-lees, frances e., patricia sharpe, and colleen ballerino cohen 1989 “the postmodernist turn in anthropology: cautions from a feminist perspective.” signs 15, no. 1: 7–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174704. ortner, sherry b. 1995 “resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal.” comparative studies in society and history 37, no. 1: 173–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500019587. somerville, siobhan b. 2007 “queer.” in keywords for american cultural studies, edited by bruce burgett and glenn hendler, 187–90. new york: new york university press. weston, kath 1991 families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. new york: columbia university press. 1998 “theory, theory, who’s got the theory?” in long slow burn: sexuality and social science, 143–46. new york: routledge. when the punishment is pregnancy when the punishment is pregnancy: carceral restriction of abortion in the united states carolyn sufrin johns hopkins university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2739-9296 in the age of donald trump, women’s reproductive bodies have become even more public and regulated canvases for moral narratives of women’s worth as humans and for the state’s claim to their bodies. we have witnessed increasing legal restrictions on abortion access, the undermining of insurance coverage for contraception, and a spectacular federal intrusion preventing a young woman held in immigration detention from having an abortion. but to fully grasp the scope and implications of the state’s investment in women’s reproductive bodies under the trump administration, we must also tend to the quieter, more opaque spaces in which reproduction is meticulously regulated: in particular, carceral institutions. for there are pregnant women in prisons and jails in the united states, who gestate largely unnoticed but within the enmeshed webs of carceral violence and reproductive control. in this brief essay, i illustrate how the adjudication and restriction of abortion access for incarcerated people exemplifies the intimate violence imposed by the state on women’s bodies, from the classic bodily control of regimented confinement to the structural and racialized violence of u.s. mass incarceration. furthermore, abortion access among incarcerated people reveals the material consequences of rights-based language about abortion promoted by prochoice activists, which then enables its carceral restriction. this carceral framing of abortion, behind the walls of the prison, tells us much about the broader politics of reproduction and the politics of indifference in the age of trump. the judicialization of prison abortions no data exist on the frequency of abortions among incarcerated women in the united states. in fact, the most recent estimates of pregnancy prevalence behind bars come from surveys conducted by the bureau of justice statistics in 2002 and 2004 (maruschak 2006, 2008). what we do know is that prisons and jails have inconsistent and variable policies: some carceral institutions explicitly prohibit abortion at any point, some allow it only in the first trimester, others permit it only when there is a threat to the woman’s health, and some allow it under most circumstances (roth 2004; sufrin, creinin, and chang 2009). the variability in prison abortion policies, along with differences in how they play out on the ground, tells a deeper story about the way incarcerated women’s reproductive bodies are put in the service of those in power—prison wardens and others—to exercise their moral claims on human reproduction. despite prohibitive policies and a statistical amnesia about prison abortions, the judicial record from dozens of lawsuits clearly indicates that incarcerated women retain their constitutional right to abortion (kasdan 2009). in part, this stipulation derives from the judicial principle that a prison can only curtail a person’s constitutional rights if doing so serves what is termed a “penological interest,” such as deterring crime or rehabilitating prisoners. the courts have affirmed that restricting an incarcerated person’s access to abortion does not serve any of these functions. but do prison workers intend to accomplish rehabilitation by preventing incarcerated people’s abortions? in my research with pregnant women in the san francisco jail (see sufrin 2017), some of them experienced their jail pregnancies as opportunities “for redemption for past failures, hopes for the future, and a chance to claim a socially acceptable and respectable identity” (murphy and rosenbaum 1999, 3). the carceral apparatus actively promotes this ideal through prison parenting classes, by providing special privileges for pregnant women like a bottom bunk and extra food, and through prison nursery programs, which exist in eight states. separate prison wings allow women who have given birth while in custody to take their babies back to prison with them. the idea is that having the time and space to cultivate their maternal identity will help them refocus away from a life of crime and toward one of normativity. research publications claim that women who participate in these programs have lower reincarceration rates (goshin, byrne, and henninger 2014). so it seems there is at least indirect evidence that prisons perceive a continued pregnancy to have rehabilitative and crime-deterring potential, thus serving a penological interest. but we need only look to the ways that pregnant incarcerated women are mistreated to find a more sinister punitive logic at play. testimonials and lawsuits abound from pregnant women who received little to no prenatal care, whose labor symptoms were ignored, who gave birth alone in their jail cells, who were separated from their newborns within hours after birth, who slept on cement floors, who were forced to detox from heroin, who were shackled in childbirth, and so on (levi and waldman 2011; kraft-stolar 2015). furthermore, my ethnographic research with jail guards shows how they often demonize incarcerated women as bad mothers for allegedly committing a crime or for using drugs while pregnant. if we needed more evidence of the devaluation of incarcerated women’s reproduction, in california prisons between 2006 and 2010 more than one hundred women were unlawfully sterilized (johnson 2013). more recently, in tennessee, a sheriff, surely emboldened by trump’s punitive logic, incentivized incarcerated persons to undergo sterilization by shaving thirty days off of their jail sentences (dwyer 2017). given the conflicting ways that prisons both valorize motherhood in the abstract and actively degrade pregnant and parenting incarcerated women, it is hard to accept the notion that prison abortion restrictions exist to revalue normative motherhood. serious medical needs the second judicial principle applied to incarcerated women’s ability to obtain abortions is that, owing to the supreme court case estelle v. gamble (429 u.s. 97 [1976]), institutions of incarceration are constitutionally required to provide health care to the people it incarcerates. “the deliberate indifference to the serious medical needs of prisoners,” justice thurgood marshall argued in the court’s decision, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and therefore a violation of the eighth amendment. whether a health condition counts as a serious medical need depends on the local administrator’s assessment. will not addressing that condition result in serious harm to the patient or—a common concern—a costly lawsuit for the prison? how much money and trouble will that medical care cost the prison? does the person deserve such care? the focus on “serious medical needs” as the standard by which to adjudicate abortion for incarcerated people makes for a neutralizing framework that is profoundly politicized and moralized. consider this recent example from a midwestern prison, as related to me by a colleague who works to support pregnant women inside. angela found out she was pregnant when she arrived in prison, but knew she did not want to have a baby. when she requested an abortion, she was told that not only would she have to cover the cost of the abortion but she would also have to pay for the officer’s time to escort her to the clinic and for wear and tear on the vehicle. requirements for payment of this sort for transport costs are unheard of for any other medical procedure, be it an appendectomy or childbirth. but the prison administrators did not consider this procedure serious enough to warrant the prison’s resources. the prison warden termed the procedure “elective.” angela could not afford the abortion, although there were community funds that could help pay for that. yet since there was no money to pay for the wear and tear on the prison’s vans, angela resigned herself to pregnancy and childbirth in prison. advocates working with angela contacted an attorney, eventually bringing the prison to agree that the woman did not need to pay for transportation and officer time. when arranging for angela’s guard escorts, the prison warden told guards the reason for the medical visit and gave them the option to decline the job. four officers refused to transport her because they opposed abortion. importantly, correctional officers cannot refuse to guard a person convicted of murder. they cannot refuse to escort a woman to the hospital for childbirth. but they can, apparently, refuse to transport her for an abortion. the warden’s description of abortion as elective and the choice that he gave guards signal a tension between efforts to make a bureaucratic, rules-based argument for denying incarcerated people abortion and a discomfort with the political and moral controversy that abortion engenders. an elective procedure is one that can be deferred to a later time without significantly impacting a patient’s health or well-being. if an abortion is delayed or not done at all, then the woman will likely carry a pregnancy and give birth. that hardly describes the absence of an impact on her physical or social world. yet prison authorities consistently claim that abortion is not a serious medical need and that, by preventing women from obtaining abortions, they are merely following the rules. it is a form of gendered violence to place pregnancy in such a bureaucratic rubric, failing to recognize the intimate and physical ways that it alters women’s lives and bodies. the designation of abortion as elective has roots in the medicalization of abortion, which led in the early twentieth century to the formation of so-called therapeutic abortion committees that adjudicated whether a woman’s reason for requesting an abortion was valid (luker 1984). this idea created a hierarchy between a legitimate and an illegitimate abortion (kimport, weitz, and freedman 2016). the hierarchy persists in medicine today: physicians (even prochoice, abortion-providing ones) speak of indicated abortions—those done in cases of a fetal abnormality or a mother’s debilitating medical condition—and elective abortions. reproductive-rights social movements have also contributed to a hierarchy of abortion legitimacy by mobilizing the language of choice. these movements, along with classic feminist scholarship, have argued that motherhood is a choice, with contraception and abortion featuring as practical tools facilitating this choice. the language of the prochoice movement is unequivocally grounded in individual, rights-based assertions. if the subjectivity advanced by prochoice discourse is the ideal western liberal subject—an autonomous human who crafts her individual self through unconstrained choices—then the framework of choice quickly dissipates in prison, an institution of control whose form of punishment involves the intentional restriction of everyday choices and bodily autonomy. speaking in the language of “a woman’s right to choose” proves incongruous in the prison’s local world. reproductive justice is a framework emerging from and centering the experiences of women of color that places reproduction in a broader context of structural inequalities (ross and solinger 2017); it provides a more apt lens through which to make sense of the ways incarcerated pregnant women’s reproduction is either punitively promoted or suppressed. the discursive claims about whether an abortion is elective or medically necessary that exist in prisons thus directly recapitulate the ways that medical institutions and prochoice movements have construed pregnancy and reproduction. the de facto result of imposing the narrow dichotomies of elective versus necessary onto incarcerated pregnant women is that some women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies as part of their prison sentence; they will be punished with pregnancy. they are forced to endure pregnancies in isolation, in uncertainty, often with unsafe medical care, and then separated from their children at birth. this case of punishing imprisoned women with pregnancy connects symbolically to the broader hyperregulation of abortion in u.s. society, as well as to questions over the states’ role in actively facilitating or restricting an abortion, which we have seen amplified under trump. nonincarcerated women, too, can be punished through their reproduction. in both incarcerated and nonincarcerated instances, the moral value of the fetus, of a mother, and the trenchant impulse to regulate them are refracted through medical, bureaucratic, and legal discourses. in the prison instance, however, no one is paying attention. abortion access for incarcerated women has not much changed under the trump administration. but looking to carcerally managed pregnancies and abortion in the age of trump illuminates the public ways that this administration reinvigorates cultural narratives of criminalizing and controlling women’s reproduction. it also highlights the complicity of prochoice rhetoric in creating opportunities for reproductive regulation in the carceral dimensions of abortion access. as abortion access remains under enhanced threat with the appointment of brett kavanaugh to the supreme court, we must turn our attention more closely to what happens behind the walls of carceral institutions, where no one else is looking, for it illuminates the political and racial control of reproduction more broadly. references dwyer, colin 2017 “judge promises reduced jail time if tennessee inmates get vasectomies.” npr, july 21. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/21/538598008/judge-promises-reduced-jail-time-if-tennessee-inmates-get-vasectomies. goshin, lorie s., mary w. byrne, and alana m. henninger 2014 “recidivism after release from a prison nursery program.” public health nursing 31, no. 2: 109–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/phn.12072. johnson, corey g. 2013 “female inmates sterilized in california prisons without approval.” reveal, july 7. https://www.revealnews.org/article/female-inmates-sterilized-in-california-prisons-without-approval. kasdan, diana 2009 “abortion access for incarcerated women: are correctional health practices in conflict with constitutional standards?” perspectives on sexual and reproductive health 41, no. 1: 59–62. https://doi.org/10.1363/4105909. kimport, katrina, tracy a. weitz, and lori freedman 2016 “the stratified legitimacy of abortions.” journal of health and social behavior 57, no. 4: 503–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022146516669970. kraft-stolar, tamar 2015 “reproductive injustice: the state of reproductive health care for women in new york state prisons.” report, women in prison project. new york: correctional association of new york. https://www.correctionalassociation.org/recent-news. levi, robin, and ayelet waldman, eds. 2011 inside this place, not of it: narratives from women’s prisons. san francisco: mcsweeney’s. luker, kristin 1984 abortion and the politics of motherhood. berkeley: university of california press. maruschak, laura m. 2006 “medical problems of jail inmates.” report, bureau of justice statistics. washington, d.c.: u.s. department of justice. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=786. 2008 “medical problems of prisoners.” report, bureau of justice statistics. washington, d.c.: u.s. department of justice. https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1097. murphy, sheigla, and martha rosenbaum 1999 pregnant women on drugs: combating stereotypes and stigma. piscataway, n.j.: rutgers university press. ross, loretta, and rickie solinger 2017 reproductive justice: a new vision for the twenty-first century. oakland: university of california press. roth, rachel 2004 “do prisoners have abortion rights?” feminist studies 30, no. 2: 353–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/20458968. sufrin, carolyn 2017 jailcare: finding the safety net for women behind bars. oakland: university of california press. sufrin, carolyn b., mitchell d. creinin, and judy c. chang 2009 “incarcerated women and abortion provision: a survey of correctional health providers.” perspectives on sexual and reproductive health 41, no. 1: 6–11. https://doi.org/10.1363/4100609. chemo-ethnography chemo-ethnography: an introduction nicholas shapiro chemical heritage foundation http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4348-5525 eben kirksey university of new south wales http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6067-1525 chemicals have seeped into the ethnographic imaginary. anthropologists have long been tracing the material, toxicological, and neurological valences of molecular dreamworlds, growing pharmaceutical markets, and landscapes haunted by industrial capitalism (e.g., fortun 2001; hayden 2003; murphy 2006; dumit 2012; jain 2013). sensing technologies and collaborations with allies in other disciplines are also allowing ethnographers to study chemical species in water, soil, air, human bodies, and emergent ecological assemblages. theoretical and empirical research is focusing on technoscientific environmental constructs, civic public forms, noninnocent optimism, state abdication, and capital despoilment. processes like sublimation and combustion are informing nascent approaches to writing culture in the anthropocene (shapiro 2015; povinelli 2017). chemicals are becoming increasingly useful linking figures as ethnographers follow complex, multisited, and multiscalar phenomena (bond 2013; hardon, idrus, and hymans 2013; myers 2015; romero et al. 2017; sunder rajan 2017; murphy 2017). chemical ethnography, or chemo-ethnography, owes intellectual debts to lochlann jain (2013, 24), who has ushered “cancer and its identities out of the closet and into a space not of comfort, or righteous anger, but of mourning, a space where the material humanity of suffering and death informs communicative and collective action.” the stomach-wrenching experience of chemotherapy offers a suitably complex inroads to other encounters with the pharmakon—a poison that doubles as a cure (stengers 2011). scaling up jain’s call for communicative and collective action, we are concerned with a broader suite of chemicals that create possibilities for life while simultaneously enfeebling bodies or multispecies worlds (cf. roberts 2010). chemo-ethnographers are starting to conduct research on economic, personal, political, and sentimental relationships that have emerged with modern chemistry (e.g., chen 2012; agard-jones 2013; graeter 2017; feser, forthcoming). departing from critical studies of carcinogenic toxics and biomedical cures, this collection also considers chemical relations in more-than-human realms. anthropologists are starting to characterize corrosive atmospheres and the play of enzymes, affects, and reagents in ecological assemblages (landecker and panofsky 2013; myers 2015; povinelli 2016). age-old philosophical questions—“what is life?” and “what is not life?”—melt into each other as some consider “life that becomes not-life, an other-than-life, a becoming-nonliving” (thacker 2005). celebrating the liveliness and agency of all matter, jane bennett (2010) has insisted on flattening distinctions between things like a dead rat, oak pollen, a plastic glove, and a bottle cap. responding to this animist exuberance, elizabeth povinelli (2016, 55) asks: “are we simultaneously extending the qualities and dynamics of one form that we believe existence takes (life) onto the qualities and dynamics of all forms of existence?” writing in the same critical vein, sebastian abrahamsson and colleagues insist that ethnographers move beyond enthusiasm “about the liveliness of ‘matter itself,’” and instead attend to “the complexities, frictions, intractabilities, and conundrums of ‘matter in relation’” (abrahamsson et al. 2015, 13). building on this conversation, we ask: how are molecular frictions, catalytic dynamics, forms of not-life, and other-than-life reconfiguring our conditions of knowing, being, and sociality? thinking chemically—channeling attention to nonliving entities through the instruments and rubrics of science—involves not just explanatory promises but also perils. chemo-ethnographers are studying how initiatives to monitor water quality or to bioprospect for pharmaceuticals have displaced other pressing community concerns and limited conversations to the priorities of scientists, policy makers, and corporations (cf. hayden 2003; bond 2013). allies in fields like geography and cultural studies have noted that chemical technologies have the propensity to foreclose imaginative horizons and structure discourses about “what revolutions are realistic, what upheavals of social and moral order are inevitable, and thus what moral anxieties do or do not warrant engagement” (hurlbut 2016, 226). this collection of essays critically considers the slippages that occur when we focus on the molecular register and clamber toward new techniques for making knowledge that risk reinforcing age-old sociomaterial fault lines. toxic methodology and chemosociality anthropologists have been experimenting with hallucinogens and other mind-altering drugs since the late nineteenth century, when james mooney (1896) and carl lumholtz (1903) studied peyote rituals as participant-observers. the counterculture of the 1960s produced a generation of anthropologists who took drugs for different reasons. “sharing a widespread discontent with their own culture,” they conducted ethnobotanical research and took hallucinogens to explore “better ways of life” (langlitz 2012, 12). but privileged hallucinatory visions became entangled with the war on drugs, which had catastrophic consequences for indigenous groups and structurally marginalized communities across the americas. local death squads began hunting down and killing suspected cartel members in colombia, while wall street brokers sniffed cocaine in the men’s room and u.s. politicians supported covert violence against cocoa-leaf farmers and black communities in the united states (taussig 2004, 16). while some seek out chemical encounters to alter their sensoria, others cannot escape such encounters. for example, the queer theorist mel chen (2012, 201) experiences altered states of “cognition, proprioception, emotion, agitation, muscle strength, tunnel perception, joint pain, and nocturnality” as a result of chronic or even ephemeral chemical exposures. physicians have medicalized chen’s condition—labeling it “heavy metal poisoning” or “multiple chemical sensitivity.” departing from these labels, chen uses their altered state of being as a starting point for a toxic methodology. this subjectivity has become an opportunity for them to consider what toxic exposure “offers to thinking about bodies and affect” (chen 2012, 197). chen’s (2012, 203–205) toxic methodology involves an “unworlding” where the “normal” world’s order is lost as neurotoxins “inhibit enzymes, disrupt cell membranes, damage structural proteins, and affect the genetic code in nucleic acids.” other starting points for toxic methods include the lived experiences of pharmaceutical personhood by chronic patients (jenkins 2011; dumit 2012; kenner 2013) and the queer diffractions of sensations experienced by transgender subjects on hormones (hayward 2012). medicines and toxic exposures often produce shifting senses of normality, or intoxication, which means that one is “impaired, yes, but also released from responsibility in particular ways that can be both dangerous and pleasurable” (pollock 2016, 185). rather than simply celebrating the liberatory potential of intoxicating drugs or starting from privileged access to an altered sensorium, our own toxic methodology is grounded in nearly a decade of research on how standard methods of detoxifying the atmosphere also sustain infrastructures of toxic exposure (shapiro, zakariya, and roberts 2017). our approach to chemo-ethnography also comes from personal experiences of caring for loved ones with cancer, whose bodies and subjectivities have been remade by the haunting specters of radioactive elements and then shocked with poisonous cures (see kirksey 2017). chemo-ethnographers need not live with the experience of cognitive, corporeal, or landscape transformation, or the labor of maintaining safe chemical equilibriums. instead, ethnographers might think with care about chemosociality—the longstanding relationships and emergent social forms that arise from chemical exposures and dependencies. ethnographers are living in chemosocial worlds, as both participants and observers. if biosociality involves social relationships that emerge from biological conditions and the science and technology through which they are known (rabinow 1996), then chemosociality involves novel, altered, attenuated, or augmented relationships that emerge from shared and shifting chemical ecologies. chemosocial phenomena and biosocial communities are often intimately entangled. such is the case when chemical exposures generate cancerous tumors. biosocial communities emerge as cancer patients jump through hoops together to access chemotherapy and “share an experience that has potentially identity transformative effects” (jain 2013, 31). political communities are emerging from shared chemical infrastructures—as in flint, michigan, where lead persists in municipal water systems (fennell 2016), and in rural bangladesh, where naturally occurring arsenic in rural wells remains due to colonial scientific and national government neglect (ahmed 2014). chemosocial communities can form around shared pleasure, rather than shared suffering. when one decides to give oneself over to the ecstatic abandon of methamphetamines and other recreational drugs, solipsistic spaces often open shared bubbles of reverberating affect (pine 2016, 310). once upon a time, hiv-positive gay men formed biosocial kin networks by barebacking without condoms—creating communities that valued pleasure above health (dean 2009). queer chemosocial worlds have more recently emerged with prep—a daily prophylactic pill that prevents hiv infection and enables novel safe-sex practices. those who take a daily dose of prep to stay virus-free are forming promiscuous chemosocial communities—where inclusion comes with a prescription. chemosocial prep communities sometimes overlap with the biosocial communities of hiv-positive people (holt et al. 2017). prep is perhaps a queer echo of the birth-control pill that enabled women to experiment with new modes of sociality and sexuality in the twentieth century. emergency contraceptive pills, generic viagra, cosmetics, and tonics have been exported from the united states and europe to enable promiscuous chemosocial sexualities in places like ethiopia, indonesia, the philippines, and west papua (hardon, idrus, and hymans 2013; see also hardon and the chemical youth collective 2017). more than just being another tool for understanding the mediation of social relations among people, chemosocial forms also involve relationships with human-built infrastructures. the form of the social in chemosociality includes the mass patterning of human life by chemicals that need not coalesce into a social movement (shapiro 2015; zee 2017). “con-spiring,” or breathing chemicals together, produces chemosocial solidarities in plumes of pesticides sprayed on agricultural fields or larger atmospheric “unequally shared milieu(s)” (choy 2016). while studying chemosocial phenomena, ethnographers are attending to relative vulnerability and privilege with respect to countervailing norms and values, to practices of inclusion/exclusion, and to the play of affect within shared spaces of pleasure. ethnographers are also starting to venture beyond strictly anthropocentric concerns to develop new tools for chemical sensing in more-than-human worlds. tactics: sensing chemical species some chemo-ethnographers are drawing inspiration from the 1990s tactical media movement in the arts. manifestos like “the abc of tactical media” (garcia and lovink 1997) described the generative capacity of “cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics.” culture workers in the tactical media movement gained renown for making creative and rebellious uses of texts and ready-made artifacts (cf. de certeau 1984). experiments in the realm of “tactical biopolitics” (da costa and philip 2008) influenced an earlier moment in anthropology, when ethnographers started to make aesthetic interventions in the realm of multispecies studies. chemo-ethnographers are departing from insights gained in an aesthetic register and are starting to use diverse apparatuses for apprehending and redirecting political, economic, technical, and industrial systems. critiques of science and technology’s many exclusions have been folded into generative design practices and civic technoscience initiatives focused on creating accessible instrumentation (wylie et al. 2014). public lab, a collective of community-oriented scientists and hobbyists in the united states, has developed low-cost and open-licensed chemical test kits. collaborating with people suffering from chronic chemical exposures, as well as with chemists and engineers associated with public lab, nicholas shapiro helped design affordable formaldehyde-sensing and remediation kits. one sensing kit measures formaldehyde (ch2o) concentrations and other similar chemicals (c3h6o and c2h4o) that interact with the sensor in indistinguishable ways. if this sensor produces epistemologically cloudy results, the remediation kit produces clear changes in ontological states. the remediation device scrubs the air of each of these molecularly similar toxics without regard to particular species. the species concept is used by chemists to denote identical molecular entities. in contrast to biological species, which are relatively stable (see kirksey 2015), chemical species may quickly change state. molecules can quickly degrade, react with other substances, and reform. taking an elementary example, the species-being of salt molecules (nacl) splits into two other species in water—free sodium and chloride ions (na+ and cl−)—only to again become the original species, nacl, if the water evaporates. at the other extreme, chemical elements like bismuth-209 endure for timescales that are difficult for humans to understand—undergoing alpha decay over a period that is more than a billion times longer than the universe is estimated to have existed. chemical species should not just be considered in relation to life. considering the full spectrum of dynamics among chemical species—processes of persistence, decay, ionization, combustion, and sublimination, to name a few—requires moving beyond the bios/thanatos divide and gazing into the realm of nonlife. instead of stabilizing molecules in the known world, chemo-ethnographers have the opportunity to work within and around factishes and even to catch glimpses of the cosmopolitical beyond. “the cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by multiple divergent worlds,” writes isabelle stengers (2005, 995), “and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable.” figure 1. the isotope bismuth-209 has a half-life of more than one billion times longer than the current age of the universe. photo courtesy of ken keray. mass spectrometers, which ionize individual molecules and determine the mass of its constitutive parts, are the standard inscription devices that help researchers grasp chemical species against the backdrop of the unknown (latour and woolgar 1979, 242). spectrometers are too expensive for most hobbyists and ethnographers, even if science magazine celebrated the moment when the price tag on entry-level mass spectrometers became “less than a lamborghini” (dove 2008, 1116). some cultural anthropologists are eschewing the instruments that shape knowledge in the realm of big science, working instead to build their own, more accessible inscription devices that produce knowledge with arduino circuit boards, nine-volt batteries, color leds, and $7 gas sensors available from amazon. as chemo-ethnographers expand the conventional anthropological toolkit, many are joining other bricoleurs, tinkerers, and thinkers in not only describing the world as it is but also in imagining alter-worlds as they might be (shapiro, zakariya, and roberts 2017; cf. ingold 2013). working to make imperceptible chemical traces perceptible—doing careful articulation work within hegemonic political, economic, and epistemological structures—ethnographers are starting to acquire new skills. but, rather than rushing to incorporate new techniques into chemo-ethnographic research practices, it is worth reflecting on how these technical devices risk reproducing structured social and racial inequalities (chen 2012, 162). an emergent market for do-it-yourself chemical sensors is capitalizing on the presence of indeterminate toxic threats. the epistemological affordances of sensors risk reinforcing the dominance of science in society and promoting the modernist dream of the imminent calculability and knowability of the material world. sensing technologies can be deployed to produce “historically specific terrains of invisibility” or “regimes of imperceptibility” (murphy 2006, 267, 274), since toxicological experts know how to tinker with humidity levels, animal models, and device types to support preordained conclusions. even so, studying industrial systems with chemical-sensing technologies could give ethnographers an ability to make slow violence visible—working with and against technologies of power that produce an “explosive mix of hope and servitude” (nixon 2011, 87). refiguring chemosocialities turning away from spectacular images of nonlife, the authors in this collection are working against dominant trends threatening contemporary lifeworlds—deploying sensing and mapping tools in antiracist struggles, making environmental knowledge in coalition with indigenous peoples, and defending life-giving waters from the strangulating infrastructure of petrochemical pipelines and the atmoterror of chemical weapons (povinelli 2016; simmons 2017; cf. sloterdijk 2009).1 anthropologists have long challenged the “unselfconscious parochialism” of environmentalism in the united states that has developed “de facto, as an offshoot of american studies” (nixon 2011, 234, 235). this collection can be read as an intervention in american studies, since the united states has been an important historical experimenting ground for industrial chemistry (across petrochemistry, pharmaceuticals, and agribusiness). yet the authors in this collection are also doing imaginative labor beyond the confines of national borders—tracing chemical species through global assemblages to describe sprawling lines of relation that are producing both discomforting and liberating modes of chemosociality (murphy 2017; see also agard-jones 2013; hardon, idrus, and hymans 2013). ethnographers who worked in an era before sensing devices formed part of the ethnographer’s toolkit have long explored precarious lifeworlds in the shadows of u.s. chemical empires. kim fortun’s (2001, 134) careful study of the bhopal disaster at a union carbide pesticide plant in india scrutinized the architecture of chemical infrastructures, tracing molecules through “every flow path, linkage, and barrier” in the piping configurations of the plant. union carbide’s managerial neglect and incompetence indirectly killed at least 2,259 people. despite this carnage, fortun (2012, 446) has subsequently observed that “understanding of the chemicals released in bhopal remains inconclusive” some thirty years after that fateful explosion. synthetic chemistry continues to fuel settler-colonial legacies, patterns of dispossession through pollution, and imperial projects that have compromised sovereign spaces throughout the modern world-system (auyero and swistun 2009; agard-jones 2013). evil infrastructures continue to proliferate (see kelty 2017). chemo-ethnographers, who have taken up the task of writing culture in the era of late industrialism, are grappling with the predictability of capital and power, while holding on to subtle hopes that the lateness of this age is also the earliness of something radically different (cf. fortun 2012). while looming sand clouds in north-central china prefigure an ever-immanent end (zee 2017), senegalese toxicologists long for the capital and capacity to once again practice their craft in an imagined future that is always just beyond the postcolonial horizon (tousignant 2013). the success of environmentalism in europe and north america has led to the export of industries connected to toxic extraction and disposal to places like botswana, where cancer wards are reserved for the postcolonial elite who alone can afford to treat the ills of development capitalism (livingston 2012). in peruvian mines, toxicological monitoring and remediation projects necessitated the integration of catholic and secular scientific practices, where believers hope to move beyond godless occidental science (graeter 2017). stepping back from the strange allure of apocalyptic nightmares and wild dreams of technoscientific salvation, ethnographers are starting to describe modest hopes emerging with new chemo-social identities. chemical exposures are catalyzing intersectional political projects. chemosocial relationships are transforming conceptions of the self, forging new virtual and place-based communities, and fueling reform and counterhegemonic social movements. ethnographers who do not claim membership in chemosocial groups are engaging in descriptive work with tact and care—cherishing bodies and subjectivities that have been remade by the haunting specters of industrial pollutants and then shocked with poisonous cures (see kirksey 2017). while living in conditions that have become inextricably linked to toxic materials and industrial chemical enterprises, chemo-ethnographers are joining with interlocutors in speculation. departing from thick descriptions of what life is like in compromised times, chemo-ethnographers are speculating on “what life might or could be like” (ingold 2013, 4) if technologies of power were to open up alternative explosive possibilities. notes acknowledgments our thanks to filippo minelli, whose artwork shape b/b is featured as the banner image for this openings collection. the image is part of an ongoing series entitled silence/shapes, and is used here with the artist’s permission. we would also like to thank jason pine, cymene howe, marcel laflamme, james nguyen, natasha bevitt, lochlann jain, emma kowal, michelle murphy, and david farrier for their generous and incisive readings of earlier drafts of this article. 1. the history of twentieth-century 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today, discussions surrounding the grid typically focus on the integration of renewable energy and communication technologies. from u.s. department of energy publications to electric utilities’ advertisements, this theme frames discussions of the smart grid—a term that denotes a digitalized, more robust grid structured by automated sensing technologies. matching supply and demand, on the other hand, sounds like it belongs in an economics textbook: it is, after all, a task assigned to markets in many variants of economics, perhaps most famously in the work of friedrich hayek. i was also intrigued by the qualification in the student’s statement: better match, which suggested that matching was a permanent agenda—matching ever better. could the balance of supply and demand not be simply left to buyers and sellers to work out amongst themselves, as hayek had envisaged? why did this researcher think that an objective famously attributed to markets constituted her field’s raison d’être? with this conversation in mind, in 2013 i started anthropological fieldwork on economic thinking about electricity among electricity traders and analysts, market designers, economists, and electrical engineers in the united states. discussion of the supply and demand of electricity saturated this research. my interlocutors, in conversations and public presentations, often prefaced their words with a commentary on the practical challenges electricity poses to commoditization and marketization: that it cannot be stored in large quantities and thus should be consumed nearly instantaneously after production. these worries are by no means novel. balancing supply and demand—when neither supply nor demand is fully known ahead of time—appeared as an engineering question at the very beginning of electrification. today, while major imbalances resulting in blackouts are not a daily issue for the grid, the supply and demand curve still serves as an essential instrument for a variety of actors who are not themselves economists. while recent scholarship on markets (particularly financial ones) has focused on how economists help to create conditions they purport to merely describe (callon 1998; mackenzie 2006; mackenzie, muniesa, and siu 2008), electricity illustrates how theories—both economic and anthropological—may be challenged and resisted by commodities and their physical properties, even as a variety of experts try to standardize those commodities for market circulation. drawing on the history of electricity and on my own ethnographic research, in this essay i mean to show how electricity alters our conventional understandings of commodities, economics, and markets. electricity as a commodity electricity emerged as a commodity in the late nineteenth century, at a time when conventional models in political economy and the nascent discipline of economics did not account for a commodity that could not be stored. residents of cities in the united states “encountered electrification in many guises” (nye 1992, 138): as spectacle at fairs, as public transportation that reorganized public space, and even as a therapeutic substance whose wonders waited to be unlocked. electricity itself was not originally the principal commodity of the electrical industry: george westinghouse and other industrial players made money by selling electricity-production equipment to city governments and industrial manufacturers. the commodity that changed hands also constituted a means of production in its own right. by the end of the nineteenth century, though, electricity’s “many guises” were commoditized. instead of selling production equipment, thomas edison built a network around his central power station to sell domestic lighting to consumers (hughes 1983). electricity, the fleeting current, became singled out as a useful good that changed hands, ushering in the era of electricity as we know it. yet the commodity that electricity became in edison’s network bore little resemblance to the models used by contemporary political economists. for instance, cotton featured heavily in the first volume of karl marx’s (1977) capital to illustrate how commodities gain exchange value. alfred marshall, the pioneer of neoclassical economics, spoke of knives in a footnote of principles of economics (marshall 1890, 432), which famously included the first graphic representation of the supply and demand curve. useful objects such as cotton and knives helped reinforce the notion that production and consumption, as well as supply and demand, are separate forces that interact through time until an equilibrium is reached. such commodities can, after all, wait in a warehouse while producers and consumers rethink their buying and selling decisions. in the case of electricity, to this day, the time window to establish equilibrium is limited to seconds in order to keep the electric grid intact and functioning. if the removal of supply (say, as a result of a tripped power station) is too sudden, blackouts can occur near and far, and similarly, transmission lines can fail or blow up if they are subjected to more power than their carrying limit allows. there is no evidence that the commodification of electricity prompted economists (or economic anthropologists) to rethink the equilibrial conditions of supply and demand. yet, interestingly, the topic commanded the attention of electrical engineers from the very beginning of electrification. building on his earlier experience with telegraphy, edison devised electromagnetic devices—regulators and exciters—that stabilized minor deviations from standard supply (hughes 1983, 43). in his centrally orchestrated system there was only one source of supply and, with a known number of light bulbs (around ten thousand), forecasting demand—or “load” in electrical parlance—was also not a major problem. by the early twentieth century, however, small grids were increasingly integrating into each other, connecting different kinds of power stations and carrying alternating current across long distances. the poorly understood dynamics of this integration resulted in power surges in transmission lines and frequent blackouts, attracting the attention of the electricity industry and newly emerging electrical engineering departments (mindell 2004, 144). massachusetts institute of technology (mit) electrical engineering professor harold hazen saw firsthand the challenges of maintaining system stability, having worked in the 1920s on general electric’s five-hundred-mile transmission line between quebec and new york. hazen compared its operation to the “towing of one car by another with a long elastic cable stretched almost to the breaking point. under these conditions, any mishap, such as a short circuit or a sudden adding of load, would in effect snap the towing cable” (mindell 2004, 151). at mit’s electrical engineering department, hazen, under the supervision of vannevar bush and in collaboration with mathematicians norbert wiener and claude shannon, led the building of the network analyzer, an analog computer that modeled the electric grid for researchers to study the stability of voltage and frequency as different sources of alternating current interact. the mechanical calculators built to analyze the electric grid were then turned into general-purpose machines open to the use of other scientists and engineers on campus. during the wartime and after, engineers and mathematicians of the electric grid, like hazen, deduced general theories for feedback, control, and computing from their studies, which would later obscure their roots in the study of the electric grid (mindell 2004). by the second half of the twentieth century, major stability issues were resolved, the computing revolution had been born out of electrical engineering departments, and the academic study of the grid had fallen out of fashion. the study of supply and demand, however, has remained a critical component in day-to-day grid management and has garnered scholarly interest once again in the age of the smart grid. electricity exchange as economics as an unusual commodity, electricity has prompted various communities of practice to pursue fundamentally economic agendas. the history and anthropology of electricity as a useful and exchangeable good, then, addresses recent debates on the relationship between economic theory and economic facts on the ground. recently, the work of economists in creating theory that is not only descriptive but also prescriptive has been brilliantly spotlighted by michel callon’s (1998) formulation of the performativity of economic models and the enthusiastic response his work has received in anthropology and sociology (e.g., lépinay 2011; mackenzie 2006; mackenzie, muniesa, and siu 2008). however, electricity exchange is rife with examples of noneconomist experts creating economic theory concerning electricity and/or adapting the tools of economics to the specificities of electricity. the scarcely known contribution of the electrical industry to the science of economics has to do with the advent of large, integrated grids. samuel insull—originally a protégé of edison and later the head of a small electric utility in chicago—was able to build an empire, commonwealth edison, which swallowed all but a few competitors in the chicago area by mobilizing an old economic argument—the natural monopoly. according to john stuart mill (1848), in industries with large starting costs and large demand, only one firm could meet demand in a given territory while continuing a profitable existence. to legitimize his claims to monopoly, insull created demand for electricity by investing heavily in research on electrical appliances.1 insull pitched mill’s argument to state politicians, to whose campaigns he had financially contributed, asking for exemption from antitrust laws and for the right to exclusive use of the transmission grid. to the shock of american industrialists touting ideals of free enterprise and competition, insull announced his advocacy for state regulation that would allow monopolistic activity (mcdonald 1958). the notion of “natural monopoly” made it into neoclassical economics textbooks as fact only in the mid-twentieth century (mosca 2008), decades after insull had successfully, if controversially, introduced it as the economic justification for his network-building. the economic order of electricity is now intended to be competitive. since the beginning of the deregulatory process in the 1990s, states have been able to pass laws to disassemble monopolies and enable new competitors to join the industry. in 1996, the federal energy regulatory commission invented the concept of electricity markets—computational processes, operated by nonprofit transmission operators, by which participants’ bids and offers are computed to generate prices binding for all. the first electricity market came online in california in 2000, and today there are seven across the united states, each with hundreds of utilities and generators as participants. the economic order of electricity is now populated by traders employed by participants, virtual traders who make profit by way of speculation and arbitration, and market analysts selling trading advice. these actors are primarily programmers, whose work revolves around forecasting supply and demand (and hence prices) ever more precisely and accurately—an elusive goal that they describe in terms of the granularity of data. on the face of things, trading electricity may not look different from, say, trading bonds and securities. but upon closer inspection, the “art of association” (beunza and stark 2004) that traders and analysts engage in to forecast changes in prices is dependent on electricity-specific tools that programmers are designing. notably, the price algorithm used by transmission operators is an imposition of marginal utility theory onto the physics of electricity transmission. pioneered in the 1980s by an electrical engineering professor at mit, spot prices of electricity (now known as locational marginal prices or lmps) are calculated differently for each node across the grid, depending on the different spatial costs of injecting and withdrawing electricity. as i observed in 2013 at a market intelligence company selling trading advice to participants, those who exchange electricity need to forecast the supply and demand data that go into lmps on a daily basis. in the morning hours before bids and offers were due, market analysts, who were often former or future electricity traders, stayed glued to multiple screens as they drafted written advice to participants under a deadline. they rarely uttered a word except to exchange opinions with other analysts working on the same market. while their fast-paced rhythm is reminiscent of the work culture described by scholars of financial markets (e.g., mackenzie et al. 2012), electricity traders and analysts deal with a commodity that is not only volatile but also essential to modern life, involving continuous feedback from its actual physical usage. the analysts i observed pulled real-time information into their models (often advanced data spreadsheets) from multiple public and private sources—which power station reported an outage, which regions had an expected spike in demand due to weather, and how the wind and solar stations would fare that day. figure 1. control room of the electric reliability council of texas (ercot). photo courtesy of ercot. the supply and demand information periodically published by transmission operators remains insufficient for market actors who seek to gain competitive advantage from superior forecasts of supply and demand. they are encouraged to excavate and incorporate every possible grain of information about real-time electricity conditions at ever-shorter time scales into the mass of data analyzed by their models. as the main factor that influences demand, weather has become a subject of particular interest. the analysts whom i observed were assisted by in-house meteorologists who expanded the analysis of weather conditions to include factors other than temperature, such as cloud cover, which determines the amount of sunlight that reaches solar stations. while meteorological expertise can now be harvested to improve electricity markets, science helps less with the treatment of other supply and demand factors than do professional experience and common sense. every analyst knew, for instance, that their models would get somewhat confused on the day of the super bowl when television viewing, and hence electricity usage, spikes for reasons that are not coded into the models. it fell to the analysts to translate this cultural phenomenon into the language of the models by making manual changes to anticipated demand. the expert performativity of engineers and programmers thus remains in constant balance with the dynamics of real-time consumption. electricity illustrates how noneconomist experts put novel or adapted economic theories and tools to use in creating conditions for exchange. these markets depend on an understudied version of economics—a vernacular one that, nevertheless, “makes its world” (mitchell 2005, 297). the future of markets the current turn in the electrical industry toward smart grid technologies presupposes a particular vision for the future of markets: an increasing temporal frequency for trading activities and an increasing number of participants. as hirokazu miyazaki (2003) argues, markets are often animated by market actors’ desire to respond to temporal challenges. traders of financial derivatives, for example, seek ever-faster-paced action for increased opportunities of arbitrage (mackenzie et al. 2012). electricity’s material requirements for deliverability and growing centrality to modern life imposed a sense of urgency on actors in the electricity industry even before the creation of markets. today the smart grid, as a research effort into increased temporal sensitivity to changing conditions in supply and demand, constitutes a new step in electricity’s transformation. envisaged as a system of decentralized information circulation—hence a market in the hayekian sense of the word (see hayek 1945)—the smart grid promises markets that are trading almost constantly. but unlike markets in financial derivatives, the smart grid is intended to encompass all of society, turning all electricity consumers into active market actors.2 i argue that the tradition and contemporary aspirations of electrical engineers organically generate a vision that we might otherwise misrecognize as generically neoliberal. smart grids are key to understanding this vision. smart grids repopularized the academic study of electric grids after a prolonged hiatus. after the stability problems of the electric grid were solved to a large extent in the second half of the twentieth century, the study of the electric grid became marginalized in electrical engineering departments, gradually giving way to the study of electronics (ceruzzi 1988). until recently, one researcher told me, graduate students did not want to study electric grid management because “all you did was design a transmission line.” through the smart grid, researchers now aim to bring computing back into electrical engineering, both to fix the vulnerabilities that caused blackouts like the one in 2003 that affected forty-five million people across the northeastern united states and to accommodate a growing number of renewable energy sources within the grid. in 2013, i spent a semester at a smart grid research center at carnegie mellon university (cmu). in the doctoral researchers’ spartan office, grid models have now moved from harold hazen’s analog calculating machines to researchers’ personal laptop computers. modeling now means numerically inputting the quantity and direction of electricity flows into programming software like matlab. one researcher used her model to test different algorithmic and technological means of calculating lmps. instead of once-a-day submissions of bids and offers, she foresaw participants iteratively interacting until they reached an improved equilibrium (joo 2013). this researcher proposed devices inserted into electricity buyers and sellers’ equipment that could continually communicate without human intervention to negotiate the price—the point at which supply and demand meet. for her doctoral project, she tested her algorithm successfully in the realm of her model—that is, the lights would have stayed on if her model had been an actual electric grid. of course, like many other researchers i met, this researcher did personally care about a grid that accommodated more renewable energy. but her primary goal was to demonstrate a grid in which supply and demand could be manipulated in ever-smaller quantities, even as the lights remained on. because of the intermittent nature of sources like wind and solar, electricity from renewable sources comes in smaller quantities than electricity from fossil fuels and is less reliable. if we could achieve the integration of small amounts of electricity from renewable sources without compromising reliability, my interlocutor argued, we could decrease waste and match supply to demand within ever-finer ranges. renewables, in other words, have become a new component of the age-old research program of balancing supply and demand. but what exactly is demand? by whom is this emergent market, the smart grid, supposed to be populated? a major part of smart grid research consists of demand-side management (dsm), which involves the manipulation of consumers’ electricity use through technological equipment, education, and various incentives. dsm researchers whom i met at cmu and elsewhere envision a new electricity consumer. lamenting consumers’ indifference to electricity prices and their failure to act as proper economic actors—the learned passivity that can be traced back to edison’s centralized carbon-fueled system—these researchers hope to create what one could call a new homo economicus. the new consumer, as one researcher of automated home technologies explained, is best characterized as striking a balance between activity and passivity: she is active insofar as she is interested in shifting consumption behavior, but passive insofar as she lets automated home devices run without interfering with them. these devices would make decisions for consumers in a way that would advance the goals of the smart grid by accomplishing electricity tasks—like charging one’s electric car—while electricity is cheap or when renewable sources are available. other researchers proposed devices that would deliver information to homes about real-time conditions of supply and demand (and one day, they hope, real-time prices). the nonautomatic forms of decision-making called forth by these technologies are the purview of psychologists who are increasingly entering the dsm field to study which factors are most effective in instilling an urge to adapt consumption behavior. regardless of their different beliefs about humans’ economic proclivities, dsm researchers hope to turn us—as electricity consumers—into a new homo economicus, upgraded with new expertise and technological equipment and making decisions for a more balanced grid either automatically or deliberately. electricity, in other words, has become a vehicle for the expansion of the economic grid into previously nonor semieconomic domains, in line with michel foucault’s (2008) description of the workings of american neoliberalism. neither the market quality of the smart grid nor the new electricity consumer as a homo economicus is taken for granted by smart grid researchers. what hayek described as the market, these researchers take as a research agenda: a guiding ideal that can only be approximated, at best. while anthropologists drawing on the performativity literature have identified some of the previously unsuspected actors who are involved in the making of markets, more attention must be paid to the actors operating at the limits of what we usually understand to constitute a market—a technoscientific space ever expanding in its meanings and its scope. conclusion electricity can teach us to see commodities, markets, and economies in a new light, especially when the materiality of electricity and its centrality to so many technologies of modern life exceeds or troubles traditional imaginaries of political economy and economics. electricity can teach us to see the economic performativity of programmers and engineers, as well as how new market forms and informational systems are helping to redefine familiar grid infrastructure. economic anthropology has much to learn from anthropology electric, an anthropology that explores where economics meets physics, undergoes mediation by computers, and travels as far as the wires can reach. notes 1. for instance, home economists knocked on doors to tell women that good homemaking depended on using electrical appliances (goldstein 1997). 2. gökçe günel (2014) describes similar aspirations in a planned city in abu dhabi to create an everyday market by redefining energy use in terms of a shared currency. references beunza, david, and david stark 2004 “tools of the trade: the socio-technology of arbitrage in a wall street trading room.” industrial and corporate change 13, no. 2: 369–400. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icc/dth015 callon, michel, ed. 1998 the laws of the markets. malden, mass.: blackwell. ceruzzi, paul 1988 “electronics technology and computer science, 1940–1975: a coevolution.” annals of the history of computing 10, no. 4: 257–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/mahc.1988.10036 foucault, michel 2008 the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, 1978–1979. translated by graham burchell. new york: palgrave macmillan. goldstein, carolyn 1997 “from service to sales: home economics in light and power, 1920–1940.” technology and culture 38, no. 1: 121–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3106786 günel, gökçe 2014 “ergos: a new energy currency.” anthropological quarterly 87, no. 2: 359–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.2014.0026 hayek, friedrich 1945 “the use of knowledge in society.” american economic review 35, no. 4: 519–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1809376 hughes, thomas e. 1983 networks of power: electrification in western society, 1880–1930. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. joo, jhi-young 2013 “adaptive load management: multi-layered and multi-temporal optimization of the demand side in electric energy systems.” phd dissertation, carnegie mellon university. kopytoff, igor 1986 “the cultural biography of things: commoditization as process.” in the social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, edited by arjun appadurai, 64–91. new york: cambridge university press. lépinay, vincent a. 2011 codes of finance: engineering derivatives in a global bank. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. mackenzie, donald 2006 an engine, not a camera: how financial models shape markets. cambridge, mass.: mit press. mackenzie, donald, daniel beunza, yuval millo, and juan pablo pardo-guerra 2012 “drilling through the allegheny mountains: liquidity, materiality, and high frequency trading.” journal of cultural economy 5, no. 3: 279–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2012.674963 mackenzie, donald, fabian muniesa, and lucia siu, eds. 2008 do economists make markets? on the performativity of economics. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. marx, karl 1977 capital: volume one. translated by ben fowkes. new york: random house. originally published in 1867. marshall, alfred 1890 principles of economics. 1st edition. new york: macmillan. mcdonald, forrest 1958 “samuel insull and the movement for state regulatory commissions.” business history review 32, no. 3: 241–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3111741 mill, john stuart 1848 principles of political economy; with some of their applications to social philosophy. london: john w. parker. mindell, david a. 2004 between human and machine: feedback, control, and computing before cybernetics. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. mitchell, timothy 2005 “the work of economics: how a discipline makes its world.” european journal of sociology 46, no. 2: 297–320. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s000397560500010x miyazaki, hirokazu 2003 “the temporalities of the market.” american anthropologist 105, no. 2: 255–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.2003.105.2.255 mosca, manuela 2008 “on the origins of the concept of natural monopoly: economies of scale and competition.” european journal of the history of economic thought 15, no. 2: 317–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672560802037623 nye, david e. 1992 electrifying america: social meanings of a new technology, 1880–1940. cambridge, mass.: mit press. zelizer, viviana a. 1995 the social meanings of money: pin money, paychecks, poor relief, and other currencies. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. triggering change triggering change: police homicides, community healing, and the emergent eventfulness of the new civil rights megan raschig university of virginia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-5198 in the gray may days following the murder of a migrant lettuce picker named osmar hernández by a salinas police department officer, a small but growing cadre of protesters stood at the edge of the supermarket parking lot where his slain body had lain too long. they emphatically waved signs at the busy intersection, exhorting drivers to honk for justice. i had driven by, fascinated by the as-yet-unseen spectacle of protestors in this tense agricultural city near the central coast of california, and honked, but kept going, with somewhere else to be. but when shi passed the same group that same day, she stopped right away. the lifelong salinas resident, former sureña,1 and present-day facilitator of a women’s healing circle, parked her blue mustang to talk to the people she did not yet know and find out what they were about. there was one person there she did recognize instantly: wera, her old homegirl. it had been ten, maybe fifteen years, since they had last seen each other, “in another life,” back when they were both “gangbanging solid,” as shi told it. since then, wera had dropped her placaso, her gang-given nickname meaning white girl, and been reborn as tara on the day she gave up alcohol. both had fallen out of the active gang scene while never renouncing it, attempting to dwell differently in resolutely established local conditions. but beyond recognizing tara’s blonde hair, pale skin, and strong walk, shi further felt she recognized all that both had been through—all the deaths they had grown up and lived with that had to be abided, “taken like a g,” in this youth homicide capital of california—as intricately involved in their respective decisions to stop at that initial protest.2 she saw these many earlier deaths as traumatic events, and the concomitant triggering effect hernández’s death had on each of them as spurring her and tara’s subsequent engrossment in emergent local responses to police violence. part of me chastised myself, after the fact, for driving past that protest at hernández’s death, as if it was not the most important place for me to be when i was studying the politics of health and healing in east salinas. like shi, i should have stopped. i should have let it disrupt my plans. as one of the first instances of direct action i had seen in six-odd months of doctoral fieldwork, the protest made me fear i had missed an “event” in the badiousian sense, a decisive moment when the scope of what is possible shifts, when politics happen and when the social changes (badiou 2012). but as a white canadian graduate student from a european university, new to the united states and its particularly insidious disparity in life expectations and experiences along the lines of race, class, and gender, i did not grasp the same scope of that protest or murder as did shi or tara. it did not strike me that this blatant state disregard for latino/a life constituted a flare-up of the much more ongoing and subtle, but still lethal, abandonment of mexican americans in this notorious city, one beholden to the agricultural industry and embedded in carceral california (gilmore 2007). in contrast to the badiousian event that ruptures the world for all, this protest and hernández’s death resonated as differently evental to those differently positioned and “plump[ed] for” it (humphrey 2008, 372). in this article, i argue that such deaths—and other police-involved homicides of black and brown men and women in the united states—can bring long-simmering communities like east salinas to a boil for reasons beyond the straightforward injustice of police disproportionately killing people of color. such deaths can coalesce, illuminate, and ignite a range of generational and particular experiences of the lethal exhaustion of being both underserved and under suspicion by the state and its agents. here, this means the enervative effects of persistent racial profiling and militarized policing, the unmitigated exploitation of the undocumented by slumlords and field bosses, uneven economic opportunities, unwalkable, unlit streets and cracked sidewalks, underresourced schools placed in dangerous proximity to pesticide-laced strawberry fields, and so on. these less spectacular instances of disregard and disposability have not been made into events in that badiousian sense, but are simply born from the kind of quasi-evental everyday ongoingness characterizing denigrated and criminalized lifeworlds (povinelli 2011; berlant 2011; cacho 2012). lauren berlant (2007, 759) describes ongoingness as a mode of living characterized by “getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermittent, often in phenomena not prone to capture.” shi and tara, and others in east salinas, could be triggered by that protest at these new deaths through their longue durée endurance of ordinary state disregard and criminalization, palpable (or only barely prone to capture) in what elizabeth povinelli calls quasi-events: those “more minute happenings” (povinelli 2011, 13) that are not equally or always registered, the structural enervations listed above, or the microaggressions or subtle everyday struggles that might “never quite achieve the status of having occurred” (povinelli 2011, 13) have a collective and cumulative effect. they wear people down. this temporality of ongoing exhaustion contours the conditions of sociopolitical possibility: the exhaustive, however relentless, generally does not demand an ethical, public, or political response the way the spectacular does. in a setting often described by locals as inducing chronic traumatic stress disorder—as though the conditions of life itself are so fundamentally and endlessly disruptive as to render disorientation the standard—triggers constitute a key genre of historical duration for viewing and processing the historical present (berlant 2011). they point to the ways people perceive and actively frame politics-in-process. an emic term, triggers evokes a kind of in-the-worldness not directly linked to culpability but to being caught up in an already implicating world, a precarity fueled by the ease with which life or livelihood can be threatened, and an exhausted, fraying hypervigilance. like the rupturing event and the steady certainty of progress as models of history and social change, triggers suggest a particular cadence of how sociohistorical conditions are sensed, problematized, and shifted, bringing lived-through events into sudden relation with each other by reigniting prior reactions to painful circumstances in new moments. bracketing phenomena and encounters as triggers renders a range of quasi-evental happenings available for ethical response, accomplishing the ethical work of temporalization involved in any living-out and interpretation of social action (zigon 2014).3 as such, some triggers give tangible coordinates to the struggle to bring about social change or the effort of endurance among strained individuals and communities in a politically fraught moment in late liberal america (povinelli 2012). they demand to be taken seriously. in the past several years, trigger warnings on potentially upsetting texts have faced virulent critique in a range of liberal publications and institutions as indicators of coddled minds, treating them as a politically correct default to safety that limits intellectual and emotional challenge and growth (coyne 2015; lukianoff and haidt 2015). however, debates over the value (or scourge) of trigger warnings elide an essential point about disparate racialized experience and political action today, as i discuss below. in what follows, i trace a bundle of triggers across three police homicides and four salinans’ lives. i foreground the responses generated in each case as particularly situated with local conditions in salinas, and politically resonant with the emerging concerns of the new civil rights period associated with black lives matter (kang 2015; day 2015).4 the instances of triggered activism below highlight the adjustment and creativity necessary among criminalized communities whose residents cannot occupy the rights-bearing, self-contained, and self-interested subject-space of liberal politics, and thus often engage in activities, build organizations, and nurture spaces that stretch and disrupt our ideas of the political (cacho 2012; ralph 2014). turning to more temporally complex ethical projects in relation to the disparate eventfulness of state violence, how might we shift the temporal frames we use to grasp emergent political processes, the newness of the new civil rights movement as it unfolds in critical settings like salinas—without merely recuperating or absorbing those fragile projects in the same teleological tropes of history? healing history and recalibrating ethical action in salinas as i would learn, hernández’s officer-involved death provoked a temporal tripwire for both shi and tara, in the sense that what happened to make them stop and keep them at that corner was not just one particular death, but a sudden, jangling cacophony of many other deaths already endured and left unresolved, lives shrugged off or taken by the police. “for our people, this is not about the one or two murders,” my friend juan explained to me later that day, trying to help me understand why shi reacted so dramatically to this killing—her absence at the afternoon’s meetings, her shrill and erratic responses to my calls and texts, her sudden impassioned demonstrating at the streetside—of another police homicide of a man she did not know. “it’s a social, historical thing, police brutality. it takes people back to a place where they’re not their best.” i knew juan and shi as the founders and leaders of the city’s two healing collectives, motivating individual leadership for public advancement (milpa) and la colectiva de mujeres, with whom i was spending much of my time in east salinas. these collectives had been formed and funded only months preceding these homicides as part of a long-term philanthropic project in the city, building healthy communities.5 prior to this project, a considerable history of philanthropic investment had already produced an elaborate and celebrated, if fluctuating, community infrastructure rooted in césar chávez and the united farm workers union’s presence in the 1970s and amplified through subsequent late liberal regimes of state disinvestment in public health. health-oriented community-level programs of various stripes saturate east salinas as a key means of managing the underserved, illicit, or otherwise-hard-to-reach latino populace, categorized as farmworkers and gang members, targeting their lives and the community at large for improvement at the same time. while the relentless responsibilization and narrow moral scope of these programs can give rise to fatigue or resentment among their participants, the healing collectives immediately struck a different chord for most members, and a generally conservative philanthropic setting could emerge as a key site of political possibility. the colectiva and milpa were the upstarts in the community, considered dramatically different than other local health-oriented organizations by their participants. their freely accessible programming primarily consisted of healing circles, but also visits to a nearby sweat lodge for those interested, and an increasingly active presence at meetings held by the city, county, or sheriff’s departments related to education, public works, or criminal justice concerns. each of these modes of engagement was considered essential for healing, and the combination felt radical. “this has never been done before” in salinas, shi told me with astonishment about the colectiva’s healing circles a few months into their implementation. “it’s actually history.” i was a member of these collectives before i was also their researcher. from the twice-weekly healing circles of the colectiva de mujeres especially, where kernels of ethically difficult and affectively ambiguous experience were “checked in” or disclosed and calibrated into new moral orders, i was becoming sensitized to the eventfulness of members’ lives in east salinas, the stakes of their healing, and the stratigraphy of their scabs. with consistently high violent homicide rates for more than a decade in this california farmtown-gangland, the persistent threat of death brought dramatic rhythms, expectations, and stakes to life for its 155,000 inhabitants, 75 percent latino/a, one-quarter earning less than $14,000 per year (dieng, valenzuela, and ortiz 2016).6 many members of these healing collectives, like shi and tara, were formerly gang-involved and had lost children, friends, or family members either on the streets or to the judicial system. they dealt with the effects of these conditions daily, in myriad expressions increasingly framed in terms of healing from old wounds. healing had come to constitute an emergent ethical imperative salient across the city, where almost all third-sector programming and social action was funded in terms of health. this shared imperative to heal offered imaginative resources and a purposive orientation to the need to know one’s triggers as they might arise at any given moment. critically, their healing circles were sites at which triggers could be anticipated and explored, brought into consideration with others’ similar experiences, and sometimes even further with a broader critical consciousness of u.s. race, class, and gender inequality. for example, naomi, a white middle-class mujer who worked at another salinas community organization, once made a statement in circle about an event of sexual assault. when translated into spanish, it triggered a flood of feeling in another mujer, an undocumented mexicana named guadalupe. guadalupe had never previously been able to articulate her own similar experience despite its determining effects in her life, but after naomi’s disclosure, she could acknowledge it and reflect on the fact that such violence against women occurred across race and class. some weeks later, she described realizing the traces of this abuse and addressing its perpetuation with a current boyfriend, modeling for the others in the colectiva what healing such a trauma could look like. in these collectives’ fledgling politico-therapeutic spaces, being triggered could initiate transformation, rather than constituting an act of smoothing over. the wider horizons of these collectives’ vigilance against triggers suggest the temporal dimensions of world-building as political action coalescing from an array of moments. such action can be constrained by the world-destroying effect of quotidian, chronically traumatizing conditions of poor and criminalized communities. as the psychoanalyst robert d. stolorow (2011, 54) writes, “trauma destroys time.” what he calls portkeys, akin to what both salinans and i call triggers, are those encounters with worldly stimuli that give the sudden sense of being transported to another time and location, which “can fracture or obliterate one’s sense of unitary selfhood” unfolding across linear time, returning one “again and again to an experience of traumatization” (stolorow 2011, 55). but such traumatization, in its repetitions, clearly also generates time. what might begin as an edgy, atmospheric suspicion that something “is gonna crack off” at an otherwise peaceful civic meeting, as daniel, a member of milpa, put it, or that public servants “are trying to gangbang on [you] at the city hall,” can lead to a make-or-break moment. in this moment, as my interlocutors narrate it and as i observed, one either falls back and gets sucked into old, devastating ways or chooses to bracket that reflex, situate it in terms of what-has-been, and decide in some way to break with that resurgent, but redundant, temporal trauma. daniel’s recounting of one such make-or-break moment illuminates the worldly and generative nature of the often individualized fragmentation and dissociation of trauma (stolorow 2011, 53). his reflections on a municipal meeting the night of the hernández shooting came as he and i, as well as other milpa and colectiva members, gathered in a small office to organize a collective response to the police homicides, in the process of descargando (checking in) that unfailingly began not only each healing circle but also every organizing meeting either collective held.7 daniel continued, “i just freakin’ almost lost it, you know what i mean? if it wasn’t for these girls that were like, hey daniel, come talk to the media real quick, i think i probably would’ve ended up getting arrested yesterday for some stupid stuff, you know. because he really pulled my triggers,” he elaborated, sketching the perhaps unwitting intervention performed by “the girls” that called him back to himself as the daniel they knew, the daniel who needed to speak with the media as a smooth-talking milpa representative, rather than the shot-caller in a local street gang he once was. he added, weary but determined, “we have to be careful not to get sucked in by all the things we did before,” or that which may be an appropriate and likely response in other circumstances. as daniel temporalized it, triggers could signal moments of what jarrett zigon (2007) calls “moral breakdown,” shifts away from one’s nonreflexive way of morally being-in-the-world, demanding an ethical response. in the grips of what often feels more like repetition, these are creative and productive moments of reflection and decision, critical moments in which individuals and their ethical and political projects may open onto an otherwise that has the potential to improve their conditions of dwelling. still, despite their interpretive efforts in these healing collectives, my friends’ triggered responses to stimuli like these homicides—and there were many—offered brusque reminders of the effort of endurance amid the slow erosion of life here. rather than leading to a moral breakdown, triggers could also remain an arresting affective resonance, a falling-deeper-into or out-of-the-world, unregistered as an event: “the same shit.” whether, how, and when such a happening is narrated as a trigger demonstrates the ethical action of temporalization involved in everyday discourse. as zigon (2014, 448) writes about the temporalizing work done through narrative, “by creating a particular temporal relation to a singular ethical moment, one is able to create particular possibilities for acting unique to the singular ethical moment.” such moments can be narrated and renarrated, post facto, throughout the process of coming to terms with one’s complex, intensely affective relational history with the state and its police. the recalibration of these affective historicities into new ethical orders enables new forms of political action understood as intervening on the relational and material conditions of the local world—even if this intervening in the world sometimes means disengaging from it. “why am i really doing this, like, if i ask myself?” shi later mused, reflecting on her recent, impassioned activism against police brutality since reencountering tara over hernández’s death and gesturing to this generative quality of her trigger. “it’s for a lot of the things my friends have went through and have never had justice. like a lot of my friends have been murdered [in gang-involved circumstances], and their parents still suffer, because they’re all cold [unsolved] cases.” this, too, was state disavowal: the nonevent of lackluster police investigation, the quasi-event of that queasy feeling of a death unsettled and a life thereby diminished. “i really feel like a lot of it has to do with a lot of the injustice that already had happened, that i didn’t see before, you know?” “and,” shi continued, her voice getting louder, “it’s even more of an injustice because law enforcement never really solved none of these cases. or they didn’t give a fuck about it! and these were people that we fucking loved!” in her rising anger, i could hear the echoing trigger, the resurgence of feelings and fidelities, the anguish of lives not mattering to the state despite being loved. that anguish and the fear of feeling it again even pushed her to move out of the east side to a different neighborhood to be “less known,” she explained, after distancing herself from the sureño gang activity that still suffused her relationships. but in 2014, as a facilitator of la colectiva de mujeres, in the midst of her own ethical process of healing and compelled by this triggering, she found a means to transform that affective condition into ethical action. in doing so, alongside others in the collective, she became one of the most active local figures in the days, months, and years following these police homicides. “so i think a lot of it,” she continued, the edge in her voice ebbing, “a lot of the frustrations and the anger, really came from some other shit that we had from before. because we never had that opportunity to really talk about it, it was just, it happened, and shit. move forward.” exhaustion and the new civil rights what made the opportunity to finally “talk about it” in east salinas possible was not only the bundle of triggers set off by the police homicides, and not only the salience of the healing circle’s reparative approach to past experience, but also the sense of a historical moment acutely taking form that summer of 2014. the police killings in salinas happened both before and after ferguson, the massive uprising at the officer-involved death of michael brown on august 9, 2014, designated as the cradle of the organized black lives matter movement against police violence and institutionalized racism (bonilla and rosa 2015). my friends from the healing collectives followed the response to brown’s murder in ferguson closely as it saturated the news coverage, expressing solidarity but also a frustrating feeling of déjà vu—that already happened here, that happens here all the time, they cried, as our everyday topics of state violence and police militarization became broadly circulated in mainstream discourse. “before it happened, it had happened and happened,” the poet claudia rankine (2014, 116) writes of the rodney king beatings, the blatancy of this particular beating overshadowing the backdrop of other repeated but unacknowledged occurrences. in east salinas, many expressed a compounded struggle. as was pointed out to me repeatedly, latino/a communities endure comparable conditions of suspicion, criminalization, and exhaustion as african americans, facing life-extinguishing or world-crumbling vulnerabilities in their daily lives, intensified in post–9/11 securitized state hostility toward undocumented migrants as terrorist figures. latinos/as exist in significant concentrations in the criminal justice system, and while they are killed by police at rates lower than african americans, their incarcerations and murders are still devastating for hundreds of thousands of people across the country.8 concerns with migrant detainability or deportability often receive more attention than police violence within latino/a communities and in mainstream america, constraining the ability to speak up or organize publicly (santa cruz, vives, and gerber 2015; de genova 2007). the point of making such comparisons was not to engage in a kind of dueling “oppression olympics,” as my informants would say, but to indicate how their communities have been differently constituted through history and geography and situated elsewhere in the racial imaginary, a coalescence of colonialism and so-called crimmigration, or migrant illegality, at the periphery of slavery and republicanism (de genova 2005). when acknowledged, these conditions can give rise to questions of why a more organized brown lives matter movement has not, it appears, taken shape, a lament in line with the discursive trope of the latino sleeping giant yet to wake up to its power (el nasser 2015; beltrán 2010). more productively, paying attention to local ethical processes and projects, like the east salinas healing collectives and circles, and lived temporalities, like ongoing exhaustion and triggers, illuminates the forms of personal and political action that are more possible and involve less vulnerability for these communities, both particular to local circumstances and influenced by broader national and racial dynamics. the ways in which time is made and the political gets stretched in communities like salinas offer solutions to the political impasse of late liberal america, where the idea of progress is little more than a broken promise, where the “old coordinates of left, right, and center seem profoundly unmoored” (comaroff 2011, 102), and where theorists and activists call for new terms and tactics of struggle (brown 2001, 2015; white 2016). further, what is at stake in this tentatively titled new civil rights period of struggle against racialized state violence is not identical to the concerns of the old civil rights movement centered in the 1960s.9 today’s new civil rights movement gestures toward an increasingly perceptible and intolerable critical node of contention: the enervation, disposability, and ungrievability of black life, and the institutionalization of a racist and dehumanizing gaze that perceives black life as an inherent threat to other life in general, and to white privilege in particular (day 2015; butler 2015). in a situation of structural abandonment, simply to exist in public entails its own precarity. “this need to be always on guard” against violence physical, structural, and discursive, as the essayist ta-nehisi coates (2015, 90) puts it, is “an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence” that contributes to the “fast breakdown of our bodies.” coates describes the eventfulness of exhaustion that wears people of color down, the ongoing traumatization and numbing that can doom any burgeoning efforts to do or be otherwise—but that can also provide fertile conditions for a genre like the trigger or an idiom like healing to take root. the lived temporality of exhaustion in individuals and communities of color, considered as a focal grievance of the new civil rights era, casts mainstream controversy about trigger warnings into new relief. the trigger warning is meant to secure readers against the risks involved in being triggered, alerting them that they are about to encounter elements that may resonate with lived experiences, thereby upsetting them or even causing reactions akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. to some critics, the trigger warning signals the moment at which the critical potential of challenging readings of classic texts melts into a moralism of sanguine safety. it is decried as a simultaneous politicizing and depoliticizing move designed to protect humorless or overly sensitive readers or consumers from unwanted disruptions to their well-being, threatening free speech and divergent views in educational environments (coyne 2015; lukianoff and haidt 2015). yet among communities facing daily, overt terror, as well as subtle and slowly exhaustive traces of institutionalized racism—the “haunting” (gordon 2008) of disparity and marginalization in an ostensibly postracial era—triggers arise from happenings in the world rather than from textbooks. they do not come with warnings. this makes the condition of being triggered particularly vulnerable, as well as potentially productive: triggers indicate not simply psychologized stutters but breakdowns of the ongoing present, generating moments of affective and ethical response. as demonstrated below, triggers and their taking up in local relationships of care and accommodation offer glimpses of how people open up to an otherwise and generate it in their actions together. like the practices and relationships of accommodation engaged in by those driven to madness through intimate loss that laurence ralph (2014) outlines in his work in eastwood, chicago, the circulation and management of grief and rage, the ethical process of becoming aggrieved through emergent communal formations of care, illustrate the worldly and social nature of conditions too often pathologized, depoliticized, and dismissed. what results is a politics of eventfulness in which participants reveal and contest discrepancies in perceptions of what, precisely, is happening. happening “this just doesn’t happen here,” the salinas police chief kelly mcmillin claimed in a news clip, in response to another officer-involved shooting on the streets of salinas mere days after the previous one. this time the victim was a man named carlos mejía. i listened as the cnn reporter repeated the chief’s words twice, discussing the shooting that subsequently fueled a much filmed protest-turned-riot: he [mcmillin] says they do not have a lot of police shootings, but acknowledged that there was this one on tuesday [may 20, of carlos mejía] and there was another one on may 9 [of osmar hernández] that was very similar to this, but he goes on to say that this is just not something that happens there. . . . this is the third of the year, but the police chief is saying they don’t have a lot of this, that this just doesn’t happen here. grappling to understand the uproar and outpouring of east salinas residents’ anger at these homicides, chief mcmillin’s words sounded like an attempt to render these deaths anomalous and exceptional rather than repeated or structural, an attempt to downgrade the scale of the police or civil response needed. mcmillin’s diminution of these homicides, which at this point were indeed suspiciously starting to pile up, stood in contrast to shi’s response to the homicides as we drove toward the scene a few hours after mejía’s death. “it’s too much already, it’s just too much,” shi sighed, trailing off. “i just can’t. . . .” i was at the wheel while shi was trying to keep herself calm, having suddenly been triggered earlier that morning by the news of this (yet another) homicide on the east side. she and i were coming from a meeting that we had intended as colectiva de mujeres program planning time, but instead mostly spent with shi alternating phone calls with two old friends and now colectiva members, yesi and luisa, leaning in every so often to give us more details on the latest death. “they shot, the police shot a paisa [recently arrived mexican migrant] in front of delicia’s, that bakery up on sanborn. flaca lives right down the street from it. she lives where the police tape ends.” she was referring to yesi and luisa as flaca and gata, their old placasos. figure 1. at the perimeter of the police tape, watching officers deal with mejía’s body down the street. photo by megan raschig. ending the meeting there, in the throes of being triggered by yet another killing, shi felt too freaked out and nervous to handle the wheel and asked me to drive her to yesi’s. “it’s too much already,” she sighed repeatedly as we drove there. “it’s just too much.” arriving at the perimeter of the police tape, we found yesi out on the front lawn, while her granddaughter whizzed about nonplussed on a tricycle. yesi had run inside and locked all the doors when she heard yelling and gunshots, and immediately called shi when she saw mejía take the bullets, but now she was outside snapping photos and surveying the scene. we stood there too, talking to some of the men in ranchero hats sitting at the bus stop in front of the house, they sitting on their hands with shoulders tight, all of us quietly looking to the corner. preschoolers hand in hand with young mothers slowly filtered home past the scene. police milled about within the taped-off zone, one standing with arms on hips next to mejía’s lifeless, uncovered, and somehow handcuffed body. was there an exceptional edge to the ordinariness, or an ordinariness to the exceptionality? we all lingered by yesi’s house, gathering around smartphones watching the soon-to-be-famous footage her daughter’s friend had taken of the cops’ slow pursuit of the stumbling mejía, filming it ourselves in case the original was forcibly blocked or deleted. the day went on like this. how can something claimed to “never happen here” also be felt to “be too much already”? to what extent were these deaths exceptional or ordinary, and how could they emerge as triggering, and as evental, in the oscillation between these conditions? yesi’s seemingly instinctive reaction to hide inside and reach out to shi, and shi’s visceral anxiety and refraction of the mejía death in terms of the proximate hernández death and perhaps countless others, were aspects of resurgent affective conditions and attachments, assailing but also setting them in motion. moving through their triggers, in part through their reorientation as belonging to an older generation of gang-involved women with a remaining claim to these streets, and in keeping with the ethical imperative to heal themselves as well as their community, shi and yesi shifted into a reflexive and creative mode. figure 2. the ensuing protest-turned-riot, at the intersection in front of the bakery where mejía was shot the day before. photo by megan raschig. these deaths, made differently sensible in the context of their participation in the colectiva de mujeres’s twice-weekly healing circles, were different enough to lead shi and yesi, but also tara and other colectiva members, to go out the next day and stand at the corners of the bakery’s intersection holding fluorescent signs and directing children in a peaceful demonstration of community stewardship. at the same time, these deaths were also “the same” enough that i could ask a young woman at that rally, as it steadily turned into what would be eventalized as a riot in the frenzy of youthful energy and frustration and noise, if she’d ever seen anything like this before. with my gestures and gaze, i was referring to the protest and the hundreds of kids and teenagers pumping their fists in the air every time someone honked, expecting her to remark on its exceptionality as a political event. instead, she responded, “oh, yeah, it happens all the time. last year it happened right in front of our apartment,” she pointed a few blocks away. “a shooting. a couple guys were taken down right there.” taken aback, i did not insist on the intended specificity of my question—deciding that she had not, strictly speaking, misunderstood it. rather, like shi, yesi, tara, and likely many more, she apprehended mejía’s death and salinans’ responses to it along a different historical trajectory, one of structural disavowal and the abandonment of latino/a lives, not of the romanticized and exceptional events of protest and politicization. what made these deaths exceptional was that they jangled into urgency a host of other unmourned and unsolved deaths that otherwise made up the ordinary. on disengagement: being in and falling out of the world their respective participation in the protest-turned-riot was just one effect of shi’s, yesi’s, and tara’s triggering; it also happened to be the most publicly recognizable. this protest became termed a riot in part because a quieter contingent left their rally counterparts and branched off at some point, ending up at a nearby community arts center where many milpa and colectiva members, myself included, hosted an impromptu public healing circle. these community-wide healing circles continued for a little while, but lost steam without producing recognizable results, though the twice-weekly healing circles by milpa and the colectiva went on. the women’s circles especially saw themselves strengthened by these homicides, becoming critical sites for local women, like tara and yesi, to demarcate and work through their triggers, generating openings for them to get involved in healing themselves and their community, entwining their respective ethical processes glossed as recoveries. in this section i explore the eventfulness of tara’s and yesi’s lives as it was refracted by their triggers and subsequent actions in relation to this period of police homicides. stirred—triggered—by these deaths in the summer of 2014, these women came to frame their reactions in terms of still needing to do a lot of the healing work from those erstwhile years. during these years, each woman had made multiple attempts at moving on from her gang involvement. each struggled to maintain a sense of contemporary moral and existential integrity for herself—to not fall apart, or fall too far into or out of the world—in the face of the beckoning repetition of death all around. their responses manifest the vulnerability of being triggered, as does the critical attention needed for the way these states are accommodated in local ethical formations, such as emergent social projects like healing or institutions like the colectiva de mujeres. in the years before reuniting, tara had endured waves of incarceration, probation, and addiction recovery. invited by shi as they rekindled their friendship after hernández’s death, she joined the colectiva for much of the summer of 2014, adding it to her busy schedule of both mandated and voluntary addiction treatment and personal growth. she was just finishing a stint at a privately run probation authority, and i would often pick her up to shuttle her between her workplace, her alcoholics anonymous sessions, the colectiva’s healing circles, and weekly city hall meetings. very open about what she continued to endure, tara spoke of living through countless deaths of friends and family, both near and far. in particular, her husband was murdered while she had been locked up, leaving her without a sense of closure, let alone the chance to mourn. she miscarried during that time, due to “stress and sorrow. i bottled it all in,” she told a group of us at a meeting to organize a colectiva response to the police homicides, “and when something like this happens, it gets all stirred up again. the danger is that it might explode.” i constantly heard apprehensions like this around the triggers, the fear of slipping back into old ways, the fragility of recoveries, and the devastating rhythms that threaten to become a life’s repeated refrain. yesi had joined the colectiva de mujeres when shi founded it months before the homicides, and despite her doubtfulness about “what kind of colorful people show up there,” she attended “just to back [shi] up.” yesi expressed happy surprise at finding that both she and shi had “completely changed,” and that they could now be “official friends without any, like, using each other, for money, for drugs, or to go fight somebody.” yesi, an energetic mujer with an infectious and endless laugh, expressed a hard-won sense of recovery, patched together through various stints in rehab and prison. she had been free of heroin for fourteen years, citing it as her major recovery, though in that time she had been to jail numerous times for drug possession, sometimes on behalf of boyfriends. “i had to take the blame,” she told me in an interview, “because you can’t go telling on people, you gotta suck it up and take it like a champ.” her other major recovery was from her anger, a fire stoked by times spent in frictional clinical rehab settings, where “they wanted me to do stuff like beading and arts and craft stuff and you know, like, when you’re trying to get yourself clean and you miss your kids and you’re scared and you don’t know what’s gonna happen, and pretty much they just pulled you out of your world. . . .” she trailed off, pausing before adding that “as bad as your world is, that’s your world and it’s what you’re used to.” both tara and yesi went to the site of mejía’s death with shi the day afterward, spending the afternoon equipping children and youth with fluorescent papers and slogans, and shepherding them safely across the traffic lights. over the honking of cars and cheering of kids, tara’s ragged voice could be heard calling cálmense!, “calm down!” yesi took a more backstage role, taking photos and facebooking the event the whole time, becoming a point of coordination for those near and far. as more and more youth, then adults, came and spread to the four corners, and as the day drew toward night, the energy shifted, becoming heavier, edgier. the cops showed up and the mood soured. as yesi related it to me later, “i went inside as soon as the cops got there. they were gonna like, do the whole pepper spray thing . . . when the riot gear came out, i was like, i think this is about time to go. . . . yeah. and i knew shi was gonna stay there, so i just took shi’s daughter with me. . . . i was like, i’m gonna be the bigger person and like, know when to stop,” she laughed, “before i get jailed again.” knowing when to stop not just at that protest but for good, yesi mostly stayed away from subsequent direct actions related to the police homicides, which other mujeres participated in or even organized. she knew her triggers well but hadn’t completely mastered their management, and she did not want to risk “all [she’d] accomplished”: her stable job, a burgeoning romance, and important maternal connections with her granddaughters. not wanting to be another statistic, and in loyalty for shi and the colectiva as “her thing,” yesi’s actions of disengagement were less active but still indicative of her pursuit of becoming other than she had been. for example, during this same summer, while east salinas was in disarray and yesi was staying away from the group, she found out that someone had pulled a gun on her daughter. her daughter was gang-affiliated but making her way out of this involvement, trying to stay out of jail. yesi felt enraged that someone had threatened her daughter, telling me that she “called every tom, dick, and harry that i know, that i know-know, and told them: ‘my daughter, she’s so-and-so’s daughter, our daughter, we’re known, and this happened. and it was a guy.’ they’re like, ‘oh, tell us who it was so we can handle it,’ right . . . but i didn’t know, and she didn’t tell me.” yesi soon found out that the person who threatened her daughter was the son of one of the other mujeres in the colectiva. though still furious, she called off the hit, because “the healing circle taught me not to bring women down, because, you know, instant motherly reaction i would’ve been over there beating the fucking shit out of her because she can’t keep her kid. but then, y’know, i had to take a step back, defuse the situation.” confronting the other mujer about it later in a safe space, yesi explained that, “me being the very . . . hitting person that i am . . . i stay away. gotta suck it up, one more time. and i confronted her, but i . . . dude, i waited. i waited.” yesi’s job at a local strawberry-packing plant kept her busy during the colectiva’s scheduled healing circles, but “even if i could go, i wouldn’t go, only because i wouldn’t want to for some reason flip a switch,” she said, using another common idiom for the effect of being triggered, as “then people are gonna be like, ‘oh, yeah, see, that’s what you get when you get a bunch of mexicans together, all stereotypical, on the east side, typical.’ i don’t want to be a stereotype!” she laughed. even though yesi stayed away from the circle and the colectiva’s activism, her apprehension and action in relation to her triggers during this time demonstrate a connection between her recovery and her sense of contributing to a changing, improving east salinas. tara, on the other hand, became a regular fixture at all protests, no matter which community group organized them or to what ends. simply speaking, tara was everywhere, addicted to the action, spilling herself out on her wordy protest signs, waving a white bandana at drivers, all the while howling, “pítaleeee! pítale, papá, no tengas miedo! [honk! honk, man, don’t be afraid!]”. she could also often be found at the twice-weekly healing circles whenever she could arrange a lift, seeing the circle as a setting crucial to her ability to keep putting herself “out there” at protests, and to keep working through and with her triggers. she had an exuberant, playful presence, but in circle she often became stoic. touching on some of the affective and ethical stakes involved in her grieving and activism, she once noted that “i feel so exhausted . . . i feel like some emotional stuff, about what’s going on in our community, it brings it home, a lot, what’s happened in my past. it brings up a lot of guilt . . . to do with, you know, everything, that life; i know people doing life behind bars, people i’ve lost that are now in heaven, loved ones . . . and i’m just feeling a lot of grief right now.” as tara found ways to manage her exhaustion by “reaching for the [healing herb] sage instead of the bottle or the blunt,” she faltered as other developments and dissolutions in her life impeded her ability to reflect, focus, and heal through the resurgent grief. though she openly embraced as well as struggled with how to make sense of past deaths, she had distinct trouble with what i see as the ethical work of temporalizing these and other past quasi-events, articulating them as distinctive and chronologically related to other similar happenings (cf. zigon 2014). one clear example came on a thursday evening in early july as the colectiva made what they called life codexes. in reference to the mayan codices, folded books filled with illustrated chronologies of important historical processes, each life codex had four folded panels, each available to hold a key event in the drawer’s life. these events could be past challenges or victories (a rape, a marriage), or they could stretch into an anticipated future—getting a much-desired motorcycle, graduating from college. these creative activities always seemed to go over well with the colectiva de mujeres, offering a change in atmosphere from the sacred and solemn healing circle to the chattier and more fluid artist’s workshop. chairs were pushed back and we all sprawled or sat on the floor, digging for markers in plastic bins, giggling at our drawings, but also becoming quiet and focused as we reflected on four things that had come to matter to who we felt ourselves to be. i looked over to tara, sitting nearby, who was alternating between being boisterous and picky with the markers’ shades, and silent with concern as she hovered over her still-blank four folds. she could not think of anything at first, feeling depleted by yet another recent police homicide in east salinas of a man named frank alvarado. she likened herself to an emptied wine bottle. eventually something came back to her, and she started to fill in the panels on her page. the first one simply said “pain,” the third “hurt.” she asked me to draw lightning bolts, in red and black, in between. despite all the specific crises she had undergone, she could not compartmentalize and eventalize them; they all constituted a commingled haze of pain and hurt. i take seriously this inability to eventalize in light of the progressive fading away of tara from the colectiva and the protests. she became ever harder to reach, without any stable address, her phone only working sporadically. my repeated efforts to contact her all failed, even as i left the field and continued periodic attempts to check in with her via facebook (on which she was inactive for large periods of time). when i returned for a short visit to salinas some seven months after leaving, among the first things i asked shi was whether tara was around. shi responded no, she was not. as she put it, tara “fell off.” “she what?” “she fell off. she never got over the [carlos] mejía stuff. she got tripped up on it and stayed there.” temporal tripwires in their own particular ways, the police homicides and the local imperative of healing opened a possibility for members of milpa and la colectiva de mujeres to shift their long abidance of lethal state disregard toward a newfound ability to let past and emergent happenings take on a stronger and politically intolerable eventfulness. through an apprehension of their triggers, shi, yesi, and tara claimed the breach of a limit of tolerance and put this to political work by engaging in concerted ethical action and political engagement, whether positive and energetic (like engaging in protest) or negative (like staying away, as many did). nurturing this understanding of their triggers from the space of the healing circle, these and other women consolidated the colectiva de mujeres into a prominent local organization for transformative healing and community engagement. still, i recognize that yesi’s and tara’s ways of working through their triggers might not seem to explain particularly well how social change happens. if anything, they seem to showcase one side of the spectrum of why certain projects proceed or certain worlds are grown and established, as elizabeth povinelli (2011) claims, and why others simply stay wavering in potentiality. how can we account for how her triggers tripped tara up and she “fell off” or perhaps decisively out of the world, without recuperating her into some already acceptable state of existence? hayder al-mohammad (2013, 212), discussing the precarity of “our fix in the world,” writes that being-in-the-world is oscillatory and contingent, as much a matter of keeping a grip on the world as constituted by our relations with other entities as it is about the ways we slip out and disentangle from it. what does it look like to reckon with these situated struggles to both stay in the world and be able to build it anew, as we trace and theorize new political formations? tara’s case suggests some of the challenges involved in being susceptible to the triggering reactions that can compel important ethical procedures and actions but can also lead to world-collapsing exhaustion. this exhaustion, a critical coordinate of the new civil rights era, can preclude the dissonance necessary to move into an ethical and creative mode. on the other hand, yesi’s strategic disengagement from the protest, the colectiva, and the social world in which she was just regaining her footing suggests the periodic need for this falling out, a retreat to a less volatile world still involved in local ethical formations, for fidelity to enduring relations or concern for the well-being of a community. such accounts speak volumes about the moral and material conditions in criminalized settings like east salinas, conditions that can add critical densities and intensities to practices and experiences of political engagement and activism. it is the primacy of liberal rubrics of participation and activism, however, the recognizable practices of direct action, that can occlude our anthropological understandings of other ways of seeking change and limit support for meaningful actions on the ground, as they may entwine with or seem unrelated to more traditional forms of protest. in tracing the outcroppings and uprisings of the new civil rights period, our analyses need to be attuned to grassroots political action that may not be immediately legible as such: the formation of local institutions like healing collectives, the politico-therapeutic aspects of a healing circle, the transformative potential of staying with the trigger. it is not a linear history of cause-and-effect events that led these women to become activistas, but rather the affectively and ethically affirmed alternative historicities made actual and urgent through their being triggered. engaging with the rhythmicity of their triggers, the incipient temporalization of social change held by those like shi, yesi, and tara was one of recalibration or reparative thinking (thomas 2011). it largely focused on dealing with what they had been through, what had happened to them, and what conditions could be shifted without a distinct sense of what that could mean or imply for the future. the triggered responses of mujeres like shi eventually led toward projects like running healing circles for monolingual mexican parents at a local public school and for unemployed agricultural workers seeking volunteer hours, collaborating with local artists to elaborate and disseminate each mujer’s healing narrative, running informal academies and forming fellowships of formerly incarcerated youth for juvenile justice reform, among others. these actions are neither straightforwardly resistant nor acquiescent; rather, they intervene on existing institutions and generate new ones to incrementally build a more responsive community infrastructure. they open possibilities for salinans to engage the work of healing and decriminalization, to realize that their triggers are circumstantial and social, rather than pathological. the radical potential of the trigger, as figured in east salinas, begins in its recalibrating of affective historicities, rendering them a source of potential for responding to what will no longer be abided through the forging of new arrangements of collectivity and the situated world-making work of local activism. the broad salience and even ubiquity of triggers, as ethical breakdowns issuing demands for the acknowledgment of a disjunction in eventfulness—something happening, something mattering—indicate a critical mode of apprehending a painful and confounding political present. this present is one that others (anthropologists included) may not entirely or initially share but must reckon with, in the sudden flushes of heat and accelerated heartbeats of loved ones’ lived histories of racism that are far from over and done. notes acknowledgments the research for this article was made possible by the european research council and the amsterdam institute for social science research. many thanks to lex kuiper, laura vermeulen, sylvia tidey, and jarrett zigon for their engagement with this text through the various stages of its life, to the anonymous reviewers whose comments have significantly strengthened this article, and to cymene howe for her guidance during the editorial process. 1. most mexican american gangs claim either norteño (northerner) or sureño (southerner) affiliation. across salinas there are dozens of norteño and sureño chapters, generally organized by neighborhood. shi was one of the first women to be initiated into her specific sureño chapter. most names in this article have been changed, in keeping with each individual’s preference. 2. salinas is the largest city in monterey county, and it consistently reports the highest youth homicide rates per capita in the state of california (violence policy center 2015). 3. throughout this article i make use of zigon’s conceptualization of ethics as reflexive and temporary tactics of self-making, which respond to a situated range of possibilities and issue from breakdowns in mostly nonconsciously enacted morality (zigon 2007). 4. the high-profile police killings of african americans in 2014 and 2015 sparked outrage and protest among communities around the country, becoming a flashpoint for related issues like the militarization of law enforcement, mass incarceration, and racial disparity. these responses swelled into an organized effort continuing the work of the mid-century civil rights movement, but in a distinctively contemporary, hence “new,” form. 5. present in thirteen other, similarly underserved but potential-rich neighborhoods statewide, this ten-year investment had been made by the california endowment, a health-focused foundation, to foster “the new social justice of health equity.” for more on the project, see http://www.calendow.org/building-healthy-communities. 6. california’s agricultural zones are among the most gang-active in the state, linked to the effects of land and populations made surplus by the state’s postwar political economic restructuring and economic displacements effected by nafta (reynolds 2014; gilmore 2007). 7. descargando has layers of meaning beyond the collectives’ gloss of “checking in.” most important, the verb descargar means “to unload”—colloquially, the unloading of emotions carried as a heavy load (cargas, baggage). 8. latinos/as make up 42 percent of the california correctional population, and around 20 percent federally. these are likely underrepresentations, as fragmented institutional reporting mechanisms and the common demarcation of hispanic as an ethnic, rather than racial, category often leads to unor undercounted latino/a demographics (wagner and rabuy 2016). as for victims of state violence, the u.s. federal government does not keep an official count of those killed by state agents like police. the fbi’s list relies on law enforcement agencies’ voluntary reporting of “justifiable homicides,” and is as such incomplete. the guardian (2015) newspaper keeps a running record through its “the counted” project (see also el nasser 2015). 9. despite awareness of a new kind of political formation emerging with black lives matter, labeling this period as new but as a reprisal of the earlier and much mythologized civil rights movement constitutes a form of recognition that is at once legitimizing and limiting, as it subjects the emergent movement to certain past-prime and neutralized criteria. the so-called civil rights gaze has been conditioned in part by the original movement’s co-optation by the rising new right in the 1970s and its institutionalization in conservative forms by milquetoast state multiculturalism (bettie 2014; hall 2005). this conservative gaze stands behind critiques of black lives matters activist techniques: that it is leaderless in its horizontal diffusion and queer rather than heteronormative masculine leadership, or without tangible purpose in its calls to stop killing black people, rather than following a clear pursuit of rights (kang 2015; cobb 2016; alexander 2015). attachments to old techniques and tropes persist alongside new political articulations. references alexander, michelle 2015 “ta-nehisi coates’s between the world and me.” new york times, august 17. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me.html. al-mohammad, hayder 2013 “ravelling/unravelling: being-in-the-world and falling-out-of-the-world.” in biosocial becomings: integrating social and biological anthropology, edited by tim ingold and gísli pálsson, 211–28. new york: cambridge university press. badiou, alain 2012 ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil. translated by peter hallward. new york: verso. originally published in 1993. beltrán, cristina 2010 the trouble with unity: latino politics and the creation of identity. new york: oxford university press. berlant, lauren 2007 “slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency).” critical inquiry 33, no. 4: 754–80. 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homicide victims ages 10 to 24.” report. http://www.vpc.org/revealing-the-impacts-of-gun-violence/youth-victimization. wagner, peter, and bernadette rabuy 2016 “mass incarceration: the whole pie 2016.” report. northampton, mass.: prison policy initiative. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2016.html. white, micah 2016 the end of protest: a new playbook for revolution. toronto: knopf canada. zigon, jarrett 2007 “moral breakdown and the ethical demand: a theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities.” anthropological theory 7, no. 2: 131–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499607077295. 2014 “temporalization and ethical action.” journal of religious ethics 42, no. 3: 442–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12065. is another cosmopolitics possible? is another cosmopolitics possible? mario blaser memorial university of newfoundland http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5613-6669 cosmopolitics is now the common situation for all collectives. there is no common world, and yet it has to be composed, nonetheless. —bruno latour on january 28, 2013, the government of newfoundland and labrador announced a five-year hunting ban on caribou. the ban was imposed after several surveys showed that the population of the george river herd had been dropping precipitously, from eight hundred thousand individuals in 1990 to only twenty-seven thousand in 2012. while uncertain about the causes, the provincial government understood that a continued caribou harvest was not sustainable, even for the innu and inuit indigenous communities that live in labrador. the day after the announcement, prote poker, the innu nation grand chief, said that the ban was unjustifiable; that innu elders did not agree with it because it was a threat to their way of life; and that the communities would continue to hunt as they always had (cbc news 2013). among other concerns, the innu refusal to accept the ban was based on the insistence of knowledgeable hunters and elders who saw the decline in population as a symptom of the deteriorating relationship between the innu and kanipinikassikueu, the master of atîku (the word innu use to refer to what euro-canadians call caribou).1 the extent to which established protocols for hunting are followed—such as the treatment of bones and the sharing of meat, among other prescriptions—determines the health of that relationship and the willingness of kanipinikassikueu to keep giving animals to, and generally bless, the innu. hunters and elders had been complaining for several years by then that younger generations of innu were not following these protocols, calling on the young people to recommit to them. in this context, for hunters and elders, the hunting ban would make it impossible to repair the relationship with atîku and its spirit master. in short, while for the wildlife managers in the provincial government hunting could mean the disappearance of the caribou, for the innu hunters and elders, being prevented from hunting according to protocol almost assuredly would mean the disappearance of atîku.2 thinking about possible ways to grapple with this seemingly intractable conflict calls to mind the concept of cosmopolitics. this concept, first proposed by isabelle stengers (1997), differs from kantian cosmopolitanism, according to which a cosmopolitan is one who rejects parochial allegiances and embraces the common world (the cosmos) as the grounding to work out differences among humans. in this conception the cosmos is transcendent and requires no discussion. what is debated (and has to be resolved) are the different views that, given their allegiance to their cultures and traditions, humans have about that cosmos. returning to our example, a cosmopolitan call to resolve the disagreement between the innu and the provincial government would appeal to the parties to abandon their respective parochial perspectives and focus instead on what is common to both: the “thing” they worry about, a thing that one calls caribou and the other atîku. in a discussion with ulrich beck, and mobilizing stengers’s notion of cosmopolitics, bruno latour (2004a) points out that humans do not go into conflicts with their perspectives on things; they go into them along with the nonhuman things that make them act. in this sense, caribou and atîku would not refer to different cultural perspectives on the same “thing,” but to altogether different (albeit not unrelated) things. thus, stengers and latour locate the problem with cosmopolitanism in its assumption of an already unified cosmos, a single world (the common “thing”), when we actually inhabit a pluriverse. such a pluriverse requires a cosmopolitics. stengers (2005, 995) recounts that she came up with the term cosmopolitics when she found herself at risk of turning a type of practice into a universal neutral key. on her account, “the so-called modern sciences appeared to be a way of answering the political question par excellence: who can talk of what, be the spokesperson of what, represent what?” the risk, she says, was forgetting that the category of politics with which she was working derived from a particular tradition, and thus, she decided to articulate it with the term cosmos. far from referring to a “particular cosmos, or world, as a particular tradition may conceive it,” in her usage “cosmos refers to the unknown constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds, and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (stengers 2005, 995; my emphasis). the reference to the possible articulations that divergent worlds might develop connects cosmos back to politics in two ways: 1) it interrupts its universality (politics is our signature; we do not know the procedures that other worlds have devised to constitute themselves as common), and 2) it enrolls politics to explore the possibility of those divergent worlds articulating with each other to become a common world.3 latour (2004a, 454) captures succinctly what stengers’s invention of the word cosmopolitics achieves: the presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. the presence of politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. cosmos protects against the premature closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos. conceived thus, cosmopolitics speaks to the intersection of two topics that have enlivened anthropological debates lately: on the one hand, under the labels of multispecies ethnography (kirksey and helmreich 2010) and new materialism (coole and frost 2010), the revaluation of agency as an attribute distributed across heterogeneous assemblages of humans and nonhumans; and, on the other hand, under the label of the ontological turn (holbraad, pedersen, and viveiros de castro 2014; kohn 2015), the revaluation of radical alterity as an index of multiple ontologies or worlds rather than cultures. each of these interventions coincides with a politics and a cosmos that are expanded by cosmopolitics. yet they still run the risk of becoming closed if they are not connected to one another. for instance, as christopher gad, casper bruun jensen, and brit winthereik (2015) argue, some scholars enrolled in the ontological turn give too much weight to the concepts of human informants, while paying little attention to the role of nonhumans.4 conversely, danielle dinovelli-lang (2013) and i (blaser 2014) have pointed out that multispecies ethnography and new materialism tend to rely heavily on the natural sciences as spokespersons for the nonhumans admitted into politics, and thus they continue to delineate a cosmos with a limited number of legitimate entities.5 the kind of conflict i described above short-circuits any premature closure of politics and cosmos, even if these are expanded, and thus forces us to retain the two components of cosmopolitics in tension. but beyond academic debates, by keeping open the question of who and what might compose the common world, cosmopolitics offers a way to grasp these kinds conflicts while avoiding the pitfalls of what i call the problem of reasonable politics. i will expand on this below; for now it will suffice to indicate that the problem with reasonable politics lies in defining in advance what kinds of differences are at stake in such conflicts (as cosmopolitanism does), thereby reinforcing a state of affairs whereby some concerns (rendered as perspectives) can be sidelined—like the claim that innu are given atîku by a spirit master—because they are deemed unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable or irrelevant. figuring the common world as its possible result, rather than as a starting point, cosmopolitics disrupts the quick recourse to rule out concerns on the basis of their deemed lack of reality. indeed, the primary purpose of the cosmopolitical proposal was to “slow down reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us” (stengers 2005, 994). and yet, as my epigraph from latour indicates, the common world must be composed. thus, although latour and stengers denote distinct senses of urgency, for each of them cosmopolitics remains oriented to the composition of the common world, even if they insist on the lack of guarantees for such a project. in this article i argue that such an orientation limits the capacity of cosmopolitics to address the kinds of conflicts i described above. to substantiate my argument, i will submit cosmopolitics to a pragmatic test by diffractively reading it (barad 2007, 200) through ethnographic materials. my concern is not primarily with endorsing or rejecting the concept of cosmopolitics, but rather with seeing what elements of it are useful to tackle this conflict as a politico-conceptual problem and where the ethnography suggests a need to expand the concept. i will first present a general outline of the problem of reasonable politics, highlighting those aspects for which cosmopolitics, and the material semiotics in which it is grounded, seem to offer some handles. i then move on to the test proper, exploring the extent to which cosmopolitics provides a fruitful concept for the conflict that concerns me. finally, following the contours of what cosmopolitics seems unable to adequately address in my ethnographic materials, i advance a series of suggestions for another cosmopolitics. the problem of reasonable politics what i call the problem of reasonable politics resembles a typical ethnographic puzzle, that is, how to gauge utterances that appear to the researcher as manifestly counterfactual. the classic example would be the nuer declaration that twins are birds when the researcher knows that they are human siblings. usually the resolution of the puzzle involves explaining how and why the nuer would think that twin human siblings are birds. martin holbraad has pointed out that such a resolution reflects the analyst’s prior assumption that different cultural representations of twins are at stake (carrithers et al. 2010). smuggled into this assumption is the implicit claim that the analyst gets it right (i.e., twins are actually human siblings), while the nuer get it wrong (i.e., they produce cultural representations of twin human siblings that are a bit off the mark and require explanation). the problem of reasonable politics becomes most visible when, rather than in the realm of ethnographic encounters, the puzzle of counterfactual utterances occurs in the realm of conflicts where matters of life and death are at stake, or when certain kinds of lives are deemed possible while others are not. conflicts surrounding entities that states and corporations treat as resources and that others take as nonhuman or suprahuman persons with whom they sustain various social relations—as is the case of the innu with atîku and its spirit master—are thus exceedingly apt to make evident the problem of reasonable politics. elsewhere, and through ethnographically inspired discussion, i (as well as other colleagues) have addressed the conceptual problems these kinds of conflicts pose. marisol de la cadena (2010, 342), for example, has argued that these conflicts bring to the fore a conceptual challenge to politics as usual. the presence of nonhuman persons, in her case earth-beings, in politics disavows “the separation between ‘nature’ and ‘humanity,’ on which the political theory our world abides by was historically funded.” in turn, i have argued that by deploying the concept of culture in trying to empower those who foreground entities’ status as nonhuman persons, we find ourselves at an impasse (blaser 2013a). by presenting nonhuman persons as culture, we end up treating these conflicts as epistemological, that is, as between perspectives on the world. (one cultural perspective sees persons, while the other sees resources.) this move reinstates and reinforces the ontological assumptions implicit in the modern constitution (i.e., the nature/culture divide and its cascading binaries). the alternative, i have argued, is to treat these kinds of conflicts as ontological conflicts rather than cultural differences (blaser 2009, 2013b). the core of the problem here is that the modernist assumption of one world with multiple perspectives on it is constitutive of what i call reasonable politics and its operations. in a nutshell, reasonable politics operates on the basis of turning differences into perspectives on the world. differences made into perspectives are amenable to be ranked according to putative degrees of equivalence between perspectival representations of the world and the factual world itself. this ordering, in turn, makes it possible to deem some perspectives irrelevant, erroneous, or dangerous, and thus dismissible or, worse, destroyable (see povinelli 2001, 2002). the process of attributing factuality is extremely contested. yet the power of reasonable politics rests precisely in its capacity to set the terms of contestation (or disagreement) as a matter of perspectives competing for factuality. this is particularly problematic for those who do not adhere to the epistemology derived from the ontological assumption of one factual world; because they are not engaged in a contest over factuality on the terms set by reasonable politics, their claims are automatically disqualified as being unreasonable or unrealistic. precisely because of the primacy of an epistemology predicated on the notion that knowledge is a relation between a real world out there and representations of it, universal science plays the primary role of arbiter in reasonable politics, especially in the exercise of ranking the putative factuality of different perspectives.6 universal science is an always shifting and situated material-semiotic assemblage in which the state, law, and knowledge practices claiming scientific status are entangled. such a configuration makes plausible, mobilizes, and protects an implicit equivalence between technological prowess and apprehending reality as it is. in very simplistic terms: we know that science knows better because we can send a man to the moon, and if you want to prove otherwise you will have to enroll the services of a natural or social scientist! universal science is of course not the only criteria mobilized to rank competing factualities, but it does tend to be the primary one. besides screening out putatively unreasonable or unrealistic concerns, reasonable politics poses another problem for the analyst who wants to escape its confines, namely, how to account for the differences at stake in conflicts like those above if one wants those differences to make a difference in the way they are accounted for. the problem emerges from a particular notion of politics that takes some inspiration from jacques rancière. rancière (2011, 4) has argued that disagreement is both foundational to politics and holds the possibility to generate a “re-partitioning [of] the political from the non-political.” building on this, i treat politics as a placeholder for: 1) differences that, while being potentially the ground for disagreement, are yet to be defined, and 2) the various possible ways in which these differences might (or might be made to) relate to each other. reasonable politics (or politics as usual) takes for granted its universal applicability and, more important, assumes that it has exhausted categories of difference (such as culture, class, gender, race, sexuality, and so on). moving away from this position which presupposes that disagreements are easily recognized, in my politics as placeholder, the very nature (and existence) of differences qua differences can be what is at stake, and constitutive of, the disagreement. for example, some parties and analysts might maintain that the conflict over caribou is a class conflict over the control of a resource. in this case the difference/disagreement is about who owns or controls the resource. perhaps that is the case, and the conflict will play out in relation to such disagreement. but maybe there are other parties and analysts that view the conflict as a cultural conflict involving competing knowledges. in that case the difference/disagreement is premised on who got the problem right, and the conflict itself will unfold differently. given that conflicts unfold differently depending on the kind of disagreement at stake, defining the very nature of the disagreement—is it about control of resources or is it about competing knowledges?—can become the mediating principle at work in the conflict. yet there might be another twist. let’s say that yet another party claims (as we will see later) that the conflict involves protecting the web of relations that sustain the life of the innu, while other parties, in turn, entirely reject the idea that such a thing could be at issue; they care about the life of the innu as well. in this case, it is the very existence of the disagreement about which the parties differ and disagree that is operative. of course, all these disagreements (and others still to reveal themselves) might be operating simultaneously. for this reason, it is important, in principle, to remain as agnostic as possible about what kinds of differences might constitute the political in a given situation.7 in part, this holds because the task of the analyst cannot be disentangled from how the disagreement unfolds. whether and how the differences at stake make a difference, at a minimum, implies that such differences be articulated and made visible, not the least by the analysts themselves. as i have pointed out, an analysis in terms of representations or perspectives on a factual world does precisely the contrary, as it stipulates from the beginning what kinds of differences are at stake and, in so doing, ends up playing into the hands of reasonable politics and its exclusionary operations. the material-semiotic versions of science and technology studies on which the concept of cosmopolitics is empirically grounded offer a way to address the exclusionary drive of reasonable politics and the analytical need to remain agnostic to the differences at stake in politics. material semiotics postulates factuality as an always emergent enactment of heterogeneous assemblages; only a posteriori might they be purified as pertaining either to facts or to representations (haraway 1988; latour 1999; law 2009). this formulation has been greatly informed by what transpires in the sites where scholars study scientific practices. these are locations of construction and of ontological uncertainty; they are sites defined by concerns or issues that are contoured by the presence of actants that, if they are able to articulate successfully, might become a matter of fact. to put it briefly borrowing from one of latour’s (1988) examples, before everything articulates successfully into the fact of microbes, what we have is a matter of concern. this is an issue or a concern that (so to speak) gathers an assembly composed by louis pasteur and his collaborators, by the social hygienists and their detractors, by yeast and so on. the trajectory of a thing from a matter of concern to a matter of fact involves a process of singularization of the multiplicity and contentiousness of the assembly. this trajectory is of course reversible, as a stabilized fact may again become an issue, thus making visible the presence of the entire assembly that constitutes it. it is important to bear in mind, however, that we are talking of visibility here. even a fact, a stabilized entity, is always a multiplicity. a multiplicity does not imply many units but rather, in the words of annemarie mol (2002) and marilyn strathern (2004), more than one but less than many. latour (2004a) has argued that, in contrast to a mode of critique that pivots around (what we could call) realist factuality, the point of material-semiotic analyses showing how things are assembled or enacted is not to disavow their reality but rather to show (and, through the analysis, participate in) how they become real in the layering and knotting of multiple concerns; this equally involves how they derealize as their assemblies scatter or turn contentious. thus, where reasonable politics stands for a politics of hierarchically stratified perspectives on an already existing factual world, material semiotics enables a politics of worlding, that is, a politics concerned with the processes through which a world is being brought into existence. this formulation deactivates the basic premise of reasonable politics—an already existing factual world—and its capacity to adjudicate who and what can be part of the political in terms of their adherence to this particular version of factuality. as latour (2007, 813) expresses it: from now on, politics is something entirely different . . . it is the building of the cosmos in which everyone lives, the progressive composition of the common world. . . . hence the excellent name isabelle stengers has proposed to give to the whole enterprise, that of cosmopolitics. in latour’s version of cosmopolitics, the only requirement for things to legitimately be part of the political task of building the common world is that they be an issue, a matter of concern that gathers a public, an assembly. but this rather quick equivalence between cosmopolitics and the progressive composition of the common world seems to rest on latour’s formulation being inspired primarily by scientific controversies; in these cases the multiplicity at stake in a matter of concern that gathers an assembly is already visible and legible, so to speak. attending more closely to stengers’s version of cosmopolitics, and her insistence on not losing sight of the victims (those with no power to represent themselves or who do not want to take part in the composition of the common world because there is something more important than the proposed issue), maria puig de la bellacasa (2011) has called for the staging of matters of care. at the center of matters of care is the recognition that in deeply stratified worlds, “erased concerns do not just become visible by following the articulate and assembled concerns composing a thing, nor does generating care happen by counting the participants present in an issue” (de la bellacasa 2011, 94). in this context, feminist notions of critical standpoint become crucial for making visible absent issues. in contrast to deconstructive critique that would wield absences as a weapon to attack the veracity of the assemblage constituting a matter of concern, a critical standpoint foregrounds the absences to foster new attachments and care for heretofore absent participants and concerns. a critical standpoint contributes to cut the shape of an issue otherwise. this is a powerful corrective to latour’s formulation, a corrective that informs my subsequent analysis. caring for atîku/caribou: more than one but less than many since 2009 i have been involved in a collaborative research project with a group of innu people from labrador. the innu communities are located both in labrador and quebec, and are subject to those provincial jurisdictions. the project i describe here started to take shape when i met a group of labrador innu elders and hunters from a nonprofit called tshikapisk.8 this group was concerned about the precipitous decline of atîku, which by that time had started to become obvious. as i mentioned before, for many hunters and elders, this population drop signified the deteriorating relationship between the innu and kanipinikassikueu, the master of atîku. the concerns of tshikapisk’s members were compounded by the proposal, starting to be advanced by some biologists and an increasing segment of the labradorian public, that caring for a declining herd of caribou, in the context of landscape changes, warming temperatures, and resource extraction, demanded that all hunting be halted.9 attending to practices of care that the relationship with kanipinikassikueu elicits from innu hunters made evident to us that atîku were quite different from what biologists and euro-canadians would call an animal species. figure 1. innu communities in labrador and quebec. map courtesy of damian castro. according to an atanukan (stories that narrate the origin of things), an innu man whose group was starving went to live with the atîku, married the daughter of the herd’s leader, turned into atîku himself, and eventually became kanipinikassikueu. since then, kanipinikassikueu persuades atîku to give themselves to the innu so that the latter can survive. however, this generosity is not guaranteed. as numerous ethnographies have shown, atîku have a will of their own, therefore hunting (nataun) is not centrally about outsmarting animals in order to kill (nipaieu) them, but rather about enticing these fully volitional beings and their leader to be generous with their bodies. this is achieved through practices that show respect and recognition of these altruistic acts. among these practices are protocols to dispose of the bones of hunted atîku (from which new specimens will regenerate), the injunction not to waste any part of their bodies, and the requirement that meat has to be generously shared among people. other prescriptions, like keeping kanipinikassikueu in one’s thoughts through storytelling, singing, drumming, and celebrating a ceremonial meal (mokoshan) are in place to receive his blessings for general well-being (see armitage 1992; henriksen 1973, 2008). hunting is thus a set of connected caring practices that ensure the ongoing realization of generosity and respect within this collective of human and nonhumans. yet hunting is also a moment richly indicative of the health of these practices: a decrease in the frequency of atîku giving themselves to hunters is a symptom that kanipinikassikueu is angry. reporting on one such circumstance, georg henriksen (1977, 7) wrote: the search for reasons to explain katipinimitautsh’s anger amounts to a self-examination to find possible failings in [the innu] spiritual and moral relationship with nature, among themselves, and between themselves and animals. . . . it may be something which is very serious: someone may have breached the rules of sharing, or someone may have been careless when handling the marrow from the caribou long bones. most of the elders and hunters whom my colleagues and i engaged in the project understood the declining presence of atîku in this key. they claimed that disrespect for atîku was rampant among younger generations. they spoke of atîku remains being carried away by dogs, of people selling meat, and of a general lack of interest about life on the land among younger people. for most of them the consequences of this were obvious not only in the decline of the herds but also in the epidemic of addiction, suicide, and diabetes that has plagued younger generations of innu for the past twenty years (see samson 2003). in a workshop we held in 2010, the elder ponas nuke expressed the problem thus: “without atîku we are nothing. if we are not in the land, hunting, the day will come when kanipinikassikueu will not know us, it will ask ‘who are you people?’ . . . and if we do not have his blessing, things will get worse.” in 2009, the governments of newfoundland and quebec agreed to commission a study to evaluate the status of the george river herd. for this, new radio collars were attached to a number of animals in the herd to allow tracking and counting from helicopters during the summer months. this aerial count, corrected according to established biometric criteria (see rivest, couturier, and crepeau 1998), provided the basis for an estimate of the population. this assessment was then combined with previous studies, as well as other factors known to affect population cycles, to propose a series of measures for the sustainability of the herd that were presented to local stakeholders. these measures hinged on the conclusion that hunting was “now significant and cumulative to natural mortality” (newfoundland and labrador wildlife 2010). in other words, caring for the caribou population would require hunting restrictions. in the presentation given to all local stakeholders it was also made clear that, from the government’s perspective, conservation efforts held precedence over aboriginal rights to hunt. since that meeting, non-aboriginals began mounting pressure on the government to put a ban on all hunting of the species. the study and the proposed measures relied on a series of assumptions about caribou that are standard in wildlife biology and management. thus, the survey was conducted on a specific caribou herd demarcated according to their range and genetic variability. similarly, the survey relied on the assumption that caribou, driven by instinct, behave in a predictable manner. for example, in the summer, caribou gather in compact groups to protect themselves against blood-sucking insects, so by following the radio-collared animals, surveyors could access the groups and enumerate the animals. in a recent ethnography, damian castro (2015, 54–55), one of our project’s associates, reports an incident that shows how these assumptions about caribou can stand in stark contrast to the views about atîku held by innu hunters: one day, while i was in the innu nation office, a very experienced hunter who had been recently charged with illegal hunting came to the office where i was working and told me, “they found a red wine [a herd then protected for more than fifteen years] collar close to lake kamistastin; see, atîku wants to go there.” lake kamistastin is located about four hundred kilometers north of sheshatshiu, very far from the red wine herd range, and right in the migration area of the george river herd. this information, as he and other innu argue, shows that the red wine woodland herd and the george river migratory herd intermingle. therefore, there is no point in declaring the hunt illegal on the basis of the assumption upheld by government scientists that the herds are different: for the innu there is only atîku. furthermore, the words of this hunter obliquely indicate differences in how the collar information is used. the government uses it to obtain the information the scientists need to learn about caribou behavior, such as their whereabouts, while the innu use this information to know what atîku wants. in other words, while the government administer the collars to satisfy their will to know, the innu use it to know the will of atîku. like human beings, atîku has will. the differences between atîku and caribou do not mean there are no connections between them. for instance, the gps signal sent by the collars to monitor caribou demographics and movements was, until 2010, fed by the quebec ministry of the environment into maps that were available online. consulting these maps, innu hunters identified areas where they were likely to come across atîku. this information was extremely important for hunters who wanted to keep their relation with atîku but that have, since the 1970s, found themselves increasingly time-constrained by job obligations in the permanent settlements. similarly, biologists and wildlife managers had often relied on the support provided by innu hunters to affix collars and make observations about the caribou. and yet, notwithstanding their mutual entanglements, atîku and caribou remain different. the most obvious way in which this difference manifests is that the former is a nonhuman person that has will, while the latter is an animal driven by instincts. but how to grasp these differences without resorting to notions of different perspectives on a single thing and thus falling into the trap laid by reasonable politics? the conceptual resources of material semiotics discussed in the previous section offer a way. atîku/caribou is multiple; it is more than one and less than many. yet the multiplicity at stake here is not exactly the same as that envisioned by latour or mol—that is, the idea that a thing is always the stabilized result of a potentially contentious gathering, an assembly or assemblage of actants. in this case, the meaning of multiplicity as being more than one but less than many might be better evoked by the following figure. figure 2. the duck-rabbit illusion. here we have a bird looking to the left and a rabbit looking to the right; more than one but less than two. there is a bird and a rabbit, and yet they are not two units; and while the traces overlap, there is not just one drawing. if we imagine that the bodies of the bird and the rabbit do not overlap as neatly as their heads, we can grasp the idea that there might be partial co-occurrence of the entities, but the difference is not cancelled. in a similar fashion, the material-semiotic assemblages from which the more than one less than many atîku/caribou emerges partially co-occur (most evidently in bodily presence)—and at points this co-occurrence may even be mutually enabling (as in the collaring)—but they remain distinct. atîku emerges from an assemblage that involves atanukan, hunters, the sharing of meat, generosity, a spirit master, and so on; caribou emerges from an assemblage that involves the discipline of biology, wildlife managers, predictive modeling, calculations to balance environmental and economic concerns, and so on. the difficulty in rendering this multiplicity singular, for example through an agreement on how to address declining numbers, should make atîku/caribou a matter of concern. yet this is not always the case. atîku/caribou: the strange trajectory of an issue as we will see, the (more-than-one-but-less-than-many) atîku/caribou has become an issue in labrador now. it was not so before, and yet, it was not quite a matter of fact either. the strange trajectory of this issue raises interesting questions about how the specificity of the multiplicity revealed in this case might affect a politics of worlding. to make this trajectory visible, i have to bring into the picture the controversy generated around the proposal for the lower churchill project, a $6 billion hydroelectric project and its relation to the complex dynamics of the labrador innu comprehensive land claim. in canada, comprehensive land claims are geared to trade diffuse aboriginal title over a territory for clearly defined rights and privileges over more circumscribed areas and resources. diffuse aboriginal title over large territories does not deter provincial governments from granting corporations permits to exploit their natural resources. thus, although carrying the price of extinguishing any right to their entire territory, a land-claim settlement implies legal certainty and a substantial (albeit short-lived) flow of money and jobs from resource development to the communities. given the trade-offs, comprehensive land claims often produce divisions within communities (see samson and cassell 2013). the labrador innu land claim is no different. the possibility of settling the land claim became somehow conditional on the innu accepting the building of the lower churchill project, which was (and continues to be) an extremely contentious issue within communities. elders and people who retain strong connections with the land (of course, including atîku) rejected the project in opposition to a group of leaders inclined to sign a deal. in spite of these contentions, steps toward the execution of the project continued, including a formal environmental impact assessment (eia), which is mandated by law and requires a process of consultation with multiple stakeholders. during an eia, a review panel evaluates the biophysical, social, economic, and cultural effects of the project and the mitigation measures required to offset them. the assessment process generates a report that is submitted to the federal minister of the environment for final approval. the assessment for the lower churchill project started on january 2009 and was rife with controversies between biologists and other wildlife management experts, both governmental and nongovernmental, who disagreed on several points, including the criteria each used to estimate impacts, the selection of indicator species, methods of research, and the like.10 innu concerns entered into the assessment process through a report on land use, commissioned by the innu nation and submitted to the review panel, and consultation meetings organized in the communities by the joint review panel. the author of the land-use report stressed that the information provided in it had a crucial limitation: it did “a poor job of conveying the deep meaning and emotion that many innu have for the land and living entities that reside in the study area” (armitage 2010, 16). yet something of that meaning and emotion surfaced in the public consultation meeting organized by the review panel. either directly in english or through an interpreter, several innu made impassioned presentations about the dam’s consequences: “when i think about it, it’s like you destroy—not only [do] you destroy the land or the animals, you also destroy our lives—the life of the innu” (jrp 2011b, 148–49). in addition to these overall assessments, innu presenters had specific concerns about the project’s impact on migration patterns and the ability of atîku to travel in a changed landscape. some participants explicitly wondered about the reactions that powerful nonhumans might have to all this. for example, one of the elders participating in the consultations said: i don’t like the idea of damming the muskrat falls. what i know about muskrat falls, there’s a hole in the falls somewhere. probably the spirit in the spirit world used that waterfall for a reason, whoever being lives in that hill. probably the spirit that lives in the mountain probably will destroy the dam itself, somehow. . . . i think that the animal beings who live in that mountain will destroy the dam (jrp 2011b, 71–72). not all innu gave the same weight to these concerns. a sector of the leadership stressed the benefits of the project and cast the concerns of elders and hunters as a romantic and unrealistic yearning for a way of life no longer possible (jrp 2011b, 103–23). the younger generations thus found themselves having to gauge the concerns of elders and hunters against the promises of jobs and the prospect of ending the legal limbo in which the innu of labrador live without a settled land claim. in any case, when the elders’ and hunters’ concerns were transferred to the report being prepared by the review panel, all mention of nonhumans as something other than animals got translated into culture and addressed as matters of spirituality in the “heritage and culture” section (jrp 2011c, 184). in contrast, and with the exception of noting “the moral value” of caribou, the contents of “traditional environmental knowledge” that were amenable to scientific corroboration (e.g., migration patterns, seasonal behaviors, and the like) were included in the section entitled “impacts to terrestrial environment and wildlife” (jrp 2011c, 114–17). in short, in the report, innu concerns were split (and implicitly ranked) according to supposedly commonsense criteria that distinguish reliable environmental information from cultural beliefs. after the panel finished the consultations and submitted its report to the federal minister of the environment, the federal government “determined that the expected significant energy, economic, socio-economic and environmental benefits outweigh the ‘significant adverse environmental effects’ of the project that had been identified in the panel report (government of canada 2012, 6). environmentalist organizations opposed to the project found in the position of innu hunters and elders a point of resonance, and thus, in some of their press releases stressed, among other issues, the aboriginal spiritual values at stake.11 yet this coincidence only went so far. the outrage generated by a protest hunt organized by quebec innu is a case in point. these communities organized a hunt among a protected herd in labrador to make the point that the province of newfoundland and labrador should include them and not only the labrador innu in the discussions about the lower churchill project. from the quebec innu perspective, there was no contradiction between their claim of caring for atîku and hunting them to enforce the notion that, even if the provincial boundaries of the colonial state said otherwise, they were relevant interlocutors in the fate of the territory. the tenor of responses to this action largely resembled that of one reader’s comment on the cbc news website: this whole situation just blows my mind. i really can’t wrap my head around their mentality. what happened to everything having a spirit and being one with the land? they are raping the land. i bet their ancestors are rolling in their graves. they should be arrested, plain and simple. many euro-canadians saw the hunt as proof that claims about spiritual connections with atîku were just a ruse that “modernized aboriginals” were using to extract benefits from the proposed project. in other words, if the spiritual connection with caribou did not translate into what euro-canadians would recognize as care, then there was no such connection. in splitting innu concerns between acceptable and unacceptable, or between those that could stand alongside science-based knowledge and those that were just “cultural,” we can see the work of reasonable politics. but in terms of a politics of worlding, or matters of concern, we can also see that the split makes another distinction. on the one hand, some concerns can compose an issue and therefore aspire to become part of that which might eventually become a matter of fact, a part of the common world. on the other hand, other concerns simply do not constitute an issue. and this of course signals an asymmetry. being amenable to a form of more or less formalized calculation that rationalizes, among other practices, hunting regulations and massive transformations of the landscape, caribou (and more generally, animals) do affect the composition of atîku. in the most immediate way, this occurs through hunting quotas, the demarcation of protected areas, and the alteration of the herd’s migration routes that enforce a recomposition of innu hunting and meat sharing, practices that partly constitute atîku. in contrast, the presence of atîku has not affected the way in which caribou has been composed, either as a matter of concern during the lower churchill controversy or as a quasi–matter of fact, more generally. in other words, innu concerns for atîku have not been an issue; at least not until recently. after the environmental review panel conducted its hearings, the innu communities had a ratification vote on the tshash petapen (new dawn) agreement that the innu nation and the provincial government had been negotiating. the agreement contained three parts: a land-claims agreement-in-principle (aip) stipulating the rights that the innu would retain within a specified territory; economic compensation for the upper churchill project that had been constructed in the late 1960s without regard for innu rights; and an impact and benefits agreement for the proposed lower churchill project. overall, the agreement set the general terms under which the innu land claim would be settled and the construction of the lower churchill project could proceed. the overall agreement and its three components, however, had to be ratified separately by the innu communities. the ratification vote for the overall agreement took place in june 2011. largely with the support of the younger generations of innu, the agreement was ratified. this allowed the government of newfoundland to move on to other crucial aspects of the project, such as financial engineering. as rumors began to spread at the end of the fall of 2012 that the government of newfoundland was about to take drastic measures regarding the caribou crisis, the innu nation called a community meeting to discuss what they would do in case a ban was imposed. many of the people who had voted in favor of the tshash petapen agreement said that a ban on hunting atîku would be an infringement on the aip. therefore, they would now side with the group that had opposed the lower churchill project all along because of its potential effects on atîku and the land more generally. the implications of this shift come into focus when we consider that the aip still has to be ratified by a vote in the innu communities and, according to the tshash petapen agreement, all three agreements contained in it will become null if any of its components is not ratified by either of the parties. as the results of the community meeting were leaked to the public, the newspaper columnist michael johansen (2013) gave voice to a silenced realization: it was yet to be seen whether the newfoundland government would sacrifice the $6 billion hydroelectric project to stop the innu from hunting. in short, atîku became an inescapable issue. in contrast to the controversy over the lower churchill project during the eia process, this time the situation is such that concern for caribou cannot be easily composed without attending to concerns for atîku. however, this is not the typical trajectory of a thing (i.e., caribou) becoming an issue, that is, going from being a matter of fact to being a matter of concern; rather this involves the sudden visibility and unavoidability of participants that were there all along. yet these participants had no part in the assembly where caribou was staged as a matter of concern with the possibility of being articulated as a matter of fact. this points to the particular problematic that the copresence of different (although asymmetrically and partially connected) assemblages poses to a cosmopolitics oriented to the common world.12 conclusion: common world and uncommon worlds although for the most part it has been treated as a discrete entity that can be understood from different perspectives, in labrador, caribou has never been just caribou, a single entity. yet the multiplicity of the assemblage that can be singularized into a more or less stabilized caribou (for example, in debates about the proper criteria to evaluate the impacts of a development project on herds) is not the same as the one where atîku can be stabilized (for example, in debates about proper protocols to ensure the generosity of the atîku master). what is at stake here is not only ontological multiplicity but also multiple worldings. this raises some fundamental questions. how does a concern in one worlding become an issue in another? what does it take to make an issue across partially connected and stratified worldings? the questions are empirical and also have practical consequences that bear on our roles as analysts and co-composers of matters of concern. de la bellacasa’s (2011) call for matters of care in order to make present absent concerns is crucial, but our case shows that, while necessary, this move is not sufficient to be effective. after all, atîku elicited care (i.e., was made visible as a concern) during the eia, yet it did not qualify as an issue worthy of attention until it put at risk a multibillion-dollar development project. and even then, one may feel doubtful that atîku had become a matter of concern as conceived by a cosmopolitics oriented to the composition of a common world, that is, as a concern that might aspire to participate in the composition of a matter of fact. sometimes different worldings may coexist—enabling each other or without noticing each other—but at other times they interrupt each other. not being reducible to each other’s terms, when and where worldings interrupt each other, the multiplicity at stake might not be amenable to the kind of singularization that latour’s constitution of the common world seems to require. recall that, for latour, the composition of the common world is modeled after the trajectory that an assembly might follow from being a matter of concern (a poorly articulated multiplicity of actants on the brink of scattering) to becoming a matter of fact (a gathering of actants that is so well articulated that it becomes stabilized as one singular thing). in this regard, the commentary quoted above that called for police to arrest the quebec innu hunters, and the looming threat of arrests under the current ban, prove very telling. in effect, if we take these threats as part of the procedure used to articulate and stabilize caribou as one thing (that is, make it a matter of fact) in spite of the disturbances produced by atîku, one might ponder the consequence of enacting a cosmopolitics as the composition of the common world when the multiplicity at stake is not amenable to singularization. latour (2004b, 124) might respond that “of these excluded entities we cannot yet say anything except that they are exteriorized or externalized: an explicit collective decision has been made not to take them into account; they are to be viewed as insignificant.” so they remain outside the common world being composed. yet what the atîku/caribou case shows us is that worlding a common world does not always produce just an externality; sometimes it interrupts and destroys other worldings: caring for caribou in certain ways endangers the existence of atîku. in short, rather than something entirely different and insofar as entities that remain outside the common world become insignificant, a cosmopolitics oriented to the common world might end up looking like a reconfigured reasonable politics. this is something that stengers (2005, 1003) seems aware of: hence, her insistence that the composition of the common world should only proceed in the presence of the victims, not because they must agree, but rather because those who have agreed “have to know that nothing can erase the debt binding their decision to its victim.” and yet, while stengers makes it more difficult and slower than what latour (2014) seems to seek, the common world “must be composed, nonetheless.” but does it? can cosmopolitics only offer the slowest possible composition of the common world? or is another cosmopolitics possible? inklings of an answer appear in some events that took place shortly before and after the hunting ban was passed. in response to the problem of the declining presence of atîku as defined by the innu elders and hunters, our research team had been discussing some interventions. one of them was translating atîku-hunting protocols into policies that could be enforced by the innu nation. when rumors of a ban on hunting became acute, members of the research team and staff from the innu nation held informal conversations with local personnel from the provincial government’s wildlife division. our intention was to avert the threat of a hunting ban. we argued that, as hunting requires a substantial investment of time and work, if innu followed proper protocol to treat atîku, there would likely be a reduced number of individuals being hunted. our pitch to wildlife agents was to name a series of aspects of the situation that were evident to the agents, even if they were reluctant to speak about them openly. first, a ban based on the claim that ceasing hunting would address the caribou crisis was unlikely to garner innu compliance. second, the threat of prosecution has never deterred the innu from hunting, and the actual capacity of the wildlife agents to enforce the ban on the ground was limited. third, even if wildlife agents could mount an effective plan to enforce the ban, it was doubtful that the upper echelons of the provincial government would give it the green light and risk the lower churchill project. in this context, we argued, collaborating with the innu nation in addressing the problem as defined by the innu elders was likely to have better results, even in the terms defined by wildlife managers. demanding and monitoring that hunters follow proper innu protocol was likely to generate widespread support in the communities, and consequently fewer animals would be taken. by december 2012, local wildlife agents were considering moving the proposal up the chain of command. but then, in january 2013 and under public pressure, the ban was issued from the ministerial hierarchy. as we had predicted, community members went on hunting in spite of the ban and the provincial government was remiss to enforce it. wildlife agents monitored the hunt from helicopters, but no hunting-related arrests were made. the moral of the story, or its relation to another cosmopolitics, is that for a moment we and the wildlife agents achieved what eduardo viveiros de castro (2004, 5) calls “translation as a process of controlled equivocation.” translation as controlled equivocation is premised on the counterintuitive notion that what needs to be kept in the foreground when translating two different terms is, precisely, their difference. this idea contrasts with the common expectation that translation should strive to establish equivalence between two terms through an existing common referent; it also belies the alternative idea that a good translation creates a new common referent. in the former case, translation resonates with the presumption of an already existing factual reality. in the latter case, translation becomes a progressive project to compose a factual reality out of matters of concern and/or care. yet, in both instances, the assumption is that what connects and makes possible a translation (and a sustained relation) between the terms is a common ground. in our case, rather than striving to discover or enact a common ground, we sought to enable a set of actions that were homonymic: they addressed different things simultaneously. promoting and enforcing proper nataun protocol (caring for atîku) also meant hunting for fewer animals (caring for caribou); neither the innu hunters nor the wildlife managers had to subordinate their own practices of caring. in fact, in this translation, caring for caribou and atîku would have reinforced each other. although the ban prevented this translation coming into future manifestations, while the proposal lasted it constituted a good example of how cosmopolitics might be actively oriented by a vector other than the common world. here, the uncommon, the difference, in short, the equivocal was a productive vector as well. and i insist, as well, for it is not a matter of either/or but of both/and. there is, here, a fruitful terrain to continue to develop other potentialities of cosmopolitics. notes acknowledgments this paper has been long in the making and i owe thanks to many friends who helped me to think it through, including my constant interlocutors and co-thinkers, arturo escobar and marisol de la cadena; and my collaborators in nitassinan (labrador), damien benuen, tony jenkinson, richard nuna, sebastian piwas, and damian castro. john law, juanita sundberg, and colin scott had helpful comments and prodding for earlier versions of the article. the editors of cultural anthropology, particularly cymene howe, pushed me to improve the article further. its weaknesses are all mine. the research on which this article is based was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. 1. the master might also be called papakashtshihku or katipinimitautsh (armitage 1992). 2. as i will show, the disappearance of atîku implies a threat to a whole set of relations and practices that many innu see fundamental to their existence. 3. stengers (1997, 75; my translation) says that cosmos is part of “the question of an ecology of practices that brings together our cities, which invented politics, and those other places where the question of closure and transmission has invented other solutions for itself.” 4. among these scholars might be eduardo viveiros de castro (2012), philippe descola (2013), martin holbraad (2007), and morten pedersen (2007). 5. examples might include the work of donna haraway (2008) on companion species, but see haraway 2015, tsing 2012, and barad 2007. 6. universal science refers to a variety of knowledge practices that—claiming to follow the experimental sciences’ example, but actually distorting the nature of the so-called truths that these produce—claim to know reality “as it is” (see stengers 2000). 7. in this sense, my call to treat certain conflicts as ontological rather than epistemological (blaser 2013a, 2013b) is, above all, a call to remain agnostic as to the kinds of differences at stake in a given disagreement. specific ontological differences are fundamentally a posteriori propositions. 8. the organization was established in 1997 by a group of innu “concerned with the disruptive consequences that the sudden change from a life based on the country to one based on permanent settlement in villages brought to the innu” (tshikapisk foundation n.d.). 9. the ban on hunting would not be passed until four years later, in 2013. 10. for instance, the sierra club canada criticized the review panel for failing to assess the environmental effects on the george river herd (jrp 2011a, 291). 11. see, for instance, http://damsandalternatives.blogspot.ca/2010/12/first-nations-rally-against-lower.html. 12. when i refer to “cosmopolitics oriented to the common world,” i am indicating that cosmopolitics gains weight as a problematic in relation to the common world. but this does not need to be so, especially in the case of isabelle 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department of social anthropology, university of cambridge, february–march 1998, manchester, u.k.: masterclass series. directing the future of gene therapy in cyprus directing the future of gene therapy in cyprus: breakthroughs, subjunctivities, and the pragmatics of narrative theodoros kyriakides university of cyprus http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8862-5096 thalassemia is a recessive blood disorder particularly prevalent in countries of the mediterranean basin. sixteen percent of the population of cyprus carries the thalassemia trait—the second-highest percentage in the world after the maldives. combined with cyprus’s small size, the potential for couples to have thalassemic infants is very high. although significant advances have been made, the main methods used to treat thalassemia today are the same as those used when it was first discovered. these treatment methods consist of weekly or biweekly blood transfusions and the daily use of a dialysis pump for the excretion of excess iron that results from such frequent transfusions. soon after cyprus became an independent nation in 1960, cypriot health officials faced the urgent question of how to prevent the birth of thalassemic infants. such urgency was accentuated by a world health organization (who) report estimating that, unless action was taken, the increased blood supply needed for transfusions would prove an unbearable burden to the public health-care system over time (angastiniotis, kyriakidou, and hadjiminas 1986). since the 1970s, the implementation of a successful prevention system has minimized the birth of thalassemic infants. although this is in many ways a positive development, it has also left about six hundred thalassemia patients on the island, who were born before the prevention system was in place, in the precarious situation of having continuously to negotiate and contest their position within state budgets regarding new forms of thalassaemia treatment. this is also the case for those seeking gene-therapy treatment. gene therapy is a technology that involves the introduction of therapeutic genes into the human body to replace mutations causing disorders (addison 2017). in the case of thalassemia, the introduction of healthy genes could help patients’ bodies begin producing hemoglobin at higher rates, thereby eliminating or reducing the need for regular blood transfusions and dialysis. this article, stemming from research conducted with a thalassemia patients’ association in cyprus from july 2012 to september 2013, explores how the political and epistemic uncertainty surrounding the promise of breakthroughs in gene therapy is harnessed to particular political objectives and narratives of the future. in what follows, i focus on the activities of the pancyprian thalassemia association (pta). the pta is the main channel of politicization for thalassemia patients in cyprus and maintains an agonistic relationship with the state. through several bouts over time with the cypriot ministry of health, it has managed to provide better health-care conditions for thalassemia patients by improving aspects of treatment such as blood supply, hospital space, and provisions for dialysis. in the context of this article, i explore the politics of thalassemia gene therapy in cyprus through the alliance between the pta and the cypriot institute of neurology (cing)—a private, but largely government-funded research center. during my fieldwork, a breakthrough regarding the prospect of gene therapy for thalassemia became a recurrent topic of conversation and events, which was generative of political deliberation among pta members, cing scientists, and cypriot health officials. as the patient and pta narratives presented in this article will convey, critique and contestation have resulted from the state’s unwillingness to provide the necessary funding and infrastructure for the public health-care system to receive and implement gene therapy once it becomes available. the unwillingness and, arguably, the inability of the state to appease the demands of thalassemia patients regarding gene therapy must be considered in relation to the cypriot context. cyprus has particularly suffered under austerity politics in recent years. during my fieldwork in march 2013, the european commission, european central bank, and the international monetary fund (imf) provided a financial bailout for the country. consequent terms demanded that the government increase taxes and cut expenditures on several fronts, including health care. amid such conditions, the promise of gene therapy in cyprus was cast into further doubt. in a foundational essay on the anthropology of the future, jane guyer (2007, 409) argued that the near future—the middle ground between “immediate situations” and the “very long-term horizon”—remains increasingly absent in political practices and public narratives. we can understand guyer’s analysis as an ethnographic indication of contemporary modes of future-making, but perhaps also as a call for further anthropological theorization of how individuals and collectives develop the means to orient themselves amid chronic uncertainty. both prior to and after the publication of guyer’s essay, anthropologists have conceptually populated this middle ground with notions of waiting (hage 2009; brun 2015; kwon 2015; sandoval-cervantes 2017; zee 2017), hope (miyazaki 2004; reed 2011; jansen 2016), patience (appadurai 2013; procupez 2015), and endurance (ringel 2014). as i suggest in this article, while such notions showcase the active stance adopted by individuals and collectives in handling uncertainty, their analytical use can obscure the dynamics of alliance through which such practices are afforded political vitality, as well as the particular goals for the future toward which they are directed. relatively little ethnographic attention has been given to the methods by which people organize possibility and uncertainty through constructing and deploying narratives of the future that are capable of bridging and proliferating relations between present immediacy and abstract futurity—a process i call directing the future. the concept used in this article to elucidate these connections between breakthrough and narrative is that of the subjunctive. ethnographic treatments of subjunctivity regard it as a mode of subjectivity inclined toward possibility. nevertheless, the sociopolitical dynamics that make subjunctivity possible, as well as varying degrees of subjunctivity, are often obfuscated by an ethnographic emphasis on open-endedness and hope. rather than celebrating the evocation of possibility that the subjunctive effects, i focus on the existential, relational, and political conditions of contestation through which modalities of subjunctivity emerge and are sustained. i argue that subjunctivity does not merely represent the ability to be receptive to transformation and the possibility of an alternative world. by juxtaposing the varying positionalities that thalassemia patients in cyprus adopt regarding the promise of gene therapy, i show how the intersubjective and political processes out of which subjunctivity and narrative emerge also constitute the processes by which an otherwise undefined future becomes ordered, as certain images of the future attain more gravity and reality than others. thinking the breakthrough as the historical and recent (post-1930s) use of the word suggests, breakthrough as a technoscientific object and keyword of public discourse is specific to societies structurally geared toward generating scientific and technological advancement (kuhn 1962; nowotny, scott, and gibbons 2003). visions of the future are intimately tied to such expectations of technological advancement and what is broadly understood and referred to as progress (franklin 1998). peter pels (2015, 787) correctly observes that discourses of social and technological acceleration are not especially recent. nevertheless, the ontological dynamics of the breakthrough are of a particular nature, as they put humanity in conversation not only with an open future and its politics but also with its limits of worldly understanding. modern science and biomedicine do not constitute processes of linear technological advancement so much as they more intensely put humanity in conversation with the “outside” (jensen 2013)—in other words, that which remains external and irreducible to the human grasp of the world. whereas notions of progress embedded in historical processes of exploration and discovery were produced through the “geographical opening up of the globe” (pels 2015, 785), discourses on breakthrough, emanating largely from the natural sciences, emerge from a human acceptance of incomplete mastery and knowledge of the world (barad 2007; helmreich 2009). pharmaceutical capitalism expands by appropriating such epistemic uncertainty and ontological opacity. in biomedicine, a field in which breakthrough makes for an especially resonant term, technological progress and intensifying flows of pharma-financialization (sunder rajan 2006) have transformed the human body into a pool of therapeutic potentiality (thompson 2005; taussig, hoeyer, and helmreich 2013), but also an instrument of commodification (rose and rose 2012). several scholars have demonstrated that our increasing involvement with therapeutic technologies fosters the development of a more direct relationship with the future (ginsburg and rapp 1995; biehl and locke 2010; gammeltoft 2013). nevertheless, a track record of technological failure has made evident the problematic character of biomedical messianism (petryna 2010). this holds especially true for gene therapy, which has been in development since the early 1990s. despite such a long trajectory, clinical trials still in development, and the deaths of two patients on separate occasions (addison 2017), recent advances in the field of targeting and delivery of viral vectors have left pharmaceutical companies scurrying to patent various forms of gene therapy for the treatment of diseases. within an abstract temporality of the future, narratives and expectations of breakthrough operate and flourish according to a vague affect of agitation and promise. when will the breakthrough come? what will it be able to achieve once it arrives? the breakthrough acquires its force through these queries. epistemic ambivalence surrounding the coming of breakthroughs infuses the temporal trajectory by which they unfold with considerable political vitality. as alberto corsín jiménez (2014) suggests, a “prototype” technology such as gene therapy constitutes a field of experimentation that is in a constant state of becoming, generative of new modes of politics and knowledge. i embrace corsín jiménez’s suggestion of a sociotechnical field of perpetual generativity, but i also aim to explore the political and cognitive processes that restrict such generativity. what i regard as a directed modality of future-making requires not only the continuous production of possibility but also its channeling into particular political objectives for the future. hence, on the one hand, gene therapy can indeed be conceptualized as a technology that, courtesy of an ongoing process of experimentation and development, produces a series of political processes aimed at negotiating and contesting its public standing and use. on the other hand, for those seeking some degree of certainty that the technology will some day extend beyond its prototypical stage, the field of possibility must not only be politically protected and cultivated but also managed and demarcated through particular narratives of the future. how to break through the first time i heard about gene therapy was when i spoke to m., a mother of one, in a downtown nicosia café. she did not know much about it except that “gene therapy was coming.” m. was working in an accounting firm and was open about her condition as a thalassemia patient. as i learned soon after commencing fieldwork, such was not always the case: although treatment for thalassemia patients in cyprus has greatly improved over time, specters of social stigma persist, especially around employment and personal relationships. numerous thalassemia patients told me how they would often face prejudice in job interviews, or how potential partners would walk away when they disclosed their illness. m. seemed proud of the way in which she carried herself publicly because, despite thalassemia, she had a successful career and marriage. i asked m. about her daily treatment routine. she told me that she used a combination of iron chelation pills and pumps to get rid of excess iron in her body. she casually mentioned gene therapy in the middle of our conversation: “and then you have all that talk about gene therapy and whatnot.”1 she stopped talking and took a sip of coffee, so i asked her what that was. from the things m. had heard from other patients and read on the internet, she gathered that “the way it works is they put good genes into your body to replace the bad genes,” and after that, “your body starts producing hemoglobin again.” she continued: “to be honest, i don’t follow all that talk—i am content with my therapy right now . . . . things are much better than they used to be when i was a child—therapy methods are much better, and if you follow them routinely, you can pretty much lead a normal life.” she then made a gesture of dismissal with her hands, her palms cyclically swirling in mid-air, denoting futility and the passage of time. she explained to me that the she had been hearing rumors of gene therapy becoming available “for eons now.” i asked why she did not seem interested in learning more about it. she blew smoke, stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray, and shrugged her shoulders. “there are some seminars i could go to, but to be honest, i don’t see the point in finding out more about it. if it comes, it comes. if they manage to make a breakthrough, i’ll find out about it.” as i came to understand through the progression of my fieldwork, m. was one of the few patients in cyprus who was not part of the pta. as m. explained: “i don’t feel like i should be part of an association just because some other person and i have the same disease. of course, i know others who have thalassemia—teachers, journalists, government employees, and even judges—but if i want to talk to them or meet for a coffee, i’ll just give them a call.” she concluded that, “as long as i am doing fine with my treatment, i don’t see why i should spend more of my time on other things having to do with thalassemia.” when i asked if she knew other thalassemia patients i could talk to, m. directed me to a friend of hers. she said that she knew this woman from the thalassemia clinic in nicosia, where patients go to have their transfusions and to get their blood checked periodically. the two would sometimes arrange to meet at the clinic if their schedules allowed, and chat for the three or so hours of the transfusion. much like m., her friend cited lack of time as her reason for not joining the association. “i pay a small subscription, but that’s it really,” she explained. “i have to deal with this disease every day—i don’t want to do it in my free time also.” at some point, i asked her what she knew about the potential of gene therapy implementation in cypriot health care. like m., the woman did not seem particularly knowledgeable on the subject, or interested: “i don’t know much about it. i know that some scientists at cing are working on it, but that nothing is really for sure. these kinds of things, only doctors know what they are really about—we only keep hearing that they are working on it.” there was not much else to be said on that point, so i posed a speculative question: “if it became available on a widespread basis at some point, would you go for it?” she remained silent and pondered the question for a second or two. eventually, she replied: “i don’t think i would. i’ve made a life for myself, my current treatment is working, and i got used to it, so i don’t see why i should go around changing that. who knows what effects gene therapy might have on your body?” she continued: “we are the second generation of thalassemics to have been lucky to receive treatment in cyprus. i was born in 1975—i feel lucky because it was much harder to get medical treatment before then. and the other thing is that everyone—my friends, family, colleagues—know i am a thalassemic. i have no need to hide it like people used to do before.” after some further seconds of silence, she went on to add: “i would consider [gene therapy]. if it had a high success rate, say 99 percent, then i would probably try it.” our conversation ended with a note of doubt: “our doctors try to stay up to date with what’s happening, and they go to seminars and educate themselves about what’s new in gene therapy. but there’s still nothing here for us in cyprus. we are depending on research centers from other countries to make the breakthrough.” making friends my initial conversations unveiled uncertainties about the prospect of breakthrough. for the two interlocutors i have introduced above, such uncertainty was above all specific to cyprus: the dire economic state of cypriot health care offered little hope for the promise of gene therapy becoming accessible in the future. at the same time, such uncertainty extended beyond the cypriot context and gestured to gene therapy’s long trajectory of anticipation and failure. statements such as “only doctors know about these things” or “we keep hearing about it” convey that the meshing of science and society do not necessarily reconcile the two, and also result in new hierarchies and “distributions” (mol 2002, 87) of knowledge and expertise between public and epistemic collectives. ethnographic work on patient activism provides a starting point in thinking about the possible reconfiguration of such asymmetric bodies of power. as roy porter’s (1985) foundational article on grassroots health care conveys, the rise of biocapitalism parallels the rise of a “medical history from below.” porter’s language is indicative of previous modalities of patient politics, which consisted mainly of resistance rather than participation in technological progress. recent scholarship moves beyond such opposition by showcasing the multilayered fabric of biosociality (rabinow 1992) and the political capacity of patients for inclusion in governmental decision-making (epstein 2007a) as well as the research agendas of scientific institutes (callon and rabeharisoa 2008; koay and sharp 2013). shortly after my interview with m., i made contact with cing and arranged to meet one of its chief scientists to learn more about the specifics of gene therapy and thalassemia in cyprus. the cing building is situated near the center of nicosia, in proximity to the green line that divides the city, and the island, in two.2 on entering, my eye meets an interior courtyard where stacks of inner balconies unfold in a wide expanse of linoleum floors and bleached white walls. it is late on a friday afternoon and by now most people have left. the laboratory bench where i sit is covered with scientific instruments: microscopes, test tubes, and a fridge for keeping samples in the far corner. the hum of a shaker, a box-shaped machine used to mix chemical solutions, is constant in the background. dr. v. enters the room, shuffles some papers, takes a folder, and leaves again. “right now,” he says when he finally sits down on a stool nearby, “we’re part of a network of research centers working together to make a breakthrough.” he goes on: “there’s some competition from some other centers and research clusters, but that’s healthy in many ways. here in cyprus we have a good thing going. cing is a thalassemia reference point for the who. and the pta is active too.” when i ask him about the relationship between the pta and cing, he reflects: what’s quite impressive is that many of the patients have incredible knowledge as to what happens in the scientific field. cing might be part of the research, of experimentation, of therapy, but we are still part of this community. i would say that, by now, we [and the pta] can’t function without each other. and then you have the need for funding. we are lucky to have a good relationship with the cypriot state; they fund most of our projects. so, what i’m trying to say is that research is always interactive. there’s no point locking yourself in a laboratory saying that you’re going to conduct research, or discover a gene, or something along those lines. to do research you need friends—to put it that way. you never do research on your own. friendship, although largely maintained and enacted through a network of committees and meetings between cing, the pta, and the cypriot ministry of health, is most vividly manifested in events such as workshops and conferences. on one occasion, dr. v. invited me to a conference that was part of thalassemia week, which takes place annually and has been co-organized by the pta since 1976. a cing scientist conducting research on gene therapy gave one of the presentations, and at the end of the talk, audience members had the opportunity to ask questions. discussion ensued on whether a therapeutic dna used in gene therapy should be frozen and thawed or directly injected. on the one hand, freezing therapeutic genes acts as a test of whether they are robust enough, and consequently whether injecting them into the host will prove successful. on the other hand, freezing and thawing the material potentially decreases its potency by killing off a proportion of the therapeutic cells. the presenter, speaking in favor of freezing, conceded that this remained a sensitive, unresolved subject requiring further tests and even actual implementation. he concluded by saying that “you can’t really know until you actually put it in practice—you can’t control everything in the laboratory.” despite such an agnostic statement, the debate carried on for several minutes and extended beyond the actual issue of freezing and thawing genes. as one thalassemia patient in the audience said: “if a freezing-and-thawing route is to be implemented in the future, then it must be made certain that the place where thawing takes place is in proximity to the location where the injections will take place. otherwise, the therapeutic potency of the genes could be further damaged.” another audience member commented that this “went back to the issue” of a new transplantation center being built near cing headquarters and the need for the cypriot state to secure the funds to complete it. this exchange effected a shift in my ethnographic understanding of gene therapy in cyprus. i came to see the conference as a site used to “convert uncertainty into risk,” thus providing the pta with an “opportunity to collaborate, experiment, and aspire in the public domain” (appadurai 2013, 129). moreover, the conference was an occasion demonstrating “the generative potential of uncertainty” (berthomé, bonhomme, and delaplace 2012, 132) that is inherent to social relations and, in this case, politico-epistemic relations. at the same time, the conference was an event showcasing how uncertainty was not only produced but also confined through specific objectives and narratives of the future. in other words, the prospect of gene therapy was not addressed at the level of scientific accuracy, but according to the political, logistical, and infrastructural predicaments surrounding its actual implementation. uncertainty did not usher conference participants into a liminal space of waiting or hoping for a breakthrough in gene therapy, but was rather reterritorialized in the context of cypriot health care and the political activities of the pta. staying active the pta’s relationship with the cypriot state extends back to the founding of the organization in 1973. in the decades leading up to the creation of the pta, both public knowledge and the treatment of thalassemia in cyprus were at a rudimentary stage. incidents of thalassemia were often mistaken for malaria or leishmaniosis. more important, patients faced heavy stigmatization, even by their own kin. when the cypriot ministry of health commissioned an american anthropologist to conduct research on the psychosocial aspects of thalassemia in 1976, she concluded: “in cyprus, the birth of a thalassemic child reflects adversely on the entire family and jeopardizes future alliances . . . the cypriot thalassemic child is unwanted—unwanted by a family which is tainted by the child’s very existence and unwanted by a medical system which is unprepared” (book 1980, 57). prior to the establishment of the pta and the founding of the cypriot republic in 1960, no treatment for thalassemia existed in cyprus. blood used for transfusions was usually acquired from family members willing to help, or even bought. cyprus was also mostly rural and a lack of public transportation and roads meant that parents living in villages had to hitchhike with their ill children to make the trip to nicosia, the only place to receive treatment at the time.3 “we got by” (∊θκιαβαίναμ∊) is the greek cypriot idiom that several thalassemia patients used to describe the uncertainty of day-to-day treatment in those days. thalassemia patients in cyprus escaped such enforced presentism and fatalism through politicization, rendering the future available to contest as a horizon of action. a public sensitization campaign led by the pta from 1972 to 1977, which included the distribution of informational material and talks in villages and schools, proved decisive in raising public awareness of thalassemia, alongside mounting pressure on the cypriot state to improve treatment facilities. once a breakthrough was made in genetic-testing technology in 1983, the pta convinced the cypriot christian-orthodox church to introduce a compulsory certificate stating that couples had to undergo testing for the thalassemia allele and become aware of their status as potential carriers prior to getting married.4 this historical trajectory by which thalassemia became integrated into cypriot society hence correlates with the emergence of the pta as a political entity and registers the alliances fostered between the pta, the cypriot government and church, and subsequently with scientific bodies such as cing (kyriakides, forthcoming). the political objectives of the pta have since changed. as several pta members said to me, the organization must now advocate for the reform of an archaic health-care system that addresses issues of mortality but not quality of life. one pta member explained: “the state system is stuck in the seventies, when the issue for us was to stay alive, but this is not the case anymore. we don’t want simply to stay alive; we want to lead a normal life with as little treatment as possible. the issue we face is not life or death, but rather living.” amid such hopes and desires for normality and therapeutic finality, the prospect of gene therapy promises a version of the future free of transfusions, dialysis, and medication side effects. the alliance and narrative that emerged from the conference i attended at cing’s headquarters—namely, that the pta sought to persuade the cypriot state to equip the health-care system to carry out gene therapy—also surfaced in several interviews with individual interlocutors. about two weeks after the conference, i spoke with the president of the pta at its offices in nicosia. when i asked her about the prospect of gene therapy in cyprus, k., the association’s president, seemed positive. she stated that “cing is on a very good track. they have already created vectors capable of entering the human organism and distributing healthy genes. they are still in an experimental stage, but are very close to making a breakthrough.” she went on to explain that even though the pta cannot participate in the scientific aspect of research on gene therapy, it nevertheless puts pressure on the state to prepare an infrastructure capable of receiving gene therapy once it becomes available. this infrastructure demands that, first, a transplantation center tailored to carry out the genetic targeting required for gene therapy should be established either near or inside cing’s headquarters and, second, that the cypriot state should be prepared to fund all eligible thalassemia patients in cyprus to undergo gene therapy once it becomes available. as she explained: with the current infrastructure, [gene therapy] cannot take place in the existing general hospital. you need a lab that will be close to cing, and will be specialized in carrying out this sort of treatment. plus, the amount of money required is huge. it is estimated that the cost of treating one patient with gene therapy will be around €500,000. and there are six hundred of us around the island. it’s not easy. but we think the state is positive with regard to this prospect, as long as it secures the funds to do so. two days after i spoke to k., i sat in the thalassemia clinic in nicosia chatting with another pta member during his transfusion. he reiterated the emphasis that the pta places on preparing the infrastructure for gene therapy, but stressed that attention and action must often be diverted to other fronts: cing is doing a really good job on the experimental front [of gene therapy]. we try and keep pressure on the state to build a new transplantation center, ideally inside cing. we apply pressure through cing—we have one of ours on their committee—and we also liaise regularly with the ministry of health through our own committee. but we have other stuff going on as well: a lack of blood, access to medication, treatment costs, and more. so we can’t really focus our attention on gene therapy all the time, as there are often more urgent issues that we need to keep asking the state to address. what i realized after interviewing several association members was that the committees and events used as mechanisms for applying pressure to the cypriot ministry of health were often aimed at maintaining the prospect of certain goals, rather than achieving them. to quote another pta member: the state has generally been helpful and responsive. there still is much room for improvement, but they’re not deaf to our demands. but we have to stay active. one of the reasons the pta has a good relationship with the state is exactly because we have been in constant communication ever since the 1960s, when the pta was founded. the necessity to “stay active” was also conveyed to me in a conversation i had with a cing scientist. as he explained: in a way, research sets its own agenda. you need to keep your ears open as to what is happening around you. a lab, especially one of the caliber of cing, cannot be static. you need to keep moving, and stay attuned to what happens around you—new information, new technologies, new breakthroughs, and so on. this whole thing, thalassemia, is a living organism, which evolves. you can’t stay static. if you stay static, you’re done for. the importance of constant political pressure likewise became evident during another conference arranged by cing and the pta, which the cypriot minister of health also attended. in his brief speech, the minister clearly indicated that the pta’s request for a new transplantation center would not materialize due to “lack of funds” and departed from the site of the conference soon after. when i approached one of my key informants to ask his opinion about what had been said, he replied: “i expected him to say that. it doesn’t mean we will stop advocating. we’ll reconvene and see how to approach the matter.” “lack of funds” has become a skeleton key for state representatives, used to defuse the demands of groups such as the pta, not only in cyprus but also elsewhere in the world. the inability of a weakened state apparatus to respond to the demands of thalassemia patients burdens the pta with formulating a political agenda capable of practically addressing the issue of establishing gene therapy in cyprus. such a task becomes increasingly difficult when one considers the epistemic opacity that surrounds gene therapy and the uncertainty of its arrival. the circulation of a particular narrative through mediums such as conferences and joint committees is a tactic (kyriakides 2016, forthcoming) used by the pta to establish a line of communication with cypriot health-care officials. below, i delve into the political work completed through this narrative as deployed by the pta. in doing so, i focus less on what one says and more on the position one speaks from. in other words, i am interested in the position one must occupy in a milieu of uncertainty and technological advancement for certain narratives of the future to emerge and attain political force. i explore these questions through another element essential to pta’s activism and politics: subjunctivity. the subjunctive inverted in his work on patient narratives, byron good (1994, 146) uses the term subjunctivity to refer to verbal declarations conveying “imagistic elements that suggest indeterminacy and openness to possibility and the potential for change.” before him, victor turner (1977, 71) contrasted the indicative mood, which expresses an act or state as “actual,” with that of the subjunctive mood, which “tends to express desire, hypothesis, supposition, possibility: it may or might be so.” in her ethnography of sonograph imaging in vietnam, tine gammeltoft (2013, 170) similarly suggests that “bringing into analysis the subjunctivity and orientation toward the future that characterizes human endeavors is an important anthropological task.” while i agree that subjunctivity is predicated on maintaining receptivity toward possibility and open-endedness, i suggest that we can gain a more nuanced ethnographic understanding of the way the subjunctive operates by focusing on two of its other dimensions: first, the sociopolitical and also existential dynamics of contestation and alliance through which subjunctivity emerges; and second, the manner in which subjunctivity gives way to narratives of a future capable of organizing, rather than simply cultivating, possibility. as good (1994, 148) observes, “the maintenance of competing plots [is] a strategy for subjunctivizing reality.” the competition between future plots was something i often encountered when speaking to pta members regarding the prospect of gene therapy. subjunctivity would usually manifest itself as an afterword of pessimism to a previous declaration of hope or, on the contrary, a punctuation of hope to a previously pessimistic statement. take, for example, the pta’s president statement that the state is “positive” about the prospect of gene therapy “as long as it procures the funds to do so.” in another example, a pta member conveyed the promise of gene therapy as plausible, yet also a race against time: now i’m almost forty, and no cure has yet been found. but we remain hopeful. we don’t expect miracles—we know it takes time to achieve results. the people at cing know what they are doing. what’s important for us as a patients’ association is to keep reminding the state that we need to be ready once the therapy becomes available. we can’t waste time. if they manage to make the breakthrough tomorrow and then we need five or ten more years to set up the infrastructure for it, it’s no good. we can’t risk that. after a pause, he went on to add: “many of us are already old. who knows if the therapy will work on us?” in such narratives and depictions of the future, possibility does not result from remaining positive about the premise of change and transformation; rather, it emerges through a tension between hope and pessimism (tutton 2011). in another interview, after it was once again made clear to me that gene therapy could potentially have age restrictions, i inquired as to why the pta was so heavily invested in it, since the majority of its members were already in middle age. my interlocutor was quick to respond: perhaps it won’t work for some of us, but you could say that for many putting pressure on the state for gene therapy is a matter of altruism and responsibility to future thalassemia patients. besides, who said that all those involved in the association have lost their chance at being cured? science takes leaps. maybe when the bloody thing finally arrives, it won’t have any age restrictions. she concluded on a subjunctive note: “hope dies last!” it soon became apparent that patients who belonged to the pta perceived the elusive technology of gene therapy differently from those who did not. for example, we can contrast the subjunctive marriage of pessimism and hope to the indicative statement made by m.’s friend that the breakthrough will come “from elsewhere.” oscillation between pessimism and hope is not necessarily an indication that one remains unable to imagine what the future holds. pessimism and hope, as active ingredients of subjunctive narrativity, are both modes of imaginative thinking that etch the future in their own way. they both provide boundaries by which spaces of possibility are organized, and by which specific routes to the future unfold. as susan reynolds whyte (2002, 183) states, subjunctivity involves “the conditionality of being implicated with other people—not only ‘know-how’ regarding one’s circumstance and illness, but also the ‘know-who.’” by exploring differing degrees of social and political capital deployed by hiv patients in uganda, whyte showcases how different visions and routes to therapy are formed or not formed, depending on the alliances a patient cultivates. correlatively, the interactions between the pta, cing, and the cypriot state convey that pursuing one’s future is mostly a matter of practically organizing, managing, and deploying one’s arsenal of relations and alliances—what morten nielsen (2011, 400) calls “relational outreach”—to pursue desired outcomes. events such as pta conferences and workshops, as well as dialogues with patients, showcase how subjunctivity relationally crystallizes through everyday events, happenings, and encounters. for pta members, this is the process by which the future becomes available. due to their relations and alliances with cing and the cypriot state, the narratives of pta members emerge from and take place within the trajectory of technological progress in gene therapy, rather than outside of it. the narrators, in good’s (1994, 153) words, “are in the midst of the story they are telling.” in pta members’ narratives of the future, two forms of gene therapy dovetailed with and informed each other. on the one hand, gene therapy was narrated as an ambivalent, enigmatic technology; on the other, gene therapy was narrated through the political processes and relations of a network of organizations that, in their interactions, constitute the political economy of a potential breakthrough. despite recent technological and scientific advancements in the field of gene therapy, the pta and cing mostly make the leap from the indicative to the subjunctive through the latter, sociopolitical conceptualization of gene therapy. the pragmatics of narrative in an age of uncertainty subjunctivity thus demands participation in a social field that remains processually alive. as suggested by one cing scientist, thalassemia in cyprus requires one to “keep moving” in order to keep up with its social and technological generativity. similarly, as one pta member put it, the association must “stay active” and maintain communication and pressure on the cypriot state. thalassemia and gene therapy in cyprus can thus be conceptualized as “motion squared,” to use henrik vigh’s (2009) term—a milieu wherein both people and their surrounding social and technological landscapes undergo constant change. in this context, it is critical to acquire the means necessary to construct images of the future that are capable of withstanding and organizing such a constantly shifting landscape. laura bear (2016) has recently urged anthropologists to address the contradictory and multifaceted dimensions of contemporary capitalist timescapes and how these dialectically unfold. in taking up bear’s provocation, i suggest that, as a form of disjunctive synthesis or “suturing” (bear 2016, 497), narratives mediate contradictions and inequalities inherent to contemporary temporalities. in so doing, they construct “drafts” (corsín jiménez 2018) of the future that are immanent to the present. the involvement of the pta and the alliances it cultivates allow its members to construct and deploy a particular narrative and version of the future: the building of a transplantation center, ideally inside cing to expedite the process of gene therapy, and the allocation of the funds needed to support the therapy for all thalassemia patients in cyprus. while conducting fieldwork, i came to the realization that no cypriot greek equivalent for the word breakthrough seems to exist. during interviews my interlocutors would use the english term breakthrough or the greek term for discovery (ανακάλυψη). on several occasions, however, my informants deployed greek cypriot phrases such as “when the thing happens” (άμα γιν∊ί τo πράμα) or, more often, “when this whole talk happens” (άμα γιν∊ί τoύτη oύλλη η κoυβέντα). on the one hand, the use of such local idioms denotes the prolonged trajectory of anticipation and also the failure of gene therapy to come to fruition as an applicable form of therapy. on the other hand, the prevalence of the notion of talk showcases how my informants’ understandings of gene therapy extend beyond scientific notions of progress. instead, understood as means of politically negotiating and contesting gene therapy in cyprus, talk conveys the importance of narrative as a continuous form of activist praxis and technopolitical inclusion. talk, as means of affirming specific narratives of the future and as enacted through occasions of conferences, meetings, and everyday conversations, has acquired a vitality that makes it an active component of thalassemia’s political life in cyprus. thus, during periods of frustration and discouragement resulting from a lack of progress, pta politics, events, and collective sociality aimed specifically at reinforcing an activist narrative as a means of garnering governmental attention. as a pta member once said regarding gene therapy: “we need to keep asking [the cypriot state]. not because we are greedy, but because thalassemia changes: technology improves, our needs change, and therapy methods improve.” narrative hence adopts the dual function of structuring the future and continuously recalibrating the relationship between present and future in the course of technopolitical change. as a means of “prefiguring” the future, narrative acts as a “condensed map of [a] contestable world” (haraway 1997, 11). a narrative might emerge from the pragmatics of alliance, but over time it can also acquire a pragmatic efficacy of its own—rendering it capable of generating events aimed at actualizing the image of the future it propounds (gallagher 2017). as elizabeth povinelli (2014) puts it, “what is initially dispersed noise . . . comes to enclose itself through self-reference.” ever since i began following the pta’s political activities in september 2012, the cypriot economy has shown signs of recovery. global research on gene therapy for thalassemia has produced significant outcomes, such as the successful treatment of seven patients (finotti et al. 2015). in 2014, cing, in cooperation with a partner research center, commenced its own human trials in italy, which included pta members. the participation of the pta and cing acknowledges global trajectories of technological advancement and strives to integrate them into the prevailing model of state-sponsored cypriot health care. the strengthening of existing alliances and the deployment of pta narratives connecting gene therapy to cyprus and, more broadly, to the future forms an essential part of this process of technological localization. in a conference organized by the pta in april 2017 under the auspices of the cypriot ministry of health, it was announced that the nicosia thalassemia clinic, which was first founded in 1981, would be revamped and moved to a new location that would house all treatment facilities. the poster circulated in the media to promote the conference displayed the logo of the association: one withered yellow poppy flower and one healthy red one, symbolizing rejuvenation, underscored by a swooshing blue arrow pointing forward. the image’s caption read “setting our sights on the future: thalassemia in twenty-first-century cyprus.” some months later, in september 2017, the new president of the pta stated in a radio interview and newspaper article that an official agreement had been signed between the pta and cing in an attempt to develop in-house clinical trials for thalassemia gene therapy in cyprus. in this interview, he affirmed that “the association’s vision of the future is that old and new generations of thalassemia patients can have the best treatment possible” (radio 99 fm 2017; author’s translation). if the promise of breakthrough and the cultivation of a collective subjunctive mood constitute the imaginative means of producing possibility, the continuous circulation of narrative by the pta is the means by which possibility is restrained, and a certain image of the future solidifies and acquires political potency. we can therefore understand the constant labor of affirming that narrative, while maintaining awareness of constant change and volatility through what elizabeth povinelli (2011) has termed embagination: a process by which the absolute immanence of the otherwise contained within the present is affirmed, but also confined to a single form. as povinelli notes, this amalgam of compounded possibility is not completely insulated but rather one that, as with a woven bag, retains a porous connection to the outside. the bag is therefore capable of adapting to and integrating contingencies, but it also has the capacity to remain robust and durable in the face of internal and external assaults. conclusion: directing the future the ethnographic milieu traversed in this article is one of uncertainty—a worldly dimension becoming increasingly pervasive in people’s lives, one that has become central to anthropological discussions of the future (samimian-darash and rabinow 2015; salazar et al. 2017). anthropologists surveying the future largely approach the manner by which people orient themselves in conditions of uncertainty through notions of hope, waiting, patience, and endurance. although such conceptual stances address the active positions that people immersed in uncertainty often adopt, they largely treat the notion of the future as an abstract horizon of unknowability and contingency (but see jansen 2016). in doing so, such conceptual paradigms emphasize reactive practices of handling and orienting amid uncertainty. they underemphasize the ways by which people regulate the space of possibility out of which uncertainty emerges by endowing specific versions of the future with political gravitas. by focusing on the pragmatics of relations and alliance, i have attempted to show how practices of future-making and dwelling amid uncertainty can be further activated and supplemented by practices that seek to clarify and define the abstract notion of the future, giving rise to a sense of direction regarding “what can be done” (whyte 2002, 179). i have used the breakthrough as a focal point and contemporary keyword through which patient ambitions emerge and, through time, attain a tangible quality of anticipation. the sociopolitical embeddedness through which expectations of breakthrough acquire consistency gestures to the manner in which people immersed in conditions of uncertainty and waiting come to discern and cultivate specific narratives of the future. if people patiently hope, wait, and endure, it implies that, despite conditions of uncertainty, they still draw power and, perhaps more importantly, direction, from somewhere. tracing the structural dynamics of alliance that make such practices politically potent and practically meaningful is of great importance. as demonstrated by the varying positionalities that thalassemia patients in cyprus adopt in considering the prospect of gene therapy, visions of the future vary according to alliances entertained and positions occupied by individuals in sociopolitical structures (green 2012). whether actors wield more or less practical and political influence may depend on the mastery they have developed in using and deploying their relational capital. once we acknowledge such variations of relationality and alliance, an analytic inversion takes place: hope, patience, endurance, and waiting are not the starting points, but the endpoints of ethnography. if “hope dies last,” as the motto suggested by one of my informants goes (see also zigon 2009), it is because everything else that sustains hope—all the relationships, alliances, and structures that contain, sustain, and nourish it—die before it. the pta’s position within the politics of thalassemia in cyprus reveals how grassroots activism deserves more attention than it has thus far received within the emerging anthropology of uncertainty and the future. the same must be said for the epistemologies and imaginaries of the breakthrough. the political landscape of gene therapy and thalassemia in cyprus offers a case in point and may even prove exemplary. the lack of a definitive path toward the arrival of a breakthrough imbues the thalassemic future not only with the active passivity of waiting or hoping but also with political vitality. this vitality emerges through a generative tension, created and enacted in the in-between of political dispute, on the one hand, and uncontrolled yet anticipated technological progress, on the other. moreover, we can refine our anthropological understanding of subjunctivity in attending more carefully to the structural and relational dynamics by which it gathers force. the interactions between the pta, cing, and the cypriot state show that subjunctivity demands imbrication in a milieu of alliance, dispute, and knowledge production. subjunctivity, in this sense, is not a vague mood or propensity toward future possibility and change, but a collective sentiment that can actively partake in the processes by which the future is politically negotiated. the existential dimensions of subjunctivity and future-making index the fact that, for the pta, subjunctivity emerges from the collective realization of being immersed in a milieu of possibility that, unless controlled, can betray all those caught within it. hence, subjunctivity results not only from the political necessity of maintaining the continuous generation of hope but also from developing the means of remaining “ontologically secure, and in command of one’s own life” (jackson 2002, 144). the construction and deployment of politicized narratives of the future are one means by which possibility is not only produced but also managed. for patients worldwide, the grip of pharmaceutical capitalism and the weakening of state apparatuses mean that the politics of patient organizations cannot always have success as their objective. the anticipation of breakthroughs demands instead a coordinated epistemology, imaginary, and politics where importance is placed not only on what can be achieved in the present but also on which narratives of the future persist over others. given the epistemic opacity and political uncertainty surrounding gene therapy in cyprus, the pta engages in the continuous political labor of affirming a narrative of governmental investment—a narrative through which the present can be diffracted, contested, and planned. as such, the pta’s long-term political strategy differs from that described by arjun appadurai (2013, 190) in his ethnography of housing activists in mumbai, which is one of “cumulative victories and long-term asset building.” rather, the pta’s political objective is the prolonged maintenance of a “materialized narrative field” (haraway 1997, 33) through which technologies and futures alike can emerge and take shape. alliance, subjunctivity, and narrative constitute the three ingredients of a process i have labeled directing the future: a form of relational, political future-making that repeatedly deploys the image of a constructed future as a point of reference to direct attention to specific objectives that are deemed achievable. the pta has creatively and persistently pursued such a project. as such, the political practices of the pta are not merely grounded in the abstract hope for the future arrival of gene therapy. they are instead firmly rooted in and attuned to the unfolding of a breakthrough. these are practices emergent from, and actively generative of friction between the present and the unveiling of its insufficiencies, which make a given future improbable or incompatible. through such practices, the pta locates and organizes the dynamics of a trajectory of possibility. such a mode of politics and future-making does not merely anticipate a future but also presses the present and nearing future toward reconciliation. notes acknowledgments this article has gone through several iterations and received numerous sets of comments. i especially thank jeanette edwards, maia green, peter wade, soumhya venkatesan, and maría puig de la bellacasa for their critical feedback and suggestions. i am also grateful to the cultural anthropology reviewers and the editorial collective, especially james faubion, whose careful guidance and expertise proved crucial in further developing and clarifying key concepts of the article. this research benefited from a university of manchester postgraduate fieldwork bursary and a sutasoma award from the royal anthropological institute of great britain and ireland. 1. all quoted speech presented in this article is drawn from research conducted in cypriot greek. english translations are my own. 2. the prevalence of thalassemia is the same in northern cyprus. patients from the north often visit the south to receive their treatment because of better health-care facilities there. if a patient from northern cyprus visited the thalassemia clinic in the south of nicosia, i was often told that he or she was allowed to “cut the line” in the transfusion schedule for immediate treatment. this arrangement, implemented by the cypriot 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https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499609346986. the road forward the road forward faye ginsburg new york university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2844-1185 in this bleak political and cultural moment for so many—especially for indigenous communities who are increasingly besieged by extractive industries, state violence, environmental assaults, and ongoing racism—the vitality and urgency of the writing gathered in this openings and retrospectives collection help us remember an important lesson: however desolate the circumstances, it is nearly always possible to mobilize creativity and community from ontological resources, to build indigenous counterpublics, and to imagine otherwise. in the important works addressed by each contributor to this collection on indigenous media futures, we have the privilege to learn how books, films, animations, archives, and installations are being used to build powerful alternative imaginaries for contemporary indigenous lives. even after centuries of horrendous genocidal policies, we see media futures emerging from communities in aboriginal australia and among first nations and inuit artists in canada, works that draw on robust traditions, engage in collective self-production, suture the past to the present, and offer visions of “the road forward,” to borrow the title of the remarkable film by the métis/dene filmmaker and activist marie clements (2017). in it, she uses indigenous song, testimony, and history to tell the story of the roots of indian nationalism in the 1930s, linking it to first nations activism today. video 1. trailer for the road forward (2017), directed by marie clements. video courtesy of the national film board of canada. this film, along with the other works discussed here, offers testimony to indigenous survivance, the influential neologism deployed by the anishinaabe cultural theorist gerald vizenor (1999, vii) to describe projects coming from indigenous communities that have “an active sense of presence, and a commitment to native stories that are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry.” before discussing these exceptionally rich essays individually, i want to turn to two key concepts that thread through them in productive ways: futurity and imaginaries. in the future as cultural fact, the anthropologist arjun appadurai (2013) juxtaposes two ways of considering the future that offer a helpful framework. the first, the ethics of possibility, embraces futurity and those ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that extend horizons of hope, expand the field of the imagination, and produce greater participation in what appadurai calls the capacity to aspire. the second, the ethics of probability, emerges from regimes of quantification, governmentality, and hegemonic control, flowing out of what michel foucault saw as the capillary dangers of modern regimes and their efforts to control populations (appadurai 2013, 298). for the contributors to this collection, the question of future imaginaries is aligned with the ethics of possibility in the face of the ethics of probability, not just in the kinds of representations with which the authors engage but also in the social relations, material, political, and ethical infrastructures, and other forms of support that have emerged off-screen to support the survivance of indigenous media worlds. indeed, it is astonishing to see what has materialized since i first started studying and writing about this work in the late 1980s. in addition to the artists named in this collection, consider the following: in australia, we have the indigenous remote communications association, indigenous community media, national indigenous television, the australian broadcasting corporation’s extraordinary indigenous department, indigitube, the indigenous unit of screen australia, the central australian aboriginal media association, message sticks, miyarrka media, and the karrabing! low tide turning collective, to name only a few. in canada, the imaginenative film festival is heading into its eighteenth year, the aboriginal people’s tv network is in its twenty-fifth, the online platform isuma tv launched in 2008, and the cherokee/hawaiian/samoan scholar jason edward lewis, who holds the research chair in computational media and the indigenous future imaginary at concordia university, inaugurated the initiative for indigenous futures and aboriginal territories in cyberspace in 2014. thirty years ago, almost none of this existed. i mention these groups (only a few among many) to underscore how indigenous media projects have grown over three decades, and to emphasize how crucial diverse cultural, technological, and financial supports are to offering a social location for building indigenous imaginaries on their own terms.p> despite all this, i worry about the futures of these projects. in november 2016, i received sobering news, a reminder of precarity’s constant presence in this media world. it came from amalia córdova, the curator of latinx and indigenous digital and emerging media at the smithsonian center for folklife, an important scholar and advocate of indigenous media in latin america and a fellow supporter of the work of the remarkable brazilian collective video nas aldeias (vna), arguably the most successful and robust of indigenous media groups on the planet (aufderheide 1995). in the three decades that i have known its founder, vincent carelli, and the many people associated with the group, vna has brought cameras to indigenous cultural activists across the brazilian amazon; they have created more than one hundred astonishing videos, filming everything from land grabs by the mining and timber industries to extraordinary rituals, accounts of children’s lives, ethnofictions, and much more. their works have won awards at almost every festival on the globe, but more significantly, vna has been a generative source of cultural pride and creativity to amazonian communities. yet, as amalia cordova emailed me, quoting a press release: shocking news: after thirty years of activity, video nas aldeias, a pioneering indigenous video training project recognized internationally, is about to close its doors, leaving only a virtual address, said filmmaker vincent carelli, creator of the project. this news is heartwrenching for those who, like me, have long been inspired by video nas aldeias’s groundbreaking contributions. this loss has occurred in the same year as severe federal cutbacks have ended the decades-long work of hemispheric indigenous film festivals run by the incredible team at the film and video center at the smithsonian’s national museum of the american indian. preceding this, the nunavut-based inuit collective, igloolik isuma, perhaps vna’s competitor as the most robust, creative, and the staunchest of indigenous media groups in the world, went into receivership in 2011 after a quarter-century of astonishing work, most notably the multiple award-winning first feature in the inuktitut language, atanarjuat: the fast runner (cohn and kunuk 2001). in a sense, the group found it difficult to sustain the weight of its own invaluable archive, now under the control of the national gallery of canada and repurposed by geronimo inutiq in the arcticnoise show discussed in kate hennessy, trudi lynn smith, and tarah hogue’s essay. these crises are indices of the fragility of social formations that seem strong, reminding us of the critical, if too often underappreciated role of funding and infrastructural support. these developments haunt my comments on the lively creativity of the projects represented here. daniel fisher’s essay offers testimony to the importance of indigenous fiction as a media form that opens up aboriginal future imaginaries. he points out that indigenous australian authors—and alexis wright in particular—share with the rest of the globe “dispersed anxieties around climate change . . . the shrinking of possibility as figures of the anthropocene become a new common sense, and . . . the related fascination with extinction and an accompanying eschatology of what comes after” (fisher 2018, 181). fisher offers a brilliant analysis of the speculative fiction and politics of the future mapped by the distinguished aboriginal author and noted cultural activist alexis wright (2013) in her award-winning dystopic futurist epic the swan book. the story is set in an imagined late twenty-first-century northern australia, an area where fisher (2016) has worked extensively with indigenous media makers. the story follows an abandoned aboriginal girl, given the name oblivia ethelyne oblivion by a non-indigenous old woman who rescues her, bella donna of the champions, after finding her in tatters, hiding in a gum tree, after experiencing a brutal rape by local youths. bella donna, a refugee from so-called climate wars, raises oblivia while living on an old warship in a polluted, dry swamp where black swans—native to southern australia—now nest. improbably, oblivia marries one of the other protagonists, warren finch, raised with expectations of leadership by his elders, which are realized when he becomes the first aboriginal president of australia. incredibly, she becomes first lady, a role that confines her to a tower in a flooded and lawless city in the south. fisher effectively loops his analysis of the fast-forward futurities depicted in wright’s speculative fiction back to his longstanding ethnographic work with indigenous youth in northern australia. many there, he points out, see the future in the “voices of young people who have been trained to represent their communities and to reanimate a series of relations fractured by colonial settlement and settler government” (fisher 2018, 185–86). if wright’s novel projects a desolate ethics of probability across a century in her sobering tale, it is also in dialogue with the ethics of possibility embodied in the lives of young people. william lempert’s thoughtful meditation equally draws on the significance of emerging generations to aboriginal futures, even in the dark times of contemporary australia. this orientation became apparent to him during two years of ethnographic work in north west australia with remote indigenous media organizations, in particular with pilbara and kimberley media in the community of balgo, where he assisted in the making of more than thirty films. these include dunba, made with the elder dunba nunju in collaboration with national indigenous television. as lempert (2018, 205, 206) writes, dunba led “a life of unimaginable heartbreak and hardship,” yet he “embodies the future-oriented hope following tragedy” that is central to lempert’s concept of generative hope, a term that embraces the difficult histories indigenous people have endured, while insisting that a future is possible. other works he discusses, like for young futures and the balgo hip-hop project, recognize the importance of intergenerational media imaginaries in insisting on possible futures. considering this work in the context of a resurgence of aboriginal activism around questions of recognition in the midst of government defunding, lempert argues that these indigenous media projects can play a key role in altering the representational economy that too often demonizes indigenous australians and their communities as utterly dysfunctional. creating alternative narratives is crucial to building generative hope for indigenous cultural and political futures, beyond the often grim imaginaries created by science fiction and postapocalyptic racist politics. given anthropology’s past role in contributing to a narrative of indigenous erasure, lempert stresses the significance of collaborative research in the creation of indigenous media that helps build the generative hope—an ethics of possibility—speaking back to the nightmarish portrayals of aboriginal lives created by hegemonic media. moving across the globe to canada, kristin dowell builds on her outstanding work on visual sovereignty, the framework guiding vancouver-based first nations media artists with whom she has worked for more than fifteen years (see dowell 2013). in this essay, she brings us a compelling consideration of the remarkable, award-winning work of the michif artist amanda spotted fawn strong’s poignant and inventive experimental stop-motion animations. dowell (2018, 189) argues that strong offers an extraordinary new vision that looks at the past to open a way to the future, “a cinematic practice that literally handcrafts new, imaginative futuristic worlds” in her wildly original and compelling films, as well as at the 2016 installation of her steampunk-meets-first-nations tabletop animation sets at vancouver’s grunt gallery. one of those animations, four faces of the moon, which opened to acclaim at the 2016 toronto film festival, is a kind of palimpsest of canadian colonial history told in four sections referencing the lunar cycle and mapping strong’s family back to the 1600s; indeed, the film is dedicated to her ancestors. the protagonist is a puppet version of strong as a photographer who uses her darkroom as a portal that enables her to travel across family history with cameras strapped to her back. her character explores the reclamation of indigenous languages, while revealing the impact on her family (and many others) of the settler nation’s extermination of both buffalo and indigenous people. in indigo, a young indigenous woman is caught in what seems like an abandoned and haunted house, assisted in escaping this victorian past by grandmother spider, a film projector, and a native drum. dowell reminds us of the resilience of the off-screen supportive infrastructures that enable strong’s work to thrive, such as the rematriate collective, an indigenous women’s group, and the artistic community around grunt gallery, well-known for its support and exhibition of work by indigenous artists. dowell makes a convincing argument that indigenous futurism draws on many genres besides science fiction. works that play with the mutability of first nations views of past, present, and future on screen use the creative power of indigenous media to not only reconsider the past but also envision future possibility. vancouver’s grunt gallery also figures prominently in the innovative arcticnoise installation discussed by kate hennessy, trudi lynn smith, and the curator tarah hogue, who collaborated on that show with the inuit artist and video producer geronimo inutiq. the project was catalyzed by the acquisition of the igloolik isuma video archive (iiva) by the national gallery of canada when the former went into receivership in 2011. as the authors explain, inutiq, an accomplished younger inuit multimedia artist active in digital video production, electronic music, and djing, was invited by the national gallery of canada’s curator christine lalonde to be a resident artist to “untangle and assess” (hennessy, smith, and hogue 2018, 214) the extraordinary iiva that she had helped the museum acquire. the question of how the archive came to be deracinated from its source community in igloolik, arguably the most successful indigenous media group in history, shadows this project, along with the troubled question of the precarity of archives for all of this work, as a crucial dimension of indigenous futurity, a point hennessy, smith, and hogue underscore. in arcticnoise, inutiq worked to remediate elements of the iiva in a contrapuntal critical response to the canadian musician and celebrity glenn gould’s iconic 1967 radio documentary “the idea of north,” which failed to include the voices of any first nations or inuit participants, mirroring the settler-colonial imaginary of the time. inutiq disrupts this absence with screens featuring digitally manipulated scenes from isuma’s films, repositioning the archive to literally speak back (in inuktitut) to the shocking lack of inuit voices in gould’s work. hennessy, smith, and hogue make a compelling case: that inutiq’s work unsettles not only the settler-colonial narrative of the destruction and erasure of indigenous lives but also disrupts conventional expectations of archival indigenous media by foregrounding noise and glitch, calling attention to the place of random and difficult-to-interpret interference. their rich, historically grounded participation in and analysis of arcticnoise is a reminder of how often remote indigenous communities have been subject to erasure by colonial regimes, a process i have discussed as “a history of aboriginal futures” (ginsburg and myers 2006). for example, the 1950s canadian government’s sponsorship of the cold war distant early warning (dew line) system imposed on inuit in the arctic became the site of transformative potential for indigenous media, as the system failed and became the infrastructure for tv northern canada, the progenitor to the aboriginal people’s television network. similarly, the arcticnoise project offers an example of how the materiality of prior indigenous media projects are repurposed through collective and collaborative curatorial work, creating sites of community building and intergenerational recognition through projects that simultaneously mobilize and reconsider indigenous pasts and futures. there is a crucial and central point that these important contributions bring together in their attentive analyses of an impressive array of indigenous media works from australia and canada. indeed, these works offer a grounded glimpse of the hope that can emerge despite a long journey through decimation and occupation, as a number of recent works in anthropology suggest (miyazaki 2004; ortner 2016). it is essential that we not forget about the importance of sustaining the infrastructures and communities of practice and collaboration necessary to ensure a future for indigenous media in a chilly climate of diminished support for this exciting and evolving field of cultural production. if indigenous communities (and all of us) are anxious about the future, they (and we) are equally subject to the specter of the past. as these essays make clear, the two are inextricably bound together in indigenous media projects of survivance that reclaim future imaginaries from colonial histories as sites of generative hope, possibility, and the road forward. references appadurai, arjun 2013 the future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition. new york: verso. aufderheide, patricia 1995 “the video in the villages project: videomaking with and by brazilian indians.” visual anthropology review 11, no. 2: 83–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1995.11.2.83. clements, marie, dir. 2017 the road forward. montreal: national film board of canada. cohn, norman, and zacharias kunuk, dir. 2001 atanarjuat (the fast runner). montreal: igloolik isuma. dowell, kristin l. 2013 sovereign screens: aboriginal media on canada’s west coast. lincoln: university of nebraska press. 2018 “digital sutures: experimental stop-motion animation as future horizon of indigenous cinema.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 2: 189–201. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.03. fisher, daniel 2016 the voice and its doubles: media and music in northern australia. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2018 “untidy times: alexis wright, extinction, and politics of apprehension.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 2: 180–88. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.02. ginsburg, faye, and fred myers 2006 “a history of aboriginal futures.” critique of anthropology 26, no. 1: 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x06061482. hennessy, kate, trudi lynn smith, and tarah hogue 2018 “arcticnoise and broadcasting futures: geronimo inutiq remixes the igloolik isuma archive.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 2: 213–23. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.05. lempert, william 2018 “generative hope in the postapocalyptic present.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 2: 202–12. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.04. miyazaki, hirokazu 2004 the method of hope: anthropology, philosophy, and fijian knowledge. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. ortner, sherry b. 2016 “dark anthropology and its others: theory since the eighties.” hau 6, no. 1: 47–73. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.004. vizenor, gerald 1999 manifest manners: narratives on postindian survivance. lincoln: university of nebraska press. wright, alexis 2013 the swan book. artarmon, australia: giramondo press. speed speed: an introduction vincent duclos mcgill university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7064-3154 tomás sánchez criado technische universität münchen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0858-1757 vinh-kim nguyen the graduate institute, geneva http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6959-5327 children go fast because they know how to glide in between. —gilles deleuze on every front, life is being mobilized. connected and put in motion, activated and fast-forwarded, life is sped up in unprecedented ways. this openings collection is premised on the conviction that the world is accelerating, and that anthropology needs to catch up. we do not make a claim for a faster anthropology, but rather for the crafting of concepts capable of creatively engaging with forces and intensities—technological, but also economic, political, and geological—that constitute and spoil the worlds we are attached to. we aim to open anthropological practice to temporalities that are immanent to both the congealment of life—for instance, of responsive capacities—and to potential deviations and overflows. with few exceptions, social-science analyses focusing explicitly on speed remain relatively scarce. anthropologists have often approached temporal notions, such as speed or rhythm, as static symbolic or cultural categories. by contrast, we aim for a timely probe into machinic, productive, pressurizing, and largely intangible energetics that operate within, across, and beyond specific social configurations and forms of life. it is our conviction that an anthropological engagement with speed can open new theoretical directions and empirical terrains. we seek to ask: how can anthropology engage with speed as a processual matter that permeates our theoretical and descriptive accounts of practices, processes, and realities? in what way would it allow us to study them otherwise? opening anthropological practice to speed raises the question of how speed is experienced. it entails exploring creative drives and vitalities, but also emergent forms of fragility and dispossession, of anxiety and suffocation. fast-paced life comes with relentless involvements that, while not totally exhausting life, may be wearing it out and pushing it to the limit: on the verge of depression. we aim to raise the question of the viability of life at ever-growing velocities. specifically, an anthropology of speed could be framed as an exploration, at once ethical, political, and ontological, of our collective (in)capacity to imagine a viable future. it seeks to probe into the effects of the widening gap between our sense of a threatening future to come—call it a pandemic outbreak, a financial breakdown, or the impending ecological catastrophe—and our capacity to imagine a viable way forward. in doing so, anthropology can provide conceptual and practical tools to tackle prevailing stupor and powerlessness. for quite some time, social and technological acceleration have been associated with disorientation, disruption, and the negation of life.1 even a cursory scan of modern artistic, literary, and cultural history reveals countless accounts of the effects of speed on metropolitan existence, the compression of time and space, modes of industrial production, and the circulation of capital, ideas, information, people, and materials.2 as reinhart koselleck (2004) has shown, a sense of acceleration has accompanied modern societies’ relationship to the future and conditioned possibilities for action at least since the mid-eighteenth century. an anthropology of speed should thus not be considered as an attempt to isolate the present times as some sort of tipping point or radical break in which a historical continuum would culminate. inquiries into speed should not hesitate to excavate past, and even ancient, experiences and sensibilities whose resonance with the present can paradoxically help resist the temptation to naturalize experiences of acceleration as traumatic assaults on everyday life.3 inferring speed from prevailing social anxiety not only leads to a downplaying of other temporalities but, by reifying speed as pathological, also risks strengthening its numbing effect and narrowing the range of possible responses to a matter of therapeutic management—coping, preparing, securitizing, and so on. to epic, totalizing accounts of coming catastrophes, we prefer “the ‘partial takes’ and ‘continuous weaving’” (bordeleau 2015, 161) involved in the arts of narrating the rhythms of the world we are becoming with, to borrow a set of terms from the work of donna haraway. while speed has been thought of as a symptom of ambient nihilism for some time, it nevertheless seems to us that, more than ever today, speed tends to crystallize into a “general resentment against the future” (glezos 2011, 163). we propose that our collective inability to imagine a viable future remains inseparable from the irruption into our lifeworlds of what peter sloterdijk (2012) refers to as “the monstrous,” namely, of a reality with which humans have a sort of complicity but which reveals itself as resisting appropriation. as was noted by steven shaviro (2015, 8–9), our sense of a future that has been cancelled speaks to the fact that we cannot apprehend the forces that make our lives precarious. we do not, for example, directly experience global warming, financial networks, or the technical operations that constitute the media environments to which we are immanent. the articulation between human knowledge and the stubborn existence of things is, of course, nothing new to anthropological or philosophical inquiry. an anthropology of speed, however, is fascinated with the accelerated obsolescence of practices and techniques—of calculation, measurement, representation, and so forth—that once hampered the shock of a direct confrontation with a seemingly incommensurable reality. modernist delusions of a total, anticipatory assimilation of the future have backfired: the more dogged our efforts at domesticating the beast, the more explicit its indifference to these desires and the more intense the summoning into action. under such pressure, the future appears so close at hand that it is imaginable only as the continuity of a shallow, contracted present (crary 2013, 41). as a result, modern hypersubjects, to borrow from dominic boyer and timothy morton (2016), are “perpetually out of sync.” they have to let go of the security once provided by a time-consciousness taken to be “an accomplice of the time of the world” (derrida 1998, 67). an anthropology of speed is thus continually confronted with the most practical question: are we opening ourselves to the future, or is the future opening us up? figure 1. another end of the world is possible, université paris ouest nanterre. photo courtesy of audrey bochaton. in addressing such a question, we certainly share now widespread claims about the ontological indeterminacy, radical openness, and vitality of matter and things—not the least because they contest the temporal fixity of identity. the challenge, however, is to be able to think vitality with exertion, openness with enclosure, and indeterminacy with the antagonistic forces that effectively constitute our worlds.4 having not forgotten the work of michel foucault, we know well enough that the radical auto-affirmation of the vital can all too easily be mobilized by processes of closure and ordering of all kinds. an anthropology of speed examines how the demands of an unknowable future-to-come contribute to grounding transformative action in a temporality of crisis (roitman 2013): that is, not a critical moment or lapse that will pass, but a moment where the very groundings for action are in crisis. it is interested in the temporal logics at play in the stabilization of emergency into a permanent state of affairs, and in politics of minimal existence and care (caduff 2015). we ask: how can different forms of speed temporalize futures and shape the present conditions of knowledge and life in certain ways and not others? but also: what is it that drives and exceeds the movements by which a particular kind of speed is stabilized into form? among the theoretical currents to have recently steered debates in this direction, accelerationism has been drawing remarkable attention. while accelerationism comes in many guises, its proponents share the notion that to recover a future canceled by political paralysis, we need to find a way out of ever more subsuming, violent, and destructive capitalist forces. and the way out, they propose, is “the way through” (shaviro 2015, 2). they find inspiration in friedrich nietzsche, gilles deleuze and félix guattari, and above all in karl marx’s suggestion that capitalism could be overcome through an intensification of its contradictions. hence, accelerationists call for the unleashing of latent productive forces and human potential—which a capitalist mode of production atrophies, constrains, and traps—by speeding things up. for accelerationists, a technology can exceed its original uses and be revamped as part of an experimental process of discovery toward postcapitalist emancipation (williams and srnicek 2013). to put it in a nutshell, they do not see speed as the enemy: rather, it is the paralysis produced by capitalist speed and its capture of everything indeterminate. on the one hand, accelerationism opens a space for strategic thinking that raises the question of how technological systems—things like logistics networks, automation, and data analytics—can be repurposed to effectuate change. following in their wake, refusing to embrace speed or seeking to live in a new arcadia in the name of a self-sufficient, reconciled, or pacified humanity—to be protected against a catastrophe to come—are not viable options. in a way, then, accelerationists force us to give up a sense of security and to move out of a defensive posture that may overactivate the threats we face and block the future. on the other hand, as deborah danowski and eduardo viveiros de castro (2014) have noted, the accelerationist capacity to imagine a future is premised on the telos of an abstract (post)humanity to come. apparently, all we would need to do is to build our way toward that which we are just not yet able to be. with accelerationists and their technological fixes, the grand narratives of progress and of promethean mastery of the world have returned with a vengeance. such a teleology of connectivity and speed can be seen as a (dubious) extension of marx’s famous anticipation, according to which the contradictions of capital could spur the annihilation of space by time. according to this thesis, primarily popularized by david harvey (e.g., harvey 2001), the reduction in the cost and time of the movement of commodities is a basic law or necessity of capital accumulation—and, indeed, of imperialism. the inner dialectic of overaccumulation, harvey argues, constantly requires spatial fixes and temporal solutions to avoid economic crisis. hence the contradiction: the speed-up of the circulation of capital that drives to eliminate spatial barriers can only be sustained through physical and social infrastructures (transport and communication infrastructures, urbanization, etc.) that end up acting as a barrier to the process of capital accumulation by freezing productive forces into a fixed spatial form—leading to what harvey (2007) refers to, after joseph schumpeter, as “creative destruction.” this notion of a self-negating acceleration is reminiscent of what this introduction has previously described as a speed-induced sense of inertia and a congealed, futureless present. however, without denying the importance of speed in the development of capitalist political economies, the contributors to this openings collection contend that subsuming the creative power of speed—and indeed, of time—into such a lawlike historical movement offers very little in the way of reclaiming a sense of the future. if anything, it naturalizes speed by concealing the labor, infrastructures, and historical formations that produce the division between object and subject. it also risks foreclosing other modes of thinking, knowing, and doing economy (roelvink, st. martin, and gibson-graham 2015). we thus refuse to reduce speed to a process of real abstraction, or to a movement between opposites, toward their sublimation into something greater—an emancipated, revolutionary subjectivity, one fully present to itself. speed is not linear. neither is it relative to movement between preexisting points. by contrast, we are interested in how things begin to live and pick up speed in the middle, to borrow an image dear to deleuze—that is, with relations of speed and slowness as they are existing always-in-between, creating their own milieu. existing in the middle, however, should not be equated with being immune to worldly violences and complications: “being in the middle of a line is the most uncomfortable position” (deleuze and parnet 2007, 39). speed provides no easy escape from the relations of force that constitute order and make things work. our (in)capacity to imagine a viable future in the midst of ambient speed can also be approached in light of a recent anthropological interest in debates around the anthropocene (see howe and pandian 2016), and the critical claims about modernist assumptions of anthropocentrism posing a threat to the interconnected webs that constitute our planetary living with other beings. the contributors to this collection certainly feel close to isabelle stengers’s (2015) suggestion that, to offer a timely resistance to what she calls the “coming barbarism,” we have to relearn the arts of paying attention and of hesitating. if we desert the “war that capitalism makes rule” (stengers 2015, 23, 132, 24) it is only to repopulate the “devastated desert of our imagination” and explore “connections with new powers of acting, feeling, imagining, and thinking.” learning how to live and think with the complications of the world is a condition of taking care of the possible that we aim to bring into existence as possibility. we have to find new ways of inhabiting speed.5 this might mean paying careful attention to the differential speeds marking our becoming with the other beings and things that make up our world. we agree with cymene howe (2016) that one condition being made explicit in contemporary debates around the anthropocene is that we should learn (again) to tell time, and to “think in chrono-mashups with divergent scales: geological time married with temporal immediacies, crises, and catastrophes.” beyond geological time, high-speed digital time as a form of lived experience and sociality has started to receive much-deserved ethnographic attention (boellstorff 2008; boyer 2013). we also share geoffrey bowker’s (2015) conviction that mapping the temporalities of infrastructure as ontology may take us beyond “the dead weight of progressivist historiography,” and force us to recognize that infrastructures do “not inhabit human lifetimes.” this also echoes recent calls to attend the deep temporalities of geological formations, minerals, and energy that sustain contemporary accelerations (parikka 2015).6 in other words, anthropology should not be satisfied with documenting cultural or historical variations in the experience of speed. it should also decenter the scope of its analysis to examine inhuman or more-than-human temporalities as complex objects of inquiry in their own rights, alongside their cultural and symbolic representations. how, we ask, can anthropological inquiry account for processes that operate in a time frame not reducible or subordinated to human experiential time? a good illustration of the challenges raised by such a decentering is the rise of high-frequency trading (hft) within the financial sector. roughly put, hft is a type of algorithmic trading characterized by the high speeds of its operations. in hft, algorithms execute orders, identifying good deals and trends more than a million times faster than a human investor can blink. more often than not, hft has hit the headlines with stories of catastrophic events, spectacular crashes and recoveries, which came to be known as “flash crashes.” on may 6, 2010, to mention a famous example, the dow jones stock index lost about 9 percent ($862 billion) of its value within minutes, by far the fastest plunge ever witnessed. again, the operations involved in flash crashes happen in tenths and hundredths of a second, well beyond human response time and the grasp of consciousness. their sheer velocity and the abstraction needed for such high-speed operations indeed make these practices very difficult to grasp, easily seen as opaque and downright enigmatic for naked human perception. figure 2. the immobility of the server room. photo by torkild retvedt. high-speed algorithmic abstraction, however, is not as automated and spontaneous as it may appear. during the past few years, hft has led to a speed war among traders, who have been investing tremendous amounts of money in technology and infrastructure. vast data centers were built at strategic locations—for instance, across the street from the nasdaq servers in carteret, new jersey—and tunnels were dug through the rock of the allegheny mountains to lay fiber-optic cable between new york and chicago to shave a few milliseconds in transmission latency. in sharp contrast with fantasies of a singular, flat, immaterial, and frictionless financialization, attention to the rise of hft makes explicit the importance of changing, coordinating, and tweaking material assemblages, together with their legal and institutional contingencies (toscano 2013). in fact, hft “gives the obdurate physical reality of space a renewed prominence, and a physical constraint—the speed of light—is of growing importance” (mackenzie et al. 2012, 281). building from these reflections, an anthropology of speed opens up speed as a constitutive dimension of the fabric of things, of biological substance and its infrastructures and modes of production. it is not concerned with speed as a stable object of inquiry, but rather with how speed is enmeshed in and sustained by given material, political, technical, and socioeconomic temporal configurations. we fully acknowledge, however, that such a commitment raises thorny epistemological issues, which include but are not limited to: does ethnography require casting off the ineffable character of speed, finding solace in the priority of empirically traceable movement(s)? should ethnography allow itself to speculate about that to which it has no direct access? in other words: how can speed be represented, without turning it into a static object of inquiry? notes 1. for a more optimistic approach, which challenges machinic power over life and insists that temporal demands are not inherent to technology but are the result of human schemes and desires, see wajcman 2015. 2. we share john tomlinson’s (2007) suggestion that the experience of speed has been for the most part subsumed to other concerns and phenomena in cultural-theoretical analyses of modernity, in contrast with its central place in cultural imagination and in the work of artists and writers. there are, of course, some exceptions to that: notably, the italian futurists, some marxist texts, parts of the work of georg simmel, max weber, and john dewey, and the precursory work of paul virilio. 3. scholarly concern with speed is not historically linear. as noted by hartmut rosa (2013, 300), the classical sociological analyses of modernity produced between 1880 and 1920 can be “reconstructed as diagnoses of acceleration.” this aspect of societal development, however, was then “very much forgotten in the social scientific analysis” throughout the twentieth century. for a discussion of the unsuspected contemporaneity of elements of the past that can leap across time to illuminate the present, see william mazzarella’s (forthcoming) essay on what he calls the “mana moment” in anthropology. 4. hence, ontological indeterminacy should not be equated with a version of the liberal motto according to which “everything is possible”—remember nike’s famous slogan, “just do it.” to borrow from karen barad’s (2012, 12) musings on nothingness: “there are an infinite number of possibilities but not everything is possible.” 5. for a similar argument in anthropology, see anna tsing’s (2015, 24–25) praise of the importance of developing and protecting what she calls the arts of noticing—that is, the techniques of curiosity or play that make it possible to follow the becomings of things or to look closely and find their peculiarities—abandoning “progress rhythms to watch polyphonic assemblages.” these, for tsing, are the resourceful ways of making sense of what capitalist ruins and the conditions of precarity produced by rampant capitalism are not paying attention to. 6. an interesting case of the effects of such inhuman temporalities is the increasing concerns and mobilisations around so-called e-waste, whose polluting materials are getting out of control as an overflow not only of increasing digitalization but also of planned obsolescence. references barad, karen 2012 “what is the measure of nothingness? infinity, virtuality, justice.” documenta (13), “100 notes—100 thoughts,” no. 099. ostfildern, germany: hatje cantz. boellstorff, tom 2008 coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. bordeleau, érik 2015 “bruno latour and the miraculous present of enunciations.” in breaking the spell: contemporary realism under discussion, edited by sarah de sanctis and anna longo, 159–71. [milan]: mimesis international. bowker, geoffrey c. 2015 “temporality.” in “the infrastructure toolbox,” edited by hannah appel, nikhil anand, and akhil gupta, theorizing the contemporary series, cultural anthropology website, september 24. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/723-temporality. boyer, dominic 2013 the life informatic: newsmaking in the digital era. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. boyer, dominic, and timothy morton 2016 “hyposubjects.” in “lexicon for an anthropocene yet unseen,” edited by cymene howe and anand pandian, theorizing the contemporary series, cultural anthropology website, january 21. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/798-hyposubjects. caduff, carlo 2015 the pandemic perhaps: dramatic events in a public culture of danger. oakland: university of california press. crary, jonathan 2013 24/7: late capitalism and the ends of sleep. new york: verso. danowski, deborah, and eduardo viveiros de castro 2014 “l’arrêt de monde.” in de l’univers clos au monde infini, edited by emilie hache, 221–339. bellevaux, france: edition dehors. deleuze, gilles, and claire parnet 2007 dialogues ii. translated by hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. new york: columbia university press. derrida, jacques 1998 of grammatology. corrected edition. translated by gayatri chakravorty spivak. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. glezos, simon 2011 “the ticking bomb: speed, liberalism, and ressentiment against the future.” contemporary political theory 10, no. 2: 147–65. https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.6. harvey, david 2001 spaces of capital: towards a critical geography. new york: routledge. 2007 “neoliberalism as creative destruction.” the annals of the american academy of political and social science 610: 21–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25097888. howe, cymene 2016 “timely.” in “lexicon for an anthropocene yet unseen,” edited by cymene howe and anand pandian, theorizing the contemporary series, cultural anthropology website, january 21. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/800-timely. howe, cymene, and anand pandian, eds. 2016 “lexicon for an anthropocene yet unseen.” theorizing the contemporary series, cultural anthropology website, january 21. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/803-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen. koselleck, reinhart 2004 futures past: on the semantics of historical time. translated by keith tribe. new york: columbia university press. mackenzie, donald, daniel beunza, yuval millo, and juan pablo pardo-guerra 2012 “drilling through the allegheny mountains: liquidity, materiality, and high-frequency trading.” journal of cultural economy 5, no. 3: 279–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2012.674963. mazzarella, william forthcoming the mana of mass society. chicago: university of chicago press. parikka, jussi 2015 a geology of media. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. roelvink, gerda, kevin st. martin, and j. k. gibson-graham, eds. 2015 making other worlds possible: performing diverse economies. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. roitman, janet 2013 anti-crisis. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rosa, hartmut 2013 social acceleration: a new theory of modernity. translated by jonathan trejo-mathys. new york: columbia university press. originally published in 2005. shaviro, steven 2015 no speed limit: three essays on accelerationism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. sloterdijk, peter 2012 “the time of the crime of the monstrous: on the philosophical justification of the artificial.” translated by wieland hoban. in sloterdijk now, edited by stuart elden, 165–81. malden, mass.: polity. stengers, isabelle 2015 in catastrophic times: resisting the coming barbarism. translated by andrew goffey. london: open humanities press. originally published in 2009. http://dx.medra.org/10.14619/016. tomlinson, john 2007 the culture of speed: the coming of immediacy. los angeles: sage. toscano, alberto 2013 “gaming the plumbing: high frequency trading and the spaces of capital.” metamute, january 16. http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/gaming-plumbing-high-frequency-trading-and-spaces-capital. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2015 the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. wajcman, judy 2015 pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism. chicago: university of chicago press. williams, alex, and nick srnicek 2013 “#accelerate: manifesto for an accelerationist politics.” critical legal thinking, may 14. http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics. the precarious present the precarious present: wageless labor and disrupted life in rio de janeiro, brazil kathleen m. millar duke university “i found a job!” rose snapped open a can of beer and quickly reached for my glass to catch the foam that poured down its sides. it was a quiet sunday afternoon in jardim gramacho, the sprawling neighborhood at the base of rio de janeiro’s garbage dump. rose and i lounged on overturned wooden crates outside her house, in a yard that was brown and barren except for a few scattered plastic bottles and tin cans. i first met rose in 2008 while conducting research on the life projects of the roughly two-thousand laboring poor, known as catadores, who collect and sell recyclables on rio’s dump for a living. her husband, carlos, often helped me heave my burlap sacks of wet cardboard onto the back of a buyer’s flatbed truck, and the two of them occasionally hung out at the bar in front of my house. like other catadores, rose had insisted many times that she would leave the garbage if she could: “the dump is pure suffering.” “in the garbage, there is no future.” seu marcão, a rather eccentric catador who had worked on the dump for over twenty years, would spontaneously shout over the clamor of unloading trucks, “pay to enter and pray to leave!” an expression taken from the portuguese-translated title of the horror film, the funhouse. these were the common refrains of catadores. rose’s new job, however, meant more than an exit from the garbage dump. for the first time in her life, she had acquired employment with a signed worker id (carteira assinada), a document guaranteeing a minimum wage, benefits, and the recognition of a regularly employed worker in brazil. she told me that she would receive the equivalent of two monthly minimum-wages—as much if not more than she was presently making on the dump. she would be cleaning the house of a couple who lived a relatively short twenty-minute bus-ride away, and she was due to start that monday. after rose shared the good news, i lifted my glass to propose a toast to her new work. no, not just work (trabalho), she corrected me—this was a job (emprego). i was therefore surprised when, after a few weeks, i asked rose how she was finding her new job and she replied with a brush of her hand, “oh, i quit.” rose’s employer insisted that she stay at work until seven o’clock in the evening even though she easily finished all of her cleaning tasks by two in the afternoon. the requirement to remain at work, while not working, struck rose as absurd. her three children would already be dismissed from school and she would rather be home with them. a few days later i saw rose back on the dump. she waved to me from across a pile of recently unloaded waste—balancing a barrel of plastics on her right shoulder as she carefully stepped through mud that oozed puddles from the drizzling rain. * * * this article considers the work of catadores not as an end for rio’s laboring poor, in the sense of the end-of-the-line, but rather as an experience of continual return. the image of the garbage dump often evokes finality, conceived as a place where society’s unwanted remnants go to decay and ultimately disappear. though for different reasons, the concept of the informal economy—long conceived as an exception to the constructed norm of wage labor and the employment contract—also implies this sense of finality, a last resort (denning 2010). such a conceptualization of wageless work, however, fails to capture tensions in the ways social and economic precariousness is experienced and lived in rio’s periphery. like rose, most catadores repeatedly insisted that they would leave the dump instantly if another work opportunity appeared, and yet those who did find work outside jardim gramacho often returned to the dump within a few weeks or months. their departures and returns inflected life in jardim gramacho with a generalized quality of transience, captured in the common expression, vou e volto, vou e volto (“i go and return, go and return,” as in the idiomatic phrase in english, “i come and go”). sometimes i would not see a catador for weeks on the dump and almost without fail, the person would reappear—often with a story of a family visit to another part of rio or a story of employment very similar to rose’s. my own comings and goings, as i strove to fit research trips into academic breaks before spending a continuous year in jardim gramacho, seemed easily understood in this world.1 in what follows, i explore how the comings and goings of catadores emerge from competing desires and demands in their lives. on the one hand, formal, stable employment is upheld by catadores as a dominant cultural value. in addition to regular income and employment benefits, a formal job with a worker id brings the status of a respected trabalhador, a worker. yet, on the other hand, the very regularity and stability of a formal job comes into conflict with the fragile conditions of urban poverty in rio de janeiro. here, i draw on ben penglase’s (2009) concept of “everyday emergencies” to grasp the ways that disruption and insecurity not only suspend but also constitute “normality” in rio’s favelas. while penglase considers everyday emergencies in the specific context of drug trafficking, this article reflects on multiple forms of insecurity that destabilize daily life: health vulnerabilities, makeshift housing, environmental hazards, debt, incarceration, and crime and violence. it is my central argument that, paradoxically, the deeply painful and precarious work that catadores continually return to on the dump enables them to contend with insecurities in other dimensions of their lives. my analysis takes inspiration from a growing anthropological literature on precarity. conceived as a condition of post-fordist capitalism, the concept of precarity has emerged as a way to capture both the tenuous conditions of neoliberal labor as well as states of anxiety, desperation, unbelonging, and risk experienced by temporary and irregularly employed workers. in recent years, the term has circulated primarily among social-movement activists in post-industrial societies of europe, north america, and japan—places where fordism was strongest in the twentieth century and which therefore have been most affected by its unraveling (allison 2012; neilson and rossiter 2005). in many countries of the global south, in contrast, precarious work has arguably always been a part of the experience of laboring poor. rose’s grandparents were seasonal agricultural workers in brazil’s arid northeast, a region marked by the uncertainties of drought and hunger. her parents, part of a wave of rural–urban migration to rio in the 1960s, worked as itinerant street vendors at downtown bus stops. in her own life, prior to her brief stint with a worker id, rose moved between a range of irregular forms of employment: selling garlic on the streets, cooking for a luncheonette, and eventually reclaiming recyclables from city garbage. though fordism might have existed as a dream, aspiration, or incomplete project in brazil and other countries of the global south (muehlebach and shoshan 2012), full employment nonetheless remained the exception. while attuned to the particularities of the brazilian context, i adopt precarity as a useful analytic for conceptualizing the labor condition as inseparable from issues of subjectivity, affect, sociality, and desire. in other words, i am interested in the relationship between precarious labor and precarious life, or as brett neilson and ned rossiter (2008, 55) put it, between precarity as a socio-economic condition and precarity as an ontological experience (see also molé 2010). it is possible to understand this relationship as a worldwide symptom of neoliberalism (bourdieu 1998; johnson 2011; standing 2011), and indeed many theorists of late capitalism perceive insecure employment as an increasingly shared condition that is merging the destinies of the global north and south (see comaroff and comaroff 2012; wacquant 2008). however, the way that the relationship between precarious labor and precarious life is articulated depends significantly on the specific history and experience of capitalism in a given location, both in the sense of a geopolitical site (e.g., brazil) and a social position (e.g., urban poor in the periphery of rio). for workers who identified as middle-class where fordism was strong in the post-war years of the twentieth century, work provided not only an income but also social belonging, a public identity, a sense of well-being, and future aspirations (muehlebach 2011). consequently, the dismantling of full-time, life-long employment under neoliberal regimes had the effect of disintegrating social ties and eroding the sense of having a place in the world. in such post-fordist contexts, therefore, we can understand the relationship between precarious labor and precarious life as one in which “unstable work destabilizes daily living” (allison 2012, 349). in contrast, the continual returns of catadores to the dump suggest that many urban poor in rio experience this relationship in reverse: unstable daily living destabilizes work. taking a phenomenological approach to precarious labor, i reflect on tensions between the fixed conditions of waged employment and the uncertainties and disruptions that punctuate life in rio’s periphery. i consider how catadores experience the garbage dump not only as a source of suffering but also, as they say, a “refuge”—a place to which they can turn in difficult times and which affords them greater autonomy in their everyday lives. here, autonomy is conceived not in the liberal sense of the sovereign, independent, self-reliant individual, which fails to account for the ways “individuals are always already woven into relationships” (han 2012, 15). rather, this article contemplates what i call “relational autonomy,” exploring how a relative degree of control over work activities and time enables catadores to sustain relationships, fulfill social obligations, and pursue life projects in an uncertain everyday.2 “the dump has a good side and the dump also has a bad side,” catadores often told me. i begin with this seeming contradiction, unpacking the ways catadores experienced and narrated their world of work. the particular characteristics of reclaiming material from city waste that emerge in these narratives suggest the need to better differentiate forms of post-fordist labor that are frequently folded into categories of informal, irregular, or precarious employment. the next three sections return to rose’s story. how can we understand her decision to quit what seemed a coveted job to return to the garbage and her work as a catadora? this question leads me first to consider the symbolic value that the worker id held for rose—the desire for a possibility that never became realized. i then explore how catadores perceive their experience of the dump as an inner transformation of the self. this new worker-subjectivity is one in which catadores, in their own words, “can no longer adapt” to conditions of waged employment. finally, i explore how this inability “to adapt” is further compounded by a much broader and deeper precarious existence. the dump as refuge in 1978, the city of rio de janeiro began dumping garbage in jardim gramacho, in what at the time was a mangrove swamp on the edge of the bay of guanabara. from the summit of the now thirty-meter-high mountain of rotting refuse, it is possible to watch planes landing at rio’s international airport just across the bay and to view the sunrise on clear mornings over the city’s tourist attraction, sugar loaf. until its closure in june, 2012, the garbage dump in jardim gramacho was considered to be the largest in latin america. a steady stream of garbage trucks and semi-trailers from across rio’s metropolitan area carried an average of eight-thousand tons of waste to jardim gramacho every day. contrary to popular images of scavenging as a marginal subsistence activity oriented toward personal consumption, the work of catadores on the dump transformed jardim gramacho into a sprawling market in recyclables, tied into a global recycling industry that generates an estimated us$200 billion annually (bir 2010). though catadores sometimes set aside a pair of shoes, clothing, a book, or a household item that they discover while collecting, nearly all of the objects that they pile into their frayed burlap sacks consist of what they call “material”—that is, white paper, cardboard, aluminum, scrap metal, and plastics that they sell to dozens of scrap yards scattered throughout the neighborhood. these scrap yards—most of which are unregulated enterprises that consist of little more than a yard, a truck, and a press to bale the material—sort and bundle the recyclables and then sell the material either to larger scrap dealers in rio or directly to recycling plants located primarily in the south of brazil. the processed paper, plastics, and metal are then sold to a range of packaging, construction, automotive, and textile industries, reaching the united states, europe, and increasingly, china. this global trade in recyclables has greatly expanded in the last two decades; the single largest export from the united states to china in the first decade of the twenty-first century, for example, was scrap (alexander and reno 2012, 3–4). the growing market in recyclables has contributed to an explosion of waste reclaiming worldwide.3 though the collection of discarded materials is not at all new among urban poor (see jesus 1962; lomnitz 1983), this work has transformed in recent years from a small-scale activity involving primarily reuse into an alternative form of urban employment connected to global markets. during the first decade of the dump’s existence, the few hundred catadores who collected there were mostly migrants from the rural northeast who came to jardim gramacho from other dumps that had closed—“following the garbage,” as they recounted. however, beginning in the 1990s, the jardim gramacho dump drew increasing numbers of rio’s poor from across the metropolitan area. this period saw both the consolidation of democracy following the end of brazil’s military dictatorship, as well as the ushering in of neoliberal economic policies in the aftermath of latin america’s debt crisis of the 1980s—nicknamed brazil’s “lost decade” (caldeira 2000). neoliberal policies impacted rio’s poor from multiple angles, beyond the loss of jobs brought about by the deindustrialization of the city. urban revitalization programs in rio promoted the privatization of public space, thereby preventing unlicensed street vendors from selling goods in highly visible areas of the city and contributing to the enclosure of rio’s “informal economies” (oliveira 2008). the reduction in public services and the state’s conception of citizens as “consumers” accentuated economic inequalities (biehl 2007, 56), and high rates of violence and incarceration of the poor made life in rio’s periphery all the more tenuous (perlman 2010). though conditional cash transfer programs (bolsa família), promoted by brazil’s leftist president lula from 2003 to 2010, have helped reduce poverty and inequality figures, several scholars have argued that these programs brought about little structural change and functioned more like a bandage stemming the detrimental effects of neoliberal reforms (rocha 2007). moreover, many catadores in jardim gramacho, who held no birth certificate or other state documents, remained invisible to the state and these social assistance programs. for rio’s poor who came to jardim gramacho to make a life within these conditions, the garbage dump has often taken on contradictory meanings. catadores commonly narrate their entry to the dump as an experience of severe shock, describing feelings of overwhelming nausea and paralysis. their narratives testify to what they see as the everyday struggle of working as a catador. most catadores arrive on the dump at dawn to collect for several hours before the sun becomes unbearably intense, or they work at night with a flashlight under their chin, a light attached to a headpiece, or with no light at all. catadores use a plastic bag or barrel to collect material in the unloading zone and then carry it back to their burlap sacks, slogging through thick mud and uneven ground. they must work quickly, and closely to unloading garbage trucks, to collect as much material as possible before a tractor comes moments later to bulldoze the pile. at the end of the day or in the early morning, trucks from dozens of scrap yards arrive on the dump and catadores lift their several-hundred-pound sacks onto the flatbeds. this usually requires four catadores on the ground lifting the sack and two on top of the truck pulling the sack upward. catadores work in the sun and rain with no shelter aside from faded beach umbrellas that they find in the garbage and stick into the tops of their filled burlap sacks. they breathe nauseating fumes of methane gas produced by the decomposing waste beneath their feet. and they spend hours bending over, racing to avoid oncoming tractors, and lugging heavy loads. anthropologists studying informal or illicit economies have often explained the decisions of laboring poor to work irregular jobs as a form of resistance to degrading or onerous aspects of wage labor. for example, in his study of crack dealers in east harlem, philippe bourgois (1995) argues that the refusal of the drug dealers to take menial service jobs is a form of oppositional politics to demeaning, minimum-wage work. dealing in east harlem brings status, respect, and an affirmed masculinity utterly lost in “the humiliating interpersonal subordination of service work” (141). these explanations, however, do not correspond to the ways catadores experience their work. for catadores, working in and with garbage—far from bringing respect—is a type of work that is stigmatizing even within their own social worlds. catadores who live in another favela of rio carry with them extra clothes, rent tiny shacks as changing rooms, and often purchase body lotions and crèmes to mask lingering odors so that their neighbors, and in some cases their family members, do not know what they do. even catadores who proudly affirm that they work as a catador are aware that others perceive their work of reclaiming objects from garbage as not “real” work, as not any different from being a beggar or vagabond. other studies have argued that underground economies provide an alternative to strenuous employment, as in the case of undocumented haitian workers in the dominican republic’s underground tourist economy, who seek to escape their only other option of hard labor in the sugar industry (gregory 2007). but as poignantly expressed in their everyday refrains of the dump as “pure suffering,” catadores endure brutal conditions on the dump. they also risk injuries, some that can be fatal: a hospital needle that punctures a catador’s worn boot, a tossed rod that splits open the forehead of an elderly catador, a tractor whose driver fails to see a catador slip in front of his path. however, the dump as “pure suffering” exists in tension with other ways that catadores experience and perceive their place of work. for many catadores, the garbage dump is a constant, one of the most stable sources of income in their lives. trucks unload at the dump twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, allowing catadores to work day and night or to not work at all for several days or weeks. access to the dump is relatively unimpeded, enabling catadores to leave jardim gramacho for stretches of time without concern that they will lose their right to work in this place, as can sometimes occur for street vendors who must maintain their claim to space (anjaria 2011). scrap dealers pay catadores at the point of sale and catadores decide when to sell their material. they can therefore wait to return to the dump until their previous earnings run out. or, in the case of an unexpected expense, a catador can work continuously on the dump, day and night, knowing that she will have immediate payment in hand. there is a shared sense in jardim gramacho that the dump is always there, that work can be taken up when needed or desired. “the garbage never ends,” i commonly heard. i do not mean to suggest that collecting on the dump is stable work in the sense usually invoked by this term. no prevention or compensation exists for the injuries that catadores suffer, and life itself is at risk on the dump. rather, catadores experience the dump as a stable refuge in one, particular way that stands in tension with other dimensions of their work. in short, catadores can decide when and how much to work. it is this characteristic of the work of catadores that distinguishes it from full-time waged employment, as well as from other forms of post-fordist labor, marked as such by their very contingency. temp, part-time, or piecemeal workers must contend with the unpredictability of work and wages. this distinction points to the importance of disentangling forms of precarious labor that hold very different relationships to a worker’s experience of the everyday. the worker in brazil’s moral order to understand rose’s initial excitement over acquiring a job with a worker id, we must first consider the symbolic value of the formally-employed worker within brazil’s historical and political context. unlike in other latin american sites, most notably argentina (perelman 2007), the image of the worker has not always functioned as a primary source of identity and citizenship. brazil’s history of slavery, and the continued power of the oligarchy following abolition in 1888, had the effect of devalorizing manual labor. many anthropologists have pointed to avoidance of household work among the middle and upper classes, and to the historic separation between service elevators and entrances in buildings from those used by residents as manifestations of this perceived indignity of labor (goldstein 2003; holston 2008). others have suggested that the figure of the malandro—the trickster or hustler—that became exalted in samba lyrics in the 1920s, expressed in a different register this disdain for work (oliven 1984). in the 1930s, president getúlio vargas sought to radically transform the position of labor in brazil by making working-class employment the basis and emblem of brazilian citizenship (holston 2008). vargas passed a series of labor laws that positioned the state as the sole arbitrator between capital and labor. this functioned as a state technology to control the labor organizing that developed in conjunction with brazil’s industrialization at the beginning of the twentieth century and the high levels of european immigration that brought with it anarchist and communist influences. through these labor laws, the state began regulating work organizations, defined what legally counted as a profession, granted rights based on one’s status as a worker, and instituted the carteira assinada—the worker id that rose pointed to as the most important element of her newfound employment. despite (or rather because of) the rights and benefits that workers gained through the carteira assinada, vargas’s labor reforms produced a new kind of unequal citizenship in brazil (holston 2008). on the one hand, labor became valorized for the first time in brazilian history and workers could access rights on the basis of their labor; but on the other hand, those who were not employed in legally-regulated professions were excluded from this new citizenship status. in short, by exalting “the worker” as the model citizen, vargas created a worker–criminal dichotomy that continues to function in brazilian society’s moral order. in recent years, the symbolism of “the worker” has taken on added meaning in the context of drug trafficking, violence, and the fear of crime among the middle and upper classes in brazil’s major cities. rather than associate favelas with the working-class poor, elites have increasingly come to perceive favela residents as marginais (marginals), a word now signifying criminals and drug traffickers rather than the poorest of the poor (perlman 2010, 157; roth-gordon 2009, 58). many scholars have argued that this semiotic shift has justified extreme forms of police violence targeting favela residents and street children (caldeira 2000, 138; scheper-hughes 2006, 154), as well as the elite’s disregard for the everyday struggles of brazil’s lower classes, no longer deemed the hard-working, “deserving” poor (skidmore 2010, 191). in this context, favela residents have taken up the trabalhador–marginal (worker–marginal) or trabalhador–bandido (worker–bandit) dichotomy as a way to distinguish themselves from criminals in the eyes of the state and broader society. this is especially the case for poor, black, male youth who are frequently the targets of police abuse (penglase 2007). for example, i observed one adolescent catador, who was stopped and shoved by police, plead his innocence by taking out his boots, gloves, and water bottle to try to prove that he was an honest worker. in such instances, trabalhador invokes the vargas-era valorization of the “worker of brazil” and becomes synonymous with law-abiding citizen. it also echoes strategies used to avoid police harassment during the period surrounding brazil’s abolition of slavery, when vagrancy laws became a mechanism for addressing a severe labor shortage on plantations in the brazilian northeast (huggins 1985). if the rural poor who flocked to cities at that time could not demonstrate to police that they had “honest” employment, they could be sent to agricultural penal colonies tied to the sugar industry. brazilian anthropologist leticia veloso (2010) has argued that in the contemporary context, this slippage between worker and law-abiding citizen has led to the fetishization of the worker id. during her fieldwork among poor youth in rio, she observed several adolescents, who had acquired formal jobs through an ngo program, flaunt their worker ids at every opportunity. even though their employment consisted of minimum-wage jobs with no possibilities of advancement, it provided them with the status of worker and the ability to demonstrate this status through their signed ids. the carteira assinada, according to veloso, became more important than the actual job because the worker id proved that these young men worked and therefore were not bandits. rose’s initial excitement about obtaining a job that came with a worker id must be understood within this larger moral order situating the worker in contradistinction to the criminal or low-life marginal. andrea muehlebach and nitzan shoshan (2012) have argued that post-fordist affect in places like latin america and south africa takes the form of a nostalgic longing for fordist promises that never quite materialized. in certain respects, we can see the fetishization of the worker id as an affective attachment to fordism that in the brazilian context became enshrined in the social rights and state protection bestowed on formally employed workers by vargas’s populist, paternalist state. i would add to this insight that, for many brazilian poor, fordist attachments are inflected with other anxieties and desires. the significance of the worker id for rose entailed not only the guarantee of full-time employment. it also, and perhaps more importantly, held the promise of shedding the stigma of an activity associated in the wider social imaginary with crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, and begging—a stigma that can carry violent consequences. however, as we will see in what follows, this aspiration clashed with other values and pressures in rose’s life. “i can no longer adapt” rose, like many catadores, began working in early adolescence. she was raised by her grandparents in brazil’s northeast region. when she was fourteen years old, she came to rio to live with her mother who had moved there to find work when rose was still an infant. rose told me that she had trouble living with her mother, and so she moved out and began supporting herself by selling garlic on the streets of downtown rio. like rose, the work histories of many catadores began on the streets or in some other context of informality. joão shined shoes at busy transportation hubs. adilson worked odd jobs as a bricklayer. funabem sold snacks on the commuter trains that funnel workers into downtown from rio’s outskirts.4 dona helena carried bags for customers at an open-air market, peddled juice on the beach, and sold mints at the entrance of a movie theater. most of these catadores recounted stories of the increasing difficulties faced by informal workers beginning in the 1990s. in 1993, the mayor of rio de janeiro, césar maia, launched a series of urban reform projects that focused on the regulation of public space. the urban planner responsible for initiatives in rio’s central business district referred to this project as “straightening-up the house” or “cleaning the landscape.” such “cleaning-up” involved burying telephone and electric wires, as well as removing ambulant vendors, street children, and the homeless from highly visible spaces of the city in operations that have continued with subsequent mayors under the name, “the shock of order” (oliveira 2008, 9; veloso 2012, 664). the guarda municipal, a police force responsible for protecting the city’s patrimony—its parks, squares, gardens, beaches, and monuments—was also established during césar maia’s first term (valverde 2009). the duties of the guarda municipal quickly extended to the policing of street vendors operating within these public spaces, actions further spurred by anxieties in recent years over pirated and counterfeit goods sold on the streets of brazil’s major cities (dent 2012). though officers of the guarda municipal do not carry arms, they make use of clubs, handcuffs, and in some cases attack dogs when detaining unlicensed vendors and confiscating their goods. most catadores who had previously worked as street vendors described the loss of merchandise as the harshest consequence of these police actions, which ultimately inhibited them from continuing to sell on the streets. thus, many catadores came to jardim gramacho not as a result of losing full-time, waged employment but as a consequence of the enclosure of rio’s informal economies. following the crackdown, few catadores who had worked as street vendors turned to regular employment. as one catador stated succinctly, “i worked for four years at a photocopier, i worked for six years at a grocer, and after one day of working as a street vendor, i never again wanted that life of having a boss ordering me around.” certainly, not all catadores worked previously as street vendors or in some kind of self-employment. many older men had work histories that included professions such as welder, metalworker, or machines operator. this type of employment, however, became increasingly scarce following the deindustrialization of rio in the 1990s, and women and younger generations of catadores tended to find domestic work or work in the service industry. in tracing their work histories, i often asked catadores to describe their first arrival on the dump and found that the verb “to adapt” (adaptar-se) or synonyms like “to get used to” (acostumar-se, habituar-se) appeared repeatedly in these narratives. catadores told me that, following an initial shock, they gradually adapted to the dump—to the smells, to the nauseating fumes of methane gas, to the movement of trucks and tractors, to the feel for distinguishing types of materials. what surprised me in these narratives was not the emphasis on needing to adjust to the grueling work of a catador, a process that resonated with my own experience of the dump. rather, i was struck by the ways catadores often described their adaptation to the dump as the reason they could now “no longer adapt,” as they said, to regular employment. this was especially the case for the few catadores who had worked formal jobs prior to coming to jardim gramacho and for whom the adjustment to work on the dump also involved the habituation to conditions of self-employment. for example, alessandra, a catadora who had been employed with a worker id before collecting on the dump, explained that she now had trouble re-adapting to formal jobs because of her work experience on the dump: i got used to the dump (me acostumei). i have tried to work formal jobs since, but i’m not able to adapt (não consigo me adaptar). i worked as a maid in a hotel. i tried. i stayed one month at the hotel. it was so tiring! my boss was always saying, “straighten up this room! do this! do that!” on the dump, this doesn’t happen. you don’t have a boss. you don’t have a schedule. you don’t even have days that you have to work. you make your own salary and your own schedule. the catador gets used to doing what he wants, when he wants. he gets used to not having orders. i got used to this too. so, i said, “do what? i am going back to my dump, because there no one is trying my patience and pestering me.” for many catadores, adapting to the dump meant acclimating to a different temporality of work. when i asked cordeiro why he had left a formal job for the third time, he told me that there comes a time when you can no longer adjust to a job with a carteira assinada because of its different orientation to time: “in a job like that, you have your shift and you have to clock in and out. and as catadores, we are used to a different rhythm of life—to not having a work schedule—and we just don’t adapt.” as you might recall, rose’s primary explanation for quitting her job similarly centered on time. she did not complain about the workload or an overbearing employer, but instead deplored the five hours she had to stay at work with nothing to do. for someone used to working hard and then taking a break, hanging out with friends, or going home, the requirement to remain at work without working struck rose as absurd. in his social history of industrial capitalism, e. p. thompson (1967, 57) shows how the transition to wage labor entailed “a severe restructuring of working habits,” and the creation of a “new human nature.” the emergence of a new time-sense oriented by the clock, the moralization of regular work patterns, and a clear division between “work” and “life” were some of the values and dispositions instilled in workers through what thompson argues was a process of making workers into proper waged-employees. when catadores speak of their adaptation to the dump, they similarly express how the cumulative experience of a particular form of labor can remake inner processes and ways of being in the world. catadores describe their inability to adapt to wage labor as a consequence of their lived experience of an alternative way of organizing work and life, a process that changed their desires and habits in ways incompatible with regular employment. cordeiro points to his experience of working without a schedule on the dump as instilling in him a new orientation to time that conflicts with the regularity and stark divisions between working and not working in wage labor. alessandra perceives the ability of the catador “to do what he wants” on the dump as a reason for her stress when working for someone else, for feeling a loss of control in formal jobs. finally, rose—someone long accustomed to coming and going from work, first as an itinerant street vendor and later as a catadora on the dump— expresses intolerable frustration at the demand to remain at work when she had nothing to do. just as the transition to wage labor in industrial capitalism entailed the creation of new worker-subjectivities, the transition to precarious labor in contemporary capitalism is also a process involving the transformation of desires, values, and arts of living. in other words, like wage labor, work on the garbage dump is a site of subject-making, which catadores experience and express as transformative of their inner dispositions. we can therefore understand rose’s return to the dump, in part, as emerging from a worker-subjectivity fashioned under conditions very different than those of her job with the worker id. life disrupted and the desire for autonomy we can also see the inability of catadores to adapt to regular employment as compounded by the multiple forms of social and economic precariousness that unsettle life in rio’s periphery. incarceration, illness, and even the sudden death of a friend or relative are commonplace experiences for catadores. these everyday emergencies disrupt daily routines, stable living arrangements, and networks of care—straining families, especially women, with additional needs and obligations. sometimes an emergency was the very reason a catador began working on the dump. for example, ana carla started to collect recyclables as a child to support her family after a leaking gas canister caught fire, burning their house down and killing several of her relatives. another catadora, jocimar, stopped working altogether for some time, relying on the support of friends in jardim gramacho, after her husband was shot and killed and her three-year-old daughter died of pneumonia within six weeks of each other. less tragic everyday emergencies occur as well: buses break down, houses flood in rain storms, creditors arrive to collect debts, long waits stretch indefinitely at understaffed health clinics, police invade favelas and stop residents for questioning. life in rio’s periphery can feel continuously interrupted. at the time that rose accepted the job with a worker id, she was living with her husband, carlos, his two children from a previous marriage, and her own three children. she had also informally adopted the two-year-old child of a neighbor and friend who was dealing with an addiction to crack cocaine. rose’s oldest daughter, who was fourteen-years-old, had recently befriended a young man known for his involvement with drug traffickers in jardim gramacho. rose feared that her daughter’s mere association put her in danger and she furthermore worried about leaving the other children in her care. prior to taking the regular job, rose and carlos had alternated the times they worked on the dump so that one of them could always be home to keep a closer watch on their children. rose gained the stability and status of a worker id, but as a result she lost control over her schedule and the ability to perform what she saw as important work of caring for kin. as rose’s story makes clear, regular employment does not always fit easily into the precarious lives of urban poor. the returns of catadores to the dump—and their interpretations of these returns as the inability to adapt—point to the incongruence between their experience of the everyday and the demands of wage labor. in contrast, the ability to come and go from the dump allows catadores not only to manage everyday emergencies but to pursue life projects amidst these disruptions. catadores often “double-shift” (dobrar), meaning that they work day and night consecutively, to earn extra money to pay a debt incurred from a purchase they otherwise could not have made. for some catadores, especially those in their youth, the dump allows a blending of intense work with an intense social life. rose described her early years on the dump as a time when she alternated collecting with days spent barbecuing, drinking, dancing, and socializing with friends, many of whom have remained important figures in her life. it might seem that the combined demand and desire for mobility in the lives of catadores echoes neoliberal logics that value flexible labor and flexible bodies (martin 1994). however, the worker who is able to respond quickly to the changing needs of capital is quite different from the catador who moves between jobs or decides to work in a context with few controls on time and schedule in order, in rose’s case, to be present to her children amidst tension and threats of violence. in the first case, the flexible worker becomes radically individualized; flexibility emerges from the worker’s alienation from her social world. this dissolution of the social is one reason that many theorists have pointed to an emphasis on autonomy as a defining characteristic of neoliberal governmentality (e.g., rose 1999). autonomy in the neoliberal sense refers to individual empowerment, entrepreneurialism, and self-help, and to the conception of the self as an economic resource requiring investment, management, and care that the subject brings to social transactions (brown 2005; gershon 2011; rimke 2000). the neoliberal subject is autonomous, ilana gershon (2011, 540) argues, in so far as the self is conceived as existing prior to relationships. i suggest instead that we read the returns of catadores to the dump as a way of claiming what i think of as relational autonomy. by calling this autonomy relational, i seek to emphasize how the desire for mobility among catadores is tightly woven into other desires for sociality, intimacy, and relations of care. the boredom that prompted rose to quit her job—the way she experienced the demand to stay at work while having nothing to do—became wrapped up with her desire to be attentive to her children at a perilous moment in their lives. rose’s autonomy, manifested in this instance as her ability to come and go from work as she pleased, emerged not from investment in the self but rather from immersion into relations of care. we might also see rose’s involvement in a vibrant party life with friends during her early years on the dump as similarly an entanglement of autonomy and sociality. by relational autonomy, i do not mean to index relational labor per se, such as caring for children or elderly parents (see muehlebach 2012), but instead to underscore how autonomy, for catadores, is always already woven into relationships and forms of social belonging. my understanding of autonomy among catadores, therefore, resonates more with an alternative meaning of this term that has emerged from social-movement struggles against neoliberalism. ranging from the struggles of indigenous movements in latin america to anti-globalization activism in europe and north america, these movements share an affirmation of autonomy as a way to distance themselves from certain forms of power (see nash 2001; graeber 2009; williams 2008). autonomy for these activists refers to the relinquishment of state power as an end, to a withdrawal from capitalist markets and modes of consumption, and to the carving out of spaces in which other forms of sociality and co-existence can flourish. rather than a technique of neoliberal governmentality, autonomy in this sense is an aspect of liberation (williams 2008). and rather than the freedom of an atomistic self, the liberation that comes from autonomy is about the “ability to create new communities and ties of mutual dependence” (graeber 2009, 266). the desire for autonomy among catadores does not emerge from a professed, deliberate political project as it does for the social-movement activists mentioned above. that is, catadores express their autonomy not in terms of a political ideal to be achieved or enacted but as their inability to adapt to regular employment—an inability that stems as much from alternative worker-subjectivities as from the everyday emergencies that disrupt their lives. autonomy for catadores, however, is similar to the political autonomy sought by anti-globalization movements in that both constitute a distancing, withdrawal, or release from particular relations of power. this parallel leads us to see rose’s return to the dump as an act of turning away from the employment contract and from relations of wage labor. by releasing the carteira assinada, rose gains greater self-determination in her everyday labor—to reconfigure her work rhythms, to modify the length, frequency, and intensity of her labor, and to interweave multiple dimensions of her working and non-working life. moreover, rose’s experience of relative autonomy in her labor enables her to attend to everyday emergencies and thereby sustain her social world. relational autonomy can thus also be conceived as an art of living through the precarious present, as that which makes possible a continued, shared existence in delicate times.5 the politics of detachment i began this article by arguing that we focus on the relationship between precarity as a labor condition and precarity as an ontological experience, and that the particular histories and experiences of capitalism in given locations shape how this relationship is articulated. for catadores, the everyday emergencies that disrupt the present in rio’s periphery often clash with the rigid conditions of regular, wage-labor employment. life destabilizes work. the distinction between work and life, of course, is always partly an analytical construct since “life itself” is labor (arendt 1958, 87), as we see in the work of care that rose performs to sustain her family and in the work on the self that catadores perform in their efforts to adapt to the dump. the recognition that life is also work pushes us beyond the fetishism of waged employment to consider not only joblessness but also the family, home, or even the subject as sites of precarious labor shifting under contemporary capitalism. in short, the returns of catadores to the dump suggest that though irregularity and flexibility might be shared qualities of post-fordist labor, the experience of these conditions shifts dramatically for workers in different class, cultural, and geopolitical contexts. the returns of catadores to the dump, furthermore, expose the limits of survival and resistance as common analytical frameworks for interpreting the precarious labor of urban poor. the figure of the unemployed worker sifting through refuse on a city dump certainly evokes what mike davis (2004, 26) has termed “informal survivalism.” while an understanding of precarious labor as a strategy of survival draws attention to the everyday emergencies that unsettle life in rio’s periphery, this account overlooks the aversion catadores express to conditions of waged employment as well as the fuller life projects and forms of sociality enabled by their work on the dump. yet, this is also not a story of resistance, which fails to capture the tension between rose’s desire for a “real” job with a worker id and her desire for what i have described as relational autonomy. perhaps even more important, the concept of resistance suggests an oppositional stance that does not resonate with the affective register of catadores’ returns. rose’s nonchalant brush of her hand when she tells me she quit her job or alessandra’s remark that she just can’t adapt to formal employment are expressions that convey detachment, not defiance or even refusal. i want to conclude by suggesting, instead, that we understand rose’s return to the dump as an act of release—in the sense of a relinquishment or withdrawal from particular conditions of labor. in the moment that rose leaves her job to go back to the dump, she lets go of the employment contract and of the organization, subjectivities, and relations of work that it entails. i see in this act of release a politics of detachment that is quite different from the politics of precarity inspired by what guy standing (2011, 19) has called the precariat’s “four a’s—anger, anomie, anxiety, and alienation.” especially in post-fordist contexts of the global north, these affective states and the politics (or anti-politics) of hopelessness that they activate emerge from the continued attachment to an imagined good life, promised by capitalism, that can no longer be realized (berlant 2011). in contrast, rose’s act of quitting her job entails a rupture with normative forms of capitalist labor that opens up the possibility of other ways of fashioning work and life. the precarious labor of catadores, at once suffering and refuge, allows relationships to be woven, life projects to be pursued, and social worlds to be reproduced amidst the disruptions of the here and now. the garbage dump becomes, then, not an overdetermined end for rio’s poor. rather, the returns of catadores to the dump constitute a politics of detachment that enables life to be lived in the precarious present. notes acknowledgments foremost, i would like to thank the catadores of jardim gramacho for their generosity, care, and support over many years. i am grateful to jennifer ashley, joão biehl, christopher gibson, matthew gutmann, michael hathaway, catherine lutz, andrea muehlebach, harris solomon, nicholas townsend, kay warren, and katya wesolowski for their encouragement and insightful feedback at various stages of writing. earlier versions of this article were presented at columbia university’s brazil seminar, st. mary’s college of maryland, simon fraser university, and the “precarious labor and precarious life” panel at the 2012 american anthropological association annual meeting. i also wish to thank anne allison, charles piot, and the two anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology for their helpful suggestions and guidance. research for this article was supported by the national science foundation’s grfp, a fulbright-hays ddra fellowship, and duke university’s thompson writing program. 1. research trips included 1–3 month periods in 2005, 2007, and 2012, and a continuous year during 2008–2009. 2. for a different use of the term “relational autonomy” in feminist philosophy and ethics, see mackenzie and stroljar (2000). 3. see medina (2007) for a global comparative perspective on waste reclaiming. 4. funabem acquired his nickname because of his background as a street child who lived in facilities operated by brazil’s national foundation for the welfare of minors (funabem). 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states. wildfires consumed 10 million acres, and the war on wildfire cost taxpayers $2.6 billion. in california alone, about 3,400 wildfires were fought, 1,000 more than the average over the previous five years. fire seasons are lasting, on average, eighty-six days longer than they have in four decades. for two weeks in 2015, recruiters in the national dispatch and coordination system hit a resource limit: there was simply nobody left to recruit to fight the fires. military personnel, volunteers, and even prisoners were conscripted into emergency response efforts. the truth is that it is hard to find stability in these numbers. as the future unfolds, these numbers (of acres burned or costs accrued for any given year) become distant benchmarks of runaway change. this became evident in 2017, when new records were set and dispatch services once again hit novel breaking points with exhausted fire crews and widespread pollution and destruction. california, with more than nine thousand fires, saw the first ever wintertime megafires in december of that year, during “what should be the peak of the state’s rainy season” (holthaus 2017). as one observer of these fires noted: “i was expecting to see snow on that mountain, and now the thing is on fire” (downey 2017). runaway change, understood by climate scientists as a rapid departure from long-established baselines, systemic patterns, or historical trends, becomes more than an accretion of ecological surprise; it renders untenable the very concept of projection. climate models predict how climate change will continue to have a serious impact on the planet. they are, however, imprecise in forecasting when and where the next megafire, superstorm, or flood will be (npr 2016). one can think of this opaque quality of runaway change not just in terms of how change escapes received explanations and models, but of how projections degrade, validating the problem of climate change as an unchecked race against time. one can also think of runaway change as signifying a gulf between what is expected and what actually occurs: an empty dimension that might not be so empty after all, but rather an elaborately staged absence, more like a vacuum, in which certain knowledge of the thing itself—wildfire, for example—continually disappears.1 if this is the case, namely, that runaway change conceals within itself the impetus for its own progression, then what does it take to render this change observable and, if possible, to slow it down? how are temporal horizons being rendered with respect to runaway change? how can actionable time be recovered or pried away from the pace of its advance? what would it mean to gain ground in this peculiar race against (lost) time, and what is at stake for agency and retreat in the negotiation of surprise? figure 1. the 2011 las conchas fire in the santa fe national forest, as viewed from the international space station. photo by los alamos national laboratory, licensed under cc by-nc-nd, https://www.flickr.com/photos/losalamosnatlab/5926991831. in the past decade, scientists have engaged in a peculiar exercise of time reckoning with certain aspects of the global climate system. concepts aiming to ascertain sudden or far-reaching modifications in particular subsets of ecosystem dynamics, such as critical thresholds and regime shifts, have proliferated in ecological science (e.g., lenton 2011; dakos et al. 2012; scheffer et al. 2012; drijfhout et al. 2015).2 critical thresholds are theorized moments at which characteristic behaviors deviate from known patterns or trends. regime shifts manifest as breakaway processes, for example, in structures and functions of ecosystems. as they surface, they rupture a so-called climate envelope for particular residents, binding them to another ecological milieu.3 different, unforeseeable constraints on survival or possible extinction arise. the suddenness of the shifts between milieus might also be hard to perceive. changes can register as anomalous at first (“that fire season was long”) but stabilize into a new state of ecosystem organization (“fire seasons are getting longer”). their impact can be observed at a regional or more context-specific scale (“that mountain is burning”). but by this time, the realization that the new conditions may not be survivable comes too late. according to the scientific literature, the mutually reinforcing feedback processes that drive regime-shifting events are either only partly quantifiable or entirely unobservable, making anticipatory thinking on structures that could “guide” (b. lin and petersen 2013) transitions a difficult enterprise. projections falter in the face of runaway change. for example, the predicted timing of the west antarctic ice sheet’s collapse was misjudged and its magnitude underestimated; projected intervals (so-called return periods) of coastal flooding events have also proven to be ineffectual (or arbitrary).4 the extreme event becomes the product of a projection that actively denies concerned publics a foothold in changing climate milieus, such that, according to the geoscientist james white (2014), scientists are left with “areas of observation where we are largely blind . . . . as a scientist, my hope is that we can study the planet well enough, monitor it well enough, understand it well enough, that we’re not going to be blindsided. as a realist, i’m pretty sure we’re going to be blindsided.” white suggests that being repeatedly blindsided is an ineluctable consequence of a rapidly changing physical world. as one engineer working with coastal scientists to improve infrastructures on the u.s. north atlantic coast suggested in a lecture: “there is a switch beyond which we cannot plan [for resilience]” (nordenson 2016). yet if extreme events reflect dynamics that deny us a foothold, then at each step in the disintegration of our projections, there is new work to do. this essay explores such work in the specific context of wildfire and asks: how do faltering scientific projections interface with the realities of emergency response? in pursuing points of contact and broadening disconnects, my ethnographic inquiry has taken me into two disparate but related fields. the first concerns theorists who are not focused on wildfire specifically but are, on a planetary scale, attempting to define varieties of critical thresholds that, if crossed, may entail irreversible ecological change, and who are characterizing early warning signals for such changes (petryna 2015). the second (and the focus of this essay) concerns ground-level actors who are directly caught up in such change and are tasked with trying to contain wildfire proliferation in the united states. in this second field, fire behavior analysts are going back to basics in wildfire science to understand a phenomenon they thought they already knew.5 my research among these scientists, training and technical specialists, and engineers has led me to explore at length how fire’s new qualities and dynamics can eclipse human and technical competencies. what is a meaningful baseline against which to calibrate progression or retrogression in the fight against fire? where unknowable futures meet the demands of emergency response, i track what i call horizoning work: local and highly practical forms of research that attempt to bring an unknown or runaway future into the present as an object of knowledge and intervention. this exercise of the imagination entails not only confronting present or near-future shifts and seemingly inevitable points of no return, but also grasping horizons and bringing them to bear on present operations, where knowledge can be made actionable and not obsolete. this is a race to secure (actionable) time, which calls for a fine-tuned awareness of jeopardy amid incomplete knowledge, and for labors of continuous recalibration amid physical worlds on edge. in what follows, i draw the reader into this horizoning work, including the daily labors of perceiving critical thresholds, determining baselines, and carving out footholds in stressed and flammable ecological conditions. how do assumptions underpinning one predictive enterprise fall apart and yield another? what are the implications for agency in negotiating the specters of inevitability and surprise? how to apprehend, fight against, or forestall a process in which, as one scientist told me (referring to forest loss), “you’re going to see something go away”? when paths disappear before turning to this work, however, let me step back and consider other, perhaps more familiar framings of these present and future-oriented challenges. the image below, adapted from the fifth assessment of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc), indicates four possible greenhouse gas–concentration trajectories plotted out to the year 2150. these trajectories contain information about concentrations of atmospheric co2, their rate of change, and the impact of four mitigation strategies that shift the planet toward or away from stabilization. the lowest path represents a stabilized scenario, in which co2 concentrations hover around 450 parts per million (ppm). in the words of the sociologist of climate change kari norgaard (2011, 9), this is “where we need to be in order to be comfortable.” today, most observers would agree that prospects for such stabilization have diminished. in a worst-case scenario, indicated by the highest path (and which many now believe is the most realistic scenario), levels of co2 will reach 1450 ppm, at which point, in the words of the environmental scientist stephen pacala, “the monsters will come out” (guterl 2012, 4)—monsters like firestorms and large-scale global extinctions. 2 concentrations (blue or lowest curve: best-case scenario; purple or highest curve: worst-case scenario) />figure 2. representative concentration pathways of future co2 concentrations (blue or lowest curve: best-case scenario; purple or highest curve: worst-case scenario). image drawn by dana nuccitelli, licensed under cc by, http://skepticalscience.com/climate-best-to-worst-case-scenarios.html. each path, in the end, is a statistically distilled mass of observations and a dim “analogue of physical reality” (mahony and hulme 2012, 78; see also randalls 2015). each starts and ends at an arguably arbitrary year; within selected windows of time, paths shift. the world’s fate is understood to head toward different possible futures, through more or less likely risk scenarios—transported down paths that destine but also, to borrow from tim ingold (2011, 44), “merely skim the surface of the world.” to be sure, what burned the mountain in california that should have been covered in snow—nonlinear temperature increases and feedbacks making fuel explosive and wildfires monstrous—forms part of an altogether different reality, one that cannot be easily mapped. here, the mutability of runaway change does not permit a predictive horizon. what becomes of wildfire next is anyone’s guess. i am interested in this latter path: the one in which wildfire intensifies and defies representation, posing complex operational challenges and appealing for novel engagements with the very concept of projection.6 that path plots breakouts and surges (such as wildfires breaching the norms of their frequency, size, intensity, seasonality, or spread), rather than incremental sequences that lead to an arbitrary shift or end. that path moves toward irreversibility, rather than assuming (erroneously) that “a choice can always be made to quickly reduce emissions and thereby reverse any harm within a few years or decades” (solomon et al. 2009, 1708). that is the path on which the very concept of containment is confronted by wildfires that grow out of proportion with—and can become largely independent of—expected trajectories. a recent study found that what is known as “global burnable area” (jolly et al. 2015, 1) has doubled over the past three decades. affected by longer fire weather seasons, wildfires, as matt jolly—the lead author of this study—told me, are transitioning “from one fire type to another much faster type; that is definitely something that is happening more often.”7 these spatiotemporal trends point to what he calls “the upper limits of bad.” at these upper limits, wildfire’s rogue nature erases comfortable distinctions between dead fuels (that burn) and live fuels (whose burning differs from dead woody fuels and is less understood). it also erases distinctions between rural wildland fires and urban conflagrations. in the words of the noted wildfire research scientist (and jolly’s onetime colleague) jack cohen, such geographic distinctions are “not relevant to the physics of what is actually happening” (curwen 2017). or, as the wildfire historian stephen pyne observed after the 2017 firestorm in santa rosa, california, the fires “seem to be going where the houses are” (curwen 2017). “it wasn’t supposed to burn that way” the new conditions of wildfires are obliging firefighting organizations to revise knowledge calibrated to a world that no longer exists. indeed, the “upper limits of bad” index a lost expertise and the search for a new one. “we should be treating these wildfires the same way we do hurricanes,” bill armstrong told me. “get the hell out of the goddamn way.” armstrong is a forester and fuels specialist with the santa fe national forest, and meeting him in 2015 put me on a path of inquiry that brought me to wildfire scientists like cohen and jolly at the fire sciences laboratory in missoula, montana. they and others i would encounter on this path showed me what they called the “relevant physics” of what is happening and how, through research, they are attempting to gain an empirical foothold in new fire dynamics while avoiding being cut off from knowing them—a cultivation of what donna haraway (2016, 35) calls “response-ability,” which precludes a “surrender [of] the capacity to think.” haraway (2016, 35) cautions against any such surrenders in a time of “onrushing disasters, whose unpredictable specificities are foolishly taken as unknowability itself.” these fire scientists agree. in addition to his years of forestry work, armstrong is a veteran of wildland firefighting. he is an advocate of prescribed burns and a critic of the u.s. forest service’s century-long policy of fire suppression. but, in a local forest supervisor’s office in santa fe, new mexico in 2015, he described unexpected paths in a decade that saw an “exponential rise in area burned.” one particular fire stood out: the 1996 dome fire in northern new mexico, whose physics were unlike anything he had ever encountered. according to armstrong: “in the eighties, when i started, intense fires were anomalies. what we thought was a freak incident became a wakeup call that nobody woke up to. it was a plume-dominated fire—more like a firestorm, with so much energy released in such a small period of time. we just weren’t expecting that kind of fire behavior.” a plume-dominated fire is characterized by huge updrafts of burning embers that pull material high into the clouds: “as material moves up through the clouds, it cools off, and when it cools off, the weight of the cloud can no longer sustain itself. then the clouds collapse, and when they collapse, they throw shit everywhere.” the plume’s behavior echoes timothy choy and jerry zee’s (2015, 211) concept of the atmospheric, of “how things lift and settle in mediums.” in fact, this manic cycle of suspension and collapse can play out repeatedly. plume-dominated fires have become more common over the past few decades as drier fuels make for higher-intensity fires and thus greater interactive coupling between these fires and atmospheric conditions. by the mid-2000s, what had previously been an anomaly (armstrong’s “freak incident”) became the norm. armstrong was a first responder for the 2011 las conchas fire, which, like the dome fire, defied behavioral models and assessments. fires usually move with winds, but armstrong noted that the plume-dominated fire at los conchas “burned with greatest intensities and greatest rates of spread against the wind. it actually managed to push its way up against the wind.” this meant that the fire, “with its own internal winds and its own weather system . . . was feeding itself.”8 furthermore, unlike previous fires, the los conchas fire eerily and aggressively “burned into areas where we thought there was absolutely nothing left to burn. it burned through the cerro grande wildfire scar of 2000. it burned through the old dome fire scar of 1996. we could not have predicted that kind of fire behavior.” fire hurricanes the concept of runaway change denotes the changing nature of wildfire formations, whose erratic behaviors can foil emergency responders’ efforts to understand them and respond. not only do these fire behaviors hasten permanent forest loss (walker et al. 2018), they are opening a gap between what is expected and what is encountered that, in armstrong’s mind, is growing too wide to bridge. for him, discrepancies between what fire behavior analysts predict and what emergency workers face reflect a new pathological normal.9 people, including firefighters, need to “get the hell out of the way,” just as they do with hurricanes (presuming they can). i admit that at first i did not know what to do with armstrong’s wildfire/hurricane comparison, but it kept nagging at me. both, i came to realize, are hyperobjects that are “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (morton 2013, 1)—even comparably so in some cases. both are fueled by “gradients in temperature, pressure, or speed that are responsible for their genesis” (de landa 2010, 116) and which, theoretically, can never be reversed. in armstrong’s absurdist image of a hypothetical disaster: “we don’t get out in front of hurricanes with fans, trying to change their direction. we don’t get out in front of tornadoes, trying to turn them around.” indeed, the two hyperobjects are subject to very different forms of physical management: hurricanes are allowed to run their course, wildfire is suppressed (more or less successfully). only in 2017, when i spoke with emergency coastal managers just an hour from my hometown in new jersey, did i start to see other distinctions. unlike fire management, emergency coastal management is a high-tech affair. the decision to evacuate coastal populations is based on a relatively clear and automated signal; as one manager in monmouth county described, it is a “threshold based on the national weather service’s forecasting of tidal surge or tides based off the sandy hook [new jersey] gauge . . . . so, just throwing a number out, if the gauge reads nine and a half feet above mean low or low water at the sandy hook gauge, that triggers my voluntary evacuation of everyone in monmouth county in zone a.” in wildfire management, though, there is never an automatic alarm to signal retreat. as one fire scientist told me: “i don’t think using the term retreat is very popular with firefighters. retreat is seen as a retasking.” one wildland fire specialist told me about an “alarm-bells-going-off-and-you’re-[still]-going sort of mentality.” as he phrased it: “we don’t have a mechanism to say ‘no.’” all these hyperobject comparisons would lead me to other awkward facts: as billions of dollars are being poured into wildfire suppression to protect public lands and private property, the efficacy of suppression is “unknowable in an exact sense” (short 2017, 33)—and yet retreat remains unthinkable. what kinds of logistical orientation to fires-as-hurricanes are occurring under such conditions, and what life-and-death adjustments must be made? in following the path that armstrong set me on, i met fire researchers who, in some cases, are starting from scratch in their attempt to model wildfire behavior and spread. i encountered wildfire-fighter supervisors who, among other things, are now urging workers to shed their “old mental slides,” or once informative guides to fire behavior that are now leading to serious misestimations. this path also included research physiologists who are assessing firefighters’ work performance under (now multiple) days of heat exposure and revising physiological standards to guide recruitment. along the way, i also met research and development engineers redesigning emergency fire shelters—four-pound devices of last resort used by u.s. wildland firefighters when they run the risk of wildfire entrapment. these women and men are experts not because they are masters of a disembodied discourse, but because they are in privileged positions to apprehend runaway change as it unfolds around them and within a critical subset of ecological dynamics.10 as david rojas (2016, 16) has observed in amazonia, experts slowing deforestation cross the nature–culture divide to “immerse themselves in what they felt were irreversible, uncontrollable, and disruptive socioenvironmental transformations.” similarly, for firefighters, there is no ahistorical sense of fire, but fuel trajectories that are remade or distorted. these do not lead to end-of-nature doomsaying but point toward horizons yet ungrasped, without which, to borrow a phrase from nigel clark (2012, 260), “‘our’ agency would be an abstract and orphan presence in the universe.” expertise also indexes nonexpertise, in which biophysical registers of instability and the unappraised aspects of emergency response converge (from the late latin convergere, “to incline together”) to build new capacities. in practice, this means that experts are obliged to find ways—scientific, perceptual, even physiological—of recognizing and pushing against the limits of what is known, or else be pushed up against, or blindsided by, those same limits. in quantifying complex hazards, they objectify situations for which older operational models (and “mental slides”) have proved inadequate. the epistemic horizon at which experts either acquire a foothold or lose it is unstable; their attempts to intervene in socioenvironmental transformations sometimes reveal conditions of futility, and sometimes they produce new insights that can justifiably keep firefighters working and engaging fire. in what follows i explore this instability, this time from the perspective of someone whose assumptions about predictability have been shattered, in part by the experience of entrapment. unlike their counterparts in many other wildfire-prone countries, u.s. wildfire fighters work in immediate proximity to fire. they are trained to remain aware at all times of available escape routes, nearby clearings, and safe spots that have already burned over (called “the black” by firefighters). to minimize the risk of entrapment, particularly when digging out fire barriers (so-called firelines), they are trained to “keep one foot in the black”—that is, to maintain access to a designated safety zone. they deduce the size and location of a safety zone from flame geometries and on the basis of (continually updated) guidelines for how to make these deductions. as changing conditions are more readily felt, these practices of enhanced situated awareness become less reliable. sometimes, there is no black and, with unburned fuels, drought conditions, and rising temperatures, even the black somehow burns. crewmen can lose their way in the shifting smoke and flame, particularly as they depend on others (squad leaders, lookouts, superintendents, and so on) to radio them about what is going on or what to expect next.11 when information is limited or communication breaks down, they must focus on getting to a safety zone or else, in a worst-case scenario, prepare for imminent entrapment and deploy their fire shelters. a fire behavior analyst referred me to his colleague, tony petrilli, a former smokejumper who now works at the forest service’s missoula technology and development center.12 petrilli told me that, in this swirl of onrushing disaster, survival sometimes comes down to a coin flip. yet when a fast-moving wildfire swept through yarnell, arizona in 2013, killing nineteen highly skilled firefighters who had deployed their fire shelters, petrilli told me that there was “no flipping of nothing.” a postaccident investigation of the yarnell hill fire cited surrounding temperatures of over two thousand degrees fahrenheit. the fire surprised the firefighters, who were in a box canyon, which blocked their view of the spread and speed of the fire. as petrilli told me, “fifty-mile-per-hour winds were pushing flames pretty much parallel to the ground [in] a ton of red-flame contact.” the deployment site was “not survivable.” figure 3. test of new fire shelters in canada’s northwest territories. high temperatures melted the aluminum covering, exposing heat-resistant silica cloth. photo courtesy of ian grob/u.s. forest service. petrilli personally survived a major blaze (the 1994 south canyon fire) by deploying a fire shelter. he “went through the porthole,” as he put it, and survived, while fourteen other wildland firefighters did not. my conversations with petrilli made me appreciate how tough it can be for firefighters to even see the same thing when looking at wildfire at very close range (is it moving faster or slower?), when looking at the ground (has it burned out or will it burn?), or when looking into the distance (and then, petrilli told me, “it’s like, boom, here’s the fire”). this perceptual divergence is not unusual, but it can undermine the chance of shared understanding on which coordinated fire management so critically depends: “it’s like trying to . . . no offense to cats, but there are a million ways to skin a cat.” a fellow smokejumper who survived the south canyon fire described its heat like a wave hitting him. add strong winds, falling embers, and choking smoke to this chaotic scene, and the idea of deploying shelters that are “flapping crazily” (national interagency fire center 2014) amid roaring fire seems challenging at best. petrilli and his colleagues redesigned these shelters’ handles to be quickly deployable, and he has made training firefighters in the use of shelters his life’s mission. yet efforts to prepare trainees do not always translate into effective responses in the field. since his near-fatal experience, petrilli has conducted numerous postaccident reviews of fire entrapment cases, where he finds the forensic consequences of the “million ways” of saying “i don’t need [to deploy the shelter] yet.”13 what follows is an excerpt from our conversation as he showed me a video used in wildland fire-safety training courses. some firefighters on the verge of entrapment will still hesitate to deploy their shelters. we were talking about that hesitation as the dread of becoming the subject of a review. ap: is [not deploying the shelter] an ego issue then, like, “i’m going to feel humiliated if i use it?” tp: i wouldn’t call it ego. i would call it: “we’re ok, we’re ok, we’re ok.” ap: ok, meaning? tp: meaning, you’re in your vehicle on sheer ice and you’re spinning around; you’re telling yourself, “you're ok, you’re ok, you’re ok.” you’re ok until you run into another car or off the road. ap: in your forensic reviews of entrapment, what does that look like? do you see evidence of that denial? tp: i see it more like waiting, waiting, waiting. figure 4. still from training video produced by the wildland fire lessons learned center, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myenvpiv1wa. petrilli went on to describe the all-too-common practice of “waiting for facts to emerge . . . when we think objectivity is just down the road.” the short training film we were watching on his computer screen showed what this waiting could look like. the footage was from the 2014 fire in northern california. firefighters were “dozing out a safety zone” when the fire switched directions and came their way. tp: one of the guys had his cell phone video going and it’s like, “the fire’s coming. the fire’s coming. the fire’s coming.” they’re talking about it. they have their fire shelter in their arms. they’re talking about it. and it’s like—as i’m sitting there watching it—it’s like: “ok, how about now? how about now?” ap: tell me what’s going to happen. tp: they’ll live. but they waited until [now]. so the—this guy’s taking photos and the other guy’s taking video. ap: ok. tp: and so this [safety zone] is freshly dozed. you’re starting to get the burning embers. ap: yeah. tp: the fire’s going to cross the trail up here. you see, it’s starting to come. ap: yeah. tp: and that’s a minute later. ap: mm-hmm. whoa! tp: the fire is starting to suck in all the oxygen. ap: you can see that, with all the dust you can—wow. tp: yeah. i mean, it’s coming. i’m ready for them to get in their shelter, right now. ap: and you’re saying, “please get in your shelter.” tp: i mean, you don’t want to yell at people, but come on. ap: but they’re filming away. the time is up, but making self-preservation a common value out of divergent perceptions of reality is hard to do. who will act on first hints and who will hold out for the last fact is not always clear in advance. in this case, in spite of all the stress training, the firefighters are still working in their safety zone; they might believe they are acting on protocol—in this case, digging out a large safety zone even though it still would not be enough. regardless of their motives, images like these provide powerful lessons; they remind viewers that these firefighters are just like “anybody and everybody,” in petrilli’s words, and that “it can be you” who thinks that it isn’t going to be all that bad. tp: you can hear the bulldozer in the background. he’s still plowing around—pushing around. ap: thinking that’s going to work. tp: just trying to make [the safety zone] as big as they can. ap: ok. tp: the bigger, the better. i don’t blame them for that, but now it’s time to call it, and he’s still going. as this work continues, it becomes apparent that the firefighters will soon be entrapped. but right before that, they are following protocol, or in denial, or underestimating the speed of the fire, or relying too heavily on mental slides from previous fires—or all of the above. operationally speaking, petrilli brings the viewer (me) to a precipice at which certain projections fall (or must fall) apart and make way for new intuitions and responses. the philosopher of science gaston bachelard (1964, 6) once wrote that fire is a scene of emotive states, of “rigid mental habits,” of “phobias” and “philias” that cripple the objectivity of a science of fire. what is the point at which perceptions of fire become too variable? for jack cohen, the wildland fire researcher, the fact that it is all of the above (and more) suggests that “we don’t have an intellectual perspective on something that is kind of a big deal: fire.” but defining increments of improvement and creating actionable time in wildfire management are confounded by other factors as well. an awful lot of reality today, wildland fire researchers with the u.s. forest service are going back to the basics of fire, researching mechanisms of wildfire spread and even the properties of ignition. these phenomena seem extremely elementary, stunningly so, especially if one considers that more than half of the forest service’s budget is now focused on fighting fires. but the longstanding fixation with suppression, especially after world war ii, meant that the science of wildfire had limited itself to an image of controllable wildfire. according to the fire behavior scientist mark finney, cold war ballistics experts, who once dominated the relatively small field of u.s. wildfire science, created “hypothetical universes in which fires burn only small, uniform, dead fuels on the forest floor.” yet finney explained that fire does not spread according to averages: “it’s actually the excursions, or the nonsteadiness, that allows fire to spread.” by averaging out nonsteady physics, these models built faulty intuitions, conjuring images of fire that themselves could prompt misjudgments in the field and suboptimal forms of response.14 figure 5. still from video of a fire experiment, showing forward bursting and vertical patterns of flame peaks and troughs. video from “role of buoyant flame dynamics in wildfire spread,” by mark a. finney et al., https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1504498112. i am sitting with finney in his office near the entryway of a two-story building on u.s. highway 10. from here, a quiet hallway leads to a multistory burn chamber, where a palimpsest of experiments have tested or simulated fire ignition, buoyancy, and vorticity. there are used, abandoned, or ready-for-reuse apparatuses everywhere: wind tunnels and a combustion laboratory; one-of-a-kind air torches and a fire whirl simulator—all built over five decades and surrounded by heaps of ignition sources like cut cardboard and shredded wood. highway 10 runs northwest from missoula, past the airport, and merges onto an interstate that soon narrows into winding stretches of valley and high-mountain roads. we are right in the middle of the northern rockies, where fires scorched more than a million acres between march and october of 2017, and where dominant models of fire behavior are losing the power of foresight. figure 6. two views of an ignition experiment showing the flammability of live fuel. image from a 2017 presentation by mark finney at the northern rockies training center. “there is an expression that everyone says,” finney told me, “‘spreads like wildfire.’ yet we don’t even know how wildfires spread.” models of fire spread no longer align with the physical trajectories of fuels. neither does the logic of suppression. the “hypothetical universes” of fire spread have left behind a vacuum and now, fire’s physical worlds confront fire’s hypothetical ones. the wildfire community refers to this sociotechnical aporia as the wildfire paradox, such that “the harder you try to suppress them, the worse they get when they happen.” well-intentioned suppression can create conditions for the next fire, creating new channels in the landscape for wildfires to travel. couple these with armstrong’s harrowing scenes of the things wildfire is not supposed to do—spreading against the wind and even pushing its way up against it; burning into old fire scars and into places fire should not be able to burn—and one arrives at scenes of an almost nuclear devastation to which nothing can return.15 finney asked me the same rhetorical question that armstrong had: “you wouldn’t throw people at hurricanes, right?” when i heard the comparison this time, i became attuned to a particular aspect of acceleration; the rate at which the phenomenon of wildfire was overtaking the techniques of its suppression was such that any human projection of its behavior was bound to fail, with dire consequences for emergency responders. this failure was not lost on bachelard, who pointed to how scientific entities can outrun techniques of their objectification with his concept of the phenomenotechnique.16 in his classic text the psychoanalysis of fire, bachelard (1964, 6) described fire as “a striking immediate object,” but one that is “no longer a reality for science.” the notion of the phenomenotechnique captures how this cognitive dissonance evacuates thought, such that, as finney remarked, “we no longer know what fire is.” wildfire, as a strikingly immediate object, morphs into an array of disruptive unknowns. figure 7. air tanker dropping flame retardant on the 2016 cold fire. photo courtesy of noah berger. in the meantime, complex critical thresholds have been crossed, although the details of such traversals—where and when they occur—are not precisely understood. in the gap between the expected and what actually occurs, the very concept of projection is at stake—trainers tell firefighters to throw away their old mental slides; fire researchers tell their colleagues in the field that they have been looking at fire in the wrong ways; dispatchers tell forest supervisors that there is no one left to recruit to fight fires; engineers seek otherworldly materials to thermally enhance emergency fire shelters. they recently tested materials from nasa designed to thermally protect spacecraft upon atmospheric re-entry, but these materials did not hold up well against fire temperatures on earth. beneath the airshow climate change has been described as a form of violence “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (nixon 2011, 2). since these lines were written, slow climate change has morphed into a multiplier of threat known as abrupt climate change (national academy of sciences 2013). yet this shift in the spatiotemporal registers of threat (or, “the upper limits of bad”) is not necessarily correlated with “existential crisis” or reflected “as a mode of political mobilization” (masco 2017, s65). rather, it can engender more of the same response and greater tolerance for paradoxes and cognitive dissonance. how so? if the wildfire paradox creates new extremes, it normalizes these through a cultural spectacle of suppression. beneath what observers call the “airshow” (erickson 2016) of flame retardant–throwing air tankers and every instrument of suppression available, i found researchers who saw the spectacle of technological promise as illusory, pointing to other spectacles of wholesale loss like massive forest die-offs due to heat and drought, as well as asking hard questions about ecosystem collapse and what mountain, forest, fire scar, or vegetation type might burn next. the airshow metaphor speaks to the way that suppression practices become dissonant with, and even provoke, landscape ignitability and flammability under future climate conditions (abatzoglou and williams 2016). yet the exemplary form of rescue on the table, geoengineering—which promises to reverse the warming effects of greenhouse-gas emissions—furthers a state of dissonance in at least one sense: geoengineering can never reverse what has already happened to earth’s fuels. where new research paths must be forged to get ahead of future climate conditions, technologies themselves can embed cognitive dissonance and varieties of “quitting thinking.” as jack cohen told me, “i’m watching for a reality response, rather than a fatalistic one; an intellectual response, rather than a visceral one.” the former are crucial today because when faced with an actively altering environment, cohen noted, “we will need knowledge of how not to break things even further.” i began this essay with the claim that runaway change is a concept that points not only to changing ecologies but also to a set of broadening disconnects in which there is—in the most general sense—the loss of a foothold. fire researchers saw the wildfire paradox as constricting operability, almost to the point of futility, and occasioning a search for new horizons. along the way, senses of paradox were personally felt. as one observer shared with me: “we focus on safety. go out there and be safe. and the counter to that is, ‘that’s bullshit. you can’t.’” today, such life-or-death dilemmas are informing how wildfire communities negotiate their continued engagement with (or retreat from) wildfire. in understanding these negotiations, we get a glimpse of what it means for an entire emergency sector to unsettle practices, protocols, and even intuitions and judgments that are no longer informative and possibly more jeopardizing. this dynamism is what horizoning is about: amid imperfect information, sustaining spaces for coordinated human action; stepping away from the primacy of prior models and, in doing so, revealing a host of underappreciated social and technical activities—the very material of ethnographic concept work that might, in turn, produce a different sort of projection. as i have suggested throughout this article, an inadequate foothold in changing realities can itself degrade knowledge about the future and the existential threats that are being brought forth. “so there’s not a ton of horizon,” matt jolly said to me. researchers at the fire lab talk about using their insights into changes in fire behavior to avoid diligent insanity (that is, subservience to the tactics of fire suppression) and to work toward “acquiring horizon”—a potential tool for deciding what, in jolly’s words, “we actually are going to do over the next week, not like the next hour.” such a tool would pry time from the pace of runaway change and make futures less remote. in this new proximate time, what cohen calls “visceral” responses (and the anxieties making them difficult to rein in) are tempered, strategy and safety protocols can be updated or rethought. runaway change is thus more than an amalgam of onrushing disasters and hyperobjects. it is also the unsettling transformation of things we thought we knew—old fire scars, live vegetation, california mountains in december that are not supposed to burn—and a constant appeal for a “reality response.” as new ecological trajectories materialize, they form new intersections relative to human and technical time. “climate change is pretty much a done deal for the next several hundred years,” cohen told me, and yet this momentum-driven process poses the prospect of what he called a “massive ecological mistake.” in “gearing up to continue fighting wildfire with more people and more equipment . . . you’re going to see something go away. what i really mean is that we need to act in a way that we are not cutting off options for future generations.” not cutting off options means regarding the future as recoverable while enacting ways to avert its abandonment today. in their efforts, my interlocutors are working to secure enough time to act while avoiding a norm of horizon deprivation. in a recent talk, the russian-american journalist masha gessen (2017) described the situation in her home country, where life is reduced to an eternal present, in terms of “that state of low-level dread where we’re always reacting to the latest outrage.” between the apocalyptic on the one hand and varieties of denialism on the other, horizons cut a different path. they are, after all, instruments—helping humans carve out effective perceptual range and guard against the threat of being blindsided. seafarers, especially in a dense fog or storm, have a special ability to grasp the kinetics of real situations. they register increments of movement using sensory parameters—the smell of a certain forest, certain patterns in tidal waters—and deduce their position vis-à-vis previously estimated locations. this is not a technical fix, but rather a countertechnique: a continual capacity for recalibration, a horizoning that makes good on faulty or fleeting information, allowing forward momentum and preventing the crash (or disappearance) of an entire system (whether a lake, a forest, a boat, or a world). today, the anthropocene stands as a new banner for the impact of human activity on the earth’s ecosystems (crutzen 2002). abrupt ecological change implies a deepening incompatibility between human and geological time scales, understood as a temporally dimensionless invisible present in which only dangerous surprises can emerge. this condition is one of attrition and loss: a situation of “absolute existential improvisation” for selves and a present literally “out of time” (malabou 2012, 2). i have been foregrounding a different set of concerns pertaining to an all-too-real human struggle to maintain responsive capacity relative to an absent object. this struggle is not only about achieving better projections of risk or uncertainty. it is also about cultivating a cognizance of jeopardy faced by entire systems and about recovering the time in which such cognizance becomes actionable rather than obsolete. when destructiveness obliges us to revise knowledge calibrated to conditions that no longer exist, marking horizons beyond which the world as we know it disappears is itself an exercise in delimiting the knowable, and thus livable, world. notes acknowledgments i thank my interlocutors for taking the time to share their work and vision with me. i am grateful to james faubion, dominic boyer, cymene howe, and marcel laflamme, as well as to four anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology for their generous and sharp comments. a special thanks goes to cameron brinitzer and michael joiner for insightful conversation and feedback on this essay, as well as to naomi zucker, paul mitchell, sara rendell, joão biehl, and the audiences with whom i have shared this work. the school for advanced research, the national science foundation, and princeton university’s center for human values have supported my research. 1. in their classic book leviathan and the air-pump, steven shapin and simon schaffer (1985) show how vacuums were only as good as the vacuity their instrumentation generated. as this seventeenth-century conundrum shows, a vacuum is not just an empty space; it is a political and technical achievement in which truths depend on the integrity of their instruments as much as on processes of elimination. 2. an important early contribution to this literature pertained to planetary boundaries as “safe operating spaces” (rockström et al. 2009) for humanity. for a conceptual genealogy of critical threshold science and instability, see petryna and mitchell 2017. 3. in using the term milieu, i draw from historian and philosopher of science georges canguilhem’s (2001) seminal essay “the living and its milieu.” in it, canguilhem demonstrates relations between organisms (the living, le vivant) and the milieu, arguing that each is never what it is without changing the other. yet given a current situation of runaway change, i am somewhat suspicious of canguilhem’s vital optimism as the reimposition of the milieu becomes a pressing question. 4. for example, coastal scientists now believe that hurricane sandy, projected as a nine-hundred-year storm, was, in fact, a fiveto ten-year storm. on the disintegration of projections, see o’reilly, oreskes, and oppenheimer 2012. for an analysis of sandy and the projected return period in coastal flooding analyses, see n. lin et al. 2016. 5. drought and temperature rise help fuel fire, but a hundred-year history of fire suppression has accumulated unburned brush and other dead fuels that are now exploding. 6. with regard to this latter path, i am interested in how assumptions underpinning one type of projection fall apart and give way to new types of measures, truths, and responses. 7. for example, ground fires are transitioning faster to crown fires, in which wildfire rapidly spreads from treetop to treetop. such fires occur in a range of inoperability (currently estimated as 2 percent of fires occurring in the united states) for which, according to jolly, “no matter what you do, you’re not actually going to effect change.” as this range of escape increases, various managers are defining criteria for inoperability to clarify the conditions in which they can act. 8. such fires actually move around based on the areas of highest fuel availability or areas of driest fuels, and do not, therefore, always conform to models of predictable spread. for a sharp analysis of how race and class difference is policed through a politics of nature in new mexico, see kosek 2006. 9. on the concept of malignant normality, see lifton 2017. 10. the question of time and the future has been central to the anthropology of climate change. jerome whitington’s (2013, 308) focus on specific material relations providing grammars of future climatic apprehension goes far in building a vocabulary “for imaginative and evaluative judgment about the subtle yet pervasive changes at work in planetary ecology.” on uncertainty as a mode of anthropological apprehension and a departure from risk-centered scholarship, see samimian-darash and rabinow 2015. along other lines, scholars have reflected on “chronopolitical experiments” (zee 2017, 218) around knowledge production, spatial and temporal strategies with respect to resistance and refusal (ahmann 2017), the demands of “telling time” (howe 2016), and climate change qua emergent forms of life (callison 2014) as challenges to the anthropocene’s unitary planetary timeframe (see also moore 2016). michael fischer’s (2018) analytic of temporal framing as it remakes action within social systems is vital here, as is joão biehl and peter locke’s (2017, ix) account of the “open-endedness of people’s becoming” within these systems. 11. such instructions are based on weather patterns, topography, vegetation, or other changes in fire behavior that may not be immediately apparent to crewmen in the field because of smoke or other visual obstructions. as one firefighter told me: “maybe you can’t see very far and you don’t know what’s going on and you don’t know where the fire is. maybe the fire’s down below you. maybe you’re in a situation where you can’t cover much territory if it starts spotting in on you.” 12. a smokejumper is a wildland firefighter who jumps (with a parachute) into a forest fire for an initial attack. 13. petrilli’s experience and that of his surviving colleagues is recounted in maclean 1999. while most firefighters will never be in a position to use these shelters, postaccident reviewers have found that fallen firefighters sometimes had not recognized that they were in the process of being entrapped. 14. in a 2016 interview, finney told me: “when we take that wrong intuition and we make observations out in the field, in wildland fire settings, we can easily misinterpret what’s going on.” on fundamental discoveries about the mechanisms of wildfire spread, see finney et al. 2015. 15 megafires recurring at more frequent intervals also invite further scenes of degradation, hindering postfire recovery and often leaving “only bare dirt and tree stumps” (heyck-williams, anderson, and stein 2017, 4). 16 bachelard first used this concept to analyze the birth of a new science, microphysics (castelão-lawless 1995). on phenomenotechnique as “part thing, part theorem,” see rheinberger 2010, 27. on the phenomenotechnique designating phenomena that are “constituted by the material setting of the laboratory,” see latour and woolgar 1986, 64. on environmental disaster and abrupt climate change as new phenomena that eclipse these material settings, see petryna 2013 and 2015. references abatzoglou, john t., and a. park williams 2016 “impact of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire across western u.s. forests.” proceedings of 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2: 215–41. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.06. attuning to the chemosphere attuning to the chemosphere: domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime nicholas shapiro chemical heritage foundation the air was rich with extrasensory material. nearer to death, nearer to second sight. —don delillo, white noise during a six-month stay in a travel trailer in rural oklahoma, a three-year-old developed small red dots on the backs of her ears, began bruising more easily, and walked through the world more clumsily, constantly toppling over. an older indiana woman descended into a fog of “fuzzy thinking” and felt that her body was deteriorating at a slightly accelerated rate. a middle-aged man in ohio sustained a “sick stuffy nose” and “throat problems” for a year and a half. eye and respiratory-tract irritation, headaches, insomnia, and fatigue slowly crept into the body of a single father in rural florida. his dreams, which became increasingly menacing over a matter of months, abated in intensity only when he slept next door at his grandparents’ house. the stool of a nurse in texas gradually loosened in consistency. a police officer in washington state almost entirely ceased eating as his sense of taste began to dull. his wife, experiencing the same sensorial skewing, doused her food with large quantities of salt and noted the “weird air” in their home. the people above, and those who fill this article, began developing subtle and ongoing alterations to their physical constitution after spending time in a home that would eventually be suspected of harboring elevated levels of airborne formaldehyde. their apprehension of conventionally insensible domestic chemical exposures was informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alterations of somatic function and atmosphere. recent attempts to theorize the body tacitly employ the terminology of airborne chemical exposures to explain the body’s relation to the world. indeed, scholars have described the ancillary processes of being a living body as becoming sensitive, embodying atmospheres, somatically judging environments, or becoming corporeally aware of nonhumans (sloterdijk 2011; latour 2004; anderson 2009; berlant 2011; stewart 2011). in this article i argue that these affective processes of attending to the minute aberrations of the body and atmosphere are the primary means of discerning protracted and low-level encounters with domestic chemicals. further, the tracking of small changes to body and atmosphere across time and space can accumulate into a process i call the “chemical sublime,” which elevates minor enfeebling encounters into events that stir ethical consideration and potential intervention. the chemical sublime is both an experience and a practice that emerges out of late industrial material ecologies, one that inverts dominant conceptions of the sublime that hang heavy with enlightenment-era baggage. in contrast to the long-prevailing formulation, the chemical sublime does not quell spectacular material threats with the transcendence of immaterial reason, thereby affirming human distinction and existing social orders. rather, in the process i document, indistinct and distributed harms are sublimated into an embodied apprehension of human vulnerability to and entanglements with ordinary toxicity, provoking reflection, disquiet, and contestation. at room temperature, the formaldehyde-based adhesives that hold together the plywood walls, particleboard subfloors, hardboard cabinetry, and carpet backings of the average american home slowly exhale chemical vapors into interior breathing space. without a cracked window, an opened door, or other forms of air exchange, these silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home. houseplants slowly filter out a fraction of the ambient chemical load as they absorb toxicants and assimilate benign formaldehyde metabolites into regular cellular function. a host of microorganisms that inhabit the soil surrounding plant roots avail themselves of formaldehyde vapors as a source of life-sustaining carbon (kim et al. 2008). the respiration of avian, feline, canine, and human inhabitants also removes formaldehyde from the air. yet as formaldehyde vapors enter these bodies they are absorbed by the mucus membranes of the nasopharynx and lungs, bind to dna and proteins, disrupt cellular functions, and are quickly dismantled. in the process of metabolism formic acid is produced, yielding the possibility of acid-base imbalance and a range of systemic effects (atsdr 2014). these slight biochemical impressions, which at first appear simply meaningless or puzzling, accumulate in the bodies of the exposed and reorient them to the molecular constituents of the air and the domestic infrastructure from which such chemicals emanate. it is through the articulation of these small corrosive happenings that residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes. the somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological, referred to herein as “bodily knowledge” and situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from. sustained bodily reasoning gives rise to the chemical sublime, and together they offer a response to kim fortun’s (2012) call for ways to differently know and reimage our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climatic, and infrastructural instability. the domestically exposed attune to their own effects and affects as a means of further discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment. this is not a practice confined to the “deviant agents” of those afflicted by multiple chemical sensitivity (alaimo 2010, chapter 5; murphy 2006, 173; kroll-smith and floyd 1997, 10) or of those with diagnosed pathophysiologies like asthma. rather, these molecular and relational appreciations arise from a somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity common to human life—and often informed by nonhuman life.1 by definition toxics bear “a potency that can directly implicate the vulnerability of a living body” (chen 2012, 203), and it is by virtue of this very capacity to be chemically wounded, even minutely so, that bodies bear revelatory power. this article unfolds across increasing durations of atmospheric formaldehyde exposure. the tip of the iceberg is my own encounter with exposures in the field. much of this ethnography was conducted through the haze of indoor-air-quality-induced befuddlement. during the first hour spent in houses with suspected indoor air-quality issues, i would slowly develop an ache in the back of my eyes, which would with time spread throughout my skull. i repeatedly found myself struggling to resist a physical desire to expedite interviews as my mind felt increasingly woolly, my focus slipped, and my lines of inquiry lost their direction. time and the flow of my thoughts became viscous.2 my energy would bottom out, but my eventual sleep was wracked with restlessness.3 the spaces to which i was supposed to be most attuned were the spaces in which i felt most cognitively unhinged. yet as much as ethnography is “a method of being at risk in the face of practices and discourses into which one inquires” (haraway 1997, 190), it is also a method of understanding how sheltered the ethnographer is even within such exposures. a molecule of formaldehyde does not strike my lungs in the same way it does those who have endured months or years of exposure—for whom its effects are biochemically magnified and semiotically enflamed. while my exposures may have intimated the costs of apprehending chemical others, my impairments proved ephemeral and the stakes of my somatic cognizance comparatively negligible. to indulge in a “radical empirical” impulse (jackson 1989), to gesture toward the evidentiary potential of my own body, would be to distract from all of the privileges of research that make my own exposure anomalous within the highly patterned landscape of domestic exposures across the united states. almost all of my work took place in manufactured homes, a mainstay of low-to-moderate-income homeownership, which harbor four times the ambient formaldehyde of conventional site-built homes (coehha 2001). my interlocutors who resided in factory-built housing could be variously classified as elderly, poor, disabled, tenuously employed, or native. in these cases formaldehyde concentrations were both indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity. as will become evident in the first ethnographic section, new homes, newly renovated homes, and tightly sealed so-called green homes also cultivate elevated formaldehyde levels, as the biopolitical circuits that expose some in the name of sheltering others are not without their leakages (murphy 2006, 111). i begin by situating this article in the space between theoretical work on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposures. in the following section i unfold the specific affects of a domestic chemical assessment scientist, an analysis that contributes to a growing literature on the body as part of the existential, pedagogical, and ethical grounds of cultures of science (masco 2004; myers 2008; helmreich 2009). my purview then widens to discuss the larger sensorium of corporeal domestic air-quality perception and the instrumental use of sensitized bodies to identify the sources of domestic chemical exposure. across authoritative and questioned bodies, companion species and humans, i ask: in what ways do diffuse sensory practices generate knowledge of, attention to, and engagements with everyday materials? how can expanding the avenues and temporality of sensing yield an appreciation of what many of us are abbreviating from our own sense of the world? attuning to the chemosphere formaldehyde is a nearly ubiquitous chemical in the domestic environment. it seeps from the very engineered woods that give much of contemporary domestic space its comfort, security, and affordability. the chemical holds the colors of upholstered furniture, adds strength to insulation, and enhances the texture of cosmetics in addition to its less deliberate environmental presence as a residue of incomplete combustion (from automobiles to cigarettes). the substance suffuses the economy to such an extent that an industry trade association asserts, “the production and use of formaldehyde accounts for five percent of the u.s. gross national product—about $500 billion per year” (acc 2013). just as in the case of major financial institutions, the chemical’s bonds are so diverse and far-reaching that the potential toxicity of formaldehyde is too big to face head on. not only the practical and procedural conventions of science yield difficulties in capturing the harms of chronic low-level exposure. governmental regulators, stakeholders in chemical economies, and unwitting discursive allies—such as those advancing the pharmaceuticalization of environmental illness etiologies—also actively unknow its injury through a protean array of technical, methodological, and legal maneuvers (shapiro 2014). formaldehyde is not only synthesized at industrial scales; trace amounts of the chemical, as a metabolic by-product, are produced on a cellular level by all organic life forms. formaldehyde’s presence in late industrial domestic ecologies is neither reducible to a natural and endogenous element of carbon-based life, as industry would have it, nor is it an absolute toxin—a completely alien agent leached from modernity’s amenities and trespassing into virgin bodies. thus bodily knowledge of ambient formaldehyde concentrations translates into recognition of a substance that is always already part of the chemical makeup of bodies, but whose specific concentrations indicate how desires for shelter, the solutions to housing demand posed by industrial capitalism,4 and toxic atmospheres are embroiled in a complex give-and-take. as a starting point, my focus on the embodied apprehension of residential formaldehyde vapors documents the ways in which bodies become, in the words of the cultural philosopher peter sloterdijk (2009, 99), “differently-attuned, differently-enveloped, and differently–air conditioned” by way of mundane chemicals and the atmospheres they animate. beyond chronicling how bodies are materially and affectively caught up in the breathing spaces of the built environment, i seek to ethnographically elucidate the “somatic modes of attention” that render minute exposures knowable (csordas 1993). as lauren berlant (2011, 15) has noted, “bodies are continuously busy judging their environments and responding to the atmospheres in which they find themselves” (see also latour 2004, 206). bodies are sites for both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of humans and nonhumans. figure 1. couple recovering from domestic chemical exposure. oklahoma, march 2012. photo by akasha rabut. the apprehension of domestic toxins is a matter of life and slow death, mediated by patho-logical bodily processes. kathleen stewart (2005, 1024) has written incisively on this dialectic of bodily harm and bodily knowledge: “the body consumes and is consumed. like one big pressure point, it is the place where outside forces come to roost.” the various processes of corporeal judging, numbing, sensitizing, absorbing, attending, consuming, and responding are part and parcel of the pervasive bodily practices that stewart (2011) encapsulates in the phrase “atmospheric attunement” (see also anderson 2009; choy 2012). such attunements, in relation to the case at hand, facilitate becoming with and orienting toward the molecular constituents of domestic chemospheres (ahmed 2006; haraway 2007), without a necessary knowledge of exactly what chemicals they are attuning to. like learning to become sensitive to environmental change, becoming unaffected too requires work. that my fieldwork was predominated by women’s accounts not only resulted from the feminization of body care, domestic care, health care–seeking, and self-monitoring for bodily dysfunctions (murphy 2006, 173; ore 2011, 281). it not only results from the likely increased exposure to domestic chemicals encountered in the course of many of these labors. the absence of men from my fieldwork stems from their active indifference to slight somatic abnormalities. a majority of the men i spoke with consigned bodily decay to the unavoidable process of aging as a means of rejecting the possibility that their bodies were permeable or vulnerable to chemical harm, thus also rejecting threats to masculine self-images (waldman 2012, 130–33). in this way the attunement to and denial of toxicity constitutes and is constituted by normative gender roles. the question at hand is not who is becoming affected, but how. phenomenological studies of pollution, environment, and well-being primarily direct their analytical attention to olfaction (auyero and swistun 2009; brant 2008; fletcher 2005; jackson 2011; reno 2011). these studies bring into crisp relief the intimate place-making and place-disrupting capacity of smells and highlight the way in which we often take displeasing scents as the primary indicators of environmental contamination. yet the respiration of airborne chemicals does not end at the nose. the diffuse embodiment of inhaled, and especially chronically inhaled, chemicals as they seep deep into bodies and spur cascades of minor and often-latent disruptions remain largely uninvestigated ethnographically.5 smells, whether off-putting or alluring, are most pronounced at the crossings of thresholds and then, over time, recede from perception as they become incorporated into new sensorial norms. as one’s scent sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation, ongoing and low-level exposures become ordinary and perceptually undetectable (dalton and wysocki 1996)—if such exposures even crested scent detection thresholds in the first instance.6 although many episodic exposure events—from landfills to hydrocarbon-extraction activities—are announced by pungent odors, the limits of what joshua reno (2011) refers to as “olfactory epistemology” are often viscerally clear to the chronically exposed, as a middle-aged woman in detroit facing persistent industrial emissions announced in an air pollution community forum in june 2013: “the state deq [department of environmental quality] says ‘we depend on you and your smell to tell us when something is in the air,’ but the thing is, after a while that stuff wears you down and your senses stop working anymore. i know that in my body there’s some of that [pollution] in my system. it mess up your mind, it mess up your whole system.” over time her olfactory perception of contamination dulled, while alterations in the quality of her thoughts and slight systemic aberrations continued to signal exposure. following two years of ethnographic fieldwork on chronic domestic chemical exposures throughout a dozen u.s. states,7 i have come to the conclusion that such microscopic encounters are most readily sensed by less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices. bodies are often embroiled in sensing the world well before cognition catches wind of protracted chemical encounters. this argument runs counter to a pioneering analysis of women’s “exposure experiences” in which the authors assert that “in the case of household pollutants and chemical body burden, science has been the primary means through which embodied and indoor pollution have been ‘discovered’” (altman et al. 2008, 419). beyond scents and science, i claim that the attuned body is the primary substrate of domestic formaldehyde exposure discovery. bodies are sensors that indicate the presence of toxicants and, in some cases, specify their atmospheric concentration with uncanny precision. the empirical matter that fills this article is intended to challenge the confidence that we often place in our own ability to know when we have sensed something and when we have not. exposures slowly and invisibly emanating from the formaldehyde-based engineered woods that give form to domestic space require an attentiveness to how human bodies reveal imperceptible chemical exposures with their own subclinical wounding. in these affective spaces, “at the very limit of the phenomenal” (clough 2009, 51), the somatic precedes and then is entangled with the rational, a mingling of mind and body that bucks the standard psychosomatic dismissal of low-level chemical complaints in which mental factors cause or aggravate bodily issues. my account draws on a deep phenomenology of bodily formaldehyde detection that focuses on visceral and indeterminate sensorial facilities, rather than on mere smell. the latter may serve as an intimation of a wide variety of exposures, but it is not the epistemic basis for chemical knowledge of everyday, ongoing, and low-level intoxication. body meter in february 2011, linda kincaid responded by email to a call for participants for my study of the experiences of domestic chemical exposure. an environmental activist had forwarded the call to what she refers to as her “formaldehyde list.” the list comprises a broad array of individuals interested in formaldehyde, many of whom have personally felt its effects—from former fema trailer residents,8 to consumers concerned about the broad range of products made with formaldehyde and, evidently, industrial hygienists. linda has worked as an industrial hygienist—a scientific profession charged with the responsibility of assessing, controlling, and communicating environmental hazards—since 1991 and holds a master's degree in public health from the university of california, berkeley. the immediacy of her interest in domestic formaldehyde was derived not only from the elevated chemical levels registered by her monitoring equipment in the homes of her residential clients, but further by her own symptoms of exposure, which maintained a grip on her after returning from the field. before meeting in person in suburban los angeles to attend one of her formaldehyde home inspections and to learn to use a real-time formaldehyde meter, we spoke at length on the phone. linda had only become interested in domestic formaldehyde exposure in the past few years. when she received her first phone call from a family that suspected their home was making them sick, she reacted with skepticism. “what are you talking about?,” she thought to herself, but a quick literature review soon revealed that common domestic formaldehyde levels could give rise to the reported symptoms. linda’s attention was piqued. as a pet project, she began to amass a small arsenal of portable real-time formaldehyde meters. yet the vast majority of her work continued to be for the semiconductor and solar industries, and the irregular flow of clients with residential concerns could not sate linda’s blooming curiosity about the magnitude of domestic chemical contamination. after developers swiftly rejected her offers to test new subdivisions for free, she saw clandestine testing of open houses as her only option for gauging the prevalence of elevated residential formaldehyde. she set out to new unoccupied homes by herself on free weekends, with the intake hose of her interscan 4160 formaldehyde meter timidly cresting the lip of her purse:9 it was really kind of a lark. can i find elevated formaldehyde in homes? is it going to be one in ten? . . . within a few weeks i came to realize that there was a problem here. there is a huge problem here. i was getting the kinds of concentrations that they found in the fema trailers, and these are not trailers; these are high-end silicon valley homes. and i started noticing that homes in one city in particular had seriously raised formaldehyde as compared to others . . . every house i went into had really pretty high formaldehyde, and i would have a headache and have trouble sleeping that night and toss and turn all night long. i’d be exhausted the next day, and when i did other communities it seemed that the formaldehyde wasn’t as high and i didn’t have those responses to the same degree or maybe not at all. as linda began to log higher levels with her formaldehyde meter, she also began to log increased levels within her body. her symptoms signaled elevated chemical levels as clearly as the lcd readouts of her assessment technologies. in embodying the invisible gas, she utilized not one of the standard human sensory faculties but a calibrated, yet diffuse, awareness to aberration. she attuned to the irregular physical state of her neurochemistry. appraisals of her clients’ homes would often turn back to her own body. when i asked about the curious symptom of intensified dreams that her clients reported,10 her first reaction was to describe her own corroborating experience: “and those were one of my symptoms too; it doesn’t seem to happen to everybody. it absolutely is one of my symptoms. it is guaranteed. if i am in a house with 50–70 ppb [parts per billion] formaldehyde, i will have the utterly weird, bizarre, freaky terrifying nightmares and that is very consistent. it is not something that happens to me normally, so when it does happen it really stands out.” linda highlights her symptoms after merely an hour of exposure, bearing corporeal witness to long-term low-level chemical exposure disorders that have been historically disqualified as (female) psychogenic illness (murphy 2006). her repeated experiences in combination with her monitoring equipment lend credence to individual and isolated complaints on the scale of reproducible and scientifically observed phenomena. it is guaranteed. despite the short duration of linda’s exposures, she can surmise formaldehyde levels with extreme precision. in the above quotation, she asserts that she can sequence the onset of exposure symptoms down to a margin of error of about twenty parts per billion. in liquid terms, that is roughly equivalent to determining the difference between fifty and seventy drops of formaldehyde diluted in a small railroad tanker or 250 chemical drums. in temporal terms, such accuracy is comparable to a margin of error of a minute when measuring durations over the course of a century. at first blush, the exactitude of her body-meter-air attunement appears to border on the uncanny, if not the impossible. the ability to discern such infinitesimally small differences in atmospheric concentration does not derive from a supernatural capacity on linda’s part. rather, such perceptivity results from a mundane monitoring of both repeated bodily irregularities and the levels of formaldehyde found by her meter. these practices are born out of standard scientific method, professional curiosity, everyday corporeal awareness, and openness to being affected. linda’s embodied awareness to biochemical aberration does not lie beyond the realm of toxicological plausibility.11 as “the exact mechanism of action of formaldehyde toxicity is not clear” (atsdr 2014, 5), the aspect of this process that remains inexplicable relates to the limits of toxicological knowledge, and not a mythic extrasensory perception. operating in tandem with her real-time formaldehyde meters, linda’s body viscerally logged the chemical exposures of the houses she visited. over time, she calibrated an understanding of toxic effects to the outputs of her instrumentation, a process of indwelling both the indoor atmosphere and the meter. scientific instrument and soma evaluated their immediate surroundings in accord. it is through this environmental and technical incorporation that linda dilates her being-in-the-world (merleau-ponty 2012) and harnesses the relational-cum-epistemic utility of her body to understand the potentials of domestic chemical exposure, a process i have alluded to with the phrase “bodily reasoning.” the chemical sublime writing on an antithetical technoaesthetic encounter—the first detonations of nuclear weapons in the deserts of new mexico—joseph masco (2004, 4) observed that “the weapon scientist’s body [was] the most important register of the power of the bomb.” the irradiation, shock wave, and ensuing firestorm of humankind’s most lethal weaponry evoked reverence and bodily fear in onlooking male scientists as some were knocked to the ground, flash-blinded, or felt the blast bore into their being. for weapons scientists, the modest or ephemeral bodily traumas of the bomb’s destructive might were, in a slightly masochistic fashion, the pleasures of a successful experiment. in the shadow of the world’s first mushroom cloud, masco posits, these bittersweet affects melted into a “nuclear sublime.” this highly specific version of the sublime propelled some scientists into nuclear disarmament campaigns, while others reveled in a feeling that approached divinity. sublime is not simply an adjective or noun denoting a characteristic or state of grandeur or awe. in chemistry, sublime is also a verb, invoked when substances transform from a solid directly to a gas, bypassing the intermediate liquid form. formaldehyde used in the fabrication of pressed woods, for instance, slowly sublimates at temperatures above −2 °f. in contrast to the spectacular, brutal, and lightning-fast sensorial pummeling that afflicted early nuclear weapons scientists, a multitude of diminutive formaldehyde plumes drifted into linda’s lungs at the sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and regular human breathing. the constituent effects of what could be summarized as the chemical sublime were often subtle and crept into linda’s consciousness at a snail’s pace. the cognitive force of her discovery was not “directly proportional to the danger involved in the experiential event” as masco (2004, 3) avers, reading immanuel kant (2000). formaldehyde’s presence in domestic space was not signaled by overwhelming sensory stimuli, but rather indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded. the interference of air-quality-induced illness is received as a phenomenological transmission of its own right (fortun 2003, 186). the sensorial noise of illness is the signal of domestic chemical exposure and the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air. the magnitude of the issue of domestic chemical exposure revealed itself in piecemeal fashion—gleaned from the repeated toxic encounters of an attuned body, rather than patently imposed by a singular event like a mushroom cloud erupting into the stratosphere and tossing scientists to the ground. for linda, the prevalence of elevated formaldehyde gradually accumulated into a technical and embodied awareness of residential chemical exposure that dwarfed her by its scale. within a few weeks i came to realize that there was a problem here. there is a huge problem here. the form of the chemical sublime highlights the gendered assumptions undergirding masco’s and kant’s privileging of sublimity’s correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events over the profundity and density of widespread private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena.12 the velocity of the epochal nuclear sublime is diametrically opposed to that of the mundane chemical sublime, yet they maintain a common substrate of experience—the bodies of scientist witnesses. linda’s body was a vital register of both the chemicals that suffused domestic space and their specific concentration. the chemical process of sublimation, the elevation of state from solid to vapor, is mirrored by linda’s somatic process of epistemic elevation, of corporeally validating her clients’ symptoms and heightening her own bodily analytics. if bodily reasoning is the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained, the chemical sublime is the accrual of bodily reasoning to the point of articulating the patterned practices and infrastructures that distribute pockets of exposure across space. it is the traversing of a threshold of chemical awareness whereby the irritations of one’s immediate environment become agitations to apprehend and attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructures. the chemical sublime thus exerts what mel chen (2012, 211) calls the “queer productivity of toxicity and toxins” that demands additional forms of labor. linda approached the city council of san jose, california, in the summer of 2009 as its members were on the verge of passing a building ordinance that required new homes to be certified as “green” by sealing them more tightly, a measure that would likely result in higher domestic formaldehyde levels.13 linda proposed an addendum requiring green homes to be tested and meet indoor air-quality standards. she offered to render those services for free to demonstrate that she held no financial conflicts of interest. her proposal was met by a smear campaign financed by the formaldehyde council, an industry-funded interest group, which commissioned scientific assaults on her findings. linda’s assertions about widespread domestic toxicity put her “at risk for future litigation,”14 as systems of commercial asset protection transformed her effort to mitigate systemic exposure risks into legal, scientific status, and financial risks on an individual level. her data were then ignored and her motion scrapped. the formaldehyde levels logged by linda’s instrumentation were well in excess of government-recommended thresholds, yet her findings failed to crest prevailing thresholds of significance. why the visceral pull of the chemical sublime does not translate to a resounding ethical call—why linda’s assertions were so easily rebuffed—is not only the result of industry’s mobilization of law, science, and capital. we must also look to how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least the dawn of the enlightenment. while the full history extends well beyond the scope of this article, it will suffice to texture the chemical sublime by digging deeper into how it diverges from the kantian root of masco’s nuclear sublime. in kant’s (2000) conception, the immensity or might of the sublime first overwhelms our imaginative capacity or indicates the fragility of the human body, yielding a sense of helplessness and distress. this diminutive feeling is then countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one’s self of the power of the mind, by the belief that reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world. the internal tumult and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason. quintessential of the enlightenment project, kant’s sublime outlines a process by which intellectual mastery dominates the threats of the material world and indicates humanity’s continued progression. as the critical theorist gene ray (2004, 10) asserts, “the ideological function of the aesthetic category of the sublime within kant’s critical system is anxiously bound up with . . . deep metaphysical optimism.” the optimism of the sublime serves to affirm existing power orders—to justify the optimist credo of “whatever is, is right”—even in the face of mass calamity, such as the great lisbon earthquake of 1755 that fascinated kant and haunts his analytic of the sublime. the chemical sublime is sharply distinct from kant’s formulation of the sublime in at least four ways: the form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure, the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter), orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa), and political reckoning. unlike in the case of kant, who relished the sublime while collecting reports on the great lisbon earthquake from his east prussian home, the objects of the chemical sublime cannot be held at a distance. as the practice of bodily reasoning makes clear, the material transformations of the body are inseparable from intellectual processes of molecular deduction. an extended absorption of toxicants is not a situation that can be transcended by way of a feeling of rational control. the sublimation of toxic bodily reasoning does not form part of a mental mastery over perceived threats—intellectually closing off their danger. rather, it constitutes a sensuous reasoning that indicates how open our bodies are and amplifies—rather than extinguishes—the tensions, agitations, and dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards. it is the coalescing of underrecognized disturbances rather than a compensation for those that overtly disturb—the beginning of a confrontation, not its resolution. as unfathomably common industrial chemicals warp, distort, and decay human and nonhuman bodies alike, they corrode the optimism and anthropocentrism of the enlightenment. instead of “transforming the worst into the best” (lyotard 1988, 41) as a foil of human triumph, the chemical sublime is a condensation of vaporous displeasures and a way of being deeply moved by the latent toxicity of industrial human progress. although linda’s attempt to effect change has ended in a way that is well recited within the contemporary history of toxic contamination (boudia and jas 2014), the way it began makes for a less recited story. it is a story that bears on how the chemical sublime can attend to the decentralized crises of the contemporary moment and that gives rise to the potentiality of living otherwise. bodies of evidence the chemically aware body is not only borne out of profession and curiosity as in linda kincaid’s case. more often than not, bodily knowledge of chemical others derives from the necessity of cohabiting with toxins, as was the case with harriett mcfeely and her husband, dick, who live in a modular home on the outskirts of a small town in nebraska. in the spring of 2011, i traveled to stay and speak with the mcfeelys, who claim to have endured more than two decades of domestic formaldehyde exposure. before harriett got access to free formaldehyde tests from the sierra club, and before formaldehyde had been introduced to her as a possible perpetrator, she was near the end of her rope. in twenty years of inhabitation, she had slowly developed constant diarrhea, a runny nose, fatigue, severe eye irritation, double (occasionally triple) vision, the need to read with one eye shut, headaches, a sense of taste that skewed toward metallic or simply “strange,” and numerous other symptoms.15 with resurgent exasperation she recounted her dogs getting sick and dying one after the other, while her and her husband’s health steadily deteriorated. her doctor received her complaints with skepticism and an implied diagnosis of hypochondria: “they couldn’t find out what’s wrong in my body, so they thought i was crazy. that’s the only answer.” harriett first began suspecting the house as the source of her family’s collective illnesses in 2002 when she left home for five days and her vision cleared and other symptoms subsided. again in 2007 she left the house for three days and her ailments abated. she then ruled out domestic radon exposure, carbon dioxide, sewer gas, black mold, and water contamination.16 her last-ditch attempt to ascertain the etiology of her family’s illnesses was to invite a friend of a friend, named nancy shoemaker, who suffered from multiple chemical sensitivities. harriett hoped that nancy would use her chemical susceptibility to pick up where her own bodily knowledge left off by divining the specific source of their health issues within the home. nancy, who spoke with delicate and slightly nervous poise, had developed chemical sensitivity at an early age, while attending beauty school in nebraska. nearly every morning when sterilizing the styling utensils, nancy would lose consciousness and collapse. she had to drop out and readjust her dream of becoming a beautician. nancy did not think much of her fainting spells until years later when she moved to florida, where she and her husband took up residency in a trailer. after moving into the trailer, her sensitivities dramatically escalated, but not only at home. a whiff of cologne on the street or shaking hands with someone wearing a transparent band-aid could be enough to wilt nancy to the ground. her body became jarringly attuned to the vast chemical infusion of the world around her. as a result of these continual chemical encounters, she learned to move through the world with caution. when barefoot at home she would cross sections of linoleum with circumspection, unsure of the daily caprice of her sensitivities. her corporeal vulnerability to chemical vapors or direct contact is not spread uniformly throughout her body. as a high-frequency exposure site, an extra-sensitive area in the center of nancy’s palm became more acutely affected with time. nancy took advantage of the embodied insights of her palm and tacitly honed its reactivity. she now uses her palm to assess the hazard of the various materials and spaces that she encounters in daily life. as she spoke, her gaze turned down to her hands, and she ran her right index finger in circles around the area on her left hand. “if i put something on that sensitive spot or touch something with that sensitive spot, i can tell if i can handle it at that time or not.” to manage anxiety about her emergent reactivity, nancy developed a deeper literacy of the chemical world by way of a deeper literacy of her own body. “i know about formaldehyde and i’d never done anything like [what i did] with harriett,” she explained, “but i knew how formaldehyde affected me.” she averred an amassing of somatic knowledge about formaldehyde via years of enduring its effects and affects—through dozens of fainting spells, bouts of wooziness, enervating weakness, and daily somatic tests of the material things that populate her world. it was with the sensitive spot in her hand that nancy began to assess the chemical constitution of harriett’s home, as an alternative to expensive and inaccessible scientific instrumentation. sitting in her small and immaculate assisted-living apartment, nancy recounted the process: “and so i went into the different rooms and i tested the carpet and doors. . . . i went into the kitchen, and i just grabbed hold to open the cabinet or something. i don’t think i touched it very long. . . .” at that point in the story, nancy lost consciousness. harriett observed nancy clutch her stomach and let out a groan. the color dropped from nancy’s face as she dropped to the floor and began to seize. harriett’s boston terrier, bowser, ran into the room to investigate the commotion and curled into a fit of seizing as he approached nancy. the two lay there next to each other on the carpet, gripped by spasms, for a few moments before harriett and her husband dragged nancy outside. bowser continued to convulse in the kitchen. the dog came to within an hour but remained disoriented, running into the furniture, walls, and doors. figure 2. a photocopied entry of the records kept by harriett mcfeely, showing photos of bowser the dog and notes. bowser’s body and disposition index the presence of otherwise-invisible chemicals. nancy gradually regained her composure over the course of half an hour. after she felt well enough, she went on her way, confident that she had found at least one source of the mcfeelys’ suffering. as unnerving as the experience was, harriett also felt relieved that nancy had validated her suspicion that chemicals were quietly emanating from her home. with an affirmative nod harriett emphasized the instrumentality and accuracy of nancy’s body: “in my opinion, that lady is like a human geiger counter.” of course harriett, and all exposed and affected bodies, also bears this capacity to make manifest the chemical world, albeit in less eventful ways. some bodies exclaim while others speak in hushed tones. in domestic chemical exposures, bodies are both the means of apprehension and the site of damage. bodies uncover invisible toxins with their wounding. humans and their nonhuman companions serve as their own canaries in the unwitting coal mines of residential america. a month after nancy’s visit, harriett’s fifth dog in twenty years had to be put to sleep after he became wracked with near-constant seizures. as of june 2015, the mcfeelys have lost two more dogs to similar ailments. figure 3. the dog owned by the mcfeelys at the time of the author’s visit to the site of nancy’s seizure. hastings, nebraska, april 2011. photo by nicholas shapiro. like linda, harriett felt the pull of the chemical sublime. she felt the attrition in her own body and monitored the bodily ailments of her dogs and her husband. in line with what the sociologist phil brown (1997) has called “popular epidemiology,” or the lay appropriation of expert means of environmental health assessment (see also murphy 2006, 62), harriett sought to comprehend the systemic nature of such exposures. harriett wrote letters to the editors of newspapers in five or six nearby towns. her short notes, published in 2008, read: “modular home owners, have you had any health problems? have your indoor pets had any mysterious illnesses? please write or call me.” phone calls began rolling in, one after another. harriett began to systematically survey respondents. she asked those who called her how long they had been living in their home and what their symptoms were. she surveyed thirty individuals from thirteen different households throughout nebraska. respondents supplied thirty-two different symptoms that they perceived to be correlated to the occupation of their modular home, ranging from unusual thirst to cancer. harriett further inquired about indoor pet health and recorded the symptomatology of fifteen animals in seven households. she was able to garner funds for formaldehyde test kits from the sierra club and tested respondents’ homes. seven of the thirteen homes tested had levels of formaldehyde in excess of the world health organization’s maximum recommended exposure for half an hour—81 parts per billion. harriett mails copies of her data, adorned with a row of skulls and crossbones along the spreadsheet’s bottom border, to anyone who may be able to help. harriett made her husband promise that a thorough autopsy would be performed on her if she were to “drop dead” before him. shifting her stone-faced gaze over to me, she asserted with certainty that the decomposition of their dogs’ bodies served as a herald of her and her husband’s future. “i would bet you a hundred thousand dollars that if they did an autopsy on us today, i would bet money that it is exactly like the dogs.’” harriett implies that their domestic exposures have reduced her and her husband to the walking dead, that a postmortem examination could rightfully be performed on them at any time. a grim suggestion, perhaps, but one that is representative of many of the persevering residents of potentially chemically contaminated homes. as evinced by harriett’s perceived imminent autopsy, sustained chemical exposures beckon death, but they also render death ambiguous. she takes the logic of bodily reasoning to its conclusion: if wounding intimates the source of harm, then death will surely disclose its ultimate truth. coming to corporeally comprehend one’s environment does not always have consequences as severe as in harriett’s case. residents of potentially contaminated homes i met across the united states gradually became aware of minor departures from their normal sense of taste, sense of balance, clarity of thought, memory, durability of skin, or frequency of contracting colds. occasionally, inhabitants did not claim even the slightest deviation from their typical physical state. they only recognized atmospheric irritation as an altogether-indistinct feeling. as one north dakota man noted, “something about the air in here doesn’t seem quite right.” or as a woman living on a reservation in the northwest observed, “in the middle of the day it gets weird air and i open the doors.” while slightly suboptimal health or simply off-putting auras were predominant among my research participants, many suffered from more debilitating illnesses. in these spaces where enduring and knowing are coterminous, the feeling of living death seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms. toward a late industrial sublime the average american home maintains indoor formaldehyde levels capable of inducing irritation (hun et al. 2010). chronically absorbing this chemical is not a process relegated to the lower classes or precarious, even if such populations do bear dramatically higher burdens. to somatically apprehend formaldehyde exposure means to begin apprehending the costs of late industrial infrastructures, economies, and standards of living. it sets in motion an appreciation that the molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unraveling. becoming a “pupil of the air” (sloterdijk 2009, 84) is to attune to the aerosolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics (kohn 2007) within which one is immersed. focusing on slight sensations and dysfunctions reorients discussions of chemical phenomenology from its current emphasis on episodic olfactory events to an apprehension of the irritating chemical background noise of everyday life. ambient formaldehyde makes itself known to mammalian life through minor effects and affects that the exposed can accumulate, over repeated incidents, into an embodied awareness of the scale of chemical saturation, beyond the individual pocket of air we call home. i theorize this string of intimate sensations as amounting to a chemical sublime, which can “aggregate life diagonal to hegemonic ways of life” (povinelli 2011, 30) and give rise to attempts at living otherwise. the chemical sublime does not merely refigure a form of the sublime in philosophical discourse but poses an alternative schema of eventfulness or call to action, one that expands dominant ideas of catastrophe and the disturbing. the chemical sublime is perhaps just one instantiation of an emergent late industrial sublime that reckons with the temporally and spatially dispersed residues of contemporary political orders, including climate change (morton 2013), biodiversity loss (yusoff 2013), extractive labor practices, and social abandonment (povinelli 2011), among others. yet with formaldehyde production and consumption infrastructure largely locked in, and without the capacity for networking the atomized populations charged by the chemical sublime, decamping from spaces conditioned by uncountable formaldehyde microemissions is, at a societal level, not an option. such pleas are either actively disqualified, as is the case with linda, or they passively languish without authoritative clout, as with harriett. beyond instrumentalizing viscera, such attunements to encounters between airs and bodies constitute the openings through which to grapple with the composition of our world and with the untold caustic ecologies that remain largely insensible to the human. notes acknowledgments my first thanks are reserved for all of those whose observations and experiences fill this article and the tireless work of becky gillette. thank you for your persistent insights and perseverance. i am deeply grateful for comments, critiques, and suggestions from elisabeth hsu, javier lezaun, christabel stirling, the oxford affect theory reading group, caroline potter, peter kirby, anna lora-wainwright, nicole novak, natalie porter, alex nading, jennifer gabrys, tristan jones, ari braverman, rose deller, the chf matter and materials reading group, elizabeth povinelli, and michelle murphy. some toiled over a ceaseless stream of drafts. some were incisive panel respondents. some beckoned these ideas into existence, while others helped calibrate their final form. all were invaluable. i also extend my gratitude to dominic boyer, james faubion, cymene howe, and three anonymous reviewers for their insights that now adorn this article at every level. the research leading to these results has received funding from oxford’s phillip bagby bequest, the chemical heritage foundation, and the european research council under the european union’s seventh framework programme/erc grant agreement no. 313347, “citizen sensing and environmental practice: assessing participatory engagements with environments through sensor technologies.” 1. within toxic domestic ecologies, the absence of mice and cockroaches or the frenetic behavior of companion birds, cats, and dogs are often read as sentinel indicators of toxicity (see limn, no. 3, http://limn.it/issue/03). 2. bouts of hypocognition are all too often anthropologically overlooked as they “tend to resist or defy explicit forms of representation due to their lack of culturally infused conceptual elaboration” (throop 2005, 506). 3. i never felt these sensations when i sat chatting with informants outside in folding chairs, on walks, in cars, in office buildings, or in fast food restaurants. photographers and journalists that i brought to meet my informants also developed similar symptoms. in collaboration with brandon costelloe-kuehn, kim fortun, and analytical chemists at prism analytical technologies, i tested the atmospheric formaldehyde of twenty-four of these homes and found elevated formaldehyde levels in the vast majority. i cannot rule out the possibility of other agents in the indoor air of these trailers, such as other volatile organic chemicals or mold toxins. 4. the case at hand is not an anomaly. as is likely well known, industrial capitalism often seeks industrial chemical solutions for its problems, from engineered wood to pesticides to pharmaceuticals. 5. more-than-olfactory air pollution sensing practices do surface in discussions of scent, such as caterina scaramelli’s (2013, 157) mention of the involuntary convulsions felt by a voluntary water quality sampler in massachusetts during the collection of a particularly potent sewage off-flow. in addition to discussing the operational usages of scent, joy parr (2010) details the less canonical but still-named senses of proprioception, kinaesthetics, and proxemics at play in avoiding (rather than detecting) radiation in a canadian nuclear power facility. 6. in addition to olfactory imperceptibility due to consistent exposures, the prominent scent scientist pamela dalton warned me in an interview that smells do not serve as resolute indicators of either chemical concentrations or toxicities. 7. between 2010 and 2012 my interest in domestic air quality was circulated online, via offline social networks, and in the news media. more than one hundred people wanting to discuss residential chemical exposures contacted me. i conducted in-person interviews and participant observation in twelve states and phone interviews in eleven additional states. 8. federal emergency management agency trailers were deployed en masse in late 2005 and early 2006 in response to the residential destruction of hurricanes katrina and rita. these emergency housing units were found to harbor elevated levels of formaldehyde in their interior atmosphere (cdc 2008) and are extreme examples of much more widespread domestic air-quality issues. these trailers were my entry point into this course of research. 9. she also used umex formaldehyde badges to validate her real-time results, as the copresence of other chemicals can increase or decrease the readout of the real-time meter. 10. the sleep disorders linda has recorded are not restricted to nightmares. she notes that several of her married clients now sleep in separate beds due to insomnia or flailing around at night; both are issues reported to me by one in three of my informants. 11. for instance, the onset of the effects she claims formaldehyde has on her body (50 ppb) is six parts per billion above the office of environmental health hazard assessment’s (coehha 2008) acute reference exposure level for formaldehyde sensory irritation (44 ppb). 12. on gender and nuclear weapons, see masco 2004, 21, note 26. joseph masco’s focus in this article is not solely on the above-ground testing that constituted the grandest manifestation of the nuclear sublime but also subsequent, “more limited” forms of the sublime under the underground testing regime, and then virtual testing of the current stockpile stewardship regime. 13. so-called green homes do pose a potential trade-off between energy efficiency and health. such homes are sealed more tightly but often use the same construction materials as traditional homes, and as a result are likely to bear high ambient chemical concentrations (kincaid and offermann 2010). 14. this phrase appeared in a letter from betsy natz, the executive director of the formaldehyde council, to linda kincaid, dated august 11, 2009. 15. her husband, dick, suffered from eye irritation, a loss of his sense of smell and taste, and numerous other symptoms shared with harriett. 16. her radon levels were negligible. a state employee checked for sewer gas and black mold. they have their own well with no nitrates or e. coli, which is also checked by the state annually as they do in-home food preparation for harriett’s wedding catering business. references agency for toxic substances and disease registry (atsdr) 2014 “medical management guidelines for formaldehyde.” october. http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/mmg/mmg.asp?id=216&tid=39. ahmed, sara 2006 queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, n.c.: duke university press. alaimo, stacy 2010 bodily 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dead bodies the sociopolitical lives of dead bodies: tibetan self-immolation protest as mass media charlene makley reed college he could be sleeping. or meditating as he waits in the car for the driver to return. his body sits upright against the seat back, shirtless and in sporty shorts, his hands loosely in his lap, his knees casually splayed. but as the camera silently moves closer to trace the contours of his body, the only sound coming from the filmer’s own shaky hands, we realize that he is lovingly draped in a soft blanket, and his mottled, blackened, and peeling skin disrupts the banality of the scene. the brief and grainy footage of the twenty-year-old tibetan buddhist monk phuntshok, hastily recorded by his friend on a cellphone and emailed to tibetans abroad, in fact captures the young monk’s last breaths after he self-immolated on a main street in ngaba (in chinese, aba) county town, in china’s northwestern sichuan province. according to a variety of competing sources, on march 16, 2011, the third anniversary of deadly protests in the town, phuntshok set himself on fire to protest chinese policies in tibetan regions. police extinguished the flames and monks from his home monastery, the geluk-sect kirti gonpa, drove phuntshok back to the monastery and later to the county hospital, where he died at 3 a.m. that morning. since then, phuntshok has taken on new social and political life, as his body, image, persona and purported words have circulated through various regions and media. for example, two days after his death, his corpse was cremated in a large buddhist ceremony presided over by kirti monks and attended by hundreds of tibetans from throughout the county. that event was then itself filmed and the footage secretly circulated abroad. as an unprecedented spate of tibetan self-immolation-by-fire protests unfolded during the following four years (as of june 2015, a total of 141 in the people’s republic of china [prc], 7 abroad), phuntshok took on a newly emblematic status as the first tibetan immolator to die in the prc.1 photos of him, both as a smiling young monk and as a corpse in silent repose, were featured prominently in foreign and tibetan exile media, in memorials, and on protest posters. and his image and story ended up as key plot devices in major documentary films competing to narrate the events and their causes, one from china central television (cctv) (2012), the other from the voice of america (ensor 2013). figure 1. map of tibetan regions in china and location of kirti monastery. map by atelier golok. just as in other forms of self-immolation protest elsewhere, this spectacle of voluntary maiming and death has raised painful questions for observers about the politics and ethics of witnessing, reporting, and analyzing such events from afar. this perhaps holds especially true in the case of tibet. with the chinese communist takeover of the 1950s, and the rise of the dalai lama in the 1980s as an international spokesman for an ideally modern buddhism grounded in rational contemplation and universal compassion, many westerners have come to regard tibet as a space of global exception, a peaceful shangri-la that serves to counter the perceived greed, violence, and death-dealing of the modern world (lopez 1998). after all, the dalai lama’s middle way approach to the sino-tibetan conflict (seeking not revolutionary independence but a negotiated status of “genuine autonomy” within the prc), as well as the post-mao tibetan protests inside the prc (up to 2008), were modeled in part on gandhi’s forms of nonviolent resistance in colonial india (ardley 2002). thanks to the dalai lama’s transnational efforts, an idealized tibet has offered a holdout domain for the liberal sensibilities of both aspiring tibetans and their supporters, a place where rational protesters meet state violence with equanimity and love of life (mclagan 2002). when suicide bombings became prominent following the 9/11 attacks in the united states, for example, the well-known lawyer and political commentator alan dershowitz (2004, cited in asad 2007, 98) contrasted those attacks committed in the name of islam with tibetans’ apparently detached and noble response to chinese state repression: “why do these overprivileged young people [the suicide bombers] support this culture of death, while impoverished and oppressed tibetans continue to celebrate life despite their occupation by china?” figure 2. location of tibetan self-immolation protests, 2009–2015. courtesy of the international campaign for tibet. http://www.savetibet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/tibet-map-immolations-0416x-mid.jpg, accessed june 2, 2015. tibetan communities, however, have seen decades of intensifying debate about the nature and uses of violent resistance in nationalist struggle (ardley 2002; mcgranahan 2010). and prominent groups of tibetans and their supporters continue to call for independence in spite of the stance of the tibetan government in exile. yet observers in and outside china still expressed shock at the display of young lay and monastic tibetans’ violence in the lhasa riots in march 2008. in china, cctv played endless loops of surveillance footage showing rioters destroying government buildings and shops owned by han chinese and hui muslims. they also caught on camera for the first time a few attacks on han and hui bystanders.2 when the first self-immolation protests began among young monks from kirti monastery a year later, tibetan and non-tibetan observers alike again expressed shock and moral disorientation. unlike in chinese forms of buddhism, tibetan self-immolation was almost unprecedented (benn 2007, 2012), and since the late 1990s, a number of high-ranking tibetan lamas have publicly lamented it as violating the buddhist emphasis on the sanctity of life. the series of self-immolations among tibetans since 2009 has thus evoked for many observers in and out of the prc what talal asad (2007, 68), citing stanley cavell, referred to as “horror”: the profound sense of the “precariousness of human identity” that accompanies the destabilization of grounding categories of existence. more specifically, tibetans’ self-immolation protests have called into question the (modern, liberal) nature of buddhism and the role of the dalai lama, the very sociomoral grounds of tibetan ethnic and nationalist identity, protest, governance, and claims to forms of sovereignty in recent decades. indeed horror, in asad’s (2007, 68–76, cf. sontag 2003) reading of cavell, is not the same as terror or fear, which, he says, refer to responses usually directed at an object. horror instead connotes an objectless state of being, a nonreflexive sense of extreme disorientation—but also of awe and fascination, even reverence, bound up with the aesthetics (porn?) of killing, the graphic dissolution of human bodies in mass-mediated representations. in the “spiral transgressions” (mbembe 2003, 16) evoked and imitated in circulating images of tibetans’ self-immolations, observers are drawn into problematic complicities. hence commentators across the political spectrum have invoked associations of buddhism with nonviolence and universal compassion to ask whether the immolations are sinful, violent suicides or altruistic, nonviolent sacrifices. accusations and counteraccusations fly, especially between chinese state and tibetan exile media, about the ethical implications of reporting these events: does reporting on the self-immolations in fact encourage the destructive or wasteful violence of youthful mimcry? or does it amplify the constructive protest of selfless martyrs on behalf of oppressed tibetans? * * * for me, this new anguish over tibetans’ recourse to self-immolation protest recalls the moral dilemmas about the role of the anthropologist that i encountered living in a tibetan town in qinghai province during the military crackdown on tibetan protests in 2008. in this article, i look to the calls of the anthropologists veena das, emily martin, didier fassin, and others to reject witnesses’ fetishization of the event in favor of an ethnography of violence that moves with events as people (including the ethnographer) reframe them over time and in their everyday lives. i thus avoid debates that assume the intrinsic morality, meanings, or efficacies of self-immolation as protest. instead, i draw on linguistic anthropological methods to take a performative approach, one that accounts for the always unresolved yet politically and socially constitutive meaning and efficacy of dead bodies. here i take inspiration from the anthropologist katherine verdery’s (1999, 26, 33) analysis of “the political lives of dead bodies” in postsocialist russia. for her, dead bodies are key sites for rethinking politics not as a series of technical and rational decisions or strategies among state citizens (liberal or not), but as a cultural politics of meaning, authority, and value-making that implicates whole worlds of contested spaces and times. she urges us to consider the semiotic and pragmatic specificities of dead bodies as both material objects and as signs or symbols in specific situations. as quintessentially liminal others positioned between the living and the dead, human corpses, she argues, embody an “ineluctable self-referentiality” (verdery 1999, 32) that encourages analogies with the bodies and biographies of living people, linking them via notions like soil, bone, kinship, and ancestry to broader histories or futures, as well as to sovereign landscapes of belonging. this perspective then challenges us to think beyond western individualist notions of secular agency or scientistic notions of death as biological cessation to understand the wide variety of ways in which dead bodies (as both objects and persons) enter into social and political lives vis-à-vis the living. verdery’s approach nicely gels with the concerns of more recent anthropologists and political theorists who have been expanding on the work of such thinkers as walter benjamin, hannah arendt, michel foucault, and giorgio agamben to rethink the nature of the modern nation-state through the figure of death. these theorists counter often-commonsense claims that modern states are rational administrative orders extending across both discretely bounded territories and biologically optimized populations (e.g., biopolitics), the protection of which justifies the monopoly of violence in policing and war (foucault 1990; das and poole 2004; asad 2007). instead, in achille mbembe’s (2003) analysis, the creation of the state’s other as a permanent enemy to be killed, and the consequent management and disposition of dead (and disappeared) bodies under state auspices, illustrates the “necropolitics” at the heart of contemporary governance. mbembe (2003, 13) explicitly opposes this politics to mainstream political theorists’ notions of liberal democracies based in the collective agreements of self-aware, autonomous citizens. necropolitics play out instead in contested claims to often-uncanny, even sacralized forms of authority over the very nature and shape of mortality as a precondition for any state-sponsored freedoms. this approach would then help us get at what veena das and deborah poole (2004, 6) referred to as “the secret life of the state” behind the official rhetoric of centralized bureaucratic rationality and the rule of law—that modern sovereignty is not the consequence of absolute mastery (of self or of citizenry), but a precariously open dialogue that draws all citizens into intensely ambivalent sociopolitical and aesthetic relations with the dead (yurchak 2008). from this angle, the active and unresolved meaning and agency of the dead emerge as key to understanding the rise of tibetan self-immolations in china and their roles in sino-tibetan relations. indeed, escalating contests over the fate of immolators’ bodies crucially structure the events through time (barnett 2012, 45). in the struggles over positioning, disposing of, and speaking for bodies, we find the dead framed as inert, silent objects, but also as active and changeful subjects—they speak, gesture, haunt, yearn, suffer, and demand. here, i expand on verdery and mbembe to explore the performative roles of dead and dying bodies as interlocutors in specific forms of communication. as verdery (1999, 29) puts it, when their messages have public stakes, seemingly silent corpses can evoke competing claims to words they said or thought in (or after) life. but this is not just a question of the sources and meanings of protesters’ words. the durable presence and recognizability of non-verbal signs, including the material qualities of bodies, environments, and the various media that reframe and circulate them, are crucially at issue. in fact, forms of self-immolation protest, as efforts to amplify messages in and through dying, pose grave challenges to the individualist notions of intentioned speech that ground liberal presumptions about the possibilities for redemptive political agency. thus the (verbally) silent body of the immolator often calls forth a high-stakes “forensic reading of motive” (asad 2007, 44), in which opponents scrutinize and circulate media representations of dead bodies to search for and claim individual protesters’ rationales in the face of such seemingly transgressive acts. for example, as robert barnett (2012, 43) puts it, the apparently individual nature of tibetan self-immolation protests, in contrast to the morally and politically fraught mass unrest of 2008, encouraged observers to interpret immolations as “rational responses to a specific cause.” in practice, however, what dead bodies say and do, and what relationships they enter into, can shift over time, beyond the intent of both living protesters and their postmortem interlocutors. here i argue that taking tibetans’ self-immolation-by-fire protests as themselves a new and particularly fraught genre of communication can help us grasp some of their semiotic and pragmatic specificity, as well as the particular stakes of their circulation by others. that is, i take them to be an increasingly ritualized form of mass media in the context of severe state repression. yet the implications of such an approach are ethically complex. a linguistic anthropological take on meaning and efficacy, not as the outcome of fixed symbolic systems but as an ongoing and embodied interpretive politics, challenges easy assumptions about the immediate accessibility of motives and affects (our own and others’). yet as william mazzarella (2009, 291) has pointed out, global media consumers are increasingly addressed as members of (competing) affective publics who supposedly know—and sympathize with—pleasure and pain when they see it. in an age of “humanitarian reason,” protesters must walk a fine line between performances of affect and rationality, soliciting the attention and mimetic affect of sympathetic spectators who would in turn render their messages credible across contexts (fassin 2011, 203). in practice, though, recourse to affect in public performance is not an opening for unmediated empathy, but a hazardous process of what mazzarella (2009, 303), citing michael warner, calls “constitutive mediation”: we can only recognize ourselves (and our publics) through the ongoing circulation of media forms, but the efficacy of those subjects as ideal types depends on their seeming to exist previously as fixed positions. these inherently intersubjective dynamics would move us away from taking tibetan immolators (living or dead) as singular voices and entail instead a consideration of the mediated addressivity of their performances (bakhtin 1981; lempert 2012; lempert and silverstein 2012). by that i mean the specific ways in which messages reach for the uncertain futures of others’ responses, evoking ideal types of persons and places as attempts to reconstitute both selves and their larger publics. importantly, these dynamics (and their risks) play out as performers must manage multiple modalities of signs in recognizable ways. here, the concept of genre is useful. it refers to conventional assemblages of the formal features of performance events, including participant roles for speakers and addressees, as well as specific aesthetic sensibilities for linking verbal and nonverbal signs (bakhtin 1981; bauman 2001). a notion of genre would in turn help us get at the ways in which protesters’ political agency relies on their capacity to mimetically invoke familiar frameworks of interpretive practice for their interlocutors—there is no guarantee of that recognition, no certainty that verbal and nonverbal signs will necessarily align in the same ways over time. horror in this light is less a universal state of being than a specific experience of the sudden loss of genre. this perspective helps distinguish specifically tibetan self-immolation-by-fire from other forms of self-immolation protest, and it implicates the broader, now transregional ethical politics of violent versus nonviolent resistance in which buddhism plays a central role. in such forms of protest, dead bodies speak to a shifting “pragmatics of modernity” (lempert 2012, 11) in which political subjectivity is vitally at stake. from this angle, the body of the suicide bomber, in its instantaneous dissolution, is supposed to communicate primarily in acting as a weapon targeting others. meanwhile, the slowly declining body and speech of the hunger striker evoke a threatened near-future death that both addresses key authorities and dramatizes their neglect. by contrast, recent tibetan self-immolators use flames to frame and amplify the body as itself a primary medium—the moral claim is that the embodied message, not harm to others, is the goal (and the gift) worth dying for. the timing indeed allows for limited speech, but especially key gestures, while the flames signify not the threat of death but its certainty within a few minutes. crucially, as mass media under state repression, self-immolation-by-fire entails or calls for a recorded spectacle that can create an enduringly communicative body for larger publics. immolators, it would seem, demand that we look, address us as voyeurs; we are obligated somehow to give them ongoing life. but in the intensifying global marketplace of attention, immolators risk being reproduced as yet another figure of the “political grotesque” (lempert and silverstein 2012, 7). that is, the camera and the various audiences it promises are ever-present interlocutors, thereby never just recording the events but, in an inherently complicit process of mimesis and reframing, helping to constitute and generate them over time in potentially unexpected ways. from this angle, we can begin to appreciate that tibetans’ recourse to self-immolation as mass media is a tragically dialogic process, a spiral transgression—it is called forth by intensifying state-sponsored repression and dispossession, on the one hand, and by foreign and prc state media spectacles, on the other. as such, the bodies of tibetan immolators speak to a highly discomfiting, indeed horrifying, necropolitics at the heart of sino-tibetan relations, the power and efficacy of violence and untimely death in the face of competing claims to buddhist compassion or state-led humanitarianism. * * * china’s olympic year (2007–2008) made clear the post-mao dilemma facing chinese communist party (ccp) leaders who presided over an increasingly fractious populace. state leaders responded to widespread tibetan unrest that spring with, on the one hand, mass media campaigns touting the lofty, even sacralized humanist ideals of state-led development and progress and, on the other, the less-touted, offstage use of old-style siege warfare in the form of de facto martial law out west (makley 2014). as several observers have pointed out, the 2008 unrest and the rapid military response were enabled by the earlier extension of anti–dalai lama policies to eastern tibetan regions (e.g., the sino-tibetan frontier zone in the western provinces outside the tibetan autonomous region), the increasing militarization of those regions, and the opportunistic use of sino-tibetan tensions by local officials (barnett 2012; smith 2010). in that context, the silence that descended on the region indicated not just the repression of individuals’ voices but also tibetan residents’ horrified sense of disorientation, fragmentation, and immobility—the sudden loss of familiar genres of practice that for many had seemed to (re)vivify the region as tibetan in the early post-mao years. as patrolling squadrons of armed swat teams enforced curfews that spring, my cellphone went silent and tibetan friends and neighbors retreated indoors. the one afternoon that a female friend, a low-level official in town, dared to visit me in my apartment, she told me everyone she knew was “extremely upset and confused.” describing her anguish at witnessing monks and lay friends being brutally arrested after demonstrations, she said that her “heart hurt” (sems khu gi). then, lowering her voice to a whisper, she lamented that this was the worst state repression she had ever experienced: “this is a bad year, a very bad year,” she concluded. in tibetan communities, where persons and bodies are often experienced as precariously open to the polluting influence of human and nonhuman others, as well as to the capricious or unknown forces of karma, misfortune, and luck, death can pertain not only to human individuals but also to the collectivities and nonhuman beings to which they are inextricably linked. in effect, the 2008 crackdown and, importantly, the specter of the disappeared bodies of protesters killed or detained by security forces (rumors of which circulated in anguished whispers throughout the tibetan community where i lived), extended the state of siege from its previously quasi-hidden status (the occasional unwise dissident) to the everyday lives of all.3 tibetans in those eastern regions had not seen such a military crackdown since 1958. in ways similar to what das (2007) found in post-partition india, this process threatened to tear apart the delicate sociomoral fabric of tibetans’ lives, rewoven after the largely unacknowledged mass trauma of the maoist years (1950s–1970s) in those regions. that is, state efforts to erase the deaths of protesters in 2008 in fact helped unleash the specter of the maoist dead, raising again moral questions about painful complicities that haunted all tibetan elders and their kin, especially those who had politically or economically benefited from chinese state intervention. i found that many of my tibetan friends experienced this sudden loss of context as horror and grief in the face of a kind of social death, the deeply polluting return of the untimely and unnurtured dead: “you know they shot and killed many monks in lhasa,” said a village man, repeating the oft-cited rumors. he and his wife had just been telling me of their son’s arrest earlier that spring, and then of the brutal beatings and arrests of monk demonstrators in town. “but you won’t see their bodies, or their crying families, on tv! now they’re cracking down on us tibetans again, and we have no recourse!” in tibetan buddhist communities, the deceased remain precariously social persons, embarked on potentially terrifying journeys of transmigration to future lives. funeral practices, presided over by buddhist monks in a time-sensitive process (forty-nine days after death), work to both purify the deceased of karmic sins and usher their consciousnesses away from their current bodies and houses, thereby purifying those left behind as well. crucially, in contrast to the horrifying asocial life of the misfortunate, untimely dead (who risk falling into low rebirths or returning as zombies or pathetic hungry ghosts), buddhist funeral rites model the good, chosen death and transmigration of an enlightened lama, who leaves his body as a final gift to hungry demons or animals. indeed, it is the charismatic lama’s supposed conquest of death that grounds his capacity for “compassionate violence” in tantric rituals (mills 2003; dalton 2011; lempert 2012), his ability to both purify persons and places and enhance their vitality through the ritualized taming or sacrificial killing of demons (figured nonetheless as their liberation). thus unlike in state-mandated maoist funerals, for tibetans, cremation in particular marks not mere biological cessation but a purified offering traditionally reserved for bodies vacated by high lamas. hence the turn, in the spring and summer of 2008 throughout tibetan regions of the prc, to grassroots mass mourning practices (avoiding celebrations in favor of monastic offerings, mass prayer assemblies with thousands of lay attendees). those practices in turn elevated and politicized the role of buddhist monks and lamas as death specialists above all. in the context of widespread laments about the loss of authentic monks and lamas since the maoist years, such a role represented for many tibetans a significant boost to the status of the monastic community. furthermore, the massive natural disasters of the sichuan earthquake in the spring of 2008 (an estimated 90,000 dead or missing) and, in the spring of 2010, the earthquake in the largely tibetan region of yushu in qinghai province (at least 3,000 killed, more than 12,000 injured), unleashed competing theodicies as residents and netizens alike read those disasters as signs of inauspicious rule or, by contrast, touted prc state leaders’ and military troops’ humanitarian response. in yushu, hundreds of tibetan monks in fact acted as the first responders to the earthquake, and local monasteries doubled as morgues. in the days after the quake, monks held mass cremation ceremonies for thousands of tibetan dead, assembling on the hills above the flames to chant prayers accompanied by grieving laity from throughout the prefecture. footage and images of those events, circulated via social media and cellphones among tibetans in and outside the prc, stood in stunning contrast to the state media coverage of nationally mandated mourning there a few days later, in which monks, now ordered to leave the quake site, rarely appeared. elsewhere, i have argued that those events in yushu, just two years after the crackdown on tibetan unrest, marked the first time since the ccp takeover that tibetan collective grief had been so graphically and publicly displayed (makley 2014). here, i note that they also set the stage for scaling up the ritual genre of buddhist cremation, transforming it into a mass practice nurturing (and sacralizing) the ordinary untimely dead (vs. just high lamas). in this light, we would have to see tibetan monks’ and lamas’ turn to self-immolation-by-fire after 2009 not as a radical departure, but as a tragic extension and intensification of the political lives of dead bodies in those regions. tapey and phuntshok, the first monk immolators in 2009 and 2011 in ngaba, were protesting in part the erasure of violence and death there in 2008, when at least ten tibetan monk and lay demonstrators were shot to death by security forces after protesting the detention of monks a few days earlier (smith 2010). and phuntshok, the first to die, staged his immolation on march 16, three years to the day after those 2008 protesters had reportedly been killed. not coincidentally, the 2008 killings in ngaba were infamously documented with graphic photos of bullet-ridden corpses laid out in kirti monastery that were sent to foreign media—in the ongoing propaganda war between chinese state officials and the tibetan government in exile, western media observers have long held the position of superaddressees, the all-important, supposedly neutral third-party witness (barnett 2010; fassin 2011). in a similar fashion, as the crackdown intensified throughout the plateau and all public gatherings were banned, self-immolation emerged as a new genre of protest in a mass-mediated process that serially reframes and scales up the specter of untimely tibetan death, from particular regions fragmented by the 2008 siege to a pan-tibetan politics of mourning now encompassing the entire diaspora. figure 3. monks preside over the mass cremation and prayers for those who died in the yushu earthquake, april 20, 2010. photo from people’s daily online, april 27, 2010. http://en.people.cn/6964930.html, accessed april 30, 2010. from this perspective, then, no single immolation can be understood as an isolated act; each one’s meanings and efficacies, and the agencies of immolators, is reframed and contested over time. foreign and tibetan exile media, partly in response to prc state media silence, have played constitutive roles in this process by enumerating and serializing all immolations in elaborate lists, time lines, and maps. not unlike the medieval chinese buddhist biographies of exemplary self-immolating monks discussed by james benn (2007, 2012), such media, in concert with memorial services and protests abroad, work to unite and entextualize the immolators in an unfolding story of tibetan heroism, despite their actual heterogeneity. meanwhile, subsequent immolators in the prc and the rites and protests that accompany them have been increasingly shaped by the templates of previous events, such that immolators and mourners return to sites of previous immolations and funeral grounds, or choose dates commemorating others. * * * this context then helps explain why escalating contests over the disposition and display of dead bodies have proven central in sino-tibetan politics, since 2008 especially. indeed, by late 2012, new central directives explicitly criminalized self-immolation-related acts, in effect codifying (extrajudicially) local disciplinary practices already widely in use, such as banning mourning practices or public support for deceased or missing immolators and their families (tchrd 2013). figure 4. “concerning the thirteen criminal behaviors that have the quality of tibetan separatism.” poster in a tibetan primary school listing new regulations criminalizing self-immolation protest and any support for protesters or their families, including buddhist funerals. qinghai province, summer 2013. photo by charlene makley. returning to phuntshok, then, we can better grasp in this light the unresolved nature of his persona and agency, as well as of some of the messages attributed to him. as for all such protesters in the prc, the implications of his life and death are exceedingly complex; in this short space i could never do him justice. indeed, it would be impossible to recover the real phuntshok from afar and under the extreme limitations of the prc state media blackout in those regions. here, i want to consider only a few main aspects of the ways he was taken up and interpreted by competing media as a way to underscore the stakes of untimely death in tibetan regions. the sociopolitical life of phuntshok after his self-immolation is particularly fraught because, as the first tibetan immolator in the prc to die (though not immediately), his protest led to the first major, highly public, and ritualized contests over the disposition and display of his body, contests that would set a template for many to come. further, in the already tense region of ngaba, phuntshok’s immolation triggered further mass demonstrations in town and yet another siege, as troops were rapidly deployed, kirti monastery blockaded, monk friends and phuntshok’s family investigated, and monks subjected to raids and what the state called “legal education.” that in turn generated the spiral transgression of further self-immolations, such that ngaba became the center of waves of such protests spreading to other tibetan regions (as of 2015, 45 of a total 141 occurred in the larger ngaba prefecture). such an extreme state of siege, in which state narratives dominate all public speech, sheds light on the semiotic and pragmatic specificities of phuntshok’s (and tapey’s before him) recourse to flaming bodies as mass media. phuntshok surely wanted to communicate something publicly—by which embodied signs in the absence of access to authorized words? in such contexts, which deaths are not shown and how might such public, hypervisible deaths by contrast come to speak of the invisible ones (das 2007)? crucially complicating matters was that no photos or film of phuntshok’s actual protest surfaced, only a couple photos of him alive and well (apparently sent to tibetan exile groups before his self-immolation) and short videos and a few photos of his dying and dead body just after. further, unlike other subsequent immolators, phuntshok used no written texts or signs during his protest and left no written or recorded last words.4 the subsequent contests over his body and messages revolved around competing yet mutually constituting claims about the nature of sovereign agency (absolutely individual or problematically social) and cremation (the voluntary offering of a buddhist transmigrator or the biological extinction of a citizen). self-immolation-by-fire, after all, does not necessarily resolve the status of the protester’s body. what happens if the flames are thwarted? and the remains of the deceased must still be managed, which often involves a second cremation, either under buddhist or secular state auspices. ultimately, opponents’ responses to these dilemmas also constituted efforts to create opposing affective publics. that is, they sought to define and fix the relevant communicative genre to which the immolations belong, and thereby to delineate the nature and political agencies of the subjects they addressed. in the case of phuntshok, these issues proved particularly important because tapey two years earlier had lived; his self-immolation had been thwarted by police, and he ended up recovering in the hospital. he appears scarred but alive and speaking in the 2012 cctv documentary (produced for foreign audiences in english), in which the narrator claims that tapey had been “saved” by quick-thinking tibetan police and chinese doctors.5 the terrible dilemma for witnesses and commentators, felt so strongly in buddhist communities especially and handily exploited by state media appropriating the terms of global humanitarian discourse, is that no one can be seen to explicitly desire the death of another. indeed, in many of the immolation events, tibetan bystanders also tried hard to put out the flames, in several instances burning themselves doing so. thus, as many observers have pointed out, much of the media among tibetans (both in and outside the prc) and their foreign supporters has focused on the absolutely sovereign, individual agency of immolators as speakers above all, a tibetan version of the liberal political subject. the youth and monastic context of the initial immolators like phuntshok aided in this, since monks and nuns ideally renounce worldly social relations to embark more fully on an individual path to enlightenment.6 the buddhist focus on the importance of individual (mental) intention over the specifics of a particular act (including violence) is also important in these arguments (cabezón 2013). thus, for example, phuntshok did speak after his death. monk friends reported to foreign media a few cryptic spoken lines they attributed to phuntshok that suggest he planned and anticipated his death as a form of mass media, addressed to an audience far beyond the prc: “i can’t go on bearing the pain in my heart, i’ll show the people of the world a sign on march 16, 2011.” here then, the reported speech act retroactively entextualizes the nonverbal signs of the immolation, framing it as addressed to a universalized, international public. but to understand the ways in which self-immolation-by-fire emerged as a performance genre over time, we also need to pay attention to the semiotic and pragmatic specificity of flames as a tibetan buddhist icon and ritual implement, on the one hand, and as an intersubjective aesthetics of bodily pain and suffering, on the other. indeed, western and chinese observers, more than they sometimes imagine, can be mere bystanders to the closer dialogue (mediated by the figure of the dalai lama) between tibetans in the prc and those in the diaspora. as james benn, françoise robin, and others have argued, in those circles, buddhist idioms supportive of self-immolation as an individual act do not frame it as suicide, or in chinese terms, zisha (literally, self-murder), a concept that implies an external sovereign judge of a crime. in the contemporary prc, that term entails a modern biopolitical state, one charged with the sovereign right and humanitarian duty to enhance and protect the biological lives of its citizens (foucault 1990). by contrast, tibetan immolators and netizens increasingly took up buddhist notions of the gift and the lama’s or bodhisattva’s enlightened conquest of death to interpret self-immolation in terms of the ritual genre of an altruistic offering or sacrifice (in tibetan, mchod pa, ‘bul ba). for example, as more monks self-immolated in the months after phuntshok’s act, the exiled tibetan singer tashi tsering posted a song-prayer online that begins with phuntshok’s image behind burning butter lamps. “our heroes and heroines,” he mournfully sings, “by upholding tibetans’ heartfelt pride, offered lamps of their precious bodies.” and several months later, sobha rinpoche, the forty-two-year-old buddhist lama who self-immolated by fire in qinghai province, took up the notion of sacrifice in his famous audio testament: “i am giving away my body as an offering of light to chase away the darkness.” in this sense, immolators’ bodies came to metonymically stand for both butter lamps (mar me), iconic of the purifying force/light of the buddha dharma offered to sentient beings, and for enlightenment itself: theirs is an act of auto-cremation, the heroic chosen death of the lama as bodhisattva. in this, as benn (2012, 211) argues, tibetan immolators and their diasporic interlocutors took up centuries-old mahayana buddhist notions of offering that figured bodily sacrifice not as a form of self-harm or asceticism but as a positive or performative gift of therapeutic or apotropaic protection against misfortune and disaster. but the gift of auto-cremation also entails an aesthetics of bodily pain specific to flaming skin. the morality and heroism of the act for a wide variety of observers of the tibetan immolations lay in the supposedly self-evident courage and bodily self-control to communicate while burning; witnesses are supposed to both lean in and recoil in horror by imagining the sensation on their own skin. here, the array of nonverbal signs suggesting universal sensory experience allows for a bridging of western and tibetan publics: the rational liberal subject meets the affective spectator. for example, after warning viewers of the disturbing images to come, the narrator at the beginning of the voice of america 2013 documentary states unequivocally that self-immolation is “one of the most terrifying and painful ways to die.” such observers imply a relationship between word and deed that strongly resonates with a long tradition among tibetans of taking blood-oaths before battles (barnett 2012). that is, the perceived pain and certain death associated with immolation by fire supposedly seals the absolute sincerity of the message (mazzarella 2015). in the climate of post-mao disillusionment with public speech amid widespread anger at dissimulation and corruption (including that of venal buddhist lamas) under state repression in the prc, flaming bodies are supposed to stand apart as individual testaments to the truth. as the exiled tibetan commentator dhundup gyalpo (2011) put it, emphasizing righteous speech above all: “to burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. there is nothing more painful than burning oneself. to say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.” immolators’ main goal, he goes on to say, is not to die, but to express that individual “will and determination.” this aesthetics of voluntary pain and verbal determination in fact links tibetans to other self-immolators in the prc,7 but supportive commentary about tibetan auto-cremators joins the pain of burning to the sovereign agency of a bodhisattva as a type of heroic nationalist subject.8 indeed, in a 2011 poem called “mourning,” which initiated a spate of such commentary among tibetans in the prc (robin 2012; dechen pemba 2012), the well-known tibetan blogger sangdhor transposes a monk’s prayerful sermon into slow-motion fire: “the flaming mouth moves. the flaming hand flourishes. the flaming chest lights up. and flaming prayer beads, one by one, scatter on the ground.” in the process, the agency of ordinary young monastics and lay immolators, along with that of their purported addressees as kinds of publics, comes to be scaled up and specified. hence many subsequent immolators in their last words styled themselves, like lamas, as buddhist models and teachers, framing their performances in the traditional genre of moral teachings (legs bshad) offered to all tibetans: “to ensure the dalai lama’s return to tibet,” urged rikyo in 2012, a thirty-three-year-old laywoman immolator who left a short, partially misspelled handwritten note: “practice tibetan customs purely. don’t cause conflict among your relatives. speak tibetan. don’t steal. don’t fight.” thus, as the series of immolations unfolded, their most important superaddressee was not the chinese state, western media, or even tibetans in exile, but an emerging public of tibetan mourners in the prc. the main road in ngaba county town where tapey and phuntshok first self-immolated, for example, came to be called “heroes’ road” (dpa’ bo’i lam) by tibetan residents. later, whole counties where spates of immolations had occurred were called “heroes’ counties.” as an intensified form of necropolitics, then, tibetans’ auto-cremations were not a singular media genre, but a meta-genre of performance that incorporated aspects of multiple media forms addressing multiple potential publics. that in turn allowed for a variety of (mis)interpretations. for example, as michael biggs (2012, 146) points out, unlike the older vietnamese buddhist monks who self-immolated in quiet meditation in the 1960s, most of the tibetan immolators have been very young, and many of them flailed their limbs and even screamed while burning. yet over time, many observers in and outside the prc began to assess immolators’ bodies in terms of the seemingly superhuman self-control they displayed while burning, counting the multiple steps they took (as in the rfa article headline “burning monk walks 300 steps” [ponnudurai 2012]), or extolling their ability to hold their hands in prayer (woeser 2014). some of the most circulated images are those of immolators who stood (or seem to stand) perfectly still (as in the video of the nun palden choetso, who stands in flame as a young laywoman throws an offering scarf toward her—the clip is the logo for the voice of america documentary) (sangster 2012). finally, as the series of auto-cremations unfolded, flames were taken to literally frame and cordon off the sovereign nationalist subject as state security forces organized to thwart and save immolators. in many cases, both eyewitnesses and commentators spoke of how powerful and virulent the flames were, which kept any would-be rescuers at bay—like the flaming prayer beads in sangdhor’s poem above, the flames act uncannily to extend the superhuman agency of the immolator. indeed, many immolators went to great lengths to keep their bodies from state forces, even wrapping themselves in barbed wire to avoid being grabbed and extinguished. not surprisingly, stylized flames are now key framing devices for heroic personas portrayed in tibetan exile posters and memorials, as well as in tibetan dissident poetry and music online (robin 2012; sangster 2012). an image of phuntshok, for example, alive and smiling and surrounded by stylized flames on a poster at a tibetan exile protest captions him as phuntshok, hero for tibetan independence (rang btsan dpa’ bo phun tshogs). figure 5. recirculating and voicing phuntshok abroad. dharamsala, 2011. photo by lhaksam, http://lhaksam.com/did-you-see-any-difference-after-self-immolation-our-communities-became-more-active-than-before/, accessed february 1, 2012. but as one of the very first immolators, phuntshok presented particular problems for assessing his agency and messages. the array of competing and unclear evidence around his protest in fact raised the moral specter of the social and intersubjective nature of self-immolation in claims about violence and sovereign authority. that is, we would have to see the performance of lone immolation protests like tapey’s and phuntshok’s as an initial response to ongoing state crackdowns on mass gatherings in those regions. and both immolators and later tibetan dissident and exile media had to counter pervasive chinese state media claims, backed by local investigations and arrests of protest supporters, about a conspiracy masterminded by the “dalai clique” to manipulate innocent tibetans in the prc. in those state narratives, which found new precedents in the rhetoric of recent policies designed to combat “evil cults” (in chinese, xiejiao; quintessentially, the falun gong), tibetan protesters’ messages were not their own, but those of a cunning separatist society based in exile and led by the duplicitous dalai lama. the relevant genre here was supposedly terrorist manipulation, an ultimatum delivered via murder. yet from the perspective i develop here, we would have to take all the immolation events and their evolving meanings and efficacies as in fact inherently social. indeed, after phuntshok’s protest, immolators increasingly turned to collective performances. many immolated in pairs or as trios (some doing so after taking vows to be “sworn brothers”), including phuntshok’s own young monk cousin, who self-immolated with another young monk just six months later. and most immolations called forth new mass gatherings both at the event and after. but more fundamentally, all immolators are ensconced in networks of kin, monastic and school peers, and friends who grieve the loss acutely, or come under state scrutiny as potential supporters. that reality would seem to belie the tibetan exile commentator dhundup gyalpo’s (2011) unequivocal statement that, unlike even boycott protests that impose economic harm on others, “self-immolation . . . exacts no apparent cost on anyone but the individual.” a young tibetan man in qinghai province, interviewed by an american reporter for cbs news in 2012, offers one kind of response: “many tibetans in exile have never been to [my hometown]. they don’t understand what is going on with us. every time someone self-immolates, they put them in the news, or they call them heroes and patriots, shout in the sky and make inspirational speeches in a way that encourages more people to immolate. they don’t think of the family they may have left behind in tibet and the real pain we are going through” (van sant 2012). the particularly ambiguous nature of phuntshok’s self-immolation set the stage for high-stakes battles over immolators’ bodies. arguably, in those uncertain times, before orienting genres of practice had emerged for such events, security forces and eyewitnesses alike did not know how to respond. self-immolation by fire in those regions in fact collapsed the janus faces of the biopolitical state in one event—military response to open protest and humanitarian response to injured citizens. some witnesses and later commentators claimed that security forces in fact beat phuntsok after they had extinguished the flames, spurring monks to intervene and take his body. the immediate protests then followed the template set down in 2008: gatherings of monks and lay people ended in police beatings and arrests, in this case reportedly resulting in the further deaths of two lay tibetans beaten by police. yet the only footage that has surfaced, aired in both the cctv documentary and the opposing documentary by voice of america, shows security forces using extinguishers to put out the flames. for their part, local authorities and then cctv and other state media made phuntshok’s case emblematic of all self-immolations, not as a suicide protest or sacrifice, but ultimately as intentional homicides, the crimes of others to be adjudicated by the biopolitical state. the 2012 cctv documentary in fact begins with a still photo of phuntshok, covered with extinguisher dust, lying alone and isolated in the street after his immolation. the bystanders, frozen in place by the medium of the photo, seem to impassively keep their distance. he is thus framed there as a radically decontextualized, innocent victim, a silent naif in need of only the state’s humanitarian care. as that kind of figure, phuntshok is supposed to enable the documentary’s efforts to recruit viewers to literally “see” like the humanitarian state (scott 1999), thereby turning the lens away from the constitutive role of legal and extrajudicial state violence and onto other (immoral) camera users. in fact, the filmmakers highlight the camera lens with the digital device of the dubbed sound of a shutter click and a simulated shutter closing over stills of phuntshok’s body. that simulated lens is supposed to stand not for the disciplinary eye of the state, however, but for the manipulative media of tibetan collaborators. figure 6. photo of phuntshok after his self-immolation, used in the beginning of the chinese central television documentary, facts about self-immolations in tibetan areas of ngapa. screenshot of youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1hi528-ha, accessed july 1, 2015. there is a deeply troubling truth to the state media narratives about the fundamentally social nature of self-immolation emblematized in phuntshok’s case—evidence suggests he did plan it with several young monk friends (one of whom was supposed to self-immolate with him, but stopped after swallowing gasoline), and another friend sent the photos of him alive to tibetans in exile before his protest, which were then taken up and circulated widely in oppositional media abroad, as well as at subsequent prayer rituals for him presided over by the dalai lama. but before his burned body became the object of contestation, phuntshok and his monk friends were arguably most interested in decontextualizing his body and persona for different reasons than those of the cctv filmmakers. to oppose state rhetoric of manipulation after tapey’s failed immolation, i would say, they sought first and foremost to “stage choice” (lempert 2012), providing photos of a living phuntshok posed alone, in one, smiling and actively engaging the viewer, in the other, looking off camera in silent introspection—that living, self-determined persona is supposed to span the event. ultimately, the cctv documentary cannot erase the disciplinary eye of the state. it relies in fact on surveillance media installed on buildings throughout ngaba town in the aftermath of the 2008 protests. as the film’s footage of subsequent immolations in those streets attests, many protests are performed for those cameras, drawing immolators to those spaces. and as it builds its case against tibetan collaborators, the film highlights the state media technology used to surveil and investigate (filmed prison interrogations, street footage, police photos), all the while attempting to keep the disciplinary state offstage by focusing on brokenhearted relatives, as well as kindly tibetan policemen and chinese doctors in the hospital attempting to save phuntshok (from others). indeed, no mention is made of any of phuntshok’s own utterances. instead, other people are recruited to stand in for phuntshok and speak for and about him, including tapey himself (scarred and regretful), phuntshok’s father (he was naive and easily misled), and the monk friend who was too afraid to go through with it (“i wasn’t serious, no normal person would have been”). in that context, visual signs threaten to fall out of alignment with the voice-over narration that attempts to recruit western viewers as humanitarian spectators: the photo of phuntshok’s isolated, charred body can come across not as an innocent to be embraced but as the emblematically “bare life” of the criminal (agamben 1998). returning to the video footage of phuntshok that opened this article, this perspective then illuminates the stakes of its competing uses in prc state and foreign media. as the cctv documentary claims, it was filmed by a monk friend and sent to tibetan exiles via social media a few days later. the cctv documentary thus uses it, soundless except for the narrator’s voice-over, to highlight and exploit the terrible fact of a bystander taking the time to film a gravely wounded and dying person instead of tending to his injuries. the subsequent contests over phuntshok’s body therefore hinged on the timing of his access to the hospital, figured as a site of biopolitical succor. in the legal cases brought against the monks who took his body back to the monastery (they were en route when the video was recorded), they are charged with intentional homicide because they delayed taking him to the hospital. yet as monks later reportedly pointed out to foreign media, chinese hospitals make for particularly dangerous sites for protesters, in that tibetan protesters are routinely beaten and tortured in prisons rather than taken to hospitals (smith 2010), and doctors will often not accept wounded protesters without the knowledge and permission of security officials. the fear of state violence perhaps explains the forensic impulse of the tibetan monk who filmed phuntshok after his immolation—perhaps the camera traces his body in part to show the red welts from the alleged police beatings. that is indeed how the 2013 voice of america documentary uses the footage, this time to a sound track of tragic cello music. that film edits it in under the voice-over narration, timing the close-up of apparent wounds on phuntshok’s cheek with the claim that security forces beat him: “he died soon after of his injuries.” here, we are also to see phuntshok as a biopolitical subject, only from a competing source of humanitarian (and techno-legal) authority. both videos in fact attempt to address and create an international humanitarian public, but for cctv, phuntshok is the mouthpiece of a corrupt society, while for the voice of america, he is a sovereign, liberal protester. questions inevitably remain. were the monks attempting to save phuntshok’s life or safeguard his sacrifice (by allowing him to die)? which injuries, in fact, killed him? his monk protectors did ultimately take phuntshok to the hospital, where he died in the wee hours of that morning. but the hospital was also the key place where the status of phuntshok’s body as object or subject was radically in question. his body was not turned over to his anxiously awaiting family throughout the following day, reportedly because local authorities, fearful of its potential for a sociopolitical life beyond death, would not release it until a certain visiting superior official had left town (kalsang rinchen 2011). * * * to conclude, in this article i have drawn on anthropologists rethinking governance, state violence, and subjectivity to argue for a performative approach to understanding tibetan self-immolation as a new and deeply contested genre of mass media. i cannot write this from a safely objective position. instead, grasping the sociopolitical lives of dead bodies in the prc requires all observers to acknowledge their implication in the inherently intersubjective (and thus changing) meaning and efficacy of untimely death under state repression. in this light, tibetan immolators like phuntshok are neither lone, completely self-sovereign individuals (autonomous protesters) nor inert objects (manipulated victims or dead remains). instead, in a necropolitics particular to sino-tibetan relations set in motion by state violence, immolators are shifting sociopolitical subjects whose messages and agencies extend and scale up far beyond their deaths. indeed, the spiraling transgressions of military crackdowns and tibetan protest beginning in 2008 have generated new (and renewed) forms of pan-tibetan publics in and outside the prc, tightening social media networks among tibetans and foregrounding again the divine prowess and transcendent life of the dalai lama. that is arguably the social world and space-time in which phuntshok took on new life in flames. witnesses and reporters later said that while burning he had shouted, “may his holiness the dalai lama live for 10,000 years!” in this, his protest came across as indeed a sacrifice, a mass-mediated message via death in exchange for the life of the buddhist sovereign. as such, his death and subsequent buddhist cremation worked to apotheosize phuntshok as himself a bodhisattva, a heroic conqueror of death. in the video of him in the car, he sits motionless, back straight, his face composed and seemingly devoid of affect, uncannily resembling the seated sakyamuni buddha triumphing over the armies of the death demon mara. and his cremation ceremony, the first such tibetan mass cremation since the yushu earthquake a year earlier, seemed to take anxious security officials by surprise. but in ngaba, phuntshok’s lone funeral pyre, burning before a large thanka (mural) depicting buddhas and the mantra om mani padme hum, now put a monk-bodhisattva in the place of the ordinary untimely dead. as the monk assembly chanted the texts to clear his way, and crying laity chanted prayers for the dalai lama’s protection, the ceremony worked to complete what phuntshok’s auto-cremation had promised. the apotheosis of phuntshok helped make buddhist cremation-as-enlightenment the most important orienting meta-genre for tibetan self-immolation practice, as well as its most relevant public, tibetan mourners in the prc: “facing unimaginable pain to voice support for all suffering people,” asserts the tibetan dissident woeser (2014, 29), blogging from beijing, “while at the same time maintaining one’s sense of dignity within a dehumanizing political environment, a nirvana-like self-sublimation is attained through the act of self-immolation.” indeed, in contrast to the propensity of both chinese state media and many western and tibetan exile observers to reproduce and circulate abroad graphic images of immolators’ charred and burning bodies, bereft and isolated in public spaces, over time tibetan eyewitnesses and mourners in the prc seemed to be more interested in producing and circulating portraits of the corpses shrouded in scarves, crowned by photos of the dalai lama, and enthroned on altars, as themselves objects of worship. as woeser’s comment above suggests, the specific nexus of liberal, humanitarian, and buddhist notions of political subjectivity in tibetan self-immolation practice allows protesters and commentators to pivot among multiple superaddressees, but therein also lies the danger of a tragically constitutive form of mass mediation.9 that is, as inherently non-neutral witnesses, we have to carefully consider our own intoxicating horror for the “necroaesthetics” (yurchak 2008) of tibetan self-immolations, and thereby our own potential roles in helping to generate them. in sino-tibetan necropolitics, chinese state violence and transnational media spectacle together call forth newly transcendent buddhas, whose divine agency can come to the aid of competing political projects. but in taking them up abroad, we could well lose sight of the specific nature and stakes of the grief of tibetan communities in the prc. notes acknowledgments my thanks especially to andrew poe and amrita basu of amherst college, who organized the workshop on “suicide protest” at amherst in october 2012 for which this article was originally written. conversations with them and with other workshop participants, including patrick anderson, allen feldman, sayres rudy (who sent me detailed comments), robert samet, and john whalen-bridge helped me both deepen my analysis and broaden my comparative perspective. i also thank my tibetan colleagues phalay and abho (pseudonyms) for helping me track down and translate some sources and for our ongoing conversations about these issues. comments and criticisms from robert barnett, sepideh battracharya and the students in her “anthropology of suffering” class at lewis and clark college, ralph litzinger, carole mcgranahan, dasa mortensen, benno weiner, as well as from dominic boyer and two anonymous reviewers, were also highly productive in the crafting of the final version of this article. all remaining errors are of course my own. 1. historically, immolation meant any act of sacrificing a living being. i thus use the term self-immolation as a general term and specify when it is by fire. since the phrase suicide protest does not necessarily address protesters’ own notions of personhood and death, i use it only sparingly. 2. a total of twenty-two were reported killed in the 2008 lhasa unrest, eighteen of whom were han chinese, many trapped in burning buildings (international campaign for tibet 2008; barnett 2009; smith 2010; human rights watch 2010). the vast majority of tibetan protests that year, however, were peaceful. 3. state media never acknowledged security forces’ use of deadly force against tibetan protesters during the 2008 unrest. foreign observers counted at least 140 tibetans dead, and tibetans i knew there were convinced that hundreds, even thousands of tibetans had been killed and secretly disposed of. see human rights watch 2010. 4. by fall 2014, at least forty-nine immolators had left written, verbal, or recorded last words. those, along with shouted slogans and placards held by immolators, have been the object of intense scrutiny in foreign and dissident media (woeser 2012, 2014; wang 2012; barnett 2012). 5. the tibetan blogger woeser (2014), in her recent book on the immolations, states that tapey’s whereabouts since his appearance in the documentary are unknown. 6. as the wave of immolations unfolded, however, the majority of immolators were young lay people. 7. forms of self-immolation protest in general, and self-immolation-by-fire in particular, have been on the rise in the prc in recent decades (biggs 2012). 8. yet it has not been entirely clear what that entailed about claims for an independent tibetan state. tibetans in the prc and throughout the diaspora are not necessarily united on that point. 9. in recent years, several high lamas (not the dalai lama) and prominent tibetan intellectuals (including woeser) have publicly called on tibetans to stop self-immolating, to no avail. references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. ardley, jane 2002 the tibetan independence movement: political, religious and gandhian perspectives. london: routledgecurzon. asad, talal 2007 on suicide bombing. new york: columbia university press. bakhtin, mikhail 1981 the dialogic imagination: four essays. edited by michael holquist. translated by caryl emerson and michael holquist. austin: university of texas press. barnett, 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http://culanth.org/fieldsights/110-mourning-online. dershowitz, alan 2004 “in love with death.” guardian, june 4. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jun/04/saudiarabia.comment. dhundup gyalpo 2011 “making sense of tibetan self-immolation.” asia times online, december 2. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/china/ml02ad01.html. ensor, david, dir. 2013 fire in the land of snow: self-immolations in tibet. washington, dc: voice of america. 56 min. fassin, didier 2011 humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. berkeley: university of california press. foucault, michel 1990 the history of sexuality. vol. 1, an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage books. originally published in 1976. international campaign for tibet 2008 “tibet at a turning point: the spring uprising and china’s new crackdown.” august 6. http://www.savetibet.org/tibet-at-a-turning-point. human rights watch 2010 “‘i saw it with my own eyes’: abuses by chinese security forces in tibet, 2008–2010.” july 21. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2010/07/22/i-saw-it-my-own-eyes-0. kalsang rinchen 2011 “monk who set ablaze self dead, 7 kirti monks released, several still held.” phayul.com, march 17. http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=29264. lempert, michael 2012 discipline and debate: the language of violence in a tibetan buddhist monastery. berkeley: university of california press. lempert, michael, and michael silverstein 2012 creatures of politics: media, message, and the american presidency. bloomington: university of indiana press. lopez, donald s., jr. 1998 prisoners of shangri-la: tibetan buddhism and the west. chicago: university of chicago press. makley, charlene 2014 “spectacular compassion: ‘natural’ disasters and national mourning in china’s tibet.” critical asian studies 46, no. 3: 371–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2014.935132. martin, emily 2007 “review essay: violence, language and everyday life.” american ethnologist 34, no. 4: 741–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.741. mazzarella, william 2009 “affect: what is it good for?” in enchantments of modernity: empire, nation, globalization, edited by saurabh dube, 291–309. new york: routledge. 2015 “totalitarian tears: does the crowd really mean it?” cultural anthropology 30, no. 1: 92–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.06. mbembe, achille 2003 “necropolitics.” translated by libby meintjes. public culture 15, no. 1: 11–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. mcgranahan, carole 2010 arrested histories: tibet, the cia, and memories of a forgotten war. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mclagan, meg 2002 “spectacles of difference: cultural activism and the mass mediation of tibet.” in media worlds: anthropology on new terrain, edited by faye d. ginsburg, lila abu-lughod, and brian larkin, 90–111. berkeley: university of california press. mills, martin a. 2003 identity, ritual and state in tibetan buddhism: the foundations of authority in gelukpa monasticism. london: routledge. ponnudurai, parameswaran 2012 “burning monk walks 300 steps.” radio free asia, december 3. http://www.rfa.org/english/news/tibet/burn-12032012161600.html. robin, françoise 2012 “fire, flames and ashes. how tibetan poets talk about self-immolations without talking about them.” revue d’études tibétaines, no. 25: 123–31. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ret/pdf/ret_25_10.pdf. sangster, leigh 2012 “the work of art in the age of self-immolation.” in “self-immolation as protest in tibet,” hot spots series edited by carole mcgranahan and ralph litzinger, cultural anthropology website, april 8. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/113-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-self-immolation. scott, james c. 1999 seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. new haven, conn.: yale university press. smith, warren 2010 tibet’s last stand?: the tibetan uprising of 2008 and china’s response. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield. sontag, susan 2003 regarding the pain of others. new york: farrar, strauss, and giroux. tibetan centre for human rights and democracy (tchrd) 2013 “china uses religious propaganda to counter tibetan self-immolations.” march 20. http://www.tchrd.org/2013/03/china-uses-religious-propaganda-to-counter-tibetan-self-immolations. van sant, shannon 2012 “tibet self-immolations: why people set themselves on fire to protest china.” cbs news website, december 10. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tibet-self-immolations-why-people-set-themselves-on-fire-to-protest-china. verdery, katherine 1999 the political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change. new york: columbia university press. wang lixiong 2012 “last-words analysis—why tibetans self-immolate?” translated by ogyen kyab. phayul.com, december 27. http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=32726. woeser, tsering 2012 “the testimonies left by tibetan self-immolators.” high peaks pure earth blog, december 3. http://highpeakspureearth.com/2012/the-testimonies-left-behind-by-tibetan-self-immolators-by-woeser. 2014 self-immolation in tibet: the shame of the world. translated by kevin carrico. unpublished manuscript. yurchak, alexei 2008 “necro-utopia: the politics of indistinction and the aesthetics of the non-soviet.” current anthropology 49, no. 2: 199–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/526098. immigrant sensibilities in tech worlds: sensing hate, capturing dissensus cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 374-403, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.02 immigrant sensibilities in tech worlds: sensing hate, capturing dissensus sareeta amrute university of washington and data & society research institute https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5320-4600 the highway traveled east. i left seattle in my rearview mirror and followed the road’s curve toward microsoft’s corporate campus and its belt of smaller satellite firms. the asphalt skimmed a misty lake where eagles perched on streetlamps tracked suvs like they were salmon coursing below; it deposited me at a strip mall between a bend in the road and a grassy field dotted with grazing horses, whose bridle trails follow pathways laid down by the coast salish and duamish peoples. on this bright june day in 2017, philip motioned me into a parking spot outside the swinging glass doors of a chain bakery. he would be my guide in this suburban borderland, where asian coders are valorized as a cheapened alternative to american citizen coders even while they are framed as job-taking aliens. philip was in his late forties, with close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and an easy, infectious smile. he came to the united states from taiwan after college and now worked in the technical software division of a seattle-area hospital. his favorite part of the job was visiting hospital patients to evaluate the system he helped build. philip had a quiet demeanor and beamed every time he mentioned his wife and two children. outside the hospital, though, philip has experienced months of low-level harassment, the kind that the washington state’s attorney general’s office terms “hate incidents,” distinguished from the more serious “hate crimes.”1 hate incidents might include verbal threats, the defacement of property, bullying, inappropriate questions, or even shoves and projectiles. unlike hate crimes, hate incidents do not fall within the boundaries of what can be prosecuted under the law, a distinction explained to immigrant groups at numerous sessions held by local police departments across seattle’s eastside.2 immigrants from india and china who work in the seattle area in software-related businesses have come to terms with increased levels of harassment since donald trump rose to national prominence during the 2016 presidential election. this essay depicts these immigrants interacting with the state through community meetings and follows them as they report patterns of harassment that remain unactionable to the police. i trace the entrainment of immigrant senses by elaborating on what jacques rancière (2004, 12–13) calls the “distribution of the sensible”: the way a particular partition of people, places, and ideas is made to seem self-evident to perception. as i will demonstrate, rancière’s model of dissensus, or the political possibilities inherent in recognizing a distribution of the sensible as particular, fails to account for that which is enunciated but unheeded. accordingly, i read dissensus against the texture of migrants’ experience with hate unavailable for legal action. i call this experience the sensate for the way it enunciates how embodied differences and regimes of value shape politics. this essay extends rancière’s notion of the distribution of the sensible through a discussion of the racialized capital that “asian” coding embodies. i offer an account of how the state and immigrants sense across a landscape marked by extrastate authority inherent in corporate landscapes and their attendant manicured commercial domains. even while immigrant senses are trained to register hate, their reports also register illegible, unactionable events and produce state effects that fall neither within the normal distribution of the sensible nor inside dissensus. tech industries and the geographies that surround them often function like a terra nullius in the landscape, an open country unencumbered by regimes of governance. the suburban radii of microsoft’s campuses push farther east economically marginalized, largely white communities who experience this shift with great ambivalence. they benefit from the sales of their newly valuable homes but find themselves simultaneously displaced by tech-economy riches. indian and chinese software engineers often serve as the figureheads of these displacements.3 at the same time, the successive displacements of indigenous populations from seattle and its environs throughout the nineteenth century and the internment of japanese farmers during the twentieth (takami 1992; takaki 1993; thrush 2007; pearkes 2016) materialize in the way roads, corporate campuses, and strip malls incorporate these pathways of use and erasure. drawing inspiration from these ongoing erasures as sites of conflict, this essay centers the sites where local and corporate governance collide—what keller easterling (2014) calls extrastatecraft: procedures where corporate governance structures both adopt and challenge state structures. these practices materialize in the repeatable and modifiable shapes of the corporate campus, the housing development, and the upscale mall, which become sites of contestation in racializing space, a process that rearticulates the use of space, who moves through it, and the cultural repertoires of landscape (lipsitz 2007; easterling 2014). the spaces created by and alongside seattle’s tech companies are also spaces brought into existence through the statecraft and extrastatecraft of an upper-caste, upper-class south asian diaspora. just as these spaces are shaped by pacific northwest histories of migration, expulsion, and techno-capitalist sanitization, so too are they shaped by postcolonial indian repertoires of caste and class exclusion (subramanian 2015). as purnima mankekar (2015) shows in her analyses of affect among indian migrants in san francisco, by attending to the border between corporate and state governance in such spaces as community centers, schools, and shopping malls, we can better understand regimes of racial capital and the sensory apparatus of the state as they knit together daily interactions in tech worlds. here, i pay particular attention to the everyday state-effects produced when immigrants are both victims of and instruments for detecting intolerable acts (scott 1998; trouillot 2001; povinelli 2002; aretxaga 2012). i interweave a theory of the senses with that of racial capital to understand shifts in the organization of immigration, race, and value creation. racial capital describes the foundational necessity of racialized bodies to the creation of value under capitalism, including the way ideas about the characteristics of populations justify current relationships of power (robinson 2000; see also leong 2013; kelley 2015; hudson 2017; bhattacharyya 2018).4 this essay offers an account of racial capital as it moves across multiple kinds of racial formations. as such, i follow the work of frantz fanon (2008), homi k. bhabha (1994), sylvia wynter (1989), and alexander weheliye (2014) in showing how divisions in the category of the human determine categories of human labor. to wit, it professionals from india and china are both targeted for harassment within a political climate increasingly hostile to immigrants as job takers and separated out as upper class (and within the south asian context and often for themselves, upper-caste subjects) from other asian immigrants, as well as latinx, native, and black bodies (lye 2004; muñoz 2007; chun 2011; halewood 2011; amrute 2020). figure 1. map of seattle’s eastside showing tech start-ups. http://cobgis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapseries/index.html?appid=7453faf396f144798372f3ef0fd90fc2. managing immigrant reactions to hate in a middle school gym just north of salish flats, students and parents sat in a semicircle around invited speakers: two representatives from the united states’ attorney general’s office, a local police chief, a child psychologist, and amrita, the organizer of this event about responding to hate crimes and the leader of a local community organization for elderly south asians. amrita began the meeting with slides compiled from real incidents that members of her organization and their families had experienced and reported to her. amrita then asked each of the other guests to speak to what the victim should do in such situations. as she spoke, a series of immigrant nightmares flickered across the pulldown portable projector screen: i was told to go back to my own country, how should i respond? i was coming out of a coffee shop in my neighborhood and someone threw coffee in my direction, narrowly missing me. what should i have done? my high schooler was told he was a terrorist, and derogatory things were written on his locker. i was stopped at a traffic light when two men pulled up in a car next to me. they said racist and sexist things, then tailgated me; i was scared and worried for my safety. everyone had boarded a domestic flight and only i was asked to leave. i was a bystander and i witnessed someone being harassed. i was filling up my car at a gas station; someone came up to me and asked, “are you hispanic or muslim?” i was waiting at a bus stop, when two men jumped out of an suv with darkened windows and asked me for my immigration papers. they asked, did i have a green card or an h-1b? my child was harassed on the school bus and told that, with donald trump now elected, she would have to leave the country. what am i to do? for each scenario, the invited guests offered a strategy catalogue and stressed that the victims needed to decide for themselves which one of these felt most comfortable. the police chief suggested that the incident at the gas station might be deflected. “that sounds like the beginning of a joke,” she offered as a response. she went on to claim that animus might not motivate such questions, that people might be curious about things they did not see every day. “being cagey or suspicious,” she declared, “can create tension that doesn’t have to be there.” the chief proposed answering the question straightforwardly, and then asking, “why do you want to know?” yet she also admitted to a difference in the time of trump. “it is hard,” the chief said, “to change people’s desires, so we have to work on reducing opportunities for hate crimes to occur.” she thinks of hate crimes as an exacerbation of bullying, which she called an “old brain response” resting on ignorance and fear. as she saw it, trump’s election brought to the surface underlying fears and desires that remain difficult to heal. in accounting for changed times, the victim also has to be made aware of what to do if a situation escalated. if our instincts are wrong and the encounter is not friendly, the chief continued, we should say, “i’m dialing 911, i’m not feeling comfortable or safe.” the representatives from the u.s. attorney general’s office added that the victim should carefully avoid engaging in verbal abuse. “do not have a malicious dialogue,” warned one, “then no one can come back and say you were part and parcel to that.” if the senses “hinge” the body to regimes of action (hirschkind 2006, 29), then this police chief’s messages about the everyday immigrant experience with hate make immigrants responsible for preventing racial animus from escalating into crime. such logic indicates a state trying to incorporate immigrants into the norms and practices of american attitudes toward foreignness and its conversational styles.5 these disciplinary practices normalize immigrant bodies as the proper repository for national curiosity, even while they formally acknowledge that these questions sometimes mask more malicious intent and anticipate the power of innocent immigrant testimony in scenes of judicial prosecution. in these sessions, the state itself is produced as the interpreter of the acceptable limits of national curiosity. immigrants must tread carefully, moving through a landscape beset with both innocent curiosity and dangerous hatred. police training sessions parcel out how hate incidents might be sensed and leave behind visceral perceptions that remain outside a distribution that carefully guides reporting these incidents towards existing apparatuses of state and policing. in their recommendations, law-enforcement officers rely on the senses to draw and redraw boundaries of advisable actions (samimian-darash and stalcup 2017). playing out scenarios frames such senses as simultaneously already active, like an insect’s antennae, and trainable, like the olfactory nerve of a hunting dog. here, the senses exist in the pores of the law, determining what can rise to the level of perceptibility and what is common to community (rancière 2004, 14). immigrants from india and china play the role of the front-line defenders of this polity, establishing that the state determines the prosecution of hate crimes to be held in common by all citizens. yet the meetings also capture the sensate, which falls outside both of the sensible and of dissensus, because immigrant opposition does not cohere into dissent. in interviews i held with participants after this and similar community meetings, i learned that many of them had an immediate, and in their accounts, hard to rationalize reaction to these indignities. the community sessions attempted to give voice to these experiences, even as these sessions shaped that experience through a framework of correct responses. the sensible describes the way the world is partitioned into what can be perceived, by whom, and how. for jacques rancière, the senses exist neither in the biological bodies of individuals nor in the categories of human cognitive faculties. instead, the senses are distributed across categories and individuals. rancière names the distribution of the sensible in two ways. first, he describes how the world is divided, or partitioned, to create inclusions and exclusions, determining what kinds of subjects belong in which parts. second, he articulates how those subjects are deemed to be part of the world—in other words, how they can participate in it (chari 2015). the exclusion of some sensations from the knowable world constitutes a means of creating a particular distribution of the sensible, one that rancière (2010, 37) might describe as a distribution based on the notion of fittingness, where “society consists of groups dedicated to specific modes of action, in places where those occupations are exercised, in modes of being corresponding to these occupations and these places.” rancière (2010, 149) calls that which lies beyond this distribution “dissensus,” which marks a break from the taken-for-granted relationship between what is sensed and what is understood to be real, correct, or natural. this break can ground a different understanding of that which is taken to be real. dissensus grounds politics, because politics concerns who is included in the management of common life, and a different answer to the question of who is included in political life emerges from registering a break between who and what are left out from having a say in making decisions in common, and questioning why that is the case (rancière 2011, 2; o’connor 2015). but what happens to those lost sense impressions that fall below the threshold of a particular distribution of the sensible yet do not enunciate dissensus? these lost sense impressions might be called the sensate. sensate are those sense impressions that pool beneath the self-evident facts of the senses. the distribution of the sensible and of the sensate are yoked. they move through the visceral and the semiotic, and affiliate individuals through a shared—but differently experienced—history of racial formations (harper 2000; smith 2006). taken together, they draw immigrant subjects into an apparatus of rule while registering immigrant exclusion. hate incidents, not hate crimes of all the scenarios presented in the salish flats middle school gym that day, only one rose to the level of a possible hate crime: the incident where a woman feared for her safety as she was tailgated. hate crimes are prosecuted in washington state under the felony malicious harassment statute (rww 9a.36.080). the law extends to race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or mental, physical, or sensory handicap. the acts that can be prosecuted under this law require maliciously and intentionally committing either physical injury or property damage or reasonable fear of harm to person or property. yet the act cannot consist of words alone. “it shall not constitute malicious harassment for a person to speak or act in a critical, insulting, or deprecatory way so long as his or her words or conduct do not constitute a threat of harm” (rww 9a.36.080).6 during the meeting in the spring of 2018, the assistant u.s. attorney, who leads the department of justice for washington state’s hate crimes task force, admitted to having seen a spike in hate crimes in the previous few months. a second assistant u.s. attorney then clarified how the law approached these crimes. first, he said, there had to be an actual attack or threat. second, there had to be a motive, which was often difficult to prove. he continued that when reporting a hate crime, one should take note of details that can show motive. for example, tattoos could evince membership in a particular organization; or discriminatory intent might be concluded from certain bystanders being spared. according to the schema of state and federal legislation, hate crimes are actions motivated by racial, sexual, or ability-based animus. hate incidents, on the other hand, are similarly motivated but do not constitute a threat of harm—that is, a reasonable person would not intuit harm to person or property.7 reports of hate incidents form part of a police surveillance apparatus and help create a profile of a potential act; of themselves, however, they are not registered as worthwhile reports. police collect reports of such incidents so they can establish a profile of possible hate. materials gathered from hate incidents are entered into police records; they include a description of what happened, the location, and the people involved. these records become part of a database of known incidents. immigrants thus become absorbed into the fingertips, nose, and skin of the state. their senses create a skin that can perceive the legal out-of-bounds of right radical extremists even while immigrants learn to recognize the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable modes of expressing rage, between out-of-bounds conduct and protected speech. the training sessions coached potential victims in how to pick up and record the indexes of hate to establish patterns, even while leaving the reports themselves and their embodied effects unacknowledged. immigrant bodies move across a field of struggle in the everyday spaces of suburban it enclaves. tech economy geographies encompass what gloria anzaldúa (1987) has described as a frontier, where landscapes are crossed by experiential regimes of belonging and displacement, limited inclusion and threat. while many workers reported feeling safe and welcome in their corporate offices, even if they recognized that their visa status constrained their career trajectories, outside the office doors many felt unsafe and unwanted. in these frontier places, hate incidents also record intimidation campaigns that simmer just below the level of viable prosecution. bringing an analysis of racial capital to bear on how immigrants are trained to respond to hate even while they are evaluated as differentially desirable working bodies reveals the stakes and the limits of immigrant solidarity in the current age of distributed contempt. to make this theoretical move between extant theorizations of the politics of the senses and those of racial capital, i next offer a methodological approach to the senses that takes processes of racialization into account. this methodology grounds a further discussion of migrants’ varied responses to the particular distribution of the sensible. the distribution of the sensible and the sensate the senses—how one perceives the way something looks, smells, feels, tastes, and sounds—have been marshaled at least since the european enlightenment to determine what a person can know and who can know what. these questions were fundamentally bound up with establishing the humanity of the enlightenment’s racialized and gendered others (wynter 1989; vora and atanasoski 2015). along the way to establishing the natural rights of man, john locke (1689), for example, determined the contours of human rationality by recourse to the idea that correlations between the senses and concepts could be taught. locke separates true from habitual sensations by means of distinguishing proper and improper associations and writes of the need to separate “natural” from “acquired antipathies.” falsely acquired sense impressions, locke suggests, could be extremely dangerous, especially when formed early in childhood. the “wrong connection” of ideas “is of so great force to set us awry in our actions” as well as in our “morals, passions, reasonings and notions themselves” (locke 1689, 1). improper associations arise from chance, training, and repetition; it is up to trained judgment to reject them (locke 1689; kallich 1945, 308). locke put the distinction between natural and wrongheaded associations, along with the practice of training the senses, at the heart of his moral and rational theory of the limits of human understanding. in doing so, he and other political philosophers (like thomas hobbes before him and edmund burke after him) participated in a discussion about the capacities of discernment that would endure throughout european colonial expansion. such debates on human understanding left open the questions of whether being afraid of some kinds of people was natural or whether colonial subjects and women could be trained to overcome their own “false” impressions. though the literature linking colonial subjects to the senses is vast, such reasoning perhaps reaches its apotheosis in frantz fanon’s (2008) account of living as a black colonial subject in paris, the colonial metropole. in a famous passage from his black skin, white masks, which chronicles fanon’s realization of his inhumanity in the eyes of french colonists despite his credentials and his language, fanon recounts a french child’s terror when faced with, in the child’s words, “a negro.” when the two meet on a train, fanon shivers with cold and the child trembles with fear. under the false impression that fanon is quivering with anger, the child jumps into his mother’s arms, exclaiming, “mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up” (fanon 2008, 86). fanon’s description records both the child’s sensations at seeing fanon and his own reaction at experiencing this terror. fanon evokes the sensate by mirroring the child’s trembling and his own shivering against the cold. these shudders echo further as fanon traces the physiological and psychological effects of colonial rule from the antilles to algiers. it is only in the conclusion of black skin, white masks that fanon manages to move the sensate that he has recorded on multiple occasions throughout the text into dissensus to inaugurate a new human condition. “oh my body,” writes fanon (2008, 131) in his final prayer in the book, “make of me always a man who questions,” thereby moving together with the very specificity of the body and its registers of the sensate toward a continually expansive new humanity. in fanon’s writings, the direct experience of european colonialism and anticolonial struggle bookend colonial subjects’ experiences of hatred. in contemporary suburban technical enclaves, the distribution of the sensible and the sensate tells a story of immigrant shock as the politics of labor loop over and contradict themselves, revealing the immigrant coder as both wanted tech worker and unwanted foreigner. in these spaces inside and outside of state jurisdiction, immigrants are drawn into becoming the subject of sensory terror even while they are asked to make fine-grained distinctions based on their own sensibilities. community members experienced these bias incidents in multiple ways. their reactions should inform discussions of immigrant sensibilities and the political possibilities precipitated therein. in other words, while existing models of the sensible take the politics of dissent as the outcome of democratic state organization, i found that the repartition of sensation rancière calls for requires work, without which dissensus can pool in disorientation rather than dissent. this may hold especially true in tech enclaves, where campus design, contract labor practices, and engineering cultures, which historically emphasize narrow problem solving over big-picture analyses, expressly push to the margins political dissent (forsythe 2002; bacon 2011; srivastava 2015). when a person like philip experiences harassment, he gathers up his sensibilities, records them, and reports on them. what happens next, though, can only be recognized through the lens of the particular racial formation that organizes his immigrant labor. dog poop politics the first time i saw philip chen, he stood before a crowded room in the local cultural center during a harvest festival. his hands were shaking. in a strong voice that belied his trim frame and his slightly stooped bearing, philip outlined how he had taken his reports of racial harassment to the local city council only to have his complaint fall on deaf ears (ahmed 2018). he was desperate for help; the room stilled after he had spoken. someone directed him to the local american civil liberties union (aclu) representative, who would strategize with him after the meeting. philip had been sitting next to me, and i explained that i was an anthropologist studying hate crimes in the seattle area and asked if we could meet. two weeks later, we found ourselves sipping overheated herbal tea from oversized paper cups at the panera bread company. philip described for me months of harassment in detail. he had been followed home from work. he had had dog feces placed on his lawn. he had had car lights shone through his living room window. after chronicling these events, he asked for my pen, and drew for me the winding road that ends at a cul-de-sac where he lives. “it is impossible,” he said, “that anyone would be parked and waiting on that street for any other reason but to harass me.” the street does not lead anywhere else. figure 2. philip marks my notebook with a map of his house x and the street he lives on. taking it back, i noted “police can do” with a question mark in the margins. image created by sareeta amrute. he then produced his phone. “i bought cameras,” he told me, “and installed them on my roof.” “but they were cheap cameras from costco,” philip continued, “and they couldn’t capture everything in enough detail.” he had uploaded all these videos to youtube, and we watched a few together. during the first one, philip pointed out the relevant features to me: a car comes down his street at night. it makes a slow turn, then waits. its reverse lights blink on. we see philip come down his driveway toward the car; the car is put in drive and speeds away. the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as we reached the end of the video. it did indeed look like someone was watching his house, the driver using the car’s rearview mirror to do so. in the next clip, we see the line of young pines that mark the edge of philip’s property. a man and his dog enter screen left. the two disappear for a while behind the trees and emerge from the other side, finally moving to the right and out of sight of the camera. the man is letting his dog shit on the edge of philip’s lawn. this goes on, every day, for more than two weeks. philip stopped the video to offer me further visual evidence, toggling between his online account and his phone’s photos. he blazed through dozens of still photographs of dog poop, glistening, wet, curled, and gigantic, now nestled together, in series, on his phone. he scrolled and i nearly retched, the piles’ vile odor seeming to emerge from the glass of philip’s handheld screen. philip’s choice to install video cameras made use of a logic of surveillance that would ultimately disappoint him. he believed that better evidence would produce prosecutable results, but the grainy quality of the video thwarted his desire. even with perfect picture quality—like that of his dog poop stills—it is debatable that law enforcement could do anything without proof of racial motive. the poop, too, was extruded just beyond the pines that mark philip’s property line and would not count as destruction of property. while his images failed to elicit the governance response he desired, we may aptly describe them as part of a surveillance culture that has evolved from metaphors of containment over a territory rooted in u.s. cold war politics to the increased collection of data from individual users by corporate actors (collier and lakoff 2008; mallard and lakoff 2011; hu 2016; gilman and green 2018; zuboff 2019). philip used sousveillance—watching from below—to try to garner state protection, even while his efforts furthered, rather than evaded, the logic of state surveillance through recourse to the police (mann 2004; browne 2015). while state actors may be interested in philip’s evidence as a prospective marker about what sites, groups, and actors to pay attention to as potentially dangerous in the future, his call was for immediate action. in that moment, this call was answered only through our shared attention to the seemingly endless series of disgust scrolling across philip’s cell phone screen. the visceral reactions philip and i experienced just looking at the pictures of dog poop points toward the senses acting in excess of formal procedures of the law.8 the senses become a repository for immigrant communities to track, remember, and train themselves in the practice of detecting white rage. they constitute a site of struggle over spatial borders, a means of training immigrants as subjects of the state, and repositories for immigrant communities to call forth encounters that simmer below the level of prosecutable hate crimes. despite his video archive, philip continued to be frustrated as his reports remained with the sensate, never grounding political agitation on a larger scale. the sensate the senses can be discounted as insignificant, too small to garner social attention. they can be subject to “numbing and erasure” (seremetakis 1994, 23), especially when they elicit reactions that fall outside of an accepted distribution. as lalaie ameeriar (2017) argues, for immigrants, evidence their senses are trained to notice is complemented by what their bodies are trained to produce, a sanitized sensorium stripped of smell, voice, and alterity. between the labors of recording the significant sensory perceptions necessary to maintain the rule of law and suppressing the ostensibly intolerable immigrant sensorium of smells, looks, and sounds, the sensate gathers in swirling eddies of discontent. a programmer from calcutta who has been working for a large software company for the past fifteen years and has lived on seattle’s eastside told me she had never been racially assaulted; that is, until this year. while taking out the garbage in front of her house, a passerby, whom she believes to be a neighbor’s friend, looked her in the face, and said with a smile, “we’ve got a new president now, you’ll have to leave.” then he walked away. the programmer was so shocked, she said nothing, instead, turning up her drive and hurrying inside. for the following three days, she could not leave her house. she would sit at the window and peer in all directions through her half-shut blinds before pacing again up and down the length of her narrow front hall. “i was ashamed,” she confided; “i felt shame that something like that could happen to me. and i felt ashamed that i could not even react.” when she finally managed to leave her house, she got in her car, backed down the driveway, and drove as quickly as she could to her office. another young woman, who was born on the eastside, found herself tailgated as she drove home from a gas station, her four-year-old strapped into a car seat behind her. the pursuing car eventually accelerated past her while the driver screamed at her: “bitch!” when she reported the incident on a local radio talk show, the deejay accused her of exaggerating the encounter to play politics in a local election because she had hosted a fund-raiser for one of the candidates. these and other encounters do not bear the structural weight of institutional discrimination; they are smaller matters. they also tend to be sidelined within populations scattered across tech enclaves. “the indian community,” an organizer with amrita’s group tells me, “tends to treat these hate crimes by sweeping them under the carpet. they do not want to acknowledge that these things are happening and they do not want to complain.” sometimes, these denials orchestrate proof that these asian tech workers are different from and superior to other immigrants; sometimes, the fear of deportation quiets complaint. the scattered nature of these encounters reemphasizes suburban enclaves as racialized spaces (lipsitz 2007; mankekar 2015). as i have argued, when such incidents fall below the threshold of hate crimes, the possibility for dissensus drops into the sensate, even while the state relies on immigrants as first recorders of hate to set patterns for surveillance and prosecution. the sensate ebbs beyond the fittingness of action, place, and being that rancière describes. rather than grounding dissent, it often pools to assert consensus within an already given distribution, or remains uncaptured, triggering disorientation. rancière overlooks the crucial place that race holds in cementing the two sides of capital in its current formation—speculative value and graduated labor organization—and therefore cannot recognize how the senses might be channeled into upholding the privilege of difference in global economies, where creativity becomes a clarion call for asserting superiority. while asian labor becomes a convenient alibi for asserting white privilege, the it worker’s status as needed talent can become a means of asserting migrant hierarchies within and across diasporic communities. as nicholas de genova (2007, 114) writes about the experience of mexican migrants in chicago, migrants’ “most visceral sense of the meaningfulness of their experiences as latina/os,” including discrimination and “manifold racializations,” both reflect and potentially transform “their subordination as labor for capital.” the question of how the migrant sensate might pierce the distribution of the sensible—and whether, when it does, it upholds settler colonialisms—troubles many immigrant communities. sensing some varieties of racial capital when the state fails to act on the hatred it has trained immigrants to record, their senses—already developed to register disgust and loathing—become the grounds for multiple logics of articulating migrants to regimes of capital. one particular gathering brought forward how the senses emerge to reveal the asian high-tech immigrant as multiply located within their own imaginaries of tech economies, diasporic upper-caste south asian communities, and national anti-immigrant american politics. this session also began with people recounting the kinds of discrimination they had experienced. amrita was again at the helm. after she introduced the speakers, she began by telling the story of another woman who wanted to remain anonymous. walking through a nearby shopping center, this woman was speaking with a friend when she was suddenly pushed to the side. the pusher began imitating her speech in what amrita termed “a very derogatory way.” the woman stood still, unable to do anything. it took her fifteen minutes to recover. as amrita continued the narrative, she underlined that this kind of encounter was a daily occurrence. “racism,” amrita intoned, “doesn’t know the color of your skin.” she continued, “people work fifty to sixty hours a week and give this nation their life, but they don’t even know if they will ever be able to vote in this country.” this introduction contained the many contradictions that would play out over the course of the evening. amrita called on her audience to recognize that asians, too, could fall victim to racism—even though some south asians believed that educated asians like themselves would remain immune from racism because they were not black.9 her message was framed against the common denials that amrita hears among asian immigrants in this area, that only black and latinx populations are targets of racism, and that asians, who work in prestigious, high-paying jobs and come from what they consider good, often upper-caste and middle-class backgrounds, are largely spared vitriol. amrita’s call—to recognize an experience of racism across ethnicity—oriented the fear of the shopping mall to a shared political horizon with others. but amrita also distinguished among victims of racism. asian immigrants—at least those sitting in the room near microsoft’s campus that evening—worked hard. yet that work did not translate adequately into political recognition. this latter message oriented immigrant senses in an entirely different way, toward separating black and brown bodies according to their training, their class position, and their work ethic, undoing much of the potential for thick solidarity the session was trying to build (singer 1972; weber 2001; liu and shange 2018). amrita then handed over the microphone to the emcee for the evening, a young man named ajay who had grown up in the united states and had been a temporary visa holder before attaining green card and, later, citizenship status. she introduced him as well positioned to moderate between the issues of hate incidents, school bullying, and visa laws because of his background. ajay introduced the four police chiefs of the surrounding eastside towns; they came to the front of the green-carpeted room. in their introductions, they emphasized their own immigrant backgrounds. one mentioned his hispanic wife and that his children had experienced bullying at school. in their presentations, the chiefs did their best to account for what they saw as the causes of hate and to counsel the audience on their possible responses. the police chief of the town closest to the microsoft campus told the audience, “courage is resistance to fear, not its absence.” he also urged audience members to remain alert to the dangers of intervention. the audience should know the signs of racism escalating into violence and be ready to call 911. they should not engage if they felt the assailant was focusing on a hijab, a transgender body, or another touchtone for violence. instead, the chief counseled de-escalation by slowly getting the person harassed away from the harasser. “do not touch, do not argue with the harasser,” retreat to safety. “most of the people in this room are aware of what happened in portland,” the next chief said before putting up her slide. it displayed a list of warning signs of someone who might turn from verbal to physical violence: the thousand-mile stare, nonsensical speech, pacing. i looked around the room, unsure if most of the assembled knew of the good samaritan stabbed to death on a train in portland after stepping between a harasser and three young girls in hijab. reactions were intent and watchful, if relatively quiet. after the chief’s warning, representatives from the u.s. attorney general’s office outlined the differences between hate speech and hate crimes, and, as they had at earlier meetings, emphasized the wrong but non-prosecutable nature of hate incidents. they stressed that hate should not exist but happens often, and they urged victims and bystanders to report what they saw, to come together in support groups, and to speak up and speak with one another to combat fear and isolation. one representative mentioned the historical and geographically relevant example of japanese internment, ending this part of the evening by calling for action: “if we remain silent, the evil that exists is going to get worse. this is an opportunity to stand up, unite, and make a great country.” these messages again urged immigrants to be in solidarity with minority groups and each other and implicitly distanced the attorney general’s office—in short, the everyday state—from the xenophobic discourse emerging from the state at the level of the executive branch. yet in what followed, these messages devolved in a discussion of visa law that separated migrants from one another along the lines of valued speculative capital and devalued labor. two representatives from a coalition called green card reforms moved to the front of the room. they expressed concern about the mismatch between the number of h-1b visas granted yearly and the number of green cards granted, the latter subject to a per-country quota. the speakers broached the topic by posing a question. “how many of you have gone to a restaurant and been made to wait?” after a pause, the first speaker said, “now, think if that wait is going to be life changing? that is more than just annoying.” the speakers took turns elaborating. as of 2018, they reported, 300,000 people were waiting for a green card in the united states. for the speakers, this wait meant discrimination. “our mistake,” asserted the next speaker, “is being highly skilled and learned. we are the ones who come and fix the snafus of the government and corporations. we believe in the country, but the country is not ready to believe in us! what is the mistake we have done? we are law-abiding, paying taxes, helping the economy grow. it should be first come, first served.” the first representative spoke of the group’s frustration with congressional lobbying. “senators ask, why don’t you go back to your own country? but, there was a need and an opportunity, we are not taking away their jobs. no one was born here except the red indians.” an audible groan ricocheted around the room at this last comment, and the emcee ajay quickly made his way to the front. he masterfully turned the conversation toward shared political goals. “we’re all in this together,” he declared, “it’s not about splitting us up. we need to improve processes together; it is not about who gets served first.” enthusiastic applause surfaced in many corners of the room, and ajay continued, “we also need to use respectful nomenclature. i would like to take this opportunity to correct the previous speaker: the preferred term is native american.” in the parking lot after the meeting concluded, clusters of people stood together talking about the event. in my particular cluster, consensus described the green card reforms group as unprofessional. this group of five thirty-something men and three women concurred that they should have included an american citizen in their group presentation to avoid the terrible mistake about “red indians.” one woman opined that the group failed to understand the nuances of american politics. they all found it embarrassing and agreed that such public gaffes could only hurt the cause of getting more green cards issued to citizens from india. perhaps the session was haunted by the multiple erasures evidenced by the native place names that dotted the surrounding landscape.10 this group recognized that the american political scene was complex and needed “native” know-how. they began to trace in their discussion the complicated terrain that placed them in possible solidarity with other racialized groups, even while dominant narratives enrolled south asian immigrant engineers into the protectionist and purist regimes of racially exclusionary suburban landscapes (lipsitz 2007, 12–13). in these exchanges, migrants began working out possible distributions of the sensible against a structured mode of racializing labor that runs along the seam between creative and distributed work. the concept of racial capital elucidates the way ideas about the characteristics of populations are used to justify current relationships of power (robinson 2000). as robin d. g. kelley (2015) argues, investment in a particular idea of power is shifting and needs to be remade constantly. “in the last century alone,” kelley (2015, 334) writes, “racial regimes have been remade, reconfigured, destabilized, and consolidated many times, employing new technologies to circulate old racial fabulations and new fictions in the process of capitalist expansion.” the documents that the green card reforms group circulate offer one piece of evidence of a remade racial regime that both devalues and overvalues asian coding labor. a bar graph from the group’s website demonstrates the many contradictions of asian labor in coding economies. it compares the number of employment visas and green cards issued for india and all other countries and shows that the number of temporary visas vastly outnumbers green cards. according to the graph, other countries receive many more green cards than indian citizens. its comparison slyly shows how tech companies rely on replaceable labor as a means of flexible control over workers by using employment visas to fill these substitutable roles. the argument for green card mitigation that it also illustrates, however, pits “indians” against “all other” green card holders by showing that indian citizens receive a small share of green cards. in portraying the green card problem in this way, it places indian applicants over all others as worthy of receiving permanent visas, thereby extending tech industry dominance into an analogous argument for indian dominance in migration policy, even though tech companies themselves benefit from keeping immigrant programming labor circulating in and out of jobs as needed through temporary visas. figure 3. green card reform chart. https://www.gcreforms.org/. this refrain of indian high-tech, high-caste exceptionalism echoed across many conversations i had about visa rights over the following several months. most of the people i spoke with that night had internalized the broad strokes of what the green card reforms group presented—that upper-class and upper-caste asian labor differed from other migrant labor on the side of creative and speculative capital rather than on the side of devalued, segmented work. often prefaced by a disclaimer declaring that what was coming next did not mean to disparage other groups, statements mostly ended by suggesting that it was unbelievable that well-educated immigrants working in the software industry had to wait longer for permanent rights of residence than other groups. one example i heard several times involved uber drivers who, according to this discourse, held less value for the economy or society than highly educated immigrant programmers. here, the speakers drew on a racial imaginary that divides types of immigrants according to the economic exchange value they produce and an industry logic that elevates creative effort over physical labor, separating out those who “just drive” from those who make the apps that manage driver labor. in these conversations, immigrants actively racialized capital by over-valorizing asian upper-class and upper-caste subjects through the language of merit and cognitive labor and by devaluing other immigrant and black bodies (lye 2004; subramanian 2015). these narratives suggest that learning to produce out of the sensate a different partition of the sensible requires what josé esteban muñoz (2007, 447) calls being “attentive to the psychic vicissitudes of our belonging in difference.” while amrita and others hold sessions that attend to this varied landscape of “polyvalent” racial formations, stateand extrastate-making practices that rely on an immigrant sensorium undercut these attempts to sustain and care for that belonging (stoler 2017). they do so by treating immigrants as first recorders for a judicial apparatus that neither can hold economic rationalities accountable nor can help build solidarities through differences (amrute 2019). the sensate unbound but what seems fundamental to me is to discern whether the state limits itself to taking the minimal steps required of it or if it is really providing, in a wider sense, the means for another form of expression, for another expression. —jacques rancière the distribution of the sensible and the sensate follow the pathways laid down when the legal regulation of migrant labor traverses tech-industry geographies of personhood and infrastructure (chun 2011; amrute 2017). technical capabilities grant asian coders entry to global corporate workplaces, but also mark them as foreign workers who can become targets of racial exclusion. these factors define the racial schema that at once includes “asian” immigrants as wage-suppressed cognitive laborers and excludes them as fleshy representatives of alien capital (robinson 2000, 2001; amrute 2016; day 2016). at the fulcrum of these tendencies in capital and its technical worlds, hate incidents both wind immigrants closer to sociotechnical racial schemas and unwind them from occupying a safe place within them. immigrant subjects can become stuck within an existing distribution of the sensible, unable to lift from the sensate the political possibility of dissensus. one kind of stickiness results when immigrant reactions coagulate in the familiar vessels of superiority and inferiority, good and bad immigrants. this stickiness remains within a distribution of the sensible achieved in state rhetoric, visa legislation, and everyday conversations that elevate tech workers above other categories of immigrant (xia, wu, and ye 2018).11 here, the sensate constitutes a subterranean clot of resentment that feeds further divisions among kinds of immigrants and cements tech industries as apolitical and meritocratic. another kind of stickiness puts immigrants within a closed loop of pressing for relief based on evidence of daily hatred, then finding that this proof of their senses goes largely unheeded. this stickiness suspends subjects within a sensate without outlet. when next i meet philip at our unremarkable coffee shop, he told me that his experience of harassment and the techniques of countersurveillance he had employed unearthed an old demon. when he was a younger man in taiwan, he used to hear voices and remember his past lives. by the time he enrolled in university, he was regularly experiencing out-of-body moments in which he felt taken over by spirits. possession had started happening again in his current home, sometimes when he was up at night waiting for a car to come down his street, sometimes when he was reviewing the video footage from his rooftop cameras. near the midpoint of our conversation, philip’s eyes flickered to the side and he began chanting softly to himself. taking my pen in his hand, he jotted down several characters, top to bottom, right to left. after a few minutes the reverie ended, and he told me he could no longer read the words he had written. he then took my palm in his hand and read its lives, but what he saw there was dark and full of death. it unnerved me. we went back to our conversation about his children for a few moments before we parted ways. figure 4. philip’s automatic writing. image created by sareeta amrute. philip’s writing joins his collection of dog feces stills and nighttime videos in an ever-expanding collection of automatic recordings with no just apparatus to order them. like an automaton, philip records in a trance, unable to make meaning of his language of the sensate (liu 2010). his sensate, now unbound, exceeds the normative sensible laid down all around him. philip, an immigrant positioned at the sensitive fingertips of the state, helps produce the sensing state that maintains the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable action toward foreign labor, even while it extends its dominion through immigrants’ surveillance. through philip’s ability to track the smell, sound, look, and feel of hatred, state officials produce patterned accounts of when and where curiosity bleeds into malevolence with intent. yet for all its deployment as an apparatus of state, the evidence of philip’s senses is discounted in a legal regime that sequesters it within the distinction between harassment and hate crime. it is in the failure to redress wrongs done to communities through hate speech that one of the most meaningful—yet underappreciated—artifacts of the politics of hate emerges. the sensate as remainder would need to be rearticulated through a politics of immigrant solidarity that moves beyond procedures of formal recognition of the protection of immigrants as hardworking aspirants to holding property as well as beyond the regime of racial capital that distinguishes bodies in terms of their utility to tech-industry needs for highly skilled yet docile migrant labor (harris 1993). for philip, this lack of redress reawakens a spirit that moves the sensate to speak through him, to give an account of that which is neither within a given distribution nor the sensible—nor constitutes dissensus. in rancière’s (2004, 13) elaboration of democracy, the starting point of a transformative political project lies in “understanding that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing, and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.” in democracy, activists should also be flaneurs, and those who narrate should also be those who work, so that the sensible becomes disrupted and boundaries blur between “those who act and those who look; between individual and members of a collective body” (rancière 2004, 19). yet beneath or alongside this understanding, an extra part of the work of undemocratic politics, akin to extrastatecraft, is the capture of understanding: it finds no outlet in disruption, but instead coheres into an enduring experience of what can be sensed but not acted on—the sensate. in studies of divination in taiwan, scholars like stephan feuchtwang (2007) and shu-wei hsieh (2016) note that spirit possession is used commonly to treat ailments and alleviate suffering through spirit mediums. these rituals of divination often include a medium who writes out talismans, prescribes herbal treatments, and uses question-and-answer sessions to communicate with the gods (hsieh 2016). such moments of possession attempt to initiate successful communication between humans and a power greater than humanity, deploying narrative structures of invitation, address, and response, followed by thanks and separation. feuchtwang (2007, 62) calls this narrative structure a performative invocation of “the human capacity for harmonizing the relation between heaven and earth.” as he notes, the responses of heaven can be capricious, they may accept or reject an offering, or they may simply laugh in the face of human striving, and demand the ritual’s repetition. philip’s writings in my notebook might be understood as a talisman that records an offering to the gods, and is to be used to protect us both from forces of hate that remain unpropitiated through the mediums of visual capture and legal appeal. even as philip’s writing records the failure of dissentual politics, it also expresses an attempt to move beyond the impasse of state-as-mediator. perhaps in recognition of the need to move beyond washington state—after several further incidents in which philip engaged in automatic writing without being able to remember what happened, and after several more hours of uploaded video footage too grainy to establish much—philip’s wife floated the idea of a move to california, where she hoped philip could be free of his hauntings. california might provide the gratitude and separation philip needed, marking the successful completion of this ritual to change his fate. though i am skeptical that a move downcoast will free philip and others like him of harassment, possession registers how undone philip has become by the failure to find redress through state apparatuses. in tech enclaves, repeating, mobile, and continually updating forms of life appear to create work places set apart from the messiness of political life (easterling 2014; sauter 2019). when the messiness of hate incidents penetrates these spaces, they reveal the interconnectedness of corporate and state dominions across transnational landscapes. the tech landscape in india has its own repeating forms of separate campuses and gated housing communities, emphasizing the separate and global status of the programmers who move between this landscape and similar topographies in the united states and elsewhere (aneesh 2015; srivastava 2015; amrute 2016). in the united states, officials act to protect the suburban communities of workers who at once signify community commitments to diversity and a flexible workforce necessary to producing surplus value. yet the temporality of these protections is uneven (mankekar 2015). within regimes of extrastatecraft, tech workers from india and china both benefit and receive inadequate forms of protection from the racial logics that both transnational corporations and nation-states have produced. indian and chinese tech workers set themselves apart from undocumented and black rights movements, as well as from anti-wall politics and agitations against the muslim ban, further entrenching historically established colorist, religious, and caste prejudices in both these countries (prashad 2001; parameswaran and cardoza 2009; rao 2009; yeung 2015; chung 2016; amrute 2017; byler 2018). an account that centers the sensible and the sensate can record the fragmented histories of capital-colonial expansion that have shaped local geographies, along with a specific state’s response to capital formations. will the sensate ever be received as an invitation to another expression, as rancière suggests? perhaps, but as amrita can affirm, it cannot happen through simply admitting that the sensible is particularly partitioned, and registering that some sensory evidence goes unrecognized. a new political expression for immigrant politics around the tech industry has to be cultivated across its legal regimes and organizational forms, designed legislatively and organizationally to keep dissensus at a distance. abstract seattle and its environs are home to more than eighty tech companies, which have added 780,000 new jobs between 2014 and 2019. along with these jobs comes increased immigration, especially from india and china. some of seattle’s eastside areas now rank among the most diverse in the nation, even while the pacific northwest bears a legacy of white supremacist agitation. this essay explores the relationship between the eastside’s tech industry, migration, and what the attorney general’s office of washington state calls “hate incidents”—verbal attacks and harassment against minorities that do not rise to the level of hate crimes. i show how forms of evidence about hate incidents circulate in asian immigrant communities. victims of these hate incidences track evidence of racial bias simultaneously through material evidence, such as dog poop left on front lawns, and through organizing sense impressions to recognize a shouted slur as racially motivated. this sensory evidence falls below what jacques rancière calls a particular distribution of the sensible. i call these lost impressions “the sensate,” to capture how the theory of the senses developed by rancière and others moves too quickly from distribution to dissensus. instead, the idea of the sensate tracks the ways in which immigrants align, distance themselves from, and register the larger technical and economic scenes in which their lives unfold. [race; immigration; code; tech worlds; distribution of the sensible; the sensate; rancière] notes acknowledgments i would like to thank chris nelson, meg stalcup, lilly irani, and michelle beckett for providing valuable feedback on this essay. early versions of this work were presented at the american anthropological association annual meetings, where bruce grant provided useful commentary and simanti dasgupta insight and encouragement; and at the center for internet technology policy at princeton university. 1. according to fbi records, hate crimes against muslims have increased by 19 percent, against sikhs by 17 percent, and against hindus by 100 percent since 2015 (trivedi 2017). 2. prosecutable hate crimes must show bias against a person because they are a member of a particular group, demonstrate intent to harm or instill fear, and must include injury to a person or to physical property. 3. these geographies are marked by recent histories of white supremacist movements such as the northwest territorial imperative, an immigration initiative begun in the 1970s designed to colonize washington, oregon, and idaho as a white ethnic state (crawford 1994; gallaher 2000). 4. for an excellect overview of the concept of racial capitalism, see walter johnson (2018). 5. for an insightful take on american conversational styles, see jane h. hill (1998). 6. the washington state law is broader than the federal law on malicious harassment because it covers property damage. the federal law includes interfering with someone’s ability to exercise rights, including the right to housing and voting. 7. for a review of the concept of the reasonable person in criminal law, see the lewis and clark law review’s (2010) “symposium: who is the reasonable person?” 8. dog feces have a long and storied history in sensory border wars. a recent entry comes from san francisco, where a dog owner called “tuffy tuffington” recently started a counterprotest campaign asking all dog lovers to cover a particular field in the city with their pets’ feces before a right-wing extremist demonstration was to take place. the demonstration was moved and the counterprotest never happened. tuffington told the san francisco chronicle, “i just had this image of people and dogs participating in civil disobedience” (rubenstein 2017). 9. for a compelling account of antiblackness and immigration, see m. shadee malaklou (2018). 10. the intrusion of the term red indian here marks the salience of the what eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012) call the “settler-native-slave” triad to immigrant politics in the united states. here, that triad is serving to separate worthy from unworthy immigrants based on hard work and simultaneously justifies brown and white settler projects embodied in housing and office complexes on the landscape. 11. jitu, an organizer and tech worker laboring against caste among diasporic south asians employed in tech firms, explains this familiar distribution in the case of india by 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35, issue 3, pp. 374-403, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2020. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.02 deep in the brain deep in the brain: identity and authenticity in pediatric gender transition sahar sadjadi amherst college paris institute of advanced study https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2004-4946 a children’s book, goblinheart: a fairy tale (axel 2012), tells the story of julep, who is born in a tribe where half of the youngsters grow wings to become fairies and the other half grow claws to become goblins when they come of age. julep is surprised and unhappy when she grows wings. when asked by the elders of the tribe to join other fairies to tend to the leaves of a tree, julep insists on staying with the goblins and tending to the roots, even though, without claws, digging proves hard work. when asked by a fairy how it is that julep, who has wings rather than claws, is a goblin, julep answers: “because i am a goblin on the inside.” the book’s author is the father of a transgender child who transitioned to live as a girl at age five. at a reading in new york city, he explained that he created goblinheart to provide a tool for other children in a similar situation to make sense of their experience. in this story, as well as in a flurry of contemporaneous media accounts, authentic gender identity comes from inside, diverging from—and overcoming—the physical body and the uses, norms, and expectations associated with it. the story exemplifies the popularity and intelligibility of the interior origin of self and identity, which reverberated among the adults and youth i met during my research on clinical approaches to childhood gender variance in the united states. throughout my fieldwork at children’s gender clinics, expert meetings, and conferences in the united states between 2010 and 2012, and during subsequent follow-up research, i was intrigued by the hegemony of the interior origins of authentic self and identity and the rejection of possible external, including social, origins of identity. i found this consensus remarkable; perhaps because my ethnographic gaze originates from a context where narratives of the self are not anchored in a deep inner core but are relational and situational—what afsaneh najmabadi (2013, 277) calls a “self-in-conduct”—rather than self-referential. moreover, the magico-spiritual undertone of the conversations i witnessed was striking, perhaps lending testimony to how mysterious these children who transgressed one of the most entrenched rules of their culture appeared. statements about a child “born with the brain of the opposite gender” were articulated as self-evident facts by many clinicians, as well as by the media and some advocates. as a physician and anthropologist of medicine, i had begun this project as a critical study of a cutting-edge clinical field; i was perplexed by this merging of science, magic, and religion in explaining children’s gender transition. as another example, i encountered the word soul in an article published by a team from a pediatric gender clinic at harvard, who are pioneers of new developments in the field: male-to-female (mtf) and female-to-male (ftm) are terms recently replaced by many in the transgender community by affirmed female or trans-woman, and affirmed male or trans-man. this shift in terminology reflects the increasingly common belief that a transgender individual’s gender does not change, as his or her brain (or soul) has always been his or her affirmed gender. (edwards-leeper and spack 2012, 322) this use of soul as interchangeable with the brain in the clinical literature is remarkable. it raises important questions about the contemporary scientific understanding of the brain, as well as the relation between the body and personhood that underpins the clinical practices surrounding gender-nonconforming and transgender children. below, i explore the epistemic and techno-scientific conditions of the emergence of clinical practices to identify, diagnose, and treat the true transgender child and adolescent and distinguish them from other gender-nonconforming children. i show how the current clinical enactment of gender identity has relied on processes of (psycho-)medicalization, individualization, thingification, and internalization. this article is based on a broader multisited ethnography of clinical practices around gender-nonconforming and transgender children in the united states.1 here, however, i focus on the history of the belief in and clinical search for the foundation of identity in the inner depths of the self, attempting to explain this cultural privileging of the internal and rejection of the external, including the social, as the origin of identity. i analyze contemporary scientific conceptualizations of the brain as the location of gender identity in relation to western metaphysical conceptions of the body and the soul, and to modern accounts of the self as interiority and psychic depth. i engage with the ongoing nature–culture debate, the place of interiority in modern ontology, and the relation of science and materialism. over the past few years, an intensified concern for children’s gender troubles has surfaced in the united states, and the field of clinical management of gender in children has rapidly expanded. the number of therapists specializing in the gender health of children is multiplying. the most renowned academic medical centers have established interdisciplinary pediatric gender clinics, particularly in response to the availability of puberty-suppression treatment for children diagnosed with gender identity disorder. at the same time, the american psychiatric association revised its manual of mental disorders, with the psychiatric category of gender identity disorder in children stirring controversies and ultimately remaining in the manual, before being renamed as gender dysphoria in 2013. the debates over the legitimacy of such a mental illness diagnosis for children continued through the process of the eleventh revision of the international classification of diseases by the world health organization. in this period, the media exploded with stories about transgender children and the possibility of medical treatment, and parent support groups formed around the country. this new and sympathetic medicalization of childhood gender nonconformity developed on the heels of affirmative approaches that emerged in the late 1990s and countered an older paradigm that, since the 1960s, had discouraged cross-gender behaviors and interests in children. the primary recipients of these corrective treatments in earlier years were feminine boys who underwent behavioral modification therapies to promote masculinity, or psychoanalysis along with their family. these clinical practices were criticized for decades by feminist, gay, and transgender activists and scholars, progressive clinicians, and children’s rights advocates for enforcing gender stereotypes and for their goals of preventing homosexual and transsexual adult outcomes (bryant 2007). the last major clinic operating within this tradition in north america closed in 2015. affirmative approaches, on the other hand, posit that children’s gender variance is not a mental disorder, and distress is not inherent to it. it is a natural variation in the child’s developmental trajectory and should be allowed to flourish without disparaging any potential adult outcome or pressuring the child toward conformity (menvielle, tuerk, and perrin 2005). the affirmative clinicians offered supportive counseling mainly to parents—and sometimes to children—to cope with stigma and anxiety. some of the early affirmative clinicians understood the condition of gender-variant children as unfolding toward an adult gay outcome. some others, whom i interviewed and observed, moved toward the position of supporting the child regardless of the future outcome, encouraging parents to accept and cope with the uncertainty of the future. during this period, a small number of young prepubertal children began to transition, often following parents’ and clinicians’ realization that the young people’s gender distress diminished when dressed and treated as the other gender.2 while the affirmative approach was taking hold in the united states, the field underwent another major transformation in the late 2000s with the arrival of medical treatment known as “puberty suppression” for transgender children. children diagnosed with gender dysphoria or recognized as transgender are offered agonists of gonadotropin releasing hormones (gnrh) at the preor early pubertal stage (often ages nine to thirteen) to suppress puberty as the first step to transitioning to the desired sex. the treatment aims to achieve a gender-congruent adult physical appearance, prevent the distress of puberty and to allow more time for decision-making about gender transition (de vries and cohen-kettenis 2012; mahfouda et al. 2017). during their years on puberty blockers, adolescents’ genitals and reproductive tracts remain in a preor early pubertal state, and the pubertal growth spurt is suppressed. if followed by steroid hormones to achieve the physical characteristics of the other sex—as has been the case with almost all the patients from the clinics that have published reports (de vries et al. 2011)—the reproductive tract never matures, eliminating the possibility of reproduction. halting puberty, a systemic growth phase beyond sexual maturation, has consequences, for instance for bone density: gnrh receptors have been found in organs as varied as the skin and the heart, and the possible effects of puberty blockers on the brain and cognitive development currently remain unclear.3 nonetheless, puberty suppression rapidly gained popularity and legitimacy, hailed as a breakthrough in the clinical management of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.4 younger children’s social transition remained controversial, however (wpath 2011). clinical approaches that support early medical interventions as a component of children’s gender transition are often based on the notion that transgender children are born with the brain of the opposite sex and, hence, that their gender identity is immutable and in need of affirmation through medical transition. proponents of this view argue that the immense tension between the gender identity of the child’s brain and the child’s sexual anatomy leads to distress and high risk of suicide and self-harm. therefore, these children need to be treated before puberty sets in. (later in this article, i will explore the clincial conceptualization of the relation between the self and the body that has led to understanding puberty as dangerous for children with strong cross-gender interests and desires.) this situation has created a diagnostic conundrum, given the knowledge that many gay adults had gender-nonconforming childhoods. the desire to know if a child, as young as four or five years old, is on a gay or transgender trajectory has constituted one of the main challenges for clinicians and principal sources of anxiety for parents. the recent availability of puberty suppression as treatment for transgender children has intensified diagnostic efforts, in order to distinguish the true transgender child from the gay-to-be child before puberty. it is the interior origin of the condition that sets the transgender child apart from other children with gender-atypical behavior, clinicians who treat transgender children emphasize. dr. diane ehrensaft, a prominent affirmative psychologist and creator of what she describes as “true gender self therapy,” after emphasizing the innateness of gender identity and locating the site of true gender self primarily in the brain, argues: “once we are born, the true gender self is most definitely shaped and channelled through our experiences in life, but its center always remains our own personal possession, driven from within rather than without” (ehrensaft 2011, 79). the authors of the transgender child, widely seen as a formative text for parents and professionals, state that transgender children’s gender identity does not match their assigned gender; they differ from gender-nonconforming children, since in the latter case “their (inner) gender identity” aligns with their biological sex, while only “their (outer) expression of gender” (brill and pepper 2008, 29) does not. however, in explaining how this inner true identity is revealed, the authors refer to one of the prominent clinicians in the field who emphasizes bathroom behavior, swimsuit aversion, toy preference, and “what type and style of underpants kids select (does your son want the girl-cut panties with flowers on them?)” (brill and pepper 2008, 3). this tension between identity and behavior or interests, and the effort to diagnose the true transgender child (or previously the child with gender identity disorder) whose identity, beyond behavior, diverges from their assigned gender, has haunted the clinical field since the outset. the brain, authenticity, and underwear “she has changed her name from arnold to ariel,” the fellow at the pediatric endocrine gender clinic reported to the rest of the clinical team,5 after visiting with the fourteen-year-old patient. “the family has started using female pronouns at home and she went shopping with her sister. she is wearing lipstick. she has not yet transitioned at school.” the fellow continued her report by adding that, during her physical examination of ariel to ascertain her stage of puberty, she noticed that ariel was wearing a pink bra but men’s underwear. confusion spread across the faces of the clinicians. this last piece of information did not align with everything else they had just heard. they exchanged a few sentences about ariel’s history. they were at an impasse and could not decide whether to give the green light for her hormonal treatment. time was passing in the room, and they needed to move on to the next patient. the whole clinic came to a standstill over ariel’s underwear. i, who rarely ever said anything in an attempt to be as unobtrusive as possible at the clinic, suddenly heard myself saying: “i know women who wear men’s underwear.” the endocrinologist and the head of the clinic looked at me with surprise. the others laughed. then he asked me: “do you mean boxers or briefs?” the fellow indicated that ariel was wearing briefs, and the endocrinologist looked a bit helpless. they kept wondering what to do with the underwear dilemma. i spoke up again: “isn’t it uncomfortable to fit the penis and the testes into very feminine and small underwear?” this possibility captured their attention. the psychologist responded: “it is a good point, but some of the kids do tuck them up even though it is uncomfortable. they can’t stand boys’ underwear; it reminds them of what they hate.” i imagined ariel just putting on whatever clean underwear she found when getting out of the shower and running out, unaware of what crisis her underwear would stir for these esteemed clinicians. the endocrinologist said to the two medical students that “this is a very interesting case who identifies as female but wears male underwear.” he paused and added: “underwear is the core, because it shows what they feel inside when they are not showing it to the outside world.” how did these expert clinicians come to ponder the meaning of underwear in diagnosing core gender identity? gender identity, as the psychological sense of maleness or femaleness, was the conceptual invention of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst robert stoller and an intervention into john money’s concepts of gender and gender role. money, one of the most well-known sexologists of the twentieth century, used the word gender for the first time in 1955 in the phrase gender role, defined as “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively” (money 1955, 254).6 gender role also included “erotic practices” and “the person’s own replies to direct inquiry” (money, hampson, and hampson 1955, 302). money suggested in his early work that gender acquisition occurred prior to age two. in the 1960s, stoller divided money’s unitary concept to distinguish behavioral aspects and social expectations about gender from the individual’s psychological sense of self, partially in an attempt to explain the condition of his transsexual patients and to distinguish them from transvestite individuals. he named the outcome of money’s critical period of gender acquisition in the first eighteen months of life core gender identity, as a stable essence of every individual (stoller 1964; germon 2009). by differentiating between gender role and identity, stoller anchored gender to some core or essence beyond the mundane behaviors and roles that might be subject to changing social norms.7 although he was primarily theorizing within a psychoanalytic paradigm, stoller suggested the possibility of biological forces involved in the core gender identity, a drive from inside the organism that possibly emanated from the endocrine and central nervous system. money’s concept of gender as an attribute of an individual, as something one has, markedly differed from later conceptualizations of gender by feminists from the 1970s onward, as a relation (holter 1970), a system (rubin 1975), an analytical tool (scott 1986), or later as performative (butler 1988). but it is this sexological concept of gender that is currently deployed in the clinical and public understanding of gender identity and transgender. the emergence of the concept of gender identity was entangled with the clinical study and treatment of gender-nonconforming children. stoller, together with richard green, led the clinic at the university of california, los angeles, where the first systematic institutional clinical engagement with feminine boys developed in the 1960s. their treatment approach consisted of promoting masculinity in the child by behavioral modifications to reinforce masculine behavior, such as comportment and gestures, asking parents (and the therapist) to point out to the child when they observe “girly” walking, sitting, or use of hands—and then to instruct the male child how to modify and eliminate these gestures. they recommended removing toys and clothes associated with the opposite sex, participation in aggressive athletic activities, more interaction with male peers and less with female peers, and more time spent with the father. the cause of the problem in this paradigm was assumed to be an overly domineering, controlling, and mannish mother and a timid, weak father; the family therapy intervention had the goal to reset the power balance by encouraging the mother to defer to her husband in a more traditional role (bryant 2007). those clinical practices and the availability of the concept of gender identity led to the introduction of the diagnostic category of gender identity disorder of childhood in 1980, which was added to the third edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-iii). in the case of ariel, on the other hand, the clinicians were concerned about the inadequacy of her femininity for a definite diagnosis of female gender identity and a successful gender transition. while these clinicians shared the corrective paradigm’s conceptualization of gender dysphoria as a distressing tension between the body and identity within a strictly binary gender order, they understood it primarily as a neuroendocrine condition and they differed in their proposed treatment and solution. this pediatric gender clinic, where i conducted fieldwork during 2010 and 2011, was one of the first to medically treat transgender children in the united states with puberty blockers (they offered steroid hormones for older adolescents).8 during the previous visit, arnold was not yet using a female name or pronoun and was wearing basketball shorts. this lack of effort to look feminine had concerned the psychologist, who found arnold androgynous, even leaning more toward the masculine. she explained to the clinical team that, as a child, arnold was interested in gender-neutral activities and sports. most of his friends were boys. by these measures, his childhood did not meet the clinic’s expectations of transgender children. arnold expressed the wish to become a woman, sometimes dressed in feminine clothes privately, and was disturbed by puberty, especially by getting taller and the deepening of his voice. neither arnold nor his father, who accompanied him, felt certain about what they wanted from the clinicians. the psychologist had suggested to them that they begin using a female name and pronoun and have arnold present as more feminine before proceeding with any medical treatment. the clinicians needed to agree on the diagnosis of gender identity to decide whether a child or adolescent was truly transgender and could receive treatment. in the guiding discourse of gender at the clinic, gender identity was located in the brain; the genitals (and, more broadly, sex) proved insignificant in diagnosing gender identity (while very significant for any future treatment plan).9 but how to access the gender identity of the brain? in practice, even though the clinic adhered to the theoretical separation of role and identity, the main tool used to confirm gender identity was the alignment of name, pronoun, and appearance (including clothing and gestures) in the direction of masculinity or femininity (judged by clinicians and shaped by the cultural standards of the clinic’s white, straight, upper-middle-class milieu). objects of clothing were imbued with meanings that could lead the clinicians to the true gender identity; the child’s choice of clothes signaled their inner truth of gender. a crisis in the clinic occurred when the children or adolescents did not care about changing their name or pronoun and outfit, or when they chose gender-neutral names or clothes, or when different items of clothing they wore varied in their gender symbolism. the belief in the existence of a gender identity within every individual as the origin of gender served as a principle to align all the material contradictions that were then perceived as signs and manifestations of the underlying entity of a core/true/inner gender identity (residing in the brain), rather than constituents of gender in themselves. this alignment occurred under the guiding clinical goal of making a coherent sex/gender (believed by clinicians to be the actualization of an already existing coherent gender identity) with the pragmatic rationale of easing the patient’s life.10 in this paradigm, the genital loses significance, but the underwear—paradoxically covering but revealing sex/gender through shape and style—gains it. most anthropological theorizing of clothing has revolved around its sociocultural meaning, through recognition and apprehension by others. dress is not only a medium of communicating identities to others but constitutes these identities “in ways which we are compelled to conform regardless of our self-consciousness or even contempt” (turner 2012, 487). marshall sahlins (1976, 203) writes: “the clothing system in particular replicates for western society the functions of the so-called totemism” that makes possible “apprehending others, their social condition, and thereby their relation to oneself on first glance.” gendered clothing thus works to ensure recognition by others as man or woman, boy or girl, “on first glance.” this is precisely why in the clinic underwear gains a privileged status as sign of gender identity (and not gender role) over other pieces of clothing. it is (presumably) not seen by others, and therefore devoid of social relations and concerns for how to present oneself to the world. it is relegated to the realm of individual interiority. at the same time, it is an artifact worn on the body, available to the clinical eye. it is a boundary object where the opposition between the external and internal of the body, between the social and the personal, becomes marked. underwear thus becomes the signifier of truth of gender identity and a shortcut to an authentic interiority untouched by external influence. to recall the endocrinologist’s pronouncement: “underwear is the core because it shows what they feel inside when they are not showing it to the outside world.” if the case constitutes a true transgender case, the clinic psychiatrist explained to me, then transition should not be externally motivated. a negative affect attached to the external, including the social, was palpable in the affirmative accounts of identity that i encountered during my fieldwork.11 fifteen-year-old leigh explained to me emphatically that she did not believe her being transgender was a result of social factors; she was sure that her sense of being a woman came from inside, not outside. in such accounts, the social becomes cast as external, and to invoke external influence is perceived negatively, even akin to questioning the authenticity of the individual’s identity and trivializing it. it may also stir troubling concerns about the mutability of gender (or, in other contexts, sexual orientation) that could be exploited by projects that attempt to pressure the minority to conform to the norms of the majority. the claims to a deeply rooted internal origin of (gender) identity have also undergirded successful legal strategies deployed in the courts in the pursuit of transgender rights. in fact, this ideological framework is becoming a near requirement for transgender rights. clinicians are frequently invited to courts to testify to the true (trans)gender identity of their patients. in the case of doe v. yunits (2000), the court’s ruling in favor of a transgender student and against her school was decided on the basis of the student’s right to dress in accordance with her deeply rooted female identity, what the ruling called her “quintessence,” rather than the right of any and all to wear gender-atypical clothes. the inward turn anthropologists have long observed that the modern western sense of the self as a bounded, coherent, internal depth denotes a peculiar, far-from-universal idea (geertz 1974; mauss 1985; strathern 1988). more recently, a number of ethnographic studies of sexual and gender identities in japan, indonesia, india, and iran depict cultural notions of identity and self that are more contingent, “on the surface,” situationally and socially oriented rather than rooted in a deep stable inner essence (kondo 1990; boellstorff 2005; reddy 2005; najmabadi 2013). historians have traced the emergence of the modern self as an innate core characterized by interiority, depth, and stability to the late eighteenth century in britain, western europe and, a few decades later, in the united states. according to dror wahrman (2004), as british subjects in the colonies began to assert their own distinct identities over and against those of the metropole, particularly during the american revolutionary war, anxieties produced by the flux of old categories—in part made possible by the rise of empire and encounter and racial mixing with populations with different gender relations—intensified and led to an embrace of more stable, rigid, and internally oriented identities. in the united states, the inward shift took place a few decades later than in britain. early public education, as well as early american liberalism, was profoundly shaped by moderate protestantism, many elements of which formed the foundations of a secular american culture. children proved crucial to the project of nation-building and the expansion of the u.s. empire, as well as to the cultivation of liberal protestant values (sánchez-eppler 1996; block 2012). children were also central to liberal theories of human nature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 among competing ideologies of childhood and child-rearing, the notion of the naturally developing (anglo-american) child began taking hold in the writings of reformers and educators in the united states in the mid-nineteenth century.13 this era saw an emphasis on the inner life of the individual, on motives that guide and move from within rather than from outside, and on qualities that were not evanescent but fixed and stable (block 2012). society and its influences over the individual were cast as negative and rife with temptations or obstacles. this negative affect toward the external, including the social, available in the american cultural repertoire, has intensified in certain historical periods and is palpable in the contemporary united states. the historical shifts in the euro-american notion of the self in tandem with the fluxes of imperial stability and instability invite us to think about the current regime of identity in the united states, with its retreat into the self and investment in ontologically fixed and innate identities, in relation to the crisis of u.s. empire. the self, if true to itself, is thus perceived as inherently good and trustworthy. tautological phrases such as “be yourself,” a common piece of adult advice given to children, capture this culturally commonsensical belief and mistrust of external forces. such articulations of the true self do not recognize power relations and how they differentially enable and uphold the self. one of the prominent clinicians of the field explained to me in an interview that she believes every child is born with a unique true gender self, and what we need to do is to allow that to flourish. describing herself as a nature-nurture-culture integrationist, she found social construction theories of gender inadequate in explaining how individuals experience their gender as deeply seated within.14 while such clinicians are compassionately engaged in an effort to open a cultural space for conceiving of and accepting gender-atypical children, they are not equipped to account for the sociocultural conditions that have produced the marginality of these children given their internal, individual, and universal notion of the self. this account of gendered self cannot, for example, explain the true gender self of the little masculine bully (bullying is a major problem in the lives of gender-variant children) or many forms of toxic masculinity among adolescents currently in public debate. are they also true gender selves, and will boys be boys? the ideology of true self and the essentialization of identity runs deep in contemporary american culture, and given its lack of a theory of power, can be mobilized across the political spectrum.15 sex of the self sex, as one of the main markers of identity, occupied a central place in this inward turn. while the anchoring of sex in biology preceded that of race by a century, both sex/gender and race underwent similar transformations at the end of the eighteenth century from fluid to rigid and became thought of as natural and essential (wahrman 2004). this shift accompanied the development of clinical medicine at the end of the eighteenth century. michel foucault (1973) illustrates the rise of a new spatialization of disease on/in the body of the individual in this era, and the development of a range of techniques of perception to make the invisible visible and the interior revealed. in classificatory medicine, disease is given an organization outside the body, and classification is a flat structure without depth. in anatomico-clinical medicine, disease is located in the body and the gaze turns toward individuality and depth. geertje mak’s praxiographic (see mol 2002) historical analysis of nineteenth-century hermaphrodites in western europe demarcates a dramatic historical shift in clinical conceptualizations of sex “from something primarily touching the sexed moral, economic and social order in which a person was inscribed, to something troubling an individual person’s self in relation to her body” (mak 2012, 230). this shift was enabled by physicians’ greater access to naked bodies and to internal organs at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the development of medical techniques that enabled the enactments of bodily sex through the dislodgement of the body from the person (e.g., samples of gonadal tissue in the laboratory). later, at the turn of the twentieth century, the hermaphrodite individual’s subjective wish and sense of self became new objects of study. consistency between appearance, social role, and sense of self became the new clinical goal, made possible by surgical advancements of the time. what mak (2012, 10) calls “sex of the self” emerged in the later decades of the nineteenth century, gained increasing sway through developments in psychology and psychiatry in the twentieth century—including an understanding of oneself as inhabited by an interior psychological space (rose 1990)—and came to be called gender identity in the mid-twentieth century. currently the self (gender identity) has gained full independence from and primacy over the body in affirmative gender clinics, but only as far as the medical technology can alter the body and appearance to align with the self. for transgender individuals, there are no atypical internal physical organs (unlike the case for individuals with intersex conditions) to partly anchor the true sex/gender; hence the search for the interior of the individual is primarily the search for the self, and the tension is a full-fledged one between the self and the body. the sexological concept of gender identity has facilitated the separation of the sex as self from sex as body, as well as the reification of the sex of the self as a thing inside the person, prior to social/external forces.16 current psychoscientific trends allocate this thing to the brain. born this way and the immateriality of the brain among the different actors involved in treating gender-variant children, there is consensus that gender dysphoria (previously gender identity disorder) has some neuroendocrine cause, even if it is only partially responsible and even if the studies and the evidence are, as of yet, inadequate. often these claims are uttered as convictions, as obvious established truth, without any reference to any studies or detailed medical explanations. when the clinicians and advocates do attempt scientific explanation, they often invoke the theory concerning the role of prenatal hormonal gendering of the brain in shaping gender identity.17 at the 2011 annual trans health conference in philadelphia, during a period when the american psychiatric association was revising the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm) for its fifth edition, the only session that advocated for the removal of the diagnosis of gender identity disorder from the dsm ended by suggesting an endocrine category with the proposed title of atypical gender identity syndrome. the proposers (trans-health-care professionals concerned about access to medical care and insurance coverage) argued that recent studies of transgender people show the effect of fetal hormonal influence on the brain, leading to the development of a gender identity incongruent with the sexing of their anatomy. this theory postulates that males and females are born with differently wired brains as a result of exposure to different sex hormones in utero. it developed and gained adherents from the 1950s until the 1970s, after which it was taken for granted as scientific fact in cognitive neuroscience and among other sex researchers (jordan-young 2010). the power of the theory, despite the lack of plausible scientific evidence to substantiate it, lay in the facile way that it spoke to old convictions about men and women’s different characters and interests. the theory was proposed and expanded by john money and his colleagues and students, most of whom were psychologists, hesitantly at first (given money’s emphasis on postnatal gender acquisition) and then more confidently. rebecca jordan-young (2010) analyzed more than three hundred studies supporting this theory and demonstrated, among other things, that these studies do not measure the same variables or compare the same populations, and hence do not establish the empirical evidence for the theory that they claim to support. previously, this theory of innate male and female brain differences faced criticism from those committed to gender justice for its sexist implications and for naturalizing conventional gender norms. today, however, many progressive scientists, clinicians, and advocates embrace it for its potential to offer what appears as a simple and essentialist account of transgender condition aligned with the popular cultural tropes such as “trapped in the wrong body” and “born this way.” having disrupted the alignment of gender interests and behaviors with biological sex, the transgender person has paradoxically become of interest to scientists as the site for research on the “biology of gender identity.” within this paradigm, there are two parallel essences—the sex of the body and the gender (identity) of the brain—corresponding to each other in most people and clashing in a small minority of people. alternative accounts of becoming (trans)gender and the insights of radical transgender thinkers remain marginal to this mainstream cultural and clinical discourse. for example, decolonial and trans of color scholars address the histories and ways of being gender-variant that the hegemonic euro-american notions of sexual/gender identity exclude (dutta and roy 2014; green and bey 2017; snorton 2017); the writer andrea long chu (2018) writes about “the notion that transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire,” while the artist rosza daniel lang/levitsky’s biographical statement often includes the phrase “identifies with, not as.”18 the recent locating of gender identity (sex of the self) in the (universal) brain has not overcome the dualism of the sex of the body and sex of the self. rather than materializing the self, this association of the self with the brain has idealized (indeed, dematerialized) the brain as something different from the body, leading transgenderism to be understood and described as a conflict between the brain and the body. this understanding of the soul or the mind (here, the brain) as a thing behind a person’s physical appearance has run through western metaphysical thought since plato. a variety of soul–body dualist theories have emerged in the history of ancient and modern philosophical, religious, and medical thought, with different accounts of the interaction between the soul and the body.19 christianity, with its emphasis on the idea of substance dualism (ontological distinction between the body and the soul) decisively enforced the idea of the human being as fundamentally a soul that initiates action through body in the manifest world.20 the dualism that appears in the contemporary clinical conceptualization of the transgender identity is, similarly, premised on the distinction between the body and brain and the superiority and primacy of the brain, as the locus of identity, in determining gender. there are older sexological accounts of inversion such as karl ulrichs’s concept of an urning (in english, uranian), in which a female psyche in a man’s body is portrayed as a positive and even noble state of being.21 in this dualist account, the sex of the body and the sex of the self can diverge but cohabit. but the dualism of current clinical accounts of transgenderism does not deem such cohabitation tenable. instead, it strives for coherence, unity, and wholeness as the ideal and healthy state of being, with the intervention and help of medicine. it is within this dualist discourse of body and identity, premised on the superiority of the soul/mind/brain, that the view of puberty as the body’s betrayal of the brain (in gender-variant children) enjoyed a smooth cultural and scientific reception. “born this way” currently dominates the clinical and popular (progressive) accounts of gender and sexual identities. the authenticity of the self relies not only on its interiority but also on its innateness, on having been always so. as one of the pioneers of puberty-suppression treatment of transgender children has explained: “i like the term affirmed rather than trans, because a person cannot really transition to something he already is. in other words, how can you be a male to female if you really always were a female in your brain?” (spack 2009, 312) this striking denial of becoming anything other than what one has always been, resonating with certain culturally rooted doctrines of predestination, accompanies and sustains the dictum of “born this way.” the claim to the innateness of the condition of transgender children joins the claim to the naturalness of gender variance. the medical history of sex/gender disorders has been heavily shaped by the cultural and theological invocation of the unnaturalness of sexual deviance.22 what nature stands for in these debates is largely about morality, even when, as early as thomas aquinas, zoological evidence was selectively marshalled for proving the naturalness of dominant sexual ethics. straddling the moral and the ontological, “born this way” recuperates sex/gender deviation on the side of the natural, thus good, through claims to its innateness. under persistent conditions of inequality and stigmatization, innate biological explanations for sexual or gender deviation absolve individuals of moral blame, ground the minority condition in ontological difference, and endow the self with authenticity, legitimacy, and stability.23 many parents of gender-variant children, facing social reprimand and at times their own ambivalences, embrace the “born this way” discourse that not only renders their children innocent but also exonerates the parents of blame, unlike the older psychoanalytical paradigm of early psychosexual development, which focused on deficient gender roles and parent–child relations, upholding cisgender heterosexuality as the healthy outcome. this discourse also responds to the religious right’s rhetoric of choice in the united states, employed to deny equal rights to lgbt individuals. at the same time, the appeal of innate notions of identity exceeds the exigencies of this political tactic. beyond this specific study, such paradoxical quests for authenticity and individual self-making by discovering the truth of self with which an individual is born are relied on more broadly to define identities in the contemporary united states.24 naturalness of identity and interiority of nature the naturalist discourse of the affirmative approach to gender-variant children privileges interiority as the site of naturalness and authenticity of difference. questioning modern western understandings of the relation between nature and culture, scholars have employed terms such as naturecultures (haraway 2003) and worlding (haraway 2008; tsing 2010)25 to overcome the dualism of nature and culture, emphasizing the entanglement of these terms and of the human and nonhuman. while much of this scholarship has challenged a cultural notion of nature that remains exterior to humans, i have found in my research a cultural allocation of nature to interiority. this is not the interiority of nature that, for example, reckons with the bacteria in our guts, but one that transcends the human body and thus distinguishes humans from other species. philippe descola (2013, 173; emphasis mine) describes modern ontology as naturalist in opposition to other ontologies such as animism and defines naturalism as “the continuity of the physicality of the entities of the world and the discontinuity of their respective interiorities.” marshall sahlins (2014, 289), in response, emphasizes the abundance of anthropomorphism in modern culture in endowing a range of institutions, organic, and inorganic beings with human characteristics. hence he questions the existence of a radical difference between naturalism and animism when it comes to anthropomorphism, asserting: “we are one of the others.” this anthropomorphism within modern naturalist ontology extends to scientific entities: the brain appears as fetish, imbued with omnipotent explanatory power. within the new materialist scholarship of the past few years, much enthusiasm has been directed toward the material and the natural, partly in response to the ruling idealism of discourse and language in the past decades and the humanist and anthropocentric tendency of social theory to reduce the material world to an effect of human culture. within social studies of science and technology, commentators have articulated this move as an invitation to a more open interdisciplinary engagement with the sciences. but one should avoid a careless equation of nature, materiality, and science, or the distribution of matter-idea along the axis of nature and culture. nature is a cultural idea at times located far from the materiality of nature (kirby 2008). in fact, the idea of nature in western modernity, as an all-encompassing, infinitely omnipotent, and inherently good being, is deeply enmeshed with christian thought.26 the abstraction of gender into the idea of gender identity and its reification as a thing in the brain is occurring at a time when neuroscience (and the popular-science version of it) has become one of the front-line scientific disciplines of our time (dumit 2004; vidal 2009; martin 2010). the return to science as a way of understanding human social phenomena does not always mark a materialist turn and, as the current phantasmatic deployment of the brain in conceiving identity shows, can constitute an extension of extremely idealist thinking: a pseudomaterialism, in a sense. i propose that the predominance of gene and brain talk in explaining identity relies less on the appeal of biological explanations per se than on a certain biological explanation that locates sources of identity or human differences within the sovereign individual. the biology that engages with what remains external to the human individual (the environment) is rarely invoked in these debates. in fact, faith in innateness and interiority, such as the hard-wired brain as a result of hormonal influence prior to birth, is taken to establish the veracity of identity, even despite biological evidence to the contrary. similarly, when people emphasize the naturalness of gender or sexuality, they are not interested in the role of air and water, trees and bacteria (elements of nature) in shaping these dimensions of human life across various histories and geographies. i suggest that the particular spatialization of the gene and the (hard-wired) brain inside the body (of the individual), and their temporality extending backward, prior to social life, make them powerful and appealing explanatory entities. perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the brain could be replaced by the soul in the scientific paper i cited at the beginning of this article. the soul, too, has both of these spatial and temporal features: interiority and innateness.27 the burden of revealing innate human characteristics presumed to be natural has long been placed on children, who have occupied a particular place in modern western thought in relation to notions of the authenticity of identity. the temporal politics surrounding adults’ relation to children is not just that of orientation toward the future (edelman 2004). children are also imagined as the past of adults—carriers of seeds of adult identity. stanley hall (1886, 131), a major theorist of childhood and adolescence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, believed that the study of childhood “is likely to give us at last what we have longed for for a great while—something like a perspective, that will enable us to distinguish the deeper and older things of the soul from those that are of recent acquisition.”28 this spatial (“deeper”) and temporal (“older”) search for what is foundational to human nature/soul—that childhood is tasked to offer against what is of “recent acquisition”—evinces the same desire that currently drives the search for the truth of identity in the brains of gender-nonconforming children. it appears to me that what is counterposed to the sociocultural in the contemporary debates over gender and sexual identity is not natural and biological but, more precisely, the individual and the internal. or, in other words, a particular cultural notion of nature and biology is invoked to restore to the self some essence beyond and before human interaction with the environment. the nature/culture dyad becomes reconfigured as internal/external—the natural is conceived as internal, innate, and thus authentic, while the cultural is framed as external, malleable, and thus spurious. coda: considerations for reframing children’s gender discontent current accounts of gender identity as a thing inside the brain of the individual, an essence prior to (and even bereft of) the bodily and social production of gender, advance an idealist ontology of human nature even as they invoke scientific language and inhibit any alternative materialist analysis of children’s gender troubles. these accounts, for instance, cannot explain the fact that ariel’s clothing did not neatly align in the direction of femininity or masculinity other than as a sign of dubious identification. nor can they account for the role of racial economies of masculinity and femininity in the united states—historically feminizing asian americans and masculinizing african americans—in enabling what some clinicians deemed a more successful transition to womanhood for the asian teenager than for the black adolescent. in addition, the notion of an innate immutable gender identity of the brain does not allow for, and finds inauspicious, the situatedness and temporality of gender: transition without a history of early childhood gender dysphoria, transition motivated by the desire to belong to a community, or retransition all come to lack authenticity.29 the contemporary appeal of the interior stable essence as the authentic origin of identity, deserving of respect and rights, constitutes a cultural tendency that has surfaced and intensified during a historical juncture in the united states in which imperial hegemony is waning and domestic conditions are marked by precarity as well as social and political crisis. during my fieldwork, when realizing my iranian origins, professionals and advocates frequently asked me about gender transition in iran, where the state institutionally supports medical transition for transgender people. my puzzled u.s. interlocutors often found iranian transgender people both peculiarly fascinating and, paradoxically, proof of a universally shared biological mechanism (“even in iran”). while many immediately and openly wondered about gender transition in iran in the context of women’s oppression there, they understood gender dysphoria and transition among american transgender youth as an individual inborn trait, unrelated to (unequal) gender relations or any other social relations. this inability to situate individuals in their environment and within the power relations that govern the cultural-historical particularities of u.s. society led to inadequate accounts of becoming gendered and to narrow prescriptions for gender discontent. to care for the well-being and health of gender-subversive children and their reproductive rights demands an approach to the child’s body in its entirety, not solely in its gender symbolism as a vehicle for sacred notions of transcendent identity. puberty, then, does not have to be imagined as an inevitable natural disaster ravaging the child’s body and body-brain integrity from within, to be averted at any cost. in that case, gender transition would not require claims to the essence of identity. an alternative materialist account could enable an approach to children as body-subjects growing as part of and in interaction with their environment and its many forces, people, objects, and ideas—and their histories. such an account would allow for the possibility that the categories of personhood of the future and their relation to each other and to the body might not be those of today and, perhaps, have yet to emerge. notes acknowledgments thanks to carole vance and miriam ticktin for their generous feedback on this article, and to rebecca jordan-young for comments on an earlier version. careful engagement and suggestions from four anonymous reviewers and both past and present editorial teams at cultural anthropology, especially brad weiss, made this a better article. i am grateful to many colleagues, mentors, and friends for generative conversations throughout the development of the larger project on which this article is based. fieldwork for this research and writing of this article were supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, amherst college, and the brocher foundation. 1. this article draws from a larger project on the study of the expert revision of the psychiatric category of gender identity disorder of childhood (gidc) by the american psychiatric association for the dsm-5, and the diagnostic and treatment practices at two major pediatric gender clinics in the united states, one psychiatric and one endocrine. in one of the clinics, i observed the clinical interview and consultation with parents and children. in the other, i observed the four-to-five-hour meetings of the clinical team as they discussed the cases before and after the clinicians visited children and adolescents. my medical training played an important role in making this fieldwork and access to the clinics possible. my familiarity with medical settings facilitated my inhabiting the space of the hospital/clinic and engaging with the clinical debates. at the same time, i needed to emphasize and clarify to the clinicians that my project was an anthropological study of their practices and not a clinical study of gender-variant children, even though i was a doctor. in addition to fieldwork at the clinics, i observed parent support groups, a summer camp for gender-variant children, and various conferences and professional gatherings in the united states and europe, and i conducted in-depth interviews with dsm-5 working group members, clinicians, and parents. the study also included research at the archives of the american psychiatric association. this project was conducted as a twenty-four-month multisited ethnography from march 2010 to march 2012, followed by complementary fieldwork during the summers of 2014, 2015, and 2016. 2. see meadow 2018 for parents’ narratives of young children’s gender transition. 3. there have been no studies of the long-term physical side effects of puberty blockers among gender-variant/transgender children. the follow-up studies conducted by the first (dutch) clinic that provided the treatment to twelve-to-sixteen-year-old adolescents report positive outcomes for psychosocial adjustment following full medical transition (de vries et al. 2011, 2014). in recent years, however, there has been emerging evidence of severe nearand long-term skeletal and neurological adverse effects experienced by women who were treated for precocious puberty in childhood with lupron (the same gnrh agonist commonly used with transgender children), which has been reported to the u.s. food and drug administration as well as on patient forums (see jewett 2017). the reported adverse effects of pediatric use of lupron range from depression and seizure to degenerative disc disease, chronic pain, and bone fractures later in life. for further discussion of the consequences of the treatment for fertility and analysis of the ethical dimensions of the treatment, see sadjadi 2013, abel 2014, and roen 2016. parental consent is required for the medical treatment of minors. the treatment is expensive: lupron cost around $15,000 per year during my fieldwork and was rarely covered by insurance. 4. puberty suppression bridged the affirmative and corrective approaches and some clinicians of the latter group also referred children who had not responded to psychological treatment for puberty blockers. 5. a fellow is a specialist (in this case, a pediatrician) who is training for a subspecialty (in this case, pediatric endocrinology). 6. this is the first time the word gender was used in print with a meaning near the manner in which it is used today. prior to money’s intervention, gender had been only utilized to refer to grammar and linguistic classifications (germon 2009). 7. stoller, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, is better known for his conceptual split of sex and gender (see stoller 1968). while stoller’s sex/gender dualism appealed to many feminists who then conceptualized gender in their own way, he in fact had imagined gender having a component that was an essence, simultaneously psychic and biological. for him, not only sex but also gender identity had essential biological causes. 8. in the clinic transgender was synonymous with medical transition, replacing the older term transsexual, rather than an umbrella term for all gender-nonconforming people. 9. hating one’s genitals, however, remains one of the hallmarks of official accounts of the true transgender child, even though during my fieldwork i found this sentiment to be rare among (prepubertal) gender-variant children. 10. in his ethnography of facial feminization surgery, eric plemons (2017) argues that a shift of focus from the genitals toward more visible parts of the body in trans-medicine marks a shift toward understanding sex/gender as a matter of social recognition. in my observations in the pediatric clinics during the same period as plemons’s research, this move away from the focus on the genitals was accompanied by a firm belief in the presocial essence of gender identity. bodily modifications were deemed necessary primarily to align the body with identity, while also directed at achieving bodies in future that would be easily recognized as man or woman. 11. such understandings of the (gendered) self vary across race and class differences (valentine 2007). during my fieldwork, i observed that the individualization, internalization, and abstraction of gender identity was more readily embraced by middleand upper-class americans than, for instance, immigrant working-class families. in this article, however, i am exploring the ideas that underpin the dominant cultural and clinical discourses and practices around gender-nonconforming children. 12. for eighteenthand nineteenth-century liberal theorists of human nature, (male) children became the central site for the resolution of the lasting dilemma in which the rational autonomous individual is both free and in harmony with the prevailing social order. in liberalism and empire, uday singh mehta (1999) argues that understanding liberalism’s relation to children is important to understanding political exclusions of liberalism and the acceptance of colonialism by british liberal thinkers such as john locke and john stuart mill. the colonized, like children, were potentially equal to europeans but not until they were civilized. conservative thinkers such as edmund burke, however, believed in the radical alterity of the colonized and were skeptical of the civilizing mission. 13. jean-jacques rousseau’s romantic and naturalist view of childhood profoundly influenced these ideas. in his view, children were neither depraved (as calvinists believed) nor a blank slate (as locke believed), but born with innate human goodness, at risk of corruption by the outside world. 14. see vance 1989 for a discussion of various (mis)interpretations of social construction, and strathern 1988 for reflections on the assumed malleability and weakness of the cultural. 15. for example, american white nationalists such as richard spencer call themselves “identitarian” and invite a return to one’s “real identity.” for an elaborate discussion of the origin of identitarianism in european right-wing thought, see williams 2017. elucidating the relation between these liberal and illiberal attachments to self-identity, i suggest, demands a closer engagement with the effects of the shifts in u.s. imperial hegemony within the anthropology of neo/late-liberal culture. 16. for a discussion of thingification in philosophical and scientific thought, see barad 2003. for a discussion of gender identity as a thing, see fausto-sterling 2012. 17. for examples of recent studies of the brain of gender-dysphoric children, see nota et al. 2017 and bakker 2018. for examples of clinicians’ invocation of this theory, see ehrensaft 2011 and rosenthal 2014. the media abounds with references to prenatal gendering of the brain, beginning with the pivotal 2007 episode of the tv show 20/20, during which barbara walters brought transgender children to public awareness. 18. for scholarly debates about the relation between identity and the sexed body, transgender embodiment, and its medicalization, see prosser 2006, spade 2006, and salamon 2010. 19. thales, for example, believed that soul is something like the power of a magnet, rather than a substance in its own right. 20. rené descartes’s translation of this idea into rational terms, whereby the human being is composed of a thinking thing and an extended thing, was vehemently criticized by other german philosophers beginning with immanuel kant. it is notable that not all philosophical reflections on the soul share an exclusively internalist emphasis. scholars have argued that christian thought, as advanced by st. paul and augustine in particular, had a major internalizing effect on the soul, an innerness later consolidated by the protestant movement. 21. here, see the series of articles written between 1864 and 1880 and published in english as ulrichs 1994. ulrichs’s conceptualization of homosexuality and the biological theory he proposed are very close to current popular and clinical understandings of transgender people. 22. see boswell 1980, 303–332 for a further elaboration of christian theology’s invocation of nature as the base of its sexual ethics. 23. for a discussion of strategic invocations of the innate and immutable origins of sexual identity by the gay movement, see jakobsen and pellegrini 2004 and walters 2016. 24. for instance, a similar trend exists in the popularity of genetic ancestry testing in the united states as a way for people to discover their true self and become who they have always already been (abu el-haj 2012). 25. anna tsing (2010) uses the term worlding to bridge the tension between anthropology’s commitment to context and science studies’ emphasis on actors. donna haraway (2008) has written about queer reworlding in reference to the normality of the human–nonhuman dichotomy. 26. in his critique of descartes’s understanding of nature, maurice merleau-ponty (2003, 131) writes: “the concept of nature is mixed with the concepts of god and human being in cartesian thinking.” 27. in his discussion of the totemic principle, émile durkheim invokes the soul as an example of a totem in western thought. 28. hall’s work was guided by an influential late nineteenth-century interpretation of evolutionary theory that saw the development of the individual child as a reflection of the stages of human evolution, which compared children to savages. 29. much to the surprise of the author of goblinheart, shortly before he finished writing the book, his daughter retransitioned to being a boy at age nine. 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the tolerance trap: how god, genes, and good intentions are sabotaging gay equality. new york: new york university press. williams, thomas chatterton 2017 “the french origins of ‘you will not replace us.’.” new yorker, december 4. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/04/the-french-origins-of-you-will-not-replace-us. world professional association for transgender health (wpath) 2011 standards of care for the health of transssexual, transgender, and gender nonconforming people. 7th version. https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc. holding patterns holding patterns: sand and political time at china’s desert shores jerry c. zee university of california, santa cruz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2731-2130 ocean, don’t be afraid. the end of the road is so far ahead it is already behind us. —ocean vuong li ming, an ecologist, and forestry official tian are standing with me in the footprint of qingtu lake. once the anchor of a verdant oasis of reedy wetlands in gansu province’s minqin county, today the lake is an expanse of sand that extends past the horizon. as late as the 1950s, qingtu lake sprawled luxuriantly across four hundred square kilometers, sixty meters deep at its lowest point. in the span of decades, with its groundwater drained in the utopian social-agricultural experiments of high maoist socialism, the lake disappeared completely, leaving a carpet of mobile, alkaline sand. it swirls around our heels like water lapping on a still-remembered shore. it pools around our boots. on the spring day that li, tian, and i have come, we walk across the lakebed, wading shoulder-deep in absent water. minqin county is dotted with places like the lake, where the relentless pace of desertification has disjoined toponyms from the landscapes they named just decades before.1 minqin, once an oasis en route to the eastern terminus of the silk road, is wedged at the sandy nexus of three provinces: gansu, inner mongolia, and ningxia. it is today an archipelago of places scattered like islands in what many of the state foresters to whom i speak call the shahai, the sea of sand. the oceanic turn of phrase, sand-sea, is a metaphor that spotlights the possible meanings for sand and desert in minqin. it draws attention not only to the sheer size of new and active desert lands but also to their oceanic activity. loosed on the wind, desert sands gather into dunes that flow like a slow liquid, land swallowing land. in this sand-sea, places like minqin, facing the expanding sand, exist in the grim anticipatory state of the not-yet-buried.2 as two deserts run aground over the oasis, scientists scramble to devise methods for modeling dune drift in the region (sun et al. 2005), generating scenarios that project minqin’s ultimate burial in the coming decades. for china’s state forestry administration, the disappeared qingtu lake has become a powerful cautionary site in the central government’s fight against desertification. sand-control campaigns across china’s desertification hot zones have become anxious stagings in the state’s combat against mobile sands that now drift over a quarter of china’s landmass and periodically rise into its skies as dust storms (liu and diamond 2005). today, exposed lakebed sands make the air a translucent haze that stings our eyes and scratches our throats. for the forestry official tian, the lake is minqin itself. from our vista point on the lakebed, tian, who is in his fifties, recounts the waterfowl that have long stopped coming. he remembers taking his children swimming here. “the lake contracted, slowly and then quickly,” he remembers. “where it dried, the sand on its bed was free to move everywhere. with no water, the farms went dry. even if they did not become sand, it was impossible to keep sand from burying the fields.” in his telling, sand has become a mineral spur to remembering. it “holds geological memories in its elemental structure, and calls forth referential memories” (agard-jones 2012, 326). in its texture, color, and dryness on the skin, exposed sand opens a catalog of environmental changes and disappearances. sand renders time into recursions. remembering through sand in this way also constitutes a foretelling. as a material that moves, accretes, holds momentarily steady, or tends to dissolution, it draws together past and future burials—each “an exception, shall we say, that announces itself only as an example” (song 2012, 131). it not only provides an occasion for memory but also gives form to a way of thinking time in minqin. past burial events appear as an earthly momentum; sand’s materiality is cautionary. “in ten years, twenty years, or five years, the sands will swallow minqin, too,” tian says, pushing his hands together to mimic the press of the two deserts that flank the sand-locked county. this pressing is a foretelling of minqin’s future from the perspective of a past ending, each of which becomes an example of sand’s powers to bury. sand, for the forestry official, offers a medium through which pasts and presents come to form. its past and future motions link memory and prognostication as the repetitive realization of a process already imminent in the geodynamics of the unrestrainable desert. as lakebed sand slips through my fingers to trace out the direction of the breeze, li ming, my ecologist friend, explains, “in places like this, we are no longer confronted with the problem of development [fazhan], but rather with the question of existence [cunzai].” in this article, i follow tian, li ming, and their colleagues in learning to tell time through sand. in the various ways that sand itself shapes state landscape engineering, sand operates as what stefan helmreich (2011, 132) calls a “theory machine” at the interface of material processes, environmental change, and the chronological conditions and tactics of political intervention. telling time through sand’s properties is a way of giving form to a “near future” (guyer 2007, 410) that forces environmental engineers and anthropologists to grapple with modes of reckoning time poised between the immediacy of omnipresent crisis (massumi 2009) and long-term environmental collapse. i ask how sand-control programs in practice make governmental control of and intervention into time a site of chronopolitical experiment, where the soaring futures of the state are reshaped through sand as a material that variously accretes, buries, oscillates between motion and stability, or provides a habitat for geoengineering plants. the question of the anthropocene and contemporary environmental challenges demand ways of imagining the future in the obliteration of a cleavage between human and environmental history (chakrabarty 2009). whereas in many contemporary anthropocene imaginaries, environment increasingly scripts an earthly future speeding toward disaster, in this article, i begin by noticing that earthly processes are increasingly reframed as a way of planetary fortune-telling. for instance, in tracing out contemporary environmental processes as the engine of a coming cataclysm, the dynamics of anthropogenic earth systems also become the template for a temporal form that arcs toward disaster. in what naomi oreskes and erik conway (2014), in their sci-fi history of the future, call the great collapse—the inevitable climatic-political resolution of today’s great acceleration—climate projections are also narrative forms. in an increasing alignment of environmental processes with doomsday, environment, today, is increasingly the name of a powerful process that vibrates with the sense of an ending. but for sand-control engineers and ecologists, sand discloses futures that may also challenge the singular narratives of environmental ending, while in the meantime earthly and political rhythms demand new vocabularies for futures that end, but may also cycle, endure, and recur again. sand’s multiple temporalities rework the chronopolitical stakes of environmental governance in various technical, personal, and scientific sites across desertifying china, while also signaling an expansive repertoire of intra-actions of environmental and political time. by chronopolitics, i mean the various ways in which the political does not merely operate in “empty, homogenous time” (benjamin 1969, 261), but rather, tacitly and sometimes explicitly, makes the manipulation, acceleration, or projection of time both the condition and ongoing goal of political and governmental intervention. through ethnographic research in the scientific, political, and engineering apparatus that aims to control desertification in china, i explore how state antidesertification programs confront sand and align political interventions with temporal formations that route politics through the dynamics of material, environmental, and ecological processes. a chronopolitics of earthly endurance, forestalled burial, and the kick-starting of ecological cycles begins from the encounter with sand’s various temporalities. engaging with sand as a material, narrative, and processual substrate of emergent temporal formations offers a method for thinking beyond what some accounts of the anthropocene render as a geological stage hemming the future into a singular trajectory. mobile dunes, blowing sands, and desertification, i suggest, are sites and material forms where we can trace emergent alignments of politics to the inorganic afterlives of the broken land. recent work in and around anthropology (kawa 2016; moore 2016; whitington 2016; ghosh 2016; haraway 2016), including reflections on “an anthropocene yet unseen” (howe and pandian 2016), have aimed to generate a vocabulary for our environmental contemporary and its possible futures. here, i ask how a politechnics (anand 2011) of sand control might also generate an archive of resources to stoke speculative futures that fully attend to practical encounters of politics, knowledge, and materials. instead of rendering environmental futures through epochal claims and planetary stages, i ask how, in practice, specific environmental processes and materials can provide a repertoire for chronopolitical experiments. as ann anagnost (1997, 7) has argued, modern chinese politics must be tracked through “tactical plays on time,” where state practice does not merely have temporal dimensions but is indeed explicitly conceived and practiced as action on time, a catching-up to history. in combating sand, state scientists and engineers do not simply articulate environmental futures that are more textured than ecological doomsday narratives with their perplexing universality. they also organize programs of state landscape engineering whose temporal horizons and chronopolitical techniques rework the futurism of the chinese communist party’s (ccp) political imaginary. i consider how, in the process of attempting to address specific environmental materialities, antidesertification programs in china enact sand as a substrate for a variegated repertoire of temporal forms and the experimental political forms that attempt to control them—some, but not all of which render the contemporary environment through the figure of coming collapse.3 how does sand, rapt in multiple earthy, geomechanical processes, displace the open, linear futures of political time into other chronopolitical forms? if sand encroaches into space, how, too, can it encroach on time? holding patterns anthropological thinkers have long had an interest in the nature of time in different social orders. reflections on statist time in recent anthropology trace specific modes of temporal experience as the ongoing conditions and achievements of political practices, running the gamut from “etatized” (verdery 1996, 40; see also o’neill 2014) temporalities of waiting and boredom to the repetitive cycles of failure and deferral in technocratic programs of governance (ferguson 1994). such writing extends much longer anthropological insights in the mutual interaction of political, environmental, and ritual formations of lived time (evans-pritchard 1940; leach 1961; munn 1992). whereas earlier works in ecological anthropology focused on the self-regulation of human-environmental systems (rappaport 1968), in contemporary environmental anthropology, scholars chart modes of anticipation that complicate notions of timeless nature, from the idioms of endangerment and extinction that condition anticipatory nostalgia (choy 2011; west 2006, 1–4) to the various modes of natural history that firmly situate nature in time (raffles 2002; r. white 1995). together, these varied works signal an orientation toward specific modes of experience in time—historical, political, natural—that emerge through potent nexuses, not all of which can be attributed to human agents. exploring how, in the encounters that drive state environmental construction in china, engineers and scientists reorient their temporal horizons through forms of geophysical and ecological future-telling demands that they grapple with environmental processes, grasped through scientific and practical training but not reducible to these ways of knowing. geophysical and ecological temporalities traced through sand complicate the state-generated and personal futures that have long been a mainstay in chinese politics. the future-orientation of modern chinese politics and, more broadly, a contemporary investment in speculative, anticipatory things (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009) have long made the future a tactical achievement of governing. lisa rofel (1999, 9–10) writes that the “repeatedly deferred enactment marked by discrepant desires that continually replace one another” has closely tied together state programs of modernization with continually frustrated anticipation in time. in reform china, the loosening of state monopolies on future-making (buck-morss 2000) has given rise to new possibilities of desirous consumer futures amid the chinese amalgam of authoritarian control and market experiment (ong and zhang 2008; rofel 2007). “traces of the future” orient the present as “a placeholder for things to come” (braester 2016, 17), a transitive moment in the realization of utopian promises. in the people’s republic of china, there has been a succession of official futures, from mao’s worker’s paradise to the new promises of consumer paradise (li zhang 2010) in infinite economic development. while for state theorists, the environmental problem suggests passage into the next historical, ostensibly ecological stage of chinese socialism, desertification politics takes shape as a site for the proliferation of environmental-material temporalities that undercut any sense of statist politics unfurling in a singular form. a keen sensitivity to environmental processes reshapes the chronopolitical stakes as political and material accounts of the future pattern into one another. scientific and engineering engagements with a material as commonplace as sand can serve as a test case for forms of political time under the apparent encroachment of environmental forces. sand is not a single thing (mol 2002). the various technoscientific and engineering agencies that seek to control it attune to its multiple properties (n. shapiro 2015) to develop an arsenal of chronopolitical interventions. as it flows in dry waves or sustains successive plant communities, it appears as a material in and at the cusps of multiple processes, as well as at the center of political and technoscientific experiments. in projects of geophysical stabilization, sand’s times confront the unity of the promissory futures of the chinese state’s modernization program and the historical emergence of a future populated by processes that can be traced through and projected out of the chinese earth. to think with reinhart koselleck (2004, 2), “what follows will therefore seek to speak, not of one historical time, but rather of many forms of time superimposed one upon the other,” with a particular attention to how forms in the mobile sand pattern into the temporal grounds and horizons of state action. for state bureaucrats, ecologists, and sand-control engineers, the earth appears as a mobile quantity, the material substrate of many futures in a tangle of engineering techniques, ecological interventions, and anxious hopes for topographical control and the revivification of a sand-choked future.4 to attend to sand, for the scientists, bureaucrats, and engineers, is less to tell a history than it is to frame a metahistory. metahistory is a term i borrow, of course, from hayden white (1973), who used it to investigate forms of emplotment in historiographic writing. metahistoric genres and forms generate narrative expectations and futures in a story; these forms are out of time, but they structure time, including the chronotopes of ethnographic writing (fabian 1983). as david scott (2004, 19) argues, specific generic forms hold any particular political present in relation to “the salience of the horizon in relation to which it is constructed.” whereas white and scott explore metahistoric genres as powerful literary conventions, for scientists and engineers contending with sand’s slippery mobilities, material processes organize their own countervailing modes of time with which state programs must grapple. in an extension of white’s and scott’s literary methods, sands, deserts, and dunes can be productively explored as forms, in eduardo kohn’s (2013) sense. these forms undergird ways of emplotting futures in consequential ways, ones not limited to the literary and generic conventions structuring historiographic narratives. form, writes kohn (2013, 180, 183), manifests in “self-reinforcing pattern[s]” that propagate across domains. in this propagation, politics and temporalities are “mediated and mutated by a form that is not exactly reducible to human events or landscapes,” even as they shape them. sand substantiates various temporal forms that powerfully interact with given political temporalities. waiting for the horizon from a pavilion atop the reservoir that feeds minqin county, the county’s main town appears as an island between two arid areas. lodged between deserts, minqin is acutely vulnerable to engulfment by sand pressing against the main town on both sides. the declaration of the county as a key zone in the nation’s fight against deserts has drawn resources in the billions of renminbi, expertise, and political attention to this unlikely place, which is already 95 percent covered in sand. this sandy vista is the first that greets any visitor to minqin as he or she emerges from the sheltering colonnade of windbreaks protecting the only road into the county. in the absence of local surface water, this reservoir holds and drains the diverted shiyang river. its waters feed the antisand forestry programs that have sprung up around the town like medieval fortifications, a moat between city and sand. keeping minqin unburied is a key symbolic achievement in the state’s campaign against sand. the continuing existence of the city marks a key policy goal of high-importance central government programs like project 937, which has supported sand engineering to hold the deserts at bay while simultaneously implementing a state-supported depopulation of the oasis. as sand threatens the very possibility of ongoing habitation, minqin has become an exemplary landscape. its predicament thus contains and doubles a china splintered into places that can be plotted in various stages of burial, affixed to stages in the timelines of sand. minqin is widely presented as a political and technical proxy of the active deserts that loom just one hundred kilometers outside of beijing’s city limits. figure 1. minqin county’s main road. image by google and cnes/astrium, cropped by micah hilt. central government parlance designates the movement of the sands a “swallowing,” claiming that minqin sits at the “throat” of the deserts. it is a place that can only be said to still exist. everywhere, the city’s predicament is presented in relation to the fearful future moment at which the two deserts touch, rendering it uninhabitable. the looming end drives changes in the social and physical landscape of the region. it has spurred a general reorganization of government in this ex-oasis through the politics of sand control. the massive investments in controlling the desert are conditioned by and elaborate this sense of an ending that is always, literally, on the horizon. minqin’s slogan, visible for teams of visiting cadres and forestry workers and often repeated by them as a quick summation of their task, narrates political investment and urgency in reference to a future that must be averted at all costs. penned in the calligraphic hand of provincial geologist turned premier of the ccp, wen jiabao, the slogan demands that “minqin must not be allowed to become a second lop nur.” lop nur was, like the lakes that once sprawled over minqin’s oasis, for centuries a massive inland sea in the neighboring xinjiang region. in 1973, it was declared officially dry, leaving a massive alkaline footprint that has become a major source of dust storms in western china. wen’s minqin is already located as a point on the timeline of its own disappearance, one that approaches the city in the backward shadow of its coming negation. the slogan enacts a call to a politics that approaches the future as an event to be held at bay. it does so by linking minqin’s future to a past disappearance, and both to the development of deserts in general. here, political action addresses a future that hurtles closer by its own progression. in minqin, a politics against the desert takes the structure of a negative command. the triumphalism of infinite progress so common in state narratives is reshaped through the ongoing work of holding sand against its powerful tendency to spread. such a politics in sand no longer addresses itself to a utopian future, but merely to the aversion of an ending already in process. nor is there a sense that the state can do anything better than keep the desert at bay in a tentative stalemate that may at any moment tear open. it is a chronopolitics of stalling. wen aligns political intervention with preventing an event that has already happened and, left to itself, is on the brink of happening again. i have come to minqin with a group of forestry officials making their pilgrimage to what has become a mecca in the world of chinese antidesertification politics. they comprise a group of technocrats, scientists, and bureaucrats charged with holding the desert at bay. some, like tian, are local forestry cadres invested in saving their hometown. others, like li ming, my ecologist friend, hail from other places in the institutional geography of state sand control, including beijing. we leave the promontory at the reservoir’s edge and embark on an inspection tour that will take us past half-buried barricades at sand’s edge and into the desert, where sand-breaking grids built of straw, nylon sandbags, or green plastic netting designed to function and look like sand-holding vegetation undulate with the ebb and flow of the dunescape. for the foresters, the landscape is a monument to its own movements and changes in time. different places become exemplars of stages in the life history of desertification. the series of sites string together as moments spread in a tableau over the county’s sand drifts. its progress can be read through the evacuated villages and buried fields that extend far past the sand’s edge. it is in the rutted-out trails ballooning off paved roads upon which sand has encroached in smooth pools, pools tracing the shape of the wind. buried and toppled sand-control infrastructures mark the desert’s advancing power. to the officials, the land is movement; it is speed. speed here does not connote a quickness, but rather, a relation between time and distance. it does not stop; it only rests. the land’s motion and stability do not appear as opposites, but rather as two possible expressions of this time-space of sand. sand, rendered as material velocity, incites a reflection on speed in counterpoint to the “contraction in time, the disappearance of territorial space” that paul virilio (2006, 156) identifies with modern technologies. at the reservoir’s ridge, the engineer liao speaks to the group, framed by the stunning backdrop of a town pressed on both sides by walls of sand. “the sand moves an average of ten meters per year from each side, sometimes reaching twenty meters,” he estimates. he presses his hands together to simulate the movement of the two deserts. “when the two deserts hold hands,” he says, “not only will minqin disappear but this whole region will have changed, in just decades, from a lush oasis to an unbroken plain of sand.” where geological epochs arrange vertically in stratigraphic layers, liao marks and projects the passage of time moving horizontally as an advancing contour on the earth’s surface. forestry and sand-holding programs are techniques for breaking this rate by modulating sand’s speed. the literary scholar rob nixon (2011) suggests that environmental processes like desertification fail to become properly political because such “slow violences” fail to breach the threshold of attention in a politics oriented toward spectacular events. speed, nixon suggests, is a condition of politics as such, and more importantly, there is a temporal disjuncture between the slowness of environmental catastrophe and the short attention spans of contemporary politics. speed is thus a threshold for the attentions that can be called properly political. liao and the foresters, invited to imagine minqin’s future as a process of inexorable burial, articulate the desert’s speed as both fast and slow. when terra firma can shift into a mobile substance (choy and zee 2015), any movement is too fast. and yet, because minqin’s burial may still take decades, the problem of desertification is one that remains forever in a future at once too close and too far. such a process and politics elude the binary of fast politics and slow environment implied by the term slow violence, with its simple mismatch of environmental and political speeds. indeed, minqin, whose end is both imminent and yet still always in the future, remains caught in a period of waiting, wherein the end is always present and still not immediate. joseph masco (2008, 361–62) explores the depiction of nuclear holocaust in early cold war america to argue that the “national contemplation of ruins . . . created a new citizen-state relationship mediated by nuclear fear.” the constant depiction of future ruins was a technique for the conditioning of an unsettled everyday affect, a sense of living emergency. in minqin, of the many ways in which political practice and lived time are oriented toward a coming disaster that is both too fast and too slow, the present has become an intermediary period. while masco reads the urgency of nuclear threat as animating a sort of frenzy, one that persists in contemporary american antiterror campaigns, in minqin, the urgency is of a different kind: that of waiting. this waiting must be prolonged. for the forestry officials, minqin only still exists. preventing minqin from becoming a second lop nur, or a cautionary vision of a future beijing, means that sand-control efforts locate the present in the fearful anticipation of desert encroachment. they are looking for a holding pattern, attempting to forestall the future by engineering the landscape into a stasis carved against the progression of sand. the remaking of minqin’s social and physical landscape therefore is a means of engineering space to engineer time. sand-control infrastructures that stall the flow of the land form part of a more general calculative logic that aims not to obliterate the desert as such, but, for the moment, to stall it in a holding pattern actively poised against sand’s futures. a slowed landscape equals a future deferred. minqin has become a showcase for the antidesertification engineering techniques that, under the implementation of the forestry bureau, have sought to protect the city by a set of practices of zhisha, sand control, or more colloquially, yasha, pressing sand. around minqin, there is an engineered landscape at and beyond the sand’s edge, 330 kilometers of barriers positioned to cut sharp edges back into a dry, liquid landscape. further in, there are rolling dunes engineered into tentative stability, part of a spectacular infrastructuralized landscape that stages the encounter between sand and state. at laohukou, where the tiger’s mouth mountain pass funnels air currents into sand-blasting jet streams, liao, a veteran sand engineer, wends his truck off the road into the curves between dunes, where construction is in progress. bales of straw collected after the corn harvest in other parts of the region pile high onto the beds of trucks. a corps of men, mostly ex-farmers who now work the dunes that have buried their fields, dig the straw stalks into the ground, tracing out an undulating grid of low windbreaks. these grids are one of a number of techniques that environmental engineers employ to slow sand drift by breaking the wind at the dune’s surface. these and other techniques recall historical landscape-engineering techniques in china, for instance in the management of the nearby yellow river (ling zhang 2016). here, they are used across the landscape, rather than in a tight line that hugs the edges of structures. such physical barriers are replicated in a variety of materials, ranging from other kinds of farm waste to burlap or nylon fashioned into sandbags or low walls. so-called biological methods, like tree-planting or aerial seeding, are prohibitive this far into the desert because of the low water content and the general shiftiness of the soil substrate. in emergency situations, chemical methods, mostly involving the spraying of petrochemicals directly onto the sand, laminate loose sand into a self-adhesive sheet. they turn the dunes into a rolling barrier against themselves, and as time goes on, sand forms into slopes on the inside edges of the squares, rather than moving across the land. forestry engineer xu, who works for minqin’s county forestry bureau, coordinates the logistics of rounding up materials and labor for construction. he laments the ephemerality of the infrastructure that today proudly announces itself with a slogan written in cornstalks: fix sand and block wind! protect our home! “grass is organic,” he explains, “and so it rots and is subject to erosion. if it is an especially dry few years, the squares may last for four years, but they may disappear as quickly as two.” nylon is more durable, but also more expensive. and even if the grass or nylon squares can outlast the process of their own decay, he explains, it is likely that they will be buried before that time comes. xu also coordinates new construction and planting, which moves one step ahead of the sand’s leading edge to slow the dusty flood. “we will be doing this for years,” he confides, looking over the organic and abiotic sand breaks that have made the landscape an unnatural infrastructure (see carse 2012). construction implies the work of ongoing repair and maintenance, as well as of rebuilding on the buried ruins of earlier projects. the work is labor intensive and sand control has become a major driver of the economy, “catching” those no longer able to work their fields. closer to the city, the quick-growing poplars and shrubs planted to break the sand demand continuous replanting and watering, but they have a notoriously low survival rate—as low as 30 percent nationally. figure 2. eroded straw grids exhort, “protect our home.” photo by jerry zee. holding the present in place requires continuous work, a sisyphean expenditure of materials and labor for an infrastructure that only ever becomes evident when it breaks down or needs repair (larkin 2008, 235–36). it takes more and more to make sure nothing happens. facing a coming burial, a politics of sand control demands an apparatus against time. it is a work of containment of the desert future in time and space that will align the “socialist ecological civilization” (pan 2007) that chinese state theorists demand with something other than the progressivist emplotment of a “war against nature” (j. shapiro 2001) so characteristic of the ideological pretentions of earlier state socialism. sand displaces that future into an ongoing now, with a politics that aims to continually maintain an unchanging present. it patterns an environmental-political endurance that neither knows nor expects release. it no longer demands any transcendent future, but only the simple continuation of existence. this is a politics animated through the urgency of keeping time and space in a condition of still-waiting, fiercely remaining in the “ontic condition” (gupta 2015) of a suspension that must not admit a final transition. still on the horizon, the future is the space of a holding pattern that, if possible, can persist a few more years. successions it is after dinner, but the sun has barely begun to set in the big, high summer sky. naiman’s desertification research station in eastern inner mongolia, one of a dozen scattered around china’s desertification hot zones, buzzes into life as people settle in for evening activities. summer field research feels like summer camp for the teams of ecologists, geographic information systems (gis) experts, hydrologists, dune scientists, and engineers. li ming, my ecologist friend who will take me to minqin months from now, and little tu, a first-year ecology phd student, suggest that we walk the grounds behind the institute. little tu, who is doing field research in naiman for the first time, has the unenviable task of processing sand samples through a sieve with the back of a spoon for later experimentation. students and young professors like these conduct the bulk of the research at the station. as dusk approaches, they want to climb the watchtower, where we can watch the sunset while eating apricots from the tree near their dormitory. the paths on the institute’s grounds curve and meander through what li ming says were sand dunes just years earlier. now, they are dense and unruly with branching shrubs, stands of small trees, and low, weedy grasses that spill over the footpaths. climbing the watchtower, little tu muses that one day, before summer ends, they could light fireworks off the watchtower’s platform. looking back over the half-dozen main buildings of the field station, then turning to face the horizon, little tu notices that the vegetation changes in thickness and density. she discerns a botanical gradient, from trees to shrubs to grasses, blotching into patches on the sand before thinning into bare, yellow dunes. li ming, the senior of the two desert ecologists who is just starting his first position as a full-fledged state ecologist for the chinese academy of sciences, listens to her. he left his hometown in china’s subtropical south with a romantic longing for the open landscapes of northern china’s steppes, and now, deserts. as she speaks, interpreting the patches of plants (cf. tsing 2015) in the late summer dunes, he interjects here and there to identify key grasses, shrubs, and trees, first in chinese and then in latin: shami, yanhao, shaliu; agriophyllum squarrosum, artemisia halodendron, salix cheilophila. it is not my first time wandering on the grounds with researchers at the station, for whom the changing communities of plants serve as a living example of the powers of desert ecology to root dunes in place. little tu knows that the species li ming names occur naturally on dunes in the region; she also knows that some of these plants, like the dwarf sand willows rooted closest to the station’s buildings, are strategic species for dune stabilization projects. plant growth is a stabilization technique. little tu wonders aloud, “how many different kinds of plants does it take to fix a dune?” “the number of species is not the important factor,” li ming replies, shifting subtly into a pedagogical mode, and now addressing both of us. “from here, we can see several species, all at once, so it looks like a single community of plants. but look, the species are not evenly distributed—there are trees there, but not at the sand’s edge.” tracing his finger across the land, from the open dunes through the gradient of plant species, he invites us to see the subtle progression in plant communities as various discrete moments, plotting out sequential years. li ming exhorts us to see the diverse communities as consecutive slices of time, a simultaneous diachrony across the dunes, with its beginnings on the open drifts and its endings in the stands of sand willows. he continues, “when we come back next summer, the way that the plants are distributed will be different again: trees will replace some of the shrubs, and shrubs will replace some of the grasses. the shami grasses will be denser, and there will be new shami in the sand. the ecology is more unstable and more fragile where there are bushes instead of trees, grass instead of shrubs, and sand instead of grass. it is still developing, and where there are trees, it is more stable. we are not interested in the number of species, exactly, but in the stability of the ecosystem.” the graduated composition of species on the dunes is a way of emplotting dunes into a process of vegetation change. this process is a version of the classical formulation of ecological succession, first pioneered in henry chandler cowles’s (1899) studies of vegetation on the dunes at the shores of lake michigan, and then in frederic clements’s (1916) paradigm, with its organismic underpinnings. ecological succession charts a process in which dunes can be imagined as passing through successive botanical stages. according to the story of succession, on a denuded landscape, pioneer species establish and create the conditions for others. they are subsequently replaced by successor species that, in turn, create the conditions for their own overtaking and replacement by new species. each stage stages the next, so that weedy pioneer communities are already inhabited by the promise of stable climax communities.5 ecological succession is a way of seeing sand at the intersection of multiple environmental processes, some of which can be mobilized against others. it is both a way of telling time on dunes and of giving form to potential action into that time. research in naiman is an interdisciplinary enterprise, oriented toward developing dune-stabilization techniques. its original incarnation, in the 1960s, was as an environmental engineering institute, coordinating sand-control projects alongside the desert-crossing tongliao-beijing railway at a time when sand encroachment caused up to fifty derailments a year throughout the country (wang and zhao 2005). principles of ecological succession allow state ecologists to see bare dunes as future forests, and to pose the mobility of bare dunes as the starting point of an ecological process that will culminate in stabilization. at the desertification research station, ecology is both a science for understanding the dunes as shifting arrangements of biotic and abiotic things and a tactical element in the enterprise of dune stabilization. ecology toggles between scientific practice and engineering technique. this doubling of ecological time is a research objective. for scientists at the station, the ecological stabilization that li ming describes is fungible with the stabilizations demanded by sand-control programs. further into the process of succession and the arrival of a stabilized ecosystem, plants tend to establish more densely and the sand-securing capacities of deeper and more robust roots increase. indeed, on the dune-surveying trips that groups of students and scientists make each day, documenting plant species and estimating vegetation cover on a square meter of surface sand are ways of locating a dune on the quadripartite scale of dune mobility. the character of the vegetation on a dune’s surface helps scientists determine whether a dune is mobile, semi-mobile, semi-fixed, or fixed. ecological and geophysical stabilization appear as faces of the same sand-engineering process, and succession describes both an ecological process and a potential geoengineering technique. on moving dunes, then, ecological succession opens ways of mining the sand for its biotic potential to unearth futures that oppose the unending advance of dunes across a landscape. as a competitive mode of sand-time, it allows dunes to exist perpetually at a crossing point between two sand-timelines: the mobility of encroaching dunes contends with ecological succession, wherein sand becomes self-stabilizing botanical substrate. in ecological succession a bare dune marks a starting point for a new process whose futures are already contained in the first weeds on a dune’s slope. xia, a teacher and an ecologist a few years older than li ming, insists that dunes are sites of ecological potential. she sinks a shovel and digs a hole less than a meter into the side of a dune to expose damp sand. “look: sand is excellent for holding water and preventing desertification. these dunes can support robust plant life,” she insists, pointing to the dunescape as a massive reservoir for botanical stabilization. xia’s desert is, following elizabeth povinelli (2015, 170), a “space where life was, is not now, or could provide the conditions for life.” a water-sealing dune, xia explains, is a potential habitat for sand-engineering plants, and for a scientific forestry that adheres to and mimics the principles of ecological succession. * * * a restless dune marks a point of eco-geophysical intervention. it shifts from the result of desertification to a cusp between two modes of environmental time. at this cusp, the future is a site of technical intervention where “the sense of the present as ruined time” (scott 2014, 12) is also the precondition for sand ecology to begin rooting stability back into the land. dune sands appear as both an aftermath of degradation and a growth medium for tenacious, infrastructuralizing species. ecological sciences assemble into a political toolkit that collects engineering techniques as tactical means of emplotting and realizing other futures. they aim to forcefully derail sand-time from one track to another, one where the desert is a future and not a future burial. it is a means of effecting a kind of temporal capture, whereby the beginning of the succession process already gestures at its completion. it should come as no surprise, then, that although the stability of an ecological community is a goal, the scientists generally focus on the beginnings of the stabilization process. it is the pioneer species and not the climax community that student scientists are trained to notice. on an early-morning dune-surveying trip, a recent phd and specialist in remote sensing, liu jun, leads a van full of students several dunes deep into naiman’s ke’erqin sandy lands. we follow him in a loose cluster into the depressions between the high slopes of dunes until he signals us to stop. he reaches down to pull up a tiny green sprig of a leaf, about the size of a clover. it pulls easily out of the loose sand, and several grains of sand hang delicately on its tender root. “this is shami,” he says, speaking of a hardy grass adapted to dry and unstructured sand. looking around, i notice a sparse carpet of shami on many parts of the dune. i am not the only one who has not taken note of it until now. “shami grows quickly, and it is one of a few plants that thrives on mobile dunes,” liu jun says. “it may look like nothing, but shami is centrally important in allowing other plants to establish.” pioneer species like shami are crucial not only because they are proof of ecological process but also because they change soil conditions in ways that allow other plants to establish. in the sparse leaves and blades, it is possible to envision—with some imagination—shrubs and trees to come on the surface of a stabilized dune. pioneer species, therefore, kick-start ecological time, promoting subsequent waves of colonization. they matter especially because they indicate the renewal of an ecological time already occupied by its projected realization. many ecologists at the station study pioneer species. li ming and a team of ecologists are especially interested in studying a shrub, yanhao, to understand how it prepares sand as a habitat for larger flora. yanhao can continue to grow on fixed dunes, therefore limning stages of succession. a study published in 2014 and based on research at naiman argues that yanhao, “under nutrient limitation [in shifting dunes] is more likely to manage with a low level of nutrients in senescing leaves, giving this species an advantage in infertile soil” (li et al. 2014, 182–83). in particular, the study suggests that in nutrient-poor environments, the shrub incompletely reabsorbs foliar nutrients, which means that that the plant and its falling leaves contribute “to the return of high-quality litter to the soil.” this starts a multiplier effect by which decomposing plant matter “accelerates leaf litter decomposition and nutrient mineralization.” in their conclusions, the study’s authors suggest that yanhao accelerates the process of dune restoration. the plant itself here appears as both an indicator and an accelerator of ecological time on the dune, as it speeds the process of succession by stimulating the improvement of the dune’s nutrient environment for other plants. the manipulation and acceleration of successive communities of plants appear as part of a potential armory of sand-binding interventions, an engineering technique alongside and in tandem with infrastructures like grids. indeed, ecologists discuss the straw and nylon grids as ways of engineering habitats for sand-pioneering species by creating tiny wind shelters where shrubs and grasses can root more easily. the ecologists at naiman believe that if dunes could be left alone and pioneer species would be allowed to establish themselves, then ecology would take its course. where much of contemporary ecology outside of china has shifted from the orderliness of succession to chaos ecologies (worster 1990), these scientists see the dunes as sites of a latent ecology just about to burst back into life. for them, ecological time propagates into a politics wherein succession is the template of an ongoing reactivation of time; its stagelike progressivism formally echoes that of chinese socialism’s theory of itself.6 as we sit on the institute’s watchtower, we face the sunset, looking at where the open dunescape breaks into a patchwork of grasses and pioneer shrubs. little tu leans back, as if to linger for a moment in the quiet calm of a future always starting anew. coda: five thousand years it is often said that china has had a continuous history of five thousand years. at times, the cliché expresses a pervasive cultural chauvinism through the profundity of civilizational time. at others, it is a way of neutralizing the tumultuous recent past into the gravity of deep historical time. those involved in antidesertification work often presented it to me as a subtle reminder that it is possible to describe environmental and human time on the same scale and in the same time frame. five thousand years admits no necessary distinction or sense of a mismatch in speeds and scales, no singular collision of nature and culture. i heard the phrase very often from scientists when driving with them through naiman and its alternating patchwork of pastures, newly opened farmlands, semidegraded fields, and rolling dunes. they deployed it, in particular, when i expressed surprise over how calm they seemed over the emergency of desertification. five thousand years offered a trope through which they could explain to an outsider the ordinariness of this apparent disaster, subsuming its exceptionality into an account of ordinary environmental processes. tingting, a young hydrologist at naiman station, for instance, thinks of the depth of time not in relation to permanence but rather as a reminder of the very transience of the present as a moment in a longer cycle. as our van speeds past the new furrows of a freshly plowed piece of farmland,7 she chides me for imagining that this opening signals a violence against pristine nature: all over china, places like this . . . have been settled for thousands of years, and the land is put to many uses and undergoes many changes. it is not like in america or elsewhere where land is plentiful: here, there have always been people and they have always worked the land in different ways. when we see these farmlands being opened up, this is something that has happened many times in the past. people farmed the land, and that changed the land and it deteriorates and underwent desertification. when desertification has happened in the past, grass has come back, and then people will come in and graze [their animals] here, and then, when the land is ready, others will come in and farm again. this has happened many times over thousands of years here. tingting is not elaborating a specific catalog of events, but rather the environmental form through which a temporality and process of environmental change can be imagined. the various kinds of landscape—dunes, pastures, fallow—rearrange as points in a process that extends backward and forward in time. her account of the earth as a long cycle of rising and falling social, economic, and ecological regimes recalls the models of ecological disturbance and succession through which the scientists see a dynamic earth, as well as the long cyclical returns of chinese dynastic time (levenson 1968). the opening of new farmland, a primary driver of desertification, is for her a reopening, an indelible moment in a cycle that has lasted since time immemorial. it is proof of the perpetuity of the land as itself a process of change, one that is driven neither by human agency nor by the workings of an extrahuman nature. just as state ecologists comb bare dunes for signs of renewed succession, the telescoping of the variegated landscape into a tableau of a millennia-long social-economic-ecological cycle makes apparent endings the necessary grounds for new beginnings. for tingting, the disturbance is already implied as part of the ongoing operation of the cycle, just as its eventual rehabilitation is; it is the normal disaster. at the center of her way of seeing the earth, where succession has shifted from an ecological principle to a framework for general time, is a relentless, cycling change that binds together the endurance of china and the endurance of the earth. tingting’s earth is not an object but a process, gathering and bearing the effects of economic, ecological, and geophysical processes. china and its difficult land urge a thinking with perpetual cycles that repeat with all the spontaneity and mystery of the changing seasons or the rise and fall of governments. in this long china, the earth is the substrate of its own time. tingting offers an account of a landscape that has long been embroiled in human practices and yet cannot be called anthropogenic—if the term indicates human life as an excess over environments rather than a moment in them. in tingting’s earthly process, there is no need to understand the environmental present or future as a rupture in time, nor to ask for five thousand years to bear themselves as a history of trespasses.8 her landscape is an earthly history of endurances, where the earth, as this knot of processes, is the engine and measure of itself. apparent end points become the proof of a cycle beginning again. the depth of time, where boundaries blur between the perpetuity of the state and the perpetuity of the land, offers a way of emplotting the environment as an entanglement of physical, demographic, economic, and climatic processes, without any need to pinpoint a moment in which one engulfs the other. what sand and the politics of its containment may offer are a gesture toward a different kind of politics in time: a politics formed through the earth and its many rhythms and materials. that is to say, the materials and processes that give shape to the earth and its changes elicit and pattern political possibilities; they may evince political futures and tactics for shaping them. as those most invested in sand control seek to contain it, temporalities of sand figure in diverse formations. in this way, sand shifts subtly from an environmental problem open to pacification by technopolitical intervention to a key actant in shaping the governmental interventions meant to finally control it (callon 1986). in many modes of encounter, more-than-human landscapes scaffold emplotments of political and environmental futurity that relay through more-than-human becomings. sand becomes the material condition of a metahistorical form that emerges in complex physical, political, and ecological intra-action, even as it shapes new forms of political time. the horizons of politics, in the worlds of sand control, take their shape through the horizons of the expanding deserts. the announcement of the anthropocene must be taken as a challenge to unearth ways of imagining futures in more-than-human worlds, beyond the timelessness of nature and the imminent endings of disaster environmentalisms. vibrant, potent, and irreducible to human design (see bennett 2010), environmental materialities and processes displace and force open an anthropocentric temporal imagination. at the shores of the desert, we may yet discern in the sand ways of living at the end of the world, enduring its erosions or opening the future anew. notes acknowledgments first and foremost, thanks to my friends in china’s antidesertification programs and the chinese academies of sciences and social sciences, without whom this work would not have been possible. many thanks to aihwa ong and gabriel coren, who read earlier drafts of this article, and to alex blanchette, sarah vaughn, nick shapiro, and bridget guarasci, who read and debated it in revisions. in its multiple iterations, this article has benefited from the kind and joyful attention of many more than i can list. these include hoon song, jia-ching chen, emily ng, vivian choi, candis callison, derick fay, and the department of anthropology at the university of california, santa cruz, especially andrew mathews and lisa rofel. the program in science and technology studies at the university of california, davis has been the most caring and supportive place to write and learn. the encouragement and insight of four anonymous reviewers, dominic boyer, james faubion, and especially cymene howe have improved this article at the every level; they are the substrate through which it has taken form. most of all, thanks to tim choy, for everything. research and writing were made possible by the wenner-gren foundation, the university of california pacific rim research program, the university of california, berkeley center for chinese studies, and the mellon foundation/american council of learned societies. 1. china’s semi-arid interior has for decades suffered massive desertification and has recently drawn scientific and journalistic attention for its epidemic of lake disappearances (huo 2011). 2. china’s antisand programs unfurl in a number of overlapping geographies, from the various airstreams that make deserts into dust-storm source areas for downwind places to the sprawling geography of field stations in key demonstration zones (zee 2015). sand and wind, as the constituents of a dust storm, have not only reshaped the temporal horizons of political intervention but have alos laid the environmental architecture for new administrative zonings (see ong 2006) across and beyond northern china. 3. i understand this work to be fundamentally consonant with the collaborative alter-speculations of the uncertain commons (2013, 10) writing collective. “to divine,” they write, “is to dream the future—namely, to live the present in the tense of the future anterior.” 4. it should be clear that this attention to the interaction of temporal forms across nonhuman and human registers is not bound to a primordialist conception of nature as a sphere outside of human intervention, or the raw material on which culture acts (strathern 1980). i am indebted to writers who have endeavored to theorize contemporary environmental being as already changed and therefore bearing an ongoing capacity to change, what michelle murphy (2015), in a biotic idiom, has called “alterlife.” 5. succession and climax models, as donald worster (1977, 1979) notes, gained footholds in land-restoration campaigns in the united states during the dust bowl period of the 1930s, as new deal conservation programs aimed to control so-called “black blizzards.” 6. a much longer reflection exists through chinese history on the nature of chinese political time. much of modern chinese state political and philosophical thought has responded to the problem of how “to be modern and chinese, that combination so desperately sought through a century of reformist and revolutionary exasperation as a seemingly immobile china and an all-too-kinetic west” (levenson 1968, 78). stagist and progressivist conceptions of history provided and continue to provide an official historiographic form, not only for making sense of chinese pasts but also for angling toward futures framed as a succession 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filling the air. honking horns punctuate a background noise of quranic recitations playing from radios, pop music broadcasting from a store, and a babble of animated conversation. vendors are setting up their stands for the day, peeling layers of decay off cabbages and lettuce, stacking oranges one atop another. a small hut stands by the side of the road, its window open at the front. the booth is nondescript, unmarked by any sign, with no produce on display or smells emanating from it. within the darkened space, a woman sits behind a counter. a customer approaches. “i’ll have a pound’s worth, please,” he says, placing several coins on the counter and handing over a plastic card.1 the woman puts the card into a small handheld machine and then reaches toward the shelves that line both sides of the booth. she starts pulling down loaves of round, flat bread, placing twenty on the bran-covered counter, and handing back the card. the customer picks up the bread, feeling the loaves and glancing briefly at each one in turn. he sets aside four loaves, which the woman exchanges for four new ones. he then moves to one side and spreads out his bread on the hood of a car that is parked nearby. after a few minutes, he stacks the now-cooled bread into neat piles and places it in the plastic bag he has brought with him. he departs, the bulging bag of bread in one hand, smaller bags of beans, greens, and tomatoes in the other. this simple transaction in a cairo neighborhood in the winter of 2015 might appear to hold little significance. underlying the transaction, though, is a set of social, material, political, and economic relationships that reaches far beyond those of a man buying bread. the moment of card-money-bread exchange marks an interface between a government subsidy system, private business, staple food, and the millions of people who eat this food every day. the bread the customer is purchasing is a particular kind of bread, known as baladi bread, which is subsidized by the government and eaten by the majority of egyptians (according to the government’s statistics, around 85 percent) on a daily basis (see figure 1).2 the card the customer hands over is a ration card, which entitles him to five loaves of baladi bread a day for each member of his family. the money he pays covers the cost of twenty loaves at the subsidized price of 5 piasters a loaf, a tenth of the price of other kinds of bread (less than half a u.s. cent per loaf).3 the bakery he is buying from is private, but the content and size of the baladi bread it produces are regulated by the government. the way he is handling the bread, checking it for defects, laying it out to cool, and stacking it into tidy piles before placing it in his bag, ensures that his family will eat bread that is evenly cooked not burnt, well risen not collapsed, firm not soggy, round not misshapen. these interactions between the man and his bread encapsulate a mode of practice that we term casual care. figure 1. baladi bread with beans and mulokhiya (jute mallow). photo by mariam taher. care has become a growing topic of interest within anthropology, science and technology studies, and geography. this work has stemmed primarily from feminist scholarship, which sought to recognize the labor of care in domestic and healthcare settings (finch and groves 1983; fisher and tronto 1990). it has since expanded to explore care in a range of empirical contexts, with a central goal of elucidating particular kinds of relations between people and human and nonhuman others that often go unseen. capacious in its meanings, care can be a mode of action, an affective stance, or an ethical value (mol, moser, and pols 2010; ticktin 2011; barnes 2012; buch 2015; martin, myers, and viseu 2015). we focus on care as action, as a set of practices that bring together bodies, subjectivities, materials, and technologies (mol 2008; puig de la bellacasa 2011). we employ care as an analytical framework because this is what emerged from our data as a more or less consistent pattern of interactions between cairo residents and their bread. these ways of handling bread constitute everyday forms of practice (de certeau 1984; bourdieu 1990), which are mediated by lines of social difference (especially class and age cohort). what makes these practices of care is people’s close attunement to their bread and degree of concern for their ultimate object of consumption. while anthropologists have utilized a range of analytical approaches to think through relations between human and nonhuman others, such as assemblages (tsing 2015) and becomings (kirksey and helmreich 2010), care helps convey not only a practice of engaged interaction but also the array of motivations and affective attachments expressed in practices of everyday life. people care for the bread not as an end in itself but in order to care for their families, to ensure that their families have good bread to eat. egyptians do not, however, use the term care to describe their handling of baladi bread. that people care about baladi bread is evident in how they talk about their access to this food and what it tastes like, but nobody would talk about caring for bread (e.g., al-ʿināya bi-l-ʿaish or al-ḥifāẓ ʿala l-ʿaish).4 for those who buy baladi bread daily, their behavior at the bakery is not a thing per se. it is not something that people typically reflect on (unless asked specifically about it in an interview, and even then people often appear perplexed by this line of questioning). there is no emic term to describe it. nonetheless, how people talk about their routine of bread buying offers insight into what we regard as an embodied practice of care. we introduce the notion of casual care to prompt further reflection on the manner through which care can be practiced. practices of care vary—what it means to care for something depends on the thing being cared for and the context of that care. care can, for example, be tied to personal care histories, as when an adult cares for her mother with dementia (taylor 2008); care can combine tenderness and clinical coolness, as when veterinarians are called on to kill animals during a disease epidemic (law 2010); or it can engage multiply scaled life forms, as when a cheesemaker seeks to cultivate specific microbial ecologies (paxson 2013). the addition of the modifier casual to the term care might seem oxymoronic; to act casually could be understood as acting in the absence of care. we use this word, however, to denote a particular mode of practicing care. casual care is not a care of calculated deliberation, such as the care of feeding patients in a nursing home (harbers, mol, and stollmeyer 2002) or of checking for cracks in a canal that carries toxic waste (ureta 2016). rather, it is a care of routinized and quotidian acts. tied to ingrained social norms, casual care proceeds with little apparent pause for thought. while other forms of care work may also be habitual, like cooking for a family (devault 1991), there is something notable about the casualness with which practices of care for baladi bread proceed. people care for baladi bread in an apparently effortless rather than studied fashion. this care is practiced by many, but not all; most of the time, but not always; sometimes meticulously, but at other times halfheartedly. other scholars have shown how care practices are not always motivated by caring feelings (mol, moser, and pols 2010; murphy 2015). such work has troubled assumptions about the affective domains associated with practices of care, demonstrating that one does not necessarily have to care about something to care for it. in the case of bread in egypt, people do in fact care a great deal about it. somewhat paradoxically, though, the manner in which they care for it is not that focused in its enactment. this troubles assumptions about what it means to care for something, demonstrating how one can practice care without being all that careful. we explore practices of casual care for baladi bread during an important intermediary stage between purchase and consumption. while much of the work on care and food has examined practices within the domestic realm (weismantel 1988; devault 1991; carsten 1997; janeja 2010; kantor 2018) or around eating in a range of settings (harbers, mol, and stollmeyer 2002; lavis, abbots, and attala 2016), we set aside how people handle and consume bread in their homes to look at how they interact with bread at the bakery and on the street.5 this phase of conveyance is relatively unexplored in anthropological work on food.6 yet practices of conveying food shape that food’s taste, form, texture, and ultimately, its quality as perceived by those who consume it. conveyance is a liminal phase during which good care can lead to bad bread being rejected and bad care can lead to good bread becoming inedible. conveyance bridges the public and private, production and consumption, while also highlighting the fuzziness of these distinctions. the political stakes of casual care reach far beyond the domain of the individual. feminist scholars have shown how everyday forms of care are about much more than just looking after things, instead having deep ethico-political implications (puig de la bellacasa 2011, 2015). baladi bread holds considerable political weight in egypt. cheap bread, which the government has subsidized since 1941, has come to be seen as an expected part of the state’s social contract with its public. although the government has made changes to the program over the years, including major reforms in 2014 in which it introduced the electronic ration card and set the five-loaf limit, the price of a loaf of baladi bread has remained the same since 1989.7 that the government has maintained this subsidy while recently cutting a number of others, under the conditions of a 2016 international monetary fund loan, is telling. for many egyptians, baladi bread constitutes the primary component of their diet.8 people expect to have enough bread to eat, and while they know that baladi bread is not necessarily the best bread on the market, they expect it to taste decent; they use the terms gamīl (beautiful) or yittākil (edible). baladi bread is thus one medium through which the public assesses the legitimacy of the ruling regime. when people’s expectations for their staple food are not met it can be a source of political unrest, as bread riots throughout history have demonstrated (thompson 1971; engel 1997; martinez 2018). in 1977, the government’s attempts to raise the price of bread resulted in two days of riots around the country, with protestors attacking shops, government buildings, and police stations. the government responded with force, bringing in the army, and at least 77 people were killed and 214 wounded (mitchell 2002, 249). in 2008, bread shortages and declining quality caused widespread anger and intermittent protests (trego 2011). during the 2011 revolution, this staple food emerged as a central motif in the protesters’ calls for “bread, freedom, and social justice” (ʿaish, ḥurriyya, ʿadāla igtimāʿiyya). these moments illustrate how an inadequacy in the supply of baladi bread can spark popular mobilization. yet our research took place after the government reformed the subsidy program, in 2014, instituting changes that largely addressed problems of bread shortages and poor quality. this was a period in which there were not long lines at bakeries or prevalent complaints about the standard of loaves.9 the casual care we describe here, therefore, is not about predicting when the next protest might erupt or explaining the causes of previous bread riots. rather, it is about bringing to light everyday interactions between people and their bread, which are in fact vital to producing the quality of baladi bread that egyptians eat daily. of course, some quality dimensions lie beyond people’s control. it is government officials who regulate the nature of the flour and ingredients that go into baladi bread; it is private owners who control production conditions in the small-scale bakeries. but assuming that the baladi bread meets a certain threshold level of quality, practices of handling and selecting with care determine what it is like to consume this bread. the evidence for this lies not in what people say so much as in what they do not say, in the absence of complaints about bread being soggy, misshapen, or burnt. without casual care, no matter how good the bread emerging from bakeries, the bread reaching people’s homes would be unsatisfactory. casual care thus helps us see that people’s efforts to obtain decent, affordable bread are forged not only through moments of highly visible protest but also through actions as mundane as placing bread in a plastic bag. our article draws on twenty-two months of collaborative ethnographic fieldwork that we conducted in a working-class area on the outskirts of cairo’s maadi neighborhood. this work stemmed from jessica’s book project on wheat and bread in egypt, in which she employed mariam, an egyptian american, born and raised in cairo, as a research assistant to conduct participant observation in cairo. the goal was to provide long-term data on urban bread to complement the broader research that jessica, who is english and has done ethnographic research in rural egypt since 2007, did for the book during five shorter periods of fieldwork. between 2015 and 2017, mariam conducted observation at two bakeries, where she went to buy bread three to four times a week. she also conducted informal interviews, building on connections with several key informants in the neighborhood, whom she has known for many years. the data presented here derive primarily from mariam’s detailed field notes, yet the authors’ regular discussions, both remotely and during jessica’s fieldwork visits to this cairo neighborhood, shaped how the data collection unfolded. similarly, while jessica took the lead on analyzing the data and writing the article, mariam’s regular readings and contributions shaped how the essay evolved. handling for conveyance fayza walks slowly through the alleyway toward the market. it is early afternoon and mariam is accompanying her to buy bread after a morning running errands together. fayza is a widow in her sixties, who lives with her three adult children, granddaughter, and sister in a small two-bedroom apartment. for most of her life she worked in other people’s homes as a cleaner, nanny, and cook, but with an injured hip and swollen legs, she now has difficulty moving around. as with many egyptians today, fayza’s economic well-being is unstable. she complements her meager pension with irregular short-term jobs; nobody in her household holds permanent, full-time employment. among fayza and her relatives, each price fluctuation in tomatoes, potatoes, or eggs is keenly felt and regularly discussed. the huge price increases since the government’s currency devaluation in 2016 and fuel subsidy cuts have proven particularly challenging. cheap, decent bread is one of the few stable things they can rely on. the family eats fresh bread every two to three days; sometimes fayza goes to buy it, but more often her children or sister will do so on their way home from work or when buying other groceries. figure 2. booth of a baladi bread bakery. photo by ellen geerlings. mariam and fayza arrive at the baladi bread bakery, where fayza greets the owner, a childhood friend. the two women do not enter the bakery to make their purchase, but rather approach the booth from which this bakery, like most baladi bread bakeries, sells its bread. these booths are small kiosks on the side of the road, typically located a short distance from the building in which the baking occurs (see figure 2). the booths are staffed mostly by women, who receive the bread that other, usually male, workers bring them from the bakery, arranging it on the booth’s shelves, and then managing the interactions with the customer, while the bakery owner moves around the premises, keeping an eye on the activities. at the booth, fayza asks for ten loaves. the server passes her bread on a rack (ʾafaṣ), a tray made of palm fronds, which she places on a wooden crate off to one side (see figure 3). mariam touches the loaves; they are extremely hot, almost painful to touch. she and fayza sit down. there is a woman sitting next to them, also waiting with her bread. she turns some of her loaves upside down and then back again. a boy on the other side is packing his loaves, stacking them in piles and placing them in his plastic bag. fayza sees a woman she knows, also packing her bread nearby. she asks about her family and they talk about their news. figure 3. hot bread on a rack. photo by mariam taher. fayza is relaxed, not impatient, enjoying a few moments of rest and conversation in the shade. after about five minutes mariam feels a loaf. the bread is still hot. fayza instructs her to turn the bread around. “see the little holes in the back?” she asks. “when you turn the loaf, you are allowing the hot air to escape from here.” after a few more minutes, the bread is cool enough to be packed. mariam helps fayza stack her loaves and place them in a plastic bag. they head back to fayza’s apartment where they unload the shopping, storing the bread in a plastic bag on the kitchen counter. later, the family will eat the bread with vegetable stew, rice, olives, and pickled eggplant. any leftovers fayza will place in the freezer for future days. this is the phase that we analyze as conveyance, a phase between purchase and consumption that involves not only transporting bread but preparing it for transport. here, we see how workingand middle-class residents of cairo manage the temperature, texture, and form of baladi bread, and in doing so, shape the quality of the bread they eat. the people we are talking about come from varied walks of life—among them are laborers, policemen, housewives, government workers, teachers, and taxi drivers—yet they are united by the fact that cheap baladi bread is a central part of their daily household sustenance. while some upper-class residents do consume baladi bread (and have various practices of caring for bread inside their homes), they typically ask their domestic staff to buy bread for them. knowing how to handle bread at the bakery and on the street, therefore, is a “gestural resource” (elyachar 2011, 82) of the nonrich. these practices of airing, stacking, and packing constitute our first example of casual care. airing waiting is a mode of being commonly associated with egypt’s bakeries. in the past, the time that people had to wait in line when buying baladi bread was a source of great anger. yet in the above example, fayza and the people around her are waiting not for their bread but with their bread. they are taking five minutes or so to care for one of the bread’s key material characteristics: its temperature. immersing themselves in the bread’s temporality, they are making time for it. depending on the context, this waiting time may prove an inconvenience or, alternatively, an opportunity for social interaction (see figure 4). when mariam asks fayza how she feels about having to wait at the bakery, she responds, “people are eager to talk. they are under so much pressure, they use the chance to vent a bit.” they vent about the challenges of their day-to-day lives while waiting with their state-subsidized bread to let off steam, performing a care that ensures that the texture of this bread is one thing they do not have to vent about. figure 4. airing loaves. photo by ellen geerlings. the small bakeries that produce baladi bread bake throughout the day. as the hot bread emerges from the oven, workers place it on racks, which they shuttle to the booths where the bread is sold. sometimes they leave them in an intermediary cooling point; at other times they take them directly. the person staffing the booth keeps track of which racks came out first and how long each batch has been cooling. but the time the bread lingers on a shelving unit varies. depending on fluctuations in demand and production, a customer may receive bread that is still hot.10 while some might think of bread’s warmth as a positive characteristic, to baladi bread customers, it is not. to them, temperature is evaluated in relation to the plastic bags that they typically use to carry the bread home.11 if a customer places hot bread directly in a plastic bag, the hot air condenses on the inside of the bag, rendering the bread soggy. egyptians talk about this in terms of the bread sweating (al-ʿaish biyiʿraʾ). sweaty bread is unpalatable. as fayza commented, hot bread packed before it is cool will “stick together” (yilzaʾ fi baʿḍu) and “become doughy” (yibʾa ʿagīna). keeping bread edible hence requires management of the bread’s temperature. this practice of handling with care is mediated both by the material quality of the bread (how quickly its temperature declines on exit from the oven) and of the receptacle in which it is transported (the degree to which its structure allows hot air to circulate). the material specificities of a food matter (harbers, mol, and stollmeyer 2002); they shape the practices of care around it. the conveyor of the bread, in turn, shapes those materialities through practices of casual care. people refer to their practices of spreading out the bread to cool before they pack it as airing (tahweya), a terminology notable for its implied sense of human agency. instead of the bread’s temperature ticking down of its own accord, as the more passive term cooling would suggest, the bread’s human handlers must make it subject to the cooling work of air to bring down that temperature. they do not see this as a labor per se. unlike past public outrage over having to wait at bakeries to buy bread—fayza still talks about how there used to be extremely large crowds (zaḥma mōt)—we have never heard anyone complain about having to wait at bakeries to air bread. while this may in part be because airing is not as time consuming as standing in line could be, it is also a different kind of waiting.12 there is a degree of uncertainty attached to waiting in a line; you do not know how quickly the line will move, or whether the bakery will run out of bread before you reach the front. long lines often induce pushing, shouting, and fighting. for someone like fayza, an old woman with a limp, standing in an unruly line can be both painful and unnerving. when waiting for bread to air, on the other hand, the outcome is known; you already have the bread that you will be taking home, and you are in control of where and how long you wait. purchasers of baladi bread are attuned to the temperature of the bread and to its need to cool sufficiently before packing. one man who has just purchased sixty loaves of bread checks with the woman in the booth before he starts packing. “is it all aired [kulluh mithawwī ]?” he asks. “yes,” she replies, “it is all well aired [mithawwī tamām, kulluh].” while this man has the expectation, or hope, that the bread be aired before he receives it, customers are used to having to manage this process themselves. they may not need to do this every time they go to a bakery. the necessity of airing depends on the bakery’s production cycle, the number of customers at a particular time of day, and how long the bread has been left to rest between coming out of the oven and being handed to the customer. but it is something they are ready to do when presented with hot loaves. around baladi bread bakeries, people temporarily commandeer small slices of public space for this airing (see figure 4). if they have received the bread in loose piles, they may lay it on a cloth or on the roof of a car. if they have purchased a whole rack of bread, they will balance the rack on whatever they can find—a rock, table, crate, or bench—allowing air to circulate around the bread to cool it before they pack their loaves and return the rack to the bakery. an unspoken rule commands that bread not be placed directly on the ground. should any bread fall, it is swiftly retrieved, brushed off, and packaged. the motions are quick, reflexive. some kinds of contact are not perceived as contaminating, like the touch of a worker’s hand, the squeeze by other customers, or the resting on a dust-covered bench. but contact with the ground is. the casualness of people’s care is hence constrained within the limits of needing to keep the bread off the ground. stacking and packing a man stands at a bakery counter. he has just bought twenty loaves and is packing the bread into a large plastic bag. his actions are methodical. he takes several loaves into his hand, one at a time, making a little stack, and then places them on top of the growing stack in his bag. outside another bakery, several people are doing something similar. one man has balanced his rack on two stone blocks and is crouched in front of it, stacking his bread into two large plastic bags. a short distance away, a woman is standing by a concrete flowerbed. the flowerbed has no soil or flowers but offers an elevated space on which to balance her bread. she, too, is stacking her bread in piles. the tasks being performed here are small. people are arranging their bread, now cool, so that they can carry it home. but both the fact that they are doing it and the way in which they are doing it is telling. thirty or forty loaves are not very heavy, but they are bulky. unlike other food products where the packaging is incorporated in the process of production and sale, the packaging of baladi bread is left to the customer. the bread’s materiality—its tendency to crease or crack if folded, and the common perception that a loaf not straight and whole is a lesser loaf—influence how it is cared for. the arrangement of the bread in the plastic bag is thus significant. on one occasion, a woman asks to purchase a plastic bag; many bakeries sell bags for those who forget to bring their own. the server asks if she wants a large bag or a small one. the woman hesitates, perhaps not knowing the sizes in question. “take this one,” says the server, passing her one. “is it enough [hatkaffī ]?” the woman inquires. “will it take all the bread?” the customer’s concern reflects not simply whether she will physically be able to fit all her bread into the bag, but whether she can fit it in the bag in an appropriate fashion, without squashing the loaves. packing may take several minutes as people work with care to arrange the bread before carrying it home (see figure 5). their practice strikes a balance between the careful and the not too careful. they do not want the bread to fold, but they handle it with the ease of an everyday good, not the weight of a delicate rarity. as mariam helps fayza stack her bread, their actions are habitual. everyday routinization lies at the heart of the casualness. one man mariam interviewed recalled the practice from his childhood: “i used to be sent out to get twenty loaves. my mother would give me a bag and i would go to the bakery.” his recollection made note of the casual care he learned to perform to stack the loaves before packing them. “i would have to arrange them all first,” he said. “i would lay them on top of each other.” through this practice, people help ensure that the bread arrives home round and flat, not torn (il-mitʾaṭṭaʿ), its integrity intact. figure 5. stacking bread. photo by mariam taher. once in the bag, the bread may require ongoing care. watching one man carry his bread in a plastic bag as he walks down the street, we see him peer inside the bag. some of the loaves are not straight; they are crumpled and falling into each other. the man reaches inside with a hand and tries to straighten them. there is some condensation on the inner side of the bag. he shakes the bag a little to air the loaves further. this small act of readying the bread for conveyance resonates with other kinds of practices that anthropologists have documented in their detailed descriptions of food handling and preparation (e.g., weiss 1996; janeja 2010). it underscores how staple foods are about more than just fuel for the body; their taste matters. customers care for their bread because they understand bread to be more than a source of calories. they know that for this central part of their daily sustenance to be gratifying, the bread must be soft not soggy, so that they can tear off pieces to dip in a sauce; flat not crumpled, so that they can use it to make sandwiches. caring for their own consumption and for that of their families, therefore, means not only bringing home bread but bringing home good bread. commenting these practices of airing, stacking, and packing bread at the bakeries that we see as casual care constitute behaviors learned in place; they are skills honed through everyday participation in the acts of buying and eating bread. they are underpinned by a set of shared expectations about how people should interact with this bread. the ubiquity of such expectations reflects bread’s deep significance as a staple food (kanafani-zahar 1997), whether people obtain it at market price or with a government subsidy. shared concern for the bread’s proper care elicits various forms of social interaction, from casual commentary to pointed instruction. there is a sociality tied to the bread’s materiality. when unwritten rules of conduct are violated, censuring takes place to reinforce practices of sufficient care. criticism may be leveled at the bakery staff. customers’ complaints focus on issues that those working in the booth can control, such as the arrangement of bread on the shelves. one man waiting for his bread, for example, notices that some of the racks in the booth have two layers of bread on them. he says to the server, “why is the bread all piled up like that? that’s not ok, no [mayinfaʿsh, laʾ]! don’t put it like that, it’s not good [mish kwayyis]!” his comment that the piling of bread is “not ok” implies that there is a correct way to organize the bread, tied to its need to air properly. other times, fellow customers are the target of criticism. while the cultural practices of care for baladi bread are patterned and habitual, they are not uniform. most people follow them, but not everyone does, or someone might do them typically, but not always; indeed, this is one of the things that marks these practices as casual care. when someone acts with less care, however, they open themselves up to peer judgment. take, for instance, a man who has brought newspaper with him to wrap the bread instead of a plastic bag. as he lays out newspaper on the counter in anticipation of his loaves, a woman standing next to him comments, “it’s not good to place the hot bread on the newspaper, because of the writing.” he looks a little confused but pulls out a glossy advertisement from within the paper and places it on top, questioningly. the woman nods in approval. in this case, the man’s act of care is prompted by the woman’s remonstration, and by his desire to appease a stranger and demonstrate his proficiency in appropriate conveyance. such critical commentary on someone else’s behavior, whether that person is known or a stranger, is quite common in egypt. yet the fact that people feel the need to comment, or to show their disapproval, about other people’s handling of baladi bread—even when they will not themselves be affected by other people carrying their bread inappropriately—reflects the depth of social investment in the handling of baladi bread. the impulse to reinforce social expectations around baladi bread is particularly evident in people’s comments about children’s handling of bread. while most children act with care as they purchase and carry bread home, not all do. sometimes children drop their bread, several loaves toppling off a rack that a young boy carries on his head, for example, or lying on the ground around a young girl airing her bread on a bench. there is a generational dimension both to the ability to care, such as the skill of handling a large number of loaves without losing hold of any, and to the propensity to care—that is, the inclination to make the effort to maintain the bread’s quality. one day, a small girl hands over half a pound and asks for ten loaves. she takes them into her arms, rather than stacking them first. as the woman in the booth piles on loaf after loaf, the girl cannot manage them all and loaves start falling to the ground. she kneels down to pick them up. a woman beside her admonishes, “didn’t you bring a bag in which to carry the bread?” her comment reveals both her expectation that the girl, despite her young age, should handle the bread with care, and her desire to teach the child how she should act in the future. while other ethnographic research in cairo has shown deep gendered distinctions in how people behave in urban space (ghannam 2011), our observations did not suggest gender differences in how people handle baladi bread. food preparation within the home remains largely a female domain in egypt, but men play an important role in the purchasing of food (naguib 2015). both men and women buy baladi bread and practice casual care as they do so. although differences exist in how people interact with their bread—some are more casual than others—these differences do not fall along gender lines. during airing, for instance, some people just stand beside their bread, speaking on the phone, smoking a cigarette, or chatting with a companion. others manage the airing more actively, constantly rearranging their loaves, taking those underneath and placing them on top, turning them over so they have a chance to cool evenly. similarly, men and women are equally subject to the criticism of others concerning their performance of care. thus, just as scholars have long debunked the association of care with women alone, so too, casual care for baladi bread challenges common assumptions about the gendered relations of food provisioning in egypt (see also naguib 2015). the outcome of these practices of handling with care is that the government-subsidized bread people eat in their homes three times a day is adequate in both texture and shape. while bread riots may be iconic of how citizens rally around a staple food, protest is not the only mode through which people seek to secure good subsidized bread. in caring for baladi bread as they convey it home, people are maintaining not only their families but the ongoing functioning of a state subsidy program. this subsidy program has a deep history, continued by successive regimes for more than half a century. it supports tens of millions of egyptians daily, providing them with an affordable staple regardless of broader market conditions. it is a subsidy whose output—cheap good bread—politicians often talk about in terms of a “red line” that cannot be crossed. through casual care, people are helping produce a subsidized food that they value rather than revile (unlike, for instance, the “government cheese” distributed in the united states in the early 1980s, which was stigmatized for its poor nutritional quality and often moldy condition [poppendieck 1998]). they are shaping the palatability of state-subsidized bread and thus, in a way, the palatability of the state. choosing loaves policy reports and media coverage typically portray egypt’s baladi bread as a singular object, a medium of government support to the population that is bounded by a set of government-imposed quality criteria. an international report describes, for instance, how the government’s subsidy allows egyptians “to purchase a form of flat bread called baladi at a heavily subsidized price” (mcgill et al. 2015, xi, emphasis added); an article in an egyptian newspaper proclaims to tell “the story of the subsidized loaf in eight numbers” (saleh 2019, emphasis added). in such portrayals, consumer choice or taste preference have no role to play. yet this bread is not baked in highly industrialized facilities in which standardization and quality checks are woven into the production process. within the small bakeries that produce baladi bread, some steps are mechanized—such as the kneading of dough and the movement of loaves through the oven—but other steps are manual, including the measuring of ingredients, sizing of loaves, and positioning of bread on the conveyor belt that carries it through the oven. in a production setting like this, defects can emerge, such as small discolorations, inconsistencies in the dough, or burnt sections. the bread’s variable material qualities open up space for critique, discernment, and selection. they generate a field of interactions at bakery booths as both workers and customers practice minute forms of quality control while they handle the bread. practices of choosing and rejecting loaves constitute our second example of casual care. although annemarie mol (2008) positions patient choice as antithetical to patient care in her analysis of clinical settings, in the case of buying baladi bread, we see the power of choice to contribute to a positive care outcome—namely, a family having desirable bread to eat. that individual choices may more readily lead to good care in the case of bread than, say, of diseased bodies is perhaps not surprising. what this case demonstrates, though, is how the logic of care and the logic of choice may not, in particular circumstances of practice, stand in opposition. mol (2008, 7) writes that “the logic of care is not preoccupied with our will, and with what we may opt for.” with baladi bread, however, the process of opting for some loaves but not others is a form of doing care. by attaching casualness to that choice, we indicate the tacit ways in which these choices are made and conducted. quality control an old woman is standing at the booth. she seems irritated. the woman serving her has placed an entire rack of bread on the counter and the customer is choosing her loaves individually. she has already selected some, maybe five, which she has placed in a bag next to her. but she is having trouble picking out loaves satisfactory to her. she touches the loaves with her hands to assess them, feeling a few here and there, commenting that they are too dusty (mitarrab) and too dry (nāshif). her hand movements and complaints make clear that there are no further loaves she is willing to accept. without a word and with no visible annoyance, the woman in the booth removes the rack and presents her client with another. this practice of checking the bread and rejecting dissatisfying loaves happens frequently. while fayza does not closely examine her loaves on the day described above, the woman next to her removes three from the rack to exchange as she airs her bread. people assess by eye and sometimes by touch, looking for defects in color or texture, feeling for temperature, and squeezing for freshness. they do not typically smell the bread, perhaps because it does not really have a pronounced smell. tasting is also not an option, rendering some dimensions of quality (like an occasionally sandy or metallic taste) indecipherable. but through sight and feel—the senses employed in this care (buch 2015)—customers can detect the material characteristics commonly understood to distinguish a defective loaf from a good one: a burnt patch, flatness, hardness, discoloration, tearing, cracks on top, wetness, or the absence of two distinct layers. this quality assessment does not occur in a studied fashion, but rather with a quick glance or feel as customers rifle through their piles of loaves. the practice mirrors what you might see in a grocery store produce aisle or at a market stall; selection is just as important to recipients of a subsidized good as it is to customers paying market price for their food. taste matters, including to those reliant on free or subsidized food (trapp 2016). voicing their complaints, people may set aside the rejected loaves and say, “change these [ghayyarīlī dola].” their request is matter of fact, an everyday occurrence that does not require special justification. other times the exchange remains wordless. one morning a woman is buying ten loaves. she takes them and, in the usual stacking-and-packing motion, puts them in the bag she has brought with her. as she does this, she sets aside two loaves, stacked one on top of the other. these loaves are more browned on top—not burnt, but darker. she stretches her hand, touching the loaves with three fingers, and pushes them forward, nodding her head, and making eye contact with the woman in the booth. she says nothing, but her meaning is implicit; she is rejecting these loaves. the woman in the booth takes the loaves without comment and replaces them. as the customer’s wordless gesture and the server’s wordless response demonstrate, this is not unusual behavior. the woman in the booth does not express surprise at the customer’s attention to the quality of the loaves she takes home. the people who work in bakeries typically come from similar social classes to the customers and are baladi bread consumers themselves. they share an understanding that subsidy recipients have a right to choose and that some loaves, like darker ones, may be less desirable. the rejection of bread is not a politically confrontational act; it is an assertion of an accepted right to good bread. the bakery may discard the loaves that customers have rejected, which are sometimes referred to as “the returned” (al-rāgiʿ). occasionally you will see a pile of unwanted dry, burnt, cracked, or broken loaves lying marooned on racks, flies buzzing around. at other times, the bakery staff may try to pass them on to another customer. on one occasion, mariam notes a woman setting aside three loaves as she packs her bread. they have not fully risen and have a little indentation in the top. the woman working in the booth places the loaves to the side without comment, substituting them with others. several minutes later, she slides these same loaves into an order of twenty loaves that a boy is buying, positioning them toward the bottom as she stacks the bread for him on the counter. anticipating that a child is less likely to pay attention to the loaves he receives, the bakery worker uses this as an opportunity to get rid of bread that she recognizes as less desirable. sure enough, the boy simply takes the stacks as presented to him. hence people are actively engaged in selecting and maintaining the quality of the food they receive from the subsidy program to meet their needs and priorities, and this active engagement is central to their ongoing satisfaction with the subsidy. in cairo, people are deliberate, first, in their choice of where they purchase bread (people used to be assigned bakeries, but since 2014 they have been able to use their ration cards anywhere). as one woman explained, “if you know that you can only buy a certain number of loaves, then you will choose carefully where you buy them from. if one baker produces bad bread, you won’t go back there.” people build relations of trust with particular bakeries and their staff, whom they feel they can rely on to give them good bread. they talk about their preferences for bread from certain neighborhoods, describing their favored bakeries with terms like niḍī f, which means “clean” but can also be used to signify quality. “the bread of fayda kamel is always very nice [ḥilw awī ],” fayza says. “the bread in maadi is dusty [turāb].” sometimes they alter their movements around the city so that they can buy from a bakery whose bread they like. fayza will often buy bread from fayda kamel, even though a detour to that neighborhood on public transport can take more than an hour in heavy traffic. her sister, on the other hand, buys bread from their neighborhood, but will walk to a bakery a little further from their apartment rather than the one closest, because she says that its bread is slightly softer, a quality she appreciates because of problems with her teeth that make chewing painful. another woman recounted how every morning her father would drive to another part of the city, park next to a bakery that he liked, take the metro downtown to work, and then buy bread on his way home from work. a conscious choice about which bakery you buy from allows for more casual choosing once there. if you know that a bakery generally produces good bread, less focused attention is required to monitor what loaves you take home. this ability to choose, albeit casually and within limits, may itself be part of what people value about baladi bread. while to some the act of selection might seem burdensome, to walid it is something he values. walid is in his late forties. originally from fayoum province, he currently works in cairo as a driver. he has never married and, with no dependents to support, is economically better off than some. having faced long periods without work, however, he remains in a position of precarity. in a world in which things are becoming more and more expensive—gas, water, electricity, housing—he appreciates cheap bread. he describes baladi bread these days as “very nice” and explains how in the past when he would go to a baladi bread bakery and ask for a pound of bread, “they’d just give it to you.” but today, he says, “you can choose, so say yes to this one, and no i don’t want that one.” walid’s positive perspective on the quality of baladi bread today is directly tied to his ability to choose from a variety of possible loaves, and to the care he then performs to select good ones. favorites customers are not the only ones who carry out quality control. those working in the booths can also assess the quality of the loaves and select with care, if they wish. sometimes they may do this in response to a request for a particular kind of bread, as when a customer asks, for instance, “choose soft ones, please [khalī h ṭary w-innabī ].” more commonly this selection proceeds without comment, as the person in the booth quietly selects better-looking loaves for a favored customer. over mariam’s repeated visits to the same bakery, this process of casual but deliberate selection on her behalf as a regular customer became evident. one day, mariam asks for two loaves. the woman in the booth takes one and then another. the second one she picks up looks fine but is a little flat, only half risen. the woman pauses, then changes her mind. she lays down the loaf and picks up an alternate, passing mariam two rounded loaves. in this woman’s actions, we see a kind of care manifest in minute movements. her hand hovers over several loaves before selecting the ones to give mariam; her arm extends toward one area of a rack, then changes direction and takes from a different part; she reaches for a higher shelf, or one toward the back, even though there is a rack right next to her from which she has been selecting for other customers. she does not make a big deal of it, but it is clear from the movement of the hand and the scanning of her eyes that she is being selective. accustomed to handling bread and assessing quality, her movements are quick, but this does not preclude accuracy. the loaves she presents to mariam are often warm but not hot, slightly soft, and clearly fresh. this form of casual care resembles the care of handling and choosing bread; in this case, though, the agent of the care is the server, not the customer. not everyone receives such special treatment. indeed, the woman working in the booth who slips the inferior loaves into the boy’s stack is not caring for his bread. when mariam has purchased bread at other bakeries that she visits less regularly, she has at times been struck by the lack of care displayed when a server does not glance to check or touch to feel each loaf, acting as though all loaves were equal and dumping them on the counter without making eye contact. in caring for the bread through selecting good loaves, however, the person working in a bakery can care for a favored customer. by drawing on a sensorial engagement with the bread and an ability to read the bread through sight and touch, the server can cultivate a relationship of trust with a regular client, mediating the quality of subsidized bread that they get to eat. facilitating this casual care for the bread is a mutual understanding between the server and the customer that some loaves are better than others and that specific material characteristics distinguish good bread from bad. casual care the egyptian bread riots of 1977 loom large in the country’s political imagination and are frequently recalled in politicians’ speeches and newspaper articles. the refrain of the 2011 revolution—bread, freedom, and social justice—also reverberates widely, underscoring the political centrality of bread in general, as a symbol of livelihoods, and of baladi bread specifically. these moments of drama tell us about how a staple food can become a flashpoint for protest, a means through which people signal their dissatisfaction with the state. but they tell us little about the day-to-day functioning of a subsidized bread program, or about the conditions that produce a general level of satisfaction with the availability and quality of baladi bread and the absence of protest. attention to casual care helps us recognize the importance of social and material relations between people and bread, and among people through bread, that transpire outside these times of crisis. it reveals the continuous ways in which people care for themselves and for their families through their everyday acts of airing, stacking, packing, choosing, and returning loaves. while the efficacy of this care is contingent on the quality of government-regulated ingredients and bakeries’ production processes, so too, the quality of bread that people eat is contingent on casual care. the impact of this care during conveyance is evident in what goes unsaid. people do not complain about baladi bread being soggy or squashed because they handle it to ensure that this is not the case. they do not complain about it being unevenly cooked, burnt, or poorly risen because they select it to ensure that they do not bring home such loaves. casual care is thus one reason why people’s expectations for good bread are being met; it shapes their experience of eating baladi bread. in caring for their bread, therefore, people are also, albeit unwittingly, caring for the government, ensuring the palatability of this central item of state support. more broadly, this essay opens up spaces of everyday practice that we might productively approach as care. as the literature on care has expanded from contexts readily associated with looking after people—hospitals, homes, clinics, assisted-living facilities—into domains as diverse as wetlands (scaramelli 2018), urban streets (kullman 2014), and copper mines (ureta 2016), it raises the question of how far we can go in what we see and write about as care. care helps elucidate particular kinds of relationships and forms of engagement between people and others, and their material, affective, and embodied outcomes. but in using a term so infused with ethical and moral connotations, we run the risk of making assumptions about how that care unfolds. casual care represents a mode of practice that is intentional but also habitual, deliberate but also perfunctory. the purpose of this designation is not to undermine the import of those care practices; such care may hold political stakes that the casualness of its performance belies. rather, the concept of casual care is designed to challenge the association of care with a type of highly focused activity. the analytical purchase of this concept is that it sheds light not only on the form of action, what it means to care for something, but on the way in which those actions are practiced, what it means to be casual. as we acknowledge some of the different ways in which people may perform care, we trouble the dichotomy between being careful and careless, showing how one may care, but care casually. abstract the egyptian government has long subsidized bread as part of its program of social support. most egyptians eat this subsidized bread, known as baladi bread, daily. we examine everyday practices of handling baladi bread as casual care. scholarship on care has drawn attention to the multiple ways in which care can be practiced around a range of human and nonhuman others. casual care signals a mode of practice that constitutes care but that is not necessarily performed by its practitioners as such. it is intentional but also habitual, deliberate but also perfunctory. we look at people’s casual care for baladi bread during the understudied phase of conveyance, between the moment of purchase and arrival at home. practices of handling and selecting bread help produce the quality of the baladi bread that people are eating. while past bread riots have underscored the political salience of this bread, casual care elucidates what goes on between these moments of crisis, revealing the role of people’s day-to-day actions in producing a general level of satisfaction with subsidized bread. this analysis draws theoretical attention to how care is practiced, opening up space for thinking about kinds of care that are not all that careful in their enactment. [care; bread; food; egypt; everyday] خلاصة منذ فترة طويلة يمثل دعم الحكومة المصرية للخبز جزءا أساسيا من برنامج الدعم الاجتماعي. يأكل معظم المصريين هذا الخبز المدعم والمعروف بالعيش البلدي بشكل يومي. ندرس في هذا البحث الممارسات اليومية للتعامل مع الخبز البلدي كمؤشر على العناية التلقائية. فقد أشارت الدراسات في مجال العناية بشكل عام إلى الطرق المتعددة التي يمكن أن تتم من خلالها ممارسة العناية سواء كانت متعلقة بالبشر أو بغيرهم. بل تدل العناية التلقائية على أسلوب من أساليب ممارسة العناية والتي تمارس بشكل غير مقصود. بمعنى انها متعمدة ومعتادة، كما انها في نفس الوقت مقصودة وتقدم بشكل روتيني. ويشتمل البحث أيضا دراسة لممارسات الناس للعناية التلقائية في التعامل مع الخبز البلدي أثناء نقله من المخبز إلى المنزل وهي بالمناسبة مرحلة لم تحظ بدراسة كافية. كما تساهم الممارسات اليومية في التعامل مع الرغيف واختياره في إنتاج جودة الخبز الذي يستهلكه الناس. بينما أكدت انتفاضات العيش السابقة الأهمية السياسية للخبز، فإن مفهوم العناية التلقائية تلقي الضوء على ما يحدث بين لحظات الأزمات السياسية هذه، كاشفةً عن دور الناس وممارساتهم اليومية في إنتاج مستوى عام من الرضى حول الخبز المدعم. هذه الدراسة تلفت الانتباه الى المفهوم النظري في كيفية ممارسة العناية؛ مما يفتح المجال للتفكير حول أساليب هذا المفهوم والتي لا تتطلب الاعتناء في ممارستها. [الممارسات اليومية, العناية, العيش, الخبز, الأكل, مصر] notes acknowledgments this article benefited from comments by the following people at various stages of its development: hayden kantor, sophia stamatopolou-robbins, andrew mathews, david kneas, caterina scaramelli, kali rubaii, tessa farmer, simone popperl, and ashley carse. we are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and members of the cultural anthropology editorial collective, particularly heather paxson, for their detailed and constructive engagement with the essay. funding for the research and writing of this article was provided by the american council of learned societies, the george a. and eliza gardner howard foundation, and the university of south carolina. 1. the currency in egypt is the egyptian pound (egp). there are 100 piasters in a pound. at the time of writing, 1 egp was equal to us$0.06. 2. this figure comes from abdallah and al-shawarby (2017, 125). the word baladī means local, traditional, rural, or “my country.” baladi bread is also sometimes referred to as “subsidized bread” (al-ʿaish al-mudaʿam) or “the bread of the ministry of supply” (ʿaish al-tamwīn), after the ministry that manages the subsidy program. while people occasionally refer to other kinds of bread, which are similar to the subsidized bread or identified as being “traditional,” as baladi bread, in this article we reserve the term for government-subsidized bread. 3. people without ration cards can still buy baladi bread; they just have to pay around fifty piasters a loaf, which is closer to the cost of production. 4. our transliterations throughout the article aim to reflect the phonology of colloquial cairene arabic. 5. there are a number of practices of caring for bread within the home, such as not throwing away bread and managing freshness through freezing and heating, which jessica explores in her current book project, precarious staples: wheat, bread, and the taste of security in egypt. 6. there is only passing reference to conveyance, for instance, in sidney w. mintz and christine m. du bois’s (2002) review of the anthropological literature on food. while a number of studies of global food commodities have shed light on conveyance and handling between sites of production and points of sale (e.g., bestor 2004; freidberg 2004; fischer and benson 2006), our interest lies in conveyance between the moment of sale and entry into the home. 7. the 2014 reforms were designed to address shortages due to limited supply (linked to bakers siphoning off subsidized flour to the black market) and excess demand (linked to people buying large numbers of loaves and sometimes feeding them to livestock), as well as poor quality (linked to the absence of competition between bakeries) (kamal 2015). 8. according to government statistics, for 60 percent of households, baladi bread constitutes the main food item (hassan-wassef 2012, 13). 9. in a 2016 survey of baladi bread consumers, 91 percent responded that the 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tailings in a chilean copper mine.” environment and planning a 48, no. 8: 1532–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x16645103. weismantel, mary j. 1988 food, gender, and poverty in the ecuadorian andes. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. weiss, brad 1996 the making and unmaking of the haya lived world: consumption, commoditization, and everyday practice. durham, n.c.: duke university press. another life is possible another life is possible: black fugitivity and enclosed places damien m. sojoyner university of california, irvine http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6213-9310 “you know that school is racist. there is no other way to put it.” mrs. wright’s calm indignation belied her fury about what she described as “outright bigotry” directed to black students at county high school. “for years, my son and the other black students have had to go through hell just to get the most basic form of an education. just ask him and he will tell you.” mrs. wright’s son, p. j., sitting beside his mother, was silently engaged in the conversation. taking his cue, he spoke with amazing grace and calm, given the weight of his story. so, yeah, all of the black students know that the school really doesn’t care about us. we never get the benefit of the doubt and the teachers just expect us to fail, period, point blank. let me give you an example. it is the first day of my language arts class, so i walk in looking for a seat in the front row because my mom is always on me about sitting in the front of class. i already know that i probably will have to move because most teachers have assigned seating, but sometimes in our senior [year] classes, we can sit wherever we want. but our teacher has assigned seating and it is not before too long that i look around and notice that all of the black kids are in the back of the class. after the teacher is done with the seating chart, i raise my hand and tell the teacher that i want to sit in the front row. she responds with something like “those rows are reserved for students who want to learn.” so then i ask her, “well, you must think that none of the black kids want to learn?” the class got real quiet and you could just feel all of the eyes looking at her, waiting to see what she was going to say. she did not like that too much, and she threatened to send me to the assistant principal’s office. i am not one to back down, so i respond, “well, if you send me, you might as well send all of us [black students], since you don’t want us here anyway.” and i mean instantly, she told me to get out and go to the assistant principal’s office. now, you may think this is a wild story or there is something off with this teacher, but let me tell you this has been happening every year with all sorts of teachers. mrs. wright continued the story: i get a call from the school, and i immediately went there and demanded a meeting with the teacher and the principal. they hemmed and hawed and said that maybe there could be a change [in seating] during the middle of the year, but she had arranged the students based upon test scores [with the lowest test scores in the back of the class]. i told them that was the craziest thing i have ever heard, because if that truly was the case, then why don’t you have the students with the lowest test scores sitting in the front of the class? the principal replied that it was a new strategy that was being carried out throughout the district. well, i know that is not the case because in some of his [p. j.’s] other classes, he gets to select his own seat. so at a certain point you really have to question: is there something up with the teachers, or is there something up with a school and, for that matter, the whole district that allows and even rewards teachers to treat black students as less than the other students? and for black males, i can tell you from experience with p. j. that, unless they are playing basketball or football, you are pretty much useless to them. the really cold and inhumane part of the situation is that p. j. is going to be all right—i am going to make sure to that. he is going to college if i have to yell, scream, and kick my way through all of his classes, but that is not the case for everybody and furthermore, why should it be? why should we have to take off from work to come down to the school just to make sure that our child is not being the target of blatant racism? i mean, when you really look at it, it is clear that they do not want us at these schools, and really, given what they put these black children through, who could blame them for not going?” this discussion took place in a makeshift conference room at an organization focused on assisting black students in navigating the difficult terrain of education in los angeles, california. as part of a larger research project, i had been working with this organization as well as teaching at county high school (chs), where p. j. was completing his senior year. the meeting was set up in an effort to help p. j. and his mother with strategies for accessing resources within and outside of the school. on the one hand, p. j. and mrs. wright’s story is inspirational, as they did not fear the actions of the school or the district and actively sought out community support to counter processes of racism; yet their narrative is emblematic of the intense, mundane violence levied at black students and their families throughout los angeles. on a grander scale, the profound conundrum that the majority of black students faced at chs left an indelible mark on my thinking about the social rendering of public education in the united states. it also generated a persistent question, which provides the impetus behind this essay: what damage is done by reinforcing a narrative that black students should not drop out of school? by no means hyperbolic, this question negotiates between two theoretical interventions that i put forward: enclosed places and black fugitivity. rooted in a liberal tradition of social progress, the current realities of black education are mired in a brutal system of punitive containment and curricular evisceration that i argue forms the basis of an enclosed place. yet the counterweight to and a conduit out of the multiple forms of violence central to education as enclosed places is what i call black fugitivity. my conceptualization of black fugitivity is based on the disavowal of and disengagement from state-governed projects that attempt to adjudicate normative constructions of difference through liberal tropes of freedom and democratic belonging. it builds on tina campt’s (2014) argument that “the concept of fugitivity highlights the tension between the acts or flights of escape and creative practices of refusal, nimble and strategic practices that undermine the category of the dominant.” these practices of refusal, operating alongside practices of disengagement, are central to black fugitivity and extend beyond common understandings of resistance. refusal is the embodied knowledge at the core of social visions of being that are irreconcilable with liberal, difference-making state projects. refusal in the context of black fugitivity is thus immersed in the politics of refusal as theorized by audra simpson (2016, 330): “refusal holds on to a truth, structures this truth as stance through time, as its own structure and comingling with the force of presumed and inevitable disappearance and operates as the revenge of consent—the consent to these conditions, to the interpretation that this was fair, and the ongoing sense that this is all over with.” proceeding from an understanding of the intimate connection between black fugitivity and the social and political governance of plantation-based economies, my argument is for the repositioning of black fugitivity from a static historical act to one of the core theoretical devices informing black radical planning and action. purposeful in its enactment, black fugitivity has demonstrated through the means of disengagement, as one of its basic tenets, the facade of state power and the liberal frameworks that buttress enclosed places. it is through this interplay of refusal, disengagement, and forced containment that the essay wrestles with the function of education in an era of rampant abandonment and indicates how a set of solutions based on black radical action provides a path forward. while the field of education is often thought of as a niche subfield within the realm of the social sciences, i posit that within contemporary capitalism, the formal education of black people has become central to any analysis of state-crafted forms of discipline, violence, punishment, and containment. in the article, i explain that the history of the education of black people in los angeles in many ways foregrounds the buildup of the massive prison system and its complementary policing apparatus in california. yet pushing the conversation beyond punitive forms of violence, a major aim of this article is to analyze the myriad ways that education reproduces multiple forms of violence on black youth. it is imperative, i contend, that we shift our framing from state-sponsored education as a redemptive structure of social progress to an understanding of education as one of the key sources of support for forms of structural oppression. in this manner, education demands to be positioned as a central focus of study, insofar as it points to the capacity of the state to make processes of black subjugation normal/invisible under the guise of liberal beneficence. my analysis is situated within the inner workings of compulsory education in los angeles. drawing on a six-year-long fieldwork project based both in a school where i taught (for one academic year) and in a community-based program that focused on the education of black youth, this article has two primary objectives. first, my aim is to detail the lived experience of black youth within a social paradigm governed by forms of racial, gendered, and class violence that are central to contemporary capitalism. framed by the backdrop of unrelenting liberal narratives of individualism, upward social mobility, and race-blind/neutral school governing mandates, the article reckons with the material and ideological conditions produced within sites of black education that belie the mythical facade of advancement, inclusion, and civility within liberal discursive practices. my interlocutors in this article are young black men who showed grace and power in the face of obscene challenges. yet my intent is to not read the lives of these young men as exceptional or within a tradition that valorizes black masculinity as the vehicle of the black communal struggle. rather, through their lived experiences of black fugitivity as refusal and disengagement, the article reveals the racialized and gendered tenets of enclosed places that set up the demonstration of respectable black masculinity as the solution to structural conditions of black subjugation. my second aim is to synthesize an understanding of black radical action against specific education-based liberal projects that give life to enclosed spaces. based on both historical and contemporary forms of state-sanctioned violence against black youth via compulsory education in los angeles, the fugitive strategy is revealed to be both illegible and dangerous within a liberal framework. akin to elizabeth povinelli’s (2011) careful reading of late liberalism’s attempt to make difference real through what she describes as the function of social tense, the lived reality and actions of subjugated people cannot be read through the filter of the liberal discursive projects that restrict racialized populations to very specific modalities of being. explaining the tension between lived reality and liberal interpolations of indigenous groups in australia, povinelli (2011, 73) writes: “as neither this nor that they stand as a constant refusal of the techniques of recognition and their inversion in late liberalism.” in the case of young black angelenos, their actions are illegible due to the criminalization of blackness and further complicated by the inability of liberal discourse to grapple with the construction of a black criminal/deviant subject who is nonetheless able to advance logical argumentation and develop action against injustice.1 the danger arises as black fugitivity exposes the fraudulent intent of education within black communities. against the backdrop of the moniker dropout, the logic of black fugitivity reveals the absurdity of forcing black youth to attend schools to which no one else wants to send their children. that is, there is a social understanding governed by modalities of race of which black education forms the baseline and on which liberal notions of upward mobility are based. the result is a twofold effect whereby all forms of violence are deemed necessary to control a criminal population, and, race and class considerations demand a move away from black forms of education to ensure upward mobility. black fugitivity thus exposes the function of black education and places the locus of agency within a black radical tradition that is antithetical to the liberal governing practices attempting to diffuse the effects of rapid abandonment. my discussion of blackness as it pertains to black communities and black education is informed by two distinct theoretical interventions on race and race-making. the first is cedric robinson’s (2000) framing of the black radical tradition as a response to the imposition of violence inherent in racial capitalism. robinson’s work is important, because his theorization of race lies at the heart of critical readings of black radical action during contemporary capitalism (kelley 1994; a. davis 2003; gilmore 2007; vargas 2010). further, robinson (2007) provides an alternative avenue for discussing matters of social structure and disciplining/punishment that are typically associated with the work of michel foucault. discussing the relationship between black radicalism and western society, robinson (2000, 73) argues, “it is not a variant of western radicalism whose proponents happen to be black. rather, it is a specifically african response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of european development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of european social life from the inception of western civilization.” it is in this manner that black radical action emanates from a genealogy that fully grasps the limitations, pitfalls, and social reckoning of liberal state projects. the second theoretical thread emerges from deborah thomas’s postulation of modern blackness. thomas deftly positions the contestations, limitations, and opportunities of black organizing within shifting models of capitalist exploitation. writing about the case of modern blackness in jamaica, thomas (2002, 48) posits: under conditions of a capitalist globalization that has intensified older hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nationality as well as created new ones, and within a context wherein the degree to which subordinated people have been able to exercise their own agency has been severely circumscribed by power structures over which they have very little control, the public ascendance of modern blackness signals a momentous change. this is true whether aspects of cultural production associated with modern blackness are evaluated as challenges or capitulations to dominant ideologies and practices. situating thomas’s intervention within education, we can understand the actions taken by black youth against enclosed places as deriving from a set of politics that may reproduce oppression within the confines of governing doctrines (such as the law), but that at its crux is an assertion of agency within a social arrangement that demands subservience. further, thomas’s framing of modern blackness provides a means to understand the relationship between race and class within contemporary capitalism. central to contemporary capitalism has been the massive incorporation of black politics of social and economic respectability, themselves indebted to logics of liberalism. as a means to dampen black radicalism, the state has been able to call on black partners to discipline the actions of those who have been abandoned by contemporary capitalism and forced into enclosed places. thomas’s inflection of modern blackness provides a means to grasp the complexity of these relationships and to refocus our positioning of black radical action as the logical conclusion to the structural constraints of contemporary capitalism. enclosed places: formation and purpose in her analysis of contemporary capitalist development in the united states, the geographer ruth wilson gilmore draws a connection between the construction of forgotten places and the politics of the people who inhabit them. writing about forgotten places in relationship to prisons, gilmore (2008, 32) argues, “in the united states, these people and locations are among the most vulnerable to the ‘organized abandonment’ that accompanies globalization’s large-scale movements of capital and labor, and as such they are subject to many other processes that accumulate in and as forgotten places.” gilmore’s theoretical intervention of forgotten places helps to frame the development and implementation of and resistance to another large state structure: public education. within the burgeoning ethnographic literature that traces the myriad connections between prisons and public education, one of the main arguments is about how the curriculum, physical structure, and modes of punitive discipline practices in schools—primarily black schools—mirror and also foreground the development of prisons in the united states (meiners 2007; nolan 2011; winn 2011; sojoyner 2016; wun 2016; vaught 2017). yet a major distinction between prisons and public education lies in the literal and metaphorical situation of space. geographically, many prisons are sited in rural or desolate spaces that place a physical barrier between them and densely populated areas. ideologically, the racial and class dynamics of prisons, and the people housed within them, also provide the moral impetus to disregard the dire results inherent in the passage and implementation of laws central to carcerality. respecting these two differences and yet emphasizing key continuities relating to the interplay between the mobilization of capital and race, i posit that, rather than as forgotten places, we should understand the structure of public education of black communities in terms of enclosed places. situated at the proverbial and physical center of neighborhoods, schools are a vital component of the development and maintenance of community and culture (anderson 1988; rickford 2016). yet it is the compulsory nature of education that sets it apart from prisons and from the majority of large state structures in the united states. the commonsense rhetorical positioning of education as central to the civic process is situated within a liberal framework of upward mobility and social advancement, which informs public consensus around its compulsory standing. yet as the aforementioned ethnographic studies bring to bear, for black youth, education functions to reproduce particular forms of racial, gender, class, and sexed violence that counters the liberal inflections of education as a public good. it is in this regard that education within black communities forms an enclosed place: a rendering of state capacity that functions to negate alternative social visions presented by black radical forms of indigenous knowledge, which might otherwise resist and counter the multiple forms of violence inherent in contemporary capitalism. operating within a liberal discursive tradition, enclosed places employ reform-based practices that incorporate obedient and nonthreatening forms of racial, gender, and sexed difference to prevent the exposure and consequential undoing of highly oppressive forms of governance that are key to the liberal project. to provide some context for the enclosed place of black education in los angeles, the following section provides a brief historical overview of the education of black people in the city. the historical narrative ends in the current period and transitions to ethnography, which provides a snapshot of the lived experience produced by enclosed places. the article concludes with an analysis of black fugitivity and investigates how black fugitive logic provides a social vision that counters the multiple forms of violence inherent within enclosed places. the making of enclosed places: black education in los angeles the education of black people in los angeles county has been a major point of contention since the 1930s and became markedly violent with the mass migration of black southerners to california during the 1940s (bass 1947). fueled by industrial growth, black southerners moved west in hopes of better wages, but segregation laws and restrictive housing covenants forced them to reside in wretched conditions and also to deal with white vigilante gangs who attempted to thwart their movement within and throughout the city (m. davis 1992, 2006; johnson 2013). given the intimate connection between housing and education, public schools throughout the city became battlegrounds. the hallmark of this period was the infamous white mob attack led by a group of parents on black students at john c. fremont high school in 1947 (bass 1947).2 the physical violence was accompanied by the planned defunding of black schools throughout black communities. in the face of often ill-prepared teachers and a lack of financial resources, black parents found themselves at constant odds with the city (los angeles sentinel 1969). the 1940s and 1950s gave way to a much more formal and draconian system of educative governance during the 1960s and 1970s. on the heels of the 1965 watts rebellion, the city implemented an official program called police role in government that sought to repress organizing in black public schools (sojoyner 2013). piloted in 1969, the curriculum was taught by officers of the los angeles police department (lapd). as outlined in the pedagogical manual, a major tenet was to indoctrinate black youth into becoming proper, subservient citizens. the establishment of the program had deleterious effects on black education in los angeles. instructional time was siphoned off and replaced with a behavioral modification program masked as educational enrichment. the relationship between the lapd and school districts in los angeles became a fruitful enterprise, with police role in government serving as a key model for further expansion into the lives of black angelenos. by the 1980s and 1990s, the police were firmly entrenched in black education. the drug abuse resistance education (dare) program was piloted in los angeles in 1983 and furthered the existing relationship between the lapd and school districts, as police were placed in schools to teach classes and also to perform random drug searches on campuses. the dare program was accompanied by a new truancy program implemented during the 1990s, abolish chronic truancy (act). it placed the los angeles county district attorney’s office over matters of discipline for school absence. while the district attorney’s office handled the procedural matter of criminal prosecution, the relationship more generally ensconced the presence of policing, as both the los angeles county sherriff’s department and the lapd served as the strong-arm mediators who rounded up students. by the 2000s the presence of police on public school campuses in black communities seemed commonsensical. not only were police officers teaching courses but schools also soon housed police substations on their campuses under the guise of public safety. the irony of the massive buildup of a comprehensive police infrastructure was that, while vast financial resources were being allocated to ill-fated programs and policies, the formal curricular portions of school budgets were being gutted. the implementation of no child left behind under george w. bush’s administration served to eviscerate what was remaining of an already tottering curricular base. forced to abide by an arbitrary set of standards, public schools within black communities throughout los angeles began to eliminate key electives such as visual and performing arts courses to stave off the possibility of losing federal funding (sojoyner 2016). the cumulative effect of draconian disciplinary policies, alongside the gutting of the curriculum, has rendered schools in black communities in los angeles sites of containment. surveilled by various layers of law enforcement, black schools have effectively become warehouses to hold black youth. to this end, schools and prisons share a fundamental operating logic: incapacitation (gilmore 2007).3 given that state-based solutions are indebted to a charter-school model governed by the ideological and material infusion of private finance and real-estate capital, the situation has dramatically worsened (watkins 2011; saltman 2012). very simply, the state of black education is appalling, and so i return to my foundational question: what damage is done by reinforcing a narrative that black students should not drop out of school? located within the current educational moment, which is dominated by asinine forms of standardized testing, hypermilitarized school sites, and liberal discursive practices of social advancement, the following ethnographic section provides a glimpse into the structural conditions and lived realities of organized abandonment under contemporary capitalism. by uncovering these dynamics within school settings, i have two objectives: the first is to describe one of the primary fissures caused by organized abandonment, that is, the disjuncture between the liberal project of civic responsibility/work and the astronomical rates of unemployment due to a lack of social infrastructure and jobs in los angeles. as a means to resolve this tension, schools in black communities, functioning as enclosed places, serve to reproduce black economic, political, and social misery and simultaneously to render said misery as a product of black failure. the second objective is to demonstrate that even in the face of the exceptional, the basic racist tenets of liberal discursive practices prevent the incorporation of blackness into the state. not appreciated as a legible form, black intellect is cast aside as a social pariah, lurking somewhere between criminal and lazy. reacting in a violent manner, schools imbue psychological trauma onto black youth and attempt to cultivate an internalized rationale of incompetence/indolence. thus schools as enclosed places operate to diminish/rebuke/castigate any black intellectual capacity that does fit into the prescribed, hierarchical arrangement of racialized subjects. as a methodological note, the names provided in the ethnography are pseudonyms chosen by the research participants. containing hidden and layered meanings, the names are reflective of their decisions and are based on an approach that i developed early on in my fieldwork. the politics of race and the unmasking of liberalism it was late march, and as usual i left chs to navigate los angeles traffic through a maze of back streets. roughly twenty minutes later, i pulled into the parking lot of the after-school program with which i had been working. advocating for students, the program often intervened on their behalf to counter many of the heinous practices levied against black students. on this thursday in late march we set up a meeting on behalf of devon kennedy. while i was often proud of the students i worked with, devon was without a doubt one of the most brilliant individuals i came across. devon had the ability to read something once and not only memorize it but also fully integrate it with material he had learned months before. at sixteen years old, he rarely had to study: high school courses were not a challenge for him, and to top it off, he was a high-level athlete. standing a shade over six feet four inches, he was an excellent basketball player. the problem for devon, and for many of the students in the after-school program, was a confrontation between the workforce of teachers, composed of mostly white middle-class men and women, and the young black men and women from poor to lower middle-class backgrounds like themselves. countless stories narrated the degradation of the students’ intellectual ability, and conflict was always on the horizon. so devon had requested a meeting that thursday with me, my colleague from the program, and devon’s advanced placement european history teacher. my colleague and i drove to the school and parked in one of the stalls marked off with spray paint for visitors. the main entrance had a series of bars and thick wire-meshed gates. much as in other schools in the area, we were checked in by the first level of security at the entrance. this procedure was followed by two more checkpoints at which security guards verified our identities. devon’s classroom was located on the opposite end of the campus in a series of temporary bungalows that had turned permanent and that gave off an ominous echo, due to the lack of a structural foundation underneath the fiberglass composite structures. we walked through the door and found devon and his teacher in the room. devon sat in the very back row of the classroom, while his teacher was sitting at her desk as we made our introductions. standing fairly short, she had a slightly high-pitched tone that immediately became defensive as we inquired into devon’s standing in the course. “devon just does not show up in class. he is here physically, but i can tell when he goes into one of his daydreams and just does not know how to focus,” she replied when we asked why she thought devon was not faring well in her course. as it stood at the time, devon was failing the course, and he was convinced that his teacher was out to get him. her comments regarding his intellectual disposition validated his analysis of the situation. when we informed her that devon was one of the smartest people, let alone students, we had ever met, she gave us an incredulous look. “well, i have had students who are extremely exceptional and devon is simply not one of them. quite frankly, he is lazy and while i have given him opportunities to succeed, he simply refuses. he does not take notes in class. only my most special students can get away with that, and devon is not one of them.” twice in the span of ten seconds she had stated in no uncertain terms that devon was a failure. i looked back at devon, who could hear everything she said. he was staring straight ahead, looking both resigned and extremely angry. “mrs. wolfe,” i interjected, “devon has been in other advanced placement courses and he has done very well. i am pretty sure that given the chance, you will see that he can achieve great things.” her response, in a very cold and matter-of-fact tone, was that “if he worked hard enough, which up to this point he has not been able to do, he can earn a d, but i very much doubt that.” at this point, i became agitated and could not imagine having to spend a whole academic year in the same classroom with an authority figure who completely discounted my intelligence. sensing that the conversation had reached its limit, my colleague and i thanked her for her time and walked out of the room with devon. in a state of disbelief, i attempted to break the tension and jokingly asked devon, “so, tell me again, how is it you are failing this class?” he laughed and replied, “man, she does not like me at all. i mean, most of our exams are subjective. like we get these open-ended questions and have to write a response to them, and all i get back is ds and fs. so after a while, i realized that it was not worth putting any time into the class. plus, you know she never wanted me in the class. i am the only black kid in there, and it is pretty obvious that she thinks i am taking a spot from one of her special kids in the magnet program.” laughing as he put up air quotes around the word special, he told us that he had a plan and just had to make it to the end of the year in “one piece.” “i am going to get the last laugh, though,” he stated very quietly. “she has a policy that anyone who gets a five on the [advanced placement] exam automatically gets an a in the course. so, my plan is to get a five.” the test, given once every may, was graded on a scale of one to five, with a five being the highest possible score. “devon,” i replied, “i know you can do it, but, man, that is putting your eggs all in one basket.” near the school entrance, he stopped walking and stated, “you just saw what happened in there, right? i have no other choice.” later that summer we all found out what devon had known all along: he earned a five on the exam, and the teacher was forced to change his grade from an f to an a. a revoking of enclosed places: black fugitivity and black fugitive logic over the past six years, i have witnessed and been told countless stories similar to the ethnographic moments detailed in the previous section, in which black people’s encounters with pubic education were predicated on particular forms of state-sanctioned violence. complicating matters was the fact that reform-based solutions—led by a coalition of city officials and nonprofit social justice organizations—that aimed to improve the quality of education for black communities was informed by a liberal framework that removed any structural analysis and intensely focused on individual behaviors (sojoyner 2016). here, michel-rolph trouillot’s (2001, 126) analysis that “state power has no institutional fixity on either theoretical or historical grounds” was exemplified in the lives of black angelenos who were negatively impacted by an array of modalities of state power used to maintain public education as an enclosed place. however, as the historical and contemporary record has demonstrated, state power is neither omniscient nor is it a proactive force. in the case of los angeles, the efforts of the state to extend the boundaries of enclosed places have occurred in reaction to black demands for education free from the forms of racial, gendered, sexed and class violence that are inherent to the state project. following in the generative ethos of that tradition, i suggest that as a strategic move to simultaneously assert black humanity, counter the growth of enclosed places, and plant seeds for alternative forms of education, black fugitivity provides a framework through which to understand the egregiousness of enclosed places and to make legible radical black actions. my framing of black fugitivity is informed by a historical and political trajectory in which the fugitive is the simultaneous embodiment of life, culture, and pathways to freedom, on the one hand, and the singular exposure of the state as a tenuous system of unstable structures constantly teetering on the brink of illegitimacy, on the other. given this duality, black fugitivity often proves contradictory, thereby often reproducing forms of oppression while simultaneously establishing spaces (sometimes momentarily) of freedom. however, at its core, it is an approach by which fugitives disengage from state processes. while black fugitivity often registers as an element of a bygone era, strategic acts of black refusal and disengagement have remained at the fore of black radical action and planning. building on michaeline crichlow and patricia northover’s (2009) theorization of “fleeing the plantation,” my argument considers black fugitivity outside the realm of an agrarian model of capitalist exploitation. writing about the shift away from plantation-based economies, crichlow and northover (2009, 34) write that “the current neoliberal project visited on disparate places and people has witnessed the emergence of new sets of social relationships dislocating the moral economics of those ‘peasants working for capital.’” it is in this context of contemporary capitalism that black fugitivity is situated within a set of social relationships functioning under economic models predicated on abandonment, where employment and social resources are scarce. it is in this manner that the formation of black fugitivity points to a different theoretical trajectory than the classic reproduction-of-class arguments commonly associated with the anthropology of education. exemplified by paul willis’s (1981) inquiry into how class and social position are internalized and reproduced by youth, the framing of such arguments within contemporary capitalism demands new analytics. within a landscape where black communities remain without the basics of a social infrastructure (e.g., employment, health care, housing), the theoretical impulse of black fugitivity is to repudiate the liberal mechanisms that undergird the reproduction of class strata. the logic of black fugitivity is framed around an understanding that the trappings of social mobility, inherent within the discourse and ideological construct of education in the united states, will not save you. the incommensurability of being reproduced within a structure based on the degradation of blackness lies at the heart of black fugitivity’s departure from the argument of class reproduction. indeed, refusal, including the refusal of class reproduction, constitutes a central element to black fugitivity. as described by tina campt, refusal is tantamount to understanding the politics of black fugitivity. campt (2014) states, “it’s the refusal to be a subject to a law that refuses to recognize you. its defined not by opposition or necessarily resistance, but instead a refusal of the very premises that have historically negated the lived experience of blackness as either pathological or exceptional to the logic of white supremacy.” in the case of the southern plantation economy, it was the refusal to accept a set of highly exploitative and violent lived conditions that demanded the extraction of black physical, social, and emotional labor. in the case of contemporary capitalism, it is the refusal to accept a set of highly exploitative and violent lived conditions that remain devoid of employment and social resources but are deeply integrated into the material, social, and political mechanisms that produce enclosed places. transferring the black fugitive from one set of historical conditions to the present is best achieved through an explication of black fugitive logic: a cultural and racial calculus of refusal and disengagement informed by a common set of lived experiences that dictate that the racially charged tenets of capitalism, across historical moments, are incapable of reform and are only capable of reproducing violent conditions for black life. as a means to locate black fugitivity and, by extension, black fugitive logic within contemporary capitalism, the following section provides an ethnographic rendering of refusal from within an enclosed place. the beauty of black fugitivity we sat on painted black steel chairs that littered the sidewalk of the elongated shopping center. underneath a large green umbrella, marley and i spoke at length. spanning the gamut from sports to music to education to politics, we hopped and jumped around subjects with an ease that took years to develop. our first interaction with each other was tenuous at best. during the summer of 2009, the southern california library, located in south central los angeles, had contacted me to teach a summer program that would focus on the relationship between schools and prisons in california.4 centered on ruth wilson gilmore’s book golden gulag and a series of comic books published by the real costs of prisons project,5 the goal of the course was to engage with black youth about the effects of the criminal justice system within their community. marley, at the time, was a confident fourteen-year-old who at a very young age had cultivated a lot of respect in his neighborhood. i would come to find that such respect was based on marley’s vision of empowerment, which included a vast redistribution of social infrastructure that would transfer multiple forms of capital back to his neighborhood and others like it throughout southern california. a masterful organizer and someone deeply concerned about issues of police violence, marley was at once funny and loving and yet serious when it came to the condition of black life in los angeles. thus, when i entered the scene as an outsider, marley was highly skeptical. marley’s skepticism did not come purely from a conventional need to develop trust, but from a life’s history of being situated as a problem that needed to be solved. by the time we met, marley had already disengaged from the formal education system and had been in and out of the juvenile justice system several times. marley’s skepticism of my presence at the southern california library in large part derived from his familiarity with university faculty making their pilgrimage down to south central los angeles and collecting information—all never to be seen again. during our many conversations about this topic, marley would often state in a jesting yet poignant tone, “don’t forget, y’all making more money off of prisons than the damn guards.” marley’s truth was that while the aforementioned cohort of intellectuals were framed in the historic terms of saviors to wayward youth, in an ironic twist, they all needed the system to stay intact to preserve their own livelihoods. marley’s initial distrust of me soon gave way to ambivalence, which then turned to a begrudging form of acceptance and, after about three years of knowing each other, morphed into mutual admiration. organizing events together and having a common affinity for the southern california library allowed our relationship to take on a familial dynamic. spending time with each other’s families and sharing meals over intense conversations, we soon understood that while i had more years of formal academic training than marley, he had learned much more during the course of his life than any class had taught me. marley had long ago disengaged from the formal education process and never expressed any desire to go back. although i knew his position on education, i had never explored with him why he had made the decision to leave school. after we discussed various forms of education and how they could potentially be implemented, i asked marley, “so, you know, i never really understood why it is that you stopped going to school. i understood that you thought it was a bad fit and that there were outside issues that were pressing, but what drove you to that decision?” giving it a moment’s thought, he replied, “i mean, how is that going to put food on my plate? how is that going to keep the police off me? how is that going to help the hood? i really think that school should be about people learning life lessons and not trying to pump people with information which, 90 percent of the time, is not needed. what is the point in staying there?” i was confused. marley was an avid reader of science magazines and an admirer of environmental science in particular. i replied, “this, coming out of the mouth of a die-hard nature buff. i know that you are not suggesting that we get rid of science.” with a smile on his face as if he had laid the perfect trap, he calmly sat back in the chair and proposed: you tell me this. i am in school reading these textbooks that are, like, over ten years old and outdated. the textbooks are talking about “this is how a plant grows” and “this what happens when you put a zygote here” and everything else, right? in the meantime, i am asking the teacher, “this is cool and all, but can’t we talk about how this relates to our lives?” the teacher don’t care, because they got to get through the material for the test or whatever. but the crazy thing is this—while i am reading about all this stuff in the textbook, the craziest stuff is going on right outside of my house. i mean, the city is pulling up all of the trees, it is like a desert outside. like, you know what they just did in order to bring the space shuttle through la.6 they cut down all those trees to bring a space shuttle through the damn city! now you tell me if that don’t make no sense. in the very class where we are talking about how trees and plants are essential to human life, right outside the door, they are cutting down all the damn trees! then you look up and down the block and you don’t see any parks that have different plants or different types of trees. all you see is like a big field where you can play football or baseball, but ain’t nothing else. so once again, why am i in class and supposed to learn about some theory of the reproductive cycle, when outside the theory is getting blown up on its head? black fugitivity: politics of disengagement and refusal the politics of gender cast a long shadow in the lived experiences of my interlocutors. the actions of these young men ran in direct opposition to the countless efforts by policymakers, private foundations, and state officials to make respectable, law-abiding “men” out of these “boys.”7 their indifference and provocation illustrate the contradictory nature and uselessness of such a gendered stance toward respectability under late capitalism. p. j.’s and marley’s testimony and devon’s strategic disengagement make clear the logic of refusal. the young men’s actions thus force us to reckon with an unnerving question: who among us would be content living in a social milieu where we were forced to learn within an educational structure that had severely outdated resources and pedagogical practices, was heavily policed, and due to the drastically uneven distribution of resources, could not even dangle the menial carrot of a living wage upon graduation? yet this is the expectation and moral imperative that we place on black students such as p. j., marley, and devon. on a very basic level, the liberal rhetorical strategies that conflate education with future economic and social success have fallen flat for black youth throughout southern california.8 effectively countering the liberal logic of enclosed places, devon’s tactical response of refusal to participate in class is an abdication of a liberal framework that masks the insidious processes of racial violence, as well as a profound means to maintain his humanity. through his brazen plan, he managed to dissociate from the pejorative invocations of his inability. however, it must be stated that devon had very few options. the school was in full support of his teacher, and he sought support from the only source of assistance he had available to him. while his stance proved heroic, we should recognize that devon had to endure levels of state-sanctioned emotional and psychological violence that no youth should ever have to endure. marley’s alternative strategy of complete disengagement demonstrated a key function of the radical nature of the black fugitive logic: the proposition of an alternative social vision for the utilization of social resources. his intervention of developing pedagogical techniques that incorporated the realities of the community performed two key tasks central to black fugitive logic. the first was to utilize the formal setting of education as grounds to teach about the duplicitous nature of state power. in marley’s case, the issue of cutting down the trees served as a literal and metaphorical device to understand the manner in which state power was commonly experienced in manipulative ways. while the parading of the space shuttle endeavor through the streets of los angeles was marketed as a public good, there was very little discussion of what that entailed for residents, for whom such a spectacle meant the destruction of their communities. marley’s insistence that a communal narrative be inserted into the formal educational setting constitutes a direct threat by exposing the oppressive mechanisms of state power while simultaneously assisting black youth in understanding the complexities of crucial processes in the natural and physical sciences. marley’s call for the incorporation of the lived conditions of his community into education, as well as devon’s and p. j.’s strategies of countering the politics of a violent space, are tightly meshed to the second function of black fugitive logic—exposure through refusal. their disengagement from the formal educational process has to be understood not as a blanket rebuke of education but as an action in opposition to state-mandated education that attempts to disempower black youth. in many ways, the three young men’s actions are manifestations of tina campt’s (2014) invocation of fugitivity as a tactical practice to counter the imperatives of the state. marley’s withdrawal, which is representative of more than 30 percent of black students in california (tucker 2010), illustrates in many ways a collective yet unorganized recognition of the oppressive tendencies found within the formal education system. as perceived by marley, the emphasis on banal forms of testing and draconian educational mandates represent state power doubling down through increased control over both the curriculum (what is taught) and pedagogy (how teachers can teach). perhaps more damning is marley’s implication that the intention of the formal education system is to obfuscate paths of resistance and dissent for the masses of black youth. in this manner, the chasm between what is taught by the school and the lived reality of black students is not a lack of knowledge and/or recognition on the part of the state, but rather an attempt to prevent meaningful discussion and forms of learning that would directly lead to questioning and rebellion against processes that uphold state power. the response by the state to the fugitive actions of black youth sheds light on the fear of exposure of the forms of violence committed within enclosed places. as outlined in my brief history of black education in los angeles, the county and city have been swift to criminalize acts of fugitivity. the abolish chronic truancy (act) program has provided the impetus for the state to enlist all of the facets of the criminal-justice and judicial systems to track down black youth and place them back in the clutches of enclosed places. yet such a response is typical with respect to the attempted state suppression of black fugitivity. stefano harney and fred moten (2013, 57) argue that this consistent response is based on the criminalization of the fugitive for fear and knowledge of what black mobilization would bring to bear: governance and criminality—the condition of being without interests—come to make each other possible. what would it mean to struggle against governance, against that which can produce struggle by germinating interests? when governance is understood as the criminalization of being without interests, as a regulation brought into being by criminality, where criminality is that excess left from criminalization, a certain fragility emerges, a certain limit, an uncertain imposition by a greater drive, the mere utterance of whose name has again become too black, too strong altogether. building on harney and moten’s insights, we can connect black fugitive logic with campt’s framing of fugitivity and trouillot’s analysis of the state. the criminalization of black fugitivity is a reaction to the black fugitive’s insistence on refusal and on not being placed in the metaphorical and literal clutches of state power. such was the case with marley, who was very explicit about the role of state mandates (e.g., compulsory education) within black communities. in this regard, black fugitive logic functions as the catalyst that pieces together the multifaceted state apparatus that enacts state power. the diffusion of power throughout its many institutions and structures is thereby made known through the black fugitive’s ability to decipher and name the many tentacles of the liberal state project (gordon 2011).9 conclusion through the many conversations i have had with black youth such as p. j., marley, and devon, i have been forced to take stock of a general set of principles regarding communities at odds with the state. at a very fundamental level, the question arises: how do you negotiate, or enter into any type of fruitful relationship, with an entity that on multiple levels has proven detrimental to your humanity? one solution that has proven highly effective is the contemporary expression of black fugitivity. i have learned, however, that this expression is often necessarily fragmented and not legible within a liberal framework. it is not by chance that black youth such as marley were not seduced by the panacea of state processes, but instead were read and treated as criminals. these young men cannot be organized by the state to demonstrate reform and respectability; they cannot be taught within enclosed places to learn their place within society. it is difficult to see how they will be brought into the proverbial fold of the liberal project in a way that state power can reproduce itself in a legitimate manner.10 the fragmented nature of fugitivity may represent the perilous economic and social situations within which black angelenos find themselves, but it also demonstrates how absurd the commonsense rhetoric of liberalism has become. within a society built on such problematic invocations of state power, a troubling question returns: what damage is done by reinforcing a narrative that black students should drop out of school? the lesson i learned is that the young black people i have had the opportunity to work with are in desperate need of resources. what they do not need, however, are failed but repackaged analytical and practical paradigms labeled as solutions. it is up to us as scholars, organizers, and caring individuals in a collective society to catch up to the profound insights already developed and implemented if we do not wish to face a future of certain ruin. notes acknowledgments i am forever indebted to yusef omowale and michele welsing of the southern california library, who are amazing stewards of black communal knowledge and organizing in los angeles. a very special thank-you to my colleague and friend kris peterson, who painstakingly looked over several iterations of the article. the students and families with whom i had the privilege to collaborate during my fieldwork are truly phenomenal. they have had tremendous patience and understanding with me, and i only wish that i could sufficiently repay their generosity and kindness. thank you to the reviewers and the editorial collective of cultural anthropology, who provided much-needed critique and suggestions to move my argument forward. 1. a major issue at stake is also the disavowal of fugitivity as a form of liberal political practice. elizabeth povinelli (2011, 76) comments that until such action is deemed worthy of recognition, it is intensely marked by the state as dangerous. 2. as covered in the california eagle (bass 1947), there were actually two attacks on black youth at john c. fremont high school during that year. 3. ruth wilson gilmore (2007, 21) states that “the generally accepted goal for prisons has been incapacitation: a do-nothing theory if ever there was one.” 4. the southern california library is a research library and meeting space in south central los angeles that houses an expansive collection of progressive and radical archival material. 5. the comics are now out of print, but have been anthologized in ahrens 2008. 6. in 2012, the space shuttle endeavor was paraded through south central los angeles on its way to the california science center. 7. the obama administration’s my brother’s keeper initiative exemplifies this logic; see https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/my-brothers-keeper. 8. the period from the late 1960s through the 1980s brought massive unemployment to los angeles county. the decline of the automobile industry resulted in the shuttering of more than ten plants employing between five and fifteen thousand workers each. many blacks who moved to the area never again found work that paid a living wage (horne 1997; m. davis 2006). 9. avery gordon (2011, 8) connects processes of refusing to engage with the state to the ideological thrust of abolition as a political project: “abolition involves critique, refusal, and rejection of that which you want to abolish, but it also involves being or ‘becoming unavailable for servitude,’ to use toni cade bambara’s words.” 10. i emphasize legitimacy here, because although the criminal justice system forms a part of legitimate state power, societies that utilize forms of brute force as a main form of governance continually face questions of legitimacy by an increasingly fragmented public (robinson 2000). references ahrens, lois 2008 the real cost of prison comix. oakland, calif.: pm press. anderson, james d. 1988 the education of blacks in the south, 1860–1935. chapel hill: the university of north carolina press. bass, charlotta 1947 “white adults instigate riot at fremont.” california eagle, march 20. crichlow, michaeline a., with patricia northover 2009 globalization and the post-creole imagination: notes on fleeing the plantation. durham, n.c.: duke university press. campt, tina 2014 “black feminist futures and the practice of fugitivity.” helen pond mcintyre ’48 lecture, barnard college, october 7. http://bcrw.barnard.edu/blog/black-feminist-futures-and-the-practice-of-fugitivity. davis, angela y. 2003 are prisons obsolete? new york: seven stories press. davis, mike 1992 “the l.a. inferno.” socialist review 22, no. 1: 57–80. 2006 city of quartz: excavating the future in los angeles. new york: verso. gilmore, ruth wilson 2007 golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press. 2008 “forgotten places and the seeds of grassroots planning.” in engaging contradictions: theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship, edited by charles r. hale and craig calhoun, 31–61. berkeley: university of california press. gordon, avery 2011 “some thoughts on haunting and futurity.” borderlands 10, no. 2. http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol10no2_2011/gordon_thoughts.htm. harney, stefano, and fred moten 2013 the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. london: minor compositions. horne, gerald 1997 fire this time: the watts uprising and the 1960s. new york: da capo press. johnson, gaye theresa 2013 spaces of conflict, sounds of solidarity: music, race, and spatial entitlement in los angeles. berkeley: university of california press. kelley, robin d. g. 1994 race rebels: culture, politics, and the black working class. new york: free press. los angeles sentinel 1969 “school board plans probe of poor school conditions.” march 6, a3. meiners, erica r. 2007 right to be hostile: schools, prisons, and the making of public enemies. new york: routledge. nolan, kathleen 2011 police in the hallways: discipline in an urban high school. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2011 economies of abandonment: social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rickford, russell 2016 we are an african people: independent education, black power, and the radical imagination. new york: oxford university press. robinson, cedric j. 2000 black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. 2007 forgeries of memory and meaning: blacks and the regimes of race in american theater and film before world war ii. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. saltman, kenneth j. 2012 the failure of corporate school reform. boulder, colo.: paradigm publishers. simpson, audra 2016 “consent’s revenge.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 3: 326–33. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.02. sojoyner, damien m. 2013 “black radicals make for bad citizens: undoing the myth of the school to prison pipeline.” berkeley review of education 4, no. 2. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/35c207gv. 2016 first strike: educational enclosures in black los angeles. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. thomas, deborah a. 2002 “modern blackness: ‘what we are and what we hope to be.’” small axe 6, no. 2: 25–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/smx.2002.0021. trouillot, michel-rolph 2001 “the anthropology of the state in the age of globalization: close encounters of the deceptive kind.” current anthropology 42, no. 1: 125–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/318437. tucker, jill 2010 “dropout rate for california black students hits 37 percent.” sfgate, december 8. http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/dropout-rate-for-calif-black-students-hits-37-2454085.php. vargas, joão h. costa 2010 never meant to survive: genocide and utopias in black diaspora communities. lanham, md.: rowman and littlefield. vaught, sabina 2017 compulsory: education and the dispossession of youth in a prison school. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. watkins, william h. 2011 the assault on public education: confronting the politics of corporate school reform. new york: teachers college press. willis, paul e. 1981 learning to labor: how working class kids get working class jobs. new york: columbia university press. originally published in 1977. winn, maisha t. 2011 girl time: literacy, justice, and the school-to-prison pipeline. new york: teachers college press. wun, connie 2016 “unaccounted foundations: black girls, anti-black racism, and punishment in schools.” critical sociology 42, nos. 4–5: 737–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920514560444. television is not radio television is not radio: theologies of mediation in the egyptian islamic revival yasmin moll university of michigan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5179-8540 on a cool november evening in 2010, at saqiat al-sawy, a cultural center in an upscale cairo neighborhood, the egyptian islamic television preacher mustafa hosny convened a religious seminar titled “technology and godliness.” al-sawy hosts many events, from jazz concerts to smoking cessation clinics to, for a brief time after the 2011 revolution, political debates. dressed in dark jeans and a nehru-collared shirt, hosny spoke in a seemingly improvisational manner as young men and women in their late teens and early twenties sat watching his image on large screens. everything about this seminar—from the venue to the mixed-gender seating to hosny’s stylish clothing—was calculated to subvert stereotypes held by both secularists and religious revivalists about what participating in the islamic da‘wa, or pious outreach, movement entails. on the stage, hosny announced his collaboration with a famous pop singer and actor, khalid selim, to record an album with the same title as hosny’s most recent islamic television program. the musical incarnation of the da‘wa program consisted of ten songs by selim, intercut with pious exhortations by hosny on godliness, rububiya. selim, with his chiseled physique, chart-topping tunes, and heartthrob celebrity made for an unlikely da‘wa partner. and that was precisely what made him attractive for pious outreach. working with him laid down yet another stone on the ambitious road television preachers like hosny were paving: changing what islamic media looks and sounds like. hosny is one of egypt’s al-du‘ah al-gudud, or new preachers, so named because their television preaching styles are unprecedented within the country’s forty-year islamic revival. between 2010 and 2013, i conducted fieldwork with hosny and his media team in the cairo studios and offices of iqraa, a transnational islamic satellite channel. established in 1998 by a saudi media mogul, iqraa promotes a “centrist islam” (islam wasati) as a bulwark against both secular westernization and religious dogmatism. for iqraa producers, the channel’s moderation is evidenced by its broadcast of preachers from different, at times mutually antagonistic, islamic trends, whether sufism, salafism, or political islamism. despite this on-screen diversity, within egypt iqraa is best known for launching the careers of the country’s most prominent new preachers, the trio of amr khaled, moez masoud, and mustafa hosny, all of whom attract youth who would not normally tune into an islamic program. as their cairo viewers explained to me, these preachers matter to them both because of what and how they preach. the new preachers appropriate genres from dramatic serials to music videos to american televangelism to create novel forms of religious media at once edifying and entertaining. in doing so, the new preachers and their producers straddle distinct standards of moral probity, commercial success, and sensuous pleasure as their programs expand what counts as “islamic media” and why.1 it is precisely this innovation in da‘wa—and its underlying theological claims and associated moral sensibilities—that has earned the new preachers much criticism from their equally popular salafi-wahabi counterparts in the piety movement. salafi-wahabism is a heterogeneous orientation bringing together individuals and groups that each lay claim to the true salafi way (al-rasheed 2006; lauzière 2016). in egypt, the most admired salafi television preachers claim authority as students of the influential sheikh nasir al-din al-albani.2 these preachers achieved renown in the 1990s for their cassette sermons (hirschkind 2006). the new preachers disagree with salafi teachings on theological grounds. they consider salafi teachings un-islamic in the most fundamental sense: they do not reflect god’s will. such an evaluation differs from that of some egyptians outside the piety movement, who view salafi norms as aspirational even while bemoaning their own incapacity to fulfill them (schielke 2009). it also diverges from the critiques of both secular nationalists and political islamists in egypt, who disparage the piety movement’s focus on ritual practice (mahmood 2005). like their salafi counterparts, the new preachers understand ritual worship as an ineluctable component of creating the capacity for virtue. they consider the popular egyptian refrain that “religion is in the heart” (al-din fi al-qalb)—a matter of interiorized feelings or inherited identity—a misapprehension of the embodied discipline that religion demands.3 questioned here is not salafis’ emphasis on ritual practice but their ostensible failure to grasp what the virtues cultivated by such practice entail in terms of social interaction and individual transformation. this failure comes from an incorrect understanding of what forms of life are pleasing to god. new preachers like hosny envisage their media as prophylactics against salafi revivalism, whose sermonizers now have their own satellite television platforms (field and hamam 2009) and a significant online presence (hirschkind 2012). the problem, however, is that salafism’s pious promoters and secular critics alike conflate its erroneous norms and lifeworlds with islamic piety itself. consequently, what the da‘wa movement needed was nothing less than a “reconstruction of what piety looks like” (‘iyadat siyaghat shakl al-tadayyun), as hosny likes to put it. the new preachers’ desire to “reconstruct” religiosity involves the very forms of its mediation. the discursive and aesthetic possibilities afforded by televisual broadcast technologies prove key to this project. this article examines how media claiming a pious mandate are objects of both onand off-screen contention within the islamic television sector, offering an important window onto islam’s competing theologies and the internal struggles they engender among revivalists. in what follows, i trace how the new preachers celebrate and champion what they call “innovation” (ibda’) in television preaching, while their salafi rivals condemn and censure these same practices. as with the islamic tradition generally, the different currents of egypt’s piety movement are typically analyzed as part of a singular moral project defined by its opposition to secular publics and subjects. in contrast, i argue that rival forms of televisual da‘wa within this movement proceed from conceptions of piety that differently configure the religious and the secular through both competing doctrinal discourses and media practices. i show how the new preachers work through the qur’anic notions of ta‘aruf, mutual human knowing, and fitra, divinely created human nature, to promote as islamic da‘wa appropriations of western media forms, while salafi revivalists appeal to precepts barring bid‘a, religious innovation, to proscribe such da‘wa as un-islamic. in making this argument, i invite attention to the secular and the religious as unstable formations not only within our analytical accounts (starrett 2010; winegar 2014) but also within the piety movement itself. i suggest that one way to think about the “authorizing processes” (asad 1993, 37) through which sensibilities, practices, or beliefs, including those about media, come to be religious or secular—and what this means for how to live an islamic life—involves recasting these as matters of continually evolving theological contention. anthropologists have not paid enough attention to theology (robbins 2006; robbins and engelke 2010), even as the latent (protestant) theological presuppositions of anthropology’s analytical categories have been carefully excavated. the relative dearth of ethnographic interest in theology, including in the ways that scriptural monotheistic religions frame theology as the bedrock of ethics (see keane 2014), is puzzling considering that theology does not exist in an abstracted dogmatic vacuum but constitutes believers’ situated attempts to think through how they should apprehend and live in the world, including in the everyday.4 by ignoring theology qua theology, we elide not only how theological traditions provide muslims with ongoing resources to address new moral problems but also how muslims seek to counteract, through theology, moral problems they perceive as engendered by erroneous theological constructs in the first place.5 religious practitioners reconfigure the islamic tradition through engagement with the variety of normative regimes they encounter as modern subjects. such reconfigurations are intrinsic to the production of a discursive tradition, rendering the notion of an invented tradition analytically suspect (asad 1996). at the same time, the idea of an invented tradition has traction for religious adepts themselves. during fieldwork in egypt, many of the accusations exchanged between rival revivalists hinged on the claim that the opposing group was “inventing a new religion” (biyikhtur‘u din gadid). my point is not the usual one that the islamic tradition can sustain a multiplicity of ethico-religious positions, but rather that such positions often draw the boundaries of the religious and secular so differently as to foreclose the possibility of mutual acceptance or, indeed, coherence. these internal differences put in sharp relief the passionate contention among pietists themselves not only over particular reconfigurations of the tradition but, more fundamentally, over what makes a form of life islamic, a sensibility virtuous, a practice pious. in this way, debates about islamic media are constitutive of the very ethico-theological divisions they articulate, inciting continuing differentiation and distinction within the piety movement. focusing on these divisions allows for ethnographic engagement with how muslim adepts critique religious difference—and the difference that religious critique makes—beyond the imperatives of secular power.6 i integrate these concerns from the anthropology of islam with the by now established ethnographic attention to the intersections of religion and media. following a broader turn to media as social practice (ginsburg, abu-lughod, and larkin 2002) and from media anthropology to the anthropology of mediation (boyer 2012), this research has considered the various ways religious practitioners discipline and train their senses through media. relatedly, another focus has been on how media make religious life itself both possible and possible in new ways.7 in contrast, i am interested in looking at how media content and aesthetic forms are construed as religious in the first place. within the egyptian piety movement, different islamic doctrines and precepts are elaborated in new ways to address emergent ethical dilemmas centered on media and mediation, on the specific manipulations of particular communicative technologies and what these represent. we can characterize these elaborations as theologies of mediation. such theologies scrutinize meta-level claims about the means and ends of media from a perspective oriented toward divine revelation, one in which media are inextricably tied to claims about what godliness demands. here, media are assumed to be objects of prescriptive divine address, and hence of moral discernment and judgment. these normative ideas about what divinely authorized practices of media-making entail frequently go beyond questions of religious permissibility to encompass broader interpretations of cultural diversity, human nature, and everyday life. such contested theologies ground divergent evaluations of what makes media “islamic” within egypt’s da‘wa landscape.8 what interests me is not the veracity or desirability of these evaluations, but rather how they create competing forms of moral distinction within the piety movement through theologically reasoned narratives of difference. these narratives offer an ethnographic vantage point onto internal revivalist critiques that frequently caricature the opposing side in religious polemic. such caricatures—the new preachers as morally “lax,” salafi preachers as “unimaginative”—take form through wider deliberations about what it means to lead an islamic life, yielding insight into the diverse and often competing anxieties and desires animating religious revivalists. in such heated debates both sides tend to amplify their differences while overlooking areas of overlap; i focus precisely on the implications of these exaggerations and erasures for understanding how participants in the piety movement create and receive new forms of media. indeed, while it is important not to uncritically reproduce such self-narratives at the analytical level (see larkin 2015, 67), centering ethnographically the normative work such narratives do allows for a better understanding of how specific media become “islamic” for some muslim adepts but not for others. it also means restraining, to some degree, our own anthropological impulse to unmask such internal accounts as inaccurate in order to take seriously what is at stake for our interlocutors in such descriptions, including the ways in which they matter within the social world of islamic television. to that end, in the first sections of this essay i look at how the new preachers and their producers make new forms of television da‘wa as an alternative to what they feel to be the mediocre, unimaginative, and incorrect programs of salafi preachers. i show how their media strategies embed specific religious assumptions about human nature, pious discipline, and what they call “ordinary life.” from there, i examine the ways salafi critiques of such da‘wa projects are informed by longstanding theological precepts that have gained new salience in response to emergent (and, from this perspective, troubling) media forms claiming a religious mandate. these normative constellations evaluate western entertainment as ineluctably subversive of godly attention and unsuitable for religious publicity. i conclude by thinking about how a focus on islamic revivalism’s internal fractures can complicate the politics of ethnographic critique. dazzling da‘wa islamic preachers have appeared on egyptian television since the 1960s, with some such as sheikh sha‘arawi achieving a level of popularity that remains unrivaled after his death (chih and mayeur-jaouen 2002; brinton 2015). for the transmission of supposedly correct understandings of islam to citizens, egyptian state television not only broadcasts religious content such as friday mosque sermons and qur’anic exegeses but also dramatic serials that impart a nationalist vision of “good islam” (abu-lughod 2004). in the late 1990s, however, changes in political economies and media regulations made possible the private ownership of television channels in the satellite sector, thereby ending the state’s monopoly on television as an outreach platform. since then, panic has characterized egyptian public discourses about transnational satellite television. local observers describe in dystopic terms the growth of privately owned channels and their corrosive social effects. religious channels (al-qanawat al-diniya) are the main objects of these critiques despite being numerically, financially, and in terms of viewership minor players in the satellite sector.9 during my fieldwork, i clipped hundreds of editorials and articles from newspapers, both governmental and oppositional, condemning islamic television preachers as money-grubbing charlatans who might also be treasonous collaborators working for sinister foreign powers. these editorials—along with recent dramatic serials, films, and novels (armbrust 2014)—lambast islamic television preachers as instrumentalist and insincere, as tuggar din, merchants of religion. such critiques, whether coming from liberal and leftist intellectuals or the state’s islamic establishment, betray an anxiety about nonstate religious publicity that the producers i worked with at iqraa found naive. at iqraa, the problem was not islamic television channels generally, but specifically salafi television channels like al-nas, al-rahma, and al-hikma. one of the issues was what iqraa producers called “media professionalism,” defined mostly in terms of care for high production values and innovation in programming formats. salafi television channels, they lamented, were the equivalent of mom-and-pop shops: small, haphazardly run operations with no five-year plans or strategic visions beyond the promotion of a “narrow” interpretation of islam. from their perspective, the narrowness of salafi religiosity—its doom-and-gloom (gham wa ham) tenor and disconnect from everyday life—was reflected in the narrowness of its televised da‘wa forms. indeed, the problem with salafi television preaching was not just its seemingly irrelevant message but its indifference to the medium of such messages. the salafis treated television as if it were radio, complained emad, a senior producer at iqraa in cairo. “i could give my back to the television screen or close my eyes, and my experience of the program wouldn’t change,” he elaborated. “their notion of da‘wa is very conventional [taqlidi]: basically, a preacher just sitting in front of the camera and speaking.” producers use the negative label conventional as a shorthand for programs adhering too closely to the genre of direct da‘wa, da‘wa mubashira, often further glossed as “god-says/the-prophet-said.” programs in this mold feature a preacher in a studio setting narrating qur’anic stories or events from the prophet’s and his companions’ lives, or else they pivot around moral exhortation, exclusively citing qur’anic verses and prophetic sayings. for the professionally trained directors, cinematographers, and editors i met, the reliance of salafi television channels on this genre did not present opportunities for what they referred to interchangeably as “creativity” or “innovation.” creativity was indexed by an interest in including elements like dramatic acting, music, special effects, or even simply in shooting a program on location, as opposed to in an indoor studio. at other times, producers spoke of innovation in terms of both form and content. “we want to create religious media that is close to viewers’ lives, not far from life like the salafis,” emad put it once. “we can do this by using nonreligious tools such as songs or acting within the da‘wa program, but also by talking about things that matter to them, like dating, leisure, or studying.” for islamic media producers like emad, this reimagination of both religious discourse and its forms of presentation makes the programs of the new preachers morally effective in an overwhelmingly secular media environment, secular here meaning avowedly indifferent to religiously reasoned strictures of broadcast permissibility.10 video 1. music video for “o journey” (arabic: ya rihla), released in 2016 by the preacher moez masoud. masoud plays the guitar and sings in the video, which features amir eid, the lead singer for the egyptian rock band cairokee. video courtesy of moez masoud. iqraa producers assume that viewers who watch hosny’s programs possess an intense interest in, and desire for, religious knowledge. nevertheless, to attract and retain such viewers the producers feel that they must create programs that can compete with nonreligious media in both production quality and entertainment value. for them, mainstream media is successful because it is mubhir, dazzling. instead of da‘wa mubashira, direct da‘wa, these producers sought to promote da‘wa mubhira, dazzling da‘wa. strategizing how to make their media enjoyable within the constraints of both “islamic parameters” (dawabit islamiyya) and comparatively small budgets constitutes a key aspect of their work. indeed, financial limits dictate that hosny’s team has to frequently adopt the very formats they abjure as conventional, with producers continually challenged to create dazzling segments within otherwise staid studio-based programs. to better understand the tastes and expectations of their audience so as to more successfully extrapolate what they might find appealing to watch, iqraa producers marshal research and data tools like focus groups, social media polls, and postseminar questionnaires. class becomes important here. iqraa producers presume that their viewers care about the “look” of the program because they are “cosmopolitan,” university-educated, and upper-middleto middle-class.11 such viewers have “seen it all,” so to dazzle them—the thinking goes—a program must be as visually sophisticated as the entertainment media they regularly consume, whether hollywood blockbusters, music videos, or reality shows. instead of dazzling these viewers, salafi da‘wa programs confirm secular stereotypes of religious media, and by extension of religiosity itself, as intolerant, irrelevant, and, perhaps most damningly, boring. echoing the criticism of egyptian secularists—who also frame the new preachers as “radical islamists in sheep’s clothing” (winegar 2014, 455)—some academic observers see this concern with aesthetics, class, and viewership as evidence of commodification. in this scholarship, new preachers such as amr khaled are lambasted for promoting an “air-conditioned islam” or an “opium of the rich,” an ersatz “islam-lite” produced by a nefarious neoliberal logic (e.g., bayat 2002; haenni and tammam 2003; atia 2013). by contrast, here i want to take seriously how these preachers and their affiliated producers see innovation in television da‘wa as a theological imperative oriented both toward this-worldly flourishing and otherworldly salvation. to be sure, as jessica winegar (2014) has argued, we need a thicker ethnographic contextualization of revivalists such as the new preachers within changing political economies, class-based distinctions, and urban–rural divisions if we want to rethink pious subject formation beyond the binaries of secularism and islamism. at the same time, it is important to recall that while islamic media is constituted, often self-consciously and deliberately, through practices and discourses that transcend longstanding religious–secular dichotomies, pious media practitioners nevertheless take as axiomatic the possibility of creating media that is normatively islamic, that is not itself indifferent to secular–religious distinctions. indeed, while current scholarship argues for approaching the secular and the religious not as fixed essences in opposition but as categories coconstituted relationally (asad 2006), this analytical framework differs from the internal understanding of islamic revivalists, who do assume religious and secular worldviews to be products of irreconcilable epistemologies, one divinely sanctioned, the other not. my point, then, is that what gets ascribed to each worldview differs across the piety movement. while salafi pietists condemn as secular da‘wa media that resembles western cultural forms, the new preachers promote this same media as religious, reserving the label secular for media productions unconcerned with divinely defined limits, even as those limits are disputed on islamic television channels themselves. actually, contested parameters of permissibility are central to the evaluative criteria marshaled for determining the dividing line between the religious and the secular within islamic television. salafi revivalists judge their new preaching counterparts as stealth secularizers because they argue for the islamic validity of what the salafi tradition holds to be manifestly prohibited. by doing so, new preaching da‘wa instills western secular norms even while erroneously claiming a religious mandate. for their part, the new preachers hold their own da‘wa projects as commensurate with islamic attachment and, in fact, more faithful to the demands of pious commitment than those of their salafi rivals. they argue that by upholding norms repellent to most people, by forbidding what god actually permits, salafism renders secular lifeways more attractive to muslim youth. as we will see, these differing arguments over what the islamic tradition permits or prohibits are not theologically neutral but are made legible through contested doctrines that enact distinctive imaginaries of what a virtuous life entails and the media forms it authorizes. these imaginaries are in turn linked to changing practices and structures of practical knowledge within the social world of islamic television production. knowing one another the producers i worked with on hosny’s iqraa team could be deemed promiscuous in terms of making islamic media. questioning the assumption that “different publics each have their own circulatory modes, their own discursive forms, so that one can neatly be separated from the other,” brian larkin (2008, 104, 105) uses promiscuity as an analytical trope to think about instances “when one public takes the discursive forms used to constitute another public.” he traces the ways in which the south african islamic preacher ahmed deedat appropriates the rhetorical forms of the christian preachers he debates to debunk them on their own home turf. such promiscuity has a long history within da‘wa movements, with historians showing how the now taken-for-granted spaces and techniques of islamic pious propagation across diverse muslim societies often took direct inspiration from the colonial-era projects of christian missionaries (green 2014), including in egypt where islamist organizations like the muslim brotherhood were determined to “fight [missionaries] with their own weapons” (baron 2014, 198). the impetus behind this appropriation is reworked in the revivalist circles i researched to go beyond skilled instrumentality and, indeed, beyond a desire to convert or confound the conversion attempts of others. borrowing is reasoned as a moral good grounded in the qur’anic ideal of ta‘aruf. ta‘aruf is a word that is difficult to translate, but it points to the active process of getting to know and communicating with others, to mutual engagement across various kinds of human difference. according to the interpretations offered to me, ta‘aruf as an ethical orientation is compelled by the fact of human diversity and interdependence, following the qur’anic verse (49:13): “[we] have made you into nations and tribes so that you might come to know one another [li-ta‘arafu].” this diversity is itself indicative of divinity, for did god not say that “among his wonders is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your tongues and colors” (qur’an 30:22)? the revivalists i worked with distilled this theological construal into the practical virtue of insaf, or fairness and evenhandedness. “it is part of our tradition to learn from others,” emad put it to me, “no matter their religion or beliefs.” he invoked qur’anic verses and prophetic sayings as evidence that muslims, enjoined to practice insaf, could adopt from any group or source what is of “benefit.” we were discussing salafi reactions to hosny’s first television da‘wa program after the 2011 revolution. the program had focused on equipping viewers with the skills and ethos needed to build the “new egypt” by showcasing exemplary individuals, including foreign non-muslims and egyptian copts. this indifference to religious difference earned the program much criticism from salafi preachers for whom a non-muslim, as a matter of doctrine, cannot serve as a role model for muslims. emad argued that by denouncing as un-islamic the positive appropriation of practices or ideas originally put forth by non-muslims, salafi theology incorrectly narrows the historical openness and creative adaptability of the islamic tradition—which was, he went on, what had allowed islam to spread across an extraordinary diversity of societies in the first place. video 2. a scene from moez masoud’s 2013 television drama/da‘wa series “satanic steps” (arabic: khatawat al-shaytan), which focused on the qur’anic imperative of ta‘aruf. video courtesy of moez masoud. this adaptability is also exemplified by what my interlocutors held up as the most powerful “media text” (nas i‘lami) of all: divine revelation. after all, god says: “and never have we sent forth any apostle otherwise than [with a message] in his own people’s tongue, so that he might make [the truth] clear unto them” (qur’an 14:4). while god’s truth is absolute, the revivalists i worked with explained that this truth must be conveyed within shifting human lifeways. the prophet himself had utilized all the media technologies at his disposal in his own da‘wa, tailoring it to his face-to-face addressees. indeed, every prophet conveyed god’s message in not just the language of his people, but through their prized media. moses performed magical feats for a society that valued that; jesus healed the sick at a time when people were plagued by disease; mohammad’s miracle was the qur’an itself, whose linguistic inimitability overwhelmed a society that esteemed poetic expression. and even then, the prophet did not always rely on reciting the qur’an in his own da‘wa; he sometimes told stories, as does god himself in the qur’an. following these divine and prophetic models, the islamic preacher has to convey god’s eternal message in whatever medium resonates best with its current earthly recipients. for these revivalists, medial contingency (and hence diversity) is not only a historical fact but also an ongoing providential mandate. this theology of mediation is implicit to the religious publicity efforts of other islamic television preachers; for example, the indonesian aa gym understood his mission in terms of “rebranding” islam to make it accessible to his middle-class audience (hoesterey 2016). it also goes beyond islamic revivalism; british evangelicals, operating in a secularized milieu that viewed religiosity as “difficult and dull,” premised their innovative biblical outreach projects on the idea that “christ spoke the language of the culture he was in” (engelke 2013, 68, 27). for the new preachers, the language of the culture—and thus the necessary form of religious renewal— is entertainment. to be sure, the producers i worked with at times overstated their own innovation in ways that both neglected continuities with older revivalist aesthetics and the constraints posed by limited budgets. but the fact remains that the production practices i observed were motivated by the assumption that the mediation of da‘wa in new and unexpected forms is germane to its success in moving muslims to greater piety. the challenge is advancing this da‘wa strategy within a revivalist context long shaped by a powerful counterarticulation of what makes media islamic, one that hinged on repudiating entertainment forms, including the “dazzlement” (hirschkind 2006, 183) they engender. it would be a mistake, however, to understand these two da‘wa orientations as simply holding divergent views about which aspects of modern entertainment are compatible with a godly society; at issue here is what dispositions, modes of comportment, and ideals constitute such a society in the first place, not merely what media forms are conducive to its flourishing. as i will explore in the following two sections, the struggle between the new preachers and their salafi counterparts over the religious validity of appropriating western media forms are located within wider theological constellations made to speak to different understandings of divinely created human nature and the role of human mediation in relation to revelation. tired of religion back at the al-sawy seminar, hosny prepared the ground for introducing the album he had made with the pop singer selim. hosny is passionate about being a television preacher. as he tells it, one of his happiest moments came in 2004, when he saw himself for the first time on a video-editing monitor at iqraa. he shed a few tears then, because he realized that his lifelong dream of trying to get as many people as possible to “taste the sweetness of faith” was being fulfilled. this had been hosny’s ambition from a young age. as a high school student, he would tape-record or take notes during mosque sermons and lessons, spend hours committing to memory what he had learned, and then eagerly preach it back to his friends as they passed the evening in the manner favored by most middle-class teenage boys: milling around their neighborhood kiosks sipping soft drinks, music blasting from dented parental cars. the lessons he learned performing for this irreverent, hard-to-please audience proved foundational to his later success on television. one of these lessons was that you cannot sternly scream love for god into most people; far more effective is gently and gradually creating this love by making religion attractive and relevant to them, fun even, and modeling the constant accessibility of godliness to even the most morally lax. in the late 1990s, however, when hosny was in his early twenties, it felt like being religious meant that one “couldn’t have an ordinary life—it meant having to cancel out 99 percent of your life,” he told me. hosny and his producers at iqraa define “ordinary life” (al-hayaa al-‘adiya) largely through participation in the leisure activities available to middle-class urban youth: going to the cinema, spending time at the beach in the summer, playing backgammon in coffee shops, listening to music while cruising. the salafi preachers popular at the time—the “cassette sheikhs,” hosny sometimes calls them, referring to the medium on which their sermons first circulated—promoted as pious a sensibility that shunned such activities as morally corrupting. these preachers had become virtually synonymous with the islamic revival. from hosny’s perspective, this conflation proved problematic, because the norms salafi revivalists propagated were incorrect, unnatural even. the hegemony of these norms within da‘wa circles meant that the visibility of pious commitment had ironically made godliness more difficult to achieve among “ordinary youth” (al-shabab al-‘adi), who now would never even consider the possibility of becoming more religious. hosny told the young egyptians who had come to see him in person at al-sawy that many participants in the da‘wa movement had adopted a holier-than-thou attitude, alienating the very people most in need of guidance. from this perspective, salafi norms created cleavages between those who consider themselves “religious” mutadayyinin, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rest of society, seen by the former as moral failures. salafi pietists have become, hosny lamented, an enclave “far away” from the rest of society. this separation misses what godliness demands: a continual commitment to helping people find ways to be pious within the everyday idioms and rhythms of the present worlds they inhabit, not in the annihilation of these worlds. hosny questions here not only the substance of the salafi counterpublic—its sensibility, sociability, protocols of address, topics of concern—but the very premise of a counterpublic as a normative ideal. a counterpublic can never, from his vantage point, be islamic. subverting this counterpublic was one of hosny’s aims in working with selim, an entertainer with wide mainstream appeal and no previous links to the islamic revival. hosny also ventured into largely uncharted territory in another way with the album, bringing together two things his salafi detractors felt to be incommensurable: music—instruments and all—and piety. against salafi orthodoxy, the new preachers presented the question of the permissibility of instrumental music as open to a range of jurisprudential opinions, all of them religiously legitimate despite salafi claims to the contrary. the choice of which opinion to follow was ultimately a question of individual conviction. to accommodate this range, hosny planned to release two versions of the album, one with instrumental music and one without. in contrast, salafi preachers argued on several television programs dedicated to rebutting such claims that the matter was not open to disagreement in the first place. the reasoning of islamic scholars, however learned, could not trump what they felt to be “clear” qur’anic or prophetic texts prohibiting this music, stating that god will hold muslims accountable for their adherence to these texts, not for their commitment to mere human opinion. as he stood on the stage in al-sawy, hosny played to his audience a few songs from the album. the music reverberated over the blue-black waves of the nile. at the end of each song, most of the listeners applauded. but mixed in with the enthusiasm was a dash of skepticism. it expressed itself that evening in the form of a question scribbled on one of the small pieces of paper that uniformed volunteers passed up in batches to hosny. instead of working with a pop star, why had hosny not collaborated with an exclusively islamic devotional performer (munshid islami)? looking up from the paper, hosny walked over to the edge of the stage. “we can’t be here,” he said, pointing to his feet, “and the rest of society over there.” he gestured to the opposite edge of the stage. if we had used an islamic munshid, only the pious would have bought the cd and these people are tired of religion themselves. they want to hear some music! when a pious guy . . . hears the latest song by [pop star] amr diab, he makes a big show of being morally offended, but he is tapping his foot to the beat. but the balanced person [al-insan al-sawi] who attends religious lessons but also has fun, he doesn’t have this hunger, so when he . . . hears this type of music, he is unaffected because he already has alternatives to listen to. and that is our goal with this album, to create an alternative. within this logic, adopting the largely westernized aesthetics of egyptian popular culture made manifest the mutuality of ta‘aruf as both an important aim for new forms of islamic media in a deeply polarized society and an intrinsic quality of the life such media promoted as godly. but the practical feasibility of ethical living in the everyday depended on the existence of entertainment options responsive to divine dictate. to distinguish this kind of cultural production from one indifferent to religious convictions, producers i worked with used the shorthand al-fann al-hadif, literally, “purposeful art,” better glossed in english as “ethical entertainment.” a similar emphasis on making and consuming morally correct leisure has become prevalent over the past decade within islamic activist circles in both muslim-majority societies and the west (van nieuwkerk 2011; deeb and harb 2013). within egypt, the new preachers have advocated for the religious permissibility of these kinds of artistic productions and contributed to their growing currency among urban middle-class participants in the islamic revival. grounding such advocacy is a particular theological ontology of human nature, one that judges salafi norms unnatural. a few days after the album’s launch, i met up with hosny for an interview. i asked him how he reasoned through the idea that leisure in the islamic tradition is not necessarily predicated on a disciplinary end (hadif tahzibi). he replied: one of the characteristics of human nature is boredom. we don’t like to just do one thing all the time. so if religiosity just means i have to pray all day, i will get bored [hazha’]. if being religious means i have to recite the qur’an all day long, i will be bored. but naturally islam is comprehensive of all aspects of life. to have fun is to be godly, otherwise i would have to draw far away from god, have fun, and then come back to him, which doesn’t make sense. in this theology of attention, being bored or remaining unmoved by religious speech—whether by preachers talking about the qur’an or by listening to the qur’an itself—is not due, as some sermonizers would have it, to an inadequate religious formation (hirschkind 2006, 34) but to the nature of human beings, to the way god created us. even the most pious would be unable to pay attention for more than a few hours without becoming distracted and restless, desirous of something else to break the monotony. instead of judging these bored pietists as failures, cater to them, hosny insisted. give them a way to be religious in the world, not in struggle with the world. give them, in other words, a way to be human as god himself intended. what needed to be promoted within the da‘wa movement, then, was a tadayyun fitri, a natural religiosity, sustainable and realistic, its forms in keeping with, not opposed to, everyday life. fitra is a qur’anic concept referring to human beings’ primordial, god-given nature. it names a positive disposition naturally inclined toward virtue.12 for my interlocutors, the norms propagated by salafi revivalists are un-islamic because they are fundamentally unnatural: they suppress our god-given desires. they would point to the salafi prohibition on music as an example. “even babies sway their bodies when they hear music,” my colleagues on hosny’s team argued. that small children possessing beyond doubt an uncorrupted fitra would spontaneously move with the music gave evidence that this was a divinely sanctioned human inclination. of course, salafi preachers and religious scholars also subscribe to the idea of islam as a natural religion; for them, however, the desire for entertainment is a corrupted one informed by a secular sensibility of what a normal life entails. the misguidance of innovation? for the islamic media producers i worked with, salafi television’s shunning of entertainment media forms discredited it as too conventional. for salafis themselves, however, this avoidance is precisely what made their channels morally authoritative. this argument was brought home to me early in my fieldwork during a conversation with zaynab, a family acquaintance who equates television with the salafi channels and da‘wa with the salafi preaching triumvirate of muhammed hassan, abu ishaq al-huwayni, and muhammad ya‘coub. zaynab enjoyed watching these preachers and felt they offered her practical guidelines for how to live virtuously in what she saw as a largely immoral society. she did not, however, value such preachers for offering “innovative” or “creative” programs; such criteria did not positively enter her viewing calculus the way they did for fans of the new preachers. to the contrary: zaynab knew that much of my interest in doing fieldwork at iqraa stemmed from a curiosity about new forms of islamic da‘wa. from her perspective, however, the types of media iqraa broadcast disqualified it from being an islamic channel and indicated instead that the new preachers were new and inventive in the pejorative sense of “inventing a new religion” (biyikhtu’ru din gadid). she urged me instead to research salafi television channels because they “would never allow the sorts of programs iqraa broadcasts. how can religion be combined with drama or music? entertainment is the opposite of religion [al-fann ‘aks al-din].” for zaynab, “religion” here was synonymous with the truly islamic—and thus with god’s will, whether in matters of this world or the next—and her evaluation of what made entertainment antithetical to religion turned on the fact that she drew the boundaries between the religious and the secular differently than my iqraa interlocutors. these boundaries, in turn, were doctrinally elaborated. a few days after this conversation, zaynab sent me an email with the subject line “the sheikhs’ refutation of the new preachers” with links to youtube videos presenting salafi rebuttals of the new preachers. one was an excerpt from a sermon by al-huwayni, in which he criticizes the new preacher amr khaled for encouraging newly veiled actresses and singers—the so-called repentant artists (see van nieuwkerk 2013)—to continue working in the entertainment industry and not abandon it altogether. al-huwayni lamented that the growth in islamic television channels has given preachers like khaled a platform to disseminate their erroneous ideas. “it is impossible for a man who has opened up even a single book of religious knowledge to say such words,” protested al-huwayni, claiming that all the prophetic traditions khaled uses as evidence for the permissibility of entertainment of whatever kind are fabricated. these video and television sermons hew closely to the themes of their cassette precursors, which also criticized forms of mass entertainment as incompatible with virtue. as charles hirschkind (2006) shows, the disciplined audition of these cassette sermons enacted an islamic counterpublic that distinguished itself from a secular sphere indexed most prominently by popular entertainment. indeed, the need to listen to these tapes resulted from the perception that “the ever-more pervasive western cultural forms—movies, television, music, dress styles, and protocols of sociability—insinuate themselves into the senses most directly, shaping the repertories of affect, gesture, and sensibility that animate and orient practical reasoning” (hirschkind 2006, 213). the islamic counterpublic constitutes a self-conscious response to the troubling sensibilities ostensibly attending such media forms. within intrarevivalist contention, the counterpublic’s constitutive assumption of a generalized, westernized, secular media culture insidiously overwhelming muslims acquires more specificity. far from celebrating the aesthetics of televised popular culture and their ostensibly dazzling capacities for sensory engagement or affective immersion, salafi preachers caution that the already pious are enjoined to judicious restraint, if not outright censure toward such media. what seems to disturb salafi preachers like al-huwayni, then, is that the new preachers are not only introducing such cultural forms into pious spaces—the religious lesson, the da‘wa program—but, even more egregiously, are arguing for their islamic legitimacy. in doing so, the new preachers are committing bid‘a. bid‘a—literally, “innovation”—is extensively thematized within the islamic tradition. most muslim theologians have categorized bid‘a in terms of the axiology of islamic jurisprudence: obligatory, recommended, permissible, reprehensible, and forbidden. this scale could allow transformations in devotional practices, so long as they did not contradict the (variously interpreted) qur’an, prophetic tradition, or scholarly consensus. a bid‘a could thus be praiseworthy or even obligatory for a muslim to perform (rispler 1991; fierro 1992). a minority of premodern islamic scholars rejected this scale, arguing that bid‘a admits of no moral or legal flexibility, being inherently a misguidance (winter 2009). this reasoning that bid‘a is intrinsically un-islamic would be adopted by the eighteenth-century reformer muhammad abdel wahab, the eponymous founder of wahabism, who made the eradication of bid‘a a central platform of his da‘wa (commins 2009). grounding this effort was an understanding of piety as mimetic fidelity to the first muslim community’s practice of islam, one ostensibly free of cultural contingency. the ever-present moral perils of bid‘a constitute a central theme of contemporary egyptian salafism, with many preachers opening their television programs with the prophetic saying: “beware of matters newly begun, for every matter newly begun is innovation [bid‘a], and every innovation is misguidance, and every misguidance is in hell.” salafi preachers warn their viewers against the errors of ahl al-bid‘a, “the people of innovation,” that is, muslims who claim to be following god’s injunctions while in reality pursuing their own desires. in this way, the evaluation of practices or beliefs as bid‘a is not just a technical legal matter but goes to the heart of the question animating all participants in the piety movement: what is pleasing to god? accusations of bid‘a pragmatically work as a moralizing commentary that impugns a muslim’s devotion to divine desire and its embodiment in prophetic praxis. within salafi spaces, the new preachers are frequently scorned as ahl al-bid‘a. over the following several years, zaynab would continue to send me links to salafi critiques of the new preachers, and i began systematically looking for episodes about the new preachers aired on salafi channels. there were many. for example, in 2010, the salafi al-nas channel devoted several episodes to the new preachers, in which preachers such as mazin sarsawi and khalid abdullah charged the new preachers with being “secret sufis”—sufis being the epitome of ahl al-bid‘a in the salafi creed—bent on creating what they called a “fake american islam” that promoted secular norms. polemics aside, what piqued my interest was the careful attention salafi preachers devoted to the form of new preaching programs as evidence of their moral turpitude. in one television episode after another, salafi preachers argued that it was egregious to claim that entertainment forms could be either pleasing to god and the prophet, or vehicles for praising god and the prophet. one salafi preacher likened new forms of islamic media to the act of “presenting halal meat in a pig’s skin . . . this is presenting religion in an impure [najis] form.” the impurity derives partly from such media frequently having music and singing and showing women on screen, all prohibited in salafi orthodoxy. in addition, such content too closely resembles western entertainment media, rendering muslims liable to the sin of al-tashabuh bi al-kuffar, or imitating nonbelievers. crucial to this evaluation is the specific interpretation of bid‘a within salafi doctrine. as the mass mediation of islam as “call” (see spadola 2013) became the object of continual care and concern by muslims generally, reformers of all theological and political persuasions continued a long tradition of moral inquiry into the religious permissibility of specific media technologies and forms in which the language of bid‘a was germane. but what distinguishes modern salafi theology is the extent to which illicitness can be a function of provenance, regardless of the intrinsic morality of the form or practice itself or, indeed, its novelty. the doctrines grounding such reasoning are multiple, but an important one is that of al-wala’ wal-bara’, loyalty and disavowal, a standard topic of salafi television sermonizing. in its first (albeit always contested) formulations, the doctrine enjoined that muslims should show loyalty to their coreligionists and disavow the ways of non-muslims. modern salafi wahabi scholars recuperated the doctrine as a foundational tenet of islamic orthodoxy that governed interaction and sociability not just between muslims and non-muslims but among muslims themselves, seeing it as an important discursive tool in the ever-present struggle against bid‘a (wagemakers 2009, 2012). thus the doctrine became directed at muslims engaging in un-islamic practices, including their failure to abandon and declare their enmity to non-muslim ways, evinced, for example, in their dress, comportment, and cultural references. within the egyptian piety movement, the broader moral logic animating this doctrine—that maintaining what its advocates saw as an “islamic” distinctiveness is necessary to virtuous living and after-life salvation—would become criterial for salafis’ negative appraisals of new preaching programs. in one representative criticism, the outspoken salafi preacher wagdi ghoneim wonders how the new preachers could even consider themselves islamic preachers when they neither look islamic—being unbearded or insufficiently bearded—nor draw exclusively on the qur’an and the sunnah in their homiletics, marshaling instead references from popular culture to philosophy to poetry. “if [preachers] don’t limit themselves to god-says/the-prophet-said, you should know then that they are quacks,” ghoneim argues in a television program excerpted on youtube. as we saw, this is precisely the da‘wa form that iqraa producers on hosny’s team abjure as boring and conventional. but for ghoneim, for da‘wa to be da‘wa, it must exclusively adhere to this putatively unadorned discursive form. ghoneim’s critique of the new preachers prescriptively orients to divine revelation as possessing a moral efficacy completely autonomous of mediating human artifacts. the qur’an as god’s message to humankind does not need to be packaged, strategized, brainstormed, focus-grouped or, indeed, inventively mediated. it dazzles on its own.13 from this perspective, new preachers continually calling attention to the medium of pious outreach as mattering, as something that needs deliberate and creative exploiting for a message—including a divine one—to be compelling or resonant to its addressees, is as egregious as their self-conscious appropriation of western aesthetics. such efforts to create new ways of doing da‘wa—and, by extension, new visual and sonic expectations of pious publicity that resemble too closely that of secular culture—open the door to innovation in religious discipline, to bid‘a, and imply that the qur’an is not enough to move humans to greater piety. video 3. excerpt from the documentary pop goes islam (2011), directed by ismail el-mokadem. here, ahmed abu haibah, amr khaled’s debut producer, debates the launch of his islamic music-video channel with sheikh yusuf al-badri. abu haibah is an influential advocate for new forms of islamic media. al-badri was known for his high-profile court cases against “un-islamic” intellectuals and cultural producers in egypt. video courtesy of alegria productions. while the new preachers also adhere to the orthodox doctrine of qur’anic inimitability, they claim that the qur’anic message nevertheless needs to be presented in ways that engage their target audience of middle-class urban youth. in a postmillennium globalized media environment, that means through entertainment. doing so is in keeping with the qur’an’s own avowal of a single eternal message delivered via a variety of differently situated messengers and contingent forms across time. da‘wa practitioners should stay true to this divine dynamism in their own efforts to propagate god’s final revelation. at the same time, the new preachers share with their salafi counterparts the assessment that the sensuous dimensions of entertainment are powerful and potentially morally perilous. in an episode in his 2012 ramadan series worldly enchantments, strategically shot on location in dazzling dubai and istanbul, hosny proposes that modern entertainment is beguiling: it entrances us, potentially corrupting our fitra. but it is precisely entertainment’s power to affect us that makes its skilled exploitation ethically incumbent on islamic preachers as professional promoters of piety. song and sermon do not have to compete for the sensory attention of believers but can conjoin to amplify godliness. there are no qualms here about muslims consuming religious media as entertainment or for leisurely distraction (hirschkind 2006, 92)—that is precisely the goal. this is not to say that salafis’ own investment in the changing communicative infrastructure of pious propagation is negligible. in an important way, the history of the salafi wahabi mission—and the enviable authority that the norms propagated by its adherents have come to enjoy within revivalist circles throughout the muslim world—can be told through the changing technologies of mass publicity that salafi revivalists have adopted with alacrity over the past two centuries, from the printing press to radio to television to digital media. more to the point, the rhetorical forms of salafi sermons, notwithstanding their condemnatory substance, draw on disparate traditions, from political speeches to cinematic techniques to sufism (hirschkind 2006). in censuring the new preachers as un-islamic, salafi preachers are neither self-deluded nor duplicitous about their own da‘wa forms; rather, in common with other practitioners across religious traditions, they have come to see some forms of religious mediation (e.g., a sermon recorded on cassette or on camera) as not in fact mediated in any significant sense, as “im-mediate” (see meyer 2011).14 crucially, the new preachers’ own disparagement of the salafis for conflating da‘wa with direct moral exhortation exclusively citing the islamic tradition’s two foundational texts (god-says/the-prophet-said) also hinges on an assumption that some television performances are more or less mediated than others. recall emad’s lament that salafi preachers approach television as if it were radio, exhibiting what he saw as a negligent indifference to the technical-aesthetic affordances of a medium at once auditory and visual. unlike emad, salafi television preachers (and salafi-identifying viewers like zaynab) laud their programs as further evidence of their channels’ promotion of “true islam” through genuinely islamic means, means avowedly untainted by religious innovation, especially innovation in the direction of secular cultural forms. the point is that even if salafi activists may in their own way be as promiscuous as their new preaching counterparts, only the latter metadiscursively promote medial innovation through aesthetic appropriation as a theologically justified—and, indeed, enjoined—form of persuasive religious outreach. the various doctrinal thematizations of salafi objections to such a claim illustrate that contestations over the means of islamic propagation are inextricable from internal disagreements over its ends. indeed, the competing revivalist orientations described here are not just matters of varying rhetorical framing. they cut deep as they offer religiously grounded criteria for evaluating what makes media “islamic,” predicating distinctive ways of imagining and practicing piety. disagreements about media become proxies for wider debates about what is essential to human nature and pious attachment and how one can be true to both given the everyday moral challenges of modern life, not least those posed by mass media. conclusion: whose critique? islamic revivalists see themselves as passionately concerned with leading a life pleasing to god and with calling others to do the same. but, as i have shown, while they profess their commitment to piety as the most significant aspiration of their lives as muslims (and, indeed, in their view of any properly islamic life), they do not share a singular pious sensibility. salafi pietists repudiate western cultural forms as incompatible with cultivating the attributes necessary for virtuous conduct, while their new preaching counterparts embrace such forms in their television da‘wa. this difference indexes competing formations of what an ethical life entails, foregrounding the ways in which the boundaries of the religious and the secular—and the sensibilities these boundaries authorize, the forms of life they sanction—are variously configured within the piety movement, even while its participants unanimously reject secularism as political doctrine. attending to the internal contentions that these differences provoke requires attending to the fundamentally different conceptions of human flourishing and divine obligation that animate the piety movement. it is to approach the islamic tradition as it matters to muslims themselves: as theology, or “god-talk” (chittick 2008, 221), broadly construed. by way of conclusion, i would like to think briefly about the stakes of such a recasting for questions of anthropological critique. salafi muslims are the current abject other in western media and policy discourses on islam. all too often, salafi doctrines are dissected as gateways to violent ideologies and terrorist activities.15 under such scrutiny, the mere fact of adopting pious norms that run counter to a conception of religion as a matter of private, interior faith is deemed problematic. anthropologists studying conservative religious activists have highlighted the moral disgust felt by liberal and leftist scholars toward such groups, with saba mahmood (2005) memorably writing of her visceral feelings of repugnance toward aspects of the piety movement she studied in egypt. she proposes to make such feelings an object of inquiry with the aim of provincializing the secular norms that underpin them. in response, samuli schielke (2015, 92) argues that the normative impulses internal to religious power should also be interrogated given the “hegemonic normality” of such power in egypt. from this perspective, an anthropological critique of revivalist norms creates space for taking seriously ordinary egyptians’ vacillation toward piety. importantly, both of these anthropological stances construct the piety movement as a domain for working out political and ethical differences largely external to the concerns of its practitioners. framing the study of islam as a challenge to “our own” secular understandings and values shifts attention from muslim adepts’ own struggles over the definition of the good and the nature of a life well-lived. similarly, mounting an anthropological critique of the piety movement occludes an understanding of it as a diverse practice to which participants bring their own critical questions. that is, critique is something in which pietists themselves engage against each other. this tendency to overlook internal struggle has become evident in a recent debate over the so-called everyday turn in the anthropology of islam. the debate addresses how anthropologists should apprehend the relationship between ordinary life and piety, with one camp seeing the disciplinary stress on the everyday as indicative of “secular-liberal sensibilities” (fadil and fernando 2015, 61) and the other seeing it as a much-needed complication of pietists’ own disciplinary aspirations (schielke 2010). but the relationship between religious norms and ordinary life is precisely what is at stake for revivalists themselves in their own critiques of different forms of da‘wa media. by debating analytically what religious adepts contest normatively, anthropologists neglect religiously grounded arguments about different forms of islamic attachment in favor of religious–secular or pious–impious binaries, missing that these binaries are not stable but configured differently through god-talk.16 what the debate frames as an anthropological divide turns out to be a theological one. instead of worrying about what crypto-political sensibilities anthropological turns entrench or resist, we could ask what insights into religious life become possible when we shift our attention from the discomfiture of the anthropological observer to that of the anthropological subject. during fieldwork, i was repeatedly struck by the repugnance my interlocutors in the world of islamic television production evinced toward the sensibilities animating their salafi coparticipants. another way to provincialize secular norms while remaining attuned to their religious correlates, then, might be to examine the local power dynamics of this (mutual) aversion as pietists struggle with each other over the definition of the islamic. such a focus avoids what sherry ortner (1995) has called “the problem of ethnographic refusal,” one partly borne of “the impulse to sanitize the internal politics of the dominated” (ortner 1995, 179) lest powerful external actors and the structural asymmetries reproducing their power be let off the hook.17 our analytical frameworks would thus be attuned to the islamic tradition as a constellation of contested practices and norms only legible as “islamic” for some religious actors and not others. as we have seen, islamic revivalists like the new preachers, who are themselves wary of secularized formations of religiosity, nevertheless critique salafism as promoting an unnatural religiosity. this does not mean that they discount salafism; rather, they take it seriously in what for them is the most important way: theologically, as a rival foray into god-talk. anthropologists have recently called for taking god seriously as a “social actor” (bialecki 2014, 38), while remaining methodologically indifferent to the question of god’s existence.18 such an ethnographic stance contrasts with theology, where there is little room for indifference to the ontological status of god on the part of the analyst. unlike theologians, we as anthropologists routinely proceed as if god did not matter analytically, as if the divinely mandated relations of obligation that bind us to each other and to this earth should not shape social-scientific ways of knowing. while as teachers and researchers, we welcome religious perspectives in our classrooms and may privilege them in our ethnographies, in common with other disciplines in the global western academy we seldom explicitly make religious warrants the basis of either our pedagogy or our theorizing, a situation that is itself partly the result of a complicated christian theological history (gregory 2012). as anthropologists of religion, then, we are not really looking from the inside out, or at least not from the same inside as our pious interlocutors, even if our personal religious lives overlap significantly with theirs. by contrast, even when we question secular suppositions, we only do so from the secular presupposition of divinity as unnecessary to the labor of analysis. this holds even when the ethnographic terrain for this analytical labor is a theistic tradition. put differently, when we study islam anthropologically, islam is not, in that process, our tradition, even when we are muslim anthropologists. our critical engagement with it is not an internal, normative one, one conducted within that tradition’s own sources of authority and appeal. if we seek to be morally responsible in our analysis, we can argue about the islamic tradition, but not with it, to repurpose an important provocation by talal asad (1995). this is less a point about insider–outsider positionality and more about how the telos of critique is inextricable from the shared premises that make arguing with something possible in the first place. for revivalists this would include recognition of divine agency in human history and acknowledgment of divinely defined limits to human action, even as what those limits are and what modes of being they authorize is precisely what internal critique seeks to ascertain. one way to take god seriously anthropologically, then, is to pay attention to how religious subjects themselves do so, to trace ethnographically the social life of theology as a space of critical contestation. in the case of egypt’s islamic revival, an emphasis on internal critique invites us to notice the differing investments muslims bring to the islamic tradition, investments that stem from divergent imaginations of both what it means to be human and what god desires. contests over what makes media islamic are particularly revealing of these divergent theologies, not least because of their shared assumption that media-making constitutes an object of divine interest and adjudication. set against the fractures of the piety movement, these theologies, including their mass mediation on satellite television, shape the means and ends of critique with stakes much higher than our own: attaining divine pleasure in this world and the next. notes acknowledgments jatin dua, tessa farmer, sherine hamdy, michael lempert, amira mittermaier, ram natarajan, andrew shryock, and ana maria vinea offered excellent feedback on various drafts of this article. i am grateful for their insights. colleagues at the university of arkansas, cornell university, leiden university, the university of michigan, and northwestern university (especially jessica winegar), as well as at the 2017 annual meeting of the american anthropological association in washington, d.c. (particularly katherine ewing) shared many useful suggestions on this material. cultural anthropology’s anonymous reviewers gave the gift of critique that was at once challenging and constructive, and the journal’s editors offered invaluable guidance. my friends and colleagues at iqraa’s cairo branch were generous with their time, welcoming of my presence, and patient with my questions. this article is based on fieldwork funded by the wenner-gren foundation, the fulbright-hays program, the national science foundation, and the social science research council, with writing support from the michigan society of fellows. i dedicate this article to the memory of saba mahmood, whose scholarship indelibly transformed our understandings of muslim piety. 1. i use producers as a catchall term to describe the variety of roles and positions held by individuals working at iqraa’s cairo branch in general and, more specifically, on hosny’s dedicated production team. throughout the article, i employ pseudonyms for both producers and viewers, and i have changed identifying details. 2. see lacroix 2009 for a sketch of this figure; see also gauvain 2013 on salafi da‘wa networks in egypt, including a discussion of al-albani. 3 the piety’s movement model of self-cultivation should not be taken as paradigmatic of muslim religiosity in egypt (see mittermaier 2012). 4. disciplinary interest in theology is increasing, including recent programmatic reflections on what a “theologically engaged anthropology” (lemons, forthcoming) and “anthropological theologies” (fountain and lau 2013) might look like. 5. salafi-wahabi preachers and the new preachers follow two theological schools: atharism and ash‘arism, respectively. these (internally diverse) schools’ conceptions of divine attributes are subjects of elite debate and rarely figure on islamic television programs; on the history of athari–ash‘ari disputes, see qadhi 2016. interestingly, theology—whose self-described ambit goes beyond speculative theology (kalam) to include jurisprudence, ethics, and creed, as well as ways of interpreting human religious experiences and their sociocultural contexts (renard 2014) —has been a neglected focus within islamic studies, as recent anthologies have pointed out (winter 2008; schmidtke 2016). 6. the egyptian state has a tactical attitude toward the islamic television sector’s various orientations, alternating between repudiation and accommodation. elsewhere, i address islamic television producers’ own concerns about transnational capital, the security state, and increasingly fraught geopolitics (moll 2017). 7. for introductions to the ethnographic literature on religion and media, see meyer and moors 2006, morgan 2008, and meyer 2009. de vries and weber 2001 offer contributions with a more philosophical approach. for thoughtful reviews, see stolow 2005, hirschkind and larkin 2008, engelke 2010, and eisenlohr 2011. 8. in his astute article on the dilemmas of immediacy in sound recordings of sufi devotional poetry in mauritius, patrick eisenlohr (2009, 285) uses the phrase “theologies of mediation” to refer to the tacit theological assumptions shaping peoples’ use and understanding of media technologies in religious settings. in contrast, my concern here is with theology as an explicit argumentative terrain for islamic revivalists’ contested claims about media. these claims ontologically orient to mediation as a subject of providential and prophetic proclamation. 9. in 2010, there were 96 religious channels (both islamic and christian) broadcasting into egypt on four satellite operators, 18 of which were transmitting on semi-government-owned nilesat. the total number of channels on nilesat in 2010 was 539. the operating budgets of mainstream entertainment channels dwarf even the most well-funded islamic satellite channels: for example, mbc’s 2011 budget was $30 million compared to al-resalah’s $5 million. 10. at the same time, to the chagrin of secular artists, the increasingly religious sensibilities of egypt’s middle class act as de facto constraints on what could be feasibly depicted on screen without financial risk or public outcry. in general, secularists are less worried about using media to make normative religious claims and more about evaluating media content through religious criteria. see kubala 2013 for an excellent analysis of how this distinction plays out in a debate iqraa staged between egyptian secularists and islamists. 11. for an in-depth discussion of cosmopolitanism and class in relation to egyptian youth culture, see peterson 2011. 12. the stress on natural disposition, din al-fitra, is a hallmark of contemporary islamic theology (griffel 2007; march 2015). islam is such in the sense that all humans are created with a disposition to be muslim, a disposition that may be corrupted by upbringing or environment. but islam is a natural religion in another sense: its ethical injunctions are in harmony with human nature. islam does not ask anything of us that we are not already inclined to perform and value. divinely mandated rules exist to facilitate the actualization, not repression, of our natural disposition. 13. this valorization of immediacy extends to recitations of the qur’an itself. michael frishkopf (2009, 107) shows how the wahabi-salafi style deliberately reduces melodic embellishment to sonically emphasize an “unmediated directness” while censuring as bid‘a the long association in egypt between qur’anic recitation and musical traditions—a synergy that enabled the professionalization of recitation as artistic pursuit. that the theologies of mediation i encountered within islamic television production extend to religious practices like recitation suggests a broader “semiotic ideology” (keane 2018) at work here. 14. perceptions of immediacy change over time. media technologies once subject to intense religious scrutiny and debate (e.g., radio) can become routinely accepted as transparently communicative—until their use by new islamic actors resurfaces their status as transformative human artifacts (see schulz 2012). 15. these discussions generally elide the robust mainline salafi critique of jihadi-salafi movements and political theologies (see wagemakers 2011). 16. for example, nadia fadil and mayanthi fernando (2015, 70) argue that “the efficacy of norms is not only determined by their realization but also by conscious and unconscious discursive and affective attachments to them, irrespective of one’s ‘actual’ practices.” but the question of attachment versus practice is a matter of theological contention among revivalists themselves. for hosny, a godly person might not be praying regularly but is trying to. this metric of godliness is anathema to salafi revivalists, for whom, to be muslim, it is not enough to aspire to regular prayer, or to concede its obligatory nature; one has to actually pray. 17. writing on the perils (and hopes) of public 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https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12116. winter, tim, ed. 2008 the cambridge companion to classical islamic theology. new york: cambridge university press. winter, t. j. 2009 “the poverty of fanaticism.” in islam, fundamentalism, and the betrayal of tradition: essays by western muslim scholars, edited by joseph e. b. lumbard, 301–313. revised and expanded edition. bloomington, ind.: world wisdom. appearances of disability and christianity in uganda appearances of disability and christianity in uganda tyler zoanni university of bayreuth https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2519-107x unfailingly, whenever i greeted maimuna, she would ask me for a photograph: kuba ekifaananyi, she would insist, using the luganda idiom for photography (“strike an image”).1 with graying, short-cropped hair, and likely in her forties, maimuna is a ugandan woman who lives in l’arche, which is uganda’s only dedicated home for people with cognitive disabilities, and part of a transnational catholic network of such homes.2 i would always comply with maimuna’s request, take out my phone, snap the photo, and show her, while she would respond with a shriek of delight. i was puzzled by the requests, because maimuna does not own a phone or other means of viewing the photos. i finally asked maimuna the question that felt obvious yet impertinent: why did she demand the photographs? i had anticipated she might say something about enjoying seeing herself. instead, maimuna declared that she wanted to “help.” perplexed, i asked how; maimuna responded that i would show the pictures to my friends in the united states, and that this would inspire them to “help the children” in l’arche. maimuna’s understanding of these cell-phone photos remains with me, and not simply because her aspirations to circulate her image as a way to affect others departs from euro-american critiques of inspiration and pity as problematic frames for disabled people (young 2012; cf. livingston 2006). maimuna sees her images as capable of moving others and eliciting material benefit that would arrive through networks i embodied. she held this theory without telling me and had drawn me into reproducing her image unwittingly. wittingly, i have done so once more here. figure 1. in one of the countless photos maimuna asked me to take, she poses with a l'arche staff member. photo by tyler zoanni. maimuna, one might say, demanded what judith butler (2015, 25) has called “the right to appear,” though for reasons that will become clear, right and its liberal connotations are not the best frame for the kind of disability politics that maimuna’s call for charitable help implies. butler is one of a cluster of recent thinkers (e.g., rancière 1999; nancy 2000; seel 2005) who have drawn on hannah arendt’s (1998) discussion of appearance. for arendt (1998, 50), the possibility of appearing—that is, “being seen and heard by others as well as ourselves”—constitutes the distinctiveness of human beings and the basis for meaningful political action. though certain aspects of arendt’s discussion of appearance fit with regnant tropes of liberal identity politics (e.g., having voice, being seen), her account gestures at a vision of social and political life irreducible to claims about identities, rights, and self-representation. arendt’s discussion also works self-consciously against an idealism deeply engrained in western thinking at least since plato, an idealism that distinguishes between “(true) being and (mere) appearance” (arendt 1981, 23) and denigrates the latter as a deceptive impediment to understanding the former. yet if arendt’s notion of appearances challenges some central assumptions within western thought, it resonates with a sensibility that is widely evident in uganda, a social aesthetics that we see in maimuna’s desire to be photographed. arendt’s concern with appearance thus serves in this article as an analytic device, helping to name and thematize key dynamics of social life in uganda. in turn, attention to disability helps us appreciate the highly fraught nature of appearance as an aspiration for those who—in the way they sound, look, and act—prove highly disturbing to many people. such attention underscores the fact that the capacity to appear is unevenly socially distributed, far more readily available to the kinds of humans who fit into dominant expectations about minds and bodies and how they are supposed to look and act in public life. the efforts that i consider in this article not only acknowledge the force of appearance in uganda; they also work to challenge some of its exclusions. at first glance, disability appears quite prominently in uganda. the country has some of the most progressive disability laws in the world, such as mandated representation for people with disabilities at every level of government, including five reserved seats in parliament. additionally, uganda is home to a vibrant disability activist community that focuses on mobility and sensory disabilities (abimanyi-ochom and mannan 2014). as will become clear below, uganda’s progressive laws and assertive activists follow liberal logics of self-representation, and it is precisely these liberal logics that have had excluded large swathes of disabled ugandans. thus, in contemporary uganda, there is dedicated disability media coverage on television, on radios, and in newspapers, but the country’s disability laws are often not enforced or funded, and they have made little difference for the material circumstances of the vast majority of disabled ugandans. what is more, issues relating to cognitive disability disappear in national conversations. in this context of relative neglect, christian groups provide almost all of what little dedicated care and advocacy exist for ugandans with cognitive disabilities. this article’s account of appearance, cognitive disability, and the efforts of ugandan christian groups serves to advance an emergent anthropology of disability, as well as the interdisciplinary field of disability studies. important paradigmatic efforts have sought to establish that disability constitutes a form of human difference as fundamental as more well-studied matters like race, class, gender, and sexuality (kasnitz and shuttleworth 2001; ginsburg and rapp 2013). anthropologists have attended, for example, to novel forms of disability kinship (landsman 2009; rapp and ginsburg 2011), sociality (ochs and solomon 2010), and citizenship (das and addlakha 2001; rapp and ginsburg 2001; mckearney 2017); the economic and political activities of people with mobility disabilities (kohrman 2005; whyte and muyinda 2007; phillips 2011; devlieger 2018); deaf social worlds and activisms (nakamura 2006; friedner 2015); the sexual lives of disabled people (kulick and rydström 2015); the emergence and globalization of new disability categories (grinker 2007); the aftermath of disabling violence (ralph 2012; wool 2015); and the ways in which the rhetoric of disability politics may be co-opted (friedner 2017; hartblay 2017). much like the interdisciplinary field of disability studies (barker and murray 2013; grech and soldatic 2016), however, this research has largely focused on disability in the global north in the context of what elizabeth a. povinelli (2002, 5) calls the “liberal diaspora,” where disability as a social category and disability politics both arise through the grids of rights-based claims-making and identity politics, as well as through highly secular visions of agency, politics, and belonging (staples and mehrotra 2016; friedner 2018; friedner and zoanni 2018). against this backdrop, i explore the contours of a nonsecular, nonliberal politics of disability made possible by ugandan christian efforts. this exploration brings into view forms of disability collectivity and publicity beyond the highly secular, euro-american frames that tend to dominate disability studies. it also expands the forms of human difference that appear in scholarly and political attention focused on disability. as don kulick and jens rydström (2015, 15) note, the field of disability studies has tended to ignore “the most significantly disabled” in favor of “the kinds of politically aware, combative, independent, and articulate disabled subjects who have always been at the center of both disability activism and academic disability studies” (see also mckearney and zoanni 2018). in other words, disability politics and activism privilege a particular vision of the person, which might be quite reasonably named as the liberal individual. in turn, this reliance on a liberal vision of the person so as to recuperate certain disabled subject positions effaces people like maimuna, who can never appear as such. the analysis that follows is grounded in two christian institutions: l’arche and special children’s trust (sct), respectively a catholic home and a pentecostal school that are the oldest and largest institutions of their kind in uganda. using a set of comparisons (englund 2000; robbins, schieffelin, and vilaça 2014; scherz 2014), the article traces points of similarity and difference between these two christian institutions, as well as between christian and secular disability politics in uganda. these comparisons bring into view the different modes of disability appearance that l’arche and sct foster, while underlining something they share: the construal of people with cognitive disabilities as “children,” as maimuna herself put it above. this appearance of people with cognitive disabilities as children becomes the basis for constituting them as persons beyond the realm of self-representation, something privileged in uganda’s national disability politics. all of this may be stated quite simply: even as christian paternalism in response to cognitive disability may appear deeply repugnant to a liberal vision of disability politics, it sustains a disability appearance in uganda that is otherwise not possible. the will to appear maimuna sees the cultivation of a certain form of publicity as beneficial for l’arche, the catholic home where she lives. she views cell-phone images of disabled l’arche residents as capable of inspiring people to help. that maimuna should turn to images and the visual as a vehicle for publicity is notable insofar as the sight of people like maimuna frequently proves disturbing in uganda—this much is apparent in the unabashed gawking that maimuna draws in public settings, as well as in the fact that people like maimuna are rarely seen in such settings. an important conversation within disability studies understands aesthetic matters as fundamental to political and social life. julie livingston (2008), writing about botswana, has powerfully explored the ways in which the visceral aesthetics of atypical bodies challenge the ideological abstractions of both african humanist and liberal rights discourses. more generally, a range of scholars examine the ways that “extraordinary bodies,” as the cultural critic rosemarie garland-thomson (1997) puts it, draw intense visual scrutiny from the nondisabled (bogdan 1988; adams 2001; schweik 2010). garland-thomson (2009) further argues that while staring is often stigmatized as a form of rudeness in north america, it can also be the basis of ethically and politically transformative encounters with disability, an opportunity to reckon with and be challenged by embodied human difference. recent anthropological conversations broaden this concern with the visual, exploring the important role of mass-mediated images and narratives produced by and about disabled people in redefining the meanings and values of disability in north america (rapp and ginsburg 2007; ginsburg 2012). though maimuna’s efforts to appear through my cell-phone camera surprised me, perhaps they shouldn’t have, and not only because of arendt: these efforts reflect assumptions fundamental to the social aesthetics of buganda, a kingdom in south-central uganda that comprises the country’s largest ethnic group. by social aesthetics i mean norms and assumptions about what human life and collectivity should look and feel like (brenneis 1987; macdougall 1999; elisha 2008). anyone who spends even a short time in buganda will notice some of the key dynamics of ganda social aesthetics: often highly ritualized forms of display are central to a variety of important social transactions—events like meetings, weddings, bar outings, burials, church services—where the public presentation of people and relationships is enacted and foregrounded in various ways (by being commented on, announced, described, etc.). the very organization of the built environment is structured to enable such presentations: the courtyards of the churches, houses, palaces, and hotels that serve as the primary venues for social gatherings and public functions all feature large amounts of centrally located open space affording display.3 these settings enable the crucial displays of self that have been and remain important for social life across precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial moments. from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, british observers—missionaries and anthropologists alike—were struck again and again by ganda investments in what audrey i. richards (1964b, 297) described as a “general concern with appearances.” she went on to observe: there is a dignity and gravitas about public life which is characteristic, and within the house, before a visitor, great attention to decorum and display—for instance to the nice arrangement of each embroidered table cloth or lace mat and to the setting out of dishes or tea cups. europeans are often criticized in such homes if they appear in dishevelled or casual clothes or behave in slap-dash fashion. (richards 1964b, 298) mid-twentieth century ganda elites often found europeans unacceptably sloppy in, for example, their penchant for shorts and safari gear (richards 1964b, 288), while europeans, for their part, were impressed by elegant tea services, elaborate royal pageantry, and imposing construction projects in buganda (hattersley 1908, 7; richards 1964a, 274–75; kodesh 2001). today, major events of life in buganda continue to foreground people displaying restrained and refined speech, charisma, and poise. these appearances constitute moments in which productive, hierarchical, and properly regulated relationships are made visible and affirmed (cf. summers 2006; peterson 2012, 19, 78–104). such appearances prove central to fostering exchanges of sentiment and money; to facilitating life-cycle transitions like graduations, baptisms, and marriages; and to maintaining the networks of obligation and interdependence that are central to ugandan social life (scherz 2014).4 appearing as socially and biologically reproductive is particularly important (boyd 2013), as are physical features, the body, and its adornment; people put a great deal of effort into matters like thoroughly cleaned and pressed clothing, shining skin, and neatly groomed bodies, all difficult tasks in an often hot and dusty environment. it is in this work of appearance that people come to embody and publicly display visions of normative personhood. a canonical (and by now perhaps conventional) anthropological observation is that, in contrast to ideologies of the individual, people in many parts of africa are not imagined as prior to or separate from their relationships with others. instead, connection to and reliance on others is understood as a central aspect of personhood (see comaroff and comaroff 2001). yet even highly relational visions of personhood, like visions of personhood everywhere, presuppose a normative trajectory of development, maturation, and socialization, and it is just such a trajectory that cognitive disability frustrates (zoanni 2018). indeed, someone like maimuna can never appear as a person is supposed to in a place where appearances matter deeply and on many fronts. in her markedly unconventional life trajectory as well as her manifestly non-normative body and speech, she violates ganda scripts for being an adult, for being a woman, and for being human. and even normatively embodied ugandans with cognitive disabilities prove disturbing insofar as they do not use language or behave in expected ways. people often speculate that such pronounced forms of disability result from spiritual trouble such as witchcraft. there is also a common notion that some conditions are transmissible, capable of circulating through saliva, blood, and urine. epilepsy, in particular, is thought to be contagious, but generalized anxieties arise in the face of any form of pronounced disability: these always posed a potential to harm others insofar as they could spread a spirit, witchcraft, or other vectors of spiritual affliction. for all these reasons, appearance is fraught terrain for someone like maimuna. nonetheless, she works within the logics of the social aesthetics that her appearance violates, logics in which displays of self can do transformative social work. in this way, a sense of ganda social aesthetics helps us appreciate the stakes of maimuna’s own presentation of self and her bid to appear via my cell-phone photos to an imagined audience of my friends in the united states. her efforts reflect the idiosyncrasies of maimuna’s personality, to be sure, but they are not isolated; instead, such efforts form part of larger sets of institutionalized ways in which organizations like l’arche and sct work to make cognitive disability appear. i will come back to these efforts in a moment, but first, to underscore their distinctiveness, i consider the ways that secular and liberal politics make cognitive disability disappear in uganda. liberal disapperances “children are persons too!” exclaimed florence. it was a muggy saturday morning in june 2017, and florence was furious. the director of sct, uganda’s largest and oldest school for what the born-again (balokole) christians who run it term “special needs,” florence is normally a reserved, even reticent person. but this morning she had lost her patience with fred, a representative from the national union of disabled persons in uganda (nudipu). fred, in the course of explaining nudipu’s history, structure, and principles, had emphasized that it was difficult to imagine how children’s organizations could ever be nudipu members, since they were not run by disabled children themselves. how could organizations that did not involve disabled self-representation—organizations that were for but not of disabled people—be a part of nudipu? that saturday morning, leaders of most of uganda’s ten or so dedicated homes and schools for people with cognitive disabilities had joined florence in nudipu’s tin-roofed conference room, under a large banner declaring in assertive capital letters: “disability is not inabilty.” these individuals had traveled from throughout the country to kampala, uganda’s capital and largest city, to attend the meeting, a discussion about how these groups could participate in nudipu. what they found was not promising. the tension in the room was palpable, and many who did not speak were angrily rocking in place, sighing, whispering to neighbors, or rolling their eyes. another group’s leader, herself the mother of a disabled child, snapped that it sounded like nudipu did not “care.” with biting sarcasm, she offered to show the nudidu staff person a photo of her son on her phone in case he was not convinced how much “need” there was. fred apologetically said that he was not defending the situation, only being realistic about it. the meeting ended with cake and sodas, which lightened the mood a bit, but the conversation did not move beyond its impasse, and people left muttering. the impasse at that saturday morning meeting manifests the wider dilemma of national disability politics in uganda, as well as the liberal logics on which it relies. in 1987 nudipu came into existence when a wide range of regionally based disabled persons’ organizations (dpos) focusing on physical disabilities, blindness, and deafness together formed a national umbrella organization. this moment occurred as uganda returned to a measure of stability following decades of ongoing conflicts, with current president yoweri museveni’s national resistance movement (nrm) the new ruling party. the notion of self-representation was central to the formation of nupidu. as one of the organization’s brochures put it: before the formation of nudipu in november 1987, persons with disabilities (pwds) in uganda were not involved in the planning and implementation of programmes meant to benefit them. mainstream programmes and the environment were constructed/designed in a manner that depicted lack of recognition and sensitivity to the needs of pwds. the services provided emphasized separation of pwds from the communities and were seen as the preserve for charity endeavours. this scenario obscured and isolated disability issues from the society’s main concerns[;] . . . created dependency on institutions; stifled individual initiatives, killed the morale, self-esteem and confidence amongst pwds. by establishing nudipu, the founders aimed at creating a unified voice to challenge the above situation, embark on a systematic and long drawn out struggle to gradually free persons with disabilities from the bondage that reduced them to sub-humans. such an account advances an emancipatory narrative premised on a liberal logic of self-representation. the brochure suggests that both the built environment and charitable programs for disabled ugandans proved oppressive precisely because they were governed by the perspectives of the nondisabled. the ostensible solution to this problem—the project of liberating people with disabilities from “bondage” and “sub-human” status—involved moving beyond “charity endeavours” while making sure that “persons with disabilities” were “involved in the planning and implementation of programmes meant to benefit them.” this logic became central to ugandan disability politics in the context of explicit state recognition in the late 1980s. when museveni’s nrm came to power, it pursued an agenda of empowering so-called “vulnerable” groups like women, youth, and people with disabilities. activists took advantage of this state support to begin building disability organizations at a national level. members of uganda’s founding generation of disability activists tend to be urban and highly educated. in contrast to people like maimuna, these activists are able to engage in social and economic life relatively fully, even as their unconventional bodies may raise questions about their capacities to be productive persons (see sentumbwe 1995). often, they are the products of the very schools and charitable institutions they set out to challenge. reflecting this early leadership, and as is the case for disability activism in many parts of the world, the concerns of adults with physical disabilities, deafness, and blindness define disability activism in uganda today. in contrast, ugandans with cognitive disabilities remain largely excluded from national disability politics. no one active in nudipu or in any of the mandated disability seats in parliament has a cognitive disability. the parents, caregivers, and guardians of people with cognitive disabilities are also excluded from participation in groups like nudipu, on the grounds that representation of disabled people by the nondisabled would violate the principle of self-representation. moreover, cognitively disabled people largely do not benefit from the series of special-education laws that uganda’s parliament began to pass in the late 1990s. in principle, these laws guarantee a free education for all children with disabilities. in practice, like national disability activism itself, the disabled people who benefit from these legal guarantees are those children with physical impairments, blindness, or deafness who can otherwise perform in schools, completing national exams and classroom assignments. in contrast, as one government official told me, children with cognitive disabilities have far too “severe” problems to need or benefit from formal education. in this way, mainstream disability politics in uganda facilitates the erasure of both children and adults with cognitive disabilities as persons with entitlements to recognition and resources. beyond that one angry saturday morning meeting, i rarely heard cognitive disability emerge as a topic in nudipu meetings or disability ngo forums that i attended while doing fieldwork. when i asked the director of nudipu why people with cognitive disabilities remained without representation in the organization, he told me that until “self-advocacy” took off among such “populations,” there would be no way forward. and when i asked why self-advocacy had not taken off, he invoked parental paternalism: in uganda, the director explained, people with cognitive disabilities were cossetted and oppressed by their parents, kept at home, and prevented from speaking on their own behalf and pursuing their own wishes. leaders of uganda’s national disability associations and ngos widely espouse this vision of suffocating parental paternalism. when i expressed doubts that self-representation was a tenable goal for all people with disabilities, especially those who did not speak, a leading activist who heads the east african disability office of a transnational development agency appealed to assistive technology and the spirit of technological optimism: he said that there was equipment available in north america and europe that enabled people without language to communicate their needs and desires, and that if such equipment were only made available in uganda, even disabled ugandans who could not speak would be able to represent themselves. against this backdrop, florence’s assertion that “children are persons too” underlines the disappearance of a certain segment of disabled people underwritten by liberal ideas of self-representation working in tandem with normative expectations about what constitutes the capacity to represent oneself. florence’s assertion also made an appeal to other terms of personhood beyond self-representation, though she did not spell out those terms exactly. but a closer look at the ugandan christian organizations that focus on cognitive disability makes such terms clear. the sense of childhood all the leaders of disability organizations taking part in the debate at nudipu spoke of children with disabilities and people with cognitive disabilities in the same breath: those “children” who are “persons too,” as the director of sct put it. maimuna likewise spoke of the residents of l’arche, to some extent distancing herself, as a helper, from that category but nonetheless reinforcing it as the relevant frame for residents at l’arche. all the residents and students of programs like l’arche and sct are referred to as children (abaana) by staff, parents, neighbors, and supporters. yet such “children” range considerably in age, from toddlers to adults in late middle age. all such organizations have participants in their twenties and thirties, while older organizations like l’arche and sct have “children” who are in their forties. conversations with caregivers revealed that not much reflection is given to why disabled adults in their forties were considered children; it seemed simply obvious. for these caregivers, then, the status of child is less tied to biological age than to perceived limitations in cognitive capacity and social competence, as well as to corresponding forms of dependency. infantilization constitutes a central concern within euro-american disability activism, which objects to the paternalistic treatment of adult disabled people—without full autonomy, in need of care and custodianship—on the basis of physical or cognitive impairments. this critique assumes that childhood is not full personhood. yet things may not prove so simple in the case at hand. childhood extends a category of personhood that, in uganda, is both readily meaningful and socially available to people with cognitive disabilities. it is not through self-representation, as articulate and autonomous subjects, that ugandan christian organizations make people with cognitive disabilities appear. instead, by figuring disabled people as children, groups like l’arche and sct define them as persons who deserve care and support and, more fundamentally, as persons in the first instance. a kind of lived paternalism defines the activities at l’arche and sct. it manifests in the aesthetics of everyday life in these settings, or what life looks and feels like, starting with classroom routines and disciplines, dormitory-style sleeping arrangements, and hierarchal distributions of authority and care. this making of disabled personhood-as-childhood extends to the most intimate of terms: people with cognitive disabilities become visible as children beginning with the surface of their bodies. the school uniform is one of the central material forms for making this happen: all the “children” wear school uniforms, modeled after the apparel of ugandan schoolchildren. for girls, this consists of either a knee-length dress or a shirt or blouse with a knee-length skirt; for boys, it is a shirt and a pair of shorts. biological age once more does not matter when it comes to who wears these uniforms; they are worn even by the oldest disabled members of l’arche and sct in their thirties and forties. like all ugandan schoolchildren, people with cognitive disabilities participating in christian institutions wear uniforms for everyday activities, like classes, community outings, and recreation. figure 2. sct students line up to shoot basketball. photo by tyler zoanni. hair is a second medium through which the childhood of people with cognitive disabilities is made apparent. the “social distribution of long and short hair” (turner 1980, 117) is not rigidly fixed in uganda, but it does have some broad contours. shaved heads are the norm for both boys and girls. in part, this is hygienic, as it helps control parasites like lice. in part, this derives from economic reasons, as braids and hair work are expensive. and, finally, it is in part due to comfort, as hair may prove heavy and hot. in contemporary kampala, longer hair, especially if styled or braided, serves adults and especially women as a means of social distinction and aesthetic cultivation. in this way, having longer hair is often a privilege if not a requirement of adulthood, while shaved hair functions as an obligatory mark of childhood. at l’arche and sct, relatively few of the female staff members have shaved heads, though it is more common for men. in contrast, all the disabled men and nearly all the disabled women had shaved heads. “children” in these contexts react to their status as children in various ways. nonreaction is perhaps most common. many people at l’arche and sct do not speak, and the majority of those who do speak do not appear to give the term much reflection. they are too busy playing, learning, and making messes to have much time for reflection on social categories or the politics of personhood. but a few have stronger reactions. consider the examples of lamula and prossie, both of whom participate in l’arche programs. lamula has a kind of honorary status as one of the founding members of l’arche. she was one of its first two residents and the source of the name of one of its two houses, lamula house. lamula’s exact age is unknown, but l’arche staff members guess she is in her forties; her hair has turned completely gray. lamula, however, insists she is a “child,” chiefly as a corrective to anyone who suggests otherwise, and she does so with much vehemence. this happens most often when someone greets lamula in passing with the luganda honorific nnyabo, a term roughly equivalent to madam or ma’am, and which for reasons of politeness is generally used in both casual and formal interactions. so routinized are invocations of nnyabo that even caregivers who have known lamula for years slip up; it is all the more common for visitors or the hapless anthropologist to do so. addressing lamula as nnyabo prompts a torrent of complaints on her part. she insists that she is not nnyabo but a child, and she enrolls anyone in earshot as a witness to the injustice of anything said to the contrary. several caregivers at l’arche find this funny, and they tease lamula on this front, calling her a woman (omukyala or omukazi), much to her chagrin. lamula, in response, is always tenacious in claiming her childhood status, and her increasingly urgent and distraught insistence typically drives even amused bystanders to join in collective efforts to make amends for the mistake and to assure her that they know she is a child. in contrast to lamula, prossie is certain she is not a child. prossie is a single mother in her thirties who had been hired at l’arche after have having been a resident there for a couple of years. she was first brought to live in l’arche by a family friend but was soon promoted to the role of a paid staff member when it became clear that she needed little in the way of supervision to engage in cleaning, cooking, or crafts making. today prossie rents a one-room house not far from l’arche, and she lives there with her son. the director of l’arche told me that she considered prossie to be one of the organization’s success stories. prossie had, after all, transitioned from being in the category of cared-for to being a caregiver, even as she was herself disabled. staff members at l’arche knew that prossie had a diagnosis of down syndrome—she had received such a diagnosis when she first came to l’arche—and they tended to talk about her as one of the “children.” that is, when they talked about her, it was as one among the many disabled people who lived at l’arche. yet in our conversations, prossie adamantly insisted that she was not one of the “children.” she pointedly distanced herself from “them,” thus putting herself in a distinct person class. in talking about her relationships with other people at l’arche, prossie aligns herself exclusively with other staff members; she singles out several staff members as particular friends, while professing that she does not feel as close to any of the “children” for whom she cares. prossie thus resisted being a “child.” although many l’arche staff members still considered her one as a result of her disability, prossie had to some extent transcended childhood by virtue of gainful employment, renting a house, and having a child. lamula, meanwhile, fully embraced her status as a child and fervently resisted even conversational rituals that positioned her as woman. lamula and prossie mark the two outer poles on a continuum of reactions from people with cognitive disabilities at places like l’arche and sct; it is a continuum ranging from total identification to rejection. yet in spite of their differences, prossie and lamula shared having their personhood defined in terms of childhood, which served as the baseline against which they negotiated their own self-understandings and social relations. divine images if disabled residents and students at l’arche and sct are “children,” then they are also “children of god.” this is a common trope throughout the new testament (e.g., john 1:12; gal. 3:26, 2 cor. 6:18), and one espoused by staff members at l’arche and sct. these staff members consider as a particularly important story a moment in the gospels when jesus calls for “the little children” to be brought to him (matt. 19:13–15; mk. 10:13–16; lk. 18:15–17). this story inspired the popular christian song “jesus loves the little children,” which i sang more times than i care to recount during my fieldwork. the idea behind this song’s deployment, as well as behind the imagery of children of god, is that the disabled “children” at l’arche and sct are precious in the eyes of god, just like all other children. a second theological trope i heard at l’arche and sct is the claim that people with disabilities are created in the “image of god,” a notion derived from genesis 1:26, which portrays god as creating humanity in a way that bears a likeness to the divine. ugandan christian efforts focusing on disability use the notion of the image of god to argue for the basic dignity and value of the lives of people with disabilities—asserting that they, too, partake in likeness to the divine, and as such deserve respect and engagement. both the image-of-god and the children-of-god tropes appeal to a shared personhood grounded in biblical imagery. this repertoire of christian imagery provides a charter for a nonsecular politics of disability. the imagery gives meaning and value to those whose personhood is questioned within a social context in which christianity is broadly hegemonic. such imagery comes into the foreground at places like l’arche and sct primarily in these organizations’ efforts to address broader publics. that is, this christian imagery is not constantly invoked in everyday work at l’arche and sct as people go about activities like caregiving, teaching, and other efforts that manifest people with cognitive disabilities as children. instead, these theological tropes explicitly emerge during these organizations’ public events, when people visit them for the first time, and in trainings for new employees or volunteers. along these lines, l’arche and sct work to make cognitively disabled people appear not only within their immediate institutional settings but also within broader religious and social settings. at the same time, these organizations’ different forms of christianity—catholic and pentecostal—lead to different forms of appearance. while l’arche and sct both engage in the work of assembling disabled people together, such that they appear publicly in visible and audible fashion, the scale and horizons of disability appearance differ, in ways that reflect distinct christian traditions. at l’arche, the catholic institution, the mode of wider disability appearance can be described as one of incarnation, an assembling of people in tangible proximity. l’arche itself forms part of a transnational network of homes for people with cognitive disabilities that have roots in thomistic strands of catholic theology emphasizing values of friendship and life together (e.g., reinders 2010). these values are readily evident in the quality and organization of everyday life at l’arche in uganda. a great deal of time at l’arche each day involves nondirective collectivity. every afternoon, after the dishes are washed and the dining room and kitchen are cleaned up, many people, whether disabled or nondisabled, assemble on the benches that line the porches of the main compound’s house. there they listen to the radio, gossip, joke, or just sit quietly. days begin, end, and are punctuated by joining together for meals, prayers, and leisure. in part, this structure has task-specific purposes, but it also reflects the value of togetherness as an end in itself. this assembling of bodies together—what i am calling appearance as incarnation—also becomes evident in the activities that most incorporate people who are not l’arche members and that bring l’arche residents into public settings—namely, church activities. here, for example, is maimuna again, singing with the choir of the parish catholic church on palm sunday, before the church’s mass. figure 3. maimuna sings with a palm sunday choir. photo by tyler zoanni. the procession of the palms began at l’arche, with the home’s residents processing at the front. maimuna was singing as she loves to do, in this case a catholic hymn. although she identifies as a muslim, she will gladly sing anything and frequently performs at l’arche gatherings. after the priest called the procession to order, maimuna was wheeled, and others walked, to the nearby catholic church through the dusty backroads of the sleepy neighborhood on the outskirts of kampala where l’arche is located. the horizon of this assembly of bodies that emerged into public was ultimately that church, where the palm sunday service occurred. this gathering represented a joining together of disabled and nondisabled people that folded them into a public catholic ritual, as disabled and nondisabled members of l’arche sat on the pews where they could find space among the members of the church. we see a very different form of disability appearance with sct, the pentecostal school. there we find an emphasis on revelation, or forms of visual display that aspire to the widespread and at times reach the level of the spectacular. as birgit meyer (2011, 2015) has observed of ghana, pentecostal projects often aim to erupt into public life, exercising influence even on people and social arenas that do not become pentecostal. the aspiration to attain widespread publicity is evident in the many forms of outreach central to sct’s efforts, including meetings with government officials and organizations like nudipu, public presentations on disability topics, an extremely avid use of social media, the director florence’s frequent appearances on radio and television, and most of all the annual “special needs awareness day.” this event involves more than a thousand people and draws dignitaries such as leading politicians and rulers of the kingdoms in uganda. i participated in several of these awareness days throughout the years. they all began with a long march to the event venue, a major stadium in central kampala. here i pull screenshots from sct’s facebook page to underline the efforts at amplifying the public nature of such efforts across multiple media—on the street during the event itself and then again on social media long after that. figure 4. sct’s facebook page prominently features a scene of the awareness day march. screenshot by tyler zoanni. this march occurs on jinja road, one of the busiest in kampala and indeed in all of uganda: it is the feeder road that connects kampala to all of eastern uganda and is a major hub for buses, trucks, cargo containers, and taxi vans. sct secures police and government support to shut down the road for the roughly hour-long march, and it draws a variety of television stations filming the event. the march then culminates in a stadium assembly. a variety of organizations that work with people with cognitive disabilities give dances, songs, and other performances, highlighting what they do. the rhetoric scaffolding these performances is highly sentimentalizing and emphasizes both the shared humanity and particular qualities of individual “children” before the gathered audience of disability organizations, the ugandan press, and dignitaries from the national government and uganda’s kingdoms. in this way, even as both l’arche and sct share a stock of common christian imagery, they pursue different modes of disability appearance, with distinct articulations of the place of disabled people in wider social life. pursuing what i have called incarnation, the catholic organization l’arche puts a premium on assembling bodies together and folding them into church life. the forms of publicity l’arche pursues arc toward catholic settings and do not seek a larger scale than that of the neighborhood where the organization is located. placing a greater emphasis on what i called revelation, the pentecostal organization sct emphasizes urban spectacle, making the center of its year an annual event widely visible in downtown kampala. a centrifugal quality defines this mode of disability appearance, as it spreads broadly in the capital city’s core and draws countless drivers and passengers who are stopped by the march, as well as the national media who cover the event. conclusion as i have shown, a liberal politics of disability promotes a logic of self-representation that serves to erase the issues facing people with cognitive disabilities in uganda, while negating their social and political standing as persons. in contrast, it is within the relatively small network of christian institutions that people with cognitive disabilities appear, doing so as children in paternalistic religious contexts as well as wider collective settings. so what? why, one might wonder, does processing to a church or even holding a rally matter? if it is clear that such efforts are neither secular nor liberal, as i have claimed, is this really the basis of a nonsecular and nonliberal politics of disability? is politics a meaningful word here? i opened by invoking arendt’s vision of the basis of politics in appearance. i noted that while arendt’s approach may prove counterintuitive in light of prevailing western metaphysical assumptions, it is in fact highly obvious to people in uganda. arendt’s concern with appearances has thus served to help me name and describe key dynamics of ganda social aesthetics, in which display proves central to the ratification and evaluation of proper forms of being a person. the terrain of appearances, as i have shown, constitutes a highly fraught arena for cognitively disabled ugandans, but it remains crucial for the assertion of their status as persons. it bears noting, however, that in other ways arendt’s thinking about appearances makes for a highly infelicitous resource for discussing the lives and worlds of people like maimuna, with whose desire to be photographed i opened. that is because maimuna depends, in a conventional sense, on the assistance of others to meet her needs. for arendt, living such a life of dependence undermines one’s capacity for appearing in public and for engaging in meaningful political action. arendt not only describes but seemingly endorses a classical greek distinction between the oikos, or home, as a realm of slaves, women, children, the infirm, and the elderly engaging in meeting basic bodily needs, and the polis, or city, as the realm of a minority of free men who appear to one another and thus engage in politics (arendt 1998, 24–28, 192–207). others have interrogated arendt’s “hellenism” (euben 2000) and rightly pointed out that this account of appearances is not only highly gendered but sexist as well as elitist (see honig 1995). here, i join the recent readers of arendt with whom i opened, who demonstrate that her basic framework for thinking about politics is more capacious than the specific account she develops in line with hellenistic social norms. butler (2015), for example, challenges criticisms that movements like occupy wall street and black lives matter do not constitute serious political movements insofar as they do not articulate a concrete list of political demands. butler (2015, 25–26) argues that simply to appear in public enacts a “call for justice”: even when they are not speaking or do not present a set of negotiable demands, the call for justice is being enacted: the bodies assembled “say” “we are not disposable,” whether or not they are using words at the moment; what they say, as it were, is “we are still here, persisting, demanding greater justice, a release from precarity, a possibility of a livable life.” likewise, jacques rancière (1999, 9, 21–42) asserts that politics only happens when “whoever has no part” in a common order contentiously irrupts into public life and thus rearranges the “partition of the perceptible.” this definition of the political is explicitly opposed to more conventional definitions that stress the bureaucratized procedures of representational politics. butler explicitly and rancière implicitly oppose their accounts to arendt’s, but they do so by relying on arendt’s emphasis on appearances. i, too, have relied on such an emphasis. this is not to say that appearance is inherently redemptive, whether for disabled ugandans or in general. after all, ableism, or antidisability discrimination, operates like racism insofar as it fixates on and targets the appearance of non-normative bodies. but it is to say that appearances can do important work, and that it proves meaningful to understand this work as political. across everyday life as “children” and through what i have called pentecostal revelation and catholic incarnation, people with cognitive disabilities appear by virtue of christian efforts, and such manifestations challenge the fact that they otherwise rarely appear in collective life in uganda. let me be clear. by pointing to what is foreclosed by a seemingly salutary liberal set of ideas and what is made possible by seemingly repugnant paternalistic ones, my aim is not simply to condemn the former and celebrate the latter. instead, i have explored an instance in which “‘human rights talk’ . . . can marginalize other ways of conceiving of human dignity and value,” as harri englund (2000, 580) has put it. for transnational disability discourses, such as those enshrined in the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, the project of human dignity is tied inextricably to notions of self-representation and autonomy, which are themselves understood as self-evident rights. against such unexamined self-evidence, this article suggests there may be more than a little daylight between dignity and value, on the one hand, and self-representation and autonomy, on the other. in the case this article examines, the dignity, value, and indeed the mere appearance of cognitively disabled ugandans depend not on self-representation but on forms of personhood that unfold as childhood. moreover, a stringent insistence on ideas like self-representation and autonomy may militate against the achievement of dignity, especially in cases where profound dependency forms a constitutive condition of people’s lives. this idea evokes important recent discussions of the ways in which people in sub-saharan africa cultivate relations of hierarchy and dependency as vehicles for social and economic possibility, means of securing and sustaining life in circumstances of relative deprivation, where the state cannot be counted on to provide support (whyte et al. 2013; scherz 2014; ferguson 2015; haynes and hickel 2016; haynes 2017). cognitive disability necessarily intersects with, and underlines, such forms of socioeconomic dependency, especially in cases of impairments that leave people unable to meet their basic needs, in part or in full, by themselves. in contrast, a liberal politics of disability presumes, celebrates, and works to realize a very different picture of the person—articulate, educated, independent, and capable of activism and self-representation as well as self-sufficiency. the “children” who live in and attend places like l’arche and sct are unlikely to ever realize such a picture of the person. one need not endorse or subscribe to the christian paternalism at places like l’arche and sct to notice what it does in making people with cognitive disabilities appear—people, that is, who might not otherwise appear at all. abstract this article considers how christianity contributes to the appearance of cognitive disability in uganda, a country with some of the most progressive disability policies in the world but little in the way of formal care and advocacy for cognitively disabled people. as a point of departure, the article invokes hannah arendt’s notion of appearance as a way to thematize the importance of public display in ugandan social life, as well as the challenge that people with evidently profound disabilities pose to ugandan social aesthetics. it first traces how cognitive disability disappears under the liberal logics that organize uganda’s secular disability laws and activism, and then compares the ways that catholic and pentecostal efforts sustain the appearance of cognitive disability, in light of their theological differences and their common paternalism. even as christian paternalism in the face of cognitive disability may prove repugnant to a liberal vision of disability politics, i argue that it sustains a form of disability appearance otherwise not possible in uganda. [cognitive disability; religion; social aesthetics; liberalism; personhood; uganda] bufunze ekiwandiiko kino kilagira ddala bulungi, nga obukristaayo bwe bwewaddeyo ennyo ku nsonga etekwatiddwa bulungi ey’endabika y’abantu abalina obulemu mu butesobola nga buva ku bwongo nga bali mu uganda. eggwanga erya uganda lirina enkola ennungi mu byokwezza obuggya ku nsonga y’abantu abo munsi yonna. wabula ate kinakuwaza nnyo, nti libulamu nnyo enkola ennungamu mu ngeri y’okuwagira endabirira esaanidde abantu abo, mu mbeera zaabwe zonna okutwalira awamu. ekiwandiiko kino okwawukana ku bya bulijjo ebirala byonna, kikoona butereevu ku ndowooza ya hannah arendt, era nga kirina n’okulaga okusomooza okuleteddwaawo obutafa bulungi ku bantu abo mu mbeera zaabwe mu ggwanga lyonna. ekiwandiiko kisookera ddala n’okulaga engeri y’okufaayo ku nsonga eyo bwe kigenda kisaanirawo ddala nga kino kiyita mu kwekkiriranya abantu kwe batambuliramu ng’abakweyambisa, nga bakola amateeka agakwata ku butesobola obw’obwongo, wamu nebirala ebikolebwa okukisaamu amaanyi, kati ekyo, nga bwe twongerako netukigeerageeranya n’ekyo ekikolebwa abakatuliki n’aba pentekooti ku nsonga eyo yemu mu kuyimirizaawo endabika entuufu eyandisaanidde ku bantu abo abalina obulemu bwobutesobola. naye ate olwokuberawo enjawukana z’e byeddini wakati waabo bombi, nekitasobola kutambula bulungi, nga kino kiva mu kugaaana okukolera awamu nga abantu abali ku mulimu ogumu. ekisinga obukulu nga kyekireeeta obutakkanya obwo kyangu okulaba. kale obutasobola kukolera wamu olw’obukulu bwensonga eyo, nakyo kiyinza okuva ku bukyaayi okwesigamiziddwa ku kwolesebwa okulina obulemu mu bwongo, mu nfuga yaabwo egobererwa. ekyo ne kiyimirizaawo endabika eyobulemu obutesobola era nga nayo tesoboka mu uganda kukolebwako. [obulemu mu bwongo, eddiini, obulabika, nampawengwa, obuntu, uganda] notes acknowledgments my first debt is to the people discussed in this article, most of whom i regrettably cannot name except by way of pseudonyms here. for conversations and other forms of assistance that have taught me much about disability in uganda, i am grateful to rose yooumbe, boas muhumza, and florence namaganda. the article has benefited from the questions, criticisms, and suggestions of catherine abbo, abena asare, pamela block, sandra calkins, lindsay ehrisman, matthew engelke, michele friedner, faye ginsburg, naomi haynes, cassandra hartblay, fred klaits, julie livingston, george mpanga, patrick ojok, elayne oliphant, stephanie palazzo, rayna rapp, christine sargent, china scherz, bambi schieffelin, angela zito, three anonymous reviewers, and the editorial collective for cultural anthropology, as well as audiences at the university of bayreuth, columbia university, the university of chicago, cumberland lodge, and stony brook university. the research and writing for this article were enabled by the generosity of the mellon/acls dissertation completion fellowship, the social science research council, the wenner-gren foundation, new york university, the national science foundation, and the lemelson foundation/society for psychological anthropology. notes 1. this article draws on twenty-four months of research, the bulk of which was thirteen months spanning 2016 and 2017. my fieldwork ranged widely across ugandan family life, secular ngos, and government offices, but its focus was intensive participant observation in two christian institutions, which form the core of this article. 2. both intellectual disability and cognitive disability are commonly used terms. following the philosophers licia carlson and eva feder kittay (2010), i use cognitive disability, with the premise being that cognition denotes not only the intellect but also domains like emotion and perception and thus names a broader matrix of difference. that said, here i am less concerned with diagnostic specificities or naturalizing disability categories than i am with the social and political life of cognitive disability as a frame for human difference. 3. there is evidence of a long history to this configuration of space. the historian holly hanson (2009) analyzes maps of buganda’s precolonial capital in terms of the relationships among palaces; those maps that contain the detail of individual palaces depict large areas of open space. 4. a small cluster of ethnographic and historical studies suggests that this emphasis on appearances is not restricted to buganda. it is discernible in both political practice and everyday life in the wider great lakes region (e.g., beattie 1971, 106–10, 138–41; weiss 1996, 119–25, 2003, 26–39) and beyond (e.g., archambault 2017, 43–71; haynes 2017, 37–56). references abimanyi-ochom, julie, and hasheem mannan 2014 “uganda’s disability journey: progress and challenges.” 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symptoms of mental disorder are often subtle, discernible only by a clinician, others are obvious even to the anthropologist. one young man huddled in a corner; another mumbled incoherently as he paced the floor; a third masturbated himself through his pants. a half dozen more men with similarly observable signs sat nearby. “they are wolves [lobos],” the pastor said. “their families brought them here.” by “here,” the pastor meant one of guatemala city’s pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. these are onetime factories, garages, and apartment buildings that have been renovated for rehabilitation with razor wire, steel bars, and iron gates. they keep pace with the country’s growing rapprochement with illicit drugs by holding drug users (often against their will) for months, sometimes for years. these centers also warehouse the mentally ill. “a wolf is a crazy person,” the pastor said while trying to define the term. “a wolf is someone who doesn’t listen. someone who you can’t control and who can’t even control himself.” insisting on the incorrigibility of these creatures, the pastor then turned toward more pastoral terrain. “and these wolves are so valuable [valiosos],” he said. “they are so much more valuable than the sheep.”2 it is this pentecostal appreciation of wolves that the present essay explores, assessing not only the theological anthropologies that make such an appraisal possible but also the pastoral power that it produces. for the wolf has never gotten its full due. thomas hobbes (1998, 3), of course, builds his theory of state power from the premise that “man is wolf to man [homo homini lupus est],” while debates about the unconscious (freud 1996), the sovereign (derrida 2009), and the wolf pack (hardt and negri 2000) imagine this animal as a model for human sociality (see also torrano 2016). yet anthropologists have never taken much interest in this boundary creature. instead, biopolitical imaginaries (redfield 2012), with their pastoral fantasies (rose 2007), tend to fixate on shepherds and their sheep, even to the point of understanding modern governance as a matter of the sheepfold (foucault 2007, 172). this is one reason why anthropologists have engaged (with near equal interest) humanitarian projects that make live (bornstein 2012; fassin 2012; malkki 2015) and zones of social abandonment that let die (biehl 2005; li 2010; allison 2013). the problem is that none of this work appreciates the wolf in any significant way, too quickly overlooking the pastoral importance of irredeemable figures. giorgio agamben (1998, 63) even goes so far as to banish the wolf to the edge of the city, to the very lip of the forest—“to dwell paradoxically within both while belonging to neither.” pentecostals know better. “i can’t care for [the sheep] without the wolves,” the pastor admitted. for he knew, as do most cultural critics, that wolves are exceedingly important, not least because they provide the conditions through which a christian humanity might assert itself (see cohen 2012). the wolf, in fact, has long delimited the morality through which bodies and souls may move, and it has done so with such success in guatemala city that pastors across the capital acquire rather than abandon them. the faithful actively seek these wolves out, often going to great lengths to bring them into the fold. “i look for wolves,” the pastor told me. “i search all over the city for them.” it is, in the end, the importance of these wolves that provokes a guiding question. put in ethnographic terms, it would be something like: how does this transformation—of status, value, and maybe even species—make the mentally ill in guatemala city absolutely essential to the flock, with the invention and domestication of wolves not only justifying captivity but also contributing to the management of populations? or, to put the question in slightly more pastoral terms, what would it mean for governance to be a matter of wolves rather than sheep? madness an answer to these questions begins with the state of mental health in guatemala. with only 1 percent of the country’s health-care budget addressing matters of mental illness (who 2011), guatemala’s only psychiatric institution is in a state of crisis, with one journalist going so far as to name this institution “the world’s most dangerous hospital” (rogers 2014). with rampant reports of patient abuse, which includes the sexual assault of heavily sedated minors, the hospital diagnoses and discharges patients as quickly as possible, in the guise of deinstitutionalization but really to shift the burden of care from the state to the family. the hospital also flatly refuses to admit anyone addicted to drugs. this is a brutal policy—not only because mental illness and substance abuse are notoriously difficult to disentangle but also because access to habit-forming drugs has expanded throughout the region. in 2004, 10 percent of the cocaine produced in the andes and bound for the united states passed through guatemala (unodc 2012). more than ten years later, after a shift in u.s. interdiction efforts, some 80 percent of this product touched guatemalan soil (fielding and giacomello 2013). one effect of this shift has been a spike in the use of crack cocaine. drug-trafficking countries, the literature notes, often become drug-consuming countries (gootenberg 2008). a second effect, inseparable from the first, has been the proliferation of pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. these are for-profit enterprises that self-consciously capitalize on the country’s growing dependency on not just crack cocaine but also new forms of christianity. once overwhelmingly roman catholic, guatemala today is at least 50 percent pentecostal and charismatic christian (garrard-burnett 2015; see also pew forum on religion and public life 2006).3 pentecostalism has since emboldened a particularly entrepreneurial set of pastors to sell something called theological therapy (teoterapia). it comprises a mashup of pentecostal theology, twelve-step programming, and self-help psychology. its guiding assumption is that captivity will give way to conversion. it rarely does. yet this bald fact has done nothing to slow the growth of these centers, for a simple reason: these centers provide a practical solution to a concrete problem. drug use is up, state resources are down, and pentecostalism is the discourse of change. the net result is a shadow carceral system infused with pentecostal imperatives not just about heaven and hell, but also about who can be held captive and why. this theological construction carries considerable consequences. today more guatemalans find themselves tied up inside these centers than locked up inside of maximum-security prisons.4 a growing number of these captives (internos) have clinical diagnoses from the state’s psychiatric hospital as well as open-ended prescriptions for antipsychotic medications. once discharged as outpatients, the mentally ill often enter pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers—largely because families are desperate for affordable long-term care. state social workers also facilitate this public-to-private transfer by providing these families with a list of pastors eager to engage the mentally ill. the only hitch is that the families must understand that the centers do not address matters of sanity or sickness so much as sin and salvation. diagnostic tests and patient files do not structure these centers so much as a cluster of christian coordinates: salvation is real, hell is eternal, and jesus loves you. matching the mentally ill to this message often means shoehorning them into a moral biography that posits an exceedingly sinful prehistory. “they did it to themselves,” the pastor told me. “drugs turned all of these guys into wolves. sin transformed them forever.” as specious as this story is disturbing, such moral retrofitting is nonetheless nonnegotiable. “we only deal with wolves,” the pastor insisted, and so wolves are what he gets. lycanthropy this pentecostal preoccupation with wolves can seem positively medieval at times, not least because humans transforming into wolves constituted a fundamental theological problem in the middle ages (bynum 2001). biblical and classical writings raised the phenomenon with such frequency that augustine (1950, 624), ambrose (nazianzen and ambrose 1953, 256–58), and aquinas (2002, 1024) routinely found themselves knee deep in neoplatonic debates over the meaning and possibilities of the human body. likely triggered by adjacent conversations over transubstantiation, the equally confounding claim that bread and wine can become flesh and blood, these theological reflections opened up into matters of christian ontology. for if rods could become serpents (exodus 7–8) and water could become wine (john 2:1–11), then why could men not become wolves? augustine, for one, was quick to concede that the monstrous and the grotesque, meaning the deformed and the disabled, could certainly embody the divine image of god, even if their relative humanity remained unclear. yet he opposed with equal force the idea that humans could transform into wolves. the devil, he argued, can create no new nature, and so all reports of humans changing into animals were illusions. augustine was absolutely clear about this last point. the problem was that no one seemed to care. medieval literature routinely depicts werewolves as sympathetic protagonists in ways that piqued theological interest—not so much in demonic activity as in the constitution of interior human consciousness as bodies came to resemble wolves (otten 2002). yet throughout this literature there appears a continuous resistance to stories of complete transformation, with the eyes of the wolf maintaining their original human form (shyovitz 2014, 526). rarely treating the matter metaphorically or even as literary motif, several twelfth-century theologians posit that becoming a wolf involves internal continuity alongside external transformation. the body changes, but the soul stays the same. this contrast between experience and appearance is one reason why the subjects of these stories can seem so very sympathetic. each of these animals desperately wants to be otherwise. often bearing little resemblance to the ravenous wolf of genesis 49:27 or to the savage wolf of acts 20:29, these poor souls find themselves literally trapped by their transformation, completely incapable of escaping their own corporeality. they haunt cemeteries and howl at the moon not because of monstrous appetites, but rather because of a cruel melancholy brought on by the horrifying condition of being completely civilized and yet looking like a dog. melancholy followed these tales of transformation as the phenomenon pivoted from the realm of theology to that of pathology. from the sixteenth century onward, even up into the mid-twentieth century, the medical sciences published case studies that describe the afflicted symptomatically—with pale skin, yellow teeth, and tufts of unruly hair (jackson 1978). eyewitness reports also confirm that the tormented loped about graveyards, alone and at night (coll, o’sullivan, and browne 1985). these moments of documentation emerged alongside the human sciences in an effort to corral superstition into schizophrenia (keck et al. 1988). they largely succeeded. one thousand years after ambrose echoed augustine to argue that all demonic transformations are illusions, psychologists mirrored theologians only at the level of earnestness. in 1850, one wrote that lycanthropy “is an expression of a bestialization of character, which is channeled into the corresponding behavior pattern of a wild animal” (metzger 2013, 352). here, the psychosocial language of patterned behaviors tames a titillating conversation about shape shifting and boundary transgression, ultimately establishing with scientific precision that human beings cannot turn into wolves. psychologists have been absolutely clear about this, too. trapped the problem is that pentecostals do not seem to care. “sinners become wolves all the time,” the pastor told me as we walked up a narrow set of stairs. they led to the roof of his center. a two-story building located in the middle of the city, just blocks from the national palace, the center holds as many as seventy drug users on the first and second floors. originally built in the 1980s as a hotel for central american businesspeople, the structure soon sat empty. the short story is that the country’s civil war (1960–1996) sparked waves of rural-to-urban migration that pushed the wealthy from the city center to greener plots of land. the building remained unoccupied for years until the pastor spotted it as a low-rent opportunity. inverting the logic of private security by aiming to keep drug users in rather than out, the pastor fortified the building. “all i had to do,” he told me, “was to put bars on the windows and locks on the doors.” his words came to mind as we reached the roof. passing through one last locked door, stepping out into the midday sun, the pastor announced with no real reverence: “and this is where we keep the wolves.” a riot of steel rods crisscrossed over our heads, soldered in just such a way as to form an expansive cage. “i had a friend do the metal work,” he said, “so no one can escape.” the sight was surreal, even for the experienced, and increasingly so as the pastor introduced me to his captives. “this is augustín,” the pastor said. “he arrived here five years ago after drinking rubbing alcohol [química] and smoking crack cocaine.” squatting in a corner, augustín did not respond to us. the pastor then turned to tomás. “he has been here for ten years,” the pastor said. “tomás turned into a wolf because of massive amounts of marijuana and masturbation.” tomás blushed as the pastor directed my attention to manuel. “this is a little more difficult to explain,” he admitted, “but manuel smoked marijuana, and now he believes that angels visit him.” the pastor took a moment to consider a more complete explanation, but then he concluded without much context: “and so he feeds the angels mayonnaise.” manuel dripped the condiment onto the end of a stick and then waved it over his head. “he’s been here for eight years.” eight years earlier manuel lived with his father on the outskirts of guatemala city. from a very young age, manuel exhibited signs of mental illness, which included defiant behavior, irregular sleep patterns, and hyperactivity. at first manageable, at least for a middle-aged parent, manuel’s increasingly erratic behavior eventually overwhelmed his aging father. his son began to hear voices, speak to himself, and retreat into his room for days on end. the angels also started to visit him. “he got aggressive with me,” manuel’s father said, “and he got aggressive with the neighbors.” one story stands out. when manuel was nineteen years old, a neighbor accused him of sexually assaulting his ten-year-old daughter. the details are difficult to determine, but what is clear is that the neighbor called the police. manuel took off running, but they soon found him hiding in a drainage pipe. “the police immediately noticed that manuel was not right,” his father said, “and so they asked me if manuel used drugs.” the father had found marijuana in manuel’s room a year earlier, and he told the police as much. “they then asked me to make a decision,” he said. “either manuel could stand trial in front of a judge [for sexual assault] or he could enter a [pentecostal drug rehabilitation] center.” well aware that guatemala’s pretrial detention centers have long been at 500 percent capacity, with due process often taking two years (cien 2011), manuel’s father sidestepped the state by choosing a center. back on the roof, still under the rods, the pastor described manuel to me as “trapped” (atrapado). this seemed self-evident, given the cage, but he meant something far more profound than the materiality of his immediate captivity. “manuel is trapped inside of himself,” he told me. “we’ve lost him forever.” the pastor then compared wolves to sheep. “those drug users [on the first and second floors of the center],” he said, “they can be saved. sheep, even black sheep [ovejas negras], can accept jesus christ as their savior.” the pastor then turned toward manuel. “but the wolves,” he said, “they are different.” when i pressed him to define this difference, the pastor seemed to approximate plato (1961, 66) in imagining manuel’s body as a prison house for his soul.5 “you can preach to wolves all you want,” the pastor said, “but they won’t change.” insisting that the rational ground on which manuel’s soul once stood had since buckled under the weight of his sins, the pastor essentially accused manuel of being the “first accessory to his own confinement” (plato 1961, 66). “it’s manuel’s fault,” the pastor said. “he did it to himself.” theologically horrifying, with manuel’s soul trapped somewhere inside of his body, this case as narrated by the pastor effectively inverted those werewolf stories of old. rather than interior continuity and external transformation, manuel’s reported drug use had triggered external continuity and interior transformation. his soul had changed, but his body had stayed the same. the net effect, by the pastor’s own admission, was nothing short of an id without its ego—a throbbing bundle of animal desires. “it’s not just tomás,” the pastor admitted. “they all masturbate.” it was a tragic scene by any standard. ontologically set apart from the sheep, these wolves ended up inspiring as much sympathy as their medieval counterparts. everyone involved, from the pastor to the parents, wanted each of them to be otherwise. “but that would take a miracle,” the pastor told me, “and i’ve never seen that happen.” so in the absence of a divine intervention, but in the name of god, this pastor held these men captive—for the horrifying condition of looking like a christian and yet acting like a dog. acquired this break between body and soul is why the pastor sent so many of these men straight to a psychiatrist. after fishing manuel from a drainage pipe and then presenting his father with an ultimatum, the police escorted the two men to guatemala’s psychiatric hospital. the pastor met them there, with the doctor diagnosing and discharging manuel in a matter of hours. the psychiatrist on staff was apparently encouraged by the prospects of manuel entering a pentecostal drug rehabilitation center that very same day. “the doctor also knew the pastor,” manuel’s father told me, “and the pastor recognized the police officers.” his son subsequently left the hospital a schizophrenic and entered the center a wolf, all on the wings of his new prescription for chlorpromazine. chlorpromazine is one of the world’s most commonly prescribed antipsychotic medications and crucial to the workings of the pastor’s center. his wolves take the substance every single day—and not in spite of but rather for the side effects. at the end of manuel’s examination, the psychiatrist mentioned that the drug can cause dizziness, insomnia, weight gain, dry mouth, blurred vision, constipation, swelling of the hands, and a stuffy nose, but the only side effect that seemed to please the pastor made the medication sound like a chemical castration. “the medicine,” the pastor said, “causes drowsiness and impotence. it makes it difficult to ejaculate.” with souls trapped inside of bodies and bodies acting irrespective of souls, chlorpromazine allowed the pastor to put a pharmaceutical leash on these men. “the medication,” the pastor said, “makes the wolves so much easier to manage.” chlorpromazine’s availability in guatemala largely depends on a government initiative that provides the chronically ill with medications at no cost (anson et al. 2012). becoming law soon after the 1996 peace accords, in the spirit of equality and accessibility, guatemala’s ministry of health established a basic list of medicines for common diseases affecting the general population. the ministry also began negotiating with pharmaceutical companies to identify suppliers and set prices, with the government eventually stocking and subsidizing more than five hundred outlets across the country. although tethered to an erratic health-care budget, itself hitched to one of the most precarious tax bases in all the americas (sridhar 2007), the program supplies a small subset of the country with free medication while providing everyone else with a viable alternative to the free market. consisting of an intricate web of for-profit pharmacies, the private sector routinely gouges customers by charging them anywhere between ten to twenty-three times the recommended international price for such essential medicines as chlorpromazine. “these wolves wouldn’t be here without chlorpromazine,” the pastor said. he then quickly conceded that “the center wouldn’t be here without these wolves.”6 the pastor then compared wolves to sheep one more time. “sheep come and go,” he said. “someone who smokes crack can be here for a week or a month, but then he’s gone.” in an effort to shepherd his herd, to stabilize his flock, the pastor negotiates with families for contractually obligated lengths of captivity, be it for one, three, or six months, but the center’s population is in constant motion. “we can hold about seventy guys here at a time,” the pastor said, “but sometimes we only have twenty.” this swing is significant, especially given the center’s fee-for-service model. stretches of uneven income have been known to shutter centers, with pastors unable to adjust to rapidly differentiating levels of revenue. “this is why the wolves are so important,” the pastor explained. “they pay the bills.” by this he meant that the family of an average captive pays the pastor roughly us$100 a month, which makes the monthly difference between a full center (i.e., seventy captives) and a near empty center (i.e., twenty captives) about $5,000. with the average annual income in guatemala hovering around $2,700, this is a huge amount of money and would prove precarious to any operation were it not for the fact that the families of wolves pay more than twice than the families of sheep—and not for one, three, and six months, but rather for five, eight, and ten years. these are the respective lengths of captivity for augustín, manuel, and tomás. having not just run the numbers but also shouldered some rather lean months, the pastor knows full well that he can pay rent and utilities as long as he has eight wolves on his roof. the most successful centers follow this business model, keeping a close eye on the deeply interrelated variables of stock (wolves) and flow (sheep). in doing so, pastors fundamentally reframe the wolf as essential rather than peripheral to pastoralism, with a state-allocated antipsychotic medication providing a vital linchpin for a lycanthropic theology that essentially inverts the market value of chronically unemployable schizophrenics. it is no surprise, then, that the psychiatrist who diagnosed manuel knew the pastor. nor is it by chance that the pastor recognized those police officers. they actually called the pastor soon after they had arrested manuel. there is also nothing serendipitous about the fact that the pastor appears on the social workers’ list of centers eager to engage the mentally ill. in fact, he appears at the very top of that list. the pastor, after all, did not agree to house manuel out of christian compassion alone. he instead carefully sought out manuel with a kind of tactical grace that michel de certeau (1984, 7) might have called the “hunter’s cunning.” “you have to be patient,” the pastor said. “you need to find the right kind of wolf, and then you need to act.” over the years, this predatory pastoralism has included navigating government bureaucracy, establishing intimate rapport with police officers, befriending teams of social workers, and flipping through stacks of patient files—all to find the right kind of wolf. “i could tell right away that manuel would be a good fit,” the pastor said. “he was quiet, and he never hit me.” the pastor also predicted that manuel would be a good candidate for chlorpromazine. “it all worked out,” he said. “manuel got the prescription. he came to the center, and he settled into a routine.” the pastor seemed pleased. “you could also tell,” he added, “that manuel would be really good for the sheep.” loved drug users occupy the first and second floors of the pastor’s center. held against their will behind locked doors, their principal task is to convince the pastor that they are ready to leave, that they have been saved. also interested in salvation, the pastor organizes his flock around a tightly orchestrated series of sermons, testimonies, and church services. the pastor is committed to the power of conversion, to the willful decision to live a good christian life, but it is works, not faith, that he is able to discern (o’neill 2017a). “i need to see that the person has changed,” he said, “i need to see that he looks different.” these signs of salvation can include clean clothes, an upright posture, and a positive attitude. “when they come here,” the pastor explained, “these guys are dirty. they’ve been living on the streets. but after their time [here], they have a haircut, clean clothes. they walk confidently.” christian captivity changes them. the most visible sign of salvation is voluntary labor.7 “when they start helping out,” the pastor said, “then i know that they’ve changed.” effectively rebranding conscripted labor as occupational therapy, the pastor staffs his center with sheep. they clean the floors, wash the clothes, and cook the food—all in the hopes of demonstrating a newfound commitment to christ, of staging a life that was once lost but is now found. a large part of this piety has to do with the bottom line. the pastor has no paid staff and, thus, relies on pentecostalism to convert the most menial of tasks into acts of christian devotion. “i need to know that [these users] have changed,” the pastor said. “otherwise, i won’t let them go.” or as one drug user put it: “if you want to get out of here, you need to do the shit work [la mierda].” wolves are the source of this center’s most coveted shit work—because caring for these captives is often the clearest way to articulate a personal transformation to the pastor. but the work is not easy. “the wolves demand constant attention,” the pastor explained, “to keep them clean. to keep them safe. to keep them from touching themselves.” twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, this unwaged affective labor taxes even the most sincere of sheep as they struggle to care for multiple men with severe mental illnesses.8 “it doesn’t always work,” the pastor admitted to me. “i can send someone to the roof, but he may only last a day.” the biggest problem is that the sheep attack the wolves. “no one is allowed to hit the wolves,” the pastor insisted, but it happens. wolves spit, curse, and bite the sheep, which prompts the fold to beat the wolves. and this is precisely the point. the pastor sends his sheep to the roof to master their own emotions through managing these wolves. this mandate has made the roof a veritable training ground for recovering drug users and, as a result, has revalued a passive population into a set of pedagogical opportunities for pastoral care.9 “it’s an opportunity,” hugo insisted. in his mid-twenties, with short hair and broad shoulders, hugo had been inside the center for six months. dragged to the pastor’s front door for his use of crack cocaine, hugo struggled against, but eventually submitted to, life inside the center. this first meant participating in the sermons, testimonies, and church services, but then he began to clean the floors, wash the clothes, and cook the food. he eventually graduated to the roof—to care for three men, including manuel. “it brings me such joy,” hugo said as he checked to see whether manuel had soiled himself. this was one of his tasks. the others, he explained, include “giving manuel his medicine every day, taking him to the bathroom, bathing him, sometimes feeding him, and cleaning up his messes.” i asked about the messes. “i have to keep him from masturbating,” hugo said, “and when i can’t, then i have to clean up the semen [sperma].” hugo winced. these messes proved to be the last straw for hugo. he was generally able to whistle while he worked, but this particular battle between purity and danger (douglas 1966) dissolved any distinction that he could maintain between frontand backstage behavior (goffman 1959). “it’s gross,” he said. “it gets everywhere. on them. on the toilet.” hugo then whispered: “it even gets on me.” while hugo could concede that christian servitude had become a necessary moment in his journey toward personal salvation, mopping up manuel’s semen had crystallized the homosociality of this relational labor, pivoting him toward the fear that he now crossed the threshold onto homosexual terrain. “the semen is often what makes the sheep beat the wolves,” the pastor admitted. “it’s a big challenge for them.” the challenge, of course, cuts both ways. for hugo, there was the seemingly insurmountable task of matching the right affect to undulating waves of offense. slapped in the face, with semen and feces no less, hugo consistently turned the other cheek (matthew 5:39). “it really is a beautiful opportunity,” hugo once told me, completely unprompted. those who care for the wolves were also constantly afraid of failure, with well-founded fears that even the smallest of infractions could lead to even more months inside the center. “manuel is very caring and sensitive,” hugo said, “but it’s hard to keep his hands occupied.” pressed to perform the christian virtues of service and humility, but with no formal training on how to do so, most of these caregivers ended up fixating on the most moral of metrics. hugo, for one, ended up mirroring the pastor’s own anxieties about masturbation, which had far less to do with biblical concerns over scarcity (genesis 38:8–10) than with the inability of these men to comport themselves like god-fearing christians (laqueur 2003). and so manuel’s ejaculations became one of the only indices that the pastor used to assess the quality of hugo’s care. “at the end of the day,” the pastor mentioned to me, “i ask hugo how many times manuel masturbated and that gives me a sense of how the day went.” released hugo’s days with manuel soon began to spoil. in april 2015, guatemalan officials arrested nearly two dozen people for customs fraud, with as many as seventy government employees having received kickbacks from importers in exchange for lower taxes. a united nations–backed anti-impunity commission estimated that the network cleared $328,000 per week, with guatemala’s then president otto pérez molina and then vice president roxana baldetti receiving roughly 40 percent of the proceeds (lohmuller 2016). alongside intricately structured money-laundering schemes and the scamming of some six dozen state contracts, the two government leaders pocketed tens of millions of dollars, spending the cash on such vanity items as vacation homes, liposuction surgeries, and shopping sprees in miami (perez d. 2016). pérez molina even landed a helicopter valued at $3,500,000 (bbc news 2016). audacious even by guatemalan standards, the scandal proved to be a zero-sum game, as the corrupt stole money directly from public funds. guatemala’s ministry of health, for one, had been fleeced, with its basic list of medicines for common diseases quickly becoming an untenable social service. the ministry could no longer provide the chronically ill with medication at no cost, and it completely ran out of its supply of chlorpromazine. all the while private pharmacies leapt at the chance to charge customers twenty-three rather than ten times the recommended international price for these essential medicines. as guatemalan newspapers sharpened their critiques of the former president and vice president, rightfully commenting that both acted like ids without their egos, like wolves feasting on sheep (el lobo sí se comió a las ovejas; sarti 2015), this national scandal forced manuel off his meds, with his mood changing almost immediately. within a week of his last dosage, manuel’s hands began to shake, and he stopped sleeping through the night. complaining of a stomachache, manuel paced the roof for hours while compulsively smacking his lips. hugo followed close behind him, making sure that manuel never hurt himself or others—because manuel had never been so unpredictable. one moment he would sit quietly in a corner, completely incapable of dealing with anyone, and then suddenly he would find himself overcome with rage. manuel even started a screaming match with one of his angels, but rather than mayonnaise at the end of a stick, he thrust his finger angrily at his invisible enemy. he threatened the angel, called her a whore (puta), and then began to hit himself with such force that he seemed to risk breaking not just his cheekbone but also his hand. hugo eventually calmed him down, with the kind of shushes usually reserved for colicky babies, but not before manuel had seriously bruised the right side of his face. as the welt turned from red to blue to green to brown, hugo obsessed over what the pastor might say. with his own captivity hitched to the quality of manuel’s care, hugo worried that manuel’s growing number of outbursts threatened his own road to redemption, and so hugo tried to hide the injury altogether. whenever the pastor would reach the roof and walk the floor, hugo would position manuel—and then constantly reposition him—in such a way as to keep the right side of his face out of sight. the tediousness of this tactic, its outright absurdity, eventually proved impractical as manuel began to masturbate more often—at night as he paced the roof, but also in broad daylight while everyone watched. at some point, between balancing the optics of manuel’s bruise and the materiality of his messes, hugo doubled down on saving himself by managing manuel. “i had to do something,” hugo shrugged after tying up manuel with a cord of rope. at first hugo bound manuel’s wrists, but then he wrapped up manuel’s entire upper body, from his shoulders to his stomach. by the end of it all, manuel looked like he was in some kind of silent movie, as if he could be laid across railroad tracks, but none of this was theater. at wits’ end, with a fear for his own future, hugo fashioned a kind of moral exoskeleton for manuel, with the improvisation nesting him inside yet another layer of captivity. on top of a roof, inside of a cage, with his soul trapped somewhere inside of his body, manuel wrestled against ropes that pinned his arms against his sides. the pastor did not approve. in fact, he was deeply disturbed—not necessarily by how hugo treated manuel but rather because manuel tempted hugo. all the pastor had ever asked of manuel was to be the right kind of wolf, and manuel, off his meds, was no longer that. for manuel seemed to bait not just himself but also hugo toward a constellation of bestial desires, with cruelty proving to be the most pernicious. the signs of this sin were never egregious; hugo never tormented manuel, but on more than one occasion, hugo did seem to enjoy the thrill of this little hunt, with an abundance of affect always surfacing in those moments when hugo hogtied manuel. for he did smile every time he approached manuel with the rope, sometimes even playing with his prey until he had manuel cornered and then cuffed. hugo even started to treat the binding of manuel as some kind of public performance for all the other wolves to watch. “you can see [the sin] in his eyes,” the pastor once told me as we also watched hugo wrap up manuel. with manuel now too wolfish for the center’s own good, the pastor decided that manuel could no longer contribute to the flock, which is why the pastor did not discipline hugo for abusing manuel but instead punished manuel for tempting hugo. the penance was brisk. after eight years of captivity, on top of that roof and inside of that cage, the pastor ordered hugo to untie manuel, walk him down that narrow set of stairs, and then wait for the pastor inside his front office. moments later, for nothing short of looking like a christian and yet acting too much like a dog, the pastor opened the front door and let manuel go. just like that. leveraged manuel’s father quickly collected him from the streets and immediately brought him home. some eight years after the suspected assault, with the affected family now living on the other side of the city, manuel quietly returned to his neighborhood, boldly refusing to enter another center or even engage guatemala’s psychiatric hospital. his father acquiesced, ultimately wanting his son to live with him rather than with another pastor. as of this writing, manuel spends most of his days standing outside his father’s house with a transistor radio hanging from his neck. quietly perched at the end of a sleepy two-lane road, manuel feeds his angels mayonnaise for hours on end, and no one seems to care. off the roof and outside of the center, beyond the reach of the pastor and his daily dose of chlorpromazine, manuel is no longer a wolf. and like so many stories of old, from the middle ages onward, manuel has returned to his original form only to endure the indifference of being human (cohen 2012). the pastor, however, knew that he had a problem on his hands. augustín and tomás held form without their daily dosage of chlorpromazine, but the pastor’s loss of manuel immediately put the center at financial risk. with one too few wolves on top of his roof, the entire operation found itself far too leveraged on flow (sheep) rather than stock (wolves), with the former much more unpredictable than the latter. “sheep come and go,” the pastor reminded me. this is why the pastor immediately went to work—navigating government bureaucracy, drawing on his rapport with police officers, reconnecting with teams of social workers, and flipping through stacks of patient files. “i need another wolf,” he said with no small amount of trepidation in his voice. for these wolves are the very subjects that allow him to save so many of those sheep—first, by underwriting his center with above-market rates for extended stretches of captivity and, second, by providing pedagogical opportunities for recovering drug users to perform their piety. in no uncertain terms, this center could not continue to exist without at least one more wolf. and neither could guatemala. for wolves do not just leverage this pastor’s center but all centers in guatemala city, with these captives allowing some two hundred pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers to pay the bills. of added interest is that these wolves, by way of these centers, also backstop the country’s prisons and psychiatric hospital. wolves make these institutions viable social services by allowing the state to stash (at no cost to itself) not just hundreds of wolves but also thousands of sheep across an absolutely unregulated industry. with less than 1 percent of guatemala’s prison population having been convicted on drug charges (fontes, o’neill, and giacomello, n.d.) and the country’s only psychiatric institution understanding drug use as well beyond the scope of its mission, these centers have become not just sites of extrajudicial incarceration but also guatemala’s largest mental health provider.10 the pentecostal possibility of becoming wolf makes this symbiosis possible, with christians not just responding to the war on drugs with a complicated mix of compassion and cruelty but also propagating the war itself, albeit on their own ontological terms. thus an eminently fair, deeply ethnographic question becomes: where would guatemala be—as a state, as a government, even as a biopolitical entity—without the pentecostal threat of masturbating wolves? any effort at answering this question belies the fact that while guatemala finds itself overleveraged when it comes to wolves, anthropologists have failed to invest enough time to consider the importance of supposedly incorrigible creatures. there is, of course, a vibrant tradition that understands subjects such as manuel as victims of precarity (allison 2013), exposure (petryna 2002), and abandonment (povinelli 2011), of a life “unworthy of being lived” (agamben 1998, 136) and eventually a death “without grief” (butler 2009, 14–15) or “weeping” (scheper-hughes 1989). from this critical perspective, manuel’s expulsion (see sassen 2014) could easily be read as yet another moment of brutality and complexity in the global economy, and yet there has been very little anthropological reflection on the importance of wolves to pastoralism, beyond rather binomial provocations to focus on the good rather than the bad (robbins 2013). while manuel’s release might mark the limits of pastoralism with a veritable moment of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the pastor’s follow-up work with police, psychiatrists, and social workers maps more closely onto calls to consider the social value of the abandoned (biehl 2005) or the “suffering subject” (robbins 2013). the hiccup of adrenaline that followed the pastor’s first viable lead, a simple phone call from a friendly psychiatrist, suggests that anthropologists of neoliberalism, precarity, and suffering have been too quick to concede that “man is wolf to man” when it is the wolf that sometimes sets the very conditions for being human. notes acknowledgments fieldwork was supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the harry frank guggenheim foundation, the social science research council, the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, the open society foundations, the american academy of religion, the american council of learned societies, and the jackman humanities institute at the university of toronto. research assistants contributing to this essay included gregory fewster, ayan kassim, basit kareem iqbal, luis pedro jacobo meoño artiga, suzanne van geuns, and edward escalon. i presented a version of this material at the jackman humanities institute and delivered a different version at the university of toronto for a workshop titled “captivity.” many thanks to my interlocutors: jatin dua, susan lepselter, darryl li, juno parreñas, rhacel parreñas, andrew shryock, rachel silvey, and noah tamarkin. generous readings and insights also came from bruce o’neill, tomas matza, and mayanthi fernando. much appreciation also to two anonymous reviewers and to the cultural anthropology editorial collective, especially dominic boyer, for their comments. 1. all interviews for this article come from fieldwork conducted in guatemala city between 2011 and 2017 in and around pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. those interviewed remain anonymous or are given pseudonyms. in some cases, details insignificant to the analysis have been changed to protect the identities of certain people. quotations are from recorded interviews or from detailed notes. all translations are my own. all biblical quotations are taken from the new international version. finally, pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers tend to be all-male institutions. thus, the masculine pronoun is used throughout this essay to refer to captives. 2. there is an expanding social-scientific literature on compulsory drug rehabilitation centers in latin america. see hansen 2012, wilkinson 2013, garcia 2015, and o’neill, forthcoming. see also elovich and drucker 2008, wolfe and saucier 2010, human rights watch 2013, and goldstone 2017. 3. this paragraph and the one that follows contain updated passages found in o’neill 2017b. 4. guatemala’s prison population amounts to roughly 18,000 inmates (walmsley 2013). this number includes pretrial detainees and remand prisoners. the guatemalan prison system holds 1,500 of these prisoners in maximum-security facilities, while two hundred pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers in and around guatemala city hold about 6,000 people. 5. this pentecostal anthropology of body and soul returns to platonic assumptions in ways that contrast with michel foucault’s (1977, 30) notion that “the soul is the prison of the body.” 6. here, as catherine waldby (2002, 310) notes in her work on stem-cell technologies, is where we see how “the production of biovalue [gets] caught up with the production of capital value.” 7. the matter of voluntary labor is most lucidly addressed ethnographically by andrea muehlebach (2012, 66), especially when she draws attention to the potential for relational labor “to bring inner disposition and intention into harmony with ameliorative public action.” this dynamic between inner disposition and public action appears particularly important within these pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. 8. studies of protestant sincerity insist that words “take their meanings from intentions” (keane 2002, 73), but here, inside these centers, sincerity is far more about bodily comportment and embodied action than speech acts. 9. joão biehl (2005, 65) describes a similar set of social relationships inside what he calls a zone of social abandonment: “the new pedagogical role of these abandoned men and women stems from their alleged inability to produce anything more than bodily infections, parasites, and silent suffering.” 10. guatemala’s psychiatric hospital maintains a population of three hundred patients. given that 10 to 20 percent of those held inside drug rehabilitation centers exhibit severe signs of mental illness, the number of people inside these 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elizabeth a. povinelli columbia university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8119-7938 my desire is on fire. its velocity is exhilarating. its direction is the wind. i am simultaneously racing in front of and away from it. i am it chasing me with its inhuman legs. i want it to catch me. but i understand the consequences if it does. so i keep running just in front, but not too far away from its encroaching reach. my desire and i are asymptotic; if it becomes mine, then i am on fire. i don’t know if this is a universal quality of desire, or if it is the specific condition of me. subjectification when i was two and a half years old, we moved from buffalo, new york to shreveport, louisiana, a trip less treacherous, perhaps, than the distance my paternal grandparents traveled from the vicious austro-hungarian and italian alps to the united states (see thompson 2009). my parents burrowed our new home into the edge of an old pine forest around which slowly grew a suburb: clean, white, and affluent in the old, middle-class, white, affluent way. but dry pine needles beckon fire to release their intense aroma. and my brother loved fire. the drama of fire: from the first sound of the rough scratch where redhead meets sandpaper to the glorious transition of stick into flame. under the tingling of wind in pines you can hear the sound of heat eating air, consuming it. and everything is parchment-dry in the incinerating southern summers. it can happen very quickly. woods burn. houses burn. old logging factories burn. another brother and i raced behind with water buckets and piss. and that, too, that horrid sound when water kills fire. what onomatopoeia captures its sensory disappointment? to fizzle, to fizzle out, to sputter out, to end feebly: how much better to hit the ferocious walls of rain, cold and pelting, that also consumed the north louisiana summers, the wild thunderstorms that drove walls of water toward you, burned your skin as they ripped across it, lit trees on fire. and sometimes, when you were very, very lucky, the rain and lightning kept time with vicious little ice balls that we heard could kill you dead. we ran with fire. we ran with the rain. we were desperate to get out of the way of the fires. we were jubilant ahead of the rain, less so if we got caught by it. we wanted to experience just barely escaping death. we also ran with the fog trucks, sometimes ahead, but often behind them. it was a game we played—who could run the longest, the closest, to the nozzle spewing the pesticides in great clouds? the trick was not to breathe. to run at full speed without breathing, then to quickly veer away from the cloud when your lungs gave out and your heart began to explode. it was great fun. we loved the sign of an approaching truck, the smell it gave off far ahead of its appearance. the love had nothing to do with how effectively the pesticide ddt rid the neighborhood of mosquitoes and their parasites. and we weren’t the only ones playing with the fog. entire generations spontaneously invented the same game across countless neighborhoods in the united states. we can ask, what were we thinking? what was anyone thinking? we can try to calculate the effects of this widespread pastime. but i will tell you something true: when i think of our races, their wild, uncontaminated intoxication is not diminished by the knowledge that they were toxic―any less than our flying ahead of raging fire is diminished by the knowledge that we could well have died, that we might be imperceptibly burning inside out from the long-lasting effects of ddt. these fires, fogs, and winds were a part of us. they were elemental to what we were because they were the elements that composed us. yes, true, we also were juvenile accelerationists. my brothers built ancient sailing ships out of manila filing folders, toothpicks, and thread, chalking the driveway with herodotus’s lands and seas, flicking matches as if they were flying balls of greek fire, but often devolving as we smeared gasoline on our sweat shirts and turned the matches on each other. this was elemental to our desire—smearing ourselves with gasoline and then racing away from the match. figure 1. a fogging machine spraying the streets of darwin, australia, with ddt in 1962. photo by ken hodge, licensed under cc by. the one very good thing my parents did, confronted by their wild children, was to refuse a new solution to all of this crazy shit with the neural pesticide ritalin. their solution to the effects of our running games was to keep us running. burn it out of your system, they’d say. and lest we think this pure metaphor, they bought us chemistry kits and showed us how heat was expressed in chemical reactions and how heat could turn one kind of thing into another. you see fire, they said, but fire is just an expression of one form of oxidation. what’s important is not what you can see, but what you can’t. it’s all a careful measure. it’s all about knowing which chemicals are in which containers and how chemicals combine. it’s probably important to wear protective clothing. chemicals burn in ways you might not notice until it is too late. territorialization in rochester, new york, the great kodak factory is undergoing a controlled demolition and a phased reorientation. kodak park is becoming the eastman business park. it cannot happen soon enough for the city of rochester. the collapse of the market for film sank the eastman kodak company into debt and left it to hemorrhage vast numbers of its once tens of thousands of employees, who worked across 154 buildings on 1,300 acres. in 2012, the city’s unemployment topped 11.7 percent. as company and personal debt rose, tales of toxic swamps and sinkholes leaked out. those billions of stilled memories and moving fantasies suddenly had a toxic unconscious. the material afterimages of those kodak moments emerged as fibromyalgia, neuropathy, and primary biliary cirrhosis. lawsuit after lawsuit followed. kodak admitted to violations of airand water-pollution laws that created “an underground plume of chemicals” (hanley 1990). cancer clusters were tracked. superfund sites were established and managed. new forms of employment emerged as the film was run backward and a secret toxic image seen. cleanup can be lucrative. servpro industries makes between $100 and $500 million of revenue each year by providing residential and commercial restoration and cleaning services in the united states and canada. its services include water damage repair and restoration, fire damage repair and restoration, and mold remediation and restoration. the company also provides storm damage cleanup and restoration services for various disasters, such as flooding caused by heavy rains, hurricanes and tidal surges, tornados and wind damage, ice and snowstorms, and wild fires. its cleaning services include odor removal, and sewage and biohazard cleanup, as well as services for trauma and crime scenes, and vandalism and graffiti. (s&p global market intelligence 2017) * * * just be sure to wear protective clothing. * * * but some don’t wear hazmat suits. they don’t suit up, clean up, and leave. my father’s sister and her family moved to rochester when we moved to shreveport. wild raspberries grew in the woods behind their yard. they live and remain among the smoldering remains, not by necessity. others remain because they have nowhere to go or no means to get there. besides, as one man said, having remained on top of the toxic plume: “i don’t think being on top of them will be any worse than living anywhere else” (hanley 1990). which does not mean that living amid the toxic plumes provides a space of composure. the invisibility of the hazard sparks an affective fire we call anxiety, which sears the neural system according to its own logics and remedies, adding velocity to system. where are the toxins? quasi-events and quasi-substances need trained or enhanced perception. how does one probe and discover the world that one is in, but can experience only peripherally? artworks and digital designs are commissioned (see shapiro 2015). how can we seal them off, if they are increasingly everywhere? new disciplines of environmental architecture are spawned. but alongside these old toxins new ones seep in, some legal, some not. how clean are the cleaners? and how corrosive the opiates of every sort, or the amphetamines that fill up the space left empty by collapsed industries (pine 2007)? newly timely, william burroughs’s junky is pulled out of storage and placed in airport bookstores as the innards of shrinking cities are pulled out and sold to fuel survival economies of a growing number of impoverished families and expanding addictions. and i mean to write impoverished, not merely poor (cf. nixon 2011). and this impoverishment has a racial form, usually african american. detroit, michigan; flint, michigan: these are the current poster children of a new american dream. neighborhoods burn, whether from wild fires or demolition crews. and as they do, what catherine fennell (2015) calls “ambient envelopes” of potent neurotoxins waft across neighborhoods as houses are demolished or stripped for their copper wiring. and while detroit might be the poster child of the toxic afterlife of collapsed industries, syracuse, new york, less than 150 kilometers from rochester, faces a similar problem. the city invested nearly $50 million to build a connective corridor between syracuse university and its boutique, deco-dotted, picturesque neighborhoods to disconnect these from the infrastructural and social rot that has settled into its interstitial spatial tissue. where would my parents have us run at this point? far away is nowhere different. and the past has a specific smell. the anthropologist ali feser (2015) has found that in spite of the hard evidence of kodak’s liability, many former employees and their children simply could not kick their habit of associating the astringent smell of photographic chemicals with better days, happier moments, more secure futures. the sensory history of chemicals sear into the affects, creating bonds of desire, nostalgia, and mourning for the very toxins now slowly overheating bodies and landscapes. the odor embodies nostalgic sensations of full and secure employment, of a working middle class, of an intimate kinship among capital, production, and consumption, and of work as something other than precarious labor, underwater mortgages, and mountains of debt. sure, it has become clear by now that profit always mattered more than the vitality of bodies; that michel foucault’s understanding of biopolitics should have emphasized more the fact that making live was an ideological cover for letting die; that the experience of vitality and potency was more like what a meth addict feels; that the battery acid, drain cleaner, antifreeze, and sudafed are more expertly mixed than anyone thought. now we know that geontopower was hiding in the open, telling everyone not to worry about the great expanse of nonlife, the soils and subsoils, the aquifers and ozone, until suddenly their irradiated glow surrounded us as chemico-capital made its vicious deal with consumptive and informational capitalism (see povinelli 2016). * * * between the rising tides and chemical burns, our bodies are stew pots cooking up a new form of posthuman politics with new forms of posthuman corporealities. * * * in the french antilles, vanessa agard-jones (2014) tries to track sexuality, race, and gender expression only to find the “chemical embodiment” of coming corporealities. transnational circuits of pesto-capital—hormone-altering pesticides like chlordecone—are simultaneously giving rise to new forms of human bodies and new forms of national political collectives. the allied signal company began manufacturing chlordecone, also known as kepone, in the 1950s in hopewell, virginia. after an environmental spill and public scandal in the 1970s, chlordecone was banned in the united states. but powerful planter groups on martinique and guadeloupe (principally local whites or békés) imported stockpiles of the pesticide with the approval of france, despite the fact that france had banned its use within its continental borders. france did not outlaw its use in its overseas, racialized territories until the 1990s. the interval produced increased levels of bodily maladies (prostate cancer, for example) as well as so-called abnormalities (intersex births, for example). and these bodies―born outside the body-with-organs and confronting an anxious bionormativity―are in turn producing a politics at the material intersection of carnal vulnerability and its chemical legacy. likewise, in the far north of australia, the karrabing film collective tries to tell a story that starts out with a simple premise—a group of young indigenous men hiding in a chemically contaminated swamp after being falsely accused of stealing two cases of beer, while all around them miners are wrecking and polluting their land—and winds up in the paradox of contemporary toxic sovereignty. the young men note that they are safe within the swamp because state officials will not enter without hazmat suits. in toxic territoriality, a robust form of indigenous sovereignty emerges. karrabing members laugh or nod when coming to this moment in the film, most of them agreeing that what the young men say is true even as this truth has no place in sense. or put somewhat differently, their conversation is diagnostic if not prognostic of the current condition of toxic sovereignty—a prognosis of a form of survivance in which survival does not quite fit into the picture.1 in the process, fictional representations become nonfictional analytics. in a crucial scene, three fictional police capture one of the fictional karrabing land rangers at a barbed-wire fence in the middle of the bush. karrabing have walked through, around, and over this fence collecting wild honey, shooting kangaroo and pig, or looking for various sweet fruits for their entire lives. but when the filmmakers emerged from the shooting of the scene onto a public road, two nonfictional police confronted them, asking if they had illegally entered “the contaminated region” or altered signage in the area. suddenly karrabing members were curious: what contaminated region? they searched the internet and found a 2014 document submitted to the parliamentary standing committee on public works by australia’s department of finance. it notes that asbestos and other highly toxic substances have been on the cox peninsula for more than seventy years, but never cleaned up for (because of) the largely indigenous population in the area. suddenly a legal but fictional sign turned into a factual but illegal sign. what was intended to produce an aesthetic experience transformed an aesthetic activity into an analytic of existence. and when the branch burns in the next fire season, a small plume of toxicity will be released as the paint boils. and with the winds might come other forms of toxicity. although the karrabing film collective does not shoot on film stock, the digital platforms on which it relies are as crucial to the overheating of that swamp and its chemical composition as the eastman kodak company (see carruth 2014). * * * my heart is exploding, but you are saying, “keep running.” how do i hold my breath against the toxic winds when they have become the air? arise fire is the element that transforms substances. it brings about new forms with new memories, desires, and nostalgia. these forms do not abide by the logic of vitality, but manifest an affiliation with the errant harms of a grinning geontopower. now, we know that fire is just one effect of oxidation—the loss of one or more electrons when two substances interact, a chemical bonding. the natural sciences believe that oceanic cyanobacteria were the first forms of life to produce oxygen through photosynthesis (holland 2006). this great oxygenation event set the earth’s original atmosphere off kilter, making humans the afterlife of cyanobacteria breath. fire is merely rapid oxidation. and while water might put out some fires, it can also cause others to spark. when water meets potassium, salt, and zinc powder a flamboyant green flame ignites. but oxidation is pressing on all things, as oxygen molecules seek free radicals, slowly eating through paint and looking for an uneven distribution of lemon juice on an open-faced avocado. the brown on a cut apple, the rust on a car bumper, and the green on the florence baptistery relief: all are the result of different rates of oxidation, leading some people to call rust a slow fire that produces iron as ash. the difference in rates depends, in part, on the ignition temperature of a substance. if you want a fire, you need to get the substance to that temperature. some can get there on their own. hay mounds, pistachio nuts, and manure piles all can spontaneously combust if not stored in ways that keep their temperatures under control. coal seams can light on fire if exposed to certain levels of oxygen. other substances need external ignition. and if you want it to run, add an accelerant. in terms of climate change, remove more ozone and spread volatile chemicals widely. as the world overheats, the accelerant will be the winds. * * * in here and out there, atoms and ions, winds and rivers, attracting and repulsing each other in ways that reveal desire to be a feeble concept. bioterrorism connects diy hormo-terrorists with religious apocalypto-terrorists (see preciado 2013). free radicals refer to new alliances between post-toxic humans and klepto-electrons. the chemistry sets have hopped out of their multicolored boxes, the chemicals remixing according to their own sense. some bodies are running toward a new smell. some are running away as fast as they can. * * * the bonds i seek are outside me in the smell of burning pine, the memory of the madness of ddt, the touch of my various smartphones as we shoot karrabing films to unravel the toxicity that surrounds indigenous worlds. but thinking the nature of desire through these bonds interrupts the staid intersection of climate-change policy and science. we think there is a choice between mitigation and adaptation. but a very different kind of adaptation is already well underway. the voracious nature of information capitalism exhales its toxic winds as it redistributes an older assemblage of viruses and their hosts. the great climate acceleration is underway “with faster rates of change resulting in less time for human and natural systems to adapt” (smith et al. 2015, 333). everything is on fire. and we are already producing our afterlife as our enjoyments seed new digital clouds and chemicals seep into more aquifers, mixing and spreading new anxieties. these fires, fogs, and winds are surrounding the poor, the black and brown, the islands, and the verging-on-extinct first. but from the future, we will have been the cyanobacteria. who will be us is not yet clear. note 1. according to gerald vizenor (1999, vii), “survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry.” references agard-jones, vanessa 2014 “spray.” somatosphere, may 27. http://somatosphere.net/2014/05/spray.html. carruth, allison 2014 “the digital cloud and the micropolitics of energy.” public culture 26, no. 2: 339–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2392093. fennell, catherine 2015 “emplacement.” in “the infrastructure toolbox,” theorizing the contemporary series edited by hannah appel, nikhil anand, and akhil gupta, cultural anthropology website, september 24. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/716-emplacement. feser, ali 2015 “‘it was a family’: picturing corporate kinship in eastman kodak.” paper presented at the visual and cultural studies graduate conference, rochester, n.y., april 17. hanley, robert 1990 “eastman kodak admits violations of anti-pollution laws.” new york times, april 6. http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/06/nyregion/eastman-kodak-admits-violations-of-anti-pollution-laws.html. holland, heinrich d. 2006 “the oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans.” philosophical transactions of the royal society b 361: 903–15. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2006.1838. nixon, rob 2011 slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. pine, jason 2007 “economy of speed: the new narco-capitalism.” public culture 19, no. 2: 357–66. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2006-041. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2016 geontologies: a requiem to late liberalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. preciado, beatriz 2013 testo junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. new york: feminist press. s&p global market intelligence 2017 “company overview of servpro industries, inc.” http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapid=4788249. shapiro, nicholas 2015 “attuning to the chemosphere: domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 3: 368–93. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.3.02. smith, steven j., james edmonds, corinne a. hartin, anupriya mundra, and katherine calvin 2015 “near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change.” nature climate change 5: 333–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2552. thompson, mark 2009 the white war: life and death on the italian front, 1915–1919. new york: basic books. vizenor, gerald 1999 manifest manners: narratives on postindian survivance. lincoln: university of nebraska press. sound + vision sound + vision: experimenting with the anthropological research article of the future dominic boyer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-406x james faubion http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0847-3008 cymene howe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9361-3812 marcel laflamme http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7489-4233 rice university are we satisfied with the conventional media for anthropological research and publication? the question is obviously not a new one. even before anthropological research and scholarship had consolidated its modern standards of fieldwork, theory, and ethnography in the first decades of the twentieth century, anthropological writing was already part of an ecology of recordings and representations of other ways of being human that ranged from colonial propaganda to exotic-pornographic photography to early filmic and acoustic experiments in salvage ethnography. all absorbed and reproduced the politics of race and empire around them, just as early anthropological writing did. films like edward curtis’s in the land of the head hunters (1914) and robert flaherty’s nanook of the north (1922) offered, despite their myriad flaws, early glimpses of the potentialities of ethnographic film and indigenous media (see ginsburg 2002). by the 1930s and 1940s we find larger-scale projects of documentation and salvage—the library of congress’s archive of american folk song, for example—but also early experiments in using film to document visual movement and to compare it across cultures—for example, gregory bateson and margaret mead’s bathing babies in three cultures (1941) (jacknis 1988). the 1950s and 1960s saw an explosion of ethnographic filmmaking—we think of figures like timothy asch, robert gardner, and jean rouch, among many others—as well as growing acceptance of film as a medium of anthropological research. by the late 1960s and early 1970s, a new subfield called “visual anthropology” began consolidating (e.g., collier 1967; ruby 1975), seeking not only to take the artifacts of multimedia ethnography seriously as vehicles of anthropological theorization and commentary but also to catalyze new experiments in representational method and indigenous–settler collaboration (e.g., worth and adair 1970). despite this long and complex history of multimedia experimentation in anthropological research practice, it remains fair to say that print has been the mainstream medium of choice for publicizing and communicating anthropological knowledge in the discipline’s history to date. it is thus striking but perhaps not surprising that even two decades into the internet revolution, a typical anthropological article or book looks much as it might have a century ago, even when it is downloaded as an electronic file onto a laptop or a smartphone. what we encounter is a lot of printed text offset by the occasional photograph, still usually in black and white to maximize contrast and print quality for paper publication. the recent and welcome proliferation of online anthropology publications—journals such as limn, hau, and medicine, anthropology, theory, to name a few—while doing amazingly innovative work at the level of content, have (as cultural anthropology has up until this point) largely composed articles in the formal traditions of the print era. elsewhere in the human sciences, we have recently seen a few more aggressive efforts to set new multimodal standards for scholarly publication; the pioneering journal vectors is perhaps the most ambitious and successful example (see mcpherson, anderson, and kelly n.d.). we find it interesting that despite the abundance of filmic, photographic, and sonic material that most anthropologists now generate in the course of fieldwork, we have not yet really committed ourselves as a discipline to exploring new multimodal forms of anthropological research publication. to be clear, there is a bright and vibrant edge to anthropological research expression these days—think, for example, of the many multimedia and installation projects at the juncture of art and anthropology undertaken by the ethnographic terminalia collective. yet those projects of research expression have not always translated well into the world of research publication, which has undeniably depressed their value in terms of mainstream standards—we are not justifying them—of disciplinary research activity. what cultural anthropology aspires to do with our new sound + vision section is to develop prototypes for a multimodal future. we wish to work together with authors to ask and answer questions such as: what should the anthropological research article of the future look and sound and feel like? what features and affordances should it offer? what role should embedded video and moving images play? what would be gained by incorporating audio clips or soundtracks? is it too early to think about syncing an article with a 3d printer in order to materialize objects that would otherwise be described in ethnographic narrative? we are committed to open-mindedness in this inquiry and, as editors and producers of this journal, we are trying to bracket any preconceived notions of how these projects will be realized. at the same time, we are aiming to create an epistemic infrastructure rather than a series of one-offs; that is, we know that reinventing the platform for each individual article is not tenable in terms of time, labor, and expense. our objective is, instead, to develop an adaptable, modular infrastructure that will, nonetheless, be transformative. it is not just a question of adding more features because it is possible to do, but rather of finding new ways to capture and mobilize the unique intimacy and multisensory character of anthropological research. in that spirit, we imagine sound + vision creating a growing repertoire of tools and toys that will inspire others to rethink how they might design, actualize, and disseminate their work. we expect that sound + vision articles may attract new audiences, since today’s cultural anthropology is not only an open-access journal but also a journal whose principal publication portal is its website. we want to utilize our departure from paper publishing as an opportunity to rethink where this journal might go next. and we want to explore the possibility of finding audiences that are interested in anthropological knowledge, but perhaps not in its traditional container of the eightto ten-thousand-word, text-dominant research article. we have taken small steps in this direction by juxtaposing sound and video recordings with text in our editor-reviewed hot spots and theorizing the contemporary web series (see, especially, howe and pandian 2016). but sound + vision articles will be fully peer-reviewed and they will push beyond the features and affordances already offered in blog-style publications—such as embedded youtube clips—and toward multimedia formats that strive to ensure the longevity of scholarly materials and yet also fulfill the desire for innovative agility. in other words, we seek a better balance between permanence and flow. it was clear to us from the start that sound + vision would need to be a collaborative undertaking. building on the journal’s existing partnerships with academic libraries (see mangiafico and smith 2014), we reached out to indiana university, home of the largest university-based ethnographic sound archive in the united states. we struck an agreement whereby the journal would deposit the multimedia content that appears in sound + vision articles in the digital collections of the indiana university libraries, and we indicated our desire to become the first academic journal to integrate avalon media system, an open-source media management tool developed at indiana and northwestern universities, into our production process. for this first iteration of sound + vision, we are relying on avalon’s existing functionality (and supplementing it, here and there, with creative workarounds for some of its current limitations). however, thanks to a generous grant from the american anthropological association’s committee on the future of print and electronic publishing, the journal is supporting further development of avalon’s media player so that future iterations of sound + vision will be able to incorporate even more advanced technical capabilities. producing downloadable versions of sound + vision articles came with its own learning curve. embedding audio and video content in pdf files turns out to be no simple matter; different pdf viewers and devices display media content in different ways, and so we were faced with the prospect of producing files that would function properly for some of our readers and not others. instead, our pdfs will link out to media content that plays back in a separate browser window: a tradeoff that sacrifices seamless user experience for greater interoperability. we are also making sound + vision articles available for download in epub format, a specification that was developed for electronic book publishing but that is beginning to see greater adoption by scholarly journals (carpenter 2013). our epubs will feature embedded media content, which makes for large files that take more time to download but that are (for the most part) device-agnostic and that will play back even in the absence of an internet connection. it remains to be seen if there is a demand for the epub format among our readership, but we encourage readers to try it out and to share your feedback with us. it is only in the process of trying new things and being willing to fail that we can build the kind of publishing infrastructure to which we aspire. one final word: in the time between the initial announcement of this new section (boyer, faubion, and howe 2015) and today, the world has lost the artist david bowie, whose formulation “sound and vision” we borrowed in deliberate and respectful recognition of a long history of bold, restless, and virtuosic experimentation within and across media. in honor of bowie, then, this is our modest effort to make anthropological publication an even more reflexive and creative space than it already is. sound + vision is just a down payment on our discipline’s longstanding dream of multiplying the forms and features of anthropological communication. references boyer, dominic, james faubion, and cymene howe 2015 “editors’ introduction to 30.1: circles not pyramids.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 1: 1–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.01. carpenter, todd a. 2013 “is it time for scholarly journal publishers to begin distributing articles using epub 3?” scholarly kitchen, march 19. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/03/19/is-it-time-for-scholarly-journal-publishers-to-begin-distributing-articles-using-epub-3. collier, jr., john 1967 visual anthropology: photography as a research method. new york: holt, rinehart, and winston. ginsburg, faye d. 2002 “screen memories: resignifying the traditional in indigenous media.” in media worlds: anthropology on new terrain, edited by faye d. ginsburg, lila abu-lughod, and brian larkin, 39–57. berkeley: university of california press. howe, cymene, and anand pandian, eds. 2016 “lexicon for an anthropocene yet unseen.” theorizing the contemporary series, cultural anthropology website, january 22. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/803-lexicon-for-an-anthropocene-yet-unseen. jacknis, ira 1988 “margaret mead and gregory bateson in bali: their use of photography and film.” cultural anthropology 3, no. 2: 160–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1988.3.2.02a00030. mangiafico, paolo, and kevin smith 2014 “reason, risk, and reward: models for libraries and other stakeholders in an evolving scholarly publishing ecosystem.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 216–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.03. mcpherson, tara, steve anderson, and raegan kelly n.d. “editorial statement.” vectors: journal of culture and technology in a dynamic vernacular. http://vectorsjournal.org/journal/index.php?page=editorialstatement. ruby, jay 1975 “is an ethnographic film a filmic ethnography?” studies in the anthropology of visual communication 2, no. 2: 104–11. worth, sol, and john adair 1970 “navajo filmmakers.” american anthropologist 72, no. 1: 9–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/aa.1970.72.1.02a00050. unruly affects unruly affects: attempts at control and all that escapes from an american mental health court jessica cooper princeton university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7599-6736 it was at the end of the second day that i spent with harriet—before she threatened suicide, but after she had told me that court supervision “feels like death”—that she suddenly started to speak about the land.1 we were sitting in a parking lot at the time. it was hot, and the vast expanse of asphalt before us wasn’t helping things. i kept sucking on the dregs of an iced tea, trying to get the last bits of melting ice out of my cup, and harriet had already twice refilled her nalgene from a hose on a nearby patio. summer had come early to northern california, in full swing by april of 2015. after a few hours of conversation, harriet and i had fallen silent, which felt right in some way—the air between us was already thick with the weight of the heat, if not dialogue. until harriet suddenly punctured the silence with a declaration that, to me, seemed out of the blue: “i am of the land, and the sea, and the air.” harriet’s origin statement hung in the space between us. in the time that has since passed, harriet has elaborated on her assertion, integrating it into her identity as a pantheist, heathen witch. but at the time of her first announcement—“i am of the land, and the sea, and the air”—i was caught by surprise, in part because harriet is not herself “landed.” put differently, harriet does not participate in a regime of land ownership. we were sitting in this parking lot next to her car, a dinged-up prius with paint chips and dents and erosions in its antiwar and lgbtq bumper sticker-covered metal shell, because this is her home. she had selected this particular parking lot as our meeting point because it offered the most shade in which she could park to protect her co-inhabitants: fluffy, megabyte, and vlad, all cats. transportation, bedroom, storage shed, litter box: the prius is everything. since 2014, harriet’s life has revolved around the prius. because of the cats, she tends to come back to this shady spot in alta vista, a wealthy enclave in silicon valley, where she believes police are less likely to bother her than in areas more notorious for their homeless encampments.2 at night, when the tech engineers return to their alta vista homes, she relocates to parking lots in strip malls on the outskirts of town, also for the purposes of evading the police. harriet’s mother is homeless and lives out of a camry. the two will park the prius and the camry next to one another at night for safety. in their own way, they commute, in the inverse direction of all of the teslas and porsches, driving out of the bedroom community at night and back in by the morning light. harriet has befriended cafe owners and will leave the cats in the car—windows cracked, sleeping bag spread out over the headrests to create even more shade beneath a makeshift tent—while she drinks free coffee and uses free wi-fi to update her facebook page and facetime an interested anthropologist from her iphone. she takes walks. she scavenges. though harriet is in her early thirties, she has found a group of genderqueer kids from the local high school who like to cut class and hang out with her, voicing admiration for her life as a transgender woman who opts to retain a masculine physical appearance, beard and all. and sometimes, harriet will drive the prius with the cats and her mother over the hill to the santa clara county courthouse, the building where harriet and i first met. harriet is a client of the county’s mental health court, a criminal courtroom that attempts to offer community care in place of incarceration to offenders whom the state believes to have mental health problems. clients, like harriet, regularly return to court for a review of their progress toward mental health. failure to clinically progress, as determined by the attorneys and clinicians who staff the mental health court, can result in legal sanction. most clients are homeless for at least part of their time in the program. in this essay, i demonstrate how harriet’s perpetual movement confounds the mental health court’s claim to jurisdiction, a claim that i figure as an attempt to ensnare harriet. i repeat: an attempt to ensnare harriet. like others who have studied the often-devastating effects of state violence, i register the ways in which states train their attempts at control on people who cultivate or otherwise possess subjectivities that states find difficult to govern. from examining south africa’s production of criminality and its punishment to authorize the state’s existence (comaroff and comaroff 2016) to exploring australia’s development of racist policies to quietly snuff out aboriginal ways of life (povinelli 2011) to revealing the “murderous” quality of “anonymous care” in the canadian arctic (stevenson 2014, 73), ethnographic scholarship has flagged the perniciousness of state violence and suggested the urgency of political engagement. my concern, however, is that scaling up from particular accounts of state violence to state power writ large overestimates the efficacy of state action. just because representatives of the state would like to punish those who deviate from norms does not mean that they are able to do so. even successfully implementing a state system to punish—to make devious subjects more governable—does not mean that such lessons are internalized. attempts at control, even those undertaken by states, sometimes fail. i foreground the suppleness and indeterminacy of state power by thinking through attempts at control—attempts that may succeed or fail but that are inevitably muddled by the people at whom they are directed. courts’ claims to jurisdiction are legal attempts at control that work chronotopically, acting on both time and space. through jurisdiction, the law fixes people in time and space to make claims about their capacities for action and the responsibility they assume for their conduct. harriet’s mobility disrupts the mental health court’s attempt to “fix” her, to stabilize a psyche that the court takes to be disordered through the inculcation of a particular arrangement of space and time, with attendant implications for action and responsibility. harriet’s refusal of psychic or physical stability, then, challenges jurisdictional claims to authority from the inside out. in legally claiming jurisdiction over harriet, the court makes certain demands of her, namely, that she appear at court on particular days and at particular times. sometimes she satisfies these demands and at other times she does not; her unwillingness to allow the court’s plans for her time to overwhelm other considerations, such as spending time with her mother, or with her cats, or by herself should she so choose, rejects the law’s narrative that authority is generated through the fixing of time and space. in other words, harriet refuses to be territorialized (see deleuze and guattari 1987), undoing the state’s claims to legitimately govern her through her own mobile manipulation of terms produced by the state’s invocation of jurisdiction. she defies fixity in her refusal to be still. the old house harriet and her mother have not always been homeless. as one might guess from her prius and macbook air and college credits and iphone and veganism and very particular attitudes toward third-wave coffee roasting, there was a time before. as she tells it, harriet never expected to live in parking lots. she grew up in a middle-class home, not too far from alta vista. while she might be “of the land, and the sea, and the air,” she was born in a nearby hospital and taken home to a house on a suburban cul-de-sac in which she lived with her mother until 2010, when unemployment and the rising costs of living in the area caused the bank to repossess the house. by the time the bank evicted harriet and her mother, her parents had been separated for several years, and her sister had moved out and into a home of her own with a new husband. only harriet and her mother were left. the house is important, not simply because it establishes homelessness as an anomaly in harriet’s life but also because its address places it within santa clara county. it is important because the house is the scene of the crime for which harriet was arrested and convicted. it is important because the repossession of the house marks the starting point for harriet’s life with the mental health court. if harriet marks her own origin as “the land, and the sea, and the air,” the origin of her life with the mental health court began with the dispossession of her home. as her relatively stable socioeconomic life began to disintegrate, deep memories—perhaps that part of her “of the sea”—began to flood over her. she remembered that her father had killed a child, a friend of hers from elementary school, and had buried the body beneath the stairs. she remembered being asked to help with the handiwork: getting a hammer, holding nails, shining a flashlight, while her father dug a pit in a closet under the stairwell. when she called the police to tell them that her father had murdered a boy twenty years earlier and that the corporeal evidence of the crime lay buried beneath the staircase that the bank was about to take away, a cruiser arrived at the house and took harriet to the psychiatric ward at the county’s public hospital. when she was released a few weeks later, she went back to the home in which she had grown up. her sister and brother-in-law had started to pack boxes. the house was still foreclosed upon. but before harriet and her mother left the home, those cruisers would be called back, this time by harriet’s sister, this time to a space that the police believed to be a crime scene, this time of harriet’s doing. the legal term that we might use to locate the old house vis-à-vis the court is jurisdiction. the house’s location determined which police agency responded to the 911 calls, to which public hospital harriet would be taken, which county psychiatrists would be making decisions about her health care, which psychotropic medications would be available for use. the place of the house had significant legal ramifications. like harriet herself, jurisdiction is, in part, of the land. jurisdiction’s partial stake in the land is instrumental, in the sense that claiming land is the way that the law works to establish authority, as made violently clear by the jurisdictional land grabs of colonial law (benton 2009; benda-beckmann and benda-beckmann 2014). and, as shaunnagh dorsett and shaughn mcveigh (2012) note, when a state claims jurisdiction, the state performs a double move, simultaneously delimiting a territory and positing itself as the rightful authority to govern said territory, a double move that, as jeffrey kahn (2017, 7) writes, possesses “cosmological, or world-ordering, properties.”3 this sovereignty is exercised sneakily and stealthily. mariana valverde (2009, 2014, 2015) demonstrates how jurisdiction constitutes a political technology whose genius lies in the masking of its own politics. the “game of jurisdiction” establishes the technocratic rules of “the governance of legal governance,” such that politics are “rendered invisible” (valverde 2009, 155, 144, 141). justin richland (2013, 214) describes this practice as a sort of shapeshifting, the conversion of “ontological questions about the essence of legal power into pragmatic ones.” when funneled through arguments over jurisdiction, questions about legal authority are made technocratic rather than political. in other words, valverde and richland show how the two-step identified by dorsett and macveigh is actually a triple step: first, the state asserts control over a territory; second, it silently implies that its control over a territory renders its authority just; and then, third, it erases the connection between the rightfulness of the state’s authority and its territorialization, such that the rightfulness of the state’s authority appears to stand on its own. claiming territory is a silent stand-in for claiming legitimate power. but jurisdiction is not so simple as determining an address. after all, harriet no longer has one. the old house is old. after she was arrested at the old house for the crime to which she eventually pleaded guilty, harriet was confined in the county jail. when her case was transferred to the county’s mental health court, the court offered her release from jail in exchange for a series of conditions designed to contain her in the community. the mental health court tried to prevent her itineracy by offering her public housing or a bed in a residential psychiatric treatment center. neither option was available. all the court could offer was a bed in a temporary homeless shelter, but the shelter would not let her cats in the building and she would be forced to live with men, based on her sex. these facts made the offer of a shelter bed a nonstarter. harriet took to the streets. absent a place, a space, to put harriet, the mental health court issued a different demand. she was to consistently arrive at a particular place (the mental health courtroom) at a particular time (every six weeks), or fall in violation of the terms of her probation. the court offered her those terms of probation in lieu of a different type of spatiotemporal confinement: a prison sentence. by imposing terms of probation, which the mental health court professionals with whom i worked considered to be a release from what they called the “cruel conditions” of custody, the court supplanted confinement-by-incarceration with confinement-by-appointments. were harriet to fail to show at her court hearings or any other social service meetings arranged by the court, the judge could issue a warrant for her arrest, swapping yet again the particular form of spatiotemporal control that the state elected to exercise over harriet. as much as jurisdiction is inescapably partly about land, then, it is never only about territory. in explicitly circumscribing space, jurisdictional claims fix time. as carol greenhouse (1996, xi, ix) suggests, time is a “classic anthropological question,” specifically because it functions as an emic “surrogate for specific questions of power, authority, and legitimacy.” extensive anthropological research has maintained that time is a cultural concept, the particular construction of which makes possible and exposes different theories of agency and authority. or, as deborah thomas (2016, 179) explains through her historical-ethnographic work on life in garrisons in the caribbean, considerations of temporality matter for understandings of sovereign violence because “normative conceptualizations of being and becoming” are “undone and remade” by “the pressures and inequalities of modern time.”4 in matters of subjectivity and agency, then, time and space cannot be pried apart. based on her fieldwork with a population that she identifies as homeless and schizophrenic, anne lovell (1997, 355) argues that temporality is the “essence” of a reflexive subjectivity, as the organization of various events in narrative time is what renders everyday life legible in an “existentially meaningful” way. in her reading, it is the socially unusual “temporal and aesthetic devices” of schizophrenic narration that “preclude the constitution of identity through culturally sanctioned narratives” (lovell 1997, 356), thereby maintaining an existential distinction between the subjectivities of those who are schizophrenic and homeless and those who are not. in her engagement with one schizophrenic and homeless man she calls rob, lovell leverages the conjunction of space and time as a methodological intervention; when rob’s flattened verb tense made it difficult for her to understand his self-narration, lovell (1997, 362, 361) “supplanted” rob’s socially illegible temporal structure with “categories of space” by spatially mapping his “voyage” through homelessness, so as to yield a timeline. the push and pull of lovell’s fieldwork mechanics reveal the ethnographic imperative to consider time and space in tandem. the imbrication of time and space ought not be surprising: this is what mikhail bakhtin (1981) refers to as a chronotope. in analyzing the emergence of the novel, bakhtin (1981, 84) highlights the “intrinsic connectedness” of time and space. bakhtin positions the chronotope, or the amalgamation of time and space prior to their theoretical distinction, as the motivating force for narrative and hermeneutics. bakhtin (1981, 258; emphasis added) is not restrained in his analysis: “every entry into the sphere of meaning,” he writes, “is accomplished only through the gates of the chronotope.” in trying to pin the slipperiness of jurisdiction, valverde (2014, 2015) has productively invoked bakhtin’s chronotope. following bakhtin, she presumes that space and time are always conglomerated; in speaking to space, jurisdiction makes claims on time, but only silently. calling on the chronotope helps reveal what the transcript of jurisdictional argumentation will not. valverde’s use of bakhtin exposes the backstage operations of jurisdiction, those silent implications of articulated claims, and engages bakhtin primarily as a theorist. but bakhtin does not just theorize in a vacuum; he does so using novels. the matter of bakhtin’s theorizing is significant. as bakhtin (1981, 99, 152) moves through various genres—from the greek romance of “adventure-time” to the medieval romances of chivalric “everyday adventure”—he emphasizes different possibilities for action. a novel’s chronotope determines potential plotlines. the formulation of time and space invoked lends itself to specific narratives. different plots imply different compositions of agency for the characters working within the narrative. consider bakhtin’s (1981, 87–88) explication of greek adventure-time. in sum: boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love and intend to wed, boy and girl are separated, boy and girl undergo various travails, boy and girl reunite and wed. this plotline is sustained by a particular formulation of time and space. for this plot to function, the story demands “an expanse of space” that is “interchangeable” and a time that is “empty” and “leaves no trace” (bakhtin 1981, 99, 100, 91, 90). the characters’ adventures over space and time have no impact on their psychological development. the beginning and end points of the narrative are homologous; the trials of the intermediary moments may just as well have never transpired (bakhtin 1981, 89–90). this is an argument about agency and subjectivity: plot is something that befalls adventure-time’s protagonists. they do nothing to participate in it and are unaltered by it. encounters or missed encounters between characters but orchestrated by fate determine plotlines in adventure-time. the meeting: an encounter, or missed encounter, in which the “temporal marker” is “inseparable from the spatial marker” (bakhtin 1981, 97). meetings only happen in the alignment of space and time, near-misses in their divergence. and while i am not arguing that the mental health court employs greek adventure-time in the present day, the court’s own regime of legally mandated meetings, appointments, and hearings likewise teases out a figure of a subject through the configuration of agency. these are the stakes of “the game of jurisdiction” (valverde 2009, 155): by claiming an explicitly territorial and implicitly temporal jurisdiction, the state promotes a theory of agency in which the object at the center of the claim to jurisdiction (here, harriet) can be held responsible for a series of events. moreover, in this particular chronotope, the state casts itself as the best protagonist to hold its jurisdictional object (again, harriet) accountable. in fixing formulations of time and space, invocations of jurisdiction fix relations of moral authority, such that one party always has the upper hand. when jurisdiction supposes that space can be determined and time is linear, it tells a particular type of story with a particular type of plot. the chronotope invoked by the court’s claims to jurisdiction tells a story in which individuals are atomistic and agentic. when said agentic individuals violate the social contract, it falls to the state to hold them responsible. and while no one with whom i worked ever mentioned bakhtin, discussions of meetings and appointments, those fused spatiotemporal markers, and their misses were a constant topic of conversation, thereby patterning discourse and subjectivity in a particular way (bakhtin 1981, 97). the individual is the unit of analysis. an action can be traced back to an individual who can be held responsible through linear time. relationality and plurality do not fit in the court’s rendering of time and space. the plot is one of an individual moving through the world with intention and agency. plotting space and time as axes on a chronotopic grid by requiring presence at a particular place at a particular time, as the court required of harriet, is an attempt at control. in the eyes of those who staff the mental health court, it is a benevolent attempt at control. martha, one of the court psychologists who had been working with harriet for several years by the time i arrived, was sympathetic to many of harriet’s troubles. when i asked martha about harriet, she would sigh. “it has to be hard,” she would say, “to grow up as a transgender kid, on top of everything else.” i took this “everything else” to refer to martha’s perceptions of what she called “harriet’s personality problems,” problems that martha interpreted in a psychiatric, diagnostic kind of way. but martha would also get frustrated, tired of explaining over and over and over again to harriet why she had to show for her court dates. “how hard can it be?” martha would mutter to me, after one or several such explanations to harriet. “i know it isn’t easy to get here, but it has to be easier than a prison term. that was her other option.”5 some of martha’s frustrations, she told me, were because harriet “had it pretty good” compared to many of the court’s other clients. harriet was white. she had a college education. outwardly, because of her self-presentation, she looked like a white man who owned a prius. you could not see harriet’s gender, or the fact that she was constantly drinking coffee to stave off the hunger pains that would inevitably arrive from not having access to anything to eat, or her expired car registration and lapsed insurance. unlike many of the court’s other clients, people who lacked both homes and cars and therefore spent nights outside, harriet had some form of shelter. and harriet’s shelter had a clock that showed the time and date. she had a digital calendar on her iphone, something that could not be said for many of the court’s other clients, who would have to ask someone or look for a public clock or newspaper to find out what day and time it was to know if they had court. no, martha would acknowledge, the cost of gas was not negligible, but harriet only had to drive a handful of miles. compared to many of martha’s other clients, who relied on the few bus tokens that martha would distribute to them for transportation for the entire month, if harriet failed to appear, it was her failing. martha’s chronotope posited a linear temporality through which individuals could be responsible for appearing in certain places when required to do so, especially if they had any material means. the plot mobilized by martha implied a particular way of moving through time and space and a subject who could be held responsible for deviations from this type of movement. it was not so much that harriet rejected or disagreed with the chronotope that martha and the rest of the mental health court professionals attempted to foist on her. in place of explicit conflict, harriet expressed bafflement and frustration. she never understood, she would tell me, her voice squeaky and distressed, how the court could expect her to physically be in one place at one time. she frequently had migraines and could not sleep, an insomnia exacerbated by trying to sleep in the prius’s reclined driver’s seat. sometimes she was too tired to get to appointments on time. she told andie, another court psychologist, that sometimes she could not come to court because of the pain from her fibromyalgia. andie had walked away from that conversation in the courtroom, turning to me to say, “now, that’s just bullshit.” andie had rolled her eyes and rubbed her palm against her cheek, a gesture that i understood as a reference to harriet’s beard. “you can only have fibromyalgia if you have a uterus. this is just pure hysteria.” andie did not note the irony of her turn to yet another (debunked) affliction of the uterus. if the court was really trying to help her, harriet would say to me, then they ought to understand everything else going on in her life, things that sometimes made it impossible for her to get to court. ironically, the court professionals agreed: as a mental health court, as opposed to a “normal” criminal courtroom, the court attempted to claim jurisdiction over all aspects of harriet’s life, not limiting itself to only attempting to control criminal conduct. yet through its various appointments and meetings, the court attempted to provide order, to neatly and therapeutically arrange the various aspects of harriet’s life, through the insistence on their spatiotemporal plotting. but that’s the thing about plot. if all a narrative achieved was to cast characters into particular formulations of space and time, it would be an awfully dull story. a plot feels like something. plots generate affective engagements with their objects. they express “mood,” as mariana valverde (2015, 78) glosses bakhtin’s argument about affect. a plot creates an atmosphere—that cluttered and unstable zone of interaction between land and air. timothy choy and jerry zee (2015, 211) propose the atmospheric as an analytic frame that entails “a way of being suspended,” not in a void, but instead with attention to interaction, friction, attraction, or, “how things lift and settle in mediums.” suspense is always mediated, involving potential interactions. the individualized narrative demanded by the court’s claim to jurisdiction cannot capture the contingencies and uncertainties of atmospheric relations. writing of ordinary life in appalachia, kathleen stewart (2011, 449, 452) calls atmosphere the “sentience of a situation,” a “lived affect” that exceeds fixity and individuation through “an attunement of the senses, of labors and imaginaries to potential ways of living through things.” jurisdiction is a game, then, with unintended consequences. the chronotopic moves that allow the court to posit a theory of agency and accountability generate narratives that give way to an affective atmosphere that exceeds the court’s grasp. harriet’s physical, temporal, and psychic peripateticism, made material by the roving of her prius, focuses attention on those “potential ways of living,” as stewart (2011, 452) would say. her life points to the otherwise, to a plot that she scripts and improvises differently than does the normative work of law. her alternative formulations of time and space give rise to different understandings of agency and accountability, frequently in uncomfortable tension with those understandings of the court that supposes itself to fix her. the pills a few times, over the course of the year and a half that harriet and i spent together, she went missing, wandered away, out of touch. sometimes she would go missing from me, not replying to my messages.6 sometimes she would disappear and not show up to her court hearing on the appointed day and time. i tried to respect harriet’s understanding of time and space, an understanding that, for me, was sometimes too absent, when she would go off the grid and not show for an arranged get-together, and sometimes too present, texting and emailing late into the night. but i worried that the court would penalize her for her absence, which was technically in violation of her terms of probation. one day, about six months after we had met, harriet did not show for court at all. i had watched the hands of the always-fifteen-minutes-fast court clock tick to its own off-beat metronome. instead of progressing minute by minute, the clock would violently slam a minute forward and then fall a half-minute back, only to repeat the lurch some seconds later. the judge took harriet’s case last, with an eye roll and a glance to the clock, announcing harriet’s absence while picking up the case file. “well,” the judge huffed, “evan isn’t here. but i have gotten several very long, very convoluted emails from him.” evan: harriet’s birth name, another legal label to which she did not respond. him: a pronoun with which she did not identify. in her absence, the court spoke about a person other than harriet. the judge began to read harriet’s email aloud and then turned, instead, to summary. the document was too long to read word by word. “well, he’s very sad, the cats, the car . . . he says he’s in pain. . . .” the judge squinted to read harriet’s language, quoting her aloud: “‘time is not in the linear order that you perceive.’” he recoiled from the letter with a smirk, as the others in the courtroom, a chorus of psychologists, attorneys, and clerks, laughed uninhibitedly. i felt myself pale and stared at my notebook, knowing the next line, knowing what was to come—i had been blind-carbon-copied on the original email. the judge leaned back in: “‘time for me is cyclical and random. . . .’” laughter overtook the letter. harriet’s attorney choked out a few words between the gales of guffaws: “cyclical and random! yeah, same here. look at the cyclical nature of the cases in here.” it was a joke, but it need not have been. harriet’s description was all too comprehensible. a different understanding of time, that nonlinear, cyclical, random version put forward by harriet in her absence, lent a very different interpretation of the court’s authority and efficacy. legal interventions in the name of linear clinical progress lost their warrant. the artificiality and arbitrariness of harriet’s own chronotope uncomfortably pointed to the artificiality and arbitrariness of the court’s. they were equally valid and equally invalid. and then there was the rub: the way in which harriet’s chronotope was, in some sense, more adept at explaining the court’s own patterns. her attorney had noticed: harriet’s cyclical chronotope could better account for the constant recycling of clients and cases through the court’s doors. clients would complete the program, be declared “graduates” by the judge at a scheduled ceremony to mark their internalization of the court’s understanding of personal responsibility, only to end up getting rearrested and returned to the mental health court in a matter of weeks or months. the chronotope with arguably the better explanatory power invalidated the normative force of the narrative to which the court clung. time is linear. space is definable. individuals are the agents of their life histories. the court holds them responsible. when you refuse the first premise, what happens to the claims that follow? they might be seen as laughable. they might be made the punch line of a joke. or the punch line of a joke that is not really a joke. harriet’s attorney would later tell me that she found harriet’s emails “genuinely” amusing. but she would also say this: “sometimes you just have to laugh at it all.” sometimes it is too much, sometimes you realize that you cannot possibly help everyone, sometimes you see the inevitability of your own failure at a game that you started. the court, too, is hamstrung, caught in the same jurisdictional game through which it attempts to catch harriet. the courtroom in which everyone laughed is a courtroom with a social justice mission; it tried to fix harriet by fixing her, attempting to stabilize what the court perceived as harriet’s psychiatric distress through interaction with the court’s interventions. jurisdiction, for the mental health court, is the legally required first step in the long game of court-mandated mental health care. settling the question of jurisdiction legally allows the courtroom to coerce, to stabilize, to fix over harriet’s objections. were the mental health court not to assert legal jurisdiction, it would not be a party to the game. there would be no legal game at all. the implications of the legally mandated first move register affectively as discomfort, or perhaps as humor, even as courtroom professionals maintain their logical coherence. in other words, if chronotopes fix relative positions of moral authority, and if claims to jurisdiction present the state as said authority as a foregone conclusion, mental health court attorneys and clinicians are well aware that this is an authority that they might live up to in name only. the law’s rules for playing the game of jurisdiction falter in the face of harriet’s movement; her itinerancy uses the chronotopic terms of jurisdiction to point to the game’s own loopholes—sentient situations, to paraphrase kathleen stewart (2011, 449)—that the court cannot address. movement, here, is physical and psychical. harriet’s itinerancy and physical wandering stand in for the less tangible ways in which she declines an identity as a stable and individuated subject, as the court wishes for her. her movements over the skin of the land are proxies for movements in the sea and in the air, movements in memory and psyche, which also cannot be contained by the court’s understanding of the individual. what is it about harriet’s movement that, for now, escapes jurisdiction’s grasp? think of a film, suggests gilles deleuze (1986). the montage, the sequence of images and their movement, is radically different than a consideration of each frame. the movement does something. to explain the sublime value of movement, deleuze turns to what henri bergson (1998) saw as the crisis of psychology brought on by the invention of moving pictures in the early twentieth century. as deleuze understands bergson’s fascination, movement is enigmatic because it reveals the inextricability of time and space. movement, deleuze takes bergson to say, cannot be comprehended purely in spatial terms. if “movement is different than the space covered” (deleuze 1986, 1), time is the conceptual tipping point. thinking temporally, deleuze (1986, 1) argues, reveals that “space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering.” whereas space can be parceled, movement is “indivisible,” such that the act of dividing the duration of movement changes the movement “qualitatively” (deleuze 1986, 1). said differently, movement draws attention to the chronotope and makes possible an interrogation of the normative conditions, such as agency and authority, which extend from a particular formulation of time and space. by moving, harriet rejects the court’s parsing of her coordinates of self. but are mental health courts not designed to move with their clients? is the jurisdictional game played by mental health courts not different than the rules to which other criminal courts subscribe? rather than plainly assigning guilt or innocence, the mental health court aims to identify convicted individuals whom it believes to be mentally ill and to move them to a condition of mental health. is movement not, then, integrated into this set of rules? this type of movement—movement pinned to one position or another—is not movement at all, brian massumi (2002) would argue. offering his own reading of bergson (1998, 308–310), massumi presents the paradox of zeno’s arrow. the flight of the arrow cannot be reduced to the points through which it passes. thus the position of an arrow is not a captured metonym of movement, only “movement’s residue” (massumi 2002, 7). adducing a position, be it guilty or innocent, mentally stable or mentally unstable, “begins by subtracting movement” (massumi 2002, 2). moving with an end point in mind is, for massumi (2002, 3), “a pinpointing, a zero-point of stasis,” replacing “movement itself” with “predefined beginnings and endpoints.” the type of change that the mental health court associates with progress is not movement at all. a known trajectory is territorialized, contained by regimes of power. harriet is unmoved by the court’s desired trajectory. she does not fully know, nor does she fully remember. the beginnings and the ends are unclear. through what substance does zeno’s arrow fly? massumi presents a pristine sort of movement, as if the arrow soars through empty air. if zeno’s philosophical arrow moves through air, harriet’s experiences move through an atmosphere, that space between land and air, that space, as timothy choy and jerry zee (2015) remind us, that is filled with materials, assemblages, constellations of relations within which life can be suspended. for harriet, movement, however cyclical and nonlinear, is never unencumbered but always weighted by her relationships to others, those things that make it impossible to isolate, individuate, or control her. the social webs that suspend her offer her escape, modes of relation that the court cannot anticipate or control. she moves around, from shady patch to shady patch, to best care for fluffy and megabyte and vlad. she moves up and down the highways, from one county to another, to be with her mother, even though the court has forbidden her to leave santa clara. affect makes the atmosphere thick, sticky, muggy, like the air that filled the space between harriet and me on that day when we were silent, until she said that she was of the land, and the sea, and the air. the social bonds of the atmosphere are adhesive in a way that is transportable, such that even if you manage to escape, to leave one sentient situation for another, a part of whatever that other experience was comes along for the ride. the court’s assumption that air is thin and navigable cannot account for the heavy headwinds of affect that one finds in the atmosphere, the love and care that harriet feels for her family, offering her an escape from the court’s attempt to guide her movement. it was in the middle of one of the days that we spent together—not long before the day that she did not show for court, but after her mother had attempted suicide—that we sat down in the grass of the park where she had learned to swim and rollerblade with her sister when they were children. in a different time (five years before), but almost in the same place (in that old house), harriet had put her mother in an asphyxiating chokehold. “after all of these years, i still can’t remember putting my hands on my mother,” she told me, in between bites of kung pao tofu. she went on: i remember standing in the doorway and seeing this figure hurting my mother, like really going at her. and when i saw that figure attacking her, i wanted to help her, i wanted to help my mom. i can kind of remember taking my hands off of my mother’s throat, but i can’t remember putting them on her. earlier in the day, i remember, i said to my mom: “leave me alone, go to my sister’s.” i wanted her out of the house. i was feeling really unstable, and she wouldn’t leave me alone. i think that she wanted to take care of me. . . . it doesn’t really make sense to me? why would i have attacked my mom in front of an open door? instead of letting her leave? i guess, i closed the door? after i attacked her. she said that she wanted to leave, that she wanted to go to the hospital because of her throat because she was scared of me and couldn’t breathe, even after i had let go, but then i didn’t want her to leave. i was afraid of myself. i needed her. at some point, she called my sister and my sister and her husband came over to get my mother. i was terrified of them when they got there. i screamed. i actually hid in the bathroom. and then, when they were about to leave, i ran out and asked them to take me to the hospital. my sister was protecting my mom, she wouldn’t put us in a car together, so she called 911 again, thinking that the police would come for me and take me to the hospital, like they did last time. but this time they booked me in the county jail. the santa clara county district attorney charged harriet (evan, the charges read) with elder abuse. harriet spent six months in the county jail, on the psychiatric stabilization floor. she says that she was in a straitjacket, by which i think she means a garment that the jail psychologists call “ferguson garments,” shirts made out of cloth that is thick and plasticky and inflexible, designed so that incarcerated people cannot rip them and turn them into nooses. she says that they keep the padded cells cold and won’t give inmates sheets, again so that these cannot be turned into nooses. she collect-called her mother daily. those calls are managed by a private company contracted by the county jail; harriet’s mother told me that they cost close to $20 for a fifteen-minute phone call. harriet’s mother eventually lost her part-time job because she was taking so many days off to visit her child. between the calls and the gas and the loss of income, harriet’s mother soon found herself in a financial hole. part of harriet’s court-mandated mental health treatment was a domestic violence class. she was required to go for fifty-two weeks, though she never completed the program. harriet’s mother, or, as the court would say, “evan’s victim,” was paying for it. at a cost of $20 per session, at some point the money just ran out. harriet spent five years on probation, which she says was almost more difficult than being in custody because she was never clear on the rules. she knew, however, that some of the terms of her probation prevented her from associating with her mother, terms that she flagrantly violated. after harriet had to give up the tent that she had pitched in a friend’s mother’s yard for shelter, her mother insisted that they roam together, live together, their cars alongside one another. the day that harriet went missing, after she did not show in court, after the jokes about time, after the stomach-churning laughter, the district attorney cut into the rip-roars with a solemn crane of his neck: “that mother, though . . . there’s something . . . creepy. he and his mom are very . . . enmeshed.” the probation officer called their relationship “pathological.” on this, everyone could agree; it wasn’t even funny. to the court, harriet and her mother are, first and foremost, a perpetrator and victim who ought to be kept apart, differently spaced. to harriet and her mother, they are, first and foremost, a mother and a child who can only survive as a unit, moving about together. the court might try to understand harriet as an individual, so as to ostensibly improve her mental health, but it is incapable of understanding her relationally, as she understands herself. the court cannot apprehend that excessive affect through which harriet understands herself and her mother. the court’s formulation of jurisdiction and its creation of individuated subjects reach an impasse at the moment of the social. the affect that lies beyond the court’s comprehension is an atmosphere inhabited by harriet and her mother, a chronotopic amalgam that yields a particular feel: rage, dependence, love. harriet had been having a rough week before her mother downed that bottle full of pills. harriet had missed yet another meeting with her probation officer, sick of being told that she couldn’t spend time with her mom, but she grew worried that she would be arrested for failing to show. she found, back somewhere in her trunk, an old bottle of pills that she had received from a clinic a few weeks earlier, moved it to her messenger bag, and waited until the weekend. if she did not feel better about things then, she told herself, she would put the cats in the camry and go somewhere in the woods to take the pills, “to end things.” but on thursday, harriet told me, her mother took the pill bottle out of harriet’s bag and downed its contents. harriet found her mother, laid her down in the back of the prius with fluffy, megabyte, and vlad and drove them all to the nearest hospital. harriet said that she was seething the whole ride, more angry than scared. those pills, that suicide, they were meant for her; her mother had stolen them. as we sat together in another park, harriet told me she knew why her mother had done it: “every time she does something like this, she knows that i go into crisis mode. i can kind of hold it together. with all of the adrenaline, i’m slightly functional. she did this to me.” i imagine that her mother would have said it slightly differently: she did this for me. but that wasn’t how harriet put it. her mother had been more successful than the mental health court in pigeonholing harriet, in forcing harriet into a particular plot point. the place into which her mother had cornered her was one we might take as a nonnegotiable beginning: her mother had forced her to stay alive. even that, for harriet, was uncomfortably overdetermined. she wanted the option to escape from life itself. back in the park, harriet rubbed her temples, her jittering fingertips tracing her beard down to her chin, and then, decisively, she spat in the grass: “fuck her.” the plastic pane after five years of attempting to manage harriet, the mental health court played the last card it had in this game of jurisdiction: it ceded authority. the court decided to end its engagement with harriet on the day she did not show in court. one of the social workers had finally shrugged: “he seems kind of at baseline, and i don’t really see him getting any better.” the last move they had to play was to declare harriet mentally stable, to declare her a graduate of their program. doing so would imply that the court had played out its own game, that they had moved harriet in their determined trajectory, that they had fixed her. the court transcript reads as though the court had heroically prevailed, having provided therapeutic order to disorder of all sorts. after the stenographer left the room, all of the attorneys and clinicians admitted to having given up. it could have gone otherwise, of course. in response to harriet’s stubbornness, her persistent rejection of the court’s demands to internalize its operational chronotope, the court could have doubled down by intensifying her treatment plan or throwing her back in jail. on the court’s terms, they had the authority to do so. and, had harriet been a person of another race, or, for that matter, dirtier, more obviously homeless, someone whom the court might have deemed more vulnerable based on external appearances than harriet, who appeared as a white man with some means, perhaps the court would have done so. maybe, under other social circumstances, the court would have given up less easily. but, as it stood, harriet was not responding to the services that the court attempted to provide her. court staff doubted that incarcerating harriet would do much to help stabilize her and, besides, at this point, at least, harriet had only ever behaved violently toward her mother, so martha and andie did not believe her to threaten public safety. treating her or jailing her for her refusal to come to court, the judge explained to me, would cost precious resources, effectively taking those resources away from another client who might better use them. they thought that harriet could avoid arrest on her own, in part because of her whiteness and class background—it was better to expend resources elsewhere. and then there was the observation that went unannounced, unarticulated by court staff: keeping harriet’s case in the courtroom, witnessing her defy the court’s attempts at subjectivation while still somewhat engaging with its services, would undermine that chronotope at the heart of the court’s procedures, the faith that getting someone to show up at the right place at the right time would engender authority. keeping harriet around would showcase the impasses of the court’s logic, those parts of harriet’s story over which the court lost narrative control. getting her out, particularly in light of the court’s determination that she was not a threat to public safety, would keep the court’s narrative intact. they had gotten her to sometimes appear at some places and, at the end of the day, the court could say that she was nonviolent by the time of her graduation. never mind that court staff had never considered her a threat to public safety: it was as true at the end of mental health court adjudication as it was at the beginning, and it better served the court’s authority to declare it at the end. remember harriet’s email: “time is not in the linear order that you perceive. time for me is cyclical and random.” six months after her graduation, harriet is again confined to a jail cell. his graduation. harriet identifies as a man now. he goes by different names, depending on which man he feels himself to be. usually dragomir, but sometimes otam, alex, holton. i mostly call him evan. evan and i speak by phone a few times over the course of the three months that he is in custody. i find myself always uncertain, never clear with whom i am speaking. but it feels uncomfortable to me, on picking up the phone and hearing the jail recording announce that “evan sawser” is attempting to reach me and accepting the fees, to then, on hearing the familiar voice on the other line, ask: “who are you today?” it seems like something that you should already know by the time you recognize a voice, particularly when the person on the other end has already been identified by name. it feels like something you should know, but i never do. i go to visit. even on my visit, we speak by phone; evan and i are seated across from each other in a cell split by a thick pane of plastic, with a phone receiver on either side. he sits with his trunk more upright now, feet planted, rather than thighs crossed. he seems bigger to me, stronger. i don’t know if that is just my perception, a part of getting to know this new evan, or if he is putting on weight in custody, now that he has regular access to food. his side of the conversation, which is most of the conversation, rambles, tumbling down various tunnels of fixation, only to be pulled out of one by the discovery of another. i let him speak without stopping him, except for when he veers into soliloquies about the reasons for which he was arrested; the jail records these conversations through the black phone receivers. but other than stopping a discussion about what happened on that night, i don’t interrupt him or ask for clarification—even when i don’t follow. at one point, he begins to laugh. he puts the phone down on the metal sill that bifurcates the plastic pane and heaves his body forward. he throws his still-gaunt face toward the plastic, into my own reflection. images of our eyes—his, across from me through the plastic plane; mine, also across from me in their reflection—align for a split second before he throws himself back and forth in a full-body cackle. the force of his rocking mixes with the volume of the laughter that i can hear in real time, as it exits evan and echoes in the small chamber in which he is locked, and then again, as the staccato electric version that makes its way through the metal phone cable on a millisecond of delay. he tells me that he saw the psychiatrist yesterday: he came by, put me on some abilify. i’ve never had a reaction that quickly. harriet came back and sat in the room next to me. she was pissed to be back, so she started to cut off her limbs. it scared me, all the blood, but then some other members of the committee came back and they started killing each other over their traumas. so i think she’s gone for now. harriet had wandered off. and now evan’s speech wanders, on to something else, but i don’t really listen. i daydream, remembering a different conversation, one in yet another park rather than in a jail cell, when evan had asked me if i preferred spending time with dragomir or with harriet. i had told him that i was not sure how to answer the question, that i understood that dragomir and harriet were different people for him, but that, to me, my experience was of interacting with one person. it was like being surprised by someone, i had tried to explain, like when you learn something new about someone you thought you knew. evan had laughed at me and had thrown the daisy chain that he had been working on in my face. “that’s absurd,” he had said, “what is there to be surprised by? when someone surprises you, that just means that they have become someone else. when you know someone, there is no such thing as surprise.” i had returned evan’s question: did dragomir and harriet feel differently about me? he could not answer. “i can remember some of harriet’s thoughts, in the distance, but i can’t feel her. i can’t be responsible for how she felt.” i had thought, then, of harriet’s remembrance of the day that she—or one of her—had hurt her mother. she could not account, she had said, for putting her hands on her mother. she could not remember. in harriet’s view, it was surprising that her body had attacked her mother. harriet loved her mother. she would not have done that. it must have been someone else. in harriet’s self-professed “cyclical and random” understanding of time, selves blossom and multiply, appearing and disappearing on the edge of that broad landscape, not confined to a single gridded plot point. in configuring space and time as linear, the court had aspired to teach harriet that selves are singular, that she must take responsibility for the linear past. but in harriet’s involutions of time and space, their “cyclical and random” rotations in which the spatiotemporal coordinates of the court’s chronotopic plot unfurl and fan, harriet sees selves fractionate into different beings, unaccountable to one another, with no sense of linear past to present, no such sense of spatiotemporal or subjective confinement. the state may momentarily succeed at confining evan to a jail cell for a particular time, but evan’s selves were not learning the court’s lessons. after all, harriet had gotten up and left. back in the visiting cell, i keep the phone receiver to my ear, but lean away from the plastic pane. i look out the slit in the heavy door to my back, the one that the guard had closed behind me when i had entered this cell to speak with evan. the sun glints. i can see the poking tops of a few evergreens. somewhere, farther off than i can see, over only one mountain ridge, is the pacific. the land, the sea, the air. i want to escape, but instead stay put in my flimsy plastic chair. and when the guard finally comes to open the door, to lead me back into the industrial-sized elevator, down to the lobby, out the front door of the jailhouse, and into the squinty sunlight, i am unsure if i will come back. part of me wants for time to be linear, to be directional, to afford me the agency to move away from this building and these people, but mostly, away from this feeling. notes acknowledgments i would like to express my gratitude, first, to harriet, dragomir, evan: i deeply appreciate your repeated willingness to let me into your lives and to explain to me the significance of living them on your own varied terms. i am very grateful to the entire working group at the santa clara county mental health court for allowing me to observe and partake in daily life in their courtroom. many thanks to joão biehl, lauren cubellis, lisa davis, adriana petryna, tali ziv, and the members of my writing group, along with dominic boyer and three anonymous reviewers, for their insightful feedback on drafts of this article. versions of this essay were presented at the “law and life in rural america: cows, cars, and criminals” conference sponsored by the program in american studies at princeton university, the “interlegal space times and ethnographies of legal assemblage” panel at the 2016 american ethnological society meetings, and the “ethnographic explorations of illegalities, penalities, and risk/security” panel at the 2016 law and society association meetings. i thank celeste alexander, elsa devienne, philip goodman, heath pearson, deborah poole, emily prifogle, lisa pruitt, sebastian ramirez, and robert werth for organizing and providing comments at these events. support for the research and writing of this article was provided by the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, the princeton university center for human values, the princeton university program in american studies, the princeton university center for health and wellbeing, and a mellon/acls dissertation completion fellowship. 1. the name harriet is a pseudonym that i use to protect my informant’s identity. 2. harriet’s locations within santa clara county have also been disguised for her protection. alta vista is a pseudonym. 3. shaunnagh dorsett and shaun mcveigh (2012) provide a helpful overview of the jurisprudence of jurisdiction. however, they overdetermine the concept, imputing success to the state’s attempt to claim territory through jurisdiction. their analysis provides little leeway for countermeasures that pull against the state’s attempt to assert authority through jurisdiction. for example, their book opens with the statement: “we are brought into life and set in motion according to the authority of law, our conduct is shaped in accordance to civil order, and our conscience created and turned to political faith in law and community. jurisdictional thinking, so to speak, gives legal form to life and life to law” (dorsett and mcveigh 2012, 1). this type of thinking cannot account for lives like harriet’s, lives that are implicated by but not entirely subject to the law. complete faith in the efficacy of jurisdiction overestimates the power of law and reifies the state. 4. for more on the link between temporality and power, see povinelli 2011, cabatigan 2016, and thorkelson 2016. mariana valverde (2014) suggests that anthropologists analytically foreground temporality over space, a move that i see stemming from the discipline’s methodological privileging of space. because ethnography involves going somewhere, descriptions of place comprise an essential part of ethnographic description. what would ethnography be without descriptions of space? space, then, is just as important, but is often mistakenly indexed as description rather than argument. 5. while this essay sticks closely to the particularities of harriet’s case, the types of arguments and conceptual differences between court professionals and harriet were commonplace within the mental health court. court staff and clients were constantly fighting over the terms of their appearances in court, over whether or not various circumstances were excusable; the mental health court’s chronotope was never specific to harriet, but applied to all clients. 6. many thanks to thalia gigerenzer for drawing my attention to the fundamental relationality invoked by “going missing.” references bakhtin, mikhail m. 1981 “forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel.” in the dialogic imagination: four essays, 84–258. translated by caryl emerson and michael holquist. austin: university of texas press. originally published in 1975. benda-beckmann, franz 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493–519. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.03. valverde, mariana 2009 “jurisdiction and scale: legal ‘technicalities’ as resources for theory.” social and legal studies 18, no. 2: 139–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0964663909103622. 2014 “‘time thickens, takes on flesh’: spatiotemporal dynamics in law.” in the expanding spaces of law: a timely legal geography, edited by irus braverman, nicholas blomley, david delaney, and alexandre kedar, 53–76. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. 2015 chronotopes of law: jurisdiction, scale, and governance. new york: routledge. alterlife and decolonial chemical relations alterlife and decolonial chemical relations michelle murphy university of toronto http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5173-1717 it has been raining all day and into the warm winter night in downtown toronto—tkaronto in mohawk. the water splashes off the office towers of bay street (canada’s wall street), is collected by a storm sewer system overtaking buried streams, and then washes out into the vastness of lake ontario. office towers and other urban surfaces are covered in a thin, greasy film that attracts persistent organic pollutants like polychlorinated biphenyls (pcbs; simpson et al. 2006). these travel in global circulations of particulate clouds, encountering office towers whose oily films act like massive pollution-collection devices. the patter of droplets on urban glass rinses the pcbs into a chemically concentrated rainwash that returns them to the lake, a legacy dumping ground of pcbs from an era of midcentury industrial exuberance. lake ontario is the last lake in the eastward flow of great lakes water. each lake becomes more and more industrialized along the way, passing by canada’s petrochemical refining corridor, the (de)industrialized zone of detroit, and the steel mills of hamilton. the great lakes form the largest basin of fresh surface water on the planet, holding some 84 percent of north america’s fresh surface water. the lower great lakes lie in anishinaabe and haudenosaunee territories, severed in half by two settler nation-states, the united states and canada. the water is not still; it is indifferent to borders, cycling through the atmosphere, splashing off office towers, and returning to nourish humans, animals, and plants. we, humans and nonhuman beings, the lake and the city, all depend on its many forms and movements (todd 2017). more than this, we are part of the water. we are part of its tributaries. and, since the mid-twentieth century, we have become a part of pcbs too. analyzing urine, blood, and breastmilk, twenty-first-century global biomonitoring studies have concluded that all people alive today contain pcbs within them (stockholm convention on persistent organic pollutants 2009); industrially produced chemicals like pcbs have become a part of human living-being. the pollution of the water has joined the molecular fabric of our bodies. i can make statements like this only because of the work of an array of disciplines, such as toxicology, epigenomics, environmental chemistry, and so on, as well as due to decades of environmental justice community knowledge-making. the study of industrial chemicals compels a posture of working with and against technoscience. two technoscientific epistemic habits run through almost all the work materializing chemical exposures. the first habit involves portraying chemicals as discrete entities, as isolated molecules, often represented through abstract structural diagrams. such diagrams are only ever models of chemicals, designed with engineering and industrial needs in mind (hepler-smith 2015). the worlds built with chemicals are imagined and systematized through this functionalist bent, which purposively pushes aside complex reactivity with livingand nonliving-being. the structural representation of discrete molecules—such as polychlorinated biphenyls—is built into the naming system used to describe them and the ways toxicology has historically studied them: one by one, as isolated entities of purely technical qualities without context. we have inherited a restrictive technical understanding of the nature of industrial chemicals from corporate forms of technoscience, as well as from a longer history of chemistry as an industrial discipline (bensaude-vincent and stengers 1996). this confining sense of chemicals is built into the design of state environmental regulation in the united states and canada, where industry lobbyists work hard to make sure that corporate-produced data is used to track and produce uncertainty about exposures. the extensive cloud of synthetic chemical relations, whether emitting from factories, extraction, infrastructures, or commodities, is externalized by capitalist ledger books that structurally will not count side effects, fallouts, or discards. today, this pervasive rendering of chemicals as disconnected functionalist molecules (as opposed to complex bundles of extensive relations) seems self-evident (myers 2015). it is difficult to talk about chemicals in any other way, regardless of your politics. as a result, the infrastructure of chemical relations that surround and make us largely resides in the realm of the imperceptible (murphy 2006). we might feel some of our chemical relations and the pain they cause, but the fullness of our chemical relations ends up being largely conjectural. the second epistemic habit is shaped by the first. because it is so rare for our chemical surround to be documented, technoscientific research that seeks to contest the presence of synthetic chemicals in the world tends to proceed by detecting and measuring the damage chemicals do to bodies. (ethnography and the social sciences, more broadly, often seek to bear witness to the evidence of damage.) focused on collecting the data of damage, much hegemonic north american environmental biomedical research surveils and pathologizes already dispossessed communities. it is hard to perceive the infrastructures of chemical violence in the world at the same time that research attends to molecular manifestations in bodies and communities already living in hostile conditions. despite often antiracist intentions, this damage-based research has pernicious effects, placing the focus on chemical violence by virtue of rendering lives and landscapes as pathological. such work tends to resuscitate racist, misogynist, and homophobic portraits of poor, black, indigenous, female, and queer lives and communities as damaged and doomed, as inhabiting irreparable states that are not just unwanted but less than fully human. refusing this economy of research, the indigenous feminist scholar eve tuck (2009) has called for “suspending damage” as a refusal to participate in damage-based research that amplifies the burdens of settler-colonial and racist violence (see also tuck and yang 2013). this refusal constitutes a challenge to environmental justice habits. it marks an invitation to find other ways of shining critical light on the infernal entanglements of settler-colonial capitalism as expressed through chemical relations, and at the same time a call to direct creative energy toward decolonial possibilities. how to refuse the chemical as an isolated entity and also not reenact body-centric damage narratives? in a posture of both collaboration and refusal, a decolonial feminist tactic might offer alternative objects of concern for each other and toward decolonial futures. this task of generating alter-concepts of care and responsibility might proceed by calling forth alter-modes of collaboration and study that simultaneously aim at world-building and dismantlement.1 how to give words that might refuse the hegemonic sense of what chemicals and life are, that might be adequate to confronting the ubiquitous condition of chemically altered living-being, a condition that is shared, but unevenly so, and which divides us as much as binds us, a condition that enacts and extends colonialism and racism into the intergenerational future? i am looking for words, protocols, and methods that might honor the inseparability of bodies and land, and at the same time grapple with the expansive chemical relations of settler colonialism that entangle life forms in each other’s accumulations, conditions, possibilities, and miseries. the native youth sexual health network in toronto has been one guide, with its collective and resurgent practices of visioning indigenous reproductive justice. a basic lesson from indigenous reproductive justice is that “violence on the land is violence on our bodies” (women’s earth alliance and native youth sexual health network 2016). what happens to the water is what happens to its relations. this includes you too. on the great lakes, chemical violence always also involves relations to settler colonialism and white supremacy that nonconsensually inhabit bodies and territories, repeatedly concentrating and distributing harms and benefits. even the ordinary acts of driving, buying, working, fishing, or sheltering are entangled in a long arc of extractive colonialism. so a decolonial feminist sense of enmeshed land and body entails affirming more consensual ways of being together within these extensive, noninnocent chemical entanglements. in orienting toward decolonial futures, i have tried to work with the concept of alterlife as a prompt. alterlife names life already altered, which is also life open to alteration. it indexes collectivities of life recomposed by the molecular productions of capitalism in our own pasts and the pasts of our ancestors, as well as into the future. it is a figure of life entangled within community, ecological, colonial, racial, gendered, military, and infrastructural histories that have profoundly shaped the susceptibilities and potentials of future life. alterlife is a figuration of chemical exposures that attempts to be as much about figuring life and responsibilities beyond the individualized body as it is about acknowledging extensive chemical relations. forms of alterlife are systematically and brutally harmed and even exterminated in chemical relations; at the same time, alterlife includes being in the mess of consumption, subsistence, and side effect, being in the contradictions of existing in worlds that demand chemical exposures as the conditions for eating, drinking, breathing. forms of alterlife might include chemically altered metabolisms, capacities to digest human-made substances, or bodily phenotypes that develop in responsiveness to both chosen and unchosen chemicals and pharmaceuticals. it is difficult to say when the condition of alterlife began; there are many possible and divergent starting points for tracing the ways that human-produced chemicals have materially altered living-being, even as there are many ways of questioning the very category of human. moreover, before capitalism and before humans, life was already altered by chemical relations between organisms and their conditions, so that the potential to become alterlife precedes its historical emergence. thus, it is not enough to theorize alterlife as merely changed bodies that are altered by chemicals. nor is it enough to theorize life as clusters of nonindividual symbiotic beings, as research on symbiogenesis, microbiomes, and holobionts tends to do (gilbert, sapp, and tauber 2012). studying alterlife requires bursting open categories of organism, individual, and body to acknowledge a shared, entangling, and extensive condition of being with capitalism and its racist colonial manifestations. it asks that we situate life as a kind of varied enmeshment and enfleshment in infrastructures—as well as in water as a distributed being. it is thus an entrapment in and a response to each other’s life supports and conditions. such concept work is a tactic for taking back phenomena from the epistemologies that have consistently erased the constitutive violence propping them up. polychlorinated biphenyls are good companions for conceiving alterlife. they are the classic persistent chemical: pcbs (always plural, because there are 209 different ways of attaching chlorines to biphenyls) tend to be quite inert, resistant to temperature change, and insoluble in water. they are slow to break down, biomagnify in the food chain, and concentrate in fatty tissues. once the industrial exuberance is gone, the pcbs remain, extending racism in time. polychlorinated biphenyls have spread into the airs, waters, and soils of the entire planet. the manufacture of pcbs in north america was banned in the late 1970s (and globally with the stockholm convention in 2005), and yet they are still circulating the earth in water cycles and atmospheric dust clouds. past pcbs are archived in lake sediment, waiting to be stirred up and reanimated. as such, pcbs are a rare example of a highly regulated and monitored industrial chemical (amid the millions of substances that are not) that has also comprehensively infiltrated the planet. like radioactive isotopes, pcbs stand as an example of the temporal and geographical extensiveness of chemical relations. polychlorinated biphenyls not only persist; they are also endocrine-disrupting. in fact, pcbs have a shape that is similar to human thyroid hormones, which allows them to participate in the metabolism of the body exposed, including the regulation of gene expression, which in turn reorders metabolism (landecker 2013). moreover, because pcbs can alter gene expression in inheritable ways, the metabolic effects of pcbs can carry over into future generations, so that the alterlife pcbs have helped make continues, not just because pcbs are incessant in our waters but also because their metabolic activations can cascade intergenerationally across bodies (steinberg et al. 2008; langer et al. 2008). this makes monsanto, which manufactured most of the world’s pcbs, a grand-kin of sorts, a toxic relation inscribed into energy infrastructures, white privilege, indigenous dispossession, anti-blackness, water, and metabolism (agard-jones 2013). polychlorinated biphenyls are ongoing. while the manufacture of pcbs was banned, pcb use has been grandparented. they still remain within the transformers and capacitors that make up the aging electrical grid. when people in toronto switch on a light, we are entangled in pcbs’ expansive relations. concentrated exposure to pcbs on the great lakes is the legacy of an unregulated industry built on stolen indigenous land that purposively pushed, buried, and dumped its chemical violence into poor, black, and indigenous communities, a violence that would then overflow such that racism would become a planetary presence. civil-rights organizing against the anti-black dumping of pcbs in warren county, north carolina in the 1970s gave us the term environmental racism (mcgurty 2007). the community in anniston, alabama living around the first monsanto factory to manufacture pcbs has engaged in a multigenerational struggle against anti-black environmental violence (spears 2014). in the great lakes watershed, generations of the mohawk akwesasne first nation have resisted the erasure of the chemical violence caused by pcbs that are intimately tied to the stealing of their land and the injury of their fish relations, which have been categorized by the state as inedible for decades (hoover 2013). the concept of alterlife asks for an unflinchingly pessimistic acknowledgment that these chemical relations are racist, harmful, even deadly, and that it is up to you to take on the ways that you are caught up in killing (even if they are killing you too, just more softly).2 this collective work conceiving of alterlife and chemical relations has largely happened while i have been living in toronto on anishinaabe and haudenosaunee territories, as a métis person of white skin who also descends from white settlers. the métis are a postcontact indigenous people who made home centered in the red river area of what is now called manitoba, and who were often entangled in the fur trade. in the 1880s the métis took up armed resistance to canada’s claims to their land, and many were dispersed westward as they were confronted with ongoing colonial violence. some métis ancestors were active agents of colonialism, working with the hudson’s bay company, and in the twentieth century many white métis became more and more assimilated into settler colonialism. being métis is complicated, not least because it is noninnocently entangled with whiteness. so, i confess that alterlife is also an autobiographical category about traumatic and noninnocent relations with settler colonialism and capitalism. alterlife embraces impure and damaged forms of life, pessimistically acknowledging ongoing violence, living within and against the worlds technoscience helped make. alterlife is resurgent life, which asserts and continues nonetheless. living in toronto, i am a guest and a settler, caught up in the chemicals and water, noninnocently making relations and suspending damage. alterlife acknowledges that one cannot simply get out, that this hurtful and deadly entanglement forms part of contemporary existence in this moment, in the ongoing aftermath. and yet the openness to alteration may also describe the potential to become something else, to defend and persist, to recompose relations to water and land, to become alter-wise in the aftermath. figure 1. stencil art from the violence on the land is violence on our bodies launch toolkit. image courtesy of erin marie konsmo. as part of the week of action toolkit created on the occasion of the launch of their violence on the land, violence on our bodies report, the women’s earth alliance and the native youth sexual health network included a set of stencils created by the métis artist and activist erin marie konsmo. the stencils portray lungs holding within them the violent infrastructure of extractive colonialism. “violence from fracking is violence on our bodies,” one reads. a second: “violence from pipelines is violence on our bodies.” a third: “violence from logging is violence on our bodies.” the campaign invites people to hold the images over their chest and to take a picture to post on social media—with the hashtags #landbodydefense and #environmentalviolence—resulting in poses of indigenous women, two-spirit people, and youth mapping the extensive infrastructural relations of settler-colonial capitalism inside them. it teaches that life forged in ongoing chemical violence is also life open to becoming something else, which is not a nostalgic return, but instead the defending of sovereignty starting here, within oneself and each other, here in the damage now. there is no waiting for a better condition. the alter-wise of alterlife is a nondeferral of the decolonial, seized now, despite its impossibility. in downtown toronto, there is a notable concentration of pcbs in the infrastructure of office towers that house finance capital. finance capital leaks pcbs (diamond et al. 2010). i imagine another stencil with a set of lungs inside of which a pair of tall glass towers contain the infrastructures of finance, which in turn fund the pipelines, the open pits, the start-ups, the boxes of property, the war machines, the missing and murdered women, girls and two-spirit people. breathe in. with each inhalation, the extensive relations of finance capital are pulled into your lungs, passing through membranes, attaching to receptors, rearranging metabolism, altering gene expression. breathe out. with each exhalation, you are reconnecting to the greater fulsomeness of our relations. breathe in, feel the fragility of white privileged life for the few around you. breathe out. notes acknowledgments i acknowledge the following collaborators and sources of inspiration and support: vanessa agard-jones, farida akhter, the students of the “alterlife, conditions, aftermaths” seminar, susan blight, mel chen, tim choy, adele clarke, deborah cowen, lindsey dillon, the endocrine disruptors action group, participants in the engineered worlds project, donna haraway, peter hobbs, elizabeth hoover, carla hustak, lochlann jain, erin marie konsmo, jake kosek, hannah landecker, elizabeth lapensee, rachel lee, max liboiron, josephine mandamin, joseph masco, gregg mitman, natasha myers, the native youth sexual health network, alondra nelson, the onaman collective, oxidate, sheri pasternak, karyn recollet, martina schluender, dayna nadine scott, reena shadaan, nick shapiro, emily simmonds, the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, kim tallbear, the technoscience salon, zoe todd, sarah tracy, eve tuck, and chia ling wu. 1. thank you to nick shapiro for refining this point. 2. this phrasing was inspired by harney and moten 2013. references agard-jones, vanessa 2013 “bodies in the system.” small axe 17, no. 3: 182–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378991. bensaude-vincent, bernadette, and isabelle stengers 1996 a history of chemistry. translated by deborah van dam. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. originally published in 1993. diamond, miriam l., lisa melymuk, susan a. csiszar, and matthew robson 2010 “estimation of pcb stocks, emissions, and urban fate: will our policies reduce concentrations and exposure?” environmental science and technology 44, no. 8: 2777–83. https://doi.org/10.1021/es9012036. gilbert, scott f., jan sapp, and alfred i. tauber 2012 “a symbiotic view of life: we have never been individuals.” quarterly review of biology 87, no. 4: 325–41. https://doi.org/10.1086/668166. harney, stefano, and fred moten 2013 the undercommons: fugitive planning and black study. london: minor compositions. hepler-smith, evan 2015 “‘just as the structural formula does’: names, diagrams, and the structure of organic chemistry at the 1892 geneva nomenclature congress.” ambix 62, no. 1: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1179/1745823414y.0000000006. hoover, elizabeth 2013 “cultural and health implications of fish advisories in a native american community.” ecological processes 2, no. 4. https://doi.org/10.1186/2192-1709-2-4. landecker, hannah 2013 “postindustrial metabolism: fat knowledge.” public culture 25, no. 3: 495–522. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2144625. langer, pavel, et al. 2008 “increased thyroid volume, prevalence of thyroid antibodies, and impaired fasting glucose in young adults from organochlorine cocktail polluted area: outcome of transgenerational transmission?” chemosphere 73, no. 7: 1145–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2008.06.067. mcgurty, eileen 2007 transforming environmentalism: warren county, pcbs, and the origins of environmental justice. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. murphy, michelle 2006 sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. durham, n.c.: duke university press. myers, natasha 2015 rendering life molecular: models, modelers, and excitable matter. durham, n.c.: duke university press. simpson, andre j., buuan lam, miriam l. diamond, d. james donaldson, brent a. lefebvre, arvin q. moser, antony j. williams, nicolay i. larin, and mikhail p. kvasha 2006 “assessing the organic composition of urban surface films using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.” chemosphere 63, no. 1: 142–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chemosphere.2005.07.013. spears, ellen griffith 2014 baptized in pcbs: race, pollution, and justice in an all-american town. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. steinberg, rebecca m., deena m. walker, thomas e. juenger, michael j. woller, and andrea c. gore 2008 “effects of perinatal polychlorinated biphenyls on adult female rat reproduction: development, reproductive physiology, and second generational effects.” biology of reproduction 78, no. 6: 1091–1101. https://doi.org/10.1095/biolreprod.107.067249. stockholm convention on persistent organic pollutants 2009 “global monitoring report.” unep/pops/cop.4/33. http://chm.pops.int/implementation/globalmonitoringplan/monitoringreports/tabid/525/default.aspx. todd, zoe 2017 “fish, kin, and hope: tending to water violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and treaty six territory.” afterall 43: 102–107. https://doi.org/10.1086/692559. tuck, eve 2009 “suspending damage: a letter to communities.” harvard educational review 79, no. 3: 409–28. http://hepg.org/her-home/issues/harvard-educational-review-volume-79-issue-3/herarticle/a-letter-to-communities_739. tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang 2013 “r-words: refusing research.” in humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, edited by django paris and maisha t. winn, 223–48. thousand oaks, calif.: sage. women’s earth alliance and native youth sexual health network 2016 “violence on the land, violence on our bodies: building an indigenous response to environmental violence.” week of action toolkit, june 6–10. http://landbodydefense.org/uploads/files/vlvb%20week%20of%20action%20kit%202016.pdf. “it’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing” “it’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing”: slow violence and the manipulation of time chloe ahmann george washington university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8974-190x on december 15, 2015, nearly two hundred people marched outside the offices of the maryland department of environment (mde), urging state officials to “pull the permits” for the fairfield renewable energy project. the project, a euphemistic name for the four-thousand-ton-per-day trash incinerator slated for construction in baltimore’s industrial hinterlands, had been permitted to release thousands of pounds of lead, mercury, and fine particulate matter into curtis bay, already maryland’s most polluted neighborhood.1 after years of debate, dozens of meetings, and hundreds of petitions were met with silence from the state, protestors had gathered to chide the agency for its inaction. locked outside the building, they chanted in unison: “we’re holding our breath.” nearby, baltimore city police idled on an unexpectedly ordinary evening, with jurors deadlocked in the first of the freddie gray trials and citizens awaiting their decision too quietly. (gray’s death from injuries sustained while in police custody had sparked citywide protests earlier that year.) commotion at mde drew the officers’ attention. within hours, they had arrested seven protesters for civil disobedience and summoned four armored vans to the scene. as sixty-odd officers urged back the peaceful crowds, who marveled at the state’s now swift and decisive response, one young black man standing beside me broke the refrain. elijah, a high school student in curtis bay, pushed to the front of the group and locked eyes with an officer sitting in the vehicle in which his classmates were restrained. then, he transformed the exasperated “we’re holding our breath” into the asthmatic “we can’t breathe.”2 this essay addresses how gradual, often imperceptible conditions of distress can lead not to the incapacitation of victims, but to deliberate and creative formulations of urgency like his. figure 1. “we can’t breathe,” december 15, 2015. photo courtesy of united workers. i got to know elijah and his friends in the back of the van while conducting research on the five generations of environmental degradation that had sparked curtis bay’s campaign to stop the incinerator. i knew from attending their meetings that the seven arrests, and their subsequent coverage by news media, had been carefully orchestrated to punctuate curtis bay’s otherwise uneventful encounter with the state. in fact, as i followed the campaign between 2012 and 2016, i documented many efforts by organizers to puncture what they described as a routinized experience of pollution and neglect—to concentrate two hundred years of undifferentiated exposure into crystalized events. what can these efforts tell us about how those in the throes of slow violence rise to the challenge of representing suffering? anthropologists have long been concerned with the experience of crisis as a moment of heightened social action, set apart from the “imponderabilia of actual life” (malinowski 1984, 20). but crisis is a privileged designation—a moment of rupture—that incites action and brings contradictions to light (cf. roitman 2013; masco 2017). in an attempt to describe scenes that dispossess without ever breaching thresholds of eventfulness, scholars have also begun to attune to sluggish temporalities of suffering. rob nixon’s (2011) “slow violence,” lauren berlant’s (2011, 95) “slow death,” and elizabeth povinelli’s (2011, 4) “quasi-events,” for example, depend on forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation whose ordinariness is their violence. as nixon (2011, 4) explains: “violence is customarily conceived as an event that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. we need, i believe, to engage a different kind of violence . . . incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.” slow forms of violence are not only environmental. in the shift from taking life to letting die, even michel foucault (2003) recognized that not all deaths are events. encompassing chronic health conditions alongside milieus of cruddiness (povinelli 2011), infirmity (cazdyn 2012), and ruination (stoler 2013), slow violence refers to a general wearing out, to “deterioration as a defining condition of . . . historical existence” (berlant 2011, 95). but it also invokes a particular set of challenges. neither spectacular nor instantaneous, and often proceeding at a speed that decouples suffering from its original causes, slow violence can be difficult to represent, even to perceive. and though many have acknowledged the consequences of inattention and the anesthetizing effects of routine, fewer have shed light on how people mired in the experience of slow violence themselves use time to maneuver politically. in this essay, i focus on the deliberate manipulations of time that characterize responses to slow violence and argue that this condition need not incapacitate its victims. instead, it can invite creative forms of temporal arrangement, orchestration, and a phenomenon i term moral punctuation: an explicit marking of time that condenses protracted suffering and demands an ethical response, eschewing the delays of political caution and the painstaking work of ensuring scientific certainty. my goal, in other words, is not only to draw attention to the insidious nature of slow or invisible suffering but also to emphasize how affected groups occasionally work time to emphasize their vulnerability. moreover, i focus on the importance of sustained collective action in the adaptation of time as strategy. in doing so, i join others working on the politics of pollution (e.g., bullard 1990; checker 2005) while making temporal tactics a more explicit object of ethnographic scrutiny. this focus challenges the impression that time and perceptibility are chiefly mechanisms of oppression. instead—like expertise (brown 1992; allen 2003) and access to information (fortun 2001)—they are overt objects of contestation among historically disenfranchised groups (see also liboiron 2015). like many late-industrial towns, curtis bay is an out-of-sight landscape where environmental problems have manifested over decades and where a “tight coupling” (fortun 2014, 310) between natural, technical, and political systems is felt through bloody noses and stilted breathing. also known as maryland’s “industrial peninsula,” curtis bay is a region of multiracial poverty located on baltimore’s southernmost tip, long deemed far enough from the city center for the location of nuisance projects but close enough to provide needed benefits. the neighborhood has managed multiple forms of risk since the nineteenth century, from quarantining lepers during the great wave of immigration to supporting nuclear deterrence with its cold war chemical arsenal. and these government operations, along with the long-term impact of the petrochemical industry, have left behind significant debris (stoler 2013). according to the environment protection agency, residents are routinely exposed to elevated levels of fine particulate matter, ground-level ozone, formaldehyde, and benzene. the environmental integrity project puts the region in the ninety-first percentile for pollution-related cancer risk; it also leads the nation in asthma mortality. recently, the baltimore city health department acknowledged that 50 percent of the deaths in this community are “avertable” (ames et al. 2011, 10). in the six years that i have worked in curtis bay, i have collected family histories of gastroschisis, a birth defect that causes infants to be born with their intestines on the outside, which the centers for disease control and prevention have associated with living near hazardous dumps. i have sat with residents on porches, watching as they tally neighbors afflicted with cancer and respiratory disease. still, as donna goldstein and kira hall (2015, 640) have shown in a different context, “toxic layering” complicates causality, making it easy for regulators to dismiss health inequities as too muddled for consideration and for residents to acclimate to “the banality of toxicity,” folding their multiple, ambiguous exposures into an everyday praxis of not noticing. similar trends populate the literature on factory towns (walley 2013) and sacrifice zones (lerner 2012), demonstrating how the effects of gradual industrial incursion discourage state intervention. slow contamination also strains the attention of the spectacle-driven media. these problems are compounded by the stultifying effects of scientific uncertainty, which obfuscates accountability and can mute the experience of pollution for residents who are confused and fatigued (auyero and swistun 2009). in curtis bay, too, the steady stream of industrial projects and the gradual accumulation of toxics have germinated slowly, complicating work for activists in the community. as one named greg admitted to me in the weeks leading up to december 15, 2015: “it’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing.” expressions such as this often suggest resignation, but they are not residents’ only response to environmental suffering. in curtis bay, competing parties have at times been quite deliberate about slowing, speeding up, condensing, and reordering time to serve different needs. drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork between 2012 and 2016—including hundreds of hours of participant-observation, more than ninety interviews, and extensive archival research—this account elaborates three of their temporal strategies. in doing so, it responds to recent calls to theorize speed (duclos, sánchez criado, and nguyen 2017) and attempts an answer to elizabeth povinelli’s (2011, 4) query about how one might “construct an ethics in relation to . . . dispersed suffering.” more importantly, though, it is a provocation to center these investigations on the individuals often depicted as time’s casualties. in what follows, i outline the stakes of my argument by situating curtis bay within a discussion of time, event, and not noticing. next, after sketching the slow encroachment of industry and residents’ reflections on its routinization, i turn to the campaign against the incinerator and examine three ways that groups have deliberately worked time: by imitating the pace of slow violence (incrementality), ensuring stasis (deferral), and punctuating time through the strategic manufacture of events (concentration). i end with reflections on the pace of climate change and the uprising against police brutality that coincided with the fight against the incinerator, suggesting that in these cases, too, slow violence need not merely impede: it can also invite temporal maneuvering. out of nothing in an essay on fallout, joseph masco (2015, 153) writes that lag—the chasm in time between environmental events and the recognition of their long-term repercussions—is “a major psychosocial achievement of the industrial age.” in curtis bay, where toxics have accumulated over generations but where old-timers see a net reduction in active industry, lag acts on the sensorium, numbing the impulse to tie this exposure to that disease. part of the work of mobilizing against slow violence, then, has been teaching residents to recognize past exposures as relevant to the present, and to count minute irregularities in the environment as part of a more expansive toxic atmosphere (murphy 2006; shapiro 2015). but retraining the senses in the absence of an exposure event has been challenging. by way of comparison, in bhopal, chernobyl, and fukushima, it was the experience of explosion that alerted locals to their toxic vulnerability. there, disasters served as signifying moments, wildly gesticulating that residents should pay attention and bringing multiple spheres of action into momentary synergy. according to marshall sahlins (2000, 301), this is the function of events: they “make a difference” by exposing the order of things, rupturing the experience of routine (see also rabinow 2003). indeed, there is a wide body of work demonstrating that events condition perception and suggest potentiality, catching people up in the fullness of feeling that something is happening (e.g., das 2006; stewart 2007; lazar 2014). to scholars like william sewell, jr. (1996), their ability to transform social practices makes events the very stuff of history. of course, not all events make the same kind of difference, nor are different genres of eventfulness equivalent with respect to their social, political, or subjective impact. instead, as andrew abbott (1988) and robin wagner-pacifici (2000) demonstrate, time unfolds on multiple horizons, sometimes bursting in a spectacle of consequence and sometimes fading into normalcy. take crises: despite the incredible political promise often invested in them, crises are not necessarily transformative. they can change the nature of one’s relationship with the state, as adriana petryna (2002) and kim fortun (2001) have shown in the contexts of chernobyl and bhopal, respectively. but they can also reinscribe existing forms of inequality by diverting attention, as janet roitman (2013) argues the financial crisis has done and as naomi klein (2007) chronicles with respect to what she terms “disaster capitalism.” perhaps because of their political ambiguity, crises have captured ethnographic attention for years, from studies focusing on resource management after catastrophes (fortun 2001; petryna 2002; button 2010) to those exploring cases where crisis has become chronicity (vigh 2008; farmer 2011; adams 2013; feldman 2016). but there are many forms of precarity and disorder not captured under the designation of “crisis” that do not command the same critical attention. consider nancy scheper-hughes’s (1992) notion of everyday violence: an existential experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that normalizes suffering. or consider javier auyero and débora swistun’s (2009, 93) work on toxic ambiguity. their study of pollution in argentina depicts a “slow-motion toxic disaster” whose lack of speed effectively dulls the senses to toxicity. given the resulting sensory aporia, it is not difficult to understand residents’ quiescence. critical responses are perhaps even more challenging to imagine in cases like christine walley’s (2013) study of postindustrial calumet, all too common in the late-industrial united states: what are people to do when diseases manifest themselves years after factories close—once their ostensible causes have disappeared from the landscape? figure 2. the local skyline, april 2015. photo courtesy of the goldman foundation. curtis bay has much in common with auyero and swistun’s account, as well as with walley’s depiction of the ties that bind bodies to chicago’s steel industry. industrial pollution has been a part of south baltimore for more than a century. beginning in the 1800s, factories concentrated in curtis bay thanks to land-use regulations that pushed nuisances (waste, industry, contagious disease) to the urban periphery. the region soon became home to maryland’s fertilizer, oil, and chemical industries. during the next 150 years, local companies produced increasingly dangerous products (such as asbestos, ammunition, radioactive thorium, pcbs, and ddt), pollution worsened, and plants were joined by massive dumps and military facilities. elsewhere, i elaborate this history at length (ahmann, forthcoming). for present purposes, know that life for longtime residents has always revolved around heavy industry. most have ancestors who came to work in local factories, and even unemployed residents depend on the plant’s various efforts at corporate social responsibility: grace chemical funds summer camps for children, csx hosts an annual thanksgiving meal, and the neighborhood association would be insolvent without contributions from the local business alliance, featuring partners like valley proteins (an animal rendering plant), abbey drum (a hazardous waste container manufacturer), and targa resources (a natural gas company). though the composition of plants has changed over the years, as has residents’ relationship with industry, locals have long learned to accept pollution as a condition of survival in their community. for outsiders visiting the region, these entanglements can seem jarring: intersections of carbon avenue and sun street, quarantine road and efficiency way, junked car parts, sunflowers, row houses, and oil tanks mark a part of the city that looks like a terrible accident. rena, a lawyer who in the 1990s represented residents seeking a buyout, described the area as being “like the center of a doughnut. if you had an aerial view, it would look as if an angry god had taken some monopoly houses and thrown them in the middle of this big industrial ring.” inside, things seem to have happened more gradually. in conversations with older residents, i always ask how industry affected the local environment. “we didn’t give it much mind,” a white man named horton once told me. others have echoed the sentiment: “we never thought about it.” “it’s always been normal.” “i guess i didn’t really notice.” things happened in curtis bay, but they never added up to happenings. the region’s industrial engulfment and its strain on local bodies occurred over such a long time that, in horton’s words, “it hardly seemed worth fretting.” these were the conditions that led greg, a white organizer in his thirties, to express exhaustion about the prospect of crafting eventfulness “out of nothing.” we had been canvassing the blocks of curtis bay on a brisk november afternoon, knocking on doors and straining to convince people who had lived amid toxicity their entire lives that, suddenly, they should act on it with urgency. we spoke with young black families who were used to having their health disregarded by the powers that be, and with working-class whites who a decade ago lived comfortable lives, but had since sunken into poverty. the latter group in particular proved difficult to reach: though white residents frequently warmed to greg and me, many shut their doors when approached by the half-dozen black teenagers who canvassed with the campaign twice a week. typically, downwardly mobile whites attributed decline to their black and immigrant neighbors, many of whom moved in when factories started closing, and few vested hope in our politicking (ahmann 2016). after giving our spiel about the proposed incinerator, greg and i were used to being told that “curtis bay’s always been a dumping ground,” that “it’s gotten worse since they moved in,” and that our efforts “won’t change anything.” in the weeks leading up to december 15, 2015, we had spent so many days leaving flyers in doorjambs and speaking to ostensibly indifferent people that greg had a hard time fathoming how the campaign could possibly build a movement out of “nothing.” i knew greg well and figured that, as a full-time organizer with a degree in social work and experience in the peace corps, he did not really mean there was “nothing” people ought to be upset about. the cumulative health effects of industrial pollution, compounded by the threat of one more plant, constituted an indelible something that greg had shaped his life around. yet the slow pace of change in south baltimore did lack the concentration, attention, and drama of contemporaneous crises. (compare the observation that “small increments of lead have built up here over years” with the affective appeal, in flint, michigan, of “look! lead is poisoning our children right now.”) indeed, in our conversations with folks who said they “didn’t give [pollution] much mind,” i detected a praxis of not noticing that seemed conditioned by the pace of industrial expansion and compounded by scientific uncertainty about the causes of local disease. mark, whom i met just weeks after he had been diagnosed with cancer, likened the trend to the body’s attunement to smell: “eventually, your nose gets numb to all that. it’s kind of like cat litter—after a while you don’t smell it, and it’s easy to forget you need to change it out.” certainly residents noticed that there was pollution in their community, and there were occasional reminders that something was amiss—in the way blond hair turned chartreuse when children swam in the cove, in the soot that accumulated on white sheets, in the holes stockings developed when left outside to dry, and in the color snow would sometimes turn (“rainbow,” mark explained, like asphalt tinged with gasoline). but these were ambiguous signs of pollution, and residents often dismissed them as inconclusive, one-off sensings (cf. shapiro 2015). given the vague connections between their deteriorating health and these equivocal environmental omens, most have learned to bracket such experiences, cultivating “somatic modes of [in]attention” (csordas 1993) responsive to their abstruse atmosphere. in her research on the production of political apathy, nina eliasoph (1997) shows that this disavowal takes work. but it is a perfectly sensible coping mechanism for residents who feel powerless in the face of risk, who “want not to be worried” (eliasoph 1997, 619; see also stawkowski 2016). even in the part of curtis bay where rena negotiated a buyout, it was not long-term toxicity that moved residents to leave, but the occasional industrial explosion. (“you can’t see toxics,” rena observed, “but you can be very agitated about blowing up.”) for officials, too, it was an argument about the difficulty of evacuating locals in the event of an accident that won the day, not residents’ “long dyings”—those “inward, somaticized . . . cellular dramas” so removed from their causes and lacking in spectacle that they remain “unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated” (nixon 2011, 6). working time toxic suffering in curtis bay would, then, seem to count as a kind of slow violence. but much work remains to be done to understand how those in the throes of this condition diagnose its idiosyncracies and then—beyond enduring them—maneuver, make claims, and transform time into a tool of critique. indeed, though few working on slow violence reject the notion that its victims can respond, initial elaborations of the concept have been characterized by a general sense of obstruction, even malaise.3 for example, lauren berlant (2011, 95), who examines the attrition conditioned by obesity, portrays agency in the scene of slow death as “maintenance, not making . . . sentience without full intentionality.” in this formulation, individuals endure instead of invent, and their debilitation appears overdetermined by conditions that they can sense but presumably not change. elizabeth povinelli (2011, 106) is slightly more optimistic about endurance, describing it as a “space of potentiality” from which new social projects emerge. yet such potential often seems to require waiting: one must survive these conditions “long enough . . . to accomplish [the] performative trick” of recognition. and though rob nixon (2011, 15) argues that writer-activists can tackle the challenge of representing slow violence by “apprehending threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses,” he does less to specify how time itself might be made a medium of resistance or refusal. without disputing these scholars’ observations (on which my own analysis is partially dependent), i offer a different set of tools—tools that, beyond depicting time and perceptibility as mechanisms of social control, also specify how those hamstrung by slow violence work time to alter their conditions. put differently, i build on work that “critically analyze[s] the politics of temporality and identif[ies] its pernicious effects on certain bodies” (zeiderman 2016, 164), while also examining how those who experience slow violence choose to participate in such politics. for this, i turn to the campaign against curtis bay’s incinerator. the fairfield renewable energy project was, as one young black campaign leader, destiny, put it, “a routine development in my community.” proposed by the company energy answers in 2009, the billion-dollar project promised to power the baltimore metropolitan area by burning shredded tires, old cars, and municipal solid waste. at the time, maryland governor martin o’malley was working to reclassify incineration as a tier 1 renewable-energy source (on par with wind and solar), and several institutions signed contracts with the facility (despite concerns about its safety). in sum, the incinerator was a private enterprise owned by a multinational corporation making claims on a planetary scale, supported by state and federal subsidies, regulated by state, federal, and transnational emissions standards, and set to power local municipalities. as an entity, it tracked the dizzying diversity of interests that had long governed curtis bay. and, rather than gesturing toward a vague set of exposures, it materialized the threat of toxicity (see murphy 2006). this made the incinerator, as greg once put it, both a “profound illustration” and a tremendous political “opportunity.” in 2012, a diverse group of local high schoolers who participated in an after-school club with greg, then a social worker at their school, learned about the proposal from the local news. after researching the risks associated with incineration, learning about area health disparities, and joining forces with united workers—a baltimore-based human rights group with organizational ties to the welfare-rights movement—the group officially set out to halt the plant’s construction. their fight has since been featured by dozens of newspapers and attracted alliances with a wide array of organizations, from law firms to environmental institutions. the campaign has also been critiqued by older residents skeptical of left-leaning outsiders and hopeful that the incinerator would reinvigorate industrialism in their community. in short: neither side represents a monolithic group (see brodkin 2009). as part of the campaign, students have studied their region’s history alongside neighborhood seniors, acquired data on toxics with the help of environmental experts, and learned organizing tactics from local labor unions. together, they have shrewdly portrayed the plant as an imminent risk and an immediate crisis, not because it threatened curtis bay with a new sort of problem, but because it unacceptably compounded an old one. among campaign leaders like greg and destiny, there is thus a certain awareness, first, that local history betrays a particularly uneventful form of violence and, second, that temporal appeals can render this history useful. with a focus on this campaign and in response to questions about techniques that move “quasi-events . . . from potentiality to eventfulness to availability for certain social projects” (povinelli 2011, 14), i examine three forms of temporal response in curtis bay. the first two, incrementality and deferral, are subtle styles that mimic tendencies to accrue or forestall. the third, concentration, challenges slow violence by transforming its representation. in all three cases, time appears as the object, not merely the context, of human behavior—it is something people use to direct attention and make claims. consequential meantimes todd and i sat across from one another in one of his neighborhood’s several worker-owned cafés. a perpetually disheveled white man and the founder of united workers, he was recounting the strategy that had marked the campaign’s early days. “at first, we thought that the incinerator was going to get built like that,” he said, snapping to indicate the anticipated speed of the project. “six months—so we developed a short-term strategy. . . . but in the meanwhile, we were monitoring the site and we realized that something was wrong: the company wasn’t doing anything.” i had an opportunity, later, to scroll through several hundred photographs taken during this period. beginning in 2013, the photos document stasis, featuring the same empty site beyond the same locked gate approximately every week for the following year. in one, weeds sprout out from underneath a vacant blacktop. in another, tangled branches vine themselves across the site’s barbed-wire fence. and a series taken that august features six grown geese waddling slowly across the ninety-acre dirt expanse. “for a while,” todd continued, “the whole thing made us feel kind of stupid . . . and it was really draining our energy.” figure 3. a photo of the still-empty incinerator site, taken during students’ routine monitoring. photo courtesy of united workers. by 2014, todd explained, activists were finding it difficult to summon a sense of urgency around stopping a development that did not seem to exist. some neighbors they canvassed assumed the project was dead, and many were flabbergasted to hear that students were fighting over an apparently empty field. as rob nixon (2011, 8) writes, “delayed effects structure our most consequential forgettings.” this went on for some time until, in todd’s words, something “clicked”: the incinerator’s absence “pointed to a weakness. . . . we had no way of knowing [what], but we did have time to slow down and develop a better strategy.” todd’s comments convey the consequentiality of the meantime, an intervening period between events that tends to lack their definition. instead, the meantime is murky, open, undefined. it can be rife with possibility or weighted by impatience (han 2011). not unlike the pauses intrinsic to industrial production that point to troublesome interruptions in profit and the potentiality of capital ready in waiting (weszkalnys 2015), the meantime can reward strategies of nonaction, suspension, and procrastination. in my analysis, incrementality and deferral are two temporalities that work within this interim, and which competing parties in curtis bay have responded to (as obstructionary or inadequate) and through (to achieve goals without detection or to play up inactivity) in a variety of ways. incrementality is a style of response that mirrors the rhythm of slow violence; it describes a gradual buildup that sometimes coalesces into something (an event, a reform, a disease). toxicologically, incrementality gestures toward the consequences of prolonged exposure not captured in the regulatory sphere, where rules designed to limit the release of a single pollutant from a single plant obscure the biological impact of living for years among heavy industry. indeed, while many toxics are regulated as though they are benign beneath a given threshold, they tend to linger in the human body and build with the passage of time, accruing in bodies exposed to multiple, continuous releases. and though i do not mean to suggest a direct link between how toxics behave and how toxic developments are resisted, there are striking resonances between slow attrition and incrementality as a political strategy (cf. pierson 2004, 82; smith 2015). seth, an organizer with one of the country’s major environmental organizations, dubbed the tactic “death by a thousand cuts. we’ll often lobby for rules that slowly increase the economic burden on polluting industries.” angelo, an air-quality official, also invoked incrementality to describe his work, seeing it as commensurate with “chipping away at a hunk of granite”—an effective (though laborious) process of environmental change-making. incrementality, then, is a pace that stays beneath thresholds of recognition, but that makes something lasting in the process. as a strategy, it can mean weakening an opponent through small, successive victories. it can also mean making progress toward controversial ends while no one is watching. as we sipped our coffee, todd explained that the incinerator’s construction had proceeded incrementally following its 2010 permitting. groundbreaking for the project did not even begin until 2013. in the interim, students worked with allies in the environmental sphere to research the plant’s prospective customers. they learned that twenty-two public entities had contracted to purchase power from the facility. they also learned that the contracts specified a deadline by which buyers could opt out if the incinerator was not yet providing electricity. with this information in hand, the group pursued a divestment strategy, targeting the institutions one by one and advocating pulling funding. in short, they transformed sluggishness (a perceptual block) into a frame for noticing the project’s inadequacies. by april 2015, the campaign had successfully stalled building by removing the project’s largest source of financing. figure 4. curtis bay’s backyard, june 2016. photo by chloe ahmann. students made a point of emphasizing the resulting stasis on toxic tours they would give visitors to the neighborhood. one sweltering summer afternoon, i walked next to destiny as she led a group through curtis bay, maneuvering past coal cars and tanker trucks, stopping at sites that symbolized children’s toxic vulnerability, and proceeding to the place where construction was purportedly underway. as we walked, she described how divestment had opened space to pursue another strategy, this one around deadlines embedded within emissions regulations. “projects like the incinerator hold certificates of public convenience,” she narrated, “which means they’re supposed to [undertake] ‘substantive and continuous construction’ within eighteen months,” a timeline set by the federal clean air act and typically enforced by the states. she explained that these certificates ensure facilities use the “best available control technology” and satisfy the latest emissions regulations; otherwise, companies could obtain permits to build, retain them for years while requirements grow more stringent and mitigation technology improves, and then construct with cheap, outdated equipment. after granting permits, it is the state’s responsibility to monitor construction and ensure that it proceeds “continuously,” a pace with legal consequences. and, as destiny noted, mde had recorded nearly two years of site visits without any obvious activity. at this point in the tour, she led groups around a bend in the road to reveal the empty site. to the group’s supporters, this emptiness communicated that they had not yet lost the fight. and it dramatized construction delays documented by mde. one observer even called the term construction a “mockery. . . . it’s like if one of us put a shovel in the ground and moved dirt from point a to point b. i guess that’s what [the company] was counting.” taken together, these observations kept “the pause prised open” (weszkalnys 2015, 616), giving shape to the incinerator’s shortcomings. by august 2015, the coalition had begun to capitalize on these lags, pouring energy into catching the company on a technicality. “pull the permits!” became a rallying cry as students, environmentalists, and social-justice workers mined the minutiae of construction regulation. at public events and at residents’ doors, they transitioned from a sermon about health and environmental justice to a script about how construction had been “substantially discontinued for a period of eighteen months or more after it had commenced.” emboldened by mde’s reports and supported by pro bono attorneys, the campaign implored the agency to recognize that energy answers had failed to undertake the “substantive and continuous construction” required by law. in time, this argument elicited a response from bureaucrats. in november, mde penned a stern letter to the company, demanding that they prove their permits had not expired. in response, energy answers enumerated a short list of projects that had unfolded slowly over the years (e.g., drainage system installations, electrical upgrades), almost all of which had taken place underground and out of sight. essentially, they argued that the project’s incremental growth—that happening that proceeds under the cover of stillness and stasis, pacifying resistance through the appearance of absence while accumulating reserves over time—had finally built to a point of consequence. as efforts intensified in anticipation of december 15, 2015, it seemed reports of the incinerator’s death had been greatly exaggerated. if incrementality has been one response to slow violence, a second has more plainly been deferral, or delay. delay does not build. it stews, halts. one can delay recognition, remediation, and effects. in the environmental sphere, what makes chemical contamination “all the more disturbing,” according to one doctor quoted in rachel carson’s (1962, 188) silent spring, “is the knowledge that our fate [as a species] could perhaps be sealed twenty or more years before the development of symptoms.” aside from the immediate effects of events like industrial explosion (such as stinging eyes or rashy skin), most illnesses in curtis bay follow a latency period that forestalls intervention and complicates claim-making. pauline, an elderly resident, found this lag particularly frustrating. in the 1990s, her retired husband was diagnosed with four different cancers that she was certain could be traced to the chemical industry. “but it’d been so long since he’d left the plant,” she explained, “we couldn’t prove anything.” in cases like pauline’s, deferral is an engine of slow violence. but with some modification it can also be a tactic—a strategic suspension of time or a conservative impulse toward inactivity. deferral has marked the fairfield project since its inception. contesting criticism over the three-year delay in commencing construction, a representative from the company argued that the “clock should have stopped” due to a mandatory stop-work order from the state in 2014. but early on, it was energy answers that most forcefully complained of delay. until 2010, the company was embroiled in tense negotiations with the state over having to obtain a refuse-disposal permit. such a delay “could have been deadly for the project,” their attorney then explained. “$300 million [in stimulus money] is on the line, and we have to get shovels in the ground by the end of the year to qualify” (mook 2010). energy answers’s ceo also complained of delays caused by the campaign. this was his main concern when we met at the empty site to discuss the incinerator. sitting at a plastic table in a prefabricated trailer—one of the only structures occupying the expanse—he blamed activists for thwarting construction through “tactical” requests for additional state review. specifically, he characterized calls for a health-impact analysis as a “devious means of obstruction,” one that concerned investors and cost millions in lost profits. he further reminded me that for every day “the opposition” delayed construction, four thousand tons of trash would go to landfills, which leach methane into the atmosphere and cause our planet to warm, hastening the end of time. “climate change is a serious problem,” he explained, favorably comparing the incinerator’s ghg emissions with those tied to landfilling. “some people will fight anything that isn’t perfect. but we don’t have time to waste looking for a magical solution.” references to the “meantime” were another common form of temporal appeal. activists invoked the phrase to draw attention to things that could have been built on the site (like a solar farm) had the state not delayed invalidating the company’s permits. and industry representatives, like the ceo, used it to promote waste-to-energy over more deleterious alternatives. at a tour of baltimore’s existing incinerator in 2016, for instance, one longtime employee told me: “the human race is gradually destroying this planet. we’re polluting the ocean, we’re polluting the air, we’re just ruining our nest.” gesturing toward the two thousand tons of trash churning behind him, i asked if he saw his work contributing to that trend, and he said: oh, absolutely! everything we do harms our environment, but there are things we’ve got to try. sometimes i compare the human race to those unfortunate people on the titanic. . . . its pumps were taking out twenty thousand gallons of water every minute, but, unfortunately, forty thousand more were flowing in. they bought themselves a bit of time, but the ship of course went down. so that’s what we’re doing here. we’re trying to buy ourselves some time. standing in the scorching observation room, i found his statement striking—it was a rare admission of complicity, full of ambivalence about his role in sinking humanity. but i soon noticed that his time reckoning was ordinary: state air-quality officials called incineration a “bridge strategy,” something they could use to bide the time until wind and solar became more “realistic” options. in all these cases, appeals to the meantime articulated what went on amid deferral as a kind of opportunity cost. but in other cases, delay itself proved advantageous; it was a “weapon of the weak” (scott 1985) within a labyrinthine regulatory process. leah, an attorney aligned with the campaign, spoke openly about taking advantage of every opportunity to legally obstruct the project. in 2012, for instance, when the company requested an extension on its first construction deadline, it went through an abbreviated agency review that invited public comment. leah and her colleagues at the environmental integrity project alerted organizers who, in turn, brought dozens to testify against the project. as a result, mde revised the plant’s emission limits, further delaying progress and precipitating another opportunity to intervene when energy answers failed to acquire the requisite emissions offsets. the politics of incrementality and deferral characterized multiple sides of the incinerator debate, with representatives from the company, the agency, and the campaign all seeking to manipulate attention and critique patterns of delay. but protests on december 15, 2015 chiefly targeted delay at the hands of the state. besides dawdling in its attempts to actualize cumulative impacts legislation, mde had long deferred its enforcement of project compliance, taking eight months to determine permit validity and letting multiple deadlines pass without consequence. among themselves, organizers expressed distress over time’s asymmetrical politics. at a strategy meeting before december 15, where members of the coalition debated how to get the state’s attention, gwen, a doctor, put her disappointment this way: residents were “still waiting,” and the injunction to wait has gone on “month after month after month.” in response, todd slammed his fists down in frustration. “i feel like our opponents own time,” he complained. “and when we give in to their timelines, we lose.” moral punctuation another consequence of the project’s deferral, however unintended, was that it left room for opposition to swell. one of the tactics campaigners embraced in the meantime was to take control of time, deliberately concentrating it by concocting their own deadlines. while deferral forestalls and incrementality builds at a strategically glacial pace, concentration derives power from its speed. it brings accumulated proceedings to a head and directs them toward a designated moment. william sewell, jr. (1996, 843) calls these moments “bursts,” explosions of temporal intensity that are more than the sum of their parts; they reframe and often eclipse the gradual changes that precede them. sometimes, deadlines set by the campaign sought to concentrate months-long struggles into singular events; at other times, they lent immediacy to the incinerator by situating it against curtis bay’s environmental history. early in 2015, for instance, when the group waged an opt-out campaign to get energy buyers to nullify their agreements, activists marked april 25 as a sort of judgment day—a day when they would either “celebrate” public institutions for choosing to “do the right thing,” or apply tremendous pressure. all twenty-two buyers listened, and by april 25, energy answers was forced to face the reality that it had lost its financing. subsequently, december 15 was to be a deadline for the mde. after requesting in august that the agency pull the incinerator’s permits, following up with hundreds of petitions, and receiving “nothing but silence,” the group delivered thirty days’ notice to the agency, promising to return with hordes of supporters. “we don’t expect [mde] to respond,” greg said, “which is good—because then the clock starts ticking. they’ll delay like they always have and eventually trigger the demonstration where we can highlight why, instead of ignoring us, they should actually do something.” in greg’s analysis, quantifying the state’s deferral of responsibility and following it with a spectacular call to action would force a response by underscoring mde’s neglect of citizens. during the years i observed the campaign, i came to think of this strategy as a form of moral punctuation, an explicit marking of time that condensed protracted suffering and demanded an ethical response. indeed, like punctuation in the grammatical sense, deadlines can be deployed to separate time and clarify meaning; they suggest that waiting has a “narrative escape hatch” (wagner-pacifici 2000, 64), a necessary ending.4 in curtis bay, the incessant assignment of deadlines to a state content to delay was saturated in moral claims—claims that demanded recognition of accumulated wrongs and refused to accommodate delays associated with trudging through the legislative process or epidemiologically proving injuries. we can’t breathe, in other words, calls for expediency. it formulates speed as moral when compared with the violence of deferral or the treacherous patience of incrementality. frustrated with mde’s unwillingness to “do its job” and convinced that “our political levers are broken,” organizers thus temporarily set aside a toxicological argument about the incinerator’s health impacts and abandoned attempts to debate politicians on official terms. instead, they decided to draw attention to the state’s moral failure with respect to the incinerator—a failure they argued derived from the state’s participation in and refusal to address curtis bay’s two-hundred-year exposure history. in this sense, moral punctuation is reminiscent of what walter benjamin (1969) calls redemptive time, a recovery of the past that endows it with urgency. in his “theses on the philosophy of history,” benjamin (1969, 255) implores historians to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger”—to put the past to work in contexts of present political need. benjamin’s depiction of the messianic moment as a stop cord halting the progress of a runaway train fancies redemptive time, first, as opposed to experiences of protracted suffering and, second, as an emphatic end to accumulated injustices. as i imagine it here, moral punctuation is a less totalizing but similarly creative reconfiguring of history. it seeks to shake up official disregard and recalibrate praxes of not noticing—both embedded in slow violence—to attune, instead, to an accrual of wrongdoings.5 like the designation crisis, punctuation does work by registering “a moral demand for a difference between the past and future” (roitman 2013, 9) and insists that history derive meaning from this breach. in my conversations with todd, i learned that this strategy drew on decades of accumulated experience within united workers and its sister organizations. part of the movement to end poverty, rooted in martin luther king, jr.’s poor people’s campaign, these groups work (in todd’s words) to “dramatize” situations of protracted harm, from housing insecurity to persistently low wages. in 1968, for instance, the poor people’s campaign brought thousands to camp out on the national mall to underscore the costs of poverty in a graphic way. and though the campaign faltered for many reasons—king’s assassination among them—this strategy has persisted within the movement for decades. as one example, todd told me about united workers’ efforts to organize contingent laborers at baltimore’s baseball stadium. we’d spent years building a narrative. eventually we put it all at the feet of the [state] and said, “we’re done talking.” and—crank, crank, crank—we announced a hunger strike. the minute we announced and the media showed, that’s what really did it. we’d built up the problem over so many years that when it finally happened . . . they conceded. one reason the hunger strike was so effective was that it highlighted the paradoxes of a system that expected employees to sell food in exchange for poverty wages. in todd’s words, this is what effective action does: it “puts people into contact with a power system that’s otherwise difficult to engage,” concentrating its diffuse effects into a single situation. direct action is, in other words, about more than being disruptive; for todd, it “makes contradictions plain.” to quote king (1963, 768, 772), it seeks to “foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. . . . we must come to see,” he wrote from a birmingham jail, “that justice too long delayed is justice denied,” and to observe deferral with “moral concern” that transcends mere impatience. students had spent years researching these campaigns. they believed that thoughtfully generating crisis could bring about substantive change. a far cry from what lauren berlant (2011, 95) describes as “sentience without full intentionality,” then, december 15, 2015 marked a studied response to slow violence, informed by years of accrued experience among organizers and designed to cap decades of systemic discrimination. in fact, the desire to stage a concentration of accumulated harms was explicit in the plans for december 15, as greg explained at a preprotest training: we’ll form a very long line and citizens will proceed into [mde] one by one. they’ll buzz in, enter the office, and say, “i’m here to express my opposition to the incinerator.” the idea is that everyone who has been involved will get to follow up directly, but also that their mass will create a backlog for the agency. each individual’s encounter with the state was on its own to be “utterly ordinary,” greg instructed, but the line’s cumulative effects would have symbolic significance and considerable logistical consequences. besides signifying how individually benign acts can accrue into substantial problems, the crowds gathered on december 15 would show (in greg’s words) that “acts of democratic participation come with an expectation,” one the agency had failed to meet for months. “people in curtis bay are tired of feeling like their lives are disposable,” destiny explained. “we’ve got to show them [the state] that there’s a price to be paid for ignoring communities.” leaders carefully mapped their timeline and planned to begin at 4 p.m. individuals would therefore line up during business hours, but their mass would occupy officials past closing. meanwhile, organizers would fill the lobby with throngs of protesters. when it began to look like mde would force citizens out, a small group would join arms, sit down, and refuse to leave until the agency enforced the law. keeping them on schedule throughout the night would be a designated stage manager, tasked with speeding things up if the line moved too slowly and stalling if it advanced too fast (which would complicate the timing of the sit-in). the sit-in would be the action’s primary punctuation, and the media would bear witness. a few days before december 15, i attended civil-disobedience training in the basement of a church with the activists who had been designated “arrestables.” they were black and white, ranged in age from eighteen to seventy, and included students, organizers, a doctor, and a priest. they had signed up, as one activist affirmed, to put their “bodies on the line” and to ensure that this confrontation with the state would be theatrical, visceral, and direct. though ostensibly an opportunity to clarify messaging and practice comporting their bodies to resist (but not provoke) the police, the meeting quickly became consumed with concerns about timing. after role-playing one exchange with law enforcement (in which police arrived on the scene, denied them access to bathrooms, and waited long enough to fatigue the media), we talked at length about the threat of a standoff. what if mde did not promptly call for help? how long would they wait for officers to respond? would they risk escalating things to provoke a reaction? some participants were nervous about a potential confrontation. elijah, for instance, thought it would be dangerous to get mistaken as a threat to the police. others felt that there was too much at stake to let the event fizzle out. in one organizer’s words: “if this is our chance to confront the state, we should create crisis.” eventually, despite well-founded nervousness around law enforcement, the group agreed to wait as long as it would take to ensure arrest, forcing state action after many months of neglect. in the process they would orchestrate a “system of correlated antagonisms” (sahlins 2000, 240)—an event, one expressly designed to highlight the absence of eventfulness. following the lead of the priest, they would kneel in the face of power and recite lines calculated to moralize curtis bay’s history of adversity. one student, josh, described the symbolism of the protest as questioning: “who’s breaking the law here? we’re just asking to be recognized by a government that tends to ignore our community.” more than a performance of their disdain for mde, then, december 15 would stage a collision between competing temporal subjectivities (hall 1980), informed by different values (legal caution, ethical concern), daily routines (media deadlines, office hours), and orientations toward history (that it ought to inform government decisions, that it should be irrelevant to permitting). figure 5. locked out of mde on december 15, 2015. photo courtesy of united workers. december 15 did not go as planned. in anticipation of the protest, mde had locked its doors, leaving citizens to march outside while officials negotiated with destiny and a small delegation (unbeknownst to them, the arrestables). stories that spread later about those who had been locked out for simply trying to deliver a letter, a powerful half-truth, supported protesters’ claims that the state had abandoned its responsibility to serve and acknowledge citizens. it was a narrative that even older residents—skeptical of the campaign but deeply disappointed by the government—could identify with. punctuating time with moral urgency and concentrating curtis bay’s environmental history within a four-hour protest—and through the public images of arrest—the group used these circumstances to fabricate its own crisis. in doing so, it blasted six months of silence from the state while simultaneously bringing years of unrequited protestations and generations of slow, invisible violence into focus. indeed, in public spaces for days after, locals circulated photos of the event alongside personal experiences of pollution. even horton, who had told me that he did not spend time “fretting,” was more attentive to his persistent cough and curious whether i had noticed other respiratory problems in his community, and he started to question the wisdom of building another plant in a place “already” overburdened by industrial “abuse.” by the following march, organizers had also extracted a response from the state: with little fanfare, mde determined that the permits had expired, leaving the project to die a slow death while attention shifted to courting projects that promised development without pollution. conclusion slow violence is a condition that seems to invite incoherence. it takes too long, it is hard to notice, and it casts a wide chasm between effects and the various forces to which we might attribute cause. but it is, in fact, an object primed for interpretive debate, even for new imaginings of accountability. in baltimore, when faced with the challenge of gradual industrial incursion and its often inconclusive effects on human health, residents subject to the vagaries of delayed destruction learned to work slow violence and its machinery of perceptual confusion. so while it is true that protracted harm can sometimes condition apathy, it can also inspire manipulations of time and creative rearrangements of history. if anthropology is indeed experiencing a “temporal turn,” as laura bear (2016, 487) argues, then curtis bay suggests that there is much to learn from pivoting from the harsh dimensions of social life embedded in slow violence to temporal forms of resistance, even refusal (see simpson 2014). it suggests that time and perceptibility can be objects of—not merely obstacles to—political maneuvering. when one pushes past what sherry ortner (2016) dubs “dark anthropology” and toward an appreciation for the lively chronopolitics (see zee 2017) at play in contemporary social movements, time starts to look less like something that happens to people and more like an arena of creative action open to even the most historically disenfranchised groups. here, i have specified just three strategies of temporal manipulation—incrementality, deferral, and concentration. broad in scope, they are nonetheless a modest start to what could be a robust vocabulary for thinking time as contested terrain, available for conscious and deliberate use. it is not my intention, in the process, to overstate the effects of the incinerator victory: curtis bay has not suddenly broken the capitalisms invested in industry, nor jolted residents into insurgency, nor disappeared toxic burdens from local bodies. nevertheless, we might take a cue from curtis bay about how people respond to problems “too massive and multiphasic in their distribution of time and space for humans to fully comprehend” (boyer and morton 2016) by taking control of temporality. to attend to this behavior is to appreciate how groups grappling with experiences as diverse as exposure (allen 2003; checker 2005; shapiro 2015), erosion (zee 2017), and illness (berlant 2011; cazdyn 2012) might assess time and perception as tools. as anthropologists of the chrono-spastic anthropocene (see howe 2016) labor to describe the environmental effects of human activity—effects that are diffuse and at times ambiguous, and which many people gladly go about not noticing—we would do well to attune to cases where people endeavor to halt time, or where they direct attention toward accrual. i imagine there are many contexts, beyond toxicity and climate change, where accrual becomes a case for acting urgently, and where it would behoove scholars to take stock of time as an instrument of social movements. while i watched the campaign against the incinerator unfold in baltimore’s southernmost neighborhood, similar debates about problems that have gone on long enough were happening all across the city. just days before the campaign’s april 2015 opt-out deadline, freddie gray, a twenty-five-year-old black man, died from spinal-cord injuries sustained while in police custody. residents called gray’s death a “breaking point” for baltimore—a “boiling over,” a “tipping point,” a “threshold.” overdetermined by generations of manifest police violence against black bodies, residents’ initial response did not demand extensive orchestration. as one told a reporter, “freddie gray’s death made it pop” (tavernise 2015). but the protests that shook baltimore in the wake of gray’s death were acts of moral punctuation. they depended in important ways on the accumulation of names—eric garner, michael brown, tamir rice, walter scott—whose concentrated deaths at the hands of police helped clarify the meaning of gray’s. the campaign to stop the incinerator rhetorically absorbed crises like flint and freddie gray to draw attention to less sensational forms of harm in curtis bay. many chanted “no justice, no peace” on december 15, 2015, and campaign statements following the uprising reminded politicians that “the world is watching.” while awaiting a response from mde, destiny appeared on the radio, warning that “structural injustices have been exposed in this city, and the world will tell the story of how officials in maryland respond.” such weaving is just one example of how slow violence creates obstacles and opportunities. nor is it limited to baltimore; it is a central characteristic of intersectional movements emerging globally. in curtis bay and beyond, the parsing out, the staving off, and the concentration of time have all been responses to slow violence—a problem that implicates how we study, organize, and make policy. amid all of this, the idea that “it’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing” harbors stunning ironies. the prospect that violence unfolding over generations could be imagined as nothing, and the strategic machinations through which groups render it a perceptible something, are both phenomena we ought to train our eyes on. notes acknowledgments this article benefited from readings by alex dent, joel kuipers, ilana feldman, richard grinker, laurence ralph, nicholas shapiro, savannah fetterolf, raquel machaqueiro, kimberly probolus, and victor kessler. special thanks are due to two anonymous reviewers and to the cultural anthropology editorial collective—particularly james faubion—whose insights have indelibly strengthened the ideas in this essay. research was conducted with the support of fieldwork grants from the national science foundation (#1528490) and the wenner-gren foundation (#9051). i also owe a great debt to the many archivists who assisted in historical research and to the dozens of residents, activists, bureaucrats, and industrial leaders who graciously shared their experiences with me. any mistakes are my own. 1. specifically, the project was permitted to release 240 pounds of mercury, 1,000 pounds of lead, and more than 3,000 pounds of fine particulate matter annually. 2. this phrase references the last words of eric garner, who pleaded “i can’t breathe” eleven times while a new york city police officer forced him to the ground and restrained him by the neck. 3. this is not a blanket critique. indeed, environmental justice research has long shown that communities respond to toxic violence creatively (e.g., bullard 1990; allen 2003; checker 2005). i do think, though, that anthropologists have a much more developed vocabulary for describing temporal obstacles to mobilization than for elaborating temporally inflected strategies. 4. while jane guyer (2007) and ilana feldman (2016) invoke punctuation to describe time that is periodically interrupted, i use the term to describe its intentional parsing out. and though i focus on an explicitly moral type of punctuation, other kinds are certainly possible. 5. in this sense, moral punctuation might be the organizing equivalent of nicholas shapiro’s (2015, 369) chemical sublime, an embodied experience “which elevates minor enfeebling encounters into events that stir 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endangered city: the politics of security and risk in bogotá. durham, n.c.: duke university press. the right to the remainder: gleaning in the fuel economies of east africa’s northern corridor cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 462-486, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.05 the right to the remainder: gleaning in the fuel economies of east africa’s northern corridor amiel bize university of bayreuth and cornell university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7213-9712 pulling into gaakwen,1 one of kenya’s busiest truck stops, a driver might reach a hand out of the window of his truck’s cabin and make a gesture—a rotation of the wrist, like someone holding a bottle by the neck and swishing it around. this hand movement signals to brokers waiting among the densely parked tractor trailers that the driver wishes to sell fuel. it sets off a series of interactions: a broker approaches the truck and strikes a deal with the driver; a crew arrives with jerricans and plastic tubes; they siphon anywhere from ten to forty liters of petrol or diesel from the truck’s tank. when conducting research in gaakwen, i took note of the gesture as an element of a symbolic world particular to these transactions, a means of demonstrating to brokers that the trucker was in the know. but what exactly it symbolized was not initially clear to me. the motion did not obviously refer to fuel, nor did it mimic any of the actions or objects of the siphoning itself—what, then, did it signal? after some time, i began to interpret it as a reference to a leftover: the gesture, i determined, indexed the fuel remaining in the tank, the share sloshing around and available for sale. more, i came to understand that the idea of a leftover was key to the entire transaction: truck drivers described what they were selling as “leftover” fuel, and dealers understood their profits in terms of a marginal “extra” they were able to gain. despite the illegality of the exchange, drivers and dealers saw themselves as conducting an entirely legitimate activity: gathering and exchanging residual bits of a commodity. rather than an illicit economy, then, this was an economy of remainders. this article traces my effort to understand the roadside fuel trade and the role of the remainder within it, as well as to understand what marginal exchanges organized around leftovers might tell us about the larger liberalized economy in which they are embedded. the kenyan fuel sector was liberalized in 1994, with the goal of allowing more players into the market—fuel was to become more accessible through competition that would lower prices, and through the entry of new distributors who would help fuel reach underserved areas. observers widely agree that the strategy has failed—top suppliers continue to dominate the fuel market, and distribution remains concentrated along certain pathways (iea 2000; gichuru 2007; kojima 2010). as a result, the movement of fuel into more peripheral and rural areas often takes place through unofficial means, and the roadside trade proves key among these. thus, while these roadside exchanges are small, they are not insignificant: they account for a substantial share of fuel distribution within kenya. in this article i explore the roadside fuel trade and the concept of the remainder in two ways. first, i draw inspiration from an ancient practice—gleaning, the right of the marginalized to gather harvest leftovers—and use it to think about what exchanges organized around remainders might tell us about entitlement and (re)distribution at the margins of capitalism. emerging from ancient and feudal societies where redistributive obligations obtained within a context of established inequality, gleaning proves surprisingly apropos for examining distribution at the edges of liberalized economies, where access to goods and notions of economic justice are often embedded in explicitly unequal exchange relationships. second, i engage in a detailed ethnographic examination of the practices of valuation in the roadside fuel economy, which are organized around a remaindered share rather than a purely price-based conception of profit, to suggest that this conception of value reflects understandings of entitlement and exchange often overlooked even by critics of liberal economics. i thus propose that the idea of the remainder can offer insight into “actually existing” liberalization (brenner and theodore 2002), as well as into alternative value concepts arising not necessarily in opposition to capitalist practices, but alongside them. in asking what the remainder can tell us about how marginalized communities engage with capitalist circuits, i also consider how one might study practices of valuation. i build here on the work of economic anthropologists attentive to the cultural logics of calculation and measurement (strathern 1992; weiss 1997; guyer 2004; peebles 2015), and especially to “the social, semiotic, and material processes whereby substances get utilized, unitized, and numericalized” (kockelman 2016, 91). as jane i. guyer (2004, 19) writes, to do this, one must adopt an approach that “puts transactions into slow motion and lingers on every frame . . . objects, numbers, scales, the modalities of exchange, relationships.” this article thus lingers on details. looking at the fuel trade from the perspective of both drivers and dealers, it examines the minutia of transactions: terminology, unit sizes, performative practices—even container preferences. with attention to what such details tell us about value definition and the creation of meaning more generally, i aim to show how visions of justice and even social order become reflected in the practical and conceptual tools of measurement and exchange. * * * my interest in economies of remainder derives from an ethnographic study of post-agrarian rural transformations in kenya, in which i tracked shifting understandings of value and risk among rural populations whose sources of livelihood were no longer predominantly agricultural. gaakwen exemplified the way that, increasingly, economic opportunities were found on the road rather than on the land. initially a market center for the surrounding villages, gaakwen grew into a bustling settlement in the early 2000s when truck transport overtook the railway as the preferred option for long-distance cargo and truckers began stopping there for the night.2 by the time i began fieldwork there in 2013, gaakwen had become a hub of entrepreneurial activity in the midst of rural space. restaurants, guest houses, bars, and other shops and services lined the highway and formed the heart of a settlement that spread into former farmland on either side of the main road. having literally sprouted out of agricultural land, gaakwen was also a site at which the infrastructure of the transnational trade route came into contact with marginalized rural economies. day and night, trucks and tankers bearing commodities passed through the truck stop, ascending west toward kenya’s western counties and the landlocked countries of east africa, or returning east, often empty, toward nairobi and the coast. gaakwen’s bustling rest-stop economy thrived on servicing and surveilling this transport. truckers stopped to eat or spend the night, leaving behind some of their “mileage” (spending money for the trip) and creating a market for products and labor drawn from surrounding rural areas. gaakwen’s networks of brokers took advantage of this interface to facilitate the diversion of cargo out of its “predestined pathways” (appadurai 1986) and into the rural spaces that provided alternative markets for it. the mombasa-malaba highway that passed through gaakwen was part of the northern corridor—one of east africa’s main commodity transport routes and a notoriously leaky one. as trucks pulling sealed containers traversed the kenyan countryside, commodities would often escape: through accidents, pilfering, or a combination of both sometimes called an “intentional accident” (ajali ya makusudi). among the variety of escaped goods that were bought and sold in gaakwen, a particularly sophisticated and established trade had grown up around siphoned fuel. crews of siphoners would regularly extract fuel from the tanks of tractor trailers and into twenty-liter jerricans, load them onto pickup trucks or motorcycles, and sell them into what the government called, with suspicion, “local markets.” fortunes were made from the roadside trade, and its illegality did not undermine the sense that it was a legitimate and attractive business. indeed, the practice of siphoning was accompanied by meaningful conversions that turned fuel-qua-commodity into fuel-qua-remainder, and thereby into something available for appropriation. my ethnography revealed complex dynamics of legitimacy and entitlement playing out in the gaps of the formalized economy. not only trucking companies but also the energy regulatory authority, the police, and the oil majors viewed the roadside fuel trade as extremely dangerous. the circulation of fuel through unregulated channels and at prices lower than those determined by the regulatory body undermined the authority of the set price and the collection of levies subsumed into fuel prices. further, fuel dealers often “extended” siphoned petrol by diluting it with kerosene, which is taxed at a lower rate and therefore less expensive—the government estimates that 80 percent of kerosene bought in the country is used to adulterate petrol, though this figure remains disputed (okoth 2018). for authorities, then, siphoning self-evidently constituted a crime, one exacerbated by questions of tax, price, and the material consequences (for engines) of using adulterated fuel. roadside communities, however, saw the appropriation differently. despite the illicit status of fuel dealers’ work, my respondents in gaakwen regarded fuel siphoning as an established trade. one interlocutor, an employee of a trucking company, described fuel dealing as a “sector” (sekta) of gaakwen’s economy. as he put it, the fuel trade was simply too established to be understood as illegitimate: “the fuel trade is illicit (haramu), but it is licit (halali) for those who are invested in this sector.”3 indeed, fuel dealing was explicitly distinguished in gaakwen from the theft of fuel, understood as siphoning without the driver’s knowledge or failing to pay after having agreed to buy. a long-term gaakwen resident described fairly draconian measures that the township had taken to curtail thefts of both fuel and cargo, measures he saw as essential to protecting gaakwen’s reputation as a safe place to park and to sell fuel. fuel dealers in gaakwen had also organized themselves into a trade association, with representation in the township’s self-governance structure,4 which regulated prices and prosecuted thieves. dealers saw themselves as providing a much-needed resource to off-road populations, creating income opportunities and engaging in a highly profitable enterprise. they did not see these goals as necessarily in tension with one another. it is not at all surprising that in contexts of evident inequality, and along a trade route not (yet) fully enclosed, resources will find ways to escape. nor is it surprising that this escape will be legitimized as a form of “social banditry” (hobsbawm 1965). indeed, scholars have often discussed such appropriation of commodities through the lens of the “moral economy,” by pointing to the way that resources are embedded in structures of meaning, obligation, and justice that extend beyond the realm of financial transaction (thompson 1991; scott 1997). in this article i take a complementary approach by focusing on the concept of the remainder. against the charge that their actions constituted property theft, those engaged in the trade framed fuel siphoning as collecting a “leftover” (salio). this was, i argue, not merely an attempt to legitimize taking fuel—rather, it revealed a specific mode of valuation that we should take seriously. when truck drivers who sold fuel and fuel dealers who bought it constructed the thing they were transacting as a leftover, they were not only claiming their right to take fuel (because the leftover is a fraction available for appropriation) but also describing a relationship to the commodity flows that traveled along the highway—a relationship embedded in the form of valuation itself. as i will show, in rewriting commodities through the concept of the leftover, gaakwen’s traders produced an understanding of value that distinguished between “necessary” and “remaindered” shares, and thus created an entitlement to fuel that—while claimed as a right—also recognized the trucking companies’ claim. traders asserted their right to profit from fuel as long as their profit remained marginal, in the sense both of small and of peripheral. attending to the explicitly marginal nature of this claim can help us see beyond the dichotomy of profit motive and moral usage that often marks discussions of moral economies (palomera and vetta 2016; carrier 2018). i begin, then, by situating marginal claims within the historical and metaphorical space of liberal circulation. flow and other metaphors fuel’s movement across kenya and even east africa was shaped by the technological and regulatory realities of transport and the fiscal processes that structure distribution through price, taxation, and (de)regulation. the liberalization of the fuel sector in 1994, part of a broader effort to open markets in kenya, sought to facilitate fuel’s distribution around the country. but its reliance on models of market distribution did not adequately take into account the country’s uneven development, which was materially entrenched in infrastructure patterns that affected distribution in enduring ways. thus we see a familiar disjuncture between the optimistic metaphors of liberal economics and the realities of exchange on the ground. in this section, i examine this contrast by exploring the difference between liberalism’s liquid metaphors—particularly “flow”—and those used in the roadside economy. financial and physical infrastructures in kenya have long colluded to undermine an ethics of active redistribution. in the immediate post-independence period (as before independence), fiscal policies focused on creating an environment attractive to private enterprise—as instantiated in a seminal economic document, sessional paper n.10 of 1965. this blueprint proposed a trickle-down approach that focused investment on already advantaged areas, where it would “yield the largest increase in net output” (republic of kenya 1965). the expectation was that this approach would create financial and human resources that, by expanding the national economy, would produce the fiscal space for investment in marginalized areas. in reality, the policy and its successors generated development patterns marked by a concentration of services and capital-intensive infrastructure along a narrow corridor, leaving large parts of the country underserved. the idea that established distribution patterns had entrenched unequal access to petroleum was one of the advertised justifications for the fuel trade’s liberalization. its supporters argued that the oil majors—chevron, mobil, total, shell, and bp—concentrated on large urban markets and left unprofitable rural hinterlands underserved. by undoing a regulatory regime that put products out of the reach of many, petroleum-sector liberalization would advance the circulation of fuel into marginal areas. in the 1990s, then, reform efforts removed price controls on fuel and opened up procurement, distribution, and pricing to market regulation. controls were replaced with an open-tender system through which companies won import permits for crude. ultimately, however, this system allowed the oil majors to continue to dominate the national market (gichuru 2007).5 nearly three decades after these free market reforms, the spatial logic of preliberalization distribution persists. a map of fuel stations shows a concentration along a corridor stretching from mombasa, past nairobi, and ultimately forking with one branch to lake victoria and another to the uganda border. this same trajectory of service distribution, pioneered by the railway, had been taken by kenya’s oil pipeline, highways, high-voltage electricity pylons, schools, and hospitals. as with distribution, so it was with prices: the bulk of the country, falling more than fifty miles north and south of this corridor of development, also suffered the highest fuel prices—a difference of up to 20 percent in cost.6 liberalization did alter the terrain of fuel access, however, in one unexpected but significant way: it intensified the decline of the state-run railway and promoted transport by road. as part of the structural adjustment programs implemented in kenya, the transport sector also underwent liberalization. the state cut back its support for the railway, further undermining an ageing infrastructure badly in need of capital investment (ogonda 1992).7 more fuel started moving by road, in two different ways. not only did tanker trucks take over fuel transport from the railway but also more fuel was used to power road transport—because more goods were moving by truck. increased road transport gave roadside populations expanded opportunities to access fuel and other commodities, albeit through unofficial channels. thus, while liberalization did not make fuel more accessible through its price/competition mechanisms, it inadvertently brought it closer to rural populations along the highway. the emergence of gaakwen, stimulated by trade between the road and the roadside, itself lent evidence to this newfound proximity. the stop’s bars, restaurants, and accommodation, as well as its commodity traders, mechanics, and sex workers facilitated exchange between the highway and rural spaces, while various kinds of surveillance, like trucking-company checkpoints and security contractors tracking containers, sought to curtail it. trucking companies expressed anxiety about their inability to keep the trade route segregated from the rural networks of the roadside. one company boss articulated the sentiment as a fear of “leakage.” virginia roberts, the director of a trucking company headquartered near gaakwen, told me that addressing fuel siphoning was one of the biggest challenges of her job. her trucks “leaked” fuel, she said, in much the same way her husband’s cattle ranch “leaked” milk: “he has to make sure that milk goes into the mouths of his calves and not off the farm in plastic bottles.” drawing a perhaps unintentional analogy between the plastic jerricans with which siphoners took fuel and the plastic bottles in which hired workers smuggled milk off the farm, the director made the tapping of fuel a wrong equivalent to that of denying a calf its mother’s milk: not just pilfering, but a kind of moral injury. it was intriguing, then, that fuel dealers also linked milk and fuel: siphoners were called wakamuaji, “milkers.” but where for the director this metaphorical rapprochement moralized the crime of fuel theft, for dealers the metaphor made obvious why one should have a right to fuel. milk and fuel were both seen as essential resources—when large landowners and company owners had plenty while others had none, bits tended to find escape routes, with the help of plastic bottles. what roberts called “leakage” should be situated in relation to gaakwen’s role as an interface between the highway and the countryside, and in relation to the uneven development that shaped the meaning of this interface both before and after liberalization. gaakwen was located amid highly visible imbalances: on the one hand, the highway created a stark division between developed infrastructure (along which goods traveled, enclosed in surveilled containers) and the underdeveloped hinterland. on the other, gaakwen was surrounded by vast farms owned by former settlers, the political elite, and multinational corporations. in this context, many perceived fuel siphoning as a mechanism of tacit redistribution. as nikhil anand (2015) argues in discussing the “leakiness” of water infrastructure in mumbai, what is considered leakage by one party can be resource provision for another. in diverting resources, gaakwen’s fuel dealers understood themselves to play a role similar to those who made illegal water connections in anand’s account. by transporting fuel to the “interior” (the vernacular for parts of the country not served by a major road), and selling at lower-than-pump prices, they facilitated its movement to places where it was needed for tractors, generators, motorcycles, and pickups—machines used on farms and rough roads. non-siphoned fuel could also find its way into these spaces, but fuel dealers’ prices proved attractive, and their distribution networks were particularly suited to the terrain and its socioeconomic conditions. as one dealer put it, his trade provided a “service” to rural populations located far from sanctioned fuel facilities. anand (2015, 308) argues that leakage is essential to the system—it diffuses the political pressure that could build up from the complete deprivation of a vital resource. for this reason, the state accepts a certain amount of leakage. the useful insight here, echoed by those involved in gaakwen’s fuel trade, is that authorities tacitly permit a certain amount of illicit redistribution, thereby alleviating the pressure to make necessary infrastructural provisions to the margins. thus, in light of kenya’s entrenched distribution patterns, the roadside trade in siphoned fuel could indeed be seen as leakage—it diverts resources from the pathways that both organize commodity circulations and serve as “structures of confinement” (tsing 2005, 6). but if leakage was the operative concept from the perspective of those who sought to enclose a resource, i found that those who liberated it used other concept-metaphors—central among them that of the leftover or remainder. a closer look at the metaphors may prove helpful in understanding why, despite the liquidity of their commodity, fuel dealers did not employ the concept of leakage. as a metaphor for extracting value, “milking” suggests a far more active, entitled, and (as i will show) unit-specific process than “leakage,” which describes a passive outflow of resources.8 indeed, leakage is something like a shadow concept of flow, a metaphor that has dominated ideas around distribution and circulation in capitalist contexts (khan 2006). flow draws an analogy between the movement of liquids and the circulation of capital to instill a sense of the naturalness of the market—when commodities and capital are said to flow, the word implies that they will organically find routes to where they need to go. it is for this reason that the metaphor is so frequently mobilized in discussions of liberalization, where regulation is perceived as an unnecessary interruption to the “natural” course of circulation. central to this metaphor is an elision of the material form and purpose of resources themselves, as the specificity of things, anchored in their materiality, is replaced by abstracted value. thus abstracted, the concept of flow ignores the labor and the desires that, in enacting circulation, inevitably generate a very un-liquid “friction” (tsing 2005; larkin 2013). so leakage works like flow in that it naturalizes diversions that in fact require work—practical and meaningful labor. this naturalization proves particularly problematic because it implies that nothing needs to be done to help resources reach underserviced areas: liquid metaphors have underpinned “trickle-down economics” precisely because they imply that distribution happens on its own (thanks to gravity or osmosis), without the need for more active intervention. contrast such metaphors of effortless, abstracted circulation with the way gaakwen’s traders understood fuel and its (re)distribution. the diesel and petrol “milked” in gaakwen were routinely described to me as what was “left over” from a driver’s trip. of course the fuel was, literally, left over, in the sense that it remained in the tank. but contained in the idea of leftoverness as expressed by drivers was a more complex claim: that the share only came into existence under particular material conditions, and that access to it was marginal to some other use. the share taken was understood as qualitatively distinct from that which was essential to the journey. interestingly, this distinction emerged from trucking companies’ practice of fuel dispensing. companies fueled trucks at the beginning of a trip in an amount intended to last until the trip’s end. the precise quantity of fuel was variable—it depended on the length and quality of the route, the type of vehicle, its age, and the kind of cargo it was carrying—but the idea that trucks received fuel sufficient for their journey was consistent. the trip became the unit in which fuel was dispensed (an indivisible unit determined by a specific purpose) and it was in relation to this unit that the leftover was defined. the significance of the unit form in shaping valuation can be helpfully elucidated by paul kockelman’s (2016) work on household economies in guatemala. describing economic practices in which one use value is substituted by another, rather than exchanged for another, he shows that measuring one thing against another to see if it is a suitable replacement turns, in part, on a system of evaluation within which unit sizes emerge intuitively out of use. in replacement economies, he writes, unit sizes often seem “natural” (one day’s labor, one meal’s worth of food, etc.); resources fall into these units as though “inherently formed.” he juxtaposes this against an exchange-value economy in which price or other abstracted and standardized representations of value ensure that commodities can be valued and exchanged not just in whole units but in fractions or multiples (kockelman 2016, 118–19).9 this is significant because only in relation to such intuitive, indivisible, units does a remainder become sensible, as leftover food only makes sense in relation to the meal. so paradoxically, drivers’ notion that fuel could be left over derived from trucking companies’ dispensing practices, as, partly, did drivers’ sense of entitlement to it. their claim was enhanced by the fact that the fuel required for a trip could vary. companies drew on fleet-management experience to determine the number of liters (just) sufficient for a particular trip, and they were suspicious if usage did not align with their expectations. but they recognized and anticipated a measure of variability, and driver reliability thus held great importance. indeed, companies avoided putting young drivers on long-haul trips because, not yet knowing how to conserve fuel, these drivers were more likely to run out of fuel mid-trip.10 drivers, in turn, were acutely aware of their role in managing fuel usage under unpredictable circumstances. as several explained, it was impossible to say exactly how many liters of fuel were required even for a familiar stretch of road, because driving conditions like traffic and police presence could significantly affect the trip. the irregularity gave rise both to the promise of a leftover and the fear of shortfall—if a driver ran out of fuel before the end of the trip, he would have to negotiate with the company for top-ups, and sometimes even pay for it himself. as i explore in more detail below, the very variability of the essential share made drivers responsible for their fuel usage and established the leftover as a product of their actions, indeed, their skill, rather than of happenstance. so the remainder is a particular kind of share: it comes into existence in relation to a mode of valuation that links unit with purpose, and relies on the idea that portions remaining beyond that purpose are “extra”—available for fresh claims. where trucking companies imagined a fraction that could be seamlessly reincorporated into their working capital, those involved in the roadside fuel trade saw a distinct share that they could take. the morality of the remainder did not inhere in a more familiar contrast that pits the appropriation of resources for use against profit—fuel traders were seeking profit just as much as trucking companies. its moral charge lay, rather, in troubling how surpluses were represented and to whom they were thought to belong. the remainder, then, was a conceptual mechanism through which surpluses—not always easily given—could be actively diverted from circuits of reinvestment. to explore this further, i turn now to gleaning, and to the drivers and dealers who trade fuel in gaakwen. gleaning the road as i have noted, the drivers i spoke to consistently referred to fuel sold as what they had “saved”: a share that they could claim as their own. to explain, let me recount a story told to me by my friend and sometime host, william—a community leader and keen observer of the life of the truck stop. a parable about drivers caught selling fuel by police, the story both articulates drivers’ sense of entitlement and locates the fuel trade within the heightened surveillance of the northern corridor. as william had it, one day “macho nne,” the founder of a trucking company called ngong works, was tipped off that his drivers were selling fuel. the company had its base only a few kilometers from gaakwen, and truckers coming back in a convoy had stopped by gaakwen to sell their remaining fuel, since they were nearing the end of their journey.11 patrolling police officers caught them in the act but proposed to look the other way if financially induced to do so. the truckers agreed, but when it came time to pay up, they only gave the officers a small payout: 500 shillings (about us$5). the policemen, estimating how many liters had been sold, thought this seemed like far too little. but the drivers refused to give more, asking, “why should you deserve more, kwani ni yako?” (rudely: “what, you think the fuel is yours?”), and insisting that they were giving the cops a bribe, not a cut. that is, they were offering the police not a percentage of the fuel sold, but a one-off payment. in saying this, they implied—as william did, telling the story—that the fuel was actually theirs to sell, that they had a right to profit from, quantify, and share it as they saw fit, in ways the policemen did not. the policemen threatened to turn them in, but the drivers did not budge, so in the end the police accompanied the drivers to their base and reported them to the boss, macho nne. here the drivers argued that the policemen were harassing them because they had refused to pay a bribe, since ngong works had a policy of not bribing. to demonstrate their innocence, they asked macho nne to check the fuel reserves in their tanks. when the gauges showed as much fuel as he expected after their trips, it was the policemen who left defeated. william told this story with great relish, fully aware of the irony of drivers asserting a claim to the fuel and denying the policemen’s claim, although both sides were engaged in what would seem, from the outside, to be equally illegal activities. embedded in the story was also an explanation of how the drivers asserted a sense of ownership over the fuel, as against the policemen’s and macho nne’s. essentially, the argument ran that if macho nne did not know he had lost any fuel, the fuel belonged to the drivers. this could work in two different ways, william explained, according to how they managed to bring the truck home with the “right” amount of fuel in the tank. either they replaced what they sold with kerosene, or they managed to save fuel by driving skillfully, most notoriously by “freewheeling” (coasting) down and up hills, but also through other virtuosic techniques, such as keeping an even speed or a well-calibrated use of gears.12 in the first case, the fuel could be said to belong to them because no one was the wiser: overlookable amounts were available for guiltless appropriation. in the second case, the fuel was theirs because they employed great skill and potentially risked life and limb to save fuel—conjuring a share, an “extra,” that could be sold without eating into the revenue expected by their bosses. while drivers understood that their actions limited the ability of trucking company owners to realize a surplus (that is, to profit off the truckers’ labor), they recoded what they sold as a leftover that they had created, to establish a right to it that did not directly compete with the trucking company’s right. although drivers lamented their low incomes and compared these to their high-value cargo and the profits their bosses made, those i interviewed did not anchor their claims to fuel in the language of need-based redistribution. instead, their positions often mimicked or extended the logic of (entrepreneurial) capitalism. their right to claim fuel, they argued, resulted from their skilled manipulation of their vehicles, and from the risk they bore. transport company owners made the bulk of the profit, but it was drivers who carried the bulk of the risk, absorbing irregular loading schedules and road conditions into their bodies by denying themselves sleep when necessary, and exposing themselves to the accidents that plagued the corridor. they spoke of an intimate knowledge of their trucks and their limits. their claim on leftover thus required a slight revision of classic understandings of the “moral economy.” the drivers did not juxtapose traditional use rights and embedded economies against the impersonal profit orientation of the market. rather, they claimed the right to gain something from their skilled management of driving conditions. intriguingly, this “feel” for the truck and its fuel consumption also allowed a distinction between essential and leftover fuel to preexist the fuel’s actual use. as one gaakwen resident explained, experienced drivers sometimes sold fuel near the beginning of their trip, projecting how much they would “save.” the leftover was thus an effect of the material relationship between truck and fuel, but also of an artful negotiation of drivers’ position as artisans of the road, which, according to them, gave them a right to a marginal share. the margin emerged both from the contingencies of material and through a preexisting social negotiation. the simultaneously contingent and planned aspects of the remainder in william’s account resonate in intriguing ways with the ancient ethics of harvest leftovers. to articulate this, let me digress briefly into a discussion of gleaning, a practice that could be glossed as “the marginal’s right to remainders.” in ancient and feudal societies around the world, gleaning was a right largely reserved for the “poor and alien.” villagers—particularly the indigent, the young, the old, and women—were allowed to enter a field after the crop had been harvested and pick up what had been left behind. the hebrew bible mentions and endorses gleaning multiple times, and it was practiced quite widely through the early modern period. in europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it contributed substantially to household economies: one researcher argues that gleaning could provide english peasant households with as much as 10 percent of the grain they needed for the year (king 1991). the practice nearly died out during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of increasingly exclusionary enclosure practices and because more efficient agricultural technologies—especially the combine harvester—gradually reduced the wastage of the harvest. as both leviticus and deuteronomy make clear, the leftovers gathered in the fields were intentional leftovers: the landowner was obligated to leave them. here is deuteronomy 15:8: when you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow. and leviticus 23:22: when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. you shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: i am the lord your god. gleaning is an odd sort of redistribution, one in which the landowner’s obligation is fulfilled almost accidentally. even the meaning of the gleaned share is ambivalent—it sits somewhere in between wealth and sustenance. in medieval england, this ambiguous status is apparent in bylaws regulating gleaning, which cannot agree on the question of whether gleaned produce was subject to the church’s 10 percent tithe (ault 1961): is it income, or not? one contemporary scholar notes that economists have overlooked gleaning because it does not involve money or prices (bardi 2015). but it is precisely this incommensurate and contingent quality that allows redistribution to persist without directly challenging the system of rights represented by the landowner’s ability to realize a surplus. gleaning exists within a framework of established inequality. in being excluded from the realm of exchange—by the very fact of being remaindered—the transfer of goods is explicitly not a transaction between equals. so both the framing as remainder and the gesture toward contingency simultaneously make the transaction possible and limit its scope. this ancient ethics of redistribution becomes surprisingly helpful for thinking about fuel siphoning and contemporary market capitalism more generally—both for the ways it resonates with contemporary practice and for those in which it diverges. contemporary scholars have mobilized gleaning in thinking about the right to use copyrighted material for “harmless” purposes (gordon and katyal 2009) or the right to gather digital “resources” and digitally distribute alms (bostock 2005; cherkaev 2019). similarly, food justice activists draw extensively on the language of gleaning when asserting the right to salvage both farm produce and processed foods—things that would otherwise go to waste. these contemporary examples help us understand the gleaned share as, crucially, one that can be taken without disturbing the dominant (landowner’s) claim. gleanings are taken, as xenia cherkaev (2019) writes, “in ways you won’t even notice.” tellingly, many of these contemporary examples of gleaning focus on the right to take a remainder (and the tacit acceptance of this taking) more than the obligation to give one. returning to gaakwen, we can see that an “intentional remainder” lies at the heart of william’s story, but it is clear that truck owners are no longer ethically mandated to redistribute. instead, the drivers of the story, like those i spoke to, articulated their right to remainders by defining themselves at once as subjects of redistribution, as skilled workers, and as risk-bearers. this combination reflects a broader shift in which redistributive obligations become rerouted through work relations—as historians of early capitalism describe, in-kind payments for artisans progressively replaced customary rights of access (before being criminalized during industrialization as pilfering and then theft) (linebaugh 2006; allen and barzel 2011). contemporary examples across the world reveal that workers exhibit a sense of entitlement to leftovers, even if employers disagree: numerous ethnographies show how extras or scraps from factories and farms are appropriated as “in-kind supplements” to wages (ditton 1977; harries 1994; callebert 2017; cherkaev 2018):13 these takings share a commonality: defining them as leftover allows workers to fill gaps in their livelihoods without troubling the landowner’s claim to the field itself and without a sense of wrongdoing. equally, when fuel dealers argue that the fuel they are trading is left over, they are stating their right to access it in a way that does not quite contest the trucking company’s right to it. as one respondent put it, “let me say that everyone benefits, directly or indirectly.” this is then a moral economy in its classic sense: an ethical formation that structures socioeconomic relationships across inequality. morality here is a language for negotiating with power and reminds us that claims are shaped by relationships of marginalization and hierarchy, however much these may not align with liberal aspirations to equality. of course, anthropologists have long paid attention to forms of obligation and dependency that clash with such liberal aspirations (ferguson 2013). for kenya, studies of patronage have shown how older and wealthier relatives are expected to redistribute across their kin and social networks, just as politicians are expected to hand out money during campaigns and to give projects to their constituencies (atieno-odhiambo 1987; haugerud 1997; smith 2008; blunt 2010). rhetoric reflecting hierarchical relationships of obligation also proved prominent in gaakwen. drivers often referred to truck owners simply as tajiri—“rich man”—suggesting a personalized hierarchy defined by wealth rather than employment structure. and beyond the fuel trade, residents praised large landowners who occasionally invited villagers to enter their land and cut overgrown brush for firewood. but depictions of patronage do not fully capture the entitlement represented in the claim to leftovers. first, fuel gleaners did not rely on social or kin ties to assert obligations; similarly, their claim took shape not in relation to age-based or gendered forms of inequality but rather directly addressed the question of who controlled the surplus. in rewriting this surplus as remainder, fuel traders both engaged with an extractive understanding of labor and value and turned it to their ends. second, the claim was expressed in the nature of the share itself, rather than through reference to a social position. in this sense, it reflected the way that unit sizes in popular economies take on a kind of morality, as in the distinction made once by a maize seller who told me: “we”—those exchanging in a more personalized economy—“sell by the debe [tin can],14 but they”—those involved in nairobi’s estranged economy—“sell by the kilo.”15 both were standardized measures of exchange, but the debe was popularly linked to units of daily use, where the kilo represented alienated exchange. moreover, those selling by the debe were expected to include a bit of extra—a trader who leveled the top of the pile instead of leaving it heaped up was considered stingy. thus, where the kilo was an abstracted standard, the debe was more like the harvest—a concrete form embedded in social life. in this sense it lent “qualitative values” to “quantitative measures,” as brad weiss (1997, 352) writes regarding currencies. similarly, the leftover as a share shows us how social and moral values can be articulated in systems of measurement—in the units of use and exchange as much as in social categories of personhood and status. to explore this last point, i turn now to fuel dealers and their profit calculations. exceptional valuation after brokers approached a driver and ascertained his interest in selling fuel, they would call a mnunuzi, a “buyer.” brokers were go-betweens, while buyers were the chief entrepreneurs; they rarely appeared on the roadside, preferring to conduct their business by cell phone. when the deal was struck, the buyer would send a crew of wakamuaji, “milkers,” to extract the fuel by sucking it through a plastic tube into plastic jerricans, which served at once as vessels for the fuel and as the unit of exchange. once siphoned, the driver received payment for the fuel and the broker who had arranged the trade, a commission. finally, young men called punda, “donkeys,” whose primary job was to carry the full containers, would take the fuel off the roadside and into warehouses where it was stored for sale. all transactions were made in cash and prices were consistent—fixed at an amount slightly lower than the price set by the state regulator. i was fascinated by the mix of metaphors in this trade—especially given the constellation of cattle, banditry, agriculture, and wage labor that marked gaakwen’s history and which i do not have space to address here at length.16 these metaphors were remnants of an older moral economy, organized around cattle and farming, that was in the process of being supplanted in gaakwen around the time of my research. in this way, they linked contemporary fuel dealing to forms of agrarian and pastoralist life associated with positive values: reproduction, life, growth. when a fuel dealer called the action of siphoning “milking,” the dead (and even poisonous) qualities of fuel were overwritten by associations with lively and productive value derived from cattle-keeping. moreover, ideas of both “milking” and “bleeding” cattle were explicitly associated by one of my interlocutors with fuel when speaking of how to make extraction sustainable. one can only take small amounts, he pointed out, because you have to be careful not to kill the cow (or its calf). but the analogy with milking also points to something else, which becomes visible in the equivalence between truck and cow. cattle are uniquely suited to thinking analogically about the relationship between liquid and the units in which it circulates and is extracted. as such they reveal something important about exchange and distribution. to return to the earlier discussion of flow, an analogy between truck and cow makes visible that containment is an essential, albeit overlooked, aspect of circulation (shryock and smail 2018). whether in the truck’s tank or the cow’s udder, liquid commodities moved within containers. and when siphoners milked a truck for fuel, they extracted a liquid out of one container (tank/udder) and moved it into another. the extraction created a new kind of enclosure, the jerrican, which in turn shifted the unit of valuation. these containers and the form of calculation they underpin are the focus of this final section. the jerrican was the unit of extraction, exchange, and calculation in the roadside fuel economy. called mitungi (sg., mtungi)—derived from the kiswahili word for “pot”—jerricans were tenor twenty-liter plastic containers first introduced to east africa by the german military in the form of steel receptacles for storing and transporting fuel. during my fieldwork, new and recycled plastic mitungi were used across kenya for fetching, ferrying, and storing all kinds of liquid. they served not only as containers but also as ways of tracking and measuring use. household water usage, for instance, was often calculated in mitungi. indeed, the most common mtungi size—twenty liters—was a widespread unit of measurement in popular economies, so much so that it functioned as what guyer (2004, 56) calls a “threshold number.” one counted in single liters up to twenty—from there, the twenty-liter unit became the base number, and one counted in mitungi. this showed that they were not just useful as vessels but also provided an evaluative function—the containers’ function inhered in their standardization as much as in their ability to contain liquid. the centrality of this unit within the fuel trade was tied to its utility for both siphoning and transport, reflecting the wider fact that unit sizes in popular economies are determined not only by how they measure or what they symbolize but also by how they facilitate movement. fuel dealers were able to divert fuel because they traded in amounts small enough to be overlooked and to be accessible to economically marginal buyers. using mitungi, they repackaged fuel in quantities more portable across uneven surfaces (by motorcycle or pickup) than the quantities required to fill a fuel station’s tank. this transfer freed fuel from the confines of corridor infrastructure and served as an inversion of the large-scale distribution mechanisms linked to economies of scale—in these economies of unscale, distribution pathways were defined by the ability to offer small quantities and to traverse uneven terrain. gaakwen’s dealers preferred the thin plastic containers used in water dispensers to the heavier plastic jerricans, because the thinness of the plastic allowed them to expand the containers. (these thinner containers were also called mitungi and also came in tenand twenty-liter sizes.) dealers altered their containers’ capacity by pouring fuel into them and then placing them under a hot tin roof. the heated fuel and vapors would expand the plastic, so that the container could hold more fuel than the measurement associated with it. thus, when they extracted “twenty liters,” showing a driver the full container as an indication of the amount extracted, they were in fact claiming more. this was one of the ways they created what guyer (2004) would call a “marginal gain.” using the flexibility of one of modernity’s materials, plastic, traders destandardized the standards themselves. drivers knew there was some degree of alteration taking place, which gave the jerrican an even more central role in the transaction. during negotiation, the crew would show the driver the container they planned to use, and fuel dealers’ skill involved their ability to present their containers as fair. the drivers’ awareness and acceptance of some variability dovetailed with trucking company bosses’ knowledge that some fuel was being lost en route. within reason, and so long as it remained a remainder, a difficult to quantify leftover, some diversion could be overlooked. the extra capacity made for more than a form of trickery. it came to define the entire transaction. dealers sold fuel by the mtungi, not by the liter, and the extra space they were able to create in their collection containers was an important element of their profit calculation. their profit was based on a remainder—one reckoned not primarily through price, but through the accumulation of extra amount. to explain, let me recount how a dealer described his calculation. when i asked him how much he earned on an average transaction, he hesitated, not having a number to hand. finally, he responded by first telling me the price at which he usually bought “twenty liters” (one expandedmtungi) of fuel, then explaining that that containers he used actually held more like twenty-five liters, then telling me for how much he sold twenty liters (one not-expanded mtungi). the approximately five liters created by the mtungi’s expansion was how he represented his profit. but he could not—or did not—articulate this profit in terms of price, nor even in a precise number. as it moved out of trucks and into dealers’ networks, then, the fuel’s value underwent a transformation—from a calculation based on price per liter, to one based on the extra capacity in a swollen mtungi. we might remember, of course, that in economics, profit itself is defined as a marginal calculation: it is what is left over after production costs have been accounted for. but what was unique about this calculation is that the mechanism of profit generation was not a price markup, but rather the generation of an unnamed share—that extra space in the mtungi. moreover, the roadside transaction, semihidden between the bodies of tractor trailers, using performative techniques of persuasion and illusion, worked with repertoires of exchange and calculation that preserved a sense of marginality and smallness. embedded in seemingly banal questions of unit size, then, was a cultural logic in which measures also constituted meanings. as guyer (2004) writes, marginal transactions are both historically and culturally shaped: their repertoires reflect context-specific socioeconomic logics. so much so, she explains, that some kinds of transactions get named and institutionalized, “their components become conventionalized” (guyer 2004, 97). the widespread recognition of the fuel trade’s performances and categories shows these to be established elements of a local repertoire. attending to this conventionality might help us avoid a certain scholarly binarism in discussions of marginal economies—in which the criminalization of practices like fuel siphoning is countered by scholars who sympathetically describe illicit trades as a “survival” practice (see fennell 2016 for a similar point17). such accounts of “surviving,” “hustling,” and “getting by and making do” (simone 2004; newell 2009; peterson 2014) capture important aspects of a contemporary crisis in livelihoods, but the framing results in scholars viewing these practices as external to the logic of the dominant economy. what my ethnographic research suggests, in contrast, is that claims to remainders are considered positive entitlements (not simply need-based “survival”) and are embedded in systems of evaluation that simply do not align with dichotomies of formal/informal or licit/illicit. rather, the roadside fuel trade is grounded in an alternative logic: one linked to the needs of rural residents, to the exigencies of off-road transport and the conventions of popular economies, and to vestiges of pastoralist and agrarian economies—all which take shape in dealers’ repertoires of calculation, measurement, and exchange. the remainder in the moral economy of the peasant, james c. scott (1977, 6) argues that risk-averse peasants will prioritize subsistence over profit—they focus, he says, on “what is left rather than what is taken.” “what is left,” for scott, refers to the basic requirement of subsistence and the source of peasant ethics. thinking about what remains “forms the standard against which claims to surplus by landlords and the state are evaluated” (scott 1977, 6). engaged in a debate around peasant economies and rationality, scott argues that activities not oriented toward profit-maximization can nevertheless be rational; at the same time, he shows how economic decisions are socially and morally articulated. the remainder in scott’s (1977) discussion operates somewhat differently from the remainder in my account, but i mention it here for its attention to peasants’ sense of entitlement, expressed in terms of a particular kind of share. through the language of “subsistence,” peasants make a complex claim: it is at once ethical and economic, but it does not derive from a presumption of equality. the conceptualization of remainder that i tracked in my observations of gaakwen also serves this complex function: simultaneously ethical and economic in ways difficult to disengage, it asks us to think about the “entanglement of values” (palomera and vetta 2016) that marks economic practice. crucially, it asks us to widen our framework for thinking about how livelihood claims are articulated in contexts of entrenched inequality: the claim to remainders asserts that the accumulation of surplus has its limits; that there can and should be something left over. gaakwen’s traders, i suggest, are reimagining the category of “profit margin” from the perspective of the marginalized. the organization of value around “remainders” more than “price” constitutes a moral economy not organized in opposition to profit or to capital, but one that nevertheless decenters it. with this article i hope to suggest that attending to remainders helps us go beyond dominant frameworks for understanding economic relations: neither liberal discourse nor empathetic assessments of the poor’s supposed survival practices give a complete sense of how claims to a living are asserted. attending to remainders asks us to think about how, within the gaps of a liberalized economy, alternative forms of valuation and distribution are established and made ethical. abstract this article argues for the importance of the remainder as a key concept in economic transactions at the edges of liberalized market economies. it tracks the east african roadside trade in siphoned fuel, where lorry drivers sell “leftover” fuel to dealers who then resell it to rural hinterlands. rather than seeing this exchange as illicit, drivers and dealers viewed themselves as legitimately trading residual bits of a commodity. they constructed their right to sell fuel, and their understanding of profit, around the idea of the remainder, rather than around concepts of income, price, or even usefulness. here, i analyze the remainder as a widely recognized concept of valuation. drawing on accounts of the practice of gleaning (an ancient ethic of redistribution organized around harvest leftovers) and examining in detail the calculative practices and metaphors used both by drivers and fuel dealers, i demonstrate the centrality of the remainder to popular economies in east africa today. roadside exchanges, i argue, reveal established practices of distribution and entitlement that both practically and conceptually challenge liberal common sense around smooth flow, equal exchange, and price-based markets. [value; remainders; gleaning; illicit economies; moral economy] muhtasari nakala hii inaangazia salio au baki kama moja ya dhana msingi katika uchumi za pembeni mwa soko huria. hususan inaangazia soko la mafuta ya kufyonzwa. uchumi huu unatekelezwa kando ya barabara kuu za afrika ya mashariki. unahusisha madereva wa lori za masafa marefu kuuza mafuta ‚yaliyobakia‘ kwa wafanyabiashara ambao nao huyachuuza mapembezoni. madereva na wafanyabiashara hawa hukana uharamu wa kazi hii na kuitambua kama biashara halali ya mabaki. wahusika hawa hueleza haki yao ya kuuza mafuta haya kwa kupitia dhana ya salio. hawatumii dhana maarufu kama mapato, bei au hata manufaa. hapa, ninachambua salio kama mbinu mbadala ya kufumbua swala la thamani. ninaandika nikifuatilia masimulizi ya kitendo cha kubuga (utaratibu wa kale wa usambazaji mali uliohimiza matajiri kubakisha masazo baada ya mavuno kwa manufaa ya wasiojiweza). ninanuia kukagua kwa undani istiari za kibiashara pamoja na taratibu za kukokotoa zinazotumiwa na wanaoendeleza biashara hii. kwa njia hii, ninakusudia kufafanua umuhimu wa salio katika shughuli za uchumi usio rasmi. napendekeza kuwa biashara ya kando ya barabara hubainisha desturi mbadala za usambazaji wa mali pamoja na mbinu bunifu za kuwasilisha madai ya kimali. kama dhana na pia kwa matumizi ya kila siku, desturi hizi zinakaidi matarajio ya itikadi ya soko huria, kwa mfano mtiririko huru wa utajiri, mabadilishano sawia, na masoko yanayozingatia bei kwa utambuzi wa thamani. [thamani; salio; kubuga; biashara (haramu/halali)] notes acknowledgments this article is based on research supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, and the national science foundation. basil ibrahim and xenia cherkaev read and commented on many drafts: i am ever grateful for their insight. i also received very valuable advice from brad weiss and no fewer than six anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology. my particular thanks go to dan rono, musa rama, and many other interlocutors in gaakwen who not only facilitated research but spent hours offering me their thoughts. 1. the names of the truck stop and of all interview subjects have been changed. 2. the reasons for gaakwen’s growth in this particular location are too complex for me to address here (see bize melnick 2018), but one of the most frequently cited reasons is that the site is located at the bottom of a long hill, and truckers arriving near nightfall prefer to wait till morning before attempting the climb. 3. the vocabulary he used in kiswahili was interesting: “biashara ya mafuta ni haramu lakini ni halali kwa wahusika wakuu kwenye sekta hiyo.” sekta (sector) is taken from business language, and the use of haram and halal is linked to the dominance of islam on the kenyan coast, where many trucking companies originate. 4. gaakwen was governed by a self-organized entity known as the gaakwen business community, an association made up of township landlords. this group engaged with county and national governments but did not constitute an official government institution. 5. according to hellen m. gichuru (2007, 41), smaller players have a combined market share of about 10 percent. beyond the ots system, barriers to entry for smaller players include the capital-intensive nature of the fuel trade and a lack of truck-loading facilities (gichuru 2007, 41). 6. maximum prices have been set by the energy regulatory commission since 2010. see its website, https://www.erc.go.ke/services/petroleum/petroleum-prices/. 7. the pipeline continued to carry 80 percent of fuel moving across the country, but the railway further lost its hold over the remaining 20 percent. 8. wakamuaji comes from the verb kukamua, which describes the action of squeezing out a liquid and is most commonly used to describe milking a cow. 9. i am grateful to xenia cherkaev for recommending this text. 10. drivers were also concerned about youth—experienced drivers communicated with newer ones to ensure that no one returned to base with too much fuel, so that owners did not begin reducing their fuel allowances. 11. the trucks that sold fuel in gaakwen were most often those on their way back to their home base, and they were usually selling fuel from their reserve tanks (in kiswahili tenki ya akiba, savings tank). that is, what they sold was not (usually) fuel they were carrying as cargo, but rather, the fuel that powered their own trucks. 12. given the heavy traffic on kenyan highways and the hilly terrain, keeping an even speed requires more skill than it might seem. 13. these ethnographies show us soviet subjects taking stockpiled goods to use in fabricating equipment; zulu dock workers “cleaning” goods off the wharves; south african miners claiming “chips” and “clippings.” all are marked by the takers’ sense that they are entitled to what they take. 14. debe were originally oil canisters and are now used to measure out and sell grain, beans, maize, and other granular products. 15. both jane guyer (2004) and janet roitman (2005, 91–93) make similar observations regarding unit sizes in popular economies. 16. most fuel dealers in gaakwen identify as kipsigis, an ethnic group that the colonial government actively “depastoralized” and “persuaded” to become settled farmers. unable to maintain large herds in the parts of the rift valley they were resettled on, kipsigis found themselves forced to reduce their attachment to cattle. by the time of 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10.14506/ca35.3.05 excavating legal landscapes excavating legal landscapes: juridical archaeology and the politics of bureaucratic materiality in bogotá, colombia federico pérez portland state university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0850-6092 an intricate patchwork of urban laws lies at the core of bogotá’s seemingly haphazard built environment and its conflicts over urban development. this was made clear to me during a public meeting about the city’s “excessive regulatory density” organized by the planning department in 2010 as part of its efforts to modify bogotá’s master plan. a typical exercise in participatory planning, the underattended meeting was more bureaucratic ritual than meaningful political exchange. a seasoned bureaucrat-turned-consultant launched the discussion by recounting his everyday dealings with urban laws: “someone recently requested my expert opinion about a plot with a building permit from the 1950s. i said, ‘it must be regulated by [decree] 185 of 1951, when don corbi [le corbusier] came [to bogotá] and created the city’s famous pilot plan.’ but then, looking further into the matter, i found very interesting things.” the expert went on to describe the city’s profound regulatory confusion and, as he put it, the “archaeological” skills necessary to interpret this layered terrain. the complexity of urban laws is partly the result of [a technical concept] that refers current regulations back to older urban laws, with all the transformations and modifications they accumulated through time. this makes the interpretation of the law an intricate archaeological exercise. and so you find really incredible things in regulations from the 1940s and 1950s. but because not everyone can master this archaeological practice, the application of the law loses all transparency. for him, urban laws constituted a nearly indecipherable amalgam of regulatory layers. in this article i explore the interpretative practices associated with these complex legal formations, which experts and bureaucrats in bogotá call “juridical archaeology” (arqueología jurídica). by employing the archaeological metaphor in their work, planners conjure images of a layered and murky legal topography. they endow urban laws with the materiality and temporal sedimentation of geological strata. while such idioms are typically couched as criticisms of bogotá’s legal confusions, i argue that juridical archaeology is best understood as a form of strategic reification. by evoking a formation that is unknowable—an impenetrable terrain waiting to be excavated—legal operators obfuscate the politics of juridical interpretation. in their view, the accretion of urban codes has created a treacherous and unstable terrain, a system run amok. but fetishizing legal technicalities as the main culprits of urban disorder ultimately becomes an integral part of bureaucrats’ and experts’ deft manipulations of the law and claims to authority. it is a key strategy they employ to displace individual responsibility and minimize contingency as they sift through decrees and piece together regulatory frameworks for the city’s development. anthropologists have become increasingly attentive to the everyday pragmatics of bureaucracy. rather than representing the state primarily as a discursive site, recent ethnographies have focused on the situated practices and performative dimensions of bureaucracies (feldman 2008; gupta 2012; hetherington 2011; hull 2012b; mathews 2011). in this context, scholars have called for the study of documents, files, and artifacts as key mediators of bureaucratic action (hull 2012a). in his recent ethnography of urban planning in islamabad, for instance, matthew hull (2012b, 13) sets out to “analytically restore the visibility of documents, to look at rather than through them.” for hull this entails recognizing the ways in which the materiality and aesthetics of bureaucratic artifacts mediate discourse and action. things matter from this perspective, and not simply as instruments or repositories of knowledge. the material qualities of documents, their circulations and inscriptions, actively shape governmental practice by projecting authority, diffusing individual responsibility, and enabling the formation of coalitions around them. in a related argument, annelise riles (2005, 973) calls for a move beyond “culturalist” studies that treat the law as “the repository of social meanings.” instead, she insists on the need to study legal technicalities in their own right. at stake for her is “the agency of technocratic legal form” (riles 2005, 980), that is, the idea that technicalities, like documents, are agents mediating social practice. in bogotá, officials and experts employ juridical archaeology to parse the technicalities that have shaped the city’s legal regime through time. juridical archaeology appears as a technique to navigate the city’s opaque bureaucratic infrastructures and search for older and more authoritative regulatory artifacts. the archaeological metaphor proves particularly significant in this regard. it evokes a tangible field in which urban regulations appear as objective facts on the ground. furthermore, the idiom of archaeology endows legal artifacts with the power of tradition by portraying them as historic relics. this usage is especially resonant in colombia, where archaeological and geological knowledge since the nineteenth century has proven integral to the production of mythical pasts and narratives of nationhood (appelbaum 2013). rather than taking the discourse of juridical archaeology at face value, i argue that bureaucrats and experts working within bogotá’s planning regimes further their interests precisely by appealing to the agency and obduracy of legal infrastructures. they employ juridical archaeology as a tactical instrument to mobilize legal resources to a variety of ends.1 the image of an excessive and intricate legal topography becomes a necessary illusion, a fabrication integral to the workings of power. by focusing on these rhetorical ploys, i do not imply that the physicality and aesthetics of state artifacts are irrelevant, but rather caution against overemphasizing their agency as the protagonists of bureaucratic action. the mediating role of bureaucratic artifacts—their performance of legal and administrative maneuvers—is inextricably bound to the ways in which experts locate such legal instruments within a recalcitrant archaeological landscape. in what follows i consider how different actors—from bureaucrats to real-estate lawyers—claim authority, deflect responsibility, and justify stratagems by portraying a capricious legal landscape. while hull and riles maintain that technical artifacts are effective agents in bureaucratic processes, i intend to show that such ideas can become part of a rhetoric that actors mobilize deliberately and strategically. in this sense, my analysis suggests that scholarship on bureaucratic materiality and technicalities risks blurring the distinction between agency and reification by overlooking the ways in which social actors themselves mobilize discourses about the power of objects. in bogotá, experts underplay their maneuvers by treating legal instruments as autonomous artifacts with agentive qualities. in this sense, viewing bureaucracies as assemblages that take on a life of their own not only occludes operators’ practices but also prevents us from grasping actors’ own strategic attempts to portray bureaucracy as an unruly system.2 to shed light on such modes of bureaucratic reification and on the legal manipulations they obscure, i draw on the vast literature on state and legal fetishism (abrams 1988; coronil 1997; taussig 1992; tomlins and comaroff 2011). several authors have argued that the idea of the state as a coherent object is constituted in everyday practice. in his recent ethnography on bureaucracy in rural india, akhil gupta (2012, 54) goes further and shows that state reification constitutes not only a scholarly problem but also a political issue. representing the state as a unified apparatus is an “important means of rule” through which powerful actors naturalize their interests and shield themselves from critique. by calling attention to ways in which experts give form to a composite landscape of legal artifacts, i expand on conceptualizations of state reification in several ways. i show that the social construction of state authority operates at various scales, with experts and citizens reifying urban law as a distinctive embodiment of stateness.3 my analysis also joins other scholarship that has attempted to rehabilitate the critical power of reification (graeber 2005; silva 2013) beyond notions of false consciousness and mystification. reification is a contested practice—a form of social creativity—that is socially and politically productive. far from a firmly held belief, reification emerges here as a practice through which legal forms and artifacts are invested with power and made into fetishes that animate social life.4 the practice of juridical archaeology shows that processes of reification are never entirely successful. in bogotá, sociopolitical conflicts constantly reemerge through cracks in the city’s legal and bureaucratic regime. by studying these processes ethnographically, i show how the artifactual agency of bogotá’s legal landscapes and documents recedes in practice, revealing the operators and maneuvers that lie behind them. ultimately, i argue that state reification is not necessarily restricted to ideas of unity and coherence. the trope of juridical archaeology shows that disorder itself can be reified as a concrete amalgamation of incompatible parts and pieces. in these terms, i explore the materialization of bureaucratic complexity and confusion in social practice.5 juridical archaeology also has significant implications in current debates about urban governance. in her discussion of urban development in india, ananya roy (2009, 83) rejects narratives about “the failure of planning or the absence of the state.” she calls attention instead to deeply ambiguous legal regimes where exceptions constitute key strategies of power (see also ghertner 2011; valverde 2012). in bogotá the ability to define the boundary between legality and illegality also marks a crucial source of power. however, the focus on legal exceptionalism does not capture the specific configurations of everyday legal and political maneuvering in the city. in contrast, my analysis calls attention to a particular history and cultural politics of bureaucratic practice in which excess figures more prominently. resonating closely with what james holston (1991) describes as the strategic use of legal complication in urban brazil, bureaucratic excess is a phenomenon that has deep roots in latin america. power and authority, in this specific genealogy, are associated with exaggeration and artifice. i aim to show that the act of representing bureaucratic labor as the stratigraphic excavation of intricate juridical fields is integral to the staging of bureaucratic power. finally, my analysis speaks to the expanding anthropology of infrastructure. from water pipes to oil rigs, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in infrastructural worlds (anand 2011; appel 2012). while this literature has been particularly attentive to the techno-material articulation of political processes and networks, it has proven less attuned to the symbolic and performative dimensions of infrastructural systems. this is what brian larkin (2013, 329) calls the poetics of infrastructure: the semiotic and aesthetic dimensions of infrastructures that can take on “fetish-like aspects that sometimes can be wholly autonomous from their technical function.” as i argue below, the practice of juridical archaeology points to a form of “infrastructural fetishism” (larkin 2013, 333) in which paperwork and bureaucratic artifacts take on an aura of inscrutability that is integral to their political effects (cf. gupta 2012, 208). rather than remaining in the background as invisible layers of control (star 2002), bogotá’s bureaucratic infrastructures become vehicles of power in large part through their appearance as muddled topographies. the experts and bureaucrats that appear in this article fall into three broad categories: mid-level officials of the planning department’s legal division who are responsible for creating and updating building regulations; urban experts known as “urban curators” (curadores urbanos), who are selected by the city administration and are tasked with issuing building permits; and lawyers who advise developers, property owners, and the city administration on the legality and application of urban regulations. within the city’s administrative hierarchy, the planning department ranks as the highest authority, with powers to revoke building permits and plans. but the city’s planning regime is a deeply contested domain, with intractable disputes falling increasingly under the jurisdiction of local and regional courts, the ultimate arbiters of urban laws.6 the practice of juridical archaeology lies at the core of these interpretative conflicts. in the remainder of this essay i trace the tactics that bureaucrats and experts employ to untangle bogotá’s convoluted legal regime. what bureaucrats describe as excavations to unearth legal facts in practice constitutes a means to lend authority to their navigations of an acutely indeterminate legal sphere. experts working closely with developers in turn employ the notion of juridical archaeology to carry out real-estate ploys, while deflecting responsibility and concealing their interpretive labor. ultimately, i argue that the practice of juridical archaeology calls attention to the symbolic force of bureaucratic infrastructures and their crucial role in conflicts over urban space. the fact that bureaucratic operators rely on a reified view of legal intricacies for their maneuvers is not simply a case of legal formalism. at stake are active practices of obscurantism and contestation that hinge on the thingified and performative power of legal excess and disorder.7 the production of legal topographies the 1970s complex that houses bogotá’s planning offices originally segregated the technocratic work carried out in a fifteen-story tower from the daily citizen traffic of a lower structure. but as one approaches the buildings today, it becomes clear that planning operations seep out of the institution and traverse it in myriad ways. pasted on nearby walls are posters advertising brokering services, with signs that announce “building permits, plans, and procedures [trámites].” figure 1. brokering advertisements. photo by federico pérez. some of these brokers, or tramitadores, hover impatiently around the entrance of the building carrying forms and pens, offering to expedite procedures. next to them are street accountants typing official documents on their aging typewriters. inside the offices one encounters not a quiet space of enlightened governmental thinking, but corridors full of people milling about, making inquiries, and establishing connections with officials willing to listen to their bureaucratic plights. figure 2. street accountants. photo by federico pérez. javier, an architect who had worked for years in the planning department,8 had a nuanced perspective on the ways in which bogotá’s legal regime had been shaped in daily practice. like other city officials, during his career javier had moved through circuits of legal expertise in and out of the planning department. he had previously worked in the office of an urban curator, a public-private agency close to real-estate developers, and had then returned to the planning department’s legal division. more recently, he had been appointed to advise a high-level group of consultants working on the modification of the city’s master plan. the team included former advisors to the national government, some with ties to the real-estate sector, as well as urban researchers working in academia and consulting. javier had become the de facto liaison between these planners and the bureaucrats charged with the department’s everyday regulatory operations. as a result of his unique position, javier had a detailed understanding of the city’s various legal categories and how they were nested within each other and layered over time: from citywide master plans to regulatory decrees and building regulations for specific neighborhoods. he offered crucial insights into how the practice of juridical archaeology had been employed to carve out jurisdictions and establish legal force in the midst of the city’s regulatory morass (cf. richland 2013). after months of informal conversations, javier finally agreed to talk with me alone at the planning department, though removed from the official circuit of cubicles and boardrooms. we met in the building’s lower level, next to the parking lot, in a small area that had become the designated hideaway for coffee breaks and gossiping. in the improvised common area, two unauthorized vendors sold snacks to the same authorities charged with regulating, among other activities, street vending. this space of professional intimacy (herzfeld 2009) became the perfect setting for a conversation about planning contradictions. it also became a forceful illustration of the extent to which anomalies are installed in the core of the state (gandolfo 2013). according to javier, one of the main sources of bogotá’s legal profusion and confusion was the tendency to preserve certain zoning ordinances while simultaneously introducing new regulations. the logic of legal layering, javier explained, started with the city’s 1979 plan, acuerdo 7 de 1979 (agreement 7 of 1979). the plan’s authors sought to preserve the regulations of neighborhoods they believed were “developing adequately.”9 but planners went further, javier noted, “and they started to make changes [to the original regulation] and introduce little things [such as new land uses].” in this manner, javier continued, “[the acuerdo 7] started to overlay little layers [capitas] on top [of the original regulation], so the original rule was no longer so original.” what this meant, effectively, is that bureaucrats both maintained and modified urban regulations, exacerbating legal indeterminacy. in 1990 the administration created a new plan, the acuerdo 6 de 1990 (agreement 6 of 1990), which extended the logic of legal accretion. here again, the criterion was to preserve the original regulation in neighborhoods that had had “good development.” but the original regulation, javier explained, had become exceedingly complex: “[the acuerdo 6] preserves the neighborhood’s original law, including the new layers of the acuerdo 7, but now it also introduces new little layers [capitas].” the plan added more land uses, as well as specific modifications to building codes. javier recalled, for example, how “people in the planning department came along and decided to create a thing they called ‘roof utilization’ [aprovechamiento de cubierta] stipulations: first it was the idea of the inclined roof, then an additional half story, and then a full additional floor.” once again, javier insisted, they referred new building rules back to the “original regulation, but an original regulation that is always changing.” in this manner, planners continued to insert legal fragments into a shifting regulatory field, while preserving the laws’ ramifications into an uncertain legal past. in 2000, the administration took the practice of overlaying regulations a step further. following a national urban reform law (law 388 of 1997) that gave greater planning powers to municipalities, bogotá’s city administration created its first comprehensive master plan, known as the territorial ordering plan, or pot (plan de ordenamiento territorial). the pot was intended as a paradigm shift away from the “legalistic planning” of the acuerdo 7 and acuerdo 6. it attempted to restore the management of urban space to the municipal government through a comprehensive “territorial strategy” and reduce the city’s gray zones of legal interpretation. specifically, the pot aimed to give greater control over planning regulations to the local state and eliminate an established practice in which public and private actors negotiated the details of development regulations (concertación de la norma). paradoxically, the plan’s operationalization led to an even more indeterminate legal regime. according to javier’s para-ethnographic insights,10 some of the inconsistencies that emerged in this new wave of planning were directly linked to internal divisions in the city’s planning bureaucracy. with the pot, planners sought again to preserve original regulations through an instrument that they now called “urban consolidation” (consolidación urbanística). the oxymoron of upholding an “original norm with all its modifications” was kept alive. this time, however, the plan introduced a crucial modification. while the layering of regulations in the acuerdo 7 and acuerdo 6 referred to all aspects of urban development, the pot separated the regulation of the physical aspects of construction from land-use stipulations.11 javier explained this added layer of complication with an example. a middle-class neighborhood a few blocks from the planning department had been developed during the 1970s following a decree that allowed the construction of five-story residential buildings and that made a provision for the preservation of an undeveloped lot on one side of the urbanization. “then they modified the neighborhood’s regulation,” javier recalled, “and they said: ‘you can build ten-story office buildings on the undeveloped lot.’” at that point, “the decree was tied to land use, so residential buildings had to be five stories tall and offices ten stories.” but then the pot was approved, and it differentiated building height from land use: “so i could now interpret this to mean that the ten-story buildings could be used both as offices and residential apartments.” the alternative interpretation, javier went on, was that the original decree should prevail—exactly the way it was applied in previous decades—and thus “i should assume that i can only have offices in ten-story buildings.” bureaucrats and experts became engaged in this way in an even more uncertain mode of legal reasoning. urban regulation, javier concluded, became “an issue of discretion.” what had originally been a project to strengthen authorities’ control over land use and disentangle the city’s regulatory regime, led to an even more intractable situation of legal indeterminacy. crucially, javier pointed out, this had happened as a result of the disconnection between high-level planners and low-level functionaries. while senior planners devised lofty design instruments in the upper floors of the planning department, lower-rank bureaucrats subverted these ideas when they translated them into everyday urban regulations. in the case above, for instance, bureaucrats created neighborhood-level regulations ignoring the pot’s instruction to separate building stipulations from land-use rules. javier claimed that “functionaries, the ones below, the ones that experience the daily [issues], did not acknowledge the changes made by the plan and continued to work under the logic of the acuerdo 6 and acuerdo 7.” out of habit or as a form of opposition, bureaucrats responded to the pot’s call to preserve original building codes in certain areas with decrees that left intact zoning regulations from previous frameworks. in this way, they directly undermined experts’ attempts to centralize the control over land use under the guidelines of the pot. bureaucrats reinscribed these older planning practices through an intermediate planning instrument known as zonal planning units (unidades de planeamiento zonal, or upzs). by dividing the city into 117 upzs, functionaries either maintained the validity of older regulatory layers—particularly land-use regulations—or left gaps in the regulation. in javier’s words: i’m not very clear if what is currently happening is that some upzs are going beyond the framework provided by the territorial ordering plan and the land uses it established. or the other possibility is that by referring to the original decree—which under the plan’s logic would only include building regulations—[and by not explicitly clarifying land uses], upzs have opened a legal void (vacío normativo). the production of bogotá’s legal frameworks serves as a powerful reminder of the central place of human agency within the allegedly impersonal machinery of bureaucracy. javier’s insights countered ahistorical and disembodied portrayals of lawmaking and technocratic planning. his analysis debunked the myth of a timeless and universal law, and called attention instead to the contingent practices that constitute the law (herzfeld 1992). at the same time, his narrative suggested that the accumulation of bureaucratic actions had produced a legal landscape surpassing bureaucrats’ designs and expectations. he portrayed bogotá’s plans and decrees as an assemblage that took on a life of its own—“a legal frankenstein,”12 as another bureaucrat once jokingly put it. the talk of legal topographies and monstrosities resonates closely with scholarly calls to move beyond understandings of documents as representational devices and focus instead on their agentive qualities (hetherington 2011; hull 2012a, 2012b; navaro-yashin 2007; riles 2006; schwenkel 2015). matthew hull (2012b, 150), for instance, argues that the circulation of files produces forms of “collective agency” and “corporate authority” in islamabad’s planning bureaucracy. in a context closer to colombia, kregg hetherington (2011, 132) looks at how a “network of documentary circulation” in paraguay creates a “public sphere” that marginalizes rural landowners. although the accretion of urban regulations in bogotá seems to follow a similar logic, the trajectories of legal complication sketched above suggest an incomplete and deeply contested bureaucratic formation. in bogotá, as javier suggested, the production of corporate authority is elusive, with institutional cleavages, policy shifts, and individual agendas continually resurfacing in the city’s regulatory regime. the law’s unstable temporality and materiality are recognized as the source of much confusion, and as a space for technical strategizing. bureaucratic infrastructures prove contradictory and precarious, and their creative power lies in part in agents’ ability to mobilize and naturalize them as obdurate material formations. it is here that bureaucrats and experts employ juridical archaeology as a means to harness the potentialities that lie dormant in the cracks and glitches of the city’s legal system. to this end operators are constantly striving to reify the city’s legal regime: they represent urban laws as part of an unruly apparatus or an opaque terrain that obscures individual agency and enables bureaucratic maneuvers. excavating as legal forensics while conducting research in bogotá’s planning department i was struck by the many blueprints and old city plans hanging on racks in officials’ cubicles. worn out, creased maps from the 1970s were stacked on a large table in the building’s public archive. soon it became clear that these were not mere survivals from a remote planning era, but that they rather formed an integral part of bogotá’s everyday bureaucratic practices. figure 3. planners at work. photo by federico pérez. for many officials, the progressive obfuscation of bogotá’s legal regimes had been imprinted on the materiality of planning artifacts. the significance of the form and the technical aesthetics of plans was something that rafael dwelled on as we talked in his office in the planning department. rafael was a middle-aged architect and possibly the most experienced functionary in the department’s legal division. contrary to javier, he had only worked in the planning department, for more than thirty years, epitomizing the bureaucratic habitus: a monotone voice that mechanically rehearsed a tired script of stipulations and rules. at some point during our conversation, however, his performance was punctuated by a moment of intensity. he asked me if i had ever seen bogotá’s older master plans from the 1970s and 1990s, as he unfolded a yellowed sheet of paper on his desk. to an untrained eye, it appeared as a generic plan dotted with triangles, letters, and numbers. for him, the graphic representation was self-explanatory: “you immediately knew what the specific regulation of a plot was only by glancing at the blueprint.” the same was true, he continued, of the terminology planners employed at the time: “the plan had regulation polygons13 [polígonos de reglamentación], and naming only the polygon, you new what the lot’s regulation was. for example, when they told you ‘a-rg-02-3c,’ you immediately knew ‘a’ was ‘actualization,’ ‘rg’ was ‘general residential,’ ‘02’ was for land uses, and ‘3c’ meant three floors with a continuous typology.”14 figure 4. section of a plan from 1979. bureaucrats usually consider plans from this era more legible and transparent than later versions. image courtesy of the bogotá city planning department. figure 5. section of a plan from 1990, whose conventions and graphic elements rafael praised for their clarity. image courtesy of the bogotá city planning department. rafael’s fetishization of old blueprints had intensified with the multiplication of the city’s spatial and regulatory subdivisions, particularly with the creation of the pot and its hundred-plus upzs. for him, this meant that rather than inspecting a single blueprint, he had to search through several plans to determine a specific regulation. “to find a plot’s regulation,” rafael noted, “you now have to know in which upz it is located, and what regulatory sector, what subsector of uses, and what subsector of floor area ratios [apply].” he implied it was a question of successfully uncovering the precise regulation. furthermore, he explained, this multilayered framework often included “footnotes” (notas) with additional specifications. “so it’s very complex and it’s easy to make mistakes.” according to rafael, the pot’s concept of “urban consolidation” exacerbated the city’s already obscure processes of juridical amalgamation. when the upz classified an area as undergoing “urban consolidation,” rafael pointed out, “you have to carry out a regulatory archaeology [arqueología normativa] to try to determine how [the original regulation] has changed through time.” some processes were easy to trace, so that reconstructing the original decree was not a particularly contested affair. in other situations, overlapping regulatory logics created great uncertainty among bureaucrats. here again rafael talked about archaeology as an exact science that could uncover correct juridical meanings. in actuality, and as other experts admitted, far from an exercise in fact finding, the practice of juridical archaeology was essentially about manufacturing plausible legal truths among the assortment of regulations suitable to particular development projects. “when you study a property or a plot under urban consolidation,” rafael explained, “you have to find out when and through what resolution or decree it was approved and what kind of zoning it had forty years ago.” if the plot appeared under environmental conservation (conservación ambiental) in the blueprints of the acuerdo 7 in 1979, then the original decree would continue to be valid. the legal archaeologist would have to study if the acuerdo 7 had introduced any additional changes or new layers. finally, “if the plot appeared under ‘regulatory continuity’ [continuidad de norma] in the acuerdo 6 [of 1990] and under ‘urban consolidation’ in the pot [of 2000],” rafael continued, “then the original decree continued to apply.” but here again, this meant the “original decree with all its modifications.” this was the easy scenario. “the complicated one,” rafael explained in fluent bureaucratic parlance, “is when you have urban consolidation and you start to go back and it turns out that the plot was not under ‘cn’ [regulatory continuity] in the acuerdo 6 but for example ‘a re 01 4c’ [actualization, special residential, 01-land uses, 4c-four floors continuous typology].” beyond the technical specificities of these categories, rafael was pointing out that original decrees could be simultaneously preserved and fundamentally modified through time as a result of contradictory legal concepts issued at different points in an area’s regulatory history. in rafael’s example, even though the law required him to trace a plot’s original regulation, other laws and decrees could at the same time substantially transform regulations at different points in their trajectory. interpreting urban laws entailed a meticulous process of excavation, rafael explained: a process of sifting through plans and regulations to ascertain where the legal bedrock lay. “so when you deal with urban consolidation,” rafael outlined, “you can’t really go to the original decree because an older master plan already blocked it. in other words, you descend until the regulation starts to change.” how deep one should “descend” in the city’s legal topography was not a self-evident matter. it was an issue of tracing the moments at which experts had attempted to legally freeze a particular spatio-juridical configuration. bureaucrats faced other ambiguities. the pot added supplementary regulations known as fichas (guidance documents), which in many cases remained incomplete. so, for example, rafael explained, of the ten construction items that a decree regulated in a plot—setbacks, height, front-yard requirements, etc.—in certain upzs a ficha would include only six, and “for the remaining items you had to keep going down.” in this scenario, a ficha might establish new conditions for the height of a building, but say nothing about setbacks from the street. “so you don’t know what to do,” rafael observed, “and you have to continue descending and if the acuerdo 6 [of 1990] tells you it’s regulatory continuity, then you have to continue descending, and in the end you get a decree with a lot of rules.” figure 6. section of a zoning planning unit from the 2000 territorial ordering plan. this is an example of the increasing complexity of plans, particularly with the addition of notes and categories. image courtesy of the bogotá city planning department. juridical archaeology is not the search for hidden juridical meanings. its main objective is not to uncover preexisting regulations in the city’s legal substrata, but rather to strategically configure legal frameworks in a field of bureaucratic contingency. in practice, it consists in stitching together regulations and decrees from the city’s shifting and contradictory legal regimes. from this perspective, juridical excavations would be best described as forms of bureaucratic bricolage in which experts assemble urban regulations drawing on disparate frameworks. such practices produce amalgamations made up of incongruous elements. this uncertain juridical system—with the multiple resources it makes available to legal strategists and the aura of authority it projects—ultimately emerges as a crucial stage for interpretative battles about how urban space should be produced and regulated. bureaucrats like rafael employed the idiom of juridical archaeology to give their legal performances a semblance of objectivity and authority. in his words, “we carry out a rigorous study of the law, we issue a technical concept about specific regulations, and we determine if a project is correct architecturally and urbanísticamente.”15 it is precisely by reifying the city’s legal regime and representing it as a stratified and opaque legal terrain that juridical archaeologists can either deflect accountability—arguing that legal imperfection is to blame—or occlude their interpretative agency, claiming that they do not shape the meaning of the law but only unearth it from the city’s legal depths. bureaucratic disorder can be both a resource and a hindrance for different actors in different circumstances. legal ambiguities emerge as fields in which multiple stakeholders struggle over authority and expertise. divergent projects—from unbridled real-estate speculation to the regulation of land markets—are enabled, distorted, and potentially subverted by the technicalities of the law (riles 2005). but technicalities in themselves do not explain such trajectories. instead, it is necessary to consider the ways in which agents shape and mobilize technical resources. in bogotá, experts and bureaucrats obscure their interpretative agency by fetishizing legal technicalities as strata in a convoluted legal topography.16 in this sense, different actors enact juridical archaeology for a variety of purposes. for bureaucrats such as rafael, the archaeological trope is integral to the performance of bureaucratic authority. representing the city’s legal regime as a tangible and intricate formation reinforces the idea of bureaucratic work as a form of legal forensics. this is crucial for functionaries who must reassert their official status in the city’s juridical field, and particularly within the volatile environment generated by a tradition of legalism and bureaucratic excess. meanwhile, for other agents such as private lawyers and bureaucratic brokers, juridical archaeology constitutes a means to contest authoritative knowledge, undercut planners’ designs, and advance particular agendas. it is to these actors that i now turn. the devil is in the details “the devil is in the details.” this is how a lawyer named camilo described the power struggles associated with the city’s planning code during a conversation we had in a busy café in 2010. we were discussing a conflict that involved the development of a twenty-five-story office building in the parking lot of unicentro, a shopping mall built in 1976. the developer had recently obtained the building permit based on regulations from the 1970s that conflicted with current decrees. the case was exemplary of the tensions created by the official preservation of older regulations in the midst of urban change. residents from the surrounding area had mobilized to oppose the expansion project, outraged by the prospect of a large tower in the already congested low-rise neighborhood. planners were frustrated by yet another situation in which their authority had been undermined, as they attempted to prevent the construction. the building permit for the unicentro office tower had been devised from one of the many excavations performed in the city’s legal topography. according to javier, the architect from the planning department who had explained to me the intricacies of bogotá’s legal landscapes, these were practices that emerged from the “breeding ground” (caldo de cultivo) of the city’s convoluted legal regime: “there’s typically a case and you have all those regulatory conflicts and then someone proposes an interpretation and resolves the situation. the solution does well because nothing happens, [no one contests it], and then everyone assumes it’s the right way to do it. it sets a precedent [hace escuela] and everyone starts using the same approach.” this is how lawyers and brokers who “carry out the archaeological work,” jairo concluded, “[become] experts.” typically, other legal experts and officials eventually come along and dispute a specific “reading of the law.” in his words: “[new experts] expand the archaeological work, and that is when conflicts start to occur—all those problems and consultations in the planning department—until the accepted interpretation changes.” according to him, this is how the city’s legal complications created the need for people who knew “all that archaeology”: “that’s where the city’s great experts come into the scene, those people who everyone consults.” one of these “great experts” was emilio, an attorney who advised the country’s largest developers. despite deriving his authority and considerable earnings from the city’s legal confusions, emilio was known for his criticisms of bogotá’s cacophonous legal system. in academic and policy conferences he typically started his interventions by unrolling several yards of paper with a list of the city’s development regulations. we met in his office in bogotá’s financial district, which occupied an entire floor in the headquarters of one of colombia’s main construction companies. emilio spoke quickly and paced energetically around the luxurious boardroom as he explained his annoyance at the city’s bureaucratic disarray: “there isn’t a greater seed for corruption than regulatory voids or legal exaggerations. behind these things there’s always the idea that we have to go to the planning department to negotiate and that’s terrible.” for him, bogotá suffered from a “drama of [multiple regulatory] languages.” according to mónica, an associate lawyer in the firm, bogotá had at least “four different legal regimes operating at the same time,” and “in order to obtain a building permit, you have to examine fifteen, twenty, or more decrees and regulations.” in their view, it was primarily “the law’s poor quality” that made legal interpretation an “extremely complex operation.” leonor, an experienced architect who had worked in the public and private sectors, had a similar perspective on the city’s planning regulations. as one of the city’s five designated urban curators, leonor was in charge of issuing building permits. the figure of the urban curator was created by national decree in 1995 to decongest planning offices throughout the country. but as leonor admitted, “no one really knows if we are public sector or not.” she described the high costs of office operations and emphasized how the supposedly public service she offered was ruled by market efficiency and competitiveness. by outsourcing the interpretation of urban laws to experts such as leonor, the government sought to streamline municipal bureaucracies and reduce bribes between developers and city officials. in reality, however, rather than eliminating corruption, urban curators often removed such practices from the planning department and institutionalized them in their new semipublic offices. instead of allowing low-paid bureaucrats looking to strike deals in exchange for “generous” interpretations or for “giving away the law” (regalar la norma),17 the decree established a system of compensations for curators based on the number of square meters of new construction they licensed each year. this created a strong incentive to favor developers’ interests, while remaining liable for any irregularity in their interpretation of urban regulations. in this regard, the curator who had issued the controversial unicentro mall license had candidly acknowledged the extent to which construction licensing had become monetized in an article published in 2007 in the country’s main newspaper, el tiempo. “and what’s wrong with a curator making 80 million [a month] [approximately $40,000], when he or she will later have to pay for attorneys to deal with lawsuits against him or her?” she had asked a journalist who was suggesting that the government had “handed over a good business” (angarita meneses 2007). back in her office, leonor criticized the indeterminacy of the city’s legal administration. like the real-estate lawyers, she complained about urban laws’ “terrible flaws,” although such legal confusions were precisely what gave experts like her some wiggle room in their job. for her, the city’s development conflicts were associated with the planning department’s technical incompetence and the lack of knowledge about on-the-ground dynamics. “it’s one thing to be an advisor over there [in the planning department], looking toward the city [from above],” she explained, “but when you actually implement the law [aterriza la norma], eighty mistakes suddenly arise.” instead of talking about the political nature of the city’s planning conflicts, leonor highlighted their technicalities, envisioning an eminently technical solution. in her estimation, “the city should have something like a council of elders to resolve those issues, but from a strictly legal and technical perspective.” she stressed the technical acumen of these hypothetical elders, implying that they would resolve all confusion and vagaries of legal practice by establishing the city’s definitive legal truths. like many experts, leonor minimized the role of interpretation in her job; in fact, at times she denied it altogether. “curators, us, we can’t interpret, let’s start from there.” she reaffirmed the supposedly neutral, technocratic nature of her profession. this deflected any potential liability toward the planning department and concealed curators’ own interpretive maneuvers. hinting at the controversial unicentro case, which had received wide coverage in the news at the time, leonor commented on how the planning department created new requirements or reversed previous edicts always appealing to the idea that “the city had changed.” in the case of unicentro’s twenty-five-story building, authorities had argued that the regulations allegedly allowing the construction had been issued decades earlier, when urban densities and traffic in the area were much lower. for leonor, however, such rules continued to form part of the city’s legal framework and had only been partially reformed in recent decrees. “[planners] say: ‘in the 1970s the city had 2 million people, now it has 9 million.’ [but my question is,] why didn’t they say that in the territorial ordering plan, in the law.” in her view, if planners had a clear vision of how urban development should proceed, they ought to translate it effectively into legal language; otherwise, they did not have grounds on which to controvert technically feasible readings of the law. interpretations such as those surrounding the unicentro case were valid, in her view, because they were plausible under the city’s legal disorder. leonor appealed to a version of legal technicality that was neutral and noninterpretative; hers was a quasi-mechanical operation that legitimated specific outcomes, even if these were anachronistic, inconsistent with existing urban policies, or opposed by considerable numbers of citizens. technical rigor became the preferred alibi for controversial rulings. here she, too, appealed to the archaeological trope. in her words: “i always say that we [urban curators and experts] perform a kind of urban archaeology. so it’s like we search, search, and search, and i don’t know where we’re going to arrive and what we’re going to find. all of this is really absurd.” with the discourse of juridical archaeology leonor reified a chaotic legal space where experts like her only searched for legal precedents, instead of actively interpreting or shaping them. leonor, emilio, and mónica bemoaned the city’s unruly legal landscapes despite exploiting legal disorder and excess as brokers for the real-estate industry. their misgivings put the burden of planning conflicts on legal technicalities, obscuring their role as administrative operators. in this sense, fetishizing the law—as an intricate and contradictory legal topography—emerged as a key tactic in their struggles over authority and legitimacy. at the same time, their complaints were a symptom of their loosening grasp on the city’s legal instruments. the city’s palimpsest of laws had become increasingly difficult to mobilize, ultimately limiting, delaying, and blocking many development projects. legal brokers walked a fine line between successfully maneuvering in a reified space of juridical complexity and being bogged down by the city’s increasingly indeterminate legal system. the unicentro case was emblematic of this legal unpredictability. the building permit for the mall’s twenty-five-story annex was issued by a curator’s office in 2009. although the planning department did not have the competency to block the license for procedural reasons, it called for the action of the tribunals and publicly denounced the project through an official resolution, stating that the developers had “transgressed the city’s juridical order and had interpreted urban regulations going against the constitution.” the mall’s administration defended the legitimacy of the construction by calling it a “remodeling project” permissible under the original regulations of the plot. in an article published by the news website la silla vacía in 2010, the mall’s lawyer commented, “unicentro’s original license is from 1974, and according to the procedure of urban consolidation, it must be developed following the original regulations that authorized [the development of the area]” (rico 2010). leonor, the curator, had a similar opinion. as she put it: “it’s absurd that the planning department says that it wants to consolidate regulations, and at the same time it issues guidance documents changing the floor-area ratios and the construction allowances; that’s when people start making strange hybrids [injertos].” planners, in turn, attempted to assert the preeminence of more recent regulations, such as the 2000 territorial ordering plan. according to a planner who was also interviewed by la silla vacía, “if a building is being developed in the future, then it must be ruled by the regulations of the future” (rico 2010). in 2011, an administrative court revoked the building permit and suspended the curator who had issued the license. in the following years, the planning department and the mall’s administration negotiated the conditions under which a new license would be eventually issued. by the end of 2013 the mall had requested a new building permit in another curator’s office and neighbors were again rallying to oppose the project. at stake in these conflicts was control over a hermeneutic field. fetishizing the law under the guise of juridical archaeology became a fundamental yet unstable tactic for legal manipulation. in some cases a rich trove of legal resources was plumbed, with experts assembling and deploying certain codes depending on their development agendas; in others, they encountered a more intransigent field controlled by bureaucrats at the planning department. this tension explained the ambivalence with which lawyers and curators talked about and engaged the city’s legal regime: it surfaced as a convoluted terrain that both enabled and imperiled their expert practices. the idiom of juridical archaeology reveals different locations and capacities within a variegated ecology of legal expertise. “constructions of the state,” akhil gupta (2012, 104) notes, “vary according to the manner in which actors are situated.” among civil servants such as rafael, the practice of juridical archaeology forms part of an attempt to assert their position within the city’s planning apparatus. the high stakes of development agendas, along with a tradition of bureaucratic disrepute, make the city’s planning bureaucracy a particularly contentious and perilous place. midand high-level officials are the frequent targets of investigations conducted by bogotá’s comptroller’s office (contraloría de bogotá), many of which are politically motivated and can lead to dismissals and prolonged lawsuits. fetishizing legal topographies becomes a way of coping with heightened uncertainty, professional vulnerabilities, and a widespread sense of bureaucratic failure—what andrew mathews (2011, 160) calls the “structural paranoia” of bureaucracy. meanwhile, private actors who gravitate around the city’s planning bureaucracy—lawyers, urban curators, and experts—redeploy juridical archaeology with more flexibility and in an almost entrepreneurial fashion. they destabilize bureaucratic authority and wrest control of legal instruments, drawing on what are often far superior technical and financial resources. this politics of juridical archaeology was brought home to me during a conversation with josé, a retired urban curator. according to him, the idea that urban laws had formed overly complex legal topographies was a fabrication. “no, no, no, chief,” he told me impatiently in his downtown office, “that’s what developers and their advisors [técnicos] want us to believe.” a complex city such as bogotá, he continued, required a complex regulatory system. “i was an urban curator for ten years, so i know the law’s complexity, the numerous regulations that exist, and i never had trouble applying regulations. i’m a legal expert [experto en normas] and that’s what i do.” unlike other urban curators, josé was decidedly against market-driven development. “what is very complicated,” he explained derisively, “is applying regulations at the whim of developers. so that’s precisely why developers say it’s too complicated, because they encounter barriers, laws, that don’t let them do what they want!” conclusion: performing bureaucratic infrastructures the complexity of urban laws is in part derived from the heterogeneity and ever-changing character of urban space. planning law, according to mariana valverde (2012, 203), is a “regulatory maze” to which new rules and concepts are continually added. the site-specific and historically cumulative nature of municipal regulations produces legal instruments ruled by contingency. the practice of juridical archaeology, however, calls attention to the ways in which urban actors themselves rely on ideas of legal complexity in everyday practice. legal operators—from city officials to bureaucratic brokers and urban lawyers—work the system by maintaining the image of a stubbornly ambiguous and unstable landscape. they mobilize the notion of juridical archaeology and objectify spaces of techno-legal improvisation to claim authority, deflect responsibility, and contest the expertise of others. in the words of camilo, the lawyer whose words opened the previous section, “the law is a battlefield, and the more laws and juridical rulings you dig up for your trench, the more effectively you can win positions and do better in legal disputes.” for him, the practice of juridical archaeology was irrevocably political, a war of position in which legal weapons acquired their efficacy through the archaeological excavation of a sedimented topography. just as spatial metaphors naturalize images of a unified and transcendent state (blomley 2013; ferguson and gupta 2002), juridical archaeology evokes subterranean legal substrata with allegedly foundational powers. from this perspective, legal strategizing is not primarily about creating zones of exception (ong 2004; roy 2009). rather, it is dedicated to multiplying excess and complexity, and to evading scrutiny in what appears as a murky legal topography. the apparent depth and solidity of the city’s legal terrain is crucial in this regard. but as i have shown, this should not lead us to displace political agency onto bureaucratic artifacts. in fact, privileging material agency in the analysis of bogotá’s planning regime would amount to reproducing operators’ strategic attempts at legal reification. equally at stake are agents’ representations and uses of bureaucratic forms in distinct contexts. in this sense, my discussion points to the performances and interactions through which bureaucracy is materialized: the pragmatic and ideological processes through which particular material properties are enacted and rendered consequential. while critiques of the dominance of representation and subjectivity in the social sciences may have swung “the pendulum too far toward materiality,” my approach here follows the call to “promote equality, a dialectical republic in which persons and things exist in mutual self-construction” (miller 2005, 38). in bogotá, the putative materiality of the legal topography—its sedimented quality as a corpus that must be excavated—emerges as a strategic idiom that allows experts to obscure and contest legal practice. bureaucratic infrastructures are not merely material networks that enable techno-political action, and legal complexities are not simply a function of excessive formalisms and technicalities. in their reification of legal process, juridical archaeologists appeal to the symbolic power of bureaucratic assemblages. they actively produce and deploy images of obduracy and material complexity—they perform bureaucratic infrastructure—as a means of manipulating the law. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to my interlocutors in bogotá and, in particular, to juan felipe pinilla and armando lozano for sharing with me their critical insights into and deep understanding of the city’s planning laws. i thank steven caton, john comaroff, namita dharia, susan fainstein, alex fattal, michael herzfeld, matthew hull, jeffrey kahn, nick smith, ajantha subramanian, kimberly theidon, anand vaidya, and the participants in the harvard political anthropology working group and the “paper life of politics” panel at the 2015 annual meeting of the american anthropological association for their valuable suggestions and inspiring conversations. finally, my sincere gratitude to cultural anthropology’s anonymous reviewers, the editorial collective, and especially cymene howe for her generous and perceptive editorial guidance. the research on which this article is based was supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the inter-american foundation, and the social science research council. 1. much like michel foucault’s (1972) archaeological analysis, the practice of juridical archaeology is oriented toward the present. but far from identifying a matrix of intelligibility (an episteme), juridical archaeologists combine and juxtapose fragments of the city’s juridico-spatial trajectories strategically. in so doing, they reify legal process as static assemblages of historical traces. a parallel problem in foucault’s archaeology is the emphasis on ruptures and the lack of attention to processual temporalities. 2. i am referring, here, to latourian understandings of assemblage that emphasize an expansive and symmetrical distribution of agency among humans and nonhumans, which typically remains invisible to social actors. in contrast, the practice of juridical archaeology calls attention to the intentional and conscious ways in which people interact with things and, most important, the mutual and constitutive relationship between humans and nonhumans, sociality and materiality (see miller 2005). 3. while anthropological work has rarely focused directly on urban laws, a growing literature in legal geography has emphasized the distinctive complexities of the city as a legal space (blomley 2013; see also valverde 2012). my analysis parallels these critiques’ emphasis on the politics of legal spatializations through concepts such as jurisdiction and scale. 4. i view fetishism as a form of reification. in contrast to negative understandings of reification that conceive it as the passive objectification of social reality, i suggest here that it produces socially and political active things or fetishes. see silva 2013 for a recent discussion of the analytical relationship between reification and fetishism. 5. in a critical review of matthew hull’s government of paper, constantine nakassis (2013, 403) defines materialization as the performative actualization of material qualities in social life and argues that “materiality is not ‘in’ anything at all, even if we often experience it as such; rather, it is a relationship across events of semiosis.” 6. other institutional actors actively engaged in these disputes are oversight organizations such as the bogotá comptroller’s office (contraloría de bogotá d.c.) and the local ombudsperson (personería de bogotá d.c.). 7. the “thinging of the thing,” in martin heidegger’s (1971, 178) suggestive words, sets things apart from objects and calls for an understanding of their eventful and transformative nature. tim ingold (2012) elaborates on this distinction, arguing that objects are distant and readymade, while things are proximate and in an ongoing process of formation. i use thingified here in a similar vein to underline the interactive and mutually constitutive relationship between people and things. 8. local governance in bogotá has changed significantly since the 1980s with the introduction of the popular election of mayors (1986), the creation of a special statute to strengthen the city’s administrative apparatus (1993), and a national urban reform law (1998) giving cities greater planning powers. the planning department has gained prominence with these transformations. although it is only one of the twelve administrative sectors that make up the city administration, it is responsible for the production of urban regulations and the creation of the administration’s government program (plan de desarrollo) and master plan (plan de ordenamiento). 9. in bogotá, planning would be best described as a hybrid system (salazar ferro 2007) in which legalistic planning (planeamiento normativo) coexists with social-spatial approaches. bureaucrats produce plans that are sanctioned as laws in the form of decrees (decretos), resolutions (resoluciones), or agreements (acuerdos). in this sense, planners work as lawmakers, continually codifying their expert assessments of urban transformation into legal instruments. the fact that most city-planning officials are architects by training is not irrelevant. it shapes their representations of the law, leading them to insist on an almost geometric legal logic in which urban laws and built forms are isomorphic. in this regard, a lawyer once mocked architects’ inflexibility by saying: “architects are more catholic than the pope!” 10. douglas holmes and george marcus (2005, 237) define the para-ethnographic as “the de facto and self-conscious critical faculty that operates in any expert domain as a way of dealing with contradiction, exception, [and] facts that are fugitive.” javier had a keen ethnographic sensibility that allowed him (and me) to reflect on the sociocultural and political dimensions of planning technicalities. 11. zoning laws now separated floor-area ratios (edificabilidad) from land uses (usos). 12. this trope represented a more direct acknowledgment of the agency of planners as the makers of legal monstrosities in their bureaucratic laboratories. i thank an anonymous reviewer for this point. 13. in the local planning jargon, polygons referred to areas of varying size and shape (from individual plots to entire blocks or neighborhoods) that were marked out on city plans. 14. these categories were called treatments (tratamientos), and they established the basic conditions for the management of urban space: conservation referred to historic and architectural preservation laws, actualization established regulations for the redevelopment of constructed parcels, and development included guidelines for the development of empty lots. 15. in spanish, urbanístico refers specifically to the expert and regulatory practices associated with urban planning. 16. here, again, it is crucial to reconceptualize fetishism as a social practice. in contrast to understandings based on the marxist commodity or on freudian psychological displacements, my usage recovers the performative and ritualistic dimensions of the fetish found in classical anthropological theorizations. the key point here is that fetishism is not primarily an 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systems 14, no. 2: 107–22. http://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis/vol14/iss2/6. taussig, michael 1992 the nervous system. new york: routledge. tomlins, christopher, and john comaroff 2011 “‘law as . . .’: theory and practice in legal history.” uc irvine law review 1, no. 3: 1039–79. http://scholarship.law.uci.edu/ucilr/vol1/iss3/. valverde, mariana 2012 everyday law on the street: city governance in an age of diversity. chicago: university of chicago press. what gets inside what gets inside: violent entanglements and toxic boundaries in mexico city elizabeth f. s. roberts university of michigan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1025-1236 in colonia periférico, a working-class neighborhood of mala fama (bad reputation) in mexico city, my landlady señora natividad always jokes about the smell. the joke comes in her knickknack-filled kitchen where she feeds children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, other relatives, and boarders like me, scolding us to eat more mole and drink more soda. she tells us how she once visited her son for a few weeks outside of portland, oregon. it was beautiful and very green, and the houses were very big. but señora nati wanted to be back in colonia periférico. in portland, she was alone in the house and the streets were empty, an alienating experience for nati, who was accustomed to a dense neighborhood in which every family had arrived in the same land invasion more than fifty years ago. the isolation was not for her. and then, always, the punch line: “i needed to be back here where the air is sweet.” or sometimes she says, “i needed to be back here, where we get the stink for free.” we laugh loudly either way, because in colonia periférico, the air is shit. señora nati’s sturdy, narrow, four-story house, painted a rich aquamarine and sandwiched between similarly vertical houses, is perched on top of a ravine holding a narrow stream of dam runoff, filled with aguas negras (untreated sewage) and garbage. birds, rats, and dogs frolic in the brush entangled with garbage on the riverbank below. in most rainy seasons the dam overflows and the ravine fills, flooding these houses with torrential brown waters roiled with debris. i learned from local urban water ecologists that this flooding fills the walls of cement houses like señora nati’s with salmonella, e. coli, and fecal enterococcus. some in colonia periférico blame the dam for the respiratory diseases that plague the residents. it’s hard to say if there is a higher incidence of respiratory problems in colonia periférico than elsewhere in this chronically polluted city. but the stench is distinctive. every time i return to colonia periférico after even a few days away, i have to brace myself all over again for the nasal assault. in a few hours i get used to it, though, and can even sleep. señora nati missed it when she was away. the smell does double duty in making this distinct place. besides providing an aromatic signature, the dam, along with other noxious attributes—like the cement factories that surround colonia periférico, filling its boundary airs with dust—provides protection. the dam and the cement factories are just a few of colonia periférico’s miasmatic membranes, which manage what gets inside the neighborhood. they prevent the incursion of police and public health workers, whose presence has intensified since the passage of the north american free trade agreement (nafta; 1994) and the declaration of the war on drugs (2006). my work in mexico city involves collaboration with public health and environmental health scientists from the united states, mexico, and canada who have been studying the developmental effects of chemical exposures over the life course through a birth-cohort study of about nine hundred matched mother-child pairs recruited from throughout mexico city (roberts 2015a; roberts and sanz, forthcoming). my ethnographic work focuses on six of the study participant families, who are located in two working-class neighborhoods, colonia periférico and buena vista.1 the environmental health scientists increasingly make connections between nutrition, chemical exposure, and body mass. this is especially apt for a study in mexico, a country since 2013 designated by the world health organization (who) as the world’s fattest industrial nation, and one in which fat is intensively classed (roberts 2015b). in discussing the children who have grown up over the course of the study, the environmental health scientists i work with often invoke the concept of resilience. in early 2016 a team member, dr. arias, said to me, “what we’re finding is that some kids are resilient. it’s like they don’t somatize what they are living. they don’t get it through their body.” comments about the impermeability of some children’s bodies emerge from efforts across public health and the life sciences to find mechanisms for creating individually resilient kids. impermeability to surroundings should stabilize children in the face of unstable realities. this notion of bounded resilience unnerves me. it does nothing to change structural inequalities and naturalizes certain groups as able to endure more. the individualized focus on preventing what kids “are living” from getting inside can feel pragmatic, though, given that mexico’s current reality makes imagining large-scale change impossible. but i don’t want that to be true. boundaries and entanglements in this article i am interested in how señora nati, a rural-to-urban migrant-colonist in mexico city, and dr. arias, a u.s.-based health researcher, both experience what-gets-inside as crucial to what shapes life conditions for themselves and others. neither of them is celebrating the postmodern collapse of distinctions between inside and out, or arguing that insides are always already outsides, or vice versa. thinking with señora nati and dr. arias, i seek to examine how maintaining an inside and managing what enters it constitutes a crucial survival response within the continued violent capitalist interpenetration of all the earth’s biota. dr. arias and señora nati possess different means to manage problematic interpenetration. dr. arias seeks the impermeability of a resilient, sovereign, bounded individual, preventing the world from getting inside. instead of prevention, señora nati assumes that survival depends on the management of what gets inside and what does not. by asserting boundaries, both approaches complicate the social sciences’ recent embrace of entanglement. entanglement allows us to understand how outsides and insides are constantly co-constituted across different lifeworlds, and the concept could easily be put to work for understanding what-gets-inside in mexico city. in fact, entanglement was my entrée for collaboration with these environmental health scientists and participant families. i wanted to study the entanglement of the production of scientific knowledge about chemical exposure in mexico city and the daily lives of study participant families in mexico city. my goal has been to develop a bioethnographic research platform that combines ethnographic data with the biological data collected from these families for more than two decades, to ask questions about the relationship of environment to health that would not be possible through ethnographic or biological data alone (roberts and sanz, forthcoming). the bulk of my time these days is spent trying to make bioethnography happen, which means actively working with environmental health scientists as they disentangle phenomena by breaking them into variables that can be arranged linearly to make numbers. this is not what i set out to do when i proposed bioethnography as a means to entangle phenomena. like many scholars working within medical anthropology and science and technology studies (sts), i seek to trace the contingent and uncertain entangled relations that endow objects with seemingly stable and linear boundaries. entanglement assumes relational beingness, permitting us to see how linear boundaries restrict our ability to know the world better (barad 2007; rozental 2016; tosoni and pinch 2016). however, despite my own continued participation in entanglement, life conditions in colonia periférico—where breathing shit offers protection against security and health officials in contemporary mexico—make me increasingly uneasy about the deployment of entanglement and the embrace of its close relations, “uncertainty” (sanabria and yates-doerr 2015) and “staying with the trouble” (haraway 2016). so, while investigating the implications of how allowing and even welcoming noxious permeability provides a boundary that prevents other penetrations like police violence, i am not celebrating the endless entanglement of those who can live within the shit. let’s review what entanglement rejects. historians and philosophers of science provide a history of how bounded facts came to be made through a world divided between subject and objects. autonomous rational individuals, numbers, genes, calories, neurons, and bacteria came into being as apolitical entities that stood on their own, to be seen by anyone, through what lorraine daston (1992, 599) calls “mechanical objectivity” (see also winner 1980). these objects can be without being related, to misquote annemarie mol (2002). this is the logic of industrial modernism, an autonomous mode of existence that divorced objects from their surroundings and helped produce the mess we are in, a mode in which, for instance, chemicals or antibiotics are imagined not to affect the world beyond their designated purpose and genes unaffected by the world around them are imagined to be the central means to understand the phenotype and behavior of organismal beingness (keller 2000). in the past decade or so, many of the social sciences have noted a move away from this mode of existence toward entanglement, in which, now to quote mol (2002, 54) correctly, “to be is to be related.” you think there is such a thing as a gene that we can isolate? well, think again. a gene is a relationship, and that relationship is political. you think genes determine beingness? well, think again. epigenetics demonstrates that gene expression is enacted through the environment of the organism. you think a fact, a number, or a piece of evidence can stand alone, can be a thing in itself? well, think again. all of the entities that looked bounded through those misguided modernist lenses are embedded in a myriad of relations and, in fact, do not exist without them. this must be the way to live in mutuality with each other on and with this planet: tracing out and acknowledging the messy and entangled relations that produce existence. but the fact that certain groups of people are and have always been entangled in shit makes me wonder about entanglement. what does an entangled prescription for being in the world do for or with those who have always had to stay with the trouble? in my effort here to examine what-gets-inside in colonia periférico, and to reflect critically on entanglement, i am indebted to scholars who think about the starkly differential distribution of entanglement in terms of porosity across distinct lifeworlds. in investigating what vanessa agard-jones (2016) calls the “chemical kinships” produced on the pesticide-saturated island of martinique, she describes how some bodies are disproportionately porous, prompting us to think more about the nonlinear effects of toxic chemicals on the poor and the colonized. with a similar focus on the chemical traces of the atlantic slave trade, tiffany lethabo king (2016, 1035–36) writes of eighteenth-century indigo plantations in the american south, where the site of indigo processing was a “rank and putrid smelling zone infested with flies. it was a place on the plantation where it was hard to breathe and a zone many avoided,” which meant that “the enslaved toiling there were not always within the master’s immediate field of vision.” while the chemicals that seeped into the pores of the enslaved contributed to their early deaths (death came five to seven years after starting to work the indigo [balfour-paul 1998]), king (2016, 1037) argues that this toxicity provided “new geographies of black freedom.” putrid toxicity disrupted the master’s gaze. agard-jones and king are grappling with the legacy of capitalist expansion, which valorized those who experienced the self as stable, free, sovereign individuals separate from nature who could control or manage what-gets-inside. their analysis deepens my concern that entanglement constitutes an extremely imperfect means for understanding unequal lifeworlds. my intention, then, is not to discard entanglement altogether, but to point to how those living in the shit (who, in fact, don’t need anthropologists, sts scholars, or even marx to explain how objects are made of relations) often seek boundaries between objects, as well as the stability that boundaried objects have to offer. in other words, entanglement is not always welcome, even in highly relational worlds. it depends on the how and the what and the when. agard-jones’s and king’s postcolonial feminist explorations of chemical kinship neither celebrate nor excoriate the entanglement of porosity, but instead document persistence within it. adopting their approach allows me to examine both the pleasures and the perils of permeability, porosity, and penetration in contemporary mexico city. with agard-jones and king as guides, we can ask: with what are we permeated or penetrated, and to what effect? as countless sexual bottoms of any gender or persuasion can attest, penetration can be pleasurable (bersani 1987; brown 1992). key to the pleasure or lack of it, though, is: by what, and how? different penetrations produce different effects. they are not all the same. permeability is the state or quality of a material or membrane that causes it to allow liquids or gases to pass through. porous is a synonym for permeable, “having minute spaces or holes through which liquid or air may pass . . . not retentive or secure,” as the oxford english dictionary (oed) would have it. penetration also involves a passing through, but it is not synonymous with the other two words; it ratchets up the violence: the oed proposes “succeed in forcing a way into or through,” or “insert the penis into the vagina or anus,” or “infiltrate (an enemy group or rival organization) in order to spy.” and then there is persistence, which the oed defines as “firm or obstinate continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition . . . the continued or prolonged existence of something.” as i’ll trace out below, i am interested in how persistence might exist despite permeability and porosity—and also because of them. the historian of science hannah landecker’s (2013) explication of metabolism allows for further reflection on persistence. standard models of homeostatic metabolism involved and still involve a model of the body-as-combustion-engine, taking in fuel and putting out energy while remaining distinct from that fuel. in contrast, some philosophical biologists and biological philosophers have proposed metabolism as a third space, where matter is exchanged with its surroundings, producing an “open inwardness” (landecker 2013, 217). in this framework, metabolism does not burn energy directly but converts it into a milieu intérieur that makes self. distinction between self and other lies not on the surface of bodies but deep inside, in the energy reserve, or the pool that is not quite the organism or the environment but the moving zone in which the “two become one” (landecker 2013, 223). what-gets-inside makes the self that can dynamically persist. both señora nati and dr. arias seek stable states within the flux of the environment, for themselves and for others. but where dr. arias posits impermeability with her assertion that resilient kids can prevent life conditions from penetrating their bodies, señora nati manages porosity for persistence. like most colonia periférico residents i know, she is concerned with living well in the reality she inhabits. the aspects of that reality that particularly interest me here are an acceptance of porosity to toxins that act as boundaries against worse penetrations, and the social and bodily density that these boundaries protect. toxicity and mala fama colonia periférico has multiple boundaries that allow for persistence. entering the colonia by vehicle involves passing under a freeway interchange near a costco, then over a congested boulevard where new luxury condos rise and through an odoriferous zone of recycling and garbage processing, junk-food distribution centers, and dusty factories established near the now-defunct sand mines that made the cement that built midcentury mexico city. walking in through this passageway leaves you covered in fine cement residue. the smell hits at the entrance to colonia periférico, at a river overpass downhill from señora nati’s house. three civic buildings converge at this spot: one of colonia periférico’s two elementary schools, a corrugated-metal community center with a playground, and a security module manned 24/7 by three rotating policemen with varying attitudes toward colonia periférico and its residents. for all practical purposes this marks the only entrance for vehicles, but there are many more by foot. this entrance alone opens to colonia periférico’s main artery, calle benito juarez, a street that rises up a hill covering the sand mines below. all day and in the early evenings benito juarez is clogged with cars, combis (microbuses), and delivery trucks, often leading to a complete impasse. instead of heading up benito juarez, you could enter one of several narrow callejones (alleys) or drive or walk alongside a long embankment wall, topped by a cyclone fence that serves as another border. more junk-food factories lie on the other side. the embankment is littered with garbage and cans of activo (pipe glue solvent that provides hallucinations when inhaled), and sometimes serves as a stage for graffiti contests and rap groups protesting police violence. figure 1. activo can on the embankment wall. photo by elizabeth f. s. roberts. the dam is upriver from the security module. topped by a causeway, the dam is the strongest stink point in colonia periférico. the causeway was landscaped not long ago with astroturf and exercise machines linked to the public health campaign chécate, mídete, muévete! (get regular check-ups, monitor your weight, stay active!). in the dry season officials send crews and heavy machinery to dredge the dam of the garbage that plugs the grates where the water sluices through. this act is repeated the year after, and the year after that. colonia periférico is the last residential stop for a system of dams that control this particular river before the aguas negras head underground. thus the stench has maximally accumulated as the sewage moves down from on high. figure 2. above the dam. photo by elizabeth f. s. roberts. colonia periférico’s boundaries are also marked by death. santa muerte (saint death) guards the dam entrance and also the border between colonia periférico and el caracol, a less established colonia near the security-module entrance. santa muerte is an unusual saint in that she was never a person whose virtuous life can be emulated. patron of the marginalized, the incarcerated, the queer, and the poor, la flaquita, la niña blanca is the great equalizer—since everyone dies (roush 2014). she is linked to the aztec goddess of death, mictecacihuatl, and the catholic church forbids her worship. outside of colonia periférico, respectable people do not interact with her. inside colonia periférico, even those who want nothing to do with santa muerte maintain respect for her and her devotees, explaining simply, “a cada quien sus cosas [to each their own].” figure 3. santa muerte at the dam. photo by elizabeth f. s. roberts. these junctures of dam, smell, and death bring up encounters with the police—at least for me. several times police stopped me at colonia periférico’s pedestrian borders, telling me i could not enter the neighborhood: too dangerous for a gringa. these were the only times i ever felt menaced in mexico city. one afternoon four policemen tried to stop me from crossing the dam back into colonia periférico. but the moment i stepped off the causeway and was back inside, the police stopped as if held back by an invisible wall. they turned and walked away as a group of young men, smoking weed and drinking pulque safely inside colonia periférico’s boundaries, hurled insults at their backs. at that moment they and colonia periférico were impermeable to the police, and so was i. figure 4. looking out from colonia periférico across the causeway. photo by elizabeth f. s. roberts. this is what menendez, the most seasoned and calm of the three policemen stationed at the security module, tells me—that he and other policemen will not enter colonia periférico. they will not go further than ten meters past their post, because then they would be too vulnerable. if they tried to chase someone, la rata (the delinquent) would disappear in the maze of callejones and through the doors opened by the misguided residents who harbor miscreants. menendez is sanguine about his inability to enter colonia periférico. he appears to know every resident who comes by the module, greeting them warmly and letting them use the bathroom. the other two policemen, both younger and hotheaded, convey more disdain for the colonia they cannot enter as they explain how colonia periférico’s boundaries protect dysfunction, violence, and drug use. the magical invisible barrier does not always hold, however. in the spring of 2015, the police entered colonia periférico at the very top of benito juarez, shooting and killing a young man who was trying to flee on foot. nearby, alma, one of the women whose family i work with, and her two young daughters, dany and mar, heard the shots and hid in their bedroom in the back of the house. two days later police carried out a raid on the home of colonia periférico’s principal drug-dealing family, the gomezes, which is safely tucked away in a cul-de-sac three blocks up from alma’s. a few days after that, a house across from alma’s that had been under slow construction for years was suddenly complete. the gomez family had made it their new base of operations, and now teenage boys stood in front of alma’s house selling drugs. alma wasn’t angry. she knew the boys and their mothers, who sell her used toys and clothes for her girls. but she did not want dany and mar to play on the street while drugs were exchanged in broad daylight. the disruption was temporary. the drug-dealing boys left in mid-december at the start of the novenas for the virgin of guadalupe. the police left, too, and haven’t been back since. colonia periférico’s mala fama extends to other working-class people who live outside its borders, especially taxi drivers, who know it by more than just reputation. menendez reassured me that i was not the only person whom taxi drivers deposited at the security module after dark, refusing to pass inside, so that i had to walk the rest of the way home. the drivers gave me a litany of reasons for not entering what they knew to be a crime-infested neighborhood. they’d been robbed in colonia periférico. people didn’t pay their fares. young men surrounded them, reaching in to steal whatever they could grab. who could blame taxi drivers for their avoidance? soon after i moved to colonia periférico in september 2014, i hired two young men to haul some used furniture to señora nati’s house in a pickup truck. the two were cousins, newly fled from a village in violence-infested northern mexico. we spent hours together in the cab of their boss’s truck, slowly winding our way through rush-hour traffic. the cousins told me they were nervous to enter colonia periférico. was i sure i wanted to live there? but then, perhaps to be polite, they reassured me that now i could tell anyone where i lived and nothing would happen to me, since my hypothetical colonia periférico boyfriend would come after them and beat them up. the violence worked against real boyfriends, too, if they were from outside. a few months after moving in, lilia, my nineteen-year-old neighbor across the street, told me about the father of her baby girl, who used to beat her when she lived with his family. when she moved back in with her mother in colonia periférico, her boyfriend came and threatened them all. the boys she grew up with on the street, her lifelong neighbors, beat him and told him never to come back. she laughed as she told me about the sight of him leaving in humiliation. colonia periférico’s protective fama emerged again when roberto told me his life story one afternoon above the metal workshop where he worked among other young men, tattooed and mohawked, shaping hot iron and steel amid flying sparks and blasting music. we sat in the middle of one of the narrowest callejones in colonia periférico, where you can rest your back on one side and almost put your feet up on the other, your body taking up the width of the lane as dogs slink around you and people step over you on the way to buy friday afternoon chelas (beers). roberto told me how he and his girlfriend had had a baby that died soon after birth, compelling him to abandon santa muerte for the virgin of guadalupe. this was after his time in prison, where even guys from tepito, probably the most infamous colonia in mexico city, left him alone. in prison, he explained, being from colonia periférico commanded respect. i narrate all of this by way of contrast to my realization, soon after i was ensconced in señora nati’s house, that i had never felt so safe in my life. inside colonia periférico everyone knows each other and kids play on the street. you need to say hello to everyone on entering and goodbye when exiting. walking up benito juarez takes forever because of how many people must be greeted. people from colonia periférico who now live elsewhere told me that they miss the “knowingness.” this entangled knowingness partially comes from the fact that outsiders have no business in colonia periférico. there are no chain stores, not even the ubiquitous oxoxs and 7-elevens that permeate all of mexico city, because of franchise owners’ fears of theft. that means all of colonia periférico’s abarrotes are family-owned. it would be hard to overstate the density of interaction in colonia periférico, especially from late october around the feast day of st. jude, the patron saint of lost causes and the disenfranchised, through candelaria on february 2 (which celebrates the presentation of jesus at the temple). this period unfolds a stream of holy days marked by nightly street parties, which are usually preceded by a mass. frequent novenas, processions, velorios (wakes), quinceaños, first communions, and children’s birthday parties take place in the middle of the street, with everyone moving to the side when cars need to pass. neighbors passing by often join in. different parties spill over into each other (see duhau and giglia 2008). at most of these parties i receive lessons on becoming naco (in my case, naca), especially through vocabulary and tone of voice. while it usually denotes an insult marking one as vulgar, unrestrained, tacky, and low-class, naco, in colonia periférico, is a badge of honor. naco pride and colonia periférico pride go hand in hand, an embrace of the located excess wrapped up in naco’s nahuatl root, said to mean “of this place.” with wild laughter almost always to the point of cackling, heavy makeup, big hair, and big tattoos, household display niches filled with multiple saints that are often exact replicas of each other and covered in a phantasmagoric array of twinkling lights, packaged baby formula, and garish and plentiful soda bottles, heavy bellies spilling out of leopard-print leggings, loud music, and intensive sociality, colonia periférico is lived through an unrestrained, exuberant density of entangled excess. colonia periférico’s density makes for close quarters, allowing many forms of chemical kinship. people’s livelihoods colonize the cramped streets, mostly without eliciting complaints. cars and pedestrians have to maneuver around temporary stalls selling fruit, underwear, costumes, saints, and pirated dvds. some of these livelihoods are noxious, from car painting that takes over the sidewalks with fumes and spray emanating outward, to wood workshops with clouds of dust pouring out, to the metal shop releasing its acrid plume on the hill above the dam. such street businesses are noisy, too, though they cannot drown out the cacophony of speakers blasting from roofs or the chained dogs barking. nearly everyone tells me that colonia periférico is safer than it was before, or when they were young. there are multiple theories as to why. some say there were neighborhood delinquents, who are now dead or in prison, or else they grew up. that could be true. time and geography seem part of this story as well. the density of knowingness has had more time to grow since the initial land invasion, and so have the boundary-making membranous ramparts: the cement plants, the freeway, the junk-food factories. the defenses have also grown through smell—the garbage and shit. the dam used to be a soccer field half the year, and during the rainy season the river ran so clean you could swim in it. it drew people from the surrounding colonias. now the dam marks a boundary that permits passage, but who would cross this shit isthmus, except for those who live inside? figure 5. looking into colonia periférico across the causeway. photo by elizabeth f. s. roberts. the specific era of colonia periférico’s founding made these ramparts possible. colonia periférico is a land-invasion neighborhood. it was settled by paracaidistas, colonists mostly from rural mexico who squatted land in the early 1960s through the early 1970s (cornelius 1975). they erected impermanent structures made of cardboard and plastic in winding patterns determined by the ravines and sand mines. i cannot imagine hearing about this settlement process from those who lived it without being moved by their labor and achievement in making it happen. they obtained services like water, sewage, electricity, and transportation, and they built the roads and schools themselves with materials from partido revolucionario institucional (pri) officials. luckily for the residents of colonia periférico, they were petitioning for these resources in a midcentury moment of great international focus on poverty and slum reduction through land titling. for the colonists this international focus combined fortuitously with mexico’s one-party, paternalistic pri rule, which secured votes from colonists by providing services and land titles in colonias throughout mexico city (lomnitz-adler 1993). the dynamics of colonia periférico’s current era make these ramparts more necessary. a growing literature now demonstrates that the north american free trade agreement (nafta), signed into effect in 1994, and the war on drugs, declared in 2006, are of a piece in terms of their effects on mexico (paley 2014). together, they have caused rural land dispossession on a massive scale that makes these lands and resources like water available for transnational corporations to exploit; increased both internal and external migration; intensified militarization, including that of the police; furthered the privatization of public services and land; restructured the legal system; and increased mexican body mass, all to the benefit of transnational corporations. many accounts of the effects of nafta and the drug war leave out mexico city, except as the overflowing receptacle for dispossessed people fleeing the violence. mexico city is currently experienced as a much safer place than it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, when kidnappings and public murders abounded. a story circulates that the cartels have designated mexico city a safe zone, a negotiation space where their families can live. recent mexico city nightclub massacres and assassinations of journalists fleeing from violence complicate that story. indeed, nafta and the drug war have transformed life in mexico city at every level. large-scale land dispossession cannot occur in such a dense urban area, but the carlos slim–style gentrification of the historic center (leal martínez 2007, 2016; pérez negrete 2016)—the ubiquity of big-box chains like home depot and walmart, which cut jobs while claiming to create them—adds to increasing instability for working-class people. moreover, with national crises like the 2014 mass kidnapping of students from the ayotzinapa rural teachers’ college and the continual discovery of mass graves across the nation, nafta and the drug war have, even in the supposedly cartel-free, violence-free zone of mexico city, caused everyday life to hang by a thread. but colonia periférico seems to be holding steady against these transformations, helped by earlier land-title programs. señora nati’s house title is in her name. she paid for its construction with savings she earned by selling her embroidery. her now-deceased husband’s wages as a taxi driver supported daily life during the construction. built continuously from the 1970s through the 1990s, nati’s house is now a compound with six separate units that have throughout the years housed her husband, her four children, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as well as boarders. señora nati has done well with her house. she paid 1,500 pesos for the title in the 1970s, which was cheap even then. she now estimates that her house is worth a million pesos. she is proud of how well built it is, and how well she maintains its security, from sweeping the street in front every day to strictly controlling who has keys. figure 6. señora nati in her sparkling clean kitchen with her bordados (embroidery). photo by elizabeth f. s. roberts. señora nati’s household resembles the majority of those i got to know in colonia periférico, where homes housed up to four generations and families held the title, often in an older woman’s name. no one who lived with their natal family paid rent. these conditions brought an extraordinary level of stability to colonia periférico residents,2 who did not have to contend with the evictions so common to working-class, poor, and, increasingly, middle-class people in nations, regions, and cities with skyrocketing real-estate markets (sassen 2014; desmond 2016). real-estate prices and speculation and new luxury high-rises are rife in mexico city, including areas just outside colonia periférico. the nearby colonia of santa fe, with its high-rise ultra-luxury apartments and chic shopping malls, displaced thousands of low-income households, though the official narrative claims that it was built on an uninhabited dump (moreno carranco 2010; shoshan 2015). colonia periférico residents tell of shopping-mall developers coming around a few years ago, but losing interest because of the stench and reputation. after living in colonia periférico for six months, i lived another half-year in buena vista, another working-class neighborhood, working with three families who were also participating in the environmental health study. situated in the foothills of the mountains that ring mexico city to the south, buena vista feels bucolic and almost village-like. my small house sat within a family’s larger compound, which also housed horses, sheep, chickens, and dogs. buena vista was not a land-invasion neighborhood. lots were laid out in a precise grid and sold to buyers in the 1970s and 1980s, which means that its wide streets have right angles, unlike the windy and confusing callejones of colonia periférico. as in colonia periférico, the three families i worked with had title to their land and homes, but household compounds all around them were in the process of being bulldozed to make room for new condos. the beginnings and ends of buena vista are not obvious, running into other unboundaried colonias that all feel the same. unlike colonia periférico, buena vista is located on major transportation routes and participates in inter-colonia commerce. unlike in colonia periférico, taxi drivers drove me all the way home at night. walking in buena vista, with its right angles, fresh air, and wide vistas of forested mountains, does not feel like walking through intestines. but the sense of peace was illusory. storeowners commonly experienced police shakedowns. there were signs hung on houses every few blocks warning ratas of zero tolerance for crime. i did not like to walk alone at night. at night the streets are empty. the neighborhood’s flow, size, and openness make it harder to know or be known in buena vista. despite its good reputation, buena vista does not feel safe for its residents. its lax permeability allows for instability. as a point of contrast, buena vista made clear what colonia periférico’s toxicity and mala fama provide. colonia periférico was the opposite of every u.s. middle-class coastal or college-town neighborhood i have known, where even before the hyperfocus on organic food and bisphenol a–free baby bottles, there were assumptions about the ability and right to protect one’s insides (biss 2014). for the u.s. middle class, protection occurs without any visible boundaries—the benefit of a century of zoning laws favoring the middle class. in a curious way, colonia periférico more closely resembles the gated communities that academics in the united states so disdain. like the wealthy who live inside these walled zones, residents of colonia periférico are able to protect the insides from the outside, even as nafta and the war on drugs rage on. stability in colonia periférico is predicated not on gates and private security guards, but on the mala fama and toxicity that permeate the bodies of its residents and that enable their persistence. protective porosity besides the police, colonia periférico is stubbornly impenetrable to the territorial incursions and educational interventions of public health surveillance, especially those interventions that target people as individuals with regard to their and their children’s health. while keeping public health surveillance out, colonia periférico lets corporate processed foods inside the bodies of its residents, much like spray paint and the stink of the dam. processed chemical substances like soda increase persistence through social pleasure amid daily injuries exacerbated through the effects of nafta and the drug war. one of the clear successes of nafta and the war on drugs, which together provide a more favorable environment for transnational trade in mexico, was making processed and sugary foods and beverages cheaper and more available. subsequently, mexico’s designation as the world’s fattest industrial nation by the who in 2013 threw mexico’s individualizing public health anti-obesity efforts into overdrive, with a special focus on soda, identified as one of the key drivers of the so-called obesity epidemic. billboards, tv advertisements, and new regulations inform the populace of soda’s harm. approaches like these do not necessarily get working-class people to drink less soda. but they do work to amplify class divisions. one of the most palpable differences between upscale and working-class or poor neighborhoods in mexico city (as in much of the urban world) is body size. upscale neighborhoods are thin, while everywhere else is fat. colonia periférico is no exception. the proposed alternative to soda is water, but water is simply not reliable. in many neighborhoods, tap water only comes a few days a week, and even then it is not seen as safe to drink. working to make water more available, more reliable, and less expensive than soda might be impossible as long as mexico is coca-cola’s number-one market and the largest consumer of bottled water in the world. legally, all water in mexico is national patrimony, making water of the state, which no one trusts. unlike many working-class neighborhoods colonia periférico tends to have running water almost all the time, while trucks selling bottled water do not always get in. other deliveries do get through, though: coca-cola, sabritas (chips and other snacks), and bimbo (white bread and snack cakes) trucks clog benito juarez all day long, backing up traffic to the main entrance. this power to get inside is unknown to the police force guarding colonia periférico’s entrance. it is also a power unknown to social and health workers. the director of the local seguro popular clinic, which serves colonia periférico and other nearby low-income colonias, was stunned when she heard that i lived inside. she explained that she could not complete health surveys in colonia periférico because her workers were too afraid to cross its borders. in the landscape of social services administered by the delegación (borough), colonia periférico is a punto rojo (problem area). in meetings, interviews, and informal conversations, social workers, those charged with making colonia periférico less marginalized, described the neighborhood to me as an abject and dangerous cesspool of violence, drugs, and broken families. it came to seem as if the colonia was designated a punto rojo precisely because of its successful resistance to pastoral ministrations, a virtue difficult for these state actors to imagine. one thing that the social workers and police get right is that drugs are done inside colonia periférico, and those who do them, mostly young men, do them in public. what would be difficult for them to know is that in many ways, public drug-taking contributes to colonia periférico’s persistence. two drugs dominate the streetscapes—marijuana and activo. marijuana is a social drug. on señora nati’s street, the same group of young men smoked joints together every evening, leaning against hollowed-out cars yet to be repurposed. the young men smoking weed, and sometimes drinking beer or pulque, were unfailingly polite. they chatted with passersby at all hours of the day or night. they are the same group that beat up lilia’s abusive boyfriend and hurled insults at the police at the edge of the dam causeway. older men smoke weed, too, on the steps winding up benito juarez with their friends. you step around them as you greet each other. activo, a pipe glue solvent easily purchased at hardware stores, provides hallucinations on the cheap, but is much less social. the young men who inhale it usually do so alone, or sometimes together, yet alone, on religious pilgrimages. they stare into space, sometimes shadowboxing the air while muttering. yellow and red activo cans litter the callejones and the graffiti wall bounding colonia periférico. activo users are usually very thin. as my eyes became accustomed to the heavy naco bodies of colonia periférico, i began to wonder about any thin man. does he use? or has he no women to feed him? like most of the grandmothers and great-grandmothers i know in colonia periférico, señora nati is both moralistic and philosophical about drug use. she attributes drug use to the failure of families, not economic decline. but she does not blame the user. her godson across the street uses activo. she speaks fondly of this rail-thin young man with a permanently glassy stare. she tells me how, when he is not inhaling, he is sweet to her and she feeds him. another activo user, osvaldo, is always stationed on the street near the bakery. people give him food and sometimes odd jobs. he is treated much like eva and rodrigo, cognitively disabled siblings who are constantly put to work throughout the colonia hauling garbage and sweeping. accepting public drug use marks a striking nonacceptance of the terms of the war on drugs, which in the name of health forces drugs underground. the very public nature of their drug-taking within colonia periférico’s boundaries allowed activo users safety, enmeshed in the care of a colonia that integrates drug users and disabled residents into everyday life. even with public drug use, residents’ bodies are much more permeable to soda than illegal drugs. the post-nafta and war on drugs dissemination of soda is wider and more profitable. with soda, as with illegal drugs, public health efforts exist to prevent penetration. but it proves difficult to undercut consumption when soda is so cheap, reliable, and social as compared to water. in colonia periférico, soda lubricates social life at every meal and nearly every moment in between. super-sized sodas are a constant at gatherings. with prompting, most residents link it to ill health, maybe fatness, maybe diabetes—but all of these “maybe,” in the future. they all point out that it costs almost no more than water, even after the soda tax. it tastes better. it’s rude not to offer it to others. who would share water? some men tell me, laughing, that they once tried to stop because they heard it might cause problems later, but they only lasted a few days. laughing harder, they declare “it’s more addictive than what the narcos sell,” their knowing laughter resonating with angela garcia’s (2010, 2017) devastating portraits of both northern new mexico and mexico city, where there is no outside to either addiction or the war on drugs. besides the anti-soda tv ads and the billboards blanketing mexico city, parents know that soda is the enemy because of recent guidelines that prohibit children from taking it to school. only water, agua natural, is allowed. in 2014, about seven months before the shooting of the young man by the police at the end of their street, alma and mar showed me how they break this rule, both giggling mightily. mar would not drink agua natural. she wanted the corporeal joy that flavor and sugar provide. lovingly, alma wanted mar to have more. she bought clear soda and poured it into clear plastic water bottles to fool mar’s teachers. a year later i asked alma if she was still sending clandestine soda in mar’s lunch. she laughed even harder than before and told me that the teacher caught her, and other mothers doing the same, and said, “mamita, if they’re thirsty they’ll drink.” the teacher now smells and tastes the liquid that comes to school with kids. providing soda is one act of loving care in alma’s broad repertoire. she is an avid biopoltical subject, as she seeks state services outside of colonia periférico, diligently signing her kids up for city enrichment programs and carefully keeping track of all their doctor’s visits through mexico’s comprehensive imss health-care system. she has their medical passbooks always at the ready, neatly filled out, documenting their every ailment. dany’s and mar’s near-constant supply of antibiotics and asthma medications are precisely arranged on the table in the middle of the living room. she knows the long generic names of all the medications the girls take. alma cooks only with bottled water. alma, who is diligent about the health and safety of her kids, does not restrain her kids’ caloric intake but gives them more whenever she can. her household of nine is heavy except for mar, who is only six. soda allows alma to stabilize dany and mar as they learn how to inhabit the unstable environment outside of colonia periférico, which seems invested in their existence only insofar as they can be chastised for their naco fatness or as excessive naco consumers of soda. of the two options, soda provides so much more. being more permeable to soda and less permeable to anti-obesity messages makes sense in colonia periférico, but this does not register with public health efforts that call for resistance to soda (see yates-doerr 2012). these efforts resonate with public health campaigns worldwide that call on people, as individuals, to remove themselves from forms of sociality necessary to their very survival. for instance, ongoing u.s.-based public health campaigns that tell iv drug users not to share needles do little if you are a homeless iv drug user, and the people with whom you share needles are the same people who have your back (bourgois and schonberg 2009). contemporary u.s.-based safe sex campaigns against unprotected anal sex demonize both black men who have what they call “raw” sex with other men and white “barebackers” for engaging in welcome and pleasurable communitas after decades of exhaustion from living in an epidemic amid ubiquitous racism and homophobia (bailey 2016; dean 2009). and brazilian campaigns advocating breastfeeding in the 1980s did not acknowledge how, in shantytowns, feeding infants formula instead of breast milk was a crucial means of distributing responsibility to male partners, who paid for a child’s sustenance (scheper-hughes 1992). in such instances, whether chemical kinships flow through heroin, semen, infant formula, or soda, survival depends on permeation—of socially shared substances and substantive sociality. public health poses these substances as threats to individuals’ lives, but it is crucial to recognize how they provide what i understand as protective porosity, which sustains life at collective levels. like the shit, cement dust, graffiti, and twisting callejones that contribute to colonia periférico’s protective porosity at the territorial scale, soda distributed at the bodily scale between family members and neighbors can serve simultaneously as both hazard and protection. colonia periférico’s ability to persist territorially through the protective porosity that shields it from the penetrations of nafta, the war on drugs, and mexico’s public health apparatus prompts an examination of dr. arias’s invocation of resilience. why is colonia periférico characterized as the kind of place to which children must become resilient, rather than celebrated as a neighborhood that is resilient because it can resist penetration? like the homeostatic model of metabolism, resilience assumes a self that persists, staying the same by “avoiding the negative effects of risk to exposure . . . [and] the negative trajectories associated with risks” (fergus and zimmerman 2005, 399). of course, only certain kinds of persistence are rewarded as resilient. we are “less willing to judge an individual as resilient if, against the odds, she becomes a wealthy and successful criminal” (allmark, bhanbhro, and chrisp 2014, 3). similarly, colonia periférico is judged perversely impermeable to the ministrations of state management and as entangled in substances that are designated as harmful—drugs, bacteria, soda—but that provide persistence through social stability. in the american south, toxicity both protected and poisoned enslaved workers on indigo plantations; in mexico city, toxicity prevents surveillance and violence for colonia periférico and its residents, even as it may make people sick. within the standard public health and social work frames of resilience, it is difficult for state actors to imagine these toxic entanglements as protective. the problem with resilience is that it partakes in individualizing logics by leaving larger structures unaddressed. i worry, though, about entanglement as an alternative, because it may not provide much more solace than resilience to those who live amid the toxins. entanglement’s discontents by august 2016 alma was trying to drink less soda. this might seem like a public health victory, but the lesson is not so clear. at a routine clinic visit in july, alma and her husband juan had both been diagnosed as prediabetic. laughing, alma and juan narrated the inexplicability of this diagnosis. juan is heavy, but has rarely drunk soda or eaten sweets. unlike alma, he does not spend his life inside colonia periférico. he works six days a week outside the colonia installing commercial security systems, a salaried, fairly stable job. and yet juan is just as prediabetic as alma, who has a sweet tooth with a vengeance. “you know me,” she says, “always with my candy”; she mimes dipping into a bag of sweets. the lack of sense in juan’s diagnosis prompts questions. why quit soda when prediabetes can arrive without it? how do you change your diet to prevent diabetes if you do not eat sweets? these uncertainties underscore something increasingly clear in nutrition, exposure science, and toxicology: substances do not have reliable, explicable, or linear effects. to isolate variables that document linear effects, knowledge claims, and public policy recommendations about chemicals and nutrition in the life sciences and in public health are based on large samples that become numbers. as anthropologists and sts scholars committed to entanglement and uncertainty, we know linear thinking constitutes a problem. linear thinking shuts down the possibility of tracing how chemicals might be engaged in looping relations with bodies situated in their specific worlds (lock and nguyen 2010). as michelle murphy (2004, 267) argues, focusing on a single signal, a single variable, a single chemical entails a “learned inattention to other noise.” linearity is modernity itself, delinking the chains that bind to make new autonomous objects. it is important, then, to foreground a critique of the isolationist, linear tendencies baked into environmental and public health. these tendencies tend to universalize bodies while individualizing behavior—for instance, in anti-obesity campaigns that fail to account for a radically transformed food landscape and the multiple destabilizations of nafta and the war on drugs, and in chemical-exposure studies that decontextualize lead from poverty (lock and pálsson 2016). in science and technology studies, entanglement is a means for knowing the world better. entanglement and nonlinear thinking allow us to ask: if people breathe shit, might they be more or less affected by soda? can the stress people experience from police violence be mitigated through protective social density? how might the vast transformation in the post-nafta and war on drugs food landscape, along with increased body mass, affect bisphenol a uptake? how might these changes change the actual composition of the chemicals, bodies, or economic policies? entanglement could allow us to ask: why is juan prediabetic when he does not drink soda? as we shift our efforts to loop and entangle phenomena amid the uncertainty, however, we need to notice the effects of leaving linearity behind. boundaries and linear models might constitute a necessary response in places where life must always be lived as improvised and ceaselessly entangled, and where objects (like water) are never stabilized apart from their relations (roberts 2017). for many of the world’s inhabitants, the entanglement of everything with everything proves relentlessly exhausting. indeed, i am pretty sure that the residents of colonia periférico would like to share in the privilege of inhabiting a world of objects that can be experienced as bounded from the relations that make them, a world, for example, with reliable drinking water, formal-sector work, and a civil police force. with the goal of knowing the world better, then, science and technology studies might complicate celebratory calls for the uncertainty of entanglement, or for staying with the trouble, by taking into account not only the (often quantitative) practices that make boundaries but also what those boundaries have to offer. in this way, we can avoid celebrations of breathing shit without dismissing the densely social lifeworlds that persist in its inhalation. both dr. arias and señora nati seek boundaries instead of constant entanglement. dr. arias is not betting on life conditions getting better in mexico, so she wants to understand how to prevent the penetration of individual kids as a matter of survival. within the world she inhabits, colonia periférico is the kind of environment to which children must become resilient—impermeable to chaos, drugs, and soda. for señora nati, however, persistence entails land, her neighborhood, where bodily permeability to toxicity prevents territorial penetration. soda gets inside. spray paint gets inside. bacteria get inside—a fecal transplant that (in a fun-house mirror image of the cold war immune system) prevents the penetration of foreign invaders (martin 1994). porosity to drugs, soda, and shit stabilizes the borders of colonia periférico against mexico in this time of nafta and the war on drugs. the stink is the price paid: the stink of a life lived in a dense, gut-shaped labyrinth that you miss while staying at your son’s empty house in the green and lonely grid of portland. notes acknowledgments dean hubbs’s insistently careful engagement with my still murky ideas and prose finally made it clear to me that this article was about entanglement and its discontents in colonia periférico. developing that argument came about through a wonderful series of collective conversations with the insightful readers in the oxidate working group and the anthropology and history workshop at the university of michigan; listeners in the science and human culture program at northwestern university, the center for science, technology, and society at drexel university, the center for social medicine at the university of california, berkeley, and the departments of anthropology at the university of california, los angeles and the university of california, irvine; as well as my energizing students in the mexican exposures ethnographic lab. wayne cornelius’s generous correspondence about colonia periférico’s early days allowed me to understand change over time. camilo sanz, alaina lemon, mike mcgovern, harris solomon, and kate zaloom helped me think more carefully about what i had to say about entanglement, toxicity, and urban life. two anonymous reviewers from cultural anthropology, as well as the editors, have helped me hone my argument further. the national science foundation and the wenner gren foundation provided much-needed resources for spending extended periods of time in mexico city. señora nati, and most everyone else i know in colonia periférico, consistently draw my attention to the surprising, sometimes uncomfortable, and always lively ways she, and they, inhabit the world. thank you all for the many shared pleasures. 1. colonia periférico and buena vista are both pseudonyms. recently theorists of ethnographic practice have persuasively argued that anthropologists should not change the names of the places where they work so that they represent place ethically (scheper-hughes 2001). while i acknowledge the importance of this critique, identifying colonia periférico by its real name feels untenable, given that its residents and geography endeavor to prevent the incursion of outsiders. the u.s.-based political scientist wayne cornelius worked in the same colonia in the 1970s and gave it the pseudonym periférico. my use of the same name maintains continuity for the research archive. i changed buena vista’s name as well in the interest of parity with colonia periférico. i have also changed the names of everyone described in the article, except señora nati, who did not want to be anonymized. 2. stability can be stifling, of course. my neighbor omar, who suffered little direct homophobia for being uno de los gays in colonia periférico, felt the heaviness of this stability. to have the privacy he craved he would have to go elsewhere and pay rent, impossible with his meager earnings as a hair stylist. one trajectory that many young people take toward some privacy in extended households is to have a child, which usually grants them some separate conjugal space. for omar, this was not an option. references agard-jones, vanessa 2016 “episode 35.” cultures of energy podcast, september 29. http://culturesofenergy.com/ep-35-vanessa-agard-jones. allmark, peter, sadiq bhanbhro, and tom chrisp 2014 “an argument against the focus on community resilience in public health.” bmc public health 14, no. 62. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-62. 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drug war capitalism. oakland, calif.: ak press. pérez negrete, margarita 2016 “ciudad de méxico: el camino recorrido en la conformación de una ciudad global.” revista mexicana de ciencias políticas y sociales 61, no. 226: 331–51. http://www.revistas.unam.mx/index.php/rmcpys/article/view/53665. roberts, elizabeth f. s. 2015a “bio-ethnography: a collaborative methodological experiment in mexico city.” somatosphere, february 26. http://somatosphere.net/2015/02/bio-ethnography.html. 2015b “food is love: and so, what then?” biosocieties 10, no. 2: 247–52. https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.18. 2017 “exposure.” in “lexicon for an anthropocene yet unseen,” theorizing the contemporary series edited by cymene howe and anand pandian, cultural anthropology website, june 28. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1152-exposure. roberts, elizabeth f. s., and camilo sanz forthcoming “bioethnography: a how-to guide for the twenty-first century.” in the palgrave handbook of biology and society, edited by maurizio meloni, john cromby, des fitzgerald, and stephanie lloyd. new york: palgrave macmillan. roush, laura 2014 “santa muerte, protection, and desamparo: a view from a mexico city altar.” latin american research review 49, special issue: 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/lar.2014.0064. rozental, sandra 2016 “in the wake of mexican patrimonio: material ecologies in san miguel coatlinchan.” anthropology quarterly 89, no. 1: 181–219. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2016.0007. sanabria, emilia, and emily yates-doerr 2015 “alimentary uncertainties: from contested evidence to policy.” biosocieties 10, no. 2: 117–24. https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.17. sassen, saskia 2014 expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. scheper-hughes, nancy 1992 death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in brazil. berkeley: university of california press. 2001 saints, scholars, and schizophrenics: mental illness in rural ireland. berkeley: university of california press. shoshan, nitzan 2015 “las temporalidades de la crisis en santa fe, d.f.” sociológica 30, no. 84: 9–38. tosoni, simone, with trevor pinch 2016 entanglements: conversations on the human traces of science, technology, and sound. cambridge, mass.: mit press. winner, langdon 1980 “do artifacts have politics?” daedalus 109, no. 1: 121–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652. yates-doerr, emily 2012 “the weight of the self: care and compassion in guatemalan dietary choices.” medical anthropology quarterly 26, no. 1: 136–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01169.x. indigenous media futures indigenous media futures: an introduction william lempert university of colorado boulder http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5137-5414 this collection of essays engages the ways in which anthropological understandings of indigenous media can be expanded and reimagined through a focus on futurity. throughout, the contributors pose two distinct yet interconnected questions: what does the future of indigenous media hold? and, how is the future itself being increasingly asserted through indigenous media production? in a sense, then, the collection serves as both retrospective and opening. we reflect on the history of indigenous media scholarship in tracing the trajectory of emerging forms and content, while also considering how the future is mobilized as a means for establishing temporal sovereignty in relation to anachronistic pasts (see rifkin 2017). in doing so, we aim to provoke new questions about the histories, politics, and futures of indigenous self-representation. despite seemingly dire circumstances for indigenous communities, nations, and their media, we find more creative and political indigenous assertions of sovereign futures than ever before. recognizing that indigenous media are not a panacea, we nonetheless emphasize that these mediations can have transformative political potential through both the process of their production and the impact they have on diverse audiences. in light of centuries of explicit and implicit associations of indigenous people with the past, invoking indigenous futures invites contradictory and unexpected pairings that the contributors explore in these pieces, including bleakness and postapocalyptic hope; sutures of time and paper; apprehension and possibility; and noise and image. the collection is bookended by this introduction and a closing reflection, in which faye ginsburg thoughtfully engages each of the essays and brings them into conversation with one another, as well as the history and current landscape of indigenous media. here, i briefly frame some of the intellectual context within which we imagine indigenous media futures. the future of indigenous media until recently, indigenous media has been closely associated with film and video. the increased availability of relatively inexpensive and durable camcorders in the 1980s led to the rise of indigenous video production around the globe. this movement also fostered media collaboration with anthropologists and consequently altered the nature of ethnographic film.1 in just a few decades, indigenous film has proliferated, and today there are dozens of festivals around the world highlighting the growing catalog of this genre. meanwhile, indigenous television programs and channels have been established, including national indigenous television in australia, māori tv in new zealand, and the aboriginal peoples television network in canada.2 in imagining the future of indigenous media scholarship, we aim to expand currently conceived boundaries of form and medium. indeed, the contributors to this collection engage a variety of formats, including novels, stop-motion animation, and multimodal art installations. the recent influx of indigenous comic and video-game production has been fostered by the annual indigenous comic con. established in 2016, the convention has expanded to include cosplay, puppetry, robotics, and experimental installation pieces in partnership with groups like the santa fe meow wolf art collective. while each of these media provides a rich avenue for disciplinary engagement—especially in light of the current move toward multimodal anthropology—i want to highlight some recent examples of mass media that creatively reimagine audience relationships. in the mohawk artist skawennati’s (2006) immersive second life–based machinima series,3 timetraveller™, the viewer follows hunter, a young mohawk man from the twenty-second century, who travels between virtual worlds from the years 1490 to 2121. in the first of nine episodes, hunter introduces himself, acquires time-traveling glasses, and transports to fort calgary, canada in 1875. there, he watches an illustrated presentation about alleged sioux “rampages,” even as his narration draws attention to the long history of indigenous misrepresentation through media. video 1. episode 01 of timetravellertm (2006). video courtesy of aboriginal territories in cyberspace. as hunter declares: “if there’s one thing every indian knows, it’s this: when it comes to history, always get a second opinion.” through this native slipstream media project,4 skawennati disrupts historical authority and the temporal boundaries of indigenous existence imposed by what the māori scholar linda tuhiwai smith (1999, 23) has described as the “imperial imagination.” furthermore, such projects provide rich intersections between anthropological scholarship on indigenous media and the sociality of virtual worlds (boellstorff 2008; lapensée and lewis 2014). sponsored by the sundance institute, lynette wallworth’s (2016) virtual reality film collisions tells the story of the martu elder nyarri nyarri morgan as he narrates his experience of 1950s nuclear testing near his homeland in the western desert of australia. the film allows the viewer to adjust their visual and aural perspective through a virtual reality headset. the goal is not simply for audiences to understand, intellectually, the destructive potential of nuclear testing and its impact on martu country; the work’s sensorial immersion also affects the viewer at a somatic level and exemplifies david macdougall’s (2006) articulation of “the corporeal image.” the technological convergence represented in such media projects provides opportunities for a parallel confluence of theoretical literatures, in this case including those on affect, toxicity, and mediation. yet such projects offer little sense of the technological sublime (see larkin 2008). these media are not ends unto themselves, primarily emphasizing their capacity to collectively imagine and creatively communicate stories that matter for the actualization of indigenous futures. the future in indigenous media while some of the most cutting-edge forms of indigenous media engage the future—as demonstrated in timetraveller™—most of the explicitly speculative projects are science-fiction films. native sci-fi explores topics around dystopian assimilation, sovereign futures, and extraterrestrial encounters that defy colonial tropes of inevitable violence (lempert 2014). more recently, this emerging genre has been developed for mainstream television through programs such as cleverman (blair and purcell 2016), a critically acclaimed australian broadcasting corporation show that directly engages issues of colonial trauma, urbanization, and intergenerational knowledge transfer through its story of two gumbaynggirr brothers. to articulate the deeper implications of indigenous science fiction in this vein, the anishinaabe scholar grace dillon (2012) has developed the analytic of indigenous futurisms, which challenges scholars to re-examine the explicit and implicit ways in which indigenous people continue to be representationally confined to imagined pasts. it also provides an important means for reimagining the temporal framing of indigenous people in anthropology. for example, it serves as a future-oriented intervention into longstanding debates around savage and suffering “slots.” the concept of indigenous futurisms can also advance disciplinary scholarship on temporality, as it takes alternative conceptions of time seriously, while simultaneously cautioning against the construction of ontological boundaries that may reinscribe radical and depoliticized difference. as a model for how to further operationalize indigenous futurisms, cherokee/hawaiian/samoan scholar jason edward lewis (2013), the director of the initiative for indigenous futures at concordia university, has articulated the importance of the “future imaginary.” building on charles taylor’s (2004) notion of the social imaginary, the future imaginary takes inspiration from the kiowa writer n. scott momaday’s (1970, 39) assertion that “we are what we imagine. . . our best destiny is to imagine . . . who and what, and that we are. the greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.” as lewis (2013) renders it: “by remembering our history, we can better see the present. by better seeing the present, we can better imagine a future.” as an imaginative process that integrates history with complex analyses of the present, ethnography can and should have a powerful role in fostering indigenous futurisms. many indigenous engagements with the future are less explicit than science fiction and focus on the well-being and development of younger generations. for example, the yolngu actor david gulpilil followed up a well-funded mainstream success, charlie’s country (de heer 2013), with what he considered an even more important project, another country (reynolds 2015), which he cowrote and starred in. this documentary thinks through the history of colonial dispossession to imagine what it would mean to move beyond it. in the following clip from another country, gulpilil articulates how some of the biggest challenges for yolngu futures are imposed by outsider assumptions, noting that “going forward will take many, many years. only future generations will get there. we can’t get there if you think you know more about us than we do.” video 2. excerpt from another country (2015). video courtesy of ronin films. while we might imagine that gulpilil is referring here to bureaucrats and politicians, it is productive to consider that he might also be speaking about anthropologists. gulpilil highlights one of the key aspects of indigenous futurisms: that they are not yet known and require a radical openness to a currently inconceivable otherwise (povinelli 2014). for indigenous people around the world, representations of futurity carry serious political implications. as turtle mountain chippewa scholar danika medak-saltzman (2017, 144) argues, it is no coincidence that future-oriented indigenous media have emerged at the same time as a groundswell of native activism. rather, such media serve as “the creative arm of the indigenous futurist movement, [which] joins the more overtly political arm of the movement evident in the protest, legal and advocacy work . . . all [of which are] vital to seeing our way toward, fighting for, and calling forth better futures.” in this collection, the future of and in indigenous media remains inextricably tied to the future of communities and nations. indeed, it is this very nexus of creative mediation, temporal reimagination, and political urgency that we hope will inspire new and generative engagements with indigenous media futures. notes acknowledgments special thanks to elizabeth lapensée (anishinaabe, métis), whose artwork manoominike mazina'anang, the wild ricing constellation is featured as the banner image for this openings and retrospectives collection. 1. for example, terence turner (1995), in his collaborative media work with kayapo communities, argued that such projects could have meaningful political implications in addition to ethnographic value. the continually shifting nature of collaborative relationships in media projects are developed within this collection. 2. in this introduction i emphasize indigenous media in the major settler-colonial nations, as they most directly relate to the essays in this collection. for an overview of the broader history of debates around indigenous media scholarship, see ginsburg 2011. 3. as a portmanteau of the words machine and cinema, machinima describes films created through real-time screen capture within virtual worlds rendered by computer graphics engines, including and extending beyond video games. 4. as dillon (2012, 3) describes, the science fiction subgenre of native slipstream “views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream . . . [and] thus replicates nonlinear thinking about space-time.” references blair, wayne, and leah purcell, dirs. 2016 cleverman. sydney: australian broadcasting corporation. boellstorff, tom 2008 coming of age in second life: an anthropologist explores the virtually human. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. de heer, rolf, dir. 2013 charlie’s country. winnellie, australia: bula’bula arts aboriginal/vertigo productions. dillon, grace l. 2012 walking the clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction. tucson: university of arizona press. ginsburg, faye 2011 “native intelligence: a short history of debates on indigenous media and ethnographic film.” in made to be seen: perspectives on the history of visual anthropology, edited by marcus banks and jay ruby, 234–55. chicago: university of chicago press. lapensée, elizabeth, and jason edward lewis 2014 “timetraveller™: first nations nonverbal communication in second life.” in nonverbal communication in virtual worlds: understanding and designing expressive characters, edited by joshua tanenbaum, magy saif el-nasr, and michael nixon, 105–119. pittsburgh, pa.: etc press. larkin, brian 2008 signal and noise: media, infrastructure, and urban culture in nigeria. durham, n.c.: duke university press. lempert, william 2014 “decolonizing encounters of the third kind: alternative futuring in native science fiction film.” visual anthropology review 30, no. 2: 164–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12046. lewis, jason edward 2013 “the future imaginary.” presentation at tedxmontreal, montreal, que., september 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwkyaualkjc. macdougall, david 2006 the corporeal image: film, ethnography, and the senses. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. medak-saltzman, danika 2017 “coming to you from the indigenous future: native women, speculative film shorts, and the art of the possible.” studies in american indian literatures 29, no. 1: 139–71. https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.29.1.0139. momaday, n. scott 1970 “the man made of words.” in indian voices: the first convocation of american indian scholars, edited by ruperto costo, 49–84. san francisco: indian historian press. povinelli, elizabeth a. 2014 “geontologies of the otherwise.” in “the politics of ontology,” theorizing the contemporary series, edited by martin holbraad and morten axel pedersen, cultural anthropology website, january 13. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/465-geontologies-of-the-otherwise. reynolds, molly, dir. 2015 another country. canberra: ronin films. rifkin, mark 2017 beyond settler time: temporal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. durham, n.c.: duke university press. skawennati, dir. 2006 timetraveller™. episode 01. montreal: aboriginal territories in cyberspace. smith, linda tuhiwai 1999 decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. london: zed books. taylor, charles 2004 modern social imaginaries. durham, n.c.: duke university press. turner, terence 1995 “representation, collaboration, and mediation in contemporary ethnographic and indigenous media.” visual anthropology review 11, no. 2: 102–106. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.1995.11.2.102. wallworth, lynette, dir. 2016 collisions. los angeles: sundance institute new frontier/jaunt vr residency program. walk this way walk this way: fitbit and other kinds of walking in palestine anne meneley trent university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5627-6124 the fitbit, a wearable activity tracker first introduced in 2008, is but one of the newly ubiquitous digital self-tracking devices. (their acronym, dstd, makes them sound like diseases acquired without forethought for lingering regret!) according to some analysts (e.g., sanders 2017, 36), dstds are instrumental to “biopower and patriarchy” in the neoliberal era. readers can decide for themselves if the story of how i got a fitbit falls under the rubric of biopower and patriarchy: my eighty-five-year-old father, on his doctor’s advice, began to count his steps with a pedometer, a primitive dstd. he emailed me a daily account of his steps—taunting me, as a lazy academic, with 8,200 one day, 9,500 the next, which in the competitive habitus of our family i took as a challenge. i got a fitbit and proceeded to email him back with accounts of my daily steps. my friends and colleagues sometimes appear a bit shocked that i wanted to compete with my aging father. and imagine my horror when i read a book chapter entitled “foucault’s fitbit” (whitson 2014), which also opens with a father–child walking competition, although luka, the child in this vignette, is a two-year-old tot, not a professor of anthropology. sensing that there was more going on here than an instantiation of “biopower and patriarchy,” i was inspired to explore how new forms of surveillance may enter into our lives in ways that are neither universal nor predictable. walking is of course known to every culture, but only recently has walking become envisioned as an activity to be divided into steps, quantified, and—importantly—recorded by technologies attached to the body. a classically maussian, nondiscursive technique of the body (see mauss 1973) has become a discursive technique in its cyborgian manifestation: walking while recording has turned into a topic for discussion, a point of comparison and surveillance of the kind that concerns academic observers (whitson 2014; lupton 2016; nafus 2016; neff and nafus 2016). these critical scholars have a point about self-tracking: the frightening possibilities of people reduced to quantifications (heart rates, glucose levels, blood pressure, calories consumed, pounds gained). some commentators worry that employers may encourage their employees to wear self-tracking devices and then use the information thereby garnered to approve or deny health-care coverage. in societies without universal health care, it could have serious implications if the sedentary sick were blamed (or shamed) for their own condition (cf. moore and robinson 2016 on neo-taylorism). as a university professor who complains about the relentless quantification of our academic production, our audit culture, if you will, i was shocked at my susceptibility to the fitbit. i found it strangely compelling to have my footsteps recorded, and felt quite perturbed when i forgot my fitbit on a day when i had walked a lot. on one level, of course, one does know that exercise is exercise, recorded or not, but still. the writer and humorist david sedaris (2014) has perhaps best captured the speed and lunacy of the quick descent into autocompetition: “at the end of my first sixty-thousand-step day, i staggered home with my flashlight knowing that i’d advance to sixty-five thousand, and that there will be no end to it until my feet snap off at the ankles. . . . why is it some people can manage a thing like a fitbit, while others go off the rails and allow it to rule, and perhaps even ruin, their lives?” while i don’t think i have gone off the rails and i still have my feet, events like forgetting keys or books upstairs or my son constantly borrowing my car suddenly have a fringe benefit: more steps! even those too cool to wear a fitbit may fall prey to the addiction of counting, as they can record their steps on their cell phones. i have had colleagues who refuse to go for a walk if they have forgotten their cell phones and ones who have returned home to get their fitbits so they wouldn’t “waste” a day of not counting their steps. gina neff and dawn nafus (2016) also had interlocutors who reported distress without their fitbits, as their emotions became imbricated with the technology. “the data,” neff and nafus (2016, 76) argue, “become a ‘prosthetic of feeling,’ something to help us sense our bodies or the world around us.” theories of the gaming world might hold some answers to the fitbit’s persuasiveness: while the telic version of fitbit walking is the goal of exercise, the autotelic goals that we set for ourselves may lead to our “personal satisfaction” (sicart 2014, 238). while some, like sedaris, engage in brutal self-competition, others grant the fitbit a kind of nonhuman agency, making of it a technological superego, like an informant of mine who sighs when her fitbit gently buzzes at ten minutes to every hour. “it’s step o’clock!” she exclaims, or: “damn! my fitbitch tells me i have to take another 250 steps.” my nephew, an employee of a multinational oil company that offered compensation ($3,000) for adherence to a fitbit program, outsourced his exercise by giving his fitbit to his girlfriend as she left to go on a walk even as he lay on the couch chatting with me. some people are very creative at retrofitting the fitbit exercise ideology to induce playful competition between themselves and others. one colleague proposed a “walk with wine” program for those who do not want exercise to cut into the cocktail hour, encouraging his facebook friends to strap on a fitbit, fill a reusuable cup with a crisp white wine, and walk! this last example came across my screen when i was conducting field research in jerusalem in the spring of 2017. jerusalem is a city people have imagined, flocked to, and walked in for centuries. walking is itself particularly important to christian pilgrims to the holy land: many of them feel inspired to walk in the footsteps of christ. my first visit to jerusalem more than a decade ago coincided with easter weekend: i was nearly trampled by fervent christian pilgrims memorializing jesus on his way to crucifixion by walking the stations of the cross. this walking in the steps of a martyr forms an integral part of their imagination of, and engagement with, a city that for many represents a moving spiritual destination. walking in jerusalem might be considered a religious technique of the body, a means of constituting a pious self by walking the sacred routes. i myself have experienced a different kind of walk there: political pilgrimages, too, employ walking as a means of tracing embodied contemporary sufferings in jerusalem, particularly the ongoing persecution of palestinians under continuing israeli occupation. these walks often trace former sites of palestinian presence: as we walk, we learn about how jerusalem, sacred to all the monotheistic traditions, is scarred by the eviction of palestinian families from their homes and the construction of israeli-only neighborhoods. while not religious in the same sense as other tours, most participants find these walks unsettling yet personally transformative, much as i did (see meneley 2014). a key practice of early zionists was walking through a very differently imagined zionist homeland, as i discuss below (see benevisti 2000; stein 2009). all these kinds of walking shape our understandings of ourselves and the stories we tell about ourselves, but the fitbit seems to shape a different self: a capturable, knowable, commensurable, quantified one. aside from my playful competition with my father, i decided to see how the technology of the fitbit would shape my experience of, and stories about, jerusalem. technological accompaniments to walking are not themselves new. thomas hobbes had an inkwell in his walking stick to record his thoughts; the compass has enabled wilderness walkers to find their way; and music gadgets and mobile phones form part of an assemblage of what mizuko ito, daisuke okabe, and misa matsuda (2005) call “personal, portable, pedestrian” technologies. but the current dstds are central to a different imagining of bodies in affluent societies. according to rebecca solnit (2000, 263), after we stop using our bodies for functional reasons or manual labor, our bodies become “pets” that we train and coddle. there is a moral element here, too: by taking care of our bodies through exercise, including walking, we inculcate ourselves as healthy, moral citizens. the fitbit technology allows us the wherewithal to provide the material sign, in max weber’s sense, of our healthy piety: the good walking self is the recorded walking self. jamie sherman (2016, 30), drawing on walter benjamin’s notion of the aura rather than the expected figure of the flâneur, notes the contemporary co-occurrence of self-quantification and the selfie, indexing different modes of understanding the self. one day, i took my fitbit and my body as healthy moral pet-self on an iteration of the ramparts’ walk in jerusalem, a walk now controlled by the israeli tourism board; ₪18 (around $5) allows one to walk the high walls surrounding jerusalem’s old city. placards mark famous historical moments: the byzantine era here, the crusader period there, and the ottoman period further on. at the end of my walk, i realized that i had paid little attention to the famous views of wider jerusalem afforded by the high walls, or to the bustling daily activities of the old city below. why? i had been preoccupied with recording the number of my steps at each placard. the bright sun had made it difficult to see my fitbit screen, and between fumbling with my fitbit, notebook, and cell phone, my attention was exclusively taken up with recording my self. i could have been anywhere. but i then took a very pious selfie, finally acknowledging jerusalem, or at least a jerusalem with me in it, and sent it to my father as part of our competition. in implicit acknowledgment of jerusalem’s fame in the monotheistic tradition, he replied: “hi anne, holy steps—you are looking great! i got my hearing aids adjusted and picked up some stuff from the drugstore, some steps but not up to your mileage, love dad.” my curated pet-self noted in my field notes that i had done 3,778 steps from jaffa gate to al aqsa mosque—surely one of the least interesting and consequential bits of information about one of the world’s most beautiful and contested places! i suspect i am not the only one who feels unsettled by the potential of the focus on the quantified self to the exclusion of place, especially in a place as politically, culturally, and religiously significant as jerusalem—since the fitbit does not really care where you take these steps. over the course of “earning” accomplishments on the fitbit, the device sends out notes congratulating the user on “earning your nile badge” or your “serengeti badge,” acknowledging that one has walked the length of the nile or the serengeti in miles. where one has actually walked these miles remains immaterial. some try to combine a pious pilgrimage self with a pious healthy step-counting self. american parishioners from iowa use their fitbits to count their steps, while also trying to imagine the pilgrimage of mary carrying the baby jesus more than two thousand years ago in the holy land: two pieties, of health and religion, here become intertwined as individuals walk (arland-fye 2016). another example was a kind elderly guest at st. george’s cathedral guesthouse, who after thanking his palestinian guide for his moving tour of political disruptions in east jerusalem, showed him how many steps the tour had taken. his guide looked bemused. i myself received the same bemused look when i returned to palestine in october 2017 to participate in the olive harvest as part of my ongoing research on agro-resistance. while the palestinians i talked to about the fitbit thought it was hilarious, if somewhat foolish, they did not actually record their steps or see much point in beginning to do so. because i wrecked my fitbit charger by flinging it into a bag as i rushed out olive picking, i cannot share my actual step count on a jerusalem tour i took that began with the palestinian neighborhood of silwan, whose residents have been displaced by the city of david archaeological dig, part of a long-term project to settle jewish families in east jerusalem (see paz 2014). our guide, daoud, a lifelong resident of the old city, had once been arrested by the israelis for doing tours like the one in which my fellow olive pickers and i were participating: one that explained in detail the israeli usurpation of palestinian neighborhoods not only with archaeological digs and settlements but also by forbidding palestinian residents to restore their own houses. my step count seemed superfluous when witnessing the settler takeover of palestinian space, but as my fitbit walking proved a productive way to elicit commentary on other forms of walking in palestine, i managed to work up enough anthropological hubris to ask daoud if he knew of a place where i could get a fitbit charger. we asked around in the muslim quarter, but all we received were quizzical looks and suggestions that i go to israeli west jerusalem, where i was told to use my phone to record my steps like everyone else did, waving me back toward east jerusalem, saying that no one in israel used the fitbit brand. marcel mauss’s concept of techniques of the body explores how the universal practice of walking is performed differently in different cultural and historical moments. although classic works of ethnomethodology (e.g., ryave and schenken 1974) ignored these wider cultural contexts, there is an enduring relevance in their brilliant eye for detail around the embodied ways people conduct themselves and interpret the actions of others through the minutiae of their bodily comportment. more recently, the burgeoning self-quantification literature (lupton 2016; nafus 2016; neff and nafus 2016; ruckenstein and schüll 2017; schüll 2017) exhibits a tension between the potential for self-surveillance to gain positive control over oneself (women co-opting information and tactics of reproductive control for their own personal and political projects) and a concern over the use of self-surveillance data for the benefit of others (doctors, corporations, governments) or the potential of this data to have unintended consequences when it is revealed. strava, a website and mobile app that allows users to share and compete with others through logging their athletic activity, published a heat map representing the activities of its users in november 2017.1 the fitbit is so common in affluent capitals that the use patterns show up on the map as a blob, but in places where few people wear them, the use patterns mean that their locations are quickly revealed. for instance, the u.s. army has handed out fitbits to encourage its personnel to get more exercise, but as they jogged around the perimeters of their army bases in syria, the secret locations of these bases were inadvertently revealed on the strava map, as an analyst with the institute for united conflict analysts discovered (hern 2018). who gets to treat the body as a pet? the first line of sarah pink and vaike fors’s (2017, 375) article on dstds in australia and sweden notes how portable self-tracking devices have become so embedded in the everyday lives of people in affluent societies that they begin to shape how people imagine themselves and their social and physical geographies in profound ways. sometimes states find self-tracking devices useful for inculcating a desire for health in their citizen population. in singapore, the government has a national step challenge encouraging fitbit use (and even pays for fitbits for its citizens). new mobile technologies such as the fitbit afford a quantification of the act of walking that seems to correspond to what is sometimes called the neoliberal self, a self no longer based on the restrained tension between private and public but on a fundamentally competitive sense of self as a list of achievements (urciuoli 2008; gershon 2016)—an outlook evident in the competition on the strava website. barbara ehrenreich (2018), a searing critic of wellness culture in the neoliberal age, notes how the self-tracking of physical exercise can be perceived as the ultimate achievement of control over the self, which represents one of the most common illusions of modern life. my own experience demonstrates how persuasive it is in my own contemporary cultural and historical context to use self-surveillance for self-improvement projects or to subvert the self-surveillance technology. my father and i supposedly subvert the technology of self-surveillance with the overt purpose of improving our health in an age of sedentarism, engaging instead in playful competition. in affluent societies self-tracking can be perceived as a fully achievable right and a moral duty, or else as a form of play, but in other contexts it might constitute luxury, both in terms of the expense of the technological accoutrements and in terms of time. the luxury of self-surveillance for the sake of wellness and achievement is not equally available to all. further, self-tracking can prove irrelevant or even dangerous in other places. walking while palestinian although my efforts to investigate fitbit walking received no small amount of teasing from my palestinian interlocutors, they also elicited conversations about the renewed interest in different kinds of walking in east jerusalem and the west bank. the kind of self-knowledge generated through fitbit walking not only differs from other forms of walking in palestine but also erases a key difference for determining how one can walk there: who you are and what you look like. in the occupied west bank and in east jerusalem where i conducted my field research, palestinians are always assumed to be security threats who must be controlled; israeli other-surveillance is built on a “framework in which palestinians are categorically suspect” (tawil-souri 2016, 58). this is part of palestinian contemporary quotidian reality, which shapes how they can and cannot walk. i am inspired here by amahl bishara’s (2015) notion of “driving while palestinian,” which riffs on american politics around “driving while black,” where one’s phenotypical presence suffices to arouse the suspicion of law enforcement. also central here is garnette cadogan’s (2016) essay “walking while black,” which describes the implications of one’s phenotype for walking in particular spaces. he compares walking while black in jamaica (where the majority of the population is black) to walking while black in the united states (where people of african descent represent a visible minority often viewed as threatening). cadogan therefore draws our attention to a very different project of self-surveillance for black men walking in the united states as they try to avoid arousing suspicion or arrest, a project that offers valuable insights for walking in palestine. palestinians, especially young males, must also subject themselves to self-surveillance for their health. but it is not so much self-surveillance for the achievement of personal fitness goals but rather self-surveillance to avoid getting shot, harassed, or arrested while walking from one place to another. in this sense, palestinians, too, are preoccupied with their bodies, but the concern is much more existential: being preoccupied about no longer inhabiting one’s body at all (death) or no longer inhabiting it in the same way (injury as a result of being shot). this form of close self-surveillance requires much more attention than offloading the counting of one’s steps to a mobile device strapped to one’s wrist. cadogan offers insightful reflections on how one manages one’s phenotype with dress and bodily comportment, including voice modulation, speed, and gesticulation, to avoid arousing suspicion or arrest. his description evokes suad amiry’s (2010, 122–25) telling account of how young palestinian men attempting to sneak into israel in search of work don sunglasses, manipulate their hairstyles, and roll up their shirt sleeves and pant legs to emulate, at least in their minds, young israeli male fashion to avoid attracting the attention of the army or police. as i show in what follows, young palestinian men walk in an entirely different manner outside of these contexts of other-surveillance. palestinian interest in fitbit-type self-surveillance pales in comparison to the attention that they must pay, whether they like it or not, to other-surveillance, which constitutes a constant and oppressive part of their existence in a landscape scarred by what critics call an “apartheid wall” and the ubiquitous surveillance towers that punctuate it. helga tawil-souri’s (2016, 58) analysis of the “surveillance sublime” traces the contemporary surveillance practices of the israeli state back to the british mandate period with its population lists, land surveys, tax lists, and maps, detailing water sources, roads, and even tribal rivalries. for both, surveillance tactics have intricately entwined with military strategies.2 in the abstract, the modern surveillance of the population might be construed as both caring and controlling, but in the occupied territories, it is the security of israelis, not of palestinians, that is of concern. despite the proliferation of high-tech surveillance tactics like closed-circuit television cameras and drones, the israeli state achieves control of the population primarily through low-tech means: along with the much-photographed wall, the checkpoint makes for the emblematic physical blockade where selfand other-surveillance takes place. at this point, one might almost refer to a checkpoint genre, one that permeates film (elia suleiman’s divine intervention) and art (sharif waked’s chic point: fashion for israeli checkpoints), to mention only two examples. checkpoints are infrastructures of control imbricated in the structures of feeling of the occupied west bank: peteet (2017, 38) describes the feeling of “anxious anticipation” and “unpredictability” generated by the checkpoint as a central node in the “calibrated chaos” of the occupation. lila abu-lughod (2007, 102) notes how walking through the checkpoints during her father’s final illness and funeral became her heart-rending, embodied way of feeling her father’s stories: “i had heard my father’s stories all my life, but it is different to walk, orphaned, through a hot dusty checkpoint dragging your suitcases because they won’t allow any palestinian vehicles to cross. it is different to be held up by arrogant soldiers with reflective sunglasses and burnished muscles who willfully delay you.” rema hammami (2004, 2010, 2015, 2018) turns the quotidian checkpoint traumas that she, her students, and her colleagues experience on their way to bir zeit university into data in her ongoing anthropology of that particular barrier; she describes her use of this daily trauma as an anthropological weapon of the weak. even as israel is known for its lucrative high-tech surveillance technology exports, the low-tech tactics of id cards and permits, so memorably described in the poet mahmud darwish’s “identity card,” hold immense significance and power. inexpensive, fragile material objects, they and their colors resemble the checkpoints in their ability to determine possibilities of movement or lack thereof (tawil-souri 2010, 2011, 2016, 2017; see also berda 2018, 107–124 on the “effective inefficiency” of the israeli permit regime). palestinians of course also engage in other-surveillance as they learn to read and manage the fear of the armed soldiers and settlers in the west bank to maintain their own safety. over the years, i’ve heard many versions of the quip “better hope the soldier got laid last night!”, which reflects the knowledge that sometimes what triggers the young soldiers might be personal and go well beyond perceived palestinian provocation. a soldier’s contentment, over which palestinians have little control, may affect the treatment they receive as they try to get on with their daily lives (see tawil-souri 2011, 11–12). as checkpoints continually disrupt and “steal” time (peteet 2017, 139–68), the temporality and footsteps recorded by the fitbit take on a different valence. of fitbits and other mobility technologies in 2016, the jerusalem quarterly had to expand a summer special issue on surveillance titled “we are watching you” to a winter issue titled “we are still watching you,” indicating the density of historical and contemporary surveillance in palestine. even as being documented and surveilled is unwanted, avoided, or feared, the israeli id cards and permits are necessary for movement through checkpoints.3 while there is no indication that walking through a checkpoint is designed to encourage palestinian physical fitness, one of the few times i have come across reference to the use of dstds in palestine is in a checkpoint walk in the documentary a slim peace (2007). this documentary chronicles what i consider one of the most unsettling peace initiatives ever: getting israeli and palestinian women together to “diet for peace.” as well as counting calories and lost pounds, participants count their steps with pedometers.4 the documentary follows one palestinian participant as she makes the humiliating walk through the checkpoint, showing her permit with her special permission to enter jerusalem to the israeli soldier. we then see her witty cursing at the weight-loss meeting where, after being publicly weighed, she is supposed to recount her steps only to discover that her pedometer has malfunctioned: the only positive thing about the time-wasting, boring, and stressful ordeal of going through the qalandiya checkpoint is that it requires steps that can be counted and then proudly recounted in the meetings that form part of the weight-loss competition—which, while it certainly did not lead to peace, at least allowed a few palestinian women access to their beloved capital (meneley 2016). it also gives us an opportunity to reflect on who gets to treat their body as a pet and their steps as an achievement toward a moral, pious (slim) self, versus who can only see recorded steps as the single positive aspect of humiliating institutions of control over the everyday movement of palestinian bodies. another example of how technology designed to shape movement ends up taking a particular form when it lands in jerusalem comes in the form of a different technology for “doing walking,” as ethnomethodologists refer to it: pokémon go. fabio cristiano and emilio distretti (2017) examine how the universally popular game of pokémon go operates in a jerusalem informed exclusively by israeli imaginings of it. pokémon go is a game played on one’s cell phone: it is touted as a means of propelling children usually stuck in front of computers out into the world, providing them with a “healthy game experience” (cristiano and distretti 2017, 131), since playing involves walking in the outside world. it seems a benevolent game, completely in keeping with the pieties of dstds: inculcating a moral (healthy) pious self by cultivating a moral (healthy) pious self in one’s children. the augmented reality of the game translates certain kinds of landmarks in the real world into parallel landmarks in the virtual space of the game, so-called pokestops, from which players not only orient themselves but also derive poké balls, the tools one needs to capture animated pokémon monsters. but as cristiano and distretti (2017) point out in their study of how the abstract overlaid space of pokémon go operates in the concrete occupation space of east jerusalem, the game in fact reinforces the israeli state’s notion of a unified jerusalem without a palestinian presence: there are no palestinian landmarks and hence no pokestops, no poké balls, and no pokémons to be captured. the vibrant, crowded, historically rich east jerusalem appears empty in the game. cristiano and distretti (2017, 131) argue that pokémon go “provides players with a depopulated and neutralized image of east jerusalem, empty of the fetishes of the occupation.” the game thus “loses its innocence in the very moment that the act of playing becomes one of preserving the status quo, built according to and through lines of separation imposed by israel’s order.” this trenchant critique demonstrates how a game for children ends up constituting yet another way in which israel tries to erase palestinian presence in jerusalem. walking to stay put erasing or displacing palestinian presence and stopping movement in the palestinian territories is the way israelis establish continual sovereign moments, proving who is ultimately in charge of the territory (see tawil-souri 2017, 400). julie peteet’s (2017) rich ethnography describes the myriad ways of restricting palestinian movement in occupied east jerusalem and the west bank, documenting the negative effects of stasis, being stuck, obstructed, and delayed against one’s will. peteet describes those who cannot face moving because they are sick, weak, or, heartbreakingly, afraid of peeing themselves at a checkpoint. while many israeli infrastructures prevent easy everyday movement (cohen and gordon 2018, 199), their overarching goal seems to be to achieve the ultimate mobility: for palestinians to leave the holy land, never to return. the writer erskine childers referred to this goal as the early zionist hope, the “wordless wish” (abu-lughod 2007, 88) that palestinians would simply disappear. but palestinians want to stay on their own land. jess bier (2017, 54) discusses the positive aspect of stasis, “the ability to remain in place.” stasis in this reclaimed sense does not denote the negative sense of stagnation or obstruction, but the positive value (and virtue) of not moving. steadfastness (sumood), a “nationalistically inflected form of stoicism” (allen 2008, 456), refers to this positive (palestinian-initiated) staying put, which infuses many strategies of resistance to the occupier’s attempts to disconnect palestinians from their land by thwarting movement. my seemingly silly fitbit competition with my father, ironically, inspired me to pay more attention to various forms of walking, allowing me to attend to the importance of movement even as the literature on palestine focuses on overwhelmingly on the infrastructures of control and stoppage. walking (mobility) becomes increasingly employed as a strategy for stasis and for attempts to reconnect with the land at a moment when palestinian access to it is increasingly threatened. nadera shalhoub-kervorkian (2016), reflecting on going to work in east jerusalem in times of duress, provides a moving example of the stasis power of quotidian walking: at about seven in the morning, and like every other day, we are in the streets of the old city, each heading to her or his destination. i walk in silence, to voice our right to normalcy, togetherness, and safety in our streets. as we walk, we salute and smile at each other, speak in low voices, sometimes whisper, and interact only when necessary. but mostly we remain silent and try to move normally through the streets packed with israeli military equipment, armed settlers, and army and security personnel. under such conditions, our morning ritual is imbued with fierceness as we palestinians reclaim our hijacked spaces by simply walking in them. (emphasis added) walking lies at the center of raja shehadeh’s (2007) moving memoir palestinian walks. foregrounded here is not the number of steps shehadeh takes, but the number of places in which shehadeh and other palestinians can no longer walk on their own land, as israeli settlements, israeli-only highways, and the wall expand and israeli stipulations on where palestinians cannot go increase. in the old ways, the chronicler of walking robert macfarlane (2012) relays his hosting of shehadeh on a walk in his home in england, where the palestinian conveys his longing for a less-militarized future in palestine. macfarlane then writes of a return visit he paid to shehadeh in ramallah, describing the unexpected emotional force of constraints on movement and the dangers that palestinians face with more nonchalance than he can initially muster. shehadeh directs macfarlane’s attention to settlements on the hilltop, identifiable by their red roofs; the latter’s attention is drawn to the surveillance effect of the settlements themselves, their capacity to facilitate the settlers’ observing outward and downward, which, as the israeli architect eyal weizman (2007) has pointed out, forms part of the design itself. capturing the embodied sensation of many of us when we look up at this surveillance landscape for the first time, macfarlane (2012, 217) reports: “i felt very nervous.” walter benjamin’s (2003, 36) flâneur concerned himself with “botanizing on the asphalt,” and he would have plenty to botanize in the contemporary holy land: these days, the land of milk and honey looks more like the land of milk and asphalt, between the wall and the proliferation of settler-only highways. macfarlane, however, includes the geological substrate in accounts of his walks by naming his chapters in the old ways after geological formations. his chapter on palestine is titled “limestone,” the rock formation whose bubbly, distinctive strength holds up most of palestine’s terraces and their famous olive groves. shehadeh tells him that the long-lived olive trees, emblems of one of the oldest human–nonhuman collaborative relationships, provide horticultural evidence of a longstanding palestinian presence on the land. macfarlane (2012, 217) also notes the israeli presences on the landscape: the aftereffects of their weapons discharge, which he sardonically calls “ak-47 droppings” at the base on an olive tree. (in one memorable refiguring of these droppings, palestinians in bi’ilin plant flowers in the casings of spent tear gas canisters.) shehadeh’s memoir also clearly denotes fear as a theme of walking while palestinian: he reflects on how the pleasure of walking is undercut by the thought that one might be shot at (or by actually being shot at). this theme also permeates macfarlane’s (2012, 212) account of what he learned from shehadeh as the two men walked together in the west bank: [shehadeh] said that as a palestinian it was inadvisable to walk outside the main cities, and that if you chose to do so it was inadvisable to carry a map, a camera, or a compass, in case you met an israeli patrol, for all were items that would provoke suspicion, confiscation, and even detention. so even the most banal cyborg accompaniments to walking can arouse suspicion if you are palestinian or appear palestinian. on one of my visits, a palestinian teenager was shot dead at a checkpoint. the soldier claimed that he thought the earbuds of the youngster’s cellphone actually doubled as a bomb trigger.5 shehadeh’s memoir is structured around a distinctly palestinian genre of walking: the sarha. the word originally refers to letting livestock out to pasture in the morning, but it now refers to a human amble, one without a clear goal or destination (shehadeh 2007, 2; macfarlane 2012, 212), thereby bearing a stronger resemblance to a situationist dérive than a stroll made by a benjaminian flaneur. in a sarha, serendipitous encounters provide a valued event impossible to anticipate in advance. in contrast, in quantified walking, recording the number of steps one takes seems more important that what one might see. shehadeh’s sarha walking and his writing about walking become a way of showing paths of loss and reclamation for his readers, providing an inspiration to future walkers with the incorporation of mobility into his criticism of israeli presence on the land (sakhnini 2014). macfarlane (2012, 220) is but one of many discerning travelers to note that “travelers to the holy lands have always moved through a landscape of their imagination.” but shehadeh’s style of walking becomes a spiritual walk for the nonspiritual: those who resist the restriction of the holy land to biblical knowledge. in the early twentieth century, the shatha, or outing, was beloved by the jerusalem middle class who would leave the city to breathe fresh air, pick flowers, enjoy nature, picnic, and duly photograph the event (halaby 2015). the shatha group, started in 2006 by saleh abdel jawad, a political scientist, and salma botmeh, an economist, envisioned it as a nature walking group, open to all. key to the group is recording nature as a form of cultural heritage, exploring the paths of movement that are still possible for palestinians to roam and ramble in. setting out to walk along the separation wall, the british comedian mark thomas (2011) describes his interaction with shatha group walkers who view their walking endeavors as an effort to escape from the infrastructures of control.6 shehadeh wrote a brief introduction to walking palestine: twenty-five journeys into the west bank, a guidebook by stefan szepesi (2012), while working with tony blair’s office of the quartet on facilitating the now defunct peace process. the joint foreigners/palestinians group he started, called walking palestine, now has considerably more than the initial two hundred members. the guidebook makes light references to biblical knowledge of the holy land (quipping, for instance, that jesus didn’t take the bus), but the walks therein acknowledge contemporary political realities by telling the reader how to avoid settlements, checkpoints, and army posts, all sites of potential conflict for palestinian walkers. these walks and shehadeh’s sarhas signal the themes of reclamation through the embodied experience of palestinians, in contrast to the intent of the hiking trips of the early zionists (benevisti 2000). rebecca stein (2009, 335) describes these nature walks (tiyulim) as strategic practices for inculcating zionist interpretations of the landscape and, ultimately, colonial occupation. by bringing the jewish hiker into intimate contact with the homeland, such travelling practices were thought to foster a powerfully tactile sense of national awakening, affording the jewish walker with firsthand knowledge of both land and homeland. in the terms of the broader zionist pedagogy in which they played an important role, [nature walks] were deemed a crucial means of linking nature to nation, of connecting jewish history . . . to a set of zionist political claims in the present, therein fortifying the latter. stein addresses the wider problem of israeli settler colonialism: asserting an empty land waiting to be colonized, while having to acknowledge the presence of palestinian arab occupants whom the jewish walkers encountered (stein 2009, 337).7 promoted here is an asserted textual jewish past, erasing the living palestinian present, a tendency susan slymovics (2014, 44) finds in early israeli art: “thus settler art, much like colonial settlements, seizes land by making claims over the existence of actual native artifacts (e.g., palestinian arab vernacular architecture).” in contrast to zionist walking, shehadeh’s walking and his writing about walking become a form of resistance to dispossession and a source of inspiration for a tactile way of knowing and contesting exclusion from the land. while the walks described in shehadeh’s book are individual or are conducted with a few friends, several kinds of recent palestinian walks resemble the group-oriented walks of the shatha group. these represent efforts to ensure that palestinian children, often reared in the city or in a refugee camp, come to know the land. i offer an example of one of these nature walks in which i participated in april 2017. i met the organizer at dar zahran, a small museum in a restored old palestinian house in ramallah’s old town. it was a simple plan: a time on the weekend and a meeting place on the outskirts of ramallah were provided to get interested palestinians of all ages, including young children, out into the countryside to explore the landscape and learn about it. ramallah locals were joined by a busload of people from jenin and one from bethlehem, which served the explicit purpose of uniting palestinians from different parts of the west bank.8 it proved an egalitarian affair: everyone brought their own lunches and some even brought sheeshas, while the organizers provided coffee made on a wood fire. we began our walk on the terraced olive land of terra fidea, outside of ramallah. there were members of the palestinian wildlife society and mahmiyat, a palestinian authority initiative to actively protect and promote palestine’s nature reserves. a german-funded initiative called hanns seidel provided cameras for palestinian youth to photograph the flora and fauna of the land. dar zahran’s walkers also included amateur foragers, who impressed me with their ways of seeing. they managed to identify and harvest edible fruits from the landscape in ways that i and some of the palestinian children could not, although i trustingly munched on the plants offered to me. like the mushroom foragers described by anna tsing (2015), palestinian foragers are reclaiming their land by teaching youngsters how to discover precious value in soil that can nurture them. in this context, walking becomes a healthful practice, but it is not recorded walking merely for one’s own health. instead, its purpose consists in sharing cultural knowledge about plants and trying to inculcate a sense of connection between persons and the land. the manner of walking impressed me, too: the jumping, really, the racing up and down the hills, the skipping over the rough rocks and soil. young men, middle-aged men with paunches and cigarettes, girls with modest ankle-length robes, women with children—all of them felt comfortable on the path and terraces that seemed to me more suitable for goats. we used to say “safety first!” but i described this as a “safety last!” approach to my palestinian friend baha, contrasting the exuberant palestinian way of making a way through the landscape with my own perhaps unduly cautious, definitely inelegant exploration of the uneven ground. he snorted and said that palestinians loved to show off: “just give them a chance and they will jump around like goats.” returning to shehadeh’s (2007, 2) description of the palestinian love for the sarha, we see how he describes the giddiness that i sensed in my dar zahran walk: “going on a sarha implies letting go. it is a drug-free high, palestinian-style,” away from the checkpoints, constraints, wall, towers, and speeding settlers who pay little heed to palestinian pedestrians. shehadeh (2007, 142) also describes a walk he took with the anthropologist rema hammami: as soon as we left the taxi that brought us down close to wadi qelt we found ourselves almost running over the hills, which were like a brown tapestry. we felt euphoric. being stuck in ramallah, surrounded as it was with checkpoints at every exit, the experience of open space, with no walls, no barriers and a wide open sky, made us giddy with joy. * * * another version of the sarha is the notion of outing (mishwar) that is today spun into “mishart”: artistic walking-outings. these walks are put on by a network of artists and activists, foreign and palestinian, who are involved in supporting contemporary art and architecture revivals in the beit sahour–bethlehem area. participants engage in a walk to visit local artists’ studios, highlighting long artistic and architectural traditions and ongoing creativity. participants are shown these reclamation activities by local artists who go beyond producing religious tourist art for the centuries-old pilgrim market in this part of the holy land. we walked from studio to studio, adding a kinesthetic dimension to these attempts to regenerate palestinian art. the mishart in which i participated included the studio of the musician aref sayed, housed in a beautifully renovated example of old palestinian vernacular architecture, where he both makes and repairs ouds, beautiful instruments famed in many middle eastern music traditions. from there we walked to the latin church for a concert by palestinian children’s choirs, sponsored in part by the said/barenboim foundation. in october 2018, i participated in another kinesthetic tour called “wandering in flavors,” which visited distinctive food spots in the old city of jerusalem, like the vanishing tahini factories and bakeries.9 similarly, reclaiming palestinian vernacular architecture from the imperial/occupation ruins is the central project of the riwaq center for architectural conservation, a longstanding palestinian ngo headed by the architect and author suad amiry. but what interests me here is riwaq’s (“re-walk” in english) introduction of walking tours to sites of renovation or future sites: the ramallah highlands trail represents the mutual heritage of sites within the wider scheme of the most significant fifty historic centers across the region as identified by riwaq. the trail examines and promotes palestinian cultural heritage highlighting nineteenthand twentieth-century architectural heritage, the surrounding cultural landscape, and archeological sites. riwaq has recently organized walks to lifta, a profoundly moving ruin, one of the few palestinian villages left standing within the israeli side of the 1949 armistice line, if in an eerie, decaying, and depopulated state. concluding meanderings the proliferation of movement and concern for it still leaves aside a basic fact about walking while palestinian, one, as tawil-souri (2011) notes, that hinges on a technology more primitive than the fitbit: the id card and the permit. access to lifta is itself limited to palestinians with permits to jerusalem, which are becoming increasingly rare and hard to acquire. so for many west bank palestinians, the walks that i performed as a foreigner with a canadian passport would be not possible at all. if one cannot get into jerusalem, one cannot walk, as i did on the walls of the old city; those palestinians who do have access to jerusalem refuse to pay the israeli tourism board ₪18 to ascend the walls of their own city. sometimes the way people walk in palestine is not a matter of their own choice. in october 2018, we were picking olives on land that had been rezoned as part of jerusalem. our guide did not have permission to enter jerusalem, so he could not come on the bus with the foreign volunteer olive pickers, lest the palestinian bus driver get fined or even arrested. as our guide had to walk down the terraces to access the land on which we were picking, a few of us came with him, to recast his exclusion into a bit of a sarha. the sun came out after the rain and despite slipping on mud, there were lots of laughs about the clumsiness of those who were unaccustomed to descending terraces (including the anthropologist who was still recording her steps). we felt triumphant when we made it to our picking spot before those who had been comfortably transported by bus. our playful subversion had attempted to repress the eerie feeling that more exclusions were in the offing. the above are facts that your fitbit cannot tell you. while i began with the fitbit in keeping with how it is marketed, as a device for self-surveillance with the goal of healthy self-improvement, i certainly do not wish to claim a vulgar technological determinism that holds true in all times and places. the fitbit and similar technologies can undoubtedly be used in more creative fashions, and potentially for a common good.10 this essay offers less a thick description of palestinian walking than a reflection on how we can use a universal technique of the body, in its fitbit cyborgian incarnation and with its piety of inculcating health and responsible citizenship, as an ethnomethodological opportunity. how can quotidian practices such as walking and self-surveillance be understood in contexts where a much more charged and dangerous relationship exists between the surveillance of the self and that of the other? while i had no intention of doing anything more than continuing my walking competition with my father, the practice itself provided a serendipitous path to talking about walking, especially to those who found quantified walking absurd. although palestinians can indulge in playful competition consisting of jumping across the landscape like goats, the fitbit style of play and its corollary body-as-pet seem excessive to many. at least it seemed that way in 2017.11 one of my interlocutors, a palestinian bookshop owner in east jerusalem, expressed enormous relief at my writing an article about the fitbit, as that seemed to give the activity a certain goal (and dignity!) that he could respect. in many ways, i agree with him completely: i would never feel compelled to count my steps, to record them religiously, just to compete with myself or strangers without joking with my father or analyzing the process anthropologically. but as i described to my interlocutors how our familial fitbit competition ended up as a form of loving kinwork, a daily e-phatic communication that allowed us, after a fashion, to walk together despite the thousands of miles between us, my palestinian friends were moved. as members of a people who have become emblematic of continued displacement, they have all experienced the challenges of doing creative, connective kinwork across a distance. kinwork and academic work make the self-surveillance meaningful to me, although this form of work pales in contrast to the enormous self-work required to prevent the other-surveillance regime’s reach into the soul. in the abstract, nothing makes the sarha or shatha inherently incompatible with a fitbit, although there are a few obvious reasons why the act of measuring one’s steps as an end unto itself might have its limits as a primary concern. in terms of the mental energy devoted to movement, dtsd recording activity has nothing on palestinians’ extraordinary mental capacity to figure out alternative routes in the everyday due to closures and reroutings of movement both expected and unexpected. as hammami (2015, 12) points out, “the refusal to be made abject by that suffering is what marks you as a member of this particular moral community.” walking seems to be one of those ways in which palestinians are refusing to be made abject, refusing, as far as they can, negative stasis while engaging in positive stasis. the proliferation of organized group walking, or of friends out for a stroll, was something palestinian friends have remarked on in recent years. at this historical moment of serious constraint, walking constitutes a tactic through which palestinians not only resist dispossession and appreciate the beauty and richness of their land but also transform and contest the dominant depictions of palestinian life as merely bare life, one devoid of the joys, hopes, laughter, creativity, and energy that also mark daily life in palestine. postscript after i finished my final revisions to this essay, i decided to go for an early morning walk to al haram al sharif, the remarkable complex that contains the dome of the rock and al aqsa mosque. my entry, via the israeli checkpoint outside the complex, was facilitated by my canadian passport and my response of “catholic” to the israeli soldier’s question about my religion. (my usual self-description as a “fallen catholic” or “godless anthropologist” seemed a little too nuanced for checkpoint interaction with a young, armed soldier.) my palestinian interlocutors were amused to hear that somewhere between the beautiful golden dome and the olive groves that face it, i lost my fitbit, which seemed a timely end. notes acknowledgments it was an oddly timely gift to be the token anthropologist among people who identify as writers for the “the art of walking” workshop at the banff school of the arts and creativity in april 2018, especially since the last time i was in banff, i was a child, walking with my father, bob meneley. this essay is dedicated to him and to the memory of someone dear to both of us, katherine lesack, herself a great walker. i greatly appreciated the inspiration of my writing mentors at banff, garnette cadogan and anna badkhen. i am grateful for the insights of the beautiful and brilliant rema hammami and rana barakat, and, closer to home, for those of bruce grant and paul manning. vaidila banelis continues to make quotidian life more fun. for various inspirations, both intended and unintended, i thank ken albala, mirna bamieh, theo banelis, kate dougherty, daoud ghoul, baha hilo, aisha mansour, imad muna, marie paterson, alejandro paz, brennan sekulic, and vivien sansour. for invitations to present versions of this essay, thanks go to mustafa koç and ingrid hehmeyer of ryerson university and nefissa naguib of the university of oslo. this research was funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. thanks to the editors of cultural anthropology, especially christopher nelson, and to the thoughtful reviewers they chose for this piece. 1. “strava or it didn’t happen” is a saying that captures the impetus to record. the product’s website notes that “strava is the swedish word for ‘strive,’ which epitomizes who we are and what we do: if you’re striving to improve, no matter your goals or ability, you’re one of us.” 2. see also lalah khalili’s (2010) important discussion about the centrality of palestine as a place for developing surveillance and counterinsurgency strategies for the british and the israelis. 3. although east jerusalem technically forms part of the west bank, the israelis ultimately control access to it, which creates a constant source of tension. palestinians with west bank id or gaza id can only gain access to jerusalem if they have special permits. all official documents are ultimately issued by israel. for a nuanced discussion of the complicated system of permits, see tawil-souri 2011 and berda 2018. 4. underpinning this initiative is the questionable assertion that the supposedly universal desire of women to lose weight and talk about it will provide an opportunity to unify israeli and palestinian women. 5. although i distinctly remember the panicked schoolchildren ripping their earbuds out at qalandiya checkpoint the next day, i do not remember the child’s name, much as his senseless death deserves recognition. 6. as penny johnson (2011, 102) points out in her review of thomas’s book, it draws attention to the current constriction of palestinians’ “right to ramble.” the shatha group also appears in an article titled “rambling in palestine” by the british mountaineering council’s carey davies (2014). 7. zachary lockman (1996, 29–38) makes the point that the well-known zionist slogan “land without a people for a people without a land” does not mean that the early zionists didn’t realize arabs lived on the land, but rather that they did not consider the arabs there as a people that could constitute the land as a nation. similarly, the continuing presence of palestinians often seems to create the same effect: in a move that differs from complete erasure, contemporary settlers see them without recognizing them as legitimate landholders with rights. my thanks to alejandro paz for our conversations on this topic. 8. one of the reviewers for this article suggested that this might constitute a third kind of piety, a nationalist one. while my consultants were leery of associating with the explicit nationalist talk of the palestinian authority, they certainly supported the idea of getting to know the land of the country for urban palestinians. but we could see walking together as work attempting to unite palestinians from different parts of the west bank and east jerusalem as analogous to the walking kinwork that i do with my father and the fitbit. some even try to connect, when possible, palestinians who are living in israel with those in the west bank. 9. this tour formed part of the palestine hosting society’s live art project, sponsored by al-ma’mal foundation for contemporary art. 10. scholars of the wider field of biosensing (beyond fitbit) have explored the capacity for selftracking tools to generate data potentially for a collective good: see taylor 2016 on envisioning better bike routes and bohlen 2016 on managing 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machine … i did not feel like an animal, i felt like a clock, one made of blood and bone, that you could neither hurry nor delay… . there was no technology for it: i was the technology. —anne enright, making babies “there are three types of knowing in labor,” explained kristen, the childbirth educator hired to give private lessons to my doula client, jasmine: “primordial, modern, and self.”1 it was a cold, gray summer saturday in san francisco’s mission district, and we were seated in the bedroom of jasmine’s tastefully decorated loft apartment, parisian prints on the exposed brick wall and the sound of her housemate’s kitchen tinkering muffled in the next room. a doula is a birth attendant who provides informational, emotional, and physical support, usually beginning during pregnancy and continuing postpartum, but who does not carry medical responsibility. i conducted much of my fieldwork on birth in the bay area as a doula. jasmine and i faced a large pad of paper leaning on kristen’s easel, where she was writing down the three kinds of knowledge. primordial she scratched with her marker. “this is like a gut feeling. it’s something you know without thinking about it.” the scent of green tea wafted in from the kitchen, mixing with the marker’s sharp chemical aroma. jasmine stood up to shut the bedroom’s french doors against the ruckus of a delivery truck in the alley below, men hollering as they serviced the thai restaurant downstairs. she swayed from foot to foot as she walked back to her chair, and distractedly stroked her gray tunic where it stretched over her protruding belly, seven months pregnant. kristen continued to explain “modern knowing” as understanding “logistics,” combining a biomedical understanding of physiology with information about risks, tools, options, and protocols within medical care. she waved her freckled hand as if to dismiss this as kind of boring but necessary. finally, “self-knowing” is “knowing who you are and where you come from. it’s knowing what you feel comfortable with, and why,” explained kristen. “this third kind is the most important,” she said, “and our session’s focus.” this seemed unsurprising to me, since in silicon valley birthing culture, childbearing did not simply mean making a new life; it was also a project of making oneself, and, as i have argued elsewhere, of making a world (ford 2017). kristen had received her training from the national childbirth education organization called birthing from within, which i encountered multiple times during fieldwork. its curriculum, which incorporates spiritual metaphors like labyrinths to guide parents on their “childbearing journey,” encompasses many tropes and assumptions about birth that filtered throughout the bay area during my fieldwork from 2013 to 2016. among the upper middle-class silicon valley professionals i worked with, navigating contemporary childbearing was not so much a question of choosing between “technological” or “natural” approaches, of looking either to expertise or to tradition, or of fulfilling gendered and familial expectations, as it was about enacting a personalized process of “self-actualization.” in ways specific to this time and place, discovering and enacting the self is a primary way reproduction comes to matter. this article describes how the cultural and ideological specificities of silicon valley and its neoliberal instantiation of feminist empowerment are realized and reinforced through “self-actualized” birthing. self-actualization is my gloss on phrases i encountered in fieldwork, such as “become your best self,” “do what’s right for you,” and “progress on your journey.” analytically, i discuss self-making as a less morally charged description of the particular theory of self i encountered: a self pre-existing yet optimizable, intensely individual yet grounded in universal human biology, requiring the body but not reducible to it. here, subject and object merge, in ways distinct from earlier analyses of american reproductive embodiment (e.g., e. martin 2001 [1987]). discourses about self-actualization can transcend the shaming childbearing people often encounter, tied to accusations of endangering their babies either by not doing things “naturally” enough or by not making adequate use of technology. yet they also hint at a troubling alienation and suggest the presence of new forms of social pressure. birthing from within’s curriculum resonates with silicon valley’s entrepreneurially minded community, already focused on individualized desires and personal responsibility. in a childbearing context, this focus facilitates the autonomy that has been the rallying cry of activists pushing against regressive gender norms and coercive medical systems—and yet such autonomy can also perpetuate feelings of anxiety and disconnection that pervade neoliberal sociality. the reproductive story i tell here is not simply a new version of the familiar tale wherein a person realizes herself as a proper woman through becoming a (good) mother in a culturally appropriate way (e.g., paxson 2004). rather than foregrounding embeddedness in a heterosexual matrix of gender and kinship, these narratives around childbearing share tropes and cultural logics from the silicon valley world of innovation, disruption, and entrepreneurial self-making. for this community, then, the cultural significance of childbearing seems to have less to do with realizing gender ideology than with creative self-expression and self-optimization. my decision to use gender-neutral terms in my analytic voice marks not only a political stance, in solidarity with trans/queer politics and to avoid reifying birth as an essential component of womanhood, but a reflection of the gender-neutral virtues that inform silicon valley birth culture. what i find so interesting about kristen’s epistemology is that it is not binary but tripartite. childbearing people not only navigate the “primordial” and “modern” knowledges kristen described, but do so by connecting with a “self” that can itself be known and trusted. although it is in conversation with the long western history of a dualism between nature and culture, parsing the epistemological conditions of childbearing in terms of primordial, modern, and self-knowing cuts things a different way. it invites childbearing people to be “border creatures,” like donna j. haraway’s (1991) irreverent figures of simians, cyborgs, and women, which are political aspirations and challenging achievements that carry the potential for different ways of being. cyborgs refuse dualism by emblematizing a chimeric fusion of organic and technological components. simians present epistemological problems, as primates “like us” yet located across the human-animal divide. haraway argues that women constitute another liminal figure because they have been socially marginalized through association with “base” bodily nature and private emotion (as opposed to intellect and public leadership), yet persistently claim membership in economic, political, and intellectual collectives. although those i worked with would not explain it in these terms, many of them sought to approach contemporary american childbearing, and its political potential, by crafting themselves as border creatures. to the extent that bearing children within these communities is undertaken as a means toward self-actualization mediated through the design of embodied practices, it foregrounds an emancipatory politics of women’s self-determination, while simultaneously advancing a dominant cultural discourse that minimizes thinking about mutual accountability. in the following, i first set the ethnographic scene for these claims by introducing silicon valley, a place rich in both material and symbolic terms, and explaining my dual role as researcher and practicing doula. the second section provides an ethnographic look at how the self in this community is both innate and designed, with interwoven “natural” and “technological” dimensions. the third section elaborates the importance given to self-actualization as a sensibility, aspiration, and moral imperative, arguing that it has effectively become a new rite of passage. the fourth section describes problems with the ideal of self-actualization through childbearing, both in heightening personal anxiety and in advancing a politics of alienation that works alongside concerns about “the human species” in mutually reinforcing ways. through ethnographic examples, i aim to convey a sense of what “finding one’s path” within childbearing looks like for many of those i worked with, while situating silicon valley childbearing in a broader history of neoliberalism and feminist activism. method and place, entangled jasmine could not fit a standard childbirth preparation class into her full-time work schedule at a philanthropic investment consultancy. such courses often meet on weekday evenings for six to eight weeks, and many were already full, so she opted for a private “crash course” over two saturdays and invited me, her doula, to attend. birth classes were pricey investments, costing $200 to $600, and likewise was hiring a doula, which ranged from $500 to $2500 for a standard package of two prenatal meetings and one postpartum, attendance at the delivery, and four weeks of being on call.2 i had met jasmine through a mutual friend, and this was her first birth; i eventually attended the birth of her second child as well. she was typical of the people i served as a doula (and not unlike myself): well educated, white, middle-class, straight and married, in her early thirties, and actively concerned with making the “right” sorts of consumer and lifestyle choices (whatever those ultimately ended up being). although many exceptions to this demographic profile existed in my research, here i am concerned with what might be called a hip elite, a particular iteration of bourgeois sensibility drawing from yuppie, millennial, and hipster trends and colored by silicon valley’s specific culture. while this sensibility is too particular to be properly hegemonic, it nonetheless proves influential in setting both local and national trends, and responds to the moral and intellectual underpinnings of broader neoliberal developments. while i do not claim to have encountered a representative sample, my research was varied enough to provide a multifaceted picture of local “childbearing culture.”3 over nearly three years of fieldwork, i supported around fifteen people as a doula and participated in parent-oriented, professional, and activist activities pertaining to childbearing, including childbirth classes for expectant parents, continuing education for nurses, social salons for doulas, reproductive justice conferences, a breast-pump design meeting, and volunteering in a transitional home for vulnerable childbearing people. i interviewed people i encountered through these activities, followed local and national media, and wrote for a medical blog. in the united states, a largely privatized health-care system and historical antagonism between midwives and physicians have created rifts and disparities in maternity care. doctors oversee the vast majority of american births (more than 99 percent), including the roughly 9 percent attended by midwives in hospitals (acnm 2014); midwifery certification has separate tracks for home and hospital practice, and the systems are poorly integrated (cheyney 2011). doulas are supplementary providers whose position evolved in the wake of midwifery professionalization in the 1990s, and insurance does not cover their services. in my analysis, doulas exist as both a niche commodity for bespoke care and an activist platform for birth reform. put otherwise, they represent both the privatization of health care within neoliberal transformations of public welfare, and grassroots activist pushback against an already privatized, racist, classist, and ineffectual maternity system (see amnesty international 2011). questions of access and oversight prove central to deciding what the doula is or should be, and are actively being worked through in doula communities. silicon valley encompasses its own apparent contradictions. it is california’s high-tech hub, characterized by innovation and exclusion. although it originally referred to the south bay, silicon valley has spread up the peninsula to san francisco, where jasmine lived, increasingly engulfing much of the east bay and beyond. in the bay area, counterculture and cyberculture grew in each other’s shadow—natural living through technology was an aspiration, not a contradiction (turner 2008). the 1960s and 1970s countercultural movement catalyzed northern california’s reputation as a site of utopian possibility, building on the state’s role as the american final frontier, since reinforced through speculative fiction and hollywood (miller 2013). immigration, technological saturation, and cultural complexity make silicon valley “a microcosm of the social and cultural identities of the future” (english-lueck 2002, 11). the area is both diverse and exclusive, demographically one-third asian, one-third white, and one-quarter hispanic. nearly 40 percent of residents are foreign born, and 60 percent are under age forty-five (svirs 2017, n.d.). people are moving out of the area as quickly as others are moving in, and gentrification is happening at a hyperbolic pace (walker 2018). youth culture and eccentricity are valorized, and people approach work as a means of self-expression. california is a trendsetter for the nation (pastor 2018), and silicon valley exemplifies privileged, influential lifestyles imagined as countercultural but in fact fully entwined with neoliberal capital. i use silicon valley less as a geographical term than to categorize an aesthetic, moral, and intellectual sensibility tied to this particular place. it is a cultural “project,” like america, or the american west. the natural birth movement of the 1970s has distinguished roots in bay area counterculture: ina may gaskin, called the mother of modern (white) midwifery, started in san francisco before caravanning to tennessee; the berkeley nurse peggy vincent catalyzed hospital midwifery; santa cruz midwives were arrested for practicing medicine without a license after starting the first out-of-hospital birth center; and the marin-based author-activist suzanne arms started another such center in palo alto shortly thereafter. this push toward the natural in birthing experience was always more political than a rejection of technology itself, emphasizing women’s autonomy and solidarity in the face of patriarchal medical institutions (kline 2016). meanwhile, researchers at local institutions like stanford and uc san francisco continue to develop cutting-edge medical technologies, and silicon valley companies are known for offering egg freezing to employees while tech executives boast of eschewing maternity leave after elective caesarians. the bay area has long positioned itself as a bridge across the supposed nature/technology binary; indeed, what strikes me is the coexistence of extremes. a vast array of technologies surrounds the childbearing body in silicon valley. high-tech tools—from apps that monitor contractions and track fetal growth, to synthetic hormones and epidural tubing—are available alongside low-tech assistive devices such as large plastic birthing balls or cotton rebozo shawls. beyond simply offering better diagnosis or treatment, childbearing technologies alter professional responsibilities and relationships, and shape the embodied experiences of all involved (sandelowski 2000). as emilia sanabria (2016, 203) demonstrates in her work on the hormonal body, the false dichotomy between technological “interventions” and natural “non-interventions” is an inadequate (though common) site to evaluate the politics of intervention. although my interlocutors frequently differentiated between supposedly natural and medicalized approaches to birth, these actors’ categories operated as ideals far more than practical realities. the childbearing people i worked with crafted a bricolage that drew from the epistemological, ontological, moral, and bureaucratic claims attached to each approach. the insight that women stake out contingent middle ground in pursuing reproductive care has been a starting point in the anthropology of reproduction at least since pragmatic women and body politics (lock and kaufert 1998), with anthropologists offering critiques of discourses about the “natural” in midwifery (macdonald 2006) and (over)uses of obstetric technology (wendland 2008; morris 2013). my informants took for granted reliable access to emergency technologies such as ambulances and cell phones, which provided an enabling backdrop for the self-fashioning i describe. some americanist anthropology aligns itself with activist birth movements in important ways, offering critiques of mainstream obstetrics and championing midwifery or home birth (davis-floyd 2004 [1992]; cheyney 2011). as a practicing doula, i value the midwifery model and woman-centered care that such anthropology advocates, finding it useful for facilitating positive childbearing experiences within existing feminist politics. (and by doing so according to the conventions of the community in which i was immersed, i participated in the self-making practices i critique here.) however, i aim less to influence maternity care than to demonstrate how childbearing marks a site where cultural tensions are being worked out, following those who have argued that reproduction lies at the center of anthropological concern (e.g., rapp 2001). political-economic logics are never set apart from the gendered politics of reproduction (gal and kligman 2000; briggs 2018). taking up calls for a renewed examination of “medically normal” and “ordinary” pregnancy (han 2013; ivry 2015), and for further ethnographic research on hospital birth (morton 2009), i contend that examining childbearing in silicon valley’s influential local culture offers a window onto our broader neoliberal moment and the ways of being it encourages. the technological making of natural birth: designing the innate jasmine’s birthing from within course exemplified the pragmatic idealism of silicon valley birth culture by critiquing medically managed birth while taking advantage of its presence. jasmine intended to give birth in a hospital, as do more than 98 percent of americans, yet she found “natural birth” compelling and wanted to make informed decisions about engaging with medical procedures and technologies. the same held true for nearly all the participants in the four non-hospital childbirth education courses i attended. all my birth experience as a doula was in hospitals, although i interviewed people who had or were planning home births. in the united states, the term natural birth generally refers to an absence of pain medication. it can refer more broadly to the absence of medical technology altogether, or simply to vaginal delivery. birthing from within (bfw) is not as prescriptively anti-medical as are some of its contemporaries in childbirth education, such as hypnobirthing, and it offers classes decidedly broader in scope than those available through most hospitals. it shares many similarities with the enormously popular “mindfulness-based childbirth education” courses i shadowed. all such courses take up the legacy of the 1970s natural birth movement, which critiqued the pathologization and male/medical control of birth, but they also incorporate pushback against older approaches like lamaze and la leche league for being too dogmatic and creating shame and guilt around using medical technology, whether by choice or necessity. birthing from within serves as an illustrative example of how natural and technological aspects of birth become woven together in silicon valley childbearing culture. although bfw presumes that its audience is wary of medical intervention, it acknowledges that such interventions can prove highly beneficial “if needed.” “like it or not,” bfw’s website states, “one of the modern tasks of birth preparation for all parents is to learn about the hospital birth culture in their community,” including preparing for medically induced labor and cesarean birth. a fifteen-minute animated film called elk and the epidural, presenting the benefits and drawbacks of epidurals (a spinal nerve-block that numbs from the waist down), featured in both jasmine’s course and in a longer-format bfw course at which i assisted. in this fable, a calving mama elk encounters difficulties in her labor, decides to have an epidural, and births contentedly in the hospital. the film presents “animal nature,” in the figure of the elk, as not only aspirational (in rosy watercolor aesthetics) but also attainable with, not in opposition to, the use of technology. this best-of-both-worlds approach echoes feminist debates over “having it all,” while showing the supposed distinction between masculine technology and feminine animality to be a false dichotomy. importantly, race and class privilege is implicit in the appeal of robust animality as a marker of feminine empowerment; the target audience is wealthy euro-american women historically rendered as fragile and hysterical within patriarchal medical traditions, whereas nonwhite women have frequently seen themselves dehumanized and their physical and emotional pain dismissed (kapsalis 1997; briggs 2000). the epistemological triad of primordial, modern, and self-knowing offered by bfw is haunted by the nature/culture binarism and remains in cultural conversation with a suite of binaries—between organic and technological, instinctual and rational, animal and human, female and male—in resonance with deep-seated western categorical dualisms (ortner 1974; maccormack and strathern 1980; descola 2013). yet when kristen describes “modern” knowing as “understanding logistics,” it extends well beyond simply using technology, while “primordial” knowing indexes an ideological commitment to a specific version of the natural. moreover, the self-knowing subject foregrounded by the third form of knowledge is necessary for, and indeed produced through, managing both modern and primordial knowing. as they design birth plans and prepare for the labor of birth, childbearing people in silicon valley negotiate nature and technology by drawing from both the idea that self-authenticity stems from an unadulterated, primordial nature and that a very modern, reflexive strategy of self-design and self-optimization enables self-realization. * * * “there’s a hormone cocktail in birth that switches moms from leftto right-brain thinking,” kristen stated later in the course, her blunt-cut hair swinging over her shoulder as she leaned forward to explain. “it’s about activating that deep brain stem area, the amygdala, not the prefrontal cortex.” according to basic neuroscience, the brain stem is responsible for systemic and motor function, the amygdala for emotions and memory, and the prefrontal cortex for cognition. kristen presumed jasmine and i were conversant with such neuroscientific facts, a display of expertise that recruited us as educated insiders while lending her claims epistemological weight. she assumed we had heard that analytic/instrumental thought comes from the left-brain hemisphere, while creative/emotional thought is generated by the right. both kinds of thinking had a place in the birthing knowledge kristen was describing. according to the bfw website, this “hormone cocktail” functions similarly for all birthing people, moving them from controlled, logical thinking to “labor land,” where “instinctual, emotional, intuitive, creative, and meditative” thought reigns. the website describes primordial knowledge as a state of being: “the innate maternal instinct. women have this knowing in their bones! and they are in this knowing when they are not in their thinking mind!”4 i was surprised by the extent to which the website’s language naturalized the trope of cartesian dualism, locating primordial knowledge in the (female) body and actively opposing it to the rational (male) mind. yet kristen’s invocation of neuroscience folded these into one another, locating—and validating—both in the birthing brain. endocrinology functioned similarly, positing hormones as both a site of innate involuntary response and a medium for self-cultivation (many hormones are produced by glands in or near “the brain” and the two discourses are mutually reinforcing). in bfw discourse, one’s “self” is always both innate and designed. biology and culture, nature and technology, the social and the emotional can all be recruited as tools in knowing and making this self. the art of self-making involves knowing which of these tools to use when, and this is precisely what kristen was coaching jasmine to do. to access “labor land,” one must put in place conditions conducive to the body’s release of oxytocin. kristen explained that this is why birthing in a calm, safe-feeling environment is important, expounding on a basic theory of hormonal responses i encountered frequently—from doula training, to birthing people explaining their homebirth rationale, to hospital nurses turning the lights down during labor. essentially, this theory holds that feelings of relaxation and safety are associated with oxytocin, the “love” hormone that facilitates birth physiology, while problematic responses trigger the release of cortisol and adrenaline, the “fight, flight, or freeze” hormones that are mutually reinforcing with stress and fear, and that inhibit birth physiology. to some extent, hormones are considered involuntary biological responses, yet one can learn which hormonal responses are beneficial or not and rationally train oneself, through mindfulness, to be more or less open to their effects. discourses about nature and instinct supported the desirability of oxytocin, yet a rational subject was required to cultivate such desirable embodied effects. for example, warnings circulated in childbearing communities about the “cascade of interventions” (in the film, mama elk hesitates at the brink of “epidural cascading falls”). according to the “cascade” theory, inducing labor using artificial oxytocin (the drug pitocin) will bypass the natural physiological oxytocin response that causes contractions and simultaneously provides some pain relief. because the pitocin-induced contractions will be stronger and more painful, the birthing person may need (or request) an epidural. epidurals slow labor in part by foreclosing movement, a key “coping strategy” doulas use to keep labor progressing, necessitating an increase in pitocin. the now hyper-strong contractions cannot be felt by the birthing person but they can distress the fetus, particularly given the absence of calming oxytocin, which it would otherwise receive through the bloodstream. since indications of fetal distress are cause for c-sections, inductions and epidurals contribute to the american cesarean “epidemic,” with rates at around 33 percent (morris 2013). because oxytocin also primes both birthing person and newborn for bonding and breastfeeding, these postpartum activities may be compromised. furthermore, oxytocin released during bonding and breastfeeding stimulates uterine contractions that expel the placenta and halt bleeding, described as an “evolutionary” means of preventing postpartum hemorrhage, a leading cause of maternal death. this theory offers a sophisticated blueprint, based on modern scientific knowing, that childbearing people can use to make informed decisions about birth practices in light of their biologically involuntary, primordially programmed effects. self-making requires primordial knowing as well as rationality—that is, cultivating certain kinds of putatively innate awareness. the bfw website explains that social conditioning has taught modern women “not to trust or act on our gut knowing,” and therefore, “one of women’s modern tasks of pregnancy is to first learn to feel their gut instinct and to distinguish this feeling from fleeting fear (or the contagious fear of others).” intention and inevitability merge: one can practice accessing and trusting “gut instinct,” using the prefrontal cortex to prepare to bypass the prefrontal cortex. “instinct” becomes simultaneously a goal and a compulsion, as one must learn to disentangle trustworthy, desirable, properly innate instincts from emotional responses caused by external factors. this idea recruits a deeply rooted western ideology about the interior origins of authentic identity, as opposed to aspects of oneself shaped by relations and context (foucault 1990; sadjadi 2019). north american body projects generally concern themselves with revealing one’s preexistent personal reality (one’s “nature”), as opposed to approaching bodies as “plastic” fields of potentiality (sanabria 2016, 191). this is evident in the name “birthing from within.” in the bfw framework, instincts are desirable not because they are biological but because they are internal, and thus linked to personal authenticity. the cortisol panic response, although equally biological, is not valorized, in part because it is seen as resulting from external factors. yet in contrast to the pediatric gender clinics sahar sadjadi (2019) describes, bfw does not consider identity a passive truth waiting to be revealed (waiting in the brain, which is dematerialized and opposed to the body). rather, the active and ongoing process of seeking to know oneself equally forms part of one’s identity. this idea is influenced by the cultural prestige of technology-based design and optimization within silicon valley, and by scientific frontiers in which biology is itself a technology (franklin 2013). this does not suggest that bodies are understood as malleable in the way they are for the brazilian hormone users sanabria (2016) describes; self-design is not about crafting one’s materiality within social relations, but rather about creating the proper conditions for internal truth to emerge. biology, whether articulated in terms of brains or hormones, does not so much constitute a medium as a conduit. it is a means to authenticity, digging into personal depths by digging into evolutionary depths (discussed below) and reconciling them within modern technological contexts. importantly, primordial biology is not an end in itself. the contemporary self-aware birthing person is neither animal—driven by instincts and evolutionarily set hormone patterns, as epitomized in some biocultural approaches and unassisted “free birth”—nor machine, overridden by technological rationalization, as in the figure of the scheduled cesarean.” rather, this “border figure” wields both instinct and rationality in service of actualizing an authentic, optimized self. key to this project is self-knowledge, bfw’s name for a managerial ability that entails self-discipline, self-awareness, and self-confidence. self-knowledge is needed to override problematic emotional-biological responses. instructors at both the longer-format bfw class and the mindfulness-based class emphasized the importance of a meditative mental state to enable “non-reactive behavior.” such meditative presence is neither instinctual nor analytic, but describes a sort of emotional transcendence. the other bfw instructor, janice, explained “reactions” as defenses, and since a properly cultivated birthing space was safe, a birthing person had no need for defensiveness. however, she said, “your body doesn’t know that… . you can’t think clearly when the brain is flooded with adrenaline.” likewise, when kristen described the amygdala, she implied that its functioning would sometimes need to be overridden. self-knowledge included confidently directing the social situation, which janice encouraged birthing people to do by “calmly working out problems” from their meditative state, without either creating or avoiding conflict, nor speaking from a place of wanting to appease. by deliberately managing one’s affect, one could also manage one’s hormones and brain, which in turn influenced one’s rational faculties and enabled practical action. the locus of the self is quite slippery here, a moving target that shuttles between being designed and being innate. the embodied self is a feedback loop between process and product, subject and object, transcendence and immanence, and the personal dexterity needed to navigate contemporary birthing has to account for this complex “lived body” (lock and farquhar 2007). silicon valley childbearing constitutes a management project premised on a sophisticated understanding of sociotechnical logistics, an attunement to one’s material biophysical functions, and a quasi-spiritual self-awareness. these capacities are not at odds but interdependent, looping through each other like a möbius strip (grosz 1994). as with people diagnosed with depression and confronted with their brain-scan images in joseph dumit’s (2003) “is it me or my brain?,” who work through the slippage in whether and how one’s brain is or is not one’s self by invoking (and then transgressing) dualistic understandings of mind-body, so too do childbearing people use dualistic terms to describe this management project. cultural categories are dynamic and blurry yet constitutive of the ways people navigate and change their world. a new rite of passage “we support women—what the mother wants is our priority,” asserted my doula training instructor. being a doula was, in theory, not about furthering our own agendas for a “good birth,” or following any prescribed course of action. as service providers, we were to help the birthing person identify her own desires by providing information and opportunities for reflection, and to mediate between her, her partner and family, and hospital staff to help realize those desires. like most of the women who asked me to be their doula, jasmine did so because she wanted “support.” as a doula, figuring out how to be supportive and not directive involved asking, listening to, and observing what a person wanted. navigating childbearing decisions and practices was not so much a question of seeking expert advice or following in the footsteps of friends or family as it was one of introspection and choosing “a path that’s right for me,” in jasmine’s words. crafting such a path has two aims: childbearing people (and their doulas) have to manage not only birth (toward the desired outcome of a healthy baby) but also the meanings of the “birth experience” toward a feeling of self-actualization. the achievement of this feeling is aspirational, but within the community examined here, the compulsion to seek it is normative to the extent of marking a rite of passage. practitioners on the medical periphery, such as doulas and childbirth educators, often declined to be overtly prescriptive while attending closely to the process, and outcome, of others’ decision-making. childbearing people were encouraged, even pressured, by online media and their peers to make their own choices and have opinions, even when they were not particularly interested in doing so. “non-directed” decision-making reflects dominant euro-american ideas of agency and consent (see tine gammeltoft’s [2014] contrast with vietnamese practices of collective decision-making). yet its “non-optional” status levies judgment of its own. discourse about making the “right” choices could certainly prove moralizing (e.g., lyerly 2006), even in ostensibly supportive reassurances that c-sections or formula feeding did not amount to personal failures, but those among whom i worked generally held that childbearing people should be judged not for their choices but for the process by which they make them. not only does this stance presume that various options are accessible at will, which is not the case for most people (the way medical technologies are often forced or withheld in racialized ways is only the tip of this iceberg, as detailed by reproductive justice scholars critiquing “choice,” e.g., roberts 1997). it also presumes that people have the time, energy, and money to spend crafting their approach and themselves. i was particularly struck by this when volunteering at the transitional home for vulnerable childbearing people, where clients needed much more practical assistance than help identifying their desires. recognizing ways my middle-class doula preparation proved largely irrelevant brought into relief how centered it was around shaping such an “appropriate” childbearing subjectivity. this pressure to take a stance (even if hypothetical) was also highlighted in an interview with a timid, middle-class pregnant person who was deferential to her husband and parents, and expressed concern over her difficulty formulating opinions about her upcoming birth. two rituals within this rite of passage stand out to me as emblematizing the aspects of design and innateness constitutive of self-making: birth plans and labor land. both are codified, meaning-laden ways of marking a transition from a less-actualized to a more-actualized self (understood as the basis for becoming a “better” mother and woman). as rituals, they serve a performative and not merely instrumental function, recursively drawing the birthing person’s attention to the meaningfulness of the process itself, apart from the outcome. in developing a birth plan, a childbearing person decides ahead of time what procedures they want to happen in the birth room, usually as a result of research, counseling, and introspection, often facilitated by a doula. increasingly, these ideas are being called “birth wishes” rather than “plans” to acknowledge unpredictability—a reframing that is less conducive to disappointment but that also suggests its performative role. people wrote such lists to express their deliberative personal desires, but ironically, the actual plans tended to resemble each other. as an obstetrician observed in a 2016 slate article, “everyone and her mother now wants skin-to-skin and delayed cord clamping,” referring to placing the newborn directly on the birthing person’s chest after delivery, before cleaning and wrapping, and waiting to clamp and cut the umbilical cord until it stops pumping blood into the baby (austin 2016). indeed, jasmine’s birth plan included both items. other aspects of the birth plan were more personalized, such as whether nurses should offer pain medication, whether to watch the delivery with a mirror, what to do with the placenta, who would cut the umbilical cord, or about bringing speakers, pillows, or lights from home. when i started fieldwork in 2013, birth plans seemed nearly ubiquitous as a ritual marking the work a childbearing person had done toward becoming more self-actualized; as a doula, i discussed a relatively standard list of possible procedures with clients, including to what lengths they would go (or like me to go) to assert agency over what happened in the birth room. birth plans are less common today in 2020, due largely to the evidence-based adoption of many commonly requested birthing options into routine hospital procedures, which increasingly articulate a middle ground between highly medical and nonmedical birth. the animalistic state kristen referred to as “labor land” equally forms part of this new rite of passage. generally, this meant feeling the intensity of unmedicated labor for a period of time, but it did not have to last for the entire birthing process; strength and self-awareness could be indicated by knowing when one had had enough primal experience and wanted an epidural, as well as by stubborn endurance. many doulas and midwives i spoke with extolled the beauty and power of “primal,” “instinctive,” and “animal” states during labor, characterizing them in terms of internal awareness, spiritual intensity, and disregard for social and cultural conventions. alzbeta, an experienced doula, offered this explanation when asked about “labor land”: it’s that place where you really need to get out of your head and go within. just work with it. go with the flow, and don’t go against it. and i dunno if that’s the right terminology, calling it labor land, but definitely i’ve seen it. an animal instinct. you’ll ask a lot of women, they’ll say, “oh my gosh,” or the partner will say, “she’s gone to that place, and it was really surprising, but she went there.” explaining that “we are taught in our culture to stay in our frontal brain,” she called it a sacred and beautiful thing to trust instead in a knowing body: “don’t try to analyze, just let go and let your body do it.” dani, whom i interviewed shortly after she gave birth in a hospital—without medication and with a midwife—referenced animality at multiple points in our conversation. for her, animality meant an emphasis on physicality and immediacy. dani: [my midwife] said she saw a laboring goat one time and it just wanted to ram its head up against a wall. that was me. i just wanted someone to push my head really hard. me: how was your brain working when you were in labor? dani: i was like an animal. i kinda describe it as like, you know how dogs want to just crawl into the backyard and die under a bush by themselves? that’s what it felt like my labor experience was! [laugh] i didn’t want any light, i didn’t want any major stimulation, closed curtains, turned off all lights … i did not want to know what time it was … so that’s what i mean animalistic, just intensely present to what was going on right there. open-mouthed, guttural “animal” noises very much formed a part of birthing, sounding out everywhere from doula training, to births i attended, to a singing circle for pregnant people and birth workers. once, in a childbirth class at which i was assisting, i was asked to playact a person in labor, and making grunting or moaning noises was foremost among the trainer’s requests. these ritualistic behaviors help generate the experience of self-actualization precisely because the animalistic is framed as essentially human. along with noisemaking, nudity seemed almost inevitable; laboring people would gradually cease to care about tugging their hospital gown into place, and my assisting them while they showered and used the toilet quickly became a commonsense intimacy. i watched hospital practitioners discreetly remove feces produced during pushing, sometimes sprinkling peppermint oil to cover the scent. i have a poignant memory of another client, molly, squatting flushed and naked on a “birth stool,” a low chair with a hole cut in its seat. her midwife’s ponytail brushed the linoleum as she practically laid her head on the hospital room floor, watching molly’s vulva and encouraging her. molly had been pushing for nearly two hours, her trembling, glowing body clinging between triumph and exhaustion. yet there was something incongruous and even ridiculous about the scene, settled against its backdrop of computerized bureaucracy and orderly generic decor. here, nudity is embraced as a sign and symptom of tapping into primordial power, a far cry from the infantilization of the shaved pubic area robbie davis-floyd (2004 [1992]) describes of decades past, yet such power must exist in modern contexts. reconciling these contrasts is part of ritual self-making. just as the birth plan’s significance is more about design than implementation, labor land concerns the personal development needed to “go there” and release into one’s innate animality, while still being connected to high-tech surroundings. although she rejected the term labor land, dani described her unmedicated birthing experience as visiting another world, using intense spiritual terms: labor land sounds like candy land, sounds like something really light. i’ve been describing it as i went to hell. it’s birth hell, it’s totally birth hell. going to the moon and back. it’s like intergalactic travel. but it really is like going to the underworld and bringing a baby back. you have to go down, you have to meet the devil … shake his hand and do a little dance, and yeah, then you have to climb back up from hades… . oh, yeah, and bleed like hell. it was very grecian, like otherworldly. spirituality was frequently invoked to frame this foray into the nonrational. biology, animality, and the primordial are all understood as universal human attributes, but the process by which one accesses such attributes is specific to one’s personal “journey” inward. although this journey is considered deeply human, it marks a radical departure from conventional sociality. in alzbeta’s words, “ignore everyone around you, think ‘i don’t care.’” to some extent, this departure is framed in gendered terms. midwives and doulas often marked the primal state as essentially female, capable of catalyzing a specifically feminine spiritual transformation (see gaskin 2002 [1975]). animal metaphors and appeals to supernatural forces can facilitate a female experience that exists beyond the social constraints of gender propriety. yet the rituals of self-making i am describing are not primarily concerned with producing womanhood correctly, much less social identities as “good” wives or mothers; rather, they foreground a person operating at the height of her capacities by skillfully drawing on the human qualities of rationality and animality. when people like jasmine craft childbearing selves, their choices come attached to ideologies; self-narration drawing on these ideologies forms part of ritual self-making. childbearing people often explained their practices to me using phrases like, “that’s just how i approach life,” or “i’m going to do [x] but i’m not ashamed to have [y],” or “i’m doing [z], but i’m not that kind of person.” dani differentiated herself from both a close friend and her sister, saying she and her partner “went the traditional medical western route” because they birthed in a hospital and accepted various tests. her partner explained how their friends, despite many similarities in their lives, “chose to go, like, total hippie style. they never had a sonogram, basically didn’t enter a western medical facility at all.” they then described how dani’s sister had a home birth but was “not as hippie [as either themselves or their friends] … they’re watching the giants’ game right now, they’re more mainstream, they’re young people, they party, they’re hip, they’re not, like, political.” because choices are seen to reflect and reinforce personal identities, the process by which one makes and advocates for them must be based in self-knowledge. brigitte jordan’s (1993 [1978]) birth in four cultures introduced the concept of “authoritative knowledge” to describe institutional, professional forms of knowing about birth and women’s bodies. the concept has been used to reclaim intuitive, relational knowledge (davis-floyd and sargent 1997) and is often contrasted with “experiential knowledge” that draws on cultural tradition and the experiences of friends and family (abel and browner 1998). yet neither the “authoritative knowledge” of experts nor the “experiential knowledge” communicated through traditional practice is deemed sufficient to guide one through the thicket of birth choices available to this community. the pressure childbearing people felt to become informed about medical/scientific evidence is not the same as unreflectively submitting to medical expertise. a popular website, evidencebasedbirth.com, produces curated reports of biomedical studies on hot-topic issues and encourages people to bring the reports to their next provider appointment, stating that “informed, empowered choices” will yield “the positive birth you deserve!” (dekker n.d.). this exceeds the “educated consumer” model by promising fulfillment on a more existential level. similarly, i rarely heard anyone explain their choices with reference to cultural tradition. some people invoked family traditions, like gifting a particular kind of teddy or using a heritage cradle, but not received wisdom about how to undergo childbearing. accepting help from parents and in-laws was often coupled with strategies for maintaining personal space and defending one’s preferences. stanford medicine offered a course for new grandparents, teaching them, basically, to back down and respect their children’s choices as parents. while some may feel removed from familial and cultural traditions for reasons of geographic and class mobility or generational length, here i am pointing to the cultural pressure to self-invent by crafting personally meaningful rituals and making “new traditions.” for example, so-called blessingways were promoted in my doula training and practiced by several people i interviewed; these appropriate a navajo custom (generally uncredited) and entail a gathering of friends and family to bless the pregnant person via newly invented rituals like group singing or making bracelets to wear until the baby is born. in silicon valley generally, knowledge accrues authority less from established institutions or heritage than from claims to being innovative, disruptive, and original.5 echoing the reproductive-rights rallying cry, “woman is the authority on her own body,” becoming an authority on oneself is forwarded as a moral and social imperative, part of a ritual framework toward becoming a more fully developed, self-aware, and empowered person. the limits of self-authority childbearing people in silicon valley are presented with the idea that crafting one’s birth experience constitutes an act of self-discovery and, ultimately, of self-actualization, but in taking up that project they might fail as often as they succeed. people i spoke with weighed circulating ideals against the constraints and imperatives of their own lives and lifestyles. being adamant about not having an epidural or cesarean could align with having several rounds of egg extraction and in-vitro fertilization. people made such compromises from positions of great privilege, and even then making it all work out appeared stressful. similar to how emily abel and carole browner (1998) describe women’s “selective compliance” with medical authority, i saw “selective compliance” with an idealized “self-authority.” people’s resolve wavered, and their opinions could fluctuate under shifting influences, pushing them to seek certainty elsewhere. the pressure for every woman to chart her own path and make decisions “from within” can be intimidating, particularly when one has little experience of childbearing and is unsure of what is actually possible. in part, doulas are a response to this reality. everyone wanted “what’s best for baby”—but it was not always obvious what that was, or what the childbearing person’s own desires had to do with it. similarly, the injunction to design the proper conditions for “natural capacities” to emerge led to feelings of failure if one’s body did not rise to the occasion. the reflexive self-making described above is not easy to realize in practice. as childbearing decisions become practices of self-actualization, they also become ways of doing feminism, producing a less-gendered womanhood, and making reproduction matter—that is to say, they become political. in this sense, they are foucauldian “techniques of the self” (foucault 1988). yet the way self-actualization circulates as a discourse is notably depoliticized, supposedly “just” about oneself. this is both a way of not acknowledging the structural and material constraints on making and realizing one’s choices, and a means of disconnecting from relationships, traditions, and responsibilities that might make claims on oneself but might also provide guidance and reassurance. it is precisely because the material and social conditions that interfere with self-actualization are sidelined from the self-making feedback loop that the whole project is not only untenable, and therefore anxiety-provoking at a personal level, but can resonate with feelings of alienation and disempowerment ratcheted up to the species level. both of these issues are illustrated beautifully by a breast-pump user experience meeting i attended. jasmine experienced the postpartum period after her first child’s birth as full of anxieties about returning to work, producing and pumping milk, and the baby’s weight. anxious memories of this time overshadowed preparations for the birth of her second child. when i encountered a silicon valley tech startup founded by three stanford graduates designing a better breast pump and looking for moms to talk to, i connected them with jasmine. later, i myself attended a meeting to brainstorm design goals for their nascent product. the meeting was held at an incubator that helps launch san francisco tech startups by providing them a workspace, funding, and mentorship. i arrived at the refurbished warehouse in the gentrifying, techie soma district, with its banged-up metal door and rusty railings, and checked in on a sleek ipad. piles of electronics were strewn across tables filling the open main space. in a smaller meeting room, pump prototypes of silicone cups and tubing were set out, and refreshments included varieties of mrs. patel’s lactation treats and teas made with fenugreek seed to stimulate milk production, a gesture toward both the herbal medicine of the white natural birth movement and the prominence of south asian immigrant cultures in silicon valley. the other six attendees were nursing mothers. infant feeding is a morally and emotionally charged issue (often reduced to questions of breast milk versus formula, though there are myriad hybrid practices) among white, educated, and/or middle-class communities. logistical difficulties accompany breastfeeding while maintaining a professional life, as jasmine did, in addition to a swath of anxieties and frustrations about one’s ability to produce adequate breastmilk. both concerns were projected onto the fantasy pump we were envisioning. attendees said it should ideally work under clothing, with people around, and while doing something else (multitasking seemed essential). it should be easy to clean with few parts and crevices, simple to use with no instructions, and have mix-and-match components to suit various outfits and contexts. perhaps it could sense when it was set up incorrectly and alert the user, and come with a nightlight. they emphasized that it must be a stress reducer, not a stress enhancer. particularly interesting was talk of an accompanying mobile app to track data and provide moral support, offering a virtual “high five” and letting the user know how much milk had been pumped—although attendees worried such information might be “crushing” should the volume prove less than usual. the app offered a kind of technological intuition, as these nursing people not only hoped it might assuage feelings of failure and guilt but also help them relax and “connect with the baby’s needs” through tracking, praise, reminders, and education—“like a baby health fitbit.” this breast pump was to be a personalized tool tailored to one’s own biometrics and emotions. when paid labor often separates childbearing people from their babies, yet the virtues of breastfeeding are extolled—from the u.s. surgeon general’s call to action (u.s. department of health and human services 2011) to the rise of “militant lactivism” (faircloth 2013)—breast pumps make for a crucial technology. they contain contradictory politics, blurring domestic work and paid labor in a way that creates “more work for mother” (boyer and boswell-penc 2010), and providing more mobility and freedom to users while also perpetuating the exceptional absence of guaranteed maternity leave in the united states. at the ux meeting, we did not discuss maternity leave policies or employer accommodations for pumping. nor were questions of affordability addressed; when i asked what price point the developers anticipated, the range given was out of reach for most american families. the quest for an individualized, exclusive, technical solution for a problem that might otherwise be solved by collectively restructuring working conditions, gender relations, and state responsibility illustrates the neoliberal context in which self-actualization is valorized. the ux meeting exemplifies how pressure to craft oneself results in personal anxieties about failure, and eclipses structural and social issues on which enacting desires depends. in the circles i moved in during fieldwork, rhetoric about humans writ large could take on apocalyptic tones, echoing epochal anxieties about the anthropocene and technological modernity’s negative effects, often via nostalgia for an imagined past purity. michel odent’s (2014) childbirth and the evolution of homo sapiens is emblematic. in it, the french obstetrician blames c-sections, inductions, and other medical interventions into the “oxytocin system” for population-wide problems with autoimmune, metabolic, and affective disorders, extrapolating the stakes of “bad” birth choices to the fate of the species. discourses of “paleo-parenting,” similar in practice and intellectual heritage to popular attachment-parenting philosophies, recruit evolution to advocate for particular cultural practices, such as extended breastfeeding, baby wearing, and co-sleeping. the primordial knowledge discussed above is related to this, but while that emphasized looking within, the aspect i am pointing to here emphasizes looking behind. looking to primates as bearers of biological truth—and to human cultural arrangements supposedly closer to primate life—evoke evolutionary narratives in the service of self-optimization. they look to the deep past to locate a form of truth in human origins, one usually disconnected from the sort of relational issues that might make claims on someone in the present. at least in silicon valley, the primordial is not the 1970s version of nature, which evoked anticonsumerism, informal communality, spirituality, harmonizing with the outdoors, and allowing the body to do what it will. nor is it ecofeminism, foregrounding ecological and intergenerational relations and their concomitant responsibilities. rather, as described above, the primordial invokes pop neuroscience and the idea that certain traits or processes are hard-wired into generic individuals, downplaying the role of society or cultural particularity. it is more about instinct than intuition, in that it is framed as something both universal and inherent to individuals, rather than cultivated through particular experiences in an interconnected world. this take on nature lies at the root of other popular trends in silicon valley and elsewhere, such as paleo diets and barefoot running. such “modern primitivism” is further consistent with transhumanist practices like biometric tracking or biohacking (schüll 2016). what links them and makes them distinct from how nature and technology coincided in 1970s silicon valley is a focus on self-optimization. this self-optimization resembles the self-making discussed above in that it is achieved through managing logistics well and in keeping with one’s essential nature, but it heightens anxiety by suggesting the existence of a best way to do so. the breast pump app and its “baby fitbit” capacities align with this trend. for the people i worked with, such rhetoric both fueled their anxiety by elevating the stakes of their decisions and provided much-desired guidance. conclusion the fantasy breast pump encapsulates the political aspirations at stake in this version of self-making. it would seamlessly meld into the childbearing person’s physical and emotional contours, enhancing her capabilities and fortifying her wellness, while feeling “like skin on skin” instead of being hooked to a machine. in this imaginary, the nursing person is a harawayian cyborg, empowered by relationship to a machine. likewise, mammalian functioning is desirable not via comparison with the denigrated animality of livestock—nursing people did not want to feel reproductively harnessed, “like a cow,” when using the breast pump—but instead the primordial version represented by the noble wild elk and experienced as naked power. the pump would produce new embodied possibilities—in many ways, new possibilities for being a woman—in a historical context of feminism in which both the mechanical and the fleshly have been simultaneously romanticized and disparaged. new social possibilities for womanhood are at stake as well. for childbearing people in contemporary silicon valley and elsewhere, bearing and raising children may be increasingly oriented toward “having the experience” (or not) of enacting a sense of self through the process of maternity and parenting, rather than fulfilling kin-based responsibilities and gendered expectations or forging important filial ties.6 cultural artifacts such as sheila heti’s (2018) acclaimed novel/memoir, motherhood, poignantly illustrate an approach to procreation framed as a project of creative self-actualization. we can read a similar push toward self-actualization via personalized optimization in the recent pressure for elite women to freeze their eggs while they are relatively young—something numerous silicon valley companies have offered to subsidize for employees as a workplace benefit. timing childbearing in career trajectories marks a contemporary negotiation of “having it all,” when having children itself is no longer a necessary rite of passage for adulthood, and might be seen as equally or less important than a career as a means for crafting one’s identity. childbirth in silicon valley today entails rationally navigating technological and social options in ways consistent with a primordial nature that itself exceeds the terms of rational thought, a project described as self-actualization. a good birth, then, is one in which a birthing person realizes themselves as agentive in a particular way: as both thoughtfully in control and able to tap into their inner animality by setting the proper conditions for it to emerge. a cultural emphasis on personal agency here responds to a history of misogyny in hospital reproductive care; it can also neutralize dogmatic ideas about natural versus medical approaches that have been used to shame and coerce women, and shifts focus off the fetus/baby, whose supposed interests can eclipse those of the mother in reproductive politics (bordo 2004). yet a cultural focus on self-actualization also diverts attention from (and perpetuates) the social and structural pressure put on mothers to act as the sole fount of security in an insecure world (villalobos 2014). moreover, the elite self-making i describe is shadowed by the curtailed motherhood of those struggling with homelessness, drug abuse, incarceration, and economic precarity prominent in the bay area, and speaks to its politics of extremes (knight 2015; sufrin 2017). there are fundamental prerogatives that many childbearing people cannot take for granted, from being listened to and having one’s pain taken seriously, to having access to health care and a safe home. recent reporting about the united states’ abysmally high rate of maternal mortality, deeply marked by racial disparities, is bringing this reality into broader awareness (n. martin et al. 2017; villarosa 2018). silicon valley’s and bfw’s shared emphasis on individualized desires, self-awareness, and personal responsibility as, in kristen’s words, the “most important kind of knowledge” advances a social politics of non-relationship, of being not-accountable for each other—which, from a position of privilege, can look like autonomy. yet anxieties about an uncertain future beyond any individual’s control or influence haunt this sort of autonomy, perhaps in a mutually reinforcing way. in his study of u.s. affect since the cold war, joseph masco (2006) argues that technological fallout creates complex problems that exceed existing social forms (such as the nation or the family), take on momentum of their own, and bewilder people’s sensory capacity to perceive and negotiate risk; consequently, practices of everyday life are based on insulating oneself from one’s environment, not engaging it. turning inward could be seen as a reasonable response in the face of a future that seems out of one’s control; hyper-focus on one’s personal decisions could go hand in hand with a sense of disempowerment and social alienation. in her recent provocation to “make kin, not babies,” haraway (2016) advocates shifting focus (back) to relationality and kinship in response to planet-level problems, but in nonhegemonic ways that have little to do with birthing babies into nuclear families and more to do with making allies toward a livable future (see also clarke and haraway 2018). loosening the creative power of childbearing from its place in patriarchal, settler, extractive gender formations could prove a step toward this end, if we could embed the personal cultivation encouraged in silicon valley childbearing in other, more collectively promising social, ecological, and political formations. abstract through examining childbearing in california’s silicon valley, this article describes how seeking “self-actualization” has become a rite of passage for contemporary childbearing people. this approach undermines distinctions between “technological” and “natural” approaches to birth, as people are coached to leverage both logistical and animalistic capacities to produce “self-knowledge” and enact new feminist ways of doing embodiment. based on fieldwork conducted as a doula, this article describes new rituals, anxieties, and aspirations that draw from both the idea that self-authenticity stems from an unadulterated, primordial nature and that self-realization is enabled by a very modern, reflexive strategy of self-design. in this community, the way reproduction comes to matter has less to do with realizing gendered expectations and kinship relations than with creative self-optimization. this approach facilitates women’s self-determination, while simultaneously introducing new forms of pressure and advancing a dominant cultural discourse that minimizes thinking about structural conditions and mutual accountability. [childbearing; birth; doula; united states; silicon valley; neoliberal subject; nature/culture; selfhood; rite of passage] notes acknowledgments i offer my sincere thanks to the many people who have contributed their insight, encouragement, and experience to crafting this essay. this includes colleagues at the university of chicago who read early drafts: amy mclachlan, erin moore, victoria nguyen, ali feser, matthew furlong, nicholas carby-denning, jeremy siegman, meghan morris, and eric hirsch. many thanks to judy farquhar, joe masco, julie chu, and susan gal for their guidance and inspiration, and also to the department at uc santa cruz for their warm welcome, particularly to megan moodie, donna haraway, and nancy chen. i am grateful for the thoughtful suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology, and especially for the brilliant editorial work of heather paxson. the research for this article was supported in part by the harper and watkins fellowships at the university of chicago and the wellcome trust, through grant number 209519/z/17/z. it was made possible by the generosity of friends, family, and childbirth communities in california, to whom i am deeply grateful. 1. pseudonyms used throughout. 2. these numbers reflect prices in 2015. many doulas offered sliding scales, and volunteer programs existed for underresourced communities. 3. a 2016 study cites about 10 percent of california births as attended by a doula, with nearly 40 percent of respondents expressing interest, percentages likely much higher in the “hip elite” bay area demographic (sakala et al. 2016). 4. the language was updated in 2019 to change maternal to parental, and women to people, in line with the less gendered framing i am describing. “three kinds of knowing,” birthing from within (blog) (accessed may 18, 2018); updated 2019 to “12 ways to change birth in our culture: cultivate three ways of knowing,” birthing from within (blog), july 22, 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issue 4, pp. 602-630, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2020. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.05 exploration or algorithm? exploration or algorithm? the undone science before the algorithms dawn nafus intel corporation http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2976-6662 the societal harms that many algorithmic systems have caused—and could cause in the future—are widely known to both scholars and the wider public (see gray et al. 2016; irani 2015; pasquale 2015; barocas and selbst 2016; o’neil 2016). in 2017, there was a veritable bumper crop of ethics statements outlining broad principles for ethical algorithm development, put in place to mitigate those harms. they came from engineering professional associations like the institute of electrical and electronics engineers, university-based institutions such as new york university’s ai now, and companies including my own. many of these statements argued that the people most affected by algorithms’ design ought to have a seat at the table in their making. while i could not agree more heartily with this view, and indeed work in an industrial r&d lab to ensure that this happens, the claim raises a further, much trickier question. what new knowledge is not created precisely because algorithms inspire preoccupations with automation? what roads remain not taken, even with a people’s seat at the table? algorithms are difficult to untangle from automation in a very particular sense. well before we get to questions of job loss through automation, algorithms have to be integrated into a deeper system of sensors, processors, communication infrastructures, software layers, and so forth. they don’t just run on any old machine. the skills required to integrate an algorithm into a system (or optimize a system around an algorithm) are elaborate, and the task is full of uncertainties. building the right team and assembling or creating the right set of tools is a remarkable undertaking in and of itself. systems, not just algorithms, distinguish between cats and things that are not cats, or between a sleep disturbance and awakening, and these are expensive to develop and maintain. such systems do not make sense to build unless these distinctions need to be made over and over again, by a machine. this particular aspect of automation means that the cost of getting it wrong—of creating a parsing with little economic or social value—can be huge. while anthropologists might sometimes see the world of technology as fast-changing, the reality is that machine execution relies on unwieldy, often brittle infrastructures that are anything but (see also taylor 2016). the economics of these systems incentivize certainty in design, which means that the road to algorithm development is littered with many alternative ways of parsing data that were not taken up, but that in fact could have even more immediate human value than any eventual algorithm. i will share two examples from my own work—work that did not end in algorithm development but very well could have—to explain what i mean. my first example comes from a collaboration with the atlas of caregiving project, a nonprofit organization that uses methods developed in the quantified self movement to teach family caregivers how to use data for critically reflecting on their situation. these techniques are very much a “data dialect” (churchill 2017) in that they are not techniques anyone will teach you in a standard data science class, but are born out of everyday experiences of people figuring out which ways of collecting and parsing data best support critical reflection. in the pilot study (mehta and nafus 2016), the value of data to the participant was unpredictable. some got no value at all, other than the satisfaction of sharing their story with others. others got practical value. for example, one participant saw her sleep data and decided that of all the complexities and difficulties of caregiving, her lack of sleep (due to the need to support her care recipient at night) constituted the biggest problem. looking at her data helped her decide it was time to hire someone for nighttime care. another used a graph of ambient noise levels to solidify her sense of how badly nearby construction affected her mother, an alzheimer’s sufferer. others still found meaning in their “care map,” a research technique where we asked people to draw a social network diagram of who takes care of whom in their family. the social network data was not news—they themselves had drawn it. yet of all the fancy sensing gadgets and data visualization techniques we tried, this form of manual computation—the adding together of all the people involved and the time spent—had the most profound effect of all, as it yielded a visual form that enabled participants to deepen their appreciation for the ways that others contributed. we encountered one caregiver who found numbers and technology hugely intimidating, but who nevertheless sat down with us to go through it all and in the process started formulating opinions about how data should be cleaned. so much for data science as an esoteric skill only relevant to the privileged. the second example comes from a collaboration with bay area environmental justice groups and the drexel university–based fair tech collective, which explored how air-quality data could be made more usable for residents of a high-pollution area. high-grade air-quality monitors that sensed the air in real time had long been operating, but few people were using the data. we wondered if wearable technology, which sensed bodies at roughly the same rate, would give the data a different valence: more meaning, perhaps more urgency. is it possible, we asked, to find a time-based relationship between air pollution and cardiovascular health? if so, what would it look like for residents to meaningfully participate in the research design and analysis? would the results change residents’ ability to advocate for change, or would it increase their burdens in some way? the pilot study had only ten participants, but we nevertheless ended up with 1.2 million data points. this dataset was modest in size by computer science standards, but it created a lot of potential pathways. we sat down with participating individuals to have a look at the data, and we found pathways that we could not have from afar: moments when travel out of the high-pollution area appeared to improve blood oxygen, or moments when questions emerged about why heart rate seemed to spike at the same time of day—was it a pattern in pollution or an infuriating television show? having one data scientist decide which is the signal and which is the noise would not do, but working out how to do it otherwise was itself an experiment in how social relations can be formed around a dataset this complex. all of this involved putting together a fairly significant infrastructure and set of work practices for accessing data and exploring it with participants. in a sense we built, on a small scale, a setup analogous to what my engineering colleagues do when they build multimodal sensing systems, but with more interpreters situated closely to the data at hand and fewer algorithms. in both of these examples, algorithm design could have been the end goal. we could have sought an algorithm that took signals identified in the atlas of caregiving pilot and inferred situations where stress was most likely to build up. key stakeholders of that project indeed advocated that we move in that direction. perhaps an algorithmic system might consistently point out the areas when health and social systems fail caregivers, thus generating stress, as opposed to making caregivers individually responsible for their own stress relief every time that stress is inferred. we could also speculate about an algorithm that learns how to define and identify, in high resolution, the extent of cumulative cardiovascular health effects that air pollution causes. in the right hands, such a tool could make a powerful case for public health action. those are, in my view, reasonably promising scenarios for algorithm design. i will not venture a guess as to how feasible they are, but i do want to point out the value that gets lost once we race toward them. in these projects, there was a good deal of undone science that got done precisely because the goal was not specifically to end in algorithm design. clues about the sources of stress or illness were surfaced. in science and technology studies, the concept of undone science points to the choices made about which research questions are asked and which go underinvestigated, such as the many unasked questions in environmental health (frickel et al. 2010). even if the new knowledge we were creating was social and cultural, not necessarily scientific, this notion encourages us to think about how critique can take the form of knowledge production that opens up or elaborates a particular line of inquiry, rather than simply identifying problems with current technical systems. both these projects pointed to undone science that needed doing. they surfaced alternative lines of inquiry by appropriating datasets that were originally designed to fit very different categories and by giving the subjects of that data the opportunity to reframe and reconsider its meaning. the undone science will not be done, however, if fairness advocates limit their sense of inclusion to matters of algorithm design. by the time anyone is at the stage of algorithm design, the data that an algorithm would work on is usually well understood, the categories to which they are believed to refer have been narrowed, and investments in other aspects of the system have already been made. assumptions might be flawed, but there is some consensus about the purpose. when inclusion is limited to algorithm design, important adjustments around the edges can be made. a self-driving car can be made to recognize objects on roads different from the roads found in palo alto, and facial recognition software can be made to recognize faces other than the white male ones on which they were first tested. however, the more fundamental question of what the data signals, and what human value those signals have, can only be asked in the most limited ways. the recent calls for broader participation in algorithm development, then, are not wrong as a first attempt to better situate algorithms in more equitable social relations. they are all but toothless, however, without a rejoinder. there must also be a call for broader participation in data explorations that do not necessarily end in algorithm development directly. such explorations could shape the consensus formation that happens before algorithm development is even in the cards and could inform new technical directions as they emerge. such explorations should also be thought of as socially useful end goals in and of themselves. in both of my examples, a reflexive, participatory approach to data opened up areas of direct value to the participants themselves. unexpected forms of value became available precisely because we had lingered in the data together and were not narrowly thinking about data as the thing that was on its way to training an algorithm to categorize something. these were not forms of value that required automation: no one needs to be told twice that they really ought to hire someone to assist with night care. value emerged instead through human interaction supported by a technical infrastructure, one that is fundamentally not the stuff of automation. patterns in data that are numerically calculable and deeply valuable to the very people who generated them are often left behind because they require slowness—a slowness not attributable to the fragility and complexity of infrastructures necessary for automation, but rooted in the intellectual patience necessary for real meaning to emerge through lived, rather than imagined, human experience. exploration cannot be short-circuited by speculating on data’s meaning in a conference room somewhere, even with “domain experts” (as nontechnical people are called in data science circles) present. the instances of travel that brought oxygen into someone’s bloodstream, or the construction sounds that distressed an alzheimer’s sufferer and her daughter, will never be found in an armchair version of data science. they are found in dialogue. such dialogues do require meaningful investment in labor and infrastructure, but of a very different kind. it is possible to ask about the extent to which everyday life should or should not be algorithmically encoded while also pointing out those places where radically different technical directions (and distribution of social and technical resources) would prove beneficial. alternative paths might end in a different kind of algorithmic system, or they might end in the production of new knowledge not necessary to repeat. good data scientists, of course, explore how a dataset came to be in the first place before attempting to write algorithms for it. anthropology can take this practice further, by doing that in a skillful way with the people to whom it refers. this is a seemingly obvious move that often surprises the data scientists i meet, but it has also frequently been welcome. while i have emphasized the practical and societal value of tracing out routes not elaborated in large-scale technical systems, i also see scholarly value in doing things in this way. these instances of engagement with data and with people constitute rich ethnographic moments. the prospect of proceeding along these lines raises a further question: what would it be like to have our own vernaculars in data—our own data dialects—attuned to the theoretical and methodological commitments that many anthropologists share? indeed, others have started to raise this issue (knox and nafus 2018), and so perhaps the question is not entirely speculative. it is nevertheless one that is worth our consideration. i remain curious about the social worlds that could be made when anthropologists and the people we study go beyond the fraught politics of getting a seat at the table—whether that seat is taken through public critique or internal advocacy—and start taking a crack at building those worlds ourselves. references barocas, solon, and andrew d. selbst 2016 “big data’s disparate impact.” california law review 104, no. 3: 671–732. https://doi.org/10.15779/z38bg31. churchill, elizabeth 2017 “the ethnographic lens: perspectives and opportunities for new data dialects.” perspectives, epic website, september 26. https://www.epicpeople.org/ethnographic-lens. frickel, scott, sahra gibbon, jeff howard, joanna kempner, gwen ottinger, and david j. hess 2010 “undone science: charting social movement and civil society challenges to research agenda setting.” science, technology, and human values 35, no. 4: 444–73. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243909345836. gray, mary l., siddharth suri, syed shoaib ali, and deepti kulkarni 2016 “the crowd is a collaborative network.” in proceedings of the nineteenth acm conference on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing, 134–47. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819942. irani, lilly 2015 “justice for ‘data janitors.’” public books, january 15. http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/justice-for-data-janitors. knox, hannah, and dawn nafus, eds. 2018 ethnography for a data-saturated world. manchester, uk: manchester university press. mehta, rajiv, and dawn nafus 2016 “atlas of caregiving pilot study report.” https://atlasofcaregiving.com/core-research/pilot-study. o’neil, cathy 2016 weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. new york: crown publishing. pasquale, frank 2015 the black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. taylor, alex 2016 “data, (bio)sensing, and (other-)worldly stories from the cycle routes of london.” in quantified: biosensing technologies in everyday life, edited by dawn nafus, 189–209. cambridge, mass.: mit press. animating relations animating relations: digitally mediated intimacies between the living and the dead molly hales university of california, san francisco https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9883-342x shortly after her mother patricia’s unexpected death, erin set out to digitally track her persistent presence by recording each time that patricia made an appearance in her life.1 she created a form using the software program google documents, a form that she playfully referred to as her “app” and kept bookmarked on her smartphone. the app included space to indicate the date and time, the location, and what erin was doing when a memory of her mother arose. it also contained boxes that she could check off to indicate her emotional state, such as sad or nostalgic. at the bottom was a text box entitled “comments” where she could type out any additional information that she wanted to include. when she was finished, she hit the submit button and the entry was uploaded into a spreadsheet alongside her past entries. erin envisioned the app as a way to track the progression of her own grief. as she began to use it, she explained: “i realized i wasn’t tracking my grief, because it really wasn’t necessarily, it wasn’t about that. it was sort of like tracking my mom. and i would say it was like tracking a ghost of my mom. it was seeing where she popped up in the world.” to reflect this new understanding, she termed her entries “mom sightings.” recent theorizations of animation offer intriguing possibilities for recognizing and attending to the sociality of a range of entities, including the dead. these literatures explore the linkages between animator, animated character, and medium, showing how objects and figures can be brought to life as characters by the collective efforts of animators, as well as by the media through which they materialize. they also open up a gap between animator, animated character, and medium, illustrating how a character can come to life in ways that exceed the grasp of those who might otherwise be seen as creating or controlling them. in this way we move from animation in a technical sense as a media genre to animation in a sense that borders on animism—bringing to life, in this case by producing an animated nonhuman person, the character. such insights are productive not only for understanding characters but also for understanding an emergent way of interacting with the dead, one that we find in erin’s use of her app to sustain her relationship with her mother. in his ethnography of japanese characters, shusuke nozawa (2013) writes: if anthropology . . . can illuminate or at least recognize special and important roles played by fairies, ghosts, gods, angels, the dead, and other fantastic and liminal actants (including liminal objects like dolls and feces as well as liminal humans such as novices in a rite of passage and spirit mediums in a séance), then it might as well do the same with characters. i propose that the reverse is similarly productive: if treating characters like the dead draws attention to the “special and important roles” that they play in urban japan, then treating the dead like characters can spark new understandings of death and digitization. by exploring the intimate relationships that those like erin and patricia are cultivating, i show how the dead are brought to life as characters through coconstitutive relations organized around the partial, iterative, and fragmented qualities of the digital media that sustain them. i do so in order to explore what happens to relationships with the dead when they migrate onto digital media. in the broader research from which this article emerges, i explore the intimacies that some maintain with dead loved ones using a range of digital technologies, including online memorials, social media pages, smartphone apps, and virtual reality experiences (hales 2018). the first online memorials date back to the early days of the internet, when the worldwide cemetery invited users to create digital monuments to the deceased. some of my ethnographic subjects continue to use online memorials as a space of connection, including one young woman who told me: “it’s very important to me that [the online memorial] is there, because it feels like a continuation of [our] relationship. . . . it’s a way of making sure that that connection stays strong.” many of the people i spoke with use social media to maintain and even deepen relations with the dead, including families who use memorial groups to keep the dead alive for each other, as well as individuals who linger on the profile pages of the deceased. others of my ethnographic subjects use digital tools to craft unique forms of connection. one family created a website that displays scanned images of paper postcards that friends and family have sent to the dead, highlighting the ways that digital media incorporate nondigital forms of remembrance. another young man collaborated with his best friend to create a virtual reality experience where he could quietly share a park bench with the virtual body of his late father. for my ethnographic subjects, digital media offer more than an opportunity for occasional reminiscence. they create mutual entanglements between the living and the dead, helping bring the deceased to life. in attending to the dead in this way, i align myself with a growing literature on the efficacy of the dead today, including their participation in practices of labor (derrida 1994; stanyek and piekut 2010), care (langford 2013; stevenson 2014), kinship (sharp 2006), politics (feldman 1991; verdery 1999; robben 2005), and social life (gordon 1997; ochoa 2010). such work extends long-standing anthropological preoccupations with the sociality of the dead, dating back to robert hertz’s (2004) famous description of the liminal status of the deceased (see also van gennep 1961; a. strathern 1981; harris 1982; watson 1982; klima 2002; aries 2005; conklin 2005; kan 2005; malinowski 2005; radcliffe-brown 2005; tsintjilonis 2007). literatures on the spiritualism movement offer a comparative touchpoint for mediatized relationships with the dead in the united states (connor 1999; sconce 2000; mcgarry 2008; manning 2018). but digital media do not just vivify the dead; they vivify the dead as characters. the interrelated concepts of character and animation are joined by certain features specific to their shared genre. animated characters are variable, appearing and reappearing somewhat differently as they move through time, context, and genre. they are partial and fragmentary, cohering around a database of elements rather than a cohesive, narrative identity. finally, they are sparse, evoked rather than represented. animated by digital media, the dead invite their loved ones to fill them, expanding into a multiplicity of different versions to which shifting attachments can form. animation one of the questions that has come up in my research involves the ways in which the dead continue to exist for us, making problematic both popular and psychological understandings in the united states about how mourning ought to proceed. in his famous essay “mourning and melancholia,” sigmund freud (1957) argues that the work of mourning involves a gradual detachment from the deceased, without which the bereaved could descend into the pathological state of melancholia. the necessity of detachment undergirds many of the most popular psychological models of grief throughout the twentieth century, including elisabeth kübler-ross’s famous description of the five stages of grief (see maciejewski et al. 2007). in the past thirty years, however, the model of “continuing bonds” (klass, silverman, and nickman 1996) with the deceased has gained traction, and with it the recognition that it is relatively common to maintain relationships with the dead throughout one’s life. even so, models of severance continue to haunt these new perspectives on grief. the dead are assumed to be a fantasy or projection of the living, confined to a past that is accessed through deliberate acts of reminiscence. thus, even models of ongoing attachment are underwritten by ontological assumptions about the limited subjective capacities of the dead. characters have often been thought of in parallel ways, as imagined figures rooted in the fantasies of others. the recent work on animation pushes back against these commonsense interpretations, exploring how characters become more than the deliberate products of their creators and consumers. in her article “animation: the new performance?,” the anthropologist teri silvio (2010) proposes that animation might offer the same range of theoretical possibilities as performance, which has been used not only to understand specific forms of media such as theater but also as a productive analytic for subjectivity and sociality. drawing from three disciplinary approaches—the arts, anthropology, and psychology—she defines animation as “the projection of qualities perceived as human—life, power, agency, will, personality, and so on—outside the self, and into the sensory environment, through acts of creation, perception, and interaction” (silvio 2010, 427). in addition to proposing animation as a broad analytic, silvio argues that existing forms and practices of animation cannot be understood using the conceptual apparatus at hand—notably, performance. she writes: the concept of performance . . . tends to hide the ontological differences between animated characters and the people who create, use, and interact with them. we lose sight of the uncanny “illusion of life” that makes these characters appealing, of their particular blend of materiality and imagination, and of their diffuse agency. (silvio 2010, 423) silvio’s reflections on animation developed out of her own experiences doing fieldwork with producers and fans of a popular taiwanese video puppetry series. she found that questions such as “how do you get into character?” did not make sense to fans who were cosplaying puppet characters, dressing up as animated figures in public spaces. she writes, “i found that the vast majority saw cosplay as reanimating the characters by substituting the human body for the wooden one” (silvio 2010, 433). silvio thus highlights the hybrid nature of the animated figure, whose existence is both enabled by others and in excess of them. in her discussion of cosplay (silvio 2006), she suggests that it is not solely the cosplayer who is animating the character but also the character who is animating the cosplayer (see also manning and gershon 2013; manning 2017). shunsuke nozawa (2016) builds on silvio’s insights by further subverting the sense of one-sided control between animator and animated. in his analysis of japanese voice actors who voice popular characters, he writes: our commonsensical idea that actors give voices to characters merits reconsideration. not that it is incorrect. obviously, it is humans who do the speaking. rather, i suggest an alternative idea, which, while maybe absurd, will help us better understand the relation between voice and spirit. the idea may be summed up by bruno latour’s commentary on ventriloquism: “we, the human subjects, are the dummies towards which other entities are projecting their real voices as if they were coming from us.” (nozawa 2016, 174) in nozawa’s configuration, the character animates the voice actor as much as the voice actor animates the character. i push forth the ambiguities between the conscious attempt to enact, embody, or voice a character and the sense of being overcome by that character. i do so in part by extending characters to include certain mediated forms of the dead. character usually denotes a rendered figure that stems from another’s imagination. as i use the term, character describes those not-quite-human persons brought to life by a particular mode of mediation built on the animating database. as formerly human, characters represent a special class of characters. yet they also point to some of the essential qualities of characters, including the way that they emerge and reemerge in relation to those others who are willing to fill them in, and in the process to be swept away by them. to be clear, i am not arguing that digital media define the way that people relate to others, including the dead (cf. turkle 1995; castells 1996; hayles 1999; weinberger 2007). animation underscores the ways in which digital media build on and extend analog technologies, pointing to a generative reciprocity between analog and digital forms (bolter and grusin 1999; gitelman 2006; galloway, thacker, and wark 2013; peters 2017). digital animations such as avatars remediate not only analog artistic genres such as drawings of cartoons and anime characters but also practices such as puppetry, which vivify nonhuman objects (manning 2009; silvio 2010; boellstorff 2015). i thus draw attention to the interdependence of analog and digital technologies in making possible this emergent form of relations with the dead. furthermore, the dead are not just animated by the technological parameters of the media but also by the practices that my ethnographic subjects have developed around them. these practices cultivate forms of attention through which the living open themselves up to the dead. they also foster a particular relationship to memory, one in which memories are experienced as an evolving database of encounters continually drawing together past and present. through their digital practice, my ethnographic subjects extend their hospitality to the dead, inviting them deeper within at the same time as they project themselves onto the screens that mediate their intimacies with the deceased (lacan 1981). i explore these animated relationships by delving deeply into one such practice—erin’s use of her app to animate her relationship with her mother, patricia. my conversations with erin began in san francisco shortly after patricia’s untimely death, when erin was still trying to figure out whether and how it would be possible to maintain their relationship. several years and cross-country moves later, my own conversations with erin were mediated by the online video calling platforms skype and google hangouts, and subject to their occasional unreliability. as the video feed froze and the audio cut in and out, i was reminded of the limitations introduced by digital media, as well as the possibilities that they opened up for our continued conversations. over the course of nearly five years, i witnessed the ups and downs of erin and patricia’s relationship, and grew to understand the intricacies of the app’s involvement in it. although it was far from the most common way that people maintained intimacies with the dead using digital media, i came to see erin’s practice as diagnostic of this emergent form of relation, gathering together and bringing into focus many of the key elements of my research. the app participated in the enchantments that it rendered, animating the objects, people, and places that contained memories of her mother. these animated entities were inscribed into the medium, becoming entries in the database that was the site and source of erin and patricia’s persistent relationship. the fragmented structure of the database encouraged erin to approach her mother as a set of partial iterations that could evoke patricia without fully capturing her. it opened up a mediated relationship that crosscut divisions between inside and outside, grounding an ethics of hospitality toward the dead. by sustaining a phatic connection between mother and daughter, the app nourished a dynamic intimacy that left both erin and patricia room to grow and change. intimate mediations on a hot july afternoon, erin sat curled up on the faded green couch in my living room, her narrow frame almost swallowed by its soft cushions. i was perched on the sofa next to her, my laptop open and my phone precariously balanced on the arm of the couch, recording our conversation. after a few minutes, erin pulled her own laptop out of the bag next to her, looking for traces of the app—and her mother—on her hard drive. patricia was a silent presence in the room, caught somewhere between our sweaty bodies, our overheated laptops, and our tears. erin struggled to remember where the idea for the app had originated, although i had not asked her for its history. she told me that it had partly developed out of her own interest in new forms of digital media, which she worked with professionally. she mused: “but it also came from this sense that with grief, there’s just little moments of your life that pop up, where the person who’s gone, they’re almost haunting it. . . . i guess i just wanted to make space for all those moments in the flow of my life where my mom appeared.” erin used her app to record these moments of haunting, allowing her to “dive deeper” into the experience. in the process, the app animated the objects, places, and people through which erin encountered her mother. this was a common theme in my ethnographic material: the technologies that mediated relations with the dead were also a means of animating them. erin told me that the app offered her a way “to capture the sightings, the physical sightings in the world. to animate the objects into life. to animate these things that had ghostlike qualities.” in her framing, animation blurs into the related concept of animacy, the quality of “agency, awareness, mobility, and liveness” (chen 2012, 2) that can inhere in diverse entities (see also kohn 2013; povinelli 2016). although she joked, “i’m not an animist!,” erin also told me that in using the app, “i wanted to take seriously the idea that my mom kind of lives in that weird water bottle over there.” the forms of animation that the app rendered were built on erin’s own memories of her mother. although this held true for all my ethnographic subjects, erin’s app made the relationship between animation and memory particularly transparent. erin drew together recording, animation, and memory in her explanation of what constitutes a mom sighting: it could be a situation, it could be a thing, an object. it could be a person. it could be a conversation. it could be the actual bringing up of my mom in a conversation, or it could just be a topic that launches me back into a memory, or to something, some form of her in the world that just reminds me of her or something that she did. . . . things in the world or conversations or whatever can make memories more present. but also not just memory. that is that person! erin’s descriptions of memory recall marcel proust’s musings on the persistent life of the dead. in the first book of his multivolume remembrance of things past, he writes: i feel that there is much to be said for the celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized them the spell is broken. delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. (proust 1970, 34) erin’s app is likewise built on the idea that objects do not just trigger internal memories but also might actually bring erin into contact with her mother. in erin’s description, she and patricia catch each other off guard, just as proust’s trees “start and tremble” when a loved one passes by. notably, in proust’s account, reunion depends on the efforts of both the living and the dead. the dead must call out, alerting the living to their presence. and the living must perceive in these objects those whom they have lost, offering their recognition to break the spell of imprisonment. this is part of what the app offers erin and patricia. through her digital practice, erin becomes attuned to patricia’s varied manifestations. by recording them, she registers her mother’s continued presence, interrupting their mutual isolation. the app thus constitutes a crucial means by which erin and patricia are brought together. at the same time, patricia’s liveliness is not merely an effect of the medium. like an animated character, patricia is not animated by a particular technology, but in the presence of that technology. silvio describes this phenomenon among taiwanese cosplayers who are animated by puppet characters from the television series pili. as paul manning and ilana gershon (2013, 117) note, “the [cosplayer’s] body can be activated when surrounded by the right combination of media,” including the recording device of the camera, the recorded text of a pili skit, and the adorned body of the cosplayer. just as the costumed cosplayers’ bodies are insufficient to channel the characters that animate them, the objects that participate in erin’s mom sightings contain only the possibility of being animated. for animation to take place, the right combination of media must be present—in this case, the app through which erin recorded her mom sightings. her app helped transform these objects into conduits for her persistent relationship to her mother. for those like erin who use digital technologies to stay close to dead loved ones, these media participate in the enchantments that they simultaneously record and render. yet like patricia, the dead are continually exceeding the media that animate them. this is a defining feature of animated characters, which manning (2009, 320) describes as “a peircean secondness, an alterity, an otherness, a set of dispositions, needs, desires, alien to themselves.” one of my ethnographic subjects conveyed this with respect to her brother’s facebook profile by saying: “there’s still always this really weird element of surprise when i go on there, like i’m not sure what to expect, although i should know what to expect, nothing’s really going to change.” in her use of new media to animate a relationship with the dead, erin’s digital practice bears a striking resemblance to american spiritualist practices. in the nineteenth century, the advent of new electronic technologies of communication and transmission was met with a growing spiritualist movement in which these technologies facilitated communion with the dead. just four years after the public debut of the telegraph, spiritualists developed a similar system of knocks and raps with which to communicate with the deceased (sconce 2000; mcgarry 2008). jeffrey sconce (2000, 12) writes: “more than a metaphor, the spiritual telegraph was for many an actual technology of the afterlife.” in one notable example, a telegraph was placed at the center of a séance circle to facilitate communication with the dead (connor 1999, 221). today, as the scope and reach of digital media expand, a similar spirit of experimentation may be taking hold, encouraging people like erin to explore new ways to stay close to dead loved ones. these parallels remind us that history, like memory, unfolds not as an orderly sequence of past events but as a series of ruptures and reappearances that bring past and present into proximity. yet it is noteworthy that erin’s digital practice did not rely on a community of fellow participants. spiritualist materializations of the dead were formed from what steven connor (1999, 210) calls the “collective psychical resources of the [séance] circle” (see also mcgarry 2008), dependent on social relations among the living to vivify the dead. for erin, recording her mom sightings remains an intensely private experience, and i was the first person with whom she shared any of her entries. i draw this contrast not to suggest that erin’s digital practice was devoid of sociality, but to emphasize the very different way in which the social is configured in spiritualist mediumship and digital animation. my ethnographic subjects found the social inscribed within the media through which they encounter the dead. this inscription of the social becomes more readily apparent when we move from erin’s app to the social media pages of the dead. i found that very few people who use social media to maintain intimacies with the dead look back at the posts that the deceased made when they were alive. instead, they are drawn back by the messages, memories, photographs, and digital materials posted to the deceased’s profile page by members of their social network after their death. for example, one of my ethnographic subjects, lois, became very attached to her brother frank’s facebook profile page after his untimely death. in the year that followed, people posted to his page almost every day, as well as responding to each other’s messages. his page became the database of an active social network that centered on frank, which imparted a certain vivacity to the deceased. this vivacity energized the intimate and dyadic relationship that lois formed with frank on social media. like these social media posts to the dead, erin’s app records ongoing social relationships that bring together herself, patricia, and a variety of others. in the case of erin’s app, these others include not just other people but also water bottles, cafés, and cell phones—a sociality that extends beyond the human. her digital practice inscribes these social relationships into the app, converting them into entries in a database—a database through which her mother is animated. the database erin’s mom sightings are automatically uploaded into a spreadsheet by the software that erin used to create the original form. the entries are arranged vertically in chronological order, numbered according to the date and time when they were logged. each entry is contained in a single horizontal row, the elements of the mom sighting separated into seven columns with titles such as timestamp, mom sighting, and comments. there are enough columns that they cannot be displayed on the screen at once, making it necessary to scroll sideways to read a full entry. when last we spoke, the database contained nearly one hundred and fifty entries, spanning a period of five years. erin often downplayed the extent of this database, worrying over her periodic lapses in logging. yet when the spreadsheet was loaded onto her laptop screen, it filled more than thirty-six pages and struck me as remarkably extensive. during the times when erin was tracking her mom sightings most diligently, she was logging several entries each day. interestingly, these features of the database proved more important to me as an ethnographer than they were to erin. during one of our early conversations, i asked if we could look at some of her previous mom sightings together. although erin quickly agreed, she seemed somewhat uneasy as she began reading them, and i watched a series of emotions flit across her face: sadness, worry, recognition, surprise. eventually she confessed that she did not think she had ever read her old entries before. i was taken aback; i had assumed that the retrospective dimension of logging would be part of its appeal. as i learned more about the app and the relationship that it mediated, erin’s decision to forgo this form of retrospection began to make more sense. erin told me that she wanted to use her app to log the same thing over and over again throughout the course of her life. she built this possibility into the parameters of the app; her fastidiousness in recording the context of each encounter meant that each mom sighting was necessarily different than its previous iteration. even if she were reminded of the same attribute—say, her mother’s commitment to holistic health care—she would not be in the same café, reading the same book, at the same time of day as she had been the last time she remembered it. the malleability of erin’s mom sightings goes beyond the context of the encounter to the very content of her memories. she explained: say i log something about a song in 2014, and then fast forward twenty years later, i encounter that same thing in the world, and i have a memory about it. it might be different. it might be rosier! it might be more simple. who knows? who cares? i like that aspect of memory. and maybe again that’s just me being contrarian to the desire of the world to capture things as they were, and sort of freeze them in time. erin explained that part of what she was doing with her app was “celebrating the failures of memory.” she then corrected herself, “memory isn’t failing when it becomes fuzzy. that is memory!” the looseness of memory meant that her own memories of her mother could change over time, emerging and submerging, becoming clearer or more opaque. erin used the technological parameters of the app to intensify, rather than mitigate, the plasticity of memory. when i asked erin how her practice might have differed had she used a paper journal rather than an app, she noted that once she submitted an entry, “it went into the ether.” although the entries were saved, she no longer had ready access to them. she suggested that if she had used a paper journal, she would have been more likely to leaf through her old entries. by making it onerous to do so, the app intensified the experience of connecting with her mother in the present, rather than recalling her as she had been in the past. erin related the variability of her mom sightings to the sense of dynamism that inhered in her relationship with her mother. she told me: “if something is fuzzier, or if memories come and go, or it’s selective, you remember certain things and you can’t remember other things, you get to have a dynamic, ongoing relationship.” by downplaying the retrospective aspect of logging, erin refused to allow a single, authentic version of patricia to take root. erin’s attachments to varying versions of patricia leads us back to animation. the iterations of an animated character contribute to its vivacity as well as its ver-acity, helping create the sense that there is something ineffable about the character that stands apart from the pen strokes or voiced lines through which they come alive (silvio 2010, 428; nozawa 2016, 185). in his work on japanese otaku, fans of animation genres such as anime and video games, hiroki azuma (2009) uses the structure of the database to illustrate the significance of the character’s variability. he argues that otaku are not drawn to a compelling narrative, but are instead attached to specific attributes. as nozawa (2013) points out, these attributes are “carefully typologized and classified” into a conceptual database that uniquely identifies the character. azuma (2009) suggests that contemporary animation moves away from the notion of the original and its derivatives toward a model of proliferating versions that gesture toward an invisible center from which the character issues forth. in azuma’s and nozawa’s writing, the database is an analytic construct used to understand the way that otaku form attachments to disarticulated fragments of a character, rather than to a singular, narrative identity. erin’s app, like many of the digital media used to maintain intimacies with the dead, takes azuma’s concept to its logical extreme. it creates a literal database—in this case, a spreadsheet of their encounters. each entry registers a different patricia, manifesting a slightly different set of qualities and invoked through a subtly different iteration of memory. it accentuates patricia’s variability, offering these partial fragments as a point of connection between erin and patricia. yet interestingly, the database does not mediate their relationship by offering a repository of past events that erin can periodically revisit. erin engages with the archive by holding, cherishing, and adding to it, not by consulting it. in addition, erin’s app shifts attention from patricia herself to the relationship between erin and patricia. the repetitive nature of erin’s digital practice suggests that what is experienced or recalled in these encounters is secondary to the sense of an ongoing sociality that they establish. we might therefore interpret erin’s mom sightings as a form of phatic communication whose purpose is not to convey new information, but to engage another for the sake of engagement.2 they are like a greeting, the “hey there” that signals an everyday familiarity while opening a channel to further communication (elyachar 2010). such mundane exchanges can be what is most difficult to maintain when a loved one dies, when daily contact can so easily give way to yearly pilgrimages to a gravesite. what erin longs for is the myriad connections that sustain a different kind of intimacy, one built on the everyday forms of contact often taken for granted among those who share their lives. consider erin’s most recent entry. it begins with the timestamp that denotes the precise time and date it was logged. the next column, “mom sighting,” contains a single word: “reading.” in the comments box are a few brief sentences: “reading food fight. one of my mom’s last voicemails to me was about gmos. she would have loved jenkins and her work.” the next two columns list the place where erin was (“café”), followed by a list of affects she was experiencing: “sad, nostalgic, warm.” the last columns contain a mood scale and a happiness scale; she rated both 9 out of 10. reading a book about the food industry, erin was interrupted by her mother’s unexpected appearance. yet neither the appearance, nor patricia herself, are narrated in the entry. instead, it captures the elements of the encounter, each of which is separated and itemized, rendered sortable and searchable in the spreadsheet into which it has been automatically uploaded. the content of the entry is shaped in part by the structure of the app and the database that it feeds into; it is difficult to imagine erin listing so many specific attributes surrounding the encounter if she were instead jotting down memories in a paper journal, for example. furthermore, much of the content of the entry describes erin’s own subjective conditions. these are not incidental, but are the very substrate of patricia’s animation. these details cement their ongoing connection, fostering the everyday contact that sustains their relationship. the resulting database remains indefinitely open to further additions, an evolving record of a dynamic relation. their iterative encounters make possible a singular relationship that is continually nourished by their phatic contact (nozawa 2015). this marks one of the key features of animation: characters are only partially rendered, evoked rather than fully represented. it is also one aspect of digitally mediated relations with the dead that distinguishes it from other forms of mediatized relations, including spiritualist practices. histories of spiritualism join anthropological work exploring the use of analog technologies such as photography and telegraphy to bring the dead to presence (morris 2000; ivy 2009). although there are intriguing parallels between my ethnographic subjects’ digital practices and the use of mass media such as photographs to vivify the dead, there are also important departures that help clarify what is distinctive about the media form. in her ethnography of thai spirit mediumship, rosalind morris (2000) suggests that the dissemination of photography ushered in an era of mass mediation in northern thailand in which truth takes a particular form—as appearance, and particularly the appearance of the body in the photographic image. she writes: “the risk of photography is not that one will be seduced by mere appearances and thus remain ignorant of the truer picture. instead, it is that one will immediately distrust appearances and, in the effort to see beyond them, err” (morris 2000, 190). this notion is taken up and amplified by practices of spirit mediumship, which rely on the truth of the image formed on the surface of the body and captured by the photograph. in contrast, the digital media that my ethnographic subjects use materialize partial representations of the deceased. the power of these media depends precisely on one’s ability to “see beyond them,” in morris’s words, recognizing the dead among the fragments of their former selves. for example, the online memorial that one woman, corey, created for her beloved friend marty seems almost bare, the generic template modified with only a few pieces of biographical information that are carefully arranged on the page. yet corey asserted that this digital space fosters their ongoing intimacy to a degree unmatched by other media, including the photograph of marty that she keeps on her dresser. this unexpected configuration is captured in the analytic of animation and its theorizations; as silvio (2010, 431) points out, “one of the key characteristics of many animated characters is incompleteness.” this incompleteness drew corey to marty, inviting her to draw and redraw the outlines of their relationship. i found this necessary incompleteness even in places where i least expected it, like the virtual reality experience that mike and alex are creating to reunite mike with his late father, george. despite virtual reality’s promise of lifelike immersion, mike and alex suggested that the accuracy and completeness of george’s avatar contributed little to the experience of connecting with him on virtual reality. alex reflected: “hands are hands, clothes are clothes. the body shape, the body stance, was more what i was going for, and it just worked somehow.” rather than creating an exact reproduction of the deceased, alex seeks above all to capture his stance, an indefinable quality that evokes george to those who know him. in this way, even the avatar, a three-dimensional replica of george, acts much like an animated character drawn with a few sparse pen strokes. it provides just enough of a resemblance to create a moment of recognition, one that depends as much on the relationship between george and alex as it does on the avatar that mediates their encounter. in a parallel way, each of erin’s entries gestures toward some ineffable quality of patricia, calling to mind the fullness of a person who can never be completely captured in any medium. these partial renderings animate patricia by sustaining her phatic connection to erin, invigorating the relationship between them. the sparse outline sketched out by these animating media can open up mutual entanglements between the character and the one who answers its call. it bids the other to fill it in—and, perhaps, to be filled in as well, moved by the attachments that form and reform between them. through technologies such as erin’s app, the dead manifest as an intimate part of the self as well as a presence on the screen, traversing and complicating the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other (lacan 1981, 1997; miller 1994; mazzarella 2017). indeed, for erin, the practice of recording her mom sightings helped open her up to these unexpected encounters, encouraging an interchange between herself and her mother. coconstitutive relations throughout our conversations, erin suggested that she and her mother continued to shape each other, in part through the coming together facilitated by the app. she reflected that her mom sightings were not encounters with an independent entity, but manifestations of their relationship. she mused: when something got triggered in the environment that gave me a memory of her, it was a mom sighting, but was it really her? it’s my memory of her, it’s how i relate to her. and so it’s more of a reflection of my relationship and . . . the interconnection between us. this indeterminacy did not necessarily undermine their status as mom sightings. erin later explained: i kept trying to inject a little criticism of how people [are] collecting all this data about themselves and all these experiences in their life. they were attempting to shore up this idea of the sort of unique, atomistic individual, with all your unique data and characteristics. and i was trying to do a project that collected data that broke that down and explored my identity in relation to another person. and it wasn’t even that, it was my identity in relation to the memory of another person! erin’s digital practice opened up forms of reciprocity between herself and her mother. exploring her ongoing intimacy with patricia allowed erin to see her mother as a relational being who persisted through her ties to the people, places, and objects in the world (m. strathern 1988; butler 2004). at the same time, it helped erin understand herself as relational. as she noted above, the app did not just allow her to record her mom sightings but also to explore the intertwining between her mother and herself. erin’s decision to create the app was influenced by the advice of her grief counselor. at the time, erin kept finding herself in situations where she wanted to talk to her mother about what was taking place. she explained: whenever i would encounter these situations and bring them up to [my grief counselor] and be really upset about it, she would encourage me: “well, why don’t you just ask your mom? why don’t you just talk to her? pretend she’s there.” not pretend. she didn’t even want to say pretend, because she even wanted to make it more real than that. “ask her. you can talk to her. what would she do?” and the app allowed me to do that. it was a way to sort of talk to the dead person. . . . and i think from my therapist’s point of view, her perspective is that, “you instinctively know what your mother might say.” or, “it’s inside you somehow!” or, “you can have the conversation, it’s in you, because you’ve been exposed to her your whole life!” . . . so part of this logging experiment was just to see if that can be true. while the grief counselor located patricia inside of erin, erin herself told me that relationships with the dead “live in our heads, as well as with things, and then with other people.” when i asked her to elaborate, she explained: to me, it’s like, i kind of liked that by a sighting, they were inside me and outside me. . . . i think it helps connect between and break down the division between the internal and external. if i see something and it evokes a memory or it evokes a thought and it’s just in my head, although i know it’s a thing in the world, it keeps it internal maybe and then later i log it. it sort of makes it more tangible or solidifies the connection. or it sort of just lays down a little bread crumb of a trail. it’s like drawing lines, connecting the dots. . . . [that] makes it more of an act of participating with the world or having the dead participate, not just with your mind, but with the world. the app allowed her memories—and her mother—to move from within her head into the world, and from within the world inside of herself. her descriptions of her mom sightings blurred the boundaries between memories that emerged from within and encounters that occurred outside of herself. the double movement of internalization and externalization proved an ongoing theme in my ethnographic research. i discovered it even in the virtual reality experience reuniting mike with his father, george. to me their project seemed a quintessential example of animation in the narrowly technical sense, creating the illusion of life by endowing a media object with the seeming ability to move independently. yet mike and alex took me by surprise by returning again and again to the internal experience of connection that virtual reality was meant to foster, what alex referred to as “inner work.” describing the experience of entering the virtual world, alex told me: at that point, it’s like that’s your meditation space. now you can just say what you want, looking at them, having memories, thinking of them, all in v[irtual] r[eality], in this place. and you’re just doing that, you have your moment with them. they don’t talk to you or anything. it’s just literally an experience to trigger your memories and see them, almost, in some sort of fashion, i guess. experience something. whereas they’re just gone before, and you don’t have anything. alex suggested that the external cues of the virtual world and george’s virtual body were meant to provide a space for the inner work of reflection through which a connection to the dead could be sustained. yet the props of the virtual world and body are also vital to this inner work. without them, alex asserts that the deceased is “just gone,” leaving the bereaved with nothing—not even memory. the example of mike and alex’s virtual reality experience helps us see that erin and patricia are not just brought together by the technological parameters of an app, but by the practice that erin has built around it. recording her mom sightings is an askesis, a labor on the self that transforms the self (foucault 2005, 2010). for michel foucault, the notion of askesis offers a point of contrast to the confessional mode of self-regulation through which the modern, unified subject is produced. askesis involves a permanent state of self-examination and self-censorship that takes place in part through the careful cultivation of ethical relations with others. my ethnographic subjects’ digital askesis likewise constitutes a labor to produce an ethical self in relation to another. it is a relational askesis that does not produce the modern, living, self-enclosed subject, but animates a relationship through which both living and dead are constituted. this askesis transforms erin and mike through their encounters with another—the dead loved one who traverses the boundaries between inside and outside. similarly, erin’s app opens her up to patricia’s ongoing presence, allowing patricia to dwell (see ingold 2011) not only in the digital database but within erin herself as well. ambivalent hospitalities although erin’s app was born out of her grief counselor’s advice, the relationship it made possible proved both more intimate and more ambivalent than her counselor had predicted. reading through her old entries, she described one to me as follows: for example, one day i was wearing her clothing, because i inherited a bunch of her clothing. so, at some point in june 2015 i guess i was wearing one of her shirts. actually, this is kind of sweet. all i wrote was, “i’m wearing one of her shirts today. starting to look like her. even my jeans are momlike. but as jonathan says”—jonathan’s a friend—“the dead grow up inside of you.” although in this entry erin described discovering her mother within, it was a very different experience than the one proposed by her therapist. the grief counselor imagined an internal dialogue where erin would pose questions and then consider how patricia would answer them if she were still alive. paraphrasing her counselor’s advice, erin explained: “you’ve had your lifetime to absorb: what would she do? what would she say?” and you can guess what they might do or what they might say, but you have to ask. you have to ask yourself. you have to pause, and you have to ask, and reflect, “what would she do in this moment?” and you might not be right, but why does that matter, i guess. the grief counselor suggested that erin had absorbed enough of her mother’s words and advice from the past to guess how she might react to a situation in the present. although she encouraged erin to start a conversation with patricia, she presumed that erin herself would be furnishing both sides. in contrast, when erin saw her mother in her own reflection as she tried on the sweater, she encountered someone distinct from herself. she recognized that her mother was evolving in ways that could not be predicted: the dead grow up inside of us. patricia’s persistent otherness introduced forms of ambivalence into their relationship. despite her own best intentions, erin was never able to sustain the practice of logging her mom sightings for very long. although she attributed this to her struggles with diligence, she also suggested that her relationship with her mother could sometimes feel like too much. at times, her words suggested a degree of antagonism toward her late mother. describing the experience of listening to patricia’s voicemails, she told me: sometimes it brings up a lot of anger. and i can’t tell if that’s just because, if it’s just the anger of grief, or if it’s the anger of the unjustness of it, or the anger of, i just got used to this person being gone, and now i’m hearing this voice, and it’s just like . . . it exists in this liminal space of, well, they’re gone, but not really gone, because they left this physical trace. erin’s anger was partly incited by her mother’s death, but it was also directed toward her mother’s persistent presence in her life, a presence made possible by the digital recordings that her phone had captured and preserved. ethnographies of ghosts and spirits are rife with unwanted encounters with the dead, as well as with the many methods that the living have developed to attend to them (harris 1982; middleton 1982; watson 1982; kohn 2013). less attention has been paid to these unwelcome encounters in the animation literature, although the ubiquity of branded characters and of characters used to convey instructions by the state suggests that further consideration is warranted (silvio 2010; occhi 2012; nozawa 2013). erin’s descriptions of her digital practice suggest that the purpose of the app is not just to animate patricia but also to open a channel between them, taking moments of unwelcome distraction and reframing them as opportunities to intensify a desired connection. her digital practice constitutes a form of “leaning in,” signaling to patricia her willingness to be addressed (zuckerman 2016, 297). in this way, erin’s attitude toward her app resonates with jacques derrida’s notion of ambivalent hospitality toward the dead. in specters of marx, derrida (1994, 216–17) writes: to welcome, we were saying then, but even while apprehending, with anxiety and the desire to exclude the stranger, to invite the stranger without accepting him or her, domestic hospitality that welcomes without welcoming the stranger, but a stranger who is already found within (das heimliche-unheimliche), more intimate with one than one is oneself. when such hospitality is offered, the self that one feels in possession of becomes the home of another. one is dispossessed (butler 2004). and the other is equally dispossessed, both occupying “places belonging finally neither to us nor to it” (derrida 1994, 217). derrida thus describes an attitude of hospitality that is cultivated toward the dead despite the recognition that the deceased is radically other and potentially threatening to the self. logging her mom sightings was one way that erin extended hospitality to her mother despite the aversion this intimacy engendered. at one point in our conversations, she pulled up an entry that she had logged while in the midst of a work project. looking back on it, she told me that doing so “felt good in that way, as opposed to feeling like these thoughts are intrusive.” while recognizing that this was a moment in which her mother had entered her thoughts uninvited, she suggested that the app opened her up to the “distraction.” it helped her cultivate the ability to “honor that tangent,” rather than using her mother’s persistent “intrusiveness” as grounds for excluding her. erin’s app thus grounded her own ethical relationship with her late mother, allowing patricia to dwell within, as well as on the digital database. conclusion five years after her death, patricia continues to animate diverse entities that erin comes across in her daily life. their encounters are mediated by the objects, places, people, and activities that bring patricia to presence, as well as by the app that erin uses to record her mom sightings. engaging in this practice of digital recording opens erin up to her mother’s presence, extending a form of ambivalent hospitality to her that deepens the intimacy between them. erin and patricia’s relationship is diagnostic of an emergent form of relation between the living and the dead, one built around a digital askesis. seeing these practices as a form of animation illuminates the mediated and mediatized relations that they make possible. animation highlights the variability and multiplicity of the dead, the partiality of their representations, and the way that these partial representations cohere as a database of elements rather than a singular narrative of the lives or personalities of the dead. this database of elements can be continually refigured to create new juxtapositions and uncanny associations that bring forth the dead in different ways. thus animation is not just of interest to scholars of characters and characterization; as silvio (2010) suggests, it offers a productive trope for understanding mediated relationships today, including, but not limited to, those between the living and the dead. as i have used it, animation is not about seeing how the dead come to have lives of their own when resurrected by digital media. rather, it means seeing how a particular set of practices developing around digital media is being used to open up a pathway between the living and the dead. in my work, the dead were animated by digital technologies that conjured and perpetuated them, from facebook profile pages to avatars of the deceased. but more than that, they were animated by their relationships with others, relationships that depended on particular digital media to persist in their current form. these relationships are by no means easy. the living and the dead are tangled up in them, done and undone, animated and reanimated by their intimacies. digital practices such as erin’s offer a means of cultivating an ethical hospitality in the face of this constitutive undoing, balancing desire and ambivalence through a digital askesis. by maintaining their mutually constitutive relationships, the living and the dead are carried forth, brought to life by and for each other. notes acknowledgments i thank my interlocutors, living and dead, for sharing their work and their insights. i am deeply indebted to daniel fisher and ian whitmarsh for their encouragement and feedback throughout the research and writing process. i also thank lawrence cohen and the anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology for their insightful comments. finally, i wish to thank my father, peter b. hales, my inspiration and muse. this research was supported by the medical scientist training program at the university of california, san francisco, by the department of anthropology, history, and social medicine, and by the earl c. anthony fellowship. 1. all names used in this article are pseudonyms. 2. phatic communication, or what bronislaw malinowski referred to as phatic communion, refers to “a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (malinowski 1946, 315). phatic language is defined by its “nonreferential character” and its “emphasis on social ties” (meltzer and musolf 2003, 143). i thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing the literature on the phatic to my attention. references aries, philippe 2005 “the hour of our death.” in death, mourning, and burial: a cross-cultural reader, edited by antonius c. g. m. robben, 40–48. malden, mass.: blackwell. originally published in 1977. azuma, hiroki 2009 otaku: japan’s database animals. translated by jonathan e. abel and shion kono. 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linguistic anthropology 26, no. 3: 294–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12137. “who you are in these pieces of paper”: imagining future kinship through auto/biographical adoption documents in the united states “who you are in these pieces of paper”: imagining future kinship through auto/biographical adoption documents in the united states kathryn a. mariner university of rochester https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6413-6383 the phrase paper pregnant is commonly used by prospective adopters in the united states to describe “the stage in which a person or couple receives their official acceptance of their application for adopting a child, prior to the formal adoption.”1 using the process-oriented language of a developmental “stage” with an uncertain temporal duration, one adoptive mother and blogger wrote in 2010, the paperwork stage can be equated with the first trimester of pregnancy, except it usually lasts several months more than that. this stage can induce some of the same symptoms of pregnancy (nausea, dizziness, etc.), such as the vast quantity of documents needed to be assembled in order to create an adoption dossier.2 another prospective adoptive mother clarified: “what it really means is that i have this piece of paper that says i am expecting a baby . . . eventually. i’m pregnant . . . on paper. at some point in the shadowy future . . . there will be a new baby in our house.”3 the descriptor is often used by prospective adoptive mothers, but through the notion of “paper pregnancy,” in which documents become a kind of “prosthetic device,” fathers-to-be can also access a world from which adopters “have been excluded because of their limited biological role in reproduction” (sandelowski 1994, 203).4 by 2018, a shop on the handmade retail outlet etsy offered two versions of a ladies v-neck shirt designed for prospective adoptive mothers, announcing “paper preggers” and “paper pregs,” respectively. on the latter, a small printed definition of the concept appears below: “adoption in progress.”5 at least one shop also offered a men’s t-shirt.6 the embrace of “paper pregnancies” among prospective american adopters—a document-based version of what signe howell (2006) has described as “symbolic pregnancy” among adoptive parents in norway—highlights the complex role documents play in the interweaving of futurity and kinned subject formation within the adoption process. papers help make kin relations imaginable and then real, allowing the paper pregnant to position themselves temporally with respect to an expected transition and resulting kin relation. through the documents, they become parents-to-be in an american cultural context in which pregnancy, birth, and child development are dominated by narratives of linear progress (layne 2003). the word pregnant itself is defined temporally, deriving from the latin for “before birth.” according to carol a. heimer (2006, 102), whose work investigates the role of paperwork in a neonatal intensive care unit (nicu), documents, especially those that materialize around the birth of an infant, “are particularly important in creating the sense of time and historicity that undergirds our understanding of how a human life unfolds.” though anthropologists have typically examined documents through their bureaucratic role in mediating relationships between individuals and the state, the announcement of a paper pregnancy is not simply a comment on bureaucratic process, but instead signals the arrival of an anticipatory subjectivity: the formal transition to expectant parent, marked by paper—a sort of pre-kinning. in the absence of more widely (and externally) recognizable biological substance and embodiment, adoption documents become the material that not only transforms kinship but also dictates and marks one’s progress (or lack thereof) along the way to parenthood. adoption paperwork mediates and facilitates processes of exchange, interaction, and imagination—the stuff of relationships (merging both substance and code of conduct, in a schneiderian [schneider 1980] sense). in advance of the adoptee’s arrival, it is the object of circulation and investment, key to the production of institutional identities and roles (carr 2009, 2010; stoler 2009, 19). by generating a seemingly neutral political and legal space, the documentary materials of adoption, as “relational objects”—those that specifically “open and control a path of relations toward others” (martín 2016, 439)—enable social workers, expectant mothers, and prospective adoptive parents to envision the past and future by reading one another through documents, with immense implications for resulting kinship formations. the “birth parent” file and the “adoptive family” profile are representative, standing in for expectant/birth mothers and prospective adoptive families, respectively. these documents are generative, constituting a condition of possibility for both the creation of future adoptive subjectivity and the future of the adoption agency itself. but they are also performative (riles 2006; martín 2016)—they do “work.” drawing on participant observation at first steps, a small private adoption agency where i conducted fieldwork between 2009 and 2016, as well as document analysis and interviews with adoption professionals and prospective adopters, i argue that adoption paperwork is instrumental in adoptive kinning (howell 2006)—which i am inflecting temporally here as pre-kinning and re-kinning—through documentary modes of “temporal folding” (cole and durham 2008, 12), in which the past and future overlap and become imaginable and actionable in the present. at first steps in particular, the rise of new documentary forms necessitated by increasing openness reveals how contemporary adoption documents fold together a range of temporalities, while providing new ways of reading not only the future and past but adoptive subjects as well. although adoption paperwork, abstractly conceptualized—as evident in the example of paper pregnancy—does lend itself to narrating a normative sense of linear progress, following its transit through the intimate and bureaucratic process of open adoption (in which kin relations are negotiated before the arrival of the [physical/living] child) reveals the various ways in which documents stretch, compress, enfold, and otherwise disrupt a linear sense of time. since open adoption threatens to produce two sets of parents at once for the same child, documents—through pre/re/de-kinning—split biological kinship from social kinship, relegating the former to the past and announcing the latter as both present and future. in the remainder of this article, i elaborate on how these insights about kinship and temporality fit into the broader historical significance of documents to american adoption, before describing the workings of paper at first steps specifically, through examples from the birth parent file and the agency’s corpus of adoptive family profiles. the anthropology of documents and the history of adoption in a recent ethnographic monograph based on my fieldwork at first steps, i argue that future-oriented experiences of waiting, apprehension, and speculation prove central to the american adoption process, which is constituted through a set of interwoven practices of anticipation, economic investment, and observation/surveillance that i term “intimate speculation” (mariner 2019a). in a series of related articles, i have traced the intimacies and intricacies of domestic transracial adoption through twinned modes of surveillance and monitoring in the ultrasound and home study, which allow social workers to mobilize a penetrating gaze (mariner 2018); the entanglements of race and kinship evident in white adoptive parents’ care of their black children’s hair (mariner 2019b); and the contemporary reverberations of historical racial trauma in the 2018 disappearance of the transracial adoptee devonte hart (mariner 2020). the previous arguments i have developed about the relationship between social inequality and adoption—particularly regarding race, class, and gender—inform the current analysis, but cannot be reproduced here. in what follows, i build on this existing work by elaborating how the specific material form of paperwork helps structure the simultaneous unfolding of time and the renegotiation of kinship within adoption. anthropologists have examined the power of documents within a range of contexts: as a material tool of bureaucratic ideology (hull 2012b; chelcea 2016), as a mediator of migration and citizenship (chu 2010; reeves 2013; seo 2016; abarca and coutin 2018), as an instrument of state surveillance (scott 1985; torpey 2000), and as a mechanism linking the politics of historical archiving, memory, and lived experience (tarlo 2003; stoler 2009). existing literature reveals a strong tendency to conceptualize documents and the practices that produce them within the analytic frames of bureaucracy and state control (hull 2012a). while anthropologists have examined the temporal role of documents in constructing the past through archives and collective memory, less attention has been paid to their production of anticipatory subjects and imagined futures. this disconnect becomes apparent in the history of adoption, in which documents’ significance is usually rendered in terms of their ability to link adoptees to their backgrounds, to vital historical information about selves and pasts. while adoption documents certainly serve to link individuals and their histories bureaucratically to the state, the documents i discuss here are significant for their ability to create newly (p)re-kinned subjects heavily invested in potent imagined futures. importantly, paperwork does not simply produce parents-to-be (or not-to-be); it also produces the very social workers who mediate these exchanges. documents have been integral to the development of american social work expertise since the birth of the profession. the adoption historian e. wayne carp (1998, 61) argues that the maintenance of the case record—of which the adoption file is a type—was “the central task of social workers during the first quarter of the twentieth century.” in addition, paperwork has occupied an extremely contentious role historically for adoptees and parents, primarily due to its utility for revealing or effacing what was taken as a problematic past or origin—in most cases illegitimacy. tensions emerged notably around access to the adoptee’s original birth certificate, spurred by the adoptee rights movement (arm) in the mid 1970s (carp 1998). adoption documents have since taken on immense political significance as a key to lost histories, identities, and relationships. in the 1990s and 2000s, a trend emerged toward open adoption—non-secretive arrangements often involving a plan for future contact between birth and adoptive families—and some level of openness is now the primary goal for most domestic adoptions in the united states. it is through openness that adoption reformers have attempted to resolve the notion of a problematic and hidden past. one result is an emphasis on the future, but in bringing the past forward (see also gray albert abarca and susan bibler coutin [2018, 16] on the “retrospective quality” of documents), the linear temporality of normative american kinship gives way to something else: a folded timeline in which past (birth/biological) and future (social/legal) kinship are brought together and made to touch. since expectant mothers now choose prospective parents, new forms of expertise have become necessary to manage and disseminate knowledge. emphasizing the role of material artifacts in the tension between confidentiality and openness, between known and unknown pasts, the anthropologist judith s. modell (2002, 69) adds, “still, ‘disclosure’ refers not to intimacy or love but to data—files, case records, government documents.” it seems unsurprising, then, that in her discussion of the increasing openness that has come to characterize adoption in the united states, modell (2002, 1) describes the social practice as coming “out of locked filing cabinets.” throughout adoption’s history, paperwork has served to control knowledge by shaping modes of remembering and forgetting, via techniques and technologies of transparency and secrecy. social workers tightly control the information contained in adoption documents, and the stakes for future kinship (or lack thereof) are incredibly high. scholars of paperwork have employed the metaphor of folding as a way to bridge the concrete and abstract realities of documents (cf. reed 2006; thomson 2012). in their discussion of the importance of children in “figuring the future,” jennifer cole and deborah durham (2008, 12) define temporal folding as “the bringing together of different chronotopes and temporalities”—but adoption documents do not just bring past, present, and future together. they enfold an imagined, and then real, child into a new family—and transform that child’s parents into first/birth/past parents. the practices of completing and exchanging paperwork constitute an important site in which the future is negotiated in the present, and through which certain representations of the past are projected forward. one potent example of this process is crystallized in the fbi background check clearance certificates that must accompany every prospective adopter’s home study. by certifying an adoptive parent’s lack of criminal conduct in the past, these documents serve as evidence of a parent’s ability to conduct hisor herself in a certain way in the present and future. the document renders certain (safe) futures—and corresponding future parenthood—imaginable, by recording an absence of past transgressions, in the name of candor (see also mariner 2019a). existing ethnographic explorations of adoption-related paperwork have primarily concerned access to the past and movement across national borders. laura briggs (2012) describes how, during the obama administration, the children of undocumented guatemalan immigrants were vulnerable to being adopted or placed in foster care after the deportation of their parents—insights newly resonant with the recent visibility of the crisis of detention and separation at the border. using the lens of legal anthropology, barbara yngvesson and susan bibler coutin (2006) present a preliminary exploration of adoptive temporality within the comparative context of international adoption in sweden and immigration and deportation in the united states, arguing that certain forms of paperwork prove instrumental in molding adoptees’ and deportees’ experiences of return, or going “back” to an origin point, a process in which time and space intermingle as social and national borders are crossed. through the birth certificate, adoptee subjects are (re)constituted in both the past and the present (yngvesson and coutin 2006, 178). on return, adoptees and deportees must also confront “selves that might have been” (yngvesson and coutin 2006, 181), a reference to futures that never unfolded. in a similar vein, briggs (2012, 130) contends that the creation of second birth certificates for transnational adoptees creates the “legal fiction that the birth parents never existed,” replacing one past with another. in the case of adoption from korea (as well as other examples of closed and/or transnational adoption), agency documents carry a particularly “heavy symbolic load,” as they often constitute the only tangible link that adoptees have to their “distant and irretrievable pasts” (kim 2010, 142–43). the historian arissa h. oh (2015, 119) has observed how in postwar korea, formal relinquishment documents, often stamped with lipstick thumbprints by birth mothers, served as “especially poignant memento[s]” for adoptees. the adoption process highlights the connection between certain documents, which describe and illustrate a present, and notions of the past and future (real or imagined), which are constructed in that present. central to this process is “the way moments of document creation anticipate future moments in which documents will be received, circulated, instrumentalized, and taken apart again” (riles 2006, 18). within the walls and filing cabinets of first steps, paper served to create social relations, categories, and expectations, all of which existed simultaneously within and outside the legal and official aspects of adoption. examining two specific genres of adoption paperwork that circulate in open domestic adoption—so-called birth parent files and adoptive family profiles—demonstrates how documents perform temporal folding through (p)re-kinning an imagined child and its parents. for open adoption to work (i.e., for social workers, expectant parents, and prospective adopters to work together to successfully transfer parenthood from one individual or couple to another), both sets of documents must be legible in particular ways: expectant mother histories need to be made incorporable into prospective adoptive family futures, and prospective adoptive family presents need to be rendered into futures imaginable to expectant mothers. this temporal folding determines the outcomes of preand re-kinning. the adoption archive before examining specific documents, it is necessary to describe the landscape in which they function and circulate. in defining my objects of analysis in this ethnographic context, i follow ann marie leshkowich’s (2014, 143) dual notion of form(s): (1) “the structure, content, and context around which individuals compose their autobiographies”; and (2) “written documents that require individuals to submit particular details about themselves for official scrutiny and recordkeeping.” this definition encompasses a range of adoption documentation, while emphasizing these documents’ materiality as instruments not only of bureaucratic record-keeping but also of communication, interpellation, and imagination—the object of what ann laura stoler (2009) terms “ethno-graphy.”7 leshkowich (2014, 149) describes particular vietnamese documents as “technologies of self,” alluding to their subject-making power. parallel to jessaca b. leinaweaver, diana marre, and susan e. frekko’s (2017, 563) mobilization of “homework” within the context of spanish adoption home studies—performative labor that brings a house into “architectural, aesthetic, and moral” alignment with social workers’ expectations—i use the term paperwork to encapsulate the documents themselves, as well as the labor they both perform and contain. first steps specialized in transracial adoption in a highly segregated urban context: chicago. the agency occupied an office in a liminal space between an affluent and majority-white suburb and a very low-income african american neighborhood. as a result, expectant mothers were predominantly african american and low-income (with economic factors being the most-cited motivation for relinquishment), and prospective adopters predominantly white and of higher socioeconomic status. the social workers were all white. i have written elsewhere about the challenges of collecting ethnographic data on the experiences of expectant parents from the vantage point of an adoption agency (an institution interested in relinquishment as a desired outcome), particularly due to the myriad ways they are rendered invisible by the adoption process (mariner 2019a). dominic boyer (2008, 38), contends that this type of access challenge is often a feature, rather than a glitch, of any “anthropology of experts,” noting that cultures of expertise often present obstacles to ethnographic access and require a level of “collegial discretion” (boyer 2008, 44). however, “inadequacies in ethnographic knowledge,” he notes, “should not be papered over as embarrassments but rather lingered on as prismatic gaps through which the contingencies/limits/opportunities of the anthropology of experts are fully revealed” (boyer 2008, 44). because my contact with expectant parents was limited and always mediated by a social worker, the present analysis is ethnographically weighted toward the accounts of social workers, adoptive parents, and the documents themselves. this further supports my contention that these two forms of paperwork function quite differently in the construction of these structurally opposed client subjects. first steps was a small agency, not only in terms of staff but also in terms of space. its two-hundred-some–square foot office housed no less than seventeen filing cabinets: four times as many as the number of employees at any given time. the human beings in the office were easily outweighed by the agency’s volume of paper: what was not spread across desks or stacked at our feet was contained within the aforementioned troop of filing cabinets, perhaps offloading or substituting less readily available human labor. the paper literally altered the physical landscape of the office, choking the cramped space in ways at times unpredictable and even dangerous. more than once, i witnessed social workers trip over placement files left in precarious stacks on the floor, and one shudders to think of the fire hazard produced by the ever-increasing piles of paper. in the summer of 2013, i watched a social worker give a new intern a “tour” of the filing cabinets, explaining the organizational logic behind the documentation of parents and children. stella dragged out a high drawer to show alicia all the files inside, while explaining that the first few cabinets contained domestic files in alphabetical order (a–r, by the adoptive family’s surname); s–z were stored in an adjacent room, relocated the previous year because of space concerns. closed, or finalized, adoption cases were kept separate from open, or ongoing, cases; the closed files lived in a separate cabinet, each folder bound with a thick rubber band. the band literally kept the file/case from spilling open, the materiality of the file mirroring its organizational reality. the top drawer of another cabinet was reserved for applicants waiting to be matched with an expectant mother domestically or with a child abroad—in stella’s words, those “in the pipeline” or “still in the mix.” the next drawer down stored files from “families awaiting finalization,” which would occur six months after placement of the child. “these people are all in their one-to-six-month thing,” stella remarked, pointing to the drawer and collapsing people into paper. as the tour unfolded, the temporal strata of the adoption process became discernible. as the files made their way from one drawer to the next, kinship relations transformed. but the documents not only made new forms of kinship possible; they dissolved old ones too. several of the myriad forms of paper in the agency’s office were instrumental in the mediation and creation of adoptive kinship, or what howell (2006, 8) has termed adoptive kinning: “the process by which a fetus or newborn child is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people . . . expressed in a conventional kin idiom.” howell (2006, 9) identifies three forms of kinning: “to kin by nature, to kin by nurture, to kin by law.” i argue that there exists a fourth: to kin by paper, a process that overlaps with legal kinning, but also transcends it—very few adoption documents were actually legally binding—through the creation of very specific materialities and temporalities. the paper-pregnant adopters described in the opening vignette have an acute sense of the power of these documents, which can cleave social and legal motherhood off from biological motherhood. for howell (2006, 4), the process of kinning has an opposite: de-kinning, through which the transnational adoptee: is denuded of all kinship; denuded of meaningful relatedness whether its identity is known or not . . . by being abandoned by relatives (whether biological or not is irrelevant in this context) and left for strangers to look after, the child is at the same time “de-kinned” by them, removed from kinned sociality. this nakedness, argues howell, allows states to exchange these children—and as such constitutes a process unique to international adoption. similarly, oh (2015, 118) describes how specific documents “produced an orphan, ostensibly free of family ties, who was available for overseas adoption” from korea. domestic adoption diverges from these examples in key ways. while the voluntary surrender or relinquishment of parental rights in the united states prompts a legal version of de-kinning, domestic adoption does not socially denude children of meaningful relationships. in an era of open adoption, while kinship may be stripped legally, domestic adoptees can rarely be considered orphaned. at first steps, paperwork rendered expectant/birth parents and prospective adoptive parents as acquaintances rather than strangers, and began the process of transforming their kinship relationships to a particular child. the notion of de-kinning remains useful, however, when considering the ways in which the process of domestic adoption transforms—rather than strips—existing kinship, instead fashioning a re-kinning. because social kinning—fostering a sense of social belonging within a family unit—occurred mostly outside the scope of the adoption process as mediated by the agency (i.e., after the agency’s work was complete), the transformation facilitated by documents was not simply re-kinning but also pre-kinning. as described below, parts of the birth parent file permanently altered a mother’s legal kinship tie to her child, while the file itself rendered certain kinned futures imaginable (and others unimaginable). birth parent files as stella’s tour of the files illustrated, most of the filing cabinets at first steps contained placement files: portfolios of information about the adoptive parents, birth parents, and infant involved in a particular adoption. inside each blue-tabbed folder hid three further tabbed folders, labeled “adoptive family file,” “birth parent file,” and “baby file.” the temporal folding of the adoption process was made uniform and legible through each file’s identical structure: each sheet of paper had two holes at the top, secured with two thin malleable metal prongs that held all the other sheets of paper in the file. unlike a three-ring binder, in which pages can be inserted or removed easily from any particular position in the folder, the placement files were structured such that in order to add or remove a given page, each page that came before had to be removed first, making the review, manipulation, and modification of the files much more linear (and laborious). though no explicit mode existed for tracing a file’s journey from one filing cabinet to another, no face sheet to record how “far along” a given adoption was, the folders swelled perceptibly as birth and adoptive placement approached. an ultrasound image tucked in here. a counseling summary appended there. a stack of intake forms added on the heels of a hefty home study. by the end of the process, a typical placement file was about two to three inches thick. the arrangement of the documents within these placement files mirrored subjects’ temporal involvement in the process: a prospective adoptive family would apply to the agency and complete their paperwork; a woman would become pregnant and be matched with the waiting family via a profile; a baby would be born, surrendered, and adopted. the adoptive family file usually came first in the placement file, and was the thickest, containing the entire home study, as well as all the foster-care licensing paperwork, adoption application materials, and the family profile, which i will discuss in the following section.8 all birth parent files contained a uniform and standardized set of thirty-eight documents arranged in a predetermined order according to a standard table of contents. their organization dictated that they be read in a uniform way. the standardization of the files mimicked the classification and stereotyping of expectant mothers as a group, while their idiosyncratic content individuated them. the last folder in the placement file was the baby file, which was also the sparest, and usually contained relevant copies of forms found elsewhere in the placement file, as well as the adoption court orders and medical records. the expectant/birth mother stood literally and documentarily between the prospective adoptive parents and the adoptable child. any information on the fetus (early genetic testing, prenatal care, ultrasound records, etc.) would be placed into the birth parent file until the baby was born, a material and symbolic mirroring of the biological reality of reproduction; until that time, the baby file remained empty.9 throughout much of the adoption process, the birth parent file was physically pregnant with fetal documents. as heimer (2006, 100) notes, “the transition to a separate physical existence is marked with the creation of a separate documentary existence.” the very naming of these documents was imbued with futurity. i have argued elsewhere that the practice of referring to this set of documents—as commonly done in the agency office—as a “birth parent” or “birth mother” file projects a mothering subject more accurately described as “expectant” or “expecting” into an imagined future in which she has given birth and relinquished her parental rights (mariner 2019a, 28). a similar temporal and ontological argument could be made for the “adoptive family” profiles i will discuss in the following, which in many cases were created by pre-kinned subjects who had not yet adopted. from the perspective of the agency, one became a birth mother not by giving birth, but by completing the intake forms (i.e., by creating an adoption plan). the paperwork creates the formal start of the adoption plan for the expectant mother, transforming her into an expectant-mother-with-plans-to-relinquish. the adoption plan always already constitutes a future plan. if the adoption paperwork completed by prospective adopters renders them paper-pregnant parents-to-be, the intake birth mother paperwork, by contrast, in formalizing the intent to relinquish, creates the anticipatory subjectivity of a mother-not-to-be. the physical location of the birth parent file mirrored the legal necessity for a certain documented action by the expectant parent(s) before baby and adoptive parent(s) could be united, namely, the signing of the irrevocable surrenders, which terminated the biological parents’ parental rights. this liminal position also reflected the expectant parents’ social location with regard to the new adoptive kinship formation, a liminality emphasized by practices of open adoption, which require the simultaneous creation and dissolution of kinship ties between birth family and adoptive family, structured by the possibility of future reconnection. the birth parent file contained the paperwork that initiated the adoption plan, as well as the irrevocable surrenders, which finalized it by terminating all legal and most, if not all, social kinship, thus (p)re-kinning the child and both sets of parents. these documents could be prognostic. birth parent files projected the expectant mother’s past and present into the imagined future of the child and adoptive family, at the same time that they rendered her a legible subject to adoption social workers and prospective adoptive parents. the files contained medical records, social histories, and self-reported physical descriptions of biological parents, which helped illustrate social workers’ and adoptive parents’ imagining of the future child. a so-called birth mother contact sheet, which contained information about drug or alcohol use during pregnancy, could help predict possible future complications. it would also record each of her previous births, if applicable, and contain descriptions of any existing children. a socio-medical history of the biological family that showed a history of depression or predisposition to certain cancers could help color the imagined future life of the child. this form read, “it is important that the adoptive parents have this information so that it can become part of their family history.” as the expectant mother completed the form in the present, her history would become fused with the already-adoptive family’s history, through a child not yet born. the form also rendered the future present for the expectant mother by asking, “what kind of contact, if any, do you want with the adoptive family after placement? what is your current feeling about being contacted by the child when he/she is an adult?” the use of “the child” rather than “your child” presages the impending legal de-kinning. a separate form recording the expectant/birth mother’s address facilitated the future exchange of information. the file also contained a formal, non-binding agreement about openness, structuring the level of future contact between birth and adoptive families. an accompanying “letter of commitment to contact” would be signed by the prospective adoptive parents and included in the birth parent file. it outlined the terms of the open adoption agreement, in which the adoptive family agreed to send photographs and letters to the birth parent(s) in order to update her/them on the child’s progress. this form was not legally binding: “this is an ethical commitment, made in good faith, and we (i) fully intend to uphold it.” in practice, openness ranged from regular in-person visits to little or no contact at all. the illinois adoption registry form collected personal information for future search and reunion, in the event that the adoption was or would become closed. the documents in the birth parent file helped determine future family structures, fleshing out to what degree the biological parent(s) would be included in, or excluded from, the resulting adoptive family (i.e., the level of kinning that would take place). they created a coherent biographical narrative of the expectant mother (and to a lesser degree, the father) as a so-called birth parent, before the baby was even born. in addition to the preliminary adoption paperwork, the birth mother file also contained the surrenders—arguably the most important set of documents in the file—which could not be signed by the mother until at least seventy-two hours after the birth. during my fieldwork, i sometimes served as a witness to the relinquishment of parental rights. in the summer of 2009, i accompanied stella to a neighborhood on the south side to meet with an african american mother and father—tamra and james—who had chosen, primarily out of economic necessity, to place their newborn with a first steps adoptive family. seated across from the couple in their living room, stella cradled a bundle of papers in her lap and explained the relinquishment process. tamra sniffled and dabbed intermittently at the corners of her eyes. james put his arm around her and sat quietly, listening to stella explain the “irrevocable” nature of the surrenders. once relinquished, one’s parental rights to a specific child could never be recovered—the properly documented surrenders themselves foreclosed any return or going back. yet although social workers always referred to the signing of the surrenders as the act that terminated parental rights, tamra’s and james’s signatures on the forms remained insufficient for a complete legal de-kinning. after five copies of the surrenders were signed, stella removed a small tape recorder from her bag, and leafed through her papers in search of the “checklist of understanding.” she switched the recorder on and read each statement on the checklist, waiting for a verbal affirmation from the parents (not-to-be) before moving to the next item. back at the office, she would remove the minicassette from the device, place it in a plastic case, and tape it inside of the couple’s file. the mandatory recording of the surrenders illustrates the limits of paperwork to accomplish certain goals within the adoption process. however, the emphasis placed on signing the surrenders rather than speaking them—and the associated symbolic significance of the forms themselves—is illustrated by a conversation i had with stella in 2013 about a mother who had signed and then experienced regret: and if you sign that and then are unhappy with that, i’ve done something wrong. well, not necessarily. i mean, there are—i had one situation where i—up-down, everything—brought the family in, had her meet them, you know, blah blah blah. she signed the surrender, and then she said, “well, i don’t really like them.” . . .you know, all of this spilled out after she signed, and i’m like, “oh, crap, if you had told me that twenty minutes ago, we wouldn’t be sitting with this paperwork.” stella frames the paperwork itself, the physical signed documents, as the obstacle to regaining the mother’s parental rights (in effect, removing agency from herself as bureaucratic expert and gatekeeper). the recorded surrenders (like the required witness signature) constitute a kind of insurance against future kinship claims—they repeat the exact text of the forms, and no one actually listens to them. in this way they function as an extension of the paperwork, rather than their own sensory or material genre. similar to the birth certificate as described by yngvesson and coutin (2006, 178), after the adoption is finalized, the birth parent file “leads one back to the birth.” yet even when these documents function as records of past origins, their value is conceived in terms of future contact. for example, when first steps closed permanently in 2015, staff packed up and moved about 1,700 files to the state capital for archiving. parents who had adopted felt distraught, unsure how to maintain the possibility of contact between their children and their children’s birth parents: “where the hell is my file going?”; “it’s such a tangible link and it isn’t there” (mariner 2019a, 191). broadly, the birth parent paperwork is crucial to the adoption process because it starts the exchange, “gets all the engines going,” in stella’s words. stella described this paperwork as “the vehicle” that put the process in motion and moved it in a particular direction. the delivery of the future hinged on these documents. although the expectant/birth mother may not be physically present or always visible (from the vantage point of the adoption agency), as a documented subject she becomes tangible, material, readable, and archivable for future reference and action. captured, and in some ways produced, by the file, she becomes a mother to someone else’s future child. a future she is instrumental in choosing, one highly mediated by documents. adoptive family profiles “we ask you to prepare a presentation about yourself, a paper presentation,” dotty, the founder of first steps, told a roomful of prospective adopters in 2013. the presentation to which she referred was more commonly called a “profile” around the office. in the case of domestic adoption, adoptive family profiles provided the representation of the family on which the expectant mother often based her placement decision—they made possible the imagining of certain futures that may or may not include the creation of new kinship ties. because of the demographic reality of chicago and the raced and classed dynamics of adoption (mariner 2019a), these profiles also portrayed a sort of ideal white middle-class family life into which an imagined child could be inserted. at first steps, these profiles were documents, in book form, assembled by prospective adoptive parents that told an autobiographical story. profiles are usually colorful, with many photographs, and contain information about the individual’s or couple’s home, existing children and pets (if applicable), careers, extended family, and most important, hopes for a child. these are completed in addition to copious amounts of more official and agencyor state-mandated paperwork (like the required fbi clearances) similar to what expectant parents complete (though exceedingly more thorough), but no equivalent to the family profile exists in the birth parent file. taken as a group, first steps profiles constituted a visual catalogue of waiting prospective adoptive families. social workers showed them to expectant mothers to assist them in selecting a family for their future child. they dictated the creation and dissolution of kinship ties by folding the future into the present. the guidelines given by the agency referred to the creation of a profile as a “creative journey,” and the completion of these profiles often proved a joyful and artistic (yet also anxiety-ridden) affair. the stakes were high: as one social worker told a prospective adoptive couple, they could not be “shown” to expectant mothers “unless there’s a book.” two other documents preceded adoptive family profiles: guidelines for the profile’s completion, and a form collecting consent to share the profile with expectant parents. the guidelines, evidence of a particular “graphic ideology” (hull 2012b, 14), offered suggestive statements such as “catch the essence of who you really are” and “depict yourself and your family doing things you enjoy.” while birth parent paperwork asked primarily about the past, with gestures toward the future, adoptive family profiles were to depict a timeless present that could be projected into the future by the potential birth parents who would read them. within certain administrative guidelines, the social workers at first steps generally encouraged creativity as opposed to conformity, believing that the chosen mode of profile creation communicated something profound about the individuals doing the creating, and that the act of creating the book, the labor, the paperwork, constituted a process both transformative and informative. as a result, profiles displayed a great deal of aesthetic diversity, while remaining recognizable as examples of a particular genre, something akin to a scrapbook. the profiles were a sort of rudimentary form of social media, producing a particular self or selves for social worker and expectant mother consumption. they illustrated clearly what johanna gonçalves martín (2016, 440) has referred to as “the ability of documents to connect worlds.” the absence of certain kinds of imagery in the profile could be as powerful as presence, particularly in conveying a message about the future. in speaking with one prospective adoptive couple, barbara, a social worker, used an example of another family’s creative use of empty space: “the one that i thought was really unique was how they [said]—‘this is our story’—and then there was a blank page at the end.” she continued, “but, i mean, she [the expectant mother] will allude to the fact that your story will be complete when a child comes into your life.” the blank page symbolized an unknown future family arrangement to be completed by the addition of the child. it charged the expectant mother with filling in the picture. one prospective adoptive mother i encountered during my fieldwork, jeanine, hired a graphic designer. “i think it’s worth investing in something that looks really sharp,” she said when i inquired about the practice. she pointed me to the website of a designer that a friend had used. the going rate for full profile design was $900, serving as a stark marker of class inequality within a context in which expectant mothers were primarily placing their children out of economic necessity. these services have since proliferated. the company forever family designs states, “your adoption journey begins with a book,” and the competitor service our chosen child adoption profile design claims to help prospective adopters “stand out from the multitude” by representing them with “beauty, honesty, and creativity.”10 photographs proved essential to any successful profile. mary bouquet (2000, 9) has argued that “as a form of folk art, family photography was and remains deeply involved in constituting kinship through the coherent looking images it produces, which are simultaneously material artefacts that occupy space and demand classification.” knowing that i was adopted, jeanine emailed me asking for a photo: “so mark & i have been working on our adoption profile & created a section on people who we know who were adopted. would you be open to having your photo or maybe you and your parents together? whatever you feel most comfortable with. what do you think?” jeanine needed photographs of families that visually resembled what she hoped would be her own future family. in a context in which domestic adoption was often transracial (white parents and a nonwhite child), it was important that my own parents be pictured to capture our racial incongruence. as barbara told another adoptive couple, “if you have family that have interracial children, you want to include them.” after some initial hesitation, i decided to send jeanine a photograph. about a week later, she sent me a pdf of the entire finished profile. there i was on page 10 (titled “adoption is in our family”—the line between friends and family became blurred within the pages of the profile), smiling out at the reader, standing between my white mother and father, one of those ubiquitous images of transracial intimacy. underneath, jeanine had added the caption: “wedding day for an adopted friend.” my photo was one among many, including a group photo of several families jeanine had helped create during her time as an adoption social worker, and a photo of jeanine’s aunt and adopted cousins. not only did these photographs serve as proof of the racial diversity already present in jeanine’s “family”; the people of color in them also served as imagined embodiments of the expectant mother’s, and thus jeanine’s, future child. in june of 2014, i received a vague email from jeanine with the subject “maternity leave,” asking if i could lead her infertility support group for about three months while she was away.11 “i’m preparing for hopefully one day becoming a mama. still waiting, but i thought i’d check in first,” she wrote. “i figure it will happen sometime this year. i realize that’s a large chunk of time to be open to, but perhaps you know you’re [sic] availability for the year so far?” i let her know that i would be happy to step in if needed. she called me later that day to tell me that she and mark had been “picked” and that the mother was in labor. the birth mother had looked at their profile and decided that they would be the future parents of her child. jeanine was no longer paper pregnant; her “shadowy future” had arrived. within this context, bouquet’s (2000, 16) contention—that “photography does not simply find ready made families, but has an active hand in making them appear”—rings doubly true. jeanine’s reference to maternity leave further reflects how prospective adoptive families are often imagined as expectant parents (howell 2006, 69), experiencing a period of waiting mediated by the profile. profiles overflow with language of futurity and waiting, and the text is often directed, dialogically, at the expectant mother. many of the profiles began with a letter addressed “dear birth mother,” indexing the role of the profiles as an initial correspondence, the initiation of a potential kinship, and the interpellation of an already-mothering (and already-relinquished) subject. deftly combining present and future tenses, one first steps couple wrote, “we eagerly await the day when we will be blessed by being selected by someone such as you.” this particular profile continued: “none of us can know for certain what awaits us in the future,” but went on to promise the future exchange of paper and knowledge: “should you wish to be connected to your child in the future through the exchange of letters and pictures, i will be happy to accommodate your wishes.” the prospective mother concluded with, “i look into the future with hope, optimism, and excitement, and i hope that you will share your life journey with me.” this kind of language evokes a sense of intimacy and connectedness absent from paperwork in the birth parent file. indeed, no correspondence exists there. another profile read, “we want you to know that we would provide a very loving and secure home for the baby and we are so excited about what the future will hold for us as a family.” the prospective adopters speak, and the expectant mother listens, reproducing raced and classed dynamics of voice and silence. these profiles attempted to fill the expectant mother’s imagination with an array of potential futures for a child she had yet to birth, at the same time that they posed an implicit argument for her unsuitability as a parenting subject. the letters often situated the expectant mother in the paradoxical role of “selfless” unfit mother by implying a particular kind of “better” future offered by the prospective adoptive parents. one letter read, “you are performing a completely selfless act by choosing what is best for your child’s future by providing him or her security, health, and happiness.” another letter-writer commented, “we cannot imagine how hard it must be to decide that the best future for your child may not be with you.” in striving to create kinship on the eve of its dissolution, profiles recruited the expectant mother to the role of mother not only of her biological child but also of the child of the adoptive parents (almost in the role of surrogate)—the role of birth mother—and begged for her response: a granting of the request for kinship. in this way the profiles aided in the construction of a dual motherhood, while simultaneously transforming the prospective parents into the parents of this specific—and at the same time, universal—mother’s future child. in certain ways, the “dear birth mother” letters resemble other epistolary genres—love letters, for example, which “shape and reflect [the writers’] changing conceptions of their own personhood” (ahearn 2000, 206), or the letters written by americans to consular offices and the international social service in the 1950s hoping for korean children to adopt (kim 2010, 64)—but they also differ markedly, most notably in that they are not directed to a specific individual, but rather must be written to appeal to a range of mothers. there is no written response, just selection, filtered through the social worker. the mother’s response is thus limited to surrender/dispossession or no response at all. the profile renders possible the process of adoptive kinning, at the same time that it hopes for legal de-kinning between expectant mother and child. before the child arrives or the surrenders are signed, these profiles begin the work of (p)re-kinning. while the profiles purported to represent parental fitness (and fit), the imagined future they portrayed was never certain—indeed, adoptive parents constructed these profiles in the face of overwhelming risk of failure. at any given time, there were many more prospective adopters in the pipeline than expectant mothers, and the wait time for a match could top one or even two years. one profile ended the first page with, “we hope you’ll keep reading to find out more,” alluding to the future of the expectant mother’s reading experience, while acknowledging the possibility of a future in which she does not keep reading, which betrayed an anxiety about not being chosen. this dystopic future of the unchosen was very real, and its fruition was rooted not only in the qualities of those hoping to adopt but also in the materiality, the style, the content, and the aesthetics of the profile itself. stella told me about the occasional profile that missed the mark: but every once in a while, we get a profile that resonates with nobody. and, when you look at it, sometimes it looks very stilted, it, the pictures are—it doesn’t reveal much. and so, people, especially after looking at the others, go, “well i don’t know anything about them.” and so, and you think to yourself, “yeah, and what i know i don’t particularly like.” so those profiles are problematic. they don’t fly as well, even though they can be very pretty. in a very pretty cover, you know, with everything nice. but it’s sometimes, it’s just like an empty house. stella continued, “i have a canadian family as well, two women and an older daughter. and their profile just never went. and now they’ve changed it, and it goes. it’s much better. it’s more alive.” here she observes that successful profiles, those with “life,” are characterized by movement. in his work on anticipatory action, ben anderson (2010, 785) observes, “making the future present becomes a question of creating affectively imbued representations that move and mobilize.” as animate and affective objects, successful profiles set adoption processes in motion; they ease and facilitate circulations and exchanges. this metaphor of life and living paper stands in stark contrast to stella’s comparison of the birth parent paperwork to a machine component. what would it take for a birth parent file to come alive? or was this a structural impossibility given the ways in which the agency constructed these two very different sets of client subjects? the birth parent paperwork differed categorically from the family profiles, in that the former only contained text (and perhaps an ultrasound). indeed the birth parent paperwork did not have a “look,” or at least not a representational one. you could read the birth mother through it, but you still could not see her. her forms were not characterized by life, but instead had a ghostly quality, as if she were always already vanishing. adoptive family profiles, conversely, allowed social workers and expectant mothers to really see prospective adoptive families, in living color. at least that was the claim made of successful ones. in a sense, through documents, expectant/birth mothers become rendered as types, while adoptive families are represented by portraits, a process that, as brian wallis (1995, 54) has argued in the context of the slave daguerreotypes commissioned by louis agassiz, constitutes “representational colonialism.” leshkowich (2014) examines a similar contrast between two forms of autobiographical documents in vietnam. one (lý lich, or autobiographical statements) parallels the adoptive family profile, while the other (the case file) parallels the birth parent file: lý lich were self-produced, with the implication that the process of examining one’s life through this form was itself a means of becoming through the internalization of particular socialist norms and values. the case file, in contrast, locates the creative agency with the social worker, for it is the expert who narrates and assesses the depicted self. (leshkowich 2014, 152) in adoption, these two modes of production are always imbricated because of the high level of social worker mediation. indeed, even when profiles are self-produced, they still pass through the social worker and are shaped and curated by social worker expectations. though i was not able to interview expectant mothers about their reasoning for choosing particular profiles (and thus, prospective adopters), my observations and the accounts of social workers suggest a great deal of both idiosyncrasy and intuition in the selection process. stella and i met with a twenty-two-year-old expectant mother named lucy in september of 2009. stella had chosen three profiles to present before we left the agency, based on wait time and various restrictions set by lucy (single women, no existing children). this was lucy’s third pregnancy and first adoptive placement. she was very quiet, and signed the preliminary papers quickly. she gave each profile a cursory glance, and reported that she did not like any of them. stella frowned, but lucy did not elaborate. at an information session in 2014, dotty told prospective adopters, “they know right away if you’re the family, believe me, they know.” when one applicant asked dotty how to predict what an expectant mother would or would not like, she responded, collapsing the applicants into their profiles, “you never know, but it’s a mystical thing—when they see you, they know.” she mentioned that one mother loved a family’s name. another was taken by the lake near a family’s home. “they fall in love with a particular family in the end,” she insisted, “and it just happens. they just feel it.” stella told me that selection was about resonance, but also about a particular imaginary of the future: because the essence of these, to me, is that you get the essence of who you are in these pieces of paper. and that people resonate with that, if you can capture it. they get that. and it doesn’t matter if they have the prettiest house, and the most furnishings. it doesn’t matter if you’re single, gay, or whatever. they get that there’s something real here, that they—“i could put my child in your world, and that child would thrive.” this is a narration both from present to future and from poverty to middle class (and often, from black to white). in her information session, dotty mentioned twice that it would be helpful for families to include information about a college fund and photos of a nursery, indexing both class status (adopters could all afford the adoption fees, which rose to $27,000 during the course of my fieldwork) and preparation for kinship to come. thus adoptive parent profiles were charged with conveying certain realities that in turn predicted an array of possible futures. such futures are based on the profile’s ability not only to ease the applicants’ movement through the adoption process and through time in the present but also literally to move the expectant mother by prompting a specific negotiation of future kinship based on autobiographical narrative, all under social worker supervision. conclusion: paper hurdles adoption affords an underutilized lens through which to view the multiply fraught interplay between documents, subjects, and futures, and uncovering these intimate temporal dynamics elucidates issues of much wider anthropological concern. for example, abarca and coutin (2018, 8) recently examined immigrants’ “anticipatory” record-keeping practices in southern california, where they found that noncitizens’ intimate relationship with the state was transformatively “mediated by documents.” “the act of collecting papers,” they argue, “is a response to uncertainty and an attempt to document deservingness [of eventual citizenship]” (abarca and coutin 2018, 10); in other words, immigrants’ archival practices constitute a mode of acting on the future in the present. “by collecting documents,” the authors continue, “immigrants who have to contend with invisibility and lack of recognition can aspire to a future when they will have status” (abarca and coutin 2018, 15). by turning back to adoption, we confirm that documents mediate intimate relations, not just between individuals and the state but also between individuals and real and imagined others, and between individuals and pasts and futures. taken together, american birth parent files and adoptive family profiles demonstrate how adoption paperwork functions across a range of contexts to produce, transform, and dissolve kinned subjectivity and sociality through the documentation of imagined futures and troubled pasts. one day, dotty said to me: i won’t name the adoption agency, but there’s a large one in this area, that demands a great deal from birth mothers and adoptive families, many, many, many paper hurdles to jump . . . and they’ve lost some business because of it. because it just seems so, “c’mon, let’s get to the real thing here.” here dotty notes the ability of paperwork—often considered a defining artifact of social service agencies (the word bureaucracy itself deriving from the french for “writing desk”)—to distort time by slowing down the process, thereby threatening an agency’s future. what the ethnographic examples above have shown is that paper in fact constitutes part of the real thing. indeed, it was only through paperwork, facilitated by a series of social encounters, that the possibility of adoptive kinship—the basis for the agency’s existence—was produced. these documents made the process, and the symbolic pregnancy, feel real for adoption’s participants, at the same time that it functioned to delay arrival at the “real thing.” they constituted a significant layer of a rich and active archive of adoption material. in pointing not only to the past but also to the future, these documents reveal adoption as a temporally fraught process rather than a status or outcome. through this temporal and ontological origami, both kinship and those thought to mediate and produce it come into and out of being in modern american private agency adoption. abstract at first steps, a small private adoption agency outside chicago, social workers spent more time processing paperwork than interacting with clients. in addition to mediating the relationship between individuals and the bureaucratic adoption apparatus, these documents created anticipatory (p)re-kinned subjectivities. based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2009 and 2016, this article examines the completion and circulation of two different forms of auto/biographical documentation during the adoption process: the birth parent file and the adoptive family profile. these documents played a vital role in the adoption process by simultaneously enabling the creation and dissolution of kinship, through the folding of past, present, and future narratives and possibilities into adoption knowledge and decision making. aided by the documentary termination of birth parental rights and the imagination of visual and narrative adoptive futures, domestic adoption legally split biological kinship from social kinship, rendering the former past and the latter present/future. [adoption; documents; kinship; temporality; future; social workers] notes acknowledgments this article originated as part of a dissertation prepared under the guidance of joseph masco, john comaroff, e. summerson carr, and julie chu. i thank them for their critical insights and constructive engagement. many thanks to colleagues kristin doughty and jennifer kyker for helpful conversations during the revision process. i am also grateful for the generous guidance of heather paxson and the anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology, whose thoughtful comments and suggestions greatly improved this manuscript. 1. posted by user fcsuper, april 8, 2007, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=paper+pregnant, accessed february 4, 2015. 2. chicago now blog, february 1, 2010, http://www.chicagonow.com/ay-mama/2010/02/the-stages-of-a-paper-pregnancy/, accessed february 3, 2015. 3. adopting mamas blog, april 13, 2011, http://www.adoptingmamas.com/2011/04/13/were-paper-pregnant/, accessed february 3, 2015. 4. sandelowki discusses this exclusion in gendered terms, describing how sonograms give men access to the world of biological reproduction. it is unclear the extent to which prospective adoptive fathers participate in the discourse of paper pregnancies, though on the other side of the adoption exchange, the terminology of birth father is a curious way to describe a man who will never give birth and is most often described by social workers in terms of “legal risk” (see mariner 2019a). 5. https://www.etsy.com/listing/221907399/paper-pregs-definition-shirt-adopting, accessed july 18, 2018. 6. https://www.etsy.com/listing/590501313/paper-pregnant-adoption-announcement, accessed july 23, 2019. 7. the term paperwork emphasizes the materiality of the paper, distinguishing it from electronic documentation and communication, which certainly conform to different aesthetic and material standards, and perhaps warrant a different mode of analysis. in this article, i bracket electronic documentation because it was not a major mode of documentation during my fieldwork. aside from email, the agency functioned primarily in hard copy. 8. in illinois, any individual adopting domestically must be licensed as a foster parent by the department of children and family services. this is a blanket process to assure that both those adopting privately as well as those caring for foster children are “fit to parent.” 9. “even before birth a baby has a bureaucratic existence,” argues heimer (2006, 100). while this holds true for both adopted and non-adopted infants, i would argue that the subjectivities of adopted infants are more highly mediated through these and other similar forms of paperwork. in fact, a common refrain among some adoptive parents experiencing infertility is that they would not have had to fill out so much paperwork and jump through so many bureaucratic hoops had they been able to conceive a biological child. 10. forever family designs home page, http://foreverfamilydesigns.com, accessed february 28, 2015. our chosen child home page, http://www.ourchosenchild.com, accessed february 28, 2015. 11. i am trained as a clinical social worker. references abarca, gray albert, and susan bibler coutin 2018 “sovereign intimacies: the lives of documents within us state-noncitizen relationships.” american ethnologist 45, no. 1: 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12595. ahearn, laura m. 2000 “true traces: love letters and social transformation in nepal.” in letter writing as a social practice, edited by david barton and nigel hall, 199–207. philadelphia: john benjamins. anderson, ben 2010 “preemption, precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and future geographies.” progress in human geography 34, no. 6: 777–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510362600. bouquet, mary 2000 “the family photographic condition.” visual anthropology review 16, no. 1: 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/var.2000.16.1.2. boyer, dominic 2008 “thinking through the anthropology of experts.” anthropology in action 15, no. 2: 38–46. https://doi.org/10.3167/aia.2008.150204. briggs, laura 2012 somebody’s children: the politics of transracial and transnational adoption. durham, n.c.: duke university press. carp, e. wayne 1998 family matters: secrecy and disclosure in the history of adoption. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. carr, e. summerson 2009 “anticipating and inhabiting institutional identities.” american ethnologist 36, no. 2: 317–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01137.x. 2010 “enactments of expertise.” annual review of anthropology 39: 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104948. chelcea, liviu 2016 “kinship of paper: genealogical charts as bureaucratic documents.” polar 39, no. 2: 294–311. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12195. chu, julie y. 2010 cosmologies of credit: transnational mobility and the politics of destination in china. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cole, jennifer, and deborah durham 2008 “introduction: globalization and the temporality of children and youth.” in figuring the future: globalization and the temporalities of children and youth, edited by jennifer cole and deborah durham, 3–23. santa fe, n.mex.: school for advanced research press. heimer, carol a. 2006 “conceiving children: how documents support case versus biographical analyses.” in documents: artifacts of modern knowledge, edited by annelise riles, 95–126. ann arbor: university of michigan press. howell, signe 2006 the kinning of foreigners: transnational adoption in a global perspective. new york: berghahn. hull, matthew s. 2012a “documents and bureaucracy.” annual review of anthropology 41: 251–67. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104953. 2012b government of paper: the materiality of bureaucracy in urban pakistan. berkeley: university of california press. kim, eleana j. 2010 adopted territory: transnational korean adoptees and the politics of belonging. durham, n.c.: duke university press. layne, linda l. 2003 motherhood lost: a feminist account of pregnancy loss in america. new york: routledge. leinaweaver, jessaca b., diana marre, and susan e. frekko 2017 “‘homework’ and transnational adoption screening in spain: the co-production of home and family.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 23, no. 3: 562–79. https://dx.doi.org/10.1111%2f1467-9655.12652. leshkowich, ann marie 2014 “standardized forms of vietnamese selfhood: an ethnographic genealogy of documentation.” american ethnologist 41, no. 1: 143–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12065. mariner, kathryn a. 2018 “the specular un/making of kinship: american adoption’s penetrating gaze.” ethnos 83, no. 5: 968–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2017.1377744. 2019a contingent kinship: the flows and futures of adoption in the united states. oakland: university of california press. 2019b “white parents, black care: entanglements of race and kinship in american transracial adoption.” american 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modern knowledge, edited by annelise riles, 1–38. ann arbor: university of michigan press. sandelowski, margarete 1994 “separate, but less unequal: fetal ultrasonography and the transformation of expectant mother/fatherhood.” gender and society 8, no. 2: 230–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/190011. schneider, david m. 1980 american kinship: a cultural account. 2nd ed. chicago: university of chicago press. originally published in 1968. scott, james c. 1985 weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven, conn.: yale university press. seo, bo kyeong 2016 “the work of inscription: antenatal care, birth documents, and shan migrant women in chiang mai.” medical anthropology quarterly 31, no. 4: 481–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12342. stoler, ann laura 2009 along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. tarlo, emma 2003 unsettling memories: narratives of the emergency in delhi. berkeley: university of california press. thomson, marnie jane 2012 “black boxes of bureaucracy: transparency and opacity in the resettlement process of congolese refugees.” polar 35, no. 2: 186–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01198.x. torpey, john c. 2000 the invention of the passport: surveillance, citizenship, and the state. cambridge: cambridge university press. wallis, brian 1995 “black bodies, white science: louis agassiz’s slave daguerreotypes.” american art 9, no. 2: 39–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/424243. yngvesson, barbara, and susan bibler coutin 2006 “backed by papers: undoing persons, histories, and return.” american ethnologist 33, no. 2: 177–90. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2006.33.2.177. editorial curation and the durability of anthropological ideas in a time of ambient innovation editorial curation and the durability of anthropological ideas in a time of ambient innovation: a comment on the thirtieth year of cultural anthropology george e. marcus university of california, irvine editor, cultural anthropology, vols. 1–6 (1986–1991) “the ideal ca submission is one that will say something unexpected yet generative . . .” —editors’ introduction to 30.1, cultural anthropology i would like to launch my comment on the journal’s thriving present by recalling two passages from an essay i wrote at the end of its beginning—for the first issue of my last year as editor (marcus 1991, 122–23): the first issue of cultural anthropology, a quarterly, appeared in february 1986. the journal was established as the official organ of the newly formed society for cultural anthropology (sca) within the major parent professional organization, the american anthropological association (aaa). this new society was the inspiration of a number of leading cultural anthropologists (e.g., david schneider, roy d’andrade, clifford geertz) who had developed their reputations during the 1960s and who felt that the parent organization had lost its vitality as an intellectual forum for the discussion and debate of ideas in anthropology. the formation of this subsociety was a part of a general trend of fragmentation into specialized groups within the aaa during the 1970s and 1980s. the founders of the sca were clearly concerned about the absence of a coherent vision in contemporary anthropology, or even any focusing debates [earlier debates had since ossified into tribes]. they looked to the activities and the journal of the new society to overcome a sense of malaise since the decline in enthusiasm for a number of 1960s theoretical initiatives, including french structuralism, marxism, and cognitive studies. when the sca was formed in the mid-1980s, there was an internal critique of anglo-american anthropology that was emerging and taking hold as a focus of attention among cultural and social anthropologists in the united states. this critique derived its power from an exposure of the conventions, tropes, and rhetoric of anthropological writing. making transparent the narratives of scripts by which the production of anthropological knowledge had proceeded, rather than suggesting a new, alternative narrative, seemed to be an important move to make for most anthropologists, however much or little sympathetic they were to such an effort. i suspect that i was offered the task by the sca board of creating and editing the journal because the discipline’s own internal critique seemed to be where there was a modicum of focused intellectual dynamism at the moment, and this was logically the point from where its revitalization might occur. the mid-1980s critique can only be partly explained as the culmination of an evolving internal critique within the discipline. its power, in fact, derives from a much broader process of transformation that is affecting the practices of all of the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, of which the critique of anthropological writing is one variant. yet, the critique and debate about the production of knowledge in anthropology are a particularly important case of the more general trend, first because, unlike most other disciplines affected, the debate in anthropology has occupied a central focus of attention in which the identity of the discipline itself is at stake for its practitioners. and second, the critique of knowledge in anthropology was produced by a working alliance of scholars inside and outside of anthropology, that is, of historians and critics, focusing upon the discipline, and of practitioners within it. this alliance across the boundaries of the discipline itself made it difficult to dismiss or marginalize the critique. then, under the section heading, “strategies for ‘making a statement’ through editorial arrangement and composition” (marcus 1991, 126) . . . from an editorial perspective, the actual content and arguments within the articles published [in ca] are themselves not enough to make the statement of purpose that the journal intends. to the contrary, in a state of emergence and transition in how knowledge is produced and represented, especially as seems to be the case with anthropology, the question of editorial design or collage in arranging articles for issues is crucial. in fact, the effect of arrangement or juxtaposition should be a clearly established element of attention for readers, not to distract them from the content of the articles, but to enhance or create a special context for them. stimulating readers to guess the logic of composition of an issue is a “mystique,” which i believe a journal with an agenda of shifting or transforming a discipline’s practices should cultivate. perceiving themes that run through the articles of a particular issue, or becoming aware that arguments in certain articles are actually contested by the arguments of other ones, which at first glance have little to do with one another, creates a special interest in reading the journal that draws attention to the coherent and salient purposes around which the journal is produced at the present time. while the moment of cultural anthropology’s critical self-assessment has long passed, perhaps the most enduring legacy of the period that the founding of cultural anthropology expressed is the organization of its research, not by a return to anything like paradigms, foundations, or broad and sustained theoretical alignments (such as the political economists/materialists versus the symbolic analysts/interpretivists versus cognitive anthropologists), but to research programs of variable traction and uncertain duration. these are guided more by engagement with events in the world as they unfold with ever more perceived rapidity (and to which the still-emblematic patient fieldwork method requires visceral, immersive access) and by an alignment and critical analytic engagement with found thinking, however it is organized and articulated in practices, conflicts, and daily living. anthropologists increasingly enter into the constituted projects of others to articulate their own in relation to them. they prize concept work and analytics that are highly original, but that are also traceably derivative and mimic or evoke the terms or stakes of life lived elsewhere, and that research through fieldwork reaches. anthropological arguments unto themselves, such as those journals stage (thus far at least . . .) have double lives and are at least double-voiced, after mikhail bakhtin. at the levels of theoretical awareness and disciplinary self-awareness, this at most allows for the recognition of turns in research activity (once, for example, the postmodern turn, now, the infrastructural turn, or ontological turn, etc.), rather than more enclosing, theory-built paradigms, and for a much looser constitution of adjectival subfields amid unexpected configurations of multiple co-occurring and speculative research endeavors, which are energized by finding each other, so to speak (e.g., anthropology’s distinctive recent contributions to understanding crises of finance capitalism arguably derive as much, if not more, from the influence of the parallel rise of science studies as from a cumulative economic anthropology; there are many other such examples). the theory tendencies, applications, and topical concerns of the so-called postmodern (poststructuralist?) era eminently prepared anthropology for its various engagements through fealty to fieldwork in a world in which speed of change has become a defining characteristic and challenge to the deliberate slowness and patience that constitutes the essence of anthropological research. concept work and speculation—prototyping analytic ideas that are much engaged offstage, with what counts as local knowledge today in the way that research is complexly framed—are the hallmarks of scholarly production. the journal research article, perhaps on the way to a monograph, and more important, the other inventions and forums for following and commenting on the contemporary that technology and editorial ingenuity afford, does not serve to build a field, subdiscipline, or theoretical tendency as much as to inform the shifting understandings of collective observers. along the way, useful concepts, systematic and sustained perspectives come and go. they last for as long as they seem relevant both to discussions among anthropologists and to those they are party to in fieldwork. the embracing of open access as a true innovation in journal availability, along with the kinds of forums and discussions that digital media afford academic journals, can only further this kind of engagement by making visible and creating new receptions and relations that have in fact shaped the research tendencies of anthropology for decades but have been offstage, or at most, in the wings, of the media of scholarly communication. the primary function of a journal with ca’s trajectory is to register, and to some extent, to provide the media to modulate the duration and development of the coming and going of anthropology’s research tendencies and programs. it is to manage the relative slowness of anthropological research as a key positive value with a sensation of a sometimes unbearably sped-up pace of contemporary events and changing conditions of existence, normatively keyed to acting by innovation, and in which the analytic default is to concentrate reflective, value-laden critical thinking on the temporality of the emergent or the detectable near future. being moved by the perception of speed and focusing creative thought on anticipating a near future define a powerful mode of creative thinking in organizations of all types today, marked everywhere in the policy and action-oriented tangibles of innovation. this provides attractive sources and allies for anthropological research, although it shares different stakes through its modes of deliberation and internal scholarly communication. the will to innovate—actually a key found thematic of contemporary social action of interest in anthropological research—often means sacrificing, through much-praised collective deliberative processes, promising ideas deserving of more development in other circumstances. parallel anthropological debates with their own expressive and communicative forms increasingly provide those other circumstances to hold onto and assess powerful and relevant ideas a while longer and in the name of the interests of different constituencies perhaps. they prolong the shelf life of ideas and reflexively and critically develop them into other arguments as they are retailed at definite velocities in found settings driven by innovation for the purposes of social engineering and technical problem-solving, and spurred by markets. given changes in the scholarly journal form and in its economy of production, what is now available to it as form requires much more of editorial teams, and offers them more creative discretion regarding content, now enhanced by unpredictable, expanded chains of reception. this function is often referred to today as curation or curatorial skill—a desirable term of status that is associated with the trendy and perhaps elitist overtones derived from its most common usage in museums and art worlds, with some agonism regarding credit for where the soul of much-prized creativity should rest. its migration to serve as a more routine term to refer to and think about the skills necessary to manage digital communication has enhanced its value as a keyword of substance for thinking through the task of scholarly journal editing. in retrospect, as evoked above in my 1991 essay, ca was driven by curatorial impulses, perhaps more primitively, more gesturally, from the start. now the editorial curatorial task is complex, in a new terrain of expanding affordances, but also more interesting and more fun. it has been brilliantly and distinctively advanced beginning with the editorship of the fortuns and vigorously sustained since then, and now extended in full creative energy and burgeoning at the beginning of cultural anthropology’s thirtieth year. i am so proud. references marcus, george e. 1991 “american academic journal editing in the great bourgeois cultural revolution of late 20th-century postmodernity: the case of cultural anthropology.” cultural anthropology 6, no. 1: 121–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1991.6.1.02a00060. speed crash course speed crash course carlo caduff king’s college london http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4505-3408 warning: the speed crash course is not suited for everyone . . . some readers might find it stressful and prefer a much more relaxed approach to . . . ! in a nutshell . . . for readers in a rush . . . need a jargon-free explanation of . . . ? you’ll find it here! the speed crash course . . . provides everything you need to know . . . discover how and why things can go . . . you’ll get a crystal-clear introduction to . . . and insight into issues such as . . . the author is an expert of . . . there’s no 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(regressing) . . . instead turn the page . . . (progressing) . . . now focus on . . . four words at a time . . . pace yourself . . . through your books . . . be persistent . . . stick to your plan . . . continue to read . . . with purpose . . . change your habits . . . read on schedule . . . use a clock . . . control your speed . . . imagine . . . all the free time . . . you’ll instantly get . . . achieve more with . . . it’s the secret to success! crush-on-crash? got it! the time? it’s 5:15 . . . my page-turner collection on speed you must read . . . (sorry to abbreviate but i must accelerate) virilio: speed and politics kundera: slowness wolin: what time is it? duffy: the speed handbook kerouac: on the road ballard: crash derrida: speed and phenomena marinetti: the futurist cookbook connolly: thinking, culture, speed de quincey: the english mail-coach koselleck: is there an acceleration of history? rosa: high-speed society barthes: the jet-man céline: north it’s called shortlisting . . . the beauty of . . . accelerating miracles! life’s a competition (not just on tv) . . . if you wanna win . . . and really succeed . . . anticipate the trend . . . the next big thing? the ultrafast machine! i wish . . . i had millions to invest . . . apologies . . . for the sharp transition . . . but . . . korea is the land of speed! a syllogism (to save time) speed is time . . . saved time is money . . . speed is money . . . saved! physics 101 scalars and vectors . . . remember the difference . . . speed . . . a scalar quantity . . . velocity . . . a vector quantity . . . if you don’t know what the hell . . . go back and . . . speed is velocity without direction . . . to pick up speed . . . is to go faster . . . without knowing . . . where you’re going . . . don’t ask me for directions! the time? it’s 5:15 . . . hot pursuit the crash-for-cash driver (caught in the act) . . . staging a collision . . . to pocket your money . . . everything will be revealed . . . by the man in the hair salon . . . if . . . on a winter’s night . . . a car . . . usw ultimate speed writing . . . is the driver’s guide . . . to writing faster . . . in this urgent and extremely gipping book . . . award-winning speed-writer . . . covers everything you need to know . . . to become a more complete . . . taking readers along . . . on a fascinating journey . . . the master of the nonfiction narrative presents a series of detailed drills . . . and practical techniques . . . in less than six hours . . . you will learn how to write . . . at speeds of forty words per minute . . . telegraphic summary (midway) everyone stop world stop works stop minutes stop end stop hurdles stop everything stop screamed stop plan stop speed stop competition stop hell stop collision stop drills stop techniques stop catch up (on speed in haste) speed is excess . . . a thing that’s always ahead . . . to understand what it is . . . abandon yourself . . . to the life of the object! catch up with . . . and get ahead of . . . the death of distance . . . you can’t miss . . . this great opportunity . . . while the rest of the world . . . races ahead . . . abbreviate to accelerate is my motto . . . as you can see i fell in love with my object . . . it took a while . . . but now things are going . . . really fast . . . it’s the ride of my life! the ultimate transgression! it got me . . . ahead of myself . . . the time? it’s 5:15 . . . stars down to earth last month . . . you were eager to press forward . . . but could not . . . because mercury was retrograde . . . sitting back and wait . . . is not your style . . . but to go against mercury retrograde . . . was out of sync . . . with the vibrations at play . . . now . . . with nothing to hold you back . . . you can go again . . . full speed ahead . . . ! the pace of life will slow down . . . from april through september . . . a very long time . . . so put your foot to the pedal . . . and speed ahead . . . while all conditions are right for you . . . you will notice that the tempo of life . . . will pick up noticeably by february . . . when mercury will have fine-tuned its orbit . . . mars will make you eager to succeed . . . so develop your strategy . . . for your aim must be perfect . . . you will defend your ideas passionately . . . and others will be drawn to you immediately . . . because of the attractive energy you display . . . ten ways to slow down (and still get things done) disc. do ntg. stare at pctr. appreciate ntr. focus on frnds. choose an actv. block tm. eat lss. say n. brth. love of the ultrafast machine sinking fast? need a break? this machine will serve you well! in the blink of an eye . . . it will make you slow down . . . it’s easy to handle . . . will never break down . . . we at slow ventures believe . . . that the future is very bright . . . and very different than the present! technology is our dna . . . flyover livingtm . . . has been designed . . . to hasten things . . . so that you can rest . . . and take more time . . . say goodbye . . . to the big hurry! get rid of all the stress . . . let someone else . . . be on call! the time? it’s 5:15 . . . speed in heaven racing ahead . . . through the sky . . . five miles high . . . seeking distractions . . . to pass the time . . . reading . . . writing . . . watching . . . waiting . . . delivered like a package . . . to a destination . . . motionless . . . on the way to . . . inert . . . in a rusty can . . . heading toward . . . i’m on it! i’m on it! i’m on it! passenger or pilot? speed . . . strapped me into a seat . . . and slowed me down . . . plastered with waste and plastic . . . i’m craving for a crash . . . standstill sorry to interrupt your journey . . . but revolutions are an attempt . . . by passengers on a train . . . to pull the emergency brake . . . (benjamin) triage (in the event of an emergency)    black you can’t be help . . .    red you can be helped . . .    yellow your treatment can be delayed . . .    white you’re fine . . . thoughts on war (full speed) you are on prompt global strike mission now . . . you can attack any place on the planet . . . in a matter of hours or less . . . you can tailor the attack for the actual target . . . and deliver it very quickly . . . with the shortest time lines . . . no delays! not now! lift up your head . . . and push the button . . . and join the war . . . on time and space . . . thoughts on death (how to get ahead of) sudden death . . . preferable to . . . slow death . . . the shortcut . . . in case of . . . a list . . . with options . . . to meet your end . . . in a timely fashion . . . drowning heart attack (very common) bleeding (speed of death depends on type of bleeding) decapitation (nearly instantaneous) electrocution fall from height (if possible aim to land feet first) hanging (speed of death depends on hangman’s skill) lethal injection (is it really painless?) explosive decompression (it takes your breath away) apropos drowning (first option) . . . here’s another example . . . of telegraphic lyricism . . . from the titanic . . . to give you directions . . . we are sinking fast stop passengers are being put into boats stop please advise this is speed culture talking . . . it’s typing, not writing! the time? it’s 5:15 . . . acknowledgments my thanks to maria josé de abreu, angie heo, tara mahfoud, rudolf mrázek, abin thomas, the culture, medicine, and power research group, and the editors of this openings collection: vincent duclos, tomás sánchez criado, and vinh-kim nguyen. tangles of care tangles of care: killing goats to save tortoises on the galápagos islands paolo bocci duke university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1181-8196 we are rather like a collective noah, deciding with a biblical coldness which life forms will be able to accompany us on our new journey in the ark. —the thematic atlas of project isabela “it wasn’t pretty,” gil told me reticently, in an effort to keep to himself the images that had quickly surfaced in his mind.1 we were talking about dead goats, hundreds of thousands of them. a few years before, the world’s largest mammal eradication had targeted goats on the galápagos islands, where he lives. a multimillion-dollar global environment facility grant funded a multi-institutional effort involving the united nations development program, the galápagos national park, the charles darwin foundation, the galápagos local government, and the ecuadorian ministry of agriculture. proyecto isabela (pi) recruited thirty-eight hunters locally; weapons, veterinarians, hunting dogs, helicopters, and pilots came from all over the world. together, they formed the most sophisticated and deadliest eradication assemblage ever attempted. from 2001 to 2006, pi targeted the mammal that, first introduced by pirates in the seventeenth century as a source of food, had denuded large swaths of vegetation and contributed to starvation among the endemic galápagos tortoises: goats. using helicopters as mobile shooting platforms, pi hunters killed more than two hundred thousand goats over an area of six hundred thousand hectares. mangled by multiple shots, with their legs stiff in death, goats’ carcasses lay on the steep gradients of volcanoes and the immense lava plains, rotting under the equatorial sun. although the park touted it as a successful project, gil was not quite convinced. despite the time that had elapsed, the images of pi—like the nightmares they inspired—were vivid. “it wasn’t pretty, what shall i say? the way a lot of goats died wasn’t clean. goats run fast . . . lots of them got multiple shots, you see.” he continued: “i’ve lived all my life here, i care about the islands [a mi me importan las islas]. but all these animals left to rot . . . not a nice spectacle, for sure!” gil appeared almost embarrassed and preferred not to talk further. he had witnessed the outcomes of pi while on a trip to the alcedo volcano on isabela island a few months after pi had ended. piled on the slopes of the perfectly coned and active volcano, dead goats seemed to have unwillingly formed a funeral pyre of impossible size, a sacrifice that made gil uncomfortable. he generally agrees with taking measures to protect endemic animals, but felt uneasy about pi. at last, he added: “they [the pi personnel] wanted to protect the galápagos, i get that. but it looked like someone bombed the islands!” to gil, the consequences of pi eerily paralleled and compounded those of goats’ overgrazing, adding a layer of gloom to a landscape that was already menacing the tortoises with extinction. intended as a measure to restore ecosystems and the flourishing of life, pi did not appear so benign in his eyes. on the near-vertical inclines of isabela’s volcanoes, the consequences of saving tortoises—the goats’ eradication—looked difficult to bear. gil’s impression of a bombed island echoes anna tsing’s (2015, 3) contention that, in the time of unprecedented human impact on the earth, we live in “blasted landscapes” increasingly beyond the promise of recuperation. that pi’s targeted areas looked like such a landscape, whose possibility of recovery had receded further and further away, was not only gil’s impression. local residents protested against pi (though they could not stop it) and successfully blocked the ensuing proposal for an archipelago-wide eradication. as a compromise, the park conducted several campaigns aimed at reducing the number of goats on the inhabited islands. but hunters spared pregnant goats and young individuals, thus ensuring the survival of the goat population. despite conservation’s most cogent arguments and best efforts, goats still chew on the islands today—they just do so on fewer islands and in smaller areas.2 the project had unexpected ecological repercussions, as well as social ones. in the targeted areas invasive plants, rather than native ones, have grown back and taken over, and their eradication is deemed even more difficult than removing goats (atkinson et al. 2012). whether present or absent, goats have unraveled conservation measures on the galápagos and, more broadly, stalled our imperative to respond caringly to the needs of other species. in the face of the anthropocene’s environmental crisis, anthropologists, biologists, and philosophers are urging us to extend forms of care beyond our own species (tsing 2015; kohn 2014; miller, soulé, and terborgh 2014; haraway 2008; latour 2013). though the definition and the dating of the anthropocene vary widely, less contentious seems to be the idea that, as bruno latour (2013) has proposed, the anthropocene marks “the end of the human and the beginning of obligations” toward the more-than-human. care suggests a mode of practical engagement that informs what scholars have called “obligation” (stengers 2015, 62), “response-ability” (barad 2012, 208), “flourishing” (cuomo 1998, 78), or “astonishment” (ingold 2011, 63) vis-à-vis other species and ecological assemblages. caring practices might trace a path for “living on a damaged planet” (tsing et al. 2017) and perhaps rendering the anthropocene as short as possible (haraway 2015). yet what happens when measures of care to respond to the anthropocene are not just invoked but actually taken? more to the point: what follows the commitment to save an endangered species? proyecto isabela reacted locally against one of the anthropocene’s most prominent global features: extensive species loss largely due, for the first time in the earth’s history, to anthropogenic causes. iconic endemic animals of the galápagos islands (species that live nowhere else but there) such as the endangered giant tortoises have been the catalysts for conservationists’ focused attention and intense forms of care (santander et al. 2009). by eliminating goats to save endangered tortoises, pi’s eradication followed from the care for tortoises. but can eradication itself constitute a form of care? whether in the context of humans in hospitals or animals in a farm or zoo, care has not always been discussed as kind. work in animal studies, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies has shown that measures to keep endangered animals alive can be ambiguous and even violent (chrulew 2011; hennessy 2013; van dooren 2014). here, i enter an uncomfortable terrain to ask if care can kill. care and eradication make an unstable and difficult marriage, given the habitual positive and negative connotations, respectively, of the two terms. yet i argue that pi’s practical mode of engagement with goats, based on persistence, creativity, and endless reconfigurations of technological and multispecies assemblages, is best understood as a form of care. such care unfolded through an open, though unequal, dialogue between conservationists and goats, one that constantly attuned to the response of the other. scholars of humanitarian interventions have discussed how the moral imperative to save human lives often results in fraught practices of care. in instances such as conducting medical triage (redfield 2013; nguyen 2010) or rendering the suffering body legible to forms of state recognition (ticktin 2011; fassin and rechtman 2009; fassin 2012), the intent to do good likely produces uncomfortable situations, in which care “is accompanied . . . by practices of violence and containment” (ticktin 2011, 6). care in conservation is no exception: this essay unveils the continuity between the care for a loved species (galápagos tortoises) and the lethal taking care of another one (goats). a “logic of care” (mol 2008) has extended the practices of tending tortoises to learning about and intervening on goats, with the goal of the latter’s extermination. this continuum unsettles the moral distinction between caring for a species, to which nature lovers and scholars alike subscribe comfortably, and killing (animal) others, which is instead generally condemned or ignored. after situating pi ecologically and historically, this article delves into pi as a technoscientific intervention. the campaign altered goats’ sociality as well as their very biology. it deployed radio-collared goats to track hiding peers and, for the first time in the world, engineered sterile female goats with an exceptionally long estrus that could attract fellow goats for longer periods and thus lead to a faster extermination. while many conservationists and ecologists had deemed its ambitious goals a chimeric fantasy, eradication in the targeted areas came about with the creation of an actual chimera (like the part-goat monster in greek mythology). the article then turns to a discussion of how hunters, goats, and the general population on the galápagos opposed the eradication campaign. as i will show, despite the project’s technological sophistication, pi’s downplaying of the role of goats in the ecological and social fabric of the galápagos compromised its results. after a discussion of care’s controversial nature, in the conclusion i offer further reflections on how care may help orient conservation and human life in the uncertain times of the anthropocene. a sign of human intervention of epic proportions, pi has indeed produced consequences, but not the ones intended. opposite to its stated goal of separation, pi created, rather than severed, new ties between park wardens, scientists, locals, and goats. i explore this divergence ethnographically.3 resisting an a priori philosophical posture against eradication, one that scholars in environmental humanities have taken (rose 2008), this story shows the challenging ways in which we are implicated in animals’ lives and deaths, and they in ours. the ways humans participate and intervene in environments transcend an axiological standpoint: even measures designed to respond against the anthropocene can, in fact, expand its reach. showing the world’s most sophisticated eradication campaign to be a complex, contentious, and species-entangling practice of care illustrates this point.4 of humans, goats, and other problems the galápagos national park covers 97 percent of the archipelago, which straddles the equator seven hundred miles off the coast of mainland ecuador. though tourists have access to limited areas of the park in guided tours, local residents are confined to the remaining 3 percent. the human population of the archipelago has grown in the past fifty years from a few thousand to thirty thousand today, but residents continue to live in the circumscribed areas on four islands (santa cruz, san cristóbal, isabela, and floreana) that the park established after its founding in 1959. goats have cared little, however, about such important demarcations between nature and culture. they have been on the galápagos throughout their human colonization, which began in the 1830s (latorre 1999). in fact, goats preceded permanent human settlement, since pirates brought them to the islands as early as the seventeenth century (dampier 1697). goats have been pirates’ food, eremites’ companions, settlers’ source of income, and a means of colonization. goats have proved as successful as humans, if not better, at adapting to and thriving on the rugged galápagos islands. they benefit from a low metabolism, efficient digestion, an omnivorous diet, low water requirements, and a high reproductive rate. goats’ versatility in surviving in the galápagos’ harsh environments possesses an almost demonic quality: as incredulous settlers have observed, goats even drink salt water from the ocean (latorre 1999). once introduced, they proliferated, even transgressing ecological barriers that ecologists considered impassable. in fact, crossing one such barrier provided the immediate justification for pi. the perry isthmus dramatically divides south isabela, of a horizontal shape, from the center and the north, which are narrower and oblong. it stretches from east to west along a seven-mile-wide lava corridor between the sierra negra volcano in the south and alcedo in the north. devoid of vegetation, this isthmus consists of bare lava of the sharpest kind, which makes walking, human or animal, difficult if not impossible. because of its impassability, the perry isthmus had created two tightly delimited ecological communities, technically termed ecological islands, that had evolved separately for millions of years (warren et al. 2015). for more than a century, goats had only lived in the south of isabela, where there were also human settlements. but in 1966, a park ranger spotted a few goats north of the isthmus, on the flanks of alcedo. undisturbed, the population grew fast. in the early 1990s, park wardens who climbed the volcano were dismayed to observe goats’ effects on vegetation. before goats reached the volcano, wardens trekking on scorched slopes of pumice pebbles would pass through low, dry shrubs and gray palo santo trees. closer to the caldera’s rim, endemic scalesia trees dotted the landscape that hosted chelonoidis nigra vicina, the largest population of galápagos tortoises in the wild (de vries 1984). nestled in scalesia’s branches, epiphytic ferns and orchids’ leaves captured water particles in the air and condensed them on the ground. in these drip pools, tortoises drank and bathed. by the mid-nineties, all of this had disappeared. what a herpetologist described to me as the “impenetrable forest of isabela’s volcanoes” was gone completely. goats’ grazing had converted forest and shrubs into grassland. lower humidity in the newly treeless landscape increased erosion triggered by the goats’ stomping (desender et al. 1999). instead of trees and drip pools, there was a barren landscape and dust; instead of tortoises, goats. from an estimated three thousand in 1992, the goat population in alcedo was believed to have risen to between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand in 1996. an eradication campaign in 1996 killed ten thousand, but that number was regained in only one year (cayot 1996). the nigra vicina subspecies had not died out, but it did face the concrete possibility of extinction. goats were eating everything: all types of vegetation and even tree bark. after a trip to the volcano in 1992, a biologist remarked on the difference between tortoises’ rather clumsy mechanics of eating and the precise, voracious methods of goats. for these “sure-footed” (merlen 1999, 5) mammals, eating had been sharpened by millennia of ferocious competition within their own species and against others. goats would place their front legs on tree trunks or even tortoises’ shells to reach higher leaves, in an accidental gesture of defiance and domination not unlike images of safari hunters posing on their trophies. nigra vicina’s shells had evolved with an arch above the neck to reach higher leaves, but goats hastily and unceremoniously dismissed this delicate line of evolution. photos of goats on alcedo mobilized international support for an eradication campaign. with eerie exactness, those images captured the unverbalized uneasiness about what appeared to be the ultimate affront: goats’ opportunistic bipedalism and resemblance to humans, alike in our tendencies to proliferate and trample nature. while pi responded to the urgent matter of the near extinction of nigra vicina, it was but the latest use of a conservation tool, eradication, that has long been used to address ecologists’ distress about the ecological changes that goats, other invasive species, and humans brought about on the islands. in the 1950s, the presence of alien species and people alike provoked shock and fear among scientists visiting the islands, which prompted the establishment of the charles darwin foundation and the galápagos national park (eibl-eibesfeldt 1959). while cordoning off the vast majority of the islands proved more successful in controlling humans than goats, measures for eradicating the latter figure among the park’s very first interventions. later studies estimated that goats, whose population continued to grow, threatened to extinction around 60 percent of the galápagos’ 194 endemic plants (cruz, harcourt, and lavoie 2007). eradication seemed the only solution for an issue that would only worsen if left unaddressed. against goats’ inexorable proliferation, pi personnel concluded that only “eradication ensures a permanent solution with a single and final investment” (cruz, harcourt, and lavoie 2007, 10). the park learned this the hard way. in the early 1960s, fishermen introduced two goats on pinta, a deserted island northwest of the archipelago. only a decade later, the single pair had become more than forty-one thousand goats (campbell et al. 2004)! in what follows, i describe pi as an intervention into the matter of life and the flesh of death. the project exploited and intervened in the goats’ sociality, and even their very bodies, in profound ways. goats were studied, modified biologically, lured, pitted against each other, chased, betrayed, poisoned, and shot. hunting techniques were devised to counter the goats’ altered behavior as the campaign progressed. goats even became enrolled in the campaign for their own death. sterilized and fitted with radio collars, hundreds of so-called judas goats led hunters to goats who had survived earlier phases of eradication and were looking for a new herd. furthermore, in a procedure never attempted before, pi personnel injected hormones into a sample of female goats to lengthen their estrus and render them attractive to male goats for longer periods. in effect, the campaign brought to life a new gender of goats to plunge their species into a localized annihilation. rather than constituting a single measure, eradication demanded continuous care and an unprecedented intervention into animals’ bodies and sociality. such forms of technoscientific care emerged in opposition to other practices of care for goats. residents excluded from the tourism boom of the past two decades have most voiced their attachment to goats. fishermen and farmers have traditionally lived with, and hunted, goats. before tourists came, everyone on the islands was either a farmer or fisherman, or both. in the 1980s and 1990s, the nexus of tourism and conservation consolidated into a powerful political and economic regime (ospina 2006; quiroga 2009). today, the galápagos are praised as the last natural laboratory of evolution and an exclusive tourist destination (grenier 2007; larson 2001). at the same time, fishermen and farmers have suffered from a double marginalization. compared to tourism, their economic activities have become less and less profitable; at the same time, new policies have increasingly restricted their activities in the name of conservation. tourists have come to the islands in greater numbers every year, while mainland ecuadorians have moved there to escape unemployment and poverty. currently the islands’ economy is growing at an impressive rate: if the archipelago were an independent state, its growth rate would rank among the highest in the world (epler 2007). at the periphery of this circuit, fishermen and farmers feel like remnants of a past way of life on the islands. their ties with goats are historical, cultural, and, in response to pi and the ensuing project of archipelago-wide eradication, they also became political. killing goats there are many deserving causes in galápagos that urgently need attention, but few can equal the imminent destruction, not just of a species, but of the essential ambiance of the galápagos islands. i believe that it would be worth the clattering roar of helicopters, the chatter of guns, the movement of many people, and the endless investment of money to ensure the survival of this milieu galapagueño before it is too late. —godfrey merlen the clatter of helicopters is what doña carmela remembers most about the eradication campaign: “for two years we had the noise [of helicopters] over our head . . . from the town to the park, to kill goats. two years! it was like a war!” proyecto isabela used helicopters on the expanses of volcanic landscape, the basaltic soil too brittle and the areas too vast to be covered on foot. the galápagos are volcanic islands with fierce sun, little water, and thick vegetation on rocky terrain or barren lava beds, depending on the altitude. helicopters were but one aspect of the campaign. mules carried hunters into the dense thickets on terrain above the arid coastal region. one hundred dogs from new zealand and a few locally trained in the galápagos accompanied hunters. outfitted with special boots to protect against the heat and the sharp rocks, the dogs corralled goats into specific areas or found individual goats hiding in clefts. semiautomatic shotguns, benelli’s m1 super 90, came from urbino, italy.5 targeted by a symphony of hunting techniques deployed in a concerted fashion, almost all goats were killed. estimates suggest that nearly 99 percent of the entire goat population on santiago and 90 percent on isabela were killed. the remaining population learned that humans, no longer allies in the islands’ colonization, had become their enemies. goats lost their innocence and became cautelosos (wary): hiding in inaccessible caves, they made themselves undetectable (cruz, harcourt, and lavoie 2007). yet even a small remnant of individuals holds the promise of regenerating the whole population and cannot be tolerated by an eradication campaign. on both islands, the surviving goats, now educated and suspicious, constituted the biggest problem, as they eluded standard hunting techniques. goats, the hunted game, had learned the hunting game that helicopters, dogs, and humans were playing against them. “in an effort to avoid educating animals, a systematic approach is needed,” wrote the pi field assistant and veterinarian karl campbell. (to control masses, whether of people or goats, education should always be avoided.) campbell proposed adding a further hunting technique to the human, canine, mule-assisted, and helicopter-based ones: hunters would capture hundreds of goats, fit them with radio collars, and release them onto isabela’s plains. these became the so-called judas goats, the betrayers.6 goats, as aristotle (1995) wrote of humans, are social animals: their aversion to isolation would lead them to find their peers. sending invisible beeps to a satellite and back to the island, goats would remotely tether pi hunters armed with directional antennas, first, and rifles, second. once the goats were found, hunters would kill all except the collared goats. two weeks later, hunters would return. having just recovered from the previous massacre, the collared goats were expected to have found the strength once again to look for peers, to be gregarious, to hope for the future. on isabela, this succession of shooting, allotted time for psychological recuperation, and more shooting went on for more than two years. unlike the biblical figure, judas goats were not aware of the scheme in which they were protagonists, but the result was the same. prevailing above everything, the herding instinct propelled eradication as inexorably as a natural force. certainly some unforeseen complications arose, such as when a judas goat would find other collared goats rather than unmonitored ones. in that event, all but one of the goats would be killed, the radio collars retrieved, and the survivor monitored to lead to further killings. judas goats proved helpful but not decisively so. female judas goats would get pregnant, lose their sociality, and thus stop leading pi hunters to other goats. following the pregnant judas goats, radio antennas would beep in a diminished cacophony. helicopters would fly longer distances only to find fewer goats. in the midst of an eradication campaign, the goats’ pregnancy meant a respite for their species in more than one sense: not only by procreating new life but also by slowing down death. local extinction through judas goats alone would occur too slowly and at too great a cost. “i started then to think about how to improve this,” campbell explained to me in an interview. “what would be the perfect, ideal judas goats?” he was thinking about a judas goat that would search for, and be searched for, by other goats in perpetuity. what may sound like a platonic quest for an ideal animal in fact unfolded in the realm of actual goats. since veterinarians identified males searching for mates as the main driver of gregariousness, strategies to increase estrus became key. according to campbell and his colleagues, the literature had established that “estrus duration may be increased by denying penile intromission during estrus” (campbell et al. 2007, 14)—admittedly rather impractical in the wild. the other known cause of a longer estrus is nymphomania, “a poorly understood condition often diagnosed as cystic ovarian disease” (campbell et al. 2007, 14). campbell and his colleagues went on to reflect that “while nymphomaniac behavior would be desirable in judas goat operations, it is unknown how to induce this condition” (campbell et al. 2007, 14). putting aside the desire for an always desiring goat, campbell resolved to capture female goats, terminate any pregnancy, sterilize them, and inject hormone implants. as a result of a new procedure, estrus would not last for the typical twenty days per year but for an astonishing one hundred eighty days. since transportation to a veterinary camp would have been costly and time-consuming, campbell operated on goats, one by one, on the scorched slopes of isabela’s volcanoes or the treeless volcanic plains of the lowland. famous as “the natural laboratory of evolution” (larson 2001, 125), the galápagos became less a site for observing gradual changes over time and more a setting for artificial and deliberate variations on mattering: the making of a new goat. with a scalpel, anesthetics, and hormones, pi recombined the elements of female goats into oversexualized individuals, devoid of the ability to bear life but with an irresistible talent for delivering death. the more their instinct for gregariousness prevailed over the landscape of death, the closer came eradication. the judas goats, surpassing six hundred individuals, were thus divided: 33 percent fertile female, 33 percent male, and 33 percent sterile females with implanted hormones. project personnel called the latter “mata haris,” after the famous dutch spy working in indonesia during the first world war (carrion et al. 2011, 3). female spies are imagined to be attractive, after all, and definitely not entangled in the laborious, motherly business of pregnancy. fusing the otherness and allure of tropical exotics and female deception, mata hari, the goats’ third gender, performed 1.5 times better than the other judas goats. with the creation and deployment of mata haris, pi personnel achieved what many experts believed impossible. care (for the tortoises) killed the goats. nowhere in the world had a mammal eradication of such magnitude ever been attempted (carrion et al. 2011). if achieving it seemed to be a chimera, the key to pi’s success lay in the careful forging of an actual chimera, a monstrous goat.7 the only way to realize a chimera was to make one. mattering care by looking at eradication as a continuous practice, my interpretation differs from both naturaland social-science approaches to this topic. the decision to execute proyecto isabela rested on the assumption that it was going to deliver a definitive solution to goats’ ecological nuisance. literature on the virtues of eradication of invasive species, like the species it promises to eliminate, proliferates in conservation biology. invasion ecologists often portray eradication as “a cost-effective and theoretically neat solution to prevent future or current impact of invasive species” (wolff and gardener 2012, 184). eradication of one species’ population results in fewer kills over time than do periodic population checks, thus offering both economic and moral advantages. as for the “theoretically neat” aspect, eradication ostensibly gets rid of the problem, the invasive species, once and for all: what could be neater than that? whether critical (rose 2008) or in favor of eradication (rolston 1999), work in the social sciences and humanities has implicitly shared this assumption—that eradication always works. building on seminal work in environmental history (cronon 1983, 1996), scholars have argued that these interventions often hinge on a rigid temporal divide that separates nature (in the past, to be reverted to) and culture—the time when european settlers arrived (brockington 2002; low 1999; van dooren 2011). to be sure, desires to eliminate all forms of anthropogenic nature sustain conservation on the galápagos too: a world wildlife foundation report (bensted-smith 2002) stated that conservation’s goal is to revert ecosystems to their state prior to the islands’ discovery in 1534. environmental humanities scholars have mainly focused on the ethical implications, or lack thereof, of invasive-species management (clark 2015; ginn, beisel, and barua 2014; van dooren 2011). they have argued that the labeling of undesired animals and the practices that target them, such as invasive species or humane killing and euthanasia, obscures the moral implications of conservation (clark 2015; van dooren 2011). though i second this line of critique, i investigate eradication not only for what it stands for but also for what it does. anthropologists and others have long criticized conservation measures for ignoring the ways local societies inscribe species, endemic or not, in their cosmologies, livelihood, and everyday life (carrier and west 2009; comaroff and comaroff 2001; moore 2012; west 2006). yet they have made the same mistake when considering eradication as a self-contained intervention, failing to see how it reconfigures multispecies assemblages. as a sustained and sophisticated intervention into an animal species, goat eradication on the galápagos was unprecedented in magnitude, but not in typology of conservation care. the project’s modulation of goats’ bodies and sociality continued forms of intensive care for saving the galápagos tortoises—the very species for which the goats were eliminated. even before the establishment of the galápagos national park’s giant tortoise breeding center in 1965, san diego zookeepers experimented with a suite of practices to help galápagos tortoises survive in captivity as early as in the 1930s. a san diego curator urged keepers to “put tortoises to bed every evening to protect them from the cold and rain, since these animals are prone to respiratory ailments” (hennessy 2013, 75). other measures aimed at enhancing tortoises’ fertility, copulation, and nesting behavior. keepers opted for giving tortoises periods of sexual rest to increase fertility, while also experimenting with the best surface in the corrals to enable male tortoises to assume the “proper position to achieve copulation” (hennessy 2013, 75). on the galápagos, the park’s breeding center has raised more than four thousand tortoises and released them into the wild throughout fifty years of continuous improvements. this result has come about through meticulous targeting of tortoises’ life such as sexual arousal, copulation, hatching, nesting, rearing, socialization, and diet. conservation measures have not limited themselves to promote tortoises’ healthy habits, but they have also intervened in the matter of tortoises. for instance, as tortoises’ sex is temperature-dependent (the temperature of the egg determines the sex), the center has kept two-thirds of the eggs at 29.5° celsius (for females) and one-third at 28° celsius (for males), which the park believes to be the optimal ratio for promoting population growth (hennessy 2013). in this context, pi’s tinkering with goats’ estrus hardly comes as a surprise. on the galápagos, as elsewhere, saving species on the brink of extinction requires great determination and continued effort (hennessy 2013; van dooren 2014). but so does the elimination of species responsible for an ecological threat. there is nothing inexorable about keeping one form of life alive or making another die. both implicate humans, ethically and practically, in profound ways. struggles to attain an invasive species’ death are a continuation of those devoted to maintain alive an endangered species: both demand certain types of care. eradication should evoke the image of continuously attending to an open wound in the tissues of living biota rather than that of swiftly performing a surgical incision. achieving mass death, in other words, is a laborious business. adding to the profound moral considerations that systematic killing demands, scholars of genocide have also reflected on the intimate imbrication between extermination and the tools of modernity in the hands of nation-states: a powerful bureaucracy, the rational division of labor, and increased reliance on technical measures (bauman 1989; feldman and seibel 2005; wolf 1999). anthropologists and others have examined the necessary, at times complicated work to design a group within a society as the part that must be excised and dispensed of (hinton 2004; semelin 2013; fujii 2009). here, i explore the contingent nature of animal mass killing by turning to its materiality. eradication is a practical event that matters: whether it achieves its goal or not, it shapes society and nature, the matter of body politics and actual bodies too. touted as a one-off, efficacious way to deal with invasive species, eradication instead requires sustained, sophisticated, and extraordinary efforts, and it is always rife with possibilities of failure. in showing the continuum between tending and caring for tortoises and intervening in and taking care of goats, i consequently question not only the assumption of care’s benevolent means but also its goals. anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars have reflected on forms of care that take place in hunting (nadasdy 2007; willerslev 2007), eradication (nading 2014; wanderer 2015), and animal mass killing (mol, moser, and pols 2010). john law has uncovered the moral dilemmas of u.k. farmers and veterinarians responding to the foot-and-mouth epidemic in the spring 2001. for law, care for the suspected sick bovine was “a matter of good death” (mol, moser, and pols 2010, 61). yet pi presents a different scenario: care was instrumental in scaling up the number of dead goats, rather than delivering a good death. caring for the tortoises’ survival translated and extended into technologies to make goats die: care’s ability to reach and respond to, and to gather knowledge about and harness control over, the animal (see giraud and hollin 2016; wanderer 2015) was subsumed under a logic of extermination. if care is the practical orientation that “attunes to the mortal bodies” (mol 2008, 31), pi’s care attuned to goats not to attend to their mortality but rather to exalt it, to make it thrive and contagiously proliferate. resisting care eradication in the targeted areas finally occurred when all but the judas goats had been eliminated. in the end, hunters were dismissed; the targeted mammals and even the introduced hunting dogs, killed; the helicopters and weapons repackaged in boxes and shipped out of the islands. the project seemingly concluded as planned: by effacing any trace of itself and allowing “nature” to take center stage. photos circulated by the park showed the rapid regrowth of vegetation on the rim of alcedo. these images were juxtaposed with ones taken before the advent of goats on the volcano. “i would like to say that we have done what the world believed was impossible! . . . goats are part of santiago’s history,” pi’s director exulted (cruz, harcourt, and lavoie 2007, 56). once the history of their human introduction had been erased, goats gained the status of historical facts. only their absence allowed goats to figure in the annals of galápagos history. goats’ menace to endemic tortoises and ecosystems seemed nothing more than a parenthesis in the millions of years of the placid unfolding of natural evolution, while pi appeared to be a shining example of technocracy and human genius. in fact, pi did not resolve matters as unambiguously as its supporters claimed. resistance to goat eradication was expressed as opposition to the prospect of an archipelago-wide eradication but was already present during pi, as some of the hunters attempted to boycott it. the official publication about the campaign issued by the park proudly notes that 95 percent of the hunters were galapagueños, anticipating the common complaint on the islands that jobs are outsourced (cruz, harcourt, and lavoie 2007, 18). yet among these hunters, even those most renowned for a longstanding collaboration with the park, uneasiness with eradication spread. miguel, an elderly farmer, told me about his son, a park warden, who felt troubled about killing so many goats: “during the weekend he would come to my house and, with the kids away during the afternoon siesta, [his son would] say that he was tired of shooting goats. ‘it’s not why i chose to work in the park!’ he would tell me.” miguel’s son added, “after weeks of walking and shooting, i got fed up. i loathed killing goats, especially in santiago.” carlos, another hunter, talked to me with embarrassment about his experience with corralled goats in santiago. his task was to shoot goats, one by one, for hours. the dull repetition of killing, devoid of the fair rules of hunting and scaled up to the level of a massacre, understandably affected hunters. yet there were other reasons for their defection. because many hunters were local, their biographies had long been interwoven with rural land and the park’s highlands, the tall grass of pasture, the narrow hunting trails monte adentro (in the mountains). “i was born and raised en la parte alta [in the highlands],” my friend mauricio told me. “as a kid i learned to ride horseback; later, i looked after the cattle and started to hunt—goats, feral cattle, pigs, but mainly goats. i joined the [eradication] campaign for the money, but the idea bothered me that i will never be able to go with my kids on a friend’s lancha [small boat] to isabela and hunt goats for a weekend.” while we were hiking through the impenetrable vegetation of the highlands, he once confided that during the goat population-control measures on santa cruz following pi, he and other hunters spared young goats and pregnant females. “we were ok with killing goats, but eradication seemed like too much! [matar sí, pero erradicar nos pareció demasiado!]” he told me. but, he added, “it is something that we kept to ourselves.” other hunters revealed that even on santiago they recorded some kills when in fact they had let goats go—until they were required to provide a piece of ear for each goat they killed as evidence. as another complicating factor, pi took place during a period of tense relationships between the galápagos national park and fishermen. to voice their frustration against catch quotas set by the park, fishermen released goats on goat-free islands. a diving cruise once spotted a goat on wolf, the most remote island of the archipelago, 120 miles from park headquarters on santa cruz. two park rangers and a photographer sailed there. one of the two rangers eventually shot the goat. they sailed back, against the wind and current in rough seas, for a seemingly interminable forty-hour journey. “it [the goat] was a message,” the ranger who shot the goat told me firmly. for this reason, pi officials decided to leave judas goats on the targeted islands longer than planned to alert the park to potential introductions. if there were goats, judas goats would reunite with them, sending their gps location to the hunters. for fishermen, goats served as a message of protest against the park; in response, the park deployed judas goats. far from gone, goats became at once signified and signifier, message and messenger: a fishermen’s symbol of rebellion and, for the park, a technology to further its policies. judas goats stayed on the islands for almost two years after pi had officially ended. ironically, the project devoted to getting rid of goats intentionally left some on the ground. because they were neutered, they could not increase the goat population. yet their lingering presence symbolized a further departure from the image of eradication as a one-off, neat intervention. surviving the most systematic and technologically advanced killing of mammals ever undertaken, judas goats were left grazing in the wake of their own species’ eradication, amid thousands of carcasses—sterile but useful. the defiance of pi’s aspirations was not only symbolic, nor human: during the campaign, goats’ resistance added to human defection. james scott (1985) has drawn attention to the minor modalities of protest in which oppressed people engage, whose significance, or even existence, long escaped historians’ and often even their own oppressors’ awareness. his book weapons of the weak masterfully describes the fragmented, uncoordinated yet diffuse ways in which peasants in a small malaysian village expressed their dissent and acted against the status quo (cf. hribal 2007; wadiwel 2016). proyecto isabela’s official documentation, amid the dazzle of graphs and data, did not include acts of protest, human or caprine. yet goats resisted by learning, escaping, hiding, standing still. after all of the interviews and conversations i had about pi, the most poignant image with which i was left was that of immobile goats eluding hunters under the vegetation, the noise of helicopter blades hovering above and reverberating all the way to the coastal town of puerto villamil on isabela. for animals of prodigious agility, the decision to stop came only after learning from the infelicitous fate of those that moved. it was, indeed, the little available to them to resist, or more likely to postpone, their elimination. controversial care care is active, it seeks to improve life. —annemarie mol, ingunn moser, and jeannette pols a way of caring over here could kill over there. —maria puig de la bellacasa by exploiting and altering goats’ sociality and biology for the sake of their own local extinction while asking hunters to perform mass shootings, pi demands that we explore consequences of care—and, indeed, forms of care—that are uncomfortable. this departs from current anthropological understandings of multispecies care. in studies of public health campaigns against malaria or dengue, care informs the laborious, mundane, but necessary practices of everyday life in a more-than-human world. attending to the lives of insects as dangerous vectors or plants as loved others, humans establish and maintain multispecies encounters through which to “explore what it entails . . . to be human” (archambault 2016, 265). two aspects of this type of multispecies care stand out: that it is about maintenance rather than change (kelly and lezaun 2014; nading 2014; see also carr 2015) and that it is positively affective (archambault 2016; nading 2014). in the context of dengue prevention in nicaragua, alex nading (2012, 572–73; emphasis added) describes “caring for the cisterns, water barrels, and containers” where larvae of aedes aegypti might infiltrate as satisfactory and even delightful: “looking for mosquitoes is not just learning, it’s fun.” though this literature’s concern with care as practice is relevant to my account of pi, taking care of unwanted species such as goats is, i contend, neither about maintenance nor pleasure. proyecto isabela aimed at profound ecological changes and not a continuation of the status quo. the messianic undertones of this article’s opening epigraph illustrate pi’s high stakes: to prevent extinction and restore ecologically degraded ecosystems. this justified even eradication’s most contentious measures, such as leaving dead goats on the ground. local residents proposed instead to recover and sell some of the meat. project personnel refused, for they wanted (in their own words) to “close the loop” of a nutrient cycle: via plants, goats extracted nutrients from the soil; if removed, these minerals and organic components would have been subtracted from the ecosystems. allowing the carcasses to rot offered the only possibility, if slow and distressing, for returning the nutrients to the soil. taking care of goats thus points to the contentiousness of care practices in conservation (cf. martin, myers, and viseu 2015). rather than “fun,” eradication entailed guns. recent work in animal studies has argued that conservation measures aimed at protecting endangered species are not always as irenic and uncontroversial as we have imagined—they can be ambiguous, coercive, and even violent (kirksey 2012; haraway 2011). reflecting on practices for the insemination and breeding of endangered whooping cranes in the united states, thom van dooren (2014, 91) talks about forms of “violent care” whose goal of saving a species from extinction does not entitle us to disregard the ethical concerns these very practices raise (see also van dooren 2011; giraud and hollin 2016). this contentiousness of caring for an endangered species is further amplified when, to save a species, conservation advocates plan for the local extermination of another one. far from harmonious, care sheds light on the distressing aspects of conservation and, broadly, the complications that emerge when humans intervene in the lives of animals—whether by sustaining their life or laboring to thwart it (shelton 2004). caprine humanities “goats have always been with us, they have helped us during all this time. i love raising goats . . . the park cannot exterminate that, for sure!” rodrigo spoke to me with a grin showing disappointment and defiance at once, as he held the horn of one of his goats. the goats are corralled behind his farmhouse, only a few miles from the park. he told me that before eradication campaigns began, puerto villamil filled with hundreds of bleating goats when the cargo ship would come every other month. corralled in the main square, goats were sold to the mainland en pie, alive. in those years, he would await with a mix of trepidation and anxiety the return of his father from a weeklong hunting trip. appearing smaller than they are to the naked eye, the plains that contour the two large southern volcanoes outside puerto villamil are in fact immense and labyrinthine, with thick spinose bushes impeding the vista for those who venture onto them. stories of people never returning still circulate. when rodrigo grew strong enough, he joined his father in goat hunting. he still hunted as we spoke, his eyes scanning my body while asking me how i would feel about carrying on my shoulders and neck deskinned quarters of bloody, warm, dead goats. rodrigo lives in the highlands, where subsistence rather than tourism still governs daily chores. “we have few . . . actually, no tourists here! [turistas . . . pocos. en verdad, no hay!]” he told me, oscillating his forearm back and forth longitudinally—the ecuadorian sign for having a problem. “i keep hunting for as long as god and the park want! [sigo con la cacería hasta que díos y el parque quieran!]” my friend gabriela, a farmer, would often mention goats as she reminisced about the galápagos “before all this [tourist infrastructure] existed.” when she was young, activities on the farm, not the regimen of a work week, marked the rhythms of everyday life. days were spent planting crops, harvesting, riding horses to the beach, exploring the highlands, and hunting goats. “i don’t understand all this rage against goats [no entiendo todo este furor contra los chivos],” she once told me, “while la gente abajo [people who live in the coastal town of puerto ayora and work in tourism] keep smuggling pet dogs onto the island!” two decades ago, she cofounded a small tourism agency that managed a sailboat. she has always loved exploring the islands, and organizing excursions around the islands seemed like a great opportunity. but when tourism picked up, people became competitive and greedy. her business partner changed too, and their relationship deteriorated. gabriela quit without even claiming her share. now the travel agency is among the many that benefit from the steady influx of tourism to the islands. “there is no awareness that we live in a national park [ya no hay conciencia que estamos en un parque]. meanwhile, i keep buying carne de chivo from hunters, to support them,” she told me resolutely. in the end, pi produced the opposite of its intended result. counter to its goal, pi created new forms of human–goat sociality under the technoscientific practices of eradication, prompting locals to reaffirm and even create new modes of engagement with goats. whether on farms or feral, goat meat serves the local market: seco de chivo (goat stew) is a delicious dish on the islands. though there are fewer than before, hunters continue to venture into the highlands to search for goats. still nowadays, a type of care for goats exists on trails through thorny bushes to the scorched volcanoes and back, drops of goats’ blood falling intact on the dry soil. conclusion in the wake of proyecto isabela, goats’ diminished yet defiant presence unravels eradication’s goal to neatly divide endemic and invasive nature. eradication practices have paradoxically produced another instantiation of the ties that bind species together. in pi, care informed worlding interventions that drew together strands of biology and fibers of socialities to recombine them into something new. resisting human attempts to untie them, multispecies knots forced ecological and anthropological thinking to slow down: to abandon long-used ideas about relationships and practices of separation between nature and society (haraway 2008; mitchell 2002; myers 2015). eradication and its consequences engendered responses to a situation for which there were no established norms, one that caused hesitation about each actor’s obligation toward others (barad 2012; dave 2014; haraway 2008; stengers 2013). still, care does not only illuminate the thriving of multispecies life. the caring practices that informed proyecto isabela have added to and contrasted with alternative forms of multispecies care between residents and goats. residents’ inscription of goats in their ways of living on and caring for the galápagos have competed with conservationists’ care for tortoises. scholarly attention to the more-than-human should therefore not solely map the connections between humans and other species but also account for the contentious nature of multispecies assemblages. the geographers paul robbins and sarah moore (2013) have suggested that scientists, caught between contradictory fears of imposing human values onto landscapes while not responding to ecological degradation with adequate urgency, should address the political aspects of conservation, invasion ecology, and restoration. but political positioning alone runs the risk of staying at the level of enunciation and forgetting about the unexpected ways in which matter changes, the geometry of multispecies webs varies, and emerging assemblages overlap and rival each other. in its emphasis on practice, the analytic lens of care brings into focus the consequences of a political commitment such as that of saving an endangered species from extinction. this essay has shown how multispecies caring practices are plural and contested. complicating any political position vis-à-vis eradication, whether in favor of or against it, attention to care helps scholars and practitioners alike move past the rigid determination of success or failure for conservation measures toward an open, continuous commitment to the flourishing of multispecies life in the uncertain times of the anthropocene. notes acknowledgments thanks to neel ahuja, anne allison, mara buchbinder, dietra buxton, jocelyn chua, rudi colloredo-mansfeld, amelia fiske, vincent joos, townsend middleton, peter redfield, kailey rocker, jennifer shaw, harris solomon, gigi taylor, and margaret wiener for taking the time to read this article and improve it. thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and to dominic boyer for his smooth guidance during the final phases of publication. fieldwork was funded by the social science research council and the institute for the study of the americas; the center for galapagos studies helped me with my research visa. 1. as a measure to ensure anonymity, all personal names of galápagos residents have been changed. 2. the project targeted goats in northern isabela, santiago, and pinta islands. small populations of goats still live on santa cruz, san cristobal, and southern isabela. 3. engaging in multispecies ethnography, this essay’s topic differs from anthropology’s traditional unit of inquiry, anthropos, to investigate the lives of humans and animals and to reflect on the fate of both. in their foundational article on multispecies ethnography, eben kirksey and stefan helmreich (2010) offer four criteria by which multispecies ethnography is anthropological: relatedness, exchange, governmentality, and signification. though carrying the specific imprint of michel foucault’s scholarship, their explanation clarifies the anthropological relevance of all strands of multispecies ethnography. 4. this article is based on the author’s conversations with galápagos residents and pi personnel during fieldwork on the galápagos in 2010, 2012, and 2013–2014. 5. urbino was one of the prime centers of fifteenth-century european humanism and home of the duke of montefeltro, the influential promoter of artists such as raphael, after whom benelli named one of its signature guns. arguably, pi’s use of benelli’s arms repurposed the late renaissance aesthetics of natura morta (still life; literally, dead nature). on the galápagos, though, stillness resulted from lethal technology rather than artistic sublimation. 6. a spanish church contacted the park to protest against the use of biblical names. on judas goats, see taylor and katahira 1988. 7. 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berkeley: university of california press. wolff, matthias, and mark gardener, eds. 2012 the role of science for conservation. new york: routledge. sounds of democracy sounds of democracy: performance, protest, and political subjectivity laura kunreuther bard college http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1784-8193 democracy is commonly associated with various forms of voicing: political speeches, public gatherings of shouting protesters, filibusters in the halls of congress, or heated debates in teashops, salons, and newspapers around the world. everyday discussions about democracy tend to imply at least two different understandings of voice. first, liberal democracy is founded on the ideal that every adult citizen “has a voice” that can and should be heard, just as they have a vote, and that these voices/votes are functionally equivalent to each other. consider, for example, a mass email from the advocacy organization people for the american way that circulated in the lead-up to the 2016 election in the united states: “the strength of our democracy is tied to each individual voice being heard and every vote counted.” voice in this case is linked to individual selves, and particularly to self-interest, consciousness, and desire. the expression of democratic belonging requires active participation by individuals with a multitude of different interests, individuals who jostle for a space to speak, debate, and discuss. scholars often emphasize the use of language as central to democratic practice—via texts in the public sphere (habermas 1989), social media (juris 2012; bonilla and rosa 2015), face-to-face debates in coffee and tea houses (cody 2011), or well-crafted oratory (bate 2009)—and thus voice serves as a metaphor for political participation. a second common association of voice with democracy appears in discussions of political representation, embodied in the notion of a representative democracy in which a politician claims to represent the voices of many. recall donald trump’s repeated comment in his speech at the republican national convention in 2016, “i am your voice,” which suggested that his role would be to represent the numerous voters who, as trump put it, “no longer have a voice.” once votes are cast by the ostensibly voiceless, they are said to gain a voice through its explicit mediation by an elected official. political metaphors of voice are often disembodied, rarely invoked with reference to the materiality or texture of embodied voices or other actual sounds that make up democratic practice.1 in many philosophical discussions of democracy, metaphors of political voice almost always refer to discursive speech, analytic or reasoned discourse. they rarely conjure other forms for political utterance, sound, or even noise—voices shouting, collective chanting, the production of noise for political effect, or, significantly, the active performance of silence—that make up the many practices of participatory democracy. in such collective performances, the notion of voice depends not on a single speaker but on a mass collectivity to make any message heard. this notion of voice is popularly embodied in the “human mic” or “people’s mic” used during recent u.s. protests, when a single person’s speech or chant is spoken in short segments and then repeated by the crowd, so that the words can be heard far from the source. the human mic works through the nonmechanical amplification of voice, through collective resounding, and in so doing it ironically inverts familiar modes of electronic mediation associated with modernity and mass experience (kelp-stebbins and schifani 2015). the human mic emphasizes a collective voice that, as homay king (2012, 239) notes, “shifts away from sovereign, solitary personhood.” by “extending the communality of the movement through embodiment,” the human mic enacts the very thing that it seeks to represent or demand (kelp-stebbins and schifani 2015). writes king (2012, 239): “this is what democracy looks like.” or we might say, this is what democracy sounds like. while the global discourse of voice (in english) rarely turns our attention to the soundings of democracy, the term āwāj—used in many south asian languages—refers explicitly to sound and to metaphoric meanings of voice. my first encounters with āwāj came initially through my research in kathmandu, where i spent a lot of time analyzing fm radio programs and fan letters in which listeners frequently commented on the sonic qualities of a radio host’s voice, described as either swar (voice of an individual person or animal) or āwāj (noise, sound, voice).2 most nepalis would translate the word āwāj as “sound” or, if they are consumers of media or activists in the political sphere, as “voice.” ralph turner’s (1931, 26) nepali–english dictionary gives us three possible translations: “noise, sound, voice.” at a metaphorical level, āwāj resonates with modern, global discourses of voice used to describe interior thoughts and desires, political consciousness, agency, and modes of selfhood central to modern publics and democratic practice (keane 1999; kunreuther 2014; weidman 2014; fisher 2016), as in phrases like mahilāko āwāj (women’s voice) or janājātiko āwāj (ethnic nationalist voice) or āwāj uthāune (raising voice). yet āwāj also includes reference to a wide array of phenomena that are not human or discursive at all: natural and mechanical sounds or noises.3 the term āwāj, then, quite literally, brings together what amanda weidman (2014) and others have identified as two registers of voice: first, the study of vocal sound, and second, its life as a discursive category related to discussions of power, subjectivity, representation, and agency. because sound affects us in ways that often exceed words, āwāj helps us focus our attention on the connections between the rational and the affective, the articulate and the inarticulate, rather than their fundamental division, raising questions around how we think about democratic practice. āwāj also offers us a way to break open the ubiquitous discourse of voice used in global human-rights organizations, humanitarian discourse, and liberal understandings of the public sphere. in these contexts, we often find a group or a person who is presented as voiceless but who might be able to “gain a voice” through some effort, often with the help of another organization, medium, authority, or knowledge producer. while āwāj and āwāj uthāune echo these global ideas about voice, i do not believe that there is an equivalent subject—a voiceless subject—implied in the concept of āwāj. this may be related to the broader nexus of sounds embraced by the term. in the present article, i follow the pathways laid out by the concept of āwāj by considering two examples of participatory democracy on the streets of kathmandu. ashmina ranjit’s performance art piece, a happening/an installation: nepal’s present situation, 2004, intended to dramatize the nation’s suffering in the midst of the maoist people’s war and, as ashmina explained to me, to “wake the people of kathmandu up.”4 eight years later, activists staged a political demonstration lasting 107 days in front of the prime minister’s home, which was called occupy baluwatar or baluwatar satyagraha, in protest of a young returning migrant being robbed by an immigration official and then raped by a nepali policeman. despite its initial name, occupy baluwatar was quite unlike the occupy movements around the globe: it did not target global capital, and the activists had a specific aim to further a concrete legal action (cf. juris and rasza 2012). but in using the same name as the movement that popularized the use of the human mic and its ideals, occupy baluwatar created many formal similarities to other global protest movements: its reliance on social media, the use of silence and noise, as well as the occupation of public space. both a happening and the occupy baluwatar protests involved a similar demographic of cosmopolitan young nepalis, many of whom had traveled or studied abroad, some of whom were journalists who often wrote in english and spoke a mix of nepali and english, and some of whom in fact participated in both events (such as ashmina). most of the people involved in these events see themselves as feminists, activists or, in ashmina’s case, as an “artivist,” who denounce party politics even when, in the case of the baluwatar movement, they seek to negotiate directly with the state.5 they practice what heather hindman (2014) has called “diy” democracy, which exhibits a “confluence between anarchic and libertarian rejections of the state.” presenting themselves as part of nāgarik samāj (civil society), they distinguish their actions from the tactics of political society (see chatterjee 2006), which uses violence or threats of violence to protest against the state. though different in intention and to some degree audience, both the performance piece and the occupy protest moved between the physical, public space of the street and the mediated public sphere of circulating texts and voices; both used sound strategically. drawing on local and global strategies of protest, participants described both events as examples of āwāj uthāune. as forms of āwāj, they invite us to consider sound, noise, and voice “as intertwined and diverging trajectories, rather than a unified progression to an autonomous, speaking subject” (manoukian 2010, 241). they indicate a range of performances that cultivate democratic and political subjectivity in nepal.6 in following āwāj, i am not seeking to indigenize a global concept like voice. instead, i argue that āwāj and āwāj uthāune offer another global trajectory of voice—one that might provincialize northern discourses of voice. in provincializing europe, dipesh chakrabarty (2000) suggests that the concepts we use to understand political modernity such as citizenship, state, the individual, the subject, the public sphere, human rights, and so on are both indispensable and inadequate because their assumptions about universal humanity always take europe as its subject. the concept of āwāj does the work of provincializing that chakrabarty argues for insofar as it offers new ways of thinking about the political role of sound that comes out of a south asian concept but is equally at work in euro-american contexts. āwāj is a global discourse in its own right. often associated with radical politics, āwāj is also a common name for newspapers, ngos, and politically inspired performances throughout south asia, as well as in kenya, the united kingdom, and north america, where there are large south asian populations. derived from the persian avaaz (sound, voice, or song), in these contexts, the political and the sonic referents of āwāj often overlap. the online activist network avaaz (n.d.), started by a canadian of south asian descent, emphasizes the global nature of its campaigns by stating in the “mission” section of its website: “avaaz—meaning ‘voice’ in several european, middle eastern, and asian languages—launched in 2007 with a single democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.” in using the term avaaz rather than voice, the organization signifies its departure from mainstream global media organizations, and its alignment with the global south. āwāj uthāune (raising voice) is sound as signal that, like setrag manoukian’s (2010, 241) analysis of crowds in viral videos during protests after recent iranian elections, “unsettles both the insatiable desire to give closure and the refusal to engage and reflect critically.” by considering affective sounds of protest that circulate on the street and in the media or on the internet, we move away from an understanding of voice as a form of transparent political representation of specific demands. w. j. t. mitchell (2012, 10) describes the occupy movements, for example, as “a demand for presence, an insistence on being heard, before any specific political demands are made; a demand that the public be allowed to gather and remain in a public space.” moreover, he wonders what “iconic figures” (mitchell 2012, 13) emerge from such protests. to get at the way in which hearing is a central affective component of democratic practice, here i ask: what are the sonic motifs of contemporary protests? from a broader perspective we might also ask: what does participatory democracy sound like? this question is inspired by a proliferation of critical studies that explore the affective, sensory, and embodied dimensions of political subjectivity (e.g., athanasiou 2005, 2017; stoler 2007; manoukian 2010; mazzarella 2010, 2015; butler 2015; cody 2015). my analysis here contributes to a growing literature on the role of sound and silence in protests and affective publics (e.g., sterne and davis 2012; gray 2013; manabe 2015; novak 2015; tausig 2015; abe 2016; sonevytsky 2016), and i take up stefan helmreich’s point that “telling signal from noise is no simple matter” (garcia molína and cossette 2016). here i consider four sonic motifs: performed silence, broadcasts of recorded crying, honking, and banging on plates.7 these are neither fully discursive nor fully musical, evincing elements of both. they create “democratic soundscapes” (kunreuther 2017) out of and against the contemporary urban sounds of kathmandu.8 such soundscapes are oriented toward a vast media complex—indeed, are largely produced for media that become a feature of the performances—while creating presence within the moment through silence, voices, and bodily assembly. audio 1. kathmandu āwāj. this sound piece moves through several different neighborhoods of kathmandu and patan over the course of a fictive day, echoing the pleasures, frustrations, and humor of the dense and richly layered urban soundscape. created and edited by laura kunreuther. urban soundscapes change radically through history and over the course of a day.9 in the early mornings in the cities of the kathmandu valley,10 one hears the sounds of dogs barking, birds chirping, the rumbling of early trucks, and bells ringing in homes and at corner temples for morning puja (worship). the sounds of morning traffic, the whoosh of pressure cookers letting off steam, and the shouts of children going to school begin around 9 or 10 a.m. those who know the city well are likely able to recognize where they are by what they hear. different parts of the city are characterized by different sounds and different languages (generally nepali, newari, english, and hindi) related to specific people, practices, and histories of a neighborhood. a passerby will know that he or she is at ratna park bus station from the noise of buses revving up their motors, peddlers hawking fruit or tea, bus drivers yelling out their destinations. they will know they are in a specific bahal (courtyard) or section of patan by the chinking sounds of newar craftsmen tapping their brass sculptures of divine figures into perfect form.11 in the late-night hours, in the tourist and youthful area of thamel, repetitive drumbeats and loud electric-guitar music seep through the closed doors of dance bars. in other parts of the city, the calls and responses of dogs barking break up the silence of night, echoing across the valley. these typical soundscapes of kathmandu are nominally and sometimes radically altered during the various protests that have occurred over nearly three decades, the most common being bandas (general strikes) or chakka jams (traffic blockades) when all traffic, commerce, schools, and other public institutions stop or are threatened into ceasing their work.12 such methods parallel the actions of what partha chatterjee (2006) has called political society, though in nepal the line between civil and political society may not be very clear (see lakier 2014). on such days of protest, a stark difference manifests itself in the soundscape of the capital city. the streets are largely empty (except for buses marked “tourist”), and people who do go out are generally walking or on bicycles. the lack of typical daily sounds (not quite silence) makes the protests palpable—along with the threat of violence they entail—even for those who do not know what a particular banda is about. the relative quiet of a banda is punctuated at various times and places by the sound of stones being thrown at businesses that have not shut down. overall, one hears the stunning absence of traffic. first motif: silence on may 1, 2004, a procession of people dressed in black took to the streets of kathmandu. processions, or julusharu, were not an unusual sight at the time; they were daily happenings enacted by protesters who spoke out against the royal regime, the demise of the democratic process, and the ongoing civil war between the maoists and the nepali state. but this procession was not a political rally; it was a piece of performance art orchestrated by nepal’s renowned conceptual artist ashmina ranjit. the black-clad performers walked solemnly and silently in pairs. one person would suddenly fall to the ground, feigning death, while the other drew his or her outline on the street in chalk. many carried handheld fm radio sets, from which the sound of crying war victims was broadcast across all fm stations and the state-owned radio nepal for a full hour, from 5 to 6 p.m. one performer attached a megaphone to a radio to amplify the sound. a newspaper headline about a happening read: “ashmina ‘raises her voice’ against present madness” (pradhan 2004). sometime after the event, ashmina explained to me what she envisioned with the performance: “it’s for peace and it’s against the ongoing violence,” she said. “and it’s not only me—this is our voice [hāmro āwāj].” the performance produced and provided material to reflect on the media of democratic protest—ranging from radio infrastructure to collective processions. i was initially drawn to write about ashmina’s performance after learning about her remarkable use of fm radios to broadcast the sounds of wailing. but when i first met ashmina to talk about a happening, a year later, she began telling me that the event was marked, at least initially, by wordlessness or silence. the sonic space it created, then, echoed the quietness of the streets during a banda. figure 1. ashmina ranjit and crowd at a happening/an installation: nepal’s present situation, 2004. photo courtesy of ashmina ranjit. a happening was staged at a volatile moment in a particularly significant place: during the height of the maoist people’s war, and a year after the king had dissolved the parliament and had appointed a prime minister without holding elections. just days after ashmina’s performance, prime minister surya bahadur thapa resigned due to growing pressure from political parties. the performance began directly in front of the nepal’s first educational institution, tri-chandra college, near the famed democracy wall of ratna park that commemorated the 1990 people’s movement, and it was the site of the most violent and regular protests at that time. this site became a key place for organizing protests from 2001 to2004, as activists often deliberately tried to get arrested just beside democracy wall (snellinger 2010, 125). typically, during the weeks prior to ashmina’s a happening, one could hear protesters shouting near democracy wall, which ended with police rounding up activists in blue police vans. before may 1, ashmina had asked political leaders and key student activists to take their protests elsewhere on that day or to join in the procession. she had also talked to police and army personnel, who typically broke up such rallies, asking that they not arrest the eighty-some students she planned to bring. some activists transported their protests to new road, a main thoroughfare; others joined the performance. all were instructed to wear black and to move without saying anything, though they were advised to moan, cry out, or occasionally cup their hands and ask for water from strangers on the street. each participant used their voice as a medium for sound, then, not a medium for articulate expression. ashmina had approached the households located along the route of the procession, asking them to put on their radios for a full hour, so passersby could hear her soundtrack. she placed brass bowls of water outside residents’ homes, which she colored with vermilion powder. the performance began with ashmina and her collaborator, sunil pokharel, sitting silently at the central clock tower (ghanta ghar) and tearing books as ink dripped onto their faces from above. a painted image of the national clock tower, broken, lay in front of them on the street. “the time of the nation had come to a standstill,” wrote journalist sanjeev uprety (2004). some of a happening’s power came from it being staged during the 2004 governmental ban on public gatherings in certain places, including, due to its symbolic significance, in front of democracy wall. ashmina marked this fact by painting a “no entry” symbol on the street. contrary to other protests, this one was not interrupted by police vans and arrests. uprety (2004) reported a police officer commenting that “if all of the political protests were this peaceful, [police] wouldn’t have to fire tear gas and plastic bullets.” perhaps because a happening was understood as art that made no specific political demands, police and army personnel complied with ashmina’s request not to carry out arrests. figure 2. ashmina ranjit and sunil pokharel streaked in black ink. photo courtesy of ashmina ranjit. figure 3. chalk bodies and democracy wall. photo courtesy of ashmina ranjit. ashmina’s strategic use of silence and black clothing echoed prior political protests and demonstrations in nepal. in nepal and other parts of south asia, black signifies protest, often silent protests that draw attention to the perceived darkness of a regime. during the teachers’ strike of 1984 and 1985, for example, teachers wore black armbands and went to their classrooms but refused to speak, hoping to move their employers to action while also remaining respectful of the lines of hierarchy (burghart 1996, 310–11). several years later, activists in the 1990 people’s movement used tactics of provocative silence not only to rebuke the government but also to oppose and dramatize government censorship. increasingly, journalists or activists explained their silence directly. in 1990, more than two hundred writers and artists staged a silent gathering in front of tri-chandra college—in the same location where ashmina performed a happening—with black scarves tied around their faces.13 journalists and media personnel staged a similar protest fifteen years later after the government had raided an fm radio station, dramatically representing the condition of silence they found themselves in. even the nonauditory media of newspapers invoked a metaphorical silence. in march 1990, a blank editorial page in the weekly nepali āwāj (nepali voice) was appended with a short explanation of its emptiness: “to oppose the arrests of around forty journalists and other professionals from all over the country.” figure 4. silent protest against government takeover of media, october 2005. photo courtesy of kantipur publications. we can think of many other protests around the world that have captivated their audiences through the public performance of silence: the 1917 silent parade of eight to ten thousand african americans on fifth avenue to protest a lynching; the black lives matter silent protests that spread across the united states nearly a hundred years later; the “standing man” protest in gezi park in turkey that spread to cities around the world; the silent vigils of women in black that athena athanasiou (2017, 225) argues reshaped “vocal registers that implicitly condition the configuration of the political.” while each instance of silence has its own history, context, and specific intentions, in all these cases silence has a powerful effect in emphasizing social solidarity, solemnity, and violence. silence also draws attention to a break in communication between authorities and citizens, or a problem with the concept of the public or of politics itself. in these demonstrations of palpable and visible silence, people dramatize the problems of voicing without uttering a word—a kind of ironic commentary on censorship in which their performance is the inverse of what they seek and desire. the use of silence aims to inspire talk, and this talk also forms part of the effectiveness of deliberate silence in cultivating political subjects. this “biopolitics of silence,” as ana maría ochoa gautier (2015, 186) describes it, involves a “dialectic between recognition and negation.” on the one hand, the ability of modern subjects to engage in silent concentration leads to rational understanding, while on the other hand, to engage in a “silencing of irrational or noisy forms of listening” (ochoa gautier 2015, 186) simultaneously elevates some political subjects and denigrates others as not yet political. in the case of ashmina’s performance, pairing silence with broadcast sounds of crying became a means of reflective engagement with the contemporary political context that tapped into people’s affective experience of politics. figure 5. silent protest against police mistreatment by african americans in new york city, 1917. photo by underwood and underwood figure 6. ashmina’s use of voicelessness, coupled with the staging of fallen bodies on the ground, draws on a global repertoire of protest iconography evident in this image of a black lives matter silent protest. photo by patrick record. when performed by a large group in public, silence often emphasizes death and respectful mourning (schwartz 2011, 617). marié abe (2016, 247) convincingly shows that, in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake in japan, silence was not a sonic performance of oppression or the alter ego of voicing, but became a “performance of national mourning and social embeddedness.” this connection was made literal in ashmina’s happening as performers fell to the ground to feign death while their partners traced their bodies in chalk, mimicking global police imagery of death at the scene of a crime. athanasiou’s (2005, 46) analysis of the women in black silent vigils to protest israeli occupation draws attention to “the historical unspeakability and silenced memory of collective traumatic encounters with death that demand our witness when nothing is left to be said.” these silent vigils are sometimes interrupted by women’s wails of grief and even occasional screams. moving between silence and crying, athanasiou (2005, 47) argues, suggests the way these women “inhabit language in the realms of its most intense and unpronounceable discontinuities (i.e., silence and scream).” strikingly similar to ashmina’s performance in terms of sounds, this feminist politics performs the inevitable experience of language—“language being at a loss” (athanasiou 2005, 47) —captivating people through audible expressions that lie at the edge of discourse. in kathmandu, silent protests like ashmina’s are also forms of āwāj uthāune, of raising voice. second motif: broadcast wailing audio 2. wailing, as part of a happening. created by ashmina ranjit. like the women in black vigils, the wordless a happening was overlaid by sounds of wailing broadcast through several fm radio sets for a full hour. ashmina compiled her soundtrack using a documentary film about maoist conflict, the living of jogimara (2002), as well as recordings of herself and other actors whom she had hired to cry. “the sound of crying is most effective,” ashmina told me; “it shakes you.” part of what makes crying the most effective sound of protest is its connection to the affective qualities of vocal sound. although crying, in nepal as elsewhere, is a gendered and performed genre, it could be seen as pure voice or a voice without language, a voice beyond language and therefore beyond accent.14 as mladen dolar (2012, 550) points out, the sound of an infant’s scream “presents speech in its minimal traits, which may later get obscured by articulation.” though words are spoken on the soundtrack, they are not articulated between cries, blurring the sounds of crying with these utterances. the layered crying voices represent many people (but notably, the sobbing comes almost exclusively from women), including babies crying out for their mothers and men trying to console those crying. voices without clear language, ashmina felt, expressed the suffering of the nation more powerfully than any words about the war could convey. the sound of crying is the sound of affect writ large. as a performed genre, crying is associated primarily with women and a necessary part of funerals and weddings, though not usually a public form addressed to strangers. much as at funerary rituals, most of the crying heard on ashmina’s soundtrack was performed by women whose only enunciation was reference to their children. these mothers’ sobs came to represent the nation writ large. recorded and transmitted over the radio, the sounds of mourning were transposed and remediated first from the familial face-to-face setting to a documentary film and then to a recorded soundtrack broadcast nationally. the anonymity of crying became a means of creating the sense and sensibility of public cohesion, even when there may not have been such a thing. the effect was to dissolve any clear, politicized identities (of class, region, ethnicity, caste, religion, and so on) possibly revealed in a person’s accent, word choice, or tone of voice, though one could still hear gender in the cries of mothers. it is quite possible that the gendered nature of the sobs rendered the voices more natural, making them appear to transcend political divides to represent the national family or motherland, a term widely embraced throughout south asia. by placing crying mothers at the center of this piece, ashmina subverted a dominant nepali masculine trope of the bir (brave) soldiers of the nation (onta 1996). after the event, much to ashmina and her team’s surprise, the maoists claimed the performance to be antigovernment, while government officials claimed that it protested the maoists. several commentators pointed to the “real” quality of the crying. “in order to hit people hard with the message,” pradhan (2004) wrote, “all kathmandu-based fm radios aired real wailing and crying sounds from the war-torn places for an entire hour.” the recording of crying and its transmission on the radio proved crucial to creating an audible sense of the real. because recorded sound is separated from the body and because, unlike the human ear, recording devices do not differentiate between meaningful and meaningless sound, the indexical qualities of a recording often make the voices appear more real, immediate, and pure than symbolic language (see kittler 1999). words might be empty or false, but crying seems harder to fake. (however, the fact that the crying soundtrack was produced by a documentary filmmaker and performing actors belies this idea, though no media commentator noted this.) what kind of subjects do the sounds of crying bring forth? these are not actors who debate rationally about issues of public opinion. these are unnamed, unidentifiable persons whose sounds make them appear to speak as one body, one voice—albeit a clearly gendered voice. the subjects constituted by these sounds may resemble a crowd that stands (at least in twentieth-century social theory) in contrast to the subjects of more self-measured publics (cody 2011, 41; see also mazzarella 2010). in his analysis of crowd theories, william mazzarella (2010, 704) points out that the crowd is central to our image of democracy, but crowds are more often feared in this literature because they lead to a kind of bodily suffusion of affect that “represents a lamentable loss of autonomy.” in ashmina’s performance, two different images of crowds collide. most of those assembled on the street were not crying; a few performers wailed in performed pain, but most performers and their audience remained silent like ghosts, animating a reflective space of assembly. yet another invisible but audible crowd emerged in the crying voices transmitted through the radio sets.15 crying transduced through radios created what pierre schaffer (1966) calls an acoustemic situation where the source of the sound remained unseen (see also kane 2014). a happening thus emphasized a distance that people in kathmandu maintained from the source of crying, while at the same time forcing aloof urban residents to engage with the sounds of wartime pain. as daniel fisher (2016, 11) points out, the voice broadcast via radio inspires “reflexive consideration” and “occasional unease” in the media’s “capacity to enable forms of collective self-abstraction . . . and to evoke an alterity, one’s ‘self’ returned as the voice in the machine.” indeed, one of ashmina’s aims was to reach beyond the scene of the street and touch people who were not immediately present for the performance, asking them to recognize themselves or their compatriots in the crying voices. this national effect was largely created through the soundtrack’s transmission on all radio stations. ashmina had first approached one fm station and found that the manager greeted her with an unexpected openness, having seen her installation nepal’s situation: 2003, which she had created a year before. in the prior installation, people moved slowly across a burning map of nepal while the sounds of crying, gunshots, and vague news reports about the dead played through a recording. ashmina felt that a happening was a continuation of this project, and the soundtrack largely came from the earlier performance. the station manager agreed to broadcast the soundtrack and, inspired by this, the artist approached another station. eventually, all fifty-some fm stations agreed to broadcast the soundtrack from 5 to 6 p.m. many of these kathmandu-based stations had satellite equipment that they then used to broadcast to other outlets far beyond the capital. just days before the actual performance, a friend of ashmina’s, the head of the state-run radio nepal, contacted her and somewhat inexplicably asked why they had not also been approached. transmitted over all fm stations and radio nepal, the sounds of crying were now to become a broadcast of truly national scope. the process of gaining this approval, ashmina told me, proved as integral to the piece as the actual performance. the simultaneous broadcast of the soundtrack on all stations echoed media coverage of the national tragedy of the narayanhiti palace massacre, when king birendra and his entire immediate family were murdered. much as with ashmina’s happening, the media were united in the representation of grief and mourning, though, of course, the events’ relation to the state were quite different. after the royal massacre, radio nepal, all fm radio stations, and nepal television, consistent with hindu practice, played hindu mourning music for at least fourteen hours (hutt 2006; lakier 2009). all media transformed overnight into sites of hindu national mourning, where truths about what happened at the palace were obscured (or, perhaps, illuminated) in the sound of dirges and televised images of the pashupatinath temple. three years later, ashmina's performance reinvoked the power of mass media to offer transparent access to truths—political and emotional—for a listening public. and it created a different politics of doubt—not the distrust of the media or the government that genevieve lakier (2009) discusses after the royal massacre, but doubt and confusion about what kind of tragedy might have occurred. some stations, like radio nepal, interspersed the sounds of crying with their regularly scheduled programs; many also included an announcement that the broadcast was part of a performance occurring in kathmandu. when it was broadcast on the street, a few people tried to drown out the sound by turning on other music. even so, those hearing the sounds of crying assumed something tragic had happened that they did not yet know about, something, like the palace massacre, that was too tragic to report with words. managers at fm radio stations told ashmina that the phones had been ringing constantly, with listeners asking what had happened. several stations just took their phones off the hook, possibly creating more confusion and fear. there were, in many ways, two different happenings: one on the street addressed to a kathmandu audience, which included students, residents, and migrants from other parts of nepal; and one that addressed an unseen and unseeing audience through the radio and sound alone. the broadcast transmission of the sounds of crying created a secular, national, and—despite (or perhaps because of) the gendered performance of crying—more human national subject. it sounded, as some observers noted, as though “nepal is crying.” third motif: honking noise the protests at baluwatar were similarly deeply intertwined with media. occupy baluwatar or baluwatar satyagraha (as it was later called by some who wanted to dissociate it from the western occupy movements) was initially inspired by reports of a local rape, when a nepali woman, pseudonymously known as sita rai, returned from working in the persian gulf in late november 2012, traveling on a fake passport.16 to avoid prosecution, a nepali immigration officer demanded that she pay a bribe of 218,000 rupees—nearly all the money she had earned abroad. sita rai was then escorted to a bus park by a policeman from the airport, who repeatedly raped her in a nearby lodge. sita rai’s brother began to seek help from women’s organizations and the media in mid-december, and the first article about the robbery and rape appeared in the kathmandu post on december 28, 2012.17 notably, this article was published after the infamous gang rape of jyoti singh on a public bus and subsequent anti-rape protests in delhi had captured global attention. like many other global movements, the baluwatar protest campaign began on facebook and twitter as enraged activists saw little government response.18 they created a petition for the prime minister, first posted on facebook, and then on other social media they agreed to meet close to his residence for others to sign the petition. they continued to meet near the prime minister’s residence every morning from 9 to 11 a.m. beginning on december 28, 2012, for a continuous 107 days in hopes of delivering the petition in person. figure 7. occupy baluwatar, in front of nepal rastra bank. photo courtesy of prajwal tulachan. a year after the occupy baluwatar protests, which i had witnessed digitally from my home in new york, i went to nepal to talk with several of the activists involved. ujwal thapa, one member who was active on social media, met me in the office of his then newly founded youth political party, bibeeksheel nepali (rational nepali). ujwal claimed that their tactics of protest in occupy baluwatar were “new,” in part to keep the attention of the media. “the media loves different things,” ujwal told me. “the media would not continuously show this if it were just people shouting. . . . we used to have impulsive dances . . . a flash-mob concert. . . . you spice it up that way.” ujwal posted a youtube video of the protest from the first day until the forty-fifth, and regularly consulted the internet for ideas on how to protest, including gene sharp’s well-known “198 methods of nonviolent action.” a graduate of bennington college, ujwal’s cosmopolitan persona is reflected in his avid internet use; he describes himself as a former “computer game addict.” in contrast to the highly cultivated and minimalist soundscape of a happening, activists at baluwatar sought to disrupt the status quo by transforming all kinds of noise into signs of protest. each day the activists turned the side of the road in front of the prime minister’s residence into a stage where, in addition to the usual repertoire of political slogans and banners, numerous performances took place. these ranged from poetry slams to performance art (by ashmina and some of her friends) and silent protests; from banging plates and chimes, blowing whistles, and asking people to honk in support to staging a so-called superman rally that mocked contemporary politicians by walking in procession in front of the police academy while wailing. audio 3. flash mob wailing in front of kathmandu police headquarters. created by prajwal tulachan. noise is popularly thought of as prepolitical and nonreflexive, an unintentional effect of urban life rather than a calculated disruption—as sound “that must be listened through,” writes hillel schwartz (2011, 37): “hard candies slowly unwrapped at harpsichord concerts, a chainsaw upriver of a wilderness camp.” the incidental noise of infrastructure or modern urban life, brian larkin (2008) has argued, is the unstable, accidental interference and breakdowns that are a function of mediation itself—the involuntary loss of signal—that is particularly clear in technological mediation. but noise is also associated with the intentional unruliness of a crowd that threatens to spin out of control, to go against law and order, and to challenge some of the foundations of liberal democracy. as david novak (2015, 130) notes, noise is an accusation by those in dominant positions against seemingly unruly marginal groups. “‘bringing the noise’ is not accidental,” writes novak (2015, 131), “but an expressive practice and a deliberate act of subversion.”19 such is the case with japanese musical groups performing in antinuclear protests that seek to break apart and challenge state-sanctioned silence and nuclear policy (novak 2013; manabe 2015; abe 2016).20 such was also the case among the quebec manifs casseroles in 2012, which brought together a wide range of people from different classes, languages, races, and genders to participate in the infectious banging of pots and pans to protest a law that banned large gatherings (sterne and davis 2012). noise always threatens to become polluting, to be read by authorities or those on the street as merely chaotic disturbances that make no sense and need to be brought under regulation.21 figure 8. occupy baluwatar noise. photo courtesy of prajwal tulachan. occupy baluwatar transformed everyday activities like driving to work from the audible traces of moving traffic into a noisy sounding of support for their movement. the prime minister’s residence is located in a wealthy area of kathmandu, a neighborhood populated by expats, diplomats, nepali businesspeople, and government officials, all of whom have cars. the level of traffic makes this thoroughfare particularly congested during rush hour. the activists on several days held up signs asking people to “honk in support” (horn bajāyera samarthan garnu hos!). “don’t forget to honk your horns to show your support in ending violence against women” read one caption to a youtube video. many activists also blew whistles, echoing the sound of traffic police. audio 4. everyday traffic sounds, kathmandu. created by laura kunreuther. at the time, horn-blowing formed part of the etiquette of driving in nepal.22 having spent much time traveling the streets of kathmandu on a bicycle or motor scooter during the late 1990s and early 2000s, i learned the basic rules of moving through traffic. rule number one is to never look behind you or in the rear-view mirror, because what happens in front of you is always changing and needs to be the focus if one is to maneuver successfully on the city’s streets. rule number two, related to number one, is to honk or beep or ring your bell continuously in short staccato bursts as you approach a vehicle in front of you, particularly when passing, so that others know you are there. along with honking, the streets used to ring with the sounds of police whistles, as the police attempted to direct traffic in particularly congested areas. audio 5. honking, whistling, and chimes, as part of occupy baluwatar. created by prajwal tulachan. the honks and whistles of protest are, in comparison, much longer in duration and volume, signifying a difference from driving as usual. in asking people to honk while driving, occupy baluwatar positioned itself firmly against popular protest movements in nepal (and elsewhere in south asia) that seek to take over public space by burning tires in the street, obstructing the roads, calling for transportation strikes to prevent free movement, and thereby presenting a real problem for liberal notions of democratic practice (lakier 2007, 253). occupy baluwatar protesters demonstrated that they were specifically not obstructing traffic by making strategic use of the noisy sounds of still-moving vehicles to signify support for their campaign. “we only knew about traditional ways of protest in nepal. strikes . . . close down the streets, close down the city, beat up the police,” ujwal told me, reflecting on prior activist strategies. “we were very tired of this. since we were such a small group, we knew that this is not the way that like-minded, civil nepalese would actually do it. . . . we only stopped the road once and that was because the police had blocked the road.” noise was not, then, a tactic of subaltern obstruction. noise was rather a strategy aimed to support what ujwal calls “civil” democratic principles. this was clearly an important message, because toward the end of the 107 days, the police arrested some protesters for moving into the road and obstructing traffic, a charge that protesters deny. honking became one of several ways activists transformed seemingly meaningless noise into the sounds of democratic protest. fourth motif: banging plates in a youtube video for the thirtieth day of the baluwatar protests, protesters invited others to join: “today, sitting down in silence with pots and pans, hungry for justice. do join tomorrow.” the video, while hardly silent, shows many protesters with black cloths tied around their mouths, shaking small tin plates with coins inside or lightly tapping the plates with spoons in rhythmic unison. audio 6. tapping plates, as part of occupy baluwatar. created by prajwal tulachan. figure 9. participants in occupy baluwatar tapping plates during an otherwise silent protest. photo courtesy of prajwal tulachan. the use of pots, pans, and metal plates to create the noise of protest is a global phenomenon, used in argentina (where the practice is said to have originated) and other parts of south america, quebec, and turkey. jonathan sterne and natalie zemon davis (2012) link the percussive banging on pots and pans in the 2012 quebec protests to the charivari protests in early modern and modern france, when noisy demonstrations “call[ed] attention to a breach of community standards in the village or neighborhood.” here protesters turn everyday domestic items into the weapons of protest, effectively bringing the home into the public. besides, drumming out beats together on pots and pans is also just plain fun. this was not a new tactic of protest in nepal, either. during the people’s movement of 2006, when the king had declared a curfew that banned people from the streets, many went to the top of their roofs and loudly banged metal plates with spoons, creating a deafening echo across the valley. participants told me that it was unlike any other protest. as one of my close friends explained, the repetitive rhythms expressed and generated a “sea of emotions” for political change and a “feeling of full control” that was not possible during the heavily censored and policed concurrent daytime protests. some explained this act as a means of humiliating king gyanendra, as if to say: “you say you will not listen to us, but we will make sure you literally hear the sound of our discontent from our homes.” as in the gezi park protests in turkey, the call to bang on pots and metal plates came from all around the city sometime after dark, when people called for a complete blackout of lights across the city. in 2015, a similar protest took place when nepalis loudly banged plates with spoons during daytime hours to demand a legal change that would give rights to mothers, like the rights vested in fathers, to pass citizenship on directly to their children. the infectious noise animated participation (gürsel 2013). like the sounds of recorded cries, banging plates transmits little political content other than an overall affective tone: an orchestrated demonstration of anger and discontent, rather than the sorrow and pain of cries. the content of protest remains obscured in the din of banging that echoes across the city, signifying through noise a breakdown in communication between ruler and ruled. there were additional meanings attributed to the plate tapping at baluwatar. plates and spoons were signs of hunger, and combined with the constant call-and-response chanting of “what do [we] need? [we] need justice!” during the protest, the sound of plate tapping spoke to the protesters’ “hunger for justice,” as the youtube caption stated and as one prominent activist repeated to me. several participants suggested the appropriateness of banging plates and pots in a public campaign against violence against women, given the domestic labor women perform in the home and the usual silence surrounding violence against women. the same noise of banging plates, then, can acquire different meanings that must be understood ethnographically for both their global and local resonances. conclusion the four sonic motifs i have considered here are all examples of āwāj and āwāj uthāune, which cannot be fully understood within the classic frames of the voice of publics or the unruly noise of crowds. crowds, and the noise they generate, typically address the embodied and affective dimensions of political subjectivity that cannot be clearly subsumed in a single political opinion. in contrast to the voice of the people, the roar of the crowd suggests an apolitical (or even antipolitical) dimension of those who have not yet found their voice to be represented. yet, as i have argued here, āwāj is orchestrated sound that is clearly embodied, affective, and simultaneously constitutive of political subjects. what does it mean to write about the sounds of participatory democracy at this divisive political moment around the world? democratic soundscapes draw our attention toward the affective and embodied nature of political performance, aspects of democracy that are often disavowed or aggressively disparaged in mainstream discussions of a rational public sphere and the political ethics of communication. certainly, there are many critical approaches to understanding the relationship between emotional and aesthetic expression within mass politics and modes of authoritarian power. this essay suggests novel ways of understanding such relationships by tuning our attention to sound. walter benjamin (1968, 241) famously argued that “fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.” today’s critic must explore the inseparable links between the rational and the affective, the ideational and the material by asking the question: what does democracy sound like? the sounds inherent in participatory democracy depend not on a single speaker but on collectivities—often assembled en masse—to make any message heard within the polyphony of perspectives that can constitute ongoing, collaborative deliberation. the south asian concept of āwāj expands our notions of the voice from expression of consciousness or political desire toward the edges of language. cries, silence, honking, the din of banging plates—these bring forth a political subjectivity based on both intention and affect, a rhetoric of noise and silence, in a transmission of sound that is at once mass-mediated and acutely embodied. notes acknowledgments i thank, first and foremost, my generous friends in nepal without whom this article would not exist, particularly ashmina ranjit, prajwal tulachan, pranika koyu, ujwal thapa, and hikmat khadka. this essay benefited at various stages from the comments of numerous colleagues and friends. i thank participants in the university of pennsylvania’s anthropology colloquium series, who commented on a very early version, particularly asif agha, lisa mitchell, deborah thomas, greg urban, and amanda weidman; the members of bard college’s sound cluster (alex benson, matthew deady, maria sonevetsky, olga touloumi, danielle riou); participants in the “making noise” panel at the 2014 american ethnological society spring meeting; participants in the “anthropology of sound forum” at the 2016 society for ethnomusicology meetings, particularly alex dent, lila gray, danny fisher, and dave novak; bob bilecki for his suggestions on the sounds; dhana hamal, danielle hanley, daniel karpowitz, penelope papailias, jonah rubin, sara shneiderman, and karen strassler for their individual readings at various stages of writing. i also thank the avery review, where i published a portion of the ethnographic material about ashmina’s performance to make an early argument about democratic soundscapes. finally, thank you to the two anonymous reviewers and to the editorial team at cultural anthropology for their insightful suggestions, especially cymene howe and the wonderfully efficient managing editor, marcel laflamme. any remaining mistakes remain my own. 1. see keane 1999; weidman 2006, 2014; harkness 2013; kunreuther 2014; ochoa gautier 2014; fisher 2016 for similar critiques of disembodied voices. 2. these letters produce a form of self-presentation, which i have called voiced writing (kunreuther 2014). this form bears a resemblance to ana maría ochoa gautier’s (2014, 171) argument about the immunized voice, a voice that emerges through “the rules of writing.” 3. the association between voice, speech, and sound is also present in the nepali term hallā, a term that, depending on context, refers to rumors (uncontrolled, widely circulating talk without a specific author) or intentional or inevitable noise (unwanted sounds that makes other sounds inaudible). like āwāj, the term hallā equally forms part of political discourse and practice (see lakier 2014, 211–53; lecomte-tilouine 2017). while hallā sometimes acquires negative connotations as meaningless noise or unconfirmed tales without a source, āwāj is uniformly understood as more formal and coming from an identifiable source. it refers to an individual or collective group's authentic expression and its particular truth. 4. the piece’s title reveals ashmina’s connection to early 1960s performance artists in the united states and europe, who frequently called their performances “happenings” (thapa 2011, 19). ashmina received a master of fine arts at columbia university, where she studied under the performance artist coco fusco. 5. gender was a crucial element in both of these events, and while i touch on this subject as it relates to sound, a fuller exploration of feminist aspects must be explored elsewhere; see koyu and pokharel 2014 and pudasaini 2016. 6. manoukian cites the persian word seda (sound, noise, voice) in his discussion of iranian postelection videos. the persian term avaaz, to which āwāj is connected, typically refers to chanting and singing without political connotations (setrag manoukian, pers. comm.). 7. rather than treat inarticulate sound in opposition to human uses of the voice, i view such strategic use of nondiscursive sound as a continuum alongside articulate language; see ochoa gautier 2014, 169. 8. the overlapping cacophony of distinct yet somehow unified sounds is what marks these as democratic soundscapes, as opposed to another political form. fascism or totalitarian soundscapes, for example, might center on a microphone with a single voice (e.g., strassler 2009). 9. just as with stefan helmreich’s (2016) exploration of sound in his article “gravity’s reverb,” sound forms an integral aspect of this analysis. i have incorporated sound into the text as a performative exercise parallel to the artists’ and activists’ performances i describe. new digital technologies enable us to do “anthropology in sound” (feld and brenneis 2004) in ways that creatively ask us to think beyond the written word. 10. the kathmandu valley is made up of three adjacent cities: kathmandu, patan, and bhaktapur. kathmandu and patan are only separated by a bridge across the bagmati river, and many people move between the two cities daily, often several times a day. bhaktapur is nine miles away from kathmandu. in this passage, i refer specifically to the sounds in kathmandu and patan. 11. a bahal is a typical newar urban housing structure, in which a group of homes are built around an enclosed residential courtyard that all of the families use. newars are a dominant ethnic group in the kathmandu valley. 12. see lakier 2014 for the history and meaning of bandas and other such protests in nepal. 13. khagendra sangroula (2008) refers to these protests metaphorically as the “festival of the black band.” 14. see feld 1982, seremetakis 1991, and wilce 1998 for ethnographies that discuss the performative and often gendered aspects of lamentations and crying. 15. several days after her performance, though, one political group organized a procession in which all the youth involved walked in procession wailing, after which some participants apparently asked, “where is ashmina?” 16. see koyu and pokharel 2014, saldaña 2014, and pudasaini 2016 for a full summary of the incident and the ensuing movement. while initially inspired by the rape case discussed above, there were several other instances of violence against women that became linked to occupy baluwatar. 17. saldaña (2014, 39) cites a woman journalist from the kathmandu post who felt that the media was not adequately covering the issue because “no one wanted to cover women’s issues.” surabhi pudasaini (2016) notes significant differences in the englishand nepali-language press. 18. the government officials were merely suspended from their duties, and the government offered the family less than half of the money stolen from sita rai at the airport. 19. political movements explicitly reference the use of noise to indicate their alignment with subaltern or nondominant groups, such as russia’s well-known pussy riot. amnesty international, while hardly subaltern, devised a human-rights campaign called “bring on the noise.” 20. novak’s (2013) work on musicians performing at antinuclear protests following the 3/11 disaster in japan shows precisely this tension. see also emily thompson’s (2002) the soundscape of modernity, in which she traces early noise-abatement policies in new york in the 1920s. 21. crowds on the street and noise are typically juxtaposed with a silent and rational reading public, and both are disavowed in discussions about political voice. as several scholars have suggested, the analysis of crowds and mass affect helps us reconsider political subjectivity “beyond liberal frameworks” (cody 2015, 63) of the public sphere; see also manoukian 2010; mazzarella 2010, 2015; butler 2015). 22. urban soundscapes are always historical, responding to changes in population, work, technology, and law. this urban soundscape radically changed once a new regulation was put in place in the spring of 2017 that forbids honking. signs were hung around kathmandu announcing the new rule, and it was enforced by traffic police through significant fines. to many people’s surprise, the sounds of continuous honking almost completely disappeared from kathmandu streets within a few days of the regulation. in this changed context, no longer can activists like those at baluwatar depend upon honking as a strategy of support. references abe, 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https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.00027.x. tausig, benjamin 2015 “twitchy ears: a document of protest sound at a distance.” sounding out!, august 24. https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/08/24/twitchy-ears-a-document-of-protest-sound-at-a-distance. thapa, archana 2011 “performance art: feminine representations as cultural intervention.” in imap reader: a collection of essays on art and theater in kathmandu, edited by sanjeev uprety and robin piya, 17–36. kathmandu: himal books. thompson, emily 2002 the soundscape of modernity: architectural acoustics and the culture of listening in america, 1900–1933. cambridge, mass.: mit press. turner, ralph lilley 1931 a comparative and etymological dictionary of the nepali language. new delhi: allied publishers. uprety, sanjeev 2004 “the canvass of history.” kathmandu post, may 7. weidman, amanda 2006 singing the classical, voicing the modern: the postcolonial politics of music in south india. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2014 “voice and anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 43: 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030050. wilce, james m. 1998 eloquence in trouble: the poetics and politics of complaint in rural bangladesh. new york: oxford university press. “masking” makeup: cosmetics and constructions of race in rio de janeiro cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 681-707, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.10 “masking” makeup: cosmetics and constructions of race in rio de janeiro samuel elliott novacich cuny, graduate center https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9515-9887 whenever i leave the house, it is to transform. —guilherme camilo for every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. but he would not sin. the picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. —oscar wilde, the picture of dorian gray it’s a hot morning in late summer, and priscila, fernanda, and i have just arrived at the hotel laghetto stilo in barra da tijuca, a patchwork of gated developments crosscut with six-lane highways in rio de janeiro’s western zone.1 we are here to attend an all-day makeup workshop with the brazilian makeup artist catlen guerra. we arrive at 9:15 and check in for the event scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. fernanda is excited. she works in a downtown office and is accustomed to rising early, but priscila and i are struggling. priscila works full-time as a makeup artist in mangueira, a complex of favelas in rio’s northern zone. she owns a small beauty salon that serves clients most evenings. her work keeps her up late, the space bustling with movement even into the early morning hours. sensing our fatigue, fernanda asks me to save their places in line and takes her best friend, priscila, in search of coffee. both women identify as negra, or black, although fernanda’s complexion is slightly darker than priscila’s. as amateur and professional makeup artists, respectively, they routinely scrutinize the skin colors of those around them. they also take care to inspect dermal qualities like saturation and subtones, oiliness and wrinkles, though not always, as i will soon explain, in ways they approach as having to do directly with race. while waiting, i meet three more workshop participants—manuela, liliane, and karina. we exchange introductions and fernanda and priscila return, empty-handed, a few minutes later. by 9:45 a.m. we are seated, and the lights dim. smooth jazz plays over a pa system, and a crowd of nearly 150 people rumbles with anticipation as a tenor saxophonist enters the room. a white, platinum blond makeup artist (maquiador), and his model, a young black woman wearing a long, tightly fitting dress, trail the saxophonist. both wave and snap selfies before taking the stage. under a spotlight, the maquiador works quickly on his subject’s skin, applying foundation, concealer, contour, and highlights before moving on to her eyes. a camera feed projects her face onto two enormous screens that flank the stage. he draws sharp “cat eyes” on her face, a trail of eyeliner extending back, up, and away. the saxophonist aims his horn directly at the two and mimics a snake-charmer coaxing into existence what we in the crowd watch unfolding on stage. the maquiador reshapes his model’s hair, transforming her afro into a more punk, “faux hawk” hairdo. he cuts off the sleeves and bottom length of her dress, pulling down the black fabric to reveal her shoulders, before she sits for the final adjustments to her face. the music changes. lady gaga’s “shallow” plays on repeat, the crescendo of music and makeover not quite in unison. satisfied with his work, the maquiador, guilherme camilo, motions for his model to rise to thunderous applause as the music lowers and the maquiador speaks: “toda vez que eu saio de vida, é pra transformer … a maquiagem transformou minha vida, e pode transformar a vida de todas” (whenever i leave the house [to work], it’s to transform … makeup transformed my life, and it can transform the lives of everyone). makeup alters the surfaces of bodies. this much is obvious. it is one of several technologies that accentuates the fluidity of the skin and, specifically, the ephemerality of the face. but the skin already exists in a state of constant becoming. not only does it change with one’s environment—sunburns, tans, and dirt lend testimony to this—but with one’s emotional state, as we blush, take on stress wrinkles, or go pale with fear (jablonski 2006). and the pre–made-up face provides a particularly fluid medium, one further unsettled with makeup. for this reason, makeup is critical to local understandings of transformation and foundational to constructions of race in brazil today. but makeup does not simply transform a person by altering their face. rather, applications of makeup destabilize the fragile hermeneutics that tie insides to outsides, essences and souls to physical appearance. and in doing so, these aesthetic practices allow for novel productions of race that question the very foundations on which race in brazil has historically been built. in spite of their mutability, faces are often regarded—at least within western imaginations—as fixed and authentic. meanwhile, it is the mask that is more typically associated with concealment and deceit (belting 2017). claude lévi-strauss (1972) famously rejected this limited understanding of the mask, asserting in his analysis of caduveo face painting that indigenous decoration actually constituted, rather than obscured, personhood, an argument later echoed by eduardo viveiros de castro (1998) with respect to feathers and clothing. hans belting (2017, 90) extends the critique on limited understandings of faces and masks further, asserting, “a face is not static. it looks backward to the path it has already traversed as well as predicting the mask that it will become in death.” but faces and masks do not exist in opposition. rather, the face is a historical object consisting of infinite masks that alternatively show and conceal our putatively authentic selves. belting’s analysis—in keeping with gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s (1987) characterization of the face as both window to the soul and screen of representation—points, in a sense, to the multivalent semiotics of facial signs. these signs may point inward but, just as often, facial signs are refracted outward (siegel 1999). indeed, such outward-pointing signs underpin andrew strathern’s (1975) arguments regarding shame in papua new guinea, where he describes the emotion as living visibly on the skin. shame manifests on the skin where it can be seen, and rather than reflecting emotions found deep within, it points to a relationship with the social world beyond the body. as strathern’s (1975, 350) primary informant explains, and in so doing negates any index to bodily insides, “‘we say we are pipil [ashamed] … but inside ourselves we may be feeling quite good. … it is only when other people are there that we actually feel ashamed about it.’” in pointing outward, signs of the body—whether they are signs of shame or makeup applied to the face—bond with new aesthetic sensibilities (rancière 2004) and join discursive constructions that paint the picture of “who a person is” (benson 2008). this underscores the important parallels between the practices of masking and making up, as well as the transformative components to each. and to that end, the double nature of masking, or its potential to both cover and reveal, applies just as readily to the world of makeup. in fact, in rio, clients often refer to makeup application in ambiguous and apparently contradictory terms, as both covering blemishes and smoothing out wrinkles—and as revealing true selves. this double nature of making up factors critically in contemporary understandings of race in brazil, where, as elsewhere, racial logics are founded on “evidence” located both on the surface of the body and hidden deep within. despite ambiguities that extend far beyond the salon, the face and bodily surface have long been looked to as indexes, or windows, to internal qualities like essence and moral character, most notoriously in pseudoscientific and overtly racist turn-of-the-century studies in phrenology (galton 1879; lombroso and lombroso 1911) and their applications on imperial frontiers (poole 1997; stoler 2002). the paintings of jean-baptiste debret, for example, famed for documenting everyday life in nineteenth-century brazil, include studies of indigenous and enslaved afro-brazilians and pay careful attention to phenotype and color. debret’s work predates continental phrenology, and yet it rests within an enduring logic that ties racial essences to outward physical appearance. although long disproven and rejected as racist by social scientists, such interpretive logics live on in innumerable iterations, from mug shots (sekula 1986; strassler 2010) to contemporary constructions of race around the world (collins 2011). these interpretive logics form what daniel miller calls depth ontology, the pervasive western “assumption that being—what we truly are—is located deep inside ourselves and is in direct opposition to the surface” (miller 2010, 16). and while such ontology informs the aesthetic practice of some makeup artists in rio, it is just as often disregarded and even rejected by others. as i will illustrate in the pages to come, there is disagreement between makeup artists and a tension exists throughout the industry between an aesthetic sensibility that focuses on beautification and another that prizes transformation. while beautification favors supposedly natural looks, it does so based on the belief that the surface of the body accurately reflects who we really are, inside. beautification thus aims to match those truths, the visible but elusive surface of the skin and the invisible but stable interior. makeup artists and enthusiasts who relish transformative aesthetics, on the other hand, seem to do so based on the belief that appearance is itself foundational to personhood, and that in fact all appearance constitutes a mask. miller (2010, 13) takes this latter approach to the extreme in asserting: “if you keep peeling off our layers you find—absolutely nothing left. there is no true inner self. we are not represented by clothes, because if we remove our clothes there isn’t an inner core. the clothes were not superficial, they actually were what made us what we think we are.” similarly, webb keane (2005) has argued that signs and clothing do not simply reflect meaning but, rather, produce it through engagement with the social and material world. the aesthetic logics and varied constructions of race described in this article are thus linked in critical ways to assumptions about the reality of being, and in particular, to the relationships between surfaces, appearance, truth, and depth. these logics also inform, at least partially, the complex relationship between beauty and subjectivity in rio de janeiro’s northern suburbs. one important resource for thinking through the aesthetic ambiguities of faces, makeup, and masks and their relations to interiority comes not by way of the social sciences, but, instead, from oscar wilde. in wilde’s the portrait of dorian gray, the title character, a young socialite, has a portrait commissioned, and upon seeing his image, confronts for the first time the existential dread of aging and mortality. wilde writes: and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colorless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. … “how sad it is!” murmured dorian gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. “how sad it is! i shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. but this picture will remain always young. it will never be older than this particular day of june. … if it was only the other way! if it was i who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old!” (wilde 1962 [1890], 33) as the story progresses, dorian’s wish is fulfilled, and the portrait ages, taking on the physical blemishes of every sin and immoral act committed, while he remains young and beautiful. it is no coincidence that wilde penned his masterpiece at the height of phrenological debates that waged in europe and the americas at the close of the century, as a clear logic throughout links bodily insides to outward physical appearance. and yet the twist in this logic is what drives the story forward—the fact that this link has been momentarily interrupted and transposed. the “true” outward appearance of dorian gray, his screen of representation and the window to his soul, has been lifted from his body and projected onto a foreign surface—a canvas—freeing him to live with reckless abandon without fear that his face betray his sins.2 residents of rio de janeiro’s working-class, peripheral neighborhoods also disrupt the interpretive relationship between physical appearance and interiority. they do so through another form of portraiture, by manipulating the surface of the body with color. in wildean fashion, makeup artists and their clients de-link the surface of the body from notions of interiority, fracturing, if not entirely destroying, this interpretive relationship. indeed, my ethnographic data will show that at times, makeup artists and their clients interpreted their own bodily aesthetics—skin color, hair, noses, eyes, and ears—in relation to racial identity and the experience of living as negras in contemporary brazil. but just as often, i witnessed an estrangement of these aesthetics from constructions of race, and more paradoxically, i heard suggestions from my interlocutors that these aesthetic details had little to do with race at all. this article will demonstrate how the surface of the body in favelas of rio de janeiro—where color and phenotype literally and metonymically reside, respectively—can be aesthetically and conceptually decoupled from constructions of race. this conceptual decoupling proves particularly salient in brazil, where discourses on race depend in critical ways on the visibility of signs, such as color and phenotype, rather than on invisible—yet ostensibly knowable—genealogical cues (nogueira 2007 [1954]; harris and kottak 1963; guimarães 2002). this text will show how signs on the body oscillate between pointing to categorical constructions of race, on the one hand, and pointing to beauty, sex, and desire, on the other. yet drawing attention to this semiotic oscillation does not suggest that race, beauty, sex, and desire are separate constructions. these relational terms indeed intersect in both productive and detrimental ways. in fact, the play in these signs between indexical overlap and divergence underlines a basic premise of sign theory more generally—signs are typically polysemous, signifying different things to different people in dialogue with their objects, in accordance with different contexts, and in relation to the materiality of the sign vehicle (peirce 1955). in rio today, the signs produced by manipulating the bodily surface with makeup do not always fit neatly into established racial ideologies. as a result, makeup—as an indexical sign that joins with and alters the material surface of the body—may foster ambiguity and even apparent contradiction when it comes to local constructions of race. as i will argue, makeup application on rio’s periphery often makes for a nondiscursive aesthetic practice, one that, rather than responding directly to existent discourses about race, gender, or sex, focuses instead on the phenomenological experience of transformation—enacted on the surface of the body—and the sensuous desire to be beautiful. and while the open-ended nature of semiotic play creates the conditions for new aesthetic possibilities and novel forms of subject formation, it also points, on a more somber note, to the persistence and malleability of race and racisms in brazil today. transformation and beautification at the workshop, guilherme camilo introduces himself by focusing on the transformative power of makeup. he steeps his presentation in metaphor, which implicitly links his aesthetic and material transformations to social and psychological effects. as he demonstrates a technique for applying eye shadow, camilo also passionately promotes the affective power of makeup in building greater self-esteem. in his study of plastic surgery in rio, alexander edmonds encountered a similar discourse among plastic surgeons, several of whom described themselves as psychiatrists working on the body to get at the soul (edmonds 2010). edmonds’s plastic surgeons, similar to makeup artists like camilo, stitch together a relationship between the bodily surface and the psychological self. and yet, in neither case does the surface of the body represent a priori inner truth. rather, the body is worked on to access and manipulate emotions believed to reside deep within.3 “whenever i leave the house, it is to transform … ”—camilo is thus speaking on two levels here, and in fact refers to spiritual shifts in both artist and client. he tells a story of how makeup changed his life—a narrative that fits well with a workshop focused as much on entrepreneurship as on aesthetics—and slips imperceptibly between descriptions of the physical and spiritual as he recounts transformations in and of his clients. yet others push back against artists like camilo, and argue that makeup should not transform anyone at all. they argue that makeup should instead focus on embelezamento, the beautification of what already is. and yet, the implied constant in this process of beautification remains unclear. is it the general shape of the face? material qualities of the skin? imagined internal essences? months later, back in her studio, i’m still searching for clarification on this point, and i ask priscila to explain.4 she responds that makeup artists who focus on beautification craft their makeup in harmony with the face underneath, rather than in contrast to it. still confused, i push back: “but isn’t all makeup transformative, in that each layer is different from the layer underneath?” as i understood it, makeup changes one’s physical appearance, because anything additive, pigments and opaque layers not there before, must bring change. “but you aren’t narrowing the nose or trying to change the face,” she says. priscila then shows me a photo of a model on her phone to prove her point. the girl is young and has vitiligo, but rather than using tones that camouflage the vitiligo on her skin, she is wearing makeup that preserves the mottled pigmentation of her face. there is no concealer to cover or homogenize variations in her skin. it is beautiful and jarring to see the girl with vitiligo wearing teal blue eye shadow and red lipstick. “this is embelezamento. she isn’t trying to hide who she is. she has vitiligo.” as priscila explains, the most essential qualities of personhood, those that make the girl with vitiligo who she is, are reflected, at least in this moment, on the surface of the skin. after lunch, i find manuela back in the event space and ask her about the workshop. she explains that she previously worked in television, doing makeup for actors and journalists for globo (a media empire that includes brazil’s largest television network), but stopped to have kids. she lives in the wealthy neighborhood of gávea, and now that her children are older, she has returned to the makeup industry. the workshop presents an opportunity to become acquainted with contemporary trends. in her early to mid-forties, manuela is tall and white with bluish-green eyes. she admits to being challenged by social media platforms like instagram, and i notice later that she has far fewer followers than her workshop peers. she also confesses to disliking the styles on display at the workshop, which she thinks are “too strong.” she lowers her voice while describing the makeup as “too heavy” and asserts—so as to highlight their excess—that it was “men doing drag” who had originally developed the contouring techniques now taught on stage.5 “think about it,” she says, “women are already women; we don’t need to contour our faces beyond what they already are.” manuela takes issue with the idea of transformation, bringing our conversation back to the spectacle that opened the workshop. although a subsequent presenter seemed to push back against camilo’s discourse of transformation, highlighting “embelezamento em vez de transformação” (beautification rather than transformation), manuela did not seem convinced. “yes, but she still transformed her model.” she goes on to assert that she likes to practice a simpler form of makeup that uses less contour. and she certainly would not engage in a makeup practice designed to narrow the nose, a technique used repeatedly, i would later discover, back at priscila’s salon. manuela is careful not to mention race directly, perhaps because of her own discomfort or a vestige of generational politeness, though it remains just below the surface of our conversation (sheriff 2001). she summarizes her aesthetic preferences by saying that she values a “natural look,” but laments that despite her own tastes, she still feels a pressure to respond to her clients’ desires for bolder styles if she is to reignite her career successfully. “masking” two months later i met up again with manuela at a shopping center in ipanema, where she further clarified her aesthetic preferences: i don’t like masking makeup. i know that it’s in style, it’s all over the internet these days, but it isn’t the kind of makeup that gets my respect. remember that day of the workshop, i told you this, and you asked me “so why are you here?” because that workshop was 100 percent masking makeup. … i call it a mask, because a person enters one way and leaves a totally different person … she changes. it changes these young girls, beautiful girls. [referring to one of the models that had been on the workshop stage.] the makeup is erasing her youth, erasing it! she had a beautiful face … she didn’t have to layer on that covering of makeup. for manuela, transformation in its most extreme iteration seems to concern moving between established lines of difference, oscillating between categories of race, gender, and, as indicated here, even age. with each transformation, the surface of the body is altered in contrast to the more essential qualities of personhood that are both unchanging and assumed to exist deep inside. in the example that she gives at the workshop, and repeats again in our meeting months later, drag queens transform themselves by using contour to make their faces more feminine. for manuela and others, transformation implies only superficial movement between—or beyond—fixed sets like old and young, man and woman, and black and white. it is remarkable that manuela codes these cosmetic transformations, these unexpected “lines of flight” from habitual aesthetic categories, as “masking” (deleuze and guattari 1987). perhaps “masking makeup” transcends the immanent, material transformations of daily life (belting 2017)—the perpetual movement of the face, the appearance of dirt and sweat, sunburns and muscle fatigue, especially in an environment like rio—and instead marks a process of deterritorialization, or as manuel delanda (2002) has described it, ascendance to the virtual. indeed for some, “masking makeup” seems to push uncomfortably at the margins of color, like the intentionally blurred boundaries of an impressionist painting (kalba 2017), distorting established aesthetic styles in perfect metonymic relation to fixed categories of personhood. indeed, in pushing at the margins of color, masking makeup also quite literally draws unmade-up parts of the head and body into new relation with the made-up face. by creating a “mask” of makeup, artists alter without touching that which is already there, transforming even untouched parts of the body that lie beyond the boundaries of synthetic color. transformation thus extends to the body that contextualizes the obviously made-up skin—the hair, the ears and neck, the person as a whole, even in the absence of makeup. but to refer to these aesthetic transformations as “masking,” or rather, to regard such transformations as aesthetically problematic, also implies a particular kind of engagement with the world, a “depth ontology” in which the relationship between surface and depth is stable and knowable, and one to which priscila and her peers do not always subscribe. moreover, such a negative reaction to masking makeup seems to miss the degree to which the transformative process—for maquiadoras like priscila—is in fact made to be deliberately obvious. figure 1. priscila in her makeup studio. photo by samuel elliott novacich. in discussing the semiotics of masking, donald pollock (1995) has pointed out that masks are icons of identity that conceal or modify signs conventionally associated with the self. masks may emphasize eyes, noses, or even ears. when put on, masks also become indexes of identity transformation. for example, eye coverings worn at masquerade balls signal disguise, since in much of the west eyes are a conventionalized sign of identity. however, in practice, these masks fail to conceal much at all.6 and so while a mask constitutes an icon of identity in that it mimics or conceals a particular object, in this case the eyes, it also performs the more important indexical function of pointing to the process of identity transformation itself by leaving bare what are ostensibly enduring, material features of the face (peirce 1955; pollock 1995). it is the border of the mask, those opaque edges touching the face, that proves so critical to transformation. to wear a mask is thus to point self-consciously and unabashedly to identity transformation, without necessarily hiding the process at all. the makeup that manuela and others dislike for being overtly transformative may perform a similar function, and indeed studies of drag have long pointed to this metafunction of makeup (goldsby 1993). while maquiadoras like manuela use makeup techniques that strive to erase their own existence, artists like priscila focus on increasingly self-referential styles. indeed, rather than “blending in” to the bodies that frame the face, the made-up faces of priscila’s clients often stand in marked contrast to their necks, ears, and torsos. and priscila’s clients, examining themselves in the mirror with bold, eye-catching makeup, oftentimes exclaim, “i woke up like this!” in a playfully sarcastic and perhaps even mocking reference to the “natural” or “clean” makeup styles favored by artists like manuela.7 and this metacommentary—ironically relishing in the absurd—perfectly complements and even advances the process of material transformation. keeping this in mind, each application of makeup compels new sets of questions, such as, why emphasize aging? why point to gender transformation? what statements are being made about race? as makeup artists like priscila add layers of pigment to the skin, they problematize the relationship between that which is thought of as natural and existential states like realness and authenticity. and while clients may relish in the irony of exclaiming, “i woke up like this,” there is also a sincerity behind the aesthetic logics that make these makeup styles possible and, moreover, desirable. in the brazilian state of bahia, some 750 miles north of rio de janeiro, mattijs van de port (2012) has problematized the association between “natural” and “genuine,” and pointed to alternative “registers of sense-making” that go beyond the “natural” to answer the question of what is “real.” van de port (2012, 865) looks first at “camp,” which pushes viewers “to unmask the natural and expose it as yet another form of make-believe” (see also sontag 1966) and then to the baroque, which points similarly to the “concocted-ness” of the human-made world (collins 2015) in much the same way that the metacommentary above points to the concocted-ness of “natural looks.” in working with drag performers in bahia, van de port (2012, 870) cites another register of sense-making that he calls montado, or, literally, “assembled,” again suggesting the “made-up-ness” of makeup, wigs, and over-the-top costume. here the “the body in montado aesthetics is indexical of ecstasy, lust, orgasm, experiences of bliss” (van de port 2012, 873). these registers are not separate, but rather different modalities “of one and the same aesthetic impulse: to reveal, rather than veil, the breaches and impossibilities of the cultural orders that reign over our lives” (van de port 2012, 875). that is to say, while there are aesthetic registers that make sense of and order reality, hermeneutics that naturalize and fix the world around us, there are also impulses to point out the shadowy distortions in such logics, aesthetic impulses that put pressure on constructions of gender, race, and sexuality. the tensions between appearance and reality, exemplified by blurred categories of race and personhood, and attempts to make those categories clear are endemic to social and political life in modern brazil. while ambiguous, perhaps, these tensions also hinge on a critical aesthetic dynamic between what is visible and that which remains hidden from view (stoler 1997). just as the edge of the mask draws in and transforms the body that extends beyond its reach, so, too, does the made-up surface of the face draw in and reconstruct what remains hidden beyond the skin, or indeed, below it. and yet, these borders between mask and body, and between surface and depth, become increasingly nebulous with each transformation (collins 2015). indeed, the ambiguity produced through transformation may in fact be a desired effect, one similar to baroque aesthetics, for example, known for pulling in viewers and muddling the distinction between subject and object. in a related formulation, fenella cannell (1999) argues that pageant contestants in the philippines revere the aesthetics of transformation itself in ways that shape both their performances and understandings of beauty. these aesthetic impulses do not deny the realness of the individual, whether drag queens in bahia, pageant queens in the philippines, or makeup artists and clients in rio. rather, these aesthetic registers question the assumption of the “real” as stable, knowable, or located in a consistent place. these aesthetics revel in evolutions and ambiguities, and in the case of beauty on the periphery of rio, they also point to the mutability of racial logics that connect bodily outsides to ideas about interiority and essence. making up race one makeup practice widely associated with transformation is a technique to narrow the nose. makeup artists routinely use delicate applications of light and shadow to afinar, or taper, the nose of their clients, especially those of afro-brazilian descent. at the workshop, each presenter treads lightly when coming to the nose, and though each has worked almost exclusively with white models, they have all hinted at—without commenting directly on—race. “there are no standards when it comes to the nose, or rather, there are many standards. … i have my own standard … ” one presenter says, trailing off as she speaks somewhat uncomfortably, before moving on. the audience is far more diverse than the presenters on stage, and i notice quick glances between participants. as each presenter applies foundation and concealer to their white models, promoting the products they use as they go, a refrain echoes from the audience as participants take turns to ask: “e para pele negra?” (and for black skin?). priscila later addresses this question of narrowing the nose in her salon during a professional makeup course that she offers to community residents. the course includes eight lessons, each one focused on a different aspect of makeup, all of which are designed to both promote technique and to “professionalize” students wishing to make a career in maquiagem. two students, bruna and joana, have enrolled in this course, and priscila has invited me to participate as well, pushing me to develop my own embodied familiarity with makeup application. we have already spent hours practicing makeup styles for daytime, for nighttime, and learning about basic relationships of primary, secondary, and tertiary colors in a lesson on “colormetrics.” this evening we focus on pele negra, black skin, and hone our techniques on different models. when we come to the nose, priscila deliberately prefaces her method with a disclaimer before proceeding to narrow the nose of my model, larissa.8 priscila: you always have to be very careful here … it’s a cultural thing, you always have to ask. there are some people who will be offended if you narrow their nose without asking, so i always ask, and almost always, everyone wants me to narrow their nose anyway. but some girls get offended, like black girls that are … how do you say it? black … joana: activist? priscila: yes, like a black activist type. they might get offended, because you’re implying a certain beauty standard that they disagree with … we might interpret this scene as an embodiment of the racial inferiority complexes discussed by frantz fanon (1967). in his analysis, internalized racism drives the individual pursuit of black transformation, the donning of a “white mask” through the acquisition of status symbols like education or mastery of white language. makeup techniques that alter racialized signs of the body, such as the nose, could thus be thought of as crude, physical manifestations of fanon’s metaphoric white mask. but such an interpretation would imply that priscila and her students are blind to such issues, and have been thoroughly mystified by contemporary, racialized beauty standards. in fact, priscila is hyperaware of the racial politics of her makeup, and tells me later that she’s really responding to demand from her clients. while one might suggest, and likely find currency in the argument that the beauty industry in brazil shapes and mystifies racism, that line of argument alone paints priscila’s clients as passive consumers who adopt hegemonic aesthetic ideals without question. this is not the case. in fact, attempts to explain aesthetic trends on the periphery as either (1) entirely shaped by dominant aesthetic and racial sensibilities, or (2) expressions of resistance to those sensibilities, are equally incomplete. alvaro jarrín (2017) has addressed the structure-versus-agency debate in his work on aesthetics in brazil, and found fertile ground in the affective, visceral allure of beauty in driving aesthetic decision-making.9 he suggests that rather than assessing beauty as shaped entirely by hegemonic norms, or, conversely, interpreting aesthetic decisions as conscientious reactions to those norms, we should examine the lived, sensorial experience of being regarded as beautiful. a similar phenomenological approach to beauty, rather than false consciousness—and i would extend that to include the sensation not just of beauty but also of transformation—drives the aesthetic impulses documented in this article. i do not mean to suggest that an experience of beauty is in any way divorced from experiences of race, but to indicate that aesthetic decisions are rarely either entirely agentive or mystified. at the same time, to cast engagements with beauty as only phenomenological misses the degree to which makeup application, as witnessed above, continues to factor into ongoing constructions of race. as a practice of inchoate signs, makeup operates, at least in part, on a complementary and nondiscursive semiotic register that often guides practitioners into more explicit, habituated conversations about the politics of race. in referring to these aesthetic practices as nondiscursive, i do not mean to suggest that makeup is pre-semiotic or somehow devoid of meaning. rather, i contend that makeup often conveys meaning through material forms that may be emergent within discourse but that need not be represented in language. i place my focus here on the first two registers within each of charles sanders peirce’s (1955) three trichotomies of the sign, and specifically, on those registers whose interpretants do not rely on habit or convention.10 makeup is ideal for examining these more sensuous, material, and nonsymbolic aspects of the semiotic process—what i lump together as “nondiscursive” but what in fact includes signs that are simply sheer qualities or embodiments of quality (munn 1986; cavanaugh 2009), as well as signs that mimic and/or point to their objects (keane 2005; mendoza-denton 2007; manning 2012). that is because makeup, like the icon and index more broadly, is fleeting and latent with possibility, and as such often resists taking solid shape within language and discourse. priscila’s lesson on makeup and noses proves emblematic of this relation between semiotic registers, since in manipulating faces with makeup, she also constantly reshapes the connection between aesthetics and race. indeed, applications of makeup—shaped by desire, an affection for transformation, or in pursuit of a yet-to-be-defined image of beauty—often occur at levels of semiotic engagement that are prior to, or below, broader, explicit discourses about race. again, just because aspects of makeup may be nondiscursive, it does not mean that the signs that constitute these aesthetic practices remain insulated from politics or ideology, or that such practices are immune to the dynamics of race more broadly. rather, the nondiscursive, sensuous, and material properties of makeup often rub up against habituated ways of thinking about race, and in so doing, they create tensions, ambiguities, racial “reorderings,” and, perhaps, momentary resolutions. figure 2. priscila demonstrates an eye-shadow technique during a makeup professionalization course. photo by samuel elliott novacich. racial thinking in brazil, like elsewhere, has always been muddled and fragmentary yet ideologically convincing—and has therefore often appeared natural and without contradiction. from gilberto freyre’s (1933) epic casa-grande e senzala, which painted a romantic portrait of settler colonialism and slavocracy, to the eugenic underpinnings of “whitening” (skidmore 1974) and, later, the demystification of “racial democracy” (fernandes 1965), descriptions of racial exceptionalism have peppered academic work produced within and beyond brazil. but it is important to problematize each of these interventions and associated concepts, and recognize that they tend to cohere and smooth over what are otherwise incongruous strands of thought. paulina alberto has described the twentieth-century shift from “racial democracy” to the “myth of racial democracy” in historiographical terms, first questioning the solidity of “racial democracy” itself (alberto 2012). rather than accepting it as a stable set of ideas—typically attributed to freyre and glossed as harmony resulting from centuries of miscegenation—alberto discusses “racial democracy” as a shifting identifier that reflects the specific social and political concerns of its time. she asserts that academics and black intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century were not blind to the implications of freyre’s legacy, but rather acutely aware of the way their engagements with racial democracy rested within shifting conversations about race. perhaps the most significant intervention in alberto’s work is to point out that race in brazil has always been ambiguous and filled with internal contradictions. indeed, conversations about race in brazil have been slow, nonlinear, and riddled with contention, and they make up an ideologically heterogeneous landscape populated with ideas about color, phenotype, and the body. within this muddled landscape there are those, like manuela and even the aforementioned “black activists,” for whom surface aesthetics are a mark of identification and a reflection of essential belonging. their faces may be beautified, but they must not contradict who they are “inside.” but for others, the surface of the body offers less a window to the soul than it provides a canvas on which to paint and transform. livio sansone (2003) has isolated a segment of this racial landscape and called it “race without ethnicity,” the idea that in brazil race is pinned to the surface of the body, rather than something that speaks to lineage or “corporate unity.” and although sansone’s arguments resonate with a large body of ethnographic data and certainly explain the limitations in black political movements of the twentieth century, he approaches race in brazil as a stable object of study. this ignores the ruptures and contradictions in racial thought that permeate contemporary brazil. these “dispersions” might include thinkers like abdias do nascimento, who founded the teatro experimental do negro (ten; black experimental theater) in 1944 and who wrote against the grain of mainstream racial thought for decades. indeed, his works anticipated a wave of new, earnest conversations about race that would accompany the transition from military to democratic rule in the 1970s and 1980s and include considerations for hypo-descent, origin, and dna (wade 2017). this also marked an important moment during which the bodily surface came within conceptual reach of ideas about internal difference. in 1990s bahia, for example, black residents of salvador—attuned to the pluralities in racial thought outlined above—drew important links between the bodily surface and ideas of internal difference to navigate the objectification of their historically afro-brazilian neighborhoods (collins 2015). and yet, an interpretive logic that takes us from the material surface of the body to ideas about soul and essence in brail today is far from consistent, and in fact such a racial metaphysics remains remarkably uneven. rather, the racial hermeneutics and their inconsistencies hitherto described in this article are far more akin to the fractured condition of oscar wilde’s title character, dorian gray. that is to say, the bodily surface is sporadically untethered from all that has come to be associated with interiority, including racial and gendered essence, soul and sin. there are moments when aesthetic signs like skin tone and the width of one’s nose point to race, and these moments are further complicated when we recognize the plurality of racial constructions that refer to race as both sets of internal qualities and expressions of outward appearance. but there are also moments when (and people for whom) these same signs skirt direct associations with race, instead approaching it indirectly, via affective qualities like beauty and desire (ochs 1992). how is it that the same aesthetic signs can mean so many different things? one possible answer resides in “regimes of truth,” which, as ann stoler (1997, 186) has explained, compel us to interpret the “relationship between the seen and the unseen” (see also foucault 1980). she argues that according to one set of assumptions, “the ‘truth’ of race is understood as grounded in somatically observable, dependable differences; in the other, the ‘truth’ of racial membership is not visually secured at all. surface perceptions are unreliable and membership is dependent on privileged knowledge of ‘hidden properties’ of human kinds, of those secreted in their depths” (stoler 1997, 86). such insights compel us to examine these disparities between the “seen” and the “unseen,”11 the tensions and apparent contradictions in racisms through history, and ultimately assert, as stoler (1997, 187) suggests, that “the ambiguity of those sets of relationships between the somatic and the inner self, the phenotype and the genotype, pigment shade and psychological sensibility are not slips in, or obstacles to, racial thinking but rather conditions for its proliferation and possibility.” the power of racisms—variable across time and space but with obvious consistencies throughout—resides in their capacity to shift, to find new footings in disparate regimes of truth. the apparently contradictory aesthetic and racial logics of this article, and indexical oscillations, are not signs of immediate shifts in racial thought or indications of a soon-to-be-post-racial brazil, but rather symptoms of what we must understand race and racisms in general to be: fluid yet fragile arrays of indexical signs existing in internal tension with one another. the internal incoherence of certain discourses is precisely why the ethnographic material presented in this article points to a certain degree of play, ambiguity, and even contradiction when measured against what we think we know about race in brazil. such an analysis becomes especially contentious when race and racial discourse are taken as stable objects. in writing against race as a solid thing, i have attempted to explore how race mutates through an ongoing interplay between discourse (or ideology) and what i have termed “nondiscursive” registers. back in priscila’s studio, this interplay is clear. as she teaches her students to narrow their clients’ noses, we see makeup, as a material, sensorial process, and language, as metacommentary on makeup application, working side by side. priscila cautions her workshop participants to be “very careful” in approaching their clients’ noses, signaling her awareness of an important transformation in the relation of beauty standards to racial discourses of the past thirty years.12 at the level of discourse, priscila and her clients appear to be uniformly aware of the ways in which racial politics shape aesthetics (pinho 2007; mizrahi 2012). as the exchange between priscila and her students makes clear—and as the glances stolen between workshop participants first introduced in this article’s opening vignette confirm—most artists are keenly aware of the impact of race on their work. and yet, makeup artists and their clients do not simply react to existing racial ideologies and adapt their makeup practice in relation to such concerns. as priscila continues our lesson, stepping in to demonstrate a new technique on one of our models or to correct a mistake, she engages with both race and aesthetics on a distinct semiotic register. as described above, this complementary process—nondiscursive yet fundamental to ongoing constructions of race—is constituted by affective and aesthetic impulses whose particular, often untheorized emergence exists in contrast to the cognized, habitual, and discursive register that helps make clear to participants how race works in their daily lives (mccallum 2005; caldwell 2007; roth-gordon 2017). guided by material sensation and the pursuit of aesthetic qualities as ends in and of themselves, these novel, aesthetic movements—in contrast to the “natural” counteraesthetics that often reify racial essentialism—often progress in tension with racial discourse to be negotiated piecemeal through everyday practice. aesthetic practices of beautification, “making up,” and covering up in rio de janeiro are what may be regarded as experimental, nondiscursive moments in the production of yet-to-be-actualized ideas about race. but rather than thinking of such moments as exceptional, these exploratory, sensuous aesthetics are in fact mundane. they explain why habituated political discourses are never entirely smooth “below the surface.”13 instead, discourses are often internally ambiguous, and cobble together coherence from relative epistemic disorder. as such, we may also think of nondiscursive aesthetic practices as strands of material disorder, strands latent with possibility but often incongruous with existing ideas about race. and one such material strand, the aesthetic decoupling of the bodily surface from notions of interiority, while full of apparent contradictions, in fact highlights the persistence of race, revealing, when we look “deeper,” overlapping regimes of truth, muddled racial hermeneutics, and openings for new aesthetic possibilities. conclusion in my discussions with makeup artists and their clients, we rarely spoke directly about race as it related to aesthetic decisions. to be clear, this does not mean to suggest the avoidance of conversations about race or personal experiences. if anything, quite the opposite occurred, and questions of race and class continuously crept into conversation as explanations for the marked inequalities that defined everyday life for my interlocutors (smith 2016). there are also surely clients out there who narrow their noses, style their hair, or wear specific clothing to make explicit statements about their own racial identities. but the styles that priscila’s makeup clients requested seemed to have little to do with masking or altering their blackness, or even “blackness” as an emergent politics of mutating conditions. indeed, within these aesthetic contexts,14 the surface of the body was not only regarded as an index of ethnicity but it also became an icon of color, desire, and beauty. that is to say, the color of one’s eye shadow or lipstick, or the contouring of a nose, did not point consistently to any single referent. instead, these aesthetic details were relished as the embodiments of pleasure and desire, the phenomenology of beauty described by alvaro jarrín (2017). makeup—both physically and metaphorically skin deep—often lives and dies on the surface of the body, where it is frequently severed from ideas about genealogically racialized difference. and yet paradoxically, applications of makeup prove critical to ongoing constructions of race. through the sensuous pursuit of beauty, pleasure, and transformation, priscila and her clients continually reshape their faces in ways that compel subsequent racial reckonings, shifting what we think we know about race and weakening the soft ground on which such knowledge sits. makeup, though frequently untethered from considerations of race, nevertheless shapes constructions of race—not by pointing to insides, but by adding layers to the surface of the body. the aesthetic practices described throughout this article might be viewed as terribly contradictory when set against what is known about dominant constructions of race in brazil. and while emphasizing internal contradiction proves delicate—and might serve as potential analytical bait, given the extent to which race in brazil is often oversimplified as “mixed and complex,” in contradistinction to the assumed simplicity of race in the united states—it bears repeating that race is continuously changing shape, and not just in brazil. indeed, i have actively avoided trying to reconcile the above aesthetic practices with any single understanding of race or bodily metaphysics. but the question that remains—and one that will continue to shape the lives of afro-brazilians in rio’s northern suburbs and throughout brazil—is to what extent, and in relation to what sorts of everyday practices, phenotype and skin color gain or lose semiotic potency within muddled, constantly shifting racial logics.15 certainly, things like skin color, noses, and hair do not simply disappear. indeed, color remains as an imperfect sign in relation to an imperfect hermeneutics of the body. ideas about race in brazil—like discursive constructions everywhere—are in transition, mixed and contradictory, and as such, different signs of race gain prominence in specific contexts. that statement in itself is not innovative. what is, i contend, is the notion that the surface of the body, where color and phenotype reside, is both linked to and independent from ideas about our bodily interiors. indeed, surfaces can be dislodged from the body and its moral underpinnings through a “doubling” of the skin—and self—as portrait. as race and racisms continue to shape-shift, aesthetic openings, and even moments of pleasure, occur. they are what allow priscilla to narrow a nose while simultaneously promoting beleza negra on models who wear earrings imprinted with the words “100% negra.” who makes the most of these aesthetic openings remains to be seen. perhaps a good place to look is in the makeup salons of rio de janeiro’s urban periphery. abstract this article examines applications of bright, eye-catching makeup on the periphery of rio de janeiro, brazil. tracking the aesthetic decisions of makeup artists and their clients, i analyze how colorful manipulations of the bodily surface relate to local constructions of race. but the bodily surface does not simply reflect established and conventional understandings of race, nor are the aesthetics described herein merely symbolic of assumptions of difference. instead, the aesthetic practices portrayed in this article may also be regarded as experimental, “nondiscursive” moments—operating on a complementary semiotic register—in the production of yet-to-be actualized ideas about race and being. this research shows how makeup practices often disrupt the aesthetic and conceptual links that tie insides to outsides, essences and souls to physical appearance, and in so doing chip away at the foundations on which race in brazil has historically been built. through sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2019–2020) in rio’s northern suburbs, i observed as disparate aesthetic practices—namely, beautification and transformation—merged with eclectic understandings of the body and notions of being. through these alternating lenses, makeup enthusiasts often interpreted material signs of the body as pointing to categorical constructions of race, on the one hand, and to beauty, sex, and desire, on the other.these semiotic oscillations and their interpretations often stood in conflict with established racial discourses, and yet rather than being exceptional, i argue that such exploratory, sensuous aesthetics are in fact mundane. taking as a starting point the understanding that racial discourse in brazil, as elsewhere, is internally ambiguous and rife with epistemic conflict, this article describes nondiscursive aesthetic practices as strands of material disorder—latent with possibility but often incongruous with what we think we know about race—working to forge novel understandings of race, beauty, and the body. [makeup; aesthetics; race; semiotics; the face; the body] resumo este artigo examina o uso de maquiagem brilhante e chamativa na periferia do rio de janeiro, brasil. acompanhando as decisões estéticas de maquiadores e seus clientes, analiso como as manipulações coloridas da superfície do corpo se relacionam com as construções locais de raça. mas a superfície corporal não reflete simplesmente entendimentos estabelecidos e convencionais de raça, nem são as estéticas descritas aqui meramente simbólicas de suposições de diferença. em vez disso, as práticas estéticas retratadas neste artigo também podem ser consideradas como momentos experimentais, “não discursivos” operando em um registro semiótico complementar na produção de ideias a serem ainda atualizadas sobre raça e ser. esta pesquisa mostra como as práticas de maquiagem muitas vezes interrompem os vínculos estéticos e conceituais que unem o interior ao exterior, as essências e as almas à aparência física e, ao fazer isso, abalam os próprios alicerces sobre os quais a raça no brasil foi historicamente construída. ao longo de 16 meses de trabalho de campo etnográfico (2019-2020) na zona norte do rio, observei como práticas estéticas díspares – isto é, embelezamento e transformação amalgamaram com compreensões ecléticas do corpo e noções de ser. através dessas lentes alternadas, os entusiastas da maquiagem frequentemente interpretavam os sinais materiais do corpo como apontando para construções categóricas de raça, de um lado, e, para beleza, sexo e desejo, de outro. essas oscilações semióticas e suas interpretações estavam frequentemente em conflito com os discursos raciais estabelecidos e, no entanto, ao invés de serem excepcionais, eu argumento que essas estéticas exploratórias e sensuais são, na verdade, banais. tomando como ponto de partida o entendimento de que o discurso racial no brasil, como em outros lugares, é internamente ambíguo e repleto de conflito epistêmico, este artigo descreve práticas estéticas “não discursivas” como fios de desordem material latentes com possibilidades, mas muitas vezes incongruentes com o que achamos que sabemos sobre raça trabalhando para forjar novas compreensões de raça, beleza e corpo. [maquiagem; estética; raça; semiótica; rosto; corpo] notes acknowledgments this article benefited greatly from time and resources provided by the cuny graduate center anthropology program, and in particular from conversations with jillian cavanaugh, marc edelman, julie skurski, and karen strassler. john collins has exemplified what it means to be a great academic advisor, and his influence in these pages is clear. thanks also to jim green for his long-standing support, to adriana facina and the universidade federal do rio de janeiro, to alessandro angelini, isabella benevides, victor carvalho, nicole labruto, felippe marchiori, and mylene mizrahi, to my graduate colleagues angela crumdy, stephanie love, yasemin ozer, christopher parisano, and paloma rodrigo gonzales, and to the members of my writing seminar who offered helpful comments on this piece. this research was made possible by funding from a fulbright-hays ddra, as well as the early research initiative, and the doctoral student research grant and urban studies programs at the cuny graduate center. many thanks are also owed to cultural anthropology editor, brad weiss, and publications manager, jessica lockrem, as well as to the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive comments and guidance. of course, i cannot overstate my indebtedness to priscila and the many makeup enthusiasts who welcomed me into their spaces and shared their passions for beauty. finally, my greatest acknowledgment goes to candy pilar godoy for her continued support, partnership, and insight, and to our families, both human and otherwise. 1. most of the names in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of participants. i have decided to retain the actual names of a select few makeup artists and beauticians who may be regarded as public figures. 2. of course, wilde’s tale is a cautionary one in that the rupture of outside from inside results in moral failing, as gray’s portrait doesn’t just age, but becomes rotten, reflecting his debauchery. wilde thus captures the double nature of the portrait—and specifically, of the face—by suggesting that while appearances may be superficial, they nevertheless reveal the morality of our acts. 3. one interesting comparison is with marilyn strathern’s analysis of self-decoration practices in papua new guinea, which she argues involve a radical departure from western cosmologies of body and soul. although a relationship between interiority and the bodily surface persists—much as it does in rio—strathern argues that for hageners, the hermeneutics of surface to depth is inverted. body decoration does not concern superficial artifice, but rather a physical and aesthetic demonstration of inner strength. the decorated body thus becomes a window, revealing one’s power, while the undecorated, naked body acts more as a mask, concealing one’s potential (or weakness) from others (m. strathern 1979). 4. a note on research methods: i have known priscila for about ten years, meeting her for the first time when she still worked in the kitchen of her cousin’s restaurant in the northern-zone favela known as mangueira. at the time, priscila was new to makeup, but devoted hours each evening to honing her craft, watching endless youtube video tutorials and starting to attend to clients in her small, one-bedroom apartment above the restaurant. she welcomed me into her world with open arms and helped explain the presence of her white, heterosexual north american friend as i slowly became a fixture in her salon. 5. although her comments hinted at a general discomfort with gender nonconformity, i did not interpret this specific phrasing as being explicitly transphobic. in this exchange, manuela uses the english word drag, in what to me seemed a deliberate word choice over the portuguese travestí, or the term most recently adopted in brazil, trans. i did not, however, push manuela on her word choice, electing rather to let her speak freely and without interruption, and am now compelled to assume that her intended referent was indeed “men doing drag.” 6. or, for another example, consider the “mask of zorro,” which is less a full facial mask than a narrow strip of black cloth concealing a small area of the face around the eyes. or, for an even more extreme example, and maintaining the hero theme, we have the almost absurd transformation of clark kent into superman, which involves removing only a pair of glasses. 7. this may or may not also be a reference to beyoncé and emblematic of her transnational aesthetic reach. the quotation “i woke up like this,” comes from beyoncé’s 2013 song “***flawless,” which features a sample from a speech delivered by chimamanda ngozi adichie about female empowerment and gender equality. about halfway through the song, beyoncé begins chanting, “i woke up like this, i woke up like this … flawless …,” in what seems to be at first irony—akin to the invocations of priscila’s clients—given the singer’s perfectly applied dark lipstick and eye shadow in the music video. but in a subsequent interview about the song, beyoncé explained that she had woken up agitated, and went to the studio with the lyrics already in her head. she further elaborated that “it was aggressive, it was angry, it wasn’t the beyoncé that wakes up every morning.” “i woke up like this” might then refer to both outward physical appearance and one’s emotional state, and so while the women in priscila’s studio exclaim “i woke up like this” with apparent irony, the expression may also be interpreted as referencing internal states like mood, emotions, or desire. 8. priscila first applies a layer of illuminating concealer under the eyes that creeps up the sides of the nose at slight angles, leaving the negative space of an upside-down triangle extending from between the eyes down the bridge of the nose. she then uses dark contour—matching the shade used earlier on the cheeks—and applies this deliberately to both sides of the nose. finally, she uses the tip of her ring finger—a finger strong enough to be precise and weak enough to not overblot—to lightly tap highlighter onto the end of the nose, using a small brush to blend the illumination without losing its focus at the tip of the nose. 9. jarrín’s (2017) actual analysis is a deft hedging of the heavy-handedness of his book title the biopolitics of beauty. he points to the limits of foucauldian attitudes on beauty, asserting that such approaches generally regard bodies as passive canvases for society’s biopolitical inscriptions. this is an argument made initially by edmonds (2010), with whom jarrín is in regular dialogue throughout the book. jarrín critiques edmonds for naively attributing an unbridled agency to his interlocutors, and for suggesting that beauty exists along an axis independent of wealth and yet acts as an unfettered engine of upward mobility. 10. wishing to limit the degree to which this section is saturated in peircean neologisms, i have condensed some terms into an umbrella of signs that i refer to as “nondiscursive.” peirce argues that signs may be divided into three trichotomies: first, according to the existential state of the sign itself; second, according to the relation of the sign and its object; and third, according to the relation of the sign and its interpretant. he defines an interpretant as that which is addressed by the sign, creating “in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign” (peirce 1955, 99). 11. i am intentionally wording the above intervention as “insight” to highlight the naturalization in language of an imagined divide between appearance/artifice/externalities and depth/truth/internalities, and the resultant implications for knowledge production. 12. i am referring here to an aesthetic shift that occurred in the 1990s, which might be contextualized by the “opening up” of the political landscape following decades of military rule (1964–1985). this political shift provided room for a surge in new social movements and, critically, reinvigorated conversations about race in brazil. patricia pinho (2007) has referred to the aesthetic shift that emerged with these conversations as “afro-aesthetics”—noses deliberately not narrowed with makeup, jamaican dreadlock-inspired hairstyles, and bright textiles—in the valorization of an aesthetic that ties the african diaspora together. 13. in referring to these moments as either “nondiscursive” or “habituated,” i am calling attention again to peirce’s phenomenology of the sign, because i believe that such a theoretical parsing of racial constructions can only be achieved through reference to peirce’s semiotic categories. the former, which recognizes signs as material and operating beyond their conventional grounds—what he would call generalized or habituated—and instead according to their material qualities, may be understood as nondiscursive in that they communicate not according to convention, but, instead, according to material qualities of the sign. 14. as should be obvious at this point, aesthetic contexts in rio de janeiro are inseparable from political contexts, and following ariella azoulay’s (2010) assertion that the separation of aesthetics from politics is a false distinction that ultimately derives from a misreading of walter benjamin’s (1969 [1936]) “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” readers are invited to experiment by replacing each iteration of the word aesthetic in this article with political. 15. these practices must also be understood as existing within a context in which pushing back against muddled, constantly shifting racial landscapes has at times proven central to black activism in brazil. this held particularly true in the early 1990s, when activists launched a campaign to não deixe sua cor passar em branco (literally, “don’t let your color pass for white,” but used to mean “don’t go overlooked”) for the 1991 census to encourage 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“cosmological deixis and amerindian perspectivism.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 4, no. 3: 469–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157. wade, peter 2017 degrees of mixture, degrees of freedom: genomics, multiculturalism, and race in latin america. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wilde, oscar 1962 the picture of dorian gray and selected stories. new york: new american library. originally published in 1890. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 681-707, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.10 from form to content from form to content hamid r. ekbia indiana university bloomington http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8437-520x bonnie a. nardi university of california, irvine automation and algorithms, as ideas and techniques, have a long history. the official history of automation traces its origins back to the close of the nineteenth century and the emergence of such mechanical systems as james watt’s steam engine, the lathe, and the jacquard loom. however, a broader view of the notion, understood as any attempt to replace or reduce human labor through the introduction of artifacts, would begin the history much earlier. such attempts, as we discuss below, have resulted in mixed outcomes—most recently, in the growing phenomenon of heteromation, understood as a new method of capital accumulation reliant on masses of free or low-cost human labor (ekbia and nardi 2017). the notion of an algorithm, similarly, has a long history, going back centuries to the work of the persian mathematician al khawrizmi (c. 780–850), the latinized version of whose name lies behind the word algorithm itself. the revival of the term in the wake of digital electronics brought it from the realm of algebra to that of computing and operation, giving it the broad meaning of any effective method that can be expressed and executed within a finite amount of time and space. the modifier effective is paramount here, as we shall presently see. as parochially old as these ideas might be, however, their marriage is not. in fact, their integration can be considered one of the major technical marvels of our era, because it has enabled a transition from the automation of form to the automation of content. the marriage has given birth in our times to a rather tenacious offspring, which can be understood as a process consisting of four stages: monitoring, mining, marking, and manipulation. in the monitoring stage, data are collected about entities (objects, events, individuals, behaviors, and so on) in an environment increasingly equipped with sensing devices and information-gathering techniques—from health trackers and mobile technologies to closed-circuit cameras and online services. the vast amount of data collected through these mechanisms is aggregated and mined to discern and identify patterns that are otherwise hidden from direct human perception. these patterns are then used as the basis for sorting those same entities that served as original sources of data, pigeonholing and marking them as belonging to certain relevant categories. finally, these markings are in turn used to target and manipulate the behavior of the entities in ways imagined or desired by the developers and proprietors of algorithms. the cycle is repeated, feeding back on itself in the incessant four-stage process outlined here. to understand this, we have to remember that earlier types of automation solely traded in form in the sense of “the conversion of a work process, a procedure, or equipment to automatic rather than human operation and control” (gerovitch 2003, 122). this could be said as much about the mechanical jacquard loom of the nineteenth century as about the electronic feedback control of ford production plants or the numerical-control machines of aircraft manufacturing in the middle of the twentieth century—they all automated form. the situation changes, however, when we wed automation with algorithms, enabling the automation of content. the reason is that the divide between form and content is not as sharp and unbridgeable as it appears—“form blurs into content as processing depth increases,” as douglas hofstadter (1985, 22) noted many years ago. or, as he went on to muse, “content is just fancy form,” by which he meant that “‘content’ is just a shorthand way of saying ‘form as perceived by a very fancy apparatus capable of making complex and subtle distinctions and abstractions and connections to prior concepts” (hofstadter 1985, 22). this happens, for instance, in music, where complex forms consisting of basic notations layered into delicate melodic and harmonic structures can arouse meaningful emotional responses in the listener. the same also happens in computer databases, where relations among entities are captured and structured so as to maintain a meaningful relationship with the outside world, endowing them with an almost magical efficacy. the magic plays out whenever you order an item online only to see its physical embodiment at your doorstep a few days later; whenever you transfer funds through your online banking site and those funds do in fact get relocated across accounts, vendors, lenders, institutions; or whenever you make a flight reservation online with all the attendant details (origin, destination, time, seat) to find yourself seated on the right plane at the right time later on. one can only imagine the surprise at these events for someone living in the precomputer era and transferred to the present moment to appreciate the spellbinding character of these feats. the philosopher jerry fodor (1975, 68) gave voice to this magic when he asserted that “computations just are processes in which representations have their causal consequences in virtue of their form”—a claim that another philosopher, john haugeland (1985, 106), framed in formalist terms as follows: “if you take care of the syntax, the semantics will take care of itself.” in other words: if you take care of the form, the content will take care of itself. although these assertions predate our examples above, they provide the gist of what was once called the computational theory of mind—a theory that has met numerous challenges in the intervening years but is going through a revival in another guise. the new guise goes by the name big data, with other associated terms such as machine learning, algorithmics, and analytics, where automated algorithms, churning gargantuan amounts of data, perform tasks that were either unfathomable or squarely belonged, until recently, to the realm of the human mind. a few examples clarify the scope and scale of these developments. the first comes from the area of drug discovery—for instance, the new technique called drug repositioning, which has to do with taking drugs developed for one disorder and “repositioning” them to tackle another (see nosengo 2016). the national institutes of health in the united states, for example, have a library of roughly 450 drugs that have never reached the market although they have passed the safety tests in humans—an untapped resource largely ignored until recently. one case involved a compound named ebselen, originally developed to treat stroke survivors, which has received new attention as a treatment for people with bipolar disorder. other common cases include the repositioning of generic drugs, failed drugs (that have passed phase one of the clinical trial but not phase two, because they fail to show the same effects in humans as in animals), or even drugs that have been approved but not developed or manufactured for various research or business reasons. tapping into these resources can save both time and money, cutting the development-to-deployment cycle from the current average of thirteen to fifteen years and $2–3 billion to roughly half the time and one-tenth the cost of a new drug. although classic cases of repositioning occurred in the past by serendipity, automated algorithms are now being developed for a systematic search, including “big-data analytics that can now uncover molecular similarities between diseases; computational models that can predict which compounds might take advantage of those similarities; and high-throughput screening systems that can quickly test many drugs against different cell lines” (nosengo 2016, 315). a second example belongs to the more subjective domain of romance and matchmaking. online dating sites match people seeking romantic relationships by capturing so-called personality attributes and tastes and comparing them against those of thousands of others who are on the same quest, in a sense automating the age-old process of matchmaking through sophisticated algorithms. these algorithms essentially follow the same steps as the drug-discovery process outlined above—namely, uncovering similarities between people, predicting scenarios in which people can benefit from those similarities, and screening individuals who can potentially match a given profile. a new set of issues arises, however, when automated algorithms are applied to human affairs such as romance and dating. the sociologist eva illouz (2012, 177), referring to these algorithms as “technologies of choice,” considers the forms provided by dating sites to be aimed at making data standard, measurable, and comparable, rather than allowing people to express their unique qualities. providing a mechanism of interchangeability through standardized profiles, these sites exemplify the bigger dilemma of extending the reach of automated algorithms beyond cases such as drug discovery, where they can be meaningfully effective, to those situations where they are not (ekbia et al. 2015). the final example has to do with commodity pricing in the marketplace. this process, until recently, proved straightforward enough, with the merchant or seller assigning a relatively stable and visible price to any given commodity. today online retailers, and increasingly brick-and-mortar ones, engage in what is called “dynamic pricing,” through which the price of the same item can change based on the time or location of purchase, the availability of competing items, or the desirability of the product. the airline industry originally pioneered this practice, which has now spread to all kinds of industries, including retailers such as amazon and travel websites such as orbitz, as well as banks, insurance companies, transportation platforms such as uber, and even local supermarkets (ezrachi and stucke 2016, 90–91). amazon reportedly makes price changes 2.5 million times a day based on criteria such as those mentioned above. these three examples from very different domains—science, romance, and commerce—speak to a much broader development that is largely enabled by the conjoining of automation and algorithms. despite their differences, each of these examples provides glaring embodiments of the four-stage process described above. this relatively generic process, diversely manifested and implemented in all domains of contemporary life, explains the unfathomable power of automated algorithms—a power that, until recently, could only be attributed to the mythical figures of olympian gods. as with the gods of ancient civilizations, however, power here is impregnated with pitfalls and paradoxes, some of which are already evident in our examples. here, they manifest themselves most clearly in the indispensability of humans in heteromated systems, and in how such systems actually work against the majority of human beings. to see how, we need to take a closer look at our examples. we already noted the pitfalls of automated algorithms in the case of online dating sites. even in the case of drug discovery, where the process works relatively well, potentially disrupting big-pharma business models, the ultimate benefit might end up accruing to business entities rather than to the consumer. the pitfalls are most evident, however, in commodity markets, where dynamic pricing does seem to work to consumer advantage in certain situations—for instance, when your neighborhood baker or grocer sells bread at a lower price at the end of the day. this appears to be the original justification by companies such as uber, which provide not only competitive fares to people seeking car services but also advantages such as rapid availability and price transparency. on the flip side, however, these same practices can lead to price discrimination or so-called surge pricing in situations in which demand exceeds supply—for example, during a snowstorm in new york, when some uber rides cost 8.25 times the normal price, leading some commentators to refer to uber’s practice as an “algorithmic monopoly” (macmillan and demos 2015). more importantly, the relationship of these companies to their workers and to those affected by their practices—amazon’s warehouse employees, uber’s drivers, taxi drivers, and so on—and the companies’ lack of responsibility for their safety, well-being, and welfare together constitute a major source of concern among those who observe these relationships closely. the recent suicide by a new york taxi driver in response to uber’s business model provides a dramatic and tragic testimony to the pitfalls of these arrangements and the “dark side of the gig economy” (bellafante 2018). these are just a few examples of a growing phenomenon that we call heteromation, referring to a new economic arrangement in which humans are put on the margins of machines and algorithms, providing labor in unrewarded or minimally rewarded ways (ekbia and nardi 2017). in uber’s case, the company gains the use of an automobile owned and operated by a minimally compensated driver who labors without benefits (unemployment compensation, health insurance, or vacation). uber provides the algorithms to link customer and driver, but drivers are on their own otherwise, assuming all risk. even with the minimal compensation uber has arranged, the company is planning to dispense with drivers altogether by replacing them with automated vehicles, putting faith in algorithms to run the business. in the process, thousands and millions of taxi drivers, truck drivers, and others might lose the sources of their subsistence and survival. yet it remains to be seen whether and for how long these arrangements can be sustained. as the philosopher george caffentzis (2013, 72) has remarked: “the capitalist class faces a permanent contradiction it must finesse: (a) the desire to eliminate recalcitrant, demanding workers from production, (b) the desire to exploit the largest mass of workers possible.” social media, gaming, video production, search, health tracking, the writing of product/film/book/travel reviews, and so on, generate immense wealth for companies such as google, amazon, facebook, and others. what are the benefits of this economy, we might ask, for the average person? with respect to labor, we find ourselves in a period of historically low unemployment, even with so much automation. yet increasingly, jobs are ill-paid, unstable, and without significant (or any) benefits. starbucks, for example, does offer some employee benefits, but the average nonmanager wage is $9.43. fifty weeks of work a year at this rate amount to $18,860. tips may add another $1,300 per year (kline 2016). the availability of many jobs shifts geographically, demanding that workers chase them. such jobs (in fast food, construction, nursing homes, coffee bars, walmart, and so on) are not heteromated, but they go hand in hand with heteromation as sources of cheap, mobile labor. heteromation allows people to work anywhere as long as they have a computing device. through this labor, we produce content to be turned into data that is packaged and sold, we identify ourselves as targets for advertising, and we create communities that drive product sales, such as gamers and fan-fiction audiences. the emergence of heteromation seems to verify karl marx’s labor theory of value once again. in summary, the marriage of algorithms and automation might indeed prove a powerful development, bringing content into the fold of automatic systems. in the world we live in, and in the capitalist economy that has come to govern this world, however, that marriage has given birth to many unwanted and untoward children: increased potentials to take advantage of humans in vulnerable situations, the increasing marginalization of labor, lack of protections for workers or thoughts for their futures, and so on. algorithms are meaningfully effective in cases such as drug discovery, but they can complicate human relations—whether in the inequities of surge pricing or by underwriting increasingly precarious conditions for workers. the question to address as we go forward is not whether automation and algorithms are inherently harmful—clearly, they are not—but why we see so many specific implementations that undermine the social fabric. references bellafante, ginia 2018 “a driver’s suicide reveals the dark side of the gig economy.” new york times, february 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/nyregion/livery-driver-taxi-uber.html. caffentzis, george 2013 in letters of blood and fire: work, machines, and the crisis of capitalism. oakland, calif.: pm press. ekbia, hamid r., michael mattioli, inna kouper, gary arave, ali ghazinejad, timothy bowman, venkata ratandeep suri, andrew tsou, scott weingart, and cassidy r. sugimoto 2015 “big data, bigger dilemmas: a critical review.” journal of the association for information science and technology 66, no. 8: 1523–46. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23294. ekbia, hamid r., and bonnie a. nardi 2017 heteromation, and other stories of computing and capitalism. cambridge, mass.: mit press. ezrachi, ariel, and maurice e. stucke 2016 virtual competition: the promise and perils of the algorithm-driven economy. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. fodor, jerry a. 1975 the language of thought. new york: thomas y. crowell. gerovitch, slava 2003 “automation.” encyclopedia of computer science, 4th edition, edited by anthony ralston, edwin d. reilly, and david hemmendinger, 122–26. new york: grove’s dictionaries. haugeland, john 1985 artificial intelligence: the very idea. cambridge, mass.: mit press. hofstadter, douglas r. 1985 metamagical themas: questing for the essence of mind and pattern. new york: basic books. illouz, eva 2012 why love hurts: a sociological explanation. malden, mass.: polity. kline, daniel b. 2016 “how much does starbucks pay its workers?” motley fool, july 19. https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/07/19/how-much-does-starbucks-pay-its-workers.aspx. macmillan, douglas, and telis demos 2015 “uber valued at more than $50 billion.” wall street journal, july 31. https://www.wsj.com/articles/uber-valued-at-more-than-50-billion-1438367457. nosengo, nicola 2016 “can you teach old drugs new tricks?” nature 534: 314–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/534314a. of broken seals and broken promises of broken seals and broken promises: attributing intention at the iaea anna weichselbraun university of  vienna https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3705-9968 in august 2005, workers at a uranium-conversion facility in isfahan, iran, cut metal seals from equipment and began feeding uranium ore concentrate (commonly known as yellowcake) into the production line to create uranium hexa-fluoride (uf6), which could then be enriched to produce nuclear fuel. the seals—three-quarter-inch metal buttons—had been placed there by international atomic energy agency (iaea) inspectors just a few months earlier as part of a process of negotiations with the united kingdom, france, and germany to limit iran’s nuclear program. the iaea had begun to increasingly scrutinize iran’s nuclear activities in 2002, when satellite imagery revealed that iran was constructing two nuclear facilities without having notified the organization.1 the seals—technical artifacts inspectors use to monitor a state’s nuclear commitments—temporarily suspended iran’s ability to produce uranium fuel. placed at strategic points throughout a facility on vault doors, storage cabinets, and reactor lids, seals provide inspectors with information about the integrity of a sealed containment. the seals voluntarily placed at these facilities by iran indicated the state’s goodwill during the talks with the other powers, and their removal was widely interpreted as a sign of iranian defiance. mere days after iran had notified the agency and removed the seals, the diplomats of the iaea’s board of governors held an emergency meeting. they adopted a resolution that “expressed serious concern” about iran’s decision to resume “uranium conversion activities” (iaea and board of governors 2005a). at the next regular meeting in september, the board determined iran to be in noncompliance with its safeguards agreements deriving from the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (iaea and board of governors 2005b). in january 2006, iran again removed seals, this time from another nuclear installation—a uranium-enrichment facility in natanz—and, in early february, the board of governors, as provided for in the iaea’s statute (iaea 1956, art. 3, b.4), referred the iran case to the un security council (iaea and board of governors 2006) as a matter of “international peace and security.” figure 1. iaea metal seal. photo by dean calma/iaea. when iranian workers removed seals in august 2005, the controversy surrounding the country’s nuclear program reached a new level of geopolitical intensity. the guardian’s headline shouted, “iran risks showdown as atomic work resumes” (traynor and macaskill 2005). usa today claimed that by removing the seals, “iran escalated a confrontation with the west.” global actors interpreted the fact that iran broke iaea seals as an act of “brinkmanship” (beeston 2005), signaling that the country no longer wanted to cooperate with the ostensibly generous international efforts to limit its nuclear program (“offer by europe would give iran nuclear future” [weisman 2005]). iran, on the other hand, argued in its august 2005 seal-breaking-announcement letter to the iaea that it was reacting to the “broken promises” (iaea 2005, 2) of its negotiating partners whose proposal had fallen short of iranian expectations. iran’s letter sought to present an alternative explanation for the seal-breaking, one that hinged on what the state understood as its right to peaceful nuclear technologies. nevertheless, in the following months, these broken seals became an increasingly unequivocal sign of iran’s bad intentions for the international community. how did western concerns about the intentions of iranian nuclear efforts, what gabrielle hecht (2007, 103) calls iran’s “nuclearity-as-world-crisis,” crystallize so naturally in the broken seals themselves at this moment, obstructing all other possible interpretations? what makes broken seals such “natural” metaphors for a broken promise? and why had there been no comparable public outcry twelve months earlier, when iran removed seals from r & d–stage centrifuges for uranium enrichment in july 2004 (iaea and board of governors 2004, 28)? this article follows interpretive interactions between nuclear inspectors, seals technicians, diplomats, and journalists from which emerge the multiple meanings attributed to seals across their material states of intactness and brokenness. i argue that it is these actors’ ontological understandings about the functions of signs, the agency of entities, and the effect of materiality that simultaneously presuppose and entail the meanings that can be made of the seal. in this context, seals are neither only signs nor things. instead, they make up the semiotic infrastructure of nuclear governance that materializes international law and geopolitical relations between states through the iaea’s supposedly neutral techno-epistemic devices and practices of interpretation. building on recent work in science studies, semiotics, and anthropology, this article takes the role of seals in the controversy surrounding iran’s nuclear program as a vantage point for reflecting on the relationship between things, signs, and meanings in the putative democracy of the global political order. beginning with an ethnographic view of the life of the tamper-indicating seal at the iaea and closing with an archival reconstruction of the events that led to iran’s referral to the un security council in early 2006, i chart the career of the seal as it is mobilized to produce geopolitically consequential knowledge about nuclear programs and state intentions. seals as semiotic infrastructure tamper-evident seals originated roughly 7,000 years ago (around the same time as the earliest writing systems) and have been found all over the world (collon 1997). they are primarily made of clay, wax, metal, plastic, and even paper, and are used to facilitate political and economic administration. in addition to indicating tampering, seals may also signal origin, authorship, authenticity, or provide authoritative information, thus facilitating the flow of goods, services, and information.2 yet we should be careful not to presume that the seal’s functions have remained stable across time and, rather, investigate how social actors understand them to function (bedos-rezak 2010). as lowly, commonly invisibilized yet ubiquitous material artifacts (star and lampland 2009) that support the functions of a complex society, seals are infrastructure. like infrastructure, too, seals jut into consciousness most prominently when they break. once broken, though, a particularity emerges that sets them apart from regular infrastructure: seals were designed to signify. to be sure, conventional infrastructures clearly have signifying tasks, for example by transmitting information about usage (anand 2015) or by transporting symbolic dimensions as “metapragmatic objects, signs of themselves” (larkin 2018, 189). yet while technocrats generally seek to avoid infrastructure’s breakdown—which may incidentally communicate information about adherence to a contract (von schnitzler 2013)—the seal’s breakability forms part of the script (akrich 1992). seals are designed as a binary sign: they are either intact or not. at the iaea, tamper-indicating seals—drawing on a long history as “devices to make honesty unnecessary” (collon 1997, 9)—serve as semiotic infrastructure for the flow of trust and the accumulation of confidence across nations participating in the global assemblage (ong and collier 2005) of the nuclear non-proliferation regime. as part of this regime, the iaea sends inspectors into the non-nuclear weapon states that are party to what is known as the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (npt) of 1970. these states have promised not to build nuclear weapons, and the iaea “verifies” these legal promises.3 verification ostensibly establishes the truth of a claim. the legal promise itself cannot be relied on to affect the state’s intention and consequently its behavior, so the verification regime and its use of seals comprise the technocratic solution to the anthropological question of “mind opacity.”4 because we cannot know for certain what others intend, seals function as passive artifacts that act as apparently undeniable, literally material witnesses of whether a state’s public expression matches its privately held intention. at the same time, seals effect the pragmatic, real consequences of the promise by gently compelling compliance. an inspector described the seal to me as a “sleeping inspector,” modifying the state’s behavior through its material presence, much like the speed bump embodies a “sleeping policeman” (latour 1999, 186). the speed bump achieves pedestrian safety because drivers slow down to avoid damage to their vehicles. the seal’s materiality, however, is not as rigid as that of the speed bump. the seal can easily be cut, broken, or removed: it retains for the state the option of noncompliance. and indeed, the seal’s material fragility enables its script: through the seal the state can communicate its compliance, or, as in the case of iran, its refusal. as such the seal seems to operate as a passive receptacle for signifying an actor’s intention, a form of verbatim technology (inoue 2018). but as miyako inoue (2018) reminds us, the effect of immediacy emerges from the social construal of the semiotic medium as neutral conduit. the seal’s lack of agency is presupposed and entailed by the social actors’ semiotic ontologies, that is, their “ensembles of assumptions [about] the world” (kockelman 2013, 3), which are both an outcome of meaningful interaction and a condition for it. in contrast to the material semiotics of science and technology studies (sts) scholars (akrich 1992; akrich and latour 1992; latour 1992; law and mol 1995), which is careful not to privilege human agency or to distinguish between things and people in its description of how actors assemble into networks, peircean material semiotics reintroduce actors’ ontologies as key “missing masses” (latour 1992) that invisibly shape how social individuals construe the world around them. with the seal, i analyze not only its institutional travels but also its interactive interpretation in the meetings of the board of governors. legal anthropologists point out that the stated goals of an interaction prove important for analyzing it. dispute interactions constitute a special case, because they are “speech events where calculating responsibility and meaning is the public, institutional goal of the interaction” (richland 2006, 75). they are therefore most likely informed by specific sets of ideologies and conventions. in the case of the seal, its entry into a public forum in which the participants’ stated goal of the interaction is to assign responsibility for the seal’s condition requires a theory that can account for how social actors interpret signs. how to understand the relationship between materiality and meaning has been the concern of both linguistic anthropologists and infrastructure scholars. in a recent piece, brian larkin (2018, 175) pushes back against new materialist approaches in an effort to examine how the “political aesthetics” of infrastructure express its “political rationalities,” which people experience sensorially. similarly, susan gal (2017) argues that the sensory experience of the material qualities of porcelain (its durability, its milky whiteness) have been structured by regimes of value that changed over time. antina von schnitzler (2013, 671), too, describes how changing regimes of value across time and space transform the meanings (“political terrain”) of the prepaid meter. webb keane (2003, 414), however, attributes the changing construal of an object’s material qualities (indeed, of the change in which qualities are saliently construed) to any object’s necessarily “bundled” material qualities. an object’s qualities are not stably construed. the seal’s material qualities—such as the oxidizability and markability of the metal or the fragility and the tieability of the sealing string—emerge through semiotic process in ontological context (see also chumley 2017). larkin (2018, 186), too, argues against assigning inherent ontological properties (such as invisibility) to infrastructure. he proposes that these properties “are made to happen as part of technical, political, and representational processes.” yet one parameter that importantly limits the range of interpretations possible in any given interaction is the ontological attribution of agency to individual entities. paul kockelman (2007, 2013) theorizes agency as the semiotic processes by which an actor’s flexibility to control their behavior and anticipate its effects is put in relation to the actor’s accountability (in terms of rights and obligations) to others in a social-semiotic context. this means agency is “necessarily contextually contingent, interactionally emergent, and ontologically framed” (kockelman 2013, 84). at the iaea, seals are generally not thought to possess agency, because they cannot be held accountable for what happens to them. bureaucrats, diplomats, journalists, and their audiences regard seals as passive devices that display what a human subject has done to and with them. seals’ lack of agency makes them credible. people—full of contingent agency—may lie, but seals always tell the truth. yet to signify unequivocally, the iaea’s seals and their administrators are tightly regimented by bureaucratic process and procedure. this process effectively removes agency from the seals, transferring accountability to the social individuals that handle them. moreover, the process “transduces” (silverstein 2003) what the seal means from the inspectorial realm of formal accountability to the public realm of political responsibility. the following section on the use of seals at the iaea illustrates how bureaucrats regiment the seal material so that a maximally unambiguous interpretation of its status can be achieved. the subsequent section takes up a moment of seal-breaking and the effort of diplomats to attribute intention and assign responsibility to demonstrate that even a supposedly unequivocally broken seal is subject to the inherent contingencies of semiotic process in which “signs give rise to new signs, in an unending process of signification” (keane 2003, 413). seals at the iaea among the substantial historical and political science scholarship on nuclear governance (shaker 1980; hecht 2012; mallard 2014; holloway and nuti 2018), and the iaea in particular (bernstein 1974; scheinman 1987; brown 2015; hamblin 2016; holloway 2016; roehrlich 2016), the technical aspects of nuclear science and its applications are readily acknowledged as significant for the way the regulatory assemblage of nuclear governance has taken shape. yet with few exceptions (forland 1997; pouliot 2010; roehrlich 2018), the verification mechanisms themselves, not to mention their material qualities, have not proven analytically central to this scholarship (which tends to focus on power, states, interests, etc.) indeed, aside from gray literature among the technical and policy professionals who are expert practitioners in this world, the verification system itself remains largely unexamined. during the time of my fieldwork at the iaea, wide-ranging debates raged about the methodological changes to inspectors’ evaluation of state compliance (weichselbraun 2016). but seals, as uncontroversially technical artifacts, clearly remained outside that vortex of controversy, so it was easy for me as an intern in the training section of the safeguards department to speak to people about seals and to learn how they worked. in that way, seals (and the array of technical devices for carrying out nuclear inspections) resembled infrastructure in that they faded into the background, unnoticed, until—perhaps—they failed. within the nuclear-verification system, seals assist the inspector in evaluating if a state is complying with its legal agreements. in the high-profile case of iran breaking seals in 2005, the seal’s signifying capacity initially appeared straightforwardly binary: the seal was either intact, signifying compliance, or it was broken, signifying noncompliance. contrary to this common-sense view, i contend that the seal’s signaling capacity should be seen as the outcome—not the starting point—of the seal’s semiotic properties; its common-sense emblemeticity is the puzzle to be interrogated (kockelman 2013, 78–79). the labor of the seal’s administration as a piece of evidence is distributed along a “chain of custody” akin to the forensic dna testing in criminal trials described by michael lynch et al. (2008). in what follows, i examine the elements of the chain to explore the seal’s varied semiotic regimentation. to become stable signs of geopolitical sincerity, seals undergo semiotic transformations, beginning as meaningless pieces of metal and returning to headquarters as witnesses of radiation or bad weather, or as victims of accidents; their component parts index professional vice and virtue, and their residues accrete into the evidence of inspection work for the inspectors and technicians at the iaea. administering the seal inspectors from the iaea use about 22,000 metal seals in the field per year, making them the most widely used seals. the total cost of a metal seal is up to us$40, of which only us$3 are in the material itself. the rest of the cost goes into the seal’s administration. metal “double cup” seals are composed of two parts, a copper-colored cap or casing and a brass-colored disk, the seal body as seen in figure 2. figure 2. loose and packaged seals used in training. photo by dean calma/iaea. usually, a given seal design will only be used in the field for a limited number of years, because seals professionals presume that the longer the seal remains in circulation, the more likely it is to be “defeated” (that is, opened without evidence of tampering). metal seals, however, have been used by the iaea for more than forty years. seals technicians at the iaea consider them very “robust,” because they have not yet been defeated. seals experts contest this assumption, however, noting that “[by] definition, defeated seals are never detected” (johnston 2001, 106). but it is not only the seal’s material design that contributes to its robustness. it must also form part of a controlled system of protocols that account for the trajectory of the seal. as seal professionals note, the effectiveness of seals is strongly dependent on the proper protocols for using them. these protocols are the official and unofficial procedures used for seal procurement, storage, record keeping, installation, inspection, removal, disposal, reporting, interpreting findings, and training. with a good protocol, a modest seal can provide excellent security. on the other hand, a sophisticated seal used poorly may be worse than useless if naively trusted. (anl, nuclear engineering division 2013) trust in a seal becomes delicately accumulated as the seal travels through the multiple protocolled stages of its life within the safeguards system. seals are assiduously cared for in order to become the reliable semiotic forms that signify a state’s compliance. the iaea’s protocols attempt to ensure that the seals are effective, robust, and therefore trustworthy from the seal’s “birth” to its “postmortem” analysis. birth the life of the iaea metal double cup seal begins with its manufacture in the united states, where the iaea letters and a six-digit serial number are stamped onto the outer casing. at the iaea’s laboratory south of vienna, austria, technicians punch two holes into the seal body and create its signature by dropping hot liquid soldering metal inside the casing and scratching it with a metal tool as it dries. these scratches are thought to be unique, like a signature, because they are made by hand. the belief in the signature’s uniqueness hinges on this “ostensibly inimitable biomechanical act, signing” (hull 2012, 131). in contrast, however, to the written signatures of pakistani bureaucrats that matthew s. hull (2012, 131) describes, the scratched signatures produced inside the metal seal are not put in “semiotic relation” with a specific individual. they are not seen as a “natural” sign (grice 1957, 378). in fact, once the seal cap is applied, the seal’s signature becomes concealed. this signature, in combination with the seal’s six-digit serial number, establishes the seal’s unique identity. the seal, at once unique but also sharing a family name with thousands of other seals, therefore serves as an indexical sign of the iaea and its authority in the state’s facility. that is to say, the seal is a sign that is interpreted (by inspectors, diplomats, and facility operators) as representing the iaea as its object via an understood spatiotemporal contiguity between sign and object.5 initialization once lab workers have baptized the seals with hot metal, they pack them in boxes of ten into secure suitcases that can each hold fifty boxes, and send them to the seals laboratory at the iaea headquarters in vienna. there, at the base of the towers, seals technicians sort the metal caps according to their serial numbers and place them in numerical order on a large tray with a hundred cutout circles for fifty seals. they receive one suitcase—five hundred seals—per week. using markers, technicians copy the last two digits of each seal’s number onto the seal body part, creating pairs that belong together. they photograph each side of the seal cup and body with a mounted camera. the technicians save the images to a database with metadata such as the serial number, date, and batch number. once the seals have been thus “initialized,” the technicians batch-package them in cardboard and in sealed plastic individual packages (see figure 3). figure 3. sealed seals. photo by dean calma/iaea. it usually takes three days to enter a suitcase worth of seals into the database, though one technician told me he could do it in one day. the labor-intensive process of endowing seals with their unique identity and registering their qualities within a database permits them to then begin to circulate as entities with potential meaning. but they do not become meaningful until the moment they are attached. learning to apply a seal “make sure you tie the knot neatly; the way we tell you to. the knot is part of the seal that is verified when it comes back from the field. a badly tied knot can reflect badly on you. there’s an error code for that!” the trainer’s warning rings across the table where i am sitting. on the table, rolls of string and loops of wire, metal bits and bobs, and various tools are scattered about in piles. it was an afternoon in the training-section workshop space and i, the intern, alongside four newly hired inspectors-in-training, was learning and practicing how to apply the iaea’s tamper-indicating seals. this made for a nice change from sitting behind desks in the training classroom where i had been observing how new inspectors are trained to do their job, with text-laden slides flashing on monitors while lecturers droned on about technical topics. following the trainer’s demonstration, we grabbed some parts and began to practice. i took the sealing thread and strung it through the two holes of the metal button. i made a triple square knot, laying one string over another in a specific pattern. then i cut off the extra thread with a pair of scissors. to close the seal, i snapped the copper-colored seal casing over the seal’s body, concealing the knot, and spun the casing to make sure it moved freely. next, i practiced applying a seal with sealing wire instead of thread. the purpose of this exercise was to gain enough practice to be able to apply seals in the more challenging conditions in the field. applying a seal at this desk proved easy enough but—the trainers warned us—the encumbrances of nuclear facilities included gloves, heat, cold, sweat, fatigue, thirst, and needing to use the bathroom, making this task exponentially more difficult. sloppy knots just as the seal is disciplined into becoming a meaningful technical device through rigorous administrative procedures, so the practice of sealing is also meant to discipline the inspectors. thus the seal can become a sign not just of state compliance or noncompliance but also of the quality of the inspector. the seal has multiple material qualities “bundl[ed]” (keane 2003, 414) into one object. depending on the context, the “relative value, utility, and relevance” (keane 2003, 414) of these qualities will shift. in the processes of the internal administration of the seal, the qualities of the seal’s knot (its neatness, its sloppiness) take center stage when it comes to evaluating the inspector’s professional skill. the trainer who led my seal-practice session explained to me in his office—a poster with photographs of correct and incorrect sealing practices up on the wall behind him—that inspectors needed to heed the importance of making proper knots. a good inspector tied tidy, proper knots, whereas a bad inspector, who did not take their work seriously, tied sloppy knots of an insufficient number and incomplete form. the seal knot constituted an integral component of the seal’s tamper-indicating function, and needed to be diligently tied. even if trainers acknowledged that applying seals could be tricky in the field, they still frowned on poorly constructed knots. in the way they spoke about inspectors who had tied bad knots, the trainers indicated that they thought these new inspectors lacked the wherewithal to carry out the inspection task. they saw the task of tying a proper seal knot as an indication of aptitude and read sloppy knots as indexical icons of inspector incompetence. in the field wearing the faded yellow underwear issued by the nuclear power plant beneath a rough cotton—bright yellow—jumpsuit, safety boots like cement blocks on her feet, borrowed socks slipping down past her heels, elizabeth struggles with her gloved hand to pull sealing wire through the two holes of the metal button that is one half of a seal, all while trying to ignore her sweaty scalp itching underneath her hard hat.6 the little device gingerly immobilizes the vault door containing nuclear material and will—by virtue of its material fragility—indicate if anyone has tried to get into the vault. elizabeth pushes the seal body snugly around the door handle and ties four square knots, nice and tidy. the recommended number is three, she likes four, some people go overboard and tie six knots, but elizabeth knows that six knots can make it hard to close the seal. she snips the excess sealing wire and pushes the cap onto the body, closing the seal with a satisfying snap. spinning the cap around the body, elizabeth reassures herself that the seal is properly put together. picking up her clipboard, she notes the seal’s serial number and location in the power plant on the designated form. she puts the seals she replaced today in her clear plastic bag, glad that her work is completed and eager for a glass of water. reflecting on the role of seals, elizabeth tells me: “nobody cares about seals before they’re attached; they’re just pieces of metal. but once they’re recorded, once they’re attached, they become more than pieces of metal and string.” an individual metal seal may stay in the field up to three years depending on environmental conditions. in the field, the intact seal becomes a sign of the state’s compliance with international law. it signals a promise kept, the alignment of words and deeds. bruno latour (2000, 19) claims that “meaning does not antecede technological devices.” instead, meaning emerges from and with the device and its inclusion in a “chain of associations.” the seal, then, presents itself as particular kind of technological device because it was designed and is administered to produce particular and limited kinds of meaning. like traffic lights, seals are technologies of nonverbal communication that are culturally expected to be self-evident, and—predominantly—binary in signaling capacity. once a seal is attached, its meaning lies in being either intact or broken; these two states entail the significations of compliance or noncompliance. for the iaea’s technician-bureaucrats, however, the seal communicates more than this. postmortem analysis back at headquarters in vienna, elizabeth turns in the seals she collected in the field to be decontaminated before the seals technicians cut them open (with an “expensive can opener”) and examine them for tampering. the seals technicians again take a picture of the unique signature of metal scratches inside the seal cap, and check it against the picture in the database. they note the seal’s condition and send these findings to elizabeth who is relieved that all the seals are “verified.” she can now complete her report and send a letter notifying the state that the inspection was satisfactory. she tells me, “99.9 percent of the time the results of the inspection are satisfactory.” sometimes, however, the seals technicians note problems with the seal according to a list of codes of increasing severity. seals may be returned with a code indicating an issue of low severity but nevertheless be verified. for example, the knot may have been tied incorrectly, but the technician’s forensic analysis determines that the seal was not compromised in its sealing function. the situation worsens when the seal is returned “unverified.” this means that the seal can no longer be trusted to have provided effective tamper-indication. for example, if the seals technician finds a slip knot inside the seal, the seal’s tamper-evidence function was compromised. the codes identify whether or not the seal can be verified, and characterize how the seal’s condition diverged from the ideal. in the case of unverifiable seals, the inspector then must determine the seriousness of the seal’s unverifiability, which depends on what kind of thing the seal had sealed. the inspector will check her inspection paperwork for the location from which the seal was removed. if the seal had been placed to secure a box of inspection equipment overnight, the inspector might decide that it suffices to reinitialize the databases of the equipment before returning to that facility the next time. if the seal had been placed on nuclear material, however, the amount of sealed nuclear material becomes significant. below a certain threshold of nuclear material, inspectors do not worry about a broken seal.7 above this threshold, the unverifiable seal indicates a potentially dangerous loss in the “continuity of knowledge” about that facility. still, if the seal had secured a large amount of nuclear material, it was likely not alone—there would be complementary surveillance video and containment devices to verify. the inspector could check the footage of the surveillance camera to figure out why the seal had come back unverified. perhaps facility crews had accidentally damaged the seal with another piece of equipment. the inspector might get in touch with the facility operators to find out more information about potential damage to the seal so as to understand what happened. when seals come back unverified, one inspector told me, “everyone’s trying to come up with a credible story.” there are multiple plausible reasons why a seal may be unverifiable that do not indicate the nefarious intentions of individual actors. but in the case of an unverified seal on a large amount of nuclear material, the inspector has to restore the agency’s so-called continuity of knowledge about that material as quickly as possible, by arranging an urgent return visit to the site and recounting all unsealed material. the chain of custody can be unfolded (like a chain of paper dolls [lynch et al. 2008, 129]) to reveal individual steps and heterogeneous practices in the procedures to administer tamper-evident seals. the chain of custody to maintain the iaea’s semiotic infrastructure of nuclear trust among nations serves as a funnel through time. custodial practices progressively groom the seal’s signifying capacity, from a material void of meaning (“just a piece of metal”) to an “unverified” seal containing a multitude of potential “stories” to produce an unequivocally binary sign: open/closed, on/off, broken/intact. at the moment when iran announced that it planned to remove seals from its fuel-fabrication equipment, the binary signaling capacity of the seal was unambiguous. the broken seals stated clearly that the state had broken the seal. but the seal was mute on the state’s intention. and from this point forward the funnel widened again to accommodate proliferating interpretations about what the broken seal meant. at the same time, the naturalized emblematic understanding of a broken seal as a broken promise acted centrifugally to consolidate meanings again. of what are broken seals a sign? in moving from the bureaucratic accounting of seals to the diplomatic negotiation of the meaning of broken seals, we also move from a realm of formal accountability to moral responsibility. what is a problem for maintaining the continuity of knowledge about a state’s nuclear material for the safeguards inspector becomes a problem of ascertaining the degree and quality of commitment of a state to the moral nuclear order. the diplomats representing their countries on the iaea’s board of governors are responsible for drawing up the board’s response (usually, a “resolution”) to the report of the broken seals. in this forum, the broken seal most loudly emerges as a sign not of a broken promise but of an uncertain intention. while iran proffered an interpretation of its action, the other diplomats sought to uncover what lies behind that interpretation. furthermore, not all broken seals are alike: seals broken (while voluntarily applied) in the context of diplomatic negotiations turn out to be far more consequential than seals broken without such an additional layer of interactional constraint. iran breaks seals for the purposes of this article, the iranian nuclear story began in the middle of 2002 when the united states briefed the iaea on a previously unreported nuclear facility for uranium enrichment in iran (lewis 2006, 2007). this revelation proved an unpleasant surprise for the iaea. the agency asked iran for clarification and access to the site, which iran eventually granted in early 2003. inspection visits by the iaea eventually indicated that iran—despite claiming to have developed their facilities indigenously—procured components of its centrifuge enrichment from pakistan.8 during the subsequent eighteen months, the iaea attempted to understand the extent of iran’s previously unmentioned nuclear activities, while iran oscillated between periods of cooperation and recalcitrance. in november 2003, then director general of the iaea, mohamed elbaradei, presented the first comprehensive report on the scope of iranian nuclear activities. the report stopped short of declaring iran noncompliant. elbaradei (2011, 120) wrote in his memoir, “none of these activities pointed explicitly toward a nuclear weapons program, but together they constituted a fairly comprehensive nuclear fuel cycle program, most of it conducted in secret.” western states on the iaea’s board of governors widely interpreted iran’s clandestine acquisition of “sensitive” nuclear technologies as an indicator that the country was up to no good. diplomats began calling for “confidence-building measures” to “provide assurances” that iran’s nuclear program had solely “peaceful purposes” (elbaradei 2011). in the spring of 2004, american anxiety about a potential iranian nuclear weapons program began growing. elbaradei remembered cia director george tenet, in particular, as convinced that iranians intended to build nuclear weapons. elbaradei noted that u.s. officials would repeat to the news media that they “knew” iran was trying to build a bomb, but had no evidence to demonstrate this. he mused that americans seemed to be “hoping the iranians would trip up somewhere during the inspection process” (elbaradei 2011, 133). at the same time, iran’s conservatives gained control of the majlis (parliament) and the country’s nuclear program had become a matter of national pride. when a board resolution in june 2004 deplored the lack of progress on clarifying outstanding questions on iran’s nuclear program, the iranians grew annoyed and removed seals they had voluntarily placed on r & d centrifuges. they resumed manufacturing and testing of the equipment. this was the first time that iran broke seals. in november 2004, germany, france, the united kingdom, and iran announced a preliminary agreement that would provide the basis for further discussions: iran agreed to suspend uranium-conversion and centrifuge-enrichment activities (and voluntarily place seals to indicate this suspension) to negotiate a deal that would permit “objective guarantees that iran’s nuclear program was exclusively for peaceful purposes” (elbaradei 2011, 141). this would be called the paris agreement. in the months following, expectations were high for a positive outcome to the negotiations. in march 2005 the iranian issue had—for the first time in two years—not been on the meeting agenda of the iaea’s board of governors. but in may 2005 the iranians threatened to leave the negotiations because of slow progress, and the europeans agreed to provide an initial offer by august. in late june of that year, the iranian conservative candidate mahmoud ahmadinejad won the presidential election. in july, details trickled in from the soon-to-be delivered european proposal, which fell far short of iranian expectations. on august 1, 2005, iran submitted a letter to the iaea in which it expressed its frustration with the negotiations and announced that it would resume uranium conversion. the letter instructed the iaea to carry out the necessary steps to maintain safeguards monitoring of the facility. on august 3, ahmadinejad assumed office and workers began feeding uranium oxide into the unsealed portion of the uranium-conversion facility. on august 10, after iran received a formal offer from the europeans, bbc news reported that “iran has broken all the remaining un seals at its nuclear plant at isfahan.” this was the second time iran had removed seals. during the subsequent emergency session of the board, the iaea governors issued a resolution that urged iran to re-suspend its conversion activities. at the regular meeting in september, the board declared iran to be in noncompliance with its iaea safeguards agreements for the first time. elbaradei (2011, 145) noted that some critics responded with “cynicism” because the claim of noncompliance referred to his report from two years prior. if that formed the basis for the noncompliance finding then iran had been noncompliant all along, without being identified as such. subsequent attempts at negotiation went nowhere, because “forces against it were too strong” (elbaradei 2011, 147). on january 10, 2006, iran resumed its enrichment activities, breaking seals on the centrifuges and moving closer to the “nuclear threshold” identified by western states. this was the third time that iran removed seals. in response, a special session of the iaea’s board of governors on february 4, 2006, referred iran’s case to the united nations security council (iaea 1956, article xii, c). conditions for semiotic transduction the iaea’s semiotic infrastructure accommodates multiple registers for the interpretation of seals. in a period of nineteen months, the iranians removed iaea seals from two of their facilities three times and replaced them once. for the three times that iran broke iaea seals between 2004 and 2006, only the first time made it difficult for the iaea to maintain effective safeguards. when iran removed seals the first time in june 2004, the iaea reported that “in the absence of such seals, the agency’s monitoring … cannot be considered effective” (iaea and board of governors 2004, 28). in contrast, during the following year’s episode that precipitated the emergency board of governors meeting and the eventual finding of noncompliance, agency surveillance continued unhindered. an iaea spokeswoman stated that despite the removal of seals, “we went from a mode of monitoring a frozen facility to a mode of monitoring an active facility” (avni 2005a). as described above, seals help maintain continuity of knowledge about a state’s nuclear material. if the iaea was effectively able to maintain this knowledge without seals in august 2005, why did the seal-breaking have such negative repercussions for iran in this case? beyond not having negative repercussions for iran, the 2004 seal-breaking episode is not even remembered by participants. in a white paper describing the events, pierre goldschmidt, the head of safeguards during this period, provides a timeline of events from 2002 to 2006. in it, only the second two instances of seal breaking in 2005 and 2006 are mentioned as such.9 the white paper describes the initial seal removal in 2004 as “iran informs elbaradei of its decision to restart the fabrication and testing of centrifuges” (gerami and goldschmidt 2012, 19). furthermore, when i asked an iranian diplomat who had participated in these negotiations about the seal-breaking episodes of 2004–2006, he corrected me, “you mean 2005 and 2006.” what explains this? in 2004 iran was only accountable to the iaea, the techno-bureaucratic actor. within that context, seals were merely part of the register of formal accountability. breaking seals was thus nothing more than annoying some inspectors. and indeed, the 2004 seal-breaking episode even had arguably constructive effects for iran in that, shortly thereafter, the above-mentioned paris agreement was drawn up, mutually orienting iran, germany, france, and the united kingdom in a moral-diplomatic framework. when i asked the same iranian diplomat why his state was then referred to the security council if its violations had been known for some time already, he responded, “because of the paris agreement.” goldschmidt, too, interpreted iran’s action to remove seals again and “resume uranium conversion activities [as] nullifying the paris agreement” (gerami and goldschmidt 2012, 12). in other words, the formal diplomatic process—and the actors’ ontological assumptions about the telos of such a process—added interactional, social-semiotic constraints to the unfolding situation. the state’s actions were then interpreted in light of the agreement’s goal to “build confidence.” in other words, the paris agreement transduced the seal’s signals from a register of formal adherence to a set of rules to a register of moral responsibility within the nuclear order. what about intention? a western diplomat noted in august 2005 that while the iaea suspected that iran was not forthright about its nuclear activities, it could do little about that because the npt “does not deal with intentions” (avni 2005b). breaking seals publicly, as iran had done, clearly constitutes a form of “communicative, purposive social action,” which jack sidnell (2017, 87) notes “is semiotic and involves one person getting another to recognize her intention.” recognizing and identifying the intention that motivated the seal-breaking act became the work of the iaea’s board of governors emergency meeting in august and september 2005. the press as well as diplomats offered interpretations for the meaning of the broken seals. the new york times reported that the “removal of the seals was part of iran’s tough stance on its nuclear program under the conservative new president, mahmoud ahmadinejad, who took office this week” (fathi and fuller 2005). meanwhile, a u.s. diplomat used the seal as a prop: the american envoy to the talks … mr. schulte appeared at a news conference brandishing a copper seal used by the united nations agency to monitor equipment and praised the action of the governing board. the resolution on thursday “shows that the international community is united in its determination that iran move off the dangerous course that it is on,” he said, holding up the seal. (fuller and fathi 2005; emphasis added) both the new york times and gregory schulte sought to mobilize the apparently obvious emblematic (kockelman 2013, 8–9) meaning of a broken seal as iconic of the broken and necessarily nefarious intentions of the seal-breaking state. yet both of these comments (“tough stance,” “dangerous course”) are rather more evocative than explicit, indicating that the broken seal’s meaning had not yet been determined. iran removed seals and the governors attempted to understand the meaning of this action. their response would assign responsibility and lay out steps for future action to restore the destabilized order. within the context of diplomacy and its repertoire of available actions and strategies, breaking seals might indicate a variety of intentions. does the actor mean to signal their impatience? is this to be taken as a threat or a bluff? the diplomatic effort was directed toward locating the state’s intentions on a spectrum of motivation from indecision to determination, while simultaneously crafting strategies for responding to their presumed motivation. in the end, the governors argued that this episode has reduced confidence in iran’s intentions. the judgment, and referral to the security council, ultimately concerned the diplomats’ collective uncertainty about the intentions of the iranian nuclear program. as john w. du bois (1993, 69) notes, “the dynamic of invocation and suppression of intention carries social meaning in itself.” after iran broke seals in january 2006, the board of governors referred to iran’s “intentions” for the first time in a resolution in the following, generically atypical, paragraph: [the board of governors] calls on iran to understand that there is a lack of confidence in iran’s intentions in seeking to develop a fissile material production capability against the background of iran’s record on safeguards as recorded in previous resolutions, and outstanding issues; and to reconsider its position in relation to confidence-building measures, which are voluntary, and non legally binding, and to adopt a constructive approach in relation to negotiations that can result in increased confidence. (iaea and board of governors 2006, 3; emphasis added) while the npt does not deal (explicitly) with the intentions of states to remain inside the treaty or not, relations of trust and promise between states (coded as confidence in this paragraph) are mediated via seals and other devices making up the semiotic infrastructure of international treaty verification. while technicians work to hone the clarity of the seal’s binary signal, what it ultimately signals must be negotiated in the board room. and, in an unexpected twist, the voluntarily applied seal possesses an even greater signifying force than the seal obligatorily applied. conclusion from the iaea’s perspective, the iranian nuclear story came to a closure of sorts with the agreement of the joint comprehensive plan of action in july 2015. then-president barack obama (2015) declared that the agreement was “not built on trust, but on verification.” herewith he cited—and revised—the dictum “trust, but verify” used by ronald reagan in the context of nuclear-disarmament negotiations with the soviet union for a newly distrustful domestic context. the fact that iaea seals are still in place in iran at the time of this writing remains a powerful symbol of the country’s compliance with the agreement in spite of u.s. withdrawal from it. the iranians are clearly aware of the common-sense signifying power of seals, broken and intact, and have mobilized these meanings in salient moments. conceptualizing seals as semiotic infrastructure, whose interpretation is not arbitrary in that it relies on powerful cultural tropes construable via sign users’ semiotic ontologies, permits us to discover and analyze what counts as a sign. approaches that favor aesthetics (understood as visual-sensory effect) and form (the analysis of features and qualities) are limited in that they are missing a metalanguage for discussing the socio-semiotic conventions by which seals become legible as signs. as semiotic infrastructure, seals and other verification technologies do not merely produce information about states but also serve to techno-semiotically mediate relationships of trust and promise between states (this is in contrast to political scientists who imagine trust as “human factors” extraneous to technical elements [bowen et al. 2018]). so what is often understood as a merely technical mechanism of formal accountability in fact becomes transduced into a register of moral responsibility when diplomats come to find states in noncompliance, and thereby in violation of their legal promises to the international community. what distinguishes semiotic infrastructure from conventional infrastructure is that it continues to work even when it literally breaks down. in its function as a conduit for the flow of trust, the maintenance of international law, and the elaboration of relations between states, semiotic infrastructure only ceases to function once it is abandoned entirely.10 breaking seals does not break the infrastructural system itself because semiotic infrastructure is designed to signify at all times. while the trust that the intact seals were meant to communicate can no longer be signaled, the normative expectations of the verification regime signaled via semiotic infrastructure itself remained, and continue to remain, intact. by joining science studies with semiotics and the anthropology of infrastructure we can more readily understand the ways in which meaning and materiality are dialectically emergent in interaction. through the example of tamper-indicating seals as semiotic infrastructure we learn how technical knowledge is variously mobilized to construct and enforce a moral nuclear order against a background of always uncertain intention. abstract in the world of global politics, talk is cheap. states sign negotiated agreements, but a treaty without an enforcement mechanism is considered weak, because states are not expected to adhere to commitments whose materiality is merely that of ink and paper. to verify the terms of state commitments to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which entered into force in 1970, international atomic energy agency (iaea) nuclear safeguards inspectors place tamper-evident seals in nuclear facilities. while seals appear to work simply as a binary signal, their meanings are multivalent. this article draws on fieldwork at the iaea, and on broken seals in iran between 2004 and 2006 that escalated into an international crisis, to examine the relationship between the material properties of the seal and its signifying potentialities. bringing the perspective of semiotic ontology to the question of materiality, this essay argues that seals constitute a semiotic infrastructure of nuclear governance that materializes international law. [seals; materiality; meaning; knowledge; intention; agency] notes acknowledgments for their critical engagement with this essay at various stages of becoming i am indebted to workshop participants at ucla and the university of chicago, as well as to sarah adcock (for pointers to the archaeological literature on seals), hannah chazin, erin debenport, lynn eden, colin halverson, gabrielle hecht, cameron hu, vincent ialenti, anna jabloner, and jonathan rosa. i thank four anonymous reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology, in particular chris nelson, for their generous readings and helpful comments. research for this piece was funded by the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, and the national science foundation. my sincere gratitude also goes to the kind souls at the iaea (and beyond) who abided my curiosity with generosity and good humor. 1. the details of iran’s obligations to report nuclear facilities to the iaea are contested, with the iaea arguing that iran should have done so earlier, and iran maintaining that it had not broken any formal rules of reporting and was not planning on keeping the facilities secret. 2. the literature on seals is vast. for a concise overview, see bonnie magness-gardiner (1997); for a classic volume on ancient near eastern seals, see mcguire gibson and robert d. biggs (1977); and for an update, see k. duistermaat, i. regulski, and p. verkinderen (2012). for a discussion of seals as precursors to the modern brand, see david wengrow (2008). 3. any verification regime appears to be buttressed by what webb keane (2007, 202) describes as the “sincerity as a moral norm” characteristic of christian modernity, which makes a moral virtue out of aligning words and thoughts. 4. this topic has been the subject of lively anthropological discussion, particularly involving melanesianists who note regional cultural preferences of “mind opacity.” see the special issue of anthropological quarterly with an introduction by joel robbins and alan rumsey (2008). in an earlier edited volume, jane h. hill and judith t. irvine (1993) treat cultural variation in intention and speech. 5. peirce’s theory of the sign puts three elements in relation to each other: “a sign stands for an object on the one hand, and an interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object in a way that corresponds with how the sign stands in relation to the object” (kockelman 2006, 5). 6. my understanding of inspection work in nuclear facilities comes from a week-long mock inspection exercise i observed. “elizabeth” should be understood as a composite of individual inspectors from whom i learned about their work. 7. this threshold is commonly cited as 0.1 sq (“significant quantity”) of uranium or plutonium. one sq is the agreed amount of uranium or plutonium necessary to build a nuclear weapon. this agreement is not uncontroversial (goddard, solodov, and fedchenko 2016). 8. in 2004 it became clear that a pakistani national, a. q. khan, had been running an illegal nuclear procurement ring for states unable to buy nuclear technologies on the heavily regulated nuclear market. 9. “iran required the removal of iaea seals to the isfahan uranium conversion facilities” and “iran begins to remove iaea seals at several enrichment-related sites,” respectively (gerami and goldschmidt 2012, 19–20). 10. as did happen when the democratic people’s republic of korea ejected iaea inspectors and left the npt in an action widely understood as a breakdown of relations between states. references akrich, madeleine 1992 “the de-scription of technical objects.” in shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change, edited by wiebe e. bijker and john law, 205–24. cambridge, mass.: mit press. akrich, madeleine, and bruno latour 1992 “a summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies.” in shaping technology/building society: studies in 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non-proliferation treaty: origin and implementation, 1959–1979. london: oceana publications. sidnell, jack 2017 “distributed agency and action under the radar of accountability.” in distributed agency, edited by n. j. enfield and paul kockelman, 87–96. new york: oxford university press. silverstein, michael 2003 “translation, transduction, transformation: skating ‘glossando’ on thin semiotic ice.” in translating cultures: perspectives on translation and anthropology, edited by paula g. rubel and abraham rosman, 75–105. oxford: berg. star, susan leigh, and martha lampland 2009 “reckoning with standards.” in standards and their stories: how quantifying, classifying, and formalizing practices shape everyday life, edited by martha lampland and susan leigh star, 3–24. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. traynor, ian, and ewen macaskill 2005 “iran risks showdown as work at atomic site resumes.” guardian (uk), august 8. von schnitzler, antina 2013 “traveling technologies: infrastructure, 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2008). the emergence of the “affective turn” (clough and halley 2007) along the lines of this patriliny in the humanities and social sciences has been questioned by feminist geographers of the emotions, who have drawn attention to the feminist scholarly genealogy that predates recent theorizations of affect (see boler and zembylas 2016). but in spite of this critique, our toolboxes for the study and imagination of affect still remain predominantly western in their crafting. many recent engagements with affect theory have therefore inadvertently been repetitive, reiterating by now well-rehearsed analyses about the distinction between affect and the emotions, referring to the particularly nondiscursive qualities of the former and the linguistic embedment of the latter. it is worrisome when evocations of a theoretical notion close down on themselves. in this article, i would like to invite more diverse, particularly non-western inspirations for affect. bracketing, for the moment, western scholarly imaginaries of affect, as well as their genealogies, i would like to ask: what resonates as affect in the different geographies that we study as anthropologists? and what can be learned from these other evocations of affect, as well as their different ways of being understood in their specific historical conjunctures? would it be pertinent to study these as ontologies of affect? rather than holding up multiple ontologies against western epistemology (see henare, holbraad, and wastell 2007; holbraad 2012; viveiros de castro 2012) or pretending that one could ever really step out of a historical embedment in western concepts and their theorizations in a postcolonial world (see chakrabarty 2000), my aim in pointing toward other inspirations for affect is to potentially break apart scholarly genealogies of affect that have become rather entrenched. after all, work on affect was supposed to engender a potentiality for the imagination, not to impoverish or limit it. it is in this spirit that i invite here more diverse imaginations for affect. that is, if we can no longer classify anything as exclusively non-western (taking colonialism and its enduring aftermath into account), i am interested in what resonates as akin to affect in other geographies and historical conjunctures that i will only heuristically call non-western.1 how can we trace and compose putatively non-western inspirations for affect, ones that do not regurgitate by now well-established comprehensions of it? i think such a project would require another sort of excavation. figure 1. the shadow of syria over the turkish coast, summer 2015. photo by yael navaro. my recent fieldwork in antakya, turkey, a city that has stood in the shadow of the syrian war for the past five years, has pushed me to draw out a different imaginary for affect. this is not about finding a culturally distinct, local term for affect, as would have been the project of cultural anthropologists of the emotions (rosaldo 1980; myers 1991). nor is it similar to the ontological project of finding the truth in the radically alter existence of non-western societies (holbraad 2012). both of the above projects have a tendency to sidetrack or underinterpret the historical conjunctures and political situations that engender new social forms, locating difference in disassociation or insularity. i take my cue neither from their synchronic approach nor from their self-purported essentialism,2 but from their insistence on looking out for difference. it is in that spirit that i suggest that we attempt to actively diversify the inspirations for affect in ethnography. i have been doing fieldwork in a city in southern turkey one hour’s drive from aleppo, on the other side of the border, during one of history’s most cataclysmic wars. in this radical shifting of grounds, i have studied affect not in the mass political gatherings, either proor anti-government, or in any other such emergent social form reflecting or reacting to the syrian war, but in interstices—in the gaps, creaks, and crevices not entirely smothered by the bombastic politics at play nor flattened by the conflicting governmentalities in the region. what has been most curious to observe and experience in antakya at this height of political tension—and during the incitements to divide along sectarian lines—is the social life that has endured in its mundanity, against all odds, reproducing bonds of reciprocity and affection across the local communities and engendering new ones with syrian refugees. i study affect in these forms of sociality that have accentuated intimacy in relations across politically differentiated communities in the shadow of the war, attempting to contain tension while at the same time harboring it. the enduring attachments across the local communities of antakya and the newly forged ones with syrian refugees within fissures deepened through the conflict is where i have focused in particular. none of the political discourses currently thrown about in this earth-shattering conflict have quite been able to prevent or entirely extinguish the minute forms of generosity, affection, hospitality, and intimacy at play in the making of sociality across members of different communities. i observe these forms of cross-communitarian affect in the vicinity of war through several interconnected terms that have emerged from my fieldwork: the remnant, the serendipitous, and the transcendent—notions that i believe could potentially expand affect studies. the remnant, in this scene of social relations, is that which endures in the form of attachments, intimacy, sociality out of habit, and interdependence across the local communities of antakya now being pitted against one another along sectarian lines as an effect of the syrian war, its ways of circulating in public discourse, and the turkish state’s divisive incitements. as a notion that emerges from the field, i conceptualize the remnant as that in affective social relations which is residually left over against all odds, resisting attempts to politically divide and regenerating itself in new encounters, at times with strangers. the remnant, in the way i construe it here as a residual, relational affect with the potential for re-creation, is like a bud that shoots again in fissures that have been carved on purpose. the serendipitous is a related concept, referring to the unexpected, out-of-the-blue element in sociality that brings about unanticipated affects of empathy, generosity, and hospitality. unlike the remnant, which refers to the memory of past social forms being reproduced or re-engendered, the serendipitous belongs to the temporal present. the serendipitous is coincidental and relies on the generation of unexpected affects of intimacy and attachment between strangers, sui generis, across and against augmenting political divides. it is more about social creativity than social reproduction. and it may escape or transcend political pressures and apparent hegemonies. it is in the serendipitous that i have observed forms of unforeseen encounter between syrian refugees and turkish citizens generating unexpected affections that have the power to create—even under bombastic conflict—new social forms such as friendship, romantic love, or fictive kinship. finally, the transcendent is yet another frame of affect i have observed as being accentuated at this historical conjuncture close to the turkish–syrian border at the height of war. through this frame, i refer to forms of spiritual experience that have been pronounced at this time of elevated conflict and political tension. both local antakya residents and syrian refugees have been referring to special spiritual experiences, sightings of divine light descending from the sky, dream visualizations of revered saints, and miraculous occurrences taking place in an emphasized manner since the start of war in syria and related political tensions in turkey. communities gather to site the transcendent and mark the material space of its emergence. the transcendent, too, appears sui generis, against the grain, in interstices. it represents forms of spiritual affect emerging in crevices in spite of every attempt to curb or extinguish them. each of the three frames of affect that i have drawn out have emerged from my fieldwork in antakya. as i conceptualize them here, they are suggestive of the sorts of nongenealogical imagination that anthropological fieldwork can engender. for although our fieldwork requires training in western institutions (departments of social and cultural anthropology) and an immersement in their associated baggages of theory, the best of fieldwork is supposed to bring out surprise elements, frames, and concepts previously unconsidered in the anthropological heritage. it is unfortunate, therefore, that affect studies should have been so associated with theory when, if approached through fieldwork, more innovative frames emerge. i therefore here propose that we more actively embrace the fieldwork dimension of our work in further crafting affect studies; it is only through fieldwork that unexpected frames for the study of affect could possibly emerge, inspiring conceptualizations that carry us beyond now well-established theoretical patrilinies. the three frames for affect that i have here brought out of my own fieldwork stress precisely this element of surprise. looking out for “the unexpected” (see strathern 2005) as a social form encourages us to perceive that which was previously uncaptured in scholarly framings, as well as that which survives against all odds and against the grain under extreme political pressures. the remnant, the serendipitous, and the transcendent that i have begun to unfold here as frames of affect are concepts that have emerged from my fieldwork precisely in that spirit. i therefore suggest that rather than reproducing imaginaries of affect descending down the genealogical scholarly line, ethnographic work on affect should push our observations far beyond, diversifying affect studies and crafting new trajectories for the scholarly imagination. notes 1. see candea 2016 on the constructive uses of heuristics. 2. see henare, holbraad, and wastell 2007 on radical essentialism. references anderson, ben, and paul harrison, eds. 2010 taking-place: non-representational theories and geography. farnham, u.k.: ashgate. boler, megan, and michalinos zembylas 2016 “interview with megan boler: from ‘feminist politics of emotions’ to the ‘affective turn.’” in methodological advances in research on emotion and education, edited by michalinos zembylas and paul a. schutz, 17–30. basel, switzerland: springer international publishing. candea, matei 2016 “de deux modalités de comparaison en anthropologie sociale.” l’homme 218, no. 2: 183–218. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.28968. chakrabarty, dipesh 2000 provincializing europe: postcolonial thought and historical difference. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. clough, patricia ticineto, with jean halley, eds. 2007 the affective turn: theorizing the social. durham, n.c.: duke university press. connolly, william e. 2002 neuropolitics: thinking, culture, speed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. henare, amiria, martin holbraad, and sari wastell, eds. 2007 thinking through things: theorizing artifacts ethnographically. new york: routledge. holbraad, martin 2012 truth in motion: the recursive anthropology of cuban divination. chicago: university of chicago press. massumi, brian 2002 parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham, n.c.: duke university press. myers, fred r. 1991 pintupi country, pintupi self: sentiment, place, and politics among western desert aborigines. berkeley: university of california press. originally published in 1986. rosaldo, michelle z. 1980 knowledge and passion: ilongot notions of self and social life. new york: cambridge university press. strathern, marilyn 2005 kinship, law, and the unexpected: relatives are always a surprise. new york: cambridge university press. thrift, nigel 2008 non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. new york: routledge. viveiros de castro, eduardo 2012 cosmological perspectivism in amazonia and elsewhere: four lectures given in the department of social anthropology, university of cambridge, february–march 1998. hau masterclass series 1. http://haubooks.org/cosmological-perspectivism-in-amazonia. mining leftovers: making futures on the margins of capitalism cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 48-73, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.07 mining leftovers: making futures on the margins of capitalism pablo jaramillo universidad de los andes, bogotá https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8960-3275 during a meeting held in the governor’s office of the department of caldas, in the central colombian andes, a group of officers, geologists, and anthropologists, including myself, debated the ongoing mining conflicts in the region. the agenda included a feud between small-scale miners and a canadian mining company, as well as the illicit extraction of alluvial gold from the cauca river. the paradox, pointed out by the secretary of government, was that “small-scale miners don’t have a future.” by that, he meant that they do not fall into the country’s grand scheme of resource governance, recognized in the mining code (2001) and in the most recent resource policies.1 but he also meant that miners lacked a sense of saving, planning, and thinking ahead. “all the money they make,” he added, “gets spent on partying, women, and booze.” interestingly, small-scale miners think that the ones who lack a sense of future are the large-scale mining companies. mario, a young self-employed man who operates a mine without an official title, stated that “the town has been here for centuries; the mining company will exhaust all the deposits in a decade.” we should understand his comments in the context of small-scale miners’ affective relationship with gold, in which the metal is seen to “reproduce itself” in the mountain. this is achieved through the miners’ entanglement with technologies, minerals, and the activation of potentialities in the materials that surround the extraction of the precious metal. corporate and governmental actors ignore the intimate and affective relationships with the geological substances involved in gold extraction, which renders the everyday practices of future-making illegible. in contrast, small-scale miners constantly create a sense of future through an engagement with what looks like waste: mud, sand, rubble, and toxic gases resulting from the extractive process. i will generically call these substances leftovers, because they point to an excess and are potentiality contained in the matter remaining after the gold is extracted. small-scale miners are at the center of global financial capitalism and deploy capitalist ways of organizing labor and property. but by engaging with remnants, they achieve a sense of vital production and reproduction despite the vagaries of life, the cycles of extractive and financial capitalism, and local violence. leftovers thus point to the way actors under current economic regimes are at once marginalized and dominant, victims and agents, depending on the temporal and spatial scale of production. figure 1. the mountain and marmato. photo by pablo jaramillo. i understand these engagements with leftovers as part of a subsistence strategy of small-scale mining communities in their experience of marginalization and violence at several scales. in contemporary colombia, global processes intermingle with local violence fueled by valuable resources such as cocaine, gold, and coltan. on the one hand, in the years before and after the 2008 global financial crisis, the latin america gold boom accounted for 50 percent of the world’s mineral exploration (bury and bebbington 2013). mineral resources became a hedge in an environment of financial risk, skyrocketing gold prices to us$1,875 per ounce in 2011.2 gold mining and trading companies responded by aggressively attracting investment. colombia, in turn, responded by progressively opening itself to direct foreign investment and criminalizing miners that did not fit the large-scale mining model. high prices also fueled the long-standing armed conflict, which has transformed swiftly over the past ten years: it went from a confrontation between large, organized guerrillas, structured paramilitaries, and the colombian army to the atomization of belligerent groups and criminal gangs. this transformation has meant a change in the control over profitable commodities. despite the risks, small-scale and traditional mining communities still see in gold a promised, if elusive, future, even when they have to deal with local mafias and their own criminalization by the national government. in this vein, the inhabitants of marmato manipulate a wide range of things that might seem valueless to an outsider but that from the inside, hold the promise of extending miners’ present. to make a living, small-scale miners use, circulate, and recirculate every single element that potentially contains gold. no “waste” exists in miners’ eyes, only leftovers, geological objects with potential agency. amid the risks caused by insecurity and crisis, small-scale miners create a sense of future through their affective (and always material) engagement with the leftovers of gold mining, feeding their own lives in the margins of global financial capitalism. from the point of view of everyday engagements with leftovers, these multiple processes constitute practices of future-making, entailing temporal affects involving a sense of pace, rhythm, duration, and future. the miners’ relationship with tailings, rubble, and toxic substances constantly coming from the mines and minerals prove central to notions of anticipation and reproduction. the affective relationship between mining remnants and miners is contradictory but generative, heavy with both fears and ambitions of a prosperous future. in theoretical terms, leftovers point to affects emerging from human-non­human collaborations, perdurances, and practices of future-making in the context of capitalist marginalization. precarious lives in mining towns ultimately survive on the gold that sustains risky investments, but also through material forms that remain dangerously and vitally dormant in their surroundings. in that way, leftovers also point to heterogeneous ways of experiencing and conceptualizing valuable objects that simultaneously constitute resources, by-products, reserves, and waste. the town of marmato, in the central colombian andes, offers a good case in point, as an intimate and affective relationship with minerals fosters local relations and political openings that oppose transnational corporations. this article has resulted from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017 in the border region between the department of caldas and antioquia, manizales (caldas’s capital city), and bogotá (colombia’s capital city). i conducted interviews with small-scale miners, local leaders, governmental officers, and local residents. i also spent a considerable amount of time in and around mines and mills, carrying out participant observation on the process of gold extraction. in the capital cities, i conducted interviews with government officers and private-sector representatives, and i also attended public fora on mining issues. dwelling and working in the margins of capitalism the paradox at the core of the future of small-scale miners is that it is illegible from the point of view of bureaucrats and corporate officers. back in the meeting room of the governor of the department of caldas, there were about half a dozen rocks of pyrite, also called fool’s gold or tourist gold by local miners. miners offered me many of these rocks as presents, but they said that they did not contain gold and were therefore considered waste in the extractive processes. the rocks in the governor’s meeting room are most likely leftovers that have become gifts. all the officers working in the governance of gold or mining territories that i met during my fieldwork seemed to decorate their offices with such stones. so, what are these pyrite rocks doing there? as gifts, they already form part of a formula by which small-scale miners attempt to build their presence in governmental offices that, in many cases, criminalize them. beyond leftovers given as gifts, there are multiple engagements between a variety of leftovers (gases, muds, tailings, and rubble) and miners that create a sense of an enduring and resilient life. marmato is one of the world’s oldest gold-mining sites. it has gone through recurrent cycles of boom and bust, producing different extractive regimes, all of which have left layer upon layer of marginalization. today, marmato’s nine thousand inhabitants also live on the verge of a looming boom that will erase the town for good. in the early 2000s, a large-scale canadian mining company acquired all mining titles, including some that overlap with the historic center. to the company, the site is destined to become a large open pit mine, meaning the total elimination of marmato’s buildings. dwellers and the many people who still work in the shafts fiercely oppose this future. far from being passive victims of destruction, small-scale miners challenge temporal dispossession, “or the inability to plan, predict, or build futures in an incremental way” (smith 2011, 17), by retrieving gold in every piece of matter available. nowhere does this become more visible than in the engagement with leftovers in artisanal and small-scale mining activities. entanglements between resource extraction and the past are a common concern in recent literature about ruins and ecological degradation (ferry and limbert 2008; d’angelo and pijpers 2018). recent anthropological research on small-scale mining and extractive industries has emphasized the importance of considering the way in which mineral extraction entails not only changes to landscapes and wealth but also complete cosmological transformations (high 2017, 22). mines, even after closure, remain an important link between past, present, and future for local communities (halvaksz 2008; beckett and keeling 2019). likewise, research on contemporary capitalist enterprises (richard and rudnyckyj 2009; blanco, arce, and fisher 2015; weszkalnys 2016) has highlighted the importance of affect in the production of resources, commodities, and labor. thinking about affect also helps overcome notions of the economy as guided solely by rational means. temporality and affect entail a dynamic and processual perspective on the relationship between humans and natural resources. such an approach encourages us to consider the agency of nonhuman entities in the analysis of extractive and financial capitalism. studies on precariousness and ruination show the ways in which capitalism acts through a dialectic of production and the destruction of infrastructures (stoler 2008; gordillo 2014; millar 2014). as more objects, subjects, and relations repopulate the economy, the concept of work expands to include nonhuman entities. sarah besky (2014), for example, analyzes darjeeling plantations as systems in which terroir works to create a particular type of tea, rearticulating forms of colonial labor. in besky’s analysis, nonhumans work to obscure human labor. similarly, mazen labban (2014) has developed a model in which recycled metals and bacteria used in the process of mineral extraction create novel forms of capital. in brief, while many analyses have concentrated on the way large-scale mining companies attempt to frame humans, nonhumans, and their futures in ways instrumental to their operations (kneas 2016; luning 2018), i am interested mostly in the ways local communities engage with nonhuman entities in practices of future-making and resilience, in the face of the imminent annihilation of their ways of life. similarly, while nonhuman forms of work have emerged as promising analytics, studies tend to emphasize the way the work of animals, plants, and bacteria become articulated in ever-growing circuits of capital, but not the ways in which they challenge them. i want to point to other alternatives. as explained by sebastián ureta (2016), mining waste points to the importance of a caring relationship between humans and nonhumans in extractive activities. ethnographic studies on small-scale mining processes and temporalities show similar results. for example, nancy lee peluso’s (2018) analysis of the territorializing practices of small-scale miners has effectively countered the notion that resource territories are solely constructed from above, that is, from state and corporate perspectives. in another example, small-scale gold miners in west africa manage to “make time” amid rapid change in extraction techniques, migrating workforces or the depletion of miners (lanzano 2018). and as part of small-scale gold mining and social conflict in the amazon project (www.gomiam.org), many anthropologists have demonstrated the importance of a temporal dimension to understanding why mining conflicts do not turn violent (salman and de theije 2017), as well as the kind of innovations that help miners achieve sustainable production without the kind of solutions suggested by large-scale companies (massaro and de theije 2018). james h. smith’s (2011) studies on congolese coltan have shown that people effectively respond to temporal dispossession by socializing the coltan that is otherwise a cause of death and displacement. for instance, people create coltan-infused beverages that make them invulnerable or even bulletproof. by, among other things, treating coltan as food, congolese people reverse the ore’s violence and manage to conceptualize the metal as socially productive. closer to this latter perspective, i aim to show that engagements with leftovers—wasted matter with potential agency—prove crucial to understanding future-making among small-scale miners. in this sense, the work of and around leftovers shows that human and nonhuman engagements recast our understanding of small-scale miners’ capacity to stay alive amid threats, while simultaneously remaining part of capitalist cycles of production and consumption. anna lowenhaupt tsing’s (2015) work on mushroom pickers, scientists, and traders has offered a framework for understanding life growing and reproducing on the edges of capitalism. the most relevant aspect of tsing’s work for the current analysis is the insight that life in the ruins of capitalism grows at different “rates of being” (see also gilbert 2007) in a polyphony of life. thus, human and nonhuman engagement allows for a more comprehensive understanding of survival in the context of harm inflicted by corporations. it reveals the everyday strategies that counter the politics of resignation in contemporary capitalism (benson and kirsch 2010). in the context of ruination and ecological degradation, i argue that human and nonhuman forms of life grow and perdure. this does not mean that we should understand the survival strategies of small-scale miners as radically opposed to capitalism. investors in global financial centers hedge their risks through the financialization of gold coming from marginalized regions in colombia and the world. thus, small-scale gold extraction always remains immersed in global economic logics. recent works on modern time (bear 2014) and potentiality (weszkalnys 2015) in capitalism have shown how, through speculation, economies incorporate pause and delay, which were formerly deemed as largely detrimental to growth but are, in fact, central to practices of value making that affect the most vulnerable populations and landscapes. local communities live in equally heterogeneous times and potentialities (bear 2014). these studies tend to emphasize the way potentiality is instrumental to resource making and capital accumulation. corporations activate or deactivate potentialities to make profit or create opportunities. but, as i will show in the following sections, potentialities in leftovers can also be important in creating opportunities for survival in the long-standing precariousness of the global south (millar 2014). human and nonhuman engagements surrounding marmato’s mining conflict account for alternative ways of reckoning with their crisis-ridden present and uncertain future. sociotechnical transitions i came across people living amid mining fumes, rubble, mud, and sand while trying to understand the politics of a conflict over one of the richest gold deposits in the world. marmato is a town located in a mountain crisscrossed by gold veins, mined since pre-columbian times and, later, through several booms and busts (gärtner 2005; gonzález colonia 2017). the town forms part of a broader constellation of mining towns (remedios, buriticá, and el bagre to the north, and suárez and buenos aires, to the south) undergoing deep transformations as migrants, the urban and rural poor, gangs, ex-combatants of colombia’s long-standing conflict, and transnational corporations strive to extract and transact gold. successive waves of extraction and abandonment have created a regime of production in which the higher part of the mountain has become occupied by small-scale miners, while the lower part is worked by medium-sized companies (recently acquired by a large-scale canadian company striving for full control of the mineral deposit). at the top, there are indigenous people, afro-colombian descendants of slaves, and mestizo populations that have remained in the town through an entangled network of economic, political, and kinship relations. some people have recently arrived in the town with dreams of changing their luck, and others who work as miners but live in nearby towns commute daily. in 2006, as the financial crisis of 2008 was approaching, a canadian transnational corporation, gran colombia gold, bought 80 percent of the mining titles in the higher part of the mountain. the town then filled with drilling equipment and consultants working for the relocation of the historic center, which fueled financial speculation and local stories about the possible futures of marmato. the company wanted to conduct large-scale mining operations and evict local residents. for some time, they proposed an open-cut mine, which implied the town’s destruction (a project they have abandoned, according to representatives of the company i spoke with). its steepness led the top of the mountain to be historically exploited by small-scale miners. several attempts to advance large-scale mining have occurred since the 1980s, but they came to only modest fruition in the lower part of the mountain with mineros nacionales (a colombian company recently acquired by the canadian corporation). the top of the mountain was the site of the town itself, whose nine thousand inhabitants lived alongside the mines. from the mid-1990s, the government and companies used the language of risk to promote the relocation of the town to a lower, flatter lot called el llano or, to the promoters, new marmato. this coincided with the first attempts to buy the titles of the upper zone for astronomic prices, which sent the town into spectacles of conspicuous consumption and surreal stories about local and global speculations. in 2006, amid the aggressive push to buy titles, a landslide damaged parts of the town, including the central plaza, the hospital, and the town hall. the company and acolyte political sectors took the landslide as an opportunity to use further risk talk to avoid reconstruction and ultimately render the area uninhabitable in an act of deliberate ruination (cf. stoler 2008). in 2009 and 2010, the multinational company closed the recently acquired mines. in 2011, as gold reached its historic price peak (us$1,880/oz.), destruction, rumor, and exploration in marmato pushed up the value of gran colombia gold stocks from a few dollars to a staggering us$881 per share.3 the whole town lost employment and housing, and experienced an existential crisis, as it could not continue its way of existence. in this context, the miners reoccupied the mines to extract its gold-rich pockets. migrants from the entire region soon flocked to work on these deposits now called guachas. such pockets and the kind of extraction used resulted in a gold rush in which people from all over colombia arrived in town with dreams of massive wealth. people in marmato call this new regime guachería. it entails a transition to a sociotechnical system characterized by more informal labor and mine occupations, more mechanization, and the division of labor of extraction and processing. it also implies making use of waste and by-products in a way constitutive of the sociotechnical system. because of the centrality of potentiality, and also because one of the words used for “waste” is sobrantes (excess, surplus), i translate such substances as leftovers. guachería allowed former miners and newcomers to set up small and medium-sized informal mills to process the increasing amount of mineral with techniques they adapted from large-scale mills such as cyanidation, which releases the smallest particles of gold from slurry. gold poured in as processing times shortened and more people could mill their own minerals. miners experience this period through an affective sense of acceleration and anxiety. camila, a young migrant from the neighboring department of antioquia who makes a living from extracting gold from leftovers, would say that “nobody catches gold”: gold is everywhere but ultimately impossible to secure. the expression captures a widespread sense of guachería as a regime of both gold democratization and precariousness. it is a time triggered by conflict, but one in which many people find a relatively decent means of living compared to the incomes of peasants and the urban poor. but it is also a time of precarious existence because small-scale miners do not possess titles, and nobody knows how long the town is going to last. at such a conjuncture, every piece of matter brings hope and opportunity. gases, fumes, smoke, rubble, debris, mud, and sand all become enmeshed in sustaining the town’s population and landscape. these substances offer a reserve and an opportunity to maintain a sociotechnical system that redistributes wealth and a life that promises autonomy. guachería engendered a questioning of what kind of political entity the town and its population constituted. the company and the regional and national government tried to stop the phenomenon of guachería through legal intimidation, but a number of miners’ organizations emerged to counter the eviction. miners and legal advisers argued that mining titles expired after six months of inactivity. according to them, the company had lost its rights over the mines.4 as part of the legal process, some local leaders, self-employed miners, and their lawyers claimed african and indigenous descent, two populations that have special legal status in colombia. thus, some organizations and initiatives have galvanized around concepts such as “mining heritage” and “ancestral culture.” the irony is that political leaders make use of the legal demands of precarious populations in colombia (in terms of race and ethnicity), even when these prove difficult to apply in marmato. the political opportunities emerge because people can make a living from the mountain. and as i will describe later, their engagement with the materials that render their lives possible profoundly shape their political openings. at the same time, they all try to come to terms with the fact that bureaucrats, large-scale mining companies, and the leaders of other social movements that oppose gold mining deem their lives outdated, impossible, and futureless. engagements with leftovers gold is seldom seen as such in marmato. when the purest version of the metal is finally extracted, it is quickly sold and taken out of town. yet during the extraction process many opportunities exist to save gold through its leftovers. at every step of the extractive process, too many forms of labor to capture in a short essay take place. in the remainder of the article, i will therefore concentrate on those that involve a mutual laboring between geological substances and humans. later, i reflect on the kind of life and future such an engagement creates. gases and smoke mineral reactions underground, dynamite, and gunpowder create toxic gases. in the final phases of gold processing there are acids that release fumes. miners have a difficult, but potentially fruitful relationship with both. gases in mines and fumes in mills seem to constitute simple, if dangerous, by-products, but at different levels, miners, through their engagements, turn the danger into socially productive matter. gases in mines index both the right and the wrong socialities and materialities involved in the extraction of gold. after the rock is broken down, ethereal substances are the first matter miners deal with in their search for gold, as, in the mines, it is gases that define the possibility or impossibility of inhabiting the tunnels. antonio rotavinski is one of the few miners who did not sell his mine when “the canadians” arrived in 2006. shirtless, he explained to me the intricacies of operating a mine in the times of guachería. in the absence of legal delimitation, mine tunnels constantly meet. workers come and leave with ease, and he has several sections operated by independent groups of miners who pay him a fixed monthly fee for usage. the most difficult part, however, is avoiding the constant danger of suddenly falling to the bottom of the mine. the unplanned work in the mines has made miners working toward the top of the mountain go in all directions, leading to complex communicative tools in the mine shafts, which include shouting and hitting the rock. all these require a heightened attentiveness to voices and explosions in other mines near thefront (the deepest and farthest section) of the tunnel. small-scale miners have also descended into lower levels that belong to the mine of the mineros nacionales title. but mineros nacionales, the branch of the multinational company operating in the mountain, have gone too high as well. apparently, the latter did not happen by accident: “the multinational is trying to poison us,” said antonio. gases from extraction were moving up to the higher part of the mines, turning those tunnels into uninhabitable chimneys. parts of 5200, a formerly very productive mine, thus became a trap of poisonous fumes, in which temperatures could reach 50°c. as legal disputes continue, the everyday strife of the small-scale miners centers on keeping the mines habitable and productive. the ability to breathe in the mines constitutes one of the central survival issues for workers. delivering the service of “air” through pumps and pipes is a lucrative business, and most often a way of getting into the business. the relationship with poisonous gases involves idioms of caring practices among men. as i was chatting with and helping juan carlos, a fifty-year-old guachero (guachería worker), load sacks of mineral onto trucks, two younger men approached to listen to us. one was placing dynamite, planning to ignite it to reenter the mine. the other had just emerged from the shaft. as juan carlos and i talked about the risks of gases and how he perceived the toxic fumes by the kind of itch he felt in his eyes, the younger guacheros took the occasion to brag about their bravado and success. juan carlos stopped them, uttering a warning in rhyme: “don’t be confiados [trusting, but also naive] and porfiados [stubborn]; listen to others—mines aren’t dangerous until they are.” the act of caring among men entails teaching and learning to wait, involving affects such as patience and prudence. the aftermath of explosions is a tense time for guacheros. eager to see the uncovered vein they are trying to follow and worried that someone might steal their ore, miners must get into the tunnels as soon as possible. life in the shaft involves the constant rubbing of bodies against each other, as darkness is interrupted by beams of light emanating from the headlamps. the sound of hammers and pikes echoes through the tunnels, indicating where other workers are. at midday, miners sit by the entrance with their lunches packed in plastic boxes or plant leaves. the mines are an intimate space. mario, another mine laborer, told me that some mines were so hot that miners had to work in trunks, pouring water over their bodies to cool down. charged with ammonia, gases coming from the mines smell like urine. learning to survive in a masculine environment and sharing the air is one of the central elements miners mention about working in the tunnels. “watch out, the mine is spicy [picante]!” is a common way of warning coworkers about the presence of odorless gases that are felt as a burning sensation in the eyes. workers in the shafts have a sense of pride about the mines’ and their own smells. leidy, a woman who worked as an environmental technician for a company, would laugh mentioning that miners hated it when she went to the mines wearing perfume. the gases are dangerous by-products, but also indices of shared, deep, buried lives. figure 2. guacheros in the mouth of a tunnel. photo by pablo jaramillo. according to alex, the municipal authority on mining issues (a joint office of the police and the mayor’s office that has auditing and conflict-resolution functions) stated that one of the canadian company’s main issues with the miners working further up the mountain was a different type of effluvium: marijuana smoke. clouds of smoke get into the upper galleries of the corporation’s mines, which treats this as a nuisance. alex, who has been called to mediate in the conflict, says that “the lads like to smoke chirusa [weed]; for them, it is normal to get high in the mines.” then we laughed about the twist in the political clash caused by smoke, and the implications of marijuana fumes on conviviality, mellowness, and mines as living spaces. the minerals themselves produce deadly gases, making some mines chronically dangerous. but the fumes of recent dynamite explosions are a more common cause of death among young, impatient miners who are too eager to get their hands on the mineral and the gold contained in it. to sustain such an intricate existence with others involves a sense of shared means and ends. waiting to reenter a mine after an explosion is of vital importance in this regard. cristina, the woman in charge of the statistics at marmato hospital, explained the point very clearly with an example: “last month two youths died in a mine; they had done well, but they went crazy with the money, and when they blew the dynamite the last time, they were too eager to take out the mineral and entered the mine at night. they were found there, dead, engasados [poisoned by gas].” gas indexes the potential of extraction and defines, in practice, a time to extract and a time to wait. the possibility of becoming engasado is one of the main complaints miners raise against mineros nacionales, the company operating in the mountain’s lower zone. additionally, the multinational company and governmental programs of mining formalization—that demand operating on mines with official titles, paying taxes, and registration of workers in the social security system—have advanced an aggressive campaign to hire the miners who occupied the disputed mines as guacheros for little more than a monthly minimum salary (us$250, compared to a guachero’s monthly average of us$600). the miners disliked many things about working for the company: having a boss, earning less, and the rare opportunities for having a lucky strike. one of those employed by the multinational company as a hired hand was rubén. when i accompanied him to his 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift in the mine, he complained that for the companies, “there was no easter, no christmas, there aren’t weekends either.” the large mine of the multinational operated in a time parallel to the social time of the residents of marmato. the image of people engasada in mineros nacionales mines would arise in conversations again and again, and it captures the mixture of carelessness and greed that miners associate with gas poisoning. small-scale miners attribute the number of engasados in mineros nacionales to a pace of production hostile to miners’ lives. tunnel fumes thus point to a feature present in all treatment of waste and leftovers, that is, to the possiblity of turning fear into a productive attitude toward life and future. rubén, who was born in marmato and worked in the multinational’s mine only because his divorce obliged him to have a formal job, linked the pace of extraction to the premature ending of marmato. he told me this while explaining his job in the mine to me. he is an entubador, a pipefitter, in charge of fixing and installing the infrastructure for ventilation in the tunnels. without clean air getting in and toxic air being expelled, it would be impossible for the mine to operate in three shifts, 24/7. moreover, the three shifts figured prominently in rubén’s view that the large-scale mine had the ability to multiply time: “when the first twenty-year concession to operate la palma [the main mine now operated by the multinational] was granted, nobody realized that this amounted to sixty years, if you operate three eight-hour shifts.” volatile substances point to the tension between matter and what it might contain, a kind of reserve or even actual resource (cf. richardson and weszkalnys 2014). gas is a substance constantly released in mills as part of the final cleaning process of gold. even after washing the fine-grained sands, a mixture of lead and copper remains attached to the gold. millers add nitric acid to the final, gold-rich mud to burn away these elements. the process leads to the release of an orange smoke, dreaded by those working in the mills because it “poisons the blood” and makes men sexually impotent. yet the fumes’ toxicity also constitutes a source of opportunities. for johan, a prominent leader in the demonstrations surrounding mine closures, fumes are not so much a poison but a leftover. he therefore decided to set up terranova, his own “sustainable mill” that “focuses on the maximum retrieval of gold.” johan is most proud of a system of chimneys and filters he developed in which he captures gold from the smoke and fumes that result from the cleaning process. he rinses the filters, sponges the pipes, and then washes the resulting slurry to retrieve a few more grams of gold. thus, gases, fumes, and smoke again indicate a sign of the always present potential for life and death in mineral substances. miners can transform their own lives and, ultimately, marmato as they engage in a relationship with the gases. gas is a substance created by mineral and human reactions, one that also shows the potentiality and promise of gold. but it also signals dangers, fears, an accelerated pace of extraction, and a productive affective relationship with risky shafts. gases are the breathable substance of miners’ lives in the underground, and they shape overtly masculine relationships built around the extraction of a mineral from tunnels. rubble rubble constitutes rocks without pyrite that are extracted from the mines. in the shafts, experienced miners define where to locate dynamite charges in the front of a mine. younger people in the team ignite the explosives. this has become a very dangerous task since the national government restricted the circulation of safe, legal explosives as part of antiterrorist measures in the country. the prohibition began to be enforced precisely at the time the miners retook the mines in the conflict with the canadian company, a coincidence widely interpreted in marmato as retaliation and the beginning of a new episode in a long-standing process of criminalization. taking the rubble outside the shafts constitutes one of the most labor-intensive parts of the relatively manual activities practiced at the top of the mountain. people who take the rubble outside the mines use a manual winch and pushcarts. the activity by far requires the most muscle labor, and although workers alternate tasks, the more novice and youngest of the lot tend to perform this job. rubble management therefore constitutes the entry-level job in the trade. rubble is thrown outside the mine, near the entrance, and the rocks roll down and rest in critical equilibrium, coating the mountain and rendering the soil sterile to plants. the rocks might later fall from a few to dozens of meters down the hills. quarrels sometimes emerge around discharges of materiales (materials) that another miner deems too harmful or a nuisance. small to medium-sized rocks lie on the steep hill—potentially dangerous, but also a source of livelihood. figure 3. mining debris on the slope. photo by pablo jaramillo. beyond a mere risk, rolling stones offer an idiom with a special affective capacity for the marmato residents to face danger and change. stories about rolling stones can be heard everywhere in town. my comments that the place was dangerous because there was too much debris coming out of the tunnels often triggered such tales. the conversation would usually end with a remark about the outsider’s inability to deal with rolling stones. eulises, an active local leader, mineral trader, and amateur lawyer, would explain, “when a rock is rolling down a hill, you do not run. as it goes down, bumping from one place to the other, you turn and face it. then you wait until the rock is close enough and avoid it in its last bounce. you never run, or the rock will chase you!” leftovers of tunnels provide miners with an affective relationship with the mountain. workers and residents repeat tales of this kind relentlessly. storytellers list survivors and victims of rocks, as well as the situations surrounding such events. the stories have meaning beyond their cautionary nature. outsiders, eulises says, consider marmato a disorderly pile of rubble only because they fail to inhabit its surroundings and move around; strangers cannot even walk. narrating and dwelling, senses and affect within a landscape of rubble are inextricably linked. rubble also features prominently in talk about fate approaching a person. thus, stories of rolling stones and their victims also take alternative forms in which people appear as marcado (marked) for death. the rocks chase people because something had to happen to them, and storytellers invoke proverbs and tropes of fatefulness and predestination. a youth of seventeen had died in a mine just a few days before i spoke to eulises. the event captured the imagination of all interlocutors during those days, not because dying in shafts was rare, but because a mineral block had fallen from the ceiling at the entrance of the mine. what struck people was that the young man did not even work as a miner. he was “marked,” according to eulises and the women in the hospital who registered his death. on hearing these stories in a mill, my partner said that in marmato, people seemed more open to the idea of dying. the people around emphatically rejected that interpretation: “we care about death as much as you do, but death is always there.” the relationship with rubble demonstrates that life and death are always readily contained in the mineral. in their everyday dealings with leftovers, people experience in practical ways otherwise abstract notions of future contained in concepts such as destino (destiny). this forms part of a widely shared view that any activity dealing with gold always already entails a problematic potentiality, a maldición (curse). infamously wealthy entrepreneurs are cursed because they are destined to return to poverty. such ideas have reverberations beyond the lives of individuals. many accounts, for instance, see marmato condemned to an always recurring cycle of slavery—today’s conflict and crisis only yet another instance of an event that already happened during the spanish colonial period, the hacienda regime, and the concessions of the mines to london companies in the aftermath of colombia’s independence. yet the ambiguous potentiality of gold can also be countered by literally standing up to rolling boulders. out of place, rubble and rocks are potentially dangerous, but they also provide a possible source of livelihood. like the gases and fumes produced in the mines, they are always by-products engaged productively. the people of marmato widely regard the town as a rebuscadero, a scrambling place, a town where people come to find a living and become enmeshed in intricate networks of labor, kinship, and dwelling. rebuscadero not only constitutes a sociological and spatial category. it is, most explicitly, a strategy for survival people call rebusque, which involves searching for hidden opportunities in the scattered rocks. people who practice such a strategy call themselves rebuscadores. during the extraction process, fragments of pyrite end up in the debris thrown out of the mines. minerals taken in sacks, cable cars, buckets, and canalized in silos also fall and end up in the rubble. the townspeople most marginalized survive partially or entirely by recovering fallen pieces of mineral. rocks picked around mines are not sold or bought, they are rebuscadas—sought and found with considerable effort and cunning. miners around the tunnel entries do not claim any property over the mineral in the rubble, and no authorization is required by, requested from, or granted to rock pickers. however, mine owners and rebuscadores often told me that this order of things stood as an expression of the generosity and solidarity characteristic of marmato, distributed in the form of rubble and other materials. rubble implies a sense of survival but also of the temporality of life. the relationship between stones rolling down the hill and making a living out of fallen rocks conceives a life in which events approach persons. this is closely tied to the notion of the catholic devenir in which it is the future that approaches the person, not the other way around, such as in the modern notion of the future as a space of possibilities to be filled. thus, the life created through engagement with rubble comes with temporal affect and a sense of temporal orientation that allow miners to build meaningful existences, even in the context of imminent and violent eviction. in the end, the mineral goes to the mills and is transformed into massive amounts of sand and mud. sand and mud miners take mineral out of mines to be processed in mills. small-scale mills grind rocks with manganese or iron balls tumbling in a mechanical drum. the resulting sand goes through a wilfley table, the output is washed in pans, and finally cleaned with nitric acid. remnants of the process still contain gold in important quantities. mill workers pass coarser sand through the drums again. it is toward the third or fourth grinding that people call the tailings conchos and they become a valuable leftover that can be saved to cover future expenses or sold to people willing to grind them again and take a piece of the remaining gold. figure 4. a pile of conchos. photo by pablo jaramillo. the circulation of conchos involves most people in town. first, there are the gold cortadores, “cutters,” people who extract gold from sands in wooden pans (bateas). they are experienced people who stopped working in the shafts (they consider themselves too experienced for such a burdensome task). the places where cutters work (cortaderos) are hectic nodes of speculation about the trading of minerals, gold, and leftovers. miners and non-miners, men and women, and people of all ages and origins buy buckets of sand at cortaderos. trading in conchos offers a way of getting into the business of extracting gold without going into the tunnels. thus, women and newcomers are prominent buyers, while male miners most often function as prominent sellers. until a recent change in the colombian labor code, women were forbidden to take jobs in underground areas, making conchos a favored alternative for them. because it requires less strength or skill, newcomers would get involved in the cumbersome materialities, times, and circulation of gold via conchos and eventually develop the knowledge, sensitivity, and relationships enabling them to perform other more lucrative tasks. these might involve deploying more relationships to extract and process greater quantities of mineral and, therefore, extract more gold, but they also create gas, rubble, and sand in the process. it is the potentiality and reproduction of substances such as sand and mud that guarantee the permanence of small-scale miners in the mountain. conchos oxidize with exposure to air, releasing more gold, a well-known process that has miners insist that “gold reproduces” in the piles of sand. such views on the generativity of gold form part of broader notions of the metal as alive and cunning. the mineral hides itself in the mines. workers say that greed and an overly strong desire for wealth affect gold, producing rejection. in turn, the desire for gold based on sharing or wasting wealth conspicuously attracts gold—it comes to people in a physical and temporal sense. in a similar way, finding gold in conchos is a matter of unlocking the metals still contained in the minerals, and time is crucial to let this happen. it is in the times when mines flood or shops close that miners sell or grind conchos to earn money. they can also sell the conchos outright after grinding the material, but transactions demand the buyer be part of a network of miners. miners often hand out conchos as gifts or alms, exhibiting another way of introducing time in conchos through delays in material circulation. in the case of alms, the recipient might end up with either a small or a huge quantity of gold. “once a woman came begging for food, and the owner of that mine gave her a bucket of sand instead,” explained mario, the same miner who insisted on marmato’s alternative futures. “the woman got an incredible amount of gold from it and couldn’t stop crying.” the surprise in conchos, unpredictable gifts, reinforces the idea that gold will appear to the right people at the right time. as with rolling stones, this kind of circulation creates a sense of forthcoming among those involved, a world of preperceived potentialities, as opposed to an abstract future with endless possibilities (cf. bourdieu 1963). the circulation of conchos reproduces gold, social relations, and certain ideas about the future. it is impossible for two buckets of conchos to be commensurate, which is why it is key to know the mine from where the mineral originated, the grade of that mine, the kind of gold it produces, and, most important, the seller. a naive buyer might find themselves deceived with fabricated conchos, that is, regular soil with an addition of gold dust, ultimately “sterile” after the added gold has been extracted. in this way, saving, selling, and grinding conchos constitutes a way of storing potential wealth. other leftovers like mineral found in the debris of tunnels or in the surroundings of mines are available to everyone who wants to collect them. this makes conchos a leftover indexing the redistribution of wealth in marmato. however, while tailings represent a widespread source of wealth, these remains can become dangerous at many levels. poison (veneno) is a word used for substances like cyanide, but also to refer to fabricated conchos. therefore, a certain kind of tailing involves the risk of dangerous relationships. for this reason, learning to deal with conchos involves lessons about moral motivations and the nature of marmato’s sociality. figure 5. cyanide leaching tanks pouring tailings into creeks. photo by pablo jaramillo. at every step of the milling process, sand falls outside the tables, canals, and sacks. this mud is the mill owners’ payment. they put the debris in piles and every two weeks pour it into tanks with cyanide in a process called cyanidation or leaching. in another instance in which the center and the margins of capitalist accumulation connect, medium-sized companies introduced leaching in the late 1930s, but only in the 1980s did it become widespread as part of the government’s efforts to increase yield. cyanide precipitates gold in the smallest pyrite structures and leads to, literally, “liquid gold.” nearly every mill constructed after guachería has a leaching tank. this has effectively created a local entrepreneurial class mostly occupied by newcomers who soon became moneylenders. however, for small-scale miners occupying the mines, this development made for only a minor problem, since the newcomers integrated into local networks of kinship and mining. cyanide is what allows mill owners to make a living, but it is also a deadly substance. miners associate cyanide with suicides and barren landscapes. for instance, creeks are the working area for miners that wash mineral in sluice boxes. they extract gold from slurry poured by mills, but they also complain that the process of leaching “burns” the gold. leaching thus affords yet another occasion in which leftovers entail both the democratization of gold and the marginalization of people in town. again: hope and despair. the use of leaching in small-scale mills attracted other dangerous businesses, such as the importation of suspicious tailings. small-scale mining in marmato does not use mercury, but mill workers began discovering mercury in leaching tanks, indicating obscure relationships. nearly a hundred kilometers north of marmato lies buriticá, another mining town under the control of paramilitary mobs and another canadian mining corporation. in buriticá, the use of mercury to amalgamate gold is widespread in illicit extraction because it is cheap and adapts well to the alluvial mining practiced there. mill owners in marmato started to import polluted sands from buriticá to conduct leaching and extract the remaining gold. processing the sands from buriticá proved extremely profitable for mill owners in marmato. for johan, who extracts gold from fumes, such windfall gains were a risky bonanza. to him, very few people wanted to talk about the business, because it was illegal, involved invisible relationships with paramilitary gangs, and, most important, implied dealing with a dreaded substance. the presence of mercury also implied more potential auditing of gold production in town, thus eventually fostering the further criminalization of small-scale mining. thomas robertson and trisia farelly (2018) describe the way mercury-elimination programs in buriticá have implied deep entanglements between smalland large-scale mining, leading to regulation, new labor arrangements, and the loss of autonomy for small-scale miners. because it makes for a profitable and widespread business, the consumption, production, and circulation of mud and sand are ultimately responsible for the financial sustainability of small-scale miners. but the potentiality to sustain this life in the margins of capitalism also contains the danger of poisonous relations and substances. in this context, dealing with muds also literally means dealing with the poison coming out of violence elsewhere. small-scale miners who intend to resist violent and exploitative processes also react by countering the dangerous potentials in leftovers. cleaning the latter offers a way of navigating the violence and criminalization that leftovers might carry. conclusion luciana massaro and marjo de theije (2018) have shown that small-scale miners in brazil have innovated cleaner production methods without relying on the solutions offered by large-scale mining. rather than being present-oriented, small-scale brazilian miners base their innovation on a clear sense of foresight, agility, and development. in a similar vein, i have found that these other temporal affects rely on small-scale miners’ engagement with leftovers to expand opportunities in time and space. i therefore show the capacity of small-scale miners to develop future-making relationships and alternative forms of social duration and perdurance that go beyond mainstream notions of economic development and growth. engagements with leftovers involve human and nonhuman collaboration to unlock and deal with ambiguous potentialities—in my ethnographic case, the potentialities of geological substances, waste, poison, and many others. the mutual engagement proves crucial for the survival of people affected by the contradictions of financial and extractive capitalism and local violence. beyond a focus on the way capitalism instrumentalizes nonhumans, i demonstrated how local communities engage in practices of future-making in the face of the imminent annihilation of their ways of life. the first consequence of the work of and around leftovers is the extension of the present in which small-scale miners’ lives perdure. the first strategy to stretch the present is waiting as an agentive act that expands the duration of marmato’s mines. for instance, the timing to reenter a tunnel because of poisonous gases combines a sense of the pace of extraction, a moral vision, and affects such as calm, hope, and fear. the second consequence is a redistribution of gains and losses for most of the population and for future generations. while estimating the amount of gold he had obtained from a lot of minerals, a miner would comment that in marmato gold is constant. “it is an illusion that their mines are exhausting; the point is that there are always miners that are ‘seeing’ the gold and others that are in the process of obtaining it.” the constancy of gold means that no seasonal variations in production can mark the passage of time and a sense of enduring life can be achieved. contrary to the widespread notion in governmental offices that small-scale miners do not have a sense of future, i have demonstrated that leftovers entail a collaboration between human and nonhumans that creates an expanded present and value through differentially activated materials. inhabiting such an expanded present constitutes a way of creating a forthcoming (cf. bourdieu 1963, 61). i understand this temporality as opposed to financial and speculative capitalism, but nevertheless as part of the heterogeneity of times present in current global economic regimes. leftovers turn capitalist pause and temporal dispossession (as in the decision of the mining company to close the mines) into an agentive livelihood practice for small-scale miners. the interplay between humans and nonhumans effectively leads to waiting moments. it is in these wait times that gains are attained, and survival is possible. therefore, paying attention to human and nonhuman engagements in the experience of marginalization offers a way to deal with and resist the kind of temporalities and durations imposed by multinational corporations and neoliberal governments. economies of leftovers are a situated response practiced in marmato and elsewhere to the unsustainable lives that come with policy programs involving notions such as progress, development, and “a better future.” collaboration with leftovers is a practice of building mutuality with, within, and around the mountain that sustains marmato. the political imagination in marginalized areas thus offers a basic template of resilience and reconstruction, characterized by intensities located in the relationship between humans, minerals, gases, mud, and mining technologies. abstract the colombian government and large-scale mining companies accuse small-scale gold miners of lacking a sense of the future, thereby harming the future of colombia. in this article, i argue that marginalized people who extract gold with small-scale techniques create an alternative sense of future by engaging with the leftovers of their gold mining practices. this article is based on ethnographic fieldwork with people who struggle to make a living in the wake of large-scale mining interventions in the town of marmato. small-scale mining constantly creates simple by-products—gases, rubble, and mud—that look like waste. small-scale miners engage with such substances as a way to make sense of their lives and the future. making the relationships between humans and geological substances, waste and technology visible elucidates alternative forms of life that “get in the way” of a multinational mining company, the national government, local mafias, and financial markets hungry for gold in times of crisis. by analyzing people’s engagement with leftovers, i offer an understanding of resilience and survival in the margins of capitalist cycles of violence. [leftovers; affect; future; mineral resources; gold; mining conflicts; work; nonhumans] resumen el gobierno de colombia y las compañías mineras a gran escala ven la minería a pequeña escala como una práctica sin futuro y dañina para el país. en este artículo argumento que las personas marginalizadas que extraen oro a pequeña escala crean sentidos de futuro alternativos al entrar en relación con las sobras de sus propias prácticas mineras. el artículo está basado en trabajo de campo etnográfico en el pueblo de marmato, con personas que luchan por sobrevivir ante la inminencia de la ejecución de un proyecto de minería a gran escala en la montaña donde se localiza el pueblo. la minería a pequeña escala crea subproductos de manera permanente—colas, sobrantes y restos—que parecen basura. no obstante, los mineros a pequeña escala se involucran con estas sustancias como una forma de hacer sentido sobre sus propias vidas y futuros. hacer visible la relación entre humanos y sustancias geológicas, desechos y tecnología hace posible apreciar formas alternativas de vida que “se ponen en el camino” de una multinacional minera, el gobierno nacional, mafias locales y los mercados financieros que buscan oro en tiempos de crisis. al analizar la relación de las personas con gases, escombros, rocas, y barro, aporto una posibilidad de entender la resiliencia y subsistencia en los márgenes del capitalismo y sus ciclos de violencia. [sobras; afecto; future; recursos minerales; oro; conflictos mineros; trabajo; no-humanos] notes acknowledgments the writing of this article was possible thanks to a newton fund researchers link travel grant (british council) by the uk department for business, energy and industrial strategy (beis). special thanks to giselle figueroa, gisa weszkalnys, austin zeiderman, laura bear, katy gardner, and rodrigo charaffedine bulamah for their valuable support and suggestions at different stages of this article. i am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and members of the cultural anthropology editorial collective, particularly to brad weiss, for their constructive engagement with my ideas. 1. including the 2002 regulatory decree for the legalisation of de facto mining (decree 2390 / regulatory decree of article 165 of the mining code), the national mining development plan, the 2010 1382 law, which reformed the 2001 mining code, the 2012 decree 2235, which penalized illegal mining, the 2013 decree 933 on formalization, and the decree 935 on mining titles (echavarria 2014). 2. data from gold.org (see goldhub 2019). 3. data from listings on the toronto stock exchange. see https://web.tmxmoney.com/quote.php?locale=en&qm_symbol=gcm (accessed september 22, 2019). 4. the colombian constitutional court first backed the local miners’ argument (t-438 of 2015) and then reverted the ruling (a-583 of 2015). in february 2017, the constitutional court (su-133 of 2017) finally supported the arguments of the small-scale miners, saying that a prior informed consultation should have taken place before the acquisition of the titles and ordering the mining company to institute one. references bear, laura 2014 “doubt, conflict, mediation: the anthropology of modern time.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 20, supp. 1: 3–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12091. beckett, caitlynn, and arn keeling 2019 “rethinking remediation: mine reclamation, environmental justice, and 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contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.07 working mis/understandings working mis/understandings: the tangled relationship between kinship, franco-malagasy binational marriages, and the french state jennifer cole university of chicago the experientially compelling nature of romantic love and companionate marriage not withstanding, marriage is neither an entirely individual matter nor an entirely familial one. rather, marriage has long been central to how states regulate their populations and constitute national belonging. the entangled relationship between marriage, kinship, and nation is particularly visible in france (robcis 2013; surkis 2006). during the past several decades, rates of marriage have declined among the majority of the population, replaced by pacs (pacte civil de solidarité) and informal cohabitation; france has one of the lowest marriage rates in northern europe (moore 2006). at the same time that marriage ratios have declined, heated public debate about marriage, sexuality, and intimate relations among gays and immigrants have exploded in the public sphere. in the spring of 2013, for example, france passed a marriage bill allowing gay marriage (marriage pour tous), amid considerable protest (le monde 2013). similarly, forced marriage and polygamy have recurrently surfaced as topics of public concern and discussion, particularly following riots in 2005, which some high-placed french officials blamed on the practice of polygamy (sciolino 2005). these controversies index more than contested cultural practices. in the context of growing threats to french sovereignty—including increasing globalization, european integration, regional decentralization, and a visible muslim immigrant population—these debates have also become the battleground on which to determine who belongs to the nation and how. the “stakes are not only the sexual order,” eric fassin (2008, 104) noted with respect to public discussions about gay marriage, “but also the national family.” in a related vein, mayanthi fernando (2013) has argued that recent concern about muslim women’s sexuality in the banlieues, neighborhoods that have become metonymic of muslim migrants and disorder, registers the french republic’s efforts to reassert sovereignty and restore authority. more generally, marriage, kinship and sexuality now constitute key sites for the construction and negotiation of the external borders and internal boundaries of french society (d. fassin 2010). the way love, marriage, and kinship figure in the negotiation of borders and the policing of french national identity is particularly visible in the case of binational marriages, what the french now refer to as marriage mixte. since the decline in state-sponsored labor migration that occurred in the late 1970s, marriage and the right to family reunification have become one of the few ways for would-be migrants to secure legal entry and citizenship (ferran 2008; for europe more generally, see beck-gernsheim 2011; bledsoe and sow 2011; charsley 2012; fernandez 2013; rytter 2012). marriage not only enables the immigration of the foreign spouse; it may also enable the couple to invite other family members to immigrate to the couple’s country of residence. in europe generally, and in france specifically, efforts to limit immigration have produced a frenzy of legislation seeking to control binational marriage and subsequent family reunification (charsley 2012; ferran 2008; fernandez 2013; neveu kringelbach 2013; rytter 2012). new regulations make them ever more difficult to achieve, even as official pronouncements justify heightened control by demonizing binational marriages and family reunification as no more than clever ploys to gain citizenship (le figaro 2013). some policy makers, citing contentious national statistics, also claim that immigrants use marriage as a way to import spouses from their countries of origin (gaubert 2012; tribalat 2009). they fear that insofar as such marriages enable the growth of separate, ethnic communities in france, they threaten the french republican norms of universal, unmarked citizenship (scott 2007). in 2006, pascal clément, the minister of justice under then president jacques chirac, declared that “marriage has come to have enormous migratory stakes. bringing a spouse to france is one of the major motives for requesting family reunification … we have to acknowledge that increasing numbers of cases of fraudulent marriages have been brought to our attention by mayors and consular officers” (cited in robledo 2011, 1; translation mine). to prevent abuse and reduce the number of visas granted, the administration extended the probationary period during which a foreign spouse is granted a temporary visa, making it harder for that person to work. the number of years before a foreign spouse can apply for citizenship has also been increased, and new laws make it harder for would-be migrants to come to france on a tourist visa and subsequently regularize their administrative status via marriage, a common practice in the past. in addition, the process of applying for visas and residency cards has become increasingly arbitrary, subject to the whims of officials who decide which foreigners are eligible for marriage on a case-by-case basis (ferran 2008). government and popular discourse on marriage migration and binational marriage has generated two kinds of opposition, one between love and money, the other between “french” and “immigrant” kinship. historically, both dichotomies emerged in the context of european colonialism and provided the grammar through which colonial powers defined themselves and later sought to manage their relations with their former colonies. as jonathan parry (1986) noted in his re-reading of marcel mauss, the ideology of a pure gift versus an intrinsically self-interested commodity, of which money is the quintessential example, emerged in tandem with the growth of capitalism and modern social institutions. in a parallel vein, elizabeth povinelli (2006) has argued that during the nineteenth century, “socially exfoliating love”—as she describes the notion of romantic love between two sovereign individuals—grew in prominence throughout europe. she contends that as marriage founded on romantic love became the dominant way of organizing intimate relations, other social arrangements premised on the more local, material, and potentially instrumentalist demands of kinship (what she calls “genealogy”) were projected outward onto the colonized world. in the context of contemporary debates about binational marriage and immigration, these oppositions converge to imply that french people have families defined by love, while former colonial subjects, now turned would-be immigrants, have families determined by the pragmatic needs of genealogy. during my fieldwork with coastal malagasy marriage migrants and their binational, bicultural families in southwestern france, however, it became clear that neither the binary contrast of love versus money nor the opposition between love and genealogy captured the complex processes i observed and participated in. this essay analyzes the predicaments in which marriage migrants and their families find themselves. i focus especially on the perspective of malagasy wives. theirs, however, is only one of three viewpoints necessary to illuminate what is happening: theirs, their husbands’, and that of french immigration law and administration. consequently, while foregrounding women’s experiences, i include all three perspectives to better elucidate the stakes of contemporary binational marriage.1 one might expect that marriage between people with different conceptions of family would prove difficult even under the best circumstances. in the case of marriages between malagasy women and frenchmen, gross economic inequality between france and madagascar magnifies these distinctions. and the french administration’s deliberate efforts to police binational marriage further complicates the contrasting understandings and social and economic imbalances potentially already present in these unions. in part, such policing occurs when the government seeks to create and mobilize difference, establishing distinctions between french and immigrant ways of marrying and creating families to shore up the boundaries of french identity. i show how as actors attempt to manage their binational marriages, they become drawn into this process, inadvertently naturalizing a hierarchical relationship between france and madagascar. all truths are not worth telling (toute vérité n’est pas bon à dire) let me begin with a conversation i had one day with two malagasy women, vola and nana, who had both married frenchmen and moved to france.2 while we sat and flipped through old photo albums featuring numerous weddings between french men and malagasy women, first communion parties, and baptisms at the local catholic church, vola recounted with evident pride how she had helped four of her sisters come from madagascar to france. at the time, just after the turn of the millennium, it had still been possible to come on a tourist visa, marry a french citizen, and petition the french state for a change of visa status, which is what these women did. as she continued her story, however, it soon became clear that to bring her sisters to france, vola had to do more than find them husbands. she had also had to negotiate with her own husband, pierre. not only did she need pierre’s consent to bring another guest into the household that they shared with his elderly mother but the french government also required his signature on the housing certificate (certificat d’hébergement) needed to authorize a tourist visa. a sociable man, pierre had welcomed the first three women who came. yet as one and then another and then yet another arrived, filled the bath tub to the rim with piping hot water, and ate expensive packaged food out of the fridge without regard to cost, he began to complain. meanwhile, vola’s relatives in madagascar continued to implore her for help. they told vola that they had suddenly become aware of another sister, her father’s child out of wedlock. reporting that the girl had started frequenting two well-known nightclubs, and fearing that she was on the slippery path to prostitution, they begged vola to help her. sensitive to the need to solidify her status among her family in madagascar, vola decided she would try to bring the girl to france. by now, however, pierre was tired of the impositions. he began to protest, arguing that surely they could not support so many people. in response, vola drew on the language of kinship that she hoped would persuade him: the girl was her sister, so it would be morally wrong not to assist her. pierre acquiesced. it was when i asked vola if she had ever explained to her husband how she was actually related to the girl that nana turned to me and said in french, “all truths are not worth telling.” i pushed vola on whether she might not elaborate—after all, her husband seemed like a kind, open-minded man. her response was curt: “you know the french, for them, family means your mother, your father, your husband, your children, that’s it. you’re lucky if even a sibling counts.” vola’s statement “you’re lucky if even a sibling counts” reveals her familiarity with french immigration law, which only deems children and spouses eligible for family reunification (ferran 2008). though pierre’s views did not perfectly replicate those instantiated in french legislation (after all, he allowed vola’s three sisters to come knowing they would likely overstay their tourist visas), vola knew that as resources became scarce and tensions grew, he was likely to find the claims of a full sister more compelling than those of a person to whom, from his perspective, she was only tenuously related. rather than elaborate the fine points of malagasy kinship, vola likened her relationship to the girl to a french notion of kinship she thought more likely to elicit pierre’s sympathy; obligations to a full sister trump those to an illegitimate half sister. vola’s and nana’s adoption of the french aphorism that “all truths are not worth telling” might be taken to suggest that the government’s fears are well founded. certainly, women find the promise of french citizenship and the ability to improve their own and their families’ lives one of the marriage’s attractions. yet this interpretation fails to recognize a number of important points. to start with, many of the men who marry malagasy women do not have an easy time finding wives; in many cases they rely on these women’s productive and caring labor for their own physical and economic well-being. moreover, not only do many of these marriages last a long time—far longer than the approximately five years that it takes to acquire french citizenship—but in many cases the french husbands and malagasy wives are involved in various kinds of complex, joint projects, including rearing children, caring for elderly parents, running businesses, and building second homes in madagascar. the combination of mutual need, sustained day-to-day interactions, and shared long-term projects suggest something rather more complicated than the commodification of marriage and citizenship. working mis/understandings and the cultural politics of marriage migration i use the idea of a working misunderstanding to analyze these complex cultural processes, a term that i borrow from the legal anthropologist paul bohannan (see also livingston 2007 and tsing 2005 for the equally useful term productive misunderstanding). bohannan (1965) used a “working misunderstanding” to capture the slippages and disjunctions between how nigerians and british colonial officials, whose relations were mediated by different legal regimes, sometimes produced commonly acceptable outcomes. in his framing, the working misunderstanding typically referred to an oppositional encounter between two groups, a view no longer tenable without attention to the multiple cross-cutting interests that characterized both colonizers and colonized (comaroff 1989; stoler 1989). despite legitimate criticisms, bohannan’s term has merit.3 in what follows, i make complex, cross-cutting interests and tensions central to the concept by attending to the entangled relationships among french law and public discourse, french husbands’ vernacular practices of marriage and kinship, and the marriage and kinship practices of malagasy wives. to signal these cross-cutting interests, i use the term working mis/understanding. working mis/understandings between people holding differing amounts of power, such as colonial subjects and colonizers, are never perfectly symmetrical. nor are the relationships between malagasy women and their french husbands. malagasy women start as astute observers of french family life and want their french husbands and the wider community to accept them. by contrast, their husbands, who enjoy a position of relative power, have less incentive and fewer opportunities to fully understand either their wives’ ways of building and conceptualizing family or their motivations. nevertheless, insofar as they are engaged in joint projects of family formation, these husbands and wives must coordinate their actions. to do so, malagasy women and their french husbands use their knowledge of french kinship and malagasy culture to effectively translate their notions of family for one another, in the shadow of state categories. malagasy wives view kin relations expansively, often seeking to grow social networks that stretch from madagascar to france (cole 2014). french husbands have a more restricted vision of who counts as kin, focused primarily on the nuclear family. they often seek to limit the connections that their wives want to build, expecting their wives to prioritize their relations with their conjugal, rather than their natal, families. as men and women seek to negotiate their different visions of family, french immigration law and public discourse intervene to further complicate their efforts. fearful that they will be accused of using marriage to obtain citizenship and its material benefits, malagasy women need to explain their ongoing commitments to their malagasy kin in ways that their husbands and french families will recognize and interpret as morally legitimate. to do so, these women play strategically on ambiguities in malagasy kinship, selectively emphasizing certain aspects and downplaying others to represent their claims in a way their husbands will understand. men may respond inclusively, as their wives wish them to, but they do not necessarily do so in the same terms that their wives present. instead, they interpret their wives’ kinship practices through their own frameworks for understanding family life, cultural difference, and historical change. the working mis/understanding they create frequently reproduces and naturalizes the hierarchical relationship presumed to connect france and madagascar. paradoxically, it reinforces cultural boundaries even as it enables the movement of people, goods, and ideas between the two countries. attending to the working mis/understandings that characterize franco-malagasy marriages illuminates some of the complex cultural processes that shape contemporary cross-border marriage and migration. scholars generally agree that marriage, love, and sexuality have all become part of the language and practices of border control in contemporary france (ticktin 2009; e. fassin 2010; fernando 2013; maskens 2013; neveu-kringelbach 2013). meanwhile, studies of so-called mail-order brides in other parts of the world have debunked the stereotype of gold-digging wives by demonstrating the complex blend of affective and pragmatic interests that characterize binational marriage, much as any other (constable 2003; zelizer 2005; parreñas 2011). they have also examined the agentive ways that marriage migrants negotiate their circumstances, despite powerful social and economic constraints (constable 2003; faier 2007, 2009; freeman 2011). by showing how spouses’ efforts to actively negotiate their relationships in the context of state regulation occasionally produce the commodification of intimacy that state officials imply are intrinsic to these marriages, the working mis/understanding illuminates the interconnected nature of these different processes. these points only become clear, however, when scholars studying marriage migration expand their analytic framework to move beyond the unit of the couple to consider the other kinds of relationships and complex socialities that are all, so to speak, in the marriage bed. conditions of possiblity: malagasy women and french men why do coastal malagasy women and french men seek one another out as marriage partners? in part the answer lies in the way economic hardship and dwindling opportunities in madagascar converge with the need for care among an aging, semirural population in france. ongoing poverty in madagascar has torn at families’ efforts to sustain themselves. along the east coast, men are expected to support women financially, while women, in turn, are supposed to use the resources they acquire in part from men to sustain networks of their own. as a result, economic hardship has exacerbated long-standing tensions in gender relations (cole 2010). in response, coastal women have increasingly sought to marry foreign men. most women find their husbands either through personal connections or internet marriage agencies. women often engage in internet correspondence with several different men, hoping that a marriage will eventually work out. alternatively, they may beseech a sister, aunt, or cousin who lives in france to find a french husband for them, either among their friends or by placing an ad in a local newspaper. they hope that these relationships will allow them to achieve the standards of valued feminine adulthood to which they aspire. most families greet the news of a daughter’s prospective marriage to a european with joy because they expect the attendant resources and opportunities to flow to them, at least in part. when women are successful, their marriages position them as important nodes in networks of material and affective exchange. not unlike their wives, the french men, too, see marriage to a malagasy woman as an opportunity to reposition themselves within existing networks of exchange, though they imagine the nature and patterning of those exchanges differently. although franco-malagasy couples live scattered throughout france, they tend to concentrate in semirural areas like the country’s southwest or brittany. the southwest, of course, is where pierre bourdieu (2008) famously analyzed the plight of rural bachelors trapped on their farms while young women flocked to the city. based on research carried out in the 1960s, his poignant analysis revealed how rural french men, typically younger sons, were unable to attract wives and thus could not marry and reproduce, becoming a casualty of france’s economic modernization. today there are far fewer family farms than when bourdieu did his research. nevertheless, the men who marry malagasy women are in many ways the sociological descendants of his informants. most of them come from modest backgrounds; a few are peasants, but many are low-level government employees, small business owners, or artisans. what bourdieu’s examination of marriage strategies in the southwest omitted was that even in the 1960s the potential marriage market extended beyond metropolitan france, even if such unions were rare at the time. starting at the turn of the century, the chasseur français, a hunting magazine for men and one of the first magazines to run petites annonces (personal ads), circulated throughout rural france, the overseas departments, and the colonies. many older men remember learning about madagascar in school, since it is a former french colony. others learn about madagascar either on the internet, through television shows, or through tourism. these husbands generally complain that changes in french society have made french women “egotistical” (trop égoïste) or “too individual” (trop individuelle), by which they usually mean that women are too materialistic and no longer interested in fulfilling traditional gender roles within the household, a complaint that echoes those leveled at modern french women after world war i (camiscioli 2009). they usually turn to madagascar hoping that malagasy women are more likely to accept a modest income or are more willing to adopt traditional gender roles than their french peers. one man recounted how numerous potential marriage partners had told him that they would only marry him if he agreed to leave his farm, while he specifically sought a woman who tolerated hard work. another, who had been widowed and then eventually married his much younger malagasy girlfriend (who had divorced her first french husband), quipped that he would no longer need to go to a retirement home in his old age. his remark was made in jest, but given that most malagasy women are much younger than their husbands and that they often find work in retirement homes caring for elderly french people, it might well become a reality. this man also speculated that his children were relieved that he had not married a locally born french woman, someone more likely to know about, and to claim, her legal rights in the marriage. as this final remark makes clear, malagasy women and french men hold unequal positions with respect to french citizenship, knowledge of french social life, and the material resources that they bring to their marriages. nevertheless, these alliances potentially hold complementary rewards for both parties. women ideally gain companionship, citizenship, and practical help from their husbands to grow and sustain their family relations in both france and madagascar. french men, in turn, gain lively, hardworking wives who willingly engage in more traditional forms of gendered care, including looking after their aging in-laws. insofar as these marriages concern the mutual fulfillment of complementary needs, they resemble any other. but these french men and malagasy women also have somewhat different understandings of family and the kinds of obligations that tie kin together. these contending visions of who counts as family and what kin relations entail contribute to a complex set of hurdles they must overcome. state interventions: gray marriages and clarifying the couple one of the reasons that these partly overlapping and partly different notions of kin and family create tensions, however, is that the french administration employs particular notions of kinship, marriage, and family, in combination with particular bureaucratic practices, to regulate immigrants’ ability to enter and settle in france. as vola’s bitter remark, “you’re lucky if even a sibling counts,” implied, french law restricts the kin relationships eligible for family reunification to persons related through birth or marriage. many administrative practices also generate a culture of suspicion regarding these marriages, thereby demarcating them from other marriages and further contributing to the perception of difference (on the culture of suspicion, see also maskens 2013). the administrative practices surrounding so-called gray marriage (mariage gris) offer one striking example of how the french state intervenes in the intimate lives of binational couples. first popularized in 2009 by eric besson, then minister of the newly created ministry of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development under president sarkozy, the term gray marriage appeared as yet another category to capture the nuances of fraudulent wedlock, generating further concern about the practice. whereas in the “white marriage” (mariage blanc) the two parties mutually agree to marry so that one of the spouses may obtain citizenship, in a gray marriage one person takes advantage of the other, luring them into marriage by pretending to be in love. naturally, it is the foreign spouse who is presumed to trick the french partner. in 2010, mayors, whose duty it is to perform civil marriages throughout france, received notices alerting them to the dangers of gray marriage and marriage fraud. one circular emphasized that since marriage was supposed to be premised on the desire to share family life, marriages contracted with an eye to practical benefits like citizenship, inheritance, or a professional advantage constituted marriages of convenience (ministère de la justice et des libertés 2010). note that according to the circular, marriage is “primarily” about “living together and sharing family life.” though it is hard to imagine a family in which people do not share resources or enjoy “practical benefits,” the official french definition renders practical benefits a secondary effect. although these new laws and directives are not always uniformly interpreted or applied (spire 2005), mayors and consular officials have stepped up their efforts to determine the real nature of binational couples’ intentions. binational couples wishing to marry and reside in france must painstakingly document the “will to share family life” by providing concrete proof of their relationships, including shared electricity and phone bills, phone records, love letters, and the like. french officials may ask binational couples where the couple lives, how they met, the composition of the spouse’s family, information on where the spouse comes from, and what they do for a living. immigration police may also cite suspicion of marriage fraud to justify entering and searching people’s homes. mayors, meanwhile, have been known to use gray marriage as a pretext to refuse to perform a marriage that they disapprove of, while consular officials may invoke the suspicion of a gray marriage as justification for refusing a visa. bureaucratic efforts to prevent gray marriages, and the state’s reinforcement of a narrow (one commentator even referred to it as “skimpy”) definition of the nuclear family, institutionalize suspicion of foreign spouses and of so-called mixed marriages. particularly in binational unions between african women and french men, the state’s discourse authorizes the view that these marriages represent an inappropriate commodification of intimate relations. though only rarely verbalized, the discourse exacerbates existing xenophobia. by emphasizing the self-interested, materialistic intentions of migrants, it fosters the fear that the foreign spouse will trick the french one, perhaps claiming an inheritance that rightfully belongs to other french family members, and then use the newly acquired french citizenship to bring over other people from the country of origin, forming a separate community within france. were a younger malagasy woman to seduce, marry, and abandon a hapless french farmer, it would hurt the man and the family in question, to be sure. if the woman then brought over a malagasy husband or other family members to build a separate malagasy ethnic community in france, it would violate french republican norms (scott 2007). the specter of gray marriage, improper kinship, and failed integration haunt the efforts of malagasy women and french men to build families. although most of the malagasy women i worked with had already gained citizenship, they nevertheless found that their french husbands, in-laws, and the wider community often still judged their motives with suspicion. their ideals of what it means to be married, their belief that husbands should give them gifts or money to show love and respect, and their desire to help their malagasy kin because that is how one expresses love and accrues moral value in the wider malagasy community may all be met with disapproval. french men, meanwhile, figure ambivalently both as gatekeepers and as dupes. they are gatekeepers because french law requires them to sign the foreign spouse’s visa papers or other legal documents and because they are expected by those around them to make sure their wives adopt french norms. they are potential dupes because they choose to marry and invest resources in women who they may find appealing, but whom many believe will only trick them and take their money. indeed, public sentiment and discourse portray a frenchman’s choice to marry a malagasy woman as a foolhardy mistake. men who want to marry malagasy women resent the obstacles that the french state puts in their path. often, however, they cannot quite shake the fear that they are perhaps being tricked. working mis/understandings: an anatomy it should be clear by now that french law’s narrow definition of what constitutes a legitimate marriage and which kin should be eligible for family reunification conflict with malagasy women’s ideals of what it means to be a good wife, mother, sister, or daughter. although many of the french husbands’ notions of family differ from those imposed by french immigration law, the french state’s version of marriage and family, which emphasizes romantic love and the nuclear family, nevertheless aligns better with their vision of correct kin practice than it does with those held by their malagasy wives. as a result, women find themselves forced to frame their relationships with their malagasy kin in ways that they hope their husbands will recognize and perceive as worthy of support. to examine this process further, i explore how women interpret their kin practices for men and how men, in turn, respond. malagasy wives’ interpretations: flexible kin categories and tradition when vola’s kin in madagascar asked her to help her half sister, vola faced a dilemma. coastal malagasy kinship is bilateral, so children ideally maintain ties with both their mother’s and their father’s families, though people place more weight on kinship traced through men. in daily life, the relations that matter most are typically those formed by the siblings born to a couple, who have in turn grown up, married, borne children, and succeeded in uniting their descendants around them. divorce is frequent, and both men and women often marry and have children with more than one partner. since children belong to both their mother’s and their father’s families, any individual has a lot of choice in terms of which kin relations to cultivate. moreover, malagasy kin categories only distinguish between people of different generations, the sex of the speaker and of the person referred to, and immediate affinity (bloch 1971), making it easy to assimilate almost anyone to the category of either a parent or child or a sister or brother. in theory, people equally recognize all kin with whom they share ascendants, though in practice this is never the case. to make distinctions among kin implies exclusion, lack of care, and the withholding of support; it is not only rude but also morally suspect. josefina, a malagasy woman who had been married to a stonemason, made the relationship between the use of particular kin terms and people’s social commitments clear by comparing how she thought about her own malagasy family connections with what she interpreted as french practice. we had been talking about a female relative, and i kept trying to figure out how josefina was actually related to the woman in question. exasperated by my queries, josefina remarked, “in france you know, people say tonton [uncle], fils de tonton [my uncle’s son], they say cousin eloigné [distant cousin]! that is like saying that your family is far away! but i call her my close kin. she is like my sister. french people would say she is my cousin, not my sister, because she doesn’t have the same mother and father as me, but our grandmother is the same.” i intervened here, “what, why can’t you call her cousin?” josefina wrinkled her nose at me with distaste: “it makes distinctions. you don’t distinguish among kin like that—it’s rude. we’re not like the french who talk about distant cousins.” similarly, another malagasy woman complained, “those french, for them, kinship must be direct [inserting the french word into malagasy]. others, such as your brother, do not count.” although josefina and vola exaggerate the degree to which malagasy never “make distinctions,” their complaints regarding their husbands’ and in-law’s propensity to draw attention to invidious differences among kin capture what malagasy view as the french preference for restricting who counts as family to a small, primarily nuclear core. their husbands mainly agreed, although they did occasionally make allowance for parents-in-law. many french husbands emphasized that for them, family usually referred to their parents and siblings and then their spouses and children. as françois explained when i asked him which relatives he included when he used the term family, “well, there are two, the one you grow up with and the one you marry into—your spouse and children.” i pushed him further, asking about cousins. he insisted that really only first cousins mattered, a view that corresponded with what i saw among those families who still farmed, where it was usually immediate family, first cousins, and hired laborers who helped with harvests. but what françois’s depiction of who counts as family obscures, is that in many cases these men live either with, or very close to, their parents, usually their mothers. historically, throughout much of the southwest, the youngest son (often the only son) was supposed to take care of his aging parents in exchange for inheriting the family farm, while his sisters were given their share of the inheritance as part of a dowry at marriage (bourdieu 2008). today, as the economy grows more service oriented and the population ages, the burden of care still often falls on the sons. sometimes the parents live alone, while their children and their families live nearby. in other cases, however, a mother may continue to live with her son and his wife; she may even control some aspect of the family finances. men also often marry late, in their thirties and forties, and their mothers sometimes continue to care for them in intimate ways—buying their underwear, for example, or bringing over groceries—long into adulthood. most malagasy women are prepared to care for their in-laws, proudly noting that they came from a culture where the elderly are respected, but they rarely tolerate their mother-in-law controlling the household finances. they usually find the intimate connection between mother and son (evidenced in the purchase of underwear) strange, if not repugnant, interpreting it as a partial usurpation of their role. as these details about french mothers-in-law suggest, family reunification law’s emphasis on the nuclear family foregrounds some relationships within french families and occludes others. in keeping with the malagasy emphasis on siblings, and the moral imperative to treat them equally, vola believed that since she had already helped three of her sisters come to france, she was obligated to assist this last one too, especially since the girl appeared to be in a vulnerable situation. but vola also had a choice, and she knew it. malagasy often use kin terms according to how they wish to transform particular social situations (bloch 1971). vola could choose to define the girl as a close relation (a sister), thereby emphasizing their similarity and paving the way for her to come to france. alternatively, she could choose to portray the girl as an accidental half sister she barely knew, thus emphasizing their difference and blocking the girl’s chance for entry. though the exact terms of this choice are specific, vola had likely made analogous decisions about how to frame kin relations before. vola and josefina complained about french peoples’ propensity to use kin terms to make distinctions and withhold resources, but in some circumstances they, too, used kin categories to create distance—just not in the same ways. they strategically selected categories to grow some connections and diminish others; if they had it their way, they would include their sisters and marginalize their mothers-in-law. in this case, vola categorized the girl as her sister not only to help the girl but also to gain the respect of her malagasy kin and grow her malagasy network within france. she claimed that the french term sœur (sister) and the malagasy term rahavavy (sister) referred to the same semantic field, even though she knew that rahavavy covered a wider range of kin than her husband would have recognized as sœur. she built a working mis/understanding premised on the gap between malagasy and french definitions of the term sister to smuggle in—literally—a relative whom she deemed important but whom pierre would almost certainly not have counted. not only do women need their husbands to recognize their kin’s claims; they also occasionally need to gain a husband’s support for their participation in ancestral ceremonies in madagascar. most of these women still see the ancestors as an important source of blessing; they fear that failure to participate in these rituals will incur ancestral wrath and compromise their position with living kin. yet asking husbands for financial support can be difficult given that french men are not always sympathetic to the needs of extended malagasy families and may further dismiss women’s desire for participation as frivolous or unnecessary. therefore women often invoke a vague notion of tradition to justify their requests. josefina made this aspect of the working misunderstanding particularly clear one day while we were preparing lunch. she recounted how a few years earlier, her deceased grandmother had appeared to her in a dream, a sign that she was upset that josefina had left for france without supplicating the ancestors at their tomb. as a result, josefina had felt compelled to perform a cattle sacrifice on her most recent trip home. to gain her husband’s consent for the journey, and to get him to give her some of the money she needed to buy a costly bull in preparation for the ceremony, josefina simply told him, “i need to do our traditions.” she continued, “even me, i don’t explain to eric, because he doesn’t want to believe. malgache don’t explain too much to europeans [vazaha]. all of us, with our husbands, we don’t explain. they won’t look or care [tsy jiren-drô]. me, i believe in things [je crois les choses]. countries are different [les pays ne sont pas pareils] … here it’s not like that, but there it’s like that.” hoping that her husband would understand and respect her request, josefina simply referred to tradition. though these rituals are traditions in the sense of practices inherited from the past, they are not exactly tradition as french conventional understanding would have it. what most women do not say, but what any malagasy knows, is that these rituals perpetuate the power of the past in the present, enlivening and renewing people’s contemporary kin connections. when women contribute to a sacrifice or when they help their families rebuild their ancestral tombs, they reenergize the power of their kin connections, as well as the social status of the men who control access to the ancestors, including their brothers. among coastal malagasy, a preference for sons to remain close to home converges with malagasy men’s fear that french women will exclude their kin to produce a pattern where it is almost always sisters who marry and migrate to france and brothers who stay in madagascar. sisters, in turn, are expected to help their brothers. french husbands often protest if brothers, particularly, demand support beyond what they find acceptable (recall one woman’s bitter comment about how brothers do not count for french people). french men’s belief that men should work and not accept handouts makes malagasy brothers’ expectations of their sisters’ help all the more suspect. but ancestral rituals and the material investments that accompany them ensure the periodic flow of resources from sisters to brothers or from migrants to those remaining at home. consequently, a sister’s return and reinvestment in ancestral rituals may build her brother’s or another male relative’s power and authority in terms of local malagasy social relations. french husbands’ interpretations: the way we were when women strategically define half sisters or cousins as sisters or gloss their participation in ancestral ceremonies as tradition, they seek recognition from their husbands for their ways of building families and nurturing social relations. when they are successful, their husbands respond positively. many men readily adopt their wives’ malagasy children from previous relationships, participate in their wives’ efforts to marry off their sisters to other frenchmen, perhaps sifting through piles of responses to matrimonial ads to see if the respondent is satisfactory husband material or not, or contribute to the support of their in-laws in madagascar. in short, they help their wives achieve the goal of becoming someone who can “give life” (mahamelona) to others in madagascar. however, even when men respond positively, they do not always interpret their wives’ explanations according to the frameworks offered by their wives. after all, husbands have their own cultural schemas for understanding large families or what it means to participate in traditions. the way they do so obscures some of the ways that these women “give life” to them as well. for example, men often interpret women’s kin practices by likening them to what french family life looked like in the past. recall that many of these men are fifty, sixty, or even seventy years old. not only do most come from modest roots but many of them grew up right after world war ii, at a time when france was far less wealthy than today. many husbands recall closer relations with cousins, aunts, and uncles in the not-too-distant past of their own childhoods. they assume that economic hardship promotes kin connections while affluence encourages separation. one man, who had been married to his malagasy wife for twenty years, made this point clear to me when i remarked that many women insisted that french people were individualistic and uninterested in kin. “no, you see, they have only come recently, so they only see how we live now, but when i grew up, we were with my cousins all the time. they lived right near our farm. and my grandmother, in the country, she didn’t have running water, just like in laurelie’s [his wife’s] mother’s village.” similarly, reflecting on his wife’s stories of family life in madagascar, pierre remarked, “it’s like when i was little, my parents and i, we lived with my grandparents.” he then went on to say that during his youth, they had not lived as separately from their family as people did now, and that his parents had raised a poor cousin. by recalling a version of what french families used to be like fifty years earlier when they were young, and relating it to present malagasy kin practice, these men construct a template for interpreting their wives’ current concerns sympathetically. men’s responses to women’s invocations of tradition reveal a related, albeit somewhat different dynamic. both anne allison (1994) and rhacel parreñas (2011) have shown how japanese businessmen who feel emasculated at work may turn to hostess clubs to reassert a sense of masculinity and class superiority. though these frenchmen occupy a different position in the social hierarchy than their japanese counterparts, they share with them an awareness of their own comparative marginality. during several of the dinners at pirette’s house after the grape harvest, her husband and his cousins, who had come to lend a hand, told me that nobody handpicked their grapes anymore and that their way of life was “dying out.” pirette’s husband and three of his cousins had all married women from either madagascar or cuba, in part because they needed women who would tolerate life on the farm: they were keenly aware of their comparatively marginal social position within france and of the fact that for many they embodied a relic from the past. much as japanese men enjoy the aggrandizement provided by hostesses, french men may enjoy supporting their wives’ continued engagement with tradition because of how it enables them to shore up a fragile modern subject position through their spouses. by occupying the role of the generous patron, the man also occupies a superior, more modern position in relation to his wife. some sought to rationalize their wives’ desire to participate in ceremonies by taking a quasi-durkheimian position. they argued that their spouses’ wishes to participate in ceremonies resulted from social pressure; husbands may bow to the demand to make their wives happy, but they see the practice as irrational. one husband, who clearly thought he had helped his wife one too many times, expressed frustration that his spouse continued to be so concerned with madagascar after having lived more than half her adult life in france. when she announced her family’s request for help, he responded, “oh, you malagasy, you are just so complicated. you waste our time [on silly things]. learn how to live! you are in france. forget madagascar. don’t complicate your life. always thinking of madagascar. you live in france. you are french. so live here.” he eventually agreed to participate, but only grudgingly. others, however, showed more enthusiasm. when alain helped pirette with money to carry out a sacrifice to inaugurate her house, for example, he enjoyed performing the role of an open-minded patron who supported his hardworking wife in turn. but he might have been less likely to do so had she elaborated on how his money was also helping her male kin at home. breakdown: the reappearance of state categories we have seen how the working mis/understanding that men and women create fosters connections and the movement of money, goods, and people from france to madagascar and vice versa. at the same time, however, it reinforces the differences thought to distinguish the two countries. consequently, when a working mis/understanding breaks down, the state’s categories of marriage fraud (re)appear as powerful explanations of the difference already assumed. the painfully harsh notions of love versus money and conniving migrants displace the subtler ways of framing kin practices that real women and men have built in their day-to-day relationships. a story recounted by eudoxie, a woman who was married to and had two children with jean-françois, a man twenty years her senior, reveals how the dichotomies of love and money, central to narratives of marriage migration, emerge in moments of conflict. eudoxie and jean-françois lived off of his retirement and the stipend the french state gave to eudoxie for caring for her mother-in-law, who stayed with them. jean-françois collected cars and loved to race. one day, without having discussed the matter with his wife, jean-françois announced that he wanted to sell the house in madagascar at the same time that he sold off one of their sports cars, so that he could buy a tow truck for hauling other cars. owning a house in madagascar, preferably a big, modern house built of cement, is by far malagasy women’s most sought-after symbol of success, and obligatory for any woman married to a frenchman. eudoxie knew that if she sold the house, her family and neighbors in madagascar would assume that it was because of financial difficulties; eudoxie found the mere thought of being—or appearing to be—in such circumstances deeply shaming. furious that jean-françois had sold the sports car without consulting her and anxious about the prospect of losing the house, eudoxie accused him of selfishly thinking only of his pleasure and not of the family’s well-being. in the ensuing fight, jean-françois accused eudoxie of wanting him only for his money, bitterly remarking, “your mask has fallen.” the implication was that her well-managed façade had been ripped away to reveal the materialistic and conniving migrant lurking beneath. i quote the argument that followed, repeated to me on the phone moments after it had occurred, because it makes the terms of the marriage unusually explicit, revealing how the state’s efforts to regulate migrants and the discourse of gray marriage help produce the working mis/understanding through which marriages often operate. when jean-françois observed that her “mask had fallen,” eudoxie replied: why would i have stayed with you all this time? you’re crazy. you only think of your pleasure, while i have done everything for you. i’m still young. i can still find another husband. you think i’m going to be your nurse in your old age? it’s not eudoxie who will be mistreated by a european [vazaha]! it is not eudoxie who will be commanded. it is not eudoxie who will be treated as the second. it is not eudoxie who will be treated like a slave. my sins? i send a little money to madagascar, i buy clothes, but i don’t spend that much. how can you say my mask has fallen? in this fight, the specter of the marriage migrant who cares only for her own interests and those of her native family looms large. but so, too, does the largely unspoken idea that men use these marriages to arrange for care in their old age on the cheap, a “practical benefit” that neither french mothers-in-law nor state officials or the husbands themselves ever seem to question. conclusion: marriage migration and postcolonial relations as the argument between eudoxie and jean-françois illustrates, official discourse shapes family life long after citizenship has been acquired. cultural economies of kinship, intimate relationuities that are central to their ways of reckoning kin relations, framing their kin practices in terms that they hope their husbands will recognize as legitimate. their french husbands, however, use their own interpretive schemas, likening their wives’ ways of practicing family to the french families of their youth or to their ideas of what tradition entails. together, they produce a way of interacting that satisfices (simon 1957), producing an imperfect but workable outcome that enables women to honor their commitments as daughters, sisters, and mothers in madagascar and care for and contribute to their french families as well, bridging and sustaining both rural french and coastal malagasy social worlds. the emergent blend is not a happy masala, nor is it a household-level multicultural formation in which each party has equal claims to its cultural traditions and conceptions of kin. rather it appears more like an informal version of the older graduated forms of citizenship that used to exist within french colonies, where different groups had different rights and were hierarchically linked to one another. this conclusion coincides with a growing consensus among scholars that the french state’s efforts to limit immigration from the former colonies has contributed to new, stratified ways of categorizing the population and granting citizenship that are evident across a variety of different state institutions and contexts (see bertaux 2013; e. fassin 2010; mbembe 2009; ticktin 2011).4 when we add the working mis/understandings through which franco-malagasy marriages operate to these observations, it suggests that this dynamic of unequal incorporation may also be reproduced even when men and women deliberately try to build relations across state-imposed divides, revealing how men and women inadvertently contribute to these processes. both parties play on gaps between official french, vernacular french, and coastal malagasy understandings and valuations of kin relations or the meaning of tradition. but the models of relatedness and tradition that men reach for first also reinscribe a developmental historical trajectory in which the kinds of kinship practiced by contemporary malagasy appear as an outdated version of what family life used to be like in france. the direction in which these translations occur contribute to what johannes fabian (1983) termed a lack of co-evalness, reinforcing the evolutionary, colonial hierarchy in which france always figures as more modern than madagascar. as a result, malagasy women can only gain recognition of their norms when they remain positioned in the past; they are unlikely to be considered both modern and malagasy, and they certainly cannot be both malagasy and french. by reinterpreting relationships in terms of much older, long-standing ideas about culture and evolution, the working mis/understanding that malagasy women and french men forge with one another further naturalizes some of the structural inequalities already inherent in these binational relationships. for the moment, the terms of recognition and belonging are neither egalitarian nor entirely inclusive. but from the perspective of the women who come to europe, unequal connection informed by a colonial, evolutionary hierarchy is far better than having no connection at all. notes acknowledgments this article draws on twelve months of fieldwork conducted in france in 2010–2011, and during additional trips in 2012, 2013, and 2014. the national science foundation and the wenner gren foundation for anthropological research generously funded the french portion of my fieldwork. the article also builds on fieldwork that i have periodically carried out in eastern madagascar since 1992. participants at the council on european studies conference and the university of toronto madagascar workshop, both held in 2012, and at the intimate migrations conference held at roskilde university, denmark, in 2013 asked useful questions. i thank summerson carr, julie chu, jean comaroff, john comaroff, julia kowalski, daniel mains, achille mbembe, karen middleton, erin moore, constantine nakassis, and three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. as always, my greatest thanks goes to the many men and women who tolerated my presence in their families. 1. yet a fourth perspective, one that i do not include here, is that of the children produced in these marriages, as well as that of children from the prior marriages of either spouse. i hope to address the issue of children and their conceptions of kinship and belonging in future publications. 2. all names used in this article are pseudonyms. 3. bohannan’s latter characterization of the colonial encounter as a kind of miscommunication has drawn criticism (hoppe 1996), because his choice of metaphor can obscure the power relations that underpinned the colonial situation. 4. writing about the unintended consequences of the illness clause, an 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intimacy. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. jane doe jane doe risa cromer stanford university purdue university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7647-9500 thousands of unaccompanied, undocumented, and immigrant minors are currently in the custody of the u.s. federal government. the office of refugee resettlement (orr), under the leadership of a longtime antiabortion activist and donald trump appointee, scott lloyd, established new rules in march 2017 that require shelter operators, who provide day-to-day care for these children while they are in u.s. custody, to notify the orr whenever a girl expresses interest in ending her pregnancy. according to lloyd, “the unborn child is a child in our care” (vasquez 2017). under lloyd’s direction, the orr has barred federally funded shelters from taking “any action that facilitates” abortion for unaccompanied minors, including “scheduling appointments, transportation, or other arrangement,” without “direction and approval” from lloyd himself (vasquez 2017). in a statement to staff, lloyd said that “[shelter] grantees should not be supporting abortion services preor post-release; only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling” (vasquez 2017). immigration, like all politics, is reproductive politics too. a few months after the new policy was instituted, a seventeen-year-old girl from central america challenged its constitutionality in a high-profile lawsuit against the trump administration. on september 11, 2017, this young woman, referred to as jane doe in court filings, was apprehended trying cross the border between the united states and mexico. after being taken to a shelter for unaccompanied minors in south texas to await immigration proceedings, she learned that she was pregnant and requested an abortion. following the new rules, she was instead taken to a so-called crisis pregnancy center, where she received an ultrasound and antiabortion counseling. to obtain the abortion she still desired while adhering to texas’s parental consent law, doe sought a judicial bypass from a texas judge, which she did with help from jane’s due process, a nonprofit legal organization that provides representation to pregnant minors in texas. the judge assigned doe a guardian to facilitate the process, but orr officials refused her transportation to the medical facility and refused to let her leave the shelter with her guardian. doe’s attorneys from the american civil liberties union challenged the administration in federal court for obstructing the process for multiple weeks. in its defense, the justice department argued that its “interest in promoting fetal life and childbirth over abortion” (sacchetti and marimow 2017) justified its refusal to let doe, a minor, obtain an abortion. two contentious issues in america—abortion and immigration—intersect in doe’s story. at the crux of these issues arises a question that i consider here in greater depth: what interest does the trump administration have in a detained latina migrant teen’s fetus? legally, the language of governmental interest in fetuses refers to supreme court decisions on abortion, from roe v. wade (1973) to whole woman’s health v. hellerstedt (2016), which provide guidance on how the government can restrict abortion based on state interest in fetal life. yet in this essay, i want to think about interest beyond its legal meaning to consider what else might explain the government’s claim of wanting to promote and preserve doe’s fetus. to pursue this question, i invoke what sarah franklin and faye ginsburg (2019, 1, 5) call the “familiar grammar” grounded in an american legacy of white christian nationalism that links reproduction, race, gender, religion, and nation “into an established syntax of national belonging under threat.” examining what interest is meant to signify in jane doe’s case reveals the seamless alignment between antiabortion and anti-immigration politics in trump’s america. tracing the grammars that make this alignment intelligible contributes to the feminist project of revealing reproduction as politics (ginsburg and rapp 1995; roberts 1997; franklin and ragoné 1998; gal and kligman 2000; briggs 2017), an alignment that is pronounced in the enduring legacies of white christian nationalism that animate the current administration. one could wonder why the government wanted to protect doe’s fetus given trump’s vocal disdain for latino immigrants, especially pregnant ones. for many years he has described them in dehumanizing terms—as rapists, animals, gangsters, and murderers. he has also categorized their countries of origin as “the most dangerous places in the world,” some of which he crassly reduced to “shithole countries.” trump alleges that pregnant latinas crossing the border intend to deliver “anchor babies,” a derisive term premised on the erroneous idea that children born to noncitizens of color in the united states can secure legal status for their parents (see chavez 2017). he agrees with americans who he claims are “disgusted when a woman who’s nine months pregnant walks across the border, has a baby, and you have to take care of that baby for the next eighty-five years” (finnegan and lee 2015). trump also remains deeply indifferent to the well-being of undocumented youth. in addition to phasing out daca (deferred action for childhood arrivals) protections for 800,000 children of undocumented migrants, he has demonized unaccompanied migrant minors as “future criminals” who pose a threat to national security, warning: “they look so innocent; they’re not innocent” (hunter 2018). in light of trump’s sustained contempt for migrating pregnant latinas and their children, why wouldn’t his administration happily take doe to the abortion clinic? couldn’t we expect a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic government to be eager to limit the reproductive capacities of those deemed threats to the greatness, whiteness, and rightness of the nation, as they have long been for the poor and people of color (roberts 1997; silliman and bhattacharjee 2002; stern 2005)? again, what interest does it have in protecting doe’s fetus? the trump administration’s fiercely contested zero-tolerance border-enforcement policy, issued in may 2018, provides some clues. widespread protests erupted in response to news from the u.s.–mexico border of the massive detention and prosecution of adult migrants crossing the border illegally, including individuals seeking asylum at designated ports of entry. the public expressed particular outrage over the forced separation of more than 2,500 infants and children from their migrating families, hundreds of whom remain in u.s. custody. parents received inadequate and inaccurate information about their children’s whereabouts. heart-wrenching evidence of mistreatment emerged from the rapidly overloaded shelters and detention centers where the children were initially held, raising concern about the risks of “irreparable harm” (rose 2018). by order from federal judges, the administration began reuniting the separated families, but it claims that about two hundred children remain ineligible for reunification or release. they are at particular risk of being permanently separated from their families through u.s. adoption (burke and mendoza 2018). by design, the administration claimed, the policy would deter migrants from attempting to cross the border illegally (bump 2018). deterrence is a decades-old strategy wielded by many prior administrations concerned with illegal migration, as is family separation (hunter 2018), although separating migrating families in this way is a new tactic. then–white house chief of staff john kelly told npr that “a big name of the game [in border security] is deterrence” and said that separating families crossing the border “would be a tough deterrent” (national public radio 2018). then–attorney general jeff sessions justified family separations as a consequence of breaking the law: if you’re smuggling a child, then we’re going to prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you, probably, as required by law. … if you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. it’s not our fault that somebody does that. (miroff and horwitz 2018) sessions hoped enforcing the policy would reduce the flow of illegal migrants: “hopefully people will get the message … and not break across the border unlawfully” (bump 2018). according to the trump administration, protecting the country from the perils of an open border justified these means of deterrence. “politically correct or not, we have a country that needs safety and security,” said trump (miroff and horwitz 2018), revealing immigrant children as strategic pawns. deterrence and related discourses about protecting america from perceived threats help explain the government’s interest in protecting doe’s fetus. these discourses draw on a syntax of belonging under threat common in expressions of white christian nationalism. white christian nationalist ideologies are premised on the belief that america has been and should always be distinctively white and christian in its identity, symbols, values, and policies (goldberg 2006; whitehead and scheitle 2018). proponents maintain that america’s whiteness and “christian heritage” must be defended. the administration invokes these grammars to justify not only its anti-immigration politics but also its dramatic expansion of antiabortion policy. white christian nationalist ideologies align easily with antiabortion activism, which has long linked its goal of protecting the unborn with defending white christian america (mason 2002). randall terry, the founder of the militant antiabortion organization operation rescue (now operation save america), often claimed that rescuing “babies and mothers” by opposing abortion was intended to “rescue the country” as well (ginsburg 1993, 558). as seen in my own ethnographic research on the newest radical arm of the u.s. antiabortion movement (cromer, forthcoming), which fights for the legal recognition of embryos and fetuses as persons, personhood advocates also promote the simultaneous rescue of embryos and america “from the impending judgment of a holy god,” in the words of one leader. for abortion opponents, trump has received the title of “most prolife president in american history,” not merely for advancing antiabortion policy but also for “put[ting] america back on the solid foundation of her founding principles,” as a member of trump’s religious advisory council told breitbart news (berry 2017). the familiar grammar of white christian nationalism makes intelligible the links between trump’s assertion that america “needs safety and security” from illegal migrants and his administration’s commitment to restoring its “founding principles” by eroding reproductive and sexual rights. these familiar grammars also clarify why the trump administration maintained an interest in protecting jane doe’s fetus. the same discourse of deterrence used to justify trump’s zero-tolerance policy also featured in the administration’s defense of its obstruction of doe’s abortion. in court, the justice department argued that it was in the public’s interest not to help doe obtain an abortion because doing so “could incentivize illegal immigration by pregnant minors by compelling the federal government to facilitate an unaccompanied alien child’s request for an elective abortion.” incentivizing illegal migration would undermine the administration’s primary goal of deterrence. the attorney general of texas, joined by representatives of six other states, filed a supporting brief that invoked these familiar grammars to underline the government’s claim of “legitimate and substantial interest in preserving and promoting fetal life” (vasquez 2017). attorney general ken paxton wrote: if “doe” prevails in this case, the ruling will create a right to abortion for anyone on earth who enters the u.s. illegally. and with that right, countless others undoubtedly would follow. texas must not become a sanctuary state for abortions. (vasquez 2017) paxton predicted that a “free-for-all” (brown 2017) would occur if the court sided with doe, claiming that it would erode any “meaningful limit on the constitutional rights an unlawfully present alien can invoke simply by crossing the border” (thompson 2017). for the trump administration, protecting jane doe’s fetus from abortion while in the custody of the u.s. government was imperative to protect the country from a greater threat: becoming a haven for pregnant migrants, whose right to abortion represents a slippery slope of constitutional protections for those entering the country unlawfully. in jane doe’s story, and in myriad others like hers, antiabortion policies conspire seamlessly with the administration’s xenophobic, racist, and nativist america first agenda. the government’s interest in doe’s fetus signifies not the administration’s care for the well-being of her potential child but rather its protectionist politics. the protective walls the trump administration attempted to build between jane doe and her own uterus, to borrow elise andaya’s (2019) insightful metaphor, parallel the symbolic and material walls that trump strives to build around the united states to ensure that white christian america comes first. doe’s case ultimately prevailed. she obtained an abortion on october 25, 2017, when fifteen weeks pregnant, one month after her first attempt. but her story and the issues it raises are far from settled. the orr has continued to prevent dozens of other janes in u.s. custody from obtaining desired abortions, despite numerous court orders requiring the agency to comply. following news in november 2018 of scott lloyd’s reassignment from directing the orr, it remains to be seen whether his successor will continue the agency’s antiabortion agenda. earlier in the year, though, doe’s case came under scrutiny in the confirmation hearings for then–supreme court nominee brett kavanaugh, a federal judge who had ruled on doe’s case in support of 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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/immigration/appeals-court-to-review-judges-order-allowing-abortion-for-undocumented-teen-immigrant/2017/10/19/5ece7202-b4ca-11e7-9e58-e6288544af98_story.html. silliman, jael miriam, and anannya bhattacharjee, eds. 2002 policing the national body: sex, race, and criminalization. cambridge, mass.: south end press. stern, alexandra minna 2005 eugenic nation: faults and frontiers of better breeding in modern america. berkeley: university of california press. thompson, dee 2017 “paxton files amicus brief in case regarding unaccompanied minor’s request for abortion.” southeast texas record, october 18. https://setexasrecord.com/stories/511243130-paxton-files-amicus-brief-in-case-regarding-unaccompanied-minor-s-request-for-abortion. vasquez, tina 2017 “ ‘anti-choice fanaticism’ in the u.s. immigration system: the real reason jane doe’s abortion request is being denied.” rewire.news, november 16. https://rewire.news/article/2017/10/16/anti-choice-fanaticism-u-s-immigration-system-real-reason-jane-abortion-request-denied. whitehead, andrew l., and christopher p. scheitle 2018 “we the (christian) people: christianity and american identity from 1996 to 2014.” social currents 5, no. 2: 157–72. https://doi.org/10.1177/2329496517725333. some reflections on editing with contrarian sensibilities some reflections on editing with contrarian sensibilities daniel a. segal pitzer college and universidade federal de roraima i recall my years as editor of cultural anthropology as an unending intellectual feast. thanks to the excellent work of the first two editors—george marcus and fred myers—the journal received an overabundance of high-quality manuscripts while i was editor. in particular, it seemed to me that almost all the best graduate students in cultural-social anthropology, in the united states and beyond, wanted to place a chapter of their dissertation in the journal. as a result, as editor, i had the privilege of being informed about what was emerging in the discipline—not just in one department, but quite broadly, across english-language, phd-granting departments. editing the journal was thus a singular opportunity both to learn from good research in cultural anthropology and to get a sense of what questions and issues were grabbing the discipline’s attention. in addition, the overabundance of good submissions meant that the journal had the luxury of selecting which manuscripts to publish from a larger set of eminently publishable manuscripts. in this “too much of a good thing” context, my editorial sensibilities—which guided both my selection of peer reviewers and the final judgments i reached about manuscripts—were, in some ways, contrarian ones. starting with its first editor, george marcus, cultural anthropology had developed a deserved reputation for always looking for “the next thing”—to quote a phrase i had heard george use more than once. i, by contrast, was skeptical about this privileging and pursuit of the new. my own training in anthropology—particularly my work as an undergraduate studying with jim boon and then as a graduate student studying with george stocking—had convinced me that considerable precedents existed for recent intellectual projects in both the discipline and related fields of inquiry, including the then-burgeoning field of cultural studies. from my perspective, seeing and representing the intellectual efforts of our own time as strikingly new erred, first, in giving ourselves more credit than we might deserve and, second, in underestimating the difficulty of disrupting and stepping outside of hegemonic systems of thought. rather than imagining that some new move would allow us to vanquish, say, eurocentrism or essentializing, we needed to learn from and build on long-standing struggles against them—struggles located both within and beyond our own discipline. in pursuing the social construction of racial groupings, for example, it was important to learn from the insights and limits of, notably, both boas’s and du bois’s earlier work on race—rather than proceeding as if the project of contesting the objectivity of race constituted an innovation of our own time.1 so too, it was important to recognize that in our discipline, in contrast with the natural sciences, even the most powerful of intellectual critiques rarely vanquish received ideas, in the way that the heliocentric model of the solar system had vanquished the geocentric model. in our field of inquiry, by contrast, dismal ideas and paradigms pop up again and again (and again), even after their intellectual errors have been laid bare—very much as in an arcade game of whack-a-mole. think, for example, about the perdurance of both social evolutionary understandings of social differences and functionalist accounts of social institutions. though both have quite rightly and smartly been discredited many times within our discipline, neither has really gone away. a part of the story here is that even when these ways of thinking are critiqued within our discipline, they remain prevalent both in other disciplines (most more powerful than our own) and in the larger social world, including in everyday habits of language. the last in particular makes it difficult to excise these ways of thinking from our own production of knowledge, given that there can be at most a partial separation of our phatic and analytic use of language. for me as editor, it thus followed that caution was required before moving on to the next thing, lest we neglect our unfinished business with the myriad persistent discontents of cultural and social analysis.2 at one point during my years as editor, i had a conversation about these issues with donna haraway. by my memory, the exchange took place at an annual meeting of the society for cultural anthropology (sca), though it is possible it was at a conference on the university of california, santa cruz campus. in any case, donna made clear her disagreement with my editorial sensibilities in this regard. pursuing and emphasizing the new was valuable, she argued, for fostering a sense of the possibility of radical change. i found this a compelling response, and returned to it many times as i weighed the strengths and weaknesses of subsequent submissions to the journal. yet as i continued to think about donna’s comment, it also struck me that cultural anthropology—as distinct from cultural studies—had a long-standing practice of fostering very much the sense she spoke of, though in a notably different manner. this different manner involved attending to global cultural diversity, particularly diversity beyond or at the margins of modern states, so as to doubt the absoluteness, and thus the permanence, of the familiar. indeed, this was and remains what makes teaching introductory cultural anthropology to undergraduates so rewarding—as when we point out to our students that other social orders have possessed systems of exchange in which profit, strictly defined, cannot occur. a second instance of my contrarian sensibilities as editor reflected my long-standing (and ongoing) dissatisfaction with the division of the human sciences into the received disciplines and, most specifically, with the existence of cultural anthropology and history as separate disciplines. this particular dissatisfaction can be expressed in many ways, but perhaps the most basic formulation would be this: if we reject the notion of static and timeless cultures, then we should recognize the importance of always locating in time (which is to say, always locating diachronically) the subjects of our inquiry. so, too, we should recognize the importance of studying, as cultural phenomena in their own right, the diverse sequences—or diachronic forms—that are discernible once we do this. as editor, i sought to nudge cultural anthropology in these closely related directions by giving editorial preference to work that was at once historical and anthropological.3 a third and final target of my editorial preferences was work that brought cultural anthropological perspectives to bear on the immediately newsworthy, producing a regular feature in the journal under the heading “in the news.”4 one goal here was to have academic authors speak to broader publics; a second goal was for this work to attract some attention from persons beyond academia. here, too, my editorial sensibility faced considerable barriers. indeed, given the many obstacles to each of these three editorial pursuits, one should ask, “how successful was any of this?” on the plus side, i think it fair to say that each of my editorial preferences resulted in the publication of a good number of terrific manuscripts between 1996 and 2001. at the same time, i would also say that any larger impact has depended, as one would expect, on the extent to which any of these editorial pursuits have converged with other efforts to move in these or similar directions. precisely for this reason, the move to interrelate the fields of cultural anthropology and history has probably had more resonances than either of the other two. here what is salient is that the emergent subfield of history known as world history has itself developed in ways that overlap and connect with cultural anthropology.5 to start with the most obvious point, world history has embraced the ideal of attending to global human diversity, thus moving sharply away from disciplinary history’s long-entrenched privileging of europe and, to shift registers, of social orders that are legible as states. at its best moments, moreover, world history has used its broadened attention to humanity to rethink established truths and produce new knowledge—thus proceeding in a manner that parallels and extends practices of defamiliarization and comparison that i spoke of above, when discussing my reflections on donna haraway’s comments about the value of emphasizing newness.6 perhaps not surprisingly, my comments here have emphasized my larger thematic pursuits as editor. yet much of my time and energy as editor went into the nitty-gritty editing of paragraphs, sentences, and words. here my goal was to help distinctive authorial voices enter the journal’s pages, rather than promote some standard voice, while also fostering the practice of expressing difficult ideas clearly. i think it is also worth noting an important practical challenge i faced as editor. when i first took up the position, the financial charges to the journal from the american anthropological association seemed to me at once quite high, relative to the services the association provided, and quite opaque, in terms of how the charges were calculated. throughout several years, what was uncovered, thanks to the considerable efforts of a number of people (including sca treasurer, mac marshall, and american ethnologist editor, carol greenhouse), was that the american anthropological association charged section journals considerably more for its services than it charged american anthropologist. establishing this with clarity and precision led, in turn, to a reworking of the financial relationship between the association and sections that sponsored journals, much to the benefit of the latter, i am pleased to say. this too was editorial work, though of a sort that is, perhaps, too easily forgotten.7 notes acknowledgments thanks to richard handler and lêda leitão martins for comments on earlier drafts of this piece. it was written while i was a visiting scholar at the núcleo de pesquisas eleitorais e politicas da amazónia, universidade federal de roraima, and i am grateful to this research center and its university for their generous hospitality in 2014–2015. 1. this is why, to my sensibilities, it was important to publish liss 1998. 2. it was on this basis, for instance, that i valued highly—and thus was pleased to publish—the critique of functionalist thinking in rosenblatt 1997. 3. in preparing this brief commentary, i looked back at the issues of the journal i edited to identify specific articles that had important historical components or dimensions, in addition to cultural anthropological ones. it was a nice surprise to find that there were simply too many of these for me to provide an exhaustive list here. that said, three worthy examples include bullard 1997, ortner 1998, and taminian 1998. i should acknowledge here that in pursuing work that combined cultural anthropological and historical elements, it could be said that i was pursuing the new and that there were thus some tensions between my different editorial goals. while i think this a valid observation, i do not find it to be a particularly damning one. moreover, i think it is also fair to say that pursuing a hybrid of cultural anthropology and history is an attempt to work through long-standing discontents in social and cultural analysis and, on that basis, one consistent with my earlier comments. 4. again, it is impractical to cite all of these “in the news” articles. they can be found by going back to the issues of the journal. 5. pomeranz and segal 2012 provides an overview of the emergence of world history and is particularly concerned with the ways this subfield departs from and remains in tension with the larger discipline of history. 6. two particularly noteworthy instances of such use of world history’s broadened attention to humanity are feierman 1993 and pomeranz 2000. steven feierman (1993, 177) uses his extensive knowledge of precolonial african histories to upend received knowledge of the relationships between “political and economic hierarchy, towns, commerce and intercommunication, writing, the plough, high densities of population, and historical dynamism”—which is to say, to upend our understanding of that bundle of traits that are conventionally said to distinguish civilizations or complex societies from simple or primitive or tribal ones. this is, in many ways, a recognizably cultural anthropological move. kenneth pomeranz, by contrast, uses his knowledge of chinese economic history to show that previous historians of the industrial revolution have simply presumed—without bothering to look much at the world beyond europe—that many precursor conditions to the industrial revolution were unique to europe, and thereby erred in attributing the industrial revolution to european specialness, in one way or another. i think it is worth noting that this comparison is much less a recognizably anthropological comparison than is feierman’s, precisely because it involves two complex societies rather than using a simple or tribal one to reconsider the familiar. we might then say that if china has been taken to be too other to be central to historical knowledge, so too, china has been taken as not other enough to be central to cultural anthropological knowledge. this particular two-sided marginalization may well be an important aspect, or effect, of orientalism. 7. a second aspect of the material conditions of the journal while i was editor is also worth noting, which is that the journal was housed at a small liberal arts college (pitzer) and used undergraduates, rather than graduate students in anthropology, as editorial assistants. that this worked so well speaks, in my view, to the often-unappreciated strengths of these peculiar institutions of higher education in the united states. that said, my own capacity to make this context work for cultural anthropology depended a great deal on having watched don brenneis serve as an exemplary editor of american ethnologist between 1989 and 1994, while he was my senior colleague at pitzer. references bullard, alice 1997 “self-representation in the arms of defeat: fatal nostalgia and surviving comrades in french new caledonia, 1871–1880.” cultural anthropology 12, no. 2: 179–212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1997.12.2.179. feierman, steven 1993 “african histories and the dissolution of world history.” in africa and the disciplines: the contributions of research in africa to the social sciences and humanities, edited by robert h. bates, v. y. mudimbe, and jean f. o’barr, 167–212. chicago: university of chicago press. liss, julie 1998 “diasporic identities: the science and politics of race in the work of franz boas and w. e. b. du bois, 1894–1919.” cultural anthropology 13, no. 2: 127–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1998.13.2.127. ortner, sherry b. 1998 “generation x: anthropology in a media-saturated world.” cultural anthropology 13, no. 3: 414–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1998.13.3.414. pomeranz, kenneth 2000 the great divergence: china, europe, and the making of the modern world economy. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. pomeranz, kenneth, and daniel a. segal 2012 “world history: departures and variations.” in wiley-blackwell companion to world history, edited by douglas northrop, 15–31. oxford: wiley-blackwell. rosenblatt, daniel 1997 “the antisocial skin: structure, resistance, and ‘modern primitive’ adornment in the united states.” cultural anthropology 12, no. 3: 287–334. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1997.12.3.287. taminian, lucine 1998 “rimbaud’s house in aden, yemen: giving voice(s) to the silent poet.” cultural anthropology 13, no. 4: 464–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.1998.13.4.464. underground inscriptions cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 31-39, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.05 underground inscriptions michele lancione university of sheffield https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9018-3562 one day in fall 2003, radu asked me if i was interested in seeing his place. we were standing in front of an open manhole, with a provisional iron ladder descending into the darkness below. grozăveşti metro station lay a few meters away, while bucharest gloomed all around, crisscrossed by poorly maintained infrastructure, failing pipes, frozen sidewalks, and a frenzy of billboards proclaiming the advantages of belonging to the “common family” of the european union (eu). glimpsing the dark end of the ladder i was both terrified and intrigued. i had known radu a few months, seeing and chatting with him every day on my way to and from the university. although we were just a few years apart in age, we did not have much in common: he was one of the many copii străzi living on the streets,1 i was an erasmus student; he was pumping a synthetic colorant (aurolac) from a plastic bag, while i did not even smoke; he had a past marked by a history of violence and institutionalization, while i was a working-class kid who had never experienced such life conditions. yet we chatted every day, ate merdenele cu brânză sărată together, and grew to trust each other. so i accepted his invitation. he moved down first and i tentatively followed, finding myself at the bottom of the ladder, staring into the darkness, without a clue what was going to happen. my senses were overwhelmed by the pitch-black hole, the humidity, the heat, the reek of piss and melted garbage. my glasses fogged, my face misted, my whole body shook. some moments of suspension: in between life, aboveground and below; in between homing and uninhabitability. then light came in the form of a candle held by a young boy. things were still mushy, but they gradually began to acquire clarity. the contours of a huge pipe running along one of the walls emerged from the dark. on the ground: rubbish, mattresses, covers—food leftovers, stagnating water—a cap, a jumper. right in the middle of this scene: radu and his younger friend looking at me—their eyes in suspension—waiting, perhaps, for a comment, an articulation of some sort. this was not what i was expecting, yet there it was—what he called home. bucharest has changed considerably in the fifteen years following this encounter. the colonizing discourse that depicts eastern europe as the other of “real” western europe was boosted by the so-called transition of former socialist countries to capitalism (hall 1992; popovici and pop 2016). from the early 1990s onward, the cultural doxa ran that the country must be “modernized,” rejecting everything associated with its recent past. the ruling classes, within the eu and other international bodies, translated this into the massive privatization and then financialization of housing, industry, and public space (chelcea and druţa 2016; deoancă 2017; vincze 2017). many have felt and lived the consequences. for homeless people and drug users like radu, but also for sex workers, the elderly poor, racialized others, and many more, the past thirty years have intensified a long history of exploitation, racialization, and neglect (lancione 2019a; mcelroy 2019). in between the cracks of these historical makings, communities of bucureştean have continued to live in underground tunnels crisscrossed by pipes running hot waters (part of the city’s massive tele-heating system); in abandoned shopping malls; in blocks already marked for demolition by the previous regime; in patchworked shacks located on public pavements or alongside railway lines; and within similar forms of supposed uninhabitability (simone 2018). yet there is more to these lives and stories than what the sociology of resilience, capability, and humanitarianism might suggest. as angela garcia (2010) shows in her work with addicts in new mexico’s española valley, the continuation and (re)affirmation of these margins is neither a matter of bare survival nor one of resilience. it is not that the bodies here fell through the cracks of history and are now waiting for a godot-like something to happen, nor are they in need of celebrations for their endurance. such a colonizing discourse does not capture the reverberations emerging from the cracks, the light coming through, as gloria e. anzaldúa (2015) puts it; instead it silences them by reappropriating their uncanny propositions within its normalizing governmentalities (foucault 2016). by contrast, an approach inspired by decolonial and radical feminist politics sees the uninhabitable of bucharest as places from which an affective proposition emerges that concerns more than survival, a statement about a form of life and a mode of becoming. this is about seeing the margins not only as a site of neglect but also as an active site of resistance: an affirmation of life despite its impossibilities (hooks 1990). crucially, this constitutes an affirmation that does not intend to fit within the dominant narrative, since it is precisely that violent and racialized narrative that has annihilated it from the start (roy 2019). life at the margins of bucharest, in its underground tunnels, takes its own form, its own weird assemblage: it is a life that saves itself from its own history, one that refuses institutionalization, and one that constructs its own way of being into the world—that is, its own way of dwelling, by caring for its own unfolding (lancione 2019b). * * * in 2014 i saw radu again, this time in a different tunnel passing under the main train station of bucharest. our encounter was possible thanks to a photograph i had taken of him in 2003: a friend recognized radu, and brought me to the gara de nord tunnel. when i meet him, radu doesn’t remember me, but he recognizes himself in the old picture. he is surprised, and i am too: radu has been living underground for more than eleven years, in warm tunnels filled with syringes running through the belly of the city. in there he feels, as he and the community put it, acasa, at home. day after day, he and other members of the community show me around their home. the tunnels become known to me as a fluid assemblage of pipes and veins, an interlace forming a living infrastructure making life possible underground (amin 2014). in a vitalist sense, this infrastructure can be seen as that shared plane where the economy of being at home was gathered in injecting heroine and mephedrone, but also in constructing collective assemblages of care by sharing food; by shouting at each other; by watching tv; by exchanging water, doses, and money; by climbing above ground to reconnect the tunnel’s electricity cable to the public lamp; by buying petrol for the electric generator; by scavenging copper wires and other scrap materials from the city’s trash bins, bringing them down, arranging them according to value and use, and bringing them out again for sale to recyclers; and by many other everyday matters, all taking place within and with a tunnel planned for energy efficiency and collective consumption by the republica socialistă românia decades ago (see lancione 2019c). the economy of care that all these arrangements brought to the fore made life in the underground possible, allowing inhabitants (as they put it) to become autonom din afară, independent from the outside, to create a home that offered an alternative to the supposed solutions provided by the city (homeless shelters, rehabs, jails). crucially, however, the economy of care in the underground does not leave evident traces: it is labile, ephemeral, largely hidden from sight, and when its traces are brought to light, they tend to be subsumed and categorized as deviant, pathological, in need of reparation. what i argue in my work is that only in paying attention to the nuanced makings of life at the margins—only in following the unfolding of its (under)grounded becoming—can one retrieve its politics of care and understand it for what it is: a proposition of its own standing, an underground inscription impossible to appropriate and sustainable only in its own refrains, at its own tempo (guattari 2009). * * * the following encounter describes radu helping a friend, andra, to inject legale—a powdered mix with mephedrone at its core. i am reporting it here to open a window on the ways in which care in the underground was brought to the fore, in the midst of extreme poverty, addiction, and diseases—but also within a shared sense of community, independence, and self-sustenance. the limited space of this essay does not allow me to give justice to the extensive complexity of these makings, which are an effect of historic lineages but also the producer of alternative ways of lives. yet the following passage hopefully provides a hint about the collective endeavor brought to the fore to align the conditions making life possible in the underground. this is a form of collective caring labor, a maker of home and belonging, inscribed also in the excruciating act of injection (garcia 2010). andra is sitting on one pipe, i am sitting close to her. all around us, there are people sleeping, talking, standing, passing by. andra: [speaking toward radu] come, will you inject me? he nods and stands in front of her, in the middle of the narrow corridor between the pipes. a gap no larger than two hands means people have to squeeze past. andra and radu do not speak. he gets the dose from her and prepares it. once it is ready, he tries to inject her, but finding a vein is difficult. he tries three or four times on her arms, then andra pulls her sweatshirt up, and he tries again on her side. andra: i’m not bleeding properly. me: yeah? radu keeps trying to inject her. inside the tunnel it is very hot and he is sweating. andra is visibly tense. all around, people shout at each other to obtain syringes or to buy stuff. in the background, a manele pop song plays loudly from the community’s tv set. radu: she’s also nervous, right? take her hand. radu keeps on trying to inject andra in different places. he inserts the needle in her arms, then her hands, trying to pull some blood into the barrel. all around noises and movements continue, but the two are concentrating on their task. they do not talk. andra: wait, ho! [andra shouts at someone passing right below radu, making him move while the syringe is planted in her skin.] me: [to radu] it’s very hard, right? radu: due to burned veins. she injected too much in the veins. andra: here! [andra points at a place on her side.] radu tries to inject there. radu: there’s no blood entering the rig, haven’t you seen it? the syringe hardly gets through the vein because it’s too stiff. radu tries again. at this point, andra has been jabbed by the syringe at least a dozen times. andra: ok, it’s in. radu tries to pull some blood, and it seems to work. he pushes the pump and, very tentatively, the substance enters andra’s body. andra: finally, it’s in! radu slowly pulls the needle out and throws the syringe away. andra: that’s it, it’s in . . . [she says something inaudible to radu.] radu: leave me alone, it didn’t work how you told me, look how much i have had to wait [referring to the fact that he tried to inject in many places, under andra’s direction]. you’ve embarrassed me, look! andra: yeah. i was so scared . . .2 collective resources—bodily, affective, relational, and material—needed to be aligned for andra to receive her shot. the outcome was not entirely dependent on her own will, nor that of radu. yet andra knew that she could not have done it alone and had to entrust someone else with her skin, her body, and her own addiction. yet andra and radu’s exchange signals more than a favor between two friends. it also constituted a form of caring for the other—of being concerned for one’s else position—that needs to be grounded in its historic and present makings. through it, one can see traces of a habitual form of being together, of sharing the same space without having to fight for it, of feeling secure in the midst of dozen of bodies crumpled in a tiny underground corridor, of looking for the same substances and sharing the same needs. this was about sitting within the same common home, crafted around the community’s wish to live independently and united, despite what the normalizing city aboveground thought of or made of it. the complexity of these forms of “caring otherwise,” to follow the term used by lauren cubellis and rebecca lester (forthcoming), is frightening, because to see its traces one has to step away from the mainstream moralities and dig into the uncomfortable cosmos of their makings (stengers 2005). yet in allowing for that displacement to happen, impossible homes might come to the fore and weird propositions about the acceptability and possibility of life might emerge, taking the form of a shared solidarity that is political even if doesn’t shout about its politics in the canonical ways (simone 2018). but even if one is ready to allow for that displacement, and to accept that “one can live a life of dignity and integrity in the midst of poverty” (hooks 1994, 199) according to its own makings, of certain things, like andra’s veins, almost no traces exist. they are hard to see, to let emerge, and to hear speak. even more so when their extended collective life, attached and sustained by the entire mechanosphere of the tunnel and its pipes, is silenced in its violent exposition to the world aboveground. this is what happened in june 2015, when the local authorities decided to evict the community of gara de nord, following a media storm generated by a number of international tv reports about life in the tunnels.3 some of the inhabitants were arrested, others displaced, and the entrances to the tunnels were sealed. according to conversations i had with one of the few providers of harm-reduction services for drug users in the city, many community members could not sustain themselves outside of the tunnel, and eventually died. what was lost in the eviction was not simply shelter but also a caring economy made of affective and material connections that went well beyond its depiction by the city aboveground. but if one sees the light emerging from the cracks, if one registers the weird politics of care inscribed within the margins, something powerful still remains of those lives and stories. these are inscriptions,ways of being together and becoming, that bucharest’s underground communities carved throughout the belly of the city and through their displaced histories. i understand them as affections and orientations that lie beyond, below, and within traces: they are matters, to paraphrase lisa stevenson (2014), that have a life beside themselves. resistant to light and to immediate appropriation, they become visible only if one sees their own markings, their own way of tracing life on earth. in their being in between evident traces and outright ghosts, they reveal with their translucence how life at the margins is possible on its own terms, speaking the proposition of the uninhabitable in its own grammar, at its own tempo (lancione 2019c). if tracing is about retrieval, inscription requires a more nuanced hermeneutic approach, one attentive to the complex making of weird assemblages and their politics. it is only when the assemblage of the underground is let to unfold and to speak its proposition that one can see why and how radu is caring for andra, and how home can be possible in the uninhabitable (simone 2018). registering what these inscriptions have to say through their affective and material being in the world constitutes the prerequisite for writing a radical political history of life at the margins in bucharest, and possibly beyond. such an endeavor contains, within itself, an invitation to slow things down and listen, and to be attentive to a politics of endurance that comes through the margins and needs only to be sustained (through appropriate harm-reduction interventions) rather than being “solved,” or subsumed into the many. the boschetari of gara de nord never saw themselves as homeless, so the homeless shelter provided by the city never appealed to them as a solution. radu and his peers inscribed their own way into the city from below, cutting across a long-standing history of neglect and deprivation. what that inscription reads and proposes is a life sustained by a politics of care that exceeded everything the city has offered, and could ever offer, them. abstract this essay examines the politics of home in underground bucharest, and the ways relationships of care among homeless drug users emerge amid everyday violence and exclusion, illuminating the unconventional practices of belonging that take shape in transient communal spaces such as underground electric, transportation, and waste-management systems. the traces of systemic exclusion in these experiences converge in makeshift forms of kinship and care, provoking questions of solidarity, fragility, and the political potential of recognizing such forms through ethnographic collaboration. [homelessness; kinship; substance use] notes acknowledgments the author wishes to thank his comrades of the common front for the right to housing (fcdl) and the ngo carusel in bucharest; lauren cubellis and rebecca lester for the invitation to this dialogue; and the cultural anthropology editorial team for their care and dedication. 1. inspired by the work of gloria e. anzaldúa (2015), in my writing i retain influences of the languages i speak and think with—including romanian and italian. this might require a level of additional effort from the reader, but it reflects the conditions of knowledge production through which a piece like this one was written. 2. this whole episode lasted around ten minutes. the conversation was audio-recorded with the explicit agreement of andra and radu. translated from romanian by dr. alina huzui-stoiculescu and checked by the author. 3. including an award-winning short report by the uk channel 4, and more from al-jazeera, deutsche welle, abc, and others, all available online. references amin, ash 2014 “lively infrastructure.” theory, culture and society 31, nos. 7–8: 137–61. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0263276414548490. anzaldúa, gloria e. 2015 light in the dark / luz en lo oscuro: rewriting identity, spirituality, reality. edited by analouise keating. durham, n.c.: duke university press. chelcea, liviu, and oana druţa 2016 “zombie socialism and the rise of neoliberalism in post-socialist central and eastern europe.” eurasian goegraphy and economics 57, nos. 4–5: 521–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2016.1266273. cubellis, lauren, and rebecca lester, eds. forthcoming traces of care: discernment and the work of recognition. durham, n.c.: duke university press. deoancă, adrian 2017 “class politics and romania’s ‘white revolution.’” anthropology news 58, no. 4: e394–e398. https://doi.org/10.1111/an.502. foucault, michel 2016 abnormal: lectures at the collège de france 1974–1975. edited by valerio marchetti and antonella salomoni. translated by graham burchell. london: verso. garcia, angela 2010 the pastoral clinic: addiction and dispossession along the rio grande. los angeles: university of california press. guattari, félix 2009 soft subversions: texts and interviews 1977–1985. los angeles: semiotext(e). hall, stuart 1992 “the west and the rest: discourse and power.” in formations of modernity, edited by stuart hall and bram gieben, 275–332. london: polity. hooks, bell 1990 “marginality as a site of resistance.” in out there: marginalization and contemporary culture, edited by russell ferguson, martha gever, trin t. minh-ha, and cornel west, 341–44. cambridge, mass.: mit press. 1994 outlaw culture: resisting representations. new york: routledge. lancione michele 2019a “the politics of embodied urban precarity: roma people and the fight for housing in bucharest, romania.” geoforum 101: 182–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.09.008. 2019b “radical housing: on the politics of dwelling as difference.” international journal of housing policy. https://doi.org/10.1080/19491247.2019.1611121. 2019c “weird exoskeletons: propositional politics and the making of home in underground bucharest.” international journal of urban and regional research 43, no. 3: 535–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12787. mcelroy, erin 2019 “digital nomads in siliconising cluj: material and allegorical double dispossession.” urban studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098019847448. popovici, veda, and ovidiu pop 2016 “from over here, in the periphery: a decolonial method for romanian cultural and political discourses.” lefteast, february 11. https://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/from-over-here-in-the-periphery-a-decolonial-method-for-romania/. roy, ananya 2019 “racial banishment.” in keywords in radical geography: antipode at 50, edited by antipode editorial collective, 227–30. new york: wiley-blackwell. simone, abdoumaliq 2018 improvised lives: rhythms of endurance in an urban south. cambridge, uk: polity. stengers, isabelle 2005 “the cosmopolitical proposal.” in making things public: atmospheres of democracy, edited by bruno latour and peter weibel, 994–1003. cambridge, mass.: mit press. stevenson, lisa 2014 life beside itself: imagining care in the canadian arctic. los angeles: university of california press. vincze, enikö 2017 “the ideology of economic liberalism and the politics of housing in romania.” studia universitatis babeş-bolyai studia europaea 62, no. 3: 29–54. http://doi.org/10.24193/subbeuropaea.2017.3.02. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 31-39, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.05 the delta is dead: moral ecologies of infrastructure in turkey the delta is dead: moral ecologies of infrastructure in turkey caterina scaramelli boston university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8513-5251 when i first met captain barbaros, i imagined that i would sail with him from the fishermen’s port in izmir’s mavişehir neighborhood, where we would see the aegean sea merge with the salt marshes of the gediz delta. instead, barbaros asked me to join him on board a crowded municipal bus. as the vehicle climbed the steep hills, barbaros pointed down at the luxury apartments near the docks where his boat was anchored. before the middle-class complexes were built, he recalled, there had been small houses with gardens boasting delicious melons, all framed by the waterways, canals, and marshes where barbaros fished for eels, gathered succulent salicornia (deniz börülcesi), and shared his deltaic livelihood with hundreds of species of water birds. but now, he declared, after a long silence, “the gediz delta is dead.” barbaros spoke to me of the marsh drainage projects that the city of izmir had undertaken in the 1970s. by the 1990s, the coastal marshes and gardens were gone, replaced by high-rises and luxury villas guarded by private security. barbaros and his family had moved, too, to a modest apartment up the hill. hoping to understand the gediz delta from barbaros’s boat, i had envisioned writing about a delta animated by the movement of fish, technology, sediments, boats, birds, plants, capital, bacteria, currents, and multiple waters (barnes and alatout 2012; richardson 2016; yates, harris, and wilson 2017). this delta, like other watery environments in turkey and beyond, had also been shaped by nineteenthand twentieth-century state-led marsh reclamation projects to obtain new land for agriculture, industry, and cities, to create new populations of national subjects, and to displace nomadic marsh dwellers (özesmi 1999; biggs 2010; evered 2012; husain 2014; guarasci 2015; gruppuso 2018). but in proclaiming the death of the delta from his hillside concrete apartment block, captain barbaros emphasized why, and to whom, these changes mattered. he assessed, in specifically moral terms, the new, precarious, and potentially mutually annihilating relations between communities of people, plants, and nonhuman animals, all enabled by changes in the delta’s built environments. barbaros, like my other interlocutors in izmir, articulated a moral stance on the deltaic worlds of infrastructures and ecologies, both entangled and inseparable.1 in this article, i offer the notion of a moral ecology of infrastructure, theorizing infrastructure and ecology as inseparable, rather than set in opposition. i use the term moral ecologies to indicate people’s notions of just relations between people, land, water, and nonhuman animals, plants, buildings, technologies, and infrastructures.2 moral ecologies also constitute assessments of justice and motivations for action, which concern relations between humans and nonhumans. for example, as i detail in later sections, delta fishermen made visible, writing petitions and filing lawsuits, their claims about the unjust effects of infrastructural transformation on their livelihoods and on delta ecologies. this analytic proves helpful for understanding how, and why, people confront and respond to environmental transformations in an infrastructural world.3 building on recent work highlighting the interconnections of ecology and infrastructure (carse 2012; anand, gupta, and appel 2018; stoetzer 2018), and on notions of moral economy (scott 1977; muehlebach 2012; see also thompson 1971), i call for a more expansive anthropological interrogation of moral ecology. i propose to take moral ecology well beyond its current use in the context of peasant, indigenous, and activist resistance (dove and kammen 1997; martínez-reyes 2016; baker et al. 2017), or deployed interchangeably with the concept of moral economy (rizvi 2017; campbell 2018). this intervention also invites anthropologists of science, environment, and infrastructure to take a more central role in long-standing debates over moral and ethical world-making (mattingly and throop 2018), as well as in inquiries into environmental ethics (hoefle 2008; saxena et al. 2018).4 distinctions between infrastructure and environment no longer hold: they fold onto one another, writes kregg hetherington (2019), echoing the work of other recent scholars of infrastructure in and of the anthropocene. but for barbaros, the delta did not die because it was suddenly made into infrastructure; the delta has long been infrastructural (for as long as human communities and their nonhuman companions have lived in the region). nor did barbaros find hope in critters thriving in the infrastructural rubble, or in weeds growing in the cracks. what does matter—with a moral urgency—for him and for others, are the contingent and unequal outcomes of particular infrastructural arrangements of organisms, materials, and economies. the moral ecologies of infrastructure i write about in this article also challenge binaries of urban and rural, resistance and hegemony, even wet and dry. expanding the concept of moral ecology beyond its previous meaning as, broadly, resistance to capitalist processes and dispossession helps us move beyond a binary that posits ecological relations in opposition to infrastructure—or, similarly, thriving in its interstices, disrupting engineers’ plans and capitalist trajectories (e.g., bubandt and tsing 2018). moral understandings of ecology in the delta, i contend, are not necessarily emancipatory, inclusive, progressive, or sustainable. they are nested within capitalist processes, histories of land expropriation, class and gender hierarchies, and exclusionary ethnonationalism. turkey is a good place for advancing a moral ecology of infrastructure; conversely, the analytics of moral ecology illuminate the urgency through which turkish residents have tackled questions of environmental and infrastructural change. understandings of ecology in contemporary turkey are mediated by the politics of large-scale infrastructure development, as well as by the rapid transformations of agrarian, mountain, coastal, palustrine, and urban environments under the justice and development party (akp) government since 2002 (erensü and karaman 2016; adaman, akbulut, and arsel 2017). these have variedly been projects of east-west regionalism (firat 2016) or ones of national development (erensü 2018). accordingly, concerns over infrastructure (especially urban, water, energy, and transportation) have come to stand in for broader claims about livelihood and democracy, and have also become vehicles for contesting state power (firat 2016; knudsen 2016). yet here i move away from a focus on turkey’s large (and small) environmental mobilizations—like the june 2013 protests against the destruction of gezi park in istanbul, as well as popular opposition to thermal and nuclear power plants, run-of-the-river hydropower, and mining—all subjects of generative ethnographic research (voulvouli 2009; arsel, akbulut, and adaman 2015; knudsen 2016). i turn instead to everyday experiences and conflicts over infrastructural ecology in the making and unmaking of the gediz delta as a wetland, a fishery, an open-air laboratory, a transportation node, and a site for speculative real estate. while many of these changes are conditioned by national and regional policies, here i foreground fishermen, scientists, ngo workers, and other working-class and middle-class residents in izmir as they reimagine their own ecological entanglement with the delta. i argue that their moral evaluations of specific deltaic configurations speak to their participation in environmental processes; in turn, these actors have transformed the delta’s material landscapes and ecological livelihoods. figure 1. map of the gediz delta and the izmir bay. map by caterina scaramelli. this argument is drawn from ethnographic research i conducted between 2013 and 2017, centered on three infrastructural ecologies of the lower gediz delta: a conservation wetland, a fishing lagoon, and an unbuilt bridge—sites that all overlap geographically. fishermen, scientists, and residents in izmir articulate varied moral claims on the livelihoods and relationships of humans and nonhumans that emerge from transformations in these sites and elsewhere in the delta. these articulations take varied forms—intimate conversations, lawsuits, scientific arguments, political declarations, and mapmaking, to name a few—and, as i will show, they enable further transformations of the built environment and its ecologies. immoral infrastructures moral ecologies reflect varying understandings about who gets included and excluded in environmental decision making, and who reaps the benefits of infrastructural and ecological transformations. one morning in march 2014, two elderly fishermen and i drove past a new residential gated community in the lower gediz delta, at the edge of a wetland conservation area. one of the fishermen, mustafa, gestured to the cotton fields that ended at the edge of road leading to the half-built villas, and to the ponds nearby, suffocating in green algae. “this is mehmet sıkı’s doing,” he uttered, referring to an ornithologist who had campaigned to create this protected area in the 1980s. unlike sıkı, mustafa was not concerned with the marshes drying as water was redirected to agriculture, or the loss of water-bird habitats to the expanding salt industry. rather, mustafa bemoaned the elusive benefits of speculative urban growth, and the effects of conservation zoning. “the city of izmir could have expanded here,” he elaborated. “then, there would have been plenty of jobs for us. but conservationists like sıkı prohibited development. now, there are only these small gated residences for the middle class, and they stand half empty.” mustafa’s moral claim, concerning economy as much as ecology, resonated with those of other rural residents as they considered the construction of high-end gated communities since the 1990s. this urban, middle-class moral ecology counterpoised the unhealthy city with the clean countryside. yet rural residents advanced a reverse moral ecology as they complained that the middle classes, in turn, were polluting their countryside (datta 2014).5 but mustafa was also concerned with the ecological effects of toxic industrial runoff flowing in the delta’s coastal marshes where he fished (scaramelli 2018a). working-class residents like mustafa and the middle-class residents of the new settlements (datta 2014) both employed shifting dichotomies of healthy/toxic and legal/illegal as indicators of just/unjust landscape making. the making of these contrasts suffused divergent moral ecologies of delta infrastructure. the other fisherman, erdal, also found fault with the residential development. “look,” he declared. “all these houses were built illegally. the building cooperative made a huge profit, but we won’t. they should not be here. this is not environmental conservation! the delta’s management plan was made by people who never even come here; they just looked at their computers in their air-conditioned offices. they never talked to us. they don’t know the delta.” erdal articulated a discomfort with classed forms of environmental expertise: even as an experienced fisherman, and the elected fishermen’s cooperative representative, he could not participate in an equal dialogue with scientists and bureaucrats about the possible futures of the delta. contestations over infrastructure constitute new political collectivities (coleman 2017), and the networks people create, maintain, or work to exclude others from, become invisible infrastructures themselves (simone 2004). erdal was similarly involved in a long struggle with the university and the conservation area’s management over a nearby fishing lagoon, which i will detail in a later section. conservation scientists, too, understood wetland ecologies as infrastructural, political, and moral. during an interview i conducted in his university office in winter 2014, mehmet sıkı recounted “irrigating” the protected wetland following a moral imperative to safeguard turkey’s natural and national wealth, and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of birds in the delta. following his recommendation during periods of drought in the 1990s, the state water works (dsi) built a water canal and installed a water pump to provide “much-needed” fresh water to the marshes. sıkı had envisioned it as an underground conduit, but the dsi had instead constructed an open canal from which, sıkı alleged, local villagers illegally (and immorally) extracted water upstream of the drying and dying marshes. as pumps and canals irrigated the wetland, the lower delta’s water was being redirected to sites of water-intensive industrial and agricultural production, which, in turn, released agricultural and industrial pollutants. moving flows of water and sediments thus simultaneously produced, sustained, and endangered the delta. sıkı’s vision of a wetland’s moral ecology was predicated on infrastructural remakings that privileged putatively native species. irrigation infrastructure that contributed to drying the marshes, he believed, could also be used to the opposite effect. he saw the gated community under construction as constituting an obstacle to wetland conservation, even as the conservation area itself increased its real-estate value. figure 2. salicornia, salt marshes, and fishing huts in the conservation area. photo by caterina scaramelli. these infrastructural ecologies presented different moral quandaries for residents, as my conversation with mustafa and erdal exemplified. neither conceived of delta ecology outside of its built infrastructure, yet they saw different connections and attributed contrasting moral salience to the changing delta. for mustafa, the gated community and the toxic sludge flowing from upstream factories into the delta’s fishing grounds were indicators that planners and managers had excluded people like him from their visions of the delta’s future. for erdal, the residences offered a blatant example of the shortcomings of environmental conservation and epitomized the reckless practices of the turkish construction industry. both men worried that residential infrastructure in the delta left less space for their livelihoods and for their ability to make claims heard across bureaucratic and economic hierarchies. these constituted moral claims about the place of the rural working class in transformations of urban form, environmental governance, and agricultural infrastructure. moral ecologies beyond resistance my understanding of moral ecology goes beyond dichotomies of anticapitalist resistance and supposedly immoral ecologies. focusing on infrastructural ecologies helps me broaden the scope of this analytic for anthropocenic ecologies (e.g., scott 2017), including infrastructure work. erdal and mustafa did not articulate a critique of capitalist and neoliberal systems of resource use (igoe and brockington 2007) but, rather, remained embedded within them. neither did they posit infrastructure as destructive of ecology: in different ways, they understood them as coproduced. anthropologists have often foregrounded the damaging effects of infrastructures—including river dams (errington and gewertz 2018), orchard fences (bird rose 2010), landmines (kim 2015), and flood shelters (cons 2018)—threatening the livelihood and existence of human communities, nonhuman animals, plants, and agrarian landscapes. alternatively, studies have called attention to emergent ecologies that (somewhat unexpectedly) thrive in infrastructural rubble and ruins (tsing 2015; stoetzer 2018)6 and in infrastructures that unintentionally become habitats for nonhuman creatures, such as water sewers (bruun jensen 2017). in these studies, ecological relations are often described as either vulnerable to or able to transcend infrastructure; conversely, infrastructure is generally cast as dominant, hegemonic, and oppressive.7 my research demonstrates the mutual constitution of ecologies and infrastructures, rather than their opposition, as conduits for moral claims about human and nonhuman livelihood. here i am also drawing from environmental histories, which have long cast environments as mutually constituted with human-built infrastructures (white 1996; blackbourn 2007; ritvo 2009; pritchard 2011).8 i propose leveraging the analytics of moral ecology to help us see the different ethical visions that suffuse ecological relations in their infrastructural transformations.9 anthropologists have often cast moral economies, across time and space, as different appeals for justice: calls for equitable access to land, for example, or fair remuneration for work (edelman 2005).10 in his analysis of eighteenth-century bread riots in england, e. p. thompson (1971) argued that they expressed a collective consensus about legitimate and illegitimate practices of bread making and distribution, as well as communal norms and obligations. writing on peasant rebellions in burma, james c. scott (1977) redefined moral economy as a notion of economic justice that responded to the exploitation wrought by colonial transformations of labor and land.11 in extensive contemporary anthropological use, the concept highlights the recognition of reciprocal obligations and the fostering of social relations. the religious evaluations of new capital and profit in a turkish village of carpet weavers, for instance, constitute one particular moral economy (hart 2013). moral economies are often seen as responding to immoral practices of profiteering and the alienation of capitalist markets and neoliberal restructurings. yet thompson (1971, 79) emphasized moral economies as a shared consensus as to what constitute legitimate or illegitimate practices: “definite, and passionately held, notions of the common weal.” indeed, many anthropologists have emphasized the embeddedness of notions of morality to hegemonic political and economic transformations (cf. polanyi 1957). for example, andrea muehlebach’s (2012, 20) study of italian neoliberal transformations has foregrounded the ongoing relevance of moral practices to postwelfare economies, “a form of ethical living that appears as the negation of and yet is integral to neoliberalism more broadly conceived.” similarly, heather paxson (2013) found that artisanal cheesemakers in the united states staked moral claims about their work that were grounded in the specifics of their production ecologies and within economic and agricultural systems. their moral practices involved working with multispecies collaborators, (post)industrial technology, tacit knowledge, and market networks. i build on these insights to expand the scope of moral ecology: this analytic helps anthropologists theorize the mutual obligations, affective relations, and valuations among humans and nonhumans. i expand the moral economy by taking into account relations with other organisms, material transformations, and symbiosis. and, i suggest, moral ecology should move beyond its current focus on resistance. in recent anthropological scholarship, moral ecology has denoted practices protecting collective resources and sustainable and reciprocal relations between environments and societies, resisting against capitalist and corporate expropriation (e.g., martínez-reyes 2016; baker et al. 2017). this use, however, tends to reproduce a dialectic of ecological morality defined as resistance to the immorality of markets, states, or corporations. this perspective ultimately results in a predetermined understanding of moral claims, and fails to account for the situated norms and values embedded in capitalist, corporate, and neoliberal transformations of environmental relations. in my use of the term, moral ecologies do not simply denote traditional subsistence practices and indigenous ontologies counterpoised with, for instance, high-yield seed varieties (dove and kammen 1997) or bounded conservation zones (martínez-reyes 2016). rather, i see these modern projects, too, as forms of moral practice and productive of new environmental subjectivities (agrawal 2005).12 the moral notions and claims of fishermen, city planners, and scientists emerge alongside (and do not simply resist) infrastructural transformations of the gediz delta, and all groups actively participate in these changes. the following sections will support this claim. a chronicle of destruction on a sunny spring morning, i was driving on a gravel road with my friend emre, a biologist, following a narrow strip of land separating a lagoon from the aegean. delta residents knew the lagoon as homa, but a sign marked it as the “university aquaculture department’s lagoon.” as we drove, emre pointed at floating foam and trash, coming from a new road construction, which had further separated sea and lagoon waters and drastically reduced circulation within the lagoon. an underground conduit connected the lagoon to an abandoned salt pan, where white and brown organic matter was pushed by the wind from the lagoon into the channel, and accumulated in one corner. our road ended at the fish traps: a long metal structure across the shallow mouth of the lagoon. near the traps stood a dilapidated one-story building. we boarded a small inflatable boat to reach the other end of the sandbar, beyond the fish traps. wading ashore, i struggled to keep up with emre, our bare feet pricked by sharp shells and stones. sitting down on a bush of red and green salicornia, i made an inventory of trash: plastic flip-flops, lycra and woolen rags, beer and water bottles. meanwhile, where lagoon and sea waters merged, emre was counting a colony of deniz kırlangıcı (sandwich sterns). emre’s perception was synesthetic: he used his eyes, binoculars, ears, notebooks, and the intimate knowledge of this lagoon, earned through decades of fieldwork. “to recognize birds,” he told me another day, “is to know birds the way you know a close relative, a friend, a loved one. you have to know their ruh, soul.” emre’s knowledge of the delta was based on his doctoral research, but just as much on years of living and working in the delta, developing emotional and personal attachments to its human and nonhuman inhabitants—what the historian of science robert e. kohler (2011) has called “residential” scientific practices. he had, for instance, helped a delta village’s headmen draft petitions to the national parks bureau to demand grazing rights for cows and sheep in the protected area (to no avail). his practices of tracing the delta’s landscapes and social relations, which he knew intimately and bodily, into the abstract representations of ecological transects, bird counts, maps, diagrams, scientific papers, and data sets might also recall erik mueggler’s (2011) account of botanists in east asia. like delta farmers, emre knew what to forage: whenever i accompanied him during a fieldwork outing, he gathered wild mushrooms, asparagus, salicornia, almonds, and bitter and tangy leaves. he usually rode his bike from home to the conservation headquarters, often chased by packs of stray dogs roaming amid cotton fields and farmhouses. he and his wife had recently moved to a new middle-class residential community in the lower delta. most other units lay empty, purchased as investments during turkey’s recent economic bubble, now burst. in this speculative infrastructure, they grew grapes, raised chickens, and fed feral dogs. only sailing back at sunset did i realize that our work also chronicled a moral ecology of changing infrastructure. homa’s waters were rapidly becoming sea, as waves and wind eroded the lagoon sandbars. emre explained that agricultural infrastructure had severed the lagoon from the gediz river estuary. removing dikes and drainage canals would once again open the delta’s marshes to their seasonal hydrological pulsing and allow freshwater to flow into the lagoon. this, he acknowledged, would prove impossible. but many species of birds continued to make the lagoon their home, and some infrastructural changes risked destroying their habitats, while others would allow for their flourishing. for example, two artificial islands built in the salt pans provided a popular nesting ground for thousands of flamingos. different environmental advocacy groups heatedly contested different projects of lagoon restoration. our fieldwork would help emre and friends at an environmental ngo draw a map showing bird-nesting sites that would be destroyed by the university management’s restoration project. this work marked a moral vision of nonhuman livelihood (at the scale of flocks, ecological habitats, and species), entangled within a spectrum of more or less desirable infrastructural configurations, all of which were lived ecologies. a natural and national wetland the transformation of the gediz delta’s agricultural fields, saltworks, wet meadows, lagoons, salt marshes, docks, reed beds, lakes, canals, and mudlands into a wetland had begun in the 1980s. local ornithologists and hunter organizations mobilized against the expansion of the saltworks of çamaltı on nearby marshes.13 in his field research, starting as a doctoral student, mehmet sıkı (1997) identified 183 bird species, 50 of which were laying eggs in the delta’s reed bed. sıkı and a colleague published a plea in the turkish magazine science and technology: “we expect that the çamaltı management will recognize the protection of the wetland area inside the salt pans, which contributes with her unique and special value to the beauty and wealth of our country. we urge management to undertake the important duty of and stop the expansion of the salt-works” (sıkı and baran 1984, 5). as a habitat for hundreds of species of birds, they claimed, a protected wetland area of natural and national value needed to be established. other university scientists joined the campaign for the conservation of the area, which, in 1998, also became a ramsar wetland of international importance.14 in appealing to the national value of the delta, rather than to international science, sıkı situated wetlands as part of a turkish nationalist discourse on nature’s value—one that could be appraised through the prism of science. this approach reversed the older paradigm positing green forests as a symbol of national civilization, while unproductive marshes and deserts represented backwardness (özkan 2018). sıkı would later also campaign for the removal of a eucalyptus forest planted on the marshes. however, beyond appeals to nativism and nationalism, sıkı largely narrated his role in the conservation of the wetlands in explicitly moral-ecological terms. as sıkı (1994, 7) wrote on the expansion of the saltworks on the marshes, for example: “i was deeply affected, and i believed that i could not remain an outside observer.” sıkı’s and others’ appeals led to the creation of several overlapping conservation zones, and to material transformations in the delta’s wetlands, shaped by scientists’ moral visions of multispecies ecologies.15 alongside university scientists, turkish environmental ngos began to take an interest in the wetlands, advocating for their conservation and filing lawsuits against new construction within the protected areas. these groups, however, staked competing claims on the changing ecological infrastructures of the delta, as i will describe in the next section. figure 3. homa lagoon: in the wetland, water is always multiple. photo by benjamin siegel. the lagoon trap when i met him in 2014, erdal, one of the two elderly fishermen introduced earlier and the head of the delta villages’ fishing cooperative, was leading a prolonged crusade against university managers who had prevented fishermen from accessing the homa lagoon fisheries. over centuries, homa had been made and remade around the seasonal flows of water and fish. fishermen collectively maintained the lagoon using kargı (arundo donax), saz (phragmites australis and juncus sp.), and stones; these were mobile infrastructures moved seasonally. in early spring, schools of fish swim through a narrow inlet into the lagoon to feed and reproduce in the shallower, warmer, and less salty waters. in late fall, as lagoon waters cool, those fish prepare to swim out toward warmer and deeper sea waters and get caught. lagoons, in a sense, are traps. one morning, over cups of tea and börek (a popular savory pastry) in his neighborhood’s teahouse, erdal told me that his parents had not been fishers; rather, they had always associated fishing with the greek orthodox villagers in the delta.16 the name of the delta’s biggest fishing lagoon, erdal continued, was a greek word: homa meant “earth,” owing to its shallow and turbid quality. greek ottomans had in fact dominated maritime professions, such as sailing, fishing, and oaring, until the 1920s (goffman 1990). but unsurprisingly, erdal did not mention the violent deportations and forced exchanges that led to the eradication of the greek orthodox population between 1914 and 1923.17 no scientist, activist, or fisherman i had talked to had ever mentioned to me the greek history of homa. in the remaking of the delta as a site of national value, older cosmopolitan histories of landscape use, and particularly those uncomfortable to narratives of ethnic nation-state formation, had been elided, thereby showing that ethnonationalism is bound to moral claims about ecological and infrastructural form. erdal was born in the delta village of tuzçullu, then known for sheep farming and camel caravans that carried, among other goods, salt from the nearby mines. the family claimed nomadic (yörük) heritage, and erdal was a shepherd. as a teenager, he had moved to the expanding industrial outskirts of izmir to work in a paper factory. on retirement, he bought a small fishing boat, nets, and other equipment, and joined the local fishermen’s cooperative. erdal’s son, too, had only become a full-time fisherman after quitting his job in an auto shop in the wake of a fight with his boss. only at sea, he told me, lighting a cigarette as i pulled nets of squid, algae, and crustaceans to the boat, did he feel free and at peace. from the deck, he threw small fish into pelicans’ open beaks. the birds knew to follow his boat, he said, and would be ready to jump and swallow the fish. erdal’s family story resembles that of many other landless (or smallholder) peasants in the lower delta: old and young men (and a few women) at sea during the fishing season, working flexible or seasonal jobs, and, if they have the capital, opening fish restaurants in new lower-middle-class compounds. tuzçullu fishermen, erdal told me another day, specialize in fishing octopus and squid in the izmir bay and in lagoon fishing in homa. erdal’s son and daughter-in-law had worked precarious seasonal jobs and had recently opened a fish takeaway, but they aspired for the next generation to achieve more secure employment as state employees. much as fish are trapped in the mobile infrastructure of the lagoon seeking warmth and food, erdal told me en route to the train station after a fishing outing, so, too, had he felt trapped in his factory job. extending erdal’s comparison, both fish and fishermen were caught in yet another trap: the changing infrastructural bureaucracy of the lagoon. figure 4. fisherman shares the day's catch with a pelican. photo by caterina scaramelli. up to code homa is a lively delta infrastructure, made and remade through flows of water, labor, capital, and regulations, as well as through changing “environmental imaginaries” (yeh 2009, 107): the layering of infrastructural projects on landscapes. in the late nineteenth century, after city engineers redirected the gediz river northward to prevent the izmir bay from becoming too shallow, the sea started eroding the lagoons (doğer 1997). the expansion of drainage and irrigation canals and the growth of urban districts in the twentieth century both served to reduce freshwater flows. lagoons became shallower, polluted, saltier, warmer, and eutrophic. one izmir lagoon was turned into a beach, then a trash landfill, and then a leafy park. in the 1990s, the municipality dredged the inner bay lagoons. the remaining delta lagoons were caught in contestations over access to infrastructure and ecological change. in the 1980s, as ornithologists began mobilizing against the expansion of the çamaltı saltworks, the university set out to acquire homa, with the aim of building a scientific fishery. the department of fisheries and aquaculture won a long legal struggle against the fishing cooperative (alpbaz 2012), and homa became the only university-owned lagoon in turkey. members of the cooperative could keep fishing, but the university would retain a large share of the catch. in addition, it would take over the infrastructural maintenance. fishermen, however, told me that university staff could not or would not do the seasonal work in the lagoon as they had done—a neglect that, they contended, had accelerated the deterioration of the lagoon ecosystem. in december of 2009, a winter storm destroyed the access road. the university placed a locked gate at the lagoon entrance. passes were distributed to authorized fishermen traveling to the docks beyond the gate, but the lagoon remained off limits. eating fried fish in his tiny restaurant, erdal’s son told me that he once tried to get in using his father’s pass and was banned from the site. in our conversations in the university department in the winter of 2014, the lagoon managers (all aquaculture professors) explained that they closed access to renew the lagoon’s infrastructure—the research building, road, barrier islands, and the fish traps—and to prevent the fisheries’ depletion. during an interview in his office in spring 2014, the department’s head and lagoon manager characterized the fishermen then fighting to regain access to the homa lagoon as cahil (ignorant) and güvenilmez (untrustworthy). a colleague declared, without irony, that the university had “brought the lagoon up to code.” he pulled out a booklet on the legislation concerning the spacing of steel bars in fishing lagoons and gave me a copy to keep. in seeking to construct stable infrastructures in unruly, unpredictable environments, experts also reproduce their own notions of politics (harvey and knox 2015). in this case, university lagoon managers made an argument about the positive ecological effects of their new and supposedly up-to-code infrastructure to justify restricted access. private security guarded the lagoon; the guards watched tv in the damp and dilapidated building, making tea on a gas stove. at night, one of them told me, they had witnessed intrusions by “illegal” users, sometimes armed. unable to access the lagoon with the banned fishermen, i accompanied a microbiologist and her student on a dinghy as they fished for valuable organisms, filtering water with a makeshift tool of cheesecloth, water bottles, and a bullet cartridge. back in the lab, she showed me the phytoplankton through a microscope, describing its potentially lucrative industrial applications.18 in 2010, the municipality restored the lagoon sandbar with truckloads of rubble from demolished informal neighborhoods that had been constructed around the ancient agora, including pieces of the agora itself. the university, sued by the provincial government, had to pay a hefty fine, remove the rubble, and rebuild the sandbar (karademir erol 2012; kızılkaya 2012). the state water works installed a pump to allow seawater to enter the lagoon, as the inlets had been closed by the new road. in 2015 the university’s vision for lagoon restoration entailed using mud extracted from the dredging of the bay to make new islands for nesting pelicans. it also involved redirecting water from wastewater plants into the lagoon through an underground canal. the project included a circulation canal dredged at the bottom of the lagoon—the first in the world, university scientists boasted. when the university did not allow fishermen back into the lagoon, erdal penned letters to state officials and institutions and held meetings and press conferences. yet his petitions were to no avail. he and other fishermen showed me that the renovation project had radically changed the infrastructure of fishing and flow. the work that the fishers had performed seasonally to maintain water circulation and fish populations—opening and closing the inlets between lagoon and sea through the use of reeds and rocks—had been replaced with less mobile steel, cement, and gravel. the renovation works and a new management model aimed to create a new moral ecology as a model ecosystem (paxson and helmreich 2014): a reengineered wetland laboratory and living space for university scientists, birds, and microorganisms. this change was not just a word game: the wetland denomination also defined who (humans and nonhumans alike) would, and could, shape its material and symbolic futures. the argument was fought through envisioning new infrastructural transformation producing different (and differently inhabitable) ecologies, all of which carried competing moral stakes for fishermen, scientists, residents, and environmental advocates. don’t touch my flamingo on may 4, 2017, three civil society organizations and eighty-five citizens filed a lawsuit in izmir’s district court against the ministry of environment and urbanization. the 2014 revision of turkey’s wetland legislation had eased new infrastructure development in protected areas. this coalition was now contesting the ensuing approval of the environmental impacts assessment for a highway bridge over the izmir bay. in february 2017, my friend zeynep told me, the national wetland commission had changed the gediz delta’s conservation boundary near the area scheduled for bridge construction from a “strict preservation zone” to an “area of controlled use.” this had simplified the approval process for infrastructural development; in august, the ngos filed another lawsuit against the new conservation zoning. the contested project consisted of an eleven-kilometer highway, including a bridge, tunnel, and an artificial island in the shape of a moon and star. these were the emblems found on turkey’s flag, but friends told me that the island would be made in the shape of a lightbulb: the symbol of turkey’s ruling party, the akp. the rumor about the “real” shape of the island suggested that the project had come to stand for the ruling party both as its material incarnation in the environment and as an authoritarian mechanism for the exercise of centralized power. the bridge would cross from the southern bay to its northern shores in the gediz delta and then connect to the new izmir-istanbul highway. the project had been at the forefront of the akp’s binali yıldırım’s losing municipal election campaigns in 2011 and 2014.19 its supporters referred to the project as a “necklace” for the city, and the bridge was named as one of the akp’s goals for the turkish republic’s centenary in 2023. zeynep, a civil society organizer and environmental social scientist, emailed me the lawsuit document. i read it as a moral ecology couched in the language of law to protect human and nonhuman livelihoods, and zeynep agreed with my analysis. infrastructure, anthropologists write, mediates state and corporate power, collective actions, and subjectivities, often becoming visible when things do not work as planned.20 for instance, failing urban water infrastructure reveals political systems that leave their citizens to fend for themselves (schwenkel 2015) and generates new everyday practices of family and neighborhood care labor to tame unruly sewage and ill-fitting connections (farmer 2014). while access to water infrastructure may be central to informal settlers’ claims of belonging to a polity (anand 2011), water technologies also produce new moral subjects (von schnitzler 2013). in this case, residents formed new alliances mediated by a shared concern with an unwanted infrastructure. they did not reify boundaries between environment and politics (stamatopoulou-robbins 2014) but, rather, emphasized the infrastructural politics of environment. the bridge, the plaintiffs declared, citing izmir’s latest urban plan, was incongruous with the city’s transportation needs. yet most of the opposition to the bridge was not couched in economic or planning arguments, but in ones of ecology and livelihood. the bridge project, poised to increase water pollution in the izmir bay, would result in destruction of the ecological life and biodiversity of the gediz delta’s wetlands. in contesting the bridge, plaintiffs leveraged the international ramsar status of the delta’s wetlands, alongside other national nature conservation statutes. the lawsuit emphasized the role of the delta as a feeding and nesting ground for hundreds of bird species, including one third of the mediterranean flamingo population. in the wake of the june 2017 court decision to reassess the environmental impact assessment (eia), zeynep and other friends staged a social media campaign centered on two connected slogans: flamingoma dokuma, “don’t touch my flamingo,” and gediz deltası hepimizindir, “the gediz delta belongs to all of us.” in a press conference i attended in june 2017, the environmental ngo’s spokesperson declared the project would “cause one of the biggest destructions ever seen in world history.” the flamingo, a mascot of wetland conservation in izmir—and tangible proof of its putative failures and successes—had become a charismatic symbol of the varied nonhuman livelihoods potentially destroyed by the planned project. yet it was not simply a charismatic animal leveraged instrumentally (cf. takacs 1996). at stake in the stated concerns for ecological life were also deep-seated, emotional, cultural, and ethical concerns with (human) power and with the effects of the authoritarian planning of infrastructure. these were questions of infrastructural moral ecology. in july and august of 2018, a court-appointed panel of experts stopped the project for its lack of compliance with environmental protection regulation in the wetlands (karakoyun 2018). in october, the court held that the project’s eia was invalid, noting its negative impact “on a very important nature conservation area, protected by international environmental conservation agreements as well as by other protection statuses” and “on water temperature and circulation in the bay, which would result in the disappearance of artemia [brine shrimp], which are fundamental to the food chain of flamingoes, and that would also cause damage to fragile ecosystem equilibria.” the general election of june 24, 2018, which resulted in the victory of the people’s alliance (cumhur i̇ttifakı), an electoral alliance between the akp and the nationalist movement party, ushered in sweeping constitutional change and an authoritarian presidency—soon followed by the rapid fall of the turkish lira. in its aftermath, media outlets devoted less attention to the bridge. but for zeynep and others, this outcome offered a glimmer of hope and resilience. conclusion izmir residents, fishermen, ngo workers, scientists, and bureaucrats understand the gediz delta as a livable place by invoking infrastructural remakings of specific relations. infrastructures are ecological, inhabited, and produced through work, power, and capital. infrastructures, i contend, exist in varied relations to environments and ecological relations, and in ways that are not merely metaphorical. given its broad analytical purchase, it is unsurprising that anthropologists see infrastructure as at once “generative and degenerative; constructive and destructive; future oriented but ultimately fleeting; fluid and mobile yet inflexible; and sometimes obdurate to retrofitting” (howe et al. 2016, 559). in the gediz delta, these apparent contradictions (inflexible and mobile, for instance, or futuristic and traditional) arise as scientists, state officials, and residents construe varied moral notions of ecological relations and livelihoods. perhaps the gediz delta is an enchanted infrastructure (see harvey and knox 2012), creating a sense of shared social good and holding together competing hopes, an enchantment that involves ecological relations alongside social or political ones. as opposition to the bridge and concerns raised by the gated communities make apparent, the movements that delta infrastructures allow—of energy, capital, media, people, and goods—also symbolize state power (larkin 2008). in this article, i have foregrounded infrastructures as existing within and shaping lived environments of human and more-than-human ecologies, suffused by moral understandings of normative relations and justice. in doing so, i have proposed to take anthropological theory beyond dichotomies of infrastructure and environment, demonstrating that ecologies that come to matter as moral landscapes are already embedded in infrastructure. we can only accomplish the disentanglement of infrastructure and ecology as separate categories by erasing a variety of perspectives. for example, the fishermen’s cooperative argued that their infrastructural labor created lagoon ecologies viable for sustainable fishing. in contrast, university management contended that only its infrastructural renovations, “up to code,” would create a valuable lagoon ecology for scientific knowledge production. similarly, the ornithologist envisioned the role of irrigation infrastructure as sustaining bird ecologies and posited the delta’s eucalyptus trees as invasive organisms to be removed. the outcome of the co-constitution of infrastructure and ecology is a moral value, in thompson’s (1971) sense of a shared sentiment (see also fassin 2009). a moral ecology, as i have theorized it, is both an impulse for action—emre’s mapmaking, for instance—and for the terms in which claims are made, like his vision for ideal relations between birds, fish, flows, and infrastructure. moral ecologies are also couched in epistemological claims: zeynep, sıkı, and emre all claim a scientific understanding of delta ecologies, appealing to different, and often contrasting, scientific arguments tempered with moral commitments to “good” landscapes. at the same time, fishers like erdal and mustafa counter an experiential command of deltaic flows gained through decades of lagoon-making, fishing, and seafaring labor. all of them also practice moral visions of the ecology of infrastructure as they create and sustain social relations with the delta’s pelicans, flamingos, salicornia, reeds, fish, and countless other nonhuman beings while working, foraging, conducting research, spending time with family, and cultivating friendships and collaborations. abstract in a turkish delta, fishers, scientists, and residents articulate contrasting moral ecologies of infrastructure. contesting the infrastructural remaking of delta environments, fishermen connect ecological change to the concerns of working-class livelihoods; scientists assert a unique moral authority to create new habitats for selected species; and activists couch claims of ecological justice within existing legal spaces, all against the backdrop of increasing authoritarianism and economic crisis. this article extends insights from anthropological discussions of moral economy into political ecology to advance a new theoretical understanding of environmental infrastructure. i offer the notion of a moral ecology of infrastructure, theorizing infrastructure and ecology as inseparable, rather than set in opposition. in my use of the term, moral ecologies are assessments of justice and motivations for action that concern relations between humans and nonhumans. these assessments are not necessarily couched as resistance, but also encompass hegemonic and capitalist projects. this analytic proves helpful for understanding how, and why, people confront and respond to environmental transformations in an infrastructural world. at stake in these claims are moral notions of human and nonhuman livelihoods, notions that include those of water flows, birds, fish, sandbars, trees, and others. [infrastructure; ecology; conservation; turkey; water] özet bir türkiye deltasında balıkçılar, bilim insanları ve deltanın sakinleri, altyapının birbirine zıt ahlaki ekolojilerini ifade ederler. her bir grubun delta ortamlarının yeniden altyapılandırılmasına karşı çıkış nedeni farklıdır: balıkçılar ekolojik değişimi işçi sınıfının geçim kaygılarıyla ilişkilendirir; bilim insanları seçili ender türlere yeni habitatlar oluşturmak için kendilerine özgü ahlaki bir otorite ortaya koyarlar; ve çevreciler artan otoriter rejim ve ekonomik krizler kıskacında, mevcut yasal alanlarda ekolojik adalet iddialarını dile getirirler. bu makale, çevre altyapısına dair teorik yeni bir anlayış geliştirmek için ahlaki ekonomi ile ilgili antropolojik tartışmaları politik ekolojiyle ilişkilendirmektedir. ahlaki altyapı ekolojisi kavramını önererek, altyapıyı ve ekolojiyi birbirine zıt olmaktan ziyade birbirinden ayrılmaz kavramlar olarak görüyorum. ahlaki ekolojilerden kastım, insanlar ve insan olmayanlar arasındaki ilişkilere dair gelişen adalet anlayışı ve eylem motivasyonlarıdır. ahlaki ekoloji mutlaka direnç demek değildir; aynı zamanda hegemonik ve kapitalist projeleri de kapsamaktadır. bu yaklaşımla, insanların altyapı dünyasındaki çevresel dönüşümlerle nasıl ve niçin karşı karşıya kaldıklarını ve bu dönüşümlere nasıl tepki verdiklerini anlayacağımızı iddia ediyorum. bu iddialarda dile gelen, insani ve insan dışı geçim kaynaklarına dair olan ahlak kavramlarıdır; suların akışını, kuşları, balıkları, kıyı kordonlarını, ağaçları ve diğerlerini içeren kavramlar. [altyapı; ekoloji; doğa koruma; türkiye; su] notes acknowledgments i am grateful to my friends, hosts, and collaborators in izmir, without whom this research would not have been possible. big thanks to anand vaidya, benjamin siegel, chris walley, emily wanderer, jessica barnes, jim scott, kali rubaii, namita dharia, nicole labruto, sam dolbee, simone popperl, tessa farmer, sophia stamatopoulou-robbins, and stefan helmreich for their generous and insightful comments. i also thank the anonymous peer reviewers and editors at cultural anthropology, especially brad weiss, for their careful reading and constructive feedback. the yale agrarian studies program provided an inspiring setting for writing and revisions. earlier versions of this article have also been presented at the sts circle at harvard, the annual meeting of the american anthropological association, the center for humanistic inquiry at amherst college, and the association of social anthropology of the uk and commonwealth conference, and i have benefited from participants’ comments and suggestions. the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research and the national science foundation (grant no. 1429914) funded much of the field research that appears in this article. 1. the terms ethics and morality are sometimes used to demarcate contrasts between personal or collective, secular or religious, general or socially embedded, unspoken or self-reflective, private or political (mattingly and throop 2018). this article takes moral ecology in the widest sense, beyond dichotomies. 2. in contrast with my use of the term, many others (e.g., hertzke 1998; swartz 2010) have theorized moral ecology using ecological models as metaphors for sociocultural processes. 3. the urgency of moral ecology is immediately apparent in contexts of infrastructural violence, such as plantations’ predatory practices and the destruction of livelihoods in indonesia (li 2018), or oil companies’ disentanglement from questions of infrastructure provision in equatorial guinea (appel 2012). my interlocutors, however, would not see transformations in the delta as commensurable to nearby, starker sites of infrastructural violence, including the 2014 collapse of the coal mines in soma that killed 301 workers. in this article, i show that moral ecologies also concern more mundane sites of infrastructural livelihood. 4. environmental ethicists interrogate and classify in universalistic terms the premises of people’s worldviews and beliefs leading to specific assessments of justice or actions, particularly in the context of intractable environmental quandaries (e.g., boylan 2014). anthropologists have challenged their universal premises and added ontological nuances to abstract categories and relational approaches in environmental ethics (e.g., jax et al. 2013) and are inviting new conversations with environmental anthropologists (saxena et al. 2018). 5. ayfer bartu candan and biray kolluoğlu (2008) have argued that the new urban forms of middle-class gated communities and housing for the poor are interconnected. by contrast, kimberly hart (2017) suggests that the residents of an aegean village that became a suburban neighborhood of wageworkers still understood themselves as independent from the state provision of infrastructure. 6. raymond williams (1977) understood emergent social and cultural practices as opposed to dominant orders in a dialectic of incorporation and resistance. michael m. j. fischer (1999) theorized emergent forms of life in late capitalism as social mediations of science. emergent, in the sense of processes arising unexpectedly and distinct from existing conditions, often carries a normative connotation: for example, eben kirksey (2015) has interpreted emergent ecologies as symbiotic associations of living creatures that disrupt the existing order, while generating new possibilities for mutual flourishing. 7. anthropologists have theorized environmental infrastructure as the managerial notion that ecologies themselves perform the work of human-built systems, foregrounding the entanglement of the built and natural environment (hetherington 2019). for instance, as floating rice supports the chao pharaya delta’s irrigation system, engineers and environmental managers envision multispecies and natural infrastructures (morita 2017). and for environmental managers, forested land becomes part of a broader infrastructure of water provision to make the panama canal work (carse 2012). 8. i also align with anthropologists like joseph masco (2004), who has argued that species once understood as vulnerable to nuclear contamination have become icons of ecological survival and purity in remediation zones. and i join andrew mathews’s (2018) theorizing of landscapes as partially connected entities structured by more-than-human relations, even though he takes infrastructure as mere metaphor. 9. moral ecologies also emerge from embodied practices of the cultivation of place, identity, and belonging, sometimes rooted in the land (pandian 2009; ives 2014) and sometimes flowing and sedimented in moving waters. 10. anthropologists have recently observed a renewed attention to questions of ethics and morality (e.g., keane 2016; throop 2016), including in people’s economic practices. 11. scott’s interpretation added an attention to specific values, emotions, and senses of justice to thompson’s focus on traditional norms. 12. moral ecologies are also embedded in broader political ecologies. 13. people had been extracting salt in the region for centuries. in the eighteenth century, salt became an export good for global trade routes from the nearby port of eski foça. extraction was controlled by the ottoman state and actioned to local tax farmers; greeks often ran the mines and salt pans. in eski foça, salt from çamaltı, adatepe, and other extraction sites was loaded onto ships or transported on camelback to the rail station of menemen (erol 2016). in the late nineteenth century, çamaltı was turned into a centralized production system (egemen 1946). after the turkish republic’s 1923 founding, the çamaltı saltworks became a state monopoly. salt was sold only on national markets, and production decreased. çamaltı salt continues to be used in the petrochemical, textile, soda, chlorine, and leather industries (saltan and okar 1968). 14. the turkish government joined the ramsar convention in 1994 (matthews 1993). in the early 2000s, as turkey’s environmental legislation came to encompass wetlands, wetland commissions were established in each province, and the national wetland bureau drafted management plans. 15. in march 1982, turkey’s directorate of national parks and hunting approved the creation of the homa lagoon wildlife conservation area and a waterbird protection and reproduction area. in 1985, the ministry of culture granted the area protected status and began reforestation in the southern marshes. in 1987, the izmir municipality named the delta a “bird paradise.” this denomination was inspired by the earlier ornithological and conservation work of kurt cosswig (özesmi 1999; scaramelli 2018b). 16. many greek orthodox fishermen were landless peasants who worked seasonally as sharecroppers, fishermen, and salt miners. almost all sharecroppers in eski foça, for example, were greek orthodox (erol 2016). 17. in the late seventeenth century, smyrna grew from a small port into a cosmopolitan city and global maritime trade node. its surrounding landscapes produced export goods such as dried fruits, salt, and stone (goffman 1990; zandi-sayek 2012). in the early twentieth century, the forced deportations of ottoman greeks and armenians, war and occupation, and population exchanges dramatically transformed the demographics of izmir (milton 2008; meichanetsidis 2015; erol 2016). leyla neyzi (2008) has argued that residents’ memories of the violent remaking of izmir from a cosmopolitan port city to a turkish town emphasized narratives of loss even as they embraced wider nationalist stances. 18. in the 1990s, scientific research in the homa lagoon focused on the role of phytoplankton on fish populations. in the 2000s, phytoplankton itself became the subject of research (yazıcı and büyukışık 2007). 19. yıldırım went on to become the minister of transportation, akp party leader, and then prime minister, until the office was abolished in the referendum of june 2018. 20. anthropologists have generally understood infrastructures as networks (of people, things, and information) imbricated in political relations. ethnographies have often focused on the things infrastructures do, the social relations and subjectivities they produce, as well as on their intended and unintended effects. this approach partly derives from notions from science and technology studies about infrastructure as invisible systems of organization embedded in social arrangements and learned practices (star 1999) and as socially constructed 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injuries and “catching” diabetes in an illegible epidemic amy moran-thomas massachusetts institute of technology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5411-1046 by the time we met in southern belize, dr. w had already named it in his mind: the “caribbean diabetic limb crisis.” he said that he hoped someone would conduct a study about the trauma caused by diabetic amputations, and not just for patients. he felt someone should also do a study about the trauma for surgeons put in the position of repeatedly removing pieces of their patients. it took me a moment to put together the fact that dr. w was one of those surgeons. “you can’t imagine how much i never want to see another person lose their foot,” he would tell me later. “but i know that each day i do this, that’s what’s coming.” archaeologists say the world’s oldest known prosthetic appendages are mostly toes, fashioned nearly 3,000 years ago in egypt out of wood, leather, linen-like plant fibers, and glue (nerlich et al. 2000). in 2010, i never met anyone who bothered with prostheses for “just a toe.” but if you looked at the sandals of the people gathering in lines in dangriga that morning, you could see that a number were missing digits. those waiting to see the doctors appeared to come from all walks of life: i observed stylish fashions and threadbare clothing, people formidable in stature and others looking markedly thin, a mix of skeptical-looking teenagers and grandmothers in weathered hats. the members of the belize diabetes association (bda)’s many branches and their colleagues from the belize ministry of health arriving in the southern town of dangriga unpacked supplies for the day, arranging stations around an open public pavilion. the team’s mood was relaxed and convivial. only their gear, plastic boxes packed with foot care instruments, hinted at the day’s high stakes. figure 1. dr. w at work in dangriga. photo by amy moran-thomas. dr. w’s team brought a stack of photocopied papers, titled “limb salvage form.” these sheets displayed sketched outlines of feet: a right and left foot shown from both bottom and top views, with circles outlining the twenty-two quarter-sized places where podiatrists test for sensation to detect any signs of lost feeling. “can the patient see the bottom of their feet?” the paper asked, just above a question about the safety of shoes. the belize diabetes association of new york collaborates with dr. w’s diabetic foot center group team, which since 2004 has been traveling between their new york city base and a range of caribbean countries. their group focused on foot maintenance checkups, only one station among an array of services offered around the pavilion. when requested, they provide training to build expertise and capacities among local caregivers. on occasion, dr. w also performs follow-up salvage surgeries to restore a diabetic limb that may have already been scheduled for amputation. in medicine, the term salvage means that all possible measures are taken to ensure an ailing limb stays alive and attached. limb salvage procedures often include vascular surgery measures to restore blood flow, such as unblocking blood vessels or placing stents. they most broadly demand the careful monitoring of feet to catch and treat tiny wounds before they reach a crisis point. this labor has its own lexicon. i made lists of unfamiliar terms in my notebook. claudication comes from a latin verb meaning “to limp,” the name for stabbing leg pains caused by restricted blood flow. it is often linked to peripheral artery disease, which most doctors just call pad. debriding means removing dead tissue to try to give the living tissue around it a chance to heal. the paperwork’s “deformities” box holds checklists of things you did not know could go wrong with parts of your feet you did not know existed: a “dorsiflexed first ray” means that the foot segment containing the first cuneiform and first metatarsal bones rides high; there are two other check boxes nearby on the page to indicate a concerning equinus (plantar flex forefoot) or depressed calcaneus (heel bone). (the feet’s cuneiform bones are wedge-shaped, recalling the ancient mesopotamian pictographic script once etched on clay tablets with wedge-shaped implements.) the physicians paid close attention to each detail, trying to tune out the long lines of people waiting around them. any concerning characteristic on a dia-betic foot could morph into catastrophic injury if it went unnoticed and untended for a few weeks: maceration or tinea between the toes, obstructed dorsalis pedis or posterior tibial pulses, ankle plantar flexion, bunions, drop foot, charcot fracture. and a very serious acronym: lops, loss of protective sensation. dr. w’s team had set up a station teaching people strategies like using their hands to feel inside their shoes before putting them on, since feet numbed by diabetes can be felled even by tiny injuries. the need for amputation can often be traced back to a stone in someone’s shoe or a bug bite on an ankle. one u.s. study about the causes of diabetic limb amputation found at least twenty-three unique causal pathways in play (including ischemia, infection, neuropathy, faulty wound healing, gangrene, and initial minor trauma). most amputations are caused by several mechanisms simultaneously—which is also why remediating any one pathway will not necessarily save a limb. the biggest pattern suggested that up to 80 percent of amputations were preceded by a “pivotal event,” usually a minor cutaneous injury (pecoraro, reiber, and burgess 1990). in dee’s case, the pivotal event that led to her losing her leg was stepping on a seashell one morning. such amputations and injuries are rising worldwide in lockstep with diabetes, which the international diabetes federation now estimates kills more people than aids and breast cancer combined (idf 2017). type 1 diabetes (about 5 percent of the world’s cases) used to be commonly referred to as “juvenile dia-betes,” while more gradually developing type 2 used to be labeled “adult onset diabetes” (about 95 percent of diabetes cases). but today, more children are developing type 2, and more adults type 1. in untreated versions of either type, high or low blood sugar wears on the blood vessels carrying it, which over time can contribute to both macrovascular and microvascular injuries—such as wounds on limbs that might stop healing, blindness, and other organ failure. many people i met in belize’s predominantly garifuna stann creek district (see palacio 2005)—where at least one in four adults and one in three women were living with type 2 diabetes alone by the time i began interviewing people in 2008 (gough et al. 2008)—simply called all varieties of diabetes and its complications sugar. that day, it turned out that several of the team’s visiting doctors originally hailed from other parts of the caribbean—part of the larger caribbean diabetes initiative—and had connected in new york city with the belizean group. people from dangriga kept telling the team that the letters on their t-shirts, bdany (an acronym for belize diabetes association of new york) resembled a garifuna word meaning “your time”—and by way of the little joke, let the bdany members know they were grateful for their time. “you have salt or sugar?” old friends called out to each other across the open pavilion. (both proved the most common answer—meaning diabetes along with hypertension.) “i never thought you were sweet!” no matter how many times we heard some version of the joke, everybody laughed. “catching it” as rising diabetes settled into social fabrics in belize, rumors kept popping up that certain forms could be contagious. diabetic sugar’s terms traveled across languages: súgara in garifuna, shuga in belizean kriol, azúcar in spanish, kiha kiik in kekchi, or ch’uhuk k’iik (sweet blood) in mopan and yucatec mayan.1 i heard numerous stories about husbands and wives becoming afraid to sleep in the same room, with amputated limbs mentioned as the defining feature of these anxieties. “well, here it comes for me,” laura recalled thinking when she was diagnosed with diabetic sugar in her twenties. “i knew it was coming for me, because my mom had it, my sister . . . we all have it.” the personified pathogens that people kept using to allude to their diabetic injuries came from the language of infection: many said of diabetes sugar that they “caught it.” more ominously, others said of sugar “it caught me.” these terms were based on people’s firsthand observations of patterns, their mental maps of neighborhoods and families. the deeper puzzle, i began to think, was not why a fast-spreading fatal disease might be perceived as infectious, but rather how our terms for framing and addressing public health conditions came to be so dualistic in the first place. the old paradigm of environmental miasma located disease agents in contaminated atmospheres and places, repurposing an ancient greek word for ritual pollution. in the late nineteenth century, germ theory began to replace miasma paradigms with a strict dichotomy. dominant models today still describe two basic ways to think about diseases: they are either “communicable” or “non-communicable.” in this binary schema, infectious diseases need to be addressed in terms of interrupting contagion between people, vectors, and environments via targeting exposures to disease-specific germs or biological pathogens (porter 1999; krieger 2011, 100). meanwhile, since non-communicable diseases are by definition non-transmissible, they are commonly analyzed in biomedicine as a risk linked to an individual’s inborn genetic constitution (paradies, montoya, and fullerton 2007; montoya 2011) or framed as resulting from personal choices and so-called lifestyle behaviors (see critiques in yates-doerr 2015; hatch 2016; mendenhall 2019). in historical genealogies, the infectious/non-communicable dualism stands as a relatively recent invention. i wondered what these binary models of causation tend to foreclose or disable, seeing the disjuncture between diabetic injuries and how they are cast in common public health models. communicability is not just a matter of seeing and interpreting the causes of disease, but also a factor shaping the plausibility and workability of treatment. this essay offers a series of grounded scenes to think with the quandaries increasingly faced by caregivers and families around such overlooked aspects of diabetes complications. it explores the working idea of para-communicable conditions to reflect on the implications of contemporary models of communicability and causality raised by diabetes’ patterned injuries. seen through practices that make another model of problem and response visible, the work people are facing on the ground shows the material effects of infectious/non-communicable dualisms: how data get lost when we assume in advance that we know what a condition’s markers look like, and how those distortions impact real access to available infrastructures of care. viewed in this way, each end-of-the-line injury like a diabetes-linked amputation could be read as what marcel mauss (1966, 76–78) called a “total social fact”—at once political, legal, economic, institutional, ecological, alimental, spiritual, and social (cf. jain 2013). a total social fact demands a total social response. yet only 2 percent of global health funding currently goes to all chronic conditions combined—leaving people around the world to negotiate the serious gaps between how these problems’ causalities and urgencies get cast in the paperwork of public health models versus how they are actually manifesting in bodies. foot soldiers “she’s one of our best foot soldiers,” dr. w smiled as he and nurse elizabeth hugged hello. years ago, he had arranged for her to complete diabetes foot care training. in the months or years between visits from the bda’s new york team, elizabeth stood as the front line of defense for those in town who needed diabetic limb care. elizabeth’s brother says she has nine lives, like a cat. as a steadfast nurse and head of the local belize diabetes association branch, she had managed to maintain herself with type 1 diabetes through many decades and helped keep many others intact. she was trying hard to train others, since no one in this southern district of belize—which also had no endocrinologist or podiatrist—had received specialty training in diabetes foot care. elizabeth’s special expertise included tending to diabetic toenails, a crucial skill: one clip at the wrong angle could lead to an ingrown nail and later infection, so trimming required complete attention. the blue plastic tub labeled foot care quickly piled high with sterile medical wrappers and used gloves. carefully emptied, it soon filled again. when a tall woman revealed four self-bandaged ulcers across both feet, dr. w stood nearby as a collaborating physician tended to her. i knew the woman, grace; she was part of a group that had convened when i once helped to coordinate a public forum on diabetes in dangriga. i watched as the visiting doctor brushed sand from grace’s toes. she used a duplex doppler ultrasound device to listen to grace’s feet for calcium blocks and other subtle acoustic clues, pressing on various points with a wand that amplified the sounds of blood flowing through the arteries. grace was already missing one of her big toes. crumbled scar tissue and a protruding bone suggested that the digit had broken off with dry gangrene, rather than through a surgical cut. making jokes about pedicures, the doctor took the foot firmly in her hand and asked grace to close her eyes. the physician used an array of soft-point brushes and metal hammers to detect where and how grace’s nerves had numbed or deadened. then she rubbed grace’s feet vigorously with soap until enough dead skin had sloughed away that the ulcers began to bleed at the edges—which might make regeneration possible. the newest ulcers formed perfectly round circles: bright raw pink and eerily symmetrical. but the doctors expressed more concern about how grace’s feet sounded: they could barely hear a pulse near her missing toe, signaling diminished blood flow in the tissue, which would make it much harder to heal. dr. w wished aloud to the team that there was some way they could give grace two days in their new york hospital’s hyperbaric chamber, the enclosed apparatus that can help otherwise impossible wounds begin to heal. “is there any way you can get to new york, dear?” his invitation hovered in the air for a moment. but that afternoon, nobody knew any way to access a hyperbaric chamber. after grace’s remaining nine toes were wrapped in fresh bandages, her flip-flops would not fit back on over the dressed wounds. the doctors could only laugh in admiration at her raw tenacity when they saw her later climbing onto a bicycle. they knew the big toe is particularly crucial for balance, yet grace moved with steady poise. someone snapped a photo of her posing with gauze-wrapped feet pressed to the pedals, but their smiles looked privately worried. there was nothing left to do for the moment. we all watched as she rode away. with an intensely focused look, elizabeth pulled another foot onto her lap. figure 2. diabetic foot care in practice. photo by amy moran-thomas. as laurence ralph (2012) reflects about “living through injury,” sometimes “it becomes politically strategic to inhabit the role of a ‘defective body’ in order to make claims” about the more subtle violence of an unjust system. belize diabetes association groups face similar questions with immediate stakes: photos of hurt feet help them disrupt ideas of diabetes as a boring disease, and thus gain support to provide material care. for many members, this does not constitute an abstract or theoretical debate. it surfaces instead as a dilemma that unfolds in real time—as in the first week of 2018, when the bda’s belmopan branch posted an arrangement of the new year’s photos on their facebook page. the image was carefully composed to both shock and counter-anchor in a grounding context of caregiving and family dignity. the startling part featured pictures of four macerated feet in limbo with mottled wounds and missing toes. it had been posted by an energetic branch leader who also coordinates foot massages for preventing and treating diabetic injuries. tagging the post #saveafoot #savealife, he prefaced it with a pointed note reading “permission granted by clients to share” and stitched the images of feet to a larger photo of a t-shirt that said: behind every person with diabetes there is an even stronger family who stands by them supports them and loves them with all their heart “it seems as if the exotic things get the attention. . . . having five people with zika brings the media. it’s very sexy, it’s exotic, it’s front-page news. people getting their limbs cut off—not really exciting,” dr. w later reflected on diabetes, and the difficulties he has had for decades trying to bring public attention to the illness. in his words: i think the problem is that in this world of sound bites, diabetes is not that impressive or sexy. but the damage it does is absolutely horrific . . . diabetes is expanding and growing at an alarming rate. it’s chewing up your gdp. it’s smothering countries. it’s something that’s really killing how your health system will work in every way. . . . i think the problem is that it’s not studied. people don’t really know how many amputations are going on. first, there is an occult number: a number not well known. number two, the long-term effects of it are not well studied in this population. number three, the transgenerational issues that go along with that. the fear, the worry, the anxiety, the denial. . . . no one is measuring that. it’s just like, yeah, diabetes. it’s in this area. in the u.s context, for which better data exists, about 80 percent of the country’s total amputations result from diabetes. but as dr. w predicted, it proved nearly impossible to find solid numbers about how many people in the world lose limbs to diabetes each year. as one journal article about this global data gap recently summarized: “internationally, accurate numbers of limb amputations performed are very difficult to estimate as there is no recognized database or organization collecting this information” (neil 2016, 107). yet even geographically narrow studies suggest some jarring numbers: in north american contexts, about a third of people with diabetes experience an ulcer, and more than 50 percent of diabetic foot ulcers become infected (armstrong, boulton, and bus 2017). a third of people who seek clinical care for ischemic diabetic ulcers (the most common type) will die before their injuries ever heal. diabetic foot ulcers “have morbidity and mortality rates equivalent to aggressive forms of cancer” (armstrong et al. 2013). after diabetes-related amputations, more than 70 percent of patients die within five years—a death rate second only to lung cancer. following a major diabetic amputation, 50 percent of people will have another limb amputated within two years (armstrong, wrobel, and robbins 2007). tellingly, some of the best statistics about the global severity of diabetic injuries have been collected by accident. diabetic amputations have often turned out to be the number one cause of limb loss captured by databases meant to gather information about landmine blasts and other war-related injuries, as reported in studies with titles like “diabetes or war?” (yaghi et al. 2012). as one team of physicians (armstrong et al. 2013, 1817) notes: “there is a lack of federally and not for profit–funded research directed toward diabetic foot ulcers. this funding gap is disproportionately large in comparison with the public health impact of this sequela.” they call this “a clear and present medical and fiscal calamity. we must mind this gap as a locomotive of lower-extremity complications is approaching.” this odd turn of phrase underlines a strange fact: if the injuries and amputations that their team analyzed had been caused by actual locomotives, they would be robustly included in the global statistics that guide health policy funding. the development over recent decades of “global burden of disease” reports, for example, was designed especially to attend to the daily difficulties of living with chronic injuries. its scale of “disability weights” emphasized the devastating toll of amputations on daily life. but the possible causes of amputations and related injuries that such studies painstakingly charted historically did not include diabetes. it did, however, estimate global amputation burdens for six kinds of traffic accidents (motor vehicle; motorcycle; bicycle; pedestrian; mass transportation, including bus and train; and other road incidents), as well as animal bites, domestic violence, gunshot injuries, self-harm, war, and torture (who 2009; haagsma et al. 2016). these statistics led the report’s authors to conclude that global injuries were declining and that the world today was becoming a safer place. i wonder for how many countries in the world, besides belize, that sounds incomplete. a report from belize’s only prosthetic leg clinic noted that of the six amputations attributed to animal bites the previous year among belize’s tiny population (280,000 at that time), only three had actually been venomous snakes. “the other three were attributed to rat bites becoming infected in diabetic patients. bites from rats speak to the need for improved standards of living” (kistenberg 2005, 38–39). the report added: “most diabetics from [this] belize clinic ambulated in flip flops, sandals or ill-fitting footwear due to poverty. in addition, they reported having their blood sugar tested once every three months! this very likely contributed to their becoming amputees in the first place” (kistenberg 2005, 41). these masked numbers have consequences in real life because they guide global funding priorities. last time i visited belize, i went to see a few friends one weekend and found that three of them had lost a leg since my last visit. the repetition was becoming so normalized that anxieties about someone “getting cut” came up constantly in conversations. the pattern did not require an epidemiologist to notice that something was wrong. of course, not everyone with diabetes dealt with limb injuries or losses. but every family living with it did have to be constantly on guard, and those stakes felt high. amputations due to diabetes complications get labeled as “non-traumatic” because they take shape slowly. yet slow timing can sometimes make required procedures even more harrowing for patients. in hospitals around the world, when it comes to supposedly non-traumatic diabetes wounds, tough choices get made at the time of amputation. for instance: surgical teams must decide whether to use limited supplies of anesthesia to render a patient unconscious, or only to numb them at the waist. in the latter, the conscious version, patients are awake and listening to everything. bone has to be screwed to the table before being sawed. one woman in dangriga told me she prayed so hard and felt her family’s love so palpably that when the drill started up, she felt grace take over completely, and her ears filled with a loud ringing so beautiful that it became the only noise in the room. “there are so many miracles,” she told me. “thank god.” displaced surveillance humans alive today, in general—and people of color, in particular (browne 2015)—are subject to constant surveillance. algorithmic tracking and facial recognition tools are on the rise, alongside what alondra nelson calls “data spillover,” cases in which things like saliva submitted for ancestry testing or photos shared on social media can become harvested as data by interested parties ranging from pharmaceutical companies to police forces (nelson 2016). companies and states have never collected more information about us. this made it feel even stranger to come across the rare issue where members of the concerned population actually expressly wanted institutional “surveillance” collected—only to find that this data remained elusive. as one prosthetic limb-maker in belize noted: “a lack of surveillance in central america has stalled the development of amputation prevention services” (kistenberg 2005, 16). this lack of published data on diabetes’ more severe manifestations shows what joão biehl (2007, 204) has called “technologies of invisibility,” making it difficult to be “seen by the state” (street 2012) and allied transnational institutions. it’s a familiar catch: it takes numbers to redirect global policy money, but it takes global policy money to assemble the numbers (sangaramoorthy and benton 2012; benton 2015; adams 2016; biruk 2018). belize has made more headway around these uncomfortable numbers than most central american and caribbean countries. uldine wright, a concerned physician, recently published a very small study incorporating data from karl heusner memorial hospital (belize’s only tertiary care hospital). she recounted a tally showing that among patients who came to the belize city public hospital to treat a diabetic ulcer (often caused by an ingrown toenail or a similarly tiny wound), 89 percent received an amputation (wright 2017, 25–26). around 29 percent lost their leg below the knee, and 24 percent above the knee. eighteen percent of amputations were transmetatarsal (toes or fingers with a piece of the foot or hand), while another 18 percent only lost digits (mostly toes). debriding allowed 12 percent of patients to heal, but conservative treatment had a 0 percent success rate (wright 2017, 26). the second hospital studied by wright showed a less pronounced but still alarming figure: here, 24 percent of patients who arrived for diabetic foot care received amputations. even a tiny snapshot sample like this suggests a sense of how normalized injuries impact care across the board—physicians upset with patients for not coming in earlier, patients terrified to seek care when they know rather accurately the probability of returning with an amputation. tensions existed about precisely which cuts were avoidable or possibly inevitable, everyone struggling to bear their piece of the intensity. long after she officially retired, nurse elizabeth had kept going to the hospital to help with diabetes foot care. she also made certain home visits, even though she no longer got paid for the work. she heard that specialized diabetes foot training will be coming soon, and said she will start to relax her watch if she gets an apprentice. in a rural district where so many were losing limbs, how else could the only person certified in foot care training truly retire? from what i could observe, the caregivers most routinely dealing head-on with diabetic injuries were mostly black and indigenous women. they made up the majority of the community health volunteers, nursing, and medical attendant care workers with whom i spoke. they provided formidable expertise, but their labor offered little way out of the intense sensorium in which rural health workers practiced their craft. it took time to learn unwritten care strategies, a garifuna rural health worker named june explained to me as she recounted the story of the first time she cared for a diabetic foot: “i just told the patient, i’ll be right back!” the older garifuna nurse with whom june was apprenticing later praised how artfully she had concealed the pause during which she went outside and vomited. “if the patient sees that you are scared, they will be scared too.” nurses taught each other techniques to steel themselves when unwrapping a diabetic foot, since “you never know what is going to be under there”: be ready for larvae, so that anything else is good news; take the cap off the bleach bottle before you open anything else, then just focus on the bleach smell. june described learning to swallow her dread while calming patients’ reactions if they looked down, telling them stories about similar diabetic wounds that ended in recovery. “laugh, don’t cry,” she added. i once fell into conversation with a team of care workers in belize wearing matching “eyes on diabetes” t-shirts. the printed design on their backs featured watchful eyes, and i found myself thinking about how the assumed optics of functioning public health surveillance had been displaced. in the gaps left in accurate foot care epidemiology by global and overstretched local institutions, these care workers, it seemed to me, were doing more than just “improvising medicine” to blunt the impact of diabetic injuries, with care practices full of the ad hoc force that julie livingston (2012) describes around cancer in a different part of the world. in addition to artfully patching together resources, members of these makeshift networks were improvising select forms of surveillance, akin to the multiplied perspectives that robert w. sweeny (2005) calls “para-sighted” optics—teaching each other new ways to see, keeping their own counts of emerging patterns, watching out for each other. figure 3. nurse elizabeth watching for anyone in need of foot care. photo by amy moran-thomas. people i met improvised daily surveillance of their own bodies: obsessively checking their skin for scrapes or soft spots, engaging others to help check the bottoms of their feet, praying to spirits for assistance monitoring. the foot center group with which dr. w works recently launched a new program in the caribbean: visiting the proprietors of nail salons to teach them signs of diabetic ulcers. this network of beauty shop technicians is now referring clients to hospital care when their hands and feet are in danger. mixed metaphors in illness and its metaphors, susan sontag (1988) famously described the disease metaphors that societies come to accept as common sense—despite the ways such associations often blame and shame patients for their own illnesses, and frequently do harm to people’s sense of self and their possibilities for recovery. “patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also made to feel that they have deserved it,” sontag (1988, 57) worried. at the same time, she added, “we cannot think without metaphors” (sontag 1988, 57). for this reason i admired dr. w’s skill at inventing counter-metaphors, which he mixed unabashedly. consistency in literal images is not his objective, just consistency in bodies. “what really bothers me is the look of loss on a patient’s face when you tell them the reason they are going blind,” he said as we spoke one day at his home hospital in new york, after returning from the team’s annual belize visit. in the face of such injuries, dr. w was willing to try on any metaphor on for size. “diabetes is like fighting a bull. you need to grab it by the horns, or it can gore you.” he explained that he had honed his skill at mixing metaphors over the years by talking with patients, learning what analogies seemed to stick and help families live with and manage their afflictions. “you can’t outrun diabetes, you can only outsmart it,” dr. w smiled. “that’s a good one. it can be overcome, but not without a strategy.” different kinds of metaphors may prove strategic for different situations, he said. many of his patients struggled with depression as their diabetes progressed, and what framings might help really depended on the individual person. alongside photocopies of medical instructions, dr. w’s team kept on hand a variety of prayers for religious patients. at other times, it helped some people to cast diabetes as an external nemesis and frame the body as an epic terrain that required great care, but implied no connotations of personal shame: “when you enter the land of diabetes, dracula is around.” in dr. w’s words: phantom pains after an amputation: the trauma over and over of feeling a limb still there and seeing it is gone. it tricks your body. diabetes is the great magician. it gives you illusions, hunger and thirst you can’t satisfy. diabetes is like a thief, or a trickster. it is a thief of limbs. it is a tragedy that keeps happening. patients getting cut into pieces. it hits like an asteroid. it changes like a chameleon. as soon as you think you know what it looks like, it will change shapes and hit you in another form: it’s high blood pressure, it’s kidney disease, it’s blindness, it’s a toe. it keeps morphing. it lives with you. it lives in you. it’s almost like it’s a virus, hiding. driving home that evening, i kept replaying dr. w’s eerie images in my mind. “our bodies prime our metaphors,” james geary (2011, 100) observes, “and our metaphors prime how we think and act.” i wondered how policies guiding public perceptions of diabetes might differ if based on dr. w’s descriptions of a volatile and difficult-to-defeat shape-shifter. his creative descriptions struck me as efforts toward what charles l. briggs and clara mantini-briggs (2016) call “communicative justice”—working at the junctures of storytelling about health conditions to try to change the ways they biologically manifest in bodies. one image, in particular, i found myself returning to again and again: almost like a virus, hiding. not quite like a virus. slow, cumulative. but in certain ways . . . almost. in contrast to the rest of dr. w’s figures, that was an image of diabetes i had encountered many times before. para-communicable conditions i was initially surprised that rumors of contagious diabetes seemed to spread, rather than subside, as time wore on and people in belize became more familiar with the illness and observed it more closely in their own communities. public health authorities often cite education about causality as one of the most important tools to curb diabetes. but in this case, it was not that people had never received diabetes education; it was that the one-size-fits-all biomedical education did not always square with the realities they saw over time. diabetes moved like an epidemic. it killed like an epidemic. in the stann creek district, diabetes affected ten or twenty times more people than hiv/aids, and everyone knew that aids was an epidemic. diabetes was spreading quickly in local communities, often mingling with and amplifying infectious conditions. but a non-transmissible disease was not supposed to spread, let alone outpace its contagious comorbidities. so what was happening in between local patterns and the biomedical explanations for non-communicable conditions? many people had learned and considered the classic biomedical account of diabetes as non-transmissible—but at times, this account did not align with their lived observations and evident bodily realities. as the historian allan m. brandt (1997, 56) notes, “the problem of causation is critically important because it reflects directly on the fundamental moral issue of responsibility for disease.” this point hit home more concretely for me when i gave a public presentation on an early version of this project’s findings one morning to a small crowd in dangriga. the audience came mostly from local branches of the bda and from helpage, a crucial organization providing supportive care for aging. i began our conversation that day with a cursory slide showing the who map of diabetes deaths. i had assumed that everyone would already know this part, but the map seemed to be the only image i showed that surprised anyone. people raised eyebrows at each other. wait, versions of this are happening across the world? some people reflected later that they had gotten so used to stories attributing the rise in diabetes to their local cultural foods or their personal “lifestyle” responsibilities alone that it shook up their perspectives just to take a step back and think of diabetes as an epidemic—a much bigger story, whatever that might mean. figure 4. © 2014 world health organization. “diabetes mortality: age-standardized death rate per 100 000 population, 2012.” map reprinted with permission. available at the world health organization map library, accessed april 22, 2018, http://gamapserver.who.int/maplibrary/files/maps/global_ncd_mortality_diabetes_2012.png. there is a lot on the line in “explaining epidemics,” as the historian charles e. rosenberg (1992) once put it. didier fassin (2011) and others have examined the way global aid resources tend to move according to the moral rationales of humanitarian “crises.” this kind of intervention “has come to define itself through exception,” peter redfield (2013, 72) aptly observes, though that framing quickly “loses its transcendent magic” when “diseases prove chronic.” one woman in belize described to me how a team of u.s. medical students visiting her village had been fascinated by her ankle wound when they believed she had leishmaniasis (a tropical disease caused by sandfly-borne protozoa parasites), but stopped visiting her when it turned out to be a diabetic ulcer. as priscilla wald (2008, 3) notes in contagious, senses of urgency are deeply contoured by “how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how they imagine the threat, and why they react so fearfully to some disease outbreaks and not others at least as dangerous and pressing.” the perceived non-urgency of diabetes intersects with questions of uncertain chronic causalities (see agard-jones 2015; shapiro 2015; murphy 2017; nading 2017). today, molecular pathologists working with population-level data describe “the new toxicology paradigm of endocrine and metabolic disruption” that reframes diabetes as a “hidden cost” to pollution exposure (neel and sargis 2011, 1846). this phenomenon was first grasped largely through industrial accidents: for example, diabetes rates in a small town in italy spiked in the twenty years after its chemical plant exploded (bertazzi et al. 2001). a recent long-term study of 1.7 million u.s. veterans estimated that about 14 percent of diabetes cases could be associated with air pollution alone, regardless of what foods individuals ate (bowe et al. 2018). reading such studies, i kept recalling the sand and ocean waves filled with bits of plastic, and how it takes decades for food containers to photo-degrade into the tiny slivers found on the beach. little pieces get eaten by fish, moving up the food chain and seeping into water, often leaching bpa also associated with diabetes risk (vogel 2009). another study of 3,080 farmworkers in rural india found that exposure to organophosphate chemicals contributed to diabetes, apparently because the insecticides designed to kill crop pests also interacted with the living microbes crucial to metabolic balance inside people’s digestive tracts (velmurugan et al. 2017). this constitutes only one of several mechanisms by which endocrine-disrupting chemicals can contribute to diabetes, a disease of the endocrine system (see colborn, dumanoski, and myers 1997). as harris solomon (2016) details, the metabolic absorptions that connect human bodies and larger environs include a range of biological mechanisms and ecological exposures. these compounding contributors can include hungerand stress-related epigenetic modulations (geronimus et al. 2006; lamoreaux 2016), and how individual humans’ eating constitutes only one way of framing nested metabolisms (landecker 2013) that interconnect people, plants, and animals. amid these complex interactions, diseases are not binary either-or conditions. they emerge from uneven landscapes of exposure with many kinds of transmissions. the popularization of infectious disease mapping often gets celebrated in public health classes today as linked to john snow’s team identifying and interrupting patterns of water-borne cholera in london.2 but the flip side of this discovery also proves instructive: the moment that infectious pathogens were becoming legible, some tried to cast this model as the only way that disease-causing exposures should matter: companies tried to use this as a shield to avoid responsibility for industrial harms. as early as 1855, snow was called in a legal case about deregulatingindustrial pollution from factories. he testified that chemicals could “not cause disease; those poisons do not reproduce themselves in the constitution” (lilienfeld 2000, 5). when prodded further about reported symptoms of toxic exposure among workers, snow responded: “persons are often very much influenced by the imagination.” to approach escalating chronic disease patterns, we need ways to recognize and publicize potential exposures of processed diets and industrial toxins, as well as biological germs—an epidemiology of what adia benton (personal communication, 2018) has called “connectors,” rather than vectors alone. that nexus requires attention, as michael m. j. fischer (2013, 347) emphasizes, to the situated “bioecologies at play” between porous boundaries and reactive membranes, human and environmental health (petryna 2013; todd 2017; niewöhner and lock 2018). figure 5. plastics washing up along the shoreline, southern belize. photo by amy moran-thomas. for this task, either-or labeling of contagious versus non-communicable disease proves insufficient to describe the prevalence of human-made diseases now becoming prominently visible around the world (see seeberg and meinert 2015; moran-thomas 2010). diabetes is not an exception to, but iconic of growing chronic epidemics—such as cancer clusters (jain 2013; walley 2013) or the soaring prevalence of asthma and other autoimmune conditions (fortun and fortun 2005; whitmarsh 2013; kenner 2018). talking to public health practitioners and policy makers about diabetes, i found it helpful to have a different name for this in-between territory of exposures, and came to describe it as para-communicable—chronic conditions that may be materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people. exploring this idea has become a way to triangulate between different spaces of knowledge making—such as academic conferences where keywords to describe exposure were plentiful, to the arenas of clinical practice where they were often illegible or simply fell out of frame. figure 6. miasma, 1831, as depicted by robert seymour. courtesy of the national library of medicine. to be sure, any chronic exposures of stressful climates and the chemical contamination of food, air, and water only compound more commonly recognized issues related to limited access to healthy foods. and of course, industrialized food products can cause harmfully high blood sugar levels through their depleted nutritional content, too. “how am i going to make a diet? there is only one kind of food here,” i often heard patients tell the visiting cuban physician, who would laugh kindly but never really had an answer. in neighboring guatemala, emily yates-doerr (2015) observed that nutrition experts often carefully avoided describing problems of macro-infrastructure that neither they nor their patients could change, because that advice could have registered as cold or uncaring. caregivers i met similarly tried to avoid depressing conversations, in hopes of generating a healthy sense of optimistic possibility—focusing on the scale within their grasp. this usually meant trying to equip patients to negotiate existing foodways. but who will rework larger food systems? foods contributing to diabetes are often familiar across global markets—sodas like coca-cola are only the most iconic of many processed foods containing sugar, white flour, and white rice. in contrast, every local diet dismantled by these industrial diets is unique—meaning that any advice about eating requires local texture to prove meaningful for people (see wilk 2006). one morning, i joined a group in dangriga that gathered to share cooking ideas to modify belizean and garifuna dishes for those with diabetes. they wondered if local labs could receive the resources to investigate the nutritional content of certain dishes, or to monitor the fish and water for traces of toxic chemicals. figure 7. map of 1854 london cholera epidemic by john snow, with illustration contrasting miasma and contagion models by james young. sometimes it feels like a miasma cloud to live in a hazy sense of ambient risk—yet at the same time, cloudiness can be strategically used by industries to obfuscate accountability (nash 2007; langston 2010; nestle 2015). such corporate strategies complicate the ways in which anthropologists might grapple with uncertainty. for instance, key theorists of “syndemic” models—describing how multiple epidemics interact—recently expressed concern that the term can take on a miasma-like cloudy quality if it is taken up imprecisely, or without follow-up steps to trace specific pathways and signatures of responsibility (mendenhall and singer 2019). anthropologists like elizabeth hoover (2017) and elizabeth f. s. roberts (2017) engage the work of collectives seeking ways to build a counterscience, through sustained collaborations and a grassroots-guided “science of the in-between.”3 i initially thought it would be fairly easy to apply for a grant to support the kind of local projects that people in belize suggested. yet it turns out that certain prominent diabetes grants explicitly decline to fund research that generates locally relevant dietary and care translations; they reason that such outcomes would not be globally “generalizable.” yet diabetes prevention relies on locally specific texture to gain traction and uptake. if only approaches imagined as “generalizable” receive policy funding, then most well-resourced interventions will end up framing what is happening with individuals as the problem. in light of this, it seemed as though grace’s hurt foot examined that day not only spoke of gaps in the surveillance around diabetes-related injuries, but also of missing watchfulness throughout larger global systems of food and medicine. the scene evinced a culmination of decades or centuries of policy and legal regulations that contributed to chemicalized water, air, and foodways, as well as skewed options in food availability, agricultural systems, and land law—compounding moments that intersected with underresourced care to culminate in debility. some months after we last saw each other, i learned the painful news that grace had chosen to die with all her limbs attached. after careful reflection, she had made the decision to refuse the amputation of a gangrenous leg. “more people are doing that now,” nurse elizabeth said when she told me. looking for a picture of grace to send to her family, i found only a terrible archive of her feet. my mind kept returning to dr. w’s words from that day, when he wished aloud that there could be some way to get grace to a hyperbaric chamber. weather not only did the infectious/non-communicable dualism often appear ill-suited to capture a full picture of diabetes causation, but a looping effect seemed to be catalyzed by these attributions: certain diseases’ “geography of blame” (farmer 2001, 97) can materially shape institutional funding and access to extant medical technologies. i came to see para-communicability as the partially connected set of ways in which etiology, treatment, morbidity, and mortality are imagined and enacted. the compounding effects of these health atmospheres—often highlighting differences linked to compounding stresses and absorbed environs—together evince the unequal “climate that produces premature black death as normative” that christina sharpe (2016, 102) calls “the weather.” in fact, “pressure” is not only a common name for stress in much of the world—barometric decompression machines are literally a key method of injury care and amputation prevention. at some point i started to think of decompression chambers as almost mythical places. originally developed in the late 1800s in england for recreational and military scuba diving, hyperbaric chambers became widely used in hospitals for chronic wounds in general (and diabetic ulcers in particular) in europe and north america throughout the 1960 and 1970s (lucas 1967). their physics resembles going deep underwater: the pressure inside hyperbaric chambers is gauged in technical units called atas, absolute atmospheres of pressure. at sea level, you are at 1 ata, experiencing one atmosphere of pressure. inside a hyperbaric chamber, each additional atmosphere corresponds to the pressure of being underneath thirty-three feet of seawater. this pressure helps saturate blood plasma with healing oxygen. (plasma is the hay-colored fluid in which more familiar components of blood, such as platelets and red and white blood cells, travel through the body, helping vascular tissues heal.) even the most stubborn diabetic wounds might have a chance with this boost of intensive oxygen under pressure. bodies that stop healing are hard to imagine. even a minor cut or scrape can be unable to form a scab or shrink a little each day. for months, even years, a tiny abrasion might look as though it had just happened, almost as though the injury is frozen in time, except that it can still become infected. preventing infection is work that starts anew each day. but even very old diabetic wounds can start to heal again if given time in a hyperbaric chamber. some studies have suggested that oxygen therapy is helpful not only for wounds, but even for preventing the onset of diabetes in the first place. these devices activate the body’s healing capacities through the saturation of oxygen-rich air, either directly inside the chamber or through masks. in the united states, some versions are even marketed for pets, i realized as i read about access advertised for “equine athletes and pleasure horses.” some masks look like the clear bubble helmets intended for astronauts, while others appeared to me nearly indistinguishable from scuba masks or nebulizer tubing. multiperson hyperbaric chambers can be sizeable, like a clinical waiting room with round submarine windows; others resemble an appliance like a huge microwave with seating inside for three to five. researching the varieties of decompression machines, one day i realized with some shock that there actually had been a hyperbaric chamber in belize all along. a chamber has been available for decades in a network sustained by ambergris diving shops, in case any scuba divers experience the bends or other pressure-related issues. as an additional safety measure, a second hyperbaric machine was recently added to serve diving tourists on the island. it turns out that the phenomenon of diabetic limb injuries across the caribbean coincides with a coral reef geography and associated tourist economy now particularly well-equipped with hyperbaric chambers. according to websites like caribbean adventures and dive vacations, barbados, belize, cuba, dominica, dominican republic, dutch antilles, jamaica, martinique, mexico’s cancun, puerto rico, saba, st. lucia, and trinidad and tobago (among others) all have hyperbaric chambers, usually located in places citizens would not think to turn to for diabetes care, such as marine parks, fisheries, army bases, and scuba-affiliated clinics. trying to digest this information after watching a video of one in barbados, i asked dr. w if he had time for a phone call, to make sure i was not misunderstanding. “are these the same machines that can prevent diabetic amputations?” i asked him. the short version of his answer was “pretty much . . . but it’s really complicated.” the long answer would be something anthropologists might call a sociotechnical problem, since it is difficult to separate technological limits from the way human societies position and use their devices. in the united states, health insurance often covers hyperbaric treatment for diabetes ulcers, billing about $350 per dive as long as the specialist is accredited by the undersea medicine and hyperbaric society. but in lower-income parts of the world, insurance reimbursement apparatuses are more complicated and oxygen more expensive per tank. and diabetic sugar’s wounds, unlike a diver’s bends, are almost never a onetime fix. additionally, most scuba divers with decompression sickness quickly recover. but the most serious diabetic ulcers might require session after session of dialing the machine up to three ata—the pressure of being under about sixty-six feet of seawater. this means more compression and more oxygen—and thus more cost and possibly greater risk, since decompression therapy always carries the rare (but ever possible) side effects of seizures or a serious issue caused by the intense pressure. it is best to be near a full medical facility, or with a range of specialists in case something goes wrong. dr. w felt hopeful that more portable devices featuring aerosolized oxygen in transportable bags may become accessible for diabetic wound treatment around the world in the near future. he sent me a link for a youtube video showing the new technology, and we left it at that. from what i could read between the lines of “it’s really complicated,” dr. w’s decades of work throughout the caribbean had taught him that a portable device would work well for his team, but it had not proven easy to open up conversations about getting citizens access to the infrastructures of hyperbaric chambers already present in their own countries. for instance, when a man named tobias had texted dr. w a picture of the bone that had fallen out of his foot, the only thing that their team of physicians could think to do was invite him to travel 3,000 miles from belize city to new york. the treatment for tobias’s foot lasted more than a year. treatment with dr. w and his colleagues included not only dozens of sessions in a hyperbaric chamber but also a wound vac (vacuum-assisted closure), antibiotic beads, and grafts to treat the bone infection. dr. w helped tobias find a place to live near the hospital, and his network of colleagues found a way to cover the treatment costs. tobias’s neighbors and family all chipped in to help with his plane ticket. * * * human solidarity is an elusive thing. one of the most famous early thinkers to theorize it was the sociologist émile durkheim. it is a lesser-known fact that durkheim’s influential ideas about social coherence were shaped by his obsession with his era’s emerging scientific insights into the behavior of infectious bacteria (wald 2008, 14–15). he suggested that community and communication shaped each other—since social groups impact how perceptions turn into concepts “communicable to a plurality of minds” (durkheim 2001, 619). in this view, communicability—the ways that biological conditions are transmitted between bodies—is impacted not only by our communication about them, but also by the communities that take shape (or not) to respond. this, too, proves integral to what i came to see as the para-communicability of diabetes: not just a different paradigm of causality but also a more comprehensive model of public response; “not to ignore difference, but to create alter-relations with one another” (simmons 2017). the availability of hyperbaric chambers for scuba divers is designed to offer a safety net, so that pleasure-seekers can indulge in risk yet have the option of rescue if threatened by death. this same logic of care was not, however, extended to those dying from diabetic injuries. between these two scenarios lurk many uneasy questions: what counts as an extraordinary measure, for whom? whose lives are valued as worth rescuing, at what cost? community can be as much about disconnections as connections—the lines and distinctions drawn when people order and categorize their worlds. according to disease theory, infection is part of the price we pay for living in association with one another, and for our many eager forms of exchange. but only some connections get recognized, while others remain overlooked, both when reckoning causation and when sharing stories of care that might impact future access. in the end, perhaps the diabetes epidemic is not so much illegible as legible in different ways from different perspectives. dr. w, nurse elizabeth, and many caregivers and patients i spoke with said they hoped essays like this one might offer a small next step toward public or media recognition of the injuries they are encountering, and the misrecognitions they highlight in our received models of causality and care work. in the meantime, the conditions they deal with on the ground often align with the very figure james baldwin (1998, 83) used to capture the effects of chronic racism: “one is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.” * * * when i called the largest hyperbaric clinic in belize, i learned that their multiperson machine simulates dives of up to 165 feet deep. a well-trained physician remains onsite. when i asked whether it could be used to treat diabetic injuries, the curator replied yes: scuba divers at times received care for coral injuries, and such therapy sessions could also be used on other wounds. she added that for patients with u.s. health insurance, the co-pay went down to us$100. it has become customary in some conversations to talk about globally unequal health infrastructures in the language of the global north versus the global south. yet this geography takes on more complicated shapes when trying to describe the outposts of either u.s. insurance-accepting technologies available to those in the know in belizean divers’ clinics, or the checkered maps of cities like new york and los angeles, where diabetic amputation rates increase in correlation with poverty and segregation. hyperbaric chambers offer another uneasy reminder that even in the same places, we live in segregated atmospheres—racialized inequalities that pattern out both inside the united states and in countries like belize across the world. my first impulse was to visit one of the chambers, as if describing it would resolve the contradiction. i had never been to san pedro, and wondered if elizabeth might go with me. but when i broached the subject as we chatted one morning, elizabeth explained that she had never heard of that machine, and did not think one existed in belize. i looked down at my notes from the dive shop, struggling to put its price list together with the insights from someone who had spent many years in diabetes wound care—all the patients whom elizabeth had pulled back from the brink of loss over the years, and all of those like grace whom she had seen die without hearing of any possible remediation measures that existed. it did not feel right to press harder about the idea of a trip together. but i found enough words to repeat to elizabeth how the machine resembled the one dr. w had used to treat tobias’s foot in new york. the phone line got silent for a minute. we probably each had our own doubts and fantasies about the potential of such an elusive apparatus. in the moment of quiet, i wondered if elizabeth was trying to imagine it too: the pressure, the oxygen, the slow hours of boredom and excitement; the blood starting to move again through skin and tissue that appeared dead; the feeling, if sensation starts to come back. figure 8. stock footage of a hyperbaric chamber. photo courtesy of bsip/getty images. abstract long-accepted models of causality cast diseases into the binary of either “contagious” or “non-communicable,” typically with institutional resources focused primarily on interrupting infectious disease transmission. but in southern belize, as in much of the world today, epidemic diabetes has become a leading cause of death and a notorious contributor to organ failure and amputated limbs. this ethnographic essay follows caregivers’ and families’ work to survive in-between public health categories, and asks what responses a bifurcated model of infectious versus non-communicable disease structures or incapacitates in practice. it proposes an alternative focus on diabetes as a “para-communicable” condition—materially transmitted as bodies and ecologies intimately shape each other over time, with unequal and compounding effects for historically situated groups of people. the article closes by querying how communicability relates to community, and why it matters to reframe narratives about contributing causalities in relation to struggles for treatment access. [chronic disease; diabetes; communicability; knowledge production; debilitation] notes acknowledgments i am so grateful to all those in belize and beyond who contributed to this project and commented on drafts. grace’s name is among those changed here for privacy, but this is offered with love in their memory. special thanks to nurse elizabeth, the many branches of the belize diabetes association, and to dr. w and the diabetes foot center group, in collaboration with the caribbean diabetes initiative. i am deeply appreciative for the support of my mentors in the belize ministry of health and institute for social and cultural research, to my teachers in the princeton department of anthropology who helped to launch this project, and to my wonderful colleagues in mit anthropology. for research and writing support, i also owe great thanks to the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, a mellon-american council of learned societies fellowship, the princeton center for health and well-being, and the mit school of humanities, arts, and social sciences (shass) research fund. special thanks to the peer reviewers and editorial collective at cultural anthropology for incisive feedback that sharpened this essay. 1. sugar is also a common name for diabetes around the world, carrying distinct valences in each local social fabric (see moran-thomas 2019; weaver 2019; de-graft aikins forthcoming). 2. historians of science recount a far more detailed version of this paradigm shift (see porter 1999; worboys 2007). 3. this formulation comes from a panel discussion at the 2018 american anthropological association (aaa) meetings, where lawrence cohen (2018) offered comments in conversation with the work of roberts and others working on themes of “communicability in crisis.” references adams, vincanne, ed. 2016 metrics: what counts in global health. durham, n.c.: duke university press. agard-jones, vanessa 2015 “chlordécone.” case presentation at “the manufacturing of 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global health in postwar guatemala. oakland: university of california press. generative hope in the postapocalyptic present generative hope in the postapocalyptic present william lempert university of colorado boulder http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5137-5414 the native apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has already taken place. —grace dillon i grew up hard, me. i’ve been through hell. i’ve faced the worst, tough people in my time, but i stood my ground. —dunba nunju (walmajarri) we live in an era increasingly defined by apocalyptic rhetoric, from the seeming inevitability of climate change to conflict in the middle east, from the specter of deregulation-induced global financial collapse to populism fueled by unprecedented first world income inequality and political distrust. despite its christian connotations, the concept of apocalypse serves a critical role in theorizing indigenous futurity, uniquely capturing the world-altering histories of colonial brutality. indigenous futures are not only vital for aboriginal people; they also provide valuable insight into global challenges. in light of the widespread “apocalyptic turn” (lynch 2012), it is essential that we pay thoughtful attention to those who have already lived through an apocalypse and are articulating generative hope in its aftermath. indeed, with her formulation of explicitly plural “indigenous futurisms,” grace dillon (2012, 3) argues that the zenith of colonial damage lies in the past for many indigenous peoples, even as it continues to manifest itself in the present. this analytic takes seriously that indigenous people have long been positioned as the anachronistic foil to western civilization, and too often remain temporally entrapped within mythic pasts and troubled presents. building on indigenous futurisms scholarship on native science-fiction films (lempert 2014; medak-saltzman 2017), i engage recent indigenous australian video projects that draw more subtly on futures to illustrate how and why they articulate generative hope in the postapocalyptic present. dystopia, a common sci-fi trope, represents an irredeemable end stage beyond all reasonable hope for justice. while dystopias serve as instructive morality plays and cautionary tales for sci-fi audiences, dystopian ethnographic depictions may unintentionally serve to reinforce the dispossession of indigenous futures. we should therefore remain particularly mindful of the deeper implications of “dark” anthropological representations that imply inevitable cultural demise (see ortner 2016). in contrast to dystopia, the postapocalyptic present proceeds from a place of beginnings, in which the apocalyptic informs the past and present yet does not foreclose future possibilities. ahistorical idealism, an inversion of dystopianism, is also deeply fraught. for example, many fly-in, fly-out visitors with whom i interacted in aboriginal communities explicitly sought to “help” aboriginal people, which locals often interpreted as implying an inherent superiority. while they certainly had good intentions, some professionals who might be described as “well-meaning, white, left-wing, [and] middle-class” (kowal 2015, 35) exacerbated matters, wavering between conflicting desires for aboriginal equality and difference without a serious consideration of settler-colonial history. like dystopianism, this idealistic approach often abets assimilation by reifying “suffering slots,” thus dispossessing indigenous futures and fostering imaginaries of a degenerative sociality for doomed and defeated victims. such subtle yet crucial distinctions inform the nature of hope. in the face of inevitable cultural destruction, the best that can be achieved is something akin to jonathan lear’s (2006) “radical hope.” lauren berlant’s (2011) notion of “cruel optimism” pushes this cautionary sensibility further, noting instances in which attachments to impossible goals for a good life become counterproductive. however, this was not what i generally encountered during my years of ethnographic research. in aboriginal communities, people alternately expressed what i describe as generative hope. this is hope with grit, hope that neither avoids the history of colonial dispossession nor has been rendered misanthropic by it. by furthering the specificity of hope, this analytic aims to help address hope’s relative underdevelopment in social science research due to its perceived ambiguity, despite hope’s central role in how desire becomes projected into the future and “always invokes an ever further horizon” (crapanzano 2003, 10). following eve tuck’s (2009, 417) call for research that decenters damage in favor of desire, generative hope is “involved with the not yet and, at times, the not anymore . . . about longing, about a present that is enriched by both the past and the future.” this hopeful sensibility becomes particularly apparent during the imaginative process of filmmaking, and the diversity of its expressions reflects the multiplicity of aboriginal australian experiences. these include whether or not an individual lived through contact, was abducted from their family to attend boarding school, worked at christian missions or cattle stations, or came of age in urban areas. echoing hirokazu miyazaki’s (2004) “method of hope,” melinda hinkson (2010, 321) describes the ascent of aboriginal film production itself as a “politics of hope,” which transcends vacillation between positive and negative media caricatures, both of which “position aboriginal culture as an object that functions or fails according to its own logic,” while concealing the entangled complexities of enduring settler-colonial structural violence. it is in their interrelationship that generative hope and the postapocalyptic present become greater than the sum of their parts, a dialectic that defies synthesis due to its pairing of theses that make up two opposing sides of the same existential coin. this intertwining is the site of a key temporal configuration, in which mediations of optimistic futures are rooted in a present that foregrounds past yet enduring legacies of colonial brutality. for anthropologists, this grounding reaffirms the need for vigilance against seductive desires for resolution and the undoing of damage that cannot be undone; it encourages both cautious optimism and the amplification of local visions for the future that seek to expand indigenous possibility. coupled, generative hope and the postapocalyptic present evoke a perpetually unsettled tension that aptly aligns with the paradoxical and erratic settler-colonial realities within which aboriginal people live their lives. since hope is a sensibility that tends to come into existence through action, collaborative media production provides a powerful process through which anthropologists can engage indigenous futurity both theoretically and methodologically. while analyzing completed projects provides insight into the meaning and impact of films, it is in the daily practices of media production that the political and representational stakes of indigeneity are actively negotiated and imagined. indeed, these films are not simply communicating visions of the future; they are also collectively producing them. dunba i first met dunba nunju during a 2015 film project through pilbara and kimberley aboriginal media (pakam), which was funded by and screened on national indigenous television. collaborating with henry augustine (2015), a pakam media worker, i traveled with dunba along the indian ocean coast near his community of beagle bay in north west australia, delving into his life story as we visited sites from the iconic pearl-shell church that he helped construct to his favorite fishing spots along the beach. over several days, dunba’s quiet and humble personality gave way to intimate and expansive stories that expressed an enduring optimism despite unimaginable heartbreak and hardship, which began when he was removed from his mother, who had contracted leprosy, and was placed in the beagle bay mission far from his walmajarri country, family, and language. video 1. excerpt from dunba (2015). video courtesy of pilbara and kimberley aboriginal media. dunba begins the film by asserting: “i grew up hard, me. i’ve been through hell. i’ve faced the worst, tough people in my time, but i stood my ground.” dunba emphasizes these last five words, which inform his hopeful outlook in spite of the hell that he describes having endured. he shares many of the experiences of his generation and embodies the future-oriented hope following tragedy that this essay aims to elucidate. video 2. excerpt from dunba (2015). video courtesy of pilbara and kimberley aboriginal media. in the conclusion of our film, dunba calls for youth to spend more time on country to avoid substance abuse, speaks to the power of forgiveness (which does not imply forgetting) in moving forward unburdened by anger, and reflects on the voices of family members that continue to guide him, as well as on how his own voice will endure within his children. the stakes of mediation it is not surprising that for dunba, the future is synonymous with younger generations. this theme emerged as prominent in many of our projects, including for young futures (young and lempert 2015), a short pakam production shot outside the aboriginal community of balgo in the great sandy desert. i collaborated on this film with two community members, david “shorty” young and allison gill, who, like dunba and henry, had a clear vision and passion for the film years before shooting began. shorty and allison were also similarly focused on the importance of extended family in supporting new generations (personified in their young son eli, who is featured throughout the film), guiding youth to avoid drugs and, as shorty narrates in the film, “to look at the good future in the front” so that “moms and dads, aunties, uncles, grandmas, and grandpas might be a proud family.” video 3. excerpt from for young futures (2015). video courtesy of pilbara and kimberley aboriginal media. while both dunba and for young futures address concerns about substance abuse, they are far from antidrug public service announcements; they frame the use of alcohol and drugs as an effect rather than a cause, as self-medication for coping with the disconnection from family and country wrought by enduring settler-colonial legacies. accordingly, their messages regarding addiction focus on strengthening these bonds, rather than on rehab or on the substances themselves. they remain optimistically oriented toward a generative hope for kinship futures on country, emphasizing connection to family and place as the proper path for living a good life. such representations of generative hope contrast starkly with dominant depictions of aboriginal people. one evening after a day of filming, shorty and i turned on a much-anticipated episode of the australian broadcasting corporation’s flagship documentary tv series four corners, which featured remote communities in the region. as we watched the episode, entitled “remote hope” (everett 2015)—a title that was quickly revealed to imply that hope itself is remote—our feelings turned from excitement to frustration as an opening line of voiceover narration declared that “these dysfunctional communities have the most depressing living conditions imaginable. they are a disgrace to australia and all those who have a prosperous way of life.” while the episode presented itself as a balanced debate on the future of australia’s remote indigenous communities, the narrator described these communities as “blighted by grinding poverty, with few job opportunities, chronic alcohol and drug abuse and, in some cases, endemic sexual and physical violence, including against children.” accompanied by ominous soundscapes, these morose narratives continued throughout the episode’s forty-four minutes, and although film crews had spent mere hours in the communities, the joyless program was framed through distorted and often disproven accusations made by governmental representatives. while fault was disputed, the overall message was unambiguous: remote aboriginal communities are miserable and futureless. such dystopian representations carry high real-world stakes for aboriginal people. in the wake of the (euphemistically named) indigenous advancement strategy—which, in 2014, cut about 40 percent of total funding for aboriginal organizations—this broadcast aired at the height of a nationally polarizing debate around western australia’s plans to defund more than half of the state’s 274 aboriginal communities, which is in practice tantamount to closing them. so far, wide-scale protests of these plans have proven instrumental in forestalling their implementation. although there certainly are instances of despair in aboriginal communities, dominant deficit-discourse representations and corresponding policy rhetoric are not representative of the sanguine register that tends to characterize everyday community life and engagements with the future. the dystopian vision of aboriginal communities that “remote hope” expressed seemed to bear little resemblance to reality, and the program stood in stark contrast to a collaborative, youth-focused hip-hop music video titled luurnpa cliff side (balgo community 2014), which the community members whom i spoke with agreed captured the affect of balgo and the challenges it faces. in the video, a young man declares: “we are the present, we are the future.” video 4. luurnpa cliff side (2014). video courtesy of indigenous hip hop projects. the seeming paradox of joy amid hardship in aboriginal communities remains difficult for most australians to imagine, let alone see. yet it is essential that they do; as the only major settler-colonial state lacking indigenous treaties and sovereign nationhood, australia is a country in which the public imagination has a significant influence on aboriginal policy decisions. this vulnerable, yet highly visible, political reality positions australia as a key site for mediating generative hope in the postapocalyptic present and for indigenous futures. more broadly, this dialectic informs a fundamental dynamic in the self-representation of indigenous people across the globe who share histories of settler-colonial dispossession and erasure. anthropologies of the future and the future of anthropology what kind of duty does the anthropologist have to engage [the] future as a social phenomenon of the present but also as a potential key for the future that opens up possibilities we may not yet have thought of? —david valentine while anthropologists are increasingly engaging with the future (collins 2008; valentine 2012; appadurai 2013; salazar et al. 2017), the relative lack of work on indigenous futurity suggests the continued temporal slotting of aboriginal people into savage pasts and suffering presents (see ginsburg and myers 2006; bessire 2011). indigenous media production helps to establish not only visual (see raheja 2011) but also temporal sovereignty from the colonial imposition of “settler time” (rifkin 2017). such projects provide immersive platforms for addressing the structural silencing of aboriginal futures through critical mediations on how and, just as importantly, when indigenous people are imagined. they also resist overemphasizing radical ontological/temporal difference, which can serve to depoliticize a key intervention: disrupting the colonial logics of futurity by which dispossession becomes enacted. film provides an ideal form for mediating indigenous futurisms because of its ability to transcend the temporal and ideological limits of written language through accessible, imaginative, and corporeal world-making (macdougall 2006). as jean rouch (2003, 185) proclaimed, the ciné-ethnographic “art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world, and ethnography, the science of the thought systems of others, is a permanent crossing point from one conceptual universe to another; acrobatic gymnastics, where losing one’s footing is the least of the risks.” i would add that rouch’s analysis proves even more relevant for future-oriented indigenous films, which provide crossing points between immemorial and apocalyptic pasts, hopeful and somber presents, and ambiguous and sovereign futures, in which imagining too expansively is the least of risks. furthermore, taking futurity seriously can provoke fundamental interventions within anthropology itself. it affords opportunities not only to reimagine ethnographic projects via futures but also to reflect such critical inquiries back onto the discipline. when considering the cycles of anthropological trends and turns, we might ask: what are we turning away from, why, and from a broader temporal perspective, to what ends? while we often frame arguments in opposition to past disciplinary missteps, it would be productive to also ask: what do we want anthropology to be and do decades and centuries from now, and what are our own roles in materializing such disciplinary futures? furthermore, how might those living in these distant futures look back on the current anthropological era and our own projects? standing at the dawn of the apocalyptic anthropocene, what types of new insights and perspectives might we gain if we sought not only to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange but also the present future and the future present? references appadurai, arjun 2013 the future as cultural fact: essays on the global condition. new york: verso. augustine, henry, dir. 2015 dunba. broome, australia: pilbara and kimberley aboriginal media. balgo community 2014 “luurnpa cliff side.” balgo, australia: indigenous hip hop projects. berlant, lauren 2011 cruel optimism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bessire, lucas 2011 “apocalyptic futures: the violent transformation of moral human life among ayoreo-speaking people of the paraguayan gran chaco.” american ethnologist 38, no. 4: 743–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01334.x. collins, samuel gerald 2008 all tomorrow’s cultures: anthropological engagements with the future. new york: berghahn. crapanzano, vincent 2003 “reflections on hope as a category of social and psychological analysis.” cultural anthropology 18, no. 1: 3–32. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2003.18.1.3. dillon, grace m. 2012 walking the clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction. tucson: university of arizona press. everett, dave, dir. 2015 “remote hope.” episode of four corners, may 11. sydney: australian broadcasting corporation. ginsburg, faye, and fred myers 2006 “a history of aboriginal futures.” critique of anthropology 26, no. 1: 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x06061482. hinkson, melinda 2010 “media images and the politics of hope.” in culture crisis: anthropology and politics in aboriginal australia, edited by jon altman and melinda hinkson, 229–47. sydney: university of new south wales press. kowal, emma 2015 trapped in the gap: doing good in indigenous australia. new york: berghahn. lear, jonathan 2006 radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. lempert, william 2014 “decolonizing encounters of the third kind: alternative futuring in native science fiction film.” visual anthropology review 30, no. 2: 164–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12046. lynch, paul 2012 “composition’s new thing: bruno latour and the apocalyptic turn.” college english 74, no. 5: 758–76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23212925. macdougall, david 2006 the corporeal image: film, ethnography, and the senses. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. medak-saltzman, danika 2017 “coming to you from the indigenous future: native women, speculative film shorts, and the art of the possible.” studies in american indian literatures 29, no. 1: 139–71. https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.29.1.0139. miyazaki, hirokazu 2004 the method of hope: anthropology, philosophy, and fijian knowledge. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. ortner, sherry b. 2016 “dark anthropology and its others: theory since the eighties.” hau 6, no. 1: 47–73. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.004. raheja, michelle h. 2011 reservation reelism: redfacing, visual sovereignty, and representations of native americans in film. lincoln: university of nebraska press. rifkin, mark 2017 beyond settler time: temporal sovereignty and indigenous self-determination. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rouch, jean 2003 ciné-ethnography. edited and translated by steven feld. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. salazar, juan francisco, sarah pink, andrew irving, and johannes sjöberg, eds. 2017 anthropologies and futures: researching emerging and uncertain worlds. new york: bloomsbury. tuck, eve 2009 “suspending damage: a letter to communities.” harvard educational review 79, no. 3: 409–428. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15. valentine, david 2012 “exit strategy: profit, cosmology, and the future of humans in space.” anthropological quarterly 85, no. 4: 1045–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0073. young, david, and william lempert, dirs. 2015 for young futures. broome, australia: pilbara and kimberley aboriginal media. on cynicism: activist and artistic responses to corruption in ghana cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 104-133, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.09 on cynicism: activist and artistic responses to corruption in ghana girish daswani university of toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1685-5957 on july 1, 2014, ghana’s republic day, a group of educated and middle-class ghanaians calling themselves concerned ghanaians for responsible governance protested the government’s bad track record on corruption. what started off as the hashtag #occupyflagstaffhouse on twitter feeds quickly circulated on social networking sites and turned into a protest that took ghana by storm, surprising even its organizers. hundreds walked through the rain toward flagstaff house, the seat of government, and presented a petition to representatives of president john mahama, the leader of ghana’s then ruling national democratic congress (ndc). the occupyflagstaffhouse organizers comprised mainly young ghanaian professionals who used social media to galvanize a following of people from different parts of the political spectrum. live coverage of the event drew public attention to the political corruption of the country’s elected leaders. a few weeks later, as a result of the demonstration’s success, members of ghana’s educated elite, with help from a younger generation of activists, formed occupyghana. on july 11, 2014, they launched a campaign called “red friday.” to indicate their solidarity, ghanaians were encouraged to wear locally made clothing and to post photos and videos of themselves wearing red (a color usually worn at a funeral) on various social media sites with the hashtags #redfriday or #occupyghana. figure 1. “#redfriday. because we love our country.” image by the black narrator. almost a year after the occupyflagstaffhouse demonstration, i met up with two of the younger leaders of occupyghana at a café on accra’s oxford street. nana akwasi, a lawyer in his thirties and one of the organizers of the demonstration, had just been selected for a mandela washington fellowship, a flagship program created by barack obama’s young african leader’s initiative. golda, who had worked for various ngos in ghana, had played a central role in igniting the spark that led to the 2014 protest. during the demonstration she hung a placard around her neck that read, “the king is naked!” and told the media that “the king thinks that he is in fancy clothes, but the king is naked. nobody is telling him the truth.” both nana akwasi and golda expressed satisfaction at having sent a message to the president and seemed excited at the prospect of effecting further change. nana akwasi added that he and others were motivated by “a desire to do good,” for they were “demanding accountability,” “fighting for social justice,” and “fighting corruption,” he said. in may 2015, nana akwasi and other activists helped the ghanaian actress yvonne nelson organize the street protest and night vigil titled “dumsor must stop.” dumsor, which translates from twi into “off-on” (dum-sor), served as a metaphor for ghana’s energy crisis and the more recent cases of corruption associated with mahama’s government. an electricity load-shedding regime of twelve hours on and twenty-four hours off was affecting domestic and non-domestic consumers of power, and critics squarely placed the blame for this erratic power supply on the hands of the government and the corruption of the political elite. the hashtag #dumsormuststop attracted more than a thousand people, who cut across different segments of ghana’s population. the rapper and singer wanlov the kubolor was among the artists who participated. he had just released a song critical of ghana’s corrupt politicians. his cynical attitude toward politicians in ghana served as the inspiration for many of wanlov’s songs. according to the singer, the political elite had no reason to change. wanlov, like other members of ghana’s artistic scene, such as the satirical cartoonist bright ackwerh, reveal how entertainment and popular culture serve as important outlets for political critique by the country’s less privileged. an undeniable global aspect adheres to these recent examples of ghanaian activism. since 2011, protest movements such as the arab spring, the may 15 movement in spain, and the #occupy movement have helped shape our shared political and social landscapes (juris and razsa 2012; graeber 2013). as elsewhere, neoliberal state forms, global financial crises, and the corruption of an entrenched political elite informed the activism in ghana. these protest movements have demonstrated a trend of nontraditional elites rising to visibility through networked counterpublics (s. jackson and welles 2015) and have highlighted how new forms of political agency are tied closely to urban relations (jiménez and estalella 2013) and overlapping similarities observed between political movements across geographical locations (obadare and willems 2014; werbner, webb, and spellman-poots 2014; lazar 2015). yet the ghanaian activist response to corruption and dumsor also showed significant differences from these global movements, and their resistance likewise formed part of the everyday practices of grassroots civic mobilization particular to ghana (oduro-frimpong 2018). in the united states, for example, satirical activism, which began in the 1980s and gained momentum in the 2000s, worked alongside the #occupy protests (haugerud 2013). in ghana, satirical artists and occupyghana activists held different ideas about political action and its outcomes and were embedded in distinct sets of social relations. in this article i argue that while both activists and artists were responding to the cynicism of other middle-class ghanaians, those who seemed indifferent to the corruption of ghana’s political elite, they differed in their class orientations, in their motivations for and expectations of future change, and in their organizational forms of sociality. if cynicism around corruption and political change motivated activism in ghana, occupyghana activists and popular artists demonstrated different kinds of activist subjectivities that demand further analytical attention. in what follows, i ask how activist and artistic responses to cynicism provided space for variation and difference and how ghanaian activists’ imagining of political action drew on different sources for inspiration. i reveal that if the members of occupyghana emulated a middle-class liberal democratic narrative of overcoming that stemmed from a utopian horizon, ghanaian artists embraced skepticism toward the future, which allowed them to keep one eye firmly on the haunting presence of colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. my analysis of the period just before and after the december 2016 national elections provides a vantage point from which to reflect on ghanaian activism as a space where cynicism thrives in multiple ways. when writing about cynicism, anthropologists commonly refer to peter sloterdijk’s (1995) critique of cynical reason.1 working some forty years after the second world war, sloterdijk was responding to a specific historical moment in west german politics, one characterized by general disillusionment and an insidious form of violence he called “cynicism” (shea 2010, 146). he described cynicism as an “enlightened false consciousness” that allowed western society to matter-of-factly declare that this is how “things really are” without doing anything about it (sloterdijk 1995, 193). acknowledging that not everyone is cynical in the same way, anthropologists have found the concept of cynicism useful for understanding how citizens in various times and places critically respond to political indifference and to a perceived moral crisis (steinmüller 2014, 2016). while some anthropologists have used the concept to analyze authoritarian states and the subtle or comparatively docile forms of resistance afforded their citizens (yurchak 1997, 2006; navaro-yashin 2002), others working in countries with multiparty systems (e.g., lebanon) have described how cynicism can coexist alongside political mobilization and hope (hermez 2015, 507–8) or how (in the context of an occupied palestine) it can “be a form of awareness and a motor for action” (allen 2013, 16). building on this work, the present article calls for a more expansive ethnographic engagement with how the politically engaged respond to cynicism and what their approach tells us about politics as understood through the relationship between indifference (born from cynicism) and critiques involving action. drawing on fieldwork that took place in accra, ghana, between 2015 and 2017, i reflect on cynicism through two kinds of activist orientations: one located in a middle-class, future-oriented project of political change, and another representing the views of the lower classes and embodied in popular performance styles that embraced contradiction by poking fun at the duplicity of politics. in the first part of my essay, i focus on the activists from occupyghana, middle-class ghanaians motivated by a desire to do good.2 since the restoration of multiparty politics in ghana in 1992, terms such as good governance have ironically crept into the language of activism (ferguson 2010) and become synonymous with opposition to corruption (muir and gupta 2018, s6). while this activism of the supposed good partakes in a global neoliberal agenda that identifies citizen engagement and participation as important for promoting democracy (hammett 2018, 71) and anti-corruption discourses (hasty 2005), it remains an elite project embodied by neoliberal ideas about the future. the activists from occupyghana were members of ghana’s new middle class who had access to university education and resources, drew on advanced communication skills, and embodied an activist subjectivity “interlaced with a ‘postcolonial condition’ that speaks in the language of rights, recognitions, and choices” (stoler 2016, 33). in the essay’s second section, i discuss the work of ghanaian artists hailing from the emergent urban intermediate class, people less concerned with expected political change than with making fun of the present through satire and humor (boyer 2013; haugerud 2013; molé 2013; dağtaş 2016; shipley 2017). rather than engaging with “good governance” and “anticorruption” discourses, ghanaian artists used popular culture to critique elite forms of knowledge by evoking “the presence of ‘us, the poor’ in contrast to ‘them, the rich and powerful’” (barber 2018, 7–12). rather than expecting things to change for the “good,” these artists used popular culture as a form of “critical aesthetics” (chari 2017a, 167) to raise awareness about the contradictions of politics through artistic parody prone to transgressive humor. i compare them to ananse, the human-spider trickster figure of ghanaian folklore (shipley 2015; donkor 2016) and to sloterdijk’s (1995) kynicism, a reference to acts that are deemed cheeky, vulgar, or provocative and therefore reside in the realm of satire. an ananse-style kynicism resembles the satirical acts of poking fun at authority that artists in ghana and elsewhere in africa are involved in when challenging the excesses of power of the continent’s postcolonial leaders (weiss 2004; obadare 2009; hammett 2010; j. jackson 2013; shipley 2013; oduro-frimpong 2014, 2018; barber 2018; limb and olaniyan 2018). by attending to the social actions and experiences that characterize these two groups, i ask what it means to take cynicism, and activism against and despite cynicism, as one’s ethnographic object. in exploring how individuals relate to cynicism differently, i pay attention to the creative potential of political protest, as well as to its limits and interruptions (chari 2017b; li 2019). sloterdijk wrote about cynicism in the wake of a conservative turn in german politics after the uprisings of 1968 (shea 2010, 146). as his philosophical meditation on cynicism continues to inform the various registers of political indifference experienced by citizens in contemporary nation-states, we need to address its adequacy for ethnographic description (steinmüller 2011, 33). i argue that looking at people’s responses to cynicism from the comparative perspective of activists and artists in ghana constitutes a fruitful endeavor, because each group participated in politics and speculated about their nation’s future in distinct ways. in the following section, i reveal how a local critique of cynicism stems from a specific vantage point and particular genealogy—a nation-state in the global south to which “good governance” has been preached for decades and where dumsor and corruption have recently become the target of grassroots mobilization. dumsor and corruption the 2014 occupyflagstaffhouse demonstration gathered momentum as a social and electronic movement among citizens frustrated with the political and economic situation in ghana: dumsor and increasing cases of corruption within governmental agencies were some of the main triggers of activism. while power outages (commonly known as “light off”) and corruption are not uncommon in ghana’s recent history, dumsor entered the popular vocabulary in 2012, crystalizing as a symbol of resistance and social commentary on corruption. as this “infrastructure disruption” (silver 2015) intensified, with rolling blackouts continuing for days at a stretch, businesses struggled to keep up with the ever-rising cost of the fuel needed to power generators, as well as the costs of servicing those machines. the activists i spoke to shared the impression that dumsor had raised its ugly head at a time when corruption had penetrated government structures at the highest levels. golda told me that she had always known that there was “corruption” in ghana, but not how “openly . . . they [the politicians] made it about themselves.” the ndc government had barely been in power for a hundred days when golda described things as having shifted from “bad” to “horrid,” tweeting to her friends, “i’m so fed up that i’m going to sit in front of flagstaff house and not move.” she received many responses and ultimately met with the people who helped initiate the first protest, which took place in april 2013. called “one simple step,” it had, to golda’s disappointment, a poor turnout of only ten people. nana akwasi told me that he was thinking about “the tro tro driver, the taxi driver,” a profession affected by fuel shortages when he went online to organize the occupyflagstaffhouse demonstration a year later. indeed, the country’s corruption discourses form rhetorical components of political life through which people publicly talk about their disappointment with the nation-state and its political elite (gupta 1995; smith 2007; pierce 2016; sanchez 2016; muir and gupta 2018). while corruption is not a phenomenon limited to ghana or the global south, but also involves multinational institutions and the unequal structures of the global economic system, corruption discourses have become a legitimate way for ghanaian citizens to engage with politics, evaluate state practices, and voice a political critique of the postcolonial state (hasty 2005). the accusation of corruption for political leaders goes back to ghana’s first post-independence leader kwame nkrumah (1957–1966), whose political opponents accused him of this crime and who was replaced by dr. kofi busia after a military coup. busia (1969–1972), later overthrown by colonel ignatius acheampong (1972–1978), also faced charges of corruption. student protests and middle-class outrage against corruption played a crucial role in the rise and fall of later regimes: they were present in the fight against acheampong and also first to support jerry rawlings in 1979 and the early 1980s and then to criticize his regime later in the 1980s. while the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s and the shift to a multiparty democracy and to neoliberal policies in the 1990s have contributed to the increase of utility prices and the lack of infrastructural development, ghanaians continue to blame “corruption” for the social and economic ills of the country. if the first thirty years of postcolonial independence favored single-party regimes in africa, the pendulum later “swung back again as significant sections of society weighed into politics with a gusto which had not been witnessed since the heyday of nationalism” (nugent 2012, 376; see also mueller 2018, 43). africa’s “second wave” of protests, which began in the 1990s after the breakup of the soviet union, was followed by a post-2011 “third wave” (mueller 2018) that saw communication technology become central to activism in ghana and africa more widely (nyabola 2018; dwyer and molony 2019). some of the cases of corruption dominating the ghanaian news channels and online media sites since 2012 involve government agency contracts given to private companies for work not done, whereby large sums of money were either never fully accounted for or never seen again. rather than constituting isolated acts of bribery involving bureaucrats, these cases circulated through social media to indicate how a systematic form of corruption, which took the shape of outright theft by political leaders and their cronies, had become the norm. in 2013, a ghanaian high court judge described these illegal activities as “create, loot, and share” (ghanaweb 2013).3 this (real and perceived) increase in corruption, or at least the blatant way in which it was being done, produced a popular anxiety about what the state is, where it is located, and what it means to be a citizen who cares, and who cares to respond (parry 2000). while changes to the constitution allowed for democratic elections and the legal right to demonstrate freely, political choice in ghana has remained constrained between two major parties since the early 2000s—the ndc, which is the democratically elected, political offshoot of rawling’s pndc, and the national patriotic party (npp), a pro-business and center-right party—both of which have faced accusations of corruption. for some, the 2014–2015 wave of anticorruption activism was reminiscent of the 1995 kum-me-preku (“kill me once and for all”) demonstration, which constituted a direct response to the 17.5 percent value-added tax that the ndc government, then led by rawlings, had placed on goods and services. organized by a group of political opposition leaders, including the npp’s current flagbearer nana akufo-addo, calling themselves alliance for change, this protest faced violence by armed government supporters, leading to the death of four people. the occupyflagstaffhouse demonstration was a litmus test on ghana’s democracy and the ability of its citizens to protest government corruption. it had a demonstrable effect in helping the npp win the 2016 national elections. yet occupyghana was caught between two activist agendas: a critique of the state, which for some comes with a class-based agenda focusing on the fate of the working classes, and the creation of a space in which the neoconservative, market-oriented npp can operate against the ruling ndc. occupyghana: an activism of the “good” and cynicism when i first met nana akwasi, he told me that his work with occupyghana concerned a “struggle for good governance,” and that the fight against corruption was inextricably linked to “happiness.” his activism echoed an aristotlean virtue ethics that lends importance to the cultivation of acts deemed good and through which ethical practice is often viewed as a form of “human flourishing” (laidlaw 2014) or as a way to lead “a life worth living” (mattingly 2014). what some members of occupyghana considered “good” (good governance, good citizenship) is closely intertwined with a neoliberal development model advocated by international agencies such as the international monetary fund (imf) and the world bank (hammett 2018). in the 1980s, structural adjustment policies saw deep cuts in social spending and, while a precarious macroeconomic equilibrium was temporarily restored, these policies introduced new ways of imagining democratic politics. in the 1990s these western international agencies shifted their priorities from structural adjustment to a new emphasis on democratic participation associated with multiparty politics, democratic elections, and an active civil society. recent protest leaders in ghana are usually members of the new middle class who emerged from the economic liberalization policies of the late twentieth century, especially after the 2000 election victory of the npp under john kufuor and his government’s free-market governance policies. cynicism was a word used by yofi grant, one of the leaders of occupyghana, to describe the political indifference of other middle-class ghanaians to ongoing government corruption. “people are tired,” he despaired. “there is so much to complain about that you scream yourself hoarse and the government does not seem to do enough about anything.” he continued: “corruption is not new. but when it gets to a point when it starts becoming institutionalized, you get a sense that the government is not doing enough, for they are engaged with corruption.” yofi was an investment banker in ghana. like other ghanaians, he was tired of watching politicians cheat, steal, and lie, but also tired of the general cynicism that characterized the response to corruption. most votes were “bought,” he told me, and bound by the codes of collective identity that descended into what he called “tribalism.” in addition, many people did not think that voting for either of the main political parties mattered. but yofi was of the opinion that people should “know better,” that better arguments or reasonable opinions ought to be adopted in place of weaker ones, and changes voluntarily accepted for the good of all. activism was his response to the cynical reasoning he found in other middle-class ghanaians: an indifference to what was happening around them and the notion that things will never really change. he was especially tired of those ghanaians he called “neo-neutrals”: those not doing anything or not responding to the corruption happening in front of them. take his facebook post from june 2016: scandal after scandal, story after story, compendium of faux pas. . . . and yet folks, especially all those mugwumps, the neo-neutrals, who think it’s not theirs to comment and condemn, sacrifice their conscience and intellect, and those who are unflinching in hailing with reckless abandon . . . shamelessly defending the indefensible . . . think that things should remain, because . . .? one can list too many issues, a whole lot of “challenges,” embarrassing violations of governance, eldritch misgivings, which should raise the eyebrows of the hardest ossified cynic. it’s not about bipartisanship, it’s about what is right and what is wrong. the people yofi refers to as the hardened “cynics” or the “neo-neutrals” in his facebook post resemble the modern cynics described by sloterdijk (1995). at this level, cynicism helps reproduce the fantasy of the state (navaro-yashin 2002) that allows ghanaian citizens to accommodate pre-established relations (e.g., corruption) and to go on with their lives (as is). this approach assumes that people are conscious of their reality but act as if they are not. in other words, cynicism instils the kind of indifference and complacency that provides people with moral opinions about what really “is,” as well as the opportunity to fade into anonymity even as they are dragged down by these inadequacies. it was the cynicism exhibited by many ghanaians that both motivated yofi and other activists to respond to corruption. in an interview aired on the ghanaian television program state of the nation, another leader of occupyghana, a lawyer named ace ankomah, said, in response to a tweet from a viewer telling ace that he should not bother with his activism but instead take these issues to court: “look at this person, comfortably sitting in his home watching tv . . . this kind of person constitutes part of the problem that we have . . . they don’t care.” if the “they” are the cynics, the activist becomes the person who cares to respond to such cynicism with what is “right” and who holds others accountable for their wrongs to reveal the greater truth. ace distanced himself from what the interviewer described as “the middle class.” he explained that the “so-called” middle class was around but “had checked out of ghana.” by this he meant that the majority of middle-class citizens were largely disconnected from the issues faced by ordinary ghanaians because they had “resolved all their problems. . . . if their roads are bad, they drive four-wheel drives. if there is no water, they have boreholes. . . . if there is no electricity, they have gen[erator] sets.” ace and others like him saw themselves as working for the good and on behalf of those too cynical or afraid to take any action. some of the ghanaian activists i spoke to noted the “assumed cynicism” (hermez 2015, 508) of others and their ability to shield themselves from life’s contradictions as underlying motivations for their own response of not exhibiting cynicism about future political change and instead doing one’s “duty.” for golda, another activist from occupyghana, activism became “infused with cynicism” (hermez 2015, 509). golda is an environmental and women’s rights activist. she represents a different generation of activist from the senior leaders of occupyghana. in her mid-thirties, born and raised in accra, and a graduate from the university of ghana, golda took a couple of years off after completing university to travel to different countries in africa, as well as to the uk and the united states, before returning to ghana in 2008. in 2009 she registered her own ngo and started working on environmental issues. golda, who initiated the first attempt to organize a protest against corruption, was actively involved on social media sites, notably facebook and twitter, and asked her online community to intervene: “why is it that we’re so intelligent on social media but every time i said, ‘let’s do something,’ nobody wanted to step forward? it was all about being online, and hiding behind [the internet],” she said to me. while twitter, facebook, and whatsapp have helped protest leaders coordinate events and connect across vast distances, they also threatened to replace face-to-face interactions and give the illusion of a movement against corruption on the ground. golda became an active participant in occupyghana, the group formed after the second twitter-fueled protest. but by 2016 she had left the movement. when i asked her why, she replied, “i was skeptical about most of the leading members and what their genuine intentions for the proletariat could be.” like some other younger leaders of occupyghana, she felt that the movement was becoming more hierarchical and partisan (favoring the main opposition npp). golda felt disappointed with the internal politics of activism, especially since she felt her organization represented the same (patriarchal) elite interests of the existing political parties. the older generation of activist leaders had taken over the reins from the younger members and had drawn a line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of critique and methods of protest. when a founding member of occupyghana joined the npp in the run-up to the december 2016 elections but did not leave the movement, the group split. together with some other former members of occupyghana, golda helped create the citizen ghana movement. citizen ghana initiated the process to legalize the freedom of information act, which allowed citizens to request information about the financing of public projects. again, however, she did not stay long: “i joined citizen ghana with high hopes, then lost the enthusiasm. . . . i left when some of the members of occupyghana that i suspected of having dark intentions decided to infiltrate that group too.” in 2016 golda explained to me that she had become disappointed with activism and how her health and marriage had suffered from her involvement. naisargi n. dave’s work (2016, 2017) on animal activists in india has had an important influence on my analysis with regard to how cynicism, as located in the inconsistencies that arise from the irresolvable contradictions activists face, can lead to “exhaustion.” it has helped me understand that golda’s experience may not differ too much from that of other activists whose ethical dilemmas have direct effects on their body, including on its capacity to be affected (dave 2016, 2017). the activist fight—and the contradictions it posed—had taken a lot out of golda. when reflecting back, she said to me: i’m not sure if i can express everything, because it is so much, and most of it eludes vocabulary. but what i can say in addition is that the situation in ghana, politically, has become one of being stuck between the sea and a hard place. no choice is good enough to rescue ghana and the future generations, and at the time, the feeling of deep disappointment in the available options was very, very fresh and very, very heavy on the soul. they promised better governance [and] then shafted us without lubrication. then handed us over to all their cronies to shaft. and they looked us in the face while they did it. the heartbreak was real, and everywhere we looked, there was no one better to rescue us. activism therefore began to feel like stage drama. you’re passionate about it, but you know at the end of the day, it’s not real. this makes you tired. golda’s disappointment was tied to a “deep cynicism about the possibility of social and political change” (greenberg 2014, 7). in her work on serbian student activists, jessica greenberg (2014, 8) argues that such a “politics of disappointment” is inherent to the contradictions of lived democratic practice, where political life is dominated by certain why questions, such as “why are activists acting like self-interested politicians?” and “why are my actions only benefiting a few?” golda’s stepping away from activism and her critique of occupyghana constituted less a retreat from politics than the experience of a transition linked to an intimate act of making sense of things. it was a “refusal” to comply with a certain kind of activist politics (simpson 2014, 2016; mcgranahan 2016, 320), the acceptance of a limit reached due to one’s refusal to be an activist within certain preconditions and criteria set by others. rather than a definitive judgment on what needed to happen next, exhaustion and disappointment provided golda with an alternative experience of being an activist. in the following section i focus on the work of activist-artists, who, in a way reminiscent of mikhail m. bakhtin’s (1984) ideas of the grotesque and the obscene, use satire and parody as a form of response and refusal. these carnivalesque performances serve as “acts of familiarization” in which “hierarchical exclusions can be subverted . . . through actions that not only flout but also exaggerate the conventions of a ruling elite” (weiss 2009, 26). however, instead of “the low” turning the tables on “the high,” these artists created a “potent symbolic space” for connecting social classes and ethnic groups to poke fun at ghanaian politics (weiss 2009, 29). able to communicate their work and to speak to the masses through digital media, these artists shape moral and social dialogue through their ability to move between and blend multiple registers and by addressing problems of social inequality and poverty that affect an increasing number of ghanaians (shipley 2013). i consider them closer to ananse-style kynics than to modern cynics who recognize the limits of long-term futurity as an effective horizon of sociopolitical change (weiss 2009; scott 2014). while a logic of demanding accountability was encoded in the future-oriented practices of members of occupyghana, the ghanaian artists i spoke to participated in an ethic of social leveling through a creative performance more focused on responding (to the) now through humor and satire. ananse-style kynicism and humor while contradictions form part of the cynic’s life, the kynics do not simply complain. instead, they use their personally experienced contradictions as a combative force for humor and satire. this outlook overlaps nicely with the model of ananse the human-spider trickster figure of ghanaian folklore. ananse is often described as an immoral character who possesses a worldly wisdom that carries him through life. he reminds us that life is not simply about established meanings but also about contradictions, which are intrinsic to life (donkor 2016, 17). in the telling of ananse stories, the aim is to question dominant ideologies and create an interaction between the storytellers and their audience that allows both sides to explore the limits of the social order and consider the possibility of alternative outlooks (shipley 2015; donkor 2016). writing about the african postcolony, achille mbembe (2001, 128–29) has referred to an “intimacy of tyranny” whereby ordinary people unable to directly confront the excesses of the elite use humor as a way to “guide, deceive and toy with power.” while humor and “mimicry” (bhabha 1994) provide for the temporary disruption of state authority or serve as a form of endurance for the powerless and can simultaneously be appropriated by the powerful, ebenezer obadare (2009) and others (hammett 2010; oduro-frimpong 2014, 2018) have argued that humor in postcolonial africa has not been taken seriously as an active form of resistance. this derives, in part, from the literature’s existing preoccupation with the african state (see bayart 1993) and the democratizing effects of civil society, which places organizations at the center of analysis. more recent literature from africanist scholars suggests a change to a greater focus on artistic protests as forms of resistance (barber 2018; limb and olaniyan 2018). the ghanaian artists i know did not always describe themselves as activists, nor did they expect their art to create real change in politics. instead, they saw their work as a necessary response to corruption, one that challenged the ruling elite and provided inspiration for other forms of activism. having gained social notoriety and value in contemporary ghana through the circulation of images, texts, and music, as well as through the concomitant production of moral commentaries (shipley 2017), they are thus comparable to the trickster ananse. their approach is reminiscent of the ghanaian concert-party theater performances of the twentieth century, which formed part of a wider history of transatlantic performances aimed at dramatizing the frustrations of the underprivileged classes while providing a unique perspective on colonialism and nationalist identity (cole 2001; shipley 2004). a currently celebrated artist in ghana whose activism and satirical cartoons started during the dumsor crisis is bright ackwerh. bright was a university student doing a master’s degree in fine arts at the kwame nkrumah university of science and technology when dumsor disrupted his ability to work from home. he described to me how, between the time he had applied to do a postgraduate degree and the moment he gained admission, his tuition fees had increased by almost 800 percent. the withdrawal of government subsidies for his postgraduate studies, the songs that emerged from ghana’s energy crisis, as well as his own experience with dumsor sparked his political sensibilities. bright also draws inspiration from other artists and popular musicians, including the ghanaian hip-hop duo the fokn bois and the nigerian activist-musician fela kuti. he is especially drawn to their unapologetic manner of relaying messages and believes that artists who are “politically conscious have the power to upset the system.” in reference to fela kuti’s 1978 musical performance in accra (especially his song “zombie”), bright stated that it was music that “inspired the audience to hit the street and riot against what was then very corrupt practices in ghana government.” bright’s first satirical piece dates from 2015 and is called “ode to fokn bois.” it depicts the fokn bois duo molesting a map of ghana while famous spectators from popular culture and politics, including kwame nkrumah, look on with glee. bright was forced to work on this piece at internet cafés as these places had the generators he needed during the height of the dumsor crisis. bright said that the controversial rap duo enjoyed “fucking” with ghana and revealing many of the social injustices faced by ordinary ghanaians. he was not sure how his piece would be received, but it marked the start of his friendship and future collaborations with wanlov the kubolor, whom i will discuss in greater detail below. in 2016, bright created the cover art for the corruption-dumsor mixtape curated by wanlov, which featured a number of songs by ghanaian artists criticizing corruption and dumsor and won bright the kuenyehia prize for contemporary ghanaian art. figure 2. “tweaa room.” image by bright ackwerh. bright’s subsequent humorous drawings, poking fun at popular, religious, and political figures, include a depiction of ghana’s then president john mahama wearing a motorcycle helmet and driving a 2012 ford expedition with a goat (also wearing a helmet) in the front seat. “expedition” was a comical response to the news that, as vice-president, mahama had accepted an suv as a gift from a burkinabe construction company that had been given several large government contracts by the ghanaian president. figure 3. “expedition.” image by bright ackwerh. bright explained to me the launch of investigations for that case. mahama’s guilt would justify efforts to impeach him, bright said. yet he also knew that this was never going to happen. illustrations such as bright’s point to the disillusionment ghanaians feel with the sincerity of politicians and processes of accountability. the case was open and shut when they claimed the car was no bribe and had been added to the national pool. i wanted to capture that “getting away with it” happy feeling on his face. the helmet referred to a video and pictures of the president speeding out of his residence on a powerful motorcycle to supposedly inspect floods in accra, images that had gone viral. the goat, which has become a feature of bright’s artwork, originated with something the president had said in botswana in 2015. responding to a question about the occupyghana demonstrations, president mahama claimed he had “dead goat syndrome”: i have seen more demonstrations and strikes in my first two years. i don’t think it can get worse. it is said that when you kill a goat and you frighten it with a knife, it doesn’t fear the knife because it is dead already. since then, these infamous words have been reinterpreted in several other cartoons and have become the butt of many jokes. by using framing devices such as parody and the analogical appositions of parallel social contexts otherwise temporally disparate, bright exposes the contradictions of mahama’s position on corruption. such satirical caricatures reinvest public statements and images with new value and allow for further debate around corruption by critiquing the actions of the cartoon’s subject (president mahama) and undermining the legitimacy with which political leaders act and speak (jackson 2013). bright and others in ghana’s artistic scene used direct and shocking expressions of humor to highlight the absurdity of politics. bright described his work as one piece in a larger jigsaw puzzle and cited wanlov’s music as an important element helping him establish his own style of satirical art. wanlov the kubolor (emmanuel owusu bonsu), a rapper and musical artist of ghanaian and romanian descent, serves as an iconic reference point and inspiration for many artists and spoken word performers engaged in challenging political corruption in ghana. wanlov grew up in accra and attended asisadel college, an anglican boys school in cape coast, where he started rapping and became involved in the local circuit of cape coast and takoradi. in 2000 he traveled to the united states to pursue his university degree in computer science, but he dropped out after two years to dedicate himself to his musical career. after facing arrest for a high-speed motorcycle chase with the police in the united states, he spent a short time incarcerated before returning to ghana in 2007. wanlov later teamed up with his childhood friend and ghanaian rapper m3nsa to form the group fokn bois. the duo, known for their satirical lyrics and their comical and witty demeanor, have referred to their songs as “therapy,” since they are able to say things that ghanaians are thinking about but afraid to say themselves. i first met wanlov in april 2016 in accra. i texted to tell him i was in ghana and wanted to meet to speak about his recent interventions on corruption (which included songs, interviews, and collaborations with other artists). he replied within minutes and invited me to join him in his one-bedroom apartment, which also serves as his recording studio. sporting long dreadlocks, a trimmed beard, and a violet-colored wrap around his waist (teasingly called a skirt by some), wanlov picked me up from the main road and walked me to his home. wanlov had a personal recording studio in his bedroom, which also served as his living, dining, and guest room. there was a huge samsung tv screen linked up to a computer and other recording devices, including speakers and a microphone. when i asked wanlov about his latest song on corrupt politicians titled “never go change,” he replied that it was not his first song on corruption. he wanted to set the record straight—he “wasn’t an opportunist.” “people kept asking me why i had changed my style [from rap], why i was singing about corruption and politics,” he said; “but they don’t remember that one of my songs in my first album from 2007 was about this [corruption].” he then played me the song “50th dependence” from his album green card. in it he was rapping in pidgin about the same problems—light off, greedy politicians, and police extortion. the song’s conception coincided with ghana’s celebrations for fifty years of independence. at the time, wanlov was living in the united states and learned that ghana had borrowed large sums of money, used to buy expensive cars for politicians. it was not until the most recent couple of years that wanlov had started conceptualizing a new album titled red card: the minstrel cycle. the title refers to the showing of a red card to ghana’s corrupt politicians, as in a soccer match, as well as to the rapper’s role as a joker or minstrel who uses humor to tell the uncomfortable truth to people in power. humor is an important part of wanlov’s personal philosophy and approach to music as “soft resistance.” as he said to me: “i’m not into these complaining songs without cheek.” he described his songs as a “response to discomfort,” and humor as an important part of his “self-therapy”: “i am reacting to my environment in a way that excites me and allows me to laugh at them [leaders, politicians] when they get upset.” the underlying inspiration for many of wanlov’s songs was the artist’s cynicism regarding politics and politicians in ghana, which, according to him, had no reason to change. wanlov cared deeply about the pollution caused by plastics on ghana’s beaches and the government’s lack of care for basic sanitation, which caused many to defecate by the sea in black plastic bags. in the video for a song he made in collaboration with the ghanaian artist eli, titled “gold coast,” wanlov raps naked, squatting in a large drain next to the beach, with a picture of then president mahama’s face covering his genitals. part of his rap goes: swimming with my people, surrounded by our torpedoes, floaters sinkers suspenders, this practice for be suspended. until further notice, store your golden plastic bags, the black ones, and drop them for flagstaff [the seat of government]. [he then makes a farting sound as he walks away].4 another of wanlov’s songs, “never go change,” is more serious and critical of corrupt politicians who seem not to care about the plight of ordinary ghanaians. it is played to rhythmic guitar strumming, sung in pidgin and with a melodic voice (unlike his usual rapping style). wanlov explained that he was inspired to write this song during dumsor and while learning to play a highlife guitar tune at his friend’s (the ghanaian musician kyekyeku) house in east labadi, a residential neighborhood in accra. unlike most other homes in the capital, kyekyeku’s house had power. since it was on the same grid as the one that supplied electricity to the castle, the president’s official residence, his home never suffered power cuts. here are some of the lines from the song: dey no dey care about light off, dey get dema generators dey no dey care if the road roff, dey get dema land cruisers dey no dey care about traffic, dey get dema police escorts dey no dey care about justice, dey get dema police and courts so why dey go change oh, dey never go change dey never go change oh, dey never go change dey never go change oh, dey never go change dey never go change oh, why dey for change? the song focuses on why ghana’s elite need not change nor concern themselves with the suffering of ordinary ghanaians. it denounces injustice, whereby the few in ghana who had electricity powered by generators were the same who could afford land cruisers and therefore not as susceptible to the accidents and deaths that frequently occurred on badly maintained roads. they were further the ones who could bribe the police and judges to avoid getting punished for their crimes. the song’s lyrics progressively get darker: “so we for kill them all chale, we for kill them all. cut off dem heads and spill dem blood on the walls.” wanlov calls into question the distinction between the elite and the powerless and ends his song with a question to all ghanaians: “like you, you go change?” wanlov did not believe that things would truly change without some kind of destruction and rebirth, maintaining that ghana’s colonialist power regime would continue to only benefit the rich and powerful, without offering an avenue of escape for the poor. in his description of the youtube video for “never go change,” wanlov writes, “if the video makes no sense to you it is because dumsor, pollution, poverty & corruption in [g]hana make no sense to me.”5 on the cover of wanlov’s recently released album red card (illustrated by bright), flagstaff house is on fire, and lying on the ground next to it, in a pool of blood, are the decapitated heads of several state figures (from left to right: mahama, akufo-addo, rawlings, tiwaa addo-danquah, kufuor), as well as the symbols of ghana’s two main political parties (an elephant for the npp and an umbrella for the ndc) (see figure 4).6 figure 4. album cover of “red card: the minstrel cycle.” image by bright ackwerh. wanlov’s and bright’s feelings about ghana were filled with the contradictions attached to the persistence of corruption, regardless of which government held power. while sitting on the floor of wanlov’s apartment one evening in 2017, i listened to him telling me how the country’s problems with corruption went back to british colonial times in ghana. how could things change when colonial countries continued to interfere in african economies and influence present-day african politics? for wanlov, postcolonial ghana reincarnated colonial evils that had never been fully expelled. this echoed mbembe’s (2001, 14–16) point about the distinctiveness of the postcolony as the “time of entanglement” that “encloses multiple durées . . . an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures.” it also speaks to ann laura stoler’s (2016, 33) description of colonial presence as “a past that is imagined to be over but persists, reactivates, and recurs in transfigured forms.” the claims of democratic citizenship and the presence of neocolonialism presented a contradiction impossible to resolve. bright himself admitted that wanting to change the world and acknowledging that you cannot was a contradiction he held while creating his art pieces. “there is a saying, ‘some people own the world. we just live in it,’” he told me. “there is already an agreed system of doing things that is different from what we are presented with. some of these structures have already been set, and, even when there is a change of power, [things] cannot be changed that easily.” corruption persisted because ghanaian politicians have “obligations that they have to fulfil. . . . to the people who fund them, not to the people who have elected them,” he said. even after akufo-addo and the npp defeated the mahama government in the 2016 elections, bright’s work continued to highlight the imbalance of power and the neocolonial nature of the relationships between ghana and its international financiers, including china, the united states, and britain. in a cartoon he created in 2017, ghana’s sitting president, akufo-addo, is pictured protecting his food—a local dish called banku—from intrusive british dignitaries who want to eat it. they include princess anne, tony blair, and then foreign secretary boris johnson. figure 5. “ky3 mu p3.” image by bright ackwerh. entitled “ky3 mu p3” (twi for “share it equally”) it is named after a ghanaian game in which the person about to eat has to announce “no ky3 mu p3” or risk dividing their food equally with anyone who passes by. bright conceived of this cartoon during ghana’s sixtieth anniversary of independence, which took place just after ghana had changed governments. in the image, the president is wearing his official anniversary attire and protecting his favorite local food. just as ghana has become a profitable site of future-oriented speculation, bright wanted to “speculate” on the nature of economic agreements and trade contracts made behind closed doors and, thus, potentially exploitative of ghana’s economy and natural resources. he said to me: during that period, we had received a lot of visits from foreign presidents, prime ministers. . . . i asked, “what is it about this government that suddenly everybody wants to come down here and negotiate some private, behind-closed-doors meeting? history has taught us that these things don’t just happen. . . . and usually when they say, “closed doors,” they don’t want us to know. so i made a painting which featured some of the prominent british dignitaries that we received because of the history ghana has with britain. i referenced that game because i felt like they were trying to take something. i don’t know what it was. and i’m not going to know. . .. so let me speculate and i’ll speculate as wildly as i can. deploying satire and parody to bring supposed corruption into view, artists such as wanlov and bright use contradictions to stretch binaries and think beyond normative models of resistance. uploading and circulating their work on social media, they provide a greater number of ghanaians access to political critique. their work serves to entertain and surprise even as it makes some people feel uncomfortable. these artists are not modern cynics (sloterdijk 1995) who do nothing about the present political situation. neither are they kynics in the greek style or direct examples of michel foucault’s (2012) “truth-telling” (see also englund 2018). instead, through their ananse-style kynicism and their ability to transform aesthetic output into political critique, artists like bright and wanlov do not hold onto the expectation that things will change for the better. rather, they describe their work as a “response” to the discomfort they experience, and as a way to make fun of the political situation. though they work toward developing critical awareness about the political present, they recognize their creations’ limitations. as wanlov said to me: “someone once asked me if i wanted to make music that was timeless, like fela kuti, bob marley. but i do not believe in that. something that is time-restricted cannot be time-less.” rather, he and bright mock social conventions and polite and normative forms of communication, sharing their artistic material for public consumption so as to excite, upset, and provoke conversation. they share what bakhtin (1984, 107–8, italics in the original) has described as a “carnival sense of the world,” an artistic genre that possesses a “life-creating and transforming power” through a shared focus on the “living present,” a reliance on “experience . . . and on free invention,” and a rejection of a single narrative in favor of a “multi-toned narration, the mixing of high and low, serious and comic.” conclusion the concept of cynicism has provided me with a productive way to reflect on different activist orientations toward corruption in ghana just before and after the country’s 2016 elections. the assumption that people are conscious of state corruption but choose to ignore this knowledge in their daily life can be compared to a modern form of “cynicism” (sloterdijk 1995) associated with the “fantasy” of keeping the state intact (navaro-yashin 2002). i have described how, apart from corruption and dumsor, the cynicism of other middle-class ghanaians played a role in motivating the actions of activists from occupyghana as well as those of ghanaian artists. cynicism emerged as an accusation (steinmüller 2016) to create an ethical distance from those not willing to respond to corruption. sloterdijk’s use of the term, however, gives the impression of an oppositional politics: either one’s indifference leads one to do nothing or one acts bravely, performing social critique (steinmüller 2011). yet in responding to corruption and to the cynicism of others, ghanaian activists and artists held different positionalities and followed separate paths to commentary, ones that demonstrate different kinds of activist sociality and subjectivities. through a close study of two groups of activists in ghana—members of occupyghana and popular artists—this article has described how activist communities differ from each other and the distinct ways in which they imagine the future. while activists from occupyghana did not question the path toward market liberalization built on a message of speculative hope, ghanaian artists asked whether this was a future worth buying into. i have argued that the subjective orientations of occupyghana activists and artists differentiated themselves through class orientations and their particular kind of embeddedness in ghanaian politics. i have suggested that the occupyghana critique of cynical reason was situated within a different genealogy of politics, one in which discursively transportable idioms such as “good governance” and “good citizenship” have proven important to activist accounts of fighting corruption. most activists from occupyghana came from ghana’s new middle class, well-educated members of a privileged group whose activism drew motivation from a combination of social justice and anti-corruption discourses that i have called an “activism of the good.” as activists, members of occupyghana separated themselves from the rest of the middle class who did not respond to corruption and whom they described as cynical about political change. if activism provided them with the opportunity to speak for a common good, it also created different outcomes for its participants. after the npp won the december 2016 elections, yofi grant resigned as an executive member of occupyghana to become the chief executive officer of the ghana investment promotion centre, working to build ghana’s transnational ties to overseas investors. he had supported the npp all along and had helped campaign for them during the run-up to the elections. he did not see his work of building ghana’s trade alliances as separate from his earlier role as an activist. instead, activism and politics went hand in hand with building the necessary conditions for a neoliberal future. golda, however, revealed how the teleological narrative of activism can get disrupted and lead to the undoing of everyday life. she came to eventually question the “good” of activism and turned cynical about its outcomes even as she held onto the hope that things will change for the better. their different activist positionalities and divergent political sensibilities complicate a simple reading of an activism of the good, in fact infusing it with irony. i have also examined an ananse-style kynicism from the perspective of ghanaian artists who poke fun at the duplicity of politics. ghanaian artist responses to corruption provided a different aesthetics of critique, where performances and the perspectives of the lower classes mattered more, and where skepticism about real political change proved inherent to the activist response. their artistic performances allowed ghanaians of different social backgrounds to participate in social critique through a generative recontextualization of a song or a cartoon to express their sense of exclusion, displacement, and frustration (weiss 2009; barber 2018). through my discussion of ghanaian artists such as bright and wanlov, i have demonstrated that an ananse-style kynicism is a critical impulse associated with popular culture that decenters power from the postcolonial state. by embracing contradictions, artists like wanlov and bright embraced a living dialogue between apparent opposites and provoked ghanaians to view politics in a new way (bakhtin 1984). drawing attention to the spectral promises and the failures of postcolonial politics and neoliberalism, they kept one eye on hope without holding onto the idea that things will necessarily improve. wanlov, for example, did not expect his music to change things for the better, due to the continued presence of colonialism in ghana’s political and economic system. he said to me: “if i am hoping human beings to change, to hear my music and change, i will forever walk crooked.” for wanlov and bright, an ananse-style kynicism was more important as a creative source of critique that allowed ordinary ghanaians to express their frustrations and to imagine a different future from the one presented by their nation’s leaders. perhaps it is not the contradictions inherent in a democratic politics that disappoint and exhaust, but, rather, the challenges of seeing and embracing these contradictions in the first place. abstract by considering how ghanaian activists and artists engage with different forms of cynicism in their attempts to fight corruption, this article reflects on two kinds of activist orientations: one located in future-oriented projects of political change, and another embracing contradiction by poking fun at the duplicity of politics. i argue that while the cynicism of other middle-class ghanaians served as an important catalyst for activist action, it is important to look at cynicism and its politics from the perspective of ghanaians who become disappointed and skeptical about change and artists who are concerned with embracing contradictions and making fun of the present through satire. by attending to the social actions and experiences that characterize these two groups, i ask what it means to take cynicism, and activism against and despite cynicism, as one’s ethnographic object. [cynicism; ghana; corruption; activism; humor] abstract dis paper na about de two different way aluta and jolly-jolly people for ghana dey show say dem “disappoint and lose hope” when dem dey fight magomago: one way na to struggle and believe say tomorrow go betta, and de oder way na to join yabis, abuse and comedy to fight wayo politics. my own argument here be say, even when e be true say many ordinary people for ghana join aluta because dem don disappoint and lose hope for how magomago don spoil tings, e make big sense also to put eye for how aluta people for ghana wey disappoint for sake of magomago come lose hope so tey dem no believe tings fit change for betta again and dose jolly-jolly people wey join yabis togeda with abuse now to fight magomago. when i put eye for dis two different way people dey behave when dem dey fight magomago, my plan na to show wetin dey happen when person wey don lose hope and disappoint come join aluta struggle with am to show how people dey behave. [somebody wey no born yestee; ghana; magomago; aluta; fool pass] notes acknowledgments this essay has benefited from conversations with respected colleagues in several institutions at which i presented earlier versions. they include osaka university, the national university of singapore, the university of toronto, and the london school of economics and political science. i am grateful to the thoughtful suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology, to the editorial work of jessica lockrem and petra dreiser, and to the insightful feedback of katherine blouin, amit desai, andrea muehlebach, alejandro paz, and brad weiss. the research for this article was made possible by the support of family and friends in ghana and funded by sshrc institutional grants from the university of toronto scarborough. abstract translated into nigerian pidgin english by rotimi fasan. thanks to joseph oduro-frimpong for making this happen. 1. i thank my colleague naisargi dave for pointing me to sloterdijk’s (1995) work on cynicism. dave’s (2016, 2017) work on animal activists in india, and her engagement of cynicism as located in contradictory thinking, proved instrumental in helping me think about the inconsistencies that arise from a liberal politics and how it can lead to an activist exhaustion. 2. the ethical project of trying to foster an idea of the “good,” the desire to do good in one’s political environment and to strive to live in light of such an ideal, seem to fit well with the aims of many activists from occupyghana (robbins 2013; mattingly 2014). however, we also need to recognize how the “good” might become an elite or middle-class project that can be rendered technical (li 2007)—as an affective sentiment in support of development and state-building projects (chalfin 2010) or as an already integral part of the structure of feeling and action located in a neoliberal moral economy (muehlebach 2012). 3. “the “create, loot and share” comment was made 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https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-161. 2006 everything was forever, until it was no more: the last soviet generation. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 104-133, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.09 mourning, affect, sociality: on the possibilities of open grief cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 40-47, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.06 mourning, affect, sociality: on the possibilities of open grief zoë wool rice university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9534-2633 grief is often rendered as central to sociality, an affective domain and set of practices in which our attachments to, care for, and investment in others are revealed in life’s breach. psychological approaches to grief generally take it to be a fundamental feature of life for us as an essentially social species, one that may have an evolutionary explanation (archer 1999). other approaches layer cultural specificity on top of this universal human account. renato rosaldo’s (1993) “grief and the headhunter’s rage” constitutes one anthropological touchstone. and in his 1915 essay on war and death, sigmund freud notes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person” (freud 1918, 243) and imputes the pain of grief to “primeval man” (freud 1918, 293). he also calls “our complete collapse when death has struck down someone we love” part of a “cultural and conventional attitude toward death” (freud 1918, 209). this account of grief as variable but also essentially human appears within theories of other fundamental features of human social life, including vulnerability and kinship. judith butler (2006, 2015) describes vulnerability in levinasian terms, as an openness to the other that is fundamental to ethical obligation and cohabitation. and take marshal sahlins’s (2013, ix, 28; emphasis added) parsimonious, lovely, and tempting formulation on the essence of kinship: kinship is “living each other’s lives and dying each other’s deaths.” but what if the contours of one’s capacities preclude the dying of another’s death? what if one does not feel grief? is a person ejected from the space of kinship altogether? does a measure of invulnerability to grief diminish one’s ability to be with others, to become with others, to make a world with them? that is the fear articulated to me by jason, a u.s. veteran with severe traumatic brain injury (tbi) with whom i’ve worked for a year and a half, and who, by his own account, can no longer feel pain, loss, or grief. he says this condition makes him “less human.” my effort to think through accounts in which feelings of grief appear as a kind of litmus test for human sociality, and thereby humanity itself, is caught by my niggling concern that such theories of grief contribute to a reading of disability—in particular of non-normative affective and cognitive modes of social engagement that are often read as disengagements (baggs 2007)—as something that imperils one’s ability to be embedded in a social world, that such theories of grief contribute to the dehumanization of disability (cf. taylor 2017). so i wonder if such theories of grief, with their alignments of mourning, affect, and sociality, might not be too strong, and if the practice of making a careful ethnographic account might require, or better yet, might help generate weaker theory, theory that is better suited to what lisa stevenson (2020, 9) in this collection calls, following roland barthes (1981), “the impossible science.” in referring to a “weak theory” here i am invoking eve kosofsky sedgwick’s (2003) elaboration of silvan s. tomkins’s (2008) work on strong versus weak affect theories. sedgwick (2003, 134) notes that strong theory has “reach and reductiveness—that is . . . conceptual elegance—involving both assets and deficits.” while strong theories allow for broad generalizations (like, “kinship is living each other’s lives and dying each other’s deaths”), they may fail to account for any given case. weak theories, on the other hand, do not allow for broad generalizations. they “account only for ‘near’ phenomena” (tomkins 2008, 433; see also sedgwick 2003, 134), but always do so effectively. in an ongoing attempt to account for forms of care that are bound to death in various non-normative ways that i encounter in my fieldwork with veterans—and in an awkward position in which my own conceptual (and political and ethical) work around disability is challenged by the normativity that structures the desires of my interlocutors in the field—i find myself reaching for the weakest of theories to account for the contradictory nature of such experiences, a weakness difficult but necessary to maintain in the face of death, a phenomenon that draws one forcefully into the realm of the universal and leaves perplexing particulars unaccounted for. * * * the first time i met jason, he told me that his brain injury had left him without feelings. i thought he was referring to the fact that he has no sensation and limited motor control on one side of his face and body. but then, as evidence of this problem of not feeling, jason said, “i couldn’t even cry when my dad died.” i found myself disoriented. i hadn’t known his father was dead, and was thrown off kilter by the news of a parent’s untimely death delivered so starkly, as a fact unburdened by the weight and affective trappings that such a death would usually carry—be they sadness, bitterness, stoicism, or even gallows humor. it became clear that physical sensation was not the kind of feeling jason was concerned about having lost. in the same sparse and unaffected way, jason went on to tell me the story of his father’s death: it was three years after jason’s injury. his father had been away on business, had gone missing, and then had been found shot in the head. “we’ll never really know what happened,” jason said to me, his affect and speech unchanged, reiterating, “i couldn’t even cry.” i awkwardly attempted to explain away jason’s problematization of non-feeling by validating it as an experience of mourning in its own right. this proved a failed gesture of care on my part, one that refused to recognize, or perhaps more modestly to hold, the intractability of jason’s predicament of non-grief. he insisted that he could not feel anything, and without feeling, he could not mourn, and without mourning, he had no “closure,” an unsettling openness redoubled in his assertion that “we’ll never really know what happened.” this conversation has stayed with me in part because of my own disorienting shock at learning of this tragic death without any of the usual affective and communicative registers that not only cushion the communication of such a difficult event but that also perform the embeddedness of such a death within a world of social intimacy, attachment, and care, registers that would transform it from the affectively dry space of forensics (“just the facts”) to the emotionally thick world of the familial (the facts of life and death). in other words, one reason this encounter stayed with me was because of the way it disoriented my own normative expectations about affect in the context of (familial) grief. while the encounter proved disorienting to me, the lack of feeling was (and remains) disorienting to jason: his non-feeling was a key marker of his own disorientation in the aftermath of his injury. as i’ve come to learn, this disorientation is anomalous for him. jason usually says he is quite satisfied with his life and the contours of his capacities. he is mostly accustomed to and unconcerned by the effects of his tbi. though he frequently finds himself physically disoriented in space—having difficulty with mobility, proprioception, and navigation—he is not usually off kilter in the more existential way induced by his incapacity to feel the pain of grief. i think here of sara ahmed’s (2006, 159) contention that “disorientation involves becoming an object,” rather than being a body involved in the world. jason has settled into his physical disorientation. when he has gotten lost mere blocks from his home, even when he loses his balance and falls, his sense of being in the world does not come unmoored. yet, as he describes it, the particular affective disorientation of not feeling his father’s death does precisely undermine his involvement in the world. if affect is the capacity to affect and be affected and, through that capacity, a becoming in (and making) the world with others (deleuze and guattari 1987; cf. leys 2011), if emotion is fundamental to the making (and governance) of the social (lutz 1988; ahmed 2014, 10), what if the affective channels and emotional genres that communicate and confer certain fundamental feelings are unavailable? though his affect is altered, jason has told me that his feelings remain there, except “the ability to cry and mourn.” he tells me he wishes he could have feelings of grief—for his father, for his many friends who have died. not having them, he says, “makes me less human.” he recalls his father’s funeral where everyone but he was in tears. he admits this non-feeling makes him “feel left out,” makes him sense he’s “not able to be like everybody else should be.” “that kind of stuff,” he says, referring to the pain of loss, “is necessary.” we might call this a kind of alienation. a becoming object, rather than being a body involved in the world. jason’s concern about his inability to mourn registers a concern about his inability to be attached, an incapacity to performatively enact the vulnerabilities of intimacy and “withness” (desjarlais 2016, 116–17) in the space of mourning that thereby calls into question the existence of these attachments at all. for jason, in losing these feelings, something necessary has been lost, bringing him to the limits of humanity. jason insists on a strong theory. * * * it seems relatively uncontroversial to say that the strongest of all theories of grief belongs to freud (1957), who distinguishes mourning, in which the lost object is separated from oneself and let go, from melancholia, in which the object is incorporated into oneself such that the object of loss may in fact be unclear and the attachment to grief does not subside. this central distinction is immeasurably helpful for understanding the normative politics of affect in the face of death in the cultural context of secular liberalism.1 because of that normative force, some writing about black, postcolonial, and other forms of life positioned outside the charmed circle of liberalism’s worthy lives have critically situated themselves within the pathologized space of melancholia, making claims, as angela garcia (2010) has, for melancholic subjectivity, or, as joseph r. winters (2016) has, for a “hope draped in black” that entails a melancholy disposition with regard to progress. but there also exist reasons to think such forms of life away from this distinction. for example, in her trenchant and haunting in the wake: on blackness and being, christina sharpe (2016) works through figurations of transatlantic slavery—the wake, the hold, the weather—to render the density of black being amid ongoing and histories of anti-blackness. it is a powerful book of life and death that refuses the diagnostic categories of normative grief altogether. freud makes not a single appearance. in response to sharpe’s work, the question of delineating healthy and pathological grieving seems absurd. for one, it eschews strong theory in favor of ramifying echoes that refuse to be stilled into objects of perfectible knowledge. what sharpe’s (2016, 17) work offers is not knowledge of being in the wake but an “orthography” that preforms “wake work,” a method sharpe calls, specifically, “unscientific.” hers is a decolonial project that resonates, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, with barthes’s (1981) impossible science (cf. stevenson 2020, 9). we might say that what both projects have in common is an insistence that projects of perfect knowledge are antithetical to the care called forth by grief. and perhaps here is a way out of the seeming dilemma of non-grief, a way of holding non-grief, rather than knowing it; a way to refuse a strong theory of grief suggesting that if we cannot die another’s death, we cannot belong to each other, suggesting that the absence of grief, or of its legible, normative performance, ejects one from the category of the human. after all, though it is not much discussed, even freud, the strong theorist of grief par excellence, confessed to not grieving the death of his much-beloved mother (lehmann 1983; jonte-pace 2001; sprengnether 2018). perhaps we can find our way, ethnographically, or orthographically, or ontographically, to a weaker place where, in a gesture of care, we do not reach toward the contours of the human at all. in an effort to move away from questions of pathology and the human, and to do so in a way that can still hold—rather than explain away—the truth of jason’s own account of his experience, i have begun to feel out the contours of a weak theory bound to open grief. alongside jason’s insistence on the necessity of grief stands the unsettling openness produced by its absence. rather than reading that unsettled openness as a sign of pathological attachment, or as an account of the pathology of jason’s injury, we might find in it a space to reckon with non-normative affects of care (cf. piepzna-samarasinha 2018). in the disorientation that comes from occupying the indeterminate space of open grief, jason—who has little conventional capacity for self-reflection—is reckoning with the difference that comes from the realignments of care, attachment, and affect brought about by his injury. from that, his desire for pain and feelings of loss emerges. and so perhaps an analytic of open grief leads us not toward the human, and not toward the pathological, but toward a way of thinking about care as a longing for the feeling of loss. this would constitute a weak theory that does not operate with closure as a normative value, and does not assume the traumatic nature of openness. in such a weak theory, the feeling of not feeling might be the feeling of becoming object at the same time as it might be an opening to reckon with alter-affects of care. this, i think, would constitute a modest and disorienting analytical space for thinking about care and death, one that would not offer solid ground on which to fix humanity and sociality, nor a certainty about how or if they ought to be affixed to each other. but perhaps such disorientation is exactly what is needed. abstract this essay examines mourning and the possibilities for open grief among veterans, asking how the traces of what has been lost persist into the present in ways that find no easy resolution. it questions the normative value of an end to mourning, proposing instead that grief—and indeed our anthropological formulations of the meaning of such affects and events—might be held open, trace and memory maintained, imagining recognition as something open-ended that might recast discomfort as the potential for a different kind of sociality. [affect; mourning; veterans] notes acknowledgments i gratefully acknowledge all the participants in the 2018 wenner-gren funded workshop on “care at the nexus of power and praxis,” for which this piece was first drafted, as well as the participants in the 2019 “bodies of knowledge” seminar at princeton, where a version of this material was presented, and the anonymous reviewers who made generous interventions. thanks to lauren cubellis whose tremendous organizational efforts made this possible. this research was funded by nsf award #1751639. 1. in death without weeping, the canonical anthropological example of non-feeling in the face of familial death, nancy scheper-hughes (1989, 426–27) notes that experts made use of freud’s theory to pathologize poor brazilian mothers’ affectively neutral or positive responses to their infants’ deaths and instruct them on supposedly healthy and appropriately modern forms of feeling and affect. the collection all the weight of our dreams: on living racialized autism (brown, ashkenazy, giwa onaiwu 2017) demonstrates how experiences of affective and neurological difference are also embedded in racialized and gendered affective norms. references ahmed, sara 2006 queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2014 the cultural politics of emotion. 2nd ed. new york: routledge. archer, john 1999 the nature of grief: the evolution and psychology of reactions to loss. new york: routledge. baggs, mel (amanda) 2007 “in my language.” january 14. video, 8:36. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnylm1hi2jc. barthes, roland 1981 camera lucida: reflections on photography. translated by richard howard. new york: hill and wang brown, lydia x. z., e. ashkenazy, and morénike giwa onaiwu, eds. 2017 all the weight of our dreams: on living racialized autism. lincoln, neb.: dragonbee. butler, judith 2006 precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. new york: verso. 2015 notes toward a performative theory of assembly. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari 1987 a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. 2nd ed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. desjarlais, robert 2016 subject to death: life and loss in a buddhist world. chicago: university of chicago press. freud, sigmund 1918 reflections on war and death. new york: moffat, yard. 1957 “mourning and melancholia.” in the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud volume xiv, (1914–1916), 237–58. london: hogarth and institute of psycho-analysis. garcia, angela 2010 the pastoral clinic: addiction and dispossession along the rio grande. los angeles: university of california press. jonte-pace, diane 2001 speaking the unspeakable: religion, misogyny, and the uncanny mother in freud’s cultural texts. berkeley: university of california press. lehmann, herbert 1983 “reflections on freud’s reaction to the death of his mother.” psychoanalytic quarterly 52, no. 2: 237–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/21674086.1983.11927030. leys, ruth 2011 “the turn to affect: a critique.” critical inquiry 37, no. 3: 434–72. http://doi.org/10.1086/659353. lutz, catherine a. 1988 unnatural emotions: everyday sentiments on a micronesian atoll and their challenge to western theory. chicago: university of chicago press. piepzna-samarasinha, leah lakshmi 2018 care work: dreaming disability justice. vancouver: arsenal. rosaldo, renato 1993 culture and truth: the remaking of social analysis. boston: beacon. originally published in 1989. sahlins, marshall 2013 what kinship is—and is not. chicago: university of chicago press. scheper-hughes, nancy 1989 death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in brazil. berkeley: university of california press. sedgwick, eve kosofsky 2003 touching feeling: affect, pedagogy, performativity. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sharpe, christina 2016 in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sprengnether, madelon 2018 mourning freud. new york: bloomsbury academic. stevenson, lisa 2020 “looking away.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 6–13. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.02. taylor, sunaura 2017 beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: new press. tomkins, silvan s. 2008 affect imagery consciousness: the complete edition. new york: springer. winters, joseph r. 2016 hope draped in black: race, melancholy, and the agony of progress. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 40-47, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.06 staging climate security staging climate security: resilience and heterodystopia in the bangladesh borderlands jason cons university of texas at austin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1869-527x in the spring of 2015, while working in the countryside of munshiganj in the borderlands of southwestern bangladesh,1 my colleague and i came across a strange and visually striking project rising incongruously from the flat delta landscape.2 it was an earthen mound, or mattir killa, meant to be used as a storm shelter. the mound was fourteen feet in height and a half-acre in size. it had been constructed in 2011 in the aftermath of cyclone aila, which caused widespread infrastructural damage and displacement throughout the region in 2009. the killa was built by a local ngo, shushilon, and financed by christian aid, an international ngo.3 it formed part of a vast wave of new projects in the region to address disaster preparedness and climate change following aila. what seemed strange about the project was not only its visual appearance, climbing abruptly from its otherwise horizontal surroundings, but its stated purpose: what kind of shelter could this raised mound provide? in contrast to the concrete cyclone shelters that dot the region, the killa seemed to offer limited protection. moreover, though nominally a public good, it had been built on private land. striking up a conversation with the farmer who owned the land and whose home stood in the killa’s shadow, we asked about the project and its uses. he lived some distance from the nearest cyclone shelter, so when the storms came, he claimed, his family and livestock sheltered on the killa. but, he also added, “in the future, when we are surrounded by water, the children will go up there to live.” the farmer’s statements offered a troubling vision of climate change as a future of disaster in which (some) families would survive on earthen plinths as catastrophe unfolded around them. as i will argue here, this statement mirrored an emergent logic of development intervention in the region—an imagining of an atomized family surviving the ravages of climate change alone, assisted primarily by development technology. in this essay, i critically engage this imagination. to do so, i consider interventions such as the killa, their situation in the india-bangladesh borderlands, and their relations to broader discourses, anticipations, and anxieties about climate security. i argue that these projects are best understood as spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis. as such, these projects function as stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. in other words, these projects advance a logic of managing and planning for future climatological disaster that both attempts to produce resilient life in a warming world and displays strategies of containment for audiences elsewhere. we might call these spaces, following michel foucault (1998), heterodystopias—a term i offer as a means to analytically diagnose the relationships between these projects and imaginations of a dystopian future to come. despite a rapidly growing body of anthropological work on climate change, so far little work has interrogated the ways in which the specter of environmental security increasingly haunts not only borders and policing practices (jones 2016) but also development projects themselves.4 such an interrogation is pressing in light of the emergence of climate security as a key term in global governance. climate security, broadly, frames a range of concerns about global warming through the lens of sovereignty, security, and borders. while it is a term used in different ways by different actors, broadly it maps fears about the impact of massive environmental displacement and migration onto existential concerns about the future of borders and sovereignty.5 scholarship on climate refugees has highlighted the ways in which the imagining of a world inundated by the environmentally displaced increasingly drives security agendas in the united states and europe (hartmann 2010; parenti 2011; bettini 2013). as i suggest here, this emergent concern with climate security should not be read in isolation from development and humanitarian intervention. indeed, climate migration constitutes the latest object of the so-called development–security nexus—the post–cold war collapse of distinctions between security, development, and humanitarian measures.6 ethnographically engaging these assemblages that meld climate, security, and development proves critical in a political environment in which security offers a primary lens through which policy makers evaluate responses to and planning for climate change (samimian-darash and stalcup 2016). the blurring of the line—historically fuzzy to begin with (cullather 2010)—between security and development is particularly evident in a range of new projects emerging in places understood as the front lines of climate change. the bangladesh delta region is one such place. the country at large is regularly framed as one of the canaries in the proverbial climate coal mine. but much of the national and global anxiety about the country’s climate future is directed specifically at the delta region—a borderland zone with a population of 20 million people that many believe may become uninhabitable within the next century, triggering massive climate migration both within and across the country’s borders. the southwest delta region of bangladesh constitutes an apt example of what mark duffield (2007, 126) calls “the global borderland”: unruly spaces imagined as on the doorstep of donor states. much new programming deployed in the borderland zone by international ngos and donor organizations such as the united states agency for international development (usaid) focuses on the need to manage climate change’s displacing outcomes. the killa, and other conceptually similar projects that i will discuss later in this essay, are not representative of all interventions afoot in the bengal delta.7 yet their focus on a disaster preparedness that will allow people to remain emplaced in the climatological landscape illuminates a securitized vision of climate change. this genre of climate programming evolves portable humanitarian technologies that, in peter redfield’s (2012, 178) words, “anticipate state [and ecological] failure and seek to provide a small scale, self-contained alternative” (see also cross 2013). in other words, emplacement programming mitigates against the figure of the climate refugee by offering technologies designed to keep people in (their) place. many of these humanitarian technologies intervene at a household scale. they frame the future of climatological borderlands not as comprising communities holding out against the ravages of climate change, but as individual families surviving in self-contained spaces characterized by isolation and fortified against the chaos unfolding around them. yet these projects are tinged with a seeming pessimism about their own possibilities of success. while they present themselves as awaiting an immanent scaling up in climate hot spots around the globe, their designs simultaneously speak to the limits and futility of these experimental interventions. as i will show, they often serve more as representational technologies for an anxious western world, claiming that the development industry is forging solutions to impending climate crisis. in this regard, they are spectacles for audiences elsewhere. this article casts ethnographic light on this new heterodystopian genre of climate intervention. i start by framing the concept of heterodystopia against foucault’s notion of heterotopia. i then explore the terrain and logic of heterodystopia by tracing the emergence of bangladesh, and especially the southwestern borderlands, as ground zero for climate change and as a laboratory for so-called resilient development. i subsequently return to the borderland landscape of munshiganj to explore how heterodystopias emerge in practice. in doing so, i examine the architecture, politics, and poetics of specific projects unfolding in the delta borderlands. i return, briefly, to the mattir killa discussed above, but look more specifically at an example of “climate-smart” development. these new interventions, i argue, are shaping and transforming the border milieu of the southwest delta region in unprecedented ways (cf. martinez 1994). yet they are not the only ways of managing ecological change. local populations continue to forge crucial political alternatives to interventions of international donors—alternatives to which we must attend if we wish to think beyond the logic of heterodystopia. i accordingly conclude by briefly exploring grounded, alternative projects carried out by residents of the bangladesh borderlands themselves. framing heterodystopia over the past decade, much work in anthropology and beyond has explored the ways in which imaginations of the future are complicit in the reshaping of the present. the broad thrust of this work is that an increasing alignment of planning with security concerns has ushered in a paradigm of anticipatory governance (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009; anderson 2010; adey and anderson 2011). this paradigm is marked by a transition from prevention to preparedness and preemption (lakoff 2008; anderson 2010; massumi 2015). such a shift signals a transformation in the logics of planning—one that focuses not on ways to forestall oncoming crises, but rather sees them as inevitable features of the future terrain and, instead, focuses on identifying and addressing vulnerabilities in response capacity. work tracing the temporalities of disaster risk reduction, vital systems security, and biosecurity shows that anticipation constitutes a powerful logic for remaking the world (choi 2015; collier and lakoff 2015; whitington 2016; zeiderman 2016). as brian massumi (2015, viii) points out, this shift toward preemption and anticipation marks a shift in the ecology of power—an emergence of “a new power for bringing into being.” in short, anticipation effects a reordering of the social around future threats. if anticipatory planning marks the zeitgeist of contemporary governmentality, it is far from monolithic. it has multiple genres, situated contexts, and cultural vocabularies in need of ethnographic attention (lowe 2010; samimian-darash 2016). i suggest that we understand what i here call heterodystopias as a specific genre of anticipatory governance: one that frames particular spaces at once as sites of experimental management for future crisis and as representational zones that enact spectacles of containment and securitization. understanding these projects as heterodystopias provides ways to diagnose not only the seeming oddities of the projects themselves but also the conflicted imaginations of the future embedded in their materiality. the heterodystopias i explore speak in the name of resilience, but they also speak to a broader set of anxieties about the future by taking the delta as a demonstration site for climate development. i frame my articulation of heterodystopia in direct relation to foucault’s brief yet provocative discussions of heterotopia. in contrast to utopias (sites with no real location), foucault offers heterotopias as countersites, spaces of enacted utopias. these places ground a utopian vision and reflect that vision, as in a mirror, back onto the spaces beyond their boundaries.8 central to heterotopia is the notion of emplacement—situating or putting in place. emplacement is a fundamentally relational term: one that allows for articulation across space and place (johnson 2006).9 heterotopias, for foucault (1998, 178), are emplacements that “have the curious property of being connected to all the other emplacements, but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented [réflechis] by them.” their role is either “creating a space of illusion that denounces all real space, all real emplacements within which human life is partitioned off, as being even more illusory. . . . or, on the contrary, creating a different space, a different real space as perfect, as meticulous, as well-arranged as ours is disorganized, badly arranged, and muddled” (foucault 1998, 184). the demonstration plot articulates and represents the idealized model of agricultural development. the penal colony enacts the containment of those who stand in the way of a perfected society. heterotopia is a notoriously slippery concept. yet it provides an interesting lens for thinking through development. historically, development interventions—especially projects such as model villages, demonstration plots, and pilot programs—have been heterotopic: countersites that are enacted utopias evoking other spaces of potential development (or its lack). they constitute slices of time (what foucault awkwardly terms “heterochronia”) where the future is manifest in the present and within a specific and highly circumscribed geography. standing, in principle, in relation to all other spaces of potential development, these sites both act on those who live within them and act to represent the possibilities of utopian perfection, a developed world in which poverty has been eradicated through technocratic management. bangladesh has historically been an epicenter of heterotopic development. often described as the “wall street of development” and as “the aid lab” (hossain 2017), the country has been the site of numerous models and reflections of utopian futures meant for propagation in abstract elsewheres—from the comilla model of village development in the 1960s through the 1980s, to the grameen model of entrepreneurial self-help through microcredit in the 1980s through the 2000s (karim 2011).10 yet the rise of climate security as a paradigm of development has significantly shifted the frame. new development interventions like the killa, which emphasize security through emplacement (as opposed to, say, offering development through market integration), work in ways roughly analogous to older heterotopian projects, though toward markedly different and darker ends. they are not spaces framed in relationship to a utopian future. rather, they are oriented toward a future in which increasing chaos characterizes the problems of management and governance. they are climate heterodystopias: windows onto life in a warming world and, as such, opportunities to manage future crises. these spaces are constituted as temporal discontinuities. in and through them, the bangladesh borderlands emerge as a sentinel site, a space of “vigilant watchfulness that can aid in preparation for an uncertain, but potentially catastrophic future” (keck and lakoff 2013). they offer a space that allows for the testing and demonstration not of solutions to climate chaos, but for the management of its presumably inevitable effects. they thus constitute spaces that facilitate a specific form of anticipatory governmentality—one organized around the deployment of technologies for maintaining life in the imagined multitude of devastated landscapes to come. making the climate borderland to understand how heterodystopias manifest in the delta, we must understand the making of the southwest delta region as a climate borderland. as countless studies have pointed out, bangladesh—because of both its geography and its history—is likely to be an early victim of global warming.11 in part because of this acute vulnerability and in part because of bangladesh’s long history as a front door of global development (feldman 2003; lewis 2011; hossain 2017), there has been a massive influx of donor funds into the country in recent years aimed at addressing climate change. the recasting of bangladesh as an epicenter of climate change has reached such a level that it has now become the stuff of glossy commercial publications and global accolades. a case in point is a recent coffee-table book published by the coast trust with support from bangladesh’s ministry of foreign affairs, titled a tale from climate ground zero (shibly and mehedi 2015). the book celebrates prime minister sheikh hasina’s receipt of the 2015 united nations champion of the earth award for leadership on global climate policy. it is filled with striking photos depicting not only familiar scenes of climate change—storm-damaged homes with water lapping at the door, eroded river banks, and so on—but also images highlighting village-level adaptive development innovations afoot in the country to combat advancing climatological disaster. the book’s preface, an excerpt from hasina’s acceptance speech, states: “as one of the most climate-vulnerable countries, bangladesh is moving with innovative ideas to address complex climatic challenges in a sustainable manner. . . . we are ready to share our modest innovation and experience with others. that is, our contribution to turn ‘vulnerability’ into ‘resilience’” (shibly and mehedi 2015, 3). this transformation, like the award the book celebrates, is far from an exclusively bangladeshi project. arguably, the award celebrates hasina’s willingness to allow foreign donors to implement myriad projects and policies to combat climate change in bangladesh as much as it does innovation on the part of her government. figured against the realities of these interventions, the book is best read as a celebration of a vast array of national and international development projects remaking the country, reframing its future across scales, and packaging its “contribution” of resilience to a climate-affected world. while climate change stands to impact much of bangladesh, the epicenter of climate programming is the southwest. the region is acutely vulnerable to cyclonic activity, sea-level rise, and increased soil salinity. yet vulnerability is only part of what makes this zone a hot spot of climate-related development. equally important, though significantly less discussed, is that it is a sensitive borderland region (cons 2016). the india-bangladesh border has historically been a source of regional tension: a communally defined line separating a supposed hindu territory from a supposed muslim one.12 in recent years this borderland has also emerged as a space of considerable global climate anxiety, aptly captured in a new york times article tellingly titled “borrowed time on disappearing land” (harris 2014). the story vividly ties the effects of fossil-fuel consumption to rising sea levels and their impending effects on low-lying coastal areas in southwestern bangladesh. while the story itself lays out a familiar narrative—the imminent erasure of many of the islands that make up bangladesh’s delta region—what is perhaps most striking is an accompanying video, which offers a satellite-view model of what will happen to the delta in the face of a thirteen-foot sea-level rise. the video unfolds over a long minute in which viewers watch much of the delta disappear under water. the final text reads, “scientists expect the rising waters in bangladesh to displace eighteen million people in the next forty years.” the video offers a dramatic illustration of what drives climate anxiety in and about bangladesh: the prospect of massive displacement, a specter that manifests most readily in the figure of the climate refugee. this anxiety drives much of the contemporary transformation of bangladesh into a sentinel site of climate change and a global climate security concern. as frédéric keck and andrew lakoff (2013) argue: the figure of the sentinel is bound up with both the problem of perception and the question of whether the detection of danger can successfully ward off a coming crisis. in the contemporary context of ecological anxiety, the sentinel has taken on an expanded meaning: it has come to describe living beings or technical devices [and, one might add, particular sites] that provide the first signs of an impending catastrophe. this double bind of perception and possible response drives anxiety over climate change in bangladesh. moreover, it overtly and covertly informs much contemporary discussion about the border within india, where migration has long served as a rallying point for the hindu right (ramachandran 1999; sur 2014). the realities and imaginations of cross-border displacement contribute to a mode of politics that sanjay chaturvedi and timothy doyle (2015) aptly characterize as “climate terror.” the imagination of an inundated bangladesh is regularly coupled with a framing of india, and particularly the states adjacent to bangladesh, as drowned in a tidal wave of (muslim) migrants (see thankuria 2015). the specter of climate refugees weighs heavily on other imaginations as well. in 2015, i spoke with a senior british development professional working for a large international aid organization and about to complete a multiyear posting in bangladesh on the politics of climate-related development. he explained this politics to me as a fear of global migration: “this is where the uk redlines. we can’t handle 165 million bangladeshis showing up on the uk’s shores.” it is this fear that animates the reframing of the india-bangladesh border as a marker of what joseph masco (2010) calls “planetary threat.” framed as a “global ‘national security’ issue” (friedman 2009), this border is increasingly positioned as a test case for climate security and for understanding the future of migration in a warming world. this vision of the border can be seen in its increasing presence in climate-change war games and strategy scenarios in the united states and europe. for example, the “clout and climate change” war game, staged by the center for new american security in 2008, imagined an indian border beset by a climate-migration catastrophe following a fictional 2013 cyclonic event in the bay of bengal.13 in doing so, it tested the organizational capacity of the international community to respond to (rather than prevent) climatological disasters by stemming migration before it compromises regional and global stability (lakoff 2008; anderson 2010). similar exercises at the u.s. national defense university and the naval war college have tested the outcomes of massive population displacement and the ability of the u.s. navy to respond to major climatological disasters in bangladesh (funk 2014). in short, the stakes of change in the region are high, and not just for residents. resilience, or, the cultural logic of climate heterodystopia what might this transformation from vulnerability to resilience mean for bangladesh and for climate-related development within it? resilience is a concept that has taken the development industry by storm over the past decade. genealogically, the concept of resilience borrows from both late-hayekian theories about the market and crawford holling’s complex systems theory, developed in the 1970s (walker and cooper 2011). its contemporary uses in development and its relationship to terms such as adaptation can often seem flexible and slippery. it signals both the limits of traditional development planning and a revised attention to what will be expected of the subjects of development in the future. for example, the same development professional concerned about the redlining of the united kingdom under the weight of climate migration who was introduced in the previous section went on to describe climate-related development as a project of mitigating migration through resilience. he further explained the logic of resilience as a way of thinking strategically about probability and risk. resilience provided a sophisticated form of systems thinking to potentially mitigate against the future of climate change. it did this by offering a more complex engagement with risk and investment than other (older) models of climate programming such as adaptation or disaster risk reduction. potential solutions to this problem of migration included more robust disaster planning and infrastructural development. yet resilience thinking also called many of these solutions into question. to demonstrate his point, the professional, as we spoke, spun out a long series of risks and challenges to development in the southwest, such as groundwater and soil salinization, sea-level rise, the waterlogging of islands in the delta, and more. he emphasized the ways in which these challenges multiplied and complicated each other, exposing the successive limitations of each new intervention that a resilience-oriented perspective exposed. as we spoke, each successive risk related to climate change in the delta region seemed to cancel out the possible long-range efficacy of existing and possible interventions and to call into question the continued investment of capital in durable large-scale projects. as he conceded ultimately: “the problem is that in a decade, that area [the southwest] is going to be unthinkable. the likelihood is that the region is only going to get tougher. . . . we’re doing a managed retreat from the coastline.” it is important to note that not all organizations working in the area necessarily share this sentiment. as a consultant for the world bank told me over coffee in dhaka, “neither we nor the government of bangladesh are ready to give up on the southwest.” but it does highlight the emergence of a logic in programming that is designed to help populations fend for themselves in lieu of other development solutions. resilience thus shifts the primary burden of preparedness from states to individuals. in other words, if the investment in durable infrastructure to address climate transformations is increasingly conceived as either cost-ineffective or impossible, what remains are strategies to help residents of climate hot spots be resilient—that is, to manage the crisis on their own. resilient development, as critics have increasingly pointed out, substitutes a vision of development as aspiration and achievement for one reduced to coping. it is a form of governance aimed not at solving or preventing dangers to security, but rather at increasing capacities to weather a range of impending storms (evans and reid 2014; watts 2014). read as such, resilience appears as the latest manifestation of human security, a project, as mark duffield (2007) argues, of globalizing and containment. resilient development globalizes security concerns such that remote spaces like munshiganj are brought into relation with the security concerns of the global north. and it attempts to contain such spaces by providing the tools to ensure that surplus populations can remain in place, as opposed to migrating across sensitive borders demarcating “effective” from “ineffective” states (duffield 2007, 111).14 in other words, resilience programming forms a bulwark against the chaos of climate migration: a set of mechanisms to territorialize spaces and their residents—keeping them firmly emplaced. as such, it is also best understood as the logic of heterodystopian development. landscapes and architectures of heterodystopia the agrarian landscape of munshiganj is variously divided between agricultural fields (largely used for growing the aman, or monsoon, rice harvest), and brackish-water shrimp aquaculture ponds, or ghers. the region is increasingly freshwater-scarce and its soil increasingly saline due to a combination of factors, including saltwater intrusion, aquifer depletion, and the proliferation of brackish water aquaculture.15 because of a lack of available fresh water for irrigation, most of munshiganj’s farmers grow only a single rice crop, as opposed to the two to three harvests common in many parts of bangladesh. the region was severely affected by aila, which washed away large sections of the protective embankments in the adjacent island of gabura. this exposed the island’s residents and agricultural land to a twice-daily tidal inundation of salt water.16 immediately following aila, the island became a humanitarian relief zone. numerous buildings still bear signs marking them as constructed under the auspices of relief efforts by organizations such as oxfam and care. the devastation of aila set the stage for the region’s transformation to a site for climate programming. indeed, since 2009, the region has been reconceived as a place where climate change has, effectively, already happened. consequently, munshiganj is awash in projects that claim to instill resilience in the lives of residents. figure 2 gives some sense of the density of new climate projects in the area. it is a photo of a single street corner in munshiganj town. each signboard in the photo points the way to the office of a different ngo working in the region, each with their own suite of climate-adaptation and resilience programs. figure 1. map of munshiganj, gabura, and the sundarbans. map made by amanda henley. beyond munshiganj town, ubiquitous signboards mark a dense scattering of climate-related development interventions. these signs simultaneously call out the limited nature of many of these projects: demonstration plots in people’s backyards, limited training programs that seek to educate farmers on new ways of growing vegetables, single-family rainwater collection wells, and the like. one day, while passing through a hamlet to the east of munshiganj town, my colleague and i stopped to ask a group of farmers about development programs in their village. one retrieved a sign marking a usaid vegetable test plot from a disused corner of his yard, and sardonically held it out for display. as his gesture suggested, signboards are often cast away not when projects have run their course, but simply when their beneficiaries lose interest in the interventions. figure 2. ngo signboards on a street corner in munshiganj town. photo by jason cons. residents of munshiganj are often alternatively bemused and frustrated by these interventions. for example, many of those who lived near the killa discussed at the outset of this essay found the project more an exasperating waste than a portent of the future. many wondered why the mound had been constructed instead of a concrete cyclone shelter that could provide robust protection from the periodic storms that blow in off the bay of bengal. others complained that, because the killa was constructed on private property (owned by a farmer who was a politically powerful member of local government), it was, essentially, single-use in nature. one person angrily told me: “as much as i can see, there is not one inch of profit in it. unnecessary place, unnecessary project!” a group of laborers we spoke with in a nearby tea stall had a wryer take on the project’s uses. as one told us, chuckling into his tea, “well, when the winds come, we will just huddle close together. that way we won’t get blown off.” if these comments reflected a darkly humorous take on climate-change interventions, they also highlighted a clear understanding of what is at stake in such projects. residents of the region are intimately aware of the impending impact of climate change and the ways it stands to affect livelihoods and lives. in the concluding paragraph of his discussion of heterotopias, foucault (1998, 184–85) notes that a ship is the heterotopia par excellence: “the ship is a piece of floating space, a placeless place, that lives by its own devices, that is self-enclosed and, at the same time, delivered over the boundless expanse of the ocean.” in contrast, an island might figure as a heterodystopia par excellence—a landscape beset by seas, but firmly fixed in place.17 as the killa suggests, the vision of the future in resilient development projects in munshiganj is an imagination of family units isolated from, yet fortified against, unfolding catastrophe around them. yet what does this vision of the future do, and to what end? to answer these questions, it is instructive to explore one of the most recognizable projects in the munshiganj region—a “climate-smart integrated house,” constructed in gabura and meant to help residents survive the chaos of climate change in place. we had heard about this house from a worldfish project manager in dhaka who breathlessly described its architecture and its many adaptive technologies. worldfish is an international research organization and member of the united nations consultative group for international agricultural research. the organization has a large presence in bangladesh, especially in the southwest.18 the house itself was a one-off demonstration project constructed at a material cost of $6,000.19 the project was famous, or perhaps infamous, in munshiganj, and known locally simply as either the pani (water) house or as dui tolla (two-story), a reference to the fact that it was the only home on the island with two stories. figure 3. pani house, gabura. photo by jason cons. the house sat in a village primarily inhabited by smallholder farmers and landless laborers. it housed a single family chosen through their industrious participation in ngo support groups following aila. the house contained a showcase of development technology: a covered well for irrigation, storage tanks for drinking water, an indoor fish pond, complex drip-irrigation systems, and much more. when we first visited, these technologies were demonstrated, one by one, as other residents of the village gathered around to watch. worldfish claims the pani house as a model of resilience.20 as the organization’s project report on the house states: “changes in climate will affect local weather patterns and impact many people’s livelihoods. the climate-smart house provides protection against cyclones and flooding and supports efficient use of water and energy. many features of the house are aimed at increasing food production and helping families become more self-sufficient and better able to cope with extreme weather events” (hossain, nurun nabi, and kaminski 2015, 3). in other words, the pani house was conceived as a comprehensive humanitarian technology of emplacement, allowing residents to survive and thrive in a coming ecology that will be both disaster-prone and resource-scarce. it was a project that addressed broad concerns about climate security and migration by providing tools to help residents not migrate. equally important, the project was a pilot. the report suggests that “communities should work with government representatives to encourage the building of climate-smart housing in vulnerable areas” (hossain, nurun nabi, and kaminski 2015, 7). the communities in question seem unlikely to be those in the delta, where it is difficult to imagine an intervention that costs $6,000 per household adopted at scale, because such a project would quickly run to billions of dollars in cost. rather, the pani house was conceived as an abstract and portable technology, ready, though perhaps unlikely, to be deployed in other areas of climate disaster. in practice, the pani house’s various technologies were fraying at the edges. for example, the complicated drip-irrigation systems that were supposed to allow residents to grow household plants in window boxes isolated from saline soil and raised above flood levels relied on plastic drip spigots. most of these spigots had broken, and were not repairable with materials available in local markets. the stairs to the second story of the house were constructed out of iron, making them rapidly rust in the saline environment. indeed, as mehru and habibur, the residents of the house, told me, a number of problems had emerged with the house’s design since its construction. the pair had a series of grounded suggestions for future iterations of the project, such as extending the roof overhang for the house, so that rain was less likely to blow in during the monsoon season. i asked them if worldfish had collected any of this feedback from them. they told me that they had not had any contact with the designers since the house was built. as mehru put it: “they have given it to us, but we cannot tell them that we are facing these problems.” the design, architecture, and construction of the house were, i suggest, heterodystopian. they evinced planning not designed specifically for the region, but rather for an abstractly conceived space of climate crisis—one that may be in bangladesh but could just as well be anywhere. this yielded a range of minor failures of design and planning, such as irreplaceable plastic spigots and iron stairs. yet more revealing of the heterodystopian vision articulated by this and similar projects were the social implications of the house itself. foucault (1998, 183) describes a heterotopia in which “everybody can enter . . . [but] by the very fact of entering, one is excluded.” the pani house proved similar. anyone, including other residents of the village in which it was situated, could enter to marvel at the technologies of resilient development on display there. yet none of these technologies were things that the village at large was meant to benefit from. the house was built and designed explicitly for a single family situated within, but removed from, the rest of the community. i asked one of the house’s designers about this and she told me that there were initial plans to make it a community resource. but there were two challenges. first, worldfish wanted the house to serve as a proof of concept that they could test and collect feedback on (something that they, apparently, have not done). “the second challenge,” she continued, “was that we were worried that something that belongs to everyone belongs to no one when it comes to work to provide, and that it creates conflicts when it comes to harvesting benefits.” this “tragedy of the commons” vision of development brushes against the many histories of collective organizing by landless and smallholder groups throughout bengal (e.g., hashmi 1992). but, like the killa discussed at this essay’s outset, it also articulates an imagination of a climate-affected future necessarily composed of individual families surviving on figurative, and perhaps literal, islands, isolated and protected from the unfolding chaos around them. an island unto itself, the heterodystopia of the pani house enacted the dystopia to come. the politics and poetics of heterodystopia that the pani house was constructed as a general solution, as opposed to one that addresses the specific condition on the ground, does not in and of itself appear surprising. the notions of piloting and modeling have long been central to development (cullather 2010). yet the pani house raised questions about whether the model was, in fact, meant to be (materially) replicated. like many other interventions in the munshiganj region, the pani house appeared to be a project that privileged the act of modeling over the process of learning from and scaling up new development technologies. this permanent provisional condition hints at other possible meanings and purposes of climate heterodystopias. to understand these, it is necessary to attend to the representational dynamics of these interventions as much as to their impact on beneficiaries. figure 4. backyard of the pani house. photo by jason cons. development is a profoundly visual language. the point of pilot and model projects is that they demonstrate an efficacy of interventions in a particular location that stands in for a multiplicity of other potential locations. these projects—model villages, demonstration plots, and so on—dramatize the distinction between the space of the project and the undeveloped space outside of it. as nick cullather (2004, 228) writes of green revolution technology, “where the dark green rice stopped, that was the edge of the modern.” in munshiganj, the clustering of projects in a single space further heightened these visual distinctions. in a pattern replicated in many projects throughout the region, the pani house accumulated other development projects within its perimeter. the pani house’s backyard, for example, housed an international union for the conservation of nature (iucn) test patch for climate-smart watermelon production, as well as a usaid irrigated rice plot. these fields were neatly cordoned off by a blue fish-netting fence that defined the property boundary. the fence marked a stark contrast between the pani house and the unirrigated, dry, and dusty aman rice fields beyond—the agricultural fields farmed by the other residents of the villages. the message in this contrast proved hard to miss. unlike older visualizations of development, which dramatized distinctions between modernity and tradition, the boundary here marked a division between impending chaos and its potential management. inside the project boundaries, resilient development flourished. outside and surrounding it lurked the nonresilient future. figure 5. iucn poster promoting saline-tolerant watermelon production. photo by jason cons. the accumulation of projects within the pani house served a dual purpose. the first, and most obvious, was that the presence of one project increased the likelihood of success of the others. the usaid rice plot, for example, was being irrigated by the pani house’s private water supply. but more importantly, this accumulation of projects made the pani house photogenic. indeed, the house and its residents appeared in press material for other development organizations working in the region. for example, iucn designed a poster showing their test plots in the pani house’s backyard and habibur, one of its residents, by way of promoting saline-tolerant watermelon production (see figure 5). the contrast between the climate-smart household and other households in the village was dramatic, but also at once beside and precisely the point. the community and the house’s residents were not the primary audience for the intervention. indeed, as my colleague and i were told by a worldfish project manager in dhaka, the pani house was meant more “for the website” than “for the people.” but whether meant as a real project or as a kind of climate set piece, the pani house also revealed the logics of heterodystopia. the pani house articulated climate futures in which single families would have to go it alone. the notion of a community—however defined as a potential actor in this climate-affected future—was not part of this vision. moreover, the question posed by projects such as the pani house was not whether such a vision of the future—climate wasteland with individual resilient families hanging on by their development-enhanced teeth—was a just vision or an acceptable one. rather, it was simply whether this articulation of resilience proved workable, scalable, and capable of capturing donor imaginations. these interventions emerge as articulations between not just, or even primarily, development practitioners and their beneficiaries, but between development organizations and a global population increasingly concerned about the impending security crisis of global warming. the message in the spectacular image was clear: technological solutions to instill resilience in the face of ecological change are possible and feasible. moreover, they are already in the works, emplacing life on the front lines of a warming world. if climate heterodystopias like the pani house only questionably achieve their stated goals, they are, nevertheless, quite successful at producing aesthetic messages. they are spectacular: spaces of juxtaposition that rely on appearances and images as techniques of power (debord 1995; foucault 1998). they constitute not only ways to acclimatize populations to particular logics of life in the anthropocene but also forms of communication between powerful development organizations and their audiences (yeh 2013). seen through this frame, residents of munshiganj are not just the targets of intervention but also the means of production of spectacles of climate resilience—the vehicles through which a set of technical interventions are demonstrated as efficacious in producing a set of resilience-like effects (dunn 2012). in other words: while projects in munshiganj framed the area as a space of climate crisis, they simultaneously offered a techno-optimistic claim to donors and concerned individuals elsewhere that development interventions can manage anthropogenic crisis at the margins of global empire. beyond heterodystopia the pani house provided a particularly vivid articulation of the intertwined logics of resilience and spectacle in climate borderlands in the contemporary moment. yet many others like it dotted munshiganj’s landscape. these ranged from vertical agriculture technologies (projects of replacing household agricultural production in fields with vertical tubes for isolating household vegetable growth from saline soil) to other test houses that, like the pani house, had received multiple development interventions from multiple development agencies to promote resilient living in the face of climate change. many homes that had accumulated donor interventions also were situated on the most productive and least saline soil. in other words, they were homes with the least immediate need of such technology but the most likelihood of visibly demonstrating its value. insofar as these heterodystopian interventions reflect a grim vision of a climate-affected future, they not only foreclose a range of possible ways of conceiving development within the region but also contribute to producing the southwest delta as a climatological borderland with an eminently translocal future of disaster. reading these projects as heterodystopias provides a way to diagnose the specific securitized imaginations of the future that are currently being grafted onto places of uncertain ecological change. peter johnson (2006, 87) writes: “with different degrees of relational intensity, heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating passages for our imagination.” so too, perhaps, heterodystopias. but precisely because such heterodystopias as the pani house are manifestations and representations of future containment superimposed on spaces of lived agrarian production, it is critical to ask what other possible futures are masked in dystopian enactment. by way of conclusion, then, i wish to briefly juxtapose these interventions with other projects offering different, more grounded visions of adaptation, resilience, and community. of these there are many. they are primarily based on cultivating resources that farmers in munshiganj see as critical to navigating life in the midst of ecological change. they tend to focus not on disastrous futures but on grounded strategies to improve short-run agricultural productivity. one farmers’ collective, for example, is working in collaboration with an organization called the bangladesh resource center for indigenous knowledge (barcik) to establish local seed banks collecting indigenous seed varietals that are, at least to an extent, saline-tolerant.21 they are currently interspersing these indigenous varietals with hybrid varietals as a hedge against uncertain agricultural conditions. beyond seeds, these collectives are also beginning to articulate their own visions of what technologies they need to develop this more livelihood-oriented approach to resilience (tanner et al. 2015). specifically, farmers’ groups in munshiganj argue that they need canals to collect fresh rainwater for crop irrigation. one collective successfully petitioned the local government for a work project to rebuild freshwater canals that had been wiped out during aila. combined with several years of good rainfall, members of the collective told me in 2016, the project has seen them experiencing above-average rice yields. they further argue that the canal will help them more easily weather seasons with unpredictable rainfall, a projected effect of climate change in the region. in short, residents of munshiganj are employing collective action in attempts to materialize an agrarian future in which agriculture might transform the island’s environment and provide more employment and stability for its residents—especially smallholder farmers and landless laborers. these projects deserve more attention than i have space to provide here. whether they will work in the long run is, of course, an open question. they are as experimental, in some ways, as the pani house. however, the alternative visions and different temporalities embodied in these farmers’ initiatives to reclaim land in munshiganj have an important role to play in contesting heterodystopian visions. these projects enact engagements with a resilience that is situated in the everyday politics of land and livelihoods in munshiganj, rather than framed against global imaginations of a securitized and crisis-ridden climate future. they are not meant to reflect or engage an abstract infinity of spaces, but are rather eminently local, prosaic, and practical. moreover, they are not predicated on exclusionary visions, such as the pani house, but rather on inclusion, communal investment, and participation. these visions of an agrarian livelihood might provide both a form for apprehending and a means of giving shape to futures that heterodystopian development projects categorically reject (zee 2017). ironically, in providing grounds for people to continue pursuing agriculture in what others imagine as a climate wasteland, they may prove more successful in achieving the emplacing goals of resilient development. they thus hint at an optimistic vision of a future where resilience might be defined not only by remote spatial imaginaries and distant audiences alone but also by peasants working in communitarian ways to collectively secure access to water, land, seed, and life. the bangladesh borderlands are spaces within which we can begin to see the confused projections of climate futures (particularly those involving borders and migration) embodied in present-day development interventions. the emplacing technologies in munshiganj imagine a world in which populations survive as atomized families, deploying various humanitarian technologies to help them remain fixed in a climate-ravaged landscape. yet the recursive constitution of these interventions as spectacles suggests that we should understand them not only as pilot projects of resilience. they also speak in an idiom framed by a broader failure to address climate change at a planetary scale, a set of anxieties about climate induced migration, and a need to project technological mastery of emerging security concerns in climatological borderlands. exploring these projects as heterodystopias reveals ways in which security and development are jointly remaking a climate-affected world in the present. reading these interventions alongside other imaginations of the future offers a crucial contrast. the interventions launched by farmers’ collectives in munshiganj are grounded responses to ecological change that cast populations neither as hapless victims of, nor stoic resistors to, climate injustice (castree et al. 2014; hall and sanders 2015). instead, they highlight a parallel terrain of experimentation based on radically different, and strikingly prosaic, understandings of ecological change. climatological borderlands are thus opportune spaces to observe what arjun appadurai (2013, 1) has recently called “the politics of possibility—against the politics of probability” in the era of climate change. they suggest a need to think resilience beyond narrowly securitized visions of emplacement and to rethink climate change from the standpoint of those navigating life in its midst. notes acknowledgments this essay has been immeasurably improved through dialogue with and feedback from elizabeth dunn, gökçe günel, courtney handman, erin lentz, duncan mcduie-ra, townsend middleton, nayanika mathur, paula newberg, kasia paprocki, raj patel, james slotta, four anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team at cultural anthropology, especially james faubion. kasia paprocki shared in an early portion of this fieldwork and generously gave of both her time and contacts. an earlier version of this essay was workshopped at the skagen school 2 meeting in 2016, where helpful comments were offered by erin collins, michael eilenberg, reece jones, christian lentz, christian lund, jonathan padwe, nancy peluso, and especially mike dwyer. support for this research was provided by the university of texas at austin and by a national science foundation grant (award no. 1560531). all errors are my own. 1. in this essay, i discuss munshiganj and the adjacent island of gabura. for simplicity’s sake, where possible, i refer to these linked spaces simply as “munshiganj.” 2. an initial stage of fieldwork for this project was conducted in collaboration with kasia paprocki. 3. typically, demonstration projects in munshiganj are funded by large ngos such as christian aid and implemented by local ngos such as shushilon, who work as subcontractors. often these subcontracting ngos are staffed primarily by bangladeshi nationals, sometimes hailing from the regions where the development project is being carried out. as lamia karim’s (2011) work shows, such local employees are anything but simple ciphers of ideas and objectives from above. this holds equally true in munshiganj. however, in extended conversations with employees of local ngos, i heard more discussion about development oriented toward future projects and contracts, rather than toward engagements with existing (already built) ones. 4. a more central focus of scholarship on development and climate change has been conservation schemes such as redd+ (mathews 2014; mcelwee 2015), as well as the entanglements of expertise and adaptation (orlove 2009; vaughn 2017). 5. the policy debate over the security implications of climate and migration has grown markedly over the past five years. for a comprehensive discussion of u.s. concerns, see werrell and femia 2017. 6. on the convergence of development and security, see duffield 2010, stepputat 2012, gupta 2015, and o’neill 2015. 7. indeed, as paprocki (2018) suggests, much programming in the delta focuses on managing outmigration from rural areas and into urban ones. 8. for critical readings of heterotopia, see soja 1996, hetherington 1997, and dehaene and de cauter 2008. 9. my understanding of emplacement in terms of “keeping in place” in this essay is consistent with, but does not encompass foucault’s broader use of the term. i thank james faubion for pointing this out. 10. faubion (2008, 35) notes that foucault’s notion of heterotopia and victor turner’s concepts of liminality and communitas emerge out the same “intellectual ecology of the turbulent drift of the 1960s and 1970s,” an observation that might be extended to engage the imaginings of development that dominate programming in this period. 11. see paprocki 2015 for an analysis of the historical amnesias that attend climate change in bangladesh. 12. see van schendel 2005 for the definitive history of this border. 13. for an analysis of the implications of this particular climate war game, see marzec 2015. 14. duffield’s use of the language of “effective” and “ineffective” states is intended as a critique of the normative framing of human security discourse. yet it also strikingly captures the international portrayal of the india-bangladesh border. 15. the ghers are outcomes of a three-decade-long boom in export-oriented shrimp aquaculture that continues to structure the politics of land use throughout the southwest (see islam 2014). shrimp farming has contributed dramatically to environmental change and to agrarian dispossession in the southwest (paprocki and cons 2014). for more on the political ecology of shrimp in the region and its links to climate adaptation, see paprocki and huq 2018. 16. following aila, many were forced to move onto the remaining embankments while the damaged areas were repaired with makeshift earthen mounds. here, see roy 2014. 17. as such, climate heterodystopian projects articulate with peter sloterdijk’s (2009) discussion of the absolute island, a space “which is placed as a completely implanted lifeworld into a milieu inimical to life.” see also günel 2011. 18. worldfish is primarily oriented toward fisheries and aquaculture. it plays a key role in discussions of development in bangladesh today, in part because of the centrality of aquaculture to the country’s vision of sustainable development. yet, as the pani house demonstrates, it is also involved in broader climate-focused development. 19. though that house was the only example of this particular design, the genre of the climate-proof house is one favored by multiple development agencies within bangladesh and beyond. 20. for a discussion of the ways that the house fits into bangladesh’s broader “adaptation regime,” see paprocki 2018. 21. barcik, unlike other bangladeshi ngos discussed in this essay, is not a subcontracting implementer for larger international organizations. its programs are developed in dialogue with the communities where it works. references adams, vincanne, michelle murphy, and adele e. clarke 2009 “anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” subjectivity 28, no. 1: 246–65. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18. adey, peter, and ben anderson 2011 “event and anticipation: uk civil contingencies and the space-times of disaster.” environment and planning a 43, no. 12: 2878–99. https://doi.org/10.1068/a43576. anderson, ben 2010 “preemption, precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and futures 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transformation and the gift of chinese development. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. zee, jerry 2017 “holding patterns: sand and political time at china’s desert shores.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 2: 215–41. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.06. zeiderman, austin 2016 endangered city: the politics of security and risk in bogotá. durham, n.c.: duke university press. toward a fugitive anthropology toward a fugitive anthropology: gender, race, and violence in the field maya j. berry university of north carolina at chapel hill http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2256-482x claudia chávez argüelles humboldt state university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7194-4848 shanya cordis spelman college http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4582-4578 sarah ihmoud boston university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0071-1171 elizabeth velásquez estrada university of texas at austin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8194-6938 the field in anthropology is the milieu for knowledge production. it is a physical place as well as an epistemological space of investigation shaped by histories of european and u.s. imperialism and colonialism. fieldwork has been referred to as the “basic constituting experience, not only for anthropological knowledge but of anthropologists themselves” (moser 2007, 243). the givenness of fieldwork as an individualistic rite of passage often obscures its constitutive and interlocking racial and gender hierarchies and inequities. these inequities structure the epistemic and ontological violence that undergird fieldwork. we write this essay as black, brown, indigenous, mestiza, and/or queer cisgender women trained in the united states in the tradition of decolonial and activist anthropological praxis (gordon 2007; hale 2001, 2008; speed 2008a, 2008b), whose research centers on marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed communities in the global south. occupying gendered-as-female bodies, which were interpellated in racialized and sexualized ways, punctuated a process of embodied pedagogy during our fieldwork experiences. our experiences with racialized gender and sexual violence compelled us to question the pervasiveness of dominant logics within activist research in relationship to our own fieldwork in el salvador, cuba, palestine, mexico, and guyana.1 collectively we imagine alternative pathways toward a decolonial research praxis that advances a critical feminist ethos. this ethos is defined by its flight from an intellectual garrison, in which the idealized radical subject within leftist struggles figures as a martyr for the movement. this self-sacrificing subject coincides with the institutionalized notion of fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage or an exercise of one’s endurance. we call for a praxis of what we term fugitive anthropology,2 a rethinking of the contours of the political in co-creating spaces of liberation and transformation. activist research that does not pursue epistemological decolonization will, we argue, inevitably reproduce the very hierarchies of power that it seeks to help dismantle. in this article, we foreground how racialized-sexualized-gendered violence is encountered, reproduced, and analyzed by women researchers.3 we are interested in deconstructing performances of gender neutrality in representations of fieldwork, which abet a particular form of professionalism within the academy’s patriarchal culture. while other scholars have written about the gendered dimensions of fieldwork (golde 1970; wolf 1996; bell, caplan, and karim 1993; kulick and willson 1995), they have done so primarily in the absence of a race analysis. we refuse the emblematic racially privileged male anthropologist and the aforementioned assumptive logics of doing ethnographic fieldwork, both of which undergird the discipline’s implicit masculinist “shut up and take it” mentality in reference to gendered violence in the field. in the spirit of furthering the movement to decolonize anthropology, our project is “not just [to] expose the lie but to find other ways of telling the truth” (visweswaran 2011, 78). for that purpose, we borrow from feminist researchers (e.g., speed 2008a, rivera cusicanqui 2012; tuhiwai-smith 2012; craven and davis 2013) to center the embodied experiences of black, brown, and indigenous (queer) women in grappling with the inherent contradictions of politically engaged research. all the women. in me. are tired.4 feminist interventions have debunked the dominant value ascribed to objectivity since the poststructuralist turn. yet experiences of violence against women researchers continue to be dismissed, class privilege goes unquestioned, and the colonial effects of u.s. academic endeavors garner little consideration (clancy et al. 2014). numerous accounts of women’s experiences with gender and sexual violence in the field (see c. mahmood 2008; winkler and hanke 1995) point to the extra affective, physical, and intellectual labor required to reassert our legitimacy as researchers (bell, caplan, and karim 1993; wolf 1996). while we frame our analysis in relation to our training as activist anthropologists and theorize from our situated positionalities, the lack of representation of embodied experiences in many ethnographic accounts is not limited to politically engaged research methods. these silences are linked, in part, to the persistence of patriarchy, its accompanying culture of male bravado, and attendant notions of meritocracy that shape the discipline as a whole. we argue that the specificity that stems from our navigation of the field as black, brown, indigenous, and queer cisgender women provides pedagogically important insights into the practice of fieldwork and the conceptualization of a decolonized anthropology. paradoxically, while activist research narrates experiences of violence enacted upon racialized, gendered (queer) bodies, the complexities of those same bodies doing anthropology have tended to be erased. thus, our critique is twofold: we reaffirm the important work of activist anthropology’s critiques of sectors of the discipline that remain positivist, presume a putative objectivity, and efface questions of race, gender, and class in the research process. these sectors assert a neutral stance that, in fact, replicates colonial and extractivist forms of knowledge production. at the same time, we critically examine how dominant strands of activist anthropology replicate that which they critique, by silencing the racialized, gendered researcher’s embodied experience or by inscribing it in new colonial narratives. these strands assume that rapport or intimacy with those with whom we are aligned necessarily results in more horizontal relations.5 patriarchal power dynamics within the collectivities we work alongside operate on our bodies in disciplining ways. yet the notion of engaging in fieldwork is often approached by activist anthropologists in a gender-neutral way, one that still assumes an unencumbered male subject with racial privilege, to whom the field means a space far from home that can be easily entered and exited. a common response used to silence these discussions is the notion that our relative privilege as academics mitigates the gender violence we encounter in the field and, that by raising the critique, we are setting ourselves apart from the experiences of women in “the community” writ large. we acknowledge how our relative privilege, as women who have completed graduate studies in u.s. institutions, could distance us from the unforeseen consequences of our engagements in the field after we finish our research and leave. we hold this acknowledgment in tension with the consideration that we are not merely conducting research, but are connected to the places where we work through familial ties, diasporic relationships, and investments in political struggles, all of which hold us accountable even after our departure. our relationship to our research thus subverts the assumption that the field inhabits an/other time-space, as well as the masculinist notion that the time-space of the other is to be instrumentally penetrated and evacuated. our entrances and exits do not hinge on geographical border crossings. in a sense, the field travels with and within our bodies. in this essay, we point to the ways in which activist research methodologies have been complicit with the dominant logics of traditional research methods, including notions of fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage. being marked as racialized women inevitably shaped our research projects and the lines of inquiry we pursued during fieldwork. by engaging with our complex positionalities, our critical examination of activist methods builds on feminist ethnography to envision avenues for social transformation while recentering our physical, mental, and spiritual bodies in our methodological and epistemological toolkits. our experiences call up the following questions: how do our gendered racial positionalities inflect the research process, and how can we push activist research methods to be accountable to the embodied aspects of conducting research in conflict zones, colonial contexts, and/or conditions of gendered and racialized terror? how can we produce feminist ethnography through activist research in a context of subordination and violence against women? finally, how does our involvement in patriarchal relationships, as marked but relatively privileged women, affect local dynamics, the knowledge we produce, and our methodologies? in the following sections, each one of us shares an ethnographic vignette from our individual field sites to engage these questions, and then we collectively develop a more general framework for alternative pathways toward a politically engaged research we term fugitive anthropology. unspoken challenges: political alliance, gender expectations, survival in august 2011, i returned to my home country, el salvador, to share the findings of my 2011 master’s thesis with ex-army and ex-farabundo martí national liberation front (fmln) guerrillas, whose postwar practices of coexistence i had studied—practices i called “grassroots peacemaking.” in those conversations and in the company of gang members, diego, an ex-guerrilla, told me that some veterans had been informally mentoring their relatives, youth in gangs, in support of a gang-led peace effort. they suggested i include this intergenerational peacemaking practice in my doctoral research. nine months later, on march 14, 2012, el faro, a respected online newspaper, reported that the rival mara salvatrucha and barrio 18 gangs had negotiated a national gang truce in exchange for government funds, portraying them in the article as “criminal organizations” (martínez et al. 2012). days later, gang leadership published a memo emphasizing their desire to “contribute to the pacification of the country” even as they critiqued researchers who sought to understand their activities, noting: “to those who make a living from doing analysis . . . as long as you continue to analyze us like a criminal phenomenon your analysis will be wrong, as will your recommendations to solve it” (see lemus and martínez 2012). after the 1992 chapultepec peace accords ended twelve years of civil war, el salvador became one of the world’s most violent countries. the state attributed this violence to youth gangs and, since 2003, has implemented punitive measures to end this violence, without success. yet the gangs’ 2012 truce reduced the national homicide rate from fourteen killings per day to five in the first months. against this backdrop, one of my research questions became: why did those generally understood as perpetrators of violence represent themselves as peacemakers in postwar el salvador? to answer this question, i deployed activist research methods (gordon 2007; hale 2001, 2008; speed 2008b), which call for researchers to establish political alliances with historically marginalized and organized groups of people engaged in struggle. they also call for research design, data collection, analysis, and dissemination of findings to be conducted collaboratively with research participants. at my prospectus defense, one committee member posed the methodological question: “how will you conduct politically engaged research in a context where men were both peacemakers and purveyors of violence?” i answered that most alliances are built upon strategic agreements where power dynamics exist, and that youth gangs are often themselves targets of state violence. i hoped that the interest expressed by war veterans, gang members’ peacemaking efforts, and my use of activist research methods would begin to address these complexities. having grown up in el salvador, i was familiar with the country’s dominant gender norms. salvadoran society socializes women and men to believe that domestic roles, such as childrearing, housekeeping, and serving men, are women’s tasks, and that men should provide for and protect the family and assume roles of authority. in my prior work with veterans, i observed that a few ex-guerrillas practiced selected principles of the leftist new man ideology—which included gender equality—that had been part of fmln guerrillas’ understandings of solidarity.6 some of these ex-guerrillas encouraged women to hold leadership roles, volunteering to care for children while women took on leadership tasks. others invited their friends, including army veterans, to practice more egalitarian gender relations. however, these advances did not seek to transform the structures that sustain patriarchy. they exemplified what r. w. connell (2005, 79) calls “complicit masculinity,” whereby men still benefit from the dividends of a patriarchal society without putting themselves on “the front line . . . of patriarchy.” though i often challenged veterans’ patriarchal attitudes—at least in one on one conversations—during fieldwork, i never confronted them in front of other veterans nor publicly. patriarchal gender norms structured the physical and verbal space i occupied. i entered the field thinking about strategies to develop shared objectives and political affinities with research participants. while ready to pursue the project of activist research, i underestimated what would emerge as a key methodological contradiction. in august 2013, i returned to el salvador to conduct my doctoral research. i met with diego, an ex-guerrilla, and roberto, an ex-army captain, at a mister donut fast-food joint in san salvador. at their suggestion, we had planned to discuss their informal mentoring of relatives in youth gangs who were supporting the gang truce. after an hour, diego’s nephew, beto, and his friend, manuel, joined the meeting, both of them mara salvatrucha gang members for some twenty years. i described to beto and manuel the study i had conducted with veterans on their postwar practices of grassroots peacemaking. i noted my use of activist research methods, emphasizing their call for dialogue and political alignment. then i asked, “would similar research be of use to your peace efforts?” “yes,” they each replied. when i inquired about next steps for conducting participant-observation, diego joked, “you come with the gringo method, wanting to plan everything.” as everyone laughed, armed security guards who had taken notice of manuel’s gang tattoos surrounded us. we ended the meeting to avoid confrontation. i felt a sense of accomplishment that these civil war veterans and gang members had agreed to participate in the study, yet i remained uncertain as to how i would actually conduct the research. weeks later, manuel called. “i can help you in whatever you need,” he said. i thanked him. having a longtime gang member offer to support my research was significant. due to confrontations among youth gangs and between youth gangs and the state, gang members tend not to talk to outsiders and keep a tight lid on who gains access to gang-controlled territories. however, the involvement of war veterans, my use of activist research methods, and gang members’ own interest in a study about their peace efforts made manuel’s mara salvatrucha clica (group) enthusiastic about the research. it opened a path for dialogue and exploration of a potential political alliance through the research itself. once i was positioned as an ally, gang members had honest conversations with me about their family lives, the state violence they faced, and their desires for a better future. to impress me as a young woman, they shared stories about outfoxing the police, but they also had patriarchal gender expectations. months later, a gang member told me he wanted a romantic relationship with me. the clear implication was that romantic involvement would become a prerequisite for continuing my fieldwork, a cost i was not willing to pay. my longstanding academic relationship with the veterans and my activist research approach gave me access to study youth gangs’ peacemaking efforts. however, the very strength of activist research methodology, in its calls for horizontal dialogue and political alliance, made my gendered sexualized body vulnerable to gender violence.7 unlike ex-guerrillas, youth gangs’ opposition to the government’s punitive measures is not part of a movement to transform social relations. instead, in a postwar context where patriarchy structures gender and political relations, youth in gangs use their identification with, and practices of, dominant masculinity to gain respectability (gordon 1997; connell 2005). for them, domination through violence or the threat of violence is a valid mechanism to demonstrate strength, compete, and resolve conflicts with the state and the rest of the population. throughout our interactions, gang member research participants viewed me as a politically engaged researcher and middle-class salvadoran woman affiliated with a u.s. university who enjoyed the privileges that my social-economic-political positionality granted. but ultimately, i was subordinated to them due to my gender. my embodiment of activist research methods revealed the ways that multiple forms of oppression and power relations operated between a mestiza salvadoran woman researcher and male research participants. for these men, there was no contradiction between participating in politically engaged research and the imposition of patriarchal gender expectations. women researchers can be accepted as political allies, but this alliance does not entail horizontal dialogues within the framework of gender equality. this hypermasculine social context highlighted a shortcoming of activist research: attentiveness to the ways that multiple inequities (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality) affect research participants has not been accompanied by a serious discussion of how these participants can reproduce those power relations with racially marked women researchers. instead of retreating from this hypermasculine domain, i changed my approach for doing collaborative research. with other feminist scholars, i consider the analysis of patriarchal effects on women’s and men’s lives to be important. however, such an analytic must also take into account how intersecting oppressions target some women and men while privileging others, as black feminist intersectional theory indicates (collins and bilge 2016; crenshaw 1991). any politically engaged research, i argue, should incorporate a discussion of gendered power relations within the collaborative research process. though this is not a sure solution for mitigating the vulnerabilities of racialized women, my hope is that it will encourage researchers to envision strategies to grapple with gendered power relations in the field. when help isn’t on the way, or black women’s fieldwork humiliated and emotionally raw after my sexual assault by the brother of the boarding house owner in havana, i sought guidance from the staff at the cuban academic institution in charge of my placement. after listening intently and quietly, the staff member asked if i had done anything to bring on the incident. the institute had never received any complaints from foreign researchers who had stayed in that house before, he explained. “was he white?” the staff member asked next. when i replied yes, he readily acknowledged that the assault was most likely racially motivated. as an afro-cuban man himself, he empathized with me but reminded me of the stakes of making such a serious criminal accusation. pressing charges could put the family out of business or worse. and so, like many other women who know that help isn’t on the way if we scream, i kept quiet. i learned to lock the door to my bedroom behind me. my closest confidant, a working-class elder afro-cuban woman, expressed indignation that my foreigner status didn’t grant me immunity from such a violation: “i keep telling you that you have to speak in english all the time, my daughter, so that people know that they can’t do that [ya te lo dije, que debes de hablar en inglés todo el tiempo, mi’ja, para que sepa la gente que no es así]”. in other words, this woman thought that my assault was a result of my misrecognition as a cuban national, with the assumption that i should not be treated like the average cuban black woman, who is presumed licentious. in cuba, the sanctity of white womanhood extends to yuma (foreign) personhood because of the way in which the national economy depends on the tourist as a vessel through which capital enters the nation.8 in my case, the presumed innocence attributed to yumas was undermined within the libidinal structure of the casa particular, or boarding house, where there was a well-established demarcation between socially white (presumed innocent) and socially nonwhite (presumed guilty) people. i was the only black guest in a house whose clientele consisted primarily of socially white middle-aged men from europe, the united states, and other parts of latin america. the only other black people present in this house were the maids, who served both the foreign clients and the family who owned the casa particular, and the visiting sex workers or novias (girlfriends) of the guests. thus black women’s labor was socially marked as menial or dishonorable, even as it was vital for the business operations of the house. as fungible bodies in a competitive labor market, the black women in the house were dependent on socially white actors whose desires demarcated the terms of virtue and propriety. as i confided in different people about the incident, their reactions revealed that my experience existed within a shared logic about blackness as a flesh that attracts sexual violence to itself. their replies would begin with a sigh of resignation: “you already know [ya tú sabes] . . .” followed by a long, weighted pause, signaling the commonplace nature of what was not said. more specifically, their responses reified a logic that black women’s bodies are naturally prone to sexual advances, particularly in spaces where tourist commerce and white domesticity converge. furthermore, the protection of private business interests was paramount. they all seemed to agree that, regardless of how modestly i dressed or how educada (proper) i behaved, the actions of the so-called man of the house were not, in and of themselves, out of order. the supposed naturalness of my white cuban attacker’s behavior granted him impunity, leaving the onus on me to take responsibility for the consequences of having a black female body. perhaps my sexual assault was a physical corrective to my contradictory social positionality, a response to my structural ambiguity as a foreigner with a native-looking body and with native-sounding spanish fluency. in other words, one could interpret my sexual assault as an intimate disciplinary act fueled by the unsanctioned degree of relative power i held as an afro-cuban-american. as a u.s. citizen and with the privileges associated with that designation, my presence upset the otherwise stable distribution of power in the white domestic sphere. accordingly, the man of the house was libidinally compelled to re-establish an asymmetrical equilibrium by toppling me over onto the bed, reasserting white patriarchal dominance over my flesh. the coercive force of u.s. empire should have come to my rescue, the logic went, spurring the cuban nation-state to protect its coveted consumer. however, given the naturalized rapeability of black flesh throughout the americas, it was my status as a foreign academic that was out of order. the legacy of black women’s historical relationship with field labor and sexual accessibility, as a result of chattel slavery in the americas, bears upon our relationship to the proverbial field in ways that are taken for granted within activist research training structured around a gender-neutral researcher working with “the [gender-neutral] community.” in reflecting on the unavoidably embodied aspects of conducting fieldwork in postcolonial contexts, then, i summon dána-ain davis’s (pers. comm.) description of the fieldwork experience as “flesh eating”: because our research depends on intimacies . . . i wonder if as black feminist practitioners we engage in ways that makes entry points for external forces/ideas/virus/people easier to enter us. . . . cultural capital can be understood as flesh and therefore we are always in danger. the colonial code of racialized gender hierarchy can overwrite any black woman’s claims to rights, because her flesh is to be eaten. for black women anthropologists, having social capital is a dangerous liability. andrea queeley (2015) has researched how, historically, in cuba, social mobility for black people triggers rather than mitigates white backlash. i join with davis and queeley to argue that my very claims to relative privilege in the field were undercut by targeted exercises of power on my flesh. despite being a middle-class u.s. citizen, the kind of labor that was attributed to my body—as durable, accessible, and expendable—overrode my class status at critical moments. black women’s relationship to the field is, i argue, predicated on an ongoing struggle for recognition as sovereign humans, as well as scholars capable of producing valuable alternative understandings of social realities. how do black feminist anthropologists who work in underdeveloped countries define redress for racialized-gendered injuries against our bodies? what would it mean if redressing my assault was a prerogative granted to me solely on the basis of u.s. imperial entitlement or on the basis of protecting the flow of capital? what satisfaction would criminal punishment achieve if it put this cuban family out of business or tarnished my institutional relationships in my field site? would the cuban institution renew its sponsorship of my residency if i attracted negative attention? the kinds of political compromises and physical dangers we encounter while doing fieldwork are inextricably tied to how racialized and gendered bodies are differentially situated within intersecting structures of oppression. bargaining for one’s full humanity while charting an investigative course that privileges a political commitment to the lives we encounter on the ground means becoming skilled in applying multiple methods simultaneously: namely, a participant-observation that invites our interlocutors to feel at ease even as we negotiate the fact that their ease may be contingent upon our subjugation as sexual objects. the kinds of (micro)aggressions we experience due to our contradictory racial-class-sex-citizenship positions do not vanish when we return home. being a black woman got me assaulted and, in this case, my internalized ideas about being an activist anthropologist kept me quiet about it. i maintained my silence out of fear that talking about my assault would potentially overshadow the research or cause harm to its perpetrator. activist anthropologists are expected to engage in lone acts of bravery in order to shed light on the struggles of others with less relative privilege. i had also internalized the idea that black women cannot afford to draw any more attention to our already hypervisible bodies. these two sets of controlling images—licentious black womanhood and noble servant researcher—unexpectedly converged, rendering me unable to seek redress for my violation. in other words, internalized scripts defining what it means to be a black woman and an activist anthropologist undercut my ability to disentangle myself from the very controlling affective structures that black feminism interrogates. the embodied knowledge i gained through fieldwork has since compelled me to re-envision a politically engaged anthropology that is compatible with black feminist teachings during both stages of ethnographic research: while working in the field (praxis) and while representing that experience (product). black women’s structural positionality within postcolonial modernity prescribes a particular raced and sexed relation to our sites of investigation, aptly referred to as “the field.” the ways in which fieldwork is described in the discipline of anthropology as a uniform, given rite of passage obscures the extraordinary tactics and strategies that we, as black women, must develop to ensure our dignity while we work to answer our research questions. the rigor it takes to keep our bodies whole while becoming anthropologists is too often illegible in the colonial, patriarchal space of the academy. intimacies of terror: centering the body as the ground of thought it is just after midnight. i am awakened by the sound of chanting. distant at first, it rhythmically builds its way from a gentle hum into a thunderous uproar that passes just below my second story window. it takes a few moments for me to shake the sleep off and discern the crowd’s refrain: “mavet al aravim.” the throng of people beneath my window repeats this phrase over and over again. i rise and cautiously peel back the curtain, just enough to see that the group of jewish israelis—fifty or so, most of them young men and boys, some armed with weapons slung over a shoulder, others holding up an israeli flag—has now taken up post in the street below. they have done so in the middle of the night in a conscious effort to terrorize the palestinian enclave that is encircled by jewish settlements in jerusalem’s old city. i try and block out the sound of their voices by shutting all of the windows, despite the stifling late summer heat. i place a pillow over my head to drown out their chanting, which is interspersed with bouts of boisterous laughter and whistles. after a while, the crowd disperses. there is no more chanting. still, the muffled phrase, now seared into my mind repeats itself time and time again: mavet al aravim. death to arabs. i drift back into a restless sleep, with this phrase and the voices of the crowd still in my mind. i am awakened, some hours later, not by daybreak but by the shadow of a figure in my bedroom—i know, instinctively, that he is a settler from the nearby jewish quarter—making his way closer and closer to my bedside until finally, he is stabbing me and my unborn baby as he screams out into the darkness: “mavet al aravim!” clutching my swollen belly and breathing heavily, a cold sweat pouring out of my skin, i am relieved to discover it was only a bad dream, that my baby and i are safe. still, i rise from bed and peer out the window—the streets are empty now. nonetheless, i double-check the locks on the door. in the israeli settler-colonial imagination, each palestinian child is a potential terrorist and women, as reproducers of palestinians, are envisioned as a central component of an impending demographic threat (shalhoub-kevorkian 2016). in my field site, occupied east jerusalem, the israeli state thus has a vested interest in controlling women’s movements and surveilling their bodies and sexualities, motivated by what palestinian feminist scholar nadera shalhoub-kevorkian (2015, 1199) calls “a biopolitical project of preventing palestinian birth.” by centering the testimonies of pregnant and birthing women, shalhoub-kevorkian reveals how israeli settler-colonial power and militarism invades women’s space, time, and physical and emotional selves, penetrating even the most invisibilized of spaces: women’s dreams. as twenty-four-year-old lama recounts: my pregnancy was filled with severe anxieties, fear, and depression . . . always constrained. . . . i was thinking about each and every act, always trapped . . . to the degree [that i was] dreaming about being tied with wires . . . you know the wires the jews put on the checkpoints, those filled with edgy ends [barbed wire] . . . that was my dream . . . being tied with wires around my face . . . even inside my body, preventing my lungs and heart from working. . . . the night before i had my baby—i had him four weeks prematurely [. . .] i closed my eyes to rest . . . and [then came thoughts of the barbed wire] . . . the inability to breathe . . . and so much anxiety . . . then i started feeling pain. . . . i called the doctors, and my husband, and they ordered the ambulance for me. at the checkpoint they questioned my pain . . . do you think they count us as humans? to question my pain, when i am wet . . . all wet . . . and they can see it . . . my water broke, the baby is drying up. . . . they just look at us . . . they have stopped [thinking of] us as humans . . . we are all imprisoned. (shalhoub-kevorkian 2015, 1201) lama’s words call on us to examine not only the visible aspects of state terror, but also the mundane and everyday exercise of settler-colonial power. for terror is not merely found in the hypervisible attacks on palestinian bodies, lives, and land—in the constant military presence that defines life under israeli occupation, the assaults on palestinian spaces and bodies, and the disposable nature of palestinian life in the settler colony. terror also creeps into the most intimate realms of everyday life, invading the home, relationships between families, and the bodies and psyches of palestinian natives: indeed, even the space of the colonized’s dreams. while my own nightmare has subsided, the nightmare of colonial occupation does not evaporate, an occupation vested in the surveillance and violation of native bodies and lands. as a first-generation palestinian american anthropologist, the lived reality of israeli racial terror is not an abstract concept to learn about from my so-called informants in the field, but an affective force that comes to shape the social bonds of the palestinian communities about which i care and am a part, one that is viscerally experienced in my own body and psyche. for i know well that those settlers calling for “death to arabs” are not calling for the annihilation of some abstract arab peoples—no, they are calling for my people’s annihilation, for my annihilation. for the death of the baby that grows in my womb. while women-of-color feminisms have long carved out spaces for consideration of the racialized female body, the disembodied nature of much anthropological discourse—even in its most politically engaged manifestations—often obscures the lived reality of the researcher herself, who navigates regimes of racial and sexual terror. how might centering these corporeal realities as a form of embodied pedagogy, making the material body the “ground of thought” (anzaldúa 2015, 5) in our praxis of activist research, change the kinds of questions that we pose, the methods that we pursue, and the scholarship that we produce? it is, in fact, these affective embodied experiences (see s. mahmood 2005) as racialized subjects that can provide the very material groundwork for identifying what charles hale (2001, 14) calls our “deepest ethical-political convictions,” which often “drive the formulation of our research objectives.” while activist research has traditionally privileged masculine domains of the political—aligning oneself with a formal organization, political party, or ideology more broadly—the mentorship of palestinian feminists, stories of women and children in occupied territory, and my own embodied experiences pushed me time and again to examine the intimate, often elusive sites in which power is reproduced and contested. understanding these sites often required a different methodological approach to activist research: one that relied on informal networks of women; one that attuned itself to the hushed whispers of those living under a regime of colonial surveillance where even the walls have ears and where everyday friendship and care among women were the invisible groundwork for more visible political struggles. working through these avenues also showed me the ways in which colonial violence strengthens and enables the reproduction of patriarchal control and violence, highlighting that women’s bodily safety and sexuality must be at the forefront of struggles for liberation. the intimacy with which terror invades our minds and bodies also poses a challenge to the idea of the researcher who is inherently privileged in relation to her field site or collaborators. our gendered interpolation into racial structures in the sites where we work operates within a global “racial contract” (see mills 1997) that follows the researcher wherever she travels. the global nature of white supremacy affirms race as a fundamental, if adaptable structural logic that constantly produces and legitimates racial hierarchy and power (jung, costa vargas, and bonilla-silva 2011). at the same time, these shared experiences of the embodiment of terror and its wounding effects bind us together across time and space in intimate, womb-like connection with those with whom we work, making us available to each other as ethical-political subjects who can choose to sustain reality (abbas 2014, 514) or to re-birth life in spaces of social death. “collaboration is like a courtship”: embodying the paradoxes of engaged research the road leading to this community in the mountains of southeast mexico is full of turns; many of the edges of these curves have been lost to the oblivion of the adjacent chasms. i had come to meet with the leaders of a maya organization that has been in open resistance to the colonial state’s neoliberal project, struggling for their political autonomy for more than two decades. members of this pacifist indigenous organization were the targets of a bloody display of state violence in the 1990s, in which mostly women and children were killed. that morning i was submitting the results of an initial phase of collaborative work. after several months of fieldwork, i was still awaiting the organization’s decision regarding an expanded proposal for collaborative research, the results of which could be used as evidence to support their ongoing struggle for truth and justice in international legal arenas. when i was finally called to enter the office where we were meeting—a single room with no windows—they asked me to sit on a stool placed several feet away from a long table, at which ten male leaders were seated. “it’s great that you came here today because we wanted to talk with you,” said the organization’s president. he informed me that they had recently discussed my proposal with other units of the organization and had decided that they could not allow the expanded collaborative research to go forward, “at least for the moment.” the president, a man in his late thirties with a strong command of spanish, explained: “you know, collaboration is like a courtship [la colaboración es como un noviazgo]. we are just beginning to know you. boyfriends and girlfriends do not get engaged or get married immediately after meeting each other. it is important to know each other well. it is important to woo each other,” he explained. the sense of caution and distrust that his words conveyed was not what took me by surprise, especially in the context of the ongoing war of attrition in the region and the banning of academic research within other indigenous organizations. what disconcerted me was his flirtatious tone and the polysemy of the courtship metaphor in these specific circumstances. the murmuring and concealed laughter of the other male leaders in the room made me feel extremely uncomfortable. all of a sudden, i became hyperconscious about my body, singled out in the middle of the dark room, away from the vigilant eyes of the women working in the kitchen. while the courtship metaphor is commonly used in the region, the way in which this organization publicly talks about collaboration is in terms of brotherhood (hermandad), not courtship. was it precisely the male-centered idea of brotherhood that made this kind of ambiguous exchange possible? would the president have chosen to use the courtship metaphor with me if i had not been a mestiza? my uncertainty regarding these speculations made me question my forms of privilege and weigh them in relation to my vulnerabilities, leading me to realize that the collaboration i was pursuing with this politically dissident organization was paradoxically subjecting me to the violence of its patriarchal norms. the more i tried to clarify with the leaders what the idea of wooing meant for them, the more i began to relive previous fieldwork encounters in which uninvited flirtatious remarks preceded other forms of harassment. entrenched patriarchy limits women’s forms of socialization and defines access to the places we can inhabit as researchers. a female researcher’s interest in the perspectives of men is constantly misrecognized as romantic desire. in an attempt to create respectful boundaries, the interviews we hold often reproduce the hierarchy of an all-knowing man lecturing a woman who is presumed naive and expected to listen. the act of listening to our interlocutors in the field as women belies a gendered assumption of passivity; as activist anthropologists, we are supposed to subvert that form and make receptivity the basis of an intersubjective construction of meaning. therefore, the intimacy created through rapport is one of our greatest achievements just as it is, paradoxically, one of our deepest vulnerabilities as women. after leaving the office, i decided not to dwell on the gendered connotations of this episode. i was familiar with this kind of interactions, having grown up in a culture of machismo in mexico city and having learned as a lawyer that suppressing my own rage was key to survival in a male-centered profession. in the end, nobody was obligating me to do this research and i was conscious that my privilege as a middle-class mestiza, chilanga,9 affiliated with a u.s. university made my collaborative efforts seem contradictory and even untrustworthy to my interlocutors. while i eventually managed to arrange for further collaboration with this organization and made a point to highlight women’s continued experiences of violence, it was a difficult process given that even my alliances with women in the organization were controlled by male leaders. moments of crisis during fieldwork led me and other indigenous and mestiza women to share our accounts of gender violence. i realized that the obstacles i had faced were directly linked to a particular racialization and gendering of my body, the product of local masculinist expectations based on the legacies of colonialism and collaboration’s unequal exchange. precisely because of these colonial legacies, access for kaxlanes (nonindigenous people) often comes at a price. in the case of women-identified researchers, there is an unspoken assumption that access to traditionally male spaces must be paid with male access to our bodies, whether on physical, emotional, or discursive planes. so even as my “feeling-thinking” (see méndez torres et al. 2013) is what weaves my alliances together with the struggles i am invested in, in the field it is my body that has often been seen as instrumental for those alliances to materialize. sometimes it has functioned as a human shield for more vulnerable populations, while at other times it has been expected to serve as a resource to be shared, a fact that visibilizes the logics of collaborative exchange within male-centered struggles. academia has censored accounts of gender violence at the hands of suboppressors (see spivak 1988) in the name of a kind of advocacy that can only exist under patriarchy’s patronage. meanwhile, survivors of sexual violence know well that publicly sharing their experiences may revictimize them, especially when others take control of their narratives. therefore, many of these accounts circulate among women in the form of traumatic secrets that we carry deep in our bodies. internalized forms of oppression make us complicit with this violence, insisting that we believe we did something to provoke its outcomes. in the case of women-identified researchers, we feel that these incidents reveal our shortcomings as activist anthropologists. these secrets shame us. it is partly our incomplete understanding of the complexities around these unspoken truths that drives us to maintain our silence. when we realize that the possibility of collaboration can ultimately rely on these gendered silences, it is then that we need to re-envision our alliances and reorient our paths. in the process of sharing my vulnerabilities with other women, deep sororal connections were formed, backed with a political commitment to help each other. along one of the winding roads leading to the mountain community, i crossed paths with women who had fruitlessly pushed to get the massacre perpetrated against this organization during the 1990s recognized as a feminicide. they invited me to participate in a campaign against feminicidal violence, and the grassroots work we did granted me a deeper understanding of the internal contradictions within the indigenous organization as well as the politics of solidarity surrounding it. i realized how much i had naturalized several forms of microaggressions, especially while doing research on more atrocious expressions of violence like massacres and forced displacements. as the mujeres mayas kaqla (2010) have noted, ignoring these microviolences allows us to think that slaughters and feminicides are the exception when in fact they are part of a continuum, structured by colonial forms of oppression and expressed in quotidian forms of violence to which women tend to be the most vulnerable. discussing this violence continuum with the male leaders of the indigenous organization was extremely complex. this was not only due to my position as an outsider mestiza, but also to the fact that the mexican state has attributed the massacre to intercommunitarian violence, while simultaneously using indigenous women’s bodies to repress the struggle for indigenous autonomy. however, it is not only state officials, but also the suboppressors who construct women’s bodies as battlefields for preserving the patriarchal constitution of their social worlds. a similar situation occurs with female researchers’ bodies: it is the white heteropatriarchal norms of academia that shape what becomes visible, discussable, and publishable about us, as key battlefields for truth in our discipline. as the experience of women survivors within the indigenous organization taught me, speaking up is not always the best path for healing when patriarchal oppression is what compels us to share our accounts of sexual violence to promote awareness. one of the main challenges we face as feminist activist anthropologists is not only finding productive ways of speaking and writing about gendered violence in the field and its intricate connections with the violence we face at home, but also creating safe social spaces to do so and to heal without giving right-wing opportunists more leverage to suppress revolutionary resistance. on being able: (re)assembling praxis in the field “if she had just been up front and honest with me, i wouldn’t have a problem with it,” the elder sighed, wiping sweat from his brow. “if she had just told me she liked women, i would have been fine.” silently, i stared back with a careful, blank expression, replaying his words to try and understand what had signaled this swift, yet crucial turn in the conversation. we were meeting to discuss my research on the relationship between indigenous land struggles and gender violence within the context of neoliberal development in guyana.10 discussing the logistics of travel within the nation’s interior, he juxtaposed the region to the ostensibly secure, ordered, and technologically advanced coastal capital, invoking the colonial imaginary of the interior landscape as lawless “bush,” an indigenous space in dire need of an anticipated development. recounting his experiences with a white female researcher in the past, the elder relayed with dismay how she “chain smoked and did not eat meat” and failed to disclose her sexuality. despite his support of local queer organizations, his tone belied thinly veiled tolerance of her presumably transgressive femininity (read: against hegemonic white femininity), taboo sexuality, and behavior, as well as an implicit assertion that the establishment of trust necessitated full disclosure. he advised me to adhere to local custom by partaking in traditional alcoholic drinks, piwari and casiri, as this formed an integral part of socializing, during which people tended to discuss topics they might not otherwise broach. with a terse nod he said, “you would make it, since you have amerindian heritage. the [other] girl, she wasn’t able.” this was one of the primary reasons he had accompanied this researcher throughout her fieldwork, an offer that was notably not extended to me. unsettled, i wondered if he believed that she had “made it” under his heteropatriarchal guidance (and presumed safety). because of my amerindian heritage, i would have to endure. unlike hers, my body and its presumed durability and elasticity, transmuted by blood, was “able.” as a cisgender queer black and indigenous woman, establishing trust would demand an intimacy concomitant with bodily precarity. in a context of gendered racialized state violence and pervasive heteropatriarchal rhetoric against “anti-man” (a local pejorative term indiscriminately leveled against cisgender queer men, as well as transgender and gender nonconforming persons), my body thus constituted, informed, and shaped my methodology. i had lived in my village site for several months before it happened. i initially focused on building rapport with elders in order to collect oral histories about the riverine community composed of several amerindian nations. farmers who had migrated to the region in what is infamously known as the “gold bush gateway” had pursued the promise of renewed economic livelihoods. subsequent generations were thrust into extractive industries like mining and logging, often as exploited laborers. while visiting part of the village with members of my host family, we unexpectedly ran into a well-known elder who had enthusiastically shared carib oral stories with me on several occasions. after conferring or gyaffing11 for an hour or so, we decided to tow his boat behind ours to ensure that he reached home safely, as he had been drinking. the water refracted the intensity of the sun’s descent; pink, coral, and yellow swathed the sky, effervescent against stark white clouds. squinting against the glare, i chuckled, unperturbed, with the others at his mumbling inquiries about where his researcher was. soon, we arrived at our house. while i waited with the elder for the boatman’s return, the others left to start the generator. anxious that the elder’s uneven steps from his boat to the adjacent one might throw him overboard, i squatted at the edge of the dock to steady it with a firm hold. his sudden grip on my wrist, fingers digging into my skin, barely registered before it darted between my legs. when i jerked back, he used my body as leverage to haul himself onto the dock. my mind separated from my body. i thought his invasive touch might be a fumbling blunder induced by stupor or imbalance until he began to mumble: “how much? $10,000, $15,000 . . .” and then, incredulously, “$20,000? [us$50, $75, and $100, respectively].” i pushed back against wandering, probing hands that sought more than flesh, as his tight voice admonished me: “like you getting mad, researcher.” in an attempt to mirror back to him what i saw as the loss of his integrity, i reminded him of his role as an elder, his accountability and obligations to his family and community. he quieted, his grip momentarily relaxing before tightening again. as though a film was passing over his eyes, he chose to see his researcher as property, as violable flesh. after several weeks, i filed a report with a trusted member of the village policing group. this man acknowledged the prevalence of sexual violence and abuse against amerindian women in both hinterland and coastal communities and the deeply embedded naturalization of and apathy toward substantive solutions to such violence. then, with chagrin, he outlined the potential repercussions of reporting my assault, pointing to my skin while rubbing his similarly dark skin: “you shine like me.” as a mixed-black amerindian outsider, my story might be met with hostility or outright disbelief. seeking redress through the policing group—ostensibly more grassroots than the state’s police and thus equitable and just—might in fact extend the violence i experienced. my dark flesh, indeed my blackness, rendered me suspect, culpable in my own sexual assault. on the one hand, the elder’s reference to me as “my researcher” seemed to suggest that i had succeeded in gaining the trust of the community. on the other, it revealed the conditional price that racialized women researchers must pay when entering spaces still perceived as the purview of men. “like you getting mad” attested to the elder’s incredulousness at my belief that i could navigate this space without a price. entangled with racialized sexualized assumptions of my bodily worth-value as (pre)disposed for gratuitous violence, his statement attempted to discipline me into accepting those costs without protest. a pervasive and insidious assumption surrounding fieldwork is that you put (read: insert) your body in a place or space where violence can be enacted upon you and thereby assume accountability for any potential violence that might occur. in order to grasp fieldwork as anthropological labor, the story goes, our bodies—mental, physical, and spiritual—must experience the milieu of doubt, alienation, tears, and frustration so as to return altered. only by getting lost do we find our anthropological selves. indeed, women-identified researchers are implicitly and explicitly told to expect sexual/gender violence as a risk that comes with the territory of fieldwork (and, by extension, the territory of everyday life), one that maps onto the racialized, sexualized territories of our bodies as property. not only is the expectation of violence normalized, reinscribed, and dismissed, but women are expected to suffer in silence as stoic, durable, expendable, and rapeable bodies—we are “able.” this dissonance manifested itself in a sense of misalignment between my objectives as an activist researcher and an inherent need for redress. i knew that part of my paralysis stemmed from a void of spirit. m. jacqui alexander’s (2005, 261) eloquent writing on embodied spiritual praxis as a source of knowledge gestures toward a “theory of the flesh,” one that resides within, but is not circumscribed by, one’s bodily experiences. a reorientation of the theory-praxis frame that refuses the mind-body-spirit division, what alexander (2005, 329) calls “pedagogies of the sacred” are teachings known only through unknowing, unlearning, and surrendering to the realization that the methodologies we have (whether positivist or activist) inevitably approach a limit. fundamentally, they are located and partial, as “there are sacred means through which we come to be at home in the body that supersede its positioning in materiality” (alexander 2005, 329). embodied spiritual praxis is never complete, for alexander, because it constitutes an ongoing “dance of balance” and demands challenge, not merely because we must confront the “cultural dissonance in daily living that can undermine the evolution of character, but also because the spiritual is lived in the same locale in which hierarchies are socially invented and maintained” (alexander 2005, 310). even as the spiritual as embodied praxis offers me redress for each of my selves—both physical and spiritual—it must also contend with the everyday forces that seek to dismember, categorize, and alienate. these realities form the terrain that we collectively navigate with others to construct spaces for imagining liberation and other pathways of freedom—even in the midst of internalized hierarchies and violences. through listening to my body—as well as metaphysical and spiritual bodies—i learned that surrender never equates with retreat or loss, and not knowing does not mean fewer possibilities for envisioning forms of relationality not confined to the methodological and epistemological parameters we have come to accept as our horizon. creating with fellow colleagues and friends who are also engaged in and committed to the “dance of balance” forms an intimate sacred space for reciprocal vulnerability and the openness to construct networks of support and affirmation. toward a fugitive anthropology the ethnographic vignettes we have shared depict differentially situated locations within global structures of power; to engage them within the same analytical frame therefore entails a commitment to the project of transnational feminist solidarity, one that deserves further discussion. by collectively voicing our experiences with gender and sexual violence in the field, we highlight assumptive logics within activist anthropology that, we contend, do not escape the hegemony of heteropatriarchal power that plagues positivist methods. when preparing for fieldwork activist anthropologists are required to be meticulous about how we will safeguard the rights and well-being of those with whom we work, while advancing collaborative processes of knowledge production. yet our differentially marked physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being remains largely absent from discussion, a silence implying that such concerns fall outside the politics of research. this implication, we argue, reproduces the discipline’s legacy of white heteropatriarchy. the ethnographic scenes we have shared are not worst-case scenarios but rather point to the naturalization of how patriarchy operates as a continuum of violence that undergirds the field. thus, activist anthropology must deconstruct the performance of gender neutrality in preparing students for fieldwork, encouraging intersectionality as both analytic and embodied praxis. centering the body in the stakes of activist research advances the path toward the project of decolonizing anthropology. we envision a critical feminist activist anthropology that holds us politically accountable to our interlocutors as well as to our own embodied reality, as part of the same liberatory struggle, albeit differentially located along the continuum of black and indigenous liberation. as feminist activist-scholars before us have insisted, oppressions and inequalities “at home” are inseparable from those “out there.” although expanding the numbers of women of color faculty might influence cultures of training, the mere physical presence of women does not guarantee a critical feminist ethos, since women scholars are also socialized to reproduce and perform patriarchal norms.12 furthermore, women of color in the academy are asked to expend ever more affective labor to work against patriarchal structures by providing emotional support to students (navarro, williams, and ahmad 2013). our colleagues, both women and men, must share the responsibility of centering queer, trans, and feminist epistemologies in their teaching and advising practices. heteropatriarchy is a structural force not reducible to the body, in which people of all gendered identities (un)consciously invest. far from holding the hands of women of color, queer, and gender-nonconforming researchers, we advocate a critical feminist ethos and politics at the most formative stage in the development of anthropologists. the tools needed to survive in the field cannot necessarily be found within traditional feminist anthropological approaches that hinge on uniformly horizontalizing the power of the researcher in the communities where she works. instead, our training must entail grounded discussions of the particular challenges nonmale, nonwhite, nonhetero, and noncisgender bodies face in order to be better prepared as researchers. to call for increased visibility of the particular struggles that anthropologists endure in the field as racially marked/gendered/sexualized bodies is, necessarily, to call for accountability from our colleagues who practice activist research. if we are invested in the project of decolonizing anthropology, we must encourage this critical feminist ethos in everyday interactions throughout the process of becoming anthropologists. in addition to bringing embodiment to the practice of activist anthropology, we must continue to search for new ways to incorporate forms of praxis that come from outside the academy. spirituality offers one pathway to reimagine our methodological tools while providing affective redress; grounding politically engaged anthropology in black and indigenous feminist teachings at the level of both ethnographic process and product offers yet another. in each of our cases, working with decentralized, diffuse feminist political networks as well as more localized feminist organizations strengthened our politics of fugitivity and allowed us to devise alternative strategies that honored our embodied experiences. these pathways emerged through the practice of collaboration with other women in the field, through which we were able to cultivate bonds of caring that extend beyond our bodies (of work). in these nurturing bonds and praxis we identify the core of a feminist ethos, whose continuation in the academy is politically vital and spiritually necessary. acknowledging our embodied experiences grounds us to research and write from places of positioned truth. drawing on donna haraway’s notion of positioned objectivity as the basis for activist research, charles hale (2008, 11–12) has urged that such a project can only take place through this critical acknowledgement. and, since the field travels within our bodies, a new language is also needed to articulate these analytical possibilities. decolonization is indeed a project worth fighting for. recognizing how patriarchy is folded into the methods of activist anthropology and calling for the dismantling of such violence is, after all, a call for the end of the world. while working in pairs as researchers, for example, or forming emotional support networks may partially counter the dangers of lone fieldwork, reformist solutions mute the structural antagonisms we highlight. we recognize, in doing so, a central contradiction: our collective analysis shows blood, yet seeks, in some ways, protection. our continued investment in the project of decolonizing anthropology suggests that justice, in some sense, exists. our written words betray our screams, which are neither audible nor appropriate in the academy. confronting violence not just as individual survivors, but as knowledge producers enhances our collective struggle. yet at the same time, we realize that these provocations may damage our careers in the academy and our relationships to local struggles that we have worked to cultivate. how, then, can we imagine a way of doing activist research that does not reproduce violence against ourselves, as racialized, sexualized, women anthropologists speaking from places of intimate connection with those with whom we align our work? this question and others like it haunt us, yet simultaneously propel us, not toward prescriptive solutions but toward a future that is indiscernible. recognizing its inherent contradictions, yet refusing a duality that understands spaces outside the academy as more privileged sites of social change, we call for a fugitive anthropology. a fugitive anthropology is an anthropology that, grounded in black feminist analysis and praxis and inspired by indigenous decolonial thinking, centers an embodied feminist analytics while working within the contested space of the academy. a fugitive anthropology engages those “demonic grounds” (mckittrick 2006) or alternative geographies of the spiritual and ineffable. a fugitive anthropology is one through which we, as feminist activist-scholars, seek to contribute to radical collectives and to build liberatory spaces of feminist ethos as sites of marronage (james 2013). rather than solely grapple within masculinist projects of the political (the party, or the nation-state) that push women’s agency, our bodies, and our sexualities to the margins of revolutionary change, fugitive anthropology directs attention to undervalued local feminist praxis. a fugitive anthropology thus cannot be tethered to preordained courses or predictable paths; it moves forward with an understanding that the path to reach spaces unknown is necessarily unpredictable (vimalassery 2016). the outline of this fugitive anthropology is, in essence, one that seeks to advance a decolonized discipline, yet at the same time takes flight from that contested space we claim as our intellectual home. notes acknowledgments we dedicate this article to the women with and alongside whom we have worked for their continuous support. the birth of this article stems from a feminist collective that the authors formed while graduate students at the university of texas at austin, in order to establish a support network for each other while in the field and during the dissertation writing process. while listed in alphabetical order for the sake of the publishing process, this article was a truly collaborative process at every stage, where each author participated as an equal contributor. its completion would not have been possible without the unrelenting encouragement, guidance, and critical feedback of charles r. hale, edmund t. gordon, dána-ain davis, and shannon speed. joy james, aída hernández, kamala visweswaran, and bianca williams also gave important feedback that sharpened the analysis, guiding our future analytical directions. we presented an earlier version at the 2016 abriendo brecha activist scholarship conference, with the support of the social justice institute at the university of texas at austin. the intergenerational and international network of scholars that coalesced during the conference to engage with the core ideas of the piece continue to fuel and inspire us. the preliminary ideas that formed the basis of the article were first presented at the 2015 new directions in anthropology graduate student conference in the department of anthropology at university of texas at austin. we thank the student organizers of those conferences and our ever-dedicated and passionate colleagues from the diaspora and activist tracks in the department of anthropology, who are in but not of the academy. although these programs have ceased to exist within the department as they once did, their struggles continue. we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology, particularly cymene howe, for their thoughtful attention to the manuscript and for pushing us to clarify key ideas and concepts. the article unmistakably benefited from this care and commitment. for anyone else who was influential throughout the writing process, but who we have failed to mention by name here, please know that we are not any less appreciative. any errors are our own. finally, at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association in 2016, we organized a panel chaired by dána-ain davis and with cheryl rodriguez as discussant, at which point we called for others to join us as we expand our project. we encourage other scholars, researchers, and activists who would like to engage further to contact us. 1. in invoking activist research, we refer to a general framework of politically engaged, feminist, decolonial anthropology, which is associated with the austin school manifesto (gordon 2007): a methodological approach to studying the african diaspora that has been employed by researchers affiliated with the activist anthropology track in the department of anthropology at the university of texas at austin. activist research praxis has been developed and debated in gordon 1991; james and gordon 2008; hale 2001, 2006, 2008; and speed 2008a, 2008b. 2. other scholars have theorized the necessary flight from the academic institution for radical intervention (james and gordon 2008). 3. we use the term women specifically to highlight hegemonic constructions of gender as binary, while also considering transgender women and gender-nonconforming persons. violence also occurs against men (transgender and cisgender), yet we recognize the disproportionate patriarchal violence enacted against cis and trans women. 4. we borrow this formulation from waheed 2014. 5. we recognize and have been in dialogue with other decolonial politically engaged methodologies, such as action, coparticipatory, and collaborative research. see hernández castillo 2016 for a feminist discussion of these genealogies. 6. the fmln political party, as opposed to the fmln guerrilla movement from which the party was born, made gender equality an official part of its ideological mission. 7. we understand gender violence to include nonphysical forms of actions, such as threats and harassment. 8. yumas, or foreigners in cuban slang, belong to what l. kaifa roland (2013, 408) calls the “monied ‘race.’” 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turns thirty, old enough to understand its place in the world, but still young enough to dream of better years ahead. to edit a journal of ca’s quality and legacy is a wonderful honor and a serious responsibility. of the many excellent anthropology journals in the world, few can claim a more consistent legacy of anticipating and shaping anthropological conversations to come. for thirty years, ca has worked to extend the horizons of the anthropological imagination and helped to give these form, content, and legitimacy. at times restless, at times contemplative, the journal has always sought inspiration from the human sciences more widely, leading to remarkable exchanges with and about narrative, reflexivity, media, postcolonial studies, queer theory, globalization, science and technology studies, poststructuralism, neoliberalism, affect, and most recently reaching toward infrastructure, ethics, multispecies ethnography, and materialist and ontological turns. it is an impressive back catalog, deep in anticipations and inter-illuminations. that catalog encourages us to adopt a capacious editorial philosophy at the level of content. the ideal ca submission is one that will say something unexpected yet generative, timely but also untimely. editors are not seers of what will occupy disciplinary attentions next; our job is simply to work together with authors and reviewers on the process of eliciting articles’ most persuasive and thoughtful realizations. where cultural anthropology goes next thematically and analytically thus depends not on us but on you; send us bold work that builds from field particularities toward conceptual transparticularities, well-written, carefully contextualized, aware of its origins, stakes and intervention, and we will publish as much of it as we can. if we are open to all contributions regardless of their specific content, we are trying to be more activist in the domains of form and medium. during the past decade, the journal has distinguished itself at the forefront of anthropology’s transition into digital publishing. cultural anthropology was the first american anthropological association (aaa) journal to actively and creatively utilize a website to augment journal-based content under the fortuns’ editorship. under anne allison and charlie piot’s guidance, culanth.org evolved into a full-blown publication portal with new content channels operated by the editors and the journal’s contributing editors. features hosted in the fieldsights section of our website like theorizing the contemporary, hot spots, and anthropod are now as essential to the society for cultural anthropology’s (sca) publishing portfolio as the research articles contained within ca, and they have helped us find wider audiences. our recent hot spot on ebola alone received 13,000 pageviews in its first week online. with cultural anthropology’s open-access transition last year, the website serves as the journal’s principal publication platform as well. every ca article published since 2014 is now freely available in electronic form to anyone in the world with the ability to access and download it. in 2014, we had 160,000 unique pageviews of journal content and 250,000 unique pageviews of fieldsights content.1 a new era for ca is here, and we hope to make the most of it by taking advantage of the rich potentialities of digital information and communication technology. in that spirit, we are proud to announce two new featured sections for the journal. openings and retrospectives begins in the next issue with a collection of essays on “life above earth.” rather than a compilation of articles driven by field-research, openings and retrospectives offer bundles of three to five conceptually driven essays of less than four thousand words each, a scale that allows for depth, range, and conversation but that also emphasizes setting an agenda in a straightforward way. the idea is to put a ca twist on both the traditional special issue format and the anthropological theory essay and to adapt to our discipline’s increasing interest in exploring shorter publication formats. retrospectives will intervene in ongoing theoretical conversations, seeking to spin them in new directions. openings will focus on emergent thematics and analytics, imagining what anthropologists might be talking about next. like the art world from whose language we borrow, both sections will be contemporary in their orientation, which is to say that they will provide commentary on where anthropological thinking and writing stands today. as with all content in the journal, openings and retrospectives will be peer-reviewed. we have commissioned a few collections to give a sense of what is possible, but we look forward to then stepping back and working with authors on their own visions for how this section could evolve. please send your good ideas our way! sound and vision is a feature we expect to launch in 2016 that seeks to harness the multimedia potentialities of internet-based publication to help inspire new modalities of anthropological communication. we hope to be the first anthropology journal to offer the possibility of publishing articles with embedded audio and video materials. have you ever imagined incorporating field conversations or video vignettes into a research article? what if you could provide animated graphics or even a sound track to your article? anthropologists have long discussed the desirability of multimedia ethnography, and innovative projects like ethnographic terminalia have given us tantalizing glimpses of what is now possible in installation-style formats. we believe that there is no better time than now to reimagine the traditional scholarly journal article, especially in fields like anthropology with its richly and variously sensuous research. with digital affordances we need no longer restrict ourselves to the conventions of the printed article, even as we respect their rationale. new ethnographic modalities are beckoning. we look forward to developing these and other features. we will nevertheless be honest: much of our labor will be expended behind the scenes as we strive to make cultural anthropology’s mission of providing high-quality open-access anthropological knowledge sustainable and scalable on a long-term basis. we do not yet have a settled financial model for doing so, and although we might be heartened that many far more prestigious knowledge-sharing organizations seem likewise to be feeling their way through the dark of internet and social media–era communication, we know that serious challenges await us. it is no secret that the current model of anthropological publication is broken. on the one hand, partnerships with for-profit publishers contribute to a system that bleeds libraries dry and reinforces pay walls limiting the reach of our scholarship, particularly outside the global north. on the other hand, even the for-profit system appears to be failing as subscriptions and revenues steadily decline. we feel that the time for a new professional standard of open-access publishing has arrived, and we aspire to prototype, in partnership with allied open-access projects and advocates, a model for sustainable peer-reviewed open access that can be scaled up to the level of the discipline. still, we recognize that open access is no utopia. it will involve retrofits and reskilling, more work, and even sacrifice. as our managing editor, tim elfenbein (2014), has written recently, for a scholarly society like the sca to become a publisher means that we scholars must understand better what happens once we hit the send button on our scholarly articles. we will need to commit ourselves to absorbing new kinds of expertise and to finding new partners like foundations, libraries, and not-for-profit publishers to help us manage the operations of the journal. this is all to say that the journal’s current metamorphosis marks an incredibly important new direction. but ca’s vulnerabilities and precarities will be exposed along the way, and everyone who cares about this journal must be willing to share in the labor of tending it. the past year has taught us that open access is not just a publishing model. it also concerns the relationships we scholars seek to have with one another. cultural anthropology’s venture into distributing its content freely will succeed or fail based on our willingness to work together on a project of common purpose. this means developing new institutions of journal-making while maintaining our traditionally high standards of publication. in the era of open access, ca needs to become more of a collaborative enterprise, one transparent about the many kinds of labor—some paid but mostly volunteered—on which the journal depends for its continued existence. the journal also needs to recognize its accountability to its new publishers, the membership of the sca. however much ca might be regarded as a high-flying trendsetter, the journal needs to be creative and serious about providing value to that membership to justify its future. we have already taken some small steps in this direction, and we expect there will be more. each month, we are sending out between two-thirds and three-quarters of submitted articles for peer review because we recognize that high-quality peer review is perhaps the most important service ca can provide the membership beyond publication. we also offer a variety of forms of hands-on editorial and publishing experience to graduate students in the context of our contributing editor and digital content editor programs. beyond this, we have worked to increase inclusivity by expanding the size of our editorial board, seeking to identify representatives of the many research-oriented departments and institutions that rely on ca for publication and credentialing. we have distributed to the board a large chunk of editorial authority in the form of selecting our pool of peer reviewers. and we have also reimagined our editorial office as that of an editorial collective. that is, there are three of us who reach all major editorial decisions collectively (including the review of incoming manuscripts, editorial work on improving them, and the curation of research articles and web content). a larger group of editors enriches the journal through a multiplicity of opinions and backgrounds that help us better model what might be of interest to you, the broad and diverse readership of cultural anthropology. in short, ca will maintain its high standards and distinctiveness, but with a greater decentralization of authority and responsibility as befits an open-access model of publication. to quote our friends among the anarcho-surrealists of iceland, “now is the time for circles not pyramids.” finally, we would like to say that our experience reviewing submissions during the past year has made us utterly hopeful about ca’s future. just seeing the quality of the work done week in, week out by our peer reviewers (the true heroes of this entire enterprise), feeling the vibrant innovative energy that our contributing editors bring to culanth.org, and reading the fascinating research submitted on a daily basis—all speak volumes about the investment that so many scholars have in this journal. cultural anthropology is thriving because so many people care that it thrives, which in turn should reassure all of us that ca’s thirty-something years will be bright ones. so, happy thirtieth to cultural anthropology and its readership! the next four years promise to be a marvelous adventure, one that we look forward to sharing with you. notes 1. unique pageviews are a measure of web traffic in which all pages viewed by a single visitor during a session on a website are counted once. this gives a more exact sense of how many individual pages are visited on culanth.org. during the same period, we received 177,000 total pageviews of journal content and 293,000 total pageviews of fieldsights content. references elfenbein, timothy w. 2014 “cultural anthropology and the infrastructure of publishing.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 288–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.06. digital sutures digital sutures: experimental stop-motion animation as future horizon of indigenous cinema kristin l. dowell florida state university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2511-2389 the scholarship on indigenous futurisms often focuses on an analysis of indigenous engagements with the science-fiction genre or on the role of prophecy and cosmology within indigenous traditions. in this essay, i want to shift the focus toward experimental stop-motion animation as a cinematic practice that literally handcrafts new, imaginative futuristic worlds, analyzing two films by michif media artist amanda spotted fawn strong, an award-winning filmmaker living on unceded coast salish territories in vancouver. making use of the multimedia publishing capabilities developed by cultural anthropology, i have embedded clips from two of strong’s animations, enabling readers to experience the vividly rendered, otherworldly realm of the space of oral tradition in indigo (2014) and the cinematic exploration of family history and cultural memory in four faces of the moon (2016). each of these films represents an engagement with indigenous futurisms in ways that address the fluidity of indigenous ideas of time, so that the past flows into the present and future, while digitally suturing generations of strong’s relatives together across time and space in a way that simply would not be possible with live-action film. in these ways, the artistry of strong’s handcrafted puppets and set design, combined with her original illustrations and unconventional approach to cinematic storytelling, actively pushes the boundaries of the future horizon of indigenous cinema. to imagine otherwise: theorizing indigenous futurisms i explore the idea of indigenous futurisms by focusing on one example of a media practice that inventively creates indigenous cinematic worlds, which engage the past to envision alternative indigenous futures without necessarily utilizing the frame of science fiction. my approach to this work is indebted to scholars including grace dillon (2012), william lempert (2014), and danika medak-saltzman (2017), who have analyzed the emergence of a distinctive literary and cinematic aesthetic within indigenous science fiction as a key site for the articulation of indigenous futurisms. central to this work is a critique of the ways in which indigenous peoples have been misrepresented in mainstream media and in early anthropological scholarship, which often fixed indigenous peoples in the past and refused to recognize their contemporary presence or envision their futures. as medak-saltzman (2017, 143) argues: such futurist work, whether dystopic, utopic, or somewhere in between, serves to not only counter persistent settler-colonial fantasies of native disappearance but, and perhaps more important, by envisioning native peoples and our ways of being and understanding of the world as essential to any shared futures, these efforts to “imagine otherwise” (a term i borrow from daniel heath justice, http://imagineotherwise.ca) hold the potential to help strengthen our communities as we work to negotiate within and beyond settler colonial realities. imagination is a powerful tool for helping to envision, bring about, and build better futures. amanda strong is an indigenous media artist who, like the indigenous filmmakers and artists with whom faye ginsburg and fred myers (2006, 29) work—is creating “an indigenous presence” and a “force with which others must reckon.” whether through a cinematic adaptation of cree oral tradition or by inserting the filmmaker back in time to talk with her ancestors and witness key historical moments of métis resistance, strong’s films visually represent what grace dillon (2012) has called native slipstream, a style of speculative fiction that infuses stories with time travel, alternate realities and multiverses, as well as alternative histories. according to dillon (2012, 3): “native slipstream views time as pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream. it thus replicates nonlinear thinking about space-time.” fascinatingly, in each of strong’s films, a piece of media technology becomes the portal or mechanism through which these native currents of time flow and out of which an empowered indigenous cultural future emerges. grandmother spider and the strength of the drum strong’s film indigo is set in an otherworldly, uncanny house with multiple rooms and levels, all marked symbolically with different colors and rendered in an indigenous steampunk aesthetic. from this space, indigo, a confined young indigenous woman, seeks to escape through the help of grandmother spider, a film projector, and a native drum. figure 1. indigo, with film projector. still from indigo (2014). image courtesy of amanda strong and vtape. while translucent, ephemeral memories flicker across the walls in the attic thanks to a film projector, grandmother spider seeks to restore the spirit of the young woman who ultimately escapes her confinement by drumming and singing, activities that make a tree grow up and out of the house. strong describes this film, inspired by cree and anishinaabe oral tradition, as an exploration of the role of imagination, while mixing “indigenous principles of the medicine wheel and stories of grandmother spider with personal experience” (mattson 2014). figure 2. grandmother spider. still from indigo (2014). image courtesy of amanda strong and vtape. the color palette of the film—which shifts from a rich yellow to stark, cool white to vibrant red accented with deep black as the main character moves from room to room in the house—reflects the indigenous principles of the medicine wheel. indigo’s clothing likewise points to the symbolism associated with the teachings of the medicine wheel. the entire film is set inside what appears to be a large victorian house, opening with indigo confined to the attic, which she escapes through a trapdoor in the floor. she then moves between rooms through a fireplace as grandmother spider encourages her to recall memories of her youth and indigenous teachings associated with the drum. video 1. excerpt from indigo (2014). video courtesy of amanda strong and vtape. in the clip embedded above, indigo and grandmother spider have fallen through a portal in the fireplace to a room that appears to be in the basement. as indigo searches the walls for a way out, the viewer notices the sprout of a small tree growing in the center of the room. the nimble metal legs of grandmother spider scurry over to where indigo’s drum has fallen out of her red leather messenger bag. insistently, grandmother spider taps her leg on the drum, pausing after each resonant sound as she notices that each beat makes the tree seedling grow. at this point, indigo walks over to the seedling and kneels down to pick up the drum. closing her eyes in reverence, she begins to play a round dance song on the drum. as she plays, the tree grows and grows, until it shoots through the ceiling and back up into the space of the attic where the film opened. figure 3. indigo gazes up at the tree she has made grow with her drumming. image courtesy of amanda strong and vtape. indigo looks up to the highest branches before she climbs up the tree back into the attic alongside grandmother spider. the drum once again secured in her bag, indigo nods at grandmother spider and pats the bag, reassuringly holding the drum. i interpret this sequence as a cinematic rendering of the cultural significance of the drum, suggesting that liberation can occur through a return to one’s ancestral teachings. indigo has neither narration nor dialogue, relying completely on indigenous iconography, aesthetics, and adaptations of knowledge contained in oral traditions to drive the film. strong explains: to me the medicine wheel is about balance. the rooms and indigo’s dresses interpretively reflect the four colors, directions, elements, seasons and stage of life among other teachings. though i do not claim to be following any story in its entirety, i am intrigued by stories of grandmother spider. to me she represents the creator and life cycle as well as a catalyst for spiritual awakening. (sneyd 2014) indigo utilizes the strengths of stop-motion animation, combined with hand-drawn illustration and digital animation techniques, to create an indigenous world that reflects a vivid rendering of the space of oral tradition, all the while anchoring the power of indigenous futures within indigenous knowledge and teachings. darkroom as time portal four faces of the moon shifts the viewer through a lunar cycle while slipping backward in time and forward toward an indigenous future resonant with cultural strength and infinite possibilities. throughout the film, viewers find themselves enveloped in the sounds of four indigenous languages spoken by actors voicing strong’s ancestors. i was struck by the photographic darkroom as a central space in this film. it becomes a time portal through which amanda strong, represented as the photographer in the film, inserts herself back in time to interact with her ancestors and witness important moments in métis history. figure 4. photography darkroom, from an art installation of the sets, puppets, and props from four faces of the moon held at vancouver’s grunt gallery in july 2016. photo courtesy of dennis ha/grunt gallery. strong’s masterful filmmaking creatively and effectively utilizes film’s inherent capacity to manipulate time and space to digitally suture four generations of her family into the frames of the work. we can find this illustrated powerfully in a poignant production image, in which strong places her head alongside two of the puppets representing her ancestors—her great-great-grandfather, napoleon bousquet, and her grandmother, olivine bousquet, as a young girl. figure 5. amanda strong, with two figures representing her relatives. production still from four faces of the moon. image courtesy of amanda strong. four faces of the moon stands as a testament to the capacity of film to bridge time and space, allowing indigenous filmmakers like strong to connect with their relatives and ancestors. * * * i am gidagakoons (spotted fawn) this is for my grandmother olivine bousquet. it is also for those ancestors who walked before me, people who carried indigenous language and ceremony, people who held the buffalo in a place of reverence and relied on them for sustenance before they were systemically destroyed and removed from the land. —opening title card for four faces of the moon the film opens with a sequence following a fawn as it runs through the forest fleeing an arrow. suddenly, the fawn comes to a sharp halt and transforms into the figure of a photographer gazing up in horror at a pile of buffalo skulls as the film shifts into the space of the darkroom, where archival photos of ancestors surround the photographer. after putting on her cap with a beaded buffalo icon on its brim, the protagonist slings a camera over her shoulder before heading out the door of the darkroom and back in time, in search of a connection with her ancestors. video 2. excerpt from four faces of the moon (2016). video courtesy of amanda strong and the winnipeg film group. this clip from the opening sequence of the film underlines the power of stop-motion animation to craft the worlds that these characters inhabit. rather than relying on live action or documentary, strong uses sets and puppets for this stop-motion-animated world, which opens up new possibilities for interactions between relatives from different generations. having inserted herself into the past, she makes visible the indigenous histories and stories that canadian settler society has sought to keep invisible for too long. this affirmation of identity, connection to ancestors, and the recentering of indigenous history offers a vibrant example of what faye ginsburg (2002) calls “screen memories.” according to ginsburg (2002, 39), “indigenous people are using screen media not to mask, but to recuperate their own collective stories and histories—some of them traumatic—that have been erased in the national narratives of the dominant culture and are in danger of being forgotten within local worlds as well.” figure 6. mound of buffalo skulls, from the 2016 grunt gallery installation. photo courtesy of dennis ha/grunt gallery. four faces of the moon contains a vehement critique of endlessly churning, destructive consumption on the part of canadian settler society, symbolized by the historical pursuit of driving the buffalo to extinction. the history of the u.s. attempt to eradicate the buffalo as a means to disrupt the cultural way of life and primary food source of indigenous plains nations is well documented. in this film, however, strong brings similar canadian efforts to light, highlighting their detrimental impact on her cree, anishinaabe, and métis ancestors. the haunting image of buffalo skulls piled up to the dark sky while an eerie green light emanates from the bones, along with an ominous sequence on a train in which hunters shoot buffalo from the windows, convey the horror and long-term cultural legacies of this historical experience. in a poetic voice-over, one of strong’s ancestors proclaims: “victory was left unsatisfied, unsavory. they would not stop until everything became unrecognizable, unbalanced.” video 3. excerpt from four faces of the moon (2016). video courtesy of amanda strong and the winnipeg film group. in contrast to this destruction and dispossession of indigenous land stand the traditions and rhythms of indigenous cultural protocols, respect for the land, and the honoring of the deep connections between people and place. at several points in the film her ancestors demonstrate teachings of respect for the land through ceremony and protocol: she learns to make offerings of tobacco to the earth and to the spirit of the buffalo whose skulls mark the landscape. for a film that explores such a dark chapter of canada’s history, it might come as a surprise that the work ultimately concludes on an image of hope and resilience. figure 7. still from four faces of the moon (2016). image courtesy of amanda strong and the winnipeg film group. one of the most striking and powerful images in the film is a scene in which strong stands hand in hand with her grandmother, olivine, as the buffalo stream around them. leather medicine bags hang around their necks, and olivine wears a métis sash diagonally across her chest. both of their heads are held high and a fierce pride in their métis and indigenous identity radiates off the screen as the voice-over declares: “we are awake and stronger within the circle. carry peace in your heart even when witnessing corrupted shadows. your blood recognizes the fire of home and remembers your spirit’s name.” figure 8. olivine bousquet, holding the puppet that represented her in four faces of the moon. photo courtesy of amanda strong. one cannot help but think of strong’s ancestors, as the anchors for her cultural identity and rootedness in her traditional territory, beaming with pride as she carves out her own path and distinctive artistic voice. conclusion the characteristics of amanda strong’s films that i have discussed above are precisely what animated my interest when i first set out to conduct my research on indigenous media fifteen years ago. quite simply, her films are unlike anything i have ever seen before. i view strong as a powerful representative of the future because her inventive films pulse off the screen with richly rendered scenes exploring family history, ancestral memory, and deep connections to place, while simultaneously articulating an innovative vision that moves indigenous cinema in a new direction. i am not the only one to see her as part of the future of indigenous cinema. in january 2017, alanis obomsawin was chosen by the toronto film critics association as the winner of the clyde gilmour award, which meant that she was able to choose a young filmmaker as the recipient of the technicolor prize, worth $50,000 in postproduction services from technicolor. obomsawin did not hesitate in choosing strong, remarking: “when i saw her last film [four faces of the moon], i was very touched by it, very impressed by her work. she obviously has important stories to tell” (collins 2017). this honor seemed particularly meaningful, as strong has described obomsawin as an inspiration: alanis is such an inspiration to not just indigenous women in film, but all women in film. her spirit and dedication to educating the world on aboriginal issues in canada is admirable. . . . it is an honor to have her works as something to aspire to, and it is my hope that i can continue to make pieces that embark on social change and awareness. (collins 2017) in a twitter post on january 10, 2017, the renowned ojibwe film critic and director of canada’s indigenous screen office jesse wente succinctly captured this remarkable moment at the toronto film critics association awards ceremony, remarking: “spent evening with alanis obomsawin and amanda strong, the origins and future of indigenous cinema. love nights like these! #nativeawesome.” her distinctive visual aesthetic positions strong as a rising voice in indigenous cinema and as part of a younger generation of artists unbound by the weight of cinematic genre or convention. she reclaims her family and personal stories, branching these stories out to link them to larger indigenous and métis histories—experiences and narratives too often obscured in the canadian consciousness. indigo and four faces of the moon vibrantly shimmer with the tremendous power of strong’s inventive cinematic vision, one that digitally imagines spirit and memory while suturing generations of her family and honoring the resilience of her relatives and the resurgence of indigenous languages, identity, and nationhood. this article has emerged from my ongoing collaborative research with indigenous filmmakers in vancouver, where i have spent fifteen years of my professional and personal life exploring the dynamic terrain of indigenous media production. i am honored to be able to continue this journey collaboratively alongside scholars, artists, and media-makers like amanda strong, who are pushing the boundaries and expanding the future horizon for indigenous cinema. acknowledgments i extend my deepest gratitude to amanda strong for inviting me for a studio visit, which allowed me to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of her production process, and for our ongoing and engaged dialogue about her media art. i also thank her for permission to use still images and media clips from her films in this essay. thank you to dan pon and glenn alteen of the grunt gallery, wanda vanderstoop at vtape, and monica lowe at the winnipeg film group for image permissions. thank you, as well, to william lempert for the invitation to participate in the “indigenous media futures” panel at the 2016 annual meeting of the american anthropological association, which inspired this openings and retrospectives collection. funding for this research was provided by a dean’s faculty travel award from the florida state university college of arts and sciences and by the florida state university department of anthropology. this essay is dedicated to olivine bousquet, who traveled to the spirit world on april 13, 2018. her luminous spirit lives on in the work of her granddaughter, in the love of her family, and in the lives of everyone she touched. may she rest in power among her ancestors in the stars. references collins, leah 2017 “this indigenous filmmaker is being championed by a canadian icon, and here’s why.” cbc, january 12. http://www.cbc.ca/arts/this-indigenous-filmmaker-is-being-championed-by-a-canadian-icon-and-here-s-why-1.3932477. dillon, grace l. 2012 walking the clouds: an anthology of indigenous science fiction. tucson: university of arizona press. ginsburg, faye 2002 “screen memories: resignifying the traditional in indigenous media.” in media worlds: anthropology on new terrain, edited by faye d. ginsburg, lila abu-lughod, and brian larkin, 39–58. berkeley: university of california press. ginsburg, faye, and fred myers 2006 “a history of aboriginal futures.” critique of anthropology 26, no. 1: 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x06061482. lempert, william 2014 “decolonizing encounters of the third kind: alternative futuring in native science fiction film.” visual anthropology review 30, no. 2: 164–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12046. mattson, kelcie 2014 “tiff women directors: meet amanda strong—indigo.” indiewire, september 11. http://www.indiewire.com/2014/09/tiff-women-directors-meet-amanda-strong-indigo-205894. medak-saltzman, danika 2017 “coming to you from the indigenous future: native women, speculative film shorts, and the art of the possible.” studies in american indian literatures 29, no. 1: 139–71. https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.29.1.0139. sneyd, luke 2014 “tiff 2014: interview with indigo’s amanda strong.” biff bam pop!, september 6. https://biffbampop.com/2014/09/06/tiff-2014-interview-with-indigos-amanda-strong. solidarity dilemmas in times of austerity: auto-ethnographic interventions cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 134-166, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.10 solidarity dilemmas in times of austerity: auto-ethnographic interventions dimitrios theodossopoulos university of kent, uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8453-3450 there is a split in myself that has troubled my anthropological engagements with solidarity initiatives in crisis-afflicted greece. it is between two authorial voices that compete in structuring and influencing my writing: the first adopts a rigid, uncompromising stance regarding power, while the second considers strategic compromise as an essential part of protracted resistance. the first voice criticizes my second authorial voice for being a bourgeois socialist of sorts, for example, in embracing the humanitarian possibility. the second voice disapproves of the hard ideological stance of the former, especially his dogmatic rejection of humanitarian solidarity as “philanthropy in disguise.” to address this emerging contradiction, i make use of—and share with the readership of this journal—an innovative analytical tool that foregrounds the ambivalence and codependence of competing ideological positions in ethnographic writing. rather than hiding the authorial split i describe above, i take advantage of the representational possibilities it engenders. the split itself, i will demonstrate, results from parallel conversations between the ethnographer and their interlocutors in the field. the emerging dialectic—an exchange of opposing views in intersubjective ambiguity (jackson 1998)—serves here as an ethnographic device that facilitates the analysis of local disagreements, but in a manner that challenges the limitations of singular representation and “the reduction of social life to fixed forms” (williams 1977, 129). making visible the conflicting predilections of the author (and the degree to which these are constituted in dialogue with his respondents) serves as a remedy against the bias of singular representation and the concomitant colonial vision of the “lonely” ethnographer (rosaldo 1989). most ethnographers recognize those moments when they—and the people they study—feel divided in identifying with more than one argument or type of practice. sometimes, the plurality of such identifications can be traced within the narratives of the same anthropological respondent, but also, within the conflicting commitments of the same anthropological author. reflexive attention to such plural views can unravel the multiple layers of consciousness that shape the ethnographic outcome (jackson 1998; bochner and ellis 2016), as well as specify and undermine the authenticity of the author as knower (fabian 1983; clifford and marcus 1986; davies 1998). the auto-ethnographic approach opens the way for treating the authorial self as a resource (collins and gallinat 2010), adding transparency to the interrelationship between the researcher and the researched (see okely and callaway 1992; reed-danahay 1997). the authorial split i introduce below builds on these previous perspectives to provide a representational lens for seeing others through more than one self-critical anthropological self, which take responsibility for the complicit interrelationship between the ethnographer and their interlocutors in the field (marcus 1997). in this article, i test the effectiveness of the analytical tool introduced here against a set of irresolvable dilemmas that emerged from the context of humanitarian solidarity initiatives in austerity-stricken greece. that is, the voluntary, grassroots associations of citizens acting together to provide support—psychological or legal advice, food, clothes, medicine—to refugees, migrants, or fellow citizens severely afflicted by austerity.1 to depart from hierarchical conceptualizations of humanitarianism, most local initiatives have embraced the term solidarity, radicalizing their ideological foundation (see rakopoulos 2016; rozakou 2018b). emerging from this radicalization, the dilemmas addressed here embrace contradictory views about the emancipatory or compromising dimensions of humanitarian giving, as well as wider issues regarding resistance to austerity politics. for example, should we conceive the prolonged dependency on aid of impoverished citizens (or the whole greek nation) as complicity with hegemony? or does such dependency perhaps constitute a form of strategic compromise—a respite from straightforward opposition—that provides scope and time for a reawakening social consciousness? the questions i outline here point toward the cyclical interweaving of resistance and compromise, and remind us of the foucauldian axiom that resistance cannot be separated from power (foucault 1978, 95; see also abu-lughod 1990). anthropological analyses of resistance indicate that resistance is not the opposite of domination—or, i would add, the opposite of compromise. local opposition to power is not autonomous of the wider cultural and politico-economic relationships resisted in the first place (keesing 1992; gledhill 1994, 2012; ortner 1995; theodossopoulos 2015). in practice, however, such a nuanced and sophisticated view of the interplay between resistance and compromise can inform more than one argument in opposition. the persuasiveness of such arguments, as these are articulated during anthropological fieldwork, has generated the authorial split i outline here. allow me to draw the parameters of this ideological disagreement. the split the first analytical voice within me that has shaped this article is a self-centered voice, authoritative and guided by uncompromising marxist principles. it superimposes an interpretation of complicity with hegemonic neoliberalism on other people’s political choices—a sort of false consciousness, so to speak. i refer to this voice in my mind as the “uncompromising author,” although my other authorial self has another name for him: the “pathologizing author,” a label that marks a certain authorial arrogance and a failure to appreciate the nuanced meaningfulness of compromise at the local level. the analytical notion of false consciousness has pathologizing characteristics (theodossopoulos 2015), as it assumes that the other does not know the nature of their exploitation—at least, not as clearly as the author. my uncompromising authorial self bristles at the burden of such critical self-accusations. he desires to rescue the notion of false consciousness from its pathologizing liabilities. this ambition represents a move in the direction of a wider reflexive-marxist project, toward which this article takes a small step. the second author within me prefers a bottom-up approach that foregrounds the situated rationality of social actors and fieldwork interlocutors. he is a “lefty,” particularly concerned about challenges set by inequality, but open to flexible solutions, even if these constitute partial compromises. i refer to the second voice in my mind as the “rationalizing author,” as he is frequently accused—by my hard-marxist authorial voice—of producing an apology for people’s compromise and inaction (disguised as a grassroots perspective). despite such criticisms, the rationalizing author persistently unearths undiscovered sets of meaning from local, unofficial conversation: the interpretations of his socially and politically emplaced interlocutors. “yes, it is true, some of these interpretations seem like rationalizations,” admits my soft-marxist self, “but the job of the anthropologist is to make sense of this mess.” representational tools i would like to introduce the authorial fragmentation presented above as an analytical tool that makes visible a productive infighting—a tussle within one’s mind—generated by the overpowering persuasiveness of local arguments in tension. i will lay out the rationale of this autobiographical device for the benefit of other researchers who seek to capture ethnographically the coexistence of plural ideological identifications. in this article, the local identifications in question emerge from a discursive trajectory about compromise and solidarity that involves many local voices in the austerity-stricken city of patras.2 the voices of my debating interlocutors from patras resonate with the two authorial voices in my head,3 and lead me to believe that my pathologizing and rationalizing authorial identities are not isolated from each other (or from the local points of view that generated them), but that they have resulted from an intersubjective crystallization of ideas. solidarians in patras do not merely juxtapose the two positions outlined: they navigate through them and the dilemmas they engender with admirable pragmatism and flexibility (papataxiarchis 2018; see also cabot 2016; rozakou 2016b; rakopoulos 2018). instead of reducing the emerging debates to a singular interpretation—as if one or the other argument has to prevail—i choose to underline here their unresolved nature, taking responsibility for the resulting ideological reduction structured by my authorial split. through this reflexive approach, the dichotomy that the author artificially inflates becomes the object of caricature: a reduction registered and exposed. the narrative technique of exposing a caricature by caricaturing invites us to consider the advantages of another representational tool employed in this article: graphic ethnography. the latter is a rapidly expanding approach that embraces ethnographically more than one form, the written and the graphic (marcus 2017).4 the combination of text and drawing brings to the fore ethnographic details that might otherwise pass unnoticed. the panels that follow, for example, remind the reader that the voices of our respondents emerge sometimes in ideologically motivated conversations. the latter may sometimes take place over food and drink; they may be more or less emotionally charged—triggering particular body postures, including the subtle or emphatic reposition of heads or hands. in this respect, the graphic medium can remind the reader that in conversations we all do more than express opinions: we share and debate ideas with friends, attempt to persuade, flatter, or compromise. the image of the ethnographer in the graphic frame serves as a further reminder that the ethnographic product—or the authorial split, in this case—is co-authored, the result of an ongoing conversation. my particular use of graphic ethnography in this article makes available components of the original ethnographic discussions presented as integral to the ethnographic narrative. they reanimate but also destabilize the authoritativeness of ethnographic interpretation, opening, rather than closing, ethnographic imagination (ingold 2011, 2012). to escape from overidentification with particular positions—a problem related to the topic i tackle here—i have mirrored the emerging dilemmas on one’s self: setting my protagonists, and myself, against their previous views, to escape momentarily from the performative certainty of arguing particular positions. to the extent that the graphic medium trades in reductions, it can—almost as easily—showcase internal complexity, accentuating a sense of incompleteness (taussig 2011; theodossopoulos 2016a) as well as a sense of ethnographic openness (see graphic panel below). graphic ethnography panels work synergistically with the main text in a way that resembles how neni panourgiá (1995, xx, 2009) uses parerga (singular, parergon), that is, as work presented “alongside, another, main work” to offer an additional perspective and aid the analysis. following panourgiá, i use the technique of parerga to support some of my graphic panels, offering further commentary and contextualization. the combination of these three analytical tools—graphic ethnography, the parerga, and the authorial split—intends to challenge the singularity of anthropological representation. all three tools rely on reflexivity to generate a unified, self-critical effect that allows the author to coconstruct their object of study with respondents (see okely and callaway 1992; reed-danahay 1997; davies 1998; collins and gallinat 2010). notably, reflexivity is not merely a remedy against the biases generated by the invisible use of the authorial filter; it also foregrounds a more nuanced view of the other. far from advancing self-absorption, self-critical reflexivity can generate—to turn clifford geertz’s (1989, 2) aphorism on its head—“plain and unpretending” anthropological texts. greek solidarity dilemmas: anthropological insights the growth of grassroots humanitarian initiatives in austerity-afflicted greece has brought attention to the emancipatory role of solidarity as a concept that reconciles an ideological wariness toward philanthropy and the institutionalization of aid. an emerging body of anthropological work has registered this reawakening of solidarity in greece. i employ this literature here as a comparative conceptual context to explore the ideological dilemmas of my solidarian respondents in patras, an urban center troubled by austerity. considering that my ethnographic exploration focuses specifically on the narratives of the supporters of two political parties in the period between 2015 and 2018,5 the discussion that follows expands the temporal and geographic scope of my analysis by bringing together insights from other anthropological work.6 but let me start by outlining the impact of the marxist perspective on greek ideas about solidarity. the basic premises of the marxist critique of philanthropy are familiar to several solidarians who participate in initiatives that aim to ameliorate the consequences of austerity in greece. the original critique can be traced back to the communist manifesto, in which karl marx and friedrich engels (1998) pointed out that philanthropic charity (of the bourgeois-socialist variety) facilitates and reproduces existing capitalist hierarchies. many theorists have echoed and developed this critique in the past 160 years,7 slavoj žižek most prominent among them. he identifies charity as a facilitating and redemptive constituent of the contemporary capitalist economy (žižek 2009). in greece, the communist party has communicated marxist ideas to the wider community, including the critique of bourgeois philanthropy, which at the local level informs spontaneous discussions about the ethics of solidarity among left-leaning solidarians. this long-established marxist-inspired critique has generated a desire among greek social actors involved in the aid and voluntary sector to replace the hierarchical notion of philanthropy (φιλανθρωπία) with the more horizontal concept of solidarity (αλληλεγγύη). in late twentieth-century greece, solidarity was associated narrowly with the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements, but it acquired a new relevance in the early twenty-first century with the influx of immigrants and refugees and the introduction of antisocial austerity measures following the debt crisis (rozakou 2018b, 189–90). this shift has resulted in the semiotic amplification of the term to embrace a wider array of progressive, antisystemic action (rakopoulos 2018). the term solidarian (αλληλέγγυος), an adjective turned into a noun, is a neologism that captures this antisystemic dynamic (rakopoulos 2016; rozakou 2017, 2018b). recent anthropological work has brought analytical attention to the subtle and nuanced dimensions of this reanimated ethos of solidarity that proliferates in austerity-ridden greece. to draw attention to its emancipatory and transformative possibilities, theodoros rakopoulos (2016) frames the notion of solidarity theoretically as a “bridge-concept” that unites diverse ideological elements with local practices embedded in social relationships. the renewed popularity of the concept among greek activists reflects a desire to evade the inflexibility of formal institutions and the hierarchies of giving (implicit in humanitarian aid). emerging as a politically aware alternative to philanthropy, solidarity serves as an inspirational principle that provides “a form of political education” realized through collective grassroots action (rakopoulos 2016, 143). rakopoulos’s work provides us with examples of activist mobilization that aims to subvert austerity through alternative forms of food distribution.8 an overwhelming majority of greek humanitarian actors affiliated with the left, volunteers and professional aid workers, have replaced philanthropy with solidarity in their vocabulary and practice—in fact, as rakopoulos (2016, 146) observes, even philanthropists have dropped the vocabulary of charity. nevertheless, many solidarians remain doubtful about the degree to which humanitarian solidarity can truly erase the connotations of philanthropy (theodossopoulos 2016b): has solidarity simply become another word for philanthropy?9 heath cabot provides us with a helpful metaphor to conceptualize this particular dilemma. urban greek solidarians are aware of the “two-facedness” inherent in the ethics of giving: solidarity inspires collective action, but it is also “tied to” “neoliberalism and austerity” (cabot 2016, 153). this two-part realization generates a janus-face effect, argues cabot, one ridden with ambivalence. cabot’s athenian respondents—volunteers in social clinics and social pharmacies—do not see solidarity as a remedy for the crisis, but rather as another one of its aspects, one intimately linked to dominant forms of neoliberal injustice. such nuanced local views can help us appreciate that solidarity initiatives in greece generate a political awareness nurturing a productive self-critique: participating in humanitarian solidarity is not a radical break from neoliberal austerity, and many solidarians are self-aware of these limitations (cabot 2013, 2014). the dilemma outlined above has deeper roots. in the greek humanitarian and volunteering context, the concept of solidarity has a rival: hospitality (φιλοξενία) toward strangers. in fact, solidarity’s antihierarchical connotations become more visible when contrasted with hospitality, which is deeply implicated with the inequality of gift-giving and the performance of competitive masculinity (hirschon 1992, 2001; herzfeld 1987, 1992, 2012; gkintidis 2014, 2018; papataxiarchis 2016c). the comparison between the two concepts encourages a wider anthropological view that expands beyond anti-austerity movements to embrace the wider value system in greek society. such an anthropologically informed analysis is thoroughly accomplished by katerina rozakou (2012) in her work on the power and biopolitics of asylum-hospitality in greece, and the spaces of sociality engendered by solidarity volunteerism in the refugee context (rozakou 2016a, 2017, 2018a). in relation to “the extravagant generosity of hospitality,” she points out, solidarity seems to be a less conspicuous or horizontal alternative (rozakou 2016b, 190). it is such previous, culturally intimate notions—for example, hospitality—that reconstitute (through opposition) the egalitarianism and political relevance of solidarity. the post-2010 explosion of solidarity initiatives in greece has encouraged a reconfiguration of previous attitudes toward giving, something most visible in refugee-crisis volunteerism. rozakou (2016b, 196–97) wonders whether this interesting transformation has something to do with the nature and short-term needs of refugee aid recipients. at the same time, rozakou indicates, the newly emerged egalitarian ethos of solidarity that has permeated greek society under austerity appears to transform the self-identification of middle-class volunteers, leading to a newly relaxed and generous attitude toward asymmetrical giving (rozakou 2016b). the experience of austerity seems to inspire empathetic perspectives (see kirtsoglou and theodossopoulos 2018), encapsulated by the everyday figure of speech, “today it is you, tomorrow it will be me” (kirtsoglou 2018b). it has become increasingly apparent, therefore, that the refugee crisis, combined with the protracted nature of austerity in greece, has engendered a new dynamic that accentuates previous dilemmas regarding the ethics of solidarity (see also, cabot 2019; kirtsoglou 2018a). in what follows, i explore some of these dilemmas, focusing on the narratives of citizens in patras who had previously shared their views about solidarity with me in a recurring dialogue that has remained open since the beginning of the austerity crisis. their arguments, taken together, outline a view of solidarity politics during a particular period of greek political life: the early period of syriza’s (the coalition of the radical left) government (winter 2015 to summer 2018). solidarity beyond political compromise: views from the grassroots the summer of 2015 proved an unsettling time for greek politics. the newly elected left-wing syriza government pressed hard for breaching the regime of austerity, imposed by previous governments and the country’s lenders (also known as the troika).10 the latter, in an uncompromising mood, defended their programmatic vision of austerity. unresolved negotiations led to an impasse, the threat of uncontrolled bankruptcy, and capital controls. many greek citizens in patras—and especially those of left-leaning inclination—felt that their country was being punished for resisting austerity. in a referendum that took place early in july 2015, a 61 percent majority voted against the austerity bailout package offered by the troika. nevertheless, shortly after the referendum (and under the threat of exiting the eu), the greek government and its lenders reached a compromise, one that seemed similar to previous austerity memoranda. subsequently, and following criticisms from its left wing, syriza held elections and was re-elected into power. it seemed that the great majority of syriza’s voters considered tactical compromise a necessary political maneuver. those among my interlocutors in patras affiliated with the left felt divided in evaluating such events. some saw the eventual compromise of the syriza government as a realistic, flexible, and temporary measure that had averted the uncontrolled collapse of the economy and its consequences for the most vulnerable parts of the population. at the same time, other citizens felt betrayed by the pervasiveness of the neoliberal ideas and the extension of austerity.11 in the three years following the summer of 2015, i returned to patras seven times.12 during these field trips, i continued my conversations about the ethics of solidarity and the overall conditions of living under austerity, now conceived as a continuous, protracted regime. from today’s perspective, i can see more clearly that local debates about (a) the country’s eventual compromise to one or another regime of austerity, and also (b) previous dilemmas regarding the appropriateness of humanitarian action, followed two parallel ideological trajectories: on the one hand, some marxist-inspired interlocutors felt compelled to argue in favor of an uncompromising stand, while, on the other hand, several left-inclined solidarians—often more closely affiliated with syriza—accepted compromise as a realistic, temporary, and ultimately subversive tactic. for the latter, compromise was an issue of degree and part of a conscious strategy. it was in fact that degree that separated a “leftist” from a politically conservative position—or at least, this is how the rationalizing author in my mind read their political interpretations.13 we can see the rationale of this second—flexible and realistic—position in the words of eléni, a leading participant in a number of solidarity groups in patras. she had been one of my gate-openers during fieldwork in 2014–2015, and an inspiring presence in the town’s humanitarian scene. it was eléni who introduced to me to a neighborhood solidarity initiative—closely affiliated with syriza—that provides cooked food for citizens impoverished by austerity.14 she has followed the activities of this group consistently since the period of my fieldwork, making additional voluntary contributions to the municipal social clinic (κοινωνικό ιατρείο) and the medicine bank (κοινωνικό φαρμακείο).15 the following conversation took place in may 2016, when we met to catch up, have dinner, and discuss the year that had passed. early in our conversation, i overwhelmed eléni with questions about the continuation of austerity and its effect on the motivation and morale of her fellow solidarians. she explained that she, and most solidarians i remembered from the food-distribution initiative, continued their humanitarian involvement, despite austerity-related difficulties in each citizen’s own life; and she gave examples of how particular solidarians were “not much better off” than the beneficiaries of the aid they helped provide—yet they stayed connected, in solidarity. as the discussion moved to an evaluation of the summer of 2015, eléni confided that a couple of solidarians, mutual friends from the food-distribution initiative, had withdrawn their participation from that particular endeavor, partly because of their disappointment with syriza. eléni understood their sentiments, considering the earlier strong anti-austerity view of these “ex-comrades,” but she stressed that such cases were “exceptions,” not the general rule. everybody was, of course, concerned about the continuation of austerity, which she felt was not the fault of syriza, but rather that of the lenders (των δανιστών), who had been “punitive” (εκδικητικοί) in their approach and “inflexible” (αδιάλλακτοι). after a short pause, eléni provided me with a metaphor that embedded the wider politics of greek debt within the locally meaningful and familiar ethics of solidarity (see graphic below). eléni’s words here prove revealing—not only of the degree to which ideas about humanitarian aid have infiltrated local debates about solidarity but also of informal political views held by several grassroots syriza supporters. they can help us appreciate how the latter reconcile a commitment to the left with the political compromise inherent in local humanitarian action and international politics. in both cases, socialism is perceived as inextricable from giving and forgiving—the cultivation of empathy (see kirtsoglou and theodossopoulos 2018; kirtsoglou 2018b) and the practice of a less calculative rationality. eléni’s overall political perspective seemed disarmingly consistent with her practice in the everyday, in particular her humanitarian contributions to the food-distribution solidarity initiative and the social clinic, but also with her concern that beneficiaries not become ensconced (να βολευτούν) in a passive and perpetual state of helplessness. the ideal aid beneficiary for her was epitomized by those citizens who sought—and recognized their need for—help, but who did not become dependent on it. unlike bourgeois philanthropy that propagates long-term dependency on aid—and eléni was explicit on this point—solidarity initiatives enable, empower, and raise awareness (ευαισθητοποιούν). “well . . . not always,” she added, “but that is our goal.” not surprisingly, my rationalizing authorial self celebrated a small victory when i reflected back on eléni’s measured and flexible view of socialism that evening. it was a short-term victory for that part of my self, lasting only until the following morning, when i met my communist friend mihális. he is a civil engineer who suffered—as did many other individuals in his profession—from the loss of job contracts during the time of austerity. “a civil engineer is the working-class alternative of an architect,” mihális frequently asserts, but he also admits with disarming honesty that he is not working class. the working class in patras was almost eradicated in the 1980s, he explains, “when most factories closed down.” in his opinion this resulted from competitive international capitalism following greece’s entry into the eu. such realizations inspired him to become a member of the communist party of greece (kke), his membership uninterrupted during the past three years. that morning in may 2016 we sat in the coffeehouse he frequented, and where we had met the previous year. we ordered the usual: a greek coffee (without sugar, σκέτος ελληνικός) for him, and lemonade for me—from a local patras company, to support the local economy. “as if nothing has changed,” i remarked poetically, “same table, same bright greek morning light.” “but everything has changed,” he interrupted me, “everything! greece is now, officially, a compromised nation.” as usual, mihális spoke with a strong, unequivocating voice, “for the benefit of the customers at the neighboring tables,” with most of whom he frequently had heated conversations. this time mihális wanted to speak without interruptions, and so he did for ten minutes or so, communicating his contempt for the greek acquiescence to foreign capital, but also his disgust at the eu elite’s “colonial attitude.” “sorry i ranted at you,” he said in the end, “i haven’t see you since last summer. what are you planning to do in patras this time? don’t tell me you will go again to these charities [τις φιλανθρωπίες] that you support?” i mumbled a word or two, aware that mihális saw humanitarian action as a pointless bourgeois undertaking, only to be interrupted one more time. he continued as you can read in the graphic depiction of his monologue (below). here again, mihális, like eléni, drew metaphorical connections between debt politics at the national level and local humanitarian action, only to arrive at a more pessimistic conclusion: on both levels one could see the same “false” capitalist logic, generating all sorts of compromises, one feeding into the other, clouding the view of the greek people, including those, he said, affiliated with the “compromised left” (τη συμβιβασμένη αριστερά). mihális insisted that “syriza is passing ineffectual measures [εφαρμόζει ημίμετρα].” a real, permanent solution, he concluded, had to involve a drastic rift, a total restart for the greek economy and society, whatever the cost for the ordinary citizen. i have learned over the years to anticipate mihális’s conclusions, which mostly align with that of the communist party. the trajectories of his arguments, however, often surprise me, and for the most part compel me to agree, as they point out, relentlessly, that local and national politics are ridden by ineffectual measures and cover-ups. the zest and enthusiasm of his voice awakens the marxist spirit within me, which calls attention to the deceptive work of rationalizations in interpreting political events and local practices, such as my own previous participation in humanitarian initiatives. was such participation a misguided expression of my bourgeois guilt? or do i sugarcoat my philanthropic tendencies with the radical rhetoric of solidarity? the softer marxist voice in my mind strives for additional explanations. he questions the ability of mihális to evoke uncompromising idealism within me. this could be guilt for my own failed commitment to a disciplined communist trajectory, something mihális understands and easily exploits. the particular conversational context may also further heighten mihális’s persuasiveness: the commensal and egalitarian context of male solidarity (see papataxiarchis 1991, 1999) into which, as a greek man, i have tried to fit, albeit rather uncomfortably. in his now classic analysis, michael herzfeld (1985) has exposed the performative and competitive aspects of greek masculinity; these mihális masterfully commands and i—a greek academic living abroad—have idealized and awkwardly imitated. the truth is that i have always felt more comfortable talking with female respondents. another friend and colleague who knows mihális very well is georgía. both were once members of the communist party, although now georgía supports syriza. she has invited mihális to participate many times in a wide array of humanitarian initiatives, but mihális has always refused. “it doesn’t have to do with party loyalty,” georgía clarified in a subsequent conversation with me: “i have invited him to help with actions [δράσεις] that are not tainted by political parties.” “his refusal,” georgía further explained, “is perhaps ideological as much as it is cruel [σκληρή].” this idea provided georgía with the impetus to summarize her own views about the ethics of solidarity, aided by her fellow solidarians maria and tasia (see graphic below), with whom i had previously spent several hours working in the same food-distribution initiative in which eléni participates. the vision of solidarity shared between georgía, maria, and tasia conveys an empowering socialist message based on the immediacy of practical action. and it is here that mihális’s rejection of humanitarian action, however persuasive at the ideological level, fails to meet the immediate priorities of local society and the expectation that the left is—or should be—better than the predominant neoliberal politics it seeks to replace. this is pointed out explicitly by mihális’s friends, such as georgía, who are well versed in the marxist critique of humanitarianism but choose to invest heavily in solidarity initiatives. much to the pleasure of my rationalizing self, georgía and her fellow solidarians provided me with the following explanation that outlines a long-term vision of persistent, indirect resistance (see graphic below). thinking with hindsight about this conversation, my soft-marxist authorial self recollects my sense of ease in the company of this group of women. their female company emanated a relaxed sense of trust,16 solidified through the previous experience of working together in the food-distribution initiative. this contrasted the fervent discussions with michális at the coffeehouse, during which we pushed political ideas to their logical extremes. the contrast between the conversational contexts in this section encourages me to admit that my authorial split is also partly constituted by sharing different types of gendered solidarity, as well as the unique combination of the gendered-cum-ideological makeup of each conversational company of friends. critical ambivalence and complexity aware that a certain degree of compromise is inherent in resistance, my rationalizing authorial self is persuaded by the argument of my solidarian interlocutors in patras: solidarity initiatives in austerity-ridden greece—despite their partial complicity with an imperfect and unequal social system—have an empowering dimension: they engender political radicalization (rakopoulos 2016; rozakou 2018b) and opportunities to demonstrate a certain political responsiveness (cabot 2014; athanasiou and alexandrakis 2016; theodossopoulos 2016b; rozakou 2018b). as my respondents eléni and georgía underline, it is better to get involved and resist austerity through action than to stay passive and allow the pessimism of austerity to overtake you. through solidarity activities, eléni argues, “one may also help a fellow citizen or two, but that is not the only purpose.” my uncompromising authorial self is not fully persuaded by such an enticing but indirect radical vision. he believes that indirect resistance, for example, as framed by james c. scott (1985, 1990), does not remain uncontaminated by hegemony (see gledhill 1994, 2012; roseberry 1994; theodossopoulos 2015). informal solidarity initiatives at the local level—to the degree that these provide a resisting alternative to austerity—are not autonomous from power, or, at the very least, not autonomous enough. they may indeed provide a temporary respite for the subaltern—in this case, the victims of austerity—but they also allow hegemony to adapt to (and neutralize ideologically) any small-scale challenges that arise. mihális succinctly encapsulated this argument in a subsequent conversation: “with the battle of delays, it is not only the weak who take respite, but also the powerful!”17 indirect resistance and strategic compromises, according to this point of view, detract attention from and postpone the battle against enduring inequality. solidarity initiatives at the local level, or reliance on installments of financial aid at the national level, extend and reproduce dependency. according to this logic, humanitarian solidarity provides yet another rationalization—or veridiction, that is, “the reason and reasoning” (faubion 2019, 2)—of established regulatory biopolitics, a perspective that leads us into seeing volunteerism as an ideological cover-up of neoliberalism (cf. muehlebach 2012). my two authorial selves have served so far as representational devices to summarize this disagreement, but also, more important, to highlight that both views can trouble the very same individuals. while my soft-marxist self rationalizes the imperfections of solidarity (seen as indirect resistance), my hard-marxist self condemns with pathologizing certainty the implication of solidarity with hegemony—“here is another version of false consciousness,” he says, “and i can see it.” exhausted from the ceaseless wavering between those two positions, i am now prepared to admit that both coexist at the local context of humanitarian solidarity. they inspire particular solidarians, and in some cases, they represent ideological attachments in different periods of one’s life, such as in the case of georgía, who once supported the communist party of greece (kke) but now follows the more flexible position (regarding solidarity) espoused by syriza. very much like my two authorial personas, those among my interlocutors in patras who are concerned about the ethics of solidarity are not neatly divided along the arguments they articulate in the heat of a conversation. in other moments—for example, while reflecting on particular practices or unanticipated problems—they appear disarmingly open to examine new arguments or to embark on self-evaluating reflection. eléni has repeatedly underlined, for example, that “solidarity issues are not, not in the least, closed . . . every case is different.”18 ideological positions are also important and necessary, she adds, but this is “food for thought for our self-examination [για την αυτό-κριτική μας].” georgía, tasia, and maria similarly agree that immediate humanitarian action comes before ideology. but they all hold slightly different positions with respect to the efficacy of solidarity, despite their left-leaning inclinations and support for the same party. maria has a hard time forgiving mihális for his inaction, while tasia agrees with several of his critical arguments—“but only at the ideological level,” she clarified, “not in practice.” georgía admitted that she feels “tortured” by her marxist background, yet found this struggle productive. “when i see mihális,” she said, “i remember our common struggles [τους κοινούς μας αγώνες] and forget our disagreements.” mihális explicitly mentioned that he treasures the “common past” (κοινό παρελθόν) he shares with georgía, a history of political engagements that made him, he adds, the person he is now. in august 2018, i showed eléni and mihális the graphic panels that support this article. eléni told me that she recognized the position of feeling split in two, especially when troubled by solidarity dilemmas. for example, “to help or not to help this particular human being, and to what degree?” mihális revealed that he has not always been programmatically “harsh” (σκληρός)—in fact, he mentioned participating in solidarity activities too! i recaptured their reflections in graphic form (below). we may consider eléni’s and mihális’s simultaneity of views indicative of intersubjective ambiguity (jackson 1998): undoubtedly, their parallel and partially overlapping identifications result from their relationships with others. eléni explains that the views of other solidarians—whom she respects—generate ethical questions in her mind, for example, about the purpose of solidarity. yet her relationship with the recipients of aid, she argues, provide her with all the necessary “answers.” mihális sees as his important interlocutors his comrades in the communist party of greece (kke)—with whom he talks about ideology and practice. he hates ambiguity, he admitted, but recognizes himself in my mirroring sketch. eléni’s and mihális’s mirroring reflections invited me to bring my ethnographic narrative to a close, as i have reached a point anticipated much earlier in this article: their relational self-positioning mirrors my authorial split, which was constituted in dialogue with them. the cyclicality of resistance and compromise does humanitarian solidarity generate a certain degree of emancipatory resistance to neoliberal austerity, or does it reproduce dependency on aid, which leads to yet another compromise with hegemony? in my attempts to address how solidarians in patras respond to this irresolvable question—a true aporia—i made visible how i opened myself to parallel, contrasting, but partly overlapping views in the field, as well as to the persuasiveness of such views. i experimented with representational devices—the split of the authorial voice, graphic ethnography, parerga—that capture the open-ended nature of the original dilemma, in an attempt to escape from singular answers constituting one or another “one-dimensional sort of explanation” (williams 1979, 144). ethnography is intimately implicated in the political ramifications of the ethnographic process, which invites us to acknowledge the simultaneity and interweaving of parallel arguments in local narratives and interpretations. some of these unofficial political views may encompass concepts studied by traditional anthropology—for example, in the case i examined here: time, gift giving, and hospitality. local views of temporality, for example, often become transformed in times of crisis (knight and stewart 2016; see also, knight 2012, 2015a; hirschon 2013). an over-burdensome (and austerity-afflicted) perception of present-ness (bryant 2016) can lead to an overstretched temporariness, extending dependency—a view favored by many solidarians and my rationalizing self. yet in the narratives of those favoring a harder marxist view, dependency on aid has been drawn out too far; it is now seen as embedded within an all-embracing hegemony. solidarity can therefore not fully redeem dependency on aid. my left-leaning interlocutors in patras seem perfectly aware of and troubled by the asymmetrical nature of giving (cf. rozakou 2012, 2016b, 2018a; cabot 2016). this awareness leads them to debate, adopt, or criticize, as well as—as rozakou testifies with respect to a variety of volunteerism initiatives—minimize over time their inhibition regarding unreciprocated gift giving (rozakou 2018b). herzfeld reminds us that offering mutual assistance does not constitute a foreign concept in greek society; it can solidify a common stance “against potentially hostile others” (herzfeld 2016, 202), including domestic and foreign proponents of austerity. it represents a culturally intimate response (or responsiveness) to the facelessness of bureaucracy (herzfeld 1992, 1997), the official politics of hospitality (papataxiarchis 2006; rozakou 2012), established inequalities, exploitation, and competitive individualism (athanasiou and alexandrakis 2016). the success of solidarity as a bridge concept (rakopoulos 2016) relies on this emphasis on disinterested sociality and reciprocity (papataxiarchis 2018; rakopoulos 2018; rozakou 2018b). my rationalizing authorial self appears most content with drawing such anthropological interpretative links, but my uncompromising marxist self views this intellectual project with wariness, and he wonders: is this the purpose of anthropology? or is such dependence on cultural values (or concepts) an ideological justification of an imperfect, unequal social reality—another rationalization? my rationalizing self respectfully welcomes this classic marxist perspective and responds with a postrationalization: even if we reduce culture to ideology, what better way to rid ourselves from its all-embracing mystification than to interpret, analyze, and understand its treacherous logic? maybe this type of anthropological struggle can prove useful after all, in the long term, as much as the critique that prompted it in the first place. it is at this precise point—the demystification of the wonder we call culture—that my two internalized voices declare a temporary truce. they both agree with the initial foucauldian proposition that structured this article: that resistance is never inexhaustible or complete. resisting subjects are implicated with the wider nexus of power that surrounds them, even with the very power structures they try to resist. which leads us to acknowledge that resistance is not autonomous from the broader cultural and politico-economic relationships that trigger it in the first place (keesing 1992; gledhill 1994, 2012; ortner 1995; theodossopoulos 2015). fighting against protracted austerity requires a conscious, long-term strategy of resistance, which can be seen here as a flexible inventive tactic (herzfeld 2016). short-term compromises—in the field of humanitarian solidarity, for example—may lead to the defeat of the pervasive temporariness structured by austerity, but they may also provide temporary solutions to immediate problems, constituting a form of pragmatism that has a generative effect (papataxiarchis 2018, 230–3; see also rakopoulos 2014a, 2018). in such pragmatic terms, solidarity initiatives in crisis-afflicted greece make a contribution greater than (and not reducible to) the heterogenous partial interests and partial commitments of their membership: collective action here generates unique and unpredictable outcomes and relationships (alexandrakis 2016, 7–8; athanasiou and alexandrakis 2016, 260), what evthymios papataxiarchis (2018, 245) calls “the un-envisioned effects of praxis.” nevertheless, the unpredictable, transformative benefits of solidarity in practice do not preclude a self-critical stance. on this point all the protagonists of this article agree. a sharper, uncompromising reevaluation of the pragmatic logic engendered by solidarity can serve as a critical lens against the rationalizing work of hegemony. in this respect, the interventions of my uncompromising-cum-pathologizing self serve as a metacognitive filter, a second layer of critical thinking about previous thinking, which constitutes a prerequisite for a reflexive marxist approach: the uncovering of biases—bourgeois, interpretative, analytical, authorial—that lead us to see our interpretations as closed or “finished products” (williams 1977, 128). seen from this perspective, the two arguments about solidarity that have troubled my respondents in patras are mutually and productively constituted, for they are set against each other—one engendering the other in a codependent relationship. self-critique—such as the auto-ethnographic split i introduced and depicted in graphic form in this article—offers a compass for navigating through the compromises inherent in both theory and practice. postscript in july 2019, on a short trip to vote in the greek general elections,19 i ran into eléni and georgía at a café in st. georgiou’s square, the very center of patras. after sharing our disappointment about the defeat of the left, the discussion drifted to the particular food-distribution initiative at which we had all worked in previous years. “we will continue,” said georgía, “we need to keep our spirit high, not only for those in need, but also for ourselves.” “now that the right wing is in power, it is more important to meet regularly,” added eléni, “to remember what we have in common.” her words echoed in my ears two days later, when i called mihális on the phone. now that political power has shifted away from the left, more common ground exists between him, eléni, and georgía: new critical trajectories, parallel arguments, but also lessons from the past. there is also more scope for productive compromise between my rationalizing and pathologizing selves. abstract this article introduces an autobiographical analytical tool that aims to elucidate the complexity and interweaving of opposing ideological positions as these emerge in the field and while writing ethnography. the technique introduced makes visible the split of the author’s identity into two: between that of a hard and a soft marxist, where each authorial self resonates with a particular local perspective. the split and those who have stimulated it—the real-life protagonists in the field—become reanimated and embodied through the self-mirroring representational lens of graphic ethnography. overall, the article provides an experimental exercise in reflexive marxist anthropology, which, apart from ethnographic innovation, engages with the ambivalence and codependence of competing arguments about the ethics of humanitarian solidarity in austerity-afflicted greece. the essay suggests that local arguments about solidarity are coconstituted through pragmatism and productive self-critique in times of protracted austerity. [auto-biographical split; graphic ethnography; solidarity; indirect resistance; reflexive marxism; greece] περίληψη το άρθρο αυτό εισάγει ένα αυτοβιογραφικό αναλυτικό εργαλείο που στοχεύει στην αποσαφήνιση της πολυπλοκότητας και της συνάφειας αντιθέτων ιδεολογικών θέσεων όπως αυτές προκύπτουν στo ερευνητικό πεδίο και κατά τη διάρκεια της συγγραφής της εθνογραφίας. η τεχνική που προτείνεται κάνει ορατή τη διάσπαση της ταυτότητας του συγγραφέα ανάμεσα σε έναν σκληρό και έναν αστό μαρξιστή, έτσι ώστε κάθε μια από τις δύο ταυτότητες να αντιπροσωπεύει συγκεκριμένα επιχειρήματα. η διχοτόμιση του συγγραφέα και εκείνοι που την έχουν εμπνεύσει οι πρωταγωνιστές της ζωής στο πεδίο της έρευνας ενσωματώνονται μέσα από τον αυτο-κατοπτρισμό της γραφιστικής εθνογραφίας . συνολικά, το άρθρο προσφέρει μια πειραματική άσκηση στην αναστοχαστική μαρξιστική ανθρωπολογία, η οποία, εκτός από την εθνογραφική της καινοτομία, αναδεικνύει την αμφισημία και την αλληλεξάρτηση των ανταγωνιστικών επιχειρημάτων σχετικά με την ηθική της ανθρωπιστικής αλληλεγγύης στην ελλάδα στην περίοδο της λιτότητας. υποστηρίζεται ότι τα τοπικά επιχειρήματα σχετικά με την αλληλεγγύη αλληλοπραγματώνοντε με ρεαλισμό και παραγωγική αυτοκριτική σε περιόδους παρατεταμένης λιτότητας. [αυτό-βιογραφική διχοτόμιση του συγγραφέα _ graphic ethnography _ αλληλεγγύη _ έμμεση αντίσταση _ αναστοχαστικός μαρξισμός _ ελλάδα] notes acknowledgments i would like to thank my ethnographic protagonists—eléni, georgía, maría, tasía, and mihális—for inspiring and shaping the writing of this article, as well as all other solidarians in patras who shared their views with me in 2014–2016. i also thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of cultural anthropology, in particular, heather paxson. their comments and close engagement with the article helped me develop its representational innovation in a direction that may benefit the wider anthropological field. the research on which this work was based was supported by uk’s economic and social research council (esrc, research grant es/l005883/1). i have a secondary affiliation with the smithsonian tropical research institute, panama. 1. over the past decade, the growth of humanitarian solidarity initiatives in greece has inspired a number of anthropological responses, which i use here as a conceptual repository to contextualize my auto-ethnographical reflections and the positions of my interlocutors in the field (see bakalaki 2008; cabot 2014, 2016, 2019; rakopoulos 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2018; herzfeld 2016; papataxiarchis 2016c, 2018; rozakou 2016a, 2016b, 2017, 2018a, 2018b; theodossopoulos 2016b). this recent literature about solidarity in greece has been, in turn, informed by wider anthropological contributions that reflect on and redress the wider ideological asymmetries between aid providers and recipients (de waal 1997; fassin 2007, 2011; fassin and pandolfi 2010; bornstein and redfield 2011; muehlebach 2012; redfield 2012; ticktin 2014). 2. in the anthropology of greece, we have seen previous experiments that depart from conventional representational norms. most notably among these are the ethnographies of james d. faubion (1993) and neni panourgiá (1995). jane k. cowan (1990, 1991) has experimented with setting voices apart to represent variable positions taken by women and men with respect to hegemonic gender notions. 3. patras is the capital of peloponnese, an urban center in southwestern greece, a three-hour drive from athens. it is the third-largest city in the country, with about 210,000 inhabitants. it is not a tourist destination, although tourists use its port, which connects greece with italy. the local economy—which relies on services and commerce—was harshly affected by the introduction of austerity measures in 2010. patras has been for me the site of ongoing fieldwork for longer than two decades, including a four-year-long project (2014–2018) that focused on the consequences of austerity in greece. 4. it includes full-length, graphic monographs (hamdy and nye 2017) or graphic articles (theodossopoulos 2019), analyses combining text and graphic components (schwanhäußer 2016; theodossopoulos 2016b), book reviews (theodossopoulos 2017), short graphic panels (shah 2017), or emulations of political cartooning (theodossopoulos forthcoming). 5. these are the communist party of greece (kke) and syriza (the coalition of the radical left); the latter was, at the time of writing, the political party in power. my analysis does not claim to address the formal positions of these two parties toward solidarity; rather, it discusses local, unofficial adaptations of these views and dilemmas about solidarity in patras. 6. in addition to the solidarity-specific literature, i draw insights from anthropological interventions that examine solidarity in the context of the recent migration and refugee crisis (papataxiarchis 2016a, 2016b; green 2018; kirtsoglou 2018b); the temporality of the crisis (knight 2012, 2015a; knight and stewart 2016); and the transformative dimensions of anti-austerity resistance (alexandrakis 2016; athanasiou and alexandrakis 2016; poulimenakos and dalakoglou 2018). 7. see also haskell 1985a, 1985b; cunningham and innes 1998; fassin 2012; trundle 2014; osella, stirrat, and widger 2015. 8. see rakopoulos 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b, 2018; for more cases of alternative food distribution see, sutton et al. 2013; knight 2015b; douzina-bakalaki 2017; agelopoulos 2018. 9. see also bakalaki 2008; cabot 2014, 2016; rozakou 2016a, 2016b. 10. the european commission (ec), the international monetary fund (imf), and the european central bank (ecb). 11. for example, communists, anarchists, and the far-left wing of syriza. 12. to carry out fieldwork as part of the esrc grant “household survival in crisis,” which focused on the consequences of austerity for greek families. i conducted the main fieldwork for this project from august 2014 to august 2015. the follow-up field trips (2015–2018) provided additional data and an opportunity to test my earlier conclusions as subsequent events unfolded. 13. neni panourgiá (2009, 15–16) has highlighted the difficulty with defining the term leftist (αριστερός/ή) in modern greece; the latter encompasses a wide variety of self-ascriptions and ideological positions. the same applies to the equally contested category the greek left (η αριστερά), which is, nevertheless, used rather inclusively in local contexts to include bourgeois-socialism. 14. for an ethnographic description of the particular initiative, see theodossopoulos 2016b. 15. between 2013 and 2016, her participation in solidarity activities took about seven hours a week, divided into different initiatives. in 2016, after the medicine bank closed down, she reduced her volunteering services by half to devote more time to her dermatological practice and her daughter. in the meantime, the social clinic has reduced its opening hours to one day a week (thursdays); eléni now serves in the latter once every two weeks. 16. the greek notion of a company of friends (parea) has been explored by several anthropologists who analyzed the social and gendered dynamics between people socializing regularly together. for all-male pareas, see papataxiarchis (1991); for female or mixed-gender pareas, see cowan (1990) and kirtsoglou (2004). 17. the original reads, “mε την μάχη των καθυστερήσεων δεν ξεκουράζονται μόνο οι αδύνατοι, αλλά και οι δυνατοί!” 18. the original reads, “tο θέμα δεν είναι, σε καμοία περίπτωση, κλειστό.. κάθε περίπτωση είναι διαφορετική.” 19. the greek general elections of july 7, 2019, brought into power the conservative party, nea democratia. it remains to be seen if the numerous solidarity initiatives—and the overall solidarity ethos—which thrived during the government of syriza, will endure. my prediction is that several solidarity initiatives will continue to function as radicalized loci of indirect resistance, raising social awareness against the consequences of austerity and the competitive spirit of neoliberal politics. references abu-lughod, lila 1990 “the romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through bedouin women.” american ethnologist 17, no. 1: 41–55. 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raymond 1977 marxism and literature. oxford: oxford university press. 1979 politics and letters: interviews with new left review. london: verso. žižek, slavoj 2009 first as tragedy, then as farce. london: verso. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 134-166, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.10 unsettling sovereignty unsettling sovereignty yarimar bonilla rutgers university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0948-7252 once confined to the specialized realms of international relations and jurisprudence, sovereignty has recently become a central analytic—some might even say a buzzword—within a broad range of fields across the humanities and social sciences. it would be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as a mere academic fad, or simply as a new sign under which old questions are currently being rethought, but i would like to suggest that the turn to sovereignty speaks to a particular political and intellectual conjuncture both within and beyond the academy. contemporary writings on sovereignty are steeped in postcolonial, postsocialist, and post–civil rights disillusion, a sharp awareness of the enduring legacies of settler colonialism, a deep distrust of the post–9/11 surveillance state, and a sober engagement with the pressing realities of climate change. as a result, the sovereign turn is marked by a skeptical and disenchanted view of state power and supreme domination—both human and environmental. anthropologists have cast an important critical eye on the forms of violence and inequity enacted by modern states in the name of sovereignty.1 yet insufficient attention has been given to the sign of sovereignty itself as a category of western political thought. in what follows, i offer a brief discussion of how anthropological perspectives have contributed to a critical understanding of the concept of sovereignty. however, i argue that we must refrain from deploying sovereignty as a neutral descriptor for forms of governance, and move instead toward a deeper interrogation of sovereignty as a concept, a norm, and an ideal—one that has been thoroughly shaped by the institutional, epistemic, and ontological orders of empire. the problem of sovereignty within political anthropology, the recent turn to sovereignty—and i mean here, specifically, the turn toward an analysis of the nature, limits, uses, and effects of state power—is in many ways the logical successor to the so-called global turn that preceded it. the rise of globalization studies, whatever its limits, demonstrated that political borders were porous and fickle, and that the persistent and longstanding flows of peoples, goods, and ideas across national boundaries made nation-states unsuitable units for many forms of analysis. the anthropological turn to sovereignty emerges out of that intellectual conversation, but is also rooted in a particular geopolitical context in which, despite blurred borders and brokered interactions, states themselves remain powerful entities in both the political system and the political imagination. even as they broker duties among nongovernmental institutions and entities, states continue to wield power—fiscal, military, economic, discursive, and imaginative. states continue to act as agents: they legislate, they deport, they invade, they build, and they borrow. even as governments are toppled, states themselves persist.2 this does not mean, however, that they hold sovereign power. if the literature on globalization served to reveal the porous nature of state boundaries, the attendant literature on sovereignty clearly exposed the tenuous nature of state power—particularly in the global south. as recent scholarship shows, the power of putatively sovereign states has been routinely and palpably restricted through negotiations with both internal and external actors, including insurgents, paramilitaries, and criminal networks, as well as lending agencies, global development firms, humanitarian organizations, and other shadow networks and agents (appadurai 1996; comaroff and comaroff 2009; davis 2010; ferguson 2006; goldstein 2010; hansen 2006; humphrey 2004; jaffe 2015; nordstrom 2000). commentators often claim that these processes have resulted in the waning or disarticulation of state capacities, leading to the rise of weakened states, failed states, and ngo republics (brown 2010; sassen 2006; schuller 2007). some have characterized these forms of fractured sovereignty as mutations under a neoliberal regime or characteristics of a postcolonial landscape (ong 2006; hansen and stepputat 2006). yet the move to cast these political forms as mutations or exceptions problematically reinscribes the classic model of political sovereignty as an actually existing relationship—a measurable quality of states—rather than viewing it as a discursive figure produced through the colonial encounter. many scholars singularly trace the concept of sovereignty to the enlightenment, rooting it in arguments about the limits of divine power. yet debates over sovereignty were just as equally a part of the age of discovery, and thus directly tied to the need to codify and regulate the practices of conquest and the settlement of lands with peoples deemed uncivilized—and hence unsovereign (anghie 2012; see also silva 2007). during this period, notions of civilization, citizenship, personhood, and humanism became established and developed—not as mere descriptors, but as discursive categories within an interested debate over the reach of european power. the colonial project spurred the need to define the terms of territorial ownership and political belonging, to draw distinctions between savages and barbarians, citizens and subjects, incorporation and inclusion, occupation and settlement. the concept of sovereignty provided a legal technology with which to lay claim to putatively unowned lands (i.e., terra nullius), to dispossess native communities, or, alternatively, to establish treaties with native peoples in ways that incorporated them into an ontological order of civilizational difference.3 sovereignty as a legal concept is thus grounded in concrete material practices of dispossession, the practical work of disenfranchisement, and the creation of legal regimes of difference. in the mid-twentieth century, subaltern populations took up the notion of sovereignty (tied to the idea of self-determination) in hopes of transforming their status through entry into a system of states and nations as equal sovereigns. yet the legacies of the civilizing mission were already deeply encoded into the very strictures of international law (anghie 2005). indeed, the entire field of international relations—driven by theories of so-called race development—emerged precisely to manage international and interracial forms of difference, both foreign and domestic (vitalis 2015). contemporary divisions of the world—into developed and undeveloped, democratic and rogue, and so on—continue to replicate these civilizational tropes. the once-held hope that the toppling of colonial rule would effectively transform the lives of subaltern populations, or that non-western states might bring about a postimperial shift of power—a hope deeply palpable in what became known as the “era of bandung”—seems to have faded after projects such as the nonaligned movement failed to transform the political order of empire (scott 2012). as national sovereignty became a global norm, the meaning and force of sovereignty changed significantly (cooper 2014; kelly and kaplan 2001, 2009). abstract pledges of codified equality were accompanied by a careful escort into enduring structures of systemic inequality. as a result, postcolonial sovereignty more often than not resulted in enduring forms of non-sovereignty (bonilla 2013, 2015). the idea of a westphalian order in which all states are, if not equally powerful, at least equally sovereign, has thus now come under significant revision with the recognition that the westphalian order is at best a founding myth and at worst a form of organized hypocrisy (ferguson and mansbach 2007; osiander 2001; krasner 1999). moreover, the idea of state power as sovereign—singular, supreme, absolute, autonomous, and free from external control—has also been brought into question as both a political reality and an unequivocal ideal. across academic fields, we are increasingly coming to understand sovereignty as an uneven and fragmented performance, rather than a stable capacity (comaroff and comaroff 2006; masco 2014; rutherford 2012; geertz 2004). the notion of a sovereign state, and its attendant sovereign individual who speaks and acts autonomously, is thus giving way to the recognition of the non-sovereign nature of most social relationships—political, intimate, and affective—all of which require brokered and negotiated forms of interdependency and a relinquishing of autonomy (berlant 2011a, 2011b). indeed, some contend that the contemporary challenges we face, most notably climate change and global pandemics, require a global community of coordinated action rather than a world system of competing sovereigns (chakrabarty 2009). at the same time, others insist that we must reevaluate our understandings of not just the global system but also of the chain of existence itself, suggesting that the idea of human beings as self-contained, sovereign, and supreme within the natural order must be upended (bennett 2010; agamben 2003; haraway 2007; grusin 2015). if the global turn (at its best) spurred an interest in historicizing and provincializing the idea of the nation-state by demonstrating the existence of other ways of imagining and organizing communities, economies, and polities—within, across, and beyond national boundaries—then the sovereign turn has the potential of helping us historicize the idea of sovereign power as singular, absolute, rooted in a social contract, and territorially bound. this task becomes particularly urgent in the present political landscape, as politicians across the globe increasingly call for a return to sovereignty through policies of exclusion that include border walls, muslim bans, and other forms of xenophobic statecraft.4 this is why, beyond simply historicizing and provincializing sovereignty as a category of western political thought, we must also examine its particularity as a political norm and an ideological project. concepts such as sovereignty, democracy, freedom, and even universalism are not neutral categories of analysis, nor simple reflections of european history (trouillot 2003, 35). these are the native categories of the west as a project, not a place.5 when tackling such concepts, our task is thus not simply to undo their coherence. rather, it is to interrogate how they have become hegemonic, what the consequences of that normative dominance are, and what social conditions maintain and reproduce this dominance (asad 2013, 13). an anthropology of sovereignty must thus begin with a critical interrogation of the concept, norm, and ideal of sovereignty itself. that is, we must treat political theory as part of the larger field of ideology and practice we seek to examine. we must thus ask: how does the norm of sovereignty emerge and how has it been sustained? how does it order forms of life and condition aspirations? which social orders does it enable and which does it disavow? finally, we must also explore alternative ways of imagining the social, political, and natural orders that trouble or upend the norm of sovereignty.6 only then will we move beyond simply provincializing sovereignty and toward unsettling the notion of sovereignty itself. unsettling anthropology anthropology as a discipline emerged from the same epistemic framework as sovereignty. its theories and raison d’être share ontological ground with imperialism and internal colonialism.7 as colonies became postcolonies, some speculated that a “science of the savages” (macquet 1964, 51) would quickly fall by the wayside. others proposed transformations from within that might produce a decolonized anthropology for a decolonized world.8 neither option fully came into existence. at present, we are witnessing the emergence of another call for decolonial academic practices and orientations (escobar 2007; maldonado-torres 2007; mignolo 2011; mignolo and escobar 2010; quijano 2000, 2007; sandoval 2000). this move signals a recognition of the constitutive role of the colonial project in the formation of the modern world, and of the enduring coloniality of the present. it recognizes that the treaties, charters, and forms of recognition produced by twentieth-century sovereignty regimes served to sustain, rather than unseat, colonial hierarchies. moreover, it makes plain that if we are to adequately critique and contest these formations of power we must directly confront the inherent limits and foundational foreclosures of our disciplinary practices. in line with these developments, i believe it is worth exploring what a decolonial, rather than postcolonial, notion of sovereignty—and of anthropology itself—might mean.9 however, i prefer the term unsettling to decolonizing not only because it privileges the perspective of settler colonialism (which has often held a backseat within postcolonial studies) but also because i remain skeptical as to whether one could truly decolonize either sovereignty or anthropology, given that there is no precolonial status to which either could return. unsettling avoids the telos of decolonization. what is unsettled is not necessarily removed, toppled, or returned to a previous order but is fundamentally brought into question. the move to unsettle sovereignty—to trouble its presumptions, question its origins, and explore its alternatives—should thus be tied to a broader unsettling of the discipline as a whole. this requires more than a simple diversification of existing theory and practice under the banner of an otherwise unaltered intellectual project. rather, it necessitates refashioning our intellectual commitments and collective purpose. the stakes of unsettling both sovereignty and anthropology are thus high—as, indeed, they imply thinking beyond these colonial technologies altogether. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to amanda haziz-ginsberg, j. kēhaulani kauanui, and jonathan rosa for their incisive comments and suggestions. 1. in this sense, the anthropology of sovereignty might fall under what sherry ortner (2016) describes as “dark anthropology.” 2. for more on the difference between state and government, see gupta and sharma 2006 and trouillot 2001. 3. within native studies, several authors have pointed to the contradictions and contortions of the sovereignty project. see, for instance, alfred 2002; cattelino 2008, 2010; kauanui 2008; rifkin 2009; and simpson 2014. 4. for more, see the recent american ethnologist forum on “brexit, trump, and anthropology,” edited by jeanette edwards, angelique haugerud, and shanti parikh (2017). 5. i borrow this phrasing from glissant 1989, 2. 6. for example, in my own work, i have examined how caribbean political actors engage in non-sovereign politics, which i see as the search for something other than the sovereignty project that was promised to, imposed on, and thwarted for the global south (bonilla 2013, 2015; bonilla and hantel 2016). 7. as talal asad (1991, 315) writes: “it is not merely that anthropological fieldwork was facilitated by european colonial power . . . it is that the fact of european power, as discourse and practice, was always part of the reality anthropologists sought to understand, and of the way they sought to understand it.” see also asad 1973 and trouillot 1991. 8. see, for instance, asad 1991, fahim 1982, harrison 1991, and trouillot 1991. for an important assessment of this project and its place within a larger intellectual generation, see allen and jobson 2016. 9. trouillot, who perhaps best outlined the implications of anthropology’s role as the colonial “savage slot,” argued that despite its shortcomings, anthropology still represented one of the best tools with which to trouble western concepts and categories. he saw promise in the discipline’s attention to native categories and non-western standards of evidence, as well as its insistence on exploring multiple ways of ordering and narrating the world (trouillot 2003, 136). 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non-sovereign futures: french caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment. chicago: university of chicago press. bonilla, yarimar, and max hantel 2016 “visualizing sovereignty: cartographic queries for the digital age.” sx archipelagos, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.7916/d8cv4htj. brown, wendy 2010 walled states, waning sovereignty. new york: zone books. cattelino, jessica r. 2008 high stakes: florida seminole gaming and sovereignty. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2010 “the double bind of american indian need-based sovereignty.” cultural anthropology 25, no. 2: 235–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01058.x. chakrabarty, dipesh 2009 “the climate of history: four theses.” critical inquiry 35, no. 2: 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. comaroff, jean, and john l. comaroff, ed. 2006 law and disorder in the postcolony. university of chicago press. comaroff, john l., and jean comaroff 2009 “reflections on the anthropology of law, governance, and sovereignty.” in rules 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ferguson, james 2006 global shadows: africa in the neoliberal world order. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ferguson, yale h., and richard w. mansbach 2007 “the myths of state sovereignty.” bologna center journal of international affairs 10: 9–20. http://www.saisjournal.org/posts/the-myths-of-state-sovereignty. geertz, clifford 2004 “what is a state if it is not a sovereign? reflections on politics in complicated places.” current anthropology 45, no. 5: 577–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/423972. glissant, édouard 1989 “introductions.” in caribbean discourse: selected essays, 1–12. translated by j. michael dash. charlottesville: university press of virginia. goldstein, daniel m. 2010 “toward a critical anthropology of security.” current anthropology 51, no. 4: 487–517. https://doi.org/10.1086/655393. grusin, richard, ed. 2015 the nonhuman turn. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. gupta, akhil, and aradhana sharma 2006 “introduction: rethinking theories of the state in an age of globalization.” in the anthropology of the state: a reader, edited by aradhana sharma and akhil gupta, 1–41. malden, mass.: blackwell. hansen, thomas blom 2006 “performers of sovereignty: on the privatization of security in urban south africa.” critique of anthropology 26, no. 3: 279–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x06066583. hansen, thomas blom, and finn stepputat 2006 “sovereignty revisited.” annual review of anthropology 35: 295–315. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317. haraway, donna j. 2007 when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. harrison, faye v., ed. 1991 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. washington, dc: association of black anthropologists. humphrey, caroline 2004 “sovereignty.” in a companion to the anthropology of politics, edited by david nugent and joan vincent, 418–36. malden, mass.: blackwell. jaffe, rivke 2015 “from maroons to dons: sovereignty, violence, and law in jamaica.” critique of anthropology 35, no. 1: 47–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x14557093. kauanui, j. kēhaulani 2008 hawaiian blood: colonialism and the politics of sovereignty and indigeneity. durham, n.c.: duke university press. kelly, john d., and martha kaplan 2001 “nation and decolonization: toward a new anthropology of nationalism.” anthropological theory 1, no. 4: 419–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/14634990122228818. 2009 “legal fictions after empire.” in the state of sovereignty: territories, laws, populations, edited by douglas howland and luise white, 169–95. bloomington: indiana university press. krasner, stephen d. 1999 sovereignty: organized hypocrisy. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. macquet, jacques j. 1964 “objectivity in anthropology.” current anthropology 5, no. 1: 47–55. https://doi.org/10.1086/200442. maldonado-torres, nelson 2007 “on the coloniality of being: contributions to the development of a concept.” cultural studies 21, nos. 2–3: 240–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601162548. masco, joseph 2014 the theater of operations: national security affect from the cold war to the war on terror. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mignolo, walter d. 2011 “geopolitics of sensing and knowing: on (de)coloniality, border thinking and epistemic disobedience.” postcolonial studies 14, no. 3: 273–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2011.613105. mignolo, walter d., and arturo escobar, eds. 2010 globalization and the decolonial option. new york: routledge. nordstrom, carolyn 2000 “shadows and sovereigns.” theory, culture, and society 17, no. 4: 35–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632760022051301. ong, aihwa 2006 neoliberalism as exception: mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ortner, sherry b. 2016 “dark anthropology and its others: theory since the eighties.” hau 6, no. 1: 47–73. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.004. osiander, andreas 2001 “sovereignty, international relations, and the westphalian myth.” international organization 55, no. 2: 251–87. https://doi.org/10.1162/00208180151140577. quijano, aníbal 2000 “coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and latin america.” nepantla 1, no. 3: 533–80. translated by michael ennis. 2007 “coloniality and modernity/rationality.” cultural studies 21, nos. 2–3: 168–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502380601164353. rifkin, mark 2009 “indigenizing agamben: rethinking sovereignty in light of the ‘peculiar’ status of native peoples.” cultural critique, no. 73: 88–124. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.0.0049. rutherford, danilyn 2012 laughing at leviathan: sovereignty and audience in west papua. chicago: university of chicago press. sandoval, chela 2000 methodology of the oppressed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. sassen, saskia 2006 territory, authority, rights: from medieval to global assemblages. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. schuller, mark 2007 “seeing like a ‘failed’ ngo: globalization’s impacts on state and civil society in haiti.” polar 30, no. 1: 67–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/pol.2007.30.1.67. scott, david 2012 “norms of self-determination: thinking sovereignty through.” middle east law and governance 4, nos. 2–3: 195–224. https://doi.org/10.1163/18763375-00403003. silva, denise ferreira da 2007 toward a global idea of race. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. trouillot, michel-rolph 1991 “anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness.” in recapturing anthropology: working in the present, edited by richard g. fox, 17–44. santa fe: school of american research press. 2001 “the anthropology of the state in the age of globalization: close encounters of the deceptive kind.” current anthropology 42, no. 1: 125–38. https://doi.org/10.1086/318437. 2003 global transformations: anthropology and the modern world. new york: palgrave macmillan. vitalis, robert 2015 white world order, black power politics: the birth of american international relations. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. sovereignty sovereignty: an introduction j. kēhaulani kauanui wesleyan university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2903-8155 on january 20, 2017, the day of donald j. trump’s inauguration as president, anthropologists across the united states organized a series of read-ins. the chosen text? one of michel foucault’s lectures from society must be defended (see jaschik 2017). paige west and j. c. salyer (2017), who initiated the effort, explained that they had decided on this text because “it demands we simultaneously consider the interplay of sovereign power, discipline, biopolitics and concepts of security, and race.” the popular anthropology blog savage minds, as well as the journals american anthropologist, american ethnologist, cultural anthropology, and environment and society, gave positive coverage to the event and, implicitly, to west’s and salyer’s chosen text. clearly, foucault’s work on sovereignty has made a lasting imprint on the field of cultural anthropology. his theorization of sovereignty in the context of a transformation in the exercise of power in the eighteenth century—when “biopower,” focused on the life of individual bodies and populations, became distinct from the legal and political mechanisms of sovereign power—has proven critical to the field. furthering foucault’s concept of biopower, giorgio agamben (1998, 2005) has examined how sovereign power is not necessarily linked to the capacity to bear rights, but often includes paradoxical exclusion—states of exception to justify violence and the decision of sovereign power. in recent years, cultural anthropologists studying the global crisis of the nation-state as the primary vehicle of sovereign power have taken up the critical reevaluation of sovereignty engendered by agamben’s work, inspiring new lines of inquiry and challenges to the foundational assumptions about state power in a range of ethnographic studies. why sovereignty? the field of cultural anthropology has considered sovereignty in new ways since the rise of a focus on globalization (e.g., humphrey 2004; wachspress 2009). works on the “anthropology of the state” emerged in the 1990s and have since become central to the discipline, unseating more conventional studies of “political anthropology” that had focused mainly on putatively traditional modes of power, kingship, and authority. especially since the turn of the twenty-first century, however, the anthropological study of political authority has shifted away from its historical focus on kinship, kingship, and hierarchical social structures (but see graeber and sahlins, forthcoming) toward a concentration on the historical formation of modern forms of governance, state authority, and the modern management of bodies, populations, and peoples through discourses of science, health, and security. in his 2003 sidney w. mintz lecture at johns hopkins university, clifford geertz (2004) asked “what is a state if it is not a sovereign?” he conceded that an older island-and-mountain anthropology had fallen short of understanding the tumultuous birth of new states across the global south in the twentieth century because it had accepted the dominant fiction that states as entities comprehensively ruled a territory and a population, and that the state represented a modern and rational form of unitary governance. yet geertz also argued that anthropologists were uniquely equipped to study and theorize the complicated historical layers of authority, power, and other forms of attachment that constitute states and politics in most of the world today. as thomas blom hansen and finn stepputat (2006) argue, sovereignty has returned as a central concern in anthropology in a reinvented form that seeks to go beyond de facto sovereignty by examining it as a tentative and always emergent form of authority grounded in violence. they delineate how classical works on kingship failed to provide an adequate framework for understanding the political imaginations of a world after colonialism. in their words, “although effective legal sovereignty is always an unattainable ideal, it is particularly tenuous in many postcolonial societies where sovereign power historically was distributed among many forms of local authority” (hansen and stepputat 2006, 295). they also emphasize studies of informal sovereignties such as vigilante groups, insurgents, and illegal networks—while tracing the relationship between market forces that also serve to reconfigure sovereign power. they thus chart and advocate an ethnographic approach to sovereignty “in practice” (hansen and stepputat 2006, 297). in 2001, the society for cultural anthropology hosted one of its inaugural culture@large sessions at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association on “rethinking sovereignty,” which was organized by vincanne adams. the interdisciplinary event featured scholars thinking and writing about sovereignty in ways differently localized in relation to one another. notably, it did not begin or end with a definitive statement on sovereignty. rather, it aimed “to provide a space to examine the analytics of sovereignty in relation to the specificity of its ethnographic locations” (adams 2008). as the session abstract put it: sovereignty as a concept and as a peculiar arrangement of power has been the topic of a wide variety of anthropological debate and inquiry of late. to some extent these debates pick up where foucault’s understanding of biopolitics left off, placing questions about forms of discipline and governance in the context of globalization and attempting to explain the mechanics of subject-making in terms of economic, state, and repressive power as well as the liberatory politics such efforts might inspire. these questions are now foundational to the field. a range of key texts and debates gave rise to this focus within anthropology and, in turn, produced other lines of inquiry, including projects that examine how states assert legal sovereignty contested by local communities as power is lived in distinct ways “on the ground.” scholars have especially focused on how states vying for a monopoly on violence contend with social forces challenging that authority—especially in urban areas across the global south with regard to a range of political movements and religious institutions. anthropologists have paid particular attention to how colonial forms of government left enduring marks on the performance and legitimation of political power beyond europe and the united states. and while the modern nation-state may remain the dominant form of political authority and imagination in the contemporary period, it has taken several specific forms throughout the world, without completely removing or superseding older languages of power and public authority (see jennings 2011). anthropology of the state, the law, and biopolitics center the way power operates in a range of contexts—from the institutional to the intimate—and attend to the relationships mediated by political actors and the structures that frame them. anthropological studies on such topics as bureaucrats, political factions, actors, movements, and stateless subjects draw attention to practices of power and provide crucial insights into how power and social life manifest, intersect, and become mobile. these analyses have grown into a corpus of research focused on a broad range of questions, including ones about citizenship, crime and policing, contemporary legal systems, governance, language and the law, ritual violence and state organization, sovereignty, state formation, socialism, and postsocialism. any discussion of sovereignty is sure to entail competing epistemological frames, and thus different ontological orientations and diverse political forms in theorizing our political present. from a diverse range of social and geographical contexts, the essays in this retrospectives collection trace the emergence of concerns on sovereignty that followed the rise of the work on globalization. each traces how the problem re-emerged, its scope, and the relevance of the concept to different areas of study within the field. in her essay, yarimar bonilla tackles the contested meanings of sovereignty, tracking the concept as it has become a central analytic in cultural anthropology and beyond. acknowledging how most anthropological writings have rightly criticized the forms of violence and inequity that have characterized modern states under the sign of sovereignty, she details how there has been inadequate consideration of “the sign of sovereignty itself as a category of western political thought” (bonilla 2017, 330). her essay discusses how anthropological perspectives have contributed to a critical understanding of the concept, and therefore challenges us to question sovereignty. as she argues, this focus necessarily entails “unsettling anthropology,” since the discipline emerged from the same epistemic framework as, and therefore shares ontological ground with, imperialism and colonialism, especially as they have centered on the production of otherness. in her contribution, circe sturm (2017) takes up the meaning of sovereignty in the study of indigenous peoples subject to the political domination of the u.s. and canadian states. she examines it as both a conceptual framework and a discourse that marks a distinct type of lived experience, which she argues must be understood within the context of settler colonialism. yet, as she notes, the discipline of anthropology has been slow to take up settler colonialism as an analytic, even though the field’s practitioners have long engaged with understanding and theorizing various complex forms of colonial order. sturm points to the fruitful possibilities of learning from scholars working in indigenous studies, a field in which sovereignty centers indigenous perspectives. providing important theoretical insights about the nature of political authority that are widely applicable beyond the bounds of indian country, she outlines some of the key conversations demonstrating the links between the two analytical frameworks—sovereignty and settler colonialism—as they offer anthropology important correctives. amahl bishara’s article examines how palestinians’ structural predicament calls attention to important variations in sovereignty. she attends to the ways in which palestinians and other people in the middle east assert provisional popular sovereignties. as she argues, these are forms “not resting on law or acknowledged rights . . . but rather on either insistent confrontation or quiet acts of caring for community in the face of abandonment” (bishara 2017, 350). bishara (2017, 350) shows that even though they have not ultimately restructured state sovereignty, these assertions “challenge the legitimacy of state authorities, create new forms of collectivity, and forge new ideas of how power should function, even though they have not ultimately restructured state power.” while concepts of liberation, statehood, and self-determination were presumed to be one and the same during the region’s twentieth-century anticolonial struggles, their outcome has produced fresh challenges to this version of sovereignty. bishara’s contribution to this collection shows how cultural anthropologists may reconceptualize both state and popular sovereignty, while noting that the latter must also be examined with attention to fractures and exclusions in movements. as she argues, focusing on collective forms of power, their emergence, and their contestation of state power at its limits can enable a movement beyond individualistic concepts of rights, as well as a recognition of how politics can change on the ground despite entrenched political structures. finally, in her essay, kamari clarke delineates how anthropology has understood and taken up modern conceptions of sovereignty, and been centrally engaged in critical conversations across disciplines about the nature of sovereignty through notions of political authority and reconfigurations of body politics. she begins by offering a selective genealogy of the concept of sovereignty in relation to both foucault’s and agamben’s works. foucault’s interventions in the interdisciplinary social sciences enabled new understandings of political authority, sovereignty, the state, and power, which “revolutionized anthropological thinking” (clarke 2017, 362). foucault, clarke (2017, 363) writes, “expanded and decentralized a view of sovereignty and legitimate power that had led to many decades of writing about how power is produced and how it produces certain effects.” then agamben proposed a renewed focus on state violence that accounted for biopower at the site of the camp as a prime example of the state of exception. noting the fractures of that account through spaces of exception and transformations of the body politic, clarke (2017, 361) suggests that new reflections on sovereignty demand a shift in the way we understand governance “through new ways of constituting bodies of persons through technological forms of bodily mediation.” in turn, she encourages us to resituate our understanding of political authority through the force field of bio-mediated politics. her contribution highlights the importance of anthropologists returning to a focus on the body as “an important analytic for making sense of new forms of mediation” (clarke 2017, 360). these essays illuminate the porous and often still problematic odyssey of sovereignty’s formation and its function as social category. all of them challenge the rationalization of sovereignty as simply the unification of power and the basic concept of political organization; indeed, their brilliant analyses demand that we probe how possibilities of political life come to be defined by the difficult task of deriving freedom from the concept of sovereignty. acknowledgments thanks to cymene howe, for inviting me to edit this retrospectives collection, and to rana barakat, for her critical feedback on this introduction. mahalo nui loa. references adams, vincanne 2008 “culture@large 2001: rethinking sovereignty.” sca archives, cultural anthropology website, march 23. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/176-culture-large-2001-rethinking-sovereignty. agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. originally published in 1995. 2005 state of exception. translated by kevin attell. chicago: university of chicago press. originally published in 2003. bishara, amahl 2017 “sovereignty and popular sovereignty for palestinians and beyond.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 3: 349–58. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.04. bonilla, yarimar 2017 “unsettling sovereignty.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 3: 330–39. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.02. clarke, kamari maxine 2017 “rethinking sovereignty through hashtag publics: the new body politics.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 3: 359–66. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.05. geertz, clifford 2004 “what is a state if it is not a sovereign? reflections on politics in complicated places.” current anthropology 45, no. 5: 277–93. https://doi.org/10.1086/423972. graeber, david, and marshall sahlins forthcoming on kings. chicago: hau books. hansen, thomas blom, and finn stepputat 2006 “sovereignty revisited.” annual review of anthropology 35: 295–315. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317. humphrey, caroline 2004 “sovereignty.” in a companion to the anthropology of politics, edited by david nugent and joan vincent, 418–36. malden, mass.: blackwell. jaschik, scott 2017 “‘society must be defended’: anthropologists and other scholars plan read-in of michel foucault to mark inauguration of donald trump.” insider higher education, january 16. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/16/anthropology-groups-organize-foucault-read-inauguration-day. jennings, ronald c. 2011 “sovereignty and political modernity: a genealogy of agamben’s critique of sovereignty.” anthropological theory 11, no. 1: 23–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499610395443. sturm, circe 2017 “reflections on the anthropology of sovereignty and settler colonialism: lessons from native north america.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 3: 340–48. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.03. wachspress, megan 2009 “rethinking sovereignty with reference to history and anthropology.” international journal of law in context 5, no. 3: 315–30. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1744552309990140. west, paige, and j. c. salyer 2017 “society must be defended: join us for a read-in on 20 january 2017.” savage minds, january 12. https://savageminds.org/2017/01/12/society-must-be-defended-a-read-in-on-20-january-2017. the axolotl in global circuits of knowledge production the axolotl in global circuits of knowledge production: producing multispecies potentiality emily wanderer university of pittsburgh http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5267-8831 the southern mexico city neighborhood of xochimilco is home to an unusual salamander, the axolotl. axolotls are a relatively young species: they have lived in central mexico for fewer than ten thousand years.1 they have a striking appearance: broad, flat bodies; large heads framed by feathery gills; wide-set eyes; and expressive mouths. in the wild, they hide deep in the aquatic vegetation, remaining still and camouflaged by their mud coloring to avoid being eaten. according to luis zambrano (2011, 230), the director of the laboratorio de restauración ecológica (laboratory of ecological restoration) at the universidad autónoma de méxico, the axolotl stays in hiding during the day and “like a good convict, its life is at night.” figure 1. a dark or wild-type axolotl. photo by stan shebs, licensed under cc by-sa, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:ambystoma_mexicanum_1.jpg. a charismatic species with deep connections to mexican history and identity, the axolotl is found in the wild only in the maze of canals winding through xochimilco. these canals are one of the few remaining traces of the lakes that used to dominate the area; tenochtitlán, the capital of the aztec empire that eventually became mexico city, was famously founded on an island in lake texcoco. yet the aquatic features that characterized the valley of mexico in pre-columbian times have mostly been drained. today the watery geographic history of the area is most evident in xochimilco, with its maze of canals separating small, artificial islands that resulted from intensive engineering transforming the land and water of the lake into an immensely productive agricultural site. farmed since pre-columbian times, the islands were essential resources for feeding the population of tenochtitlán and, subsequently, mexico city. these days, the neighborhood is most widely known as a site for recreation and tourism. the human engineering that transformed the landscape produced new habitats, notably the deep canals that became home to the axolotl. unlike other salamanders, including the tiger salamanders from which they evolved, axolotls are neotenic. that is, they do not undergo metamorphosis. instead, they retain their juvenile characteristics and the morphology of larvae as reproductive adults, remaining aquatic for their entire life span. stephen j. gould (1977) speculated on the significance of the axolotl’s unusual development in his ontogeny and phylogeny, hypothesizing that their delayed somatic development (in which they reach sexual maturity before going through the developmental stages typical of a salamander) offered them a selective advantage in the environmental conditions of xochimilco. gould (1977, 321) noted that “if they transform, they are forced to trade a favorable pond for harsh ground.” unlike salamander larvae in vernal pools, which dramatically alter their bodies to correspond with a radically changing environment, the axolotl responded to the constancy of the canals of xochimilco by (forever) delaying transformation into the adult form, becoming sexually mature while still in a larval stage. in other words, its morphology is attuned to the requirements of life in the stable environment that agricultural engineering produced in xochimilco. in gould’s (1977, 322) formulation, they have “repeatedly abandoned their facultative status for an irreversibly determined, permanent larval life.” while the axolotl is finely adapted to the historic environmental conditions of xochimilco, the neighborhood has been undergoing rapid change as it urbanizes and as invasive species arrive in the canals (salles 1992; peralta flores 2012). restoration ecologists, who study damaged or disturbed ecosystems and the efforts to repair them, have paid attention to how these changes have decimated the wild axolotl population, tracking declining populations until a 2014 census found some five hundred to one thousand left in the wild, down from a population of six thousand per square kilometer in 1998 (vance 2017). figure 2. an albino axolotl. photo by fronx, licensed under cc by, https://www.flickr.com/photos/fronx/6744367567. yet while axolotls are disappearing from xochimilco, this does not signal their extinction. instead, they have thrived in the global circuits of biological research, appearing in labs throughout the world as a model organism. their unusual life cycle does not constitute their only noteworthy biological characteristic; they are also capable of regenerating a remarkable range of body structures at any point in their life cycle. they can regenerate entire limbs and tails, eye and heart tissue, and even their central nervous system. they can also be induced to change sexes. as a result, developmental and regenerative biologists, who study how organisms grow, develop, regenerate, and repair their bodies, prize them as research tools. while axolotls are proliferating, the lab axolotl differs from the axolotl in xochimilco. to serve as a scientific model, the bodies of axolotls in the lab have undergone transformation, standardization, and commodification. these practices have produced a population with little genetic diversity, setting them at odds with the logic of conservation biology, which seeks to maintain the genetic diversity of species (friese 2009). drawing on fieldwork in mexico with restoration ecologists working to conserve axolotl habitats, as well as on scientific papers and informal communications among the scientists who use axolotls as model organisms, i examine the fate of the axolotl in and out of xochimilco. taking up the lives of both wild and cultivated axolotls, this essay asks what is at stake when a species is eliminated from one anthropogenic environment, the canals of xochimilco, while being made to live in another, the laboratories of scientists studying developmental and regenerative biology. in contrasting these fields, i show that these different scientific deployments of the axolotl foster divergent imagined futures for human biologies and lives. while for restoration ecologists the axolotl demonstrates the fragility of biological life and the necessity for humans to transform their practices to protect all life forms, regenerative biologists see the axolotl as representing the unlimited potential and flexibility of human life and bodies. recent work by anthropologists has considered more-than-human engagements and entanglements, tracing the connections between human and nonhuman life forms (haraway 2008; kirksey and helmreich 2010; ogden, hall, and tanita 2013). scholars have considered the place of the nonhuman in science and conservation (hayden 2003; lowe 2006; birke 2012; friese and clarke 2012; sharp 2013; hartigan 2017), and the (sometimes violent) forms of care administered to animals and other nonhumans (chrulew 2011; van dooren 2014; lowe and münster 2016; bocci 2017). much of this work engages with the question of life in the anthropocene, the moment in which human activities have begun reshaping geological processes, creating global environmental crises, and troubling the nature–culture boundaries produced by modernity (latour 1993). yet even before the anthropocene, the axolotl and its home in xochimilco were made by humans: pre-columbian agricultural practices and the deep, permanent pools of water they produced made axolotl biologies possible. in the present day, different ways of making the human are emerging from the intersection of axolotls and scientific research. i analyze how scientists (and others) tend to axolotls, and argue that different ways of knowing axolotls suggest different possibilities for human biology and practices. these possibilities differ quite markedly depending on whether humans enact care for the axolotl in the wild or in the laboratory. restoration ecologists studying the axolotls’ imperiled ecosystem call for a return to historic agricultural and consumption practices that shaped xochimilco. regenerative biologists, on the other hand, find in the axolotls’ malleable bodies models for remaking human bodies and reversing the processes of injury or aging. producing knowledge about axolotls is speculative, generating new possibilities for humans and ecosystems. karen-sue taussig, klaus hoeyer, and stefan helmreich (2013, s5) call for an anthropology of potentiality, proposing three meanings of the term: “a hidden force determined to manifest itself,” “the capacity to transmute into something completely different,” and “latent possibility imagined as open to choice,” available to be worked on and molded in different directions. each meaning carries with it a different set of implications, calls to action, and politics. in other words, “though presented as insights into ‘nature,’ they work as vehicles for politics” (taussig, hoeyer, and helmreich 2013, s5). in the distinct contexts of xochimilco and the laboratory, people interpret the axolotl as embodying significantly different forms of biological potentiality. these interpretations have consequences not only for the axolotl but also for human social and biological life. examining the divergent meanings scientists draw from the study of the axolotl underscores the contingency of these claims. in the wild, the axolotl is a fragile sentinel species, that is, an organism that provides people with advance warning of environmental hazards by virtue of its greater susceptibility to them. it is seen as in need of protection and as an indicator of the fragility of the ecosystem more broadly. conservationists interpret its failure to thrive as a message to human populations to reform and reconsider how they live in relation to the environment. in the lab, the axolotl is no longer something that needs protection; rather, as a result of its biological capacity to heal and regenerate, it is interpreted as a being that models the potential power of human biology. flexibility and its limits scientists studying developmental and regenerative biology are exploring new possibilities for the plasticity of human bodies (steinhoff 2016). they suggest that humans may have hidden capabilities for regeneration, capabilities that they propose to unlock through research. these new powers include improved healing, the replacement of damaged tissues, the regeneration of limbs and organs, and even the reversal of aging. scientists have supported these claims through research with model organisms and by making cross-species comparisons, in particular between the human and the axolotl (bryant, endo, and gardiner 2002; farkas et al. 2016). as sarah franklin (2007, 33) has argued, in a postgenomic age scientists are reimagining the limits of biology, envisioning biological systems as “plastic, flexible, and partible.” for regenerative biologists, the axolotl embodies this flexibility. in translating their findings from the axolotl to humans, regenerative biologists reimagine relationships across species lines, suggesting an underlying sameness or kinship between humans and salamanders. drawing equivalences between salamander and human biology, they propose new possibilities for the flexibility of the human and the ways in which injury, aging, sex, and reproduction might be transformed.2 the perception of the animal from the point of view of the lab makes for a dangerously limited one; expanding our view to the axolotl in the wild suggests alternative messages or readings of the axolotl, ones that emphasize the limits of biological flexibility and the different kinds of potentiality that inflexible, conditional biology might enable. with the axolotl populations in xochimilco threatened, restoration ecologists have taken the salamander up as a sentinel species, its life marking the health and vulnerabilities of the environment. as its population diminished, conservationists used the decline of the axolotl to raise awareness about the threats to xochimilco. they hope that the axolotl as sentinel has the potential to inspire people to change their behavior to protect the ecosystem in which it lives. conservationists developing an axolotl refuge in xochimilco interpret its failure to thrive as a message to human populations to reform and reconsider how they live in relation to the environment. protecting the axolotl requires rethinking human lives and practices, as well as drawing on the axolotl’s charisma and vulnerability to inspire these changes. scientists in both regenerative biology and restoration ecology respond to an uncertain future by caring for the axolotl, with the hope that this care will produce future benefits for both salamanders and humans. but who and what benefits from such care varies significantly. as carrie friese (2013, s129) has noted, “care is a potentializing practice and, in turn, a site of politics.” this essay demonstrates how, through scientists’ tending and labor, axolotls come to represent different forms of potential, producing different insights into life. as aryn martin, natasha myers, and ana viseu (2015, 627) have pointed out in their analysis of care in technoscience, “care is a selective mode of attention: it circumscribes and cherishes some things, lives, or phenomena as its objects.” by examining this mode of attention and the politics of care in two spaces, i draw attention to the contingency of technoscience, and to the very different worlds and forms of human life constructed by these practices of care and entanglement with nonhuman others like axolotls. bringing these two fields together highlights how, as maría puig de la bellacasa (2017, 7) has argued, “caring implicates different relationalities, issues, and practices in different settings.” furthermore, care, even when it involves affection and fondness, is not necessarily benevolent (chrulew 2011; van dooren 2014; bocci 2017). humans may care for nonhumans without caring about their futures. the axolotl is taken care of, but care is not always for the axolotl. material and symbolic axolotls axolotls were significant figures in aztec life and culture. in marketplaces, raw and roasted salamanders constituted an important protein source for the population of tenochtitlán (tate 2010). their name derives from a nahuatl word variously translated as “water toy or game,” “aquatic monster,” “water twin,” or “water dog.” many of these translations reference the linguistic and mythic connections between the axolotl and the aztec deity xolotl, the canine twin of quetzalcóatl, and the god of twins and monsters.3 axolotls appeared in bernardino de sahagún’s sixteenth-century text on indigenous life in central mexico, historia general de las cosas de la nueva españa, in which he reported, “there are little creatures in the water called axolotls that have feet and hands like lizards, and the tail and body of an eel; they have wide mouths and whiskers on their neck. they are very good to eat; they are the food of gentlemen” (bartra 2011, 38). their unusual appearance and life cycle drew the attention of other european travelers, and their global circulation dates back at least to alexander von humboldt’s journeys through latin america. humboldt obtained two axolotls, which he passed on to georges cuvier, who regarded them as an object of some curiosity (von humboldt 1966; bartra 2011).4 figure 3. xolotl, as depicted in the sixteenth-century codex telleranio-remensis. they also appear in more contemporary literature and social theory as figures of latin american identity. julio cortázar’s 1956 short story “axolotl” depicts a nameless, unattached man in paris who fixates on an axolotl in an aquarium (a descendant of cuvier’s pair?), eventually metamorphosing into one himself. in cortázar’s (1967, 7) rendering, the axolotls constitute an unknown and unknowable aztec presence in paris, silent, immobile figures with “aztec faces, without expression but of an implacable cruelty.”5 unknown and unknowable, that is, to everyone except the narrator, who comprehends their “secret will, to abolish space and time with an indifferent immobility” (cortázar 1967, 5–6). they speak to him of a different way of life and way of seeing, utterly incommensurable with the human.6 the relationship between the man and the axolotls can be interpreted as the return of a denied or repressed connection with a pre-columbian world, one in which non-european life is cast as inherently inhuman and incomprehensible.7 regenerative biology and life without conditions as a lab subject, the axolotl has both a storied history of more than a hundred years of use and a bright future as a model for studies of regenerative biology, an exemplar of the flexibility and fluidity of biology (voss, epperlein, and tanaka 2009; reiß, olsson, hoßfeld 2015). regenerative biologists celebrate axolotls for their endlessly malleable bodies and ability to rebound from the trauma inflicted on them in the course of research. the scientists marvel at their capacity to heal wounds, regenerate, and even produce additional accessory limbs. the kinds of separation between individuals that mark many other species is absent from the axolotl. one can graft tissues from one individual to another at any life stage. the biologists martin kragl and elly tanaka (2009, 1) describe this as “a remarkable property of axolotls,” noting that, “amazingly, there seems to be no rejection of tissue grafts from individual to individual.” likewise, the axolotl suggests surprising possibilities for reproductive flexibility, as ovaries can be made to undergo reversal to testes through the strategically timed transplantation of gonadal tissue, or when female and male axolotls are surgically joined together (a technique known as parabiosis; humphrey 1945).8 pieces of an ovary can be transplanted from one animal to many recipients, where they become functional (humphrey 1976). scientists working in regenerative biology often read the axolotl as representing what life could and should be—ultimately flexible and able to respond to any kind of change by transforming its body to fit new circumstances. this flexibility has been taken up in representations of the axolotl in u.s. popular culture, for example in a 1970s ad for travelers insurance company, where an image of an axolotl appeared with the caption “the adjustable axolotl.” the advertisement lauded the axolotl as a being that “isn’t, technically, a finished product of any ordinary life cycle. he’s simply the aquatic larva of the north american salamander, ambystoma tigrinum. and he has an ability to adjust himself to changes in his living conditions which might well cause a lot of us humans to turn grass-green with envy.” the ad goes on to claim that in periods of drought or food shortages, the axolotl can transform from an aquatic creature to a land-dwelling salamander. this is not true—it does not normally undergo metamorphosis—but the ad agency has found the axolotl too compelling a symbol to be hindered by facts. the ad goes on to compare men and axolotls (with unfavorable results for men): “like the axolotl, man is often confronted with events which threaten to make a major change in his living conditions. but, unlike the axolotl, he can’t transform himself physically to meet them.” as in the lab, the axolotl here appears to be the epitome of the flexible body that emily martin (1994) describes as the ideal body of late-stage capitalism. the work of scientists in regenerative biology intends to make axolotl capacities accessible to humans. care of the amphibian the flexibility and potentialities of the axolotl become evident only through the labor that scientists devote to axolotls as laboratory animals, work that has both enabled knowledge production and reshaped axolotl life. this work has been thoroughly documented in both formal publications and in a newsletter circulated among the scientific community engaged in raising axolotls. published by the axolotl colony at indiana university, bloomington, the newsletter is informal and chatty, a place in which scientists share not only citations for recent publications, preliminary data, and tips on axolotl care but also art, doggerel, and other ephemera related to axolotls.9 the newsletter, a space in which scientists have worked out problems related to the care of the axolotl, provides a window into the lives of scientists and their interactions with the animal. it is full of the kinds of understandings and interactions with animals suppressed or erased in typical scientific publications. it is a place where knowledge seen as not properly scientific can nonetheless be shared among a community of practitioners, as they represent the axolotl in terms of what michael lynch (1988, 267) called the naturalistic animal, “the animal of common sense, the animal as it is viewed and acted upon in the world of everyday life.” it is what keepers of axolotls tell themselves and each other about these animals. read together with the official reports contained in publications, these archives give a picture of both the practices of care and the models of biology that animate life in the lab. since humboldt sent cuvier a pair of axolotls, scientists have been acquiring axolotls from xochimilco. once extricated from the canals, axolotls moved from lab colony to colony, in circuits documented in genealogies connecting axolotl and scientist families, as in this recounting of how the first animals arrived at the axolotl colony in indiana: “axolotls were passed on from mexico to european dealers, to dr. h. gloor of zurich, to dr. h. caspari of cold spring harbor, to dr. j. holtfreter of university of rochester to dr. de lanney of wabash college, and finally to dr. r. humphrey of indiana university” (tassava and stover 1978, 17). once they arrived at the axolotl colony, the animals were used for studies in embryology and developmental genetics (humphrey 1976). lineages of axolotls soon picked up the names of scientists who bought them in markets in mexico or bred them, although almost always these names were of european or american scientists. for example, dr. rafael palacios, a young mexican scientist from the mexican national institute for medical and biological sciences, came to indiana to observe the procedures used in rearing axolotls. in return for six white axolotls, he sent dr. robert tompkins at indiana six young dark animals. the resulting strain of dark animals was promptly named the “tompkins strain” (humphrey 1976). once an axolotl has arrived in indiana, it (or members of its lineage) might go anywhere in the united states. started by the biologist rufus humphrey, the axolotl colony was instrumental in proliferating axolotl bodies throughout laboratories nationwide. supported by the national science foundation and the u.s. department of public health, the colony provided axolotls to scientists at no charge beyond shipping expenses. demonstrating the docility of the axolotl and how easy they are to ship from place to place, humphrey described transporting five larvae he was given in pennsylvania in the summer of 1935. tucked into thermos jugs, he took them on a sightseeing road trip, noting later that “the axolotl passengers may be the only ones of their species to have had the distinction of visiting fort ticonderoga and ascending to the summit of mount washington” (humphrey 1976, 3). the ease of shipping axolotls and their amenability to even circuitous or lengthy trips greatly facilitated their spread in laboratory ecologies, if not in the wild. axolotls could easily be moved from the canals of xochimilco, compatible not only with the agricultural infrastructure but also with other human-designed environs, whether thermoses or labs, their biological requirements converging with preexisting arrangements. making a new axolotl scientists sought out the axolotl as an ideal lab resident. while the wild axolotl hides in canals, camouflaged in mud, the axolotl of the lab proves remarkably tractable. once in the laboratory, it was remade as a model organism, a process that transformed axolotl life cycles, bodies, and genetics. while other salamanders breed only after periods of hibernation and metamorphosis and require diverse habitats, the axolotl, adapted to the ubiquitous pools of water in xochimilco, is easily bred in the lab. its eggs can be obtained with ease, and it produces great quantities of large embryos at each spawning: between 500 and 1,500 eggs, four times a year in the wild (voss, epperlein, and tanaka 2009; zambrano 2011). while, in the wild, spawning occurs only at particular times of the year, axolotls raised in windowless laboratories and exposed to light in regulated twelve-hour periods will never acquire a seasonal rhythm and can be induced to spawn at any time (løvtrup 1981). in addition, selection pressure has resulted in the survival of larvae adapted to life in glass bowls (tassava and stover 1978). scientists extensively characterized the genetics of the axolotls in the lab, developing transgenesis tools and intentionally breeding axolotls for particular characteristics. they produced mutants with differences in pigmentation patterns, size, morphology (such as animals with short toes or arrested limb development), and organ development (including axolotls without eyes or with abnormal cardiac function) (malacinski 1978; briggs 1982).10 they carefully orchestrated the breeding of axolotls “for the purpose of having available a ready supply of genetically uniform experimental material” (malacinski 1977, 22) to be used in studies of developmental genetics. standardizing the axolotl and its genetics became particularly critical as developmental biology turned increasingly toward descriptions done at the molecular level in the 1950s (ankeny and leonelli 2011; on the importance of standardizing amphibian model organisms, see also nace 1978). standardizing animals helped guard against the individual animal body as a source of variation and ensured that each animal had predictable characteristics.11 in this sense, axolotls have proven themselves to be highly adaptable to the human-engineered environment of the lab. axolotl adaptability has made the animals abundant, expanding far beyond their initial habitat to labs around the globe. as a lab tool, the transformed and standardized axolotl had the potential to produce generalizable knowledge about biology and to stand in for human bodies, at least at the cellular level. figure 4. axolotls in the laboratorio de restauración ecológica. photo by emily wanderer. even as axolotls are seen as easier to raise and more adaptable to the lab than other amphibian life forms, they are still delicate and fragile, requiring precise care and attention. axolotls in laboratories have been trained to eat meat (generally minced liver or heart) and have become accustomed to being fed by hand, a time-consuming tendency that scientists found difficult to break (forbes and forbes 1980; lampiaho 1980; lawrence and montoya 1980; montoya 1982). tending to axolotls thus entails preparing special foods, feeding them by hand, and noting and attending to their moods so that they might go on to produce good data. the biologist rudolf brun (1980, 21) wrote about the challenges of axolotl care, observing: “probably many of us keeping ambystoma mexicanum in the lab have gone through the difficult times when they seemed to prefer to sicken or even die rather than cooperate in providing research material. my lab is no exception to this sinister axolotl rule.” figure 5. suggested menu for axolotls. reprinted from an article by nathan montoya in the winter 1982 issue of the axolotl newsletter, courtesy of the ambystoma genetic stock center. this tongue-in-cheek comment suggests the necessity of enlisting the collaboration of axolotls to produce data; an unhappy axolotl will prove useless to the scientist. brun (1980, 21) goes on to say that he followed the rationale of preventing disease by keeping the animals in good spirits (if they have any). how can this feasibly be accomplished? as anyone knows, good eating is an essential part of happiness. as indicated in several “pet store books” dealing with the care of salamanders, fresh, live earth worms seemed to be the correct diet. although the liver-trained axolotls were initially frightened by the twisting and turning worms in their glass bowl, they learned quickly how to deal with the new food. the advice provided by brun offers just one example of the tips and suggestions traded through the axolotl newsletter. the kind of individualized care that axolotls require to produce good data in turn produces an affection in the scientists who care for them, one that becomes evident in the descriptions that scientists provide about their axolotls for the newsletter. for example, one described the population of a laboratory in the following terms: “we have white animals, inbred for five generations, hyper-pigmented whites, a few black and—(the most cherished of all our axolotls) two beautiful golden albinos” (thomas 1978, 13). the language of beauty and cherishing indicates an aesthetic appreciation and fondness for the animals. from axolotl research to human biology however, care of the axolotls did not necessarily translate into care for the axolotls. while scientists spoke with affection about these creatures, they often treated the animals violently, removing axolotl limbs or organs, grafting one axolotl to another. in the axolotl colony and, subsequently, the ambystoma genetic stock center (agsc), axolotls were highly inbred, both for purposes of standardization and to reveal new recessive phenotypes. while initially advantageous for research, the extent of laboratory axolotl standardization has become problematic; according to the agsc, the lack of diversity indicates “an ominous future for the agsc population if genetic management strategies are not enacted” (voss, woodcock, and zambrano 2015, 1136), imperiling its future and indicating some of the negative consequences of exposure to laboratory life. tending to axolotls is a potentializing practice, but the potential generated is human potential rather than axolotl potential. while regenerative biologists are concerned about the viability of the axolotl and its health in the lab, they study axolotls not because they find the animals interesting for their own sake, but because scientists believe that they contain clues to capabilities and powers available to humans, if only we pursue them.12 in the work of biologists studying development and regeneration, axolotls come to stand in for the potential embodied in all vertebrates. this argument makes the claim that the processes of cell and organismal development do not radically differ across classes and that the regenerative powers of urodele amphibians could be shared by all vertebrates. some developmental biologists argue that amphibians, rather than being exceptional creatures, should “remind us that regeneration is an ancient and fundamental biological process, and challenge our creative and scientific abilities to discover how to unlock the regenerative potential with us” (bryant, endo, and gardiner 2002, 895).13 this argument holds that failing to properly interpret the axolotl as a model for human bodies and instead viewing it as an alien aberration has hindered research. figure 6. the process of limb regeneration. reprinted from an article by bruce m. carlson in the october 17, 1976 issue of the axolotl newsletter, courtesy of the ambystoma genetic stock center. scientists studying the axolotl have demanded a reconsideration of the prevailing view that humans are incapable of regeneration in light of recent discoveries of multipotent cells—cells that can give rise to a variety of cell types—in adult mammalian tissues (bryant, endo, and gardiner 2002). axolotls and their powers of limb regeneration thus become a source of “strategies for inducing regeneration in mammals” (bryant, endo, and gardiner 2002, 888). biologists argue that “the remarkable regenerative abilities of salamanders demonstrate what we reasonably can expect in terms of enhancing our regenerative potential” (mccusker and gardiner 2011, 566). scientists studying axolotls claim that the process of limb regeneration in axolotls, on one hand, and mammalian tissue repair, on the other, are based on common cellular and molecular programs, and that the pattern of gene expression in regenerating axolotl limbs resembles that of developing limbs in other vertebrates (morrison et al. 2006). beyond possibilities for limb regeneration, the axolotl is seen as suggesting an improved human future, one in which aging as well as trauma can be overcome. while most studies focus on limb regeneration, the developmental biologists catherine mccusker and david gardiner (2011, 566) suggest that the study of these regenerative mechanisms might also provide a means “to enhance our intrinsic regenerative abilities in order to slow and even reverse the damage of aging.” in their labs, the axolotl serves as a model for remaking human capabilities, one suggesting that the standard developmental narrative presumed to underwrite human life—birth, aging, and death—could perhaps be otherwise. they read the axolotl as evidence that within ourselves we have the capability to produce alternative developmental pathways, ones that do not end in aging or death. by scaling their focus to conserved genetic sequences, shared cell-signaling pathways, and other similarities at a cellular, molecular, or genetic level, scientists call into question the significance of the apparently vast differences at the level of the organism. they argue that at the scale of the cell, the preconception of fundamental difference between humans and salamanders is misguided and has obscured the possibility that humans might be capable of regeneration. following in the axolotls’ footsteps, rather than a speculative or radical proposal, is what we can reasonably expect. in the lab, the axolotl can repeatedly generate surplus vitality in the form of additional or replacement body parts. it transforms in response to new conditions, whether adapting itself to life in the glass bowls of the laboratory or to manipulations of its reproductive organs. it is a model of what sarah franklin (2007, 10) has called “the age of biological control,” in which biology is remade as plastic, flexible, and ideally suited to the market forms of biocapitalism. through the care and labor of regenerative biologists, the axolotl has become a tool that could potentially unlock new sources of value and surplus vitality within the human body. these potentialities are produced under capitalist logics that would most likely make flexibility, transformation, and rejuvenation unequally distributed, available only to those who could afford them. restoration ecology and the axolotl as sentinel species the image of the axolotl as regenerative harbinger becomes ironic once one ventures out of the lab to consider the amphibian in the wild. in 2011, i went to xochimilco, the axolotl’s only native habitat. the present-day canals of xochimilco are popular destinations for residents of mexico city and tourists alike. people come for rides in trajineras, festive colored boats that can carry up to thirty people and are available for rental by the hour or the day. as the boats make their way slowly through the canals, they are stopped by vendors offering drinks, multicourse meals, or serenades by mariachi bands. the whole area has the atmosphere of a party, and few people seem to take notice of the extremely murky quality of the water below. i went to xochimilco with luis zambrano, the director of the laboratorio de restauración ecológica, who studies aquatic ecosystems and organisms with a focus on the axolotl. zambrano’s work in conservation and restoration has made him well known, and he has a high profile both within mexico and internationally. shortly after we arrived in xochimilco, zambrano hailed a trajinera to take us to the site of one of his research and conservation projects, a refuge for the axolotl. zambrano scoffed at the tourists, telling me that we would not be following them. we were going to what he called “the nice area. not the tourist area.” eschewing the more populated canals, we headed toward the area where zambrano was developing the refuge.14 while axolotls used to abound in the canals, populations have been declining; starting in 2006 they were listed as critically endangered by the international union for the conservation of nature, and today they are protected under the convention on international trade in endangered species agreement. hence, the need for a refuge to protect them. figure 7. trajinera in xochimilco. photo by emily wanderer. we arrived at the refuge after a short ride in a skiff. the refuge was one of the lake’s artificial islands that had been restored to its historical function as a chinampa, an area for labor-intensive agriculture. like most of the chinampas in xochimilco, it had been abandoned for two decades. chinampas had fallen out of favor as xochimilco underwent acute change, becoming increasingly urbanized while agricultural production was marginalized. the growing water needs of mexico city and the accompanying diversion of water from xochimilco resulted in declining water quality and food production and harmed the agrarian landscape (salles 1992). yet despite these changes, the laboratory for ecological restoration managed to transform this chinampa after acquiring the land with a grant from the federal government. it had once again become a thriving garden, demonstrating the continued fertility of the land. zambrano had hired laborers to work the soil and had purchased the equipment, tools, and seed necessary to make it productive. they grew organic lettuce, broccoli, cabbage, and chamomile to sell in urban markets. to provide a refuge for the axolotl, they tended to and cultivated the canal, planting water hyacinth and other native plants, and they constructed a filter to prevent nonnative fish from entering and to improve the canal’s water quality. the improved water quality was also intended to better the quality and healthfulness of the crops grown in the chinampa, which were irrigated with canal water. figure 8. in the axolotl refuge. photo by emily wanderer. figure 9. luis zambrano in the axolotl refuge. photo by emily wanderer. zambrano was optimistic about the refuge’s promise to provide a haven for axolotls and to protect the ecosystem in xochimilco more broadly. the refuge began with one experimental canal and one control canal, subsequently expanding to four additional canals (valiente et al. 2010). as we walked around the refuge, he told me that they had been working on it for the past three years, exclaiming: “and see the changes! from this experience, we know that in three years we can change the land. you need to have a good team. one person can’t do anything alone.” he went on to describe the refuge as a “synthesis of culture and nature.” in this project, he was attempting to resurrect a historical form of agriculture to protect a species that had the status of a national symbol. people are fascinated by the axolotl, and the refuge project received significant attention from journalists within mexico and from abroad.15 the affective appeal of organisms, or their charisma, has proven key to motivating conservation projects globally (lorimer 2015). zambrano intended to make use of the animals’ charisma and significance for mexicans to call for the protection of not only an entire ecosystem but also the agricultural practices that have historically characterized the area. this project contrasts with other conservation efforts in xochimilco that have paid little attention to the local community and have often resulted in its dispossession in the name of protecting nature (narchi and cristiani 2015). the refuge would offer protection from encroaching urbanization, making it possible for the axolotl to survive in its native environment while maintaining the chinampa as a space for agricultural life and labor. to protect axolotls, zambrano argued, mexico had to maintain the historic cultural practices that had allowed humans and axolotls to coexist for centuries. the canals in which the axolotl lived could never be conceived of as pure spaces of nature; they are anthropogenic landscapes, tied to human practices, in which axolotl and human lives are produced together. living well with axolotls as mette svendsen (2011, 416) argues in the case of human embryos, articulations of potentiality are “acts deeply embedded in a social context and constitutive of the mobilization of social relations and networks.” articulating the potentiality of the axolotl depended on activating a range of social relations, including interest in particular food products. the success of the chinampas depended on the development of a culture within mexico city that valued food attached to a specific locale. the concept of terroir, or the taste of place, conveys the idea that the geophysical attributes of a place, like soil, topography, climate, ecosystem, combine with social and cultural practices of agriculture to produce particular tastes (paxson 2010; weiss 2011). zambrano and the farmers i spoke with at the chinampa described the produce as having a unique flavor. “the rosemary has a saltier flavor,” one said. “the earth is different,” another added, “the epazote [wormseed] has its own taste.” a third: “whatever herb we grow here, it has a different flavor.” the process of constructing a connection between a particular taste of food, a form of agriculture, and a particular place requires the development of a consumer market, one that is willing to seek out and support local foods and is invested in conservation. the growing prominence of fine-dining restaurants that emphasize the use of local produce suggests the possibility of generating an interest in the terroir of xochimilco.16 at the moment, the products produced in the axolotl refuge are not explicitly marketed as coming from xochimilco. gradually, the team hopes to get people to pay more for plants from xochimilco because they are more delicious, and because supporting agriculture in xochimilco means maintaining practices that produce places essential for nonhuman life forms like the axolotl. in the cage of melancholy, roger bartra (1992, 7) deploys the axolotl, which he identifies as “that most mexican amphibian,” as a metaphor for mexican national identity. he translates the nahuatl word axolotl as “game of water,” drawing attention to the playful and fluid qualities of the axolotl. bartra (1992, 7) suggests that there are “certain associations between social and biological phenomena, associations of ideas which traditionally have been at the root of national thought.” in his telling, the biology of the axolotl and its mysterious double nature as both larva and salamander, the result of an eternally delayed metamorphosis, becomes a representation of the mexican national character, highlighting the nation’s perpetual delay and immaturity with respect to global trends. the biological properties of the axolotl in this account are signs, “a message that is transmitted to mexicans in order to instruct them on their condition, their origin, and their future” (bartra 1992, 8). taking bartra’s deployment of the axolotl seriously, i ask what the fate of the axolotl tells us today. what is the axolotl’s message as it is circulated in scientific labs and taken as object of conservation for the mexican nation? the refuge brought together nonhuman life forms and human practices to move past anthropocentric conceptions of a good life toward a more biocentric view, one that considers better living not only for people but also for mexico’s biodiverse life forms. projects like the axolotl refuge incorporate both human and nonhuman into projects that conjoin the political with the biological, producing new forms of biopolitics (foucault 1978, 2008). nonhuman and human lives have long been entangled in xochimilco and this project, rather than seeking to address one in isolation from the other, brings them together in the same frame. reports on zambrano’s projects described the conservation of the axolotl as crucial for the ecosystem of mexico city, ascribing to the retiring salamander tremendous ecological significance. zambrano explained that “keeping the salamanders would imply that the urban environment had improved, and that xochimilco had become a strong point for sustainability that would provide the city with water, climate, food, air, and vegetation” (olivares alonso 2011). protecting xochimilco would represent at least a symbolic commitment within mexico city to protecting the environment. zambrano argues that the health of the nation is tied to the preservation of life forms like the axolotl and that this preservation will come through a commitment to maintaining human ways of life tied to mexican history. the management of nonhuman animal life entails management of human life, labor, production, and even taste. saving the axolotl thus becomes a project that could reshape human lives in mexico city. while the refuge draws on contemporary western scientific principles and is organized by a well-regarded, mainstream academic scientist, it also exemplifies efforts in mexico and latin america more generally to use concepts of buen vivir/vivir bien to reconceptualize and challenge western scientific paradigms. buen vivir/vivir bien has emerged as a social movement in latin america in recent decades. translated as “living well,” the concept of buen vivir draws on values, experiences, and practices from indigenous communities to challenge capitalist practices and conventional western notions of the good life. the goal of buen vivir is to value harmony among individuals living in a community and between peoples and nature, decentering the human in favor of an ecosystemic view of the world (de la cadena 2010, 2015). buen vivir has been written into the constitutions of bolivia and ecuador, where the idea that all life forms ought to be “living well” has been used to critique narratives that represent the global south as underdeveloped and in need of conforming to the developed world. the axolotl refuge (unlike other so-called conservation projects enacted in xochimilco) refuses standard narratives of development in which nature is subject to domination and exploitation, as well as the modern division between culture and nature itself. the stalled development of the axolotl, and its refusal to metamorphose, might in this light be reinterpreted as resonating with buen vivir’s rejection of western categories of developed and underdeveloped and its calls for alternatives to development that draw on indigenous lifeways and practices. i read the axolotl refuge as an effort to highlight local indigenous and mestizo practices to find a new way forward, to construct a future in which both human and nonhuman life forms are valued and thrive and to imagine an economy based on solidarity, sustainability, wholeness, and diversity. despite these efforts to care for the axolotl and to sustain human forms of life, this is ultimately not a story of hope and survival across species lines. the axolotl has radically diminished in xochimilco, succumbing to invasive species, pollution, and generally degraded water quality and habitat. neither the corporeal flexibility lauded by regenerative biologists nor the refuge project has protected the axolotl against the continuing transformation of an increasingly malfunctioning ecosystem. the axolotl in the context of xochimilco represents a very different future than the axolotl of the lab. rather than exhibiting limitless, unconditional biology, the axolotl in the canals appears inflexible and vulnerable. it is far from a unique case. the story of salamanders and amphibians more broadly in the anthropocene is one of collapse and disappearance; indeed, amphibians are often taken as indicator species signalling anthropogenic harm. herpetologists argue that contemporary extinction rates among amphibians indicate that the class is currently undergoing a mass extinction event, one that rivals the one at the end of the cretaceous period that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs (wake and vredenburg 2008; kolbert 2015). the extinction events among salamanders and other amphibians carry a broader message as well; these species are often seen as sentinel species, crucial indicators of the broader health of the watershed (hovingh 1982). their disappearance tells us about the broader environment, and about the future of other species. despite the axolotl’s poor prospects, the refuge project itself remains an important example of how scientists engaging in efforts to improve life have drawn connections between forms of human life and protecting biodiversity, an example that perhaps should be more broadly applied. zambrano continues his work on the refuge, attempting to improve at least a small portion of xochimilco for the axolotl and raising wild axolotls in his lab for potential release (vance 2017). conclusion the axolotl in the canals of xochimilco and in the biological laboratory suggest different models and practices for living alongside species; in each setting, the axolotl embodies different forms of potential. both projects break down species boundaries, imagining human and axolotl lives as intertwined. however, the nature of this relationship differs radically depending on the context. in the laboratory the axolotl multiplies. flexible and fluid, it becomes a model for not only biological processes but for modern life. it is an idealized form of vitality and regeneration, able to adjust and regenerate in the face of any kind of abuse or violence that modernity supplies, and one that humans should strive to emulate. yet the vitality and regenerative potential of the axolotl exist only within very narrow parameters: in the monitored and controlled spaces of the lab where the animals are tended to with a particular kind of care. in the wild, axolotls are vulnerable to change and can only be sustained by equally precarious human forms of life, certain agricultural practices fast being pushed aside by urban living. despite being touted as models of flexibility and adjustability, axolotls are here better understood as precarious and fragile, creatures whose survival in a degraded environment requires human commitment and work to preserve their habitat. the axolotl demonstrates how biological care can enable very different imaginings of the future and very different biopolitics for both humans and other creatures. notes acknowledgments i am very grateful to luis zambrano for showing me his work in xochimilco. many colleagues read and commented on drafts of this article; i would like to especially thank mary brazelton, laura brown, heath cabot, stefan helmreich, amy johnson, gabriella lukacs, lisa messeri, tomas matza, joy rankin, and david singerman for their thoughtful engagement. i presented versions of this research at the university of california, santa barbara latin american and iberian studies program, at the university of pennsylvania program in environmental humanities, and at the university of cambridge centre for research in the arts, social sciences, and humanities; the responses i received from these audiences helped shape and improve the essay. thanks also to the cultural anthropology editorial collective; cymene howe’s editing was particularly valuable. this research was supported by the wenner-gren foundation and the national science foundation. 1. compare the axolotl with the jaguar, another iconic mexican animal, which evolved between 2 and 4 million years ago (johnson et al. 2006). 2. scientists compare axolotl and human cellular and molecular programs and genomes, trying to establish what biological differences enable axolotls to regenerate while humans cannot and what similarities exist between the two species’ biological processes. mammals do have some capacity to regenerate; for humans, this ability is most evident in newborns, who can regenerate amputated fingertips (hutchins and kusumi 2016). work by regenerative biologists seeks to draw on animal models to find ways to extend and enhance this capacity. scientists study genetic programs, the processes of cell signaling, proliferation, and dedifferentiation, immune responses, and other elements of regeneration in their search for commonalities between model species and humans. the axolotl has an extremely large genome (its thirty-two-gigabase pair is about ten times the length of the human genome). due to its large size, it has only recently been sequenced (nowoshilow et al. 2018). researchers hope that studies of the axolotl genome will allow them to better understand which genes related to regeneration have been conserved across species and how their regulation differs in mammals and salamanders (koshiba et al. 1998; farkas et al. 2016; hutchins and kusumi 2016). 3. afraid of death, rather than being offered up as a sacrifice, xolotl transformed first into a maize sprout, then a maguey or agave plant, and finally hid as an axolotl in lake xochimilco, a mythical transformation that ties these three life forms and food sources together (read and gonzalez 2000). 4. of course, mexico city was also an important space for knowledge making at this time, not simply a source of raw materials for european consumption; see achim 2007 on the circulation and debates about lizards as remedies in the late 1700s. 5. what was, for zambrano, a survival strategy—immobility during the day—becomes an indication of axolotl alienness, foreignness, and disconnection from the human. 6. axolotl ways of knowing and being may be incommensurable with the human, but, as this essay argues, axolotl ways of being may have important consequences for human practices. 7. for a more detailed analysis and other interpretations of the story, see levinson 1994. 8. see fausto-sterling 2000 for an analysis of the history of models of male and female development in animals and humans and their implications. 9. the axolotl colony has been a major center of axolotl breeding and research. it moved in 2005 from indiana university to the university of kentucky’s department of biology, where it was renamed the ambystoma genetic stock center (agsc). in 2016, the agsc resurrected the newsletter, which had ceased publication in 2003. 10. the laboratory population of axolotls is highly inbred (voss, woodcock, and zambrano 2015). most appear to be descendants of a shipment of thirty-three animals to paris in 1864 (malacinski 1978; reiß, olsson, and hoßfeld 2015). according to george malacinski (1978, 196), an early director of the axolotl colony, they are notable even within populations of laboratory animals for their degree of inbreeding: “among vertebrates, the axolotl may indeed have achieved one of the higher extents of selective, closed colony breeding yet achieved for a laboratory maintained experimental animal.” 11. for more on the standardization of animal bodies for scientific research, see kohler 1994, creager 2001, and rader 2004. 12. this recalls rachel ankeny’s (2007) point about how modeling work assumes that findings can be generalized across species. 13. these claims are eye-catching and remarkable for scientific, peer-reviewed articles, borrowing the capitalist language of sales and salesmanship to promote the science of regenerative biology. 14. for an account from zambrano’s lab on the development of the refuge, see valiente et al. 2010. 15. for examples of media coverage of the refuges, see walker 2009, universal 2011, varela huerta 2011, and castello y tickell 2012. 16. take pujol, enrique olvera’s restaurant in the neighborhood of polanco, which frequently appears on lists of the world’s best restaurants and emphasizes local ingredients. references achim, miruna 2007 “making lizards into drugs: the debates on the medical uses of reptiles in late eighteenth-century mexico.” journal of spanish cultural studies 8, no. 2: 169–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/14636200701431008. ankeny, rachel a. 2007 “wormy logic: model organisms as case-based reasoning.” in science without laws: model systems, cases, exemplary narratives, edited by angela n. h. creager, elizabeth lunbeck, and m. norton wise, 46–58. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ankeny, rachel a., and sabina 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https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011. 01106.x. zambrano, luis 2011 “la extinción del axolote en xochimilco.” in axolotiada: vida y mito de un anfibio mexicano, edited by gerardo villadelángel viñas and roger bartra, 230–50. mexico city: fondo de cultural económica. affective atmospheres of terror on the mexico–u.s. border affective atmospheres of terror on the mexico–u.s. border: rumors of violence in reynosa’s prostitution zone sarah luna davidson college http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2278-1114 in mexico city in january 2011, i organized a reunion with eva and sofía, whom i had become close to during my twelve months of fieldwork in reynosa’s prostitution zone—known locally as la zona or as boystown among many americans.1 when i met eva and sofía, they both expressed that they urgently needed to leave reynosa. they feared for their lives because gun battles and techniques of intimidation by armed men had increased since federal troops had been sent to reynosa to combat drug trafficking. they were barely able to make a living as sex workers because the economic crisis, the swine flu, and drug violence had scared clients away. eva, who was in her fifties, had escaped el salvador’s civil war after many of her family members had been killed. she moved to reynosa to work in la zona to support her daughters and grandchildren in central mexico. sofía, a single mother in her thirties, worked to send money to family members in her hometown of tampico who were caring for her adolescent son, sergio, whom she eventually learned was working for a drug organization.2 sergio and his pregnant fourteen-year-old girlfriend joined my reunion with eva and sofía in mexico city in 2011. the five of us slept in a large hotel room for three days and ate meals, took photos, and walked through chapultepec park together. we exchanged news and gossip, reminisced about funny things that had happened, and repeated rumors of the gun battles and murders that took place in reynosa. sergio and eva compared observations about the techniques of intimidation that drug organizations used in mexico to the practices eva had witnessed during el salvador’s civil war. they told stories of watching their friends and family members being killed. they described the red color bullets leave in their wake as they pass by, and their hot sting when they enter the body. one morning, as we were all eating a breakfast of orange juice, coffee, and spicy egg dishes, the narco-stories of the day began. although we were ostensibly a safe distance from reynosa’s narcos, in hushed tones, eva told us a story about two “little old women” shopping at a market in downtown reynosa. while one woman loudly recounted a rumor about narcos, the other remained quiet and looked nervous. the loud woman was later found dead, with a severed finger in her mouth. a note was attached to the corpse: “keep quiet if you don’t have anything to say.” our eyes widened, we breathed deeply, and we looked at one another in silence. rumors like the one eva narrated have shaped affective atmospheres of terror, especially as reynosa has become further militarized by the mexican state in what was officially an attempt to combat narco-trafficking and its attendant torture, killings, and threats.3 as reynosa residents spread rumors of violence, borders between narco-controlled territory and state-controlled territory shifted in and through their bodies. i argue that, in such atmospheres of terror, rumors of violence have a particular kind of contagious performativity that conditions affective responses and inculcates both fear and intimacy. these stories produce shared bodily intensities such as a rapid heart rate, a slowness of breath, and a hyperawareness. in the first part of this essay, i draw on theories of performativity, conspiracy, and affect to analyze the rumor eva told us. the circulation of such stories constructed affective atmospheres of terror and intensified feelings of vulnerability. the second part of my discussion examines how reynosa residents generally, and sex workers specifically, changed their spatial practices in response to both affective atmospheres of terror and the content of rumors. these effects first occurred among reynosa’s less empowered populations, such as sex workers, and eventually among populations that historically felt relatively safe in border cities, such as american (sex) tourists and missionaries. i conclude with how this particular manifestation of fear and precarity led to the decline of the prostitution zone for sex workers, missionaries, and clients. performative rumors of violence shape the way power feels. the primary forms of power held by drug organizations that i discuss here are tied to coercion grounded in violence—the power to kill or let live—as well as in the economic ability to purchase loyalty and impunity. this kind of power is best described by the expression plata o plomo, silver or lead, which is the choice narcos offer between accepting currency (in exchange for cooperation) or a bullet (death). plata o plomo is a key method through which drug organizations have woven themselves into mexico’s political fabric. howard campbell (2009, 16) shows how plata o plomo has proven integral to relationships of “corruption and collusion” between drug traffickers and mexican police, as well as judicial and military forces.4 because narco power and state power overlap at various levels, they are often indistinguishable to the populations that reside in their territories. fear forms an important part of the power wielded by drug organizations, which have diversified economic strategies to include protection rackets, extortion, and kidnapping. the spread of terror makes their other enterprises profitable (see campbell and hansen 2014). while drug organizations clearly take part in actions meant to spread fear, this article focuses on how practices of the resident population likewise contribute to atmospheres of terror. my analysis adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates how the most vulnerable populations suffer the consequences of a war on crime. after a contested win in december 2006, president felipe calderón deployed fifty thousand troops throughout mexico in the name of public safety. calderón’s critics accused him of using the drug war to legitimize his unpopular presidency. during mexico’s drug war, partially funded by the united states through the mérida initiative, tensions between drug organizations and armed men of the state increased,5 gun battles became more frequent, the murder rate nearly tripled,6 and people felt less and less safe. of course, mexico’s problems with drug violence are of binational origin. the united states is in great part responsible for the ascendance of mexican drug organizations through interventions into colombian drug-supply routes, the smuggling of firearms to mexico, the purchase of mexican drugs, and the implementation of prohibitionist and neoliberal policies (andreas 1995, 1996; campbell 2009; mcdonald 2005; muehlmann 2014). the militarization of both sides of the border has escalated wars on drugs, terrorism, and organized crime, rendering life more dangerous for both countries’ most vulnerable populations (campbell 2009; mcdonald 2005; muehlmann 2014; vite pérez 2014). working in the narco-economy is one of the few options for young men in many parts of mexico where poverty, unemployment, and underemployment have increased since small and medium-sized farmers were bankrupted through nafta and agrarian reforms (mcdonald 2005). figure 1. the mcallen-hidalgo-reynosa international bridge. photo by sarah luna. tamaulipas is one of the key sites for the northbound smuggling of cocaine, marijuana, and migrants, as well as the southbound smuggling of guns (made easier by lax texas gun laws) and u.s. dollars. it is also the home of the gulf cartel, one of mexico’s oldest drug organizations, which began smuggling alcohol and other items to the united states during the prohibition era. drug organizations are deeply embedded in the social life of reynosa, and almost everyone i met from reynosa had worked for or with narcos in some capacity, whether voluntarily or not, including teachers, police officers, dentists, graphic designers, and taxi drivers. reynosenses noted that narcos had long run their city, often in collusion with local law enforcement and politicians. although reynosa was far from peaceful before, reynosa residents experienced heightened fear and bloodshed after soldiers and federal police flooded reynosa’s streets in december 2007. i met both eva and sofía in 2008 through a white missionary, stacy, who moved to reynosa from tulsa to form a small mission team when god told her to “love the women of boystown.”7 sex workers and missionaries met in reynosa’s prostitution zone, which is surrounded by cement walls, with only one principal exit and entrance guarded by municipal police officers who collect money and provide security for clients and workers. because the security guards did not let her into boystown, stacy prayed and walked around the periphery for fifteen months until her friendship with a drug dealer and pimp facilitated her entrance. prostitution in reynosa is legally tolerated if sex workers register with the city and are examined for sexually transmitted infections by the city’s health department. la zona was considered to be the territory of the drug organization in power, and high-ranking narcos were said to be the owners of many of the buildings within the walled enclosure. la zona was theirs, much as the city of reynosa was: through bribes, threats, and inciting general fear. narcos ran their business as they pleased and demanded compliance from residents. figure 2. the entrance to la zona. photo by sarah luna. boystown vividly reflected economic inequalities between the united states and mexico, and it also provided an opportunity for women to leverage those inequalities into monetary resources that they could use to support themselves and their families. american sex tourism historically helped make mexican border prostitution zones profitable (see curtis and arreola 1991), and many sex workers migrated to reynosa hoping to earn dollars. most were single mothers whose work was motivated by relations of love and obligation to children, parents, and/or pimps.8 sex workers’ temporary intimacies with clients earned them cash that they could convert into subsistence, commodities, and savings that they hoped would lead to economic stability for themselves and their families. for their part, missionaries explained that because jesus chose to spend his time with “poor and forgotten” people like prostitutes, getting to know sex workers made them feel closer to god. stacy and her team built friendships with sex workers, prayed for them, and learned their names and stories. they also circulated sex workers’ narratives to christian congregations and blog followers who supported the mission through prayer, money, and short-term teams who worked to build what they called a “modern-day monastery.”9 missionaries had faith that their relationships with sex workers would lead to relationships between sex workers and god, which would in turn result in sex workers leaving boystown and quitting sex work. thus boystown enabled the creation and maintenance of relationships both within and beyond its parameters. however, factors from 2008 to 2010 led many missionaries and sex workers to leave reynosa. the atmosphere of terror effectively destroyed some of the ways in which migrants created intimate ties and fulfilled obligations. contagious rumors and bodily intensities all of us having breakfast that day in mexico city, recalling times both good and bad, first felt eva’s story about the old woman with a finger in her mouth on an affective level. affects are intense sensations in the body resulting from external stimuli, and they are noncognitive, nonconscious, and nonrational (gould 2009, 19–20). rumors shape emotions, actions, thoughts, and subjectivities, but they are first experienced at the level of affect.10 while emotions are largely individual, affect is intersubjective and bodily transmitted, and, as sara ahmed (2010, 39) notes, “contagious” (see also richard and rudnyckyj 2009; herrmann 2015). “ordinary affects,” as kathleen stewart (2007, 2–3), has written, “are public feelings. . . . their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible.” my bodily response during eva’s story was a fight-or-flight adrenaline surge and a rapid heartbeat. in an attentive state of increased psychological and physiological tension, i breathed slowly and leaned in to hear eva’s whisper. surely these affective intensities were experienced in different ways by different people. as lauren berlant (2008, 4) notes, the emotional states linked to affective structures are not predetermined. rumors help shape an affective atmosphere, which ben anderson (2009, 78) defines as “the shared ground from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge.” stories of narcos’ exploits were followed by long moments of silence and intense eye contact; sometimes there were tears. eva broke the heavy silence by affirming for us all: “that is why i need to leave reynosa.” when i asked her if she could think of any kind of solution to what was happening in mexico, eva said that all we could do was pray, and she assured me that god must have kept her alive for a reason. although living in territory contested between drug organizations and state actors put eva at risk, she ultimately had faith, or hope, that god’s sovereignty would prevail. while designating a narrative as a rumor or a conspiracy theory calls into question its truth-value, this is not my intention.11 my analysis of rumors, rather, is in line with that of scholars of conspiracy theory who do not attempt to assess the veracity of narratives but rather examine them to make sense of particular political conditions in which available information is incomplete or inconsistent (fenster 1999; keeley 1999; stewart 1999; butt 2005). stories like the one told by eva proved vital for transmitting information to one’s friends and family, in part because people associated with drug organizations effectively controlled the press. while i knew as early as 2008 that the press was not free in reynosa (and reynosenses knew this long before i did), this information circulated only in rumors until surfacing in the u.s. and mexican press in 2010. that year, mexico was the second-deadliest country in the world for journalists (heslop 2011), and during a two-week period, eight journalists in reynosa were kidnapped; two were released with a warning, one died after being tortured, and four are still missing (stevenson 2010; pérez arellano 2013). many gun battles in reynosa went unreported by the local media,12 so people depended on rumors for information. rumors and conspiracy theories can operate as critiques of larger power structures by people with little access to power (white 1997; masquelier 2000; comaroff and comaroff 2001; hoskins 2002; kirsch 2002). rumors are one means through which people react to collective experiences of inequality, exploitation, and political violence, and the circulation of rumors intensifies during times of extreme exploitation and suffering (white 1997; masquelier 2000; kirsch 2002; butt 2005). the violence and inequality in the neoliberal and heavily militarized reynosa of 2008 and 2009 created fertile ground for rumors. claudio lomnitz-adler (1995, 36) suggests that mexicans have relied more heavily on gossip than on official information sources because the national public sphere has rendered itself untrustworthy by excluding many voices due to power asymmetries. rihan yeh (2012) further demonstrates asymmetries in the mexican public sphere through her analysis of tijuana’s two publics: one constituted by the lower classes through hearsay, while the bourgeois-type public rested on a “we” of citizenship that distanced itself from poverty and criminality. reynosenses who considered themselves locals constituted a bourgeois-type public. in private reynosenses whispered complaints that narcos were taking over their city, and in public they loudly complained about migrants from southern mexico and central america, attributing the city’s problems to them. for the purposes of my discussion, i have focused on what yeh (2012, 716) would call the “hearsay public” register. during the drug war, rumors of violence had performative effects—their contagion circulated affectively and increased perceptions of risk and vulnerability. performative rumors played an important role in constituting power relations they might, at first glance, appear only to describe. i am thus interested in what kind of work local theories about power in reynosa do. rumors are performative speech acts in the sense theorized by j. l. austin (1962), utterances that do not merely describe but also accomplish something in the social world.13 these rumors had corporeal and social effects, creating intense sensations in bodies that led not only to collective fear but also to shared intimacy. performatives cannot be evaluated in terms of truth, because their success requires felicitous conditions that allow them to do the things in the social world that they name. i do not know if an elderly woman was found with a severed finger in her mouth. the local press in reynosa did not publish such things. the absence of a free press and the fact that people periodically received evidence of violent acts created the conditions of possibility for such rumors to be especially poignant. howard campbell (2014, 64) shows how narco-propaganda has propagated terror in mexico through public acts of violence, media censorship, and written statements, videos, and music. reynosa residents were active consumers of narco-propaganda, including my host family, which crowded around a computer to watch videos of reynosa’s gun battles. some were filmed by news reporters while others were taken on cell phones and put to the soundtrack of narcocorridos, ballads about drug trafficking. one of my host sister’s friends, josiah, claimed that the song “fiesta en la sierra,” by the musical group tucanes de tijuana, was an accurate reflection of the ties between narcos and politicians. the song is set at a lavish ranch party in the mountains where mexican politicians and high-level narcos socialize together. invoking the “we” of the gulf cartel and referring to the mayor of reynosa, josiah said, “we put him into power.” politicians were elected as well as killed to the beat of narcocorridos. when juan antonio guarjardo anzaldúa, rio bravo’s ex-mayor running for re-election, was gunned down with five other people in broad daylight in november 2007 (sánchez et al. 2007), the tucanes de tijuana allegedly played at a party put on by a drug organization to celebrate his death at reynosa’s holiday inn. the circulation of rumors, threats, and the occasional display of dead, mutilated bodies, sometimes with messages attached, generated a public both passive and terrified. iterability is partially responsible for the power of narco-stories. jacques derrida (1982) argues that part of what makes performativity work is the ability to cite previous instantiations. drawing on both derrida and austin, judith butler (1990) argues that a gendered subject does not exist a priori but through the enactment of gender, creating the illusion of an already gendered subject. in reynosa, the circulation of rumors of violence led to affects embodied in emotions such as fear and anxiety that changed the way people experienced their own vulnerability. rumors form an important part of discursive power; their presence changes how people talk and think about the world and imagine their place in it. as we will see below, vulnerability was gendered, raced, and classed, but the circulation of narco-stories contributed to atmospheres of terror that created increasingly vulnerable-feeling subjects all around. the repetition of violent narco-stories not only expressed cartel power but also amplified it. according to danilyn rutherford (2012, 101), every violent act may be considered performative insofar as it “says” what it “does.” i argue that, in environments of terror, even rumors of violence are performative in this way. narratives about incidents of assault, kidnapping, torture, and murder do not say what they do in the same way that experiencing or witnessing violence does. yet while rumors may not create the physical violence they name, i have found that they have performative effects, producing a sensation akin to what subjugation feels like. narco-stories produce the anticipation of pain just as they produced the terror of the apparently unchecked power of narcos. all rumors, like all speech acts, have performative capacities. rumors of violence differ in that they recapitulate previous violent acts and contagiously shape how power feels for the people circulating and listening to these stories. as in derrida’s conception of iterability, some rumors have been circulated so many times and in so many contexts that they have become spatially, temporally, and substantively separated from original acts of brutality. some narco-stories surely named events that never occurred, but reynosenses witnessed violent acts often enough to sustain belief in rumors. yet despite, or perhaps because of, the distance between the violent act and its performative citing, rumors continue to draw on the power of violent acts. as with michael taussig’s (1986) concept of epistemic murk, what happens in the imagination adds force to the power of fear in an environment of terror. these gaps between the evidence of violent acts and perceived violence not only intensify fear but can also, perhaps oddly, allow rumors to provide a feeling of comfort, because they help make sense of an uncertain world. but these rumors lull their circulators into a false sense of security. as stuart kirsch (2002, 70, 57) writes, “much as violence often begets violence, rumours about political violence seem to reproduce rather than critique existing power relations.” thus rumors about political violence are both an expression and a source of terror. sharing rumors about torture, murder, and kidnapping produced affective states that allowed for the bond of collective trauma in reynosa. stranded in a mutual sense of powerlessness and isolation, migrants withheld information from faraway family members to avoid worrying them and nurtured local intimacies, in part, through the circulation of narco-stories. missionaries, sex workers, and i observed that when we traveled to other cities to visit family members, it was difficult to explain how fear haunted us in reynosa. indeed, many of us lied to loved ones so as not to worry them. rumors of violence in an atmosphere of terror are contagious in part because they help sustain social bonds. sex workers would often preface a story about narcos with, “i may end up floating in the river for telling you this, but . . .” the “but” was followed by the revelation of a rumor. they divulged stories and speculations compulsively, torn between reluctance and recklessness, and they often spoke in whispers, a gesture reflecting both the regulation of fear and the intimacy of trust. these moments of sharing created intimacy in an uncertain world. the take-home message of the narco-story about a gossiping old woman who was found dead with her finger in her mouth was that one should not speak of narcos in public, yet people like eva spread these stories regardless of risk. they served as a parable-like warning to those with loose lips. given the potential risks of exchanging rumors, the latter not only created but also reflected trust and intimacy. when i asked my closest contacts to repeat these stories for my recorder, they did so hesitantly, tensely, and with fewer details. i suspected, but never asked to confirm, that we feared the same fate: that a high-ranking narco would find my recording and torture and murder the participants of my study or me.14 i could never tell if this was a reasonable fear or paranoia. reynosa residents cared for one another through text messages, phone calls, twitter, and facebook. on social media, i observed reynosa contacts warn each other of where they heard gunshots or explosions. spreading rumors despite the risk constitutes an act of care because disseminating knowledge can, in theory, keep those who acquire it safe from harm. these rumors often have a warning subtext: don’t honk your car horn. don’t leave the house at night. yet circulating narco-stories was not only a means of caring for one’s loved ones; it also worked, on an affective level, to spread terror. embodied spaces of narco/state territory affective atmospheres of terror had embodied, spatialized, and social effects that changed how people moved through reynosa generally, and through la zona specifically. setha low’s (2016) concept of embodied space pays attention to the human body as a spatial field that both constitutes and shapes space. low’s work not only bridges smaller-scale analyses of bodies and macro-analyses of the social and political world but also supplements accounts of the material production and phenomenological construction of space with bodies and their affects, mobilities, and feelings. this concept helps explain how terror contagiously spread through bodies in specific kinds of places and altered peoples’ trajectories, which in turn had material and social effects on border cities as businesses closed and migrants returned to their places of origin. fear pervaded the embodied habits of whispering rumors, scanning the landscape for new suvs, and driving carefully. narco-stories generated temporal and spatial topographies of fear in reynosa that eventually became generalized to any time and place. as shootings, which had historically occurred at night, started to happen during the day, many reynosenses became reluctant to leave their houses at all during particularly violent periods. affective atmospheres of terror were spatialized, as were the places of intimacy where people disclosed rumors about violence. particular locations became infused with terror when people heard gunshots or revealed narco-stories. sex workers would not tell me certain rumors of cartel activity in coffee shops or restaurants, fearing that the space might be bugged or that we might be overheard by a high-ranking narco. they waited until we were in my car or their rooms to tell me the rumors that scared them the most. even in periods of heightened fear, though, places such as my car, sex workers’ rooms, and missionaries’ houses remained filled with stories other than narco-stories and affects other than terror. sex workers gossiped about each other, missionaries spoke about their families, and we planned a missionary’s bachelorette party. in reynosa, i observed and participated more frequently than in other periods of my life in laughter so intense it caused crying, bellyaches, and difficulty breathing. these bodily intensities were likely the flip side to our terror. reynosa residents altered their spatial practices in relation to the content of rumors. rumors of further violence kept the streets empty for days after a three-hour public gun battle between soldiers and members of drug organizations had shot up a school while children hid under their desks to dodge bullets (crónica de hoy 2009). my host mother worked at a preschool that was closed due to bomb threats. she and my host sisters stayed in the house for days, complaining about their boredom on social media. but fear of the street extended beyond the fear of dying in a gun battle. this story was first told to me in whispers at a fiftieth birthday party in mcallen, texas by a man who, like many of us at the party, lived across the border in reynosa, tamaulipas. a woman in a car sat waiting at a traffic light for several minutes after it had turned green because a brand new lincoln navigator with tinted windows and u.s. plates was idling in front of her. she didn’t honk her horn. finally, a man got out of the car and approached her, laughing. “my friend and i had a bet,” he said. “i told him that if you honked, i was going to kill you, and if you didn’t honk, i was going to give you five hundred pesos.” opening his jacket to expose his gun, he handed money to her and said, “you win.” my host mother later forwarded me an email of the first-person account of the same story, which ended in a warning to the loved ones of the narrator to exercise caution and to avoid honking their car horns. this story was told to me as an act of care to help me safely navigate the city by car. but these rumors also summoned fear at the moment of telling that would resurface as i drove around the city. although this story rehearses plata o plomo, its protagonist was not granted the opportunity to choose between silver and lead; she was a pawn in a deadly game she did not know she was playing. in this rumor plata o plomo appears, at first glance, to be a mere game for narcos’ amusement rather than a political/economic strategy. yet the fear generated by the rumors that snowball from such (possible) acts reinforce their political and economic power. the takeaway of this rumor, like many circulating in reynosa at the time, was that one should be vigilant and treat narcos with respect and deference. narcos’ imagined omnipresence had a disciplining effect. drivers in reynosa were especially aware of their behavior around new, luxury-brand suvs with tinted windows. as anyone could be a narco, attentiveness to visual and spatial cues prompted anxiety. the circulation of narco-stories spread awareness of corporeal vulnerability and instilled habits of self-surveillance and behavioral restraint thought to mitigate danger. many people avoided honking at stopped cars and exchanged tips for negotiating interactions with armed men who might pull them over while in traffic, which also fueled terror. none of the sex workers i knew had cars, but even on foot, they found it ever more stressful to navigate the city and so became reluctant to leave boystown, where they felt safer. while money and violence provided the material grounds for narco power, the contagion of rumors spread terror in ways that caused people to alter their spatial practices. people in northern mexico during this era particularly associated reynosa with drug activity and bloodshed. young men from reynosa told me that when they traveled to monterrey (which would, several years later, become as violent as reynosa), people there assumed that most reynosenses had narco ties. those of us who lived in reynosa shared the perception that it was more dangerous than other cities where we spent time. when i left town with sex workers or missionaries, we often felt a sense of relief, like we could breathe. while affective atmospheres become mapped onto space, it is through the space of bodies that they travel and live. some of this terror lingers in bodies even as they travel to different locations, since affect shapes subjectivity and habitus. as tensions between state actors and members of drug organizations escalated, sex workers felt increasingly vulnerable to narcos in la zona. once, when i was standing in front of eva’s room during a moment of downtime, she whispered to me: we [the sex workers] are in danger here [in the prostitution zone]. everyone is in danger, but we are especially in danger here. la maña [a term at the time used interchangeably with narcos] comes every week to take money from us, and if we do not pay it, they write it down, and they will beat us or kill us if we do not pay. i could end up dead, floating in the canal, and my children wouldn’t even know what happened to me, because they don’t know what i do for a living. they would just know i disappeared one day. eva’s sense of risk was tied to her obligation to provide for her children and grandchildren and to her desire to protect them from news of her death. migrant sex workers’ vulnerability was structured by their stigmatized professions and their visibility in la zona, as well as by the way in which the preexisting apparatus for their control by the state was co-opted by a drug organization. figure 3. a sex worker in front of her room in la zona. photo by sarah luna. sex workers occupied a gender, race, and class position that shaped their vulnerability. on the mexico–u.s. border, as in many other places, if a woman is taken to be a “whore” (sexually promiscuous or an actual sex worker), she can be blamed for her rape or murder. as melissa w. wright (1999, 2011) notes, local discourses in ciudad juárez surrounding the rape, mutilation, and murder of working-class women blamed the victims, suggesting that if they were alone on the street at night, they must have been prostitutes. that the ciudad juárez femicide victims did not, in fact, perform sex work demonstrates the larger social implications of the whore stigma that, as anne mcclintock (1992, 3) notes, is used to discipline all women. but this discipline is unevenly applied to people who are racially marked, poor, and gender-nonconforming. i was sometimes mistaken for a sex worker, while at other times i was taken for a missionary. i felt safer when i was surrounded by white, english-speaking missionaries than if i was with other mexican friends, including sex workers. my perception of my vulnerability shifted depending on my company, because i was aware of the relative impunity surrounding the murder of poor brown women in border cities. fewer rumors circulated of violence toward american citizens, which was more likely to generate international news. perhaps affective atmospheres differ based on the color, citizenship, gender, and class of the bodies that constitute them, as these factors shape these bodies’ relationship to power and disposability. during breakfast one morning in mexico city, eva told sofía and me about the closure of baile, a dance club we had all visited in reynosa. internal migrants from veracruz who worked low-wage jobs frequented baile, where men paid women the equivalent of a dollar to dance with them. sofía and her friends occasionally danced at this salon to earn money and solicit clients. eva told us baile closed because a room full of freezers was found stuffed with corpses missing vital organs. “they say most of the victims were veracruzanas,” she said, “and la maña sells their organs to americans and rich people in mexico.” more than just a gruesome piece of gossip, eva’s story expressed anxiety about the vulnerability of poor, racialized bodies marked with the whore stigma in relation to narco power and predatory u.s. capital. in reynosa, racializing discourses described veracruzanos as lazy, promiscuous, and polluting the city. in 2008, i started to hear rumors that central american migrants on their way to, or just deported from, the united states were being found in mass graves, following their kidnapping, torture, and the extortion of their families. i began to see newspaper coverage in 2010.15 eventually, mexicans started to fear that they would disappear like central americans. on the so-called highway of death in 2010 and 2011, mexican citizens were among those forced to exit buses; some were raped, and most were never seen again (ramsey 2011; torres 2011). thus, as mass graves full of bodies were eventually assumed to also include mexicans, tensions rose as people previously granted security worried that they would meet the same fate. as the contagion of terror spread, the differences that once separated more from less vulnerable bodies gradually faded. in stories like the one narrated by eva, narco power emerges with few constraints, as almost absolute and god-like. stories of narcos threatening, killing, and mutilating people as well as controlling various aspects of political life snowballed through rumors, in effect magnifying the power of drug organizations. whether or not narco-stories accurately reflected the social world, each rumor’s circulation constituted a further iteration of this power. the subject in most of these rumors, the agentive actor in each sentence, was a supposed narco; the verb was torture or murder; the direct object was a person that the speaker and listener were afraid they might become. consequently, each telling and retelling of a narco-story spread both imagined and felt narco power and created subjects regulated through fear. shortly after federal troops were sent into reynosa in december 2007, every business selling alcohol, including in la zona, was given orders to close at 10 p.m. and remain closed until 10 a.m. newspapers speculated that these were military orders. however, a city-level public official in reynosa in charge of media relations stated that neither the city government nor the state or federal authorities had imposed the curfew (osborn 2008). reynosa residents believed la maña put the curfew into place. in one common explanation, narcos attempted to limit the local economy to mobilize local resistance to the military occupation. during this period, many people in reynosa took extra care to remain inside at night because they heard rumors that those on the street after 10 p.m. would be shot. a march against narco violence in august 2008 in mexico city included hundreds of thousands of people, and this was only one of many marches throughout the country. yet no such march against narcos occurred in reynosa, and locals noted that reynosa residents would never organize an anti-narco protest due to either apathy or fear. although they did not protest against narcos, reynosenses did protest the military presence in reynosa in early 2008 and early 2009. one march included a thousand people, mostly those involved in the nighttime tourist industries such as bar, restaurant, and club owners, waiters, sex workers, taxi drivers, and mariachis (proceso 2008). the protesters accused the military of human-rights abuses and demanded they leave reynosa. yet many locals told me that the protests were not organized by concerned citizens, but rather by narcos.16 a woman living in a squatter area in reynosa who had protested told me that la maña offered her and her neighbors bags of food and money to pile into buses and protest.17 territory battles between narcos and soldiers became enacted via the bodies of sex workers. a week before one of the marches, men who appeared to be soldiers blocked the exit and entrance of la zona with what seemed to be military vehicles. toting guns, they assaulted sex workers and clients. in retrospect, sex workers speculated that la maña had committed these acts of intimidation and violence dressed as soldiers so that they would want to join the protest against the military. several days later, a man wearing a ski mask who identified himself as part of la maña told sex workers that they must join the protest or else lose the right to work and be punished with spankings on bare buttocks with a large wooden paddle. these spankings, tablazos, constituted a punishment that formed part of an alternative justice system for offenses that would not warrant torture or murder. sofía told me that narcos visited jails to give tablazos to everyone accused of either rape or beating women or children “before they [were] sentenced by the law.” when eva was sick and unable to march, someone from la maña threatened to give tablazos to her good friend sofía, who had been made responsible for making sure that all her colleagues marched. eva and sofía lived on the same block in boystown, often ate meals together, and would watch each other’s rooms when the other left town to visit family. by assigning responsibility to one woman, narcos used established intimacies to create cooperation. once sofía left la zona to return to tampico, eva was given responsibilities originally assigned to sofía, and she risked punishment if other sex workers did not comply with orders. sex workers’ bodies proved particularly vulnerable in confrontations between narcos and soldiers. “they put us at the front lines.” sofía explained. “if someone was going to die in that situation, it would have been us.” that sex workers were threatened with physical force and economic sanctions instead of bribed with money indicates that la maña possessed a kind of power over sex workers that they did not have over some other reynosa residents. according to local narratives, narcos both masqueraded as state actors—dressing as military officials—and acted as civil society: organizing protests and using both gifts and violence to coerce people to participate. whatever the truth-value of these reports, the attribution of these roles to narcos implies their power to generate fear and compliance. in militarized reynosa, narcos were given credit via rumors for almost all acts of violence and politics. that protests were believed to be fueled by narco threats and bribes compellingly reflects on how people imagined power to work in reynosa. following the militarization of state interventions at the border, the intensification of cartel power resulted in the breakdown of institutional and political differentiation in the minds of the public. in response, the public engaged in a range of communicative and interpretive practices such as telling each other stories of brutality and tweeting about locations of gun battles, practices that sustained interpersonal social obligations under circumstances of extreme anxiety and risk. ironically, the same narco-stories that manifested cartel power in the public sphere also provided border residents a private space in which to foster intimate ties and practice care. intensified vulnerabilities and blocked intimacies in la zona the factors that made reynosa a popular destination for foreign visitors like sex tourists and missionaries were overshadowed by fear of drug organizations’ activities. depictions of narco violence in the u.s. media, another kind of rumor that spreads terror, proliferated from 2008 to 2010,18 and american citizens i interviewed reported feeling less secure in mexican border cities. while tourism had already seen a decline, media coverage of the violence in mexico had a significant impact on reynosa, where revenues dropped by half in 2010, following already important reductions in 2008 and 2009. tourism dropped 40 percent in tamaulipas between 2009 and 2010, and thirty-eight restaurants in reynosa closed that year (milenio 2010). residents’ responses to fear were structured by inequalities of mobility. the privilege of leaving reynosa for safer places was accessible to americans (including missionaries and anthropologists) and mexicans with visas or savings. most sex workers, like other low-earning workers in the informal economy, left reynosa only to return to hometowns similarly inundated by fear and bloodshed. figure 4. sex workers’ rooms in la zona. photo by sarah luna. for sex workers, the decision to leave la zona required a complex calculation of factors related to their intimate obligations. so few clients visited that they barely earned enough money to pay their rent, much less send money to their families or save for the future. rebecca, a sex worker from puebla who was saving her money to attend nursing school and buy a car, rhetorically asked me: “if i’m only earning enough to pay my expenses, what’s the point?” some sex workers credited their relationships with missionaries and god as factors influencing them to leave boystown and reynosa, and missionaries spread these stories to their christian publics. the decisions of others to leave were sparked not only by drug violence and reduced earnings but also personal factors. frida entered prostitution because she was coerced by and fell in love with a pimp. she continued to work after terminating that relationship to support her children. frida eventually left la zona because she feared that her son, who was still a baby, would grow up to work for narcos or to be teased by other children for having a sex worker as a mother. furthermore, she had a sense that her relationship with her son’s father was dissolving. sofía, who had considered leaving for years, finally took action when her teenage son, sergio, went missing after escaping from a drug rehabilitation center in their hometown of tampico. he had left the drug organization and had been in hiding near mexico city for a year. when he returned to tampico to meet his infant daughter, he was kidnapped from sofía’s house. like many young men in mexico, sergio is assumed by his family to be dead, although his body has not been found. thus, although fear of dying at the hands of narcos and a generalized anxiety were factors compelling sex workers to leave reynosa, their intimate relationships were also profoundly affected by the increasing power of drug organizations. foreigners faced difficulties forging intimacies with mexican sex workers as militarization increased tension in reynosa. missionaries’ decisions to leave required weighing reynosa’s risks and rewards in relation to their intimate obligations to god, sex workers, children, christian publics, and spouses. sex workers were wary of strangers after their abuse and intimidation by armed men. stacy, the american missionary, stopped taking short-term missionary teams into boystown and instead had them “construct the monastery” two blocks away. however, several missionary groups canceled construction trips after seeing u.s. media depictions of mexican violence. stacy was also forced to schedule an early cesarean to avoid a gun battle that was rumored to block the road to the hospital. after stacy’s daughter was born, gunfire and explosions kept the family up at night. in may 2010, stacy and her husband abandoned their mission. while drug violence clearly factored into their decision, stacy indicated that god told them to leave reynosa. team boystown had already stopped entering la zona due to increasing tensions as the zetas and the gulf cartel split and fought for territory. some of stacy’s team members told me that while before they had had “favor with the gulf cartel,” they did not assume that the rival cartel would extend the same welcome to them. it is notable that, in reynosa, even missionaries needed informal alliances with drug cartel representatives to carry out their work, indicating a certain alignment between god’s territory and narco territory. police corruption further deterred american visitors. clients reported increasing robberies and extortions by local police in reynosa, generally, and in boystown, particularly. chuck, a frequent client, became hesitant to cross the border because security guards conducted revisiones, or inspections, which they used as a method to rob, extort, or blackmail clients. several clients, as well as many reynosa locals, believed that boystown security guards, like the local police more generally, worked for or with narcos. once all uniformed representatives of the state—the police, the military—could potentially represent narco power, either by disguise or collusion, power in reynosa became reduced to the random and absolute exercise of violence through a single, undifferentiated agent of corruption. affective atmospheres of terror extended from their temporally and spatially delimited arenas (at night, in certain neighborhoods, directed at particularly vulnerable populations) to encompass more kinds of people, places, and times of day. anxiety and suspicion, forged in part through rumor, stymied the border’s productivity. many clients ceased to visit the prostitution zone due to fear of bodily harm, and many sex workers and missionaries chose to leave reynosa. conclusion events that took place in reynosa between 2008 and 2009 foreshadowed what would happen throughout mexico in the following years: affective atmospheres of terror spread to more and more of the country’s residents, and drug trafficking organizations penetrated social, political, and economic life in new, profoundly destructive ways. my analysis of the performativity of violent rumors draws attention to how atmospheres of terror spread through bodies. populations terrorized by the threat of bodily harm are affected in ways collective and corporeal that shape space and change the social world. through the contagion of affect and the performative power of rumors about violence, narcos became posited as all-powerful, while vulnerable subjects sustained that power by circulating rumors. eventually, most political acts—whether in the form of protests, local ordinances, or military action—were said by reynosa residents to be the work of drug organizations. i have suggested that rumors of violence in an affective atmosphere of terror differ from other kinds of rumors because they cite prior acts of violence and thus reamplify the power effects of that violence. terror is contagious in part because circulating narco-stories create intense bodily sensations that also mark a form of intimacy. the bodies of reynosa’s residents were key sites at which territory battles between soldiers and narcos were felt. these turf wars had effects on the bodies of sex workers (among others), bodies used in confrontations between narcos and soldiers. these findings offer further evidence for the value of an ethnographic approach to understanding dynamics in hostile situations like drug-war zones, where freedom of the press is compromised and survey data or brief interviews would not yield the textured data and analytic richness of long-term research. rumors of violence spread in such a way that even those who would have been protected by some combination of class, racial, and citizenship privileges eventually felt defenseless. through the contagion of rumor and affect, atmospheres of terror enveloped more and more of the population. affective shifts were in dialectical tension with real acts of torture, brutality, and murder in the world. perhaps narcos first tested techniques of domination on the most vulnerable populations, such as central americans without legal status in mexico, before applying them to the rest of the populace. the decline of boystown offers a case study of how drug trafficking organizations’ ascendance to power and the local population’s vulnerability were intensified during a period of increased militarization in the war on drugs. more than a war on crime, it constitutes a war on those who are poor, racially marked, and at the bottom of gender hierarchies. eva once said to me, looking at the empty streets of la zona: “vice is ending because god is mad. no clients come to visit us. we are all alone.” her comments indicate a deep feeling of abandonment, perhaps by god, the state, and clients—but missionaries and an anthropologist would eventually abandon her too. many sex workers would also eventually leave la zona, but in the meantime, they found ways to sustain social bonds and care for one another even as they contributed to atmospheres of terror. notes acknowledgments this research would not have been possible without the support of many people and institutions. first, i thank my interlocutors in reynosa for sharing their lives with me. i extend my gratitude to the cultural anthropology editorial collective and the anonymous reviewers for closely and carefully reading this essay and providing such generous and constructive critique. thank you especially to cymene howe for support and feedback during the final stages of the editorial process. thank you to the colleagues, mentors, and friends who have engaged this text at various stages: susan gal, julie chu, danilyn rutherford, kesha fikes, melissa w. wright, lisa simeone, james mcdonald, alexis salas, maria gonzales, trevor boffone, rachel afi quinn, keith mcneal, christina sisk, leandra zarnow, sylvia mendoza, tshepo masango chery, elizabeth gregory, laura-zoë humphreys, abigail rosenthal, amanda englert, emily wentzell, roger waldinger, maria islas-lopez, carly schuster, jessica horton, monica mercado, larisa reznik, charlotte ashlock, hadas weiss, christopher fraga, michelle lelièvre, tracey rosen, maurice magaña, michael letteri, danny zborover, kavita singh, nancy postero, veronica pacheco, rupert stasch, suzanne brenner, john haviland, sergio sanchez diaz, jessica cattelino, molly cunningham, john davey, alberto diaz-cayeros, kathy kopinak, karina kordova, susana vargas, linda zerilli, robert foster, eleana kim, thomas gibson, daniel reichman, and ayala emmett. research and writing were supported by the national science foundation graduate research fellowship; the fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation abroad fellowship; the university of chicago trustee’s fellowship; the university of chicago center for latin american studies field research grant; the university of chicago lesbian and gay studies project graduate research grant; the northeast consortium dissertation year visiting diversity fellowship in the department of anthropology at the university of rochester; the james c. hormel dissertation fellowship in sexuality studies at the university of chicago; the center for u.s.–mexican studies predoctoral fellowship at the school of international relations and pacific studies at university of california, san diego; the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program and the friends of women’s studies at the university of houston, and the consortium for faculty diversity fellowship in the latin american studies program at davidson college. 1. i conducted fifty-seven open-ended interviews with residents of reynosa, primarily missionaries and sex workers. i lived with missionaries for three months and with a host family for nine months. most interviews and interactions with sex workers were conducted in spanish, while most interviews and interactions with missionaries were conducted in english. in the interest of the privacy and security of my interlocutors, all names have been changed. 2. i have opted to use the terms “drug organization,” la maña, and los narcos interchangeably, as the latter two are the terms my contacts used. in 2008 and 2009, the gulf cartel controlled the drug trade in reynosa and had an alliance with the zetas, but in early 2010, the two groups split and fought for territory. in 2008 and 2009, reynosenses rarely distinguished between gulf cartel members and zetas (and therefore examples used in this article follow suit). 3. michael taussig (1984, 464) notes that culture of terror is in part constituted “in the coils of rumor, gossip, story and chit-chat.” 4. according to campbell (2009, 23), a cartel uses bribes to gain loyalty from the military commander or head of federal police in a district. after loyalty has been purchased, soldiers and officers are used to protect storage facilities or drug lords. further, many members of drug organizations have ties to high-ranking politicians and officials in the government and military. 5. a reynosa police chief claimed that the military investigation of the police force was in vain, and suggested that corruption could better be found in the state police, the federal police, and the military (roig-franzia 2008). twelve signs accusing government officials of protecting rival cartels were hung in public places in reynosa and other border cities in august 2008, containing messages such as: “mr. calderón, if you want to stop crime, start with your corrupt cabinet” (taylor 2008). 6. under calderón, the number of murders documented by the mexican statistics agency inegi rose from 8,867 in 2007 to 27,213 in 2011 (molzahn, rios, and shirk 2013, 1). 7. team boystown did not identify as but was influenced by the new monasticism and emerging church movements, which are mainly composed of young people critical of the materialism and hypocrisy of suburban evangelical churches and who seek to live among the poor like jesus (moll 2005; bielo 2011). 8. pimps were not necessary, but some women had them. most pimps came from the mexican state of tlaxcala and had no connections to local drug organizations. 9. robert priest and brian howell (2013) estimate that around two million americans participate in short-term missions each year. churches send mission teams to border cities for a week at a time to give congregations the experience of what they term “helping the poor.” 10. lauren berlant (2011) argues that the present is always first experienced at the level of affect. 11. i believed most of the narco-stories discussed in this article and, given my difficulty discerning between when my fear was paranoia and when it was reasonable, my avoidance of assessing the truth-value of the narratives i analyze is perhaps even more crucial. 12. some gun battles occurred between military and drug organizations and others between rival groups. experts have suggested that calderón’s strategy of arresting kingpins fomented succession wars within major cartels and the splintering of groups, intensifying violence on the ground (guerrero-gutiérrez 2011; molzahn, rios, and shirk 2013). 13. scholars of language in context would argue that this is the case with most utterances and gestures (silverstein 1993; hall 1999). austin suggests that perhaps all utterances are performative, to some degree. 14. i used pseudonyms in my fieldnotes to protect the safety and privacy of my interlocutors. 15. in may 2010, 55 bodies of migrants were found in abandoned mines outside mexico city; in july 2010, 51 corpses of migrants were found outside monterrey (ramsey 2011). in august 2010, 72 migrant corpses full of bullets were found in san fernando, a town ninety miles south of reynosa that was controlled by zetas (associated press 2011). in april 2011, 145 bodies were found in mass graves. mexican authorities arrested 16 police officers and 17 zetas in connection with the graves (wilkinson 2011). 16. i have since found newspaper articles speculating that these were “narco-protests” (lacey 2009). 17. historically, the pri political party used similar tactics to rig elections, offering poor people money or food and a ride in exchange for a vote (lettieri 2014). 18. in february 2009, the u.s. state department advised americans to avoid places associated with drugs and prostitution; by 2010, these became more generalized warnings to avoid whole cities and states in mexico when several americans were killed. references ahmed, sara 2010 the promise of happiness. durham, n.c.: duke university 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http://articles.latimes.com/2011/apr/15/world/la-fg-mexico-bodies-20110416. wright, melissa w. 1999 “the dialectics of still life: murder, women, and maquiladoras.” public culture 11, no. 3: 453–73. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-3-453. 2011 “necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: gendered violence on the mexico–u.s. border.” signs 36, no. 3: 707–731. https://doi.org/10.1086/657496. yeh, rihan 2012 “two publics in a mexican border city.” cultural anthropology 27, no. 4: 713–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01168.x. shock humor shock humor: zaniness and the freedom of permanent improvisation in urban tanzania michael degani johns hopkins university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1393-4091 [a] key sense of banishment is captured by another german word, used by both nietzsche and marx: vogelfrei, or “free as a bird.” to be free as a bird was a bittersweet sort of freedom: while one can do what one wants (for one is not under the compulsion of a state), one can be killed without ramification (for one is not under the care of a state). —paul kockelman on a friday night in 2010, the popular television show ze comedy is beaming into living rooms and bars across dar es salaam. one sketch begins at the desk of a female anchor (played by a man).1 we are watching a nightly newscast and she is all exaggerated officiousness. she reports: the tanesco company of tanzania has issued an announcement to all citizens in the villages, cities, and city centers after determining that there are feki (fake) electricians involving themselves in tanesco matters in people’s homes. the directing manager sent us a memo on the importance of instructing citizens about these fake street electricians, who are known by the name of viwembe (razorblades). i mean, uh, vishoka (hatchets; singular: kishoka). they’re very dangerous for you tanzanians. regretfully—well, i don’t want to say too much, but the ze comedy cameras have captured one incident that took place out there in the michochoroni (back alleys). we now link up to our reporter who brings us the picture, after which we will return for commentary. so begins a spectacle in which two “fake” electricians try and fail to fix a minor short, only to be repeatedly shocked. the sketch made a deep impression on me, and i often thought of it while conducting fieldwork on dar es salaam’s municipal power grid in 2011 and 2012. for electricians, residents, and tanesco workers, living on—and off—the power grid was a frustrating and difficult experience. but in some moments, it acquired a strange sort of comedy. residents played seemingly endless cat-and-mouse games with the utility; electricians contrived schemes and deals only to have them backfire; people laughed as they reenacted the dangerous zap of minor shock. this essay attempts to take such comic moments seriously by treating them as an experiential rendering of the social and political paradoxes of permanent improvisation. it draws on sianne ngai’s (2012) analysis of zaniness as an aesthetic category. many americans will have encountered the zany through film and television figures such as tom and jerry, charlie chaplin, or mr. bean. many of these same characters populate the imaginaries of african cities like dar es salaam.2 east african popular culture developed its own version of the zany aesthetic when british colonists disseminated commedia dell’arte plays and chaplin films through their educational and theatrical institutions (riccio 2001). performance troupes blended these influences with indigenous expressive traditions to create what is now known as vichekesho (chuckles): short, farcical, and largely unscripted sketches about scuffling protagonists, of which ze comedy is the latest, televised version. ngai (2012) persuasively argues that this aesthetic is about constant improvisation or, more specifically, about a permanent entanglement of work and play wrought by capitalism’s constant revolutionizing. the original zannis of the commedia dell’arte were modeled after servants of the italian court—factotums constantly jumping into new roles and situations but struggling to perform them convincingly. their short-term navigations of the world were thus deeply improvisational in the sense that they were brought into existence by nothing more and nothing less than the doing of it. they channeled the subversive comedy of improvisation, in which one is free from fixed roles or expectations. yet their status as permanent improvisers gave their comic predicament a tinge of anxiety, even desperation. ironically, their freedom to play around was also a role they were consigned to perform. while ngai builds an impressive archive of the zany, she does not engage the literature on what has been variously called the lumpen, the informal, or simply the poor populations of the urban postcolonial global south. the presence of zany characters and situations in cities like dar es salaam certainly stands as a corrective to the eurocentrism of much critical and cultural theory. more importantly, for my purposes, the concept of the zany can be put to productive ethnographic use. it names the way that certain comedic figures and situations i encountered in dar es salaam channel the social and political paradoxes of the informal: the way it oscillates between sociopolitical freedom and constraint, the way it generates an ambivalent mix of pleasure and annoyance. the first section of this essay describes the electrician sketch in more detail and situates the global south and, more specifically, african urban life within broader debates about precarity, affect, and labor. the second part follows electricians and vishoka in their daily improvisations as they race from task to task and struggle to make a living. it shows how their constant improvisations suggest a particular type of zany character defined by a self-conscious performativity. finally, the third section shows how an improvisational logic extends into the daily operations of state infrastructure. it relays scenes from my fieldwork with tanesco patrol teams, who were charged with policing irregular power connections and often encountered consumers that tried to evade, bribe, or otherwise fend them off. in the collective zaniness of these encounters, i suggest, one can grasp the underlying paradoxes of citizenship as an exercise in seemingly permanent improvisation. shock humor the ze comedy cameras take us to an urban tanzanian living room, empty but for the glowing television. a baba—father, or man of the house—comes home and surveys the scene. he yells out to his absent children, angry at them for wasting electricity, but he trails off—a colorful music video has caught his attention, and he laughs at the antics on the screen. his reverie is cut short as the power insolently disappears. scowling, he fiddles with the cables and is rewarded with a zap. “electronic is power!” he exclaims in english. holding his hand and cursing, he mutters: “let me get a youth to come fix this.” in the next scene, a diminutive kishoka ambles in. he wears a plug strip around his neck and a cowboy hat. despite his flashy outfit, he is a little apprehensive about the task in front of him. “did you get shocked?” he nervously asks the baba. “no, it was just a little thing,” the man of the house assures him. the kishoka musters up his confidence as he leans down. just as he makes contact, the baba unhelpfully exclaims: “yes, that’s exactly where it is!” startled, the kishoka jumps back; politely, but testily, he mentions that that kind of thing really raises the pressure of the situation. he is now skeptical and repeats his question: “did you get shocked?” “no,” the baba reassures him impatiently once again, “this isn’t a transformer; it was just a small bit of power.” the kishoka allows himself to be convinced. “well, if you didn’t get shocked, then it’s no problem,” he agrees with recovered swagger. the kishoka leans in again to begin. once again, the baba cannot help but interject, “right there, that’s where the current is,” one more time breaking the kishoka’s concentration and making him jump back up. for the third time, the jack-in-the-box structure resets. this time the baba remains obligingly silent as the kishoka leans down. suddenly, the kishoka flies back from shock, doubled over and groaning. the baba harangues him to “quit showboating” (acha majonjo) and “milking the foul like a goalkeeper.” the electrician scrambles up and assures the baba that they are dealing with a very serious problem and that he needs to call a friend for help. in the final scene, the cowboy kishoka’s friend swaggers in. he is dressed as an actual soccer goalkeeper, protected by cleats and shin guards, but with pliers jauntily shoved into his belt and headphones clamped over his ears. he grandly announces that there is no need to worry; it is surely only a minor problem and he can fix it. the cowboy explains the situation and then whispers to him, sotto voce: “brother, i expect that you will give me at least my riziki (daily bread, sustenance) since you came [to this job] through me.” the goalkeeper is dismissive. “according to the rules of professional technicians, you must leave and allow me to do my work,” he pronounces. they bicker in heated whispers until the baba pulls them apart, frustrated: “just fix it!” for all his panache, the goalkeeper is nervous as well. he takes the jack dangling from his headphones and offers it to his friend—“here, plug this in for me,” he urges. “no, no, that’s a red wire and i’ve already been shocked by a red wire!” his friend protests. the baba waves his hand dismissively, motioning to the first kishoka. “this one sits in his little body, afraid—he has no blood!” the goalkeeper, we see, is on his own. he delicately places his foot up on the wall and leans in toward the socket strip on the floor. suddenly, he is shot backward wildly. as he lies dazed on the ground, the other two scramble out of the room, panicked, running into the door three stooges–style. we return to the news anchor shaking her head: “just look at what [the goalkeeper kishoka] was wearing! playing around with electricity without knowing anything. but then, it’s not their fault, no. it’s the fault of house owners like you all, who hire them instead of professionals. that’s why we have unstable power in our cities.” * * * the sketch depicts an encounter with electricity that is perpetually off balance, with residents constantly improvising, yet without much control over the situation. alternately indignant, entranced, and frustrated, the father’s affect is yanked in one direction by his spotty electrical connection and then in the other by the insubordination of his children and the vishoka. the vishoka, meanwhile, are yanked back and forth by the pull of current and currency, willing to risk their bodies and the potential shock the work entails for a few thousand shillings.3 they are alternately bickering and reassuring as they try to control the situation, chattering but always with an anxious bravado. against this diffuse assemblage of interconnected affect, energy, and bodies, the three shocks act as punctuation marks that, for a split second, promise to crystallize the situation, to definitively turn it in one direction or another. but after each body careens to the floor, the antic hum starts back up. all are once again caught up in a teasing rhythm of actions and reactions piling up on themselves. a number of scholars have engaged the trope of improvisation as a way to understand creativity and method (e.g., pandian 2015; hegel 2017). tim ingold (2009, 97) argues that improvisation is nothing less than the “form-giving” process of life itself, its lines of flight crisscrossing into a world-making texture. and yet here we are confronted with lines of flight that do not so much weave as collide and bounce off each other. how might we account for an improvisational unfolding that is not form-giving but, in some sense, as ngai (2012, 231) asserts, “form-obliterating”? this also means to ask how we might historicize improvisation itself, tracing its forms and aesthetics in relation to particular social and political processes. to begin answering these questions, i would suggest that the sketch depicts a fundamentally zany scene. “in their purest form,” daniel harris (2000, 117) observes, zany comedies are “structureless journeys through worlds of dangerous and volatile objects. every prop, every character is . . . a potential projectile.” and yet for all its acrobatics, zaniness tends to give off more light than heat. indeed there is “something impotent and reactive about the zany’s incessant activity,” an “undercurrent of desperation” (ngai 2012, 187). ngai tracks zaniness across high and low culture, from friedrich nietzsche and jacques derrida’s manic deconstructive prose stylings to gender-bending films like mrs. doubtfire or the full monty, with their specifically post-fordist concerns about the feminization of labor. at root, however, the zany’s extroverted performativity expresses a type of work that has accompanied capitalism since its early modern inceptions. in sixteenth-century commedia dell’arte, a zanni denoted the servant character and was based on peasants near milan and venice who escaped war and droughts in search of work as itinerant laborers. zannis, then, were jacks-of-all-trades who made themselves available for whatever task might be required. what ngai (2012, 191) calls their “veritable theme song” belongs to figaro in the barber of seville, who sings: “ready to do anything / night and day / always on the move . . . swifter and swifter i’m like a thunderbolt, i’m the factotum of the city.” the necessity of improvisation also highlighted a reflexive link to theater, both in that factotums had to play whatever role they were given and in that acting was, itself, an early form of precarious gig work staged by bands of traveling players. through improvising, then, the zany (as both character and situation) thus indexes an open-ended, performative kind of labor. in some deep austinian sense, all labor is performative in that it must enact its own conditions of possibility (lee and lipuma 2002). as karl marx (1990, 200) observed long ago, becoming a commodity is a salto mortale, a leap of faith. its exchange value is not pregiven but only emerges retrospectively, after the buyer has paid for it (and the seller has agreed to part with it). yet marx’s account of capitalism narrates the emergence of infrastructures and institutions that format this leap so as to make it perform more reliably. primitive accumulation and enclosure movements disembedded peasants from their land and funneled them to the disciplinary spaces of the school and factory to ensure that they had nothing to sell but their labor power. hence, while working for a wage has a performative dimension, it does not quite feel performative. the historical contingency of extracting surplus value is veiled within the discipline of capitalist relations and thus naturalized, given a taken-for-granted quality that ultimately extends to the “empty homogenous time” (benjamin 1968, 261) of capital itself (see chatterjee 1999, 131). much of the scholarship on contemporary precarity dwells in the heterotopic gaps and residues of this system, attending to superfluous populations that cannot be absorbed into the labor force or afforded biopolitical care. in many places, this is rightly narrated as abjection and abandonment (povinelli 2011). with cautious optimism, other accounts point to the ways in which subjects find themselves free to improvise niches in global supply chains, aligning whatever resources (affect, bodily capacities, social relations) they have at their disposal to deliver a competitive advantage (tsing 2015). ngai cites the sociologists luc boltanski and eve chiapello’s (2005, 110–11) observation that the quintessential sort of work under this new spirit of capitalism is the transient, entrepreneurial project, a term that, as we will see, suggestively links back to the experience of the projectile. indeed, ngai argues that the preindustrial zany prefigures the relentlessly expansionary tendencies of a postindustrial capitalism no longer regimented by the infrastructures of mass employment. zanies were, in a sense, the first permanent workers with nothing to sell but their labor power. but they contrast with the classic industrial proletariat, which experiences its social constraints and social freedoms as bifurcated along a gendered public/private distinction: as producers regimented on the factory floor and then as consumers enchanted by the play of advertising and commodities. but in late capitalist milieus, where many workers are neither fully employed nor fully unemployed, and where they are not only commodities but also self-marketing ones, the experiences of work and play are combined in a series of entrepreneurial projects unmoored from institutional supports. postindustrial work thus merges with a long history of explicitly performance-oriented occupations that include domestic servitude, women’s unpaid labor, and culture-industry work. in all of these situations, producer and product are precariously entangled in what is now baldly called “human capital.” to these examples of paraand postindustrial project work we might add the small-scale entrepreneurs of postcolonial cities such as dar es salaam. in many parts of the world system, a bazaar-style economy that mixes commerce and social relations has long existed (geertz 1978). here, small-scale traders have survived through performance in a socially thick marketplace and against the predations of the colonial and postcolonial state (clark 1988). as generations of scholars have learned, no truly satisfying sociological term exists for these subjects of the “informal economy” (hart 2006). as james c. scott (2012, 55) says of such artisans, peddlers, and market women, “they are neither fish nor fowl, they may be poor, but they are poor capitalists.” the undecidable nature of such poor capitalists is well reflected in their scholarly treatment. most contemporary accounts react to a high-modernist contempt rooted in marx’s (1994) dismissal of the lumpenproletariat as little more than a grab bag of disjointed opportunists, spasmodically following whoever might ply them with wine and sausages. in his socialist manifesto, the arusha declaration, tanzania’s first president julius nyerere (1968, 30) similarly proclaimed that the “energies of the millions of women in the villages and thousands of men in the town which are at present wasted in gossip, dancing and drinking, are a great treasure which could contribute more to the development of our country than anything we could get from rich nations.” the message here is clear: such populations are not properly working; they are at play. hence they are sociopolitically constrained, pathetically tied to their own desires and thus unable to act collectively or contribute to modern development. against such sentiments, proponents of neoliberal empowerment have adopted a rhetoric that would dignify things like gossip and self-expression as social capital to be mobilized (see elyachar 2010). without going quite this far, africanist urban ethnographers have attended to the creativity of urban life as “a kind of improvisation under conditions of adversity” (ferguson 2015, 94; see also mbembe and nuttall 2004; simone 2004). in many respects, this sensibility can be traced back to the notion of the informal economy, keith hart’s 1970s-era attempt to reconcile abstract development models with streets that were “teeming with life, [with] a constantly shifting crowd of hawkers, porters, taxi-drivers, beggars, pimps, pickpockets, hustlers—all of them getting by without the benefit of a real job” (hart 2006, 24). here the message is just the opposite: such populations are in fact working. hence they are sociopolitically free, uncaptured by a dirigiste state and harboring potential for alternative modes of development. to each set of propositions, zanies might well respond with that classic principle of improvisational comedy: “yes, and!” effectively freed from the standardized wage labor or peasant subsistence wrought by state developmentalist schemes, they are free to do anything. free to do anything, they find themselves doing a bit of everything—hedging, calculating, keeping their options open, but rarely with any definitive resolution. in other words, zaniness aesthetically expresses the paradoxical freedom of the informal economy, piling up improvisations until they blur into a generalized, teeming movement without distinction or referent. this paradoxical freedom also helps explain why zaniness as an aesthetic is both funny and grating to its spectators. it is certainly true that buying and selling have long been associated with playful humor. mikhail bakhtin (1984, 34) notes that commedia dell’arte is an outgrowth of the medieval carnivalesque, which itself is rooted in the historical experience and “language of the marketplace.” marketplaces “consecrate inventive freedom, [they] permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement” (bakhtin 1984, 34). there thus exist dense historical and conceptual links between fairs and markets and their ritual suspension of normal proprieties; in such spaces, one is free to play with one’s words, intentions, and identity. bakhtin insists on the utopian possibilities of this space, wherein seemingly opposed categories—strangers and familiars, praise and insults, gifts and thefts—are all reconciled in a bawdy, regenerative laughter. the carnival brings the high low and renders the foolish holy. it is thus a space of transgression and critique, puncturing the pretensions of officialdom. but the zany is a kind of parody of the utopian fair/liminal marketplace. its exaggerated hustling specifically embodies the capitalist market, whose constant revolutionizing creates a permanent play frame. thus, if the rabelaisian marketplace liberates bodies from feudal propriety, the zany body is laced up tight, propulsive, anxious, electric—constantly doing and acting. while this has a certain comedic potential, the effect underscores that for all his or her movement, the zany is stuck. as the ze comedy sketch suggests, the zany’s presence does not so much relieve or liberate a stuffy situation as whirl everything into a frenzied mixture of exuberance and exhaustion, pleasure and punishment. where the metacommunicative frame of the carnivalesque is “this is play,” the zany situation seems to ask, is this play?4 in its endless, self-consuming fun, the zaniness of labor echoes other historical situations in which social license is exaggerated to the point that its comedy acquires an uncertain edge. in his seminal account of the postcolony, for example, achille mbembe (1992) points out how the routine, banal qualities of the commandement’s buffoonery renders it a kind of psychic violence. it induces a reactionary laughter pointedly at odds with the affirmative, joyous laughter that bakhtin emphasizes. in a mixture of subversion and impotence, the zany might be seen as a kindred postcolonial figure; where mbembe offers a vision of the african state as a kind of permanent carnival, the zany suggests the african metropolis as a permanent marketplace generated in its wake. where mbembe highlights the grotesque overconsumption of the commandement, we might probe the zany overproduction of the proverbial “little man” of african life, the way he exhausts those who would discipline him and, in turn, himself. the remainder of this article elaborates these points through examples and encounters from my ethnography of dar es salaam’s power grid, beginning with vishoka electricians. on the one hand, vishoka exemplify “the freedom of the city—the anonymity, the possibility of reinventing oneself, an encompassing possibility of social license” (mcgovern 2010, 72). this is a freedom from socioeconomic claims pressed by rural kin, for example, or a freedom from the social relations of wage labor. at its best, working as a kishoka entails the freedom to earn money through heterogeneous projects—different jobs, different clients, and different roles—all potentially convertible into money. vishoka have license to be “entrepreneurs in the literal sense of ‘bringing together’ the valuation repertoire” (guyer 2004, 98), with its range of gains. hence, as sasha newell (2012, 4) has described for youth in abidjan, “to work” (travailler) is above all a kind of play—a series of games or performances, with their bluffs and possibilities. on the other hand, the freedom to improvise means that, in some sense, one must keep improvising. any deal, score, or trade is structurally disconnected from the next, so that the performative work of bringing the valuation repertoire together must always begin anew. the building of reputation, social trust, and expertise are all so many strategies to domesticate this fundamental instability, albeit without ever resolving it. hence, caught somewhere between the uncertainty of the marketplace and the predictabilities wrought by reputation or skill, the days of the vishoka are a paradoxical repetition of dissimilar tasks. this can make for ambivalently zany comedy. free improvisation the value of freedom is something that electricians often expressed to me. consider the case of a fundi (handyman) named samueli. samueli started his career by lucking into a job through his neighbor, a tanesco employee who recognized samueli’s knack for working with his hands. samueli was paid tsh. 5000 per day to install new electrical service lines in houses that had completed the application process. after four years, samueli was part of a cohort of eighty temp workers who did not have their contracts renewed—officially because they had not passed their secondary educational exams. afterward, samueli reconstituted his career mtaani (in the street). he began working as a kishoka fixer, wiring houses without a license and liaising with friends still working at tanesco to expedite applications for new connections. now, he explained: i live a good life . . . yes, the days are incomparable, there’s monday and then there’s tuesday, but on the days when it pleases god, i can make tsh. 200,000, even tsh. 600,000. i can do wiring for up to 1,000,000. and with that, even if i spend the rest of the month just sitting and not working, i’m still doing better than when i was working inside the company. there the boss loads you with work, where sometimes you don’t leave until nine at night or ten, sometimes you’re at the site until morning for tsh. 5,000. if you protest to the boss, “why are you having us work for more time than we’re getting paid?” he’ll say “don’t come into work tomorrow.” they just fire you. it’s much better now than in the company. in contrast to wage labor, working as an entrepreneur offers the dream of social autonomy. consider how an electrical contractor named felix recalled his training in a sort of primal scene, laughing how as a boy his father beat him for tinkering with a circuit box: in primary school, i pulled quite a sweet stunt at home. i opened a switch in the house. when i reconnected, it shocked me. i was looking at it like, “ah, why did i just get shocked?” i didn’t understand that electricity shocks you. i reconnected it and got shocked again, because i was using a knife. when my father saw what i was doing, he really beat me, but that didn’t stop me. i was asking myself, what the devil happened there? i asked my friend about it, and he said: “that electricity will kill you!” i became a little timid, but it wasn’t overpowering. as a budding electrician felix risked his father’s punishment to entertain his curiosity. this attitude condenses what mike mcgovern (2010, 56–57) calls “entrepreneurial capture,” an agentive ethic widely documented across sub-saharan africa since its insertion into the capitalist world system nearly five hundred years ago. in folklore and popular culture, for example, the “mutant hero” (de boeck 2000) of afromodernity—a mix of cowboy, hunter, soldier, and other masculinist figures of action—has exemplified the bravado conversion of sometimes illicit or dangerous opportunity into gain. in a similar vein, dar es salaam youth have historically had their own “cult of the cowboy” (burton 2001). such figures in turn form part of a wider network of symbolic contrasts. in east africa, they are associated with fluid substances like blood and money, with their powers of transmissibility and connection, and stand in contrast to the density and particularity of bone, with its powers of containment and preservation (beidelman 1997). felix’s childhood encounter with electricity intimates this embodied tension between improvisation—an unlegislated and free-form connectivity—and the punitive, policing functions of paternal authority. as suggested above, this tension can also map onto the distinction between waged work, with its hierarchical relations of command and procedure, and entrepreneurial labor, with its lateral negotiations. a tanesco worker once wove these associations together in the following comment to me: there’s something called self-confidence [kujiamini] that bedevils us. and even today it entered. i went to cut the power and was supposed to wear gloves, but i just went like this [he holds up his bare hands]. but that electricity . . . [shakes his head]. and why? because of self-confidence. it’s an issue that needs to be addressed educationally, that you shouldn’t have excessive self-confidence. the background to these comments was a discussion of vishoka electricians, who are often said to be uneducated and overly confident—that is, reckless. but whereas salaried work turns on restraint, working as a street electrician for hire incentivizes some measure of “self-confidence,” even if the conditions are less than safe. the baba’s accusation that the cowboy kishoka “lacks blood” speaks to this idea. self-confidence, here, is related to blood’s ability to flow and mix, to weave new relations between people and things. the anthropological ear may hear resonances with the concept of bricolage, which involves the willingness to dive into a situation and assemble something from the elements at hand (lévi-strauss 1966). the magic of self-confidence, then, is the way it performatively actualizes potential: a new circuit is completed, a new skill acquired, a new relation with a client forged. many electricians are not as lucky as samueli. as mafundi ya mtaani (street handymen) or, as they are alternately called, mafundi vishoka, they get by with small-scale repairs that are not much different from felix’s initial foolhardy encounter: jerry-rigging an urban landscape filled with electrical odds and ends—wire and batteries, copper and plastic. as the mafundi of the sketch learned, this polymorphous environment of potential connections may prove uncooperative. incessant contingencies vex their work, forcing them to move in a set of steps logically corresponding to the nature of the problem they confront. an electrician must acquire this part before he can work on that one; he must complete a first task before he can move on to a second one. each task, moreover, can suffer its own shifts in availability of materials or from knowledge deficits. finally, the electrician must also balance multiple jobs at different levels of completion, ones that will generate different levels of revenue and that embed different levels of personal connection. with certain kinds of competitive firms, these variables are more or less rationalized, so that the consumer experience has a measure of predictability (geertz 1978). registered contractors in dar es salaam, for example, have offices and formal contracts to this end. by contrast, it is said that the street electrician’s office is mfukoni, in his pockets. sometimes, unsurprisingly, these logistical convolutions can work to an electrician’s advantage. artisanal craft, after all, begets craftiness, and self-confidence is but a short jump to the realm of the confidence artist. as my friend ally once grumbled to me: “the only honest fundi is a kinyozi, a barber.” why? barbers cut your hair in one shot, and you see the result immediately. its visibility and temporality is that of the instantaneous commodity exchange. it has none of the veils, elongations, or delays that tend to make exchanges feel personal, in the manner of a gift. with a haircut there are no intermediary steps, no elaborate supplies or shortages thereof, no knowledge asymmetries between buyer and seller. indeed, many residents related stories of seemingly well-installed wiring that broke down or turned out faulty, or electricians that had taken money for parts and then kuingia mitini, “disappeared into the trees.” for their part, electricians complained to me of underpayment and unreasonable demands from their clients. in general, i found them to be like any commercial operators in that (to mix metaphors) most would try to cut corners without burning bridges—a calculus that is not without its own emergent logic (degani 2017). one friend, for example, told me he employs an old handyman’s trick of leaving spare tools at his different worksites. this almost perfectly rides the line between hustling in the sense of performing to the best of his abilities and hustling in the sense of merely performing (that is, of being only a “fake electrician”). it allows him to move between jobs while assuring anxious or pushy clients he will soon return. moreover, it is a testament to the realities of small-scale electrical work, in which technicians are free to pilot their own livelihoods and yet yoked to an array of shifting circumstances, customer indignations or desires, supplies and possibilities. whether an electrician’s hustle is oriented toward honest exertion or a quick score (an ideal-typical division suggested, for example, in the respective attitudes of the cowboy and goalkeeper vishoka), his continuous improvisation can foster a certain zany sense that he is at once free and constrained, a sense that is often codified in the form of being a particular kind of character. * * * when i told a friend in dar es salaam about my fieldwork with electricians, he chuckled and suggested i meet issa. issa was a neighborhood electrician who provided the useful but not-quite-licensed service of clambering up utility poles and balancing loads on transformers. he had once famously injured his leg while jumping down from one in an attempt to run away from the police. he was, my friend said grinning, “a real kishoka.” when we finally did sit down at a local bar, issa did not disappoint. he arrived theatrically, announcing that he was tired of getting shocked—the last one was enough to swear him off utility poles altogether. working on a transformer, he had had the misfortune to grip his pliers “poorly,” where there was no rubber insulation; after that, he said laughing, “only god himself knows what happened to me; all i know is i came to and suddenly had to pee.” minor shocks are inevitable, issa went on to reflect, evincing the same touch of pride as felix did (cf. winther and wilhite 2015). they are, he told me, the mark of any electrician whose work entails mambo ya practical, the practical problems of the handyman, and not mambo ya theoretical, the abstract problems of engineers. echoing the refrain of the original factotum figaro, issa went on to define vishoka like himself as those street electricians who are willing to “do anything” for a client, to take on any job even if it should involve tasks not strictly legal or within their field of competence. and like figaro, issa was a man for whom the distinction between action and reaction, freedom and constraint, was comically precarious. he likened the jolt of current to a soccer ball shooting off the cleat, and his own constant movements around town to a skittish crow, flying from branch to branch. in fact, during our conversation, issa stopped in the middle of his animated explanations to answer his phone: a woman wanted to know if he could fix a short. “i’m a bit far,” he said, “let me hop on a motorcycle taxi and i’ll be right there.” actually, he smirked as he hung up, the woman was right down the street, but this way he could charge extra for nauli, travel fare. without much ado, he jumped up and walked away, leaving his beer and half-eaten chicken on the plate. fifteen minutes later he came back, having decided not to do the work. the household’s other tenants were out and wouldn’t be returning until morning, and the most money the woman could muster was tsh. 4,000. and besides, he was getting drunk and in no mood to get shocked again. unlike well-paid tanesco engineers or technicians, issa is indeed a kind of bricoleur. he responds to, and with, whatever elements are at hand, and attempts to assemble them to his advantage. how much does one motorcycle taxi ride cost? is it measured in miles? gallons of gas? what might have convinced him to work a little tipsy and wait another day for payment? a closer social relationship? a less equal one? issa’s livelihood is thus a kind of improvised performance. he must rise to the occasion, in all its social and technical complexity. but precisely because of this unruly complexity, there is no guarantee that its elements can be properly aligned. issa could not have predicted that another job would present itself in the middle of dinner, nor could he have predicted that his client would delay payment. the only available option was to keep improvising—in this case, to return to the bar and finish his meal. this is perhaps why issa turns to the language of birds and soccer balls—projectiles careening around the city, unencumbered by any particular situation but constrained by all of them. in a similar vein, claude lévi-strauss (1966, 16) notes in passing that bricolage originally referred to some sort “extraneous movement” in sporting, “a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle.” this older meaning captures the blurred boundaries between seizing a situation and being seized by it, since a swerve is precisely both at once. when that swerve is drawn out and elevated to social theater—when an entire character feels like one continuous series of swerves, for example—we can feel the zaniness of entrepreneurial freedom. we experience constant improvisation taken to its logical conclusion—a frenzy of movement as such, divorced from any particular efficacy. it is perhaps not surprising that shocks poetically evoke continuous improvisation’s ambivalent sense of action sans efficacy. consider the following story a mechanic friend told me. one day, while hanging out in his garage, he pointed to a tangle of fraying wires and asked if i knew what would happen were i to grab one. he explained that he once mistook a live wire for a neutral one, holding his arms out and mimicking the jerky contraction of his hands around the uninsulated copper. the forces multiplied as his quick-thinking friend wrapped his hands in a t-shirt and attempted to pry him loose, only to have the current pass into him. after a moment, both tumbled backward, clanking their heads on the iron bars that closed the small space. while i chuckled uneasily at the violence and danger of the story (and the arms-length tangle of wires that precipitated it), his laugher seemed to echo the convulsive shock itself. as the ze comedy players captured so well, minor shock galvanizes the body, simultaneously liberating and constricting it, reducing it to an autonomic response yet animating it with a surging intensity. zaniness thus manifests the paradox of continuous improvisation. for the lucky and skilled, improvisation can be an opening up of the social field and its opportunities. the city remains a preeminent site of freedom and life-building; vishoka like samueli and issa can be in control of their working day. yet this control comes at the cost of predictability. it asks its residents to be factotums on call, disposed to any opportunity, whether or not they are exactly qualified to pursue it. it guarantees residents work in general but not in particular, and this sends them running around in circles, sometimes literally.5 is this social freedom or constraint? the joke is that it is both. issa, i suspect, grasps this joke all too well. indeed, in many ways issa was himself a comedian, improvising a performance about the failure of improvisation and thus partially mitigating that failure; he did not get the job, but he did get a few self-mocking wisecracks in (and thus perhaps charmed a guileless anthropologist buying him dinner). issa was a “real kishoka” in exactly the same way american english speakers call someone a “real character”—someone who has fully internalized his or her role as a performer in everyday life, who is always switched on and onstage and therefore alternately amusing and aggravating. there is a rich tradition of such ambiguous characters in east african popular culture, constantly reacting to unpredictable circumstances, their labored improvisations bound up in the politics of both class and colonialism. the origins of vichekesho skits have been traced to zanzibari “street vendors selling water and peanuts during colonial times. these people were usually from rural areas and illiterate, and in order to attract customers, they exaggerated their dress and behavior” (riccio 2001, 135). adopting influence from chaplin, as well as early modern comedies by shakespeare and molière, they often centered on “satirical misunderstandings of african servants in front of their british masters” (shule 2010, 52), their contortions both amusing and evidence of their low status. in the postcolonial era, terms such as mswahili likewise mobilize an ambivalent mixture of amusement and derision. conflating the negative associations of coastal, african, or even national identity, a “swahili” person is a poor urban resident without proper employment who is constantly scrambling through life (brennan 2006, 409). during my fieldwork, friends would teasingly admonish each other to acha mambo ya swahili (quit it with the swahili business), sometimes wisping their fingers across their lips to suggest garrulous bullshitting. they would also impute the historically “african” settlements (uswahilini) of the city to be full of quarrelsome and often fumbling gossips and schemers (cf. lewinson 2006). for those characters, whose survival depends on nothing more and nothing less than continuous improvisation, the very notion of a stable character itself becomes a zany farce. and, recapitulating social theory’s own undecided stance toward the informal, this farce oscillates between contempt and sympathy. residents can laugh at the fact that no matter how hard zany characters work or scheme, they never get very far, and at the fact that their indiscipline generates a certain anarchic chaos in its wake. the zaniness of patrols historically, the fictional and real zany characters of dar es salaam are poor residents looking to survive through forms of entrepreneurial capture, only to find themselves caught up in a swahili-style scramble. part of the reason for this scramble, however, lies in the colonial and postcolonial state’s repeated campaigns to tax, repatriate, or otherwise police them, and their equally concerted attempts to evade these operations. despite formal political and economic changes, this general dynamic has remained remarkably consistent. as aili mari tripp (1997, 1) has shown, the great open secret of tanzania’s liberalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s was that it merely ratified the ongoing noncompliance of ordinary people, who often merrily and quite performatively outwitted state agents. improvisation is thus not only a mode of livelihood but also, insofar as it intersects with state governance, a mode of citizenship. residents often cultivate an entrepreneurial attitude toward the state’s biopolitical infrastructures of control and provision. they cut corners and elect to take njia panya, the rodent’s route, alternately provoking or evading the nuisances, burdens, and obstacles of legality and formal regulation. the catch, however, is that one is never fully off the clock in such a mode. issa’s improvisations set off a cycle of move and countermove, pinging and spiraling him about the city. when this cycle is sufficiently drawn out or raised to a certain pitch of intensity, the sheer zaniness channels its underlying social paradox—the sense that one is actively performing (their livelihood, their citizenship), but so permanently performing it that it threatens to lose coherence and direction. in this final section, i examine the political paradoxes of permanent improvisation by considering the zany as an aesthetic of infrastructure. infrastructures have both symbolic and affective dimensions that exist beyond their technical properties (larkin 2013). electricity networks in particular have long functioned as the “tentacles of modernity” (winther and wilhite 2015), bringing light to countrysides and placing populations on grids of state legibility. in recent years, electrical infrastructures have also served as instruments for imparting fiscal discipline and self-responsibility (von schnitzler 2016). all of these elements are generally in play in tanesco’s daily operations, which mix idioms of consumer discipline with a civic commitment to paying one’s fair share for the collective good. for their part, residents often invoked their expectation that the state adhere to its own disciplinary standards and provide reliable service. indeed, tanesco is routinely glossed as mali ya umma, public or state property, in a phrase that literally translates to something closer to “collective wealth.” it stands in some basic way for reciprocity between citizen and state. despite these discourses of discipline and reciprocity, the grid exemplifies a more entrepreneurial relation to urban infrastructure common throughout the global south. by the mid-2000s, electricity had grown more expensive and less reliable in dar es salaam, giving rise to a thriving informal economy of electricity whose sociotechnical dynamics sit somewhere between flouting a lugubrious state and drawing its resources into local neighborhoods. vishoka, as we have seen, might be hired for quick, cheap repairs, but also, more audaciously, to reconnect lines, tamper with meters, or create switches that toggle between metered and unmetered electricity. significantly, the largest constituency for outright theft comes from high-volume power consumers. with only a few lights or fans, poorer households’ consumption patterns are usually too low to be worth the risk or effort of active theft; they are far more likely to get disconnected for debt and nonpayment. by contrast, light industries, bars, and wealthier households find more intensive electricity use central to business and pleasure. as one wealthy patriarch once told me, “the cord cuts where it is thinnest”; for those with the resources to do so, the grid was a logical site to be entrepreneurially worked or gamed. these arrangements incited their own countermeasures. since at least the 2000s, tanesco has sent out a variety of patrols on a daily basis, as well for what they called special “exercises and operations” to inspect and/or disconnect households for theft, debt, or other irregularities. during my fieldwork, i accompanied one such patrol, a revenue protection unit (rpu), as they tried to access, inspect, and enforce the legality of their power connections. to my surprise, these encounters often tilted less toward the disciplinary than toward the zany. as i wrote in my field notes at the time, my prose mimicking the somewhat frenetic encounters they described: “to determine if a customer had done anything wrong was to cut through a maze of excuses, of inherited debts, other actors not on the scene, of absentee landlords and tenants late on the bills, of misplaced documents and technical malfunction, of spatial ambiguities, of ignorance feigned and real.” like other african cities, dar es salaam was replete with cat-and-mouse games between consumer and utility (larkin 2008, 246). the games would begin on arrival. in wealthier households, meters are often locked behind a compound gate or thick door and a series of social-legal assertions. again and again on rpu patrols, domestic servants, guards, and relatives would assert that they did not have the authority to let us in, as the house did not legally belong to them. although the homeowner is ultimately responsible for the meter, such dependents were often very nervous about interacting with us. they rightly understood that they would be held responsible for admitting the rpu team into the house in the first place. hence we were treated to many exaggeratedly solemn declarations that we could not possibly be admitted. this was a rather inane bit of theater, but one with a convincing set piece and mood lighting: an iron gate or concrete wall physically enclosing the space. in one such house, an inspector discovered that a meter was rigged so that two of its three phases were not recording the power consumed. as she was finishing writing out the disconnection form in duplicate, the truck arrived out front. i followed her out of the compound to help get the ladder. she glanced back, jumped a little, and told me to remain right where i was. “why?” i demanded. i was instantly suspicious that some bribery proffer was afoot. “because,” she answered, “if we both walk past the gate, they’ll probably lock us out.” once we did get in the door, rpu patrols could turn zany thanks to the tenacity with which customers stuck to flimsy responses, betrayed only by their own sheepish smiles. one day we were called to examine a large, very wealthy compound whose owners were away traveling. this left the dependents—a brother-in-law, gardener, and house girl—to deal with us. a common way to test for meter tampering is to have the customer switch on all electricity-consuming objects in the house and measure the meter’s output relative to an rpu voltage recorder. an amazing comedic dialogue ensued. the home’s four air conditioners could not be switched on because, well, each of their remotes were missing, we were told. and all the musical equipment on the top floor—that was broken too. what about an iron? “no,” the house girl informed us, “no one uses an iron here.” in dar es salaam this is a rather astonishing claim. “how do you press your clothes then?” “we, um, take them to the dry cleaners.” “every day?” “yes, every day.” “what about servants’ clothes?” “our clothes, too.” we switch tacks. an inspector sees that the bracket, where the cable connects to the house, looks a little odd, but at the moment our truck does not have the one ladder that’s being shared between the two rpu teams working the area. there is a ladder chained to the fence, so we ask the gardener if he can unlock it. “i don’t have the key,” he promptly replies. “well, then, where is it?” “it’s probably inside.” “can you go in and get it?” “i’ve never gone inside the house.” “never?” “never.” “how long have you been working here?” “three years.” “three years?” “look,” he said, laughing, “ask me to get the jembe (hoe), no problem. anything else, i don’t know.” when all else failed, residents would proffer bribes. bribes, with their euphemisms and uncertainties, are explicitly improvisational and as such perhaps especially prone to comedy. during rounds in the commercial center of kariakoo, for example, a team of rpu inspectors disconnected a hotel for an elaborate setup that could toggle between metered and unmetered power, one that included selling stolen electricity to the house next door. the team decided that the resident was guilty by extension and that his wire was to be cut. smiling, and presumably unaware that i understood kiswahili, the resident proclaimed his ignorance and implored that surely they could work something out. partly for my instructional benefit, the inspector answered: “and about the money that tanesco has lost because of your actions? how will that be recovered?” “oh that,” he answered, laughing, “well, it’s already gone, no use worrying about it.” at this point i started laughing myself. the tenant, seeing that i had been following along, started laughing with me—we all knew the jig was up. in fact, a few days later we happened to pass each other at the tanesco office—he had surely come to deal with that very disconnection. we both did a double take and started laughing all over again. the zaniness of the rpu patrols lies in the way residents launched themselves into spontaneous evasive maneuvers with a mixture of agility and impotence, never quite evading so much as delaying their impending disconnection. as such their antics proved both amusing and irritating for the inspectors. by the same token, however, rpu teams could occasionally be made to look the fool. however temporarily, residents could give them the runaround, thwart some particular advance or, as in the case of the renter in kariakoo, undercut their officious performance of bureaucratic authority. indeed, sometimes the work of a single disconnection required a comically large expenditure of energy relative to the rpu team’s daily quota of households. and this relative impotence held true more broadly; no matter how many households the inspectors cut, they were all too aware that the disconnection sheet would continue to grow, and that many households would simply surreptitiously reconnect. this exercise in mutual vexation, i think, formed part of the laughter i shared with the kariakoo renter who had been cheerfully buying stolen electricity. there are interesting implications to the cat-and-mouse games that flourish at the junctures of the power lines connecting consumer to utility. tanesco hails its customers as citizens, as part of a collective responsibility toward a national project and social order. what instead transpires is a more agonistic, negotiable version of this social contract in which power connections are liable to breakdown or increase in expense, provoking households to pursue various shortcuts or clever rearrangements. the result is that basic service (from the state) and basic legibility (of citizens) are locally variable and collectively constrained. zany situations allow us to feel the way that governance and perhaps the city itself becomes seized by this paradox, rendering it a collectivity defined by its inability to act in concert. in true bottom-up, free-market fashion, a zany power grid is one in which there are only ever temporary winners and losers, temporary connections and disconnections. energy infrastructure, which should withdraw into the backstage of daily life, becomes a site of incessant activity, worry, argument, and indeed performance. conclusion slavoj žižek (1999) observes that as cultural modes, comedy and tragedy involve a kind of immortality, albeit the opposite ones. in the tragic predicament, the hero forfeits his terrestrial life for the thing, so that his very defeat is his triumph, conferring onto him the sublime dignity, while the comedy is the triumph of the indestructible life—not of the sublime immortality of the tragic hero, but of the very vulgar, opportunistic, terrestrial life. which is why the ultimate comic scene is that of a false death: say, the proverbial scene of the solemn funeral with all the relatives gathered, crying and praising the deceased, when, all of a sudden, the allegedly dead awakens (he did not really die, after all) and asks what the hell is going on, what’s all the fuss about? the kinds of back-and-forth on rpu patrols that i detail above get at this fundamentally comedic, stubborn survival. at the wealthy compound, the indefatigably straight-faced excuses persisted, irreverently, beyond any semblance of plausibility. the resident in kariakoo’s attitude toward tanesco’s lost revenue reminds one of the man who wakes up at his own funeral: it’s not gone, just departed—what’s the use in mourning? the comedy of improvisation lies in this unexpected burst of indestructible life where we expect suffocating form, a salto mortale into the next encounter, workday, or milieu. but (as the original acrobatic zanni attests) the zany is all bursting and leaping. its intensified irreverence is not just funny but manic, not just joyous but vaguely regimented. it is a comic aesthetic about, in some sense, the limits of comedy, the point at which what žižek calls “vulgar, opportunistic, terrestrial life” begins to race around in a permanent limbo—where situational adaptability becomes the defining feature of one’s character. electricity, which is at once vital and mechanical, which can never stop moving, is perhaps the zany medium par excellence. as the ze comedy sketch illustrates, it can channel a shock that pushes lighthearted comedy into something more tetchy and ambiguous. the relevance of the zany for sianne ngai (2012) is precisely this ambiguity, one that she suggests is appropriate for a postindustrial milieu in which heroic genres such as the sublime or the beautiful no longer have the same purchase. to call something zany is to find its superfluity sort of amusing and sort of irritating. whether or not this general claim about aesthetics under capitalism holds, i do find the zany to be a suggestive concept with which to think through the informal economies of the global south. the freedom of entrepreneurial improvisation has been routinely underestimated by colonial and postcolonial high modernists who cannot stand the disorder of the marketplace and the urbanity it fuels. the ability to make one’s own money, to control one’s own working day, and perhaps to even cut a deal on things like one’s household power supply all give urban life its characteristic sense of play and possibility. as michael watts (2005, 182) observes: “uncertainty, turbulence, unpredictability, chronic shifts, and unanticipated innovations—charles baudelaire’s ‘mouvements brusques’ and ‘leaps and jolts of consciousness [soubresauts de conscience]’ . . . serve as a basis for the african city’s sameness-as-worldliness.” still, in conducting fieldwork on dar es salaam’s power network, i have come to suspect this formulation might lend too much grace to the somersaults. it misses their anxious comedy, their spiritual proximity to undignified scrambling. as often as not, vishoka, residents, and state officials take the “leaps and jolts” of the urban life in which they are caught and render them not as ballet, but as a farcical bricolage of wheeling and dealing. they play the swahili figaro, thunderbolts zigzagging through the city, their succession of moves and countermoves evoking freedom and constraint in the same careening whirl. notes acknowledgments research for this article was funded by the national science foundation, the social science research council, and the wenner-gren foundation. i am deeply grateful to mike mcgovern and naveeda khan for their long-running encouragement and feedback over the course of its development. special thanks goes to anand pandian, whose own improvisational sense of anthropological possibility served as a guiding inspiration. i also wish to thank cultural anthropology’s editors, dominic boyer, cymene howe, and especially james faubion, for their support and wisdom, as well as three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful readings and critical improvements. petra dreiser and marcel laflamme were indispensable in shepherding the manuscript through the copyediting and production process. finally, thanks and love to natalie hung for her careful edits and for putting up with my own zaniness. 1. the sketch can be accessed online at https://eastafricantube.com/view/7400/ze-comedy-mafundi-vishoka. 2. jamii forums, tanzania’s major message board and social-media site, has numerous threads and videos devoted to charlie chaplin, mr. bean, buster keaton, and other zany comedians. for an example, see 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advocates for neoliberal globalization in our discipline and i, for one, expected the public profile of free-market economists to be substantially downgraded. a swing back toward keynesian macroeconomics seemed the obvious remedy for the abrupt contraction in demand. it is easy enough, in retrospect, to identify what prevented these expectations from becoming reality. it is more difficult to explain why. in this short essay, i seek to place the developments of the last decade in a broad historical context, focusing on the current and former western imperial powers: the united states, france, and britain. in doing so, i draw mainly on sources from outside of anthropology. the world economy has not recovered from the abrupt loss in purchasing power brought on by 2008. before the crash, sixty countries were growing at a rate of 7 percent or more per year; today, the number is nine. critics underestimated the political power that big money consolidated after the overthrow of the developmental state, the sheer weight of finance capital when allied with bureaucracy and bought politicians. no attempt was made to reflate though public spending and redistribution or to punish profligate banks—with the exception of iceland! instead, balance sheets riddled with deficits were replenished with free money (“quantitative easing”) and asset markets from stocks to real estate boomed. the ruling creditor alliance supervised increased economic inequality and a substantial weakening of democracy. their debts were paid off by cutting public spending and ordinary people’s purchasing power (see rakopoulos 2018). some even claimed that the crash was an opportunity to make the reagan and thatcher revolutions permanent: what better way of subduing the working and middle classes? in what follows i will suggest that the present moment, a decade later, contains more potential for radical change of the sort that inaugurated the neoliberal counterrevolution some forty years ago. but we cannot assume that such a reversal would please left-leaning intellectuals. the main threat to neoliberalism now comes from the right, and a major war would upset all predictions: not in a good way. nevertheless, i believe that the events set in motion by 2008 (and, before that, 1979 and 1980) are reaching their denouement now, rather than then. the roots of the west’s political crisis the west is in the grip of a moral panic—or perhaps political breakdown would be nearer the mark. at the same time, there are signs of insurgency from the left and the right that are generally described as populist or autocratic, rarely statist. meanwhile, corporations are steadily building a world society that suits their purposes, while dismissing the modern political formula of national government, law, and citizenship as decadent, irresponsible, and irrelevant. the president of the united states is being investigated for collusion with russians, obstruction of justice, and corruption. he openly espouses white racism and does his best to subvert government, the law, the press, and public language. for a would-be charismatic leader, the british prime minister ran the worst election campaign in memory, while invoking the will of the people for a divorce from europe that was decided by a razor-thin margin. she cobbled together a majority supported by some bigots from belfast and is now deploying the absolutist powers of parliament to drive through a “hard or no deal” brexit supported by her party’s extremists, the tabloid press, and a criminal conspiracy of london billionaires. western europeans face a wave of xenophobia that has reached fascist proportions in hungary, poland, and italy and is on the rise in northern europe. the euro’s flaws—no fiscal mechanism, the dominance of the banks, the german export surplus, the built-in democratic deficit—are brushed under the carpet. the french first encouraged and then rejected the racists, while destroying the parties that shared power under the fifth republic and, with the lowest voter turnout ever, awarding a parliamentary landslide to a europeanist “center” party that was just one year old. for four decades, britain and the united states have led a neoliberal consensus which, after the 2008 crash, consolidated the power of finance still further and imposed austerity on the rest of us, with no end in sight (mirowski 2013). then two old men led a socialist insurrection of the young, which threatens to overthrow the establishment—but not quite yet. bernie sanders did it largely from outside the democratic party, while jeremy corbyn did it as the leader of the labour party. the faustian compact with finance capital made by bill clinton, tony blair, and the eurocrats of the 1990s has come home to roost, since these politicians neglected their own people to court power, money, and the free market. so the democrats are now in open civil war, blair’s followers are implacably opposed to corbyn’s, and the french socialists lost the presidency, six million votes, and 250 national assembly seats between 2012 and 2017. volte-face is now in vogue: if you lose an election, borrow the opposition’s policies. the tories talk about ditching parts of austerity for the sake of brexit and marine le pen considers rebranding herself as a europeanist. why is all of this going on? the west was always outnumbered by “the rest,” but during its heyday around 1900, when europeans controlled 80 percent of the world’s inhabited land, they were still experiencing a population explosion that lasted for roughly a century until the 1930s: 25 percent of humanity then lived in europe, and 36 percent when the lands of new settlement were included. this was a unipolar world with divergent income distribution, meaning that most of the money came to the west. this inequality was explained as being racial in origin and white racism was everywhere. the flagship publication of american international relations, foreign affairs, began its life in 1910 as the journal of race development (vitalis 2015). things changed after 1945 when the american empire took over from its british predecessor. the anticolonial revolution and the bureaucracy of the united nations pushed overt racism onto the back burner, but it was always there. the cold war was ostensibly fought between the free market and state socialism, but states and markets were always indispensable to money (see hart 1986) and these social realities were less starkly opposed than the rhetoric made it seem. the pentagon, while fighting for free enterprise, was the largest antimarket collective in world history, locating military bases in the american south for political reasons and even awarding food contracts on a noncompetitive basis. meanwhile, the world bank made loans to the soviet bloc so that western corporations could benefit from its cheap and cowed labor force, even as politburos bought foreign luxuries with hard currency earned from exports. since 1990, we have seen four massive transformations: the collapse of the soviet bloc; the escape of money from political controls; the rise of china, india, and brazil as capitalist powers; and the internet going public. a revolution in urbanization, transportation, and communication has brought people closer together, while inequality has escalated within countries and regions, if not between continents. unlike the unipolar, divergent world of 1900, our world is multipolar and convergent, with the postcolonial masses—especially in asia—staking their claim to a place in the sun. this, along with stagnant or eroded living standards at home, is the context for increasing xenophobia and white racism in the west. the world economy since 1945 may be divided into two periods. the first was built around developmental states committed to expanding workers’ spending power, public infrastructure and services, controlling capital flows, and reducing economic inequality. the biggest boom in world economic history lasted until the 1970s. it encompassed the industrial west, the soviet bloc, and newly independent countries: truly a world revolution catalyzed by war. its opponents, mainly private capital, mounted a counterrevolution in the name of the market and “sound money.” the regime inaugurated by margaret thatcher and ronald reagan has lasted until now, despite the financial crisis of 2008. unsurprisingly, economic inequality has returned to levels unseen since the gilded age. the world’s population is currently divided as follows: asia, 60 percent; africa, 15 percent (double its share in 1900); and the americas, europe, russia and oceania, 25 percent between them. the united nations forecasts that, in 2100, asia’s share will be 42 percent, africa’s 40 percent, and the rest 18 percent. europe will comprise just 6 percent, compared with 25 percent in 1900. the reason for this awesome demographic shift is that africa is the only continent whose population is growing (by 2.5 per cent a year). all of the others, including asia and led by europe, are aging. asian manufacturers already recognize that africa will be the most buoyant sector of market demand in this century. but in the west, while the notion of “africa rising” has some currency, the implications for global hegemony are barely acknowledged. given that economic growth has historically been correlated with population growth, the message is clear. sooner or later, africa and europe will change rank order. humanity’s future will be worked out between asians and africans, unless the west decides that no future is better than one that is worse for itself. the west may no longer control the world, but does anyone seriously believe that the americans will stand by while new capitalist powers take over and a resurgent africa challenges a racist world order dating back five centuries? a colonel in the u.s. air force once told me, perhaps with some irony: “you europeans have stolen our moral high ground, and the chinese have stolen our manufacturers. all we have left are the weapons. i guess it’s double or quits.” in europe especially, a subliminal feeling that the game is up is gaining ground. unearned income from everyone else is dwindling. but will the whites go down without a fight? free trade and protection since 1945, the american empire has supervised a rigid international regime comparable to the british empire’s gold standard. in both cases, market fundamentalism or what karl polanyi (2001) called the self-regulating market outlawed protectionist measures and marginalized the state’s economic role. the freedom of capital to flow everywhere has subordinated politics to markets for decades. no one runs for office on a program of increased state intervention anymore. but things may be changing. this monolithic ideology has suddenly spawned variants, with xenophobic nationalism linked to limited market freedom and protection now challenging the cosmopolitan universalism of the transnational corporations. as a result, the west finds itself hostage to an escalating division between those who want to leave the world and those who embrace it. free trade and protection, following the logic of the nineteenth-century gold standard and, more recently, that of neoliberal globalization, have been represented as mutually exclusive. but, historically, they have been a complementary pairing in economies whose internal and external needs are contradictory, as the leading western nations recognized when struggling to establish their own relationship to the world economy. we may now be entering a global paradigm shift comparable to that of 1980. a historical approach to free trade and protection may help us to clarify what the opposing sides share and to understand why nationalist market fundamentalism might not be as anomalous as it currently seems. sir james steuart was a jacobite exile who brought the term political economy from continental europe to britain. a decade before the wealth of nations, steuart published his inquiry into the principles of political economy in 1767. for advocating a free scottish home market with initial protection from foreign predators including england (this was sixty years after the union), he was soon labeled a mercantilist. but his strategy has some relevance today, especially for regions that are politically fragmented, economically backward, and subject to financial and other kinds of imperialism. in the present political climate, steuart’s approach makes more sense than neoliberalism. free trade and protection constitute a dialectical pair, swinging variably between the extremes. steuart rejected the idea that edinburgh and glasgow should be cleansed of riffraff—a term for the informal economy then popular among elites—by sending them back to the countryside. what the world needed least, steuart thought, was more farmers. by leaving home, migrants reduce the number of farmers. as long as people who seem to have no jobs survive in the city, they generate demand for food supplied by the remaining farmers. with the money from commercial agriculture, farmers buy more manufactures and services, thereby helping the city economy to grow, making migration from the countryside more attractive, and accelerating the rural/urban division of labor. as demand rises, so does labor productivity, but it starts from a very low level. the main threat to this benevolent spiral called development is cheap foreign imports, which undercut infant industries and commercial agriculture. the home market must be protected at first by high tariffs. but as local enterprises become more competitive, with stronger firms driving out weaker ones (as they themselves would have been if exposed to the cold winds of the world market too early), the government can selectively reduce tariffs in strong home sectors while promoting exports. in this way, the national economy can gradually join the world economy as an equal. the early modern revolutions that transformed the united states, france, italy, and germany all combined mass insurgency with warfare that lasted several decades. they focused on building up the home market and consolidating fragmented sovereignty by removing unfair taxes and restrictions that had been placed on the movement of people, goods, and money, usually against the rising global power of the united kingdom or lesser empires like austria. impediments to trade caused by divided sovereignty within and between states had to be overcome. development, under these circumstances, depended on removing these barriers to trade. at the same time, incipient free-trade areas needed a measure of protection, so that their own farms and manufactures could benefit from supplying newly consolidated home populations. the french revolution is a striking case in point. in 1793, the jacobins unleashed the terror and the bretons raised what they called a “royal and catholic army,” supported from the sea by britain, against which the revolutionary republic needed to send out an army of its own. this became known as the war of la vendée, incidentally the subject of victor hugo’s last novel, ninety-three. nantes, france’s largest port (with bordeaux, the regional base of the girondin opposition to the jacobins), was heavily involved in slavery and trade with the caribbean. these traders financed the republican army and were in turn besieged by the royalists; four thousand catholics and royalists were drowned in the loire—an episode known as “the national bathtub”—and, as hugo’s novel shows, atrocities were commonplace, especially on the part of the republicans. historians agree that this struggle to the death was the turning point in the revolution, not the storming of the bastille in 1789. why did the nantes bourgeoisie risk so much for the revolution? france had been a centralized monarchy, but it was also a patchwork of local fiefholders, each of whom exacted what they could from people and goods moving through their territory. the republic promised to end all of that by establishing a regulated and policed home market. the interest of nantes was to reduce the cost of moving caribbean goods inland, and so its residents allied themselves with the revolution. in the united states, dutch traders and american smugglers led resistance to the east india company’s tea monopoly and to british taxes imposed on the colonists to offset the crown’s military costs. the italian risorgimento, too, was backed by the industrialists of milan and turin, who wanted a national home market devoid of fragmented jurisdictions and the abolition of austrian restrictions on their access to world trade. in all three cases, the power of merchant and manufacturing capital played a decisive part in these revolutions. long before the small european common market became an expanded european union, the prussian zollverein was launched in 1818, culminating half a century later in the german empire. in each case, political federation was preceded by a customs union lasting fifty years. the zollverein was an attempt to harmonize tariffs, measures, and economic policy in a few scattered territories controlled by the prussian ruling family. the germans attributed their vulnerability to extreme political fragmentation: some forty states in 1815. prussia’s main objective was to expand a protected zone of internal free trade from which the austrians were to be excluded. by the 1860s, most of what became germany had joined the customs union. the german-american economist friedrich list (2005) proposed a “national system” of political economy, which he claimed was the only way that germans could escape from being forever hewers of wood and drawers of water for the british. he emphasized the scope for innovation within an expanded free trade area protected from the world market. similar proposals were made by americans such as alexander hamilton and henry clay. in a recent piece of writing (hart 2016a), i argued for regional trade federations as a step toward a politically stronger africa, following the international trend for such federations that mediate between nation-states and global markets. the volume’s editors asked me to explain how you can have free trade and protection at the same time. the international left has been brainwashed by neoliberal universalism. sir james steuart could have set them straight. the political and economic scenarios change, of course, when old industries including agriculture are in decline, undercut by cheap labor or more efficient machine production elsewhere. then the majority of national consumers benefit from cheaper commodities, and displaced labor (in theory) should find employment in newer and more efficient industries, as they have throughout the modern history of capitalist expansion. transitions of this sort are, however, painful for capitalists, workers, and the places where they live. the temporary solution is to emigrate, but many regard that as rather drastic and prefer to stay at home, unless forced to leave by necessity. the imperial hangover: the united states, france, and britain today finally, a brief sketch of recent political events in the united states, france, and britain: donald trump’s presidency, emmanuel macron’s improbable rise, and brexit britain. trump’s assault on the institutional foundations of democracy (even if it is also a plutocracy) has no precedent since hitler in 1933. fortunately, the united states is not the weimar republic. already, parts of the american establishment are regrouping to resist his illiterate attack on their institutions. my young american friends worry that this represents a reassertion of the conservative state, since they too have been brainwashed to believe in techno-utopias linked to markets unhindered by politics. but many germans in 1939, and even more of them in 1945, would have been glad of such robust conservatism when adolf hitler first came to power. perhaps civil rights, the rule of law, honest language, and a free press become crucial only when they have been lost. besides democratic resistance, not least by the federal bureau of investigation, trump’s future hinges on the political cover he can expect from a republican congress. this is holding firm, but a change in the balance of party power in the congressional midterm elections becomes ever more probable and could shake up republican support for him before then. george w. bush’s rejection in the 2006 midterms sounded the death knell for what he stood for. intellectuals on both sides of the atlantic grossly underestimate the power and resilience of the american empire. europeans prefer not to inspect their own parasitism and play up every sign of hubris, incompetence, and malfeasance on the americans’ part. this empire owes nothing to the free-market idea, except as a rhetorical fig leaf, but its opponents reproduce it in their own strategy. the bulwarks of american global hegemony are rather world market share, all of those weapons and bases, the world currency, and intellectual property (recall that the united states’s leading exports are movies, music, and software). the united states invented and still dominates the internet economy, which is rapidly becoming the world economy, supplying the bulk of its hardware, software, content, and giant firms (the acronym is faang: facebook, apple, amazon, netflix, and google’s parent company alphabet). in other words, the american empire rests on mercantilism, militarism, financial monopoly, the enforcement of private property in ideas, and the digital revolution in communications. world war would enhance all of these strengths. meanwhile, thomas jefferson and alexis de tocqueville turn in their graves. france is, by some accounts, the most statist economy in the world. to neoliberals this means the worst, but in 2008, nicolas sarkozy, elected as a french thatcher, had every reason to be grateful for the french social model—as i am. the rise of marine le pen, combined with france’s lingering imperialism in africa and the terrorist attacks, seemed to indicate an inexorable descent into xenophobic nationalism. facing the likes of trump, putin, xi jinping, may, erdogan, modi, netanyahu, the saudi crown prince, and egypt’s sisi, the writing was on the wall. the death throes of neoliberalism pointed inexorably to fascism and world war. it seemed that society everywhere—or at least in the west—was divided between two kinds of market fundamentalism: global and national, being in the world and or being against it. another thirty years’ war for europe looked possible. macron’s ascent at this moment was based on luck, timing, and considerable political acumen. the europeanists and paris’s cosmopolitans breathed again when he was elected president. but most intellectuals, the communist unions, and the far left saw the neoliberal banker in him more than the genuine centrist. so far, this perception has been borne out. macron is the youngest french leader since napoleon and apparently shares his appetite for autocracy. thus far, however, he lacks an international alliance such as the one that sustained françois mitterand, helmut kohl, and jacques delors. last, but not least, is perfide albion, the sick man of europe. i have argued that what matters in this context is not europe but the impending breakup of the united kingdom, led by scottish independence and the reunification of ireland (hart 2016b). the international mafia based in london and fronted by the tories leaves no room for national politics, and it seemed to me that the labour party would inevitably self-destruct. austerity would continue indefinitely, and thus a politics of decentralization was the only hope. what a difference a day makes: june 8, 2017, when corbyn almost beat theresa may. the labour party’s woes have not, however, gone away. the killings in manchester and london, the hung election with its depressing aftermath, and the grenfell tower fire add up to a perfect storm that threatens to sink britain’s political right. we could be witnessing the end of almost four decades of thatcherism (including new labour). scottish independence was postponed by the 2017 election, while ireland’s has become more precarious. corbyn, with the most left-wing platform since 1983 (itself then known as “the longest suicide note in history”), has changed the direction of british politics. britain has long since lost its empire, but maybe this election belongs in a series with the arab spring and occupy wall street, neither of which fulfilled the hopes they raised, but which nevertheless changed the political outlook of millions, including me. the cracks in the wall of neoliberalism and its dark authoritarian twin are there for everyone, especially women and the young, to see. corbyn likes to quote the last verse of percy shelley’s great poem, the most revolutionary in the english language: rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number— shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you— ye are many—they are few. i wonder if the grenfell tower fire will be a defining political moment, comparable to the peterloo massacre of 1819, except that grenfell is more obviously systemic and its heat thus more readily dissipated. corbyn’s opponents damn him as an associate of terrorists, but the main threat he poses to the status quo inside and outside the labour party is his own principled lack of contamination by neoliberalism. in this, there is real hope of reversing thatcher’s mantra “there is no alternative.” reactions to trump’s white supremacist politics, along with the surprising french and british elections, suggest that neoliberal hegemony may be cracking. a swing back to state intervention is now more likely than at any time in the last four decades. but what is the state now and where can it be found? not where the postwar consensus left it, that’s for sure. references hart, keith 1986 “heads or tails? two sides of the coin.” man n.s. 21, no. 4: 637–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/2802901. 2016a “afrique: en attendant l’émancipation.” in les gauches du vignt-et-unième siècle: un dialogue nord-sud, edited by jean-louis laville and josé-luis coraggio, 351–66. lormont, france: éditions le bord de l’eau. 2016b “brexit: where once was an empire.” anthropology today 32, no. 5: 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12293. list, friedrich 2005 the national system of political economy, volume 1: the history. new york: cosimo. originally published in 1841. mirowski, philip 2013 never let a serious crisis go to waste: how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. new york: verso. polanyi, karl 2001 the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. boston: beacon press. originally published in 1944. rakopoulos, theodoros, ed. 2018 the global life of austerity: economic crises beyond europe. new york: berghahn. vitalis, robert 2015 white world order, black power politics: the birth of american international relations. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. a right to the future a right to the future: student debt and the politics of crisis caitlin zaloom new york university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6285-7171 in september of 2008, when the banking giant lehman brothers collapsed, lending came to a halt. borrowers across the globe were left holding outsized debts and declining credit scores. consumers in the united states soon showed that they wanted out of the credit trap. from 2008 to 2012, u.s. households reduced their financial liabilities by $1.3 trillion (federal reserve bank of new york 2013). they “deleveraged” in all areas but one: student debt. by 2012, this rising level of debt already represented a 70 percent increase in the number of borrowers and a 70 percent increase in the sum of each borrower’s loans from just 2004 (brown et al. 2013). in 2018, outstanding student debt crossed the $1.5 trillion mark. this balance represents growth of more than 170 percent from the years just before the crash (federal reserve bank of new york 2017). since 2008, exploding student debt balances have become a signal feature of finance. figure 1. student loans defied the trend in the united states to pay down debt in the years following the financial crash of 2008. image by the federal reserve bank of new york. another, less heralded change has accompanied this upsurge. in 2010—two years after the financial meltdown—the federal government took over the student loan business, alleviating private banks of a debt market they no longer wanted. today, the u.s. department of education provides the vast majority of student loans, making the federal government one of the largest consumer credit agencies in the world. student debt has become a key point of relation between the government and young adult citizens. so does the student debt crisis promise to generate a new politics? crisis discourse, janet roitman (2013) has argued, tends to generate solutions that resemble religious salvation. the student debt crisis has indeed inspired redemptive narratives, with calls for old testament–style jubilee and the end of capitalism (graeber 2011). roitman contends that demands for radical change like these place power outside of human time and capacities and, by doing so, undermine their stated goals; they render the precipitating crisis incapable of producing transformative political thought. anthropologists should not capitulate to what jane guyer (2007) calls the “evacuation” of the near future, however. new futures do not happen through gestures toward grand prospects but through conflicts over the near term, often on the scale of proximate generations (zaloom 2018). struggles over imminent possibilities—like those contained in the student debt crisis—can inspire novel politics and shifts in the key concepts that support them. the politics of student debt protests calling for an end to student debt have swelled in recent years, both in the united states and across the world. critics have called anti-debt activists “entitled,” unwilling to pay their fair share of college costs; but protesters are challenging the very intellectual foundations that make this reproach possible. they contest the view that student debt should be considered an individual’s investment in her own labor market value or human capital. activists’ core demands—ending student debt and instituting free tuition—would break from the past that such economic reasoning created. they affirm that the value of higher education lies not in its individual market potential but in the possibility of intellectual growth, solidarity among peers, and, ultimately, political change. these demands amount to what i call a right to the future. an end to student debt would require rejecting the logic of human capital and the policies that have saddled young adults with debt. it would require that universities and politicians value college for bringing students of different classes together in a common educational project, such that students could use their experiences to craft new visions of social, political, and economic life for young adulthood. the right to the future is a claim to generational reinvention. a right to the future encompasses threats to young adults’ near-term futures beyond higher education, too. consider global warming. in coming decades, the best-case scenarios point to more frequent and more lethal extreme weather events. in the worst-case projections, these disasters will be accompanied by catastrophic sea-level rise that inundates coastal cities and regions, propelling large-scale refugee migration throughout the world. the maturing generation will face conflicts over food and potable water, as well as outbreaks of infectious disease. the fact that student debt and climate change have similar sources—economic logics linked to global capitalism and neoliberalism—gives young adults further grounds to claim a right to the future. to show how a right to the future is emerging, i track conflicts between activists and human capital–minded technocrats around student debt and higher education costs in the united states and chile, a country with similar student loan patterns to the united states. chilean students, like their u.s. counterparts, pay high fees and take on significant debt to attend college; in fact, according to data from the organization for economic cooperation and development, education in these two countries requires more of students financially than anywhere else in the world (santiago times 2017). activists in both countries have agitated for an end to student debt and for free tuition. in chile, higher education activism has been especially widespread, vibrant, and sustained—but in america, too, the struggle has created opportunities for challenging the recent history of higher education, for developing new ideas about politics, and for articulating fresh approaches to debt. free, quality higher education in the wake of the 2008 crash, a fight for a different future began with a contest over the meaning of the past. in august 2011, chilean students began protesting the effects of their country’s costly higher education system in ways that follow the crisis script as theorized by roitman. these students asserted that the social and political repression of the dictator augusto pinochet’s government was continuing, long after his formal rule had ended, with the unfair economic burden that students were bearing. pinochet famously brought in neoliberal economists from the university of chicago to remake chile and upheld the economic transformations he wrought with violence. in the realm of higher education, pinochet installed an expensive, privatized system that required students and families to pay while suppressing any dissent. saddled with debt, students and families had to work to service their educational loans, a burden that tied them tightly to the demands and desires of employers and the marketplace, fulfilling the requirements of pinochet’s neoliberal agenda. in 2011, activists articulated a historical break, declaring their student debt loads to be unsustainable. then they narrated history anew: their debt burden was not, they insisted, a personal investment in their labor market potential or their personal responsibility. instead, it represented the chilean government’s moral abdication. they called for “free, quality higher education.” to publicize their agenda, protesters held mass kiss-ins, dressed up as superheroes, reenacted michael jackson’s “thriller” dance, and ran in circles around the president’s palace. they seized a television station and insisted that the broadcasters publicize their demands. following the station takeover and the burning of a santiago department store, police cracked down on the protesters, 874 of whom were arrested (franklin 2011). activists argued that this police belligerence further exposed the enduring injustices of chilean history. their chants affirmed their goals: “it will fall, it will fall! the education of pinochet, now it will fall” (mcsherry and mejía 2011). the demonstrations and police aggression continue today. when students across chile took to the streets in 2017, the santiago police blasted them with water cannons (telesur 2017). still, the protesters persist in demanding a historic break from pinochet’s neoliberal era. in addition to street demonstrations, the activists have also performed jubilee, or the mass cancellation of debts, giving politicians and universities an object lesson in casting history aside. the chilean artist francisco tapia, known as papas fritas (or “french fries”), burned paper records of student debt worth $500 million from a private chilean university (democracy now! 2014). meanwhile, u.s. activists were also targeting loan balances. the u.s.-based strike debt! bought out and canceled almost $4 million in loans from students who attended the fraudulent, for-profit everest college, which had deceived students about the workplace value of their near-worthless degrees (kamenetz 2014).1 destroying papers and canceling loans, as strike debt! did, provides relief only for a small number of students, yet debt jubilee is fueled by a larger redemption fantasy of eliminating the need for debt entirely. even in their biblical form, though, jubilees are periodic, not transformative. they bring only temporary relief to worldly injustice. although these jubilee performances have brought significant publicity to activist causes, they paradoxically reaffirm the valid nature of debt arrangements. still, these tactics have prompted political responses. in chile, president sebastián piñera fired his education minister and promised new government funding for higher education in an effort to mollify the protesters and prop up his plummeting approval ratings (bbc 2017).2 in 2014, his successor michelle bachelet pledged that low and middle-income students would attend chilean public universities tuition-free, initiating the gratuidad program that has paid for the studies of 270,000 students at chilean public universities. during his second successful presidential campaign in 2017, piñera made higher education a key part of his platform, pledging to expand gratuidad into vocational education (pells 2018). free, quality higher education at all universities would, in fact, move beyond pinochet’s legacy. the latest expansion of gratuidad both moves toward this goal and gives student debt greater political heft. it does not yet address the issue of social inequality, however, and many activists have judged the program insufficiently transformative for this reason. because gratuidad addresses only the 15 percent of chilean students who attend underresourced public universities, it arguably extends divisions between haves and have-nots that have been in place since pinochet. protesters have maintained that, in effect, the gratiudad program heightens social divisions among universities, continuing to funnel poorer students to schools that cannot serve them well and further entrenching a tiered education system. however, gratiudad has cemented higher education’s place in chilean national politics and centered young adults’ futures in the politics of inequality. gratuidad has thereby opened a sightline to a new near future. student movements in the united states have also won political concessions, some of which alleviate the strain of existing policies and others of which promise greater transformation. responding to pressure from higher education activists, the obama administration began to expel fraudulent for-profit institutions from federal loan support programs and promised to cancel debts for students taken in by their false claims. today, donald’s trump’s secretary of education, betsy devos, is rolling back this policy, reopening the door to for-profit malfeasance. however, by focusing on bad actors, both the obamaand trump-era approaches are united in a political logic that divides institutions according to a logic of personal gain: some are worth the investment and others are not. the government’s job lies in determining and then sanctioning those whose actions will distort students’ assessment of the risks of their investment. as in chile, free tuition holds a stronger promise of transformation in the united states, and movements have also won a place for it in formal politics. in 2016, during the democratic presidential primary, bernie sanders adopted the movement’s demand for tuition-free and debt-free college education as a key element of his platform, leading hillary clinton to take up the issue herself. costly higher education, sanders (n.d.) argued, represented a “shortsighted path to the future [that] must end.” in taking up the cause of free tuition, sanders embraced the language of a historic break and made young adults’ years after graduation a national priority. acting on that vision of the near future, politicians and educators have launched programs at the state level, even as the trump administration has stymied federal efforts. new york state governor andrew cuomo created the excelsior scholarship, which promises middle-income students tuition-free access to the state’s public colleges and universities. the excelsior program layers funds on top of existing programs and requires income verification and enrollment in thirty college credit-hours. these complexities have made the excelsior funds difficult for students to access and limited the reach of the program. in fact, almost two-thirds of students who apply are rejected (karlin 2018). because the program supplements, rather than replaces, existing supports, it does not move beyond the existing model or establish the historic break that activist demands have the potential to initiate. even if free tuition became a reality, though, it would not mean an end to debt. living expenses would still need to be paid with funds from either work or loans. with costs confined to room and board, however, students could spend less time at paying jobs; taking on more limited loans could allow them to focus on their studies and projects. they could also look toward their years beyond college as a time more under their own control, not first and foremost in service to their weighty debts. what conditions would enable debt to function in the service of young adults, rather than the reverse? answering this question would require a conceptual transformation, beginning with a challenge to human-capital discourse of the last forty years. “a gigantic revolution of expectations” the politics of the post-2008 moment have posed a challenge to narrow economic thinking. as the idea of a student debt crisis has gained media traction and political popularity, think-tank economists and media pundits on the center-right and -left have raised their voices in opposition (e.g., akers and chingos 2016; baum 2016). hewing to the crisis script that roitman identified, these technocrats have reasserted the need for continuity, standing on the authority of established economic concepts and theory. they point to data showing that higher education will, overwhelmingly, earn a return on investment and they avow that education should be considered a personal financial wager. these arguments reinforce human capital as the foundational common sense of policymakers whose judgments and actions steer higher education. centers of power like the brookings institution and the urban institute have produced reports arguing that higher education remains a good investment because it will pay off in higher incomes and better lives even with the debt that students carry. loans are good, these reports assure, because they allow students to access their strong future earnings today to pay for the asset of their education. student borrowers in the united states, they insist, are in good shape as long as they graduate. these writings do concede, however, that policies could be improved—specifically, by targeting assistance to those students whose personal wager on higher education hasn’t paid off. this group includes those who don’t graduate and those who carry debt but haven’t found well-paid employment. the need for change, as these economists see it, comes from students’ positions in relation to market failures, fortune, and folly. that means focusing on those who suffer from the inefficiencies of the student loan repayment system and the bad luck or decision-making that has led them to drop out of school. in other words, these writers look toward continuity by bringing reform to the broken parts of what they see as a functioning system. free tuition does not make sense within this framework, and the advocates of a human-capital approach have not shifted their thinking to value higher education beyond individual students’ labor market success or failure. following new york’s announcement of the excelsior scholarship, the center-right pundit david brooks (2017) tarred it as “regressive”—since middleand upper-middle-income students and families stood to benefit. for this, brooks gave cuomo pride of place—in the months following trump’s ascendance to the presidency—for “worst public policy idea this year.” when experts with a human-capital perspective focus on activists’ demand for free tuition, their emotional tenor is often one of bafflement. in an article entitled “progress and its discontents,” the economist (2012) assessed the reasons for the chilean student protests from the centrist magazine’s editorial perspective. the very successes of chilean higher education over the last twenty years had generated the protests, the writers asserted, going on to present an argument in support of chile’s high-cost colleges and the student debt that attending them requires. in 2016, americas quarterly published the perplexed article “free college in chile! so what are students so mad about?”, noting in the subtitle that “some reformers want to upend the system entirely” (o’boyle 2016). free tuition jeopardizes the continuity these commentators seek; they have yet to come to grips with the challenge to human-capital thinking that activists are posing. these centrist publications’ arguments proceed through the blind spots of the technocratic perspective—but even within their pages, a new generational politics emerges. the economist article wonders if student protests mark a revolt against “the model,” or the free-market, neoliberal policies that pinochet inaugurated and that his successors have followed. carlos peña, the rector of diego portales, a private university in chile founded in 1982 under the pinochet regime, is quoted as saying that chile’s strong economy has generated a “gigantic revolution of expectations” (economist 2012); student protesters have no personal memory of pinochet and are therefore unafraid. peña’s comments support the economist’s technocratic assessment, but the article suggests that higher education activists’ vision portends the end of an era and propel aspirations for a new beginning in their adult lives. a right to the future higher education can create new generational futures, but only under conditions where students are freed from the hierarchies and inequalities of the past. the desire to change course has fueled calls for an end to burdensome student debt and for inaugurating free tuition. in the process, activists have also opposed dominant economic concepts that have tied university education to historical inequalities. challenges like these assert an emerging claim to a right to the future. a right to the future extends a concept popular with urban scholars and movements alike: that of a right to the city. inspired by the writings of henri lefebvre, the right to the city begins with urban inhabitants’ capacities to produce space in all its physical, social, and imaginative forms. citizens can make city space to serve those who live there; obstacles that stand in the way of that creation must, it follows, be lifted. the social relations of neoliberal capitalism and their epistemological foundations quash this creativity. scholars and activists favoring a right to the city oppose governance by technical economic assessments and strategies that disenfranchise nonelites. this politics parallels the challenge that higher education activists are posing to the social legacy of neoliberalism and the dominance of human-capital discourse. the right to the future shifts the concept from a spatial to a temporal framework, opening new avenues. while existing technical solutions make few allowances for student input, the right to the future helps reveal that students are necessary participants in the conditions of their education, especially around the costs that will shape the future of both students and nations.3 young adults’ creative capacities enable them to make their own political choices; they must have the ability to exercise these choices in order to bring about generational renewal. they have a political claim on the future. today, student debt and higher education costs undermine generational reinvention by tying graduates to inherited systems of power that reproduce inequality. we can see this in the united states in the class stratification that is deepened by for-profit universities and the disproportionate share of student loans that african americans and women carry. free tuition and an end to burdensome debt are critical for moving beyond these social legacies. at the scale of national and state-level university systems, however, affordable education is necessarily a technical problem; broader political thinking is needed to forge deeper alliances between policy experts and movements. the right to the future must encompass technical solutions, but ones that can gain traction both inside and outside the halls of think tanks and consultancies. student debt has to be rethought and, with it, debt has to be reconceived as more than a personal investment. some economists have advanced a technical agenda that would transform student debt to allow generational renewal. the economist susan dynarski (2014) advocates for an income-contingent repayment system for the united states that takes inspiration from systems like sweden’s and germany’s. linking loan repayment to rising or falling wages and extending the time to pay back the debt, this system would enable students to pursue new futures for their generation. dynarski notes that such a system would release them from worrying about their loans during their young adult years when they make the least money and are most economically vulnerable. it would have the additional benefit of supporting students during the time when they are most likely to experiment with who they want to be, both individually and collectively. if this does not work out for them financially, then their loans would be forgiven. by changing the institutional power dynamics of loans—how and when debt is to be paid back—student debt could allow young adults more power to exercise their creative capacities and to govern their own lives. debt can open possibilities, as well as foreclose them. with a renewed concept of debt, universities can be places where young adults cultivate themselves and each other to define new, near-term futures. notes 1. the group bought the debt once everest had written it off as uncollectable. debts on the secondary market are worth pennies on the dollar, a lowered value that strike debt! used to the advantage of the action and the students. 2. piñera, a billionaire, made his money in the 1980s during the pinochet era by introducing credit cards to chile through his company, bancard. 3. critics of the “right to the city” approach have argued that the idea is undefined, especially in what rights it might entail. for a cogent enumeration of these criticisms, see purcell 2002. however, the very lack of definition may be seen as a strength in generational politics. the right that i see higher education movements demanding is that of openness, as well as the possibility of making the world anew without the demands of burdensome debt. references akers, beth, and matthew m. chingos 2016 game of loans: the rhetoric and reality of student debt. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. baum, sandy 2016 student debt: rhetoric and realities of higher education financing. new york: palgrave pivot. bbc 2017 “profile: sebastian piñera.” news, december 18. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-11558721. brooks, david 2017 “the cuomo college fiasco.” new york times, opinion, april 14. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/14/opinion/the-cuomo-college-fiasco.html. brown, meta, andrew haughwout, donghoon lee, and wilbert van der klaauw 2013 “the financial crisis at the kitchen table: trends in household debt and credit.” current issues in economics and finance 19, no. 2. https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/current_issues/ci19-2.html. democracy now! 2014 “exclusive: chilean robin hood? artist known as ‘papas fritas’ on burning $500m worth of student debt.” story, may 23. http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/23/exclusive_chilean_robin_hood_artist_known. dynarski, susan m. 2014 “an economist’s perspective on student loans in the united states.” brookings institution, economic studies working paper, september. https://www.brookings.edu/research/an-economists-perspective-on-student-loans-in-the-united-states. economist 2012 “progress and its discontents.” the americas, april 14. https://www.economist.com/node/21552566. federal reserve bank of new york 2013 “total consumer debt up slightly as deleveraging process decelerates.” press release, february 28. https://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/news/research/2013/an130228. 2017 “household borrowing, student debt trends, and homeownership.” press briefing, april 3. https://www.newyorkfed.org/press/pressbriefings/household-borrowing-student-loans-homeownership. franklin, jonathan 2011 “chile student protests explode into violence.” guardian, august 5. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/05/chile-student-protests-violence. graeber, david 2011 debt: the first five thousand years. new york: melville house. guyer, jane i. 2007 “prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time.” american ethnologist 34, no. 3: 409–421. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409. kamenetz, anya 2014 “these people can make student loans disappear.” npred, september 17. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/09/17/348036877/these-people-can-make-student-loans-disappear. karlin, rick 2018 “study: majority of applicants rejected for excelsior scholarships.” albany times union, august 10. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/study-finds-lots-of-applicants-rejected-for-13147401.php. mcsherry, j. patrice, and raúl molina mejía 2011 “chilean students challenge pinochet’s legacy.” nacla report, november/december. https://nacla.org/article/chilean-students-challenge-pinochet%e2%80%99s-legacy. o’boyle, brendan 2016 “free college in chile! so what are students so mad about?” americas quarterly, january 28. http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/free-education-frustration-chiles-student-activists. pells, rachael 2018 “chile’s rightward shift raises doubts over free tuition scheme.” times higher education, january 14. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/chiles-rightward-shift-raises-doubts-over-free-tuition-scheme. purcell, mark 2002 “excavating lefebvre: the right to the city and its urban politics of the inhabitant.” geojournal 58, nos. 2–3: 99–108. https://doi.org/10.1023/b:gejo.0000010829.62237.8f. roitman, janet 2013 anti-crisis. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sanders, bernie n.d. “it’s time to make college tuition free and debt free.” issues, berniesanders.com. https://berniesanders.com/issues/its-time-to-make-college-tuition-free-and-debt-free. santiago times 2017 “chile’s university tuition fees among world’s highest.” education and technology news, september 15. http://santiagotimes.cl/2017/09/15/chiles-university-tuition-fees-amongst-worlds-highest. telesur 2017 “two hundred and fifty thousand chilean students flood streets against crippling debt.” news, may 9. https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/250000-chilean-students-flood-streets-against-crippling-debt-20170509-0011.html. zaloom, caitlin 2018 “how will we pay? projective fictions and regimes of foresight in u.s. college finance.” hau 8, nos. 1–2: 239–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/698220. animate earth, settler ruins: mound landscapes and decolonial futures in the native south cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 4, pp. 516-545, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.02 animate earth, settler ruins: mound landscapes and decolonial futures in the native south leigh bloch agnes scott college https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6805-0192 wise elders taught us that one above thinks not with words and language, as do humans, but through movements and processes. —hakope, personal communication, april 19, 2020 place-thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts. —vanessa watts, “indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non-humans” my friend deb mcgregor (ojibwe, whitefish river first nation) always points out to me that we are really living in just the tiniest sliver of anishinaabe history. —kyle p. whyte, “our ancestors’ dystopia now” “you know,” hakope’s voice spoke, distorted through my phone, “sometimes people picked up whole mounds and moved them.” as an undergraduate student working on my thesis, it was only a few months prior that i had begun learning from hakope, an elder and heles-hayv (maker of medicine) of pvlvcekolv: a small, native american community in the us south who claim muskogee (creek) identity. the mounds in question are earthworks and shellworks built by various native american nations over the past six thousand years between the north american gulf coast and the great lakes, the atlantic and the ozarks.1 while i had imagined these structures to be fixed in place, i learned that some mounds migrate. visiting mounds over the past decade with hakope and other pvlvcekolv people, i also occasionally noticed my teachers gathering pinches of soil or plants to bring home to their ceremonial space and gardens. our paths meandered through these landscapes, twisting along nature trails and circling around mounds. soils—and also glass beads, stone points, and ceramic sherds found on the earth’s surface—circulated through descendant communities and were gifted to friends on either side of the mississippi river. this movement was a far cry from the straight lines that i walked as an archaeologist conducting systematic surface surveys, my back aching from bending over and searching the ground, or the neat walls of excavation units carved into cartesian grids transposed over sites (imagine the abstract space of graph paper imposed over land). such techniques help document the spatial context of artifacts found—without which, as i tell my students, artifacts themselves have little to no scientific value for illuminating past peoples’ lives. yet these methodologies also fix indigenous places and things within eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies, or ways of knowing and being in place. they ironically immobilize traces of ancestral lives in the archaeological imagination even as they dislocate the archaeological record. archaeological time, after all, is produced as soils and material traces migrate through excavation screens, labs, museums, and universities. these methods are premised on a logic of separation that severs knowledge of past people from my aching back and ebbing attention as i traversed the land in neat transects. while widely critiqued from feminist, postcolonial, indigenous, and marxist perspectives, these myths of separation continue to inform the basic methodological practices that generate the archaeological record. however, some mounds migrate, refusing to be so fixed. introduction in alabama, along the tallapoosa river, a dirt road winds between cotton fields littered with fragments of ceramics and glass, flaked stone, and the occasional bead. just behind the tree line, through thick river cane, the earth rises into a tall mound overlooking the river. a historical marker sits down the way where the dirt road meets the highway. one side of the marker is written in english. the other is in mvskoke (creek). figure 1. the english side of the historical marker at tukabatchee. photo by leigh bloch. figure 2. the mvskoke side of the historical marker at tukabatchee. photo by leigh bloch. the marker informs readers that this place, tukabatchee, was once the site of a powerful town in the creek confederacy. it was here that tecumseh and tenskwatawa, the shawnee leaders and prophets, urged the creek national council to join their pan-indian movement of spiritual renewal and military opposition to the expansionist united states. i am told that when the marker was written, authors from the muscogee (creek) nation in oklahoma had wanted to include a sentence at the end to the effect of, “imagine what it would be like here if white people never came.” this language was removed from the final text. even so, an old site becomes a place for imagining alternative indigenous futures. ancestral native american peoples built thousands of mounds across eastern north america over the past six thousand years. although important exceptions exist, archaeological research on mounds as a disciplinary project has been overwhelmingly organized around the assumption that these are “prehistorical” places, construed as terminal sites fixed within self-contained chronological periods. the kuna and rappahannock playwright monique mojica (2012, 219) writes: “how do i talk about realisms when definitions of realism (and what is perceived and presumed to be real) depend on my continued erasure, my vanishing outline against the ‘preservation of archaeological remains/collection of data/confirmation of evidence,’ of language and signage that declares our cultures ‘abandoned’ as they ‘fell into decline’?” the scientific realism that dominates archaeology in settler colonial contexts relies on the erasure of indigenous bodies and presence. in contrast, mojica writes of drawing the living forces of ancestral ceremony into her body, as an archive of knowledges and dramaturgies sedimented within the earth, and extending these through her performance art. like the alternative futures imagined at tukabatchee, such practices exceed what mark rifkin (2017) calls settler time: a concept that names the temporal dimensions of elimination practices (including physical genocide, displacement, forced assimilation, and symbolic erasure) at the heart of settler governance. this foreclosure of indigenous life renders land dispossessable as the very condition of possibility for settler society, law, and wealth. settler time reduces mounds to prehistorical spaces and abandoned ruins within regimented, linear temporalities: in short, places without future. it organizes the indigenous past around a eurocentric history/prehistory divide that obscures longer indigenous processes (lightfoot 1995; scheiber and mitchell 2010; schmidt and mrozowski 2013; schneider 2015) and fixes mounds within a terminal past removed from a settled present. yet mounds continue to draw descendants into ancestral lives and movements, insisting on specifically indigenous futures. this article theorizes the contradictions and convergences between colonial power and what i call mound power, attending to deep histories and slow processes as they animate social possibility and hope in an era of proliferating apocalypses. ann laura stoler (2008) notes that the material ruins of empires exercise force in the longue durée and calls on researchers to attend to the slow processes of colonial power that exceed the timeframes of bureaucratic state apparatuses. settler power specifically, however, already constitutes a process of ruination. it both constructs indigenous landscapes as prehistorical ruins and itself enacts apocalyptic, political-ecological catastrophes. these forces include what is often called the anthropocene, although the term risks artificially separating environmental destabilization from violence enacted on indigenous bodies, ancestors, and landscapes as expressions of settler power. as indigenous critics argue, environmental destabilization is not a new or future event, but a world-ending historical process that has been unfolding for the past several centuries and that interrupts place-based, more-than-human knowledges and relationships (davis and todd 2017; whyte 2017). in a third sense of ruination, settler states themselves eventually collapse and crumble. archaeologically speaking, the nature of the state is to collapse. a deep historical perspective illuminates these processes and the possibility of an afterward. while such afterlives may not be free from the long-term effects of colonial power, they will differ substantially. the operations of settler power are both countered by and entangled within mound power, which similarly operates in the longue durée. by “mound power,” i mean the force relations exercised by mound landscapes as not simply dead spaces, but as animate beings in their own right (mojica 2012). working from anishinaabe and haudenosaunee oral traditions, vanessa watts (2013) argues that the land is alive, intentional, and thinking. these earthly thoughts find expression as the embodied agency of human and nonhuman beings. as sentient landscapes, mounds are vulnerable to ongoing colonial violence. mounds may erode or be leveled by tilling or development. many have been mined for dirt fill in the construction of train rails and highways, literally powering settler economies through indigenous sacred places and ancestors. but mounds also endure, even as cement infrastructure around them cracks and crumbles. wounded by colonial violence, mounds call on descendants to provide care, interpolating them into the deep durations and patient processes of ancestral movements.2 these deep temporalities expose the radical hubris of the colonial project, with its claims of encompassment and finality and its presumption of defining the scope of possible futures. mound power breathes life into indigenous futures that emerge within the ruins of empires, offering hope for resurgent modes of life beyond settler nation-states. colonial discourses fix mounds within a terminal past removed from a settled modernity. in this way, removal is not just a historical event, but an ongoing process and temporal structure (wolfe 2006; rifkin 2017) that organizes violence against indigenous landscapes and ancestors. yet mounds also refuse to be fixed within settler time, insisting on indigenous futures. refusal, as audra simpson (2014) theorizes it, marks an act of saying “no” to the terms of interpolation set by colonial states that asserts the power to define indigenous sovereignty, or the scope of self-determination as peoples and nations, beyond the limits of settler practices of legibility or recognition. while liberal settler regimes demand indigenous peoples’ articulate sovereignty in ways that are legible to—and reproduce—the model of the nation-state, this does not constitute the limit of indigenous nationhood (coulthard 2014; a. simpson 2014). mound power extends refusal beyond the human, foregrounding the agentive forces of ancestral landscapes. in this context, mounds enroll descendants into ancestral movements and nonlinear temporalities, enacting indigenous sovereignties as embodied and emplaced expressions of earthly intentionality (watts 2013). these political formations are not structures but processes animated by mound power that unfold in deep and nonlinear time. at times, settler and mound power contradict each other; at others, they appropriate, re-appropriate, and redirect one another to animate their own projects. this framework helps theorize alternative indigenous and decolonizing archaeologies as a practice of caring for wounded landscapes within slow processes in which empires collapse and crumble. for this, we need theories of how the land and the dead become vulnerable to ongoing colonial violence in the fractures of liberal settler regimes of recognition, as well as in indigenous practices of caring for wounded landscapes and outlasting settler states. by liberal settler colonialism, i mean policies and practices that extend selective federal recognition and accommodate narrow, confined spaces for indigenous self-determination encompassed within settler nation-states, that is, in which pluralistic settler states “seek to ‘reconcile’ indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of indigenous identity claims” (coulthard 2014, 3). community-based research in the pvlvcekolv community since 2010, i have conducted community-based research visiting some three-dozen ancestral sites with pvlvcekolv people.3 indigenous and community-based archaeologies call on researchers to re-center theory and practice within indigenous communities, values, oral traditions, epistemologies, and ontologies (watkins 2000; smith and wobst 2005; atalay 2006; colwell-chanthaphonh and ferguson 2008; silliman 2008). as these methods gain widespread acceptance, practitioners increasingly ask how they might advance a theoretical agenda (mcniven 2016; cipolla, quinn, and levy 2019). i address this question by adopting an ethnographic approach (dowdall and parrish 2003; ferguson and colwell-chanthaphonh 2006; laluk 2017) that attends to alternative archaeologies (or ways of knowing the deep past and renewing relationships with ancestral presences) already practiced within descendant communities, which may differ from how archaeology is usually imagined at this particular moment in time. i draw on ethnography as a methodology adapted for identifying contradictions between dominant discourses and local knowledges, or “life on the ground.” at the same time, many community members have taken archaeology classes in college. some attend archaeology talks often, seeing these as important if often problematic sources of information about ancestors. sometimes new research will even trigger memories of oral traditions that elders had not thought about since childhood (bloch 2018, 136–41). i argue that mound landscapes enroll descendants into circulations of tangible and intangible heritage that generate multiple, at times competing, temporalities. this framework encompasses but is not exhausted by traditional archaeological methods and theories. this research began on the invitation of the community’s leadership. as an undergraduate student, i presented a conference paper critiquing the gender binary in interpretations of birdman and birdman figures in mississippian period art (c. 1000–1600 ce). a community member in attendance passed my paper to the leadership, who invited me to attend a ceremonial gathering, called a busk. there, i learned that pvlvcekolv people interpreted these same figures as moths (bloch 2014). this set the tone for my graduate studies. at the risk of underplaying the complexities involved, a ceremonial leader saw my role as an opportunity to “set the record straight” by advancing an archaeological perspective centered in indigenous cultural frameworks (smith and wobst 2005; atalay 2006). over the years, i have also been asked to help with pvlvcekolv cultural revitalization efforts, especially by recording knowledge from elders and creating archival records for future generations. for example, in the early years of my research, hakope asked that i document a funeral, stating that the departed’s children and potential future grandchildren would appreciate such a record in decades to come. this document was subjected to several rounds of community reviews in which my hosts and teachers rejected early drafts and pushed me to work through my own existential (and ethnocentric) anxieties about death. yet while i often felt a need to provide tangible benefits that utilized my academic training, for many of my teachers, my research was just as much an opportunity to take weekend trips with family and friends to visit mounds. on these trips, people had fun, strengthened community, and at times cared for ancestors. historically, the muskogee confederacy was made up of several dozen tvlwv, or towns (ethridge 2003; foster 2007). each maintained a high degree of political autonomy. the ancestors of pvlvcekolv people avoided removal in the nineteenth century, in which the united states forcibly marched creek and other native american nations to oklahoma. as such, the pvlvcekolv community remains distinct from the muscogee (creek) nation in oklahoma. the community is not federally recognized, nor are they actively seeking recognition. some community members state that they simply want to live their life with minimal outside interference. the leadership holds that they can maintain greater autonomy by practicing the busk in private, beyond the gaze of the settler state and public. elders describe busking as a means of honoring, acknowledging, renewing, and “giving breath” to the more-than-human world—a framework that has both ontological and political dimensions. in this way, pvlvcekolv sovereignty primarily finds expression through busking—and mound power—as what glen sean coulthard (2014, 65) calls a self-determining mode of life, rather than in direct relation to the settler state (koons 2019). the indigenous longue durée while i place my focus on mound landscapes in eastern north america, shell mounds in what is currently california provided places of refuge and memory for descendant peoples in the mission period (schneider 2015). in such contexts, mound power animates a politics of flight from colonial institutions as a continuation of indigenous mobilities that exceed the history/prehistory divide. in eastern north america, mounds likewise embody deep durations of movement and connectivity. some mounds are massive, like monks mound in cahokia’s grand plaza. at thirty meters in height, the mound erupts out of the suburbs of east st. louis, illinois. the grand plaza was only one of many similar plazas, the rest of which were destroyed by urban development. other earthworks house the dead or assume geometric or zoomorphic forms, such as the four-hundred-meter-long serpent mound in ohio. figure 3. monks mound behind a smaller mound at cahokia. note the car and telephone poles near the mound for scale. photo by leigh bloch. mound building constitutes an expansive historical process, or longue durée, thousands of years in the making.4 the earliest archaeologically known mounds were built during the middle archaic period, about five thousand to six thousand years ago, in what has become louisiana (saunders et al. 2005). the material intensity of mound-building cycles throughout the following millennia, peaking next in the late archaic at the poverty point site in louisiana (c. 1750–1000 bce) (ortmann 2010). mound building intensifies next across the midwest and southeast in the woodland period, and especially the middle woodland (c. 200 bce–500 ce). these sites were connected by interregional networks that carried goods such as copper, marine shell, pearl, mica, and stone over immense distances. the fourth peak in material mound construction occurs in the mississippian period (c. 1000–1600 ce). both the middle woodland and the mississippian refer not to a single phenomenon, but a broad, interregional process shaped by a multiplicity of local histories and complex interactions between many peoples (carr and case 2006; pauketat 2007). the poverty point site illustrates this deep history on a site level, as a place of return in which descendants repeatedly renewed relationships with ancestors across spans of thousands of years (howe 2014). the immediate built landscape consists of six mounds and six concentric, kilometer-long, semicircular earthen ridges, most of them constructed during the late archaic. yet diagnostic projectile points indicate human presence as far back as circa 13,500–11,000 bp. moreover, the earthworks were built according to a geometric plan that incorporates two middle archaic mounds built two millennia before the late archaic component, which sit 2.4 kilometers to the south and 1.7 kilometers to the north, respectively (clark 2004; sassaman 2005). people returned to poverty point again around 1100–1150 ce and constructed the most recent mound (ortmann 2010, 674). contemporary native american people of many nations continue to visit the site (mojica 2012; howe 2014; bloch 2019). the choctaw novelist leanne howe (2014) interprets the largest mound at poverty point as a hawk that embodies teachings told in more-than-human bodies and relations. hakope interprets the form of the large mound and ridges as representing a horned owl, noting that a number of miniature owl-shaped beads and pendants have been found at the site (bloch 2019). when hakope described oral traditions about traders who visited an “owl-shaped village” on their way to places like cahokia, another pvlvcekolv elder pointed out that, archaeologically, cahokia dates to several thousand years after the bulk of poverty point. hakope suggested that traders may have visited the site as a place of power long after the late archaic. this deep historical perspective renders the colonial project a fleeting moment in comparison, exposing the radical hubris of its self-aggrandizing vision of totalizing encompassment, mastery, and control. yet chronology as a way of seeing also bounds and brackets mounds in linear time and bounded periods with beginning and end points. these foundational methods risk obscuring indigenous temporalities and ways of knowing. for example, researchers in the southeast have posited a “mississippian shatter zone” (ethridge and shuck-hall 2009) to explain the shift from complex, hierarchical chiefdoms in the mississippian era to the consensus-, persuasion-, and confederacy-based political orders of the early colonial period. this transformation is understood as an effect of widespread collapse and destabilization resulting from disease, slave-trading, and nascent capitalism. opponents of the concept point to the limits of the chiefdom model and the conflation of continuity with the stability of political institutions as understood from elites’ perspectives, suggesting that it is better to work backward from the better-documented political structures of the colonial era (foster 2007). indeed, models of chiefly power were originally derived from functionalist accounts of polynesian societies (pauketat 2007), so the appearance of discontinuity potentially reflects a methodological problem. yet both the shatter zone and the counter models naturalize settler time, defining continuity in terms of stasis between distinct chronological points. this precludes the temporalities of indigenous governance vis-à-vis mound power that operate through nonlinear processes of return and renewal. the effect is a teleological narrative in which the lives of mounds—and even the mississippian—are already over. figure 4. an archaeological chronology of the eastern woodlands. note that the colonial period is only a small sliver of indigenous history. image by leigh bloch. pvlvcekolv people see mounds as living and sentient landscapes (see also mojica 2012; howe 2014; allen 2015a, 2015b; miller 2015; and more generally cruikshank 2005; watts 2013; laluk 2017; larsen and johnson 2017). they draw descendants into deep histories that might lead in other directions, deflating teleologies that cast mounds as sites of finished pasts subsumed by colonial orders as the apex of human progress. migrating mounds to build a mound, one usually imagines starting from the bottom and working one’s way up. building the middle first seems unnecessarily difficult. based on this assumption, an archaeologist might date a mound from samples taken from the bottom and top strata: the first construction event occurred at x point in time and the final layer of earth was added at y later date. fixed in time and space, this approach leaves no room for mounds to move about. there is a place in florida off i-10, a mississippian site behind the storefronts and residential neighborhoods of tallahassee. seven mounds, conventionally dated to about 1000–1500 ce, sit enclosed within a state park and private lots (jones 1982, 20–22; payne 1994, 260–72; see also marrinan and white 2007; marrinan 2012; seinfeld et al. 2015). often called the lake jackson site, pvlvcekolv people also call it okeeheepkee.5 in the 1970s, a local landowner, sam crowder, decided to build a machine shop where mound 3 stood. when the state of florida did not follow up on negotiations to acquire the land, crowder began to level the mound and sell the dirt as fill. another landowner found an artifact in purchased soil and called the state archaeologist, b. calvin jones. in this complex regime of attention and bureaucratic, object-oriented care structured by settler formulations of private property and national heritage, jones began salvage excavations on what remained of the mound (jones 1982). mound 3 housed two-dozen burials and was built in twelve construction stages. radiocarbon samples from the pre-mound ground surface and final construction cap provided calendar dates of 1293±71 and 1540±75 ce, respectively.6 table 1. radiocarbon dates from mound 3 at okeeheepkee, or the lake jackson site context material raw date calibrated date burial 17 fill charcoal sapling 850 ± 70 bp 1152 ± 80 ce feature 1 mound cap charcoal fire basin 365 ± 75 bp 1540 ± 75 ce burial pit 1 floor 1a charcoal sapling 1025 ± 80 1012 ± 98 ce burial 3 fill floor 1a charcoal zone, 50 cm thick 720 ± 70 bp 1293 ± 67 ce structural log floor 2 charcoal, upright structural post 1045 ± 75 992 ± 91 ce burial 7 fill floor 9 charcoal sapling 550 ± 90 bp 1372 ± 59 ce burial pit 2 floor 10 charcoal sapling 1035 ± 80 bp 1003 ± 98 ce burial 6 fill floor 11 charcoal from fill 620 ± 60 bp 1343 ± 44 ce pre-mound midden charcoal from post 715 ± 85 bp 1293 ± 71 ce sources: data derived from jones (1982); marrinan (2012); marrinan and white (2007). notes: a see jones (1982, table 1). based on these samples, one can create a hypothetical model of linear mound construction in which mound 3 was built continuously across this timeframe, with a new layer of soil being added every twenty years or so. figure 5. hypothetical linear construction model of mound 3 at okeeheepkee. image by leigh bloch. several radiocarbon dates associated with intermediate strata fit this model well. however, three dates associated with strata 1, 2, and 10 cluster around the turn of the eleventh century, long before the mound was supposedly built. b. calvin jones (1982, 21) simply notes, “these early dates are difficult to explain.” how strange that the middle of the mound would be built before the base! trying to make conversation, i asked hakope what he made of these dates (bloch 2014, 92–93). he thought for a moment and suggested: “perhaps the dates came from wood reused from older structures. this would be easier than preparing new timber. or they could have come from secondary burials.” indeed, traces of poles with one internment could represent a burial litter (jones 1982, 11). hakope paused for a minute, thinking. “you know,” he continued, “sometimes people picked up whole mounds and moved them.” i chuckled to myself, imagining a group of people lifting up a mound and carrying it away. it took a moment to sink in. “you mean with baskets?” “yes, with baskets,” hakope replied. he suggested that mound 3 could have been what he called a “bird mound.” bird mounds migrate: they are periodically moved from location to location. they can either be visible or unseen structures. indeed, the borrow pits around okeeheepkee—depressions created as ancient peoples gathered soil—are too small to account for the quantity of earth needed to build the mounds (jones 1982, 5). migrating mounds foreground movements of soils that exceed clear temporal and spatial boundaries. they are not fixed in place. they are not static and inert. they are not even built bottom first. instead, they migrate. the people of okeeheepkee gathered up soil associated with circa 1000 ce and drew this place into their lives on three separate instances centuries later. but the story does not end there. as mound 3 was graded away, pvlvcekolv people purchased some of this dirt fill from crowder. they added it to their ceremonial space, called the stomp or square grounds. and so ceremony continues to be danced on the soil of okeeheepkee. migrating mounds draw attention not to monumentality but to memory and movement: to landscapes that move about and places that are simultaneously here and elsewhere. i later learned that pvlvcekolv people have taken pinches of soil from mound sites across the region to add to their square grounds. with this in mind, i once gathered a bit of backfill from digs at two sites in georgia as a gift. what i had assumed was a relatively simple act of transporting two ziploc bags of dirt in the trunk of my car turned out to be much weightier. as an elderly woman explained, this was dirt steeped in the ceremonial forces of ancestors. such matters of power are not without risk. the next day, an elder and retired professor, simon, and i took up the task of adding the soil to a foot-tall mound in the center of the square grounds, the place where the fire sits. as we finished, simon placed his hand atop the mound. “feel the top of the mound,” he directed me. “do you feel the heat?” i reached forward and did so, surprised by the warm sensation. simon said: when this sacred place was recognized by the fire moving here, earth from many other towns was added to the mound … a kind of bringing back of a community of energies together. it’s also a way for us to honor and recognize those places and the people who lived there … we go to these old places that have been abandoned and may feel neglected and we recognize them, we honor them. those places have spirits, too. and the spirits can get to feeling sort of forlorn. but i just have to imagine that those places that you mentioned, they’ll be joining with us today when we do our busk work. as the soils of old places join the pvlvcekolv square grounds, the living and the dead join in ceremony together. this provides a means of acknowledging and tending to ancestors, as well as joining in ancestral bodies and movements. pvlvcekolv people also bury the umbilical cords of infants just east of the square grounds. when community members gathered twice in 2015 to do this, hakope described it as an act of making the infants citizens of the town and one with the land (bloch 2018, 213). this language makes indigenous claims legible within colonial modes of governance (being “citizens of the land”), but they are not exhausted by these (belonging within political formations that extend from the land as an agentive, thinking being or milieu of relations) (see bruyneel 2007, 106, 128). should the community ever be forced to relocate, hakope urged, they should gather up a bit of soil from this place to bring to the new grounds. migrating soils weave seemingly distant peoples and places together, generating enfolded, non-euclidean space-times (again, think graph paper as compared to the curvatures of general relativity or entanglements of quantum mechanics). value hierarchies that privilege dates from the top and bottom strata of mounds obscure their historical depth, ongoing movement, and futurity, systematically underrepresenting their durations and misrecognizing indigenous political formations. moving beyond the assumption that earthworks are self-contained, bounded objects, migrating mounds take shape through acts of drawing other peoples, places, and times inward. through these practices, descendants are enrolled into ancestral movements and indigenous political formations that unfold within deep time. these circulations generate multiple temporalities, whether mounds and their contents migrate through excavation screens and scientific instruments like accelerator mass spectrometers, the baskets and hands of ancestors, or the bodily movement of pvlvcekolv ceremony danced on earth from okeeheepkee. in this sense, migrating mounds constitute a practice of indigenous archaeology much older than how the discipline is usually imagined. making life with the dead some mounds move; some move people. as i traveled across the southeast with pvlvcekolv people, i was struck by the number of mounds that have been graded away by plows, demolished to make way for development, and mined for dirt fill in the construction of railways and highways. burial mounds have been and continue to be looted, desecrated, and appropriated as “treasures” and scientific specimens. mound power is generative of settler orders, which depend on the appropriation and redirection of the force relations of indigenous landscapes. yet so, too, do the workings of capital open up unexpected indigenous possibilities. as mound 3 was commoditized and sold as fill, it also became available to pvlvcekolv people for purchase. pvlvcekolv people are able to share in the life-sustaining and healing forces of ceremony with okeeheepkee—something all the more important in a context of burial violations. i want to hold on to this contradiction. it says something important about the ways of caring for wounded landscapes that become necessary in the ruins of settler colonialism. vulnerable to colonial violence and hurting, ancestors call out to pvlvcekolv people through dreams, asking for companionship and care. one day, i traveled with several pvlvcekolv families to visit fusihatchee, a muskogee confederacy site in what is currently alabama. today, a small mound sits next to a dirt road and agricultural fields. the village site is now an open lake, created when the site was mined for gravel in the 1990s. simon had visited this place a few weeks earlier and experienced a strange feeling: as if invisible hands were reaching out of the ground, pleading. this had proven a matter of some concern, and pvlvcekolv families made plans to gather at the site. so i found myself standing on a dirt road that ran alongside fields of dried cotton stalks, the earth cracked under the august sun. about a dozen pvlvcekolv people stood in the road wearing longcoats, a style of ceremonial dress, in spite of the heat. the smell of burning cedar filled the air as a thin trail of smoke wafted upward from a small fire. i shifted my weight from foot to foot, wondering if it would be inappropriate to turn on my recorder, and deciding against it. the men sang busk songs about snakes, birds, and healing. then hakope spoke, first in mvskoke, then in english, about the four directions. four people placed four small sticks braided with red, white, black, and yellow ribbons in the earth, upright in the four directions. figure 6. pvlvcekolv people gather at fusihatchee to care for the dead. photo by leigh bloch. after another song, more words, and flute music, things finished. all in all, it took about fifteen minutes. as others left for lunch, i lingered near the mound with simon and another elder, victor. a community friend and respected creek and choctaw pipe maker who scoured archaeological texts for inspiration, victor had begun busking at the pvlvcekolv grounds after his wife had died earlier that year. he said, “that was probably the first time mvskoke has been spoken on this land in 150, 200 years.” later, hakope told me that the purpose of the visit was to cleanse the land, removing corruption collected over centuries. however, he and others also told me that like any old person, ancestors sometimes got to feeling lonely, wishing relatives would call or visit more often. in this sense, the ceremonial proceeding was more fundamentally a gesture: a formal way of saying, simply, “you are still here, and you are important to us.” that night, several people had strange dreams. one man, harry, described a woman tied to a wooden post, about to be executed. he next saw her as a corpse, her dried skin tight around her bones. although dead, she opened her eyes, which were brilliant and shining. at first frightened by the eerie dream, harry discussed it with others. they concluded that the dream was a message of affirmation. “it was good of you to visit us,” those people at fusihatchee seemed to say. “it is good of you to keep the muskogee way going. it looked like it was dying, but it is still alive.” pvlvcekolv people, like indigenous people elsewhere, are concerned about the threat of cultural loss. very few young people busk, and elders worry about the future. ancestors like those at fusihatchee share in this anxiety, but they also have the benefit of a deeper temporal perspective. they seem to say: “we, too, were worried that the muskogee way had reached its end. yet here you are.” it is not that mounds are abandoned, but that those buried within them are consigned to oblivion within the afterlife of removal, which left too few kin in homelands to attend the dead. this constitutes the ongoing violence of removal: a systematic neglect and loneliness inflicted on the dead. ancestors are vulnerable to this violence because their very capacity to hurt is unthinkable within colonial orders of life and death, life and nonlife, in which they are legible only as inert remains and tierra nullius, empty and waiting. they go unnoticed and uncared for, except perhaps as scientific specimens, objects denuded of life. as pvlvcekolv people return to mounds, they open their bodies to ancestral affects. a most intimate kind of contact, these may be felt as hands reaching up, pleading, or as dreams that take hold of pvlvcekolv people’s sleeping consciousness. perhaps this is why my teachers say that their most important ceremonies are ways of acknowledging, and in doing so, renewing and “giving breath” to others. if to be alive is to be given breath by another, who is unacknowledgeable within settler regimes of recognition? hurting, ancestors turn to descendants. and as the living and the dead find one another in mutual embrace, they breathe new life into indigenous futures that both worried had been foreclosed. care in the ruins of empire mound sites are vulnerable to colonial violence, but they also draw descendants into deep historical processes and specifically indigenous futures. as a kind of indigenous archaeology, these practices eschew teleologies that would declare the histories of mounds over and done with, privileging the loving labor of caring for ancestors and making life together within wounded landscapes. in this way, mounds animate what rifkin (2017) calls sovereign indigenous temporalities: a multiplicity of space-times tracked by durations and momentums that exceed the universalizing and cartesian frames of reference of settler time. wary of assimilating indigenous peoples into a “shared now” of modernity defined by colonial encompassment, rifkin is interested in other kinds of time. such temporalities are sovereign in that they are autonomous from—if entangled with—settler time. but they also structure indigenous political formations irreducible to liberal settler practices of federal recognition. as mounds migrate, they enroll descendants into ancestral movements that weave together seemingly distinct places and sites, extending ancestral lives forward in living ceremony—even reappropriating circulations of soils as settler landowners and states recognize small artifacts in dirt fill as cultural resources in need of documentation and preservation. likewise, as the dead call out to descendants, their wounds remain unrecognizable within settler regimes of life and death and they enroll pvlvcekolv people into specifically indigenous futures. mound power animates modes of life that extend from beings unrecognizable by settler regimes that cast ancestral bodies and landscapes as inert objects and remains, as an act of being interpolated into the deep durations of ancestral movements and political forms. this politics may not always directly challenge settler states, but it does generate spaces for flourishing with ancestors (l. simpson 2011). the anthropology of care proves helpful here in theorizing both the ways people navigate the fractures and “zones of abandonment” of biopower (or state practices of managing populations and [unevenly] distributing life and death) (biehl 2005) and caretaking practices irreducible to such regimes (han 2012, 25–26). lisa stevenson (2014) asks what kinds of care do not disavow the others’ autonomy and do not frame death as abject to life. in the context of the inuit suicide epidemic, she problematizes health-care interventions that fix subjects as problems to be solved. instead, she theorizes acts of “loving interpolation” that call others into presence, without fixing them in advance as a more modest work of sitting with others’ wounds (see also garcia 2010). this, she suggests, poses an alternative to bureaucratic mechanisms of regulating and enforcing life. in this same way, i am interested in mound power as it “unfixes” ancestral places from settler time and calls on descendant peoples to care for wounded landscapes, as an agentive force larger than settler dreams of mastery and control. stevenson (2014) writes of moments when the living call out into absence and into death, such as yearning for family and friends who have ended their lives. however, at fusihatchee, it is the dead who call out to the living. it is the land who interpolates my pvlvcekolv teachers, animating political formations that enact what stevenson (2009, 73) calls “a way of loving [that presumes] neither the certainty of life as ultimate value nor the discreteness of life and death.” however, pvlvcekolv practices of caring for wounded landscapes and ancestors foreground the colonial relations on which biopolitics is premised and ways of acknowledging and attending to ancestors’ hurt that exceed liberal settler regimes of recognition. indeed, pvlvcekolv people inhabit complex colonial regimes of acknowledgment, recognition, and abandonment. unrecognized by the united states as a native american nation, members care for wounds unrecognizable within settler realisms in places preemptively declared abandoned. a state archaeologist acts as a steward, if not caretaker, of mounds as national heritage and pvlvcekolv people purchase soil from okeeheepkee and extend ancestral dances forward. biopolitical regimes of managing life depend on ontological, or what elizabeth a. povinelli (2016) calls geontopolitical, orders. by using the terms ontological and geontological, i point to questions and practices surrounding the nature of being as they relate to and order the functioning of state institutions, problematizing what mojica (2012) might call the realisms of colonial governance. settler governance is ordered through dichotomies of life/not-life (povinelli 2016) and life/death (stevenson 2014) that interpolate ancestral bones as inert objects denuded of life, rendering mounds as simultaneously abandoned places and vulnerable to the ongoing violence of systemic neglect. pvlvcekolv practices of caring for land and ancestors operate within the fractures of these regimes, but they also animate ways of life irreducible to such logics. these practices are not simply acts of “self-making” but also of being interpolated into a self-determining mode of life (coulthard 2014) by ancestors and land as an operation of power that contradicts, re-appropriates, and outlasts settler power. these considerations articulate a practice of indigenous archaeology that operates through acts of being drawn into ancestral movements and caring for wounded landscapes. these archaeologies create not only pasts but also futures. they may but do not always excavate; they may but do not necessarily create chronological periodizations or representations of the past. they do, however, generate affective entanglements that gather up seemingly distant persons, places, and moments and renew relationships with ancestors as a practice of indigenous flourishing (a. simpson 2014; whyte 2017). such a practice can draw on what kenneth e. sassaman (2012) calls futurology, which problematizes archaeology as the study of a past severed from the present and future and looks to long-term human processes for insight into contemporary problems such as climate change. pvlvcekolv practices, however, demand a specifically decolonial futurology that challenges the commitment to the future of settler states that manage environmental problems (tuck and yang 2012), calling attention to what grace l. dillon (2012) terms “indigenous futurisms” that extend from within folded, spiraling, and nonlinear temporalities (whyte 2018). such a decolonial futurology constitutes a practice of being drawn into the folded space-times of indigenous land and governance, or teachings for living rightly with human and more-than-human relations (alfred 1999; watts 2013; todd 2018) as an expression of earthly intentionality or mound power. it is a practice of making life with the dead and cultivating specifically indigenous futures in the ruins of settler states. the land, wounded, heals itself as kyle p. whyte (2017) writes, indigenous peoples already live in their ancestors’ dystopian futures. at okeeheepkee and fusihatchee, this is not just a speculative method but a visceral function of the ongoing violence of removal. following this critique, settler power operates through ruination in multiple senses (see also stoler 2008; dawdy 2010; tsing 2015; haraway 2016). first, dominant discourses construct mounds as sites of ruin. the privileging of mounds as prehistorical sites operates to naturalize settler time, removing indigenous pasts from a settled modernity and erasing the operations of indigenous governance via mound power. more than a “modern exceptionalism” that constructs modernity as severed from “before” (dawdy 2010), this creates a specifically settler modernity premised on the foreclosure of indigenous futures. second, settler colonialism itself lays ruin to land via extractive economies. mound landscapes and the ancestors who inhabit them are particularly at risk because their sentience and capacity to be wounded is impossible within settler orders of life/death and life/nonlife, in which land is inert and human remains are devoid of life. such violence may take the form of disturbing ancestral remains, mining indigenous sites to power the settler economy, or the systematic loneliness and neglect of post-removal landscapes. this formulation extends anthropological theories of violence beyond life and beyond the human, attending to colonialism as an ecology (and afterlife) of proliferating apocalypses (davis and todd 2017; whyte 2017). yet as mound landscapes call on pvlvcekolv people to provide care, ancestors and descendants make life together, carving out space for indigenous futures within the ruins of settler power. anna lowenhaupt tsing (2015) argues that even the ruins wrought by capitalist production can sustain surprising and unexpected forms of life. these are not separable from the operations of capital but may nonetheless resist regimentation. yet mound power foregrounds the specific relationship between capital and settler colonialism, in which colonial relations of dispossession create the conditions of possibility for settler law and wealth (wolfe 2006). this brings me to the final sense of ruination: even as mounds are graded away or mined for fill, the seemingly permanent artifices of the settler state collapse and crumble, falling into ruin. i once visited horseshoe bend with a pvlvcekolv man, david. in 1813, the creek civil war erupted between the red sticks, a faction sympathetic to the prophet tecumseh, and those allied with the fledgling united states. the latter called on andrew jackson for aid, and in 1814, the battle of the horseshoe bend ended with red sticks’ defeat. in the aftermath, general jackson betrayed his allies, forcing the creek nation to cede 23 million acres of land: about two thirds of creek country. removal began just a little more than ten years later. here, at horseshoe bend, a refusal of the settler and capitalist order fell (saunt 1999; ethridge 2003). yet as david and i walked about the site—now a national park—we were taken aback by the beauty and serenity of the landscape. leaves crunched under our feet while ancient oaks stretched their branches over us. the earth sloped gently toward the snaking edge of the river. the remains of an old bridge stood before the newer roadway, in the slow process of collapsing into the tallapoosa river. figure 7. an old bridge falls into the tallapoosa river at horseshoe bend. a new bridge has been constructed in front of it. photo by leigh bloch. “it’s strange that a place with such a dark history could be so beautiful,” i said. david pointed out how much sweetgum was growing in this place. in pvlvcekolv teachings, sweetgum is the burden tree. an agent of healing and peacemaking, it takes up the heavy loads that people carry, their hurt and sorrow, so that they can be present with creator’s teachings and learn to live well together (bloch 2018, 149–56). “it’s as if the land is healing itself,” david said. conclusion the land, wounded, heals itself. as the land enrolls pvlvcekolv people into circulations of soils and relationships of care, it animates indigenous temporalities that dramatically exceed settler time, exposing the radical hubris of the colonial project. as sentient landscapes, mounds are vulnerable to ongoing colonial violence, whether in the form of grave looting, desecration, or systematic neglect. in turn, these places reach out to pvlvcekolv people, asking for companionship, acknowledgment, and care. they animate a decolonial archaeology/futurology as a practice of being drawn into the operations of mound power: of renewing intimate relations with ancestral presences, caring for wounded landscapes, and reopening indigenous futures together. these practices may not look like the kind of disciplinary norms that most have come to expect, demanding a rethinking of what counts as archaeology that accounts for care within the violence of colonial ruptures between human/nonhuman, life/death, and life/nonlife. here, decolonization does not stand as simply a metaphor (tuck and yang 2012). returning and caretaking enact small moments of repatriation and land reclamation that side-step settler bureaucracies, even as these acts are contingent on uneven access to ancestral places within parcels of private property and public parks. the concept of mound power turns colonial pretensions on their head, foregrounding indigenous futures emergent in the ruins of settler states. mounds may migrate or be mined for dirt fill, but the cement infrastructure of colonial nation-states cracks and crumbles. such a long view helps foreground the slow processes in which mound power operates as a source of hope for life in the ruins of settler states. some may ask how this perspective demands a rethinking of the relationship between archaeology, cultural anthropology, and native american and indigenous studies (nais). of course, these are not equal claims made on a level playing field. a dose of modesty proves essential: what is anthropology from the vantage of the deep durations of mound power, which renders even colonial orders so fleeting? at the same time, migrating mounds provide a deep genealogy for indigenous archaeologies, calling attention to movements of soils that generate multiple, at times competing temporalities. without erasing the real antagonisms between these fields, this idea subordinates anthropology within nais, as encompassed and located within indigenous archaeologies that are much older than how the discipline is conceived within eurocentric intellectual genealogies. to adapt eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012), mound power is not accountable to anthropological futurities, but it does account for the deep histories of indigenous archaeologies. the relationship between mound and settler power likewise demands a rethinking of political philosophy, articulating an expansive indigeneity not contained or captured by the settler state and that recognizes the fleeting nature of the colonial moment. mounds offer hope for when the colonial moment is a painful memory. while critical scholarship has inquired into the social possibilities afforded by ruins in a moment of proliferating environmental catastrophe (e.g., tsing 2015; haraway 2016), such frameworks often fail to account for the decolonial possibilities (and responsibilities to land) enacted by mound power. a mound in okeeheepkee is graded away for a machine shop but finds its way to the pvlvcekolv ceremonial fire. ancestors at fusihatchee call on descendants for care and reopen indigenous futures together. in these ways, mound power demystifies the hubris of colonial claims to completion and permanence. these force relations demand a rethinking of the temporalities of indigenous governance as they interpolate pvlvcekolv people (and sometimes settlers such as me) within indigenous legal orders (todd 2018) articulated not through coercive regulations but animate earth (watts 2013). as such, a deep temporal perspective helps recognize indigenous political formations that do not operate in linear time and that encompass but are not exhausted by settler colonialism. if settler colonialism is a system of organized apocalypse and ruination, then the ruins of colonial orders (in the remaining two senses) are also sites of indigenous life and governance. in short, mound power animates resurgent possibilities of life beyond settler nation-states. as mounds draw descendants into ancestral movements, the living and the dead reach out to one another, reopening indigenous futures together within the contradictory spaces afforded by settler ruins and animate earth. these indigenous archaeologies are enacted through practices of returning to place (clifford 2013; howe 2014) and cultivating resurgence (alfred 2005; l. simpson 2011): a “flourishing of an indigenous inside” and an “art of starting over,” in the sense of indigenous renewal ceremonies that rebalance the world. this does not imply an ahistorical adoption of “ancestral ways of life” but rather a breathing of life into ancestral relationalities—a renewing of relationships with ancestral presences as agents in their own right. in these ways, mound power articulates self-determining modes of life irreducible to settler governance and demands a fundamental reordering of archaeological questions, methods, and objectives to center the loving labor of caring for wounded landscapes and making life together in the ruins of empires. the land heals itself, even as the infrastructure of the settler state collapses into the tallapoosa. abstract this article theorizes the uneven entanglements between settler processes of ruination, a dynamic structured by regimes of history/prehistory, life/death, and life/nonlife, and “mound power,” or the force relations exercised by indigenous landscapes as animate beings in their own right. i draw on research with members of a community in the u.s. south who claim muskogee ancestry, visiting ancestral mound or earthwork and shellwork sites built over the past six thousand years. wounded by ongoing colonial violence, these landscapes call out to descendants, drawing them into ancestral movements and relations of care. in these moments, ancestral sites refuse to be fixed within terminal chronological periods removed from a settled present, enrolling descendants into indigenous space-times that dramatically exceed colonial timescales and temporalities. drawing on this deep historical perspective, this article articulates a modest hope for the ways indigenous landscapes, as agentive beings, animate decolonial possibilities for life in the ruins of colonial empires. [temporality; landscape; southeastern united states; native american and indigenous peoples; archaeological ethnography; animacy; care; settler colonialism; the anthropocene] notes acknowledgments i would like to thank my pvlvcekolv hosts and teachers who supported my research, shared their knowledge, and pushed me to ask what it means to live and do research in good relation on indigenous land. many community members reviewed this article and provided important feedback. kasey keeler organized a symposium at the university of virginia in 2018, where i presented an early draft of this essay. there, i met j. kēhaulani kauanui, who was instrumental in pushing me to publish this argument; coll thrush, who offered important insights about the political implications of language such as being “enrolled” into deep time; and jessica cattelino, who helped me think through the political and economic implications of my argument. my students at brandeis have inspired and helped me engage more deeply with critical theories of settler colonialism and indigenous visions of governance beyond nation-state models. i workshopped many of these ideas in anna brickhouse’s “the americas and/as catastrophe” seminar through the virginia foundation for the humanities. my advisor, jeff hantman, has worked with me patiently over the years to help me grow as a scholar and a person. china schertz guided my engagement with the anthropology of care. jim igoe and kath weston guided me through critiques of the anthropological turn. aileen walsh helped identify places where i had reproduced a colonial orientation by taking eurocentric ontologies and epistemologies as the norm and othering indigenous ways of knowing/being. martha caldwell, julia haines, myranda pierce, and gwendolyn bright provided important editorial feedback on drafts of this article. the editors of cultural anthropology and anonymous peer reviewers helped me tremendously to clarify and sharpen the argument, giving me lifelong teachings about the relationship between ethnography and theory, as well as the subtle contradictions of recognition at play in this particular context. funding for this research was provided by the national science foundation cultural anthropology program (doctoral dissertation research improvement grant #1528653), the wenner-gren foundation (dissertation fieldwork grant #9121), the american philosophical society phillips fund, the explorers club washington group, and the university of virginia institute of the humanities and global cultures. 1. i use the term native american as a broad umbrella for indigenous peoples in the continental united states, parallel to other regionally specific terms such as first nations. i use the term indigenous to refer to global identities with specifically politicized connotations. i speak of peoples and nations to foreground issues of sovereignty, pointing to histories of nation-to-nation treaty making and political visions ordered around what glen sean coulthard (2014, 65) calls self-determining modes of life. 2. interpolation refers to the act of hailing others into relationship as a specific subject position (or kind of social role or social being). the archetypal example is turning to face a policeman who “hails” you, and in doing so, being fixed into the subject position of a citizen, potential criminal, and target of policing (althusser 2001, 117–18). 3. in previous published work, i referred to this community using the mvskoke-language pseudonym, talwa. due to the small size of the community, i did so to preserve the privacy of community members. indeed, living in the post-removal south has historically meant practicing muskogee ways in private, outside the gaze of the settler public. however, colleagues noted that the pseudonym obscures the place and relationships from which i write. as an alternative, i use the ancestral mvskoke-language name of the community, pvlvcekolv, here to mediate both these concerns. this decision was made in conversation with the community leadership and brings my work into closer conversation with other scholars writing about pvlvcekolv people (koons 2019). 4. for a more thorough review, see david g. anderson and kenneth e. sassaman (2012); george r. milner (2004). on the middle woodland, see elliot m. abrams (2009), christopher carr and d. troy case (2006), and alice p. wright (2017). on the mississippian, see john h. blitz (2010) and charles r. cobb (2003). 5. “disappearing waters,” referring to the lake, which periodically drains into the florida aquifer (bloch 2014, 88). 6. radiocarbon dating measures the decay of carbon-14 isotopes, which can be extrapolated to calendrical dates within a given confidence interval. while these dates are given with only a 1-sigma (68 percent) confidence interval, this suffices to illustrate my argument. references abrams, elliot m. 2009 “hopewell archaeology: a view from the northern woodlands.” journal of archaeological research 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scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.02 exhuming dead persons: forensic science and the making of post-fascist publics in spain cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 345-373, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.01 exhuming dead persons: forensic science and the making of post-fascist publics in spain jonah s. rubin knox college https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-4496 in march 2011, spain’s association for the recovery of historical memory (asociación para la recuperación de la memoria histórica, or armh) and the aranzadi society of sciences inaugurated the traveling exhibit exhuming graves, recovering dignities at the carlos iii university of madrid. a collaborative project between the two most prolific organizations associated with spain’s “historical memory movement,” the installation conveyed how civil society organizations locate and exhume the more than 150,000 civilians killed during spain’s civil war (1936–1939) and the ensuing dictatorship of francisco franco (1939–1975), civilians who remain buried in a series of unmarked mass graves throughout the country. around the circumference of the building’s lobby, a series of stations explained the stages of an ideal typical exhumation, starting with relatives’ oral testimony, moving to archival investigations, prospection, digging, laboratory analysis, and culminating in a public reburial service. at the center of the lobby, marked off by low-hanging ropes, lay the centerpiece: a life-sized photographic reproduction of a fully excavated mass grave. if most madrileños would never come face to skull with a mass grave, then the exhibit would bring the experience of witnessing an exhumation, or at least a simulacrum of it, to them (see figure 11). dr. francisco etxeberria, spain’s most prominent forensic scientist and the president of aranzadi’s forensic anthropology department, provided the opening address: “i believe that the work of historical memory that we are doing in spain . . . works to build democracy day by day. we are building democracy and reinforcing values, . . . one of which is truth, the other is justice, and the third part is reparation.” he quickly added, “just in case there are any historians in this room,” that “historical memory does not claim to reconstruct past history in a faithful manner. that is the responsibility of historians. what historical memory speaks to is the present.” “in the end,” he concluded, “it all comes back to persons. you cannot deal with all of this with the idea that a skeleton is an object. a skeleton is a person with an identity, with feelings. and this is something that you cannot lose sight of when you are in this phase of recovering remains.” figure 1. exhuming graves, recovering dignities traveling exhibit at the carlos iii university of madrid. photo by jonah s. rubin, march 2011. see note 1 for a discussion of the ethics of displaying photos of human remains. in invoking truth, justice, and reparations as the fundamental principles of historical memory, etxeberria situates spanish forensic science firmly within the project of post-conflict transitional justice. for transitional justice advocates, late twentieth-century exhumations heralded a new “forensic turn” in human rights (gessat-anstett and dreyfus 2015; dziuban 2017). whereas previously historians and lawyers alike had to rely on the faulty memories of often-traumatized witnesses or the biased documents of perpetrator states, forensic science promised to open a new and putatively objective archive by transcribing the “history of their life and death recorded in their bones” (steadman 2003, x). in the aftermath of mass violence, forensics promised a common, factual foundation for reforging a fractured polity. ethnographers have rightly expressed skepticism at the positivism and historicism that undergird this triumphalist human rights account. forensic methodologies, they point out, are designed first and foremost to produce evidence for legal forums (keenan and weizman 2012, 28). as such, they respond to the epistemological demands of particular juridical systems, whose standards for truth may diverge dramatically from those of scientists or historians (jasanoff 1997, 9). because of their fundamental entanglement with the law, exhumations, in they eyes of anthropologists, have tended to provide not so much incontrovertible historical proof as “neither fully neutral nor purely objective” information that “enters a landscape of contested narratives,” supplying “political and moral capital” to different political programs (rosenblatt 2015, 65).2 for etxeberria, though, exhuming the dead is not about narrating the past at all, a task he leaves to historians. instead, it is about securing spain’s democratic future, a project that remains incomplete, four decades after the fall of the dictatorship. for the historical memory movement, spain cannot be a true democracy until it exhumes the unmarked mass graves in which franco’s victims remain. this is so not only because of the ways this ongoing war crime violates the rights of kin to know the fate of their loved ones but also because it violates the dignity of dead persons. the present essay examines how memory activists use forensic science to challenge the spanish state’s relationship to franco’s victims and, in so doing, its claims to democratic legitimacy. departing from popular and scholarly depictions, i show that, in post-franco spain, the impact of exhumations has little to with their ability to extract historical information directly from the bones of victims. instead, i argue that exhumations transform the disappeared into dead persons, thereby reincorporating them as integral participants in a democratic public sphere. for memory activists, the project of securing spain’s democratic future depends on recognizing the long-excluded victims of fascist violence as persons. in examining how exhumations teach the living to recognize the personhood of the exhumed, i aim to reconsider the place of the dead in democratic publics, particularly in the aftermath of state violence. philosophers have described liberalism as operating on a “dead-are-gone assumption,” whereby the deceased can no longer directly affect or be affected by the actions of the polity (mulgan 1999). careful ethnographic attention to spanish exhumations, however, suggests that, under certain conditions, the deceased may play a greater role in shaping political processes than generally acknowledged. this results less from the ontological status of the exhumed than from their ability to successfully lay claim to one of the foundational juridical fictions of liberal politics: personhood. although colloquially used as a synonym for human beings, in both anglo and hispanic traditions, liberal personhood is at base a legal status, denoting those entities capable of participating in public life (andrews 1911; cabanellas 1998). it is for this reason that the category can be both more and less expansive than humanity: corporations in the united states, the ecosystem in bolivia, and chimpanzees in spain are all recognized within their respective jurisdictions as “non-human persons,” or entities whose interests must be accounted for in the course of public deliberation (kirsch 2014; schneider 2015). at the same time, the legal architecture for excluding women and minorities from political participation has often relied on denials of their personhood (pateman 1988; patterson 2018). the issue of the dead’s personhood proves especially salient in the context of forced disappearances.3 in contrast to a murder or a kidnapping, the violence of forced disappearance manifests not only on the victim’s body but also through severing their social and political ties. forced disappearances transmute public acts of state violence into “intensely private and personal” experiences (robben 2000, 70). classified as foreign enemies, rather than rights-bearing citizens, the dead did not have the right to a proper burial and their kin often had great difficulty claiming widow or orphan benefits (preston 2012, 588). particularly in the early years of the dictatorship, public recognition of their bond with the disappeared could subject surviving kin to harassment by neighbors and local officials (ruiz 2005). barred from public life, the dead could exist only in cries and whispers between close kin and confidants (ferrándiz 2008). while spain’s transition to democracy entailed radical transformations in the state’s relationship with its living citizens, as i discuss in the next section, the political status of franco’s victims remained largely unchanged. this results in part from the unequal knowledge politics of forced disappearance. for surviving kin, the terror of this crime manifests in the gap between the general knowledge that the state has kidnapped a loved one and the ongoing silence about the specific fate suffered by the victim. this inability to establish public knowledge of disappeared kin while remaining vulnerable to state violence makes such crimes inadmissible in public discourse. because forced disappearances are defined through a state-sponsored indeterminacy about the fate of the victim, spanish exhumations aim not only to generate information about the disappeared but also rekindle the social and political relations severed by the dictatorship and denied by successive post-franco governments. attending to the personhood of the exhumed requires a reconsideration of how the dead interact with the democratic public sphere. traditionally, liberal theorists conceive of publics as a kind of “virtual space” in which individuals may “transcend the given realities of their bodies and their status” to debate the future of their community (warner 2005, 382). from this perspective, it is hard to see what the inclusion of the dead in the public sphere might add, since their private status as the victims of fascist violence should, ideally, fade before the rational arguments they might make before a public audience. in this essay, i take inspiration from the alternative understanding of publics developed by hannah arendt (1998). for arendt, the democratic public is characterized not by the erasure of individual particularities but rather through the recognition that all persons speak from a particular subject position: “only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can the worldly reality truly and reliably appear” (arendt 1998, 57). on this account, the proliferation of perspectives constitutes a necessary precondition for well-functioning public debate, allowing subjects to be confident in their judgments of what is and what could be. recognizing the dignity of dead persons, then, fundamentally concerns which perspectives might be included or excluded from post-dictatorship public debate (zigon 2018, 210). in post-franco spain, exhumations are as much an aesthetic as a scientific practice, one that denotes the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that define the public sphere (see rancière 2010). this understanding of the public sphere calls particular attention to the temporal dimension of personhood. as the spanish philosopher julián marías (1996, 15) argues, claims of personhood are inherently “oriented towards the future.” that is, if personhood denotes those perspectives with which we might partner to assess and act on the present, then it is synonymous with those entities with whom we might partner to build a more just society. although objects might be used in working toward a better future, marías notes, persons can collaborate with each other to achieve the kinds of collective action that cannot be reduced to any of its members. franco’s campaigns of forced disappearances, then, constituted an attempt to circumscribe the possible futures that might emerge from the public. in forcibly disappearing politicians, union activists, schoolteachers, and other public figures associated with the republic and banning any attempts to publicly reckon with their deaths, the dictatorship also sought to restrict the perspectives that could comprise the public sphere. if publics are a kind of performative, world-making poetics (warner 2005, 114), then franco’s campaigns of forced disappearances attempted to delimit spain’s possible political futures. moreover, insofar as the foundational settlements of post-franco democracy continued to exclude the disappeared from the “space of appearance,” they also continue to impoverish spanish political life (arendt 1998, 200). despite significant reforms, the post-franco state’s ongoing failure to recognize its deceased citizens as persons represents a continuation of the antidemocratic policies the dictatorship imposed to constrain the public sphere. in the hands of spanish memory activists, international forensic protocols accomplish more than just the productions of historical evidence of past war crimes. memory activists creatively deploy forensic procedures to challenge a political system built on the exclusion of disappeared persons’ perspectives from public debate and revive alternative political futures. before examining the transformative power of exhumations, though, we must first focus on the particularities of the spanish forensic context. forensic history and democratic transitions early in my field research, i visited the laboratory of the armh in the northwestern city of ponferrada. as i entered what some activists call “the laboratory of hope and dignity,” a specialist stood at a table, gluing together bone fragments, in an attempt to reconstruct the crania of two recently unearthed victims. across the room, a lab worker combed through some documents. although the location of most successful exhumations is provided by relatives of the missing, these records remain critical for building a historical profile of the disappeared. in the middle, an archaeologist busied himself compiling survivor testimonies, field journals, physical anthropological analyses, photographs, and more into a report on the team’s latest successful effort to identify the disappeared. the scene was instantly recognizable to anyone who has followed similar efforts to recover the missing after mass atrocities. and for good reason: from the start, spanish exhumations were explicitly modeled after the sorts of high-profile exhumations that accompanied latin america’s transitions from dictatorship to democracy (silva and macías 2005). but although the techniques and technologies of forensic science crossed the atlantic with ease, the context of their deployment differs markedly (rubin 2014). the latin american exhumations that inspired spanish activists occurred as part of state-led transitional justice programs. as such, they were designed primarily to generate legal evidence for a war crimes tribunal, truth commission, or other juridical process. by contradistinction, spanish forced disappearances fall into something of a legal black hole: spain’s 1977 amnesty law prevents local justices from investigating the dictatorship’s crimes (aguilar 2002). the european court of human rights has ruled that the statute of limitations for these cases has expired (márquez and melón 2012). and, as most disappearances occurred prior to the foundation of the united nations in 1945, the committee on involuntary and enforced disappearances has determined that they fall outside its mandate, even if they otherwise meet the legal definition of forced disappearance (greiff 2014). as my tour of the laboratory concluded, i sat down with santiago macias, then vice president of the armh and laboratory manager to conduct an interview. given the lack of legal recourse, i asked him, why were memory activists so committed to following strict technocratic procedures for generating forensic evidence from ossified human remains? macias conceded that, for fulfilling the rights of kin, the technical procedures were relatively unimportant. after all, most of the time, it was relatives who pointed out not only the location of mass graves but also provided the names of those buried therein. at best, forensic analysis could confirm what they already knew. however, he continued, “in a country like spain, our work must be incontestable. otherwise, tomorrow someone could come and claim that these were victims of [the other side].” he quickly added that this was not to criticize an earlier generation of spaniards who, in the immediate aftermath of franco’s death, set out “practically in secret” to recover the remains of their loved ones (see hristova 2007). however, “our work,” he insisted, “needed to be an act of justice” that “speaks to the world” and helps “normalize democracy.” at first glance, macias seems to be advancing a rather straightforward argument about the great powers of forensic science to reveal historical truths about past violence. since the late 1980s, advancements in physical anthropological and archaeological technologies have made scientific expertise central to the prosecution of both war crimes and more mundane legal processes, leading some to proclaim the current age an “era of forensics” (keenan and weizman 2012; see also comaroff and comaroff 2016). for human rights advocates, these new techniques promise to act “as a vital provider of physical and documentary evidence in trials of perpetrators of mass atrocity that has ‘unparalleled benefits’ that ‘don’t lie’” (pearlman 2008, 5). but why should forensic evidence be especially needed in a country like spain, where the possibility of legal justice has been foreclosed? in the state-led exhumations that inspired spanish activists, the production of forensic history is seen as a lynchpin of post-conflict peacebuilding. according to transitional justice theorists, “abusive regimes thrive in secrecy, seeking to hide their wrongdoings within and outside the county. often, even the perpetrators of human rights abuses are ignorant of all that their peers are doing and the general public is usually not fully aware of what is being done in their name” (humphrey 2012, 259–60). for transitional justice theorists, ignorance, rather than ideology, is the fons et origo of mass violence. therefore, in the aftermath of dictatorships, transitional justice practitioners profess faith in the therapeutic powers of accurate historical narration. confronted with long-hidden truths, former warring parties will be convinced “to give up their coercive politics, and to adhere to the rules required by a democratic order” (sánchez gómez 2016). at a moment when civic unity has been ripped asunder, transitional justice practitioners invoke forensic history making to ground renewed liberal norms. spanish democracy, however, was founded on very different terms. conducted over a decade prior to the rise of the transitional justice paradigm, spain’s democratic transition avoided any public reckoning with past crimes. following then-contemporary ideas of best practices, in the wake of franco’s death, spanish politicians undertook a pact of oblivion (pacto del olvido), a tacit agreement among the political elite not to legislate, litigate, or publicly discuss their recent history (encarnación 2014). by setting aside a still divisive past, spain’s political class hoped that, together, they might build a common future. the pact of oblivion never entailed an outright ban on engagements with the past. in fact, a flurry of new academic research accompanied the end of the dictatorship, written with the aim of countering francoist propaganda (boyd 2008, 137). it was only when such commemorations erupted into the broader public sphere, threatening the renewed democracy’s “regimes of visibility,” that they became subject to censorship (leivas and kerangat 2018). thus, even as critical historical studies proliferated, conference posters making visual references to the flag of the second republic were “unofficially, but effectively banned” (preston 2012, 8–9). and although the new democracy now permitted families to privately rebury their republican kin, the government censored public screenings of the film, rocío, removing a scene in which the names of the disappeared are read aloud (espinosa-maestre 2013, 8–9). whatever its political theoretical ambitions, in practice, the pact of oblivion meant that victims’ kin experienced the transition as a continuation of the dictatorship’s violence. even as spain undertook ambitious constitutional reforms, the violence of the dictatorship remained a public secret, known to all in its broad strokes and yet barred as the condition of possibility for post-franco public life (taussig 1999). yet the hasty attempts of politicians to impose public finality on the stories of the disappeared left few options for families seeking to learn the specific circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths and to provide them with last rites. despite lacking the kind of public reckoning with its past that transitional justice sees as essential, by most international measures, spain remains a stable democracy. moreover, although the civil war and the franco dictatorship remain controversial topics in the public sphere, opinion polls indicate that this is not due to an ignorance of historical facts. according to a 2008 survey, only 0.2 percent of spaniards deny the existence of mass graves, while the vast majority (88.2 percent) agree that franco violated basic human rights (cis 2008; 4.3 percent disagree). whatever faults spanish memory activists see in their compatriots’ relation to the past, it is not the kind of widespread ignorance that transitional justice theorists would lead us to expect. to understand why spanish activists so highly value forensic science, even in the absence of legal backing, we will need to more closely examine how exhumations challenge the foundational settlements of the post-franco public sphere. (how) does science prove history? spirits were low in la toba de guadalajara as the forum for memory neared the end of its third day searching for the grave of severiano clemente gonzález, a baker and sympathizer of the leftist popular front, killed by fascist militias on november 17, 1936. a large backhoe continued digging trenches across the roughly square kilometer field, hoping to encounter some sign of the informal burial. but so far, only a few hunting shells and some animal bones had emerged. several activists began to wonder aloud when to give up the search. as the day wore on, more people came by the ongoing prospection to corroborate the original testimony of gonzález’s children and confirm that the victim had, in fact, been buried in this location. but the terrain had undergone significant changes in the ensuing seventy-five years, erasing the once familiar landmarks by which people navigated the area. a social psychologist tried to prepare the relatives for an increasingly likely disappointing scenario: “whether we find it or not, we know the facts. what is important is the history, and that much we know.” the sentiment seemed to reassure one of gonzález’s sons, who replied that, thanks to media reporting on our efforts, “in the village, they know it all.” i sat down with the social psychologist and the lead social anthropologist to conduct an interview with two of gonzález’s sons. regardless of the search’s outcome, the organization wished to record and archive the testimonies of those who knew the victim (renshaw 2011; ferrándiz 2014). just as i hit the button on my audio recorder, though, an excited shout came from across the field: “we found bones!” cheers rang out as people enthusiastically ran over to the backhoe that, at long last, had encountered human remains. tears welled up in the eyes of gonzález’s children and grandson as they gave emotional hugs of gratitude to all around. as the initial excitement passed and the forensic team got back to work, one of gonzalez’s sons turned to the social psychologist and commented, “what a joy!” then, recognizing the awkwardness of expressing happiness at finding the skeletal remains of a father who had been violently murdered for his political beliefs, he added: “well, it’s a joy, but it’s not a joy.” the social psychologist reassured him: “yes, it’s a joy. because it confirms the history. . . . now we need science to confirm it.” a few months later, science did just that as physical anthropological and genetic analysis confirmed the identity and cause of death of severiano clemente gonzález. as with macias’s comments in the armh laboratory, the forum for memory’s exhumation of gonzález seems like a straightforward story about the great potentials of forensic technologies to definitively confirm memories of past violence. to a certain extent, the laudatory discourse of human rights scholars is reflected in the technical practices of spanish forensic teams. historical memory associations speak of forming “hypotheses” about the location of mass graves based on oral testimony. for both forensic specialists and lay activists, exhumations function to confirm these suppositions. but, as the difficult path to discovering the gonzález burial site indicates, the hypotheses tested by forensic scientists differ quite markedly from those that may be evaluated in a laboratory. even at the moment when hopes of locating gonzález’s grave were fading fast, the veracity of his relatives’ testimony was never in doubt. as the social psychologist assured him, “whether we find [the grave] or not, we know the facts.” the history of this war crime, she emphasized, was already known prior to the discovery of any human remains. unlike the propositions tested in the laboratory, the ones offered by victims can never be falsified. this became evident at dinner one night, after over a week in which the armh had attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate a burial site. “what do we do when we don’t find a grave?” asked one volunteer. “because i once read [in a newspaper after another unsuccessful prospection] that the armh failed.” the volunteer expressed outrage at the notion that the failure was that of the ngo, rather than of the state, which refused to undertake its legal and moral obligations to locate the disappeared.4 the vice president of the association replied: “we do not say that the search failed. . . . instead, we say that we have suspended the search.” “because it does not end,” another activist finished the thought. a testimony may lack the precision necessary to locate human remains, but its truth value is never in question. even when these “hypotheses” can be proven, though, the question of what, exactly, has been established remains somewhat elusive. the analysis of gonzález’s remains certainly produced significant quantities of new data: it definitively established the location of his interment, the precise manner and method of his death, the caliber of the bullet used, and much more. in graves that contain multiple bodies, forensic science can often identify groups of persons executed together, the order in which they were killed, and sometimes even significant details about their final moments. this information is highly valued by those who maintain an affective link to the deceased, be they related by kinship or ideology. at one exhumation, a relative recalled how, as a child, he would come with his mother every day of the dead to leave flowers at the entrance of the farm where the grave had been discovered. a friend marveled at the precision of his memory, noting that his testimony had led to the expedited discovery of the victims. the relative, however, took offense at the suggestion that a proximate location was good enough: “no! it was not exact!” he insisted, noting that the actual grave had been discovered a good five meters from where they would leave flowers. and yet, forensic analysis alone cannot produce the sort of information that families and activists value most. while, under ideal conditions, an exhumation can reveal who was murdered, where, and how, it cannot reveal why a person was killed. details like that of a man who was forced to bury five bodies at gunpoint, a schoolteacher who was murdered for reading socialist newspapers, or how gonzález was killed for giving his leftover bread to the poor—that is, the narratives that comprise both the local and the national histories of franco’s repression—can only be derived from the testimonies of those who remember the dead. here, forensic data acts as a derridean supplement, supplying the facticity that oral accounts on their own lack, even as, in most cases, it adds little substantive information to the testimonies of kin (derrida 1998). forensic scientists are well aware of this reality. even when exhumations go as planned, the claims made in their reports remain rather constrained: “the evidence found, as well as the analysis of the grave as a whole, allow an interpretation of the grave that is consistent with the testimonies of the relatives before and during the exhumation” (crespo prieto 2008; emphasis added). although forensic exhumations produce vast quantities of new information, they cannot, strictly speaking, confirm the stories families tell about their loved ones. it can only yield evidence that “allows an interpretation of the grave” along the lines of what they have said. this is both a straightforward commentary on the plausibility of oral testimony as well as an acknowledgment of the ways internationally recognized forensic protocols open up the space for the kinds of public testimonies barred by the tacit pact of oblivion. what emerges from this ethnographic description of forensic science in practice differs substantially from the popular image of scientists using “archaeological techniques to test witness testimony” (schmitt 2001, 280). far from extracting truths about past crimes directly from the bones of victims, history, as the spanish experience shows, precedes, rather than follows from, the forensic exhumation. this was certainly the case in la toba, where, as the social psychologist pointed out prior to the discovery of the remains: “whether we find it or not, we know the facts. what is important is the history, and that much we know.” in contrast to its popular and scholarly representation, the goal of the exhumation is not to overrule less reliable ways of knowing the past. instead, at its most successful, forensic science proclaims its own inadequacy, demanding a public accounting for facts about the dead it has produced, but is not capable of fully explaining on its own. as the forensic report indicates, in order to publicly account for how the facts that emerge from laboratory analysis came to be, one must return to the testimony of the victims’ kin. far from supplanting witness testimony, forensic science proclaims its necessity. rather than producing a single, definitive account of the disappeared, forensic science aims to multiply the things that may be said about them. in the course of a single exhumation, the dead body is subjected to (and subjectified by) a wide variety of technical fields—including archaeology, physical anthropology, medical pathology, ethnography, history, social psychology, and the law—each with its own methodologies and standards of proof (crossland 2013). in the state-sponsored exhumations that inspired spanish activists, the inevitable gaps between these varied performances of the dead are not especially problematic. conducted in the context of official programs of transitional justice, truth commissions and war crimes tribunals provide a ritual vehicle for uniting varied scientific and sovereign performances into an authoritative account of past violence (moon 2009, 56–58). like all judicial proclamations, these must exceed a strict reading of facts (derrida 1992; keenan and weizman 2012, 24). like a pointillist painting coming into focus as one backs away from a canvas, the judicial declaration stabilizes the varied performances into a singular, authoritative, public account of state violence. in spain, however, no such possibility exists for attaining any official legal pronouncement. like the transitional justice exhumations that served as their model, spanish forensic reports demand a public accounting for facts about the dead that scientists produce yet cannot fully explain. yet unlike the interventions that inspired spanish memory activists, the state refuses to provide any such public accounting. therefore, memory activists seek alternative means for transforming the post-dictatorship public sphere. recognizing persons, just like you and me absent the authoritative proclamations of the state, spanish forensic teams must go beyond international protocols for interacting with dead bodies, and develop procedures for managing the many living persons who gather to watch exhumations. memory activists encourage these visits, establishing viewing galleries and discussion spaces in the immediate environs of excavations (see figure 2). the sight of a mass grave can be confusing to the untrained eye. after more than seventy years of decay, even the best-preserved human remains no longer resemble the living in any straightforward way. recognition becomes even more difficult when bones are comingled or overlapping, buried in acidic or humid soil that accelerate decomposition, or if subsequent building at the surface level has affected the substrata. particularly in graves where crania are no longer easily discernible, people’s first reaction on witnessing a mass grave is not sympathy, outrage, or horror: it is incomprehension and despair. in response, the memory movement invests much time and effort explaining the forensic tableau to the uninitiated. at least once a day, the team leads “mobile seminars,” explaining an opaque burial scene to those who do not know (bevernage and colaert 2014, 5; see figure 3). to understand the place of forensic science in these exhumations, it will be helpful to focus on one such explanation.5 the lead archaeologist began by welcoming his audience: i don’t know if you’ve ever seen a mass grave before. this is a mass grave. this is an unknown reality that, unfortunately, attempts have been made to hide it. this is a reality and i say that because we have here five persons that—perhaps now it is difficult for you to see— . . . but we have five persons who were killed in ’41 and who were brought here, a grave was dug and, just as the remains fell, that’s how they were buried, and that’s how we are finding them now. . . . once we begin to take them out, we put them all individually—that is, one by one—in a box and transport them to the laboratory to do the forensic anthropological report and identify these persons. i’ll explain to you, for example, one of these bodies, so that you can see it. let’s look for example, at [individual] number 3. figure 2. exhumation teams established distinct zones for families and visitors to watch ongoing forensic activities, along with discussion spaces and interviewing areas (not pictured). photo by óscar rodríguez, 2011. in the absence of a formal legal procedure, the archaeologist introduced onlookers to the mass grave by making the authoritative ontological statement that elsewhere might be provided by a judge or truth commissioner, twice affirming, “this is a reality.” the archaeologist needed to repeat this, he explained, precisely because of the nature of forced disappearance. like other dictatorships, the franco regime did not simply kill its victims; it denied their very existence (gatti 2014). although spain’s transition to democracy entailed substantial reforms to the ways state institutions governed the living, the pact of oblivion proscribed the possibility of any changes to its public management of the dead. figure 3. armh lead archaeologist rené pacheco points out forensic details to visitors and relatives of the disappeared during a forensic seminar. photo by óscar rodríguez, 2011. the proof of the victims’ reality is not, as transitional justice scholars would have it, extracted from the bones of its victims. as with the forum for memory’s exhumation at la toba, here, too, the specialist confidently narrates the grave’s history prior to any laboratory analysis. instead, the proof of the dead’s reality is aesthetic. despite the deteriorated state of the remains, the expert reassures the onlookers, they too will soon learn to see the jumbled bones as human bodies. and in short order, he proceeded to retrain their visual fields, illustrating the number and disposition of each corpse, making sure that each of them became capable of seeing within the jumble of confusing remains a series of individual bodies. here, the presence of bodies comes into focus by training onlookers to inhabit a basic forensic medical gaze (araguete 2013, 10). the archaeologist’s lesson on how to properly perceive the mass grave is a staging of what jacques rancière (2010, 37) calls dissensus. against a dictatorship that sought to erase their public existence and a democracy that continues to neglect the disappeared, the archaeologist “makes visible that which had no reason to be seen” under the existing political order (rancière 2010, 38). in so doing, he opens up a “gap in the sensible,” calling attention to those who have been overlooked, and therefore violently excluded, from the political community (rancière 2010, 38). insofar as a well-functioning public sphere depends on a plurality of particular perspectives (arendt 1998, 57), the archaeologist’s highlighting the public exclusion of those who resisted fascism also demonstrates the impoverished nature of post-franco democracy. this aesthetic retraining concerns more than just seeing once overlooked objects. for in “transforming this space of ‘moving along’” into a site of historical significance, the archaeologist also opens up “a space for the appearance of a subject” previously neglected in the public sphere (rancière 2013, 17). as the jumble of bones becomes a series of individuals, onlookers often raise their arms, lower their jaws, or cross their legs, mimetically adopting the positions of the human remains. mimesis, as michael taussig (1993, xiii) notes, is “the faculty to yield into and become the other.” in unconsciously adopting the bodily dispositions of the departed, the living come to recognize their own bodies as being fundamentally like those of the dead, save for a few of decades of decay. as the archaeologist continued, he urged onlookers to extend these feelings of mutuality beyond the corporeal: i don’t know whether you can come to this idea, but it is a person. it is a person just like me, just like you. . . . these people are the parents, the siblings, the grandparents of people like us. and they have been waiting for more than seventy years for someone to find their bodies, and with this work we are trying to give these families the opportunity to recover them and to bury them with dignity in a niche, which is all they are asking for. while describing the forensic identification process above, the expert distanced himself from those in front of him, distinguishing between our ability to see, excavate, and analyze the remains, with their never having seen a mass grave before. this effectively established the distance between the expert, object, and layperson that is the sine qua non of scientific specialization (rosenblatt 2015, 19). in this excerpt, however, the deictic markers shift. by first asserting his own similarity with the deceased and then with the onlookers, the expert hails his audience to recognize themselves as persons who share in the same bodily substance, kinship networks, and desire for a dignified burial as both himself and the dead. in so doing, he transforms the dead from silenced suffering subjects into the kinds of persons capable of publicly articulating desires shared by both the living and the dead (rancière 2010, 38). the training that started as a practical means for seeing a confusing forensic tableau here culminates in an ethical project. yet in contrast to transitional justice theorists and their anthropological critics, in the forensic seminar, recovering the missing is not, in the first instance, about forging the kinds of truthful narratives that can inoculate the public from renewed conflict. instead, it is about building the kinds of communities capable of recognizing franco’s victims as persons. the tense the archaeologist adopts is particularly telling: it is not just that the dead were persons whose rights had been violated in the past. rather, they continue to be persons in the present. memory activists frequently emphasize this commitment to the ongoing personhood of the dead. for instance, over dinner one night, a volunteer complimented this same archaeologist for the way he adapted his forensic seminar for a particularly young audience: “i really liked your explanation [of the grave] to the children. it almost made me cry. . . . we were all there with one eye on you. and you always referred to them as persons.” this sentiment is not restricted to forensic specialists. at one excavation, an elderly woman remarked that though “i know little about politics,” to her, “what is important is this, that they come out [of the grave] and they have dignity. they are persons.” spanish activists, no less than liberal philosophers, do not always agree on what behavior—beyond the basic, movement-defining commitment to properly burying franco’s victims—recognition of personhood ought to compel. at one exhumation, a documentarian from the forum for memory criticized the armh’s photographic procedures. the latter group favors close-ups of the deceased. as one armh photographer explained to me, these detailed shots served to “humanize” the bones, helping wider audiences recognize their similarity with the disappeared. for the forum for memory activist, however, such photographs “lacked respect” for the dead. he analogized: on march 11, 2004, during the al qaeda terrorist attack, “there were cameras all over atocha” train station in madrid. yet the media refrained from showing close-ups of the dead, he noted, “out of respect to the victims.” the same protection from the voyeuristic gaze of the media, he argued, was owed to “the victims of state terrorism” whom we were presently exhuming. regardless of their differences, though, both the armh and the forum’s photographic protocols emerge from a shared concern with the dignity of dead persons. while the armh draws on humanitarian visual tropes to build recognition of the deceased, the forum situates the exhumed within hegemonic media ethics for representing victims of violence.6 yet regardless of their different media ethics, both organizations mobilize established media tropes for representing victims of violence to make the long-neglected disappeared publicly recognizable as persons whose perspectives must be reckoned within the course of democratic deliberation. like all claims to personhood, those made in the name of the disappeared are inherently bound up with their ability to shape the public sphere. within liberal political systems, the term person is itself a forensic term, a legal fiction denoting those entities permitted to voice their interests and account for their actions in public (cabanellas 1998; locke 1998, 258). often, the category is deployed to include non-human persons whom the polity wishes to grant legal standing while excluding certain humans as a means of silencing their political voices. despite personhood’s legal reality, though, liberalism relies on an ideology whereby it “appear[s] normal, natural, and prior to political and economic forces” (collier, maurer, and suarez-navaz 1995, 5). liberal thought seeks to naturalize personhood by grounding this foundational concept through a productive conflation of personhood and the human body (scheper-hughes and lock 1987).7 at the same time, because liberal politics denies personhood to certain humans, liberal philosophy also limits personhood to those bodies deemed capable of “rational thought,” “maturity,” or “communication” (macintyre 2001, 10). memory activists deploy forensic science in the gaps between these legal and philosophical aspects of personhood. first, the forensic expert enfolds the disappeared within the kinds of expert scientific and legal discourses that define liberalism’s shared cosmological grounds (asad 1993, 38–39). then, the pedagogue leads a mobile seminar in which he teaches visitors how to see the bodies of the dead as fundamentally like their own, establishing the shared corporeal grounds central to liberal ideologies of personhood (farman 2013). having established the dead both as subjects of law and as sharing in the natural substrata of personhood, the archaeologist calls on his audience to join the public pushing for the dead to be buried with dignity. dignity and democratic politics whether it is the dead or their living kin who have awaited this dignified burial for decades is left ambiguous in the mobile seminar. but etxeberria’s inauguration of the exhuming graves, recovering dignities exhibit suggests that, at the very least, the memory movement considers exhumations as the fulfillment of ethical duties owed the dead by virtue of their inherent dignity. hence, as he led a guided tour of the exhibit, etxeberria, seemingly contradicting the exhibit’s title, noted that exhumations “are not to recover the dignity [of the dead]; they never lost that.” similarly, at a reburial service, an activist for the forum for memory declared that this act was “not to recover the dignity [of the dead]. those who lost their dignity are those who fought against democracy.” in part, invoking dignity is about reinforcing claims for the dead’s personhood. although rarely defined in legal documents (schachter 1983, 849), the concept of dignity proves foundational to the possibility of liberal jurisprudence and international human rights law (rosen 2012). the preamble of the international covenant on civil and political rights, for instance, declares that the rights enumerated therein “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” within roman civil law traditions like that of spain, though, there is even more at stake, as dignity also undergirds the possibility of the polity writ large (chaskalson 2002). thus, article 10.1 of spain’s 1978 constitution cites the “dignity of the person” as part of the “foundation for social order and social peace.” spanish constitutional scholars frequently describe dignity as the “invisible cement” holding together the possibility of political order, even while bemoaning its definitional ambiguity (jiménez campo 2018, 219; see also pascual medrano 2015). for spanish audiences, then, the accusation that the dignity of the dead has been violated concerns more than the rights of an individual dead person. it also calls into question the legitimacy of the post-franco political order (see rubin 2018). as ana pereda put it at the armh-organized exhumation of her grandfather: “a democracy that leaves its dead forgotten in a grave is not a real democracy.” conversely, as one leader of the platform against impunity for francoism declared at a public assembly in madrid: “the destruction of memory makes the construction of democracy impossible.” a true democracy, the memory movement argues, must properly care for dead persons as well as for the living. ultimately, the work of historical memory concerns itself with establishing the conditions of possibility for forming an alternative democratic public. this can be seen in one prominent memory activist’s reaction to the june 2014 abdication of king juan carlos i, in favor of his son felipe, now the vi. at the time, many leftists were calling for a popular referendum on whether spain should remain a monarchy or return to a republican system. juan carlos, they pointed out, had only become head of state due to the 1947 succession law, which established him as franco’s legal successor. a referendum therefore offered an important opportunity to rid spain of the vestiges of the dictatorship and ground political authority through democratic means. for some memory activists, however, these calls for a referendum missed the point. on a facebook post accompanied by a photo of an exhumation, one wrote: a protest in favor of a referendum has been called for this saturday. . . . but there are persons who have not been taken into account, they cannot attend an assembly because they are dead. they were murdered with impunity by fascists, without the right to complain [reclamar],8 which is what impunity means. they are not going to go to the protest, but we should bring them. photos, photos, photos. at stake in the protest against the monarchy is not only the political status of the dead, nor even just the reciprocal knowledge gained by recognizing the personhood of the disappeared. for this memory activist, any proper consideration of spain’s political future must account for the rights and desires of those dead persons excluded from participation in the public sphere since their forcible disappearance at the hands of the dictatorship. the work of historical memory, then, extends beyond the recovery of bones to include attempts to restore these missing perspectives. as emilio silva, the president and founder of the armh remarked on the 2012 international day of the disappeared: “they made them disappear, but they were then transformed into seeds, into the dna of ideas. . . . they uproot you from the present but a root always remains, a seedling that sprouts new dreams that have beautified the world. today is their day, today and all the others, but it is the day to scream that their fight for justice has not disappeared.” here, a better future can only emerge once the living commit to advocating on behalf of a project for justice that continues to be defined by the dead. conclusion: reconsidering the place of the dead in a post-conflict democracy this essay explored how spanish civil society organizations deploy forensic science to challenge a state that, four decades after the fall of its dictator, refuses to undertake its legal and moral responsibilities to locate the disappeared. rent from its legal context, forensic science does not generate the kinds of hegemonic historical narratives imagined by both transitional justice scholars and their anthropological critics. derived from the latin forensis, originally referring to the roman forum in which citizens presented arguments before their peers, forensic science entails the scientific production of evidence for a juridical institution. in a context in which neither courts nor legislators willingly admit the evidence that emerges from mass graves, spanish memory activists look to forensic science not as a mode of addressing a public forum but to create it anew. spanish exhumations constitute a tailored response to the particular postmortem violence directed against those who died resisting fascism. both the franco dictatorship and its ensuing democracy were premised on the exclusion of the disappeared from the public “space of appearance” (arendt 1998, 57). for spanish activists, the publics that exhumations generate must be composed of both living and dead persons. memory activists devote considerable time and attention to training the living to acquire both the aesthetic capacities and the political subjectivities needed to recognize the long-overlooked dead as persons, who share in the same bodily substance, desires, and political projects as the living (rancière 2010). once their personhood is recognized, the long-excluded dead can re-enter the public as entities who demand the recognition of their interests and desires. yet spanish memory activists are far from alone in seeking to recruit victims of state violence as matters of public concern. in recent years feminist groups protesting femicide throughout the hispanic world have adopted the slogan: “not all of us are here; we are missing the dead.” similarly, the #blacklivesmatter campaign in the united states sought to make visible the long neglected victims of police violence, in part through the circulation of hashtags such as #ifidieinpolicecustody and #saytheirnames, that ask readers to imagine themselves in the place of and join together with the voices of the deceased (bonilla and rosa 2015). from the self-immolation that sparked the arab spring to the #weareallayotzinapa (#todossomosayotzinapa) hashtags popularized in the wake of the disappearance of forty-three teaching college students in mexico, popular protest movements increasingly organize themselves in coalitions of living and dead persons.9 these cases suggest that we need to pay more attention to the ways in which states regulate postmortem personhood. the management of death has long been considered a cornerstone of liberal statecraft. the sovereign monopoly over the legitimate use of force is defined by its right to kill (weber 1946), while the necropolitical ability to designate certain populations as not worthy of life is central to the its modern biopolitical management (mbembe 2003). and yet, for all the attention paid to how states facilitate, distribute, and regulate death, the dead themselves have most often been treated as existing beyond the reach of state power (e.g., foucault 2003, 248). to be sure, anthropologists and political theorists have long recognized the importance of commemorating the dead to the formation of collective political identity. and yet, within these accounts the dead remain a medium rather than an object of state power. for instance, katherine verdery’s (1999, 27–28) seminal study of post-soviet exhumations convincingly argues that a corpse’s materiality and shared bodily form make it a particularly powerful symbol during times of political upheaval. yet no sooner does verdery (1999, 29) recognize the symbolic potency of the corpse than she argues that, because “they don’t talk much . . . [w]ords can be put into their mouths” by the living seeking to recruit the dead to help sacralize political projects. here, the dead appear as little more than an empty signifier, there to add affective depth to political projects whose content is always formed elsewhere (see also anderson 1991, 205). this omission appears especially surprising given the history of the modern state’s attempts to manage the dead. the european liberal reforms that created the modern, purportedly universal individual were enacted through both dead and living bodies. coterminous with the legal and disciplinary reforms that produced individuals out of masses, radical changes in burial practices for the first time guaranteed all citizens an individual interment in a demarcated spot, rather than inclusion in a common grave (joyce 2003, 90–91). similarly, colonial officials in africa and the americas understood that remaking indigenous populations into docile subjects required controlling not only the bodies of the living but also the dead as they manifested in funerals, cemeteries, and religious rituals (comaroff and comaroff 1991, 218; lomnitz 2005). this history is mirrored in the writings of contemporary liberal philosophers who argue that, regardless of their ability to exercise postmortem agency, the dead continue to have ongoing interests that require protection (baets 2004; moon 2017).10 my purpose in calling attention to these varied examples is not to claim some inherent political capacity of the dead; just as the government of the living looks different in distinct contexts, so too does the governance of the dead take on a variety of forms. yet the spanish memory movement’s work building recognition of franco’s victims suggests the possibility for a kind of radical politics based on resisting the state’s attempts to manage the dead. abstract four decades after the fall of its dictator, spain still refuses to undertake its legal and moral responsibilities to locate the disappeared. this essay examines how spanish activists use forensic exhumations to transform the political status of franco’s victims. departing from popular and scholarly depictions of forensic science, i show that, in post-fascist spain, the impact of exhumations has little to do with their ability to extract historical information directly from the bones of the exhumed. instead, i argue that exhumations transform the disappeared into dead persons, thereby reincorporating them as integral participants in a democratic public sphere. for memory activists, the project of securing spain’s democratic future depends on recognizing the personhood of long-excluded victims of fascist violence. absent any official legal framework, i show how spanish activists train laypersons to recognize the inherent dignity of the dead and see them as potential participants in an alternative democratic public. [spain; democracy; forensic exhumations; publics; death; forced disappearances; personhood] resumen cuatro décadas después de la caída del dictador francisco franco, españa aún rechaza su responsabilidad legal y moral de localizar a los desaparecidos. este ensayo examina cómo los activistas españoles transforman el estatus político de las víctimas del franquismo a través de las exhumaciones forenses. partiendo de representaciones académicas y populares de la ciencia forense, demuestro que el impacto de las exhumaciones en la españa posfascista tiene poco que ver con la capacidad de extraer los hechos históricos directamente de los huesos exhumados. en lugar de ello, sostengo que los desaparecidos se transforman en personas muertas a través de las exhumaciones y, de esa manera, son reincorporados como participantes integrales en la esfera pública democrática. para los activistas por la memoria, el proyecto de asegurar el futuro democrático de españa depende de que las víctimas de la violencia fascista, excluídas por largo tiempo, sean por fin reconocidas como personas. a falta de marco jurídico, demuestro cómo los activistas españoles entrenan a las personas no expertas a reconocer la dignidad de los muertos y considerarlos como participantes potenciales en una esfera pública democrática y alternativa. [españa; democracia; exhumaciones forenses; lo público; muerte; desaparición forzada; la persona] notes acknowledgments my enormous gratitude to michal ran-rubin, the anonymous reviewers, and chris nelson for their insightful comments on this essay. 1. the ethics of displaying photos of dead bodies in general, and human remains produced through archaeological encounters in particular, has been the subject of much debate (e.g., keith, schwalbe, and silcock 2006; fehrenbach and rodogno 2015). contemporary western cultural norms hold that corpses ought to be shielded from public view (ariès 2008). consequently, the display of the dead body outside of designated medical or funerary spaces is often assumed to be voyeuristic or transgressive. these ethical dilemmas can be particularly fraught within the discipline of anthropology, given the discipline’s contributions to a colonial narco-aesthetics, whether through the conscription of corpses by racist pseudoscience, the display of looted remains and funerary artefacts in museums, or even the display of skeletal artefacts in status-affirming cabinets of curiosity (kakaliouras 2012). while there exists some disagreement within the memory movement over the proper way to display pictures of mass graves that respect the dignity of the dead, spanish memory activists are united in their desire for images of mass graves to circulate as widely as possible. in part, this has to do with their adoption of internationally circulated forensic aesthetics that take visual displays of dead bodies as a touchstone of truth (see keenan and weizman 2012). in the spanish context, the widespread dissemination of images depicting franco’s victims also functions as a critical corrective to a dictatorship that denied the existence of mass graves and a democracy premised on suppressing public representations of these continuing crimes. 2. for some, exhumations provide support for long-marginalized subalterns (sanford 2003). for others, it risks reinscribing state power, either by allowing for a too-hasty reassertion of state authority (wagner 2008, 205) or through an overdetermined framework that naturalizes liberal democracy at the expense of alternative political visions (clarke 2009; scott 2014). regardless of these differences, anthropologists tend to agree that exhumations’ political force derives from their ability to legitimize historical narratives. 3. while some have questioned the use of the term disappeared in the spanish context, due to the historical differences with latin america’s southern cone, where the legal concept originated (e.g., gatti 2014), the united nations has ruled that, given the spanish state’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge the fate of franco’s victims, these acts meet the legal definition of forced disappearance (ferrándiz 2010; rubin 2015a). 4. for several years after the passage of the 2007 law of historical memory, the spain provided limited funding for civil society exhumations. though the policy demonstrates the growing political power of the memory movement, this funding covered only a fraction of the associations’ budget and did not provide a mechanism for the state to take on legal or logistical responsibility for the missing (moreno 2006). 5. due to an approaching thunderstorm, this transcript represents an unusually condensed version of the forensic seminar. i owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to óscar rodríguez for rescuing my field notebook, which i had inadvertently left out in the rain, as i scrambled to cover the excavation with tarps. 6. these organizational differences in part reflect the complicated intersection of various liberal philosophical, legal, and catholic traditions of dignity in both legal and colloquial use of the term within spain. on the varied traditions of the term dignity, see michael rosen (2012). 7. on struggles within spanish constitutional jurisprudence between defining personhood as incorporeal “spiritual and moral value” and personhood as bound to individual physical bodies, see josé enrique mora mateo (2000). 8. reclamar has both colloquial and legal connotations. as such, this comment can be read as a criticism of the ways post-franco governments limited the ability of the dead to access both the public sphere and the legal system. 9. there is nothing inherently progressive about this kind of politics. drew gilpin faust (2008) convincingly shows how the refusal to allow proper burials of confederate war dead following the u.s. civil war led directly to the commemorative efforts that accompanied the establishment of jim crow. on the lasting effects of recruiting the dead to perpetuate racial apartheid in the united states, see mark auslander (2011). 10. my concern is not with the agency of the dead (cf. crossland 2009; rubin 2015b). such questions of individual agency—whether for the living or the dead—prove less relevant to the kinds of mass movements and publics i focus on in this essay. references 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reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.01 framed by freedom framed by freedom: emancipation and oppression in post-fordist thailand claudio sopranzetti university of oxford https://http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6044-9147 freedom is a project . . . flanked by the problem of power on all sides: the power against which it arrays itself as well as the power it must claim to enact itself. —wendy brown seen from above, bangkok resembles an octopus, scarred on its left side by the sinuous bends of the chao praya river and squeezed in the middle, with its tentacles distending sideways. zooming in, the structure of the city starts to break down, and the octopus contorts into cramped and convoluted patterns. long and narrow streets branch out of the major roads and conquer the space between them without connecting. every morning, the city wakes up from these small alleys (soi): the octopus moving the tips of its tentacles. inhabitants and their children flood into the city center, where most of them work but cannot afford to live. small vans, collective taxis, and buses ferry the working class through the complex maze of radial roads and branching streets, all the way to their workplaces. those who have the means take taxis, or their own cars, to the underground or to an elevated mass-transit terminus, and continue their commutes inside air-conditioned trains. people living along the few remaining navigable canals jump on slim longboats and endure the pungent smell of the waterways in exchange for bypassing traffic. nonetheless, even in a city that serves different locations, capacity to pay, and levels of rush with multiple modes of transportation, few of them are able to reach deep into the maze of soi, where most of bangkok’s city dwellers live. mobility inside those alleys—too narrow for buses, vans, and the skytrain, and often clogged with cars—remains largely in the hands of motorcycle taxi drivers who arrive at their street corners every morning, just before the city revives. bangkok is traversed every day by two hundred thousand of these drivers, most of them migrant men from outer provinces. collectively, they operate between four to six million trips per day, roughly ten times the number of trips traveled by bangkok’s subway and skytrain combined.1 perched on their seats, the city keeps moving, even during its infamous traffic jams. while many of the drivers arrived in bangkok with dreams and desires that went beyond allowing its population and commodities to circulate smoothly (sopranzetti 2012), they eventually took up their occupation through personal and collective paths that aligned with those of thai capitalism in the past two decades. most important, the massive layoffs that followed the 1997 crisis (addressed in what follows), combined with a difficult adjustment to the discipline of labor in the factories where many migrants found themselves after having landed in bangkok, compelled them to become drivers. if these causes brought them to the job, ‘itsaraphāp (freedom, independence),2 many of the drivers like to repeat, is what keeps them in this hectic, stressful, and health-threatening occupation. the drivers acknowledge job insecurity and the risks of road accidents, and they often resort to the protection of amulets and magic tattoos (sopranzetti, forthcoming). nonetheless, they insist—as do many other workers in the urban service economy—that the job’s ‘itsaraphāp makes up for the precarity of their labor.3 as yai, the vice president of the association of motorcycle taxis of thailand (amtt) told me, staring into my eyes, “motorcycle taxi drivers die young, but live free.” this article examines the discourse of freedom among the drivers as both an emancipatory and an oppressive force. ‘itsaraphāp, i show, is emerging as a central framework through which to understand life in contemporary thailand. it is by mobilizing this principle that self-employed and precarious workers make sense of and make do with political-economic, social, and conceptual shifts taking place around them by casting themselves as successful migrants, entrepreneurial subjects, and autonomous urban dwellers. in this sense, the drivers adopt ‘itsaraphāp to reconcile their personal desires and aspirations with the changing structural configurations of capital and labor in post-crisis thailand. to show this process, in the first section of this article i focus on the drivers’ experience since the 1997 crisis and their formulation of freedom. in the second section, i show how this formulation relates to larger political-economic shifts in the thai economy toward post-fordism during the past two decades.4 it is only when juxtaposing the two dimensions—that of experience and of political economy—and exploring their entanglements, as i do in the conclusion, that the significance of freedom in contemporary thailand is revealed. toward an anthropology of freedom the paradox of freedom as both an emancipatory and an oppressive force has been extensively studied, both in social theory and in the social sciences. explorations of the role of freedom as a way to accept and often push for deregularization, flexibilization of labor, and precarity—as well as the reduction of civil and political rights—in the contemporary world have been numerous (clarke 2005; peters 2001; rose 1999; roberts 2010). these analyses, however, have largely revolved around two established arguments.5 the first, derived from karl marx’s early writings, poses freedom as a toll of exploitation that displaces structural oppressive forces into the realm of individual decisions. as marx (1975, 232) said in his exploration of the introduction of constitutional rights to liberty, “man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. he was not freed from property; he received freedom to own property. he was not freed from the egoism of business; he received freedom to engage in business.” in the development of this line of thought, freedom becomes a hook that drags people into a false sense of empowerment while interpellating them into accepting and participating in contemporary capitalism or similarly oppressive projects (althusser 1984; santoro 2003; žižek 1989). when applied to the drivers, this reading would see ‘itsaraphāp operating as a mechanism through which they are not freed from their exploitation but rather given the freedom to exploit themselves by becoming their own bosses—entrepreneurial subjects who accept unstable and unsecure employment. the second explanation, deriving from michel foucault’s early writings on disciplinary apparatuses but largely ignoring his later explorations of ethics and techniques of the self, sees freedom as an apparatus that operates by creating its own subjects, “free individuals [who] become governable . . . as normal subjects” (rose 1999, 76). in this view, most notably expressed in the work of nikolas rose, the ethics of freedom has come to provide the ground for our conceptions of how we should be ruled, how our practices of everyday life should be organized, how we should understand ourselves and our predicament—in other words, for our conduct of conduct. in this sense, rose (1999, 87) argues, “modern individuals are not merely ‘free to choose,’ but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice.” both of these approaches, while invaluable in positioning subjects in relation to capitalism, disciplinary apparatuses, and discursive imaginaries, miss the aspirational, affective, and personal dimensions of adopting freedom as an organizing principle that sustains conscious decisions to accept new forms of precarity, or stubborn refusals to do so. these explanations, in short, miss one basic question, namely: why do people accept and at times resist both this hegemonic discourse and its material consequences? the vocabularies of receiving freedom or being obliged to be free reduce the mechanisms of consent to brainwashing—false consciousness—or brain-shaping under the rubric of subject formation.6 in so doing, these approaches present passive subjects and dismiss their ability to understand the paradoxical nature of the political-economic and hegemonic processes, while also deciding to take part in them.7 this reduction, i argue, has largely derived from an analytic mistake, one that anthropology is particularly well suited to reveal and correct. both analyses implicitly compare, and ultimately conflate, whichever local and contextual use of freedom they encounter in the real world with an abstract, absolute, and universal conception of freedom—with a capital f—as something obtained and not given or obliged to exercise. as a result, they always find the former lacking when compared with the latter, and cast passive subjects to explain and justify the gap between the two. in other words, both arguments ignore the core lesson of anthropology: context matters. nonetheless, while our discipline would seem to have a lot to contribute to this debate, it “has [historically] had strikingly little to say [about freedom]” (laidlaw 2002, 311). partly, this results from the fact that anthropologists have been as guilty as other social scientists of turning their attention—however critical—to freedom with a capital f. as a discipline, we have pointed out its analytical shortcomings and unmasked its universalist, normative, and elitist nature (bidney 1963; mahmood 2005); we have revealed its grounding in protestant and western modernity (keane 2007; asad 2003) and its centrality to colonial and postcolonial governance (van der veer 2001; viswanathan 1998). in the process, however, we have too often turned our attention away from what i call freedom with a small f, away from the contextual understandings of freedom that we encounter in our ethnographic engagements. these freedoms are not predicated on a metaphysical and ahistorical ideal, but always develop against a local experience of unfreedom and are therefore much more entangled in the complexity of people’s experiences and political-economic transformations. recently, under the rubric of the anthropology of ethics, a number of authors have argued for a limited, qualified, and restricted understanding of freedom (fassin 2014; faubion 2011; laidlaw 2013). building on the late foucault’s explorations of freedom as a necessary condition of ethical practice (foucault 1997, 283; 1984c, 245), rather than on his analysis of disciplinary power, they have pointed out that degrees of freedom—understood as the capacity to exercise choice and pursue alternatives—are always situated in an existing field of power relations and have called for an investigation of “how freedom is exercised in different social contexts and cultural traditions” (laidlaw 2002, 311). while resonating with my own argument, their engagements have largely remained at the analytical level. as a result, they have stopped short of exploring local conceptions of freedom ethnographically and revealing how they operate as systems of value, objects of reflection, and compasses that orient people’s lives,8 not just in relation to local moral worlds (kleinman and kleinman 1996) but also to political-economic restructurings. in this sense, our disciplinary engagements with freedom have yet fully to live up to our epistemological strengths, those of considering our informants as themselves social theorists and adopting their contextual use of freedom to recalibrate our own social theories, rather than the other way round. in this article, i propose to do just that. in the traditional ethnographic manner i take the drivers’ claims to ‘itsaraphāp seriously9—not as a product of brainwashing or brain-shaping—and ask: what do these migrants mean by freedom? why have they decided to leave formal jobs in factories for the supposedly free life of job insecurity? how does this claim relate to changes in political-economic relations since the 1997 crisis? finally, what can we learn about contemporary capitalism in and beyond thailand by exploring how the ‘itsaraphāp simultaneously operates as an emancipatory and an oppressive construct? tales of freed men adun was born in a small village in the northeastern province of udon thani, some fifty miles from the laotian border. he arrived in bangkok in 1979, at the age of fifteen. adun spent his first month in the city walking to his job in a small shoe shop. as soon as he saved up a few hundred baht, he went back to the village, homesick. desires for a stable income and a different life, however, quickly brought him back to bangkok. he worked in jewelry-polishing, construction, and furniture-making, only to land by the mid-1990s in a small chemical factory. in the seasonal trips back to his village, adun got married, had children, but never moved his family to bangkok, because of the high material and emotional costs of raising his kids away from land, family, and the village school. after a few years in bangkok, adun got to know a group of motorcycle taxi drivers from his province who operated close to his factory. saving up a little money, he bought a battered motorcycle and started to drive after his work hours. it was not until 1998, when he lost his job as a result of the financial crisis, that adun turned his after-hours job into a full-time occupation. after the crisis and years of economic stagnation, the new job allowed him a renewed freedom. he had no boss to order him around and the opportunity to go back home whenever he wanted, without having to ask anyone or lose face with a refusal. on these trips adun, like many other drivers, was able to reclaim what he saw as his central role as a man in the economic and social life of his family and village, a role that he had lost during his years working in a factory. adun was outspoken about the importance of ‘itsaraphāp to his personal choices. sitting at his street corner, he told me: “my family and i are happy with this job. it is a free life. you can come and go from home anytime. you can get money fast, every day, without waiting for the salary. i have ‘itsaraphāp.” “what is this ‘itsaraphāp?” i asked. adun responded: i can go home whenever i want. i don’t have to take leave. don’t have to ask anyone. i don’t have to come to work. i can remain home if i get sick or get drunk. if i earn enough money for the day and i want to go home to sleep, i can do that. this is ‘itsaraphāp. i used to work for a company, i went home often and i was never promoted. i have to go back home to the village regularly: my family is there, my farm is there . . . . i like my job because it is a free job. they offered to take me back in the company i used to work for, but that job in bangkok is bad for a countryman like me. the boss always looks down on you, always orders you around, always insults you. the last place i worked, the boss’s son kept insulting me, shouting at me: a twenty-year-old kid with no experience, just out of university. i could not accept that. so i am happy now; i am my own boss. the idea of being one’s own boss also kept boon, another driver, in this profession, even though his life was less connected to the village in which he grew up. boon moved to bangkok from an uncharacteristically prosperous cluster of villages in northeastern thailand. the area was selected in the 1990s for a pilot agricultural project to expand rubber farming beyond southern thailand, where the bulk of its production took place. the results were, at least at the time of my research, remarkable.10 each house had a pickup truck parked outside, roads were paved, the village school had a computer room, and a steady flow of returnees from bangkok were joining the remunerative agricultural business. boon was not, and would not be, among them. boon had moved to bangkok in the 1980s looking, like thousands of other migrants from the impoverished northeast, for a good income, entertainment and adventure (pai thīeo), and a modern life (chīwitbæpthansamai) (pattana 2006; walker 2012; mills 1997). after the plantations were introduced in his village, the modern technology of rubber production cut him off from home. during the family’s first harvest, boon discovered he was allergic to the chemicals used to transform latex into rubber, and from then on he visited only occasionally and accepted he could never work there. similarly to adun’s, boon’s life in bangkok was a sequence of low-paid jobs, some of them decent and some remembered with contempt, which came to an abrupt end with the 1997 crisis, when he was laid off. unable to go back to his village, boon bought a bike and became a driver. income was not a central concern to boon, as a share of the family farm ensured him a regular cash flow. nor, it seemed, was personal safety, as testified by his upper body, scarred by the signs of multiple road accidents, which shattered his forearm bones and left his right arm slightly bent, unable to extend fully. but boon was a prideful man, and the ‘itsaraphāp offered by his new occupation proved central to keeping him in this line of business. “i never liked to follow orders,” he told me, sitting on his bike, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “i came to bangkok to have my own life, and i found myself sitting at a table, fixing electric components or sewing bags. now i have a free life [‘āchīp‘itsara]; i come to work whenever i want, i leave whenever i need.” “but you always stay until night,” i responded. “i see you here every morning until sundown; you work more than in a factory.” “yes, maybe,” he interrupted, “but it’s my own decision.” similar exchanges were repeated, with minimal variations, hundreds of times during the course of my research. through the idiom of ‘itsaraphāp, the drivers claimed their human and economic independence from the crushing machine of mass production and its organization of labor, as well as—at least for drivers who traveled back home—a renewed form of participation in the economic and emotional life of their villages. if the language of adventure and modernity had directed internal migration and permanence into the industrial and service economy, as boon mentioned and as mary beth mills’s (1999) work among female migrants has analyzed in detail, by the time of my fieldwork in the early 2010s, the idiom of ‘itsaraphāp had taken over, at least among workers who were pushed off of the factory floor and joined the booming flexible service economy.11 to understand the role of ‘itsaraphāp in the drivers’ professional decisions following the 1997 crisis, therefore, it is fundamental to dissect how the word is used in thai, as well as the meaning it acquired for workers like adun and boon after the crash. composed by ‘itsara (to be free, independent) and phāp (vision, image), the word ‘itsaraphāp started to be used at the end of the nineteenth century in relation to the colonial encounter. the word was interchangeable with sovereignty and referred to collective entities, dominating the debates over the abolition of slavery in the country in 1905 and the siamese risks of colonial subjugation. it was only between the 1920s and the 1930s that ‘itsaraphāp assumed its individual connotations, as western-educated siamese elites diffused the idea of individual free will against the authority of the sovereign, initiating a debate that would bring the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 (aphornsuvan 1998). thus understood, the word acquired its contemporary use and carried strong individual connotations of self-reliance and sovereignty over oneself. adun’s and boon’s depiction of ‘itsaraphāp retains this meaning, and does so in a double sense. on the one hand, they conceive of it as a form of autonomy from the factory discipline of labor that infantilized, dehumanized, and forced them to subordinate their working hours and participation in family and agricultural life to the whims of their bosses. on the other hand, they talk about the freedom to go back home whenever they want, to organize their own schedules, and ultimately to be their “own bosses” and make their “own decisions.” this duality echoes the british philosopher isaiah berlin’s (1969) double understanding of freedom as positive and negative.12 it is in this double territory of positive freedom (as freedom to) and negative freedom (freedom from) that the drivers sustain their commitment to their occupation. to begin to understand why the ‘itsaraphāp of precarious employment becomes attractive to them, therefore, we need to investigate not only the drivers’ everyday life and aspirations but also the political-economic conditions under which this precarious, insecure, and unstable job has become a synonym of freedom. adun and boon, like many other drivers, moved to bangkok from villages where occasional and sporadic wage labor complemented regular yet seasonal work in the fields. their activities in the village—whether as wage or agricultural labor—were organized according to social hierarchies and relations that went beyond the factory-floor division of labor. back home, age, family relations, expertise, and status provided a hierarchy in and beyond labor processes, which appeared to them more transparent and navigable, compared to the division of labor in the factories where they landed once in the city. this does not mean that the village offered some mythological and precapitalist space of free and equitable production—much as the drivers, as well as the larger dominant discourses in thai society, often nostalgically seem to imply (dayley 2011). nor does it mean that economic class, bureaucratic titles, and social capital played no role in the village. rather, and more concretely, all these social relations and interactions in the village preceded and extended beyond the labor transaction. as a result, disciplining labor could not take the form of direct and frontal dismissal, attack, or scolding, or at least not without the risk of jeopardizing social standing, for both the employer and the employee. very different is the matter in the anonymity of urban industrial production. here both the actors involved have nothing at stake in the preservation of a good relationship with any specific worker or employer beyond keeping their working arrangement. to use marxist terms, labor in the city has been abstracted. while this configuration offers a respite from the expectations of the localized and intimate social hierarchies that orient labor in the village, it also creates a space in which disdain, scorn, and open derision—forms of engagement considered extremely offensive in thailand (persons 2016)—color the relations between workers and employers. to make things worse for rural migrants, a deeply rooted urban bias against them often orients these already uneven interactions in urban factories. in particular, the discourses of the backward and stupid villager (chāo bān) provide a framework inside which the relation between urban employers and rural employees is understood and experienced. a failure to adjust to the factory’s organization of labor is accepted, justified, or exacerbated through this lens by migrant workers and urban employers alike. this failure, when it occurs, is often framed in a dehumanizing language, which compares migrants to water buffalos (khwāi), quintessentially stubborn and stupid animals—another unacceptable offense. in this context, adun’s and boon’s occupation as motorcycle taxi drivers, even if taken up as a result of post-crisis layoffs, offers a step away from the system of control and discrimination experienced on the factory floor. in their words, being a motorcycle taxi driver provides ‘itsaraphāp from such forms of discipline and stigma, but it also configures a positive freedom or ‘itsaraphāp to. adun views positive freedom as entailing two levels: first, the freedom to decide if and when to go to work, and therefore to claim ownership over his own life, income, and daily rhythms; second, the freedom to leave the city and go back to his village, where his family resides and where their fields are, whenever he wants or needs to. both of these forms of freedom are presented as emancipatory forces that enable him to live a less alienated life. in the first case, it amounts to the exercise of a refusal of alienated labor on the factory floor and a reclaiming of control over his own body and time; in the second, to the practical realization of the demand to participate in family and village life and to pursue alternatives threatened by regional migration and the urban organization of labor (rigg et al. 2008). ‘itsaraphāp, as boon and adun conceive it, operates on a personal level as a construct that helps them make sense of their labor trajectories, as well as claim pride in and agency over their lives. its role, however, does not stop at the personal and experiential level. as william roseberry (1994, 361) has argued, similar hegemonic constructs generate “not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination.” in other words, ‘itsaraphāp not only becomes a framework for making sense of their new lives as an experience of emancipation but also provides a framework for making do with new forms of domination and the increasingly precarious lives generated by the post-crisis restructuring of thai capitalism. ‘itsaraphāp, therefore, not only operates on the personal level i have so far analyzed but also functions at a collective and structural one, as a way to push an increasing number of unnecessary industrial laborers toward more precarious forms of employment, such as driving motorcycle taxis. focusing our attention only on the first level, therefore, would mean seeing these individual stories as plots of land but failing to grasp the larger landscape in which they are located and by which they are shaped. until now i have focused only on adun’s and boon’s plots and explored the role of ‘itsaraphāp in organizing them. in the following sections, i place them into the larger landscape of shifting relations between labor and capital in thailand since 1997, away from industrial production, unionized labor, and collective bargaining toward flexible accumulation, entrepreneurship, and precarity (sauwalak 2002; hewison and tularak 2013). freedom as post-fordist hegemony in the late 1980s and early 1990s, southeast asian economies experienced a period of unprecedented growth, led by a massive influx of foreign capital and a realignment of national economies toward export-oriented industrialization. between 1986 and 1996, thailand’s gdp grew faster than in any other nation of the world, 9.5 percent per year. this unprecedented growth came to a halt in 1997. on may 14 and 15, 1997, the thai baht was hit by speculative attacks, driven by the ease with which capital moved in and out of the country and the increasing instability of the national economy. this was the spark that ignited the asian financial crisis. in a few days, the thai currency lost more than half of its value. suddenly most thai companies that had borrowed in foreign currencies saw their debt burden doubled and went into bankruptcy, provoking an estimated two million layoffs in finance, real estate, industry, and construction (pasuk and baker 1998). migrant workers reacted either by returning to agricultural land, which had traditionally offered a security net in times of economic recession, or by entering the swelling informal economy. the growth in the ranks of motorcycle taxis after the crisis was stark, even at a time when the city was getting smaller because of the departures of many laid-off workers. in 1994, bangkok was home to an estimated 37,500 drivers. by 2003, their numbers had expanded almost threefold, to 109,056.13 more broadly, thai capital shifted toward flexible accumulation, a regime that pushed “flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets, products, and patterns of consumption . . . characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial and business services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological and organizational innovation” (harvey 1990, 1). following the crisis, the thai economy began to move away from the centrality of industrial production, collective bargaining, and the support of workers’ buying power through rising salaries rather than the welfare provisions that had characterized thai fordism. as a result, it shifted toward a post-fordist configuration dominated by flexible labor based on risk-taking entrepreneurialism, easier access to debt, and more precarious lives, even if in the context of an expansion of state-run welfare policies.14 for millions of workers, this meant the reduction of fixed contracts and the expansion of occupations not protected by any form of labor rights or collective bargaining (warr 2005; pasuk and baker 2008). ‘itsaraphāp played a central role in providing a “meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon” (roseberry 1994, 361) this flexibilization of labor, self-employment, and its growing insecurity. it made precarity not only acceptable and bearable to workers, including motorcycle taxi drivers, but in fact desirable. this does not mean that ‘itsaraphāp operated solely as a bait into post-fordist capitalism. rather, for the drivers and millions of other workers, freedom supported their emancipation from the factory discipline of labor and its limited mobility, but also framed new oppressive structures. this occurred not despite the real advantages that the new configuration offered, but precisely because of them. the framework of ‘itsaraphāp became dominant not because it duped these workers or obliged them to conform to it, but because it connected the requirements of post-fordist restructuring with the everyday desires and aspirations of its increasingly precarious workers, who wanted to define themselves in opposition to the factory discipline of labor they had experienced before the crisis. in this sense, it is always—as raymond williams (1977) has stressed—an alignment between people’s agency, desires, previous experiences, and existing possibilities that pulls them into hegemonic consent, and not passive understandings of false consciousness or subjugation. this dynamic is by no means peculiar to motorcycle taxi drivers or to thailand, even though its specific configurations are. many have accepted self-employment and flexible labor as a recovered independence from the tyranny and dullness of fixed-schedule jobs, only to find themselves outside the protective net of collective bargaining and permanent jobs. have they acquired renewed freedom by becoming their own bosses and being able to mold their working hours to family arrangements or personal preferences? most definitely. have they, at the same time, accepted a retreat of both government and employers from providing basic services and securities? absolutely. how is this paradox possible? and, more to the point, does this acceptance mean they were passively given freedom or obliged to be free? the work of antonio gramsci helps us to answer these questions and to understand the daunting tensions they suggest. in his prison writings on italian history, gramsci (1971) clarifies how hegemony and control sustain each other and how an emancipating personal discourse—such as that of ‘itsaraphāp as voiced by adun and boon—can also sustain an oppressive form of hegemony. this is as much the case with fascism, the implicit reference of gramsci’s analysis, as it is with post-fordism in thailand. the italian workers who supported mussolini, to whom gramsci hints between the lines of his heavily controlled prison notebooks, were not gullible passive agents, tricked into false consciousness. neither, for their part, are the drivers who willingly accept reduced job security and limited social services. rather, as gavin smith (2004, 99–100) has pointed out, “the epistemological bedrock of the ideas contained in the notion of hegemony rejects the possibility of the social person as object, passive recipient, or cultural dupe, just as it minimizes the moments when consciousness can be false.” starting from this bedrock, gramsci (1971, 12) elucidates how control over social groups takes two forms: domination and hegemony. while the first is obtained through the coercive organs of the state, the second entails an “intellectual and moral leadership” exercised through civil society—a composition of educational, religious, and associational institutions. this second form of submission operates through the “spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group, consent ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and therefore by the trust) accruing to the dominant group.” while until now i have shown what this spontaneous consent is based on among motorcycle taxi drivers in thailand, i will now turn toward an analysis of how the hegemony of ‘itsaraphāp emerged after the 1997 crisis and, to go back to the question i started with, why people accepted it. a brief history of post-fordist ‘itsaraphāp in the first few years after the 1997 economic collapse, thailand followed the international monetary fund’s (imf) gospel of structural readjustment. the country opened to foreign investors, cut government spending—in particular, spending on social services—and deregulated its labor and financial markets. the plan ensured that foreign lenders would be repaid, but it proved disastrous for the country and its economic sovereignty. the national gdp fell by 7.9 percent in 1997, 12.3 percent in 1998, and 7 percent in the first half of 1999. by 2000, three years after the crisis, thailand was still in recession, while malaysia, ignoring the imf’s suggestions, was in full recovery (stiglitz 2002). in thailand, the crisis became known as wikrit imf (imf crisis) and was understood to have neoliberal policies as its source. the country, therefore, called for solutions that kept their distance from a classic neoliberal agenda. thaksin shinawatra—a billionaire who made his money in telecommunications—was elected prime minister in 2001 and pushed for a significant expansion of the state’s role in promoting economic growth and managing its social consequences, against the imf’s prescriptions. at the core of thaksin’s vision was a post-fordist flexibilization of labor, the application of the logic of management to public administration, and a redefining of citizens as entrepreneurs. this meant providing them with access to credit, both as a way of freeing up their economic activities and supporting their consumption, as well as pushing for an expansion of state interventions in the national economy—not the shrinking theorized by the imf. his recipe revolved around five main policies that were implemented during the first six months of his premiership: a rural debt moratorium, a village and urban community revolving fund, the creation of the people’s bank, the one tambon (district), one product scheme, and universal health-care coverage.15 overall, this system was aimed at fostering universal participation in capitalism by making small businesses and low-income people into free entrepreneurs—a classic neoliberal project—but it did so by expanding welfare provisions to protect these entrepreneurs from unexpected difficulties, in particular health expenses and outstanding debts. the idea of turning workers into free entrepreneurs became the new organizing principle of contemporary thailand, a set of material and symbolic provisions that emerged under thaksin’s premiership but survived its deposition in 2006 by a military coup. even though military officers, royalist forces, and fiscal conservatives have attempted in the past decade to shift this approach, time and again electoral masses have thrown their support behind it. the aim of these provisions, in thaksin’s words, was to create “a new class of entrepreneurs who could marry local skills with international technology and hence move up the value chain” (pasuk and baker 2002, 3). among these new entrepreneurs, thaksin liked to repeat, were motorcycle taxi drivers: a new free labor force that decided to leave behind the shackles of dependent occupation to enter the brand-new world of self-employment and entrepreneurship. this “liberal reason”—as michel foucault (2008, 69) has pointed out—“must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats.” thailand was no exception. first, by becoming their own bosses, the drivers also became their own exploiters and, as both entrepreneurs and workers, they morphed exploitation into forms of sacrifice to build their own capital, investing in themselves. second, as thaksin ostensibly freed entrepreneurial forces from the binds of the fordist discipline of labor, he also proceeded to control their flows, effectively posing limits on their free entrepreneurship. in 2003, two years into his first premiership, thaksin registered, archived, and controlled the drivers’ operations. like many state institutions that advance deregulation and free markets as they tighten control on their borders and strengthen their intelligence apparatus to spy on their own citizens, the thai government pushed its workers toward free and flexible forms of labour while registering and making them more visible and controllable. the registration of motorcycle taxis constituted a central piece in a larger government campaign, known as the “war on dark influence” (‘itthiphon mū’t). this formulation pointed to a variety of interventions that attempted to bring different sectors of the illegal economy—from logging to prostitution, from underground lotto to motorcycle taxi operations—under the administrative and economic control of the government, include them in the formal market, and provide assistance to its entrepreneurs. more broadly, this campaign represented a litmus test for the new approach to low-income economic actors proposed by thaksin. in his vision, their entrepreneurship had been constrained by a lack of state services and access to credit for too long. it was now time to free their capitalist acumen, but only inside the control of a strong state able to see, control, and ultimately tax.16 motorcycle taxis became the showcases of this new approach. on may 20, 2003, thaksin initiated a registration of operating drivers with their district offices, and by late august, district offices in bangkok distributed new vests to the drivers, which would operate as personal licenses and, at least in theory, as collateral. now the drivers were free entrepreneurs, but only insofar as they were framed by a new system of registration and control, allowing the state to monitor their location, take away their licenses in the case of accidents or drunk driving, and keep their numbers stable. boon was very much aware of this paradox and still refuses to this day to put on one of the government’s official vests and register with the local administration. “i chose this job because it gave me ‘itsaraphāp, and i am not going to give them my name and location to be under government control,” he told me. boon’s adamant reaction, however, was just a drop in the sea. most of the drivers accepted the registration as recognition of their roles as significant actors in the life of the city, stakeholders in the thai state, as well as as free entrepreneurs, rather than as good-for-nothing, lazy country bumpkins. on the whole, the emergent discourse of free entrepreneurship, the drivers’ participation in it, the establishment of new systems of control, and the precaritization of their lives reveals the complex role of ‘itsaraphāp in post-fordist thailand as both personally emancipating and structurally oppressive. on the one hand, the vision of drivers as entrepreneurs depoliticized exploitation, job insecurity, and social inequality by reframing them as individual successes or failures based on effective decisions, rather than on structural relations. on the other hand, it provided the drivers with recognition, pride, and a sense of dignity in their decision to escape the industrial discipline of labor and become their own bosses, as voiced by adun and boon. conclusion the analysis of the drivers’ emancipatory experiences of ‘itsaraphāp and its relation to oppressive capitalist restructuring in thailand since the 1997 crisis has brought us to two central paradoxes. first, the paradox of using freedom to motivate the acceptance of precarious labor arrangements. second, the paradox of unleashing free entrepreneurship only to enforce more stringent state control. these two paradoxes are by no means exclusive to motorcycle taxi drivers in bangkok or even to migrant workers in thailand. they, in fact, echo existing ethnographic engagements with entrepreneurship, precarity, and late capitalism globally (ferguson 2006, 2010; elyachar 2012; li 2007; ong 2006; slocum 2006; comaroff and comaroff 2001; muehlebach 2012). these echoes are deliberate and, while they cannot be further explored in the context of this article, provide a backdrop and an implicit comparison to my argument.17 even though they take specific forms in different contexts, these apparent contradictions largely revolve around allowing free flows and activities only insofar as they can be transformed into legible aggregate flows, and externalizing social relations—such as exploitation or job security—to individual entrepreneurship by fostering individual freedom. these paradoxes lie at the core of the question that directed my investigation, namely, why people consent to their roles within hegemonic systems—be they nation-states, dictatorships, or capitalist structures. as i have argued, orthodox marxism solved these paradoxes through the idea of false consciousness, and certain strains of poststructuralism through an analysis of the roles of discipline and subjugation in exercising power. both attempt to give a general answer to a question that, as i have tried to show, requires contextual analysis and responses. once we abandon this generality, we can provide an answer that does not entail an account of people being duped. moreover, we reveal these paradoxes not as contradictions that challenge capitalism but as generative forces that, on the contrary, sustain this system by offering significant emancipatory possibilities while framing new forms of oppression. in this sense, capitalism—here in its specific post-fordist forms it has taken in contemporary thailand—proves to operate, like electricity, by creating opposite magnetic poles (freedom and control; emancipation and oppression) and harnessing energy from their tension, rather than crumbling under the resulting contradictions.18 the paradoxes i have pointed out constitute two of the many ways in which these tensions are created in contemporary thailand. let me address the second paradox, that between the growth of free enterprise and tighter control over its activities—which is the contextual declension of a larger paradox between free markets and the expansion of state control and repression. presenting states and markets as in opposition to one another has been one of the main myths told by apologists of neoliberalism, one taken at face value by many scholars (e.g., ong 2006; boyer and drache 1996).19 however, as karl polanyi (1944) has argued and the 2008 bailouts revealed most strikingly, markets are not architectonic; they need states to create, preserve, and manage them. as a consequence, “under capitalism the impetus to increase productivity generates a tension having to do with the enhancement of the creative potential of people and its harnessing with an enclosure that captures the value that results and directs it back toward capital” (smith 2011, 24). in other words, free markets need tight state interventions to direct flows, without which their fruits are of no use. this was certainly true in the case of motorcycle taxis in thailand, where the new entrepreneurship of the drivers needed state control and visibility to flourish and be aggregated and harnessed into significant economic forces. the same generative tension lies at the core of the two uses of ‘itsaraphāp as workers’ emancipation from labor discipline and as oppressive justification for labor restructuring. at first glance, the contradiction seems irreconcilable. this, however, holds true only if we understand freedom with a capital f, a universal and absolute category that stands in opposition to control, as its archenemy and not its ally. in this view, any form of freedom that does not achieve decontextualized liberation remains incomplete and does not deserve the name. this vision limits our ability to understand the drivers’ attitudes, as well as those of millions of workers around the world, basically pronouncing them unable to understand their own situations. on the contrary, as wendy brown (1995, 6) has argued, “freedom is neither a philosophical absolute nor a tangible entity but a relational and contextual practice that takes shape in opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as un-freedom.” for the drivers, the fordist disciplining of labor was, around the time of the crisis, the epitome of unfreedom, an oppressive system that limited their mobility, controlled their time, and broke their spirit. post-fordist ‘itsaraphāp offered a way out of that, attractive even as it constructed new limitations around them. if we abandon the abstract idea of freedom, the answer to the question with which i began this article—why do people accept being part of hegemonic systems or being interpellated in them—is quite simple. it is because they understand freedom, emancipation, and oppression as contextual practices and processes. as a result, the personal freedoms obtained by moving toward self-employment are not illusory and do make a difference in the drivers’ lives, freeing them from degrading labor conditions on the factory floor and allowing them to work in the city without cutting themselves off from life in their villages. being their own bosses and being able to participate in agricultural life, therefore, constitutes emancipation, at least from the fordist disciplining of labor. at the same time, this new freedom also frames new forms of oppression—of which the drivers are both aware and against which they often mobilize (sopranzetti 2014)—that keep them in a precarious occupation under increasing state control. in this sense, the drivers, like the rest of us, always navigate between double binds, limited by our own frameworks but also freed by them, claiming a freedom that is both an emancipatory demand for activities outside the dictates of our present oppression and the raw material of a new one. freedom is emancipation and oppression all the way down, but each specific configuration frames the reality of our social life, offers a horizon of emancipation from the previous level, and shapes the oppression of the present one. notes acknowledgments i thank anand vaidya, eli elinoff, lizzie presser, david gellner and michael herzfeld for reading multiple versions of this article and making it better at each turn. the three anonymous reviewers contributed greatly to the development of this piece, which could not exist in the present form without the careful assistance and engagement of james faubion. 1. these numbers are an estimate, generated in collaboration with the association of motorcycle taxis of thailand. 2. this article follows the american library association/library of congress (ala-lc) system of romanization, which uses diacritics to mark length of vowels rather than tones, leaving tones unmarked. 3. anthropological engagements with precarity have mostly emerged in the context of retreating welfare states (molé 2013; allison 2012; muehlebach 2013). as a result, their definition of precarity has taken a specific form of precaritization—the retreat of welfare states—and expanded it to define much larger trends in contemporary capitalism (kalleberg and hewison 2013; lee and kofman 2012). while some scholars have argued for the use of the concept exclusively in these contexts (neilson and rossiter 2008), i take the opposite view and argue for its relevance to contemporary thailand. the concept has been adopted recently by a few anthropologists of thailand (endo 2014; johnson 2012), but without defining its meaning in a country in which the welfare state has been expanding in the past decades, rather than contracting. to exit this impasse, i here define precarity as an experience created by a variety of forms of unstable, flexible, unbounded, and individualized employment, one only marginally protected by social benefits, legal provisions, or collective bargaining. these include the informalization of labor, seasonal and temporary employment, homework, flex and temp work, subcontracting, freelancing, and self-employment. while this status emerges out of labor arrangements, the conditions they generate go well beyond the sphere of employment and extend their characteristics of instability, flexibility, and individualization to subjectivities, social relations, and imaginaries of the future. 4. here, fordism describes an alignment between the form of the organization of labor based on mass-serialized production and a compromise between labor and capital—predicated on transforming workers into consumers through salaries, which dominated thai capitalism from the 1980s to 1997. in euro-america, this alignment is often conflated with keynesian anticyclical welfare programs that emerged there—but not in thailand—in relation to fordism. acknowledging the different histories in relation to social welfare and the state’s economic planning, i define the contemporary shift in thailand as post-fordist and not neoliberal. the neoliberal doctrine emerged—in the words of its founding fathers in the mont pèlerin society—to find a middle path between keynesian state planning and adam smith’s liberal market (burgin 2012). as a dominant political project—one that advocated for market liberalization, cuts in labor rights, reduction to income taxes for the wealthy, and the retreat of the welfare state—neoliberalism emerged in the 1980s under the governments of ronald reagan and margaret thatcher. ignoring its contextual history, the label of neoliberalism has been projected onto the rest of the world, often with little analytical rigor (see ferguson 2010). in this reading, any restructuring of relations of production, labor practices, and national policies is seen as a sign of neoliberalism, even in countries like thailand, where the state has been expanding its planning presence in the economy and introducing unprecedented welfare schemes. refusing this oversimplification, i prefer to focus on post-fordism, a system that does not configure specific relations between states and capital, or to the retreat of the welfare state, but rather reorganizes the relations between capital and labor away from mass-serialized production and raising workers’ buying power through salaries, as has been happening in thailand since 2001, even as the welfare state has expanded. 5. these are obviously ideal types of existing arguments, presented in their most extreme versions, which may not be fully endorsed by most, or even any, of their proponents. exaggerating their characteristics, however, helps us to reveal the existing spectrum of explanations and, in so doing, to shed light on underexplored alternative routes. 6. a significant body of literature that questions these two views by focusing on local desires among postpeasants is emerging in southeast asia, specifically in relation to shifting logics of capital (walker 2012; sopranzetti 2012; high 2014; li 2014). the present article is an attempt to expand these approaches to a study of freedom in thailand. 7. i am here referring to a specific—and possibly incorrect—understanding of subject formation and freedom. as james faubion has shown, foucault himself pointed out the fallacious nature of this passive understanding of subject formation in the later part of his life. for foucault, “ethical practice proceeds after all in the middle voice, actively and passively often at one and the same time” (faubion 2011, 50). in this sense, foucault (1997, 1984a, 1984b), while acknowledging his role in allowing this misunderstanding to emerge, showed how subjects are neither unfree to participate in their formation nor fully at liberty to invent their own techniques of the self. 8. for exceptions, see riesman 1977, slocum 2006, and englund 2006. 9. in doing this, i make no claims of moving away from the realm of epistemology and, somehow, elevating myself to a study of ontologies. i am dealing with how people make sense of and make do with realities around them, not with a hard-to-defend claim of gaining access to some ontological dimension of radical alterity (see graeber 2015). 10. the global price of rubber has since plummeted. 11. maureen hickey (2010, 146) has pointed out the emergence of the discourse of ‘itsara in her study of cab drivers in bangkok and argued that after the crisis, the traditional thai conception of ‘itsara, “stressing free will and responsibility for one’s actions, has been reworked to reflect the neoliberal ideals of the autonomous individual and rational economic actor.” despite her laudable attempt to connect conceptions of personal freedom with larger economic, social, and political restructurings, her reading—following an argument proposed by nikolas rose—concludes that freedom is reworked from an emancipating force to an oppressive one, one in which subjects are obliged to take part. 12. for an extensive analysis of the centrality of berlin’s liberal conception of freedom, see laidlaw 2013. 13. these numbers come from unpublished data on motorcycles registered for public use, which i obtained from the ministry of land transportation. 14. in my book manuscript, i analyze the characteristics of this expansion of the welfare state in detail (sopranzetti, forthcoming). suffice it to say here that welfare provisions established since 2003 were not fordist/keynesian anticyclical interventions aimed at supporting workers in their unproductive phases, but rather represented a schumpeterian welfare state that supported already productive forces and fostered their entrepreneurialism. 15. the debt moratorium allowed farmers to postpone their repayments to the bank for agriculture and agricultural cooperatives, while the revolving fund for villages or urban communities provided cheap loans, promoted local community-building, and stimulated the entry of farmers and the urban poor into the capitalist economy. the people’s bank funded low-income people to invest in microbusinesses, while the one tambon, one product scheme provided government-led guidance to such microbusinesses. under this policy, the state offered local districts technical support to choose a specific product or service typical of their area and develop its production and marketing, with the purpose of making it attractive to international markets. finally, and most successfully, the universal health-care system, popularly known as the “thirty-baht scheme,” provided lower-income citizens with affordable health assistance. 16. this idea was predicated on the theories of the peruvian economist hernando de soto, which were introduced to thaksin by president bill clinton. 17. in my forthcoming monograph (sopranzetti, forthcoming), i explore more fully the role of these paradoxes in contemporary thai capitalism. 18. however, most contemporary marxists have failed to accept that the contradictions they rightfully describe, rather than weakening capital, have become its central strengths, allowing the system to constantly renew itself. 19. aiwa ong’s (2006, 6) definition of neoliberalism offers a prime example of this analytical slippage. according to ong, neoliberalism is “(a) a claim that the market is better than the state at distributing public resources and (b) a return to a primitive form of 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oxford university press. žižek, slavoj 1989 the sublime object of ideology. new york: verso. remains of the future remains of the future: rethinking the space and time of ruination through the volta resettlement project, ghana thomas yarrow durham university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1863-3909 walking around the township of new senchi, ghana, the ghost of the original plan is still faintly discernible in linear rows of crumbling, single-story houses.1 constructed to resettle people displaced by a large hydroelectric power scheme in the 1960s, the town was at the vanguard of postindependence visions of national development and embodied the high-modern aspirations of the time (see j. scott 1998). original plans show the spatial zoning of industrial and residential use. architects’ drawings depict rows of bungalows fronted by manicured lawns and fringed by neatly clipped hedges. artists’ impressions of interiors show flushing toilets and modern kitchens. i am accompanied by eric, an unemployed primary-school teacher in his early thirties. although born after the 1960s, he has a vivid sense of the project’s promised futures and describes these as we walk: officials told resettlers that well-paid jobs would be created through the industries that would develop, catalyzed by the cheap and plentiful power supplied by the nearby akosombo dam; subsistence farming would be transformed through mechanization and industrialization; infrastructure—including railways, paved roads, and a nearby airport—would be built. figure 1. artist’s impression of a resettlement core house, circa 1965. reproduced from the volta river experience, edited by robert chambers. the image instantiates an aesthetic of modernity, with a visual appeal to order and unification through the use of rectilinear forms, beyond the specific content of the project’s promises. eric points out a house in a particularly poor state of repair. in the absence of proper drainage, surface runoff has undercut the walls, which are sagging heavily. a temporary lean-to structure, built from mud and crudely thatched, has been added to the side, as a makeshift pen for animals. the tin roof, explicitly hailed by midcentury planners as the epitome of modern efficiency and hygiene, is rusting. to the front and rear of the single-room nucleus there are roofed but open areas originally envisaged as spaces for further rooms. built in anticipation of future development, these empty spaces now embody and elicit a broader sense of absence: “there is no development here, we are living like animals,” eric pronounces with frustration and despair. his thoughts make evident the specific experience of ruination that emerges in these townships: myriad juxtapositions of actual circumstances with the unrealized plans of modernization. ruins of an unrealized future: rethinking the temporality of ruination in a landmark account of the modern experience, the political scientist marshall berman (2010, 21) remarks: “one of the distinctive virtues of modernism is that it leaves its questions echoing in the air long after the questioners themselves, and their answers, have left the scene.” this article traces the echoes of a mid-twentieth-century resettlement project, focusing on the unrealized promises of plans for modernization as these frame a distinctive experience of ruination. influenced by the critical theory of walter benjamin, a recent interdisciplinary literature has focused on the socio-material ruination of achieved projects of modernization (e.g., dawdy 2010; edensor 2012; gordillo 2014; schwenkel 2013; stoler 2008). interest in processes of ruination has correspondingly focused on the capacity for material decomposition to expose the conceptual limitations of modernization, notably through processes that literally deconstruct ideas of ordered, cartesian space and of linear progressive time. this essay, by contrast, traces ruination as the felt sense of decomposition and decay framed by the unfulfilled promise of a plan that only ever partially arrived but that resettlers continue to want. it explores the seemingly contradictory possibility of the ruination of buildings and infrastructures that were, at most, partially completed, and that in many cases were never constructed at all. this paradoxical ruination entails a palpable sense of the failure of modernization to arrive, associated with an unstable and unresolved relationship between the actuality of existing circumstances and the imagined futures that continue to be projected from the unrealized plan. focusing on the spatial and temporal dimensions of ruination, i highlight how the plan's engendered promises of linear, progressive temporality and of ordered, cartesian space are implicated in contemporary social practice (e.g., bear 2014; latour 1993; rabinow and stavrianakis 2014). rather than write against the teleology of modern infrastructure (gupta 2015; harvey, forthcoming; howe et al. 2016), i focus on the practical ways in which this temporal representation frames experiences of time as the negation of this teleological ideal. likewise, i explore how spatial images of modernization are enlisted to actively presence the absence of buildings and infrastructures. unlike the negative spaces of buildings that once existed and are now destroyed (buchli 2013; edensor 2012; gordillo 2014; navaro-yashin 2009), these ruins exist as the negative time and space made present by an ideal: of what might have existed, even might still, but which does and has not. these are not absences presenced as the material remains of that which has gone (berdahl 1999; bille, hastrup, and soerensen 2010), but as the remembered anticipation of a future. the remainder of this essay is in three parts. the first takes a historical view to outline the specific visions of modernization that animated the volta resettlement project, and the ways in which the project fell short of expectations and stalled. the following three ethnographic sections examine, from different angles, the spatio-temporal experiences of ruination for those now living in the remains of the volta resettlement project. the final ethnographic section examines these residents’ individual and collective efforts to develop and improve the settlement, and the interweaving of hope and despair produced by the desire to bring a lost future to fruition. these dynamics are associated with specific spatial and temporal logics and, as i suggest in the conclusion, enable a broader critical reframing of the concept of ruination. i argue that much of the existing literature is framed by a critical orientation to modernization and modernity, more generally, that elides what is ethnographically at stake in forms of ruination configured through an orientation to these as unrealized but desired conditions. planning modernization: the inception and failure of the volta resettlement project sidestepping normatively inflected critiques (e.g., holston 1989; scott 1998), i approach modernization in this article as an ethnographic category and concern (dick 2010; ferguson 1999; rabinow 1989) central to a range of discourses, practical interactions, and ways of seeing. in ghana, these ideas emerged in the 1960s as rationalist development and planning ideology, synonymous with the desire for rapid social and economic progress through linked changes in infrastructure, industry, society and economy, and hence through a break with tradition (meyer 1998). in the contemporary “afterlife” (benjamin 1999, 460) of the project, as i will show, these ideas remain implicated in social practice as identity, process, event, and spatial category, sometimes elided with and at other times distinguished from more general understandings of modernity as the condition, identity, and experience of being modern. thus i approach modernization as a specific “ideology of aspiration” (karlström 2004, 597) that intersects in contemporary discourses with ideas of development, progress, and improvement. the volta resettlement project was undertaken in the wake of the construction of the akosombo dam during the 1960s. although plans for the dam were initiated in the colonial period, the project finally commenced following ghana’s independence in 1957 (hart 1980; moxon 1969; shapiro 2003). as a flagship policy of kwame nkrumah, the leader of the ghanaian independence movement and then ghana’s first president, the physical construction of the dam became materially and symbolically central to the construction of the newly independent nation (cf. mitchell 2002). because ghana was africa’s first country to gain independence from british colonial rule, the project took on particularly exemplary importance, both internationally and in ghana, as a model for postcolonial development. a newspaper editorial published in the ghanaian times (1963), a conduit of government propaganda, gives a sense of the significance of the project as a testament to a broader commitment to modernization: step by step, as the heroes of the nkruhmaist labor, stone by stone, put the volta river project into shape, another giant nkrumah monument is rising to the glory and foresight of the revolutionary emancipator and the determination of the great party he founded to lead the people of ghana to the socialist paradise. work and happiness for all takes a million steps forward with the good news of the progress at akosombo. the project directly indexed the personal agency of nkrumah and literalized his vision of a modernist pan-africanist future, entailing a teleology of progress that sought to combine rapid modernization with the retention of existing traditions. in government propaganda, the dam’s capacity to generate plentiful supplies of electrical power was often metaphorically conflated with the growing power of the nation (shapiro 2003). temporally it was constructed in public discourse as facilitating a movement from tradition to modernity, laying the economic foundations on which the nation was to be constructed. while the project depended heavily on international financial support and the technical, planning, and scientific input of international development agencies and staff, this was routinely elided in state narratives of the project as a symbol of national independence and emancipation. at the vanguard of these nationalist aspirations, the eighty thousand resettlers held an ambiguous position in the national consciousness. following completion of the dam in 1966, an editorial in the state-owned ghanaian times (1966) praised their selflessness: “not least in the pride of place of honor and praise are those ghanaians whose love for the motherland and the prosperity of mother africa sacrificed their lot to bring the project to fruition. history will not forget them.” while resettlement was celebrated in public discourses as a sacrifice for the broader good of national development, it was itself associated with progress (miescher 2012). in a widely reported quote, frequently cited by inhabitants of the resettlement communities today, nkrumah made a personal pledge that none of the resettled communities would be worse off as a consequence of the move. figure 2. the volta river project and nkrumah’s modernist vision. reproduced from the evening news, 1966. in this piece of government propaganda, the project is one of the literal fruits of a process of modernization, represented here as a form of growth involving the interlinking of improvements in infrastructure, economy, society, and planning. the volta resettlement project entailed a package of linked infrastructural changes imagined to set in motion progress to a different and better future via a break with the traditional pasts (cf. meyer 1998) of displaced populations, mostly rural subsistence farmers and migrant fisher folk. key elements of this modernizing approach were the promotion of social and economic development through the creation of planned urban spaces and the technological improvement of agriculture and industrialization, notably linked to the power produced by the dam. strongly inflected by nkrumah’s pan-africanism, this ideology drew explicit inspiration from other socialist contexts, specifically in its presumption that planned urban infrastructure would generate a transformative modernity (alexander and buchli 2007; holston 1989). explicitly conceived as model townships, the resettlement communities represented an ideal of planned urban life. by bringing together previously distinct villages, planners aimed for a more efficient use of resources in accordance with the tenets of central place theory, an internationally fashionable planning discourse of the time (shapiro 2003). under the volta basin area development plan, hundreds of small subsistence villages were aggregated into fifty-four townships. as well as enabling the centralization of services, the agglomeration of previously distinct communities was intended to provide a compact labor force that would facilitate the mechanization of agricultural production and provide a further impetus to economic growth (diaw and schmidt-kallert 1990). resettlement townships were conceptualized as functionally integrated units in which social, ethnic, and economic differences were subsumed under a regional and national logic of development. as in a range of other african contexts (bonneuil 2000; mitchell 2002; d. scott 2004), the midcentury discourses of planners and politicians constituted a set of aspirations concretely embedded in infrastructures intended to literalize a new relationship between citizens and the state, and that carried forward a set of hopes and expectations about the possibility of a different and better future. from the outset, planners sought to make the future knowable and controllable through visions that existed in an unresolved and disjunctive relation to the material and social conditions they sought to change. while government discourses foregrounded the capacity to shape nature to human ends, the realization of this capacity required the coordination of a vast and complex range of people, processes, materials, and places that often evaded planners’ efforts at control (cf. mitchell 2002). planners’ letters and reports describe how buildings cracked, materials were stolen, cement caked, local workers failed to turn up and produced shoddy work, and resettlers retained traditions understood to be contrary to the logic of the modernist plan. even by 1965, the aim of providing a modern home for all had given way to the provision of materials for resettlers to complete the housing themselves. failure emerged in various public and planning discourses as a sense of disjuncture between promise and reality, which widened as the project unfolded. following a military coup in 1966 in which nkrumah was deposed, as well as international shifts in donor-driven development priorities, there was little political support for a scheme that seemed to embody the more general failures of a corrupt and bloated state and a now unfashionably top-down approach (diaw and schmidt-kallert 1990; hart 1980; obusu-mensah 1996). project staff, including town managers, extension workers, and welfare officers were laid off, compensation claims were often left unsettled, and support to complete resettlement houses was largely withdrawn. in many cases, residents who lacked funds and sought opportunity elsewhere abandoned houses before they were completed. urban aspirations were confounded by net outward migration, as a lack of economic opportunity led people, particular young men without land, to move to larger towns (diaw and schmidt-kallert 1990). migrant fisher folk resettled from seasonally occupied villages inundated by the lake returned to home towns on the coast (lawson 1958). ambitious plans for commercial, mechanized agriculture were abandoned, often before they began, as the new, politically conservative national patriotic party government reallocated land as small plots for traditional subsistence farming. irrigation plans were abandoned before work started on grounds of feasibility and cost (hart 1980). public buildings including schools and clinics often remained unstarted or partly completed (diaw and schmidt-kallert 1990). from the 1980s onward, the world bank structural adjustment policy further exacerbated state retrenchment throughout ghana, imposing a series of measures to shrink the state and expand the market, including through privatization, deregulation, and the redirection of government aid to so-called third-sector organizations (brydon and legge 1996). these measures were associated with further withdrawal of the state from resettlement communities (tsikata 2006). while free electricity was a key promise of the nkrumah plan, most resettlement communities were not connected until the 1990s as part of a rural electrification project. high electricity prices meant that uptake was limited. inhabitants of these townships have continued to rely on kerosene and wood as the main energy sources for cooking and light. pipe-borne water, another key promise, remains largely absent. today, the situation in townships is mixed: a general atrophying of state institutions and infrastructure complexly intersects with a range of more specific factors, including proximity to transportation and larger towns, distinct livelihood strategies, differential support from external agencies, and varying forms of ethnic tension. notwithstanding resulting differences in demographic, economic, social, and infrastructural circumstance, a broad contrast remains central and salient across the fifty-four resettlement townships: between the promise of modernization set out in the plan and a set of circumstances that, in kofi diaw and einhardt schmidt-kallert’s (1990, 55) blunt if simplistic assessment, “share the common plight of farmers in remote places all over africa.” in this context, the architectural and infrastructural remains of the project exist in an unrealized or partially completed form, as “unintentional monuments” (riegl 1982, 23) to the memory of past plans. the following three sections trace how memories of the plan simultaneously arise from and dramatize these contemporary circumstances. they focus, respectively, on memories of the promise of nkrumah’s time; on the contrasting perspectives of modernity offered by contemporary city life and by the imagined utopia of the settlement as it might have been; and on ambivalent recollections and imaginations of a traditional pre-resettlement past. remembering the future: nkrumah’s time and the nostalgia for modernization almost fifty years after the inception of the project, i speak with alex, an elderly man resettled to the town of npakadan in the 1960s, as he shows me his home, a so-called core house given to him at the time of resettlement as compensation for property lost in the move. these prefabricated structures took three main forms, each providing a small nucleus along with foundations and overhanging roofs intended to facilitate the future development of further rooms, as prefigured by the plans (danby 1970). the provision of partly finished buildings thus anticipated the whole, not only of a completed modern building but also of a fully modern future (shapiro 2003). as we were talking, the vision of his wife cooking on a charcoal fire at the threshold of the house brings to mind the memory of a promised future: they had to give us a kitchen. that was the plan in nkrumah’s time. they said they would put up kitchen, bathroom, toilet for every house. but this was not done. so this structure, this toilet, i put it here myself. the kitchen too, i put it there myself. bathroom too, myself. structural voids that once anticipated the end point of a modernizing process now literalize its failure. alex’s own modest additions index an absence of promised support and the failure of modernization to arrive. figure 3. resettlement core house abandoned before completion. photo by thomas yarrow. later, as alex escorts me on a tour of the town, we pause for a moment to take in the scene: an unpaved road fringed by houses, mostly unfinished and in poor repair, some completely abandoned. he explains that in the absence of well-paid jobs, many people have moved elsewhere. today the place is occupied by only a thousand or so residents, and can be walked across in a matter of minutes. agricultural produce, including yams, cassava, and tomatoes, are stacked and stored in rooms that planners intended for expansion as kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms. in places people have constructed makeshift boundary fences, but for the most part the delineated space of the plan, never realized as envisaged, remains only as the memory of a promise. as he takes in the scene, alex reflects with obvious pathos on what might have been if history had taken a different path: life would have been really good—happier. today we would have had an aerodrome, and nkrumah also thought of making some rail lines from kpong—many, many good things. the minute nkrumah died all his plans and all that he wanted to do for the resettlement was stopped. . . . so that is why we are suffering. other than that, this town would be a very nice town. alex’s invocation of the plan is situated through a specific history of resettlement and his own personal circumstances: located away from the main road, economic opportunity has been limited, outmigration is correspondingly high, and building completion rates are low; a witness to when resettlement took place, he remains keenly aware of what was lost. beyond these specificities, his narrative exemplifies an “infrastructural imaginary” (nielsen and pedersen 2015) more widely pervasive in resettled communities. through a range of everyday encounters, existing circumstances are imaginatively juxtaposed with images of the promised possibilities of modernization. partially completed or entirely absent, infrastructures do not prompt the recollection of actual people and events (cf. crang and travlou 2001; edensor 2012; stewart 1996), but instead of a set of unrealized possibilities and promises. plans for modernization are both the retrospective memory of a promised future and the prospective anticipation of what still might be. the incomplete or never begun elements of the plan exist as ruins of the future, in the sense that decay and decomposition are experienced relative to an image of what the townships could have been. through explicit discourses and as a less articulated “visual aesthetic of progress” (d. scott 2004, 254), the plan is made imaginatively present, offering visions of social, economic, and infrastructural completion that constitute the sense of failure and deficiency. these present absences are encountered through myriad everyday interactions: abandoned houses are understood to index a failure of modernization, evidence of a town that has failed to develop; incomplete structures are apprehended as unrealized versions of the modern homes they might have been; bodies are spoken of as withered versions of the healthy bodies that could have resulted from a more prosperous way of life. understandings of infrastructural ruination and material decay have their counterpart in temporal orientations that emerge as negations of linear progress and development. born in awura hae, a small village resettled to new senchi, nana (“chief”) moved to accra to work as a security guard before returning. now in his sixties, he lives in a small core house, adapted for the purposes of his current role as a locally respected but relatively powerless village subchief. in contrast to neighboring houses, the plot is demarcated by a picket fence. by the gate is a shrine, a conical cement structure with protruding, empty beer bottles. nana refers to the house as a palace (ahemfi), a term that conveys its distinctive nature as a locus of chiefly authority and a space of secrecy (mccaskie 1995). the term is also associated with a level of grandeur that highlights through stark contrast the small, decaying nature of the building. bemoaning the inadequacies of his palace for the purposes of an office, nana connects his impoverished status to the wider problems of the resettlement townships: “if we were to be during nkrumah’s time, by this time here would be very different. . . . we don’t get anything after nkrumah’s time.” imagining a set of circumstances in which nkrumah had not been overthrown, he described an alternative developmental trajectory: “if it was nkrumah [still in power], you would find it difficult to enter my palace. you see, i will be growing tall and fine. but now, see, i am poor in everything.” as he speaks, he gestures to himself, as if to highlight his own embodiment of a wider state of poverty: he is wearing a t-shirt that has holes and is heavily worn. though withered with age, his arms have a sinewy musculature, the corporeal embodiment of his ongoing dependence on farming. the utopian terms in which the modernizing aspirations of the project are routinely recalled resonate with contemporary national discourses in which nkrumah emerges as a focus of collective nostalgia, arising from disenchantment with the corruption of subsequent governments (hasty 2005) and a pervasive sense of postcolonial developmental failure (nugent 1996). as in katie kilroy-marac’s (2013, 11) account of senegalese memories of senghor, nostalgia works retrospectively and prospectively, “looping back” to a hope that directs itself to a present “that was lost before it ever came into being.” inhabiting the infrastructural remains of a project that once situated them at the vanguard of national development, resettlers experience the linked senses of developmental failure and high-modern nostalgia in particularly acute terms. imagining an alternative trajectory in which development occurred according to the modernizing ideals personified by nkrumah, existing social and infrastructural realities are understood in relation to a parallel present projected from the expectations of the plan: how life would or might have been had the planned modernization occurred. recent commentators describe how nostalgia arises as a positive desire for traditional pasts, projected from disenchantment with modern progressive time and experiences of rapid change (e.g., berman 2010; boym 2001). as an inversion of this logic, nostalgic yearnings for the modernizing visions of nkrumah arise as a reflex of the sense of its absence: in daphne berdahl’s (1999) terms, a fluid and open once was arises from and dramatizes the sense of a static now. experiences of unwanted temporal stasis emerge as the presenced absence of the linear, progressive temporality of modernization. frustrations at a lack of development prompt nostalgic recollections of modernization and the desire to return to a time in which the future seemed open, hopeful, and full of promise (cf. boyer 2006). modernity elsewhere: the city and the utopia planned visions of modernization are situated alongside contemporary images of modernity to compound this experience of stasis. rose moved to senchi to live with her husband, whose parents were resettled to the township in the 1960s. with two young children, they rent a partly completed house. electrical wires remain exposed, blockwork unplastered, and windows unfitted. she cooks on a solid fuel stove in the shell of a room intended at some point to house, in her own terms, a “modern kitchen.” unsure when, if ever, these plans will be realized, she describes this condition as “permanently temporary” and connects her domestic situation to problems in the town more generally: when we ghanaians go abroad we like it! but here there are no jobs. there is no money. my husband wanted to work at atl [a large local textiles factory]. he has applied, applied, applied, but he doesn’t get work. so he is thinking about getting a job, getting money. everyone in this town has plans that they want to get money, want to build a house, want to buy a car. but the money is not there. in a context in which rural-urban migration is common, understandings of life in the capital city constitute another powerful referent to a spatially dislocated modernity (manuh 2003). peter, now in his early thirties, spent some time working in accra as a mechanic, but was forced to return to his family home in the resettlement township of senchi following the loss of this job: the abroad of ghana is accra. everything can be found over there. so we the youth prefer living in accra than here. but you see, if you want to go to accra, like me here, you have to sit down and analyze the issues—who am i going to stay with? where am i going to sleep? what am i going to eat? because of lack of those things, that’s why we are here. but if the opportunity is created for you to go to accra, then it’s good. because those places, you can make life. those places, you can make a living. so it isn’t our desire, we are not so happy to be here. whether or not people actually migrate, understandings of modernity there inflect understandings of its absence here, so that, as hilary parsons dick (2010, 276) describes in the context of transnational mexican migration, “present life [is refracted] through the prism of possible lives inhabitable somewhere else.” images of contemporary modernity, and of the past futures of high-modern planners, share a temporal logic of progress that allows for elision and slippage between these (dick 2010; koselleck 2004). while both are drawn into experiences of these spaces as deficient, they entail distinct imaginative possibilities. images of contemporary modernity locate the temporal opposition between modern and nonmodern in various spatial contrasts, so that the presence of modernity there makes evident its absence here. conversely, the past futures of modernization (see koselleck 2004) are experienced as spatially contiguous but temporally dislocated: modernization promised then presences its absence now. whether or not people have experienced city life themselves, narratives of urban life celebrate economic possibility, excitement, and civilization alongside a more ambivalent understanding of cities as places that are morally corrupting, lack the support of kin, and in which economic possibilities remain heavily constrained. in contrast, existing only as aspiration and promise, nkrumahist visions of modernization carry a heightened sense of imaginative possibility, verging on the utopian, relating to their lack of a tangible referent (cf. boyer 2006; koselleck 2004, 264). younger residents share in a positive evaluation of this ideal, even as they lament the older generation’s continued preoccupation with it. the latter are “living in the past,” as the young often remark, and so are unable to imagine futures of more viable kinds. after tradition, before modernity: recalling the pre-resettlement past brian larkin (2004, 305) highlights how, in nigeria, senses of temporal stasis are constituted through routine interactions with poorly functioning infrastructures, so that “even as life speeds up, the experience of technological marginalisation intensifies, and the gap between how fast society is moving and how fast it could move becomes a site of considerable political tension.” in resettlement townships, partly realized, crumbling, or nonexistent infrastructures are encountered alongside precariously functioning and failing technologies of more recent origin, engendering a similar sense of falling behind. linked ideas about development and modernization inflect experiences of time as a negation of these: a pervasive sense of temporal stasis and regression arises in this gap between the ideal and the actual. temporally speaking, ruination emerges as the felt sense of anachronism—not as the presence of the past in the present (lucas 2015) but as a present out of kilter with itself: of buildings, infrastructures, and circumstances that appear behind where they should have been had expectations materialized. the absent, partly realized, and decaying infrastructures of resettlement are seen as indicative of unrealized modernization, but they also prompt ambivalent reflections on the more traditional ways of life that prevailed prior to the move. now living in the resettlement town of senchi, ek (the initials by which he is locally known), a young adult when the move took place, reflects on the changes resettlement has brought: by that time there were no lorries. there were no communication facilities. there was no development. no post office. no proper road. and farming was with crude implements. we would just weed—weed, weed, weed. there were no tractors: nothing there! ideas about actual or promised modernization are implicated in negative characterizations of pre-resettlement life as undeveloped, but they also inform a more positive orientation to this period. ek exemplifies a wider ambivalence: “before, we had fishing and trapping and hunting. but here things were not like that. where are you going to weed?” he asks rhetorically, highlighting the lack of farmland. “where are you going to get grasscutter [a large rodent referred to outside ghana as the greater cane rat]?” he implores, recalling a time when bush meat was freely available. for ek, the failures of the plan are compounded by the diminishment of a more traditional way of life. ruptured from the promised futures of modernization, he also feels ruptured from a past that is positively associated with greater freedom and traditional customs now lost. while things in the present are understood relative to things as they might have been had modernization occurred, contemporary problems are also experienced relative to the possibilities of things as they were in the pre-resettlement past. younger people share in these narratives of ruin, but they are often more willing to see the benefits of the move. born shortly after resettlement, emmanuel lives in accra, earning a good wage as a policeman, but he regularly returns to the resettlement township of apeguso, where he owns a house and continues to provide material support for relatives. he considers apeguso his hometown. though he laments the failure to deliver on nkrumah’s vision, he is sanguine about the changes resettlement entailed: in those days the school was far from the villages and the children had to walk about a mile or two before they got to school. but now we have resettled, schools are around us. so those are the benefits we have actually got. because if we were staying at the old place, i would not have been able to become a policeman. i would have been a farmer or a fisherman. but because we were brought here, everyone’s children now go to school. education is the key to what we have now. so in fact we the youth, we the children, we have benefited. he acknowledges the relative poverty of his parents and the personal benefits of resettlement, even as he also laments the unrealized promises of the plan. differences in access to farmland, paid employment, and the ability to leverage funds from urban relatives relate to differential abilities to modify, improve, and modernize these houses. through contemporary interactions, “the plan” is projected as a series of imaginative possibilities that arise through the interplay of specific resettlement infrastructures and the myriad circumstances of people now occupying them. distinct understandings of ruination arise as specific articulations of disjuncture: between existing material and social conditions and visions of the project’s modernizing promise. in a recent discussion of the temporality of infrastructure, akhil gupta (2015) suggests that “suspension . . . instead of being a temporary phase between the start of a project and its (successful) conclusion, needs to be theorized as its own condition of being. the temporality of suspension is not between past and future, between beginning and end, but constitutes its own ontic condition just as surely as does completion.” in the wake of resettlement, midcentury plans prove integral to an experience of ruination that engenders a particular temporal orientation: suspension is a permanent ontological state variously experienced and configured as a relation between the promises of a still unrealized plan and contemporary material and social conditions. where the developmental timeline is “cracked apart” (ferguson 2006, 186) into its constituent parts, stasis constitutes the status of being in between a tradition that has been lost and a modernization that has yet to arrive. the preceding three sections have examined the varieties of experiences of ruination and lost promise. in the next and final ethnographic section, i focus on residents’ active attempts to remedy this situation and the paradoxical interweaving of hope and despair entailed in these efforts. building the town: hope, despair, and collective effort how is the future made in the wake of these collapsed promises? visions of modernization are reanimated in the present in diverse diagnoses of the problems and possibilities of resettlement townships. widely held ideas about the unfulfilled promises of the plan frame different understandings of who is to blame for its failure and what is to be done as a consequence. wisdom, a primary school teacher in his early thirties, lives in the resettlement town of apeguso, in the core house he inherited from his parents, migrant fisher folk. in a narrative common to his generation, he describes how the problems of the town stem from the actions of the older generation: you see people who were here and then left for greener pastures. most of them have forgotten this place. those who have built their homes and settled there, they don’t care about this place any longer. if they were to have that thinking, “i came from there and there are still people living there, so the development of the place is my priority,” then they can come in, organize themselves, and contribute. many of those resettled to apeguso were ewe fisher folk with hometowns in the southeast of ghana, to which they returned. the township is attached to a previously existing village of twi-speaking akans, resulting in ethnic difference that is widely understood as a source of discrimination and tension (yarrow 2011). wisdom tells me of his own decision to stay and of the need to learn the lessons of these failures: it is very important to study the past and compare it to the present so that you see where you have fallen short and correct them for development. if you don’t think of the past, you will never progress. it is not just a matter of studying the past and leaving it, you also have to compare it to the future. then you look at the measures to take so that you see that the future will be very bright. hopeful developmental futures continue to be projected from the plan, even in light of discourses that highlight persistent and long-term failure (cf. miyazaki 2004). while post-nkrumah governments have largely sought to abrogate responsibility for these townships (diaw and schmidt-kallert 1990), resettlers continue to make claims on the basis of this history. efforts to enlist support from ngos and government agencies take shape through discourses that presence the history of resettlement and the broken promises of the plan. organizations have been set up to advocate for the rights of resettlement communities. calls for sanitation, water, and repairs to houses are voiced in discourses that recall the sacrifices of resettlers and nkrumah’s claims that nobody would be worse off as a result of the move. the felt absence of modernization inspires calls for help and is also connected to a range of personal and collective efforts to improve circumstances within these townships. inhabitants of resettlement townships echo narratives common in other parts of southern ghana (van der geest 1998; yarrow 2011), which connect the act of building or improving a house with a range of positive virtues. people build to provide a legacy for their children and attach importance to houses as a literalization of a commitment to hometowns, grounded in kin ties. in resettlement townships, the moral imperative to build is explicitly configured as an effort to contribute to the collective development of the town. now in his seventies, ek lives in the resettlement township of senchi. after the move, the house his family was given proved too small, and many of the children scattered to other parts of ghana. recently, he returned and, through money earned as a cocoa farmer, was able to expand the core house given to him by the government as compensation for possessions and land he lost in the move. he described his own building project as part of a trajectory of the town’s development through the successive acts of future generations: when you are in your town and there is no job, you travel to go and acquire money to come back to develop. so when your children, when they also go, they too acquire land and build. then the town will be large. economic migration is not only understood in terms of personal advancement but also as a source of wealth through which the whole town benefits (van der geest 1998). james spent time working in somanya, the district capital of krobo, but recently returned to his hometown of senchi, where his parents were resettled. drawing a contrast to life in somanya, he describes the “backwardness” of senchi, highlighting the lack of paved roads and absence of street lighting. correspondingly, he explains his intention to build there as a contribution to development: the place is not good, but some people are building their house here, making development. . . . i didn’t build in somanya because i want my hometown to grow. i could build there but i want here to develop. personal acts of building are imagined as part of a broader process of development and progress that is celebrated as a contribution to the realization of a more modern form of life. through hometown associations, money and resources are donated by urban-based migrants to assist with community-development projects, including the construction of schools, borehole wells, and efforts to generate local employment. as a series of interlinked images, midcentury plans intersect with images of urban life in the capital and the west, eliciting efforts to improve and providing benchmarks against which the adequacy or inadequacy of their own developmental actions are assessed. lacking electricity, illegal connections are often established. without money to extend houses in the concrete blocks and corrugated iron that are widely desired, the houses are built using mud construction techniques (locally termed swish) and thatch. in the absence of money to renovate a decaying infrastructural fabric, houses are patched up, using whatever materials are available. these improvised alterations may in practice last long periods of time, but they are explicitly understood as temporary. while residents of townships seek to accommodate themselves to present circumstances as best they can, they remain keenly aware of their failure to bring about the futures they desire. in this context, where the plan is manifestly unrealized and the state almost totally absent, deviations from the spatial regularities of the plan are not, in michel de certeau’s (1984) influential framing, tactics of resistance. quite the opposite: they stem from an internalized desire for order, discipline, and regularity whose perceived lack leads to lamentation and despair. ideas of accommodation, locally connoted through such terms as making do and managing emerge as a recognition of the limitations of resettlers’ efforts, a recognition inflected by midcentury infrastructural imaginations of different, better futures. imagined images of planned modernization animate a negative experience of time and space that is associated with efforts to redress this lack through development, but they also prompt a more fatalistic orientation to living with things as they are. in resettlement communities, narratives of failure and despair are specified forms of negativity relative to visions of modernization that are sources of hope: in the possibility and anticipation of moving on or catching up, even in the knowledge of previous failure to do so (cf. miyazaki 2004). other analysts have theorized ruins as sites of hope, engendering logics alternative to the hubris of those seduced by modern self-representations of time and space (e.g., dawdy 2010). in post-soviet kyrgyzstan, mathijs pelkmans (2013) foregrounds the imaginatively productive dimensions of ruins as literally empty spaces that open up sites for the imagination of open futures, and hence for collective hope. shannon lee dawdy (2010, 777) suggests that “there is hope in ruins, in the suggestion that modernity can be surpassed.” situated temporally and conceptually after the fact of modernity, ruins draw their socially and imaginatively productive force from their subversive orientation to this condition. by contrast, the volta resettlement project shows how hope can be directed toward the possibility of modernization in ways that are also powerfully associated with despair over a gap between the present and a future that appears out of reach. conclusion: rethinking ruination in a recent article, cymene howe and colleagues propose an important distinction between “infrastructure that has gone to ruin and infrastructure that never was” (howe et al. 2016, 4). while a considerable literature has focused on the former, accounts of the latter remain scant. in this essay, i have sought to trace the distinctive form of ruination that emerges not as the absence of something once present (buchli 2013; edensor 2012), but as a sense of decay, fragmentation, and degradation seen through the lens of a promised future. in his landmark account, reinhart koselleck (2004) traces the emergence of a conception of irreversible, directional time to eighteenth-century europe. he proposes that such a conception “appears to unchain a yearned-for future . . . [that] robs the present of materiality and actuality” (koselleck 2004, 23). i have sought to outline forms of immateriality and absence that are likewise configured in relation to a future yearning for completion. here, however, it is not that a shifting present is outpaced by a moving horizon of expectation. rather, absence is rendered material and actual precisely in its incommensurability with a planned future that never arrives. how might these enable a critical reframing of the concept of ruination? building more or less directly on the critical theory of walter benjamin (1999), the recent interdisciplinary “turn toward ruins” (dawdy 2010, 762) constitutes a critique of the romantic reification of ruins as sites of aesthetic contemplation and illumination (buchli 2013). even as this turn directs attention to ruins of more recent origin, a broadly romantic sensibility remains pervasive: a conceptual antipathy to modern ordering and disciplining and the correlative celebration of logics that elude, complicate, and question modern and modernist progressivism (buchli 2013; pelkmans 2013). building on benjamin’s (1999) arcades project, much of this recent work starts from the given fact of the spectacle of modernity and looks to ruins, highlighting what is illusory and so concealed in this condition. in gastón gordillo’s (2014, 6) terms, rubble reveals “the critical power of negativity to disintegrate the positivity of the given, of things as they seem to be, and thereby to undermine any reified fantasy of a complete seamless whole.” ruins undermine the “self-deception” (dawdy 2010, 763) of modern representations of time as linear and progressive. likewise, material decomposition reveals the conceptual limitations of cartesian understandings of planned space, and of a western metaphysics of presence (derrida 1976). tim edensor (2012, 844) suggests that ruins, highlight how “modern attempts to cleanse, banish ambiguity and order the memory of space are always disturbed by such disorderly spaces and by the ghosts they contain.” much of the recent work on ruination therefore has a critically deconstructive orientation, aiming to highlight the manifest but illusory sense of modern self-representations of time and space. yet after the fact of the purified self-representations that are the signature of modernity (see latour 1993), this deconstructive orientation eclipses the logic of others’ practices wherever these are oriented toward a felt sense of the lack of modernity and a positive hope for its presence. the volta resettlement project foregrounds a set of spatial and temporal dynamics that have received little attention in existing work on ruination and, accordingly, enable a critical reframing of the scholarship to date. where, to paraphrase gordillo (2014, 6), the positivity of the given is manifestly not a given, modern representations of time and space exist as self-evidently unrealized ideals, which configure a series of negations. in these circumstances, it is not that ruination exposes the hubris of linear time, but that hope in the possibility of progress frames a pervasive sense of stasis and regression (cf. ferguson 2006; geissler 2011; larkin 2004). crumbling infrastructures do not elicit the memory of people and places that once exited and have now gone (edensor 2012; gordillo 2014; navaro-yashin 2009; schwenkel 2013). they presence, instead, the promise of what might have been. unrealized plans are associated with a bifurcated experience of time, in which the present is shadowed by images of things as they might have been had modernization occurred. nostalgia does not take the form of the longing for a static traditional past in contrast to a progressive present (boym 2001), but of the melancholic recollection of an earlier, progressive promise in conditions of apparent temporal stasis. ruination in these conditions involves a series of temporal negations that are linked to a distinctive experience of space. in the remains of resettlement, ruination is not a process by which the manifestly whole forms of an earlier modernity are decomposed, exposed, and surpassed; it emerges, instead, as a pervasive and self-evident sense of the fragmentary nature of built environments and lives, when seen through the lens of promised plans. notes acknowledgments i am grateful to the many residents of resettlement townships who shared their experiences of these places and welcomed me into their lives. during fieldwork i was particularly assisted by alex oboubi and oteng danso, who helped me navigate some difficult terrain and whose thoughtful reflections profoundly shaped my understanding of it. the argument of the essay originated in a conference at the university of st. andrews titled “urban times,” where it was given particular conceptual impetus by the conference’s organizer, morten nielsen, as well as the many contributors who provided valuable commentary. along the way—quite long!—it was shaped by the critical insights of numerous colleagues, including chantal conneller, james evans, john gledhill, penny harvey, sian jones, ann kelly, tom mccaskie, stephan miescher, simon marvin, and marilyn strathern. particularly heartfelt thanks to catherine alexander, matt candea, adam reed, and david yarrow. the essay has benefited immensely from the perceptive comments of four anonymous reviewers, from careful editorial input from dominic boyer, cymene howe, and particularly jim faubion, and from marcel laflamme’s guidance on some tricky production issues. research was generously supported by a leverhulme trust early career fellowship. 1. the article builds on two periods of ethnographic research, totaling four months undertaken in 2007 and 2008. participant-observation and semistructured interviews focused mainly on the resettlement townships of apeguso, senchi, and npakadan, all located toward the south of lake akosombo but with contrasting ethnic compositions and resettlement histories. 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township.” in recasting anthropological knowledge: inspiration and social science, edited by jeanette edwards and maja petrović-šteger, 88–105. new york: cambridge university press. care and the nonhuman politics of veteran drunk driving cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 23-30, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.04 care and the nonhuman politics of veteran drunk driving ken macleish vanderbilt university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4815-9291 there was a story circulating on the internet in the fall of 2015, in the certainty-inspiring form of a police blotter announcement, that tells of a navy petty officer first class whose drinking and driving had left him saddled with a breathalyzer ignition lock in his car. at the end of a subsequent night of drinking, this seaman knew that his intoxication would prevent him from starting his car, so he procured a raccoon rummaging in a trash can in a nearby park, brought it to the car, inserted the interlock tube into its mouth, and squeezed an exhalation from it that satisfied the interlock’s chemical sentry. the raccoon collapsed unconscious on the floor of the car, the story goes, and then awoke to attack its abductor as the latter drove triumphantly away. the distracted seaman crashed his car through a fence and into a swimming pool, where police later found him covered in bites and scratches. he was charged with drunk driving and “abuse of a public animal.” the story is the fictional product of a military humor website,1 but a number of regional, national, and military news outlets initially reported it as true, and the tale made the social media rounds as well. its absurdity seems to have lent it credibility as it went speeding and crashing around the internet, fueled by the hilarity of the badly behaved service member—a literal drunken sailor. the story’s ready believability arguably serves as a sign of its underlying cultural truth. its cyborgian, human-animal-machine assemblage hurtling dangerously across the landscape, violently divided within itself and a threat to the home-front world around it, affirms a deeply engrained american tendency to regard the same veterans who are the avatars of foreign policy violently inflicted on the rest of the world as problematic threats to domestic social order, which also then makes them candidates for controlling forms of care. configurations of the “problem veteran” (kinder 2015) as a morally hazardous dependent of the state, a failed agent of economic and sexual reproduction, or a criminal deviant underlie many past and present discourses of civilian support. that is to say, both historically and in the present, the hegemonic modes of caring for and caring about veterans are inextricably bound up not only with the heroic violence of foreign battlefields but also with domestic hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, disability, capital, and nation (millar 2015; wool 2015). at the same time, the spectacular and pitiable aftermaths, excesses, and residues of war attributed to military subjects frequently serve to distance and distinguish violence wrought on foreign populations from domestic terrains and actors characterized by order, right, and peace (favret 2010; howell 2018; kaplan 2018). if attended to care-fully, the story and the denigrated form of life at its center can trace war’s use of force and vital instrumentalism from its remote overseas deployments to the heart of the domestic orders it is meant to defend. i was prepared to believe the raccoon story myself because of my own ethnographic immersion in care practices aimed at ostensibly “disorderly” military and veteran populations. i read the story while in the midst of three years of fieldwork in a veteran treatment court (vtc) in a military town in the u.s. south—“hullford”—with a large population of post-9/11 veterans. the first vtcs were started in 2008, modeled on other nonadversarial helping courts that focus on offenders with mental health or substance use problems. there are now more than three hundred veteran-specific programs around the country in civilian municipal and county courts (lithwick 2010; justice for vets n.d.). these treatment courts offer twelve to eighteen months of supervised rehabilitation in place of jail time for military and veteran offenders charged with dui, drug possession, assault, and other non-felony crimes. court participants are subject to regular drug and alcohol testing, evening curfews, and the threat of incarceration if they violate program rules. the court also helps connect them with a host of medical and financial veteran benefits that many have yet to access. the sixty or so veterans and active-duty soldiers that the hullford court can accommodate at any given time tend to skew young and male, many having deployed as part of the u.s. wars in iraq and afghanistan. veteran treatment courts are explicitly premised on a tight causal linkage between military service, mental illness, and lawbreaking. in this real-world enmeshment of military life in constraining and coercive care, the non-human adjuncts of the animal and the automobile—the raccoon and the car in the apocryphal sailor’s story—can help illuminate how the disorderly subjects of veteran care are figured. first, the animal: the story traffics in an otherness signaled not only by the apocryphal sailor’s lawbreaking, dissolution, and abject haplessness but also by his intimate cross-species deception, mimicry, and “abuse.” animality locates soldiers’ and veterans’ status as problematic, disorderly, or ungovernable home-front presences amid the other populations and figures of attenuated humanity produced by globalized war-making (cf. pandian 2008; kosek 2010). references to and uses of animals in war—totemic eagles or wolves, say, or the virtuosic nose, ears, and teeth of trained military working dogs like the ones who famously cornered high-profile terrorists such as osama bin laden or abu bakr al-baghdadi—point to the limits of humans’ physical and technological capacities. animality haunts breakdowns of human self-mastery in the face of war’s terror, trauma, pain, cruelty, and exhaustion, revealing limits to what the biopolitical control of military life can actually do. as ryan hediger (2013) writes, when life escapes from those mechanisms that fantasize its perfect realization, instrumentalization, and control as human—especially when it does so in notably clumsy or abject ways—it can look like, even be, an animal. in the world of the veteran court, the symptoms of the posttraumatic stress presumed to lead soldiers to lawbreaking are characterized by experts and laypeople alike as the excessive activation of the evolutionarily obsolescent fight-or-flight threat response—the animal lurking within and suddenly possessing the human. the judge, the case managers, and the participants themselves pepper the court’s semiscripted speech with invocations of unruly brains or bodies that “aren’t used to” life at home or that “think they’re under attack” in the face of benign but triggering stimuli. alcohol, as well as the marijuana, opioids, and methamphetamines that together account for the majority of the cases that show up in the court, tends to be extremely effective—up to a point, and not without cost—for managing the depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, anhedonia, social withdrawal, sleep disturbance, and aggression associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). but even as alcohol and other drugs help blunt the unwanted animal becomings of war trauma, they constitute their own threat, what the national veteran court advocacy and credentialing organization justice for vets calls a “cycle” of mental distress, substance use, crime, arrest, lack of treatment, and re-arrest in which veterans traumatized by war may be trapped. breaking that cycle then becomes a project of agentive, responsibilized re-humanization with which court participants are invited to identify. as in the story of the sailor, the animal does not operate in a vacuum here, but as part of a kind of jalopy-like cyborgian assemblage that also entails a logic of automobility. more than three-quarters of the hullford vtc participants are there for duis or other alcohol-related charges. both heavy drinking and reckless driving are deeply engrained in army culture, especially among junior enlisted soldiers, and hullford and its semirural surroundings are, like most military communities, car-centric landscapes. this confluence of factors makes drunk driving an inevitability and a ready target for the policing of soldiers and veterans, and it also almost renders invisible the sympathetic animality of ptsd symptomatology when dui is treated foremost as an administrative or criminal offense and only later, under the court’s caring eye, as a sign of trauma. many of my acquaintances in the vtc interpret this state of affairs as veterans being set up to fail by both an uncaring military that discourages asking for help and is eager to trim the ranks of troublesome soldiers and a predatory civilian world that sees veterans either as a threat or a source of revenue.2 susan, an army vet and contractor who did deployments in iraq and afghanistan as an intelligence analyst, said of the hullford cops, “they know we’re out here. they know where the bars are. . . . cops know that vets are gonna drink and shouldn’t drive, but instead of helping ‘em, they put ‘em in jail!” she had been through vtc for her own dui, and on the day of this particular conversation she had just come from visiting an active-duty friend she was hoping to help get into the program: he had done five tours, she told me, and really needed help with his ptsd, but now the army was trying to kick him out over a dui. “back in the day,” susan told me, “you could get two, three, four duis and they would handle it internally, support you, keep you from getting in too much trouble, see if you needed help. now we get this crap—guys are in trouble and they just wanna get rid of them.” here too, behind the wheel, the problem vet appears as both more and less than human to civilians and supervising institutions: machinic, tool-like, and mindlessly subordinate, but also technologically enhanced, hypercapable, and prone to running out of control. for felix, a vietnam veteran who was one of the first program graduates (he was on his third dui arrest) and who now volunteers as a court mentor for younger vets, this dynamic is nothing less than trauma manifesting in plain sight as disorderly kinesis. “if you don’t get injured,” he said of young soldiers, “you come back with this invincible feeling. you see it in this town, all these mustangs and crotch rockets”—the muscle cars and sport bikes that peel away from stoplights and can be heard roaring and whining their way down hullford’s highways at high rev. “all these guys are pumped up,” their aggression echoing the automotive violence seen, endured, and perpetrated by soldiers in the counterinsurgency terrain of afghanistan and iraq: ambushes, vehicle-borne bombs, pedestrian injuries and deaths, checkpoint and convoy security carried out with machine guns and unforgiving rules of engagement. as venues of dangerously failed self-management, the road and the car furnish the court with its opportunities to do caring work: drunk driving, speeding, reckless driving, the drugs and paraphernalia secreted in a glove box or under a seat, and confrontations or assaults stemming from road rage are all where individual pathology becomes a crime and a threat, still strangely valorized by association with war but also available for reform and healing. court participants themselves, in the short, confessional speeches they give on advancing from one to the next phase of the program, thank the officers or deputies who pulled them over and cast roadside arrest as a moment of transformative intervention. more than one narrates these enforcements as literally lifesaving, describing police stops that likely prevented fatal traffic accidents or that interrupted journeys that would have otherwise ended with premeditated violence or self-inflicted harm. messier here is the way that automobility is also a space within which veterans’ lives may fall further apart, whether despite or because of the surveillance and solicitous, caring attention that binds them. the court does not use interlock breathalyzers, preferring instead handheld alcohol monitors that can be mined for gps data and make it possible to catch participants violating curfew or visiting bars or liquor stores. many dui arrests lead to suspended licenses, depriving participants of the both symbolic and practical necessity of automotive sovereignty and leaving them to navigate work, home, court, medical care, and school with buses, bikes, and the kindness of friends and kin. continuing to drive on a suspended license makes for a major temptation that sets participants up for aggressive sanction from the court, as well as the possibility of new criminal charges. those still legally allowed on the road may also be immobilized by the expense of loan payments, repairs, gas, and exploitative fees and lending through which automobility propagates inequality (lutz 2014). while for felix, veteran bodies behind the wheel trace the violence of foreign battlefields and inscribe it anew on home-front terrain, the domestic highway constitutes its own largely unquestioned system of mass death and vulnerability. the animal-abusing sailor might stand out as an exception, but he points to the rule that driving is a horrifically dangerous activity: a politically normalized accident (beckmann 2004; virilio 2006) that blurs the lines between victim and threat. as with war, automobility unequally distributes harm along racial and geographical lines and bears a hefty body count alternately hidden from view and sensationalized as grist for moral panic. read in one direction, the sailor, raccoon, and breathalyzer promise that the harms and excesses of war can be kept at a safe distance; like so many scratches and bites, the need for care and the limits to what it might accomplish announce themselves as traces on dangerous and ungovernable bodies. to be marked by one system of violence means to be normalized into another, whether by one’s own dangerous improvisations, the coercion of a caring authority, or perhaps by some combination. diana, another participant, was the only person i knew who had a breathalyzer interlock. she had received it from the dui court she was in before entering the vtc and paid out of pocket to keep it in her car. it came after her last charge. diana had been drinking at home, avoiding the triggering sound of the 4th-of-july fireworks, and packing for a field exercise. a friend stranded at a bar called to ask for a ride. another driver, also drunk, smashed into diana’s tiny sportscar head on at forty miles an hour. she was hospitalized with a traumatic brain injury. when i visited her, her apartment living room was dominated by a new, primer-black fender for the car and a carpeted hutch with two cats drowsily nesting in it. “i love this thing,” she told me of the interlock. “i’m so glad it’s there. i don’t want to kill anybody.” abstract military veteran drunk driving is a field of pathologized behavior in which traces of military excess meet the surveillance and banality of home-front safety. in communities with significant veteran populations, drunk driving blurs the lines between battlefield dangers and more familiar modes of domestic disorderliness, and the deployment of special mechanisms for dealing with law-breaking veterans gives rise to novel combinations of dangerous and deserving, criminal and cared-for. this article recognizes and questions the production of knowledge that is as ambivalent as the scenes of life from which it emerges. [care; military mental health; nonhuman politics] notes acknowledgments this research was made possible by a wenner-gren foundation post-phd fieldwork grant and a vanderbilt university research scholar faculty development grant. special thanks to susan, felix, and my numerous other interlocutors whom i cannot thank by name for their time, trust, and insights. thanks to sarah besky, jenny carlson, ashley drake, aimi hamraie, ali howell, o. a. lindsey, cathy lutz, alex nading, rachael pomerantz, nisha shah, laura stark, debbie weinstein, zoë wool, and audiences at the 2017 meeting of the society for the social studies of science, the 2018 meeting of the international studies association, and a presentation audience at the watson institute for international and public affairs for the discussion of and comments on various versions of this article. special thanks to lauren cubellis and my fellow participants at the 2018 wenner-gren foundation workshop on theoretical and ethnographic approaches to care at washington university in st. louis. 1. the site, just the tip of the spear (jttos.com), was subsequently shut down in 2016 for its role in supporting the massive military photo-sharing and revenge-porn ring known as marines united (keller 2017). 2. since 2012, the army has been aggressively downsizing, specifically singling out “risky” personnel with mental health and substance use issues for “deselection” (u.s. army 2012). references beckmann, jörg 2004 “mobility and safety.” theory, culture and society 21, nos. 4–5: 81–100. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0263276404046062. favret, mary a. 2010 war at a distance: romanticism and the making of modern wartime. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. hediger, ryan 2013 animals and war: studies of europe and north america. boston: brill. howell, alison 2018 “forget ‘militarization’: race, disability and the ‘martial politics’ of the police and of the university.” international feminist journal of politics 20, no. 2: 117–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310. justice for vets n.d. “what is a veterans treatment court?” justice for vets. accessed august 20, 2019. http://www.justiceforvets.org/what-is-a-veterans-treatment-court. kaplan, caren 2018 aerial aftermaths: wartime from above. durham, n.c.: duke university press. keller, jared 2017 “the rise and fall (and rise) of ‘marines united.’” task and purpose, march 16. https://taskandpurpose.com/rise-fall-rise-marines-united. kinder, john m. 2015 paying with their bodies: american war and the problem of the disabled veteran. chicago: university of chicago press. kosek, jake 2010 “ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.” cultural anthropology 25, no. 4: 650–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01073.x. lithwick, dahlia 2010 “a separate peace: specialized courts for war veterans work wonders. but why stop at veterans?” slate, february 11. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/02/specialized-courts-for-war-veterans-work-wonders-but-why-stop-at-veterans.html. lutz, catherine 2014 “the u.s. car colossus and the production of inequality.” american ethnologist 41, no. 2: 232–45. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12072. millar, katharine m. 2015 “‘they need our help’: non-governmental organizations and the subjectifying dynamics of the military as social cause.” media, war and conflict 9, no. 1: 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1750635215606867. pandian, anand 2008 “pastoral power in the postcolony: on the biopolitics of the criminal animal in south india.” cultural anthropology 23, no. 1: 85–117. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00004.x. u.s. army 2012 “army 2020: generating health and discipline in the force ahead of the strategic reset.” washington, d.c.: department of the army. virilio, paul 2006 speed and politics. los angeles: semiotext(e). originally published in 1977. wool, zoë h. 2015 after war: the weight of life at walter reed. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 23-30, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.04 the afterlife of gender the afterlife of gender: sovereignty, intimacy, and muslim funerals of transgender people in turkey asli zengin brown university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5450-7953 it was a bright, sunny day in may 2010 in istanbul. at around noon, i reached the mosque for the funeral of sibel, a trans woman sex worker. a big crowd of trans women had gathered in the narrow street surrounding the mosque. some trans women followed islamic tradition and came to the funeral with headscarves, while others were bareheaded.1 sibel, a close friend to many trans women in istanbul lgbtt, a trans-majority lgbtq organization, had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage a few days earlier, while soliciting sex work at night. after her emergency hospitalization, trans people from istanbul lgbtt took turns visiting and caring for her. like most trans women in turkey, sibel had been abandoned by her blood family. so her trans friends informed sibel’s blood family about her situation, but the family paid little attention to sibel, who had lost consciousness after the hemorrhage, as she remained in the hospital. a few days after being admitted, sibel passed away. sibel had identified and lived her life as a woman. yet in the eyes of the turkish state she was a man, and hence held a blue id card, the color of state-issued id cards for male citizens.2 had she completed her official gender transition, an arduous medico-legal process that takes about two years,3 she could have been holding a pink id card and been officially recognized as female at the moment of her death. sibel had had breast reconstructive surgery but still had a penis, a bodily configuration that transgressed the strict gender binary institutional categories of female and male. sibel’s body invoked a chaos of illegibility at her funeral ceremony and burial ritual, opening gender and sexual difference to debates and negotiations by a variety of social actors. religious authorities, particularly imams, as well as members of sibel’s blood family and state medico-legal actors from the department of funeral and cemetery services, started to discuss the deceased’s “real” sex and gender. sibel’s sex/gender-transgressive body became a source of multiple interpretations and inscriptions of categories revolving around not only female/male and woman/man but also kinship, religion, and citizenship. sibel’s friends from the lgbtq activist community also played a part in these negotiations, challenging other actors’ claims and advocating for sibel to be mourned as female/woman and as their kin. the afterlife of a normative death usually manifests a collaborative work of multiple sovereign registers to bid farewell to the deceased. the blood family, together with the state, guides the formation of an intimate alliance between legal frameworks, religious authorities, friends, and community to ensure the proper mourning and burial of the person who has died. this intimate alliance pivots on shared forms of sovereignty that the state, the family, and, in the case of turkey, islam secure over the body of the deceased—sovereignties related to and embedded within each other. the afterlife of a transgressive death,4 however, ruptures these alliances and offers a window into the contours and limits of different sovereign registers and intimate claims over the body. the ruptures and sutures may be ethnic, religious, sectarian, and economic in addition to gendered or sexed. sunni muslim transgender deaths, the main focus of this article, provide just one example for such transgressive deaths. the afterlives of transgender deaths demonstrate how sex, gender, and sexual difference, as a social field of constant and emergent contestation, mark the gendered and sexual limits of belonging in sovereign regimes of islam, family, kinship, and citizenship, and in practices of mourning and grief. a mortuary ethnography of these funerals and burial rituals in turkey evinces the shifting alliances of a framework formed by islamic notions of embodiment, familial order, gender and sexuality regimes, and legal regulations around death. here, i find it useful to approach sovereignty as “a tentative and emergent form of authority always grounded in violence that is performed and designed to generate loyalty, fear, and legitimacy” (hansen and stepputat 2006, 297). seen from this perspective, the body, both dead and alive, demands attention as a site and object of sovereign power. at transgender funerals such as sibel’s, we see the multiple and segmented work of sovereignty enacted through the body. turning the body into a site of constant and emergent contestation, sovereignty—both statist and nonstatist, official and popular—becomes multiple, opening sexual/gender difference to debates and negotiations by a variety of social actors, including medico-legal authorities, imams, family members, friends, and lgbtq activists in istanbul. the work of sovereignty through the body establishes intimate legal alliances between families, religious authorities, and the state, alliances that might invalidate the intimate claims that lgbtq people make over each other in life and in death. as i will demonstrate, the hetero-reproductive blood family, through its legally and religiously secured privileged place and rights to intimacy and sovereignty over the body, can further kill the deceased by abandoning them at their death and funerals. this framework proves useful for examining how violence and abandonment ground statist and nonstatist forms of sovereignties (e.g., community and queer family making) through the rights and claims to the body. yet it has also its limits—it does not account for the domain of intimacy that conditions the formation of certain sovereignties through the work of love, affect, and care. the emerging critical work on indigenous and popular forms of sovereignty is key to my thinking of sovereignty in relation to intimacy. this literature stresses substantial and contextual variations in the formation of sovereignty, and approaches sovereignty as fragmented, emergent, interdependent, uneven, nested, and polymorphous (hansen and stepputat 2006; comaroff and comaroff 2009; navaro-yashin 2012; simpson 2014; bishara 2017). amahl bishara (2017, 350), for instance, draws our attention to those forms of popular sovereignties that are “provisional, not resting on enforceable law or acknowledged rights . . . but rather on either insistent confrontation or quiet acts of caring for community in the face of abandonment.” these communally practiced forms of sovereignty do not necessarily restructure existing state power, but instead produce new collectivities, contest the legitimacy of state authorities, and offer different formulations for the operation of power. in caroline humphrey’s (2004, 420) words, these “localized forms of sovereignties” are usually “nested within higher sovereignties,” yet they still “retain a domain within which control over life and death is operational.” expanding on these discussions, i suggest that at the thresholds of dominant regimes, sovereignty manifests itself not only in statist and official forms through legal regimes of family and citizenship, social scripts of religion and ethnicity, and dominant frameworks of gender and sexuality but also in nonstatist and popular forms through an intertwined network of care, labor, affect, and love. as the afterlife of sibel’s sex/gender-transgressive body will demonstrate, if violence is one essential dimension of sovereignty then intimacy is another one, and in some cases these mutually shape and constitute each other (see zengin 2016b). though my ethnography draws mainly from sexual/gender transgression and trans lives and deaths in turkey, my theoretical contribution expands beyond transness and gender nonconformity to engage with novel ways of thinking relationships between sovereignty, intimacy, and death in the margins of the social. death and its afterlife at these social thresholds make for compelling sites to examine distinct yet overlapping formations of sovereignty and intimacy, as well as the intricate, coconstitutive, and prolific relationship between them. to that end, this article traces some of the analytical and theoretical paths that we find ourselves on when we start thinking sovereignty as intimacy and intimacy as sovereignty. before continuing, a few words on methodology: this essay results from ethnographic work conducted with transgender people during different periods between 2009 and 2012 in istanbul, turkey. my research took place across several research sites, ranging from lgbtq organizations to transgender people’s homes and neighborhoods, as well as the cafés, bars, and streets they frequented. i attended conferences, parties, funerals, meetings, and political campaigns for gender rights and against hate crimes. i also conducted interviews with transgender people, lawyers, consultants, doctors, and social and ngo workers; gathered legal codes and documents on gender-reassignment surgeries, the issuance of new id cards, and transgender killings; and collected official and historical documents, newspapers, blog articles, and novels about sex/gender-transgressive people in turkey. sovereign intimacies: family, kin, friends, and lgbtq community achille mbembe’s (2003, 39) concept of necropolitics famously theorizes “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.” necropolitics is captious: it locates traditional forms of sovereignty (e.g., state or religious authority) alongside a more comprehensive politics of death, as well as the contemporary production of “death worlds” (mbembe 2003, 40). sovereignty, in this understanding, operates as having a capacity to make death central to the life of the oppressed. in this “symbiotic copresence of life and death” (haritaworn, kuntsman and posocco 2014, 2), there is a differential invitation into life for different groups of people: while some take pleasure in inhabiting norms, others are abjected and marked for slow or immediate death. for racialized queers and transgender people, for example, livability and killability usually operate as two sides of the same coin by providing publicity and visibility to some, and disposability and erasure to others (see edelman 2014; shakhsari 2014). necropolitics is crucial to understanding the relationship between sovereignty and death, including at moments when decisions are made to end a life or prolong it under conditions of suffering and harm, when life is a “slow death” (berlant 2007). necropolitics, however, reaches a theoretical limit when we move our attention to the afterlife of the dead and the many forms that this afterlife takes, including the political production and destruction of the afterlife itself. my thinking on sovereignty offers a shift from the capacity to “kill or let live” to a different yet complementary form of violence that draws from the domain of death, the realm of the postmortem, and relations with the corpse and the afterlife. in an article about ekin wan, a pkk (kurdistan worker’s party) guerrilla woman whose dead and tortured body turkish soldiers exhibited naked in the streets of kurdistan in 2015, nazan üstündağ (2015) draws our attention to the sovereign’s warfare over the dead of the oppressed. using the death of the other, states attempt to punish communities beyond mortality and inscribe themselves on communal relations of intimacy. üstündağ notes that states ruin and poison the relations with the dead and, in that way, reshape relations with the hereafter, the divine, and the world of faith. in the 1990s, the turkish state adopted a widespread war strategy of disappearing kurdish people, later dumping the dead guerrilla bodies in garbage-processing sites and landfills, preventing the community from practicing their burial and funeral rituals. since 2015, with the heightened conflict between kurdish guerrillas and the turkish state and intensified siege conditions in several kurdish towns, a similar tactic of warfare has targeted the dead bodies of kurds. death and the afterlife (its customs, burial practices, funeral rituals, relations and symbols of mourning, and so on) have become sites of state warfare against kurdish resistance. for instance, in 2015, cemile, a ten-year-old girl from the kurdish city of cizre, was shot to death by the turkish military while playing with her friends in front of her house. after being denied a proper burial by the state, her family had to put her body in a deep freezer to prevent it from rotting (kamer 2015). the same year, a fifty-five-year-old kurdish woman, taybet inan, was shot to death in the streets of silopi while returning home from visiting her neighbor during a state-imposed curfew. state security forces prevented inan’s family members from collecting her body from the street, where it remained for seven days (söylemez 2016), publicly demonstrating the state’s power to violate and defile individual and family rights to socially hegemonic death rituals, in this case muslim burial precepts. a number of scholars address this particular form of violence as necropolitical violence or necroviolence, which mainly concerns corporeal mistreatment of the deceased through burial and funeral practices, graves and cemeteries, and acts of mourning and commemoration (see de león 2015; bargu 2016). necroviolence intensifies at times of war when death is no longer a threshold but rather a continuation or the beginning of terror. in his dissertation, hişyar özsoy (2010) notes that biological killing does not satisfy the nation-state when it comes to people who rebel against its demands. instead, the nation-state, as the sovereign, prevents the bodies of the dead from gaining significant meaning and a social value. in this way, as özsoy goes on to argue, the sovereign kills the people in a symbolic as well as political register, and endeavors to separate the dead from the life of a community. when states occupy not only the domain of life but also that of death and the afterlife, they intervene directly into the intimate life of the community and its ability to socially and politically reproduce itself (zengin 2015). this particular notion of necroviolence, however, relies on an understanding that places the state and the community in opposition to one another. my research shows that this is not always the case. in the afterlife of a sex/gender-transgressive death and/or a sex worker’s passing, the blood family may also become a chief necropolitical actor in an intimate alliance with the state, an alliance that hinges on shared forms of sovereignty on the body of the deceased. the family partakes in sovereignty through those rights to the body that are secured by the state and by islamic precepts. to understand the alliance between blood families and the state, we must first unpack state and islamic regulations behind death rituals and practices of mourning in turkey, both of which define the blood family as the primary holder of obligations for and rights to the deceased. this intimate alliance and the embeddedness of each sovereign register—the state, the family, and islam—within the others proves crucial to understanding the afterlives of gender. lawful death: the state and the blood family the operative functions of modern state power rely on the simultaneous workings of sovereignty and governmentality, each acting as a condition of the other (dean 2001). people face the widespread embeddedness of sovereign violence in every mundane detail. through its fruitful capacity of diffusion, expansion, and regulation, governmentality organizes the investments of sovereign power in its management of populations. within this domain, law has a privileged role and represents the most fundamental characteristic of sovereign power. as john comaroff and jean comaroff (2009, 39) argue, states build “an architecture of legalities” in order to transform their power into sovereignty. when it comes to the realm of death, law works in collaboration with medicine to place death at the service of biopolitical life. for example, medical expertise decides when death occurs and life stops, but law relies on and authorizes this medical decision to facilitate rights on the deceased. those living members of the legally recognized family gain intimate access to the deceased body through legislation concerning inheritance, burial, and funeral, access that consolidates familial sovereignty over the deceased body. blood ties are crucial in giving value and definition to the dominant understanding of the family in turkey, and they are inscribed in social, legal, and religious frameworks. one notable example is the legal regulation of ivf treatment, which strictly prohibits egg, sperm, and embryo donation and surrogacy. it allows only married couples to use their own eggs and sperm. a similar emphasis on blood ties is present in the particular realm of death, allocating a hierarchy of intimate rights to the deceased’s lineal kinship members based on their ranking in the family organization: first, the deceased’s legal spouse and descendants, second, the deceased’s parents and their descendants (i.e., siblings), and third, the deceased’s grandparents and their descendants (i.e., uncles, aunts, their children, and so on). in the presence of a will, other designated inheritors follow this bloodline. this ranking concerns itself primarily with the order of shares in the material afterworld of the deceased, that is, the distribution of their inheritance. even if the deceased wrote a will and denied inheritance to the abovementioned blood family members, and even if the deceased bequeathed all their property to someone outside the bloodline, such as a friend or a lover, the state would still guarantee the blood family members a reserved portion of the succession. that is, the state secures the rights of blood family members to material wealth by designating and legislating them as compulsory heirs of the deceased. another set of death rights concern claims over the body of the deceased, including choice of burial practice, selection of burial plot, whether or not to have an autopsy, and organ donation. blood families and spouses have de facto sovereignty over these decisions, unless a will exists that specifies particular death rights and practices. yet even in the presence of a will, blood families and/or spouses are allowed to contest the decisions of the diseased. under these conditions, judges must interpret the situation according to existing “customs and traditions” (özel 2002, 60; author’s translation), and judges decide who has rights to the deceased body, or more precisely, who has intimate sovereignty over this particular death. but what are the available social scripts and practices for such interpretations? what kind of customs and traditions make consensus possible and allow for the legal designation of the intimate sovereign over the dead body? what are the continuities and ruptures between legal practices and social and cultural scripts concerning the afterlife of a death? to approach these questions, we must move beyond theories of sovereignty that are grounded securely and singularly within the arena of law. the divine sovereign: allah, islam, and the deceased body in turkey’s social and cultural life, sunni islam, the hegemonic religious doctrine, often authorizes sovereign claims on sexed/gendered embodiment. the mainstream interpretation of islam commands that people’s bodies—both body surfaces and internal organs—come from and belong to allah. the body is allah’s emanet (entrust) to humans; allah entrusts the body to humans and hence an individual is responsible for taking good care of their body until they return it to allah. it is therefore not surprising that sunni islam requires a meticulous set of body-related rituals at death. a significant dimension of this religious bodywork includes keeping the body clean by washing away things that are considered polluting, such as blood, urine, feces, and semen. ritual washing is essential to returning the body to allah as clean as it was when gifted by allah at birth. in that sense, one can never possess or own the body. allah’s ultimate sovereignty over both life and death is mediated through a claim on the body. ensuring the return of the body to allah as clean and pure as possible reflects the way in which it is held in trust by the deceased. this washing ritual also evidences the last respects that are paid to the deceased and the process of preparing the body for the afterlife. the treatment of the dead body is intimately related to the formation of communal boundaries and forms of (un)belonging within communities (balkan 2016). as explained earlier, the deceased’s blood family members are the de facto agents of this bodily treatment, a designation that allows them to decide the deceased’s sex and gender through washing and funeral practices. the strict display of a gender regime at islamic funeral practices not only reaffirms the deceased’s belonging in the family but also establishes the dead body’s belonging in a given sex/gender category. the coffin design, the prayers at the mosque, the washing ritual prior to burial, and the rites of inhumation differ according to the state’s determination of the sex of its citizens. for example, only officially trained ritual specialists and family members of the same sex as the deceased—the sex written on the id—can enter the special washing place, or gasilhane (see figure 1), and practice the washing ritual. but it is also possible for the family to supersede the state definition of sex in the case of a transgender burial. during the ritual washing, the body is covered between the belly and the knees. the genitals should not be exposed while cleaning the body. the ritual washing is repeated three times. after the washing, cotton plugs are placed in the body openings. the body is then shrouded in a simple white cloth, or kefen, which symbolizes the equality of all before allah. the face should not be exposed after shrouding. figure 1. a gasilhane, or special washing place for the deceased. photo by aslı zengin. kefen is made of three pieces of cloth for men and five pieces for women. the two additional pieces cover women’s breasts and hair, parts that most observant muslim women prefer also to cover in life, thus marking gendered/sexed difference. prior to burial, the white-shrouded body is placed in a coffin covered with a green cloth upon which verses from the qur’an about death are printed. if the deceased is a female, a headscarf is placed on the side of the coffin over the location of the head. a name tag, colored blue or pink depending on the gender of the deceased, is placed on one side of the coffin. before the dead body is transferred from the mosque to the grave, male attendees of the funeral engage in prayers under the guidance of an imam, and they assemble around the coffin. in turkey men usually perform the funeral prayer in the mosque, while women wait for its completion in the family home of the deceased. when women do attend funeral prayers at a mosque, they are required to stand at the back outside the mosque. figure 2. a green cover, on which verses about death from the qur’an are printed. photo by aslı zengin. the imam’s prayers—both in turkish and arabic—address the deceased as merhume or merhum and as hatun kişi or er kişi, gendered terms that announce the deceased as male or female. these gendered prayers are exceptional to the turkish language, which is gender-neutral and has no distinct gender pronouns for women and men. on the contrary, all objects and human and nonhuman subjects have the same pronoun. on the completion of prayers, the dead body is carried to the graveyard, taken out of the coffin by men, and buried in the white shroud. only men may be present around the graveyard during the burial, regardless of the deceased’s gender. again, women are usually expected to either stand in the background or stay at home. a popular turkish saying, ölüm karşısında herkes eşittir, states that people are made equal in death. the official and actual organization of funeral and burial rituals, however, demonstrates that diversities in ethnicity, class, denomination, and gender and sexual identity may play a significant role in determining the pertinent funeral and burial practices, including the design of gravestones (see eldem 2005; sağır 2013). the headstone design varies according to the material used, its size, and the personal information—even a picture in some instances—written on the stone. given the gender dichotomy embedded within sunni islamic funeral practices, it is no surprise that gender-nonconforming bodies, including sibel’s, might invoke questions. people who follow sunni interpretations of islam might view the sex/gender-trangressive body as a challenge to islamic notions of embodiment, that is, to allah’s ascription of sex to each body. imams may refuse to organize a ceremony for a deceased transgender person, they may refuse to conduct the prayers, or may consent to do so only if the prayers are gendered in the same way as the sex assigned at birth.5 imams usually have recourse to and make use of state authorities and medico-legal regulations on sex and gender while they deliberate over the transgressive body. for example, the directorate of religious affairs (diyanet i̇şleri) dictates the organization of funeral rituals based on a reading of the material surface of the body—meaning that the funeral ceremonies of trans women who have not undergone gender reassignment surgery (grs) are practiced in compliance with the sex assigned at their birth and marked on their state identification card. although they lived as women, the funeral and burial rituals related to their bodies are expected to be performed by men. if they had grs and had their ids reissued to reflect their reassigned gender/sex, then state and religious authorities require women to perform the corpse washing, cleaning, and wrapping rituals. in short, the state and sunni islam, which derive their sovereignty from two different scripts—civil law and centuries of interpretation and argumentation of the qur’an, hadith and sunnah respectively—work in alliance to reinscribe the gender/sex of the dead body. the alliance between these sovereignties came into evidence at sibel’s funeral. ceyda, a fifty-year-old trans woman and a close friend of sibel, told me how it had been difficult to find a mosque willing to do the funeral and prayers for sibel, since most of the imams rejected organizing a ceremony once they learned that the deceased was a trans woman. some imams had even refused to do the funeral prayers and thus denied final religious rites to sibel. a few imams had consented to perform the prayers and burial rites as long as she was referred to as a male. they recognized the blue id, the state’s inscription of sex, as sibel’s true sex, dismissing sibel’s life as a woman and her identity as such. sibel’s friends rejected this option and kept looking for an imam who would agree to conduct her funeral ceremony—to recognize, in death, that she had lived and died as a woman. this effort points to fissures in the alliance between state and religious sovereignties. these fissures are produced by communal action—in this case, the actions of a community of trans women—and a growing body of islamic jurisprudence on sex/gender nonconformity in various muslim contexts that reads sex/gender embodiment as open to practice, negotiation, and interpretation (najmabadi 2013; ragab 2015; almarri 2016; hamzić 2016; alipour 2017; zainuddin and mahdy 2017). alongside ongoing debates and interpretations within islamic traditions, people themselves seek their right to religious practice, and even their “right to sin” (savcı 2016, 176). families or the friends of the deceased may succeed in persuading religious authorities to perform funeral practices pertinent to the lived gender and sexual identity of the deceased. moreover, the dead trans body is not alone in causing a rupture in prescribed religious traditions relating to death. for example, aslıhan sanal (2011) discusses this issue in the context of organ donation in turkey. another example is committing suicide, one of the greatest sins in islam, viewed as one greater than homicide. since the body is an emanet, a borrowed thing from allah, a human cannot violate its right to live. the practice and conferral of a traditional religious funeral ceremony and burial for a person who committed suicide thus also produces an ambiguous space for imams, a space within which to practice islamic authority. some imams refuse to organize a religious ceremony, while others may gain some flexibility by finding an excuse for the deceased’s suicide. they may, for example, justify the conferral of a religious funeral ceremony for a suicide on the grounds of a momentary loss of sanity or short-lived hysteria. the dead bodies of hunsa, or intersex people, also produce ambiguities and modulations in death practices. traditionally, neither women nor men practice the full washing ritual for intersex people. instead, the washer wraps their hand with a piece of cloth and performs a cleaning ritual of the face and arms only, using purified sand or dust. while state-issued gender identity is seen as the principle criterion for performing the gendered practices of funeral ritual, in cases of an intersex person an imam might try to learn how the person identified in their lifetime. in case this information is impossible to acquire, the imam could act according to the testimonies of those who knew the deceased in life. mostly it is families and loved ones who locate and press sympathetic imams for the conferral of appropriate death rites for trans people, intersex people, and people who have committed suicide in turkey. these spaces of religious ambiguity and interpretation allow individual imams to practice their authority. they also demonstrate alliances that form between members of vulnerable communities and imams. sibel’s friends, for example, eventually found an imam who agreed to practice her funeral and burial rituals according to sibel’s self-identified gender. at the funeral, i was nervous about how sibel’s gender would be addressed in the prayers. however, i did not need to wait for the imam’s prayers: i saw the coffin, covered in a green cloth with a headscarf placed on the side where the person’s head would rest. the imam of this mosque had recognized sibel as a female, despite her having a state id that still (mis)recognized her as male. he grounded his interpretation in his long-term residence in a neighborhood with a high population of transgender people and in his authority as an imam. his familiarity with transgender lives and communities led him to take a particular interpretive approach. the imam concluded his gender-appropriate prayers for sibel and asked for people’s helal, blessings to the dead person and the last chance to forgive the deceased for misdeeds before the burial. when sending someone off to the graveyard (in islam, a passage to the other world), it is rare for someone to deny their blessings to the deceased. under the imam’s guidance, we all gave our blessings to sibel. sibel’s funeral, however, also presented the problem of the corpse-washing ritual and the placement of her grave in the cemetery. who would—and who should—organize the funeral rituals and material resources for the burial? as ceyda, sibel’s close friends, and i walked toward the mosque’s gate, we saw sibel’s mother sitting in a chair in front of the mosque, accepting people’s condolences. sibel’s mother, her sister, and i were the only non-trans women at the funeral. in fact, along with sibel’s brother-in-law and the imam, we were the only non-trans people at the funeral. sibel’s mother and sister were present at the funeral, but they had chosen not to participate in the washing ritual—a particularly intimate familial obligation. they maintained a distance from sibel’s dead body through withholding this most intimate of death rites, as well as the affective, social, and kinship effects these rites are meant to produce. instead of sibel’s blood family members, ceyda had performed the ritual washing of sibel’s body. as we were leaving the mosque, ceyda remarked on the many times she had had to wash, clean, and wrap the dead bodies of her trans friends, since so many blood families had completely abandoned their trans children and did not want to touch their bodies, even in death.6 the stigmatization of sex work also comes into play in the distance that blood families produce by not performing death-rite obligations. the majority of trans women in turkey have difficulties finding jobs in sectors other than sex work, and the stigmatization of sex work and transphobia in tandem often lead to severed intimate relations with blood families over the course of trans people’s lives. despite this, throughout my research i did not come across a single story of a blood family denying burial and funeral rites to a cis woman sex worker, whereas stories of funeral denials to trans women were commonplace. sovereignties of intimacy: love, care, and the real family my fieldwork was punctuated by stories of two family forms that frequently had contrasting roles in transgender women’s lives: blood families who abandoned their transgender kin in life and death, and the lgbtq community and friends who stepped in, claimed, and protected transgender women in times of abandonment and violence, as well as in times of death. this intimate becoming, i suggested earlier, creates room for thinking about sovereignty from a different perspective that highlights its close associations with relations of care, bonds of intimacy, and the creation of affective communities in the face of everyday violence. more precisely, at transgender funerals we see the intimate work of care, love, protection, and claims that lgbtq activists and friends of the deceased generate in the afterlife of a sex/gender-transgressive death. the lgbtq community and friends often reclaim the body and organize the funeral, thereby taking the place of the blood family as the real family (see also avramopoulou 2017; çalışkan, forthcoming). lgbtq lives, and in particular trans lives, are shaped by abandonment and disowning. as such, they consistently invest in their friendships and comradeships and contest the primacy given to blood families. this is what happened at the mourning ritual following sibel’s burial, held at istanbul lgbtt. when i entered istanbul lgbtt, i saw about ten pairs of shoes lined up next to one another on the floor, ranging in color and in degree of wear. the shoes were now waiting to embrace new feet and carry new bodies, a practice that has become tradition in the trans community: when a trans woman from the community dies, friends collect objects and belongings from her house and exhibit them for people to take according to their needs and preferences. this redistribution of resources—an intimate gift economy of the dead—makes for yet another way in which a community of trans women proclaims itself a family. someone made helva, another ritual for the dead. traditionally, ölü helvası (helva of the dead) is a dessert prepared with semolina or flour, sugar, and butter, and then cooked and served by the deceased person’s family for the participants of the funeral following the interment. as people eat helva, they also talk about the departed and remember them. for sibel’s funeral ceremony, one of the trans women had taken on the role of cooking sufficient portions of helva and bringing it to the center. i had not seen the place so jam-packed before, but sibel’s blood family remained absent—as they had at the cemetery. they departed from the mosque immediately after sibel’s body did and returned home. sibel’s mother and sister had also asked ceyda to tell other trans women not to come visit them in their homes to give their condolences. they would not welcome them inside the house. sibel’s burial plot was bought with money pooled by trans women; sibel’s blood family had contributed nothing. this was not the first time the community had pooled their resources for a deceased friend, nor would it be the last. when ceyda saw that i was impressed, she turned to me and said: “when i die, they’re gonna do the same thing. after all, we are each other’s family! we are the real family!” the emphasis on “real” family-making becomes most evident in violent moments of everyday life—when trans people face exclusion, displacement, and abandonment. it is both analogous and dissimilar to kath weston’s (1991) work on “chosen families” among gay men and lesbians in the san francisco bay area. although weston’s chosen families form a sort of network in their interactions with one another across household lines, they still maintain affective attachments to and through the sense of a nuclear home, which becomes central to couples’ relations and which other gays and lesbians might enter and exit as lovers, friends, and/or solidarity partners. households on the model of a nuclear-family home are maintained as nodes, bases, or continuities within a larger network of queer kinship. in that sense, links between a sense of home, domestic household, and affective family retain their significance among weston’s queer families. yet in istanbul, among the lgbtq community in general and trans people in particular, i found less investment in maintaining nuclear structures of family-making in relation to the space of home than in making the family a form that brings many trans people together through lgbtq organizations. that is why sibel’s shoes were displayed and her helva cooked and served at istanbul lgbtt instead of at any other house. in other words, a network of trans people, emerging through political struggle and the spaces created by different lgbtq organizations, comes to define itself as the queer family. as i have learned, many members of these organizations speak of organizing and community spaces as their home, as opposed to their individual dwellings, where they either live alone or with roommates or partners. furthermore, when they write wills they often request to be buried by their queer families, not by their blood families. queer familyand kin-making more often concerns breaks and discontinuities than stabilities and continuities. borrowing from david eng’s (2010, 15) discussion of “the feelings of kinship that threaten . . . ‘to disappear irretrievably’ if we do not recognize and seize hold of them,” i suggest that the lgbtq community also develops a feeling of kinship that derives from a social archive of transgender deaths and shared experience of violence and threat of death. dilara calışkan (forthcoming) tackles this relationship between transgender deaths, memory, and temporality by examining how the lgbtq community socializes this archive into practices of intimacy, including care, bonds, connections, protection, and division of labor at the moment and in the aftermath of death. i would like to push this insight further and to claim that, both in its material and affective documentation and in its archival collection of past, present, and future intimacies in the lgbtq community, each deceased transgender body becomes a tangible and intangible temporary home—as well as a space for homemaking—for transgender people. returning to the scene of sibel’s funeral, i spent the entire day with ceyda after the burial. she recounted another story, in which efforts to reclaim the deceased body of another trans friend, ayşe, had failed, and the blood family did not let ayşe’s friends organize a funeral. this other family had disavowed their trans daughter both in her life and her death, and had requested that the state bury ayşe in a cemetery for the unknown. turning into a necroviolent actor, the family denied an afterlife to ayşe, rendered her anonymous, and cast her body out from socially recognizable scripts of mourning. judith butler (2004) has long drawn our attention to those unequal and differential economies of mourning that proclaim some deaths as grievable, while denying bereavement to others. one can describe the cemetery for the unknown as one of the chief architectures in this economy of mourning. in this graveyard the state buries the bodies of those who remain unidentified or unclaimed over a certain period of time. in practice, it constitutes a burial site for marginal people, namely, homeless people, victims of honor crimes, and more recently, unaccompanied syrian refugees. there is also a political dimension to these cemeteries for the unknown: they abound with the bodies of political detainees who were disappeared under police interrogations and state violence. historically, the state has deemed many radical leftists and kurdish guerrillas unidentified, denied families and communities these bodies, and buried them as anonymous corpses. the three most popular cemeteries for the anonymous are located within the graveyards of kilyos in istabul, sincan in ankara, and dogancay in izmir. cemeteries in other turkish cities have also allocated specific sites to the burials of the unknown. these graves usually lie side by side, with a numbered plate assigned to each. numerical representation functions as a technical tool either to manifest anonymity or to transform an already existing identification into an anonymous sign, especially in the case of supposedly terrorist bodies. the cemeteries for the unknown attracted attention following the coup attempt against recep tayyip erdoğan’s government on july 15, 2016. in the aftermath, the directorate of religious affairs released a statement denying funeral rights and burial practices to sixteen soldiers who had been part of the coup. ten of these dead soldiers were not claimed by anyone, and their bodies remained in the morgue until their planned transport to the cemetery for the unknown. the mayor and municipality of istanbul, however, constructed an entirely new cemetery, called hainler mezarlığı (the cemetery for traitors), for these soldiers. the mayor wanted to prevent these men from receiving prayers from people who might visit the cemetery and pray for the unknown. he publicly stated that people should curse and humiliate the graves of coup-affiliated soldiers, claiming that this new cemetery for traitors would constitute a perfect site for such acts. eventually, the directorate of religious affairs intervened and the municipality of istanbul had to remove a sign above the newly constructed cemetery proclaiming it “the cemetery for traitors.” however, the site continues to mark a mortal location for treason in the popular imagination. the cemeteries for the unknown terrify ceyda. long removed from her blood family, she has already decided to donate her corpse as a cadaver for use in anatomy courses at medical schools, in part to avoid being buried as an “unknown.” sanal (2011) offers a detailed discussion of this arrangement between medical schools and the council of forensic medicine. she explores how mentally ill people have been denied full personhood and rights over their own bodies since the early years of the turkish republic, because they depended on others and did not have mental health. when they died, they were deemed homeless unless a relative claimed or the anatomy lab demanded them (sanal 2011, 121). in that case, they were buried in the cemetery for the unknown. with the release of a circular by the supreme board of judges and prosecutors in october 2011, the council of forensic medicine linked bodies that fall under the category of homeless to cadaver regulations even more stringently. according to this procedural change, the council of forensic medicine has decided to deliver to medical schools those bodies not claimed by family members within fifteen days following death, placing these cases under the category of anonymous (haberturk 2012). while people can request that their bodies be donated to medical schools upon death, the donor’s family often feels reluctant to fulfill the donor’s wish, a reluctance with which the state complies. some medical schools have had to return corpses to families that insist on organizing a burial for the deceased. such moments further mark the body of the dead as a social body that has been (re)produced and shaped within the relations of kinship and family. the burial rituals represent not only the last obligations to the deceased but also a social obligation for the family to present itself as a family to society. ceyda did not think anyone in her blood family would contest her decision to donate her body to science, precisely because she did not believe that anyone in her blood family would claim her body or organize a funeral. while talking to her about her not-yet-dead body, i was struck by the way that ceyda drew out the regulatory apparatus behind the making of the known or unknown cadaver: unless she donated her body to science, she explained, there would be a chance of her being regarded as anonymous. furthermore, if she donated her body, there would be no legitimate actor who could contest her will and take back her body. ceyda was afraid that the state might not recognize the years-long relations that gelled into queer family-making between her and her trans friends. if the state did not recognize this relationship, it would claim the body as its own and decline to return the body to ceyda’s trans friends for a funeral. moreover, she was unsure whether her trans friends could mobilize enough people and capital to buy a grave plot in a regular cemetery for the known, because these were extremely expensive. ceyda felt comforted by the idea of donating her body as a cadaver to medical students, explaining: “at least my body could contribute to something scientific.” in this way ceyda also proclaimed sovereignty over her future deceased body, over the afterlife of her transgender body. it was a claim shaped by her experiences living with the deaths of her trans family members, particularly that of ayşe—whose blood family had insisted on burying her in a cemetery for the unknown even though her queer family had raised the funds and bought a burial plot for ayşe in a cemetery for the known. the blood family had exercised its state-given right to ayşe’s dead body and refused the claims of ayşe’s queer family, although the latter, and not her blood family, had cared for ayşe for years. ceyda and the rest of ayşe’s queer family could do nothing. in the absence of a will or a marriage, the blood family is the only actor to inherit the property the deceased has left behind. so trans women told stories about some blood families who did not hesitate to deny funeral rights to their trans children, but at the same time claimed their wealth. the family’s refusal of the obligation of intimacy in ayşe’s case was not just an act that broke ties between the blood family and the trans child; by not allowing ayşe a burial ceremony organized by her trans friends, they also sought to destroy trans intimacies, obligations, and relations. as ayşe’s funeral story demonstrates, the blood family, as it is recognized and constructed by the state, can kill a person beyond their physical death. the blood family can be one of the most violent sovereign models of intimacy—a deadly one, in fact. the production of intimacy between family members is frequently coupled with strict rules of producing, ordering, and regulating lives, bodies, and desires. the family, with all its emotional, material, and symbolic work, includes and excludes through drawing borders between different bodies and desires, inscribing its sovereignty over family members. sara ahmed (2006) astutely argues that to be a family member demands that one follow the family line, that is, the naturalization of heterosexuality as a line that directs bodies to desire the body of the opposite sex. inheritance of this family line also constitutes the condition of family love. hence, when a child fails to inherit a desire and orientation for a hetero-reproductive future, she/he risks the material, social, and affective capital provided by the family (see also weston 1991). among these conditions is not only sexual orientation but also gender identity (see yanagisako and collier 1987). in other words, many families require their children to inherit and integrate not only heterosexual desire but also cisgenderism into the construction of their selves so as to be recognized as those families’ respectful, loved, and cared-for members. the state’s sustenance of a dominant intimate order in turkey strictly depends on the circulation and cultivation of desires for and within hetero-reproductive family life, which has become increasingly prominent in emerging forms of governance, particularly under the current akp (justice and development party) government (see kocamaner 2014). this family model is the only legally recognized organization of intimacy in turkey, and it forecloses alternative ties of relatedness (remember, here, the ivf regulations restricted to heterosexual couples)—a situation also found in many other countries (mikdashi 2018). trans people’s sovereign claims over their intimate relations with their friends and their bodies are contested, negotiated, and shaped at the intersection of those legal regulations, institutional practices, and norms that inscribe the hetero-reproductive nuclear family as the hegemonic model of intimacy in turkey. sibel’s funeral demonstrates how her trans friends’ claims on her deceased body became mediated through the heteronormative family, the state, and islam. in ayşe’s case, however, her friends’ claims on her body were denied due to the state’s legal inscription of blood-family sovereignty over the dead body as it relates to funeral rites. it is crucial that scholars pay more attention to the role of the state as the mediator and authorizer of particular forms of intimacies between trans people, their blood families, and other social actors, as well as of the limits on the sovereignty that trans people claim over their intimate bonds and definitions of sex and gender. conclusion this article has argued that the entanglements between religious interpretation, familial order, and gender and sexuality regimes, as well as the secular laws governing the individual body in turkey, embed close relationships between sovereignty and intimacy, which become apparent through emergent collective struggles over transgressive deaths. death at the threshold of dominant regimes is never an ending, but rather an initiation into intimate and violent afterlives. in these afterlives, i have suggested that the lgbtq community and friends of the deceased produce localized and provisional forms of sovereignty through practices of care and love toward a sex/gender-transgressive death. transgender women deploy the family as a sovereign form of intimacy but strategically rework it through queer alignments. they contest intimate sovereign alliances between the state, islam, and blood family, and thus survive their disowning and abandonment. in this way, they “secure ‘space’ for death and mourning” (avramopoulou 2017, 75) and register it as a loss into the heart of life. death and its afterlives become vital to how trans people relate to one another and to society at large—including its relationship with religious authorities—through the creative work of living. trans people turn death itself into ways of becoming political and intimate subjects, remaking the conditions of their living (see zengin 2016a). the contestations over who provides meaning to ritual constitute a struggle over futures for trans/queer social worlds. the queer family intervenes in and ruptures the ritual domain of religious and cultural practice, transgressing multiple sovereign arrangements of sexuality, sex, gender, kinship, and citizenship. caring for the dead, in these political and social projects, becomes an emergent form of sovereignty that invigorates life in an intimate way. like any other death, transgender deaths are social events, a contentious symbolic and material field in and through which social order in turkey or elsewhere is formed, negotiated, and contested. transgender deaths provide just one example among many other transgressive deaths that constitute a field of social contestation for interrogating how heterogeneous and mostly antagonistic understandings of sex, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and religion meet and entangle with each other, and how they shape and define both life and death in the margins. each of the stories presented here—from sibel, ayşe, cemile, and ekin wan to unclaimed refugees, suicides, homeless people, and so-called terrorists—demonstrates that death marks the ethnic, sexual, gendered, and economic limits of belonging in regimes of family, kinship, religion, and citizenship, as well as in practices of mourning and grief. multiple forms of transgression open the organization of social difference to debates and negotiations by various actors who, in turn, advance diverse claims on the body of the deceased, sovereign intimacies that coexist in concert or collide with each other. violence, death, and intimacy at the limits of gender and sexuality regimes are not a phenomenon unique to turkey. we live among the ghosts of gender-nonconforming deaths in a multitude of temporal and spatial registers. to name a few: those indigenous two spirit people massacred at the hands of european colonial gender regimes; those so-called hermaphrodites staged as scientific objects of inquiry for the european medico-legal gaze; those who died in the united states under the reagan government during the hiv/aids crisis of the 1980s; black trans people and trans people of color who are targeted for hate crimes and who die (and live) in euro-american countries every day. we have many deaths to remember, mourn, and commemorate. may these stories from turkey help you remember and grieve some of your own ghosts. notes acknowledgments this article benefited from the generous intellectual environment provided by the women’s studies in religion program at harvard divinity school during my tenure in 2017–2018. thanks to colleagues at the university of california, berkeley, the university of cambridge, columbia university, harvard university, brown university, washington university in st. louis, the college of william and mary, boston university, and amherst college for inviting me to share my work and providing me with insightful feedback. i am extremely grateful to amahl bishara, kimberley blockett, ann braude, jean comaroff, avital davidovich eshed, gökçe günel, ferial khalifa, maya mikdashi, durba mitra, afsaneh najmabadi, laura prieto, nazan üstündağ, and emrah yıldız for their invaluable comments on different versions of this article. thanks also go to thomas abowd, seçil dağtaş, mark jordan, george paul mieu, minoo moallem, gül özyeğin, sahar sadjadi, sertaç sehlikoğlu, vivian solana, and bettina stoetzer, who attentively listened to my work and shared their insights. finally, i appreciate the thoughtful engagement by four anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial team, especially heather paxson, which greatly improved this article. 1. despite its various interpretations, a headscarf is a dominant religious practice among muslim women at a funeral ceremony. even women who do not wear headscarves in their everyday lives usually attend funerals with their headscarves. 2. with the legislation of a new id bill in 2016, civil registry offices have started to replace blue/pink ids with smart white ones since january 2017. the new ids now have digitized personal finger, vein, and palm prints, and will be issued until 2020. they still display dichotomous gender categories, but in verbal form. time will tell whether this shift will create new possibilities for challenging gender binarism in institutional life. 3. for a detailed account on this medico-legal process, see zengin 2014. 4. i use the term transgressive death not to denote death itself as transgressive, but to capture those social forms of transgression that emerge at the moment and in the aftermath of death in the margins of the social. 5. there have been other instances of funeral denials by sunni imams when it came to the death rituals of alevis (zirh 2012) and supposed terrorists (özsoy 2010). 6. some trans women do succeed in maintaining relations with their blood family, although mainly through monetary transactions. the majority of the trans women i met during my fieldwork, however, had severed connections to their blood families. i should also note that such stories of abandonment extend beyond the boundaries of turkey, reaching multiple geographies of 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üstündağ, nazan 2015 “ekin wan bedeninde ifşa olan devlet ya da kadınlar sıra bizde [the state exposed in the body of ekin wan, or, women, it’s now our turn].” evrensel, august 23. http://www.evrensel.net/haber/258899/ekin-wanin-bedeninde-ifsa-olan-devlet-ya-da-kadinlar-sira-bizde. weston, kath 1991 families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. new york: columbia university press. yanagisako, sylvia j., and jane f. collier 1987 “toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship.” in gender and kinship: essays toward a unified analysis, edited by jane f. collier and sylvia j. yanagisako, 14–51. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. zainuddin, ani amelia, and zaleha abdullah mahdy 2017 “the islamic perspectives of gender-related issues in the management of patients with disorders of sex development.” archives of sexual behavior 46, no. 2: 353–60. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0754-y. zengin, aslı 2014 “sex for law, sex for therapy: pre-sex reassignment surgical therapy sessions of trans people in istanbul.” anthropologica 56, no. 1: 55–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24469641. 2015 “cemile cagirga: a girl is freezing under state fire.” jadaliyya, september 17. http://www.jadaliyya.com/details/32470/cemile-cagirga-a-girl-is-freezing-under-state-fire. 2016a “mortal life of trans/feminism: notes on ‘gender killings’ in turkey.” transgender studies quarterly 3, nos. 1–2: 266–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334487. 2016b “violent intimacies: tactile state power, sex/gender transgression, and the politics of touch in contemporary turkey.” journal of middle east women’s studies 12, no. 2: 225–45. https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-3507650. zirh, besim can 2012 “following the dead beyond the ‘nation’: a map for transnational alevi funerary routes from europe to turkey.” ethnic and racial studies 35, no. 10: 1758–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2012.659274. reproductive politics in the age of trump and brexit reproductive politics in the age of trump and brexit sarah franklin university of cambridge https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4623-6962 faye ginsburg new york university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2844-1185 for feminists and feminist scholars who have been active in reproductive rights since the 1980s, donald trump’s policies concerning national autonomy, religious freedom, increased police and military spending, racial profiling, and border control rearticulate a tragically familiar grammar grounded in a distinctly american legacy of white christian nationalism and its highly racialized reproductive politics. above all, this grammar feels familiar from decades of american conflict over the practice of abortion, a political struggle in which, as faye ginsburg (1998) documented in her pathbreaking study of the abortion debate in fargo, north dakota in the 1980s, issues of race, class, gender, generation, religion, sexuality, and reproduction emerge as the fault lines of mainstream political division and struggle—far more than party politics. in the name of promoting and celebrating a “culture of life,” u.s. right-to-life groups have for more than three decades maintained a campaigning strategy that powerfully links traditional gender roles and family values, opposition to gay marriage, the right to gun ownership, and opposition to abortion within an overarching white settler narrative of lost american greatness. this is the same grammar articulated by randall terry, the evangelical protestant founder of operation rescue, which from the late 1980s onward advocated increasingly extreme and violent forms of antiabortion activism to putatively save the nation. for terry and his followers, prolife politics linked fetal salvation to rescuing america’s future. making america great again, white again, and right again became a culture war in which militarization was not only an idiom but an explicit code of practice. “justifiable homicide” was operation rescue’s answer to six fatal shootings of abortion clinic staff between 1988 and 1994. of equal concern is the impact of that violence—or the threat of it—on the availability of abortion for women in the united states, beginning with the steady decline of training available for medical students. some 55 percent of medical schools report that they offer no clinical exposure to abortion for their medical students. a lack of medical personnel, as well as variations in state legislation, have translated into a steady decrease in the number of abortion clinics in the united states; five states are down to a single abortion clinic. and in january 2018, for the first time in american history, a u.s. president officially addressed the annual march for life. in addition to the moral support trump offered the newly energized crowd of antiabortion activists, he announced two new policies: an effort to exclude planned parenthood facilities from medicaid programs and a proposed regulation that would allow health-care providers to refuse to perform services that conflict with their “religious or moral beliefs.” the strategy of undermining women’s access to abortion from the bottom up is accelerating. the ways in which the politics of race, gender, and nation are bound together in this foundational american reproductive model arguably explain as much or more about the rise of alt-right populism today as conventional theories of economic decline. in the nativist reproductive imaginary of operation rescue and its descendant political movements, the signs and threats of evil and degeneracy are evident everywhere, from the universal product code to the rainbow flag. these distinctly coded signifiers, like hillary clinton or l. l. bean (see anderson 2017), structure an overarching grammar of national belonging defined by the preservation of whiteness, biological men and women, heterosexual marriage, and the right to carry one’s weapon of choice. but while the reproductive grammar fueling trump’s populist “build a wall” nativism is in many ways distinctively american, it shares features with other contexts of populism, including resurgent nostalgic nativist discourses in europe and the anti-immigration narratives of britain’s brexiteers, common ground that trump has eagerly pointed out. in europe, the racialized and demonized figure of the immigrant family is frequently accompanied by a discourse of local communities “flooded” or “swamped” by waves of needy and resource-less incoming foreigners. in germany, recent alternative für deustchland (afd) party posters juxtaposed images of domestic and cultural reproduction—think folk costumes and pork sausages—and those of biological reproduction to assert a new kinder, küche, kirche (children, kitchen, church) agenda in defense of white national sovereignty, traditional family values, and conventional gender roles. figure 1. “new germans? we can make them ourselves.” in this advertisement from the populist-nationalist party alternative für deutschland, an image of a woman’s pregnant body symbolizes both national renewal and traditional gender roles. casually dressed in jeans, relaxed and smiling, the white woman is pointedly juxtaposed with the specter of foreign migrants entering the country. the leave campaign in britain foregrounded a discourse of taking back control: over borders, banks, laws, taxes, and public services. in their advertising campaigns, proponents repeatedly emphasized the financial cost to britain not only of european union subsidies but also of the uncontrolled immigration that had supposedly brought britain to a “breaking point.” figure 2. by fabricating visual evidence of a migrant caravan extending off to a distant vanishing point, this leave campaign poster urges voters to “take back control of our borders,” thus reinforcing one of the chief economic myths propounded by brexiteers, namely, that immigration is “breaking” britain. these seemingly economic arguments were tied to depictions of immigrants as threats to national values and to “our way of life,” even going so far as to pinkwash the leave campaign with references to “islamist extremism” and the imminent risk of “an orlando-style atrocity” in england. figure 3. in this poster from the leave campaign, gay rights symbolize the freedoms that british people allegedly stand to lose as a result of increased immigration, with a decontextualized photo of armed jihadis warning voters to protect the values they hold dear before it is too late. as in the case of the u.s. grammar linking guns, abortion, gender roles, and family values to an established syntax of national belonging under threat, so too in britain and europe do we see reproduction at the core of newly powerful and emboldened populist movements that openly articulate an explicitly racist, sexist, and fascist agenda. the gloves have come off in the “war to save the west,” as trump so plainly put it in his 2017 visit to poland. drawing on the legacy of feminist anthropology to parse these new right-wing movements, to which the politics of race and reproduction are fundamental, thus makes for a crucial task. at the 2017 annual meeting of the american anthropological association, a panel titled “the reproductive politics of trump and brexit” that the two of us organized examined not only the prolife foundations of trumpist populist discourse but also similar forms of populist rhetoric internationally—especially in relation to a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in britain and europe. focusing on specific case studies, we investigated the overlapping reproductive logics at work in today’s populist and nativist political movements, and we are pleased to present this work as an openings and retrospectives collection in cultural anthropology. in her insightful analysis of walls and uteruses, inspired by a woman holding a protest sign that proclaimed “i’m building a wall around my uterus and making the gop pay,” elise andaya (2019) exposes the internal coherence in the rhetoric of (non)belonging, insularity, and danger that underlies trump effects from reproductive politics to immigration, from state militarization to the strengthening of stand your ground laws. risa cromer (2019) continues to trace the paradoxical alignment of u.s. antiabortion and anti-immigration politics condensed in white christian nationalism through a close reading of the 2017 jane doe case, in which a seventeen-year-old awaiting immigration hearings had to sue the u.s. government to attain the abortion she was determined to have and that was legally her due. in doing so, cromer demonstrates what feminist scholars of reproduction do well, which is to make explicit the centrality of reproduction within all politics, including (in this case) a u.s. politics of immigration and white christian nationalism. following the historian and literary scholar saidiya hartman, dána-ain davis (2019) analyzes reproductive politics under trump as yet another iteration of the afterlife of slavery. contemporary antiabortion rhetoric, davis argues, echoes worries about displacement and wealth preservation that white planters expressed in the context of increasing opposition to slavery just before the american civil war. in both instances, discourses of white vulnerability/privilege and nation-building desires are linked through a politics of forced reproduction that depends on the maternal citizenship of particular women (and not others). peering behind a different set of walls—those of the prison—carolyn sufrin (2019) reveals that although carceral institutions are constitutionally mandated to provide health care to their charges and incarcerated women retain their legal right to abortion, these women’s access to abortion in fact depends on the whims of administrators and misguided rules made possible by inattention to what happens behind prison walls. thousands of pregnant women, disproportionately women of color, must carry unwanted pregnancies as part of their sentence. in the final essay, sarah franklin (2019) draws on her personal experience in a small english village to comment on the familiar grammars of britain’s brexit vote in june 2016. like the election of donald trump in the united states, brexit offered an important lesson in reproductive politics: whereas common media accounts of brexit rely on narratives of economically marginal communities “left out” of the benefits of globalization, franklin points to a much older and more familiar phenomenon, namely, the reproduction of white ethnic nationalism. the most dangerous identity politics in europe and america today, she argues, are those directed at the rescue of a threatened way of life primarily defined by its racial origins. franklin introduces the concept of reproductive sacrifice to illustrate the value of comparative anthropological research on contemporary reproductive politics. together, these five short essays offer a set of powerful resonances around walls, nationalist narratives, discourses of salvation and sacrifice, and the ongoing significance of prolife politics and anti-immigrant sentiment to the mainstream political agenda. in the spirit of a retrospective, the essays also look back to the long history of feminist anthropological concerns with the politics of reproduction in all its senses. today, books such as laura briggs’s (2017) recent how all politics became reproductive politics are asking why basic questions of social reproduction have been neglected for so long, especially given their critical importance to the successive waves of neoliberal, value-for-money cutbacks to the welfare state. these tactics have been accompanied by wars on race and gender that have been used to legitimate them. thus our long feminist history of analyzing reproduction as politics, culture, and economics is back where it should be: front and center. we hope you enjoy these contributions to cultural anthropology, and we hope that they inspire many similarly concerned contributions in issues to come. references andaya, elise 2019 “‘i’m building a wall around my uterus’: abortion politics and the politics of othering in trump’s america.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 10–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.03. anderson, l. v. 2017 “liberals, don’t let donald trump tarnish l. l. bean’s sterling brand reputation.” slate, january 12. https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/01/liberals-dont-let-donald-trump-tarnish-l-l-beans-sterling-brand-reputation.html. briggs, laura 2017 how all politics became reproductive politics: from welfare reform to foreclosure to trump. oakland: university of california press. cromer, risa 2019 “jane doe.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 18–25. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.04. davis, dána-ain 2019 “trump, race, and reproduction in the afterlife of slavery.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 26–33. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.05. franklin, sarah 2019 “nostalgic nationalism: how a discourse of sacrificial reproduction helped fuel brexit britain.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 41–52. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.07. ginsburg, faye d. 1998 contested lives: the abortion debate in an american community. 2nd edition. berkeley: university of california press. sufrin, carolyn 2019 “when the punishment is pregnancy: carceral restriction of abortion in the united states.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 34–40. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.06. the limits of corporate chains and brand management: “loyalty” and the efficacy of vernacular markets in the andes cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 252-281, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.04 the limits of corporate chains and brand management: “loyalty” and the efficacy of vernacular markets in the andes juliane müller university of munich https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2126-6521 walking through the streets of la paz, bolivia, where the electronics wholesale and retail trade is concentrated—a densely populated area northwest of the city center with sidewalk sales, small retail shops, warehouses, and popular shopping galleries—one commonly sees a native trader woman talking to a representative of the south korean firm samsung electronics about shelf display, or, more recently, in a conversation with an employee of the national branch of chinese huawei technologies about deposits. the bolivian employees of these east asian multinationals are in daily contact with shopkeepers and street vendors. through personalized attention, gifts, and bonus payments, they try to create brand fidelity among traders and convince them to collaborate with market research and inventory control. in business jargon, they deploy midstream and downstream supply-chain management to render the distribution of electronics more predictable, cost and time efficient, as well as more in line with trade and brand marketing to enhance sales at the retail end of the chain. although the corporations have engaged in these activities for the past fifteen years, the terms of market exchange continue to be set mainly by vendors, shopkeepers, and wholesale traders. while the labor of the corporate staff adds a more official aura to the area and makes it more attractive for middleand upper-middle-class clients, any of the most fashionable appliances continue to be available in different value classes according to price, quality, and brand authenticity. fancy billboard advertisements for flat-screen televisions and glimmering shelves with the newest smartphones abound; but there are no price tags, as the price is produced along particularistic market channels and ultimately set during the final sales transaction. based on eighteen months of fieldwork (in 2013–2018 and 2020) with both corporate employees and traders,1 this article aims to make sense of the persistence of a vernacular market despite attempts to profoundly change it. by analyzing corporate strategies, technologies, and visions of the market against the backdrop of traders’ economic actions and understandings, i show that the market’s persistence is not a matter of traders’ collective rejection of, resistance to, or moral objection to the multinationals. retail traders agree to rearrange their shops to display brand-name products prominently and happily receive merchandising material. yet they reject multinationals’ interference when it comes to the concrete handling and pricing of products. wholesalers are especially reluctant to disclose information on prices and stock, and they hesitate to have their products registered as inventory. my analytical approach has been informed by this tension between corporations and traders about how to move, store, define, price, and sell the electronic appliances. the products—their circulation, classification, and valuation—demand greater attention than they usually receive in the literature on marketplace trade, street economies, and popular commerce in the global south, focused on traders’ local spaces, social networks, and institutions.2 the strain i observed between traders and corporations guided me toward and made me start from the work of actor-network economic sociologists (cf. kjellberg 2007; çalişkan 2010; çalişkan and callon 2010) who critically address the knowledge practices and technological devices that lie at the heart of the economic (re)ordering of markets—namely, the requalification of goods and their rechanneling. such a reordering of the market constitutes an ideological project often disguised in a discourse of consumer interest and economic efficiency (kjellberg 2007). this article explores the concept of the practical efficacy of traders’ market channels and transactions in contrast to the efficiency of supply chains, homogenous pricing, and image branding as envisioned by corporate managers. in essence, practices are efficacious or effective if they deliver what they promise or aim to achieve, whereas efficient processes are further specified by the input-output relationship.3 the idea that the economy must be run efficiently because of a scarcity of resources lies at the basis of the discipline of economics. it is a notorious normative argument for and powerful instrument to achieve liberal market reforms. most important for my analysis, whereas taylorist scientific management focused on organizational and task efficiencies, contemporary chain management concerns itself with process efficiency (witzel 2002). maximizing the communicational, informational, and technical efficiencies of supply and distribution chains is considered a last resort for corporations looking to make big profits (bonacich and wilson 2008; tsing 2009; cowen 2010).4 this means, for example, samsung electronics and huawei technology in bolivia try to gain market share primarily by creating predictable high demand through brand marketing and making sure the right goods reach the market at the envisioned moment, instead of competing in the production process and at the technical level. efficacy, in contrast, indexes effectiveness. following claude lévi-strauss’s (1963) seminal essay “the effectiveness of symbols,” the term is commonly used in relation to cosmologies and healing, and, accordingly, in medical anthropology and ritual studies. in this article, i make use of one of the essay’s core ideas: market channels and arrangements (like a healing cure) might prove materially effective even though this is difficult to measure.5 the effectiveness here relies on and is distributed among the social, physical and affective infrastructures that make a market lasting, appealing, and meaningful. efficacy offers a conceptual language to think about the productive processes and effects of markets that are complex and semiformal but are neither wasteful nor deemed to disappear. in this sense, effective market channels and arrangements are often labor intensive, offering income for large numbers of people. an effective market fulfills its purpose for the people with a stake in it, and creates an environment in which clients find a wide range of products, as well as a variety of prices and qualities to choose from. they should also be relatively attractive in terms of working conditions and income in comparison to other job opportunities. the notion of the vernacular further explicates this last point. the vernacular invites us to explore transactional forms, idioms, and relations of mutuality as well as modes of valuation and pricing that successfully nurture peoples’ expectations of a “gainful margin” (guyer 2004; roitman 2007). vernacular markets are self-built over time, but not necessarily free from external influences, for example, that of marketing professionals (welker 2018). following other ethnographic analyses of andean mercantile forms and dynamics (seligmann 2004; antrosio and colloredo-mansfeld 2015), as well as non-state economic regulation of open-air markets and indigenous economies in south america (thomas 2016; dewey 2020), this article addresses tensions over market making and value creation at the heart of contemporary power struggles in bolivia, the andes, and beyond. the encounter between actors who represent the world of grassroots trade, on the one hand, and globalization writ large, on the other, brings into focus the way that the former are increasingly targeted by mass retailers and big manufacturers looking for “emergent markets” into which to expand to increase profits. corporations mobilize resources, technologies, the law, and discourses of authoritative knowledge to actively make and remake market arrangements, and to render things more efficient and profitable for them (mazzarella 2003; çalişkan and callon 2010). yet these actions do not make for a conflict-free process or a linear progression toward “debasement” (gudeman 2008), nor a frictionless superimposition of a universal model onto marketplace trade. the multinationals depend on regional transport entrepreneurs, local marketers, and other commercial intermediaries, or mediators,6 to successfully move their goods, advertise them to culturally informed customers, and ensure they are adopted in retail markets worldwide (mazzarella 2003; foster 2007; welker 2018). it is through such an engagement across difference that relations of domination and power work in globalized markets and supply chains (çalişkan 2010; tsing 2013). electronics, as other products, undergo various processes of (re-)classification and (re-)valuation in circulation and exchange, and these alter their commodity status. this article reiterates the importance of denaturalizing the notion of the market by revealing how different economic actors perceive, understand, act on, create, and change markets. this is a labor-intensive process neglected by dominant ideas about abstract processes and atomized actors (applbaum 2004). markets are made and regulated by institutions, interpersonal relationships, and mutual expectations, as well as through legal, technological and material tools that i understand here as including commercial law, knowledge practices, and the physical and sensory features that facilitate the circulation and frame the commercialization of goods—from transport and storage facilities to the arrangement of sales outlets, advertising banners, and commercials to the materiality of the products and their packages (see welker 2018). by contrasting the vernacular and the corporate, traders’ and corporate labor, i seek to contribute to an ethnographic understanding of the complexity and contingency of markets and market channels, not mainly to deconstruct ahistorical ideas and untenable assumptions but to offer a substantive understanding of the potential limits of corporate-capitalist chain and brand management. ethnographically, it does not suffice to say that the spatial-temporal coordination of commodity chains as a network of heterogeneous actors and organizations is unstable and creates unpredicted outcomes (cf. gregson, crang, and antonopolous 2017). it is also necessary to comprehend why—both structurally and culturally. in what follows, i first describe the electronics trade in the context of burgeoning marketplaces in urban bolivia during the past two decades, as well as the arrival of multinational electronics companies at the heart of popular commerce in la paz. i then analyze the labor of corporate employees, mainly those working for samsung electronics. chain management, trade marketing, and brand merchandising face several challenges as traders’ commitments are primarily oriented toward other market actors, not the corporations. i characterize long-term seller-buyer relationships and the expectation of mutual benefit that nurture these other commitments. the article goes on to explore an area in which corporate and traders’ interests and meanings fundamentally differ, namely, the valuation and pricing of products. in the conclusion, i sum up the qualities that comprise vernacular market efficacy and discuss its wider implications for how we conceptualize commodity exchange in the current conjuncture of supply chain capitalism and corporate branding. the electronics trade in bolivia and the region there are about two thousand electronics traders in la paz.7 they form part of the wider socio-commercial world of bolivian independent traders (cuentapro­pistas, which means “those working on their own account”). in the macrodistrict of max paredes, on the northwestern slopes of la paz, relatively close to the center and easily accessible from other parts of the city and el alto, located above the valley of la paz, traders of the most diverse products and commodity groups have materially upgraded street trade into enduring material structures. they have simultaneously constructed webs of commercial relations with distant partners (tassi 2016; müller 2018). despite increasing internal differences in investment capital and purchasing volumes, traders usually operate as individuals, married couples, or nuclear families, supported by only a few kin and fewer than five employees. they organize through territorially defined associations. those traders who rent or own their own shops are less actively involved in collective political action than street vendors, but they remain part of bolivia’s huge traders’ unions (gremiales), organized locally, regionally, and nationally (hummel 2017). gremiales publicly identify as retail traders (comerciantes minoristas) and are persistently associated with the country’s rampant informal economy.8 they represent about 1.5 to 2 million people (of a total population of 11.5 million) who are, in one way or another, involved in trading and related activities.9 whereas electronics traders share their principal organizational forms and terms of political engagement with traders of food and less expensive manufactured products such as clothes and furniture, some important particularities exist. electronics traders have constructed commercial areas and shopping precincts for customers looking for original brand-name goods. traders’ interactions with customers tend to be more anonymous than seller-buyer relationships surrounding the exchange of goods that constitute everyday essentials. their associations supervise some competitive issues such as access, but not others, for instance pricing. the three main markets for electronic appliances in la paz were established between the 1960s and 1980s by rural aymara migrants mainly from the department of la paz, but they have since become more diverse. whereas wholesalers are typically middle-aged or senior married couples with adult children (among them a significant number of aymara and quechua women born in the countryside), at the area of the retail site of eloy salmón, the average trader is younger and male. the area is also more heterogeneous than the wholesale market in both social and ethnic terms and in levels of formal education and business prospects. likewise, electronics traders have not only maintained long-term business relations with intermediaries at the free trade and industry zones of iquique in northern chile and colón in panama—as traders across different commodity groups have—but also with the regional and national representatives of the multinational electronics corporations whose goods they sell. this engagement has sharpened traders’ awareness of their position in the market. while the strong standing and bargaining power of traders’ unions—among other unions, peasant, indigenous, and neighborhood organizations—is a historical feature of bolivia that gained momentum under the left-wing government of evo morales, the market relationships and power struggles analyzed in this article are not unique to bolivia, nor do they merely respond to the current state of the economy. throughout latin america, indigenous and popular economic actors operating on the margins of the official economy succeed in satisfying the consumer demands of the urban lower and middle classes (antrosio and colloredo-mansfeld 2015; thomas 2016; dewey 2020). as recent studies in economic anthropology and sociology have shown, to look closely at socioeconomic and cultural processes (informal but persistent social relationships, the combination of mutuality and secrecy, local business ethics and pragmatic understandings of branded commodities and “copies”) in everyday market life facilitates a nuanced understanding of social forms of economic regulation. these differ from universal market models (gudeman 2008) and may even be illegal, but they produce positive socioeconomic outcomes, jobs, and income, as well as expectations of upward mobility and well-being. from guatemala (thomas 2013, 2016) to argentina (dewey 2020), ecuador (antrosio and colloredo-mansfeld 2015), peru (ødegaard 2008; gandolfo 2013), and bolivia, self-account traders and small-scale producers exhibit productivity in the face of state and corporate projects that aim to marginalize their practices. the east asian multinationals in bolivia in 2016, young bolivian employees of the asian multinationals i interacted with still marveled about an incident that had happened a couple of years before: lg had tried to work preferentially with a sole distributer in bolivia—a department store from santa cruz, the wealthier, more westernized regional capital city in the lowlands. in response, electronics traders from the main marketplaces across bolivia collectively started a boycott of the brand. they demonstrated in front of lg’s headquarters in santa cruz until the company finally backed down. similar oppositional reactions reportedly took place when samsung aimed to install its own delivery service in la paz, and a few years before, when it also had tried to circumvent regional commercial mediation. during the time of my fieldwork, the multinationals’ middle managers considered similar initiatives—trying to force market distribution abruptly in a new direction by misrecognizing traders—inefficient. lg electronics had to learn that such initiatives could produce a loss of sales (because of the boycott). likewise, the product manager of the smartphone sector at samsung’s national headquarters in la paz considered legal actions against traders’ occasional infringement of intellectual property rights (ipr) rather a “loss of resources,” because in bolivia “it is so complicated to solve this in a reasonable time span.” yet, instead of leaving the country, as sony and other music labels had done in the economically volatile and politically instable late 1990s and early 2000s,10 the electronics multinationals stayed and changed strategies. my interviewees framed the bolivian market as “unique” and extremely complicated, but also as highly attractive. during a stark expansion of the market for electronics between 2005 and 2019, sustained by continuous economic growth under the mas (movimiento al socialismo; movement for socialism) government of evo morales and redistribution policies that increased consumption levels among the middle and lower-middle classes,11 the east asian electronics multinationals kept and even amplified their presence in bolivia.<fnref> </fnref>while they had come closer to the bolivian market over the previous two decades, opening regional branches in santiago de chile, logistics outlets at the free trade zone in iquique, and national headquarters in either downtown la paz or santa cruz, they finally became physically present among traders. sony electronics was the first to open a showroom and back office in the popular commercial max paredes district in 2003. lg and samsung electronics followed sony into this area in 2007 and 2012, respectively, and huawei joined in 2016. these four east asian multinationals have followed a dual strategy in the country: direct sales to a handful of institutional clients (the three telecommunication companies who operate in bolivia and a few official retailers in shopping malls, mainly in santa cruz) and more mediated relationships with traders and shopkeepers in what is called, using the english term, the open market. this marks a significant administrative, social, and symbolic divide. whereas relations with the small number of institutional and high-end clients (negligible in terms of market share) are managed by the mid-level corporate staff in the national headquarters, following regional corporate hierarchies, the engagement with traders is put into the hands of low-paid personnel, hired under worse terms than the headquarters staff.12 among samsung’s corporate staff, the terminology of the open market has replaced the notion of the informal market that is still occasionally used, though only in more casual conversations. the open market is the official term that simultaneously hints at a locus and indexes an unwelcome relatedness and connectivity of actors and goods. the lower-level employees deploy the term to speak about where they work: the popular retail and wholesale areas. in this sense, they are emplaced in the open market, in contrast to the administrative staff and midand upper-level managers “down there in calacoto,” a business district in the upper-middle-class southern zone of the city. this spatial distinction follows the socio-racialized urban geography of la paz. since its creation at the beginning of the twentieth century, the zona sur has been known as the “white” middleand upper-class neighborhood of the political and professional elite. in contrast to the headquarters, set off in the southern district in a fancy glass-and-steel building, the open market is open air, messy, and physically demanding. from the point of view of the middle managers in calacoto, however, the open market primarily refers to complex and illegible market channels and transactions. it consists of a bundle of commercial routes, networks, and market exchanges that exist outside of corporate oversight. goods destined for bolivia are shipped to the port of iquique and brought to the nearby free trade zone, where a handful of official distributers—a mid-sized firm from chile, merchant migrant businesses from india and lebanon, and, in the phone sector, also a u.s. firm—receive them. once these distributors sell them to bolivian traders, the multinationals lose track of “their” merchandise.13 the goods get diverted from the envisioned supply chain into opaque market channels. the samsung managers contrast these complex distribution channels with what they consider a universal tendency for progressive “formalization”: the development of mass retail with the corresponding geography of distribution centers and chains controlled from the top down. this is what they had learned at university and by working for global enterprises. critically addressed, they aimed at deploying strategies and devices to realize a “universal model for the market” (gudeman 1992), though not for a market as a neoclassical abstraction, but for very concrete corporate-controlled channels, prices, and sales. the laborious work of open-market corporate employees in la paz is to re-register the products—to a certain degree, as traders hesitate to let them enter their warehouses. another instrument is on-the-ground market research. samsung’s head of marketing at calacoto, for instance, has to send weekly reports to the regional headquarters in santiago de chile with information about the sales and prices of samsung products, as well as numbers on the competition. the most important strategy has been to deploy trade marketing and merchandising. for all of this, the middle management relies on the ceaseless work of lower-level corporate staff. samsung had twenty-nine employees in the open market of la paz in 2016 and 2017, a remarkably big team showing the significant labor costs necessary. loyalty marketing in the open market noticeable social and professional differences exist between the headquarters and the open-market staff of samsung electronics in la paz. the three middle managers i interviewed hold master’s in business administration (mba) degrees from the bolivian catholic university, the elite private university in bolivia. they are in their forties and fifties and had prior experience with other multinational corporations in bolivia. in contrast, most of the open-market staff were in their twenties and had gone to public universities or private ones with little cachet, and not all had finished their degrees. only three of them wanted a career within the corporation. they already stood at the top end of the open-market hierarchy as promotores and supervisores,14 had more frequent contact with the calacoto managers, and were longing to move on to more analytical tasks and greater strategic responsibilities in the headquarters. boris,15 who had studied economics and worked for the municipal government for six months before joining samsung, stressed that he had to learn how to “talk” to the traders in an area with which he was not familiar. he respected what he considered “their customs and traditions.” similarly, the head of marketing at lg presented her socialization with the traders in a language of corporate responsibility and affective paternalism. not only did she have to “be with them every day” but she also had to “take care” of their needs and concerns. davida, a samsung consumer electronics merchandiser who had trained as a lawyer with an additional qualification in marketing and who lived in irpavi in the southern zone close to calacoto, said she had to make efforts to overcome her own prejudices. the work differed from what she had imagined. she wanted to work for a “prestigious international brand,” with all that that meant, but had ended up in the messy open market. some colleagues had not been able to cope with this and had left. figure 1. samsung sales assistant at work in a covered market for mobile phones, gadgets, and small electronic products in la paz. photo by juliane müller. figure 2. labor-intensive market research in the open market: merchandiser with questionnaire while the vendor attends to a customer, la paz. photo by juliane müller. yet other merchandisers and the sales assistants i hung out with during my research stay at samsung’s office felt much more at home in the open market. emilio appreciated the “freedom” and “conviviality” of the market, as well as his close interactions with the traders, through which he came to know their life stories. emilio had grown up in the district of max paredes, where his parents continued to live. although he had studied international commerce, he visibly felt closer to the spanish-speaking world of popular trade with strong aymara cultural influences than the world of business administration and its adoption of english terms and concepts. he strived to be an electronics trader himself. likewise, alisa toyed with the idea of using her savings as seed money for a small independent business in eloy salmón. although she had not previously been as familiar with the world of popular trade as emilio, she found it attractive and especially compatible with caring for her son. in our conversations, she complained about her current low salary and compared it to what she could potentially earn as a trader with a small shop, or even as the employee of a shopkeeper. as an employee she could make additional money through her own efforts—as vendors usually receive a commission for each sale from the shopkeeper—while as a subcontracted sales assistant for samsung she received no additional reward beyond her salary.16 alisa captured both the unacknowledged importance of her role and the embodied and material quality of her daily work experience when she said to me: “we are the eyes of samsung; we are gold for them. their reports are based on the data we provide.” emilio equally highlighted his situated knowledge and informed familiarity: “down there, they don’t know anything; we tell them about prices. it is in the market where the knowledge is produced.” these are strong statements about the epistemic value of “local knowledge” (gudeman 1992) on which the deductive analyses of aggregated data at the headquarters ultimately depend. for emilio, the management was too far away; it did not know the traders and had no idea about the market. in fact, the physical and social distance, as well as the knowledge gap, was why the multinational corporations created the open market positions in the first place. traders’ lack of fidelity even with a branch office at the heart of popular commerce, the supervisors of these offices and the higher ranks of multinationals had to recognize that it was not only essential to be physically close to the traders but that they needed employees to “fidelize” (fidelizar) with traders, who were considered notoriously “disloyal” (desleal) by the corporations’ middle management. the head of the lg showroom commented in our interview in september 2013: now we are next door to everything. we hear about everything. our promoters see the market every day. people are very special; we have to visit them every day… . the treatment is complicated, highly complicated. you have to create fidelity. what does it mean to “be next door to everything”? or, put another way, to not “leave traders unattended,” a statement i heard in my first interview with a sony open-market employee, also in 2013. he told me about the recent months during which they had left traders and vendors “unattended” because of a global restructuring of the company. as a result, their brand had lost visibility, all their advertising banners had been replaced by those of the korean competition, and sales had fallen considerably. on a friday morning during my research stay with samsung, i accompany boris on his tour of one of the indoor marketplaces that are regional hubs for mobile phones and tablets, brand-name and otherwise. on our way to doña sofía, boris tells me that she is a samsung “a client,” selling five hundred to eight hundred phones a week. for her “loyalty,” boris adds, the corporation invites her on business trips, recently to the international business fair in santa cruz. after a little bit of small talk and easy laughter at her stall, doña sofía takes us toward the entrance of another market building where she owns another sales outlet. she needs more glass display cases. customers like doña sofía get all the furnishings they request. part of the deal is that traders use them as the corporation intends and collaborate in “looking after the image.” this, however, does not necessarily turn out to be the case. touring the market with grover, another promotor, we see a samsung-sponsored shelf used to display huawei cell phones, and a tcl commercial played on a samsung flat-screen television. grover immediately approaches the shops and politely asks the vendors whether they have received the samsung commercial. he will make sure they get it soon. these are examples of what it means to be close to everything. as a business concept and subcategory of marketing, merchandising first appeared in u.s. manuals at the beginning of the twentieth century, from which point on it spread around the world as a shorthand for formalizing the presentation of consumer goods (freidberg 2007). the creation of point-of-sale aesthetics makes for a key instrument. at the open market in la paz, the merchandisers work toward creating a high-end point-of-sale aesthetic within a sea of improvised-looking infrastructure and built environments; they aim at creating branded shopping environments inside traders’ tiny shops and at stalls of no more than two square meters. traders hardly oppose these changes in the presentation and placement of the brand-name goods, which include putting them in what boris termed the “golden zone”—international marketing jargon for those areas in plain view. for the traders, this adds to the visual attractiveness of the shops and the market as a whole, something widely appreciated. emilio told me that he enjoyed working in merchandising because he “especially liked the image.” he believed that the products must “enter” customers’ awareness entirely “through the eye.” emilio’s words resonate with a widespread idea among traders about attracting customers through the display of varied, colorful, and indeed opulent amounts of products. it is this visual impression of plenty and “abundance” (tassi 2010) that is further enhanced by professional merchandising and welcomed by traders. the traders feel less at ease, however, with those corporate initiatives that go beyond the mere presentation of the goods to address storage, prices, and sales. traders have a strong idea of their standing as cuentapropistas vis-à-vis the enterprises and an acute awareness of their genuine interest in not fully complying with merchandising agreements. for gonzalo and eduardo, two young games-console and smartphone vendors who share a nicely decorated shop with branded shelves up front, their business clearly depends on diversification. at the beginning of 2020, they sold about 50 percent samsung phones, only 20 percent huawei but about 30 percent xiaomi, and not all of them new products. some were older models or refurbished items. when i asked how this worked out with samsung and huawei, the two men admitted that they were doing some sales “more under the table” (más por debajo) and even “underground” (clandestinamente). to my knowledge, no explicit agreements or contractual obligations exist about brand exclusivity, which is something traders openly oppose. there is in place, however, a certain understanding between individual traders and the corporations regarding common objectives that call for the preferential sale of new and brand-name items. subverting this understanding proves effective and gainful for traders, but it undermines efforts to create the type of demand for “authentic” brands most profitable for the corporations. the casero/a idiom in line with this diversion from target agreements, it is important for multinationals to make sure that traders not only adequately display their goods, but really recommend them—and not those of the competition. this is the main problem of brand “infidelity.” as a sony staff member commented, “they are capos [crafty, clever] here. a customer comes in to buy a sony but leaves with any other brand.” without vendors’ engagement and proactive recommendations, even the most nicely displayed good can remain a shelf warmer. part of multinationals’ obligatory learning process was their recognition that traders are powerful commercial intermediaries, without whom merchandising can be wasteful, as it might fail to produce the desired rise in sales. vendors’ power of persuasion has various dimensions. there are long-lasting mutual commitments known as casero/a (regular client or provider) bonds. these have been described for trade and markets across the andes (buechler and buechler 1992; seligmann 2004; tassi 2016). in the electronics trade, these client-customer bonds are salient between wholesalers and retailers at different points of distribution. at the electronics marketplaces in la paz, however, interdependencies are weaker, as many street traders and shopkeepers sell to customers from across the metropolitan area. yet the interpersonal connection between buyer and seller continues to be a powerful mutual expectation. retailers’ calling out to unknown passers-by with caserito, or with phrases such as “caserita, just ask” (caserita pregunta no más), promise good offers and a willingness to answer any query the client might have. customers also call unknown traders caseros, which places a moral obligation on them to sell good merchandise for a low price. the casero idiom and related gestures imbue the market encounter with a sense of responsiveness that facilitates mutually satisfactory transactions. it must be understood as part of a wider range of etiquette and performative signs that indicate respect across social, gendered, and ethnic-racialized boundaries, which have historically been stark in andean societies.17 the prevalence of the casero/a language in the market and the expectation of mutuality constitute major challenges for the corporate open-market staff. it seems as if their presence in the market and the interactions with traders are never intense or strong enough. the personalized attention they give can easily be considered too little, especially by elderly wholesaler women, such that they get annoyed and stop responding. the day i toured the market with the head of the samsung showroom in 2017, the first thing we had to do was reach out to a client he considered “b,” an importer-wholesaler of television and entertainment equipment. she had to be put at ease after not having been invited to the latest business dinner. favors or favorites appear impossible to keep secret in the open market. traders tend to expect a reciprocal exchange of information and contacts, in addition to gifts and bonus payments, without which a relationship of loyalty is hard to create and maintain. emilio picked this up by emphasizing that he—in return for the numbers about sales and prices traders shared with him for his obligatory weekly market research tour—gave advice about international commerce, business administration, and similar topics. the corporate classification into a, b, and c clients according to purchasing power was visibly at odds with what traders expected from business partners: that loyalty and longevity were as important as quantities of sales. likewise, the channel specialists’ task to get hold of products as soon as possible on arrival in la paz proves challenging as traders jealously hide access to their deposits. once scanned by channel specialists, products—which had been circulating and sold among bolivian importers, wholesalers, and retailers out of manufacturers’ sight—become part of a digitally trackable chain. yet traders only allow a few select employees to enter and see what they have in stock. again, as for merchandising, to build inventory, corporate staff needs to be in daily contact with traders, renewing and confirming reciprocal bonds. significant energy on the part of employees goes into the simple task of finding out about arrival times and contents of truckloads. to my knowledge, the multinationals are significantly less successful with inventory building than with merchandising. in sum, the open market embodies the antithesis of an efficiently managed chain of adequately placed, framed, and commercialized brand-name products. although the manufacturers, especially samsung electronics, employ significant human labor and technological devices to render traders’ market channels legible and their own products predictable, they have done so with limited success. traders like the visual effect of merchandising but hesitate to disclose numbers, prices, and stock. the corporations have not managed to overcome racialized class differences inscribed in the urban landscape and have failed to fully adapt to vernacular commercial language and traders’ expectations of a mutual exchange of favors and information. the international business jargon stands at odds with local, aymara-influenced spanish market etiquette and creates a social and symbolic boundary between multinationals and traders. the challenges to creating brand fidelity with traders are replicated with the open-market employees, who are aware of their low status within the corporate national and international hierarchy. under these circumstances, independent trading seems a more attractive and feasible mediumand long-term option than remaining within the corporate world. furthermore, because of the tangible experiences and contacts, emilio, alisa, and other open-market staff find themselves in a privileged position to start their own businesses. i will now switch perspective and analyze the workings of market channels, handling, and pricing from the point of view of wholesale and retail traders to further interrogate vernacular market efficacy. market channels and the pragmatics of pricing at any of the three markets for electronics in the max paredes district, one will find neither a wholesaler who has the best offer across product categories and brands nor a retail shop or stall that offers persistently low prices. although wholesalers have usually specialized in one or two brands, sometimes complemented by their own store label, as well as in one commodity subgroup, they rarely sell all types of lg white goods, for example, or all sizes of the samsung flat-screen television, or the complete set of huawei phones. likewise, the distinction between wholesaler and retailer is frequently made in the market to refer to the trader’s main activity, but layers overlap. the same trader might be an importer-wholesaler for certain products, a person that “brings over” (trae) this merchandise, but a secondary wholesaler or a simple retailer for other items. traders are situated at different linkages (eslabones) in fragmented transnational market channels. their offers—although many strive for an oferta surtida, a varied, well-stocked offer of the products in the commodity subgroup they handle—are far from complete and follow a different logic than brand-centeredness or price coherence. as a result, there are different prices available for the same product, depending on the specific channel, the moment of the transaction, and social variables, such as the nature of the seller-buyer relationship. in this regard, don francisco, an importer-wholesaler of toners and printers who owns a shop with his wife, told me with conviction, “we”—meaning cuentapropista traders in general—never keep track of prices. he showed me his excel table with the serial number of every sold item (for possible returns), the name of the client, and the day of the transaction. it mentioned nothing about prices. wholesalers handle prices with an air of secrecy and know where their loyalty is primarily directed: toward their providers and clients, not toward the multinationals. when i visited don francisco on a rainy day in november 2015, he was attending to a wholesale customer from as far as sucre in the region of chuquisaca, a ten hours’ ride from la paz. as an in situ demonstration of what he had just told me, namely, that he had geographically dispersed clients and providers, he received a phone call from miami. after animated small talk and laughter, he negotiated a direct order of canon printers and ink cartridges with the spanish-speaking dealer on the line, commenting at once playfully and triumphantly, “we are gaining over canon.” retail price-setting and modes of valuation unlike other classic loci in economic anthropology, such as agricultural marketplaces (geertz 1978; alexander 1992; gordon 2010), where there is little product innovation, or the low-end street sales of homogeneously cheap merchandise, price-setting for electronics in the open market in la paz is complicated by the growing number of brands and the proliferation of internal value classes for each brand-name model. the big electronics manufacturers, driven by the need for novel products year after year to maintain high profit levels, contribute to this overflow of goods, especially in ict (information and communication technology). for each fancy new ict product launched globally, the offer in the bolivian market is usually tripled. the galaxy s8, for instance, exists in different versions due to internal categories or “scales of value” (see guyer 2004, 83–96). these are an original with an official warranty for bolivia, an original without this warranty, and a fake in one or the other way, called either after the site of production (chinito, meaning from china) or hinting at its dubious quality (trucho). these categories can be further subdivided as each of these products exists either as a new good, a second-hand item, or a refurbished product. anthropological studies on counterfeit products and sales, mostly concerned with imitations of international fashion brands in places as nigeria, vietnam, and guatemala (guyer 2004; vann 2006; thomas 2013), have shown that customers do not necessarily distinguish products along the simple binary matrix of the fake versus the original, or the copy versus the real brand. this binary is codified in international ipr and related to western notions of ownership and authenticity (thomas 2013; dewey 2020), but it does not hold everywhere. in la paz, the prestige of a name like samsung also rubs off on its imitators. before the multinationals’ engagement with popular marketplaces, traders and shops already visibly announced the commodities they were selling by using a copy of the logo with the right typeface and color. this violates ipr, as logos form part of the protected “object-signs” (nakassis 2013, 111); but it attracts customers who look, if not for an original (original), then for a copy that promises to be better than imitations of less well-known brands.18 customers i spoke to commented that they looked for a reliable product, whether original or not, that would not break down. in la paz as elsewhere (vann 2006), customers tend to make pragmatic judgments about whether a product is worthwhile or not. the average customer does not perceive a copy as necessarily bad or fraudulent. a defective product or a totally different item would be considered a fraud (see guyer 2004, 92–93), for example, if you bought a new water heater and found the box filled with a broken one, or with plastic cups. this is something rarely seen in bolivia, as boxes are always opened before a purchase, so that clients can a have a close look at the product and touch it. once a customer is inclined to buy, the merchandise’s functioning is tested. even stall vendors have an electrical outlet available to do so. this marks one of the differences between wholesalers and retailers: the latter test the equipment before the clients’ eyes. shopkeepers and more established stall vendors also offer their own warranty, in cooperation with nearby technical workshops, usually for several months. retailers’ gainful margins rely on a combination of social and situational factors (as in other trades), as well as on elements specific to the value scales of electronic products. from time to time, these gains rely on small deceptive acts, such as overpricing a good and playing with product scales. an oster mixer might be sold as original with an official warranty for bolivia although it does not have one.19 i regularly visited a stall vendor of small household items who sometimes highlighted the watt potential of the oster mixer for 160 bolivian boliviano (about usd 26.50), whereas on other occasions he would stress the reliability of the 180-boliviano philips mixer. with yet another type of client, he would stress that this or that product held an official warranty. what differentiates the products according to international legal regimes and corporate interests (the official warranty) appears here as just one among many criteria that define the characteristics of products. although traders are accustomed to highlighting the product’s technical and practical advantages according to their on-the-spot assessment of a client’s preferences, and a consideration of their own need to sell this or that product, self-interested tactics are limited by the mutual expectation that both retailer and customer will build a good relationship and start to form a casero bond. figure 3. clients, probably mother and daughter, after purchasing one of the popular oster household appliances, la paz. photo by juliane mmüller. from the multinationals’ perspective, this looks quite different. imitations are, contrary to expectation, not much of a worry for the manufacturers of itc and entertainment equipment, the fastest growing sectors in urban markets. “they do not do much harm,” the samsung open-market supervisor commented in this respect. by contrast, the originales without a manufacturer’s warranty for bolivia created a bigger issue. from the multinationals’ perspective, these constitute “parallel imports” that ought not to be in bolivia.20 they are not illegal except under private commercial law,21 but they make for a costly annoyance for the corporations. because the parallel imports are hard to track, they make it difficult to generate data about sales, anticipate future demand, and assure corporate accountability for the products sold. since 2016, one measure to combat parallel imports in bolivia has been to create a novel value class. these products are called homologados (authorized; validated) or plus. they have been created mainly by samsung and huawei in a process of mutual copying and borrowing of strategies. from the traders’ point of view, the homologado is a product with an official warranty for bolivia—it is that simple. for the corporations, it should be a fancy and superior kind of branded good, not just original but, as the samsung staff stresses, “authenticated for bolivia.” customers are induced to perceive qualitative differences and spend more money for this added value. apart from being positioned in branded spaces as described, some homologado phones have extraordinary packages—another key strategy of merchandising. by advertising them as specifically “made for bolivia,” samsung tries to connect with ideas about unique bolivian culture and respond to economic nationalist sentiments promoted by the mas government. this strategy of requalifying originales as homologados is made by means of a distinction between two basically identical products; although this might seem paradoxical, it is a rather common marketing strategy (callon, méadel, and rabeharisoa 2002, 202–4). homologados are not technically better in any way than simple originals (both types are usually materially unaltered brand-name products), but they cost about 5 percent more. the difference generated between an original and a homologado potentially increases the number of customers who can choose between classes of the same samsung and huawei product model. in this sense, the homologado might be interpreted as a premium “brand extension” (foster 2007, 708), with the peculiarity that the homologado appears to be “more legal” than the original. a bundle of features serve to entice the customer: the notion of purchasing the official and authenticated “world-class” brand; a manufacturer’s warranty for bolivia; and special sales and entertainment offers through the manufacturer’s smartphone app. to activate their welcome package, clients are invited to visit samsung’s showroom and register. there they receive personal attention from the samsung open-market staff and can validate their newly acquired product. in this way, they experience being part of the “real” company. still, as market transactions remain in the hands of traders, the effectiveness of the new value classes rises and falls with traders’ recommendations and sales. for instance, wholesale traders’ commitment to building long-term relationships upand downstream means that they do not always go for the homologado product, although both wholesale and retail traders as well as vendors receive a special high bonus payment for the premium products, constituted by the newest and most expensive homologado products. price dispersion and gainful margins on the threshold of value classes mean that homologados, even with the bonus payment, are not always the most lucrative option for retailers. moreover, they feel obliged to serve the needs of heterogeneous clients and “all kinds of pockets” (todos los bolsillos). this most likely serves traders’ own mediumto long-term advantage: if a certain brand loses popularity or an economic downturn heightens peoples’ price sensitivity, they must be able to offer alternatives. diversification, identified as the most important strategy of popular economic actors in the andes (cf. zoomers and mitzman 1999; seligmann 2004; tassi 2016), continues to prevail among electronics traders and is seen as vital to success. this is not principally a pluri-activity, as in rural and peri-urban settings and less lucrative trades, but refers to brand diversification and the use of proliferating value scales to achieve a gainful margin. by working at the interstices of value classes, and setting and keeping secret their fluctuating prices, traders not only demonstrate how prices reflect power struggles (çalişkan and callon 2010; see also alexander 1992) but also defy the legitimacy of protecting corporate profits through private commercial law. they contest homogenized pricing and the illusion that only one “authentic” brand-name product exists, with its corresponding price. conclusion the electronics multinationals struggle to monitor the movement of their products in south america and to fix their locations, prices, and identities in la paz. the brand-name products destined for bolivia become detached from the digitally trackable distribution chain by entering popular market channels. transactions between bolivian wholesalers and official and nonofficial providers in the free trade zone of iquique, in miami, and other places in the region embody this point of detachment. in la paz, the multinationals try to regain an overview of their products and convince traders to cooperate with inventory control and help with loyalty marketing. yet traders themselves lack brand fidelity. despite the offer of monetary incentives to comply with corporate marketing, traders’ primary interests and loyalties continue to lie elsewhere. merchandising is welcomed, as it heightens the attractiveness of shops, stalls, and the entire market by upgrading these aesthetically and transmitting reliability and prestige. yet the brand image not only indexes the homologado; it also shapes the reputation of the shop and stall owners as traders of branded goods who, nonetheless, need not restrict sales to these products. traders reject product standardization. to have a few premium products in plain view does not hinder traders from selling older models, second-hand phones, and parallel imports, or from caring for casero customers. the “social price” (roitman 2004; seligmann 2004) retailers arrive at with clients depends on interactional dynamics within the wider framework of expectation that the relationship lasts beyond a single sale. the institution of caseridad is fundamental to understanding the efficacy of vernacular markets. to care for a personal network of providers and clients promises to be meaningful and lucrative for traders at different points of distribution. when asked about economic prospects, traders most often refer to their contacts and partners as a guarantee for present and future successes. likewise, customers can reasonably expect to find a better price with a retail trader with whom they already share a transactional history and expect to buy from in the future. the sociality that is a fundamental part of commodity exchange through the workings of caseridad has further implications. it has created an idiom of relatedness and mutuality in the market, and casero bonds also channel important commercial knowledge and price information. as prices vary according to the moment, value class, and the social relationships among transactors, competition also depends on many elements and is not centered on prices only. this allows for the coexistence of hundreds of traders with different business prospects and facilitates market entry. becoming a vendor of an established shop, as a door into retail trade or to opening a small business of one’s own, tends to be more attractive than working as a corporate employee in the open market. for some of the employees just described, this had to do with the human quality of market relations. in this regard, the viability and desirability of a vernacular market depends on the production of entangled economic and social value. what does this tell us about commodities at the current global conjunction of corporate chain management and branding with vernacular market transactions and channels? the contemporary brand seems to be the fully accomplished commodity form as to marx’s understanding: it is not only material and immaterial, equipped with use and exchange value, but embodies an “excess of social meaning and value—a brand fetish … that always reaches beyond itself, beyond (but through) exchangeability into another realm of value” (nakassis 2013, 113). this other realm is social life with its moral values and emotional attachments. from the mid-nineteenth century onward, corporate brand marketing has tried to forge an imaginary that invokes “fidelity, standardization, quality control, and trustworthy distribution” (nakassis 2013, 114), capable of creating emotional experiences among consumers (forster 2007; gershon 2016; see also applbaum 2004). as elsewhere, at bolivian marketplaces corporations try to achieve this by relating concrete and bounded commodities with other visual and material elements such as trademarks, labels, packages, shelves, and advertising banners and films to create an unbounded brand image and the “affective dimension of the person-product relationship” (foster 2007, 708). yet from the perspective of distribution, some of these assumptions must be problematized as well as the equation of brands and commodities. it offers an ethnographic inquiry into the potential failures of corporate branding that proves important not least to counterbalance predominant success stories (manning 2010, 34). the circulatory sphere between production and consumption is not only crucial for corporations in their attempts to forge the brand image and control the commercialization of knockoffs and counterfeits (dent 2012)—and otherwise unwelcome products such as parallel imports; from the perspective of traders and other commercial intermediaries, it also makes for a crucial domain in which commodities are potentially “de-branded.” in la paz, corporate branding hardly debases the logics and meanings of commodity exchange among traders. the commercialization of electronics is based on interpersonal loyalty, idioms of mutuality, and pragmatic valuation that promise to deliver not quality control and standardization, but satisfactory combinations of price, quality, and degree of authenticity. to this day, the multinationals have not managed to destabilize the transactional routines and attachments that characterize the markets’ efficacy. it is the social, affective, and material texture of the vernacular market, and peoples’ understandings of what makes it worthwhile and successful, that offers a substantive understanding for why the electronics get diverted from distribution chains and escape the fixation of brand marketing. the manufacturers face challenges to reclassify the products according to their interests because they cannot detach them from established connections and infrastructures. in this regard, the circulation of commodities beyond the outlined paths entangles them in variable relationships with peoples, spaces, information, prices, and value scales that differ from the fixed relational elements (such as trademarks, commercials, and packaging) making up the brand. the commodity is caught up in interpersonal attachments that complicate the creation of the kind of surplus value characteristic of the brand form (see foster 2007). in the contemporary economy, with its networks and logistics that span the globe, we observe important power struggles over market distribution and valuation—not only between economic actors (such as traders and corporations) but also between different productive processes and, indeed, collective forms of value creation. such a regime of value of vernacular markets is not a preexistent and bounded system, nor a rigidly separated space from corporate capitalism (çalişkan and callon 2009, 387); rather, it emerges from prolonged socioeconomic practice and bottom-up market making amid global connections. abstract this article offers a nuanced ethnographic description of the encounter between multinational corporations and the economic actors who distribute and commercialize their commodities. by analyzing the labor of lower-level employees and the strategies of the middle management of samsung electronics bolivia against traders’ practices and understandings and the vernacular market infrastructure, i offer a substantive interpretation of the obstacles and unintended outcomes of corporate commodity chain and brand management as it expands into an “emerging” market such as that in bolivia. street vendors, shopkeepers, and wholesalers are teased with personalized attention, gifts, and monetary incentives to sell the high-priced premium brands and build legible inventory, but they have remained notoriously disloyal. by focusing on the agreements and tensions between corporations and traders about how to move, store, categorize, advertise, and price the products, this article engages with the literature on urban marketplace trade and commercial transactions, counterfeit commodities, and economic power in globalized markets and supply chains. to think about the appeal and effectiveness of vernacular market channels and arrangements offers a conceptual lens to critically address the efficiency paradigm in supply-chain thinking, as well as to analyze discrepancies and power struggles not only among economic actors (such as traders and corporations) but also between different forms of valuation that co-exist and compete in markets. [multinational corporations; traders; supply chains; brands; valuation; electronics; bolivia] resumen este artículo ofrece una detallada descripción etnográfica del encuentro entre empresas multinacionales y los actores económicos que distribuyen y comercializan sus mercancías. al analizar la labor y las estrategias de los empleados de samsung electronics bolivia frente a las prácticas y visiones de los comerciantes, así como la infraestructura social, material y afectiva del mercado vernáculo, ofrezco una interpretación sustantiva de los obstáculos en la gestión corporativa de la cadena de productos (supply chain management) y en el marketing (branding) a medida que se expanden hacia mercados “emergentes” como el boliviano. al centrarme en los acuerdos y las tensiones entre las empresas y los comerciantes sobre cómo mover, almacenar, categorizar, valorar y comercializar los productos, este artículo reconsidera la literatura sobre el comercio de las plazas de mercado, las mercancías falsificadas y los procesos de economización. pensar en el atractivo y la eficacia de los canales y arreglos del mercado vernáculo ofrece una lente conceptual para abordar críticamente el paradigma de la eficiencia en el pensamiento sobre las cadenas de suministro, y permite observar discrepancias y luchas de poder no sólo entre unos agentes económicos (como los comerciantes y las empresas), sino también entre diferentes formas de valoración que conviven y compiten en los mercados. [empresas multinacionales; comerciantes; cadenas de suministro; marcas; valoración; electrónica; bolivia] notes acknowledgments the article has taken shape after a seminar talk in october 2019 at the department of anthropology at the university of barcelona. i thank the colleagues present, especially gemma orobitg canal, as well as aditi saraf, adolfo garcía jerez, and the five anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their sharp and insightful comments that helped enormously to tease out the most important themes and concepts. i am grateful for the extraordinary support of the editorial collective of cultural anthropology, in particular brad weiss for his close and constructive engagement. without the benevolent attitude of the corporate employees and traders, this research would not have been possible. while i decided to keep the original names of the corporations and markets, all individual names have been changed to ensure anonymity. 1. fieldwork at the main wholesale and retail markets for electronic equipment in la paz was carried out with traders (wholesalers, store retailers, and street vendors) and samsung’s corporate staff (mainly lower-level employees, interviews were also conducted with middle managers). i also interviewed employees of south korean lg electronics, japanese sony, and chinese huawei and xiaomi. throughout the text, i primarily refer to samsung electronics, as my main data comes from this corporation. it is investing most in bolivia’s popular markets, but the others do similar things, only with fewer employees and a smaller budget. 2. on street trade, see john cross and alfonso morales (2013) and karen tranberg hansen, walter e. little, and b. lynne milgram (2013). for an overview of anthropological research on marketplaces, networks, and institutions, see theodore c. bestor (2001). on andean commerce, compare linda j. seligmann (2004) and nico tassi (2016). 3. this is conventionally expressed in economics as the maximizing and the minimizing principles (of the energy balance, human labor, or overall costs): maximizing the yield with least input, and vice versa, minimizing input for a set outcome goal. 4. whereas commodity chains evoke a long history of international production and trade, supply-chain management indexes “new profit regimes” (tsing 2009, 149). the business literature has identified supply chains as the main competitive actors in the global economy (mangan, lalwani, and butcher 2008). they are usually categorized into upstream (production related), midstream (transport and storage), and downstream (marketing and sales to end clients) activities. supply-chain thinking and management can ultimately be tracked to toyota’s production system and lean manufacturing. 5. my use of efficacy differs from that of janet roitman (2007) who addresses epistemological questions. still, the idea of thinking concepts “through practices” (roitman 2007, 158) has inspired my usage of the term. such an ethnographic development of concepts of course fundamentally differs from the deductive and atomistic methods, mathematical models, and evolutionary-selective thinking of mainstream economics. it also differs from more sociological approaches, such as institutional economics, which measures economic performance by holding certain principles and variables separate and fixed, and believes that only those institutions that solve a range of efficiency problems (with regard to prices, resource allocations, etc.) endure (ensminger 1992, 23). 6. actor-network approaches distinguish mediators from intermediaries by ascribing an agentive network capacity to the former. i follow christian bessy and pierre-marie chauvin (2013, 96) in sticking to the term intermediary, although i highlight traders’ active and transformative part in shaping markets. 7. the estimation is based on official data on single-person businesses (empresas unipersonales) in the rubric of home appliances and consumer electronics in la paz, the number of licensed street traders at the main marketplaces for electronics, and membership numbers from the various associations of electronics traders. 8. we should not equate informality with trading. whereas an estimated 60 percent of the economically active population in bolivia work in domestic and semi-industrial units with fewer than five employees (many of them as traders), 65 percent of all citizens do not have a tax identification number (nit) and almost 80 percent do not contribute and therefore are not entitled to a pension program (hillenkamp 2013, 49). 9. the number of gremiales in bolivia is difficult to know. according to their self-description, the number lies between 1.5 and 2 million. 10. sony music was present in bolivia in the 1990s but left the country when music and software piracy skyrocketed (stobart 2011). 11. according to the un development program, between 2003 and 2013, 2.1 million citizens joined the middle class in bolivia on the basis of their income (between ten and fifty u.s. dollars of purchasing power), which would be equivalent to a growth of the middle class of almost twenty percentage points (undp 2016, 51–52). even so, on average, 50 percent of the bolivian population living in poverty (based on their income) did not emerge from that situation during the same period and 15 percent of the former middle class lost purchasing power (undp 2016, 66). 12. samsung engages a bolivian agency for recruitment. it makes official job offers instead of hiring directly among traders. the boundaries between traders and corporate staff are permeable, but generally in the opposite direction: employees become vendors and retailers. 13. the distributers have business relations with bolivian traders established over two decades that include generous conditions of supplier’s credit (müller 2018). after purchase, traders arrange transport with semi-informal lorry drivers who are responsible for overland logistics and customs. the multinationals usually know how many products of each model are sold weekly to bolivian traders (numbers facilitated by the distributers), but not how many arrive at marketplaces in la paz or are re-exported to peru. likewise, brand-name goods that have not passed through the hands of the official distributers and are not officially destined for bolivia end up in la paz. 14. to my knowledge, job categories are either translations from english—supervisor (supervisor), promotor (promoter), and asistente de venta (sales assistant)—or have been directly incorporated into the language, as in the case of the so-called merchandisers. in 2017, the promotores were renamed channel specialists, a further example of the usage of international business jargon and anglicisms in contrast to the world of spanish-speaking and aymara-influenced grassroots trade. 15. all names have been changed. 16. the contracts of the open market staff offer salaries above the minimal wage and health insurance at the workplace but used to be flexible. 17. traders, especially women, embody an intermediate position in andean societies. their subjectivity has been historically informed by a position between social and racial categories (seligmann 1993). 18. commentaries from corporate staff and traders according to which samsung should visually dominate the retail marketplaces by “70 percent” offer a telling illustration of brands producing excesses or “surfeits” (nakassis 2013). traders interpret this as promoting samsung in general, not just the authenticated products. although counterfeits and nonauthorized advertisements might destabilize the brand in terms of quality and accountability, they also strengthen the brand image through omnipresent visibility. 19. oster household appliances are highly popular in bolivia and among the products with the highest number of parallel imports and chinitos circulating. oster and the other most successful western multinationals, such as philips and bosch, run 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anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.04 the subject of wrongs the subject of wrongs: crime, populism, and venezuela’s punitive turn robert samet union college https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4517-2354 it was another robbery gone wrong. on the evening of january 6, 2014, the venezuelan actress and former beauty queen mónica spear and her ex-husband, thomas berry, were murdered along a strip of highway in the state of carabobo. the couple was vacationing with their five-year-old daughter, who survived despite a gunshot wound to the leg. overnight, the case made international headlines. in venezuela it inspired a wave of demonstrations, editorials, and televised homages. many of them made the point that the spear-berry murders, while tragic, were not unusual: venezuela has one of the highest homicide rates in the world. the only thing that made this case different from hundreds of others and attracted the attention of the international press was the celebrity of one of the victims. weeks later, the international spotlight again turned toward venezuela after a series of volatile student protests racked the country. youth armed with molotov cocktails took to the streets, first in the border town of san cristóbal and later in major urban areas like caracas. insecurity was one of the primary grievances of the student protesters. they held up the spear-berry murders as emblematic of a larger problem and identified it as a driving force behind the protests. less than a year after the death of president hugo chávez, the killing of mónica spear and the ensuing student protests marked the beginning of a series of crises that engulfed the country and helped legitimate a draconian shift in the government’s approach to security (zubillaga 2015; antillano, zubillaga, and ávila 2016; smilde 2017). not only did chávez’s handpicked successor, president nicolás maduro, take a hard-line position with opposition protesters, he also adopted a harshly punitive model of policing against the popular sectors—his own political base.1 the maduro government’s tough-on-crime stance deserves to be situated within the context of a broader punitive turn that has transformed law, policing, and corrections in venezuela and much of the world. mano dura (literally, “strong hand”), as it is known in latin america, has been inspired in part by developments in the united states and europe, including the philosophy of broken windows, the spread of zero-tolerance policing, and the rise of mass incarceration.2 these tough-on-crime policies champion the use of overwhelming, often deadly, force against entire populations, most explicitly the poor, the foreign, and people of color (garland 2002; wacquant 2009; alexander 2010). president chávez repeatedly denounced such tactics as thinly veiled attacks on the popular sectors. for that reason, the maduro government’s rapid embrace of mano dura constituted a striking political reversal. venezuela’s punitive turn illustrates a paradox that emerged in the late twentieth century—the expansion, from within democracies, of a security paradigm that singles out poor people of color and strips them of their rights (caldeira and holston 1999; caldeira 2000; comaroff and comaroff 2006; godoy 2006; goldstein 2012; moodie 2012). tough-on-crime policies target the very populations that suffer most from criminal predation. as a result, the popular sectors experience a double victimization at the hands of both police forces and criminal actors. and yet, surprisingly, there is often strong support for tough-on-crime policies by the very populations who suffer their sting (e.g., forman 2017; in venezuela, see hanson and smilde 2015). critical scholarship finds itself at an impasse. if the punitive turn carries explicit racial, ethnic, and class biases, then how does it gain traction among the popular sectors in a place like venezuela? my objective is not to resolve this impasse, but to suggest a shift of perspective that casts the problem in a somewhat different light. i want to take seriously the proposal that the punitive turn grows out of a political logic internal to democracy, the logic of populism.3 the pairing of populism and tough-on-crime policies is, by now, a fairly standard analysis of the right-wing movements sweeping much of the globe.4 what these analyses tend to elide are populism’s democratic credentials.5 populism upends most of what liberals have come to take for granted about democracy.6 nowhere is this more evident than around questions of citizenship. instead of beginning, as is customary, with the citizen as bearer of rights, populism presents an inversion in which the citizen appears, first and foremost, as the subject of wrongs. seen from this perspective, it is the force of injustice that provides the impetus for democratic subjectivity. those who feel wronged, in one way or another, are those who most passionately pursue political demands.7 it is on the subject of wrongs that anthropology may have the most to contribute to analyses of the punitive turn and populism more broadly. elsewhere, i have explained how populism pits a victimized “us” against a perpetrating “them” (samet 2013, 532). familiar targets of populist ire include corrupt politicians, foreign powers, and financial or cultural elites. beginning in the late twentieth century, a new wave of populist movements used the figure of the criminal—and later the terrorist or the migrant—to make neoliberal economic policies palatable through appeals to racism and ethnonationalism (hall et. al. 1978; kazin 1995). critical appraisals of the punitive turn have exposed how the stigma of criminality became deliberately stamped onto the poor, the foreign, the queer, and people of color. and yet insufficient attention has been paid to the construction of crime victimhood, its relationship to the material experience of injury, and its constitutive role in political subjectivity. theories of populism bring this dimension of the punitive turn more sharply into focus and allow us to understand how tough-on-crime policies grow out of particular, historically contingent articulations of victimhood. anthropology is no stranger to the politics of victimhood. what joel robbins (2013) calls “the suffering subject” was at the root of the discipline’s political reawakening during the 1970s and 1980s. this preoccupation with suffering was linked to a wider provictim turn, which has been described by cathy caruth (1996), thomas laqueur (2002), didier fassin and richard rechtman (2009), and samuel moyn (2010). recently, some debate has emerged about whether victimhood should be the focus of anthropological attention. for some, including robbins, anthropology’s turn toward suffering was a bridge too far. i believe, to the contrary, we have not followed it far enough. wrongs are essential because they represent the symbolic and material foundation on which a particular kind of political solidarity is constructed.8 populism appeals to “the people” through the experience of injuries; it is through the righteous indignation of victims that populist movements constitute the popular will. populism’s critics sometimes mistake its wounded subjectivity for a fatal flaw. they fail to recognize how democracy’s most fundamental principle, popular sovereignty, is often animated by the affective force of injury. anthropologists make a similar error when we assume victimhood as the sole provenance of marginalized groups.9 it is important to emphasize that movements across the political spectrum—those that champion the popular sectors and those that criminalize them—cast themselves as citizen-victims struggling against injustice. the primacy of wrongs marks a methodological starting point for thinking about the punitive turn and democratic subjectivity in times of populist upheaval. it is not a point that i am setting out to prove; it is, following eve kosofsky sedgwick (1990), something that i take to be axiomatic. what snaps into view when we approach crime and punishment through the lens of wrongs is a terrain of political struggle—of mobilization and countermobilization—that conventional accounts tend to obscure.10 my interest in populism and the political force of wrongs grows out of nearly three years of ethnographic research alongside crime journalists in caracas, the bulk of which was carried out between 2007 and 2014.11 for much of this period, the media formed the symbolic epicenter of opposition to the chávez government. this meant that a handful of television stations and newspapers were, arguably, more important to the opposition than any single party or political figure. it also meant that crime news was understood in explicitly partisan terms. for that reason, reporters lost access to most of their official police sources (who were tied to the chávez government) and so decided to turn to a new source of crime news—the families and friends of homicide victims. during the course of my fieldwork, i encountered thousands of grieving relatives. many of these encounters took place outside the central morgue in caracas, where families of homicide victims waited to claim the bodies of loved ones. the point of working alongside crime journalists was not to get close to suffering or the supposedly authentic experience of crime, but to understand how the aftermath of crime victimhood was mediated for a national audience. within just a few weeks of research on the caracas crime beat, it became clear that the figure of the crime victim functioned as a channel for political mobilization, a fact that seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom on reactions to crime. most of the scholarship on this subject assumes that crime victims are passive, fearful creatures.12 at least in theory high rates of violent crime should have gone hand in hand with a retreat from public space, a distrust of strangers, a demobilization of the populace, and a defensive posture toward the future. visitors to venezuela would have observed these behaviors. however, foregrounding fear of crime would mean neglecting other responses to urban violence that were equally if not more significant. in particular, it would mean ignoring how the figure of the crime victim linked demands for protection to structures of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic domination, something particularly evident in the mónica spear case. the politics of crime spear was not just any beauty queen turned actress. she was a former miss venezuela, which in a country obsessed with beauty pageants made her akin to royalty (ochoa 2014). at the time of her death, spear had reached the apex of her stardom thanks to leading roles in several internationally popular telenovelas. she played the exquisite protagonist of la mujer perfecta (the perfect woman; 2011), the dutiful heroine of flor salvaje (wild flower; 2012), and the tormented lead of pasión prohibida (forbidden passion; 2013). all this made spear a success story and a symbol of national pride even though she lived in the united states. news coverage of her death made this symbolism explicit. “mónica was in love with venezuela,” her father told the press (castillo and shoichet 2014). “what happened should never happen to anyone else in this beautiful country. we must work together to make the country safe. we must disarm the people. we must make it so we can go out at night, like we did before.” no sooner had news of spear’s murder broken than president maduro and his administration hurried to contain the fallout. that morning the president made a lengthy statement to reporters from the state television channel. maduro acknowledged the murders as a national tragedy, one that united all venezuelans. he discussed details of the crime, announced plans for a new security initiative, and asked that the case not be used for political ends. most notably, though, maduro passionately promised to respond with an “iron hand [mano de hierro].” this pronouncement underlined a dramatic shift in the government’s anticrime discourse—a shift that was justified, at least in part, by nearly a decade of political pressure (antillano 2012). from 2006 to 2012, insecurity ranked as the top voter concern in venezuela (provea 2012; sanjuán 2013). violent crime inspired hundreds of protests large and small. during my fieldwork, i observed scores of blockades, marches, and demonstrations against crime. various bus and taxi unions, whose members were vulnerable to violence and accustomed to collective action, organized many of these protests. neighborhood associations or student organizations were behind others. in almost every instance, a homicide served as the catalyst for these mobilizations, and the central actors were relatives or friends of the murder victim. these victims were, in turn, linked to a larger landscape of political struggle. the most dramatic example of anticrime protests roiled caracas in early 2006, when thousands took to the streets in response to a series of high-profile kidnappings-turned-homicides. many of the people who joined these protests were veterans of the struggle against the chávez government. in this regard, the protests represented a continuation of the opposition’s earlier mobilizations, including the failed coup d’état (2002), the massive oil strikes (2002–2003), and the presidential recall referendum (2004). they differed, however, in at least one important respect. anticrime protests were ostensibly apolitical. demonstrators could credibly argue that crime affected people across the political spectrum, and as such they could also claim the protests as a spontaneous expression of the popular will. this made for a powerful claim. it was so powerful, in fact, that the first wave of anticrime protests momentarily threatened the stability of the chávez government by weakening the bond between chavismo and the popular sectors.13 the spear-berry murders recalled this earlier episode of mass protest. no one was surprised that the death of miss venezuela provoked an outpouring of popular sentiment, that it served as a springboard for political mobilization, or that it became another symbol of the failures of the maduro government.14 charismatic signifiers crime victims have a charismatic quality. this holds especially true in the case of homicides, the aftermath of which is often characterized by a mixture of pathos and outrage.15 we are familiar with homicide victims as objects of collective grief, but we are less accustomed to thinking of them as a focal point for grievances. during my research alongside crime journalists in caracas, however, it became clear that it was this combination of grief and grievance that made them powerfully symbolic. the sacredness of mourning shielded the relatives of homicide victims from excessive political scrutiny and lent their testimonies added weight. these testimonies frequently included angry denunciations of rampant crime, corrupt police, ineffective courts, and the failings of the government. journalists tended to gravitate toward people who explicitly denounced such injustices. it was in this capacity, as subjects of wrong, that crime victims fulfilled a symbolic function not unlike charisma. as a term of social-scientific analysis, charisma has a checkered career beginning with max weber’s (2013) writings on religious and political authority. the concept is most commonly associated with the personal magnetism or superhuman agency of an individual leader. if this association is at least partially supported by weber’s work, the german sociologist explicitly links charismatic authority to the presence of a charismatic community, rendering it unclear which takes primacy: the leader or the led. more often than not this equivocation between charisma as a property of the person or as a characteristic of a social movement is reproduced uncritically. as a result the term lacks precision. the problem is so intractable that some scholars, most notably peter worsley (1987), have advocated abandoning the concept of charisma altogether—a position to which i am not unsympathetic. and yet the specter of charisma persists, even flourishes, despite its lack of conceptual coherence. here i would like to propose that charisma’s incoherence may actually account for its success and, moreover, that it lends itself to thinking through the antimonies of democratic citizenship. martin riesebrodt (1999) traces this incoherence back to weber’s original formulation of the concept, which was inspired—at least in part—by anthropological debates about mana around the turn of the century (see also tybjerg 2007; mazzarella 2017). this derivation is tremendously suggestive. as claude lévi-strauss (1987) famously argues, mana is not so much an analytical category as a function of thought itself (see also mauss 2001). more specifically, it is a function of symbolic or magical thinking. per lévi-strauss, the value of terms like mana and charisma is that they fill the gap between signifier and signified, langue and parole. they are what he calls floating signifiers whose value derives from the simultaneous discontinuity (of the parts) and unity (of the whole) internal to symbolic thinking. the power of such floating or empty signifiers is their plasticity, their openness, and their availability to a range of meanings. most theories of citizenship eschew the magical thinking internal to democracy, which is rooted in democracy’s constituent fiction, the principle of popular sovereignty (frank 2010; wolin 2016). government of the people, by the people, for the people is only possible if we agree to make the leap between embodied experience and collective representation. rather than recognizing what teresa caldeira and james holston (1999) call the disjunctive and discontinuous fabric of democratic politics, normative approaches attempt to contain it within a regime of rules, regulations, and pseudoscience. the result has been a failure to foresee the current wave of populist revivals sweeping the globe. many of these revivals are deeply troubling. a few have held out genuine promise. either way the populist movements that have spread across the americas, europe, africa, south asia, and the middle east are nothing less than democracy in action. over the past two decades, venezuela has witnessed not one but two such populist revivals, each predicated on a series of deeply felt wrongs. in both instances certain types of victims took on the role of charismatic signifiers that functioned to mediate the distance between those discrete bodies that constitute a body politic. the bolivarian revolution was the first and best known of these populist movements. propelled by the disjuncture between the promise of fantastic oil wealth and persistent socioeconomic disparities, its emblematic citizen-victims were the poor and the racially marked.16 the late hugo chávez came to embody their suffering. the second and less celebrated populist movement in venezuela had its origins in the backlash against the chávez government. like chavismo, the opposition has been propelled by a sense of injustice and wrongdoing, albeit one more inchoate. aside from its opposition to the governments of chávez and maduro, this populist revival failed to coalesce around a unifying grievance. for much of the chávez era, the opposition was in fact a movement in search of its own charismatic signifier. crime victims came to fill that role at certain critical junctures. white skin, black masks if homicide victims have a charismatic quality, then it is not tied to the extraordinary qualities of the person but to the symbolic operation of their death. the figure of the homicide victim was well suited to the polarized landscape of venezuelan politics because the experience of violent crime cut across party lines. in a setting in which fundamental definitions of rights were contested, remarkable consensus existed about violent crime. opinion held that crime was neither a chavista nor an opposition problem; it was a venezuelan problem. an editor for one of the national newspapers described it to me as a question of mathematics. when i asked her why the paper paid such close attention to crime victims, she explained: because people connect with them. suppose that in venezuela’s prisons there are approximately 25,000 delinquents and suppose that there’s a similar number on the streets. that makes 50,000 people. now, i’m not particularly good with figures, but in a country with a population of 28 million it is fair to say that 50,000 is an infinitesimally small number. so, obviously, we are not as interested in talking about delinquents—i mean the majority of people are victims. some 50,000 people are affecting 27,500,000 [sic] others. what i am saying is that these 27,500,000 people, we are all victims. crime victimhood was routinely depicted as an experience that united citizens. however, in death—just as in life—not all citizens were equal. the discourse on crime in venezuela alternately elided or emphasized these inequalities. like citizenship, the politics of victimhood was shaped by a dialectical tension between inclusion and exclusion (turner 1993; isin and wood 1999; holston 2008). the very practices that created a community of suffering also distinguished different categories of sufferers. some victims were valued over others. in venezuela, as elsewhere, crimes committed against certain kinds of people elicited more attention from the press, greater sympathy from the public, and harsher penalties from the courts. this fundamental inequality was on display in the memorialization of mónica spear. most homicide victims in venezuela are young, poor, racially marked men from the barrios. the death of someone who matches this profile rarely draws public attention. such victims are often dismissed as malandros, or shady ne’er-do-wells who possibly deserved their fate (ferrándiz 2004). in contrast, spear matched the profile of the wholesome sano, or innocent victim. not only was she a celebrity, but she was also a dutiful mother and a white woman from a good home. clearly, she was someone who did not deserve to die before her time. in this sense, then, spear’s victimhood became simultaneously marked and unmarked: marked in that she represented a particular social stratum; unmarked in that through her suffering this social stratum came to stand as a symbol of the nation as a whole. given the poles of venezuelan politics—in which elites were associated with the opposition and the popular sectors with chavismo—the memorialization of certain victims over others took on particular significance. perhaps the best illustration of how crime victimhood mediated unequal demands in the name of national unity was the grassroots campaign project hope (projecto esperanza). in november 2011, a group of photographers and student activists began collaborating on a photomural project that featured images and testimonies of fifty-four mothers of homicide victims. the inspiration for the project was an international campaign by the french street artist jr, who rose to prominence thanks to his work in the banlieues of paris and the favelas of rio de janeiro. the first phase of project hope hewed closely to the guidelines set out by jr’s inside out: the people’s art project.17 volunteers plastered massive, six-by-eight-foot portraits of the mothers in various locations throughout caracas. each portrait was accompanied by a short testimony on the project hope website. the project’s aim was “to promote respect for life in venezuela through art” (pérez rincones 2012, 31; author’s translation). simple enough. during the second phase of the campaign, project hope modified its visual strategy. under the slogan “put yourself in her place [ponte en su lugar],” they invited celebrities and activists to pose with mask-sized portraits of the mothers. the original black-and-white pictures were halved along their vertical axes. people then held the portraits in front of their own faces in a visually explicit merger of the identities. perhaps the most arresting image from the campaign was a photograph of one maria elena delgado—a mother who lost all three of her children—surrounded by people wearing her image. the photo recalled the famous frontispiece of thomas hobbes’s leviathan. instead of the king, however, the figurative head of the body politic was the suffering crime victim. figure 1. maria elena delgado, surrounded by project hope supporters wearing masks that merged their identities with hers. photo by project hope. the charisma of crime victimhood could be likened to a mask. project hope makes this explicit. it also provides a visual record of the racial and economic contradictions that the crime-victim-as-mask attempts to resolve. a quick look at images from the campaign reveals that most of the crime victims are disadvantaged minorities. most of the people wearing their images are not. this is a pattern. homicide victims are overwhelmingly poor, young men of color, and yet on the road to collective subjectivity the figure of the crime victim undergoes a kind of whitewashing. project hope’s depiction of the crime-victim-as-mask demonstrates the simultaneous plasticity and concreteness essential to the success of any charismatic signifier. on one hand, it shows us the discursive underpinnings of crime victimhood. it is a reminder that collective identities are constructed and that they are always internally heterogeneous. on the other hand, it also reminds us that every telling is a doing. identities are produced through embodied experiences and material practices. think of this as a pragmatic modification of philip abrams’s (1988) famous thesis from “notes on the difficulty of studying the state.” rather than a mask that obscures political practice, we might understand masking or masquerade as one of the fundamental elements of any state-making project and the assertion of wrongs as a performative practice through which claims to citizenship become mobilized.18 mobilizing wrongs crime becomes an object of populist mobilization through symbolic practices that transform citizen-victims into avatars of the body politic.19 protest is one example of how discrete tragedies become the flesh of a collective subject. memorialization is another. a third practice through which wrongs become mobilized in venezuela and much of latin america is the use of denuncias. the term translates as “denunciation,” “accusation,” or “complaint.” in much of latin america it has two closely related usages. a denuncia can refer to the official report that plaintiffs file with the police or the courts to initiate an investigation or trial. in a strictly juridical sense, denuncias are written accusations. however, denuncias also refer to informal accusations that circumvent the legal system and go straight to the court of popular opinion. this kind of denuncia is a public grievance staged by or in the name of victims. an episode from my fieldwork with crime reporters in caracas illustrates the practice of denunciation and its significance vis-à-vis the politics of security. it involved a macabre photograph of eleven naked corpses strewn haphazardly about the city morgue. the photo was originally published on the front page of el nacional, one of venezuela’s most respected newspapers. it was intended to shock. it succeeded in creating a cascade of denuncias and counter-denuncias, all of them voiced in the name of victims. what ostensibly provoked the publication of the morgue photo was an hour-long documentary, the guardians of chávez (los guardianes de chávez), disseminated in latin america by cnn. the documentary linked rampant violence in caracas to militant leftist groups associated with president chávez. three experts were invited by cnn to comment on the documentary the first time it aired in venezuela. two of the experts—roberto briceño leon and eliseo guzman—were associated with the opposition. the third, andrés izarra, was a prominent member of the chávez administration and also a former cnn correspondent. for most of the debate, izarra appeared visibly annoyed. early on, he reproached cnn for promoting what he called “journalistic pornography.” when one of the other participants began discussing the homicide rates in caracas, izarra laughed derisively, clearly in disagreement with the assessment that venezuela’s capital was the most violent city in the world. it was not a polite exchange. after the segment aired, many took umbrage. they accused the ex-minister of laughing about insecurity. izarra backpedaled. his allies made public shows of support. the carousel of accusations about the documentary and izarra’s response offered a good example of the kind of denuncias that audiences expected from both politicians and pundits. parliamentary elections were just around the corner. given the context, the whole episode was rather pedestrian and, in all likelihood, it would have been forgotten if not for the morgue photo. on august 13, 2010, two days after the cnn debacle, el nacional published its response to izarra. rarely did anything so lurid appear in the press, much less on the front page of an established broadsheet like el nacional. there was no public access inside the morgue, and cameras were strictly forbidden.20 no sooner did the morgue photo appear in el nacional than the national director of the investigative police announced that he was pressing charges against the newspaper for violating venezuela’s child protection law.21 it was under this same law that the national ombudswoman filed an official denuncia with the courts, which led the twelfth tribunal for the protection of children and adolescents to pass a general restraining order prohibiting all media outlets from publishing “violent, bloody, or grotesque images that in one form or another violate the psychic and moral condition of children and adolescents.” el nacional and another newspaper, tal cual, were hit with heavy sanctions and ordered to refrain from publishing “images, information, and publicity of any kind” that could be broadly construed as violent, provocative, or that otherwise dealt with death and dying. the wording seemed to suggest the prohibition of even the most quotidian form of crime reporting. rather than disappearing, the controversy gained steam. el nacional used the restraining order to launch a raft of denuncias against both crime and government censorship. i was sitting with about a dozen reporters from various media outlets the day the restraining order was announced. attention fixed on el nacional’s defiant response. the front page of the newspaper screamed: “publication of images and news about violence prohibited.” just below the headline, in bold red type, “censored” was written across a pair of empty image boxes. one of the crime reporters picked up the newspaper, thumbed to the editorial page, and began reading aloud, approvingly: when a government exhausts its capacity to lie and loses its ability to deceive a society, it resorts to violence against the media. people need to be informed and know the truth of what is happening in the country, in the city where they live, and at their places of work. one requirement of modern life is that no one has the right—be it a judge, a minister, or a prosecutor—to arbitrarily impede citizens from accessing information that they want and need. he read on. the editorial denounced government lies, the violation of press freedom, the enrichment of a corrupt class of bureaucrats, the cynicism of state officials, and the rise of leftist extremism that was transforming venezuela into a new version of cuba, north korea, or iran. on finishing, the reporter looked up and clapped theatrically. “bravo! bravo! that is exactly what they need to do.” turning to the journalist beside him, he tapped emphatically on the table, adding: “they’ve got to keep this up. they can’t let this one go.” his colleague nodded her head in agreement, observing: “one of the editors was saying that they are thinking about running headlines about insecurity every day until the election.” for the next month, el nacional did exactly this. it ran story after story about crime under a banner decorated with a censorship sign. almost overnight, the morgue photo morphed into a whole series of political demands that far exceeded the problem of crime in caracas. more than simply a denunciation of urban violence, news coverage of crime symbolized opposition to the chávez government broadly construed. the point is not simply that the morgue photograph was “political.” rather, it laid the groundwork for a particular kind of community that was constituted around the shared experience of victimhood, be it at the hands of violent offenders or of government censors. elsewhere i have argued that denunciations of wrongdoing function as building blocks of populist movements (samet 2017). it is through the airing of otherwise disparate grievances that populist identities coalesce or articulate (see hall and grossberg 1986; laclau 2005) around a shared sense of injustice. this is exactly what happened in venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s when denuncias of corruption created the conditions of possibility for the rise of hugo chávez and the bolivarian revolution. in a similar fashion, denuncias made in the name of crime victims channeled demands against the chávez government and propelled a disquieting shift in its approach to security. venezuela’s punitive turn since the 1970s the charismatic quality of crime victims has made itself felt across the americas. if we approach the matter from a micropolitical level, crime victimhood has been linked to a proliferation of practices that have no necessary political valence. these include the formation of victims’ movements (rentschler 2011), increased participation in voting and civil society initiatives (bateson 2012), vigilantism and death squads (sluka 2008), lynching (goldstein 2004; godoy 2006), mass protests (moodie 2009), and journalistic exposés against crime. on the ground these practices are politically heterogeneous. crime victims and their advocates are just as likely to make calls for forgiveness as to demand retribution (rentschler 2011). if we approach the matter from a macropolitical perspective, however, a disturbing pattern emerges. the figure of the crime victim has played a crucial role in what scholars describe as the punitive turn or punitive populism. in north america and western europe, the victims’ rights movement and the war on drugs reshaped the criminal justice system, resulting in longer sentences and harsher punishments for all manner of crimes (bottoms 1995; beckett and western 2001; garland 2002; wacquant 2009; alexander 2010). in latin america, the rise of mano dura policies followed a parallel trajectory (godoy 2006; basombrío and dammert 2013). everywhere the plight of crime victims has helped legitimate systematic and brutal campaigns of oppression carried out against poor, young men who are racially, ethnically, religiously, or sexually marked. under president chávez (1999–2013), the venezuelan government publicly resisted the punitive turn. this changed in the 2013 transition from chávez to maduro. seemingly overnight, venezuela’s national government went from espousing a humanist or leftist model of security to adopting a shock-and-awe approach that is the hallmark of neoliberal governments. this transformation became starkly apparent when president maduro promised a hard-line response to the murders of mónica spear and thomas berry. to those who killed them: how do you explain yourselves? society is extending [you] its hand. the president of the republic is extending [you] his hand. how long will you keep killing? i say this with indignation and sadness. this is a blow to all of us and i assume ultimate responsibility. but i am also making a call: those who come to kill will receive an iron hand [mano de hierro] response. iron hand. with democratic authority, with constitution in hand—but no, no we cannot accept this [state of affairs] under any condition. the phrase “iron hand” was direct and unambiguous. with it, president maduro announced his government’s readiness to get tough on crime. a series of new security initiatives followed. the most draconian, operation liberate the people (olp), was launched in july 2015.22 under the auspices of crime control, police and military officers conducted sweeps of the barrios. in its first six months, olp was responsible for upward of 200 extrajudicial killings and more than 14,000 arrests (human rights watch and provea 2016). the program proved politically popular, but little suggests that olp or other such initiatives did anything to curb violent crime in venezuela. if anything, the situation worsened (antillano and ávila 2017). it would be hard to overstate how radically maduro’s discourse on security departed from that of his predecessor. during his first seven years in office, president chávez rarely spoke about crime. when forced to confront the subject, he consistently emphasized social and economic exclusion as the root cause. the best way to go about solving the problem of insecurity, he stated, was to attack poverty, inequality, and marginalization. during his first campaign for the presidency in 1998, chávez remarked to an interviewer: “how are you going to fight [public insecurity]? with more police, more patrols, more searches, more guns on the street? no. not without fighting the root—hunger, unemployment, abandoned children, and that has to do with the social and economic model and the role of the state” (antillano 2012, 708).23 more than a decade later, chávez continued to insist that crime would diminish only if its structural roots were addressed. he was similarly consistent in his repudiation of what he called “the repressive model” of security. chávez regularly criticized the mano dura or “strong-handed” vision of security even though it was popular with much of his base. instead, he declared himself in line with “humanist,” “preventative,” or (later) “socialist” ideals of public security (see antillano 2012). although chávez publicly repudiated the punitive model of security, two contradictions in his stance became progressively apparent. first, the problem of violent crime did not subside despite efforts to fight the social, economic, and political exclusion of the popular classes. privately and publicly, the chávez administration was forced to admit that the problem of violent crime was unlikely to simply vanish.24 second, there was the fact that policing in caracas became brutally repressive under chávez despite the president’s repudiation of mano dura policies. the 1999 constitution overseen by the president included a number of progressive laws guaranteeing civil, political, and human rights, yet the practices of law enforcement agencies went in the opposite direction.25 this disjuncture deepened from 2006 onward as certain actors within the government began to champion the very model of security that chávez publicly opposed. so while venezuela’s punitive turn seemed to happen overnight—in the transition from chávez to maduro—it was connected to a longer trajectory of mobilization and countermobilization in which both the opposition and chavismo played a part. by the time of mónica spear’s murder in early 2014, demands for security had become a point of political convergence. for opposition leaders like leopoldo lópez, along with news outlets like el nacional and globovision, the plight of crime victims served as a potent political symbol through which to voice demands for regime change. crime allowed them to connect with the popular sectors in ways that economics did not. for president maduro, taking the side of crime victims helped him contend with pressure from within his own political base. in both cases, the figure of the crime victim functioned as the symbolic scaffolding that mediated a series of complex and contradictory demands. if the actual injuries of crime were heterogeneous, then following the figure of the crime victim allows us to understand the outlines of a political settlement (see mazzarella 2017) that emerged in venezuela from 2006 onward. it also allows us to understand how and why the bolivarian revolution—a political project that recognized and initially rejected mano dura as a program of racial and socioeconomic domination—traded the hand of social justice for the gauntlet of security. the subject of wrongs joel robbins (2013, 448) has observed that “the subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression now very often stands at the center of anthropological work.” robbins is right to argue that this turn toward suffering was tied to a larger sociohistorical transformation. equally perceptive is his suggestion that anthropologists working under the sign of suffering tend to erase sociohistorical differences in favor of universal humanity. these are what i see as the lasting contributions of “beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good,” an article that has achieved special status within the discipline as both manifesto and bone of contention. the call to rethink anthropology feels timely and urgent, but robbins’s proposal contains a pair of elisions concerning the relationship between historical transitions and political struggles. i want to examine them briefly because they cast my argument about the subject of wrongs in sharper relief. robbins (2013, 448–49) dates the emergence of the suffering subject to the late twentieth century, as anthropology began to shift its focus away from “the savage, the primitive, and the radically other,” or what michel-rolph trouillot famously called “the savage slot.” this historiography makes sense, but robbins’s description of the transition from the savage to the suffering slot is curious. he argues that trouillot and other critics of anthropology failed to outline a new vision for the discipline and that we arrived at the suffering subject like “the proverbial drunk searching for his or her keys under the streetlight because that is where it is brightest” (robbins 2013, 450). such a description overlooks the seemingly obvious fact that critiques of anthropology were predicated on a multitude of overlapping injuries—colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, to name just a few. suffering was the point. the discipline did not stumble, drunkenly, into suffering. it was the grounds on which an emergent political consciousness was staged in the first place. robbins makes a similar leap from the anthropology of suffering to what he calls an anthropology of the good. the latter is vaguely outlined. there is a list of topics—“studies of value, morality, imagination, well-being, empathy, care, the gift, hope, time and change” (robbins 2013, 457–58)—and the suggestion that they point to a new way of doing anthropology. robbins tells us that the idea is not to replace the anthropology of suffering but rather to fulfill its immanent critique. if that is, indeed, the case, then i would push the analysis one step further. for an anthropology of the good to emerge, it is likely to begin with attempts to articulate the bad. from what i can see, the great contemporary questions shaping anthropology are arising out of grievances that have new urgency, things like police brutality and its relationship to forms of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic discrimination; environmental degradation; the exploitation of indigenous peoples; the spread of preventable diseases; the injuries of patriarchy and heteronormativity; acts of terrorism by state and nonstate actors; the decimation of labor and the instabilities wrought by global capitalism. suffering is powerful because it shapes the terrain on which political communities are established and claims of belonging/exclusion made. this relationship between injury and democratic subjectivity holds true for causes that organize both the left and the right. pointing to the parallels between popular movements across the political spectrum does not mean falling victim to false equivalences. different wrongs give rise to different expressions of political subjectivity. the citizen-victim who rises up against police brutality, for example, is qualitatively different from the citizen-victim who tacitly condones it. when it comes to violent crime in the early twenty-first century, a strong correlation exists between demands made in the name of crime victims and the strain of punitive populism that entrenches racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic inequality. what i have described in this article is the political logic through which diffuse experiences of violent crime in venezuela served as the basis for a collective identity that simultaneously whitened victims and criminalized the poor and the racially marked. this fits a larger pattern. as early as the 1970s, ethnographers recognized the ways in which crime was used to legitimate a right-wing populism that targeted minorities (hall et al. 1978), and we have no shortage of contemporary examples. jair bolsonaro, rodrigo duterte, viktor orbán, and donald trump all come to mind. among scholars and activists who oppose such projects, our main response has been to emphasize the political nature of crime victimhood. this was precisely the tactic embraced by president chávez. it failed at least in part because it mistook the politics of security for the lived experience of injury. beginning with wrongs is a bottom-up approach to democratic subjectivity, one that recognizes victimhood as the material base on which populist movements are constructed. no one in venezuela needs to be convinced that homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault, or extrajudicial killings are real and present dangers. the failure to find substantive solutions to the injuries of crime is what created the conditions of possibility for venezuela’s punitive turn in the first place. undoing the punitive turn in venezuela or anywhere else does not mean disavowing the gravity of crime or downplaying demands for security. rather, it means reconsidering how we go about rectifying a particular category of wrongs. apparatuses of security (laws, police, courts, prisons, and so forth) are historically contingent. they emerge out of socioeconomic conditions inherited from the past, but that does not mean their form or content is etched in stone. the provisioning of protection, punishment, and social order is open to different political articulations. critical scholars are right to expose right-wing and conservative projects of security that target the poor and people of color, but it is even more vital to begin imagining what a left art of security might entail.26 such a project was largely abandoned in the 1970s and 1980s by scholars disillusioned with the soviet union. what they bequeathed us is a critique of the state that repeats itself without advancing viable alternatives. it is true that the law and apparatuses of security operate as tools of socioeconomic oppression more often than not, but—as walter benjamin (1969) reminds us—history is not a game of chess played against structural forces destined to win every time. it is an all-too-human struggle. taking wrongs seriously means paying attention to how political struggles over crime play out and forcefully confronting patterns of racial, economic, and ethnonational domination. but it also means starting to think about how we might go about setting things right. that is the challenge facing venezuela and much of the world today. notes acknowledgments early versions of this article were presented at the american ethnological society meeting in washington, dc, and the thirty-third international latin american studies congress. thanks to elif babül, regina bateson, thomas blom hansen, aaron kappeler, william mazzarella, austin zeiderman, and my colleagues in the department of anthropology at union college: karen brison, george gmelch, arsalan khan, steve leavitt, michele osborne, and jeff witsoe. i am also grateful to brad weiss and the editors of cultural anthropology, as well as the three anonymous reviewers, who helped me hone the argument. this article is based on research supported by the wenner-gren foundation; the national science foundation (grant no. 0719667); and the latin american security, drugs, and democracy fellowship, administered by the social science research council, with funding from the open society foundation. 1. in latin america, popular sectors refers to a mix of subaltern groups, most notably the urban masses and rural campesinos. 2. authoritarian policing in latin america has a long history. during the cold war period, police forces trained and backed by the united states carried out egregious—in some cases, genocidal—attacks on civilian populations (huggins 1998; grandin 2004). the dark past of authoritarian policing in latin america is what makes the political popularity of mano dura politics so troubling. 3. invoking populism invites debate. most scholarship on populism begins with a nod to conceptual clutter surrounding the term. that said, a general consensus has emerged, which i would summarize as follows: populism is the jacobin logic of popular sovereignty. when dealing with populism we are dealing with a distinctive pattern of political mobilization. every populist movement claims to represent the unmediated will of the people against the illegitimate usurpation of power. such claims are totalizing. they are also militantly democratic in their assertions of rule by the demos. note that populism’s inalienable principle is not sovereignty, but rather popular sovereignty. this principle is what populism shares with both democracy and republicanism. populism emerges under conditions in which a fictive “people” is considered the locus of political authority; as such, it is tied to a particular pattern of state formation, which became dominant during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. in the americas, popular sovereignty became the standard of political legitimacy beginning with the wars of independence. on the history and nuances of popular sovereignty, see canovan 2005. for an overview of the literature and debates on populism, see laclau 2005 and panizza 2005. like rafael sánchez (2016), i prefer jacobin to other descriptors like radical, manichean, or illiberal. 4. despite the growing literature on punitive populism (e.g., bottoms 1995; basombrío and dammert 2013), most scholars interested in the phenomenon have failed to engage theories of populism at more than a cursory level. this article forms part of a broader project to spell out the linkages between populist mobilization and the punitive turn. 5. approaching populism as a political logic that is internal to—although not necessarily synonymous with—democracy means setting aside the outcomes of populist movements and focusing instead on the populist imagination. such an approach avoids many of the normative (usually negative) assumptions about populism, for example that it appeals to base emotions, promotes unreason, or paves the way for authoritarianism. it also has the advantage of recasting democracy as something inherently unstable, simultaneously promising and perilous. on the relationship between populism and democracy, see panizza 2005. 6. this is, namely, that democracy can be reduced to a series of bureaucratic institutions, technologies, and procedures. 7. in his philosophy of right, g. w. f. hegel (1967, 64–74) describes abstract right as the by-product of concrete wrong. jacques lacan (1976, 17) makes a similar point: “what is social is always a wound.” lacan, in turn, influenced thinkers like wendy brown (1993), jacques rancière (1999), ernesto laclau (2005), and slavoj žižek (2014). 8. it was émile durkheim (2014) who first observed the relationship between crime, punishment, and social consciousness (see greenhouse 2011). 9. we confuse normative claims about whose victimhood should be recognized with descriptive accounts about the experience, perception, and mobilization of injury. 10. the mobilization of crime victimhood was just one of several factors that contributed to venezuela’s punitive turn; however, we learn much about this phenomenon by scrutinizing how certain victims are transformed into political subjects. 11. the bulk of my fieldwork was conducted in two stints: august 2007 to july 2009 and december 2011 to may 2012. participant-observation was augmented by a range of ethnographic and textual methods, including more than one hundred interviews with key figures in the press, the field of security, activists, and politicians on both sides of the political divide. 12. the punitive turn owed much to a shift in the discourse on security, a discourse that coalesced around fear of crime. before the mid-1960s, fear of crime was invisible as either governmental problem or object of social scientific inquiry. it emerged out of a particular conjuncture in u.s. history (lee 2007). the rise of victim surveys, the violent backlash against civil rights, and blatant political opportunism combined to make fear of crime an object of fascination for criminologists and policy makers alike. in a short time, fear of crime became a cottage industry linking government to the social sciences. today, fear is the predominant sensation that scholars associated with crime, which tends to obscure how crime functions as a tool of political mobilization. 13. the chávez government was aware of the threat. one political figure with access to internal polling data told me that he believed the government’s failure to address crime and other problems confronting the barrios led to chávez’s defeat in the 2007 constitutional referendum. 14. crime was just one of many issues behind the 2014 protests. its importance is highlighted in a widely circulated youtube video from this period, “what’s going on in venezuela in a nutshell,” which can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw7xt_hsekc&t=27s. 15. in the discourse on violent crime, homicide came to stand in for a host of other offenses including kidnapping, sexual assault, carjacking, armed robberies, and even petty theft. homicide was to crime what monica spear was to crime victims. here, see sanjuán 2013. 16. venezuela is one of the world’s largest exporters of oil. rents from oil and gas production account for well over 90 percent of gdp. venezuela’s democratic contract is, largely, based on the promise to redistribute and reinvest oil wealth in a way that grows the nation as a whole (coronil 1997). 17. the project can be accessed at http://www.insideoutproject.net/en. 18. by “performative practice,” i am suggesting that masking is an act that constitutes subjects in ways similar to those described by judith butler (1997) or thomas blom hansen (2001). 19. the term citizen-victim is borrowed from susana rotker’s (2002) writings on violent crime in venezuela. 20. this is standard protocol in morgues throughout north america. 21. the organic law for the protection of children and adolescents (ley orgánica para la protección del niño y adolescente; lopna) was passed by the venezuelan national assembly in april 2000. it contained a number of provisions that ostensibly protected children from inappropriate content and unsanctioned representation. in practice, it functioned to check the power of the press. 22. the initiative’s official name was operación de liberación y protección del pueblo, but it is usually referred to as operación de liberación del pueblo, or olp for short. 23. this stance against state repression was tied to the conditions that gave rise to the bolivarian revolution. chávez attributed his political awakening to el caracazo—the 1989 uprising against neoliberalism that was violently put down by the venezuelan military on the orders of president carlos andres pérez. hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians were murdered. here, see coronil and skurski 1991. 24. such an initiative was begun in 2006 with the national commission for police reform. andrés 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st. louis https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4516-4407 in august of 2007, eight-year-old gift munkanta rose up into the sky and took flight.1 he flew away from the farm in rural zambia where he lived with his grandparents, past fields that gave way to buildings as lusaka, the capital city, came into view. gift flew over the buildings and descended into the university teaching hospital where his one-year-old sister was a patient, seriously ill with tuberculosis (tb). gift pointed to the illustration he had made of his sister in a hospital bed and told me, “i put her on my balloon.” interrupting his story, he ran into a bedroom to retrieve a deflated red balloon as proof that he really possessed such a thing. gift then continued his tale. he and his sister used the balloon to float away from the hospital and toward the family house in george, a residential area of lusaka, where we sat. when the siblings reached the house, the balloon became a parachute, he explained, and they descended. once in the house, gift watched over his sister, which was not easy, he showed, as he pointed to the page: “this is a snake that wanted to kill her. i used my bow and arrow and killed it.” he again ran into a bedroom. this time he returned with a bow that he had fashioned out of a small branch and some string. figure 1. gift’s drawing and the words he used to describe it tell the story of flying to the university teaching hospital where gift’s baby sister had been admitted, taking his sister home using a balloon, and caring for her through her illness and into their adulthoods. drawing by gift munkanta. looking back at his drawing, he pointed to a bus. it was now the future, and he was a driver. with all the money he made, he explained, he had built a large house in a high-income area of lusaka. he pointed to stairs he had drawn on the page, thus confirming his financial success, for only wealthy people have houses with two stories. his baby sister, who was also now grown, lived in the crayon-drawn house with him, and they looked after one another. * * * we have a mantra in childhood studies: children have agency. we repeat this mantra because children’s agency has been ignored for so long in ethnographic research. in my own research, i have shown that children play active roles in caring. children do things within times and spaces characterized by illness: they nurture bodies and minds; they sustain relationships, upholding households and families under duress; they assist states struggling with gutted health-care systems. their caregiving might even sustain global health policies and programs in ways yet unrecognized. but, as researchers have argued, there is a dark side to our mantra. an overemphasis on children’s agency—understood as the active roles children take in the world—invites us to overstate children’s power, understate their vulnerability, and insufficiently problematize the constraints placed on children (bluebond-langner and korbin 2007; allerton 2016). children are, in fact, agents, but they are not “super agents,” we are wise to remember. none of us are. in this article, i examine caring acts that have been marginalized in efforts both to uncover children’s agency in care and to attend to their vulnerabilities and constraints in very difficult conditions. such caring acts are fantastical, exaggerated, and counterfactual. the examples on which i draw include gift, from the story above, flying to the hospital and loading his sister onto a balloon. they also include: a girl drawing a two-dimensional orange that rose off the page and into her mother’s hands to be peeled and eaten; a boy sitting with his father in a hospital room to which he had no access; and another boy piloting a plane to south africa. these fantasies are not quaint, they are not delusional, and they are not separate from more materially evident care. fantasies are social acts (weiss 2002) and, as such, children’s caring fantasies provide vital insight into the care that has emerged within the intersecting regimes of global health and biomedicine. scholars in sub-saharan africa have used fantasy as an entry point into understanding the experience of large-scale global processes, such as colonialism and neoliberal capitalism (white 2000; comaroff and comaroff 2002; weiss 2002) and, more recently, epidemiological shifts and the rise of global health projects that permeate daily life (livingston 2005; brada 2013, 2019). in my previous work, i have described the dominance of global imaginations of health and well-being in george—from the imagery promulgated by a world health organization–promoted, donor-backed, and nationally supported tb control regime (hunleth 2013a) and the rollout of no-cost antiretrovirals for hiv (hunleth 2013b) to the anticipatory programming aimed at children affected by hiv (hunleth 2017) and at universal primary school education (hunleth et al. 2015). while other researchers have examined the fantastical in sub-saharan africa as populated by witches, vampires, and zombies, i turned in my previous writing to something far scarier, at least to the children i knew: the orphan. orphan discourses, circulated by global health programs, had palpable effects on children, scripting for them a narrative resembling a fairy tale without the happy ending, where the death of a parental figure led first to exploitation, then to homelessness and the social death of the child (hunleth 2017). the fantasies i examine in this article build on this previous work and come from that same ethnographic project i carried out in zambia on and off between 2005 and 2014 and, most intensively, between 2007 and 2008. that study of children’s caregiving practices in the midst of epidemic tb and hiv took place in tb-affected households in george, lusaka, and included thirty-eight children between the ages of eight and twelve who belonged to twenty-five households. i visited the children weekly in their households, and my research assistants and i engaged the children in the research through participatory methods such as drawing and child-led interviewing and storytelling. i also organized six participatory workshops that the children attended midway through and at the end of the study, where we played games, had group discussions, and the children acted out role plays of their own design. in 2017, i published a book on this research, children as caregivers: the global fight against tuberculosis and hiv in zambia. after finishing the book, i expected my last piece of writing on the project to be the commentary attached to a digital children’s art gallery i was developing as a visual companion to the book.2 the gallery would showcase some of the nearly one thousand drawings that children had made for me, a body of work that covered diverse topics, from caring for a sick family member to being cared for by family members, from deaths in the neighborhood to women’s fashion and holiday dance parties. it also included objects encountered in daily life or on television and illustrations from school lessons.3 as my book was going to press, i pulled hundreds of drawings from my filing cabinet. the scents and the crayon-rendered images, the small and large fingerprints smudged across the once-white papers, and my own and my assistants’ handwriting on the backs of the pages returned me to the people and the places of the research. i spent weeks with the drawings scattered in different configurations across my office desk and floor, trying to order them in a manner that made sense for the online gallery. as i did this, i rediscovered many fantastical tales that i had not fit into children as caregivers, including gift’s story, told above—a story i found both beautifully and frustratingly opaque. i went back through my notes to see if i had overlooked fantastical tales of care in other methods i had used. i had—there were fantastical stories, songs, role plays, interviews, and interactions throughout. later, as i talked to students in the united states who had read children as caregivers, i fielded questions that required me to recognize the presence and also, then, the absence of the fantastical in my writing. students asked: how do you know if what the children were telling you was real? how do you get to the truth about what children do? students’ fascination with “the real” reminded me of the geographer nadia von benzon’s (2015) argument that childhood researchers, concerned perhaps with issues of verifiability or overwhelmed by uncertainty and analytical messiness, have underreported and underanalyzed children’s fantastical stories. and so i returned to a project that i thought was finished. “the people and places that we circle back to in the ethnographic endeavor—hence in space, time, and writing—are critical practices integral to the making of new forms of knowledge,” wrote angela garcia (2016, 588). circling back in my thinking to gift and to the other children led me to consider, in more detail, children’s play-based, fantastical, exaggerated, and counterfactual renderings of care as themselves a form of care. i call this care imaginal caring. my phrase is inspired by cindy dell clark’s (2003) term imaginal coping, which she used to describe children’s coping practices during their own illnesses. imaginal coping includes, for clark (2003, 94–95), a range of activities—play, stories, rituals, humor, prayer—that children engage in, often with others, to address problematic meanings that arise during painful treatments and disease diagnoses that alter daily life and future expectations. by introducing a new concept, imaginal caring, i am not arguing that the concept of imaginal coping is unsuitable for a study of children’s caring for others, just that it would produce a different analysis, one focused more inwardly on children’s knowledge and cognition. unlike coping, caring is directed toward an external entity—a person, an animal, a thing—and more directly homes in on relationality and the provision of actions and sentiments. i bring imaginal and caring together to suggest that, through their imaginal caring, children both expressed their care for others and were, in fact, providing care for these others and for themselves. this argument builds on dualities in the terms caring and imaginal. to care for can mean: 1) to provide for: to feed, to bathe, to house; or it can mean 2) to have an interest in or affection for another or oneself.4 that is, care is both a doing and a feeling and, while distinct, the doings and feelings of care are deeply entangled and difficult to separate (devault 1991). in botswana, julie livingston (2005) showed that caring sentiment could be crucial to healing bodies and maintaining social persons. frederick klaits (2010) observed that doing for others presented the most marginalized people in society with a means of improving how others felt about them and, connected to this, the care provided back to them. the intersubjective, interdependent doings and feelings of care affirmed relationships and worked to preserve social and biological life (ross 2010; whyte 2014). imaginal, more than terms like imaginative, imagined, fantasy, or play, signifies another dual meaning that i wish to engage as it relates to care. first, i wish to consider the imaginal as indexical of t. o. beidelman’s (1993, 204) definition of the imagination: the way in which people envision and critique their worlds and also try on their “what ifs” and “construct other versions of existence besides those actually experienced.” second, i use imaginal to direct attention to the image as a vital datum for studying care (stevenson 2014). in what follows, i focus on visual images children conjured through drawing, telling stories, or invoking word images laden with cultural meanings (such as medicine or fruit), as well as on the art of producing, playing with, and communicating through these images. by engaging with images, i decenter the privileging of voice that excludes from research people who are silent, silenced, or alternatively expressive (white 2000), including children.5 as will become clear, there were many times when children could not, in conversation, articulate what they wanted to communicate. the image, as a “language that expresses without formulating” (foucault 1993, 36; see also stevenson 2014, 12) proved, perhaps, all the more powerful because of this.6 building on the dual meanings encapsulated in the concepts of care and the imaginal, and bringing these concepts together, i show that children produced image-rich fantasies of performing care in the past, present, and future in an effort to elicit behaviors and feelings they wanted to produce in their kin. this was not an entirely altruistic act. as i have shown in my other work, the futures the children imagined for themselves were tied to maintaining social connections, which required the return to health of guardians. in this way, children’s imaginal caring was speculative and anticipatory in a region where regimes of anticipation drive humanitarian programming (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009). their engagement with the imaginal transcended the limits placed on children by their bodies, their relations, and their social locations. it held magical qualities, as children conjured care out of and through images to push back against external and deeply unequal global power structures in a place where care, for both sick persons and children, was both critical for biological and social survival and difficult to accomplish. the quest for care in george george forms part of lusaka’s densely populated urban sprawl, home to roughly 130,000 residents. some families have lived in george since the country’s independence in 1964. many more have moved in and out depending on employment, housing, and other life circumstances, including illness. hiv has woven its way into almost every aspect of life in george, and conditions of poverty exacerbate its effects, including its effects on tb. for the past fifteen years, biomedical therapies for hiv and tb have also made their way into day-to-day life, as george’s publicly run health center designated specialized tb and hiv clinics. these clinics provide medicine at no cost, and governmental and nongovernmental activities extend out from the clinics to the surrounding community and households. i met gift’s grandmother, mrs. munkanta, in george in august 2007 at the health center’s tb clinic. just after mrs. munkanta’s tb diagnosis, her family decided that she should move from the farm where she resided with her husband and grandsons to the family house in george, which they had owned since 1964, and where her grown daughter now lived. on the farm, mrs. munkanta’s grandsons, eight-year-old gift and fifteen-year-old blessing, had been her caregivers. when her condition worsened and she was diagnosed with tb, which necessitated medications not readily accessible in the rural area, the family decided that mrs. munkanta and gift should move to george. there, clinical access was easier, and mrs. munkanta’s daughter (gift’s mother) would be able to monitor her care. mrs. munkanta explained to me that, following her family’s decision, she and gift packed their things and boarded a bus. when they arrived, mrs. munkanta’s daughter was not at home but in the hospital with gift’s baby sister, who had also been diagnosed with tb. “tb runs through our family,” mrs. munkanta told me. the year before, her grown son and her husband both had the disease. her son would eventually die (in 2008), with mrs. munkanta by his side at the family house. the demands illness places on families in george are high, and children help meet these demands. even in the absence of illness, children in zambia are socialized to participate in household economies at a young age (colson 1958; hansen 1990). they carry out domestic chores such as cleaning, washing, cooking, and minding children younger than themselves. they run errands for adults, carrying messages to neighbors and relatives and buying food and other items from the markets and shops. when people are ill, children become involved in quests for therapy and care for family members. notably, as in gift’s case, children’s involvement is frequently confined to the domestic sphere and to domestic tasks, and they remain peripheral to family discussions on care and healing—what africanist scholars have called “therapy management” (janzen 1978, xviii). gift’s family noted and appreciated gift’s help as much as they expected it, and they framed his move to the city in terms of a parallel quest: a quest to care for gift by enrolling him in school—something his grandparents were unable to do previously because of the demands of the farm, the chronicity of illness and scarcity of caregivers, and the costs involved in school attendance. despite the removal of primary school fees in zambia in 2002 as part of a global primary-school-for-all movement, the costs of books, shoes, and a uniform remained substantial. meanwhile, the increasing global and national attention to education fueled children’s and their guardians’ dreams for brighter futures. these combined factors—the cost of schooling and the importance it held in the social imagination—meant that schooling was not only highly valued but that sending children to school was an act of care that affirmed an adult’s love for and commitment to them. the day mrs. munkanta told me about the intertwined quests that landed both grandmother and grandson in george, gift was seated on the floor next to me, telling a different story of moving to george, one propelled by flight: this is the telling with which i began. i had not prompted gift to draw the sequence of images he did that day. instead, i had given him crayons and paper during this first meeting without any instructions other than to draw anything he wished to draw. it was something i did during my first meeting with each child as a way to acknowledge the child’s role in my study, and to get him or her accustomed to methods we would use. gift’s caring quest was imagistic: it was grounded in the pictures he had drawn, the objects of the deflated balloon and the homemade bow and arrow he brought out for show, and the physical stances he took as he enacted the story. his quest was fantastical—a hero’s quest that defied laws of gravity and the power constraints that eight-year-olds face. a playing matter despite timeworn observations of children imagining themselves as doctors, at least in western contexts, little research exists on children’s imaginative acts or play in caregiving. jo aldridge (2008, 261) critiqued this deficit, in part by calling the literature on children’s caring “all work and no play.” imaginative acts have not been so marginalized in research with sick children. cindy dell clark (2003), for example, observed in her u.s.-based study of children with diabetes and asthma that children engaged with play and metaphor as part of treatment—a syringe became a zebra, a stuffed tiger a protector. the healing power of this retreat from “fixed, literal representations” of cultural material, clark (2016, 176) argued, was in “freeing up constraints upon subjunctivity.” cheryl mattingly (2006) worked with african american families with children who had life-threatening illnesses. she described the prevalence of global images, such as disney characters, in clinical encounters. through invoking and playing with such images, children, parenting kin, and clinicians from different backgrounds managed to create a “shared imaginative space” (mattingly 2006, 495) in fraught clinical encounters. taken together, clark’s and mattingly’s work identifies the temporally inflected and communicative aspects of children’s imaginative acts and the images they invoke and play with during their own (or others’) illnesses (see also bluebond-langner 1978; buchbinder 2008). george is a far distance from the hospitals and houses in which clark and mattingly worked. to moor children’s imaginative acts to the time and place in which they occurred, i offer a brief overview of play in george and how children and adults valued play and the capacity to imagine. to play proved central to what it meant to be a child in george. young children made toys from things they collected; younger and older children played sports and other games they invented; and children of varying ages recounted and remade stories passed down from older generations. children relished neighborhood drama. they followed, often literally, emerging goings-on and misdeeds, reporting these back to children and adults, while filling in holes in the narratives or reenvisioning and critiquing the outcomes. gift once described to me a scene he encountered at a communal water tap after several women had found a fetus. in his account, he named the baby, brought her into his house, and raised her as his own. children’s imaginative play took them outside of george, as they piled into houses with working televisions and electricity. during 2007 and 2008, children were captivated by a filipino soap opera, it might be you, with a rags-to-riches story line and an orphaned character. unlike the figure of the orphan from global health discourses, a character children described as devoid of a future (hunleth 2017; see also henderson 2006), the beautiful female lead triumphed over childhood misfortune, falling in love and finally marrying a wealthy man. boys watched john cena, an american wrestler, and they invoked his presence in their play. beyond hollywood, bollywood, nollywood (nigerian cinema), and other cinematic and sports industries, children were avid consumers of global health and humanitarian productions. they tracked the comings and goings of nongovernmental organization vehicles and workers, and they were prominent attendees at educational dramas, concerts, and other events put on for adults. the workers and the events they organized spread globalized discourses on a range of topics— including childhood, education, public health, and medicine—providing all sorts of fodder for children’s imaginations. adults in george did not engage in activities of mutual pretense with children to the degree that middle-class adults in the global north often do. still, they viewed the capacity for children to engage in imaginative play and to fantasize as important to a good childhood. adults referred to children they knew who did not engage in play using adult terms—“the mother of the house”—to judge the children’s kin and/or assess a desperate situation. gift’s uncle once explained to me the importance of a television, which they did not own, for a child’s development: watching television provided the child with the content they needed to imagine life beyond george. he worried aloud that gift might have very limited views of his future possibilities without such content. adults and children alike considered a good parent or guardian as someone who gave a child time to play and also imagined with and for that child. much of this imagining was geared toward constructing better versions of reality based on their—the child’s and the adult’s— own desires and aspirations, something that beidelman (1993) called the “moral imagination.” that is, it was relational, empathetic toward the needs of the other, and also deeply personal. the centrality of play and imaginative acts in george prompted me to consider play as a way of doing anthropology. the activities i used—drawing, storytelling, and role-playing—responded to the setting and context i just described. they fit well within children’s everyday lives and were easily accepted, even encouraged, and sometimes participated in by the adults in the children’s lives. play, however, might best be envisioned less as an activity and more as a mode, as helen schwartzman (1979) has, in which a person adopts a contextual orientation toward something, which produces a text distinguished by allusion, distortion, and purported imitation. play as a way of doing anthropology can serve as a form of listening that compels us to attend to and contextualize what schwartzman (1979, 330) has called “texts.” texts, as i understand the use of the word in schwartzman’s definition, can take different forms, and they can be quite fantastical and also imagistic. the imagistic evidence i present in this article includes many drawings that children made during my visits to their households and many more that they made between my visits, something i had neither anticipated nor, at first, encouraged. and even though i introduced topics, such as “draw yourself taking care of a sick person,”7 many drawings i discuss in this essay were made without such direction. readers might note at this point that the creative methodologies i used introduced new persons, objects, and spaces, and these compelled the children to respond creatively. but this does not reduce the validity of the images and imaginings produced; instead, it adds another line of evidence (von benzon 2015). whether we are working with children or adults, relying on drawings or ethnographic interviews, people will always respond to the methods we use and the materials and people we bring to the field (including ourselves). the creative uses to which children put my research, i have suggested, are informative of broader tactics that the children employed because of the constraints they faced (hunleth 2011). figure 2. the author and her research assistant, emily banda, in alick’s house, listening to alick and his siblings talk about their drawings. alick drew his father coming home from work at the top. drawing by alick katongo. i do not think that the image in imaginal caring is limited to drawings, and other examples come to mind that i do not mention at length in this article—dreams, songs, stories, and word-images (e.g., gift’s invocation of blood in the following section). however, i have, both consciously and unconsciously, focused on the drawings in writing this article. the drawings, it seems, have their own power over me. they are witness to the deeply interpersonal experience of ethnographic research: they connect me to children who are now grown. they are testimony, too, to the lives of a number of adults and one child who have since died. i have taken them out for weeks at a time, and i have hidden them from my sight. i purposefully left them out of my published articles and then, when i was about to move on in my scholarly work from this particular research project, i obsessed over their invisibility and curated an online art gallery. michael taussig (2009) once asked: “what do drawings want?” i have over the years asked the same question, though increasingly i have asked this in a more personalized tenor: what do these particular drawings want from me? mine is a question born of frustration (why have they not let me go?), and also of care. how to do things with drawings i met ten-year-old abby in 2007 on the day that her mother, elesia, learned that she had tb. in the morning at the clinic, elesia had asked me to come to the house to meet abby and to go over the consent forms for my study in more depth. when i arrived that afternoon, the sitting room was filled with extended family members who had formed an impromptu therapy-management group (see janzen 1978) after hearing the news of elesia’s tb. elesia sat quietly, curled up on one end of a couch. her family members and i surrounded her in a circle of chairs. abby stood behind a chair opposite elesia, peeking out to watch her mother and also get a good look at me, the stranger in the house. i reached around the chair to offer her a packet of crayons and paper, an offering i hoped would be read as acknowledgment that i wanted to hear her perspective even as the adult talk pulled my attention away. back across the circle, a family member explained to me the direness of elesia’s situation, and i listened to the family debate possible care scenarios, which did not include elesia and her children staying in their current housing situation—a sparsely furnished rental of a relative who was a bus driver “on arvs” (antiretrovirals for hiv) and rarely at home. his maleness, his job, and his own health challenges made him a less-than-suitable caregiver for elesia and her children in the eyes of the family. although abby and her younger sister had already been taking care of their mother for weeks prior to the diagnosis, there was an unspoken acknowledgment that they, too, were unsuitable caregivers given elesia’s expanded care needs, the contagiousness of tb disease, and the girls’ young ages. during the conversation, abby drew, responding on the page to the debate occurring in the room. the adult conversation ended with a plan. elesia would go to her sister’s house across lusaka, and abby and her sister would go to the family house in george where their uncle currently lived. this decision would separate the girls from their mother for the first time. excluded from the circle and the debate, abby drew a cooking pot, a schoolbook, a beer bottle, and an orange. when the family discussion had ended, i asked about her drawings, with the family still seated around. she whispered: the pot, it was for cooking for her mother; the beer bottle, it was for her father, who “likes beer,” an indictment of the man who had kicked them out of their house (also drawn) the week prior, which had caused her to stop attending school. the schoolbook was a schoolbook, without further explanation. the orange, a fruit known for its health benefits and also a rarity in households in george because of its price, rose off the page. abby told her mother that this was an orange “for her.” figure 3. abby drew these images while her family members debated how and where they would care for elesia, abby’s mother, who had been diagnosed with tuberculosis earlier that day. drawing by abby banda. a person who draws, in taussig’s (2009, 265) terms, is a “maker-viewer,” whose drawing is “at once intimate and personal yet bears the obligation to make something that exceeds the personal.” taussig (2009, 265) calls this a conversation “between the drawer, the thing drawn, and the hypothetical viewers.” i would add that when drawn in front of an audience, this conversation includes, also, very specific, nonhypothetical viewers. i am reminded of d. w. winnicott’s (2005) suggestion that play—in this case, drawing as a form of play—can conjure a transitional space of creativity and communication. within this space of creativity and communication, a drawing, to use taussig’s (2009, 271) words again, might provide a “zone of mediation” and also a “means of getting close to” the object drawn. after knowing abby for some time, i came to appreciate how much she was doing in and with the drawings, and i gained a partial understanding of her motivations. she combined images of performing care and forestalling care, love and hate. the magic of the cooking pot and the orange were not their visual similarities to these objects or that she knew what she was supposed to do with them. the magic was that she was able to get into the page to become the cook she wanted to be, and that she was able to pick the orange off the page to give to her mother. was the drawing specifically intended to influence the debate occurring in the room at that moment? perhaps. yet abby was aware of the limits to her control over her situation, limits that did not exist in drawing. and while her mother and her other relatives could still overlook, minimize, or reject abby’s desire to live with and provide care to her mother, the drawings of care—the orange, the cooking pot, and even the schoolbook—circulated in that room as visual reminders that she both cared for her mother and was herself in need of care. months later, her life still beset with uncertainty, abby drew her father’s bed with a rat under it—a rat specifically made for him. her father, she said, had a “bad heart.” one can send love through an image; one can also send hate, rendering visible feelings that held the potential to heal or to harm.8 the images drawn to heal blurred the line between fantasy and reality. on a different visit with gift, i asked him to draw “caring for a sick person.” as he was making that drawing, he whispered, “so much blood. so much blood.” these remarks stopped us—his grandmother, emily (my research assistant), and me—mid-conversation. “what blood?” emily asked as we examined his drawings for clues. the blood, we learned, referred to a neighbor’s bludgeoning death. the death occurred seemingly at random right after gift had moved to the city. it was a disquieting introduction to the city neighborhood that prompted gift to worry about the safety of his family, especially that of his sister and grandmother. among other material and existential threats, illnesses required the family to unlock their doors at night to go to an outdoor toilet for bouts of vomiting or diarrhea. after the neighbor’s murder, gift practiced fighting (on and off the drawing page) and fashioned a bow to protect his family against intruders, the same bow he imagined using to kill an imaginary snake that threatened his sister’s life in his earlier drawing. alongside the blood, gift called up another image: that of mobile phone parts scattered across the dirt road in front of the house. the day after the murder, the neighbor’s family discarded parts that the man had used for his phone repair business. most passersby did not wish to touch the parts because of their associations with death, paired with their own imaginations of the misfortunes that the possession of such items might bring. as the first person to claim the mobile phone parts, gift felt some fortune in this tragedy. he sold the parts at the local market and in the neighborhood. with the money he made, he bought food and drinks for his baby sister. for a brief moment, gift had purchasing power to bring a highly valued aspect of caring into existence. lest we oversentimentalize such caring, i offer an interlude of the children’s dramatic role plays of living with a sick person. i call it an interlude because i do not view children’s role-playing, which i initiated during workshops held away from family members, as imaginal caring. i never witnessed children role-play care with peers spontaneously in their households, or with parents or guardians as their objects. because children participated in the concealment of tb and hiv from peers and within their households and because they avoided certain types of play near sick adults (hunleth 2011, 2017), role-playing care with peers in the presence of a person who needed care might be interpreted as counter to efforts—imaginal or otherwise—to give good care. even though the role plays are not examples of imaginal caring, they offer critical insight into the political-economic context and the stakes of caring, while staying focused on the children. interlude: playing the state water! medicine! give me a blanket! blanket! blanket! blanket! from stage left, a sick man gave commands to his wife and two children in the opening lines of a role play created and performed by eleven-year-old stephen and three other children. this was one of twenty-one role plays that took place across six children’s workshops i hosted in george with the same children who participated in the household research. the theme of the play was living with a sick person, which was the only guidance i gave the children before they created it. stephen played a sick man who had tb, much like his father at the time of the workshop. “blanket!” was stephen’s last spoken line in the role play—his speech undercut by the severity of his illness. following this final command, the child playing his son arranged his shirt; the daughter covered him with a pretend blanket; and the wife decided that they should see a doctor. the four children crossed the room to the fictional clinic and waited for the doctor. they waited for so long that it became time for stephen to take his medicine, which was still at home. the wife directed the daughter to run back to retrieve it, and they gave the medicine to stephen when she returned. more time passed, and the wife sent the son home for a blanket. they waited. when the doctor still had not come, the wife asked the siblings to help her carry stephen back home. a child in the audience interrupted their journey across the room, yelling out: “take him to the hospital.” responding to this command, the group changed course, and headed toward a different corner of the room. “why is he walking [to the hospital]? take a taxi,” another child shouted. this time, instead of responding to the audience member, the actors kept walking, holding stephen on either side until they arrived at the hospital. perhaps even in their imaginations, the family could not afford a taxi. once at the hospital, the family waited. “even here there is no doctor!” a child in the audience exclaimed, and the family headed back to their house, where they continued their watch over stephen. time passed, and the daughter went back to the clinic without stephen to collect more medication. “medication for what?” an audience member asked. “tb,” the daughter replied. she returned to the house and gave stephen the medicine. “he’s not getting better,” another audience member shouted, prompting the family to take stephen back to the clinic. again, the doctor did not show up. frustrated—either with the audience for continuing to point out the futility of their efforts or with the course of the role play—the child posing as stephen’s wife ended the role play, announcing to the audience that “he has recovered.” in this role play, clinical surveillance and care coexisted with abandonment. state care was given through medication, emblematic of what joão biehl (2007) has referred to as the pharmaceuticalization of public health. i have written previously of how various global and national actors proclaim treatment as the key to recovery, a message that the children embraced and also transformed to cultivate caring actions and sentiments between themselves and specific adults (hunleth 2013a). in all play, rules of behavior exist in concealed form (vygotsky 1967). the actors showed some rules of care for the family: stay present, give food and water, get medicine from the clinic, give medicine, observe closely the timing of specific caring activities, and go to the clinic when the person is not recovering. the audience members made explicit other rules and lodged judgments at the family: “take him to the hospital”; “take a taxi”; “he’s not getting better.” like the audience members, onlookers from families, neighborhoods, and clinics make judgments about the sentiments and actions of caregivers. judgments about care become fodder for blame and debates about persons’ “hearts,” which extend beyond illness and into death. the above role play recalls another play at a separate workshop, with different children from the study participating. again, all four children acting out the play came from households where a family member was currently suffering from tb. abby, whom i introduced in the previous section, began that role play with loud coughing, prompting her character’s daughter, played by agnes, to take her to the clinic for a diagnosis: tb. agnes collected medication from the doctor and gave it to abby at their house. because abby was not recovering, despite the daughter’s dedication, the daughter began to consider a possibility: “you want to kill my mother,” agnes shouted at the doctor. she and her father dragged the doctor to the local police station and had him imprisoned. with the doctor in prison, father and daughter were in a bind. abby needed medicine, but there was no one at the clinic to hand it out. they returned to the police station and had the doctor released, warning him to “do better.” once out of prison, the doctor created more confusion. he even prescribed kachasu, a distilled liquor, that tb patients are warned against drinking. fed up, agnes chased after the doctor to beat him up. he narrowly escaped and the play ended. how might we interpret a scenario in which the clinic provides medicine but the doctors never show up? or one in which a child plays a doctor who wants to kill his patient? these were stories that circulated in george in various forms. however, as with children’s play in general (schwartzman 1979), it would be inaccurate to suggest that children’s play—or role play—was either simplistic imitation of such stories or mere illusion and distortion of the social world.9 like the stories of vampires that luise white (2000, 89) analyzed to reconstruct african experiences of colonial medicine, such fantastical accounts, including in role-play form, “describe meanings and powers and ideas that inform how people thought and behaved.” children experienced the collective concerns, frustrations, and uncertainties with illness and medicine from a position of relative powerlessness in their households and in the clinic. role-play gave them the opportunity to play with and invert the structures of power that constrained their usual engagements. perhaps that is what made the second role play so comical—maybe even freeing—to audience and actors alike, who laughed throughout, as the doctor made explicit his intentions to harm and the daughter sought revenge. against isolation: on the road, in the sky, and at the bedside an image is imprinted in my memory from my work with the children. it is reinforced as i look through the drawings that the children made, both on my suggested topics and initiated on their own and in my absence, without direction or guidance. this image is of a child and her sick family member walking side by side, and hand in hand, to and from the clinic or hospital. i see ten-year-old annie holding her mother’s hand on her way to get her mother’s tb medications and arvs. i have an image of paul and his father on the side of the road, waiting for a minibus to take them the partial distance to the clinic, shortening what would be a two-kilometer walk. i also have an image of them taking a different route, this time on foot. i picture stephen and his father on the side of a road, holding hands on their way to their house from the university teaching hospital (uth). i even visualize gift holding his baby sister as they float on a balloon that takes them away from the hospital.10 figure 4. when asked to draw herself taking care of a sick person, annie depicted the following scenes of herself caring for her mother (from top): taking her mother outside to vomit, giving her mother medicine, eating with her mother, and accompanying her mother to the clinic. drawing by annie nkhata. these and other images come to me so vividly that, over the years, i have questioned my memory; maybe some of the less fantastical scenes occurred, though they likely did not, based on all my available evidence. the tb ward at uth was not a place for children—with its warnings about contagion and the necessity to keep space open for staff to move around amid the overcrowding. other tb-affected spaces, such as the tb clinic in george, were more proximate and open. yet adults who controlled these spaces were wary of children in them and did not approve of their presence. when younger children entered george’s open-air tb clinic on their own, they were told to go home. or so clinic workers told me. i rarely saw children there and, when i did, the children seemed to understand not to breach the inner area. spaces designed with children in mind, such as schools, camps, and children’s hospitals embody idealizations of children, and these idealizations hold political and affective power (brada 2019). the management of the tb epidemic in zambia shows that spaces designed for adults can also embody idealizations of children that hold political and affective power. these idealizations came up against the children’s own visions of their roles in propping up the biological and social lives of family members who were sick. being hospitalized and visiting the clinic presented risks for sick persons. people in george recognized these risks in their talk of persons they knew who had died coming to the clinic, shortly after returning from it, or while hospitalized. the journey was taxing; it could wear a person’s body down. beyond the physical exertion it took, family members worried that a person making such a journey might lose hope under the ambiguous gaze of bystanders. they would cover the sick person’s face, at times, to protect against onlookers. the power of the gaze should not be underestimated, something that annie’s mother emphasized to me when she said that children’s proximity prevented sick persons from succumbing to the potential evil others might wish on them, and to which they were more susceptible in their weakened state. protecting a sick person from the gaze, then, itself constituted a form of care in george. once at the hospital, families had significant, substantiated worries about the provision of good care. drugs could run short and waits for diagnoses and treatment could run long. family caregivers who stayed in the hospital through the duration of admittance, known locally as bedsiders, were an acknowledged, though unofficial, part of the hospital system, helping hospitals monitor patients and meet patients’ day-to-day needs. hospital staff worried about the well-being of patients who did not have suitable bedsiders or whose family had abandoned them. not only did bedsiders accomplish much physical and emotional work for patients and, thus, for hospitals but they also provided a link to the sick person’s family and community needed for their return home.11 if we only looked in hospitals and clinics (and along the routes to them) for acts of accompaniment and bedsiding, we would miss a lot. when luka’s father was in the hospital, luka asked to use my audio recorder in private. speaking into the recorder, he explained that he was not allowed on the ward and that he felt tired. he then described a fantastical plot to scale the brick walls of the hospital and climb through a window and into his father’s ward, so that he could see him and give him medicine. but he recognized, aloud into my recorder, that the building was too tall to climb and that, anyway, the doctor would not allow him in. luka then proceeded to hold an imagined conversation with his father’s doctor, the same doctor who had refused to let him on the ward. he implored the doctor to take care of his father because he and his brother, paul, would not “be coming to see him with medicine every day in the morning before he eats anything.” while luka discarded his fantasy of scaling the hospital building, his request also held moral force (klaits 2017). the fantasy and the imagined request, spoken into my recorder, verbalized his commitment to his father and made known his father’s needs. both risked elision within the medical system. though luka did not see himself getting into the hospital, a number of children envisioned themselves as bedsiders. in between my visits to steven’s house and without my prompting, steven made a detailed drawing of himself bedsiding for his father when his father was admitted to the uth. he included images of his father’s iv drip and medicine in this drawing, relying on his mother’s accounts of what she saw and did to achieve accuracy. other children presented drawn accounts of loved ones’ hospitalizations well after they occurred and included themselves in the images. through the acts of creating and showing such drawings to loved ones, their imaginal (bedside) caring was brought into existence and served as a form of assertion, one that told family members: “i have not stopped caring for or about you.” the messages conveyed through the drawings also said: “recognize me, i am here.” anticipating the future: of buses, planes, and houses with stairs the children held onto idealized versions of the future, in which they were able to complete their schooling and achieve financial independence or, in abby’s terms, get a good job and a house of one’s own. to achieve such a position of social adulthood, they needed monetary, emotional, and social investments from relatives while young. abby described it this way: a child who is given what they need when young will grow up to have a good job and a house. with such financial independence, they will be able to keep and care for dependents by sending them to school and giving them everything else they need. she elaborated that this was important “so that [the child dependents] also get an education and take care of you [when you are old].” to summarize abby’s ideas using parker shipton’s (2007, 11) words, a lifetime was built on a series of entrustments returned either “in kind or in radically different form.” illnesses, particularly of parenting kin, siblings, or close family members, cast normative ideals of dependence and independence throughout the life course in an uncertain light. recall luka, who imagined scaling the hospital building. luka’s brother, paul, was eleven years old when his father first became ill. in paul’s, luka’s, and their parents’ imaginations, paul was going to make it out of poverty and take his family with him. i learned of his aspirations early on when i asked paul to draw himself caring for a sick person. in his drawing, paul drew himself giving his father an orange and accompanying his father on foot and by minibus to collect medication. at the bottom of the page, he drew an airplane. the airplane on the page was his airplane, and he was flying passengers from zambia to south africa as a pilot for zambian airways. with pride, his father, who was listening to our conversation, explained to me paul’s desire to become a pilot. in the process, he invigorated paul’s dream and reaffirmed its plausibility. while paul acknowledged that his father could not monetarily contribute to his future development at present, he confided into my recorder on a different occasion that he intended to ask his father to buy him a new school bag when his father recovered—the promise and image of a new school bag acted as a form of care.12 luka also drew paul’s airplane in his drawing of caring for a sick person, tying his own future to his older brother’s future. it is possible that he expected to make sacrifices for paul’s success, something not uncommon in their area, where resources are limited and where some siblings are expected to work to put others through professional schooling. a successful sibling would not—or should not—forget the siblings who helped along the way, promoting the well-being of those siblings and their families by providing housing (as gift imagined doing for his sister), money, food, and funding for their siblings’ children’s schooling. figure 5. when asked to draw himself taking care of a sick person, paul drew himself giving his father an orange that he had bought to help his father feel better. he also drew himself accompanying his father to the clinic. at the bottom, he included a drawing of his airplane, the one he used to fly passengers from zambia to south africa. drawing by paul kangwa. figure 6. luka featured paul’s airplane in his own drawing of taking care of a sick person. luka also drew a fish for his father to eat and scenes of giving his father medicine and taking his father by bus to the clinic. drawing by luka kangwa. the appearance of paul’s plane in the boys’ care drawings raises questions: was paul simply filling up the page or drawing things he knew how to draw? was luka emulating his big brother? were the boys shifting the conversation away from illness? i do not have ready answers for these questions. however, one answer seemed to surface five weeks later when paul gave me an unprompted drawing when i visited his house, shortly before his father was hospitalized with pneumonia. the drawing resembled his previous drawing of care, in which he also imagined accompanying his father to the clinic. the clinic, however, was more prominent in this version, and the plane had moved to the center of the drawing. it was situated between the clinic and the family’s house, presenting imaginal accompaniment and imagined future side by side—the present and the future folded together. figure 7. paul made this drawing five weeks after drawing himself taking care of a sick person (see figure 5). he drew on his own, instead of responding to a drawing prompt, and presented this drawing to the author during a visit. while it resembled his previous drawing of taking care, there were several differences. notably, the clinic and his plane were more prominent, and the latter plane was in the center of the page. photo by paul kangwa. the disruption caused by paul’s and luka’s father’s illness, alongside growing concerns that their father might die, seemed to have threatened paul’s imagined future as a pilot, an already precarious dream given the depths of poverty endured by his family and the shortages of social resources and formal-sector jobs in the region. it is worth pointing out that during the time paul made this second plane drawing, his father was openly considering death as an alternative to suffering. paul believed that his father wished to stop taking his medicine and was giving up on living, and he was attempting to counteract his father’s sentiments and actions. one way he did that was by invoking the future—without tb, without pain, and with financial security. i understand the second plane drawing as part of these efforts. paul drew the plane without my direction; he presented it to me in the presence of his father when i made my weekly visit; and he used it as a tool to redirect the conversation during my visit to talk about his future. paul was not just speaking to me, but to his father through me, as he had done during past visits when he symbolically gave his father fruit from his drawing pages. i view paul’s drawing and related conversation, in part, as a creative measure to gain power within and control over illness, his father’s extreme suffering, and his own uncertain future. paul played on and also with his dream of becoming a pilot and the normative notions of children’s future caring responsibilities to parents. he engaged in a process of retemporalization, where the future becomes an intervention into the present (chua 2011). public health efforts hinge on such processes, as patients are asked to anticipate better health and better lives, and children are encouraged to go to school to anticipate better futures. here, i point out that such regimes of anticipation (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009) are not unidirectional, but that paul, and other children, were actively using them to encourage the types of behaviors and emotions they wanted to produce in their guardians. they were doing so not just for their guardians but also for what their guardians’ life and death meant for their own potential lives and their own futures. conclusion just as i was preparing to submit this article, i received a message from a friend from zambia, a nurse who had worked in george. she and i had lost touch in 2008, and we ran into each other by chance in may 2018 at the uth, where she now works and where i was visiting to set up a new study. she has since kept in regular touch by sending me inspirational messages several times a week via the messaging app whatsapp. the message she sent this time was a joke: an old farmer wrote a letter to his son who is in prison. “son, this year i will not plant cassava and yam because i can’t dig the field. i know if you were here you would have helped me.” the son replied to his father, “dad, don’t even think of digging the field because that’s where i buried the money i stole.” the police and prison on reading this letter went early in the morning and dug the whole field in search of the money, but nothing was found. the next day the son wrote his father again. “dad, you can now plant your cassava and yam, this is the best i can do from here.” dad replied, “haha, my son, you are too powerful indeed, even in prison you still command policemen to work for me. i was so surprised to see the igp [inspector general of police] and his team holding hoes and shovels, digging my farm. i will write to you when i want to harvest.” moral lesson: nobody can imprison your mind. i take a somewhat different lesson from this exchange, which is that constraint and separation demand creativity. while the son’s success certainly adds to the humor and appeal of the joke, my goal is not to claim that children are successfully overcoming their limitations. instead, it is to show how the economic, moral, and imaginative dynamics of care are played out in children’s efforts and relations. acknowledging and writing about children’s fantastical, exaggerated, and counterfactual stances within illness does not trivialize children’s social acts, make light of their marginalization in society, or ignore the desperate situations in places like george. likewise, it does not replace a focus on other forms of care that children also gave out of love and necessity, and which were demanded of them by others or because no one else was around. there is sufficient evidence, including in my own research, to show that children do a lot of the things we (as outsiders, as global health workers, as anthropologists) consider under the rubric of care work. but what i am arguing for is not an either/or. to suggest that fantasy is not real would, of course, be false. rather, my suggestion is for an expansion of the evidence used to examine how people give care, especially under severe constraint. in george, there were high social stakes for children (and almost everyone) in not doing care for others. not doing and not feeling removed a person from the social. it scripted dark future possibilities that children went to great lengths to avoid, including through the images and fantasies they invoked, created, and with which they played. did the children think they were doing the things they imagined—flying, creating consumable fruits, sitting in the hospital, walking to the clinic? as much as this question seems to surface for audiences of my work, it was never a question i thought to ask during the research. i assume that, had i asked, the children would have answered, “no, those things are impossible,” much like luka, who corrected himself aloud when he considered climbing the hospital wall. but this question and the answers to which it leads us miss the point. recall that luka did not finish his story with the impossibility of scaling the wall—a rejection of fantasy— but with another possibility, as he implored the doctor to stand in for his absence. part of giving care and also receiving care back, for the children, was doing things to make others act and feel: parenting kin who were sick, doctors who served as gatekeepers, and family members who had other notions about the direction of care for a sick person. as i have shown, children could not stay with kin in the hospital to ensure that the doctors attended to them and that their kin’s needs were met. they could not always accompany sick persons on the path to the clinic, picking them up when they fell and warding off the ill intentions and curious gazes of onlookers. they were not able to “do anything the sick person wants,” to use nancy’s words, a defining feature of good care. and even when they could, family members and sick persons did not always respond in desired ways, either in their actions or through bodily change. these are some of the areas where imaginal caring, as i have discussed it, held possibilities as a way of providing and performing care, an intervention into the present with implications for the future. everyday acts and expressions of care take form within broader regimes of care. ethnographic research shows that current regimes of care fall short in providing for the needs of persons who are sick and, further, that individuals and their families must somehow make up for these shortfalls. as susan reynolds whyte and colleagues (whyte 2014) found in their work with members of the first generation of ugandans with access to hiv treatment, care (given and received) was what distinguished between life and death for people on arvs. relationships are vital, and people, especially those most marginalized and constrained by status, identity, and economic means, must devise creative ways to compel others to listen and respond to them. there is imagination within all such creativity. perhaps, then, imaginal caring is not so uncommon in the world and, if we attune ourselves to it, we might just find that, in our efforts to give and receive care, we are all drawing our imaginary airplanes.13 notes acknowledgments this article has taken me a long time to write, and i now have many people to thank. above all, my gratitude goes to the children and their family members who participated in the study, and to emily banda and olivious moono, the best research assistants i could imagine for this project. i carried out the research on which this article is based with funding from several sources: the national science foundation, the wenner-gren foundation, the fulbright institute of international education, and the association of american university women. i wrote the article with funding from the foundation for barnes jewish hospital. karen tranberg hansen and helen schwartzman helped nurture the ideas i present in this article long before i knew i would write about them. i benefited greatly from discussing the manuscript in its early stages in washington university’s ethnographic theory workshop, on panels on children’s creativity at two conferences (the 2017 anthropology of children and youth interest group conference and the 2017 annual meeting of the american anthropological association), and with the students in casey golomski’s class on “gender, sexuality, and hiv/aids in sub-saharan africa” at the university of new hampshire. i need to specifically thank cindy dell clark, helen schwartzman, rebecca lester, aviva sinervo, ea quinn, kedron thomas, brad stoner, and emily steinmetz for providing helpful comments on different versions of the manuscript. dawn pankonien deserves special mention for reading drafts, listening and responding to my whatsapp brainstorms, and pushing me continuously to clarify my thinking. i deeply appreciate the work of the anonymous reviewers and the editors at cultural anthropology, christopher nelson, heather paxson, and brad weiss. the article is much stronger because of their critical comments and guidance, and because of heather paxson’s editorial work during the final stages of revision. finally, i need to acknowledge everyone involved in translating the abstract from english to bemba and nyanja, most notably jebros fumbelo, and also lackson kaunda, simon kabanda, mutale chileshe, and chishimba lumbwe. natotela sana. zikomo kwambiri. 1. gift munkanta is a pseudonym, as are all names used in this article. 2. this gallery can be accessed at https://www.flickr.com/photos/childrenascaregivers/albums. 3. prompts included: family; everything you did yesterday; who takes care of you and what they do; people in your house, doing what they usually do; map of places you go; yourself caring for a sick person; holiday; school. children made many self-initiated, unprompted drawings during and between my visits. for more on issues of agency and representation in participatory drawing methods, see mitchell 2008, hunleth 2011, and johnson, pfister, and vindrola-padros 2013. 4. i thank an anonymous reviewer for help in formulating this point. 5. this is likewise my effort to move beyond the problematic notion that participatory methods “give voice” to children. 6. i thank an anonymous reviewer for identifying this point. 7. note that i never asked children to draw, role-play, or tell stories about taking care of specific persons. 8. i appreciate an anonymous reviewer’s observation that the language i use to describe children’s imaginal caring holds parallels to language around witchcraft. while children would not describe their caring in terms of witchcraft, their work in other realms bears some similarities to sonia silva’s (2017) description of asking, giving, and receiving as it relates to witchcraft in northwestern province, zambia. perhaps caring in other realms held potential to reinclude children in and address their exclusion from reciprocal and intergenerational caring relationships. 9. see extensive studies of children’s socialization and creativity in peer play by linguistic anthropologists, such as goodwin 1990, watson-gegeo 2001, and goodwin and kyratzis 2012. 10. children produced these drawings in response to a range of prompts including, but not limited to, “draw yourself caring for a sick person.” they also made such drawings without any direction from me and between my visits to their households. 11. i thank mutale chileshe, who carries out research with bedsiders on the zambian copperbelt, for help with these points. 12. paul conveyed this message on my recorder in private while describing a sketch that depicted a boy, whom paul interpreted as a schoolboy. see hunleth 2017 on this “talking with pictures” method. 13. this sentence plays on schwartzman’s (1979) closing sentence of transformations, in which she invites anthropologists to see all ethnography as a form of play. references adams, vincanne, 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imagining care in the canadian arctic. oakland: university of california press. taussig, michael 2009 “what do drawings want?” culture, theory, and critique 50, nos. 2–3: 263–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735780903240299. von benzon, nadia 2015 “‘i fell out of a tree and broke my neck’: acknowledging fantasy in children’s research contributions.” children’s geographies 13, no. 3: 330–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.829662. vygotsky, lev s. 1967 “play and its role in the mental development of the child.” soviet psychology 5, no. 3: 6–18. https://doi.org/10.2753/rpo1061-040505036. watson-gegeo, karen ann 2001 “fantasy and reality: the dialectic of work and play in kwara’ae children’s lives.” ethos 29, no. 2: 138–58. https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.2001.29.2.138. weiss, brad 2002 “thug realism: inhabiting fantasy in urban tanzania.” cultural anthropology 17, no. 1: 93–124. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2002.17.1.93. white, luise 2000 speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial africa. berkeley: university of california press. whyte, susan reynolds, ed. 2014 second chances: surviving aids in uganda. durham, n.c.: duke university press. winnicott, d. w. 2005 playing and reality. new york: routledge. originally published in 1971. amendment to “golden snail opera” amendment to “golden snail opera” tsai, yen-ling, isabelle carbonell, joelle chevrier, and anna lowenhaupt tsing. 2016. “golden snail opera: the more-than-human performance of friendly farming on taiwan’s lanyang plain.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 520–44. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.04. the authors wish to make the following amendment to the published article: on p. 540, under scene one in the notes section, the following sentence has been added to the note that begins the ontic status of their practical interactions: “our project draws, in particular, on elaine gan’s (2016) pioneering work on wet rice agriculture, multispecies life, and temporality.” the cited reference has also been added to the references section. beyond compassionate aid: precarious bureaucrats and dutiful asylum seekers in italy cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 25-51, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.02 beyond compassionate aid: precarious bureaucrats and dutiful asylum seekers in italy daniela giudici university of trento https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5769-2728 so here i am, a victim of a violent system, exactly like those who are in front of me [i.e., the asylum seekers] and unload on me their frustration. and me, who i am actually a human being, i respond to another human being with my own anger, the anger of someone who sees her own aspirations and hopes getting wasted in a ruinous project, with job contracts that do not allow you to plan your life and forge your future, precarious projects for precarious workers, and sometimes a sense of exhaustion and bitterness stands above everything. … i don’t have the right to holiday or sick leave, because i have a short-term contract. but this, to those who are in front of us, we cannot explain it. hence, they often see us as distant, bored … and we cannot establish a connection with the human being that lies beyond the “guest.” (galieni 2015) this is an extract of a public letter, written in 2015 by an anonymous worker employed in a refugee reception center in rome.1 since i began ethnographic fieldwork in the italian asylum system in 2010, i have been puzzled by the ubiquitous presence of a background critique to the asylum system’s functioning and organization. recurrent frustration was not only expressed by asylum seekers, who were suffering on a daily basis from the inadequacies of a reception system that has had a hard time meeting even their most basic needs. indeed, reception workers also expressed deep discontent,2 often complaining both about their insecure working conditions and about the asylum system’s multiple dysfunctions. overall, a strong sense of uncertainty and vulnerability seemed to pervade the institutional encounters i witnessed. on the one hand, in contemporary italy, asylum seekers are oppressed by an extremely fuzzy and intricate bureaucratic machine, which leaves them suspended in an unsettled and marginal position while waiting for a response to their applications (beneduce 2015; fontanari 2018). taking a closer look, protracted marginality also often permeates the lives of those who have obtained legal status, due to the overlapping effects of inadequate inclusion policies and multiple discriminatory practices (pinelli 2013; msf 2016). this scenario certainly holds true beyond italy, although some of its features appear exacerbated in this specific national context. indeed, the contemporary scenario of an immigration “crisis” affecting the global north tends to shape a transnational asylum system implicitly aimed at protracting asylum seekers’ existential incertitude and, therefore, their potential “removability” from the national territory (peutz 2006; de vries and guild 2019). on the other hand, italian reception workers are increasingly compelled to accept uncertain and exploitative working conditions. until quite recently in italy, the majority of social workers found employment with the public sector and therefore enjoyed its relative stability and protection. yet in the early 2000s the architecture of the italian welfare system was broadly reshaped, both vertically, by delegating responsibilities and funding to regional and municipal levels, and horizontally, by devolving services to the “nonprofit third sector” in accordance with the catholic-derived principle of subsidiarity (marchesi 2020, 6; see also rose 1996).3 the “thirdness” of this sector stands in relation to the first and second domains of market and state; it encompasses a multiplicity of nongovernmental subjects, such as cooperatives, ngos, and volunteer organizations (ranci 2001). although many of the current neoliberal trends that affect italian society are often presented in public discourse as a “necessary sacrifice” required by the contemporary economic recession, their roots are much more entrenched (see also powers and rakopoulos 2019). whereas the third sector in italy elicits fantasies of distance from both state and market logics, it is in fact entangled with and dependent on both (muehlebach 2012). the fast withdrawal of the italian state from the provision of public services, encouraged also by the fiscal demands of european monetary unification, has allowed a new kind of labor force to be employed in social service provision: nowadays a growing number of social workers are hired by third sector actors, with poorly protected and underpaid contracts. in fact, a third sector worker costs on average 40 percent less than a public servant employed in the same position. as in the passage quoted above, social workers are experiencing the transition to unregulated working conditions with a range of emotions, from anxiety to frustration and anger. this complex mix of material and affective unrest often finds articulation through the term precario (precarious), which, as noelle j. molé (2010, 38) has noted, in contemporary italy “is an ontological claim that exceeds economic typology and becomes a way of identifying subjects’ classed position and psychic interiority.” these frustrating working conditions seem to have profound consequences both on a personal level (impossibility of forging one’s future) and on the dynamic of aid that they end up providing to asylum seekers (impossibility of establishing a connection with “the human being that lies behind the guest”). although the liminal condition of asylum seekers has been well documented in rich ethnographies (khosravi 2010; cabot 2014; fontanari 2018), less known is the precarious state of uncertainty faced by street-level bureaucrats (lipsky 2010) burdened with the task of concretely enacting the progressive withdrawal of the state from its obligations in terms of asylum rights. in line with studies that urge us to go beyond the citizen/non-citizen divide and examine “refugees’ and citizens’ partially shared continuum of precarity” (cabot 2019, 5–7; see also anderson 2013), i explore shifting paradigms of refugee management in italy in the light of broader processes of workplace regime transformation. drawing on ethnographic research with asylum-related bureaucratic workers in bologna, italy, i address some of the paradoxical and violent effects of welfare decline both on reception workers’ labor conditions and on the dynamic of aid that they end up providing to asylum seekers. my argument has two main theoretical points. first, i argue that recent developments of asylum management in italy suggest a transition toward post-compassionate forms of aid, hinged more on the production of dutiful subjects ready to repay the “hospitality” offered by the state than on the moral imperative to rescue suffering bodies or lives. recent anthropological scholarship on asylum in europe (and beyond) has focused on the politics of legitimation of the unstable category of refugee, revealing the specific configurations of “deserving human life” embedded in aid institutions and practices (see, for example, fassin 2005; rozakou 2012; cabot 2013). this body of literature has revealed the exclusionary—albeit often unintended—consequences of compassionate humanitarianism, understood as a moral and political project hinged on the suffering victim (ticktin 2014, 275). in the context of european immigration management, the tension between a politics of piety and policies of control (fassin 2005) translated into the privileged status assigned to the suffering body in aid distribution and legalization procedures.4 it is not by chance that in italy, recognition as a “victim”—either of human trafficking or of persecution as defined by the 1951 refugee convention—is virtually the only means of achieving a residency permit for migrants already present in the country (see also giordano 2008). yet early in my fieldwork, i started realizing that human vulnerability was not the only cornerstone around which everyday aid practices were built and organized. asylum seekers were not simply conceived as “suffering bodies” (fassin and d’halluin 2005), “helpless sufferers” (huschke 2014), or “disabled citizens”—as, in other words, inhabiting a limited humanity produced on the ground by a politics of compassion (ticktin 2006, 35). indeed, in the context of welfare decline and increasingly “anxious politics” surrounding migration (de koning and modest 2017), new configurations of “deservingness” seemed to be taking shape (holmes and castañeda 2016). in the bureaucratic settings i encountered, reception workers increasingly encouraged asylum seekers to display a dutiful, willing, and, quite surprisingly, “caring” attitude in order to show their eligibility for some, albeit partial, social and legal rights. in fact, some forms of recognition seemed granted to subjects ready to conform to stereotypical representations of a european citizen (e.g., by performing “socially useful” and unpaid volunteer work) and, simultaneously, to occupy the most subordinate positions in italian society. on the one hand, the push to engage in voluntary work echoed the recent institutionalization of volunteerism as a laboratory for the production of new “responsible citizens” in the context of social care privatization (muehlebach 2012; rozakou 2016). on the other hand, the presence of asylum seekers in the national territory, and related access to its “community of value” (anderson 2013), remained conditional and highly uncertain (marchetti 2020). hence, as i will detail, processes of socioeconomic transformation and transformed cultural expectations around supposedly deserving guests come together to elicit novel forms of subaltern inclusion, ones not fully encompassed by the tropes of humanitarian compassion. i make my second but related point by suggesting that to move beyond a single focus on either a refugee crisis or an economic crisis may help us better contextualize and trace emerging political subjectivities and possibilities. the shifts in the politics of legitimation of others described in this article were materially implemented by an array of social workers who, as in the opening quote, experienced a sharp deterioration in their own labor rights and living conditions. these two sides of the story, far from being unrelated, have much to tell about current reconfigurations of forms of (non)citizenship in southern europe and beyond. indeed, financial recession and austerity policies have highlighted how not only migrants’ but also citizens’ rights face profound reconfiguration, “such that citizens and their noncitizen counterparts are not always clearly distinguishable by a set dividing line but instead hover along a gradation of rights and rightlessness” (muehlebach 2012, 26; see also cabot 2019). in fact, both asylum workers’ precarization and asylum seekers’ involvement in voluntary work evoke highly moralized forms of (non)citizenship—based more on sacrifices and duties than on the actual enjoyment of rights—emerging in the context of the dismantling of the welfare state (hyatt 2001; muehlebach 2011). yet populist discourses and policies often have the effect of shifting images of victimhood from the body of the migrant to the body of the nation, thus further separating marginal segments of society, migrants or not. in what follows, i first reconstruct the deep-seated narrative of emergency and scarcity that characterizes italian immigration management, from well before the beginning of the 2015 so-called european refugee crisis. then, i examine the recent institutional endorsement of refugee volunteerism against the backdrop of paternalizing forms of social support and moralized forms of (non)citizenship. the ethnographic core of the article focuses on everyday encounters between reception workers and asylum seekers in bologna, a city once considered a model for welfare services. by tracing the effects of an affectively charged scenario centered around feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty, i show how precarious bureaucrats, frustrated by insecure and demanding jobs, find themselves engaged in ambiguous processes of aid distribution that are embedded in new normative ideals of the “deserving guest.” in the final part of the article, i sketch elements of the recent xenophobic turns of the italian sociopolitical landscape, turns that have involved a further exacerbation of exclusionary narratives and practices, as well as meaningful forms of dissent. these restrictive changes have deeply affected not only asylum seekers but also reception workers, who—alongside human rights activists, solidarity movements, and ngos—have come to represent the internal enemies of nativist propaganda (zamponi 2017; tazzioli and walters 2019). reception workers’ feelings of marginalization were only exacerbated by drastic budget cuts in 2018, which led to the closure of several migrant reception centers and to the layoff of many reception workers. under such conditions, modes of agency and sites of contestation may emerge even from within what have been traditionally described as sites of antipolitics, namely, humanitarian aid institutions and practices (see also cabot 2013, 453). indeed, reception workers’ precarious positioning and dissent hold the potential for exposing the inherent contradictions of state-based narratives, thereby bringing to the fore alternative discourses on the causes and responsibilities of both the migrant crisis and the austerity crisis. this article draws on ethnographic data collected between 2010 and 2012, as well as on ongoing research since 2018, in the field of asylum in italy. i collected much of the material for this article at one particular reception office, instituted by bologna’s local administration, which provided bureaucratic assistance and support to asylum seekers and refugees. its coordinators were public servants, hired on a long-term basis by the local administration. conversely, reception workers engaged in the daily assistance to asylum seekers and refugees were employed by social cooperatives, often on a short-term basis. “crisis” and shifting patterns of victimhood italy is a major threshold of europe for numbers of people coming from the middle east and africa.5 after a period of relative slowdown in the flow of maritime arrivals, since 2010 italy’s southern shores have experienced a renewed increase in migrant boat landings, reaching a peak with the so-called 2015 refugee crisis (fondazione ismu 2016). yet people fleeing economic and political violence were meeting the systemic injustices of european migration policies long before syrian displacement on an unprecedented scale brought the refugee issue to the attention of the general public (fernando and giordano 2016; cabot 2019). as a matter of fact, in italy, even before the mediatized beginning of the european refugee crisis, a significant number of people both with a pending asylum application and with a protected status usually spent their days looking for charitable food or shelter, sleeping in vacant buildings or train stations, and sometimes finding exploitative and temporary work in the informal economy (msf 2016). the italian asylum reception system is very complex, as it involves a number of state and nongovernmental actors, strong regional variations, and recurrent changes of functions (d’angelo 2018, 5–7). the country’s reception capacity has always proven inadequate to the needs of asylum seekers. in the words of a reception worker i encountered in 2011: “we all know that reception measures theoretically would be a right of asylum seekers. however, in practice, it is not like that. it’s hard to say, but we can’t save them all. … in the end it’s not a right, it’s an option.” in this context, italy, much like other southern european countries, has been alternately criticized by eu central authorities for being either an insufficient guardian of european borders or an inadequate host to newcomers (rozakou 2012, 563). a deep-seated narrative of emergency and scarcity, as well as a generalized moral panic surrounding the idea of migration itself, seem to stand out as the well-established trademarks of italian migration management (mai 2002; campesi 2011). the logic of treating the entrenched phenomenon of migration as a permanent emergency allows for the suspension of the regular rule of law by activating exceptional, and often discriminatory, instruments of intervention. at the same time, the depiction of migration as a “human flood,” a “human tsunami,” or even a “biblical exodus,” which has a long-standing tradition in italian political discourse, displaces a sense of vulnerability from the body of the migrant/refugee to the body of the nation (garelli and tazzioli 2013; see also hage 2016). this was exemplified when, in april 2011, the italian government nominated civil protection as the managing unit of the “refugee crisis” resulting from the arab spring. the italian civil protection’s traditional competence covers natural catastrophes (such as forest fires, floods, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes), and it has no expertise on refugee issues. this choice spelled a political vision that cast refugees as a natural catastrophe for the receiving country: “it was not first and foremost the body of the refugee that bears vulnerability … ; it was also (and eminently) the land of the receiving country that became somehow vulnerable because of the refugee influx” (garelli and tazzioli 2013, 1008). in addition, an emergency rationale has proven a useful tool for an opaque management of the so-called migration crisis. indeed, although mainstream representations describe an objective and indisputable lack of resources, in the last few years the italian state has invested millions of euros in the asylum reception system. these funds have proven irresistible to criminal organizations, corrupted politicians, and unscrupulous administrators, making the reception system an extraordinary engine for the accumulation of profit from the tragedies of one of the most underprivileged sectors of society.6 nonetheless, when a populist narrative of invasion, predation, and scarcity dominates italian political discourses and media representations, asylum seekers are increasingly perceived as undesirable guests and an unsustainable burden for a collapsing welfare state. dutiful (non)citizens in may 2015, the italian interior minister, angelino alfano (center-right), proposed in parliament that asylum seekers should “work for free” (lavorare gratis) for the municipalities hosting them while their applications are being processed. in a press conference, he commented: “instead of keeping them doing nothing, at least they should make them work.” these comments instigated heated debates in parliament and in the public arena, with the leader of the right-wing northern league, matteo salvini, provocatively accusing alfano of having shifted from scafista (smuggler) to schiavista (slaver). and yet, asylum seekers had already been involved in “volunteering projects” at least since 2011, particularly in the center and north of italy. in early 2017, the issue gained public attention again when the newly elected interior minister, marco minniti (center-left), unveiled a plan “to cover part of the expenses of hosting the migrants and help improve the souring relationships between refugees and locals” (momigliano 2017). in recent years the cost of asylum seekers has become a thorny issue in italian political life, as conservative politicians and media outlets depict refugees as freeloaders who divert resources from poor italian families. here, again, a narrative of victimhood is shifted from refugees to “italians,” as the responsibility for suffering is displaced “from historical, political and economic policies supported by powerful actors in europe and the united states to the displaced people themselves” (holmes and castañeda 2016, 2). such stories resonate in a country severely hit by financial recession, where the number of citizens living below the poverty line has risen from 3 percent to 8 percent in the past decade (caritas italiana 2016). in an early formulation, the minniti plan envisaged the possibility of making community service a mandatory requirement for asylum seekers. after the “unpaid labor requirement” attracted harsh criticism from legal scholars and refugee advocates for being unconstitutional, asylum seekers’ unwaged labor was reframed as volunteer and “socially useful community work” (lavori socialmente utili), receiving widespread approval. the figure of the volunteer has recently emerged as a central category in italian public life. italy was the first country to treat volunteerism with a distinct body of law, and no other country in europe relies as extensively on volunteer labor as italy—about one-quarter of all nonprofit organizations rely exclusively on volunteers (ranci 2001; see also muehlebach 2012, 10). andrea muehlebach (2012), reflecting on the rise of a new regime of voluntary labor in italy, remarks that highly moralized forms of citizenship are emerging in the context of welfare and care privatization. she has developed the concept of “ethical citizenship” to indicate how in contemporary italy, as the state shifts the burden of providing social services onto a citizenry conceptualized as active and dutiful, “citizens imagine themselves as bound together by moral and affective rather than social and political ties, and primarily through duties rather than rights” (muehlebach 2012, 43). asylum seekers’ involvement in volunteer work clearly evokes some of this scenario’s elements, and more generally of the “mantra of active citizenship,” which anthropologists working in many parts of the world have described as one of the main features of neoliberal governmentality (hyatt 2001; fleischer 2011; rozakou 2016). in recent years, refugee volunteer work has generally been praised in italian public and media discourses as a useful remedy against the protracted inactivity that asylum seekers are otherwise forced to experience during their asylum claim assessment. most important, by performing socially useful volunteer work, asylum seekers are expected to refurbish their negative image among local populations. as a service coordinator commented during a personal conversation in 2018: “volunteering sends a good message to italians, who don’t appreciate seeing migrants doing nothing all day.” it is noteworthy, however, that the services asylum seekers are often called to perform are limited to essential, low-level community services (such as sweeping the streets, shoveling snow, or maintaining public parks), which local administrations burdened by financial cuts are struggling to provide. while hinting at novel forms of asylum management in times of austerity, these social projects also play on distinctive racial and postcolonial imaginaries that insist on a substantial difference between supposed insiders and outsiders and, at the same time, on the paternalizing mission of rendering migrant bodies as deserving of modern social support (see, among others, silverstein 2005; de genova 2016). in this respect, it should not go unnoticed that italian institutional attempts to manage migrants today are conditioned by unresolved questions about italy’s past and ambiguous negotiations between nationalization, internal migration from south to north, and colonialism (schneider 1998; mai 2002; giordano 2008). as several anthropologists have noted, an enduring denial of racism and intolerance—from northern prejudices toward southern italians to a widespread disregard of “new immigrants”—constitutes a structural trait of italian society (e.g., cole 1997; holmes 2000). taking a closer look, an increased racialization of the labor force has proven crucial in managing the contemporary narrative of austerity by strengthening competition within the working class and, at the same time, producing cheap and disposable migrant workers (oliveri 2018). the massive promotion of volunteering jobs, which traditionally entailed remuneration, also threatens a delicate balance in the already fragile labor market, thereby worsening the conflict between failed citizens (italians or long-term migrants) and noncitizens (asylum seekers). against this backdrop, a destabilizing and affectively charged atmosphere of uncertainty and lack of future possibilities permeates asylum-related institutional encounters, during which reception workers mainly engage in taming unrealistic aspirations and demands from their interlocutors. this is italy one gray morning in the winter of 2011 i was assisting elena,7 a reception worker in her thirties, in her daily duties at the office of the international protection service. elena had a master’s degree in international relations and had started working for the service two years earlier, as an unpaid intern. after the internship, the managing social cooperative hired her on a six-month contract. outside her office there was, as usual, a long queue of people waiting to be received. it was the turn of a newly arrived asylum seeker, a young woman. she walked into the office with an attitude of dismay, looking lost. elena started asking the woman, who introduced herself as rose, for some basic information about herself and her situation. rose could not speak italian, and so the conversation was held in french. rose had landed three days earlier at the airport in rome, coming from the democratic republic of congo. she then had taken a train with some other asylum seekers, who had advised her to get off in bologna. since then, she had been sleeping in the train station. due to the constant overcrowding of asylum reception centers, elena had no accommodation to offer to rose. yet she explained to rose that she stood a good chance in the coming months of finding a place in a reception center dedicated to women, as she was alone, without family or support. then, elena took out a brochure about facilities for homeless people in the city. until a place in a housing structure opened up, rose’s only option was to sleep in the city’s public dorm and to eat at one of the soup kitchens run by catholic organizations. here is how elena explained to rose what her first steps should be in the search for charitable food or shelter: first of all, you have to go to the public shelter … here [pointing at a map]. you’ll have to go there very early in the morning, around 6 or 7 a.m., and you will probably have to queue at least for four or five hours to get a bed. you should know that this is a place where everybody can go to sleep … everybody who doesn’t have a home. i mean, there you’ll also find people that stink. … then you’ll have to go to this place … rose looked at elena with a puzzled face and interrupted her: “well, why should i go there? i am an asylum seeker. i have the right to get accommodation.” elena looked at me with a tired expression and then replied: “i know that, but this is not how things work here. this is the only thing i can offer you for the moment. but, as i told you, if you are a bit patient, as a woman, you’ll probably get a place in a reception center.” rose insisted that this was europe and that she knew her rights, becoming increasingly agitated. elena sighed, visibly tired, and replied: “listen, i am just doing my job. i know that it’s not easy for you. … but this is how things work here … this is italy, it’s not europe.” italy, in contrast to other southern european countries including greece, was once perceived as a core country in european geopolitical and moral geographies (cf. cabot 2014). in this sense, elena’s comments are emblematic of an unprecedented and pervasive sense of collective failure. it is even more striking given that bologna, as i will elaborate, is considered a model city for welfare services, at both national and international levels. nevertheless, i encountered this kind of situation repeatedly during my fieldwork research. reception workers often described the italian asylum system as a field of governance saturated with multiple “crises” (job crisis, welfare state crisis, migration crisis, and so on), essentially marked by an endemic scarcity of resources, as well as by a lack of direction or strategy. they tended to perceive and present the italian state as a peripheral area of the “european territory of rights,” substantially unable to fulfill its moral and legal responsibilities toward its citizens, as well as toward protection seekers (see also cabot 2019). on the other hand, many asylum seekers expressed outrage at being repeatedly confronted with this scenario of humiliation and destitution. although mostly aware of the multiple flaws in the italian reception system, in struggling to articulate their claims through the vocabulary of human rights, they revealed the far-stretched contradictions of the european project as a universalist umbrella of rights and democracy. precarious bureaucrats the city of bologna represents a paradigmatic example of the massive outsourcing of state social services to the third sector. traditionally considered “italy’s showcase city of the left,” as well as a center of excellence for welfare services (però 2005), bologna is the principal city of the emilia-romagna region. in the 1970s and early 1980s the emilia-romagna region attracted international attention for a model of development that realized positive economic performances and, simultaneously, fostered social cohesion. in recent years, however, the “emilian model” has progressively deteriorated, with the effect of disclosing many of its structural ambiguities (kertzer 1980; heywood 2015). under the generalized pressure of establishing a slimmer, cheaper, and more cost-effective welfare state, the regional administration is currently undertaking a substantial transformation from a public model to a semi-private one. traditionally ruled by the left-wing partito democratico (democratic party), the local government’s current policies seem to “fit quite well with the new ‘post-socialist’ course of the left and its accommodating posture vis-à-vis the neoliberal transformation of society, which includes the rolling back of the state, cuts in public spending, the subordination of political powers to economic ones with the consequent exclusion of the economy from the sphere of political intervention” (però 2005, 852). provision of the majority of social services, immigration services among them, is currently subcontracted to the asp (azienda servizi alla persona, literally company for the services to the person), a modern, refashioned version of well-established catholic charity institutions.8 the “asp system” represents a structurally hybrid form of governance, as these institutions are rooted in the non-profit sector of catholic inspiration and, at the same time, are strictly dependent on local government decisions. this hybrid institution subcontracts the hiring of its street-level workers to social cooperatives active in the social sector. one of these asp subcontractors was the local manager of the office where i conducted part of my ethnographic fieldwork, and where elena worked, which here i call international protection service (ips). the reception workers employed at ips were in large part women between twenty-five and forty-five years old. they hailed from diverse educational backgrounds (with degrees ranging from international relations to social sciences or cultural mediation), and their work tasks were various and somewhat blurred. while mainly tasked with providing assistance in the asylum claim application, they also engaged in a number of more or less related duties, whether offering guidance in the quest for shelter or health assistance or managing access to asylum reception measures. in the everyday life of the reception office, the new social services (dis)organization was at the center of a number of discussions and critiques. in the first instance, the deregulation of the welfare labor regime seemed to reduce people’s ability to perform everyday tasks by introducing a permanent anxiety about the temporary nature of the workers’ presence. for example, anna, a reception worker in her thirties employed on a short-term basis, spoke of the strict time constraints imposed by the new administration as follows: it’s not possible to work in these conditions. … the people we are assisting wait on average ten to twelve months before knowing the decision about their international protection claim. on the other hand, you’re always uncertain about your future and you are not given the possibility to assist the clients properly. in the end, we are never sure about whether we’ll be here next month. it’s true that in recent years they have been renewing contracts, but almost every month you basically don’t know what to expect. … basically, it’s a mafia.9 the new organization gave rise to discourses organized around sentiments of resentment and vulnerability. reception workers tended to perceive the new environment as predatory, confusing, and abusive. they experienced the constant uncertainty about the future as a sort of violent blackmail—illustrated by the comment, “basically, it’s a mafia”—that leaves the worker feeling stuck, deprived of the possibility of understanding and controlling the mechanism’s logics. a series of anxieties and preoccupations were directed toward the system itself, depicted as an unknowable, irrational, and thoughtless governing structure. here is how a worker addressed his colleagues during an internal meeting: “either we start building a group identity or we are stuck, and they are going to crush us. the system has no direction. they keep on sucking our resources, and we don’t even know it. they keep on doing things, and we don’t even know it. and there is no direction or strategy.” the asp itself emerged as a major source of complaints, often presented as an institution ruled by people with no experience in immigration services and therefore completely unaware of the kind of problems they encountered daily. in this context, older workers tended to express nostalgic feelings for the previous welfare organization, in which they were directly subordinate to the public administration. indeed, the asp’s intermediary role was often presented not only as responsible for their increased precariousness but also as the source of many organizational malfunctions. here is how rita, a senior caseworker, articulated the transformed nature of the relationship with the police department since the reorganization of the immigration services: rita: the shift of the immigration services to the asp was a huge mistake. since we have this new organization, it’s simply a mess. for example, now we are no longer considered as part of the municipality, and the police department is simply not considering us anymore. this morning i was there with an asylum seeker and, as usual, there was a huge line. and they left us waiting for hours outside their offices, in the cold. i’m telling you, it’s humiliating for me to go there and to be treated like that. me: was it different before? rita: of course! it was completely different. we were considered representatives of the local authorities. we had a stable position. but now, they just ignore us, they don’t respect our work. rita’s comments offer a powerful critique of the open-ended and contradictory nature of the state form, whose boundaries are continuously made and unmade in everyday social life (gupta 1995; thelen, vetters, and von benda-beckmann 2014). at the same time, in the bureaucratic settings i encountered, it was common to hear people refer nostalgically to a previous organization of social services—whether or not they directly experienced it themselves—when resources and possibilities were more available (see also muehlebach and shoshan 2012). it is beyond doubt that asylum seekers in contemporary italy endure a degree of existential and material precarity far from comparable to that experienced by the reception workers i encountered during my fieldwork. on closer examination, the latter’s uneasiness was not merely elicited by the insecurity of their own labor conditions but also by the awareness of working within a system substantially unable to fulfill its moral and legal responsibilities toward protection seekers, leaving most of them to wrestle with extremely harsh living conditions. yet the accelerated deregulation of the welfare state, of which their own employment formed an integral part, seemed to play an important role in the rise of collective feelings of oppression and vulnerability, as well as in the deployment of novel forms of asylum management, not solely encompassed by the tropes of humanitarian compassion. deserving guests and productive bodies about six months after our first encounter, i again met rose in the rooms of the ips. she looked better, entering elena’s office with a big smile. rose was now being hosted in a center for women asylum seekers, and her asylum application was still pending. elena and rose discussed bureaucratic matters for a while. after rose left the office, elena commented to me: “did you see how she looks calmer now? she is a very determined and active woman. she is attending two italian classes, she knows the city very well, and she’s really keen on working. everybody is very satisfied with her.” elena then met with the social worker in charge of assisting rose in her housing facility. she wanted to suggest that rose volunteer in an association engaged in the assistance of elderly people: “i think that this might be a very good idea for her. did you hear what they said during the last meeting with asylum claim evaluators? at the end it is very important what they are doing here, perhaps even more than what they did there. … well, it’s understandable … because if someone claims to flee his country for some rights and then does not care at all about others. …” in the bureaucratic settings i encountered, asylum seekers were taught not only to care for themselves and thus avoid weighing on a shrinking welfare state (ong 2003), but also to care about others. as the fragments of conversation above illustrate, asylum seekers’ involvement in volunteer work was often perceived as a precondition to more favorable treatment in the quest for social and legal rights. this implicit and informal requirement recalls an array of legislative frameworks, scholarly works, and state policies that in recent years have contributed to the construction of volunteer work as an ideal of civic participation and europeanness (rozakou 2016).10 yet since international conventions define asylum as a universal right, those implicit assumptions clearly upend the very meaning of a right as a legal entitlement that does not entail reciprocity or repayment, whether symbolic or material. in this sense, the widespread promotion of refugee volunteerism seems to embody not so much an ideal of civic engagement and “integration”, but rather an ideology that subordinates (partial) rights to goodwill. the push to volunteerism is embedded in the repeated insistence, which i heard frequently during my fieldwork, that some asylum seekers are, as a matter of personal character, particularly “willing” (volenteroso), “active” (attivo), and “cooperative” (collaborativo), which usually led to more favorable treatment. tellingly, these deserving personality traits reflect a shifting paradigm in the politics of hospitality displayed in times of austerity and waning welfare state protections. the moral primacy granted to vulnerability and victimhood, described as one of the main features of compassionate politics in various european countries (fassin and d’halluin 2005; ticktin 2006; cabot 2013), had—and, to some extent, still has—certain resonance in the italian context (see giordano 2008; giudici 2014; beneduce 2015). however, the pressure on asylum seekers to become involved in volunteering programs, which grew exponentially after 2015, hints at a different logic of (de)legitimation. a model of engaged noncitizenry actively contributing to the social life of the hosting community does not seem to rest on a classical understanding of compassionate humanitarianism, ready to grant legitimacy to vulnerable victims in the name of their suffering and unproductive body (fassin 2005).11 on the contrary, it is the productive body of the migrant that is invoked to attract an aura of legitimacy around his/her otherwise undesirable presence. yet not all migrants felt ready to play the role of the dutiful asylum seeker and to engage in unpaid, voluntary work. as ahmed, a young asylum seeker from somalia, told me: “they asked me to go and clean the parks. well, i can do that, but i want to get paid. i mean, i am here, i just want a job, i need money to live. … this story of volunteering is really nonsense.” as opposed to the “ethical citizen” who “desires and seeks pleasure in unwaged labour,” as described by muehlebach (2011, 75), ahmed’s comments shed light on how asylum seekers in fact experienced refugee volunteerism as deeply coercive. yet such non-compliant attitudes were often met with suspicion and mistrust. indeed, since many reception workers began their own careers as unpaid interns, the refusal to engage in volunteerism often confirmed a widespread conviction that asylum seekers lacked a “sense of reality.” in a context where reception workers themselves experienced financial difficulties and political marginalization, everyday institutional interactions were fraught with complex and contradictory emotions, ranging from frustration and exasperation to understanding and, at times, empathy (see also casati 2018). to be sure, reception workers’ aid practices tended to enact shifting moral economies of what distinguishes between “good” and “bad” (non)citizens (ong 2003). in doing so, workers often tried to help asylum seekers gain better access to scarce opportunities. yet as the situation for both migrants and workers increasingly deteriorated, critical stances and open conflicts became more visible and widespread. between reception and struggle italy found itself generally unprepared for the constant increase in the number of migrants arriving between 2014 and 2016 as part of the so-called european refugee crisis. the drastic intensification of arrivals prompted an expansion of the overall capacity of its undersized reception system, which grew from about 22,000 facilities in 2013 to more than 190,000 facilities by 2017, mainly via the creation of a parallel and chaotic system of so-called extraordinary reception centers (cas—centri di accoglienza straordinaria). it should not go unnoticed that this capacity expansion also represented expanded opportunities for (precarious) employment for many young people, many of them humanities graduates with a background in anthropology (cf. altin and sanò 2017). yet as the emergency regime became, once again, a structural feature of migrant management (campesi 2018), the already fragile allegiance of asylum workers to state institutions began to crack, laying bare underlying tensions (giudici 2020). in march 2016, reception workers announced their first general strike. as the presentation flyer stated: “reception workers’ exploitation, the emergency regime, and the idea that social work is equivalent to volunteering all have devastating consequences on the services offered within refugees’ centers and, mainly, on migrants’ pathways to inclusion and autonomy. this is why the struggles for workers’ and migrants’ rights should not be distinct.”12 meanwhile, the greater visibility of migrants in many municipalities, combined with the misperception (fueled by media and political discourses) that reception costs siphoned away funding from other policy measures, contributed to the construction of an undisputable “migrant crisis” (marchetti 2020, 241). in the face of mounting hostility toward migration, in 2018 a new immigration and security decree drastically restricted services and facilities available to asylum seekers and refugees in the country. among its major consequences, the decree further marginalized migrants by portraying asylum seekers as illegal aliens, and it abolished the residency permit for humanitarian protection, underscoring the fading political emphasis on compassionate humanitarianism. until 2018, a humanitarian permit was one of the residence permits granted in the legislative framework of international protection, one that accounted for 30 percent of the italian asylum system beneficiaries. its abolition resulted in a predictable increase in “irregular migration” and social marginality (idos 2019). the drastic budget cuts led to the closure of several reception centers and to the layoff of many reception workers.13 against this backdrop, critical voices coming from the inside, as well as public protests involving both reception workers and asylum seekers, grew ever louder in many italian cities (baratta 2019; la repubblica 2019). by bringing together the plight of asylum workers and refugees’ claims, these recent political struggles work to shape an alternative discourse on others, one based not on the intrinsic asymmetries of compassion (see also arendt 2006), but rather on shared mechanisms of oppression. the disruptive potential of these forms of dissent proves even more meaningful as asylum workers find themselves in the position of epitomizing “the left hand of the state” in the implementation of controversial state policies (spire 2007; cabot 2014; kalir 2019). moreover, these mobilizations hint at transversal alliances and collective actions that can actually emerge through the folds of what have been described as sites of “antipolitics,” namely, humanitarian aid systems and practices (ferguson 1994; ticktin 2006). nick gill (2009), while reflecting on third sector workers employed in the asylum system in the united kingdom, reminds us that these intermediate actors, despite being pushed toward discretionary decision-making through an array of state-managed conditionings, also inhabit pivotal sites of contestation and potential sites of resistance. in gill’s (2009, 9) words, state power “is eminently resistible, precisely because it rests upon the allegiance of critically reflexive actors to the idea of the state itself.” precarious reception workers, because of their ambivalent relationship with the same state institutions they represent, hold the potential of playing a crucial role in the development of such struggles. conclusions: after compassion in italy, crisis-thinking and its consequences, by shifting images of vulnerability from the body of the migrant to the body of the nation, (re)opened the way to policies and attitudes dominated by securitarian preoccupations and xenophobic sentiments, while simultaneously concealing well-rooted processes of welfare state retrenchment that concern migrant and native persons alike. in the context of widening disparities and emergent populisms, the moral imperative to rescue suffering bodies and lives appears, maybe for the first time, under attack.14 it is not by chance that in recent years we have witnessed a growing criminalization of citizens, human rights activists, and ngos that intervene in support of migrants and refugees, both inside european territory and during search-and-rescue operations in the mediterranean sea. the criminalization of maritime rescue and solidarity practices is clearly linked to the rise of far-right parties and their increasing power to institutionalize xeno-racist biases (see fekete 2009). in italy, the leader of the far-right lega party, matteo salvini, has made targeting those who “facilitate illegal migration” a hallmark of his reign as interior minister. the policing of grassroots humanitarian assistance is widespread across europe and indicative of shifting paradigms of government that, as i have tried to show in this article, are inexorably moving beyond the tropes of a politics of compassion. when the fundamental importance attributed to the suffering body—and to human life—as the last terrain of a common humanity seems called into question, novel forms of subaltern inclusion take shape. to be sure, the emerging figure of the volunteering refugee is shot through with deep ambivalences and contradictions. while formally promoting asylum seekers’ increased civic participation in the hosting society, the aggressive promotion of those activities also crystallizes the erosion of asylum rights for the “unwanted,” as well as the imposition of normative subjectivities through inherently paternalistic workfare schemes. since 2016, the pressure on asylum seekers to engage in volunteering programs has grown exponentially in italy—and since 2018, migrants’ access to asylum procedure and protections have seen significant constraint. as a reception worker noted to me in august 2020, “migrants are still expected to behave well and demonstrate their respect for italian institutions, but they have lost their hope of being somehow rewarded for their good behavior.” in fact, the “dutiful asylum seeker,” deeply embedded in the neoliberal production of subjectivities, hints at strategies of governance that, once again, rest on and reproduce both structural inequalities and racialized classifications of human value (see thomas and clarke 2013). nonetheless, as new compromises and forms of exploitation take shape, unexpected political opportunities may yet arise. interestingly, such opportunities might emerge not only from outside but also from “within the organizational terrain we call the state” (mitchell 1991, 93, cited in mountz 2003, 639). in contemporary italy, responsibility for the withdrawal of the italian state from its obligations to asylum seekers is assumed by street-level bureaucrats, who find themselves in the position of administrating increasingly inadequate reception measures while experiencing the progressive waning of their own social rights. the precarious reception workers investigated in this article are concretely involved in implementing aid practices that may end up reinforcing frameworks of exclusion. yet they also stand out as critically reflexive actors whose detachment from the same institutions they represent could open a path to multiple forms of dissent. that they are not public servants but, rather, precarious third sector workers certainly plays a role in the emergence of their critical stance. indeed, an ethnographic analysis of state-based forms of humanitarian support sheds light on the relational nature of the state, understood not as a monolithic actor but rather as a social construction whose boundaries are continuously made, unmade, and contested in everyday social life (thelen, vetters, and von benda-beckmann 2014). furthermore, it reminds us that even in sites of anti-politics, such as humanitarian aid systems, forms of agency and unexpected political opportunities may arise. in this sense, the fading centrality of a compassionate ethos, while strictly connected to repressive policies informed by a blunt disregard for human life, might open the door to an alternative discourse on others, one based neither on pity nor charity but instead on a re-politicization of the notion of solidarity (siapera 2019). engaging solidarity as a contentious political terrain relates to the emergence—in southern europe and beyond—of a variegated landscape of anti-austerity socialities that challenge migration border controls (tazzioli and walters, 2019) as well as official versions of volunteerism and humanitarian charity (rakopoulos 2014; rozakou 2016; theodossopoulos 2020). as both the refugee crisis and the austerity crisis are, in fact, symptoms of an underlying deep structural crisis of capitalism, we should pay more attention to the political spaces in which transversal alliances between migrants and citizens might take shape. abstract in this article, i track shifting paradigms of refugee management in italy in times of austerity and welfare state restructuring. drawing on an ethnographic analysis of asylum-related bureaucratic work in bologna, the essay explores paradoxical and violent effects of welfare decline both on reception workers’ labor conditions and on the dynamic of aid that they end up providing to asylum seekers. on the one hand, recent developments in asylum management in italy suggest a transition to post-compassionate forms of aid, hinged more on the making of dutiful subjects ready to repay the “hospitality” offered by the state than on the moral imperative to rescue suffering bodies and lives. on the other hand, reception workers’ precarious positioning and unrest hold the potential for exposing the inherent contradictions of state-based narratives, thereby shaping alternative discourses on the causes and responsibilities of both refugee and economic “crises.” [asylum; neoliberal governance; asylum workers; citizenship; precarity; compassion; italy] abstract questo articolo ricostruisce l’emergere di nuovi paradigmi di gestione dei rifugiati in italia, in tempi di austerità e ristrutturazione dei sistemi di welfare. prendendo spunto dall’analisi etnografica di un ufficio di supporto per l’asilo a bologna, l’articolo esplora effetti violenti e paradossali dello smantellamento del welfare pubblico, sia sulle condizioni di lavoro degli operatori dell’accoglienza, che sulle dinamiche di aiuto a richiedenti asilo che essi finiscono col contribuire a produrre. le recenti trasformazioni nella gestione dell’asilo in italia suggeriscono uno slittamento verso forme di aiuto post-compassionevoli, incentrate più sulla costruzione di soggetti attivamente impegnati nel ricompensare “l’ospitalità” offerta dallo stato, che sull’imperativo morale di salvare corpi e vite sofferenti. al tempo stesso, la precarietà e il dissenso dei lavoratori dell’accoglienza sono potenzialmente in grado di illuminare alcune delle contraddizioni intrinseche alle narrazioni statali, elaborando così discorsi alternativi sulle cause e responsabilità della “crisi”, sia migratoria che economica. [asilo; governance neoliberale; lavoratori dell’accoglienza; cittadinanza; precarietà; compassione; italia] notes acknowledgments i would like to express my sincere thanks to all my field interlocutors who shared with me their thoughts and time. i am particularly grateful to katerina rozakou for her generous and inspiring feedback on this article. the argument in this essay also benefited from feedback received within the research group anthropology of global inequalities at the freie universität berlin. in particular, i would like to thank katharina schramm for her detailed and insightful comments. special thanks go to kyra grieco, stefania japo, and anita sunda, who have commented on drafts and ideas at various stages. my gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers for their productive and detailed comments, as well as to the cultural anthropology editorial team and, in particular, to heather paxson, for her invaluable guidance throughout the revision process. research for this article was supported by a doctoral fellowship of the italian ministry of education, university and research and a postdoctoral fellowship within the miur-fare hoasi project at the university of trento. 1. my translation. 2. in italy, not all the workers employed in the asylum reception system hold a degree in social work, nor are they specialized humanitarian professionals. in italian they are usually named operatori dell’accoglienza, “reception workers.” 3. the separation of the church from the italian state has been a central theme since unification, when the state could not afford to alienate the catholic church because of its wealth and charitable apparatus. as a matter of fact, the church’s resources still play a pivotal role in the implementation of italian social policies (quine 2002; see also giordano 2008). 4. whereas compassionate humanitarianism finds its roots in deep-seated charitable paradigms of catholic inspiration, the upsurge of moral sentiments and, in particular, of compassion in political action is linked to the growing global importance since the early 1990s of ngos, such as the french-born médecins sans frontières (msf) (redfield 2005). in italy a residency permit for “humanitarian reasons” was instituted in 1998 as a “flexible visa” for specific conditions of vulnerability, such as pathologies declared unable to receive proper treatment in the country of origin (see also ticktin 2006). 5. until the early 1990s italy was not a country of settlement for refugees. the issue of refugees erupted into the italian public imagination in 1991, with the massive arrival of albanians fleeing their country after the fall of the communist regime and, subsequently, of refugees from ex-yugoslavia. from the end of the 1990s onward the refugee flows toward italy changed radically. italy’s southern shores became the destination of migrants from different african countries, crossing the mediterranean through libya and egypt. while the so-called 2010 arab spring caused a sudden spike of asylum applications in italy, the highest increase came with the 2015 european refugee crisis. according to unhcr, the number of asylum claims received by italy in 2015 (about 67,000) was four times the level of that seen in 2012. eritrea and somalia, former italian colonies, together with nigeria were the first countries of origin of asylum seekers in 2015. after 2016, due to the implementation of salvini’s closed-ports policy, combined with eu efforts to limit arrivals and outsource responsibility to countries outside of the european union, asylum applications sharply decreased. 6. in december 2014, italian prosecutors unveiled a close collaboration of criminal groups and corrupt politicians in the awarding of the contracts for the management of several asylum seeker reception centers. the opportunity for illegal profit was sensationally articulated by the man at the center of the so-called mafia capitale corruption scandal in rome, salvatore buzzi, who was recorded telling an associate that drugs were “less profitable” than the business of housing asylum seekers. on the mafia and migrant centers in italy, see, among others, gaia pianigiani (2017). 7. names and some details have been modified to protect research participants’ identities. 8. those charitable institutions, in many cases quite ancient, are managers of a considerable patrimony of assets and properties. for instance, immigration services were subcontracted to an asp (poveri e vergognosi, literally, “poor and ashamed”), founded in 1495, whose real estate holdings in the territory of bologna are estimated to cover 55,000 square meters. 9. in everyday italian, the term mafia can be used in a broad sense, going far beyond the established meaning of “organized crime.” it can refer, as in this case, to a group of people that uses its power illicitly to achieve personal interests. 10. katerina rozakou (2016) describes the “crafting of the volunteer” in the beginning of the twenty-first century in greece as a laboratory for the production of new european and greek citizens. her insightful analysis has a certain resonance in the italian context, yet there are important differences. whereas the push to volunteerism in greece takes place through a top-down vision of modernizing an “underdeveloped” greek civil society, in italy (or at least in northern italy) the sentiment of volunteerism, while also state-mediated, seems to be embodied by a larger public in search of social recognition through affective—and unremunerated—labor (muehlebach 2011). 11. in her ethnography of asylum claims evaluations made by judges at the bologna tribunal, barbara sorgoni (2019) also refers to the fading centrality of the suffering body. she situates her analysis within a wider shift from a “culture of suspicion” that emerged in the 1990s and a more recent “culture of rejection,” produced by european policies striving to deter the arrival of migrants in the european continent. sorgoni argues that, at a time when rejection (rather than suspicion) becomes the political imperative, adjudication procedures rely less on the body—sick, traumatized, wounded—and more on mere oral testimony, which can eventually allow for speedier denials. 12. public statement available at https://www.sialcobas.it/2016/02/1-marzo-lappello-dei-lavoratori-dellaccoglienza-di-roma/ (accessed may 25, 2020). 13. under the new asylum regime, an estimated 18,000 reception workers have lost or are about to lose their jobs (marchetti 2020, 248). 14. in october 2013, just after two migrant shipwrecks in lampedusa caused more than four hundred deaths, the mare nostrum operation was launched by the italian government as a military and humanitarian operation aimed both “at safeguarding human life at sea and bringing to justice migrant smugglers.” it was the last search-and-rescue operation carried out by the italian government, which ended its activities in october 2014 after rescuing some 150,000 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anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 25-51, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.02 biopolitical paternalism and its maternal supplements: kinship correlates of community mental health governance in china cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 290-316, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.09 biopolitical paternalism and its maternal supplements: kinship correlates of community mental health governance in china zhiying ma university of chicago https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8210-7551 in november 2010, the new york times published an article on the inadequacies of mental health treatment in china. it vividly described the “dearth of care” in the chinese household: left to their own devices, some relatives resort to heartbreaking solutions. in 2007, he jiyue, a government psychiatrist, discovered a 46-year-old man locked behind a metal door in a stinking room in a rural hebei province home. the man was mentally ill, his aged parents told dr. he. they had locked him up after he attacked his uncle. that was 28 years earlier. the man, a high school graduate, could no longer speak. “i said to the parents: ‘how could you do this to somebody?”’ dr. he recalled. they replied, “we had no choice.” in the past three years, chinese mental health workers have rescued 339 other people whose relatives were too poor, ignorant or ashamed to seek treatment. some, shackled in outdoor sheds, were “treated just like animals,” said dr. liu jin, of the peking university mental health institute. (lafraniere 2010) this tragic image of home confinement has been repeatedly invoked in both international and domestic media reports as the primary justification for an ambitious government-sponsored program, unlock action (jiesuo xingdong), that sought to eradicate the home confinement of seriously mentally ill patients.1 the action led to a broader national community mental health program—the 686 program—established by the ministry of health in 2004 and promoted in full force since 2010. aimed at building a nationwide mental health infrastructure that extends beyond psychiatric hospitals and reaches patients living at home, the 686 program trains general practitioners and nurses to visit patients regularly, monitor their symptoms and risks of violence, and offer them necessary treatment. why is the establishment of community mental health services in china hinged on this image of mental health workers as heroic rescuers against ignorant family members? why and how do some family members engage in home confinement and other practices denounced by the state? kinship correlates of china’s community governance from 2008 to 2014, i conducted thirty-two months of fieldwork on how families in china were involved in the lives of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses (smis)—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or other disorders with predominant psychotic features—and how medical and legal institutions shaped those involvements. as part of this fieldwork, i interviewed national and local leaders of the 686 program, reviewed archival and media sources about it, observed workshops that trained practitioners and family caregivers, shadowed practitioner visits to more than eighty households with smi patients,2 and independently interviewed many more patients and caregivers, mostly in a city in south china that i call nanhua.3 drawing on these data, this article examines the discourse and practice of community mental health in china, especially how it conceptualizes, mobilizes, and molds the family in relation to questions of care, risk management, and coercion. more broadly, this examination illuminates the interplay of the family and state power in contemporary china, including how the state deploys ideas of, and practices from, the family for its projects of governance, and how these projects in turn reshape family relations. as susan mckinnon and fenella cannell (2013, 24) suggest, state power has “kinship correlates”—that is, “cultural understandings [and practices] about kinship, marriage, family, and relatedness [that] organize, inform, and naturalize what will count as the nation and citizenship.” other scholars have argued that kinship and gender should be analyzed together, since gender helps articulate systems of meaning and models of inequality in and beyond the household (yanagisako and collier 1987). note that gender means not only socially constituted roles performed by different groups of people but also symbolic representations of masculine, feminine, or other qualities invoked by normative concepts and reinforced by social institutions, even when they are not exclusively tied to a particular group (scott 1999). for instance, men can act maternally, a situation demonstrated in the evidence i present here. the present study thus also attends to how kinship correlates of state power become mediated by historically situated ideas and practices of gender. in china, the ideology of state confucianism, dominant for most of the imperial era, saw the family and the state as constructed on the same patriarchal principles. like the father ruling the son, the emperor was to rule his subjects; motherly figures, meanwhile, were to provide compassion and nurturing (hsu 1971; wolf 1972). the maoist regime downplayed the family, organizing people into collectives such as work units and rural communes. meanwhile, following the confucian legacy of paternalism, it fashioned itself as a parent state that safeguarded people’s lives and livelihoods (walder 1988), and it encouraged people to develop a direct paternal identification with the leader (steinmüller 2015). during the market reform period that began in the late 1970s, political and popular discourses turned away from collectivization to cherish individualization. families have again become a key social unit, this time to produce individual subjects and to protect them from fierce market competition and the retreat of public welfare. scholars have noted that this “neo-familism” (yan 2018) continues to reinforce male dominance, casting women as natural and primary caretakers (harrell and santos 2017). by examining how the 686 program invokes and interacts with the family in the care of smi patients, this article further explores how the family figures in state governance, especially how this process invokes both gendered notions of power and gendered practices of relation. as we shall see, historical legacies of paternal authority and maternal compassion continue to influence contemporary chinese state governance, though with changing discursive and institutional conditions. with the demise of work units in the 1990s, and the rising wealth disparity, social unrest, and public health crises of the new millennium, the chinese state needed to find a new axis around which to organize and order the social. loosely referring to various place-based or group-based networks of people, the notion of community provided a mechanism for this reorganization by dispersing the sites and proliferating the agents of governance, thereby reaching deep into everyday life (bray 2006; zhang 2012; tomba 2014). community governance sees its subjects no longer as “the people”—a unified proletariat citizenry of the socialist state—but as “the population,” that is, a multiplicity of individuals who exist biologically and who need to be regulated to achieve an “optimal public” (cho 2013). for instance, the community mental health program seeks to manage the risk of violence that smi patients pose to the public. as such, community governance in china constitutes a form of biopolitics (foucault 2009). according to michel foucault (2009, 105), when population and security replaced sovereignty as the new focus of euro-american governments in the eighteenth century, the family changed “from being a model to being a privileged instrument for the government” (also see donzelot 1979). anthropologists have also examined how families become entangled in biopolitics in other contexts (e.g., biehl 2005; cohen 1998). building on these insights, this study explores how the family may work as a model, an instrument, and/or a product of the biopolitics of community governance. indeed, as the chinese state seeks to outsource the task of managing the population through community governance, the family becomes an effective site to which it can turn. for one, since the family can be seen either as a pristine private realm or as a basic social institution, its flexible positioning enables “the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not” (foucault 1991, 103). for another, community governance often entails various constructs of the subject and uses various techniques of power, ranging from expecting self-responsible individuals to manage themselves to disciplining intractable ones through coercive and carceral means (rose 1996). as community agents and experts teach family members to interact with one another in specific ways, as they publicize certain family practices while keeping others private, they are reshaping the image and reality of the state in relation to its citizens. moreover, as an idea and practice of difference, gender proves critical to revealing how the state draws flexible boundaries and negotiates intricate modalities of governance through the family. my fieldwork shows that in china, the 686 program constantly struggles between care, management, and coercion in its governance of people with serious mental illnesses. two gendered kinship correlates stand in tension here. by exposing and intervening into home confinement as well as providing basic biomedical services to the general patient population, the program presents the state as a father caring for its vulnerable children. meanwhile, the program portrays these same vulnerable patients as carriers of medical and security risks and demands that family members manage them. it equates care with risk management, defines both biomedically, and assumes that caregivers can smoothly enact their familial paternalistic power to command patients’ compliance. it is this interplay between the state’s invocation of the paternalistic tradition to construct new public responsibilities for population management and its simultaneous privatization of that management through outsourcing care to families that i call “biopolitical paternalism.” it marks the first kinship correlate of community mental health, and in the following i will demonstrate its workings in the 686 program’s history, discourse, and practice. i will then turn to the second kinship correlate—that is, the ways in which families supplement the program’s biopolitical paternalism through compassionate practices coded as maternal and carried out mostly by women, practices that reveal the limits of medicalized care and the hidden edge of psychiatric coercion. by discovering and disentangling the dual kinship correlates at work, we can gain a fuller and more transformative understanding of community governance in contemporary china and beyond. when community mental health meets families: the emergence of biopolitical paternalism the iron cage and the father state during the maoist era, mental health—like most other health-care services—was eclectic, inexpensive, and focused on primary care. besides hospital psychiatrists and patients’ families, many other local agents were also involved in the care of patients, and the goal was to return them quickly to revolutionary society (kao 1979). with the introduction of market reforms in the 1980s, primary health-care services gradually collapsed. the limited state investments in health largely went into building big tertiary hospitals, which in turn charged clients exorbitant fees. as psychiatry became predominantly biomedical and pharmaceutical, it came to see patients with smis as carriers of chronic pathologies needing perpetual care and management. with the retreat of public welfare, the task of illness management disproportionately fell onto patients’ family members. they either looked after patients at home or paid to have patients hospitalized, often involuntarily (phillips 1998). in recent years, as human rights activists vigorously criticized the prevalence of involuntary hospitalization in china, psychiatrists have defended the practice as a manifestation of “state paternalism” (guojia fuquan), literally the power of the state to act as a father. according to this idea, although committing patients to an institution against their will might seem coercive, it actually demonstrated care for patients because they had no insight into their own condition (z. ma 2014). this idea of state paternalism thus defined people’s well-being biomedically as symptom control and elimination while requiring the state only to endorse, but not actually perform, the paternalistic responsibilities to help patients achieve this state of well-being. meanwhile, many psychiatrists whom i interviewed expressed frustration with the concentration of mental health care in a limited number of institutions, because they saw most patients’ families as having little knowledge of or access to them. this went against the mission of mental health-care professionals to “serve the people”—a mission especially cherished by senior practitioners trained before the market reform. a golden opportunity for change emerged in the wake of the sars epidemic in 2003. the inability of hospitals and health departments to handle the outbreak, resulting in lost lives, wealth, and public trust, made clear to the state that public health was crucial for maintaining its priorities of social stability and market productivity. since then, the government has poured much money into constructing a public health system (mason 2016). after a decade of development, this system now consists of a network of community health stations staffed by general practitioners and nurses who are subsidized by municipal governments to provide basic public health services. however, the state’s renewed interest in public health was initially limited to preventing and controlling infectious diseases. how, then, could psychiatry share the spotlight and insert itself into this new wave of development? my analysis of media reports and policy documents shows that psychiatrists and allied policy makers turned to the sensationalist image of home confinement, of the kind presented in the new york times article quoted at the beginning of this essay.4 such reports depict a crisis of care in which patients are treated like animals—wounded, disoriented, smelly, and filthy. note that many of these reports do not portray confined patients simply as victims of family maltreatment. rather, they emphasize the violence and disruption that those patients inflict on others because of their mental illness: they have allegedly beaten up their family members, damaged property, harassed neighbors and villagers, and even killed people (cao 2013). as the new york times article explains, family members often “had no choice” but to resort to home confinement, because they are “too poor, ignorant or ashamed to seek treatment.” in other words, even though these reports depict home confinement as pure coercion, they see it as an ultimately understandable response to patient violence and to families’ lack of access to health care. psychiatrists and allied policy makers have used the tragic image of home confinement to call for more government investments in mental health. in response, the state has found a perfect opportunity to performatively demonstrate care for its citizens and to address the public outcry against the retreat of welfare and market deprivation. in the mid-2000s, under the banner of unlock action, many local governments sent psychiatrists and officials out into communities to find patients confined at home. the patients were freed from the homemade locks, chains, or cages, sent to the psychiatric hospital for treatment, and ideally returned home having recovered. estimates suggest that the unlock action reached thousands of patients nationwide (guan et al. 2015). in reports of home confinement, as we can see in figures 1 and 2, the family member involved in confining the patient is often an old and weak parent, living with tears and a broken heart. in contrast, state agents leading the unlocking efforts are typically senior male doctors who bring patients from an animal state back to humanity by wielding the miraculous power of biomedicine. in figure 3, for example, against the background of a decrepit room and a rusty cage, the doctor appears bright and clean, like a beam of light that dispels darkness. his tall but slightly bent body, his smiling face, and the hand gesture accompanying his self-introduction suggest his authority, expertise, and kindness. on seeing him, the patient, who it must be assumed has been abject and disoriented, appears immediately lucid and attentive. if the patient resists the unlocking effort, as seen in figure 4, then doctors can easily overpower him and take him out of his chaotic lifeworld.5 in addition, psychiatric treatment is reported to restore the confined patients’ capacity to recognize and relate to their family members—for example, by enabling a long-mute patient to greet his mother again (jinan shenkang hospital n.d.). in all these accounts, psychiatrists—and the state they represent—appear to embody and enact a set of paternalistic power, knowledge, authority, and care to bring order to the patient and the family. figure 1. a forty-year-old patient restrained with chains by her mother for twenty-three years. photo by zhibing zhong. http://health.sohu.com/20110825/n352889530.shtml. figure 2. a father showing the wounds on a tree his son inflicted with a knife during a psychotic episode. since then he has confined his son at home. photo by beijing news. http://health.sohu.com/20130711/n381262203.shtml. figure 3. a patient who has lived in a cage for ten years is rescued by hospital psychiatrists. photo by beijing news. http://health.sohu.com/20130711/n381262203.shtml. at the same time, the emphasis on the past or potential violence of the mentally ill patient in the image of home confinement posits smis as urgent a threat to public safety as infectious diseases. this has helped to insert mental health into the country’s growing public health apparatus. moreover, since the late 1990s, with the rise of socioeconomic inequalities and popular unrest, the chinese state has shown an increasing obsession with monitoring and eliminating any actual or potential threat to its governance and to general social stability. it has thus come to spend the largest proportion of its budget on “stability-maintenance” (weiwen) work (lee and zhang 2013). several leading psychiatrists told me that the violent aspect of mental illnesses had to be highlighted to gain resources from the stability-maintenance apparatus. the image of home confinement provides a potent discursive tool for this purpose. in turn, managing the risk of patient violence has preoccupied the design and operations of community mental health. figure 4. doctors carry an unchained patient to the hospital while he is kicking and screaming. photo by qilu net. http://yx.iqilu.com/2016/0623/2862679.shtml#10. constructing the paternal family the unlock action spurred a broader community mental health program in china. in 2004, the ministry of health established the national hospital-community integrative treatment and management program for smis, also known as the 686 program, because it was initially funded by rmb 6.86 million (about usd 1 million) in state revenue. the 686 program’s main goals, as stated by its leaders, are “to establish an effective mechanism to comprehensively prevent and control the violent behavior of patients with smis; to enhance the treatment rate and reduce the violence rate; to disseminate knowledge of mental illness prevention and treatment; and to spread the knowledge of systematic treatment of smis” (h. ma et al. 2011, 726). in other words, the program connects the prevention and treatment of smis to the management of patient violence. note that the program is not aimed at ending or reducing psychiatric institutionalization, as community mental health programs in euro-american countries were historically, but at strengthening institutions and connecting them to community treatment. thanks to psychiatrists’ successful strategy of linking patient management to stability maintenance, government support for the program has steadily increased, and especially since 2010, the program has been rolled out across the country aggressively. most urban and rural communities now have primary care physicians or nurses working as community mental health practitioners (cmhps) to manage patients. before the advent of the 686 program, the state only endorsed and enabled the family’s paternalistic practices such as involuntary hospitalization chiefly to promote the biomedically defined well-being of individual patients. in the face of the severe lack and disparity of mental health care, the 686 program fashioned itself as the father state directly caring for individuals in dire need and restoring proper familial authority. indeed, although the sweeping scale of unlock action has abated, the program still requires cmhps to watch for cases in which caregivers “lock up or chain” patients “for non-medical purposes,” to report these occurrences, and to stop them by sending the patient for free hospital treatment (ministry of health of the people’s republic of china 2012). after the unlock action, the program has expanded its focus to the general smi patient population, providing them with services such as free basic psychopharmaceuticals and physical checkups.6 community mental health practitioners have the task of connecting patients to these services by organizing community clinics with hospital psychiatrists and conducting routine home visits themselves. meanwhile, as government support makes the 686 program increasingly preoccupied with patient violence, the state now also expects and demands that families act paternalistically for the biopolitical task of population management, for the state’s security interests. this task of population management is first put on cmhps. many of them have said that no matter how hard they work, they would be held accountable—such as failing their yearly evaluation—if one patient they manage wound up doing something publicly violent (j. zhu et al. 2018). however, even with increased government support, the country faces a severe shortage of cmhps, so that one practitioner has to oversee as many as a few hundred patients. under these circumstances, the 686 program has come to outsource its care and management tasks back to family members, albeit now with professional state supervision. in nanhua, for instance, cmhps typically ask patients’ family members—not the patients themselves—to visit community clinics to receive the medications, so that they can supervise patients’ medication intake at home. in their routine home visits, cmhps usually ask family members about the recent state of a patient’s conditions, medication compliance, and social functioning. they also solicit family members’ reports on a patient’s recent acts of aggression or violence, in particular those acts committed outside the home. as home visits come to an end, cmhps usually exhort family members to closely watch over patients, lest they make any trouble outside. as the pressure of risk management is passed down from the state to cmhps and then to families, the 686 program configures family members as private agents to manage patients’ illness and prevent them from harming the public. the 686 program sees family members as key to patient management because they can supposedly use their intimate authority, knowledge, and attention to guide patients through medical treatment. as a cmhp told me, “i really like those family members who can urge patients to take the meds and supervise the process. if something happens, they will increase the dosage [based on their own experience or psychiatrists’ advice]. then when the patients get better, they will decrease the dosage.” comments like this are fairly common in cmhps’ public discussions about, and education of, family members. they imagine patients as submissive, easily influenced by their family members. family members, in turn, are thought to be invested in managing patients solely by psychiatric means, through a supposedly open, if hierarchical, relationship, with no coercion or deception on the part of caregivers needed or warranted. if patients are unwilling to abide by the (medically informed) familial authority, especially when this may lead to illness relapse or a heightened risk of violence, then family members are encouraged to send the patients to the psychiatric hospital. as such, the family is supposed to act like the paternalistic state and be articulated with its paternalistic institutions. covert medication as maternal supplements as we have seen, biopolitical paternalism defines care biomedically, emphasizing it for the purpose of managing patients’ risk of violence, and it expects family members—be they men or women—to perform these tasks in an authoritative but open fashion. in reality, women are usually the ones who stay at home to look after patients, because their jobs often earn less and seem more dispensable. in some cases, especially when patients have no other relatives, men—typically elderly fathers—may also become primary caregivers, although people would see their high involvement in care as uncommon and characterize them as “being a father and mother” for patients. as these female, or elderly, caregivers are themselves vulnerable, they cannot always count on patients submitting to being managed. instead, they often have to resort to covert and seemingly coercive tactics denounced by the program discourse, such as secretly administering medicines to patients (hereafter “covert medication”) or confining patients at home. interestingly, cmhps often acquiesce to these practices when they visit patients’ homes. this section and the next will examine these covert and apparently coercive family practices in relation to state agents’ reactions. i suggest that these practices allow caregivers not only to act on the state’s mandate to manage patients’ risk of violence from a position of vulnerability but also to compassionately prioritize the preservation of patients’ well-being, especially their non-medical desires and lifeworlds. drawing on jacques derrida’s (1997) idea of supplementation, which entails both accretion and substitution, i argue that these family practices supplement the work of biopolitical paternalism in community mental health: on the one hand, they contribute to the mission of patient management, allowing it to work to the fullest extent (derrida 1997, 144), beyond existing institutional confines and beyond the limited resources available in community mental health. on the other hand, these practices—especially the everyday labor provided mostly by women, the compassion for suffering they show, and the diverse forms of well-being they enable—offer a maternal alternative to the ideals and demands of biopolitical paternalism. the practical and ontological challenges that these practices pose to biopolitical paternalism render them as a “subaltern instance” (derrida 1997, 145) publicly denounced by the community mental health program even as it privately relies on them. these covert, seemingly coercive, and ultimately compassionate practices by caregivers constitute what i call “maternal supplements” to biopolitical paternalism. the structure of community governance reduces them to the supplemental, but their supplemental status in no way renders them insignificant. on the contrary, only by grasping the workings of the supplemental can one understand how the primary, that is, biopolitical paternalism, functions. a case example illustrates how covert medication works as a maternal supplement. one day in 2014, the cmhp dr. xu and i visited the home of a fifty-year-old female patient, jing. she was napping in her bedroom while her eighty-year-old mother received us. dr. xu asked to check the medications jing was taking, so the mother went to her own room and fetched a small bottle of perphenazine. every day during the past ten years, she told us in a hushed voice, she had mixed thirty milligrams of perphenazine with some hepatinica, ground it up, and dissolved the powder into jing’s milk. “i have no choice. my daughter doesn’t think she is mentally ill, and she refuses to take any pills. whenever i ask her to, she just gets mad at me.” like jing’s mother, the majority of caregivers do not hold as much authority as the community mental health discourse assumes they do or as is needed to win over the “noncompliant” patients. when trying to persuade patients to take medications, they often get stuck in trivial, painful, and futile arguments with them. despite these difficulties, caregivers often feel the need to use medications to handle the disruptions that mental illness brings to everyday life, such as jing’s frequent wanderings and occasional yelling at strangers. they are also faced with the pressure—constantly reinforced by cmhps—to minimize the risks the patients pose to others. covert medication thus provides a way for these vulnerable caregivers to manage patients while circumventing resistance, protecting themselves, and easing family relations. as these female (or elderly) caregivers closely look after patients every day, they are intimately exposed to patients’ suffering, desires, and hopes, including those that seem strange from a medical perspective. covert medication thus also offers caregivers a way to show compassion for patients and protect their alternative lifeworlds. in jing’s case, her mother told me that she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in early adulthood. thinking that love would calm her down, the mother arranged a marriage for her with a large dowry. unfortunately, her husband turned out to be after the money, and he treated her coldly, especially after learning about her diagnosis. soon after she gave birth to a son, he divorced her and took custody of the child. since then, jing had been going to her ex-husband’s home every day, trying to catch a glimpse of her son, but he did not want to be associated with his “crazy” mother. jing’s mother found it understandable for jing to fiercely resist psychiatric treatment, to hold onto the image—and the self-understanding—of a normal and capable mother. “i can’t confront her with her illness,” jing’s mother told me, “otherwise it will break her heart.” to simultaneously manage patients and engage compassionately with them, caregivers have to tinker with how to hide the pills in a way similar to the everyday experimentations that parents—especially mothers—of children with other disabilities lovingly conduct (silverman 2011). it is not rare for these experimentations to fumble, to come short of meeting the psychiatric standards. in jing’s case, her psychiatrist had only prescribed her twenty milligrams of perphenazine a day. her mother had decided to put in more, in case she did not finish all the milk. as time went on, jing’s blood pressure rose to dangerously high levels, probably as a result of the long-term overuse of antipsychotics. in some other cases, caregivers do not have the opportunity to hide the pills in food or drinks every day, and fluctuations in medication intake may worsen patients’ symptoms. patients may also suspect or even find out what caregivers are doing and then lose trust in them, refusing altogether any food or drink they provide. given these compromising qualities, cmhps publicly denounce covert medication. privately, however, cmhps often acquiesce to this practice and help caregivers with it. they may provide caregivers with pills, cooperate with them in front of patients, and even quietly suggest better ways to hide the pills. in jing’s case, as soon as her mother finished showing us the pill bottle and put it away, jing emerged from her bedroom. we all greeted her warmly. dr. xu, known to her simply as a community doctor, did not utter a single word about mental illness. instead, having gathered from previous visits that she admitted having hypertension, the doctor asked her about its symptoms, such as mood swings, dizziness, and sleep problems. she slowly answered the questions with slightly slurred speech. the doctor then told her not to go out so often lest she should fall in a faint, and he invited her to the community health station for a checkup. she nodded. as dr. xu later told me, the questions and the checkup could reveal not only jing’s hypertension but also her schizophrenic symptoms and the effects of antipsychotics. at the checkup, dr. xu might also be able to prescribe her some antihypertensives, which would then serve as a cover-up for any other pills that she might see her mother handling in the future. jing’s mother immediately recognized the doctor’s intention. she beamed on hearing his suggestion to jing and thanked him profusely for his care. in this way, just as the family’s concerns for the patient’s well-being, kin relations, and the household’s social standing make it complicit in the state’s demands for biomedicalized patient management, so the state’s requirements for patient management make the cmhps complicit in the family’s compassionate practices that nurture their loved ones’ non-medical desires. the concept of supplementation reveals the mutual dependence between the agenda of management in biopolitical paternalism and the practice of compassion in maternal labor. it also reveals the hierarchy and tension between them: while the discourse of community mental health, operating on the vision of biopolitical paternalism, openly criticizes caregivers’ practice of covert medication for its secretive and compromising qualities, caregivers quietly push back on having to shoulder the supplemental labor alone when the state turns away. their appreciation for cmhps’ understanding of, cooperation with, and advice for them shows how much they long for the state’s recognition and assistance. the “problem” of home confinement compared to covert medication, home confinement is decried by the discourse of the 686 program in even stronger terms. after all, its coercive appearance contradicts the program’s vision of caring for the patient—and the public—through pharmaceuticalized risk management, and the confined patient’s reportedly abject, animal-like state constitutes the polar opposite of the program’s ideal of a dignified human. examining the actual practice of home confinement and the response to it by cmhps can shed light on the subject, relation, and technique of governance at stake in community mental health, as articulated in biopolitical paternalism and its maternal supplements. “how could the madman not be locked up?” my first encounter with home confinement occurred in the summer of 2011. one day, i followed the cmhp dr. gao on his home visits to some urbanizing villages on the edges of nanhua. driving through rows of glamorous european-style townhouses, we came to uncle long’s rundown neighborhood. uncle long, an eighty-one-year-old man, greeted us warmly and led us to the place where ah niu, his mentally ill son, lived. “just a glance is ok,” said dr. gao, indicating his familiarity with ah niu’s condition. ah niu lodged in a single-room bungalow, its door locked from the outside, with thick iron bars on the only window and no light within. ah niu stood inside, topless and disheveled. smiling, he greeted dr. gao with a “hi.” the doctor approached him, gave him a cigarette, and immediately drew back a few feet before asking ah niu how he was doing and whether he was taking any medications. ah niu began screaming, and we left the scene. we then went to uncle long’s own house nearby. to my surprise, dr. gao refused uncle long’s invitation to enter the house, and instead sat on the doorstep. uncle long took out a medley of pill bottles for us to examine. i asked him whether ah niu was willing to take the pills. “of course not,” he responded. “i have to hide them in his rice or soup. and look at the sleeping pills. whenever i want to go inside and clean his room or change his clothes, i have to mix some of these in his meal and put him to sleep first.” uncle long told me he had two other sons and a daughter besides ah niu, but they had all married and moved out. dr. gao delicately asked whether uncle long’s wife was still there—she had been paralyzed by a stroke the previous year, and as i learned, the doctor had not gone inside for fear of disturbing her. but uncle long now told us she had passed away earlier in the year, leaving him as the sole caregiver for his son. ah niu was now thirty-eight years old, and had been ill since 1991. “he used to be the smartest and most filial among all my kids,” uncle long said with a sigh. in high school, probably in reaction to peer bullying, ah niu started having headaches and acting strangely, and later doctors diagnosed him with schizophrenia. he managed to finish school and work for two years, but soon his symptoms worsened. he began smashing things and hitting people. these behaviors and the repeated hospitalizations—sixteen over the years—made it impossible for him to work anymore. at home, he often screamed in the middle of the night, which drew complaints from neighbors and admonitions from the police. in 2006, his parents decided to put him in the locked room. unfortunately, even confinement could not contain his aggression. he often threw things from the window, and he had once injured uncle long. over the years, ah niu had smashed three cd players that uncle long had put in his room. he had also broken the television and the light bulb in the room, which still awaited uncle long’s repair. when we were about to leave, dr. gao suggested that he might be able to set up a three-month, free inpatient stay for ah niu, although he was unsure whether the district’s quota had been reached this year. uncle long shook his head, saying that ah niu had been beaten up in the hospital before, and would not be willing to go again. as we bade uncle long goodbye and walked back to the car, dr. gao asked me what i had learned from the field so far. “it is the first time i have ever seen a patient locked up,” i said, “like those i’ve seen in the news.” dr. gao raised his voice, with a slightly embarrassed smile: “oh dear, please don’t tell my supervisor that there are patients being locked up here! what you saw does not count; it only counts when the person’s hands and feet are tied.” i was struck by his definition of confinement, but dr. gao shifted gears: “nowadays people like talking about humanitarianism. whoever is chained needs to be unchained. but think about ah niu. how could he not be locked up?” in the years of fieldwork following this initial experience, i would encounter three more patients locked up at home, all of them looked after by women (a mother or wife). curiously, despite program policies that require cmhps to report and end the confinement, the cmhps in all four cases chose to turn a blind eye. two of them did not raise any concerns at all; the other two (including dr. gao) proposed free hospitalization to caregivers, but did not insist when they refused. why? what can the program’s public denouncement of home confinement and cmhps’ private acquiescence to it tell us about the workings of biopolitical paternalism? in his equivocation about whether uncle long’s action constituted confinement at all, was dr. gao acknowledging a different logic of care and kin relations? the coercive edge of community mental health the discourse of the 686 program situates home confinement as pure coercion resulting from families’ ignorance of, or lack of access to, biomedical care. in reality, the practice is inseparable from the state’s focus on risk management, which can go as far as requiring coercion in certain cases. as dr. gao implied, the high risk of violence that ah niu posed required his confinement, and the home could serve as a space of confinement just as well as the psychiatric hospital. in fact, the home may prove an inevitable choice for most cases, because the neoliberal market economy makes public goods such as free psychiatric beds a scarcity. a district-level community mental health supervisor in nanhua told me that, in 2013, her district had more than 4,700 seriously mentally ill patients but only five free psychiatric beds. because the 686 program aims to protect mentally ill patients from harming the public, cmhps often have to save these precious resources for patients who are extremely poor and violent, who have damaged property or injured people outside their homes. patients confined at home are typically only able to cause damage or injury within their own household. it thus becomes hard to prioritize providing them with free hospitalization. instead, cmhps provide caregivers with medications to help them subdue the patients at home, ensuring risk contained there. by facilitating home confinement, cmhps are facilitating the biopolitical paternalism of the state, especially the coercive edge of population management,7 when the state is not even willing to invest sufficient resources into the task of coercion. in this process, the risk that caregivers face, especially as women or elderly people having to handle strong, sometimes aggressive adults, remains unrecognized and even becomes heightened. biopolitical paternalism conceals its coercive edge partly by celebrating the humanitarian potential and scientific prowess of psychiatry: once moved from the home to the hospital, the patient will supposedly experience miraculous improvement (if not cure) and will be able to live a dignified human life. of course, we now know that the public psychiatric beds to which patients confined at home should be moved may not actually exist. resource shortage aside, the claim of psychiatric efficacy is also questionable. patients whom i have seen confined at home have all undergone repeated hospitalizations, and these experiences have disrupted their life trajectories, rendering their recovery and social participation even more difficult. community mental health practitioners sometimes privately agree with caregivers that another round of hospitalization would not help much. meanwhile, cmhps tend to see those cases as among the few that will inevitably degenerate, either because they were not treated early or systematically enough, or because they are simply unlucky. these interpretations uphold the discursive supremacy of psychiatry while marking certain patients as irredeemable, people who should just be left at home. however much the state tries to conceal this situation, caregivers are acutely aware that their everyday labor to look after patients—whether through confinement or not—is defined precisely as the public responsibility of managing a risky population that has been outsourced to them. at a community health station, i saw a middle-aged woman complain to her friend that, after looking after her mentally ill husband at home for a few years, she had recently been told by local government officials to get off welfare and to work. her friend, who was also a wife and caregiver, suggested: “well, you can just tell them, ‘my job is to watch over a patient. what if i didn’t do that and he went crazy? what if he ran out and beat people up or even slashed at strangers? believe me, the first person he would attack is you!’” indeed, while they may not see patients from this lens, caregivers sometimes feel the need to strategically emphasize their loved ones’ potential for violence. in so doing, they highlight their contribution to the state’s biopolitical agenda, the deprivation that this supplemental labor brings, and the despair and resentment they feel. compassion and the unbearable burden of suffering when it is made available, the free inpatient stay typically lasts only up to three months. even though it may give them respite, some caregivers hesitate to take the opportunity, in part because they fear patients will retaliate after discharge. besides this concern for themselves, these caregivers also fear for patients’ feelings and well-being. in my interviews, the caregivers who choose to keep patients at home—whether or not under lock or in restraints—tend to use the phrase cannot bear (buren) to explain their decision. like uncle long, they know from the past that their mentally ill relatives would not only fail to benefit but might well suffer from the experience of inpatient stay. they are intensely uncomfortable with aspects of institutionalization, such as the crowded ward, the physical discomfort, the staff’s neglect, possible bullying from other patients, and so on. “my heart ached when i saw him/her [the patient] go through these,” several caregivers told me; “i can’t bear seeing him/her suffer again.” the term cannot bear has its roots in a gendered history of chinese thought. according to mencius, an early sage of confucianism, humans instinctively cannot bear seeing the suffering of other sentient beings, and such compassion constitutes the starting point of benevolence, a core virtue that undergirds kingly governance (chen 2007). however, as confucianism became institutionalized and adapted into the framework of a gendered and hierarchical order, the ethical sentiment of “cannot bear” or compassion became feminized and devalued. by the twelfth century, “womanly/motherly benevolence” had become associated with the “inability to bear small things” and “inability to bear [the discomfort resulting from] love/compassion” (x. zhu 2013). these associations define the discomfort unbearable to mothers, such as children’s growing pains, as the minor and necessary cost of realizing greater goals and principles. motherly compassion is therefore viewed as a potential weakness that should be reined in by fatherly endurance and discipline. today, the historically gendered discourse of “cannot bear” continues to shape different parties’ approaches to coercion and compassion. by using the term cannot bear, caregivers convey their discomfort with the coercive aspect of hospital treatment and the suffering it produces; implicitly, this constructs their practices at home as less coercive and more compassionate. meanwhile, especially in public discussions, health professionals often criticize caregivers who express unease with hospitalization as “sentimental,” “weak,” and “feminine,” even when said caregivers are men. from the professionals’ perspective, the caregivers’ womanly (or womanlike) compassion prevents them from seeing how coercion ultimately serves the biomedical vision of care—however remote that is—and the biopolitical task of population management. therefore, as the maternal labor reveals its compassionate nature and distinguishes itself from psychiatric coercion, biopolitical paternalism discursively disparages it so as to maintain its own caring image. this despite the fact that in practice, neoliberal social policies rely very much on caregivers’ refusal to use hospitalization in preference for managing patients at home. through these entangled readings of “cannot bear,” compassion becomes reinforced as maternal and reduced as a supplement—as a diminished but essential component—of biopolitical paternalism. home confinement, of course, is not without its burden. my fieldwork shows that in households where patients are locked up, exposure to their suffering is immediate, constant, and substantial. in some cases, the locked room is inside the household, so that the smell of the patient’s unwashed body and excrement permeate the entire house. in other cases, the patient’s room is separated from the main domicile, but family members remain within earshot of the patient’s screams and sighs. if caregivers cannot bear the discomfort of letting their loved ones suffer in the hospital, how can they bear the emotional and practical burden of keeping patients at home and witnessing the overwhelming suffering? the answer is this: these supposedly “sentimentally weak” women (and men) bear the burden through extreme personal effort to alleviate as much of the patient’s suffering as possible. every day, they pay close attention to patients and send materials into the locked room to meet patients’ needs: they serve meals three times a day, often including patients’ favorite dishes; they set up water hoses and other cleaning equipment inside the room for patients’ sanitation; and as we have seen in ah niu’s case, they sometimes provide patients with entertainment devices despite the family’s poverty. these processes of care are fraught, especially since the externally imposed task of risk containment leaves caregivers to handle patients’ potential aggression without public support. because patients can be calm for a while and suddenly destroy things that caregivers take great pains to provide, caregivers have to constantly adjust the amount of material goods and freedom they should—or can afford to—give to patients. each time they withhold an item or keep a door shut, they regret the contraction of the patient’s world, while also feeling helpless and choiceless in having to make that decision. these emotionally and ethically difficult decisions add to the burden quietly borne by caregivers. as we have learned, the 686 program sees patients primarily as sources of potential violence who need to be cured, or at least well-managed, before being recognized as proper humans and reintegrated into society. in contrast, even in the direst circumstances, caregivers tend to see patients as able to engage and not permanently violent. they try hard to connect to patients, paying close attention to signs of kindred recognition even when patients show aggression or refuse to communicate. in one household, a woman told me that her mentally ill husband had beaten up everyone who came near his cage, except for his young daughter. in another household, the mother told me that when her mentally ill son once tried to poke her hand with the cigarette she had just given him, she scolded him, threatening not to give him cigarettes anymore. “he stopped, and doesn’t do that again. what a kid,” the mother said with a shrug and a smile. in those moments, at least, caregivers see themselves or other family members as being taken into patients’ hearts and participating intrinsically in patients’ existence (sahlins 2011). they interpret changes in patients’ behavior, aggressive or otherwise, as emerging from kin relations and expressing kindred affects. this familial and deeply human connection marks the starting point, and the reward, of caregivers’ compassionate engagement. the suffering that families endure also becomes an emotional burden for cmhps, but their responses differ. when dr. gao drew back from ah niu’s room and refused to enter uncle long’s house, he obviously felt disturbed by the possibility of seeing the miseries of both the patient behind bars and the mother on the deathbed. yet his job did not enable him to alleviate the suffering that the neoliberal health and welfare policies had wrought on long’s family. in fact, it probably perpetuated the suffering by demanding that families contain high-risk patients while giving them little support. meanwhile, in equivocating about whether uncle long’s arrangements even constituted confinement, he might have tacitly acknowledged the compassionate care happening inside the household, care that went beyond the capacity or imagination of community mental health, and that made life more bearable for patients, however slightly. yet as he turned away from the scenes of suffering, not bearing the burden alongside the caregiver, he helped reinscribe the public image of a powerful, caring father state and the program’s mission of population management, while leaving the task of coercion and the practice of compassion to the privatized and deprived space called home. conclusion in the formation of biopolitical paternalism, as evinced in the discursive and institutional arrangements of the 686 program, care is defined biomedically as symptom control and elimination, and it is emphasized for the purpose of maintaining social order and public security. the state fashions itself as a caring father by intervening in home confinement and developing services for the general patient population. it then outsources most responsibilities for patient care and management to families, expecting caregivers to embody and smoothly enact a set of paternalistic powers and authority as it does, to have no need for coercion or deception. in everyday practice, however, caregivers may indeed resort to covert medication and even home confinement. this is partly because as women and elderly people, they have to respond to public demands of patient management from a position of vulnerability rather than of paternalistic vigor. meanwhile, as they listen to patients’ cries and sighs, as they hesitate to discuss the diagnosis with patients, to demand medication compliance, or to seek help through hospitalization, these caregivers also quietly question biopolitical paternalism, pointing to its limits of care—in terms of both resource shortage and the inability to address patients’ needs—as well as its hidden edge of coercion. by hiding acts of medication and keeping patients at home, they seek to alleviate patients’ suffering—including that produced by psychiatric coercion—and to nourish lifeworlds unrecognized by the biomedical order. such is a maternal labor of compassion. in an attempt to avoid the ethical and ontological challenges posed by these maternal practices, psychiatric discourse publicly dismisses or decries them, as if they were completely external and counterproductive to the vision of community mental health. in reality, however, the neoliberal social policies that privatize care and limit the provision of public goods not only treat these practices as acceptable but also make them necessary for risk management and containment. the pressure that cmhps consequently exert on caregivers, as well as the psychopharmaceuticals that the program provides, help sustain these practices. in derrida’s (1997, 145) terms, caregivers’ maternal practices are rendered supplemental to biopolitical paternalism as a “subaltern instance” or even “negativity of evil.” yet as they “transgress and at the same time respect the interdict” (derrida 1997, 155) of the primary, these maternal supplements work to fulfill the task of biopolitical paternalism precisely by overcoming the inadequacies it has and repairing the injuries it makes. as such, they are indispensable to our understanding of biopolitical paternalism. in china, many other members of the population besides people with smis are deemed too immature, dangerous, or vulnerable to govern themselves, threatening the body politic (cho 2013). with the combination of a growing security apparatus and the withdrawal and limited resurrection of public welfare, the post-socialist state may well highlight paternalistic management of these groups and then relegate it to devalued, precarious, and female labor. throughout the world, biomedicalized techniques of rule continue to redefine individual well-being and population security, and neoliberal economic policies continue to transfer responsibilities to achieve these new ideals away from the state. as such, many projects of governance have turned to private paternalistic strategies, especially everyday techniques of direction, instruction, and surveillance (e.g., soss, fording, and schram 2011; shever 2013). in light of our findings, we may ask how these projects in and beyond china mobilize kinship metaphors or practices, and how they define and distribute responsibilities for population management. meanwhile, given the tenuous positions of paternalism’s agents—be they parents, case managers, or street-level bureaucrats—and given their intimate exposure to their charges’ vulnerability, we should also ask whether they may quietly engage in any further supplemental practices, how those practices are gendered, and what kinds of subjects and relations they nurture. in closing, it is important to note that unearthing maternal supplements does not mean glorifying or romanticizing them. the caregivers involved in home confinement or covert medication would be the first to refuse any romanticization. after all, although such practices might make the life of the patient a bit more bearable, they are still performed under the severe pressure of risk management and coercion by the state. doing supplemental labor when the state turns away also generates much despair and resentment. still, by considering these supplemental practices with sympathy rather than contempt, we can start to address the ills of biopolitical paternalism and transform community governance. since 2015, the 686 program has developed some new services, such as providing smi patients with vocational rehabilitation training and subsidizing caregivers for their labor in monitoring patients. more research is needed to explore whether these new developments re-entrench the program’s existing practices and problems or whether they open up new horizons for community mental health work. in general, instead of restricting the vision of care and putting all the responsibility on family members, we should learn from their insights and vulnerability about what works, use this understanding to help redesign the task of mental health care, and distribute the task more equitably among wider social circles. instead of trying to burnish the state’s image with limited resources, we should reform pay for services, increase public investments, and build a team of grassroots service providers dedicated not to rationing support or managing people, but to working with individuals and families on their own terms. abstract this article examines how the community mental health program run by the chinese state conceptualizes, mobilizes, and molds the family. my fieldwork shows that, on the one hand, the program defines care biomedically and connects it to managing security risks in the population. the state fashions itself as paternal while displacing most responsibilities for patient care and management onto the supposedly authoritative families. on the other hand, caregivers—mostly women and the elderly—may resort to practices publicly denounced but privately enabled by the program, such as covert medication and home confinement. they do so not only to manage patients from a position of vulnerability and deprivation but also to compassionately engage with patients’ suffering and non-medical desires. these two entangled kinship correlates of state power, which i call “biopolitical paternalism” and its “maternal supplements,” prove critical for understanding the work of community governance in china and beyond. [care; biopolitics; paternalism; family; mental health; community governance; china] notes acknowledgments initial writing of this article was supported by the doctoral fellowship of the chiang ching-kuo foundation for international scholarly exchange. comments on drafts were generously provided by amy borovoy, judith farquhar, gillian feeley-harnik, donald lopez, elizabeth roberts, andrew shryock, 2016–2017 junior fellows of the michigan society of fellows, participants of the sociocultural workshop at the department of anthropology, university of michigan, on october 26, 2017, and participants of the 2018 madness afield workshop at the university of california, irvine. i also thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of cultural anthropology for their remarks on the submitted and revised versions of this piece. 1. among the media reports that feature home confinement and psychiatric unlocking, i choose to use the new york times article because it concisely invokes several key themes (the patient’s violence, the caregiver’s helplessness, and the doctor’s heroic benevolence) and because the peking university mental health institute serves as the leading institution of the 686 program. 2. in this article, i follow the customs of the field and use the word patient. this is not an endorsement of psychiatric knowledge. rather, the term allows me to pay attention to the discursive construction of persons labeled as such and the experiences that they have as a result of this construction. 3. nanhua is a pseudonym, as are the names of my fieldwork interlocutors here. 4. because these reports on home confinement—international or domestic—often end with psychiatrists going in and unlocking the patients, or appealing for government-funded medical intervention, they were likely to be orchestrated by the psychiatrists themselves or by allied policymakers. 5. the gendered language is intentional here, because most patients confined at home are depicted as 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association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.09 making kin from gold: dowry, gender, and indian labor migration to the gulf cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 435-461, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.04 making kin from gold: dowry, gender, and indian labor migration to the gulf andrea wright william & mary https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9685-7348 i first met yogesh, a young man from tamil nadu, india, in 2009, when he was living in sharjah, in the united arab emirates (uae). at that time, he was working at a factory that built parts for oil rigs, and i was conducting ethnographic fieldwork on indian labor migration to the arabic-speaking countries of the arabian/persian gulf.1 yogesh is one of the millions of men from india who work in the gulf (moia 2013). the reasons for the large numbers of indians in the gulf’s oil industry include british colonial labor mobilities, the fact that few gulf nationals work in the industry, and the oil industry’s need for workers willing to travel abroad alone to work on fixed-term (usually oneto two-year) projects. like many of the men with whom i work, yogesh came from a rural, economically depressed part of india, where his father and two brothers farmed a small plot of land. when yogesh finished high school, his parents insisted that he take a job through a cousin who also worked in the uae to pay for his sister’s marriage and to contribute to household expenses. yogesh had been working in the gulf for about three years when i met him, and he had no plans for moving permanently back to india, although that was what he eventually wished to do. during the week of eid al-adha, yogesh and his friends allowed me to accompany them as they ran errands and made the most of their vacation time. as we traveled through dubai, our group visited outlet stores and everyone, with the exception of yogesh, took advantage of the sales and bought clothing, shoes, trinkets, and snacks. yogesh did not shop with us because he was saving his money for the gold souk. he told me repeatedly that his “primary obligation” was his sister’s marriage. to help his sister marry, he told me, he needed to buy gold. this gold would be a gift from his family to his sister’s fiancé’s family at the time of marriage. while yogesh did not use the word dowry, anthropologists use the term to describe gifts given by the bride’s family to the groom’s family at the time of marriage. it was november when yogesh and i visited the gold souk, and the weather was hot and humid. despite the heat, yogesh did not want to shop for gold in the air-conditioned mall. the stores in the mall were largely empty due to the global financial downturn in 2008, and they were advertising sales on the local television. but the mall felt uncomfortable for yogesh, because the workforce of the arabic-speaking gulf is defined by a racialized labor hierarchy in which south asian laborers fall near the bottom (gardner 2010; vora and koch 2015). as a result, indian workers face social discrimination and feel under scrutiny in many public spaces. yogesh, similar to other indian working-class men, told me that he perceived patrons and mall employees as unwelcoming. instead, yogesh and i ventured into the gold souk in deira, the historic commercial center of dubai which houses more than three hundred gold retailers. as we walked, yogesh looked for a shop with the lowest gold prices. finally, he decided on a little stall with some design pieces, but mostly ropes of gold. yogesh was reluctant to spend money on jewelry design as he felt unsure as to what styles his sister preferred, and he did not want to waste money. in the little stall we entered, we heard tamil, malayalam, urdu, and hindi being spoken by south asian workers buying gold to take home to their wives, sisters, and mothers. after much deliberation, yogesh chose a plain chain; its price was determined by weight. yogesh expressed worry about the amount of gold that his family asked him to bring home. on his annual trips to india, he spent more than three-quarters of his salary buying gold to accumulate for his sister’s dowry. he had wanted to buy his mother some gold, but she instructed him to focus only on getting gold for his sister’s wedding. he disliked speaking to his sister on the phone, he told me, because his sister was “mera dimaag ko kha rahi hai,”2 or “eating my brain,” by making demands about the quantity of gold she wanted him to buy that seemed impossible for him to meet. yogesh attempted to satisfy his family’s requests by living frugally, which, he told me, included sharing a one-bedroom apartment with eight men and refraining from buying unneeded items. he said he felt “phans gaya,” stuck or trapped, in the uae and forced to spend all his money buying gold. an especially large amount of gold was needed because his sister wanted to marry a man who worked in information technology (it) and lived in australia. this marriage would allow an upward mobility for his family impossible without his uae income. yogesh felt obliged to provide gold for his sister’s dowry, but he also felt he needed to provide money to support his family. after buying gold and paying for his daily needs, yogesh sent the remainder of his paycheck to his father to use for household expenses. the family yogesh helped support included not only his sister and his parents but also his brothers, his brothers’ wives, and his brothers’ children. this type of family organization, called a joint family, is based on the practice of patrilocal social organization and involves a group of adult male joint heirs and these males’ dependents living together. joint families, considered by many indians to be the ideal family structure, are found among christians, muslims, and hindus throughout india (lal 2011, 574). yogesh is one of the hundreds of workers and their families i have met since 2008 as i have conducted ethnographic research in india and the united arab emirates. most laborers come from rural areas in india. many poor indian families see transnational migration as a means of improving their living standards. while historically many indian migrants were from southern india, today the majority of migrants come from northern indian states, which are the most reliant on agriculture and have higher unemployment and underemployment rates (moia 2013; plfs 2019, a-141). most migrants tell me their family farms are smaller than an acre in size and that their job options are either to migrate or to work locally as casual laborers. casual laborers earn, on average, between usd 2 and usd 3 per day (nss 2014, a-18-19, 120). in interviews, employees at recruiting agencies, which help companies hire workers for projects outside of india, told me they believe that as an area benefits economically from the inflow of remittances, the education level throughout the community increases and residents of that area are no longer willing to migrate for low-wage, menial labor positions. as a result, companies recruit from agricultural areas in poor states to fill these positions. from the perspective of migrants, i am often told that working in the gulf pays six to ten times more than a job in india. transnational labor migration illuminates how global economic disparities and social inequalities impact individuals and communities (holmes 2013; albahari 2015; de león 2015). while economic necessity informs indian migration to the gulf, migrants indicate that their work abroad is not fully explicable as a simple economic calculus. indian labor migration to the gulf may be motivated by gendered kinship obligations; positive attitudes toward migration that raise the status of those who migrate (ali 2007; leonard 2007); religious narratives linking the middle east with a supposedly purer islam (hansen 2001); discrimination and violence in india against muslims, dalits, and other minorities (wright 2015); and recruiting processes that may rely on workers’ personal networks (gardner 2012). while social practices and structural inequalities clearly motivate migration, migration also influences social practices. as men purchase gold for their sisters’ and daughters’ marriages, indian migrants and their families make sense of labor migration. migrants and their families are not, and do not see themselves as, passive victims of larger forces. examining the kinship practices of migrant laborers and historically situating these practices makes clear that capitalism creates “value from non-capitalist value regimes” and depends on “noncapitalist elements” (tsing 2015, 128, 66), and that local practices and value systems shape global capitalism (upadhya 2016). by focusing on kinship obligations and gendered roles within families, this article takes up a case in which kinship motivates migration and migration, in turn, influences kinship practices by providing opportunities to reshape kinship ties and express gendered roles within families. gender and kinship are inextricably imbricated: “kinship is a system of categories” given form by sex and gender relations (rubin 1975, 169–77), and gender is dynamic, relational, and given context through kinship (carsten 2004, 75). sylvia yanagisako and jane collier (1987) argue that when anthropologists focus on procreation and birth in analyzing kinship, they often assume a natural dichotomy between men and women, males and females. instead, yanagisako and collier (1987, 15; emphasis original) call for anthropologists to examine the “the social and cultural processes that cause men and women to appear different from each other.” the gift of gold and gold’s position as a kinship substance demonstrate how kinship and gender are defined, understood, and enacted within indian migrant families in the gulf. an analysis of gold as a kinship substance demonstrates how familial relations and gendered roles shape kinship practices in contexts other than procreation and birth. this article examines how gold bought by indian migrants working in the gulf becomes a kinship substance that maintains family relations and informs gendered labor. to understand the transmogrification of gold from commodity to kinship substance, this article first explores contemporary perceptions of dowry in india and the role of substances in indian kinship. it then historically situates dowries and gendered labor practices and examines the role colonial capitalism and state policies played in shaping kinship practices, illuminating how kinship and economics were, and continue to be, mutually constituting. in the contemporary moment the gift of gold is used to improve a family’s status, maintain and shape natal family relations, and fulfill gendered kinship obligations. often, migrants find that accumulating gold for marriages offers a way to demonstrate they are good sons and brothers, and migrants who do not buy gold for marriages are often viewed negatively by their peers. as sons contribute to their patrilineal joint families, their work abroad is enabled by their wives, who help their husbands fulfill kinship obligations by caring for their husbands’ aging parents. as women cook for their in-laws, the food they prepare, like the gold their husbands buy, operates as a kinship substance, but wives often receive little recognition for their kin work. in this context of transnational labor migration, gold provides a way for migrants and their families to shape and maintain kinship relations and fulfill gendered roles within their families. dowry and indian kinship the pressure that yogesh felt to buy gold for his sister’s wedding was not unique to gulf migrants, despite the fact that dowry is a contested practice. in india, dowry is technically illegal and described regularly in the indian news as a “social evil.” as a result, many families deny giving or asking for dowry, but still engage in large expenditures of gifts from the bride’s family to the groom’s family, including the gold focused on here. to acquire these gifts, families go to great lengths, including, in extreme cases, selling a kidney (cohen 2011, 139). some middleand upper-class indians see dowry as a traditional practice that continues despite the 1961 dowry prohibition act, which made it illegal, and many assume the practice will change with modernization (rahman 2001; cohen 2002; lamb 2013). indians who see dowry as a social evil most often cite its negative impacts on women. these negative impacts are made clear in an amendment to the act in 1984, which strove to offer greater protection to women by explicitly making dowry demands and dowry harassment illegal. in the present, anthropologists have found that dowry contributes to and reinforces indian preferences for sons, skewed gender demographics, and the higher value placed on male children (bloch and rao 2002; kowalski 2016). in addition, dowry is strongly associated with violence against women, and dowry demands may escalate to domestic violence and murder (kumar 1993, 116; oldenburg 2002). despite these negative impacts, in my conversations with yogesh and other migrants, i was never told that giving a dowry is illegal in india, nor was dowry discussed as a reason for the poor treatment of women. nonetheless, negative depictions of dowry by indian newspapers or politicians may have influenced how migrants describe the practice. notably, migrants did not regularly use the word dowry (nor jahez/dahej in urdu/hindi). rather, men told me they worked in the gulf to “buy gold for their sisters’ (or daughters’) marriages” or to “help their sisters marry.” in framing their reason for working in the gulf as “buying gold,” they describe buying gold for their sisters and daughters as a practice that connects the natal family and extends those relations as women marry. when pandeya, a hindu from the state of bihar, narrated his life story to me, he stressed the importance of kinship practices and gendered obligations in his choice to migrate. pandeya moved to the gulf in his mid-twenties. he was hired as a manual laborer and, after decades, earned a promotion to a position as a low-level supervisor on an oil project. when i met pandeya, his parents had passed away, and he, with his wife, padma, lived in mumbai, india. in mumbai, pandeya had used the connections and skills he had developed in the gulf to find work at a recruiting agency. pandeya told me that when he was a young man, his father had farmed a small plot of land, but this land did not produce enough money to support his large family, which included pandeya, his parents, and his seven sisters. during the first decade that pandeya worked in the gulf, he focused on helping provide dowries for his seven sisters. like many of the men i interviewed, pandeya felt it was his obligation to help his sisters marry before he did; as a result, pandeya did not marry until his mid-thirties. when i asked pandeya what he provided for his sisters’ dowries, he stressed the importance of gold. “in north indian style of marriage, of course, the gold is an important item for the marriage.” as i took notes, pandeya, who had learnt english while working in the gulf, looked over my shoulder and offered corrections, insisting that i capitalize “the gold” to indicate its importance. after he was satisfied with my transcription, he continued: “but it is not as important as it’s emphasized in south india. say if it is 50 grams in north, then it would be 500 grams in south indian marriage. south indians are more fascinated towards gold. however, one thing is true in all indians’ marriage—i.e., dowry—which a girl has to carry to [her] in-laws place.” this conversation exemplifies that dowry, also capitalized at pandeya’s direction, is given from a bride’s family to the groom’s family at marriage. many indians consider these gifts to be unidirectional: the bride’s family gives a dowry and the groom’s family gives no return gifts (trautmann 1981, 26–27, 277–85). often, a woman’s ties and obligations to her natal family are thought to be severed when she, with her dowry, moves to her husband’s home (lamb 2000; xiang 2005). however, as migrants acquire gold in the gulf for their daughters’ or sisters’ marriages, the gift of gold maintains natal family relationships and informs ongoing kinship practices. it is in this sense that i view gold as a kinship substance. when anthropologists discuss kinship substances, they often focus on bodily substances, such as blood, semen, and breastmilk, and on how these substances are mobilized in the “symbolic constitution of social relations” (sahlins 2013, 16). in david m. schneider’s (1980) analysis of american folk theories of kinship, kinship is organized by a dichotomy between substance and code of conduct, in which “substance” refers to a naturalized, biologized bond of relatedness represented as blood, or a biogenetic contribution of each parent, whereas relatedness by “code of conduct” is “only” a matter of cultural convention. subsequent anthropologists have shown how the “seemingly unproblematic distinction” between (fixed) nature and (malleable) culture that underlies the substance/code distinction in american culture obfuscates the interconnectedness of people, socioeconomic practices, and the environment (feeley-harnik 1999; carsten 2004, 114, 2011; shryock 2013). kathryn a. mariner’s (2019) recent work on adoption in the united states, for example, demonstrates how materials such as paperwork merge substance and code in american understandings of kinship. in folk theories of indian kinship, by contrast, substance and code are more explicitly imbricated in one another since kinship substances are understood as malleable, not biologically determined or fixed. people develop relatedness through intimate interactions, including breastfeeding, sex, and eating, during which organic substances, like breastmilk, semen, and food, are shared (lamb 2000). anthropologists approach these organic substances as cultural phenomena that people use to define both the closeness of individual relations and larger social hierarchies (trawick 1990; daniel 1996; busby 1997). inorganic matter may also be used as a kinship substance, and indian migrant laborers working in the gulf draw on gold to reinforce, modify, and extend kinship relations. as men like pandeya work in the gulf and use their incomes to purchase gold for their daughters’ and/or sisters’ marriages, they strengthen natal family ties and fulfill gendered family obligations. colonial capitalism and gendered labor although many indians tend to regard dowry as traditional, a historic examination of gold and migration reveals how colonial capitalism and state laws have significantly influenced indian dowry practices, including the central role of gold in dowries. during the british colonial period, the enactment of laws, the commodification of labor, and the formation of the market society contributed to shifting social and familial landscapes (polanyi 1957; graeber 2009; mathew 2016). dowry is one practice impacted as the british colonial government in india altered property rights to more effectively collect taxes. before the implementation of colonial tax laws, dowry often took the form of immovable assets such as land, and this property was considered women’s own (stridhan). as concepts around property changed, dowry increasingly took the form of moveable assets, such as gold. the conversion of property to movable capital allowed for the control of capital to move easily from a woman’s father to her husband or parents-in-law, and women no longer held control of this property (oldenburg 2002, 148). the taxation of dowry and the process of state building influenced how gold as part of the dowry became, over time, a central aspect of contemporary indian kinship, while appearing to be a fixed and timeless tradition. gold’s importance relates not only to colonial taxation but also to historic circulations in the arabian sea. as yogesh bought gold and we wandered through the gold souk, he was participating in these circulations. prior to independence in 1947, india was one of the main exporters of gold in the world. post-independence, gold smuggling constituted a lucrative endeavor for merchants in the gulf, as the indian government charged duties on its import and placed restrictions on its export (records of the emirates 1990, 841–46). gold smuggling continued until the early 1990s, when the liberalization of india’s economy included the lifting of both trade restrictions and custom duties (ali 2010, 16–19). today, indian gold merchants in dubai characterize the city as a “golden frontier” of india. this frontier, like changes to private property, is gendered, and neha vora (2013, 92–93) demonstrates that gold merchants celebrate dubai’s “freedoms” that are rooted in “illicit maritime masculine trade.” as gold, colonial officials, and traders circulated through the arabian sea, indian workers also traversed the area. indian laborers began working at gulf oil projects in 1908, with the discovery of oil in persia (today iran). to protect british oil interests in the gulf, the british administration, in conjunction with oil companies, re-instituted the system once used to move indian indentured workers to plantations in the british empire to move indian workers to the oilfields (wright 2021). throughout the twentieth century, oil companies wanted cheap and easily replaceable labor, and, therefore, the home places of indians who migrate to the gulf have expanded. oil construction projects, in particular, require large numbers of workers who are willing to leave their families for one or two years at a time. in the mid-twentieth century, oil projects were the site of political unrest and imperial competition. during the 1960s, strikes by khalījī, or gulf arab, workers proved costly, and officials and oil company managers characterized these strikes as threats to both state and corporate security. in response, oil companies decided to preferentially hire south asian workers, because they believed those workers more loyal to the british. they could also be fired without political or economic consequences (wright 2020). today, migrants make up a sizable percentage of the gulf’s population. in dubai, for example, expatriates comprise about 80 percent of the population, and there are more indians than any other nationality living in the emirate (pasha 1999; leonard 2007; colton 2010; castles, de haas, and miller 2013). about 20 percent of the indian workforce in the uae are women, usually employed as domestic workers (prakash, zachariah, and rajan 2004, 2229). domestic work does not pay as well as jobs in the oil industry. in addition, domestic workers in the gulf, as in much of the world, work unregulated hours and are at higher risk of experiencing physical and verbal abuse (mahdavi 2011, 126). one key reason uneducated indian women are unable to find work outside of the domestic sector derives from current emigration restrictions, which build on colonial laws and nationalist discourses. during the colonial period, nationalist and anticolonial writers positioned women’s work as ideally located in the home, with an emphasis on the (re)production of future citizens (rajwade 1938, 83). in nationalist texts, indian women were discursively situated in the private sphere and valorized for “remain[ing] essentially unwesternized,” thereby becoming emblematic of tradition and metonymically representative of the indian nation (minault 1982; chatterjee 1989; sangari and vaid 1999; metcalf 2002). laws enacted by the postcolonial indian state reinforced the association between women and the home. after independence, citizenship provisions drew on colonial law and the legal doctrine of coverture to establish citizenship by domicile and birth. women’s citizenship became legally dependent on their fathers’ or husbands’ domicile and birthplace (zamindar 2007; grapevine 2015). the close association of women, the home, and india continues, and indian women working in the it industry abroad cultivate a “respectable femininity” that they considered emblematically indian through their balance of work and home life (radhakrishnan 2011). today, men and women must meet different criteria to emigrate for work. for example, the emigration act of 1983 makes it illegal for a woman under thirty years of age to emigrate to work in the gulf if she has not passed tenth standard in school. government officials responsible for overseeing the implementation of the emigration act argue that these restrictions protect the “most vulnerable” indians from trafficking, as well as safeguarding india’s reputation abroad (wright 2018). as a result, women over thirty who hope to migrate need to obtain a no objection certificate, and this certificate must be signed by their husband or father. furthermore, those who hire maids to work outside of india must be vouched for by an indian national. laws restricting women’s emigration more than men’s, and the discursive location of women’s labor within the home, mean that women often rely on their male relatives for their dowries. the gendered exclusion of socially reproductive work from wage labor occurs globally, and scholars have demonstrated the need to attend to “points of gendered contradiction and conflict” as we approach work (ehrenreich and russell hochschild 2002; weeks 2011; ahmad 2012, 23, 39–40). by considering how gender, kinship, and labor are historically situated within the expansion of capital as it seeks out new revenues in the form of taxes, commodifies labor, and creates market societies, we are able to see that dowry, something considered traditional in an indian setting, is actually shaped by liberalization, contemporary statecraft, and transnational migration. attention to the meaning of gold for dowries and gendered labor highlights these interconnections. the gift of dowry as i began my fieldwork, my understanding of dowry was influenced by my conversations with women’s rights advocates in india. i had assumed that in cases like yogesh’s family, because his sister wanted to marry a well-educated young man who lived in australia, the fiancé’s family would not ask for a dowry. yet contrary to my expectations, migration and increased participation in transnational, neoliberal economies do not decrease the practice of giving a dowry, but, rather, have the reverse effect. although most men do not explicitly use the term dowry and instead use phrases such as “buying gold to help their sisters marry,” all migrants stressed that their sisters and/or daughters need to take gold with them when they move to their in-laws’ homes. ramchandra, a lower-caste farmer’s son from uttar pradesh, began working in the gulf when he was twenty years old after “dropping out of school” and spending years unable to find work in india. in the gulf, he said, he could “find” more money—money needed because he had “two sisters and no money in india.” as he explained, “helping his sisters marry” was his “first responsibility.” when i asked ramchandra what was needed for his sisters to marry, he was shocked that i would not know. after staring for a moment, ramchandra said, simply, “gold.” like other migrants with whom i spoke, ramchandra was involved neither in negotiating his sisters’ marriages nor in deciding what other gifts his sisters would bring to their in-laws’ houses. these arrangements, ramchandra and others told me, are done by family members in india and, as migrants in the gulf, their duty is to buy gold for these marriages. now, ramchandra’s sisters are married, and he sends money for his father to build a pucca house, or a house made of concrete and bricks, an expense often taken on by a family before a son’s marriage to ensure a “good match.”3 while ramchandra married before he began building his family’s pucca house, other migrants told me they were building such houses in preparation for their own marriages. building a pucca house, they said, would help their parents find them “good” wives. when i asked what makes a woman a good wife, migrants often described a woman’s ability to look after or care for the home, children, and parents; a woman’s religious piety; and a wife’s family’s economic status. men never discussed with me the amount of dowry they anticipated their wives would bring, and, if i tried to ask, they told me that their parents arrange such matters. nonetheless, anthropological studies of indian transnational migration suggest that this type of migration drives increasingly large dowries. men working in it, in particular, have seen the largest increase in the amount of dowry they are able to obtain from a bride’s family, in part due to their potential to migrate to australia, the united kingdom, or the united states for work (van der veer 2005, 278). xiang biao’s (2005, 370; 2011, 33, 36) work on indian it workers in australia demonstrates that men feel compelled to give as much dowry as possible for their daughters’ or sisters’ marriages to maintain their families’ status and free their families from the “burden” of the daughter. xiang (2005, 369) approaches dowry as an institution, and this approach makes clear how dowry is informed by an economic calculation and its close relationship to other social institutions, such as education.4 in xiang’s and other anthropological studies, the importance of dowry is considered within the context of marriage and building relationships between families. in contrast, examining how men acquire gold for their daughters’ and sisters’ marriages demonstrates how gold operates within the natal family as both gift and kinship substance. the value of this gift exceeds its financial value, and migrants and their families represent dowry as a gift that maintains and recreates kinship ties and gendered roles. the value of gold shabana, an indian muslim woman from tamil nadu, described to me the multiple values dowry holds for a family. shabana’s husband, brother, and father work in the gulf, and she lives with her two sons and her husband’s parents. while much of her day revolves around caring for her children and in-laws and overseeing the household’s daily tasks, shabana also maintains close ties to her natal family and regularly visits her sisters and mother. in the summer of 2011, shabana and i chatted frequently, and most of our conversations included a discussion of gold’s price. at that time, the u.s. and european stock markets were volatile, and the price of gold was consistently increasing. while i had known shabana since 2009, we had never before discussed the price of gold. her new interest, shabana explained, came from her younger sister asma’s marriage preparations. one day, in a conversation with her friends, shabana asked, “why is gold increasing at a skyrocketing pace? what has gold rates to do with u.s. dollar or oil? or is there no gold in the gold mines?” sighing, she said that the increased prices “make people’s life more miserable than it already is.” shabana’s friends commiserated with her and offered their perspectives on the gold market. one friend explained that gold is expensive because “people don’t trust any commodity but gold; shares on the stock market are rubbish.” another friend made the case that indians played a direct role in gold’s price, saying, “maybe if mallus [malayalam speakers from the state of kerala] and gujjus [people from the state of gujarat] stop buying so much it will probably drop.” another friend also commented on this link between indian wedding practices and gold’s price, with the conjecture that gold was so expensive because “more and more mallus are getting married.” both kerala and gujarat are indian states known for their trading and have a visible presence in the gulf, often as middleand upper-class workers. the (joking) assumption in the conversation was that the wealthy from these indian states were getting married in higher numbers and therefore driving up the price of gold. in shabana’s conversation with her friends, gold was explicitly discussed as a commodity, with its market price a concern. as many anthropologists have demonstrated, the value of a commodity is not rooted in what an individual will pay for that particular commodity. rather, the value is a “momentary instantiation of coagulation out of an open, dynamic, and interactive process” involving alienation, wage labor, and historical context (pedersen 2013, 19; see also, e.g., coronil 1997; graeber 2001, 31–32). while the price of gold certainly held importance to shabana, as we continued to discuss asma’s dowry, it became clear that giving gold for a dowry was valued for its expression of kinship ties as well as its economic value. colonial capitalism played a key role in gold’s emergence as a central component of dowry. in addition, indian migrants and their families often note that gold bought in the gulf is purer than gold bought in india (even if this does not empirically hold true) and that they see gold as an item that retains its value over time. as shabana describes below, she believes indians trust gold more than money, because money fluctuates in value according to the global markets, but gold’s value remains stable. it is this stability and purity that contributes to gold’s importance in indian kinship. when discussing gold’s importance for asma’s dowry, shabana described gold as a gift that situates one’s family within a community, maintains relationships, and expresses care. she told me that her family felt “compelled” to supply a large amount of gold for asma’s dowry because her family worked in the gulf. through providing a large dowry of gold for asma’s wedding, the family was attempting to assert its relatively new class position. this position was further improved by asma’s marriage, like yogesh’s sister’s, to an indian it worker who lived in australia. for both shabana and yogesh, gold’s value went beyond demonstrating their families’ wealth. rather, they saw gold bought in the gulf and given for dowries as a way to uplift women’s natal families. this uplift becomes possible because gold operates as a kinship substance that maintains ties with female kin, as seen in changing gift practices. in a later conversation with shabana and asma, shabana told me her husband was contributing “a handful” of gold for asma’s wedding. because this movement of goods from a husband to his wife’s family differed from descriptions of gifts moving only from the wife’s family to the husband’s family, i asked if this contribution was related to shabana’s mahr, or the gift given from the groom to the bride in muslim marriage (nikah). asma dismissed my question and explained, “dowries are very important in india. for muslims, the rich are expected to give a house, gold, and a car. the poor are only expected to give a car and gold.” in contrast, asma told me, mahr, the groom’s gift to the bride, is a “menial amount. poor indian muslim grooms only give inr 100 (usd 2 in 2011) and the rich give aed 100 (approximately inr 1,400 or usd 27 in 2011).” as our conversation continued, asma clarified that mahr constitutes a religious obligation and that, as a self-described devout muslim, she expected only a small gift from her husband. in contrast, there is no religious obligation for a dowry, and the gold her fiancé’s family expected at the wedding was substantial and openly negotiated. to clarify why gold for asma’s marriage was so important and why her husband was contributing to help asma marry, shabana explained that her husband’s actions were both “practical” and a way to ensure asma’s happiness. asma’s marriage to an it worker living in australia, shabana told me, would mean that both shabana’s natal family and her husband’s family would “rise in status.” simultaneously, the family would be caring for asma by ensuring her husband was a “good match.” masculinity, labor, and gold to understand how gold transmogrifies into a kinship substance, we must think about the value of dowry not in economic terms, but as a gift. sareeta amrute (2016, 166–70), in her study of skilled indian migrants in germany, argues that gifts function as one of the means by which indian middle-class workers abroad represent their work to their families and build communities. in the case of nepalese migration, ina zharkevich (2019) demonstrates that money is particularly useful at expressing and maintaining kinship ties in a context in which sharing food or having other regular contact is absent. following the work of marilyn strathern (1988, 143, 286) in melanesia, anthropologists often argue that the value of the gift is located in social relationships of reciprocal exchange, whereas david graeber (2001, 45) extends nancy d. munn’s (1986, 127) examination of gifts to argue that value emerges in action, including how people represent the importance of their gift giving to themselves. importantly, migrants and their families understand buying gold for dowries as representative of masculinity and familial obligation. as men migrate to work in the gulf, they extend not only the reach but also the geographic scope of their kinship networks. indian migrants maintain and restructure kinship relations by sending remittances and purchasing gold for their sisters’ dowries. examining how migrants represent these gifts provides insight into how people make migration and labor meaningful in ways additional to labor’s economic value. anna lowenhaupt tsing (2015, 121–28) argues that commodities become gifts through a process of translation—a process in which mediators confer on certain commodities “relation-making powers.” this process of translation becomes necessary because of alienation, which tsing (2015, 121) defines as how things (including labor) are made commodities by being “torn from life worlds.” labor alienates people from the product of their labor, their work, themselves, and their community. the kinship practices of indian migrants and their families complicate understandings of alienation as rupture, as migrant labor works simultaneously in multiple value systems. migrants navigate tensions between commodities and gifts through representing the gift of gold as indicative of gendered labor and gendered obligations. for indian migrants, bestowing gifts of gold to their sisters and remittances to their fathers demonstrates that they are “men” within their families and communities. established by fulfilling roles as good brothers and sons, this masculinity provides an alternative to hegemonic representations of adult masculinity in india that are predicated on marriage. in many poor farming communities in india, young men cannot get married because of increasing unemployment and lack of opportunities (chowdhry 2005). in the face of high unemployment, northern indian families may allocate resources to prioritize a son’s employment or marriage at the expense of a daughter’s marriage (jeffrey 2010, 177–78). transnational migration, on the other hand, provides routes through which men may express adult masculinity by being dutiful brothers and sons. in 2010, i met often with ramchandra and his colleagues during their lunch breaks as they worked to build an oil rig in abu dhabi. one day, i ate lunch with a dozen men and, as we talked, they described how they regularly sent money home, as well as purchased gold for their female relatives’ weddings. during the lunch, ramchandra introduced me to mohammed, a young muslim man from northern india, who was new to this crew. when he introduced us, ramchandra said, “voh achchha beta hai,” or “he [mohammed] is a good son.” mohammed responded in english, telling me, “i [am] supporting fully to family” by sending all of his paycheck home, because “[i am] fully devoted to family.” while some workers send money monthly, others told me they send money “every five months because it is a more substantial amount and avoids fees.” workers generally send money using uae exchange, a popular wire-transfer service. migrants buy gold in the souk and then wear it home as chains around their necks to avoid import duties. while they differed in how often they sent money home, my lunch companions agreed that sending this money and taking home gold was their farz or karm, the urdu and hindi words, respectively, for “duty.” by fulfilling this duty, they told me, a man demonstrates he is a good son and dutiful brother. during lunch, one man told me that doing one’s duty and working in the gulf may also lead to a migrant’s family “giving [the migrant] more respect.” this respect manifested in their opinions being sought on topics ranging from family conflicts to household purchases to children’s education. ramchandra, worried that i would not understand, turned to me and told me that working in the gulf “elevated him” in the eyes of his family. this, he said, was due not only to his financial contributions but also because no one else in his family had flown on a plane or traveled far from home. to demonstrate his “elevated” status, ramchandra described how his family had called him the week before to ask his advice before buying a piece of farm equipment. as we talked, my lunch companions described their work as integral to their families, as the household’s relationships and interactions extended from rural villages in india to construction sites in the gulf. despite agreeing on the importance of sending money and buying gold for dowries, my lunch companions did not agree on what percentage of their paycheck they needed to give to their families. as lunch continued, ramchandra and sunil, a hindu also from northern india, became embroiled in a heated debate over this question. ramchandra had been working in the gulf intermittently for more than a decade, and he had recently started listening to a radio show in which the host (an indian living in the uae) encouraged listeners to save their money instead of sending it home. the show resonated with ramchandra, and he had recently opened a personal savings account that no one in his family could access. the reason, ramchandra said, was because “whatever you send, they [your family] upgrade the needs”—meaning that families would spend all the money migrants earned on both necessary and unnecessary items, and ask for increasingly larger amounts of money. this meant, ramchandra told us, that if a migrant did not build his own savings, “when you go back, [you] will have nothing.” he continued by telling us that, of course, personal saving needed to be weighed against family needs. while the show’s host recommended that migrants save for themselves at least 50 percent of their income, ramchandra said he sent home 60 percent, keeping the remaining 40 percent. ramchandra’s discussion of personal savings upset sunil, and he dismissed the radio show. loudly, sunil argued for sending the entirety of one’s paycheck to one’s family, except the money used to buy gold for weddings or minutes for a mobile phone. he felt that sending money was a son’s duty. to enforce his point, sunil quoted the bhagavad gita, a hindu religious text: “karm karo fal ki chinta na karo,” a phrase that could mean either “do your duty and don’t expect a reward” or “do your duty and don’t worry about the outcome.” sunil used this phrase to stress the importance of actions in fulfilling one’s familial duties. for sunil, the issue resided in the question of how he could be a good son or brother, not how his family might spend the money. refusing to speculate as to what may happen in the future, sunil stressed that the importance of the gift (either money or dowry) lay in the act of giving. the danger of forgetting one’s family while my lunch companions and other migrants, like yogesh, all sent money and bought gold for dowries, the families of migrants often express concern that they will be forgotten after a man moves abroad. as in many contexts, transnational migration has the potential to destabilize families and disrupt gendered roles within them (dahinden 2005; gamburd 2008; coe 2011a). this holds particularly true when migrants’ access to cash provides an opportunity for them to express masculinity outside of their families (osella and osella 2000). in 2009, i sat in a recruiting agency in mumbai, india, with pandeya and other employees as the agency held interviews for oil projects in the gulf. as employees collected resumés, a group of young men who had recently returned from working in the gulf arrived. they wore large gold watches, button-up shirts made of shiny, iridescent material, and trendy new sports shoes. their fashion choices set them apart from the dozens of men already standing in the office building’s hallways and courtyard, all of whom were dressed simply and without accessories. when this group of men walked in, the recruiting agency employees with whom i sat immediately began talking about them. based on their appearance, the agency employees said that these young men had clearly not spent their gulf money wisely and had “forgotten” their families. the agency employees quickly reached consensus that these young men had been “seduced by dubai ki chamak [the glitter of dubai].” chamak, a hindi term meaning “shiny,” may describe the shininess of modern and new things, such as dubai’s high-rises or shopping malls. indian laborers in the uae often use chamak to refer, derogatorily, to men who wear name-brand clothes or dress stylishly. it may also be used to describe indians trying to present themselves as arabs. as all of the employees with whom i sat had previously worked in the gulf, their choice of chamak gestured toward the allure of dubai’s modernity, a recognition of the gulf’s racialized hierarchies, and a criticism of these young men’s consumption choices. the seductive nature of the gulf and the possibility that men might spend money on unneeded luxury goods came up regularly in conversations at the agency. one agency employee, jimmy, told me he lectured “noobies,” or first-time emigrants, on the best way to spend money.5 he explained, “noobies [have] totally funny ideas, and they don’t know that they are making tax-free money and they should be doing things like buying gold. they are going to earn and save—not to spend.” when i asked how common this was, jimmy replied, “people think they are in the gulf and they can spend, but then the workers return to india with nothing.” according to jimmy, the gulf’s place in popular imagination contributed to young men’s choices to consume luxury goods and not support their families. “people have certain habits that they need to support. they also want to buy good clothes because they think ‘i am in the gulf, so i can spend money, and i need nice clothes and to get fat to show that [i was] in the gulf.’” jimmy and his colleagues believed that when young migrants returned from the gulf wearing “flashy” new clothes and other ostentatious displays of wealth, what they were exhibiting was their failure to fulfill kinship obligations and care for their families. women’s work and migration workers who did not forget their families often discussed their families’ importance in facilitating migration. amit, an older man who had worked as a manual laborer in the gulf for more than twenty years, focused primarily on his family when i asked him why he was once again moving to the gulf for work. he said, i am going only for work. my family needs the money. you can find jobs in india, but they don’t pay as well. i will compromise to whatever . . . i have to, because i am sacrificing to go to make money for my family. so, i will adjust, just like my family will need to adjust, because i am not at home. as we talked, amit described his family, which included his wife and children, as well as his mother, brothers, brothers’ wives, and his brothers’ children. amit understood that both he and his family were sacrificing in order to send him to the gulf. his family sacrificed by missing his presence in the household, but also by initially borrowing large amounts of money from a moneylender to facilitate amit’s migration. amit’s story demonstrates a common one in which joint families and shared responsibilities both motivate and facilitate migration. as amit described, living in joint families provides support for migration, and men, like ramchandra, often say they receive greater respect from their families after going abroad. gendered obligations influence this choice to migrate as well. women’s work, meanwhile, often supports men’s migration to the gulf. yet this work often remains unrecognized, and many wives do not feel they receive the same respect that their husbands do (cf. bhatt 2018). migrants repeatedly told me that their wives care for their parents while they are in the gulf, and migrants see this care—conducted on their behalf—as one of their duties as sons. many women, however, find it hard to live in their in-laws’ homes without their husbands. pandeya’s wife, padma, told me she found it challenging to live with her in-laws when her husband was away because, she said, her mother-in-law treated her as a servant and demanded that she do all the household chores. she also told me pandeya’s sisters would regularly visit their parents and then berate her for not properly caring for their parents. according to padma, without pandeya present, she was “alone” living with pandeya’s parents, without anyone to care for her. padma’s description of being “alone” while living with pandeya’s parents points to the importance of a husband in building a relationship between a wife and her in-laws. when pandeya worked in the gulf, padma said she wanted to live abroad with him, rather than live “only” with her in-laws. despite her wishes, padma never traveled to the gulf, in part because gulf governments place restrictions that make it challenging for lower-wage employees to bring dependents. yet even if it had been legally possible, padma told me, pandeya would never have agreed for her to leave his family. at a later date, this topic came up when i spoke to pandeya, and he told me it was hard to live apart from his wife, but that it was his duty (karm) as a son to care for or look after (dekhbāl karna) his parents. padma fulfilled this duty on his behalf by living with his parents. in this context of patrilocal social organization, neither padma nor pandeya argued that padma had a responsibility to look after her own family. rather, after marriage, padma’s duty became to care for pandeya and to help her husband fulfill his obligations to his family. during the time padma lived with pandeya’s parents, she cared for them by cooking food, and this food shaped and informed padma’s relationship with both her husband and her in-laws. as wives cook for their parents-in-law, they enable the generation of additional kinship substances, including gold and money. it is a wife’s care of her husband’s aging parents that facilitates migration, a migration on which the gulf’s oil industry depends. from commodity to kinship substance although we often understand money and love to form connections between people in different, noncomplementary, ways, this distinction does not resonate globally. in many contexts, money is used to express intimacy and care. as cati coe’s (2011b) work in ghana demonstrates, children of migrants see the money from their parents as expressions of intimacy. in the case of nepalese migrants, zharkevich (2019) shows that remittances constitute a substance of relatedness that helps span the distance created by transnational migration. for indian migrants to the gulf, gold, too, has an economic value within families, and the gift of gold is seen as an expression of care. unlike monetary remittances, however, the semiotic materiality of gold means that, within the context of kinship, gold not only economically uplifts a family but also constitutes a gift that operates as a kinship substance (cf. munn 1986; keane 2003; fehérváry 2012). while food and other kinship substances inform relatedness through proximity and daily interactions, gold bought in the gulf transcends geographic distance. it manages to do so because of its role as a gift that connects people, a gift perceived as pure because it is bought in the gulf. gold, as a kinship substance, also calls into question distinctions made between substance and code, fixity and malleability. like blood, gold is seen as durable, in contrast to cash, which fluctuates with the markets. gold is also seen as malleable, as the plain ropes of gold bought by migrants such as yogesh are often reshaped by their recipients. here, gold’s qualities as pure, stable, and malleable are mutually constituted with its role as a gift that builds and maintains kinship relations and indexes one’s gender. as they buy gold for their sisters’ and daughters’ dowries, migrants navigate gold as a gift and a fulfillment of gendered kinship obligations. men often feel their status within their households improve as a result. their gift of gold reinforces the fixity of relations by maintaining connections within natal families; simultaneously, gold informs a malleability of relations by extending broader kinship networks. women, meanwhile, actively support the migration of their husbands and brothers through their own labor, although this work often goes unacknowledged. the femininity of migrants’ wives becomes reinforced by their role in helping fulfill their husbands’ duties of care. these dynamic interactions of kinship and gender shape and are shaped by migratory movements and economic practices. in the case of indian migrant labor to the gulf, kinship practices and economic necessity are deeply intertwined. the gulf’s oil industry depends on indian kinship relations to have access to the large numbers of temporary workers required by oil projects. in turn, migrants use money earned in the oil industry to provide financial support to their families, to purchase gold for their sisters’ or daughters’ marriages, and for possible further migration. gold, a key component of dowry, becomes a kinship substance that continues natal family ties after men’s transnational migration and their sisters’ subsequent marriages. migrants represent giving gold as the fulfillment of their gendered kinship obligations as sons and brothers. exploring this gift of gold as historically and culturally situated illuminates how it forms part of contemporary kin-making, how gold is imbricated in economic transformations and class relations, and how gold becomes a gendered kinship substance as salient as semen, blood, or breastmilk. abstract drawing on ethnographic research in the united arab emirates and india, this article explores relationships among indian kinship, gender, and transnational migration through a focus on gold that migrant men buy for their sisters’ or daughters’ weddings. gold, used as a key component of dowry, is often considered “traditional” in an indian setting, but is actually shaped by liberalization, contemporary statecraft, and transnational migration. as migrants purchase gold for their sisters and daughters with money they earn in the gulf, they express adult masculinity by being dutiful brothers and sons. this examination of indian labor migration reveals how workers and their families understand migration as a way to build and maintain kinship ties, and how gold bought in the gulf becomes a kinship substance that informs understandings of gender and family. [kinship, gifts, labor, gender, migration, masculinity] शोध-सार  संयुक्त अरब अमीरात और भारत में किये हुए मानव-जाति संबंधी शोध के बिना पर यह शोध-पत्र भारतीय रिश्तेदारी, लिंग, और अंतरराष्ट्रीय प्रवास के संबंध का अध्ययन करता है, जिसका केंद्र वह सोना है जो प्रवासी पुरुष अपनी बहन-बेटियों के विवाह के लिए ख़रीदते हैं। सोना, जो कि दहेज का महत्वपूर्ण अंग है, अक्सर भारतीय समाज में एक “प्रथा” की तरह समझा जाता है। मगर इसका मतलब वास्तव में उदारीकरण, समकालीन शासनकाल, और अंतरराष्ट्रीय प्रवास से प्रभावित है। प्रवासी अपनी बहन-बेटियों के लिए खाड़ी देशों से कमाए पैसों से जब सोना ख़रीदते हैं तो वे कर्तव्य पालन करके अपना पुरुषत्व दिखाते हैं। भारतीय प्रवासी श्रमिकों का यह अध्ययन इस बात को दर्शाता है कि कामगार और उनके परिवारवाले इसे रिश्तेदारी बनाने और निभाने का एक तरीक़ा समझते हैं, और इस तरह खाड़ी का सोना एक रिश्तेदारी की वस्तु बन जाता है जो लिंग और परिवार के मतलब पर रोशनी डालता है।  [रिश्तेदारी, उपहार, श्रमिक, लिंग, प्रवास, पुरुषत्व]  خلاصہ متحدہ عرب امارات اور ہندوستان کی انسیانیاتی تحقیق پر مبنی یہ تحقیقی مقالہ رشتہ داری ،  جنس، اور  بین الاقوامی  نقل مکانی  کے تعلق کا مطالعہ کرتا ہے جس کا مرکز  وہ  سونا  ہے جو   مہاجر مرد  اپنی  بہن بیٹیوں کی شادی  کے  لئے خریدتے ہیں۔  سونا  جو کہ  جہیز  کا  اہم حصہ ہے،  ا  کثر   ہندوستانی سماج میں  ایک  "رسم" کی طرح سمجھا جاتا ہے، لیکن  اس کو در اصل   لبرلائیز  یشن ،  ہم عصر  دور حکومت، اور  بین الاقوامی  نقل مکانی کے ذریعہ  شکل  ملی ہے۔  مہاجر  اپنی  بہن بیٹیوں کے لئے  خلیجی ممالک میں کمائے پیسوں سے  جب سونا خریدتے ہیں تو  وہ   فرض ادا  کر کے اپنی مردانگی دکھاتے ہیں۔ ہندوستانی مہاجر  محنت کشوں  پر   یہ  مطالعہ اس بات  کو  دکھاتا ہے کہ یہ  مزدور  اور  ان  کے  خاندان  اسے  ایک طرح  سے  رشتہ داری  بنانے ،  اسے  قائم  رکھنے کا ایک طریقہ سمجھتے ہیں،  اور  اس طرح کا  سونا  رشتہ داری کا ایک  سامان  بن جاتا ہے،  جو   جنس اور  خاندان کے مطلب پر  روشنی ڈالتا ہے۔ [رشتہ داری، تحفہ، محنت کش، جنس، نقل مکانی، مردانگی] notes acknowledgments i owe a great deal to the people in india and the uae with whom i work. i am particularly indebted to pandeya, who tragically passed away while i was working on this article and whom i still miss. during the time i knew pandeya, he always welcomed my questions and answered them with great patience and thoughtfulness. critical and insightful feedback from the anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology and heather paxon’s generous engagement greatly strengthened this article. i thank syed ali, david boyk, and jimmy for their help and feedback on language translation. this article has greatly benefited from conversations with and feedback by hoda bandeh-ahmadi, alexandre belieav, david boyk, david william cohen, juan r. cole, william fisher, matthew hull, elizabeth kelly, julia kowalski, michelle lelievre, purvi mehta, and farina mir. funding from the fulbright hays doctoral dissertation research award, the joint program in anthropology & history at the university of michigan, and william & mary helped make research for this article possible. 1. given the controversy regarding the name of the arabian/persian gulf, i use the gulf throughout this essay. 2. in yogesh’s home, he primarily speaks tamil, but he is also fluent in hindustani, and the latter is the language we use in conversations. 3. in india, a pucca house is contrasted with a katcha house, or one made of mud, thatch, or other low-quality materials. the preference is for a pucca house. 4. in gift of the virgin, lina fruzzetti (1982) focuses on the tension between the sacred gift of a father giving a daughter to a husband’s household and the economic gift of dowry. in this and other research on dowry, the focus is on the relationships between the father and daughter and the father and his daughter’s husband’s family at the time of marriage. 5. noobies is a common indian-english slang word for what we call “rookies” in the united states. during my research, noobie was often used interchangeably with kaccha limbu, a marathi phrase that literally means “unripe lemons.” references ahmad, attiya 2012 “beyond labor: 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transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.04 affect affect: an introduction daniel white hosei university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2866-6587 this retrospectives collection offers a look at what the concept of affect has contributed to anthropology in the recent past and where it might take us in the near future. although the practice of retrospection suggests its own affective character of being a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn, i hope to dial up the intensity some. why? because lately i get the sense that affect is escaping our theoretical grasp. sure, this was one of the fundamental points of the affective turn (clough and halley 2007): if anthropologists of emotion throughout the 1970s and 1980s had shown how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse, anthropologists of affect shortly thereafter sought to show how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture. this proved incredibly stimulating for scholars who took this distinction between emotion and affect seriously, as it meant finding creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it. this held especially true for those working in and sometimes against the wake of the writing culture moment who understood that while poetics may quite possibly be all that we have, it certainly isn’t all that we are. so when i say that affect is escaping our grasp, i am not only acknowledging affect’s methodological challenges and its ontological spirit, so to speak, but also how both of these are inextricably entangled with its political relevance. i make this point not to suggest that an anthropology of affect should more actively engage with politics, though activists would surely find inspiration there. rather, i make it because politics as the permutations of evolving power relations and our reflexive attempts to negotiate and manage them seems to have played an important role in creating and enabling the very world that affect theory saw most apt to address. or, as kathleen stewart’s contribution to this collection has it, the world that affect proposed.1 one task of this collection, then, is to seek in good anthropological fashion an understanding of the rise of affect theory as an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it. indicative of affect’s contemporary relevance to the discipline are examples of its proliferation outside it. consider that while we pause to reflect on theorizations of affect in anthropology, others working on affect adjacent to us in industry push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel. in early 2016, for example, tech giant apple purchased the company emotient, a startup specializing in artificial intelligence (ai) that is developing software to more sophisticatedly interpret emotions by analyzing facial expressions. paul ekman, the famous psychologist of cross-cultural emotions as measured in facial expressions and associate of psychologist silvan tomkins (a common reference for affect theorists) has served—with mixed feelings—as an advisor to the company (dwoskin and rusli 2015; winkler, wakabayashi, and dwoskin 2016; paul ekman, pers. comm.). in robotics, the japanese mobile giant softbank released what it called the world’s first emotional robot, pepper, an android companion said to be able to understand and even learn human emotion by comparing the data collected from single-user interactions—a smile, an elevated pitch of the voice—with thousands of others stored in a collective ai cloud to which other softbank robots are connected (softbank corp. 2015; montaqim 2015). finally, in the political world proper, services such as those offered by the company affectiva hint at an increasing role for affect-sensitive technologies in telling us the effects candidates have on the electorate, not through the individual opinions and narratives of voters gathered through polling, but through blood-flow and heart-rate variability of bodies watching a presidential debate (bosker 2013). indeed, as populist anti-establishment sentiments continue to spread, i suspect that few need much convincing of affect’s power in public culture today, as feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and more generally experiencing politics with global precarity stoking anger on the right, fear on the left, and anxiety at large. figure 1. triggers of anger, from the atlas of emotions, http://atlasofemotions.org/#triggers:anger. figure courtesy of the paul ekman group. even in their anecdotal nature, these examples reveal that the epistemological gap between how bodies feel and how subjects make sense of how they feel serves as an enormously productive site for intellectual, economic, technological, and most of all political investment. it is this mutually constitutive entanglement of theoretical promise and political propagation that makes what might be called the affect-emotion gap equally appealing for both affect theorists and those seeking to capitalize on its generative power.2 affect theory’s reliance on brian massumi’s (2002) positing of affect as nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies, among other things, and of emotion as those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices, has asserted a seemingly irreconcilable gap between what happens in the world and what we can know of it as that happening. the impossibility of entirely accounting for one side of the affect-emotion gap via the other underscores the gap’s fecundity, as active projects of knowing affect generate the potential to, in turn, transform emotion. this line of inquiry poses methods of mining feeling as fundamentally political problems: projects of knowing become projects of power as narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap, and the varying analytical, ethical, religious, and scientific methods mobilized to that end, are applied to institutional and political gain. from this perspective, one can see how affect alone is not independently capable of power, but that its capacity is realized through methodological attempts to render it knowable through particular kinds of data, some more powerful than others.3 some critics have questioned what they see as an overly polarized model of feeling that divides emotion from affect. scholars like sara ahmed (2004), sianne ngai (2005), emily martin (2013), as well as the contributors to this collection, address this concern while offering various alternatives. even so, the question of affect’s role as an intensity that variously energizes, contradicts, deconstructs, and overwhelms the narratives through which we live nonetheless serves as a driving force in much of their work. however they approach the concept and however they proceed to debate it, theorists of affect share an affinity in the courageous claim that there is much to be learned (and much yet undiscovered) about motivation experienced not as a story—as, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms—but rather as momentum and force. despite a tendency to sometimes underplay its sociality in emphasizing its materiality, the best accounts of affect acknowledge that its cultural underpinnings are as deep as the political stakes for understanding it are high.4 precarity, violence, a passionate citizen casting a ballot, a nervous police officer shooting someone dead: this is culture in the brutal happening of it, effect as affect’s long history breaking on a shore. while anthropologists have eloquently drawn attention to the interpretation and reintegration of that happening via representation after the fact—as one might, for example, trace how embodied experiences engender narratives of identity politics with themes like migration, ethnic conflict, electoral politics, or community policing—the anthropologist of affect attentive to both the coefficient and the countervailing forces of sense and story seeks more. he or she strives to show something of affect’s sheer momentum—of the welling up of energies that often, despite warnings, consequences, facts, or one’s best intentions, make possible and then real the nervous departure, the violent blow, the landslide vote, the trigger pulled. the purpose of this collection, then, is not primarily to pause, to collect, or to capture memory in a moment.5 again, if we have learned anything from recent theorizations of affect, it is surely that affect renders capture implausible. instead, this collection seeks to inspire a sense of critical urgency—to activate curatorship in order to generate from the contributors multiple trajectories for reapplying theory to emerging horizons of affect’s evolving arisings and appropriations. in this spirit, the contributors to this collection do not only reflect on affect theory but also situate its genealogy within the social world itself, reminding us that theory is of the world it so describes, and that affect and affect theory are here, now, for good reason. notes 1. that affect is fundamentally political in its ontology as well as in the problems it poses for a method of representation, whether of subjects or of things, has been well documented. brian massumi (2015, vii) calls affect not a field of study but a “dimension of life . . . which directly carries a political valence.” sara ahmed (2004, 117) argues that affects and emotions are “crucial to the delineation of the bodies of individual subjects and the body of the nation.” finally, kathleen stewart (2007), with characteristic elegance, has demonstrated how projects of knowing affect are inextricably tied to our motivations for and modes of writing about it. 2. although many have identified this seemingly irreconcilable space between affect and emotion, the term affect-emotion gap owes some credit to sara ahmed’s discussion of rené descartes’s observation that objects seeming to inspire love or hate actually depend on how we interpret those objects as beneficial or harmful to us. for ahmed (2004, 6), “this dependence opens up a gap in the determination of feeling: whether something is beneficial or harmful involves thought and evaluation, at the same time that it is ‘felt’ by the body.” for further discussions of the affect-emotion gap, see martin 2013, mazzarella 2009, and white 2011. 3. i thank valerie olson and kathleen stewart for their assistance in crystallizing this point. a collective indebtedness to michel foucault’s (1978) formulation of power-knowledge is, i think, clear. 4. again, i seek to draw attention to the always already politically determined underpinnings of understanding as that which is not isolated from power in a kind of ethically sympathetic verstehen (weber 1978, 4–22), but rather always enabled by and enabling power through an act of transmuting feeling into data. 5. in his discussion of different kinds of memory, brian massumi (2015, 61–62) distinguishes between conscious memory, which is “retrospective, going from the present to reactivate the past,” active memory, a nonconscious process of the “past actively contracted into the cut of the present instant,” and a felt memory of future, which he describes as “the quasi-causal force of tendency taking effect.” while retrospection most literally enacts conscious memory toward a kind of canonization, it can also be understood as playing the more active role of intervention, galvanizing the past for a particular direction of future action. it is in this spirit that i hope the essays in this collection will be read. references ahmed, sara 2004 the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. bosker, bianca 2013 “affectiva’s emotion recognition tech: when machines know what you’re feeling.” huffington post, january 2. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/24/affectiva-emotion-recognition-technology_n_2360136.html. clough, patricia ticineto, with jean halley, eds. 2007 the affective turn: theorizing the social. durham, n.c.: duke university press. dwoskin, elizabeth, and evelyn m. rusli 2015 “the technology that unmasks your hidden emotions.” wall street journal, january 28. https://www.wsj.com/articles/startups-see-your-face-unmask-your-emotions-1422472398. foucault, michel 1978 the history of sexuality, volume 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: pantheon. originally published in 1976. martin, emily 2013 “the potentiality of ethnography and the limits of affect theory.” current anthropology 54, s7: s149–58. https://doi.org/10.1086/670388. massumi, brian 2002 parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2015 politics of affect. malden, mass.: polity. mazzarella, william 2009 “affect: what is it good for?” in enchantments of modernity: empire, nation, globalization, edited by saurabh dube, 291–309. new delhi: routledge. montaqim, abdul 2015 “cloud robotics: talking cloud and saying nothing.” robotics and automation news, july 25. https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2015/07/25/cloud-robotics-hybrid-networks-and-the-rise-of-small-talk/968. ngai, sianne 2005 ugly feelings. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. softbank corp. 2015 “pepper—the world’s first personal robot that reads emotions.” new breeze, autumn. https://www.ituaj.jp/?newbreeze=new-breeze-2015-autumn&lang=english. stewart, kathleen 2007 ordinary affects. durham, n.c.: duke university press. weber, max 1978 economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology. berkeley: university of california press. originally published in 1922. white, daniel 2011 “the affect-emotion gap: soft power, cultural diplomacy, and nation branding in japan.” phd dissertation, rice university. winkler, rolfe, daisuke wakabayashi, and elizabeth dwoskin 2016 “apple buys artificial-intelligence startup emotient.” wall street journal, january 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-buys-artificial-intelligence-startup-emotient-1452188715. an idiotic catalyst an idiotic catalyst: accelerating the slowing down of thinking and action ignacio farías technische universität münchen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6611-2975 an anthropology of speed is an invitation to think differently about time. as epitomized by johannes fabian’s (1983) time and the other, anthropology has long engaged with the social, historical, and cosmological construction of time and the thoroughly political production and valuation of present pasts and present futures: memory, tradition, preparedness, utopia, innovation, and so on. against this backdrop, an anthropology of speed involves exploring time as an intensity shaping the unfolding of relations. speed invites us to reimagine the social as a vector space, in which different bodies, human and nonhuman, are constituted through the direction, force, drive, and friction of movements and associations (farías and hoehne 2016). rather than concerning itself with time, an anthropology of speed is about timing (see farías 2010) and various concepts associated with it, such as rhythm, urgency, and acceleration. it is an invitation to study events, not just as instantiations of overarching logics of practice or social structures, but as constitutive of socialities, temporalities, actors, knowledges, and ontologies. in this essay, i would like to explore what the question of speed might entail for participatory and collaborative techno-urban design processes. my starting point will be isabelle stengers’s vindication of idiocy as a cosmopolitical virtue that, by forcing a slowing down of thought and action, enables the emergence and recognition of otherwise excluded human and nonhuman entities. i would thereby like to think about the paradoxical conditions for an acceleration of an idiotic slowing down, by exploring tensions and misunderstangings in collaboratory processes. slowing down in her “cosmopolitical proposal,” isabelle stengers (2005) has proposed a radical redescription of political action and decision-making dependent, to a great extent, on a politics of speed. concerned with the role of technoscience and expert knowledge in the shaping of contemporary worlds, stengers proposes that engaging with the radical uncertainties deriving from the entanglement of humans and nonhumans requires a slowing down of thinking and decision-making, the opening up of space-times for the cultivation of emergences and differences. notably, stengers returns to the figure of the idiot to think about the political consequences and challenges of slowing down thinking and decision-making. you might remember the childlike prince that fyodor dostoevsky (2002) depicted in his novel the idiot. lev myshkin does not understand the conventions, assumptions, norms, jokes, metaphors, and ultimately the shared values of the society to which he has returned after four years abroad. he is an idiot who embarrasses himself, asks ridiculous questions, minds his own business, defends strange positions, has unfounded prejudices, and so on. just as in ancient greece, the idiot is the one who speaks an unintelligible idiom and is not proficient in the language of the polis. politics has, since then, been defined as the opposite of idiocy: with idiots one cannot talk, argue, or build a common world. except, perhaps, in dostoevsky’s novel, wherein some characters take the idiot and his views seriously. the result is a slowing down of thought and action, and with that an opening toward the unknown, toward alternative definitions of the common world. by featuring the idiot, stengers’s cosmopolitical proposal does not simply state specific political values or contents for a political program. rather, it proposes a reflection on political practices and intensities, on what cannot be contained by a political program. politics appears here as an activity directed at making present what is absent, opening up space for previously excluded actors, and redesigning coexistence. the key, stengers suggests, is speed: slowing down as a condition of possibility for the emergence and recognition of difference and indifference. the idiot, of course, is a conceptual persona: an intellectual device to think about such politics of timing. the idiot is not a social role that individuals could play by meeting socially stabilized sets of expectations. it is, rather, a figure of thought aimed at reflecting on the politics of existing arrangements and relationships. but does the figure of the idiot offer guidance for every situation? is slowing down always the best way to take into account a diversity of actors, to allow for all sorts of emergencies in all circumstances? disasters are a case in point. how would we slow down in situations of need and despair (see farías 2016)? how would we recommend or pursue an idiotic slowing down of recovery and reconstruction efforts, when those affected call for improving the capacity of the state to react rapidly? disasters are not the only kind of situation inviting us to rethink our commitment to a slowing down. another is the quite common situation in which funding constraints set the pace for the implementation of new technologies or policy schemes. the question that such situations pose is thus how to make sure that an idiotic slowing down occurs on time, that it happens quickly enough to question the premises of such policies or technologies before they are already implemented. accelerating the idiotic slowdown even if not formulated in these terms, accelerating the idiotic slowing down of thought and action constitutes a key challenge for experiments in public engagement and collaborative design. mike michael (2013) points, for example, to speculative design objects, such as an in-home device that displays second-hand advertisements from nearby areas according to the velocity and direction of the wind, as resources for easing idiotic becomings. michel callon, pierre lascoumes, and yannick barthe (2009) conceive of hybrid forums as instances in which heterogeneous actors engage in the collaborative exploration of sociotechnical issues and the making of nondefinitive decisions. while significantly different, both hybrid forums and speculative design aim to accelerate the slowing down of thinking and action. inspired by such approaches, a team of colleagues and i are currently organizing citizen-participation and cocreation processes in a horizon 2020 innovation project called “smarter together,” which is aimed at the integrated implementation and large-scale demonstration of new infrastructural (and market) arrangements for low-energy buildings and districts, sustainable urban mobility, and urban services based on information and communication technologies. we are part of a consortium including three central european cities and twenty-eight research and industry partners. one of the main challenges of the project is to develop so-called smart solutions for the everyday lives of city dwellers, with an emphasis on their cocreation. the project team is responsible for giving cities recommendations on cocreation processes and, in particular, the implementation of such processes in the german city of munich. much can be said about how collaboration with citizens and concerned actors involves accelerating the slowing down of thought and action. but perhaps the most interesting aspect of this work has involved not what we are supposed to do, namely, to organize cocreation processes, but the misunderstandings and tensions that have emerged along the way. one of those misunderstandings has involved the name that the project team first proposed for the collaborative space that we have set up in munich: the stadtkatalysator, or city catalyst. the space was proposed to facilitate the constitution of design collectives, which would include government officials, technical experts, engaged technicians, concerned publics, and so on. the figure of the catalyst was meant to stress the generative and transformative interactions of the component parts. interestingly, though, our partners welcomed the idea of the stadtkatalsyator for slightly different reasons; they imagined it as a space in which we could develop design solutions with the public in a faster and more effective way than with traditional citizen-participation methods. while the project team certainly shares the conviction that we do not need more citizen participation as we currently know it, we reached this conclusion for fundamentally different reasons than our partners did. if, for our partners, traditional citizen participation was not the right approach to cocreation, this was because it involved too many workarounds and reframings of the envisioned projects. hence, they looked forward to a catalytic space or process that could rapidly yield useful results. for us, the problem with citizen participation was not that it is too vague, but, quite on the contrary, that citizen-participation initiatives are often strongly framed by expert problematizations. accordingly, what we wanted to create was a space in which new interactions might take place and displacements of what counts as expertise could occur. this was, at least on our end, a very productive misunderstanding, as it confronted us with demands for acting quickly, forcing us to think about our task in terms of accelerating the slowing down of expertise. partly as a result of this misunderstanding, we decided to change the name of the stadtkatalysator to stadtteillabor, the city district lab. this, in turn, brought to light another misunderstanding; the testing of intelligent lamp posts on short stretches of city streets was being described by some of our partners as a reallabor, or living lab. the partial homonymy with the city district lab invited us and the partners involved to reflect on and discuss what a living lab entails with respect to participation and experimentation. a different kind of misunderstanding concerning timing and speed became apparent in a project meeting intended to synchronize the various smart-infrastructure interventions planned in munich. in december 2015, as “smarter together” was about to start, all project partners met to assess interdependencies among the timelines of their subprojects, which included the retrofitting of housing, intelligent lamp posts, a virtual power plant, multimodal e-mobility stations, and more. interestingly, all of the timelines depicted the quickest possible implementation time, even for projects with what looked to be an incredibly optimistic completion date. this, of course, is not specific to “smarter together,” but is a common way in which project timelines are constructed and used: not as representations of how events are likely to unfold, but as powerful devices made to operate in the present, exerting pressure on the present with the aim of accelerating processes as much as possible. this amounts to a specific politics of speed, where quickness allows for certain practices and not for others. indeed, what quickness does is invoke a certain type of knowledge, one assumed to be straightforward, based on best practices and on mastering whatever needs to be done. accordingly, the depiction of projects as advancing at an amazingly quick pace, even quicker than what can be realistically expected, forecloses collateral explorations and diversions that then occur anyway, as circumstances kick and speak back in all sorts of ways (hyysalo and hakkarainen 2014). in that meeting, over a year ago, we presented the slowest timeline possible for the codesign process, one that required at least one year to come to proposals for any single project. was this a fruitful intervention? if we consider the processes that we have organized for the codesign of e-mobility stations and intelligent lamp posts, which involved four to six meetings in no more than two months, and if we consider that one piece of feedback we received was that our work was too slow, one might say that we have not been able to achieve much of a slowdown. but interesting challenges to what counts as expertise have occurred in these short periods of time. on the one hand, by bringing together different administrative experts, we opened up a space for expert critique of expertise. instead of a monolithic expert voice, we managed to make apparent the wide range of contradicting views, assessments, and opinions. on the other hand, our own role as citizen-participation experts was radically challenged, as we were forced to leave the neutral position of a facilitator and to adopt a more engaged and committed position, intervening, setting up priorities, and pushing certain problematizations and not others. as this account makes apparent, we have not just accessed a site of power shaped by knowledge production and technical expertise regarding urban infrastructures and citizen-participation processes, but we have done so as full-blown collaborators in charge of critical aspects of a collective endeavor. the situation thus resembles the co-laboratory practices described by jörg niewöhner (2016) as joint, but separate epistemic work with the potential for generating ecologies of idiocy, but with two fundamental differences. the first is that this joint, but separate work has a shared goal, the cocreation of so-called smart solutions, even as this goal is fundamentally differently understood. the second is that idiocy is not a possible ecological emergence, but a sought contribution. we are doing what is possible to catalyze idiocy, and to avoid any expectation among our partners that we are just as smart and quick as they are. but this effect does not just happen; it has to be actively pursued. an anthropology of changing gears coming back to the anthropology of speed, it seems that the crucial issue would be to pay attention to the articulation of different speeds in specific settings of practice. in the case discussed above, constantly changing gears, accelerating and slowing down, becomes fundamental to addressing the challenge of technical democracy (callon, lascoumes, and barthe 2009). while far from realizing such a promise, our idiotic catalyst has triggered these reflections and further, iterative adjustments in our approach to the timing of collaborative interventions. references callon, michel, pierre lascoumes, and yannick barthe 2009 acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy. translated by graham burchell. cambridge, mass.: mit press. originally published in 2001. dostoevsky, fyodor 2002 the idiot. translated by richard pevear and larissa volokhonsky. new york: everyman’s library. originally published in 1868–1869. fabian, johannes 1983 time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. new york: columbia university press. farías, ignacio 2010 “sightseeing buses: cruising, timing, and the montage of attractions.” mobilities 5, no. 3: 387–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2010.494842. 2016 “devising hybrid forums: technical democracy in a dangerous world.” city 20, no. 4: 549–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1193998. farías, ignacio, and stefan hoehne 2016 “humans as vectors and intensities: becoming urban in berlin and new york city.” in deleuze and the city, edited by hélène frichot, catharina gabrielsson, and jonathan metzger, 17–32. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. hyysalo, sampsa, and louna hakkarainen 2014 “what difference does a living lab make? comparing two health technology innovation projects.” codesign 10, nos. 3–4: 191–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.983936. michael, mike 2013 “the idiot.” informática na educação 16, no. 1: 71–82. http://seer.ufrgs.br/infeducteoriapratica/article/view/36926. niewöhner, jörg 2016 “yhteistyöstävä antropologia: kuinka edistää refleksiivisyyttä kokeellisesti [co-laborative anthropology: crafting reflexivities experimentally].” in ethnologinen tulkinta ja analyysi: kohti avoimempaa tutkimusprosessia, edited by jukka jouhki and tytti steel, 81–125. helsinki: ethnos. stengers, isabelle 2005 “a cosmopolitical proposal.” in making things public: atmospheres of democracy, edited by bruno latour and peter weibel, 994–1003. cambridge, mass.: mit press. legal care and friction in family detention cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 312-339, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.06 legal care and friction in family detention erin routon cornell university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4719-1401 from across the desk in the cold, private room of the detention facility, the mother handed me a worn piece of paper with a number scribbled across. i dialed it and waited to hear the call go through before handing the receiver back to her. she smiled broadly at me as she told her sister that she and her daughter were getting released soon. i sat quietly on the opposite side, waiting to answer questions she might have about the process of getting out: who would buy her bus tickets to her new home, when officials would make the call to her family to make travel arrangements, and so on. she worried that her family would not have enough money to buy the expensive tickets, so we placed multiple calls to different contacts. her daughter, who was around four years old and had previously been sitting patiently next to her mother, disappeared from view behind the desk. suddenly, i felt a soft brushing against my suede shoes. i looked down and saw a petite hand gently petting my foot. as her mother explained the situation to another family friend, i knelt down on the floor, gasping with faux surprise as i met her daughter’s eyes. she giggled loudly and pulled her hand away before crawling out from under the desk and ambling over to my side. she clearly preferred to play rather than sit quietly while her mother spoke on the phone, and yet, as usual, this space offered no toys. she and i spoke quietly as we examined the only object beyond the phone in the barren room: the desk. she was pulling at cords and empty drawers when she then became fixated on one of the small holes in the corner of the desk, partially covered by removable plastic pieces. she frantically tried to pull the pieces out, looking down inside the crevices. i looked too to find the source of her interest: she had spied one of the most precious forms of “contraband” in the detention center: crayons. i lifted the edges of the coverings as she reached in and pulled out each lovely color one by one, smiling with delight at her discovery. as her mother finished her calls, her daughter quietly completed a drawing. afterward, i stuffed these implements back into their hiding place for the next distracted child and burdened mother that would inevitably walk through those doors. the mother and i hugged before leaving the privacy of the room. she smiled, thanked me for helping her, and i waved goodbye to her daughter as she left with her artwork cradled under arm. in recent years, the detention of migrant families in the united states, and the often associated practice of family separation, have become increasingly familiar topics to many americans. yet an understanding of the everyday realizations of these policies, practices, and spaces remain, to a great extent, elusive. this is, of course, no accident: migration scholars have noted the complex productions of isolation and dislocation involved in migrant detention (e.g., mountz 2012; martin 2015; loyd and mountz 2018). this article concerns itself with illuminating a particular aspect of migrant incarceration within the context of so-called family detention or residential centers in the united states. my research focuses on the centrality of care in the labors, experiences, and particular social arrangements involving legal advocates providing pro bono aid to the asylum-seeking families held in these facilities. scholarship on the subject of care has a long, cross-disciplinary history, stirring important debates and new forms of social recognition. marjorie murray et al. (2017) contend that anthropological research on care, despite recently having expanded to studies of everyday encounters “beyond the clinical,” has historically centered on the fields of health care. care, of course, has long existed in the studies and debates of feminist anthropologists and sociologists, science and technology researchers, and scholars broadly associated with the study of work, some of which have looked precisely at the clinical, others beyond it, examining the various forms of relationality and interaction that intimately involve care (e.g., hochschild 1983; tronto 1993; boris and parreñas 2010; garcia 2010; mol, moser, and pols 2010; puig de la bellacasa 2017). nevertheless, such research has rarely directly considered the relationship between care and the work of lawyers and other legal practitioners. this article aims to apply the insights of this expansive and diverse research on care and care work to legal advocacy. in doing so, my argument aims to extend scholarship that recognizes caregivers by valuing the myriad services that advocates provide detainees as not just forms of legal aid but also as care work. i argue that care is analytically useful for understanding legal advocacy and the relationships in which legal advocates engage in these spaces. to start, legal assistance is commonly interpreted as a unidirectional, often unsentimental encounter for those providing the assistance; scholars remind us of the many ways in which legal education itself often encourages a “casting aside” of personal emotions or empathy in favor of supposed neutrality and legal authority (scheingold and sarat 2004; mertz 2007). of course, legal anthropologists and migration scholars have repeatedly demonstrated the extent to which legal encounters, especially those involving refugee or otherwise migratory groups, are fraught with emotions that engage all associated parties (e.g., coutin 2000, 2016; cabot 2013). my research affirms and builds on this insight. what i observed during fieldwork with legal advocates indicated an expansive form of assistance, attention, and relationality, far exceeding the limitations of legal aid and refuting a perception of their work as unidirectionally affective. as i observed them, what advocates did and the ways in which they articulated their roles led me, in a sense, to care. advocates showed deep involvement in emotion work and multidirectional affective exchanges that informed their own intimate subjectivities. care moved through the ways in which they practiced legal advocacy, tended to detainees and each other, managed their relationships with administrators, and even played an important role in conflicts, some of which i will explore here. thus, this article illustrates why care matters not only to the ways in which we can understand these spaces and the work of legal advocates but also to how it brings into focus certain relational and institutional complexities and conflicts. i suggest a term—legal care—as a way to approach such forms of labor and relational encounters. while not a novel concept in and of itself, legal care offers a conceptual pathway to recognizing the work of legal advocates and aid workers as care work without disavowing the central role that the law plays within these contexts. it is, at its core, an extension of care into the legal practical terrain. much cross-disciplinary scholarship has explored legal work with asylum applicants and immigrants (e.g., james and killick 2012; eagly and shafer 2015; ryo 2018), as well as with lawyers and paralegals, as ethnographic subjects (e.g., henderson 1987; pierce 1995). while researchers have also devoted attention to lawyers and legal practitioners as advocates and activists (e.g., abel 1995; sarat and scheingold 2005; merry 2006), this linkage demands greater attention, particularly in today’s political climate and related responses from advocacy communities. legal practitioners, professional or otherwise, rarely receive consideration as caregivers, and yet as i demonstrate in this article, they often practice care to intimate and complex degrees. of course, to recognize the caregiving efforts of legal advocates, we must first recognize the violence with which advocates and detainees contend in these spaces, indeed, the violence engrained within multiple facets of family detention. the following sections will explore the different ways in which violence takes shape in these facilities, from so-called family detention, itself a destructively misleading concept, to everyday barriers to legal information and representation, to poor physical and mental health care. legal advocates are implicated both directly and indirectly in the harmful practices which define these spaces, often compelled to struggle against forces beyond their control or influence and far beyond the apparent boundaries of legal aid. yet advocates’ expressions and sentiments of care also serve as vehicles for resistance against the practical and institutional forms of violence family detention inflicts. it is crucial to note that the encounters between legal advocates and incarcerated parents and children in family detention are, due to the environment’s nature, fleeting. this will become clear as my argument unfolds. while i suggest that legal care has potentially important implications for legal encounters beyond the context i discuss here, this transitory quality of the relationships defines the kind of care possible in these spaces. this care is not defined by prolonged engagements, intimacies that naturally unfold over time, or the kinds of clearly bounded giver-receiver roles one might find in other caregiving environments. the fleeting nature of these encounters simultaneously shapes the care given and informs the conflicts with which legal advocates contend. thus, legal care in family detention is construed through its conflicts, and its frictions. “friction reminds us,” anna lowenhaupt tsing (2005, 5) claims, “that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.” using legal care, i hope to explore the kinds of configurations of power, relationality, and resistance that are borne out of the everyday frictions that define spaces such as these. as a final introductory note, i want to clarify the critical time period in which this research took place. the ethnographic detail that informs this article’s arguments about legal care comes from a time in the field when the obama administration had effectively reinstituted the incarceration of asylum-seeking migrant families. thus, while i bore witness to trump administration changes in legal policies and practices that dramatically impacted the institution and everyday realities of family detention, what i present in this article effectively preceded those changes. this is a critical distinction not only because it draws attention to the harm both administrations have inflicted on asylum-seeking families but also because it highlights the adaptability of legal advocates engaged in forms of caring resistance as they navigate a rapidly shifting asylum landscape. the degree of violence inflicted on asylum seekers by the trump administration far exceeded that of the preceding one; i certainly do not dispute this fact here. nevertheless, it was and will continue to be critically important to recognize the history of both harm and care within family detention. figure 1. the south texas family residential center, left, and the karnes county residential center, right. photos by erin routon. orientation in late 2014, standing against the backdrop of a clear, bright sky, and flanked by officers and american flags, then secretary of homeland security jeh johnson told the crowd of reporters: “frankly, we want to send a message that our border is not open to illegal migration, and that if you come here, you should not expect to be simply released” (preston 2014). johnson’s symbolic message referred to the facility still under construction behind him: the south texas family residential center. this center, located in dilley, texas, would become one of three family detention centers in the united states. the ethnographic research presented here comes from my time spent at this facility and the karnes county residential center, located in karnes city, texas, over an extended research period from 2016 to 2017. i will hereafter refer to these centers as simply dilley and karnes. with a capacity for 2,400 detainees—rivaling the population of the town and eclipsing the capacity of the neighboring prison (see texas department of criminal justice n.d.)—dilley stands as the largest immigrant detention center in the united states, contractually owned and managed by corecivic, formerly the corrections corporation of america. in fact, both facilities under discussion here are owned and managed by private prison corporations. the geo group, another of the world’s largest such corporations, operates karnes. the facilities opened as a response to a “surge” earlier in 2014 of tens of thousands of asylum-seeking families, or “family units,” in the government’s language, arriving at the mexico–united states border, principally from the northern triangle countries of honduras, el salvador, and guatemala. the vast majority of those arriving sought asylum in the united states as a result of increasing gang violence, police and government collusion with gangs, and the inability to receive local protection against domestic or intimate partner violence. while the government refers to these centers as “residential family” facilities, in reality they have housed almost exclusively single mothers and their minor children. by historically excluding fathers and other family relations, these centers have effectively engaged in family separation since they opened. in this way, the very notion of family separation, even as it relates to the limited context of the detention of asylum-seekers, preceded what the public has recently come to know under that term. while the trump administration instituted new policies related to the administration’s so-called zero-tolerance measures that indeed expanded the physical splitting of family members and familial relations through novel tactics, the government’s practice of family separation itself is not new. as family detention centers, these facilities effectively function as punitive processing centers for asylum-seekers placed into “expedited removal” legal proceedings. created by the illegal immigration reform and immigrant responsibility act of 1996 (iirira), expedited removal describes a truncated legal process in which particular immigration officers are given authority to make decisions on migrants’ legal cases, potentially denying them the opportunity of having a regular immigration court hearing (american immigration council 2019). the mothers and children who end up in these facilities after arriving at different u.s. border points—either at official ports of entry or at other locations at or near the border—and request asylum, are to all apparent accounts arbitrarily selected for placement in this legal category, which requires them to undergo a part of the asylum process while in detention. the latter is known as the “credible fear” or “reasonable fear” interview.1 only by passing, or receiving a positive decision in, this interview—one in which they must demonstrate both their credibility and how their experiences make them eligible for asylum—are they released into the interior united states, continuing the rest of the lengthy legal process outside of detention. otherwise, they eventually face deportation from the facility. another migratory group has resided in these facilities since their inception: pro bono legal advocates. these advocates have shown up daily to provide free legal aid to all those detained. in dilley, these advocates form part of a nonprofit project now known as proyecto dilley. karnes is served by a group of legal advocates associated with a texas-based organization known as raices. both groups function in similar ways and often collaborate. advocates with these groups contend that the practice of family detention constitutes an unnecessary, cruel, and unusual form of treatment of asylum-seeking parents and children and, knowing the complexities inherent in navigating the asylum process, have committed to the universal representation of all detainees while simultaneously litigating for the closure of these facilities. thus, unlike in most immigration defense settings, all detainees have the option of detailed, individual assistance, regardless of the purported merits of their case. this is critical for several reasons, not least because most applicants cannot afford legal representation or assistance with their cases, since private attorneys are usually prohibitively expensive and are mostly located in faraway cities. without the help of volunteer legal advocates, the detainees would have little hope of assistance with their cases while locked away in remote locations. the advocates’ presence also proves critical because it is so difficult to “pass” a credible or reasonable fear interview without previous access to legal advice. while the trump administration has effected numerous changes to asylum law that have negatively impacted the likelihood of success for applicants, my observations of this process during the obama administration—which oversaw the opening of these facilities—demonstrated the previous difficulty of passing this interview without legal support. the interview itself was and continues to be fraught with issues, from translation inadequacies to procedural failures to outright subversive, antagonistic behavior on the part of some asylum officials. thus preparation and continued legal assistance remain of vital importance. both legal-aid projects comprised a small number of paid staff and temporary volunteers. although staff members remained with their projects for months or years, both projects heavily relied on volunteer labor. in fact, non-local volunteers did the majority of the daily work in detention. these migratory volunteers had received training from project staff members on the ground, typically serving the projects for a week before being replaced with a new group of volunteers. the volunteers ranged in associations and experience with the law and legal practice. some were lawyers or law students, others doctors or social workers, while still others came to perform the critical role of interpreters. some had experience working or volunteering with asylum cases, while others knew very little about the subject. the organizations generally welcomed all who were interested in helping, regardless of their expertise, but they simultaneously emphasized the need for particular skills, primarily language or legal experience. i volunteered with each of these organizations, performing the same daily tasks alongside other staff and volunteers in both of these facilities each week throughout my extended fieldwork. each week in “baby jail” (as advocates called it) clients’ cases would get passed along to a new group via a vast online case-management system. these projects depend heavily on such forms of collective action: not only do advocates rely on the work of previous volunteers, but in daily practice, they also depend on one another to manage difficult cases and overcome the myriad bureaucratic or legalistic roadblocks that arise, sharing different skills. the members’ exceedingly diverse backgrounds and expertise make the projects dependent not only on collective action but also on collective knowledges, for example about asylum and immigration law, responses to trauma survivors, and approaches to working with children. while advocates often work with clients individually, some collaboration with others almost always occurs in the background. time limits in family detention significantly strained advocates’ work, playing a major role in the frenetic, often crisis-like environment of the center. a particular court decision, known as the flores settlement agreement, ultimately made the case that children could be held in detention, but only for brief periods of time. in 2015, in district court judge dolly gee’s ruling on the agreement’s terms, children were to be released “without necessary delay” (preston 2014). this came to be interpreted as not longer than twenty days.2 this arbitrary deadline made processes move at a rapid pace in detention, meaning that advocates had little time to prepare their clients for critical moments or to respond to deportation attempts. furthermore, because the majority of applicants’ cases fell under the category of asylum law, understood as persecution based on “membership within a particular social group (psg)”—a category characterized by vague and unpredictable boundaries—advocates typically needed even more time with clients to construct a strong case. the rapid pace of the work environment resulted in fleeting encounters of care rather than prolonged engagements. these advocates did not seek to help detainees “win” an asylum case. some volunteers, who were professional lawyers, were capable of continuing the legal representation of clients after their release; some elected to do so. yet these advocates primarily fought to get their “clients” out of detention, so they could reunite with family, friends, and services, and have the opportunity to properly prepare their asylum claim or pursue another form of relevant legal status. while advocates performed many different tasks in detention, arguably the most critical was to prepare clients for their fear interview, so that they could receive the passing decision that would allow their release. thus, the majority of the work revolved around this interview: preparing clients for success and then responding when some clients inevitably did not pass. advocates repeatedly demonstrated the value of these forms of preparation for the outcome of fear interviews. in what is known as the “prep” conversation, an advocate speaks privately with an individual about their case, helping them shape their legal claims ahead of the interview with the asylum officer. prior to this individualized conversation, advocates conduct informational group sessions, known as charlas, or chats, in which they offer detailed explanations and answer questions about aspects of asylum law and the processes clients face. detainees did not have effective access to this information from the government or facility contractors; few even understood where they were or how they had ended up there, much less what the asylum process entailed. some did not encounter anyone who spoke their language until they met with these advocates, who used their collective resources to locate remote interpreters. the effort of advocates’ work derives from a need to prepare clients to achieve a sort of legal consciousness (merry 1990) for their fear interview, in which they are required to articulate their case in terms meaningful to asylum officers, without the aid of legal translators (cunningham 1992) or expert witnesses (good 2006). while these legal projects collectively represented their detained clients, advocates could not officially speak on their behalf in interviews or in court proceedings taking place in the facility, thus necessitating quick work that made clients understand the expectations set on them. interference legal advocates in family detention are child caregivers. figure 2 depicts gifts, remnants of encounters between child detainees and an advocate, after she sat with them at tables and desks or sprawled out on tile floors. together, they colored and waited for the children’s mothers to finish discussing their cases with advocates in private rooms. while mothers wiped away tears with the edge of their government-issued t-shirts, talking about la violación, the unreasonable impuesto de guerra they owed “ms” (ms-13), or even the lies la migra told them, their babies would sit at a table, talking about their pets from home, asking which colors they should use for the hulk’s pants, and wondering if the advocate could draw them a cat (and subsequently name it). far from simple colored drawings made to pass the time, the children’s images are tangible expressions of quiet distraction, of attention to something at least remotely pleasurable in places that are objectively not, and of care in contested terrain. figure 2. drawings made by child detainees at dilley and karnes. photo by erin routon. young children in these facilities needed sources of entertainment and distraction while their mothers worked on their cases—sometimes for hours—discussing intimate details many did not want their children to hear. these conversations took place in private rooms, primarily for purposes of confidentiality and comfort. both inside and out of these private rooms, in the open area of the visitation buildings, crayons and paper became critical tools. if children resisted separation from their mothers, they could be given these to play with in the room, so that they wouldn’t be listening in or distracting her from speaking. if the mother needed them to be outside of the room, other advocates could sit with them while they colored. crayons and coloring books provided an excellent option for work with children due to their mobility in the space and the attentiveness involved in playing with them. from the facilities’ earliest days, administrators had instituted various rules about crayons and coloring books. the outlines of these rules changed frequently, and, understanding the greater importance of the crayons, advocates consistently pushed back against them. in november 2016, administrative officials banned crayons at the karnes facility, at least within the facility’s visitation area (laughland 2016), where legal advocates met with mothers and young children. it was not the first time that such items had been prohibited at a family detention center. in 2014, an incident known as “crayon-gate” had occurred at a temporary family detention facility in artesia, new mexico. advocates at dilley were also often met with barriers in attempting to bring in crayons or coloring books. at karnes, immigration and customs enforcement (ice) claimed that the ban had resulted from “an action resulting from crayons which raices staff/volunteers [had] given children which [had] caused property damage to the contractor.” in other words, a child had colored on a table in the open space of the legal visitation area. advocates of both projects responded quickly, releasing statements to the media about the ban, posting on social media, forming petitions, and tweeting about the incident to crayola, cheekily asking for instructions on how to clean crayon marks. in a release, advocates argued not only that “such markings are a cost that comes with the detention of children” but also that “it is extremely disturbing that ice’s concern for geo’s property takes precedence over the well-being of the children and their mothers’ rights to legal advice” (raices t. n.d.). as this statement illustrates, the uproar from advocates did not simply result from the apparent absurdity of the ban. the latter also impacted advocates’ abilities to give care and mothers’ abilities to obtain legal assistance, because it took away options that allowed mothers to speak comfortably about their cases and thus receive the sort of attention they needed. in this incident, advocates were the intended recipients of punishment. by explicitly naming raices as the supposed instigator of the event that “destroyed” property, administrators laid bare their intentions: children coloring on tables did not cause damaged property; advocates giving them crayons did. this incident, and the language used to describe it, demonstrates a critical argument in my research: administrators deployed punitive strategies against advocates in both overt and covert ways. the friction between these groups inspired different responses to what was ultimately an irreparable conflict, as their distinct efforts appeared to exist at counter purposes. yet despite this conflict, both administrators and advocates deployed care as a central force in their strategies and tactics. mere weeks after the crayon ban, i walked into the legal visitation area to find a large chalkboard installed, an apparent response to advocates’ fierce and ultimately viral pushback. many advocates wondered how facility administrators had still missed the point behind their frustration. the chalkboard, like the facility’s toys, remained firmly outside of the private spaces in which parents met with advocates, where things like crayons proved the most useful. months after the installation of this large chalkboard, i walked with a client into one of the private rooms and saw newly mounted miniature chalkboards. neither chalkboard ever had chalk; that was kept at the guard’s station. children were usually too anxious around the guards to ask for the chalk themselves, and thus the boards remained perpetually blank. superficially, the addition of chalkboards was a material expression of care by facility administrators. this act, though, did not resolve the problem that the ban had created, and it did not assuage the friction between advocates and administrators. the chalkboards were not an equal replacement for crayons and coloring books; they did not meet the needs of the children. as a result, advocates believed, as they did in many other scenarios of conflict, that administrative responses after the fact were committed in the interest of maintaining a positive self-image, rather than in that of actual care for the well-being of their detainees. clients’ well-being was connected to their ability to receive legal assistance, functionally impeded by not being able to separate children from their parents for brief periods. this broad point of conflict, in which material objects meant to benefit the work of advocates became “contraband,” manifested itself at various times throughout my research. it is possible to interpret these refusals as forms of punishment for advocates, as many did, as well as an expression of the state’s power and authority to control and police the activities of both detained children and their parents. these often overlapped in detention. in other scenarios, administrative punitive measures appeared to more overtly correspond with efforts to interfere with the work of advocates, sometimes painfully so. proximity contrary to michel foucault’s (1977) broad assessment of the historical trajectory of the prison as by-and-large a shift away from bodily punishment, didier fassin (2016) contends that significant degrees of punitive work on bodies have not left carceral spaces. while not often explicitly considered official elements of punishment, persistently poor health care and unmitigated sexual assault make for just a couple of the ways in which prisoners are subjected to forms of this body-work. with respect to both of these, a disregard of care for the body is bound up with the status of imprisonment. because care work requires bodily as well as emotional proximity (alber and drotbohm 2015), giving care to incarcerated individuals becomes complicated by these normative punitive strategies, especially in places such as family detention facilities, which, while reproducing punitive strategies familiar to other carceral environments, nonetheless attempt to maintain a caring identity. in the cases studied here, legal advocates became entwined in these processes; they were not only involved in counteracting harmful body-work—at times, through the critical application of nonverbal practices of care (mol, moser, and pols 2010)—but could also be unwittingly subjected to punitive strategies themselves. maria,3 a mother from haiti, was seemingly on the verge of a panic attack. sitting in the plastic chair in the nearly empty room, she began hyperventilating. the stress of recent developments with her case seemed too overwhelming, and her future appeared ever more hopeless. she had received a negative decision during her interview, meaning that the officer did not find her claim credible. in subsequent appeals, the judge had affirmed the officer’s decision; maria was, therefore, left with few options before the initiation of deportation proceedings. alejandro, a staff member of the legal project at dilley, was seated on the opposite side of the table, watching her anxiety swirl like a dust storm. he then did what he felt she needed: he swiftly walked to her side of the table, sat next to her, and placed his hand on her shoulder while speaking softly to calm her. after a brief period, the dust cleared just enough, and they carried on talking about the next steps for her case. not many days after that, alejandro walked in as usual on a monday morning to start work with a group of new volunteers and was casually handed a piece of paper by facility staff in the security building. the letter communicated that he had been banned from the facility. unlike the many volunteers and staff that passed through the facility, he would never enter that space again. all this because he had touched the client he was working with, and an employee of the facility saw it happen. facility administrators decided that this gesture constituted a threat to detainees and banned him in the interest of their care. this event demonstrates the unpredictable practical applications of security in detention (hall 2012). it was followed by intense litigation on behalf of the legal project attempting to reverse the decision to revoke alejandro’s access permissions. the experience proved incredibly difficult for him to process. simultaneously abrupt and drawn out, he had to wait for at least a month in relative silence from administrators and his own project team to learn that the legal challenges would remain unsuccessful. he felt hurt, angry, and guilty for leaving the few remaining staff members to manage the immense workload inside without him. he was sad that he did not get to say goodbye to his clients and that he would not get to meet and help the new clients arriving every day. when we met up at a taco shop in san antonio months later, he said he was still trying to reckon with the fact that he would not be coming back. it turned out that this ban had been expanded to prohibit him from entering all other detention spaces managed by corecivic, which meant that what he had hoped would become a career of helping detainees with the language and legal skills he had built would be seriously limited. this incident led to what advocates came to call the ban on hugging. this forced change in behavior proved difficult for many to accept, as the development of intimate relationships were a constant in advocate-client interactions. clients often reached out to hug advocates, forcing advocates to move their own bodies away. some advocates considered this a hurtful gesture, difficult to explain to clients and denying them their right to a typical yet meaningful human exchange. some would speak about how they would quickly jerk their bodies backward if they saw a client reaching out to hug them within view of security cameras and guards. others chose to reject the rule and embraced clients in those moments of intimacy that called for it, awaiting potential repercussions that, inexplicably, never seemed to arrive. still others would argue that it happened too quickly, that they did not have time to communicate to the other person before they were embraced by them, but that they did not try to stop it from happening. angela was a long-term volunteer, staying on with the dilley project for weeks or months at a time. she was an undergraduate student and gifted cellist from juárez, mexico. she became a favorite among many clients, more than a few of whom treated her like a daughter, some even trying to set her up on dates with their non-detained sons. her warmth and closeness with clients produced a natural intimacy, and as might be expected, frequently led to moments in which clients attempted to embrace her. sometimes she let it happen; in others, when in view of guards, she would try to avoid it. she told me: there was this one mom i worked with … she had been raped when she was little and was bullied and abused by different people throughout her life because of it. when her husband found out that she had been raped, he beat her and said that she should have told him about it. that he wouldn’t have been with her. so, i went with her to her interview, and it was a really hard interview. afterwards, we walked out together, and she said to me “thank you, you’ve been more to me than my own family, you’ve done more than my family has ever done for me. you take care of me.” then she just fell into my arms. like, i know they can’t give us hugs, but when someone falls into your arms, you can’t do shit. they just fall apart in your arms. so, i was holding her, and there were so many guards around us. she was just crying on me, and i cried too. in a way, angela’s story speaks poetically to what advocates do and how they interpret their practices. this is not an ideal caregiving situation. advocates and detainees are relative strangers, and advocates both recognize and struggle with this fact. they meet briefly before having to manifest some sense of trust and comfort in order to exchange necessary care. because the trauma experienced by detainees, which led them to leave their homes, is compounded by the harm created by the carceral environment, caregiving sometimes looks less like an intimate embrace and more like someone keeping someone else’s body from falling to the ground. as these experiences illustrate, advocates are subjected to their own form of punitive body-work. their care is constrained by the facility’s purported interest in the well-being of detainees. physical contact is prohibited because it is framed as a threat to the imprisoned body. though not made explicit by administrative entities or these legal projects, the source of this punitive action likely relates to one of the regulations concerning physical abuse in carceral spaces. in 2014, the department of homeland security released a regulation—known as the prison rape elimination act (prea)—that, coupled with ice’s policy known as the sexual assault and abuse prevention and intervention, was meant to expand oversight of physical abuse concerns in migrant detention facilities (see ice n.d.). while my research did not find evidence that this indeed constituted the justification administrative officials used to not only ban alejandro but also to then justify new practices denying advocates and detainees the right to hug one another, i suggest this was a possible legal justification. it is purely conjecture on my part, but conjecture influenced by conversations had with legal advocates over time.4 regardless of official intentions or stated justifications, in this particular case, a hug, as an expression of intimacy, is important for the caring relationality between advocates and their clients. denying them this appears part of an extensive punitive strategy aimed at the advocates themselves, which advocates then interpret as harmful to themselves and detainees. yet in this instance, administrators’ actions are not promoted as punishment against advocates, but are rather justified through care for detainees. yet these supposedly caring actions ultimately deprived detainees of the sort of care they themselves sought in their interactions, and that advocates desired to provide for them. the troubled feelings of care that advocates experienced in response to being denied a small but important element of relationality with their clients illustrates the necessity of recognizing care as practice and acknowledging the ways in which we imagine or think through care (puig de la bellacasa 2017). facility administrators’ actions align with what miriam ticktin (2011, 5) calls the “antipolitics” of care, in which “brutal measures may accompany actions in the name of care and rescue … [and] ultimately work to reinforce an oppressive order.” other scholars have charted how violence may be evoked by acts intended as care, sometimes through expressions of indifference or uncare (gupta 2012; mulla 2014). so, too, a regulation to police sexual assault that punishes advocates who hug their distressed clients. these incidents demonstrate how, in situations in which multiple actors participate with care, everyday practices contest what counts as care or harm. care, here, is not a solid object with clearly defined boundaries. it is best understood in this exchange not as a moral good but as something interpreted and entangled within the discourses surrounding its use. the very way in which advocates find themselves in caring exchanges, in this case through physical proximity, becomes the site on which administrators build a counternarrative, thus denying meaningful contact. the hugging ban thus lends evidence to the frictions between regimes of rights-based processes—determined by administrative officials and carceral regulations—and legal advocates’ caregiving. the apparently arbitrary application of such rules, of course, belies legitimate concerns for the care of detainees and reinforces perceptions of punishments borne out of those, and other, frictions between parties seemingly serving cross-purposes. care in conflict while care often breaches categorical boundaries (alber and drotbohm 2015), it might be broadly understood as something involving both practical and sentimental, or affective, elements. care is simultaneously done, thought, and felt. starting with joan c. tronto and berenice fisher’s broad definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (tronto 1993, 103), my analysis also aligns with scholarly views of care that emphasize its embodied, situated, and contingent qualities (e.g., hamington 2004; puig de la bellacasa 2017) and caring practices as characterized, in part, by their relationality and interdependency (e.g., kittay and feder 2002; cooper 2018) and fantastical or “imaginal” potentialities (hunleth 2019). annemarie mol, ingunn moser, and jeannette pols’s (2010) articulation of care, which involves “tinkering” on uncertain grounds and living with “the erratic”—emphasizing unpredictability as well as a commitment to continuous engagement—is instructive for making sense of the emergent and urgent environs of family detention and legal advocates’ necessarily experimental tinkerings. such perceptions of care offer important visibility to the multilayered landscape of legal advocacy in a context where the facility administration’s claims to care paradoxically proscribe and delimit much care practice. these are, after all, “residential centers,” not, as one facility employee in particular liked to aggressively remind advocates, “prisons.” indeed, on corecivic’s website, officials offer the following description for the dilley facility: “employing several hundred individuals, this center’s mission is to provide an open, safe environment with residential housing as well as educational opportunities for women and children who are awaiting their due process before immigration courts” (corecivic n.d.). the carefully crafted language is clearly intended to distance the company from any appearance of incarceration or punishment. facility employees reinforce this position through daily practices, for instance, by insisting that they be referred to as “residential supervisors” rather than “guards.” how does thinking through or with care (puig de la bellacasa 2012) aid in making sense of the conflicts that come to define everyday encounters in these spaces? the most common manifestation of conflict is found in contentious encounters between advocates and administrative actors, from guards to ice officers, asylum officers, and immigration judges. cheryl mattingly (2010) refers to these kinds of encounters as “borderland moments.” the detention center makes for a kind of borderland in multiple respects: detainees await determination on whether or not they will be allowed beyond the second, sometimes third or fourth, set of barriers intended to keep out those subjects deemed foreign. but they constitute borderlands in other senses as well. in her study of clinical borderlands, mattingly argues that borders can also designate spaces defined by particular practices that cohere individuals or groups who otherwise would not be. as a result, in such zones, she argues, actors constantly question the actions of others and struggle to understand one another. in her research on intimate partner visitation in prisons, megan comfort (2008) demonstrated that an inherent conflict exists between those tasked with the micro details of daily control and management, like guards or other associated officials, and the resistance naturally effected by free persons traversing this same terrain in carceral facilities. within family detention facilities, border frictions between advocates and administrative officials take multiple, often quite distinct, forms, while also expressing shared qualities. beliefs about what is good, necessary, or harmful for detainees are contested by advocates, administrators, and detainees themselves, and these frictions play a substantive role in advocates’ perceptions of and feelings about the detention environment. simultaneously, the practical movement of advocates’ work with detainees is determined by administrators’ and advocates’ relationships with them. to give care to detained clients, in other words, advocates depend on a degree of collaboration with administrators. thus my research examines not only the tensions between advocates and administrators but also the distinct care given to those relationships. the metaphor of friction appears, again, particularly suited for understanding the sorts of encounters and relationships borne out of legal care work in this environment. the ways in which advocates and their work grate against administrative processes and officials in these facilities is palpable every day, as evidenced in the aforementioned incidences. the use of punishment as an expression of power (foucault 1977) and control is not simply limited to incarcerated persons but extends to those who care for them. setting aside for the moment questions about globalization, i follow tsing (2005) in my consideration of how the boundaries of care within this particular borderland must be reimagined and perhaps reconstituted in light of these frictions. legal care in describing the collaborative history of the dilley project’s approach to such work, their now defunct website once claimed: “this concept of what some called ‘lawyer camp’ captured the hearts and minds of willing volunteers. rather than just taking over a paper file handed to them, they were taking over the legal care of a human being desperately needing their help.”5 the phrase legal care rarely came into use on the ground. while i independently came to see the advocates’ work as akin to care, after encountering this language on the site, i wondered what might in fact constitute legal care. my conceptual use of this phrase owes much intellectually to the anthropological and feminist theorizations of care already cited. legal care draws attention to the ways in which legal practitioners perform as caregivers. in this formulation of care work, the law sits in a central position. it is the mechanism that brings about the need for care, as it is used to incarcerate and isolate those seeking a form of protected status in the united states. however, it is also the mechanism that brings those needing care in detention into contact with those positioned in some way to assist with its provision. as i have shown, the law was simultaneously used as a tool for the provision and the denial of care. in this setting, the law—as practiced and struggled with daily—becomes knowable (mountz 2010) through its relationship to care. figure 3. as photographs are not allowed inside these facilities, advocates make drawings that depict inner workings. here, a depiction of an advocate caring for a detained child while her mother works on her case with another advocate. drawn by volunteer and artist molly mcgowan. maría puig de la bellacasa (2017, 8) encourages becoming “involved with care as a living terrain that [needs] to be constantly reclaimed from idealized meanings, from the constructed evidence that, for instance, associates care with a form of unmediated work of love accomplished by idealized carers.” legal advocacy in family detention should by no means be interpreted as an “unmediated work of love,” and legal practitioners, especially lawyers, are often far from the ideal of a caregiving subjectivity. this is not to say that loving sentiments do not play a significant role in how these advocates interpret their experiences; they often do. many spoke about feelings akin to love that they felt for the relative strangers with whom they worked. the intensity of these fleeting encounters irrefutably shaped the production of these sentiments. it is also not to say that many legal practitioners, even lawyers, do not possess or project idealized caregiving qualities. what this research demonstrates, though, is a reclamation of care not delimited by either of these. in feeling terms, care is as much characterized by anger and sadness in this environment as it is by love or joy. similarly, caregivers negotiate conflicted interests in their daily work, and embody seemingly contradictory subjectivities. the marginalization of care (lawson 2007)—the unrecognition of the ways in which care is both denied to some while affording others significant privileges—speaks to the need for greater attention to the subject in different environments and spheres of relationality. what motivates or influences the need for care to be given here, and what forms of recognition do caregivers receive? victoria lawson (2007, 7) suggests that individual relations of care involve “understanding how difference is socially constructed, and [thus] a critical ethic of care must be coupled with analysis of the structures and institutions that reproduce exclusion, oppression, environmental degradation,” and so on. this reminds us of the importance of critically analyzing why these advocates are needed in such spaces. although many advocates experience what they characterize as transformative experiences in their encounters with asylum-seekers, all recognize that the government should provide the required legal services and strongly agree that asylum-seekers should not be incarcerated, particularly the especially vulnerable, such as children or those with illness or disabilities. legal care, as a concept, embodies significant potential for making sense of practices of care in different sorts of human encounters. legal advocates in these contexts are typically not medical professionals and thus not meant to provide care in the same ways. yet, as ethnographic observation demonstrates, their work constitutes a form of care, one that sometimes overlaps with bodily care. as they help detainees and asylum-seekers navigate the processual complexities of asylum and the institutional ambiguities of incarceration, legal advocates tend to the many wounds created by such structures. the very notion of legal care affords us the ability to disentangle the intricacies of these environments and interpret the work that legal advocates do in them as care work without ignoring the important role that the law plays in their encounters. figure 4. depiction on a legal pad of an advocate meeting with their client. drawing by erin routon. conclusions the frictions surrounding the incidences involving detained children’s use of crayons and the ban on hugging in the facility illustrate how figurations of power can be understood more intimately through, or perhaps alongside, care. the right to give care and the ability to receive it, of course, involve expressions of power. in these instances, both the provision and the reception of care are controlled by administrative figures, deployed as means to control and punish legal advocates and detainees. ultimately, the friction itself results from the existence of legal advocates, as caregivers, in these spaces. it is precisely both their active contestation of what administrators implicitly or explicitly define as care and their attention to the diverse needs of their clients that cause frictions. while administrative authorities repeatedly deploy putative care in ways that reinforce oppressive orders (ticktin 2011), legal advocates redraw the borders of care through practice to resist. power is effectively asserted and contested through care. of course, legal advocates recognize the inherent conflict in their existence within these centers, one that hinges, importantly, on some cooperation with the very figures they resist. for despite advocates’ legal right to meet with potential clients, administrative authorities wield significant power in allowing or disallowing their continued presence beyond the front doors. thus one can see how advocates’ responses to the conflicts they experienced in detention simultaneously created both traction for their work to continue and barriers for its continuation. “you know, our project struggles, at times, because it has these two kinds of contradictory functions,” carlos, a dilley project staff member, said as he sat exhausted on the floor of the office room. his stickered laptop and a messy stack of client paperwork rested on his legs. he continued, explaining to a weekly volunteer: “these functions conflict in that one, we have established this working relationship with ice and corecivic, so that we can get the women the help they need so they don’t get steamrolled, forgotten, deported, whatever. but then we have this other work that is all about ending family detention. it seems paradoxical to me, because the one sort of hurts the ends of the other.” while trying to effect the collapse of the facility’s operation, drawing attention to the ways in which these forms of incarceration should not exist, advocates’ everyday work involves managing the very mechanisms of the operation. this in itself creates a form of friction, as one goal, ending family detention, grates against another, providing daily legal care to as many detainees as possible. much has changed with respect to family detention since i completed my lengthy stay in the field in late 2017. while the modern instantiation of family detention was reinstituted and reconfigured during the obama administration, the trump administration effected even greater violence on asylum-seeking families, far beyond what many, even legal advocates, would have predicted. yet as the years have passed and americans have observed the countless atrocities visited on migrants and otherwise undocumented groups, one aspect of my field observations has remained relatively unchanged: legal advocates performing as caregivers to those incarcerated in these facilities. it is my ultimate contention that these actors are, and should be recognized as, caregivers. as i have shown, caring for detainees in these spaces is invariably shaped by the frictions and ambiguities that mark the environment and its fleeting encounters. legal advocates navigate these painful terrains through intimacy and relationality, tinkering with care on uncertain grounds, reconfiguring both power and resistance. coda as a final note, it is important to recognize both the effects of the trump administration on the individuals described in this article, as well as the current state of these environments as the united states has transitioned to a new presidential administration. the past four years of the trump administration have brought about vast expansions of incarcerations and separations of asylum-seeking migrant families (flagg and calderón 2020), new limitations to asylum law, and the institution of new mechanisms to refuse entry, such as the “remain in mexico” policy, or migrant protection protocols (mpp). furthermore, as of late 2020, several hundred children that were separated from their parents at the border, as a result of “zero tolerance” measures, have yet to be reunited with their family members (pilkington 2020). in march 2021, officials in the biden administration announced that the two south texas family detention facilities—dilley and karnes—would cease to detain asylum-seeking families. instead, they explained, the facilities were being rebranded as “reception centers,” wherein asylum-seeking families would stay for much shorter periods of time while being tested for covid-19 and arranging travel to their new homes. the third family facility, in berks county, pennsylvania, abruptly released all of its remaining detained families, though the future function of the facility itself, as it has not officially been closed, remains unclear. some advocates have expressed relief at these changes, as it means that families will not be required to undergo asylum processes while detained in these facilities, sometimes for long periods. many, however, continue to express their frustrations and skepticism, asking why the facilities must remain open, particularly when local communities and programs are capable of supporting these families with their needs. these advocates point to the fact that while the function and language around these facilities have been reformulated, even in positive ways, they are still, nonetheless, spaces from which asylum-seeking families cannot willingly escape. activist, filmmaker, and formerly incarcerated japanese american dr. satsuki ina recently penned an article on the matter, reminding president biden that whatever you wish to call them, a “cage is still a cage” (ina 2021). still, what precisely will transpire with the new administration in the coming years has yet to be seen, but what is already apparent is advocates’ continued commitment to asylum-seeking families’ care. abstract the modern instantiation of migrant family detention in the united states has resulted in the creation of carceral spaces in which conflict and care intermingle in everyday encounters. while legal advocates traversing these spaces offer critical aid to the detained, asylum-seeking parents and children confined within, legal advocacy is rarely recognized as caregiving work. drawing from my ethnographic research with voluntary legal advocates working at family detention facilities in south texas, this article demonstrates the potential for deploying a lens of care to such encounters, which i ultimately frame as “legal care.” i argue that cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of care, which emphasize its interdependency, relationality, and contested terrains (puig de la bellacasa 2017), as well as its practices as being marked by a continuous tinkering (mol 2010), offer windows to reconfigurations of care and power that reside amid both the mundane and unpredictable frictions that characterize these environments. [legal advocacy; care; asylum; incarceration; family detention; united states] notes acknowledgments words cannot properly express my feelings about the legal advocates at the center of this article’s story. the individuals who served the projects at these detention facilities were some of the most admirable people i have ever known and had the fortune to work alongside. family detention legal advocates are infinitely tireless, creative, and, above all, caring individuals engaged in what is objectively heartbreaking work. it was both a pleasure and a pain to observe and assist these caregivers in their work every day in these facilities throughout my dissertation research, from which this article derives. as work with asylum-seekers makes clear, reliving trauma is neither desirable nor easy, and yet, despite that, these advocates consistently and enthusiastically volunteered to recount the entirety of their often painful experiences in family detention in my interviews and conversations with them. i feel lucky to have known them, and i hope that this article serves as an accurate representation of what they shared with me. i would also like to acknowledge my dissertation advisors at cornell, who provided me with careful advice and support throughout the many years of this research: drs. sofia villenas, vilma santiago-irizarry, and adam smith. i also thank my family, especially my partner, dr. john gorczyk, for both the emotional support they provided during this research and the many drafts of this article they graciously read. i extend my appreciation to the highly supportive editors and reviewers of cultural anthropology for offering thoughtful feedback throughout the publication process. lastly, while legal advocates stand at the center of this article, this story simultaneously concerns the parents and children imprisoned in these facilities. i am incredibly grateful that they allowed me to play some small part in their lives, doing what i could to help them in their journeys. memories of their courage, kindness, and resilience remain with me every day, as do their stories of pain and trauma, some of which were written, needlessly, as they crossed the mexico–united states border. 1. while public discussions of these interviews often simply refer to them as “credible fear” interviews, there are actually two types. those applicants deemed “subject to administrative removal” or who have had a “prior order of removal” from the united states must undergo a reasonable fear interview. others who do not have this record will undergo a credible fear interview. unfortunately and confoundingly, the burden of proof for passing the reasonable fear interview is much higher than for the credible fear interview, putting those who have previous records at an unfair disadvantage in their interview (uscis 2019). 2. see reno v. flores, 507 u.s. 292 (1993), united states supreme court, march 23, 1993. 3. pseudonyms are used for all individuals referenced throughout this article. 4. it should also be noted that despite institutional policies and regulations, evidence has shown that claims of sexual assault in carceral spaces are rarely adjudicated in favor of the prisoner. of course, assault claims are widespread across migrant detention facilities in the united states, including in family detention facilities. this concern was one of the reasons why the artesia facility—the first modern family center—was ultimately shuttered, advocates claim, and it has continued to plague detainees in other family facilities. 5. while this particular site no longer exists, the legal project in dilley continues to function. references abel, richard l. 1995 politics by other means: law in the struggle against apartheid, 1980–1994. new york: routledge. alber, erdmute, and heike drotbohm, eds. 2015 anthropological perspectives on care: work, kinship, and the life-course. new york: palgrave macmillan. american immigration council 2019 “a primer 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tronto, joan c. 1993 moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. new york: routledge. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2005 friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. uscis (u.s. citizenship and immigration services) 2019 “affirmative asylum, credible fear, and reasonable fear.” https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/uscis/resources/resources%20for%20congress/uscis_olia_march_2019_hill_conference_asylum_overview.pdf. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 312-339, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.06 pedagogies of prohibition: time, education, and the war on drugs in rio de janeiro’s zona norte cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 286-316, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.09 pedagogies of prohibition: time, education, and the war on drugs in rio de janeiro’s zona norte benjamin fogarty-valenzuela leiden university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1941-0547 “here’s the tragic part. andré would be alive if he had been here practicing jujitsu with me.” guerreiro, a police officer–cum–educator, was wearing a jujitsu kimono, army boots, and an oversized wristwatch. he represented the social arm of rio de janeiro’s policing strategy, the social police pacification unit (upp social). a complement to the hard side of the war on drugs—the military-grade street battles—this softer strategy consists in a battle over hearts and minds that takes place quietly in dojos, sports venues, and classrooms. operating in the name of drug prevention education, guerreiro’s after-school jujitsu program is one of dozens of its type—running on public and ngo funding—that intervenes in the daily lives of “at-risk” youth in madeiros,1 a neighborhood in rio de janeiro’s zona norte (north zone) among those most severely affected by police violence. a thirteen-year-old resident of madeiros, andré had been shot during a police incursion at 4 p.m., after school hours. guerreiro elaborated, stating that brazil’s four-hour school day left andré “abandoned” after school, and therefore likely envolvido (involved in drug trafficking), which in turn implied that he must have been firing on police when he was shot. while eyewitnesses said he was shot while playing soccer at a local field, guerreiro rejected this claim, arguing that andré’s particular geographic location was secondary to the fact that he was neither in school nor enrolled in an after-school program at that time of day. the problem was not andré’s location, but the fact that he had too much free time. guerreiro claimed that andré was temporally delinquent: idling unsupervised when he should have attended an after-school program. and the stakes were life and death: “andré would be alive if he had been here practicing jujitsu with me.” educators like guerreiro work in tandem with school principals, ngo workers, police, and social workers. private actors, for their part, also vie to provide services and activities that extend brazil’s part-time day to full-time. this disparate array of actors finds itself united by the idea that free time is the enemy. collectively, they aim to create a situation in which purportedly at risk youth like andré, as they imagine, might choose packed schedules—full of arts and sports, vocational courses, work and test-prep—over packing cocaine or bongs. in an effort to find a legitimate use for the millions of reais earmarked for at-risk youth prevention—for institutions such as upp, the international development bank (bid), and the secretariat of youth, sport, and leisure—local prevention educators insist that the cause of deaths like andré’s is “too much free time.” talked about as if it were a gateway drug, free time both frames the problem in clear terms and prescribes an easy and intuitive solution: keep them busy. recurrent throughout my fieldwork and interviews, this framing is best captured in the commonsense refrain, mente vazia, oficina do diabo (an empty mind is the devil’s workshop). the solution, therefore, is not fewer bullets fired, but busier after-school schedules. this article attempts to comprehend such solutions, paying particular attention to the way they marry pedagogy with efforts to enforce drug prohibition. i aim to make visible the effects these initiatives have on the life trajectories of black and working-class youth in urban brazil. to do so, i introduce the term pedagogies of prohibition, which names the intertwining of the war on drugs with educational interventions. employing pedagogies of prohibition as an analytic renders visible the entanglement of youth, the drug war, and the moral formation of middle-class “good citizens” in the service of capitalist ends. generative (as opposed to destructive), directive (as opposed to negative), and sensory and affective (as opposed to merely calculative or instrumental), pedagogies of prohibition set the foundation for the “making up” (hacking 1987) of particular subjectivities. crucially, this article locates time as the primary coordinate for the governance of the everyday life of young people in urban brazil. in this sense, it departs from a widespread consensus across much of the literature on youth governance and drug prohibition in urban brazil and across the americas that focuses, for good reason, on the spatial dimensions of governance. literatures on the governance of youth have highlighted hard forms of state power—such as policing (fassin 2013), segregation (caldeira 2000), incarceration (lessing 2017), and assassination (feltran 2010)—with an emphasis on spatial control. such an emphasis gives rise to a familiar urban story, one in which youth like andré become constituted as subjects by virtue of the territory they occupy. studies of the war on drugs in favelas likewise tend to focus on territorial dominance and spatial extension associated with policing and trafficking (arias 2006). this emphasis in the literature on spectacular (robb larkins 2015) turf wars over territory between traffickers and police (penglase 2014) has resulted in less attention paid to the soft side of prohibition—the side directed primarily toward youth, including many not involved in drug economies and not living in informal domains such as favelas. pedagogies of prohibition, therefore, reveal how all such interventions are necessarily spatial and temporal, highlighting a neglected dimension of policing in pedagogy. time complements prohibition’s spatial concerns by involving a subtle governance of habit, personhood, and aspiration. forms of resistance to pedagogies of prohibition, in turn, take a range of forms, encompassing urban aesthetics and protest movements (ralph 2008; fogarty-valenzuela 2020). temporality proves central to soft forms of prohibition because young people have long been understood through a temporal lens: as indicators of the present and forecasts of the future. in urban brazil, youth are generally seen as having two possible future paths: the good path, or caminho do bem (the path to becoming a worker, consumer, and citizen), and the bad, or caminho do mal (ending up as a delinquent, drug dealer, or idler). as such, they are framed as “subjects of prevention” (k. l. o’neill 2013). the spatial form of a path implies walking. so too, however, does it imply a deeply temporal preoccupation: the temporal form of a path, which orients those who walk it forward, toward the future. those understood to be busy, punctual, and attuned to the rhythms of work (or to school, as preparation for work) are deemed on a path to the future—to upright consumer-citizenship (lukose 2009). on the other hand, state, ngo, and media observers understand those out of joint with officially sanctioned time as temporally delinquent. while scholarship on youth and neoliberalism has pointed out how entrepreneurial education (dejaeghere 2017) prompts youth, largely left to their own devices, to self-govern (besley 2009) amid moral panics over “idleness” and a “lost generation” (sukarieh and tannock 2014), it tends to place less emphasis on the centrality of temporal discipline in pedagogy—with educational spaces sequestering youth, and introducing them to highly regimented forms of busyness, punctuality, and rhythm. to better understand the interventions that target these young people, therefore, this article turns to the anthropology of youth and education, drugs, work, and time. the stakes become even clearer when considering the context. figure 1. madeiros neighborhood. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. the after-school problem drug prevention programs like guerreiro’s form part of the front line of the war on drugs in brazil. but their emphasis on filling up empty time means that these soft security efforts occupy an especially important place in the everyday life of youth in madeiros. their origin can be traced to three historical factors. first, brazil’s official school day is only four hours long. parents, ngo workers, policymakers, and educators have identified the period before and after brazil’s four-hour school day as a key obstacle—what they call the problema do contratempo (the after-school problem). an eclectic mix of after-school services (funded publicly and privately, by foundations, development banks, and ngos) are proffered and advertised in the name of securing youth by extending the school day. second is the ongoing war between police and tráfico (drug-trafficking organizations) for territorial control over favela neighborhoods, which has raged for a quarter century and unleashed a furor of violence, leading locals to nickname particularly war-torn areas after infamous failed military operations: vietnam, syria, korea. unpredictable gun violence has meant rising numbers of young, predominantly black victims of balas perdidas (stray bullets) and police assassinations.2 it has also made the imperative to keep youth safely off the streets more urgent. the third factor finds expression in a category repeated in media and public discourse: the geração nem nem (literally, “generation neither nor”), or the generation of youth considered to be neither working nor studying.3 the demographic term indexes a specifically temporal fear: young people neither present nor future workers (students: workers in training) put the nation’s future well-being at risk. public anxiety around this geração nem nem has spread across brazil and latin america, combining middle-class moral panics about unemployed urban youth with fear stemming from the country’s economic woes and drug war. the political discourse surrounding desocupado (idle) youth getting involved in crime and drugs not only helped propel jair bolsonaro into the presidency, but it also bolstered interventions aimed at eliminating free time. much media analysis has painted the rise of bolsonaro as an unexpected, sudden lurch into fascism and militarism (fogel 2018). yet other commentators have observed that bolsonaro in fact draws on longer histories of right-wing racist, classist, and sexist moralizing about drug use and idleness (pinheiro-machado 2019). this article builds on these attempts to historicize bolsonaro’s rise. making the war on drugs productive pedagogies of prohibition keep young people busy—on paths to become entrepreneurial cidadãos do bem (good citizens)—rather than allowing them to become desocupados.4 this means to say that the war on drugs, and its pedagogies, undergirds a large-scale regime of citizen-subject formation, one that profoundly affects the life trajectories of millions of young people who have no direct connection to drug markets. these principles, as we will see, have a range of real-world impacts—from shaping forms of personhood and practices of self-fashioning to engineering daily routines and particular forms of capitalist consumption. pedagogies of prohibition value busyness. they operate through an improvised patchwork of after-school programs, services, and activities that generate and reinforce the demand for busy lifestyles. here, busier is better—and safer. parents’ desires for their kids to have easier, shorter everyday routines give way, under pedagogies of prohibition, to an urgent sense that staying occupied is the only way to achieve security and futurity.5 this view construes youth as temporally delinquent: empty-minded and empty-handed, either in delay or precocious. avoiding accusations of desocupação and engaging in the correria do dia a dia (the everyday rush) emerges as a marker of distinction, connoting middle-class ambition and success. meanwhile, youth cultures’ self-generated collective temporal practices and routines come into tension with, and are often foreclosed by, efforts to enact temporal discipline by way of occupation.6 pedagogies of prohibition therefore shape the conditions of possibility for socializing, aspiring, resisting, and being. figure 2. playing ball. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. in this sense, pedagogies of prohibition form part of a long history of educational anti-drug interventions that aim to make the war on drugs productive. like nancy reagan’s infamous “just say no” campaign, draconian regimes of prohibition have long garnered legitimacy through educational campaigns. underappreciated, however, is the pedagogy that stems from prohibitionist premises. crucially, pedagogies of prohibition extend far beyond negation (the “don’t do”: don’t be lazy and unoccupied, don’t use drugs). they are, rather, squarely directive—they teach learners a particular way of fashioning themselves and their daily habits. in short, they prescribe a corresponding normativity (the “must do”: do become a good citizen, do consume the right goods). this is because moral evaluations about drug use concern prescription as much as they do negation. and pedagogy has consistently served as the vehicle through which such moral evaluations are smuggled. drug war contexts, then, constitute the ideal sites from which to understand and critique the entanglement of pedagogy and prohibitionist regimes. of crucial importance to this essay, pedagogies of prohibition enact what elizabeth freeman (2010) calls “chrononormativity”: a set of norms that operate on the temporal axis, with an emphasis on filling time. for good reason, the anthropology of drugs has largely focused on the spatial dimensions of prohibition. this body of scholarship documents drug prohibition’s impact on a wide range of populations around the world and demonstrates how prohibition functions to expand the territory of global capitalism (paley 2014). anthropologists interested in global systems and commodity chains have tracked how drugs are imbricated in global “drug war situations” (zigon 2015) and addiction trajectories (raikhel and garriott 2013). by instrumentalizing illicit drugs, business and state actors have created scapegoats for various social and systemic ills and inequalities (bourgois 2009), authorized prevention interventions (k. l. o’neill 2015), and marginalized populations deemed dangerous and exterminable (penglase 2014). jason pine (2007), bridging the temporal and the spatial, has noted what he calls the “economy of speed” associated with capitalist consumption, expansion, and acceleration that extends into the state’s margins (das and poole 2004), where “vibrant, violent enterprise flourishes” (comaroff and comaroff 2007). nevertheless, the dominant frame with which the war on drugs has been apprehended is a spatial one. a war over “trafficking” keeps the focus on the hard, spatial and territorial policing side of the drug war. the temporal disciplining of young people marks the soft, pedagogical side of the war on drugs, with temporality emerging as an object of political control and a site of resistance. building on e. p. thompson’s (1967) analysis of “clock time” as a disciplinary technology, authors have noted how “social time” (evans-pritchard 1969; gell 1992) is far from an empty, homogeneous containment grid, but rather a fungible object that can communicate (tawil-souri 2017), be tricked (ringel 2016), be manipulated (fleming 2016), be punctuated (ahmann 2018), and be sped up (duclos, sánchez criado, and ngyuen 2017) by both state representatives and their subjects. in this light, rather than constituting a stable metric, time is a social object—one deeply contested and crisscrossed by relations of power. pedagogies of prohibition, therefore, entail orientations to the future (stambach and hall 2017; bryant and knight 2019; b. o’neill 2017) that hinge on a logic of preemption operating at the everyday level of affective sensibility and embodiment (ghertner, mcfann, and goldstein 2020), as well as at the level of state power and security (masco 2014). it comes as no surprise, then, that time as an object of intervention proves central to processes of racialization—in brazil, of learning how to be, or how not to be black (thomas 2016; rifkin 2017; almeida 2019). moreover, just as time can be wielded to police bodily and political imagination along racialized lines, so too can alternative temporalities form the basis for resistance (ahmann 2018; samuels and freeman 2021; bailey 2021; fogarty-valenzuela 2020). figure 3. student members of an occupation protest block rush hour traffic. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. building on literature on the war on drugs that foregrounds the spatial politics of prohibition, this article centers the pedagogy emerging from prohibition: forms that operate along distinctly temporal coordinates. considering pedagogies of prohibition as having a temporal as well as a spatial dimension opens up new analytical terrain. in this light, a focus on pedagogy—long understood as a pillar of disciplinary regimes (foucault 1982; rancière 1991)—can expand our understanding of prohibition in the war on drugs. this is because the global war on drugs has long expanded beyond mere prohibition to encompass pedagogy. building on the spatial control associated with prohibition, pedagogies of prohibition are distinctively temporal, hinged on the rhythms, patterns, and pacing that structure daily habits and routines. tending to time through the lens of pedagogies of prohibition, then, as much concerns understanding the emancipatory potential of pedagogy as it does illuminating forms of control. the following, in fact, presents three particular modalities of temporal control and contestation: busyness, punctuality, and rhythm. busyness rodrigo is a man of discipline. coming of age in the military during the dictatorship, he does not hesitate to bar students from entering the 800-student madeiros public high school if they are late, or to punish them if they speak back. he is a man of two poles: his military background prompted him to station eight armed police officers in his school. yet his background as an educator also led him to create after-school programs with an altruistic feel, such as the jujitsu class led by guerreiro. we walk out of his office at dom hélder câmara school (subsequently, câmara) into the open-air atrium, after a long conversation about the dangers faced by his students. as we gaze at the building, he criticizes its architectural modifications. these alterations were made when the building, formerly a military barrack, was transformed into a school. as a symbolic staging of brazil’s transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy, the school was inaugurated in 2010. in rodrigo’s view, the low, porous, easy-to-hop perimeter fences encourage tardiness, while the school’s proximity to a park encourages idleness before and after school. he found this dangerous. to compensate for these deficiencies, he has installed a deafening school buzzer that echoes off the walls of buildings across the park and stationed police in the school halls. rodrigo and i stand in the schoolyard (divided from the adjacent park by a mesh fence). spotting a group of youths hanging out in the park, he stops and points, lowering his voice, as if sharing a secret: r: look over there in the corner, look over there. it’s the traffickers. b: you think so? r: i don’t think, i know. b: doing what? r: selling drugs, doing drugs. b: you think so? r: yes, sir. from inside the park, man. over there in the corner, it’s full of people selling drugs. … r: they have nothing to do, they’re idle … b: they don’t work? r: nothing, they don’t work at all. b: how many hours a day do they spend there? r: ah, they spend over eight hours hanging out [de bobeira] there. “você acha? [you think so?],” i ask him again: in my understanding, these youths led, in fact, quite busy lives. in a defeated tone of voice, he continues, lamenting to himself, “sim, essa desocupação toda aí na praça [yes, all that idleness in the park].” by his calculations, brazilian students (including his own) have eight to twelve hours of free time per day, during which they are unsupervised by either parents (who work) or educational authorities (who only sequester youth for four hours). this is why the most urgent security flaw of all, for rodrigo, was to be found in the temporal architecture of brazilian education: the length of the school day. this is the problema do contratempo, or the “after-school problem”: the challenge of occupying the hours in the day during which students are out of school, and therefore have—or are imagined to have—too much free time. this section observes how rodrigo, like countless other educators, fights the war on drugs by fighting against desocupação. eradicating free time by keeping students busy, to rodrigo, not only prevents youth from becoming vulnerable to the temptations of drugs and violence; it also increases their chances of becoming “cultured,” hardworking members of the middle class. figure 4. students in park. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. lazer (leisure) is inscribed as a “fundamental right” in the 1988 brazilian constitution and central to the mission to the department of youth leisure and sports. rodrigo imagined lazer as occurring in the art museums and theaters of the zona sul (south zone) among light-skinned members of the middle class. by contrast, what students enjoyed in madeiros’s parks did not amount to lazer: for rodrigo, these students were engaging in desocupação. the free time of particular bodies—namely, racialized, gendered, geographically marked bodies—is not the exercise of a fundamental right, but a problem. lazer becomes desocupação when particular subjects engage in it, especially beyond the purview of particular figures of authority and institutions. recall rodrigo’s lament, “yes, all that desocupação in the park.” the youth we observed in the park were such subjects. rodrigo discussed desocupação as if an epidemic. a widespread and ingrained state of being, the charge of desocupação marked youth as simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous: vulnerable to their dangerous desires (young men’s desire for consumption, young women’s desire for sexual pleasure, as he explained). in neighborhoods like madeiros, desocupação is understood to lead to the desire for doing and dealing drugs. free time thus constitutes a sort of gateway drug, clouding judgment and opening young bodies up to the dangers of the street. this may be why rodrigo was jovial around his school’s stationed cops: he saw himself as working hand in-hand with them in the war on drugs. while police prohibit behaviors and lock people up (as a doctor would intern an addict), rodrigo inculcates behaviors and keeps young people busy—all in the name of prevention. busyness, in his logic, is the solution to desocupação. rodrigo fights the war on drugs by striving to keep young people fully occupied. this is how pedagogies of prohibition operate: they entail not only prohibition’s negation (“don’t be desocupado”) but also education’s prescriptive function (“keep busy”). pedagogies of prohibition extend far beyond an abordagem (stop-and-frisk) or a passagem pela policia (arrest) in the park. rather, they seek to occupy the terrain of the entire waking life of young people by way of busyness. in searching for a solution to his problem during an interview at his desk, rodrigo took a pen and paper and sketched the architecture of a utopian school. he dreamed up its seamless orchestration of students’ movements through time within the school space. rodrigo’s solution, his dream school, would shuffle students from vocational course to vocational course, spending lunch in a courtyard with classical music playing in the background: an orchestrated kind of lazer a world apart from desocupação. most importantly, it would be full-time. rather than simply prohibiting desocupação, such a routine would nip free time in the bud by sending students home exhausted. once home, rodrigo told me, they would only have the energy to say hello to their parents before collapsing on their beds. his attempts to recreate his dream institution at câmara are evinced in his authoritarian tact and reliance on police. yet fully aware that such a school was utopian, he settled for something within arm’s reach: after-school arts, sports, and martial arts programs (choir, theater, and the aforementioned jujitsu classes). he funded these interventions with money from the ministry of education, but also through international organizations, ngos, public-private partnerships, and foundations. these included partnerships such as the social program arm of the pacifying police (the upp social), which brought guerreiro to teach at the school. these programs kept youth shuffling from room to room well after the buzzer rang and gave them, in rodrigo’s words, the skills deemed necessary in the labor market. while after-school education programs didn’t quite constitute his full-time dream vocational school, both models held one thing in common: they were designed to mitigate desocupação. figure 5. overlooking madeiros park and school. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. unsurprisingly, câmara students harshly critiqued rodrigo’s framing of the supposed problem, and disliked being seen as desocupados. welington, a student of câmara who frequented the park, traced the association between desocupado and other derogatory terms for the state of having free time, such as vadio (idle) and vagabundo (lazy, idle). an antithesis to president bolsonaro’s moralist framing of the cidadão do bem (good citizen), to be seen as desocupado implied laziness and a lack of a work ethic, as well as indulgence in easy pleasure, he explained. welington regarded his time with friends in the park as anything but “empty.” rather, it was filled with brincadeira (play/jokes), bate papo (chatting), namoro (dating), and arts like poetry and music (caldeira 2012; almeida and eugenio 2006). above all, he highlighted a concept that brazilian youth refer to as zueira. translated loosely to “lighthearted messing around,” zueira takes place on the margins of official, institutional time—providing the basis for modes of play (harney and moten 2013), political practices, and urban aesthetic value (ralph 2008). zueira, as opposed to desocupação, describes a way of spending free time that leads to novel and self-generated forms of personhood, experimentation, and creativity, as vital as they are emancipatory. moreover, zueira punctuated and extended into intervals of formal and informal work, domestic care, and social activities that—unrecognized by authorities like rodrigo—kept them feeling quite busy. such alternative temporal rhythms—disciplined in their own right—can generate modes of value and personhood with different meanings and potentials (freire 2000, sales and paraíso 2013, perry 2004). rodrigo didn’t see zueira as a pedagogically valuable form of busyness: instead, he valued sanctioned rhythms of work, study, consumption, and rest centered on constant busyness. in his imaginary, these rhythms aligned with the needs of the brazilian private sector, and with the global temporalities of capital (chu 2019; t. harris 2021). in practice, though, his effort to churn out temporally disciplined students smuggled specific middle-class mores into a seemingly objective performance of the rhythms of global capital (heiman, freeman, and liechty 2012; bear 2016). oblivious of his students’ local modes of passing time, he projected his own brazilian middle-class ideology, which provided an idealized one-size-fits-all solution for the ills of the drug war. in this respect, rodrigo was not alone. punctuality it was 9:04 a.m., and the young woman was underslept, hungry, and on the verge of an emotional breakdown. the sign-in clerk reluctantly explained to her that she was four minutes late, and that, due to the punctuality policy, she could not be allowed into her curso profissionalizante (vocational course). the woman, andreia, began crying inconsolably. she was wearing a green polo shirt that read “jovem aprendiz” (young apprentice): the same shirt that could be seen across the city, worn by young people on their way to internships in corporations four days a week. the fifth day was dedicated to a vocational training workshop, run by the center for school-company integration (csci). like many other organizations of its type, csci’s mission is to insert working-class public high school students into the service-sector job market. operating in the name of social inclusion, csci is the charitable arm of the foundation of one of the wealthiest and most influential media corporations in brazil. it wasn’t clear what made andreia break: the physical exhaustion, the lost salary for the day and report to her boss, the prospect of facing the grueling two-hour commute back home to the zona norte by bus, or the worry that she was failing as an aspiring profissional. but what was clear was that for her parents, for csci administrators, and for education policymakers, her day went according to plan. more than being just another rule, the punctuality policy proved central to csci’s pedagogy of prohibition. it inscribed within her memory and body the importance of being on time, bringing her one step closer to corporate postura (disposition or attitude). the previous section shed light on how pedagogies of prohibition hinge to a regime of time management predicated on keeping youth constantly busy. this section extends that analysis to csci’s punctuality policy, analyzing pedagogies of prohibition as part of a broader project of subject formation that aims to instill rigid time discipline. punctuality here functions as a means to keep youth—forced to leave home early enough to beat the bottleneck—even busier, and, most important, to produce well-behaved employees. yet this section observes how students’ failure to arrive early derives less from character flaws than from the physical limitations on urban mobility they face. put another way, it is a spatial dimension of temporal discipline. “why?” andreia asked the sign-in clerk repeatedly. she didn’t understand the point of the punctuality policy. to the administrators, though, the quantity of time did not matter; a quality did. from their perspective, the inability to be punctual signaled a character flaw, a weak spot through which any number of other negative qualities associated with working-class youth from favelas could crowd in: indolence, indiscipline, insubordination, indifference, immaturity, substance abuse. the transnational corporate firms for which these interns were being trained could not be expected to tolerate such a lack of professionalism. this is where csci came in. the objective, as voiced to me by the program’s superintendent, was the cultivation of profissionais out of cru (raw) favela youths. demonstrating punctuality, he reasoned, provided the foundation for other qualities such as professional speech, attire, and postura. the superintendent saw this relation as a win-win: brazilian corporate elites got well-behaved service workers, disciplined into performing the rhythms of the workday (eräsaari 2017), while working-class youth got “social inclusion.” beyond private interest, he emphasized, it was about social good. more than solving the problem of unemployed youth, he added, his program intentionally aimed to solve the after-school problem by keeping otherwise idle youth busy. punctuality, here, was a precondition of busyness. figure 6. “every second is a moment to change things forever.” poster in csci headquarters. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. he cited the recent example of a student smoking a joint during a break. this prompted a mandatory “drug use” lesson, which i observed, only to witness a textbook rendition of “just say no” prohibition-based pedagogy, replete with before and after photos of meth users, as well as of the putrefied limbs caused by the newest ominous drug, “krokodil.” according to the superintendent, though, these lessons were necessary but insufficient as ways of cultivating cru youth. information about drug use was a first step, but the real goal was to teach a way of being (called comportamental, or “behavioral,” instruction)—hence the punctuality policy. this process of acculturation was initiated in andreia after being barred at the sign-in desk, and then supplemented by workshops, including ones on accent reduction, time management, and workplace attire. what csci administrators and likeminded educators failed to see was what alexandre, the sign-in clerk, brought to my attention following andreia’s late arrival. he opened whatsapp on his phone and showed me an updated list of each neighborhood in the rio de janeiro metropolitan area, followed by the name of a drug-trafficking faction or armed group: commando vermelho, amigos dos amigos, milicia, upp, and so on. next to some neighborhoods, an “emergency” emoji appeared: the red siren light signified an ongoing territorial dispute. disputes were updated in real time, alerting commuters and residents to dangers, such as shoot-outs and police operations, as well as ensuing traffic jams, no-go zones, bus re-routings, and unofficial curfews that impeded students like andreia from moving through the city (see also k. l. o’neill 2021). a comprehensive list of the constantly shifting geography of territorial control, this whatsapp list provided a resource that alexandre—also from a distant favela—often marshaled to justify interns’ tardiness to the csci administration. in so doing, he helped students point out how the expectation of punctuality placed on interns was disconnected from the urban realities of the drug war. alexandre’s whatsapp “tactics,” in the words of michel de certeau (1984), reveal the contradiction at the heart of draconian punctuality policies. what is key to understand here is that hard forms of drug prohibition generate more than just shoot-outs. they also generate lateness—by way of delays, curfews, no-go zones, and police operations at the scale of millions of commuters each day. these secondary phenomena of the war on drugs have two closely related effects. first, they generate a stigma for laborers like andreia, devaluing their labor power as corporations seek workers who have access to urban mobility and are therefore consistently punctual. on the other hand, disruptions to urban mobility caused by prohibition legitimate the work of vocational, supposedly professionalizing interventions couched in the language of “social inclusion” for “raw” inner city youth. put another way, the more intensely prohibition takes its toll on daily commuters, the more evidence available for proponents of pedagogies of prohibition to justify their interventions. the interlocking of urban mobility and punctuality at csci showcase an instance of the spatialization of time discipline. to parents, policymakers, ngo workers, and csci leadership, the upshot of their draconian punctuality policy was a situation in which youth were required to keep even busier: “leave early or never arrive,” one student put it. he, like many others i interviewed, began his commute from his suburbio (low-income suburb) at 4:30 a.m. to “beat the traffic” and arrive well before 9 a.m. students devoted more and more time out of their day to the program and everything it required, even at the expense of sleep. i came to see how such vocational programs had outcomes in students’ lives that were, in fact, closely aligned not only with guerreiro’s vision of mitigating the after-school problem but also with rodrigo’s utopian vision for a full-time solution to desocupação. far from the imagined figure of the unoccupied youth of the geração nem nem, many of my interlocutors are in fact over-occupied. they are members of what one interlocutor called geração tudo tudo: the generation who works, studies, and commutes all the time. all this movement and labor left little room for sleep. when interns arrived for their vocational training at or before 8 a.m., alexandre would allow them into an empty classroom. in spaces unlit except for the glow of dawn over rio de janeiro’s skyline, students would place their backpacks on their desks, lay their heads down on their backpacks, and sleep. figure 7. sleeping before class. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. rhythm “one! two! three!” a group of fifty high school–aged students dressed in camouflage uniforms assemble in the middle of a busy city avenue to do flexões. these flash mobs of students performing push-ups in public are a ritualistic practice at tropa, a network of private test-prep schools in rio de janeiro. flexões mark the start of each long period of practice for the standardized tests required for entrance into brazil’s military and public universities. rush-hour traffic comes to a halt. on their palms and feet, students chant loudly, counting from one to twenty, before disbanding and heading into the school to take simulados: the dozens of weekly practice tests they take in training for the real test. this highly public display of the school’s military aesthetic provides tropa with a significant marketing boost. camouflage uniforms feature the slogan “tropa de elite” (elite troop), which is also the nickname of rio’s special police operations battalion (bope), popularized by the 2007 film tropa de elite and notorious for executions and the torture of youth accused of drug distribution who live in neighborhoods like madeiros. building its brand on this imagery, the tropa school targets those who seek to distance themselves from drug imagery, encouraging them instead to align themselves with the police and the military. during these public bouts of deep-voiced, boisterous theatrics, the image of rigorous militaristic temporal discipline and rhythm—“one! two! three!”—is reinforced and projected outward. tropa draws its ranks from youth like andreia, welington, and andré, who, rather than enter the workforce with high school diplomas or entry-level service-sector experience as profissionais, instead aspire for social mobility by way of a university degree, becoming a profissional formado (a “formed” or graduated professional). the biggest obstacle to this ascension is learning the specific test-taking skills that tropa, in all its militaristic trappings, claims to offer. the rhythmic militarism of the flash mob constitutes a concrete instance of a pedagogy of prohibition in action: it’s a form of education that explicitly bases its aesthetic on the hard side of militarized drug prohibition. but whereas the bope concerns itself with territorial control, the prohibitionary side of this pedagogy manifests itself through the control of time, and it does so in two ways: first, by way of an aesthetic and performance of militaristic rhythmic discipline, and second, by enveloping the students in a school culture of constant studying. this section assesses the rise of test-prep schools like tropa, analyzing how they appeal to families and youth from neighborhoods like madeiros, and how they route these forms of pedagogy toward profit. if the busyness discussed earlier is designed to prevent youth from coming into contact with drugs, and punctuality is organized around subject formation, rhythm does something distinctive. if being busy is ongoing, a status, being punctual is an event, a moment. rhythm, then, constitutes the bridge between the two: a string of punctuation along time’s arrow, ever busy, ever punctual. tropa students study piously and rhythmically each day of the week, with practice tests on saturdays, and pressure to study sundays (otherwise known as “trash days”). this routine intensifies as the test date approaches, pushing non-test-related course content out of the study rhythm for weeks on end. that is why tropa’s rhythm contrasts sharply with that of, for example, the park next to câmara: it is standardized and constant, a tempo that straitjackets the present in the name of order and progress (the mantra on brazil’s coat of arms) toward a successful test day. such a rhythm ably undergirds fascist ideology, in which bodies that do not align with sanctioned rhythms are deemed deviant obstacles and targeted (gershon 2021). but it also constitutes a capitalist temporality (puar 2021), bent on endless acceleration in search of profit. figure 8. students block rush hour traffic for pushups. image by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. test-prep schools like tropa have come to rival both the ngo and state arts and sports programs and the vocational training programs as a prominent educational trajectory during the after-school period. their rise, which has occurred in parallel with the that of bolsonaro’s psl party, can be traced to the promise of security they provide against the risks of drug-related violence. high on bolsonaro’s agenda is expanding military public schools, an education reform policy that rests on the opposition between disciplined, upstanding soldiers and deviant, criminal desocupados. also on his agenda is the privatization of public education. tropa, in many ways, emblematizes this marriage of militarism and the market. it reflects the simultaneous shift in brazilian politics toward militaristic fascist authoritarianism and the privatization of social services—including education—with bolsonaro as a figurehead. while brazil is not a fascist state, fascist politics (stanley 2020) are widespread, including appeals for improved education and security (for specific groups) alongside the elimination of others (graeber 2015). the appeal of bolsonaro (and tropa) among favela residents over the issue of public security can be attributed to his promise to eliminate drug traffickers, long positioned as the scapegoats for the violence caused by the war on drugs and the nation’s underdevelopment. take, for example, the case of thompson, a resident of madeiros who took test-prep courses at tropa. for thompson, tropa was not the only “troop” in his neighborhood. two others existed: the military police’s bope, and the meninos do movimento or tráfico (drug-trafficking organization). though pitched against each other in a drawn-out war in rio’s north zone, each of these purported troops sought to win the youths’ hearts and minds, and each had been within thompson’s social horizons at different points in his life. at the test-prep center, thompson could envelop himself within the testing tropa. but he could also, via a performance of discipline and military aesthetics—wearing a camouflage school uniform, doing push-ups at school rituals, yelling war cry chants in unison, and performing an austere persona of constant studiousness—express his allegiance to the bope tropa over the tráfico. yet, like the majority of my informants, thompson belongs to the demographic most squarely in the crosshairs of bope: young, black, male, and a resident of a favela. this fact perhaps drew him most to the testing tropa’s performance of bope militarism. spending his days studying at tropa was not merely about passing tests, economic mobility, or social distinction. it was about being on the right side of a semi-automatic barrel. just as important, as he learned at tropa, it also marked the difference between being socially recognized as a busy, disciplined profissional formado correndo atrás (running after) success, and being seen as desocupado, doing or dealing drugs.7 tropa’s pedagogies of prohibition also appealed to thompson’s parents who saw a packed schedule as increasing his odds at attaining social mobility while keeping his aspirational horizons focused squarely on the right kind of “troop.” and crucially, tropa’s price tag would reflect a part-time school with a full-time workload, as opposed to a pricier full-time institution. in addition to the push-ups on city avenues, the grito de guerra (war cry) plays a key role in performing and projecting militaristic temporal discipline. screamed in unison by teenagers at the top of their lungs, these chants punctuated my interview audio files and echoed during recess in school halls and before tests: é o bope preparando a incursão it’s bope preparing the incursion e na incursão and in the incursion não tem negociação there is no negotiation o tiro é na cabeça the shot is to the head e o agressor no chão it’s the aggressor on the floor e volta pro quartel and then back to the barracks pra comemoração for the celebration these hypermasculine war cries held a performative force that lent tremendous service to tropa’s social appeal and economic success. this chant centers on fantasies of execution: suspending common sense and the politically correct, this homage to control over life itself culminates in a celebration of murder, with the victim standing metaphorically for the entrance exam. such chants provide a cathartic release of the pent-up energy stored up by relentless disciplining and isolation, and their rhythmic performances envelop the students in effervescent, if momentary, unity. yet tropa’s projected appearance of rigorous militaristic rhythm—which leads parents to expect heavily regimented study routines and elaborate practice drills—belies the actual experience of students, who are largely left to their own devices to pass the test. tropa’s is a militarism of form only. i speak to thompson on a sunday, at his branch of tropa, located inside the norte shopping megamall. to make up time off on sundays, some teachers deploy threatening comparisons (“over in acre [brazil’s westernmost state] they’re studying right now”) to remind tropa students that others are studying even while they sleep. it’s no surprise, then, that thompson’s days are organized around what tropa’s administrators and the customer manual refer to as a “rhythm of continuous study.” to maintain “a focus on victory” (a tropa slogan), thompson spends hours on end after school studying in a sala de monitoria (tutoring room) full of other tropa students and, occasionally, a tropa tutor. across countless interviews, i heard the same refrain: the school’s culture aims to motivate them to “study all the time”—bringing about temporal saturation in which leisure is ruled out as a valid way of spending time. despite the emphasis on a “rhythm of continuous study,” though, tropa concerns itself more with appearance than with curricular content. in practice, how these parcels of time get filled is of secondary importance; the idea is not to micromanage every single hour of a student’s day, because doing so would require enormous amounts of supervision and resources on the part of tropa (costs that would be passed on to the parents of students, who are already going into debt to afford the school’s fees). students are mostly left to their own devices: they are told to study all the time, given a room in which to do so, and little more. the logic that governs tropa’s pedagogy is ultimately not the micromanaged scheduling of military time but (in the words of the marketing director) the creation of a “herd mentality” that organizes the entirety of its students’ waking life around studying. meanwhile, parents are happy to pay a part-time fee, comforted by the thought that their young are safely busied studying for a test. figure 9. tropa advertisement in norte shopping mall. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. small wonder, then, that parents of youth like andré and thompson seeking to solve the after-school problem are drawn to schools like tropa to an equal or greater degree as to after-school programming and vocational courses. these three instances of pedagogies of prohibition share the opposition between traffickers and good citizens, between desocupação and ocupação (busyness), and the emphasis on controlling youth’s time. what makes this instance unique is not only the particular valence of this form of temporal control—its focus on collective rhythmic endeavors (synchronized push-ups and war cries)—but also the presence of the aesthetic trappings of prohibition. borrowing the symbolic potency of the hard, militarized drug prohibition of the bope, tropa sells a softer form: pedagogical security. such rhythmic hypermasculine bravado, it turns out, results from a pedagogical model as alluring as it is profitable. in this way, tropa stands as a prime example of the way pedagogies of prohibition shape for-profit educational institutions and their expansion. conclusion thompson and i stood on an escalator one day after class at a tropa school, located inside the norte shopping mall. behind us lay the lifestyle plaza: a shopping and entertainment court with a giant fluorescent mickey mouse at its center. to our left was the bowling alley; to our right, a starbucks. i read aloud a sign with the mall’s slogan—“vem viver aqui” (come live here)—and asked thompson his thoughts. “there’s everything here, a supermarket, gym, cinema. you can even eat at burger king,” he pointed out as we neared the restaurant. the restaurant (like the starbucks) was dotted with groups of thompson’s peers from tropa, many students dressed in camouflage uniforms. he also knew the staff working behind the counter; they hailed from the same neighborhood. as i would later learn, csci provided young people with part-time jobs at burger king and a range of other businesses in the mall. indeed, many of my interlocutors from madeiros sought work—through programs like csci—at norte shopping. norte shopping had managed to position itself as a comprehensive solution to all these young people’s needs: it wasn’t just where they’d go to spend time but also where they’d go to earn their disposable income and where they’d go to prepare for the entrance exams that would allow them passage into a middle-class life in which disposable income would be plentiful. all roads away from the danger in madeiros led to the prosperity and social mobility of norte shopping. this was no coincidence. the framing of the mall as an educational space propping up a drug-free, busy lifestyle serves as a prime instance of pedagogies of prohibition: the mall is the location of an entire educational apparatus that includes both test prep and vocational training. it’s an avatar of middle-class prosperity—an embodiment of dreams of social mobility. but it’s also a place that derives its appeal from racialized and classed images of its alternative: danger, desocupação, and drug use in places like the madeiros park and favela. the mall—as a space for education—is therefore entangled with the racialized violence of drug prohibition. it is a site where the values of prohibition are put into practice (its ideology and infrastructure coming full circle), fundamentally shaping the personhood and trajectories of young people. it therefore makes for an ideal site for understanding how the violence of the drug war is rendered productive, aiding in the generation of a sort of closed circuit conducive to particular daily schedules and lifestyles that, ultimately, translate into the consolidation of power and profit in the zona norte. i recalled the words of norte shopping’s director of marketing, ana. trained in lifestyle marketing, her team worked hard to create “not just a place, but a whole world.” “you sell a lot more than a product,” she told me. “you sell a lifestyle, and everything involved in that lifestyle.” that world, that lifestyle, proved a structuring fantasy in the lives of many of my interlocutors. the slogan “vem viver aqui” implies a fantasy not far removed from reality: a lifestyle that involves spending all of one’s time at the mall. in the space of the mall, the after-school period no longer constituted a problem. if rodrigo’s dream exists anywhere, then it is here in the mall, where youth study, work, and consume (the right kind of goods). to “come live here” entails a funneling of all waking hours to a particular place: a spatial discipline herein becomes built on practices related to time. figure 10. norte shopping “lifestyle plaza” at night. photo by benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. echoing the way rodrigo framed his school, ana explained how the mall served as an “island” surrounded by favelas that harbor drug traffickers and other dangers. on top of that, the lack of “culture” and “leisure” in their neighborhoods, she explained, positioned such shopping centers as “the big option that they have, the big one: that’s why we play such an important role.” the mall, and institutions within it such as tropa, draw their appeal from claiming to offer what madeiros lacks: security, culture, leisure, and full-time education. pedagogies of prohibition have a potent material impact: they lead youth from madeiros to spend their time, money, and labor inside malls. and as these malls diversify and make money from broader aspects of the public’s life, they also concentrate wealth and power. it’s no surprise that, in this ethnography, merely two ceos profit from this setup: the ceo of br malls (owner of norte shopping), and the brazillian billionaire jorge paulo lemann (owner of tropa school network and burger king, with a net worth of us$22 billion at the time of writing). the latter also owns some of the largest consumer goods corporations in the world. it turns out that investors like lemann are best positioned to profit from pedagogies of prohibition, from the work, study, and leisure of interlocutors like thompson. the “lifestyle center” brought about a dramatic transformation in these young people’s daily routines and social horizons, subsuming my interlocutors’ metabolic energy, their playful lines of flight, their aesthetic sensibilities and forms of consumption, and eventually their personhood and aspirations. the means to achieve their sonhos (dreams), it seemed, were routed through norte shopping. investigating pedagogies of prohibition entails investigating the means through which the violence of the drug war is rendered productive, the way a war can generate power and profit. pedagogies of prohibition are not limited to brazil. they exist wherever there are drugs, and wars declared on them: wherever people—the true objects of drug wars—dream and breathe (de abreu 2021). and in contexts where youth find themselves with more time on their hands—a global recession, combined with the growth of flexible labor and distance learning resulting from the covid-19 global pandemic—the policing of habit, daily schedules, and aspirations has often grown more intense. fueled by a pandemic that has accelerated processes of digitalization, teachers, parents, and social workers have worked to minimize free time, often by way of maximizing screen time (benjamin 2019). while we can draw parallels elsewhere in temporal discipline hinged on busyness, punctuality, and rhythm, the brazilian moment specifically sheds light on the connection between accusations of desocupação and the epidemic of police violence targeting young, black youth today (2019 saw more than 1,814 police killings in rio de janeiro alone). this is because the charge of desocupação is unevenly distributed among particular racialized bodies: it is not only a matter of leisure or idleness but one of life and death. such accusations are as much about life and death in the shadow of police violence as they are about consumption practices, personhood, political imagination. madeiros offers an especially powerful example of the extent and stakes of these forms of temporal governance. the clocks that keep burger king employees, tropa students, and norte shopping shoppers in the right place at the right time are tied to the multiscalar rhythms of capitalism. the gradual entrance of latin american nations into global markets and technocracy has entailed integration into the rhythms of capitalism—to work the right amount and consume the right goods (and substances) at the right intervals, and to enjoy leisure in the right ways. these rhythms are the heartbeat of pedagogies of prohibition, and of the production of the political horizons of consumer-citizens across the hemisphere today. abstract drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in rio de janeiro, this article traces the proximity between educational interventions and the war on drugs. to do so, i introduce the concept of pedagogies of prohibition, which names this proximity. pedagogies of prohibition center on temporal concerns (rather than strictly spatial ones), revealing neglected aspects of discipline and policing. whereas disputes over prohibition frequently hinge on control over territory, pedagogies of prohibition leverage the subject-making potential of everyday schedules and time-bounded habits. the article’s three sections focus on three forms of temporal control—busyness, punctuality, and rhythm—and each demonstrates how the war on drugs is rendered productive of particular lifestyles and consumption practices. by positioning hard (policing) and soft (educational) anti-drug interventions in the same frame, i show how these two aspects of the war on drugs incorporate everyday domains such as habit and aspiration, impacting the routines of black and working-class youth in urban brazil. [time; education; drugs; capitalism; militarization; policing; brazil] resumo a partir de dois anos de trabalho de campo etnográfico no rio de janeiro, este artigo traça a proximidade entre as intervenções educativas e a guerra contra as drogas. para tal, introduz o conceito de pedagogias de proibição, que designa esta proximidade. pedagogias de proibição centra-se em preocupações temporais (e não estritamente espaciais), revelando aspectos negligenciados de disciplina e policiamento. enquanto as disputas sobre a proibição dependem frequentemente do controlo do território, as pedagogias de proibição potencializam o aspecto de formação de sujeitos dos horários diários e dos hábitos quotidianos. as três secções do artigo focalizam em três formas de controle temporal—ocupação, pontualidade e ritmo—e cada uma delas demonstra como a guerra às drogas se torna propulsora de determinados estilos de vida e práticas de consumo. ao posicionar intervenções antidrogas duras (policiamento) e suaves (educativas) no mesmo quadro, este artigo mostra como estes dois aspectos da guerra às drogas incorporam domínios quotidianos como o hábito e a aspiração, impactando as rotinas da juventude negra e de classe trabalhadora no brasil urbano. [tempo; educação; drogas; capitalismo; militarização; policiamento; brasil] notes acknowledgments a special thanks to all the friends and collaborators who participated in this research project in brazil. thanks to students and faculty from the museu nacional/ufrj (federico neiburg and eugenia motta, as well as christina vermelho) and fiocruz (maria paula bonatto, francisco inácio bastos, and maria das mercês navarro) for welcoming me in the rio de janeiro scholarly community and for pushing my work in exciting directions. at home, joão biehl, kathleen d. hall, kevin l. o’neill, carol greenhouse, rena lederman, didier fassin, julia elyachar, carolyn rouse, pedro meira monteiro, and the editorial eye of phillip sayers were instrumental in writing and thinking. colleagues from my time at princeton—heath pearson, mauricio acuña, vinicius furuie, quincy amoah, jessica cooper, shinjung nam, and kessie alexandre—provided thoughtful early engagement. a warm thank-you to fellows from the national academy of education/spencer foundation, as well as lesley bartlett, frederick erickson, diana rodriguez, and thea abu el haj. faculty from the university of chicago anthropology and sociology departments, and the interlocution of kimberly hoang, kristen schilt, kathryn takabvirwa, joseph masco, and eugene raikhel—was invaluable. a wholehearted thanks to the mansueto institute for urban innovation team for supporting my postdoctoral work. finally, thanks to members of the cultural anthropology editorial collective for their in-depth engagement. 1. people and locations have been anonymized to protect my collaborators. 2. activists have denounced the murder rates of young “poor, black and favela residents” at the un as a “genocide of black youth” (gomes and paula laborne 2018). 3. for instances of this demographic discourse beyond brazil, see the oecd’s (2020) youth not in employment, education, or training (neet) indicator. 4. derived from the latin occupo, meaning to seize or 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10.14506/ca37.2.09 imperfect accomplishment: the fo guang shan short-term monastic retreat and ethical pedagogy in humanistic buddhism imperfect accomplishment: the fo guang shan short-term monastic retreat and ethical pedagogy in humanistic buddhism james laidlaw university of cambridge https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1035-4799 jonathan mair university of kent https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6176-3157 imagine eight hundred people wearing identical robes, walking in perfectly aligned rows, making prostrations in unison. they are living under quasi-military discipline in a monastery, following a tightly scripted timetable, organized by age and sex into numbered units, cut off from the outside world, observing silence. these are participants in a fo guang shan short-term monastic cultivation retreat. having taken a series of vows, they have become buddhist monastics and are being schooled in discipline and deportment, in the philosophy of chan buddhism, and in chanting and ritual. just a week later, as many of them weep openly, they will ask to be relieved of their vows, citing family commitments, and return home. this retreat offers an intense encounter with inspiring exemplars of virtuosity, in the shape of the monastics who lead the event and the great lives and attainments described in the lectures they give. but the retreat is not only a place for virtue. it is not, as it might first appear, a flight from the contingencies of the world into a place where one can perfectly realize the buddhist values of equanimity, wisdom, and compassion. on the contrary, it is designed as an intense and sustained encounter, in the light of those values, with one’s own shortcomings. bodybuilders increase their strength by repeatedly bringing themselves to the point of weakness, isolating particular groups of muscles and repeatedly loading them to the point of failure in a safe environment. so, apparently paradoxically, a gym is the place where people who wish to be stronger go to encounter their weaknesses. similarly, retreat participants are placed in an environment that provokes, in a controlled fashion, reactions, such as greed or envy, that embody the opposite of the qualities they wish to cultivate, such as compassion and toleration. participants living together in close quarters are subject to strict and sometimes arbitrary rules, and they are often chastised, sometimes unjustly. they are told this will provoke anger. they are deprived of their smartphones and warned that this will arouse intense feelings of attachment. all the while they are continuously exhorted to notice their flighty attention, understand their weakness of will, feel ashamed (慚愧; cankui), and renew their commitment to completing the path of the buddha (成佛道; cheng fodao) through engaging in cultivation (修養; xiuyang, 修行; xiuxing) by monitoring their external behavior and internal thoughts. participants hope to maintain improvements in conduct when the retreat is over and continue the task of self-cultivation in their householder lives. so, while they hope that the retreat will successfully bring about changes, success is entangled with and indeed proceeds through concerted exposure to failure and imperfection. figure 1. preceptees prostrate in the main shrine room at fo guang shan headquarters, kaohsiung, taiwan, 2016. photo by life news agency. understanding how this process works not only provides insight into this influential form of buddhism but also proves instructive for anthropologists seeking to understand the ways in which people strive to live well—that is, ethics, broadly understood. over the past couple of decades, many anthropologists have come to see ethics as happening in two modes: a transcendent mode, based on perfect values, often arbitrated by religious authorities, and an everyday or ordinary mode, based on an egalitarian, interpersonal encounter with the imperfections of embodied human life. as we discuss below, this contrast has begun to be questioned in some recent work that focuses on the ways in which, unsurprisingly perhaps, religious people routinely encounter failure. the fact that planned encounters with imperfection form the core of fo guang shan ethical pedagogy calls for a still more radical rethinking of the opposition. fo guang shan and humanistic buddhism based in taiwan but global in reach, fo guang shan claims around two million registered members and more than two hundred temples in twenty-nine countries worldwide. its founder, venerable master hsingyun (1927–), grew up in jiangsu province in china and in the 1940s was abbot of a monastery in nanjing, but he crossed the straits for taiwan (along with many other religious figures) when the communists won the chinese civil war. from a modest base in rural northeastern taiwan, he steadily built a lay following. by 1968 he could found a monastery (now known as headquarters) in the hills of southern taiwan, including a buddhist college for training monastics. in the 1980s and 1990s, as taiwan’s economy mushroomed and political liberalization inched forward, an expanding middle class joined fo guang shan and other reformist buddhist organizations in droves, beginning to fund them handsomely (madsen 2007; kuo 2008; huang 2009). fo guang shan expanded overseas, first to the united states by founding hsi lai temple near los angeles in 1988, and then across asia, europe, and beyond. in the past ten years, it has made inroads into china, and is the only organization permitted to function as a religious institution that is not subject to direct control by the chinese communist party. master hsingyun describes his teachings as humanistic buddhism (人間佛教; renjian fojiao). this term (originally 人生佛教; rensheng fojiao; buddhism for human life) was coined by the early twentieth-century chinese buddhist reformer master taixu, then carried to taiwan during the civil war (jones 1999, 111), and adopted there by a number of influential buddhist leaders. taixu thought chinese buddhism had become fixated on death and future lives. monks would isolate themselves in mountaintop monasteries; lay people would sponsor services to feed hungry ghosts. he proposed that buddhism ought to be in touch with rather than seeking to escape society, and to welcome advances brought by modernity. in master hsingyun’s distinctive interpretation, buddhism is endlessly adaptable, compatible with technology, democracy, the market economy, and liberal social ethics, as well as able to flourish in varied cultural settings (chandler 2004). yet, much as with many other religious reform movements, this adaptability is combined with the idea of going back to fundamentals. self-conscious innovations are explained as reversions to buddha’s “original intent” (hsingyun 2016) and to the underlying meaning of chinese cultural traditions. faithful adherence to tradition is effortlessly but self-consciously combined with use of modern technology. participants are told that the clothing worn in the retreat, for instance, is modeled on han dynasty (206 bc–ad 220) styles and that the liturgy authentically follows ancient practices. yet modernization is also pervasive and much remarked upon. lectures and ceremony display conspicuous technological sophistication; both make liberal use of audiovisual technology. the whole retreat, for instance, is comprehensively filmed and photographed. participants’ monastic dress is completed by a plastic lanyard showing name and details, as might be seen at any modern conference. fo guang shan comprises an integrated hierarchy of male (around 300 in number) and female (around 1,400) monastics, known as fashi (法師; dharma masters) and addressed as shifu (師父; master or venerable). they are posted for tours of duty to branch temples around the world, but all attend an annual gathering in taiwan. headquarters exerts considerable influence everywhere, although branches in different countries are also encouraged to develop adaptations to enable the appeal of humanistic buddhism to cross cultural boundaries (mair 2014). the lay buddha’s light international association (blia) engages in charitable, educational, and cultural activities. this association and the monastics are said to be like “two wings of a bird,” but ultimate authority, both moral and organizational, rests with the monastic hierarchy. our interest in fo guang shan arose from its explicit concern with ethics, especially its intense focus on cultivation, and its creativity in adapting monastic practice for its lay following. we began a pilot project in the london temple in 2010, and have participated in activities at various temples, first interviewing leaders in taiwan in 2014. during a discussion of concepts of the good life, venerable tzujong, one of hsingyun’s earliest disciples, suggested that to understand humanistic buddhist ethics, we ought to study the short-term monastic cultivation retreat—adding that to study it thoroughly, we needed to participate. in summer 2016, we joined the retreat at headquarters and interviewed participants in taiwan. in 2017, we interviewed a number of former participants in singapore and malaysia. in summer 2018, we joined the european version of the retreat, in france. ethics, “ethics,” and “buddhist ethics”: disambiguation there are at least two ways in which a reader might be confused by our use of ethics, so let us explain what we mean by the term. the first potential confusion arises because it is often used differently in ordinary english; the second because it is used differently in buddhist studies. in common and academic usage in english and many other languages, ethics and morality have come to be interpreted very narrowly, as referring to codes and rules governed by a special form of obligation putatively uncontaminated by desire or self-interest. considerations that have been very important historically and cross-culturally to questions of how to live well have been systematically excluded from this narrow version of ethics, which the philosopher bernard williams (1985, 174–96) dubbed “the morality system” (see also laidlaw 2002, 2014, 110–19). an important strand of the recent anthropology of ethics has sought to make those wider considerations available for ethnographic study by expanding our understanding of the ethical. one important way of doing this is focusing on projects of self-cultivation or autopoiesis (faubion 2011; laidlaw 2014). michel foucault’s (1997) writings on ethics have proven influential, as have aristotelian and neo-aristotelian virtue ethics (mattingly 2012). the emphasis on what foucault called “techniques of the self,” and on the freedom and reflection on which they depend, has sometimes been taken to refer to self-regarding rather than other-regarding behavior, but in fact both foucault and anthropologists following him have been at pains to emphasize that projects of self-making depend on historically specific social relationships, not least pedagogical ones. an emphasis on ethics in this broad sense includes matters that go far beyond conformity or otherwise narrowly moral obligations or rules: models or exemplars that people aspire to emulate, the work they engage in to transform themselves, the relationships such work depends on, and so on. fo guang shan practice clearly constitutes an ethical project in this sense. in this tradition, human beings should improve themselves through cultivation, there exist a wide range of techniques for doing that, and buddhism provides a particularly effective set of such techniques. cultivation refers to a central idea in chinese confucian (ivanhoe 2000), maoist (lynteris 2013), post-maoist (kipnis 2006), and buddhist ethics: that the human being is malleable and can be transformed through practice. for fo guang shan, cultivation includes developing good posture or learning to appreciate tea, and these things are absolutely of a piece with learning to live harmoniously with other people. this may surprise people used to speaking about ethics in the restricted sense of the morality system, just as it is surprising to read in the nicomachean ethics that a quick wit is as much a virtue as courage or generosity. figure 2. the witnessing master welcomes new preceptees at the conferring the precepts ritual in the main shrine room, fo guang shan headquarters, 2016. photo by life news agency. the second possible source of misunderstanding is that ethics is also a term of art in buddhist studies, where it is often used to translate the sanskrit sila (and its equivalents in other languages). fo guang shan does have a concept that corresponds in part to sila, which is 戒 (jie, or 戒律; jielü). this refers to formal vows that one takes in order to cultivate, such as those taken by monastics at ordination, or vows taken by laypeople such as those known as the five precepts. for fo guang shan, ethics in the broad sense of how to live well centrally involves self-cultivation, and so vows of this kind constitute an important ethical technology. but contrary to what is implied by those in buddhist studies who translate sila or 戒 (jie) as “buddhist ethics,” this concept does not exhaust fo guang shan’s ways of thinking about how to live well, such that other kinds of excellence might be distinguished as nonethical. it is not only the taking of the precepts in the retreat that is ethical; so is all of the trial and error involved in attempting to fulfill them. fo guang shan teachings deny any clear distinction between instrumental action aimed at achieving goals desired by a self and ethical action aimed at benefiting others. in this way of thinking, a mistake or shortcoming in one’s conduct is as much an ethical failing as is telling a lie. the short-term monastic cultivation retreat the first retreat was held at headquarters in 1988. fo guang shan sources explain that the aim was to learn from the theravada (southern buddhist) practice of temporary ordination, though there are also indications that the idea was influenced by christian models (yao and gombrich 2017). it was a radical innovation, but instantly successful. the three courses organized that year were oversubscribed, with three thousand applications for one thousand places on three retreats (hsingyun 2016, 25). fo guang shan uses the english term retreat, and we use it here too, although its connotations are different from those of the chinese name (短期出家修道會; duanqi chujia xiudao hui), which literally means “short-term renunciation (leaving home) cultivation gathering.” the retreat is one of many events fo guang shan runs at its temples. some are clearly religious activities, but many are less obviously so, such as competitions for singing or debating, calligraphy classes, or tea ceremonies. these are all explicitly presented as opportunities for cultivation. the retreat is typical in this respect, but whereas other activities emphasize approachability, comfort, and convenience, the retreat is famously challenging. it now runs regularly at a number of centers around the world. the ratio of women to men seems generally to be about four to one. in taiwan, of eight hundred participants, all hailed from eastern asia. in france, branch temples from across europe sent members, both long-term local residents, mainly cantonese-speaking firstor second-generation migrants, and students from asia studying in europe. at both retreats, the overwhelming majority of participants were ethnic chinese. all activities were carried out in mandarin, but a simultaneous interpretation of plenary sessions was provided, in languages including english and cantonese. of the retreat’s seven days, the first three are a struggle: disorientating and exhausting even for those who have participated before. the following days are modeled on routine monastic life for a novice: a framework of morning and evening chanting, meditation, formal meals, chores to contribute to the maintenance of the monastery, and dharma talks and study sessions in which participants extend and deepen their knowledge of buddhism to inform their personal practice. almost everyone describes their experience during this middle period in terms of peacefulness, contentment, and “dharma joy” (法喜; faxi), but as the end of the retreat approaches, this feeling becomes overlaid with a gathering sense that one could have done more with the opportunity, as well as apprehension and regret (mixed with an expectation of relief at release from the retreat’s many challenges) at the prospect of renouncing one’s vows. and then during the last hours, the generally somber mood gives way to tearful emotion. induction by lunchtime on the first day, participants have arrived, registered, and moved into their dormitories. they pay a modest fee (and many also make voluntary donations),1 and they receive an information pack and clothes. men receive two pairs of cotton trousers, two long cotton tunics (中掛; zhonggua), and two sets of thick cotton stockings, worn with garters. each participant also receives an apron and sleeve coverings for chores, and a set of more sacred items. the first of these is the haiqing (海青), a high-collared, ankle-length, gray-blue tunic with capacious sleeves that serve as pockets. the haiqing is worn at all times outside one’s dormitory except for physical work and walking meditation, and it must be removed and folded correctly before entering a bathroom. then there is the ju (具), a colored cloth used as a liturgical sitting mat, and a small bag with a shoulder strap used for carrying an alms bowl. men receive a jiasha (袈裟), a long rectangular brown cloth worn as an outer robe for most activities after initiation. women take different vows and their clothing differs accordingly: a knee-length, short-sleeved, cream-colored tunic, and, in place of the jiasha, a shorter, sleeveless brown tunic (式叉摩那服; shichamonafu). figure 3. new preceptees are given robes, alms bowls, and sitting mats at the conferring the precepts ritual, fo guang shan headquarters, 2016. photo by life news agency. participants are assigned dormitories by group, and these groups are essential to the basic mechanics of the retreat. each participant’s lanyard shows the group (堂; tang) and the half of that group (班; ban) to which they belong, as well as their numbered position (號; hao) within it. each ban has a leader (班長; banzhang), usually someone who has attended a retreat before, who walks first in line and exercises some delegated authority on behalf of the monastics. before and after all activities, each group lines up in order for inspection. throughout the week participants will sleep, dress, walk, sit, stand, kneel, chant, prostrate, meditate, eat, and work, alongside these neighbors. when they have unpacked the few things they are allowed to bring—underwear, minimal toiletries, one pair of shoes—they deposit the rest of their luggage and valuables (including electronic devices) for safekeeping. then training begins. a video covers the history and purpose of the retreat, demonstrates correct ways to bow, and correct procedure at meals. an orientation speech sets out basic parameters: “maintain silence. you may not leave the monastery precincts, and within them, go only where specifically instructed. in particular, do not enter anyone else’s dormitory or contact any friends or relations you may have here. when waiting for activities to begin, do not look about you or let your mind wander, but use the time memorizing the texts used in liturgy.” two senior monastics, the master of ceremonies (開堂和尚; kaitang heshang) and the discipline master (糾察師父; jiucha shifu), begin what will become a constant chorus of admonishment: “you will make mistakes and will need to be corrected. you need to receive criticism and correction in a spirit of humble gratitude. a grateful heart is soft, and only if you have such a heart can we teach you the path.” the intensely (albeit silently) social nature of the retreat is emphasized: “when you live with a group, you cannot help but compare and compete. this will generate feelings of grasping. ‘why am i not as good as the other person? why am i so unlucky?’ these feelings will come and torture you.” from now on, everything that is done, the way participants stand, sit, eat, and walk, is subject to minute instruction, intensive practice, and relentless correction by these and other monastics, especially the guiding venerable (引禮法師; yinli fashi) appointed to oversee each group. becoming a monastic groups intensively practice dressing and undressing, folding sitting mats, standing, walking, and bowing correctly. and there are rehearsals for the main ceremonies to come. fo guang shan rituals are meant to be solemn (莊嚴; zhuangyan). movements are carefully choreographed. participants are encouraged to memorize key texts such as inviting the holy, the heart sutra, and the dharani of great compassion. four ceremonies are required to make monastics out of the participants. each takes between one and two hours to rehearse and then about as long to perform. the first ceremony, at the end of the first day, is purification (灑淨; sajing). the entire space in which the retreat occurs is ritually cleansed and sealed. the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and spirits are invited, with flowers and incense, to witness the proceedings. the space, and all the participants, are sprinkled with holy water. by the time participants retire to their dormitories after purification, a general mood of shell-shocked disorientation has taken hold. they are dressed in unfamiliar clothes and unsure how to behave; almost anything might turn out to be a mistake and subject to sharp correction. they are sharing this experience, living in close quarters with people they have probably never met before, about whom they know almost nothing, and with whom they are not allowed to converse. there is a strict lights-out time shortly after the end of the ceremony. although most people return drenched in sweat from the many prostrations, they are not allowed to bathe and are required to sleep still wearing their tunic and trousers. hot, tired, and uncomfortable, reeling from a sustained fusillade of prescriptions and prohibitions, abruptly cut off from responsibilities and loved ones, participants find that the required silence makes anxieties about life inside and outside the retreat echo all the louder in their minds. the second day begins with the second grand ritual, the ordination ceremony (正授; zhengshou). while the assembly recites praise of the incense offering, a small delegation processes out of the hall and invites a witnessing master (a senior monastic) to come to perform the ceremony. he prostrates before the buddha, invokes the buddhas and spirits as witnesses, and reads a discourse on the merits of renunciation. at the end of the rite, as the witnessing master leaves, the ordinands make a gesture of respect, and he calls out a series of encouraging instructions—“think of your causes and conditions!” “cultivate diligently!”—to each of which they reply loudly: amituofo! (阿彌陀佛!; amitabha buddha!). returning to their dormitories before breakfast, ordinands are issued with a new monastic name, which is used from now on and replaces their lay name on their lanyards. this day continues with more training and rehearsal, as well as lectures on the meaning of the precepts, and ends with a lengthy rite of repentance, with many prostrations that leave ordinands sweating and exhausted but spiritually ready on the third morning for the last of the four opening ceremonies, conferring the precepts (傳受戒; chuanshoujie). figure 4. a guiding venerable shows a class of new preceptees how to fold the sitting mat, fo guang shan headquarters, 2016. photo by life news agency. kneeling and dressed in their haiqing robes, they take their monastic vows, six for women (do not: act licentiously, steal, kill, lie, eat at forbidden times, or take intoxicants) and ten for men (refrain from: killing, taking what is not given; sexual activity; incorrect speech; intoxicating drinks or drugs; eating at forbidden times; dancing, singing, and so on; wearing ornaments; using a luxurious bed; and accepting money). the women’s vows are different, we are told, because an old rule stipulates that men may ordain as monastics up to seven times in one lifetime, while women may ordain only once. if women were to take full monastic ordination temporarily, it would be impossible for them later to ordain permanently. so, they take precepts that are short of full ordination (the 式叉摩那戒; shichamounajie or ´sik․samā․nā precepts). men take the full novice precepts (沙彌戒; shamijie or ´srāma․nera precepts). however, the difference is never explained during the retreat and the importance of the distinction is played down; all participants are told to remember they are now “real renouncers” (真的出家人; zhende chujiaren). at the culmination of this ritual, the markers of a buddhist monastic—robe, sitting mat, and alms bowl—are conferred. as ordinands put on their monastic robe in the manner they have been practicing, they chant, “wondrous robe of liberation, unequaled field of merit. today i put it on. life after life, i will not remove it or be distant from it.” the participants are now monastics and referred to as preceptees (新戒; xinjie). this ceremony marks the most physically demanding part of the retreat. just how demanding varies between venues, with headquarters in taiwan having the justified reputation for being the most severe, including the most complex ceremonial and long periods of painful kneeling on a hard floor. the emotion elicited is very marked. but with the ceremony’s completion, participants have reached a turning point. the intensity of the timetable is reduced, exhortations from the monastics begin to include occasional praise as well as relentless criticism, and many preceptees experience much calmer mental states, progressively letting go of extraneous concerns and finding a greater capacity to concentrate on their cultivation. this was also our own experience. but as preceptees become more skilled, monastics become more demanding, issuing instructions such as “follow the lines in the paving when processing, but don’t look down” and “don’t just finish your food, but use a piece of vegetable to clean the last drop of the sauce from your bowl, without making noise.” living the life of a monastic: external and internal monitoring from now on the daily schedule is less punishing, but still every minute is accounted for, from the sounding of the wooden board that signals wake-up (5 a.m. in taiwan, an hour later in europe) until lights-out (10–10:30 p.m.). the day is taken up with morning and evening chanting, formal meals, lectures or dharma talks, diary writing, chores around the monastery, and the business of keeping bodies, clothing, and dormitories clean. all these activities, no less than the grand ritual dramas, explicitly constitute opportunities for the practice of cultivation through constant monitoring and correction. preceptees are enjoined to concentrate (專心; zhuanxin or 用心; yongxin). maintaining silence is crucial. as one monastic observed: “if you observe silence for seven days, you will find something different about yourself. you will be able to hear your mind. don’t communicate with each other, even silently. some people are trying to connect by wi-fi. what does that mean? eye contact! be silent, and you can calm your mind and listen to it. when you calm your mind, impurities will sink to the bottom.” in lectures and ongoing instruction we were told to maintain two kinds of concentration: external monitoring (外觀; wai guan), focusing on the body, movement, and use of space; and internal monitoring (內觀; nei guan), the observation of one’s heart (心; xin). it is important to understand that this distinction does not correspond to the distinction that anthropologists have often made between the individual and the social. on the contrary, since both are realized in coordinated and cooperative interaction, both external and internal monitoring integrate the cultivation of self and other in a single process. external monitoring is mainly concerned with what fo guang shan monastics in english call “etiquette” (in chinese, 威儀; weiyi, which means “majestic presence” or “impressive manner”). this essentially consists of a radical intensification, achieved by thoroughgoing ritualization, of fo guang shan’s general concerns with respectfulness, politeness, and beauty. the rules of the retreat make these concerns, applied to everything from mundane dormitory life to collective ceremonies, all-encompassing. the core of etiquette is deportment, the importance of which is signaled by the fact that its components—walking, standing, sitting, and lying down in prescribed fashion—are referred to as the four great comportments (四威儀; si weiyi). when walking, for instance, gait should be smooth, posture upright, with eyes slightly lowered. hands should be loosely clasped, fingers in a prescribed configuration. when sitting, one should have a straight back, without leaning on the back of the chair. individual lapses, whether during study sessions, lectures, meals, or ceremonies, are corrected with a sharp look or word or a tap on the shoulder from behind. a key setting for concentration and etiquette is dining (過堂; guotang; “passing through the hall”). preceptees enter the dining hall in formation, silently file to their places, bow in unison, and take their seats. the food is all vegetarian, although it often includes dishes cunningly disguised as meat. every movement is prescribed: how to pick up the chopsticks, lift each plate and bowl to new positions, hold a bowl while eating from it (the “dragon holding a pearl” position), use chopsticks (the “phoenix nodding its head” movement), and place bowls to indicate a request for more food. servers pass silently but speedily along the rows, serving more food to those who signal for it. maintaining beautiful deportment is not easy. monastic clothes, especially the men’s, are so designed that without constant attention and adjustment they will slip from the correct position. for example, the end of men’s long outer robe must be folded thrice and looped over the left arm so that it hangs down to the correct length, forming a tidy pleat. one’s left arm therefore needs to be kept bent more or less at a right angle, with about four-fifths of the robe’s length on the outside and only a fifth on the inside. if not checked and corrected regularly, it will slip from position. in the same way, dining with proper etiquette is a fraught process. the chairs must be moved with care to avoid making a noise. the metal chopsticks, placed at the near edge of the table, are easily knocked off by uncontrolled robes or by the lanyard dangling from preceptees’ necks as they try to sit down silently, and sent tinkling loudly to the floor. the cause of errors—wardrobe failures, wayward chopsticks, dropped food—as venerables never tire of reminding preceptees, is a wandering mind. the exhortation following each such mistake is an embarrassing reminder for the culprit and everyone else to focus on cultivation. internal monitoring means focusing on the mind to identify and try to remove afflictions (煩惱; fannao), especially greed (執著; zhizhuo) and the spirit of comparison (比較; bijiao). monastics frequently emphasize that this internal renunciation with the mind (心出家; xin chujia) is as important as the external renunciation with the body (身出家; shen chujia). they are causally linked because “the human heart tends to follow outer impressions and has no way to govern itself, for that reason choosing a pure environment can produce a real benefit in terms of our frame of mind” (fo guang shan n.d.). figure 5. preceptees walk in formation behind their guiding venerables. they are wearing the jiasha robe, holding the sitting mat before them, and carrying the alms bowl in a bag worn over the shoulder. fo guang shan headquarters, 2016. photo by life news agency. throughout the retreat, participants are told which thoughts or feelings they ought to cultivate and avoid. for instance, specific thoughts are prescribed for chores. groups of preceptees are given tasks such as weeding, sweeping, serving at meals, and cleaning lavatories. they are told to remember that self-cultivation is like this endless work, requiring qualities of endurance and diligence. an interviewee reflected: “in the lawn there were lots of weeds. i imagined that i was plucking my mental troubles. our minds are cluttered with unnecessary stuff. we should pluck out these weeds that are cluttering us and taking our nutrients.” while dining, preceptees should concentrate on the five contemplations: ponder the effort necessary to supply the food, and appreciate these origins; reflect on one’s own virtues, and consider whether they are sufficient to deserve this offering from the faithful; guard one’s mind against faults, especially avoid being greedy, and refrain from selecting by preference among the foods on offer; consider the food as medicine and nourishment, to prevent emaciation of the body; receive the food as necessary to sustain oneself for spiritual cultivation. these contemplations plainly seek to ensure that preceptees’ internal monitoring seamlessly links the social conditions and relations in which their activity is embedded—and which are the material precondition for their practice—with their bodily and mental experience, just as the rules of the practice itself ensure that their external monitoring is a tightly coordinated process of social interaction requiring the minute regulation of bodily deportment. self and other opportunities for internal monitoring arise continually in relation to other people. although the work of self-cultivation requires individual effort, the form of life that sustains it is intensely collective and systematically ensures that preceptees have to confront a range of challenging feelings. participants’ backgrounds vary widely. they rarely know each other, and the requirement for silence means that they cannot get acquainted in a normal way. dormitories are packed. there are precise rules governing exactly how and where bedclothes, spare clothing, toiletries, and books must be placed. little time is allowed for dressing and tidying in the morning, for bathing and laundry in the afternoon, and for retiring at night. everything must be done in a rush, resulting in a distinctive atmosphere of frenetic but silent activity. the dormitories are periodically inspected, and demerit points awarded for each misaligned tooth mug or imperfectly folded duvet. the justice dispensed is rough, and venerables make a point of the fact, urging preceptees to overcome the moral emotions aroused by it: “don’t complain that you earned a cross because someone else moved your towel after you had folded it. why should you be disturbed by what is fair and unfair? just accept gratefully and focus on keeping the right attitude and concentration. make sure you do it correctly in future.” much of what groups have to do requires precise coordination. they must assemble for inspection at appointed times and frequently need to bow, kneel, prostrate, stand, and speak in unison. walking from place to place is generally done in perfectly aligned pairs of columns, maintaining formation through sharp right-angle turns, and gathering robes correctly and adjusting pace for climbing or coming down stairs. however careful you might be, if the person in front of you goes out of line, there is literally no longer a correct place for you to be. it is therefore easy to become frustrated with one’s companions and hard not to compare oneself with neighbors and find oneself either wanting or superior. venerables draw attention to this and insist that preceptees should feel positively toward those who might annoy them: “they are giving you the opportunity to cultivate, so you should think, ‘thank you, pusa [菩薩; bodhisattva].’” a sense of group responsibility is also encouraged. guiding venerables make clear that if their group is late, or badly turned out, or deficient in etiquette, they will in turn be criticized by more senior monastics. yet we were struck by the toleration of those whose mistakes caused problems for their group. the slowest and most error-prone are gently encouraged and corrected, with at most wry amusement. quite rapidly a warm, uncompetitive solidarity develops, with a silent intimacy and sense of shared achievement in the face of adversity. a day or two into the retreat, on both occasions we participated, we found preceptees straightening incorrect folds in their neighbors’ robes, checking that each other’s lanyards were hanging correctly, and silently sharing tips about how to get prayer books in and out of haiqing sleeves smoothly. in this highly ritualized practice, what promotes such solidarity is not so much, as a durkheimian approach might lead one to expect, direct experience, effervescent or otherwise, of anything transcendent, but a sustained and shared struggle with imperfection. the lessons to be drawn from individuals’ mistakes are transmitted to the whole retreat during meals and lectures, with presiding venerables recounting, “one person did such and such, and the reasons why this is wrong are thus and so. you should all avoid this mistake.” such public criticism is always anonymized, and the correction of individuals, while sharp and direct, is also done discreetly; if verbalized, it is usually directed at a whole group. further discreet correction is provided by each group’s guiding venerable in written feedback on the daily diaries participants are required to write, recording their thoughts and feelings. figure 6. preceptees eat together during the retreat at fo guang shan headquarters, 2016. photo by life news agency. tellingly, prominent among the mistakes that venerables most eagerly discourage are enthusiastic attempts to excel or exceed prescribed requirements: preceptees who do extra prostrations at night, for example. this is denounced not only because it disturbs others’ sleep but also because the motivation is suspect. a few preceptees choose to follow strict monastic practice by not eating at all in the evening. this is permitted, but they are required to attend the dining hall with everyone else, be served food, and sit in contemplation while the rest of the assembly eats. in a lecture during the european retreat, a senior venerable explained the thinking: once an opera singer came to the london temple and challenged us by singing very high, and then very low. in the end she was defeated by us. she realized we are connected to the buddha. if you have a great voice, you might want to show off, but you will be defeated by the congregation. . . . we are all trained in the same way, so we sing in unison and it sounds very good. we have the power of community. practicing on your own is dangerous; doing it in a group is better. our water and land ceremony has 108 monastics singing, but we are not there to compete with each other. it’s all about teamwork. this is important for cultivation: you need other people around you or you won’t know that you’ve changed. this last point recalled, for us, a central idea from adam smith’s (1976) theory of moral sentiments about the irreducibly social nature of ethical life. perfection, imperfection, transcendence, and the everyday the retreat’s combination of intensive self-reflection and relationships based on care and intimacy is hard to square with the analytical distinction, which has become established in the anthropology of ethics, between two modes of being and acting: a transcendent mode, in which people reflect on otherworldly values, mediated by ritual and the (typically) religious authorities that control it, and an everyday or ordinary mode characterized by caring accommodation for others amid the unpredictable messiness of embodied human life. this distinction has become the basis of debates as writers have adduced ethnographic examples to argue that ethical life is dependent on one, but not really on the other mode. where have these debates come from? one formative aspect of the anthropology of ethics was attempts to take seriously values and projects at odds with those of most readers of academic anthropology, often for convenience referred to as nonliberal. authors writing in this vein (asad 1993; laidlaw 1995; robbins 2004; mahmood 2005; hirschkind 2006; cook 2010; faubion 2013) sought to convey the integrity of these forms of life, resisting the temptation to see them entirely through the lens of progressive politics (a similar effort characterized the emerging anthropology of christianity; see harding 1991). in particular, they challenged the idea that freedom necessarily requires resisting authoritative norms, arguing that it might equally consist in actively inhabiting them. and they maintained that anthropology should not be preemptively committed to one model of human flourishing but take seriously as diverse forms of ethical life even ideals and values widely disparaged in contemporary academic circles, for instance as regressive, repressive, or patriarchal. these studies, including those of islamic piety movements by talal asad, saba mahmood, and charles hirschkind, proved deservedly influential, but critics argued that they privileged religion in general and single-mindedly religious people in particular, and that they described what successful progress in regimes of self-cultivation looked like at the expense of conveying the complex and sometimes conflictual experiences of people actually pursuing those projects (e.g., marsden 2005; schielke 2009; simon 2009; mittermaier 2012; laidlaw 2014; keane 2016). one response to these perceived failings has been to assert the importance of ethics in the ordinary or everyday (these terms being routinely used interchangeably), including outside formal religious or political institutions, among people who make no conspicuous claims to extraordinary virtue. this approach has enabled some perspicuous descriptions of ethical life, in acts of care and intimate joys and sufferings, especially in modest circumstances (e.g., das 2010; jackson 2013; schielke 2015; singh 2015). however, the injunction to locate the ethical in the ordinary has often proven unhelpfully disjunctive. the implication has been not only that (usually unspecified) others have actively excluded the everyday from the scope of ethics but also that it is an error to think that the religious or the political might ever constitute important sites of ethical life. ethics in this view might be an immanent and pervasive dimension of human life (lambek 2010), but life construed as excluding anything that is ordered or institutionalized, specifically formal religion. thus, michael lambek (2010, 2, our emphasis) influentially characterizes ordinary ethics as “relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling attention to itself.” similarly, veena das (2012, 134) sees ethics as “a dimension of everyday life in which we are not aspiring to escape the ordinary . . . not by orienting oneself to transcendental, objectively agreed-upon values.” joel robbins (2016) has countered that religion quite obviously provides a widespread source of morality, and that a focus on the ordinary to the exclusion of the transcendent misses the importance of religious ritual in grounding values in emotion (see also lempert 2013; clarke 2014). rituals have this effect, he argues, because they enable people to experience a pure manifestation of moral values, unobtainable in other settings: christian rituals among the urapmin of papua new guinea, for example, provide the only settings in which their paramount value of lawfulness is fully experienced. one such ritual ends in an emotional levity, which robbins (2016, 779) interprets as durkheimian effervescence, which “is precisely what it feels like to realize a value fully—to realize something transcendent in its transcendent form, rather than in the piecemeal, often compromised forms in which one realizes values, if one realizes them at all, in ordinary life.” thus, while persuasively opposing das’s and lambek’s claims that religion, ritual, and the transcendent do not constitute a real source of ethical value, robbins develops his position within the general schema on which their position is based: a distinction between a perfectly ordered transcendent sphere (the domain of religion and especially ritual) and a messy everyday sphere.2 another line of thought that locates ethics in the ordinary or everyday emphasizes the ways in which the pursuit of “grand schemes” (schielke and debevec 2012), such as those advanced by religious or political institutions, are undermined by the exigencies of everyday life. again, much of this literature assumes that religion typically requires the unflinchingly consistent, successful execution of a clear moral system, which must overcome the messiness of everyday life. some insightful recent studies, responding to this line of argument, have interpreted the accommodation of failure as a positive aspect of religious ethics (e.g., fahy 2017; mayblin and malara 2018). in a stimulating collection on failure in islam and christianity, for example, daan beekers and david kloos (2018, 2), while noting how much we learn from studies that highlight experiences of imperfection and incoherence in religious ethical striving, regret that “the everyday perspective” tends to place such experiences “outside the domain of religious experience ‘proper.’” they instead examine how senses of falling short “feed back into islamic and christian ethical formation” (beekers and kloos 2018, 2). such experiences, they argue, are often positively embraced and valued in these traditions, as a test of faith, a lesson in humility, and a spur to ethical striving. “our specific contribution,” they write, “is that we investigate the dialectical relationship between muslims’ and christians’ experiences of moral instability, fragmentation or ambivalence on the one hand, and their attempts to achieve a level of moral coherence grounded in religion on the other” (beekers and kloos 2018, 12). as these scholars present things, fragmentation enters moral experience when the exigencies of nonreligious life undermine the pursuit of religious order. it is something that life does to religious practice, to which the latter must find a response. to make sense of the fo guang shan retreat, we must go one step further. there, perfect ideals and imperfect practice are not opposed or in a zero-sum relation; it is not that transcendent religion coexists with and accommodates the mundane. imperfection is not merely an opportunity religion takes to advance its program, by seeking as it were to make a virtue out of necessity. rather, it is a tool actively deployed by religion itself in its most serious ethical striving. it would be mistaken, in other words, to think of experiences of falling short and the religious practice of self-cultivation as being in a dialectical relationship. and neither is it the case, as robbins’s interpretation of ritual as transcendence might suggest, that this religiously inspired ethical pedagogy proceeds principally through an experience in ritual of perfected ideals, that is, through an (albeit fleeting) attempt to manifest the transcendent, “realizing one or a few values very fully” (robbins 2015, 28). if that were the aim, the retreat would be constructed differently. as in much liturgical ritual, mistakes and missteps would be simply ignored, with only the successful completion of prescribed actions acknowledged as having occurred at all (humphrey and laidlaw 1994; seligman et al. 2008). instead, the conditions are such that chronic, repeated failure becomes inevitable and salient. figure 7. preceptees carry out chores, carefully cleaning a buddha statue and other garden ornaments at the fo guang shan european headquarters, fahua temple, bussy-saint-georges, near paris, 2018. photo by life news agency. this is not, for example, an environment in which it is difficult to talk. it is a place instead with endless opportunities for talking (and quite a bit does surreptitiously take place) as one lives continuously cheek by jowl with others. likewise, it is not a situation in which it is impossible to be greedy. at every meal, participants are told they can eat as much as they want, and requesting more food is straightforward. participants have to confront their appetite head on. the detection of mistakes is relentlessly pursued, with spot-check inspections of dormitories and monastics posted so as to catch incorrect posture as preceptees walk by, or while sitting. admonishments and expressions of disappointment at preceptees’ failures are among the most dramatized aspects of the whole, highly ritualized performance. both shortcoming and its correction are scripted throughout. thus this exercise in ethical striving is, simultaneously, a carefully engineered encounter with the experience of inevitable ethical shortcoming. and the falling short at issue is not the intrusion of everyday contingency into religious order, but the result of following faithfully the program of activity mandated by the religious tradition itself. so, it would be incorrect to describe what the retreat aims at as “moral coherence grounded in religion” (beekers and kloos 2018, 12). certainly, humanistic buddhism is as coherent as any ethical and philosophical system, but the ethical subjectivity it seeks to develop, in general and in the retreat in particular, does not constitute a coherent and consistent telos, which it might make sense to seek exactly to attain. it is intrinsically unrealizable (emmet 1994): a practice to which disconcerting paradox, ambivalence, and unknowability are intrinsic, and it is conceived as a never-ending process rather than a state. just as failing to live up to an ideal or to follow a norm does not imply that one is not nevertheless committed to it—it might even be profoundly defining of one’s way of life—so the fact that an ideal is intrinsically unattainable does not prevent one from orienting one’s life in relation to it (laidlaw 1995). imperfect accomplishment the final phase of the retreat consists of a sequence of events over the final twenty-four hours: group discussions, repentance (懺悔; chanhui; in taiwan, a challenging ceremony involving 108 full prostrations, abbreviated in europe), a general discussion, the relinquishment ceremony, and a final exhortation. all these events are designed to elicit strong emotions, and in their dharma talks and remarks, the venerables prepare the ground for this emotionality, remarking that time is running out (“have you made the most of it? there is still some time. remember your original vows”), predicting its occurrence (“do you think you will weep?”), and using increasingly emotional language to describe their own state of mind in relation to the preceptees (“we are very sad and feel like weeping”). in the group discussions, preceptees finally have the chance to speak freely to the twenty or so people with whom they have shared a very intense and challenging experience. they are asked to say what brought them to participate and might reveal family and personal religious histories, marriage breakups, career difficulties, or terminal illness. we were taken aback by how courageously people spoke about terrible circumstances or confessed to faults and failures. the group’s guiding venerable interjects from time to time, with advice to those considering full renunciation or encouraging those undertaking the retreat in order to benefit a sick family member, to make a statement formally dedicating their merit. in the general discussion, a selection of preceptees express gratitude before the whole assembly to the venerables, the volunteers, and their fellow preceptees, which leads to frank expressions of how moved people are to have participated, tearful accounts of afflictions in their lives and how practicing buddhism has helped them come to terms with them, impassioned expressions of devotion to master hsingyun, stories of bitter personal conflicts and heartfelt vows to resolve them, and fervent resolutions to live changed lives in the future. from this carefully choreographed emotional drama, the assembly proceeds to the main shrine for the last time. the final relinquishment ceremony is markedly downbeat. the witnessing master attends without the usual ostentatious invitation and procession. already many of the preceptees are weeping openly. we all kneel and read a humble request to be released from our vows. we remove and fold our robes, which are gathered in quietly, followed by our sitting mats and alms bowls, without the joyful music and chanting that accompanied their distribution. as the witnessing master leaves the hall, he this time shouts no words of encouragement, but leaves in silence. one of the senior monastics comes forward and tells us mildly that this marks the end of the retreat. as many now former preceptees wipe tears from their faces, we are enjoined to take what we have learned and continue to practice as much as we can in lay life. official publications describe how master hsingyun established the retreat to allow householders to experience monastic life, to engage in cultivation, and to increase their merit so that they will afterward set an example to others, thereby contributing to social stability. our interviews revealed a wider range of motivations among participants. many—like the woman who wanted to learn to control her temper or the former army officer who wanted to become less domineering—sought to transform themselves in specific ways. others had taken part because their spouse insisted. some had recently lost a parent and hoped to transfer the merit to assure them a good rebirth. like several others, a financial worker from singapore told us that he regretted not being able to become a monk. by participating, he had planted a seed that might result in his doing so in a future life. younger people who have not married might yet join the monastic community on a permanent basis, and a number said they were seriously considering this, but had not made up their minds. among the older participants, several had been or were still seriously ill and hoped to earn merit that would benefit their health. one man revealed that he was recovering from a tumor of the neck, which doctors had said would be fatal. he had prayed to the buddha and promised to join a retreat if he was cured. the tumor duly shrank, and he fulfilled his vow. others had made similar vows in pursuit of exam success or other professional goals. many participants claimed lasting changes in their everyday life—if not becoming fully vegetarian, then moving in that direction, or reducing alcohol consumption, or refraining from killing insects. others reported more dramatic changes. one young singaporean woman went home, packed four boxes of clothes and shoes to give to the salvation army, and quit her job with an airline. after volunteering at a temple in the philippines for some time, she started a new career as a charity fundraiser. “oh,” she added, “and i gave up drinking coffee.” others found they were unable to sustain the self-improvement they felt during the retreat for very long afterward, and some of those used imagery of needing to be “recharged.” perhaps thinking back to the retreat and how one felt then might help? others concluded that they had to undergo it again. figure 8. preceptees and monastics pose for a group photo after the conferring the precepts ritual, fo guang shan european headquarters, 2018. photo by life news agency. almost all these participants linked the effects of the retreat directly to the idea that it involved genuine monastic initiation, which they acknowledge as extremely challenging. the very minuteness of the regulations and the strictness with which they are enforced, the fact that there is always some criterion by which one may be found wanting, some further improvement to be aimed at, all emphasize how exceptional and efficacious it is. so, while preceptees may chafe under the discipline enforced on them, the value of fulfilling their vows depends directly on its unappeasable severity. conclusion the fo guang shan short-term monastic cultivation retreat is a formal, structured exercise in ethical pedagogy of a kind that is widespread in diverse religious traditions but also has close analogies in secular forms of training, treatment, and rehabilitation (kondo 1987; lester 2005; cheng 2009; cook 2010; zigon 2011; borneman 2015). yet the premises that continue to underlie current anthropological debates about ethics show that little attention has been paid not only to practices of this kind but also to ethical pedagogy in general (but see faubion 2011). the case of this retreat indicates, we suggest, that the anthropology of ethics has much to learn from such practices. it demonstrates, first of all, that ethical striving, in a religious and ritual context, is not only in practice compatible with, but in this case actually depends on, participants in some senses not being up to the task. preceptees take vows to be pure in mind and body and loudly affirm that they can uphold them, but the whole drama ends—designed purposely to come to this conclusion—with an admission of defeat. participants accept the robes of a monastic and promise not to take them off from one life to the next, until they have liberated all beings. days later, they plead that family commitments prevent them from fulfilling these promises, and the witnessing master releases them. the rigors of the retreat provide participants with a prolonged and intensive encounter with their own failings in light of the values of compassion and equanimity that fo guang shan promotes. and yet it is precisely through the planned encounter with failure that preceptees learn to cultivate themselves and thus to embody those values more successfully. the retreat is realized as a radically set-apart, ritualized form of life—entered by participants explicitly so as to leave behind the specific relations, affections, attachments, and cares that ordinarily constitute their lives—to devote themselves to cultivation. in going beyond all that, it becomes transcendent in a sense. but it turns out that preceptees’ labors in this realm are shaped and constrained by other social relations and by the fact that they are embodied beings. the ritualized life of a dedicated cultivator is, like ordinary life, a matter of standing, sitting, walking, sleeping, eating food, and rubbing along as one imperfect being together with many others. for a human being, there is no getting away from the human condition. the distinctiveness of the retreat and of monastic life in general turns out not to be a matter of kind; it differs from life outside the monastery only in the degree to which it facilitates cultivation. so, when participants return to lay life, ethical striving can and should continue, in the same way, but inevitably at a slower pace. for fo guang shan, the nonduality of the transcendent and the mundane is an inevitable condition of any activity (religious and ritualized or not) involving human beings. this is what makes humanistic buddhism humanistic: the perfection of the buddhist path must be realized in the human world. it is this insight that, according to master hsingyun, lies at the heart of the buddha’s “original intent,” one lost by centuries of chinese monastic tradition, precisely because monks sought in vain to escape the conditions of human life so that they might cultivate, with the result that the laity came to believe that buddhist teachings and practices were inaccessible to them while they were mired in the suffering of samsara. in addition to casting doubt on the distinction between the ordinary and the transcendent, the retreat also gives us cause to question some other oppositions that anthropological thinking about ethical life has often taken to be universal or analytic. so, for example, contrary to the expectation that being in the flow of embodied, emotional, and intersubjective experience is opposed to self-consciousness and rational deliberation, the elicitation of powerful affective responses in the retreat goes hand in hand with the achievement of mindful detachment and cognitive transformation, and these are combined in the pursuit of ethical self-cultivation. contrary to the common suggestion that self-cultivation is the self-regarding pursuit of monadic individuals and opposed to an ethics of care for the other, pursuit of ethical progress here is, in one sense, intrinsically individual—only you can do it for yourself—yet possible only as part of an intensely interactive shared collective life. and contrary to the idea that freedom and authority are at odds, the retreat is both a practice of and a method for strengthening the will, through voluntary subjection within hierarchical relations of power and discipline. abstract fo guang shan (佛光山; buddha’s light mountain), an international buddhist movement headquartered in taiwan, regularly runs what it calls a short-term monastic cultivation retreat, a week-long residential program designed to provide lay members with an opportunity for intensive cultivation (修養; xiuyang or 修行; xiuxing). contributions to the anthropology of ethics have recently drawn sharp distinctions between ordered, systematic ethics associated especially with religious traditions, and the compromise and accommodation that result from the exigencies of everyday life. this retreat, we argue, shows that the experience of ethical shortcomings can be a positive instrument and aspect of religious striving. while much debate in the anthropology of ethics assumes an a priori conceptual framework that opposes ordinary or everyday exigency to ordered transcendence, exigency and order in the fo guang shan retreat are instead mutually constitutive and dynamically related. here, failing and being corrected are not imperfections in, but central and ritually scripted elements of its ethical pedagogy. [ethics; self-cultivation; virtue; pedagogy; character; buddhism; taiwan; fo guang shan] 摘要 總部設於臺灣的佛光山是具有世界影響力的佛教組織。其各地道場定期舉行之「短期出家修道會」活動通常持續一周，旨在為信眾提供密集修行機會。目前倫理人類學研究領域已明確區分了兩種道德實踐：其一為具有完美性和秩序性特質之系統，如宗教；其二為在日常生活應對道德困境時形成的具有折衷性和適應性的倫理。本研究透過分析佛光山「短期出家」活動，提出：（1）「不圓滿」體驗在個人宗教修行中具有獨特的積極促進作用；（2）兩種倫理是相輔相成，互動共生的。在佛光山「短期出家」中，活動參與者的行為錯誤與被矯並非通常認為的「不圓滿」所在，而是修行教育體系中至關重要的核心部分。 •[核心詞：道德; •自修; •美德; •教學法; •品格; •佛教; 臺灣; 佛光山] 摘要 总部设于台湾的佛光山是具有世界影响力的佛教组织。其各地道场定期举行“短期出家修道会”，活动通常持续一周，旨在为信众提供密集修行机会。目前伦理人类学研究领域明确区分了两种道德实践：一是具有完美性和秩序性特质的系统，如宗教；二是在日常生活应对道德困境时形成的具有折衷性和适应性的伦理。本研究通过对佛光山“短期出家”活动的分析，提出：（1）“不圆满”体验在个人宗教修行中具有独特的积极促进作用；（2）两种伦理是相辅相成，动态共生的。在佛光山“短期出家”中，活动参与者的失败感与被矫正经验并非通常认为的“不圆满”所在，而恰是修行教育体系中至关重要的核心部分。 •[核心词：道德; •自修; •美德; 教学法; •品格; •佛教; •台湾; •佛光山] notes acknowledgments we would like to express our gratitude to the fo guang shan buddhist organization for facilitating our research so generously in recent years. in the united kingdom, we have been helped in countless ways, since the beginning of our project, by monastics and laypeople alike at the temples in london and manchester, including venerables manchien, miaoduo, miaolung, and miaoshiang. we owe thanks for the help received from the fo guang shan leadership at headquarters, near kaohsiung in taiwan, and from those in temples in france, malaysia, singapore, and taiwan: venerables chuehcheng, chuehpei, chuehyuan, huichuan, ruching, hsinbao, huihao, miaoguang, miaojue, miaoyue, rusheng, tzujong, yilai, yongguang, zhiguan, and zhiying. thanks also to miles chen and shi baozhen for much practical help with fieldwork. we are extremely grateful for permission to participate in the retreats we attended in taiwan and france, and we owe a particular debt to our guiding venerables during those retreats (venerables huiju, huiren, and huiyi) for their kindness and patience and for the explanations they provided to us on so many points. we are grateful, too, to all the venerables and other participants on those retreats and to the volunteers and donors whose support made those events possible. we conducted many long and exhaustive interviews with participants in past retreats in taiwan, singapore, malaysia, and the united kingdom. to all those who gave so much of their time, and who opened themselves so generously to our questions—sometimes no doubt impertinently probing, at others no doubt blindingly obvious—we are very grateful indeed. for permission to reproduce the photographs included here, we are grateful to fo guang shan life news agency and fo guang shan tsung lin university. earlier versions of this essay were presented to seminars at the university of kent and the adam mickiewicz university in poznan, and we are grateful for insightful comments and questions. the following have read and commented on earlier drafts of the article, and we thank them again here for their various comments, criticisms, and suggestions: peter allen, tom bell, matei candea, joanna cook, nicholas evans, james faubion, paolo heywood, kai lim, patrick mckearney, ni haiying, joel robbins, shi baozhen, and di wu. we express our gratitude also to the editors of cultural anthropology, brad weiss, heather paxson, and christopher nelson, for what we have experienced as a remarkably supportive, insightful, and efficient editorial process, and to the three anonymous reviewers who read this article for the journal. for financial support for the research that informs the essay, we are grateful for a british academy/leverhulme trust grant (sg151876). as ever, responsibility for errors and omissions resides with the authors. 1. in taiwan in 2016, this took the form of an “education fee” of ntd 500 (us$16), with a note that an accommodation and food fee of ntd 1000 (us$32) had already been covered by donors. in paris in 2018, the fees amounted to €120 (us$137) for nonmembers, €100 (us$114) for members, and €80 (us$91) for students. 2. elsewhere, the framework in robbins’s approach is provided by roughly congruent oppositions between 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self-cultivation.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 18, no. 2: 247–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2012.01742.x. robbins, joel 2004 becoming sinners: christianity and moral torment in a papua new guinea society. berkeley: university of california press. 2007 “between reproduction and freedom: morality, value, and radical cultural change.” ethnos 72, no. 3: 293–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141840701576919. 2015 “ritual, value, and example: on the perfection of cultural representations.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 21, s1: 18–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12163. 2016 “what is the matter with transcendence? on the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 22, no. 4: 767–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12494. 2018 “where in the world are values? exemplarity, morality, and social process.” in recovering the human subject: freedom, creativity, and decision, edited by james laidlaw, barbara bodenhorn, and martin holbraad, 174–92. new york: cambridge university press. schielke, samuli 2009 “being good in ramadan: ambivalence, fragmentation, and the moral self in the lives of young egyptians.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 15, s1: s24–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2009.01540.x. 2015 egypt in the future tense: hope, frustration and ambivalence, before and after 2011. bloomington: indiana university press. schielke, samuli, and liza debevec, eds. 2012 ordinary lives and grand schemes: an anthropology of everyday religion. new york: berghahn. seligman, adam b., robert p. weller, michael j. puett, and bennett simon 2008 ritual and its consequences: an essay on the limits of sincerity. new york: oxford university press. simon, gregory 2009 “a soul freed of cares? islamic prayer, subjectivity, and the contradictions of moral selfhood in minangkabau.” american ethnologist 36, no. 2: 258–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01134.x. singh, bhrigupati 2015 poverty and the quest for life: spiritual and material striving in rural india. chicago: university of chicago press. smith, adam 1976 the theory of moral sentiments. edited by d. d. rafael and a. l. macfie. new york: oxford university press. originally published in 1790. williams, bernard 1985 ethics and the limits of philosophy. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. yao, yu-shuang, and richard gombrich 2017 “christianity as model and analogue in the formation of the ‘humanistic’ buddhism of tài xū and hsīng yún.” buddhist studies review 34, no. 2: 205–237. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsrv.35392. zigon, jarrett 2011 “hiv is god’s blessing”: rehabilitating morality in neoliberal russia. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. algorithms and automation algorithms and automation: an introduction ian lowrie portland state university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7216-6849 our world is densely populated by ubiquitous processors, capacious storage, and vigilant sensors. networks of such machines are constantly measuring, packaging, storing, circulating, and operating on the world. they are busy assembling and being assembled, sharing information, and distributing their processing loads as they make decisions and enact plans. at the same time, they are refusing connections, maintaining their immune systems, performing network security, managing their boundaries, and controlling access. human bodies move among this flexible, securitized meshwork of silicon, electricity, code, fiber optics, and data: building, maintaining, and restructuring. their activity ensures that aesthetic, epistemological, economic, and political structures are thoroughly woven into these computational networks, tightly coupling the technical to the social as they experiment with new forms of work and life. yet many of those who are building these systems do not seem particularly concerned with ensuring that our computational futures remain within the control, or even comprehension, of fleshy and cultural human beings. on the contrary: as they craft and maintain the datascape, the technicians of global information capitalism are busily and happily laying the groundwork for the outsourcing of many social, cultural, and economic processes to computing machines. i first met these technicians during my fieldwork in the moscow data science community. the computer scientists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers with whom i spoke almost universally considered themselves minor players in the global knowledge economy, more interested in exploring what they called “scientific questions” about the nature of algorithms and their implementation than in building the bedrock for a qualitatively new form of the information economy (lowrie 2017). if you take them at their word, their infrastructural work on the datascape was almost a by-product of their intellectual projects, simply an opportunity to find new data to explore and problem domains on which to unleash their algorithms. if you look at what they are actually building, however, you see the emergence of a profound new form of automation: one that not does not merely rely on the extension of human capabilities and rationality in the form of assembly lines or jacquard looms but that also actively works to replicate those capabilities and that rationality in extended sociotechnical systems. not all automation is algorithmic, but all algorithms automate, and the extension of algorithmic automation from purely mathematical and computational terrains to extended sociotechnical infrastructures has produced profound, ongoing, and open-ended transformations in the organization and function of contemporary social worlds. * * * humans have been automating their world for a long time. the first feedback-regulated device that replaced human labor was probably a water clock invented by ctesibius circa 250 bce, which obviated the need for manual replenishment of the outflowing water chamber, automatically keeping the ultimate inflow to the measuring chamber at a constant rate (nocks 2008). the invention of the thermostat by cornelius drebbel in the seventeenth century is a better-known landmark, which was soon succeeded by an eighteenth-century explosion in the automation of mills, looms, and other industrial devices. these machines used analog programming in the form of gears, flywheels, linkages, cams, and followers to replace the human labor and cognition required in the performance of specific, regular, predictable tasks. many modern instances of automation, especially of industrial functions, grow directly out of this mechanical lineage. yet the quintessentially contemporary form of automation relies, instead, on the computational command, control, and communication of information in what i call algorithmic assemblages.1 technical definitions of algorithms abound, although scholarly consensus remains elusive (see the debates in moschovakis 2001 and gurevich 2011). the various synthetic definitions given by data and computer scientists themselves, however, might be boiled down to something like “a set of formal procedures for operating on a specific set of data in a finite amount of time to produce a specific range of outputs.” algorithms are mathematical and computable procedures for doing things like routing traffic, diagnosing cancerous tumors from mri images, or matching people on dating sites. these sets of procedures, though, cannot do a great deal on their own. as grigori, a muscovite data scientist, put it to me: “a recipe—even a really good one—isn’t a bakery.” an algorithm on its own is a flimsy thing: a few concepts, a heuristic approach, elaborated in some scant lines of code. without being integrated into a broader sociotechnical system, an algorithm remains motionless, inert (gillespie 2014). to make an algorithm work, you rather obviously need processing power, a storage-and-retrieval medium, and data; less obviously, you need to ensure that this computational architecture remains thoroughly integrated with social processes, with what my colleagues in moscow frequently called “the world of applied tasks.” as grigori explained it: “without customers, a bakery will not [stay open]. analogously, you need to find things for your algorithm to do! problems to solve, data to digest.” the efficacy of an algorithmic assemblage consists not only in its ability to process and identify patterns in vast amounts of data but also in its ability to manipulate adjacent computational routines, material infrastructures, and human beings. depending on its domain of application, assembling a functioning algorithm requires the integration not only of hardware and digital flows but also of the organizational structures, analog infrastructure, and socioeconomic processes from which it draws its problems and on which it operates.2 the algorithms at the core of an application such as lyft or uber, for example, analyze customer, driver, and mapping data, as well as producing and monitoring actual changes in extended flows of automobiles, human bodies, and money. the logistical algorithms at the core of an amazon shipping center not only make predictions based on the analysis of past transactions, shipping events, and worker performance but also use those predictions to actively manage product inventories, control the position and performance of human workers, govern the flow of packages through the physical space of the warehouse, and interact with external organizations such as fedex or the postal service. algorithmic automation represents a genuinely novel break with previous forms of automation primarily because of its ability to bring together and operate on a huge range of digital and analog processes at once. as hamid ekbia and bonnie nardi (2018) suggest in their contribution to this collection, in an algorithmic assemblage, the distinction between formal-mathematical procedures and the actual manipulation of objects in the world breaks down. it does not seem entirely hyperbolic to say that what we are encountering here is a collapse of the barrier between computational res cogitans and social-infrastructural res extensa.3 the power unleashed by this collapse—the ability to directly supervise, intervene into, and operate extended material systems by mathematical fiat—is the basis for a truly epochal metastasis of algorithmic control. whereas earlier forms of analog engineering mostly automated repetitive, low-creativity human labor, the speed and sophistication of algorithmic information processing has enabled the automation of ever more “human” domains of activity. (of course, our inclination to treat repetitive, low-creativity work as somehow less human than creative work is not a neutral claim, but rather a culturally specific response to our having automated such work to begin with.) the financial system is probably the most thoroughly computationally automated terrain in contemporary society (mackenzie 2006), a field in which algorithms are more or less free to intervene into the cacophonous maelstrom of accelerating vector and quantity typical of late capitalism, often without a human on the loop. the political system is also being colonized by algorithms, with many quotidian functions of governance in metropolitan centers becoming mechanized (agar 2003), although the actual electoral organs of the political system have remained relatively resistant to automation. security functions such as policing (joh 2016), targeted killing (franz 2017), and war fighting (suchman and weber 2016) have been becoming automated since the second world war (see de landa 1991). algorithms are also taking responsibility for other putatively cultural social functions, with the curation of taste (seaver, forthcoming), the production of news media (carlson 2015), medical diagnosis (soni et al. 2011), scientific discovery (leonelli 2016), and pedagogical supervision (williamson 2015) also all undergoing various forms of automation. certainly, many of these systems keep humans in the loop, leading ekbia and nardi (2017) to argue elsewhere that the current trend ought to be labeled heteromation, rather than automation proper (cf. laflamme 2018). others, however, have argued that work and circulation generally are on their inevitable way to becoming automatic social functions (srnicek and williams 2015; stiegler 2016): science-fiction shades of marx. in the face of all of this posthuman automation, the viral expansion of algorithmic control and the concomitant concrescence of computational and human agency, it has proven difficult for anthropology to find its theoretical footing and ethnographic scope. despite our long history of engaging humans as tool users and more recent enthusiasms for new forms of materialism that push social analysis into posthuman and multispecies terrains, there seems to be something profoundly heterodox—a whiff of the heretical—about an anthropology that would approach automatic processes on their own terms (but see fisch 2013). as much as any specific empirical challenges to conducting an ethnography of automatic systems, ongoing research programs appear haunted by an unspecified and unacknowledged malaise, an epistemologically unjustifiable but deeply felt hunger for humanity. one response has been simply to continue to do what we ethnographers have, historically, done best: follow the people, focusing on the new forms of labor emerging adjacent to algorithmic assemblages. some scholars working in this vein have suggested that these new forms of automation will not or cannot replace human labor, but can merely displace it (irani 2015). certainly, building and maintaining most types of algorithmic assemblages still requires human labor—for now. this suggestion is, in part, empirically justified, as automation seems to have an ambiguous, or even positive, overall effect on employment (e.g., deloitte 2015). yet i see no theoretical reason for us to assume that this will continue to be the case, especially as algorithmic processes assume more and more responsibility for their own development, evolution, and maintenance, while drone control becomes more thoroughly integrated with logistics and management software. optimism about the future necessity of human labor should not blind us to the emergent potentials for a drastic reconfiguration of the role such labor plays in the socioeconomy. the insistence that algorithmic assemblages cannot replace the human seems to me to speak more to contemporary disciplinary and political anxieties than to any objective analysis of those assemblages’ capabilities and limitations. further, even if there is something structural about algorithmic automation that requires the production of new, adjacent spaces for necessarily human labor, studying that labor does not obviate the need to understand automation on its own terms. although perhaps less avidly than practitioners in the other social sciences, communications, and information science, ethnographers have been turning their attention to the construction and operation of algorithmic assemblages as extended sociotechnical systems (e.g., gates 2011; schüll 2012). unfortunately, however, rather than delivering a detailed ethnographic examination of how algorithmic systems are built and function, our primary disciplinary focus has been on the effect of algorithmic automation on existing social structures. while this certainly constitutes crucial work, our stubbornly all-too-human discipline has frequently used this research as the basis for what is probably an overly hasty critique of algorithms both per se and as agents of automation. algorithmic processes, according to the dominant storylines across the human sciences, replicate and can in fact exacerbate existing forms of inequality, while removing putatively humane human judgment from the decision loop on critical social functions. though most of these criticisms focus on specific algorithmic implementations, there is a pervasive sense in the literature that the problem lies with automation itself, that algorithmic processes somehow necessarily and generally fail to capture the nuance and specificity of human and social processes. the preferred solution, more often gestural and inchoate than concrete and programmatic, is the contextualization of algorithmic knowledge and the reintroduction of humans to the development, implementation, and maintenance of algorithmic assemblages. i do not consider this a particularly felicitous way forward for anthropological knowledge in the age of algorithmic automation. quite the contrary: i think that we should be suspicious of the deeply ingrained, professional-intellectual satisfaction that comes from a thorough contextualization of an algorithm qua technical object. certainly, understanding the social forces shaping the construction and deployment of an algorithmic assemblage, or charting how they integrate with broader social structures and processes, constitutes a crucial step in the analysis of algorithmic automation. but as nick seaver (2013, 10) argues elsewhere, allowing this to remain the horizon of that analysis tends to leave “algorithms themselves untouched, objective stones tossed about in a roily social stream.” i am similarly skeptical of calls to “humanize” contemporary automation processes by providing nonengineer stakeholders or kibitzing anthropologists a seat at the table of algorithm development. as dawn nafus (2018) convincingly argues in her essay, this may actually give away the farm, insofar as it forecloses arguments about the propriety of the algorithmic colonization of infrastructural and intellectual ground that perhaps might be better occupied by more human forms of analysis and control. more broadly, it seems to me simply unlikely that any luddite insistence on humanizing algorithmic systems, especially by a community as peripheral as ours, will have any profound effects on the automation processes unleashed by algorithmic innovations and ubiquitous computing. still more vexingly, such refusals to engage seriously with emergent technologies may have the unfortunate side effect of assuring engineers and policymakers that ethnographic critique has little to offer them besides nostalgia and wishful thinking. so what is to be done? certainly, neither i nor the other contributors to this collection would be happy with an anthropology of algorithms that writes humans out of social analysis altogether. this would be, at best, premature: as the contributions collected here amply demonstrate, algorithmic assemblages remain thoroughly integrated with and reliant on myriad forms of human labor for their function, despite my insistence on the genuine novelty and power of algorithmic automation. to borrow a term from nafus’s (2018) essay, an exclusive focus on algorithmic assemblages as technical objects would leave a great deal of social science “undone.” rather, it seems to me that the best way forward is to carefully and thoughtfully separate our roles as ethnographers of algorithmic assemblages and as anthropologists of the contemporary. what does it mean to approach an instance of algorithmic automation ethnographically? to sum up seaver’s (2018) recommendations: we must begin with a realistic assessment of an algorithmic assemblage’s capabilities, functions, limitations, goals, drives, resources, and meanings, charting its internal distribution of agency and affects across humans and machines, placing it within extended social terrains and networks of relationships with both humans and other assemblages. that is to say, in the same way that we begin to understand any of the other things that we study, be they moieties or swidden plots or migration patterns or persons or masks or cattle or automobiles or jaguars. certainly, the anthropological opening that this introduction proposes has focused on contemporary forms of automation and computation in a structural and theoretical mode, treating algorithmic assemblages as an emerging type. the work of ethnography, however, must proceed in an altogether more nominal fashion, confirming or disconfirming these claims in particular situations of assembly and feeding empirical material back into theoretical conversations. anthropological theories must, ultimately, be synthetic if they are to be either anthropological or theoretical. i think, though, that our theories in this domain ought to be centered on algorithmic assemblages themselves, rather than on their contingent uses within specific social situations. certainly, we should criticize those deployments of algorithmic control that produce and circulate bad affects, diminish human capabilities, damage the biotic world, and exacerbate (or create new) inequalities. however, i think that the existing theoretical preoccupations with such negative tendencies tells us more about our collective political imaginary than about the objective affordances and constraints of algorithmic assemblages. it seems to me underwritten by an ultimately sterile form of technological determinism, reflecting an unfortunately prevalent inability to think expansively and imaginatively about the utopian lines of flight contained in our admittedly brutal present. karl marx, after all, was no critic of automation. instead, our task should be to rigorously develop an architectural understanding of the conceptual, technological, and social problem spaces opened and explored by algorithmic innovation. * * * algorithmic automation is a potent form of social engineering, capable of vastly expanding and accelerating our capabilities for interpretation, organization, and production. like other world-historical innovations such as the division of labor, the electrical grid, double-entry bookkeeping, the assembly line, or flexible employment, it has the potential to dramatically restructure the field of human experience. algorithmic assembly also brings to bear a potent form of domination and hierarchy, eroding as it does the barriers between computational res cogitans and concrete res extensa to orchestrate new forms of life and circulation, making bodies and numbers and commodities and knowledge dance to the austere tunes of algorithmic rationality. precisely because of the vast forces unleashed by these new forms of action and control, however, it seems to me that our first task as anthropologists should be a modest witnessing, the production of a careful and resolutely untimely chronicle of our emerging contemporary (rabinow 2011). genuinely understanding how algorithms become assembled within social processes and the effect that they have—or could have—on social worlds should be our priority. the picture of the future may be an algorithmic boot stamping on a human face, forever—but this remains to be seen. there is no technological reason why the future could not, instead, be one where algorithmic automation radically liberates humans from the drudgery of work and the all-too-human domination that has heretofore structured industrialized life (srnicek and williams 2015). given that our present has seen its share of human boots stamping on human faces, however, and that humans remain the architects, builders, and maintainers of most algorithmic assemblages, it is easy to understand why ethnographically informed futurological speculation in this domain has proven almost uniformly pessimistic. ethnography is obliged to cleave closely to the particulars under observation, and the sociological particulars have not been particularly inspiring, especially given the imbrication of algorithmic automation with platform capitalism (srnicek 2017) and the precaritization of labor (noble 2011; srnicek and williams 2015). in its concrete engagements with worlds of human practice, ethnographic knowledge and critique should continue to militate against the damage caused by specific implementations of algorithmic automation, examine its place within global political economy, and strive to encourage the collaborative relationships with engineers, designers, and computer scientists that are necessary to build more humane assemblages of computational and social processes. ethnography is not coextensive with anthropology, however. while we disagree on the relative value of ethnography for anthropology, i am in absolute accord with tim ingold (2017, 24) in his insistence on the separation of the two forms or moments of thought and on his understanding of anthropological reason as a “fundamentally speculative” partner to the radically empirical—and indeed, nominalist—work of ethnography (see also bialecki 2013). ethnography is concerned with how things are, in specific places, for specific folks. anthropology has the mandate to think expansively, imaginatively, and otherwise: it is the exploration of “the conditions and possibilities of human life in this world” (ingold 2017, 24). in condemning the deleterious effects of specific algorithmic assemblages, we should not abandon automation conceptually or practically to the forces of hierarchy, domination, and inequality. the anthropology of algorithmic automation can be both militant and optimistic, dedicated to cultivating allies and building better worlds in the datascape—but only if it works, first, to understand how those worlds function. notes 1. mike ananny (2016, 7) also uses the term algorithmic assemblage, but he restricts what is assembled to the relatively limited set of “institutionally situated computational code, human practices, and normative logics.” 2. of course, some algorithms are directly focused on managing other computational flows, such as those that manage processing tasks or information retrieval and storage within a specific computational architecture. the idea that these are solipsistically digital functions, however, is a mistake: even these autonomic computing functions require the ability for information processing to feed back into the material world, manipulating actual storage and processing substrates. 3. rené descartes (1988) thought of the world as made up of res extensa, the extended corporeal substance occupying material space, and res cogitans, the immaterial mental substance that is the nonextended stuff of pure thought; these were joined together by the third substance, god. here, these terms are used with some playfulness. references agar, jon 2003 the government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer. cambridge, mass.: mit press. ananny, mike 2016 “toward an ethics of algorithms: convening, observation, probability, and timeliness.” science, technology, and human values 41, no. 1: 93–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915606523. bialecki, jon 2013 “virtual christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology.” anthropological theory 12, no. 3: 295–319. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499612469586. carlson, matt 2015 “the robotic reporter: automated journalism and the redefinition of labor, compositional forms, and journalistic authority.” digital journalism 3, no. 3: 416–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976412. de landa, manuel 1991 war in the age of intelligent machines. new york: zone books. deloitte 2015 “from brawn to brains: the impact of technology on jobs in the uk.” report. https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/growth/articles/from-brawn-to-brains--the-impact-of-technology-on-jobs-in-the-u.html. descartes, rené 1988 “principles of philosophy.” in descartes: selected philosophical writings, translated by john cottingham, robert stoothoff, and dugald murdoch, 160–212. new york: cambridge university press. originally published in 1644. ekbia, hamid r., and bonnie a. nardi 2017 heteromation, and other stories of computing and capitalism. cambridge, mass.: mit press. 2018 “from form to content.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 3: 360–67. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.02. fisch, michael 2013 “tokyo’s commuter train suicides and the society of emergence.” cultural anthropology 28, no. 2: 320–43. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12006. franz, nina 2017 “targeted killing and pattern-of-life analysis: weaponized media.” media, culture, and society 39, no. 1: 111–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443716673896. gates, kelly a. 2011 our biometric future: facial recognition technology and the culture of surveillance. new york: new york university press. gillespie, tarleton 2014 “the relevance of algorithms.” in media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society, edited by tarleton gillespie, pablo boczkowski, and kirsten foot, 167–94. cambridge, mass.: mit press. gurevich, yuri 2011 “what is an algorithm?” technical report 2011-116. redmond, wa.: microsoft research. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/what-is-an-algorithm. ingold, tim 2017 “anthropology contra ethnography.” hau 7, no. 1: 21–26. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.005. irani, lilly 2015 “justice for ‘data janitors.’” public books, january 15. http://www.publicbooks.org/justice-for-data-janitors. joh, elizabeth e. 2016 “the new surveillance discretion: automated suspicion, big data, and policing.” harvard law and policy review, 10, no. 1: 15–42. http://harvardlpr.com/print-archive/volume-10-1. laflamme, marcel 2018 “a sky full of signal: aviation media in the age of the drone.” media, culture, and society 40, no. 5: 689–706. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443717737609. leonelli, sabina 2016 data-centric biology: a philosophical study. chicago: university of chicago press. lowrie, ian 2017 “algorithmic rationality: epistemology and efficiency in the data sciences.” big data and society 4, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717700925. mackenzie, donald 2006 an engine, not a camera: how financial models shape markets. cambridge, mass.: mit press. moschovakis, yiannis 2001 “what is an algorithm?” in mathematics unlimited—2001 and beyond, edited by björn engquist and wilfried schmid, 919–36. new york: springer. nafus, dawn 2018 “exploration or algorithm? the undone science before the algorithms.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 3: 368–74. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.03. noble, david f. 2011 forces of production: a social history of industrial automation. piscataway, n.j.: transaction publishers. originally published in 1984. nocks, lisa 2008 the robot: the life story of a technology. baltimore, md.: john hopkins university press. rabinow, paul 2011 the accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. chicago: university of chicago press. schüll, natasha dow 2012 addiction by design: machine gambling in las vegas. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. seaver, nick 2013 “knowing algorithms.” paper presented at media in transition 8, cambridge, mass., may 4. 2018 “what should an anthropology of algorithms do?” cultural anthropology 33, no. 3: 375–85. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.04. forthcoming “captivating algorithms: recommender systems as traps.” journal of material culture. soni, jyoti, ujma ansari, dipesh sharma, and sunita soni 2011 “predictive data mining for medical diagnosis: an overview of heart disease prediction.” international journal of computer applications 17, no. 8: 43–48. https://doi.org/10.5120/2237-2860. srnicek, nick 2017 platform capitalism. malden, mass.: polity. srnicek, nick, and alex williams 2015 inventing the future: postcapitalism and a world without work. new york: verso. stiegler, bernard 2016 automatic society, volume 1: the future of work. translated by daniel ross. malden, mass.: polity. originally published in 2015. suchman, lucy, and jutta weber 2016 “human-machine autonomies.” in autonomous weapons systems: law, ethics, policy, edited by nehal bhuta, susanne beck, robin geiß, hin-yan liu, and claus kreß, 75–102. new york: cambridge university press. williamson, ben 2015 “governing software: networks, databases, and algorithmic power in the digital governance of public education.” learning, media, and technology 40, no. 1: 83–105. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2014.924527. what matters what matters catherine lutz brown university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9369-5344 when anthropologists turned to the concepts of emotions, sentiments, and passions in the 1980s, they found them to be thoroughly centered in psychophysical frameworks. charles darwin, experimental psychology, and popular discourse more generally construed emotions as features of a universal human character, as primitive, natural, simple functions, and as more dominant in the dominated and more under control in those at the rational controls of the social order. feelings were deficits of a sort, even as a human life could not be imagined without them. the work that began in that decade (abu-lughod 1986; lutz 1988; myers 1986; rosaldo 1980) reshaped these concepts into devices for identifying what comes to matter to people in diverse historical, cultural, and political contexts and for reimagining human psychology in less individual and more social, relational, and political terms. the concepts have continued to energize a remarkable and rich body of ethnographic work. affect has joined these concepts more recently in anthropology. sometimes affect is treated as a synonym of emotion, sometimes as a kind of master category that includes specific feelings and emotions, and sometimes as an inchoate feeling or intensity that stands in contrast to emotions, which are then defined narrowly as objects of discrete and linguistically coded meanings. while attention to affect has both revived and expanded earlier work on emotions, it has also contested the premises of this work under the sign of affect theory (or a variety of affect theories). rather than with psychology, this new work is mostly in conversation with philosophy, cultural, literary, feminist, and queer studies. regardless of the key category used or the tradition invoked, these overlapping academic explorations concern themselves with what moves and matters in human life. many see the overarching question as how historical social formations and change intersect with that mattering. how, in other words, are feelings deployed in governing social orders or in motivating change? what affective qualities or frames, like song (justifiable anger) on a pacific island or cruel optimism under conditions of contemporary capitalism, shape the tones, the political possibilities, or the harms of everyday life? the initial work on emotion criticized how then current understandings and uses of the concept tacitly resurrected the distinction between emotion and reason, between the unintended and the intended, the bodily self and the immaterial mind, and the private self and public sociality. the prompt to critique these distinctions came with the rise of several intellectual and social movements that identified the politics of those binaries. those movements included feminism, which pointed to the devaluation of a capacity culturally associated with the female; of poststructuralism more broadly, led by key feminist thinkers, which asked for a deconstruction of master categories like objectivity and the psyche and for the recognition of the co-constitution of knower and known (e.g., haraway 1989); and of postcolonial scholarship, which suggested that we might ask, for example, not for an experimental accounting of papuans’ facial expressions but for a more fully agentic, experience-based account of papuan (socio-emotional) lives in a global context of power relations. additionally, from within anthropology as well as feminist and postcolonial thought emerged sharp questions about the role of ethnographers, the kinds of emotional/affective/cultural understandings they brought with them into the field, and the workings of both affect and gender in colonial and postcolonial regimes previously viewed as rationalist, enlightened, and male projects (e.g., stoler 2005). the result was that anthropologists relativized, historicized, and contextualized both the emotions or emotionality and the euro-american psychological science that asserted itself as at the helm of understanding emotion (lutz and abu-lughod 1990). researchers who have followed in this tradition have insisted on seeing the study of affect and/or emotion (which i use here synonymously, even though affect theory insists on distinguishing them, as i will explore below) as an aspect of the study of political and ethical life. some scholars then began to worry that this work treated the force of emotions as if it were lodged in impassioned words more than in animated bodies. the call for studying embodied sentiments was energized by phenomenological thinking (csordas 1994), but, perhaps ironically, it also resonated with the neurological turn (see gopnik 2013) in the social and natural sciences. that turn was itself animated by a long-standing technophilia, by which today’s mris and experimental devices for measuring, for example, whether preferences require inferences, have held pride of methodological place. in a related but more productive vein, the revolution in conceptualizing nature brought two new schools of thought that in a sense decolonized the body of emotions: some biocultural approaches helped shape new conceptualizations of biology that were more open or local (hinton 1999), while bruno latour and his followers undermined the standard opposition between inert matter and active humanity. this has prompted serious questions about the usefulness of standard psychobiological frames, which assume the existence of a small set of basic, hard-wired, universal emotions that may be only superficially masked by cultural forms or combined in culturally specific ways. as tom boellstorff and johan lindquist (2004, 440) note, however, “‘the body’ has become a near-panacea for anthropology’s ills,” without attention to “the danger . . . that ‘the body’ can become an inadvertent rallying point for a reworked methodological individualism . . . unless its fundamentally social character, so often de-emphasized in ‘western’ traditions, is foregrounded instead.” figure 1. a public demonstration of military skill, fort bragg, north carolina. photo courtesy of elin slavick. like earlier work in the anthropology of emotion, much contemporary work on emotion/affect continues to focus on discourse and practice. it looks to discourses and practices not so much as signposts to a deep interiority but rather as themselves social activities. the notion of an interior self was not so much abandoned as reconceptualized. interior selves became objects of the imagination—not places of origin, not primitive and/or authentic, not precultural places of universality and nature that could be contrasted to a civilized cultural outside. scholars focused on emotional life as social life. the excitement came from discovering that we could study emotions through naturally occurring dialogue and through speech that did things in the world. emotions did not have to be portrayed as private property, but could be seen as the very stuff of social relations. the earlier focus on language expanded to include interest in the exchange of gestures and in embodiment (tapias 2006), and even in the emotional impact or nature of objects (navaro-yashin 2009), but the idea of emotional communication, exchange, or transfer has remained at the center of emotion study, both theoretically and methodologically. within ethnographic work of the past decade, these concepts of emotion/affect have been used to illuminate the ethical sensibilities and the overall complexity evident in yapese forms of happiness (throop 2015), the revalorization of romantic love and pride in new marriage practices in nepal (ahearn 2001), and the role of depression in shoring up fragmenting kin relations under pressure of commodification and monetarization among hmong in laos (postert 2012). much valuable and complex work (e.g., klima 2004; muehlebach 2011) uses emotion as a route to a grounded understanding of how political and economic changes affect communities of people living together (or, sometimes, in isolation from each other [allison 2013]). much of that work has been comprehensively and thoughtfully reviewed in an annual review essay by bonnie mcelhinny (2010). some of the most exciting new research has tried to expand what anthropology can do with emotions by going beyond translating disparate emotional worlds to focus on how a shared global predicament is emotionally and differentially construed. alan klima (2004) gives a compelling analysis of how this works in his examination of a recently invented thai public ritual in which citizens gift the nation with love and cash via buddhist intermediaries as a way to manage the country’s debt and financial crisis. he avoids treating the “passion for money” (klima 2004, 447) as either natural, as rational-choice models do, or as constructed in local and perhaps fetishistic response to a global economic system, as other, more critical cultural models do. klima instead argues that passion varies in groups differentiated by power and that it can be ethnographically analyzed as a way to understand globalization, rather than as an end itself. the nonuniversal character of globalization can be better understood, he argues, by attending to the emotional dimensions of the creation of value and of economic trauma, which allows us to see emotional formations that “contain both play and order . . . elements of both domination and liberation . . . [and] potentials for reproducing and extending . . . global capital power processes as well as disrupting and altering them” (klima 2004, 447). looking at emotions allows “insight into [the] multiple, rather than singular, possibilities for the ways in which the ‘logic’ of money has potential to play itself out” (klima 2004, 460). we find other astute contributions to the study of emotion/affect in the work of those who have examined the limits—self-imposed and otherwise—of ethnographic fieldwork methods and writing style. andrew beatty (2010) draws attention to the problem that lila abu-lughod (1993) originally identified and countered in complicated narratives about the people in egypt with whom she, like so many ethnographers, had come into loving relationship. these personal relationships are violated first when people are turned into ethnographic typifications—say, as sisters in an affectionate relationship in a matrilineal system or as exemplars of the power of neoliberal ideology to drive life into a distorted, depressive, or anxiously consuming shape—and, second, by overtheorization. beatty calls this depersonalization and sees our understanding of emotions as correspondingly drained of the life-historical specifics and significance they have. despite his return to the individual as the essence of the affective, beatty’s essay, like abu-lughod’s book, offers an important reminder of the value of writing about events that we watched and participated in in less reductive ways than as examples of the culturally or historically emergent. can we write those emotional events as richly moving, capturing the way they involve people-in-relationship as well as the contradictory and ambiguous outcomes of life’s experiences? as has often been noted, this approach requires intricate, microcontextual narrative writing, longer periods of fieldwork, and more linguistic dexterity. theory, central to advances in understanding, can nonetheless get in the way of comprehending emotion when it is valorized over narrative and character development,1 especially when handled in the manner that john borneman and abdellah hammoudi (2009, 16) call “neo-scripturalist.” in the case of some recent anthropological writing using affect theory, the scripture is the written word of brian massumi (2002) and a handful of others. borneman and hammoudi (2009, 16) argue that “to equate theory making with the illustration of specific philosophical trends is a travesty of the kinds of articulation possible between high theory and anthropology, and it suggests inattention to the range of views and open questions about human consciousness and action.” as yael navaro-yashin (2009) has shown, theory can be misused when one mode of thinking about emotion/affect is treated as a necessary replacement for earlier modes and theory-building itself becomes a project of the ruination of other theories. feminist writing continues to work against the gendered hierarchy of reason and emotion, a distinction that distorts and divides understandings of human activity. some important feminist work presses for a view of emotions as not defective in relation to reason, as not mere subjective impulses or microsociological details, but as having as much “simultaneity, reality, and social efficacy” (muehlebach 2011, 75) as other social or economic phenomena. the feminist critique of the positivist modeling of human life reoriented attention to the everyday emotional relations of people, including the fieldworker. the emotions, in such literature, were treated as both passionate forms of reason and concepts that could bridge those cultural and gendered dualisms. the rise of affect theory and its critiques over the past couple of decades, new forms of affect theory have emerged that may offer anthropology a valuable theoretical apparatus. many now firmly distinguish emotion from affect. the former is considered a “sociolinguistically fix[ed]” (massumi 2002, 28) experience that comes to be known as personal experience; the latter is defined as a presubjective and asocial intensity that is nonetheless not presocial. affect theory is less interested in subjectivity understood as disembodied content and more interested in the idea that we should be looking for a presubjective but somewhat smarter body, one whose intensities prove important in shaping human life and which bears the traces of social experience without itself being social; the intent is to break down the distinction between the material and the immaterial. much affect theory implicitly positions itself in distinction to earlier work on the emotions, which it imagines as overly focused on language and linguistically coded meanings rather than either the body or the inchoate. it also considers earlier work to be too focused on ferreting out power dynamics (stewart 2007). oddly, the earlier critical feminist and anthropological work that drew attention to the flaws in standard binaries of passion and reason and body and mind is ignored, as when michael hardt (2007, ix) asserts in his foreword to the influential volume the affective turn that affect theory has new value “in the first place, because affects refer equally to the body and the mind; and, in the second, because they involve both reason and the passions.” this passage elides anthropological and feminist work in the first clause and, contrary to the second clause, re-erects the split between cognition and emotion elsewhere in his work, where hardt builds a distinction between cognitive and affective labor.2 while affect theory has taken many forms, the analytic treatment of the body by some of its leading theorists is flawed, karyn ball (2015, 61) has charged, by a kind of scientism that it “poach[es] from scientific paradigms [e.g., that of the psychologist silvan tomkins] and flirt[s] with a vitalist characterization of . . . matter.” some versions of affect theory universalize the affective impact of capitalism and other social forces, paying far less attention to the unequal social distribution of feelings of weariness, for example, although a few critique precisely this failure of attention to difference and inequality. finally, ruth leys (2011) has noted the standard cartesian account of the mind as a mental state separate from the body in the dominant strain of affect theory. these evaluations of affect theory come from a variety of perspectives, but perhaps most important for anthropology is emily martin’s (2013). she sees the dominant strains of affect theory in the humanities as dismissing experience (a dismissal that also dominates in contemporary psychological science) and worries about their craving for generality, as well as for the politically energizing notions of potentiality, creativity, and transformation. martin argues that these strains of theory misunderstand affect as something that belongs to an interior life fundamentally beyond social articulation. in this, she sees affect theory’s “resistance to allowing the meaning of human acts to rest on social understandings all the way down” (martin 2013, 156). martin (2013, 157) detects an ideology of capitalism’s productivity in this resistance: is this kind of ineffable affect, she asks, a concept intolerant of “anything that limits the kind of commensurability that our markets and systems of governance demand?” as vincanne adams, michelle murphy, and adele clarke (2009) argue, the turn to affect could be seen as related to the rise of regimes of anticipation, which direct emotional energy (especially hope and fear) toward the future, legitimating a sense of urgency to act today to minimize risk, and in ways that are especially gendered (as in national security rhetoric and practice [masco 2014]). much affect theory appears to reproduce and celebrate the analytic utility of something akin to the dualism that feminism and other early work in anthropology first critiqued: strong traces of the opposition between body and mind can be found in the distinction between embodied intensity and discursive content, even as that body, so often made the realm of women and people of color, is at least rehabilitated as more social, sensual, and complex than it was in the earlier schemas. some of the recent literature on affect rehearses work done in the 1980s. i see this as necessary, given that the projects are carried out with new ethnographic material and in a changing world, and because the study of emotion must continue to struggle against an intellectual heritage—embedded in words, things, and relations of power—that requires intense effort to withstand or think without. the study of emotion/affect has still not fully escaped the straitjackets of reason versus unreason, civilized versus primitive, (monadic) self versus society. directions for studying what matters the unique insights that ethnographic fieldwork provides would advance theory-building in the study of affect by thickening the crucial but neglected mid-range below abstract theories about the nature of the human and the nature of nature and closer to the history of the present. we can take from affect theory the healthy reminder that human life is messier and more resistant to our efforts to make sense of it as social analysts than we might think, and we might consider returning to the strengths of earlier moments by writing rich narratives based in field conversation, observation, and reflexive self-critique. the longer history of anthropological research on emotions, especially that inspired by feminism, allows us to see emotions as labor whose value can be extracted or erased by the workings of power and legitimation. we could focus more on the work that emotion and emotions do as forms of sociality and embodied experience (jones 2004; martin 2013). such mid-range projects might involve studying the emotional/affective aspects of reproductive labor, especially as it has become increasingly commodified (constable 2009). those insights are to be found in the silences, the dialogues and the monologues, the practices (from political meetings to singing competitions to paid and unpaid caregiving across generations) as well as the materialities and objects of suffering and a variety of embodied human relationships. mid-range contributions to our understanding of emotions are diverse in current anthropology. they include attunement to cross-cultural differences through a singular case, such as when c. jason throop (2015, 47) concludes from fieldwork in yap that we might appreciate that positive emotions like happiness or joy are “seldom experienced without some degree of ambivalence, ambiguity, and instability,” or that suffering is often linked to hope in social discourse. they include insights into the nature of post-fordist compassion as the form of affective labor to which citizens of many states are being summoned as so-called real work disappears (muehlebach 2011). and they include research that alerts ethnographers working in current and former war zones to attend to the way people live with war’s physical ruins and remnants and how these shape the social/emotional relations of everyday life, as yael navaro-yashin (2009) does in her research on cyprus. what has the field of anthropology gained by a turn to the study of affective life? it has gained ways of talking about personhood as genuinely relational or transpersonal, beyond even what psychoanalytic theory offered. it has been able to track the ways that power is capillary in more aspects of sociality and object worlds than formerly recognized. it has produced a more consistent way to see the politics and moralities of everyday life as powerfully organized (and disorganized) through emotion discourses. and it has given new insight into the ways the institutions of knowledge production have reinforced a bifurcated self divided between reason and emotion along gender lines. further, it has led us to think more about fieldwork itself as a complex emotional activity, in an extended relational and political sense. finally, an orientation toward the affective or emotional has directed us to focus more intensely on what matters to the communities we study, what moves them through the day, and thus what makes the emergent material and social worlds in which we are immersed. notes 1. the gendering of theory has also set up a hierarchy of value that has this result (lutz 1995). 2. see liljeström 2016 on this erasure, in the context of an overview of the varieties of feminist affect theory. references abu-lughod, lila 1986 veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a bedouin society. berkeley: university of california press. 1993 writing women’s worlds: bedouin stories. berkeley: university of california press. adams, vincanne, michelle murphy, and adele e. clarke 2009 “anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” subjectivity 28, no. 1: 246–65. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18. ahearn, laura 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https://doi.org/10.14318/hau5.3.004. habilitating bodyminds, caring for potential: disability therapeutics after zika in bahia, brazil cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 9-36, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.02 habilitating bodyminds, caring for potential: disability therapeutics after zika in bahia, brazil k. eliza williamson washington university in st. louis https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4831-364x i arrived at sara’s home after a long, hot bus journey from my apartment in salvador da bahia, brazil, in october 2017. she was living in águas claras, a periferia (low-income periphery neighborhood) located near the outskirts of salvador, with her husband leonardo and their daughter lizinha, who was then going on two years old.1 lizinha was one of the first bahian children born with congenital zika syndrome (czs). the shiny white tiled floor of their small living room contrasted jarringly with the humble exterior of their auto-constructed home, borrowed from a cousin who was working in são paulo. against one wall, brightly colored toys rested in bins. lizinha lay on her tummy on a foam mat when sara led me through the door at the top of the brick stairs. when she heard us come in, the little girl raised her head a few inches above the floor, responding to our voices and approaching footsteps. but neurological damage from zika had weakened her cervical spine control, so she didn’t lift her head and turn around like a “typical” two-year-old might do. as we settled in for our interview on the beige couch separating the living room from the kitchen, sara picked up lizinha and held her on her lap. lizinha squealed with delight, breaking into a big smile that exposed her emerging first teeth. “you know she’s going to die, right? it may not be tomorrow, but she’s going to die.” this was what doctors had told sara and her husband when she and lizinha were in the hospital after delivery. the physicians warned that the extent of their infant daughter’s neurological damage made her a lost cause. as long as she did live, the doctors said, she would be like a “hollow trunk” (um tronco vazio), with almost no brain function at all. this dire prediction may have been meant to brace lizinha’s parents for the worst, but sara considered it an insensitive affront to their hopes for their little girl. lizinha did not die, and since she was born, sara has been determined to aid her disabled daughter’s development as much as possible. she explained that lizinha was on a ketogenic diet—a high-fat, low-carb diet that may prove useful in controlling epileptic seizures. like many of the children born with czs, lizinha used to have frequent seizures that, besides being dangerous in themselves, held back her developmental progress by “shocking” her neurological system into relative disarray. hard-won skills like following objects with the eyes or holding up the head just an inch higher could be “forgotten” in an instant and had to be re-learned, so controlling lizinha’s seizures was vital to protect her brain function and developmental progress. meals for the pediatric ketogenic diet must be individually homemade, measuring out the exact amounts of each ingredient to the decimal point—a tedious and intensely laborious undertaking. additionally, the family had just won a legal injunction to import cbd oil from the united states, also to help control their daughter’s seizures. when she wasn’t accompanying lizinha to her numerous therapy sessions, sara spent significant time at home reinforcing the exercises done there: encouraging her tiny hands, usually balled into fists, to open and feel toys with various textures; moving objects across and around her line of sight so she might follow them with her eyes; talking to her to stimulate auditory processing and speech. at one point in the interview, sara motioned to the kitchen counter, on which sat a large bottle of a nutritional supplement called speak+d smooth®, which sold for around r$400 (us$150 at the time). she explained that it was “an omega-3 [supplement] imported from the united states,” originally formulated to aid speech development in autistic children. lizinha’s pediatric neurologist had said it would bring “marvelous results,” making the little girl’s speech take “a leap forward.” all of this also required significant financial investments on the family’s part. sara and leonardo had moved to salvador from the semi-rural interior of bahia, and while they are both white, they belong to brazil’s precarious “new middle class”—not poor enough to be counted among the very poorest, but far from economically privileged (klein, mitchell, and junge 2018). leonardo worked intermittently in construction when he could find work. and, like many other moms i know, sara had given up her job as a clothing store sales attendant to care for lizinha full time. the couple made sacrifices to pay for the diverse collection of substances and technologies understood to aid in the little girl’s development. for sara, it was well worth it to know they were doing all they could to ensure lizinha reached her full potential. she told me: “we’re always trying things out, and lizinha is going to be progressing [indo na frente], right, lizinha? … thanks to god, it’s getting results!” this article began in sara’s living room. while it wasn’t the first time i had been struck by a parent’s considerable investment in their zika-affected child’s development, it was there i began to think of the disabled child bodymind as a site of aspiration—both discursively, as a site of meaning production, and materially, as a fleshy locus where aspirations to child development were being quite literally embodied. i was both intrigued by and uncomfortable with these intervention-heavy forms of care. by investing so much time, money, and labor in the habilitation of their children, were parents not cleaving to the idea that the more typical or “normate” (garland-thomson 1997) their children could become, the better? in aspiring to augment their children’s bodymind capacities to the maximum possible, were they not participating in and perpetuating ableism? this article grapples with these questions, attempting to understand the stakes of habilitative therapies from parents’ perspectives in a way that does not reduce their aspirations for their disabled children to “a failure to grasp the politics of their own situation” (gammeltoft 2008, 826). in what follows, i trace how mothers raising children with congenital zika syndrome cultivate their children’s bodyminds through what i refer to as habilitative care: care involving a range of substances, technologies, and techniques understood to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children. i dwell on habilitative care to reflect on the stakes of what is done or not done to young disabled bodyminds in the name of “potential.” while anthropologists have explored habilitation in the context of cochlear implantation, i dwell on a wider range of technologies and practices mobilized in disabled children’s habilitative therapies, linking them under the umbrella of habilitative care (friedner 2022). i also attend to the stakes of habilitative care for families living in precarity, not just neurological (mauldin 2016) but also socioeconomic. i argue that bahian mothers’ intensive investments in habilitative care as a bodymind-potentializing practice constitute a way of asserting their children’s personhood by contesting narratives of their children’s lack of futurity—narratives shot through with exclusionary ideas about which lives are worth living and whose bodyminds are worth investing in to bring out their full potential. i use my ethnography in bahia to unsettle critiques of (re)habilitation as medicalized ableism, asking how we might attend to the shaping of developing bodyminds amid the precarities of everyday life in parts of the global south where the future of marginalized bodies especially is itself made precarious (grech 2015; grech and soldatic 2016). zika and its afterlife in bahia since 2016, i have worked with families raising children diagnosed with czs in northeastern brazil, the global epicenter of the 2015-2016 zika virus epidemic. this ongoing, longitudinal research focuses on the long-term socio-corporeal impacts of zika in salvador, bahia, asking how bahian families living with the virus’ embodied fallout reimagine their lives in the wake of the epidemic and care for children with multiple disabilities in the context of brazil’s recent economic, political, and public health crises. in late 2015, doctors in northeast brazil noticed a sharp increase in the number of fetuses and babies with congenital neurological malformations, most notably microcephaly (reduced cranial circumference due to incomplete brain development in utero). clinicians and scientists quickly linked these abnormalities to the zika virus, a vector-borne disease first detected in brazil earlier that year (diniz 2017). transmitted by mosquitoes as well as sexually, in pregnant people zika can pass through the placental barrier and infect the fetus, disrupting the development of fetal brain cells. the virus attacks the central nervous system, so microcephaly is only one of the many manifestations of what is now called congenital zika syndrome, or czs. babies born with czs may have microcephaly, calcifications in the cerebral subcortex (the area of the brain responsible for motor control and skills learning), arthrogryposis (joint curvature), ocular damage (leading to low vision), and hypertonia (rigid muscles causing mobility difficulties). some children may also have cerebral palsy (a neurological condition that affects a person’s ability to move, maintain posture, and balance), and many have epilepsy (cdc, n.d.). zika primarily impacted the northeast region of brazil, and those who gave birth to children with czs were by and large women of color in low-income communities in urban areas and the interior. the aedes aegypti mosquito, largely responsible for virus transmission, can breed practically anywhere there is standing water, but certain environmental and infrastructural conditions commonly found in impoverished areas can provide an especially favorable setting for mosquito proliferation. combined with a lack of access to comprehensive reproductive health care, including safe and legal abortion, this meant that brazil’s most marginalized were also the most exposed to zika and its long-term consequences (cruz et al. 2023; diniz 2017). between 2015 and 2022, brazil reported 1,857 confirmed cases of czs nationally, and the state of bahia had the highest number of cases in the country after pernambuco.2 i spent four years in bahia between 2015 and 2019. in 2016 i began volunteering with the local parents’ support group-turned-ngo, associação abraço a microcefalia (i embrace microcephaly association). i did clerical work; helped organize regular gatherings; played with children while parents participated in events; stocked donated goods; and translated grant proposals to capture funds for the fledgling ngo. i also conducted fieldwork at cepred, the state-run rehabilitation center that enrolled many of the children into its early intervention program, where i interviewed fifteen parents and three therapists and observed children’s therapy sessions. i also accompanied parents and children to informational sessions on cbd oil for epilepsy; observed health worker trainings; joined parents in disability rights direct actions; and participated in parents’ whatsapp message groups. since 2019 i have kept in touch with my interlocutors via whatsapp and other social media and conducted five-year follow-up interviews with parents via zoom. this article is based primarily on formal interviews and participant observation between 2016 and 2019. brazil’s first colonial capital, salvador, is majority black and home to a vibrant african diasporic culture. precarity in the city is classed, gendered, and racialized: periferias are home to primarily black and brown families, while those living in high-rise condominiums in wealthier areas are generally white or lighter-skinned. sara is a rare exception. bahia has markedly poorer maternal and infant health indicators compared to the wealthier states in the south and southeast, a legacy of the country’s colonial history and unequal economic development. with their sprawling districts of informal housing and precarious sewage and water infrastructure, the periferias of salvador also constitute a prime location for mosquito proliferation and, in turn, for the spread of zika. in periferias, women are often heads of household and primary or sole caregivers for children. with fathers frequently absent or taking little part in childcare, women bear this responsibility while balancing economic instability. austerity measures approved during the recent temer and bolsonaro governments threaten the social assistance stipends that allow many mothers to feed their families, and finding work to earn extra money proves difficult, especially for mothers of children who need specialized care nearly 24/7. the zika epidemic unfolded during a turbulent time in brazil: an economic recession bloomed into full-fledged crisis, former president dilma rousseff was ousted by a parliamentary coup, and her successor proceeded to approve a series of draconian austerity measures. most drastically, constitutional amendment 95 froze public spending on health care, education, and social assistance programs until 2036.3 dubbed the “constitutional amendment of death” by the opposition, this measure all but guarantees that those relying on government-funded services—including those living with zika’s consequences—will continue to fall deeper into precarity. combined with rapid inflation during the bolsonaro administration, 2 million brazilians have fallen into extreme poverty (madeiro 2021). during the first years of their children’s lives, most mothers in my research relied primarily, if not solely, on brazil’s public health system, the sistema único de saúde (sus), which is free at point of service. many also relied on the benefício de prestação continuada, or bpc, the government pension designated for disabled people or their caregivers. the bpc provides families with the equivalent of one minimum monthly salary (salário mínimo), which many complained was not nearly enough to cover household expenses, but it nevertheless helped mothers who were dedicating all their time to their children (in fact, receiving the bpc disqualifies one from formal employment).4 very few families were able to afford private health plans that granted their children access to a wider range of therapy options, and some patched together sus and lower-cost private health plans, striving to give their children the best care possible. regardless of each family’s particular arrangements, with regressive policies tearing at the threads of what little safety net they still have, and with the acceleration of a long-standing neoliberal project of dismantling public health care and social supports, the bahian mothers in my research found themselves looking into a hazy future. early in the zika crisis, some doctors told new mothers like sara that their babies wouldn’t survive, or that if they did, they would essentially be “vegetables.” others publicly referred to zika-affected babies as a “lost generation,” implying that their disabilities would make them unable to participate in or contribute to society in any meaningful way (mello 2016). however, as i will show, mothers invest time, money, and concentrated effort in their young children’s development, thereby countering these narratives of non-futurity. through habilitative care, they enact their children’s future potential through the cultivation of their small, developing bodyminds. habilitating bodyminds, caring for potential i speak of children’s “bodyminds” here for two reasons. first, the varied therapeutic practices i am addressing take for granted that “body” and “mind” are inextricable from one another. habilitative therapies are premised on the wisdom that “mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other” (price 2015, 269). when lizinha hears her mother speaking to her (physically senses soundwaves through her body’s aural mechanisms), her synapses fire, neural pathways are created or reinforced, and these in turn shape the sounds she herself makes, as well as her overall mood. lizinha broke into a wide-mouthed smile every time sara spoke to her during our interview, expressing her pleasure and joy. as for many other children with similar conditions, when she was feeling irritated or tired, therapy sessions tended to lose their effectiveness and sometimes were cut short. building on margaret price’s work, sami schalk (2018) proposes that the concept of bodyminds can also help us theorize the embodied impacts of other forms of oppression and social marginalization, such as structural racism. this is important for me here because most of the children and parents in my research are black, brown, and/or low-income, thus also living within the constraints of structural racism and economic inequality. their bodymind capacities, actual and potential, are affected by the access they have to habilitative therapies and equipment, medications, and other forms of intervention. because access to these resources is unequally distributed along class and racial lines, children embody these forms of inequality in particular ways. to habilitate always means to habilitate bodyminds. habilitation aims to help young disabled children develop embodied skills and capacities, such as hand-eye coordination, the ability to chew and swallow foods, and verbal communication. this differs from re-habilitation, for the objective is not a return to a prior state of ability or skill now lost, but rather the training of new skills (friedner 2022; mauldin 2016). habilitation “is predicated on the potential, because of plasticity, we have to shape the inner workings of the brain” (mauldin 2014, 132), making habilitative caregiving always also a practice of imagining, and indeed enacting, what should or could be possible for a child in the future. the expanding availability of cochlear implantation (ci) technology is changing expectations for deaf and hearing-impaired children, “unleash[ing] the potentiality of hearing brains and produc[ing] ‘wonderful outcomes,’” such that the widespread expectation is that these children can “become ‘normal’” (friedner 2022, 126). yet, as michele friedner points out, the opening of this potential to create normatively hearing and speaking subjects at the same time closes down other possibilities of deaf sociality, since anything but normative hearing is increasingly perceived as not just undesirable but avoidable (see also friedner 2022). friedner, laura mauldin, and many others have noted that the work of habilitative care is eminently gendered: women around the world—and particularly mothers—shoulder the responsibility to aid their children in reaching their potential. this also holds true in brazil. friedner (2022) also highlights the precarity of habilitation technology in india, as poorer families struggle to keep up the expensive maintenance of ci devices after initial implantation. i wish to highlight similar conditions of precarity and gendered care labor in bahia, where many mothers of children affected by congenital zika syndrome struggle to make ends meet, let alone consistently access costly habilitation technologies. anthropologists have attended to the ways in which notions of plasticity shape bodily practices in brazil, from popular and religious healing to biomedicine, indigenous and afro-brazilian ceremonies to cosmetic plastic surgery (béhague 2016; edmonds 2010; jarrín 2017; rabelo 2014; sanabria 2016; vilaça 2005; williamson 2021). while some have emphasized how biomedical therapeutic technologies like disaggregated, synthetic birth-control hormones, become modalities of self-care, bodymind enhancement, and even social mobility, scant attention has been paid to technologies of (re)habilitation for children, much less for disabled children (cf. béhague 2016; béhague and lézé 2015). these scholars have nevertheless shown that therapeutic interventions of various kinds are inextricable from social imaginaries of optimal embodied capacity and aspirations to social mobility, entangled with pharmaceutical and other medical markets, and profoundly shaped by brazil’s history (including its eugenics history) of shaping bodies and populations toward particular ends. aspirations cutting across class and race—to beauty, social mobility, modernity, wellness, whiteness, and, i submit, children’s future potential—are realized in and through the quite literal molding of flesh. after the initial chaos of the zika outbreak, health authorities began turning their attention to affected children’s longer-term needs. the brazilian ministry of health published a set of guidelines for the clinical care of children diagnosed with czs, which emphasize the vital importance of early intervention (intervenção precoce) for children born with impairments—usually a combination of physical, occupational, and speech therapy designed to aid the development of embodied abilities in children diagnosed with developmental “delays.” this early period—according to child development and neurological sciences, the time of the brain’s greatest plasticity (béhague and lézé 2015, 251; goldfarb 2015; rose and abi-rached 2013, 15)—therefore proves critical. from birth until three years of age, the brazilian ministry of health recommends that children born with impairments be placed in early intervention programs to encourage “the best possible development.” the first three years of life constitute “the phase in which the brain develops the fastest, constituting a window of opportunities for the establishment of the functions that will lead to good health and optimal productivity in the future” (ministério da saúde do brasil 2016, 9–10). these guidelines hew closely to global health discourses: unicef (n.d.) similarly alerts that for all children, “in the brain-building process, neural connections are shaped by genes and life experiences—namely good nutrition, protection and stimulation from talk, play and responsive attention from caregivers. this combination of nature and nurture establishes the foundation of a child’s future.” for children with disabilities, unicef affirms, focused intervention is even more vital. as elsewhere in the world, with the brief window of time for maximum neural plasticity, young disabled children are swept up in a race to reap the maximum possible benefit from therapies while they are still very young and neurologically most malleable. and so, soon after their diagnoses, bahian children were funneled into the early intervention program at the state-run rehabilitation center (cepred). there, rotating teams of therapists worked with children in thirty-minute sessions several times a week, and parents learned how to do stimulation exercises with their children at home to encourage motor, sensory, and cognitive development. indeed, clinicians stressed repeatedly that parents must reinforce these exercises at home to reap the maximum benefit of therapy. habilitative techniques and technologies, therefore, make their way far beyond the clinic. and when they do, they are primarily, if not solely, the domain of mothers, the ones who perform the vast majority of caregiving for children, habilitative and otherwise, throughout brazil. histories of habilitation since the nineteenth century, disabled brazilian children have been targeted for various kinds of therapeutic intervention. at the turn of the twentieth century, eugenic nation-building projects sought to perfect the brazilian “race” and populate the territory with people deemed “fit,” making “modern therapeutic and hygienic resources” a priority for “defective” children (lobo 2009, 322). in large part, the importance of such intervention was framed as an investment in the country’s future, since advocates argued that in the long term, disabled children would become not just unproductive citizens but financial burdens on the state (lobo 2009, 374). labeling czs children a “lost generation” today echoes this kind of thinking. segregation and the institutionalization of disabled people was never the norm in brazil. instead, the country emphasized “medical pedagogy” (a kind of proto–special education) in psychiatric hospitals, and puericulture, “the scientific cultivation of the child” (block 2007; stepan 1991, 77). intervening as early as possible became key. mothers have therefore played a central role in efforts to cultivate future citizens and, by doing so, help modernize the nation (martins and freire 2018; otovo 2016). eugenicist organizations like the brazilian mental hygiene league sought to “intervene in the family and in the child” to facilitate “the discovery of defects, anomalies and physical illnesses that must be without delay corrected and cured” and “organize the discovery and education of the mentally deficient” (physician and educator josé paranhos fontenelle, quoted in lobo 2009, 116; my translation and emphasis). this urgency again came to the fore in the 1930s and 1940s, when the populist dictator getúlio vargas declared “the protection and health of children” as of utmost national importance, calling on governors throughout the nation to turn their attention to improving the health of the citizenry through maternal and child health interventions (quoted in otovo 2016, 4). mid-century, as urban industrialization got underway, preventing or ameliorating “mental or physical deformity” in children became an eminently economic question for brazil’s leaders, and successive outbreaks of poliomyelitis led to the creation of rehabilitation services in large cities (brégain 2022, 372; see also souza and mancussi e faro 2011, 299). the rehabilitation of children was presented as “a cost-effective investment for the nation, since it allowed an increase in national production, savings in disability pensions and the recovery of social [security] contributions” (brégain 2022, 368). advocates cast habilitating disabled children to their maximum potential as urgent largely because the nascent nation needed “productive” citizens. this thinking hasn’t disappeared; one mother, when i asked what she envisioned for her then two-year-old son in the future, said she hoped he would become a “good worker,” even if disabled. while many traces of eugenics thinking remain, dominant approaches to childhood cognitive disability in brazil today owe themselves largely to the work of developmental psychologist helena antipoff (1892–1974), who believed steadfastly in intellectually disabled children’s potential to learn and participate fully in society. going against some eugenics thinkers who claimed that people’s “innate” abilities could not be modified, antipoff brought disabled and nondisabled children together in classrooms, insisting on disabled children’s potential to learn and grow in community with others (block 2007). that her approach to intellectual disability has become so central to pedagogical models in brazil today—in both prominent non-profit organizations and governmental inclusive education guidelines—speaks to a continued emphasis on the malleability and adaptability of children’s bodyminds. pediatric rehabilitation boomed in the latter half of the twentieth century with the consolidation of the physical therapy profession and founding of pediatric rehabilitation institutes (fietz 2020; souza and mancussi e faro 2011). marco gavério and gil lourenção (2020, 156; my translation) contend that since this period, perhaps due to the influence of cybernetics, approaches to rehabilitation have shifted from models of “correction” and the restoration of function to models of “capacitation” (as in improvement or recovery) and, more recently, to the “robotization/mechanization” of bodies. with these shifts, they argue, rehabilitation no longer so much concerns attaining a standardized “normal” as it does maximizing individual capacities. while normative horizons of bodymind ability continue to animate rehabilitation, emphasis is placed on personalized therapeutic interventions that consider each patient’s particularities (gavério and lourenção 2020, 157). i suggest we can also see this emphasis in early childhood habilitation, in the work of therapeutically potentializing these very young bodyminds, both in and beyond the clinic. such shifts haven’t made the project of habilitating disabled children any less urgent, and further developments at the turn of the twenty-first century have only magnified this urgency. the 1990s and 2000s were both a period of consolidation of social rights for brazilian citizens, including disabled people, and a period of an international explosion of brain research (costa, silva, and jacóbsen 2019; rose and abi-rached 2013). this research highlighted the brain’s plasticity, particularly in the beginning of life, and ushered in global and national guidelines for intervening early and intensively to ensure maximum potential child development, as discussed above. whether it’s fixing “defective” children or intervening early to maximize disabled children’s development, the urgent drive to habilitate has persisted. during the first few years of a child’s life, this drive now meets neuroscientifically grounded exhortations to act now, in the “critical period,” before it is too late. the clock begins ticking even before birth: following her child’s microcephaly diagnosis nearing her third trimester of pregnancy, one mother i know was advised by a fetal medicine specialist to consume as many foods rich in omega-3 as possible to improve her baby’s neurological outcome, which she dutifully did. whether it is filling up on fatty acids or fidelity to therapeutic exercises and specialized pediatric nutrition at home, mothers invest major thought, time, and energy in cultivating their children’s bodyminds in hopes that their efforts will pay off in the future. and if, as gavério and lourenção (2020, 157) argue, rehabilitation therapeutics in brazil today tend to “personalize each case in its specificities,” it is mothers who become the “scientists” (diniz 2017; fleischer 2022) and experts in their individual disabled children’s condition and needs, and whose hopes drive their pursuit of therapeutic technologies (fleischer and garcia 2022). potentializing the children of zika one thursday afternoon in 2016, at abraço a microcefalia’s borrowed space in an old catholic school in the cidade baixa (lower city), while waiting for instructions from the volunteer coordinator to begin setting up for the weekly meeting with families, i snapped a photo of this “message of the month” with my cell phone: go for it! risk it! there are times when you must believe in that silent voice inside you. the specialists don’t always have the right answers. according to the laws of aerodynamics, bumblebees cannot fly. i think no one remembered to tell [the bumblebee] that! keep flying! figure 1. a sign hanging on the wall at the abraço a microcefalia headquarters in salvador, brazil, in 2016. photo by k. eliza williamson. the homemade motivational poster, confected by one of the volunteers using printer paper and light pink poster board, captures an important way parents viewed their young disabled children and their duty to continue investing in their habilitation, regardless of what “the specialists” might say. because czs is a new and rare condition, it remains in many ways an open case for clinical science. doctors can make educated guesses, but it is still not known exactly to what extent children’s neurological malformations will impact their development as they grow, in what measure zika’s damage to the central nervous system can be mitigated through therapeutic intervention, or even how long the children will live. for mothers, however, this uncertainty is both a source of anxiety and a reason for hope. if no one knows for sure what developmental heights their children may eventually be able to reach, then anything might be possible (williamson 2018). in working intensively with their children to take advantage of the early childhood period, mothers recruit diverse arrangements of therapeutic techniques and technologies into the everyday care of their disabled children, encouraging their developing bodyminds to reach their maximum potential. habilitation cares for children’s potential abilities, laden with parental aspirations for the future, its landscape dotted with an ever-evolving constellation of technologies, techniques, and expertise. maria, for example, scraped money together every month to pay for her son bruno’s health plan. she also successfully sued the state for access to a specialized therapy program called therasuit, described as “an intensive individualized therapy program that accelerates functional progress,” in which children in special canvas suits work with therapists while hooked up to various bungee cords in a “spider cage” to “learn new and correct patterns of movement through strengthening and functional skills practice” (johns hopkins medicine n.d.). at r$50,000 per year, this treatment would otherwise remain far out of reach for bruno. i interviewed maria in 2017, shortly before bruno turned two. abandoned by the boy’s father early in pregnancy, she and her son relied mostly on bruno’s government pension. she identifies as black (negra) and, like sara, lives in a periferia far from salvador’s city center. maria had completed part of a degree in social work and was employed by a shipping logistics company before becoming pregnant with bruno, who was diagnosed with both czs and cerebral palsy. on discharge from the hospital following his forty-day nicu (neonatal intensive care unit) stay, the neurosurgeon told maria that her son’s brain was full of “water” (cerebrospinal fluid) and “almost [didn’t] have cephalic mass.” he picked up a roll of micropore tape from his desk and held it up for her to see. the smaller, brown tube that held the tape, he told her, should represent “water” (cerebrospinal fluid), and the much larger white tape itself should be the proportion of brain mass. “but his [bruno’s] was the opposite: only this part here [the brown tube] is mass, and all of this [the tape] is water. … that means that he has almost no cephalic mass. that is, his development will be almost none. [and] if what he has is damaged by calcifications. …” maria trailed off. the neurosurgeon’s point was that her son’s prognosis was grim. “that right there left me a little upset [um pouco afetada],” maria told me. her facial expression when she told me this story gave away more than just “a little affected”; she clearly found the news devastating, and she later commented that she felt this a cruel way to have it delivered. the day of our interview, maria invited me along to bruno’s scheduled therapy appointments, and we watched a team of therapists manipulate bruno’s small body in succession. first is the physical therapist, who places bruno on his belly and dangles a clinking toy about a foot in front of his head, with the idea that bruno will practice lifting his head from the table and look toward the source of the sound. he does lift his head, with much effort, just for a moment. maria’s face breaks into a proud grin as she points this out to the therapist. “that’s it, son!” she says. next, bruno sees the speech therapist, who uses various techniques to stimulate the little boy’s oro-facial area. we sit on the floor in the darkened room, surrounded by objects of various sizes, colors, and textures. the therapist first massages bruno’s jaw muscles to relax them, then uses a cotton swab to dab an edible paste just outside the corners of his mouth. this encourages him to lick the paste off with his tongue, working his lingual muscles and coordination—important for both eating and speaking. she shows maria how to train her son’s verbal communication. with bruno sitting on her lap facing us, she gently but firmly holds his chin between her thumb and forefinger, moving it down and back up as she slowly repeats “ma-mãe”—mommy—several times, exaggerating the pronunciation. this is to get bruno to connect the feeling of the mouth movements with the vocalization of the word “mommy,” training him to verbally call maria’s attention. perhaps this constitutes more than simply a “functional” ability allowing him to call his primary caregiver’s attention when needed; it may also approximate the kind of reciprocity that parents expect from nondisabled children, and which many parents of cognitively disabled children long for: verbal recognition of his mother that approximates that of a nondisdabled child (rutherford 2020). maria, the speech therapist emphasizes, is to repeat this exercise at home a few times a day. maria nods understandingly; she already knows that frequently repeating the exercises bruno does in these short therapy sessions will maximize his developmental progress, and it is her responsibility to make sure this happens. habilitative care is not only, or even primarily, what happens in clinical settings, where doctors and therapists work with children and advise parents on their progress. habilitative care also happens outside the clinic, in the home and other spaces in which children and their parents circulate—the homes of family members, clinics, hospitals, pharmacies, and grocery stores—and in precious leisure time at mall play-spaces, park playgrounds, and beaches. this is in good measure because, as clinicians stress to mothers especially, habilitative therapy is a daily activity that must be realized in the home as well as in the clinic. it requires what cheryl mattingly, lone grøn, and lotte meinert (2011) have called “chronic homework”: near-constant labor patients and their family members perform at home to manage chronic conditions. what can the chronic homework of habilitative care tell us about how parental aspirations for their disabled children become enfleshed? i contend that it is in the micro-level practices of attending to small, developing bodyminds that parents not only imagine but enact futures for their disabled children, very often in hopes of defying what doctors predict. embodying potential in abstract terms, potentiality “is the always possibly realizable but never yet” that “comprises the ‘incorporeal materiality,’ the unseen capacities of other people and objects, that is always sensed by us, shaping the course of our actions” (bryant and knight 2019, 110). it is “the presence of an absence” (agamben 1998, 179) that “gives us the future’s capacity to become future” (bryant and knight 2019, 115). but as lynn morgan (2013, 22; quoted in bryant and knight 2019, 126) reminds us, potentiality is also a political matter; it is “a discursive device that can be used to formulate, activate, or resist particular imagined futures.” human actions can help someone or something realize potential—and inaction can leave this potential unrealized—and such choices have both ethical and political consequences. as karen-sue taussig, klaus hoeyer, and stefan helmreich (2013, 6; my emphasis) note, “articulations of potential typically enact politics by working on and through morality, by making claims on us to do something.” to identify someone or something as having potential also foregrounds the necessity of making sure that potential is reached. potential should not be squandered. but who has potential, and for what? who determines this? what kinds of interventions are imagined to aid someone in reaching their full potential, and who has access to them? while anthropologists have largely addressed potentiality in the context of high-tech biomedicine and the life sciences (e.g., gammeltoft 2013; rose 2007; taussig, hoeyer, and helmreich 2013; wanderer 2018), imaginaries of potential also deeply imbue much more mundane or “prosaic” technologies of care (hart 2014). high-tech or not, these technologies often involve a great deal of labor on the part of caregivers. parents can become “case workers” coordinating care across a range of clinical specialties and geographical areas to maximize the benefits of treatment and therapy (sobo 2010, 222). this intensive labor is strongly bound up with gendered morality: mothers are the ones saddled with synchronizing this complex choreography, and cultural notions of motherhood can make habilitative care compulsory—“a ‘good’ mother will do the long-term care work” needed for maximum bodymind habilitation, and mothers have a “duty” to “capitalize on neuroplasticity,” thereby keeping up “a regimen of ‘neuronal fitness’” for their children” (mauldin 2016, 16; see also landsman 2009; pitts-taylor 2016). mothers may gain a sense of hope from scientific discourses of neural plasticity, but the flip side is near-constant vigilance and endless care labor, since the plasticity of the brain is always “precarious,” vulnerable to regression as a result of not enough stimuli or exposure to the “wrong” stimuli (mauldin 2014, 145). attending to habilitative care for disabled children’s potential allows us to ask new questions about plasticity, about how developing bodyminds are shaped, by whom, to what ends, and how this shaping is informed by, and in turn informs, ideas about what lives are considered worth living. the various technologies mobilized around lizinha’s and bruno’s bodyminds—early-intervention therapy sessions, stimulating play techniques, a laborious ketogenic diet, imported cbd oil and nutritional supplements—are geared toward manipulating the disabled child’s bodymind to cultivate maximum developmental progress in the early years of life. sara’s and maria’s quest to provide their children with all they need to develop their sensory and motor skills to their maximum potential led these and other parents to invest much of their time and their family’s financial resources in their children’s habilitative care. the horizon of “results” is often murky, but these mothers imagined their children’s future abilities as actualizable through consistent, often self-sacrificial effort, as well as the right combination of substances and stimuli. disability studies scholar alison kafer (2013, 33) has asked, drawing on jasbir puar, “how are incidents of illness and disability inextricably bound, and differentially bound, to race/class/gender/nation?” the ability to project oneself into a future is not afforded to all children equally, since “some futures (and some bodies) are more protected than others” (kafer 2013, 34). we must therefore attend to the often “curtailed futures” (kafer 2013, 42) of disabled and chronically ill people, especially the marginalized, for whom longevity is a privilege in a society that systematically wears them out and exposes them to death. this means attending to the social, cultural, and political conditions in which disability is lived; the contexts in which disabled children and their caregivers navigate the world matters (rutherford 2020). corporeal standards are culturally variable and unequally attainable for people with poor access to medical care, particularly those who are racially and economically marginalized like the families in my research. many disability studies critiques of (re)habilitation, largely from the global north, tend to assume the availability of all kinds of therapeutic options to everyone, everywhere, but this is not the case (erevelles 2011). bahian mothers’ investments in their children’s habilitation must be understood in the context of their projects of maternal care and the conditions of precarity in which they realize these projects. through these investments, mothers assert that their children do indeed have potential, and that their bodyminds are worth habilitating, contesting narratives of their non-futurity that cast them as a “lost generation.” habilitating potential, cultivating cure? undeniably, the impetus to habilitate, and the techniques and technologies mobilized in that habilitation, are embedded within social imaginaries of how children should be, what abilities they should have at the various stages of their development, and who is responsible for performing the therapeutic labor necessary to help them cultivate those abilities. in our interview, maria told me: i strive [luto] for the cure, or for bruno’s overcoming [superação] in many senses. and a lot of doctors don’t share our expectations. dr. anita [bruno’s pediatric neurologist] … didn’t tell me that he wouldn’t be able to do anything; she said: “stimulate him, and there will come a time when he will respond, because it will depend on the child. because every case is its own case [cada caso é um caso]. there’s no way to say that he won’t do [things] because he has [cerebral] palsy.” but i know that there are many who think that he won’t be able to do one thing or another, [for example,] that he won’t walk. but for me, i work [with him] so that he can walk. i work with him so that he can talk. i do everything so that he can do things. (maria, interviewed september 2017) for maria, the negative prognoses given by some health care professionals do not adequately consider her son’s developmental potential. she prefers to listen to dr. anita, who insists on the hope of uncertainty (“there’s no way to say that he won’t … ”) and to follow dr. anita’s advice to keep on stimulating him toward an unknown, aspirational goal of bodymind capacity that approaches that of a nondisabled child. scholars in critical disability studies have long critiqued rehabilitation as part of the “medical model” of disability, in which disability is framed as a problem that biomedicine can and should fix (e.g., albrecht 1992; barnes 2003). colin barnes (2003, 4), for example, claims that the logics of rehabilitation turn “disabled people [into] objects to be cured, treated, trained and changed and made ‘normal’ according to a particular set of cultural values” (see also wendell 1996). the historian henri-jacques stiker (2019, 128) also asserts that rehabilitation is bent on standardization and assimilation into an imagined norm, “caus[ing] the disabled to disappear and with them all that is lacking, in order to assimilate them, drown them, dissolve them in the greater and single social hall.” for these scholars, rehabilitation is designed to discipline disabled bodyminds to conform to a world that systematically excludes them, and is thus a materialization of ableism: “a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human [and in which] [d]isability … is cast as a diminished state of being human” (campbell 2009, 44). rehabilitative therapies manifest a curative imaginary, an imaginary “that not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention” (kafer 2013, 27; see also mcruer 2006). in curative time, “the only appropriate disabled mind/body is one cured or moving toward cure” (kafer 2013, 28). and cure, kafer (2013, 28) reminds us, encompasses not only the total eradication of bodymind impairment but also “normalizing treatments that work to assimilate the disabled mind/body as much as possible.” the constraining logics of cure permeate disabled people’s lives, constantly calling into question their value as persons and even their very existence. these logics have material consequences for disabled people, as they are subjected to all manner of therapies in the name of “fixing” their embodied differences. the logics of cure have material consequences, too, for those who care for disabled people, as they are recruited into projects of habilitation and rehabilitation, sometimes at the cost of their livelihoods and their own physical and mental health. the habilitation of young children is wrapped up in a curative imaginary and unfolds in curative time. it is not just any bodymind that children are habilitated into, but one that approximates, as closely as possible, “the corporeal standard.” habilitative therapies rely on ostensibly shared notions of what bodyminds should be able to do and at what point in the life course they should be able to do them. in wholeheartedly investing in their young disabled children’s future potential, are bahian mothers participating in “an ethics of endless deferral” (kafer 2013, 29) in which a nondisabled adulthood serves as an imaginary endpoint these children will never, because they cannot possibly, reach? the “potential” of child development on the whole undeniably bends toward a normative horizon. parents grapple with the remaking of kinship and the life course, as rayna rapp and faye ginsburg (2011) point out, but they do so largely within the bounds of what is culturally appropriate to want for one’s children. desired futures and the technologies they mobilize can be oppressive. desired futures can also, however, constitute an important source of hope, particularly for marginalized people whose futures are systematically denied, and not just because of disability. kafer’s “political/relational model” of disability proves useful here. the political/relational model conceptualizes disability as a social and political rather than an individual “problem,” but it also does not oppose medical intervention outright, leaving room for desires for such intervention. disabled people can both desire cure and identify politically with a wider disabled community (kafer 2013, 6). so too, i argue, can parents of disabled children. the political/relational model thus maintains and expands the politicization of disability, permitting both critiques of ableism in all its forms and the space to imagine and bring about “a world which does not disable” (crow 1996, 210; quoted in kafer 2013, 8). by honoring desires for cure as well as the relationality of disability, this model allows us to understand parents of disabled children as something other than dupes of an ableist society bent on making their children “normal.” as eli clare (2017, 62) acknowledges, “holding it all—sickness and human vulnerability, health and disability, the need for and the rejection of cure—is much harder work than writing anti-cure diatribes. and much more necessary.” this appears especially important when considering the experiences of multiply marginalized people. attending to habilitative care in bahia draws our attention to how the intersections of race, class, and region further unsettle critiques of (re)habilitation originating in “white disability studies” based in the north atlantic (bell 2016). an “anti-cure” stance tends to obscure the structural and geopolitical violence that produces many disabilities, particularly in the global south and among marginalized communities in the global north (clare 2017; erevelles 2011; kafer 2013; puar 2017). with clare (2017, 56), i want to keep asking the thorny question, “how do we witness, name, and resist the injustices that reshape and damage all kinds of body-minds … while not equating disability with injustice?” maria holds tightly to her faith in bruno’s potential, to the hope that his bodymind capacities might someday approximate those of children without his impairments. her hope is active (mattingly 2010), as she constantly works with him, “doing everything so that he can do things.” the therapeutic exercises in the clinic and at home, the constant search for the best treatments her limited money can buy—all of these are high-stakes endeavors that, with her steadfast perseverance, might lead to a less disabled future for her son. we must understand maria’s talk of “overcoming” and “cure” in the context of her economic precarity and the “lost generation” narratives about children like bruno that proclaim their utter lack of futurity. by investing in bruno’s potential bodymind capacities through habilitative care practices, maria actively contests these framings. conclusion mothers like maria and sara focus on their children’s potential, refusing medical and public narratives of limitations and impossibilities. they proudly speak of adversities already overcome, especially the ones that fly in the face of specialists’ authoritative knowledge. a large part of their time is spent amid the faltering of facts—the many moments when clinical science cannot tell them what to expect, or when new research contradicts what was previously believed, or when their children begin doing things doctors said they would likely never do. continuing to invest in their children’s potential—materially, emotionally, and through care labor—marks a way of refusing prognoses they feel are unwarrantedly negative. additionally, i contend, intensive investments in children’s developmental potential likewise constitute a way of refusing narratives that cast their children as lacking (worthwhile, livable) futures. certainly, we can sense a normative bodymind haunting sara’s talk of “results” and maria’s mentions of “striving for the cure” and “overcoming” congenital impairments. they aren’t working toward just any end goal, after all, but one in which their children’s embodied capacities come as close to those of a “typical” child as possible. but in cultivating these developing bodyminds through habilitative care, the two mothers also assert their children’s personhood as small people with lives worth living, children deserving of everything they need to reach their maximum potential. children with a future. the stakes of making this assertion are high when it comes to children labeled a “lost generation”: to ensure that their disabled children reach their full potential also means contesting narratives of failure and non-futurity. habilitative caregiving thus makes claims about bruno’s and lizinha’s potential as people, as children deserving of therapeutic investment. maria and sara therefore work hard so that their children might someday develop skills like walking, feeding themselves, and speaking. the future remains uncertain, and this, too, is important here. in precarious lifeworlds, that tomorrow is not guaranteed lies at the forefront of mothers’ minds. with brazil’s political and economic volatility, the means to access the health resources their children need, let alone pay for specialized treatments, hangs in the balance. several of the mothers also worried that they may not be around long enough to see their children into adulthood (williamson 2018). in a country with such stark socioeconomic and racial health disparities as brazil, they might not be wrong. sara and maria are under no illusion that their children will ever be “typical,” but they take it as their mission to get them as close as possible, doing everything they can to cultivate their potential. the moral and corporeal stakes are simply too high to do any less. so, perhaps rehabilitation is inextricably bound up with curative logics. but what to say about habilitation, where the temporal trappings of “re-” remain absent, and where—for small children with a novel congenital condition—the development of motor, sensory, and cognitive abilities seems open-ended? and more to the point, what are the stakes of habilitating these small bodyminds—or, indeed, of not habilitating them—particularly for families living in conditions of precarity in contemporary brazil? i have argued here that, in cultivating disabled children’s potential through habilitative caregiving, brazilian mothers challenge pervasive narratives of non-futurity. perhaps paradoxically, mothers like maria and sara refuse ableist assumptions about their children—for example, that the extent of their cognitive impairment makes them pitiable victims or renders their lives somehow less worthwhile or valuable—by fervently investing in the cultivation of their bodyminds toward a horizon of development that, while open-ended, is nevertheless traversed by normative ideals for being and acting in the world. but rather than automatically label habilitative care as ableist or not ableist, we should consider these intervention-laden forms of tending to developing children’s bodyminds as situated within particular lives. what is a “normative” life course in contemporary brazil, particularly for precarious lives? what does a normative future look like for black and brown brazilians who see people who look like them killed by state forces nearly every day on the evening news, and in their own neighborhoods (smith 2016)? their aspirations to the good life are conditioned by these circumstances, as are the ways they find to manifest these aspirations through care for the developing bodyminds of their disabled children. sara and maria, and all the mothers i’ve encountered in this research, know that the attitudes of others, even the structures of society, must change. they also know that they are the ones responsible for ensuring their children thrive within the yet unknown limits of their neurological condition. and they fiercely embrace this responsibility. mothers thus carefully tend to their children’s bodyminds in ways they understand will give these small humans the best possible chance at living in a world hostile to embodied difference. as i finished writing this article, bruno turned six. in a conversation with maria over zoom, she said, “i know my son will probably never be able to walk. but i continue to stimulate him, because the neurological system is a box of surprises, and you never know. …” even though the horizon of bruno’s bodymind potential has narrowed somewhat, maria remains steadfastly hopeful, allowing the promises of neuroplasticity to light the way forward. abstract this article traces how brazilian mothers raising children with congenital zika syndrome cultivate their children’s bodyminds through habilitative care—care that mobilizes a range of substances, technologies, and techniques to encourage maximum potential development of embodied abilities in young disabled children. based on fieldwork conducted since 2016 with families impacted by the zika epidemic in bahia, brazil, i argue that bahian mothers’ intensive investments in habilitative care constitute a way of asserting their children’s deservingness of ongoing care and of contesting public narratives of their children’s lack of futurity, thereby challenging exclusionary ideas about whose bodyminds are worth “potentializing.” in dialogue with critical disability studies, i show how habilitative care is bound to discourses of “overcoming” and “curing” disability that scholars in this field have long criticized. i use my ethnography to unsettle these critiques, asking how to attend to the shaping of developing bodyminds amid the precarities of everyday life in the global south. [disability; care; potential; rehabilitation; zika; brazil] resumo este artigo examina como mães brasileiras com crianças diagnosticadas com a síndrome congênita do vírus zika (scvz) cultivam os corpos-mentes dos seus filhos através de cuidado habilitativo—cuidado que mobiliza uma série de substâncias, tecnologias e técnicas para fomentar o desenvolvimento potencial máximo de habilidades corporificadas em crianças pequenas com deficiências. baseado em pesquisa de campo de natureza etnográfica, conduzida desde 2016 com famílias impactadas pela epidemia do vírus zika na bahia, brasil, argumento que os investimentos intensivos das mães baianas constituem uma forma de reivindicar que os filhos merecem cuidado terapêutico e de contestar narrativas da sua falta de futuro, contestando, assim, narrativas repletas de ideias excludentes sobre quais corpos-mentes valem a pena “potencializar”. dialogando com os estudos críticos de deficiência, mostro como o cuidado habilitativo está ligado a discursos de “superar” e “curar” a deficiência, os quais este campo tem criticado há muito tempo. lanço mão à minha etnografia para questionar estas críticas, perguntando como se pode pensar a moldagem de pequenos corpos-mentes em desenvolvimento no contexto das precariedades do sul global. [deficiência; cuidado; potencial; reabilitação; vírus zika; brasil] notes acknowledgments this article exists thanks to many conversations with a number of people over several years. i am grateful, in particular, to the feedback and encouragement i’ve received from michele friedner, chris sargent, helena fietz, pam block, and caio fernandes barbosa, as well as from the three anonymous reviewers of this article, members of the american anthropological association (aaa) disability research interest group (drig), members of the brazilian anthropological association committee on disability and accessibility (codea-aba), members of the wenner-gren–funded realities of disability in brazil working group, and colleagues in the latin american studies program and the disability and embodied difference reading group at washington university in st. louis. any errors or other missteps are mine alone. i am also grateful for the research and writing funding i’ve received from the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, the fulbright-hays doctoral dissertation research abroad program, the aaa association for feminist anthropology, washington university in st. louis, and rice university. 1. all names here have been changed to protect interlocutors’ privacy. i have used the diminutive form of the pseudonym “liza” here because both parents always referred to their daughter using the diminutive of her given name, a common practice in brazil for loved ones. 2. numbers here come from the latest available epidemiological bulletin issued by the federal government at the time of writing (vol. 54, no. 5, released april 3, 2023): https://www.gov.br/saude/pt-br/centrais-de-conteudo/publicacoes/boletins/epidemiologicos/edicoes/2023/boletim-epidemiologico-volume-54-no-05/view. 3. the full text of constitutional amendment 95 can be found here: http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/emc/emc95.htm. 4. since 2019, when the bolsonaro administration approved a pensão vitalícia (lifetime pension) for children with microcephaly, many families have switched from the bpc to this pensão. during fieldwork for this article, however, the bpc was the only option. the pensão vitalícia provides the same amount of money each month (one salário mínimo), but allows caregiving parents to work. many of the mothers have since told me that little difference exists between the two, since the money does not suffice to pay for childcare to re-enter the job market anyway. the pensão vitalícia also stipulates that recipients cannot take the state to court, for example, for its negligence in allowing the spread of zika and thereby failing to prevent the children’s malformations. references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. albrecht, gary l. 1992 the disability business: rehabilitation in america. thousand oaks, calif.: sage publications. barnes, colin 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1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.02 rethinking sovereignty through hashtag publics rethinking sovereignty through hashtag publics: the new body politics kamari maxine clarke carleton university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4910-548x modern conceptions of sovereignty have come a long way, and anthropology has been centrally engaged in multidisciplinary conversations about the nature of sovereignty, including those related to notions of political authority and reconfigurations of body politics. such explorations of political authority are not new to anthropology. yet during the past fifteen years, we have seen an explosion in the renewal of discussions about sovereignty through the explicit understanding that it starts with sovereign authority resting in individuals and that, in order for political power to be seen as legitimate, it requires a transfer of that authority to other political bodies. many explicit examples exist of these manifestations; one is the realm of citizen mass mobilizations that reconfigure sovereignty through changes in the body politic—that is, the practices and policies by which an entity is invested with political authority. shifting away from a model of transferring authority from the individual to governmental authorities or civil-society and related judicial, technological, and scientific institutions, citizens are reconfiguring the body politic through new uses of digital technologies aimed at fostering a so-called human rights technology revolution. for example, in response to the boko haram abduction of more than two hundred girls, the globally circulating hashtag #bringbackourgirls has led to the invigoration of social activism as well as the use of scientific crisis-tracking technologies and cellular phone video-capture technologies to identify the girls, produce evidence, and prevent future violence. these two sets of digital tools—video capture through social media and geo-thermal satellite documentation—have led to the transformation of citizen political authority against twenty-first-century mass violence. since 2011, various partnerships with civil-society organizations, scientists, technology designers, and various judicial offices have proliferated with the aim of preparing courts for the transformation of new evidentiary approaches using digital technology. ngos such as witness and the european journalism center are developing tools to help people document crimes, and courts and judges to develop protocols for the untested evidence (cole 2015). that new competitors—individual citizens, nongovernmental, governmental, and international institutions—are inserting themselves across borders and localities and struggling over the management of violence alongside states is indeed significant. yet such mobilizations are changing the terrain of governance and the contours of sovereignty in post-independent states. from satellite tracking and surveillance, crowdsourcing, social media, and autonomous weaponry, citizens are mobilizing their moral impetus to protect victims of violence—despite questions of legality—and are becoming increasingly involved in the management of violence according to that which they deem morally legitimate. by extension, they are also reshaping body politics through a rethinking of contemporary sovereignty (see brotherton 2012; agathangelou, n.d.). it is clear that a retrospective on sovereignty as it relates to the development of anthropological futures should highlight the importance of returning our focus to the body as an important analytic for making sense of new forms of mediation. such a focus on the body opens up a space for a robust interrogation of how new technologies are being witnessed, used to document and to expose events that, through a series of transformations, can serve as evidence for those intent on claiming the authority to demand justice at any cost. today, when the guarantee of rights, fairness, and equality for some is resulting in the retraction of rights for others, we see new possibilities for understanding how the securing of new entitlements requires reflection on the way that political authority is claimed in the contemporary period. here, following the lead of scholars such as sheila jasanoff (2011), i examine the ways that fresh reflections on sovereignty demand a shift in the way we understand governance not just through categories of the state and the nonstate, or individual and community actors, but through new ways of constituting bodies of persons through technological forms of bodily mediation. in this case, i reflect on the role of social media in bringing to the fore modalities through which new protections of the social body are taking shape. the foregoing considers the relationship between new forms of technological mediation and their significance in foregrounding new ways of understanding the relationship between bodies, sovereignty, and the shifting technological domains for the management of violence. here, i suggest that we rethink sovereignty as a way to reconceptualize the social contract, especially in relation to new bioconstitutional arrangements of the contemporary period (see jasanoff 2011; agathangelou, n.d.). cultural anthropology has not been quick to study these changing technological assemblages as a way to rethink sovereignty. classical anthropological studies of sovereignty tended to focus on issues of political authority, especially as it related to various recognizable models of governance. but how, we now need to ask, are everyday citizens using biomediated technologies of mass surveillance to transform their social worlds? and what are the domains of authority through which they operate? for example, how are witnesses of police violence in the united states and elsewhere using social media to transmit singular evidence to legal officers or to document mass atrocities? as significant openings for change and possibility have been created by the users of these technologies, as well as scientists, defense attorneys, and members of civil society, how is the introduction of new tracking technologies transforming sovereignty now and into the new millennium? the answers to these questions raise considerations about the consequences of such new technologies—especially as we specify which bodies, and through what body politics. since the early 2000s, various scientific and legal experts have deployed a new assemblage of technical domains ranging from medicine, science, religion, human rights, and law to facilitate the protection of the human body. the uses of digital and automated technologies for gathering and preserving evidence about bodies under the threat of violence and death highlight recalibrated values around governance and citizen responsibility and are leading to new social arrangements. these arrangements, reshaped by experts such as lawyers, judges, civil-society workers, and governmental officials, are contributing to the reformulation of body politics in the contemporary period (clarke, forthcoming). for even as the rights revolution has led to particular forms of rights consciousness, digital technologies today point to questions not only about the technological representation of the body but also about how we know the body, how we read it in its particular landscapes, what our assumptions are about its entitlements, and what our expectations are about its protections. during the past three decades, scholarship on the body and its related arenas have concerned themselves with the role of scientific evidence and its complicated place in the wider epistemological domains of science as a mode of power, social ordering, and knowledge production (agathangelou, n.d.; see also foucault 1977, 1978). made real through their contribution to the genealogical study of institutions, such approaches to scientific findings have focused on knowledge, culture, and power. attention is only now turning to studies concerned with the role of biomediation in assessing the basis on which bodies are seen as needing protection, and their links to satellite and drone technologies, the related production of scientific and legal claims, and the relationship between violence and conflict. yet average citizens engaged in justice-capture projects are now deploying new surveillance technologies that were once under the control of states. armed with a discourse focused on a responsibility to protect as the basis for their moral call, these citizens’ uses of technology differ in form and content and call on us to reckon with the nature of the body politic’s transformation. the literature on biomediation has proven productive in this regard, especially in its attention to the relationship between the body and technology when technology enables the body to “produce an image that is larger than itself” (m. hansen 2004, 6). such cases require that we clarify the way in which technologies serve as social mediators of perceived threats. genealogies of sovereignties the introduction of michel foucault’s work into the interdisciplinary social sciences opened a way for imagining different notions of political authority, sovereignty, the state, and power. foucault’s work revolutionized anthropological thinking about culture, power, and the social processes that shape political authority. many interpreted foucault’s analysis of government as one that removed the sovereign as an element of analysis. instead, we saw an approach to sovereignty reconceived as a tentative process grounded in violence. this notion of sovereign power acts against its subjects with force and violence. yet foucault described power as diffuse and operating through various institutions and state mechanisms, rather than simply as a centralized state apparatus. he famously called attention to “its ultimate destinations, [to] those points where it becomes capillary, that is, in its more regional and local forms and institutions” (foucault 1980, 96). shortly after the publication of discipline and punish (foucault 1977), foucault revisited his views on sovereign power in his 1978 lectures at the collège de france. there, he introduced the idea of governmentality as allowing for a complex form of “power which has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument” (foucault 2007, 107–108). using the term both as the western processes that led up to those transformations, as well as the forms of governance themselves, foucault expanded and decentralized a view of sovereignty and power that had led to many decades of writing about how power is produced and how it produces certain effects. departing from a hobbesian sovereign who rules subjects with absolute power, foucault described the transformations of the early eighteenth-century modern state in europe as the formation of an art of government, allowing him to explore the techniques and technologies of centralized authoritarian power. however, it was the notion of governmentality as the ideal of a self-regulated society that proved to be his transformative observation: in this light, subjects are disciplined through state mechanisms such as biopower and biopolitics. biopower thus became the modality through which disciplinary power was made to penetrate the constitution of bodies at the level of the entire population, allowing politically peripheral subjects to emerge (humphrey 2007, 419). at the core of foucault’s work lies a tension between sovereign authority and individual freedom. this binary was established through the relationship between monarchs and their subjects and was maintained in various forms until the period of economic and imperial expansion between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. foucault’s contribution allowed anthropologists to map out political authority through multiple dimensions of power, and this approach radically transformed the contours of the discipline. even so, critiques of foucault resounded just as clearly: not only was his approach dismissed for decentering sovereign power and law, but he was also taken to task for his inability to manage questions of violence and its scale—especially in relation to the coercive force of state authority. as anthropology entered the post–9/11 moment and the u.s. war on terror took off, the relevance of the authorial power of state violence returned anthropology to questions of ultimate decision-making. here, giorgio agamben emerged to remind us with lucidity of state violence. agamben (1998, 6) argued that biopower and sovereignty are fundamentally interrelated, to the extent that the production of “a biopolitical body” can be seen as “the original act of sovereign power.” here, he articulates the politics of the ban as a fundamental activity of sovereign power that shapes the production of bare life as an originary political element for social politics. indeed, we have seen in the post–9/11 period that traditional state forms have become increasingly powerful and relevant, prompting scholars of sovereignty to concern themselves with themes such as security borders and customs regimes. agamben’s contribution to anthropological debates made us see how sovereign power works: its location and domain of engagement are not the biopolitical paradigm of the west, but rather that of the camp (agamben 1998, 181). this approach to sovereignty through spaces of omission and exclusion redirected the nature of existing debates and, today, calls on us to rethink the basis of forms of contemporary citizen participation. resituating political authority through biomediated politics in their important review essay “sovereignty revisited,” thomas blom hansen and finn stepputat (2006) move us from the global north and its genealogies and histories to differently configured fields of power and authority. they argue that among anthropological studies of sovereignty and power are studies of a range of zones of exclusion in which we see ruthless local strongmen establishing sovereignty over some parts of the state. a second strand of sovereignty that interests them is comprised of various zones of informality, which include secrecy and magic. their work highlights studies of the postcolonial or postsocialist state and details the role of state officials in the “de facto exercise of sovereign practices in the interstices of laws and formal procedures, between the real and the legal” (t. hansen and stepputat 2006, 307–308). these studies complicate the state–society binary, showing that the relationship between control and regulation, on the one hand, and complete autonomy, on the other, varies in different cases and contexts. they also show that these forms of internal sovereignty do not demonstrate a weakness of the state, highlighting instead the way that particular practices may be seen as examples of zones never effectively governed in the first place. this insight points to a body of new work that seeks to explore the workings of various informal economies characterized as zones of exception. the sites of these informal spaces of exception are widespread, and they produce fissures in state standardization processes. from black markets to paramilitary operators to illicit webs of circulation, twenty-first-century anthropology has concerned itself with analyses of sovereignty that make sense of the way that individuals within and in relation to the state engage in diffuse forms of authority and power. today we are witnessing a new era of deliberations whereby the unleashing of violent harm to bodies has led to the mobilization of new strategies to capture the multiple iterations of bodies under siege, as well as to compel various constituencies to view such violence and act on it. the lived material and/or sentient body, the violated body, the social body, and the body politic—each of them coproduced and intersecting—are mobilized through affectively propelled technologies, with repercussions for how we make sense of bodily, structural, and juridicial violence. these mobilizations are not driven by state actors, but by everyday citizens. they are appropriating capture technologies—formerly used for purposes of state surveillance—and posting them on social media to produce moral outrage and incite affects for social action. under the language of “the responsibility to protect,” we have seen the emergence of legal rights for victims under international law. alongside such shifts have been citizens’ use of geo-satellite and drone technologies to capture digital information and to do the work of surveillance and protection. these realities call on us to contend with the changing force of the sovereign individual and the way that new forms of political authority are realigning in the contemporary period. by examining the role of popular moral outrage, sentiments of protection, and social action to protect the human body, we see how the body can be deployed as a grounded analytic that does real work in the world. these spheres range from humanitarian pleas to protect the body to the recent emergence of the human-rights category of the victim around which a new body politics is emerging. these newly constituted communities and their mobilizations have necessitated, in the absence of the identification of the sovereign with the state, a new figure producing the moral right to engage. it is the category of the victimized body that has emerged as the new rallying cry of the twenty-first century. through new forms of social action organized around it, new publics have begun to intervene in the domestic affairs of states. the mobilization of these new publics is compelling us to make sense of an entirely new level of bodily engagement with violence through the language of morality. these realities have consequences for bodies and body politics, and they call for a reorientation of how we understand anthropological approaches to sovereignty—especially in relation to the complexities of the forms of social change that are underway. such complexities ultimately shape the protection of bodies under threat. this terrain represents one of the many sites for the reallocation of contemporary forms of sovereignty, which are key to anthropological futures. acknowledgments special thanks to my colleagues sean brotherton, for our ongoing engagement on the relationship between the body and its cultural politics, and anna agathangelou, for the early conversations and potential collaborations in this arena. references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. originally published in 1995. agathangelou, anna n.d. science and body politics. unpublished manuscript. brotherton, p. sean 2012 revolutionary medicine: health and the body in post-soviet cuba. durham, n.c.: duke university press. clarke, kamari maxine forthcoming “making suffering visible: the #bringbackourgirls hashtag and the changing victim fetish.” in affective justice. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cole, alison 2015 “technology for truth: the next generation of evidence.” international justice monitor, news, march 18. https://www.ijmonitor.org/2015/03/technology-for-truth-the-next-generation-of-evidence. foucault, michel 1977 discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. translated by alan sheridan. new york: pantheon. originally published in 1975. 1978 the history of sexuality, volume 1: an introduction. translated by robert hurley. new york: pantheon. originally published in 1976. 1980 “two lectures.” in power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977, edited by colin gordon, 78–108. originally published in 1977. 2007 security, territory, population: lectures at the collège de france, 1977–1978. translated by graham burchell. new york: palgrave macmillan. originally published in 2004. hansen, mark b. n. 2004 new philosophy for new media. cambridge, mass.: mit press. hansen, thomas blom, and finn stepputat 2006 “sovereignty revisited.” annual review of anthropology 35: 295–315. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123317. humphrey, caroline 2007 “sovereignty.” in a companion to the anthropology of politics, edited by david nugent and joan vincent, 418–36. malden, mass.: blackwell. jasanoff, sheila, ed. 2011 reframing rights: bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age. cambridge, mass.: mit press. toward an ethnography of the national economy toward an ethnography of the national economy hannah appel university of california, los angeles http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7896-3227 each year, the international monetary fund (imf) releases a list of the “world’s best economies.” winners in 2013 included south sudan—the world’s fastest-growing economy, and equatorial guinea—the economy with the most investment.1 if equatorial guinea and south sudan are among our world’s “best” economies, it begs the question, what is a national economy? what does it measure, value, or represent? what does it do? in equatorial guinea, as elsewhere, the economy is a privileged object—perhaps the privileged object—in official discourse. state actors and multilateral institutions articulate futures in its terms—development, diversification, growth. in 1983, united nations rapporteur fernando volio jimenez reported from equatorial guinea that “one official after another all the way up to [the president] himself” justified limitations on the press (there was none) and on political participation (political parties were banned) “as being necessary for the focusing of attention on economic issues” (fegley 1991, 220). more than twenty years later, during my own fieldwork, state officials continued to justify the persistent unreliability of electricity or potable water, not to mention the unremitting limits on the press and on political organizing, citing the need to focus first on economic development. here, the economy is both an object of the future and a justification for the constant deferral of the present. but what, precisely, is the economy as invoked by the imf, or by state officials in equatorial guinea? both gesture toward a given national economy or, as timothy mitchell (1998, 84) has defined it, “the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within a given country.” in this article i attempt to lay some groundwork for an ethnographic approach to national economies as a serial global form, and, by extension, to the geopolitical scale and implicitly bordered categories invoked any time the economy is mentioned. the national economy form has eluded concerted ethnographic attention, despite its centrality to modern geopolitical imaginaries and its tendency to lurk in the explanatory background of much anthropological work (wolf 1982). in this article, i ask how national economies become both intelligible, possessing representational unity or naturalized authority, and compelling—the stuff of fantasy and desire, power and subjugation.2 my explorations function in dialogue with work in the anthropology of capitalism and the social studies of finance, where questions of markets, market actors and institutions, money, and the expertise of economics have frequently taken center stage.3 often, however, the economy as a thing in itself can remain an underspecified conceptual box, or else a kind of causal context. the economy is not, however, an empty or borderless repository merely populated by markets, financial institutions and actors, labor, commodities, and money. rather, it is a specific and surprisingly recent sociohistorical and geopolitical formation (mitchell 2002). turning our ethnographic attention to it will, i argue, make a contribution not only to the anthropology of capitalism, but also, significantly, to the anthropology of the state. thus, in this article, i join a handful of authors (mitchell 1998, 2011, 2014; holmes 2014; elyachar 2012; roitman 2005; gibson-graham 1996; ralph 2015) who, in different ways, have paid explicit attention to the national economy form. the case of newly oil-rich equatorial guinea offers a unique historical moment in which the making and maintenance of something called a national economy was widely (and with some degree of amnesia) considered a new process. taking a series of national economic conferences in equatorial guinea as a point of departure, i trace how and to what effects equatorial guinea’s national economy was imagined and reproduced through economic theory and desire, futurity and dystopia, state and corporate power. in particular, the ethnographic material shows how an economic theory known as the resource curse shaped and formatted equatorial guinea’s national economy in the wake of oil. juxtaposing the scholarship on economic performativity with equatoguinean political history and the power of u.s. oil companies in the global south highlights the open-endedness and unpredictability of what michel callon has called economics “in the wild” (see callon and rabeharisoa 2003).4 resource-curse theory in equatorial guinea not only helped create the world it posited, but also helped create a politically consequential distance between something called the national economy, on the one hand, and local experiences of state violence and corporate power, on the other. thus, rather than an encompassing process of creating what it purported merely to describe, economic theory in the field created fractured epistemological and political spaces—productive spaces where the world and its representations (here, the national economy) were pulled apart, sitting mismatched alongside one another for all to see. i refer to these as spaces of as-if: misrepresentation, simplification, forgetting, longing. it is, in part, through these productive as-ifs that epistemological objects like national economies come to exercise much of their power, while remaining contingent and contestable. i begin with a two-part conceptual framing, in an effort to think through how national economies became not only intelligible and compelling but also have tended to slip from anthropology’s view. first, extending timothy mitchell’s (1998, 2002, 2011, 2014) work, i chronicle the mid-twentieth-century moment when the economy, bounded by national borders, began to replace the spatiality of empire. in dialogue with the ethnography to follow, in which the politics of numbers and measurement emerge as central to the story, i note how new techniques of measurement available in this mid-twentieth-century moment (gross domestic product or gdp, for instance) rendered the radically unequal postcolonial order licit and apparently subject to scientific management. this historical interlude ends at the moment when anthropologists “abandoned the study of modern economies to the economists” (hann and hart 2011, 14), and i use that moment as the hinge to a brief theoretical section showing how the social studies of finance offers a set of analytical tools designed to interrogate the so-called modern economies that many anthropologists had abjured. in the ethnographic sections that follow, i trace how the performativity of economic theory—the theory of the resource curse, in particular—unfolded erratically on deeply politicized terrain, producing the fractured spaces of as-if that are as much about state and corporate power as they are about the smooth functioning of economic expertise. i also chronicle the seductive power of something called the private sector, often metonymically taken for the economy, and especially seductive in a place like equatorial guinea where the repressive state feels omnipresent. in the conclusion, i open out the theoretical and methodological implications of ethnographic attention to the national economy form: lest we be tempted to imagine equatorial guinea as exceptional (which, of course, it is in some ways) or generalize only to other african economies or economies of the global south, we need only think about brexit in relation to the european union or the collision course between the anthropocene and economic growth (most often calculated nationally) to begin to imagine the ethnographic possibilities of national economies more generally, as perhaps the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity. the national economy, in history and in theory it was john maynard keynes’s (1936) the general theory of employment, interest and money that first posited the economy as a bounded whole, defined by the borders of the nation-state and by the tools states had at their disposal (statistical aggregation, public spending) to manage this ostensibly distinct sphere (coyle 2014; mitchell 1998, 2011; stiglitz, sen, and fitoussi 2010). keynes’s (1940) subsequent book, how to pay for the war, inspired the british state to commission economists to develop the first approximation of what we now call gdp (coyle 2014). unlike earlier practices of national income accounting, gdp indicators—the kind the imf uses for its “world’s best economies” list—include government purchases and spending in their tally, hence putting national governments at the very center of national economies in at least two ways. national governments are both counted and counter in gdp statistics: “by contrast to purely theoretical liberalism, ‘real’ liberalism implied for the state a role as organ of economic intelligence, gathering and disseminating information needed by economic agents in order to act in the market” (desrosières 2003, 557). thanks to unevenly globalized histories of liberal and neoliberal economic thought, the private sector is often metonymically taken for the economy, despite the fact that, the world over, state budgets and public-sector expenditures account for a large percentage of total gdp (collier 2005; mbembe and roitman 1995; elyachar 2012). the national economy is, therefore, in the first instance an epistemological project of the state, born in a geopolitical moment in which western powers were looking for tools to manage the great depression, pay for war, and respond to imperial decline. it was at this moment that states increasingly took explicit responsibility for economic activities nominally within their borders and sought statistical tools like per capita income, national income accounting, and gdp through which to know and manage their new charge (stiglitz, sen, and fitoussi 2010; vanoli 2005). as chris hann and keith hart (2011, 34) put it, “states claimed the right to manage money, markets, and accumulation in the national interest; and this is why today ‘the economy’ primarily refers to the country we live in” (see also mitchell 2002; stiglitz, sen, and fitoussi 2010; vanoli 2005). this, then, is the surprisingly recent history of the banal nationalism (billig 1995) of the the; why the economy, without scalar specification (municipal, regional, global), reflexively refers to national economies (see also mitchell 2002). this history of the present troubles widely accepted teleologies of globalization, in which a world of independent nation-states has recently given way to intensified transnational orders. on the contrary, this recent history shows us that the making of the national was always already responsive to shifting global orders—the end of empire, projects of development, new multilateral institutions, and u.s. hegemony. as empires crumbled in the wake of world war ii and anticolonial movements coupled with emergent u.s. hegemony reframed the world as a collection of nation-states (institutionalized in the united nations, the world bank, and the imf), practices of measurement, comparison, and evaluation developed apace. between 1945 and 1955 the number of countries publishing national-income estimates grew from thirty-nine to ninety-three, and in 1953 the united nations published the first system of national accounts (sna)—a method for national accounting for use by all member states (speich 2011; coyle 2014). again, the year is no accident. the united states had dispensed the equivalent of $120 billion (in 2016 dollars) through the marshall plan, and the united nations was tasked with tracking these resources: “countries that wanted to receive post-war aid under america’s marshall plan had to produce an estimate of gdp. . . . to be a nation was, in part, to know your gdp” (economist 2016; emphasis mine). as i will recount below, we can see this interplay between the transnational and the national in equatorial guinea: when oil rents from u.s. multinational firms began to circulate in the late 1990s, the country was newly knitted into the transnational surveillance regimes of international organizations, bureaucrats, governments, and corporations. this surveillance demanded something newly legible as a national economy that had not been demanded in the same way before oil. as former colonies became sovereign states, development replaced colonialism as the official framework for relationships across the global north and south (cooper 2015; escobar 1995). the statistical tools newly available in this moment—including sna, per capita income, and gdp—were used to compare newly like sovereign states—suddenly senegal was “just like” france and could be compared as such. rather than demonstrating the disastrous relational effects of colonialism, these tools were employed to demonstrate global poverty in ostensibly discrete nation-states and to intervene, now in the name of economic growth. development, in other words, took the newly measurable national economy as its object (escobar 1995; mitchell 2002; speich 2011). the sna became central to cold war competition and comparison as well, as communist countries developed the material product system (mps) and net material product (nmp) as countermeasures to gdp (coyle 2014). far from mere tools, aggregate economic indicators became an authoritative language of ideological struggle, nationalism, and imperialism. national economies here are both newly legible and newly compelling. to former colonial powers and to the united states as an emergent imperial power, they elide racist colonial history, rendering licit the deep inequalities created by that system. in other words, “the national income view of global inequality did not force western politicians to reconsider the colonial logic of domination fundamentally. notions of supremacy, which used to be grounded in cultural considerations, found easy expression in the statistically based language of economic strength” (speich 2011, 21). these new indicators proved symbolically compelling for newly sovereign nations as well; gdp was both a proud mark of sovereignty and a claim on sovereign interdependency (cattelino 2008). the terms and conditions of international finance—how big of a loan? at what interest rate? over what repayment term?—have, since this moment, been partially contingent on gdp indicators. the sna or gdp, then, are compelling symbolic frameworks that generate performative facts and affective sequelae—interest rates, desire, sovereignty, comparability, competition, licit supremacy, nationalism. in their transposability, modularity, and affective intensity, they are both analogous to and constitutive of benedict anderson’s (1993) idea of the modular nation. “in all instances of national income accounting, the nation-state was reified as a category of knowledge and hence enormously stabilized as a historic entity” (speich 2011, 22; see also meyer et al. 1997). this mid-twentieth-century moment, when the economy, bounded by national borders, began to replace the spatiality of empire precipitated the formalist-substantivist debate in anthropology, which began with the great transformation (polanyi 2001) and peaked in the 1970s. economists working in still-colonial africa turned to anthropologists with questions about nonmarket goods and services, household production, and nonmonetary denominations. it was in part this enrollment of anthropologists in early attempts to quantify african economies that spurred disagreement about the universal applicability of the tools of economics. the substantivists—karl polanyi, conrad arensberg, and harry pearson (1957), paul bohannan and george dalton (1962; see also dalton 1969), and marshall sahlins (1972, 1976) among others—refused the universality of economic calculation and insisted that “the tiv” or “the maori” would not recognize something called an economy apart from sociocultural life. consequentially, polanyi and his followers “abandoned the study of modern economies to the economists” (hann and hart 2011, 14). and yet, substantivists’ refusal of the calculative techniques of economics could not have anticipated the power, ubiquity, material, and symbolic effects in the world of those forms of representation, now stable enough to lie at the center of global political imaginaries. it seems to be through this history, in part, that national economies slipped into the background of some ethnographic work. it is also through this history, however, that we can recover the centrality of national scale-making, the state, and the post/colonial histories of metrics like gdp to the analytic life of the national economy form. if the formalist-substantivist debate steered anthropology away from so-called modern economies for a time, the past decade or more has seen a major shift in anthropology, feminist approaches to capitalism, and the social studies of finance in particular. scholars now put economists, corporations, financial institutions, markets, and even central banking under ethnographic scrutiny. sifting through this bibliography for sustained attention to the national economy form, however, is trickier. consider michel callon’s (1998, 2) groundbreaking laws of the markets, which opens by stating that “economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes, and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions.” this initial statement of the economic performativity thesis—as the proposition that economics performs the economy came to be known—has been tremendously generative for the social studies of finance (mackenzie 2008; miyazaki 2013; holmes 2014), and indeed i take it up ethnographically below. but in the context of attention to scale, the state, and geopolitics, i want to note a common slippage between the economy (invoked without scalar specificity) and the market, or market devices. for example, callon’s (1998, 3) book aimed to analyze the relationship between economics and the economy, for which, he says, “the most convenient starting point is the general definition of the market.” indeed, the performativity thesis has paid close attention to markets, market actors, market materialities, and the performativity of economics therein. but the relationship of all this to something called the economy, still less a given national economy, remains unclear. more recently, koray çalişkan and callon (2009, 2010) have urged us to provincialize the economy and to shift our focus to processes of economization (see also bear et al. 2015). on the one hand, of course i agree; the economy is processual—continually made and remade in daily practice. on the other hand, as i have argued above, the the—that most prosaic and routine of definite articles that çalişkan and callon urge us to discard—rhetorically makes the economy into a geopolitical object whose tacit limit is the nation (mitchell 2002). thus, to callon’s (1998; see also çalişkan and callon 2009) dictum that there is no economy without economics, this article responds yes, and, there is no economy without the state. anthropologists writing in dialogue with the social studies of finance offer material that is more substantively tied to a given economy’s geopolitical terrain. douglas holmes’s (2014) economy of words—an in vivo account of macroeconomic thinking as monetary policy in the central banks of new zealand, europe, and the united states—has perhaps gone the farthest in this direction. close attention to the publications and declarations of central bankers leads holmes (2014, 14) to argue that the narratives of central banks “are generative of a communicative field within which and by which the economy is made, remade, and unmade.” following holmes (2014, 23), i, too, aim to understand “the economy as an empirical fact,” yet i am struck by how his account of the economy—emerging from ethnographic intimacy with experts, expert practices, and expert documents—profoundly differs from the more public life of equatorial guinea’s national economy that i present below. rather than an economy that central bankers are trying to apprehend and manage both in real time and prospectively, i found an economy to which people were told to subordinate their needs; that people were hopeful they might find and participate in; that laundered sordid dealings between transnational oil companies and the equatoguinean state into platitudes of economic theory. where, for holmes’s interlocutors, the economy (he does not specify a scale) is a communicative field of experimentation and intervention, the national economy i present below is a communicated field of political contestation and the sequelae of colonialism. both approaches (and more!) are necessary. the ethnographic material below is perhaps in closest dialogue with bill maurer’s (2005, 2007) work on offshore finance in the caribbean and south africa, james ferguson’s (1994) on the world bank’s radical misdiagnosis of lesotho’s national economy, or the work of walter rodney (1982) and fred cooper (2015, 36), the latter of whom reminds us that “to see an africa, asia or europe whose economic ‘performance’ can be compared with each other obscures both the historical mechanisms through which such entities were imagined and constituted and the nature of international connections today.” these false equivalences and disavowals of historical connection are precisely the effects of macroeconomic tools like gdp and national growth rate when laid across postcolonial inequality. on the one hand, these tools offer an expert language of comparability and potential equality. on the other, they legitimize and dehistoricize radical inequality, rendering hierarchies of global supremacy licit in scientific language (speich 2011). as equatorial guinea’s national economy is remade with the arrival of major u.s. oil and gas firms, these histories of domination are the terrain on which the fallacies of liberal equality are built. the ethnography to which i now turn draws attention to the relationship between economic theory—in this case, the resource curse—and something called the national economy on postcolonial terrain. while the performativity of economic theory was robustly present in equatorial guinea, the field was also full of performative failures and the multivalent productivity of misfires to economic world-making (butler 2010). productive failures bore the national economy in its poetic mode, wherein “the budget must act as if it were a realist representation” (larkin 2013, 335; see also mbembe 2001; mbembe and roitman 1995). i draw attention to these spaces of simultaneity, between solidity and incompleteness, between performative representations and the world they both (fail to) describe and (fail to) create. these are the spaces of as-if: misrepresentation, simplification, forgetting. capacious and contentious political spaces, as-ifs both disturb the smooth performance of expertise and make room for national economies to exercise much of their power. a new national economy? in 1997, equatorial guinea held its first national economic conference. there had been national-level conferences before, but the 1997 conference was distinguished by the fact that it was conceived, documented, and publicized by its state organizers as equatorial guinea’s “first” national economic conference (república de guinea ecuatorial 1997). a u.s. company had discovered oil three years earlier, and small amounts of money from exploratory contracts had just begun to circulate back into the country. this was a dramatic turn of events for a microstate characterized by unprecedented economic collapse in the 1970s and a crippling debt burden by the early 1990s. in december 2007, two months into my fieldwork and ten years after the first national economic conference, flush with oil wealth, equatorial guinea held its second national economic conference. here again, despite conferences on other themes in the interim decade, the “second” designation was an official part of the conference’s title: “national economic conference ii. national plan for economic development. agenda for the diversification of sources of growth. equatorial guinea toward horizon 2020.” how to understand the idea, implied in those “first” and “second” descriptors, that the national economy, or at least a conference on it, was something new in the wake of oil? seemingly ahistorical or amnesiac, these firsts come into sharper relief by going back briefly into equatorial guinea’s colonial and immediate postcolonial history. while spain gained imperial rights to what was called spanish guinea in 1777, it was not until the 1930s that spanish missionaries had even seen the interior of continental río muni, let alone established administrative rule of any kind (bidyogo 1977; fegley 1991; sundiata 1990). while bioko island was an economically and politically strategic holding, with increasing spanish presence if not rule, río muni “was viewed as a magnet for the border population (from gabon and cameroon) because it was a place where censuses, native taxation, levies, and native justice [were] unknown. according to one french official, it was possible for africans to live ‘in complete freedom’ in rio muni” (sundiata 1990, 34). though equatorial guinea’s colonial era cannot be characterized homogeneously, processes of foreign administrative rule that were (unevenly) characteristic of other places, including statistical representation, did not capture equatorial guinea in the same way. figure 1. map of equatorial guinea produced by the u.s. central intelligence agency. annotated by university of california, los angeles document services. this exceptional relationship to statistics continued after independence in 1968. in the ensuing years, amid spanish-backed coup attempts, escalating political tensions, and what equatoguineans described to me as postindependence leader macías nguema’s deteriorating mental health, equatorial guinea descended into profound violence. in the decade between 1968 and 1978 roughly one-third of the population was killed or fled into exile. during this time, identification as an intellectual was reason to be put to death, and statistics were illegal. “after 1970 there was not one reliable economic figure, government statistic or census report to be found in the country” (fegley 1991, 72). the man who eventually took power in a 1979 coup—obiang nguema mbasogo, still president in 2017—served as chief of security in the previous regime and was intimately implicated in its brutalities. obiang’s coup brought foreign observers back into the country for the first time, and a uruguayan lawyer invited to equatorial guinea to witness the regime change wrote an account of the economic situation he found in 1979: the economy was to all intents and purposes paralyzed. the basic services—electric power, transport, the post, banking, communications—were virtually at a standstill. . . . macías, as head of state, took the national treasure to his palace of nzeng ayong . . . he administered the funds of the state from his house. . . . commerce is practically at a standstill in malabo. there are only a few small shops . . . still open but their shelves are empty. there is not a single restaurant in the whole town. there has been no electric power since 1978. for four years or so, there has been no written press in the country because, according to the government, there has been no paper. (artucio 1979, 14–15) as randall fegley (1991, 155) summarizes, “nowhere at any time had an economy collapsed in the sense that equatorial guinea’s had by 1978.” though foreign aid poured into equatorial guinea with the advent of obiang’s rule and the country joined the economic community of central african states (cemac) in 1988, those renewed ties had little effect on an already-fraught relationship to certain forms of knowledge production. during my time in equatorial guinea, the ministry of finance and budgets was routinely without electricity for days on end. the street-facing door to the ministry’s archives remained constantly ajar, and precariously stacked files and papers escaped into the street, caught by harmattan winds or soaked in the rainy season’s mud. when i talked to an equatoguinean lawyer about access to those archives, he quipped, “here, it is easier to find petroleum than information.” for its part, the international monetary fund (2009, 16) wrote that “data on the national accounts, balance of payments, and inflation all have significant limitations and make it difficult to get an accurate representation of the performance of the non-oil sector.” note the emphasis on the non-oil sector. though the report does not specify why, one can infer that oil-industry accounting makes up for the data gap, and that equatorial guinea’s public administration is contractually obliged to keep certain kinds of records in the oil and gas sector that are not obligatory outside those boundaries. from erratic colonial administration to the national treasure in macías’s nzeng ayong home to the ministry’s records soaked in the street, equatorial guinea has had a long, fraught relationship with the kinds of enumeration and recording practices constitutive of the national economy form. and yet, as oil money began to circulate in the mid-1990s, that form was interpellated in new ways. an acceptably documented national economy became both newly demanded and newly possible, hailed by the visibility of a single—and singularly profitable—global commodity. the economy, in other words, does not predate oil in any simple way, as a separate sphere ready to be populated. rather, the transnational circulation of oil makes equatorial guinea’s national economy both possible and necessary in new ways. the national, in other words, is always already entangled with the transnational—the lumpy movements of global capital, compliance with international public accounting norms, and what callon has described as economic theory “in the wild.” hydrocarbons account for more than 99 percent of equatorial guinea’s gdp. this reliance on a single commodity—nonrenewable, subject to radical price fluctuations, dominated by foreign expertise and capital, but also wildly profitable for the local state—makes equatorial guinea appear to be a case study for the so-called resource curse, a theory out of economics and political science that analyzes the typical oil state and its pathologies. resource-curse theory suggests that equatorial guinea will now become a member of a class of states that includes nigeria, venezuela, and kazakhstan, among others, in which the influx of oil money fuels a distinctive set of economic and political problems including corruption, antidemocratic tendencies, and the maldistribution of oil rents (ebrahim-zadeh 2003; hirschman 1958; humphreys, sachs, and stiglitz 2007; mcsherry 2006; sachs and warner 1995; for critiques, see weszkalnys 2011; mitchell 2011). both the idea of the resource curse and a subset of this theory, known as the dutch disease, circulated widely in equatorial guinea. dutch disease takes its name from the netherlands, where, after oil and gas discoveries in the north sea in the 1970s, revenue from the manufacturing sector plummeted. this so-called disease now refers to resource-rich countries’ overreliance on oil, to the detriment of other productive sectors. economists prescribe diversification away from oil—agriculture! tourism! it!—as the treatment for this malady. note how resource-curse theory moves the national economy in both time and space, framing it as something out there in the future to be diversified, separating it from both local histories and the involvement of transnational corporations, causally tying its fate instead to the translocal properties of hydrocarbons. while i discuss the ethnographic life of economic theory and the resource curse in particular at length below, here i want to flag its power to disentangle the world from its representation (see also mitchell 2002). where the performativity program shows the world and its representation to be co-constitutive, there are moments when the distance between them becomes the space of politics and power; the world sitting uneasily alongside its representation: the space of as-if. utopia and dystopia i: the resource curse and salt into gold at the 2007 conference, the president and ministers of government, oil company representatives, national and international business owners hoping to invest, the world bank, the imf, usaid, european union delegates, washington, d.c. lobbyists, and regional diplomats were all brought together in the name of the future: horizon 2020. after an initial day of opening ceremonies and closed-door meetings, day 2 presented conference participants with four concurrent, daylong sessions—infrastructure, social sector, public sector, and private sector. i followed the decidedly largest portion of the crowd into the private-sector session. on entering the room, assistants handed each attendee a plastic carrying case, modeled after a briefcase, containing more aggregated information about equatorial guinea than had arguably ever been released to the public. given the histories of information narrated above, the conference’s printed material was startling. each plastic briefcase included three booklets of seventy-five pages each. printed in vibrant color with extensive graphs and charts, the first booklet offered an economic and social diagnosis of the country; the second, strategies for improving that diagnosis over the coming thirteen years; and the third, a poverty profile. the package also included five smaller booklets of demographic and statistical analysis. as we waited for the proceedings to begin, audience members marveled audibly at the material. where did it come from? who wrote it? who produced the statistics? is there any reason to think that any of it is accurate? the (re)production and circulation of oft-repressed forms of information coupled with economic theory-making turned these booklets into what one informant aptly called “dream papers.” at the conference and afterward, many shared the sentiment that the materials were more daydreams spun atop economic theory than reliable representations of an external economic reality. this is the space between the world and its representation as ethnographic fact. what is possible in these spaces? what happens here? the dream papers came to life through long hours in the private-sector session, as the minister of mines, followed by representatives from state oil and gas companies and then a german agro-businessman seemingly in the process of brokering a large deal with the government, narrated one after another a future at once utopic and surreal. i transcribe (in translation) excerpts from each of these narrations, intentionally stringing them together to evoke the surrealism of their progression. in the energy sector, the government will build two conditioning plants to make gas available for local use and diminish ongoing reliance on foreign processing. it will also construct a modular refinery in the country to bring down prices. by 2020, state-of-the-art facilities in equatorial guinea will monetize the gas that is currently burned off in the petroleum-production process not only here, but also in cameroon and nigeria. the potential for the fishing industry is colossal, with an estimated local capacity of sixty-five thousand tons per year, the equivalent of one hundred million u.s. dollars. the government will build two industrial centers and ice factories to service this industry. it will educate oceanographers and boat engineers. by 2020 there will be a fleet of industrial fishing ships and an industry producing value-added products for export, including salted, dried, and smoked fish, canned and packaged products, and modern fish farms. annobón will be the center of the industry, where women will be transformed into commercial fishers. equatorial guinea has the richest soil in the world for tropical cultivants. by 2020 local agriculture will supply one hundred percent of nutrition needs, and there will be more for export. the forests of 2020 will be conserved. tourism, too, is an important world industry that generates employment and eradicates poverty. equatorial guinea will be a destination for luxury and business tourism, offering endemic-species safaris, sumptuous lodges on remote islands, and innumerable opportunities to invest while you recreate. small businesses and the entrepreneurial sector are the priority in this process. the private sector must drive the economy. this will require microfinance, small business loans, export infrastructure, transparent access to credit for small businesses. but the pure gold, the german man suggested as the session concluded, is in salt. the production of salt here, alongside caustic soda and chlorine, is the first step in modern industrialization, and then into the real chemical industry: plastic and other petroleum products that turn salt into pure gold. as he hurried to get through his last improbable sentences, having been told repeatedly and loudly to end his presentation, the minister of mines finally stood to conclude the session. by 2020, equatorial guinea will be a successful african model of the transition from a petroleum economy to a diversified economy. equatorial guinea will be the first country in the global south to have avoided the resource curse. the salt-into-gold future was narrated by each presenter and detailed in the printed materials as a route through the predictions of economic theory. that both the conference presenters and the printed materials presented the dutch disease, in particular, as a looming threat was incongruous in multiple ways. first, the country had been without a productive agricultural sector long before the discovery of oil, let alone other industries for either domestic consumption or export. far from a disease contracted in relation to oil, the rise and fall of a once-profitable cocoa industry had everything to do with colonial and postcolonial relationships between spain and equatorial guinea, nigerian and liberian labor, fernandino land owners,5 contemporary struggles over imports from cameroon, and internal private-property issues. moreover, with once oil-rich gabon just across the country’s eastern border and with the offshore platforms of nigeria visible on clear nights from the shores of malabo, equatoguineans did not need an economic theory to understand the complex perils of becoming an oil exporter, which clearly had everything to do with the toxic cocktail of transnational oil companies and local politics. and yet, many at the conference welcomed a narrative that could lay these outcomes at the foot of a resource and not at the feet of either local or transnational power. the resource curse provided a safe, causal, and authoritative narrative that replaced local histories of power and ownership, offering a modular explanation for social and economic ills that moved responsibility in both time and space: away from grounded local histories and toward futures, already seen elsewhere, ostensibly inherent in the qualities of the resource. the conference became about avoiding a potentiality out there as opposed to reorganizing power distributions in here. economic theory—the resource curse—was opening a politically consequential distance between something called the national economy, on the one hand, and local experiences of state violence and corporate power, on the other. yet layers of dystopian presents and pasts burdened each of the conference’s utopic visions, requiring tremendous public acts of forgetting and future-oriented confabulation. on what fictions and forgetting does the making of a thing called a national economy depend?6 the projected fishing industry, for instance, would require a program of environmental controls for off-platform pollution, and yet according to my equatoguinean interlocutors working on oil rigs, as of 2009 there had not been a single independent environmental review of equatorial guinea’s offshore industry. for the education of oceanographers and engineers, the country had one functioning university, which during my fieldwork had sporadic electricity, a library of perhaps fifty books, and six computers belonging to an american study-abroad program doing research on primates (known locally as los monkeys). a slightly deeper history of the fishing industry and annobón’s prospective role therein takes us back to 1975, when macías outlawed doctors (as part of what he perceived to be the foreign-trained and treasonous intellectual class) and half of the island’s inhabitants died for lack of medical care. during my fieldwork, one could only get to annobón by boat—a state-owned ferry service that was notoriously unreliable and often diverted to bata. a new airport was under construction on annobón, however, and though quoted airfares would be prohibitively expensive for the majority of those commuting to and from annobón for their livelihoods, the airport was central to the imagined tourism industry, allowing access to annobón’s exquisitely beautiful, sparsely populated beaches. annobón’s future as a tourist utopia of untouched beaches conveniently depopulated by leprosy and other forms of political violence is overlaid not only with the island’s history, but also with contemporary forms of surveillance throughout equatorial guinea. during my fieldwork, maps were illegal, as was photography in cities or anywhere in view of a policeman or soldier. while websites and tourist brochures advertise the beautiful views to be had from atop el pico, the mountain that rises along malabo’s southwestern edge, soldiers guarded the road up the mountain. in my fourteen months in equatorial guinea, i was never able to secure permission to go up. the utopian agricultural future totters uncomfortably on the brink of dystopia as well. historically, labor in equatorial guinea’s cocoa industry was provided largely by migrants, first liberians and then nigerians (campos serrano and micó abago 2004). within five years of independence, macías began to stop paying the nigerians, who left en masse. in their place, macías decreed a compulsory labor act for equatoguinean citizens in 1972, sparking mass exodus. since the precipitous decline of cocoa production that followed, equatorial guinea has had no industrialized agriculture. while much of the population outside major cities is involved in both subsistence farming and the selling of small surpluses, bulk agricultural products are, on the whole, imported from cameroon. less than a month after the conference’s proclamations on the future of agriculture, the then minister of agriculture and forestry (the president’s much-maligned son teodorín) was shown on television literally throwing money and basic tools to elated farmers, arms outstretched. to imagine that the resource curse could begin to account for present challenges, or point clearly to ways of strengthening or diversifying something called the national economy in the wake of these histories, would be laughable—deconstructable, in fact—if it did not have so much power. economic theory here opens a distance between literally unspeakable local histories and something called a national economy. utopia and dystopia ii: private-sector desire the surreal utopias presented at the conference were not the product of resource-curse theory alone. these detached, idealized private-sector fantasies were also deeply rooted in local experiences of a suffocating authoritarian regime, and in translocal imaginings of the endless riches to be had on the equatoguinean frontier. despite, or perhaps because of the mirrored surrealisms of a fishing sector amid unimpeded offshore pollution and a tourism industry without maps or cameras, i repeatedly found myself in the unexpected position of cheering for this imaginary object of desire called a private sector. i was not alone. the as-if distance opened up by economic theory, the putative safety of a separable sphere called the national economy, does not have a single political valence. it does not only work in the service of power. at this conference and beyond, it also enabled critiques of the equatoguinean regime and its complicity with u.s. oil companies that were otherwise untenable and even illegal. one of the first audience members to ask a question after the surreal narration of future utopias was alberto, who happened to live in the apartment above mine and was the head of the equatoguinean delegation for small businesses. obliquely referencing the amnesias of the conference, he reminded the audience of a 1982 national forum on the promotion of business, and of the 1997 conference, where the private sector had also been established as the motor of development. after these reminders, he asked, “where are we now? we need financing and access to credit, education, good labor conditions, access to technology, and a fiscal climate according to the law. i’m no xenophobe,” he continued, “but foreign companies are granted all the big contracts, and then we’re hired at dismal wages as subcontractors. i have the capacity but i lack the capital. if i had the money, i, too, could subcontract an architect or an engineer.” when he finished, the conference room erupted in boisterous applause and full-throated cheers, and he turned and smiled and waved at the crowd. his question was a thinly veiled critique of the state and of iterative conferences that came to the same conclusions yet produced nothing—no credit, no education, no fiscal climate according to law, no disengagement of the state from its control of the private sector. despite these serial failures, the enthusiastic response to his question revealed that the conference and its imagined private sector offered the opportunity, otherwise unavailable, for people to gather in large numbers and cheer loudly at indirect critiques of the regime. for many in equatorial guinea, this imagined private sector was the preferred realm of fantasies of freedom and opportunity. while these fantasies were certainly not evenly shared, neither were they the exclusive daydream of the wealthy or well-connected. these desires stretched from impoverished young hip-hop artists who had to go to gabon to find a recording studio free of government or official spanish sponsorship/censorship to young americans working in an “mbas without borders” program who were shocked at the extent to which, as they put it, “big brother is watching everything in equatorial guinea.” a private sector detached from this pervasive feeling of surveillance and control felt downright radical. here, i want to explore different moments of this desire for and idealization of a future private sector, thinking through its ambivalent character of subversion, on the one hand, and the intimate subvention of state power, on the other. on weekends in june and july 2008, orange—the central brand of france telecom, at that point trying to make inroads into the cell-phone market in equatorial guinea—sponsored a free music and dance festival, setting up a stage and sound system in the public plaza around malabo’s city hall. replete with obnoxious recorded advertisements about orange goods and services blaring between youthful acts, the festival allowed for something that rarely happened in equatorial guinea: free public art and an open-air public gathering, seemingly unrelated to the regime. i attended the festival nearly every weekend, joining a small crowd that was mostly groups of teenagers with younger siblings in tow, though a little bit of everyone skirted the event’s edges, curious about the unusual public spectacle. whereas alabaciones (political propaganda songs) flooded the official music industry, whose only source of income was the state, the orange summer stage boasted not a single song praising obiang or the regime. indeed, several songs critiqued him, directly or indirectly. there was even a song about marijuana. with labor and event management subcontracted to a small equatoguinean media company owned by a young equatoguinean recently returned from life and education abroad, the audience was clearly seduced by what orange and its local collaborators were able to facilitate. in a place where dissent was reduced to hushed conversations around dinner tables, the spaces that private enterprise seemed to open up—like this orange stage—felt oddly radical and out of control. like alberto, who felt free to critique the state at a conference on the economy, on the orange stage, too, the private sector in its own image became a felt space of possibility and unpredictability for the equatoguinean youth performing, for those of us in the audience, as well as for the mayor herself, whom i watched leave in a huff during the marijuana song. rather than dismiss everything that happened on the orange stage that summer—or, indeed, fantasies of the private sector in general—as always already compromised by some essential evil of capitalism, i follow hirokazu miyazaki (2013) and others in suggesting that to take the economy seriously in part means to take seriously people’s fantasies about it. the seduction of the private sector was a common trope with which to narrate what was and was not possible in equatorial guinea. take feliciano, another recently returned equatoguinean man working for a software company with a contract to digitize the social security system. he noted with some pride that, in his estimation, this work challenged ethnic and other local divisions, implying that those divisions were exacerbated by the handwritten, inconsistent record-keeping practices that his company sought to put in the past. he told me that his project would bring real change “if we don’t get kicked out first.” i smiled and said that i, too, was hoping not to get kicked out, to which he replied, “oh, but we’re not an ngo. we’re a business, in it to make money.” the difference, he explained, was in the politics: ngos represent political interests, and are thus more likely to be kicked out. profit, on the other hand, is apolitical. while feliciano knew that i was a researcher affiliated with a foreign university, unattached to any ngo, my lack of any profit motive placed me on the political side of a line. it was only profit that offered safe haven in a place where getting kicked out was a real historical and contemporary possibility. from the orange summer concert series to feliciano’s conviction that the profit motive sheltered his company’s presence and potential to foment social change, the feeling that the private sector was variously unencumbered and full of potential was pervasive. and yet, it is precisely because private profit is almost entirely of a piece with public power in equatorial guinea that it seems to operate so freely. in other words, while the national economy undeniably opened up contingent and unstable spaces of expression, dissent, or opportunity for private gain, it was fundamentally a state-sanctioned and state-building project. as one private development worker put it, “if you come with the right partners,” you can pretty much do what you want, gesturing to the need to collaborate with a local liaison, or socio, in all business ventures. decree 137, which mandated that all businesses be at least 35 percent locally owned, made the role of socio a common one for equatoguinean state personnel or high-powered individuals, put on retainer to serve as government liaison. foreign companies licitly paid a socio to protect their interests, move their ideas and needs ahead, and get their paperwork through. thus, while feliciano was excited that his company pushed against localisms of various kinds, the company also used those very localisms (referred to as enchufes or “plugs” into the system) to ensure success. the idealized private sector that beckoned with boundless future utopias of fishing and tourism, and that lured those of us living in malabo’s boom times out into summer evenings for corporate-sponsored concerts, is unmistakably entangled in the knot of equatorial guinea’s state apparatus and u.s. oil firms, a knot made licit by the seriality of the national-economy form. conclusion on the closing day of the 2007 conference, participants were noticeably tired. people straggled into the conference hall late; there were fewer animated discussions in the hallways. after evenings spent discussing the event over dinners with equatoguinean friends, our conversations, too, had grown tired, moving from early laughter at the impracticable goals toward the torpor of long days and wasted time. i sat and sat with other audience members that final morning, waiting for the president to appear, slowly sinking down in our chairs, wrinkling our clothing, and trying to hush our growling stomachs. i wrote in my notebook: the future is exhausting. finally, the voice of the president’s announcer roused us from our slumps, and the president’s moroccan security guards strode in before him. the audience clapped in rhythm, and obiang joined in as he walked to his seat at the head table. then, for a moment, it was as if the impossible future gave way and the dystopia of the present slipped in. in front of the president and others seated at that front table, government presenters elaborated with a bluntness that surprised me the serious and obvious problems the country would have to overcome to achieve its goals. again, i transcribe in translation from multiple presenters: we are essentially without all basic social services. there is little to no running water, none of it potable. electricity is sporadic in the cities, and not distributed throughout the territory. the health sector is essentially nonexistent for the majority of the country’s residents, and the education sector is little better. there is no transparent access to credit for businesses, and no regularized process according to which one might start a business. there is a total lack of legal instruments or regulation in any and all sectors. there are serious problems with private property and contract law. in fact, there is no state contract law. in equatorial guinea, we see that the economy with the most investment in the world operates without contract law; that the resource curse—used to serially diagnose the maladies of resource-rich states—often finds little empirical traction; that something newly legible and publicized as a national economy can come into being, as if new, in the wake of a commodity boom; and that this object opens up unpredictable political spaces in which power can both consolidate and be newly vulnerable. all of this tells us that when we assume to know what a national economy is and what it does, we do so at our peril. ethnography can help us trace the sites, practices, people, documents, daydreams, and institutions that continuously remake the national economy as a serial global form. the historical particularity of equatorial guinea at the turn of the millennium allows the national economy to pop into a certain kind of visibility. there is a temptation, therefore, to think about equatorial guinea as exceptional, to think about local histories of information and statistics, for instance, as incomparable. and of course, equatorial guinea is exceptional in some ways. if we are willing to think a little more broadly, it is tempting to think of data and statistics in africa or the wider developing world as exceptionally thin or untrustworthy. but when recent studies in france and the united kingdom claim that “only one-third of citizens trust official figures” (stiglitz, sen, and fitoussi 2010, 10), we see that we have a broader question on our hands. the affect-laden spaces of as-if—misrepresentation, simplification, forgetting, longing, outrage—where world and representation are pulled apart make room to ask about local and transnational histories of power and ownership, as alberto did. the as-ifs disrupt the representational singularity of a given economy, the farce that we all have a common relationship to it, a shared interest in how it fares (see rae and drury 1993). similarly, while the equatoguinean government may be exceptionally coterminous with the private sector, we see that across member countries of the organization for economic cooperation and development total government output accounts for nearly half of gdp (stiglitz, sen, and fitoussi 2010), destabilizing an approach to national economies that metonymically privileges markets, or the so-called private sector. when we think about national economies, we are always already thinking about the state, even as our desires, fantasies, and critiques may take us elsewhere, as they did on the orange summer stage or with feliciano’s software company. our theoretical approaches should acknowledge not only private-sector desires, but also their empirical inadequacies and political collusions. in its bluntest representation, an economy at a given scale is a statistical aggregate, one widely acknowledged as distressingly approximate and incomplete at best. but of course, at the same time, the economy is arguably the most powerful singularity of our contemporary world. anthropology has the capacious and creative empirical task not of putting questions about history, colonialism, fantasy, epistemology, information, and the state back in (as if the economy was, in fact, disembedded from them), but of showing them to be always already constitutive of this thing called the economy, especially at the scale of the nation, though certainly not only there. once we develop the methodological tools to understand how national economies are fabricated and to what effects, new theoretical terrain opens up. for instance, the idea of a national economy is clearly specious, and yet it is one of the structural effects that maintain the power of the nation-state. given the ways that national economies were compelling to newly sovereign states in the postcolonial moment, a wealth of historical and archival projects remains to be done.7 how might those projects decenter the western, keynesian history i narrated above? or, given the privileged position of national economies in development thinking, what might an ethnographic account of economic growth—most often calculated nationally—look like? more work on national economies could help us think through the intersection of growth imperatives with the imperatives of the anthropocene. the particular violence of the national economy form in the global south, and the enrolling of economic theories like the resource curse in that violence, entreats ethnographic attention. independence-era senegalese political leaders mamadou dia and leopold senghor were prescient in their concerns that, even as they fought for political independence from france, relational inequality between colonizers and soon-to-be nation-states would not be undone by “nominal independence” (cooper 2015, 68; see also pierre 2012; ralph 2015) in a world they insisted was increasingly interdependent. the sequelae of their concerns live on, thrumming in those moments when world and representation are not one, when development plans and economic theory occlude transnational corporate power, when performativity is not so complete that the model becomes the world. these are the spaces of political possibility within the foreclosures of modern politics. to find them is to participate in the classic ethnographic project of making the familiar strange: “given the centrality of the economy to modernist social representations . . . it is necessary to defamiliarize the economy as feminists have denaturalized the body, as one step toward generating alternative social conceptions and allowing new political subjectivities to be born” (gibson-graham 1996, 97). notes acknowledgments thanks very much to the editorial team at cultural anthropology and to the anonymous reviewers for bearing with this article and transforming it for the better. i also thank hilary chart and james ferguson for early, helpful comments. i benefited greatly from presentations of this material at brown university, harvard university, the university of chicago, the university of california, irvine, and the university of california, los angeles. over the course of those presentations gregory mortenson, soo-young kim, william mazzarella, sean mallin, taylor nelms, lieba faier, and adam moore all gave invaluable feedback that they should recognize in these pages. taylor nelms, in particular, held my intellectual hand through many rounds of revision. i extend particular thanks to the organizers of the “historicizing the economy” conference at harvard, dan hirschman, adam leeds, and onur ozgode, and also to alden young, whose work has been an inspiration for many years. research in equatorial guinea was funded by the national science foundation, the social science research council, and fulbright-hays. final and enduring thanks to friends and interlocutors in equatorial guinea. por una guinea verdaderamente mejor. por una industria mejor. 1. most investment is calculated on the basis of total government and private-sector investment, as a percentage of the gdp. in equatorial guinea, this is oil money pouring in. “fastest growing” is calculated by gdp growth, which was 24.7 percent in south sudan, the world’s newest country. i thank james ferguson for initially drawing my attention to the imf list. 2. thanks to william mazzarella for the original formulation of national economies as not only intelligible, but also compelling. 3. these include projects on markets (callon 1998; çalişkan and callon 2009, çalişkan 2010; elyachar 2005; riles 2011; tsing 2015); financial institutions and actors (ho 2009; miyazaki 2013); corporations and firms (yanagisako 2002; welker 2014; kirsch 2014; golub 2014); money, monetary regimes, and central banking (maurer 2011, 2012; peebles 2011; holmes 2014); and the expertise—performative and otherwise—of economics and economists (callon 2007; fourcade 2010; mackenzie 2008). 4. on the unpredictability of economic performativity, see also butler 2010, bear et al. 2015, and narotzky and besnier 2014. 5. fernandino (named after fernando po, the colonial name for bioko island) generally refers to two colonial-era groups in equatorial guinea. it includes the children of spanish fathers and bubi mothers who, by virtue of their mixed-race parentage, were considered emancipados (emancipated) under colonial hierarchies and were thus entitled to own land and exercise other privileges not accorded other equatoguineans. the term also refers to the descendants of english-speaking freed slaves who returned from the united states to sierra leone and liberia, and were later forced to migrate to equatorial guinea as laborers. arriving with substantial formal education compared to the local population and also considered emancipados, this group of people intermarried and worked closely with the british, who had a colonial presence on fernando po for roughly fifty years starting in 1826. eventually, these fernandinos became large 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2015, rami was a recent university graduate in finance working in a bank in damascus. while a student, he had received an exemption from military service. but his student days now lay behind him, the war was on, and he was due to report for service in september. he did not have the money to re-enroll and continue in school for his master’s degree. news about the possibility of getting a visa to qatar came from neighbors. “i had to accept,” he explained: i couldn’t wait. i had to leave. when i was a student, i worked in a restaurant one or two days a week—just to pay for things. but not even in my worst dreams did i imagine myself ever working in a restaurant [after finishing school]. i studied for years, i was one of the best in my class. and now, i’m not even a captain waiter. i’m a shisha boy.1 rami’s escape from military duty in wartime syria to doha, qatar, where he worked at a high-end “oriental” restaurant involved the exchange of one form of service for another. his telling of this exchange offered the understanding that his labor migration was a move imposed by the war, a development that entailed not only a fall in status but also an upending of who he had been and who he had imagined he would become. rami’s blunt and plaintive “i’m a shisha boy” was one of the many moments in my conversations with syrian men living and working in doha that cut through the ways we commonly think about the long war in syria. the syrian war is an ongoing conflict fought between the syrian regime, the regime’s domestic and foreign supporters, and the many domestic and foreign forces that oppose it. it developed, in 2011, from discontent with the regime’s violent suppression of civil uprisings that formed part of the broader arab spring protests. much of our understanding of the war’s impact focuses on the experiences of syrians displaced by violence and the untold forms of suffering they have endured both before and since leaving their country for highly precarious lives and futures in places within and far beyond the region (see, e.g., maadad and rodwell 2016; baban, ilcan, and rygiel 2017; naguib 2017; pearlman 2017). the group of men i interviewed in doha in 2017–2018 differ from this population. they are not refugees and do not identify as displaced. they carry syrian passports, make periodic visits to syria to see their families, and plan to return to their home country in the future. yet the war has not only compelled their labor migration or prolonged it but centrally organizes their lives and movements. in this essay i therefore provide a different and critical perspective on the conflict by examining how the war’s reach can be located as well amid the losses, interruptions, and experiences of those syrians who have until now largely escaped its incredible violence. by looking closely at how the war has altered the life trajectories of and produced distinct modes of vulnerability for military-age men, i develop an argument about how, although they avoid fighting by going to work in qatar, the lives of a group of syrian men remain defined by conscription. through my investigation of how these men are located in a landscape of conscription that extends beyond the borders of syria and into their lives as workers in qatar, i build on anthropological knowledge of how masculinity is shaped by and through contexts of political destabilization (pankhurst 2008; hafez 2012; aciksoz 2017). i demonstrate how the syrian conflict has both altered and upheld the relationship between men and the nation-state. in fulfilling their masculine role as providers for and protectors of their families, military-age men have avoided becoming soldiers and embarked on new migration itineraries. yet these migrations, which enable men to buy themselves out of their state-prescribed military duty as male citizens, have also led to circumscribed lives in the highly policed labor system of the arab gulf. in examining how forced conscription has come to define the lives of a group of syrian men, i join other scholars (allsopp 2017; turner 2017, 2019; suerbaum 2018a, 2018b) committed to developing a gendered and intersectional approach to the study of the syrian conflict that investigates the complexities of masculine identity and ascription for both those who have stayed and those who have left. i contribute to understandings of the socially transformative conditions of war (lubkemann 2008) by tracing, across two authoritarian regimes, the trajectories of migration and manhood (ghannam 2013) undertaken by a group of syrian men during a time of conflict. rather than tracing war’s destruction, i offer insights into its stages of remaking by showing how these men navigate a wartime landscape to establish livelihoods that enable them to prepare and plan for the near and farther-out future. in baathist syria, citizenship has been measured, as rahaf aldoughli (2018) writes, “by men’s readiness to die for the nation and a commitment to a masculinist conception of national membership based on militarism and chivalry.” a certain kind of patriarchal bargain (kandiyoti 1988), not unlike the one sherine hafez (2012) describes being struck by both women and men in mubarak-era egypt, has characterized the nation-building and citizen-making processes of the republic of syria since it emerged as an independent state following the second world war. in this bargain, the authoritative and patriarchal father, personified by the former and current presidents (hafez al-assad and bashar al-assad, a father-and-son pair that have ruled since 1971), offers protection for the syrian people as the country has been at war with one or more foreign enemies since the establishment of israel in 1948. until a more recent neoliberal turn (wedeen 2013), a range of welfare-state provisions included subsidies on commodities such as bread, rice, and sugar, as well as diesel and chemical fertilizer, on which especially rural syrians depended (de châtel 2014). in return, the regime demands the loyalty and public support of all citizens, whose efforts are in fact necessary to maintain this safety and security; citizens, for example, are expected to surveil one another and inform the authorities of acts of disloyalty, and men of military age are dutifully to report for mandatory military service. however, as suggested by the number of men who have avoided military service, with estimates at tens of thousands between 2011 and 2016 (khaddour 2016)—including those who become refugees, hide out within syria’s borders (al-jablawi 2019) or, like those i discuss in this essay, find jobs outside of syria to work toward a payment that exempts them from duty—the current war has unsettled some of the terms of this patriarchal bargain. naturally, given the risk of death, being a soldier during wartime appears generally undesirable. but the civil dimensions of the syrian conflict make for an important reason that so many syrians would want to avoid becoming a soldier for the assad regime, as this has meant not only fighting foreign enemies but also killing, brutalizing, and destroying the homes of syrians. being a regime soldier, in short, has meant having to wage war against syrian children, women, and men. whether or not a man politically supports the regime, awareness of this fact has served as a strong deterrent to doing what has been framed as one’s duty as a male citizen-soldier. but men risk conscription not only by the state. as men, they have been defined throughout the war as potential combatants both by the regime/its supporters and by the myriad armed groups that have comprised its opponents (davis, taylor, and murphy 2014). quite simply, if you are not on one side, you have been construed as a member of an enemy side. fear of conscription by one or another faction has therefore become a way of life for military-age men, always already imagined as soldiers. for the men whose stories i explore here, this situation has created certain vulnerabilities and disrupted their “masculine trajectories” (ghannam 2013)—the process of becoming a man across the life course—as working in qatar has meant deferring future plans to labor to pay off the state for freedom and access to home. i begin the essay by discussing the broader context of migrant labor in qatar and how it connects with the politics of positionality that shaped the situated terms of my own research with syrian men living and working in doha. based on their experiences, i then examine how the persistent possibility of wartime conscription in syria shapes the lives of syrian men working overseas. next, i show how, in avoiding becoming soldiers, these men in fact become enlisted in another form of service in which their lives are not really their own. i argue that, to provide for their families, these men cast off the patriarchal bargain of old that demanded the fulfillment of one’s duty as a citizen-soldier and enter into a new bargain with the state that requires their conscription in the global capitalist labor force. the patriarchal bargain is not displaced so much as its terms are altered as it extends out into a transnational capitalist landscape. these men offer a “different kind of war story” (nordstrom 1997), one that centers not on the violence of war but on the gendered vulnerabilities of wartime existence and the life projects it shapes in relation to the negotiation of masculinities. work and research in qatar qatar is a small, wealthy, oil-producing persian gulf nation enormously rich in natural gas reserves, with a population of nearly three million, more than 80 percent of whom are (primarily male) foreign resident workers from across the globe (khatri 2017). in the midst of the country’s regional and global rise—from its expanding role in the region’s geopolitics and pursuit of a higher global profile in the realms of architecture, tourism, and international sporting—the population has increased by 40 percent since 2010, and the vast majority of people live in and around the capital city of doha (al-monitor 2017). although qatar is the gulf cooperation council (gcc) country with the highest number of non-nationals,2 estimates from the european university institute’s gulf research centre website demonstrate the unique “migrant-majority” demographics of many other gulf societies as well.3 given this fact, anthropological investigations undertaken in gcc countries have largely focused on non-national residents. two groups have served as the primary locus of inquiry: asian and african workers at the bottom of the labor hierarchy employed in the construction, transportation, domestic, cleaning, and sex-work trades (e.g., nagy 1998; gardner 2010; mahdavi 2011; gardner et al. 2013; ahmad 2017; gardner 2018), and much higher-status expatriate members of the business and professional communities (e.g., vora 2013, 2018). while these studies have enabled us to see how non-nationals such as members of the south asian diaspora cut across these two tiers (leonard 2003), less attention has been given to laborers working in front-of-house jobs in hospitality, security, retail, and daycare. a crucial dimension to understanding life for the foreign workers in gcc countries is the kefala, or sponsorship, system that undergirds the labor structure and produces “hierarchized differences between citizens and noncitizens particularly by ensuring the impermanence of the region’s noncitizens” (ahmad 2017, 31). with limited paths to naturalization, this system treats all foreigners as “impossible citizens” (vora 2013), constituted as contracted, temporary resident-workers requiring an in-country sponsor. sponsors hold substantial control over workers as the latter require their employers’ approval, for example, to change jobs and, until 2018, to exit the country. yet the sponsorship system is not one size fits all, and higher professional status, as i learned through my own experience as a visiting scholar at a university in qatar, translates into more autonomy. since 2010, after winning the bid to host the 2022 world cup, qatar’s labor laws and conditions, particularly those that concern the highly disenfranchised workers building the transportation and stadium infrastructure, have come under intensified scrutiny by human rights organizations, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and academics. as a result, the government has introduced some reforms (qatar government communication office on labour reform), and in 2017, the international labour organization (ilo) opened an office in doha and entered into a three-year “technical cooperation programme to carry out extensive labour reforms focusing on wage levels and payment, reform of the sponsorship system, and the promotion of workers’ voice [sic]” (ilo n.d.). the lives of syrian men in qatar can reveal something of the heterogeneity of the sponsorship system and the inadequacy of describing it solely through the migration experiences of the “quintessential low-paid construction worker in the gulf” (vora and koch 2015, 545). low-paid male workers in the construction and cleaning industries generally live in crowded if not substandard housing conditions in labor camps on the peripheries of cities (babar and gardner 2016), are often recruited and exploited by so-called middleman brokers and agencies in their home countries (jureidini 2014), and regularly find employment with agencies who then subcontract their labor to employers for various periods of time (gardner 2018). by contrast, the syrian men i met lived in modest but adequate employer-provided two-bedroom apartments—two or three per bedroom—in buildings in central doha. they ranged in age between twenty-eight and forty-five and mostly held jobs in the food service/hospitality industry across two different, multibranch restaurant chains. they obtained their jobs through personal networks and, as arabic speakers working in service, some even in high-end restaurants that attracted mainly non-qatari arab customers alongside qatari ones, they were engaged in labor much more visible and integrated into the everyday fabric of doha society. at the same time, like most of the country’s lower-level migrant workers, they were subject to the labor structure’s restrictions—which make it difficult to change jobs, for example—and to many of its hardships, such as residence-workplace transportation arrangements that could add one to two hours, often on an un-air-conditioned bus or van, onto a ten-to-twelve-hour workday. migration flows into the gcc countries are “carefully engineered” through state ministries’ policies (jamal 2015). this engineering has formal and documented dimensions, such as the (pre-arrival) criminal background check and the (in-country) medical test required for all resident workers, as well as more informal undocumented features, like the curtailing of labor migration of certain communities because of their perceived political associations, and the “fitting” of certain nationals with certain types of work (nagy 1998, 92). for example, african men are funneled into security jobs, filipina women into daycare, south asian men become drivers. syrians, like other arabs, work in a wide range of service and professional-sector jobs and share linguistic—and to some extent, cultural and religious—ties with their gulf arab hosts. in responding to the out-migration flows of syrians over the past eight years, many gulf states claim that, although they offer no system of asylum for syrians, they have relaxed their entry and residency laws to allow sizeable numbers (temporarily) to migrate (de bel-air 2015). the syrian men i spoke with saw things differently, citing, for instance, the impossibility of bringing their wives and children to doha, because “they stopped giving family visas when the war began,” as one put it. i found in my conversations with syrians in qatar that they do not feel that they have held any special status as syrians in their migration trajectory. recent studies corroborate this perspective, finding that the gulf countries have not been particularly receptive toward syrian refugees (valenta and jakobsen 2016, 646) and that most migrants from syria arrived before the war began (valenta and jakobsen 2017, 45). in fact, because qatar and other gcc states have been allied together against the assad regime and served as frontline actors during the war working to dismantle it (lynch 2018), syrians find themselves in a precarious position among the arab worker populations: those who express support for or are suspected of supporting the assad regime are constituted as a security threat. the vulnerabilities faced by syrian and other foreign laborers raise important ethical concerns about conducting ethnographic research with migrant communities in the gulf region. while the situation is of course relative to the status and social capital of the person in question, formalized conversations between workers and researchers or journalists can put workers at risk of repercussions, from disciplining by their employer to loss of employment followed by deportation, and even to arrest. in this setting, my own positionality helps explain how, as a researcher from the united states, i was able to gain access to a group of syrian migrant laborers in qatar and learn about their experiences of labor and migration during the syrian war. my scholarly interests in forced conscription during the war in syria intersect with my personal life. i am married to a syrian man, a naturalized u.s. citizen who emigrated in 2006 and has returned to syria twice during wartime following the (not war-related) deaths of two close family members. the threat of conscription hung less over his 2012 visit, in the early days of the war, than it did over a visit in 2016, but, in short, i—through and for him, his brother, his relatives, and neighbors—have faced this fear. although syrian law recognizes dual citizenship, “if a person’s original citizenship is syrian, then he is fully liable to the syrian laws” (syrian embassy in australia n.d.). thus, although he is a u.s. citizen, my husband always has to show his syrian national identity card when he enters syria, and as a syrian male registered in the state system, he remains eligible for conscription. the essentialism of his identity as a syrian male citizen, in that it overrides his u.s. passport, has been reinforced at other border entries in the arab world: in lebanon (where it makes geopolitical sense due to the syrian conflict’s entanglement in matters of lebanese society and state), but also in morocco, where in early 2018 a member of the casablanca airport security forces nearly prevented us from boarding our flight because my husband did not display his syrian national identity card along with his u.s. passport. my analysis in this essay draws on interviews conducted in 2017–2018 in a mix of english and arabic with twelve syrian men living and working in doha.4 the first men i sat down to speak with formally were two of my husband’s distant relatives. although, as i describe below, they had no interest in participating in my research themselves, they were willing to put me in contact with their coworkers. in a move that secured my respectability in a patriarchal field (cf. abu-lughod 1988), while also offering assurance when sharing personal details with a stranger, i was introduced and accompanied by my husband in several of the initial meetings. from these encounters, i would ask for referrals to others who might want to share their stories with me. to address the question of how my positioning shaped my ethnographic knowledge, i would note first that i held various identities. during some conversations, i felt that i was understood as a partial insider. being from the united states meant i was surely an outsider for the men i spoke with and, for some, as i discuss later, this proved a problem. but i was also the wife of a syrian man whose family lives in syria. this fact communicated to my interlocutors that i knew something about what the war means for syrians and, quite simply, that i cared. when we hosted men in our apartment for meals, as a middle-aged wife and mother i easily took on the gendered role of attentive listener and hospitable homemaker. in the public, more neutral settings where i met a couple of men on my own while they were on breaks from work, i presented a more professional identity. this duality generated forms of both distance and closeness that characterized the social dynamics of the conversations on which my analysis is based. however, as todne thomas (2016) reminds us, the ethnographic relationship does not comprise just one person. rather, this relationship is forged through a process of what she calls “negotiated recognition,” whereby research participants, too, structure their encounters with the anthropologist/researcher (thomas 2016, 81). readings of solidarity made by participants can create ties of affinity with the researcher. and likewise, readings of difference, though often unspoken, may be projected onto the relationship between researcher and researched and, i found, can sometimes break it off. sitting down in our apartment’s living room to speak formally about the impact of the war with two brothers, my husband’s second cousins (mentioned above) with whom i had spent time casually on numerous occasions, i found their response stony. “let me tell you about how the u.s. has fueled the war; you don’t know about this, do you?” the older of the two started out in anger when i asked my first question. this set the tone, and the younger brother, generally a more laid-back personality, followed his lead. while in our interactions until then i had held the position of distant affine, the way they spoke to me in the frame of the interview foregrounded my identity as a u.s. citizen who implicitly supports—and at the same time remains ignorant of or indifferent to the effects of—u.s. foreign policy and its operations in syria. the moment evoked both carolyn nordstrom’s (1997, 5) argument about the fiction of the concept of local wars and the imperial character of western research (thomas 2016). these men, and perhaps others with whom i spoke, saw the war that has destroyed their country as one in which the world, the united states, and even i were implicated. it was a moment that gave lie to my so-called insiderness and showed how political and historical realities configure the positioned nature of our identities and the nature of anthropological productions themselves (narayan 1993). all but one of the men i spoke with hail from the majority-druze suweida province whose leaders have had a variable relationship with the assad regime since the start of the conflict—even openly advising its men to evade conscription at one point (naylor 2015).5 this region has remained under regime control, at least nominally, throughout the war, and its population is often perceived as having a pro-regime stance. early on while living in qatar, i learned about a syrian man living in doha who had posted pro-assad comments on his facebook page. when someone read this and reported him to the police, the man lost his job and was deported. to try and allay the men’s vulnerability vis-à-vis the u.s., qatari, and syrian security state apparatuses, i trod carefully in my conversations and did not seek to elicit their political opinions. moreover, in my analysis, i have sought to avoid framings of “for” or “against” the regime. no necessary correspondence (hall 1985) exists between (inherited) sectarian identity and political position. indeed, what the stories of these men from the majority-druze region bring to a broader understanding of the syrian conflict is the complexity of syrians’ relationships to the regime. amid this complexity we discover a much-needed shading of the war that calls into question its simplistic sectarian narratives (phillips 2016, 48). important to my analysis is the fact that conscription cuts across sectarian and political identities and raises issues of masculinity, vulnerability, fear, and other personal issues that become more significant than abstract affiliations when people face the pragmatic dangers of war. having described the labor context and the politics of positionality that shaped my research questions and methods, i turn now to consider how the syrian conscription regime participates in the making of men. conscription in assad-era syria, compulsory military service has proven foundational to the profoundly gendered construction of the syrian “military-nation” (altinay 2004) and a “totalizing project by which boys are made into men and citizen-soldiers forged out of the male masses” (gill 1997, 533). before the current civil war, most syrian men did not view military service as a contentious issue; it was simply what every man did (davis 2016, 51). in the stories told by my husband, his relatives, and our friends, in the prewar period, military service constituted a rite of passage into syrian citizenship-manhood in ways that go beyond the cultivation of a militarized masculinity through soldierly exercises. for instance, for most syrian men going to the army meant engaging in new modes of self-care, looking after their clothes’ washing or their meals for the first and perhaps only—if a man returns to his natal home or heads into marriage following military service—time in their lives. as lesley gill (1997) and andrew canessa (2012) have written about indigenous bolivians, it is also through military service that the national community itself is reimagined as men from around the country are drawn together and meet their co-nationalists with different accents who hail from diverse sectarian and ethnic backgrounds. some syrians learn about their kurdish or druze fellow citizens for the first time during their military service. having had their civilian national identity cards confiscated at the start of their service and replaced with military ones, conscripts focus their talk on tasreeh (time of discharge). it was at the moment of their demobilization that conscripts would both get their lives back, signified by the return of their civilian identities, and also begin their lives in the sense of planning for marriage and securing a livelihood. before the war, a formalized system of exemptions spared many from military service. being the only son in a family qualified one for an exemption, as did certain medical issues. syrians living outside the country could pay a fee in lieu of their service at costs that have varied in the past decade from between us$500 and us$15,000. in the early 2000s, in a move aimed to reduce barriers to syrian expatriates and their descendants from visiting syria, the costs of exemption began to be determined according to a complex matrix of factors having to do with where a man was born, at what age he left syria, for how long he had resided abroad, and where he lived outside syria (immigration and refugee board of canada 2014). university students received automatic postponements that could be extended after graduation depending on their employment status or if they were working abroad. informal pay-for-release arrangements between the high status and well-connected and high-ranking military officials could also reduce a man’s length of service, soften its experience, or even dismiss the service requirement altogether. a syrian man in his late forties whom i met recently in the united states related one example of this. being druze, as he told it, he was not as fortunate as many well-connected alawite (the minority sect of the ruling party in syria since 1971) men who never serve at all, but his father paid the general in charge of his assigned division to allow him to do a six-month period of boot-camp training and then serve out his remaining time living at home working in a nearby civil service office. the first decade of bashar al-assad’s presidency also brought with it significant reductions in the length of required military service: from thirty months to twenty-four months in 2005, to twenty-one months in 2008, and to eighteen months in 2011 (khaddour 2016). the war has changed all of this. hamid, a twenty-eight-year old restaurant employee from lattakia, came to qatar in 2008. he filed the document (sanat iqama) with the government, indicating that he could not complete his military service owing to his working abroad. at that time, the fee for permanent release from service, to be paid within a five-year timeframe, was us$5,000. (i hear it is now us$8,000 for those living abroad no less than four years).6 he returned home for his first visit in july–august 2011, but, because he has not paid the fee, he cannot return again without facing immediate conscription. in describing his 2011 visit, he provided a snapshot of the early days of a war that began as a civil uprising brutally repressed by the regime: i went home and it was ramadan, and at the beginning it was in deraa, and we weren’t thinking that it was coming to other parts of the country. but while i was home there were protests near my building, outside of a mosque. we would watch from our apartment. and then one time it was broken up, there were plainclothes policemen, they had gone into the crowds, they were shooting up in the air, and everyone went running scared. police began to do house-to-house searches looking for those involved or suspected of involvement with the protest movements. hamid’s mother kept asking him to leave the country earlier than he had planned. fear concerning the gravity of events—and, for his mother, the particular vulnerability of young men to arrest, torture, and disappearance—quickly set in. “she would hide my shoes,” hamid told me. “if i went out and came home, i would not see my shoes by the door.” with this action, a quiet domestic moment inlaid with terror, his mother hoped to conceal his presence from the police. even before the intensification of the conflict, then, before life for syrians was torn asunder by the violent and politically fragmented landscape of myriad armed groups, tremendous fear ruled the everyday (pearlman 2016). in my conversations with syrian men working in doha, i found that state conscription practices proved central to the workings of this fear. throughout the war, the regime has had to rely on a dwindling number of soldiers. tallies of civilian deaths due to the conflict vary significantly, but the united nations estimates that more than four hundred thousand have been killed (specia 2018). although it is well known that the syrian forces have faced heavy losses in the more than eight years of fighting, no figures are available for the number of syrian soldier deaths. media and policy reports are rife with accounts of men who have fled the country to evade conscription and soldiers who have defected from the army doing the same (koehler, ohl, and albrecht 2016), suggesting a reduction of the prewar numbers of the syrian army by as much as half (khlebnikov 2018). other men of military age have stayed in syria but moved to areas outside of government control to avoid conscription. others who live in areas even nominally controlled by the regime have been immobilized. my brother-in-law, for example, restricted his movements to just within his village limits until he reached the age of forty-three (the target age for conscripts is eighteen to forty-two) to avoid major roads with government security checkpoints. the old rules regarding service exemptions no longer apply. in recent years, as reported by the immigration and refugee board of canada (2017), the government has continually changed its policies regarding conscription, reserve duty, and postponements. the regime’s desperation for soldiers, with the war now in its ninth year, has meant the conscription of some members of the population who used to be exempt, such as university students, a family’s only son, and men over the age of forty-two. amer, a thirty-year-old restaurant worker, related to me how before the war students could postpone military service, but now, if you are the eldest son, for example, and you are enrolled at a university and you have younger brothers, when the next brother reaches the age of eighteen, the government will conscript the oldest brother—regardless of whether or not he has finished his studies—and allow the next-oldest brother to “take his place as a university student.” in short, a family is allowed only one son of military age to postpone conscription due to his status as a university student. “is this a straightforward matter of needing more soldiers?” i asked amer. “well, yes, of course,” he explained, “but it’s also to keep families from taking advantage of the system . . . everyone will want to put all their sons into university to keep them from going to the army.” the war has also changed the length of military service from a fixed number of months to a period that could have no definite end. soldiers serving since 2010, known as dowra 102 (recruitment class 102), have been the subject of much discussion among syrians. the reality that one would have to go and fight for years and years, perhaps indefinitely, two men told me during one conversation, has served as further motivation to evade conscription through labor migration or other means. at the end of may 2018, the dowra 102 were finally deactivated and allowed to return home.7 while officially the definition of military age remains eighteen to forty-two, there have been reports of men as old as fifty directed to register for reserve duty and boys under the age of eighteen conscripted (danish immigration service 2015; unhcr 2017). several presidential decrees offering amnesty for defectors have been issued since the war began, declaring that those who have evaded conscription and fled to locations both within and outside the country will only be required to complete their military service but not face punishment (see, e.g., al-khalidi 2015). people do not rely on such decrees and announcements, walid, a civil service employee, told me. he had moved to work in doha after his salary no longer provided an adequate livelihood because of wartime inflation (abdulrahim 2017). “there are rules that can be in place or there is a policy issued about something, but you can’t be sure that that’s what will actually happen.” in fact, i was told that although the news media report policy changes concerning military service, people hear about them, as they do about other aspects of the war, through facebook or word of mouth (dagher 2018).8 significant insecurity exists, then, even for those men who might technically be exempt from service. hamid related one such story that concerned someone from a village near his. he told me of a man who had been regularly filing the yearly document (sanat iqama) that designated his status as a worker abroad and was paying off the military-exemption fee within a five-year period. this man suffered an accident while working in the uae. thinking he was safe from conscription and unable to work, he returned home—only to be seized at the airport in damascus because his exemption document had not yet received official approval. he was later killed fighting. “you see,” hamid explained, “you can send your paperwork back to syria for approval, but you cannot be sure how long that will take, so even if you are set up in the system to pay off your service because you are working outside syria, if your paperwork has not been approved, they can still take you.” to avoid this stress and uncertainty, some workers in doha bear significant costs to travel to oman—the nearest accessible syrian embassy since the one in qatar closed in 2011—to file their documents and wait until they are approved. but few can afford to do this because of travel costs and the time off from work it requires. as hamid put it, “you might go to oman and wait for weeks for the approval; there is no way you can know how long it will take.” checkpoints, where forced recruitment even for protected populations has been known to take place, are feared. basel, who worked in lebanon before coming to qatar in 2010, was the first to describe to me the udrub fiche—the computerized registry that holds information about one’s military status. “i visited syria without worrying for a couple of years, during the first years of the war, because i had done my military service in the late 1990s, but then they were running out of manpower, so when i went back in 2016, it was a different story.” at one checkpoint on the way to his hometown, basel handed over his id to a soldier. the soldier returned and said his name was flagged, that at age forty-one, he was still within the age limits. basel paid a bribe—he remembered paying about us$10 or us$20—to be let through, and he did the same on his way out of syria, heading to lebanon for his flight. but on the return trip he paid off the solider straightaway before even handing him his id, just in case someone at the checkpoint was in possession of the computerized database. the violent threat of wartime conscription and its bureaucratic order materialize in the state space of the checkpoint and its instrument, the fiche. to come and go during the war entails confrontation with this threat. but the regime of forced conscription during the long war in syria has gone beyond the bounds of the nation. the risk of conscription has become not just a cause for leaving syria but an ongoing threat exerted across a global landscape. and, while facing this risk, many men labor in the arab gulf, trading military service for another form of enlistment. masculine trajectories in a 2018 propaganda video, “braids of fire” (rt news arabic 2018), aimed at the young men of syria, asma assad, the wife of the syrian president, speaks to a group of female army volunteers in a disparaging tone about the “so-called men” who have fled and hid to escape their soldierly duty. “you are the ones on the front lines,” she says to the women, you are “tougher [islab, literally, more steel-like] than they are.” in her denigration of the man who does not fight, assad invokes the “logic of militarism and masculine protection” central to the construction of syrian national identity (aldoughli 2018), but she also misses the point made by the men i spoke with in doha: that only by not being soldiers and leaving syria for lives as laborers in the gulf can they fulfill the role of masculine protector of their own families. unlike the palestinian men in the israeli army whom rhoda ann kanaaneh (2008, 83–84) describes as receiving regular paychecks and myriad public and educational benefits that help make them providers for their families, the syrian wartime soldier, even if he is not injured or killed, cannot support his. with monthly compensation of about us$50 per month (westall and al-khalidi 2015), conscription means an inability to provide. all the men i spoke with regularly send remittances to syria, generally via cash-transfer offices in lebanon, where money can be picked up by a friend or relative and given to a cross-border taxi driver charged with its delivery. but the amount of money that goes home is reduced because of the need to save for the payment of the exemption fees. as amer described, “i paid the us$8,000 already, i borrowed from people, so now i’m working to pay this off. i think about it, about how much this is, i mean . . . i could have bought a house in my village for this amount.” the exemption-fee structure that has allowed men to avoid military service during wartime is experienced as a form of extortion. and while payment of the fees ensures access to syria, to home and family, the siphoning of earnings means the deferral of certain life-course transitions. the costs of marriage and setting up a home, for instance, are instead paid out to the state. for basel, who is in his early forties, the decision to stay and work as a waiter in doha is marked by the delay of the experience of fatherhood. it is during his time in qatar, after working in both damascus and lebanon as a chef, that both of his sons have been born. “honestly, for me, i feel like with this money i send home to them [to my wife and young sons], i am just replacing myself. but my children need their father.” with this notion of replacing himself through remittances that both stand in for and also create emotional and material connectedness with his family (ghannam 1998), basel spoke to the different ways in which the exemption fees constitute badal (substitutes), as they are referred to in arabic: instead of getting a soldier to fight its war, the state receives money; instead of a father facing the mortal risk of fighting a war, his children have an absent one. with women remaining at home to do physical care work on the home front for children, younger siblings, and aging parents (coe 2016), the men i met clearly provided care through remittances, but also other forms of nurturing. rami, for example, says that through both texts and especially recorded voice messages on whatsapp, his family consults him on every decision, that they “keep him connected” (ghannam 1998) and that he not only has to “pay for them,” he has to “think for them.” men with younger brothers spoke of how the threat of conscription raises the stakes of their roles as (male) protectors by sending money for tuition fees to delay their military service. mazen related how two of his brothers working in doha avoided going back to syria by finding their way to panama and later ecuador, where they could enter with still-valid qatari residence permits. but once in ecuador, the brothers kept requesting that he send money to help them set up a restaurant. “they are safe, they’re not in syria, but now i’m trapped here working”—even after paying off his own conscription—“so that i can keep sending them money. i keep saying that i’ll finish my time here soon, i keep setting deadlines. we all do this, we say ‘oh, when my trip home comes next year, then i’m not coming back.’ but we don’t know when we’ll get out.” economic migration has long been a feature of syrian society, but the out-migration induced by the war no longer represents or constitutes, as it had, a pathway for upward mobility. several of the men i spoke with, including rami, with whose words i began this article, have college educations in fields like art, engineering, and banking. prior to the war, they might have come to the gulf to work in the fields in which they were trained. but lack of diplomatic relations between the syrian regime and the gulf states—the syrian opposition opened its own embassy in qatar in 2013—has made it increasingly difficult to obtain work and family visas. many of the men i spoke to work for one of the numerous holdings of a syrian billionaire who has, because of his clout, continued to hire syrians throughout the war. thus the aspirations that transnational migration often allows for, that it involves an eventual move up that helps one build a better future for oneself and one’s kin, have been upset by the war. other men never imagined migrating for work. though now laboring abroad as a bank employee, walid had not considered leaving during the early years of the war. in syria, he was a civil service employee working as an accountant with a stable salary, state-provided benefits (such as no-interest loans for new appliances), and long-term job security. but wartime inflation began to push prices so high, even for basic goods, that he found it impossible to provide for his family. “this banana,” he gestured to the fruit assembled on the table in front of us, “you would not believe it . . . a banana became this very special luxury, i would bring one home to my children perhaps once a week.” the war has upset other life-course trajectories as well. mazen, a forty-five-year old, had worked for the same doha restaurant for eleven years when he and his brother were summarily fired for budgetary reasons in early 2018. in 2010 he had returned to syria to get married. after a subsequent visit in 2012, when he paid a bribe after his name was found in the registry of those due for military service, he felt the risk of returning was too great and remained in doha. his wife gave him an ultimatum at one point because she was so frustrated by trying to build a marriage without him present; they divorced in 2015. two years later, his ailing father passed away. his younger brother, who had paid off his military exemption, returned for the burial, but mazen still felt he could not take the risk. he missed saying goodbye to his father. youssef, a restaurant worker who has not yet paid the us$8,000 exemption fee and has not returned to syria for seven years, has given up on the idea that he will marry a syrian woman. “how will i meet her and get to know her?” he asked rhetorically. “my brother in saudi, he can’t return either, so he became engaged by skype. our mom had them meet, they courted by skype . . . and then she came to saudi for umrah [the “minor” pilgrimage to mecca, which a muslim can perform anytime of the year] and they got married. my mom came too, and i was able to meet them there.” but qatar is not like saudi, he explained; it is not feasible to imagine a syrian woman getting a family visa to come and live with him. the challenge of imagining a life deferred—of getting married to and having a family with a syrian woman—became too much: i have a girlfriend now from indonesia, we met online, we have been together for a couple of years. i hope that we will get married. my parents don’t approve, but i have to live! life here is so hard, it’s only work. . . . after so many years, i needed to get a car, a girlfriend, you have to feel like you are living. like you have something. for the syrian men i met, the war shaped masculine trajectories in various ways. while the role of financial provider can largely be fulfilled through transnational labor migration, the insecurities of war have unsettled the path to realizing other socially recognized masculine roles and norms. in her research with syrian men living as refugees in egypt, magdalena suerbaum (2017) found that in displacement, the transition into adulthood for young men proved incomplete and partial, and that the challenges of achieving the middle-class norms of syrian male respectability, having to do not just with providing but also with consuming (suerbaum 2018b, 680), have disrupted both their passages into manhood and their own notions of masculinity. similarly, for syrian men avoiding conscription in doha, displacement from home has created empty spaces in their life trajectories, ones marked by non-participation in rituals of marriage, fatherhood, and death. weary from imagining a life deferred, youssef has begun to fill in these spaces and cultivate a life in which, to use his words, he has something. while a sacrificial economy (weiss 2014) surely characterizes the regime of conscription for syrian soldiers on the front lines of the conflict who risk their lives for the state, a different sort of sacrifice defines the experience of avoiding the war through the payment of exemption fees. the risks of fighting are substituted for a life put on a long pause with no clear or self-selected end. this is a life of work with little autonomy and plans for a future that feels at once overdue but always postponed. these are, of course, the life conditions of the majority of qatar’s migrant laborers in the kefala system. but syrians labor not only under the threat of losing their jobs and of not being able to earn to provide but also with the threat of being sent back to wartime syria. this is a specific vulnerability shared by military-age syrian men across the warscape, as suerbaum (2018a, 369) also relates about the fears of syrian refugees in egypt. mazen, for instance, told me of how he and a coworker approached the restaurant management to request a reduction in the number of employees per room in their employer-provided housing: “we weren’t just told ‘no’; we were told, ‘go back to syria if you don’t like it.’ they know we are all afraid of going back, that we have to stay outside syria. they use this.” the threat of conscription organizes life for military-age syrian men at home, and also for those away. the syrian state, in this way, extends out beyond the boundaries of the nation. mazen, after telling his story about talking to his boss, continued, “you want to know what the war means for us? that’s what you said you wanted to hear about, right? we curse that we are syrian. that’s all we can do.” concluding thoughts hassan al-kontar, a syrian man in his late thirties, lived in the kuala lumpur airport for more than seven months. deported from the uae, where he had lived illegally since 2011 when his work visa expired to avoid returning to syria, where he faced immediate conscription, he made the malaysian airport his refuge after being turned away from a flight to ecuador, where he had hoped to gain entry. from the plight of al-kontar, widely covered in western news media and through social media campaigns, and his plaintive assertion that the war in syria is “not my war” (ahmed 2018), emerged a lesser-known narrative of the syrian conflict and of the social impact of war more broadly: the gendered experiences of military-age men. during the syrian conflict, the performance of manhood has been both dislocated (cornwall and lindisfarne 2016) by, for example, the avoidance of military duty and refugee status under humanitarian care (turner 2019) and, at the same time, sustained through the labor migrations that enable men to maintain their role as providers. in my analysis of the lives and experiences of a group of syrian men in qatar, i have shown how conscription in syria operates as a form of debt exchange. through the years-long payment of exorbitant exemption fees that diminish remittances sent to families but should allow access to home, these migrant laborers avoid military service but remain indentured to the state. moreover, while the rites of male adulthood are delayed, or displaced to younger brothers, and absence from kin is endured, they lead half-lived lives as contract laborers with little autonomy in the gulf’s kefala system, with the constant threat of being returned to syria hanging over their heads. in this wartime economy of sacrifice, one form of conscription comes to be exchanged for another. across two authoritarian regimes during the syrian conflict, we see how the state’s patriarchal bargain is not destabilized but instead reframed. the extraction of the military labor on which the terms of syrian male citizenship are founded is converted into u.s. dollars earned by joining the global capitalist workforce. unchanged in this reframing is the insistence that men provide for and protect their families. as a consequence of how the male body is constituted as physical capital that must remain subordinate to both patriarchal and capitalistic demands (ghannam 2013, 170), men’s breadwinner status in the syrian context, and more broadly throughout the region, produces a new set of gendered vulnerabilities. in times of conflict and instability, these demands send men out and away from their families and communities, but also dislocate them from the life course itself. in fulfilling their end of the bargain through political obedience and economic production, they miss out on a particular stage of manhood and the aspirations, projects, and affective promises it holds. abstract in this essay, i provide a different perspective on the syrian conflict by examining how the war’s reach can also be located amid the losses, interruptions, and experiences of those syrians who have until now largely escaped its incredible violence. by looking closely at how the war has altered the life trajectories of and produced distinct modes of vulnerability for military-age men, i develop an argument about how, although they avoid fighting by going to work in qatar, the lives of a group of syrian men remain defined by conscription. through my investigation of how these men are located in a landscape of conscription that extends beyond the borders of syria, i build on anthropological knowledge of how masculinity is shaped by and through contexts of political destabilization. i demonstrate how, in fulfilling their end of the patriarchal bargain through political obedience and economic production, these men lose a particular stage of manhood and the aspirations, projects, and affective promises it holds. [masculinity; conscription; war; labor; migration; syria] ملخص في هذا المقال, أنا أقدم وجهة نظر مختلفة حول الصراع السوري من خلال دارسة واقع الحرب وسط الخسائر, و الانقطاع, و تجارب السورين الذين نجو من العنف, من خلال النظر عن كثب في كيفية الحرب التي غيرت مسارات الحياة التي انتجت انمطاطا مختلفة من الظعف بل النسبة للعسكرين. أنا اطور نقاش حول هولاء الشباب الذين تجنوبو القتال في سوريا من خلال الذهاب الى قطر. حياة هؤلاء الرجال الذين من خلال تحقيقي في مشهد التجنيد الاجباري الذي يمتد الى ماوراء حدود سوريا الى حياتهم كعمال في قطر. أنا أعتمدت على المعرافة الانثروبولوجية حول كيفية تشكيل الرجولة من خلال زعزعة الاستقرار السياسي. أنا أشرح كيف الوفاء من ناحيتهم يتمركز من خلال الطاعة السياسية و الانتاج الاقتصادي. أما الرجولة بشكل خاص تبقى تطلعاتها و مشاريعها و وعودها العاطفية بعيدة الانظار في ظل استمرار الازمة السورية. [رجولة; الخدمةالإلزامية; حرب; عمل; هجرة; سوريا] notes acknowledgments i am indebted to the men in doha who gave of their time and shared their stories. the ideas presented here were enriched by feedback from sami hermez, giulia el dardiry, wendy pearlman, and other participants in the september 2018 “(in)security in everyday life” workshop in beirut supported by the arab council for social sciences and the wenner-gren foundation. earlier versions of this essay benefited tremendously from the suggestions made by my colleagues erin koch, sarah lyon, and karen rignall, as well as the careful and generous reading of three anonymous reviewers. the editors of cultural anthropology, especially heather paxson, provided valuable guidance and sharp insights. 1. this is a lowly service position at restaurants involving the setup of water tobacco pipes and continuous checking to ensure that the hot coals that fuel them are refreshed. 2. the gcc is a political and economic coalition of six gulf countries—saudi arabia, kuwait, the united arab emirates, qatar, bahrain, and oman. the coalition has been strained recently by rising political tensions between qatar and saudi arabia, which resulted in an air, sea, and land embargo of qatar, led by saudi arabia, and the severing of diplomatic relations between qatar and several gcc countries. the rift began in june 2017 and is ongoing at the time of this writing. 3. see, for example, gulf labour markets and migration (glmm) programme (2017). 4. i use a simplified system for transliterating arabic, omitting all indication of long versus short vowels, as well as any distinctions between hard and soft letters. i trust that specialist readers will be able to use the context to follow my transliteration. 5. massacres and the kidnapping of women from druze villages by isis-affiliated militias in july 2018 renewed this friction (maksad 2018). 6. the workers i spoke with earned between us$750 and us$2,000 per month. 7. views differ about the 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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-military/syria-to-hike-pay-of-frontline-soldiers-with-bonus-pm-iduskbn0oo1ir20150608. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 264-289, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.08 toward adversary anthropologies toward adversary anthropologies, or, how to build your own revolutionary infrastructure marcel laflamme university of washington http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7489-4233 dominic boyer rice university http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-406x some three decades ago now, ulf hannerz (1987) wrote an appreciation of what he called “anthropology’s other press”: periodical publications that were neither flagship journals like american anthropologist nor devoted to a specific subfield, but that were sustained by an essentially local scholarly community. hannerz (1987, 214) recounts one characterization of these journals as “the samizdat of anthropology,” noting that they often appear at somewhat irregular intervals, for which their editors make apologies; they tend to be mimeographed or produced by some other less prestigious technique, although some are quite elegantly printed; and many are short-lived, while those which are less ephemeral may have changed name and design at least once. despite these putative faults, hannerz treats this “other” press as worthy of careful consideration. he argues that its function is, in part, that of training professionals to eventually engage in weightier publishing endeavors. yet he goes on to complicate this teleological narrative, noting that these journals can also serve as a space for play: “the style can be more daring, or more familiar in tone; you may use sources of an unconventional sort; you may play on a wider range of the collective consciousness; you may allow yourself to speculate more freely” (hannerz 1987, 218). at their most ambitious, he suggests, such publications might give rise to “adversary anthropologies” (hannerz 1987, 218) that challenge the doxa of the day and torque the discipline in new directions. the same year that hannerz published this article, graduate students at syracuse university founded new horizons in adult education, arguably the first scientific journal to be published in electronic form (see hugo and newell 1991). as this new mode of publishing gained momentum, researchers began to argue that low-cost online distribution could radically expand access to the scholarly record. yet the open-access movement has never really caught fire in anthropology beyond a fervent corps of true believers. why, we wonder, might that be so? people, of course, are busy, and the intricacies of different publishing models are enough to deter anyone save the most bloody-minded. beyond that, though, we speculate that, for many, open access seems to be a technical problem rather than a basis for political mobilization. from the perspective of those thirsting for radical change in the academy and beyond, there is surely something a bit precious about the open-access movement’s preoccupation with how articles get downloaded. so, for those of us who do see a more broadly revolutionary potential in open-access initiatives, it’s up to us to make the case for how it could be unlocked. as the fiery reckonings of #hautalk have insisted (e.g., mahi tahi 2018; todd 2018; west 2018), the open-access movement in anthropology needs to open itself more fully to decolonizing, antiracist, and feminist currents within the discipline. we are writing in this spirit, in the hope that open access can serve as an accelerant for more radical kinds of social change (and in recognition of all that open-access advocates can learn from those who are already bringing such change about). thus, rather than foregrounding liberal formulations of freedom and property on which discussions of open access so often rely, we propose to approach open access as a kind of “revolutionary infrastructure” (boyer 2017) that redirects energies presently locked into the status quo toward fissures of breakthrough and transformation. proof of this potential already abounds. new, hybrid publications like limn are expanding the circulation of anthropological insight, while organizations with established journals are turning to diy forms like the zine (see tanis 2017). scholarly blogs like allegra lab, anthrodendum, footnotes, and somatosphere have meanwhile lapped journals as the liveliest nodes of disciplinary debate, publishing vital scholarship but also constituting publics whose participants can find allies for bold political programs. we believe that anthropology needs more of these projects, which regard open access as the default but nurture activist commitments that extend far beyond it. such projects can use next-generation technologies to nurture the localism that makes them unique, while allowing a wider audience to listen in and learn. by reinventing anthropology’s “other” press for our digital era, we can rebuild anthropological communication from the ground up. there is some irony, of course, in issuing this call in the pages of one of the discipline’s most prominent journals. but it was not so long ago that cultural anthropology (ca) was itself an upstart, and that spirit of restlessness has been carried forward in recent years with new multimedia capabilities and short-form genres. still, ca remains enmeshed in a journal system that has come under criticism for its sluggishness, elitism, and opacity, even as scholars have revealed that system to be more historically contingent than we might think (csiszar 2018). thus, our aim here is not to fetishize the journal form or to insist on its reproduction. rather, we want to emphasize that the real promise of open access is its ability to amplify conversations that have not yet found recognition in mainstream channels and to thereby catalyze material transformations of a deeply unequal world. if you are not seeing your interests, ethics, and politics represented in the leading journals of your discipline, then perhaps it is time to advance your own adversary anthropologies. here are some ideas for how to go about it. pathways to scholar-led publishing in the first of a series of blog posts on starting an open-access journal, martin eve (2012) argues that “what takes the time, energy, and willpower is to get the social, rather than technical aspects sorted.” we largely agree. initiating a new publishing project is, in the first instance, about recruiting a motivated, dependable, diverse group of co-conspirators. it also entails a substantive discussion about the project’s goals: what need will it meet, who will its audience be, and what will make it different from other projects with a similar focus? what values will guide the project, both in terms of its intellectual output and its day-to-day operations? decisions about which tools to use, what form of governance to adopt, and so on should be made in the context of active, spirited debate about what those values require. of course, the technical aspects of a publishing project also demand attention, although our sense is that too often those aspects are what scare scholars off from launching a new project at all. exhaustive lists of the things that legacy publishers do (e.g., anderson 2018) can intimidate scholars into thinking that turning a project over to the pros is the only viable option. but we propose an alternative or adversary reading of such lists, as blueprints that can be reverse-engineered to keep scholars at the center of their publishing endeavors. this is not to discount the expertise that publishing professionals undeniably have. but it is to challenge their monopoly over the means of production in light of new digital tools paired with an ongoing commitment to learning and collaboration (see adema and moore 2018). path one: starting a journal the model of journal publishing with which most of us are familiar involves soliciting manuscripts that are reviewed on an exclusive and anonymous basis by a small number of reviewers selected by the journal’s editors. upon their eventual acceptance, these manuscripts are placed into a production process that might include copyediting and typesetting before being published in their finished form. many open-access journals operate in just this way; what differentiates them from subscription journals is the fact that the published articles are freely available to read and, in many cases, to reuse in derivative works like translations. figure 1. excerpt from “how to start an open-access journal,” a poster by the hybrid publishing lab at leuphana university of lünenburg. see the complete poster at http://hybridpublishing.org/2014/07/infographic-how-to-start-an-open-access-journal for a detailed walk-through of starting an open-access journal. image licensed under cc by. as figure 1 shows, starting a new journal on this model means identifying people to serve in various editorial roles and mapping out how they will work together. it usually also means selecting a piece of software known as a journal management system and deciding who will be responsible for it. open journal systems (ojs), first released in 2001, is one of the most widely used journal management systems for open-access journals; as of this writing, ca uses ojs to manage submissions and reviews, and in 2019 the journal will begin using a much-improved new version of ojs as its primary publication platform. a journal that wants to use ojs has a few options, depending on available resources. for $850 per year, the public knowledge project’s publishing services division will host an instance of ojs and take care of any necessary upgrades and backups. if your team has some technical expertise, you can host your own instance on a local server: a less expensive and fully customizable option, but one that leaves you responsible for ongoing support. perhaps the best option, from our point of view, is to partner with a library publisher; you can find an annually updated directory at https://librarypublishing.org/resources. most library publishers provide free hosting for journals with some connection to their institution, and many provide other services too. even if you aren’t at an institution with a library publishing program, don’t write this sector off: a growing number of library publishers will work with external partners, although they may charge a fee to recover some of their costs. to be clear: ojs is not the only journal management system out there (see michael 2018 for a recent review). open-access journals like tipiti and teaching and learning anthropology are built on top of digital repositories maintained by libraries. companies like scholastica emphasize turnkey simplicity through a software-as-a-service model. and new platforms continue to be developed, including janeway (which powers the open library of humanities) and vega (which has a particular focus on multimedia content and interactivity). many of these platforms have both hosted and self-hosting options, allowing users to decide on the tradeoff between providing their own infrastructural labor or paying a modest sum for someone else’s. timothy elfenbein (2014, 295) cautions that, too often, open-access advocates focus on the accessibility of published content and gloss over other priorities like discoverability and persistence. for this reason, if starting a journal is your aim, we do not recommend simply throwing up a website using an off-the-shelf platform like wordpress. such a site will not be well-integrated into research infrastructures like google scholar, meaning that the research you publish runs the risk of getting overlooked by scholars outside your core network. here, again, working with a library publisher can save you time and money; knowledgeable library staff can handle tasks like reaching out to indexers, who will place your journal in specialized scholarly databases, and registering digital object identifiers (dois), which will direct future readers to your content even if the journal is eventually hosted somewhere else. path two: beyond the journal today, a growing chorus of disruptors has the journal form in their sights. they express frustration with the time it takes for an article to make its way from submission to publication, and with a peer review process that can be marred by error and bias. they question the hoarding of prestige by a small number of influential publications, and the use of that prestige (or its quantitative analogues) as a proxy for merit in high-stakes decisions about tenure and promotion. they also note the vulnerability of the existing system to capture by publishers, who can charge libraries whatever they want because researchers insist on access to particular titles for which no substitute will do. for these reasons and more, there is new enthusiasm in some quarters for steering scholarly communication beyond the journal system, while aiming to ensure that the functions journals presently serve will continue to be carried out. in this postjournal world, the standalone article “ricochets around a rich ecosystem of modular services, acquiring new metadata, comments, stamps, links, citations, annotations, and edits as it goes” (priem and hemminger 2012). without endorsing the platform-capitalist vision of a publishing marketplace that many of these disruptors espouse, new open-access projects can further their revolutionary aims by exploring alternatives to the model of the journal described in the previous section. you might decide that the ease of setting up a blog-style forum is worth the tradeoffs in terms of discoverability and persistence; social media can help to close the gap on the former score, while web archiving initiatives like webrecorder are making strides toward the preservation of dynamic content. you might participate in one of the experiments that are underway around peer review (see tennant et al. 2017), many of which invite reviewers to provide feedback on a manuscript after it is already online for the world to see. you might go on to curate a selection of these writings into an overlay journal—a cohesive playlist of sorts—without laying exclusive claim to them. (check out a platform called pubpub if this model appeals to you.) innovations like these challenge our received notions of what a publication looks like, but they speed up the dissemination of new ideas and they show the community-based work of thought being refined—pushing back against the sometimes alienating polish of the finished product. indeed, it is fair to say that contemporary challenges to the journal system are motivated, in part, by a desire to make the process of knowledge production more visible and more collaborative. in the hard sciences, the push for open data has been driven by norms of reproducibility that anthropologists do not necessarily share. but tools like the open science framework could be used in a more critical, interpretive vein to work through research data marked by varying degrees of rawness. as philip mirowski (2018, 190) reminds us, such data is not “inherently fungible,” which is why other projects like mukurtu and the platform for experimental and collaborative ethnography are working to ensure that context does not drop out as data travels. we believe that designing a publishing project around tools like these could invite new forms of intimacy with the research worlds that each of us inhabit and establish a norm of getting our research materials off of our hard drives and back into the hands of the communities to whom they ultimately belong. conclusion we want to close with a few friendly recommendations for senior scholars who are willing to become allies in the production of adversary anthropologies. first of all: don’t stay on the sidelines. your participation can be extraordinarily valuable in the process of establishing and gaining traction for new publishing projects. while the hau scandal showed how a lack of transparency and robust oversight can lead to abuse, one more positive lesson that might be salvaged from the project is that a group of established scholars were able to help boost the reputation of a publication led by a graduate student such that it became one of our discipline’s most influential journals in just a few years’ time. your involvement matters, and yet we hasten to add a second point: this isn’t about you. senior scholars are more likely to be welcomed as partners in the fashioning of revolutionary infrastructures if they do not assume that they should be in charge and do not use new open-access projects as vehicles for their own intellectual agendas. we believe that senior scholars can accelerate a bottom-up revolution in anthropological publishing—if they are willing to commit themselves to a future-tilted, intergenerational ethics of collaboration. in other words, if you’re fortunate enough to be a tenured faculty member in the brave new world of the twenty-first-century academy, congratulations are in order: you’ve made it! there is no need to anxiously tend to your achievements or legacy. rather than striving to continue accumulating academic capital, why not invest time in sending the elevator back down? or, better yet, in helping to build more elevators. our third call to action is especially aimed at faculty serving on hiring, evaluation, and tenure committees: help to loosen the grip of the so-called top journals (and yes, that includes this one). the legitimizing power of these journals, most of which are published in english and based in the global north, is sustained by myriad everyday acts of evaluation at institutions around the world (e.g., lee and lee 2013). wherever you can, move away from expecting publications in one of three or four legacy titles as the ticket to a job offer or promotion. instead, help to build recognition of the no less excellent work being published in new open-access ventures, especially if they are published in languages other than english and/or based in the global south (see piron et al. 2016 for one inspiring example). be willing to serve on their editorial boards if you are invited to join them, offer your time and networks for peer review, and cite their output in your own publications. put your labor into opening horizons rather than gatekeeping privilege. finally, and this is a more radical proposal, consider taking steps to starve the system. the journal system as we know it depends on voluntary labors of writing, reviewing, and editing. by the time one has reached tenure or equivalent status, those labors truly are chosen, rather than required. it’s important, therefore, for senior scholars to be strategic about where they spend their energies. what if anthropologists in secure, tenured jobs were to take a #starvethesystem pledge, publicly stating that they would no longer write, review, or edit for paywalled journals in the hands of predatory commercial publishers like elsevier and wiley? such a pledge, if widely adopted by senior scholars, would hollow out the legitimacy of the existing journal system and create an environment ripe for experimentation and renewal. it would also compel scholarly societies like the american anthropological association to reconsider their reliance on corporate royalties and to become actively engaged in the work of forging open futures. there is, in short, a role for each of us in the making of adversary anthropologies. let’s get busy! acknowledgments thanks to tim elfenbein, nick estes, and ryan jobson for their valuable comments on this editorial. references adema, janneke, and samuel a. moore 2018 “collectivity and collaboration: imagining new forms of communality to create resilience in scholar-led publishing.” insights 31. https://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.399. anderson, kent 2018 “focusing on value—102 things journal publishers do (2018 update).” scholarly kitchen, february 6. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/02/06/focusing-value-102-things-journal-publishers-2018-update. boyer, dominic 2017 “revolutionary infrastructure.” in infrastructures and social complexity: a companion, edited by penny harvey, casper bruun jensen, and 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september 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1525-from-reciprocity-to-relationality-anthropological-possibilities. nostalgic nationalism nostalgic nationalism: how a discourse of sacrificial reproduction helped fuel brexit britain sarah franklin university of cambridge https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4623-6962 two years ago my partner and i moved to a small rural english village in south cambridgeshire, close to the suffolk border. the parish, which dates back to the tenth century, occupies a thin stretch of land along a tributary of the river stour. it is surrounded by some of the most productive agricultural land in europe, farmed since neolithic times. paths dating back to 3000 bc cross the village green, bordered by the tiny local post office and shop, a disused phone booth, the local reading room, and a bus shelter. during the second world war, the village was used as a bomber airfield, and the legacy of the war remains a prominent feature of daily village life. the crumbling remains of air-raid shelters built between 1943 and 1945 dot the local woods, and the local war memorial is signposted from all the nearby main roads. figure 1. the decaying foundations of air raid shelters remain a common sight in woods near the village, which was used as a bomber base during world war ii. photo by sarah franklin. the main sign for the village is dominated by an image of a heavy bomber from world war ii, and this military theme is accentuated by the low-flying military aircraft that regularly pass over the village en route from nearby royal air force bases. also nearby is the historic airfield at duxfield, which stages regular air shows featuring fly-pasts of iconic world war ii aircraft such as spitfires, hurricanes, and lancasters. these vintage planes so regularly fly over our village that most of my neighbors know them individually by name. figure 2. the village sign features a mill, a farmer plowing a field, and a popular game bird (the ring-necked pheasant) beneath a dramatic image of a lancaster bomber flying overhead. photo by sarah franklin. the soundscape of air traffic intermingles with the hum and roar of agricultural machinery in this intensively farmed region. the parade of industrial equipment past our house sets an annual rhythm: the frantic clattering of gigantic hayracks in august is succeeded by the race to plow the fields and sow the winter crop throughout september and october. during the winter, as new green shoots of wheat, flax, barley, and sugar beet push steadily upward, the watercourses are dredged and hedgerows cut back. winter also brings the shooting season, punctuated by the local hunts that feature charging brigades of horses surrounded by packs of braying hounds. we know spring is here when farmers spray rank-smelling fertilizer onto their crops and the ropes of bird-scaring firecrackers are lit, setting off regular, loud explosions beside the early crops to drive away voracious flocks of pigeons. summer marks a time of long, quiet days, as the crops shoot up in the hot sun, at first bright green, then a deep golden yellow by july’s end. the agricultural cycle grinds back into gear in august when the noisy harvest season returns. figure 3. the fields of wheat planted in november have turned bright green in early summer, but by july they are golden ripe and ready for harvest. photo by sarah franklin. it was a wet and windy day in june of 2016. i stopped for a chat with two of my oldest neighbors while walking my dog. they were discussing the strange weather we had been having and how unpredictable it had become. this, of course, constitutes a quintessential form of british conversation: everybody talks—and generally complains—about the weather. yet as with the tea that everyone still drinks here all the time, the minor variations—in how you take your cuppa or do weather talk—are all the more important because they form languages of individual and national belonging. weather talk, in short, never just concerns the weather. my neighbor william, who is in his eighties and has worked in the village as an agricultural laborer nearly all his life, is a font of weather lore. he is a living repository of extreme seasonality metrics, and can tell you in which year exactly the frost came earliest, latest, or most frequently, as well as which crops it affected most and how many died. much of his advice comes in the form of extreme warnings—such as his annual caution not to plant the tomatoes until at least mid-may, since he has known the last frost to come as late as that in some years. but even william has found the weather ever more disorienting of late, as he was telling his friend george, another of the village’s oldest residents, on that windy june day in the run-up to the brexit vote. “i don’t know, i just don’t know,” william said shaking his head. “i just don’t know what to make of the weather anymore. in all my life i’ve never known it quite like this.” a man of even fewer words than william, george nodded his head sagely and stared at the ground. since it is precisely the unpredictability of the weather that marks one of the most common themes in the quotidian ritual of british weather talk, it took me a while to realize that the weather had taken on a new symbolic role in william and george’s conversation as a synecdoche for a wider sense of bewilderment that left them not only confused, but embittered. it wasn’t just the weather that was bothering them. just below the surface of their bonding over something profound that had been lost and a sense of being lost themselves, i could feel something else. occasionally breaking through the calm surface of their slow and measured conversation, i noticed, were the bright glints of a steely anger underneath. it was the tone more than the content of their exchange that unmistakably implied that something had not only been lost, but had been taken away. in that moment i realized that some of my oldest and wisest neighbors might well vote for brexit because of the weather. not because of the weather per se, in any simple sense, of course. but there is no such thing as a simple sense of the weather in england anyway. and there was no simple cause of brexit either. the only simple thing about brexit was the tragically brutal binarism of the mechanism that brought it about: a yes-or-no referendum. figure 4. the referendum on membership in the european union offered only two options: to remain or to leave. photo by sarah franklin. the vote that delivered a slim majority in favor of leave reflected widespread feelings of loss, anger, confusion, bewilderment, and disorientation. brexit was carried on such a great tide of lost-ness, it even encompassed the famously unpredictable british weather. the result has been the painful fracturing of a contested, but workable consensus about the benefits of belonging to an ever more diverse and inclusive global community. brexit marked a rejection of this postwar consensus and a return to a different interpretation of the war as a marker of british distinctiveness and isolation. like the concrete bunkers looming in the local woods and the familiar drone of propeller-driven bombers overhead, the old narrative that emphasizes britain’s singular triumph in the second world war has become the new face of brexit britain. having turned its back on europe, its largest trading partner, britain is now facing inward—and nowhere better illustrates its newly solipsistic definition of itself than its age-old village rituals. at the summer village fetes near us, for example, a staple menu of elements attracts hundreds of visitors to the local fairgrounds. these typically include displays of vintage cars and old farming machinery sponsored by local businesses, a fairground and games area for children, a refreshments tent beside a band, stalls selling cakes and jams, a dog show, a falconry exhibit, and a sheep race. figure 5. the ritual activities of the rural english country village fayre are reliably reproduced every summer, with military bands playing beside tents where tea and cakes are served. photo by sarah franklin. as laura briggs (2017) argues, we need to learn to read the reproductive grammars structuring a surge of recent populisms in which race, nation, and migration have become increasingly stark axes of social division. research following the brexit vote identified “a strong sense of national identity” as one of the most consistent attributes of leave voters, more than half of whom described themselves as “very strongly english” (goodwin and heath 2016). like all national identities, englishness is defined by its specific means of reproduction, and at the village fayre, we can practice parsing these elements as a kind of rural nationalist primer. the lessons here are those that feminist anthropologists have been teaching for years: about nature, gender, and culture; race, nation, and empire; death, sacrifice, and the social order; and the politics of genealogy. in the generic vocabulary of the village fayre, subtle but consistent hierarchies are reproduced as the order of things. the falconry show demonstrates the ability to control a powerful bird of prey while celebrating its natural wildness through the shared activity of hunting. figure 6. birds of prey trained to hunt on command express the intimate hierarchies of nature and culture, wild and domestic, and human and animal that define the english value system. these are the same values that inform longstanding institutions of aristocratic land ownership, agricultural stewardship, and the conventions of rural english village life. photo by sarah franklin. the famously wayward sheep is similarly enrolled into an elaborate masquerade of horse-racing, in a cross-species double entendre of animal amusement. figure 7. in the sheep race at the country fayre, ewes pass as race horses carrying small teddy bear jockeys. photo by sarah franklin. at the dog show the blurring of boundaries between animal and human disappears completely in the award categories of prettiest bitch and handsomest dog. figure 8. no english country fayre is complete without an elaborate slate of dog show competitions. photo by sarah franklin. through all of these fayre activities, an ordering of value is reproduced, reliably displaying the firm foundations of englishness, including a somewhat parodic image of itself. but while the cultured natures of birds, animals, and people become blurred, hybrid, and ironic, their proscribed relations are disciplined by a code as strict as any army’s. this strict code of convention and conduct hardly surprises, given the roots of many english traditions in the imperial past. reproducing a tradition of local dance troupes that has seen a revival in the twentieth century, morris dancers are a common sight at village fayres, including groups that continue to use black face paint as part of their attire, in spite of many protests against this practice. their costumes and headgear, often explicitly imitating african dress, reproduce the legacies of british colonialism while being paradoxically defended as expressions of autochthonous rural primitivism. as paul gilroy (1992, 339) has argued, the entirely nonironic use of black and commonwealth cultural markers to reproduce white english nationalism remains one of “the most volatile political forces in britain today.” figure 9. morris dancer in traditional blackface and feather headdress at the local village fayre. the extent to which blacking up is a reproduction of whiteness and white privilege becomes especially apparent in the defense of blackface as mere local history. photo by sarah franklin. the complex integration of the english national flag—the red cross of st. george against a white background—into a morris dancer’s headdress and lapel pins typifies the kinds of inward-focused mixtures that are premised on the denial of external histories. neither the complex overlaps between imperialism, orientalism, and “blacking up,” nor the objections to this practice regularly expressed by many nonwhite british citizens, are taken into account by those morris troupes who continue to insist on their right to reproduce what they refer to as local traditions. figure 10. in the popular history tent at the fayre, the lives of villagers and their ancestors are used to celebrate local connections to britain’s colonial and military pasts. photo by sarah franklin. history features differently in another tent at our local summer fayre, full of exhibits created by villagers and curated by members of the local parish church. unsurprisingly, the major activity of the local history society is the tracing of historic family lineages, often foregrounding the roles that local villagers have played in britain’s colonial and military history. in the local history tent, brochures for trips to france to visit war memorial sites confirm the extent to which national sacrifice still drums through the everyday life of the village. but if nostalgic english nationalism was always a subtext to the village fayre, the new enthusiasm for leaving europe has greatly amplified the significance of this idiom. in the wake of brexit, war commemoration has—almost inevitably—become the most prominent source of national celebration to fill the vacuum left by the idea of being either global citizens or european. the arrival of big-budget feature films such as dunkirk and darkest hour have only reinforced the surge of leave nostalgia. always a major focus of national attention, the annual ceremonies of remembrance day, somberly commemorating the war dead, are now more powerful than at any time this century. noticeably, they increasingly articulate a logic of sacrificial reproduction through which many britons are once again defining themselves and their national future. this nostalgic logic from the past has garnered new significance in the face of the enormously costly act of voting to leave the european union to take back control and save the country from ruin. indeed, the new logic of sacrificial reproduction recombines elements familiar from war narratives, of having had something taken away that should be given back. identifying this logic of sacrificial reproduction is essential, because it is not only acquisitive and retaliatory but also zero-sum: if you got something, it must have been at my expense. the connection between narratives of wartime sacrifice and resurgent white ethnic nativisms in both the united kingdom and europe is the epoxy resin cementing a recommemoration of lost british soldiers to a reforgetting of how british imperialism, orientalism, and racism set the stage for the globally catastrophic losses of the two world wars. reinforcing the exclusionary logics of what counts as national sacrifice, nostalgic white european and british nativisms are structured by logics of substitution that displace the violent legacies of enforced racial hierarchy, military subjugation, and theft of resources from colonized peoples around the globe for more than a century. figure 11. the intergenerational injustice of the world wars, in which the greatest sacrifices were made by the young, has ironically been repeated by the brexit referendum, which will burden younger—mainly remain—voters with the enormous cost imposed by their older compatriots, who were largely responsible for the leave vote. photo by william bartlett, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2136442, licensed under cc by. until these legacies are remembered—and taught in schools and universities—the threat posed by injured white nationalism will remain at red-alert levels. the elegiac paean to lost soldiers penned by laurence binyon in his 1914 poem “for the fallen,” which has become an internationally recognized call to remember the sacrifices of war, has today become an anthem to an injured british pride ubiquitously racialized. parsing this sacrificial reproductive logic will prove critical in the effort to exchange for angry bewilderment a renewed popular belief in the possibility of more inclusive unions. references briggs, laura 2017 how all politics became reproductive politics: from welfare reform to foreclosure to trump. oakland: university of california press. gilroy, paul 1992 there ain’t no black in the union jack: the cultural politics of race and nation. new york: routledge. goodwin, paul, and oliver heath 2016 “brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills, and lack of opportunities.” report, joseph rowntree foundation. https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/brexit-vote-explained-poverty-low-skills-and-lack-opportunities circling back circling back cymene howe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9361-3812 james faubion http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0847-3008 dominic boyer http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8944-406x rice university the editors’ introduction to our first issue as editors of cultural anthropology proclaimed that our mission was to create circles, not pyramids (boyer, faubion, and howe 2015). back then, donald trump was still only the stuff of reality tv and tabloid journalism. our city of houston was not yet infamous for new rainfall measurement codes on weather maps, before a slow hurricane named harvey dumped four feet of rain across too much asphalt and sprawl. but since beginning our work with the journal, we’ve also seen a great resurgence in unapologetic activism through movements like #blacklivesmatter (williams 2015), standing rock (dhillon and estes 2016), and #metoo (west 2018). this gives us hope. when we embarked on this collective trip as editors, we were looking for essays that produced the unexpected, that were timely and also untimely. in that ecumenical spirit we announced: “send us the best there is and we will publish it!” you did. and we did, with a vision of decentralizing authority and responsibility as our guide. over the last five years we have seen brilliant refractions in the work that has come across our screens. truly exciting conversations continue to bloom in cultural anthropology, from the infrastructural to the anthropocenic, from the ethics of care to the politics of movement, and from humanitarianisms to the more-than-human, to name a few. the many scholars whose manuscripts we read taught us an immense amount about the current direction of a field that continues to grow and overflow in its ambitions—reflecting an epistemic ecology that is both lush and weedy, often crowned with vivid theoretical petals but still rooted in an earthy empirical sensibility. we found the discipline less divided into insular and antagonistic camps, less fragmented than we might have predicted. anthropological thinking today, we discovered, is not preoccupied with recursion but instead fascinated with serial processes of emergence and uncertainty. these are speculative times where, with a nod to paul rabinow, an anthropology of the contemporary is reinventing itself. but this is not to the exclusion of recognizing the deeply political acts of documenting and narrating human (and other) lifeways and worlds. our field continues to hold promise and surprise and, certainly, the power to anticipate. during our tenure as editors, we were able to send out an unprecedented number of submissions for review and we depended on the recommendations of our editorial board in soliciting reviewers. that board was also constituted so as to include scholars whose specialties were not our own and whose networks had global reach. without the sage advice of the editorial board and the stellar work done by reviewers, the journal could not have been realized. the energy and commitment of our contributing editors—early-career scholars from many different institutions—buoyed our spirits always. their generosity of time and intelligence is unsurpassed, and we are pleased to have their work online, free for the entire world to use and appreciate, in sections of the cultural anthropology website such as anthropod, teaching tools, and the visual and new media review. our editorial assistant, jessica lockrem, and our managing editor, marcel laflamme, have been absolutely fabulous, perhaps even flawless—as anyone who has worked with either of them will know. thank you all. thank you for your care and labor and commitment to this collective project of journal-making. we look forward to the day when some of you become the editors of cultural anthropology. our work as anthropologists is lively and animated, full of voice and sounds and scenes and smells. to stay true to that ethnographic experience, we were glad to be able to shepherd a new feature of the journal that we call sound + vision (see boyer et al. 2016). we launched sound + vision with three stunning, multimediated essays/soundscapes/encounters: “gravity’s reverb” (helmreich 2016), “the infinite rounds of the stubborn” (thorkelson 2016), and “the golden snail opera” (tsai et al. 2016). a handful of other contributions have appeared since then, and we expect this new modality of exposition—the first of its kind in an anthropology journal—to burgeon in the years to come. sound + vision is, we think, a glimpse into the future of anthropological communication, and one that is good to teach with as well. on the textual side, we were able to inaugurate openings and retrospectives, a section of the journal that bundles three to five conceptually driven essays to focus on a particular thematic. this was meant to reconfigure the special issue form and to encourage shorter pieces with theoretical heft. retrospectives have provided commentary on debates in the field including sovereignty (kauanui 2017), affect (white 2017), and queer anthropology (manalansan 2016), seeking to reflect on a mature set of interventions while also pitching them in new directions. openings collections, concerning phenomena like algorithms (lowrie 2018), chemo-ethnography (shapiro and kirksey 2017), and life above earth (howe 2015), among others, have been dedicated to emergent thematics: an invitation to imagine what anthropologists will be talking about next. in all of our thinking about the journal’s content, we have also been attuned to the inequalities that continue to exist in authorship and citational practices. we became keenly attentive to bibliographic gaps and we worked with authors to ensure that theoretical contributions by female scholars, scholars of color, and scholars from the global south were included in the citational repertoire of the articles we published. the politics of citation and authorship are not inconsequential to the success of careers, and we recognized that male authors (usually from the global north) often accrue more citational recognition and thus legitimacy, particularly in the domain of theory; this is what sara ahmed (2014) calls “the citational relational” (see also strong et al. n.d.). we believe there is room to grow here too. our august 2016 issue was the first in the history of cultural anthropology to be comprised of all female authors. although this is an outcome that we could have engineered, in fact we did not. the composition of the issue came together organically out of the good work that came our way. we were equally pleased to be able to publish a significant number of articles by authors based outside of the global north. the circle, unlike the pyramid, seems to lend itself to expanding without collapsing; its slopes and curves have proven a splendid shape to replicate in our work as editors. a circle is also like a wheel, something to move us forward. now, we turn the keys over to an amazing new team of editors, brad weiss, heather paxson, and christopher nelson. as you enjoy the ride, please picture us rolling. references ahmed, sara 2014 “white men.” feminist killjoys, november 4. https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men. boyer, dominic, james faubion, and cymene howe 2015 “editors’ introduction to 30.1: circles not pyramids.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 1: 1–5. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.01. boyer, dominic, james faubion, cymene howe, and marcel laflamme 2016 “sound + vision: experimenting with the anthropological research article of the future.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 459–63. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.01. dhillon, jaskiran, and nick estes, eds. 2016 “standing rock, #nodapl, and mni wiconi.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, december 22. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1010-standing-rock-nodapl-and-mni-wiconi. helmreich, stefan 2016 “gravity’s reverb: listening to space-time, or articulating the sounds of gravitational-wave detection.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 464–92. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.02. howe, cymene 2015 “life above earth: an introduction.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 2: 203–209. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.2.03. kauanui, j. kēhaulani 2017 “sovereignty: an introduction.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 3: 323–29. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.01. lowrie, ian 2018 “algorithms and automation: an introduction.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 3: 349–59. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.3.01. manalansan, martin f., iv 2016 “queer anthropology: an introduction.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 595–97. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.07. shapiro, nicholas, and eben kirksey 2017 “chemo-ethnography: an introduction.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 4: 481–93. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.01. strong, susan, catherine lutz, jessica katzenstein, and amy teller n.d. “gender and citation in cultural anthropology.” unpublished manuscript. thorkelson, eli 2016 “the infinite rounds of the stubborn: reparative futures at a french political protest.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 493–519. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.03. tsai, yen-ling, isabelle carbonell, joelle chevrier, and anna lowenhaupt tsing 2016 “golden snail opera: the more-than-human performance of friendly farming on taiwan’s lanyang plain.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 4: 520–44. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.4.04. west, paige, ed. 2018 “from reciprocity to relationality: anthropological possibilities.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, september 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1525-from-reciprocity-to-relationality-anthropological-possibilities. white, daniel 2017 “affect: an introduction.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 2: 175–80. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.01. williams, bianca c., ed. 2015 “#blacklivesmatter: anti-black racism, police violence, and resistance.” hot spots series, cultural anthropology website, june 29. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/696-blacklivesmatter-anti-black-racism-police-violence-and-resistance. trump, race, and reproduction in the afterlife of slavery trump, race, and reproduction in the afterlife of slavery dána-ain davis graduate center, city university of new york https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7305-709x i want to come at the question of reproduction in the era of donald trump via my own work on racism and reproduction. to be sure, the unjust policies inflicted by trump hold all bodies hostage. but i take a black feminist approach to explore some of the reproductive issues facing black and brown women in the united states to make the point that this moment of reproductive control has been rehearsed in earlier periods of u.s. history. i place two examples in conversation to trace racism’s imprint in the realm of reproduction. the point is to show that contemporary black and brown bodies are inextricably entangled with past articulations of white supremacy and power. these issues are complicated and require a bit of unpacking; let me begin with an event shared with me. in november 2017, i received a message from efe, who works as a doula—a term coined by margaret mead’s student dana raphael (1973) to describe those who support a birthing mother. efe forms part of a growing group of politically engaged black cisgendered, trans*, and queer birth workers currently participating in major debates around the causes of and strategies to address black women’s adverse birth outcomes. according to the march of dimes (2017), black women are 49 percent more likely to give birth prematurely, and their infants twice as likely to die than white women and their infants. efe and the nearly one dozen black birth workers with whom i examined pregnancy, prematurity, and race as part of a research project attribute these statistics to racism, defined as the “structures of power that emerge through processes of accumulation and dispossession within local and transnational processes” (mullings 2005, 668). from their perspective, the medical system treats black women as disposable and irrelevant. the irony, of course, is that black women and anti-black discourse are also fundamental to perpetuating ideologies of white supremacy—the interlocking systems of racism, patriarchy, homophobia, ultranationalism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, and religious fundamentalism that create a complex matrix of oppressions as a tenacious ideology in practice (washington 2008). efe was disturbed by an incident she encountered at a public hospital. she had arrived to train health educators about the services offered through a program at the department of health, where she was employed. she told me that when she arrived, the health educators were just completing a prenatal session with a group of black women by promoting the benefits of tubal ligation. she recalled, “all the women were just sitting there looking blank. no one was saying anything, and i thought to myself, ‘this is not normal. this should be a private conversation that they [the women] bring up.’ ” a conventional reading of this incident would say that, in keeping with the neoliberal ideological imaginary of choice and reproduction that i and others have discussed elsewhere (davis 2009; richie, davis, and traylor 2012), the women were receiving information about reproductive options. taking advantage of the group prenatal care model, which has been shown to help bring black women’s pregnancies to term (carter et al. 2016), health educators were simply imparting information. however, although birth control is not an off-limits topic, most of the group prenatal sessions i have attended focus instead on stages of pregnancy. i mentioned the incident to shakina, an african american former nurse who runs a birth center in the midwest. her response: “i smell bullshit. while a robust discussion on contraceptives is certainly appropriate, there are some methods that black women are targeted for. this is one of them.” in light of shakina’s comment, i want to offer another reading that refracts the targeted control of black women’s reproduction, a racial politics of reproduction, through the afterlife of slavery framework. the historian and literary scholar saidiya hartman (2007, 6) defines the afterlife of slavery as the circumstance of having “established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone.” consequently, “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago” (hartman 2007, 6). she goes on to say that the afterlife of slavery encompasses “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (hartman 2007, 6). i use the afterlife of slavery as a critical framework to discuss a method of reasoning and knowledge production about the medical management of black women’s reproduction. it draws on archives and documents of the past to uncover how the precarities of chattel slavery are imposed on contemporary conditions of black life. as dorothy roberts (2014) reminds us, the politics of reproduction are indeed linked to slavery. using the afterlife of slavery, we can read the incident efe described as an expression of reproductive abuse—a lingering reference to earlier moments of population control. specifically, nineteenthand twentieth-century eugenic projects viewed particular groups of people as inferior and dangerous, and they ultimately subjected to sterilization people deemed unfit because of their (dis)ability, poverty, ethnicity, or race.1 the archives offer instructive sources as i seek to unpack what is so disturbing about a discussion of tubal ligation with a group of pregnant black women attending a prenatal care session. we need only remember the relf sisters. mary alice and minnie relf, aged fourteen and twelve, respectively, were sterilized in 1973. deemed mentally disabled, they were targeted for sterilization along with a disproportionate number of african american, american indian, puerto rican, and mexican women (when compared to european american women). the abuse they endured became a rallying point for reproductive activists, and it was the relf case that brought racially targeted sterilization abuse to national attention. to shakina and efe, the discussion of tubal ligation in prenatal care evoked the relf incident as iconic of population control: an apparition of that past. a second example of how we can analyze the politics of reproduction through the afterlife of slavery framework comes from a little-discussed moment on march 29, 2011, when former u.s. senator rick santorum appeared on a new hampshire radio show called “the advocates.” although santorum’s most notable legislative accomplishment was ushering through a bill banning late-term abortions and then pushing to prohibit the use of fetal tissue for research purposes on moral grounds, this conversation underscored a financial impetus for his antiabortion position. a caller erroneously claimed that 50 million abortions occurred in the united states every year, pointing out that if half that number instead represented future workers who paid social security taxes and medicare, those two systems would be solvent. the actual number of abortions performed each year in the united states is closer to 1 million. nonetheless, santorum agreed, commenting that “the reason social security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. well, a third of all the young people in america are not in america today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion” (kiely 2011). santorum’s assessment contradicts data showing the u.s. abortion rate at 1.5 percent, meaning roughly 15 abortions per 1,000 women aged fifteen to forty-four (guttmacher institute 2018). social security, according to the urban institute (steuerle, smith, and quakenbush 2013), when considered across many decades, redistributes money from hispanics, blacks, and other people of color to whites. this is less ambiguous when examining old age and survivors’ benefits, although disability payments do restore some progressive redistribution to blacks. this happens, for example, through forced annuitization, “the requirement to claim benefits as a perpetual stream of payments after reaching the age of eligibility rather than as a lump sum” (steuerle, smith, and quakenbush 2013, 2). here, we clearly see the redistribution of capital from those with shorter lifespans—often black people—to those with longer lifespans. deploying black reproducing bodies to uphold the redistribution of money through actuarial analyses in social security resembles the racialized actuarial practices found in insurance policies during enslavement. the historian dania ramey berry (2017) argues that the value of enslaved laborers is calculable through analyses of life insurance policies. according to berry, enslavers protected their investment by purchasing policies based on an appraisal to determine the premium connected to death averages and mortality tables. yet processes of commodification capitalized black women’s preconception. indeed, reproduction was crucial to the expansion of slavery. in the database that berry compiled, we find that insurance coverage for young women from ages twelve to seventeen ranged from $1,800 to $2,600, with interest rates between 2.25 and 2.75 percent. enslavers capitalized on enslaved people’s value and factored in the time from which they were able to reproduce. the black body, berry (2017, 89) claims, was a “well-thought out” enterprise. the value of reproduction through the actuarial narratives of social security and insurance appraisals described above aligns with both abortion and antiabortion positions. according to the historian marie jenkins schwartz (2006), slaveholders generally wanted enslaved women to bring infants to term. this held especially true after congress ended the importation of slaves in 1808. the value of enslaved children led doctors to pay increased attention to preventing spontaneous and deliberate miscarriages in the slave quarters and prompted medical professionals to become “more sensitive to debates surrounding abortion” (schwartz 2006, 108). yet debates about abortion were drawn along racial lines and structured in relation to morality. black women—already degraded by race and class—were not really viewed as debasing themselves by performing abortions. that moral repugnance, schwartz argues, was reserved for white women who avoided childbirth for selfish reasons. this observation resonates, albeit imperfectly, with a point faye ginsburg (1998, 128) makes in her book contested lives, in which she describes how “many pro-life women . . . viewed liberated women as a symptom of an increasingly selfish and materialistic society.” returning to the controlling dimension of restricting abortion, the issue was that black women performing their own abortions challenged slaveholders’ authority. by regulating their own fertility, enslaved women undermined owners’ power over them and interfered with potential capital accumulation. slaveholders therefore castigated abortion when initiated by the mother, but paradoxically utilized the procedure when the life of the mother was in jeopardy, because her future fecundity that was measured against the financial gain of her having a child (schwartz 2006). the paradox of race and reproduction in the trump era is that reproductive restrictions simultaneously protect whiteness and determine power over nonwhites. as the reproductive justice activist and scholar loretta ross (2016, 53) points out, the concurrent narrowing and expansion of reproduction exemplifies how “white supremacy constructs different destinies for each ethnic population of the united states through targeted, yet diffuse policies of population control.” at the intersection of ross’s and berry’s analysis rests a complex explanation for santorum’s comment—restricting abortion access represents power over black and brown bodies and facilitates the capitalization of social security with more workers. most recently, we see the entanglement of race and reproduction in the afterlife of slavery in trump’s proposal to use an executive order to strip the children of undocumented immigrants born in the united states of their birthright citizenship. this breach resonates with the 1857 dred scott case, which held that no negro could ever be a citizen. in 1868, however, the fourteenth amendment settled the question of citizenship for black americans, affirming citizenship not as a racial matter (of “blood”), but as a matter of birth in the united states (i.e., on american “soil,” which at the time excluded indigenous americans living in tribal territories). in other words, what trump proposes to do is legitimize the excision of reproducing others by invoking anti-black racism through the reversal of the fourteenth amendment. with regard to white women’s reproduction, certain conservatives see hegemonic masculinities and femininities as under threat, while right-wing activists are upheld as saviors of the nation. although she was referring to the discourse leading up to the brexit vote, the sociologist umut erel (2018) is correct in suggesting that the analytic lens of reproduction offers a productive way of understanding the centrality of gender, race, and nation. within this discourse, the desired nation or type of nation can be achieved by controlling the (re)production of particular families. here, the politics of appropriate reproduction depends on the maternal citizenship of white women. relatedly, anxieties about the reproduction of black bodies gain purchase through discourses of white vulnerability and nation-building (belew 2018; kelly 2018). thus we see that differing destinies for controlling reproduction exist for white women. in both the united kingdom and the united states, white women are instrumental in the construction of national identities, serving as symbols of the nation and as mothers for the biological or assisted technological reproduction of the group. controlling black and brown women’s reproduction may be viewed as power plays. so, reproduction in the era of both brexit and trump is a culminating expression of xenophobia and racism. across the united states, however, individually and in partnership with community-based organizations, radical black birth workers form part of what might be seen as an abolitionist movement to end the high rates of premature birth and infant and maternal mortality among black women, a movement that also addresses issues such as access to abortion, housing, and other human rights. i use the term abolition here to signal what i see as the political alignment of those who want to decolonize birth with the critical resistance movement. critical resistance seeks to abolish not only the carceral state, but as angela davis reminded us in a lecture at the 2017 annual meeting of the national women’s studies association, all structures of oppression, including the medical-industrial complex and any complex that compromises black women or disrupts the radical possibility of living a free life. note 1. recall the statement by margaret sanger (1919, 11) that “we who advocate birth control, on the one hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health.” references belew, kathleen 2018 bring the war home: the white power movement and paramilitary america. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. berry, daina ramey 2017 the price for their pound of flesh: the value of the enslaved, from womb to grave, in the building of a nation. boston: beacon press. carter, ebony b., lorene a. temming, jennifer akin, susan fowler, george a. macones, graham a. coldtiz, and methodius g. tuuli 2016 “group prenatal care compared to traditional prenatal care: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” obstetrics and gynecology 128, no. 3: 551–61. https://doi.org/10.1097/aog.0000000000001560. davis, dána-ain 2009 “the politics of reproduction: the troubling case of nadya suleman and assisted reproductive technology.” transforming anthropology 17, no. 2: 105–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-7466.2009.01061.x. erel, umut 2018 “saving and reproducing the nation: struggles around right-wing politics of social reproduction, gender, and race in austerity europe.” women’s studiesinternational forum 68: 173–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.11.003. ginsburg, faye d. 1998 contested lives: the abortion debate in an american community. 2nd edition. berkeley: university of california press. guttmacher institute 2018 “induced abortion in the united states.” fact sheet. https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states. hartman, saidiya 2007 lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route. new york: farrar, straus, and giroux. kelly, annie 2018 “the housewives of white supremacy.” new york times, june 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/sunday/tradwives-women-alt-right.html. kiely, eugene 2011 “santorum wrong on abortion birth facts.” factcheck.org, march 31. https://www.factcheck.org/2011/03/santorum-wrong-on-abortion-birth-facts. march of dimes 2017 “u.s. preterm birth rate on the rise for second year in a row.” https://www.marchofdimes.org/news/u-s-preterm-birth-rate-on-the-rise-for-second-year-in-a-row.aspx. mullings, leith 2005 “interrogating racism: toward an antiracist anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 34: 667–93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093435. raphael, dana 1973 the tender gift: breastfeeding. new york: schocken. richie, beth e., dána-ain davis, and latosha traylor 2012 “feminist politics, racialized imagery, and social control: reproductive injustice in the age of obama.” souls 14, nos. 1–2: 54–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2012.723407. roberts, dorothy e. 2014 “race, gender, and genetic technologies: a new reproductive dystopia?” in women, science, and technology: a reader in feminist science studies, 3rd edition, edited by mary wyer, mary barbercheck, donna cookmeyer, hatice örün öztürk, and marta wayne, 318–33. new york: routledge. ross, loretta 2016 “the color of choice: white supremacy and reproductive justice.” in color of violence: the incite! anthology, edited by incite! women of color against violence, 53–65. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sanger, margaret 1919 “birth control and racial betterment.” birth control review, february: 11–12. schwartz, marie jenkins 2006 birthing a slave: motherhood and medicine in the antebellum south. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. steuerle, c. eugene, karen e. smith, and caleb quakenbush 2013 “has social security redistributed to whites from people of color?” urban institute program on retirement policy, brief, no. 38. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/has-social-security-redistributed-whites-people-color. washington, harriet a. 2008 medical apartheid: the dark history of medical experimentation on black americans from colonial times to the present. new york: penguin. what should an anthropology of algorithms do? what should an anthropology of algorithms do? nick seaver tufts university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3913-1134 programmer lore holds that software systems take the shape of the organizations that make them. first formulated as conway’s law in the late 1960s, this idea has reappeared periodically since then in various manifestos that reimagine the figure of the programmer and the work of programming. in his new hacker’s dictionary, eric s. raymond (1996, 124) put it this way: “if you have four groups working on a compiler, you’ll get a four-pass compiler.”1 social structures emboss themselves onto digital substrates; software is a kind of print left by inky institutions. today, technology companies have taken this lesson to heart: if you want to change how your software works, you need to change how the people who make it work. these companies configure their organizational charts in anticipation of software architectures to come. where old firms stamped out major releases one at a time, the new ones are self-consciously “agile,” rolling out updates continuously and constantly adjusting themselves in response to the data they now collect in ever greater quantities. software and the teams that produce it are arranged in small, semiautonomous, readily reconfigurable groups. these organizational designs often play out in open-plan offices, where desks and employees can be rearranged, aggregated, and disaggregated at will. facebook, for instance, is largely typed into existence from the world’s largest open-office workspace—a massive hangar designed by frank gehry that, when it opened, held 2,800 people (frankel 2015). that enormous room symbolizes at once a corporate commitment to openness, an antihierarchical ethos, and a recursive willingness to rewrite the organizational chart as though it were computer code (cf. kelty 2005). consequently, social architectures, software architectures, and physical architectures echo each other. walking into a tech company’s offices today, one can conjure the feeling of walking into the software itself, as though the building and the people in it—their positions, their interactions, the flow of information—were programs transcoded into social space. * * * brad worked at a table by the windows, sitting with the five other members of the radio team. together, they built playlist-generating algorithms for whisper, a music recommendation company. given a song or an album or an artist, whisper’s algorithms could generate endless lists of similar music—what music streaming companies call “radio.” one day, brad explained to me how he decided if his algorithmic dj was working. he listened to it, brad told me. as he tweaked parameters, adjusting the relative weights of features like popularity or tempo, he would try the resulting radio station out, putting in songs and checking the results. if those results sounded good to brad, he would ask one of his teammates to listen. then the whole team and their product manager might try it out, adjusting settings along the way. configurations that seemed plausible and functional would roll out internally to the whole company for feedback, and to small groups of users as tests. if these users seemed to like it, then the configuration would roll out to all of the service’s users. at every step, radiating outward from brad’s computer, people are listening. brad might plug in his favorite artist and decide that the resulting stream is no good. some unexpected error in the data or software might manifest as a conspicuously out-of-place song. or, when users unknowingly test the new design, they might listen less, causing the radio team’s product manager to roll the change back. this image has stayed with me as the essence of a contemporary algorithmic system: a steady accumulation of feedback loops, little circuits of interpretation and decision knit together into a vast textile. every stitch is held together by a moment of human response, a potential rejection shaped by something outside the code, whether it is the arbitrariness of personal preference, the torque of structural bias, or the social force of a formal evaluation framework. whenever something goes wrong—a public scandal breaks out, a key metric crashes, a manager gets a bad recommendation—the fabric is rewoven, altered by a cascade of human actions. although this weaving can take many forms, everywhere there are people making little stitches, tacking software to the social world. algorithmic drama contrast this swatch of sociotechnical fabric with contemporary discourse about algorithms: they have come to “rule our world” (steiner 2012), not only recommending music but also identifying people as potential criminals, deciding on loan eligibility, trading stocks at unimaginable speed, and shaping the news feeds through which you likely heard about them in the first place. while algorithms are apparently consolidating their power, academic critics find them to be the “key of modern rationality” (totaro and ninno 2014), agents of a procedural logic that threatens to displace human judgment, to anticipate and encapsulate us, to draw everyone ever tighter into their surveillant circuits. a pair of popular quips among critical scholars of algorithms captures the general sentiment: if you are not already “slave to the algorithm” (edwards and veale 2017), then “the algorithm is gonna get you” (cheney-lippold 2017, 93).2 through the rehearsal of this story, which malte ziewitz (2016, 3) calls the “algorithmic drama,” algorithms are figured as powerful, inhuman, and obscure, leaving critics and their readers to fight on behalf of humans. describing the uncanny effectiveness of recommender algorithms, for instance, blake hallinan and ted striphas (2016, 126) write: “it is as if the human lifeworld has been invaded by strangers who nonetheless seem eerily adept at navigating foreign land.” algorithms threaten to blunt culture in their image, to reformat our lives in ways amenable to computation, to strike technical rationality’s killing blow to what remains of the free, serendipitous spirit of human existence (e.g., gusterson and besteman, forthcoming). but what about brad? he and his coworkers are not strangers to the human lifeworld. their countless little choices hold algorithms together; they make algorithms responsive to the world; they weave in particular points of view; they change algorithms over time. while some proponents of algorithms—or machine learning, or artificial intelligence, or whatever complexly responsive software is called by the time you read this—may claim that their systems are autonomous, there are brads everywhere, tweaking and tuning, repairing and refactoring. in the world of music recommendation, these people often argue that their human sensitivity is, in fact, key to their systems’ success: knowing things about music, caring about it, being a culturally conditioned person makes a programmer better at their job, because such things shape their choices and their choices matter. the algorithmic fabric has a human weft. one might argue that machine learning is different. now, programmers make software that comes to program itself, learning from data. maybe we need to consider these algorithms as actants in more-than-human networks, agentic counterparts to their designers, not just their creations; indeed, many people already do this, in more or less social-scientific jargon. but press on any algorithmic decision and you will find many human ones: people like brad or his manager deciding that a certain error threshold is acceptable, that one data source should be used over another or that a good recommendation means this, not that. these systems are, as a former head of recommendation at spotify put it, “human all the way down” (heath 2015). there is no such thing as an algorithmic decision; there are only ways of seeing decisions as algorithmic. in other words, algorithms are not autonomous technical objects, but complex sociotechnical systems. as i have argued elsewhere, this change in framing reverses many of algorithms’ supposedly essential qualities: if the idealized algorithm is supposed to be generic, stable, and rigid, the actual algorithmic system is particular, unstable, and malleable (seaver 2013). while discourses about algorithms sometimes describe them as “unsupervised,” working without a human in the loop, in practice there are no unsupervised algorithms. if you cannot see a human in the loop, you just need to look for a bigger loop. take, for instance, the case of the programmer jacky alciné (2015), who discovered that google photos had automatically tagged a picture of him and a friend as containing “gorillas.” alciné and his friend are african american, and their experience is one of the more straightforward and well-known examples of the racist outputs of contemporary algorithmic systems. alciné and others attributed this algorithmic output to a lack of diversity in the data on which the tagging system was trained and a similar lack of diversity in the programming and testing teams that produced it. while some critics suggested that the algorithm itself could not be said to be racist (in spite of this outcome), this suggestion was a category error, analogous to the insistence that racism requires intentionally racist individuals (bonilla-silva 1997). we can readily see how the worlds of reference of the people working within algorithmic systems—what they anticipate and are sensitive to, their habitus and common sense—come to matter in those systems’ functioning, and thus how diversity in these settings is not only a matter of equitable representation but also one of functional, technical consequence (see noble 2018). and we can ask: what happened next? a few hours after alciné tweeted about the problem, a google manager named yonatan zunger (2015) responded to him, asking for access to alciné’s data so that the relevant team within google could investigate the problem. by the next day, the objectionable tag was gone. if we grant algorithms autonomy, treating them as though they are external to human culture, then we cannot make any sense of this story—why it happened in the first place, how it was resolved, and why similar problems might happen again. tales of autonomous algorithms cannot explain why the system works differently now than it did then. to explain what happened, we need to talk about the makeup of technical teams, the social processes by which those teams define and discover problems, how they identify acceptable solutions, and their culturally situated interpretive processes.3 there is no independent software domain from which computers send forth their agents to insinuate themselves into our cultural worlds. like any other technology, algorithms can produce unanticipated results or prove challenging to manipulate, but they have no wicked autonomy. especially in the case of the constantly tweaked and revised algorithms that filter news or make recommendations, these devices work at the pleasure of people who can change them, turn them off, or reorient them toward other goals. these choices emerge from particular cultural worlds, not from some technical outside. algorithms, we can say, are culture—another name for a collection of human choices and practices (seaver 2017). if we want to understand how they work and especially how they change, we need to attend to people like brad and the worlds of reference in which they make decisions, not to idealized visions of autonomous algorithmic logics. this argument is, admittedly, not new: anthropologists have been redescribing technical systems as sociotechnical systems for a long time. bryan pfaffenberger (1988, 241) states the classic lesson succinctly: technology is not an independent nonsocial variable that has an “impact” on society or culture. on the contrary, any technology is a set of social behaviors and a system of meanings. to restate the point: when we examine the “impact” of technology on society, we are talking about the impact of one kind of social behavior on another. yet it now seems necessary to learn this lesson again, as the rhetorical force of algorithms grows and as they appear to be coming detached from their sociocultural moorings. arguing for this approach means giving up the excitement of new objects that might demand new methods (and new journals, conferences, and other trappings of academic novelty) in favor of identifying continuities with older concerns. against the analog slot so if the problems posed by algorithms are not new, then what should an anthropology of algorithms do? when i started asking this question (seaver 2013), i was struck by the familiar scripts that anthropologists rehearsed when confronted by technical systems that appeared to encroach on our cultural turf. we could offer the analog alternative to algorithms’ digital; the small-scale to their large-scale; the cultural to their technical; the thick description to their thin; the human to their computer. everywhere, our role in the algorithmic drama seemed already to be cast, such that ethnography was destined to fill whatever negative space algorithms left for us. whether that made anthropology a complementary counterpart or a perfectly positioned antagonist to algorithmic systems, our role was determined in advance by the very phenomenon we set out to study (seaver 2015). i have come to think of this as the anthropology of computing’s version of michel-rolph trouillot’s (1991) “savage slot”—our position within an inherited field of significance that exceeds the discipline and has been integral in shaping it. let’s call it the analog slot: a position nominally opposed to the digital, but which depends on it for coherence. the analog slot is full of the wild and distinctively human remainders that computing can supposedly never consume: our sensitivity to context, our passions and affects, our openness to serendipity and chance, our canny navigation of the cultural field that uncanny algorithms ape but never attain. the contemporary imprecision of the term analog nicely captures the imprecision of the slot, which is effectively a grab bag of qualities thrown together in opposition to computing’s supposed limits. where analog once designated a particular class of computer, it has now come to signify everything outside of computers, a set of objects with no intrinsic coherence. this usage, as jonathan sterne (2016, 32) argues, “comes with a cost, because it effectively diminishes the variety of the world as it elevates conceptions of the digital” (see also chun 2011). in embracing the analog slot, we do not resist computing so much as grant it definitional supremacy, making it harder to see the variety and detail that might help us to understand how algorithms work and what they do. yet a casual analog humanism still dominates anthropological conversations about algorithms and computing more generally. like other humanisms, this one is selective, carving out a part of the world where it does not apply: the people working within algorithmic systems are, it seems, the only people anthropologists are comfortable treating as homo economicus, governed by technical and economic rationality. the kinds of culturally informed decisions i have described so far are thereby rendered invisible. rather than endorsing the analog slot, anthropologists should work against it. trouillot and other critics of anthropological humanisms offer a model. instead of restating our inherited premises as our conclusions, we can “offer new points of re-entry” and “address directly the thematic field (and thus the larger world) that made (makes) this slot possible” (trouillot 1991, 40). we do not need to defend the human, as it has been defined in opposition to the algorithmic, nor do we need to build that dichotomy up so that it might be dialectically resolved. rather, we can refuse it from the start and look for alternatives; we can try to bring that human-versus-algorithm frame into focus and see how it is maintained and reproduced. drawing on marilyn strathern’s (2005) work on the relations between kinship and knowledge, we can investigate the intellectual kin-making practices that sustain these apparently opposed analog and digital moieties. what ritualized processes of alliance and descent configure anthropology’s relations with its algorithmic alters? how is their connection, stability, and separation maintained? and how do people on the putatively digital side of the divide conceptualize and navigate the discursive field we share with them? what local theories of culture and technology are in play, and where? these are empirical questions that, to date, critics of algorithmic systems have tended to answer with recourse to first principles—to the logic of interacting logics, transcendent of the situations in which ordinary life plays out. by attending to the ordinary life of algorithmic systems, anthropology can contribute some much-needed empiricism and particularism to critical discourses on algorithms.4 many critiques grant algorithms a homogeneity and coherence that is elusive in practice. we hear that google search is like predictive policing, which is like the netflix recommender, which is like high-frequency trading. these links are supported by claims that certain algorithmic techniques are “domain-independent,” working in any setting. but such claims ignore the practical implementation of algorithms in mundane routines of translation and articulation, maintenance and repair, confusion and ad hoc reasoning. not all algorithmic systems are the same in their configurations, their effects, or in the worlds of reference of their human minders. there is no more reason to assume that all of these systems share a singular algorithmic logic than there is to assume that all people share a singular human logic. and while i have focused here on engineers like brad, they are by no means the only people hidden within supposedly automatic systems. scholars like lilly irani (2015), sarah t. roberts (2016), hamid ekbia and bonnie nardi (2017), and mary gray and siddharth suri (2017) point our attention to the underpaid and overworked people whose labor powers so-called machine vision or the content moderators who keep obscene content out of our social media feeds. being human within the machine is not a pleasurable or powerful experience for many of the people thus involved. again, algorithmic operations are more human than we have been led to believe. * * * this is one thing an anthropology of algorithms can do: we can reject the casual humanism of the analog slot in favor of finding the people within these systems. if conway’s law offers a rough emic theory of the relationship between social structure and software, we might fill in the cultural theory: what local practices of analogy, valuation, and contextualization can we find when we recognize that algorithms, in spite of it all, are thoroughly dependent on human sense-making? what cosmologies do people like brad make their choices in? ultimately, anthropology’s greatest contribution to contemporary critical discourse about algorithms may be the corrosive potential of anthropological attention itself, which promises to break down the apparent solidity and coherence of the algorithm. following alfred gell (1992, 41), who originally made this claim about art, we can say that “the ultimate aim of [the anthropology of algorithms] must be the dissolution of [algorithms], in the same way that the dissolution of religion, politics, economics, kinship, and all other forms under which human experience is presented to the socialized mind, must be the ultimate aim of anthropology in general.” notes acknowledgments thanks to christina agapakis, adia benton, ian lowrie, the cultural anthropology editorial staff, and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions about what i should do with this piece. 1. a compiler is a program that converts human-readable source code into machine code that can be executed by a computer. a four-pass compiler would perform this conversion in four sequential passes; raymond is suggesting that having four groups working on this problem would result in the problem being divided into four parts. 2. these lines play on the titles of two 1980s pop music hits: grace jones’s “slave to the rhythm” (1985) and gloria estefan’s “rhythm is gonna get you” (1987). 3. what happened, according to a recent report in wired (simonite 2018), was that google engineers simply blocked the system from labeling most nonhuman primates. this particular solution, blunt as it is, resulted from a human decision-making process and it meaningfully changes how “the algorithm” works, even if it seems too crude to count as machine learning. 4. methodological challenges face the would-be ethnographer of algorithmic systems, but again, these are only apparently new: anthropologists have tried to study the cultural worlds of elite and secretive groups for a long time, and we already have many useful tactics for trying to understand these worlds when access is elusive or complex (e.g., gusterson 1997; ortner 2010; jones 2011; mahmud 2014; seaver 2017). references alciné, jacky (@jackyalcine) 2015 “google photos, y’all fucked up. my friend’s not a gorilla.” twitter post, june 28. https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865. bonilla-silva, eduardo 1997 “rethinking racism: toward a structural interpretation.” american sociological review 62, no. 3: 465–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/2657316. cheney-lippold, john 2017 we are data. new york: new york university press. chun, wendy hui kyong 2011 programmed visions: software and memory. cambridge, mass.: mit press. edwards, lilian, and michael veale 2017 “slave to the algorithm? why a ‘right to an explanation’ is probably not the remedy you are looking for.” duke law and technology review 16. https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dltr/vol16/iss1. ekbia, hamid r., and bonnie a. nardi 2017 heteromation, and other stories of computing and capitalism. cambridge, mass.: mit press. frankel, todd c. 2015 “what these photos of facebook’s new headquarters say about the future of work.” washington post, november 30. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30/what-these-photos-of-facebooks-new-headquarters-say-about-the-future-of-work. gell, alfred 1992 “the technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology.” in anthropology, art, and aesthetics, edited by jeremy coote and anthony shelton, 40–63. new york: oxford university press. gray, mary l., and siddharth suri 2017 “the humans working behind the ai curtain.” harvard business review, january 9. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-humans-working-behind-the-ai-curtain. gusterson, hugh 1997 “studying up revisited.” political and legal anthropology review 20, no. 1: 114–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/pol.1997.20.1.114. gusterson, hugh, and catherine besteman, eds. forthcoming robohumans: how algorithms are remaking social life. chicago: university of chicago press. hallinan, blake, and ted striphas 2016 “recommended for you: the netflix prize and the production of algorithmic culture.” new media and society 18, no. 1: 117–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814538646. heath, alex 2015 “spotify is getting unbelievably good at picking music—here’s an inside look at how.” business insider, september 3. http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-spotify-and-the-future-of-music-streaming. irani, lilly 2015 “justice for ‘data janitors.’” public books, january 15. http://www.publicbooks.org/justice-for-data-janitors. jones, graham m. 2011 trade of the tricks: inside the magician’s craft. chicago: university of chicago press. kelty, christopher 2005 “geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics.” cultural anthropology 20, no. 2: 185–214. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2005.20.2.185. mahmud, lilith 2014 the brotherhood of freemason sisters: gender, secrecy, and fraternity in italian masonic lodges. chicago: university of chicago press. noble, safiya umoja 2018 algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. ortner, sherry b. 2010 “access: reflections on studying up in hollywood.” ethnography 11, no. 2: 211–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138110362006. pfaffenberger, bryan 1988 “fetishized objects and humanized nature: toward an anthropology of technology.” man n.s. 23, no. 2: 236–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/2802804. raymond, eric s. 1996 the new hacker’s dictionary. 3rd edition. cambridge, mass.: mit press. roberts, sarah t. 2016 “commercial content moderation: digital laborers’ dirty work.” in the intersectional internet: race, sex, class and culture online, edited by safiya umoja noble and brendesha m. tynes, 147–59. new york: peter lang. seaver, nick 2013 “knowing algorithms.” paper presented at media in transition 8, cambridge, mass., may 4. 2015 “bastard algebra.” in data! now bigger and better, edited by tom boellstorff and bill maurer, 27–46. chicago: prickly paradigm press. 2017 “algorithms as culture: some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems.” big data and society 4, no. 2. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104. simonite, tom 2018 “when it comes to gorillas, google photos remains blind.” wired, january 11. https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google-photos-remains-blind. steiner, christopher 2012 automate this: how algorithms came to rule our world. new york: portfolio. sterne, jonathan 2016 “analog.” in digital keywords: a vocabulary of information society and culture, edited by benjamin peters, 31–44. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. strathern, marilyn 2005 kinship, law, and the unexpected: relatives are always a surprise. new york: cambridge university press. totaro, paolo, and domenico ninno 2014 “the concept of algorithm as an interpretative key of modern rationality.” theory, culture, and society 31, no. 4: 29–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413510051. trouillot, michel-rolph 1991 “anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness.” in recapturing anthropology: working in the present, edited by richard g. fox, 17–44. santa fe, n.m.: school of american research press. ziewitz, malte 2016 “governing algorithms: myth, mess, and methods.” science, technology, and human values 41, no. 1: 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243915608948. zunger, yonatan (@yonatanzunger) 2015 “@jackyalcine thank you for telling us so quickly! sheesh. high on my list of bugs you *never* want to see happen. ::shudder::.” twitter post, june 29. https://twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/615383011819794432. crisis effects crisis effects daromir rudnyckyj university of victoria http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3940-4881 in late 2013 i was sitting in dinar matahari, an airy cafeteria inside the headquarters of the malaysian central bank (bank negara), with anwar, a senior bank official responsible for regulating islamic finance in the country. it was late afternoon and the cafeteria was sparsely occupied. employees had already begun wiping down tables, signaling the end of another workday. anwar and i had started our conversation by discussing the technical aspects of islamic finance, focusing on bank negara’s plans to develop standard forms for twelve contracts that it had identified as pivotal to the industry and discussing some of the problems around calculating risk in islamic finance.1 abruptly, anwar shifted gears and asked: “is it ok to talk about religion?” he then launched into a monologue that, at first, seemed to have little to do with the preceding discussion. only allah and the prophet muhammad, he explained, could know what would happen in the future: “we act as if we will live forever . . . but our behavior must be checked.” the check on human behavior was the fact that the twin angels of islamic eschatology, roqib and atid, would tally our sins in advance of judgment day.2 coming full circle, anwar invoked the islamic prohibition of interest as an ethical commandment, explaining that allah had “prohibited riba [interest],” but that the dominance of interest in global finance had created numerous problems, most notably the 2008 financial crisis. the financial disorder in the world today, he explained, stemmed from the fact that god had commanded humans “don’t practice riba,” but this commandment had been ignored. figure 1. the headquarters of malaysia’s central bank, bank negara. photo by daromir rudnyckyj. while a senior central banker attributing financial crisis to the failure to obey divine injunctions might appear odd in europe or north america, such attributions were ubiquitous among islamic finance experts in the years following 2008. indeed, invocations of crisis and its relationship to islamic finance were the subject of frequent debate, discussion, and introspection among professionals in the field. the events of 2008 brought new urgency to the project of islamic finance and economics, as experts sought to demonstrate what they called the “value proposition” of these forms of knowledge, by which they meant the benefits that islamic finance offered to a world seeking remedies from fiscal turmoil (asutay 2012). in so doing, they created a conveniently identifiable frame against which experts could contrast the ethics and operations of islamic finance. the shape and trajectory of contemporary islamic finance has been, in certain key respects, formed by representations of crisis that emerged in response not just to the events of 2008, but also to events a decade earlier, which were also defined against crisis and likewise had a profound role in shaping malaysian islamic finance (kassim and majid 2010). in describing this formation, i develop the concept of crisis effects to provide analytical purchase on how representations of crisis precipitate sociotechnical interventions, such as those made by islamic finance experts in contemporary malaysia. this formulation draws on janet roitman’s (2013, 12) observation that researchers should both be conscious of “the effects of the claim to crisis [and] be attentive to the effects of our very accession to that judgment.” roitman contends that invocations of crisis are regularly deployed as part of explicitly political projects. her objective is to show how “crisis narratives” establish “the conditions of possible histories” (roitman 2013, 11). in attending to crisis effects, i build on roitman’s attention to crisis narratives in documenting the construction of a sociotechnical intervention.3 furthermore, i heed roitman’s caution against presuming crisis as either an analytical frame or a necessary historical outcome. i thus ensure that attention to crisis effects does not take crisis as a structural feature in the history of capitalism (cf. marx 1977), but rather seeks to document it as a representational object. in so doing, i show how representations of crisis are mobilized and the types of interventions to which they give rise. in malaysia, two events retrospectively labeled crises have radically influenced the formation of islamic finance in the country. in this sense, the contemporary configuration of islamic finance can be understood as a crisis effect. crisis one in malaysian islamic finance, the events of 2008 were perhaps less important than a crisis narrative that had emerged ten years before. while it was of only fleeting concern in media and public consciousness in north america, the 1998 asian financial crisis and narratives about it were formative in recent malaysian history. indeed, they accelerated efforts to scale up malaysian islamic finance from a national project to an international one. the malaysian state began to aggressively position the country as a global center for islamic financial services. while malaysia had developed a national infrastructure for islamic finance in the 1980s and 1990s, in the early 2000s it began to focus on developing an international one. this included establishing the regulatory, research, educational, and legal infrastructure necessary to facilitate islamic finance globally. the 1998 crisis inspired a highly visible public media spectacle in which mahathir mohamad, then prime minister of malaysia, lambasted wall street financiers and laid blame for the crisis at their feet. the specific target of mahathir’s ire was the influential hedge-fund manager george soros, whose speculation against asian currencies mahathir held responsible for the financial difficulties of countries such as malaysia, indonesia, thailand, and south korea. mahathir famously referred to currency speculators, soros foremost among them, as “unnecessary, unproductive, and immoral” (economist 1997). mahathir’s criticisms were not only fodder for media spectacle. in the wake of the crisis, political officials and islamic financial experts in malaysia initiated technical and administrative efforts to forge a transnationally integrated islamic alternative to the conventional financial system. in 1999 the kuala lumpur shariah index (klsi) was launched to showcase equities that were deemed compliant with islamic law. a counterpoint to the dow jones islamic market index (maurer 2005, 105–108), the klsi sought to avoid investment in companies that engaged in activities deemed contrary to islam, such as gambling, certain forms of entertainment, and the production of alcohol, pork, and weapons. then, in 2002, the malaysian government established the islamic financial services board (ifsb; çizakça 2011, 151). the ifsb is an international standard-setting organization that develops global standards and guiding principles for islamic financial institutions. it was based in kuala lumpur, after successfully lobbying the organization of the islamic conference to headquarter the institution in malaysia. today, membership in the ifsb exceeds 150 institutions, including regulatory supervisors such as central banks and securities regulators, financial institutions and professional firms, and international intergovernmental institutions such as the asian development bank and the islamic development bank. malaysia also fostered research and educational infrastructure in the wake of the crisis by establishing two key institutions: the international center for education in islamic finance (inceif) and the international shariah research academy (isra). inceif was formed to alleviate a shortage of qualified personnel familiar with the intricacies of islamic finance and capable of staffing islamic financial institutions. bank negara founded inceif and designated it the “global university” for education in islamic finance. the goal was to create professionals as well versed in shariah (islamic law) as they were in finance. as degree programs in islamic finance have proliferated around the world, inceif has become regarded as a leading site for islamic finance education. one of the distinguishing features of the university’s curriculum is that it requires students to complete coursework not only in conventional and islamic finance, but also in islamic law and jurisprudence (fiqh). the standard curriculum includes courses ranging from financial econometrics to the methodologies of islamic jurisprudence. figure 2. the headquarters of the islamic financial services board. photo by daromir rudnyckyj. isra was established to cement malaysia’s position as a key center for research in islamic finance and to make the so-called malaysian model of islamic finance a global standard.4 the institute conducts applied research on shariah questions in islamic finance and seeks to foster dialogue between the four main expert groups in islamic finance: shariah scholars, islamic economists, regulators, and islamic finance practitioners. in addition to creating new knowledge, isra is a repository of knowledge about shariah decisions (fatwa) on islamic finance; it also examines debates over the role and interpretation of shariah in the islamic financial industry, both in malaysia and abroad. a major issue in islamic finance are the differences of opinion between shariah scholars in the middle east, south asia, and southeast asia regarding the permissibility of certain contracts. isra facilitates interaction among shariah scholars in the diverse regions of the islamic world by translating arabic documents into english and vice versa, thus reducing linguistic barriers to the circulation of knowledge in fields pertaining to islamic finance. it also seeks to enhance communication among shariah scholars by holding two major meetings each year. one is considered regional and consists of scholars from southeast asia, including malaysia, indonesia, brunei, thailand, and the philippines. the other is global and is attended by scholars from across the muslim world. the first of these meetings, held in 2005, was a material instantiation of efforts to bridge differences in interpretation of islamic law and thus to develop a transnational islamic financial infrastructure. crisis two while what became known as the asian financial crisis precipitated the creation of the infrastructure for a global islamic alternative to the conventional financial system, events at the end of the decade that followed reinvigorated malaysia’s islamic finance project. in some cases this took the shape of moral invocations, such as those by anwar with which i opened this essay. proponents of islamic finance argued for its superiority in theological terms, arguing that the home foreclosures, bankruptcies, job losses, and sovereign debt defaults that swept across parts of north america and europe were due to the failure of citizens and political leaders to conform to islamic injunctions against debt. for example, as one senior islamic scholar said at a conference examining the articulation of islam and finance: “the financial crisis is really the collapse of the ethical norms and shared values of all the major civilizations.” he then invoked the revelation of islam as the response to financial crisis, quoting the prophet muhammad as working to “perfect the virtues of morality” that led to events such as financial crisis. yet the remedy that islamic finance offered in response to seemingly recurrent crises was not only framed in moral and theological terms. islamic finance experts asserted a technical justification for islamic finance that emphasized the superiority of economic arrangements premised on partnership and investment, rather than interest-based lending (mirakhor and bao 2013). what became known as the 2008 financial crisis was largely interpreted in malaysia and in the united states as the outcome of a surfeit of debt (mian and sufi 2014). islamic finance experts regarded qur’anic injunctions against interest as a caution against debt, mirroring recent anthropological anxieties (peebles 2010; karim 2011; han 2012; bear 2015; schuster 2015). moreover, they saw islamic injunctions against debt as a surface manifestation of a more profound problem: the rampant proliferation of a financial device characteristic of debt-based capitalism, leverage. leveraging refers to the practice of purchasing assets with a combination of equity and borrowed funds, under the presumption that the income generated by the asset will exceed the cost of borrowing those funds: the interest payments (appadurai 2016, 137). during the rapid escalation of real-estate values in the early 2000s, many americans “leveraged up” by using the equity in their homes to take out additional mortgages and sometimes used these borrowed funds to purchase additional property. during an economic boom leveraging can be an enormously profitable strategy, as it was for homeowners who used debt to purchase rapidly appreciating properties. however, during a downturn, leverage can lead to devastating losses. this was evident during the 2008 crisis when real-estate values suddenly suffered acute drops. in several cases this left homeowners and other real-estate investors owing more to banks than the value of their properties. forced sales of real estate led to further declines in property prices, pushing more homeowners underwater (stout 2016). leverage greatly multiplies the risk in a given financial strategy. for example, the widespread use of credit-default swaps to insure collateralized debt obligations precipitated the near collapse of the insurance giant aig at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, a prime example of high-risk leveraging (roitman 2013, 51–53). in contrast to the debt-fueled excesses of conventional finance, islamic finance experts sought to build an islamic system based on equity and investment. they argued that the proliferation of leverage had produced the calamity of 2008. rather than lending money, they believed that an islamic system should put limits on the hazards of leverage by making investment the central mechanism for the mobilization of capital (chapra 2008). there are different versions of equity-based devices, but the one most often invoked by those seeking to reform islamic finance is the mudaraba (çizakça 2011, 30–31). in this contract, a party with surplus capital invests with an entrepreneur in need of capital for a business concern. the two parties form a partnership in which they agree to share in any profits (or losses) generated by the company. the investor accepts the risk that the enterprise may not produce any returns, but also offers his or her guidance and advice to the entrepreneur. advocates of equity-based contracts argue that they put limits on leverage because, in the words of one interlocutor: “you can’t invest what you don’t already own.” in the wake of the second crisis islamic finance experts engaged in a project to change the technical devices characteristic of islamic finance from ones based on debt to ones instead based on investment. today the malaysian state, led by the country’s central bank, is aggressively seeking to make the country’s capital a central node in an emergent global islamic financial system. this has involved creating the essential infrastructure necessary to make an islamic alternative to the global financial system possible. professionals and experts in the field commonly acknowledge that the country has created the most developed system of regulatory, legal, educational, and commercial institutions for islamic finance. today, there is a viable, transnational islamic financial system that does many of the same things that the conventional system does: that is, it facilitates the availability of capital for commercial development on a range of scales. in spite of these ambitious developments, islamic finance is still dwarfed by its conventional counterpart. at the end of 2016, the total assets held by islamic financial institutions around the world was about $1.89 trillion and the annual growth rate of those assets averaged 10 percent per year. while perhaps impressive as a number, this volume is roughly equivalent to the size of the assets held by a single large u.s. financial firm such as citigroup. in this sense, islamic finance remains an emergent project. nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude that islamic finance will always remain a niche realm in global finance. indeed, the dream that drives many islamic finance professionals is one that might be termed geoeconomic. it is a poorly kept secret that oil-rich countries such as saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, and the united arab emirates have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in conventional, debt-based instruments in the financial capitals of the west through their massive sovereign wealth funds. islamic finance professionals in malaysia and beyond hope that once the citizens of these countries wake up to the hypocrisy of gulf leaders who espouse puritanical, salafi piety but rely on the haram financial services of jp morgan chase, goldman sachs, and barclays, among others, they will demand changes to the ways in which the capital that these countries hold is managed. when this happens, they imagine, these sovereign wealth funds will be withdrawn from the conventional financial system and will instead be invested in financial instruments that do not violate the antidebt ethos of islam, with its stringent prohibitions on the collection or payment of interest. crisis in theory, crisis in method our time is that of crisis, or so we are told. from the opioid epidemic to the nuclear standoff with north korea, from the revolving door of white house staff to the ever-present specter of economic collapse with each gyration of the markets, crisis glares as a ubiquitous sign under which history is lived. however, we would be well advised to heed roitman’s caution against presuming crisis as an analytical frame or teleological outcome. the narrative construction of financial crisis has had wide-ranging effects, exemplifying what douglas holmes (2014) has called the “economy of words.” building on these approaches, i have sought to illustrate how, although crisis narratives are always representations, these representations have material and technical effects. rather than asking whether crisis exists or trying to deploy it to define an epoch, i have sought to show what representations of crisis do. in malaysia two events, a decade apart, came to be retrospectively constructed as crises, in turn precipitating financial experimentation. following the 1998 crisis, political leaders and experts sought to create a globally integrated alternative financial network to that centered in western financial centers such as new york, london, and frankfurt. they worked to create a new network that operated according to islamic norms and linked cities such as kuala lumpur, dubai, and bahrain. ten years later, the next crisis event gave rise to soul-searching about what made islamic finance distinctive from its conventional counterpart. experts invoked crisis narratives in seeking to shift islamic financial devices away from the taint of debt and leverage toward investment and partnership. crisis effects, then, have shaped islamic finance even as islamic financiers seek to foreclose the crisis yet to come. notes 1. in the broadest terms, islamic finance refers to an ongoing effort that began in the 1970s to create a functioning financial infrastructure and set of financial devices that comply with religious prescriptions for economic action. most centrally, this entails efforts to comply with qur’anic prohibitions against interest payment, speculation, and contractual ambiguity (maurer 2005; çizakça 2011; rethel 2011; pitluck 2013). in my forthcoming book (rudnyckyj, forthcoming), i document how contemporary islamic finance is defined by efforts to move away from devices that replicate the debt-based instruments of conventional finance and toward ones premised on equity investment and risk-sharing. 2. for more on this tenet of islamic eschatology, see bowen 1984 and rudnyckyj 2010, 145. 3. this formulation builds on timothy mitchell’s (2011) attention to the sociotechnical work of expert interventions. 4. here, i draw on the work of elizabeth dunn (2005), who has documented the importance of standards in the creation of global infrastructures. references appadurai, arjun 2016 banking on words: the failure of language in the age of derivative finance. chicago: university of chicago press. asutay, mehmet 2012 “conceptualizing and locating the social failure of islamic finance: aspirations of islamic moral economy vs. the realities of islamic finance.” asian and african area studies 11, no. 2: 93–113. bear, laura 2015 navigating austerity: currents of debt along a south asian river. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. bowen, john r. 1984 “death and the history of islam in highland aceh.” indonesia, no. 38: 21–38. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3350843. chapra, mohammad umer 2008 “innovation and authenticity in islamic finance.” paper presented at the eighth harvard university forum on islamic finance, cambridge, mass., april 19–20. çizakça, murat 2011 islamic capitalism and finance: origins, evolution, and the future. northampton, mass.: edward elgar. dunn, elizabeth c. 2005 “standards and person-making in east central europe.” in global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, edited by aihwa ong and stephen j. collier, 173–93. malden, mass.: blackwell. economist 1997 “mahathir, soros, and the currency markets.” business and finance, september 25. http://www.economist.com/node/101043. han, clara 2012 life in debt: times of care and violence in neoliberal chile. berkeley: university of california press. holmes, douglas r. 2014 economy of words: communicative imperatives in central banks. chicago: university of chicago press. karim, lamia 2011 microfinance and its discontents: women in debt in bangladesh. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. kassim, salina h., and m. shabri abdul majid 2010 “impact of financial shocks on islamic banks: malaysian evidence during 1997 and 2007 financial crises.” international journal of islamic and middle eastern finance and management 3, no. 4: 291–305. https://doi.org/10.1108/17538391011093243. marx, karl 1977 capital: a critique of political economy, volume one. translated by ben fowkes. new york: vintage books. originally published in 1867. maurer, bill 2005 mutual life, limited: islamic banking, alternative currencies, lateral reason. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. mian, atif, and amir sufi 2014 house of debt: how they (and you) caused the great recession, and how we can prevent it from happening again. chicago: university of chicago press. mirakhor, abbas, and wang yong bao 2013 “epistemological foundation of finance: islamic and conventional.” in economic development and islamic finance, edited by zamir iqbal and abbas mirakhor, 25–66. washington, dc: world bank. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/798771468050094748/economic-development-and-islamic-finance. mitchell, timothy 2011 carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil. new york: verso. peebles, gustav 2010 “the anthropology of credit and debt.” annual review of anthropology 39: 225–40. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-090109-133856. pitluck, aaron z. 2013 “islamic banking and finance: alternative or façade?” in the oxford handbook of the sociology of finance, edited by karin knorr cetina and alex preda, 431–49. new york: oxford university press. rethel, lena 2011 “whose legitimacy? islamic finance and the global financial order.” review of international political economy 18, no. 1: 75–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290902983999. roitman, janet 2013 anti-crisis. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rudnyckyj, daromir 2010 spiritual economies: islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. forthcoming beyond debt: islamic experiments in global finance. chicago: university of chicago press. schuster, caroline e. 2015 social collateral: women and microfinance in paraguay’s smuggling economy. oakland: university of california press. stout, noelle 2016 “#indebted: disciplining the moral valence of mortgage debt online.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 1: 82–106. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.1.05. theorizing (vaccine) refusal theorizing (vaccine) refusal: through the looking glass elisa j. sobo san diego state university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7711-9873 what goes on when people say no? how can we theorize refusal? in this essay i hope to show the value of casting refusal not only as an instance of resistance, but also as distinct from the latter in important ways (picture a venn diagram). in doing so, i seek to open up space for a dynamic and salutary reading of refusal and, by extension, of resistance itself. i therefore highlight refusal’s productivity—not in terms of achieved regime changes or political gains, but of what refusal does for immediate social relations. my argument starts with the assertion that refusal often begins well before said utterance or act, and extends far beyond the moment of behavioral or verbal proclamation. moreover, in refusing, resistance—the act of standing against—is not always actually or primarily entailed. refusal is more about avoidance than active opposition (the characteristic by which most scholars define resistance; see hollander and einwohner 2004): in refusal, the overt power contests, class antagonisms, or struggles for liberation or against domination that resistance entails are not necessarily directly implicated. answering dimitrios theodossopoulos’s (2014) call to deprimitivize and depathologize how we think about resistant nonconformity, the refusal concept that i lay out provides an opening for grappling with the fact that even people who are not outsiders or who have not been excluded can be subversive. it also helps correct for a tendency in resistance studies to position resistant nonconformity on society’s (imagined) sidelines because, as i explain, refusal accommodates action taking place directly within the here and now of local social life. thus, rather than existing as simply a synonym for resistance, the refusal construct can offer, as i hope to show, a complementary albeit partially overlapping (remember venn) point of view. this view, or analytic frame, is best understood in light of the emerging anthropology of becoming (e.g., biehl and locke 2010), which draws heavily on gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s (1977) explication of potentiality. the anthropology of becoming seeks to remediate for foucauldian and neo-marxist views of people as “done to” or “done through.” it restores to humanity agentic engagement with life, diverting our attention from foreclosures to openings—from angry nos to happy yeses. instead of treating subversive discourses and tactics as “windows into the workings of power” (urla and helepololei 2014, 434), which has been common in resistance-oriented work, theorizing refusal in terms of becoming allows us to read such subversions in reverse. that is, it enables us to see them not only as signs or symptoms produced in a top-down fashion by existing power structures but also as crucially generative, in and of themselves, of local in-group relations. akin to prior process-oriented works, such as those done under the rubrics of performativity and practice theory, an anthropology of becoming gives primacy to desire, for instance focusing on “the ways desires can break open alternative pathways” (biehl and locke 2010, 318; but see sobo 2015a) when individuals and collectivities are excluded from preferred pathways. it highlights how, by means of propositional claims, people challenge stigmatizing classifications and assumed or imposed limitations. refusers’ assertions thus negate outsider or out-group definitions of the situation and, most importantly in terms of what i want to argue, they reaffirm in-group framings and, thereby, in-group ties. refusal’s immediate focus is not structural reform but the health and vitality of one’s immediate social relations. my path to this opening i came to this position slowly, through a series of projects beginning (for our purposes) in 2012, at a waldorf school. waldorf education is rich in the arts, heavy on experiential learning, and light on summative testing. it has been the source recently for a number of mainstream education innovations (e.g., costello-dougherty 2009). i had been interested in how teachers leveraged waldorf education’s unique pedagogy to promote child health (sobo 2015a). i also asked how school parents’ home health practices aligned with teacher recommendations such as for early bedtimes, a healthful diet, and limited or no media exposure. vaccination practices were not on my inquiry list, but parents saw them as important and so, in keeping with anthropological convention, i paid attention (sobo 2015b). in 2014, i began a follow-on project directly focused on vaccine decision-making. however, this second study was not school-sited; it involved a community-based sample (sobo et al. 2016). about half of the children in the first project and two-fifths in the second had not gotten all of the vaccinations deemed necessary by the state for kindergarten entry. what stood out to me was that, while in the first study what is popularly glossed as “vaccine refusal” was normative, in the second it was not. further comparison, between and within groups, revealed vaccine refusal as a complex, multifaceted, processual activity—something that the layperson’s use of the phrase vaccine refusal, with its categorical focus on the rejecting aspect, failed to account for. such verbal flattening and foreshortening is not unusual in popular talk regarding subversive practices. as sherry ortner (1995) has noted, resistance studies, too, can homogenize countercultural discourses or movements, valorizing their subversive potential without examining their inner workings. in reality, resistance is manifold; dominated groups have rich, complex cultural, political, and religious lives that support diverse oppositional activities, with “breaks and splits and incoherencies of consciousness . . . [and even] alternative forms of coherence” (ortner 1995, 186). ortner argues that hesitance to explore such things, perhaps for fear of undermining the political aims of study participants, has led to the creation of a superficial and impoverished record that, along with being partial, has stunted the growth and development of resistance-related theory.1 it is the same with vaccine refusal: although all parents who are not in full conformity with vaccine recommendations/requirements have traditionally been lumped together as “refusers,” great diversity exists within the lot. for one thing, being fully vaccinated entails numerous injections for varied diseases taken over several years’ time—but not all refusers refuse the same vaccines or doses. some skip all shots necessary for kindergarten entrance (which can number in the twenties); some skip one. and parents have diverse reasons for refusing: some worry over efficacy; others, side effects; still others, the broader political-economic context in which vaccination is promoted. moreover, being late for a vaccination or missing vaccinations due to lack of access are not the same as never intending to catch up.2 such variation aside, parents’ vaccine refusals were always highly social. to best appreciate this, it is important to understand that what counts as an act of vaccine refusal is an artifact of one’s position in relation to the various sociocultural entities of which one is part, and of related affordances and exclusions. to members or practitioners of mainstream culture and society, vaccine refusal signals one’s subversive opposition to the status quo. in some ways, at some times, for some vaccine-cautious parents—for instance, those who refuse vaccinations as activists—this equals resistance. yet as erica weiss (2016) notes, refusal need not always involve defiance or action-against.3 it can entail quiet abstention instead. more than that: it can be an affiliative act. in other words, vaccine refusal often serves as a declaration of identification with the social setting of import to the individual. this kind of refusal is more about who one is and with whom one identifies than who one isn’t or whom one opposes. while it is the case that vaccine refusal generally entails various important critiques (of the political economy, biomedicine, etc.), vaccine refusal is also, and for some parents more so, a highly social act—an act that, each time it is undertaken, reinforces social belonging by vitalizing community ties. to further grasp this, a quick look at the findings is warranted (for details, see sobo 2015b and sobo et al. 2016). study one: school parents the average personal belief exemption (pbe; vaccine waiver) rate for california’s kindergarteners at the time of the school study was 3 percent for public schools and 5 percent for private (california department of public health, immunization branch 2013). the study school’s pbe rate was 51 percent. while some preexisting vaccine caution hitched a ride into the school community along with parents’ preference for alternative education, for many members, the tendency toward refusal was intensified or even cultivated from scratch after joining. as one focus-group member summarized: “a lot of people that come [here] have vaccinated their children . . . and then they chose to discontinue.” indeed, younger siblings at the school received notably fewer vaccines than older ones. and by the time participants’ children were ready for seventh grade—which for many might represent ten years of community belonging—the pbe rate was 71.5 percent. the social fabric of the school served as an incubator, fostering and propagating vaccine caution. opting out of vaccination was an act of opting in. it was the case that 49 percent of kindergarteners did not have waivers; they were fully vaccinated. and nearly all of those with waivers had received at least some vaccinations. still, parents said that the school’s culture valorized countercultural child health approaches and supported skepticism regarding governmental and health-care industry interests (which have, in fact, compromised our health previously). so parents with fully vaccinated families remained quiet. their refusal to refuse went undisclosed for fear of social consequences (e.g., “there’s prejudice against mainstream medicine”). vaccine nondisclosure, in turn, lent strength to the idea that a very large majority of the school community disfavored vaccination. the school’s antivaccination reputation was self-reinforcing (sobo 2015a). study two: community parents my community-based study questioned vaccine confidence against the backdrop of mainstream digital culture (sobo et al. 2016). like the parents just described, vaccine acceptors in the community sample were affected by social factors: they accepted vaccines because of custom or an everyone-does-it-here point of view. in routinized fashion, many were content just to go “with the package” of recommended vaccinations because, as one mother said, it was “a cultural norm.” most full vaccinators knew surprisingly little about vaccination’s mechanism and less about herd immunity, which is “the shared protective effect conferred on unimmunized individuals when a sufficiently large proportion of the population is immunized” (committee on the assessment of studies of health outcomes related to the recommended childhood immunization schedule 2013, 2). in terms of uptake, this knowledge did not matter anyhow: they vaccinated as part of their parenting routine. a thirty-eight-year-old father with two fully vaccinated preschoolers explained: for me, it’s always been kind of a foregone conclusion that we’re doing it. it’s just kind of—it’s part of the program. i’ve never had a second thought about not doing it. but i think mostly the decision—i know i’m doing the right thing—is based mostly on previous experience with my parents, [what they] did for me. not to follow tradition—to refuse “the program”—would entail inordinate social risk. my view from the clearing crucially, all parent discourse regarding vaccine choice-making—whichever position promoted—expressed the desire to belong. refusal, despite its popularly negative connotations, actually represented a very sociable stance for school parents—as did habitual conformity to vaccine routines for those in the community. simply lumping refusal into the generic categorical construct of its liberatory counterpart, resistance, would have masked this, eliding how social factors, cultural recommendations, and parents’ related identity concerns interacted to support both routine vaccination and its refusal, depending on context. further, using the lens of the anthropology of becoming helped me see how vaccine-related subjectivities are always in the making, not least due to the frequency with which vaccinations are offered for young children. parental confidence in their vaccine decisions must be maintained; claims staked against the grain must be buttressed forcefully and continuously, given extant opposition. vaccination-related practices—chatting about a child’s vaccine status with friends, self-educating, taking a child in for shots—are significantly social events. they index, as well as validate and reinforce, one’s prioritized sociocultural moorings. this holds true even when undertaken alone, or mentally, or otherwise beyond the sight of one’s immediately preferred in-group (e.g., in a doctor’s office or at the computer late at night). seen in this light, refusing to be separated from one’s in-group constitutes a form of insistence, not resistance. it entails association and becoming, not disaffiliating and being sidelined. theorizing refusal in relation to human sociality generates more insight than the negative perspective. rather than signifying disaffiliation—although it can do that too, as when declining a gift (see mcgranahan 2016)—refusal is most productively first appreciated for its generative, affiliative qualities. in this looking-glass light, refusal’s primary meaning or aim is revealed as positively prosocial. by rearranging relations (to paraphrase mcgranahan) in a way that favors preferred social ties over obligations viewed as irrelevant (if acknowledged) or even as undesirable, refusal is a creative, communion-focused act. it is future-oriented, too: it is a promise to one’s child of sustained good health and a vow to one’s associates of continued connection. even the scholars taken to task by sherry ortner (1995, 179) for refusing to acknowledge “patterns of exploitation and power” internal to subaltern communities likely did so to further refusal’s prosocial aims: they probably identified with these communities or some common cause (see simpson 2014).4 to refuse vaccine-preventable diseases—to engage in or endorse vaccination—is to proclaim one’s social communion with the mainstream. similarly, to refuse a vaccination is to proclaim one’s affiliation with significant others from beyond the mainstream. like getting a gang tattoo, slipping on a wedding ring, or binge-watching a popular streamed tv show, vaccine refusal entails an act of identification—of opting in—of proclaiming “i belong” and “i share your values.” through vaccine refusal and related expressions of vaccine caution, parents make their commitment to in-group norms clear, thereby ensuring continued good relations with socially valued others (see brunson 2013; kahan 2013; kahan et al. 2012; sobo 2015b). viewing refusal this way entails a paradigm shift of great significance—one in which rejection is neither the primary feature nor the first step in refusing. key to the affiliative equation infusing this new viewpoint is that rejecting another value set comes after the fact. selection precedes rejection. the difference this makes is vast both for human subject formation on the ground and for how scholars conceptualize vaccine and similar forms of refusal theoretically. vaccine caution and conformity both express and attest to membership, albeit to different groups. each attests to a group-specific definition of the situation. nonconformers additionally express an insistence on exceeding official knowledge-power structures—on possibilities beyond the scope that has been delimited for the mainstream (see biehl and locke 2010). acknowledging the proactive way in which refusals embrace and recommend values and norms typifying one’s preferred in-group allows us to appreciate an underexamined, undertheorized field of cultural activity. by recognizing that to refuse means to receive and to create—by giving primacy to the positive, salutary, generative pole—we can ask better research questions regarding our social and cultural lives. we can carve a new opening onto human experience: one through which to view and consider human becoming as well as human being, and human doing as well as being done to. notes 1. audra simpson (2014, 97) suggests we shift the emphasis away from cross-cultural difference, so that cultures no longer need be presented as “one comprehensive, official story” and internal opposition, struggle, and dissent can be explored. 2. for this and other reasons, many (myself included when writing for vaccine scholars) now label what laypeople call “vaccine refusal” as “vaccine caution” or “vaccine hesitancy.” 3. see weiss 2016 regarding how overt action-against can be slyly co-opted by the state as, for instance, when refusers are forced to recognize state authority and the default position even when resisting these, and in how refusers willingly make sacrifices in service of the state (i.e., in an effort to change state rules for the good of the nation). 4. audra simpson (2014) uses the term ethnographic refusal very differently than sherry ortner (1995), for whom refusal serves as a (failed) protective gesture. for simpson (2014, 34), it is a claim to a “heightened awareness” of the shortcomings of prior ethnographic representations. references biehl, joão, and peter locke 2010 “deleuze and the anthropology of becoming.” current anthropology 51, no. 3: 317–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/651466. brunson, emily k. 2013 “the impact of social networks on parents’ vaccination decisions.” pediatrics 131, no. 5: e1397–e1404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2012-2452. california department of public health, immunization branch 2013 “2012–2013 kindergarten immunization assessment results.” https://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/immunize/pages/immunizationlevels.aspx. committee on the assessment of studies of health outcomes related to the recommended childhood immunization schedule 2013 the childhood immunization schedule and safety: stakeholder concerns, scientific evidence, and future studies. washington, dc: national academies press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13563/the-childhood-immunization-schedule-and-safety-stakeholder-concerns-scientific-evidence. costello-dougherty, malaika 2009 “waldorf-inspired public schools are on the rise.” edutopia, august 31. http://www.edutopia.org/waldorf-public-school-morse. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari 1977 anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by robert hurley, mark seem and helen r.lane. new york: viking. hollander, jocelyn a., and rachel l. einwohner 2004 “conceptualizing resistance.” sociological forum 19, no. 4: 533–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11206-004-0694-5. kahan, dan m. 2013 “a risky science communication environment for vaccines.” science 342, no. 6154: 53–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1245724. kahan, dan m., ellen peters, maggie wittlin, paul slovic, lisa larrimore ouellette, donald braman, and gregory mandel 2012 “the polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks.” nature climate change 2: 732–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1547. mcgranahan, carole 2016 “refusal and the gift of citizenship.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 3: 334–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.03. ortner, sherry b. 1995 “resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal.” comparative studies in society and history 37, no. 1: 173–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500019587. simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sobo, elisa j. 2015a “salutogenic education? movement and whole child health in a waldorf (steiner) school.” medical anthropology quarterly 29, no. 2: 137–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/maq.12140. 2015b “social cultivation of vaccine refusal and delay among waldorf (steiner) school parents.” medical anthropology quarterly 29, no. 3: 381–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/maq.12214. sobo, elisa j., arianna huhn, autumn sannwald, and lori thurman 2016 “information curation among vaccine-cautious parents: web 2.0, pinterest thinking, and pediatric vaccination choice.” medical anthropology, january 26: 1–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2016.1145219. theodossopoulos, dimitrios 2014 “on de-pathologizing resistance.” history and anthropology 25, no. 4: 415–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2014.933101. urla, jacqueline, and justin helepololei 2014 “the ethnography of resistance then and now: on thickness and activist engagement in the twenty-first century.” history and anthropology 25, no. 4: 431–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2014.930456. weiss, erica 2016 “refusal as act, refusal as abstention.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 3: 351–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.05. in the shadow of the palm in the shadow of the palm: dispersed ontologies among marind, west papua sophie chao macquarie university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5434-9238 rosalina,1 a young marind woman from khalaoyam village in merauke (west papua), is crouched, pale and tired, at the foot of the old mango tree. it is the third night running she has been eaten by oil palm. but last night, she died. in her telling: it was pitch black. i was on a plantation with my family. we were on our knees, in a big circle, surrounded by oil palm [elaeis guineensis jacquin, in western scientific taxonomy, or sawit in indonesian].2 our heads were bent, our hands tied behind our backs, and we were barefoot. i could feel my father was beside me, even without looking at him. the others i did not know. some of them had bags over their heads, tied around their necks with rope. everyone was completely silent. silent, silent, silent. nothing happened for a very long time. it was like time had stopped. time had been eaten by the oil palm. then i saw that some of the sawit trees surrounding us were not oil palm trees at all, but soldiers. you see, sawit is like the military: patches of black and green. it kills people. it is powerful. it is indonesian, not papuan. it eats us. sawit’s spines, sharp like the blades of bayonets. its fruit, hard and round, like bullets. red, like blood. then, a shot rang through the darkness—loud and clear. pang! my father collapsed beside me. was it sawit that killed him? then another shot. pang! the person beside him fell to the ground, without any sound. was it sawit? i was the last to be shot. i wonder if it was the military men that shot us, or sawit. i wonder if there is any difference. yes, i must have died last night. nightmares of being “eaten by the oil palm,” or even shot by it, haunt many indigenous marind like rosalina in the upper bian region of merauke, where large-scale monocrop expansion is underway. agribusiness plantations are being promoted by the government of indonesia—the world’s top palm oil producer—as part of the controversial merauke integrated food and energy estate (mifee), a megaproject geared toward food and fuel production for domestic and international markets (awas mifee 2012). between one and two million hectares of forest and swamp land will be converted to privatized concessions under the scheme, primarily for oil palm cultivation. recurring motifs in dreams of being “eaten by the oil palm” include getting lost in the plantations, violent or sudden death, solitude, and hunger. dreamers become spatially disoriented and can no longer sense the passing of time. spirits and the deceased appear alongside bulldozers, the military, and oil palm itself. human bodies are disfigured as oil palm fruit drupes proliferate subcutaneously like cancerous tumors. razor-edged palm thorns incubate between sinew and muscle, perforating the skin like arrows shot from deep inside the dreamer’s entrails. for women, being “eaten by the oil palm” takes the form of tortured birthings of monstrous oil palm children, both alive and stillborn. these dysphoric nocturnal experiences are one of many acts of violence that marind of khalaoyam village, where i conducted my fieldwork, attribute to oil palm, an agentive plant-person of radically destructive inclinations. in this article, i explore the ontological implications of oil palm’s arrival among khalaoyam residents in light of their preexisting relations with plants and animals, as well as the broader sociopolitical context of west papua. as a literal and figurative neophyte (from neos, “new” and phuton, “plant” in greek), oil palm threatens the multispecies cosmology of the forest because it is unwilling to participate in what isabelle stengers (2010, 35) calls “reciprocal capture,” or processes of identity construction where each agent has an interest in seeing the other maintain its existence. instead, oil palm’s self-interested and relentless proliferation subverts morally valued interspecies relations of interessement, michel callon’s (1986, 17) term for the processual “locking” of roles to different entities that are implicated in and sustain each other’s identities (see also marder 2013, 131–38; kirksey 2015, 196–203). the extension of an agentive self to oil palm aligns with marind conceptualizations of personhood as a multispecies rather than specifically human trait. persons, including plants and animals with whom marind share common descent, are endowed with sentient minds that are expressed through their actions or behavior—for instance, the way they move, reproduce, grow, and sustain themselves. these persons also come into existence through their corporeal relations to other species, notably through the exchange and contact of bodily flesh and fluids including blood, water, skin, and sap. such interspecies commonalities are a prevalent understanding of many indigenous groups in which social networks encompass other-than-human actors. in melanesia and amazonia, for instance, plants may be personified as kin and surrogate children, or classified as male or female.3 the sexualization of plants is often associated with procreation and gendered divisions of labor, as well as stages of vegetal growth correlated with the human life cycle and social reproduction.4 while native plants feature prominently in these accounts, less attention has been paid to introduced (or invasive) species, such as oil palm in the upper bian. such plants may not be afforded the same moral attributes as those with a well-established status within local cosmologies. furthermore, ethnographic material on interspecies relations has tended to focus primarily on the agency of the humans involved, rather than the phenomenological lifeworld of their other-than-human counterparts (see schneider 2013). for instance, plants have often been explored primarily in terms of their function and symbolism as foodstuffs within human systems of exchange and resource use (e.g., fox 1977; kahn 1986; eves 1998). recent years have seen renewed attention to vegetal organisms as agentive persons and things, or what lewis daly and colleagues (daly et al. 2016) describe as “botanical ontologies.” this article contributes to the “plant turn” (sheridan 2016, 39) by drawing from the methods and concerns of multispecies ethnography, an emergent interdisciplinary current that explores the agentive lifeworlds of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes in natureculture borderlands (kirksey and helmreich 2010). much of this literature has sought to displace notions of human exceptionalism and to rehabilitate disaffected or exploited species by calling for “passionate immersion” (tsing 2011, 19) in the experiential realms of diverse organisms that humans “become-with” (wright 2014). a growing body of literature exploring plant–human encounters is taking root in multispecies approaches (e.g., hustak and myers 2012; schrader 2012; berrigan 2014; myers 2015; tsing 2015; hartigan 2017). yet discussions of the more-than-human have largely centered on animal-focused studies, often carried out in western, urban, or technoscientific settings. for instance, research on “lively capital” (sunder rajan 2012) within mass-production circuits has focused primarily on animal commodification (e.g., collard 2014; lien 2015; beldo 2017; blanchette 2017) rather than cash-crop production and its perhaps less obvious ethical implications for the plants themselves.5 the exclusion of plants from moral purview, which james wandersee and elisabeth schussler (2001) describe as “plant blindness,” likely stems from the widespread perception in western cultures of vegetal life forms as sessile, unconscious, incapable of feeling pain, and thereby lacking the vitality that characterizes humans and animals (see also hall 2011; marder 2013). figure 1. a mature oil palm fresh fruit bunch. photo by sophie chao. this article provides a counterpoint to the predominantly westernand zoo-centric focus of multispecies ethnography by exploring the perspectives of a group of indigenous papuans in an “out-of-the-way place” (tsing 1993), whose loving relations with kindred forest organisms are jeopardized by the advent of a profoundly immoral and invasive plant-person. while scholars in the environmental humanities speak of the need to cultivate love for other species, many among my interlocutors are grappling with a vegetal being that is violently unloving. furthermore, plant–human relations in merauke problematize the multispecies effort to decenter the human and encourage the flourishing of other beings. such an approach brings us into alliance with a plant that is doing harm to people who are themselves historical victims of the kind of “racializing assemblages” (weheliye 2014) that render them killable or subjectable to dispossession (see also kirksey 2017, 195–96). marinds’ heterogeneous perspectives on oil palm thus invite us to rethink violence in multispecies terms. the exceptionally destructive attributes of oil palm expose the unloving nature of some other-than-human organisms and the situatedness of who is deemed loving or unloving. these affectively charged categories cannot be reduced to human and other-than-human dichotomies. nor can they assume that the perpetrators of violence are always necessarily human. always hungry, sawit has no friends or family khalaoyam village is home to some two hundred marind households who derive their subsistence primarily from hunting, gathering, and fishing. within marind cosmology, the forest constitutes an “ecology of selves” (kohn 2013, 16) in which selfhood is extended to plants and animals. each clan (marind: bawan) is related to grandparent (amai) or sibling (namek) species (see van baal 1966), with whom it shares bodily wetness (dubadub) and skin (igid), the primary markers of relatedness in marind conceptions of personhood. humans and amai sustain their mutual existence through everyday practices of reciprocal care. amai grow to support humans by providing them with food and other resources. in return, marind exercise respect and restraint as they interact with amai in the forest, recall their stories, hunt, gather, and consume them. as they walk across the landscape, marind attune to the presence and activities of amai whose diverse lifeways and relations endow the forest with temporal, moral, and affective texture. people trace kinship connections with each other through the sites at which their respective amai settled, rested, hunted, or fought. sago palms, in particular, are celebrated as symbols and sources of fertility and nourishment. their propagation defines customary land boundaries and natural resource use within the landscape, producing rooted identities among those who manage, exchange, and consume their starch (see also ellen 2006; stasch 2009, 25–30). as they sweat, work, and eat together among sago stands, marind affirm their social relations to each other and derive evident pleasure from observing the growth of sago and its symbionts, which, together with the rivers and forest soil, endow the grove with life-generating wetness. forests and groves thus emerge from the dynamic relations of humans and their plant and animal kin, who participate in each other’s existences as members of a shared community of life, or what marshall sahlins (2011, 2) describes as a “mutuality of being.” figure 2. a marind family walking to the sago grove. photo by sophie chao. in contrast, sawit’s rapacious appetite for land and water is characterized by nonreciprocity and insatiability. forest organisms are obliterated as vast swaths of forest are burned or felled and replaced with 10,000to 100,000-hectare concessions dominated by a single plant. sawit gnaws away at the soil, leading to erosion, abrasion, and subsequent siltation (obidzinski et al. 2012). when a prolonged drought afflicted merauke in 2015 and 2016, young and old alike affirmed that sawit drinking up the wetness of the rivers caused this unprecedented event. as he described the bulldozers clearing the forest to make way for irrigation channels, antonius, a man in his twenties, noted how the redirection of the bian river left humans, mangroves, and animals parched. picking up a clump of dry earth in a razed sago grove, he compared sawit to suanggi, or perpetrators of black magic. just like oil palm depletes the wetness of the forest, suanggi attack their victims by sapping their fluids until their bodies dry out, leaving only a tottering husk of skin prior to their imminent collapse and death. sawit also pollutes watercourses with the effluents from the mills where it is processed. after failing to catch fish to feed her three children, selly, a middle-aged primary school teacher, pointed to the murky surface of the bian river and told me how endemic fish and amphibians were “losing their way” in their murky milieus. underwater, riverine life forms become “drunk on poison” and suffer from eutrophication as oxygen availability is redirected from aquatic biodiversity to rapidly growing algae. meanwhile on land, the skin of terrestrial organisms rots away from irritations caused by pesticides that seep into the water they drink and bathe in. figure 3. skin infections are symptomatic of the “drying out” of place caused by oil palm expansion. photo by sophie chao. sawit’s insatiable greed is accompanied by a solitary mode of existence. as we drove past a 20,000-hectare concession, yulianus, antonius’s brother, contrasted the uniform landscape to the diverse flora and fauna of the forest, concluding that sawit “has few friends” and “likes to be alone.” indeed, few life forms are able to make a “companion species” (haraway 2008) of sawit in agribusiness plantations, which are characterized by low canopies, sparse undergrowth, unstable microclimates, high temperatures, and frequent chemical spraying (fitzherbert et al. 2008). the conversion of natural forests to plantations also increases habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss, and forms impervious barriers to species migration (meijaard and douglas 2013). yet at the same time as many khalaoyam community members struggle to curb the expansion of oil palm, they have learned from their urban kin and ngo workers that they themselves routinely use and consume foods and goods that contain palm oil—instant noodles, ketchup, shampoo, and soap, for instance. as we queued at the local kiosk to purchase biscuits for the school fair, maria mahuze, a primary school teacher, acknowledged: “we hate sawit, but we eat it every day. we have no choice.” this is compounded by the fact that palm oil is difficult to identify as an ingredient because it is usually labeled as generic vegetable oil, or one of more than two hundred different organic compounds.6 crumpling the biscuit packet with frustration, maria commented: “sawit is everywhere, but it keeps its secrets well.” domesticated and foreign perpetua, a midwife in her late fifties with whom i often processed sago in the forest, frequently described oil palm in contrast to bamboo, the amai of her clan. the main difference, perpetua noted, was that bamboo was native and wild, whereas “sawit is domesticated and foreign—it grows here, but its roots are elsewhere.” underlying this statement are two sets of distinctions central to marind multispecies personhood-making—the wild (indonesian: liar) and the domesticated (pelihara), and the native (asli) and nonnative (pendatang). to be native means to retain a certain degree of wildness and, through that, of freedom. various forms of restrained care ensure a balance maintained between respecting individuals’ autonomy and establishing relations with them. for instance, marind are reluctant to engage in horticulture because it involves overly manipulating plants’ growth and taking away their freedom. they do not rear animals for the same reason.7 instead, marind engage in indirect acts of “minimal manipulation” (groube 1989, 300) that make the environment more conducive to animal and plant well-being. for instance, they support sago growth by thinning the canopy, removing epiphytes from the base of the tree and burning vegetation that inhibits the growth of suckers. similar principles shape interactions among marind themselves. people create relations through collective acts of exchange, but they also actively avoid imposing themselves on others in ways that violate their autonomy of thought and action. otherness as the focus of social relations (see stasch 2009) thus operates within and across species lines among marind. each organism is as much the product of multiple human acts of restrained care as it is the product of the organism’s own self-willed modes of growth and relations. respect for the capacity of beings to live autonomously yet in relation to each other within multispecies social and ecological networks (collard 2014, 154) enables loving relations between humans and their forest kin. in contrast, agriculture, and more specifically monoculture, entails the radical reorganization and simplification of the environment toward human ends, at the expense of natural diversity (j. scott 1998, 2; tsing 2011, 19; marder 2013, 55). indeed, the monocrop plantation model is favored because the product harvested—being uniform in size, dimensions, and yield—fulfills the criteria of a homogeneous market commodity, thereby reducing the risk of revenue fluctuation (j. scott 1998, 18). agribusiness cultivation disrupts the ethos of restrained care that enables loving interspecies relations and instead embodies an extreme form of domestication or violent care—the “flip side” (tsing 2005, 30) of valued wildness. the uncontrolled proliferation of sawit results in a sort of ontological top-heavy fraction in which oil palm unilaterally imposes its presence on others, thus casting the reciprocal relations of marind and their amai kin into lethal cosmological imbalance. many of my interlocutors contextualize the ontological predation of sawit within the broader sociopolitical history of west papua, where continued internal colonialism goes hand in hand with egregious human rights abuses, community impoverishment, rampant exploitation of natural resources, cultural assimilation, and heightened military presence (see timmer 2007). in particular, the proliferation of sawit bears ominous resonances with the once state-endorsed and now spontaneous influx of (primarily muslim) non-papuan settlers in west papua, further boosted by the labor opportunities presented by the mifee project (farhadian 2005, 63). just as oil palm takes over customary forests to the detriment of marind and their other-than-human kin, so too marind are increasingly outnumbered by non-papuan transmigrants, who in 2017, comprised some 68 percent of merauke’s population (elmslie 2017). many khalaoyam villagers also associate sawit with the national indonesian army, as we saw in rosalina’s dream. as with military garrisons and training grounds, of which there are many in the national border zone of merauke, plantations extend across vast areas of land and remain off-limits to nonpersonnel, with trespass heavily sanctioned. company guards and company-hired military units strictly guard the entrances. rows of equidistant oil palm trees crisscross the plantations much like a regiment of obedient, disciplined soldiers, identical to each other in appearance and size. young marind men sometimes compared the temporality of sawit’s homogeneous, controlled growth and regular harvesting to the appearance and movements of marching soldiers. they also noted that terms used in the context of military spatial organization are also employed by oil palm companies to describe the breakdown of plantations into divisions, districts, building complexes, blocks, and echelons. in historical terms, the arrival of sawit is the latest in a long series of confrontations between marind and unloving foreign others. dutch rule and the influence of missionaries led to forced sedenterization, the imposed cultivation of nonnative crops, and the abolishment of ritual practices that had once sustained kinship bonds between clans and with amai. while foreign plume-hunters decimated bird of paradise populations in the forest (swadling 1996, 176–99), viral and bacterial organisms ravaged marind communities in the form of influenza and lymphogranuloma venereum (van baal 1966, 24–25).8 with the influx of indonesian officials, settlers, and military forces following the transfer of the administration of west papua to the republic of indonesia in 1963, large-scale landscape conversions continued in the form of rice cultivation, oil palm plantations, and mining and logging concessions (monbiot 1989; marr 2011).9 in this light, the violence wrought by sawit constitutes the latest emanation of memoria passionis, a term used by west papuans to denote the collective suffering and oppression they have endured since the region’s forceful incorporation into the indonesian state (hernawan and van den broek 1999, 8). sawit participates in the region’s ongoing domination as the state’s “biological ally,” a term developed by alfred crosby (2003, 52) to refer to plants and animals that thrived as they traveled alongside human colonizers across geographical realms. as concession boundaries in merauke continue to multiply, the powers that govern the expansion of this alien and invasive plant remain firmly rooted in the political heart of the country—jakarta. where is its family, where is its home? sawit plantations are the latest addition to a network of state and corporate projects that together constitute a topography of terror not unlike the one explored by chris ballard (2002) among amungme near the freeport copper and gold mine in west papua. plantations, along with the other nodes of this pervasive network—roads, military posts, kiosks, and clinics—are pharmakonic in isabelle stengers’s (2010, 29) sense of being uncertain in their effects, alternately poison or remedy. for instance, plantations come with attractive compensation packages, welfare schemes, and employment opportunities for indigenous landowners. yet in fact, oil palm companies do not implement most of these (largely verbal) agreements due to lack of funds and goodwill, or else the results fall short of communities’ expectations. corporations promote agribusiness as a means to integrate rural communities into a modern and civilized lifestyle. instead, geometric concessions of strictly guarded boundaries disconnect humans from their kindred species and thwart the multispecies movements through which places and persons accrue meaning. in highland papua new guinea, porgerans affirm “the land is ending” because of gold mining and its morally laden cosmological and social impact (jacka 2015, 240). a similar expression exists among khalaoyam community members who affirm that with the advent of sawit, time is “ending” or “drying out.” many of my interlocutors point to the disappearance of forest organisms as evidence of this radical temporal rupture. for instance, as we walked through the rubble of a razed sacred forest, marcus, an elder in his seventies known for his skill in imitating animal sounds, noted how the call of birds marking the break of dawn and the fall of night had become rare. hunting, fishing, and gathering had become difficult because the times of fruit maturation, bird and animal migration, and fish and amphibian reproduction had halted indefinitely. by imposing a mono-time of homogeneous growth on forest organisms, sawit obstructs their different temporalities of life and the very possibility of their continued existence and relations. its proliferation obliterates the spatially experienced past that, in turn, forestalls the possibility of a meaningful present and thwarts the shared futures of the forest’s dwindling communities of life. sawit’s ontology constitutes a doubling up of sorts. on the one hand, it is almost oversaturated with meanings that relate to its destructive effects on space, time, and the morally valued reciprocity of multispecies relatings in the forest. on the other hand, it is characterized by a deep-seated ambiguity resulting from a lack of knowledge on the part of khalaoyam’s inhabitants about what sawit wants, where it comes from, and how they might establish relations with it. ruben, a young man who had once been involved in a rice-cultivation project near merauke city, noted that sawit itself is in its early years of infancy, having only been planted in the last two or three years. little is known of its modes of growth because, as ruben said, “sawit is still a child.” the plant’s ambivalence is heightened by the absence of encounter with sawit’s human counterparts by khalaoyam villagers. the nature of oil palm production means that plantation workers are few, seasonal, and spread out over vast expanses of land. higher-level company staff are housed in the plantation living quarters, mills, and offices, restricted in their access to company personnel. figure 4. in most of merauke, oil palm plantations are still in their infancy. photo by sophie chao. the ambiguity of sawit’s ontology gave rise to widespread curiosity among my interlocutors. many looked to church organizations, ngos, and myself for information about the processes, labors, actors, and institutions involved in palm oil production. they found themselves intrigued by how oil palm transforms from plant to product as it travels from the nursery to the plantation, and beyond that to the mill, refinery, and to supermarket shelves. younger marind often asked me about the countries and communities that would eventually purchase the palm oil grown on their customary lands. when contrasting the destructive effects of sawit with the reciprocal relations of care characterizing their relations to forest organisms, my friends pondered whether sawit has “ever known the wild” or “what it is to be free,” in other places, at other times, and with other companions. as she watched truckloads of newly sprouted seedlings rumble down the road from merauke city, elena balagaize, an old widow originally from the upstream village of mirav, mused: “sawit, too, has a family and a home, somewhere far away. where is its family, where is its land? does it not miss them? does it not want to return to them?” the opacity of sawit generates sentiments of fear, anger, and dislike among many khalaoyam community members who affirm that sawit thrives off its condition of domestication without qualms about the annihilation of other species’ worlds. yet oil palm also comes with the potential of progress and development. landowners who endorse the plantation sector take pride in contributing to regional economic development and national food security, as well as in helping feed the biofuel-hungry nations of europe and the united states. oil palm may be destructive, but it also offers the possibility of new connections to faraway places, peoples, and profit. otherness coalesces in the body of sawit as an ambivalent object of longing and loathing (see rutherford 2003). finally, a small number of villagers feel sorry for sawit because it has been forcefully uprooted from its native home and overwhelmingly subjected to human control. for instance, as we sat in the community hall watching drone footage that i had captured of a nearby oil palm plantation, yulianus wondered if sawit ever felt “lonely” in the uniformity of the monocrop landscape. his comment reminded his sister, evelina, of a recent consultation organized by the plantation operators, during which she had learned that oil palm seeds were genetically modified by humans and made to grow in plastic bags and industrial nurseries. more than twenty-five different kinds of pesticides, she told us, were used to spur their maturation and those that failed to perform were culled en masse. evelina pitied these kinless seeds that she called “orphans” because their growth and development (and eventually, death) did not occur freely but rather under total human control. similarly, mariana, a young girl who had recently given birth to her first child, expressed sorrow over the fate of oil palm fruit—or “sawit children” (indonesian: anak sawit)—that she had seen ripped from their parents during harvesting and unceremoniously flung into overloaded trucks “like dead bodies.” figure 5. forest cleared to make way for an oil palm plantation. photo by sophie chao. sawit does violence to the inhabitants of the upper bian because it eats the land, rivers, and forest of marind and their other-than-human forest kin. yet the plant itself is also violently manipulated and exploited, burned up as calories and combustibles by bodies and vehicles far removed from its source. consumed at the pyre of modernity, sawit is at once victim and driver of what michael marder (2014) aptly calls the “pyropolitics” of the contemporary era. and while real fires, set by oil palm companies for land-clearing purposes, ravage the landscapes of the upper bian, sawit also fires the imagination of khalaoyam inhabitants, who express a deep sense of curiosity as much as animosity in their speculations about sawit. tossing and turning with ontology ethnographies of agribusiness have attended primarily to the experiences of peasant groups involved in the plantation sector as workers or smallholders (e.g., mccarthy 2010; dove 2011; li 2014; tammisto 2018). in the upper bian, by contrast, villagers suffer oil palm’s relentless expansion even as they remain excluded from its sites and circuits of production. more importantly, the adverse impacts of agribusiness are not attributed to the humans and institutions driving oil palm expansion, but to oil palm itself. giving center stage to plants in a world where vegetal beings are violent and humans their victims reveals that human exceptionalism may constitute just one of many possible kinds of destructive exceptionalism, one in which other-than-human life forms might figure not as “unloved others” (rose and van dooren 2011) but rather as unloving others. in positioning themselves as one kind of self among a plethora of agentive life forms, marind embody a posthuman ethic that drives theories of ontological anthropology and multispecies ethnography. the insights revealed by plant–human relations of the upper bian suggest that central ethical tenets of the multispecies approach—respect, response-ability, immersion, and care, for instance—could usefully draw from the cosmologies of indigenous groups like marind who incorporate other-than-human entities within their social relationships. at the same time, the forces of oil palm as lively capital in merauke invite greater attention on the part of anthropologists to processes of ontological transformation. in particular, such approaches might attend to how new and not-always-human actants, such as oil palm, not only travel across and disrupt ontologies (bessire and bond 2014, 446) but also actively participate in the fashioning of contested and dispersed realities across scale and locale. this approach could be extended to explore the moral position occupied (sometimes literally) by other mass-cultivated or reared and often introduced species—soy, sugarcane, jatropha, and cattle, for instance—within indigenous lifeworlds, and their ontic relations (or lack thereof) with native life forms of established cultural significance, human or other. ontological analytics and the multispecies turn are closely linked in their drive toward an “anthropology beyond the human” (kohn 2013), inspired in part by the many non-western “sentient ecolog[ies]” (anderson 2000, 116) that extend personhood to all beings with a perspective. despite their shared intellectual and ethical drive, however, their compatibility in terms of understanding sawit’s lifeway proves problematic. on the one hand, the anthropology of ontology suggests that we take the diverse beliefs and discourses on sawit upheld by khalaoyam community members as possibly real in their own right. on the other hand, an interdisciplinary approach to sawit’s lifeworld, as the multispecies turn favors, would likely move away from what might be seen as the anthropomorphization of sawit by marind. it might reveal all kinds of ecological facets of sawit’s lifeway that, first, my interlocutors might not know, and second, that might demonstrate how their truths about sawit diverge from what western science tells us of oil palm’s attributes and effects. for instance, recent advances in oil palm ecological science demonstrate that oil palm plantations can support communities of flora and fauna that have found ways of living in symbiosis with sawit.10 the drought attributed to sawit also results from fluctuations in temperature between the atmosphere and the ocean, otherwise known as the el niño–southern oscillation cycle. if some among my interlocutors pity oil palm for its totalizing subjection to human control, my own research in an oil palm plantation revealed that breeders and geneticists in fact become deeply emotionally invested in the seeds they manipulate (chao, forthcoming). and as damaging as oil palm is to the people of khalaoyam, it remains the optimal choice in terms of land-to-yield ratio compared to other vegetal oil competitors—the lesser of two evils, so to speak. of course, whether and how perspectives on oil palm differ across actors and sites is something to be discovered rather than assumed. oil palm’s reality does not consist solely in its narrow ecological entanglements but in its placement within a historically specific situation that includes global capitalist trends, regional geopolitics, and national developmental and political projects. in many ways, my informants’ multifaceted characterization of oil palm captures elements of this wider reality in ways that a purely secular technoscientific approach would not. one might therefore approach khalaoyam inhabitants’ accounts of oil palm as an elaboration of the scientific worldview, not (just) an alternative to it. at the same time, my interlocutors conceive the plant’s reality in highly heterogeneous ways, from driver of destruction to victim of human exploitation. their theories of reality are perpetually in the making and transform in the light of new encounters, experiences, and knowledge. from a western secular scientific perspective, oil palm may not be the antisocial creature that many khalaoyam individuals describe. yet to refute their worldview on this basis and focus purely on oil palm’s generative entanglements is to ignore (perhaps even perpetuate) the violence enacted by oil palm against a people themselves subjected to ongoing political and cultural discrimination. at the same time, to refrain from imparting ways of knowing sawit rooted in alternative ontological frameworks also seems unsatisfactory, as it suggests that ontologies are somehow bounded, that communication across them is impossible, or that doing so in some sense patronizes or corrupts our informants’ theories of reality. indeed, my interlocutors’ own curiosity about the lifeworld of sawit beyond merauke—its origins, kin, and home—suggest they recognize that the unloving impacts they suffer from sawit may obscure loving relations that the plant entertains with other life forms in other places. the moral complexities generated by this recognition can equally act as a fruitful avenue for rethinking discourses and practices surrounding unloving humans. whose reality matters (more) under such circumstances? how do we find a balance between the multiple and often contested realities of humans about other-than-humans and the realities of other-than-humans beyond their human context? weaving together the lifeworlds of different species as situated (and sometimes suffering) beings is a matter of ethics and responsibility. as donna haraway (1997, 129) notes, choosing which realities to follow and moving transversally across cosmologies always marks an analytical, imaginative, physical, and political choice. whether a species is loving or unloving, and therefore loved or unloved, comes down to perspective. eschewing representationalist approaches to non-western worldviews, eduardo viveiros de castro (2011, 135) notes that taking what people think as expressive of a truth does not necessarily mean believing in that truth, but rather sustaining its possibility. however, the consequences of exhorting openness to alternate realities in the real world (so to speak) of advocacy can prove challenging. for instance, positing sawit as an antisocial person and time-eater—as “true” as this may be—in multistakeholder negotiations with states and oil palm corporations can reinforce entrenched stereotypes of papuans as primitive and superstitious peoples, in turn enhancing the perceived need for the kind of development that drives projects like mifee in the first place. khalaoyam land rights activists themselves are acutely conscious of the politics of ontological disclosure and performance as they struggle for recognition in the face of multinational conglomerates, state agencies, and international financial institutions. their pursuit of ecological justice entails astute negotiations and collaborations (kirksey 2012, 1, 5) not only with oil palm but also with the human others who constitute this industrial plant’s allies. in these complex plant–human entanglements, how indigenous actors engage in strategic self-representation before powerful and predatory audiences (see rutherford 2012) profoundly determines the shape of reality itself. dispersed ontologies moving away from cartesian dualisms, ontological anthropologists reject concepts as static, discrete, and universal entities and instead attend to “the web of relations which inhere in things and in which things inhere” (m. scott 2013a, 863). plants, in broad terms, are good to think as an embodiment of relational becoming. they demonstrate remarkable phenotypic plasticity in their interactions with environmental surrounds. plants’ existence is also one of perpetual metamorphosis. growth and senescence occur simultaneously across their leafy limbs and radiating roots. as “sub-organismic processes and supra-organismic ensembles” (marder 2016, 64–65), vegetal beings incarnate the dividual par excellence (battaglia 2017, 18–19). at the same time, the specific plant that is sawit teaches us a less appreciated (but no less politically significant) dimension of relational living/thinking: its limits. like settlers, the indonesian state, and the military, oil palm does not belong in merauke because it fails to participate in the reciprocal exchanges through which places and persons become physically and ideologically consubstantial (leach 2003; stasch 2009). its proliferation erodes the “cosmic economy of sharing” (bird-david 1992, 30) of the forest and violates the principle of restrained care that enables loving relations across species lines. instead, oil palm constitutes a vegetal form of “significant otherness” (haraway 2003) that imposes itself on preexisting multispecies lifeworlds and appropriates the resources necessary to their survival only to sustain its own. as i demonstrate in this article, investigating plants like oil palm as antagonistic yet ambivalent actants has consequences for anthropological methods and ethics in worlds where opacity proves constitutive of meaningful ontologies (graeber 2015). indigenous theories of reality in the upper bian are far from singular or static. at once agent and subject of destruction and exploitation, oil palm multiplies ontologically across divergent interpretations of the plant’s ways and wants. whose reality matters, how, and to what end complicates the notion of bounded ontologies as these reveal themselves to be “sticky,” a term sara ahmed (2010, 90) has developed to describe sites of ambivalent affects produced by complex histories of contact between bodies, beings, and objects. i offer the notion of dispersed ontologies to highlight the entanglements through which human and other-than-human realities come into existence, and the limits to which interspecies relationings are possible and mutual in the capitalist ecologies of monocrop plantations. dispersed ontologies help characterize the ontological live-liness of interspecies engagements. these engagements are pregnant with the possibility of fusion and fission. for instance, the ontology of the forest is dispersed across marind and the manifold, agentive other-than-human beings with whom marind entertain loving relations of care and reciprocity. no single entity, human or other, constitutes the center of this dispersed ontology. rather, all beings participate equally, if differently, in enlivening each other’s existences in morally valued and affectively charged ways. just as there is no singular marind reality, so too sawit constitutes a “boundary object” (star and griesemer 1989) that accrues meaning as it travels across spatial and conceptual realms, drawing together disparate individuals, communities, and institutions. we too participate in the dispersed ontology of oil palm by consuming its oil, which is present in over half of all packaged goods in the world. but just as dispersion has no permanent center, so its limits and impossibilities are contingent. “nondual” worlds—michael w. scott’s (2013b) term for ontologies that arise from relations in perpetual flux—may not always be able to fit all exigencies, or to contract or expand their scales to absorb and accommodate all kinds of others, particularly when these others, like sawit in the upper bian, do not reciprocate in lively dispersion. the “co-opting of strangers” (margulis and sagan 2000, 20) in symbiotic relationship can fail. dispersed ontologies are more akin to improvisations than choreographies (cussins 1996), in that “contact zones” (haraway 2008, 244) are not always successfully or evenly achieved, and those who participate in them are not always expected, invited, or wanted. in this light, distinguishing wanted from unwanted relations, imposed and impossible transformations, is part of recognizing the tipping point of ontological resilience (jacka 2015, 1). for many in khalaoyam, sawit embodies the limit of reciprocal relations across species lines. if ontic dispersion characterizes the plant–person relations of the upper bian, epistemic dispersion may help us apprehend the reality of sawit in ways that transcend conventional cultural anthropological research techniques (see hartigan 2014; myers 2015). as humans, we may never be able to inhabit oil palm’s umwelt, the german biologist jakob von uexküll’s (1957) term for the perceptual world of other-than-human organisms. however, we may deepen our understanding of its dispersed ontology by means of an epistemic nomadism that draws diverse actors and institutions toward a “non-unitary vision” (braidotti 2006, 11) of oil palm as plant, part, and product. insights into the realities and relations of oil palm and its multisited “social worlds” (barnes 2016) might weave together history, economics, philosophy, biology, plant science, anthropology, and indigenous cosmologies, much as critical plant studies scholars are now attempting to do. such approaches engage knowledges, practices, and actors through transformative dialogue in a form of inter disciplinary and inter sited cross-pollination (see marder 2016). indigenous conceptualizations of plants as animate beings, for instance, might be brought into conversation with the emergent science of plant intelligence (e.g., trewavas 2005; chamovitz 2013). similarly, indigenous notions of vegetal agency might be explored through the optic of evolutionary niche construction to examine how oil palm shapes and enhances its environment through consequential, if unconscious, modes of environmental engineering. certainly, navigating the politics of “situated knowledges” (haraway 1988) is challenging. yet working transversally across epistemic divides may allow new ways of understanding and relating with oil palm to flourish—otherand wise-ly. the trees that won’t hug back my host sister mina and i were waiting for our flight from merauke to jayapura. mina, who was born and raised in khalaoyam, was texting family, while i was reading an article arguing fervently that donald trump was the best solution to tackling “free spenders, organizers, race baiters, intellectuals, tree huggers, and professional value arbitrators.” mina glanced over and picked up on the word tree, which she had learned a few weeks before. “what is a tree-hugger?” she asked me. i explained that it meant an environmental campaigner, the expression derived from activists literally hugging trees to protest their felling. mina went silent, then asked: “but what if the trees won’t hug you back?” the ethical and ecological urgency driving much of the multispecies and eco-philosophical literature suggests that while multispecies encounters do not guarantee either happy or unhappy endings (haraway 2008, 15), generally the human party is assumed to be committing violence to its other-than-human companions by failing to exercise respect, curiosity, and care toward them. yet the call to respect the difference of the other-than-human in a nonhierarchical way proves limited if it fails to recognize that it is not always a human/other-than-human dualism that underlies species hierarchies, and that humans are not necessarily the more powerful entities in interspecies relations. in the upper bian, it is the person-plant of oil palm that obliterates other species, and a particular group of humans that is struggling to relate to the “unexpected country” (haraway 2007) of monocrop plantations. in this context, assuming that only humans are capable of violence to other-than-human life forms may constitute yet another instance of human exceptionalism. if giving voice to marginalized beings on the edge of extinction is never morally unproblematic, to “stay with the trouble” (haraway 2016) of proliferating other-than-human entities that, as mina put it, “won’t hug back” is perhaps a thornier task. here, taking love seriously in plant–human relations (see archambault 2016) also requires taking seriously its affective counterparts—hate, pity, and ambivalence. some plants commit “acts of love” (marder 2016, 25), while others commit acts of violence. “double death” (rose 2004, 175) in the upper bian is the shared fate of all beings eaten by oil palm. in these multispecies entanglements, some humans bear the palm in profit, while others must bear with it. multispecies ethnographers have tended to highlight sensorial immersion, phenomenal contact, affective receptivity, and empathetic response-ability as valuable tactics in encountering (and taking seriously) our other-than-human companions. encounterings (despret 2004), entanglements (kohn 2013), fingeryeyes (hayward 2010), touch (barad 2012), and immersion (tsing 2011) are some of the many words used to describe interspecies relationships in the phenomenal sense. for khalaoyam residents, however, the difficulty of encountering oil palm, combined with the elusiveness of its supply chain and the facelessness of its consumers, are precisely what give rise to its ambivalent ontology. this suggests that attention needs to be paid to the absence and impossibility of multispecies encounters and relations, as well as the role of the imagination in the making of speculated encounters. to not be able to touch or be touched can also be the source of creative imagination, a form of speculative haptics (i.e., the imagination of what the touch of a possible encounter might entail) rather than haptic speculation (i.e., the imagination triggered by the touch of an actual encounter; puig de la bellacasa 2009, 310–11). distance, loss, and imagined encounters matter just as much—albeit immaterially—in the entanglements of species. perhaps the anthropology of ontology, with its emphasis on taking reality seriously, needs to make space for a speculative practice of the imagination whose effects stem from what is not there, but could be. figure 6. sago fronds reflected in sago starch and water. photo by sophie chao. multispecies ethnographers have drawn our attention to the ethical importance of practicing “multispecies love” (tsing 2011, 19) in an era of widespread ecological destruction. the violence of plants on persons in the upper bian suggests equal attention must be paid to unloving others who may or may not be human. to care about the unloving is not (only) to redeem them as necessarily (or possibly) lovable in reciprocal ways. it is also to accept and recognize their unlovingness and consequent unloveability as meaningful in its own right. never a straightforward either/or, loving and unloving as forms of care move across and through diversely situated bodies and practices. it is these transformations in multispecies loves and loathings that shape the lifeworlds of peoples like marind of khalaoyam who are most deeply and directly mired in the morally fraught predicament of interspecies care. notes acknowledgments i thank the marind communities of the upper bian for their hospitality and critical insight into the analysis set out in this article. i also thank the members of the merauke secretariat for peace and justice for their invaluable logistical and moral support throughout the research. the content of this article benefited from inputs from jaap timmer, eve vincent, and eben kirksey. i also thank karin bolender, laura mclauchlan, cymene howe, and three anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology. this research was supported by an endeavour international postgraduate scholarship, a wenner-gren dissertation fieldwork grant, and a macquarie university fieldwork research grant. 1. all names are pseudonyms. 2. most marind in khalaoyam communicate in bahasa indonesia with each other and neighboring ethnic groups. in this article, i indicate whether non-english terms are indonesian or marind. 3. see nimuendajú 1939, 90 and 1946, 60; tuzin 1972, 234; seeger 1981, 105; kahn 1988, 44; battaglia 1990, 49; and gregor and tuzin 2001, 8. 4. see malinowski 1935, 52–55; c. hugh-jones 1979, 114–132, 200–217; s. hugh-jones 1979, 165–73; descola 1997, 93–98; heckler 2004, 243–48; and dundon 2005. 5. while there is a vast anthropological literature on agriculture and plant domestication (e.g., morgan 1877; childe 1928; smith 1995), only a few scholars have investigated the subjectivity and agency of the plants involved (e.g., mendum 2009; van dooren 2012; van der veen 2014). 6. here, see http://www.palmoilinvestigations.org/names-for-palm-oil.html. 7. the only exceptions to this rule are kava and pigs, which are cultivated and raised by marind as ritual foods for large congregations and feasts, respectively (verschueren 1970, 45). 8. lymphogranuloma venereum is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium chlamydia trachomatis. 9. although rice was not discussed by my interlocutors because the crop is not grown in 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sorrow and joy: cultivating relations with the unseen in muslim devotion stefan williamson fa lund university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7476-3356 “you felt it last night, didn’t you?” vedat asked me as we packed away the makeshift sound system set up for the celebration the previous night. “there was a real festive atmosphere in the room. when we were chanting together, i felt it . . . i really did. as if he was there with us . . . listening.” the previous evening i had joined a cramped gathering in a room at the back of an apartment block in eastern turkey.1 around forty men had met to celebrate the birthday of imam ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet muhammad and the first imam for shiʿi muslims. the atmosphere was unmistakably festive, the attendees filled with enthusiasm and excitement as they dispersed into the town’s dimly lit streets at the end of the night. yet vedat was referring to something less evident for the unattuned: the unseen presence of another member of the prophet’s family, imam mahdi, the “living imam,” said to be concealed by god on earth only to return before judgment day. for vedat, the prophet and his family are not mere historical or symbolic figures or moral exemplars for a pious life; he feels them viscerally and relates to them as co-present in this world. two community leaders started off the evening with long speeches recounting the life of imam ali. vedat then took the microphone. he had collected and rehearsed verses of praise poetry to recite for the occasion. although not considered to have the best voice in town, he was an enthusiastic reciter with a huge repertoire drawn from the latest recordings of azeri-turkish devotional poetry from neighboring iran and azerbaijan. he chose a popular poem called “i am haydari.” haydari, meaning a devotee of haydar, an epithet for ali. vedat began with a verse praising ali, invoking devotion and loyalty to him in a self-effacing tone. kimlər əliyə ziddi səvab dəftəri olmaz whoever opposes ali will receive no divine reward vallah əli bir zatdır onun bənzəri olmaz by god, ali is a person with no comparison dünya deyilən evdə ona müşteri olmaz whoever calls this world their home will not be his customer məndən əlinin nökərinin nökəri olmaz i am not worthy to be the servant of the servant of ali kimlər əlini zikr eliyər nökəriyem men i am the servant of whoever praises ali and olsun əlinin canına heydəriyəm men i swear on ali’s soul, i am haydari audio 1. the source of vedat’s recitation. “heydəriyəm” performed at a birthday celebration for imam ali in azerbaijan by the author of the poem elşən xəzər. as vedat reached the chorus, he encouraged those present to chant the refrain, “oh, ali, oh, ali, oh, dearest ali.” visibly uplifted, the previously subdued listeners began waving their hands in the air, clapping gently, and chanting in unison. some even rose to their feet. the atmosphere resembled that of a birthday party: the room was decorated with colorful balloons and banners, and small tables with plates of dried fruits and nuts were scattered around to accompany the sweet black tea served by the young boys of the house. as the guests sang the last chorus, an oversized birthday cake, iced with “happy birthday, imam ali,” was brought in. the cake cutting was accompanied by a loud communal chant of the salavat—the arabic formula intoned regularly as a salutation on the prophet and his family. after eating the cake, the men rose to their feet again to recite the final supplications of the evening. vedat clearly felt overjoyed by the success of the occasion. he was pleased with the response to his recitation, but, more important, he felt profoundly that we had been in the presence of the family of the prophet, that imam mahdi had been there, listening with us. “may he accept our efforts, inşallah [god willing],” he uttered to me. “may we never be separated from the family of the prophet.” the presence of beings like imam mahdi at a birthday party held for another member of the family of the prophet appears out of step with anthropological accounts of islam. savoring cake, reciting praise poetry, and feeling the co-presence of an invisible imam all point toward a different modality of muslim religiosity concerned with the realm of the unseen, one hitherto marginalized in accounts that present islam as a religion “categorically averse to immanence” (mittermaier 2019, 7). despite the centrality of god and other supernatural figures like the prophet and his family in islam, their active presence in the lives of muslims has been backgrounded in much ethnographic writing. while earlier anthropological and orientalist studies often documented beliefs and practices such as saint veneration and spirit possession, these were presented as unorthodox, “local folk” islam, in contrast with the sober orthodoxy of the scholarly islam of literate clerics (mcloughlin 2007). anthropologists have since moved away from this dichotomous view of islam, but the more recent debate that has dominated the subfield—concerning ethics, piety, and the “everyday” (fadil and fernando 2015; schielke 2010)—has overly focused on “this-worldly-oriented forms of religiosity” (mittermaier 2012, 249), sidelining the kinds of encounters and relations with more-than-human beings that prove central to the experience of vedat and other muslims. in this essay, i argue for a relational understanding of islam that pays attention to the ways individuals and communities live alongside, and cultivate relations with, immaterial more-than-human beings. muslim lives, like all others, exist in “networks of relationships” (orsi 2013). this comprises both horizontal interhuman relations and vertical ones, which include not only a powerful monotheistic god (schielke 2019) but other immaterial beings as well, such as the imams who are taken to be literally present in the everyday circumstances of believers’ lives. for my interlocutors, forming relations with the prophet and his family proved essential to muslim life. like other religious practitioners, shiʿi muslims do not just “believe” in the imams from a distance but deeply feel and sense them in ways that challenge modernist sensory modes and capacities. while the critique of “belief” as the primary religious experience is long-standing (lopez 1998; asad 1993), the alternative prioritizing of the body and disciplinary practices have inadvertently perpetuated an individualist notion of the religious subject by focusing on disciplinary practices and discursive control (furey 2012). bringing relationality into play in the anthropology of islam by attending to muslim relationships with more-than-human beings allows us to move beyond accounts of ethical self-cultivation and everyday ambiguity to understand how muslim subjectivity is constituted relationally, how the religious subject is always also a relational subject. however, understanding the ways in which the lives of religious practitioners are intimately bound up with the immaterial more-than-human presents significant challenges for an anthropological engagement with religion. supernatural figures have been neglected in the anthropology of religion, where they have appeared as mere symbols or “social facts,” rather than as actors alongside humans (chakrabarty 2008, 11), symptomatic of euro-american scholarship’s prioritizing of “absence” over “presence” (orsi 2016). multispecies ethnographers have shown how human social worlds are always more-than-human social worlds composed of “relations between humans, non-human life, and lively materials which shape, and are shaped by, political, economic, and cultural forces” (kirksey and helmreich 2010, 545). yet they have mostly stopped short of considering the ways in which human lives are also entangled with supernatural beings and forces. mayanthi fernando (2017, 111) sees this omission as the result of secular-modern attachments to the “material and visible as the site of the real.” the materialist epistemology assumed by “post-humanist” scholars, propped up by the modern ocularcentric reorganization of the senses, makes it difficult to account for the presence of invisible beings. fernando pushes us to think about a “true post-humanism” that entails the possibility of modes of existence not immediately accessible, or even completely inaccessible, to our common sensory perception. engaging ethnographically with relations with such immaterial beings—including but not limited to jinni, saints, and god (el-aswad 2010; mittermaier 2010, 2019; suhr 2015; taneja 2017; bubandt, rytter, and suhr 2019; schielke 2019)—is not only essential to understanding diverse modes of muslim religiosity but further “destabilizes the distinction between the material and immaterial, natural and supernatural” (bubandt 2018, 7–8) that underlies much anthropological scholarship. doing so pushes the study of human–non-human entanglements beyond its materialist biases (fernando 2017) to consider the possibilities of extra-secular “becomings” (haraway 2008), ways of becoming attuned, encountering, and living in a relational context with immaterial as well as material beings. the cultivation of intimacy—relations of closeness, familiarity, and love—with the family of the prophet proves central to shiʿi muslim religiosity. for shiʿa, like vedat, these figures are present and felt and are not purely historical or transcendent—distant, abstract, or unknowable. however, intimacy requires “persistent activity” (berlant 1998, 282). like human relations, these relationships are cultivated over time through practice, including sharing birthday cake and vocal recitation, which enables, generates, and sustains a sense of closeness and affinity. the recitation of praise poetry and laments constitutes a particularly powerful practice for cultivating intimate relations. the combination of sonic, discursive, affective, material, and semiotic qualities in the recitation holds important affordances that draw listeners and reciters into closer relation to the family of the prophet as co-listeners, co-present in the moment of recitation. listening to the sonic and intimate contours of these recitations transcends ocularcentric ideas of knowing and being in this world (hirschkind 2006; jay 1991; tyler 1987). this understanding builds on ethnomusicological and anthropological explorations of sound and music’s abilities to encapsulate and engender different forms of intersubjectivity, intimacy, and social relations (dueck 2013; stokes 2010; denora 2000; james 2020; labelle 2018), including with non-human species and environments (feld 1990; pettman 2017). in the present context, however, the relational qualities of vocal recitation are shown to surpass the material, suggesting ways of living with the immaterial more-than-human. i begin by outlining the centrality of love and devotion to the family of the prophet in shiʿism and show how this must be understood in terms of relations of intimacy, relations with the more-than-human enabled and sustained through practice. using as an example the recitation of mersiye, a genre of melodized narrative lament, i demonstrate how vocal recitation, through its sonic and discursive elements not only expresses love and devotion for these figures but, more important, affords the cultivation of close relations with them. the embedding of audio examples of vocal recitation in the essay serves to illustrate my analysis as well as to allow listeners to follow the sonic and affective contours of the lament beyond textual description to gain a better sense of how sound is enlisted in the cultivation of relations of intimacy. lovers of the family of the prophet the family of the prophet, ehl-i beyt in turkish, is revered and respected by both shiʿa and sunni across turkey. however, who exactly constitutes the family, and their position and status in cosmology and as figures of devotion, differ greatly across islamic thought and practice. for twelver shiʿa, the ehl-i beyt —the prophet mohammed, his daughter fatima, his son-in-law and cousin imam ali, and the eleven imams descended from these two—lie at the center of devotional and ritual life. in twelver shiʿism, the term imam encompasses the twelve male members of the ehl-i beyt recognized as the rightful successors to the prophet. according to shiʿi hagiography, each of the imams was persecuted by the political rulers of the time, deprived of his rightful worldly rank, and eventually martyred, except for the twelfth imam, al-mahdi, who is of particular significance to shiʿi cosmology and millenarianism. al-mahdi is said to have been taken into occultation by god in 941 ce and divinely concealed only to return before judgement day to eliminate injustice on earth. true worldly authority continues to rest with al-mahdi, whose title is also sâhib-ü zamân, the master of the era. as exemplary humans with divinely ordained qualities, the imams act as mediators of love between humans and god (amir-moezzi and jambet 2018, 75) and, despite their physical and historical deaths, continue to have the power to intercede in this life and the next (nasr, dabashi, and nasr 1989, 103). as immaterial yet immanent beings imbued with agency and the ability to witness and intercede in this life, the family of the prophet are seen by shiʿi muslims as actors in their lives with whom they seek to forge relations. anthropological accounts of shiʿi islam have mostly presented the imams as “social facts,” emphasizing their symbolic and political potential, all the while sidelining the intense relationships individuals build with them. in his analysis of shiʿism, michael gilsenan (1982, 55) presents the martyrdom of the third shiʿi imam, al-husayn, as a “theodicy of suffering,” “largely determined by social factors.” he contrasts the ways shiʿi mourning rituals and narratives of husayn’s suffering served to actively challenge the state in nineteenth-century iran and acted as a passive force in lebanon in the twentieth century to reinforce social and political hierarchies. gilsenan argues that the different meanings given to the same set of core symbols demonstrate the social production of this cultural tradition. this presentation of imam husayn as a symbol with fluctuating meanings in different social political contexts is fairly representative of accounts, especially those following the iranian revolution in 1979, which present the suffering of the family of the prophet as a revolutionary paradigm (fischer 2003), and shiʿism as a “religion of protest” (dabashi 2011). in contrast to accounts that reduce these figures to social and political symbols, saba mahmood (2009) provides a more nuanced view, more approximate to how muslims understand and relate to the prophet. mahmood advocates for the need to understand muslims’ relation to muhammad as assimilative with the words and deeds of the prophet, understood “not so much as commandments but as ways of inhabiting the world, bodily and ethically” (mahmood 2009, 847). mimesis is seen as central to this relationship, as the prophet models the virtues to emulate if one wishes to acquire a devoted and pious disposition. this “relation of similitude” resonates with aspects of how shiʿi muslims relate to the prophet and his family as figures to emulate or embody (deeb 2009). their lives and sayings proffer guidelines for ethical and moral action. yet this similitude does not constitute the entirety of the relationship between the faithful and these figures. the forms and experiences of love and devotion for the prophet and his family are suggestive of relations of intimacy, rather than “relations of similitude.” understanding these relations as intimate points toward the emotional, affective, and social closeness of these figures in terms of intersubjective relatedness. this is not a case of mimicking passive moral exemplars. along with the recognition of the authority and divine institution of the imams, worshippers repeatedly professed love of the ehl-i beyt as an essential condition for becoming a faithful muslim (gerçek mümin). tevella, love, and teberra, disassociation, constitute fundamental principles of shiʿi islam and refer to the love of the prophet, his family, and their followers, and dissociation from their enemies. apart from emulating their exemplary virtues, loving these figures also entails “remaining always in their proximity” (subḥānī 2001, 168), and therefore living a life in relation to them. the faithful constantly proclaim their love for the ehl-i beyt in both formal and everyday settings. in sermons, announcements, and social media posts, shiʿi muslims in turkey often use the phrase ehl-i beyt aşıkları (lovers of the ehl-i beyt) as a form of communal self-designation. this highlights the significance of emotional attachment and affinity to these figures in communal and social formations and imaginaries. hasan, a grocer in his mid-fifties who dropped in and out of the local shiʿi religious association’s events, expressed this to me in the following way: “for us shiʿa, our love for the imams is greater even than the love for our fathers, mothers, or children, whom we love so much. for us, allah is the most important, followed by the prophet and then his ehl-i beyt.” this may sound simply like a declaration of doctrine, but the way love for these figures is compared with that for human kin situates the prophet and ehl-i beyt in a larger network of fictive kin relations (ruffle 2011, 160). social bonds with these immaterial figures, as with all social and kin relations (carsten 2019), are not static, but rather complex, ambiguous, and changeable throughout one’s life. these relations are made and may endure or dissolve through time, with different members of the ehl-i beyt holding greater significance at different stages of a devotee’s life (ruffle 2018). the intimacy sought with the ehl-i beyt brings devotees into kin-like relations, participating “intrinsically in each other’s existence” and sharing a “mutuality of being” (sahlins 2013, ix). these figures’ unique positions as immaterial mediators between humans and the divine, however, distinguish these relations from interhuman ones. the faithful often affirm that, despite their earthly martyrdom or occultation, the imams remain able to witness, hear, and communicate with people. hasan continued: when we say, “peace be upon thee, oh, husayn,” husayn hears us and responds with “peace be upon you.” when we say, “oh, ali help us!” ali hears us and can come and offer us help on behalf of god. some of our sunni brothers call this şirk [polytheism], but we are not worshipping them, we are calling on them, as god has granted them certain privileges to do this. of course, we can ask god directly, but we love the ehl-i beyt and they are familiar, close, and knowable to us. they are the family of allah’s chosen prophet, that is why we love them so. this proximity hasan asserts, and the idea that the ehl-i beyt are agents who can witness and respond to ordinary humans, point toward both intimacy and co-presence. occasions when the presence of the imams is felt and when requests, petitions, or vows are answered are not rare. accounts of indirect experiences of the family’s co-presence, like vedat’s at the celebration above, are bolstered by detailed reports of more direct encounters in dreams, visions, and miracles, which are not uncommon either (al-hudaid 2020). to categorize the prophet or his family as paradigmatic, symbolic, or exemplary figures for ethical, social, or political action alone therefore oversimplifies the ways in which individuals relate to them and live their lives alongside them. these figures, to extend the example of human-animal co-sociality, are not just “good to think with” but entities and agents “to live with” (haraway 2003, 5). they must be treated as “parts of human society rather than just symbols of it” (knight 2005, 1; emphasis in original). relations, however, cannot be assumed or taken for granted. loving the family of the prophet, as my interlocutors often pointed out to me, requires work. it is only through active devotion and attention to these figures that a relationship of love can be cultivated. accounts of interhuman relations have long shown how relatedness and intimacy are dynamic and processual, involving “a continuous process of becoming connected to people” (carsten 2000, 16), one constantly produced through everyday acts that “enable, generate and sustain a subjective sense of closeness and being attuned and special to each other” (jamieson 2011, 1). relations are never a given or emerge out of nowhere: they must be forged, performed, announced, enacted, and shaped by encounters. vocal recitation and other devotional acts make for practices of intimacy that situate shiʿi muslims in webs of relations with the ehl-i beyt by recognizing and feeling their co-presence. it is not only through meditation on their qualities or incorporeal prayer that one comes to love these beings but rather through daily acts and annual cycles of remembrance and commemoration. cultivating intimacy through sound on the birth and death anniversaries of the figures of the family of the prophet shiʿi muslims in turkey and across the world come together, pooling a substantial amount of time and resources, to organize meclis, gatherings of celebration or mourning.2 these events are extremely well attended compared with daily and weekly prayers or regular religious jurisprudence classes and lectures held at mosques and religious associations. birthday commemorations, like those for imam ali, are joyous celebrations, with the recitation of praise poetry at their center. somber mourning gatherings, eza meclisi, are held at mosques and at homes to mark the death and martyrdom anniversaries. the islamic months of muharram and safar are particularly important for the commemoration of the tragic martyrdom of imam husayn, the prophet’s grandson and third imam, killed in 680 ce in karbala, in present-day iraq. during this period of mourning, it is customary not only to attend evening gatherings at mosques but also to host meclis at homes. the former are large-scale public affairs attended by women, children, and men of all ages, whereas those at home are smaller gatherings, resembling a family wake, with the hosts bearing the costs of providing food and tea for the attendees. there are diverse reasons for hosting a meclis and distributing food—it is seen as savap, a deed with divine reward, and may be done in fulfilment of a specific vow, in gratitude for a successful undertaking, to ask for a blessing, or as a request for favor and grace from god through the intercession of the ehl-i beyt. shortly before his family was to hold a meclis, murat, a middle-aged grocer, explained the importance of hosting to me: when the month of muharram comes, we all do as much as we can to serve imam husayn. we say, “let me also be in service.” everyone has expectations from husayn on the day of judgement. we have expectations for the other world. we love husayn. but we also have expectations in this world . . . for example, we may ask allah to bring bereket [blessings] to our household for serving our imam. our illnesses may pass by serving husayn. for these reasons, everyone wants to have mersiye recited at their house. my interlocutors and shiʿa elsewhere (el-aswad 2010, 65; d’souza 2014, 166; gehad marei 2020, 134; shanneik 2022) consider the ehl-i beyt present at these events, able to witness the grief and be consoled by it. weeping for the imam is therefore deemed a meritorious act, with shiʿi sources speaking of the reward of holding mourning meclis and weeping for the sufferings and afflictions of the family of the prophet (ayoub 1978). weeping is stimulated by the material, sensorial, and atmospheric dimensions of the meclis. black mourning banners cover the walls of the rooms and attendees dress in black. during the recitation of mersiye, the lights are often dimmed or turned off completely to allow for deep listening. food associated with funerals is served immediately after the recitation. these material and sensorial elements all prove essential to create the somberness of mourning, eza havası, desired by the hosts and participants—an inversion of the festive atmosphere, bayram havası, of the celebrations seen in the introduction. these elements prove indispensable for successful communal mourning. weeping and feeling sorrow for the ehl-i beyt come from a deeply held inner belief, but they are also induced by the words recited, the quality of voice, and the other material and sensory features of the event—the power, hum, and reverb of the amplifier, light and darkness, the fragrance of rice and cooked meat, the sniffling and the rustling of tissues, the shaking of bodies. through the organization of bodies, objects, food, and voice, people actively shape experiences and moods in themselves and others which are oriented toward an ideal feeling of mourning, generally referred to as grief (eza) or sorrow (hüzün). these feelings unfold as a continuous process of reaching intensity and are not simply achieved as an instrumental end of the meclis. the recitation of mersiye, long, semi-improvised melodized elegies that narrate the tragic earthly demise of the family of the prophet, lies at the heart of the meclis. in fact, no meclis exists without recitation. in turkey, mersiye are primarily recited by male hocas, prayer leaders, or seyids, individuals who claim direct descent from the prophet and the ehl-i beyt, whereas in neighboring iran and azerbaijan, specialized reciters called meddah recite for those gathered. the recitation of mersiye aims to move listeners to tears through the power of voice. the main vocal element of the meclis can be broken up into two sections: vaaz, an oration, and mersiye, the narrated, melodized lament. each section is sonically and discursively marked by the distinct use of voice: the vaaz will occur in a spoken voice, though changing in quality, while the mersiye is always melodized and intoned. in some cases, a meclis may go from opening prayers straight into the recitation of mersiye; this is rare, however, as a key purpose of the vaaz is to set the scene and context for the ensuing lamentation. the combination of sonic and discursive features makes forms of vocal recitation, like mersiye, particularly important practices for cultivating intimacy and seeking intercession. examples of vocalized poetry in honor of the prophet, his family, and saints, are present in muslim communities from west africa to southeast asia.3 the recitation of devotional poetry often acts as a form of supplication, to ask for grace, intercession, forgiveness, healing, and salvation (ogunnaike 2020, 25). oludamini ogunnaike asserts in relation to west african madih poetry that such poems constitute more than mere aesthetic exercises of linguistic or vocal virtuosity. rather, “composing, reciting and listening to them is understood to be [an act] of devotion that brings one closer to the prophetic ideal” (ogunnaike 2020, 11). the act of praising or remembering through reciting and listening is said to develop and define a relationship between the praiser and the praised. in turkey, the recitation of devotional poetry and lament not only marks the climax of meclis in honor of the ehl-i beyt but, with the rise of recording technology and various media forms, has also become part of everyday listening practices beyond the ritual context (williamson fa 2019). these practices mobilize the senses, language, materiality, aesthetics, and media to cultivate relations with these more-than-human beings. the example of vocal recitation proves particularly powerful in demonstrating the ways intersubjective relations are enacted beyond the visible. vocal recitation not only serves as a means of communication with these figures but also as a way of embodying relatedness and feeling their co-presence. sound, music, and voice engender and sustain diverse relations—from romantic relationships between individuals (denora 2000) to larger social, communal, and national formations (dueck 2013; stokes 2010) in ways that challenge ocularcentric understandings of the social. sonic and musical atmospheres (eisenlohr 2018; riedel and torvinen 2019) are also intrinsically relational, emerging from assemblages of human and non-human beings, things and materialities, which create a shared sense of affective intensity that enables and produces new forms of belonging through a “felt-reality of relation” (massumi 2002, 16). in his concept of acoustemology, for example, steven feld (2015, 15) demonstrates how sound connects actors (human and otherwise) into sonic relations through “modes of acoustic attending, of ways of listening for and resounding to presences.” feld draws on the ideas of “relational ontology,” which point to relatedness as a condition of and for being, to argue that sonic knowledge, or acoustemology, is emergent and contingent, unfolding through interplay between humans and their wider social ecology. feld (2017, 93) adopts the concept of acoustemology to ask “what’s to be learned from taking seriously the sonic relationality of human voices to the sounding otherness of presences and subjectivities like water, birds, and insects. . . . it asks if what are more typically theorized as subject-object relations are in fact more deeply known, experienced, imagined, enacted, and embodied as subject-subject relations.” fernando’s (2017) critique of materialist post-humanism suggests that the notion of acoustemology can be expanded to understand how intersubjective relations with immaterial beings may be enacted through sound. vocal recitation relies on sonic relationality to cultivate relations of intimacy between muslims and the ehl-i beyt without reliance on the visible. the example of vocal recitation as a form of sonic relationality offers humans the possibility of cultivating intimate relations with invisible more-than-human beings, as the visible is not essential to the process of establishing intersubjective relations because sociality, collectivity, and co-presence can be experienced through sound. fatima’s lament after parking the car outside murat’s apartment block, i helped the seyid invited to recite the mersiye at a meclis that evening carry the heavy portable amplifier up several flights of stairs and set it up at the front of the living room where the men had already gathered. we waited another ten minutes for latecomers to slip in before beginning. the meclis was offered in honor of a group soon to embark on an overland pilgrimage to imam husayn’s tomb in karbala, iraq. the seyid’s oration, vaaz, focused on the merits, meanings, and challenges of such a pilgrimage, and on the way a pilgrim should feel and act in karbala. he described each of the places the pilgrims would see, relating them back to the tragedy that took place there. as the tragic incidents were recalled, the emotional intensity of the speech mounted, leading some of the men present to begin to weep aloud. the seyid’s voice begins to tremble and break up with a slight intonation at the end of each sentence as the oration reaches its peak and he introduces the topic of the mersiye, the demise of fatima, the daughter of the prophet and mother of husayn. he speaks directly with imam husayn, apologizing for retelling his mother’s suffering: audio 2. vaaz oration. recorded by stefan williamson fa. ahh, so we have come to this point. today the story of her misery and tragedy will be told. oh, master imam husayn! you know what happened at that house. what happened to your mother? how your mother suffered? master, forgive us! pardon us! i don’t want to hurt your burning heart again . . . but i don’t know which door to turn to tonight . . . who is more valuable than your mother, in this world? the sobs now fill the room, almost drowning the voice from the amplifier. although the meclis was held during the period of mourning for imam husayn, the seyid chose to recite about fatima, his mother, instead. despite the notes in his hand, he soon closed his eyes and spoke without them. as he describes the last moments of fatima’s life, the seyid pauses briefly and breaks into the melodized phrase that marks the start of the recitation of the mersiye proper. at the melismatically extended arabic phrase as-salāmu ʿalayka yā abā ʿabdillāh (peace be upon you, oh, husayn),4 the lights are turned off. he reverts to turkish to continue sending greetings to the martyrs of karbala: audio 3. beginning of mersiye. recorded by stefan williamson fa. peace be upon those who died of thirst at the water’s edge peace be upon the sacrificed infant the narrative of fatima’s death continues now in a fully melodized voice. the recitation of the mersiye shifts to the local azeri-turkish dialect, much of it recited in the first person, adding to the emotional impact of the words. it is said that imam hasan and husayn cried and threw themselves onto their mother’s wounded chest. they saw the wounded holy arms of our lady reach out to embrace her children “i miss you too, my children” ali heard a call from heaven “oh, ali! separate the mother from the children.” ali wants to carry our lady at night to bury her he takes the coffin from the house he heard footsteps behind the coffin when he looked, he saw our lady’s sweet, little daughter, zaynab, following her mother’s coffin she says: “my mother is modest she is the beauty of medina place her in her grave slowly because her back is broken and she is injured” the words called out by zaynab in the mersiye are a well-known rhyme, allowing the men to join in collectively alongside the reciter, a feature in several forms of shiʿi devotional recitation (gehad marei and shanneik 2021, 61). as seen in the text, several discursive features act as powerful affective cues. reported speech is used as a way of introducing the first-person voices of the protagonists of the tragedy and decenter the reciter from the narration. by quoting the voices of others, the reciter moves between multiple voices—past, present, and future—to weave together the mersiye’s narrative. the use of vernacular phrases in the first-person, quoted reported speech indexes relations of familiarity and proximity. the switch from the more standard turkish in the vaaz section to the local dialect and the use of colloquial terms of endearment, such as balam (my child), usually reserved for one’s own child or loved one, brings the listener and reciter discursively into the most intimate forms of relation to the subjects of the lament. onomatopoeic phrases, such as lay lay, used by mothers and grandmothers in lullabies, blur the lines between the sonic and discursive, creating a relation of shared pain and suffering with the ehl-i beyt as intimate loved ones. however, the discursive alone is not enough. it must be combined with the semiotic, affective, and material features of the voice to bring about the desired feelings of intimacy. in this instant, the raspy, creaky, melismatic voice, distorted at a high volume through the small amplifier, is not intended to be aesthetically pleasing but to induce an embodied response from the listeners, one that positions them in relation to the ehl-i beyt. the vocal melodization of the mersiye is quite free and relies on limited pitch movement within a small range, following the melodic contours of most lamentation in the region (de la bretèque 2012). each phrase begins at a higher pitch and slowly descends, melismatically ending on a lower tone until the voice breaks into a sobbing sound. there are several other “icons of crying,” including “cry breaks”—sonically realized as a diaphragm pulse accompanied by friction, voiced inhalation, and creaky voice (urban 1988, 389). these “icons” are clearly audible in the inhalation and disjointed sounds between recited lines, which become amplified and distorted through the microphone. toward the beginning of the mersiye, the seyid also pauses briefly between lines to extend his sobbing into the microphone. these pauses also allow for the communal sobbing of the attendees to be clearly heard over the buzz of the amplifier. despite the monologic form of the recitation, the listeners constitute part of the performance, with the sound of their sobbing and calling out entering a feedback loop with the reciter. as the sobbing of the mourners increases, the reciter intensifies his recitation. there is a strong dialogic component to the performatives enacted in the mersiye, central to its emotional impact. auditors somatically respond to the call of weeping by engaging in mourning and weeping themselves or by calling out phrases. the sound of the mourners’ weeping, sniffling, or interjections is as important as the recitation of the mersiye itself. the sonic features of mersiye, such as its characteristic intonational contour and crying voice, are significant in setting the genre apart from other forms of speech and sound. as a distinct genre only heard at mourning gatherings like these and at funerals for loved ones, the recitation of mersiye is tied to the specific contexts of intimate mourning. sound amplification has the practical function of allowing women in a separate room to listen to the mersiye, but the manipulation of sound also has important and desired affective qualities. despite the confined homes in which most private meclis are held, the amplifier is almost always set to its highest setting. at such a high volume, the sound of the voice modifies the felt space of the room, at times creating a physical sensation of vibration in one’s body. the intensity of the volume is inescapable, and the listener becomes consumed by the recitation, as all other sounds are smothered by the reciter’s voice. around fifty minutes in from the start, the mersiye reaches its climax as the seyid recounts the burial of fatima. at this stage, the amplifier’s volume is distorting his voice and the apartment is filled with the shrieks and sobbing of the men and women in separate rooms. audio 4. mersiye climax. recorded by stefan williamson fa. [ali] buried our lady he heard her voice at midnight saying “cousin, oh, ali, get up and go home the children have woken up and are crying.” salman says: “when ali arrived i saw the children of our lady had woken up each cried out with their own tongue and wept but there was a voice among them which set the world on fire i looked and saw our lady’s sweet, little daughter, zaynab with all her brothers around her they recited a mersiye for her mother, wept and set the world on fire. she says: “mother i didn’t know that you would set like the sun in the evening i didn’t know, mother, that you would ignore me i didn’t know, mother, you would lie down in the grave without me oh, my wounded mother, woe oh, my mother who went to the grave with the night, woe” with the recitation of this short verse in zaynab’s voice, the seyid pauses before switching back to his own spoken voice in a hushed tone. audio 5. final supplications. recorded by stefan williamson fa. let us invite our imam [al-mahdi] with these tears. let us pray for him. . . . oh, he, who filled the world with his justice come for the sake of your mother [fatima] zahra the blood of husayn remained on earth unavenged come he who would take the blood back come for the sake of your mother [fatima] zahra oh, allah! peace be upon fatima and her father and ali and her innocent sons, and upon our imam, oh, allah! the meclis finishes with the recitation of the salavat and a short arabic supplication attributed to imam al-mahdi. this is followed by the implorations of the seyid on behalf of the hosts and attendees, wishing them good health, safe travels on their pilgrimage, and the forgiveness of their sins. after each request, the listeners repeat the phrase amin in unison, and, with one last salavat, the microphone is lowered and the recitation ends. the recitation of the mersiye and the shedding of tears are dedicated to the twelfth imam to please him and hasten his physical reappearance. in addressing him directly the seyid seeks to communicate with the living imam and offer the meclis to him. he makes it clear that the audience of the recitation does not just comprise the people in the room but, more important, the living divine guide, imam al-mahdi. the volume of the amplifier targets a more-than-human audience to receive their favor and intercession. the lights come back on. many of the men are still wiping the tears from their eyes and sniffling. some thank the seyid as he sips his tea, others utter “allah kabul etsin”—“may god accept [your mourning]”—to which the men reply “inşallah.” the younger boys rush out of the room to bring in the yoghurt soup from the kitchen and place a bowl for each person on the small tables in front of the seats. once this is consumed, the rice and meat are brought out and served. the meal is taken in near silence. compared with the celebratory gatherings in which the men joyfully eat cake laughing and joking around, the meclis meal always remains subdued, with the solemnity of the mersiye still pervasive. occasionally, someone may break the silence to ask the seyid a question. when the meal is, over the guests politely ask for permission to leave. i waited to help the seyid pack up the amplifier and carry it down to the car. the next night there would be another meclis at someone else’s house, and he would call me to join again. sounding relations beyond mediation shiʿi listeners and reciters of mersiye understand recitation as a way of cultivating intimacy with the ehl-i beyt. but how exactly? as an affective genre, the mersiye aims to move listeners emotionally and elicit weeping for the suffering and death of the ehl-i beyt. as with quranic recitation, the experience of mersiye is never merely a matter of the cognitive apprehension of text and meaning alone; rather, it is “pre-eminently emotional” (frishkopf 2009, 82). the successful recitation of mersiye, in this instance, does not rely on the clarity of voice or the quality of the lyrics, but on the overall affective and emotional impact of the melodized narrative, which draws on both sonic and discursive features. after the main period of muharram mourning ended, i met up again with the seyid to discuss the features of mersiye recitation at length. “both ses [sound] and söz [words] are important,” he explained. “the words are important, but these words must be recited with a beautiful voice. if the words are beautiful and the avaz [melody] is terrible, they will go nowhere! if the sound is beautiful and the words are terrible, then it will not be successful either. both aspects are important. the words have to be beautiful and so does the voice!” discussions with other reciters and listeners similarly emphasized the importance of both text and voice and their different ideal qualities. successful recitation was said to be a balancing act, avoiding “exaggeration” in both lyrical content and vocal performance. when pressed on what exactly constitutes a “beautiful voice,” the seyid explained how the reciter should be able to control their voice, to keep the pattern of melodization. while melodization is important, the lament should not be overly performative or showy—as this would cross the line between appropriate recitation and secular singing. although different styles of recitation and listener preferences exist, listeners emphasized the authenticity of the text and the sincerity of the reciter, along with the poetic and vocal qualities of the recitation. in eastern turkey, this meant that mersiye recitation by male seyids was particularly valued, as they not only had a “beautiful voice” but had studied at the seminary in iran, giving them the religious knowledge to authenticate the words recited. in addition, they descended directly from the imams. for listeners, this genealogical connection to the ehl-i beyt meant the seyid’s recitation was unparalleled due to his emotional bonds and intimate connection to these figures. getting people to talk about the moving and affective quality of sound and voice always proves a challenge. in my regular discussions with reciters and listeners, they always struggled to articulate why they felt sound was so important to relations with the family of the prophet. in one interview hasan, a regular reciter of praise poetry at events in the town, tried to help me understand the emotional impact of recitation better: ok, let me give you an example like this. . . . in your own language there are songs, right? love songs, yes? here in turkey, these songs are important for young people. . . . when someone is in love with a girl, they cannot express their feelings . . . instead they use songs. . . . a boy may send a song to a girl. the girl listens to the song and the lyrics. . . . these words can’t be said, but the song communicates a feeling. sometimes we cannot explain our feelings entirely, but in the form of a song, a hymn, a poem we try to communicate these feelings to people. if you pay attention, you will see that the holy quran is written in a poetic form. this has a big impact on people; the form of recitation affects people. have you never felt emotional when listening to a song? if you allow yourself, you can become emotional . . . and if you understand what the person is trying to communicate, it can affect you. we use our voice as a method to explain the tragedy of karbala. but never in a way that is needlessly emotional. just reading about these incidents will begin to make you emotional. . . . for example . . . you start to think, what if my brother had been lost like that? what would i have felt? look, husayn is separated from his brother. . . this immediately makes you emotional. thus, according to hasan, recitations, like love songs, express, communicate, and cultivate feelings of emotional attachment and relations. the sonic and discursive qualities of vocal recitation appear especially conducive to this reaction, not only because poetry is the discourse of intimacy in many west asian settings—where “reciting poems to particular individuals communicates, and even creates, closeness” (abu-lughod 1986, 241)—but also because of the particular affordances of sound and voice. as the sonic is simultaneously affective and signifying, both sign systems and the materially experienced precognitive elements of sound and voice combine to provoke strong feelings of intimacy. in his work on the recitation of naʿt—urdu-language poetry in honor of the prophet muhammad—among mauritian muslims, patrick eisenlohr (2018) advances a pioneering theory of sonic atmospheres that analyzes the material qualities of sound and their impact beyond the faculty of hearing on the entire body. he claims that sonic atmospheres are “events emerging and exuding from persons and objects” (eisenlohr 2018, 83) that blur the boundaries between humans and non-human environments and objects, creating emotions and “the experience of the divine” (eisenlohr 2018, 13). according to eisenlohr, moments of sonic intensity related to acoustic dimensions—volume, fundamental frequency, timber, pitch, and reverberation—lead participants to report strong effects on their felt-bodies, which they describe in emotional and religious terms. centering the materiality of sound in this way provides an innovative approach to understanding how the tangible and powerful effects of sound are mobilized in ritual and devotional contexts like the meclis. amplification in the meclis is clearly employed to physically move the bodies of listeners in ways that further convey affect and meaning, shaping experience beyond the discursive and rendering interior processes of relating to the ehl-i beyt corporal. while the volume and distortion of the amplified recitation provoke a visceral effect on the listener, the materiality of sound is not mistaken for the presence of the more-than-human. the recitation is not intended for the benefit of the human listeners alone, but for the unseen audience too, as the lines directly communicating with the imam show. therefore, not only does the sonic blur the boundaries between humans and objects but it positions listeners in atmospheric relations with the ehl-i beyt as co-listeners in the meclis. rather than seeing the power of vocal recitation to develop relations of intimacy as a clear linear cause and effect between material elements and individual listeners, intimacy is nurtured through a complex and imprecise entanglement of sound, discourse, material, aesthetics, poetry, and bodies within the context of the meclis. recitation does not mediate between this world and another. rather, it allows for listeners to cultivate relations of intimacy with the ehl-i beyt in ways not dissimilar to the ones in which sound and poetry act to create relations between humans. within the anthropology of religion, the so-called media turn (engelke 2010) has successfully highlighted the centrality of sensory-aesthetics forms, media, and materiality in religious life. the concept of mediation is used to argue that religion is inextricably tied to media forms that mediate between humans and the transcendent. according to birgit meyer (2020, 2), religion is “a set of human ideas and practices with regard to another, non-empirical sphere—a beyond—which can only be rendered tangible through mediation, and thus requires some sort of media.” religious practitioners are ultimately concerned with the bridging of the distance between the immanent and the transcendent through the use of media employed for the purpose of making connections between the “here and now” and a “beyond” (meyer 2020, 23). while the concept of mediation has been extremely productive and can account for aspects of the practices discussed here, applying the same conceptual framework to all religious practice and experience can act as a universalizing force that runs the risk of contracting diverse forms and practices of religious life and modes of relating to the supernatural. applying the concept of religion-as-mediation in all settings digresses, as meyer (2020, 9) herself has acknowledged, from religious practitioners’ own understandings of the use of media and notions of immanence and transcendence (hirschkind 2011; reinhardt 2016; robbins 2017; hovland 2018). rather than apply a single concept to understand all religion, it is important to engage ethnographically with other ontological formulations and modes and relations with the immaterial more-than-human. in her work on santería, aisha beliso-de jesús (2014, 2015) has criticized the concept of mediation for simplifying transcendence into a dualistic division between self/earth and other/heaven. she adopts instead the concept of “co-presences” to describe how practitioners of santería “walk through the world negotiating with and being closely related to various spiritual assemblages” (beliso-de jesús 2014, 518). co-presences are intimately sensed as beings, treated as a person, fed and paid honors, and they offer advice, perceive, and provide evidence of their existence in ways that resonate with shiʿi relations with the ehl-i beyt. while the imams are seen as mediators between humans and god, there appears to be less of a gap between humans and these figures than the concept of mediation would suggest. for shiʿa, sensory-aesthetic devotional practices do not mediate between this world and an otherwise imperceptible or unknowable other. rather, they constitute practices of acknowledging, relating to, and living life alongside these beings in this world, as co-presences. intimacy with these beings is achieved through the same means as in human kin or other relationships (carsten 2019): dedicated quality time together, celebrations of joy, and shared suffering. the immateriality of the ehl-i beyt does not mean they are any more reliant on mediation and media than human relations are. emphasizing mediation in religion therefore runs the risk of marking relations with immaterial beings as fundamentally different from all other types of relations, thereby creating a sense of distance between the human and the divine, which cannot always fully capture the ways religious practitioners experience their lives. devotional recitation does not make these figures present from a distinct invisible realm but allows for the cultivation of intimacy with figures already understood as present, witnessing, responsive, and super-conscious in this world. these are practices understood by shiʿa as constituting ways of being in this world with the more-than-human, ways of becoming attuned to a multiplicity of beings through encounter and connectivity. conclusion the forms of vocal recitation listened to here are central to how shiʿi muslims cultivate relations of intimacy with the family of the prophet. empathy, familiarity, and feelings of emotional attachment are nourished by celebrating their lives and mourning their earthly deaths, by sharing cake with them as one does with friends and loved ones and shedding tears for them as one does for friends and loved ones. vocal recitation is not just a superficial addition to these gatherings but lies at the very center of the cultivation of intimacy. this is not only because of the discursive and poetic forms recited but also because of their sonic and material qualities, which index and produce intimacy and directly position the ehl-i beyt and faithful into proximity as co-listeners. the object of recitation is not to reproduce the narratives of the lives of historical figures, as moral ideals to be simulated, embodied, or emulated, but rather to deepen relations and emotional bonds with these more-than-human beings—to cultivate a life alongside them. to ignore this and interpret such practices through the lens of psychological catharsis, political action, or social fact means to erase the relational motivations and experiences that lie within them. that is not to deny that such figures have multiple meanings and effects, including to inspire social and political action (gehad marei 2020; deeb 2011); but they do not exist merely as virtuous exemplars, symbols, or social constructions. for shiʿi muslims in turkey, relatedness exceeds the human and the material realm in everyday doings, as relations involve a range of immaterial more-than-human beings. living life as a muslim is not just a case of understanding and following moral principles for ethical self-formation; it also involves the cultivation of the self in relation to these beings. a relational account of religious life moves away from an atomistic individualist self as an ethical deliberator and agent and points instead toward the self-in-relation, paying attention to the ways the self is embedded in a network of relationships with others, both human and more-than-human. an expanded ethnographic scope that includes these more-than-human beings as actors proves essential to fully understand the complex significance of these voices of sorrow and joy. to gain a deeper understanding of religion as it is experienced and lived by many, we must consider relations with immaterial beings—whether gods, saints, spirits, or others. this assertion holds not only in terms of veneration but also in terms of living with, alongside, and being co-present with these beings—and loving in the sense of seeking proximity and intimacy. abstract the family of the prophet muhammad holds a central position in shiʿi muslim religiosity. as immaterial beings able to intercede in this world, they are said to be witnessing and co-present in the lives of muslims. anthropology has neglected relations with immaterial more-than-human beings like these. instead of regarding them merely as symbols or moral exemplars, this essay focuses on the cultivation of relations of intimacy with them through the devotional practice of vocal recitation. in eastern turkey, gatherings of celebration and mourning are held throughout the year to commemorate the earthly deaths and birthdays of these figures. the climax of such occasions is marked by the recitation of various genres of lament or praise. this essay uses audio examples and focuses on these recitations to demonstrate how their vocal and discursive features offer ways for muslims to cultivate love and intimacy to live life alongside these immaterial more-than-human beings. [sound; voice; shiʿa; islam; turkey; middle east; religion; more-than-human] özet hazreti muhammed’in ailesi (ehl-i beyt), şii mezhebi inancında merkezi bir konuma sahiptir. bu dünyada şefaat edebilecek gayri maddi varlıklar olarak, müslümanların hayatlarına tanık oldukları ve onlarla birlikte bulundukları söylenir. ne yazık ki antropolojide, bu gibi gayri maddi ve insan-ötesi varlıklarla ilişkiler ihmal edilmektedir. bu makale, insan-ötesi varlıkları sadece birer simge veya ahlâki model olarak görmek yerine, onlarla ilahi ve mersiye okumanın aracılığıyla kurulan yakınlık ilişkilerine odaklanmaktadır. türkiye’nin doğu anadolu bölgesi’nde, ehl-i beyt i̇mamların şehadet ve doğum günlerini anmak için yıl boyunca kutlama ve eza meclisleri düzenlenmektedir. bu tarz merasimlerin zirvesi ise çeşitli ağıt veya ilahi türlerinin okunmasıyla gerçekleşir. bu makalede sesli örnekler kullanılmaktadır ve kayıtlara odaklanılmıştır. bunların yanı sıra mersiyelerin ses ve söylemsel özelliklerinin, müslümanların ehl-i beytin yanında yaşamak, onlarla sevgi ve yakınlık ilişkileri geliştirmek için ne tarz yollar açtığı tartışılmaktadır. [ses; şiilik; i̇slam; türkiye; orta doğu; din; insan-ötesi] notes acknowledgments i thank, first and foremost, my generous friends and interlocutors in turkey without whom this work would not exist. this essay benefited at various stages from the comments and input of numerous colleagues and friends. i thank oliver scharbrodt, charles hirschkind, ruth mandel, and martin stokes for offering their time to read through and discuss both early iterations and later drafts of this work. in london: aida balafkan, rik adriaans, and aeron o’connor. in birmingham and lund: pooya razavian, foaud gehad marei, nada al-hudaid, oula kadhum, and yousif al-hilli. finally, i thank the editorial collaborative at cultural anthropology, particularly brad weiss, and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments and useful suggestions. all audio recordings (except for audio 1) were recorded by the author in turkey, in november 2015. the reciter chose to be anonymous in the publication. fieldwork was made possible through doctoral research funding from the gibraltar department of education. writing up at the university of birmingham and lund university has been supported by funding from the european research council (erc) under the european union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 724557). 1. this essay draws on fieldwork in eastern turkey carried out between 2015 and 2016. i use pseudonyms for all interlocutors who requested confidentiality. twelver shiʿi muslims make up around 5 percent of turkey’s majority-sunni population. shiʿi muslims in turkey are predominantly azeris, turkic-speakers with historical, cultural, and linguistic ties to the caucasus and northwestern iran. 2. other examples of ritual gatherings, which also include both distinct and cognate forms of vocal recitation, are practiced by other religious practitioners across turkey. most sufi groups hold regular zikr sessions in which devotional poetry plays a prominent role (raudvere 2002). the practice of mevlid, the recitation of ottoman poetry in praise of the prophet and in celebration of his birth, is widespread among sunni muslims in the country (tapper and tapper 1987). 3. scholars of literature and arts in islamic contexts have long shown how poetry and other aesthetic forms are integral to islam in practical and theoretical terms (schimmel 1982). the development of philosophical theories of aesthetics, poetry, and music across islamic worlds often emphasized different characteristics of these art forms and practices, which had implications for their moral and ethical potential (behrens-abouseif 1999). 4. the arabic abūʿabd allāh is a teknonym (kunya) commonly used by shiʿa for imam husayn. teknonyms are used by arabic speakers to denote both familiarity and respect. references abu-lughod, lila 1986 veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a bedouin society. oakland: university of california press. al-hudaid, nada 2020 “karamah [‘marvel’]: an 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commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.02 interscalar vehicles for an african anthropocene interscalar vehicles for an african anthropocene: on waste, temporality, and violence gabrielle hecht stanford university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1445-0785 brightly painted concrete houses, equipped with running water and electricity, arranged in dozens of identical rows: this photograph (figure 1) depicts the newly built company town of mounana in eastern gabon. the road is clean, the children happy. in the late 1970s, this image represented gabonese “expectations of modernity” (ferguson 1999) through national and corporate projects. by the end of this essay, i hope you will also see it as an image of the african anthropocene. figure 1. mounana, gabon, late 1970s. photo courtesy of cogéma. the idea of an african anthropocene may seem like a paradox. after all, the biggest appeal of the idea of the anthropocene has been its “planetarity” (deloughrey 2014). for some geologists, the anthropocene signals the start of a new epoch, one in which humans permanently mark the stratigraphic record with their “technofossils” (zalasiewicz et al. 2014). other earth scientists adopt the notion to signal humanity’s catastrophic effects on the planet’s physical and biochemical systems. during the past decade, the term has become a “charismatic mega-category” (reddy 2014) across the humanities, arts, and natural and social sciences (steffen et al. 2011; ellsworth and kruse 2012). inevitably, debates rage about origins and nomenclature. did the anthropocene begin with the dawn of human agriculture? or with the columbian exchange of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? how about the start of european industrialization in the eighteenth century? some favor july 16, 1945, the date of the first nuclear weapons test at alamogordo in new mexico (lewis and maslin 2015; monastersky 2015; zalasiewicz et al. 2015). while geologists ponder the stratigraphic signals left by each of these options, humanists and social scientists worry about their political and ethical implications. early start dates, for example, risk naturalizing the anthropocene as part of the human experience, depoliticizing its causes and exonerating energy-intensive capitalism. some feel that the very term obscures massive inequalities: attributing the unfolding catastrophes to an undifferentiated humanity elides crucial differences in responsibility and lived experience. others contest claims that the anthropocene signals a new awareness of ecological harm: the history of nineteenth-century climate science and industrial pollution shows that previous evidence and warnings were politically marginalized (bonneuil and fressoz 2016). still others object that the anthropocene attributes too much agency to humans, sidelining nonhuman forces. this array of concerns has prompted alternative proposals, such as the capitalocene (j. moore 2015). or the chthulucene, the monstrous metaphor used by the ever-humorous donna haraway (2015, 160) to invoke “myriad temporalities and spatialities and myriad intra-active entities-in-assemblages—including the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus.” wrestling with these counterpoints is invigorating, but alternative nomenclatures seem unlikely to gain much traction in natural-science disciplines or the public sphere. it is hard to imagine the international commission on stratigraphy adopting the capitalocene to designate a new geological epoch. critics of the anthropocene concept rightly worry that the idea can be used to revive fantasies about humans’ ability to control nature, pointing to an ecomodernist manifesto (asafu-adjaye et al. 2015) as a dangerous example (collard, dempsey, and sundberg 2015; crist 2015; hamilton 2015; latour 2015a; szerszynski 2015). still, for many of the anthropocene’s most prominent proponents, the term offers a way of signaling human responsibility, not of asserting control. they use the anthropocene to acknowledge—not deny—the importance of politics, to invite a broad conversation about our earthly condition, to make friends rather than foes (jonsson 2015; latour 2015b; rockström 2015). how can anthropologists (and their scholarly kin) build on these critiques while retaining the concept’s political power, along with its potential to spark new narratives, methodologies, and forms of knowledge? in exploring this question, this essay makes three analytic moves. first and foremost, i argue, we need to understand the anthropocene and its critiques as scalar projects. this requires treating scale reflexively, as both an analytic category and a political claim, engaging in what e. summerson carr and michael lempert (2016) call a “pragmatics of scale.” the anthropocene concept holds that our planet has recently experienced a “great acceleration” in the metabolism of its materials, and invites scholars to dramatically expand their spatial and temporal scales of analysis. i maintain that in accepting this invitation, we must also consider the political and ethical work accomplished by scalar choices and claims. to model what such an approach could look like, this essay attempts to hold the analytic and political aspects of scale in productive tension: i unpack the scalar claims of historical actors and projects, and use their stories—as well as the materials with which they engage—to move across scalar registers in my own narrative. my second move is to treat the anthropocene as the apotheosis of waste.1 this relates to spatial and temporal scales, of course. much of what has massively increased is the quantity, extent, and durability of discards: consider the planetary production of particulates, the millennial futures of microplastics and radioactive waste. furthermore, monitoring discards is a key technique of anthropocene epistemology: it’s how we know the geological, atmospheric, and biophysical impact of human activity. scholarship on waste has come a long way since mary douglas (1966, 44) first identified dirt as “matter out of place.” most notably, scholars have sought to disentangle waste from abjection by focusing on how waste and its management can produce new social relations, cultural forms, and political demands (hawkins 2006; gille 2007; chalfin 2014; reno 2015; liboiron 2016; harvey 2017). my analysis draws inspiration from this emerging field of discard studies. but i stop short of framing the biophysical properties of waste as lively or vibrant (bennett 2010; hird 2012; reno 2014). metaphors matter. and those particular metaphors enchant: they make materials appear mystical and mysterious. their joyful connotation can all too easily erase the brutal histories and ontologies that produce new biophysical phenomena, instead indulging in what zsuzsa gille (2013, 2) calls “waste fetishism.” it is certainly true that discards never disappear, and that their constituent materials remain active, often in ways that discarders and waste managers did not anticipate and do not track. but that does not mean that the biophysical interactions of wastes with their surroundings are (or were) inherently unpredictable or unknowable. as scholars who study agnotology have shown, ignorance is the obverse of knowledge: its production can be strategic, with the absence of knowledge legitimating the absence of regulatory protection (proctor and schiebinger 2008). and even when ignorance is not deliberate, it emerges from social relations. it has power effects. and so we must never forget that the violence associated with the anthropocenic apotheosis of waste is not merely planetary—it also has particular, differential manifestations. hence my third move: putting the anthropocene in place.2 i gloss this move as the “african anthropocene,” but my goal is decidedly not to propound continental essentialism. i do not aim to identify the characteristics of an “african” anthropocene in clear distinction to an “asian” or a “european” one. rather, i seek a means of holding the planet and a place on the planet on the same analytic plane. as judith irvine (2016) cautions, large scales do not necessarily encompass small ones. rather than zooming into a place in africa, i am using that place as a point of departure for thinking about the anthropocene and its multiple forms of violence. hence my insistence on “an”—rather than “the”—african anthropocene. there are many possible points of departure, many stories to tell, and many ways of telling them. this essay seeks merely to open the conversation. for this much is clear: to grapple with the complex interscalar connections posited by the anthropocene, we need new narratives and analytic modes (hamilton, bonneuil, and gemenne 2015; thornton and thornton 2015). compartmentalization has failed: scholars of the anthropocene sometimes write as though this were a new revelation (e.g., chakrabarty 2009), but in fact anthropologists and science and technology studies scholars have understood this failure for decades, having long challenged the nature/culture binary. yet challenging binaries is not enough. to understand their violent consequences, we need to refract history through new prisms. we need, as rob nixon (2014) argues, to “counter the centripetal force of the dominant anthropocene species story with centrifugal stories that acknowledge immense inequalities in planet-altering powers.” in experimenting with centrifugal narratives to open new ways of seeing the anthropocene, this essay pivots around mounana, gabon. interscalar vehicles first, though, i need to say more about scale. after all, at its most basic level the anthropocene asserts scalar enormity. this is readily apparent in the dozens of graphs (generated by natural and social scientists) showing exponential increases in the rearrangement of earthly materials and the production of waste, especially as of the 1950s (steffen et al. 2011). this “great acceleration” is sometimes visualized with a single curve whose only purpose is to invoke scale itself: time forms the x-axis, but the y-axis remains unmarked, denoting pure size. figure 2. the great acceleration, writ large. image from global change and the earth system: a planet under pressure, by will steffen et al. (2004). in such assertions, temporal metrics matter as much as spatial ones. the anthropocene gains traction over the present by predicting the future, by asking that we position ourselves as geologists millennia from now, uncovering technofossils in future stratigraphic layers. indeed, as recent anthropological writing about scale deftly demonstrates, scale is not just about size or granularity. it is also about categories: what they reveal or hide, the ways in which they do (or do not) nest. and it is about orientation: how we position ourselves, what we position ourselves against, and what comparisons such locations do (or do not) authorize (helmreich 2009; carr and lempert 2016). these insights help us understand the intensity of debates around naming the current epoch. scholars object not to the claim that humans have wrecked the planet, but rather to the type and coarseness of the scalar units used to make that claim, especially when attributing wreckage to the anthropos. a term like capitalocene offers different scales of analysis and comparison, units that are more tractable for humanists and social scientists. in this instance, as in so many others, rescaling serves both to make political claims (by attributing causation and responsibility) and to demarcate disciplinary boundaries. but scales do not obey fixed ontologies. geographers argue that scale is emergent, relational, and performative (marston 2000; purcell 2003; sayre 2005, 2009; neumann 2009; mackinnon 2011). instead of caving to the reification reflex, we must treat scales as outcomes of social, cultural, and technopolitical processes. historians have explored how the construction of scale shapes what can be seen in the anthropocene (thomas 2014): climate change can only be apprehended via global models (edwards 2010), while endocrine disruptions require microscopic attention (langston 2010). refracting this contrast back through judith irvine’s (2016) argument, we see that the latter practice does not nest within the former, but rather represents an entirely different system of observation and value. as anthropologists have shown with studies ranging from the tongan court system to contemporary fights over indonesia’s rain forests, instances abound in which the production of national, imperial, local, regional, or global scales involved power struggles, replete with winners, losers, and brokers (tsing 2005, 2012; philips 2016). scales, then, are emergent rather than eternal. but their situatedness and historicity do not detract from their reality. they do work in the world. they are performative. scale is messy because it is both a category of analysis and a category of practice (brubaker and cooper 2000; a. moore 2008; carr and lempert 2016). scholars who seek to understand how actors use scale concepts in practice do not, by virtue of such analysis, escape deploying scalar concepts themselves; nor does such analysis mitigate the real-world effects of scalar practices. observing that the anthropocene is a scalar project should not absolve us from engagement. rather, it should help us refine our modes of engagement. scaling is inescapable, but that does not force us into the trap of reification. scaling is neither inherently evil nor intrinsically virtuous. as e. summerson carr and brooke fisher (2016, 136) note, scalar practices can both “spawn a sense of intimacy and an ethic of interrelatedness” and “serve projects that discriminate, individuate, and alienate.” so unless we want to leave the anthropocene to the ecomodernists and the geo-engineers, we need to jump in. for that, we need interscalar vehicles. in science-fiction dreams of interstellar travel, characters travel distances unbridgeable by conventions of newtonian mechanics. they arrive at impossible destinations, worlds that teach them new ways of seeing and being. let’s attempt similarly impossible journeys. what happens when we treat empirical objects as interscalar vehicles, as means of connecting stories and scales usually kept apart? this essay experiments with interscalar vehicles as tools and objects of analysis. the possibilities for such vehicles are endless. here, i take uranium-bearing rocks as my primary interscalar vehicles, riding them from gabon to france to japan, from the 1970s to our planet’s early history to the distant future. in navigating this journey across spatial and temporal scales, i simultaneously observe the interscalar vehicles deployed by historical actors: maps and photographs; compensation claims and warning signs; urban development and cosmological theories; atomic bombs. interscalar vehicles—theirs and ours—have political, ethical, epistemological, and/or affective dimensions. what makes something an interscalar vehicle is not its essence but its deployment and uptake, its potential to make political claims, craft social relationships, or simply open our imaginations. i thus use the term african anthropocene not only to signal the significance of african places to our planetary condition but also to frame the analytic challenge at the core of this essay: namely, steering between and within emic and etic scales. scales have epistemological, political, and ethical consequences for both informants and scholars. rather than reject these entanglements, i propose to incorporate them. moving between scales while simultaneously attending to the history and politics of scale-making, i contend, offers ways of engaging the anthropocene while highlighting the interscalar complexity of its politics. now we can go to mounana. scales of prospecting the compagnie minière d’uranium de franceville (comuf) launched its operations in 1957, just before gabon gained independence from france. the comuf began as a joint venture between the french commissariat à l’énergie atomique (cea) and mokta, a colonial mining corporation. as the first shipment of uranium left mounana for france in 1961, the (white, french, male) company managers congratulated themselves on a job well done. ore reserves seemed ample, and a new training program promised to prepare large numbers of gabonese men for long-term, salaried mine work. gabonese uranium was poised to supply french atomic bombs and nuclear power plants for decades to come. that promise alone represented a victory for the french atomic energy commission. created at the conclusion of world war ii, the cea’s top priority in its early years was finding uranium. newly valued by the explosions at hiroshima and nagasaki, the mineral was initially deemed rare. france had some deposits in its metropole, but would clearly need more to power its reactors, not to mention the bombs some of its engineers longed to build. the cea launched a massive search throughout france’s african territories. figure 3. prospecting for uranium in africa. image from the 1960 annual report of the commissariat à l’énergie atomique. uranium prospection in the twilight of empire presented scalar dilemmas, both spatial and temporal. consider this schematic map of the cea’s prospecting activities in 1959. the image appeared in the cea’s annual report in 1960, the year when most french african colonies gained independence. back then, only gabonese ore reserves were sufficiently proven to justify a full-blown mining operation. but niger and the central african republic showed considerable promise, and the report announced the cea’s plans to pursue those options. the map simultaneously represented the past and imagined the future, demarcating space according to the expected national lines of 1960, instead of the imperial ones that still obtained in 1959. as johannes fabian (1983, 146) might put it, this temporal projection became “a means to occupy space”: even as the map acknowledged historical rupture, it made a powerful claim to the temporal continuity of french technopolitical authority. at the cusp of decolonization, the cea intended to keep treating francophone africa as a continuous resource space: its pré carré, a zone of privileged access. dreams of french energy independence relied on african uranium becoming french. they relied, in other words, on the imperial scale disappearing into national scales—on both continents. figure 4. prospecting for uranium in gabon, 1950s. photo courtesy of cogéma. while the map (figure 3) represented french technopolitical aspirations at a spatial scale of one to thirty-five million (the temporal scale was inherently unquantifiable, gesturing at an indefinite future), this official photograph (figure 4) depicted power on the ground: a prospecting team trudging through the gabonese rain forest. the black man in front held a geiger counter, which crackled in the presence of sufficiently radioactive rocks. his job title was assistant prospector; the cea trained a cadre of about a dozen such men, selected for their french colonial education and their knowledge of the terrain. the two white men in back were the chief prospectors. yet the image inadvertently subverted the cea’s claim to mastery, depicting a classic example of african intermediaries’ key role in the (post)colonial production of knowledge. after all, the so-called assistant was the one guiding the team through the bush and operating the key instrument. considered together, these two images exemplify the scalar politics that characterized colonialism and its aftermath. grand claims, made credible by fine-grained pockets of practice. an interscalar insistence that territorial management resulted in individual uplift, that producing value for france would also produce value for africans. such promises justified postcolonial collusions between gabonese state elites and french parastatal corporations, which later critics would identify as the hub of la françafrique (verschave 1998). (the term designates corrupt relations between the french government and postcolonial african elites. the word can also be heard as france-à-fric; fric is slang for money.) anthropocene scholars note that industrial capitalism has long relied on “cheap nature” (j. moore 2015, 17)—the assumption that earthly materials are there for the taking. this certainly describes uranium mining in gabon, where—at least initially—extraction costs were predictable and limited: equipment, transport, wages, and food. building materials also relied on cheap nature: rock for gravel and concrete, trees for timbering the mineshafts. value, at all scales, came from turning earthly materials into “raw materials.” valuing slow violence (part one) but uranium did not merely produce value for employees. it also produced violence. boring holes, blasting rocks, digging tunnels: these were dangerous activities. many locals refused to work in the tunnels because they feared the evil spirits that lurked underground. working conditions did not dispel those fears. in 1965, a huge slab of rock came crashing down on a team of workers, killing two and injuring others. in 1970, a flood trapped five miners in an underground cul-de-sac; the image of their bloated bodies, retrieved after six days of searching, remained seared in memories for decades. other forms of violence unfolded more slowly (nixon 2011). blasting rock left dense clouds of dust, which took longer to disperse than the fifteen-minute waiting period specified by workplace regulations. “after the blast, there’s a lot of dust,” said marcel lekonaguia, who had been in charge of blasting for several years. “it’s the dust that wasted us . . . you swallow it, you breathe it.” protective gear did not help: “those little masks, they didn’t hold up well. they’re made of paper . . . if it gets a little wet—paf!” the masks would dissolve, over and over, leaving him with a lifetime of respiratory ailments. and then there was the radiation. invisible, odorless, and easy to forget, it came in several varieties. gamma rays, emitted during the radioactive decay of uranium, could be tracked by individually worn dosimeters. at the end of each month, workers rendered their dosimeters, which went to france for processing. in underground shafts, however, other forms of radiation proved more insidious. natural uranium atoms decay into radon, which decays into other elements that, when inhaled, lodge in the lungs and bombard soft tissue with radioactive alpha particles. over time, this changes cellular structures and can lead to lung cancer. but not in everyone: the process is stochastic (another way of saying that scientists do not fully understand the synergy of its causal mechanisms). in any case, portable alpha dosimeters did not exist until the late 1980s. radon varied unpredictably throughout the shafts, in some places reaching levels twelve times international regulatory limits. for workers, such radiation exposure was the slowest violence of all: cancers could take decades to manifest (hecht 2012). workers did protest. they refused to return to work for days after fatal accidents, shocked that management did not allow time for them to mourn their comrades. news traveled, making it difficult for the comuf to recruit new labor after major accidents. when the company doctor rejected links between lung disease, dust, and radiation, some workers refused to hand over their dosimeters for the monthly check. lekonaguia held on to his dosimeter because he hoped to find other experts to interpret the results and attest to his exposure levels. none of this, however, interrupted mining operations for very long. the comuf counted on jobs, training, housing, and medical care to keep protest in check. it managed the social effects of workplace accidents by placing a monetary value on their violence, offering hazard premiums for underground and other dangerous work. in these and other ways, the company deployed the classic tactics of industrial development: valuing modernity above life, manufacturing consent. hardly a unique story. and then, for a brief time, nature stopped being cheap. this is the moment when our story veers from standard accounts of capitalist/colonial exploitation and plunges into the scalar drama of anthropocenic imaginations. to understand how, we need to get back into our interscalar vehicle and ride the rocks to the atomic scale. as befits anthropocene tales, this means delving into the physics and chemistry of uranium. fossilized reactors natural uranium is primarily composed of uranium-238, an isotope whose nucleus contains 92 protons and 146 neutrons. but other uranium isotopes are also present, notably uranium-235 (still 92 protons—that’s what makes it uranium—but only 143 neutrons to glue the nucleus together). the 235 isotope only comprises 0.72 percent of natural uranium. but it holds greater interest for engineers, because its nucleus is unstable enough to split by bombarding it with neutrons. known as fission, this splitting releases energy and liberates more neutrons, which go on to split other nuclei. for this sequence to become a self-sustaining chain reaction, however, the ratio of u235 atoms must be increased: natural uranium must be enriched. if you want to make an atomic bomb, you need 90 percent u235. if you want to fuel a reactor, you can settle for 3.5 percent enrichment. the same plant churns out bomb and reactor fuel—the difference lies in how long the uranium feed stays in the circuit. preparing the feed for enrichment plants required many steps. ore extracted from the mounana deposits was milled at the comuf, then shipped to france. there it passed through three different factories for additional preparation, before finally entering the enrichment plant in gas form. each of these stages produced tailings: unwanted material whose uranium content was not high enough to merit further processing. waste. uranium enrichment plants are huge, complex, delicate, and expensive. france’s plant at pierrelatte was devoted exclusively to making military fuel. it came online in 1967, after seven years of construction. smooth operation required controlling impurities in the feed. at each stage of preparation, engineers took samples to ensure they met specs. this included checking the feed’s isotopic composition, a routine test because—as everyone knew—the proportion of u235 isotope in ore was a constant. 0.7202 percent. until it wasn’t. one day in may 1972, pierrelatte engineers discovered a batch of feed with less u235 than normal, clocking in at 0.7171 percent. the discrepancy was big enough to pose both technological and financial problems. flustered, they ran another sample: 0.7088 percent. worse (bouzigues et al. 1975). at first, engineers suspected the batch had become contaminated with tailings during one of the preparation stages. such a mistake could have geopolitical consequences. the cea sent uranium destined for civilian purposes to the ussr for enrichment. using soviet enrichment services made france less vulnerable to u.s. technological dominance while it spun up another enrichment plant to make civilian fuel (hecht 1998). the soviets would certainly discover the depleted feed. they would be furious if they suspected the french of trickery. tracing the chain of custody, however, demonstrated that the depleted uranium came from gabon. further investigation revealed that mounana’s oklo deposit had been delivering depleted ore since it opened in 1970. in one core sample, the u235 proportion sank to an astonishing 0.44 percent (naudet 1991). to grasp the profound weirdness of this result, listen to radiochemist and manhattan project veteran george cowan (1976, 36), who wrote about it for scientific american: the isotopic composition of uranium is thought to be a constant of the solar system in any one era. . . . chemical processes can make one region rich in uranium and leave another region poor; that is how the deposit at oklo was formed. u-235 and u-238, however, are virtually indistinguishable chemically. . . . indeed, the difficulty of separating the isotopes is attested to by the size and complexity of uranium enrichment plants such as those at pierrelatte. . . . there seemed to be no plausible mechanism in nature [to explain] the depleted ore. as far as anyone knew, the only sources of depleted uranium in the entire solar system were human-made waste: spent reactor fuel or enrichment tailings. what could possibly account for its presence in a precambrian rock formation in eastern gabon? investigators finally settled on an explanation. the depleted uranium resulted from a series of self-sustaining fission reactions almost two billion years ago. (that’s half our planet’s lifetime.) way back then, uranium had a different isotopic ratio. this was because u235 decayed faster than u238. when the planet first formed, its uranium contained 17 percent u235. by the time the oklo deposit formed, this ratio had dropped to 3 percent, roughly the proportion required by most nuclear power plants. other aspects of the geologic environment—the presence of water, the thickness and density of the uranium deposit—made conditions propitious for self-sustaining chain reactions. these had taken place in the rock bed, off and on, over a period of two million years. in september 1972, cea experts announced their stunning conclusions to the academy of science in paris: nature had made nuclear reactors nearly two billion years before humans (bodu et al. 1972; neuilly et al. 1972). fission in these so-called natural reactors had depleted the uranium. diplomatic disaster averted. but trouble now loomed on another scale. seven hundred tons of oklo ore had already entered the fuel cycle, and there was more to come. because the depleted ore was not usable in human-made reactors, the comuf viewed it as waste. but it still had to be removed to reach the rich veins of marketable ore underneath, upon which the company had banked its future. removing depleted ore cost just as much as extracting valuable ore, threatening the comuf with bankruptcy (hecht 2012). and there was another problem. for geologists, radiochemists, and nuclear physicists, the remaining rock formation housed fossilized reactors. these fossils were their interscalar vehicles into the planet’s past, and they desperately wanted to keep the formation intact to better study it. nature was no longer cheap. scientific value challenged economic value. atomic action threatened international reaction. values and scales crashed into each other. la françafrique in action state-supported capitalism—both french and gabonese—averted wreckage from the crash. in 1972, the french state (via the cea) was the comuf’s primary shareholder and its sole customer. but the cea also conducted france’s nuclear research. so while one division wanted to normalize its ore supply, another lobbied for preserving the fossilized reactors. to satisfy both constituencies, the cea agreed to purchase the depleted ore—at a discounted price—for use as research material. this persuaded the comuf to leave the oklo ore body intact for a few more years. meanwhile, the cea sought support for the research from president albert-bernard (omar) bongo (naudet 1991). defying colonial-era corporate claims, the gabonese leader had begun to advocate postcolonial sovereignty over natural resources. he also demanded that the comuf honor its promises to bring modernity to eastern gabon, notably by building better housing for its employees. so getting bongo on board was crucial. by 1974, the comuf had agreed to build the housing development pictured at the start of this essay. it also accepted a capital infusion from the state, in return for giving gabon 25 percent ownership in the company (hecht 2012). the arrangement set expectations of modernity for workers, the company, and the state (ferguson 1999). science played a part in performing such expectations: modern states, after all, were supposed to support research. bongo agreed to help fund a symposium on the so-called oklo phenomenon. cosponsored by the international atomic energy agency (iaea) and the cea, the conference took place in june 1975 in libreville, gabon’s capital. eager for validation of their bizarre conclusions, cea scientists had shared oklo samples with colleagues in the united states, the soviet union, and elsewhere. the conference offered an occasion for seventy-four experts from nineteen countries to discuss their initial results. the conference began with a trip to mounana to see the phenomenon. attendees traipsed to the rock face, where comuf employees outlined the traces of the fossilized reactors. hardly a spectacular sight, but attendees were happy to see for themselves, and to pick up a souvenir specimen in situ. plus, who didn’t enjoy a little pomp and circumstance? a stage in the middle of the pit, complete with palm fronds, featured speeches by “gabonese” notables, performing the national scale and reminding visitors whose territory housed the discovery (cowan 2010). scientists then repaired to libreville to present their findings. some found the conference setting surprisingly splendid: a luxury hotel, a restaurant supplied by food and wine flown in from france. george cowan—who by then had become the director of radiochemistry research at los alamos, the united states’s premier nuclear weapons lab—reported on a lavish reception that bongo hosted at his residence: we were serenaded by an orchestra, the all-male musicians dressed semi-formally. then the dancing began. one of the attractive native female employees from the french embassy asked me to dance. i couldn’t resist a viennese waltz and did a few turns. the wine and toasting continued until midnight. suddenly the musicians stripped down to loincloths and began to play wild “jungle” music dominated by percussion. the lovely french embassy females reappeared wearing only native skirts and gyrating to the new tempo. one of them grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor. i clumsily tried to hold the deafening beat (cowan 2010, 107). this too was la françafrique in action, with bongo and french officials shamelessly catering to visitors’ expectations of exoticism. there is no record of how embassy employees—presumably professionally trained clerical staff—felt about dancing topless with middle-aged white foreigners. nor do we know how the five female scientists from france responded to the spectacle. scalar collapse when french experts first released their conclusions, they had been greeted with skepticism. the prospect of prehistoric reactors sounded like science fiction. journalists speculated that ancient aliens accounted for the phenomenon. many in the international scientific community also expressed doubts. but for the japanese-born chemist paul kazuo kuroda, the discovery was a vindication. kuroda had trained as a nuclear chemist at the imperial university of tokyo, joining the faculty there in 1944. despite a ban on radiochemistry research by the american occupation forces, kuroda pursued this work after the war. in 1949 he sailed to the united states in search of research collaborations, only to discover that his nationality excluded him from projects with security ramifications. he eventually joined the faculty at the university of arkansas, where his research led him to predict the existence of natural nuclear reactors in 1956 (kuroda 1956). he was dismissed as a crackpot. “scientists were saying that if this idiot is an indication of the program” at arkansas, he later wrote, “there must be nothing there at all” (robertson 2011). the oklo discovery changed everything: kuroda went from eccentric to prophet overnight. kuroda’s paper in libreville used evidence from oklo to hypothesize about the origins of the earth’s elements. he had first begun to speculate about natural nuclear reactors in the earth’s early history “one day in august 1945, while standing in the ruins of hiroshima” (kuroda 1975, 480). he would invoke this moment repeatedly in later publications, writing that he “became overwhelmed by the power of nuclear energy. . . . the sight before my eyes was just like the end of the world, but i also felt that the beginning of the world may have been just like this. would it not be possible that nuclear chain reactions occurred on the earth then?” (kuroda 1982, 2–3). the oklo find validated his prediction, and kuroda boldly spun out its cosmological implications. over the course of time, he speculated, the ancient fission reactions “could’ve been one of the most important factors in creating mountains and continents thousands of feet below the surface” (robertson 2011). indeed, his calculations suggested that the solar system itself was much older than scientists had previously thought. kuroda thus collapsed all of terrestrial time into a single, atom-splitting moment. in this ultimate act of nuclear exceptionalism (see hecht 2012), the atomic bomb became a synecdoche for all thinkable temporalities, from the solar system’s distant past to the planet’s apocalyptic future. japanese scientists might not have designed the atomic bomb, but witnessing its effects firsthand brought unique insight—or so kuroda’s narrative asserted. his scalar collapse claimed intimacy and cosmic significance simultaneously (helmreich 2009). introducing geopolitics, pain, and redemption into texts that were otherwise filled with equations and tables, kuroda used the bomb itself as an interscalar vehicle. this scalar practice enabled kuroda to “feel, as well as see [himself] as a part of something larger,” as e. summerson carr and brooke fisher (2016, 148) would argue in a different context. its repetition in publications spanning decades also suggests an urge to proselytize: to make others feel the intimate cosmological import of his theories. at the libreville conference, the bomb as interscalar vehicle traveled through space as well as time—and with no small measure of irony. for kuroda did not attend the conference personally. instead, his paper was presented by george cowan, the manhattan project veteran and los alamos radiochemist. the two men had probably met over their shared interest in radioactive fallout. cowan had spent years tracking fallout patterns from u.s. nuclear weapons tests. kuroda, meanwhile, had studied fallout from china’s 1965 atomic test, which he had compared to the probable fallout path of the first-ever atomic explosion at alamogordo. the bomb that cowan had worked on. the explosion that preceded hiroshima. the event that some earth scientists use to mark the official start of the anthropocene. oklo rocks also served as interscalar vehicles into the far future. one of the strangest aspects of the phenomenon: many of the fission products from these ancient chain reactions had moved very little, if at all. this relative immobility sparked a question. could oklo serve as a natural analogue for geological storage, shedding light on how buried nuclear waste would behave over the very long term? geologists and nuclear power advocates around the world got excited. waste from weapons manufacturing and power plants was mounting. activists argued that in the absence of storage solutions, nuclear power development should stop. some of the waste would remain dangerously radioactive for tens of thousands of years—a time scale far beyond human engineering capacity. sealing the waste in airtight vessels seemed like an obvious first step, but it was equally evident that “no man-made container [could] last indefinitely” (walton and cowan 1975, 500). what would happen after the canisters cracked? how far would their contents travel? in grappling with such questions, “the most striking fact concerning the oklo phenomenon is that nature successfully managed to store as much as ten metric tons of fission products in the ground for two billion years” (walton and cowan 1975, 500). many of oklo’s fission products were also found in human-made nuclear waste. maybe this remote part of gabon could help solve the so-called wicked problem of nuclear waste disposal? several papers in libreville explored this possibility. pace jane bennett (2010) and others, the long-term biophysical interactions between radioactive wastes and their surroundings drove scientific and technical inquiry. oklo-as-natural-analogue also entailed strategic scalar collapse. but while kuroda primarily sought a window onto the deep past in order to understand the origins of the solar system, other geologists and chemists saw that past as a window onto the far future—a future they began to contemplate decades before the anthropocene project made its claim on scientific imaginations. for these experts, making that future knowable could legitimate a technopolitical present powered by nuclear energy. experts emerged energized from the libreville conference, ready to plunge into more research. gabon’s newly appointed minister of scientific research vocally supported the prospect of gabon becoming a destination for cutting-edge research (naudet 1975, 633). but scientists had forgotten that their research material was in an active mine. with a heavy heart, the cea’s roger naudet reminded them that the party was over. the comuf had already sacrificed profits by postponing extraction for three years, but now operations had to resume. today, his rueful words read like an anthropocene lament: the place we saw during the beautiful inaugural ceremony will remain a memory without a future. these extraordinary “fossilized reactors,” the likes of which we will doubtless never find again, and about which we still have so much to learn, will be irremediably destroyed. (naudet 1975, 631) the comuf did destroy the oklo reactors in the course of mining. but research continued, thanks to the thousands of core samples taken in those early years. de-situated samples became a metonym for de-situated science: the iaea’s second conference on the subject was held in paris, not libreville. naudet eventually produced a seven-hundred-page textbook on oklo. two other fossilized reactor zones were later found, both near oklo; none have been found outside gabon (janeczek 1999; jensen and ewing 2001). meanwhile, natural analogues became an important tool for research into geological burial of radioactive waste (miller et al. 2000; simmons and stuckless 2010). taking the narrative in any of these directions would keep us in the anthropocene, but make us lose our grounding in africa. at its most productive, the anthropocene concept serves as an invitation to probe the deep past and the far future in relation to the (relative) present, the recent past, and the near future—and especially in relation to the people who inhabit these more proximate times. so let’s conclude our story by staying in gabon, and sticking with the rocks themselves as our primary interscalar vehicle. valuing slow violence (part two) for local residents, the fossilized reactors sparked different scalar dynamics, in which violence remained central. consider this remark from dominique oyingha, an elected official who had grown up in the area and whose brother worked for the comuf: the whole village washed themselves at okeloleni, drank at okeloleni. that place where we drank and washed, there was an atomic reactor. . . . [many people died, and] we knew it wasn’t normal. . . . at the time, people accused each other of witchcraft. . . . only when the comuf did its mining did we see that we really were in danger-danger. there are several ways to interpret oyingha’s comment. we could conclude that when locals learned that their area had housed fossilized reactors since time immemorial, they transferred their explanations for low fertility and short lifespans from each other to the rocks. that is what company managers concluded, when—under pressure from local officials—they commissioned a study of radiation levels around mounana in 1986. the study took great pains to establish “background” levels, radiation present before mining began—a dubious exercise at best, given that extraction had begun in 1959. unsurprisingly, these levels were high. defining them as background, however, meant they could be dismissed as having always been present. stretching the temporal scale back to the beginning of time meant that nature, not the company, was to blame for abnormal demographic and health patterns. in french regulatory schemes, only exposure over the background level counted toward a person’s dose. and there were no gabonese health data from before mining, no demographic background against which abnormal outcomes could be formally compared: in short, no control groups. another way to read oyingha’s comment would be to focus on the last phrase: only when the comuf did its mining did we see that we really were in danger-danger. oyingha himself had long harbored suspicions. his brother marcel lekonaguia worked at the comuf; you met him earlier, when he described the dust produced by blasting. in the late 1960s, oyingha took his brother to the congo, where another uranium mine had recently shut down. doctors there confirmed the brothers’ sense that dust inhalation accounted for the respiratory trouble, and that uranium exposure presented special health dangers. but when the two men returned to mounana and confronted the mine doctor, they were met with scorn: “are you crazy? who told you that uranium made people sick?” oyingha laughed as he remembered this response. he respected the doctor, whose hospital offered free medical care to everyone in the region. but he did not really expect acknowledgment of occupational disease. the brothers eventually obtained a leave of absence for lekonaguia to recover a bit—but no etiology, not even a diagnosis, and certainly no compensation. danger-danger had many sources, as those who lived with the wastes of mining knew all too well. water from mining and milling flowed into rivers, where women soaked their manioc (a regional staple that requires prolonged immersion to become edible). in 1983, residents filed an official complaint with the provincial government: faced with alarming numbers of dead fish, they worried “that their lives [were] in danger.” monitoring and medical care did not adequately address these problems. disputing these assertions, management insisted that the real problem was that villagers who did not work for the comuf—and therefore did not live in the company town—wanted access to the same benefits. in other words, these residents also treated infrastructures as forms of “political address” (larkin 2013, 333); they too deemed access to basic services as integral to the promise of modernity (von schnitzler 2016). managers at comuf strongly felt that responsibility for potable running water belonged to the state, but they conceded that if the company “made an effort,” it would “certainly circumvent many of the complaints” (magnana 1983), thereby touting short-term modernity to elide the longer-term effects of waste-making. in the zambian copperbelt, james ferguson (1999) has argued, workers experienced the end of development as betrayal. but around mounana, workers, their families, and their neighbors felt betrayal—manifested as dead fish, burning lungs, and vile water—long before the mine shut down. so-called “international standard practice” dictated that mine waste should be treated or contained. increasing scrutiny certainly made it necessary to do something. dreading “heavy maintenance and surveillance obligations if gabonese regulations eventually came close to those . . . in europe” (jug 1986), the company reluctantly built a tailings dam to contain the waste in 1990—three decades after operations began. when i visited eight years later, i saw no warning signs. both the (french) associate director of the mine and the (gabonese) operator who toured me around the plant insisted that children “just knew” to stay away from the tailings. mining ceased in 1999. with few prospects of salaried employment, comuf veterans focused on the wasting of their land and their bodies. many remained convinced that mining accounted for their ill health. but could they prove it? could they hold the company accountable? to answer these questions, mounana residents engaged in their own politics of scale. they refused to be relegated to the local, a scale that worked to dismiss them as ignorant and parochial. they also refused the national scale: the gabonese state had not served them well in the past. instead, former mineworkers reached north, beyond national territory, to ngos in niger and france that advocated on behalf of sick uranium workers. this move asserted how the bodily absorption of minerals connected miners to places and people, not just outside gabon but outside the african continent. joining forces, these groups sent a small group of scientists, doctors, and lawyers to investigate in 2006. the team took independent environmental readings and interviewed nearly five hundred comuf veterans. the resulting report testified to toxic contamination—and, at least implicitly, to the ways in which it had been facilitated by scalar politics. protective gear had not been mandatory. work clothing got washed at home. as one former worker reported, “we were so unaware of the risks that we smoked and ate at the workplace, and since we never wore protective gloves, we ate and inhaled whatever was on our hands and in the air.” employees did not receive reports of their radiation exposures. the gabonese state had performed no inspections. company clinicians had no training in uranium-related occupational health, no access to dosimetric readings. the report estimated that the comuf had generated more than seven million tons of waste: some dumped directly into rivers, some buried under a thin layer of dirt, and some piled in the tailings pond (daoud and getti 2007). and some of the waste rock was used to build the well-ordered houses in the photograph that launched this essay—as well as the marketplace, the maternity clinic, and the school. the problem? although revalued as construction gravel, the rock was not devoid of uranium. nor was this uranium inert on the atomic scale. it decayed. many buildings had radon levels well over internationally recommended limits. the materials of modernity had become instruments of slow violence. shelter turned into toxic infrastructure. behold an african anthropocene. an african anthropocene toxic infrastructures are hardly unique to africa. radioactive houses are not even unique to gabon. at the very moment that mounana’s houses were going up, one-third of the houses in grand junction, colorado were being slated for demolition or remediation. built with tailings from the uranium mills that powered that town’s growth in the 1950s, they too were bursting with radon. ninety miles further south, some homes in uravan had radon levels more than seven hundred times the regulatory limits. in 1975, a survey demanded by the navajo tribal council found radioactive buildings strung out from shiprock to tuba city. some observers might be tempted to see in this simultaneity another example of how africa lags behind. that would be wrong. it would deny the very coevalness (fabian 1983) that allows modernity to thrive in some places at the (dialectical) expense of others. as we saw, comuf managers did know that “international standard practice” precluded disposing of tailings in rivers. were managers equally aware of “radoned” buildings in colorado? sources are mute on this point, but it is hard to believe that they completely missed reports circulating through international conferences, journals, and other media. as historians have argued, pollution despite knowledge has been a central dynamic of the anthropocene (hecht 2012; locher and fressoz 2012; boudia and jas 2014; bonneuil and fressoz 2016; malm 2016). instead, we might think of international standards as interscalar vehicles that aspire to—but rarely achieve—coevalness. in principle, they perform interscalar work through calibration, offering ways of comparing procedures in distant places (“international”) against a benchmark (“standard”). in principle, they deny the legitimacy of displacing harm to spaces inhabited by marginalized people, asserting that all places should adhere to the same environmental and labor norms. the scalar promise of the international, in sum, is that all places should be in the same physical and typological temporality. if and when these interscalar promises are fulfilled, standards become infrastructural (star and ruhleder 1996; edwards 2003, 2010; busch 2013). but international standards are not ontologically singular. they are historically and technopolitically produced. they can be devices for seeking remediation, but they can also serve as permits to pollute. and they can be ignored, of course. interscalar vehicles do not necessarily follow the maps drawn for them. so the simultaneity should serve instead as a sentinel: an indicator (among others) of the unequal waste/valuation dialectic that underpins the making of modernity’s scales. recycled waste provided free building materials with which the comuf could address the gabonese state’s developmentalist ambitions, thereby enacting the national scale in mounana. providing water services in response to protests about pollution produced a municipal scale, entangled with the national scale. but precisely because gabonese regulations did not match european standards, the mine could avoid the heavy financial burdens imposed by the international scale. meanwhile, the uranium that it churned out for four decades fueled the motors of metropolitan modernity. gabonese uranium disappeared into french uranium treatment plants. when gabon’s uranium became nuclear fuel, it switched nationalities, enabling france to assert national energy independence through nuclear power. this movement exemplifies why i place this story under the sign of an african anthropocene, rather than (say) a gabonese one. it is not just because the uranium switched nationalities. it is also because invoking the national scale had political stakes for actors such as gabon’s lifetime president or the director of the french atomic energy commission: stakes that i do not share, and claims that i explicitly seek to counter with my narrative. were it not for the fossilized reactors, the story might remain confined to the sadly familiar temporal scales produced by the deadly confluence of capitalism and colonialism, nationalism and nuclearity. oklo, however, serves as synecdoche for the anthropocene avant la lettre. it brings industrial time into dialogue with deep time, bodily temporality into dialogue with planetary temporality. driving the phenomenon is an utterly nonhuman agency, both geological and atomic, accomplishing something that humans, in their infinite hubris, had believed only they could do. yet oklo simultaneously underscores the technopolitical power of human agency to operate at both geological and atomic scales. it encapsulates the terrifying scalar collapses and explosions of which we have become capable. precambrian rock took two million years to generate the materials that a human-built nuclear reactor can pump out in one. now there’s a scale for anthropocenic acceleration: two million to one. the materials that power such acceleration do not disappear—not even when they explode. they change form and scale, but they are still there, some more noxious than ever for our species (and others). cast as natural analogue, oklo had value for thinking about that problem, though not for solving it. studying the path of its fission products made for fascinating science, but the analogy had serious limits: the sites under consideration as waste repositories had very different geological properties. when it came to nuclear waste planning, oklo offered a research paradigm, but not a solution. the anthropocene contention engages industrial pasts and presents by scaling them against geological time. but its most powerful demand is actually on (or about) the future(s). oklo thus fit into the full temporal range of anthropocene claims. managing temporal excess was—is—a major concern for those seeking a solution for nuclear waste burial. it is not just that ten thousand years (or longer—plutonium’s half-life is twenty-four thousand years) exceeds human design horizons. that sort of time scale exceeds human language horizons. how to make waste repositories legible to humans millennia in the future? how to persuade our descendants that the buried materials are permanent waste, too dangerous to ever be revalued? such projection into the future does not just require reckoning with geology; it also requires reckoning with language and representation. attempts to address such questions have involved anthropologists, archaeologists, philosophers, artists, and linguists. interdisciplinary committees have imagined twoand three-dimensional signage to warn future generations. the most famous is this field of thorns, which aspires to be an interscalar vehicle for language itself. figure 5. a warning for future generations: landscape of thorns. image from “expert judgments on markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion into the waste isolation pilot plant,” sandia report sand92–1382 (1993). image courtesy of safdar abidi/wipp. inevitably in such discussions, someone invokes the giza pyramids to demonstrate that taboos against plunder stop working after a while. of course, memory had some continuity around giza; locals knew the structures contained treasures. so instead, consider the eight-thousand-year-old geoglyphs recently discovered on the steppes of kazakhstan. today, their patterns are only visible from space, in satellite imagery. figure 6. geoglyphs in kazakhstan. image courtesy of digital globe. archaeologists assume that nomads made these colossal earthworks, but can only guess at their purpose. were the geoglyphs a form of media? did they contain a message? we will never know. the signs—if that is what they are—remain unintelligible. scholars and artists tasked with communicating with future generations have the best of intentions. they have to try; they have to hope. what else is there? but let’s face it: thorn fields and similar warnings are more reliable as technopolitical signifiers in the present (in this case: look! we’ve figured out how to communicate with our millennial descendants, so it’s ok to bury the waste!) than as effective media for the far future. meanwhile, seeing the anthropocene from africa forces us to consider signage aimed at present-day humans. a scandal broke out in french and gabonese media over mounana’s radioactive buildings. in response, areva (the corporation that took over france’s nuclear fuel cycle and power plant construction early this century) reached a deal with the ngos that commissioned the study. the most heavily contaminated buildings would be demolished, and new dwellings built. and signs would be posted. one, scarcely a meter wide and stuck in the bank of a rivulet, depicted a woman with a basket of manioc on her back, squatting by the water, a red diagonal line crossing the pictogram: trempage interdit, soaking forbidden. others consisted only of spray-painted letters on walls, marking the houses slated for demolition. in contrast to the thorns, these signs—technopolitical signifiers with a different goal—aimed at “de-escalating disaster” (carr and fisher 2016). this de-escalation operated in both space and time: the signs proclaimed the local as the appropriate scale of action, and their very flimsiness suggested that the contamination, too, was ephemeral. unsurprisingly, the reality of remediation has not matched its promises. areva certainly claims to have accomplished the mission, calling the comuf “the first rehabilitated uranium site in central africa” (areva n.d.) production facilities have been dismantled. but further action has lagged. a map of contaminated areas—in areva’s (2015; author’s translation) words—“zones with usage restrictions”—was only drafted in late 2015. the construction of replacement dwellings did not begin until 2016, nearly a decade after the alarm was sounded. as part of its response to the ngos, areva established a health observatory in 2010 to monitor former workers. medical tests would determine whose diseases could be attributed to occupational exposures, and those men would receive treatment and compensation. at this writing, however, no one in mounana has been deemed to suffer from uranium-related illness. the lack of a cancer registry makes statistical demonstration of disease incidence impossible. (how do you prove that work caused excess illness if you do not know the baseline?) the clinic does not have adequate access to equipment or resources. after a protracted legal battle in france, the families of two former french employees who died of cancer have received compensation. so far, however, not a single gabonese can say the same. fed up, former workers obtained an audience with their prime minister in january 2016 (nouveau gabon 2016). their first attempt to rescale their claims had bypassed the national level because gabon’s government had consistently favored la françafrique over its own citizens. it remains to be seen whether this new rescaling attempt will have a different outcome.3 we can safely predict, however, that the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism will make restitution more difficult. areva recently went bankrupt because of its failure to complete french and finnish nuclear power plants on time and within budget. the real meaning of flimsy signage: companies are far more ephemeral than the contamination they create—and the structured ephemerality of capitalist institutions is part of what enables contamination. extraction (of all kinds) has powered the large-scale rearrangement of substances that materially constitutes the anthropocene. but to go beyond those who speak of lively waste and vibrant matter, and to see beyond grandiose solutions that draw on modernist tropes to assert ever-larger scalar reach, anthropologists and their scholarly kin need to reflexively assemble their own scalar projects, their own interscalar mechanisms for keeping the planet and all of its humans in the same conceptual frame. thinking with the anthropocene expands our vision of time and space. thinking with an african anthropocene reminds us of who pays the price for humanity’s planetary footprints, so as to better grasp the kinds of entanglements—and futures—people face in our treacherous times. notes acknowledgments interlocutors at the many venues at which i presented talk versions of this essay offered provocative questions, for which i thank them. an early draft of the written version was completed while on a mary i. and david d. hunting family fellowship from the university of michigan’s institute for the humanities. special thanks to paul n. edwards, members of michigan’s african history and anthropology workshop, and the editors and reviewers of cultural anthropology for incisive comments that helped sharpen the final version. 1. on the apotheosis of trash as individual human experience, see yaeger 2008. 2. some geographers refer to this kind of move as grounding the anthropocene (e.g., whitehead 2014; braun et al. 2015). 3. things do not look promising. a recent post on the website of the gabon ministry of mines (2015) focuses primarily on prospects for new mines. its discussion of health and environmental consequences is a nearly perfect echo of areva’s: remediation accomplished, monitoring ongoing, no problems to report. references 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123, no. 2: 321–39. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.2.321. zalasiewicz, jan, et al. 2015 “when did the anthropocene begin? a mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal.” quarternary international 383: 196–203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045. zalasiewicz, jan, mark williams, colin n. waters, anthony d. barnosky, and peter haff 2014 “the technofossil record of humans.” anthropocene review 1, no. 1: 34–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019613514953. a disarmament program for witches a disarmament program for witches: the prospective politics of antiwitchcraft, postwarcraft, and rebrandcraft in sierra leone samuel mark anderson new york university abu dhabi https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9603-2928 a decade after its invasion by rebel forces amid 1999’s infamous operation no living thing in the final months of sierra leone’s devastating civil war, freetown was once again the site of a shocking series of battles. mobilized squadrons descended on public sites in regimental formation. armed figures engaged and struck their enemy with advanced technologies deployed across specialized units. emergency medical teams tended to their wounded. dozens of culprits were apprehended and imprisoned. yet while these battalions claimed to serve the defense of the nation, they were neither police nor army nor international peacekeepers. through extravagant public operations, the sierra leone indigenous traditional healers union (slithu) took upon itself the task of ridding the country of witchcraft—unearthing countless so-called witch guns, apprehending numerous reputed witches, and retraining offenders as benevolent healers. the union dubbed such actions a “disarmament program” for witches, consciously conjuring both sierra leone’s recent strife and the technocratic responses imposed by the united nations (un) through disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (ddr) models. as slithu’s inimitable leader, president alhaji dr. sulaiman kabba, field marshal and professor general, told me: [in] this organization, disarmament is a separate unit. . . . the health sector, that’s their own [area]. they must treat people and integrate those people. to pull them from evil. to bring them to good. the traditional healers’ disarmament frees us, because we have come to help the people. if we don’t begin to hold bad people here, in order to change them, we will not be able to succeed.1 yet kabba did not limit his vocabulary of transformation to the buzzwords of international intervention; he also espoused the jargon of global marketing strategies. in a newspaper interview, kabba declared the disarmament programs “our rebranding effort to shift the paradigm complex attitude of some malcontent persons opting to always display wicked knowledge on the innocent” (tarawally 2012; emphasis added). kabba further interspersed such appeals to rebranding throughout calls on his constituents to shift their public image by labeling medicines, halting sidewalk sales, or suspending bloody society initiations. with a handful of rhetorical gestures, kabba brought into conversation the seemingly disparate spheres of esoteric tradition, peacekeeping bureaucracy, and commercial promotion. figure 1. a disarmament for witches led by alhaji dr. sulaiman kabba, campbell town, 2011. stills from eye opener, videographer unknown, courtesy of the slithu archives. in contemporary africa, conversations about violence and recuperation cross multiple discourses, and putatively traditional healing practices—fluid products of ongoing postcolonial negotiations among diverse knowledge regimes—inherently synthesize numerous lexicons. stacey langwick (2015) observes that contemporary traditional medical professionals attempt to speak to multiple, changing, and often contradictory partial publics, even as their expertise is progressively marginalized. the slithu disarmament programs constituted one group’s efforts to reclaim political power by mobilizing longstanding witch-finding conventions within novel idioms that addressed its publics simultaneously as patients, war survivors, citizens, patrons, and consumers. the organization’s disarmaments exhibited many qualities common to pan-african, charisma-based antiwitchcraft efforts: “a transregional and outwardly modern character” (smith 2008, 217); the appropriation of bureaucratic and scientific language; dramatic, affective impact through haste, induced chaos, and the invasion of private spaces. such efforts aim to remap moral geographies in contexts of unpredictable economic and social transformation (douglas 1970; auslander 1993). widespread uncertainty promotes what peter geschiere (1997, 205) dubs “the search for new public arenas . . . to balance witchcraft’s secrecy” and what jean and john comaroff (1999, 293) call “instruments of social divination, dramatic discourses of discovery in the public sphere.” such spectacular events serve to make visible otherwise imperceptible forms of violence—spiritual, structural, economic, environmental—while often resorting to violent tactics of their own. the union reframed older models of witch-finding spectacles, formerly designed to cleanse villages and sponsored by chiefs, as events targeting the whole nation and performed in the name of the government’s development efforts. james smith (2008) has shown that development discourse, perhaps counterintuitively, can promote witchcraft discourse, while harry west (2005) has described how citizens in postwar mozambique mobilized interpretations of sorcery and traditional medicine in their demands for better governance. erica caple james (2012, 52) correlates the diagnostics used by haitians to suss out occult insecurity and those used by internationalized development projects to assess governance failures, labeling the latter “bureaucraft.” we might consider postwarcraft a subset of bureaucraft designed for conflict settings and rebrandcraft a parallel process undertaken within global marketization. the union’s operations show that antiwitchcraft, postwarcraft, and rebrandcraft—despite their divergent ontologies and aims—share common logics of diagnosis, exposure, and transfiguration. the play of secrecy and exposure perhaps constitutes the predominant political dynamic in the broader upper guinea coast region and beyond. as mariane ferme (2001b, 7) has observed, spaces marked by uncertainty and violence such as sierra leone call for a “hermeneutic of suspicion” and practices of concealment to protect oneself and one’s agency. thus those who forcibly expose such protected power both defuse it and empower themselves, as was the aim of the socialist government’s demystification program in neighboring guinea (mcgovern 2013). on the other hand, possessors of even the most covert power must expose it strategically to be recognized. sasha newell (2012, 1) describes how ivorian youths reveal illusory wealth through fashion in a “dance of brands”; much like slithu’s occult power, the economic capital these youths flaunt is inherently dubious, but that suspicion proves immaterial to their “display of potential.” the union drew on all these regional logics at once by revealing hidden, suspect power in order to demonstrate potential contributions to the nation-state. such procedures redistribute power between authorities, constituents, and experts, echoing geschiere’s (1997, 9) observation that witch-finders resemble “public relations experts” in western democracies, whose “intervention . . . loaded with esoteric knowledge, seems to remove power from the people.” the union’s claim to state authority represented an outgrowth of african governments’ neoliberal transformation into “para-states” (see geissler 2015) that outsource governance to ngos, businesses, and other agencies, often at the expense of popular welfare. although its relations with the sierra leone government were tentative at best, slithu reproduced officials’ and experts’ efforts to consolidate power while dispersing responsibility. as the direct authority of nation-states continues to wane in the face of a variety of neoliberal forces, governments, political aspirants, and related organizations increasingly manufacture revelatory spectacles that diagnose hidden ills and proscribe proprietary cures in order to hail various forms of financial and emotional investment. figure 2. kabba (center) launches the kenema district branch of slithu, kenema, 2012. photo by samuel mark anderson. kabba’s synthesis of witch-hunting, ddr procedures, and brand management potentially reveals further congruities. one might argue that kabba was simply throwing concepts together and seeing which ones stuck. indeed, in interviews and speeches, his verbose and seemingly extemporaneous pronouncements skimmed across discursive fields from biomedicine to development to commerce to religion—all ultimately steered toward justifying union activities or, more often, his own supremacy. yet to dismiss such sweeping conjunctions as mere bombast would be to discount kabba’s skill for integrating local and foreign languages of power, a vital art in contemporary sierra leone. moreover, kabba’s hybridizations, however quixotic, are in themselves revealing ethnographic projects, attempts to explain disparate cultural regimes to each other. beyond representing another case of witchcraft’s modernity, his provocation articulates a profound correlation between the strategies of seemingly opposed models of social transformation. yet i also aim to push his analogy further to expose the shared fragility undermining those same models. as a foreign researcher with presumptive access to external resources, i too was hailed by slithu. i first heard of the organization on a 2010 pilot study when i chanced on an herbalist posted below a banner promoting the union’s upcoming official launch that had been strategically hung near freetown’s downtown banks and government offices. during my fieldwork from 2011 to 2013, i followed the organization’s exploits when i could amid more methodical study of provincial performances. by then, slithu had largely discontinued the disarmament spectacles, but kabba introduced many projects with similar objectives, including launch events in the provinces, literacy programs for members, and the inauguration of a curiously named “allopathic” clinic that purportedly synthesized traditional and western medicine. i also attended a number of union assemblies, the first of which hosted numerous speeches and demonstrations of occult power clearly orchestrated to cultivate me as a potential patron. such appeals continued as i interviewed union executives, along with former members and other healers. yet i fear i ultimately disappointed their hopes for investment due to my modest finances and my skepticism, indicating to some extent the contingency of their aspirations. i am more concerned here with slithu’s logic than with the reception of its acts, although controversies indicate the tenuousness of its approach. the terrains of witchcraft battles, by their nature invisible and contested, invite suspicion, and detractors accused slithu of inventing the very problems it claimed to cure. critics, many of them defectors from the union, contended that kabba accomplished nothing but his own enrichment from dues and donations. the disarmaments, they argued, presented no more than staged inventions using wrapped umbrella handles for props, as true witch guns are invisible. the hypervisual operations thus simultaneously substantiated and undermined slithu’s competence. the question of whether or not the heterogenous sierra leonean public believed kabba’s claims seemed as inconclusive as questions of witchcraft belief more broadly. contemporary sierra leonean understandings of witchcraft appear more often defined by doubt and contingency than belief (cf. bubandt 2014): anything is possible, little is certain. in my admittedly unsystematic experience, the union did little to shift common conceptions of witchcraft or traditional medicine. outside of union events, most sierra leoneans i questioned had only vague ideas about the institution and continued to select healers based on reputation rather than affiliation. while the union’s dramatic actions did win the attention of a number of local elites from television personalities to journalists to the president of sierra leone himself, such recognition never resulted in substantial support. its calls for confidence unheeded by either the power brokers they courted for resources or the broader public they courted for advocacy, slithu began to slip into irrelevance even before the 2014–2015 ebola epidemic disrupted the organization’s activities and any authority it had accrued. the union’s maneuvers nonetheless marshaled new possibilities and new publics, however briefly. following kabba’s example, this article employs the successive lenses of witch-hunting, ddr implementation, and brand management to explicate a logic of politics by prospection—a logic that may well inform other spectacular promises of radical social transformation, from pentecostal crusades to protest movements to populist rallies. where power and suffering are increasingly diffused within and beyond the boundaries of community, individuals and institutions stage events that probe invisible terrains, dramatically expose sources of affliction, and ostensibly enact personal and social change. these spectacles represent a kind of aspirational governance that seeks out resources and labor in other social strata and hopes to generate new forms of intimacy between them. such projects beget novel effects yet also prove inherently precarious, dependent on the efforts of those they claim to serve and predicated on an unstable foundation of trust—all too often code for a lack of real choice, whether over the persons, processes, or products in one’s life. antiwitchcraft the union marshaled dozens of members, each of whose legitimacy as an agent of transformation was rooted in a different configuration of inherited skills, inspired visions, and ad hoc inventions. given the variety and hyperindividualism of local healing practices, president kabba’s most impressive ability was perhaps his capacity to unite disparate actors and their often conflicting knowledge systems around a single project. though largely rooted in combinations of herbs (“leaf medicine”) and islamic scripture (“book medicine”), available antiwitchcraft remedies are as diverse as the many forms of invisible violence they combat and the varied geographic, temporal, and linguistic (krio, temne, mende, limba, and other) milieus in which they are deployed. thus a multiplicity of strategies became available to the union once it framed its work as neither chiefdom-level nor ethnic tradition, but as national project. it would be futile to catalog all the practices from which slithu draws inspiration, due both to their breadth and to their continuous innovation. yet some dynamics are notable. beyond its inherent antisociality, witchcraft is as mysterious in sierra leone as anywhere, reflecting the difficulty of classifying invisible evil, as well as incrimination risked from knowing too much about it (geschiere 1997, 57–60). in krio, wich might refer either to one who deploys invisible evil or a substance or spirit within such a person possessing its own powers, agency, and desires.2 as an adjective, it might further reference any extraordinary power granted by such a spirit; most frequently evoked is the wich yai (witch eye) allowing the perception of hidden realms, comparable to the temne ɛ-fɔr t-aŋlɛ (four eyes; shaw 2002, 92). kabba embraced and exacerbated the semantic slipperiness of the krio term wich so as to encompass a wide variety of invisible forces.3 histories of exploitative violence have inspired violent responses from antiwitchcraft practices, directed both externally and internally. witchcraft accusations multiplied amid the transatlantic slave trade, as social ties unraveled and accused witches and their families were sold into bondage (shaw 2002, 211–18). in apparent contrast to such extroverted violence are more private practices of individual introspection. michael jackson (1975) noted a relative absence of witchcraft accusations but a prevalence of confessions amid kuranko communities before the war. it was left to villagers, largely women, to do the introspective labor of discovering witch spirits inside themselves and confessing so as to invoke broader social healing. witch-finding spectacles merge accusation and confession. in one sensational example, the missionary anthony gittins (1987), working in mende communities in the 1970s, described dramatic witch-finding spectacles conducted by a flamboyant kɛmamᴐi (witch-finder; literally, “one who shows or demonstrates”). invited by a paramount chief at the request of villagers plagued by inordinate child deaths, the kɛmamᴐi engaged in three nights of revelatory exposure of power objects that were then ritually destroyed, exploding in blood and apparent baby parts. yet at the moment the villagers were most agitated, the kɛmamᴐi enjoined them to feed and clothe penitent offenders and tend to broken relationships. from gittins’s (1987, 183–202) perspective, these events promoted conscientious reciprocity, and even discounting such functionalism, his fervid text attests to the kɛmamᴐi’s effective use of spectacle to captivate a culturally diverse audience, including gittens himself. such disruptive dramas remain in use by contemporary rural witch-finders and clearly underpinned slithu’s disarmament programs. of special concern in sierra leone’s national imaginary are witch guns, weapons causing inexplicable illness and misfortune while reflecting particular violences of modernity (shaw 2002, 208). while every practitioner i interviewed recognized witch guns, their descriptions varied. dancers and drummers use herbal injections to defend against witch guns fired during their acts by jealous colleagues with an audible pop and an acrid smell like gunpowder. one herbalist argued that witch guns are only used by initiatory societies to censure insubordinate members. another distinguished three types, with effects ranging from sickness to instant death. yet all conceptions of witch guns focused on the unknown identity of the assailant, participating in broader unease about potential violence arising from urban anonymity and dangerous technologies (cf. bonhomme 2012).4 if, as rosalind shaw (2002, 265) suggests, the witch gun arose in tandem with the violences of the slave trade and colonialism, such fearsome power was echoed by an explosion of terrifying analogues in more recent warfare. such revitalized witch technologies served as a logical focus of slithu’s disarming movements. these key elements—the unstable meaning of witch, its historical implication with other forms of violence, its potential to inspire both spectacle and introspection, and the category of witch gun technology—served as the foundation for kabba’s amalgamation of local witch-finding practices. kabba’s synthesis was by no means free of controversy, but it was ambitious and elastic enough to attract the imaginations of a wide swath of healers and herbalists. slithu sierra leone has undertaken some nominal efforts to manage local medicine, but such attempts have remained limited in comparison to other african states (cf. last and chavunduka 1988; langwick 2015). when sierra leone emerged from civil war in 2002, its medical conditions ranked among the worst in the world, and progress since has proven disappointing. postwar reconstruction strained the state’s ability to provide health solutions for its citizens, so it has farmed out responsibility for medical services to ngos and other associations. so-called traditional medicine could serve as a preexisting and cost-effective source for health solutions, but the government has made only symbolic gestures toward oversight and promotion. thus, slithu aimed to fill the void. in 2003, under the aegis of the world health organization’s (2002) traditional medicine strategy, fourah bay college professor babara m. s. turay founded the sierra leone traditional healers association (slentha) within the ministry of health and sanitation, expressly to recognize the affordable, available, and holistic ministrations of traditional practitioners and local herbs. yet following the all people’s congress (apc) party’s election in 2007, slentha, a project sponsored by the previous administration, lost government support. at the same time, slentha members, frustrated that resources did not match earlier promises, blamed turay for the alleged misappropriation of funds. in 2008, many broke away to form a new organization, the sierra leone indigenous traditional healers union. figure 3. slithu launching ceremony overseen by president ernest bai koroma (lower row), national stadium, freetown, 2010. videographer unknown, courtesy of the slithu archives. the union began to make dramatic new claims for its mission and mandate as a new leader consolidated power. president kabba was born in foredugu, port loko district, where his father, also a scholar and healer, spurred his qur’anic studies. kabba traveled to his grandfather’s mandinka homeland in kankan, guinea, for additional education, and he has claimed further training in ghana, nigeria, india, syria, china, and france. before returning to sierra leone, he worked for president yayah jammeh of the gambia, to whom he credits his respect for traditional african culture.5 courted for his resources and energy, kabba was duly elected by the slithu membership, although this represented a minuscule fraction of the constituents over whom the union claimed jurisdiction. in 2010, he orchestrated a spectacular launching ceremony during which sierra leone president ernest bai koroma presented him with a staff of authority akin to that of a paramount chief, enabling kabba to claim that the post was his for life. his titles—president, field marshal, professor, doctor—bestowed by his followers rather than achieved through institutions, further tie him to medical, military, and governmental power (cf. luedke 2006). perhaps inclined toward his own expertise, kabba refocused union activities from the scholarly documentation of herbal medications to the sensational expulsion of witchcraft ills. operations the union began disarmament programs in early 2009, performing regularly for the next two years and more sporadically afterward. dressed in charm-laden cotton shirts rendered bulletand witchcraft-proof and popularly known by the limba name ronko (richards 2009), healers assembled at chosen sites with instruments of ritual cleansing: amulets, brooms, horns, and mirrors with which to see the invisible. disarmaments began with a “charity” or sacrifice, determined through prayer, which might consist of groundnuts, eggs, coconut, leaves, or other comestibles distributed within the community before disarmament troops could enter a site. fanning out through fields, forests, and markets, healers moved in formation under the direction of a handful of commanders, as discerned by yankain marrah, slithu’s welfare chairlady: we have five types of ceremonial [healers]. some people can see [witch weapons], but they can’t remove them. some people are there who can remove, but they can’t see. some people remove and see. some people don’t remove, but only spoil [the bad medicine]. once you see them spoil [witch weapons], you can hold them and try to use them, but they won’t do anything anymore. some people call out bad things, they call and they command them to fall. when healers in the disarmament division found invisible powers, they would “pull” them, risking seizures and coma in the process. another team of herbalists stood by with medicines to wake and heal their fallen comrades. leaves held in bottles were capable of keeping an herbalist standing even while holding an armed witch gun. other teams stood on watch, using witch eyes to spot attacks before they happened. figure 4. slithu members search for witch weapons, campbell town, 2011. stills from eye opener, videographer unknown, courtesy of the slithu archives. sometimes a witch would bolt, forcing the squad to pursue. the witch might have taken on a disguise or changed gender, becoming a woman and unable to change back to a man until assisted by slithu members. witches were then detained; at the time i asked, one slithu member claimed the union was currently holding forty witches. without access to offenders, i could not assess their demographics, but witches highlighted in the media tended to be young men, suggesting several overlapping factors: the continued marginalization of youth, the reproduction of male-centered templates of ex-combatant disarmament, and retribution for the wartime potential of youths to “jump ahead” of elders’ traditional authority through visions and esoteric defenses in what mike mcgovern (2013, 174) calls the “entrepreneurial capture” of authority. the accused were fed and lodged until cured of their witch and rehabilitated back into the community. welfare chairlady marrah argued: “some of their people don’t take care of them, so we also have to feed them, because you’re not going to host someone and not feed them.” small children apprehended as witches might be taken to school. many union members claimed privileged positions as redeemed witches, specialists who now used their witch eye to serve the country’s good rather than selfish profit. figure 5. kabba (upper left) and slithu members display and explain a variety of divination tools and witch weapons, including a “witch plane” (center), campbell town and marampa, 2011. stills from eye opener, videographer unknown, courtesy of the slithu archives. perhaps most vital to the event’s impact was the revelation of material objects. from tree trunks or thickets or the mud underneath cooking fires, various items were unearthed, from witch guns to witch planes, the latter appearing as small agglomerations of pipe, string, and stones with crude helicopter rotors (cf. geschiere 1997, 3; shaw 2002, 202, 209). the materialization of what had been largely considered invisible weapons proved highly controversial among the broader community of sierra leonean healers. but these tangible objects appeared essential for binding slithu’s programs to the civil war and its unresolved consequences. postwarcraft from 1991 to 2002, sierra leone was devastated by a protracted rebellion whose particular forms of brutality often erupted into international headlines in the form of child soldiers, blood diamonds, and amputations, as well as “juju journalism” (shaw 2003) that disparaged and exoticized local forms of ammunition and defense. that said, wartime, as a period of social stress and hyperintensive movements of military and refugees, did cultivate occult beliefs. esoteric technologies inspired by local hunters were appropriated by both rebels and the progovernment militias of the civil defense forces (cdf)—amulets, elixirs, and vestments bestowing powers of bullet-proofing, teleportation, and transfiguration (ferme 2001a; hoffman 2011). alongside such neutral defenses circulated more indisputably nefarious forces. witchcraft and cannibalism were weapons ascribed to many international fighters: burkinabés who fought alongside the first wave of rebels, liberians who replaced them, and nigerian economic community of west african states monitoring group (ecomog) troops who restored the government to power (hoffman 2011, 249). at the end of the war, many felt that unruly and imported occult violence persisted. kabba collapsed residual, unchecked tradition with what he termed “wicked people”: in that time [war], we had many societies working in sierra leone. we had kamajor, gbethi, ronsho, kapra, tamaboro [various ethnic hunters’ associations mobilized under the cdf] etc. etc., all under tradition. but that’s no good. we believe that we should form one umbrella for tradition, rather than everybody forming many different things under the name of tradition. if you do that, you will invite wicked people. the union’s dramatic exercises aimed to contain invisible powers that remained unregulated. visible weapons of war were deactivated through internationalist peacekeeping models. disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs originated in central america in 1989, and they quickly became the prevalent three-step recipe to pacify irregular armed forces. facilitated by the united nations mission in sierra leone, ddr ran from 1999 to 2004. in total, 42,330 weapons and 1.2 million pieces of ammunition were said to have been collected from 75,490 fighters (united nations mission in sierra leone 2005). while statistically successful in disarmament, the process largely passed the responsibility for demobilization and reintegration to local communities. as in other ddr implementations, administrators emphasized certain postwar transitions at the expense of others, and risked remarginalizing ex-combatants by providing insufficient or untenable skills training (knight and özerdem 2004; theidon 2007). on the cumulative national level, ddr potentially bore more significant ramifications. danny hoffman (2005) argues that ddr events provided stages for renarrating combatants’ agency. they were also highly visible manifestations of the restored state and its international backers (knight and özerdem 2004, 506), especially through widely publicized ceremonial bonfires of arms. the process not only reestablished the state’s monopoly on violence (munive and jakobsen 2012, 361) but also presumed a rewriting of the ex-combatants’ social contract with national and international authorities (knight and özerdem 2004, 506). whatever its effects on individual lives, ddr itself constituted a highly visible promise made between the international community, the national government, and a newly reconfigured citizenry. just as the united nations and the sierra leonean state regained a monopoly on physical violence by negotiating the surrender of combatants through ddr processes, slithu sought a monopoly on invisible violence by negotiating the surrender of witches through discursively identical programs. yet the reproduction of ddr also reproduced its shortcomings. the union mirrored ddr’s deferral of responsibility for long-term social transformation as former witches and freelance healers were pressured to surrender independence for a promise of future benefits that ultimately failed to fully materialize. state discursive affiliations were not the only markers of slithu’s connections with the state. its performed regimentation evoked the state’s most clearly formidable aspect: the military. moreover, it situated its operations in arenas of state power, thus casting the state as its primary client and beneficiary. witch-finding took place at state headquarters—army barracks, police posts, and even the state house—or sites of heavy state infrastructure, most notably the national airport. the union also marched into crucial nodes of the informal circulation of goods and individuals, such as the market at upgun turntable, the target of their first operation in 2009.6 by bringing their national operation to such sites of unregulated exchange, they carried the state into sectors previously considered beyond its reach. the union also invited the state to participate in its operations, most frequently via the ministry of internal affairs. police and military served as bodyguards and, crucially, as crowd control, their presence both escalating and containing the presence of spectators. ostensibly, these agents could do what the healers could not, resort to physical violence, while the healers could do what the state agents could not, identify sources of invisible danger. once witches were apprehended, slithu turned to state models for censure and punishment, as kabba conceded: i only arrest you, i send you to the chief . . . or i send you to the police if you killed someone. i make a statement, you make a statement. they send you to pademba road [prison]. we go to court. i testify that this is a thing that kills, this doesn’t kill, this is such-and-such. you accept it, and it’s left to the government. nothing’s left to me. it’s not my business. me, i’ve done my work. but law doesn’t permit me. i don’t have a jail, i don’t have a cell, i don’t—the law doesn’t permit me to do anything. because we have human rights. . . . the power invested in me, and his excellency the president dr. ernest bai koroma, and the government of the people of sierra leone, now that’s what we work with. i don’t have any different power.7 according to kabba, cooperation with the prison system reifies the ties between slithu and the state and bolsters each agent’s claims to righteousness. stage union activities offered a ready source of news that tied together cultural, political, and public health issues. the local media regularly reiterated the numbers captured in raids, though without necessarily verifying them independently. each executive meeting i attended was covered by a different reporter for a different newspaper, all having apparent long-term and cordial relations with the executive council. both the publicity of spectacle and the intimacy of individual relationships substantiated slithu’s authority. among the figures most eager to promote slithu was sarankay bayoh of the sierra leone broadcasting corporation. bayoh shadowed slithu through televised correspondent reports. she interviewed participants, bystanders, and even those confessing to witchcraft, while eschewing debate by rarely introducing critical or skeptical views. the title of her program, eye opener, attests to visual and revelatory epistemes uniting witch-finding and investigative journalism. bayoh was an iconic example of the modern cosmopolitan woman reporter. she often sported pantsuits, the quasi-masculine formal wear of the international elite that women rarely wear on freetown’s streets. her charisma met her fashion with aggressive professionalism conforming to global models of television journalism. both bayoh and slithu exploited the juxtaposition with each other’s embodiment of the modern/traditional divide. by sharing the same screen, they reconfirmed boundaries of difference, but also amply demonstrated their powerful abilities to cross those boundaries. bayoh’s journalistic skill was rendered incisive enough to allow her to access the secret and rarified practices of african tradition; slithu’s esoteric power was rendered influential enough to be recognized and honored by the most modern of actors. figure 6. sarankay bayoh, grafton, campbell town, and marampa, 2011. stills from eye opener, videographer unknown, courtesy of the slithu archives. another incident involving the media and the state suggests how slithu’s practices could be interpreted and accepted by freetown’s evangelical christians. in early 2014, the controversial newspaper publisher sylvia blyden, then serving as special executive assistant to president koroma, detailed with photographic evidence kabba’s expert dissection of a “witchcraft arsenal” that had “dropped out of thin air” at her residence, exposed by her own powerful faith: christianity causing [sic] the metaphysical to be forced into the physical. my house is deeply consecrated with holy ghost fire of our lord and saviour jesus christ. . . . dr. kabba can be contacted to elaborate on the type of witch, evil, black magic arsenal that was launched on my house that night. we called him to be the one to dismantle the witch weapon because they (traditionalists) know best about how these things are built and what purposes they serve. us christians do not know and since the world needs to know what was built, launched and for what purpose it was sent on my house, it was important to call him in. (blyden 2014) shared logics of revelation and expertise thus potentially transcended religious differences within the nation-state. performing the state by enacting its disarmament programs in public spaces and the broader public sphere, slithu performed the state.8 postcolonial governments often call on expressive cultural traditions to perform the nation and thereby promote allegiance. they are less often explicitly engaged in performing the state, that is, in bringing the state into existence by enacting strategies of governance. intriguingly, slithu did so not by mimicking state performance (although the presence of security personnel evoked such practices), but rather by reenacting longstanding forms of witch-finding divination within the discourse of the state apparatus, using terms like disarmament, transparency, and accountability to signal alternative explanatory paradigms. by reframing the act, slithu transformed its interpretation. yet the role slithu took on was more than a simple citation of government; it was a surrogation, a mirror government projected onto an invisible world, one where the processes of peace-building accomplished in the visible domain had not yet succeeded and whose lack of resolution explained the persistence of suffering on both planes of existence. kabba and his team presented themselves as the only public servants capable of action in both realms. ironically, the sierra leonean state was also merely performing itself, using rituals, procedures, and self-professed expertise to produce conditions to host other administrations and labor pools, agencies that would supposedly enact governance in turn. this embrace of nested sovereignty (hansen and stepputat 2006, 307) unfortunately promotes a kind of fractal mimicry; the fact that slithu structured itself isomorphically to the state while the state structures itself to be enacted by organizations like slithu suggests the disturbing image of an infinite series of empty nesting dolls of governance, each successive tier awaiting fulfillment by international funders from one direction, and by local laborers from the other. indeed, a certain stratum of the national economy appears consigned to civil society organizations who deploy forms of expert knowledge and continuously shifting partnerships to cover for limited means and impact. the leverage and legitimacy of such para-states and their proselytes depend on public image: in effect, their brands. rebrandcraft as part of the agenda for change that brought him to office in 2007, president ernest bai koroma inaugurated the secretariat for attitudinal and behavioral change (abc). the program was meant to overcome sierra leone’s “state of backwardness” (government of sierra leone 2008, 110) by changing inhabitants’ mind-sets into those of productive optimists and responsible citizens.9 the abc secretariat’s purview remained vague beyond media sensitization and public talks, but its repeated invocation in the public sphere proved enough to inspire discourse on the nature and necessity of personal transformation. the union frequently aligned itself with abc, even though many sierra leoneans might have accused slithu members of participating in exactly the “backwardness” abc was meant to stamp out. medicinal and ritual practices have been vilified in sierra leone for more than two centuries—by missionaries aiding the foundation of freetown, by waves of proselytizers of christianity and islam, and, more recently, by horror movies imported from nigeria and ghana. by rehabilitating witches as productive herbalists, slithu has reinvented traditional medicine in the image of contemporary neoliberalism, as when kabba trumpeted slithu’s successes: the traditional healers have done something in this country. the traditional healers saved thousands of lives in this country. traditional healers brought transparency and accountability in this country. . . . traditional healers made those who feared to come to this country before, today they come to invest. we have our sisters and brothers in the diaspora, who feared to come here. today they come. the white people feared to come here. today they come. all the [scam artists], we arrested them because they’ve resolved to cheat the people who come invest in this country, and we won’t allow that. all that was under tradition. and we aren’t playing. traditional healers have shown reality in this country. we’ve shown that traditional healers, we’ve changed, we’ve arrived, we’ve mobilized. we’ve shown we are patriotic citizens. in kabba’s telling, slithu’s key contribution has been to recuperate sierra leone’s modern public image and, thus, international investment. market principles have long found purchase in witchcraft discourse through “occult economies” (comaroff and comaroff 1999, 284) organized either to enrich via perversions of the norms of exchange or to combat such supernatural predation. witches often lurk in markets, they trade in human body parts, and throughout sierra leone, they are said to meet in rotating credit associations that travesty longstanding village-level cooperatives (shaw 2002, 208). kabba’s embrace of the idioms of rebranding thus aligns with historical conceptions of exchange and value. brand as performance sierra leoneans are hungry for languages of transformation, especially those associated with global power, and many deploy the word brand metaphorically for any form of promotion (cf. pier 2011, 416). the term development is an obvious precursor that still maintains cachet in sierra leone’s aid-based economy. yet the language of branding may prove even more potent, as it is tied to the iconography of the global marketplace, “an ever more powerful sovereign force” (hansen and stepputat 2006, 309). brands—and their qualities such as reputation and consumer loyalty—have increasingly been interpreted as a predominant source of value, eclipsing that of the commodities they purportedly represent (manning 2010). the detachment of brands from products exacerbates “entanglements of branding” (banet-weiser 2012, 7) and their multiple confusions: of material products with immaterial affects; of authenticity with fabrication; of individuality with mass production; and crucially, of the labor of production with the labor of consumption (manning 2010, 36). brands serve as the organizing principle mediating and consolidating forms of consumer labor, from loyalty to promotion (foster 2007, 717). brands achieve this displacement of labor through performativity, in the austinian sense of action through utterance, often by constructing the very desire the brand claims to satisfy (nakassis 2012, 635). a brand’s various utterances can further instill a sense of responsibility to act in a manner properly representing an identity, from nike’s call to “just do it” to save the children’s “kick polio out of sierra leone.” recent heineken ads promoting their clear green bottles near freetown government buildings playfully enjoined the reader: “it’s good to be transparent.” such calls of duty represent a contract between the user and the brand owner to mutually support a set of aspirational qualities, from fashionability to healthfulness. marketing strategies of so-called cultural branding have appropriated anthropological and sociological theory to argue that successful branding derives from “performing a myth that addresses acute contradiction in society,” where the consumers’ task is “ritual activity to experience the myth when using the product” (holt 2004, 14). an acknowledged goal of such models is to enter into zones once naively considered beyond market influence, including culture and tradition. in africa, both marketers and practitioners of local traditions initiate such interpenetration through the sponsorship of festivals (see pier 2011) and the establishment of intellectual property rights for cultural products, markers of identity, and ethnicity itself (comaroff and comaroff 2009). figure 7. slithu promotional billboard, on which kabba appears with various national and international figures, including ernest bai koroma (center) and the author (far lower left), kenema, 2012. photo by samuel mark anderson. figure 8. herbal medicines displayed at a slithu event in support of the government’s free health care initiative, calaba town, 2011. photo by samuel mark anderson. kabba welcomed paradigms that shifted consumer loyalty from tradition to branding, and thus demonstrated some ways in which sierra leonean rebranding discourses played out in practice. he obliged healers to purchase id cards featuring the union logo that are still brandished throughout the country. he promoted the union through giant billboards strategically placed in freetown and regional centers. he advocated ingredient lists on medicines and researched pill-manufacturing technology—less to ensure customer safety, as there were no means to authenticate the medicines’ composition, than to mimic the public image of marketable pharmaceuticals. he attempted to regulate seemingly chaotic practices like public initiations and informal markets that undermined the union’s reputation for transparency and order. all these efforts called on herbalists and their clients to conform to new image standards, explicitly so as to win support from potential national and international sponsors. yet it was in the public spectacles of disarming witches that slithu most clearly embraced the “entanglements of branding” by generating a space in which materiality and immateriality, authenticity and fabrication, desire and responsibility became productively confused. brand as governance kabba’s use of the term rebranding echoes president koroma’s own frequent invocation of the “rebranding of sierra leone.” beyond being one of many ways the former insurance company ceo deployed the language of business, this bid formed part of a globally accelerating effort to apply neoliberal marketing logics to statecraft. brand states are said to operate on image and reputation, a politics of “style over substance” (van ham 2001, 3). in nations classified as developing, branding’s task is to expose “bad” culture as the gap between local and foreign understanding, thus initiating a “transitional process during which local participants gain increasing clarity as to what foreign interests want from them, and adapt their customs and output accordingly” (aronczyk 2013, 162). the purpose of national representation is no longer political at all, in the sense of serving a public, but economic, attracting foreign capital and increasing marketability (jansen 2008). postwar reconstruction offers an especially potent arena for national rebranding. the most visible brands across sierra leone—excepting perhaps bottled beverages and telecommunication networks—remain those of postwar internationalist agencies and ngos. in recent work, alex fattal (2018) profiles colombia’s experimental ddr process that employed international marketing experts to orchestrate spectacular publicity stunts meant both to encourage rebels to disarm before the initiation of a joint peace process and to preemptively declare the war’s end to the international community; fattal (2018, 16–22) argues that such “brand warfare” failed rebels who defected only to be abandoned to a perpetual limbo between ostracism and reintegration. participants in sierra leone’s less media-savvy ddr process have likewise found themselves exposed and struggling to live up to imported, individualized rights-based values embedded in postwar rebranding. rebranding as governance thus entangles different publics in different ways, and the spectacular launch of a new brand unfolds variably as it hails ever more participants. the existing brand’s bad reputation is explicitly exposed to proscribed, insider publics—shareholders in the case of corporations, stakeholders in the case of governments and ngos. in sierra leone, this took the form of extensive discussions about “backwardness” and the need for “attitudinal and behavioral change.” meanwhile, the reinvented brand is broadcast outward to broader publics, implicitly inverting the former brand that nonetheless still haunts it. descriptions of sierra leone’s “adventurous” investment opportunities and “peaceful” beaches purposefully echo and upend preconceptions of wartime. the apc’s call to rebrand sierra leone simultaneously invited outsiders to invest and transform the country and demanded that the public transform its behavior. both publics were thus tasked with the actual commitment of transformation. the union’s synthesis of governance and rebranding reflected a global rapprochement between the two fields, particularly in attempts to transcend violence. yet its integration of these spheres within antiwitchcraft discourse revealed not just shared transformative ambitions but also shared procedures and fault lines. conclusion antiwitchcraft, postwarcraft, and rebrandcraft share a politics oriented around spectacles of prospection. prospecting—to use an apt metaphor tied to sierra leone’s mineral resources and the extractive economies they inspire—evokes a quest for hidden resources across promising strata (see hayden 2003). authorities and experts collaborate to program spectacles of prospection designed to bring to the surface otherwise hidden resources of local labor, international capital, and further sources of value. such spectacles serve as the engines for governance by anticipatory transfiguration. demands for transformation arise from experiences of affliction that do not match observed phenomena of exchange: the suffering of innocents, continued threats of physical violence, a lack of commercial traction. explanations are found within the terrain of the invisible, “a space of imagination once dominated by the dead [and other spirits] but now shared with the technological apparatus of modernity and the mysterious value form of commodities” (newell 2012, 162). summoned experts initiate spectacles of prospection with acts of divination, designed to suss out sources of negative value production (see munn 1986), whether witch, rebel, or brand liability. once the source of negative value production has been determined, it can be exposed and reconfigured in spectacular form. the exposure itself serves as the primary transformation. the witch is rooted out, the implements destroyed, and a confession extracted. the rebel is pulled from the bush, the firearms confiscated, and an apology and reintegration ceremonialized. the brand’s new, fashionable iteration—an implicit inversion of its former failings—is rolled out through an advertising blitz. each of these processes claims to be capable of rendering invisible malefactors visible and of refiguring them, once visible, into positive principles. yet running beneath are implicit demands on the concerted labor of their constituents. witch-finders enjoin their communities to accept former witches and change behaviors to rein in jealousy. ddr officials acknowledge that “locals are the real heroes” (williamson 2006, 189) for overcoming prejudice and finding ways to reintegrate combatants. brands depend on buyers for promotion, and “consumers pay again and again to recover the outcomes and means of their own productivity and subjectivity” (foster 2007, 719). the central tokens of these processes—accused witches, ex-combatants, and brands—are less sources of change and more visible beacons around which constituents are invited to orient and coordinate their own labors of transformation.10 such aspirational spectacles perform a kind of promise, demonstrating capacity for change rather than any significant change in and of itself. the witch’s confession disavows future invisible violence alongside an implicit promise from the community not to encourage jealousy. the ddr process rewrites the social contract between ex-combatants, governments, and communities (knight and özerdem 2004, 506). the brand promises personal transformation, just as the consumer promises to act in accordance with the brand’s identity (banet-weiser 2012, 4). the promise simultaneously offers hope and demands allegiance. it also requires trust. each of the aforementioned processes are quite explicitly designed to restore trust, whether between kin in prototypical witch hunts (geschiere 2013), between combatants and civilians in ddr programs (humphreys and weinstein 2007), or between corporations/nations and consumers/citizens in brand management (aronczyk 2013, 163). geschiere (2013, 23) triangulates (anti)witchcraft practice as a response to the ever more urgent quest for trust amid the ever-expanding dangers of intimacy. yet neither what he calls the “necessity” (geschiere 2013, 29) of trust nor the “elasticity” (geschiere 2013, 208) of intimacy should be taken as a priori. in politics by prospection, trust and intimacy are manufactured. revelatory events draw people together not only physically through the attractions of spectacle but also psychologically through the divulging of privileged information—they thus invite intimacy by pushing people and knowledge in and out of visibility. such intimacy immediately calls for trust. alberto corsín jiménez (2011, 190) sees these movements as recursive, “an appearance of trust in the disappearance of other forms, and vice versa. trust thus emerges as the forever self-eclipsing relationship through which people re-place themselves into new relationships.” matthew carey (2017, 22) argues that trusting “always implies . . . a redistribution of control,” referring largely to the allocation of responsibilities among the entrusted. but trust also redistributes control by allowing social actors to extend predictability into unseeable and ungovernable realms: the future, the mind of the other, not to mention the invisible domain of witches. none of these arenas are at all controllable, but trust offers the necessary yet always unstable illusion that they are. the sleight of hand shared among witch hunting, ddr processes, and nation rebranding is to offer trust as a panacea for precisely those crises during which choice appears most remote. built on trust and often hollow spectacles of aspirational transfiguration that largely serve to call for change rather than providing the actual instruments necessary for change, such programs are subject to dramatic reversals of fortune. witch-finders and those who use them are ultimately open to accusations of witchcraft themselves. postwar ddr implementers are blamed for collusion with military leaders (munive and jakobsen 2012, 369–70; theidon 2007, 82, 88). corporate brands are continuously at risk of accusations of inauthenticity (banet-weiser 2012). thus slithu itself succumbed to the fickleness of its own model. the rank and file soon began to suspect corruption in the disconnect between kabba’s pronouncements of government support and the realities of continued deprivation. during the time i knew the union executive, they hemorrhaged active members, to which they could only respond with their own accusations of witchcraft and malfeasance. when i began research in earnest, the disarmament operations were already part of slithu’s past, serving primarily to legitimate more recent projects, all of which struggled to meet the disarmaments’ success mustering the country’s diverse healing professionals and raising the union’s national profile. coda on april 8, 2014, a healer died in sierra leone’s far east, and by the end of may when she was identified as the country’s index case for ebola virus disease, an epidemic had slipped through the fingers of authorities that ultimately propelled the nation and the international community into a state of emergency (sack et al. 2014). soon, traditional healing practices were outlawed alongside other activities presumed to exacerbate transmission. as the public face of the healer community, kabba attempted to consolidate his influence with his typical press releases and conferences (e.g., kargbo 2014). yet denied the central platform of his authority—spectacle—by the bylaws against healing and public assembly, his influence was largely limited to posing as the representative traditional healer for a series of government-sponsored posters in which community members declared le we tap ebola (anglicized krio for “let’s stop ebola”). figure 9. leftover sensitization poster, kenema, 2016. photo by samuel mark anderson. if the ebola epidemic exposed a void behind slithu’s model of spectacular governance, it laid bare the parallel hollowness of the sierra leone government’s free health care initiative. to combat the deplorable state and untenable cost of medical infrastructure, the government had in 2010 initiated a program designed to provide free services to mothers and children up to five years old. rolled out with great ceremony and repeatedly touted on the apc campaign trail throughout the 2012 election cycle, people on the ground knew that the program was plagued by graft and an overburdened and undereducated workforce (nossiter 2013). the lack of proper equipment and training for infection control proved devastating as dozens of hospital staff and patients succumbed to the virus. in retrospect, slithu’s dramatic witch-finding spectacles now appear part of another era, one in which lack of oversight invited an upsurge in creative experimentation with the available languages and structures of power. it is not yet clear if such grassroots trial-and-error will be possible under potential new regimes of medical regulation. more resilient was the language of neoliberalism. in 2015, i was told the ministry of tourism and cultural affairs was preparing a project that would tout culture as the key to “post-ebola rebranding.” further such calls rolled in from newspaper commentators (hanciles 2015), the liberian military (cooper 2014), and the sierra leonean president himself, who told the african union (au): we would like the au to champion the rebranding of our countries . . . and the entire continent as brimming with profitable investment and other opportunities for recovery and growth. without this rebranding the fortunes of our countries would be constrained by travel, investment and other restrictions that could hamper our recovery and resilience to prevent future outbreak. (koroma 2015) in the absence of agency, rebranding remains the ultimate panacea. notes acknowledgments this article is the result of ethnographic research in sierra leone from september 2011 to march 2013, with shorter visits in 2010, 2015, and 2016. funding for research and writing was provided by the social science research council and the charlotte w. newcombe foundation, as well as by grants from the international institute and graduate division of the university of california, los angeles. initial revisions were made under support from the mahindra humanities center at harvard university. my profound gratitude to allen roberts and the rest of my dissertation committee, all of my colleagues at harvard, as well as rosalind shaw, susan shepler, mike mcgovern, and kevin lewis o’neill, among others, for countless helpful comments on earlier drafts. many thanks to the cultural anthropology editors and reviewers for further advancing the article’s interventions. special appreciation to slithu’s executive for their accommodation, and to foday bangura and abubakkar juana for logistical support and camaraderie. 1. all interviews were conducted in krio and translated by the author. krio largely employs english cognates, including such overloaded terms as wich and tradishun. 2. certain regional languages make distinctions similar to e. e. evans-pritchard’s (1937) classic division between involuntary witch and voluntary sorcerer: for example, the distinction between hᴐna and bᴐni in mende (gittins 1987, 130; grijspaarde et al. 2013, 29–30). yet such nuances are absent in krio and frequently lost in everyday discourse. 3. kabba thus reproduces rather than alleviates the wider problem of witchcraft’s “loose terminology” (geschiere 2013, 9). 4. as a comparatively wealthy foreign researcher of cultural and political affairs, i was consistently warned to take seriously the threats of witch gun owners who might be jealous of my success or seeking to defend secrets. in fact, it was to allay the fears of a friend that i first visited yainkain marrah and learned more of the union. 5. only later did i learn jammeh led his own spectacular and brutal national witch-finding operation in 2009 (see amnesty international 2009), possibly to unearth the killer of his aunt. i was never able to ask kabba if this inspired him—or vice versa. 6. upgun represents the historical frontier of the colony, and it still serves as the intersection of roads from the city, the mountains, and the dockyards, as well as hosting the petrol station terminus for private taxis from the provinces and the large kissy road cemetery. it thus stands as a barely regulated borderland between city and province, land and sea, and life and death. 7. in january 2016, i was told kabba was running “trials” against accused witches, apparently largely union defectors, and may have been overseeing similar trials during my fieldwork from 2011 to 2013. this would have directly contradicted kabba’s claims during our interviews and might indicate something of his narrative and moral flexibility. 8. many thanks to kevin o’neill for pointing out this important distinction. 9. ironically, the first abc executive director, philip conteh, and its national coordinator, alieu kamara (also known as “territorial integrity” and a former spokesperson for the afrc junta), were convicted in 2011 by the anti-corruption commission for the misappropriation and mismanagement of funds, abuse of office, abuse of position, and obstruction of justice (awoko 2011). 10. while emphasizing antiwitchcraft’s coherence with psychoanalysis rather than governance or marketing, jeanne favret-saada’s (2015) argument that french antiwitchcraft rites encourage victims to transform their self-image so as to accept their own perpetuation of patriarchal violence resonates here. references amnesty international 2009 “the gambia: hundreds accused of ‘witchcraft’ and poisoned in government campaign.” press release, march 18. 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https://au.int/en/speeches/20150721-0. langwick, stacey a. 2015 “partial publics: the political promise of traditional medicine in africa.” current anthropology 56, no. 4: 493–514. https://doi.org/10.1086/682285. last, murray, and g. l. chavunduka, eds. 1988 the professionalization of african medicine. manchester, uk: manchester university press. luedke, tracy j. 2006 “presidents, bishops, and mothers: the construction of authority in mozambican healing.” in borders and healers: brokering therapeutic resources in southeast africa, edited by tracy j. luedke and harry g. west, 43–64. bloomington: indiana university press. manning, paul 2010 “the semiotics of brand.” annual review of anthropology 39: 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104939. mcgovern, mike 2013 unmasking the state: making guinea modern. chicago: university of chicago press. munive, jairo, and stine finne jakobsen 2012 “revisiting ddr in liberia: exploring the power, agency, and interests of local and international actors in the ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of combatants.” conflict, security, and development 12, no. 4: 359–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/14678802.2012.724792. munn, nancy d. 1986 the fame of gawa: a symbolic study of value transformation in a massim (papua new guinea) society. new york: cambridge university press. nakassis, constantine v. 2012 “brand, citationality, performativity.” american anthropologist 114, no. 4: 624–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01511.x. newell, sasha 2012 the modernity bluff: crime, consumption, and citizenship in côte d’ivoire. chicago: university of chicago press. nossiter, adam 2013 “sierra leone graft charges imperil care and aid.” new york times, april 13. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/world/africa/sierra-leone-graft-charges-imperil-care-and-aid.html. pier, david 2011 “the branded arena: ugandan ‘traditional’ dance in the marketing era.” africa 81, no. 3: 413–33. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972011000246. richards, paul 2009 “dressed to kill: clothing as technology of the body in the civil war in sierra leone.” journal of material culture 14, no. 4: 495–512. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183509345950. sack, kevin, sheri fink, pam belluck, and adam nossiter 2014 “how ebola roared back.” new york times, december 29. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/health/how-ebola-roared-back.html. shaw, rosalind 2002 memories of the slave trade: ritual and the historical imagination in sierra leone. chicago: university of chicago press. 2003 “robert kaplan and ‘juju journalism’ in sierra leone’s rebel war: the primitivizing of an african conflict.” in magic and modernity: interfaces of revelation and concealment, edited by birgit meyer and peter pels, 88–102. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. smith, james howard 2008 bewitching development: witchcraft and the reinvention of development in neoliberal kenya. chicago: university of chicago press. tarawally, abu bakarr s. 2012 “traditional healers president at arm’s length.” sierra express media, march 5. theidon, kimberly 2007 “transitional subjects: the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants in colombia.” international journal of transitional justice 1, no. 1: 66–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijm011. united nations mission in sierra leone 2005 “fact sheet 1: disarmament, demobilization and reintegration.” end of mission press kit. https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/unamsil/press_kit.htm. van ham, peter 2001 “the rise of the brand state: the postmodern politics of image and reputation.” foreign affairs 80, no. 5: 2–6. https://doi.org/10.2307/20050245. west, harry g. 2005 kupilikula: governance and the invisible realm in mozambique. chicago: university of chicago press. williamson, john 2006 “the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of child soldiers: social and psychological transformation in sierra leone.” intervention 4, no. 3: 185–205. https://doi.org/10.1097/wtf.0b013e328011a7fb. world health organization 2002 “who traditional medicine strategy, 2002–2005.” geneva: world health organization. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/js2297e. sense out of sense sense out of sense: notes on the affect/ethics impasse william mazzarella university of chicago http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2500-6316 one of the great contributions of the affect theory boom of the past fifteen years or so has been to address that which is at once intimate and impersonal (berlant 2011; gregg and seigworth 2010; massumi 2002, 2015; sedgwick and frank 1995; stewart 2007; thrift 2008). the intimate and the impersonal have conventionally been imagined either as opposites or as prosthetic supplements to each other. according to such a scheme, the intimate sphere is that of the innermost personality, in contrast to the impersonal outer domain of social routines and pressures. as a consequence, communication that wishes to engage us intimately needs to move beyond anonymous, merely rational facts and figures toward the kind of sentimental resonance that, supposedly, only human-interest stories can activate. against such clichés, affect theory alerts us to the uncanny fold in which inner and outer life are disjunctively blended: the zones of the intimately impersonal and the impersonally intimate. in march 2013, the republican senator rob portman came out, unexpectedly, in favor of gay marriage, revealing that the decisive factor in his conversion was his own son’s homosexuality. a radio commentator followed up the announcement with the observation that, for most of us, the radius of empathy stretches no further than intimates and acquaintances. two implications are embedded in this claim. the first is that our (spontaneous?) capacity to empathize remains inextricable from our (cultivated?) ethical capacity as citizens. the second is that there may also be an irreducible gap between these capacities. or, to put it differently: being members of societies that constantly expect us to have an ethical relationship to people we will never meet makes demands on us to which we are not naturally adequate. at issue, then, is our public response-ability: the distance between our ability to respond and a potentially infinite horizon of responsibility. the media theorist john durham peters (1995, 665) observes, “parochial containment for us . . . has been shattered today, in our dispersed yet interconnected condition. . . . limitations of scale have been breached and we citizens of the world today inhabit social systems not apportioned to the limitations of our bodies.” that our attention is daily an/aesthetized by images of distant suffering—images at once visceral and remote—hardly helps (boltanski 1999). here, we have a classic point of contention between liberal-progressive and conservative-populist positions on the relationship between citizenship and affect. conservatives tend to ground the ethics of citizenship in some communitarian conception of moral values that are supposed to be locatable in the circumscribed affective field of family and local community life. the liberal tradition, conversely, has tended to stress the importance of self-suspension, of transcending the partiality of merely local and personal attachments to attain a higher or more impersonal ethics. as georg wilhelm friedrich hegel (1977, 43) once warned, “since the man of common sense makes his appeal to feeling, to an oracle within his breast, he is finished and done with anyone who does not agree; he only has to explain that he has nothing more to say to anyone who does not find and feel the same in himself. in other words, he tramples underfoot the roots of humanity.” once we lay it out like this, the flaws in the standard opposition between conservative and liberal visions become clear. on the one hand, senator portman’s ostensibly personal announcement is already a calculated public act; its invocation of the intimate affective ground of family is intended to address—and, crucially, to resonate with—strangers. on the other hand, the impersonality of liberal ethics is shot through with its own affects, from the dense pathos and not-so-secret enjoyment that suffuses every insistence on acting on principle to the suddenly intimate reverberations, the wild affect, of even the most apparently abstract kinds of information—illness statistics, threat-level assessments, and so on (jain 2007; masco 2014; massumi 2005; woodward 2009). sometimes the very abstraction or inscrutability of the information that confronts us is what makes it agitating. the intersectionality of recent writings on affect—their engagements with queer, environmental, and posthumanist thought—has proven especially generative for theorizing cultural politics. still, as i have had occasion to observe elsewhere (mazzarella 2009, 2013, forthcoming), affect theory certainly did not invent the problem of the interfolding of the impersonal and the intimate. emile durkheim’s classic meditations on the ritual mediation of mana, for example, insist on the inextricability of the most palpably intimate currents of experience and the most impersonal social forms. and the philosophy of aesthetics has mined related terrain for more than two hundred years (eagleton 1990; hammermeister 2002; haug 1987). if anything, recent iterations of affect theory have tended toward a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the resonance between many of its concerns and deeper genealogies of that subject too often pejoratively dismissed as “enlightenment” or “liberal.” these deeper genealogies have bequeathed to us both the habits of thought enshrined in the figure of a radius of empathy and, i want to suggest, the necessity of thinking beyond it. figure 1. apuntes (edition), by dianna frid, 2015–2016. heat transfer on canvas, with embroidery floss; edition of ten variables. photo courtesy of dianna frid. one useful way to begin grappling with these genealogies is to revisit that moment in the mid-eighteenth century when moral philosophers like david hume and adam smith were trying to make sense of the place of affect in a then nascent mass-mediated society.1 the human capacity to be empathetically affected—hume and smith called it “sympathy”—appeared to them as a kind of pharmakon of modern citizenship: at once an obstacle to and a condition of possibility for ethics in a society of strangers. around that same time, jean-jacques rousseau (1997, 74) argued that a large-scale society of strangers was affectively unworkable: “the people has less affection for its chiefs whom it never sees, for a fatherland which in its eyes is as [big as] the world, and for its fellow-citizens most of whom are strangers to it.” a couple of centuries later, benedict anderson (1983) would counter rousseau’s prejudice by accounting for the mediatic forms—novels, newspapers, maps, and so on—that made intimate affective investments possible between strangers at national and transnational scales. but the question was never just whether the anonymous intimacies of public affect were possible; the question was also whether they could be ethical. the underlying question informing hume’s and smith’s musings on sympathy was: what happens to the relation between our affective and ethical capacities when the local radius of our face-to-face interactions is no longer isomorphic with the imagined communities of citizenship and nationality through which we are expected to understand ourselves? in short, hume and smith were engaged in early attempts to come to terms with the affect/ethics impasse under conditions of mass publicity. hume’s and smith’s explorations of sympathy are certainly not reducible to an organicist equanimity regarding the affective grounds of social life.2 for them, sympathy is, from the very beginning, an ambiguous matter. at one level, hume (2000, 206) says, sympathy is our most extraordinary resonant susceptibility, “that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.” smith (1982, 11), in turn, describes such sensuously mimetic transmission as follows: “the passions, upon some occasions, may seem to be transfused from one man to another, instantaneously, and antecedent to any knowledge of what excited them in the person principally concerned.”3 as much as this sympathetic capacity makes human solidarity possible, it also clouds autonomous judgment. hume (2000, 209) cautions, “nothing tends more to disturb our understanding, and precipitate us into any opinions, however unreasonable, than their connexion with passion; which diffuses itself over the imagination, and gives an additional force to every related idea.” the radius of empathy comes into focus here. both hume and smith suggest that we will care less about and resonate less with those who are more distant from us. by the same token, we are more likely to be blinded by a spontaneous resonance with those who are close by (whether this resonance is solidary, competitive, or antagonistic is another matter). “there is no quality in human nature which causes more fatal errors in our conduct,” remarks hume (2000, 345), “than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote, and makes us desire objects more according to their situation than their intrinsic value.” hume’s solution is to make sure that impartial magistrates will, in all decisive matters, guide human affairs. but smith, writing a couple of decades later, proposes something more striking: the famous formula of the impartial spectator. smith (1982, 113) imagines a kind of internal self-division whereby each of us might view and review our passionate engagements as if from a neutral, external standpoint: “i divide myself, as it were, into two persons . . . i, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other i, the person whose conduct is examined into and judged of.” by setting up this inner division, smith prescribes something more than the usual austerities of stoical and, later, liberal self-abstraction. rather, smith’s impartial spectator enacts the intimate anonymity of modern publicness: the inner stranger qua ethical compass—at once private and exposed before the gaze of the world.4 this amounts to an important difference between hume and smith. in hume, the sympathetic relationship is more or less dyadic and face to face: one subject resonating with another. for smith (1982, 50), by contrast, something like a generalized public opens up as an imagined audience for the self-abstraction of the impartial spectator: “the view of the public . . . open to the eyes of all mankind.”5 it is easy enough to see that smith’s impartial spectator models the kind of protestant white-man “birch-rod pedagogy” (adorno 1973, 336) that we all love to satirize, with its febrile attachment to moderation, prudence, and the strictest monitoring of corporeal desire.6 yet, crucially, the impartial spectator is not simply dispassionate and distant. rather, he or she is at once affectively absorbed and reflexively autonomous. how? smith’s impartial spectator establishes not so much self-reflexivity as such, but a theatricalized (some might say hystericized) self-relation.7 by theatricalized i do not mean only that the impartial spectator is, in some sense, as much on display to himor herself as to an imagined public (indeed, the two become, in smith’s scheme, hard to disentangle). in fact, smith explicitly idealizes the quietly industrious bourgeois against the showy public man, the flamboyant courtier of the ancien régime. nor do i mean only that smith invokes the impartial spectator as a model of imaginative identification—much as audience members at a play might put themselves in the shoes of the characters on stage. what makes smith so modern is the deep ambivalence that runs right down the middle of the self-relation opened up by the impartial spectator. on the one hand, and against hume, smith insists that there can be no direct transmission of sentiments between individuals; the best we can do is imagine what it would be like to be someone else.8 at the same time, smith (1982, 10) also acknowledges a profoundly and spontaneously mimetic-corporeal faculty: “when we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our own leg or our own arm; and when it does fall, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. the mob, when they are gazing at a dancer on the slack rope, naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel that they themselves must do if in his situation.” it is the juxtaposition and the disjuncture between (ethical) identification and (mimetic) resonance that makes the peculiar self-relation established by the impartial spectator theatrical: a dynamic tension between distanced communicative representation and immersed sensuous participation.9 inadvertently, inconsistently, and with a great deal of ambivalence, smith offers us one of the earliest diagnoses of mass-mediated subjectivity. we are now in a position to return to the conservative-versus-liberal opposition with which i began. both terms in this opposition name attempts to resolve the anxious tension, the affect/ethics impasse necessarily triggered by the existential predicament of mass-mediated subjectivity. both attempt, in opposite ways, to enforce a spatial separation between the personal and the impersonal. whether they celebrate it or castigate it, both imagine a radius of empathy as the spontaneous situation of affective life. the conservative model draws a defensive line around a community—whether of kin, locality, or nation—and treats it as if it were a family in constant need of protection from external threats. within the radius, according to this approach, we find a perfect—not to say a claustrophobic—coincidence of affect and ethics. the liberal self-abstraction model, conversely, insists on a radical split between spontaneous affective resonances (which are imagined as inherently parochial) and the cosmopolitan potential of an impersonal (which is thus imagined as properly ethical) field of judgment. carrying a stoical topos into the space of mass publicity, the liberal tradition has fixated on the interestedness of affective resonances, as opposed to the disinterested, objective judgment that is supposed to become possible once we have sufficiently interrogated our own biases, investments, desires, and unconscious proclivities. a paranoid hermeneutic of suspicion is meant to serve here as a prophylactic against internal and external seductions. if the conservative romance of the communitarian circle launders affect, as it were, by insisting on its organic grounds, then the liberal tradition tries to make it safe by idealizing a disinterested aesthetic as the most reliable sensuous foundation for ethical life. we see this in immanuel kant’s absolute prohibition on desire in the aesthetic judgment of the beautiful. and we see it in smith’s invocation of civic virtue sustained less by ethical commitments to our fellow citizens than by our sheer enjoyment of a smoothly functioning social machine. again, it is easy enough to satirize this kind of strenuous piety in the enlightenment subject—to pour scorn, as friedrich nietzsche so mercilessly did, on both the pathos of purity and its inevitable other side: the only barely suppressed fascination that constantly obtrudes, obscenely, from under the philosopher’s cassock. but maybe this kind of satire, entertaining as it is, rather misses the point. behind the manifest obsession with interest and its seductions lurks a knottier, perhaps more uncanny problem: the affect/ethics impasse, which is not so much a problem of interest as a kind of parallax gap—“a constantly shifting perspective between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible” (žižek 2006, 5). as such, the affect/ethics impasse is, from the standpoint of a prescriptively normative philosophy, an intolerable deadlock. and yet life goes on. what we call everyday life consists, as a quotidian ethics of habitation, of the myriad ways in which this deadlock is pragmatically negotiated. therein lies an ethnographic opportunity for the anthropology of affect: to account for the ways in which people, amid common currents, intimate and anonymous, make sense out of the impasse of sense. notes 1. my take on smith differs in this regard from that of john durham peters (1995, 665), who argues that smith’s ethics in theory of moral sentiments are still fundamentally those of the face-to-face community: “sympathy is adjusted to human finitude in smith in a way that it cannot be for us two centuries later.” although paddy scannell (2000) does not discuss hume or smith, he does provide an efficient outline of the relation between mediatic shift and subjective experience that i am presuming here. 2. here i depart from the line of argument taken by, for example, uday mehta (1999, 38–41). 3. john durham peters (1995, 660–61) stresses the distance between smith and the more romantic eighteenth-century tradition of interpersonal influence and sympathetic vibration. i read smith as more ambivalently situated in this regard, that is, as participating at once in a stoic-liberal tradition that emphasizes self-abstraction and in a discourse of interpersonal influences. 4. the evocation of georg simmel’s (1971, 143) essay on the stranger is entirely appropriate here: “in the case of the stranger, the union of closeness and remoteness involved in every human relationship is patterned in a way that may be succinctly formulated as follows: the distance within this relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near.” 5. smith’s moral sentiments is a transitional text in the theorization of modern publics. on the one hand, it imagines the kind of generalized public view that i am discussing here. on the other hand, smith opposes the essentially feudal public man of the court with the emergent private man—the bourgeois entrepreneur. 6. adorno uses the phrase to ironize the kantian commandment that we renounce all merely personal attachments in our pursuit of bildung. 7. see egginton 2003, 2006 and roach 1993 for detailed discussions of the elective affinity between modern theatricality and modern structures of publicity. see peters 1995 and marshall 1984 for analyses of the theatrical dimensions of smith’s impartial spectator. 8. for instance, smith (1982, 9) writes: “as we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. though our brother is on 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futures arcticnoise and broadcasting futures: geronimo inutiq remixes the igloolik isuma archive kate hennessy simon fraser university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3303-1669 trudi lynn smith university of victoria http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1619-6867 tarah hogue vancouver art gallery http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9848-6090 all that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints— is noise, the only possible source of new patterns. —gregory bateson geronimo inutiq is an accomplished contemporary artist specializing in digital image and video production, electronic music production, and djing. he has performed and exhibited in the museum of civilization of quebec, in the acclaimed group exhibition beat nation, in the transmediale and club transmediale festivals in berlin, in material experiments at imaginenative 2015, and in the contemporary native art biennial in 2016. the arcticnoise project was catalyzed by the acquisition of the igloolik isuma video archive by the national gallery of canada. this acquisition came about after the production studio that famously produced atanarjuat: the fast runner (2001), which won the cannes caméra d’or, and which also facilitated extensive cultural work in igloolik and other northern communities for twenty years, went into receivership. supported by a mobilizing inuit heritage grant, the curator christine lalonde, who proved central in acquiring the collection for the national gallery of canada, invited geronimo inutiq to take up a residency at the national gallery to begin to untangle and assess what isuma producers had documented over the course of their work in the north. arcticnoise was then initiated in 2014, when collaborators and curators britt gallpen and yasmin nurming-por further invited inutiq to remediate elements of the archive as a critical response to glenn gould’s iconic 1967 contrapuntal radio documentary “the idea of north.” the igloolik isuma video archive continues to be explored and researched by geronimo inutiq, both through the arcticnoise exhibition and subsequent publication and through his work at the national gallery of canada. figure 1. geronimo inutiq performing at the opening of arcticnoise at grunt gallery, august 2015. photo courtesy of reese muntean. in 2015, the authors of this essay collaborated with inutiq, gallpen, and nurming-por to organize the first exhibition of the arcticnoise project. we also worked together to develop a parallel program that included an ethnographic terminalia workshop called “terminus: archives, ephemera, and electronic art,” a collaborative zine publication, and a public dialogue event in coordination with the 2015 international symposium on electronic art. in a month-long installation at vancouver’s grunt gallery that summer, visitors experienced inutiq’s reimagining of gould’s iconic radio documentary and the revisualization of igloolik isuma media. the exhibition was subsequently installed in different forms in saskatoon and toronto, with an accompanying exhibition catalog (hogue 2016). in this essay we highlight the role of the indigenous media archive in supporting creative practices between indigenous and settler collaborators. inutiq’s work both illuminates the potential of cultural institutions like the national gallery of canada and artist-run centers like grunt gallery to challenge colonial legacies of representation while inspiring new forms of aesthetic and cultural communication. we present the work of inutiq and his curatorial partners as an example of the ways in which indigenous media futures are becoming articulated through digitization, appropriation, remix, and exhibition. we highlight inutiq’s critical engagement with signal, noise, and glitch to re-present the north––as well as the archive––as an unstable, dynamic idea, instead of a static apparatus of the colonial imagination. temporal relationships between the past, present, and future are unsettled and resignified as contemporary art activating both fictional and documentary media in the igloolik isuma video archive. at the same time, we point to the urgent precarity of these archives and the complexities of copyright and ownership in a rapidly shifting media environment. in doing so, we suggest that arcticnoise resists colonial legacies of meaning by unsettling conventional expectations of archival indigenous media and foregrounding noise as a productive force in the communication of knowledge. the distant early warning system in an interview about arcticnoise (inutiq and hennessy 2016), inutiq reflects on his childhood in frobisher bay, northwest territories, where the decaying infrastructure of the distant early warning system signaled the existence of a cold war world and hinted at the possibility of a mutually assured destruction. these systems were eventually appropriated to become the broadcast infrastructure for the canadian broadcasting corporation’s (cbc) northern service, transforming a harbinger of terror into an instrument of canadian colonial nation-building. these same infrastructures became tools of resistance for northern indigenous media producers, a dynamic that sits at the heart of the arcticnoise project. the terror politics of the cold war brought enhanced visibility to the north with the construction of the distant early warning system (gallpen 2016). also known as the dew line, this military communications infrastructure was a system of radar stations stretching across the arctic, through the alaskan aleutian islands and as far west as vancouver island. it functioned between 1957 and 1985 to detect incoming soviet bombers and give early warning of sea and land invasion. in 1958, the potential of this broadcasting system expanded when ten former military and volunteer-run community radio stations were appropriated to establish the cbc’s northern service. the dew line, as a metaphor for media power and transformative potential, was also adopted by the canadian media theorist marshall mcluhan as the title of his loose-leaf publication the dew-line newsletter (a startling, shocking early warning system for our era of instant change!), which he distributed between 1969 and 1970. figure 2. cover of the first issue of the dew-line newsletter, 1969. image from the collections of the mackintosh library at the glasgow school of art. mcluhan’s articulation of the dew line as medium for transformations and potential futures has resonance with histories of communication infrastructures and indigenous media production in the arctic. while the influx of southern media into the north has been identified by some as a destructive force, the infrastructure that facilitated its transmission also augmented the agency of inuit peoples to represent themselves. as faye ginsburg (2002, 51) has written, some indigenous activists have seen film, video, and television as a sort of neutron bomb that “kills people and leaves inanimate structures intact.” at the same time, depending on the time and place in which they arrive, these technologies “also offer possibilities for ‘talking back’ to and through the categories that have been created to contain indigenous people” (ginsburg 2002, 51). the creation of the inuit broadcasting corporation in 1981 became a model for the repurposing of broadcasting technologies for indigenous peoples around the world; later, in 1999, the aboriginal peoples’ television network “played a dynamic and even revitalizing role for inuit and first nations people, as a self-conscious means of cultural preservation and production and form of political motivation” (ginsburg 2002, 41). indigenous broadcasting in the north, according to the communications scholar lorna roth (2005, 219), has “opened up frontier audiovisual spaces, improving the information structures, sources, and conditions for the renegotiation of [first peoples’] power relations in canadian society).” * * * geronimo inutiq grew up in frobisher bay, northwest territories, a city today known as iqualuit. later, he lived in montreal, quebec, where his mother worked as an inuktitut language radio broadcaster for the cbc northern service. broadcast and its infrastructures constituted a part of the everyday, at home in the north and in the south of the country. as a child in frobisher bay, inutiq recalls playing in the ruins of the dew system, concretizing his sense of connection to geopolitics of broadcast media and the power transformations they created: the idea of the broadcast systems as early warning is important to the north because i think there was projects going on, experimental projects in terms of military with communications and security like national security for the united states and canada during the cold war. i was very much aware of this dynamic because i grew up in the context where i was made aware of it and i saw it. i could feel it in the world. (inutiq and hennessy 2016, 32) the theme of destruction and recreation, and its sensory dynamic, is complicated by the arcticnoise project. first, at the core of inutiq’s remix art and performance practice, the igloolik isuma video archive represents decades of concerted efforts to counter ongoing colonial projections of northern identities and lifeways, as well as their potential futures. the director zacharias kunuk’s feature films, such as atanarjuat: the fast runner (2001) and the journals of knud rasmussen (2006), are masterful cinematic reimaginings of the ancestral lifeways of inuit peoples and their responses to the beginning of colonial disaster in the eastern arctic. the less public work of igloolik isuma productions in northern communities to facilitate cultural continuity makes up another large section of its archive (lalonde 2016). the constellation of activities around the arcticnoise project at grunt gallery grew out of the context of an artist-run center that regularly invites new forms of engagement through projects like ghostkeeper, a website highlighting the work of the indigenous theorist, curator, writer, new media practitioner, and performance artist ahasiw maskegon-iskwew. in his essay “for iktomi” on the ghostkeeper website, steve loft (2012) writes that maskegon-iskwew did not conceive of digital art practice as a “new medium” because he understood that its basic premise of connecting thoughts and aesthetics electronically was linked to aboriginal cosmologies, pedagogies, and epistemologies. cosmological media ecosystems that can be seen as interrelated and part of a larger indigenous worldview. thus they exist as media, as message and form of knowledge transferal. inutiq’s arcticnoise resonates with the intimacy and continuity of maskegon-iskwew’s conception of and engagement with the digital as a mode and method of representation that flows from indigenous worldviews and holds the potential to reconstitute how artist-run centres and public galleries envision their archives. arcticnoise further amplifies maskegon-iskwew’s conception of media with its potential to effectively communicate a past, present, and future, a continuity of situated knowledge. this engagement with media in both cases redefines the potential of the archive as simultaneously a record of the past and the location of speculative futures. arcticnoise audio 1. track 5 from . . . variations (2016). audio courtesy of geronimo inutiq. arcticnoise was formulated in response to an experimental radio documentary produced by the legendary canadian pianist glenn gould, well known for his interpretations of the work of johann sebastian bach. “the idea of north” was first broadcast on the cbc radio program ideas on december 28, 1967. on the cbc website, a page that is no longer available described the documentary in this way: an anthropologist, sociologist, a nurse, and a surveyor discuss the subjective “idea” and the reality of the north. montage and voice counterpoint are used to express the antagonism and scope of the country, the loneliness and isolation, the warmth of community living, personal reasons for living there, the fear that human nature will gradually take over from the elements as common enemy number one, and the challenge involved in any decision to live there. during the last eight minutes the voices are heard over music. gould’s meticulous arrangements and overlappings of his narrators’ voices represent a southern fiction in which the north constitutes a place of solitude, devoid of community (gallpen 2016). not a single indigenous voice is presented as counterpoint to colonial reflection on a place that, for the majority of canadians, remains an open expanse of snow and ice ready for the projection of a colonial imaginary (see turions 2016). geronimo inutiq engages in a generative act of destruction and recreation when he remixes audio and video from gould’s work with selections from the igloolik isuma video archive and his own audiovisual content. in august 2015, the first installation of inutiq’s arcticnoise was exhibited at grunt gallery in vancouver. in the main gallery, three video projections occupied three walls. the central projection reinterpreted footage from the igloolik isuma video archive. the left channel provided the “noise window,” which remixed materials from inutiq’s personal archive with pixelated images referencing the introduction of broadcast in the arctic. the right channel inutiq called the “travel window,” referencing the way in which gould traveled on a train with his narrators to record “the idea of north,” and evoking a sense of movement through space and time. in a second room, inutiq displayed a series of postcards of digital images he created by manipulating stills from the igloolik isuma video archive, along with another video using text and images to provide additional context for the work. figure 3. installation view of arcticnoise at grunt gallery. photo courtesy of dennis ha and grunt gallery. noise was encountered throughout the gallery. first, it is sonic––the sound of inuktitut and cree language in the igloolik isuma films. these are entangled with electronic music that, on the night of the opening at grunt gallery, geronimo performed in live sets. the videos themselves are marked by visual noise, glitch, and interference. glitch is an unexpected digital malfunction. for the media theorist laura marks (2014, 251), glitch “interrupts the intended message with a more urgent one.” these videos, and the postcards shared with gallery visitors, aestheticize digital distortion as an unsettling move that defies interpretation and understanding of the content in its original form. noise in this space both refuses and complicates past ethnographic experimentation with soundscape that has tried, for example, to represent “a synesthetic blend of ideas and experiences from actualities” (ridington 1983, 19). rather, embodying steven feld and donald brenneis’s (2004) challenge to make sound as primary rather than marginal in ethnographic theorization, and moving beyond an anthropology preoccupied with the visual at the expense of the sonic (samuels et al. 2010), inutiq’s work places sound and its potential to disrupt at the center of the exhibition. figure 4. installation view of arcticnoise at grunt gallery. elements of the image have been redacted to comply with copyright restrictions. photo courtesy of dennis ha and grunt gallery. at grunt gallery and in subsequent installations of arcticnoise in toronto and saskatoon, inutiq altered the content and presentation of media in such a way that no singular experience of arcticnoise could be claimed (nurming-por 2016; turions 2016). the randomized combination of audio and video further disrupts inutiq himself as an authorial inuit voice. as such, the work represents the creation of a subjective, unstable experience of the north, a refusal of singular meaning and understanding. inutiq’s response to gould’s radio documentary also references a history of indigenous media production that appropriated the infrastructures of communication technologies originally created to serve colonial, national, and international cold war political agendas. inutiq’s use of the concept of noise is a productive force for “talking back” (ginsburg 2002, 51) to media power, and arcticnoise is a creative intervention into the legacies of colonial misrepresentation of the north and inuit peoples. arcticnoise in dialogue the ethnographic terminalia collective and grunt gallery copresented an arcticnoise public dialogue event at the native education college in vancouver, inviting the haida/québécois artist raymond boisjoly to comment on inutiq’s work. boisjoly reminded the audience that there is no communication without noise. drawing on an example given by the media theorist friedrich kittler, boisjoly insisted that a phonographic record plays noises that were never recorded. thus [noise] somehow encompasses this larger realm that is somehow beyond our own ability to articulate what it is. it is a sound that simply exists, even though it is not a meaning for us. . . . in fact, it is something reproduced and is somehow at odds with what we thought we were doing in the first place. noise is not only productive and creative but is also a block that can prove important in resisting certain meaning. for boisjoly, the arcticnoise installation holds promise in the same way that noise does not adhere to a single point. inutiq’s work productively resists the symbolic and associated colonial legacies of meaning by using the form of noise as the primary element. to boisjoly, noise constitutes a means of resisting the all-too-frequent associations between a work of art by an indigenous person and the symbolism, subjectivities, and temporalities of ethnographic pasts. boisjoly expressed frustration about this kind of meaning-making by audiences of his own artwork. in noise, boisjoly recognizes a counterstrategy for indigenous artworks that hope to exclude ethnographic meaning from their readings. figure 5. detail from arcticnoise. image courtesy of geronimo inutiq. a nonhierarchical entity, inutiq’s arcticnoise resists reductive dualisms like past and present, and challenges efforts to relegate indigenous experience and culture to the past. inspired by marilyn strathern, donna haraway (2016, 12) writes: “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts. . . . it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds makes stories.” to this, we add: it matters what noise makes noise. references feld, steven, and donald brenneis 2004 “doing anthropology in sound.” american ethnologist 31, no. 4: 461–74. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2004.31.4.461. gallpen, britt 2016 “testing, testing, do you copy?” in arcticnoise: geronimo inutiq, edited by tarah hogue, 18–22. vancouver: grunt gallery. ginsburg, faye d. 2002 “screen memories: resignifying the traditional in indigenous media.” in media worlds: anthropology on new terrain, edited by faye d. ginsburg, lila abu-lughod, and brian larkin, 39–57. berkeley: university of california press. haraway, donna j. 2016 staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, n.c.: duke university press. hogue, tarah, ed. 2016 arcticnoise: geronimo inutiq. exhibition catalog. vancouver: grunt gallery. inutiq, geronimo, with kate hennessy 2016 “interview.” in arcticnoise: geronimo inutiq, edited by tara hogue, 24–35. vancouver: grunt gallery. lalonde, christine 2016 “can inuit bring storytelling into the new millennium? the igloolik isuma video archive at the national gallery of canada.” in arcticnoise: geronimo inutiq, edited by tarah hogue, 38–42. vancouver: grunt gallery. loft, steve 2012 “for iktomi.” essay, ghostkeeper. http://ghostkeeper.gruntarchives.org/essay-for-iktomi-steve-loft.html. marks, laura u. 2014 “arab glitch.” in uncommon grounds: new media and critical practice in north africa and the middle east, edited by anthony downey, 257–71. new york: i. b. tauris. nurming-por, yasmin 2016 “please wait.” in arcticnoise: geronimo inutiq, edited by tarah hogue, 44–48. vancouver: grunt gallery. ridington, robin 1983 “in doig people’s ears: portrait of a changing community in sound.” anthropologica 25, no. 1: 9–21. https://doi.org/10.2307/25605106. roth, lorna 2005 something new in the air: the story of first peoples television broadcasting in canada. montreal: mcgill-queen’s press. samuels, david w., louise meintjes, ana maria ochoa, and thomas porcello 2010 “soundscapes: toward a sounded anthropology.” annual review of anthropology 39: 329–45. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-022510-132230. turions, cheyanne 2016 “being local.” in arcticnoise: geronimo inutiq, edited by tara hogue, 50–54. vancouver: grunt gallery. not built to last: military occupation and ruination under settler colonialism cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 484-508, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.10 not built to last: military occupation and ruination under settler colonialism joseph weiss wesleyan university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8216-222x it took a long time for the swimming pool to close in the village of masset. the pool had been the single most important feature of masset’s recreation center, which the community had inherited when the military base was decommissioned in 1997. but the only way to heat the pool was with diesel fuel, and by 2013, that had become cost-prohibitive for the greater masset development corporation, an organization administered jointly by the settler village of masset and their immediate neighbors, the haida first nations community of old massett. left without any other option, the communities shut down the pool and closed the recreation center for good. only the shell of the building remained, the last remnant of canadian forces station masset (cfs masset), left hollow and abandoned in the center of town. the shuttering of the rec center appeared to many in both masset and old massett as an unhappy epilogue to more than fifty years of sustained military presence on the islands of haida gwaii, ancestral home and unceded territory of the haida nation. the base, as cfs masset was popularly known, was gone, and with it all the resources it had brought to the two communities. other than ruins, all that remained was a radio outpost a few kilometers north of masset, which, people believed, was remotely operated. except, as marlene liddle and her family discovered, the military had not gone from haida gwaii. one day in july, when the liddle family was out berry picking on their traditional territory, they—to their surprise—discovered a sign on their recently renovated outhouse. the sign, written and placed by a member of canada’s department of national defense (dnd), informed the liddle family that their outhouse had been built on dnd land and was thus an “illegal building, … built without the approval of the minister of national defense, and violated [sic] the canadian environmental protection act.” unless the family took down the offending building, the note informed them, it would be “removed on their behalf.” and yet, the offending outhouse was not new, even if it had been newly renovated. indeed, one incarnation of the outhouse or another had stood in this same place for the past fifteen years. the military had been notorious for interfering with haida resource gathering on land the dnd had claimed as its own, and marlene liddle and her family had wasted little time in returning to berry picking and other forms of food gathering when the military ostensibly left in 1997. there had been material evidence of that departure, moreover: by 2011 the buildings that had made up the base had been in gradually decay for more than a decade and most of the remaining facilities had been shut down. even the “private married quarters,” mid-sized houses built for military officers and their families, had been sold to masset’s residents as civilian housing. the ruins of the base provided a material reminder of the military’s absence, their skeletal frames signaling masset’s post-military present to residents and new arrivals alike. it was community common sense, in short, that the military was gone for good. as, it turned out, however, that absence was an illusion, or perhaps even a deception. what does it mean when ruins lie? in his ethnographic exploration of the afterlives of material and social destruction in argentina, gastón r. gordillo (2014, 10) characterizes the rubble left behind by the multiple histories of conquest and violence in the chaco as “the material sedimentation of destruction.” a focus on rubble, gordillo (2014, 11) argues, allows us to “examine space negatively: by way of places that were negated to create the geographies of the present.”1 as gordillo (2014, 207) makes clear throughout his ethnography, such acts of negation are productive, making possible particular political, social, and temporal realities via the “material and affective erasures of traces from the past,” most often “shaped by orders to remember given by dominant social actors.” destruction, then, is a performative action, a means of making erasure real, and the rubble left behind acts as a “topography of oblivion” for these ongoing social projects of selective memory (cf. trouillot 1995). put more simply, to destroy material traces suggests that those who inhabited said matter are, themselves, gone. such modes of “ruination,” as yael navaro-yashin (2009, 5) has argued, leave profound and often deeply ambivalent affective traces—“the subjectivities and residual affects that linger, like a hangover, in the aftermath of war and violence,” as she elegantly puts it. humans, these authors argue, feel haunted by what has come before, the ghostly doubling of an effaced past that has constituted the present by its absence but has not, at the same time, truly disappeared (cf. leathem 2019). except, on haida gwaii, the military never actually left. this does not mean that both haida and non-haida did not experience the military as gone; quite the opposite. as i will show, the military’s departure and the subsequent erosion of its seemingly abandoned facilities generated a series of affects that resonate with gordillo’s (2014) and navaro-yashin’s (2009) accounts of ruination. indeed, this is precisely the point. ruination made it appear as if the military had left haida gwaii, concealing the fact that the army was still actively occupying haida territory. this, i argue, is no coincidence. rather, what we find at work here is the deliberate production of a paradox, in kanaka maoli scholar j. kēhaulani kauanui’s (2018) sense: a constitutive contradiction that serves to reinforce the structures of settler domination even as it seems to mitigate the visible presence of the force—and the forces—of occupation. by erasing the overt forms of military power, colonial governments thereby render covert the ongoing maintenance of settler domination. my goal in this article is to hold together the very real affects of ruination on the part of haida people with the contention that this ruination constituted a deliberate and deceptive means through which a particular kind of military presence disguised the ongoing quality of its occupation of indigenous territory. i begin with the base itself, situating cfs masset in the history of haida gwaii, with a particular focus on the experiences of haida people. i then turn to the idea that, despite its seeming permanence, the base was “not built to last,” as one former employee put it. instead, the military adopted a series of strategies designed to mitigate the possibility of its personnel forming durable relationships with haida people or, to an extent, their settler neighbors. in this, i take the ruination of the swimming pool as my central, epitomizing image. drawing on ann laura stoler’s (2016) compelling formulation of “imperial durabilities,” i query the nature of these paradoxical durabilities, keeping in mind the particular irony that cfs masset’s occupation of haida land was, from a military perspective, an almost incidental epiphenomenon of the need to maintain radio surveillance during the cold war. finally, i return to the liddle family’s “illegal outhouse,” suggesting that the military’s continued presence on haida gwaii despite its performance of departure offers us a potent metonymy for the shifting means through which settler-colonial states such as canada conceal the violence that remains at the heart of their ongoing occupation of indigenous territories. “three communities” i first became interested in the legacy of the military base in the massett area during a conversation with david armstrong,2 a well-respected senior member of old massett’s community.3 we’d been talking “on the record” about changes in the haida community for a dozen or so minutes when armstrong turned the conversation to the base: da: i mean, when i was growing up around 1970, the military showed up. i mean the military was always here, but small scale, and all of a sudden there were three thousand of them. so it made it three communities instead of two, and they drove the wedge in more, well, i guess we all did cuz it’s, when they had the rec center and they had their own canex, the food store. jw: yeah, i remember hearing about that, that they had their own grocery store that no one else could use. da: unless you worked for them or else you were military and that, that was hard on the kids cuz, i mean, all these kids were going to the gym and swimming pool and if your parents didn’t work for them, you couldn’t go. and that really segregated the place. jw: yeah, that’s really rough. da: and the military, the first thing they were told when they arrived here is they’re not to go down to the village. jw: huh. da: so, and that, i mean, they’ve downsized them quite a bit and it’s changed, it’s back to two communities now, not three [emphasis added]. armstrong’s concise narrative of the social changes brought by the military reconfigured my understanding of the social terrain of the two massetts. the “settlers” of settler colonialism were not, for armstrong, a homogenous mass, a single, cohesive body to be endured by the haida. instead, when the military “showed up”—and note again the fact that even before soldiers arrived en masse, the military “was always here”—it made “three communities instead of two,” interposing itself between the haida of old massett and the historically settler community of the village of masset. relationships between the two communities were already segregated before the establishment of cfs masset in the village of masset. haida gwaii has been haida territory since time immemorial, but living conditions underwent a fundamental transformation in the late nineteenth century with the arrival, on the one hand, of settler missionaries and, eventually, homesteaders, and the decimation by epidemic diseases such as smallpox, on the other. haida are matrilineal, with territorial and resource rights allocated to individual matrilineal clans and adjudicated through the feasts now commonly glossed as “potlatches” (e.g., collison 2011; bell 2016).4 yet the reserve allocation process in british columbia ignored clan rights, superimposing colonially mandated boundaries in perpetuity over a flexible system of inter-clan territorial negotiation. the reserve of old massett was thus by definition a hybrid space when officially constituted by british columbia’s joint reserve commission in 1882, composed of the survivors of many different clans who had joined together in a single, central location so as to survive (weiss 2018, 7). the creation of these reserves on haida gwaii was justified, as elsewhere in british columbia, by the assertion that the islands had been claimed as crown land and that canada, as the crown’s representative, had jurisdiction over the lands and lives of haida gwaii’s indigenous population—this although no treaties had been signed (or even proposed) and their aboriginal title had never been extinguished. nonetheless, the haida communities were allocated small patches of land on their ancestral territory and expected to allow for colonial settlement and resource extraction throughout the islands.5 the village of masset was founded a few decades later by a group of settler homesteaders who appropriated territory just a few kilometers east of the reserve. even the village’s name represents a kind of founding theft, as i have chronicled elsewhere: in 1907, when the site for the future settler village was first surveyed, the town site was given the name graham city. however, when the city planners discovered that the postmaster for the haida community then called masset was leaving, they applied for a post office in their townsite and claimed its name was masset. effectively, the city planners had stolen both the post office and the name masset from their soon-to-be neighbors. (weiss 2020, 67) what followed over the course of the twentieth century was the systematic establishment of settler domination over the island’s resources and territories. alongside the centralization of services in the settler community and the regular refusal by most banks and businesses to serve “indians,” settler fishermen monopolized control of commercial fishing, establishing themselves as leaders of fishing crews that, at best, included indigenous employees, and attempted to push independent indigenous fishermen out of business (see stearns 1981; weiss 2018, 53–57).6 this was the landscape in which armstrong grew up, and the social world where the military “showed up” in the late 1960s. the base opened with a lavish ceremony in 1968, at least in the form that armstrong’s generation remembers. yet “the” base was not, strictly speaking, the first military base on haida gwaii. instead, the base’s first incarnation was naval radio station masset, established during world war ii and operated directly within the old massett reserve as a relatively minor naval listening station aimed primarily at the pacific theater of operations. but the base proved different when it was (re)opened. while it retained its function as a listening station—albeit one now firmly entrenched in the geopolitics of the cold war—the new canadian forces station masset was heralded at the time as also inaugurating a major transformation in military-civilian relations in canada. it was to be the first “open-concept” military base in the country,7 “devoid of fences and sentries” and, instead, “enmeshed” in the life of both masset and old massett (mcmullen 1998, 3). and enmeshed it very quickly became. at its peak of operations in the 1970s, the base included almost three hundred military personnel split between barracks—the core of the ruins post-1997—and the aforementioned private married quarters, built in residential circles near the base’s primary facilities. these houses, typically two storied affairs with nicely painted exteriors, spread out around the base in miniature neighborhoods, offering an almost suburban veneer to the barracks’ stark brown walls and flat, squat roofs. the base provided employment for many, developed local infrastructure, acted as a local hospital, and hosted leisure activities like dances, arts and crafts groups, and community events. indeed, the very layout of masset as i encountered it was shaped by the presence of the base, its residential circles radiating out from the center where the base once sat, with easy proximity to the local elementary school (constructed, i learned, with military support to house haida and non-haida students along with the children of military personnel). even the asphalt roads that connected the masset area to the southern towns on haida gwaii’s largest island were laid by the military, a road that passed by the golf course put in by the military for recreation. and while there might not have been fences, the military was ubiquitous, patrolling “its” territory and making sure that “intruders”—particularly local haida resource-gathering—were quickly removed.8 as armstrong details, with these transformations came shifts in the forms of segregation—the “wedge,” as armstrong puts it—already present between the indigenous and settler communities on the island. the modes of division that the base brought unfolded in parallel with these already ongoing dynamics, but their terms proved distinctive: if someone worked for the base they and their family had access to discounted groceries, military dining messes, programming aimed at military families, and, of course, the rec center and its facilities, especially the all-important swimming pool. and many haida did indeed work for the base.9 over the course of my research, i spoke with former cooks and drivers, former janitorial workers, and even former radio operators, all of whom formed part of the substantial support staff that the base relied on to operate at its peak. many haida elders that i have known draw military pensions for this work. these facts mean that the terms of inclusion and exclusion from armstrong’s three communities might be more complicated than they first appear. while his initial two communities seem to map fairly coherently onto the categories of indigenous and settler,10 the fact that the privileges carried by the military extended to their non-military employees makes such binaries messy.11 it meant that some haida had access to facilities that other haida did not; so too, some haida shared that access with some of the non-haida residents of masset who were also working for the base. likewise, some haida shared with their non-indigenous neighbors the absence of privileged access—more expensive groceries, fewer (if any) recreational facilities, no space to teach their children to swim. note armstrong’s discursive shift as he tells the story: “and they drove the wedge in more,” meaning the military, transitions to “well, i guess we all did,” distributing the responsibility for community polarization among all three categories of actors—haida, settlers, and military. armstrong was not the only person to elaborate on these tensions. consider, for instance, how divisions over the military in the haida community emerge in haida artist and political leader fred willis’s comparison between life now and life with the base: fw: like i said, eh, there’s more sense of freedom again, being able to walk where you want, when you want. you go do your seasonal things in that area, … which i’ve been doing and i never did stop, even though they came after us, i never did stop. i always reminded them, “you’re on haida territory, it’s old massett’s territory you’re on.” they never understood that kind of thing, because they’d never dealt, a lot of them had never dealt with first nations before, let alone stepped on somebody’s territory, and had somebody say something about it without due process, eh? ask first, that kind of thing. so. jw: which makes a lot of sense. so, like, would they ever, i’m just thinking in terms of resource-gathering, would they ever intervene when elders were out gathering? fw: yeah, it didn’t matter who it was. their orders were to go out and remove people from that area, and so they did. so yeah, some of our elders were—that’s when we really, really started to hear about it, more often than not, was because the elders were the ones who were most upset about it. jw: yeah. fw: and then of course there were some that would, that, you know, basically joined them, if you will, eh? like did and said and worked with them, and so they were side by side, a lot of them, and so now we have haidas on that side and haidas on this side, so it created a conflict for sure, for sure. plus they took our women! that’s why i say it’s now a little more serene for me, anyway. willis begins with a confident assertion of haida sovereignty in the face of military occupation and his own commitment to resource-gathering even when faced with opposition from the base. “even though they came after us, i never did stop.” haida sovereign rights, for willis, necessarily entail the right of haida to gather resources on their clan’s territories and to retain the power of permission over who can and cannot gather on haida land; to disrupt these rights marks a violation. “ask first, you know?” indeed, in the face of this opposition, willis remembers reiterating haida territorial sovereignty to these invaders, whom he figures as disconnected from any experience with indigenous communities in general, much less any specific knowledge about or respect for the haida people whose lands they were occupying. and yet, as he continues, willis turns to the haida who “basically joined them,” those who worked with and stood by the base’s employees even as, in willis’s view, haida elders in particular were impacted by the military’s refusal to allow them to gather resources or even simply to be present on their traditional territories. unlike the military, who “never understood that kind of thing,” these haida, presumably, would have “known better,” and yet chose to ally themselves with, in willis’s reading, the agents of military occupation of their own land. here the clear lines of “us” and “them” break down, as different haida position themselves and are positioned separately in an ongoing space of at least imminent conflict. this sense of division held as much true for haida who worked for the base as it did for willis and those who shared his position. former haida base employees with whom i spoke expressed to me their frustrations with friends and family who didn’t understand their choice of employment or, even more distressingly, resented the financial benefits and privileged forms of access that military employment brought. some friends even recalled seeing physical altercations between haida on different sides of this divide.12 we also should not neglect willis’s exclamation near the end of the excerpted conversation. “plus they took our women!” one of the most dramatic and yet simultaneously most intimate consequences of the sustained presence of military officers were the relationships—and sometimes marriages—that developed between military personnel, their families, and haida community members. as willis emphasizes, there were, and are, undeniably gendered dimensions to these discourses, with the narrative of “theft” in particular mapping onto older, typically colonial, and certainly problematic discourses that frame women as men’s possessions.13 and yet, men as well as women made frequent reference to intimate and sexual relations with military folk as a major axis of haida-base sociality (cf. enloe 2000). one reason for this, as i heard frequently, was to avoid intimate relations with kin. haida clan and moiety membership is reckoned matrilineally, and the eagle and raven sides are formally exogamous. as my friends pointed out—sometimes in jest, sometimes seriously—entering into a relationship with a military officer or their children guaranteed you wouldn’t wind up “dating your cousin,” considerably opening up the field of potential partners, both casual and long-term. the impact of the base means that, on haida gwaii at least, the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion did not devolve comfortably into clear lines between indigenous and settler, between native and military. whether one reads the haida people who worked with the base as co-opted by it, as willis intimated, or follows the opposing position that those haida who did not work with the base were jealous of the resources it offered to employees, as others suggested to me, we arrive in each case at the base as a complex site of relationality, striated by flows of power, by access and exclusion, and by gender and intimacy. in these senses haida experiences with the base echo ethnographies of other military bases as close to old massett as north carolina (lutz 2002) or as far as south korea (schober 2016). at the same time, that armstrong nonetheless characterized the islands as divided into “three communities” matters. real and ongoing pressure existed to keep the three communities conceptually apart, even if they could not be separated economically or socially in any real material sense. even the haida people that did have connections to the base through their own work or that of a family member sometimes found themselves excluded from military-sponsored events and organizations through the force of social pressure and hostility, echoing the forms of segregation that haida already experienced in settler masset. many who had lived through the military era felt that the bars were not safe, and they were often characterized as the primary spaces where fistfights between haida and army personnel broke out. the antagonisms were regularly ritualized in local sports events, in particular the annual tug-of-war challenges that were a fixture of my conversations about life during the base era. in these “games,” participants were separated into indigenous, military, and masset resident teams, formalizing armstrong’s three communities not only as socially visible but in a sense also as implicitly obvious. such performative attempts aimed to clarify the murky, grouping communities into clear and legible lines even as their forms of sociality cut across them in complicated, intimate, and uneasy ways. “poof, it was all gone” while very little may have been simple about the entanglements of military, civilians, and haida during the base era, one thing seemed obvious to most haida and settler civilians: the base was there to stay. it is not difficult to understand why this would be the case. the military paved the roads, provided medical services, built a school, radically expanded the infrastructure of haida gwaii’s north end, and even put in a golf course. it engaged in the ongoing, material, and irreversible transformation of haida gwaii’s landscape. so, too, its social landscape was reshaped simultaneously by military employment, the privileges of canex and rec center access, and the more intimate ways through which military personnel were building relations (and sometimes families) with haida people. the presence of the military thus appeared durable in stoler’s (2016) sense, a “hardened,” “tenacious,” and “enduring” fact of life on the islands. imperial durabilities, as stoler explores, are charged with suffering, but they also speak to the ways that subjects of empire can “endure” against ongoing colonial violence and domination, and the “damage and disability” that it brings with it (stoler 2016, 7). dealing with the base made for an inescapable, ongoing reality for haida people, whether they were navigating the opportunities it afforded or experiencing the many constraints and limitations the military imposed. and then, in 1997, cfs masset was decommissioned and the military “left.”14 while this might have been an untampered relief for those haida like willis who had avoided the base as much as possible, many others met the military’s departure with considerably more ambivalence, especially given the speed at which it seemed to occur. daniel montgomery, the son of a haida woman and a non-haida military officer, found the ambivalence especially sharp. though his parents had met on haida gwaii, montgomery did not spend his earlier years there. effectively, he could not have: not only did military deployment rules mean that army families had to move every few years (a point to which i will return in detail), but the terms of canadian native law before the 1980s meant that, because of her marriage to a non-haida man, montgomery’s mother lost her indian status, and thus her band membership and right to reside on reserve. only after the end of his parents’ marriage when he was a youth did montgomery come to live on the islands full time. reflecting on his experiences with the base, montgomery shifted affective registers. he spoke with considered enthusiasm about the income the base brought into the community despite its complications, the ways meeting families from all over the country expanded his own horizons, and the benefits of meeting potential partners who were definitely not his cousins. “i think i was sad to see it go,” montgomery told me. “i enjoyed it, it was a good experience for me, met my first love through the military… . so, yeah, i miss it, i think it was a sad thing when that happened.” but, and here montgomery shifted, “i mean, good and bad; i’ve had some bad experience with the military.” he then told me the story of being detained by military police one evening because he was out walking after dark. apparently, he later learned, an assault had been reported, and montgomery, a dark-skinned haida man walking alone after 10 p.m., seemed to the military police precisely the kind of person to interrogate about the matter. this despite the fact that, from montgomery’s perspective, the military did not have the jurisdiction to detain civilians on such matters. “they were patrolling around the area, and i was in the wrong place at the wrong time… . i of course wasn’t who they were looking for, but it was quite, really, you guys aren’t even police, how can you do this? so we got through that, but it was traumatizing at the time.” crucially, montgomery noted, the military officers who detained him weren’t people that he knew. as he turned toward the base’s eventual decommissioning, montgomery’s reflections became more critical: the houses were all still there, but the people who filled the houses weren’t there. it was over a couple of years, i guess, but it sure didn’t seem to take long for them to move out… . once a decision was made, it seemed like it was just, “poof,” it was all gone. and then what really seemed to, you know, we always had the barracks, it was kind of sad to see that go, nothing really came out of that, you know? i understand that it was an older building. like that’s almost kind of sad, it’s almost like we just got, i’m not going to say left their garbage, but the equipment was old, the swimming pool was old, the barracks was old. so, i guess in that way, it almost feels like we kind of got used, you know, kinda. so that’s probably my most negative thing towards it, just saying, “yeah, you came, you saw, you took what you had to take and you just left,” and all we got left was some old houses and a run-down barracks that had to be torn down. sad to see the base go, but also sad to see what it had left behind. the military was too “militant,” as montgomery put it, about “defending” what they took to be their territory, but, even more insulting, when it left, it left nothing behind but ruins, material reminders of the lack of commitment to making life better on the islands. ambivalence can be productive, argue ciara kierans and kirsten bell (2017, 39), because it “destabilizes the very categories it is built upon.” ambivalence, that is to say, is unsettling, casting critical purchase on the conflicting emotions that constitutes it precisely because the paradox—the military as a force that provided and would be missed, the military as an active agent of violent domination—cannot be resolved. montgomery’s comments echo the theories of ruination with which we began, aptly embodying the “subjectivities and residual affects” of haida people dealing with the aftermath of the base as social phenomenon and material presence. these feelings had their corollary in the rec center’s swimming pool, whose maintenance became the predominant fiscal priority of the greater masset development corporation (gmdc). founded in partnership between old massett and masset, the gmdc’s mandate was to manage the lump sum that the military left to the two communities as part of the base’s decommissioning process.15 over the next decade, it invested a significant percentage of its funds to maintaining the recreation center—and, especially, its swimming pool—as a public facility. this seemed an obvious choice at the time. as i noted earlier, both old massett and masset are fishing communities. haida people have been fishing for salmon, halibut, and other seafood since time immemorial, and many perceive marine resource-gathering an essential dimension of what it means to be haida. fishing income was and remains crucial to many haida families operating within the settler capitalist economy. fishing was likewise central for the haida community’s non-military settler neighbors, who relied primarily on (and monopolized) commercial fishing for much of their community’s income. in this context, a controlled environment in which to safely teach children how to swim took on tremendous importance for haida and non-haida alike, at the same time as it offered a valuable means of exercise and recreation for the two small towns. but these facilities were old, as montgomery emphasized to me. run down, destined to be nothing but garbage. eventually, it simply became financially impossible for the gmdc to maintain them, and the rec center was shuttered. moreover, the efforts to keep the facilities open as long as possible had essentially wasted much of the money that the military had left. all this, and all the frustration, ambivalence, and betrayal that it represented, sedimented the idea that what was left of the base was mere rubble, without any more value for the community or social significance except as a reminder of a prior era, a “space negated to create the geography of the present,” as gordillo (2014) might put it. this was certainly my experience of the base when i first began spending time on haida gwaii in 2012. i recall walking around the brown, hollowed-out shells of the barracks in the center of masset and wondering what they could even be, as by then they had been stripped of any identifying labels. when i asked, people referred to the military presence as “a long time ago,” a part of the community’s history. “not built to last” as potent as the appearance of durability was that the base gave, however, and as resonant and complex were the emotions generated by the base’s decommissioning and its aftermath, what must be emphasized is that these very forms of ruination were anticipated by the military. they were, put simply, part of the design of cfs masset itself. take the swimming pool. as ted andrews, a former base employee, told me, none of the military facilities were “built to last.” in particular, that the swimming pool relied on a steady source of diesel for its heating meant exorbitant costs without the support of a department of defense budget. the military, andrews explained, didn’t think of its facilities as permanent structures—they were constitutively temporary, to be kept as long as their function was needed, but not preserved past that point. the funds given to the communities by the department of defense were non-renewable, and the portion that had been sunk (quite literally) into the swimming pool could never be recovered or put to other uses. this is not necessarily surprising. after all, the department of defense had (and has) a network of bases throughout canada, meant to respond to particular threats and needs as necessary. the significance of one station or another can always be understood as relative to that broader scale of operation. the fact that this necessarily erodes both the spatial and social specificity of military relationships within a given context would, by this logic, be an anticipated consequence of the structure of military durability. similarly, while the military presence on haida gwaii was, in aggregate, constant, individual military personnel were rarely given permanent postings at the base. instead, personnel deployed on an approximately five-year rotation, which meant that, with the exception of some key higher-rank personnel, no soldier resided in the masset area for more than a few years at a time.16 thus, while the base itself could be understood as a permanent fixture of the north end of haida gwaii, its constantly shifting personnel undercut the possibilities for durable relationality between haida people and any individual soldiers or their families. these rules applied just as much to personnel with haida spouses, who had to uproot their lives on the island if they wished to remain with their partners. for the military, then, social relationships, like material structures, were not built to last. the imperial durabilities of military occupation appear paradoxical here. as we’ve seen, the military reiterated its presence on haida gwaii in the most visible and dramatic of ways, restructuring social and physical geographies alike, meeting elders with guns as they picked berries, arresting young haida men when they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. why, then, did the military so systematically seem to emphasize the temporary nature of its own occupation? one answer lies in the nature of occupation itself. the forces of occupation are precisely that, forces, people acting on other people. these people thus contain within themselves the imminent potential to enter into relationships with those they occupy. because the base relied on the labor of non-military employees, haida might be employed by the military for much of their lives, forming durable—and, as we’ve seen, often fraught—attachments to the military community, even as it acted to deny the sovereignty of haida actors on their territories. such modes of attachment are developmental, even linear, building and growing as relationships are made, attachments formed, and social (and physical) worlds transformed. there is a mutuality here, one that might make it difficult, for instance, to bring one’s firearm to bear on a grandmother by her berry patch. the structures of military deployment cut against this form of durability, consistently reforming the social composition of the base’s personnel so that, while the institution remained—including the ways in which haida were recruited to it—individual relationships between haida and non-haida would always be temporary. the social content of occupation is perpetually foreclosed even as the material fact of occupation is, just as perpetually, reinforced. that is to say, the actual social relations that constitute military relationships with the haida—and by definition form the social terrain on which occupation occurs—are eroded and erased so that, in turn, military violence can be wielded against indigenous community members. indeed, the rendering absent of military presence could even be understood to reinforce this power, offering us (the fantasy of) a de-spatialized and non-social military force that can operate anywhere without any ongoing commitments to the peoples or communities against which it operates. imperial durabilities, then, need to be carefully managed, because affective ties, social relations, kinning, and all the other ways in which military personnel, haida people, and their settler neighbors build community together are also durable, at least in potential, and can rupture such fantasies of military totality. the very fact that people like montgomery experienced ambivalence at the military’s departure points to this. undercutting these social durabilities requires what we might almost think of as a premeditated plan for ruination, an anticipated foreclosure that leaves no space for ongoing relationality. the military was always going to leave, even as they made it appear they were there to stay. except, as marlene liddle and her family discovered, the military did not, in fact, ever give up its occupying presence on haida gwaii. “the rot remains” one of the central concerns of stoler’s recent study, duress, is to push against too great an emphasis on essentially immaterial representations of traces and hauntings in histories of the (post)colonial present. “the scholarly romance with ‘traces,’” she writes, “risks rendering colonial remnants as pale filigrees, benign overlays with barely detectable presences rather than deep pressure points of generative possibilities or violent and violating absences. the ‘haunting’ trace seems too easily unmoored from material damages and disseminated landscapes” (stoler 2016, 4–5). imperial formations, for stoler (2016, 7), have a “hardened, tenacious quality,” meaning they endure in material, affective, and social ways in even seemingly “liberated” contexts. as she puts it, borrowing from the work of the caribbean poet derek walcott, even as the physical and social structures of imperialism might appear to decay, the “rot remains” (stoler 2016, 338–39). we can take this provocation quite literally on haida gwaii. despite the ruination of cfs masset, the military remained on the islands and continued to monitor the territory it claimed as its own. yet a shift in approach had occurred with the closure of the base. i was told on a number of occasions that the military personnel who remained on the island had been explicitly ordered not to wear their uniforms, effectively “blending in” with the local population. these claims came from local residents and former base personnel, not active-duty officers, so they exist at the level of local rumor rather than military policy.17 nonetheless, the idea that the military had remained in concealment couples resonantly with the experiences of the liddle family. recall that liddle did not encounter any actual soldiers when her outhouse was declared illegal. rather, her family returned to the presence of a note placed—one almost wishes to say surreptitiously—while they were in the woods resource gathering. compare this experience with willis’s stories of elders being forcibly removed and the frequent refrain of guns being leveled at berry pickers that dotted my conversations with older haida who had lived through the base era. for liddle’s family, there was an almost ghostly quality to military presence, making its claims known without direct, human interaction. following stoler, however, we must remain clear that the performance of a disappearance, or the assumption of a ghostly quality, does not actually constitute absence. the military personnel who put that note on the outhouse were not ghosts, and they maintained the same capacity for violence they had with an overt presence. instead, liddle’s experiences show us that what proves most durable under the conditions of colonial occupation are not the material sedimentations of the military nor their potentially unsettling social relations with indigenous civilians. what is durable is the maintenance of domination itself. this truth was not lost on liddle. “regardless of the dnd having a ‘lease’ or ‘license of operation’ over that area,” liddle wrote to the local paper in response to the notice, for the radio station or “elephant trap” or whatever you want to call it i am hereby giving notice that as a haida i will not be pushed out, or bullied out of accessing an area that my family and generations before me have accessed for pleasure, and for food gathering! … your “occupation” of my traditional lands has altered their appearance and use on a much larger scale than my little outhouse ever will! your “golf course” has ruined our berry picking areas, and our access to a large swath of land that covers acres. i think that we have a bigger issue that needs to be discussed, not only with myself, but with our community as a whole. (peerless 2013) liddle regarded the note on her outhouse as an extension of the base itself, an instrument of settler violence and domination on haida traditional territory—altering haida land and restricting haida access to resource-gathering areas used for generations. the ruins of cfs masset did not mean, then, that the military was gone. really, they did not mean anything at all for liddle, since the “issue” that the base had always represented remained ongoing. we should take liddle seriously when she invokes a “bigger issue” in need of discussion. indeed, one could extend her critique to the mechanisms of settler colonialism more broadly—the occupation of indigenous territories via legal means that ignore indigenous claims to sovereignty and land title, the transformation of the lands and waters in sometimes devastating ways that ignore long histories of indigenous rights, resource practices, and care for human and nonhuman beings, and, of course, the many different means of violence through which colonial domination is effectively maintained (cf. wolfe 2006; kauanui 2016). the military is metonymy here, the literal occupying force that instantiates and undergirds settler colonialism at its most basic level. military violence lies at the heart of settler colonialism. consider, for instance, audra simpson’s (2014) reflections on the so-called oka crisis, which occurred when a country club in the quebec town of oka extended its golf course onto the land of the mohawk community of kanehasatà:ke in the early 1990s. after months of peaceful protest to this latest iteration of centuries of land expropriation produced little result, as simpson (2014, 151–52) narrates, “the warrior society convened at kanehasatà:ke with ak-47 assault rifles,” intending to block the theft of their land. in response, quebec’s provincial government and the federal government of canada deployed a total of 2,650 troops to end what settler media had declared a “crisis.” there were only fifty-five mohawk warriors. “this,” writes simpson (2014, 151–52), “was the most unambiguous form of exceptional relations, that of warfare.” similar shows of violence have occurred throughout canadian history, just as they continue into the present, as the 2018 and 2019 deployments of the royal canadian mounted police (rcmp, armed with assault rifles, sniper rifles, and helicopters) to “remove” wet’suwet’en elders and activists from their own land demonstrates (e.g., dhillon and parrish 2019; nikiforuk 2019; netnewsledger 2020). this colonial capacity for immediate and overpowering military intervention on indigenous lands and in indigenous communities undergirds the many “diverse forms of violence—from cultural repression to labour coercion to sexual exploitation,” as penelope edmonds and amanda nettelback (2018, 6) put it, that together constitute imperial and colonial domination in settler contexts.18 dispossession, as leanne betasamosake simpson (2017, 41) writes of her michi saagii nishnaabeg nation, “was accomplished and is maintained through land theft as a result of unethical treaty making and the murdering, disappearing, assimilating and erasing of michi saagii nishnaabeg bodies and presence from the north shore of ontario.” all of these are essentially violent processes, but, echoing both max weber (1994) and giorgio agamben (1998), it is the colonial monopoly on putatively legitimate violence that makes them possible by rendering indigenous bodies perpetually vulnerable as indigenous bodies, bodies that always carry the potential to be excluded from the circle of settler society and legitimately killed as its inconvenient excess (a. simpson 2014, 152–57). or, put another way, the distinctively military capacity to, at any moment, slip indigenous subjects from the category of “(partial) citizen” to “enemy” is one means through which colonial legitimacy is produced in the first instance, allowing military interventions to be read by settler citizens as the maintenance of civil order rather than the exertion of colonial (and colonizing) force. what the oka crisis, the attacks on wet’suwet’en protestors, and the many other cognate moments in which police and military force are deployed to address indigenous protest have in common are their visibility. they constitute flashpoint moments, the overt expressions of military violence that remind both indigenous and settler citizens of the settler state’s capacity to enforce its territorial authority. to remain marked as “exceptional,” however, such violence must become invisible in the course of everyday life. here is where the particular configuration that was cfs masset can give us specific insights into the broader nature of colonial occupation. unlike an rcmp raid on an indigenous camp, the base was not aimed at the haida community. as a naval listening station, it was focused on the cold war, and we could understand the everyday ways in which it happened to dominate indigenous territories and attempted to regulate indigenous lives as a mere epiphenomenon of regular military practice. the base, in other words, was not explicitly commissioned to dominate indigenous populations; it did so as a matter of course. and this mundane quality, this everyday domination, erases itself even as it proceeds, even as it eventually erodes even the possibility for alternative modes of relationality. and, of course, the base itself proved exceptional rather than typical as a military base. it was meant to be “open-concept,” after all, a striking move away from the model of army facilities as spaces of fear surrounded by barbed wire fences. yet, as we have seen, this very openness caused tremendous insecurity. both the base’s facilities and its personnel policies undercut the idea that anything could be durable in the military’s relationship to haida gwaii except for the simple fact of occupation itself. and for those purposes, a base in the center of town simply proved far too visible. ruins and ghosts do a far better job concealing the ongoing conditions of occupation to which liddle so effectively pointed in her letter (cf. leathem 2019).19 “they sure thought we’d miss them” one night, over dinner with haida friends in their house in the village of masset, which was once a private married quarter, we began to chat about the legacy of the base and my research. after reflecting on her own experiences over many years of engagement with the personnel of cfs masset, primrose adams, elder and matriarch, responded pithily: “they sure thought we’d miss them. we didn’t.” there are many ways to read adams’s quip. one, as the liddle family discovered, would be quite literal—how can one miss the military when its members never actually left? but we might also see in adams’s statement an almost sympathetic understanding that military personnel, too, had engaged in relationship-building with haida, that they, too, felt the ambivalences of bonds “not built to last.” as i have argued, the dangerous possibility of military-indigenous relationships is precisely mutuality, the ways in which military personnel could find themselves in relationships with haida people that entailed both care and respect. even beyond the unsettling promise of such relationships, however, the idea that at least some military personnel hoped to be appreciated for the work they understood themselves doing for the haida community, even if that work was ultimately janus-faced, would not be particularly surprising. adams nods to this in her quip, positioning the military as actively desirous of affective ties, of wanting to be missed. for non-haida, just as much as for haida, relationships are meant to be durable even when, structurally, they are foreclosed. hence the hope that adams reads into the military officers, “they sure thought we’d miss them.” in this we see the ways in which the military’s policies also do a kind of affective violence to its own personnel, preventing them from building relationships with haida people even if they might wish to do so. all that is left is for them to hope to be missed. ruination, particularly in navaro-yashin’s (2009) reading, is inextricable from loss. what has been lost on haida gwaii is not the violence of military occupation. such violence cannot be escaped under the ongoing structures of settler colonialism. but what the ruins of the base, literal and figurative, represent is the loss of the potential for something otherwise to colonial hegemony, the potential for relationships that might be more entangled, more complex, perhaps even relationships that could open up space for dialogue, for mutuality. this loss is worth mourning, at least for montgomery and those haida who share his ambivalence about the base and its legacy. and, one imagines, it might be worth mourning for those military personnel who did wish to make haida gwaii home, for whom the golf course, the swimming pool, and the other transformations that cfs masset brought with it also formed part of making the islands into a more suitable space for cosmopolitan canadian military officers. adams, by contrast, expressed no ambivalence in our conversation. there was an affective charge, a sharpness, to her quip that written text does not convey perfectly: “they sure thought we’d miss them. we didn’t.” adams here claims the power to reject, to refuse, an ongoing affective relationality with the military, and she claims it on behalf of her haida community more generally. regardless of what the military might want, they were an aggressive presence on haida land that brought changes neither asked for nor necessarily desired. for adams, who experienced haida gwaii’s entire military era over the course of the twentieth century, there is nothing worth missing, either by her or by haida people more generally. while she hints that military personnel might regret this loss even though they engendered it, adams feels certain that the haida community has no reason to regret the loss of relationality with the forces of occupation. indeed, as the continuing pseudo-phantasmic presence of military personnel on haida gwaii reminds us, the promise of relationality, of an open-concept military base embedded in the community, was always illusory, always a means of disguising the violence of settler colonialism. even the most sincere of affects are eroded by this ongoing violence. abstract this article explores the afterlife of a military base on the islands of haida gwaii, unceded territory of the indigenous haida nation. canadian forces station masset was officially decommissioned in 1997, its buildings abandoned by canada’s armed forces. the understanding of both haida and their settler neighbors was thus that the army was gone, leaving only ruins and ambivalent affects in its wake. yet the military had not actually left; rather, it remained in concealment, continuing to monitor the territory it had occupied. at work in this strange juxtaposition of absence and presence, i argue, is the deliberate production of a paradox, a constitutive contradiction that serves to reinforce the structures of settler domination even as it mitigates the visible presence of the forces of occupation. the affects of ruination engendered by the military’s departure, i contend, form part of these processes of settler concealment and deception. [settler colonialism; indigeneity; ruination; militarism; occupation] notes acknowledgments first, i would like to acknowledge the generous assistance and support of the old massett village council and the village of masset during my research. my gratitude to friends and colleagues on haida gwaii is, as ever, incalculable, with particular how.aas owed here to helen davis, the late agnes davis, sherri burton, alfred adams, the late primrose adams, leslie bellis, and craig and karen russ. i am also most grateful for the exceptional feedback and suggestions on the article from j. kēhaulani kauanui, bruce miller, margot weiss, eric hirsch, hannah chazin, andrea ford, meghan morris, and xiao-bo yuan. hilary morgan v. leathem also provided endless commentary, feedback, and exceptionally helpful suggestions, and my love and gratitude to them is, as always, profound. the article further benefited from the feedback of four anonymous peer reviewers, the patience, suggestions, and editorial guidance of christopher t. nelson, the excellent copy editing of petra dreiser, and the fantastic editorial support of jessica lockrem, to whom i also owe my thanks. earlier versions of this article were presented at american anthropological association meetings, wesleyan’s division ii luncheon seminar, and the university of victoria anthropology department’s anthropology colloquium series; i’m most grateful for these conversations. finally, portions of this research were carried out with the support of the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, the american philosophical society, the canadian museum of history, wesleyan university, and the university of chicago, all of whom i would like to thank sincerely. 1. gordillo (2014, 6–11) opposes this way of thinking about rubble with more conventional heritage logics that prioritize the preservation of “ruins” as sacrosanct spaces (cf. leathem forthcoming). 2. all names in this essay are pseudonymous unless quoted from a public context or identification was specifically requested. 3. this article draws from the fieldwork i have been doing on haida gwaii since 2010, with a sustained period of full-time residence between 2012 and 2013, though most of the conversations i bring forward here took place over a number of summers between 2015 and 2019. while i do not have the space here to fully address my own positionality as a settler researcher working with an indigenous community, see weiss (2018, 21–25) for a detailed discussion of my own commitment to relational, anticolonial, and dialogic research practices and ethics. 4. the haida scholar jisgang nika collison (2011, 17) is explicit on this point, arguing that “the potlatch is our [haida] legal system,” a means through which territorial claims can be evaluated and verified. 5. the refusal to acknowledge aboriginal title in british columbia and the absence of historical treaties are some of the defining features of the province’s distinctive settler-colonial history. see cole harris’s (2002) making native space for a detailed discussion of the logics that justified the crown’s seizure of indigenous land although even britain’s own royal proclamation of 1763 commanded the king’s subject to extinguish aboriginal title before taking possession of indigenous territories. note, too, that aboriginal title is itself a problematic concept, a colonial reframing of the idea that indigenous communities had preexisting territorial rights prior to colonial settlement (asch 1997). it should not be considered identical to haida understandings of sovereignty as vested traditionally in the individual clans and their leadership and negotiated through ceremony. more recently, the claim to haida sovereignty has been taken up by the council of the haida nation on behalf of the haida nation as a whole (see weiss 2018, 2020). 6. there is also the impact of the so-called davis plan on indigenous fisheries on haida gwaii (and throughout british columbia), which severely limited the ability for indigenous fishers to participate even in relatively small-scale commercial fishing (see newell 1993). 7. the language of “open-concept” was drawn directly from open-concept architecture, emphasizing notions of space and freedom in social and spatial design. the application of these values to military design is ironic, to say the least, especially given the ways that military presence fundamentally constrained haida mobility on their own ancestral territories. 8. this is another irony of the “open-concept” military base—as the barracks were positioned within the village of masset, it meant that the military police patrolled the town itself, though ostensibly only when issues involving the military occurred. yet this boundary proved porous. 9. while many haida worked for the base in service positions, i am not aware of many individuals who joined the canadian military themselves. this differentiates the social dynamics from spaces such as hawai’i, as ty p. kāwika tengan (2008) has explored, in which military service marked a significant way through which indigenous masculinity could be articulated under ongoing settler-colonial conditions. 10. note that during most of the twentieth century—and certainly during the period in which armstrong was growing up—haida women married to non-haida men were stripped of their indian status and could no longer reside in old massett. many chose to live in the village of masset with their spouses. the children of these marriages, likewise, did not have status until bill c-31 brought substantial changes to canadian indian law in the 1980s (weiss 2018, 6; see a. simpson [2014] for a discussion of the impact of these changes in a mohawk context.) 11. we might also consider patrick wolfe’s (2013) suggestion that “binarism” itself might result from settler subjecthood. 12. these tensions were not limited to haida of fred willis’s age, who were in their twenties and thirties during the base’s heyday. as the journalist ian gill (2010) recounts, some haida elders supported the military, at least on the surface; gill tells the story of young haida protestors being scolded by their elders for interfering with a ceremony in which the military was given masset’s key to the city in the early 1970s, though whether this represented genuine approval of the military on the part of those elders or a concern with respect and decorum is not entirely clear in gill’s account. likewise, while i did not collect systematic data on this point, a number of the haida individuals i knew who had previously worked for the military also held relatively high ranks within clan hierarchies, which suggests, at the very least, that the resources the military provided could be (and often were) repurposed for internal haida ends. 13. see joanne barker (2011) for a detailed discussion of the naturalization of colonial gendered norms in different u.s. contexts, and kauanui (2018) for a discussion of similar issues in hawai‘i. 14. while i note below that the sense of the military’s departure was felt as quite sudden by many in the haida and settler communities, interlocutors working at the base during that time described a more gradual winding down of military operations, marked especially by decreases in active personnel and training activities. the end of the cold war in the late 1980s simply meant less need for a well-staffed training base so close to russian waters. 15. the funds were a combination of assets, financial reserves and, perhaps most interestingly, a lump sum given to gmdc to manage or demolish the military’s former buildings in lieu of their demolition by the department of defense. this arrangement meant, in part, to preserve the rec center and, especially, the swimming pool. it was also at this point that the military sold the private married quarters to the village of masset, which in turn resold them as private real estate. 16. this is also true, and remains true, of officers deployed to masset’s rcmp station. 17. this sense of military invisibility, i was recently told by a military officer, contrasts sharply with the military’s own understanding of their continuing presence in old massett, which consists of a small crew who operate the radio apparatus, now renamed cfs leitrim detachment masset. and yet, the sense that the military was at best gone, at worst hiding, was almost ubiquitous in both communities during my time there. here again the performative work of ruination and concealment works to disavow the social sense of an ongoing military presence. 18. it is not a coincidence, shifting briefly from one settler colony to another, that the united states armed forces still refers to enemy territory as “indian country” (lyons 2010, 17–18). indeed, “the early us military,” notes catherine lutz (2009, 10), “became entwined with the frontier project of removing indians from the land and protecting colonists who settled there. in this sense, every western fort—and there were 255 of them—was a foreign military base, established on native land during the indian campaigns and the mexican-american war.” this formed an important precedent, lutz argues, for american overseas expansion, which similarly operated through a dense network of territorializing u.s. bases on foreign soil. 19. even the “elephant cage” itself seems to have lost at least some of its significance as a military facility for some of masset’s residents, as the marketing of a gourmet coffee by local non-haida entrepreneurs under the brand elephant cage coffee roasters attests (see the elephant cage coffee roasters website, www.elephantcagecoffee.com, accessed july 24, 2020). references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. asch, michael, ed. 1997 aboriginal and treaty rights in canada: essays on law, equality, and respect for difference. vancouver: ubc press. barker, joanne 2011 native acts: law, recognition, and cultural authenticity. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bell, lucy sdaahl k’awaas 2016 “xaad kilang t’alang dagwiieehldang: strengthening our haida voice.” master’s thesis, university of victoria. collison, nika jisgang 2011 “xaayda xaadaga giiahlgalang, story of the haida people.” in that which makes us haida: the haida language, edited by jusquan amanda bedard and nika collison jisgang. skidegate, british columbia: haida gwaii museum press. dhillon, jaskiran, and will parrish 2019 “exclusive: canada police prepared to shoot indigenous activists, documents show.” guardian (uk), december 20. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/canada-indigenous-land-defenders-police-documents. edmonds, penelope, and amanda nettelbeck, eds. 2018 intimacies of violence in the settler colony: economies of dispossession around the pacific rim. london: palgrave macmillan. enloe, cynthia 2000 maneuvers: the international politics of militarizing women’s lives. berkeley: university of california press. gill, ian 2010 all that we say is ours: guujaaw and the reawakening of the haida nation. vancouver: douglas and mcintyre. gordillo, gastón r. 2014 rubble: the afterlife of destruction. durham, n.c.: duke university press. harris, cole 2002 making native space: colonialism, resistance, and reserves in british columbia. vancouver: ubc press. kauanui, j. kēhaulani 2016 “‘a structure, not an event’: settler colonialism and enduring indigeneity.” lateral 5, no. 1. https://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/. 2018 paradoxes of hawaiian sovereignty: land, sex, and the colonial politics of state nationalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. kierans, ciara, and kirsten bell 2017 “cultivating ambivalence: methodological considerations for anthropology.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 7, no. 2: 23–44. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.2.006. leathem, hilary morgan 2019 “manifestations that matter: a case of oaxacan ruin possession.” archaeological review from cambridge 34, no. 2: 92–110. https://doi.org/10.17863/cam.59741. forthcoming “heritage (dis)possessed: haunting, theft, and the making of monumental history in oaxaca, mexico.” phd dissertation, department of anthropology, university of chicago. lutz, catherine 2002 homefront: a military city and the american twentieth century. with photographs by elin o’hara slavick. boston: beacon press. lutz, catherine, ed. 2009 the bases of empire: the global struggle against u.s. military posts. new york: new york university press. lyons, scott richard 2010 x-marks: native signatures of assent. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. mcmullen, frank francis gerald 1998 “when you come to a fork in the road take it: negotiating crisis and transition in a northern village.” master’s thesis, university of northern british columbia. navaro-yashin, yael 2009 “affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 15, no. 1: 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.01527.x. netnewsledger 2020 “rcmp patrol wet’suwet’en cultural site with assault rifles.” netnewsledger, june 29. http://www.netnewsledger.com/2020/06/29/rcmp-patrol-wetsuweten-cultural-site-with-assault-rifles/. newell, dianne 1993 tangled webs of history: indians and the law in canada’s pacific coast fisheries. toronto: university of toronto press. nikiforuk, andrew 2019 “from the archives: when indigenous assert rights, canada sends militarized police.” tyee, january 17. https://thetyee.ca/analysis/2019/01/17/indigenous-rights-canada-militarized-police/?fbclid=iwar2lco5masyinmdyyxrwlptzkzbegn-kgrrsnuslpvr00kewx2hdleyyv9s. peerless, sarah 2013 “family questions trespass notice from masset military.” haida gwaii observer, july 15. http://www.haidagwaiiobserver.com/news/family-questions-trespass-notice-from-masset-military/. schober, elisabeth 2016 base encounters: the us armed forces in south korea. london: pluto press. simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. simpson, leanne betasamosake 2017 as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. stearns, mary lee 1981 haida culture in custody: the masset band. seattle: university of washington press. stoler, ann laura 2016 duress: imperial durabilities in our times. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tengan, ty p. kāwika 2008 native men remade: gender and nation in contemporary hawai’i. durham, n.c.: duke university press. trouillot, michel-rolph 1995 silencing the past: power and the production of history. boston: beacon press. weber, max 1994 “the profession and vocation of politics.” in weber: political writings, edited by peter lassman and ronald speirs, 309–69. cambridge: cambridge university press. weiss, joseph 2018 shaping the future on haida gwaii: life beyond settler colonialism. vancouver: university of british columbia press. 2020 “giving back the ‘queen charlotte islands’: the politics of names and naming between canada and the haida nation.” native american and indigenous studies 7, no. 1: 62–86. https://doi.org/10.5749/natiindistudj.7.1.0062. wolfe, patrick 2006 “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8, no. 4: 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. 2013 “recuperating binarism: a heretical introduction.” settler colonial studies 3, no. 3/4: 257–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2013.830587. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 484-508, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.10 the civilizations choir of antakya: the politics of religious tolerance and minority representation at the national margins of turkey cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 167-195, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.11 the civilizations choir of antakya: the politics of religious tolerance and minority representation at the national margins of turkey seçil dağtaş university of waterloo https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8037-9855 we are not “us and them.” we are “one,” on earth and under the sun! at the end of their biriz (we are one) concert, the performers assembled onstage to repeat the above verse in turkish, kurdish, and laz. organized in 2010 by the turkish rock singer demir demirkan, this concert, which formed part of the events scheduled for the european capital of culture series in istanbul, featured the kurdish singer aynur doğan, the laz folk singer ayşenur kolivar, the eurovision-winning turkish pop singer sertab erener, and the multireligious civilizations choir of antakya. before going onstage, kolivar explained to the cameras the idea behind the event and the meaning of its concluding verse: nowadays, turkey is going through a period where the importance of oneness [birlik] and togetherness [beraberlik] is being discussed in a new way. we have always said, “we are united” or “we need to be united,” but before, unity meant something different. it meant becoming the same. today, however, we will be “one” onstage without denying our differences. we will listen to each other and sing in each other’s languages. we will give the message that if we can find union in our differences onstage, we can do so in our lives as well. when members of the civilizations choir spoke, they used their religious denominations to reframe kolivar’s message of “unity in diversity.” introducing themselves in turn as “the priest of the antakya orthodox church,” “an alawi sheikh,” “a jewish teacher,” and “a sunni imam,” the choir members each emphasized the unity of the three abrahamic religions under one god as the formula for peaceful coexistence. this, they declared, was something that people had achieved in the city of antakya, the administrative capital of turkey’s border province hatay, which was annexed from french-mandate syria in 1939.1 “we may not pray in the same way,” one of them noted, “but we can sing together to show the rest of the world that antakya upholds the culture of tolerance [hoşgörü] that it has adopted as a lifestyle and sustained for centuries.” since its foundation in 2007, the civilizations choir has employed this religiously inspired language of tolerance to represent antakya (and turkey) as a “bridge between civilizations.” in annual hatay festivals across the country, it has staged antakya’s religious diversity as both an exemplar of harmonious coexistence and a foil to ethnoreligious tension. in the context of european cultural policy, turkey’s pending accession to the european union (eu), and turkey’s role in the united nations alliance of civilizations (unaoc), this message quickly turned into one about the state of religious minorities in turkey.2 the choir gave concerts to un ambassadors in new york city; u.s. officials in washington, d.c.; and eu parliamentarians in brussels. its nomination for the 2012 nobel peace prize attests to the global appeal of the choir’s emphasis on togetherness under the monotheistic god of abrahamic traditions. my fieldwork in the civilizations choir’s hometown, antakya, however, has shown that this (inter)nationally endorsed narrative of “unity in diversity” (iğsız 2018, 171) is fraught with contradictions.3 the choir performances categorize minority religions as equally representable citizens of a global community of believers, while also subjecting them to the terms and conditions of representation under a sunni-majority nation. in doing so, the choir produces contradictions as to what tolerance means for the political recognition, communal autonomy, and religious authority of its diverse constituents. this article examines how individual members of religious groups represented in the choir—alawis, jews, and orthodox christians—describe these contradictions on the basis of their distinct historical positions and unevenly situated identities vis-à-vis the country’s turkish sunni majority. such descriptions, i argue, reveal that the contradictions that characterize the representational practices of cultural citizenship derive from the incommensurable conceptions of authority shaped by community-specific histories of subjection and intercommunal interaction. representation here refers both to re-presentation in the aesthetic portrayal of a form, conviction, or identity, and to representation as a matter of proxy, including the “representative” charged with the task of “speaking for” a particular community.4 liberal politics conflates these two meanings while debating the public visibility of religious others in pluralistic societies. this is well illustrated by the controversy surrounding muslim and jewish markers of difference in europe (bowen 2010; arkin 2013; özyürek 2014) and in debates over the rights and recognition of groups labeled as minorities in postcolonial contexts (chatterjee 1995; eisenlohr 2007; mahmood 2015). proponents of cultural citizenship view the public recognition of ethnolinguistic and religious signs of belonging as preventing social exclusion, which is frequently a by-product and limitation of legal approaches in pluralistic societies (casanova 1994; habermas 2004). cultural citizenship here denotes a liberal vision of national membership that extends to citizens who hold a marginal position within society despite their legal status.5 the endorsement of recognition within the existing political structures of representation, however, often results in the reification, rather than the transcendence, of sociocultural differences (povinelli 2002). part of the problem resides in the majoritarian attributes of liberal democracies that maintain ethnoreligious definitions of national identity (brown 2006; mahmood 2015) and that remain premised on the perspective of those who have the power to offer or withhold representation to religious others (bender and klassen 2010). as “a dimension of multicultural governmentality and western civilizational discourse” (brown and forst 2014, 18–20), religious toleration grants the tolerant the power to determine what or who is tolerable. yet what religious tolerance signifies and produces in a given context is not fixed in advance, and should be analyzed through the particular discourses and practices that create the conditions of its enactment. in contrast to its long history in euro-christian political theology, for instance, tolerance never emerged as a powerful political concept in the ottoman empire, with which it is often associated (kymlicka 1996), and has only recently become one in turkey. the contradictions that result from its invocation for religious minorities at turkey’s national margins direct attention away from the limits and possibilities of tolerance as a prescriptive model and toward the historical shifts, ambiguous experiences, and political indeterminacies that its deployment contextually signifies. in examining these contradictions in the civilizations choir, the present article foregrounds representational politics as one key site for the anthropological study of religious diversity, as well as for addressing broader problems of minority recognition inherent in liberal regimes of tolerance. recent anthropological work has already identified such politics in disputes within minor traditions regarding the re-presentation of their religious practice in public. aramaean and assyrian groups of the syriac orthodox christian diaspora in the netherlands, for example, practice discordant singing styles during liturgical performance that reflect tensions over where to situate the collective self within the secular legal distinction between religion and ethnicity (bakker kellogg 2015). for sephardi jews of paris (arkin 2013) and istanbul (brink-danan 2012), representational politics materialize in debates concerning the public display of jewish visual signs, and blur the boundary between religion, culture, and race. compare also the case of alevis in turkey whose youth and senior leaders differ about the public performance of their cem ritual as “a type of national folklore rather than as a form of communal worship” (tambar 2014, 82), often bringing the material-aesthetic history of the ritual to the political fore.6 with its focus on the entanglement of representation and re-presentation in a multireligious context of performance, this essay shifts attention from intrato intercommunal dynamics of political aesthetics. in bringing together the signs, songs, and singers of distinct minor traditions through the joint performance of national interfaith unity, the civilizations choir throws into sharp relief incommensurabilities in the lived realities of what produces authority and who holds it in each religious tradition. the specific aesthetic forms that elicit religious authority for politically recognized minority groups in this context become the very ground for the exclusion of others who lack recognition. to understand how majoritarian positions set the terms of minority representation in multireligious settings, then, we must turn to the history of cultural power dynamics not only between states and religious minorities but also between communities differentiated on the basis of their religion and citizenship. this relational matrix of diversity and its governance ultimately invites a rethinking of representational politics of tolerance through the material effects of history, authority, and collective realities that such politics often obscure. ezan, çan, hazan during my visit to his office in march 2011, the vice governor of hatay gave me a small painting of antakya created by a local artist, with “ezan, çan, hazan” handwritten at the bottom. this phrase was a term for the muslim call to prayer, christian church bells, and jewish chazzan, as well as the title of a 2004 state television documentary about the city. the image itself was a painted version of a well-known photograph taken from the courtyard of the city’s catholic church (figure 1). although no synagogue can be seen from the courtyard, and the original photograph shows only the freestanding bell with a cross in the foreground and the minaret of a historic mosque in the background, the vice-governor justified the insertion of the synagogue into the picture, reminding me that it was only a short walking distance from where the photograph was taken. “the culture of tolerance in antakya you see in this picture reflects turkey’s commitment to democracy,” he explained. “we owe this culture to our ottoman ancestors.” figure 1. ezan, çan, hazan. photo on the left by seçil dağtaș. photo on the right by pelin emrahoğlu. this was not the first time i had heard antakya being called a “city of tolerance.” since the early days of my fieldwork, the designed illustrations of the entwined religious symbols have inundated the city in material forms, such as jewelry, souvenirs, state monuments, local artwork, and architectural ornaments. when asked to comment on them, local residents often assured me of the authenticity of such representations by referring to their neighbors, school friends, and business partners who belonged to different religious communities or (as did the vice-governor) to the physical proximity of sunni mosques, alawi tombs, and churches of various denominations. obscured in these depictions are the exceptional circumstances that have historically enabled antakya to maintain an ethnoreligiously diverse demographic profile. antakya was excluded from turkey’s national pact (1920) under the french mandate for syria. hence, the region’s arab and armenian populations remained relatively protected from the national homogenization of the early republican years. for instance, unlike the majority of the greek orthodox community who were compelled to leave turkey through the population exchange between turkey and greece in 1923 (iğsız 2018), antakya’s orthodox christians remained in the region.7 today, they constitute the largest officially recognized minority community, with a population of a few thousand in the city and seven thousand in the province. with the annexation to turkey as the province of hatay (1939) began the gradual dispossession and outmigration of the region’s religiously diverse populations through assimilationist language, education, and population policies, along with economic and property-ownership restrictions (neyzi 2004; shields 2011). in 2011 only about a dozen arabic-speaking jewish families still resided in antakya, which led to difficulties in forming the quorum required for sabbath services. constituting over one-third of antakya’s population, alawis have a stronger socioeconomic presence in the province, yet they remain demographically insignificant within the country as a whole. consequently, dominant frames of representation substitute for them either sunni muslims or “anatolian” alevis, other twelver shi’a sects associated with a bektaşi-sufi lineage that have distinct ethnolinguistic and theological orientations. against this backdrop, the everyday life of religious plurality in antakya moves among exclusivist claims, incommensurable differences, and shared practices. most of my alawi and christian interlocutors express more affinity with each other than with anatolian alevis or istanbulite rums. such expressions point to the traffic of objects, concepts, and practices among these communities, on both cultural and theological grounds. alawis, for instance, honor christian saints and celebrate many christian festivals (prager 2013; kreinath 2014). both alawi and christian women cook a wheat-and-meat stew made of the animal sacrificed in these festivals, but they differentiate their versions with spices. the established custom of tomb-shrine visitation in the region is associated mostly with alawis, yet i joined my christian interlocutors in similar healing and visitation practices in nearby villages. because birth determines religious membership in each of the alawi, christian, and jewish communities, interfaith marriages and conversion are subject to strict communal regulation. when such events do occur, however, they rarely generate violence between families or communities. anthropologists have long used instances of religious fluidity to challenge the fragmentary models at the heart of colonial and national projects that position different religions as opposed to each other. while some have examined these instances in reference to the historical legacies of cohabitation (bryant 2016), the “competitive sharing” of religious sites and objects (hayden 2002), and agonistic modes of relatedness (singh 2011), others have turned to the transnational movement of religious texts, discourses, and practices in relation to the processes of colonization, migration, and globalization (comaroff and comaroff 1991; keane 2007). public representations of religious diversity as indexing tolerance provide further insight into the sociopolitical conditions under which ethnoreligious boundaries maintain their significance. in the case of the civilizations choir, these representations explain how and why tolerance operates largely within the framework of nationalism rather than transcending its exclusionary cultural logic.8 viewed from this angle, the choir’s representatives of minority religions also converge in their shared ambiguous position vis-à-vis the dominant understandings of nationhood in turkey. secularist turks have historically affiliated arabic-speaking populations near turkey’s southern borders with “the islamic middle east” in their attempts to align the country with “modern and secular europe” (stokes 1998, 268). as “non-sunnis,” these groups have also become the targets of islamist attacks in moments of political instability, such as cold war–era conflicts involving turkey (a nato member) and syria (a soviet ally). in recent years, sectarian (alawi-sunni) divisions have been exacerbated by the current government’s support for the syrian opposition and the sunni refugees fleeing the assad regime (can 2017, 184), despite the cross-communal bonds that have endured these divisions (navaro 2017). it was precisely this ambivalence between ethnic and religious difference that brought these populations to the center of public attention in the mid-2000s, with the liberalization of turkish politics under the rule of the justice and development party (akp). since its rise to power in 2002, the akp has fostered an islam-oriented neoliberal agenda and invoked the ottoman past as an alternative to the homogenizing tendencies of the preceding secularist era. expressed in kolivar’s statement at the biriz concert as a transformation from “sameness” to “difference,” this liberalization included a series of symbolic government gestures for the legal rights and political recognition of formerly excluded citizens.9 introduced in response to pressure from different segments of civil society and under the scrutiny of the eu and the european court of human rights, these reforms have proven short-lived and failed to meet the targeted populations’ expectations (özgül 2014; tambar 2016; biner 2019). the contradictory effects of this process for religious minorities nevertheless reveal the ethnoreligious hierarchies rooted in the political structuration of liberal governance, underpinning what critics today perceive as the failures of democratization in turkey. indeed, the limits of turkey’s liberalization became apparent long before the government’s authoritarian turn (white 2012). legal mechanisms of religious toleration have facilitated, rather than resolved, discrimination against religious minorities, as legal reforms have marked claimants for official self-representation as “more visible and hence more manageable subjects” (özgül 2014, 630), while concealing the historical injustices they have endured. the antiterror laws for alevis and kurds have led to a radicalization of the youth (yonucu 2018), as well as to problems of co-optation akin to those experienced by non-muslims (tambar 2014, 2016; biner 2019). tolerance, in short, has worked not as a political ideal but as a discursive tool to circumvent the socioeconomic and legal roots of minority subjection in the present (kaya 2013). my analysis builds on these works, especially in addressing how the incorporation of religious differences into public performances of cultural citizenship reproduces the nation-state’s authority to define the proper limits of difference. as evident in the vice-governor’s appeal to realness in relation to the “ezan, çan, hazan” in the painting, such performances further expose the tenuous conditions of religious coexistence that require its legitimation through representation in the first place. by equating cultural performances of religious diversity with minority recognition, the civilizations choir helps identify these conditions of political violence outside the legal mechanisms of representation and shows their ability both to support and to undermine the normative claims of religious tolerance. this ability, as the ethnography will show, rests on the community-specific forms of religious practice and intercommunal dynamics structured by ottoman and post-ottoman regimes of governance. the civilizations choir the civilizations choir of antakya came into existence in 2007 with the support of the hatay governorship as a one-off event to celebrate antakya’s religious diversity as part of the annual turkish culture and tourism week. its initial members hailed in equal numbers from armenian, alawi, sunni, orthodox, catholic, and jewish communities living in the region. in early performances, each community dressed differently, stood separately, and sang only its own hymns in its own language—except for the first and last songs, which all members performed in turkish. figure 2. image from a concert ticket depicting the civilizations choir of antakya on stage. after culture and tourism week ended, local participants decided to continue the choir but changed its name and format to stress not only diversity but also unity. this resulted in an increase in members, a standardization of costumes (which became nonethnic and nondenominational) and music (with all songs performed by the whole ensemble), and the integration of communities during performances. the choir’s new insignia featured the cross, the crescent, and the star of david entangled together within an ottoman star (figure 3). as such, the choir became a means of promoting turkey’s ottoman legacy in various publics as both the instantiation of—and a path toward—a more inclusive democracy. the concept of civilization (medeniyet) played a key role in this new incarnation and invoked liberal discourses of intercultural dialogue that emerged under the unaoc, under european cultural policy (iğsız 2014), and under the islamic gülen movement (an akp ally until 2012). although understandings of civilization as culture writ large informed early nationalist debates concerning the place of turkish customs within european civilization (gökalp 1959), the adoption and pluralization of the term in naming antakya’s multireligious choir had a more recent global appeal. after 9/11 the idea of an “alliance of civilizations” has gained prominence in countering theories of civilization clash and inherent conflict between muslim and western values. among the advocates of this idea was ahmet davutoğlu, turkey’s minister of foreign affairs (2009–14) who made the country’s accession to the eu a priority. davutoğlu criticized theories of civilizational antagonism as the intellectual justification for western powers to securitize islam for political ends. instead, he promoted “the self-perception of the islamic personality as a civilizational prototype,” which he argued was “inclusive, egalitarian, and easily accessible,” and thus could “spread in different civilizational zones comprising different ethnic and sectarian communities” (davutoğlu 2014, 75). figure 3. the choir emblem. davutoğlu promoted turkey as a mediator between western and islamic civilizations, and turned to the historical legacies of the ottoman empire as an islamic and expansionist model of pluralism. identified by some scholars as neo-ottomanism (walton 2017; iğsız 2018), the cultural memory and staged performances of a tolerant multicultural past reimagined minorities as nostalgic remnants of the ottoman empire (mills 2010) so as to legitimate the nation-state’s aspirations for turkish and muslim dominance (brink-danan 2012). as “pressing political issues such as immigration and integration [were] increasingly deflected into the realms of cultural policy” in europe (karaca 2010, 28), performances of art (karaca 2009), music (jackson 2013), and dance (potuoğlu-cook 2006), as well as museum and cultural-heritage practices (walton 2015; iğsız 2018), became central to staging turkey’s liberalization. as a “historical representation that actually dehistoricize[s] alterity” (iğsız 2018, 202), neo-ottoman nostalgia has reconfigured urban culture in this process through commemoration ceremonies, popular television series, and urban renewal projects that have sought to revitalize ottoman arts and architecture (türeli 2018). while istanbul, the former capital of the ottoman empire, constituted the main site of such performances (göktürk, soysal, and türeli 2010), a series of projects focused on antakya as a vital node in turkey’s multifaith composition, mirroring the emphasis placed on the muslim identity of minorities under western liberal democracies (e.g., rogozen-soltar 2017). numerous performances of interfaith dialogue that took place in antakya, such as the 2005 hatay civilizations conference and the 2010 european heritage days events, brought together community leaders as heirs to the ottoman millets (administrative and legal tax groups). this inversion framed religion as culture and replicated the ideas of progress embedded in the term’s historical role in turkish modernization. as the choir director yılmaz stated: antakya is a cradle of civilizations. from roman to islamic, each has contributed to the culture of tolerant coexistence here, instead of diminishing the civilizations that it has replaced. so when we say medeniyet, we mean something more than religion. we also mean the civility [medenilik] of antakya’s peoples, in their respect of other cultures and willingness to open themselves to their influence. this narrative endorses a language that valorizes openness to diversity as civility and places the demands of modernity within the history of antakya’s religious diversity. the choir enacts this moral language as the core of cultural citizenship in both the arrangement and the staging of its performances. the concerts are free. singers receive no compensation, and in fact pay a nominal participation fee. these payments, together with funding from local government and concert sponsors, cover the salaries of the instrument players who, unlike the rest of the choir, make their living solely from music. the number of singers (and the particular individuals involved) is chosen in rotation. hence the choir forms a noncommercialized site of citizen participation whose members are expected to share responsibility for the choir’s maintenance as well as to represent (i.e., embody) its onstage message for diverse audiences. such participation enlists citizens to identify as members of particular ethnoreligious communities as a condition for transcending differences. during the concerts, the director presents each song to the audience with commentary on the community from which it originates. for instance, before the performance of an orthodox hymn in classical arabic, he referred to antakya as antioch, the land of the first christians, and described the orthodox christians of antakya as their descendants. for the sunni hymn, he emphasized muslim tolerance and recounted the story of habibi neccar, a christian saint from antakya whose name has been given to a mosque. the turkish lyrics of the alevi song were sung in two different styles, starting in the conventional rhythms of the cem ceremony of the turkish alevis and then moving to a style similar to the sunni hymns before returning to the alevi rhythms, which begin slowly and then speed up, concluding with the fastest-paced part. this shift in style functions as an aesthetic illustration of yılmaz’s preceding speech on the absence of an alawi-sunni conflict in antakya, which contradicts the local accounts of violent clashes between alawi and sunni youth in the 1970s and emergent tensions in the context of the recent syrian displacement. by telling the audience “what to listen for,” yılmaz’s introductory speeches direct both re-presentation and representation as communal expression. the final move of subsuming the singers’ communal commitments under the larger story of the turkish nation is nevertheless musical. concerts always end with the song “memleketim” (“my homeland”), whose lyrics glorify turkey’s landscape, heroes, and epic stories. “memleketim” was arranged in 1972 from the jewish folk song “rabbi elimeylekh” and became a national hit after turkey’s 1974 invasion of cyprus. when the concerts take place in turkey, the director motions to the audience to join in the singing, making hand movements suggesting that he is now also conducting them. in a concert that i attended in toronto in 2015, the turks who made up the majority of the audience joined in with the singing on their own and clapped rhythmically to express allegiance to their country of origin. in either case, the collective singing of an appropriated patriotic song brings the audience to the concert’s climax, the moment at which the “community of believers” becomes the “nation.” in the course of the performance, religious tolerance casts its prescriptive norms of interreligious engagement by turning the performed songs—and their performers—into properties of distinctively perceived religious communities. the visual (e.g., costumes) and aural (e.g., songs and speeches) aspects of live concerts give material substance to the national framing of religious tolerance while also creating the conditions under which such framing is continuously contested and negotiated. the choir’s expanding repertoire includes religious songs not only in arabic, kurdish, armenian, laz, and hebrew but also in italian and latin to represent those involved in antakya’s catholic church.10 because only arabic and turkish are widely spoken in antakya, and only turkish is intelligible to all, singers are given the song lyrics transliterated into turkish during rehearsals.11 the single tune in which the white-robed choir sings these songs creates a sonic image of sameness overriding difference. yet the absence of vocal or instrumental polyphony—common in popular genres of turkish music (stokes 2010, 14–15)—also widens the range of participation by singers and listeners. those committed to performing religious tolerance in the choir, however, have different—often conflicting—perspectives on how to re-present their religious traditions (e.g., which songs, costumes, and images to select) and on who will do the re-presenting. dissonant viewpoints about re-presentation generate tensions that often become enmeshed in the political problems of minority representation. these tensions predominantly concern neither the qualities, recording, and training of physical voice (bakker kellogg 2015; schäfers 2017) nor their sensorial, affective, or technological mediation (stokes 2010; eisenlohr 2012; gill 2017). instead, they concern the terms and national implications of the physical togetherness of minorities (and their songs) onstage.12 the remainder of this article delves into these tensions as described by community representatives in the choir. “which songs?”: the choice and performance of religious verses the civilizations choir presents music as a bridge between religious communities and as a means to transcend communal boundaries. singing religious verses, however, exposes the incommensurabilities in each community’s musical forms, the authority of such forms in religious practice, and the place of distinct identities within the nation. the tensions that emerge from these differences show both the contingencies of religious tolerance and the significance of representational politics for its national legitimation. ismail, a shop owner in antakya, became involved in the choir at the request of the head of the antakya jewish foundation. although he lacked musical training, he felt obliged to join the choir to save his community from poor representation. this feeling echoed other accounts i heard from jewish men about the moral obligation to attend sabbath services, which appeared inseparable from the survival of the community and its recognition in public arenas. but ismail never equated praying in the synagogue to singing onstage. “it is not appropriate to have such musicality in the synagogue,” he remarked, “there, we pray in the hopes of being heard by god. onstage, we appeal to the nationalistic sentiments of our audience by our togetherness.” such distinctions proved especially difficult to maintain when they concerned the sacred quality of the prayers performed onstage, and led to tension between yılmaz and salma, a jewish woman from syria who had lived in antakya for more than thirty years. salma criticized yılmaz for truncating the sabbath morning prayer “el-adon” (“god is the lord”) during a concert. when she insisted that this caused a sin on every singer’s part, yılmaz told her that they were not onstage for religious purposes. salma agreed, yet also maintained that the prayer’s sacred quality lay beyond the context of its performance. “this is why,” she told me, “the antakya jewish foundation needed the permission of the chief rabbinate in istanbul to be able to sing the prayers in concerts.” the problem of jewish representation in the choir echoes the debates surrounding the performance of maftirim (paraliturgical songs of istanbulite sephardic jews) in the istanbul-based birlikte yasamak concert series (jackson 2013). the maftirim performances in secured synagogues “focus exclusively on cultivating and transmitting musical and religious culture within [the] community” (jackson 2013, 126). when opened to the “outside” to stage “an ottoman music world,” however, these performances required jews to act as “tolerated” citizens to maintain the majority’s pride. ismail’s and salma’s reactions present two different perspectives from within the jewish community on how the practitioners negotiate this predicament in a context in which cultivating an exclusively jewish musical practice is not an option. to maintain the integrity of religious practice in the face of anticipated communal disappearance, ismail highlights the specific setting and purpose of performance as a determining factor, while salma emphasizes the power of prayer to sacralize the singer, venue, and presumed audience. although the director yilmaz echoed ismail’s reaction in discourse, the choir eventually addressed these dilemmas in a way that confirmed salma’s point. when i returned in 2015, salma had left the choir and “el-adon” had been removed from the repertoire. i was told that some new muslim members felt uncomfortable singing jewish prayers, so yılmaz kept only the jewish folk song “hava nagila” (“let’s rejoice”). this compromise had a clear precedent in the choir’s history of institutionalization, vis-à-vis alawis.13 antakya alawis do not practice musical forms such as mersiye or kaside that represent the “islamic civilization” in the choir.14 they also do not perform the cem ritual of bektashi alevis.15 mehmet, an alawi sheikh and one of the founding members of the alawi ehl-i beyt foundation, told me that when the governorship contacted the foundation for assistance in finding alawi singers for the choir, many people regarded the task as a burden: “since we don’t have a religious culture of singing, we had difficulty at first, both persuading our people that it was acceptable to represent alawism through songs onstage, and finding songs that would really represent us.” unlike alevis who are ambivalent about the folklorization of cem in twenty-first-century turkey because it erases the ritual’s material-aesthetic history,16 the antakya alawis debated the implications of acquiescing to more intelligible modes of representation that lack clear precedent in their communal history. after some research, they found an arabic shi’a song called “mevla ali” (“god ali”) and sang it in the first concerts. but some members (mostly other religious figures in the choir) objected to that song for representing the fourth caliph of islam and the first imam of shi’as, ali, as god (mevla). along with hymns about jesus and mary, it was eliminated from the choir’s repertoire to forestall religious conflict within (and outside) the group. anticipating the solution yılmaz found for “el adon,” the endeavor to transcend religious differences in this case set aside—rather than engaged with—what appeared to be intractable disagreements from a liberal point of view. the replacement of “mevla ali” by some turkish cem songs, however, meant a double effacement for antakya alawis, who saw their contribution to the choir as both oppressed by the dominant sunni identity and unrepresented beyond bektashi alevi voices. the choir’s mission to transcend religious boundaries—and to represent such transcendence—through collective singing appeals most to the orthodox christian liturgical tradition to which choral music is fundamental (erol 2015). in the face of communal dispossession, class distinctions, and the threat of the catholic and evangelical missions, community leaders emphasize the liturgy as a symbolic resource for antakya’s internally divided christian population, connecting urban christians to immigrants from nearby christian villages. the liturgical service in the orthodox church consists of synagogal hymns that originated in antioch and are performed by the church’s local mixed-gender choir. although accompanied by an electronic organ and amplified with microphones, liturgical performance relies on human voice and monophonic singing, which are considered more appropriate for divine service. moving these hymns to the concert stage for political expression, however, breaks the hierarchies surrounding liturgical singing, the religious authority of community leaders, and the sacredness of particular songs and their media. şirin, a schoolteacher who sang in both the church choir and the civilizations choir, differentiated onstage performances from liturgical singing: “most singers in the choir—including nonpracticing christians—don’t know about the historical and religious significance of the orthodox hymns. they just memorize the songs.” indeed, civilizations choir rehearsals rarely involved musical or religious training and instead consisted of the director’s announcements and the collective repetition of songs for the next concert. emphasis lay on the political message related to the communal affiliation of singers, as evident in yılmaz’s comments, during one rehearsal, about upcoming auditions: “of course, we will pay attention to the talents of new members. but we should not have too many people from one community. we don’t want all the new members to be alawis or sunnis. we have to be democratic.” however distinct the christian, jewish, and alawi positions are in the civilizations choir, their problems regarding the choice and performance of songs register political concerns about how to properly represent religious differences in the public sphere. as chantal mouffe (2005, 98) suggests, liberal pluralism postulates “the availability of a public sphere where power and antagonism would have been eliminated.” in denying the political dimension of social interactions, pluralist models disguise how the deprivation of voice can result from the idea of harmonious coexistence itself. the removal of controversial religious songs from the choir performances attempts to build consensus within the choir through a similar denial, one that has produced other forms of violence (as in the case of the alawi representation). further revealed through the experiences of jewish and christian singers is the need to analyze such violence in relation to the specific conditions of its manifestation, which reveal differences about what counts as authority and who can authorize the representability of particular aesthetic forms in each tradition. although the choir’s dominant mode of representation (choral music as the ground for unity and transcendence) derives largely from the christian tradition itself, it also requires christians to relinquish their religious authority and communal autonomy for the sake of the nation, as i examine further in the next section. “who sings?”: the problem of autonomy and authority from the perspective of the civilizations choir members, the difficulties of re-presenting religious difference for public consumption do not merely concern the commensuration of their distinct musical forms. compelling the members to engage with each other’s musical traditions outside their religious homes, the choir’s institutionalization turns questions of political representation—especially the identity of representatives—into another major site of contestation. ferit, a former choir member, summarized the general discomfort among the christians about this process: when the choir was first founded, we, the orthodox community, supported it. but over time, it lost its meaning . . . i don’t find it right that everybody is forced to sing each other’s hymns. a christian should be able to sing the songs that are about jesus or mary if they wish. the alawis should be able to sing “mevla ali.” to me, tolerance means being able to listen to those who have different beliefs but not necessarily taking part in their singing. ferit’s distinction between “listening” and “singing” points to changes to the choir’s format that have come at the expense of the orthodox community. in the choir’s early days, community leaders and priests selected the songs, trained the singers, and conducted the orthodox hymns. most of the early orthodox members of the civilizations choir were in fact chosen from the church choir and included two priests. with the standardization of songs and the mingling of groups, however, the orthodox representation in the choir became less about the visibility and expertise of identifiable community members under a recognized authority and more about the performance of orthodox hymns by unidentifiable subjects for the national public. in other words, the popularization of the musical practice has not only detached the singing from its liturgical context but also challenged the religious authority of community leaders and the musical authority of liturgical singers. in this context, ferit’s preference for “listening” does not express a refusal of engagement with other religions. he wants to preserve the community’s relationship to its religion on its own terms while performing for diversified publics. metaphorically speaking, the move from “listening” to “singing” symbolizes the loss of autonomy and communal authority on the political path from the preservation of difference within a hierarchical system of plurality (as in the ottoman millet system), to its denial and exclusion (as in early republican nationalism), and then to its valorization (as in nationalist and liberal discourses of religious coexistence). in categorizing religions as preestablished distinct entities, however, ferit’s formulation, just like the choir’s representation of tolerance itself, elides the heterogeneity of the christian community and the existing forms of relatedness among antakya’s diverse religious traditions. while christian singers struggle to preserve their existing spaces of autonomy and authority, alawis who lack institutionalized religio-musical settings seek to create spaces for recognition. the international fame that came with the civilizations choir, for instance, inspired some singers to plan the first alawi choir of the ehl-i beyt foundation. this choir, they claimed, would not only introduce the practice of singing to antakya’s alawi community but also allow them to freely sing the songs mehmet had initially recommended to the civilizations choir. in this quest for autonomy lay also a desire to withdraw alawi participation from the governmental representation of religious diversity as ottoman. “the civilizations choir has given us some visibility,” commented hasan, an alawi singer. but we do not have much power over this [visibility]. when they credit the ottoman rulers or sunni tradition for antakya’s tolerance, it offends us. we as a community bear the responsibility to show others that the alawis have an undeniable role in antakya’s culture of tolerance. the civilizations choir may be one place to do that, but an independent choir can provide more opportunities to get our voices to be heard. the ehl-i beyt choir project did not succeed due to a lack of resources and interest from the community. but the idea itself has shown the centrality of representational politics in alawi imaginations of cultural citizenship. as is evident in the contestations of the civilizations choir as a whole, cultural citizenship concerns not merely the cultural rights and national membership of minority communities but also the question of whether the aesthetic forms and communal histories of their religious practice remain legible enough to ensure the political representation of these communities. this necessity for legibility has informed the continued identification of its alawi singers with the choir’s mission and the material forms such identification has taken. one striking example was a framed newspaper article on the walls of mehmet’s office. it included a picture of the choir members wearing the costumes of their separate communities (figure 4), but the tags that labeled each community were not from the original newspaper article. they had been glued to the picture by mehmet himself, as he proudly told me when i asked his permission to photograph the image. this self-guided act of categorization can serve as an example of mehmet’s attempt to position his religious identity within the statist imaginaries of religious tolerance that align collective singing with religious representation and that rearticulate religion as a representable category of affiliation. yet mehmet’s nostalgia for the earlier days of the choir, when community boundaries were clearly demarcated, also contradicts the intentions of governing agencies to stage an indivisible and standardized entity of the governed. given that not only particular religious congregations’ sounds but also individual bodies are put on display, such contradiction extends beyond the realm of music to visual markers of difference. figure 4. mehmet’s tagged and framed newspaper cutting. photo by seçil dağtaş. the public visibility of jewish tradition in the choir, for instance, contradicts the strategies of “public secrecy” that jews in turkey have long employed to protect themselves (brink-danan 2012, 144). when the jewish songs are sung by all choir members, this contradiction manifests in the use of identifiable religious markers and their visual perception. even after the standardization of concert costumes, most of the jewish men continued to wear kippahs during the concerts. amit, a retired merchant, was the only one who refused to do so: we don’t wear kippah in our daily life, so why do we wear it for the concerts? to make our identities recognizable to others? maybe i don’t want to be recognized by others! maybe the whole point is to mingle with others so that we cannot be distinguished as jews. i’m a turkish citizen, too, and want to be in the choir to show that i am no different from you or the others. amit’s desire to be “no different from . . . the others” inverts the logic of cultural citizenship by highlighting sameness as national identification. as for other non-muslim/non-turkish members of the choir, such a path to citizenship is caught between inclusive rhetoric and exclusionary practices of minority representation: on the one hand, the consistent necessity for those who are different to express their sameness with the majority; on the other hand, the hegemonic denial of sameness due to their racial or religious differences. the paradox, of course, is the impossibility of moving beyond the particularities of difference in a setting where many have found a place precisely because of their differences. conclusion when the terms of national belonging rest on the values of the majority religion despite (or arguably due to) the state’s secularist orientations (mahmood 2015), liberal discourses of tolerance present a political possibility for those who inhabit difference to acquire voice and recognition. they offer a moral and political ideal of harmonious coexistence against the threat of religious violence. they also represent a mode of cultural citizenship for religious others that seeks to ensure their “right to be different” without being excluded from the nation (rosaldo 1994, 57), an endeavor that carries contradictions shaped by the distinct historical experiences of authority formation and religious coexistence. the civilizations choir of antakya provides a lens through which to examine these contradictions from the national margins of turkey, a country where liberal pluralism has long been subservient to nationalist discourses of unity. the choir emerged at a particular conjuncture in which an imperial and islamic model of diversity conceived in opposition to the secular nation-state became re-envisioned through the lens of nationalism while also giving a nod to liberal and eu-oriented accounts of cultural difference. as the performance of multiculturalism in europe deployed intercultural dialogue to regulate muslim immigrants (karaca 2009; rogozen-soltar 2017), the neo-ottoman framing of such performance-as-civilizations accentuated religious identity for recognition within a nationalist framework of sunni supremacy (iğsız 2018), rendering certain religious identities, markers, and practices more recognizable than others. the ensuing problems of recognition are not limited to the legal domains of citizenship, but are cultivated and exacerbated by the representational practices of tolerance. minority representation in the sense of abstract political voice relies on categorical understandings of identity that often treat re-presented groups as inherently coherent, externally bound, and commensurable with each other. but the material forms necessitated by such re-presentation—that is, “actual signs, symbols, figures, images, narratives, words, and sounds—in which symbolic meaning is circulated” (hall 2002, 8)—indicate historically contingent modes of interand intracommunal action, indifference, and political violence beyond discrete identities. without attention to such modes and their incommensurabilities, we cannot fully address the political contradictions that arise for different communities that states govern through tolerance. in the choir context, problems of re-presentation for each community point to historical processes of differentiation. alawi singers who have no legal status as minorities approached the new form of multireligious performance as an opportunity to acquire long-awaited social recognition and cultural rights, even though they remained wary of references to the ottoman past and to neo-ottoman politics. for orthodox christians and jews who lost their communal autonomy under modern turkish policies, at stake were the preservation of internal hierarchies and the communal legacies of their religious practices. as arabic-speaking communities in direct interaction with each other, all three groups shared an ambiguous position vis-à-vis the turkish state in that they operated on the peripheries of national citizenship and served as key figures in the country’s projection of religious coexistence, staged for both national and international audiences. overall, representational politics of religious tolerance in the civilizations choir revolved around the problem of when and how difference should turn into sameness, be tolerated, or be integrated into the shifting signifiers of nation. this problem manifested itself differently for the political mediation of diverse religious voices, positions, and authorities through staged performances that, in turn, reflected the hierarchies of legibility between represented communities. despite their criticisms and hesitations, many (such as mehmet and şirin) maintained their involvement with the choir on the basis of their religious affiliation. they objectified their religious difference and re-presented their transcendence of it through costume, music, and the collective performance (which, paradoxically, only confirms that which is transcended). others (such as ferit) could not accept the conditions under which differences became subsumed into the nation—and quit. for them, the national framings of religious tolerance resonated more directly with the loss of communal autonomy and the weakening of religious authority, especially when accompanied by the historical process of their exclusion from the legal and cultural domains of citizenship. as turkey moves from a seemingly pluralist vision toward an authoritarian nationalism under recep tayyip erdoğan’s regime, the civilizations choir continues to illuminate the majoritarian underpinnings of both visions and the centrality of representational politics to their realization.17 it is telling, for instance, that this multireligious choir did not disappear from the political scene under the pressures of “sameness” encapsulated in erdoğan’s populist rhetoric calling for “one nation, one flag, one country, one state.” on the contrary, the choir has manifested the shifting (and persisting) images and voices of the nation by giving concerts dedicated to those who died on the night of the 2016 coup attempt while resisting the army, an approach much in the spirit of the government-sponsored “democracy rallies” (featuring turkish flags and islamic banners) against the coup. participation in such national spectacles has once again transformed the visual markers of difference in the choir, this time by gender rather than religious identity: men and women now wear different costumes, all of them with ottoman-inspired embroidery. the choir has maintained its discursive focus on civilizational dialogue as the organizing trope of its performance. however, religious songs and those with armenian and kurdish lyrics have become minimized in the overall presentation of difference by a greater emphasis on national and popular songs from across turkey. while these changes have so far ensured the survival of the choir by conforming to the conservative gender norms and racial hierarchies inherent in turkish nationalism that have resurfaced in the current political context, their ramifications remain to be seen. the choir’s activities over the past decade nonetheless echo the contradictions of turkey at large regarding the place of minority voices within the representation of the nation. these contradictions will likely prevail in the context of turkey’s majoritarianism and its neo-ottoman reconfiguration of international relations with europe and the middle east. they also provide important reminders of the limits and contingencies of religious tolerance, as western multiculturalism cedes its hegemonic place to anti-immigrant rhetoric, stricter border regimes, and new populist movements in the state management of racial and religious differences, not only in turkey but across the world. abstract this article examines the politics of minority representation focusing on the civilizations choir of antakya, a multireligious ensemble formed in the mid-2000s against the backdrop of turkey’s democratization process and involvement in globally funded programs of intercultural dialogue. based on ethnographic fieldwork in the choir’s hometown, antakya, near turkey’s border with syria, i compare the experiences of arabic-speaking religious groups who simultaneously represent and are represented in the choir. these experiences, i argue, manifest different historical positions and political tensions that defy the choir’s categorization of minority religions as equally representable constituents of a tolerant nation. together, they expose the uncertainties of ethno-religiously defined citizenship and the representational work such uncertainties demand for constructing nationhood. by analyzing this process, the article foregrounds representational politics as one key site for the anthropological study of religious diversity, and for addressing broader problems of minority recognition inherent in liberal regimes of tolerance. [tolerance; religious diversity; representation; minority; nationhood; turkey] özet bu makale, 2000’li yılların ortalarında türkiye’nin demokratikleşme süreci ve küresel olarak finanse edilen kültürlerarası diyalog programlarına katılımı zemininde kurulmuş çok dinli bir topluluk olan antakya medeniyetler korosu özelinde azınlık temsili politikalarını incelemektedir. koronun kurulduğu, türkiye’nin suriye sınırı yakınında bulunan antakya şehrinde yapılan etnografik saha çalışmasından yola çıkarak hem koroyu temsil eden hem de koroca temsil edilen arap kökenli dini grupların deneyimleri karşılaştırıyorum. savım, bu deneyimlerin, koronun azınlık dinlerini hoşgörülü bir ulusun eşit temsil edilebilir bileşenleri olarak sınıflandırmasına ters düşen farklı tarihi konumları ve siyasi gerilimleri ortaya koyduğu. bu konum ve gerilimler, etnik ve dini köken temelinde tanımlanan vatandaşlık kavramının belirsizliklerini ve bu tür belirsizliklerin milliyet inşası için gerektirdiği temsili çabayı gözler önüne sermektedir. makale, temsil politikalarını kilit bir çalışma alanı olarak ön plana almak suretiyle, hem dini çeşitliliğin antropolojik olarak incelendiği klasik çalışmalara, hem de liberal hoşgörü rejimlerinde esas olan azınlıkların tanınmasına dair daha geniş çaplı sorunların analizine katkı sağlamaktadır. [hoşgörü; dini çeşitlilik; temsil; azınlık; milliyet; türkiye] ملخص يبحث هذا المقال سياسات تمثيل الأقليات من خلال التركيز على جوقة الحضارات في أنطاكيا. تشكلت الجوقة المتعددة الأديان في أواسط سنوات ال 2000 في سياق مسيرة التحوّل الديمقراطي في تركيا واللإنخراط في برامج دولية داعمة ومموّلة للحوارات بين الثقافات. وإعتماداً على بحثي الميداني والإثنوغرافي في مدينة أنطاكيا؛ مسقط راأس الجوقة، أقدم مقارنة لتجارب المجموعات الدينية الناطقة باللغة العربية التي تُمثّل و تَتَمثّل في آن واحد في الجوقة. وأناقش أن هذه التجارب تُعبّر عن مواقف تاريخية مختلفة وتوترات سياسية تتحدى تصنيف الجوقة للأقليات الدينية وتماشيها مع فكرة الوطن كمتسامح. وتكشف هذه التوترات والمواقف مجموعة من الشكوك المتعلّقة بالمواطنة العِرقية والدينية وبالتالي العمل التمثيلي الذي توظفه هذه الشكوك في صنع الوطن. وعن طريق دراسة هذه السيرورة، يناقش المقال السياسات التمثيلية كحيّز جوهري لدراسة أنثروبولوجية التنوع الديني، وكركن أساسي لتناول إشكاليات أوسع متعلقة بإعتراف الأنظمة الليبرالية للأقليات. [الكلمات الرئيسية: تسامح، تنوع ديني، تمثيل، أقليات، وطن، تركيا] notes acknowledgments early versions of this article benefited from conversations at the university of göttingen’s centre for modern indian studies, wilfred laurier university, the university of toronto, the university of waterloo, and the woolf institute at the university of cambridge. i thank janice boddy, götz hoeppe, michael lambek, jennifer liu, adrienne lo, nandu menon, amira mittermaier, tanya richardson, kabir tambar, and jeremy walton for their critical feedback on earlier drafts. i am grateful to nayrouz abu hatoum, ashley lebner, timothy makori, andrew paruch, vivian solana, and aslı zengin for their insights and support in the writing process. thanks also to heather paxson, the editors of cultural anthropology, and the three anonymous reviewers who further advanced the article’s interventions. i am indebted to the openness of the civilizations choir members whose perspectives have proven invaluable for this work. research and writing for this article were supported by the university of toronto connaught scholarship, the vanier scholarship through the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, a residential fellowship at the collegium de lyon, and the sakıp sabancı international research award. 1. antakya’s current population of 370,000 comprises bilingual (arabic-turkish) jewish, orthodox christian, sunni, and alawi groups, as well as turks and armenians with ties to gregorian, protestant, and catholic churches. since 2011, the city has also hosted more than 80,000 displaced syrians, the implications of which i have examined elsewhere (dağtaş 2017). 2. the un launched the unaoc initiative in 2005 with the cosponsorship of the spanish and turkish governments to “promote international peace and security” against the clash of civilizations in the post-9/11 era. representing “islamic civilization,” turkey took a leading role on the “eastern side” of the initiative with its national action plan, sponsoring hundreds of intercultural dialogue projects, including the 2010 european capital of culture series (iğsız 2014, 692). 3. i attended weekly rehearsals of the civilizations choir from may 2010 until november 2011. i visited the choir members in their homes, workplaces, and places of worship and conducted thirty-two interviews with choir members. i also draw on booklets, news articles, publicly available audiovisual material, and my continued interaction with the choir’s past and current members. 4. i draw from gayatri chakravorty spivak’s (1999, 259) analysis of vertretung (representation as proxy) and darstellung (re-presentation as portrait) as together complicit in problems of “speaking in the name of.” spivak (1999, 63) criticizes the obliteration of this distinction in poststructuralist theories of subjectivity for reducing postcolonial critique to identity politics, and “leaving out the real others because of the ones getting access into the public places due to the waves of benevolence.” although spivak’s analysis concerns the ethical impasses of the subaltern’s intellectual portrayals, this formulation helps identify the gap in the choir between the necessities of political representation and the historical ways of being (and being-with) that exceed institutional channels of voice giving. 5. anthropological inquiries into cultural citizenship have focused largely on migrant, diasporic, and creole communities (rosaldo 1994; eisenlohr 2007) and debated the power and limits of statecraft in inscribing cultural norms of race and language (ong 1996; clarke 2013). this article brings questions of religious practice, tolerance, and representation to bear on these debates. 6. alevism is a twelver shi’a sect associated with a bektaşi-sufi lineage. cem is the alevi worship service that takes place in houses rather than mosques, and it involves the recitation of religious verses, the commemoration of revered figures, sacrificial offerings, and the semah ritual, which sees male and female participants dancing in a circle to the singing of spiritual songs. 7. although tied to the ecumenical patriarchate and identified as rum (greek) since ottoman times, the region’s orthodox churches associate themselves with the eastern orthodox patriarchates in damascus and latakia and perform their rituals in ancient arabic, not greek. 8. see marc david baer (2009) and esra özyürek (2009) on how turkish secular nationalism has historically limited the possibilities for religious fluidity in cases of conversion and syncretism. 9. among the reforms introduced in this period were the “democratic opening” policies of 2007 and 2008 that allowed kurdish-language broadcasting and instruction by the state and considered alevi demands for religious accommodation, and 2014 legislation that recognized syriac orthodox land rights. 10. the catholic mission, since its empowerment during the french mandate (1923–38), has targeted the rural orthodox christian community and alawis suspected of secret christian proclivities. less than a hundred people are officially registered as catholic in antakya, yet most attendees of the catholic services are orthodox christians. 11. since 2013, the choir has been conducting its weekly rehearsals in a renovated antakya townhouse named medeniyetler evi (the house of civilizations), which was allocated exclusively to the choir’s administration by the governorship. 12. although the choir’s facebook page includes video clips, many listeners are unaware of this. choir members told me that the recorded performances do not give the same feel as the live concerts on which the choir’s national and transnational existence relies. 13. unlike their christian and jewish neighbors, the alawis were never granted the status of millet, nor officially recognized as a religious minority. because they suffered persecution under sunni rulers, many embrace the secularist principles of the republic and its denial of the ottoman past. 14. kaside and mersiye are two poetry forms found in divan literature that are sung to praise islamic figures or express their divine suffering. 15. alawi rites include initiation rituals in which the esoteric parts of the koran are revealed to adolescents in a male-only ceremony, shrine visitation, dreaming and healing practiced by men and women. 16. since the 1970s, the semah element of cem has gained popularity and state recognition as a public token of national folklore, divorced from the ritual’s overall performance, spiritual references, and religious (shi’a) history of communal lamentation (tambar 2014). 17. since 2011, turkey has had three general elections (the second restoring the akp’s parliamentary majority, which it had lost in june 2015), the end of the peace process with the kurds followed by heightened state violence in kurdish provinces, and a referendum that granted the president sweeping executive powers. held during a nationwide state of 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permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.11 editors’ introduction editors’ introduction brad weiss college of william and mary https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3795-0064 heather paxson massachusetts institute of technology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8429-5429 christopher nelson university of north carolina at chapel hill https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3293-3185 what is your vision for cultural anthropology? the three of us are often asked this question as the incoming editors of this storied publication. our answer is simple: we don’t have one. this can be a surprising or even confusing response to our interlocutors. we imagine this is because authors and readers generally assume that editors—who, it is true, exercise their judgment in bringing articles to publication—must be guided by their own topical interests and theoretical preferences, if not personal tastes. this assumption is undoubtedly compounded by our work on behalf of cultural anthropology, a journal highly regarded for its distinctive voice and its concerted efforts to make a real difference in the world of anthropology and interdisciplinary scholarship more broadly. but rather than view our editorship as an opportunity to forge a new path through the thicket of anthropological scholarship, we honestly feel that the task and privilege of our editorial collaborative is just that: collaboration. in reading manuscripts submitted to the journal over the past fourteen months, we have encountered a wealth of fascinating topics and trends, concepts and concerns that we could never have anticipated, let alone solicited, when we began our editorial work in january 2018. we have been continuously impressed by the range of work we have received from scholars around the world, from doctoral candidates to emeritus professors. we have been equally gratified by the generosity and thoughtfulness of our editorial board and of the reviewers whom they recommend to us weekly. all of this is a testament to the efforts of our predecessors in stewarding a publication to which a very wide readership and prospective authorship feels so strongly attached. every bit as important has been the indispensable work of our editorial staff, managing editor marcel laflamme and editorial assistant jessica lockrem, as well as the leadership and member support of the society for cultural anthropology, the section of the american anthropological association that remains committed to publishing an open-access journal and to investing in the scholarly infrastructure that makes this possible. for its first five years as an open-access title, cultural anthropology was published in a custom content management system that had been developed to showcase the society’s dynamic web content and was then retrofitted as a journal publishing platform. this issue marks the migration of the journal to open journal systems (ojs), a purpose-built open-source platform that has long powered our submission and review processes. when a major upgrade to ojs was released in 2016, we saw an opportunity to align ourselves with an active, values-driven developer community while retaining a sense of aesthetic distinctiveness. financial support from one of our institutions, the college of william and mary, allowed us to build out the functionality for presenting our curated collections—thematic portals into the cultural anthropology backfiles—and thereby to offer this feature to the almost 10,000 other journals around the world that also use ojs. in some ways, the pendulum of the society’s publishing program is swinging away from bespoke systems and processes toward new forms of interdependency. we see this shift as an investment in cultural anthropology’s sustainability, even as we are determined to safeguard the capacity for experimentation that all of us value. our vision, then, is to remain true to the legacy of expanding scholarly innovation and inclusion that has been entrusted to us. to do so, we aim to work with the always interesting material submitted to us, helping authors to realize their visions of their scholarship in ways that will spark the most compelling and expansive conversations for the future. “jurisprudential massage”: legal fictions, sectarian citizenship, and the epistemics of dissent in post-socialist china cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 4, pp. 487-515, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.01 “jurisprudential massage”: legal fictions, sectarian citizenship, and the epistemics of dissent in post-socialist china andrea e. pia london school of economics https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4061-7369 “you have already been incredibly faithful toward the man. and you have been following all the relevant rules for establishing a co-operative. now, what you need to do is to try to save your relationship as kin. it is not only about the business you are putting together. you need to understand that respecting the law also means respecting the particular circumstances in which your business partner appears to be. what i ask you to have is another pinch of hope and to fix this. forget about this mandatory entry payment, put the money up yourself if you must, and go ahead! if you’re not convinced, try out the administrative court, see how it goes there. what you need to know is that the result we can get here is in both parties’ interests [liangbian yao baiping]. do not ruin everything here, insulting each other and losing temper. what could you expect from your co-op if you establish it on unstable grounds?” this was master du at his best. an extremely witty communist party cadre, he had been, since the beginning of my fieldwork in the rural town seat of yancong, northeast yunnan province, an omnipresent figure in dispute resolution. the dialogue above comes from a particularly stormy session held by du and two of his assistants in november 2013 at the village committee common room of litian, a rural hamlet hidden behind the hazy rice-terraced slopes east of yancong. to my surprise, once du had concluded his summation, the old man allegedly responsible for defaulting on his financial commitment toward the joint co-op project gave a half-contrived nod and promised he would forgive his “unfilial son” (niezi) for bringing him to court. in turn, a-mu, the old man’s son-in-law who only a minute before had vehemently rejected any possibility of reconciliation, promised he would file no further charges against his father-in-law and that he would foot the entry fee. that day, du asked me to keep him company as he went through a long day of “extra-court mediation” (tiaojie gongzuo). his duty: “making sure that people live harmoniously with one another and have respect for the law.” out of five cases he sat through only that day, du successfully persuaded parties to reach an agreement four times. “i have a 90 percent success rate,”1 he usually boasted to other mediators, “and i do almost one thousand cases per year.” “do they ever go to court?” i asked him that day, out of curiosity. “to court?” he replied, baffled. “why would they? the court doesn’t care about what happens next, they are simply after establishing compensation.2 the way i see it is that mediators should combine ‘the rule of law’ [yifazhiguo] with the ‘rule of morality’ [yidezhiguo]. what is requested of us, is that we usher people back into harmony [wei qunzhong kaiqi hexiezhimen] and that we preserve good social relationships.” figure 1. the house of a dispute mediator. photo by andrea e. pia. in contemporary rural china, the extrajudicial and voluntary conciliation of disagreement by a qualified third party—the messy business also known as “mediation”—is experiencing a stunning revival (minzner 2015, 4). after almost two decades of steady decline in favor of court litigation (di and wu 2009, 234), the chinese government is now heavily investing in the professionalization of mediators (h. zhang 2013, 262) and in enforcing prerequisite mediation across various arenas of social conflict, from labor to administrative disputes (su and he 2010; zhuang and chen 2015). intrinsically permeable to elite and partisan interests, the practice of institutionalized mediation has been heavily criticized as a form of “control of the political thought of the masses” (glassman 1992, 466). yet contemporary observers of china understand this return of mediation as indexing the communist party’s tottering ideological grip on its citizens’ growing awareness of individual rights and an evolving “grammar of justice” (brandtstädter 2017, 14; minzner 2018, 100). in 2015 alone, china’s 3,911,000 people’s mediators dealt with 9,331,000 civil disputes, a twofold increase in only ten years (read and michelson 2018, 436). expansive state support to dispute mediation is integral to the current moment in chinese politics, in which the system’s “capacity to respond to public demands” (tsang 2016, 19) is being tested on a dramatic scale. the mediated resolution of disputes has a long, and for many sociolegal scholars, praiseworthy history in china (e.g., huang 2010, 61, 203). one could gesture back to the ancient confucian predilection for social harmony (hexie) and conflict-aversion (yansu)—the anti-hobbesian idea that harmony, not conflict, “arises and persists automatically in a hierarchical universe” (stephens 1992, 4). or one might point out how such practices channeled and energized class conflict under mao (lubman 1967). under xi jinping’s rule, the communist party is revitalizing, but also redefining, the institutional legacies of both the maoist and confucian traditions in the belief that this will “enhance its ability to govern or improve its moral authority” (tsang 2016, 36). while historical continuity provides popular legitimacy, the versatility of mediation also panders to contemporary bureaucratic anxieties about the administrative sustainability of continuous state surveillance (he and warren 2011, 282). dispute mediation eases the mounting governmental frustration with judicial litigation while providing disgruntled citizens with a first venue of extrajudicial redress. it decreases the legal system’s level of exposure to huge fiscal expenditures arising from expanded access (li, kocken, and van rooij 2018, 67–68). it channels increasingly organized and tactically innovative forms of grassroots dissent (gallagher 2017, 89; fu 2018, 20), and acts “as the first line of defence [diyidao fangxian] against social conflicts and negative mass incidents” (di and wu 2009, 239). thus, dispute mediation is usually conceived as a form of “governing at a distance” (l. zhang and ong 2008, 4), one among a set of institutional mechanisms that by enhancing state legibility allegedly contributes to social stability (weiwen). between 2011 and 2017 i conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside master du, mr ni, and a number of other yunnanese dispute mediators to explore how this “mediation fever” (tiaojie re)—to borrow a felicitous expression from the chinese legal scholar yao zhijian (2005)—is currently affecting the popular quest for social justice in rural china. stuck between an impossible workload and the intractability of bitter village rows, dispute mediators such as master du are pressed to catch up with the latest developments in chinese political and legal ideology while juggling all sorts of official requests for a better, faster, and more reliable paralegal service. and yet, despite the heavy toll that this task takes on their time and energies, all mediators i met in yancong felt adamant about the absolute necessity of the service they provide. yunnanese mediators are usually keen to point out that, despite the various legal education campaigns championed over the years by the central state and the multiple opportunities for professional legal advice currently available to its residents, contemporary rural chinese society still shows very low levels of compliance with the law. even worse, decades of “law propaganda” (altehenger 2018, 255–57) have supposedly resulted in a more combative articulation of grassroots collective action, which now leverages established legal principles “to anchor defiance” (o’brien 2013, 1055). in yancong, a township of less than 100,000 residents, unofficial figures reported an average of thirty “mass incidents” (quntixing shijian) per year for the period between 2010 and 2015. while local mediators accept that class tensions brought about by three decades of pro-urban biases in state economic policies may matter, they prefer explaining endemic unrest as the symptom of widespread moral decay. in this article i investigate dispute mediation as an institutional response to the backfiring of china’s legal dissemination programs. in a country currently leading the global innovation race for more efficient and sophisticated technologies of state surveillance (byler 2019), and therefore already dramatically invested in projects of social “harmonization” (hexiehua), what role is there to play for those lower-tech forms of governmentality—forms less rooted in physical coercion and behavior monitoring and more based on interpellation, moral education, and ideological remodeling (rancière 2010, 36–37)—that were once instrumental in mobilizing and shaping rural consensus under socialism? complementing anthropological theories of resistible power (e.g., scott 1990; simpson 2014), i show how a politically motivated shift in the epistemology of law—that is, the ways in which statements are appreciated to carry legal weight and therefore expected to have a certain type of agency—correlates with the (im)possibility of meaningful dissent and therefore with the moving moral complexion of politics and citizenship in this country. how is “agreement” ordinarily made sense of and brought forward in rural yunnan? according to what moral or legal principle is resolution said to have settled in, and how are everyday forms of dissent and refusal managed? master du usually referred to cases such as a-mu’s as “petty infighting” (wolidou) or “trivial cases” (xiaoshi). “the mission of every dispute mediator is to transform big cases into small cases and small cases into no-cases,” he remarked to the always bamboozled-looking attendees of dispute-resolution sessions. below, i endeavor to invert master du’s laudable adage—turning trivial cases back into heuristically pregnant cases—with a view to unpacking the political work that the cautionary tales, half-baked legal fictions, and cursorily legal lessons imparted by dispute mediators such as du, as well as by other law-brandishing street-level officials, currently perform in dispute-chocked rural china. the selection of cases for this essay will reflect an aspiration to generalizability. among the twenty mediation cases i personally followed and the hundreds of “requests of hearing” and mediation decisions i have collected in various dispute archives during fieldwork (see pia 2017), i will focus on those most representative of the existing social and political fault lines in the region. for all the cases i personally studied, i have always followed up with both mediators and disputants to discuss their experiences of and expectations for the mediation process. below, i will first contextualize mediation within various theoretical debates at the crossroads between chinese and western sociolegal studies. i show how looking at the internal functioning of mediations, as opposed to its institutional function, frees up space to theorize about the micropower wielded by chinese mediators. second, i look at an official training session in the “rule of law” to show how mediators are primed to reimagine the relationship between social stability and the attainment of conciliation by virtue of a creative reappropriation of socialist jurisprudence. third, i rely on mediators’ own accounts of successful resolution to highlight the techniques of moral subordination that disputants’ appeals to justice undergo within mediation—a process of epistemic refashioning that master du himself calls “jurisprudential massage.” finally, i tease out what the implications of such an epistemic shift may be for contemporary chinese citizenship, and through the ethnography of mass incidents, for an anthropological theory of meaningful dissent. a vernacular of repression in the past decade, scholarly debates about the possibility of legal redress in authoritarian societies (lai and slater 2006; whiting 2017) have brought attention to china’s continuous reliance on informal means of dispute resolution. a panoply of multidisciplinary case studies now testifies to the ubiquity and versatility of this legal form (e.g., erie 2015; balme 2016; for a review, see sida liu and wang 2015). importantly, this literature has highlighted the key institutional role played by dispute mediation in smoothing out the potentially highly fraught transition from the maoist planned economy to a capitalist market one (peerenboom and he 2009, 25; s. zhu 2016, 127–29). a guiding research hypothesis here is that of the “vernacularization” of rights and rules—the process through which the law-in-the-book is actualized, or subverted, by law-in-action. as with other asian countries (engel and engel 2010, 95–96; tanase 2010, 155–57), in china the desired transition to a modern market economy capable of innovation is usually expected to rely on citizens’ increasing propensity to litigate the rights abuses accompanying economic development. however, such reliance on litigation is now interpreted as having a dwindling effect on the moral force of “customs” (xiguanfa)—a term used widely in the official state discourse to speak about challenges to social stability (see huang 2010, xi–xviii). customs, the once-powerful moral glue of society, no longer appear able to elicit mutual agreement among disputants, the experience of law-enabled social change arguably acting to destabilize ordinary village mores, local notions of fairness, and expectations of justice. the progressive entanglement between these two opposing normative orders, that is, between the “market-conforming” (gallagher 2017, 34–36) legality of the party-state and the crumbling moral authority of local customs, has led the chinese legal anthropologist zhu xiaoyang (2007, 107–8) to speak of a “confusion of tongues” (yuyan hunlun) seemingly beleaguering the legal consciousness of contemporary chinese citizens. because of this, sociolegal debates in china are today bent on reassessing dispute mediation as either a site where “law propaganda and ideas of justice” can be made to overlap (huang 2010, 259; altehenger 2018, 259) or, conversely, as a productive space for counterhegemonic, market-averse claims-making (pia 2016, 279). and yet, this revamped interest in dispute mediation can still be faulted for trading in the same old homeostatic currency of functionalism, that is, the flattening of the discourse of law on to the exigencies of power (pirie 2013, 31, 187). in a context such as the people’s republic, this usually entails using mediation to test the correlation between the deregulation of justice and regime stability (e.g., erie 2015, 1003; hu and zeng 2015, 47; gallagher 2017, 30). while this line of inquiry has much to recommended it, its latent legal pragmatism—the conflation of the assumed social ends of law (stability) and its institutional means (mediation)—creates a source of unwanted inconsistency. this becomes apparent when the stress on mediation as a powerful corrective for social instability is framed against the empirical scholarship on citizens’ access to the legal system. in the case of rural china, in fact, dispute settlement is alternately shown to be either a relatively underused remedy for aggrieved villagers (michelson 2007) or a redress mechanism of wildly exaggerated efficacy (read and michelson 2018, 448).3 figure 2. a group of elders discusses the details of a dispute agreement. photo by andrea e. pia. in this essay, i bring my ethnographic study of chinese mediation in dialogue with broader theoretical conversations happening in anthropology at the nexus of legality, language, and citizenship (e.g., richland 2013; dresch and scheele 2015) to argue that there’s much more to this governing technique than a just-so story about its alleged institutional (in)convenience. in what follows i argue that this approach advances our comprehension of current trends in the politics of repression, of both the liberal and authoritarian kind (povinelli 2013, 25–29; wang 2016, 152–60), as well as our conceptualization of law’s force as distinct from that of the material apparatus of the state (riles 2010). in what follows, i make three specific contributions. first, i argue that the ethnographic material in this article challenges the received interpretation in chinese studies that mediation, and the country’s legal system more broadly, are exclusively motivated by the attainment or maintenance of social harmony (see benney 2016). rather, this essay shows that mediation is currently being retooled to affect a “radicalization” of rural political sensibilities—a political project to introduce into the public sphere more rigid, obtrusive, and non-negotiable interpretations of everyday morality. second, chinese dispute resolution offers a privileged vista on emerging forms of state mediation that while minimizing the possibility of hidden resistance (scott 1990), or autonomy (simpson 2014; mcgranahan 2016), simultaneously allow for the staging of what jacques rancière (2010, 43) calls “political excess”—the articulation of a differently ordered polity through the public expression of dissent and refusal. it is in the very articulation of dissent, however, that chinese mediators attend to socially destabilizing views in ways that make their actual underlying political stakes difficult to say and ultimately dis-acknowledgeable. to achieve such control over the expression of dissent, chinese mediation does not necessitate the co-option or criminalization of those who express it. if hidden resistance entails a “tacit ideological complicity” with the language of power (scott 1990, 100), and refusal an authorizing context that feels diminished by the mere existence of dissensus (simpson 2014, 18–24), this article demonstrates a governmental action geared toward the subordination of non-confirming subjectivities, one which exceeds the problem that their overt or covert existence poses to authority. third, with a view to moving away from the functionalist undertones characterizing the scholarship of legal consciousness, this article investigates the functioning of dispute settlement4—how routine encounters with local grammars and ideologies of law qualitatively transform the possibility and articulation of disagreement. while functionalism stands for theories that treat law exclusively as a vector of social control (see hart 1983, 353–54), zooming in on the twists and turns of mediated agreements discloses the epistemic labor that capacitates legal-brokers beyond the question of control to reshape the moral complexion and substance of chinese citizenship itself. here i stress law’s capacity to convey “authoritative images of social relationships and actions” (merry 1990, 8–9; see also richland 2013, 218) and show how the discursive work that goes into the resolution of rural disputes encapsulates a persuasive vernacular of allusions, metaphors, and legal fictions ingeniously concocted by mediators to achieve what, following the feminist philosopher miranda fricker (2007), i will call “epistemic resolution,” a disputing stance that preempts the performance and intelligibility of meaningful dissent. sticking to du’s self-account of mediation, what does “ushering people back into harmony” practically entail? what are the epistemological implications of persuading someone to proceed according to their own better judgment, as when one is cautioned to “preserve their good social relationships”? and above all, what can a study of the functioning of dispute mediation tell us about the “durability and ideological power of law” (silbey 2005, 358) in a global time in which the law is increasingly exercised “in the name of a collectivity” (hall et al. 2013, 192), rather than in that of justice? the stability bluff yancong mediators spend considerable time debating what they call “the legal consciousness conundrum” (falü yishi wenti). if the state’s popularization of legal remedies has led people to “use the law as a weapon” (yongfaweijian) rather than as a “teaching” for self-restraint (yifaweijiao)—as originally intended by governmental policies—could the law still be used to shape social conflict in ways congenial to the objectives of state governance? in response to my continuous querying about this conundrum, in december 2017 master du gave me the unprecedented opportunity to attend one of the official mediators’ training sessions organized by the kunming civil affairs bureau (kunmingshi minzhengju). entitled “cadre training in social stability through the rule of law” (fazhi weiwen ganbu peixun), these mandatory sessions form part of the professional development goals for yunnanese dispute mediators. this session took place on the glamorous premises of a prestigious building in central kunming city and gathered somewhere around three hundred dispute mediators operating in qujing prefecture, where yancong is jurisdictionally located. the morning was organized around an orderly sequence of public remarks by village cadres—starting from an elderly han male party secretary and finishing with a relatively young, democratically elected tibetan female village leader. speakers were instructed to spend a few words relating the experience of delivering sound mediation services to their own village constituencies. all speeches dissected the biographies of a select handful of dispute mediators across the swath of chinese history, mulling them over and repackaging them to crowd-pleasing effects. it was on one specific figure, though, the communist leader ma xiwu, that the organizers wanted us to focus. in small groups of ten trainees each, the better part of the afternoon session was devoted to the exegesis of precirculated paper excerpts from an official legal biography of comrade ma xiwu. “is comrade ma’s way of judging an example of how mediation ought to be carried out today in view of the imperatives of social stability?” was the prompt to our group discussion. all the chinese mediators i met in yunnan had great familiarity with the figure of comrade ma. ma xiwu, a native of zhidan county, in shaanxi province, joined the chinese communist party in 1935 and acted as presiding judge of longdong tribunal of the senior court of shaanxi-gansu-ningxia revolutionary borderland base in 1943. after liberation, he went on to become vice president of the supreme people’s court. during his time as a revolutionary judge, ma became popular for championing a mediation style that while “based on common sense” (f. yu 2008, 81), remained capable of joining the promotion of the state’s socialist reform programs with the broad participation and consensus of the masses. and all of this, apparently, without creating “antagonism in communities” (cong 2014, 32). for instance, in one of the most famous cases he mediated, the 1943 feng v. zhang, ma decided to validate a technically void, arranged marriage conducted through the kidnapping of the bride, basing his ruling on the bride’s private testimony that she really wanted to marry her arranged husband. ma made a point of determining the “popular inclinations” (yiban yulun quxiang) of co-villagers toward the case—all in favor of the arranged marriage—before reaching his decision. in so doing, ma upheld the socialist legal principle of “self-determined marriage” (ziyuan jiehun) while at the same time preserving the collective economic interest that had originally led the involved families to arrange the marriage of two of their members. “ma’s view truly is that of a modernizer”—a middle-aged han dispute mediator sitting in my group commented—“arranged marriage is a formality that followed local custom. socialist law says that the essence of this case was the will of the spouses. ma’s practice is to resolve disputes by bridging both local customs and modern law, rather than creating conflict between them. this is the best possible conduct toward maintaining social stability.” “and yet, ma’s judgement won’t stick today,” rebutted another; “today’s litigation masters [songshi] will appeal to the superordinate office, or disputants would suddenly change their mind and sue for cancellation.” “people like ma are cut from a different cloth, today’s people’s mediators don’t have the harshness [ying] that is needed to adjudicate [panjue] the way he did,” concluded the most experienced mediator at the table. as our group time was over, the organizers went on to collect takeaway points from the various working groups. while noting how the general discussion exuded a certain degree of self-deprecation, they suggested that ma’s legacy still had a crucial role to play in today’s rural society. “ma’s mode of mediation came out of the revolutionary experience. and, indeed, the maintenance of social stability today is a comparable wartime endeavor,” one of them remarked. the gist of their comment was that embattled mediators today ought to think creatively about the jurisprudence of mediation (tiaojie jiufen de fali)—the subtle ways in which the law can be made to simultaneously square with and off the frictions of local politics. to hammer this point home, the organizers asked us to pause on one aspect of ma’s mode of mediation that, they argued, had been left significantly unexplored by group discussions: “you have been focusing on ma’s moral standing or his subtle knowledge of socialist laws, and yet what really matters is his ‘radical method’ [jijin cuoshi] of executing mao’s mass line.” famously, mao advocated for a policy practice that relied on the input of the masses to articulate legislative goals. but according to the civil affairs officials, ma performed the mass line in ways that, today, prove potentially decisive for china’s “mediation fever.” “when addressing complicated cases that weaved together questions of rights to feelings of envy, resentment, or selfishness, ma would always make sure to reach a conclusion that accorded with the revolutionary sentiment of the people.” at the same time, the civil affair official continued, ma would always mediate so that “incorrect opinions” (cuowu yijian) or behaviors could be publicly criticized. conversely, “correct opinions” (zhengque yijian), those rooted in the collective interest, would end up being included in the adjudication. if reiterated, the speaker argued, this method could reduce the number of “incorrect” requests for hearings mediators needed to process—“you don’t have to take up requests that are based on what everyone knows to be incorrect opinions”—while at the same time increasing the legal quality of the decisions mediators reached during dispute settlement. sociolegal debates in china currently question the state’s ability to read the root causes of social conflict in contemporary society. yu jianrong, for instance, has argued against the “rigid” governmental concept of “stability” (gangxing wending), claiming that it misconstrues genuine concerns for economic equality as inherently political threats (yu jianrong 2009). as we have seen, “cadres training in social stability through the rule of law” do not ask participants to consider the ways in which specific rules and procedures can help assuage socioeconomic tensions at the grassroots. rather, mediators are prompted to think about the intersection between the practice of popular justice and the epistemic foundations of legality. a cluster of ideas that frames consensus, agreement, and stability as a political project brought about by mediators’ motivated interventions into common people’s sensibilities and capacity for discerning what correct legal opinion to follow. in this interpretation, law’s function as a facilitative tool of governance gets somewhat sidelined. to receive more attention is rather law’s capacity, through the vehicle of dispute mediation, to generate a social vision, one organized around standards of conduct and “popular inclinations” (see epstein 1973) subject to “evaluation and judgement” (pirie and scheele 2014, 9). thus, non-conforming legal opinions are adjusted to a party-approved moral compass whose coordinates only partially map onto the more capacious, compromise-oriented moral topography of chinese dispute settlement, in which customary ideas of fairness and appropriate behavior are usually located (e.g., thireau and wang 2001; zhao 2019). the institutional deselection of “incorrect opinions” advocated by the civil affairs officials does not simply aim to stabilize society—in the literal sense of achieving a steady state kept in balance by counterforces. in line with ma’s vision, it also endeavors to reorient society toward those partisan views that, by being monopolized by state authorities, become the only ones legally enforceable. as suggested by paul dresch and judith scheele (2015, 13–14), the act of redrawing the epistemic boundaries between background and foreground in legal matters—or, in other words, between the implicit categories people live with and the explicit rules they ought to live by—entails “entrenching” one particular version of rule-following conduct, at the expense of all others. everything that falls outside those “legal trenches”—behaviors or opinions that rest at an angle to the officially prescribed ones—is neither explicitly resisted nor rejected by legal authorities, but simply relegated to public irrelevance (pirie and scheele 2014, 21). in the remainder of this article, i will show how dispute mediators are innovating precisely on the rhetorical repertoires and legal instruments that allow for such epistemic shifts to happen. jurisprudential massage a few days after the kunming meeting, i sat with mr. ni and master du smoking cigarettes by the porch of qingkou village committee as they waited for a party meeting to begin. looking troubled, mr. ni broke the smoke-filled silence: “if the law is not self-explanatory [ziming], as the people in the kunming meeting suggested, i fear we are losing a lot of time learning it.” du, looking unimpressed, replied, “mediation is as much about the moral quality of people [renpin] as it is about law. work on the quality of disputants and what you get back is a law-abiding society [fazhi shehui].” he offered one example: one day, while consuming his usual mutton-noodle breakfast by a roadside inn along the motorway to zhaotong, on his way to guizhou province, he casually overheard a group of strangers adoringly quoting a legal summation (chengci) he had delivered a few days earlier. “good mediation is not about establishing guilt [zhengming beigao youzui]. nor should it stop at a verbal agreement. good mediation is about motivating people to become better persons [zaipei zuoren de xin],” he remarked. the yunnanese dispute mediators with whom i have been in conversation since 2011 are profoundly aware that operating legal services as if they were moral elevators entails an intractable paradox. in yancong, as in many other places where mediation or adjudication services are widely available, people would only turn to them as a last resort (michelson 2007, 466). how can people be convinced that mediation in fact contributes to a fairer and more stable society if only a few of them are willing to engage with it? take the sizeable number of disputants i interviewed in yancong who reported feeling jaded, patronized (bei kandi), or even misunderstood during mediation. a-mu’s is once again a case in point here. a young yi man in his early thirties, a-mu had been toiling all his life in a remote village north of yancong. with the expansion of the township economy, a-mu for the first time confronted life-changing opportunities. in late 2012, the yunnanese representative of a state-subsidized and rather shady dutch-chinese joint-stock company had visited yancong with the intent of recruiting local farmers into a marigold-growing scheme. the representative promised a dividend windfall with the first spring bloom, and many local farming households followed his alluring call. to join this scheme, individual households had to be grouped together and merged into agricultural co-ops to benefit from economies of scale. each household head had to first contribute individually to ensure the co-op against crop failure, a sum that a-mu’s father-in-law, the defendant, growing increasingly suspicious of this payment, had suddenly refused to cover. this agitated a-mu, who could not afford to advance this payment and felt he was missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance. eventually, a-mu’s wife convinced him to bring her father to a mediation committee. along with a large group of local villagers, his wife had relied on mediation in the past and considered it reasonable (heli) and in defense of common people’s livelihoods (pia 2016). yet that day, when it became clear that mediation was not turning in his favor, a-mu walked out of the room shouting to the casual attendees: “what is mediation for if the result is always the same? forget about rules and ‘respect the elders’ [zunlao]?” eventually, a-mu decided to honor the agreement reached by master du that day for fear of looking unfilial to his family-in-law. “law does not bring itself to the common people. as a matter of fact, common people need to put a lot of work in to bring it down to the countryside.” this is mr. ping, one of du’s key dispute collaborators, during a follow-up conversation on a-mu’s case in 2013. he was suggesting that navigating china’s modern market economy was no small feat, and that “legally illiterate” peasants (famang) such as a-mu’s father-in-law would inevitably end up lagging behind and become upset about it. who knows what a co-op entry payment is for? who has rights in a shareholder dividend? and besides, why do we have the complicated rules that we have? failing to account for such questions, ping explained, usually engendered envy, suspicion, and animosity between people, emotions that would eventually catalyze the conditions for further rule-breaking behavior. “using persuasion to turn the masses into legally savvy people [rang qunzhong chengwei falü mingbairen] is the only reliable way to decrease contention, create more economic opportunities for everyone, and assure that people behave respectfully,” he concluded. similar to the civil affairs’ reading of ma’s method, ping here describes a legal pedagogy that channels paternalism to elevate common people into a politically congruous state of legal awareness, a moralized vision of social betterment. but how could such pedagogy alone be enough to convince a-mu that he, for instance, was the one in the wrong, since ultimately the one who refused to stick with the rules was his father-in-law? during an interview on this topic in 2017, master du started by borrowing a metaphor from his younger sibling, a trained chemist, to describe his mediation effort as a form of therapeutic massage. here du developed the most articulate account of how chinese dispute settlement is understood to function. mediators draw from a rich metaphorical repertoire to weave conciliatory interpretations of case-related events in the hope of reaching a form of agreement capable of simultaneously disacknowledging the relevance of dissenting views. meditation is not adjudication. mediation is about removing the “root causes of conflict” [maodun de binggen]. my young brother calls this “jurisprudential massage” [fali anmo]. both masseurs and mediators are in the business of making people’s lives more harmonious [hexiehua]. all relapsing bodily pains are because of the bad influence that a disharmonic energy [buhexie de qifen] has on the body. if left unaddressed, these are likely to lead to brooding [men] and all sorts of ill-feelings. the same is true for the social body [shehui de shenti]. conflict exists because social relations have lost their functionality [guanxi shibai gongneng le]. clients can’t point to the cause of their pain, just as masseurs can’t correct wrong posture by simply telling patients how they actively contribute to its relapsing. legal mediation works the same way. disputants know that something is wrong but can’t point to the root causes. mediators can’t simply refer to rules and principles to recompose conflict, they have to gently rub these rules into disputants. the case you mention is a typical one, an exuberant yi son-in-law embittered by his han father-in-law’s authority who believes his real problem is his father-in-law’s stubbornness rather than his own shamelessness [gualianpixing]. mediation “healed” [jie] that wrong perception [cuojue]. scholars have already noted that chinese communist party–speak has long relied on a wide range of therapeutic metaphors for the self-diagnosis of institutional malfunctions (sorace 2017). however, what interests me here is to show how the more abstract metaphorical process performed by “jurisprudential massage” fundamentally analogizes consensus to well-being. jurisprudential massage is a discursive technique that aims at taking the stakes of motivated dissent away from the political field and moving them into the conflict-blind register of therapy. it subordinates legitimate invocations of prescriptive rules—disputants’ only possible “voice under domination” (scott 1990, 137)—to a hierarchical vision of exemplary conduct, and through this, denies legal protection to these very rules. miranda fricker (2007) calls similar forms of metaphorical subordination “epistemic injustice,” a formulation intended to capture the wrongful act of denying to a speaker their capacity to know what their own political and moral stakes are in self-reported accounts of injustice. such injustice was evidently at play in a case co-mediated by du and party secretary l. in 2012. the case saw six farmers—three older men, the defendants, and three younger women—as opposing parties. according to the latter, it involved a new house being built too close to another one, the subsequent demolishing of the claimants’ waste-water channel (yingou), and the misuse of the communal irrigation ditch that passed in front of both buildings. the old man inhabiting the newly built house used it as a garbage dump, the three women said, polluting the water and stopping its free flow. the old man, accompanied by his two sons, replied that the complainants were the ones “throwing filthy water” (pozangshui), a trope used to accuse the opposite party of slandering. figure 3. a mediation session is underway in the foyer of a village committee building. photo by andrea e. pia. one of the women accusing the old man stated that she had been requested by her own community—incidentally, the same as that of the old man—to “supervise and be accountable for” (guan) other people’s behavior in matters of public concern. how could the old man say she was a slanderer just because she was doing what had been requested? had master du himself not pleaded with the community to “take care” (ziliao) of their own petty business? how was it that she was now discredited for doing precisely that? “you are doing a very important job [renzhong],” said du in response, “but you should remember that being a community guardian means above all to preserve the good feelings [haoganqing] among all members of the community!” the mediation eventually ended when the woman accused of slandering stated that she would drop charges if proper measures were taken to confirm she did not speak ill of anyone. as with other cases, that day du achieved “resolution” by pushing an interpretation of the principles at stake, thus reordering them according to the imperative of social harmony. by disacknowledging the defendants’ illegal encroachment on the claimants’ water channel, du also discredited the latter’s testimony by suggesting supposed incompetence as an officeholder. following fricker once more, we could refer to the outcome of du’s “massage” as “epistemic resolution,” a conciliation agreement reached by denying individual standing to the legal arguments expressed by the hierarchically subordinate party. fictionalizing citizenship comparatively, jurisprudential massage could potentially fall in angela garcia’s (1991) typology of “disputing techniques,” the speech exchanges used by american mediators to escalate agreement and prevent argument from occurring. however, du’s approach innovates on these techniques by explicitly recurring to astutely concocted legal fictions in an attempt to shift the epistemic grounds of the disputing process.5 my ethnography of yunnanese mediation shows a number of legal fictions—statements universally understood to be non-factual but which are nonetheless taken to be valid or useful in a legal context (thomas 2016)—deployed in dispute settings. the most popular of these is certainly what we have seen in a-mu’s case, and, in a slightly different form, in the one above. briefly put, it is the unexamined and unprovable assumption that disputants always entertain a relationship that they would be better off preserving, even if they assert the contrary. the full normative form of this fiction is the confucian-sounding statement: “you should preserve good social relationships” (yao baochi renqingguanxi). in such fiction, keeping “good relationships” is what any “civilized” (wenming), law-abiding, harmony-craving chinese citizen would recognize as their own moral responsibility. the implication is that performing and behaving in accordance with these fictions is ethical, civilized, and lawful, while not doing so—or worse, ignoring that one should—is backward and immoral. du’s appeal to legal fictions works similarly to comrade ma’s radical method of “entrenching” a particular social vision for chinese society through mass-line mediation. this time, though, it works through a different grammar of justice: confucian revivalism. mediators seem to prescribe an extreme version of behaviors (e.g., cultivating relationships of trust among neighbors) that disputants themselves should know how to execute already (e.g., being filial, showing deference). for instance, in a private conversation, a-mu rejected the argument proposed by du that bringing his father-in-law to mediation meant that he was “unfilial.” rather, the most filial thing to do in that situation, he commented, was to convince his father-in-law that his stubbornness was doing disservice to the economic prospects of the whole family.6 to fall back on dresch and scheele (2015, 14) again, disputants in yancong often felt as if they were commanded to “stand to a rule with which their conduct conforms.” to bring about agreement, chinese mediators refrain from employing legal rules that may appear not as obvious to “legally illiterate” peasants. rather, they devise legal fictions that, by decoupling ordinary language from ordinary practice, also “untie” the norms of customs from their “usual social moorings” (mertz 1998, 158). in this sense, legal fictions maintain a non-heuristic relation with truth (thomas 2016, 33–35). they are not used to regulate or constitute social facts but contrived to make some of them irrefutable. by “locking in” and bringing “finality” (pirie 2015, 114) to customary figurations of relationships, deference, or responsibility, the fictions of chinese mediation offer a space for the radical redrawing of grassroots political sensibilities. think, for instance, how in all cases covered until now, mediators actively construed their fiction-rich conciliatory strategies to advance a specifically patriarchal and paternalist view of chinese citizenship. a-mu was ultimately scolded for not having abided by his father-in-law’s better judgment, a behavior that contradicts the age-old fiction that wants han fathers “not simply to guess what may benefit their sons but know it” (ruskola 2013, 97). what looked like a progressive resolution in feng v. zhang ultimately meant that the decision taken by two male elders over a woman’s reproductive decision received official validation. finally, female authority—famously championed by the legal reformist rhetoric of mao—was somehow “put back in its place” when in the filthy-water case du subtly accused one of the complainants of failing in her own official duties toward a senior male member of her constituency. the political philosopher joseph chan has suggested that confucianism justifies the paternalistic nature of government in promoting the cultivation of a specific vision of the good life on the assumption that the common people cannot fully govern themselves (chan 2013, 51–53). but the legal fictions proliferating in contemporary chinese mediation encapsulate not just a vision of the good life—where good relationships are cultivated by self-nurturing communities in seamless harmony—but a “sectarian” one too. this vision, by subordinating principles of everyday conduct to a radicalized version of state confucianism, intentionally relegates a subset of the country’s citizenry (i.e., women, ethnic minorities, and junior generations) to a rancièrian (2010, 42) “surplus,” a space where dissent becomes both inarticulable and ineffectual. importantly, legal fictions do not require that disputants believe in their correctness (see riles 2010, 802). fictions rob disputants’ contextual statements of their ability to produce the right kind of legal consequences from the right kind of legal arguments. figure 4. disputes minutes. photo by andrea e. pia. moreover, looking at chinese mediation from this angle allows us to focus on the role this governing technique plays not just in managing local expectations of justice but also in the constitution of modern chinese citizenship. as a-mu’s and the filthy-water cases clearly show, mediation is linked to citizenship to the extent that welfare entitlements, compensation, property, and economic opportunities are usually the matters under dispute (simpson 2007). when du affirms that mediation “is about motivating people to become better persons,” he vouches for a governmental action that ties the “substantive entitlements” (woodman 2017, 756) of citizenship to its more aspirational and normative dimensions. as a result, the “radical” subject assembled out of yunnanese mediation is one for whom access to material well-being is subordinated to the voluntary recognition that the social vision undergirding mediated exchange is ethically attractive and therefore legitimate. indeed, it is hard to imagine how common citizens could escape this legal order without seriously jeopardizing their livelihoods and well-being. the end of dissent? in contemporary yunnan, people experience “epistemic injustice” through their encounter with dispute mediators. injustice is produced when mediators present as unproblematic and self-evident certain aspects of the law, in particular those mediating the relationship between the state and its citizenry or among citizens. as they rhetorically naturalize certain rights or obligations to disputants, chinese mediators also produce legal interpretations that make a normative set of relations and behaviors irrefutable, and everything outside of this set unintelligible. borrowing from master du’s legal epistemology, in this article i have called “jurisprudential massage” an emerging extrajudicial form of dissent management that discursively reframes justice as a form of moral therapy. according to this reframing, participants in grassroots mediation are not simply exerting their rights to administrative redress but are more consequentially being taught a redeeming lesson about the merits of adopting morally appropriate behavior. this lesson is performed via the purposeful and systematic layering of legal fictions that work to condition the political sensibilities of disputants and promote an extremely paternalistic and patriarchal view of citizenship. while typically handed down from the austere armchair of a village mediator, this technique of government also features conspicuously in public encounters between street-level officials and ordinary citizens. in these occurrences, the bone of contention is always the management of some common good such as land, water, or infrastructures. villagers usually complain that state agents are making decisions on common goods without consulting them. in turn, local officials complain that villagers are too greedy and oblivious to how the legal system works. for instance, when one day in 2012 swaths of cropped land north of yancong were flooded by the breaching of a faulty irrigation canal, a state infrastructure only recently subcontracted to a local village cooperative, villagers staged a mass protest against the government for failing to uphold its responsibilities. a group of forty people had diverted through sandbag barricades the water flowing from a huge irrigation channel on the upper side of the main road linking yancong to zhaotong, flooding an important and usually busy crossroads with mud. a long queue of bikes, buses, tractors, and excavators had formed on both sides of the blockade, bringing all economic activities in town to a halt. when the police and other local authorities arrived on site, they were confronted with a crowd of no less than three hundred people, all standing in relative silence by the water margin. no slogans were shouted at this time, nor did anyone feel the need to communicate what was truly going on. while at first glance it may have been difficult to make sense of the scene, the presence of a group of men impeding passage to oncoming vehicles by the only practicable spot on the road soon made it clear that this gathering of people was in fact a public protest—in party parlance, a “mass incident”—and not a collection of passers-by randomly aggregated by the faulty work of infrastructures. among the dispute mediators i interviewed in the aftermath of this protest, the majority did acknowledge the gathering as an “incident,” but had a hard time grasping the “logic” of it. for instance, mr. ni was genuinely taken aback by the massive turnout, as well as by the action taken. this was even more surprising if one considered that “according to regulations,” he commented, “the upkeep of the faulted canal was villagers’ sole responsibility [duli fuze].” if this simple fact of law did not go down well with villagers, it would only mean that they were intentionally acting as immoral hooligans (liumang) who wanted to pressure the government for unwarranted compensation. by now, the reader should recognize this as the trademark move of yancong mediators, pulling the legal rug from under citizens’ claims to malfeasance. conversely, party secretary l. qualified the nature of villagers’ opposition in different tones: “only 20 percent of the people present were there to express their anger against the government, the remaining 80 percent were actually mere passers-by.” when pushed on this point, the secretary argued that the mute stance adopted by the crowd signaled its “tacit consent” (moxu)—another legal fiction—to government actions. in the literature on popular protests in china, the tongue-tied fashion in which popular protests are often staged has been widely read as a side effect of the legal framework that regulates demonstrations in this country. the law on processions and demonstrations in fact makes mass protesting legal only with the prior approval of the police department (cai 2010, 31). by naturalizing the assumption that silence equals approval, the legal fiction of tacit consent intentionally throws the political foundations of organized dissent into a state of illegibility. proof of this is the fact that no one who took part in the protest was formally prosecuted, as if their intentional breaking of the law had never taken place. this move inverts anthropological accounts of resistance to hegemonic legal orders. here, “alternative logics” (simpson 2007, 76) of justice are not bridled by instrumental recognition but relegated to categorical impossibilities and inverted into their opposite. as a governing technique, jurisprudential massage is brought on stage because of its capacity for throwing the boundaries of law, morality, and politics into a convenient state of indistinction, only to then recompose them in new shapes. it is precisely by deploying this technique that mediators, rather than vernacularizing the letter of the law, are often able to evacuate the “possibility of political dissensus” (rancière 2010, 193) from their own constituencies. in particular, the political weaponization of legal fictions seems not only capable of preempting the potentially subversive appropriation of the language and ideals of law (cf. o’brien 2013). rather, by simultaneously “entrenching” the language of customs (as in a-mu’s case) while sabotaging any counter-appropriations of that of “deference” (as with the farmer’s appeal to master du’s prior plea to her community), it also systematically shrinks the “zone of volition in which individuals make decisions about how law will shape their political behaviour” (marshall and barclay 2003, 623). or as james c. scott (1990, 224) and carole mcgranahan (2016, 322) would respectively put it, it systematically shrinks the “symbolic reach” and “generativity” of refusal. figure 5. a worship altar devoted to a chinese crossroads spirit. a chinese character can be read across its pillar: “illegal.” photo by andrea e. pia. and yet, while epistemic resolution is achieved by policing the dialogical process through which disputants articulate disagreement, the normative interpretations resulting from this may in fact offer inroads to performative politics in china. one could read tacit consent as a state-baked fiction through which dissent is disabled by disaggregation. but one could also see in the coordinated silence of tactical standstills a specific, pre-articulate form of resistance, one through which the “well-ordered partition of speech and silence which constitutes the community as harmonious animal” (rancière 2004, 128–29; shih-diing liu 2019, 106) falls perceptually apart, so that its accompanying political ventriloquy—oppositional claims thrown by disputes mediators in the voice of moral insanity—is made to contend with what is seen more than what can be said about dissent. finally, as an innovative low-tech tool of voluntary subordination, jurisprudential massage comes handy to street-level officials in a political moment in which high-end technologies of social control are reconfiguring the societal purchase of china’s coercive state apparatus. at the same time, the analysis of jurisprudential massage, if taken out of its authoritarian context, demonstrates how the strategic blurring of backgrounds and foregrounds in the epistemology of law should force us to reconsider the political credentials of functionalism in sociolegal scholarship. the “authoritarian populism,” to quote stuart hall’s famous phrasing (hall et al. 2013, 396), that has seemingly overtaken global politics hinges on the promotion of a form of reactive traditionalism—the “radical” recuperation of maoist and confucian values in the case of xi’s china—that thrives on delinking the representation of social conflict from its roots in systemic inequality, while disacknowledging responsibility for any negative consequence for marginal groups this delinking generates. if the law does not just constitute an instrument but also serves as the repository of a social vision, its contribution to politics may exceed stability maintenance and come to encompass projects of political radicalization of what might once have been a more relaxed and capacious social imaginary. abstract while china leads the global race to high-tech surveillance, a homegrown low-tech institution of dissent management is currently experiencing a surprising revival: dispute mediation. drawing on confucian and socialist practices of justice, yunnanese dispute mediators are today considerably innovating the jurisprudential techniques that frame the composition of conflict and the meaning of state laws in dispute settings. jurisprudential massage is the emic term given to one such technique. here i show how this technique stands for the deployment of therapeutic analogies and legal fictions with the aim of reorienting the political sensibilities of disputants toward a neo-paternalistic form of citizenship. contributing to the anthropology of law and resistance, this article shows how civil dissent cannot only be physically quenched through state coercion and silenced by pervasive surveillance or tactical buyouts but can also be ushered off the political stage by a selective redrawing of the epistemic foundation of legality. [china, law; mediation; dispute; dissent; resistance; protests; rights; justice; authoritarianism; citizenship] 摘要 当中国政府在大力发展高精端社会监控技术的同时, —种土生的低端社会抗争管理机制, “争议调解”, 也正在蓬勃发展。在综合了孔子的正义观和相关的社会主义实践经验之后，如今, 云南的争议调解人员在法理的应用上体现出了相当的技术创新力。他们往往很有技巧性的用法律来确定争议的构成性质, 也时常会就案件的实际需要用它们来诠释国家法令。在当地，这种技术被称为 “法理按摩”. 笔者在本文欲描述当地的调解人员是如何通类理疗和法律拟制等方法来完善这套调解技巧的. 对于他们来说, 使用这些技巧的目的是重新塑造抗争者的政治觉悟, 将其转变为—种新父权主义形式下的公民意识. 旨在丰富法人类学和社会抗争理论，笔者借本文展现了公民抗争不仅仅会因国家强制，或因无所不在的社会监控和政治买断而“消声觅迹”，同时也会因地方法律从业者对行为合法性认知基础的重新划定而退出政治舞台. [中国; 法律; 调解工作; 纠纷; 异议; 抗争; 抗议; 权益; 正义; 威权主义; 公民权] notes acknowledgments this article is dedicated to mr. ni, whose curiosity and forbearance have been instrumental to the successful completion of this project. the arguments and overall intellectual posture of this essay owe much to many inspiring conversations i had over the years with natalia buitron, agustin diz, geoffrey hughes, liisa kohonen, carwyn morris, fuad musallam, wu di, and giulia zoccatelli. a deep thanks to the chiang ching-kuo foundation, the chinese scholarship council, the universities’ china committee in london, the john wright memorial trust, and the lse research infrastructure and innovation fund for support of this project. i am also thankful to christopher nelson and cultural anthropology’s three anonymous reviewers for their insightful readings of previous versions of this text. 1. official figures, which are typically controversial (li, kocken, and van rooij 2018), record comparable success rates nation-wide (h. zhang 2013, 245). 2. philip huang (2015, 7) argues that the “chinese legal system continues to show a preference for mediation over adjudication. today, one out of two open (recorded) disputes involving outside intercession is still settled by some form of mediation outside the court system.” 3. since the late 1980s the chinese government has surreptitiously de-incentivised citizens’ recourse to litigation by raising various barriers to access (e.g., costs, geographical proximity of courts). before the inauguration of a local branch in 2013, yancong’s closest basic level people’s court was a two-hour bus ride away. more generally, chinese citizens’ experience of litigation has so far been described as a mixture of disenchantment, disappointment, and strategic inculturation (gallagher 2017, 189–90). 4. i am grateful to giulia zoccatelli for clarifying this point for me. 5. the people’s mediation law of 2010 defines mediation as a process through which parties to disputes are brought 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https://doi.org/10.5235/20504721.1.2.244. zhang, li, and aihwa ong, eds. 2008 privatizing china: socialism from afar. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. zhao, xudong 2019 power and justice: disputes resolution in a north china village. translated by xiaofei sun and rui ma. berlin: springer. zhu, suli 2016 sending law to the countryside: research on china’s basic-level judicial system. singapore: springer. zhu, xiaoyang 2007 “yuyan hunluan yu falürenleixue de zhengtilun jinlu.” zhongguo shehuikexue 2: 106–17. http://www.shehui.pku.edu.cn/upload/editor/file/20181102/20181102113513_9644.pdf. zhuang, wenjia, and feng chen 2015 “‘mediate first’: the revival of mediation in labour dispute resolution in china.” china quarterly 222: 380–402. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305741015000739. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 4, pp. 487-515, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2020. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.01 becoming-after: the lives and politics of quinine’s remains cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 282-311, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.05 becoming-after: the lives and politics of quinine’s remains townsend middleton university of north carolina at chapel hill https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1439-5678 as dawn breaks over darjeeling’s cinchona plantations, a young man ambles across the lawn of a dilapidated colonial bungalow—a wooden mallet in one hand, a smartphone in the other. bundled up against the himalayan brisk, he saunters to a gong hanging at the terrace’s edge, waiting to ring in a new day. below, villages tucked into stands of cinchona poke their heads up from the morning mist. he stares into his phone, an incandescent beacon amid the morning gray. the pixels flash 6:00 a.m. and he strikes the gong in one confident swing, allowing it several seconds to reverberate before striking again. this is the wake-up bell. the ritual will repeat at 6:30 a.m., with the call to morning muster. and again at 7:00 a.m., with the commencement of the day’s ganti (counting). the routine has stirred many a generation on these cinchona plantations. by 7:00 a.m., laborers are wending their way down footpaths from their homes to the maidan (field), where the day’s ganti and muster are under way. they arrive quietly in dribs and drabs—two here, three there—many still rubbing the sleep from their eyes. on arrival, they duck into a concrete hut to check in with their gangmen, who dutifully record their presence in over-sized ledgers. with their name in the books, most fail to notice the new vinyl banner hanging on the hut’s side. those who do stare perplexedly at the message: “mero bāgān, mero garwa” (my plantation, my pride), it reads, extolling the virtues of the land and work at hand. it is something of a head-scratcher: the plantations have been in decline for decades. the quinine extracted from cinchona’s bark is no longer the primary treatment for malaria that it once was. with the pharmaceutical market for their product almost fully eroded, these cinchona plantations no longer produce the life-saving medicine for which they were founded. the industry’s demise is everywhere apparent: in the cinchona trees growing unkempt on the surrounding hillsides; in the once-pioneering, now-shuttered government quinine factory; and in the work culture of laborers playing out the string of an industry whose time has seemingly come and gone. so it is understandable that most pay the banner little mind as they make their way to their respective corners of the field to await the day’s orders. at 7:15 a.m., the head gangman begins barking orders. with their assignment called, the laborers file silently back up the footpaths to their homes, where they will eat breakfast with their families, put on their work clothes, and steel themselves for another day of working the remains of a once-vital industry. * * * today, quinine is most commonly known as the bitter ingredient in tonic water. historically, however, this alkaloid served a more profound purpose. for centuries, quinine was the only known remedy for malaria. extracted from the bark of cinchona, the miraculous “fever tree” native to highland south america, quinine became integral to the colonial project throughout much of the world.1 european empires invested heavily in the antimalarial, clandestinely appropriating cinchona varietals from indigenous south america; establishing transcontinental networks of plantations, labs, and factories; and orchestrating a global quinine trade in which private capital and cartels ruled the day. as the alkaloid made its way into the bodies of troops fighting world wars, peasants plowing fields throughout the tropics, and colonial officials sipping gin and tonics across the world, quinine coursed through the bloodstream of empire. vital to colonial health and power, it was, in hegelian terms, a “world-historical” substance (hegel 1991): a material that profoundly altered the course of history. quinine proved indispensable to british rule in india (mukherjee 1998; veale 2010; deb roy 2017). beginning in the 1860s, the british indian government established massive cinchona plantations in the darjeeling region in a desperate attempt to secure medicinal autonomy for the empire. thousands of workers, mostly nepali-speaking gorkhas from the surrounding hills, came to this medical frontier to cultivate the plant and strip the tree of its precious bark. factories were erected to transform the bark into life-saving quinine doses, which were then distributed across the subcontinent and beyond through elaborate dispensary systems. the quinine made at darjeeling saved countless lives during its colonial career. figure 1. cinchona bark, darjeeling, 2017. photo by townsend middleton. but for the communities who made it, quinine has left grave uncertainty in its wake. the world war ii–era advent of synthetic compounds like chloroquine and the insecticide ddt prompted paradigmatic shifts in the global fight against malaria. with today’s pharmaceutical market dominated by synthetic antimalarials, artemisinin-based combination therapies (acts), and stronger, cheaper quinines from africa, demand for indian quinine has vanished. yet, despite not having produced a dose in decades, government cinchona plantations first established by the british in the nineteenth century still exist in the darjeeling hills—albeit in a dilapidated state. the indian government has labeled the industry “sick” and has targeted it for privatization, but local communities, led by strident unions, have successfully resisted. so far. what is to become of the industry—and the roughly fifty thousand people who inhabit its remains—is unclear. shuttered quinine factories and unkempt cinchona trees may conjure images of ruination, but these remains are anything but dead. darjeeling’s cinchona plantations have instead become the site of urgent efforts—and a periodically charged politics—to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. for those who call the plantations home, quinine’s remains constitute the grounds on which any viable future must be forged (middleton 2019). more immediately, they are the grounds on which the present must be lived and defended. figure 2. the colonial cinchona frontier in the darjeeling hills. map prepared by unc-libraries. beginning with sidney w. mintz’s (1986) pioneering work on sugar and continuing through anthropology’s multispecies turn, we have learned more and more about how particular plants and chemicals shaped human history. the aftermath of such world-historical substances demand extended exploration. this essay situates itself amid quinine’s living remains. it asks not only how history, empire, and life itself were made with things like quinine but also, crucially: what happens after these game-changing substances have run their course? historically, the existence of india’s cinchona plantations seems unremarkable. malaria killed and cost millions throughout the colonial period. that the british raj brought cinchona from south america to darjeeling and made the plant, land, and humans work to imperial ends is no revelation. that’s what empire does. and no complex was more comprehensive in this mutual disciplining of human and nonhuman life than the plantation—a point underscored in recent conversations of the plantationocene led by donna j. haraway and anna l. tsing (2019; see also besky 2020). what is remarkable, anthropologically, is that india’s cinchona plantations still exist. the plantations have been hemorrhaging government funds for decades. much of their infrastructure has deteriorated beyond use. factories and drying sheds are crumbling. machinery is corroded. soils are exhausted. after years of neglect, once-manicured stands of cinchona saplings have happily outgrown their sixteen-year harvest cycle and become unruly forests of thick trunks and gnarled roots—their aging bark diminished of the alkaloid for which they were planted. raw bark production has slowed to a trickle of its former levels. quinine manufacturing has ceased entirely. yet somehow these cinchona plantations remain. this is no historical accident, but rather owes to the political work and persistence of those who call the plantations home. in her writing on mumbai’s seemingly antiquated mill-workers, maura finkelstein (2019) warns against the analytic dangers of reading such spaces as anachronistic or allochronistic. “the mill is not a relic from the past,” she notes; “while [it] may invoke a sense of pastness, this orientation toward ruin forecloses our ability to engage it as a lively and vital space of modernity. this is a crisis of temporality” (finkelstein 2019, 13). for darjeeling’s cinchona workers fighting to maintain their presence in the present, coevelness (fabian 1983) is precisely what is at stake. temporality is critically important to their politics. developing an analytic of becoming-after, i turn to quinine’s remains to explore what people do when the historic products that centered their lives lose their place and value in the world. how does life come back together (or not) once the market collapses, once the factory closes and the fields go fallow? how, who, and what do communities become after the world-historical substances of one era give way to those of the next? such questions of becoming-after refract across the postcolonial and postindustrial world, from the coal countries and rust belts of the global north to the archaic plantations and exhausted landscapes of the global south. these spaces may appear worn out, anachronistic, and left behind by the putative march of history, but in them stir some of the most critical questions of our times: none more perplexing than how to make something new—or at least viable—with the remains of the old. engaging the politics of becoming-after, i draw on ethnographic fieldwork on darjeeling’s cinchona plantations (2015–2019), as well as on archives and oral histories with plantation workers, managers, union leaders, and others to explore life and politics after quinine. generations after this world-historical substance ceased to be the first-line treatment for malaria, it continues to generate an array of politics, temporalities, and im/possibilities that fundamentally structure life in its wake. amid this aftermath, the future appears marked more by constraint than unbridled possibility. india’s cinchona plantations remain, in many ways, bound by their colonial past, yet hope and a discernable politics animate their present. the sections that follow probe these dialectics of constraint and possibility that shape the prospects of becoming-after quinine. after a brief elaboration of the analytic of becoming-after, i turn to communities’ struggles to defend the plantations against privatization to explore the temporality of local politics after quinine. next, i examine residents’ attempts to escape the clutches of the plantations’ undying colonial past. in conclusion, i consider the ethical ambiguities of the work—and value—of maintaining the present to buy time for figuring out a more just version of what comes next. on becoming-after the analytic of becoming-after that i propose here brings together two lines of anthropological inquiry: the first concerns humanity’s becomingwith animals, plants, and chemicals (honed by multispecies ethnography [kirksey and helmreich 2010; kirksey 2014], planthropology [myers 2017], and chemo-ethnography [shapiro 2015; shapiro and kirksey 2017], respectively); the second concerns postcolonial and postindustrial ruination (see, for instance, benjamin 1998; stoler 2008, 2013, 2016; fortun 2014; walley 2014; tsing 2015; finkelstein 2016, 2019; murphy 2017). haraway, in her companion species manifesto (haraway 2003) and subsequent when species meet (haraway 2008), has called for us to examine how humans “become with” (haraway’s formulation) our nonhuman counterparts. additional discussions of becoming, often drawing on gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s (1987, 257–72) emphasis on the openness of becoming, have gone on to highlight the plastic, durative nature of these co-becomings: we are always in a process of becoming with our human and nonhuman others (dave 2014; wright n.d.). as joão biehl and peter locke (2017, 6) elaborate in their volume, unfinished, “becoming is characterized by the indeterminacies that keep history open, and it allows us to see what happens in the meantimes of human struggle and daily life” (see also fischer 2018). although not necessarily historical in their orientation, these analytics of becoming and becoming with can help illuminate how history, empire, and life itself were made with cinchona and quinine (cf. deb roy 2017). my analysis builds on these more-than-human attentions by extending the temporal frame to question what happens after: after the historic rise, after the fall, after the proverbial medicine has run its course. becoming-after similarly attunes us to the materiality of things, but in another time and space: not so much in the makings of more-than-human worlds, but in their unmakings and potential remakings. to probe the after is to examine all that remains and transpires in a world-historical substance’s wake. similar to the post in stuart hall’s postcolonialism, the after signals neither a clean nor epochal break with the past but rather a contemporary wrestling with its remains: material, ideational, human, and otherwise.2 “it is what it is,” as hall might have it, “because something else has happened before, but it is also something new” (see drew 1999, 230). for those who dwell in quinine’s wake, the after forms a time-space of both impossibility and possibility. for the inheritors of these aftermaths, becoming-after is an ongoing project: something to be worked on and worked at.3 and it is a horizon: something to work or orient toward, using the immediate stuff at hand.4 figure 3. remains of the government quinine factory, darjeeling, 2017. photo by townsend middleton. the becomings that interest me with becoming-after unfold on the tired grounds and crumbling factories of the postindustrial, postcolonial world. materiality matters in these contexts (tsing 2015; finkelstein 2019), though not always in the ways it once did. rusting factories are not easily rebuilt. exhausted soils do not rejuvenate overnight. aging infrastructure—and laboring bodies—cannot simply be made young again. on darjeeling’s cinchona plantations, these material intransigencies (collier 2011) combine with a plantation institution that has stubbornly outlived its product to produce a distinctive breed of postcolonial, postindustrial precarity. for those who dwell amid these aftermaths, the horizons of ­becoming-after are less open to possibility than they are constrained by prior conditions. figure 4. cinchona plantations at mungpoo, darjeeling, 2017. photo by townsend middleton. in sketching the plantationocene as an epochal alternative to the anthropocene, haraway and tsing (2019) frame the plantation as the modal complex of capitalism’s more-than-human ruination. yet because the plantationocene presumes a ruined and blasted landscape—the detritus of capital’s world-making—it risks occluding a more vital reality: the politics of those who continue to make (meaningful) life within actual plantations. ask cinchona workers, and they will be the first to explain how the plantations’ aging infrastructure, diminishing biochemical energies, and stubborn institutional logics continue to constrain them. they will be the first to tell you of the uncertainty that haunts them. the precarity is palpable. but so are affective ties to these plantations. so are the efforts for a better future. these endeavors of becoming-after beckon ethnographic engagement beyond the plantationocene’s reckonings of more-than-human ruination. for residents, the plantations are not (in) ruins. neither are they blasted. they are home—places that, despite their constraints, afford vital forms of stability and belonging amid the other forms of extraction loosed upon the world. cinchona workers have accordingly chosen to defend the plantations and the lifeways they afford. they are not alone. sarah besky’s (2013, 2017, 2020) research on the nearby private tea estates of darjeeling and the dooars similarly illustrates the solidarities between workers, plants, and land that define plantations as living spaces. andrew c. willford’s (2014) study of tamils defending their place in malaysia’s defunct rubber plantations shows how plantations can be anchors of identity and belonging in a rapidly changing world (see also li 2017).5 these defenses of the contemporary plantation can be hard to locate in the theoretical landscape of the plantationocene. yet it is worth remembering that workers live on plantations. they become-with the land, plants, machines, and all the rest—and not all, or only, as slaves or bonded labor. for the gorkhas who settled on india’s colonial cinchona plantations as wage-laborers generations ago, the plantations’ more-than-human ecology became the grounds not only of livelihood but also of community and belonging. these latter have proven to have greater staying power than quinine itself. despite far-from-ideal conditions, these communities have chosen to defend the plantations as their home. as i detail below, living and working on plantations producing little in the way of products or prospects entails a daily dose of paradox and sacrifice. but for the moment, dealing with these sacrifices today feels necessary to finding a dignified life after quinine, tomorrow. lacking clear answers as to what comes next, theirs is not so much a politics of the future as of the present—a politics of the meantime.6 persisting capital it is seldom a good sign when foreigners in suits show up in places like darjeeling’s cinchona plantations. worse still, when they come back. in 1991, finance minister and future prime minister manmohan singh announced the “liberalization” of india’s economy. the embrace of free market capitalism opened the door to the privatization of many of india’s public utilities and government-run industries. it did not take long before investors came calling on the supposedly sick quinine industry. by 1992–1993, representatives of hindustan lever, a subsidiary of the transnational unilever, and their international consultants from pricewaterhousecoopers were prowling the cinchona plantations, surveying the resources on offer. these included 26,000 acres of topographically diverse land, the labor potential of more than 50,000 residents, and industrial infrastructure, not all of which was beyond repair. the ensuing events—here reconstructed through oral histories and ethnographic engagement with many of the key players—have become legendary on the plantations. in workers’, trade union activists’, and community leaders’ tellings, local hackles went up as soon as the suits were spotted surveying the plantations. suspicions were confirmed when hindustan lever subsequently unveiled its proposal to convert the entirety of the cinchona plantations over to tea. the public-private partnership (ppp) proposed significant labor retrenchment, land expropriations, and infrastructural overhauls. the proposal met immediate backlash. foreseeing the end of lifeways generations in the making, the cinchona trade unions launched strikes and gherao-ed (publicly harassed) officials. this was a force that pricewaterhousecoopers had missed in their scrupulous reports. hindustan lever quickly recognized the oversight and walked back the plan. they returned with another proposal to retain some cinchona, while converting much of the plantations to tea. in 1996, the west bengal government convened a meeting of stakeholders in the nearby city of siliguri to discuss the plan with hopes of moving it forward. the trade unions had other ideas. the meeting, which began in staid fashion with representatives of hindustan lever, pricewaterhousecoopers, and government agencies gathered around a boardroom table, soon erupted into chaos. shouting at the officials, trade union leader renulina subba, the “iron lady” of cinchona, led union members in staging a dramatic walkout. the cinchona unions subsequently called region-wide strikes (bandhs) to oppose privatization. politicians, meanwhile, worked behind the scenes to salvage the deal. in 2017, i met with the trade union secretary l. m. sharma to revisit those tumultuous days when life with cinchona teetered on the brink. the revered labor leader, now getting on in age but still with fire in his eyes, recalled, “the local mla [member of the legislative assembly] took us to writer’s building [the state capital in kolkata] and arranged for a meeting with the minister of commerce… . we had quite a heated discussion with him. he insisted that cinchona is a losing concern.” sharma and his cadres countered by insisting that the plantations were rich with untapped potential. they explained how cinchona cultivation could be combined with timber and other initiatives to create a portfolio that would allow the plantations to carry on without undue burden to the state. their pleas seemed to strike a chord with the left front government official, sharma noted. west bengal’s then-ruling communist party of india-marxist (cpi-m) maintained an active union (citu) presence on the plantations. since the 1970s, the left front’s ideological affinity for labor had served as a buffer of sorts for the troubled cinchona plantations. but the bottom line was the bottom line: the government industry was hemorrhaging state funds. hoping to stop the bleeding, the left front government continued to court the handover to hindustan lever. field managers, nearly all of them gorkhas with deep connections to the plantations, found themselves at the fulcrum of the controversies, balancing the government orders of the cinchona directorate and the concerns of laborers and their volatile unions. “the government was trying to give as much of it [the plantation system] away as possible,” a manager i came to know well during fieldwork remembered; “they were just trying to get rid of it.” laborers, meanwhile, were growing increasingly leery of the men in suits. with rumors swirling that a secret deal was imminent, the situation came to a head in 1997, when hindustan lever and pricewaterhousecoopers representatives convened at the plantation headquarters in mungpoo. the trade unions summoned their members to crash the meeting. some made their way inside and began hurling furniture through the windows before seizing the proposal and ceremoniously burning it. spooked by the escalations, hindustan lever, at the advice of the government, gave up the ghost and walked away. this time they did not come back. the turning away of hindustan lever marked an important victory in the fight against privatization, but it was not long before other suits came calling—in the late 1990s, they arrived from dabur india ltd, a manufacturer of ayurvedic medicine. cinchona did not bring them; it was the land. specifically, they eyed the fertile hills for the cultivation of taxus buccata, a natural cancer treatment. but because their proposal largely neglected to address either cinchona or local livelihoods, the unions again mounted a successful opposition and drove dabur away. the government found itself in a bind. by its own ideology, west bengal’s left front could not ignore the well-being and political will of its fifty thousand cinchona residents. then again, what was to be done with an industry without a market? in 2002, west bengal hired the international consultant firm mckinsey & company to help answer that question. hoping to head off resistance, the local district magistrate (dm) summoned trade union and political leaders to his office to explain the government’s logics. one of the invited leaders, the late r. b. chhetri, a preeminent local intellectual,7 remembered the dm framing the situation in terms of darkness and light. “the cinchona plantations are now going through a tunnel of darkness,” chhetri recalled the dm proclaiming. “for survival, you see a light there. and that light is privatization. else you will remain inside the tunnel.” dark metaphors aside, mckinsey consultants were enlightened of a different view when they began their assessment. a mob of plantation union members confronted the team at mungpoo, demanding that the consultants reveal their true intentions. the confrontation turned violent and someone snatched files from a consultant’s hand. as one witness i interviewed recounted, “when the mob saw the mckinsey files, they burned them. that’s when they [mckinsey] ran away.” for the third time in a decade the unions had managed to chase away the threat of privatization. that numerous private investors have eyed the putatively sick industry following liberalization hardly seems surprising. labor’s opposition—especially given the industry’s dire condition—warrants a closer look, however. how are we to understand the persistence and vitriol with which the unions drove away private capital? are there lessons in the ashes of the proposals snatched from prospective investors and burned? cinchona laborers’ resistance to privatization has centered on safeguarding what are known as the “facilities” guaranteed by their work on the government plantations—none more important than land. unlike on darjeeling’s tea estates, where laborers receive paltry plots for kitchen gardens (besky 2013, 2017; sen 2017), cinchona laborers have long enjoyed access to fields—some more than an acre in size—to accompany their government-provided housing. the discrepancy stems from how the british quinine project mapped onto the steep terrain of himalayan darjeeling. the colonial makings of darjeeling’s cinchona plantations were unusual in several ways. notably, this plantation system was not geared toward profit (at least not directly), but instead toward the production of cheap medicine for the general population (after, of course, colonial officials). the british government framed its quinine industry as an imperial and a humanitarian endeavor. in the words of the secretary of state to india in 1875, the aim was “not to be a commercial object, but one having reference solely to the supply of a cheap febrifuge to the people of india.”8 while history would eventually lay bare the imperial priorities of the project, what is important for understanding the contemporary politics of ­becoming-after is that the government-run cinchona plantations were never themselves intended to generate profit. this fundamentally impacted how the land was and was not capitalized. then there was cinchona’s peculiar botany. each varietal requires specific combinations of elevation, soil, sunlight, temperature, and moisture to survive. the finicky tree from the andes gave colonial botanists fits when they first attempted to grow it in india. darjeeling, where elevations quickly range from four hundred to seven thousand feet above sea level, eventually proved one of the few sites where cinchona thrived.9 yet because this precipitous landscape can vary so rapidly from one acre to the next, finicky cinchona could never achieve the crop coverage of tea. at most, cinchona has covered roughly one-third of the plantations’ acreage. this left significant land for other purposes, like labor. as it looked to secure a stable workforce for its critically important quinine industry, the colonial government was thus able to promise wages, housing, and ample land—often doling out acres at a time to workers and their families.10 passed down through the generations, these homesteads have allowed workers and their families to maintain a relatively comfortable peasant existence alongside their wage labor. plantation residents continue to use these lands to grow fresh vegetables and raise livestock mostly for domestic use. these facilities and their attendant forms of belonging have been—and remain—defining features of life with cinchona. figure 5. worker’s homestead, kalimpong, 2017. photo by townsend middleton. privatization directly threatened these lifeways. cinchona residents are quick to point out the plantations’ distinctive character when justifying their resistance. “cinchona has its own ways of functioning. it is not a private enterprise,” a manager who grew up on the plantations, a “son of the soil,” told me over tea in 2019. “the people who are here have lived [here] for generations, and if hindustan lever tells a worker that it is not able to take him in, then what will happen to the family that is dependent on the worker? the land that has been allotted to the family will now belong to hindustan lever. so that is a huge thing.” these entanglements of labor, land, family, history, and life itself ran through many of the testimonies i gathered during fieldwork. when i interviewed the late r. b. chhetri in his plantation home in 2017, the renowned leader and intellectual elaborated on these more-than-human attachments that define life in the cinchona plantations and make these spaces worth defending. “the land is precious,” he told me, looking back on his years opposing privatization. “we have emotions, sentiments, belongingness, attachment, culture, and society attached to our homes. i would never give up this home of mine… . they [hindustan lever] understood they had stirred a hornet’s nest. and that’s when they left.” crucially, it is not only these sentiments of home that have made the cinchona plantations a hornet’s nest. in the context of the region’s recurrent gorkhaland movement, the plantations have become battlegrounds for ethnic autonomy, territory, and belonging in india. since the colonial period, the region’s nepali-speaking gorkha majority have been exploited, racially discriminated against, and marginalized as outsiders in india, despite their legal citizenship and demonstrated loyalties to india. starting in 1986, the gorkhaland national liberation front (gnlf) waged a violent three-year struggle for a separate state of gorkhaland in india. the aim was to free the region and its people from the neocolonial clutches of west bengal, their archenemy, and thereby establish the gorkhas’ rightful place in india. because the cinchona plantations were (and remain) the property of the government of west bengal, they became a front line of the subnationalist struggle. clashes between unions loyal to gorkhaland (like those of the gnlf and gorkha league) and those associated with west bengal’s ruling cpi-m (like citu) made the plantations a violent arena. the movement also turned on the cinchona directorate itself, destroying property, kidnapping officers, and reappropriating government resources to myriad ends. ultimately, though, the agitations failed to deliver a separate state. the situation repeated in 2008, when the gorkha janmukti morcha (gjm), the newest liberation front, launched a second gorkhaland movement. the gjm made it an expressed goal to pry the plantations from the grip of west bengal. the 2008–2011 agitation also failed to deliver gorkhaland. it did, however, achieve the transfer of the cinchona directorate to the newly minted gorkhaland territorial administration in 2012, a conciliatory government of limited autonomy, still within west bengal. the small victory proved misleading when it emerged that it was only the directorate (i.e., the administrative apparatus) of the cinchona plantations that had been transferred, not the land and resources. those remained the property of west bengal. cinchona plantation residents considered this an affront perpetuating a long history of colonial domination—first by the british, then by bengalis. as one local leader exclaimed to me during a particularly animated conversation in 2017, “these rulers from kolkata have very colonial designs. colonial designs!” he spoke these words less than three months after a devastating third gorkhaland agitation had crippled life on the plantations and across the region for 104 days during the monsoon months of 2017. the destruction, food shortages, and casualties again were to little avail. the darjeeling hills, at present, remain part of west bengal. the cinchona plantations, home to more than fifty thousand gorkhas, remain the property of the government of west bengal. the gorkhaland agitations put the resistance to privatization into ethnopolitical context. the same sentiments of “belongingness, attachment, culture, and society” that fueled the fight with hindustan lever motivate the movement for gorkhaland. both the plantations and gorkhaland are home—one nested inside the other. through three traumatic agitations, the politics of gorkhaland have reanimated the cinchona plantations as a distinctively ethnic space: a markedly different kind of claim on quinine’s remains than those of the postcolonial government or private investors. imbuing these spaces with tremendous affect and periodic violence, the gorkhaland movement has made the cinchona plantations all the more difficult and dangerous places for outsiders to do business: a hornet’s nest. and yet, despite the volatilities, capital keeps coming back. recent years have seen numerous piecemeal attempts to develop the plantations. proposals for eco-tourism resorts, ashrams, and universities have largely gone nowhere, owing to local resistance and the legal-political complexities of privatizing government lands. yet the plantations have ceded ground to other governmental uses: ninety-one acres were allocated to the national hydro-electric power corporation (nhpc) for the damming of the teesta river in 2003, and smaller parcels went to an industrial training institute (iti) in 2016 (five acres) and a government tourist complex in 2017 (six acres). although small in comparison to the wholesale overhauls pitched by hindustan lever, for those defending the plantations such land grabs portend a future of further loss (middleton 2019, 208). most residents believe it is only a matter of time before additional private investors come calling. per the logics of privatization, after all, india’s cinchona plantations have lost their raison d’être. with cinchona growing wild, its bark rotting, and the quinine factory beyond repair, the plantations themselves would seem to be decomposing into ruins, unused spaces, and “waste lands.” such tropes should sound an alarm for students of british imperialism in india, where the waste lands designation functioned as a legal mechanism to expropriate massive tracts of ostensibly uninhabited land.11 unlike the native cultivators (ryots) of these lands, who were conveniently ignored, displaced, and written out of imperial histories of primitive accumulation, the people of cinchona today are refusing to become subalterns. their struggles concern not so much being written out of history as maintaining their presence in the present. theirs is a politics of remaining—a politics of persistence. quinine’s remains, they attest, are not dead. struggles for the future of these lands and lives hinge precisely on the fact that there is (or could be) life in these remains—human, material, and otherwise. for communities fighting to remain amid the remains, to admit to the deadening terms of ruins and ruination could prove devastating. many plantation residents and leaders i have come to know through fieldwork cling to the possibility that india’s quinine industry will be rejuvenated. experts familiar with the science and economics of quinine (e.g., botanists, chemists, and others) doubt that possibility, however. india’s cinchona plantations can no longer compete with the congo’s, they told me. any talk of quinine’s rebirth is a “political drama,” as one plantation chemist called it, meant only to keep hope—and the status quo—alive. are the hopes of a future in cinchona, then, an instance of what lauren berlant calls “cruel optimism,” that “condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss” (berlant 2007, 33; emphasis original)? yes and no. more interesting, i suggest, is the temporality of their optimism—that maintaining. when unions dig in against the threat of privatization and insist that the cinchona plantations can be revitalized, they strategically pry open the present in the name of the life in the remains—human and otherwise. doing so, they parry the advance of unwanted futures and buy themselves time to find a better alternative. today, the directorate and residents are piloting new crops on the plantations. experimental cultivations of orchids, kiwi, mushrooms, coffee, and ginger build on prior diversification efforts that have included rubber, citrus, and medicinal ipecac and dioscorea. not one of these crops has individually shown a clear path out of the present impasse, but unions and many plantation officers believe a viable combination can be found. this will, however, take time, work, and investment. the semiotics of development proposals snatched and burned in this setting are hard to miss but easy to misinterpret. destroying the bids of hindustan lever, pricewaterhousecoopers, and mckinsey & company does not represent an obstinate clinging to the status quo. neither does it enact a cruel optimism extending the agony of an inevitable loss to come. cinchona trade unions and the people they represent do not reject change. their contention concerns what kind of change the future will entail. when the cinchona workers look across to their neighbors on darjeeling’s private tea estates, they see precisely the kind of more-than-human ruination one would expect in the plantationocene. besky’s (2013) work on darjeeling’s tea plantations, as well as her more recent discussions (besky 2020) of starvation on the dooars’ tea plantations, offer chilling portrayals of these deprivations of land and life. that cinchona workers have vehemently rejected tea as an option therefore comes as little surprise; this is a community built around a very different colonial plant and project. cinchona plantation residents do not lack a sense of futurity. they may lack definitive answers to what the future may hold, but they are centrally concerned with the question of the future. heading off catastrophe and staying open to alternatives here entails its own form of what adriana petryna calls “horizoning work,” wherein (in this case) unions and workers orient their current action to possible futures and thereby “secure enough time to act while avoiding a norm of horizon deprivation” (petryna 2018, 588; emphasis original). most residents recognize that things cannot go on as they are and that this may mean parting with the objects—cinchona, quinine—that have defined their livelihoods for generations. but until and unless an acceptable future comes into view, they have chosen to persist and, where necessary, fight. the meantime may not be ideal, but it is better than succumbing to the depredations of privatization. with the plantations deteriorating around them and capital on the prowl, cinchona’s trade unions and communities know that time is not necessarily on their side. but time is also precisely what they need, before all else, to find a way forward. and so they continue to maintain and defend their presence. their politics are clear: there is life—and lives—in quinine’s remains that must be accounted for. a present tethered to the past to see life in the remains is not to ignore the tremendous constraints they impose. while cinchona’s finicky nature may have opened space for the unique lifeways discussed earlier, the fever tree does much to dictate the prospects of becoming-after. cinchona has grown ever more obdurate. where saplings once lined the hills in orderly 4’x4’ plots, these stands have now become entangled forests of mature, knotty trees. one of the most hated jobs on the plantations involves uprooting these long-neglected trees. yet that is what is required to clear space for something new—be it rubber, ginger, coffee, or new cinchona stands, all of which are being piloted. the mature trees that remain are, moreover, diminished of alkaloid content. after generations of relentless overproduction and then decades of neglect, the plantations’ exhausted soils and unkempt trees are yielding barks with less than 2.5 percent quinine. this renders them unable to compete with the east african barks that yield alkaloid contents as high as 9 percent (wbla 2004) and that dominate the global market for beverage and medicinal quinine. figure 6. laborers clear a hillside for new cinchona, kalimpong, 2019. photo by townsend middleton. the chemical manufacturing side of the industry has suffered a parallel decline. lacking the research and development to keep afloat in a rapidly changing pharmaceutical market, the government quinine factory’s extraction techniques grew dated from the 1950s onward. the factory’s aging machinery, by the 1970s, could no longer handle the volume of bark grown on the surrounding hills. budgets ran short and manufacturing inputs stopped showing up on time. the factory sputtered through the 1980s and 1990s—sometimes running at capacity, sometimes lying in wait for the required materials to produce its product. in 2000, when the factory produced its last dose of quinine, it did not so much formally close as simply stop working once and for all. since then, sacks of bark have sat deteriorating on the factory’s floor—a telling disarticulation of the field-to-factory nexus. looking to breathe some life into this scene (or at least garner some votes), darjeeling’s then political leader, bimal gurung, goaded the cinchona directorate into revitalizing the factory for a test run in 2014. with some tinkering and a fresh coat of paint, the sleeping giant roared back to life, proving that it could still make quinine. however, the entire facility now fell below the good manufacturing practice (gmp) standards required to sell on the national and global market. updating the factory into compliance would require massive capital investments—a nonstarter for an industry long in the red. and so, after the briefest of awakenings, the government quinine factory again sits dormant and deteriorating. figure 7. cinchona bark rots in the factory at mungpoo, darjeeling, 2017. photo by townsend middleton. surveying these remains, one must remember that decolonization shifted the biopolitical calculus on which the enterprise was founded. the british intended darjeeling’s quinine industry to be a biomedical backstop for empire. its top priority was the health of colonial officials, but as a cheap, government-made, and widely distributed drug it also served india’s general population—a public good for the public good. the 1940s marked the advent of not only india’s independence (1947) but also of synthetic antimalarials and ddt. both became game-changers in the war on malaria. with the paradigm shifting, india’s independent government relinquished the colonial designs of its quinine industry, leaving this vestige of a bygone biopolitics little chance of surviving in a contemporary medical landscape dominated by big pharma. materially, technically, and ideationally, indian quinine, in the postcolonial era, became an industry “out of time,” in more senses than one (cf. finkelstein 2019). nothing, however, tethers the present to the past quite like the plantation system itself—particularly its institutional disciplining of land and labor. as discussed earlier, the rule on the cinchona plantations—known as badli kām—has always been that one member of each family must remain a full-time employee in order to receive the government-provided facilities of homes, land, and the like. the ability to live on the government plantations therefore hinges on the passing down of employment from one generation to the next. the system has allowed about five to six thousand official cinchona employees to support a population of now roughly fifty thousand residents. never mind that the plantations are no longer producing quinine: to remain, one must have one’s name (or a family member’s name) recorded in the books. daily. on a rainy summer afternoon in 2019, my research assistant, vikash (himself a “son of the cinchona soil”) and i convened a group of plantation workers to discuss cinchona’s present realities and future possibilities. there, on a hillock with experimental crops all around and cinchona growing unkempt in the distance, the workers—all men between the ages of twenty-one and fifty—talked us through their frustrations and hopes. their testimonies, spoken over lashing rains and hot tea, told of a present troublingly bound by quinine’s historic past. anit framed the experience as one of compulsion and sacrifice: you asked right at the beginning what the situation of cinchona is right now and what can happen in future. the situation at present shows a dark future. the young generation has a future that is gloomy, the reason being the system of cinchona is already collapsing… . but we have a compulsion. we have to sacrifice a family member, a son, to work on the cinchona. this is our compulsion… . we have to save our homestead, our land. and it is for this very reason, one son has to stay back in the plantation to safeguard the shelter that the family has. we are sacrificing our educated sons for the safety of our homes. we are turning the educated young man into a laborer. he is going to be a laborer forever. so we are mindfully, purposefully sacrificing the future of our son, even if he is educated, for the sake of this system. anit, it turns out, spoke from experience. he was one of those educated youth. a sharp intellect had helped him earn a law degree. but, as the only family member who could fulfill the employment requirement when his father passed, the plantation reeled him back in. he took the position to save his family homestead. he even arranged for substitute workers to take his place in the field so that he could continue to pursue his law career in the nearby city of darjeeling. when cinchona administrators caught wind of this, however, they issued a letter to the darjeeling court explaining that, as a scheduled government cinchona laborer, he was legally bound to another kind of work, not in the courts, but in the plantations. such was the compulsion and sacrifice of anit—a trained lawyer, but in the archaic logic of the plantation, forever a laborer. anit’s project of building a life beyond quinine has accordingly found itself bound by the unrelenting institutions of the plantation. his quandaries echo across the plantations, particularly among the youth. with the industry offering little prospects for the future, more and more have sought education and employment outside the plantations, whether in the nearby cities of darjeeling, kalimpong, and siliguri or farther afield in kolkata, bangalore, and new delhi. yet many know they may be called back and compelled to sacrifice their ambitions to support their family’s basic means of existence. that these plantations are no longer making the life-saving drug for which they were founded only underscores the paradox and perversity of these sacrifices. quinine’s aftermath adds a sobering note to the anthropology of becoming, which has tended to look optimistically to becoming’s open-endedness as a way to explore possibilities of other futures (biehl and locke 2017, 29; wright n.d.). insofar as the projects and politics of becoming-after quinine are vested with hope and possibility, they share in this deleuzian embrace of the open and unknown. their difficulties, however, warrant a deeper historical, causal explanation.12 for plantation residents, quinine’s colonial past constantly drags at the present, severely limiting who and what they can be (or become). encumbered by this temporal drag (freeman 2010, 62), anit and his peers embody a distinctly postindustrial form of precarity, comprising equal parts uncertainty over what the future holds and the intransigence of an industry’s material and institutional remains.13 in such circumstances, the horizons of becoming-after are seldom open and free, but, more typically, tethered and troubled. unable to pursue his otherwise bright future in law, anit has consequently found himself stuck in the aftermath: the reluctant inheritor of quinine’s remains. what to make of these remains—and how to live with them—is thus the challenge rung in daily by the morning bell. it is both an individual and a shared project. and so anit rubs the sleep from his eyes to begin the work at hand. an ethic/s for the time-being in a world indelibly shaped by colonial, industrial, and anthropogenic change, it would seem that even in the freest of circumstances (certainly a far cry from the postcolonial plantation), people are never fully after what came before. rather, they are always making do—and to the extent possible, re-becoming—with the remains of their pasts. i have offered becoming-after as an analytic for exploring these conditions, projects, and horizons of unequally inhabited im/possibilities. varying by context and community, becoming-after will look different in post-sugar puerto rico (mintz 1986) or belize (moran-thomas 2019) than it will in post-quinine darjeeling. its work, politics, and feel will manifest differently amid the toxic “enfleshments” of north american settler industrialism (walley 2014; murphy 2017) versus the deafening aftermaths of gold in south africa (morris 2008) or papua new guinea (jacka 2015). identifying the histories of ­becoming-with that made these places and linking those pasts to their communities’ current struggles of ­becoming-after is not simply a matter of history for history’s sake. it is a prerequisite for ethnographically mapping the challenges and unevenness of our fundamentally affected present. at the end of the day, figuring out what to make of life after world-historical substances have run their course is no easy matter. like my friends on darjeeling’s cinchona plantations, i have no simple answers as to what comes definitively after quinine. that question is being worked out daily on the plantations. because it involves such dense entanglements of human and nonhuman, past and present, and material and immaterial forces, becoming-after quinine brooks little resolution. an analytic of becoming-after is not necessarily in the business of asking “what comes next?” but rather, “what happens in the meantime?” to that end, let me offer a last look into the day-to-day realities of life in quinine’s wake. it’s getting late. around the offices of the government quinine factory in mungpoo, a dozen clerks sit at large wooden tables, watching the clock, waiting for their shift to end. in another time, these desks teemed with ledgers tabulating factory inputs, outputs, quinine extraction rates, tablets produced, and so on. in another time, clerks worked feverishly to keep pace with the pharma-industrial giant, steaming and groaning away next door. not today. with the hulking factory padlocked, desks worn smooth by generations of paperwork now sit empty, save for a few personal items—a calendar here, a photo there. these clerks were once the factory’s brains: the counters, the calculators. yet at 2 p.m. on a friday afternoon in 2017, the main calculations concern the clock. the clerks who have made it this long sit at empty desks, watching the minutes tick away, doing their best to complete an honest day’s work. by 3:30 p.m., when i pass back through the offices after visiting the factory, the desks are all empty. the clerks have returned home. another day in the books. similar scenes are unfolding across the cinchona plantations. the most earnest of workers have lasted their full shift. others went home hours ago. some, having gotten their name in the books at the morning ganti, never reported at all. this is what work has become for many: the art of doing the bare minimum. this is understandable. but the lack of worker discipline (anushasan) has become a major problem for those trying to breathe new life into the industry. although the population of rank-and-file workers has remained, thanks to the trade unions, relatively stable over the years, leadership positions have dwindled significantly. at full capacity, the plantations employed fifty-eight officer-level positions, ranging from quinologists and botanists to factory and field managers. today, there are fewer than ten. as these experts have retired, taking with them knowledge that could prove instrumental to quinine’s rebirth, the west bengal government has not replaced their lines. many retired managers i interviewed, all of them gorkhas with deep attachments to the lands and livelihoods at stake, see this as the single biggest threat to the industry’s future. on their more conspiratorial days, they frame it as a strategy of attrition—west bengal’s way of slowly killing a dying industry. bereft of its leaders, the plantations lack the hierarchy to enforce the discipline that once suffused their more-than-human ecology. to a manager’s trained eye, the effects are everywhere: in cinchona overgrowing its harvest cycle; in equipment rusting beyond repair; and in workers doing little more than showing up, signing in, and checking out on a daily basis. these deteriorations hamstring from the start any top-down initiative to revive the plantations. recall the banner at the beginning this article. the “my plantation, my pride” campaign formed part of a broader effort by the cinchona directorate to revitalize the industry. it included renewed diversification efforts through the experimental planting of ginger, coffee, kiwi, citrus, rubber, and even new cinchona. the directorate also turned attention to worker culture, heritage, and pride to pump life into the plantations. the top-down campaign began with semiannual meetings of plantation gangmen at the directorate’s headquarters, where powerpoint presentations and self-empowerment corporate-speak sought to instill purpose in the plantations’ remaining leadership. the campaign likewise reached down to workers with banners and other reminders extoling the heritage and pride of the work at hand. mero bāgān, mero garwa, as it went in nepali. these efforts have largely fallen flat not because workers lack a sense of heritage or pride, but because the industry itself—and the world around it—has become something different. many residents see no future in the field and factory. the afternoon after watching sleepy-eyed workers scratch their head at the banner’s perplexing message, i asked the gangman who had barked out orders on that misty morning about the challenges of leading his crew—many of whom are his friends and neighbors—into such dismal horizons. “it’s tough,” he told me as we bounced along in the back of a jeep on rocky plantation roads made for the british many lives ago. “people come and try to cut out of work early. they try to work as little as possible,” he later explained. “or they come to work in the fields and all they talk about is their education degrees. but i tell them: you are here to work in the fields. what are you going to do? you can’t dig a hole and clear the fields with a ballpoint pen!” as conversation turned to how his workers might interpret the banner, he responded wryly: “who knows? they might read it and feel like it’s theirs. or, [starting to chuckle] they might just rip it off and take it home and use it for something else!” the gangman’s wit captured something the banner elided: the ambivalences of inhabiting an industry’s remains. plantation workers speak nostalgically of the days when the fields flourished and the factory churned out life-saving medicine. they maintain a deep attachment to cinchona, the plant around which their lives were built, and a strong sense of belonging within the plantations. but whether the banner’s message of pride and heritage “feels like theirs,” as the gangman put it, is a question that throws into high relief the peculiar alienations of postindustrial labor. thinking beyond the early karl marx (1978 [1844]), there is perhaps only one thing more estranging than selling one’s labor to an industry that makes a product sold far from those who made it: namely, selling one’s labor to an industry that makes no product at all. and yet that is precisely what the people of cinchona must do if they wish to remain among quinine’s remains. this requires a daily habitation of paradox, precarity, and, as anit, our attorney-laborer put it, sacrifice. for communities playing out the string of an industry producing little in the way of products or prospects, these are days that cannot be gotten back. and yet, staying with the present—no matter how tethered or troubled—may be the best option for those searching for a future amid the remains of old. it may be the only option. what then can we make of life and politics in quinine’s wake? trade unions chasing away private investors and their well-heeled consultants and mobs snatching and burning proposals of an undesirable future are easily recognizable as a politics. but what of the plantation workers for whom the morning bell tolls? what of clerks sitting dutifully at empty desks, watching the clock count down their days? are these practices of showing up and being counted—of remaining among the remains—also a politics? these practices may not figure as perfect examples of resistance or “weapons of the weak” (scott 1985), but they are compulsory—and tactical, in michel de certeau’s (1984) sense—because they are the precondition of any subsequent politics or life in these spaces. particularly when transformative forces loom on the horizon and no viable future is in sight, manning the present may itself make for an act of political consequence. if not a politics proper, there is an ethic here, in the weberian (weber 1992 [1930]) sense of a duty or calling—and an ethics, in the kantian (kant 1957 [1785]) sense of how one acts upon the world—for becoming-after and its anthropology: a call to the present and the ongoing work and politics thereof. in seeking an ethnographic understanding of how, who, and what people become after the world-historical substances of one era give way to those of the next, i have come to theorize becoming-after as a condition, project, and horizon of life in a broader world of remains—colonial, industrial, and otherwise. if reckonings of ruins and ruination help us see the constraints these inheritances hand down to the present, becoming keeps us open to the possibilities that inhere in the after. we need both these attentions to appreciate the lives, politics, and im/possibilities that animate remains. at the end of the day, it is not enough simply to recognize that life exists in the remains. the real ethical and political question is: what kind of life? from the coal countries and rust belts of the global north to the archaic plantations and exhausted landscapes of the global south, what is to be made of life after world-historical substances have run their course stands as one of the most urgent questions of our times. though particularly acute in these contexts, the problem of becoming-after—what to make of remains and how to live with them—does not confine itself exclusively to postcolonial or postindustrial circumstances. it marks a signature challenge of the anthropocene. in developing an anthropology of becoming-after, i have sought to think small—or at least ethnographically—about these big questions. transforming quinine’s remains into something viable continues to be a fraught affair for the people who live on india’s cinchona plantations. governmental regimes attempting to privatize this ailing industry, corporations looking to capitalize on its material resources, trade unions insisting on the industry’s revitalization, and individuals making do with the limited resources at hand suggest a surfeit of options. just not necessarily mutually viable or good options. until a desirable future opens before them, cinchona’s workers will heed that morning bell and continue to show up and get their names in the books. they will continue to inhabit the remains and defend the status quo, no matter how precarious. and they will continue to do their best to persist amid the onslaught of capital. offering lessons for becoming-after and the anthropology thereof, theirs is a politics—and ethics—for the time-being. abstract this article explores the aftermath of quinine in india. derived from cinchona, the fever tree, quinine was once malaria’s only remedy—and, as such, vital to colonial power. but it has left grave uncertainty in its wake. today, little market exists for indian quinine, but government cinchona plantations established by the british remain in darjeeling. what will become of these dilapidated plantations and their 50,000 inhabitants is unclear. crumbling quinine factories and overgrown cinchona may evoke ruination, but these remains are not dead. they have instead become the site of urgent efforts—and a periodically charged politics—to redefine land and life for the twenty-first century. this essay develops an analytics of becoming-after to ask not only, how do empires and human beings become-with world-historical substances like quinine but also, what do we make of life after they run their course? [becoming; ruins; ruination; plantations; postindustrial; postcolonial; materiality; temporality] notes acknowledgments a special thanks to the communities of the cinchona plantations who made this article possible, as well as the directorate of cinchona and other medicinal plants. i am grateful for the intellectual generosity of my reviewers and editors at cultural anthropology, especially heather paxson, who guided this piece to its final form. eklavya pradhan and jason cons offered valuable feedback on drafts, and i am grateful to all the interlocutors who commented on various presentations of these arguments along the way. my research on quinine has been supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the american institute of indian studies, unc’s institute for the arts and humanities, the carolina asia center, and other unc sources. 1. there is a significant literature on quinine’s imperial implications. for a comprehensive overview, see rohan deb roy (2017). 2. as hall writes with signature clarity, “so, postcolonial is not the end of colonisation. it is after a certain kind of colonialism, after a certain moment of high imperialism and colonial occupation—in the wake of it, in the shadow of it, inflected by it” (see drew 1999, 230). 3. “social projects,” elizabeth a. povinelli (2013, 238) writes, “are activities of fixing and co-substantiating phenomena, aggregating and assembling disparate elements into a common form and purpose. the word ‘project’ means to convey the constant nature of such building as well as the constant tinkering with plan, draft, and scheme as the building is being made, maintained, and remade out of disparate materials.” 4. the concept of horizon has grown particularly salient in decolonial studies. see, for instance, the journal decolonial horizons / horizontes decoloniales; the pluto press series decolonial options / postcolonial horizons; key works by walter d. mignolo (2011; also in conversation with mónica gonzález garcía 2006). on horizoning, see adriana petryna (2018). 5. though not on plantations, sarah ives (2017) illustrates related entanglements of plants, belonging, and politics. 6. these encounters between workers’ lived time and other forms of temporality and power (for instance, those framing the plantations as anachronistic relics) lend themselves to the approach of power-chronography charted by sarah sharma’s (2014, 9) in the meantime. 7. chhetri passed away in august 2020. this interview occurred in 2017. 8. west bengal state archive [bengal, agricultural, pc9, proc29, april 1875]. 9. the other main site was the nilgiri hills. 10. in the nineteenth century, workers received anywhere from 1 to 5 acres. the allotments have steadily fallen to the current average size of 0.25 acres. sizes of worker’s fields vary by family history. 11. the notion of wastelands awaiting the civilizing hand of european capitalists dates back at least to adam smith (2015 [1776]). it became law in india via the waste lands (claims) act of 1863. 12. deborah a. thomas’s (2019) historicization of contemporary politics in post-plantation jamaica offers another example. 13. for a more hopeful reading of uncertainty and indeterminacy, see anna lowenhaupt tsing (2015) and others (tsing et al. 2017) who have explored the possibilities of life in capitalist ruins, finding patches of indeterminacy and thus possibility. references benjamin, walter 1998 the origin of german tragic drama. introduction by george steiner. translated by john osborne. london: verso. originally published in 1963. berlant, lauren 2007 “cruel optimism: on marx, loss, and the senses.” new formations 63, no. 8: 33–51. besky, sarah 2013 the darjeeling distinction: labor and justice on fair-trade tea plantations in india. berkeley: university of california press. 2017 “fixity: on the inheritance and maintenance of tea plantation houses in darjeeling, india.” american ethnologist 44, no. 4: 617–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12561. 2020 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the meantime: temporality and cultural politics. durham, n.c.: duke university press. smith, adam 2015 the wealth of nations, book iv: on systems of political economy. cambridge: cambridge university press. originally published in 1776. stoler, ann laura 2008 “imperial debris: reflections on ruin and ruination.” cultural anthropology 23, no. 2: 191–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00007.x. 2016 duress: imperial durabilities in our times. durham, n.c.: duke university press. stoler, ann laura, ed. 2013 imperial debris: on ruins and ruination. durham, n.c.: duke university press. thomas, deborah a. 2019 political life in the wake of the plantation: sovereignty, witnessing, repair. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2015 the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. tsing, anna lowenhaupt, heather anne swanson, elaine gan, and nils bubandt, eds. 2017 arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. veale, lucy 2010 “an historical geography of the nilgiri cinchona plantations, 1860–1900.” phd diss., university of nottingham. walley, christine j. 2014 exit zero: family and class in postindustrial chicago. chicago: university of chicago press. wbla (west bengal legislative assembly secretariat) 2004 “the present state of affairs of cinchona production in west bengal: seventh report.” kolkata: wbla. weber, max 1992 the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. translated by talcott parsons. london: routledge. originally published in 1930. willford, andrew c. 2014 tamils and the haunting of justice: history and recognition in malaysia’s plantations. honolulu: university of hawai‘i press. wright, katherine n.d. “becomings.” the multispecies salon: a companion to the book (blog). accessed march 17, 2021. https://www.multispecies-salon.org/becomings/. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 282-311, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.05 where the sidewalk ends where the sidewalk ends: automobility and shame in tbilisi, georgia perry maxfield waldman sherouse http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6567-3095 in july 2015, i met the urban planner vladimir (lado) vardosanidze in front of the tbilisi concert hall, a round, glass-plated building located at the convergence of a bewildering traffic pattern where two multilane one-way streets combine in a swirl of traffic to form a bidirectional road that becomes the main drag in tbilisi’s downtown. lado, a spry seventy-year-old professor with specializations in urban planning, architecture, and culture, greeted me with a smile and told me that he had selected this location to meet because he wanted to point out some features of the urban landscape that were indicative of larger trends in the development of georgia’s capital city. this area, he told me, was nicknamed the bermuda triangle because of the erratic traffic patterns that render it particularly dangerous for pedestrians. as we walked toward his home office nearby, lado drew my attention to a variety of sidewalk hazards: a set of plastic bollards that had been cut off at the base to allow cars to park on the sidewalk, loose and missing bricks in the pavement that made walking treacherous and wheelchair travel impossible, and a kiosk situated so close to the curb by a bus stop that it forced riders to wait on the street rather than the sidewalk, with the sharp edge of its exterior metal counter positioned at eye-level overhanging the ramp from sidewalk to street.1 cars were parked on the sidewalks, and pedestrians dodged traffic to cross the busy street. the boundary between street and sidewalk was at risk of collapsing, and with it, the moral orders that the sidewalk symbolically supported. figure 1. the “bermuda triangle” traffic pattern in front of the tbilisi concert hall. the glitzy rotunda stands on a concrete expanse flanked by steps descending to the tunnels of an underpass, a series of underground crosswalks by which pedestrians traverse a city block in order to reach vera park, where there is a busy bus stop and taxi pickup point. map data by google. cars have steadily colonized the sidewalks in downtown neighborhoods in tbilisi since i first visited in 2009. in recent years, the process has intensified. according to lado, the municipal and cultural acceptance of behaviors such as driving or parking on sidewalks is one of several developments in tbilisi urbanism since the 1990s that have set new unfortunate precedents. once established as normative, certain modes of public comportment prove difficult to reverse. lado contended that many decisions by the local government had ignored urban planning and environmental considerations in crafting tbilisi’s urban landscape, demonstrating the triumph of private over public interests (vardosanidze 2003, 2009). after the political instability and economic hardship of the 1990s, the pattern of urban development since 2003 shifted toward the privatization of transportation and a rise in what some critics have termed “investor urbanism” (van assche and salukvadze 2013, 94). following the 2003 rose revolution, mikheil saakashvili and the united national movement (unm) ousted eduard shevardnadze and came to power, implementing changes to the built environment as a means to remake public perception. transformations of public space, such as the construction of glass police stations meant to symbolize transparency, have provoked scholarly inquiries into the political and social significance of the broader project that is afoot in the architectural reshaping of tbilisi urbanity (frederiksen 2012; curro 2015).2 mundane elements of urban material culture, such as parking, also underwent renovation during the same period. this article focuses on the politics of parking as a way to understand contested visions of the public good taking place at the edges of official, large-scale urban development projects. the sidewalk bisects public and private life, and as a consequence it has become an enduring trope in narratives about how modernity can be reconstituted. in georgia, this reconstitution has involved literally standing on cemented layers of the soviet past, while tempering the meaning of these layers with corporate interests, emerging environmental concerns, and visions of a european material and ideological future for the built environment. disputes about parking engage fundamental questions about the forms that urban public spaces and transportation systems should take. the conflict between two dominant modes of urban order—vehicle-centered or pedestrian-centered—is a central object of concern for citizens, planners, and urban theorists alike (jacobs 1961; berman 1982; holston 1999). resolutions, compromises, and redescriptions of this fundamental conflict manifest different perspectives on the functions that sidewalks serve as elements of public space. although the tension between pedestrianism and automobility has been present in urban modernism since the nineteenth century, in the twenty-first century this conflict has become more pressing as privatization-centered urban growth and a dystopian present of automobility grind against desires for ecological sustainability and urban livability. as this conflict has become more acute around the world, the remaking of the city has received increasing attention: from the promotion of bike lanes, pedestrian zones, and green spaces, to a restructuring of public transportation. shame has entered into discourses of urbanism as an instrument of pedestrian activism. for example, members of the young greens (green party; akhalgazrda mts’vaneebi), launched a campaign against large vehicles called didi jipi = pat’ara ch’uch’u (large jeep = small penis), which targeted suvs and other large vehicles as signs of conspicuous consumption.3 figure 2. image from the didi jipi = pat’ara ch’uch’u (large jeep = small penis) campaign. image by the georgian young greens. this shaming campaign connected masculine insecurity with social and environmental disregard. on june 30, 2015, i met with several members of the young greens to learn about their organization’s vision and programs. following the large jeep = small penis campaign, they were working on a policy document focused on transportation in tbilisi. they defined themselves as a leftist political and activist organization with a broad agenda of political change, in which ecological and transportation issues were just two dimensions. i inquired about why, in recent years, the number of organizations of young people in tbilisi trying to change urban space had increased and become more visible. one of the members, stela namgaladze, offered multiple reasons, including an increase in old and cheap cars (that make it so you “can’t move” on sidewalks), a lack of ecological regulations resulting in greater emissions, and a government under which “young people see that they can express themselves more freely.” she added that “this kind of activism became cooler than it was five years ago . . . but only in terms of this ecological stuff and this urban stuff, not with worker rights or something.” she added that for urban and ecological issues, they could mobilize thousands, whereas other campaigns, such as the may 1 international workers’ day events, only attracted a hundred supporters. in reference to the large jeep = small penis campaign, another member of the group emphasized that the proliferation of vehicles in urban space partly resulted from the social status that these vehicles conferred, an association that the campaign sought to challenge. it is not surprising that affect plays a role in activism. what is distinctive, in this case, is how shame operates to inform, but not determine, the perspectives around which activists mobilize in tbilisi. shame draws together a series of asymmetric power relations without catalyzing a particular form of politics against them. as silvan tomkins (1995, 139) points out, shame-humiliation “does not renounce the object of identification permanently, whereas contempt-disgust does.”4 shame, as a dominant affect and discursive hinge in activist interventions, organizes a series of asymmetric power relations, including geopolitical (between russia and georgia), modal (between local car-driving elites and proponents of pedestrianism and public transportation), and aspirational (between an imagined european order and a lived urban experience characterized by dismal frictions). while shaming belongs to the domain of environmental activist tactics in many parts of the world, what is notable in this context is that the promotion of pedestrianism, as a seemingly neutral ideology about comportment in public space, is politically underspecified and can therefore be associated with either capitalist or socialist values. this article draws on fifteen months of fieldwork conducted in tbilisi in 2009, 2011–2012, and 2015. my perspective on tbilisi urban life is informed by the traffic, parking, and pedestrian discomforts i witnessed there. the rapid growth of car ownership since the 1990s has exerted pressure on urban infrastructures, as the city was not planned with extensive automobility in mind. old, cheaply purchased cars crowd the roads, producing environmental strain, road fatalities, noise, and an increasingly congested road and parking system.5 cars comprise part of a larger infrastructure that the sociologist john urry (2004) has termed “automobility,” or what catherine lutz and anne lutz fernandez (2010, xi) term the “car system” (see also lutz 2014).6 within the tbilisi car system, i found that contestations over sidewalk space revealed a moral underpinning to the banality of parking. in the media, political discourse, or casual discussion among friends and acquaintances, conversations about sidewalks quickly turned to the moral qualities that the city has engendered in its citizens. what seemed like a chaotic collapse of sidewalk order gave rise to a host of responses about the primacy of certain material and social practices as pathways, literally and figuratively, to civilizational modernity (or what saakashvili, in a speech in 2013, referred to as georgia’s “european destiny”). like much of the public symbolic repertoire in tbilisi, sidewalks function as a prism refracting the neoliberal cityscape through the mixed legacies of soviet modernism. in what follows i first describe some of the frictions in tbilisi’s car-and-sidewalk system that have emerged from the juxtaposed logics and legacies of liberal and socialist urbanism. i then focus on two authorities that organize public parking in the contested zone of the sidewalk in tbilisi: the corporate parking company ct park and self-appointed parking attendants. the afterlife of socialist urbanism has resulted in a situation in which different institutions of parking order coexist, for the moment, under the pressures of an expanding car system. in the final section, i analyze how pedestrian activists in postsocialist space share forms of engagement by connecting the georgian case with the contemporaneous stopkham (“stop a douchebag”) campaign in moscow, russia. activists attempt to redirect their frustration and sense of shame toward obnoxious drivers, transforming imagined global hierarchies into admonitions about failures of personal responsibility. the comparison between russian and georgian activists demonstrates an emerging sensibility of pedestrian rights across postsocialist spaces. even as georgian activists recognize a substrate of commonality with russian activists, they are careful to disavow direct russian influence on the strategies they adopt. sidewalks in socialist modernity sidewalks show the economic, political, and social stakes of the public good at a different scale than other transportation infrastructures, such as roads and highways. the adjacency of the sidewalk and the road has meant that the tropes each engages (such as freedom, connectivity, and movement) work in parallel.7 social-scientific scholarship on the sidewalk has registered the power relations, ideological orientations, and imaginative and affective parallels among the various institutions and actors that exert influence over the contours of public space. jane jacobs (1961, 29) famously wrote that sidewalks, the “pedestrian parts” of the streets, “serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians.” research on sidewalks has stressed their multiplicity of functions, particularly as domains of commerce, mobility, and sociality (duneier 1999; kim 2015; goldstein 2016). much of the literature on urban design celebrates the multifunctional, crowded sidewalk as a source of enjoyment and prosocial frisson, providing what william whyte (2000, 242) termed “vital frictions.” by contrast, i concentrate on the negative dimensions, or dismal friction, of tbilisi’s sidewalks as infrastructure elicits shame and provokes debate about what constitutes the public good.8 as the car system’s demands exceed the capacities of infrastructure constructed during the socialist era, the public/private distinction comes under stress in architectural zones like the sidewalk, spaces that have fallen outside the main foci of research on architecture and material culture.9 the sidewalk represents a crucial zone for ethnographic attention and anthropological theorization because it is the ground on which memories of past urbanisms accrue and claims to potential future urbanisms are staged. the case of tbilisi epitomizes the contested status of the sidewalk, where certain social actors see it as a space for the growth of commerce and parking, whereas others are fighting to promote pedestrianism by restricting automobility. the idiom of personal freedom, which provided a rationale for the growth of automobile use, also forms the basis for activist contestations of the resultant car-crowded sidewalk space. pedestrian activists describe the inferiority of tbilisi street-and-sidewalk spaces with reference to what they imagine to be superior “european” modes of order, predicated on sharp boundaries. at the same time, they recognize that european cities, too, are struggling with automobility and its discontents. a new set of solutions must transcend, rather than recapitulate sharp divisions between what fernando rubio and uriel fogué (2013, 1037) have described as the political surface of human relations and domesticated nature, on the one hand, and the black-boxed subpolitical spheres of infrastructure, on the other. in tbilisi, aspirations to pedestrianism risk appearing either as a return to a form of failed socialist modernity or as an anachronistic imitation of european modernity. because pedestrianism does not have a clear political anchor in the georgian context, it is a signifier with a mutable relationship to the utopian visions of socialism that the sidewalks in tbilisi once served. without a positive ideal, the pedestrian activist project lingers in contradiction: it is a campaign of hope conducted in the negative. the present-day dismal friction of tbilisi sidewalks is rooted in an uneasy relationship to twentieth-century state socialism, which incorporated many material and ideological elements from the nineteenth-century european liberal city. this included the street-and-sidewalk complex as a manifestation and index of modernity. writing about the taken-for-granted dimensions of the logics of sidewalk infrastructure, the geographer nicholas blomley (2011, 36) argues that “pedestrianism” holds the facilitation of mobility as the self-evident rationale for the orderly sidewalk.10 he contends that pedestrianism, as a logic of circulation that focuses on the entanglements of people and things rather than primarily on the human subject, departs from the commitments of civic humanism that scholars of urbanism have mobilized for understanding the production, regulation, and evaluation of public spaces. blomley (2011, 47) interprets the genealogy of the modern european and north american street-and-sidewalk complex in terms of fashioning a “nebulous collective end of the ‘public good,’” rather than of the individual liberal subject. meanwhile, the historians patrick joyce (2003) and chris otter (2007), also working within frameworks that emphasize materiality and technology, have described how the victorian city street enabled forms of governance and subjecthood. developing and displaying civility in the victorian city involved crafting “public spaces conducive to the exercise of clear, controlled perception: wide streets, squares, and parks” (otter 2002, 3). blomley’s view is compatible with joyce and otter’s arguments about liberal subjecthood in this crucial way: the design features of the modern liberal city can be mobilized by engineers and other municipal actors to generate an abstract principle (circulation) for an abstract collective (the public), while at the same time producing certain modes of liberal subjecthood. pedestrianism, as a seemingly neutral, apolitical rationale for public space as a zone of circulation, can be mobilized to support differing concepts of the public good under socialism and modern liberalism. in georgia, new impingements on pedestrian mobility have catalyzed discourses of entitlement about the use of public space, thereby prompting the specification of a previously nebulous public good. rather than approach the issue through the lenses of legal dispute or expert discourse, i focus here on popular discourses about what has gone wrong with cars and sidewalks in georgia and what might be done to set things right. contestation about how to reconcile the inheritances of the european liberal city and their refraction through socialist modernism has been a hallmark of the postsocialist order (manning 2009a). the georgian experience of liberal modernity, moreover, was filtered through socialist modernity (though the two are, as one reviewer of this article put it, “uncanny doppelgängers”). the sidewalk-and-street infrastructure of contemporary tbilisi is a product of socialist modernity, as the transport network was soviet-made (van assche and salukvadze 2013; salukvadze and golubchikov 2016). the organizing ideological principles of the neoliberal postmodern order in georgia exhibit inheritances from liberalism, which enabled ruling through freedom (joyce 2003) via technosocial affordances of a built environment that was organized around clear vision, movement, civility, and socialism. under socialism, the inculcation of interior moral dispositions was achieved in part through the doctrine of kul’turnost’ (culturedness), which offered a system of exterior, material forms allowing one to express one’s civilized status and encompassing both private domestic spaces like apartments and public spaces like parks (dunham 1990; fitzpatrick 1992; boym 1994, 102–106; kelly and volkov 1998; volkov 2000). the forms and social meanings of kul’turnost’ changed over time. kul’turnost’, as a “program for proper conduct in public” (dunham 1990, 22), represented soviet ways of displaying and interpreting the material world as expressive of moral qualities related to civilizational ideals. one of the postsocialist legacies of kul’turnost’ was the notion that sidewalks, and the ways that one comported oneself on them, constituted symbols of a moral order. kul’turnost’ provided a template with which to understand diverse practices of consumption and comportment as constitutive of embodied civilizational modernity. figure 3. this 1949 poster reads: “protect the children!” (georgian: gauprtkhildit bavshvebs! russian: oberegaite detei!). the man physically diverts the scooter-riding child away from the road and onto the sidewalk. a series of such street behavior posters focuses on instilling rule-and-norm-abiding behavior in drivers and pedestrians alike. image by i. kutsenko for the state traffic police, http://dspace.nplg.gov.ge/handle/1234/18315. figure 4. this 1947 poster reads: “walk on the sidewalk, only on the right side.” pedestrian comportment was an object of state-directed instruction. image by the city council utility division, http://dspace.nplg.gov.ge/handle/1234/18040. new corporeal competencies proved to be crucial components of urban space, as car and pedestrian instructional texts and warnings attest. the wide sidewalks that flank major avenues were once conducive to a pedestrian culture that embodied what joyce (2003, 213–15) has termed “liberal walking.” twenty-first-century sidewalk orders the conditions of tbilisi’s present-day street-and-sidewalk system reflect an acceleration of investor urbanism, which has exacerbated and made visible tensions among different aspirations toward urban harmony. many sidewalks operate according to a de facto model of shared space, one often experienced as dismal friction, reducing pedestrian enjoyment of the city.11 wide sidewalks on rustaveli avenue, once intended to support a pedestrian culture, have now been overtaken by outdoor seating for restaurants and cafés. elsewhere, as on chavchavadze avenue, sidewalks have provided the space for an expansion of the parking system. cafés are potent symbols of the everyday infrastructures of sociability under modernity (manning 2013). but installing a café does not suffice to ensure the creation of european-type sociality. activities on the sidewalks outside cafés and other places of commerce also contribute to the forms of sociality that the city engenders. the saakashvili-era government targeted merchants, as unwanted social pollutants, for removal from public spaces like these (rekhviashvili 2015). outdoor seating for cafés, like automobile parking on sidewalks, can function either as a sign of affluence and freedom or of waste and selfishness.12 in tbilisi, the perimeters of restaurants and roads have expanded, engulfing the sidewalk archipelagos that lie vulnerable between them. the colonization of the sidewalk by cars has not occurred evenly throughout the city; instead, it has concentrated in areas of commerce. certain areas of tbilisi, including much of the downtown strip of rustaveli avenue and davit aghmashenebeli avenue, are designed with physical barricades to prevent cars from invading the sidewalks. davit aghmashenebeli avenue underwent major renovations beginning in 2010. then president saakashvili said about these renovations: “this area most resembles paris, and we will make it look like paris” (kirtzkhalia 2010). the resemblance to paris, however, remains purely aspirational.13 a more accurate analogy would be to saint petersburg, but saakashvili’s distaste for russianness precluded such a comparison. installing bollards that firmed up the boundaries of street and sidewalk was one element of the project intended to make davit aghmashenebeli avenue look like paris. barricades include waist-high metal posts, elevated flowerbeds, and small trees. such demarcation is modeled on an imagined european city in which the respective worlds of car and human remain clearly marked off from one another. when a recent renovation program on davit aghmashenebeli was finished in 2016, prime minister giorgi kvirikashvili remarked at the opening that “the price of the real estate has shot up fivefold . . . this will be one of the most attractive districts in tbilisi for all tourists” (georgia newsday 2016). the most carefully controlled pedestrian zones in tbilisi are those that are intended to be tourist-friendly shopping areas. these zones are fashioned as european spaces conducive to orderly forms of commerce. distinct conduits for pedestrian and automotive movement, with a backdrop of leisurely commerce, are interpreted as signs of europeanness. within the ecology of transportation infrastructure in tbilisi, another factor that has contributed to a predominance of cars is the class-linked devaluation of public transportation. in tbilisi, many who have aspirations of upward mobility avoid public transportation, including metros, minibuses, and buses, in favor of private cars or taxis. one afternoon on kostava street, i counted as forty taxis drove by in one minute. the ubiquity of the taxi is connected to its special status as semipublic and semiprivate, symbolizing multiple forms of freedom, including commerce, movement, and distance from other commuters. public transportation, including the metro, constitutes an infrastructure of public life in which there was considerable investment under socialism (jenks 2000). in the postsocialist world, narratives about human potential have been tethered to transport, as alaina lemon (2000, 2015) has described in the forms of order and disorder attached to the moscow metro. in tbilisi, this has meant that the metro, as a socialist-era infrastructure, has diminished in status, having become associated with low social class as a consequence of an expanding car culture. as inga grdzelishvili and roger sathre (2011, 44) argue, based on a survey of more than three hundred transportation users in tbilisi, combating the growth of an increasingly “car-oriented culture” depends on “making public transportation options competitive with the perceived advantages of the car.” parking chaos and corporate order frustration, dissatisfaction, and shame emerge against the backdrop of large-scale changes in the ways that a growing car culture has impacted street-and-sidewalk order. for this reason, it is important to take stock of who controls parking in tbilisi, and how public and governmental actors have assumed responsibility for sidewalk governance. parking politics offer a lens onto disputes about the public good. in 2007, a private group called ct park signed a contract to serve as the exclusive parking-management company in tbilisi until 2022. the company’s practices provoked public frustration and a new focus on the forms of authority governing street and sidewalk parking. parking politics in tbilisi also open a window onto contests for control among actors including the municipal government, ct park, and a fleet of self-appointed parking attendants (st’aianshik’ebi) who direct cars into spots on the sidewalk and street for spare change.14 a holistic account of parking labor must take into account the uneven relationship between ct park and the st’aianshik’ebi, who operate around, and at times within, the official zones of ct park. figure 5. a self-appointed parking attendant at work, 2015. the three cars on the left are parked on the sidewalk in an area adjacent to chavchavadze avenue. photo by perry maxfield waldman sherouse. st’aianshik’ebi, who have existed in tbilisi at least since the 1990s, represent an entrenched form of parking organization that operates alongside yet out of the control of the painted lines, metal signs, and ticketing mechanisms of ct park. because they manage to work alongside ct park in a fashion that solves the immediate problem of where to put cars without creating new material infrastructure, st’aianshik’ebi have fallen outside of activist, political, and corporate concern. they are mediators, filling the gaps between multiple, overlapping systems and temporarily resolving the contradictions among them.15 in a pathbreaking article on the anthropology of parking, liviu chelcea and ioana iancu (2015) describe self-appointed parking attendants (parcagii) in the romanian context, offering a portrait of parcagii as human laborers who function as infrastructure (cf. simone 2004). like the parcagii in bucharest, st’aianshik’ebi in tbilisi command a strip of pavement in areas of downtown that are tourist or work destinations—and hence car destinations. attired in the weathered garments of the urban poor, they are identifiable by a bright neon sash or a loosely fitting neon vest. they often wield a white baton, modified with electrical tape or neon strips to enhance visibility. their interactions with drivers consist primarily of directing drivers into empty parking spots, whether in makeshift lots on the sidewalk and edges of the street or in official ct park spaces, after which they solicit donations in the form of spare change. some english-speaking expatriates refer to st’aianshik’ebi as the “modi-men,” because they say modi, modi! (“come, come!”) to beckon drivers into free spots, particularly when apprehensive drivers in conditions of low visibility halt before backing up far enough. st’aianshik’ebi engage in other traffic services for regular customers, such as reserving spots and coordinating situations of double-parking or other parking maneuvers (cf. chelcea and iancu 2015, 66–67). unlike in bucharest, many of the self-appointed parking attendants in tbilisi have a reputation for alcoholism, and it is not uncommon to find parking attendants who drink on the job. citizens as well as governmental officials have criticized ct park. aliko elisashvili, a member of the city council, vocally reprimanded ct park for the way the company has handled city parking. in 2014, elisashvili even pursued an annulment of the city’s contract with ct park. mayor davit narmania, who was elected in 2014 and served until november 2017, has also been critical of the company.16 in a television interview, narmania asserted, for example, that ct park profits from the chaotic parking culture in tbilisi but does nothing to improve it. “i’ll put it plainly,” he said, “ct park will not remain in tbilisi for long.” yet canceling the contract with ct park would cost an estimated 25 million georgian lari (about us$10 million), exceeding what the local budget can supply. city hall has sought renegotiation on several points of the original contract, while stopping short of proposing an annulment. in january 2015, mayor narmania announced that a new multilevel parking structure would be built in tbilisi, one that would serve as a competitor to ct park. speaking to a journalist, narmania said: “as for city park’s fate, it currently remains unsettled” (agenda.ge 2015). later that year, the georgian parliament approved changes to parking laws that reduced the range of cases for which ct park could tow vehicles. a few months later, my friend ilia17 and i conducted a telephone interview with a public relations representative from ct park, levan tabidze. we inquired about why the organization had developed a negative reputation. tabidze answered in this way: first of all, there is no parking organization in the world where most people meet such an organization positively, as [such an organization] is associated with fines and taking cars away. it is associated with the negative. the kindness that this organization does nobody recognizes. . . . let me give you a very simple example. i live in vake. . . . i remember what chaos there was in my nearby street in terms of parking. since ct park entered the market and established the rule that cars can be parked on the left and not on the right, the traffic is more simplified now and is not so complicated. even pedestrians, who can walk on the sidewalks normally nowadays, they don’t remember this. . . . we must also take into account the situation in georgia before. we drew a city map of tbilisi and the plan of how and where to draw the parking lines, we planned the city, we put up the signs—as for the [no parking] sign, there was none in the city. there were no parking methods, which we have nowadays. there was total chaos in the city, and nobody responded to it. we didn’t have parking problems resolved over the years, we didn’t have parking culture itself at all. there were no parking problems in the soviet union at all, and in the 1990s everything was ruined and complete chaos was set up. and from the 1990s up to 2007 the number of cars increased tenfold, and ct park started to clean up this chaos. tabidze argued that parking problems did not exist in the soviet union. once automobility intensified in the 1990s, ct park stepped in to create parking order from “chaos.” the swirl of public, activist, and governmental discontent with the “parking culture” promulgated by ct park raised questions about its efficacy. meanwhile, ct park policed only the zones in which they had been granted jurisdiction. in many other parts of the city, cars roamed freely. right before we interviewed levan, a neighbor called to let ilia know that his car, which was illegally parked on an adjacent street, was being ticketed. when ilia came back inside after moving the car, i asked him how the ticketing system worked. he showed me the online ct park interface, where customers could check and pay for their fines. i noticed that his account had eight unpaid fines. when i asked about this, he remarked that he would never pay them. this reaction reminded me of what james scott (1985) calls the “weapons of the weak,” forms of everyday resistance available to the relatively powerless. yet ct park, as a private organization without widespread popular or governmental support, was also relatively powerless. ilia did not consider the organization’s authority over parking legitimate, and was unconcerned about the possibility of ct park’s retribution. he told me that ct park mailed tickets in hard copy, but ilia refused to accept the mail. the mailman understood ilia’s refusal and would simply return the ct park tickets, indicating that the intended recipient was not home. the stopkham campaign in russia georgian activists and politicians alike hold a euro-normative conception of modernity as an aspirational target for tbilisi, even if they may disagree on the forms its material infrastructures ought to take. for georgian activists, russian influence, even in the form of inspiration for social action, is undesirable in part because of associations with the soviet past. russia figures as a second-order version of modernity, and many distance themselves from deploying signs of russianness, as they call up the history of hierarchy in which georgia held a subordinate political and cultural position. in an example of this insistence on georgian difference, a pedestrian rights organization called iare pekhit (literally, “go by foot”) released a youtube video in april 2015 that discussed the genesis and goals of their sidewalk social activism.18 in this video, called “vin aris anonymous georgian?” (who is anonymous georgian?), a masked person called anonymous georgian introduces him or herself as a chveulebrivi mokalake (a regular citizen) and goes on to narrate the video in a low voice modulated to conceal the speaker’s identity.19 anonymous georgian describes how the idea of putting flyers on cars arose as a reaction to the parking and traffic problems in tbilisi. the speaker refers to another activist who curates an online repository of photos of drivers in violation of rules (the facebook page is called gaitsanit samartskhvino mdzgholebi [meet shameless drivers]), and says that anonymous georgian had likewise begun making videos of drivers, even going so far as blocking cars from passing on the sidewalk. then the narrator makes a connection to the practices of stopkham in russia: “when i said this idea [of blocking the sidewalk] loudly, someone sent me a link to stopkham. some also accused me of plagiarizing stopkham, but that is not so. i heard about the existence of stopkham at the end.” what is stopkham? in russia, drivers have taken to the sidewalks to circumnavigate congested roads. the stopkham (“stop a douchebag”) campaign began in moscow in 2010. the group, founded by dmitry chugunov, is a government-sponsored organization that spun off from the controversial pro-kremlin youth movement nashi. according to the journalist eva hartog (2016), stopkham received about 18 million russian rubles (us$300,000) in federal grants between 2013 and 2015. the concept behind stopkham is that a group of citizens prevent motorists from driving on sidewalks by physically standing in the way and then, if motorists persist, as they often do, affixing large stickers to their windshields. they also affix stickers to cars whose drivers violate other traffic regulations, such as double-parking or parking in inappropriate locations. the stickers say mne plevat’ na vsekh / parkuyus’ gde khochu (i don’t care about others / i park where i want) or, for those driving on sidewalks, mne plevat’ na vsekh / ezzhu kak khochu (i don’t care about others / i drive how i want). figure 6. stopkham sticker that reads: “i don’t care about others / i park where i want.” the text in the outer circle reads: “federal program against rudeness on the roads.” image by stopkham. these encounters with so-called douchebags are video-recorded, edited with an electronic music soundtrack, and uploaded to youtube.20 aside from providing a valuable repository for students of russian swearing (mat), these videos, some of which have millions of views, are demonstrations of a new form of vigilante justice in action. in addition to the entertainment value of these videos, the recordings also show how activists have intervened in public space to police the public/private divide. upon discovering that the activists and the stopkham stickers will not budge, drivers often scream that stopkham is encroaching on their chastnaya sobstvennost’ (private property) or, more simply, their sobstvennost’ (property). the calculated indifference that members of stopkham express at this sentiment reflects their mission to preserve the sidewalk as a domain for public, pedestrian movement. their campaign assails the sanctity of the private vehicle by lacquering it with stickers. in a way, the stopkham campaign refuses a nesting of the public and private. the same logic holds true for stopkham antismoking videos, in which the activists extinguish pedestrians’ cigarettes with a spray bottle, thereby refusing to acknowledge the smoker as freely passing through public space in a private bubble. they treat smoking as a violation of standards of publicness. the stopkham campaign thus contests the rights of private properties to pass or waft through the public space of the sidewalk.21 figure 7. still image from the video “arrogant smokers,” in which activists extinguish smokers’ cigarettes using a spray bottle. image by stopkham. this form of activism is noteworthy as much for its innovative use of social media as for its focus on the public/private distinction as a crucial site of societal transformation. though the teleology it presupposes is no longer from capitalist to socialist, the stopkham campaign asserts boundaries between public and private property in ways that are reminiscent of earlier utopian projects of social transformation.22 for stopkham, the target of transformation is renegade private property that rolls over curbs and down pedestrian paths. such actions taken against private impingements on public space, however, should not be understood as reflecting a straightforward political position. targeting the excesses of automobility, even if activists do not frame it in these terms, suggests that such excesses are the signs of a moral boundary has been crossed.23 social actors who seek to transform urban parking culture by targeting excesses, through policy or advocacy, define modes of desirable (or adequate) urbanity in the process. the moral order that the stopkham campaign asserts does not present a positive ideal, but mobilizes negative correctives against certain private behaviors that impinge on shared public space. such public shaming tactics raise the question: how are shame and freedom related in the liberal tradition of the city? activists hope that shaming a douchebag driver will rebalance the pedestrian-versus-vehicle divide in a way that affords more freedom to the walking subject. but drivers, too, assert that their own freedoms are being impinged upon. in the russian case, it is the state that restricts certain car freedoms in order to promote pedestrian freedoms. the georgian state, by contrast, has ceded parking authority to ct park, with poor results. with that, i return to the georgian case to provide more detail on the contours of pedestrian activism and shame. european boundaries as the parking system expands, how do social actors envision new urban harmonies? in addition to being a generative topic of complaint in everyday conversation, the filling of sidewalk space with cars has also served as a point of critique for a variety of activist organizations. here, i highlight the pedestrian rights organization iare pekhit.24 challenging uses of sidewalk space in georgia, as activists have increasingly done over the past decade, has involved redefining publicness through the figure of the pedestrian, whose ambulatory paths have faced a changing bevy of obstructions including other people. the primary tension that has come to the fore in protests is the conflicted cultural symbolism of the personal automobile: a sign of comfort and individual prosperity, but also of disregard for pedestrians and the environment. signs of prosperity are impoverishing pedestrian life. as cars circulate along sidewalks, activists have concentrated their work on defining and policing the threshold where the sidewalk ends and the street begins. to describe models of the city to which tbilisi might aspire, social actors often refer to other real or imagined urban landscapes in the manner of collage, fashioning a discursive composite of places such as barcelona, shanghai, berlin, and paris, as if they possessed a common denominator. the templates of imagined order to which activists appeal discursively combine diverse postmodern cities into a placeless modern composite, for which the car-free walking subject constitutes the centerpiece of urban life. in one example, elene margvelashvili, the then leader of iare pekhit, said in an interview that she wanted to meet enrique peñalosa, the mayor of bogotá, colombia, because in her view peñalosa had managed to change public perception of pedestrian rights.25 government officials and activists alike positioned tbilisi uneasily amid a palette of eclectic, incommensurate modern elsewheres. later in the same interview, when asked what her dream is for iare pekhit, margvelashvili replied: a city that fosters human dignity and respect, development, a sense of freedom. but a sense of freedom that stands a lot higher than your personal freedom. a sense of a community, equality, and just, you know, a cool city, where you really do enjoy your time outside. because i miss this so much that sometimes i just want to rush out of tbilisi and go to somewhere like berlin where i can just lie down in a big park and just enjoy my day, which is something impossible in tbilisi today. so yeah, european city [laughs]. here, margvelashvili simultaneously invests tbilisi with aspirational resemblances to bogotá and berlin.26 in another interview, in response to a question about how people can help, margvelashvili replied that what her organization needed was “foreign experience.”27 she went on: many countries in europe have managed to convince their government and managed to stop this unbreakable cycle of turning cities into places not for humans but for something else, for making money, for business, for prosperity of higher levels, for higher-income people and communities. the sentiment that cities are turning into environments hospitable only to businesses, not people, serves as a reminder that iare pekhit centers the pedestrian in its reimagining of the street. margvelashvili’s concern that tbilisi was becoming a city “for making money” rather than one for “humans” also contained a critique of emergent class divisions. the relationship between pedestrian life and class divisions begs the question of how organizations like iare pekhit deal with the legacy of the soviet past, as the soviet reformulation of public space was also intended to disrupt class divisions. margvelashvili’s solution was to selectively borrow from the soviet past, rather than framing it as a nostalgic ideal. in the earlier interview, she simultaneously praised and criticized the soviet experience for imbuing and depriving citizens of a “sense of community”: this sense of community, which should be there, because the soviet union was actually very community-oriented, is not there. because what the soviet union, i think, killed in our community is the sense that one person is responsible for the common good, and can actually contribute to the common good. this understanding was not there because everything belongs to everybody, and this responsibility of every single person to do something for the general development, for the general well-being, is not there. so this is where education should come in, and this sense of, you know, civic engagement, civic responsibility, the responsibility of every person to do good, not just in terms of pedestrian issues. margvelashvili does not provide an explanation of what the problem with the “community-oriented” soviet union was. instead, she uses the soviet era as a reference point to discuss the personal and community responsibility that education must address. the class politics of this vision for freedom and responsibility in urban space remain unclear. perhaps she meant to suggest that the soviet experience valued the right thing (“community”) but in the wrong way, or with the wrong effects. referring to an array of urban places that have supposedly achieved a higher level of civilizational modernity than tbilisi also served as a way to describe georgia’s capital in terms of a state of comparative lack. even though margvelashvili’s comparisons included urban centers in south america and asia, she nevertheless referred to these places with the shorthand of “european.” it is as though europe were a roulette wheel on which it would be a privilege for georgia to fall, regardless of the particular tile. redescriptions of an idealized past often form the basis for claims about future political trajectories (gotfredsen 2014; khalvashi 2015). as katrine bendtsen gotfredsen (2014, 251) has discussed, under saakashvili, an unambiguous rhetoric of development and prosperity was constructed as an antithesis to the soviet past. preindustrial, soviet modernist, and capitalist european forms served as reference points in narratives about clashes of values in the present. in tbilisi, pedestrianism is not a return to an imagined harmonious past, but a new mode of order resonant with european forms. reasserting boundaries, which activists imagine as a form of european order, stands as a mode of anachronistic imagining—but one without a clear relationship to the soviet past. a variety of other organizations in addition to iare pekhit are invested in so-called eco-urbanism in tbilisi, harboring broad agendas for political and social change. my final example comes from a group called aighe kalaki (“take the city”), which promoted the construction of planters as makeshift sidewalk bollards. the group created a youtube instructional video in which they describe how to craft bollards from car tires. in the video, group members fabricate bollards on tbilisi streets with a portable lamp illuminating their work in the dark. this type of time-consuming diy intervention straddles art and utility. the video ends with a shot of the completed bollards, standing on an otherwise empty sidewalk. superimposed text reads daik’ave q’vela t’rot’uari! (occupy all the sidewalks!). like the anonymous reference in the campaign by iare pekhit, this form of occupy-style messaging links sidewalk politics to international protest movements. tires filled with potted plants are more than barriers to cars: their digital representations are signs of belonging in an era of mediatized protest. conclusion: walking into modernity the public shaming tactics that i have described—campaigns insisting that suv drivers have small penises, or posting pictures of instances of rude driving and parking online, or extinguishing cigarettes with spray bottles—are intended to catalyze self-regulation on the part of their targets. they form part of a broader moral policing of how automobility has allowed public space to become invaded by a swarm of mobile metal private spheres. self-regulation is taken as the mark of a modern, ethical liberal subject, as well as its socialist twin. another aspect of the use of such tactics, however, is that they are designed to catalyze an affective response, and in doing so, to function as a means of exerting power over the target. as performative acts, such shaming tactics may accomplish a wide variety of ends, including occupying, insulting, threatening, and refusing. while shaming campaigns may generate reflection on the boundaries of acceptable public comportment, the more immediate activist goal is to generate attention and discomfort. martha nussbaum (2004, 15) describes shame as “normatively unreliable” as a punitive measure, in part because of the indeterminacy of its effects on subjects.28 in the context of social activism, though, the indeterminacy of shame’s effects can be beneficial insofar as the goal is to stir up sentiments, rather than to settle new norms of behavior. in tbilisi, emerging contests over parking demonstrate how local actors make sense of the aesthetic and economic conditions of urban lack. in response to the erosion of sidewalk boundaries, shame, as the “affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation” (tomkins 1995, 133), occupies a primary position. one reason for this is that shame emerges in situations of unmet ideals. it operates, as tamta khalvashi (2015) has described, as a diffuse but pervasive affect in conditions of peripherality. activists throughout the world wield shame as an instrument of social change; what is specific to the case of urban georgia, though, is that shame, as a discursive hinge, joins dimensions of inferiority that exceed a singular politics and do not coalesce into a program with a positive ideal. rather than offering a cultural-psychological explanation for the appearance of certain affects, then, i have focused in this article on how a series of interrelated conditions shape the particular contours and transformations of shame in urban postsocialist activism. as precipitated in encounters with material infrastructure, shame articulates a sense of comparative lack. in turn, activists minimize their experience of this negative affect by redirecting it toward inconsiderate drivers, thereby converting it into a tool of public good. restoring or preserving the pedestrian function of the sidewalk is framed as a way to keep civility and personal dignity intact. without a consensus about the ideal form of public good or an agreed-upon balance among logics of automobility, pedestrianism, and public transportation, a circuit of negative affect remains open. the lack of consensus about the shape of the public good remains an underlying cause of the dismal friction of tbilisi’s urban condition. pedestrian activists’ rhetoric about the desirability of european boundaries animates unfulfilled modernist dreams and, in so doing, draws attention to the irreparable gaps between the promises of urbanism and the practical realities of investor urbanist development. furthermore, such rhetoric signals an ambivalence about the meanings of collective and material life in european modernity, encompassing nineteenth-century ideals of pedestrianism and their afterlives. notes acknowledgments thanks to maria abascal, florian biermann, dominic boyer, elsa devienne, dana graef, michelle jurkovich, alaina lemon, tony levitas, paul manning, casey miller, sue petersen nedved, serguei oushakine, bridget purcell, emily wilson, the brown university department of anthropology lunchtime colloquium participants, and five anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology. 1. see hartblay 2017 on practices and discourses around disability access in russia. 2. fountains, especially those equipped with amplified music boxes, came to be emblematic features of the urban development that saakashvili promoted during his presidency (2004–2013). in front of the concert hall, for example, a large fountain decorated with a painting of a red rose had been installed. paul manning (2009b, 927) argues that the rose revolution formed a “culture of erasure, in which western capitalist brands were deployed to banish, once and for all, the last vestiges of socialism.” this erasure was a precondition for the material inscription of a european orientation, which, in turn, was to influence “mentality” (cf. jones 2006; curro 2015). for further discussion of the rose revolution, see manning 2007 and jones 2012. 3. i follow the apridonidze system of transliteration for georgian to english, except in the case of personal names and other proper nouns, for which i leave off the diacritic markers in the english transliteration. all translations of georgian and russian are my own unless otherwise noted. 4. i follow silvan tomkins’s (1995) conceptualization of affect as a motivational system that operates alongside the drives. 5. in georgia, everyday interactions with the car system reflect the consequences of poverty. in neighboring azerbaijan, by contrast, the uneven consequences of renovation and hyperbuilding are objects of scrutiny in making sense of aesthetic and economic surplus and its discontents (grant 2014). 6. lutz and lutz fernandez (2010, xi) define the car system as “a mix of industry, infrastructure, land use, governmental activity, consumer behavior, and habitual processes of daily travel.” i use the terms car system and automobility interchangeably in this article. 7. penny harvey and hannah knox (2015, 3), in comparison, analyze roads as a mundane infrastructure that allow us to “register histories and expectations of state presence and state neglect.” 8. on networked infrastructure and technological mobilities, see graham and marvin 2001. 9. scholarship on the links between socialist material culture and ideology has found distinctive footholds either in inner domestic spaces, with housing serving as a preeminent example (see humphrey 2005), or in the construction of monumental public forms like statues. when semipublic spaces, such as the corridor or courtyard, appear in analyses of socialist and postsocialist architectural forms, they are often positioned as buffer zones between the inner realm of the communal apartment and the outer realm of the public street. susan gal (2002) has observed that the public/private distinction constitutes a malleable, shifting mode of oppositions. 10. blomley’s concept of pedestrianism is not to be confused with competitive speed-walking, a sport popular in the nineteenth century that went by the same name. for an account of recent scholarly work on the social practice of walking, see lorimer 2011. 11. shared space is a “traffic engineering concept that eliminates physical barriers separating motor vehicles, pedestrians, and other road users to facilitate a sharing of street space” (imrie 2012, 2261). this design model has negative consequences for vision-impaired populations (imrie 2012; sánchez criado and cereceda otárola 2016). as the scholars of urban planning anastasia loukaitou-sideris and renia ehrenfeucht (2009, 33) have observed, historically, the figure of the pedestrian has been equated with the public, a process that characterized by social exclusion. 12. for a history of the soviet automobile, including its cultural symbolism, see siegelbaum 2008. 13. for georgian modernist conceptions of paris as an incarnation of the fantastic western european urban cosmopolitan wished-for homeland, see manning 2013. 14. the georgian term st’aianshik’ebi is a calque from the russian stoyanshchiki, formed from the noun stoyanka (parking). 15. my use of the term mediator echoes bruno latour’s (1993, 77–78) opposition between intermediaries, which simply “transfer, transport, and transmit,” and the mediator, which is an “original event and creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role.” latour revisits the intermediary/mediator division in reassembling the social, where he explains that mediators effect transformations (in meaning) while intermediaries do not: they simply “transport” it (latour 2015, 39). 16. the newly elected mayor kakha kaladze has also spoken out about ongoing public concern over ct park’s practices and their overall effect on tbilisi’s parking culture (morrison 2017). 17. this is a pseudonym selected by the informant. all other names in this article are real. 18. the video is available on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt-6fmyg4p4. 19. on the organization anonymous and its links to protest, social activism, and hacking, see coleman 2014. 20. the english-language channel is no longer available, but the russian-language channel is available as of this writing at https://www.youtube.com/user/stopxamlive. 21. the fate of the stopkham movement, however, has grown uncertain as participants have enforced traffic laws against political elites, rather than exempting them (hartog 2016). 22. susan gal (2002, 86) points out that the “public/private distinction was . . . directly targeted by communist theorists in the nineteenth century—and by soviet and, later, east central european communist parties—as essential points for transforming bourgeois, capitalist society through social engineering.” 23. on the concept of excess, see phillips 2010. 24. iare pekhit was founded by an american named mark mullen. in june 2015, i spoke with him about the genesis and goals of the organization. he believed that without the consistent enforcement of parking rules, the problem of sidewalk drivers would remain. mullen was optimistic that a zero-tolerance policy would fix the traffic problems of tbilisi. by way of analogy, he described the seat-belt regulation, championed by vano merabishvili (minister of internal affairs from 2004 to 2012) as an example of a zero-tolerance policy that created rapid social change. prior to the regulation, almost no one in georgia wore a seat belt, but within a matter of weeks, that changed because drivers and passengers were fined 40 lari (about $15 at the time) for not doing so. nevertheless, cultural obstacles to seat-belt use exist, as refusing 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asia meet, edited by kristof van assche, joseph salukvadze, and nick shavishvili, 189–208. lewiston, n.y.: edwin mellen press. volkov, vadim 2000 “the concept of kul’turnost’: notes on the stalinist civilizing process.” in stalinism: new directions, edited by sheila fitzpatrick, 210–30. new york: routledge. whyte, william h. 2000 “new york and tokyo: a study in crowding.” in the essential william h. whyte, edited by albert lafarge, 227–45. new york: fordham university press. originally published in 1977. suggestions of movement suggestions of movement: voice and sonic atmospheres in mauritian muslim devotional practices patrick eisenlohr university of göttingen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4843-4169 one afternoon in july 2010, i was sitting in shareef’s living room in a village in central mauritius. shareef is a schoolteacher and was also the president (mutawalli) of the local mosque. he is widely known in mauritius as a reciter of na‘t, a genre of urdu devotional poetry that honors the prophet muhammad. in collaboration with other mauritian reciters of na‘t (na‘t khwan), he has released nine collections of na‘t audio-cd recordings, and he has more recently also published na‘t recordings on youtube. at the beginning of our conversation i had asked him for an example of what he thought was an appropriate way of reciting na‘t. as we were talking about events that had happened in our lives since our first encounter some seven years earlier, shareef switched from mauritian creole, the predominant french-lexifier vernacular language of mauritius in which we conversed,1 to urdu and suddenly started reciting. i had reached his house just before a heavy rain set in, darkening the sky, and now the hissing sounds of car and bus tires rolling on wet asphalt entered through the window from the nearby main road that passed along the edge of the village. in a slow, elegiac air, shareef recited two lines of na‘t poetry: āj ashk merī na‘t sunāye to ajab kyā what if my tears would recite na‘t today? o what wonder this would be sunkar voh mujhe pās bulāye to ajab kyā what if he [the prophet] listened, calling me to be close to him? o what wonder this would be by way of explanation, shareef added: what i want to say is, if one day huzur [the prophet] hears my na‘t and then he says, ey, you are too far away, come close to me and come and recite this in front of my tomb, how wonderful this would be. but if i go to a mehfil [a devotional gathering], those who are there have a booklet with the text of the na‘t. and then when they sit there they start reciting like this. shareef then launched into a rhythmic air, reciting the same two lines at much greater speed, his vocal expression suggesting an entirely different, more distanced mood. āj ashk merī na‘t sunāye to ajab kyā what if my tears would recite na‘t today? o what wonder this would be sunkar voh mujhe pās bulāye to ajab kyā what if he [the prophet] listened, calling me to be close to him? o what wonder this would be shareef continued: “beh, you see, it is devoid of any emotion! there is no emotion, there is none of the sentiment i try to transmit. well, i said to myself, i have to record my recitations. just to let people know what the original air is that one has to put into the na‘t when reciting it.” shareef stressed how reciting exactly the same lines of poetic text might have very different, indeed opposite effects depending on the mode and style of vocal rendering. for shareef, the poetic texts recited in a performance of na‘t are of course highly important; indeed, they are sometimes even the focus of disputes. however, in our conversation and his reciting of examples shareef made it clear that the sonic rendering of the poetry was also of crucial significance for a successful recital. both poetic discourse and its appropriate vocal performance stirred feelings of affection for the prophet among those listening to the poetry, provoking the ardent wish to be close to him. shareef’s comments and vocal demonstration thus raised the issue of the voice and its effects in several ways. he pointed to the intertwining of the discursive and sonic dimensions of the voice, a theme that has lately gained increased attention in anthropology (kunreuther 2006, 2014; weidman 2006, 2014; harkness 2011, 2014; faudree 2012; briggs 2014; jacobsen-bia 2014; bakker kellogg 2015). more broadly, voice has emerged as a pivotal concept in the discipline, bringing together a range of research directions on subjectivity, language, and sound. critiques of the established logocentric paradigm of the voice as the expression of a unified, authorial self have become increasingly widespread in recent years. for example, inspired by mikhail bakhtin’s (1981) theorizing of polyphony in discourse and erving goffman’s (1974) work on fragmentary and shifting participant roles in interaction, linguistic anthropologists have demonstrated the multiplicity of stances that speakers can inhabit in a single utterance (levinson 1988; irvine 1996). this line of work on voicing has demonstrated that a subject’s voice is the outcome of complex social processes, in which voice refers to “the linguistic construction of social personae” (keane 1999, 171). subjects can inhabit and rapidly shift among a plurality of recognizably other, typified voices, positioning themselves vis-à-vis such cited voice-utterances in different ways (hill 1995; agha 2005; keane 2011). breaking up the equation of voice with a subject’s intentionality and authorial agency, this strand of research has drawn attention to the fractured multiplicity that often characterizes the links between voice and subjectivity. this research tradition has usefully complicated the identification of a single voice with a single subject, which lies at the heart of the common use of the category of voice as a metaphor for a subject’s agency and intentionality. it has, however, paid far less attention to the embodied voice’s sonic materiality. more recently, a number of anthropologists have sought to overcome the “oppositions between a masculinized, signifying, authorial voice, and a feminized, sonic, material vocality” (weidman 2015, 240) pervading north atlantic scholarship about the voice. these anthropological interventions reject the notion of a logocentric authorial voice. they also position themselves against a one-sided valorization of the voice as “the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (barthes 2012, 506), or alternatively, as an autonomous object, an “object voice” (dolar 2006, 11) that from a psychoanalytical perspective exceeds subjectivity and signification. anthropological approaches to what nicholas harkness (2014, 12) has called the “phonosonic nexus” have drawn analytic connections between the historically grounded analysis of social values with which those performing vocal sound align themselves and the sonic materialities of the voice, showing how the latter function as integral parts of emerging subjectivities and social formations (weidman 2006; harkness 2014; kunreuther 2014). while i am inspired by this recent anthropological turn toward the sonic dimensions of the voice, in this article i would like to shift my focus away from the issue of subjectivity to the body as the site where vocal sound originates, reverberates, and rebounds. more specifically, i would like to point to the centrality of the phenomenological felt-body (leib) in contradistinction to the physical body (körper) for the analysis of voice. the distinction between leib and körper was first made by helmuth plessner (1982) and adopted by edmund husserl (1973, 57) and maurice merleau-ponty (2002, 329–30).2 i specifically draw on hermann schmitz’s (1965) more recent explication of the notion of leib as reaching beyond the boundaries of the physical body. the purchase of the notion of the felt-body in this context is that the felt-body transcends the limits of the material body as it is commonly conceived and thereby helps to do justice to sound as a material phenomenon that ignores the boundaries of bodies. the felt-body is the space of what is felt to pertain to the body beyond what are normally regarded as its limits, thus complicating distinctions between inside and outside. for this reason, the notion of the felt-body proves useful for grasping the intermingling of sonic phenomena with human bodies. drawing on newer approaches in phenomenology, i suggest that an analytic of atmospheres can provide useful leads for a better understanding of vocal sound as a force that is socially meaningful but at the same time often appears ineffable in the way it generates its effects. arguing against the increasingly widespread identification of the sonic with affect among scholars in the field of sound studies, i suggest atmospheres as a conceptual tool that offers a way out of persistent dualisms between mind and body, as well as signification and affect, which continue to haunt much writing about the voice and sound more broadly. devotional performances in this article i am concerned with the recitation of na‘t, devotional poetry in honor of the prophet muhammad. the recitation of these hymns and poems, usually in urdu, is very popular in south asia and the south asian diasporas. in my research, i have focused on the performance of this poetic genre among muslims in mauritius, where approximately 70 percent of the population is of indian origin. this devotional practice is particularly widespread among the followers of the ahl-e sunnat wa jama‘at, an islamic reform movement with origins in late nineteenth-century colonial india that fuses ‘ulema-based islam, which is based on communities of islamic scholars, with the sufi tradition (sanyal 1996). for many followers of this south asian islamic tradition, the extolling and praising of the prophet that is at the center of the recitals aims to bring about his spiritual presence. gaining access to god via a spiritual intermediary, such as a saint or the prophet, is in turn one of the hallmarks of sufi traditions of islam. for this reason, the practice of collectively reciting na‘t to personally apprehend the prophet has also invited criticism by followers of other, more purist islamic currents who consider the emphasis on spiritual mediation and the exuberant praise of the prophet a denial of the unicity of god. many of these critics hail from the deobandi and salafi traditions, both of which are also present in mauritius, the former especially through the deoband-affiliated missionary movement tablighi jama‘at. in recent decades, these two traditions have made steady inroads into the constituency of the ahl-e sunnat wa jama‘at, as has happened in india and pakistan. islamic traditions have long regarded vocal recital as a privileged avenue to divine presence. a powerful qur’anic paradigm according to which the reciting voice is the site where god manifests himself in this world has had a profound impact on islamic ritual practices and scholarly learning (nelson 2001; gade 2006; jouili and moors 2014). this religious paradigm presents an interesting variation on the theme of the voice as an other— here, the presence of god—that has come to play a key role in anthropological and psychoanalytical engagements with the voice. while different from the recitation of scripture, mauritian muslims’ recitation of na‘t is also informed by this particular sensibility to vocal sound as divine manifestation. in its textual and discursive dimensions, na‘t not only features exuberant praise of the prophet and expressions of utmost devotional and attachment to him. many na‘t also center on the theme of medina, considered to be the prophet’s favorite city. the sights and landmarks of the city are lauded in the most enthusiastic and affectionate ways, and the devotees’ ardent wish to travel to medina underlines the poetic role of medina as a stand-in for the presence of the prophet. accordingly, the devotional poems revolving around a longing for medina are widely taken to be expressions of the desire to personally encounter the prophet. moreover, in a process of voicing, the lead reciters seek to appropriate the voice of prominent author-saints who are assumed to have been the composers of many well-known na‘t, merging these poetic words of such saints with their own responsibility and agency as an expression of their personal devotion to the prophet. the performance of the poetry is thus markedly polyphonic in a bakhtinian sense, as the reciters combine their personal agency with those of divinely inspired saint-poets. in goffmanian terms, this results in an overlap of the participant roles of composer, sponsor, and relayer (goffman 1974; levinson 1988), giving the voice of the na‘t khwan a complex, multifaceted character resulting from social processes of discourse circulation and appropriation. as important as these discursive dimensions are for a successful performance of na‘t, for shareef and others among my mauritian muslim interlocutors, its sonic dimensions were also crucial. in fact, many of the conversations about na‘t performances that i had in mauritius centered on the qualities of the voice a good na‘t khwan should have. several of my respondents described how a na‘t khwan’s voice would deeply touch them, stirring love for the prophet in them while moving them profoundly in ways they often struggled to describe. atmospheres the contagious quality of the feelings that a good na‘t recital spreads was a recurrent topic in my conversations with my mauritian interlocutors. farhad, a young na‘t khwan and urdu teacher said: when an ordinary person reads na‘t, the others who are listening will just sit there. they will appreciate the recital, but they will stay silent. however, we who are used to reciting na‘t, when a na‘t khwan recites we are not able to remain silent any more, we have to join in. we call that jawab [urdu for answer]. once we join in, he [the na‘t khwan] is happy; when he is happy that means he gains respect and his message comes across, and he recites even better, he gives everything. according to farhad, the voice of a skilled na‘t khwan compels listeners to respond, joining into shared exclamation. in another conversation he pointed out that when provoking such a response, the voice would literally “grip” the audience with force. one of his friends, mohamed, a former school principal, even spoke of audiences seized by the force of a na‘t khwan as “vibrating” in unison. as several of my interlocutors stressed, to be able to do so, a na‘t khwan’s voice would have to be “touching” those exposed to it. how can one account for the sensations of touch and vibrating movement that my respondents described? clearly, an analysis of the discursive dimensions of the poetry alone is not sufficient to grasp the sensations and tangible effects of the voice that farhad and others describe. the widespread use of voice as a category indicating subject positions, interactional stances, and participant roles in the traditions of mikhail bakhtin and erving goffman will not get us much closer to the bodily felt effects of vocal sound that appear to be so central to the performance of na‘t as a devotional practice. for this, we need an approach that takes sound seriously, doing justice to the kinds of knowledge and effects mediated by it. my interlocutors often found it difficult to make clear what exactly the voice of a na‘t khwan did to them, considering its effects both ineffable and profound. such vagueness in the face of an undeniable presence lies behind the power of na‘t khwans’ voices to provoke spontaneous responses among their audiences, and to carry them along in ways that go beyond the metaphorical. nevertheless, several of my interlocutors did come forward with descriptions of their culturally embedded perceptions of sound, thereby pointing to the crucial role of auditory cultures, learned techniques of attending to sonic events that are part of larger sociocultural complexes, such as a particular religious tradition (feld 1996; schmidt 2000; bull and back 2003; sterne 2003; erlmann 2004, feld et al. 2004, kane 2015, 15). a skillful vocal performance would make mohamed feel “transported elsewhere, to a better place.” in many na‘t, medina, as the prophet’s favorite city, is exuberantly extolled as such a desirable destination, with the devotee longing to travel there, hoping to encounter the presence of the prophet himself. that is, the voice of a na‘t khwan would move listeners to this pious destination, close to the prophet. na‘t khwans’ voices were described as producing sonic events that effected profound transformations in listeners. a common thread in the responses my interlocutors provided when trying to describe their experiences of being touched by a good na‘t khwan’s voice were sensations of movement exerted on them, making such phrases as “making one vibrate” or “moving one to a different place” common. one image that shareef used to describe such an experience of felt movement was “getting on a bus,” traveling toward a desired destination through sonic affection. the sonic dynamics of a voice would then result in changes in the body’s felt location in space. i suggest that the analytic of sonic atmospheres that i describe in this essay can offer a promising approach to understand how such movements can be more than poetic metaphors, having a very literal base as well. the bodily encounter with voice was the dimension of na‘t performances that my mauritian muslim interlocutors found most powerful, though they struggled to describe what exactly these encounters consisted of. through my conversations with them, and during my attendance of mahfil-e mawlud (devotional gatherings where na‘t is recited), it became clear that these felt encounters revolved around moments of sonic intensification, that is, around marked instances of vocally enacted movement that affected listeners in a somatic register. where does this peculiar power of voices come from? how can we account for its capacity to move people in ways that go beyond the metaphoric? i suggest that such effects can best be understood as the workings of sonic atmospheres. here i draw on recent work in music studies that treats sonic phenomena as atmospheres (abels 2013, 2017). for such neo-phenomenologists as gernot böhme and hermann schmitz, atmospheres—including those containing sonic dimensions—are “ecstasies of the thing” (böhme 1993, 110), exuding from people, objects, or their combinations. atmospheres are quasi-objective entities that spread in a given space, touching and enveloping the bodies of those perceiving them in a way that exceed single, definite sensory impressions. far from being a matter of subjectivist interiority, feelings are atmospheres poured into a space where they encounter and impact humans, similar to the sensations of being in darkness or warmth (schmitz, müllan, and slaby 2011, 255). sound and sonic events in turn provide concrete, empirically observable instantiations of böhme’s notion of atmospheres as “ecstasies of the thing.” they exist in time, can be measured, and propagate through space. for schmitz (2014, 30; author’s translation), sound and sonic events rank among the foremost instances of atmospheres as “the occupying of a nondimensional space or area within the range of experienced presence.” sound waves come into existence when objects or human bodies disturb a medium such as air, enveloping and often transductively entering the bodies of those perceiving them, thereby weakening their boundaries. sound waves propagating through the medium of air as differences in air pressure cannot only be perceived by the hearing apparatus but can also potentially reverberate in and be sensed by the entire body, by its flesh. this is an experience familiar to anyone who has felt the bass resonate in one’s own body in a dance club (henriques 2003). unlike the notion of soundscape, which in its analogy to landscape suggests a three-dimensional auditory space that a listener is confronted with, an analytic of atmospheres attends to the intermingling of sound and the felt-body.3 in this somatic dimension, sound is one of our principal modes of experiential commingling with the world (ingold 2007, 11). according to böhme (2000, 18), the concrete role that sonic phenomena play in such commingling is that they affect the felt-body’s sense of spatiality: listeners will sense tones, voices, sounds as modifications of their own space of being. human beings who listen in this way are dangerously open, they release themselves into the world and can therefore be struck by acoustic events. . . . listening is a being-beside-yourself (außer-sich-sein); it can for this reason be the joyful experience of discovering oneself to be alive. connecting these insights to a larger theory of sonic atmospheres, böhme (2000, 16) writes about the often remarked-upon emotional force and ineffability of musical effects: the discovery that music is the fundamental atmospheric art has solved an old, always annoying and yet inescapable problem of musical theory, i.e. the question: of what does music’s so-called emotional effect actually consist? . . . the aesthetics of atmospheres gives a simple answer to the question: music as such is a modification of space as it is experienced by the body. music forms and informs the listener’s sense of self (das sichbefinden) in a space; it reaches directly into his or her corporeal economy. concerning the particular nondiscursive power of voices on those exposed to them, böhme (2009, 30–31; author’s translation) points to the ways in which vocal sound manipulates the felt-body’s sense of being in space: we listen to a voice in space. we are affectively struck by the voice because we are modified in our own presence in space through the voices we hear. to be present in a space means to reach out into this space through the sensing of the felt-body [durch das leibliche spüren]. this occurs through feeling oneself contracted or expanded, pushed down or lifted up and much more. . . . the extraordinary effect of voices on our present emotional state is due to them immediately modifying our presence in space as sensed by the felt-body. they can make one contracted or expanded, they can be elevating and redeeming, or dampening and frightening. as tones are called high and low, having a broad base (greek: barus), or pointed and sharp (greek: oxus), so do our sensations follow the suggestive impressions [anmutungen] of such tones by inviting or forcing us to be present in space in this or that way with the sensing of our felt-body. in this quote, böhme points to how vocal sound manipulates the felt-body’s sense of locating itself in space in concrete ways. for him, this occurs through subtle sensations of spatial movement enacted on the felt-body through the force of sound. böhme’s arguments about vocal sound as modifiying the felt-body’s sense of being in space align with schmitz’s (2014, 85) notion of atmospheres as containing suggestions of movement (bewegungssuggestionen). in the case of sonic phenomena, several acoustic parameters such as loudness, pitch, and timbre are involved in the patterning of what böhme calls “modifications” of the space felt by the body. in other words, the dynamics of sound, including vocal sound, enact such suggestions of movement. sound’s seizing of the phenomenological felt-body is driven by suggestions of movement that reach into corporeal economies, altering the space sensed by the felt-body. the propositions of this phenomenological theory of sonic atmospheres in turn bear striking resemblance to my mauritian muslim interlocutors’ descriptions of sonic perception in their devotional practices, descriptions that revolved around sensations of touch and spatial movement.4 this analytical route requires closer attention to the particularities of sonic phenomena than has so far been common in anthropological writings on voice. for instance, recordings of performances by well-known mauritian na‘t khwan are characterized by variations in vocal dynamics including loudness (perceived volume), pitch (fundamental frequency), and timbre. also, professional recordings of na‘t recitals in mauritius and south asia nowadays typically feature a marked reverb, which leads to a distinct effect that my interlocutors referred to as “echo.” as a result, all acoustic events are multiplied and thereby intensified. a key characteristic of vocal dynamics in the recitation of this genre is recurring moments of sudden intensification, frequently after a short pause in the recitation, that coincide with a marked increase in volume and pitch. at the same time, at the level of timbre, a greater concentration of acoustic energy (the pressure level of sound waves) occurs in frequency bins far above the fundamental frequency: specifically, in the threeto five-thousand-hertz range described by johan sundberg (1974) as the “singer’s formant.”5 that is, such moments of vocal intensification do not just consist in an abrupt increase in perceived volume and pitch, but also changes in timbre. the latter refers to the shape of and energy within the formant or overtone structure above the fundamental frequency that makes up complex sounds such as a voice. timbre enables us to identify the sources of complex sounds, and to distinguish between the sounds of an engine, a violin, a voice, or between different individual voices. as mentioned already, na‘t recordings feature a reverb throughout, leading to the multiplication of acoustic events. in such moments of intensification, the voice enacts suggestions of movement in several ways. the combined increase in loudness, pitch, and the shift of acoustic energy to higher-frequency bands within the spectral envelope of vocal sounds carry out a movement of enrapture that my mauritian muslim respondents described as being beside oneself, as being moved up and away to another place. as the discursive dimensions of the recital often qualify such sonically enacted movement as being directed to medina, my respondents also spoke of the sensation of being carried away toward medina and the desired encounter with the prophet. as mohamed put it when describing how the voice of owais qadri, a renowned pakistani na‘t khwan, affected him: “people like him, when they recite they make you vibrate. why? because the way they are reciting, you will not feel you are here; you will feel you are in medina. they have taken you to medina.” to do justice to sound and prevent its immediate reduction to language in analysis, some formal engagement with sound’s characteristics is necessary. this is particularly relevant for the study of sound in islamic contexts, where previous ethnographic work has mainly attended to verbal descriptions of sound, its perception, and its effects (hirschkind 2006; kapchan 2008, 2009). discursive renderings of sound and its perception, like those offered by my interlocutors in mauritius and those found in other ethnographic studies, remain central to anthropological approaches to the sonic dimensions of islam. nevertheless, the analysis also has to go beyond the discursive if one wants to do justice to sound as a separate modality of creating knowledge and meanings not reducible to language. such an approach also necessitates paying close attention to sound’s formal features and characteristics, as well as their dynamics as sonic events unfold. the diagrams of spectrographic and waveform analysis below are not intended to tell a superior scientific truth but to complement what my interlocutors said about islamic sounds, serving as a recognition that sound requires modalities of access beyond language. the spectrograms measure movements in timbre and fundamental frequency across a short stretch of time. the x-axis measures time, while the y-axis measures the frequency of sound waves in hertz. the acoustic energy of complex sounds such as a voice is not evenly distributed along a spectrum of frequencies, but coalesces around particular frequency bands that look like layers on the spectrogram. these build the structure of overtones above the fundamental frequency that creates the sound’s timbre. very important for timbre, some formants or overtones (the layers along particular frequency bands) contain more acoustic energy than others, which the spectrogram makes visible by a color continuum ranging from green (low) to yellow (medium) to orange (high). the waveform diagrams likewise measure sonic dynamics over time; the sound waves are centered on a zero axis, representing the given atmospheric air pressure, while the waves stretch between hypothetical 1 and -1 values that represent the waves’ pressure. the greater the amplitude of a wave, the greater its pressure differential and, with some qualifications, the greater its volume. a graph additionally tracks the fundamental frequency of the sounds below the waveform.6 examining the sonic dynamics of na‘t recitation, consider the following example from a recording produced and circulated in mauritius. in this na‘t, the reciter, assuming the “i” of the devotional discourse, compares the perfect figure of the prophet to his own abject existence as an ordinary sinning person, thereby further exalting the prophet while imploring him for intercession on the reciter’s behalf. the familiar medina motif also features prominently in this panegyric poem. the reciter lauds the supernatural splendor of the prophet’s favorite city, begging to be able to go there. in directly addressing the prophet, the na‘t khwan appropriates the voice of the saint-poet who presumably composed the poetry, entering into a personal conversation with the prophet. voh madīna nagīna hai jo ‘arsh kā that city of madina that is the gem of the heavenly throne voh madīna bahram jo banā farsh kā that city of madina is also the dream of the world below as significant as these discursive dimensions of the poetry are for the performance, the sonic dimensions of the na‘t khwan’s voice play a decisive role. this is because the na‘t khwan’s voice also enacts a movement of enrapture through the medium of sound. over these two lines, the voice carries out a movement of being carried away that coincides with the discursively expressed wish to travel to medina to personally encounter the prophet. audio 1. excerpt from disc 1, track 5 of shareef chady’s undated recording naaté-rasool (saw), produced by étoile brilliant sound. in this excerpt, the spectrogram shows an abrupt increase of acoustic energy in the threeto five-thousand-hertz range at the onset of the phrase, marked by red-orange coloring. as is evident from both the spectrogram and the graph tracking fundamental frequency, the pitch peaks on the syllable -gī of nagīna, which is especially drawn out, with the spectrogram and the pitch tracker illustrating the very strong modulation of the na‘t khwan’s voice. as the comparison of the spectrogram with the waveform makes clear, the appearance of the “singer’s formant” (sundberg 1974) in the timbre visible in the spectrogram also coincides with an abrupt increase in loudness evident in the waveform that finally peaks on the syllable -na of nagīna. the marked reverb applied throughout is especially evident in the echoing decay of the previous phrase into the short pause of about 2.2 seconds before the phrase’s sudden onset and attack, visible on the left of the spectrogram. in the second line, voh madīna bahram jo banā farsh kā, the concentration of acoustic energy in the threeto five-thousand-hertz range disappears after the second rendering of madīna, which also coincides with a decrease in loudness and pitch. spectrogram, waveform, and pitch tracking very clearly illustrate the sonic dynamics of the two parts of the phrase as a movement of intensification or contraction and a following countermovement of extension or relaxation. figure 1. spectrogram of the sung words voh madīna nagīna hai. image created by patrick eisenlohr. figure 2. waveform and fundamental frequency of the sung words voh madīna nagīna hai. image created by patrick eisenlohr. both the spectrogram and the waveform with pitch tracker are diagrams of the sonic movements performed. however, it is important to realize that these enacted movements go beyond the metaphoric. this is because the sonic dynamics i have detailed above are not just representations of movements, but actually enact suggestions of movement on the felt-bodies of listeners, encountering and affecting them through the medium of sound. the phrase above begins with a movement of rapture and upward expansion, suggesting an overcoming of the boundaries of the self and a spatial removal to another place. the discursive dimensions of the poetry, with its elaboration of the medina motif, in turn specify such transcending of the self, its sonic reaching out, and its transportation to another place as islamic in a certain way. in a devotional idiom, it is cast as the travel to the wonderful city of medina to encounter the prophet. the second part of the phrase finally features a relaxation of the first part’s expansive sonic movement, returning to its starting point, thereby enabling its repetition. intense, sonically enacted suggestions of movement are also evident in the following excerpt from a different recording. the text of the na‘t reads: kul jahān malik aur jo kī roṭī ghizā he owns the entire world and he is content with a plain flatbread as food as the discursive dimensions of the performance exalt the exemplary character and modesty of the prophet, the dramatic sonic movement that the na‘t khwan’s voice carries out is palpable. here, we can see a rise in fundamental frequency (pitch) and loudness, with a buildup of acoustic energy in the threeto five-thousand-hertz range. audio 2. excerpt from disc 2, track 10 of the undated recording ashiqué rassool shah ahmad razaa ka kalam, by dar-ul-uloom imam ahmad raza. the dynamics of the reverb effect also prove highly salient in this excerpt. not just at the end of the phrase, but especially in the approximately nine-hundred-millisecond pause after the drawn-out jahan in the middle of the phrase, the reverb is very much in evidence, the spectrogram showing a reverb time of about two hundred milliseconds. the latter time is clearly located above the threshold of sixty milliseconds at which most humans perceive sounds set off from each other by such an interval as separate phenomena (benade 1990, 210). as a result, a powerful echo effect gives the impression of multiplying the articulations of the na‘t khwan’s voice. figure 3. spectrogram of the sung words kul jahān malik aur jo kī roṭī ghizā. image created by patrick eisenlohr. figure 4. waveform and fundamental frequency of the sung words kul jahān malik aur jo kī roṭī ghizā. image created by patrick eisenlohr. yet the most striking feature of this excerpt is the drawing out of the second syllable—the -hān of jahān for about 3.5 seconds. the na‘t khwan then breaks with the tone held for this period in a modulating movement for another two seconds before pausing. the spectrogram also reveals an extreme vibrato on all harmonies of the spectrum. after the brief pause, the na‘t khwan’s voice resumes with a movement culminating with a peak on the words aur jo kī, displaying a coincidence of a rise in pitch and loudness with another concentration of acoustic energy in the formants of the threeto five-thousand-hertz range. this coinciding of several acoustic parameters of intensification creates a sonic movement of being carried away in rapture, a movement that also overcomes the boundaries of the self. to sum up, in these examples the reciting voice enacts suggestions of movement through the medium of sound. these movements are not merely metaphoric; rather, the sonic dynamics that carry them out act on the felt-bodies of those exposed to them in analogous fashion. the sonically enacted movements thereby act as atmospheres in böhme’s and schmitz’s sense, enveloping and suffusing listeners’ felt-bodies while modifying their spatial economies through suggestions of movement. at the same time, the poetic discourse recited qualifies such suggestions of movement as islamic in a particular way, as an overcoming of the boundaries of the self that is resonant with sufi traditions and that involves travel to a desired destination, medina, in order to personally encounter the prophet. the na‘t khwan’s voice unites these two dimensions of na‘t recital as a devotional practice, generating sonic atmospheres that enact movements of rapture and uttering poetry that praises and expresses deep devotion and longing for the prophet muhammad. in the examples i have discussed, the sonic dimensions of voice and the discursive aspects of the recital work hand in hand, mutually reinforcing each other. nevertheless, the sonic modalities in principle remain independent from discursive meaning. this is because sound constitutes a phenomenon in its own right, with its own modalities of knowledge and meaning-making. in my examples, the meanings generated by sonic movement and the discursive aspects of recitation align, but there remains a difference in kind. this differentiation is related to what schmitz (2005, 104; author’s translation) has called the “holistic internally diffuse meaningfulness” of atmospheres, including sonic atmospheres. with this he meant that atmospheres generate an excess and multiplicity of meaning that is hard to specify clearly and that is impossible to describe in an exhaustive way. its characteristics blend into each other to such an extent that they are difficult to distinguish in description. while multiplicity of meaning certainly also pertains to discourse, especially poetic discourse, the latter qualifies the meaning generated in sonic movement as islamic, and even sectarian, in a much more specific way. in other words, there is no definite link between particular sonic movements and a particular, discursively elaborated islamic theme. rather, in na‘t as a form of devotional recitation, discourse specifies and fine-tunes the diffuse meaningfulness of sonic movements, suggesting spatial displacement and a longing to be elsewhere as an islamic form of spiritual travel toward a personal encounter with the prophet. likewise, when my mauritian muslim interlocutors listen to na‘t, they do so with knowledge of this islamic way of interpreting sonic movements. in other words, their learned auditory techniques also contribute to the alignment of sonic movement and spiritual travel. against affect: sonic suggestions of movement and signification my discussion of sonically enacted suggestions of movement as a deeply meaningful dimension of mauritian muslim devotional practice runs counter to the work of several scholars in the field of sound studies who identify the sonic with affect. inspired by the ontology of gilles deleuze as interpreted by brian massumi (2002), several theorists of sound have come to treat the sonic as an exemplification of the material intensities and flows to which they refer as affect, which operate prior to consciousness, signification, and representation. as eric shouse (2005) has put it: an affect is a nonconscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. . . . the importance of affect rests upon the fact that in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her nonconscious affective resonance with the source of the message. music provides perhaps the clearest example of how the intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can “mean” more to people than meaning itself. the fact that the sonic comprises vibrational and wave phenomena that often operate outside or beyond the threshold of human perception has led some sonically inclined theorists of affect to take the sonic as a privileged avenue to think about the deleuzian opposition of the virtual and the actual (evens 2002, 183; massumi 2002, 30–31, 62; goodman 2010). while the actual consists of empirical, seemingly given phenomena, the virtual are the sheer forces of multiplicity and constant differentiation that generate them. accordingly, actual sonic events stand in deep relations of continuity with the vast spheres of virtual vibrational and wave phenomena from which the former emerge. will schrimshaw (2013, 43) has drawn on the notion of noncochlear sound to designate this realm of implicated acoustic signals from which actual sound emerges, a world of “inaudible yet affective signals, signals that are taken as structurally equivalent to autonomous and infraesthetic affects.” one of the main problems with this alignment of the sonic with affect is that it has led to a categorical distinction between the sonic and signification. for example, taking the sonic as “an asignifying material flux,” christoph cox (2011, 157) draws an ontology in which the sonic is prior to and excessive of interpretation and representation. cox hereby extends the “autonomy of affect” (massumi 2002, 35) to the sonic. here, the distinction between the realm of the sonic and the realm of signification coincides with a reinstated boundary between the material as the sphere of energetic forces affecting bodies and the mind as the producer of meaning. according to massumi, the former is necessarily prior to the latter because the mental creation of consciousness and signification always comes a split-second too late. this “half-second delay” (massumi 2002, 195) is responsible for affect’s power: affect, including the sonic in the understanding of the theorists cited above, has always already done its work of traveling through and affecting bodies before subjects even become aware of it and apply signification to its effects. affect theory’s inverted body-mind dualism (see leys 2011) is the justification for its dismissal of meaning, and has prompted several scholars in sound studies to declare the sonic, aligned with affective forces more generally, as prior to and free from signification. yet seen from the vantage point of a phenomenology of atmospheres, sonic dynamics contain suggestions of movement that act on the felt-bodies of those perceiving them. these movements are not linguistic signs, but they are nevertheless highly meaningful. in peircean terms they contain a combination of iconic and indexical relationships (see parmentier 1994). indeed, in the excerpts analyzed earlier, the sonic movements provide diagrams of spiritual travel. according to charles sanders peirce (1932, 157), diagrams are icons “which represent the relations . . . of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts.” thus diagrams, such as a map, are iconic signs that depend on the structural resemblance of relations across qualitatively different domains. in this case, the relations between sounds that constitute sonic movements resemble the spatial movements of a devotee pursuing spiritual travel to a desired destination. most important, these sign relationships are embedded in their material (and more specifically sonic) forms, and are not mental representations applied to materiality after the latter’s unfolding.7 therein lies the link between the sonic movements i have investigated with the help of spectrographic and waveform analysis and the way my mauritian muslim interlocutors described the ways in which they felt moved by the vocal sounds of na‘t recitation: it is the iconic relationship between sounds’ measurable dynamics and my interlocutors’ reported sensations as they were affected by vocal sounds when exercising the auditory techniques that form part of their devotional practices. taking vocal sound as atmospheric phenomena that mingle with felt-bodies can, in turn, help us understand how such an analogy between sonic movements and my interlocutors’ reported sensations comes about. a reduced, intellectualist understanding of meaning in which materiality and signification inhabit separate realms informs the characterization of the sonic as asignifying. it casts all sonic meaning as saussurean signs, which impose arbitrary mental forms on an essentially meaning-free material flux. more promising than such a binary opposition between signification and materiality is an approach that not only takes the material as part of signification but also recognizes the possibility of different modalities of meaning in a sonic practice such as na‘t recitation. these modalities range from the more diffuse meaningfulness of suggestions of movement to more strongly qualified discursive meanings pointing to a particular islamic tradition. to sum up, then, in contrast to sonically minded versions of affect theory, an analytic of atmospheres overcomes the dualism of materiality and signification. it does justice to the somatic dimensions of sound while enabling us to treat sonic dynamics as deeply meaningful in their nondiscursive musical modes and forms of knowledge. affect theory’s insistence on the involuntary and often unor preconscious effects of sonic and vibrational phenomena is also problematic because it sidelines the importance of auditory cultures, the learned techniques of listening embedded in cultural frames to which my interlocutors’ descriptions of the power of vocal sound pointed. defenders of affect theory who subscribe to massumi’s stance on the autonomy of affect might argue that hearing cultures are about interpretation after a “half-second delay,” when sonic affect has already done its work regardless of any form of cultural mediation, which always arrives too late. however, the notion of auditory culture is necessary to account for the diversity of auditions that any particular sonic practice is subject to and embedded in. empirically existing sonic practices cannot be understood separate from the plurality of traditions of listening. sonic events do not have the same effects on all human actors exposed to them. this is also the case for reciting and listening to na‘t poetry among mauritian muslims, all the more so as the practice has always been embroiled in sectarian differences. a mauritian muslim following salafi traditions might appreciate the beauty of a na‘t khwan’s voice. nevertheless, he or she is unlikely to be moved by it in the same way as adherents of the ahl-e sunnat wa jama‘at are. for the latter, deep devotion and personal affection for the figure of the prophet is not only central to their tradition. they also seek to bring about the spiritual presence of the prophet through devotional practices such as mehfil-e mawlud. the latter would be anathema for a committed salafi but also to followers of the tablighi jama‘at, who would take them to be shirk, or associating others with god, thereby compromising the unicity of god in unforgivable ways. thus, not all mauritian muslims are fond of the na‘t genre and receptive to its call to be closer to the prophet. an analytic of atmospheres recognizes sonic phenomena as energetic flows that affect felt-bodies while allowing for the mediation of the sonic through auditory cultures, semiotic ideologies, and other historically and social embedded traditions. as schmitz (2014, 86–87) has pointed out, atmospheres that are merely observed need to be distinguished from atmospheres as feelings that seize someone in a more thoroughgoing somatic mode. anthropologists have long argued that bodies are socially shaped and sensitized. this idea also extends to their perception of sound (downey 2002; erlmann 2004; feld et al. 2004; hirschkind 2006). bodies need to be attuned to the effects of a devotional practice such as the recitation of na‘t. their sociocultural qualification mediates the effects of sonic atmospheres, including the suggestions of movement enacted by them. conclusion in this essay i have made a case for an analytic of atmospheres as a way to understand the seemingly ineffable, yet powerful effects of vocal sound on listeners in an islamic setting. such sonic practice produces tangible atmospheres that fill spaces between their sources and felt-bodies, enveloping and suffusing them. detailed attention to the particularities of sonic phenomena enabled us to see that sonic atmospheres enact suggestions of movement. sonic atmospheres manipulate felt-bodies’ sense of being in space. this phenomenon accounted for the religious sounds’ profound somatic effects, often spoken about as sensations of being touched or moved. arguing against the identification of the sonic with affect in the work of several scholars in the field of sound studies, i have also sought to show that the suggestions of movement enacted in the recitation of na‘t poetry are highly meaningful. far from being a matter of mental representations imposed on an essentially asignifying sonic materiality, vocal sound’s meaningfulness is internal to the processual nature of its material forms. the recitation of na‘t as a devotional practice in mauritius further qualifies the meaningfulness of sonically generated suggestions of movement as islamic in a specific sense through poetic and discursive mediation. in this way, recitation brings sonically enacted sensations of a movement elsewhere in alignment with spiritual travel to medina to personally encounter the prophet. in mauritian na‘t recitation the sonic and discursive dimensions of the voice therefore operate in tightly interrelated ways. in my analysis, i have sought to bring together the neo-phenomenological analytic of sonic atmospheres with recent anthropological approaches to the voice that seek to overcome the unproductive dualism of discursive signification and unfathomable sonic materiality that has characterized much writing on the voice in north atlantic scholarly traditions. unlike theories of sonic affect, an analytic of atmospheres does justice to somatic effects of vocal sound that often evade discursive rendering. it also treats both sonic and discursive dimensions of voice as fully embedded in particular historical and sociocultural worlds. notes acknowledgments fieldwork in mauritius was made possible by the support of utrecht university and a generous vidi grant from the netherlands organization for scientific research. in mauritius, i am deeply indebted to enayet hossen edun, rehana edun, and their family. without their support and guidance my research would have been impossible. i also benefited from conversations with shareef chady and fardeen maraye, who generously shared their knowledge of na‘t with me. birgit abels introduced me to the neo-phenomenological literature on atmospheres, which had already informed her musicological scholarship. several of the core ideas in this article took shape in long conversations with her, and my intellectual debts to her are obvious. 1. french has provided most of the vocabulary for mauritian creole, but the latter’s grammar and morphology are unrelated to french. 2. merleau-ponty (2002, 329–30, 270) drew an explicit link between his use of the concepts of corps vivant and leib, and made reference to plessner’s 1925 essay. 3. in addition to soundscapes’ downplaying of the somatic aspects of listening (see also daughtry 2015, 122–23), the “-scape” component of soundscapes evokes a stable setting, sidelining the temporality characteristic of sonic events and listening experiences (ingold 2007; helmreich 2010). 4. there are resemblances but also significant differences between an analytic of atmospheres and marcel jousse’s (1990) gestural subject, which charles hirschkind (2006, 76–79) has drawn on in his ethnography of cassette-sermon audition in cairo. both approaches are concerned with the connections between perception—including sonic perception—and movement. jousse, however, does not distinguish between felt-body and material body. for him, what matters most are subtle physiological processes in reaction to external stimuli, which result in micromuscular “gestures” that are the base of all expression and memory (jousse 1990, 23–30). in contrast to the distinction between external phenomena and internal gestures as reactions to stimuli from the outside, the notion of the felt-body central to the analytic of atmospheres stresses the blurring of the boundaries between inside and outside. the felt-body, exceeding the boundaries of the material body, is the ground for mingling with atmospheres as “ecstasies of the thing” (böhme 1993, 110). also, feelings are not phenomena that just occur inside the material body; they also take the shape of atmospheres spilling out in nondimensional space: “feelings are atmospheres poured into [nondimensional] space and powers that seize the felt-body (leib)” (schmitz 2014, 30; author’s translation). that is, they are entities outside the material body. their einleibung, or encorporation in the sense of becoming part of a felt-body, is therefore different from jousse’s (1990, 232–33) “intussusception” of sensory stimuli that trigger gestural reactions (see also sienaert 1990, 95). the modification of the felt-body’s sense of being in space, as described by böhme, and schmitz’s suggestions of movement, such as those proper to sonic atmospheres, are therefore different from jousse’s gestures. while the latter’s micromuscular dynamics are located in three-dimensional space, atmospheric suggestions of movement unfold in the nondimensional space of the felt-body: “musical gestalten are webs of suggestions of movement in the medium of tones, that is, foreshadowings of movement without movement enacted by the music itself (through a shifting of the source of sound)” (schmitz 2014, 88; author’s translation). thus, jousse’s gestural subject provides a more anthropocentric account of stimulation through sensation indebted to a subject-object divide, while the analytic of atmospheres stresses the intermingling of humans and the world in the felt-body. 5. sundberg (1974) argued that a marked formant or concentration of acoustic energy in the threeto four-thousand-hertz range enables the voices of european opera singers to be heard over a very loud orchestra. 6. the analyses of the recited excerpts were made using sonic visualizer, on the basis of .wav files. tracking of the fundamental frequency was done with the help of the vamp plugin cepstral pitch tracker. 7. see peirce 1932 on the varying degrees of dependence of signification on interpretants. an interpretant, for peirce, is the condition of being taken as a sign by someone, resulting in the creation of another, related sign in the mind of its interpreter. but this condition is only necessary for a certain class of signs: “an icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even though its object had no existence; such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geometrical line. an index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose that character if there were no interpretant. such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as sign of a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole; but there is a hole there, whether anybody has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. a symbol is a sign which would lose the character which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. such is any utterance of speech which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signification” (peirce 1932, 170). according to peirce, the iconic and indexical relationships that make up the sonic movements therefore do not depend on mental acts of 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anthropology 43: 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030050. 2015 “voice.” in keywords in sound, edited by david novak and matt sakakeeny, 232–45. durham, n.c.: duke university press. untidy times untidy times: alexis wright, extinction, and the politics of apprehension daniel fisher university of california, berkeley http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2587-7020 their story was unfolding dangerously through the complex design of children growing up in untidy times. of times inscribed in the warped, dull state of a publicly determined fate. or law that stretched back to the beginning of time. —alexis wright we are, it has been widely observed, haunted by the future.1 the ghosts that trouble us today seem temporally unfixed, the future regarded with apprehension, its avatars encountered in the uncanny half-light of déjà vu. what is the character of the contemporary such that this apprehension animates such a broad swath of filmic, literary, and academic imaginaries, spilling from the pages and screens of sci-fi and fantasy across literary fiction and into a range of other, ostensibly realist narrative genres? how ought we understand the power of these and other critical forms when the future occupies such an unstable, ideologically weighted place in them? in part the answer ready to hand, in popular culture as well as academic analyses, rests in dispersed anxieties around climate change, in the shrinking of possibility as figures of the anthropocene become a new common sense, and in the related fascination with extinction and an accompanying eschatology of what comes after. yet this ready gloss does not address the distinctions among multiple futurisms that mark filmic, literary, and political thought, and it may conflate lengthy histories of apprehension and their politics with contemporary philosophical and anthropological concerns with the ends of life tout court (danowski and viveiros de castro 2017). this essay concerns the politics of the future as they emerge in the work of the waanyi author alexis wright. here i explore the temporal experimentalism that animates wright’s (2013b) the swan book, a literary work that brings together critiques of time and human exceptionalism in a speculative exploration of extinction. while reviews of this work note its arch humor and accurately describe its narrative as a dystopian parable alert to the stakes of climate change, i am interested in some specific and less often noted dimensions of this novel: the temporal disorientation it seems to pursue, and the politics of apprehension it makes legible. in wright’s book, the future and the past spin around one another so rapidly that readers might easily lose track of up and down, backward and forward. for wright’s principal characters, the past’s future and the future’s past stand in for one another as memory becomes déjà vu and apprehension becomes recognition. i suggest that this temporal disorientation provides paraethnographic attunement to tropes of innovation and capitalist realism that differentiate and parcel out social potential in a race toward the future. wright’s work reckons, i argue here, with the politics of apprehension and their stakes for indigenous australians, animating these politics by making time newly perceptible and human exceptionalism problematic. time, extinction, and the black swan wright has spent decades in land rights and legal advocacy across northern australia. as a writer and cultural activist, she is accomplished in multiple genres, including both academic and historical nonfiction and the realist novel. in 2007, wright won the miles franklin award, perhaps australia’s highest literary honor, for her long-form epic carpentaria (wright 2006), a book that also received the australian literature society gold medal and the queensland premier’s literature award, among others. in carpentaria wright develops a narrative voice that embraces colloquial aboriginal english, drawing on the speech poetics of the northern territory to tell a story about a fictional conflict between a mining corporation and a small, northern australian town. the prose poetics that wright developed in carpentaria are amplified in the very different narrative of the swan book, which extends wright’s enduring political concerns with indigenous sovereignty into questions of time and futurity. indeed, in many ways the swan book is a grand play with time itself, drawing together syntactic, narrative, and poetic features in a chronotope of temporal indeterminacy. the difficulty of locating oneself as a reader in the book’s time is echoed in the underdetermined status of time itself. in the novel, the future is made at once an instrument in australia’s ongoing colonization and something through which aboriginal people might yet find respite (“satisfaction,” as one character perceives this possibility). the ironic, difficult status of the future here resonates with other australian artwork and film, but perhaps most strikingly with the photography and filmic works of tracey moffatt. moffatt’s work is widely appreciated for the ways it explores the difficulties of her characters’ efforts to move beyond forms of racialized and gendered subjugation. wright also asks us to reckon with the complications and ironic inversions that attend aboriginal efforts to attain, as moffatt might have it, “something more,” and both moffatt and wright draw on a global set of interlocutors and intertexts in the pursuit of their respective projects. figure 1. something more, by tracey moffatt, 1989. series of nine photographs. from the collection of mona, museum of old and new art, hobart, australia. image courtesy of tracey moffatt, roslyn oxley9 gallery, and mona. photo by rémi chauvin. in many other ways, however, wright’s work proves singular. the swan book is loosely set in waanyi country, along the southwest coast of the gulf of carpentaria, straddling the northern territory and western queensland. the novel tells the story of two children, each differently bound to a shared fate. warren finch, placed on a path to greatness by his elders, is sheltered from the policy mandates of the state and slated to become an aboriginal president of an australian republic. oblivia ethylene oblivion, a girl born into a community less able to achieve the recognition that would afford such shelter, is instead raised by a white auntie, a refugee from climate wars on another continent. raped as a child by a group of petrol-sniffing boys, oblivia remains deeply wounded, living with her auntie in a detention center for aboriginal people in northern australia. the center marks a site where different aboriginal peoples are detained together, an avatar of the actual towns of the gulf region and many other communities across the north, but it also resonates with contemporary (as yet unimplemented) proposals for northern australian “growth towns,” where aboriginal people might be more readily policed, educated, and governed.2 for wright, the future arrives in the form of black swans. in the novel, these birds arrive in the hundreds to the swamp that oblivia calls home, sharing in her story and shadowing her (and her fate) throughout the book. these birds are indigenous to southern and southeastern australia, but they are now seen, as she has written elsewhere, flying and settling ever farther north (wright and zable 2013). this is an avian climate-change casualty, now without a dreaming for the country in which it finds itself. northern australia abounds with animals and other nonhuman agents from elsewhere: invasive species, as they are sometimes called. in addition to the black swans that now wing their way northward, there are the better-known cane toads, a poisonous imported species that has moved along water routes north and west from queensland, and gamba grass, a species of african origin, which threatens to transform the fire ecology of the far north by upending a longstanding détente between burning grasses, thriving trees, and towns and cities (see bowman et al. 2011). in discussing the book after its release, wright underscored the uncertainty such creatures can entail for her friends and interlocutors in the northern territory. they ask: can i kill such a thing? what is this swan doing here? “so what do you do?” wright responds. “what happens to a bird—or to anyone—who has no story for that country? . . . how do you make stories for them in a new place?” (wright and zable 2013) the black swan also marks a contemporary trope of impossibility, a thing that one will never see. the figure can be traced to the roman poet juvenal and, later, to dutch encounters with australian black swans in the seventeenth century. more recently, the figure of the black swan has been refashioned, taken from the analysis of financial markets to explain historical change itself as sharply punctuated by transformative events that are wholly unexpected and unpredictable based on past experience (taleb 2010). while wright’s work is replete with intertextual references to swans, white and black alike, she downplays these tropes of unknowability and historical rupture. her swans are not oddities, and they come in the hundreds. as climate refugees themselves, wright suggests, these black swans are to be welcomed and given a story: they do not simply constitute exotic alters or signs of historical rupture; they are also kindred beings. as figures for relations between humans and nonhumans, for human refugees from far-flung places, and for the migration and dislocation within australia of different black communities, swans draw the book’s concerns temporally close to our present—reckoning not an unlikely future, but rather a contemporary moment for those knocked about by shifts in australian policy. given the ways in which this future ultimately seems so much like our present, the words oblivia offers when confronted by the particular black swan who singles her out for attention in the book seem apropos: “what kind of premonition is this?” (wright 2013b, 15). ostensibly set one hundred years in the future, the book might as well describe a time just a year or two ahead: the world the swan book discloses appears as merely a slight variant to the one described in the grim pronouncements of contemporary journalism and policy prescription. the children at the center of the book suggest the resonance of its concerns for the present. when her foster mother passes away, oblivia overhears the gossip of others and finds her own memories contested by these stories. she recalls dreaming inside of an old gum tree, protected by its ancient stump as she recovered from a violent attack, but these overheard stories figure her as a problem, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome and traumatic rape and now an unhappy reminder to her community of its purported dysfunction. oblivia’s story is thus not always her own: it is told and retold by others. it is she who has to bear this community’s traumatic past and, as it turns out, its promised future. as a child who cannot grow up, who is not allowed to become a person, she offers a gendered figure for the broader confinement of aboriginal people in australia’s settler colonial present. finch, on the other hand, is a boy held apart for an educational experiment, an icon of indigenous promise. in one key passage, the author describes finch’s community as a model for a broader human future: warren had been taught, from the day he entered his people’s aboriginal government school of brolga nation as the sweetest boy of six years of age, that he would fulfill a vision primed for their own survival, that above all else, he would connect brolga values with the future of the world. (wright 2013b, 107) we might read this paragraph with trepidation. readers learn that the brolga nation has been singled out, “chosen by an international, fact-finding delegation to be their showpiece of what a future humane world was all about” (wright 2013b, 106). children like warren are thus not simply avatars of a reproductive futurity (see ginsburg and rapp 1995; edelman 2004) but captive to the investment in aboriginal futures of both aboriginal and settler agencies. the problem of locating oneself in time, the ways in which we are in the future and the ways in which the future animates the present and its politics, marks a range of other speculative fiction and futurist work including novels, films, and music. these works unbind time to explore the future’s ghost in our midst, and to reckon the costs of bearing the future and the differential distribution of possibility and responsibility that it may entail. this is also, i think, how we must apprehend the paradox faced by the swan book’s characters: as a glimpse of what falls on their shoulders while the analepsis of flashback and the prolepsis of premonition trade places in its narrative, amplifying our temporal disorientation and showing us the promise and problems of our present’s future. indeed, the book ends with a sudden leap in tense. we learn of the extinction of the swans, of how oblivia herself became an old woman and then a myth, an ancestral presence. she thus becomes placed at once in the future and in the past and, like the swans, written into the foundation of what is to come. speculative fiction as paraethnography my own ethnographic work in northern australia has addressed different forms of activism, particularly indigenous media production and forms of urban housing and land rights advocacy. these are spaces of institutionalized advocacy in which the future takes shape in the capacities and voices of young people who have been trained to represent their communities and to reanimate a series of relations fractured by colonial settlement and settler government (d. fisher 2016). these young media-makers, whom i first met during my doctoral research, are now young adults familiar with the efflorescent character of what tess lea (2014) terms “wild policy,” as well as with the bureaucratic entanglements, delays, and frustrations it brings. some of the more enabled and financially solvent among them buy houses and talk about retirement and mortgages while riding the cresting wave of australia’s urban and periurban property boom. but most of them have far fewer fiscal resources, and those closer to the epicenter of indigenous political struggle are fatigued by the sense of suspended animation that can accompany such uncertainty. wright’s speculative fiction offers a paraethnographic road map to the political geography of this situation. her futurism is attuned to the ways in which aboriginal australians find different means to cultivate spaces of autonomy—of a “sovereignty of the mind,” to use wright’s (2013a) own figure for her efforts—while remaining open to relationships with outsiders and unexpected friends. these could be boat people or black swans—or the internal voices of foreign languages that jostle for room in the free indirect discourse that offers warren’s perspective on his experience. this futurism is also drenched in the present as seen from a point just on the other side of emerging regional growth towns, threats of urban proletarianization as states move to defund remote communities, and another decade of interventions in aboriginal government made in the name of children’s well-being. wright’s futurism is also relational in its attention to the entanglement of human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, and to the political and ethical imperatives of such entanglements. unsurprisingly, these aspects of wright’s work have drawn the interest of australian literary scholars. attending to the pragmatics of the book’s narrative interventions and the specific cultural conflicts that its narrative addresses, philip mead (2016, 1, 2) analyzes wright’s “dystopian generics” as part of a “storytelling war” (wright’s own term). as mead’s reading suggests, the swan book’s narrative overtly disputes an indigenous embrace of capitalist common sense by exploring the different futures of those young people who would be its standard-bearers, those communities it may leave behind, and those nonhumans whose extinction it seems to promise. the effort to embrace a form of “capitalist realism” (cf. m. fisher 2014), wright’s narrative implies, entails its own troubles, troubles that might be made apparent by meditating on the phenomenon of the unexpected as a nonhuman relation, and on time as itself unmoored from the serialized unfolding of linear progress. in these ways, wright’s novel offers a critical window on the costs to her indigenous characters of being made to bear the hopes of others and on what it might take to tell their stories otherwise. if wright provides ironizing distance on the ways in which aboriginal people might now be asked to preserve the future, to become custodians of its possibility, the swan book also speaks to the impossibility of anyone actually giving up on such a project. rather, it explores some of the tools—narrative, conceptual, and political—that one might deploy in its pursuit. engaged scholarship must, janet roitman (2014) has written, rethink crisis and its relation to critique to see how crisis narratives entail understandings of history and time that, in disclosing aporias or failures, also close down other possibilities and emerging worlds. i suggest that wright’s work narrativizes time in ways that perform an analogous reformulation, extending crisis over the longue durée to reimagine its coordinates and the kinds of persons and relations it implicates. in so doing, wright allows readers to apprehend both the need for critique and the danger of its capture. critique here emerges from more speculative questions: what kinds of differences might the future in fact bring, and for whom? what might endure, and in what fashion? and what continuities with our present might make this future difficult to apprehend once it arrives? however we figure the achievements of wright’s speculative fiction, this proleptic novel assembles a series of insights, built from the prose poetics of narrative form, that unbind time to decolonize our apprehension, estranging us from the end of the world itself. notes 1. see, for instance, derrida 1994, žižek 2010, m. fisher 2014, and danowski and viveiros de castro 2017. 2. the figure of detention could also describe attempts to govern aboriginal people, from the concentration of different aboriginal peoples in early twentieth-century darwin to the forced settlement of different kin and language groups in places like port keats (now wadeye) and papunya. references bowman, david m. j. s., et al. 2011 “the human dimension of fire regimes on earth.” journal of biogeography 38, no. 12: 2223–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2699.2011.02595.x. danowski, déborah, and eduardo viveiros de castro 2017 the ends of the world. translated by rodrigo nunes. malden, mass.: polity. originally published in 2014. derrida, jacques 1994 specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. translated by peggy kamuf. new york: routledge. originally published in 1993. edelman, lee 2004 no future: queer theory and the death drive. durham, n.c.: duke university press. fisher, daniel 2016 the voice and its doubles: music and media in northern australia. durham, n.c.: duke university press. fisher, mark 2014 ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology, and lost futures. alresford, uk: zero books. ginsburg, faye d., and rayna rapp, eds. 1995 conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. berkeley: university of california press. lea, tess 2014 “‘from little things, big things grow’: the unfurling of wild policy.” e-flux, no. 58. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61174/from-little-things-big-things-grow-the-unfurling-of-wild-policy. mead, philip 2016 “the injusticeable and the imaginable.” journal of the association for the study of australian literature 16, no. 2. https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/jasal/article/view/11400. roitman, janet 2014 anti-crisis. durham, n.c.: duke university press. taleb, nassim nicholas 2010 the black swan: the impact of the highly improbable. 2nd ed. new york: random house. wright, alexis 2006 carpentaria. artarmon, australia: giramondo press. wright, alexis 2013a mabo lecture. national native title conference, alice springs, australia, june 4. wright, alexis 2013b the swan book. artarmon, australia: giramondo press. wright, alexis, and arnold zable 2013 “the future of swans.” overland, no. 213. https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-213/feature-alexis-wright-and-arnold-zable. žižek, slavoj 2010 living in the end times. new york: verso. the work of disaster: building back otherwise in post-earthquake nepal cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 237-263, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.07 the work of disaster: building back otherwise in post-earthquake nepal aidan seale-feldman university of virginia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2209-1487 prem is listening to a small, handheld radio, his cigarette glowing in the darkness. through the sounds of the night, the crackling voice of a man can be made out as he describes the concept of depression and the benefits of counseling and sharing, spoken in nepali bhasa peppered with these english terms. the voice explains that there is medicine for depression, but that it is better to begin with counseling. that people have many kinds of tension, but when you share your tension, when you no longer make your tension hide, you can improve on your own; that your man, your heart-mind, will become light. “this is the meaning of counseling: listening to people’s problems,” says the voice. a caller calls into the show, his voice is barely audible. he says that he feels as if the earth won’t stop shaking. prem switches off the radio. your browser does not support the audio element. audio 1. prem’s radio. while getting ready to sleep outside together we listen to a voice explain the symptoms of “depression” on a call-in fm radio show—an early indication of the post-disaster expansion of psychiatric discourse in nepal. recording by aidan seale-feldman. from 2014 to 2016, i conducted fieldwork on global mental health and psychosocial transformations in nepal, living and working among small farming communities, nongovernmental organizations (ngos) for mental health and counseling, psychiatrists, psychosocial counselors, and development and humanitarian aid workers. as part of this work i had been exploring the conceptualization and contestation of affliction between psychiatric and indigenous worlds against the backdrop of the emergence of global mental health in nepal (seale-feldman 2019, 2020). in 2015, eight months into my fieldwork, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and a 7.3 magnitude aftershock struck nepal, claiming more than 9,000 lives, generating a massive influx of humanitarian programs for mental health and counseling, and rapidly changing the therapeutic landscape. the disaster radically reconfigured the field: as the earth beneath kathmandu was jolted ten feet to the south, it ripped open both the material landscape and my conceptualization of the field. at the time of the earthquake i was conducting research in a rural hill district in eastern nepal. although the village escaped the total decimation of both earthquake and aftershock, we felt, heard, and feared the shaking. for the month following april 25, we (my adoptive family, of which prem was part, and i) slept outside, together, in mangers and on porches, avoiding the inside of the three-story mud house. we kept the solar-power radio on at all times, using it as our main source of information. at night the family listened to radio nepal as we lay side by side under blankets in the open air. in every day that followed, a psychosocial program called speaking listening (bhandai sundai, a post-earthquake program funded by unicef) was broadcast on the radio. on the broadcast people talked about manasik rog, mental illness, and explained the concept of depression, listing its symptoms. callers phoned in to share their stories, and received advice from a psychosocial counselor or psychiatrist live.1 the appearance of the radio program and the new presence of mental health discourse in this region indicated that the disaster and its humanitarian response could have implications for this once minor field. what does disaster generate? to think through the unfolding of disaster, i read theories of event and crisis through a critical phenomenological lens to trace what i call the work of disaster. the work of disaster encompasses what is generated through the event and what is destroyed, what is accomplished through narratives of crisis and what is foreclosed, and the processes by which affliction is made visible or rendered invisible.2 such work is done by the earth itself by destroying worlds and creating possibilities for new life, and by humans for whom the disaster and its management differentially reveal forms of suffering and generate opportunities for transformation. an earthquake is a sudden release of energy. when stress builds up along a fault line, eventually it will rupture, generating seismic waves that travel through the earth’s layers into the lithosphere. the seismic event and the shifting of tectonic plates occurs without respect to the network of lives above it, yet the demands the event makes, the ethical response it garners, and the forms of work it requires reflect the particular historical, social, and political context in which it occurs. disaster studies have long pointed out the power of catastrophes to reveal and disclose hidden truths about society and act as catalysts for transformation (kreps 1995; oliver-smith 1996; hoffman 1999; oliver-smith and hoffman 2002). yet as roberto e. barrios (2017, 157) has argued, “rather than be revelatory crises, disasters are perhaps better described as contested arenas where hegemonic visions of societal advancement are challenged by the voices and experiences of those most impacted by catastrophes.” disasters do work not only by destroying but also by generating new possibilities for becoming and natality (arendt 1998; solnit 2009).3 the ontological destruction of worlds requires human work to rebuild those worlds, often creating new forms of knowledge practices and experimentation for the management of life (fortun 2001; petryna 2002; bond 2013; tironi 2014). yet the particular form the work of disaster takes, and the new worlds it may generate, are determined by a priori assumptions of what such worlds should be. unlike other approaches to disaster, critical phenomenology helps us attend closely to the “politics of the a priori” (zigon 2018, 3) that delineate not only what is revealed and for whom (barrios 2017) but also the competing visions of world-building set into motion by the work of disaster. i begin with the work of disaster as a frame through which to trace the emergence of a crisis in the aftermath: its strategic uses, ethical demands, and unexpected consequences. a phenomenological perspective focused on the objectification of crisis makes strange the unquestioned necessity of humanitarian psychosocial intervention that appears and justifies itself according to its own practices, speech acts, and discourses of truth (roitman 2013). in the realm of mental health governance, i describe how the work of disaster generated two interconnected consequences through the biopolitics of humanitarian intervention. people who received psychosocial counseling after the disaster were often treated for chronic problems that had become momentarily visible through the event and the ethical demand it necessitated. at the same time, humanitarian and development agencies were well aware of the logics of crisis and strategically used the disaster as an opportunity to increase mental health governance in nepal under the rubric of “building back better.”4 in this article i follow the emergence of a mental health crisis in nepal to identify how predetermined frames and genres of crisis, suffering, and “the better” were engaged as part of the humanitarian response. i argue that a priori frames of crisis and its required interventions delineate and foreclose imagined possibilities both for care and for building the world back otherwise. figure 1. corn growing in the ruins of a destroyed home: the work of disaster is also the gift of natality. photo by aidan seale-feldman. “a boon for mental health in nepal” although a mental health policy had been drafted and endorsed by the government of nepal in 1997, it had never seen implementation (luitel et al. 2015). two decades later, mental health had not yet been fully incorporated into the health care system, and at the time of the earthquake, the ministry of health and population had no mental health representative (luitel et al. 2015, 5). this would become a problem for humanitarian mental health interventions in the aftermath of the earthquake, which had to contend with the fact that they would be providing people with brief access to care in regions that otherwise did not have such resources regularly available. although three major global mental health projects had been working toward the goal of incorporating mental health into the primary health care system in partnership with the government of nepal, psychiatric services remained concentrated in the capital city of kathmandu and in select district hospitals. outside of these institutional resources, temporally finite donor-funded community mental health programs implemented by nepali ngos provided access to care in some districts, a situation best described as a form of “transnational governmentality” (ferguson and gupta 2002), in which an uneven assemblage of foreign donor-funded ngos provide state services. similar to post-crisis psychosocial interventions elsewhere (james 2010; abramowitz 2014), these programs focused largely on so-called victim groups, such as those subjected to gender-based violence, ex-child soldiers, or people impacted by the decade-long people’s war, the maoist insurgency that stretched from 1996 to 2006 demanding an end to the “semi-feudal/semi-colonial system” that had kept the rural poor, low-caste, and indigenous groups trapped in cycles of debt through high-interest loans and exploitative patron-client relations (bhattarai 2003). from this point of view, state-led mental health governance in nepal had been in crisis for a long time, but it had not been widely critiqued as such in public discourse. the shift of attention toward mental health governance was generated by the work of disaster. in the context of disaster studies, scholars have shown how societies have unevenly transformed in the aftermath through increased nationalism, development, militarization, and privatization (klein 2007; gunewardena and schuller 2008; pandolfi 2010; adams 2013; choi 2015). just as extreme flooding was mobilized to pass a new constitution in venezuela (fassin 2012, 181), in nepal the disaster served as an impetus to promulgate the constitution after years of deadlock (ruszczyk 2018), generating protests by madhesi activists who argued that their region had not been granted full rights to self-determination. a critical issue at stake in such uses of disaster concerns the ways in which certain transformations and visions for the future become prioritized and supported while others are not (lovell 2011; simpson 2014, 31). as i will show in the following section, the strategic use of crisis to support predefined development goals also proved the case for mental health in nepal. in may 2015 the international news media began reporting on nepal’s “mental health crisis” (bennett 2015; stockton 2015; nyenhuis 2016). according to these publications, the impact of the disaster would cause widespread trauma, with increased risks of ptsd and depression. from this perspective, it was a pre-accepted fact that trauma generated by the disaster would be minimized through immediate emergency psychosocial intervention. the sense that mental health was now in crisis was palpable in kathmandu, where an unprecedented amount of activity and attention gathered around this new “matter of concern,” enabling the crisis of mental health to emerge as a “matter of fact” (latour 2004, 235). as peter redfield (2005, 337) writes of humanitarian intervention more generally, “once a state of crisis has been established, then action (especially technical, expert action) acquires self-authorizing status by virtue of circumstance.” prior to the earthquake, i had been conducting research among nepali ngos for mental health and counseling in kathmandu. at that time, eight years after the end of the people’s war, the gold rush of donor-funded projects related to the conflict had largely run dry. beyond the ngos directly connected to the movement for global mental health (mgmh), there was little activity, with the exception of a handful of development projects that had incorporated a psychosocial component. after the earthquake, almost every psychiatrist and counselor i knew in kathmandu had become directly involved in the humanitarian response. the mental health ngo offices pulsed with frenetic activity as project managers from donor organizations arrived to negotiate contracts. during this period the demand for psychosocial counselors was so high that there were not enough trained and qualified people to staff all the new projects and jobs that had suddenly appeared. in the months following the 2015 earthquake i began to hear talk of “building back better” among my nepali colleagues, and we wondered what this unprecedented flood of resources would mean for the future of mental health governance in nepal (seale-feldman and upadhaya 2015). in the context of the humanitarian mental health and psychosocial response, there was much discussion of this topic in the weekly mental health sub-cluster meeting. the meeting was run by the united nations office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (ocha) and held with the hope of coordinating and documenting the array of almost seventy foreign and local organizations providing a range of mental health and psychosocial interventions, from psychiatric treatment, psychosocial counseling, and psychoeducation to community theater and anonymous phone hotlines. as the group began to form over the following months, it became a place where nepali and expatriate mental health specialists—psychiatrists, ngo staff, development workers, humanitarians, activists, and even anthropologists—would not only report their activities but also imagine together what the future of nepal’s mental health system could be. so much money was flowing into post-disaster mental health and psychosocial support programs for earthquake victims that it seemed almost anything was possible. as one nepali psychiatrist exclaimed to me in the mental health sub-cluster meeting, “the earthquake has been a boon for mental health in nepal!” what does it mean for a disaster to be a boon: a godsend, a blessing, a bonus? that crisis generates transient care is a well-known observation not only among anthropologists of disaster and humanitarianism (redfield 2005; ticktin 2011) but also among practicing medical humanitarians. in the influential 2013 publication titled “building back better: sustainable mental health care after emergencies” (the key document and reference point to which my nepali colleagues were referring) the world health organization (who 2013, 3) urges readers to take situations of emergency, crisis, and disaster as an “important opportunity for mental health reform and development.” these goals, inspired by the movement for global mental health, would soon find alignment with the world bank’s vision of making mental health the next major international development priority. the authors of the document argue that increased international attention during situations of crisis enables aid to flow, and that this paradox should be seen as an opening. the report goes on to describe cases of building mental health systems in times of emergency, drawing on examples from the west bank and gaza, sri lanka, iraq, and indonesia (aceh), among others. the message is clear: when mental health becomes a political issue in times of emergency, it should be seen as an opportunity to create sustainable forms of systemic change via humanitarian intervention. as the authors of the report put it, “in some countries, senior government leaders express—for the first time—serious concern about their nation’s mental health. this is frequently followed by national and international agencies’ willingness and financial ability to support mental health and psychosocial assistance to affected people” (who 2013, 17). as mark van ommeren, an influential global mental health scholar-practitioner and coordinator of the “building back better” report said in a 2016 interview for reuters, “the interest in mental health in and after an emergency is enormous. it’s not surprising to see that the countries who have made the greatest progress in mental health system development are those that have been through emergencies” (whiting 2016). here the biopolitical logics of humanitarian reason, in which increasingly spectacular events of suffering are required to “make live,” become clear (foucault 1990, 2013; povinelli 2011). but what counts as a spectacular event of suffering? lauren berlant (2011) and elizabeth a. povinelli (2011) have pointed out that there are “genres of event” and technologies of measurement that shape the way a given situation is perceived as a crisis or not, an objectification that determines who and what is worthy of care and intervention or subject to abandonment. in this way they draw our attention to the becoming of an event and the ways such becomings are grasped and perceived through predetermined frames of eventfulness. this way of thinking of event and crisis, i argue, is deeply phenomenological. phenomenological anthropology is an approach most often used in relation to questions of illness, healing, morality, and ethics that has contributed careful studies of embodied, lived experience and the ways such experience becomes objectified and made meaningful intersubjectively (desjarlais and throop 2011). while some have called for a “critical phenomenology,” the study of experience as it takes form within social, historical, and political-economic contexts of inequality (desjarlais 1997; willen 2007), its application has largely focused on the first-person, subjective, experiential domain. in the anthropology of disaster, those who have engaged a phenomenological lens have also focused on experience (hastrup 2011; desjarlais 2016).5 yet lived experience is not the only use to which we may engage this mode of analysis. critical phenomenology, i argue, may also be used to analyze the designation of a given phenomenon as an event or as being in crisis. in such analyses a phenomenological perspective makes it possible to attend to the “politics of the a priori,” that is, to how preconceived understandings, genres, and frames create but also foreclose possibilities for things to become otherwise (zigon 2018). in this way, this article contributes to phenomenological anthropology by extending its application from studies of the body and experience to the phenomenology of disaster. the work of disaster in august 2015 i put my original research questions on hold to contribute to the humanitarian response. this decision was borne through a feeling of helplessness, a desire to make anthropology useful, and an invitation by a foreign development worker in charge of a psychosocial intervention. i joined the team of the centre for mental health and counselling–nepal (cmc), a leading nepali ngo that had been subcontracted by multiple foreign donor organizations to heal trauma among disaster-affected populations. in this role my fieldwork was transformed from classical ethnography and participant observation to a collaborative and engaged mode of cocreation (lassiter 2005). as an “ethnographic consultant” for cmc, i attended trainings for supervisors, counselors, and community psychosocial workers, participated in meetings, attended the un cluster meetings for mental health and counseling, and over the course of a year, accompanied three psychosocial counselors into the earthquake-affected districts to observe their interventions with individuals and communities. my observations and documentation were then taken back to the ngo, which used them in training workshops for nepali supervisors, led by a foreign psychologist, and in training sessions for psychosocial counselors, led by the nepali supervisors. sharing my reflections and notes on various interventions did not prove easy, as my observations often operated in a mode of critique. but the negotiation of interpretation across all levels of the organization was the aim, and my observations and data served as a foundation from which we built more engaged practices of support for counselors in the field.6 drawing on this aspect of my research, in the following sections i introduce four vignettes that demonstrate how forms of suffering that predated the disaster became visible through the event and its transient ethical demands. in doing so, each story shows the ways in which a priori frames of crisis, “the better,” and earthquake-related suffering created and foreclosed possibilities for care and for building back otherwise. the otherwise has emerged as a hope-filled concept in the wake of what sherry b. ortner (2016) has referred to as decades of “dark anthropology,” for it allows us to move beyond the paralysis of critique and sketch a politically engaged path toward what is not yet. povinelli (2011) first described “the otherwise” as forms of alternative social projects that emerge and endure in the unlivable and lethal spaces of late liberalism. such projects may be organized modes of resistance or simply found in the act of maintaining a particular form of life when faced with its possible extinction. while povinelli (2011, 129) locates this radical otherwise in “scenes of abandonment,” she also questions the implications of positing a form of world-making created by lethality. alternately, in jarrett zigon’s (2019, 20) work with anti–drug war agonists, the otherwise marks neither a rupture with the past nor utopia, nor even something that is necessarily “better” than what came before. instead, thinking with giorgio agamben, zigon argues the otherwise is something that sticks and endures through “tiny displacements” over time. yet his spaces of otherwise experimentation also come into existence in connection to the drug war and its deadly effects—if not inside it, then in clearings along its edges. like the sudden surge of care and concern inaugurated by the work of disaster, the potential for the emergence of an otherwise is always found in relation to the threat of death. the better in nepal, while the majority of the humanitarian mental health programs operated for less than a year, some international donor agencies, informed by the “building back better” report, saw the disaster as an opportunity to initiate long-term programs to support the development of the mental health system, blurring the boundaries between humanitarianism and development, emergency response and long-term investment (ticktin 2014). the international medical corps (imc), with funding from corporations, foundations, u.s. government grants, and $10 million generated from 500,000 individual donors on facebook, became a key actor in both short-term humanitarian mental health and psychosocial support as well as long-term development work. in addition to working in nepal, imc had also supported programs to integrate mental health into primary health care in iraq, jordan, lebanon, syria, and turkey (imc 2015). back in the cluster meetings, a troubling issue began to surface, the problem of the homeless mentally ill who in nepal were at that time unable to receive medical services without a guardian willing to take responsibility for them, a prerequisite for hospital care. the only existing help for this group of people was a nepali ngo, run by a man named vivek ji,7 who brought the issue to the table. vivek ji is a well-known mental health activist in nepal. i saw him regularly at both the mental health sub-cluster and the psychosocial working group, and he would continually bring up the problem of the homeless mentally ill in both groups. when he did so, he would often be met with silence. everyone enthusiastically agreed it was a problem, but what could be done? in the mental health sub-cluster meeting one of the humanitarians working with imc mentioned that there might be a possibility of securing money to work on the issue. the group unanimously decided to form a working group to tackle the subject, and i, too, offered to help in drafting any reports or documents they might need. a palpable sense of excitement took hold. “you must strike while the iron is hot!” said a nepali woman in attendance. the facilitator of the group also approved of the idea, and it seemed that maybe the right people with enough power could also be brought into the conversation. but, in the end, the representative of the humanitarian donor organization announced that funding could only be allocated for earthquake-related mental health issues. yet even after this failure, vivek ji continued to advocate and raise critical questions. “what will happen to the abandoned children with mental disabilities? what will happen to the abandoned adults with severe mental illness?” he asked the room full of humanitarians. the facilitator of the meeting looked at him solemnly and said, “we don’t have the capacity …” who and what qualified as an earthquake-related mental health issue? the answer was not at all clear. the ongoing problem of the homeless mentally ill that had suddenly resurfaced remained beyond the scope of the humanitarian intervention, even among those engaged in the project of “building back better.” and yet, although a priori frames limited care, they also created the conditions for its emergence. figure 2. the temporary shelters of resettled families. photo by aidan seale-feldman. the limitations and possibilities of transient care the psychosocial counselors and i arrived at a green hillside in dolakha district dotted with tin shelters, so that indira could conduct a group counseling session with the members of a highly earthquake-affected community. unlike other places, this community had not only lost their homes, but they had been resettled to an entirely new area of land due to the risk of landslides. on arrival, indira explained the intervention to a confused and weary crowd. why had she come? what relief materials would she be providing, people wondered aloud. “we won’t be bringing you relief, nor any gi sheets,” said indira’s assistant. “we won’t be bringing tarpaulin. we don’t have all these things. we are here to bring relief to the hearts of all those who have problems… . know it well that we don’t have any relief materials. look, we have come empty handed.” “it’s only for psycho counseling,” a local man explained to the group. “they are not here to corrupt your minds. they are here to help you to spread public awareness. their objective is to increase your confidence. that’s why we should cooperate with them,” he added. with each new visit, psychosocial counseling had to be explained in lay terms. a group of twenty, mostly women, had assembled in a circle beneath a tin shelter. the counselor, indira, who had grown up in this district and had made a career of her work as field staff on donor-funded health-development projects, asked, “how is your man doing?” and instructed people to go around the circle and share with each other how they were feeling and enduring their loss. man, a nepali-language term, is often translated into english as “heart-mind.” the concept of man collapses thought and feeling, and is the site of desire, intentionality, mood, opinion, delight, and dislike (turner 1965; desjarlais 1992; kohrt and harper 2008). too much activity in the man can lead to suffering and anguish, thus inspiring the translation of “psychosocial counselor” as manobimarshakarta, or “one who advises on matters of the heart-mind” (kohrt and harper 2008, 484). after each person shared a brief story of suffering, indira would comment on their words, praising them for their ability to imagine concrete plans for the future if they did so, and asking the group for a round of applause for particularly optimistic, self-motivated individuals. as indira went around the circle, people spoke of worries about being able to pay their debt, about their children’s education having been disrupted (literally “broken,” bigreko), about their crops that were harvested but beginning to rot in the damp, makeshift shelters. many had sons and even daughters working abroad in india, malaysia, or the persian gulf, more had thoughts of sending their children abroad in hopes to make some money to somehow start again. they worried about how they would feed themselves. consolation came in the form of hope that maybe the government, some organization, or project would help them, and a sense of comfort in the fact that at least everyone had suffered from the disaster, not just one person. people spoke of what they had undergone, of what they had lost, as their karma, as one’s fate that was already “written,” lekheko. what kind of care was possible in the midst of so many limitations—economic, infrastructural, geological, temporal—and what did such care look like? three months later i returned again to dolakha with indira. this time it was winter, and indira was bundled in a puffy jacket and knit hat to fight the biting cold. searching for clients to follow up with, indira found a young man she had met twice before. they sat, legs crossed, on a woven mat in front of the corrugated tin wall of his makeshift shelter. it was their third meeting, and indira began by saying, “the other day we spoke. after the conversation, i see that your face has become a little brighter, ujyaalo. you look happy. is my guess correct?” neither confirming nor denying her observation, the young man began to talk about how he felt everything was worthless. he explained that his problems started while he was working abroad as a labor migrant in the persian gulf, one of the few viable possibilities for employment available to nepalis from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. life as a labor migrant in places like the gulf and malaysia is often brutal and sometimes deadly, as workers are confined to labor camps where they earn low wages, exercise little freedom, and are often exposed to dangerous working conditions of extreme desert heat (bruslé 2012; pattisson 2013). while this client was abroad, his fear of heart attack was so great that he sometimes could not get out of bed. he told indira with sincerity, “my biggest medicine is alcohol. i have started drinking it not for taste, but for treatment.” indira did not hide her disapproval. toward the end of their meeting, indira’s client told her directly that he would like to have more treatment, and asked if he could go with her somewhere to access additional care. “ok,” she responded. “we have already talked two to three times with you. if you want to talk more with us, then we have a one-year program here, so we will talk to you again.” it was a moment of relief as she announced the program had been extended for one year. but what will happen after a year has passed, and she can no longer make promises of return? as long-term suffering became visible over the course of the intervention, it had to be treated with transient care due to the limitations of a priori frames of crisis and humanitarian intervention. many clients, particularly those who described prior symptoms of psychosis or epilepsy, said that medication had helped them improve. in another district, bina, a second psychosocial counselor with whom i worked, met with a middle-aged man who, prior to the disaster, had largely abandoned his daily farming tasks and family responsibilities and begun to wander incoherently in the nearby forest, a form of madness known as jangali. we met with him in the upstairs room of his mud home, which had survived the earthquake. a month had passed since he had been prescribed olanzapine 5mg, an antipsychotic, and fluoxetine 20mg, an antidepressant, by the ngo, two medications he took along with his own memtone memory tonic, an ayurvedic medicine for “memory loss, stress, depression, headache, sleeplessness, anxiety and forgetfulness.” the man spoke as if heavy with sleep. bina listened patiently, often repeating back the phrases he said to her as if checking that she understood correctly. “after meeting you and talking with you, and after taking the medicine, i am feeling a little better,” he said slowly. “and after having more medicine, i believe that i will be cured.” “that’s very good thinking,” bina replied. “so you are feeling better and comfortable after talking to us and taking medicine?” “yes,” he answered. bina neither confirmed nor denied his belief in a cure, although it is likely that without the program, his access to medication would be greatly limited. on the day of the session, he informed bina that he had only one more dose of medicine left. in this particular program, clients who counselors felt might need medication were taken to kathmandu where they would meet with the ngo psychiatrist for a consultation. once the psychiatrist had given a diagnosis, clients were eligible to receive their medication free of charge through the ngo. back in the villages, they either had to purchase their own medication and submit receipts for reimbursement or the local community psychosocial workers were expected to be notified ahead of time to deliver the medication to clients. but when the program phased out, this access and monitoring would also disappear. even during the program, unless a client started looking for more medication at least ten days before it ran out, it was not guaranteed that the medication would actually be available in a nearby pharmacy, nor was it guaranteed that the available pharmaceuticals would be of trustworthy quality due to the lax regulations of the off-patent formulations that dominate the market in nepal (harper, rawal, and subedi 2011, 6). the availability of drugs (along with fuel, cooking gas, and construction materials) became further limited when violent political protests over the new constitution erupted in the madhesh region of the southern terai, causing india to endorse a four-month unofficial blockade at the border from september 2015 to february 2016, and sending nepal into a spiral of scarcity. the possibility that clients might be left without access to medicines after humanitarian care ends is one of the key reasons driving the “building back better” model. the hope is that if lasting mental health infrastructure can be built in the midst of emergency, then people will continue to have access to medication even after the end of humanitarian intervention. figure 3. a counselor helps a client sort out new medication. photo by aidan seale-feldman. mundane disasters of everyday life we hiked down the dusty trail of a steep hill to reach the still-standing mud house of an elderly woman, ganga maya. it was the second time bina had met with her. tara, the community psychosocial worker (cpsw) a local resident, herself living in a transitional shelter made of corrugated metal, led us to ganga maya’s home. bina and ganga maya sat cross-legged on a woven mat on the floor inside her modest house. the mud walls were painted in a classical style, red mud on the bottom, white mud on the top. “namaste, aamaa,” bina said, her hands held together in prayer, the typical nepali greeting. compared to bina’s robust health, ganga maya’s body was small and thin. her face held a sorrowful expression, and her eyes were downcast. “how are you feeling today?” bina asked. ganga maya replied, “you all came, so now my heart-mind, man, is a little refreshed, sital.” “i don’t know what to do,” she said to bina. “i am sick. i just sit and cry. what can i do, ke garne. i belong to a poor family. we have to work for our livelihood. so i work here and there. this is reality. what to do. whatever is written we have to face it, right? i have children but no one is here with me. i don’t know where they are. i stay here alone.” ganga maya had recently tried to commit suicide in the nearby river. she was saved by people nearby who pulled her out of the rushing water. she told bina that her husband was often away at work, and that he rarely came home except to sleep. she proceeded to tell the following story. my husband has a very bad habit of talking bitterly. that’s the reason i don’t want to stay here. i get pain in my lower abdomen. i pulled the placenta myself … . i get pain while with him as well. if i say i cannot do it, he gets angry. that’s why i cannot tell him that. so i want to stay away from him, and sometimes i feel it would be better if i die … it’s been a very long time. that happened when i gave birth to my third son. he is now sixteen years old. labor started at noon and i gave birth at midnight. at that time nobody took me to the hospital and no one gave me any medicine. the newborn was in front of me. he was crying and his lips were getting dry and blue. so i didn’t care about the consequences and pulled the placenta to separate the baby. when i pulled, everything came out. then with the help of another woman, i put everything back in myself. ganga maya told bina that although she had seen a shaman, dhami, about her problem, her husband did not support her seeing a doctor. “a daughter’s karma is a life already lost [choriko karma hareko juni],” she explained, quoting a well-known nepali proverb and critique of the ongoing power of patriarchy. later ganga maya continued. “i wish i didn’t worry so much. i am taking medicine for that. but when i had that medicine, i used to fall asleep everywhere.” “did you take the medicine after proper consultation with a doctor?” bina asked. “no, without any consultation. we were talking just like this. i told my problem, and they gave me the medicine.” ganga maya had been prescribed amitriptyline 25mg, an antidepressant, by another ngo also providing mental health and psychosocial care in the earthquake-affected district. ganga maya’s story of suffering occupies a different kind of temporality. it does not describe a sudden disaster in which everything is lost; instead, she speaks of something slower. these are the mundane disasters of everyday life—an abusive relationship with her husband, severe pain due to untreated uterine prolapse, and the sadness of family conflict. according to her narrative, her physical suffering had gone untreated for sixteen years. suddenly, after the event of the earthquake, multiple psychosocial counselors came to her home to provide counseling, antidepressants, and support to travel to a hospital. her everyday suffering had become hypervisible through the frame of crisis.8 the widespread use of medication by clients in the psychosocial intervention program also pointed to an unexpected aspect of the humanitarian intervention as a whole. while clients seen in group sessions in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake described problems that had a clear connection to the disaster, the majority of those seen over the following eighteen months were being treated for problems, sometimes serious mental illness, that predated the earthquake. while the earthquake undoubtedly placed these individuals and their families into situations of further precarity, their suffering had only become visible through the work of disaster and its ethical demands. the “right to intervention,” justified on the basis of “superior ethical principles” and predefined universal values (hardt and negri 2000, 18), has also produced a contemporary situation in which spectacular crisis is required for care, and a disaster might become a boon. this is the specter that haunts humanitarianism. the end of care phul kumari, age eighty-one, sat on the ground in the courtyard in front of the ruins of her home. she said that she felt afraid that she would die in her sleep by being crushed by the remains of her house. she was less worried about dying per se than about dying a slow and painful death. her problem, she said, was that her sons, who lived on the same property, had not built her a shelter to stay in, and she had not been invited to stay with them in theirs, so she remained alone inhabiting the ruins of her home. her family problems stretched back many years to a feud over land holdings. phul kumari told us again and again that she felt alone. the last time she met with bina, she told her that she wanted to kill herself, that she was thinking of jumping off a cliff, or of hanging herself. but that she was worried about what people would say about her. she said these thoughts come to her, gesturing at her chest. bina was attentive. she sat close to phul kumari and leaned her body toward her. when the old woman told her that she had recently fallen, bina took her hand to examine the swelling. phul kumari called her babu, child, and bina called her aamaa, mother. toward the end of the session, phul kumari told bina, “you talk so nicely and politely. you talk in such a way that you show me reality like in a mirror,” she said as she spread her hands across the ground in front of her. “when you talk i feel that i have everyone, my children, my relatives, and my grandchildren. i feel like my heart has broadened with joy, it is like a nanglo [a large round rice-winnowing pan]. when you leave, it is again the same loneliness.” responding to this direct comment on separation and the end of care, bina suggested, “there is an old saying that ‘even a ghost that is close to us is more helpful than a distant god,’ tadako deuta naajikko bhut kaam laagcha.” “yes, that’s it, babu,” phul kumari agreed. “distant gods … ghosts close by … the ghosts close by are more useful.” “yes,” said bina. “we are distant, hami tadako ho.” “we will visit you when we can.” after the earthquake, psychosocial care in nepal was unevenly distributed and always constrained by the timeline set by the donor agencies in which “victimhood” required a practical endpoint. in the psychosocial support cluster meetings in kathmandu, humanitarian partners were reminded to make a “dignified exit.” even the most sensitive and engaged foreign project managers could not escape the constraints of the logics of their field (fassin 2012)—whether development or humanitarian—in which “phasing out” was always required. on the ground, counselors seemed to avoid discussing the possibility of the project ending with their clients, an unpleasant truth no one enjoyed speaking about. when i asked, in the ngo headquarters in kathmandu, what would happen to clients who had been prescribed free psychotropic medication once the project came to an end, the nepali project supervisors could not answer with clarity. ultimately, the duration of the program was out of their hands. as one ngo officer said to a group of counselors during a training, “donors bhane [say], ‘beggars can’t be choosers’” that is, ngos cannot control how long a project exists. by december 2015, the cumulative reporting from the child-protection sub-cluster announced that more than three hundred thousand “beneficiaries” had been provided psychosocial support services by more than sixty-six organizations (united nations children’s fund 2016). in the first months following the earthquake many people spoke in group sessions about their fear, confusion, sorrow, loss, and somatic pain. six months later, the focus had switched from the group to the individual, and the majority of people seen were not suffering from problems directly related to the disaster. these were people who had been suffering all along from the slow disaster of poverty, from the mundane disasters of everyday life such as abuse in the family or the anxieties of labor migration, from severe mental illness, from ghosts or witchcraft (boksi laagne/chopne), or from a combination of these. the disaster and their categorization as earthquake victims had temporarily rendered their suffering visible, and in their brief visibility they received transient care. figure 4. waiting to rebuild. photo by aidan seale-feldman. conclusion: building back otherwise the seismic event set the work of disaster into motion. its designation as a crisis worthy of care inspired people from all over the world to donate money. humanitarian agencies like imc used the sudden increase in national and international attention and resources to fast-track prior development goals of improving the mental health system in nepal. the who prepared the “building back better” policy so that when a situation of crisis is designated as such, previously determined development priorities can be pushed through. the policy anticipates the crisis as an opening, a possibility to create further infrastructure, in this case, mental health governance. in this way, international development actors like the who and their partners predetermine “the better” to be built. the earthquake was a boon for mental health governance in nepal: many aspects of the country’s mental health system have seen development because of this policy. additional psychotropic drugs have been added to the free drug list, and the government has for the first time created a budget for decentralized mental health care (chase et al. 2018, 10). yet it is also important to point out the limitations of having a predetermined understanding of the “better.” the work of disaster is a powerful process by which a world is destroyed and then must be rebuilt. but ultimately what is rebuilt does not particularly differ from what came before. when the “building back better” report states that “global progress on mental health reform would happen more quickly if, in every major crisis, strategic efforts were made to convert short-term interest in mental health problems into momentum for mental health system development” (who 2013, 20), we begin to see how such plans for global reform already directly align with broader world bank priorities. in 2016 the world bank, in partnership with the who, held a high-profile event titled “out of the shadows: making mental health a global development priority.” the inaugural panel framed mental health not only as a universal human right but also as a major constraint to development. citing figures showing that mental illness is the leading cause of years lived with disability (ylds), it was announced that “the global cost of lost productivity due to mental illness amounts to … the equivalent of us$1 trillion dollars per year” while every dollar invested in the treatment of depression and anxiety yields a four-dollar return in better health and the ability to work (world bank group and who 2016, 6). the role of the world bank in this new global crisis will be to provide funding and technical support to help decrease the prevalence of mental illness in resource-poor countries, with the goal of increasing economic productivity. as the management of mental illness in populations becomes justified in economic terms, the old link between biopolitics, capital, and the economization of life becomes clear (foucault 2013, 65). yet it is unknown what would happen to these newly productive citizens in nepal, a country with few existing opportunities for employment. in 2018, 28 percent of nepal’s annual gdp was generated from remittances, placing it among the top six remittance-driven economies in the world (world bank n.d.). this article should not be read as a critique of the need for access to care in nepal. far from it. instead, it offers an inquiry into the forms of suffering that are grasped, and the preconceived notions of “the better” that are employed by development agencies, and how these frames limit but also enable possibilities for care and an otherwise to come into being in surprising places. it is this latter point that directs our attention to the possibilities of care and formations of the otherwise brought about by the work of disaster. it is not only through the future-oriented project of world-building but also in the present moment of being together that we glimpse the otherwise—if only for a fleeting moment. as phul kumari said to bina as they sat together facing the end of care, “when you talk i feel that i have everyone … i feel like my heart has broadened with joy … when you leave, it is again the same loneliness.” there was a beginning and an end to care, which did not neatly align with the temporality of suffering for clients. this was patchwork care, in the same way people in kathmandu were said to have patched up the cracks in their concrete homes with putty and plaster, without rebuilding the structural damage beneath. but the counselors were not entirely limited by the logic of humanitarian care within which they found themselves. for bina and indira it offered an opportunity, also transient, and they tried to do good with what little they could offer under the circumstances. through the course of a given counseling session, care might be extended through touch or a certain turn of phrase, through the delivery of medication, through an insistence that one had improved, through a guided breathing session, or simply through an acknowledgment that one person had traveled a great distance to listen to the worries of another—that after the world had been destroyed, a stranger had walked and suffered for them. yet just as quickly, a moment of care and connection between counselor and client could dissolve into disconnection, a touch could be withdrawn, a judgement made, a face turned away. in the work of post-disaster psychosocial counseling, three temporalities were braided together. the first strand was the temporality of humanitarian care, defined by its transience. the second was the temporality of suffering, one that often predated the disaster and would certainly outlast this transient care. the third temporality was that of karma, in which suffering was placed in a far longer duration. clients would talk about their dukkha, their suffering, as their karma. “whatever is written we have to face it,” as ganga maya put it. in the nepali language, shaped by the religious philosophy of both hinduism and tibetan buddhism, one’s karma, or fate, is inscribed, written, lekheko, on one’s forehead at birth, nidaama lekheko. in such karmic temporality, the present links directly to actions done in a previous life (desjarlais 2016). in the psychosocial counseling project, these three temporalities coexisted simultaneously, often in the same moment. within this braid of time the otherwise came into being. the otherwise is not a future dream: it is already with us. the possibility for an otherwise to emerge is always already there as a potentiality in the intersubjective space between us. we can find it in moments of care that instill small changes in the present and continue to live in memory, no matter how transient or precarious the conditions of their creation. “after meeting you and talking with you, and after taking the medicine, i am feeling a little better … i believe that i will be cured,” said the middle-aged man to bina. this otherwise is not the grand plan of “building back better,” but the small mark left on a single life that has been touched by the concern of another. the question is how we might intentionally cultivate otherwise encounters that do not depend on threats of annihilation and temporalities of crisis to bring them into existence. as bina reminds us, “the ghosts close by are more useful than distant gods,” for they are always already beside us. to build back otherwise beyond the temporality of crisis would be to find a way to sustain this ethics of care with each other and with the world—which may be generated by the work of disaster but does not depend on it. abstract what does a disaster generate? this article brings a critical phenomenological approach into conversation with theories of event to trace the emergence of a mental health crisis and its consequences in nepal after the 2015 earthquakes. following the disaster, people who received psychosocial counseling often presented chronic problems that had become visible through the frame of crisis and its ethical demands. at the same time, humanitarian agencies were aware of the logics of crisis and strategically used the disaster as an opportunity to increase mental health governance under the rubric of “building back better.” i demonstrate that these phenomena are linked consequences of the work of disaster, the destruction and creation of worlds set into motion by disaster and its management. i argue that a phenomenological approach to disaster helps us attend to the ways a priori frames of crisis and “the better” create and foreclose possibilities both for care and for building the world back otherwise. [disaster; crisis; care; critical phenomenology; biopolitics; global mental health; nepal] सारांश विपदले के उत्पादन गर्छ? २०१५ सालको भुकम्पले निम्त्याएको मानसिक स्वास्थको संकट र नेपालमा त्यसका परिणामको उद्भव यस लेखले घटनाक्रियाविज्ञान (फेनोमेनोलोजी) र घटना सिद्धान्तको संवादबाट चित्रित गर्छ । २०१५ को विपद पछि, जुन जीर्ण समस्याहरु मनोसामाजिक परामर्श पाउनेहरुमा देखा पर्यो, यी समस्याहरु संकटको धारणा र संकटको बेलाको नैतिक जिम्मेवारीको माध्यम बाट मात्र बाहिर देख्न आइपुग्यो । त्यस समयमा मानवीय निकायहरुले पनि रणनीतिक तरिकाले विपदलाई मानसिक स्वास्थ प्रशाशनलाई अझ सहज बनाउने अवसरको रुपमा लिए, झन् राम्रो पुननिर्माण (‘बिल्डिंग ब्याक बेट्टर’) को शीर्षक मुनि । यी घटनाक्रम सबै ‘विपदका काम’ सित जुडेका परिणामहरु हुन भनेर म यस लेखमा उल्लेख गर्छु, जहाँ विपद र विपदका व्यवस्थापनले नयाँ संसारहरुका बिनाश र सिर्जना दुबै भैरहेका छन् । संकट र ‘झन् राम्रो’ जस्ता पूर्वनिर्धारित अवधारणाहरूले कसरी हेरचाह र पुननिर्माणका सम्भावनाहरुलाई संगसंगै उत्पादन एवम सिमित गर्छन भनेर बुझ्न घटनाक्रियाविज्ञानको दृष्टिकोणले सहयोग गर्छ भन्ने मेरो तर्क यस लेखमा प्रस्तुत गरेकी छु । [विपद; संकट; हेरचाह; घटनाक्रियाविज्ञान; जीवराजनीति (बायोपोलिटिक्स); अन्तरास्ट्रिय मानसिक स्वास्थ; नेपाल] notes acknowledgments this article would not have been possible without the guidance, friendship, and encouragement of barbara weyerman, pashupati mahat, karuna kunwar, laxshmi tamang, and everyone at the centre for mental health and counselling–nepal, thank you for helping me discover new ways of engaging anthropology. i am especially grateful to jason throop, sherry ortner, robert desjarlais, jarrett zigon, douglas hollan, l.f.r. murillo, camille frazier, and devin flaherty for carefully reading and commenting on various versions of this text at critical moments, as well as to my anonymous reviewers who helped sharpen my thinking. i am thankful for having had the opportunity to work with chris nelson, who provided incredible editorial care, insight, and guidance. special thanks to erica adhikary and pranaya rana for help with complex translations. i also received valuable feedback from scholars at the ucla/university of amsterdam conference on crisis and the everyday, cermes3 in paris, the 2016 american anthropological association annual meetings, and the uva/duke writing group “formation, deformation, care,” especially anne allison, anne lovell, raphaëlle rabanes, china scherz, and lisa stevenson. this research was funded by the wenner-gren foundation, the ucla center for the study of women, the ucla international institute, the ucla department of anthropology, and the foundation for psychocultural research—culture, brain, development, and mental health program. 1. this radio program fits into a longer history of the use of call-in fm radio programs and voice as a medium for public intimacy and the sharing of suffering, dukkha, in nepal (kunreuther 2014). 2. here i follow veena das (2007, 95) in her use of the term work and her discussion of the agency of time and temporality. 3. as hannah arendt (1998, 257) writes: “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. it is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.” 4. a slogan coined by un special envoy bill clinton following the 2004 indian ocean tsunami. 5. one exception is the call to study the temporality of catastrophe by christopher dole et al. (2015), which, while not described as a phenomenological approach, shares many of its sensibilities. 6. additionally, i shared drafts of this article with members of the project so they could comment and edit. every story i present here was discussed and presented to the organization for supervision and further training. all clients provided me with permission to record their counseling sessions, which i explained was for the purpose of my research and for understanding how to improve the work of the psychosocial counselors through further training. 7. i use pseudonyms for all personal names. 8. for a discussion of the intersection of eventfulness, slow violence, and precarity see anne allison (2013) and megan raschig (2017). for literature on “slow disasters,” particularly in relation to toxic exposure, see kim fortun (2001); max liboiron, manuel tironi, and nerea calvillo (2018); and rob nixon (2011). references abramowitz, sharon alane 2014 searching for normal in the wake of the 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accessed march 8, 2020. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/bx.trf.pwkr.dt.gd.zs?most_recent_value_desc=true. world bank group and world health organization (who) 2016 “out of the shadows: making mental health a global development priority.” report of proceedings of event, april 13–14. washington, d.c.: world bank group and world health organization. world health organization (who) 2013 “building back better: sustainable mental health care after emergencies.” geneva: who. http://www.who.int/mental_health/emergencies/building_back_better/en/. zigon, jarrett 2018 disappointment: toward a critical hermeneutics of worldbuilding. new york: fordham university press. 2019 a war on people: drug user politics and a new ethics of community. berkeley: university of california press. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 237-263, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.07 why do “good” pictures matter in anthropology? cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 572-598, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.11 why do “good” pictures matter in anthropology? camilo leon-quijano centre national de la recherche scientifique https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4904-8908 there are “good” and “bad” pictures—ask an editor, curator, or photographer. you might also have an idea of what a supposedly good picture is. what makes us see a picture as either “good” or “bad”? what do “good” and “not so good” photos do for anthropology? why is it important to understand the moral ecology surrounding their creation and dissemination in anthropology? with this provocative title, my article explores both the phenomenology and the politics of photographic experiences in the field. i consider the pragmatic relationship we have with photographs through a series of ethnographic encounters based on critical, sensory, and situated practices. i will begin my argument by stating what this article is not about. first, it is not a theoretical discussion on the status of images in anthropology. it does not intend to contribute to the rich visual theories that have nourished the anthropological reflection on photography (e.g., barthes 1980; belting 2004; didi-huberman 1990; freedberg 1989; mitchell 2009; tagg 1993). this article also does not contribute to any prescriptive definition of what might be considered aesthetically pleasing in anthropology. nor does this article offer a visual analysis of what might have been considered photographically good in the history of anthropology. finally, this article does not constitute a plea for the aestheticization of photographs produced by anthropologists in the field. this essay questions the practices and objects that define anthropologists’ photographic experience at various social scales. based on a series of concrete experiences, i introduce a reflection on how in this age of future anthropologies (e.g., pink et al. 2017; horst and miller 2014), photographs provide an opportunity to rethink the relationship researchers entertain with ethnographic materials. by drawing on one of the objects that have shaped the discipline since its origin (edwards 1997), i develop a reflection about the multiple engagements that guide the photographic experience of ethnographers in the field. to this end, this article is articulated in two main sections. first, i will discuss what i mean by a “good” picture. the central argument is that good pictures in anthropology will always be relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory. good pictures are experienced pictures. they rely on photographic conventions existing in the social environment from which they emerge and on the technical, pictorial, narrative, and material conditions in which they were produced and shared. good pictures emerge from a dialogue. unlike a “decisive moment” photograph (e.g., cartier-bresson 1952), good pictures in anthropology needs to engage in “good” ethnographic encounters. second, following a reflexive and critical approach (cox, irving, and wright 2015; pink 2001; de león 2013; canals 2017), i will draw from photo-ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2018 in a french banlieue (working-class suburb) to describe the experiential relationship and corporeal sensibility to images in this social environment. i will discuss the phenomenological bond between the camera and the picture-taking process and outline why we need good pictures in anthropology. by looking at the disciplinary historiography of photographic practices (e.g., edwards 1997, 2015; poole 2005; pinney 2012; vium 2018), i suggest examining the conditions under which visual narratives are performed through engaged visual practices. at this point, i define engagement in more than just its political dimension. i conceive of engagement as the pictorial, narrative, and sensory awareness involved in constructing a visual narrative attentive to existing cultural practices and photographic conventions. i will draw on a series of ethnographic encounters to describe how the photographic experience connects to a phenomenology of visual representations. i argue that good pictures rely on good ethnography, and to this end i will reflexively focus on encounters that brought out implicit ideological concerns about the photographic representation of the local community. i will discuss how anthropologists’ pictorial choices redefine our material and experiential ties to photographic materials and consider the editorial connections between photography, sound, and text. this article concludes that a good picture might embrace the politics of visual representation from a critical standpoint that questions the social depiction of imaged subjects. what is a good picture? toward a critical phenomenology of an experienced picture before explaining why good pictures matter, i will sketch some possible answers to this first question: what, in fact, makes a good picture? we may first attempt to answer by looking at normative definitions of the good in photography. in his famous book understanding a photograph, john berger (2013) evokes what is commonly considered good in photography. based on the critical historiography of the pictorial approach, he shows the extent to which we often judge a good photograph by its composition. in his critique of this prescriptive definition, often advised in photography manuals, berger (2013, 19) introduces a central idea: time, he claims, not the formal content of a photograph, matters: “the true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.” this assumption constitutes the starting point of my argument. time makes it possible to contextualize a photograph. berger’s critique allows us to place the putative content of the photograph in the space-time framework of the experienced image. while following a semiological approach (e.g., barthes 1980; krauss 1977), berger introduces a practical strand to situate photographs in the experiential framework of what could be considered good. it is because it is lived and sensed that a photograph accomplishes its ends. the photographic condition does not derive from a moral normativity surrounding the iconic content of the image, but rather from the practical experience viewers have of it. a good photograph is an image that is experienced, performed (bolt 2004), and shared (gunthert 2015). thus the value of a photograph does not derive solely from its aesthetic characteristics but also from its ability to provide social experience. in the argument that i propose, a first response to the question about what makes a good picture relies on the inextricable relationship between photography and experience (e.g., larsen 2005; poivert 2016; didi-huberman 2009). the environmental interaction between beings and objects (e.g., ingold 2000) shapes a photograph’s social dimensions. at the crossroads of a pragmatic (dewey 1934) and phenomenological (desjarlais and throop 2011; merleau-ponty 1964) perspective, a good photograph is experienced by a variety of participants, including the photographer, the person or persons photographed, and the spectator. cristina grasseni’s ecological approach to visual practices might frame the theoretical framework of the experienced picture through the notion of skilled visions: “a plurality of visual practices that employ different kinds of gestural competence, develop within different kinds of apprenticeship, and are differently embodied” (grasseni 2011, 22). this approach involves a perceptive exploration of the gaze and the inscription of visual practices in the sensorial environment of everyday life (de certeau 1990). a good picture is sensed and embedded in the “phenomenal body” (merleau-ponty 1945, 184) that involves a situational, bodily, and sensory engagement. to understand what good pictures do for anthropology, we need to consider the practical relationship between photography and the act of picture-taking. for instance, how does the materiality of the photo shoot define the photographic experience? does a good picture require a good camera? gregory bateson: by the way, i don’t like cameras on tripods. … margaret mead: and you don’t like that? bateson: disastrous. mead: why? bateson: because i think the photographic record should be an art form. mead: oh, why? why shouldn’t you have some records that aren’t art forms? because if it’s an art form, it has been altered. bateson: it’s undoubtedly been altered. i don’t think it exists unaltered. —margaret mead and gregory bateson, “margaret mead and gregory bateson on the use of the camera in anthropology”1 the above passage, taken from the renowned interview titled “for god’s sake, margaret!” (brand 1976), portrays one of the dilemmas that have shaped the attitude of anthropologists toward visual media. eighty years after the publication of the two anthropologists’ seminal work (bateson and mead 1942), this debate continues to structure disciplinary debates in anthropology (e.g., pink 2001; banks and ruby 2011). is photography an art form? is it a “record,” a piece of “evidence” (becker 2002), or “ethnographic data” (emmison and smith 2007)? historiographies of photographic use and practice in anthropology proffer the first key to answering these questions. its colonial past haunts the medium’s tumultuous history (e.g., blanchard et al. 2018; morton and edwards 2009). as a direct witness to the violence committed and documented by ethnologists in the biometric quest for the “other,” photography has found itself both promoted and critiqued as a powerful tool for recording difference. the performativity of photographic practices in colonial regimes helped define a structural praxis of domination and visual exploitation of the supposed other, despite the heterogeneity of those visual practices (e.g., edwards 2015, 2014). photographic imagery during what marcus banks and jay ruby (2011, 13) called the first phase of visual anthropology was thus marked by the use of photography in a non-systematized and exoticized way. some critical studies on this subject (e.g., poole 2005) show how colonial photography played a significant role in constructing an iconographic representation of the studied communities. between “cure” and “curse,” to use christopher pinney’s (2008, 17) expression, the creation and sharing of photographs constituted a way of exercising a “right to look” on those populations (mirzoeff 2011).2 furthermore, as a result of its supposedly indexical nature, photography in anthropology has historically been tied to its capacity for verisimilitude. elizabeth edwards (2015, 238) holds that in the tension between evidence and affect “photography becomes simultaneously naturalised, marginalised and submerged within anthropology.” navigating between record and art form, evidence and affect, photography has become entangled within a form of realism increasingly challenged since the early 1990s.3 but how can we define a good picture? how do we situate the still image in what edwards (2015, 236) identifies as the “unsolvable tension” between photography and anthropology? we might find a first answer in the relationship anthropologists entertain with cameras.4 brent luvaas (2016), in his ethnography of the fashion industry, develops one of the most insightful recent contributions on this subject.5 luvaas (2019) points out that, despite extensive theoretical work in visual anthropology, little has been written about how anthropologists pragmatically deal with cameras in the field. describing chronologically his relationship to a series of cameras he used, luvaas highlights the role played by the visual tools in his interactions with his photographed subjects. as part of this heuristic account, he describes, for instance, how the use of long focal lengths (e.g., 85mm) “renders a subject” correctly. luvaas (2019, 88) insists on the “trusty” character of professional cameras such as the nikon d4s and on the importance of choosing lenses with proper bokeh (the quality of the out-of-focus parts of a photograph). but what if in the field we don’t necessarily need or want sharp photos? what if we are not looking for a nice bokeh or prefer lenses with optical aberrations? what if supposedly bad cameras better capture our ethnographic experience? to answer these questions, i will consider the materiality of visual practices in a photographic ethnography i conducted in a french banlieue between 2015 and 2018. i will focus on a series of four ethnographic encounters to portray the role of bodily, technical, and pictorial choices in the critical definition of an experienced picture. good pictures involve good ethnography sarcelles is a banlieue located fifteen kilometers to the north of paris,6 a place historically represented through the lens of marginality and violence. moreover, with its 60,000 inhabitants, it constitutes one of the urban spaces traditionally mythologized through media, film, and photographic narratives since the birth of the grands ensembles (housing complex) in france (canteux 2004). locals are aware of the city’s unflattering image and endure the consequences of this stigma daily, particularly in terms of access to the labor market. this “bad image” results in part from a long history of visual marginalization (e.g., bertho 2014). for three years, i was immersed in sarcelles as a photographer and an anthropologist.7 while photographing the daily lives of locals, i recognized the importance of critically situating my production within a more exhaustive visual history of the community. as soon as i started my fieldwork, i encountered a sort of objection from the local inhabitants to the stereotypical image publicly conveyed of their city. one of the first things participants asked me was to “show another face of the city” to “see deeper than the apparent misery.” they asked me to question the hegemonic representation of otherness through my photographic practice.8 figure 1. an article from the local newspaper le parisien val d’oise publicized my photographic activity in 2015. in the field, i was perceived as an outsider, since i am colombian and wasn’t just observing but creating new narratives in and of this space. people told me that as an outsider, i would manage to “see differently” daily life in sarcelles. residents, aware of their city’s stereotypical image, were concerned about how my photographic narratives would depict sarcelles. as one inhabitant put it: “we are sick of white journalists who come here and speak for us.” in the field, an event revealed the extent of this citizen’s awareness regarding the visual productions on sarcelles. on july 16, 2018, i went to sarcelles to photograph a group of soccer fans while watching the world cup final. at that point, i was photographing a group of sarcellois i had previously met at a community center. at about 8 p.m., france won the match, leaving the streets in euphoria. i left the community center and started taking pictures outside as i had been doing with the neighborhood people i already knew. cars raced through the streets of the grand ensemble at full speed; screams and firecrackers resounded everywhere. figure 2. celebration during the world cup 2018. photo by camilo leon-quijano. in three years, i had never seen sarcelles like this. i continued photographing these moments of collective ecstasy without worrying that the people i was depicting didn’t know me. while going downtown to the flanades (the central mall of sarcelles), i met amin, a forty-year-old local well-known in the neighborhood. at the flanades, a big crowd of around four hundred people had gathered in the street to celebrate the french victory. figures 3 and 4. celebration in sarcelles. photo by camilo leon-quijano. soon some tensions arose. some individuals fought in the street for a french flag; some others incinerated a few garbage cans in the middle of the crossroads. a car was also set alight at the corner of the boulevard, and two firemen and police cars were hit with bottles and stones. i shot the crowd with my two dslr cameras for fifteen or twenty minutes. at one moment, i noticed firecrackers started being thrown, falling near me. then, when a firecracker hit my foot, i realized they were deliberately flung in my direction. i decided to move away. on the other side of the sidewalk, a stranger addressed me aggressively: s: who are you? are you a journalist? c: no, i am a photographer. s: and for who do you work? c: i’m independent, i don’t work for anyone, i take pictures of the world cup, and i might share them on the sarcelloscope (a local citizen media i work with). behind her, other strangers look at me suspiciously. s: uh, you are with amin? do you know him? c: yes, i know him well. i was with him a little earlier. she turns her head and speaks to another woman behind her. s: it’s ok. he’s with amin! she shouts to the crowd. s: well, be careful man, it’s dangerous to take pictures like that in the middle of a crowd. over the past three years in the field, i had never been attacked for my photographic practice. i quickly understood that something had gone wrong. carried by the collective euphoria, i had photographed an illegal scene adopting the stance and attitude of a photo reporter. far from the emotional and personal confidence i had previously built with the residents i used to work with, i had failed to socially engage with the people i was photographing. i later found out that the person confronted me directly because of the type of situation i was photographing. it was the first time i had photographed an illegal event (street gathering, assaulting police cars, burning objects in the middle of the street, etc.). in a certain sense, the group controlled the production of audiovisual activities of someone they didn’t know, images they thought could potentially spread undesirable images of their community. this event revealed a significant phenomenon: at the citizen level, sarcellois operate visual control over what can or should be publicly shown. showcasing an illegal event would only reinforce the stereotypical representation of violent and deviant youth from social spaces already marginalized. in a certain sense, this event also allowed me to critically rethink the corporeal and material attitudes deployed while shooting. i understood that somehow, at that particular moment, i had failed to engage in a direct dialogue with the people i was representing. sometimes a “good” photograph thus also implies not taking pictures at all, or at least looking for other ways to visually engage with the public who expects the photographic materials. this ethnographic encounter made me reconsider the position to adopt in such moments of social transgression, and critically explore how to depict collective moments through a more reflexive and empathetic attitude. a way to visually rethink the local community’s visual experience was to photographically reconsider the place of the author and the photographed by reassessing the point of view of the represented subjects. acknowledging that local communities have their own visual values and critically inscribing the anthropologist’s photographic practice in light of those values redefined my visual encounters in the field. good pictures are inextricable from good encounters. we need good pictures since they allow us to experientially reconsider the methodological and epistemological posture of a photographer-anthropologist in the field. a good photograph considers the power relations that shape the representation of a subject. situating photographic practices in such a critical historiography of anthropological photography implies situating our production in a broader iconology of the people we represent. we need good pictures since they engage a “critical dialogue” (vium 2018); they question the experiential relationship to the representation of the other and force us to situate ourselves in regard to a more extensive visual history reflexively. we need good pictures to step outside the normative framework of the evidence. following a phenomenological approach that is both “phantasmographic” (e.g., desjarlais 2019) and critical (e.g., cox, irving, and wright 2015), the corporeal encounter of the photographer with the lived experience allows us to position ourselves visually, at both an iconic and a pictorial layer, by offering a critical account of how we represent the subjects we are working with. an experienced picture opened in 1973, the forum de cholettes was a showroom at the heart of the grand ensemble. in 1997, the presence of asbestos shut down the forum. for more than twenty years, public authorities neglected the abandoned building before its demolition in 2018. on march 12, 2016, i visited this place accompanied by local activists and former rappers. on his cell phone, farid showed me a photograph taken in the 1990s: “this was the forum before it was abandoned. … it was the secteur ä, the good old days of sarcellois rap!” figure 5. photograph of “old” (les anciens) rappers from sarcelles. photographer unknown, the early 1990s. in the picture, the most important figures of the sarcelles rap scene pose on the roof of the forum. it’s a well-known local cliché, reminding farid of the “good old days” when the forum offered a place for local people to meet. unfortunately, since 1997, the grand ensemble has no major cultural center for a population of more than 40,000 people. instead, places of local sociability have gradually disappeared. with nostalgia, farid commented: “they [the local authorities] have broken all our memories.” on the roof of the forum, farid asks me to take a portrait of the present group: “camilo, take a strong photo, you know they are going to demolish the forum, a photo for the record.” at this point, i feel a certain pressure on myself. what does he mean by “strong photo”? what does he intend by a “photo for the record”? i move along the rooftop, thinking about the best way to depict a place doomed to disappear. i photograph the sarcellois, the buildings, and the forum. i try several points of view, several focal distances. as i photograph, we move through this building with a certain despair. i see in this place the institutional decay of what was meant, in the 1960s, to be “the city of the future” (canteux 2004). when i press the shutter, i remember the image farid showed me a few minutes before, and try to remake it. unsatisfied after several tries, i decide to create a whole new portrait that shows the city’s decor. the sun is setting behind the towers of avenue 8 mai 1945. i squat on the ground in front of the setting sun. i want to visually emphasize the contrasts of that renowned place. the participants, perplexed by the bodily position i adopt, ask me what i am doing and what they need to do. i tell them to approach me slowly. i aim for a low-angle, backlight portrait to highlight the participants’ shadows and the city background. i click the shutter several times as they walk toward me. figure 6. photograph of “old” (les anciens) rappers (collectif made in sarcelles). photo by camilo leon-quijano. among the dozens of photographs i took that day, i post-produced the one created in black and white during this staging. to me, the graphic construction of this picture was probably, to use farid’s expression, the “strongest.” my manipulation is evident in the distortion of the wide-angle lens used during the shoot (24mm). the low angle and the strong contrasts (enhanced in post-production, but already present due to differences in the backlight) reveal the bodies, the shadows, and the abandoned decor. for me, this picture also seemed “strongest” in how it responded to the photographic conventions of the hip-hop world within which i had created and aimed to share it. in a certain way, the pictorial characteristics of this photograph responded to the visual performance of iconological patterns surrounding the visual culture of rap in france (shuman 2021; vallot 2021). i chose to post this photograph on social networks, where it received a series of shares and comments. some sarcellois used it as a profile picture. one participant picked it up to advertise her brand of jewelry. another one posted it on his facebook wall, including numerous hashtags to promote the non-profit organization he manages. another one reframed and published it as a cover image on his facebook profile. finally, under the hashtag #madeinsarcelles, the local community widely disseminated the photograph on social media. while a good picture is a socially experienced picture, we must also notice the importance of photographic conventions and material arrangements in the way pictures are socially anticipated. for monique sicard (1997, 52), images “must arise in theoretically, emotionally, and institutionally prepared spaces. they must be anticipated [attendues].” exploring how people conceive and want to represent their environments visually provides an opportunity to re-examine the photographic objects through the lens of lived and embodied experiences. the previous ethnographic encounter, both sensory and participatory, allows us to identify specific elements that bring the experienced picture into focus: the interactional ecology that encompasses the realization of pictures in the field; how the inhabitants reclaim their depictions on social networks; the relationship of the local community to the visual archives; the photographic conventions that allowed the community to identify itself with a precise iconographic representation; and finally the relationship between the socio-spatial experience and the visual experience. while a photograph can be a pretext for discussion in the field (e.g., “photo-elicitation” [harper 2002] or “photovoice” activities [wang and burris 1997]), a good picture engages a critical reflection on the conventions, manipulations, and materiality of the photographic process. thus, a double photographic and ethnographic engagement requires focusing on the practical and phenomenological environment in which the image-making process is situated (cefai 2010). a good picture goes beyond the picture we have seen in these examples the extent to which performative practices of picture-taking can frame visual experiences. but what about the public circulation of these experiences? what is the relationship between photographs and other forms of writing? in particular, what role does a visual layout play in the sensory encounter of an experienced picture? we might find one answer by exploring the visual layout of anthropological and other academic narratives. standardized graphic patterns have historically structured the publishing format of academic publications. the visual layout of most articles and books in the social sciences has relied on a structure that privileges textual continuity. the textual format hegemonically favors a layout based on a central text, footnotes, and a median border between the pages’ edges. this editorial format standardizes the presentation of academic work and limits graphic and narrative explorations in anthropology. what happens when we change the orientation and framing of the text? and suppose privileging the pictures rather than the text? the rise of research collaborations such as writing with light,9 the emergence of photo-essay sections in journals such as visual ethnography journal, or the increase of critical and multimodal journals (e.g., sensate journal, terrain) may allow us to rethink visual experience in anthropology.10 several relatively recent publications have redefined the editorial layout of audiovisual materials in anthropology, some in innovative fashion,11 others in more problematic ways.12 one of the books that i consider a reassessment of photo-ethnographic materials using an innovative editorial design is alex fattal’s (2020)shooting cameras for peace. this book has resulted from a multimodal and participatory survey conducted with young people in a marginalized district south of bogotà, colombia. fattal’s book reimagines how ethnographic narratives can be edited, arranged, and displayed. the horizontal framing, a layout closer to a photo book than a work of anthropology, and the way texts and images are graphically arranged prove the possibility of revisiting the experienced picture through graphic experimentation. these editorial experiences, and more broadly visual experiences in other fields such as film, can revisit the relationship between pictures and anthropological publishing. if the book is one of the most popular media for photographers and anthropologists to share their work, other multimedia fora such as the sound slideshow may engage new dialogues among pictures, sounds, and texts. halfway between film and photography, the sound slideshow connects texts, ambient sounds, interviews, and photographs in a short multimedia montage. the sound slideshow revisits the perceptual and sensory aspects of the experienced environment by combining photographs with other forms of communication. in 2017, as part of my doctoral research, i produced les rugbywomen (2017), a sound slideshow and exhibition that focuses on the sporting experience of a group of rugby players in sarcelles, twenty women between the ages of fifteen and sixteen. they were part of the rugby team of chantereine, a local high school located at the margins of the grand ensemble. the school has a high dropout rate, and 86 percent of the students come from financially stressed households who live mainly in social housing neighborhoods. throughout the academic year, i followed the daily activities of the group. on receiving an invitation from the team, we decided that i would document their activities while producing photographic materials to showcase their actions to a broader audience. the photographic encounter provided a means to collectively consider the creation of new narratives in a social context marked by marginalizing and stereotyping visual discourses. collaboration with participants through collective editing, feedback sessions, and sound recording activities resulted in a visual narrative centered on women’s sports engagement.13 the visual and moral attention of the account was tightly tied to the dialogues and interactions i had with the rugby players. the photographic series focused on critical discourse in a social space publicly seen and perceived as dangerous and marginal. consequently, the narratives we produced highlighted the women’s corporeal investment in rugby and described the heterogeneity of the social world in which this practice occurred.14 figure 7. still from the sound slideshow les rugbywomen (2017). photo by camilo leon-quijano. as a result of our work, we first created a large-format exhibition in the high school. the players, the inhabitants, and the public who attended this exhibition discovered the bodies of the portrayed women differently considering the print size (3 x 4m), the location of the installation, and the vertical placement of the photographs (see leon-quijano 2020, 2021),15 engaging a new visual experience of the participants’ actions. figure 8. exhibition “the rugbywomen” in the chantereine high-school, sarcelles. photo by camilo leon-quijano. second, i produced a sound slideshow. i initially shared this multimedia object with the local community during the exhibition’s opening at the rugby women’s high school in 2017. then, i released this work to the national and international press in 2018. sharing this experience, first within the community and then with a broader audience, allowed me to apprehend the gaze, reactions, and feelings of the different social actors (locals, photographers, journalists, editors) toward the representation of youth in terms of gender. by doing so, this multimedia piece allowed me to reconsider the social understanding of a public narrative. it created an immersive and sensory environment based on a story line that showcased these young women’s physical strength and determination. in addition, the presentation on a multimodal medium allowed us to reconsider the visual experience in sarcelles using sound clips produced with the participants. moreover, texts and broadly verbal narratives (whether written or oral) played an essential role in defining the social experience of these visual materials. for instance, we used texts and oral excerpts in the sound slideshow and the exhibition. whether it was an editorial layout or a projection on a multimedia device, the medium through which the pictures were experienced relied heavily on material arrangements. in this regard, roland barthes (1980) referred to the “anchoring” (ancrage) function of the text within a photographic object.16 the verbal excerpts “rooted” the purpose of the ethnographic narrative. to summarize, a picture’s formal or material characteristics do not make an ethnographic photograph a good one. instead, the picture’s experience during its conception, creation, socialization, and exhibition shapes the “content” of a photograph, to use berger’s expression. performativity, good, and truth so far, following my experience in sarcelles, i have disclosed that good photography needs to be rooted in good ethnographic encounters. a photographic ethnography creates a critical interface between pictures and the ideological and cultural contexts of their production. bodily engagement, as well as the technical and pictorial choices when taking photographs play an essential role in determining how any local community will apprehend pictures. this final section delves into more depth on this interface, exploring how photographs’ formal, technical, and pictorial performances might redefine the ethnographic encounter. in 2016, i met maryse gevrey, a local sarcelloise born in 1934 who settled in this city in 1958. after the death of her husband in august 2017, she invited me to live in her apartment, so i could have a place in sarcelles to do my ethnographic fieldwork. for a year and a half, i stayed with her and photographed her daily life.17 figure 9. “le deuil” (the grief). photo by camilo leon-quijano. even though i proceeded with an approach close to photojournalism at first (documenting the observed environment, bodies, interactions, and objects exhaustively), i gradually realized that taking photographs differently could offer a medium to reconsider the particular experiences that maryse was living at that moment of her life. the camera, the lenses, and the other tools i used gained a whole new sense of purpose. at that moment in time, maryse was in the process of mourning. i wanted to employ photography to portray this process and engage differently with the changes she was going through, which she often expressed through gestures and words. the camera thus constituted a place of creation and expression. gradually i abandoned a photojournalistic approach for a more expressive approach, focused on maryse’s lived experience. the camera became a device for depicting feelings such as anguish, solitude, and despair. in that way, the camera, the lens, the flash, and the tripod acquired a new function in creatively depicting the lived experience of mourning. we conceived the above photograph to depict the state of stress maryse experienced during her grief, a feeling related to the many responsibilities she had to fulfill after her husband’s death. fatigued by the life-changing transformations, she fell into a state of depression at the end of 2017. we co-constructed this portrait to better express her inner experience. i imagined a performative activity in which maryse would become involved in the process of photo-making. first, i installed the camera on a tripod. with an external shutter release, i photographed to obtain an underexposed image (15s, f/14, iso 50). at the same time, i randomly flashed maryse’s face and moving hands with an external strobe. the resulting photograph does not pretend to “properly” show her physical body. instead, it is a visual performance of a psychological and felt state observed and experienced in the field. this composed portrait is neither more nor less “real” than a spontaneous photograph taken in action. the performativity rather allows us to consider the photographic act as a dialogue. it less concerns capturing the “decisive moment,” to use henri cartier bresson’s famous expression, than reviewing forms of visual representation in light of lived experiences in the field. let’s return to margaret mead and gregory bateson’s conversation. in this situation, it was not a question of discussing whether what was produced by the camera was a “record” or an “art form.” the heuristic character of the photograph produced on a tripod doesn’t depend on the equipment itself. in the previous example, the tripod, the camera, and the lens didn’t fulfill their primary function (the tripod, to obtain a sharp image, the camera, to fix an instant of light, the 50mm lens, to offer a perspective close to the human vision). i agree with luvaas (2019, 77) when he says that “cameras matter.” but i think that more than the camera, it is the graphic, pictorial, and iconic experimentation that we make of the lived situation, using appropriate photographic tools, that actually “matters.” painting and drawing ethnographic experiences provide a useful point of comparison. while a good picture doesn’t directly depend on the camera itself, the cultural and technical capital of the creator plays an undeniable role in the social experience of the emerging narrative. parallels with other forms of visual representation allow us to explore the social construction of the good pragmatically from the device’s point of view and the necessary skills demanded to handle them. acknowledging this practical and sensorial capital can foster a new understanding of the reflexive assessment of photographic practices (as raised by julie spray’s [2021, 11] discussion of participatory drawing exercises). like painting, good pictures rely on the empathetic relationship to the subject, the technical and corporeal sensitivity to the medium. they represent “intangible human features in their specific sociocultural and historical contexts over time” (bray 2015, 129). nevertheless, photography allows us to propose a different experiential engagement than the one involved in drawing or painting. a good photograph depends significantly on its capacity to interact with existing photographic conventions in the cultural environment in which they emerge (poivert 2017; becker 1995). this requires a bodily, sensory, and graphic intentionality by the photographer and mastery of certain technical skills. deploying the camera in the field generates expectations, reactions, and sometimes tensions. the performance of the photographer shapes the moral ecology of the social environment. therefore, the experienced picture creates a nexus between the photographic encounter, the device, the corporeal performance, and the visual conventions that exist in the cultural environment where it emerges. conclusion the lens, the so-called impartial eye, actually permits every possible distortion of reality: the character of the image is determined by the photographer’s point of view and the demands of his patrons. the importance of photography does not rest primarily in its potential as an art form, but rather in its ability to shape our ideas, to influence our behavior, and to define our society. —giselle freund, photography and society i develop a central assumption in this article: good pictures matter in anthropology. from both a pragmatic and a phenomenological perspective, i have defined a good picture as a socially experienced picture that is inevitably incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contradictory. a good photograph relies on its capacity to engage in good ethnography. in this experiential definition, a good ethnographic photo is not necessarily a “beautiful” one. yet even if the goodness of an image does not derive directly from its pictorial composition, a good photograph should nonetheless consider the photographic conventions of the social order in which it is perceived. as a “just image,” a good picture comes to matter when it is concerned with “what representation means within a larger history and context” (carter 2019, 126). good ethnographies are rarely badly written. the same holds true for photographic narratives in anthropology. appreciating the camera, mastering the editing and post-production process, reflexively situating its iconic production within the studied community, and more broadly inscribing its visual creation into broader photographic conventions allows a creator to rethink the significance of photographic encounters within the discipline. a good picture goes “beyond aesthetics” (pinney and thomas 2001), and it draws on the sensory and reflexive experiences we have of visual materials throughout the research process. consequently, to produce a good picture, we must consider the materiality of the visual practices involved in the depiction of a social encounter. the “goodness” doesn’t directly rely on a moral or aesthetic judgment. in some cases, making a good picture means not taking a photograph at all. what matters in the ethnographic process is questioning the practices and objects that intervene in the collective experience of picture-making and picture-sharing. from a reflexive, creative, and critical perspective, doing, sharing, and analyzing the social experience of good pictures brings us into the heart of anthropological action. understanding the sensory interrelationship of photographs with other media such as text, prints, or sound has the potential to go not only “beyond text” (cox, irving, and wright 2015) but also “beyond the image.” this point of view questions our relationship to space and to the phenomenal body. creative, performative, and sensory practices provide a means to live the ethnographic experience differently. they make us reconsider our position in the field from an attitude that focuses on the sensory and creative engagements of visual practices. this experiential approach enables us to get away from the dualistic relationship between “art form” and “record.” instead, it strengthens a synthesis between “evidence” and “affect” (edwards 2015). by proposing a photographic activity based on sensory experiences, this approach allows us to reflexively situate the creative practices of the anthropologist through a critical lens that takes into account previous iconographies of the represented subject. abstract this article explores the relationship between photography and anthropology in the age of digital ethnographies and anthropologies of the future. it focuses on the phenomenological bond between the picture-taking process and the politics of visual representations by looking at an object that has shaped the discipline since its very origins. based on a series of visual encounters in a french banlieue, i describe to what extent good pictures are relative, incomplete, uncertain, sometimes inconsistent, and contain contradictory objects interacting with existing cultural and photographic conventions. i argue that good pictures are experienced pictures that go beyond the realm of a photograph. to this end, i consider the material and experiential connections between photography, sound, and text. finally, i discuss how anthropologists’ pictorial choices redefine the material and experiential ties to photographic materials. from a critical standpoint, a good picture might challenge the politics of visual representation of the imaged subject through both a photographic and ethnographic engagement. [photography; anthropology; visual; ethnography; phenomenology; urban; multimodal] résumé cet article explore la relation entre la photographie et l’anthropologie à l’ère des ethnographies numériques et des anthropologies du futur. il examine le lien entre le processus de prise de vue et la politique des représentations visuelles en s’intéressant à un objet qui a façonné la discipline depuis ses origines. suivant une série de rencontres dans une banlieue française, je décrirai dans quelle mesure les bonnes images peuvent être des objets incomplets, relatifs, incertains, parfois incohérents et contradictoires qui interagissent avec des conventions culturelles et photographiques existantes dans le milieu étudié. j’affirme que les bonnes images sont des images « expérimentées ». j’analyse en quoi les choix plastiques des anthropologues redéfinissent les liens matériels et expérientiels avec les matériaux photographiques issus de l’enquête de terrain. d’un point de vue critique, une bonne photo peut remettre en question la politique de représentation visuelle du sujet imagé, par un double engagement à la fois photographique et ethnographique. [photographie; anthropologie; visuel; ethnographie; phénoménologie; urbain; multimodal] resumen este artículo explora la relación entre la fotografía y la antropología en la era de etnografías digitales y antropologías del futuro. el texto analiza el vínculo fenomenológico entre el proceso de realización fotográfica y la política de representación visual mediante el estudio de un objeto que ha forjado la disciplina desde sus orígenes. a partir de una serie de encuentros visuales en un suburbio francés, describiré hasta qué punto las buenas imágenes son objetos relativos, incompletos, inciertos, a veces incoherentes y contradictorios que interactúan con convenciones culturales y fotográficas existentes. las buenas imágenes son imágenes “experimentadas” que van más allá de la fotografía. para ello, considero las conexiones materiales y experienciales entre la fotografía, el sonido y el texto. des ésta manera analizo cómo las decisiones plásticas de los antropólogos redefinen los vínculos materiales y experienciales con los materiales fotográficos. desde un punto de vista crítico, una buena imagen puede desafiar la política de representación visual del sujeto representado a través de un compromiso tanto fotográfico como etnográfico. [fotografía; antropología; visual; etnografía; fenomenología; urbano; multimodal] notes acknowledgments my sincere thanks to the cultural anthropology editorial team and the anonymous reviewers for their careful, rigorous, and constructive examination of this article. i would especially like to thank brad weiss for guiding me through the editorial production process. i’m grateful to olivier coulaux and roger canals for their helpful suggestions on an early version of this piece. i would also like to thank la fabrique des ecritures (centre norbert elias, umr 8562), boris petric, and veronique benei for their continuous support during my postdoctoral research. finally, i express my gratitude to anne monjaret and juliette rennes for their unique guidance and support throughout the research process. this research was sponsored by a doctoral grant (2015–2018) from the école des hautes études en sciences sociales (ehess) and by financial aid from the iiac and cems laboratories (ehess-cnrs). this research was also supported by the society for visual anthropology/robert lemelson foundation fellowship, made possible by a generous donation from the robert lemelson foundation. 1. this conversation was published in coevolutionary quarterly in june 1976 with the title “for god’s sake, margaret!” it was partially republished in 1977 in the studies in visual communication journal as “margaret mead and gregory bateson on the use of the camera in anthropology.” 2. among the numerous studies on this subject (e.g., edwards 1997), james faris’s (2003) photographic historiography of the navajo holds a distinctive position in the critical analysis of material and archival photographic practices and representations. 3. elizabeth edwards mentions two “strands” in this regard, first a “reassessment of colonial practices” (edwards 2011, 178) and second the “phenomenological turn” (edwards 2011, 183). 4. material analysis on this subject has mainly been made in historical anthropology (see edwards 1997) and the history of ethnological photography (see joseph and mauuarin 2018). a genuine interest in the materiality of photographic devices has emerged over the past thirty years. i would mention the well-known research of elizabeth edwards (2002) on the materiality of photographic practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, christopher pinney’s (2008) investigations on photographic techniques in india, craig campbell’s (2014) analysis of siberian photography, and the studies of christopher wright (2013) in the solomon islands. 5. even though other anthropologists had also previously worked on this issue (e.g., gómez cruz 2012; messier 2019; pink 1999). 6. sarcelles is one of the most recognized examples of french banlieues (canteux 2004; bertho 2014). this city is characterized for being one of the most diverse and multicultural ones in france. it has a young population, a high unemployment rate, low household incomes, low levels of education, an underrepresentation of highly qualified working professionals, and a high proportion of immigrants in its population. moreover, sarcelles has one of the largest social housing complexes (grand ensemble) in the country. 7. as part of my phd dissertation that i defended at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales (leon-quijano 2020), i analyzed how photographic practices socially define an “imaged community” (communauté imagée) in sarcelles. 8. moreover, the studies on the banlieues have primarily dealt with the phenomena of ghettoization, violence, and exclusion, mainly by working on young populations (lepoutre 2008). 9. http://www.writingwithlight.org/ 10. the work of certain photographers allows us to explore other types of editorial arrangements between text and images within a publication. for instance, the participatory project bieke depoorter (2018) initiated with egyptian families or the critical documentary work matthieu asselin (2017) did exploring the modus operandi of monsanto. 11. for example, bruno latour’s (2004) “online” book made in collaboration with émilie hermant, the visual exploration of domestic spaces in the collective work gathered in arnold et al. 2012, mirko zardini’s (2005) sensory account of urbanities, lewis bush’s (2020) reflection on the algorithmic stakes of contemporary photography, or catherine de clippel’s (2020) recent photographic book on voodoo. 12. for example, the book sexe, race et colonies (blanchard et al. 2018), coordinated by a group of historians and featuring extensive visual research on the connections between french colonization and race, has been heavily criticized for its exotic and ostentatious layout (see bertho 2020). 13. i taught some of the participants how to make sound recordings. they independently produced several hours of recordings, and then i selected and mixed them with interview extracts to make the slideshow soundtrack. 14. i extensively describe the experience of designing, editing, sharing, and publishing the rugbywomen narrative in the article “the performative photograph: a poietic approach to visual ethnography in a french banlieue” (leon-quijano 2021). 15. this project was supported by the society for visual anthropology/robert lemelson foundation fellowship, made possible by a generous donation from the robert lemelson foundation. 16. talking about the relationship between text and images, roland barthes considers texts as a way of “anchoring” the polysemic “floating string” (chaine flottante) of pictures: “the denominative function corresponds to an anchoring of all possible meanings (denoted) of the object through the use of a nomenclature” (barthes 1964, 44). 17. a photographic narrative is available on lensculture: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/camilo-leon-quijano-the-fume-of-sighs references arnold, jeanne e., anthony p. graesch, elinor ochs, and enzo ragazzini 2012 life at home in the twenty-first century: thirty-two families open their doors. los 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of habitability: plants, healing, and sovereignty in a toxic world stacey ann langwick cornell university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1688-8561 what first struck me was the lushness. i had stepped through the gate and into the compound of the ngo training, research, monitoring and evaluation on gender and aids (trmega), just a few hundred meters off the main road running east out of arusha, tanzania. the label of an herbal formula, imarisha afya yako (“strengthening your health” in kiswahili) had led me to this address. figure 1. imarisha afya yako: an herbal formula whose components are grown, processed, and packaged by trmega, maji ya chai, tanzania. photo by stacey ann langwick. at trmega, unlike at the herbal or biomedical clinics where i also worked, passion-fruit vines covered the fence. neatly labeled medicinal plants packed narrow beds along the edges of the compound and squeezed into corners of buildings. chard and a range of other dark green, leafy vegetables grew in a kitchen keyhole garden and burst from sacks placed around the courtyard. a brightly painted sign reading “maji ya chai slow food community garden” sat at the head of a winding path that invited walkers through plots of taro, sweet potato, watercress, and tomatoes. figure 2. trmega garden, as viewed upon entering the compound at maji ya chai. photo by stacey ann langwick. while it has taken time to understand the relations constituting this lushness and to follow the alliances suggested in the sign, the garden immediately compelled a reframing of the story of imarisha and the other herbals that sat in piles on a table against the back wall of the office. imarisha is one example of the rapidly expanding developments in therapeutic foods or nutritious medicines that are capturing imaginations in tanzania and beyond. helen nguya, the founder of trmega, glosses this new configuration of plant-based healing as dawa lishe: a playful phrase that draws together the more official categories of medicine (dawa) and fortified or nutrient-dense foods (chakula lishe). these therapies heal by feeding, nourishing, strengthening, bringing vitality, stimulating growth, enabling endurance. tanzania is not alone in witnessing a rapid rise in herbals. the world health organization (who) has estimated that herbals make for a $60 billion industry worldwide, and some market forecasters suggest that it stands to grow to a $140 billion industry by 2024 (sharma et al. 2008). statistics on the market and on industry growth, however, do not capture the work of trmega gardens or elucidate their alliances with food sovereignty movements. dawa lishe is emerging as an unruly object in the interstices of medicine and agriculture, refusing to accept them as separate fields of knowledge and practice. dawa lishe is not a return to, or even a nostalgia for, traditional african healing. it is, however, a refusal to forget in the present that african healing has long addressed humans and their environments together. therapies attend not only to bodies but also to the relations between people, plants, and soil that drive modern economies and frame health. individual commodified formulas fade in and out of view. imarisha and trmega’s other colorfully packaged dried-plant remedies draw people, as they drew me, to trmega. the ease with which such remedies can be sold and gifted facilitate introductions to trmega’s work. yet these commodified herbal formulas circulate in the service of complex interventions into the forces that foster vital human and nonhuman communities. indeed, trmega’s garden explicitly destabilizes the commodities produced from regular harvests through the sharing of seeds, cuttings, and saplings across networks of support groups. the labors of people and plants, as well as the myriad organisms both human and nonhuman that make up healthy soil and fertile communities of pollinators, constitute a central focus of trmega’s interventions. as they spread, one out of the other, trmega gardens and the gardens that they catalyze are complex experiments in what constitutes the therapeutic. in the name of healing, trmega gardens explicitly intervene into relationships between plants and people—remaking them in ways that unsettle assemblages built through colonial plantations, national development, and extractive capital. in this, these gardens share a kinship with the rise of various projects in africa and throughout the global south that draw local knowledge of how to support the flourishing of plants and people together with global ecological and health movements.1 these gardens are examples of what michelle murphy (2017, 105) has called the “experimental otherwise,” and dawa lishe is the unruly object forged in the multiple knowledges, myriad practices, and entangled politics that they draw together. through dawa lishe, tanzanians are debating the conditions under which life is attenuated, diminished, depleted, exhausted, or drained away in the twenty-first century, and they are experimenting with ways to intervene in these conditions. the efficaciousness of herbal products and of gardens full of therapeutic foods and nutritious herbs rests in their cultivation of the forms of strength that make places, times, and bodies livable again (and again). gardens and gardeners are generating a lexicon through which to challenge the techniques of governance unfolded in the name of health. their efforts, i will argue, articulate an emergent politics of habitability.2 dawa lishe ties the dynamics of human liveliness to those of plants and soils. through it, tanzanians work to build relations supporting the possibility of a lushness that situates healing in the cyclical transformations of composition and decomposition. they experiment with ways to inhabit the toxicities that simultaneously enable contemporary life and deplete the very conditions of its ongoingness. toxicity imarisha, specifically formulated to benefit people with hiv/aids, contains plants that have been shown to have dense nutritional profiles and a range of biochemical effects with therapeutic implications in laboratory research (anwar et al. 2007). yet an account of its potency must also attend to the ways in which it problematizes the toxicity of pharmaceuticals, especially those like antiretrovirals that are to be taken for life.3 trmega has a close relationship with a nearby hiv/aids clinic. imarisha is meant to be taken with antiretroviral medications: the herbal formula works alongside antiretrovirals to strengthen bodies so that they can sustain the pharmacological treatments, so that individual bodies can incorporate these medications in ways that exploit their benefits. members of trmega build their stamina for antiretrovirals through imarisha, as well as their compliance with the clinic’s regimes. imarisha addresses the widespread sentiments in tanzania that (1) the toxicity of antiretrovirals (which is critical to their capacities to heal) is also harmful, and (2) this harm is not sufficiently articulated through the concept of side effects or fully mediated through the practice of dosage.4 imarisha highlights the double bind out of which tanzanians are forging dawa lishe more broadly: the very substances used to support modern life also deplete the vital forces from which it comes.5 figure 3. mchaichai (dried lemongrass) produced and packaged by dorkia enterprises, moshi, tanzania. photo by stacey ann langwick. over the past six years, as i have investigated the rise of dawa lishe, i have come to see its political and therapeutic potency as intimately tied to the ways in which it reconfigures the relationship between toxicity and remedy. dorkia enterprises, a small-scale entrepreneurial initiative in northern tanzania, addresses this directly on the label of its mchaichai (kiswahili: lemongrass). it removes toxins from the whole body—those [toxins] that come from the food whose growth we have cut short, aluminum pots, steel wire, chemical medicines [synthetic pharmaceuticals, as well as synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides], mental stress, and nicotine, which is from cigarettes and their smoke [and] is the cause of lung cancer. it cleans the kidneys; it removes all the residue stopping urine/plugging up the bladder (especially in elders). it returns a quicker memory and it puts the body in a good and lively state after using. the problem articulated here is that eating, drinking, cooking, healing, and breathing all involve ingesting toxins. mchaichai offers a way to mediate the forms of complicity and contamination that are constitutive of twenty-first-century lives and bodies. like imarisha, it is not a targeted or singular curative remedy, but rather a therapeutic tea to be included in the everyday rhythms of nourishing. this sense that toxins saturate everyday life compels herbal producers not only to address the effects of toxins in individual bodies but also to pay attention to how the plants in their remedies are grown and processed. as toxicity becomes respatialized in this way, it focuses attention on that which is left behind as the very ground through which new or alternative life might then be nourished, coaxed, and cultivated—or cut off, deprived, and attenuated. producers’ commitments to sustainable agriculture—in particular, to the use of organic crop-management practices, composting, and seed sharing—generate the concrete practices through which dawa lishe articulates toxicity as a condition of modern life and the substance of ethical engagement.6 by attending to the liveliness of soils and seeds, as well as to their economies, tanzanians reflect on and labor over the relations that constitute toxin and those that constitute remedy. this problematization of toxicity by herbal producers in tanzania highlights a friction within public health studies of environmental exposure. the latter have proven important in illustrating the uneven distribution of harm in our world, both nationally and internationally, by mapping disease prevalence data alongside the location of industrial contaminants and toxic waste. this data has supported the development of environmental regulations, a conceptualization of the true cost of industrial production, the monitoring of industries, and (in the best of cases) the ability to hold them accountable to the people they affect. in this work, the image of individuals free of toxins provides both a ground for normative legal intervention and benchmarks for measuring success. yet: is there a we that can be held safe against all else? a growing scholarship on toxicity and chemical exposure is challenging philosophical investments in the possibility of discrete, bounded objects and subjects that undergird the ideal of bodies that can be whole, independent, authentic, and pure, as well as their versions of politics (both progressive and conservative).7 expanding bruno latour’s (1993) argument about the practices of purification that have been central to the project of modernity, alexis shotwell (2016) captures this argument in her assertion that we have never been pure. the processes of purification built into scientific and juridical knowledge-making practices structure our forgetting of this fact. living through toxicity as a condition means remembering. it means remembering that the work it takes to purify human bodies and synthetic chemicals is embedded in the work it takes to solidify a long chain of ontological distinctions between us and them, subjects and objects, and science and culture. living through toxicity as a condition means remembering that this work has proven critical to the formations of contemporary hierarchy and privilege and the notions of contamination, corruption, and contagion that justify their maintenance.8 such remembering challenges any easy recognition of a we who has a right to live uncontaminated, of a toxin separate from and threatening this we, and of a neutral position from which to adjudicate this separation (fortun 2001; petryna 2002). shotwell’s research is helpful because it clarifies why purity politics do not offer a space to argue and act that many africans find compelling.9 the forms of forgetting developed through practices of purification have justified violence and dispossession through colonialism, nationalism, postcolonial development, and humanitarianism in africa. how we grapple with toxicity is thus a question of how we remember and whose remembering matters (agard-jones 2016). postcolonial memories shape how african publics hear both official news stories and circulating rumors of the continued spraying of ddt (cone 2009), the large graveyards of e-waste from the united states and europe (schmidt 2006; redfern 2010; minter 2016), the international trade in radioactive waste (clapp 1994), the use of cyanide and mercury in mining (campbell et al. 2003; belem 2009), and chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides in large-scale agriculture (tilman et al. 2001; mwegoha and kihampa 2010). tanzanians are well aware that the lack of regulations on known toxins is exploited as an asset throughout the continent. this is before leakage into informal markets, such as when the surplus pesticides used by the large-scale flower farms in arusha made their way into small agricultural shops and were picked up as a cheaper alternative to protecting tomatoes in local kitchen gardens.10 in this space, a politics of purity, an ideal of an uncontaminated body, is unthinkable both practically and politically. more evocative is the mchaichai that “returns a quicker memory and it puts the body in a good and lively state after using.” more evocative is the invitation to take in a plant and attune to its transformative potential. this is not a nostalgia for tradition but a call for memory, for a remembering that relations between plants, people, and place have not always been as they are, that they were reorganized through colonialism and continue to be stabilized through large-scale (plantation) agriculture. liveliness might be found by inserting the body into alternative economies of people and plants. for tanzanians, such remembering also means that the toxicities that compose the everyday are not only the result of capitalism’s offloading of its harmful waste to africa but also the social-material effect of efforts designed to address insecurity, poverty, and disease. the pesticides and herbicides in food, the growth hormones fed to modern chickens, tissue cultures injected into banana plants, the aluminum pots used in everyday cooking, the hybrid (at times, genetically modified11) corn whose reproductive strength decreases over generations, and the pharmaceuticals required to address chronic diseases (whether hiv, hypertension, or diabetes) and provide birth control are all held responsible for forcing modern bodies to bear complicated toxic loads. approaching toxicity as a condition rather than an anomaly, however, does not mean an acceptance of sickness, pollution, injustice, poverty, and death. it does mean that interventions focused narrowly on modes of recognition (and management) are not sufficient. through dawa lishe, the interpenetrations of plants and people become a concrete space from which to explore “the enmeshment of flesh with place” (alaimo 2016, 1) by elaborating a notion of healing that recognizes our ontological inseparability from the world. this starting point was brought home to me by a woman working at one of the herbal clinics where i have been conducting research since 2013. through our many hours together in the face of the pain of those seeking help at the clinic, in the camaraderie and joys of collective efforts to support them, in the rush of multiple demands, and in the boredom of long hot afternoons, we had grown very fond of one another. one afternoon, she shared her concern about the toll my trips back and forth between tanzania and the united states would inevitably take on me. the dis-ease of my body, as it had to adjust and readjust to these different environments, would benefit from some attention. to cultivate this dual orientation, she recommended a strategy that she had learned from a german missionary in the area. when i traveled back to the united states, my friend told me, i should take a little dirt from tanzania. on arrival, i should mix it with a little water from the united states and drink it. on my return to tanzania, i should do the opposite: bring u.s. dirt, mix it with tanzanian water, and consume it. this way, my body would be constituted in the interstices of these two lands; it would be of both places and could make the corporeal translations and shifts necessary to my constant returns. the vulnerability of a body is not only implicated in toxic substances but also in the very movements that give rise to the conditions and labors through which strength is constituted. in his effort to account for the toxic in north america, nicholas shapiro (2015, 372) has argued that “bodies are sites of both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of human and nonhumans.” healing, then, is not necessarily limited to managing that which bodies absorb. healing might also mean intervening in human–nonhuman relations to affect how specific bodies are put into motion. dawa lishe emerges as therapeutic as it (re)shapes the formations of time, space, and materiality through which bodies live and labor. in tanzania, healing is raising questions of habitability, as it works through and against the politics of exposure that have shaped “late industrialism” (fortun 2012).12 the plants and their institutions dawa lishe has a complicated relationship to the state-recognized category of traditional medicine and its institutional trajectories.13 producers of therapeutic foods and nutritious medicines draw on indigenous plants, as well as those that have migrated to the continent. they are inspired by local healers, as well as by books on functional foods, web-based investigations, scientific research at african, european, and north american universities, local chinese healers, visiting indian spiritual leaders, permaculture workshops, and sustainable agricultural practices.14 rarely interested in acting as custodians of the past, producers seek a more dextrous and subtle position that enables response to the ways past relations have shaped the bodies and landscapes of the present.15 many mobilize the form of the ngo to reframe older social and political institutions in an effort to initiate generative spaces for action. for instance, while helen nguya is not a traditional healer by her own or anyone else’s account, the process through which she came to found trmega and grow into the work she does there echoes the embodied transformations involved in african healers becoming expert through their own illness and healing. a physical collapse set in motion the conditions of possibility for trmega. the stress of more than a decade of demanding work and long hours as a director of social-service programs for the roman catholic church in the northern part of tanzania, combined with two intense years during which she organized and worried over the care of her children back in tanzania while she was in europe earning a master’s degree, exhausted nguya. she did not have the strength to bear the shock of the deaths of her mother and sister. she collapsed. suddenly, she could not stand or feed herself. her kin nursed her in her marital home of maji ya chai. nguya’s healing slowly drew her back to the garden. first, as she sat in the garden and then, eventually, as she put her hands in the dirt, she felt that she began to heal. or, as she tells it, she started to remember those things that had fed her, had given her vitality when she was younger. from her initial efforts to reimagine a life in which she could do meaningful work and sustain her strength emerged the vision of trmega. among her extensive portfolio of social-service programs was a church-supported hiv clinic. she was moved by the story of a man who had sought treatment through this clinic and had come to feel that he was capable of continuing his life with aids, that his diagnosis was not a death sentence. together, they began reaching out to others who had been diagnosed with hiv/aids. through their initial efforts in 2009, nguya began to see a particular set of needs and possibilities. she explained: i realized that some had problems, and i didn’t have the funds to help. they had clothing needs and food needs. so i told my family and friends. some contributed clothes. some gave me shoes. some donated domestic utensils. some donated food. they came and they saw [my work]. they were amazed and gave me maize flour and whatever they had. i taught those who gathered about nutrition. we had already planted some plants. i taught them how to cook them. they came here [to my garden in maji ya chai]. we ate together and participated. this made them more active. after that we saw that it would be better to teach them about herbs, and that they should not only practice it here, but also at their homes. and those who had land around their homes, we gave them things to plant. thus emerged the garden as object and intervention. gardens are not exactly a solution to the problems that nguya perceived, but something more and something less. for trmega, gardens—organic, cultivated without chemical pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, full of therapeutic plants, spreading from one to another and growing up around homes and schools—are remedy and relation, resource and momentum. they constitute the very material of individual, institutional, and community extension. gardens offer a response to the attenuation of life; their answer is a thickening, a density, a multiplicity that one might experience at times—like when walking through the gate of trmega—as lushness. today, the garden at trmega’s headquarters serves as a community garden for the members of trmega support groups and a slow food demonstration garden to introduce new members, school groups, and other visitors to the plants and principles of sustainable agriculture. experiments with recycling kitchen water, sack gardens, and composting were always underway. bees have been introduced, both larger honeybees and smaller, stingless african bees. medicinal plants are neatly labeled in both swahili and the local language of the area where nguya learned of their therapeutic potential. in the shade of the pavilion, medicinal herbs as well as therapeutic foods are dried and processed into trmega remedies. this garden also generates the cuttings, seeds, and saplings used to stimulate other gardens. the contents of this garden embody a lifetime of living with and working with plants. both in its shape and in the plants that populate it, nguya’s garden innovates older ways of organizing landscape through the residential farms of her childhood. nguya grew up in kagera. she helped her grandfather as he tended banana trees, which not only supplied the primary staple food crop but also structured the spatiality of village life and the masculine forms of land ownership that drove it.16 nguya first learned to identify and collect medicinal herbs with her grandmother, a traditional midwife. she has transplanted some of these plants to maji ya chai. others she continues to get from kagera, sometimes going herself, at other times asking a nurse in the health center to collect a desirable herb for her and then send the harvest by bus. the novel collectives fostered through the rapid expansion of ngos in tanzania since the 1990s have enabled nguya to combine the ways that the gendered landscapes of buhaya villages structured reproduction, nourishment, and expansion with the work of global projects. while her home in an adjacent lot is surrounded by banana trees, her trmega garden is not. the contents of trmega’s garden might be better seen as an extension of the gardens buhaya women would cultivate in the grasslands outside the village.17 the plants she learned from her grandmother grow together with the charismatic plants now used for therapeutic purposes globally, inputs from nutrition initiatives and development projects and vegetables that make the many stews accompanying starches throughout tanzania—all in a space shaped by a set of practices often glossed as “sustainable agriculture.” the gardens at trmega are in a complicated conversation with older social-political practices of dwelling and newer global ecological practices. nguya’s knowledge of these ecological techniques first grew out of her participation in an ngo called women development for science and technology association (wodsta). in the 1980s, nguyga worked with a group of prominent women leaders to found wodsta. in those early days, president julius nyerere’s wife, maria nyerere, joined their efforts. the association has always focused on “grassroots women,” meaning rural and often disenfranchised women. sustainable agricultural practices were central to the mission of the organization from its inception. because of this work, nguya was first invited to the biennial slow food gathering in turin, italy in 2004. she returned in 2008 and has gone to each subsequent gathering. these days she generally goes with rose machange, who runs the gardens and does outreach for wodsta. in the 1980s, machange was one of the grassroots women whom wodsta had contacted. initially part of a support group, she rose to lead this group and then to mobilize others. each of these gardens forms part of the ten thousand gardens for africa project, one of the flagship initiatives of the slow food foundation for biodiversity. in 2011, while in tanzania to celebrate the first gardens (one in dar es salaam and one in southern tanzania), italian staff members visited nyuga’s compound and saw the trmega garden. they ate with her and talked about their vision for ten thousand gardens for africa, asking if she would volunteer to be the convivium coordinator for the northern region. although coordinators are not paid, this position would enable nyuga to solicit limited funds for material enhancements to expand the network of gardens, such as hoes, wheelbarrows, watering cans, and fencing. in addition, the foundation strives to train convivium coordinators and other leaders and to support travel to meet other communities. these connections draw members into other slow food projects like the arc of taste, an effort to catalog indigenous foods and recognize groups whose work ensures their endurance. a women’s group that machange leads, called umangu, has recently succeeded at having their african stingless bee honey accepted into the arc of taste. it also oversees projects like the new traditional foods shop that sells various products from the women’s support groups machange runs. when nguya and machange travel, be it locally to the gardens or internationally to kenya, uganda, italy, ethiopia, or india, seeds often return in their pockets. even after decades of friendship, it seems they rarely leave one another’s gardens without something in their hands. knowing them both for the past four years has allowed me to witness not only their attentiveness to plants but also how they move through the world with them. throughout its existence, trmega has grown, extending its work through a variety of organizations. originally, nguya’s wide-ranging connections with the catholic dioceses and their projects animated trmega’s formation, and they continue to provide fertile ground for growth. currently, nguya is folding some of the projects and energy of the slow food foundation for biodiversity into trmega’s work. such entanglements have been further extended and reinforced by nguya’s connection to wostra and by her friendship with machange. the interpenetrations of these institutional trajectories also carry with them certain orientations toward history—here, catholic social-justice agendas, a global movement for culinary diversity and food sovereignty, and a postcolonial, nonaligned socialist drive for self-sufficiency. connections are partial, situated, and embodied, built through personal histories of resilience, friendship, and striving, as well as of inequality, abuse, and sickness. it is into this density of relations (institutional, human, and botanical) and these storied spaces that trmega welcomes people. the gardens and their remedies early in trmega’s formation, nguya met jane satiel mwalyego, who at the time was very weak. her husband had died in 2002. she was, in her own words, “living with much stigma” (saas 2014). she had stopped taking her antiretroviral drugs in the midst of these pressures and the demands of providing for her children as well as her nieces and nephews, whom she had taken in after her brothers had died from aids. she tells a story of decline and searching, and of visiting a range of healers. eventually, she lost the strength to farm. at times, she could not even rise from bed to cook. both of her parents had passed away. she ran out of money and found herself without enough to be able to feed the children in her household or herself. the vitality that had sustained her life and that of others grew more and more attenuated; the courtyard of her home grew sparse. when mwalyego reflects on this time, she describes loneliness, and isolation, and anger—anger at healers who took her money, time, and waning strength. but she marks 2010 as the turning point, in which she met nguya and gradually began building up relations with people and plants. at the time, trmega focused on teaching people with hiv to “together leave aside stigma” (kiswahili: nawafundisha waondokane na unyanyapaa). the organization sought to create spaces where people with aids could, in its own terms, “get used to each other,” gain the confidence to talk with one another, and “share what is in their hearts.” this language resonated with that of hiv/aids support groups. indeed, nguya did receive some external support for such work. most prized at the time were bicycles that would ease outreach efforts and enable more connections. yet an account of trmega’s approach at this time must acknowledge that stigma here was in translation, a sort of boundary object that often emerges as ngos appeal to global initiatives in efforts to design local projects and take up medicalized concepts to support interventions into everyday life. the way that trmega actualizes stigma differs from the way that stigma is actualized through psychosocial research and public health programming. the histories of discrimination and social sanction that structure stigma (unyanyapaa) are most accurately accounted for through material instantiations. stigma, for trmega, glosses a thinning of social relations and all matter of life entangled with them—human, plant, and otherwise. rather than seeing stigma as a psychosocial phenomenon, a judgment of the mind that can be fixed by addressing ignorance, trmega takes up stigma as a relational phenomenon. it entails a turning away or attenuation of involvement that must be fixed by addressing the density of interconnection through which life is generated. while trmega gladly folds education into its agenda, the efficacy of its efforts lies as much or more in the gatherings convened than in the correction of false beliefs or the transmission of information. addressing stigma requires a series of encounters that interpolate one into vital, mutualist relations with things, people, and plants. nguya introduced mwalyego to mlonge—the kiswahili word used for many species of moringa, but here for moringa oleifera in particular. she remembers that mwalyego’s dramatic response to the plant was the first time that she “saw the power of mlonge.”18 mwalyego gained strength, resumed her antiretrovirals, and started gardening again. she was able to support her children and her brother’s children. her physical and social life thickened; the landscape around her house grew denser. this experience strengthened the role of mlonge and the centrality of the gardens as remedy in trmega’s work. figure 4. mlonge (moringa oleifera) in the garden at trmega headquarters in maji ya chai. photo by stacey ann langwick. when i first came to know mwalyego, her life had grown lusher. she had come to embody the transformations possible through trmega and its gardens, and to serve as a catalyst for others. in 2016, when an anonymous donor gave trmega a plot of land so that the organization might increase its production, nguya asked mwalyego to live on the property and tend the gardens. in addition to a house, mwalyego received space to grow some of her own food. using seeds, saplings, cuttings, and tubers from other gardens, she built up a second demonstration garden and developed plans for a much larger production garden. mwalyego’s daughter and grandchild moved in with her. as a new slow food community garden, this second trmega garden attracted some additional investments. mwalyego started a chicken coop and developed a vision of acquiring goats. one of the first luxuries at the house was a long, thin wooden bench where trmega members and others could gather, where mwalyego could teach, and where collective work could be organized. during the past few years, much of my fieldwork involved nygua, mwalyego, and me filling my vehicle with plants and distributing them. many of our best conversations arose as we drove through the region delivering cuttings, seeds, and saplings—as we extended trmega’s garden outward. our activities catalyzed other patches of lushness in orphanages, street children’s homes, elementary schools, and the homes of people planning community gardens of their own. plants were delivered, along with a great deal of advice and problem-solving skills, as we tromped around the spaces to be planted. nguya instructed on composting, organic pest and fungi management, irrigation and drainage, intercropping and more. she brought both nutrient-dense vegetables and medicinal herbs. after these long and detailed walks through the gardens, conversations regularly turned to health, to the therapeutic benefits of plants. over tea, we would speak of the ways they cured and strengthened. such meetings never stood alone; they always marked moments in long and involved relationships. some had started a decade or two earlier through catholic church projects, while others emerged from newer, secular connections. yet all gardens required tending and ongoing relationships. while individual gardens and their gestures were limited, gardens were sites from which plants and relations could be extended. one trmega member, who lives on the outer reaches of arusha, started a community garden for members on his land. the medicinal teas he makes for his parents facilitate his caring for them. his neighbors drop by to explore ways that they might use plants to support the health of their families. other gardens are larger. for instance, the garden at the watoto foundation, a home for male street children run by the catholic church, is quite established and substantial. the residents eat from the garden and make products to sell. many of these boys go home during breaks. they have been encouraged to bring mlonge saplings home and to plant them at their parents’, relatives’, and neighbors’ houses. immigrant natures, composting futures mlonge, the tree that was so powerful in mwalyego’s story, animates trmega’s current work and their slow food gardens. the saplings sprouting in small plastic bags that line the wall of the garden in maji ya chai lend themselves to travel, to manifesting extensions and initiating new spaces. this mlonge tree is also known as moringa oleifera, a tree native to the foothills of the himalayas in northwestern india. the species likely traveled to tanzania along numerous routes, involving both land and sea. gujarati traders arrived in tanzania in large numbers in the nineteenth century. indians were also brought to east africa as indentured laborers, many of whom worked on the kenya-uganda railway around the turn of the twentieth century. even before these migrations, however, moringa oleifera may have found its way to tanzania along earlier trade routes, whether from egypt, south africa, or through centuries of indian ocean exchange. in more recent times, moringa oleifera has extended its reach through international nutrition and water purification projects. today, many producers of therapeutic plants dry and grind the leaves to be added to tea or porridge. at trmega, it is mixed with three other plants (including the herb from kagera discussed above) to make imarisha. trmega shares seedlings with its members and sells them to support the organization’s work. as the immigrant histories of therapeutic plants in these gardens suggest, herbal producers are no more invested in the purity of nature than they are in the authenticity of the healer or the discreteness of institutions. local slow food festivals do celebrate indigenous foods. yet through a careful parsing of plants as “therapeutic,” tanzanians are mobilizing commitments to indigeneity toward new ethical-political negotiations.19 some gardens share space with more recent hybrids such as banana stock from the usaid tanzania agricultural productivity program, or the many sorts of orange sweet potatoes that have made their way into the country through nutrition projects that have introduced a variety of nutrient-dense cultivars. relations with plants are cultivated based on the ways that collaborations with them enable particular modes of exchanging, growing, eating, tasting, healing, communing, and decomposing. the qualities of the plants themselves matter. mlonge, for instance, does not lend itself easily to plantation agriculture despite the ongoing efforts of many. the leaves are small and difficult to harvest en masse; they wilt quickly. one failed effort at large-scale production lies to the east, outside tanga, where row upon row of trees stand unattended and unharvested. mlonge’s value emerges when it is enrolled in human projects by different means. relations among plants, as well as between plants and people, prove critical to decisions about which plants are brought in, cultivated, and catered to, and which plants are not. not only are gardens as remedy ones that foster mutualist relations—nitrogen fixing, pesticide management, pollination, and so on—but they are also capable of holding surprises and remembering, even when people do not. nguya and machange illustrated this one day when walking through the garden of a member of one of the women’s groups. they saw a vine growing among the more purposefully tended plants and asked the woman what she did with it. she told them that it was “just a weed.” nguya revealed that she could eat the fruits of this wild cucumber plant, and machange added that the leaves made a good vegetable. the woman tasted the plant; later, she ate the fruits and cooked the leaves. soon, she was making a small income selling the leaves and seeds back to nguya and machange for slow food gardens and to others in local markets. the gardens here are weedy. often blackjack or other medicinal herbs will be growing in the middle of a bed of another vegetable, or on the side of a tended row. such weeds are left. these gardens are not plantations. the plants brought in must make affordances for, if not explicitly support, other life. the practices through which particular plants are folded into the space of these gardens cultivate plant relations, and therefore a plant politics. these weedy natures defuse a politics of purity and, in so doing, the fantasies of salvation (or apocalypse) such a politics supports. projects such as trmega’s make much more modest proposals about what it might mean to develop spaces with the capacity for growth or for what anna tsing (2015, 179) calls “resurgence.” the work is patchy and uneven. it requires making arguments for care and healing, for taking positions and initiating action from some ground other than crisis (roitman 2013). this ground is compost. in the gardens discussed here, compost is both practical consideration and a form of re-membering. compost is that which fosters a process of living-through. it trains our attention on the ability of parts of the past that have been left behind, residues and scraps, to transform through specific entanglements into something other than themselves—and, if carefully tended, to transform into the components of rich healthy soil, the entanglement that grounds growth and other life. compost re-members and in so doing, it decenters the work of crisis and its forms of forgetting.20 there are stakes in this turn. compost constitutes a material, social, and ethical relation. for not all things compost and not all compost well. the stakes, however, rest in an ongoingness, not in an authenticity. they rest in the qualities of relations that support “making livable again” (haraway 2016, 33). plants can be localized over time by becoming other than themselves, by being turned under and becoming soil. compost draws us toward accounts of pragmatic spaces of thoughtful entanglements with the potential for increased liveliness. compost is not only a practice worthy of description but also an incitement to theory.21 some of the most involved conversations between ngyuga, mwalyego, and the others with whom they collaborate concern composting: what to compost, where to put it, how to tend to it, and how to use it. in my first interview with nguya, she emphasized compost as central to the identity of her garden, stating emphatically that they never use dawa za dukani, literally “store-bought medicines,” referring to chemical fertilizers available at the market. composting, which in practice includes the recycling of crop residues, food scraps, and animal waste, orients toward a “collective continuance” (whyte 2018) of the vital forces that support ongoingness. in the process, it problematizes that which attenuates and diminishes these forces over time, or toxicity. on entering each of the gardens that we visited together, nguya attends to the signs of composting: the pits or piles of organic matter in slightly shaded spaces, in different stages of decomposition, bearing evidence of regular turning. she asks questions and advises on how to foster the sorts of relations that lead to soil that can go on—systems of replenishment, practices of nourishment. as she builds new relations or starts to become more deeply involved with a garden, establishing composting routines and ensuring practices that regenerate the soil’s fertility often demands significant time. successful composting requires reflection and attention, even in her own garden and in those of longtime companions. figure 5. a discussion in the garden at trmega headquarters in maji ya chai. the brick compost bin for both garden waste and kitchen scraps is visible on the right. photo by stacey ann langwick. composting involves cultivating thick relations. the greater the content of organic matter, the greater the capacities of the soil to retain water and nutrients, to make proximate those entanglements that support plants and a community of decomposer microorganisms. when these relations are attenuated—when plants are harvested and taken away, when plant matter is not turned back into the soil, when there has been a thinning of relations—then the structure and porosity of the soil becomes compromised. composting proposes an ethic of return or, at least, of a regular turning. the past is turned in and under to cultivate an environment dense with matter and with the potential for transformative relations. the pleasures of composting rest in these interconnections, interpenetrations, and transformations. the stuff of the world must alter from itself, change from what it was: corn stalks, bean vines, fallen rotting tomatoes, spinach stems, and other debris from the garden and scraps from the kitchen left after human consumption. exposure to living decomposers like bacteria, fungi, protozoa, algae, invertebrates, and insects triggers long and complex sequences of physical transformations: decomposition, mineralization, and humification. composting calls for an ethics that rests in ontological dynamism. our stakes in each other cannot be articulated through a loyalty or faithfulness to what one is; rather, the stakes consist in a commitment to becoming other—to becoming that through which other living might happen (holbraad, pedersen, and viveiros de castro 2014).22 conclusion for tanzanians, modern bodies bear complicated toxic loads not only because of the dumping of capitalism’s harmful by-products but also because of the very products that facilitate domestic life (plastics, kerosene), agriculture (pesticides, chemical fertilizers) and health (antiretrovirals, contraceptives). dawa lishe is forged in this double bind. it problematizes toxicity as a way to think about the conditions under which life becomes attenuated, diminished, depleted, exhausted, drained away. the toxic is social (as with stigma) and environmental (as with chemical fertilizers). producers of dawa lishe offer dried herbal formulas—but “not only” (see de la cadena 2015, 13–28). they also intervene into the social and environmental conditions that attenuate life and diminish vitality. in raising gardens as remedy, producers of therapeutic foods and nutritious medicines shift attention from the individual embodiments of plants and people to the ways that plants collaborate with people to make vital spaces that enable healing. plants are not only agents with active ingredients, although both herbal producers and users are happy to fold in such articulations if available. plants are not only resources to be capitalized on, although they do at times constitute a latent commons that offers the possibility of commodification. they are therefore not (or not only) anticommodities (see scott 2009), even as they resist the forms of politics possible through stable trajectories of commodification (glover and stone 2018). in these gardens, therapeutic plants are never only resources to be harnessed for human need (corporeal, aesthetic, or economic); they are also collaborators in the making of nourishing and nourished spaces.23 in fact, plants become therapeutic as they move and work with people to create habitable spaces, pockets where people and plants mutually reinforce the cultivation of vitalities.24 agricultural policies in tanzania over the past fifty years have focused on cash-crop productivity as a way of navigating the country’s position in the global economy. the gardens at trmega disrupt the forms of scalability so critical to these dominant notions of development. they are designed for ongoingness, rather than scalability and maximum extraction. gardeners eschew notions of transcendence through continual growth; they work within the impermanence, dependencies, and decompositions of plant and human life. organizing their gardens around compost, they question how we problematize toxicity by pointing to the ways that people and plants navigate value within the dynamics of composition and decomposition. they do not ignore other framings—environmental destruction, chronic disease, or food insecurity—but they unsettle them by recognizing and folding in the temporalities of other urgencies. such gardening projects think expansion with their plants; reproducibility here is about seed sharing, cuttings, and transplants. health is about lushness, density, diversity, and the mutualisms it enables. many have cited the witticism, famously attributed to fredric jameson, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” in part, this failure of imagination is an effect of what (and who) we choose to think with. these gardens of therapeutic plants are not outside modes of capitalist extraction and world-making, but they do seek healing through ways that alter it and are alter to it (viveiros de castro 2012). trmega’s engagement with food sovereignty movements, then, raises an interesting question about the sorts of sovereignty the organization imagines. from one angle, these gardens appear to democratize the means of therapeutic production. indeed, knowledge of the ingredients in one’s medicines, and the ability to make them, stand in stark contrast to most people’s relationship to pharmaceuticals. these gardens also expand access to particular therapies, reclaiming the right to alternative options for treatment. by sharing cuttings, seeds, and transplants with each other, trmega members and affiliates might be said to create and extend a form of the commons. in this reading, the commercialization of plant-based medicines hovers as the ultimate, if not inevitable goal. sovereignty would seem to emerge through people’s ability to determine what sorts of therapies are available, what they are composed of, how they are produced, and how they are distributed. from another angle, however, the extension of these gardens results in more than a democratization of the means of production for herbal therapies, because the gardens themselves move the therapeutic value of the plants beyond the process of commoditization. gardens cannot be explained away as apothecaries for the poor. in this reading, trmega’s work is not about control over the means by which therapeutic plants are turned into resources for the alleviation of human need, but rather about the creation of spaces that facilitate dynamic relations among plants, people, soil, and decomposers of various sorts, as well as the interpenetrations that might transform them. a plant’s own capacity to reproduce is utilized in efforts to extend the gardens. none of the gardens stands as a model of some original or imagined garden. none is merely a concept. rather, each constitutes an actual extension of other gardens, an extension of their social relations, physical matter, and storied histories.25 not only does this move challenge a particular notion of ownership but also, as diverse temporal relations fold in on one another, it also troubles the very notion of an owner. opened up to the indeterminacies of both subject and object, this version of sovereignty suggests the ability to shape the conditions of possibility for thriving and becoming—that is, the conditions of habitability. indeed, thinking with the edges of capitalism means, in part, thinking through toxicities as a condition of life to be navigated, shaped, and engaged, rather than as apocalypse or salvation. the ethics of these gardens grow in the relations and logics of dirt. they do not lend themselves easily to dystopic or utopic visions. they push against these “cramped spaces” (povinelli 2016, 6) for argument and action. they are experiments in creating spaces for a new politics of habitability, one that continually asks: what kinds of lushness can be cultivated in twenty-first-century tanzania? what relations enable bodies and landscapes to grow ampler, denser, more productive and more potent? whose ongoingness and what forms of continuance do our gardens support? notes acknowledgments the research on which this article is based was supported by the national science foundation and the wenner-gren foundation, as well as by cornell university through the mario einaudi center for international studies and the institute for the social sciences. i was grateful for a generative and generous environment in which to write during my fellowship at the society for the humanities at cornell university (2016–2017). the analysis developed through my extended participation in the translating vitalities working group, which was supported by the university of chicago, the university of british columbia, and the wellcome trust. the article also benefited from the feedback of many scholars at the annual meetings of the american anthropological association and the african studies association, as well as from presentations at the society for the humanities and the institute for comparative modernities at cornell university and the department of history and sociology of science at the university of pennsylvania. 1. here, see lyons 2016; murphy 2017, 105–109; and whyte 2018. 2. michel de certeau (1984) taught us that habitability is about the making of storied space, as well as the spatiality of stories. in the practice of everyday life, he accounts for the ways that walkers make urban space habitable over and against the concept city of the planner, which is created from a view in the tower with the logics of efficiency and design. the walker creates spaces as she moves through the city, drawing with her not only maps but also memories and legends. the city unfolds through the movements of the walker as she is pulled down different paths by longings, nostalgia, and glimpses of beauty, or pushed by fear, dread, or boredom. the walker takes shortcuts (or long), breaking with the planners’ trajectories and weaving more complicated, laden spaces. for de certeau, the walker is seized on by the imagination, which creates spaces for return, spaces where the past can be acknowledged, its presence responded to. without this ability to return, the city is not habitable. this article is also about movements that strive to remember and reorient toward the past through material entanglements in the present. in contrast to de certeau’s urban walker and that very human-centered story, however, i think through gardens and the labors of plants and people. 3. see hamdy 2012 and livingston 2012 on ways that the toxicity of pharmaceuticals is problematized elsewhere in africa. 4. see walter stumpf’s (2006) argument about the biomedical truism “the dose makes the medicine.” 5. consider, for instance, their impact on bodily life and household economies through hunger (kalofonos 2010; langwick 2015) and on political-economic positioning globally (peterson 2014). 6. i am inspired here by michel foucault’s (1985) ontological claim for ethical substance as the matter of the self on which ethical and moral discourse reflects. ethical substance is that which demands reflection and work. attending to this substance is what makes ethical subjects. foucault argues that for the greeks, this was bodily pleasure. the potency of dawa lishe resides in the way that it captures an active material-social space to work on an alternative ethical substance: toxicity. 7. much of this literature is inspired by feminist, queer, critical race, and postcolonial theory. shiloh krupar’s (2013) work reminds us that the impossibility of purity is not an issue of the so-called developing world. yet elizabeth roberts (2017) does not let us forget that other ways of articulating boundaries (and managing the flow of substances in ways that constitute insides and outsides) remain important. the impossibility of purity does not mean that all entanglements are welcome. 8. one might argue that at the heart of interest in alternative modernities lay an attraction to the creative maneuvers of people outside of the united states and europe to reject forms of purification that would marginalize them from discourse while simultaneously translating the institutions of modernity. 9. see helen tilley’s (2004) and louise white’s (2004) contributions to the issue of osiris on “landscapes of exposure,” as well as hecht 2012. 10. while pesticide and herbicide use is prevalent on small holdings, many report feeling ill after application (ngowi et al. 2007). 11. in supporting of the government’s 2006 national biosafety frameworks, which required the monitoring of genetically modified organisms, chagula mwita, ken hosea, and masoud muruke (2013) conducted a study to assess gmo contamination in both imported maize stocks and processed soybeans in the country. 12. in the interpretive social sciences, the demands of grappling with toxicity have incited the theorization of exposure. a central catalyst has been a special issue of osiris edited by gregg mitman, michelle murphy, and christopher sellers (2004). see fortun 2001; petryna 2002; fortun and fortun 2005; murphy 2006, 2017; choy 2011; chen 2012; shapiro 2015; alaimo 2016; and haraway 2016. see also the series of essays on “toxicity, waste, and detritus in the global south: africa and beyond,” edited by pamila gupta and gabrielle hecht (2017). 13. for more on the history of traditional healing in tanzania, see feierman 1974, 1990; turshen 1984; and langwick 2011a, 2011b, 2012. 14. in 2011, tanzania launched a new process for the registration of healers, their premises, and their medicines. the national registrar of the council for traditional healers first recommended some of the herbal producers with whom i worked in northern tanzania. she held them up to me as models for how healers might develop and in turn lead the development of traditional medicine. yet others with whom i worked explicitly rebuffed the label of healer and state attempts to manage their practice and products through this category. identifying as entrepreneurs, they were more likely to seek certification through the small industrial development organization. 15. see feierman 1985 on the ways that healers were separated from their social basis of power. 16. i thank steve feierman for this point. as brad weiss (1996) has described, villages in this region comprise a cluster of household-based farms dominated by banana (the staple food crop) and coffee (the primary cash crop). 17. helen’s grandmother would have been unlikely to have access to farmland defined by the cultivation of the bananas by men. yet she, like other women in kagera, would have used the grasslands outside of the village to cultivate food and potentially medicines for family consumption and sale. helen’s establishment of trmega echoes longstanding strategies by women in kagera to generate possibilities within the frictions of patriarchal systems of land ownership (weiss 1996). 18. see archambault 2016 for a discussion on how affective encounters between people and plants in mozambican gardens inspire reflections and reorientations that generate the possibility of new futures. 19. for an important argument on the political and ecological significance of native plants, see mastnak, elyachar, and boellstorff 2014. 20. for roitman 2013, this forgetting is that which articulates crisis as the point that requires radical epistemological revision, the rupture that justifies intervention and something new. 21. here, i join k. hall 2014, puig de la bellacasa 2015, haraway 2016, and lyons 2016. 22. this is also the logic of ancestors, of a dying in which one might return but not as one’s self, not as human, not embodied. ancestors lay claim to the living. they demand feeding, coaxing, appeasing, and relation. they compel actions that remember that embodied life was born from them. compost proposes a theory of nonhuman ancestors to be fed, appeased, and coaxed into new relations that will protect and nourish. 23. as natasha myers (2017, 297) writes, “plants entice entire ecologies of other creatures to participate in their care and their propagation: they have the know-how to entrain others in the service of their rhythms, their wiles, and desires.” see also hustak and myers 2012. 24. this account joins work in the emerging field of critical plant studies, which “challenges the privileged place of the human in relation to plant life” (stark 2015, 180; see also marder 2013). 25. such gardens grow and extend, but they are not scalable (as with 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donald trump’s inauguration, i sent an email to friends soliciting photographs to accompany a then-forthcoming article on abortion rights in the united states (andaya and mishtal 2017). of the many compelling images, one caught my eye. a woman stands on a subway platform on her way to a protest march, holding a sign proclaiming: “i’m building a wall around my uterus and making the gop pay me back.” it’s funny—a witty critique of the administration’s position on reproductive rights and migration policy, as well as of its deeply transactional approach to domestic and international diplomacy. the image provokes a consideration of walls and reproductive politics in trump’s america. what do walls mean? who or what is ostensibly protected by a wall, and whose walls can be breached? what does the symbolic power of walls suggest to us about the reproduction of rights and citizenship in the contemporary era? using walls and uteruses as points of departure, i offer some initial reflections on the increasingly punitive nature of reproductive politics in the united states and its relation to emergent state and national preoccupations. figure 1. a billboard held by a protester on the way to a march. photo courtesy of nadine fernandez. the state of abortion and reproductive rights in the united states is grim. since 2010, more than half of all u.s. states have: passed targeted regulation of abortion providers (trap) laws; mandated preabortion wait times, fetal ultrasound viewings, or reading of scripts about fetal development; and/or reduced gestational ages for legal abortion. conscientious objection among health-care providers is on the rise; hospitals affiliated with catholic organizations have refused emergency contraception to rape victims or therapeutic abortions to women with life-threatening conditions. the trump administration has slashed funding to international women’s health organizations, threatened planned parenthood, and cut the title x programs that provide family-planning services to low-income women not covered by medicaid. further, the appointment to the supreme court of the openly antiabortion justice brett kavanaugh underscores the political influence and emboldenment of antiabortion activists who perceive a historic opportunity to challenge abortion rights at the federal level. in the polarization of contemporary u.s. politics, antiabortion activism has become one of the pillars of a socially conservative platform. yet the political alliance between trump—who declared his prolife commitments only after he declared his republican candidacy—and antiabortion advocates was not a foregone conclusion. trump is a far cry from the masculine ideal enshrined in conservative ideology: the disciplined, measured patriarch whose clear moral vision and firm hand on the reins keeps his family’s fiscal and moral house in order. rather, trump is a libertine who shows no respect for many of the principles that conservatives supposedly value. figure 2. a street commentary on the sex scandals surrounding donald trump. a billboard advertising the movie girls trip in the new york city subway features trump’s face, added in by an anonymous artist. photo by elise andaya. for many religiously conservative voters, trump’s prolife stance was and continues to be the keystone of their willingness to put aside their moral quibbles about the president’s licentiousness and their disquiet about other aspects of his nativist agenda (zauzmer 2018). the importance of abortion activism in the forging of political relationships provides a clear example of reproductive governance, a term coined by lynn morgan and elizabeth roberts (2012) to describe the centrality of reproduction to diverse political agendas. as at least one conservative pundit has noted, trump’s soft-pedaling on issues such as same-sex marriage means that he cannot pull back from a hard-line stance on abortion and expect to maintain his support from religious conservatives (fieler 2017). in the context of republican setbacks, reproductive politics have become a crucial battleground where the trump administration can reassure its constituency of his conservative credentials. what, then, is the utility of thinking with walls and uteruses in trump’s america? walls serve as a symbol for nationalisms of all sorts (borneman 1992; de león 2015). trump campaigned on walls, with the backward-looking “make america great again” and the nationalist “build the wall” becoming rallying cries for an identity politics that marshaled white resentment and anxiety and directed it against racial and national others. walls demarcate boundaries, insisting on the rigidity and permanence of categories. walls suggest division and danger; whatever lies beyond a wall is different and to be feared. walls claim possession: this is my space that others may not enter. in the logic of walls, belonging becomes spatialized and militarized, while politics is reduced to performances of domination aimed at demonstrating whose walls can be breached and whose are supposedly invulnerable. the gendering of this “wall to power” should not be lost on anyone, particularly in a context in which some voting segments fear the establishment’s emasculation. figure 3. a homemade sign displayed during a 2017 women’s march. photo courtesy of becca howes-mischel. walls, as overdetermined symbols of division, danger, and possession, shore up the relationships among elements of a contemporary populist movement that perceives itself as under siege: white nationalism; the militarization of domestic and international boundaries; anti-immigrant and antiminority sentiment; as well as gender and sexual essentialisms of all kinds. yet how to connect this to an increasingly regressive reproductive politics? as we struggle against an ever-narrowing definition of nationalism and citizenship, the work of 1990s postcolonial feminists can prove illuminating. analyzing the criminalization of homosexuality by trinidad’s postcolonial government, m. jacqui alexander (1994) argued that when the state’s authority is under threat and the ideological foundations of nationalism have been dislodged, the criminalization of sexuality serves as a central technology of control and a crucial site for the production and reproduction of state power. alexander’s words resonate in contemporary u.s. politics, where a deeply felt sense of the state’s illegitimacy and the loss of foundational principles that have represented the nation as home have driven both the wave of nativist populism that trump rode to power and subsequent resistance to it. if americans can agree on one thing, it is that this state is in crisis, with the very definition of the nation at stake. following alexander’s argument, it hardly seems surprising that sexual and reproductive politics have become central to highly contested visions of the nation. the exercise of state power over bodies through conservative migration and reproductive policy—walls and uteruses—was underscored in the 2017 case of jane doe, a seventeen-year-old undocumented central american immigrant whose request for an abortion the federal government initially blocked. using its position as guardian of an unaccompanied minor, the administration declared that an abortion was against her best interest, stating that its goal was to “promote childbirth and protect fetal life” (npr 2017). this is an extraordinary declaration of the state’s right to intervene in reproductive decision-making. despite the failure of the administration’s bid to force jane doe to give birth, the case highlights her multiple vulnerabilities as the trump administration seeks to exert its power over bodies marked as other through both border and reproductive control. underscoring this emergent alliance between antireproductive rights and nativist movements, in 2016, texan legislators allocated $800 million to border security while slashing the state’s family planning budget, which serves 60 percent of texas’s low-income women, from $112 million to just $40 million (wright 2017). some eighty-two family-planning clinics shut down, leading to a disproportionate rise in births covered by medicaid, since low-income women—largely migrants and minorities—no longer had access to either birth control or abortion. control over reproduction is thus becoming increasingly central to nativist politics. in august 2018, the washington post reported the government’s denial of the citizenship claims of some latino residents born along the texas–mexico border, arguing that midwives had falsified birth certificates of babies born between the 1950s and the 1990s (sieff 2018). as this essay went into production, trump further stoked nativist factions a week before the closely watched november 2018 midterm elections by proclaiming, in violation of the constitution, his intention to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship to children born to noncitizens or undocumented residents. as regressive reproductive politics intersect with nativist and antipoor agendas, it is clear who will suffer most: history shows that those with resources will always manage to exercise greater control over their reproductive lives than those with fewer means. this “stratified reproduction,” to use shellee colen’s (1995) generative term, is not new: scholars have long pointed out both the racialization and the contradictory agendas when supposedly prolife legislators restrict access to abortion and strip funding from programs that support low-income women and their communities. the consolidation of the trump state—despite significant internal dissent—through a coalition of antiabortion rights advocates, nativist and white nationalist movements, and a conservative economic elite (among others) has only accelerated this ungenerous strain of american politics. the narrow vision of national belonging that results from this assemblage of interests can be found in the disinvestment from individuals and communities marked as other, and in the undercutting of their ability to reproduce households, communities, and political citizenship. reproductive and sexual politics, as alexander points out, prove central to efforts at legitimizing the state and redrawing (racialized) boundaries around the nation. shored up by racist, sexist, and xenophobic politics, sex—both consensual and coercive—and reproduction become key sites for the consolidation of elite privilege, as well as for the exercise of state power over gendered, racial, ethnic, national, and religious others. reproductive politics thus connect us to one of the most urgent questions in today’s biopolitical order: on whose bodies will this new nationalism be built? who is walled out, or walled in? i end by offering select interpretations of the opening image. an obvious reading is the protester’s redeployment of the idea of the wall—here, the uterine wall—as a symbol of individual ownership and privacy. this discourse has a long history in abortion-rights activism, codified in roe v. wade’s justification of abortion on the grounds of privacy. another reading suggests the invocation of walls as insularity or protection. if nationalist movements can enlist women’s reproductive capacities as a symbol of political power, this refuses any enrollment into such patriarchal politics (see kligman 1998). but for me, the power of the critique enacted in this photograph lies in the fact that it draws together two apparently incongruous discourses and images—walls and uteruses—to suggest the tensions and contradictions of trump-era policy. while strategic alliances form the root of trump’s populist coalition, they also constitute its weakness. in the context of an ever-narrowing definition of nationalism and belonging, the fragility of these politically instrumental relationships makes them potential new sites of resistance. the stakes could not be higher: as faye ginsburg and rayna rapp (1995) argued more than twenty years ago, reproduction is a critical site for the production not only of children but also of cultural futures. my final words, then, are alexander’s (1994, 22), who asks: “how do we, in our alternative movements, construct a collectively imagined future that takes account of the dismemberments, migrations, exiles and displacements that have become part of processes of domination? how do we construct a home when home is not immediately understood or intuitively accessible?” as we struggle to defend a broad and inclusive definition of home, belonging, and the nation, our attention to the politics of reproduction, as always, will prove central. references alexander, m. jacqui 1994 “not just (any) body can be a citizen: the politics of law, sexuality, and postcoloniality in trinidad and tobago and the bahamas.” feminist review 48, no. 1: 5–23. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.1994.39. andaya, elise, and joanna mishtal 2017 “the erosion of rights to abortion care in the united states: a call for a renewed anthropological engagement with the politics of abortion.” medical anthropology quarterly 31, no. 1: 40–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12298. borneman, john 1992 belonging in the two berlins: kin, state, nation. new york: cambridge university press. colen, shellee 1995 “‘like a mother to them’: stratified reproduction and west indian childcare workers and employers in new york.” in conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction, edited by faye ginsburg and rayna rapp, 78–102. berkeley: university of california press. de león, jason 2015 the land of open graves: living and dying on the migrant trail. oakland: university of california press. fieler, sean 2017 “how trump became the pro-life leader republicans always needed.” the hill, february 17. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-administration/320138-how-trump-unexpectedly-brought-the-pro-life-movement-to. ginsburg, faye d., and rayna rapp, eds. 1995 conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction. berkeley: university of california press. kligman, gail 1998 the politics of duplicity: controlling reproduction in ceausescu’s romania. berkeley: university of california press. morgan, lynn m., and elizabeth f. s. roberts 2012 “reproductive governance in latin america.” anthropology and medicine 19, no. 2: 241–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/13648470.2012.675046. national public radio (npr) 2017 “news brief: sen. flake won’t seek re-election, court rules for unauthorized immigrant’s abortion.” morning edition, october 25. https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/559963745/news-brief-sen-flake-wont-seek-re-election-court-rules-for-unauthorized-immigran. sieff, kevin 2018 “u.s. is denying passports to americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question.” washington post, august 29. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-denying-passports-to-americans-along-the-border-throwing-their-citizenship-into-question/2018/08/29/1d630e84-a0da-11e8-a3dd-2a1991f075d5_story.html. wright, lawrence 2017 “america’s future is texas.” new yorker, july 10. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-future-is-texas. zauzmer, julie 2018 “as trump picks kavanaugh for the supreme court, evangelicals rejoice: ‘i will vote for him again.’” washington post, july 9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/07/09/as-trump-picks-a-supreme-court-justice-evangelicals-rejoice-i-will-vote-for-him-again/. “l’enfer, c’est les autres”: proximity as an ethical problem during covid-19 cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 341-349, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.01 “l’enfer, c’est les autres”: proximity as an ethical problem during covid-19 thomas strong maynooth university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5214-432x susanna trnka university of auckland http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4779-8035 l. l. wynn macquarie university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2466-8534 in new york city in may 2020, a journalist photographed a sign announcing that “selfish joggers who jog on this block without masks be warned—we value the lives of our elderly neighbors and will throw stuff on you from our windows!!!” (schwartzman 2020). an imagined invisible threat of contagion was projected onto interlopers, simultaneously signaling social virtue and its lack (“selfish joggers”), identifying insiders and outsiders (“our neighbors”), and threatening reprisal. all over the world, media coverage of threatened or actual vigilantism, articulated either in tandem with or in opposition to laws policing proximity, has triggered debate. such cases both reflect a pandemic imaginary of how disease is transmitted and articulate ideas about relations between the state and its citizens, social care, and the ethics of nearness and farness. figure 1. dublin social distancing stencil, 2020. photo by thomas strong. during the covid-19 emergency, countries the world over are debating concepts like social distancing, lockdown, and sheltering in place. some people express outrage at teenagers playing basketball in a public park. others imagine curtain-twitchers behind every window, anxious to report anyone holding hands across household “bubbles.” in the declaration of emergency, leftists see a frightening expansion of sovereign power. so do right-wing agitators. communities struggle with historical and novel disciplinary bureaucracies of policing, health-care provision, and state surveillance. these are the anxieties of our time. they cross borders like the virus that provokes them. what are they about? people everywhere are asking themselves about the moral meanings of physical distance—or are actively avoiding such questions. one might say that the ethical significance of proximity—that is, closeness or farness as ethical qualities of relations (strathern 2020)—is being newly troubled across a range of habits, practices, and personal relationships: sex, care, kinship, friendship, cohabitation, coworkers, dress, pedestrians, public transport, shopping. but reflexive ethical consideration of the imperatives of, say, social distancing (more correctly, physical distancing), often gets framed in terms of the verities of law and science. an image emerges of the public as either complying or not with lockdown regulations, without accounting for the moral decision-making underpinning the variety of ways in which we may engage in forms of responsibility, care, or ethical concern for the other in public and private contexts. indeed, forms of social control associated with state epidemic response and the actions they provoke are rarely recognized and expressed as ethical. rather, questions of an ethical nature—about the harm and happiness our relations with others engender—become masked by discourses of risk and law, science and sampling, conspiracy and global power plays. the essays in this colloquy reassert the primacy of the ethical. through case studies from five different countries, contributors shed light on what the hype of the pandemic often conceals: the forms of ethical reflection and conduct that the problems of proximity and contagion can elicit or repress. much of public discourse about social distancing is made intelligible through the language of risk, for example, battles over r-numbers and mortality rates. this discourse surrounding the pandemic and its associated argot (“flattening the curve”) frequently eclipses other forms of risk, such as the emotional or mental risks of physical distancing. it may trump all other forms of reasoning, as when citizens block roads (as susanna trnka [2021, this issue] describes in aotearoa/new zealand), refusing to allow “outsiders” entry, when government controls on proximity block people from accessing clinic care (as susan levine and lenore manderson [2021, this issue] describe for south africa), or when police quarantine apartment buildings (as l. l. wynn [2021, this issue] describes in australia). it may be obviated as when privileged classes demand their rights to go mask-free (as carolyn m. rouse [2021, this issue] describes in the united states), or people continue to hook up in public places (as thomas strong [2021, this issue] describes in ireland). it may be a new demand on or by national collectivities, while simultaneously articulating deep-seated axes of violence, disadvantage, and lack of care between states and citizens, as our contributors collectively demonstrate. this colloquy analyzes ethical reflection as an alternative to merely assessing compliance with expert dictates. rather than assuming that subjects are driven by fear, rational cost-benefit analyses, or blind obedience to the ideology of risk, we see people crafting an ethics of connection and avoidance as part of projects of creating ethical selves and communities. the important questions then become: what values, principles, or behaviors shape how people imagine themselves as responsible, caring subjects during covid-19? how do we grapple with the “competing responsibilities” (trnka and trundle 2017) we now feel toward the law, the state, the community, the lover, the grandparent, the stranger? how does our awareness of not just being in the world but (seemingly perpetually) being in the midst of others shape our modes of ethical reasoning and the affective states associated with them (cf. sartre 1958)? how do these articulate with novel forms of disadvantage emerging from the pandemic, as well as with enduring forms of dispossession and structural violence? what does this suggest about new possibilities for collective care? our focus on proximity extends current work on how covid-19’s physical distancing and lockdown regulations are reconfiguring intimacies of various kinds (dawson and dennis 2020a, 2020b, 2021; lopes et al. 2020; schlosser and harris 2020). this scholarship has greatly elucidated the affective dimensions of new distancing regimes, but proximity and intimacy are not equivalent. while covid-19 has certainly reconfigured intimate practices, it has also altered our spatial relations with others with whom we may, or may not, be on intimate terms—the stranger who stands too close in the supermarket; the flatmates or neighbors who share toilet facilities. responses to the pandemic demonstrate novel ways of reckoning with matters of proximity (e.g., determining how, when, and to what extent to move out of another’s way, what level of surveillance and coercion is appropriate, and who should undertake these). moreover, individual and collective understandings of viral contagion, as well as governmental mandates, class divisions, racial and structural violence, and gender and sexual ideologies (team and manderson 2020; wynn 2020) construct new axes of privilege (long 2020; napier 2020; trnka et al. 2021) in terms of who can define, enact, and enforce “appropriate” ethical conduct. ordinary ethics in extraordinary times over the past two decades, we have witnessed a groundswell of anthropological attention to ethics. our work is primarily informed by approaches focusing on “ordinary ethics”: the ways that ethical reasoning and comportment take place as part of quotidian experience (for three distinct articulations, see das 2006; lambek 2010; brodwin 2013). we focus on how communicative acts (including language, gesture, and bodily comportment) are constitutive of ethics, while remaining attentive to how state discourses, political processes, and bureaucratic norms inform and motivate particular forms of ethical engagement (calhoun 2010; fassin 2012; brodwin 2013). our prompt to focus on everyday elaborations of individual and collective ethics around proximity comes from both the ethnographic specificities of physical distancing, sheltering in place, staying within one’s bubble, and the like that we and others are experiencing and the long lineage of scholarly analyses of responsibility, care, and violence in relations between self and other including, among others, the work of veena das (2006), joão biehl (2013), sarah pinto (2014), and emmanuel levinas (1969). in times of national crisis and during medical emergencies, ethical reasoning may take on heightened meaning yet remains reflective of broader social and political processes (scarry 2010; stevenson 2014). thus, rather than examining “crisis ethics” as a distinct phenomenon, we trace how long-standing identifications and social cleavages such as class and classism, gender and gender discrimination, ethnic identity and racism, sexuality and sexual phobias as well as the language, sensibilities, and new legislation of the covid-19 crisis come to imbue individual and collective decision-making. we take a specific interest in ethical self-fashioning (foucault 1988; laidlaw 2002; mahmood 2005; zigon 2008; faubion 2012) in terms of how it informs, and is informed by, (imagined, enacted, legislated) relations with “others.” we are thus particularly concerned with conceptualizations of personal and collective responsibility, including how reciprocal, interpersonal responsibilities and dependencies are envisioned (faubion 2001; adam 2017), as well as enactments of larger-scale exchanges and flows of obligation and acts of care between citizens, states, and corporations (welker 2014; trnka 2017). as susanna trnka and catherine trundle (2017) have argued, these three facets of responsibility (personal, interpersonal, citizen-state) may interact to reinforce, bifurcate, disperse, or multiply one’s sense of obligations and abilities to achieve them. for too long, state-of-emergency critiques have tended to portray citizens as ignorant or duped by state power, eliding their roles in envisioning and delineating crises and extending the powers of the state (exceptions include honig 2009; fassin 2012; trnka 2020a, 2020b). we aim to question this portrayal, not by denying how emergencies are employed (and sometimes manufactured) to extend state power, but by examining citizens’ active engagement with the state through everyday responses to how contagion is imaginatively connected with self and others, eliciting acts of distancing, care, or protection through the disciplining of proximity. disease imaginaries in considering the aotearoa/new zealand, australian, american, irish, and south african publics’ fears (or lack of fears) of covid-19, our contributions examine the interpretive work that people undertake to understand how an invisible pathogen moves between people, and how that shapes their formulation of everyday spatial ethics of relatedness and care, responsibility and otherness. in the wake of persistent uncertainties about how covid-19 is transmitted, and contestation over the veracities of scientific information (rouse 2020), we are all compelled to rethink relations in terms of proximity and code distance as ethical. in one sense, we are asked to avoid: “stay home.” on the other, we are asked not to avoid but to maintain precise physical distances from others. in the midst of striving to understand, question, uphold, or subvert regulations, we also make our own assessments of the ethics of nearness and farness. in focusing on the anthropology of ethics our aim is not to determine whether something is ethical, but rather how the very category of the ethical is made present (or absented) in discourses about contagion, its spread, and its containment. our contributors’ insights into these processes derive from ongoing fieldwork reshaped by lockdown (levine and manderson 2021; rouse 2021; strong 2021) and de novo projects, born from the pandemic (trnka 2021; wynn 2021). in each case, lockdowns and physical-distancing regulations have recast what is ethnographically possible, reconfiguring reliance on digital communications and social media sources, as well as on more traditional, physically distanced modes of participant observation, for example, walking ethnographies (trnka 2021) and drive-by observation (levine and manderson 2021). in their contribution, levine and manderson (2021) underscore the embodied histories of proximity in post-apartheid south africa, revealing how long-standing class and racial divides preclude disadvantaged segments of society from being able to enact a novel “ethics of care as distance.” rouse (2021) analyzes a similar axis of disadvantage in the united states to suggest a rethinking of anthropology’s critiques of biopolitics, indicating how those on the losing side of the “veil” between black and white americans struggle to assert their humanity, much less receive state care. wynn (2021) draws our attention to new “imagineries” of infection, demonstrating how national narratives grounded in long-standing stereotypes and disadvantage fuel australia’s covid-19 response. focusing on ireland, strong (2021) considers how gay men’s continuation of sexual encounters reveals both the limits of state authority and the ethical meaning of sustaining sexuality, despite the pandemic. in considering how the state galvanized collective engagement in covid-19 restrictions in aotearoa/new zealand, trnka (2021) focuses on the mobilization of different publics in enacting ethical proximities that distance “others” while keeping “us” together in ways that simultaneously support, extend, and contravene physical distancing regulations. collectively, these pieces underscore how states and citizenries formulate the ethical dimensions of proximity in a time when maintaining the “right” interpersonal spatial relationalities has become vested with profound moral meaning. abstract during the covid-19 emergency, people around the world are debating concepts like physical distancing, lockdown, and sheltering in place. the ethical significance of proximity—that is, closeness or farness as ethical qualities of relations (strathern 2020)—is thus being newly troubled across a range of habits, practices, and personal relationships. through five case studies from australia, ireland, new zealand, south africa, and the united states, contributors to this colloquy shed light on what the hype of the pandemic often conceals: the forms of ethical reflection, reasoning, and conduct fashioned during the pandemic. [covid-19; infectious disease; ethics; pandemic; physical distancing; proximity; state of emergency] notes acknowledgments the editors of this colloquy are grateful for the financial support the research received from the social science research council’s rapid-response grants on covid-19 and the social sciences, the australian research council special research initiative for australian society, history and culture, the irish research council, and the university of auckland faculty of arts’ pbrf fund. thanks also to samuel brennan, brodie quinn, imogen spray, and our fellow contributors for feedback on earlier iterations of this collection. references adam, barry d. 2017 “the politics of responsibility in hiv.” in competing responsibilities: the ethics and politics of contemporary life, edited by susanna trnka and catherine trundle, 181–92. durham, n.c.: duke university press. biehl, joão 2013 vita: life in a zone of social abandonment. photographs by torben eskerod. berkeley: 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2014 life beside itself: imagining care in the canadian arctic. berkeley: university of california press. strathern, marilyn 2020 relations: an anthropological account. durham, n.c.: duke university press. strong, thomas 2021 “the end of intimacy.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 381–90. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.05. team, victoria, and lenore manderson 2020 “how covid-19 reveals structures of vulnerability.” medical anthropology 39, no. 8: 671–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2020.1830281. trnka, susanna 2017 one blue child: asthma, responsibility, and the politics of global health. palo alto, calif.: stanford university press. 2020a “from lockdown to rāhui and teddy bears in windows: initial responses to covid-19 in aotearoa/new zealand.” anthropology today 36, no. 5: 11–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12603. 2020b “rethinking states of emergency.” social anthropology / anthropologie sociale 28, no. 2: 367–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12812. 2021 “be kind: 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university of california press. wynn, l. l. 2020 “invisible monsters: why infectious diseases are so hard to conquer.” the lighthouse, may 18. https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/may-2020/invisible-monsters-why-infectious-diseases-are-so-hard-to-conquer. 2021 “the pandemic imaginerie: infectious bodies and military-police theater in australia.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 350–59. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.02. zigon, jarrett 2008 morality: an anthropological perspective. oxford: berg. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 341-349, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.01 time at its margins: cattle smuggling across the india-bangladesh border cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 4, pp. 546-574, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.03 time at its margins: cattle smuggling across the india-bangladesh border malini sur western sydney university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5744-9648 after learning that the broker jokhim had arranged a “signal clear” for the transport of six bulls across the india-bangladesh border, the cattle transporter alibaba had no time to speak to anyone. indian border commanders who had accepted jokhim’s bribes had verbally granted a signal, which jokhim relayed to alibaba by rushing to his house. a signal clear comprises a precious two-to-three-hour window of opportunity during which indian cattle workers such as alibaba can cross the border to bangladesh with their animals.“signal clear,” alibaba said to me, tying his cotton gamosa (towel) around his head as protection against the heat and the rain. during signal times he did not engage in useless banter pretending to be a bepari (trader), when he was really a trusted kamla (transporter). to acquire alibaba’s services, bangladeshi cattle traders arrived at his modest one-room house in a remote village in the indian state of assam, situated about a mile away from the india-bangladesh border. cows are politically significant animals, for one because hindu nationalists in india consider them sacred. despite having one of the largest cattle populations in the world, india does not export live cows, bulls, or buffaloes.1 since direct diplomatic efforts have failed to convince india to export cattle legally, bangladesh, a muslim-majority country with a high demand for beef, especially, among the upper middle classes, has set up twenty-six animal-import corridors along its borders with india. here, bangladeshi border forces unilaterally “legalize” smuggled cattle by imposing a fine of us$2 per cattle head. the printed receipt the bangladeshi troops hand over to the traders constitutes a legal loophole allowing cattle transport and sale all over the country. for alibaba and jokhim, who reside in the borderland chars—silted depositions and settlements created and recreated by the shifting course of the brahmaputra and the jinjiram rivers—signals from indian troops set into motion a series of activities. during signal clear, they lead the animals from assam across the border to the adjoining kurigram district in bangladesh. alibaba gathered the stocky bulls, colloquially known as home gorus, from a secret enclosure; his sharp stick landed on their humps, forcing them to nervously break into a run. much like the english word signal, the word home has been domesticated to refer to cattle bred locally in the region. the dynamics of small-scale smuggling in home gorus that i discuss here, entirely dependent on the border commanders, stands apart from the movement of high-value and massive zebu bulls that arrive from northern and western india to assam. smuggling in zebu cattle involves a bigger network, with these animals arriving in large numbers, exceeding legal trade and consumption within assam, expressly for smuggling to bangladesh (sur forthcoming). when indian soldiers escalated their surveillance over india’s newly constructed border fence and intensified their search for political dissidents in the state of assam, jokhim’s negotiations with the border forces would prove ineffective. the closure of border gates generated what i call armed times, times of imminent danger that would last from a few days to a month. during such periods of heightened state control, indian border troops intensely surveilled cattle markets, border villages, and the border itself. heavily armed soldiers searched markets to arrest assamese political dissidents, whom they alleged acquired illicit firearm supplies from bangladeshi cattle smugglers. the soldiers were also on the lookout for bangladeshis, suspecting them to be smugglers, terrorists, or unauthorized migrants seeking to resettle and occupy land in assam. since 2014, under india’s hindu nationalist bhartiya janata party (bjp)–led government, and the rise of the bjp to power in the state of assam in 2016, the political revival of the gau mata (mother cow) as a revered hindu symbol and the mushrooming of “gau rakshaks” (cow protectors) has led to tighter controls over cattle smuggling to bangladesh. the resurgence in cow protection generates new temporal rhythms. new armed times now last for as long as three months. during the extended suspension of opportunities for signal clear, cattle workers can either wait indefinitely for armed time to ebb—and subject themselves and their children to hunger—or they can risk torture, imprisonment, or being shot by indian border troops while swimming across the rivers with the cattle. as the days stretched interminably during newly protracted armed times, alibaba’s gamosa remained carelessly thrown over his shoulder. the animals waited in hidden enclosures, often without food and water. no one knew when the border gates would open again. how do borders structure the lived experience of time? how do borders reorder the linear measures of national histories? in addressing these questions from the 2,545-mile india-bangladesh border, i relocate the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative scholarship of internally coherent religious and national bodies to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital.2 borders recalibrate time, imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. the case of cattle smuggling demonstrates how, at the india-bangladesh border, time proves erratic. the confluence of the cow’s sacredness, the militarization of national sovereignty in india, and the militarized legalization of smuggled cows in bangladesh expands and contracts time unpredictably, in ways that generate state violence. in dangerous border crossings, the shifting relationships between the sacred and the material embodied in home gorus shape the labor and value of the cattle trade. if the border’s life-giving properties ensure the mobility of capital, people, and animals, its coercive temporal energies prolong hunger, dispiritedness, and death. the border makes time calculations fundamental to earning a living, setting new terms on which muslim cattle workers, and the animals they trade in, will live and die.3 in this article, i open the labors of cattle smuggling to close ethnographic inquiry. i show how cattle’s unique symbolism in india, india’s new border fence construction, and bangladesh’s animal corridors contribute to disruptions in the progression of time: an erratic syncopation has replaced a previously predictable cycle of signal clear announcing times for border crossings. consequently, as i demonstrate, people’s experiences of the space of the border, both the mundane and the exceptionally violent, are essentially informed by fractured, shifting, and contingent experiences of time at the border. borders thus constitute temporal as well as spatial phenomena. in what follows, i briefly engage with the anthropology of time in relationship to the rhythms and structures of pastoral societies, nation-building, and capital to show how time and time calculations prove vital to surviving the violence that constrains the mobility of the cattle workforce along the india-bangladesh border. i then explore the lives and livelihoods of muslim cattle workers in india, demonstrating their negotiations with border outposts for smuggling signals. their struggles and border crossings redraw the lines of national histories and economies. next, i argue that the legalization of smuggled animals in bangladesh makes cows and bulls mobile and high-value commodities; these arrangements ensure that bangladeshi traders who have the upper hand in cattle transactions can speed up time to their benefit. finally, i analyze the rise of a new politics of cow protection under india’s bjp-led government that harnesses sacrality to reshape the tapestry of time. these policies intensify risks without preventing cattle smuggling. the borders of time anthropologists have closely attended to time’s manifestations through rituals, values, nature, and capital. time regulates economic activities and political and cosmological governance (leach 1961; geertz 1966; evans-pritchard 1969; burman 1981; munn 1992); it shapes nation-building and national histories (chatterjee 1993; hoskins 1997) and structures capitalist value and governmentality (bear 2016; yeh 2017). e. e. evans-pritchard’s (1969) ethnology of the nuer in southern sudan immortalized cattle as pivotal to the study of time in anthropology. for the nuer, a constellation of pastoral communities, evans-pritchard showed how time materialized through a sequence of tasks surrounding the care and pasturing of cattle, tasks rooted in local ecologies and seasons. in his analysis, cattle shaped nuer time-consciousness as well as labor; the animals were a social force that united tribes in structural interrelations. the shared temporalities of cattle gave cohesion to nuer life, while cattle’s value simultaneously reinforced political boundaries between the nuer and neighboring tribes such as the dinka. in other words, cattle proved vital to the structuring of daily life and territoriality in this pastoral community (evans-pritchard 1969, 104–7). in pastoral societies more broadly, cattle determine the tempo of economic actions and notions of property, as well as strife (ferguson 1985; comaroff and comaroff 1990; straight 1997). unlike the nuer time reckoning described by evans-pritchard (1969), where the animals’ bodies and life cycles functioned as a force to structure social time, along the india-bangladesh borderlands the smuggling in bulls and cows has emerged as a response to shifting dynamics between “imagined communities” of humans (anderson 1991). and whereas evans-pritchard’s celebration of the cultural specificities of nuer cattle-clocks came to depoliticize time, as his characterization of the nuer was timeless and lacked history, the crafting of national territories in the indian subcontinent and the consolidation of india’s borders came to transform the cow into an intensely political animal. janet hoskins’s (1997) insights on time-reckoning among the kodi in indonesia offer a rich synthesis of how agricultural undertakings that closely followed ritual calendars stood in disjuncture with the timescale of the indonesian nation-state. notions of biographical time embedded in the value of objects and animals that composed local historical forces did the same. this disjuncture made local notions of heritage and national history distinct forces (hoskins 1997). at the india-bangladesh borderlands, this sense of dislocation has been historically evident as the lifeworlds of cattle extended far beyond narrow notions of religious nationalism and its political mobilization. in india, given cattle’s distinctive place in religion, hindu nationalist politics, which centers on cow protection, seeks to obliterate the diverse ways in which cows, bulls, and buffaloes hold value on the hoof, bone, and hide. these values are fundamental to pastoral and agrarian life, and by sustaining marginal communities in the borderland chars, they remain intrinsic to the experience of border times. contemporary notions of sacrality rooted in nationalist histories continue to perpetuate an intensely material timescape at the border. that nations produce asymmetric times—with past, present, and future neither in linear relation to one another nor neatly linking to a shared sense of identity, nationhood, or progress—is made evident in partha chatterjee’s (1993) rendering of the exclusions generated by nationalism. marginal subjects and subjectivities are ever palpable at the edges of nations. national borders make the very experience of time a profoundly fragile and ever-changing phenomenon (andersson 2014, 804). here, state control of unauthorized migration, the construction of border infrastructures, deportations, and human rights violations make temporal registers uncertain for undocumented migrants and border residents (coutin 2005; boehm 2009; yeh 2017). if recasting scholarly attention on the nation’s margins has established how exclusion exercises force by producing a duality of shared and divergent histories (cons and sanyal 2013, 7–8), it remains to be explored how borders reshape the temporal limits of national territories by splintering the experience of time. in other words, i am suggesting, time consciousness at borders is vital to our understanding of nations and nationalism. temporal gridlocks prove especially potent in frontier locations embedded in specific histories of capitalist mobility; at such sites, speed accelerates time to transform into a value in its own right (yeh 2017). as contrasted with earlier formulations of capitalist modernity, laura bear (2014) shows how capitalist circulations fill modern time with doubt, conflict, dilemmas, and orchestrations. departing from capitalist modernity that posit modern social time as situated in routines and mediations, bear argues that changing labor dynamics in contemporary modernity lay bare and work to resolve disparate social rhythms and representations of time, including nonhuman times (bear 2014, 6, 20, 22). as a temporal divider, the india-bangladesh border continues to mark cows as venerable animals. yet cattle times are controlled not by bovine life cycles, but by the actions of affluent, “animal tax” paying bangladeshi traders who demand cattle in a hurry and bangladeshi troops who legalize cattle. they prod indian cattle workers to move fast, even with high risks to life. high demand and price differentials drive the risky movement of cattle workers and animals, pushing their sales. the contrasting notions of the cow’s sacrality and the use of cows, bulls, and buffaloes in everyday life provide the impetus for smuggling, reinforcing a material world of trade and strife. illicit cattle passages sustain villagers while intensifying the risks of crossing a lethal border. the specific modalities of cattle smuggling intrinsically tied to time calculations are inseparable both from state violence and from the new economies and social arrangements that rupture prior bonds of trust and kinship. here, too, the boundaries of religions—especially hindu and muslim—in forming oppositional communities and nations further structure border policing. where the india-bangladesh border cuts through the chars of assam and kurigram, threats to india’s national security plants the seeds of suspicion and results in the harassment of muslim border residents. in april 2007, when i began fieldwork in the border chars, indian troops shot 119 bangladeshi and 23 indian border crossers; the majority of those killed in cross-border firings were muslim small-scale cattle traders and transporters like alibaba (human rights watch 2010, 10–13, 66, 78). in this sense, the border functions as a “chokepoint—a site of constrictions—that disrupts as well as makes possible the terms on which life depends (carse et al. 2020). chokepoints are not just geographical locations; rather, they constitute temporal phenomena, facilitating and impeding the circulation of people and goods in time (cons 2020, 6). two seemingly divergent infrastructures—india’s new border fence and bangladesh’s animal corridors—modulate the progression of time, shifting it from cyclical beats to irregular rhythms. engineers and construction firms responsible for building india’s border with bangladesh, and indian soldiers who, in guarding the new barrier, fluctuate between signal clear and armed times, disrupt the flows of the cattle trade. signal clear means sustenance for the traders but also quick deaths for well-fed bulls, whereas armed times lead to anxious waiting, scarcity, and violence for the traders and their families, as well as to the prolonging of animal lives before their inevitable slaughter. signal clear as soon as alibaba said “signal clear,” badshah, his three-year-old son, would mimic his excitement. pretending to be a trader, badshah would hold a borrowed mobile phone and scream: “hallo hallo—signal clear, line clear?” in the border char where alibaba and jokhim resided, signals punctuated the routine rounds of border patrolling. here, the border outposts—officially intended as insular militarized infrastructures, housing troops and weapons and functioning as the first line of defense during wars—grant signals and mediate everyday exchanges that revolve around the border (sur 2019a). figure 1 and figure 2. chars along the india-bangladesh border. photos by malini sur. ecologically, the border chars make for unstable territories. the changing course of rivers—such as the brahmaputra and its numerous tributaries in assam, as well as the jinjiram in the kurigram district of bangladesh—both form and destroy these river islands composed of sand and silt. residents laboriously reclaim the wetlands for cultivation and settlement—the forces of nature dictate life in these shifting regions. although villagers carefully strive to make the chars cultivable and habitable, the returns from both agriculture and seasonal daily wage employment prove meager (chakraborty 2009; lahiri-dutt and samanta 2013; khan 2014). border chars are, however, not only ecological fragments; their locational fuzziness also make them economically productive sites. rivers ensure that villagers can smuggle goods to make a living. in these areas, indians and bangladeshis share a predicament of being nodi bhanga manush, people whose lives and struggles are founded on the changing course of mercurial rivers. in the chars, i rotated between the biweekly cattle haats, or markets, that occur on both sides of the border—during the day on the indian side and during the evenings and nights in bangladesh. i operated according to the circularity of time that straddled a dense network of places and relationships, which in turn revolved around cattle markets, border outposts, and animal corridors. in the state of assam, cows, bulls, and buffaloes older than fourteen years and unfit for work and breeding can be legally slaughtered against a veterinary certificate; beef and buffalo meat, known as cara beef, are legally sold and consumed. buffaloes are also sacrificed annually as a part of a specific hindu temple ritual. one day in alibaba’s char in assam, i watched jokhim wait unsuccessfully to gain entry to an indian border outpost. rumor had it that the hindu commander-in-charge had moral reservations about transporting cattle for slaughter to bangladesh, and even a bribe of us$10 per cattle head would not suffice. jokhim, however, did not give up. he waited for khan, a new border constable, to walk out of the outpost on errands. brokers like jokhim carefully watched the arrival of young constables whom they believed more open to bribes—in his words, “more likely to swallow.” lighting a cigarette, jokhim stood under a tree near the telephone booth on the highway. alibaba fretted anxiously at a distance. as soon as khan finished his phone call home and started off to complete his errands, jokhim walked near, speaking to him without making eye contact. by the time khan reached the border road, jokhim had walked away, returning to alibaba and another trader, kazi. by early evening, the camp had granted passage for a consignment of twenty cattle from three villages under its jurisdiction. at once, a frenzy of activity started. as soon as children heard their fathers uttering the english words “signal clear,” they screamed in excitement, running out of their houses. nasneen, alibaba’s wife, placed a wrapped betel leaf with nuts into his hand, giving similar pouches to their neighbors entrusted with the consignments. then the men left. they walked for a mile or so before untying the stocky brown bulls from two shelters. at the border, alibaba and others broke into a run, prodding the bulls with their sticks to cross quickly. signal clear propelled life into motion at the border. when signals were granted in quick succession, cattle workers and their families hardly slept. indian kamlas ate once at home in the morning before sunrise and then again, long after sunset, either in their counterparts’ house in bangladesh or, on receiving another signal of clear passage, after they had returned home on the indian side. on the indian side of the border, sons, nephews, and neighbors quickly transported the cattle, running between brokers, positions of clearance, and areas where traders and cattle could gather to cross over to bangladesh. signals from india set bangladesh’s animal corridors into motion; cattle traders escorted the animals to tax counters, waited in queues, paid taxes, and then either sold the animals in cattle markets or kept them at home until they could strike deals with traders arriving from other districts. taking advantage of signal clear, small-scale bangladeshi cattle traders like chand and karim mia arrived in assam to visit the cattle markets. their hands were freshly painted with henna, a plant dye and auspicious symbol meant to protect their safe border crossings. one afternoon, chand, alibaba and i arrived in the cattle enclosure of a border haat located fifteen miles from alibaba’s char. we walked between the animals lining the congested enclosure, passing the heavily armed indian border troops closely monitoring the market, guns and bullets strapped to their chests and wireless radios in hand. chand stopped next to a herd of bulls, scrutinizing their size and mentally calculating the amount of beef that the animals would produce and the concomitant price it would fetch in bangladesh. such considerations determined whether he would purchase the animals. it was cheaper for chand and karim mia to purchase the animals themselves and entrust alibaba to arrange shelter and passage against a fee than to buy the animals for double or triple the price after indian traders transported them to bangladesh. figure 3 and figure 4. cattle markets along the india-bangladesh border. photos by malini sur. karim mia spent his days visiting markets, always reminding his indian friends that he was a legal trader who paid cattle tax. he invited me to visit bangladesh and see for myself how the state and the border forces efficiently regulated the cattle business, telling me, “you should see how well organized the animal corridors are in bangladesh. we are all doing legal business; the border forces manage the counters and we pay tax to the state.” in the evenings, he relaxed with friends, often joking that one could never find his large shoe size in indian markets. mia’s humor hid a confidently calculating mind that relied on the labor and goodwill of trusted transporters like alibaba. bangladeshi traders like him had the upper hand in time keeping. given the legitimacy that bangladesh’s animal corridors afforded as a means of meeting upper middle-class demands for beef, leather, and ritual sacrifice, traders prodded time to move faster and faster to maximize the supply of animals. the regulation of india’s border fence and bangladesh’s animal corridors constituted sophisticated capitalist relationships that accelerated time beyond the usual push for profit. while traders and transporters moved between cattle markets on either side of the border, alibaba’s wife nasneen in assam and chand’s wife dilshad in kurigram paced outside their houses to locate mobile cell signals. nasneen confirmed the passage of cattle from indian chars to their bangladeshi trading counterparts, patiently answering questions about changes in routes and delays over a phone she borrowed from her neighbor, also a cattle trader. given the important role that women played in the trade, both indian and bangladeshi transporters and traders (roles taken by men) waxed eloquent about having women with “standards” in the family—meaning women who, as alibaba put it, hosted his visitors with politeness and proved adept at persuasion. he had divorced his first wife, whom he had met during his border-crossing times as a youth, mostly because she was “lazy” and without the said standards. chand joined the conversation, adjusting his red scarf and emphasizing: “having a standard woman in the family like dilshad adds value to the business—especially one who has the standards to speak to people, to host visitors, to cook for them, and attend to phone calls.” nasneen and dilshad lit their clay ovens to attend to both local and foreign visitors, feeding traders and transporters from well-stocked kitchens with supplies of rice and vegetables, and sometimes even buffalo meat in assam and fish in kurigram. women’s actions in creating “spatiotemporal transformations”—as nancy munn (1986) describes in the case of gawa—function as critical parameters for forging a sense of community beyond the self. munn reminds us that although women did not acquire fame, unlike the men whose self-transformation through the transmission of food to foreign visitors furthered trade exchanges, their role and powers of persuasion were central to kinship, relationality, and trade for the future (munn 1986, 8–11, 52–53). similarly, the gendered roles of persuasion meandered time for cattle passage across the india-bangladesh borderlands. nasneen and dilshad did not attend to the cattle at any point of their transit. yet their ability to extend time for passage and profits, and their labor in attending to the workers, reinforced cattle’s value as a mobile commodity. signal clear was an industry in itself. it reconfigured time cycles, created new markets, and fostered exchanges. that cattle could exchange hands despite legal and infrastructural barriers expanded people’s temporal horizons; signal times enabled impoverished cattle workers to imagine new futures. alibaba desired to become a trader of the large, expensive zebu bulls that arrived in these borderlands from northern and western india; chand wanted to buy an enfield “bullet” motorbike, which he promised he would take to his grave; and nasneen aspired to own a water pump right outside her house. smuggling also energized children, with the promise of full plates of food, and other villagers, with the potential of employment. children waited in anticipation of their fathers purchasing eggs and, with a little luck, even buffalo meat. cattle rustling and border-making traders interpreted the clearance for cattle passage as an explicit acknowledgment of the long-standing professions of herders, tanners, traders, and butchers in the borderland whose lives revolved around the use and exchange of cattle across political boundaries. between rushing around, traders and their families traced genealogies of trading. chand would emphasize that traveling across the border chars resembled moving between two similar districts, not countries; both alibaba’s and nasneen’s fathers had also traded in cattle. in fact, as alibaba nonchalantly conveyed to me one day, nasneen’s father was imprisoned in the district jail for murder over a failed cattle deal. official records stored in this region’s dusty archives confirmed the long history of cattle rearing, rustling, and trade. in british india, cattle were ubiquitous as highly movable property, with cattle theft and recovery negotiated in diverse ways (gilmartin 2003, 36–37). since the late nineteenth century, cattle trading and slaughter occurred alongside the hindu nationalist movements, which harnessed the cow’s differential positioning—as alive and godly for the hindus and as sacrificial and food for muslims—for mass mobilization. through this process, hindu nationalists transformed the animals into a political tool to protest the british colonial state in india, unite a dispersed hindu community, and emphasize the differences between hindus and muslims in irreconcilable terms (robb 1986; van der veer 1994; hansen 1999). hindu nationalists politically invested the body of the cow with divinity; the animal came to embody both hindu cosmology and a proto-nation. as a representative of hindu identity and nationality, cows were seen to require protection from non-hindus (pinney 1997, 481–83). despite the political leverage of cows in the fight for separate homelands for hindus and muslims, their use for trade and exchange persisted. cattle consignments arrived from northern india to the eastern borderlands, where they went on display in numerous cattle fairs. in the early twentieth century, british veterinary officers eagerly awaited the arrival of trains with large consignments of milch cows and bulls from bihar, in high demand in these riverine borderland regions because the locally bred, smaller cattle proved unsuited for agricultural traction and carts. further, the riparian landscape did not allow for breeding and grazing large herds of cattle (blackwood 1915). in august 1947, amid large-scale violence and displacement, the densely interconnected landscape of chars transformed into india and pakistan with the partition of the indian subcontinent. pakistan’s territory was further bifurcated, with the part known as east pakistan separated from west pakistan by indian territory. the mobility of land, as in the form of shifting char settlements, posed additional territorial dilemmas, and the new nation-states aggressively claimed these regions (chatterji 1999). india restricted live cattle exports and differentially prohibited and regulated cow and bull slaughter and transport even within the country. along india’s border with east pakistan—which today includes regions that alibaba and chand traverse—competing claims over resources made cattle a precious resource for agricultural traction, trade, food, and leather. ranchers, herdsmen, traders, and tanners who struggled to maintain their livelihoods had to make sense of how the newly imposed border could become of use to them (van schendel 2005). trans-border cattle raids were not just survival strategies in these regions but actions that delineated the margins of national territories at a time when even nation-states remained unsure about the precise location of the border.4 in its official records of border issues, east pakistan came to classify and criminalize low-caste hindu ranchers and herdsmen and indigenous communities as “notorious cattle lifters.” official deliberations on cattle raids and thefts between east pakistan and india were remarkably devoid of religious overtones in the 1950s.5 the political location of cows and bulls at the border differed from other commodities such as rice, which was important as a precious food grain. india and east pakistan used rice and rice taxation not only to demarcate national territories, ethnicities, and religions but also to evict and deport peasants through oppressive taxation and state repression (sur 2016). although the indian customs act (1962) permitted cattle exports with a license, cattle remain categorized with camels and horses as “restricted items.” in effect, this regulation implies that no trade licenses are ever issued for live animals. despite legal prohibitions, cattle transactions received a boost after the former east pakistani territory emerged from the liberation war as an independent bangladesh in 1971. the continuing journeys of cattle traders and transporters across borderland chars attest to the economic value of cattle in a region where the sacred has a long history of being profane. notwithstanding friendly diplomatic relations, india has refused to legally export cattle to bangladesh. still, retired bangladeshi and indian cattle traders recounted to me how cordial diplomatic relations had initially ensured an open border that had allowed for the routine occurrence of cattle exchanges across borderland haats. trans-border trading waned between 1974 and 1979, due both to political instability in bangladesh and to the emergence of anti-foreigner agitation in assam known as the assam movement (hussain 1993). after the agitation ended, cattle smuggling resumed. in fact, india continues to be a leading exporter of carabeef (buffalo meat) even with the bjp’s ascendance in national politics (dhingra 2019). in some indian states that share a border with bangladesh, such as west bengal, indian border outposts have imposed cattle ceilings and introduced identity cards for animals that need to be grazed close to the border. these arrangements have realigned the political power between village headmen and prominent community members who desire cattle passage across their villages and the indian border forces. they have also created new forms brokerage and control (cons 2016; ghosh 2019). along assam’s border chars the large deployment of mostly hindu soldiers in the indian border security forces (bsf)—who sometimes refuse to allow cattle to cross india’s newly built fence for reasons of religiosity—complicates cattle smuggling, but ways including bribes are found to facilitate this highly lucrative trade. diverse fiscal practices and the diffusion of political authorities in border zones structure sustenance and confer meaning to life and social legitimacies (flynn 1997; walker 1999; chalfin 2001; das and poole 2004; roitman 2004, 2005; van schendel 2005; van schendel and abraham 2005; ghosh 2011; sur 2012). villagers on both sides of the india-bangladesh border felt that cattle smuggling generated employment and prosperity; in fact, everyone i spoke with believed that the business of cattle smuggling had reduced rustling and theft. travel for small-scale trans-border trading called kacha bebsha (perishables), including locally bred cattle, is sharply distinguished from pakka bebsha (high-value and often contraband) trading in drugs, arms, alcohol, and precious metals. border communities shun the latter, as it involves dealing with morally suspect and highly dangerous substances. jason cons (2016, 558), writing about enclaves at the india-bangladesh border, argues that neither border territories nor border dwellers fit the precise constructions of logic and rule imposed by nations. by closely attending to struggles of livelihood and legitimacy along the india-bangladesh border, he argues that border histories are far more than mere linear narrations of the past. so, too, i argue are the time calculations and time-consciousness of border dwellers that set such histories into motion in the first place. in india, relationships between the state, people, and cattle transcend the binary of religion and economy that has fundamentally driven bovine politics in india, as well as set the intellectual terms on which these binaries have been reproduced (adcock and govindrajan 2019, 1099). the scholarship on cattle symbolism, privileging histories of the sacred, has largely failed to account for people’s distinct temporal sensibilities and relationships to bulls, cows, and buffaloes as commodities on the indian subcontinent. radhika govindrajan’s (2018) analysis of bovine materiality in india has brought to light how cow vigilantism coexists with, and does not override, the ritual and agrarian economies of care that shape people’s relationship with cattle as domesticated animals in india, including their sale for slaughter. india’s electoral agendas focusing on “cow protection”—which seek to wipe out the livelihoods that center on cattle rearing and trade—make the everyday materiality of bovine-human relations complex and anxiety ridden (govindrajan 2018). in the india-bangladesh borderland chars, such complexities bear on our understanding of borders as temporal barriers. disruptions in the flow of time make cattle routes longer, escalate state repression directed at muslim cattle workers, generate prolonged periods of scarcity, rupture kinship, and gender the experience of time by discounting women’s significant role in cattle economies. indian and bangladeshi cattle workers also felt ambivalent about their relationship with the animals. none of them were directly involved in slaughtering the cattle, but neither did they have the time to take care of them as they would for domestic animals. the families i lived with in the chars occasionally slaughtered chickens or sacrificed a goat, but border villagers could not afford to ritually slaughter large, expensive animals or purchase beef for consumption. moving through cattle markets and along the animal corridors, i found myself continually avoiding eye contact with the animals, an act that revealed my awareness of their final fate. armed times periodically, the cyclical beats of hurried signal clears are interrupted by armed times that might last for one to four weeks. the distribution of risks associated with smuggling became especially evident during the national celebrations of india and bangladesh—such as independence, republic, and victory days—when, as the villagers noted, “not even an ant can crawl across the border.” the buzzing of wireless radios in roadside eateries, cattle markets, and border villages announces the onset of armed times that suspend the possibility of signal clear. when the civil engineering firms contracted to build india’s new border fence with bangladesh started digging up the chars, the emergent barrier imposed new, off-kilter rhythms. senior officials regularly arrived to oversee the progress of the construction work. camp commanders and intelligence agents kept a close watch over the site to prevent the pilfering of materials. while construction haltingly proceeded in some stretches and galloped in others, border patrolling intensified and additional outposts were built to house troops on both sides of the border. uniformed men in khaki, blue, and military green, guns swinging from their shoulders, appeared in the border markets frequented by alibaba and chand in assam. indian troops, other federally funded security agencies, and specialized weapons teams combed the cattle markets, anticipating trouble from dissident groups in assam and intensifying their efforts to apprehend bangladeshis who had traveled to india without the necessary documents.6 one day in august 2007, on the eve of india’s sixtieth anniversary celebrations after independence, i was in a border market with chand. a trader in his mid-forties, the amicable chand was a popular figure in assam’s chars. as soon as he arrived from bangladesh, traders and transporters in assam competed for his time and attention in the hope of striking a deal with him. adjusting the red scarf that he always wore around his neck during good times, but not while crossing the border, he also suggested to me that his popularity stemmed from his honesty, honoring deals, and making payments on time. amid the crowd in the cattle arena and the numerous tea stalls where cattle traders stopped for a break, a healer’s loud microphone announced magical cures for ailments ranging from aching muscles to infertility. suddenly, unusually loud sirens drowned out the sounds of the loudspeaker. chand gulped down his tea, walking toward the cattle arena. i nodded to him somewhat inattentively, raptly listening to the exploits of a young bangladeshi cattle trader, who was boastfully recounting how indian cattle smugglers had twice kidnapped him for ransom. when the story had come to an end, i slowly walked toward chand, carefully wading my way between the animals through the monsoon slush. a young man approached chand and whispered something to him, at which point chand immediately lost his composure. sweating profusely, his voice shook as he told me that the indian border forces were on a special lookout for bangladeshis. nervously, sensing the danger he usually felt when crossing the border, he untied his red scarf and stuffed it into his pocket. seeing his face cloud in reaction to the security forces’ patrolling the cattle market, i sensed danger, too. everything blurred. behind us, indian troops continued to patrol; one blocked my way and suspiciously sized me up. i stood out as the only woman, and an urban one at that, in a remote and aggressively male-dominated cattle market. i turned my eyes away from his gun as chand and i slowly made our way from the cattle stall to the bus stand. the imminent danger heightened our sense of time. time sped up; we needed to leave the market quickly. instead of waiting until the cattle arena closed, as we usually did, to buy the unsold cattle for a lower price, our rapid heartbeats let us know that the time was now to get back to the relative safety of alibaba’s house. the sound of my heart drowned out the din of mooing cattle and haggling traders. on the bus, indian security forces frisked passengers, and my fears as well as numerous checkpoints prolonged our journey. late that night, anticipating that the border gates would shut indefinitely, chand anxiously crossed over to his village without purchasing any cattle. with the border gates closed, chand lost both money and his youthful demeanor. as we sat in his courtyard in a remote char in kurigram, he stated, “the border is a strange place these days; everything has shut down for bangladeshis, we don’t know whom to trust anymore.” even at a well-known place where chand crossed regularly and had arranged chairs for bangladeshi and indian troops to sit on during official meetings, armed times now constrained his access to the border. during such moments, the border came to be situated in a violent past where the boundaries of religion—hindu and muslim—once again surfaced as significant. the border no longer made for an everyday resource to a livelihood. chand’s failed deals and monetary losses in india meant that he could no longer purchase wooden shutters for the windows of his new house. instead, tin sheets covered the gaps. since he could not travel to india and purchase cattle himself, he had made an advance payment to indian traders. while they claimed his money, they failed to transport his consignments. as his wife dilshad lamented, lighting a clay oven and placing a pot of rice to boil, “they [his counterparts in india] now turn their face away when he arrives; security is also high these days . . . they no longer host him.” from their courtyard, we could see india’s emerging border fence with its newly planted metal rods, later to be laced with barbed wire. alibaba went to the market every morning to see if he could earn a few cents from loading and unloading goods, failing which he sat at the roadside looking vacantly at the sky. he waited for more trucks to arrive with goods in the early afternoon. as alibaba and chand anxiously hoped for the border gates to reopen, armed time stretched for nearly a month, a seeming eternity. waiting can be a political predicament that renders people unproductive (hage 2009; andersson 2014; khosravi 2017; janeja and bandak 2019). it is an enduring condition for those in chronic poverty; for those prohibited from participating in economic activities, the act of waiting imposes a sense of cruel boredom (o’neill 2017, 15–16, 43). prolonged unemployment extends time by preventing people from achieving the socially desired status of modernity and adulthood (jeffrey 2010, 466, 468). as atreyee majumdar (2018, 56, 70) reminds us, as people’s relationship to time shifts from speed to slowness and immobility, they experience alternating feelings of control and loss. time marginalizes people and places by positioning them at the limits of capitalist modernity. political and legal regulations unevenly distribute insecurity, danger, and hope in ways that force people to wait indefinitely for employment and sustenance; time’s expansion pushes people into forms of “non-­becoming” (khosravi 2017, 218–19). state repression resulted in a depressed distancing from smuggling; during armed times, traders pretended that they or their fathers had never engaged in the cattle business—as if cattle trading had no history in this region. then, on a gloomy winter afternoon, chand suddenly reintroduced his father as a trader who had been imprisoned in assam. until then, most of his stories of travel and trade had rested on his own trans-border journeys and stories of rivalries and abductions that occurred and were resolved within the cattle-trading rings. but that afternoon, his father’s biography was suddenly revised from cattle trader who had traveled to assam for decades to one who had abruptly ended his border-crossing career. armed times made chand link the precarious present that revolved around india’s border polices on unauthorized bangladeshi migration with the past. referring to the assam movement, he said, “that was in the late 1970s, and even now they are imprisoning and killing muslim cattle traders … nothing changes.” although chand’s father never spoke about his involvement in smuggling, his silence established how his imprisonment in assam had made him fear the border. despite his father’s inability to cross the border anymore, and even after several failed deals in smuggling hybrid seeds and alcoholic cough syrups from assam, the profits from bull smuggling had lured chand into the trade amid the uncertain times. hungry times, violent times the expansion of time at the india-bangladesh borders chars transforms it from a thriving center of capital, profit, and employment into a site of scarcity and violence. alibaba and nasneen’s son badshah stopped playing to run inside the house and scream for food the morning i arrived from another village. i had temporarily left alibaba’s char and was residing in an uphill village since disruptions in cattle flows had made my otherwise well-established domesticity with traders and their families edgy. nasneen’s voice cracked as she spoke to me, covering her bruised jaw with her palm. embarrassed both about the visibility of her bruise and the lack of tea at home, she asked if i wanted to pay a visit to her sister-in-law, nakhoda, whose son also traded in cattle. alibaba walked in the opposite direction to sit in the local market; he was neither concerned nor apologetic about the violence that he had perpetrated on nasneen. purchasing a packet of tea leaves, sugar, and biscuits from a local shop, badshah, nasneen, and i walked to nakhoda’s house, the last one along the border, which functioned as a transit point for traders, brokers, and even legal travelers who paid for meals and rest. figure 5. nasneen and badshah. photo by malini sur. seeing nakhoda’s adolescent son lick the last morsels of rice and lentils from his fingers, badshah immediately demanded a plate of rice. nakhoda pretended to scold me for bringing her the tea leaves while brewing tea with them. for the following hour, badshah regularly interrupted our conversation, imploring his aunt for rice. nakhoda smiled lovingly at her nephew but did nothing. badshah cried again for rice. we chatted a while—leading me to realize that, knowing that her sister-in-law had greater resources, nasneen had intended to procure badshah a meal. nakhoda continued to engage him with verbal affection while remaining totally unmoved by his hungry cries. as we walked back, nasneen softly cursed her sister-in-law while badshah momentarily forgot his hunger and broke into a run. we returned home that afternoon with rice, eggs, and oil. nasneen and i hurriedly cooked. badshah ran into the kitchen demanding an entire egg for himself—it otherwise would be divided between him and his two elder siblings. figure 6. nakhoda standing at her door. photo by malini sur. sharon e. hutchinson (1996) has shown how rapid political changes, famines, strife, and the imposition of government rules and courts in the 1980s had disrupted the remarkable harmony of nuer marital relationships described by evans-pritchard in the 1930s. these had transformed men’s prior social position as protectors of the hearth and cattle herd and had eroded women’s roles as procreators who defined how blood, cattle, and food would make relationships. men complained about losing control over their wives and daughters, while women spoke bitterly about abandonment, their husbands’ seizing of domestic resources like cattle, and their struggles to gain control over essential supplies of food, medicine, and money. the symbolic relationship of blood and food that had reinforced vitality and vulnerability, and the sharing of food which had earlier sustained kinship, had now become unsettled (hutchinson 1996, 158–60). the crisis of food and thirst as bhrigupati singh (2015) avers, is indeed “slow moving.” he advances that hunger and thirst occur at different speeds and temporalities: they are not just related to one significant catastrophic event. across the borderland chars, hunger lingered through recurrent scarcity, rendering fragile the bonds of family and kinship. delays in cattle passages reinforced kinship hierarchies, but not obligations. new calculations about resources and consumption made the familial and familiar exchange of food difficult. disruptions in cattle flows unsettled both the sense of paternal pride in providing for the family and maternal responsibilities in relationship to food. no one knew when the border gates would open again; the border itself effortlessly shifted to a site of closure, suffering, and hunger. scarcity had cut nasneen off from kinship networks within her husband’s family. today, armed times can persist up to three months and occur unpredictably. a resurgent politics of cow protection with the rise of india’s bjp further entrenches hunger and disrupts social ties. new and erratic configurations make the time calculations for border crossings fraught with even more dangers. under assam’s bjp-led state government, cow-protection policies have severely impacted the transport of animals. they disrupt even legal trade within the state. instead of preventing cow smuggling, these policies have only led to a greater number of cattle seizures.7 although the bangladeshi government officially states that the smuggling of indian cattle harms bangladeshi dairy farmers and traders (business standard 2017), by continuing to operate the animal corridors, the state in fact condones its troops unilaterally legalizing smuggled animals. while earlier cattle workers oscillated between signal clear and armed times as distinct temporal experiences, in recent years fence construction, border shootings, and the unilateral legalization of cattle have made their distinctions blurry. during new armed times, the high risk while crossing the border to human and animal lives becomes evident in instances of torture, incarceration, and the shooting of cattle workers and injuries to the animals by indian troops. furthermore, unauthorized migration from bangladesh to assam related to conflicts over land, language, and identity led to the updating of the national register of citizens in 2015, with the intention of weeding out suspected bangladeshi foreigners. this bureaucratic exercise has made 1.9 million people stateless and has also eroded people’s claims to indian citizenship in the chars. during this time, india escalated troop deployment. muslim traders and transporters were even more fearful of crossing the border. relationships that had coalesced around smuggling in the devastating world of the chars suddenly became nationalist. in each country, small-scale cattle workers had differential access to the border. although in india the border gates remained shut, bangladeshi traders and troops continued to demand the delivery of cattle, since the animal tax legalized the trade for them. indian troops granted signals at their discretion, favoring affluent villagers who traded in big consignments of the zebu cattle that were in greater demand in bangladesh for the large quantities of beef each animal produced. those who failed to get clearance reported rival traders to the police. the disruption in time meant that cross-border journeys of barely two miles between one cattle market and another took weeks. when indian outposts refused to relent and accept bribes, cattle workers’ journeys extended and turned mostly nocturnal (sur forthcoming). the asynchronous motions of time that mark people as lawbreakers and places as crime-infested serve to justify state violence. across the borderland chars the irregularity of legal restrictions and allowances made the experience of time uneven. it pushed workers to cross the border while risking potential torture, detention, and incarceration at the hands of indian soldiers. the border released time’s coercive forces to disrupt prior relationships of trust and affinity that had realigned notions of national territory. the consequences of armed times at the india-bangladesh border were evident in partly constructed houses and empty kitchens and stomachs, and in violence that indian troops perpetrated on the muslim cattle workforce. as punishment indian troops sometimes strung transporters and traders upside down from trees outside the border outposts. this torture meant to deter others from crossing the border. these incidents do not figure in the high estimates of human rights violations at the india-bangladesh border. between 2009 and 2019, indian border troops killed 455, injured 657, and abducted 518 bangladeshi citizens (see human rights watch 2010; ain o salish kendra n.d.). these incidents occurred while indian and bangladeshi commanders continued to facilitate the high-value trade in zebu cattle (sur forthcoming). in calling attention to a distinct temporality of daily life, e. valentine daniel (1996) and veena das (2006) have raised important questions about violence and the recurrence of suffering. violence halts the flow of time, producing what daniel (1996, 127, 133–34) calls “arrested moments” yet to be channeled into the passage of time. das (2006) shows how violent events generate a “field of force” within which later narratives nest. as a life-changing force, “time strikes” and “time showers great cruelties” to reshape the association between political transformations and social structures. substituting time for space, das (2006, 1, 9–11, 86–88, 198) takes “critical events” as an anthropological entry point to depart from privileging locality. the india-bangladesh border unevenly gathers dispersed and violent national histories into unpredictable times; time realigns people’s spatial and trans-border relationships. the force of the past transforms the bodies of cows and bulls into signs of a modern social imaginary of the hindu nation protecting sacred cows in the present. hindu nationalist and religious histories resurface as temporal forces that make cows revered and push impoverished muslim cattle workers through a precarious present. such times move the border troops to violence and transform feast into famine for children like badshah. prolonged unemployment compelled transporters to cross borders despite the increasing threat to their lives. alibaba used his knowledge of trans-border river geographies to circumvent the temporal regimes imposed by indian border troops, without challenging them. jokhim sensed the border for transporters. time compressed as they took the final plunge and crossed the boundary without a signal. a week after alibaba risked the unsignaled border-crossing, nasneen and i heard gunshots. soon, alibaba returned with the news that the decomposing bodies of cattle transporters had been found floating in the brahmaputra. no one claimed responsibility. dead bodies floating on rivers and mutilated bodies found along border roads or hidden deep in jute fields emphasize india’s nationalist postures against transgressive muslim citizens and an islamic bangladesh (van schendel 2005; jones 2009, 889). yet such graphic displays of violence mask the lucrative commercial transactions that benefit both the indian border commanders who shoot at traders in between rent-seeking deals and the bangladeshi border troops who meet the nation’s demand for cattle with cold disregard for the lives of bangladeshi cattle workers. violence reorders the experience of time. for me, the long hours and exhaustion from fieldwork that entailed negotiating distinct times for different kinds of smuggling blurred the boundaries of days and nights and fieldwork and writing. even within the confines of the village homes where i resided, late at night, the noise of animals and the loud purring of transporting trucks filtered into my consciousness. like the cattle workers whose struggles i intended to study and whose bodies seemed to be forever in motion, my body alternated between gaining momentum in sleep and sleep paralysis. the lingering effects of post trauma disoriented my sense of time. it made my nights as bright as the days and my days as fearful and dark as the nights. i physically left the borderland in 2008 and returned to it between 2013 and 2015. during this latter period and after, the border and its humans and animals have continued to linger in my consciousness in unanticipated ways (sur 2019b). for small-scale muslim traders and transporters and their families who, unlike me, have no recourse to elsewhere, state repression lingers in uncertain mobility and time beats. writing about palestinian immobility, julie peteet (2017) has shown how mobilities are located in a system of asymmetrical relationships. the imposition of what she describes as “calibrated chaos” reinforces categories of difference in ways that partition and govern access to space. the anticipation of torture and death, and the fears of crossing the border and the loss of livelihood, as i have shown, not only realign people’s relationship to partitioned nation-states but also radically alter the cycles of time. during new armed times the unpredictable river waters that both enable the passage of cattle and also seasonally flood alibaba and chand’s homes heighten their sense of time and loss. lives and livelihoods are scarred and divided. conclusion in this article i have shown how the unique sacrality ascribed to cows in india reshapes people’s experience of time, nation, and capital. borders bring into sharp relief the fictive bounding of time by nations and capital. they reveal the irregular beats of time-consciousness in a non-linear manner amid calculations that determine who will move, when, and under what circumstances. india’s new politics of cow protection make the experience of time more fractured, ever changing, and contingent. in many ways time shapes the space of the border. in the chars, time shapes its use as a resource for smuggling. such temporal predicaments recall victor turner’s (1979) “liminal times” of “being-on-a-threshold.” for turner (1979, 465), the location of liminal times outside the temporal horizon of clock time was one of “enchantment when anything might, even should, happen.” but at the india-bangladesh border, zones of temporal indeterminacy pull the bodies of cattle workers toward disenchantment and danger and push the animals toward slow deaths. this relationship between time and violence is endemic to border societies and defines the anxious predicaments of undocumented border-crossers around the globe. as the more insidious workings of nationalisms and arbitrary state power leave their imprints on the shifting landscape of the india-bangladesh borderland chars, cattle passages reveal time as a force that both destroys life and enables its productive potential. cattle smuggling thus indexes capital’s unevenness and its emergent possibilities, collapsing the distance between national events and everyday life. here, too, for children like badshah, and families who depend upon cattle work, histories and genealogies resurface as forces that undergird the tension between time’s non-linearity, precarious textures, and territorial dispersals. abstract this article resituates the study of time in anthropology, moving it from the comparative exploration of internally coherent religions and national territories to the very margins of religions, nations, and capital. borders recalibrate time by imbuing mundane economic activities with political salience. dangerous border crossings make temporal registers contingent and erratic, and generative of violence and torture. i show how india’s prohibitions on live cattle exports and bangladesh’s demand for beef compel acts that effectively legalize animal smuggling, which, nonetheless, remains a risky business. across the riverine islands of the india-bangladesh borderlands, small-scale traders and transporters operate according to the distinct logics of militarized infrastructures and legal regimes that generate moments of “signal clear,” marking the temporary opening of border passages and opportunities for sustenance, as well as “armed” times, more sustained periods of heightened national security, and imminent violence. by subjecting the border’s productive and coercive temporal energies to close ethnographic scrutiny, i suggest that cattle’s sacrality reinforces the material world of capital and strife, ruptures kinship ties, and subjects muslim cattle workers and their families to prolonged periods of scarcity and hunger. this article shows how people’s experiences of the borderland as a space are vitally shaped by fractured, shifting, and contingent rhythms of time. [borders; time; value; cow smuggling; violence; kinship; gender; assam; india-bangladesh border] notes acknowledgments i thank the editors and reviewers of cultural anthropology for their exceptionally insightful comments, especially heather paxson for her generous engagement. maria josé de abreu, prathama banerjee, eli elinoff, george jose, eric kerr, rakesh kumar, geir henning presterudstuen, willem van schendel, and emrah yıldız offered incisive suggestions for earlier drafts for which i am grateful. i thank the audiences at the university of amsterdam, the asia research institute at the national university of singapore, the american anthropological annual meeting in san jose, and sarah lawrence college. bernard bate’s thoughtful commentary greatly shaped my thoughts in writing; i dedicate this article to his memory. 1. on the restrictions of cattle as livestock, see the indian customs act, 1962, accessed may 11, 2018, http://exim.indiamart.com/act-regulations/customs-act-1962.html. 2. i conducted almost a year of fieldwork in 2007 and 2008, living in remote border villages in assam and meghalaya, northeast india, and kurigram, sherpur, jamalpur, netrokona, and mymensingh districts in bangladesh. i returned to the borderland in 2013, after the intensity of my post-traumatic stress had subsided, and continued fieldwork until mid-2015. i thank rashid who accompanied me for fieldwork in assam in 2007. i have used pseudonyms to protect all the identities of people mentioned in this article, including rashid. 3. on how india’s cow-protection policies impose discriminatory hindu caste-oriented human values on animals, and how “casteised speciesism,” ensures that exceptional violence is directed toward animals, see yamini narayanan (2018). on the interplay of the sacred and capital in the context of killing animals, and how time regulates which animals will meet a prolonged death or die quickly, see bhrigupati singh and naisargi dave (2015). 4. government of east bengal, 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2017 “la racha: speed and violence in tijuana.” signs and society 5, no. s1: s53–s76. https://doi.org/10.1086/690088. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 4, pp. 546-574, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2020. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.03 ruderal ecologies ruderal ecologies: rethinking nature, migration, and the urban landscape in berlin bettina stoetzer massachusetts institute of technology http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6719-620x there is a small plot of land at the edge of kreuzberg, in what was once west berlin, that has a peculiar story. this is how the story goes: in 1983, osman kalin had just quit his job. having been a construction worker for many years, he struggled with back problems, which forced him into early retirement. yet he soon got bored, and felt ready for a construction project of a different kind. living a few blocks from the berlin wall, one day, he discovered a small triangle of land in the wall’s shadow, littered with garbage. osman cleared it and began to grow onions, tomatoes, and cabbage on it. as time went on, he added cucumbers, garlic, beans, sunflowers, and collard greens. with his wife he built a hut that soon developed into a two-floor shack, cobbled together from found objects. months later, just when the tomatoes began to ripen, two east german border guards knocked at osman’s door. his garden, it turned out, was located on gdr territory: the east german government had constructed the wall in a straight line to save money, instead of following the zigzag contours of the actual border, thus skipping the triangle of land on which osman’s vegetables were now thriving. after endless negotiations, the gdr government allowed osman to stay—provided his sunflowers did not grow taller than the berlin wall. in 1989, the wall tumbled and osman’s garden was no longer situated in an abandoned corner, but in the center of a unified city. when the new district office protested the garden dwelling, osman insisted that the east german state had entrusted the piece of land to him. in the end, the dismal state of berlin’s finances benefited his cause, and plans to relandscape the former border zone into a green strip did not immediately materialize. once again, osman’s garden was left alone. today, people affectionately call the garden the berlin tree house (baumhaus) or gecekondu—a reference to the squatter houses in turkish cities whose name literally means “places built overnight” and whose courtyards and trees bear a resemblance to the structure of anatolian villages.1 not unlike the turkish gecekondu, the berlin version today features a small orchard of apricot, apple, pear, and plum trees. a large tree of heaven, once a small shrub growing in the cracks of the sidewalk, is now an integral part of the gecekondu’s front wall. each year, as the trunk expands, osman cuts further into the wall to accommodate its growth. figure 1. the berlin gecekondu, with tree of heaven (ailanthus altissima), berlin, january 2017. photo courtesy of hank von hellion. the berlin gecekondu is well known among berliners and as far afield as istanbul, where news reporters have chuckled about osman’s clever dealings. sometimes, on the weekends, a tourist group stops by. osman put a few chairs and a table in front of the garden shack to welcome occasional visitors from the neighborhood. when the table was stolen one day, osman quickly replaced it. its legs are now cemented to the ground. * * * i begin this essay with the story of the berlin gecekondu to introduce the notion of the ruderal. nestled in a small gap in the city’s border infrastructure, osman kalin’s tree house took advantage of the state’s desire to simplify and draw straight lines. thus the garden’s ecology filled a gap, both in osman’s life and in the gray zones of the nation-state. cobbled together from dreams, thriving vegetables, weeds, and thrown-away furniture, the gecekondu captures what i call a ruderal ecology in the city. the term ruderal comes from rudus, the latin term for rubble. a common term in urban ecology, it refers to communities that emerge spontaneously in disturbed environments usually considered hostile to life: the cracks of sidewalks, the spaces alongside train tracks and roads, industrial sites, waste disposal areas, or rubble fields (grime 1977).2 neither wild nor domesticated, ruderal communities depend on what is known as an “edge effect” and the juxtaposition of contrasting environments in one ecosystem. ruderal worlds initially entered my fieldwork thanks to a particular person: herbert sukopp, a well-known berlin urban ecologist, who, alongside other botanists, studied plants growing in berlin’s rubble after world war ii. i met sukopp at the official opening event for berlin’s first urban nature day, which had been organized by the berlin senate in 2007. through him, i first heard about ruderal plants, such as sticky goosefoot (chenopodium botrys) and tree of heaven (ailanthus altissima)—plants that can still be found in berlin today, including in osman’s garden. from our conversations since, as well as in my encounters with other berliners, human and nonhuman, i learned a new way of seeing nature in the city. drawing on my fieldwork and the history of urban ecology in berlin, this essay develops the notion of the ruderal as an analytical framework for rethinking the heterogeneity of urban life in the ruins of european nationalism and capitalism. attending to ruderal worlds, i argue, can redirect ethnographic attention toward human–nonhuman relations that emerge spontaneously in inhospitable environments—and thus to often unnoticed, cosmopolitan yet precarious ways of remaking the urban fabric. following them means never just telling one story; it calls for an analytical lens that combines environmental perspectives with questions of migration, race, and social justice. such a method of thinking across registers, i argue, proves salient at a historical moment in which several crises of inhabiting the world have proliferated, including increasing nationalisms, racism, and global climate change (see hage 2017). employing a ruderal lens in my ethnographic writing has challenged me to juxtapose seemingly disparate stories and practices—from rubble plants growing in the ruins of war, to makeshift urban gardens that accommodate spontaneous vegetation in the shadow of the berlin wall, to the smoke emanating from berlin’s racialized debates about barbecuing and appropriate human–nature relations in the city. engaging with a series of these practices, this essay explores the possibilities of a ruderal analytic for an anthropological inquiry into urban environments and their ruins: an analysis that examines not only unruly nonhuman life but also the broader, unintended ecologies of human-built structures and the multispecies worlds of which they become part. in short: an ecology of unexpected neighbors in the city. * * * in recent years, anthropologists and scholars across the human sciences have turned their attention toward an analysis of the built environment, its infrastructure and ruination. highlighting how the physical networks of cities, such as roads, trains, water supply, waste and sewage systems, or electric grids enable social life and forms of urban governance, many ethnographies have opened up fresh perspectives on the relation between materiality, consciousness, and culture (carse 2012; larkin 2013; von schnitzler 2013; lowrie and boyer 2014; chalfin 2014; fennell 2015; anand 2017). this analytic shift has emerged at a historical moment when the earthly entanglements of anthropology’s central subject, “man,” and the limits and toxic effects of managing nature as resource have become increasingly visible (fortun 2012).3 in an era of what some call the anthropocene—an era in which humans have fundamentally changed the course of the earth’s ecosystems (chakrabarty 2012; latour 2013)—cultural analysts are reconceptualizing how human–nonhuman relations exceed western dichotomies of nature and culture (viveiros de castro 2012; descola 2013; de la cadena 2015). this call for renewal carries a sense of urgency. in the face of climate change, the global circulation of toxins and waste, and the ordinariness of planetary environmental risk, anthropology it seems, has become a science of ruins (masco 2008; dawdy 2010; navaro-yashin 2012; gupta 2013; harms 2013; johnson 2013; schwenkel 2013; stoler 2013; gordillo 2014), examining the dynamics of life on a damaged planet (tsing 2015). although this scholarship attests to a common lens that examines the destruction and possibilities of modern world-making projects, infrastructures and ruins are often conceptualized separately from one another.4 as a result, an understanding of infrastructure as a substrate of human cultural systems can run the risk of assuming a vitalist dynamic, even as some scholars discuss infrastructure’s failures, highlight “experimental ontologies” (bruun jensen and morita 2017), or show how progress and ruination are intimately tied to one another (johnson 2013). this vitalism depends on a gendered binary between technology and built environments as forms of externalization, on the one hand, and matter (or ruins) as passive or degenerate, on the other (le guin 1989). in addition, the duality between infrastructure and ruins corresponds to a nature–culture divide in urban scholarship: nature has for a long time functioned as the constitutive outside, or other, of much urban social analysis, including urban anthropology. with the development of industrial society and the emergence of sociology and anthropology, the city, specifically the european metropole, became the locus of culture and progress, independent from the resources and labor of the countryside or the colony (williams 1973; cronon 1992). although recent scholarship has challenged this divide by examining various ecologies of urbanism (wolch 1998; bennett and teague 1999; heynen, kaika, and swyngedouw 2006; brantz and dümpelmann 2011; gandy 2013; rademacher and sivaramakrishnan 2013; chalfin 2014; anand 2017), urban analysis often continues to treat nature as a background of urban life, or as “a physical place where you can go” (haraway 1992, 66), and thus risks seeing cities as being in control over or apart from the nonhuman. the ruderal perspective i offer draws on ruins and infrastructure as conceptual devices to further undo the nature–culture divide in anthropological scholarship. while examining what it means to live with ruins (see also tsing 2015), it pushes a ruin framework further by theorizing the urban and life in the rubble of nationalism and racial inequality. a ruderal lens thus combines an analysis of ruins and their emerging ecologies with questions of urban social justice. inspired by approaches in feminist and critical race studies, this lens eschews what kim fortun (2014, 314) has called “the latour effect” in anthropology and science studies: a singular focus on practices of expertise and actor networks in late industrialism that does not take a closer look at the material and social constitution of the toxic and inhospitable environments that make up people’s lives today. in contemporary european cities, this means looking at the ways in which the ruinous effects of capitalism, racism, and nation-making become embodied in human–environment relations, beyond the boundaries of the human skin, in often unpredictable ways. for the purposes of this essay, i will first attend to an instance in berlin’s history in which the urban fabric literally burst apart. it is in this moment, i argue, that the city emerged as more than human habitat, abundant with unexpected neighbors and illegal squatters (both human and nonhuman). this rupture gave rise to a view of the city in which nature is not simply out there to be managed and incorporated into anthropogenic landscapes via human infrastructures, but an unwieldy and integral part of the city—a ruderal city in which humans and nonhumans have coexisted (however violently) all along.5 if we go a step further and understand ruination (stoler 2013) and rubble (gordillo 2014) in the broad sense, not as separate from but as central to the urban environments we inhabit—built on social exclusions, capitalist urbanization, and profound environmental change—then, i suggest, the ruderal can serve as a guide to explore the lives that arise in their midst. thinking with the ruderal, the goal is not to equate people with plants or other nonhumans, but to ask how people, plants, animals, and their environments connect and get entangled in modes of capital accumulation, in projects of nation-making, and in environmental destruction—and how they traverse them. revisiting berlin’s postwar moment, i will reflect on the challenges that the notion of the ruderal city poses to the study of cities, and more generally, to a cultural analysis that examines the material and social dynamics of what it means to live on an increasingly inhospitable planet. in the second part of the essay, i will then address how a ruderal lens emerged in my fieldwork and guides my ethnographic writing about urban ecologies, migration, and displacement in berlin. a city of rubble at the end of world war ii, the city of berlin lay in rubble. in their effort to bring the nazi regime to a final halt, the western allies bombed large parts of the city center. after intense ground battles between german and soviet troops in the spring of 1945, large parts of the city's built environment were destroyed. thousands of people had died on all sides; the city’s infrastructure had torn apart; trees in parks and urban woodlands had burned down. many people lived in makeshift shelters. amid the destruction, images of berlin as a feral city abounded. news of starving deer, wolves, and wild boar ravaging the city’s outskirts in herds evoked a sense of berlin “gone wild” (davis 2002, 384). with it, a widespread sentiment unfolded: numbness. in a natural history of destruction, w. g. sebald (2004) depicts this numbness as a key element of the social life of the bombed cities after fascism. describing scenes of apathy amid a population living in ruins, sebald shows how a sanitized knowledge of human suffering pervaded much of the public narrative about the postwar urban experience. figure 2. berliners planting potato seedlings by the ruins of the reichstag, tiergarten, berlin, may 1946. photo by fred ramage, reproduced here courtesy of getty images. in this context of urban breakdown, cultivating plants played an important role. short of food, residents grew vegetables in the burnt and logged-down parks. thousands of oak and birch trees were donated and brought from across the country via plane during the berlin airlift to reforest the city’s parks and forests. a new infrastructure of nature (carse 2012) developed as the city became divided into two parts: east and west berlin’s municipal administrations hired thousands of workers—many of them women—to clear the streets from rubble and erase the traces of war and genocide. paving the way for economic growth, large amounts of rubble were recycled to rebuild roads or landscaped into so-called rubble mountains. today, berlin’s rubble mountains—fourteen of them altogether—appear as a natural part of the urban landscape. greening the city’s rubble and the notion of new life emerging from ruins thus formed key elements in the national imaginary after the war (diefendorf 1993): “rising from ruins” (“auferstanden aus ruinen”) became the title of east germany’s national anthem in 1949, and so-called rubble women entered the national imagination as heroic figures. in the 1950s, west germany depicted the following image on its fifty-pfennig coin: a kneeling woman stooping over to plant an oak seedling. it commemorated both the rubble women and the women reforesting the logged-down urban and rural forests. the unruly heterogeneity of nature in the city yet despite this carefully managed nature returning to the city, berlin’s rubble had its own life. due to the city’s political division during the cold war, large rubble fields dotted berlin’s center for decades and provided a habitat for many plants to flourish in the city for the first time. intrigued by this new diversity, west berlin botanists—both hobbyists and scientists—began to study the rubble vegetation in the 1950s and developed a different way of seeing nature in the city. one of these botanists was herbert sukopp. born in berlin in 1930, he grew up in a landscape blasted by the bombings. as we sat sipping tea in his office at the institute for ecology at the technical university berlin, i asked him how he began studying the rubble’s ecology. pointing out that the city’s rubble formed an integral part of his childhood, he responded: “how could i have studied anything other than rubble spaces?” indeed, the construction of the berlin wall and the city’s division created a new situation for west berlin botanists: instead of traveling to their usual field sites in the countryside or as far away as brazil, they were now literally walled off from their surroundings. in a city numbed by national reconstruction and an urge to move on, they re-envisioned the city as that which was new and unknown. researching the rubble flora, they discovered a city bustling with plants from all over the world. usually considered weeds, these “newcomers” (sukopp and wurzel 2003, 72) hailed from warmer regions in the mediterranean, asia, and the americas. among them: sticky goosefoot (chenopodium botrys), a mediterranean plant, as well as a tree from china, the tree of heaven (ailanthus altissima), the north american black locust (robinia pseudo-accacia), and the herb giant goldenrod (solidago giganteana), which all appeared widely in berlin for the first time. but there were also plants like mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) and a grass species of north american origin, lindheimer’s millet (panicum lindheimeri). as ruderal plants, they prefer dry, gravelly soil and a warm climate. their seeds had found their way into berlin via diverse transport routes. some of them had crossed the city on the boots of soldiers or refugees during the war, via packaging material from imported goods, or hay transported on wagons by the russian army for horses. other seeds’ routes remained unknown. figure 3. herbert sukopp, conducting research on ruderal vegetation in the 1950s in berlin. photo by alexander kohler. following the dispersal and ecology of ruderal plants throughout the city, a world of cosmopolitan connection and profound environmental change unfolded in front of the botanists’ eyes. for example, the highest density of sticky goosefoot occurred in the bombed city center (sukopp 2007, 62). increasing trade, migration, and urbanization had created a diversification of habitats, and a new type of vegetation became visible: a ruderal vegetation spontaneously growing in rubble spaces, wastelands, and along the city’s infrastructure. its diversity mirrored the history of the city and ran “parallel to the size and intensity of trade and industry,” thus being “a direct standard of the technical culture” (sukopp 2008, 84). although some of the botanists made use of terms such as foreigners, aliens, and guests, thus engaging geographic imaginations that connected plants to a world of nations, borders, and immigration (lachmund 2003, 245),6 they did not necessarily see ruderal plants as unwelcome intruders. the first to inhabit disturbed environments, ruderals were not a nuisance: they set the stage for other flourishing ecosystems, as by giving rise to spontaneous wetlands, attracting birds, or providing shade and organic matter important for other species.7 ruderals were also not simply a sign of regenerating nature; they indicated the outcome of a much more ambivalent and radically changing urban ecology. the life cycles of sticky goosefoot and other plants revealed that berlin, like other cities, had become hotter (sukopp and wurzel 2003, 70). increased traffic, a densely built environment, and additional heat sources in the city and on earth in general had led to a rise in berlin’s temperatures—sometimes up to 12°c in comparison to its surroundings. this greenhouse effect (see sukopp 2003) had accelerated over the course of industrialization. ruderals were thus indicators of global connections, a city coming back to life, and of global environmental change—and they were traces of the violence nationalism had wrought across europe. the encounter between botanists and ruderal plants led to the emergence of urban ecology as a new field of scientific inquiry and opened up new possibilities for including urban wastelands in city planning and conservation policies in enduring ways.8 but as jens lachmund (2013, 6) has shown, this view of the heterogeneity of urban nature, including subsequent biotope mappings, also created new hierarchies of value by differentiating urban habitats according to their degree of closeness to nature, thus losing some of its “initial political momentum.” yet despite this incorporation of ecological research into urban governance, i argue that the encounter between botanists and ruderal plants created an opening for the study of cities and cultural analysis more generally. with their unwieldy and sticky presence,9 rubble plants challenged botanists to account for ruderal life in the city beyond the value regimes of urban nature and culture. neither wild nor domesticated, sticky goosefoot and its ruderal companions dwell alongside and in the cracks of urban infrastructures, including the categorical units of nature and culture through which we make sense of them. they are their unsolicited hitchhikers and invisible ecologies. their presence demands a broader conversation about the unexpected consequences of anthropogenic landscapes, capitalist trade, and migration shaping urban environments—beyond a universalizing framework of the anthropocene. exceeding systems of human governance, berlin’s rubble fields were not passive environments but developed their own lives. rather than constituting the cultivated nature of postwar urban planning or the native natures the fascist regime had dreamt of, they challenged the idea of a homogeneous nation and directed attention to previously unnoticed and cosmopolitan ways of remaking the urban fabric. in this ecology of unexpected neighbors, the story is never singular but always consists of multiple strands, and one does not know beforehand whether it will end up in destruction or enable flourishing. let me thus elaborate how, in my research in berlin, the ruderal has served as a guide to think across registers—of migration, capitalism, and the more-than-human. urban nature in the new berlin the period after the collapse of socialism and german unification constituted yet another fraught moment when the nation had to reinvent itself. not unlike after world war ii, plant publics and green spaces once again took up a central role, both symbolically and materially, in naturalizing social bonds and solidifying the nation’s cohesion beyond the boundaries of the human skin. this process has proven especially tangible in berlin’s urban fabric. with the fall of the wall, new regimes of urban and environmental policymaking have transformed the city’s material environment, reconstituting it as a national capital and european metropole. for example, the city’s landscape program established a network of parks and green corridors as part of the reconstruction plan for a unified berlin (senstadt 2014, 22). in addition, the city’s nineteenth-century legacies of environmental conservation, the experience of urban breakdown in 1945, and the subsequent political division and deindustrialization during the cold war created an abundance of open spaces such as parks, city forests, gardens, and urban wastelands. thus today, even as some of these spaces have been lost to urban development, berlin is often promoted as “europe’s nature capital” (senstadt 2014, 3; author’s translation), with close to 40 percent of its cityscape comprising green space. in the past decade, experts have reported on the diversity of the city’s fauna and flora despite the endangerment of many species. national media highlight the city’s abundant wild life, including foxes, praying mantes, raccoons, ruderal plants such as the tree of heaven, or wild boar roaming the city’s green corridors. as a result of global climate change, urban sprawl, increasing traffic, deforestation, overfertilization, and the consolidation of farmland, many animals and plants have made the city their permanent habitat (riechelmann 2004). intrigued by this diversity, a variety of publics tending to urban nature proliferate across the city. during berlin’s annual urban nature day, thousands of residents tour the city to discover nature’s magic. they follow the tracks of wild boar in the city’s forests, listen to the songs of nightingales in parks, or search for herbs growing on sidewalks and in urban wastelands. bodies and matter out of place as nature continues to return to the city and berliners explore the romance of urban wastelands and nonhuman life, debates about immigration and unemployment stress the existence of troubled neighborhoods and a clash of cultures in the city’s body. after an initial postunification construction boom in the late 1990s, the city plunged into a fiscal crisis, which coincided with deindustrialization, as well as wide-ranging changes in labor market policies and welfare reform a few years later. unemployment rates and poverty rose among many berliners, and the city’s turkish immigrant communities, many of them employed in the manufacturing sector, were negatively affected by these developments (lanz 2007; mandel 2008). as in many other cities across europe, public discourse and policy located the source of these inequalities in migrants themselves,10 especially in their presumed lack of economic productivity and sense of disconnection, which leaves traces of dereliction in the urban landscape—for example, by barbecuing in the city’s parks and leaving garbage behind.11 metaphors of parallel worlds and social hot spots (soziale brennpunkte) emphasize a sense of lurking danger: the danger of fire breaking loose, the threat of wilderness imposing itself on the civilized city. in a political climate of austerity and constant suspicion vis-à-vis migrants’ unwillingness to integrate, the question of how migrants inhabit nature and the urban environment has become a key site of articulating their racialization and their status as strangers, regardless of actual citizenship status (see also linke 1999).12 local and national media have painted a gloomy picture of the capital’s so-called underclass problem, depicting scenes of wild, unemployed barbecuers (wilde griller)13—a favorite pastime among many middle eastern immigrants—polluting berlin’s green lungs with smoke and garbage. both the bodies of people of color and their environments, as well as the smoke, meat, and litter they supposedly produce, figure as “matter out of place” (douglas 2002, 44) in these scenarios. migrants become almost animal-like, in need of containment. these tropes of wilderness are more than metaphorical; they inform public policies such as eu-based integration projects that attempt to undo racial segregation, poverty, and urban decay. as paul silverstein (2005) has remarked in the case of france, plans to reintegrate europe’s hot spots such as the banlieues, the migrant and working-class suburbs of major french cities, have been likened to the marshall plan for rebuilding war-struck europe, drawing parallels between the ruins of war and europe’s racialized urban peripheries today. since the fall of 2015, as local bureaucracies have scrambled to accommodate asylum seekers in the face of europe’s so-called refugee crisis, public discourse in germany at first glance seems to have shifted toward a welcoming tone regarding migrants and refugees from the middle east. yet a closer look at media coverage reveals an abundance of natural metaphors of waves, tides, and tsunamis of people straining europe’s and the nation’s resources, not unlike natural disasters. these scenes of chaos at and within europe’s borders infuse political decisions to distribute and manage asylum seekers’ arrivals. indeed, recent changes to asylum law, which enable faster and more efficient deportations of those considered undeserving, aim precisely at domesticating this seemingly natural force at europe’s gates. as ghassan hage (2016) has pointed out, images of ruins, unruly nature, and urban plight in the global north, as well as the porosity of national borders and the widespread sense of embattlement in the context of europe’s migration crisis, express fantasies of colonial reversal that are more than metaphorical. they are occurring at a time when various projects of the governability of our global postcolonial order—such as the nation’s efforts to shore up borders and domesticate its others, as well as capitalism’s extraction of natural resources—are coming undone. in this climate of intense debate about nature and migration, berlin’s green spaces, especially its gardens and abandoned lots (brachen), for many once again provide spaces of hope for escaping social divisions. in recent years, so-called multicultural gardens have proliferated across berlin and other german cities. by cultivating plants, urban residents hope to overcome cultural barriers and parallel worlds. at the same time, planners, politicians, and many residents advocate gardening as an opportunity for integrating migrants into society: the hope is, through nature, to move past judging or dividing communities. engaging with plants, people are supposed to identify with their surroundings and to let integration and a genuinely multicultural society grow (senatsverwaltung für integration, arbeit und soziales 2007). whereas after the war, rubble plants formed an ambivalent urban ecology amid projects of nation-making, today the cultivation of plants once again serves as the basis for dreams of unifying the nation. the question remains whether, not unlike after the war, contemporary efforts to rehabilitate urban ecologies constitute yet another version of reconstructing the nation through nature and a form of anesthetic greening that glosses over past and present racisms, or whether they are a step toward forging connections across difference that are alert to histories of violence and exclusion in the urban landscape. from ruins to rubble to a ruderal analytic exploring this question ethnographically, i have employed a ruderal analytic as a guide for both my subject of analysis and my methodology. first, this analytic highlights “ecologies of nationhood” (comaroff and comaroff 2001, 625) and draws attention to the ways in which the nation is naturalized and how some human and nonhuman bodies are situated outside the national body. drawing on recent scholarship on ruins,14 a ruderal lens engages a notion of ruination as an active process that shapes “what people are left with” (stoler 2013, 9). it thus directs focus to the connective tissue that binds human lives to degraded environments, to a lack of access to urban infrastructure, and to racialized inequities such as unemployment in europe. yet while ruderal ecologies encompass everyday and nonmemorialized forms of ruination that, like rubble (gordillo 2014),15 are often labeled as insignificant, their story begins with decay—but does not end with it. as feminist writers have pointed out (e.g., tsing 2015; haraway 2016), it is important to go beyond destruction and situate one’s analysis in the desire to forge new connections. while analysts such as gastón gordillo (2014) promote rubble as an analytic highlighting forms of destruction that, though invisible, are constitutive of the production of space, a ruderal analytic shifts attention to heterogeneous and unexpected life amid rubble. ruderal ecologies grow in the inhospitable environments created by war and exclusion; they emerge by chance and entail illegal border crossings—often unnoticed in ethnographies of a city that tend to focus on people, buildings, institutions, or infrastructure. this unruly heterogeneity includes multiple human and nonhuman neighbors that defy a singular focus on ruination or rubble as the end point of social analysis, as well as any easy integration into mononatural or multicultural frameworks. in mutual dialogue with donna haraway’s (2016) notion of “staying with the trouble” and anna tsing’s (2012, 96) work on “contaminated diversity” in capitalist ruins, the perspective of ruderal ecologies accounts for the ways in which biological life, cultural identifications, and strategies of survival are never authentic or pure but always situated within histories of disturbance.16 yet while highlighting unplanned takeover and dormant potentials amid capitalism and environmental destruction, as for example tsing does, a ruderal lens directs focus toward the city and the unruly heterogeneity of life in the ruins of nationalism and racialized exclusions. osman kalin’s gecekondu, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, offers a case in point. built in the shadows of a border infrastructure that divided two nations and competing political systems, it takes advantage of an abandoned gap of institutional power, unwilling to wait for its assigned place in a country where one never fully belongs. staging a spontaneous takeover, the gecekondu creates a space of hospitality for people, plants, and objects left behind. as cultural analysts have begun to recognize human–nonhuman entanglements, thus expanding our analytic lens beyond the human body toward broader vulnerabilities of life, there is a pressing need to be alert to the sticky and persistent ethnoracial politics at work in europe and beyond. this requires a stronger emphasis on how unruly forms of diversity can easily line up with fantasies of colonial reversal (hage 2016) or be co-opted by neoliberal projects of profit-making that celebrate resilience and cultural hybridity (moore, kosek, and pandian 2003; helmreich 2016). thinking with feminist and critical race scholars (agard-jones 2014; fortun 2014; puig de la bellacasa 2014; tsing 2015; haraway 2016; todd 2016; hartigan 2017; myers, forthcoming), a ruderal analytic thus combines an environmental perspective with questions of social justice. building on the conceptual frameworks of ruins and infrastructure in anthropology and science and technology studies, my research stresses the unintended effects of capitalism, racism, and nation-making as they become embodied in a city’s fabric, beyond the boundaries of the human skin. from this perspective, the task is to see ruins or infrastructure not as end goals of analysis but as points of departure for projects that highlight the cosmopolitan more-than-human lives that emerge in cities—and to ask how these set the stage for changing the terms of connectivity in a world shaped by social inequalities and the destruction of environments. for this very reason, a ruderal analytic seeks out practices and ways of “being alive” (ingold 2011) that exceed ruination or efforts to create belonging via nature or culture. as the austrian artist lois weinberger indicates, ruderals require a form of “precise inattention” (kos 2004)—if you are lucky, you catch a quick glance of them on your way to somewhere else. perhaps it is no surprise that some of the botanists first discovered sticky goosefoot and other ruderals while riding their bikes to work, catching a glimpse of them out of the corner of their eyes. exploring berlin’s urban ecologies ethnographically thus involves looking for unanticipated human–nonhuman interactions that occur at the edges of the city’s infrastructures and that do not adhere to national or capitalist schemes for multicultural gardening and rehabilitating nature. rather than posit a universal hybridity of urban wastelands that challenges an emphasis on native species in cultural landscapes (gandy 2013),17 or utilize a notion of (urban) development as ruination or rubble (gordillo 2014), a ruderal perspective combines science-studies approaches with close-up ethnographic description,18 and it traces the ways in which humans and nonhumans do not stick to their assigned places amid projects of domestication. feminist scholars have paved the way methodologically. in times of proliferating nationalisms, racial injustices, degrading infrastructures, toxic environments, and economic precarities, developing methods that allow us to look across scales, shift analytic frameworks, and tell a “rush of stories” (tsing 2015, 37) becomes paramount. instead of easily adding up, stories interrupt each other to account for material and social entanglements, gaps, displacements, leakages, and collaborative strategies of survival (fortun 2012, 2014). ethnography then becomes a practice of creating connections and hospitable spaces for unexpected intruders. in my work, these have included plants that grow in rubble or the cracks of sidewalks, makeshift urban gardens and informal food economies, or the smoke emanating from “wild barbecuing,” as well as other unwieldy uses of urban green space. with this in mind, let me return to berlin. beyond the hedges of publicized and highly regulated nature spaces, such as multicultural gardens or the older tradition of allotment gardens,19 less visible and more ephemeral garden practices exist. their presence begs the question of what kind of human–environment relations are desired in the city, which bodies and lives matter (cf. butler 1993), and which ones exceed the categories of urban nature that planners and immigration policies have carved out. the rabbit heath berlin: a green city? everyone loves to say it these days. but what is it? it’s just a pile of concrete after all. —hakim, a gardener the hasenheide, or rabbit heath, is a park in the previous border district of neukölln, adjacent to a mosque and the former city airport tempelhof. covering fifty hectares of meadows, the park’s landscape is pervaded by traces of urbanization and nationalism—pointing to its transformation from a royal hunting ground (hence the name) to a public gymnastics site and military drill ground in the early twentieth century. after world war ii, a seventy-meter-tall rubble hill containing the bombed city’s debris was constructed at the park’s edges. today, the hasenheide is dotted with oak and birch trees and elderberry shrubs. it features a small kiosk, a petting zoo, and an arabian nights–themed adventure playground. in the past two decades, the park has also moved to the center of controversies around crime and immigrant drug dealers. portrayed as a dangerous place in national and local media, the park conjures images of escalating battles between bands of arab and african drug dealers, many of them refugees. terms such as no-go area used to describe the park reveal the highly racialized public affects that cast the park as off-limits to white german citizens. concerned, a series of neighborhood groups have initiated events to “take back the park” by caring for its nature, such as a leaf-raking day or the construction of a new nature trail. wild barbecuing has been banned altogether. despite the media flurry, there is a small corner of the park invisible to local authorities, situated between bushes and adjacent to a meadow of sunbathing german nudists. cultivated by a group of friends and former coworkers, this secret garden features fruit trees, sunflowers, tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, mint, peppers, and a few nettles in between. hidden in the shrub, there is also a barbecue. the gardeners, all men in their late fifties to seventies, live nearby and come to the park every day, bringing food, plants, drinks, and card games. the gardeners all migrated from rural anatolia to berlin in the 1960s and 1970s, when turkey signed contracts with west germany to tackle unemployment and send migrant workers to cities like berlin to continue to rebuild the country and boost germany’s economy from the ruins of war. when hakim arrived in berlin in 1969, he was assigned a few square meters of living space in the city’s migrant barracks.20 in the following decades, the west german government did not recognize germany as a country of immigration (mandel 2008) and hakim, like many other turkish berliners, continued to be perceived as a temporary guest worker. hakim felt he had paid a high price, working jobs that required strenuous physical labor. many of his colleagues depended on walking aids or wheelchairs and suffered severe physical impairments at a relatively early age. indeed, due to hard physical labor and environmentally hazardous working conditions, the rates for early retirement and disability among turkish immigrants have proven disproportionately high (lüneburg 2006). hakim worked for an electronics company assembling adapters, but due to a chronic neck injury from years of repetitive manual labor, he, like osman kalin, had to retire early. widowed, he went to the park to meet friends instead of sitting at home—friends like kadir, who had recently lost his eyesight during a work accident. according to hakim, they began cultivating the garden because “we were here all the time anyway.” it must have been erol, they recall. bored, he started moving the earth back and forth one day as he sat on the bench chatting with others. in fact, erol claims that he accidentally dropped some sunflower seeds and they sprouted. in turkish these seeds are called ayçekirdeği, a favorite snack of which one can see traces across berlin’s sidewalks. while hakim saw berlin as a pile of rubble and concrete, he considered their garden to be the antithesis of that. going there, he was able to breathe. his friends called it “maria mama,” because someone had found a marble figure resembling maria, the mother of jesus, and placed it in the middle of the vegetable bed. maria mama was in constant flux: people kept adding tomato seedlings, brought seeds sent from turkey, and ripped out dead plants. but most of all, the garden was a nursery for withering plants: everyone brought plants they did not need, or that were doing badly on apartment windowsills. yet altogether, maria mama was a failure—at least according to its caretakers. one day, someone stole the apple tree. then the figure of maria mama disappeared. now a pink stuffed rabbit replaced it. worse yet, with increasingly hot and dry summers in recent years, the soil was not fertile enough and water supply was scarce. hakim had struck up a deal with the owner of the nearby kiosk to use the faucet, but carrying the water across the park proved a tedious business. still, he was hopeful: he dreamed that strawberries would cover the entire meadow the following year. * * * not unlike osman kalin’s gecekondu garden, maria mama constitutes a ruderal ecology: it fills a gap not only in between the city’s landscaped meadows and exclusionary environments of nation-making but also in hakim’s life. in both gardens, we see that ruderal ecologies are not necessarily characterized by an absence of cultivation: human–plant relations are shaped by systems of control, and yet their interactions also create unruly openings for new forms of cohabitation (see also myers, forthcoming) that do not adhere to the places assigned to them in official definitions of public space, private property, and multiculturalist schemes. it is in this sense that they carry seeds of change. at first glance, maria mama might look like an object of nostalgia, an ephemeral project of elderly men who have become superfluous—if it is visible to anyone at all. and yet, the men’s relation to their environment and their cultivation practices sit squarely among contemporary celebrations of urban nature and multiculturalist efforts to integrate immigrants, who are racially cast as other, via the care for plants. instead of waiting to be granted a costly garden unit, the gardeners of maria mama took over space and created a sociality of neighbors and coworkers in the absence of work and access to public resources. cobbled together of withering plants, thrown-away seeds, and clandestine access routes to public water supplies, maria mama’s cultural and material fabric is far from authentic. in fact, when i asked the gardeners, they seemed rather indifferent to whether this was a turkish or religious garden. after all, once it was stolen, the figure of maria was quickly replaced by a pink rabbit. providing a space of hospitality for flailing plants, found objects, and chance encounters, they instead created a fragile garden ecology that, far from value-free nature or anesthetic greening, exposes histories of damage and makes viable what has been left behind. in our conversations, kadir, erol, and hakim all recounted experiences of being marked as culturally and physically other in german society. they commented on how their life trajectories had been deeply shaped by layers of racialization and exclusion—ranging from the exploitation of cheap foreign labor embedded in the logic of guest-worker contracts, to the health and body screenings as they were recruited to germany, to the racist discrimination that they experienced in the labor and housing market in berlin. their everyday lives were full of reminders of their continued status as suspect strangers in a city and country that, although having begun to recognize them as part of the nation’s multicultural fabric, continues to deny them full citizenship and for several decades has cast them as guests soon to return “home.”21 perhaps, though, it was hakim’s remark about berlin being less of a green city than a city of rubble that best captures a sense of ruination and damage in the face of multiple layers of exclusion experienced both in their lives and their relation to the city’s material environment. as frantz fanon (1963, 250) remarked, racial and imperial formations are forms of power that sow seeds of ruination in bodies and psyches, but also in landscapes, sensibilities, and things (see also stoler 2013, 9–10).22 similarly, applying a ruderal analytic to maria mama, as well as to the gecekondu and other sites across berlin, can reveal histories of damage inflicted onto bodies, affects, and environments. yet the ruderal lens i promote in this essay also illustrates that humans and nonhumans have the capacity to create openings for new collaborations that challenge contemporary multiculturalist agendas and their invocations of nature by actually reworking the fallout from past exclusion, exploitation, or violence.23 at a historical moment when not only the bodies of middle eastern immigrants are coded as other, suspect of being unwilling to integrate, but also their relation to the urban environment is framed as unruly, under scrutiny for leaving traces of dereliction or posing a threat, maria mama’s gardeners challenge their positioning as out of place. in their own words, they have created a space to “breathe.” a project of recuperation of both plants and people, maria mama, like the gecekondu garden, exposes the frailties of ruderal ecologies and projects that challenge urban nature as defined by private property and urban planners—projects in which people, plants, and seeds follow the traces of human communication and injury, and in turn inspire action to forge new socialities. although it may have been a failure the year i visited, maria mama’s seeds are lying dormant in the ground, waiting to remake alternative ecologies of belonging out of europe’s ruins of ethnic division and racism. conclusion as analysts in anthropology and beyond have turned to new materialisms and multispecies relations, we have sharpened our understanding of earthly entanglements and the in/stability of structures such as technological networks, urban environments, access to material resources, and other forms of governance. yet this may come at the risk of eclipsing the volatility of violence and the viscosity of social injustice—also among humans (bauer and bhan 2016). anthropologists’ recent attention to infrastructure, ruins, and rubble grapples with this caveat. in times of increased racism, displacement, war, and the loss of hospitable environments for both humans and nonhumans, engagements with urban materialities face the challenge of more explicitly mapping the mechanisms that shape what lives come to flourish amid the disturbed environments of our time. in this essay, i have proposed a ruderal perspective to tackle this challenge and to sharpen recognition of the politics at stake in emerging urban ecologies. bringing together questions of migration and social justice with environmental perspectives, i have engaged different instances of remaking urban nature in berlin. in the encounter between media, scientists, and rubble plants, as well as turkish berliners and their gardens, the lens of the ruderal guides me to look for the city’s unintended ecologies as these emerge in the ruins of nation-making, war, displacement, xenophobia, environmental change, and contemporary austerity policies. as i have shown, this entails three analytical moves. first, a ruderal lens takes rubble and ruination as points of departure to examine the (after)lives of racial exclusions, economic collapse, and interrupted futures (stoler 2013) embedded in urban environments. while ethnographically tracing the multiple historical layers of capitalist, colonial, and environmental destruction (gordillo 2014) that reside in urban landscapes, the perspective i propose also goes a step further: it draws attention to unruly forms of embodiment among strangers, both human and nonhuman, and thus to persistent ecologies in a city’s inhospitable environments. in this regard, a ruderal perspective also responds to a gap in scholarship on ruins, which is often crowded with images of rubble overgrown with weeds yet rarely describes or theorizes its actual ecologies, even as some scholars highlight the afterlife of ruins. following stories about rubble, gardens, and other human–environment relations in the city thus also means looking at how the ruins of contemporary capitalism and nation-making become our very habitats. second, a ruderal analytic examines how social inequalities and histories of race and nationhood work through human–nonhuman relations in sticky and persistent ways. doing so, it provides a lens for integrating ecological perspectives into an urban context while highlighting questions of social justice. as i have shown, relations between people, plants, seeds, and environments are deeply shaped by the history of nationhood in berlin. yet the human–plant socialities i have described do not adhere to those envisioned in the city’s shiny brochures on multicultural gardening. instead of fitting into categories of urban nature and gardening for (national) integration, the berlin gecekondu and maria mama grow in the gaps—not only of the city’s landscaped meadows or other infrastructure but also in people’s lives and in an inhospitable environment that suspects turkish-germans of not integrating into german society. as i have shown, these practices are not a simple, happy survival amid ruins, nor are they free of power. rubble plants grow from seeds carried on the boots of migrants and refugees, and they may remain dormant potentials in a city’s fabric. glanced over or viewed as insignificant side effects of more solid urban infrastructures and institutions, it remains an open question as to whether or not they enable flourishing. third, while i have focused on human–plant relations in the more narrow sense, a ruderal lens considers a notion of ecology not as “a naturalization of politics—as if one wanted to ‘treat humans like plants or animals,’” but as “the recognition of the immense complexity involved for any entity—human or nonhuman—to have a voice, to take a stand, to be counted, to be represented, to be connected with others” (latour and weibel 2005, 458–59). hence it opens up cultural analysis to a wider field of human–nonhuman relationalities (see descola 2013) while asking about the power at stake in shaping what lives thrive in the disturbed landscapes we inhabit. the history of postwar rubble plants illustrates the layered histories of this process. in an effort to do justice to these layerings, i have put together seemingly disparate stories—stories of west berlin botanists researching rubble plants and turkish men planting gardens at the side of parks or in between walls. following a ruderal method that utilizes shifting frameworks (fortun 2012, 2014) and a “rush of stories” (tsing 2015, 37), i argue, accounts for the ways in which urban ecologies, globalization, and racial exclusions are entangled with one another. such a practice pushes anthropological inquiry beyond a singular focus on homogeneous entities of particular ethnic communities, systems of kinship, formal economies, institutions, built environments, or even the anthropocene (see bauer and bhan 2016). rather than simply expand the realm of urban society to include the nonhuman, this essay therefore promotes a strategy of exploring how multispecies relations give rise to new socialities and connections, including among humans (hinchliffe et al. 2005; hinchliffe and whatmore 2006), that work against a city’s divisions. as i have shown, rubble plants, botanists, immigrants and their gardens are implicated in the dynamics of capitalism, nationalism, and war in disparate and yet deeply connected ways. i thus argue that if we want to imagine a future of social and environmental justice in cities, or what abdoumaliq simone (2004) has called a “city yet to come,” we need to attend to the ways in which these unlikely neighbors inhabit and traverse the domesticated—and ruined—landscapes that make up cities today. notes acknowledgments i could not have written this article without the immense generosity of my informants in berlin, most of whom remain anonymous here. with their insights and creativity, they taught me a different way of seeing the city. i am particularly grateful to herbert sukopp for inspiring me to consider ruderal plants and for helping me sharpen my understanding of berlin’s urban ecologies. i am indebted to the intellectual communities of which i have been fortunate to be part in the past years. special thanks go to jason alley, nikhil anand, mark anderson, fadi bardawil, amahl bishara, julie chu, james clifford, ian condry, jeffry diefendorf, amah edoh, catherine fennell, michael fisch, matthew gandy, donna haraway, stefan helmreich, eleana kim, kristina lyons, andrew mathews, natasha myers, damani partridge, bruno perreau, lisa rofel, anna tsing, noah tamarkin, armanc yildiz, austin zeiderman, and asli zengin, who have commented on drafts and ideas at various stages. the argument in this essay also benefited tremendously from feedback received in a series of workshops, including the infrastructure reading group at the university of chicago, the sts circle at harvard university, the matters of urban citizenship workshop at columbia university, the military ecologies workshop at the university of california, irvine, the infrastructural worlds workshop at duke university, the anthropocene campus at the haus der kulturen der welt in berlin, and the chronopolis symposium in the department for germanic languages and literatures at the university of michigan. my gratitude also goes to the anonymous reviewers for their detailed and productive comments, as well as to dominic boyer and the cultural anthropology editorial team for their guidance throughout the revision process. research and writing for this article were supported by the andrew w. mellon/acls dissertation completion fellowship, a university of california, santa cruz chancellor’s dissertation year fellowship, and a fieldwork grant by the wenner-gren foundation. 1. gecekondu is a combination of the turkish words gece (night) and kondu (placed). taking advantage of legal loopholes, gecekondu emerged in connection with rural migration to turkish cities beginning in the 1950s, sometimes literally popping up overnight. many turkish berliners, like osman, lived in them before migrating to berlin (lanz 2007). in contrast to the turkish gecekondu, the berlin version did not serve as the main residence for osman’s family. for a survey of the literature on gecekondu and changing representations of rural migrants as “other” in turkey, see erman 2001. 2. forms of disturbance range from vegetation removal and uses of herbicide to drought, fire, and soil erosion (grime 1977). 3. while this shift has challenged anthropocentric social analyses, humans often continue to appear as key agents of the consequences of their structures of design. in this moment of self-reflection, there is remarkably little reference to earlier forms of reflexivity, such as the writing culture moment or feminist and postcolonial critiques that highlight racialized and gendered intersections of language, power, and embodiment (fortun 2012; helmreich 2014). 4. for a discussion of ruination as a concept that captures the paradoxical nature of infrastructure as productive and destructive, see howe et al. 2016. 5. following matthew gandy (2006), i thus use the term urban nature in two senses, referring to the ecological dynamics and material transformation of cities as well as to shifting ecological imaginaries about the city. 6. for an ethnographic account of the contextual politics of classificatory practices around alien species, see helmreich 2005. 7. furthermore, the composition, associations, and succession schemes of ruderal sites did not easily fit into the scientists’ rectangular sample areas, nor the classificatory schemes of adventive floristics and phytosociology (lachmund 2003, 248). 8. alliances between scientists and citizens, as well as sukopp’s role as berlin’s commissioner for nature protection and advisor to the state office for environmental protection since the 1970s, helped pave the way for the conservation of urban wastelands such as the schöneberger südgelände, an abandoned switchyard for trains (kowarik, starfinger, and trepl 1995; lachmund 2013). 9. mary douglas (2002, 47) describes stickiness and viscosity as concepts that alert us to the properties of matter and embodied interrelations between self and the world. 10. in germany, the categories of immigrant and migrant are highly contested, historically contingent subject positions that are deeply entangled with racialized notions of german citizenship. in this article, i use the terms immigrant and migrant to refer to the subject positions produced in public discourse and policymaking, and also to first-generation turkish-german immigrants. in contrast, i use the terms turkish-german or turkish berliner to refer to both immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from turkey. 11. see, for instance, thilo sarrazin’s (2010) controversial book deutschland schafft sich selbst ab. 12. emphasizing the enduring power of race and racism in europe and its historical specificity (see gilroy 2004), i understand race to not have an intrinsic, fixed meaning but to articulate with the politics of nature, nation, class, gender, and ideas of bodily difference in historically contingent ways. racial formations thus constitute a “body politic” (brown 2005, 72) that marks inner selves, social bodies, and environmental milieus and goes beyond the boundary of the human skin (cf. hartigan 2017). 13. on the racialization of barbecuing as a “savage” or “wild” practice, see stoetzer 2014. 14. recent work has also examined how ruins capture national imaginations and emerge as a central element of nuclear nationalism (masco 2008), or as affective attachments of cold war urban restructuring and (post)socialist citizenship (schwenkel 2013). 15. in contrast to ruins, rubble is often considered formless material without value, and hence it is not memorialized (simmel 1983; puff 2010). 16. tracking matsutake worlds in oregon’s forests, tsing (2015, 97) identifies a shift in cultural identifications among asian american immigrants: while many adopted a framework of assimilation immediately following world war ii, contemporary cultural practices are often routed through heterogeneous memories of war or narratives of freedom. 17. wastelands is an ambivalent term that, like rubble, connotes lack of value within a capitalist economy (gandy 2013). neither are inherently progressive: they are not immune to commodification, and their hybridity can signal extinction, exclusion, and racial violence. 18. see tsing (2015, 159) for a critique of the focus on concepts in science studies, at the cost of careful ethnographic and historical storytelling. 19. allotment gardens (schrebergärten) originally served as a source of food and as leisure space for the urban working classes in the nineteenth century. icons of national identity and still abundant in many german cities today, these gardens follow intricate sets of rules that prescribe their size and design, as well as the composition of (often native) flowers and vegetables. although never free of power, ruderal sites differ from allotment gardens (and multicultural gardens) because they adhere less neatly to boundaries of nationhood, culture, property or other institutionalized human–nonhuman relations. 20. turkish migrant workers comprised west berlin’s largest immigrant community. for a discussion of east-west developments and housing policies, see çağlar and soysal 2003, lanz 2007, and mandel 2008. 21. see also damani partridge’s (2012) analysis of the simultaneity of exclusion and inclusion and the racialization of citizenship in germany. 22. for fanon (1963, 249–50), any struggle of liberation therefore has to root out imperial and racial formations from both the land and people’s minds and bodies. 23. see paul gilroy’s (2004) critique of mainstream 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urban habitats 1, no. 1: 66–86. http://www.urbanhabitats.org/v01n01/climatechange_full.html. todd, zoe 2016 “an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism.” journal of historical sociology 29, no. 1: 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124. tsing, anna 2012 “contaminated diversity in ‘slow disturbance’: potential collaborators for a livable earth.” in “why do we value diversity? biocultural diversity in a global context,” edited by gary martin, diana mincyte, and ursula münster, 95–97. rcc perspectives, no. 9. https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/5599. 2015 the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. viveiros de castro, eduardo 2012 “immanence and fear: stranger events and subjects in amazonia.” hau 2, no. 1: 27–43. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau2.1.003. von schnitzler, antina 2013 “traveling technologies: infrastructure, ethical regimes, and the materiality of politics in south africa.” cultural anthropology 28, no. 4: 670–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12032. williams, raymond 1973 the country and the city. new york: oxford university press. wolch, jennifer 1998 “zoopolis.” in animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature–culture borderlands, edited by jennifer wolch and jody emel, 119–38. new york: verso. author(iz)ing death author(iz)ing death: medical aid-in-dying and the morality of suicide anita hannig brandeis university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4733-0392 on october 27, 2015, the massachusetts joint committee on public health held a hearing at the state house in boston to discuss a new bill that would enable terminally ill patients to end their life by ingesting a lethal medication prescribed by their physician. at the hearing, opponents of the proposed bill invited testimonies by those who had lost someone to suicide or who had been active in suicide-prevention organizations. that is why pauline mars, an elderly resident from north grafton, got up to speak. some forty-two years ago, her husband had shot himself in the head in their bedroom, leaving behind mars and their four children. “on that sunday afternoon, our lives were shattered and changed forever. i was the widow of suicide. my children were the children of suicide,” she testified. “suicide does not eliminate suffering; it causes unbearable, unending pain.” two hours later, mary hoge, an elder law attorney from medfield, warned legislators: “if you pass this law, you will redefine a tragedy and call it a medical procedure. you will call death just another choice. we all know suicide has been considered a sad consequence of depression, loneliness, fear, and desperation. suicide of any kind is a result of a mind in turmoil, an act of a person who feels unloved and abandoned. can we legislate love and accompaniment instead?” that the death of mars’s husband was unrelated to a terminal illness mattered little. for opponents of medically assisted dying, an ailing patient’s underlying condition does not carry much weight—ethically or practically—in justifying what they consider an untimely exit. on the contrary, many of them locate virtue in enduring suffering at the end of life instead of taking “the easy way out.” similar to hoge, critics consistently portray patients who pursue what they call “doctor-prescribed suicide” as plagued by undiagnosed depression or social abandonment (golden and zoanni 2010). they point to the danger of normalizing suicide through the passage of assisted-dying laws and voice concern about “suicide contagion.” the issue goes well beyond semantics, of course. by equating a physician-assisted death with suicide, opponents argue for the moral and ethical equivalence of both. especially during the past decade, proponents of assisted-dying laws in the united states have become increasingly invested in drawing a robust line between medical aid-in-dying and a suicidal act. “i’ve devoted my career mainly to suicide prevention, but these patients aren’t suicidal,” carl brownsberger, a physician from belmont, declared as part of the same public hearing in boston. “they don’t want to die—their death is coming down a train track toward them, and it seems like it’s true reverence to life to give them some kind of control over the timing and means of their death.” right-to-die activists across the country welcomed the statement released by the american association of suicidology (aas) on october 30, 2017, asserting that “suicide and physician aid-in-dying are conceptually, medically, and legally different phenomena,” therefore placing medically assisted deaths as matters “outside the central focus of the aas.”1 for them, the statement represented a hopeful step toward shifting the terms of a public conversation that continues to conflate aid-in-dying with the terminology and morality of suicide. as roger kligler, a physician suing the commonwealth of massachusetts for his right to die, remarked to me: “calling it suicide means that we’re not talking about end-of-life issues.”2 this article examines the shifting rhetoric that has surrounded the legalization of a form of intentional death that is permissible in eight u.s. jurisdictions today.3 it reflects on the stakes of maintaining a discursive and conceptual distinction between a medically assisted death and the most common cultural category for self-inflicted death—suicide. inspired by ian hacking’s (2008, 1) observation that “the meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide,” this article aims to understand on what basis the differentiation between medical aid-in-dying and suicide rests, how it is upheld in practice, and what we gain and lose by insisting on it. my goal here is not to determine whether assisted dying does or does not amount to suicide. i am far more interested in how this debate exposes understandings of human agency, responsibility, and rationality when it comes to life-limiting illness and purposive death in the united states. what are the broader moral stakes for fighting over a division between aid-in-dying and suicide? how, exactly, is this form of death registered legally? and how does assisted dying facilitate cultural ideals of a good death that depart from quintessential notions of suicide as a bad death? the categorical distinctions advocates invoke between medical aid-in-dying and suicide go beyond a simple search for legitimacy and an attempt to distance themselves from the societal stigma that continues to surround suicide in the united states today—although they do that too. in carving out a form of willful death that sits in a category of its own, activists can gesture to the complex medico-technical, bureaucratic, and legal assemblage that has come to govern assisted deaths and that has led to their routinization in states that permit them. as the sociologist of law shai lavi (2005, 3) notes: “suicide is always an extraordinary act performed under extraordinary circumstances, whereas the medical hastening of death is meant to be a routinized response to a problem we all know we may face, the onset of a fatal illness.” by stressing the role of debilitating, terminal illness in an aided death and by submitting such a death to the rationale and management of institutionalized medicine, ideas about human agency undergo an interesting shift. as much as an assisted death—similar to a suicide—has been interpreted as a radical act of free will (callahan 2002), agency in aid-in-dying is much more diffuse. it is dispersed among a patient’s illness, the institution of medicine, and the state—both discursively and in practice. this kind of agentive displacement—the idea that agency for an act ostensibly authored by a single actor comes to be distributed among a range of actors—enhances the moral and social acceptability of an assisted death, which becomes an authorized form of dying that looks very different from the socially deviant act of suicide. although external authorization of and shared responsibility for an aided death are never fully reconciled with the idea of singular, rational authorship, exploring this tension is productive for reminding us that human agency in living and dying rarely equals autonomy (mahmood 2001). the goal of this article, then, is to uncover the complex dialectic between authorship and authorization that characterizes medical assistance in dying and attendant moralities of intentional death, speaking to broader disciplinary concerns in the cultural study of death and medicine. this article draws on ethnographic field research that i have conducted with physicians, patients, families, hospice workers, activists, pharmacists, religious figures, lawyers, and legislators, primarily in oregon, washington, and new england, since october of 2015. the research is ongoing and has, to date, consisted of more than eighty in-depth, personal interviews; collection of data at public hearings, court cases, death-care workshops, and volunteer trainings; archival work; as well as participant-observation during end-of-life social events, such as death cafés and film screenings. the project began amid ultimately unsuccessful efforts to legalize aid-in-dying in massachusetts (in 2015 and again in 2017), and my work in this context involved following those who had a stake in this legislation, as well as those who had availed themselves of vermont’s assisted-dying law. since then, the bulk of my research has focused on oregon, the state with the longest experience of implementing an aid-in-dying law in the united states. i met with contacts in restaurants, coffee shops, private homes, offices, and public gardens in the greater portland area and throughout the state. from january to august 2018, i also served as a portland-based hospice volunteer so as to map the context in which these conversations emerged. in setting out on this project, i was less interested in abstract debates about assisted dying than in how the practical reality of this form of death is changing the ways patients, families, and clinicians view and manage the end of life. as a result, most of my research has focused on those who administer and make use of assisted-dying laws in the united states, rather than on those who categorically oppose this practice (though their viewpoints do feature in the research as well). in wanting to document how medically assisted deaths transform the landscape of death and dying, i have identified myself as an observer sympathetic to the cause (which i am), while at the same time trying to retain the critical distance necessary for the work of analysis. to better appreciate how aid-in-dying has been positioned against suicide as a form of intentional death, the next section revisits key approaches in the anthropological study of suicide, followed by a brief historical framing of assisted death in the broader context of the medicalization of dying. the subsequent three sections move from discussing agentive displacement onto a patient’s terminal illness to agentive displacement onto the authority of the medical profession and the state to a discussion of the idea of authoring a good death. this structure exposes the question of how outside authorization through agentive displacement comes into tension with the idea of authorship, an issue taken up again in the conclusion. suicide reframed rather than subscribing to universal definitions of suicide, anthropologists have tended to study suicide as an expansive heuristic in situated ethnographic contexts. in doing so, they have generally moved away from older sociological, statistical approaches that locate suicide beyond the individual in the social fabric and its attendant constraints (durkheim 1951; douglas 1967; halbwachs 1978). émile durkheim (1951) famously attributed suicides to the level of integration of members in their society, in which both too little and too much integration could lead to suicide. while embracing the idea of suicide as a deeply social act, anthropologists have criticized durkheim’s approach as overly deterministic (livingston 2009; garcia 2010), pointing to the varied ways people build and sever relationships. studying the field of suicide ethnographically has attuned anthropologists to distinctive forms of self-death that carry discrete moral valences, such as the voluntary, requested death of chukchi elders in siberia, which is understood as a commendable sacrifice and as a ritual inversion of ordinary suicide (willerslev 2009). despite the variation in practices of self-inflicted death, the editors of a recent volume on suicide and agency identify a striking tension in vernacular and expert understandings of suicide: “the requirement for agency and a simultaneous denial or diffusion of the agency of the suicidé” (münster and broz 2015, 11). on the one hand, in order to be thought of as such, the act of suicide requires what they call “singular intention” (münster and broz 2015, 11) and relies on ideas about sole authorship; on the other hand, responsibility for the act is almost never fully attributed to the agent. as evident in both psychological and sociological approaches to suicide, there always exists an “external other” (münster and broz 2015, 14)—mental illness or society, respectively—that diminishes or deflects the agency of the individual.4 this agentive tension, the editors point out, relates directly to the moral evaluation of suicide in a given context, as “convictions about the im/morality of suicide determine the un/ease with which agentive involvement” is perceived (münster and broz 2015, 19) and whether a given act is classified as suicide.5 instead of resolving this tension, they suggest studying it ethnographically. whether or not we group medically assisted deaths under the rubric of suicide, the same dialectic between authorship and authorization characterizes right-to-die discourse in the united states. on the one hand, advocates position aid-in-dying as an act of autonomous will that hinges strongly on notions of authorship. they often invoke the language of rationality to prove lucid intent and to juxtapose aided deaths to the alleged irrationality of suicides, calling attention to the screening process of assisted-dying candidates that seeks to ensure that patients’ motives for ending their life are based on a rational decision that stems from a place of physical rather than mental pathology—a decision, in other words, by a self-possessed actor intent on orchestrating their own death. on the other hand, we see clear instances of agentive displacement, in which agency is discursively shifted onto the patient’s fatal illness as the true cause of their demise and, in practice, onto medicine and the state, which ultimately need to authorize this form of death (hence the terminology of “assistance”). an aided death cannot be achieved autonomously but depends on other actors (physicians, psychiatrists, pharmacists, hospice staff, volunteers, and family members) sanctioning, facilitating, and sharing responsibility for such a death. while human agency is not wholly evacuated in aid-in-dying, it becomes distributed among entities that have the power to affect the moral and conceptual status of assisted deaths as something other than suicide. by relocating agentive power in part to forces external to these deaths, advocates also advance the notion of a kind of nonhuman agency that resides in a pathophysiological state—the patient’s terminal diagnosis. as one oregonian patient put it: “i’m not killing myself; bone cancer is taking care of that.” this type of agentive displacement highlights the fact that patients have entered a temporal space of imminence to death where their personal capacity to act has become severely curtailed. the agentive power granted to a patient’s fatal illness serves to reiterate the inevitability of their demise, which in turn softens the potent onus that continues to surround the idea of causing one’s own death. until well into the nineteenth century, suicide was considered a crime in the united states, one punishable with forfeiture of the deceased’s property, denial of a christian burial, and postmortem bodily mutilation (lopes 2015, 42–43). long considered a violation of nature’s law of self-preservation and an affront to god, the sovereign, and society, suicide gradually came to be seen as a result of mental disorders, particularly melancholia. although suicide (but not its assistance) has been decriminalized today, it remains heavily stigmatized. as hacking (2008, 3) notes, “news of a suicide among us has an immediate response: horror.” in on suicide bombing, talal asad (2007, 67) offers one explanation for why suicide continues to be seen as an act of deviance beyond its treatment as a mental illness: “suicide is a sin because it is a unique act of freedom, a right that neither the religious authorities nor the nation-state allows. today, the law requires that a prisoner condemned to death be prevented from committing suicide to escape execution; it is not death but authorized death that is called for.” suicide, asad suggests, challenges the state’s enduring monopoly over violence and death. by equating medical aid-in-dying with suicide, opponents of the former can tap into the persistent social taboos and moral outrage that surround the latter—even if no longer primarily seen as a sin, the act of taking one’s life remains strongly suspect. but even those in support of medically aided deaths generally do not challenge the prevalent image of suicide; they simply put aid-in-dying outside that category, thus creating a form of intentional death that is not negatively judged. nonetheless, it would be a mistake to boil down contemporary efforts to distinguish assisted dying from suicide to the social illegitimacy and perceived abnormality of suicide. such a reading risks reductionism as it obscures the complex processes—medical, legal, bureaucratic—through which new cultural categories develop and congeal. the medicalization of death in the united states, aid-in-dying emerged from the medicalization of death over the past two centuries as an event that could be managed, controlled, and tamed by doctors at the deathbed (kaufman 2005). “by the end of the nineteenth century,” writes lavi (2005, 15), “death and dying were governed by medicine, not by religion, and the old art of dying was replaced by a medical and technical governance of death.” even before physicians had medicines for easing the process of dying, they began caring for those close to death. as death came increasingly under the purview of bio-scientific systems of authority, it slowly migrated away from the home and into the hospital. simultaneously, with the advent of anesthesia transforming sensibilities of suffering (pernick 1985), notions of a painless death gained popularity. especially for those diagnosed with painful, incurable diseases, the possibility of dying a “gentle” death became attractive and led to the introduction of two legislative proposals—the so-called chloroform bills—in ohio and iowa in 1906. both bills envisioned the use of chloroform on fatally ill or injured patients to induce their death, but their terms were so flawed that they never materialized (lopes 2015, 19–23). for the remainder of the century, no other proposals for actively expediting the death of patients proved successful. none, that is, until oregon’s 1994 death with dignity act, which voters approved at the ballot box by a thin margin, prompting its legal stay until 1997, when popular support for the bill was reaffirmed.6 in oregon, administrators and state health officials were initially split on which terminology to use to frame the emergent aid-in-dying debate. in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, it was not uncommon for them to use the term physician-assisted suicide, borrowing from contemporary medical and bioethics literature. “that was the terminology at the time,” katrina hedberg, state epidemiologist at the oregon health authority, recalled. “we wanted people to know what we were talking about.” after the first few years and some lobbying by right-to-die activists, administrators of the law—like most lay people in oregon—began to go with the name of the oregon law, death with dignity, and dropped the term suicide.7 today, unless they are strictly opposed to the practice or are unfamiliar with the issue, most observers and many professional organizations, such as the american college of legal medicine and the american public health association, use a variation of the terms physician-assisted dying or medical aid-in-dying, highlighting the evolving idea of aid-in-dying as a medical procedure. peter goodwin, one of the architects of the oregon law, came to regret sticking with the language of suicide initially. committee members that worked with him on the 1994 campaign had asked him to avoid the term suicide, because “they felt that this was not suicide. this was so different from suicide, in every parameter. and i felt that it was such a well-established phrase within the medical community that to fight against it would be in vain. … and now i regret it tremendously. because that is such a colored phrase.”8 at the end of the day, the doctor claimed, assisted dying was not suicide, as it adhered to a distinct, medico-legal logic: “these are patients taking some medication, which we have prescribed according to a proposed law. i have always thought of this as a rational response to a medical problem. and it is the most—it is one of the deepest medical problems. perhaps the deepest medical problem is how to deal rationally with terminally ill patients.” framing a hastened death as a logical, bureaucratic response to the problem of dying leads to a defensible delineation of the practice as a form of medical treatment, rather than an act of murder or self-murder. early proponents of assisted deaths had made a very similar argument, stressing the medical context from which these considerations arose. for them, these deaths “did not emerge primarily from a personal desire to bring one’s life to an end, nor from the desire of relatives or physicians to murder the dying patient, but rather from a more calculated and institutional decision following the logic of medical practice” (lavi 2005, 88–89). thus what differentiates a terminally ill patient who uses a gun to end their life from one who undergoes an aided death is that an assisted death occurs within the medical care system, following medical protocol. “it’s a medical process, because the medicine is prescribed,” george eighmey, a prominent right-to-die proponent, told me. “because of that, we insisted on calling it medical.” from its inception, aid-in-dying legislation in the united states has been dedicated to following a medical model aimed at making assisted dying a routine, if rare, medical practice. in this way, discourse around medically assisted dying “does not challenge, but makes productive use of the larger framework of the medicalization of dying” (karsoho et al. 2016, 188), requesting the involvement of clinicians and medicine at the end of life. in the united states, clinicians have long been involved in easing the dying process for fatally ill patients under the aegis of the hospice and palliative-care movements that emerged in the 1960s, largely as an antidote to the excesses of life-prolonging, curative medicine (but still under a medicalized model of dying). to qualify for hospice—which in the united states typically entails in-home services rather than the move to a facility—patients must have a life expectancy of less than six months and stop any treatment that goes beyond symptom control. on hospice, patients generally receive enough medication to be comfortable. yet in rare situations when their pain cannot be palliated, patients may request what is known as “terminal sedation,” the administration of sedatives putting them into a coma that will eventually lead to death, especially if nutrition and hydration are withheld concomitantly. it is noteworthy that such forms of lethal dosing were institutionalized largely “without undergoing any legal, moral, or public scrutiny” (lavi 2005, 127), as they are primarily understood as treatment for pain rather than the intentional termination of someone’s life (and hence permissible, even in catholic hospices). end-of-life care on hospice can thus sometimes blur into the kind of ending life care usually associated with laws like oregon’s death with dignity act.9 medicine’s power to frame and manage aspects of human existence moves into clear focus here. the participation of medical professionals in aided deaths not only affords patients a key measure of social legitimacy, but it also diffuses attendant moral responsibilities for their death and increases chances for a successful outcome because of the perceived technical know-how of clinicians (see richards 2017, 353). according to one prescribing physician in portland, once he began offering his attendance at their deaths, nearly all his patients have taken him up on it, even though all he does is watch the patient drink the lethal medication. in canada, where qualified aid-in-dying patients can choose between a self-administered death and a lethal injection by a clinician (an option unavailable in the united states), more than 99 percent opted for an injection between january 1 and june 30, 2017.10 yet it is not just the authorizing power of medicine that distributes human agency when it comes to aid-in-dying. according to advocates, in the unfolding course of a patient’s illness, the patient ceases to be the primary actor; instead, their terminal condition seizes agentive power. terminal illness and agentive displacement during our conversations, some advocates of assisted-dying laws would occasionally raise the issue of the so-called 9/11 jumpers—the estimated two hundred people who leaped from the world trade center towers that tuesday morning in 2001 to escape the scorching heat caused by the crash of two airplanes. or they would paint an analogous scenario of a different high-rise engulfed by deadly fire. whether real or hypothetical, the general contours of the setup never changed, and neither did the expectant look on my contacts’ faces when the scene was complete. to them, the example of people trapped so cruelly—no longer facing a meaningful decision between life and death, but between different forms of dying—resembled the painful predicament of patients with a terminal diagnosis pondering a physician-aided death. it remains unclear how many of those who dropped from the twin towers on 9/11 were pushed out by accident and how many made the deliberate choice to die from jumping rather than from being burned alive. either way, tasked with filling out death certificates for the fallen, new york city’s office of the chief medical ­examiner refused to categorize any of the fallen as suicides (or “jumpers”). “a ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide,” a spokeswoman told reporters (cauchon and moore 2002). “these people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out.” in the end, her office classified all those who had plunged to their deaths that day as homicides from the attack. despite requiring some mental acrobatics, the burning-building analogy that aid-in-dying advocates liked to invoke captures something fundamental about the temporal and agentive logics that undergird understandings of an assisted death in the united states.11 for proponents, medical aid-in-dying constitutes an anticipatory act that preempts an already looming, inescapable death. it accelerates a trajectory that is imminent and frequently accepted—if somewhat unknown in its exact course—and it substitutes one type of feared death for another slightly less feared one, or at least one that the patient may direct. the temporality of assisted dying is forever and anxiously oriented forward—not to a distant ending, but to a near one that the patient seeks to intercept. as one patient-advocacy organization argued in a no longer available web resource: “the patient’s primary objective is not to end an otherwise open-ended span of life, but to find dignity in an already impending exit from this world. they’re participating in an act to shorten the agony of their final hours, not killing themselves; cancer is killing them.” aid-in-dying abbreviates a life expected to end in the foreseeable future; for instance, oregon’s death with dignity act stipulates that patients must have a prognosis of less than six months to live. this idea of expediting an unavoidable fate surfaces prominently in the term hastening, which is how participants—until recently—would refer to an assisted death. they would say, “we’re going to a hastening” or “sally is hastening.”12 the concept implies moving up a known end point in time—dictated by a patient’s terminal prognosis—rather than the active cessation of a life that would otherwise continue. proponents consider the difference critical. aid-in-dying operates according to an anticipatory calculus not of life over death, but of one kind of death over another. the perpetual forward-looking trajectory of a preemptive death can provoke much anxiety in patients and families, particularly when it comes to correctly timing one’s exit. to have the death they prefer, patients may have to sacrifice some “good” days. if patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (als), for example, wait too long, they may miss the obligatory window in which they are physically able to self-administer and ingest the medication. most patients describe a palpable turning point that led them to make concrete plans for their death. for nancy, who was diagnosed with als in march of 2008, that turning point came when she started to lose her ability to speak. by january of 2009, nancy’s life expectancy was estimated to be less than six months. at that point, she qualified for oregon’s aid-in-dying law, but she was not ready yet to take the lethal medication. “she was so strongly aware that she wanted to stay alive as long as she could, so her target time was to go into june or july,” her older sister marnie recounted. “but the progression of her speech becoming so challenged meant that she could wake up one day and not be able to swallow, and she had to be able to swallow; it’s that volitional act. she felt so strongly about not wanting to be hooked up to a feeding tube, some apparatus that would be breathing for her and all that.” nancy didn’t make it until june. she took the medication in april of 2009 in her backyard in north portland. although patients like nancy may choose certain parameters of their death, supporters of medical aid-in-dying emphasize the constraints of patients’ agentive involvement, even as they frame their advocacy primarily in terms of enhancing people’s end-of-life choices.13 ari gandsman (2017) points to this very paradox in his work with right-to-die activists in north america and australia. despite their reliance on the language of choice, gandsman (2017, 5, 10) notes, activists “construct an ethical worldview … that transcends the rhetoric of freedom, choice, individualism, autonomy, and self-determination,” such that “the right to die is thus a choice exercised in the context of having no choice.” as in other contemporary understandings of self-inflicted death, there is a simultaneous attribution and disavowal of agentive power. advocates argue that patients’ ability for purposeful action comes to be severely constrained by their terminal illness—it is the blazing fire that pushes them to the window. “i understand that i have no choice about the fact that my life is ending,” an oregonian diagnosed with a fatal glioblastoma let his physician know. “my only choice is to determine the circumstances of my death.” proponents highlight the primacy of a patient’s underlying terminal illness that not only drives them toward an assisted death but that is also responsible for killing them. this form of agentive displacement adds complexity to the notion that patients are killing themselves, even if they are the ones who ultimately lift the lethal drink to their lips or press down on the plunger on their feeding tube. though oregon law requires self-administration and therefore a certain type of agency not located in the disease, a patient’s medical condition is seen to significantly diminish their agentive potential. it is in this restricted, narrow sense that we must understand the sometimes fetishized discourse around choice and autonomy that characterizes right-to-die advocacy in the united states. if the right to die represents a choice, it is an acutely limited one. david grube wrote his first prescription for aid-in-dying in 1999. at the time, he was part of a clinical practice in philomath, a small oregon town near corvallis, where i met him in 2017 in a downtown café and again, a few days later, at his home. one experience from his early clinical years had left a particularly strong impression on grube; he said it haunted him still. he witnessed the aftermath of a shotgun death of one of his neighbors, who also happened to be his patient. jerry was a man in his early fifties suffering from bladder cancer that had metastasized to his bones and left him in uncontrollable pain. he had entered hospice, with his life expectancy now measured in weeks. it was on one of the doctor’s days off that he got a call from jerry’s son who asked him to come over to the house, and quickly: “there’s something wrong with dad.” and it’s just a couple hundred yards, so i went over to his house. the tv in the bedroom was on so loud you could hear it from the street. so i went into the room and jerry was sitting in a chair between the twin beds in their bedroom with a shotgun in his lap and nothing above his neck—everything on the ceiling. i’ve never—i have, you know, i’ve practiced medicine for forty years, i’ve been in the er, i’ve taken care of car accidents—this is the worst experience of my clinical practicing. it just really impacted my whole psyche. this can’t ever—this is the worst way. jerry’s death proved a turning point in grube’s career. he had no legal ways of assisting jerry with other options to shorten his anguish, so in a way he felt that he had failed as a doctor. but if he struggled to come to terms with the gruesome manner of jerry’s death, he did not struggle to comprehend the reasons for it. grube drew a sharp distinction between a “suicidal” person who wants to die for reasons related to mental illness, addiction, or unrequited love, and patients like jerry who are facing imminent death. “these patients, they want to live,” grube said. “they want to live forever, just like i do. they do not want to die. but they’re going to die. it doesn’t matter what they think.” absent a terminal diagnosis, most aid-in-dying patients have no independent desire to end their life, the doctor maintained. but given the inevitable course of their illness, the choice regarding death is no longer theirs to make. those critical of aid-in-dying take issue precisely with the temporal and agentive logics laid out by proponents. most of them bristle at the very idea of hastening, and they believe that even a terminal illness cannot dilute the active agency behind taking one’s life, which they view unequivocally as suicide. for critics, a patient’s life-limiting illness fails to constitute an agentive force. catholic opponents of the law, in particular, argue that it is against god’s design to accelerate one’s demise and timeline, pointing to the redemptive potential inherent in bodily suffering and insisting that the intentional taking of a human life is always wrong (callahan 2002; schotsmans 2003). as james driscoll, the executive director of the massachusetts catholic conference, told legislators during the 2015 hearing on beacon hill: “the catholic church teaches that life is a gift from god and should be cherished and nurtured until natural death, not predetermined death based on a diagnosis of terminal illness.” rather than being indicative only of biological decline, terminal illness, from this vantage point, holds spiritual possibility. many religiously motivated opponents argue that by usurping the power of god over life and death, patients who opt for an assisted death are doing away with something that is not theirs to give up. rushing the putatively natural timeline of one’s departure, they contend, not only goes against god’s plan and the sacredness of life but it also short-circuits necessary processes of human struggle and leads to the shirking of “one’s moral duties” (callahan 2002, 56). in line with catholic ideals that tie suffering to the prospect of redemption, the end-of-life ordeals faced by patients in their final days are seen to provide crucial opportunities for spiritual growth. to be sure, arguments against aid-in-dying are not made exclusively on religious grounds, and there are roman catholic and protestant theologians who have come out in favor of medically assisted death on the basis of the concept of neighborly love (badham 2009; jens and küng 2009). and still, religious values tend to permeate even ostensibly secular opposition to assisted-dying laws through a new rhetoric that focuses on risk—the idea of suicide as a public health threat—which is increasingly supplanting the discourse around suicide as sin (gandsman 2016). it is this sentiment that makes opponents question the seemingly incongruent involvement of the state in preventing suicides through public health interventions while at the same time encouraging them by sanctioning assisted deaths. a closer look at how the state administers these deaths reveals a more complex situation that does seek to distinguish between aid-in-dying and suicide. authorizing death and the limits of autonomy in states that have legalized medical aid-in-dying, the death certificate of individuals who avail themselves of these laws must list their underlying condition as the cause of death, making no mention of either aid-in-dying or suicide. oregon’s death with dignity act also contains this telling passage: “actions taken in accordance with [the act] shall not, for any purpose, constitute suicide, assisted suicide, mercy killing or homicide, under the law.” legally, medical aid-in-dying is therefore not registered as suicide, reflecting an effort by the state to keep a categorical distinction between the two acts in place and to prevent life and health insurance companies from reneging on their policies. the power of this distinction does not, however, derive from the law alone. rather, the law “defer[s] to the authority of medicine” (lavi 2005, 89), which is incapable of navigating these novel frontiers on its own. as seen, too, in the creation of “brain death” as a new category of death in the 1960s by the harvard ad hoc committee (lock 2002), such laws are called on to facilitate emergent social realities rooted in medical interventions. one important consequence of the way oregon’s death with dignity act was written—something that differentiates assisted-dying laws in the united states from those in europe—is that medical professionals are charged with upholding a distinction between a medically aided death and suicide in their quotidian clinical work by screening for mental illness, especially depression, and with assessing whether it influences a patient’s request for assisted dying. physicians must weed out “suicidal” patients from those whose desire to end their life results legitimately from their terminal prognosis and who are thus authorized to die. if a physician suspects that a patient’s motives for terminating their life exceed the condition of their illness, their case must undergo further scrutiny by a mental health expert. as linda ganzini, a prominent oregon psychiatrist who has published extensively on medical aid-in-dying, told me: “we know that 60–70 percent of people who commit suicide have a mental disorder, particularly severe depression. if we treated the depression, they would make a different choice. . . . but that’s just a small subset of people who want physician aid-in-dying.” ganzini readily acknowledges that the screening process for assisted dying is more complicated than the law would suggest, as those responsible for implementing the law try to evaluate what she calls the “authenticity” of a patient’s decision to pursue an aided death, that is, whether their decision is consistent with their long-term coping strategies. nick gideonse, a physician and associate professor of family medicine in portland, has developed his own mechanism for assessing possible psychiatric suicidality in a patient: “i will usually ask the question, ‘if i had the magic wand, if we did tomorrow invent the curative aspect that could remove this cancer, this lou gehrig’s disease from your life, would you still be pursuing this?’ to me, that makes pretty clear what the driving force is.” attending and consulting physicians are of course aware that a terminal diagnosis may cause a patient to experience painful realizations and profound sadness at the fact that their life is ending. in fact, some advocates maintain that the suicidal indicia used to diagnose depression should not be used for aid-in-dying applicants. “if you say to a person who is terminally ill, do you think about dying? well, hell yes i think about dying, i’m dying,” one advocate told me. to complicate things further, the side effects of a terminal illness such as cancer or its treatment—loss of appetite, fatigue, feelings of hopelessness, sleep irregularity—can look exactly like the telltale signs of a major depressive disorder. the challenge for physicians, then, is to determine whether any of these symptoms indicate a depression or another mental disorder, and whether these might be impairing a patient’s judgment. as grube explained: you have to start with the fact that 100 percent of people who are about to die are grieving and sad. if they’re happy that they’re about to die, that’s probably mental illness. but in major depressive disorder, generally it doesn’t just show up willy-nilly when you get terminally ill. it’s been going on for many years. . . . if they’ve been on antidepressants before, that makes me sit up a little straighter and ask harder questions. but if they’re really sad because they got liver cancer, wow, that’s—they should be. it’s horrible. in other words, signs of depression need not, in and of themselves, raise questions about a patient’s ability to make an informed decision or render them otherwise incompetent. but patients have to be capable of grasping the consequences of their actions and show evidence of being cognitively intact. they must repeat what they are asking for at multiple stages during the application process, and often right until they take the medication. in fact, the written request that patients complete ends with the line: “i make this request voluntarily and without reservation, and i accept full moral responsibility for my actions,” thus placing final responsibility for the act back onto the patient. at first glance, the language of informed consent and accountability seems to signify the epitome of a world in which self-optimizing, responsible subjects decide on the manner of their own demise. aid-in-dying requires patients to select an assisted death as an act of rational choice. self-acting citizen-subjects—in consultation with their physicians—are seemingly not just taking private charge of their health and well-being (rose 2007) but are also judiciously choosing the manner of their own dying, eluding the state’s control over death. and yet, in practice, not only is this choice heavily circumscribed by the patient’s already terminal condition but the agency for their death also rests in large part with the state and with physicians as organs of the state. patients who avail themselves of aided dying operate squarely within bureaucratic regulations of what constitutes an authorized death—they must demonstrate that their desire to end their life falls strictly within the limits set by the state. to qualify for oregon’s death with dignity act, a mentally sound adult must have a terminal prognosis of less than six months to live; must be an oregon resident; must have made one written and two oral requests separated by fifteen days; must be able to self-administer the lethal drugs; and must have been independently assessed by two physicians.14 the law thus tightly structures the process through which a specific group of patients already deemed to be dying may end their life. especially in rural parts of oregon east of the cascades and on the coast, patients struggle to find two physicians who will approve their request (or even just enter it into their medical record), particularly as many hospitals there are owned by catholic health systems that bar their clinicians from participating in the law (bannow 2017). between 1998 and the start of 2018, a total of 1,275 patients ended their lives under oregon’s death with dignity act. even if political power in the west concerns itself principally with the administration of life today (foucault 1978), the state retains a substantial hold over death via elaborate regulatory mechanisms and bureaucratic hurdles (see bernstein 2016). in fact, nowadays the law folds the very principle of autonomy directly into a regime of regulation. “from this perspective,” lavi (2005, 167) contends, “autonomy is a more sophisticated way of regulating end-of-life decision making. . . . [the death with dignity act] does not use coercion to impose a regulatory regime on the dying but rather makes use of autonomy to enhance the power of regulation.” as a result, the purity of the desire to die comes under scrutiny by the state, compelling patients to reproduce the proper narratives at the proper time. as dominique memmi (2003, 655) points out: “the historical increase of ‘self-determination’ works through highly unusual avowal procedures: namely, the request made to social actors to subscribe solely to narratives that can be legitimated by the state.” indeed, if it becomes clear that a patient’s motivation for seeking aid-in-dying resides outside the limited scope of the law or is propelled by an ulterior desire to die, their ability to exercise that right can quickly be taken away. in practice, physicians rarely encounter patients whose desire to die is divorced from or independent of their terminal condition—in 2016, oregon doctors made use of the law’s referral clause only 2.5 percent of the time (for 5 out of 204 patients who received prescriptions that year). but when they do, it can leave them deeply conflicted. charles blanke, a physician who heads a research unit on cancer in portland, recounted the case of a patient who had an incurable form of cancer and who did fall within the six-month prognosis that qualified him for aid-in-dying, but whose reasons for wanting to end his life were less conventional: he had six months, but he probably had a good four months of quality time, and i asked—because the state asked me to ask—“why are you interested?” and he said: “i don’t have any friends. i don’t have any real quality of life—not because i’m ill, but for social-economic reasons.” that one was a little challenging to me, because how is that different from someone who’s just sad and wants to commit suicide? except that he technically qualifies for the law. so that one was challenging. i don’t see that very often. blanke referred this patient to a psychiatrist for evaluation who determined that he was competent and not depressed. “or, if he was depressed, it wasn’t affecting his competency,” blanke added. in the end, he agreed to write the prescription. his case crystallizes a central tension faced by administrators of aid-in-dying laws: what constitutes a legitimate reason to die and who has the authority to decide that? within the parameters of the law, one doctor may agree that a patient’s desire to end their life is valid, whereas another might not. for blanke, a patient’s self-determination routinely outweighed his impulse for medical paternalism. “i don’t really feel it’s my job to judge the quality of their reason,” he explained. “my job as an oncologist is to outline the choices, the pluses, and the minuses, the risks, and the benefits, and help in finding the best choice for themselves.” while some of his colleagues would try to coax patients into receiving all the treatments they could right until the end, he never felt it was his place to do so. in fact, belief in a patient’s right for self-determination—the ability to author one’s own dying in the face of impending death—was the single most noticeable quality that prescribing physicians i have met during my research shared. contrary to colleagues whose primary goal was to prolong or to ease a patient’s life and who refused to administer the law, these doctors championed patient autonomy. yet they all recognized limits to this kind of autonomy. grube once shared with me the case of a patient who had been diagnosed with diabetes and who declined to take insulin, as he did not want to face the difficulty of living as a diabetic. he asked grube if he could qualify for aid-in-dying. because diabetes is considered a chronic but not inevitably lethal condition in the united states, grube replied: “you’re not acting kind of appropriately. i’m not going to participate with you in this. my professional integrity rises above your autonomy.” while this case might appear straightforward, a young adult patient refusing chemotherapy for lymphoma for fear of toxicity presents a much tougher call. without treatment, the patient qualifies for the law, but with treatment she might live for another fifty years. “so the question is, do you offer this patient death with dignity?” blanke, who consulted with the patient on her request, wanted to know. “and i will tell you, a lot of my colleagues—even those who support death with dignity—say: ‘no chance whatsoever. why does she want to die? this is suicide. this isn’t medically aided dying.’ but the fact is, under the law it’s not suicide.” hers was another case that the doctor referred for psychiatric consultation, which determined that she was fully competent and understood what she was doing. in the united states, patients have had the right to refuse life-prolonging treatment since 1991, with the enactment of the federal patient self-determination act. doctors do not have to agree with the reasoning behind a patient’s decision to decline care, but they do have to ensure that patients are mentally capable of making it. similarly, in trying to assess who among their aid-in-dying patients is motivated by circumstances outside the intent of the death with dignity act, physicians are attempting to apply the state’s distinction between medical aid-in-dying and a suicidal act—a line that can prove ambiguous for some. for a form of death routinely portrayed as the ultimate manifestation of free will, assisted dying hinges fundamentally on the authorizing power of both medicine and the state. without such endorsement or regulatory oversight, a patient’s wish to end their life threatens to run into the sand. in contrast to suicide, medically assisted deaths allow the state to retain control over who may die and under what circumstances. the state—through its medical professionals—thus preserves the right to determine who gets to opt out of life and to differentiate between a moral and an immoral death. it is precisely the involvement of physicians and state authorities that lends medically assisted deaths a significant measure of social and moral legitimacy—a quality notably absent in popular understandings of suicide and in cases where terminally ill people use “do-it-yourself” methods to end their own lives (richards 2017). authoring death if there is one aspect of assisted dying that seems clearly to reinstate the agentive involvement of the patient, it is the potential for a good death the practice affords, in contrast to either the diminishment wrought by the end of debilitating illness or the classically bad death of suicide. as maurice bloch and jonathan parry (1982, 16–18) note, in many cultures suicide signifies the “supreme example of ‘bad’ death,” as it occurs both at the wrong time and the wrong place and condemns death to the “disorganized wild.” margaret lock (2002, 195), too, writes that it is precisely the uncontrolled and sudden nature of suicides that “produces profound feelings of disorder in those ‘left behind,’ ” as in the testimony of pauline mars, mentioned above. by contrast, advocates position medically aided deaths as tender, orderly, and communal affairs that are usually arranged in advance, staged at home, and carried out with the help of many others in the know.15 as peter reagan, the first oregon physician whose prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates led to a patient’s death in 1998, said to me: “if you’re talking to your family and inviting them to your death and then taking a medicine in the presence of other people, it’s—it’s a whole different thing!” in preparing for an assisted death, patients and families try to realize their own version of a good death—frequently, a quiet (but occasionally festive) home death enacted in front of a privileged audience of loved ones, usually family and sometimes friends. in fact, it is precisely the medical management of aided deaths that allows participants to lay claim to ideas about authorship because of their ability to time and shape such a death and to imbue it with purpose. derianna mooney, a volunteer for end of life choices oregon—an organization that accompanies patients and families on their path to an assisted death—has witnessed hundreds of planned deaths. a vivacious retired nurse in her seventies, she drives across oregon and washington to be with patients during their final hours. to her, a good death is one where everyone who wants to be present has assembled at the bedside, feels prepared, and has reached a level of acceptance: “they’re grieving, they’re horribly grieving, but they are so grateful to be there. it’s something that everybody is doing together. to watch someone die, in front of you, i think is not as hard as what your mind does if they die away from you. it’s a ritual of witnessing.” during one of our talks, mooney brought up the idea of “loving someone out,” referring to all the words and actions family and friends deploy to lift someone over the threshold between life and death. “you’re going to the gate with them and letting them go,” she said, “but you’re nurturing them through the gate.” to illustrate, she mentioned the case of one patient whose entire family had at first opposed her desire for an aided death, but who eventually came together to see her off: and then when she died, she had a wig on—she had her hair all done up in this beautiful wig—she had this beautiful little blue jumpsuit on with jewelry and her nails done. we tell them this is awful-tasting medicine but you only have to do it once and you have to drink it in ninety seconds or less. so she took a sip of it [and said]: “oh! that’s horrible!” and then the whole family, there were five kids there and her husband and her best friend, [they shouted] “drink, drink, drink!” they were chanting her out! of course, family members and significant others do not always agree on the goodness of an assisted death; some have religious objections in principle to the practice, others feel regret that their loved one is dying earlier than they might otherwise, or they are in denial about their impending demise. and yet those close to a patient often put aside their personal objections to support the patient’s request in what robb miller—a longtime advocate for end-of-life choices who lives in seattle—calls “loyal opposition.” “they will remain opposed to it, but they will not interfere,” he told me. “that’s as far as some people can get. … [if they are not present] their loved one might feel abandoned by them, and they might ultimately feel they abandoned their loved one in retrospect.” nonetheless, the social, relational element of dying can make it difficult to predict how those left behind will evaluate a death after the fact and whether they will ever describe it as “good.” in giving death a new script, an assisted death removes many uncertainties of how, when, and where someone will die, allowing patients to try to mend bridges, plan for a particular kind of departure, and reach closure with family members—opportunities often unavailable to those who die suddenly and unexpectedly. linda jensen, also a volunteer for end of life choices oregon, is convinced that most patients opt for an assisted death primarily for the sake of their family. “that’s the gift these people give to their families,” she explained to me. “they don’t hold the mental picture of a loved one in pain or gasping for air or all those things that happen when people die certain kinds of death.” of course, idealized visions of a good death do not always become a reality. while an aided death seldom involves writhing, incontinence, or seizures, there are accounts of patients choking on or regurgitating some of their medication or, in some rare cases, waking up again hours later. still, the perceived authorship afforded by an assisted death comes very close to advocates’ ideal of dying well. conclusion we are witnesses to a moment in which the cultural authority and reach of medicine, in concert with the law, are rewriting not just the ways north americans die—a process that started long ago—but also moralities of dying more broadly. we must therefore take stock of the powerful ability of medicine—as a form of biopolitical governance—to transform the very categories of human existence. when medicine can no longer prolong life, it is called on to facilitate a good death, evidenced by the emergence of the hospice movement, palliative care, and, more recently, assisted-dying regimes. the involvement of medicine in requested deaths has not only augmented their moral legitimacy; it has also led to the construction of a new kind of death that departs in key ways from existing forms of purposive death. for proponents, a medically aided death hinges on a particular relationship between life-limiting illness, agency, and finality that contrasts sharply with the received logic of suicide and that warrants a moral and conceptual category of its own. other sites at which moralities of dying are being reshaped by medicine and the state range from the ongoing abortion controversy (where it is yet unclear if a medical model will prevail) to changing (medical) scripts for the administration of capital punishment to advance directives (or “living wills”). acrimonious discussions around expanding the stipulations of advance directives to include provisions for patients with dementia to opt out of being spoon-fed show how contested ideas of human agency, rationality, and responsibility remain when it comes to matters of living and dying. currently, living wills cover only medical interventions—such as artificial nutrition through a feeding tube—but not processes of regular nourishment. bill harris, a resident of southern oregon, learned this the hard way when he sued the memory care facility that persisted in spoon-feeding his wife nora, whose alzheimer’s had progressed so far that she lost all ability for self-expression and feeding. despite having recorded in her advance directive years ago that she did not want to prolong the process of her illness, such as through assisted feeding, her request was deemed invalid. on the form, bill and nora had mistaken the term “parenteral feeding” (which means feeding through an iv) for “parental feeding.” nora thought she had agreed to cease all spoon-feeding when she could no longer feed herself. yet such an option had never been on the table. here, as in assisted death, the tension between authorship and authorization comes into relief once more as dying patients and their loved ones try to navigate the medico-legal landscape of end-of-life decisions, where human agency remains as diffuse as it does disputed. notes acknowledgments this article benefited from the generous input of numerous readers and interlocutors. primary among them are colleagues and students at brandeis university, tulane university, the university of leipzig, reed college, and portland state university. george paul meiu and ilana cohen read earlier versions and provided vital insights. i am thankful, too, for the detailed and productive feedback of the anonymous reviewers and to the editors of cultural anthropology, who expertly guided this process. special thanks go to heather paxson, whose discerning editorial suggestions helped massage the manuscript into its final form. i am grateful to my research assistants (doug bafford, ilana cohen, alyssa martin, sierra dakin kuiper, and amanda votta) for their diligence with the interview transcriptions. lastly, i am profoundly indebted to my research subjects for their time and expertise, and for trusting me with their stories. 1. the full statement, entitled “ ‘suicide’ is not the same as ‘physician aid in dying’,” can be found at https://www.suicidology.org/statements. 2. honoring the wishes of my interlocutors, i do not utilize pseudonyms in this article, but i do occasionally omit someone’s name for privacy reasons. all interviewees reviewed and approved their quotations. 3. in 1994, oregon became the first u.s. state to legalize aid-in-dying. washington (2008), vermont (2013), california (2015), colorado (2016), the district of columbia (2017), and hawaii (2018) followed suit. in montana, the state decriminalized aid-in-dying in 2009 through a montana supreme court ruling, but it never formally codified the practice. 4. for example, paul bohannan’s (1960) edited volume on african homicide and suicide shows that, in most instances, suicide is not considered a fully volitional act as it depends on the intercession of various supernatural forces. 5. this tension is evident in the literature on rational suicide, which asks whether suicide under certain circumstances—such as old age or terminal illness—can be rational and thus moral, following the kantian equation of rationality with morality (werth 1999; mccue and balasubramaniam 2017). while valuable, this literature does not tend to examine the usefulness of the category of suicide as such, but takes its internal cohesion for granted. 6. for a discussion of the right-to-die language around dignity, see gandsman and burnier 2014. 7. a minority of proponents, among them derek humphry, the founder of the hemlock society, continued using the rhetoric of suicide after most right-to-die activists had abandoned it, arguing that calling a medically aided death anything but suicide was euphemistic. 8. this interview was conducted by matthew e. simek as part of a project by the oregon health and science university oral history program on june 4, 2008. in 2012, goodwin used the death with dignity act himself, after being diagnosed with a rare neurodegenerative disease. 9. in 2017, 91 percent of patients who used the death with dignity act were on hospice, meaning that theirs was not an either-or decision. 10. see https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/health-system-services/medical-assistance-dying-interim-report-sep-2017.html for the full report. 11. there is a wide spectrum of positions among proponents and dissidents of assisted-dying laws in the united states. my use of such descriptors as advocate or opponent is not meant to deny this complexity but to identify common positions held by those i encountered during my research. 12. as they became cognizant of its alienating effect on members of the hospice community, practitioners dropped the term hastening. most hospices conceive of their mission as neither prolonging life nor hastening death. 13. for example, the websites of two major right-to-die organizations in the united states—compassion and choices and the death with dignity national center—foreground the language of rights and choices. 14. oregon’s death with dignity act (and similar statutes elsewhere in the united states) is the most restrictive assisted-dying law in the world. countries such as belgium, the netherlands, and canada allow for more open-ended prognoses that include various degenerative conditions and, in some cases, psychological suffering. all three countries also offer the possibility of a lethal injection in lieu of self-administration. 15. there are, of course, suicides that are elaborately ritualized, meticulously planned, and also collective. many of these deaths, however, are often regarded not as suicides, but as acts of martyrdom (nanninga 2016). references asad, talal 2007 on suicide bombing. new york: columbia university press. badham, paul 2009 is there a christian case for assisted dying? voluntary euthanasia reassessed. london: society for promoting christian knowledge. bannow, tara 2017 “rural oregonians still face death with dignity barriers: roadblocks abound in rural areas.” bend bulletin, august 14. https://www.bendbulletin.com/health/5512373-151/rural-oregonians-still-face-death-with-dignity-barriers 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subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. schotsmans, paul t. 2003 “relational responsibility, and not only stewardship. a roman catholic view on voluntary euthanasia for dying and non-dying patients.” christian bioethics 9, nos. 2–3: 285–98. https://doi.org/10.1093/chbi.9.2.285.30288. werth, james l., jr., ed. 1999 contemporary perspectives on rational suicide. philadelphia: brunner/mazel. willerslev, rane 2009 “the optimal sacrifice: a study of voluntary death among the siberian chukchi.” american ethnologist 36, no. 4: 693–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01204.x. predatory fleas, sterile flies, and the settlers: agricultural infrastructure and the challenge of alien-native dichotomies in israel/palestine cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 87-112, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.05 predatory fleas, sterile flies, and the settlers: agricultural infrastructure and the challenge of alien-native dichotomies in israel/palestine liron shani the hebrew university of jerusalem https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7935-2724 on a warm winter’s day in 2015, i join orit, a pest inspector, for a tour around one of the fifteen bell pepper hothouses assigned to her supervision in the mid-arava/arabah, a desert area in the south of israel/palestine. inside the greenhouse, the temperature is even higher than outside. orit tells me that her job is to trace and identify “pests”—insects that damage crops in the fields—and to recommend a pertinent course of action. orit thoroughly surveys the greenhouse and then starts weaving through the rows of peppers. soon, she points out one specimen, gesturing to where the pepper joins the plant. i try to discern what she is pointing at, but all i can see are silvery marks on the pepper’s bottom. but orit recognizes the signs. she marks the plant with a colored ribbon that indicates “contaminated” and announces to me, “western flower thrips,” before moving on. several days later, i am back inside the greenhouse, this time with asaf, a farmer and the owner of the greenhouse. asaf is relatively new to the area, having lived there only seven years. as i watch, he picks up a small white flask and shakes brown specks on the leaves of plants singled out by orit. the specks come alive. the “specks” are orius, predatory fleas and “natural enemies” of the western flower thrip, considered one of the most harmful pests (mezik in hebrew) for bell peppers and tomatoes. the thrips “invaded” the arava/arabah in the early 1980s, arriving with the introduction of intensive agriculture. orius and other insects contribute to the growers’ efforts to thwart damage to their crops. in the professional jargon of farmers and ecologists, these insects are known as the “beneficials”—or “good insects”—as they fight pests like thrips. orius, too, is an invasive species of sorts, but it is a more recent immigrant than the thrips. nor did it arrive by accident. the abilities of orius to reduce the thrip population have become known around the world in recent decades, and they have been brought to the arava/arabah in collaboration with farmers, scientists, and the state. orius stock is grown in special factories of a private company in israel and sold in small bottles for use in the fields. a few days later asaf sends me a grainy photograph of orius feeding on thrips by sucking out the latter’s bodily fluids. for asaf, the fight against the thrips has proved successful so far; it will allow him to sell his produce to european markets. orius, like aphids, sterile flies, and other insects now mobilized for “biological pest control,” operate as a major part of the more-than-human “agricultural infrastructure” that allows settlement and agriculture in the arava/arabah region to continue today.1 figure 1. the orius, senior representatives of the “arthropoda mercenaries.” photo by jack dykinga, united states department of agriculture. in this article, i follow predatory fleas and other insects, as well as the farmers themselves, to examine the ecological and political impacts of zionist settlement of the arava/arabah desert and the fluidity of definitions of alien and native species. i use the term agricultural infrastructure to describe the network of connections that make agriculture possible, beyond the system’s physical components such wells, pipes, and wooden pallets. i show agricultural infrastructure to be a political enterprise: it establishes hierarchical boundaries between communities and strengthens land control. it also establishes and maintains human–non-human boundaries, often resulting in compounding ecological harm. yet a focus on the various dimensions of agricultural infrastructure within a given context of settler colonialism contributes a more nuanced approach than forcing dichotomous contrasts between alien versus native, settler versus local. spanning roughly 1.5 million dunams (about 625 square miles), the central arava regional council comprises 13 percent of israel’s area (within its pre-1967 borders). some 3,500 jewish israelis,2 constituting 0.03 percent of the israeli population, reside in seven rural communities that stretch along the jordanian border and subsist primarily on agriculture—principally bell peppers and other vegetables for export. as someone born and raised in the arava/arabah area,3 i was not always aware of the socio-cultural implications of the settlement and certainly was not cognizant of the “natives” issue. in the early 1970s, my parents moved to the region and began to engage in agriculture as part of the jewish settlement (moshav). with their friends, they considered themselves “pioneers,” sent by the state to fight the wilderness and transform it into a prosperous agricultural sector. we, the second and third generation of jewish settlers, considered ourselves desert children, natives of the region. the idea of defending the desert is embedded in our identities; even though the 1948 war pushed bedouin out of the region, their traces remain: in place names, regional folklore, and the dread that if we do not hold onto the land, they will (re)conquer it. as a child, i had little interest in the question of when settlers become natives (mamdani 1998; zreik 2016). my friends and i considered the desert our natural home. only during my university years did i start digging deeper, reading, studying, and exploring the past and present to comprehend the tensions inherent in our activities in the arava. in the process of my training and work as an anthropologist, i went through a perceptual transformation from a settler who considers himself a native to a researcher who critically investigates the privileges and power relations embedded in that settler ideology. at the same time, as i learned more, i became increasingly uncomfortable with some aspects of the paradigm of settler colonialism. despite the similarities between the theories and the reality i knew, the writing on settler colonialism seemed too dichotomous, not nuanced enough, and often indifferent to the existing spectrum between natives and others. i found ecology to be an excellent lens through which to examine both my perceptions and the general logic of settler colonialism. local and global ecologies have been significantly influenced by settlement projects. several scholars have shown how such projects, from north america throughout australia and africa and all the way to the middle east, have sought to re-engineer climate, creating a new environment (braverman 2021; davis 2015). others have demonstrated how plants and agriculture have been used to restore indigenous identity in settler-colonial settings (monterescu and handel 2019; sabbagh-khoury 2022; tesdell 2017). following the perspectives of tomaz mastnak, julia elyachar, and tom boellstorff (2014) as well as stefan helmreich (2005), i began to consider invasive and local species, alien and endemic species, and to examine critically how humans identify, comprehend, and act toward them, especially within the paradigm of settler colonialism. anthropologists have also played with the comparisons between the discourse on invasive species and settlement projects (raffles 2010; comaroff and comaroff 2001; bocci 2017), specifically in the space of israel/palestine (braverman 2009, 2021; gutkowski 2021; salih and corry 2022). in addition, the definition of what is considered an invasive species and what indigenous has been at the center of social research for several years. for example, david s. trigger and lesley head (2010) analyzed cultural differences between different groups in australia in their definitions of “invasive” and “native,” while helmreich (2005) showed how scientists’ cultural perceptions affect the different definitions and classification of invasive species, as well as the impact of politics and history on the practices against such species. following this, mastnak, elyachar, and boellstorff (2014) question the effectiveness of distinguishing between native and other plants as a way of understanding the relationship between the human and the non-human in a colonial context and in the anthropocene era, while charles r. warren (2021) examines the use of the terms native and alien that create—in his view—a cultural dichotomy based on western ideas. elsewhere, i continue this approach and trace the cultural, social, and political meanings of the question of when an alien species becomes a native, showing how the definitions of foreigner, invader, native, and citizen are sometimes cultural, political, and temporary (kolodny and shani, in preparation). in this sense, the question of time forms part of politics. when does an alien species stop being considered as such and by whom? yet while researchers of the non-human agree on the ambiguity and complexity of these categories, when we return to the human and settler colonialism, a rigid binary tends to remain. the question of nativeness, or the desire of the settlers to become natives, lies at the heart of many settler-colonial projects (wolfe 2006; zreik 2016; sabbagh-khoury 2022; kotef 2020). although some consider the israeli case unique because of the claim to be continuing a mythical and historical past rather than one of new settlers (busbridge 2018), the modern zionist project shares many characteristics with other models of settler colonialism, especially in an ongoing project of “becoming native” (zreik 2016; evri and kotef 2022). and like other settler projects, the zionist emphasis lies on intensive agriculture operations and endeavors to both connect and control nature and the desert (salih and corry 2022; davis 2015). the discussion that developed around mahmood mamdani’s (1998) “when does a settler become a native?” and raef zreik’s (2016) response suggests that only a radical change in the structure of the settler state—and in the settlement practices themselves—can dissolve the dichotomous categories of native and settler. that is, as yuval evri and hagar kotef (2022) rightly point out, such claims do not specify the ways in which the settler becomes a native, but rather the ways in which that distinction is made less significant. evri and kotef, on the other hand, challenge the dichotomy themselves by asking the opposite question. by focusing on jews who lived in palestine before the zionist era and analyzing the connections between language, land, and identity, they show how natives became settlers. further, they point out the fluidity and temporality of the definitions of indigenous and settler and how politics, history, and boundary work influence them.4 the ethnographic research on which i largely draw has played out in what donna j. haraway (2003) refers to as “contact zones”—zones in which encounters and interrelations take place between different species who share neither language nor characteristics but who nevertheless affect one another. in the arava region, such zones mainly comprise the fields and hothouses adjacent to settlements. following daniel miller (1997),5 i trace the multiple appearances of agricultural infrastructure, which includes different players, human and non-human alike. my fieldwork was carried out from 2013 to 2016 and consisted of more than fifty in-depth interviews with arava growers, residents, state officials, scientists, and officials of environmental organizations. i conducted it alongside the daily work of farmers, sessions, different events, conferences, and meetings. this research allowed me to draw a more comprehensive picture of human–environment relations in the arava, including the forces that forge them. figure 2. map of the central arava regional council. on infrastructure and agricultural infrastructure as a conceptual tool, “infrastructure” brings several heterogeneous elements together. the framework of environmental or ecological infrastructures allows us to examine the making and remaking of worlds that are at once material and semiotic, inhabited not only by people but also by a multiplicity of non-humans (barua 2021; jensen and morita 2015). scholars have conceptualized infrastructure as a large technical system, an ecology, a site of (geo)political struggle, and an axis that connects nature and culture (bishara 2015; stamatopoulou-robbins 2019; krieg, barua, and fisher 2020). since the 1990s, the term has become a key concept in environmental management, as the anthropologist ashley carse shows (2012). carse uses environmental infrastructure as an analytical term in his study of the panama canal to signify the transformation of nature into a coordinated system of service distribution. other anthropologists have deepened the connection between infrastructure, environment, and politics, including sophia stamatopoulou-robbins’s (2019) work on waste in palestine, caterina scaramelli’s (2019) on swamps in turkey, or jessica barnes’s (2017) on irrigation infrastructure in egypt. however, the environmental transformation inherent in agriculture, especially intensive agriculture in desert areas, generates a different level of environmental and political change. while other environmental infrastructures are more concerned with disasters, complex structures, or energy resources (jensen and morita 2015; adalet 2022), agricultural infrastructure concerns itself with the connections between water, land, crops, workers, and technical equipment, as well as with territorial control, environmental transformation, and setting national and geopolitical borders. as a geopolitical enterprise, it establishes boundaries between various communities while also maintaining and establishing human−non-human boundaries. it describes the political, economic, and cultural networks that motivate and sustain agricultural practice, as well as the physical and more-than-human links. on one level, agricultural infrastructure elucidates the political and material efforts to divide human from human—creating borders and hierarchies between different groups around accessibility, control of land and the means of production, and regional and global politics. it represents nationalist and colonialist conceptions alongside an environmental vision of making the “desert bloom” and the appropriation of space and time (davis 2015; gutkowski 2018). but it also deals with concrete and material representations: fences, people, fields, lighting, and the army. agricultural infrastructure allows the creation of a continuum of jewish-zionist communities along both internal and external frontiers. it also allows for a physical spatial presence against what the settlers and the israeli state regard as dangerous groups—such as the bedouin within israel’s internal borders or their entry, including from across israel’s border with jordan. on another level, agricultural infrastructure makes it possible to control and change nature and the desert, turning it green and making it a productive space. but such changes carry with them unintended consequences. the creation of intensive agriculture, irrigation systems, the use of chemicals, the utilization of natural resources, and more lead to changes in the local environment, such as the eradication of many habitats and the creation of others, dramatically affecting biodiversity. agricultural infrastructure is followed by alien and invasive species that displace native species, such that even the use of biological pesticides usually fails to restore the previous ecological balance. in this manner, alien species, human and non-human, rely on infrastructure as they move from space to space (gutkowski 2021; barua 2021). but as many researchers have already shown, one of the conceptual strengths of infrastructure is that it is not frozen, but changes, develops, and reshapes over time (barnes 2017). so, too, does agricultural infrastructure, adapting itself according to economic, geopolitical, technological, and social needs. agriculture as a means of maintaining internal and external borders “agriculture protects the state borders,” reads a sign on the arava highway, the road that runs through the region from north to south. this appears like something of an anachronism for most of the israeli general public, when forces such as neoliberalism are challenging the importance of agriculture for israeli society and eroding its political power (shnider 2014; kaminer 2022b). yet this sentiment still resonates with the self-identity of the region’s jewish residents. for israelis, agriculture has played, and still constitutes, an important role in maintaining the state’s external and internal borders. figure 3. “agriculture protects the state borders.” photo by liron shani. as in other instances of settler colonialism, the desert, like the land of israel at large in the early days of zionism, was perceived as an empty “wasteland,” its fate lying in the hands of humans (tesdell 2017; alatout 2009). agriculture, with the support of state and military agencies, was the main practice employed to realize the dreams of “making the desert bloom,”6 while drawing both internal and external national boundaries in the process (monterescu and handel 2019; shani 2018b). spurred by imperialist views of an overarching agricultural infrastructure (tesdell 2017) and by colonialist concepts of struggles against desertification (alatout 2009; davis 2015), organized farming proved a key to the success of the settlement project and so developed advanced technology to enable it (shani 2018a; tubi 2021). scores of agricultural communities were set up close to frontier lines, informed by the conviction that their presence would assert israel’s borders more effectively than fences. following this logic, settlements were also established in the arava desert along the israeli-jordanian border, which was established after the 1948 war and reaffirmed in the 1994 peace agreements. initial attempts to establish jewish communities in the arava in 1948 failed because of harsh environmental conditions. only in the early 1960s, when the israeli military began establishing semi-civilian outposts along the border, did a cadre of young zionist idealists manage to realize their ideals of cultivating the desert. eventually, those outposts became a permanent agricultural settlement enterprise, expanding under the national conviction that securing the nascent state’s borders meant populating outlying areas. echoing what we would now term settler-colonialist logic and celebrated as pioneers and the embodiment of zionist values, these young farmers enjoyed considerable moral and financial support, with the state investing huge amounts of capital in the development of agricultural infrastructure, which included, among other things, deep-water drilling, cultivating agricultural areas, workers, the deployment of irrigation infrastructure, the paving of roads, the construction of dams, and encouragement of financial investment, all backing the boundary drawn between israel and jordan. at the same time, agriculture served—and continues to serve—to maintain internal borders, within what are defined as the borders of the state, or “inside the green line.” the relationship between humans and land in the arava dates back thousands of years. during the sixteenth century, the saidiyin bedouin tribe migrated to the area from the sinai and arabian peninsulas, in search of new grazing grounds, which they found on both sides of arava/arabah creek (bailey 2006). elsewhere in the negev, north of the arava, twentieth-century battles for israeli statehood led to the flight and forcible expulsion of bedouin inhabitants, as well as to protracted territorial struggles between the bedouin and israel (mckee 2016; abu-rabia 2008; nasasra 2017). while no significant conflict took place in the arava, after the drawing of the border with jordan in wadi arabah, bedouin tribes were denied the right to return to the western arava creek. consequently, there are almost no bedouin in the central arava region. thus, unlike in other parts of the negev, almost no friction exists between them and the jewish settlers today. nonetheless, the jewish residents remain afraid for their future in the arava. time and again in their conversations and practices, local growers cite the threat of those they perceive as their national competitors, the bedouin, despite the latter’s absence from the region. as many of the residents told me, “if we’re not here, someone else will grab hold of the land.” the introduction of agricultural infrastructure as a means of defining the national and internal borders contributed to the transformation of farm practices in the region. in the early years of settlement, the ethic of manual labor was prioritized. that is, the settlers themselves worked the land. however, as communities grew, processing technology improved production efficiencies, challenging the ideal of independence. initially, jewish volunteers and backpackers from abroad provided additional labor, but since the mid-1980s, when the economic crisis was accompanied by the massive entry of a neo-liberal approach, things have changed. government support decreased and growing competition in european and world markets indicated agricultural infrastructure as no longer adequate. vegetable cultivation, then as now, proved labor-intensive, and exposure to the global market made cheap labor necessary. currently, the agricultural infrastructure in the arava relies heavily on the thai labor force, which began to supplant volunteers in the 1990s.7 thai workers arrive for a set period and return home when their visas expire; in recent decades, they have made up about half of the population in the area. thus, agricultural infrastructure originally based on the labor of the settlers themselves changed dramatically within thirty years, encompassing an array of employers and landowners versus temporary workers who could not become local (kaminer 2022a; shnider 2014). although agriculture would not be possible without the thai workers, the israeli farmers still see themselves as the pioneers, the guardians of the state borders, and those who responsible for transforming a supposed wasteland into a green space of productivity. now, almost sixty years after the establishment of the first jewish communities in the region, the residents feel that they have changed the desert completely. moreover, they have made it their home. but even before settlement, the desert never constituted an actual wasteland. alongside its human residents, the mid-arava sustains a vast diversity of non-human inhabitants, permanent or temporary, migratory passersby, and some recent arrivals who have made the region their home (shani 2018a). but the belief in the need to change the desert has led settlers to ignore everything that predated their arrival (davis 2015; dromi and shani 2020).8 water, land, technology, government support, massive capital, and cheap foreign labor have been some of the most prominent components of the agricultural infrastructure introduced and supported by settlement, but it, too, continues to change. in the early 2000s, settlers realized that their heretofore successful farming practices required adjustment, this time through the recruitment of non-human players. sterile flies, global friction, and cross-border struggles the small aircraft takes off at dawn, as the sun is just rising over the mountains of edom. a few minutes later, it sets its course, flying back and forth across the jordanian border several times as it starts releasing its load. thousands of black “specks” pour from the aircraft to the desert below. only as the swarm of specks nears the ground can one finally make out what they are: insects. an awful lot of insects. the aircraft is scattering flies over the arava. these are no ordinary flies, but sterilized male mediterranean fruit flies, or ceratitis capitata. the flies are yet another major example of insects that have become part of the regional agricultural infrastructure. the sterile males, whose mating with female flies produces sterile eggs, allow the mediterranean fruit fly population to be controlled and reduced to the point of declaring the arava a fly-free zone. such a declaration enables agricultural exports to countries like the united states or japan, which enforce a strict no-entry zone for crops contaminated by the mediterranean fruit fly. although battlefield metaphors usually accompany struggles against insects (russell 2001; reis-castro 2021), the struggle against the flies in the arava has been mobilized as a symbol of the peace processes between humans (gutkowski 2021). it is not only flies that you have in the arava, however. different insects are present at any given moment, in their thousands, in the air and on the ground: bees, flies, ants, and butterflies. many insects live and buzz around us, in what the anthropologist hugh raffles (2010, 7) refers to as “aerial plankton.” when we talk about human–animal relations, we generally refer to our relationship with pets or other common animals. but a large proportion of those animals that come into contact with humans fail to garner scholarly and public attention, although they can occasionally play a substantial role in driving historical events or cultural and institutional changes (mitchell 2002; reis-castro 2021; tubi 2021). typically, arava growers have held negative attitudes toward insects. they perceived most as pests, creatures that harmed crops, and carriers of diseases, a stain on the quality of their life. for the most part, efforts have aimed to get rid of them, drive them away, or reduce their presence. flies, however, evoke different sentiments. most humans dislike them. even among insect lovers, they fail to arouse favor. yet in the arava, inhabitants see them as part of life in the region, part of this place. as one veteran farmer in the area remarked, “this is not a sanitary issue at all. it’s a social issue. where there are people, there are flies. where there are no people, there are no flies.” but while the housefly is seen as a nuisance that one can put up with, the mediterranean fruit fly had hardly made its presence known. few had even heard of its existence, let alone that it posed any threat, until the demands of the american market and economic aspirations to sell crops to the united states entered the scene. yellowish-brown in color, the mediterranean fruit fly measures about five millimeters in length. despite its name, it probably originated in west africa, “invading” israel early in the twentieth century. it reached the arava with settlement in the late 1970s, pushing out local fly species and reducing their habitats. the fly is considered a “multi-host”: the female deposits her eggs in manifold types of fruit and vegetables. hundreds of fruit species have been recorded as serving as hosts, but as far as growers are concerned, the main threat is to citrus and deciduous fruits such as pears and guava. the fly also makes use of vegetables like tomatoes and bell peppers, though it causes little visible damage to these crops. the fly’s eggs, larvae, and pupae lie hidden (inside fruit or beneath the soil); only adults are exposed to ordinary methods of pest control, making them hard to tackle with standard chemical sprays. due to its imposing “invasive” powers, the fly is considered a “quarantine pest” by several countries that constitute agricultural export destinations. this means that once identified, fly-contaminated crops are summarily quarantined and destroyed. in the early 1990s, when arava growers began to consider exporting crops to the united states, it soon transpired that one threshold condition was the reduction of the mediterranean fruit fly population. “it was not until the americans told us about a fly problem that we realized there was a problem. it had never been a bell pepper pest. literature informed us that bell pepper was a [fly] host, but up until then we never felt its presence,” reports alona, who spent many years working in agricultural instruction in the arava. “but then, once they told us, we started looking into it, conducted experiments with academia, and realized the fly was actually present in the region and the bell pepper was actually a host, though you could hardly tell.” the arava had to rid itself of the fly. in modern agriculture, growers rely heavily on their export markets, which are shaped by geopolitical elements beyond the control of the grower, community, or even the state (shani 2018a). throughout most of my years conducting fieldwork, the arava’s target market comprised europe and, to a lesser degree, the united states. the quality requirements for some of these markets include growing parameters, appearance, and disease control. in addition, many requirements pertain to how crops must be grown, particularly efforts to regulate agriculture-environmental relations. export requirements vary from one country to another, but generally demand the reduced use of harmful pesticides and fertilizers, reduced waste production, and an “environmental” management of landfills, among other things. the stricter american market has additional regulations for the removal of any threat of fruit fly damage to crops. the so-called environmental enforcement by european and u.s. retail chains has also had a major effect on agricultural-environmental relations in the arava (shani 2018a).9 in an interview in 2015, yuval cohen, a representative of one of the environmental organizations in the arava, pointed out the driving logic of change in the arava: “if a european buyer comes along, saying: clean up your act by tomorrow, or you’re not going to export any produce to europe, i bet you they’ll be all getting their greenpeace and nature and parks authority member cards the very next day. why? because at the end of the day, it’s your bank account that matters.” such was the case with the mediterranean fruit fly. to be allowed to export fresh fruit to the united states, the fly had to be eliminated from the entire region. following discussions, political pressure by arava locals, and other struggles, the fly was declared a national-level pest. in other words, the fly, which locals had hitherto viewed as a tolerable nuisance or a non-issue, became an enemy to be eliminated because of external economic pressures exerted by the export markets. thus, the state helped establish a new infrastructure to support agriculture in the arava, enabling the marketing of agricultural produce to the united states. since the late 1990s, the “zahav” project has been operating in the region. the project, whose name is a hebrew acronym of “mediterranean fruit fly control in the arava,” is a collaboration between the ministry of agriculture and the so-called flagship project of the regional council and agricultural r&d. as part of the project, thousands of sterile male flies, bred in a special system, are scattered across the entire region. the fly-breeding process involves genetic intervention to eliminate the females, as well as radioactive radiation (rossler, ravins, and gomes 2000). as part of the process, scientists have developed a variety of fly with females who are more sensitive to heat than males: the breeding stages see the fly eggs placed in 34-degree celsius water, in which only the males can survive. the surviving fly eggs are grown on fermented food strata, where they morph into larvae, then pupae, with every stage controlled and supervised. the pupae are painted fluorescent red, traces of which are left on the adult flies’ heads, later allowing the sterile males to be told apart from their “natural” counterparts under uv illumination. the male flies also undergo an additional stage, where they are subjected to hypoxia (a kind of coma induced from lack of oxygen) and put into a radioactive sterilization facility, a technique co-developed with the iaea (international atomic energy agency). i join haim, an arava grower who coordinates the egg-breeding project, to learn more about the process. the strongest thing that hits me as i get into his car is the smell: the smell of the fly bags, with their substrates—the source of the odor, combined with their pheromones—as the flies remain under hypoxia. haim laughs at my disgusted face. “everyone gets used to it, eventually,” he says, patting my shoulder. he and his staff grow the pupae in special rooms, also dominated by an unbearable smell. several days after the eggs have hatched, haim shows me how he moves them to sleep-inducing refrigeration, from which they will be awakened as they are tossed out of an aircraft flying above the arava. the sterile flies are scattered on both sides of the israeli-jordanian border, in collaboration with the kingdom of jordan. fly-scattering is a year-round operation, performed in the early morning, the peak time of the flies’ sexual activity. the sterile males, scattered in a ratio of about fifty specimens to every “natural” male fly, or roughly 14 million flies per week, step into the shoes of the natural wild flies, and mate with the females. any eggs deposited by female flies following this mating session are infertile, decimating the fly population. and so, the domesticated sterile fly precipitates the extinction of its supposedly local counterpart, which actually invaded the region following humans, and which, in turn, took the place of the “native” fly, which, too, probably came from another area. the sterile fly disrupts the “authentic” “alien” fly and thus highlights the dangers of assuming dichotomous definitions of a native in the face of an invader, challenging the way we perceive them. the fly-scattering project has been hailed a success, and the ministry of agriculture expresses great pride in it, especially in the collaboration with jordan. the project has subsequently ventured into other regions of israel, and even yielded (partial) collaboration with the palestinian authority. in reality, though, the collaboration with jordan also remained partial, and in recent years it has been virtually non-existent. nevertheless, it remains one of the first things described in any article or press release about the project, and it could be the very thing that keeps it alive, now that export to the united states has become an increasingly less lucrative prospect. as natalia gutkowski (2021, 149) points out, israel has led and mastered this technology and thus succeeded in affirming colonial control over the territory in a way that shows how the fight against pests forms part of a political, organizational, and techno-scientific endeavor (russell 2001; tubi 2021). as elsewhere, the war on pests is used to strengthen the justification for the settlement regime (mitchell 2002; russell 2001) and constitutes a continuation of the expansion of agricultural infrastructure. but the local twist in our story is how the infrastructure for combating pests as a platform for international cooperation and strengthening peace relations actually enhances the control mechanisms of settlement colonialism. figure 4. agricultural areas on the banks of wadi arava, the border with jordan. photo by noam ofran. predatory fleas and invasive thrips: biological pesticides as an agricultural infrastructure as in other agricultural areas around the world, the fight against harmful insects, which “invaded” the area as part of the environmental changes following the settlers’ agriculture, took the form of spraying toxic chemicals. these chemicals have significantly damaged the environment, degraded and polluted water resources, and harmed the health of the growers themselves. even though they were aware of the damage caused by toxic agents, people in the arava nevertheless continued to use them as an essential part of their agricultural infrastructure, assuming it was the only way to succeed in agricultural production. external pressure only precipitated the ensuing change. as part of the “environmental enforcement” of european retail chains, to which arava farmers tried to sell their produce, there was a growing demand to cease using chemicals. to meet those standards, farmers introduced biological pest control, pitting “good insects” against “bad insects.” and so, the aphids, bugs, sterile flies, and others grown in specialty plants have become the farmers’ allies, and part of the agricultural infrastructure. nowadays, biological or integrated (chemical-biological) pest control makes up almost 90 percent of the overall pest control on the arava bell pepper farms. to understand the change of attitudes toward insects among arava growers, we must go back to the so-called contact zones, back to asaf’s hothouse. it is april and palpably hot, with the thermometer inside hitting almost 40 degrees celsius, even at this early morning hour. asaf has invited me over again, to show me how the beneficials have gained the upper hand over the hothouse’s pests. originally from the center of israel, asaf arrived here in 2010 following his partner, michal. born in the arava, michal is my classmate and a second-generation grower in the arava. asaf and michal met when they were both studying computer science in tel aviv. until two years ago, asaf was working with oded, michal’s father, who came to the area almost sixty years ago as a member of the founding generation of a settlement in the region. but the couple had recently bought their own property, roughly fifty dunams of farmland (0.05 square kilometers), where they grow thirty dunams (0.03 square kilometers) of hothouse bell peppers and twenty dunams (0.02 square kilometers) of date palms. just as the western flower thrips came to the region with the intensive agriculture of oded, my parents, and their friends when they established the zionist settlement in the arava, orius and the other insects forming biological pesticides came to the arava at the same time as asaf. by 2010, when asaf and michal started large-scale farming, the growing culture that awaited them differed from that of our parents, with biological pest control a key feature. but the beginning of the era of biological pest control proved tough. in the late 1980s, most growers struggled to ditch their familiar pesticides, some of which were highly toxic not only to the environment but to the growers themselves—a fact still unknown back then. collaboration between inquisitive agricultural instructors, scientists from academia, and a handful of growers who grasped the potential of this approach led to the early “good insects” experiments. “it was hard to convince growers that if i scattered insects in their field, this was actually supposed to help them,” alona, a veteran member of the agricultural instruction team in the arava, relates. “it was only after they had seen this working in other fields that attitudes started to change … but particularly after authorities started banning the use of different hazardous materials.” government regulations, coupled with market demands (first abroad and then later in israel) accelerated the introduction of “arthropoda mercenaries” and changed perception of insects. following the tour of the hothouse, asaf and i go out for some fresh air. suddenly asaf points at the small aircraft hovering above the moshav’s fields. “there you go,” he says, “these are your friends,” as i watch in wonder as the aircraft scatters the sterile flies. “your friends, my soldiers,” he smiles. though meant as a humorous remark, asaf’s reference to the sterile flies, the product of scientific and technological developments, as “his soldiers” demonstrates the map of the human-insect relationship in the arava, signaling once again the israeli military discourse and the integration of the non-human in power relations (russell 2001; braverman 2021). the insects are enlisted in the battle to secure the land. indeed, the “zahav” project and the use of biological pest control mark the move away from the monolithic lumping of all insects together as pests, pointing to changes in the human-insect relationship around the arava. but for most of the region’s growers, the use of orius and sterile flies offers yet another tool in the toolbox designed to maximize agricultural capacity. rather than pesticides, they resort to a small flask full of insects. under pressure from consumers and regulations to reduce pesticide use, they found another tool for this end. that is, the shift toward biological pest control was neither a voluntary initiative nor the result of ideological change, but rather an economic inevitability. likewise, the struggle against the mediterranean fruit fly resulted from the external enforcement of new regulations. as rafi grosglik (2021) shows in his studies on organic food, most growers who practice organic farming in israel view organic agriculture as yet another branch of conventional agriculture. the adoption of arthropoda mercenaries can be viewed similarly. pesticides, as well as the orius and the sterile male flies, belong in the same interpretive framework of means of production. in this sense, asaf’s use of the term soldiers can be compared to the common branding of biological pest-control insects as “mercenaries” (who are there for financial gain). this difference is all the more interesting in our case, where those “fighters” (soldiers or mercenaries) never chose to join this war; someone else made them this way (literally, by genetic and other means). the “beneficial” insects and sterile flies allow growers to survive in the global, competitive agricultural world. and yet, insects are not mere partners-soldiers in the economic war. they also partake in the political-colonial struggle, defending the state against the perceived threat of the bedouin. as already noted, the bedouin were driven out of the region after 1948, and the region has since been almost exclusively jewish.10 but local growers time and again mention the threat of the bedouin—the national other within the internal border11—in their conversations and practices. even though both agriculture and its growers are falling out of grace with israeli society, the sign at the entrance to one community still reminds us that “agriculture protects the state borders.” the good insects, in this sense, also form part of the settlement colonialism project by allowing the ongoing agricultural livelihood and presence of jewish growers in their region. as gutkowski (2021) demonstrates, the political use of non-human things such as insects and viruses allows the preservation and redefinition of national and ethnic boundaries. the inclusion of insects within the agricultural infrastructure allows israelis to feel secure of their hold on the land, strengthening the borders, inter-state and human–non-human alike. agricultural infrastructure and the question of the alien versus the native in this article, i have shown how different global and local interests challenge the agricultural infrastructure and the material and ideological spectrum it enables. at the same time, i have shown how the people of the arava, drawing on both human and non-human actors, adjust their agricultural infrastructure to adapt to new realities. beyond that, tracking sterile flies, predatory fleas, and other insects allows me to challenge some of the tenets of settlement-colonialism approaches, and to sketch a more nuanced analysis. while we recognize the fluidity, political nature, and temporality of the definitions of what is considered invasive/alien species versus native species (helmreich 2005; warren 2021; scoville 2019; lien 2015), we can exercise similar tools even when the discussion comes to humans (evri and kotef 2022). with the help of the theoretical platform of infrastructure, it is possible to bridge the discussion between the human and the non-human within the context of settlement colonialism. agricultural infrastructure can lead to other things, create connections between things, and change the social and political order (adalet 2022). in the arava, changes have occurred due to both external and internal pressures. it is influenced by geopolitical, economic, environmental, and personal interests and is both flexible and changing. it involves the common technologies of water-pumping and irrigation systems, the conversion of natural areas to agriculture, and sand filling, but it also involves economic subsidies from the state or donations, political ties and informal networks, cheap labor and mercenary arthropods. despite the many changes and challenges, the role of agricultural infrastructure persists, preserving the boundaries, privileges, and hierarchy between the ruling group and others, in both the human and non-human realms. on one level, the agricultural infrastructure sustains, and even bolsters, the settlement colonialism project. the very presence of agriculture, the physical presence of the settlements and agricultural areas, all reinforce the national boundaries and underscore the spatial separation of different ethnic groups. at another level, agricultural infrastructure enables (or even requires) environmental change; it allows humans to change the desert into a different environment. in the more-than-human dimensions, the agriculture-protects-our-borders ideology operates not only in the human geopolitical arena but also by fixing the boundaries between the human and the non-human and between nature and culture. it allows humans to control nature, subordinate the desert to culture, and perpetuate the separation between the human and the non-human. the advent of orius and other beneficial insects has changed attitudes toward insects among the arava growers. they mostly consider the “natural” or “wild” insects “bad,” while their human-made counterparts, or insects that have undergone some domestication process, are considered “good.” in this way, the agricultural infrastructure helps preserve the difference between those perceived as “good” and “beneficial” and those perceived as “bad” and “harmful”; between different nationalities and ethnic groups; between the human and the non-human; between culture and nature. thus, the “soldier” insects become part of the infrastructure, part of the national and environmental effort to hold onto the desert, and at the same time, change it—to make “the desert bloom.” in this way, nature becomes part of politics and geopolitics, part of the israeli system of political and environmental control. agricultural infrastructure enables the continuation of the project of land holdings and the regime of privileges, alongside a deepening of the desire to become a native. asking the question of when an invasive species becomes a native (kolodny and shani, in preparation), as opposed to the question of when a settler becomes a native (mamdani 1998; zreik 2016), makes it possible to challenge the dichotomous model of settlement colonies and perhaps allows a more complex view. future studies may find the native and the alien to constitute two poles of a spectrum, and that initially alien species may gradually naturalize and become an inherent part of the native culture and ecosystem. further, this spectrum may be considered a multi-dimensional space, so that the naturalization process may take place along different dimensions at different rates. some of these dimensions are sociological, cultural, or political and reflect the different ways that various humans or human groups perceive a species. in this way a parallel conversation takes place in the face of the discourse surrounding insects—the local insects, which were pushed out in favor of the “invaders” who came with the settlers’ intensive agriculture, in the face of the “good” insects, the “civilized” insects spread by the farmers in the fields. this stands in contrast to the narrative about human settlers, the “pioneers” who came to the area after the displacement of the bedouin occupants and view themselves as natives of the area, together with young people like asaf who have been moving to the area in recent years. using agricultural infrastructure, we can connect these two discourses and identify how the non-human is used to reclaim the native conception of the settlers in the arava. although the question of privilege remains the same (zreik 2016), such a discussion allows a more nuanced understanding of the encounter between settlers and natives. the flexibility of agricultural infrastructure to adapt to the changing economic and political conditions, and the massive state support that ensures its continuation, shows its importance for the settlement project and the continued jewish hold on the land. thus, the arava’s agricultural infrastructure forms part of israel’s geopolitical relations in the region, what jean carlos hochsprung miguel, martin mahony, and marko synésio alves monteiro (2019) call “infrastructural geopolitics.” meanwhile, mobilization of the non-humans in favor of the project of turning the settler into a native, as part of the agricultural infrastructure, opens a new space for understanding settlement projects with political, geopolitical, and environmental drive, and for a renewed understanding that these constitute two sides of the same coin. abstract in this essay, i follow predatory fleas, sterile flies, and other insects, as well as farmers, across the arava/arabah, an arid desert region in southern israel/palestine, south of the dead sea, marked by harsh environmental conditions. following a four-year ethnographic study, i examine the ecological and political impacts of zionist settlement in the area and the fluidity of definitions of alien/native species. i use the term agricultural infrastructure to describe the network of connections that make agriculture possible—wells, pipes, and “beneficial” insects—as part of a theoretical framework that integrates both the human and non-human in the anthropocene era, while also examining the challenges posed by environmental and agricultural transformation. agricultural infrastructure is shown in this piece as a political enterprise: it establishes hierarchical boundaries between communities and strengthens land control while maintaining and establishing boundaries between humans and non-humans, often resulting in compounding ecological harm. yet the use of the term agricultural infrastructure within a given context of settler colonialism contributes a more nuanced approach than dichotomous contrasts between alien versus native, settler versus local. [infrastructure; agriculture; non-human; israel/palestine; environment; alien species; settler colonialism] תקציר במאמר זה אני עוקב אחר פרעושים טורפים, זבובים מעוקרים וחרקים אחרים, כמו גם אחרי החקלאים עצמם, ברחבי הערבה, אזור מדברי צחיח בדרום ישראל/פלסטין, דרומית לים המלח, המאופיין בתנאי סביבה קשים. בעזרת מחקר אתנוגרפי בן ארבע שנים, אני בוחן את ההשפעות האקולוגיות והפוליטיות של ההתיישבות באזור ואת נזילות ההגדרות של מינים זרים/ילידים. אני משתמש במונח “תשתית חקלאית” כדי לתאר את רשת הקשרים המאפשרים חקלאות קידוחים, צינורות וחרקים “מועילים” כחלק ממסגרת תיאורטית המשלבת הן את האנושי והן את הלא אנושי בעידן האנתרופוקן, יחד עם בחינת האתגרים שמציבים השינוי הסביבתי והחקלאי. “תשתית חקלאית” מוצגת במאמר זה כמפעל פוליטי: היא קובעת גבולות היררכיים בין קהילות ומחזקת את השליטה בקרקע תוך שמירה וביסוס של גבולות אנושיים והלא אנושיים, מה שגורם לרוב לפגיעה אקולוגית מורכבת. אך השימוש ב”תשתית חקלאית” בהקשר נתון של קולוניאליזם התיישבותי מאפשר גישה יותר ניואנסית מאשר ניגודים דיכוטומיים כמו זר מול יליד, או מתיישב מול מקומי. [תשתית, חקלאות, לא-אנושי, ישראל/פלסטין, סביבה, מינים זרים, קולוניאליזם התיישבותי] notes acknowledgments a wide variety of people have contributed to this project, and i am grateful to each and every one of them. firstly, i would like to thank the people of the arava themselves for sharing their activities and thoughts with me, especially naama navon and oded kenan. a different version of this project appeared in theory and criticism in hebrew, edited by shaul setter and yoav kenny, and another version was published in society + space magazine by lisa krieg, maan barua, and josh fisher, who edited a special issue on ecologizing infrastructure, and i want to thank them for the encouragement and guidance. i would like to thank tamar neugarten and susan n. johnson-roehr for editing the various versions linguistically. thanks also to riki anteby for research assistance for this article. in particular, i would like to thank tamar alor, rafi grosglik, guy shalev, yael asor, and natalia gutkowski for reading previous versions and provoking me to think about the topic. i would like to thank the four anonymous readers of cultural anthropology, the editorial team, and especially julia elyachar and kate herman for making this paper more accurate and correct. 1. my interlocutors distinguish between hityashvut, the hebrew word for settlement, mainly within the green line, and hitnahalut, which refers to settlement beyond the green line, principally in the west bank. the green line is the original demarcation set forth in the 1949 armistice agreements between israel and jordan. following the 1967 war and israeli conquest of the west bank, the green line became the de facto border between the israeli-occupied palestinian west bank and the internationally recognized territory of israel. the jewish residents of the arava, most of whom are on the left of the israeli political map, see themselves as part of a hityashvut and view the hitnahalut in the west bank as right-wing political activism and a deviation from zionism. 2. with the exception of some three thousand thai workers and a single bedouin family living within the council’s jurisdiction. 3. since i refer in this article to the way the settlers perceive themselves and their environment, i will refer later in the essay to the name of the area as “arava.” 4. from another angle, lana tatour (2019, 1570–72) criticizes the essence of the definition of the indigenousness of the bedouin communities in israel/palestine and claims that it is based on a political discourse predicated on the fetishization of bedouin culture as premodern and endangered, thus possibly harming their struggle for land. 5. daniel miller (1997), whose acclaimed ethnographic works on “things,” maintains that the best one can do is to approximate the (non-human) thing and its interconnection with the social. 6. the phrase “making the desert bloom” makes for a strong ethos in zionism. it refers to the “wasteland” the zionists supposedly found when they arrived on the land, but mainly it points to the technological, entrepreneurial, and ideological ability of zionism and the state (george 1979; tal 2007). an example of this in the context of the arava can be found in a 2014 report on cbn news, “israelis use technology to make the desert bloom” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68xfaxxhpj0). 7. the employment of thai workers in agriculture intensified in the wake of rising violence in the israeli-palestinian conflict in the early 1990s. the resulting travel and employment restrictions imposed on palestinians disrupted agriculture in central and northern israel, which had previously sourced significant labor from the occupied palestinian territory (however, there were no palestinian workers in the arava). following the shortage of labor in agriculture, cheap labor from thailand began to enter agriculture, including in the arava region (kaminer 2022a). 8. for example, beyond the attraction of many alien species to the food reserves that agriculture creates, and as part of the mobility of infrastructure (barua 2021; mitchell 2002), materials and objects that come with agricultural implements (for example, wooden pallets and cultural crops) bring with them non-human objects alien to the local ecology, such as a variety of termites, invasive plants, and harmful insects. foreign species, associated with human activity and agriculture, begin to repel the native species, becoming “erupting species.” thus, for example, the common fox replaced the desert fox, the cultured bee pushed out the desert bees, and the like. this process has been ongoing for thousands of years, but the scale of jewish settlement and the intensive agriculture that have occurred since the 1960s have led to a significant change. 9. in the arava, as elsewhere, the engines of change are neither internal nor occur at the state level; 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(with apologies to mamdani).” constellations 23, no. 3: 351–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12240 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 87-112, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.05 kin-work in a time of jihad kin-work in a time of jihad: sustaining bonds of filiation and care for tunisian foreign combatants alyssa miller duke university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2100-8517 the scene begins in a domestic interior, where a finely crafted desk stands beneath an open window. displayed prominently on the desk is a family portrait featuring three generations of respectable folk gathered in downtown tunis. daylight streams in through a gauzy curtain that flutters gently in the breeze. suddenly, a gust of wind from the open window sows chaos into this placid scene. the family portrait pitches forward precariously—but the moment passes quickly. a woman now moves into view; she fastens the window shut and steadies the photo, brushing away a bit of dust from the frame before exiting the room. yet the wind outside proves insistent. as dramatic music plays, the window bursts back open and the wind, rifling recklessly through the pages of a leather-bound qur’an, tips the portrait over and sends it smashing to the ground. while the camera pans over shattered glass, a voice-over cautions: “we don’t realize the danger until it’s already too late. just like the terrorism here in our country, which draws closer every day. terrorism doesn’t only exist abroad. one day, it may enter our houses.” zooming in again on the photograph, we see that the image has changed. where the loving family once gathered, there is a single child, orphaned and forlorn. in the background, tunis resembles a war zone, reduced to smoldering ruins. the scene then cuts to black, revealing a message in stark white text: “terrorism is not who we are.”1 this public service announcement, broadcast to tunisian television audiences in 2014, assigns the family a critical security role in tunisia’s domestic war on terror. as the nation’s basic social unit, the family constitutes the first line of defense against the threat of radical islam. it is up to each family to protect the nation by surveilling their kin, ensuring that no one is seduced by dangerous outside ideas. yet there is something uncanny about the outside threat, represented here as a force of nature that slips surreptitiously into domestic life and begins to wreak havoc. despite the assertion that “terrorism is not who we are,” the very need for such a publicity campaign belies this categorical assurance. what happens when a tunisian family confronts the knowledge that their child has become a soldier for transnational jihad? after the 2011 prodemocracy uprising in syria transmogrified into regional war, between three and six thousand tunisians traveled to the eastern mediterranean to join jihadi militias, making tunisia the largest exporter per capita of foreign combatants to the conflict. while the state and its televisual representations have excised the jihadi from the tunisian national family, such a clean break is unavailable to the kin whom foreign combatants leave behind. in the mainstream public imaginary, the figure of the jihadi violates the symbolic kinship of nation, religion, and humanity, quitting national soil to engage in fratricidal violence against fellow muslims. kin to combatants thus become paradoxical victims of jihad, suffering the agonizing loss of a son while also falling under suspicion for failing to prevent his religious deviancy.2 like a phantom limb, foreign combatants exert a powerful affective hold on their families, leaving a painful complex of longing and shame in place of their presence. anthropologists have long viewed kinship as more than mere biological descent, documenting the diverse ways in which kin are made beyond heterosexual reproduction (strathern 1992; franklin and mckinnon 2001; carsten 2004; haraway 2016). michael lambek (2013) proposes a performative model, whereby kinship is enacted through intentional acts that carry ethical consequences, such as calling someone by a kin-term or recognizing the paternity of a child. in this article, i build on lambek’s insight to examine the politics of kin-work as performed by the families of tunisian combatants lost at war in the eastern mediterranean. kinship relations are characterized by “diffuse, enduring solidarity” (schneider 1980, 116), feelings that are neither natural nor given, but require the steady work of time, attention, and care (see weston 1991). following micaela di leonardo (1987), i use kin-work to refer to a form of affective labor that sustains relations of care for sons engaged in jihad and seeks to pressure a resistant state into facilitating their repatriation. my discussion is based on relationships with families of foreign combatants cultivated during fieldwork in tunisia from 2014 to 2016, as well as participant-observation of their advocacy work with a tunisian ngo, the rescue association for tunisians trapped abroad (ratta).3 in a hostile public sphere where the jihadi denotes a monstrous form of life (puar 2007), any political advocacy for foreign combatants requires first recovering their humanity. in its political register, kin-work comprises public acts that refold the combatant into the family’s relational bonds, making visible how the loss of kin leaves families vulnerable to catastrophe. by mobilizing sentiments of loss, families make moral claims for state assistance (chatterjee 2004), despite their sons’ embrace of a jihad project that existentially threatens the nation. kin-work, however, cannot be fully circumscribed by any political instrumentality. the work of caring for kin caught up in transnational circuits of violence thrusts families into a liminal zone between absence and presence, life and death, intimacy and strangeness. the analysis of kin-work must therefore attend to the ways that transnational violence reconfigures kinship itself, as families manage the ontological uncertainty that absence introduces into their intimate lives (stevenson 2014). tunisianité and the unruly subject in her writings on the ethics of mourning under the global war on terror, judith butler (2004, 2009) describes how representational regimes govern how lives are perceived as human. for butler (2009), the destruction of civilizational enemies is enabled by “frames of war” that designate certain lives as worthy of being lived, whereas others do not register as lives at all. while the geographical distances inherent to wars of global scale facilitate the uneven distribution of security that butler describes, markers of difference, such as race, religion, or class, can structure biopolitical hierarchies among more localized populations. the public service announcement with which this essay began enacts such a biopolitical framing through its representation of the tunisian family who merits rescue from terror. visual cues identify them as the embodiment of a hegemonic national identity known as tunisianité, which is religiously tolerant, culturally francophile, educated, middle-class, and moderate in its expression of islam (zemni 2016). engendered by modernizing reforms promulgated by the country’s first president habib bourguiba, the nuclear family functioned as a key technology for crafting tunisianité, used to subjugate extranational allegiances of tribe and religion to state power (charrad 2001). these qualities underwrite a narrative of tunisia’s liberal-secular exceptionalism among arab nations, which has been central to both its postcolonial identity and its national security rationale. during fifty-five years of authoritarian rule, president bourguiba and his successor zine el-abidine ben ali repeatedly invoked the need to preserve tunisia’s unique moderation to justify state violence, eradicating political islam and brutally disciplining all but the most benign and state-sanctioned forms of religious expression (hibou 2011). the 2011 revolution radically decentered the hegemony of tunisianité by foregrounding marginal actors as the primary agents of history (bayat 2015). unruly subjects—particularly unemployed youth—emerged as national heroes for confronting the lethal force of police in their neighborhoods during the uprising (allal 2011; aloui 2012). once mobilized, tunisian youth did not return to their houses following ben ali’s ouster, but engaged in a flurry of civic, cultural, and charitable projects, reflecting a desire to protect their revolution and shape the democracy to come. not all of these projects have been liberal in nature (marks 2013). during a period of interim governance (2011–2013) overseen by the islamist party ennahda, questions of religious identity sharply polarized the populace into secular and islamist camps (zeghal 2013).4 by their own account, ennahda mismanaged an increasingly militant wave of salafi violence by approaching it with paternalistic leniency (international crisis group 2013). sympathizing with salafi activists as “our sons,” ennahda’s use of kinship idioms signaled their desire to reorient the national family toward a transnational community of believers (umma). yet this brief experiment in islamist governance sharply came to an end in 2013 with the assassination of two leftist politicians by members of the salafi group anṣār al-sharī‘a, sparking protests that forced ennahda into a negotiated step-down from power. the 2014 election of the secularist president beji caid essebsi reterritorialized tunisia into the ideological coordinates of tunisianité under an ascendant war on terror. even ennahda moved to distance itself from transnational islamist currents as dangerous and inauthentic imports into the tunisian national context (cavatorta and merone 2015). ambient fears provoked by postrevolutionary upheavals in religious identity and the nation-state form have hardened mainstream tunisian opinions against legal protections for terrorism suspects. proposed reforms to tunisia’s 2003 counterterrorism law, which would bring this artifact of dictatorship into conformity with international human rights norms, became an incitement to discourse that excised terrorists from the category of the human. statements such as “we cannot afford to respect human rights for terrorists” became relatively banal during my fieldwork. or, on the fate of tunisian militants fighting in syria: “just let them die there. they are no longer welcome in tunisia.” my purpose in raising the question of humanity for foreign combatants is not to argue simplistically that “all lives matter.” however, as paul amar (2011, 40) observes, the terrorist and jihadi are figures generated by security discourses as “problems to be solved”; they are “not actually recognizable as social formations and cannot speak on their own terms as autonomous subjects.” it is therefore critical to ask what tunisian youth believe themselves to be doing when they embark on the ethical project of jihad (see devji 2008). this is a different task than identifying any ideology motivating jihadism in tunisia, since it demands that we apprehend the precariousness of these young men’s existence from within their lifeworlds (butler 2004). in her work on state recognition for indigenous land claims in australia, elizabeth povinelli (2002, 234) remarks that “some people are foreclosed from entering the human realm in order that a nation can be made more human(e).” while the notion of tunisianité establishes religious tolerance as an innate quality of the tunisian personality, certain religious subjects must nevertheless be eliminated to uphold the nation’s moderate cultural character (handler 1988). in deciding the boundary of who will and will not belong to the national family, the state remains the ultimate arbiter. given that citizenship in postauthoritarian tunisia remains weak (jayal 2013), the violence of such exclusion will likely be enacted not through the revocation of citizenship, but through indifference and “benign neglect” (herzfeld 1993, 33). when the state responds by doing nothing, tunisian combatants are exposed to death as part of the normal course of war. the family, however, is more than just a metaphor for the body politic, held together by nationalist ideology. while the modern nuclear family may largely be an effect of kinship’s partial subsumption by the state, kinship itself has an excessive quality that “cannot be rationalized . . . [or] reduced to an effect of biopolitics” (lambek 2013, 256). perhaps the most powerful name for the excess ascribed to kinship is love, a word that “indicates the affective site where choice and compulsion are blurred” (povinelli 2002, 229). thus, even if the foreign combatant has chosen another loyalty over the nation, those kin-members bonded to him by love cannot simply choose to abandon him. for them, the loss of a son is tantamount to the destruction of the family, both as a genealogical principle and as a nexus of intimate attachment. tunisia’s postrevolutionary constitution, adopted in january 2014, maintains that “the family is the nucleus of society and the state shall protect it” (tunisian const. art. vii). this pastoral commitment offers a potential counterweight to security imperatives that would abandon foreign combatants outside of citizenship’s protective scope. kinship therefore opens up a strategic breach from “the other side of legality” (chatterjee 2004, 56), where moral claims for foreign combatants can be made on behalf of their families. performing kin bonds in public on the last sunday of november in 2014, ratta staged a demonstration outside the municipal theater in tunis. having traveled to the capital from all over the country to attend the event, families assembled on the theater stairs bearing photographs of their loved ones—mostly official portraits of young men ensconced in wooden or gilt frames. a banner spanning the scene communicated a simple message to passersby: ḥissū binā. feel for us. polls would open the following morning for tunisia’s first democratic presidential election, but the eve of the election had been declared a day of mandatory silence on the campaign trail. members of ratta seized on this opportunity to raise awareness about the plight of tunisian citizens said to be “trapped” in the eastern mediterranean. in early 2012, as the assad regime brutally cracked down on arab spring protesters rather than yield to democratic reform, the tunisian interim president moncef marzouki had cut diplomatic ties with syria in solidarity with the embattled revolution. as a consequence of this principled stance, tunisians no longer had recourse to state assistance in locating kin who went missing in syria. under the marzouki presidency, which drew its own legitimacy from revolution, state officials met ratta’s entreaties to end the diplomatic ban with either silence or derision. the sunday protesters implored the electoral victor to restore diplomatic relations with syria as the first step toward reuniting their families. but who were the tunisians trapped abroad, and how had they come to be stranded in war-torn syria? although muhammad iqbal ben rejeb, ratta’s founder and director, maintained that many had been haplessly ensnared, having moved to syria for work or marriage prior to the arab spring, a cursory survey of the rally revealed that they were mostly young men whom the law referred to as “foreign combatants.” if these missing men were truly trapped, their willing departure for syria to wage jihad made it difficult to construe them as victims who now merited state assistance. pedestrians who paused to gawk at the demonstration from the sidelines used less delicate terminology: they called these young men terrorists (īrhābīīn), and some loudly and bitterly berated ratta for what they considered traitorous support for them while tunisian soldiers lost their lives in the war on terror.5 due to the importance of the upcoming election as a milestone in tunisia’s democratic transition, the international press presence at the rally was thick. while some families lingered on the stairs, cradling picture frames in their laps or silently holding them aloft, others sought out the journalists directly, tearfully addressing the television cameras. milling among the demonstrators, i observed the following exchange between an arab journalist and a mother from medenine province. journalist: tomorrow, elections will be held in tunisia. a lot of people are looking for work. as a mother, what are you looking for? mother: my message for the new government is simple: bring back our sons. beyond that, i ask for nothing, not for work or anything else. i don’t have any blood left in my veins, i don’t have any love left except for my son. i swear to god he was the only one in everything. bring back my son, even if there is no work, at least let him sleep. even if he is sick, or handicapped, or anything else is wrong with him. the important thing is my son, that’s all, that he listens to me and to god. if they did anything wrong, forgive them. they did something wrong, but for our sake, forgive them. this mother did not frame her appeal to state assistance as a legal-juridical right to due process on national soil, but addressed a higher moral reason rooted in the kinship relation. her message expresses the violence that jihad enacts on the family, as a misguided adventure that disfigures the family’s nuclear form. as a metaphor for biological kinship, her reference to blood evokes the substantive bond that ties a mother to her son, as well as the expenditures of pain and exhaustion provoked when their natural connection is severed (schneider 1980). yet blood symbolism also circulates in nationalist discourse to evoke the moral sense of the nation as family (herzfeld 1993), begging the question: who has a greater claim, kinship or the nation? while nation-states use a variety of techniques to invest the family with national sentiments, here the specter of a son’s loss creates a direct conflict between national and kin obligations (mankekar 1999; abu-lughod 2005). the mother’s appeal therefore takes the form of a bargain: in exchange for return, she renounces aspirational life for her son beyond the home. emptied now of fugitive desires, she portrays her household as the ideal unit of governmentality, asking the nation-as-family to “forgive” transgressions without recourse to a court of law. the state should return her son not because he is blameless, but because acting otherwise would abandon his mother to immeasurable pain. the efficacy of familial sentiments muhammad iqbal is a former boxer. his hands, which lay politely folded in his lap during our interview in a tunis hotel lobby, had dark callouses at the knuckles, permanent traces of impacts in the ring. “in boxing,” he tells me, “you either knock out your opponent, or you get knocked out. you hit, you hit, and you hit again. only cowards throw in the towel.” as the director of ratta, iqbal has put forward an advocacy strategy for families rooted in persistence and a belief in the power of emotional spectacle. he founded ratta in 2013 after his brother, aziz, ran away from home to join jubhat al-nuṣra in syria. incredibly, iqbal managed to secure safe passage for aziz back to tunisia, and this success has made him a figure of hope for the other ratta families. aziz’s disappearance proved particularly alarming because he has a disability that requires him to use a wheelchair. a second-year university student majoring in computer science, aziz told his family over the phone that he was recruited to wage “computer science jihad” (jihad informatique) because he was a genius in the field. iqbal did not find this narrative credible: “my brother is not a computer genius—he’s a student who hasn’t completed his studies.” given aziz’s physical limitations, iqbal was filled with a dreadful premonition that his brother would be sent on a suicide mission. at the time of aziz’s disappearance, their father’s advanced age and diabetes had made iqbal the man of the house. his devastated mother therefore looked to him to recover her youngest child: “when aziz left home, i watched my mother enter a state of mourning. it was as if she were begging me for help. i had never experienced this before in my life.” this instance of transferable affect became a foundational moment for iqbal, grounding his faith in the power of kin sentiments to stir hearts into action. unlike humanitarian strategies of immediation where the body is used to express a universal humanity for the suffering subject (malkki 1996; allen 2009), iqbal’s work draws its emotive power from local understandings of gendered family relations. in the patriarchal muslim family, the relationship between mothers and sons is particularly affectionate, especially in working-class environments where women have limited access to public space (white 2004).6 iqbal therefore prefers to showcase maternal sentiment, foregrounding the mother as the archetypical figure of kin-suffering at demonstrations. “when a mother loses her son, the other family members feel ashamed. the husband can always go to a café to get out of the house, but the mother cannot. when a mother no longer wants to be involved in the world, it moves everyone around her.” after an ill-conceived trip to libya to intercept aziz in tripoli, iqbal resolved to take the scandal of his brother’s recruitment story to the media. thanks to an atmosphere of moral panic over youth conversions to violent extremism, he quickly secured an invitation to appear on a popular political talk show. during his television appearance, iqbal displayed images of aziz and denounced jubhat al-nuṣra for exploiting his disability. invoking the pathos of his mother’s pain, iqbal began to cry openly, and the profusion of tears from this large, masculine persona elicited a powerful sympathy from the audience. contemporary tunisian television viewers have developed a taste for such melodramatic scenes, due to the popularity of reality programming focused on family crisis. acting as a masculine conduit for maternal despair, iqbal’s tears achieved their evocative force by simultaneously transgressing and reinforcing normative expectations of gender performance. shortly after his television appearance, which was broadcast in syria via satellite, jubhat al-nuṣra contacted iqbal through an intermediary. they claimed that they could longer adequately care for aziz and sought to repatriate him. although iqbal places little stock in jubhat al-nuṣra’s capacity for concern, he believes that his media appearance forced a change of fortune by damaging the militia’s reputation among potential recruits: “seeing a handicapped person, that makes you feel bad. it gives a bad image to their revolution.” he surmises, moreover, that the dissemination of aziz’s image liquidated his use-value as a soldier for the militia. likening jubhat al-nuṣra to the mafia, iqbal remarked that aziz had become a “card already played” (waraqa maḥrūqa), a former asset now rendered a liability for the organization. based on this experience, iqbal believes that mobilizing emotion is the only way to pressure the state into honoring its constitutional obligation to protect the family. while the transitional government may resist normalizing relations with the assad regime, the tunisian public’s compassion could still be mobilized to induce a policy change. in the meantime, ratta functions as a surrogate kinship structure for the families of foreign combatants. as iqbal explained, given that “each of [them] has either lost someone or has someone in prison,” ratta members are bonded through a common pain that is difficult for outsiders to understand. during public appearances, iqbal always wears a t-shirt emblazoned with his personal telephone number, extending a lifeline to families longing to exit the isolating shame of their own domestic tragedies. its members united in love for sons whose participation in jihad categorizes them as enemies of the state, ratta requires an alternative principle to constitute itself as a moral community worthy of the state’s pastoral care (chatterjee 2004). collective suffering provides such a principle. to render that pain legible to a national public, however, families are solicited to perform according to normative scripts that shore up the state’s position as guarantor of their well-being and protection (taylor 1997). for those who privately blame the state itself for their sons’ disappearance, such performances inevitably enact their own forms of epistemic violence. lines of flight from filial piety after the revolution obliterated the state’s monopoly on religion, tunisia’s formerly outlawed salafi movement experienced a remarkable efflorescence. salafism is a transnational counterpublic that seeks to recover an original, authentic islam through the methodical cultivation of “new identities and alternative norms” (wiktorowicz 2005, 211). far from a monolith, the salafi movement contains significant ideological fractures and diversity, many of which are reproduced in the tunisian salafi scene (meijer 2009). scholars disagree on whether contemporary isis-style jihadism truly constitutes a form of salafism, due to the former’s comparatively shallow textual engagement and apparent disinterest in orthopraxy. nevertheless, they share an overlapping matrix of ideological commitments and can therefore coexist within the same spaces and communities (roy 2017). when jihadism began to take root in certain mosques and neighborhood gathering places in tunisia, many pious-minded parents were unaware of the risks these emergent publics might pose for their children (ben ammar 2014). the precipitous nature of their sons’ conversions and subsequent disappearances fostered a paranoid atmosphere among parents that was ripe for conspiratorial thinking. as the ratta rally drew to a close, i lingered among a cluster of demonstrators at the foot of the theater stairs. withdrawn now from the television cameras, in the intimate company of fellow kin to foreign combatants, they discreetly exchanged details of their disappearance stories: woman: to tell the truth, the day he left his eyes were totally green. i asked him: are you high? he said, of course not! can i attend the mosque when i’m high? i swear to god his eyes were green. man: the day he left we had a fight. my son was never violent like that—he used to respect me! he would come to me saying: father, kiss me. how could this happen to someone who always sought his father’s kiss? woman: my son never used to lie, but he started lying to me at that time. it was like he was playing the same record that they plant into everyone else. the man speaking here was faisal, an older father in his late sixties from the tunis suburb of radès. though courteous, faisal spoke with an undercurrent of anger that could be unsettling, particularly when we discussed his son muhammad. whereas the other ratta parents often engaged in complex rationalizations to shield their sons from guilt, faisal stood out for his candor about muhammad’s radicalization. at the time of my fieldwork, muhammad was working as a security guard in a stable district of the islamic state. he had regular access to skype and frequently called home to his family in tunisia. according to faisal, muhammad had been “normal” before his religious turn. in fact, he was supernormal, possessing talent and good looks that made him a model of heteronormative masculinity. a professional athlete on the second-tier team of a popular tunisian soccer club, muhammad’s odyssey into salafism began after a work stint in libya. faisal described salafism as a contagion that muhammad had contracted abroad. he complained that his son had been brainwashed, behaving as if under the influence of a powerful drug. the literature on islamic revival abounds with narratives of generational struggle, where religion becomes the grounds for rebellion against parental authority (khosrokhavar 1997; rozario 2011; fadil 2017). yet for tunisian youth, any desire for rebellion in the religious domain must be situated in the context of modernity’s institutional erosion. pervasive conditions of economic precarity have progressively gutted middle-class securities, undermining the prestige of social figures associated with postcolonial modernity, such as the teacher or civil servant (meddeb 2012). reliable mechanisms of social mobility have broken down for the younger generation, as evidenced by the swollen ranks of unemployed university graduates (diplômés chômeurs). these crisis symptoms have contributed to the unmooring of subjectivity among tunisian youth, who no longer feel they have any purchase on the good life modernity promised (mbembe and roitman 1995; piot 2010). while faisal understood muhammad’s religious conversion as a crisis of filial piety, he located the problem outside the home, blaming authority figures for failing to enmesh his son in proper relations of care. as a retired public-school teacher, faisal strongly identified with the normative ideal of tunisianité. he lamented the degradation of the school system as a key institution for the reproduction of national subjects: “these days there are even teachers who say bad words (kalām zāyid) in front of the students. how is that possible?” faisal’s son never thrived in the classroom, but his talent for soccer provided an escape. yet as a professional player, disappointment whittled away at muhammad’s love for the game. underpaid and passed over for promotion, he told his father: “the rottenest thing i ever did was play soccer. those who are responsible, who are supposed to be mentors, are not on the right level.” faisal never suggested that he may have played a role in muhammad’s disappearance, yet his narrative betrayed a profound discord in the father–son relation. in tunisian families, sons are expected to treat their fathers with respect, and as a consequence, their relationship is often formal and distant (white 2004). faisal, however, seemed to overidentify with his son’s masculinity, revealing his invasiveness through persistent comments about muhammad’s sexuality. in tunisia today, where the islamist/secularist debate revolves around bodily practices (zeghal 2013), the performance of modern secular subjectivity encourages the flouting of religious directives governing bodily pleasures.7 thus, when describing muhammad as “modern,” faisal took pains to assure me that his son had been (hetero)sexually active. “you understand?” he emphasized with a meaningful look. “normal. you could not say he was gay.” these unsolicited comments to a foreign, female researcher suggest faisal’s interpellation by a global discourse on the monstrous sexuality of the jihadi, depicted as homosexual and hyperheterosexual at the same time (puar and rai 2002; puar 2007). such representations have only proliferated with sensationalistic media coverage of the islamic state. faisal mobilized sexuality to establish the truth of muhammad’s subjectivity (foucault 1990), and yet his appeals to normalcy raised the possibility of obtrusive paternal control. jihadi conversion cultures in tunisia have employed a range of disciplinary practices to produce combatant subjects. muhammad was initiated through zamaktel, a hybrid martial art that combines physical and spiritual training (sellami and haj salem 2016).8 shortly after his return from libya, muhammad began attending classes outside the stadium in the affluent el menzah suburbs, led by a martial-arts expert known simply as “the master.” each session included a spiritual audit, where trainees were interrogated about their prayer practice and sent home if found wanting. though unconventional, muhammad’s athletic performance improved under the master’s tutelage, and faisal grew confident that his son would “make a great leap in soccer” that year. instead, one evening muhammad demanded his passport and quit his father’s home. connecting first with al-qaeda encampments on tunisia’s western frontier, muhammad crossed into algeria on foot. he then caught a plane for istanbul en route to the islamic state territories in syria. prior to his departure, muhammad used his emergent pious sensibilities to challenge his father’s authority on religious grounds. whereas faisal considers himself a devout muslim, muhammad made a point of competing with him in the regularity of his prayer. more troublingly, when footage of isis’s righteous atrocities began to circulate online, muhammad showed the videos to his father, saying: “they are better muslims than you.” faisal countered by rebuking muhammad’s behavior as un-islamic, citing its violation of the prophet’s enjoinment to “please one’s parents” (riḍā’ al-wālidayn). he supported this claim with a hadith, which stated that when a young man sought to enlist during the wars of islamic conquest, the prophet muhammad would ask the prospective recruit if he had his parents’ permission. if the answer was no, the prophet refused his service, suggesting that he perform jihad on behalf of his parents (fī sabīl al-wālidayn) instead—remaining with them and assuring their maintenance into old age. faisal argued that in choosing jihad over deference to his father, muhammad violated genealogical principles central to islam. faisal tells me that he has disowned muhammad over his affiliation with the islamic state. the charismatic “modern” athlete whom faisal recognizes as his son has become a distant militant whose beard stretches down to mid-chest. yet unlike other combatants whose lives in syria remain almost entirely unknown, muhammad has remained in close contact with his family in tunisia via skype. faisal refuses to come to the computer, leaving his wife and daughter to soothe muhammad’s anxiety during late-night calls that stretch on for hours. nevertheless, i imagine that faisal hovers just within earshot during these conversations, since he has carefully filed away the smallest details of muhammad’s life abroad. the islamic state has perhaps not proved the religious utopia of muhammad’s dreams; his work as a security guard is tedious and he suffers from terrible insomnia. although he tells his family he can never return to tunisia, faisal hopes that muhammad is secretly biding his time, waiting for the opportune moment to escape. in embracing jihadism, muhammad traces a line of flight from genealogical filiation (see deleuze and guattari 1987), rejecting his father’s authority and refusing to pay him deference. yet his phone calls home attest to his continued investment in family. while the relationship with his father has reached an impasse, female kin provide muhammad with a lateral connection to home, one that does not require him to occupy a subaltern position. women’s kin-work thus presents muhammad with a margin of maneuver, where he can renegotiate the terms of his relationship to family. for faisal, however, his commitment to tunisianité makes it impossible to assimilate the new muhammad into his notion of family. this is particularly so because the tunisianité to which faisal belongs is deeply residual, undercut by the erosion of institutions that provided its material base (williams 1977). the ennahda party’s ascension to head tunisia’s transitional government was for faisal an unfathomable, even personal betrayal of national ideals. he therefore imagined scenarios for confronting ennadha with responsibility for his loss: “i’d like to show them a series of pictures,” illustrating the arc of his son’s development since childhood. each image would be captioned with muhammad’s age and family name, representing patrilineal descent and an unfurling promise for the future. the final photograph, however, would portray muhammad as he appears today: clad in military fatigues, his face obscured by a thick beard. the caption would read “your son” (ībnkum), in clear reference to statements made by ennahda embracing the salafists as spiritual kin. with its televisual sensibility, faisal’s fantasy reads as the uncanny double of the antiterrorism campaign—only now, ennadha is cast as the outside danger that exposes the family to calamity. enduring attachment to tunisianité cannot be reconciled with love for a jihadi son. for faisal, kin-work has therefore largely retreated into the domain of fantasy. the missing son as a spectral presence in addition to explicitly political performances of kinship addressed to the state, the domain of kin-work encompasses a quieter labor of sustaining hope and waiting in the meantime. each time they stage a public event, ratta families orient their thoughts toward an indeterminate future when they will have been reunited with their sons (bloch 1986; miyazaki and swedberg 2016). for most families, a son’s departure for jihad represents a journey into obscurity, where definitive knowledge of life or death cannot be ascertained. caring for absent kin in the face of uncertainty demands an unflagging work of remembrance, to hold the loved one present amid everyday life concerns. in the slippage between remembrance and mourning, i recognize what lisa stevenson (2014, 15) theorizes as “living mournfully,” an ambivalent mode of habitation that refuses “the radical separation of life and death.” rather than simply metabolizing loss, mournful living permits the subject to live beside the lost object of affection, resisting the embrace of death as a welcome form of closure. i met thoraya at the margins of ratta’s november demonstration. wearing a black headscarf and ‘abaya, thoraya had a calm demeanor as she recounted her son bilal’s disappearance for the press. unlike many of the other demonstrators who hung back on the theater stairs, she betrayed no shy ambivalence about publicly airing her family tragedy. one week later, thoraya called me up, asking when i would visit her home in ettadhamen. ettadhamen is a suburb of tunis whose name has become associated with a litany of urban troubles. on the first of many visits, thoraya welcomed me at my taxi door with what seemed like excessive caution. taking my hand in the winter rain, she led me through a series of dense, residential alleyways to the gate of her modest home. through my friendship with thoraya, i learned to recognize signs of her absent son embedded throughout the house. a pastry chef by trade, bilal exhibited a curiosity that drove him to study all manner of crafts. his mother boasted that he picked up new skills by watching the neighbors work on home-improvement projects: “he could work with electricity, with water, he knew how to mount pipes. he could do everything, mashallah.” the walls and ceiling of the sitting room were imprinted with a lively stucco pattern that bilal had designed, presided over by his portrait stationed high above the sofa. outside in the foyer tumbled a cascade of plants, living testimony to the green thumb that thoraya shares with her son. although we went over the story many times, the motivations for bilal’s passage into syria remain mysterious to me; his communications since the time he left ettadhamen were too scant to provide an answer. as far as his mother knew, bilal was never interested in salafi youth culture. he was employed, engaged to be married, and building an apartment on the roof of his mother’s house where the couple would live after the wedding. to all appearances, bilal stood within striking distance of achieving the modest dreams of young men from his social milieu: to get married, have kids, and own an apartment. one afternoon, bilal came home late from friday prayers. when thoraya scolded him for causing her worry, he said that he wanted to leave for libya to save up money for his wedding. bilal had worked in libya before, but by 2013, civil war had destabilized that country. thoraya advised her son to be patient and continue steadily saving at home. nevertheless, the following morning, bilal rose early and caught a bus for the libyan border crossing at ras ajdir. ever the responsible son, he checked in frequently with his mother during the bus ride south, but his phone calls were cut off abruptly once he crossed into libyan territory. after five days of silence, bilal called home again. the message was brief, but devastating: “mother, i’m in syria. please forgive me. god willing, i’ll return.” some common themes recur in almost every disappearance story i collected. perhaps the most salient is the anguished dialogue of remote communications, in which a mobile phone becomes the final thread tying a family to its missing son. during rare phone calls, the family scrutinizes each detail, such as tone of voice or long pauses or sighs, attempting to discern a hidden transcript of motivations, emotional state, and well-being. that these communications are punctuated by long periods of silence, each one haunted by the possibility that it may now last forever, enhances the value of every phone call as a source of precious information. most families could tell me the number of days between one phone call and the next, or how much money they spent in phone credit to be reconnected when a call was dropped. bilal’s subsequent communications revealed that he was descending ever deeper into the syrian conflict. one evening, he told his mother that he was going on a training mission and had to relinquish his phone for security reasons. whereas in earlier conversations bilal had appeared to speak at ease, that day thoraya sensed that her son was constrained—perhaps he was under surveillance and could not reveal much information? she spent the next two days heartsick, without means to verify his safety. on the third day, her daughter received a brief phone call from syria, delivering the news that bilal had died a martyr. ambiguities of remembrance jihadi proselytizing in tunis has been concentrated in the urban peripheries. these neighborhoods were settled by rural migrants in the 1970s, drawn by employment in the expanding food-processing and textile-manufacturing sectors (sellami and haj salem 2016). high unemployment, social marginalization, and uneasy relations with the police have rendered these areas receptive to salafi messaging (lamloum and ben zina 2015). at the time of bilal’s departure in 2013, ettadhamen hosted a thriving salafi counterpublic. although security crackdowns had sent recruitment networks underground prior to my first visit, thoraya told me that neighborhood youth once openly encouraged each other to depart for syria. when news of a martyrdom reached ettadhamen, some families celebrated the occasion: “they bring a sheikh to lecture about jihad and praise the young martyr over a loudspeaker. they offer dinner to people in the street—it’s just like a wedding.” local youth communicated with the militias in syria via social media and were fluent in the codes that govern announcements of martyrdom online. typically, a photograph of the body is posted to facebook to establish the cause of death, while a passport or id card confirms the martyr’s identity. bilal’s death, however, left no digital trace. his friends exchanged conflicting stories about bilal’s demise: one claimed that he had been crushed in an aerial bombardment, while another held that a sniper had shot him while he performed his prayers. the absence of documentary evidence left a wedge of doubt in thoraya’s mind, and she adamantly refuses to accept that bilal has died. nevertheless, on the day that she heard the news, thoraya went into mourning by donning the black headscarf and ‘abaya. she also stopped sleeping in the interior quarters of her home, laying out a foam mattress in the foyer and thus exposing herself to the winter cold. in this intermediary space of the threshold, thoraya keeps a nightly vigil, holding herself ready to welcome bilal on the day that he returns. thoraya’s contradictory reaction to the news of bilal’s death illuminates the liminal position in which kin-work places the families of foreign combatants. in his analysis of rites of passage, victor turner (1967) describes liminality as a position of transit from one well-defined social role to another. having “a physical but not social ‘reality’” (turner 1967, 98), the neophyte’s existence is fraught with contradiction and ambiguity. in donning the black of mourning, thoraya marks a change of social state and recognizes loss—if not as death exactly, then at least as a disappearance. but if this mode of remembrance occupies a space of transit, it is potentially endless, lacking any well-defined terminus. moreover, as a visible sign of mourning, thoraya’s sartorial practices have estranged her from certain neighbors in ettadhamen, members of a counterpublic for whom bilal’s death marks a martyrdom worthy of celebration. these neighbors ridicule thoraya for her stubborn insistence that bilal is still alive (while their sons are dead), just as they resent her activism and eagerness to court the media with bilal’s story. thoraya maintains a distant and uneasy acquaintance with such neighbors, preferring to greet them from afar and otherwise keep to herself. i visited thoraya frequently during the fasting month of ramadan. as she prepared the copious iftar meal, the house was warmly animated by visits from her two daughters, who lived nearby with their families. a third daughter, lobna, had moved back in following a divorce, and her sunny six-year-old son shuttled between the house and the alley where he played with friends. one evening, just before iftar, silence fell on the dining room as we waited for sundown. suddenly, thoraya broke out in gentle sobs where she sat at the table. lobna wandered out from the kitchen and wrapped her mother in an embrace; wiping tears from her face, she gently scolded: “come on now—cut it out!” smiling weakly, thoraya said: “if bilal were here now, the house would not be so silent. he was always coming and going, which made the house feel so lively and animated.” it was thoraya’s second ramadan without her son. although phone contact with syria has fallen silent for now, thoraya tells me that bilal continues to send her messages, signs of both life and his persistent attachment to family. the night she heard the news of his death, as she slept outside in the foyer, thoraya received the first of several visits from her son in a dream. it is the living bilal who comes to her—he never arrives as a sign of death—and thoraya holds fast to such dreams as proof that bilal is still physically present in this world. through the exchange of loving gestures, thoraya makes use of the dream space to verify her son’s bodily integrity. “he comes to me and says: mother, hug me—and so i do,” she explains. “i swear that he is fine.” in the dream, bilal kisses her hands and forehead in a gesture of love and respect. in islamic cosmologies, the dream space is not a purely imaginal realm animated by psychic energies from the unconscious; rather, it constitutes an intermediary space “between the spiritual and the material, between the visible and the invisible, between god and humans” (mittermaier 2007, 231). known as “the isthmus” (barzakh), the zone in which dreams unfold mediates between multiple worlds of which the natural world is but one, allowing for contact and knowledge exchange between living persons and unseen entities, including spirits of the living and the dead (el-aswad 2010; schielke 2012). unlike the freudian paradigm, in which the son’s appearance would be interpreted as the nocturnal fulfillment of his mother’s wish, popular muslim understandings of the dream permit contact between mother and son, and the dream content may therefore be considered veridical. the dream suggests that bilal is not dead, but merely occluded, absent for an undetermined interval from the time-space of ettadhamen, but not without hope of return. dreams are not the only form of message that thoraya receives from her son. there are other ways that bilal disrupts the fabric of ordinary life to make his presence known. “we have a tradition in tunisia,” thoraya told me, “when something stops you short like this.” she placed a hand on her chest and audibly caught her breath, making a soft grunt, like a stutter in respiration. she described this affect of being struck by the remembrance of an absent loved one amid the stream of mundane activities—like washing the dishes or looking after the kids—as a sign that this loved one is thinking of you. “we asked an imam about it, and he said that this message can only come from someone who is still alive—it cannot come from the dead. when this feeling comes over me, i know it is a message from bilal that has been relayed by god.” while his three sisters also attest to receiving such otherworldly messages, they maintain that “it is different for mom. she is constantly thinking about bilal.” according to the geographer paul harrison (2008), the same openness to the world that renders us vulnerable to harm is also a precondition for experiencing the vitality of life. for thoraya, the affective labor of kin-work is not only about instilling a particular feeling in others (hardt 1999) but also about holding herself open—remaining receptive to intensities that arrive from elsewhere and declining their raw sensations into kin-meanings. thoraya continues to offer bilal her care by orienting her attention toward him, even as the nature of his absence remains indeterminate. donna haraway (2016, 103) reminds us that making kin is about making persons, though “not necessarily as individuals or as humans.” in the face of catastrophe, haraway (2016, 101) calls our attention to the task of building refuge, assembling “myriad temporalities and spatialities” to generate a place where something can nestle and be nurtured. i find this an apt description of thoraya’s kin-work for her son. assemblage works according to an additive logic; like the image, it “can capture uncertainty and contradiction without having to resolve it” (stevenson 2014, 10). gathering affects, intensities, dreams, artifacts, and other physical traces, thoraya generates personhood for bilal in the place of his absence. this mattering provides the basis for continuous narration, establishing an unbroken presence for bilal in the refuge of kinship. conclusion political transitions are fraught with peril and possibility, as foundational aspects of national life are subject to renegotiation. just as the arab spring disorganized tunisia’s national borders and security regime, so, too, was the tunisian personality decentered, opened up to formerly outlawed religious affiliations and transnational solidarities. caught at the confluence of these forces, the tunisian family is asked to defend the nation’s integrity by maintaining its coherence as a social unit. in its political register, kin-work insists that this relationship be one of mutual obligation. as the guardian of family welfare, the state must uphold its commitment to shelter the intimate domain of the family, despite the ideological changes wrought by political transition (chatterjee 1993). even if these men’s actions mark them as enemies of the national family, the state must still protect them as sons to make good on its moral pledge. kin-sentiment therefore lies at the center of a political strategy to move the tunisian state from intransigence and save the family from disintegration through transnational circuits of violence. performing kin bonds in public, families claim humanity for their sons against an overdetermined security matrix that casts them outside of citizenship. insisting on the integrity of the household unit as a moral good, families shore up the state’s pastoral power by appealing for the recognition of kinship’s intimate bonds. in seeking assistance for its missing sons, the family finds its political efficacy in emotional performances that beseech the state for its care. exposing their pain in public, families mobilize powerful claims of both genealogy and intimacy as “semiautonomous” (povinelli 2002, 235) forms of attachment that are inextricably intertwined. yet kinship exceeds any political instrumentality, imbued as it is with a “surfeit of meaning, feeling, and presence” (lambek 2013, 255). in its intimate register, kin-work appears as an aptitude for receptivity within a potentially shameful and world-destroying situation of loss. at its most fundamental level, kin-work works as a means of maintaining personhood for the absent son, assembling disparate materials to form a shelter for his presence. just as “it matters which stories tell stories” (haraway 2016, 101), so this work of assemblage generates the matter from which new stories of kin can emerge. in this sense, kin-work functions as a mode of affective survival for families, as well as an organizing principle for inhabiting the difficult ground of uncertainty. beyond even hope for return, kin-work sustains familial investments of love into combatant lives. notes acknowledgments the research for this article would not have been possible without the generous assistance of friends in tunisia, many of whom will remain anonymous. in particular, i wish to thank muhammad iqbal ben rejeb and the ratta families for sharing their stories with me, as well as youssef ben ammar for putting me in contact with the organization. the article was improved by interlocutors who offered their wisdom at various stages of its development, especially anne allison, ellen mclarney, engseng ho, laurie mcintosh, harris solomon, kamran ali, kaushik ghosh, saikat maitra, maysoun sukarieh, kathryn mathers, chitra joshi, christopher webb, alessandra radicati, laura jaramillo, and three anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology. early drafts were shaped by conversations with samuel shearer, patrick galbraith, stephanie friede, and cagri yoltar at a dissertation writers’ seminar led by louise meintjes at duke university. feedback at various workshops helped sharpen the argument, including “futures and ruins: a workshop on crisis and possibility” at duke university, the youth, democracy, and dissent series at duke university, and the “de-framing the mediterranean from the twenty-first century” workshop organized by forum transregionale studien in crete. i am grateful to the editorial team at cultural anthropology, and dominic boyer in particular, for their guidance and care in steering the manuscript to publication. research was supported by the graduate school at duke university and the duke university center for international and global studies. 1. the public service announcement can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7lazkwtjle. 2. although tunisian women have joined jihadi militias, my focus on young men reflects the data collected during my fieldwork. all the families i worked with had lost sons to jihad, not daughters. 3. with the exception of muhammad iqbal ben rejeb, ratta’s director and therefore a public figure, my informants’ names have been changed to protect their anonymity. 4. in elections held in october 2011, ennahda won a preponderance of seats in the constituent assembly, a body charged with rewriting the constitution, electing a president, and forming a caretaker government. ennahda ruled with a coalition known as the troika, which included the social democratic party ettakatol and the populist congress for the republic, the party of interim president moncef marzouki. 5. many of these passersby referred to violence near jebel chaambi in kasserine province. since late 2012, this mountainous region on the algerian border had been the scene of deadly confrontations with the ‘uqbah ibn nāfi‘ brigade, an affiliate of al-qaeda in the islamic maghreb (aqim). on july 29, 2013, militants ambushed and killed eight soldiers on patrol, three of whom were left mutilated with slashed throats, making jebel chaambi synonymous with terrorism at the time of my fieldwork. state security forces were the main target of terrorist violence in tunisia until 2015, when major attacks on foreign tourists were carried out in sousse and bardo. 6. jenny white’s (2004) ethnography focuses on kinship relations among working-class turkish families. while i do not wish to suggest that muslim families around the mediterranean conform to any particular type, the intrafamily relationships described by white ring true to my understanding of tunisian family dynamics. 7. these might include the consumption of alcohol, opting out of the ramadan fast, and engaging in sexual intercourse before marriage. 8. zamaktel is a martial arts form created by the tunisian trainer sheikh moncef al-werghi. the name is formed from the arabic words for time (zaman), place (makan), and combat (qītal), which constitute the “three essential elements” (sellami and haj salem 2016, 133) of its practice. references abu-lughod, lila 2005 dramas of nationhood: the politics of television in egypt. chicago: university of chicago press. allal, amin 2011 “‘avant on tenait le mur, maintenant on tient le quartier!’: germes d’un passage au politique de jeunes hommes des quartiers populaires lors un moment 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politics of ethical difference in the netherlands cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 618-648, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.08 a racial-religious imagination: syriac christians, iconic bodies, and the sensory politics of ethical difference in the netherlands sarah bakker kellogg san francisco state university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5394-5927 the icon sets the visible and the invisible into a relation with each other. —marie-josé mondzain, image, icon, economy: the byzantine origins of the contemporary imaginary … race names a difference that emerges precisely in the context of evaluative hierarchies. —j. reid miller, stain removal: ethics and race as the saying goes: now you see me, now you don’t. —frantz fanon, black skin, white masks heleen confounds dutch perceptions of middle eastern migrants with her long blond hair, vivid blue eyes, and provincial dutch accent.1 she came to the netherlands as a child in the 1980s, when her parents fled their mountain village to escape violent conflict between kurdish separatists and the turkish government. like many other syriac orthodox christians, or suryoye,2 of her generation, she is deeply committed to her parish community, her extended family, and to speaking surayt, also known as turoyo, the endangered central neo-aramaic language spoken in the monastery-studded highland villages of southeast turkey. every week, heleen drives with her sister and cousin into the city of enschede from glanerbrug, their village on the dutch-german border, to sing in church on sunday mornings and to attend weekly madreshto, the church’s evening classes on classical syriac language and liturgy. one mid-summer’s day, heleen and i met for lunch at a bagel-shop-meets-café-terrace in enschede’s city center. as a place where one can study or talk undisturbed for hours, the café appealed to a certain class of urban dutch cosmopolitans concerned with the quality of their cappuccinos and a taste for american-style baked goods. eating our bagels and drinking our tea and coffee, we chatted cheerfully—but our conversation soon turned glum as heleen lowered her voice to a near whisper and began telling me about a number of upsetting recent interactions with some of her “ordinary,” or gewoon (by which she meant “white”) neighbors. our conversation prompted a memory, which she recounted: i had a friend from school, just an ordinary girl from the village, who said something to me once. you remember how we all go to the monastery to visit our dead in the cemetery on the day after easter? you remember how many of us come—from all over the netherlands and germany—there are thousands of us. the street is full of cars and bikes and people—it gets very busy! well, the day after, i met my friend on the street in glanerbrug, and she started to complain to me about “all those moroccans crowding up the street.” i told her, “no! those were not moroccans! they were syriac orthodox people like me! i was there myself!” and then my friend said, “ach, it is all the same.” i could not believe she said that—the difference didn’t matter to her at all! since 2007, i have heard or witnessed countless such stories while conducting ethnographic fieldwork among syriac orthodox christians in the netherlands. friends, neighbors, and acquaintances have trouble registering the conspicuous christianity that my research interlocutors put on display with their oversized gold cross necklaces, jesus bracelets, and headscarves embroidered with images of the virgin mary. there is the story of the elderly man in amsterdam whose neighbor asks him every year, for thirty years without fail, how ramadan is going, and every year he responds: “i am not muslim, remember? i am christian, i don’t celebrate ramadan.” there are the students at the local secondary school where syriac orthodox youth are nearly as numerous as the white dutch majority, and yet who were denied their request for accommodation for a major religious festival because they “were just given time off for the sugar feast [the three-day muslim festival of eid al-fitr].” there was the moment the contractor finished erecting a giant cross at the entrance to st. ephrem monastery, and triumphantly presented it to the archbishop with the words, “congratulations, your excellency—your mosque is finished!” my interlocutors would retell these stories with a laugh, but also a sense of injury. amid their struggle with the intergenerational traumas of unrecognized genocide, dispossession, and displacement, these refusals to register syriac orthodox ethnoreligious difference stung.3 for scholars concerned with the damage done to muslims and christians alike by reductive binaries equating europe with christianity and the middle east with islam, these stories ask us to interrogate the role of race-thinking in constructions of religious difference in western europe. since 9/11, european debate over immigration and minority accommodation has often been framed as a matter of islam’s distance from europe’s putative judeo-christian ethical tradition, and therefore a matter of neither explicitly racial nor religious animus. for example, in an influential tract, former pope benedict xvi makes explicit what usually remains implicit in more liberal and secularist framings when he grounds the “moral-spiritual” foundations that distinguish europe as an “autonomous cultural unit” in incarnational theology, a christologically specific theorization of personhood from which all ethics and politics flow (ratzinger 2007, 43). in this formulation, human reproduction is inflected with theological significance, as the sexual, social, and spiritual formation of individual souls together comprise the church, the body of christ in the world, whose historical inheritances separate a supposedly european ethico-political identity from other “autonomous cultural units” like the islamic world, whose mere presence within europe “cannot help but undermin[e] it” (ratzinger 2007, 24). in this worldview, theology undergirds ethics, and ethics undergirds culture. how then do we account for the claim by heleen’s school friend, echoed by many of her neighbors, that syriac christian difference is no different than moroccan muslim difference in the social imaginary of a western european nation like the netherlands, where the fraught relationship among roman catholicism, calvinism, and liberalism has shaped a normative twenty-first century secularity? why is it that in my research participants’ accounts, it is skin, eye, and hair color, as well as accent, comportment, and other embodied traits, that register in their neighbors’ attention, while visual symbols like crosses and tattoos of the holy family—symbols that could index a shared christological “moral-spiritual foundation”—do not? what precisely is the nature of the difference perceived in these encounters? approaching these moments of misrecognition from another angle, what does it mean that “moroccans” and “muslims” are invoked interchangeably throughout these stories? given the ostensibly secular national context in which race and religion tend to be seen as separate ontological objects, what do we make of this collapsing of racial, national, ethnic, and religious histories in establishing which differences matter, and which ones do not? i pursue these questions by examining a convergence of theological politics and semiotic ideology in constructions of sociopolitically salient difference in western europe,4 constructions conditioned by a common-sense, albeit complex, belief in the power of the body to communicate ethical difference. by ethics i mean, in the first instance, the criteria for judgment undergirding all human action and social relations. michael lambek’s (2010) grammatical view of ethics as “intrinsic to speech and action,” as geology is intrinsic to landscape (lambek 2015), shares much with my own understanding of ethics, grounded in the anthropology of the senses (e.g., seremetakis 1994; stoller 1997) as shaped by intersensorial interaction, that is, the intimate exchange of sight, sound, and touch through which humans learn language from infancy. i take ethics as enmeshed in sites of social reproduction in that people generate, organize, and reproduce relations among selves and others through inherited evaluative hierarchies, which they may or may not re-examine as they proceed through life.5 as such, our intersensorial and social relations—the history of relations that form us as individual subjects—are imbued with power, reinforced by judgments. this understanding of “ethics” entails, in the second instance, relational differentiation of the sort that inscribes moral hierarchies onto unequal power relations. that is, perceptions of moral superiority ascribed not to individuals but to groups reproduce social hierarchies. racialization, in this analysis, operates on the basis of heritable (in that it is socially reproduced) moral difference, rather than heritable biological difference. considering that this racialization process, and such judgments, must be communicated to operate, i explore how a racializing regime of ethical differentiation plays out through everyday and bureaucratic misrecognition. in the dutch context, ethical misrecognitions occur when the body communicates a relational history that challenges the autonomous, liberal ethical subject. more specifically, miscommunication arises when the perceiver refuses their own implication in the history of relations that makes the communication possible. i analyze this communicative process, and its breakdown, through the concept of iconicity. an icon is a communicative sign in which a signifier resembles what it represents (e.g., a road sign with an image of a bicycle indicating the bicycle lane). unlike symbolic and indexical signs, an iconic sign’s meaning depends on connections among form, experience, context, and memory. in conversation with her friend, a central piece of who heleen is and aspires to become in an ethical sense—that is, the evaluative hierarchy undergirding the communal practices she undertakes to rededicate herself daily, weekly, and annually to the liturgical life of her church and its ancestors—was obscured by her friend’s inability to see these practices as anything other than social disruption, and thus fundamentally unethical—a violation of what is popularly called in dutch normen en waarden (norms and values). in dehistoricizing heleen’s ethical life—disarticulating its public form from experience, context, and memory in the very moment that she observed its social implications—her friend invoked the figure of the muslim moroccan body as a template for racial and religious differentiation and classification. in the same breath, she collapsed the complexity of moroccan and muslim ethnicities,6 religiosities, histories, and ethical lives by linking even minor disruptions of the social order to certain kinds of ethical embodiment.7 in this racializing regime, moroccan muslim and syriac christian bodies are made into icons of ethical difference through an iconoclasm that refuses to see the very relational histories that produce them as ethical subjects. at stake in this racializing regime is a question of reproductive power, which i understand as interpretive, material, and political control over sites of social reproduction—that is, the caretaking practices that socialize human persons into the body politic—a control that is implicated in but does not always entail sexual reproduction. disputes between ecclesiastical and state authorities over reproductive power have shaped the history of christian theological politics, and the secular political cultures influenced by them, since the first iconoclastic controversies in eighth-century byzantium (mondzain 2005). in what follows, i examine one thread of the iconoclastic inheritance shaping a process of racial-religious differentiation and classification in the netherlands in the obscured link between the ethical and the social. the outline of my argument is thus: in moments of racial-religious misrecognition, when muslims are interpellated, in the althusserian (1970) sense of the hail, as the archetype of ethical difference and syriac christians are hailed as either “moroccan,” as in this example, or as “turkish” or “muslim” elsewhere, the human body is read as an iconic sign to communicate an invisible difference. the constellation of form, experience, context, and memory that makes this meaning-making process possible constitutes a dutch racial-religious imagination. the logic of the icon reveals an interplay of visibility and invisibility shaping dutch perceptions of new minorities as ethically other when they take the human body as a vehicle of ethical communication while refusing to account for the history of reproductive relations that generate the body’s form and bestow it with signifying power. i theorize this configuration of ethical thought, practice, and embodiment as “sensory politics” so as to further anthropological understandings of how race is “made and unmade in specific constellations” (m’charek 2008, 2013; m’charek, schramm, and skinner 2014; balkenhol and schramm 2019) rooted in “implicit colonial afterlives in everyday life” (balkenhol 2014, 2016). the colonial afterlives of everyday life are especially pronounced in the enduring entanglement of reproduction and racialization, as black feminist scholars have long shown (mullings and wali 2001; bridges 2011; davis 2019; shange 2019). this entanglement problematizes the concept of freedom at the heart of the liberal ethical tradition and its theorization of personhood, which rests on a “false presumption that the right to choose is contained entirely within the individual and not circumscribed by the material conditions of the individual’s life” (roberts 2017 [1997], 309).8 one crucial dimension of my analysis derives from the fact that neither my interlocutors nor i ever intended to talk about race in our work with each other. and yet, it surfaced again and again in conversations during fieldwork for a project on diasporic syriac orthodox liturgical practices. as a novice ethnographer, i went looking for something i thought of as religion, not race; that i found complex “racial” formations embedded in conversations about “religious” life destabilized my own common-sense notions of my analytical categories. thus the empirical material i offer only emerged as my interlocutors began to grasp my ambivalent relationship with dutch national identity as a white (aspirationally ex-)calvinist dutch american researcher who had lived in the netherlands as a child. ethnographically, then, i examine moments that i either witnessed in person or had recounted to me by my interlocutors over the course of a decade, moments in which some perceived violation of the social order had registered in someone’s attention as a “cultural”—and thus, by definition in the dutch context, an “ethical”—difference. i argue that in dutch common sense, “syriac christian difference is no different than moroccan muslim difference” because the state’s distributed management of reproductive power among its minoritized subjects rearticulates calvinism’s iconoclasm. by erasing the relational histories, whether those of moroccans or suryoye, that produce subjects capable of ethical judgment or action, this iconoclasm subjects minoritized populations to a theological knot of an evaluative hierarchy, producing race and religion as inextricably entwined effects of ethical differentiation, classification, and control. i develop this argument by tracing the interplay of visibility and invisibility in political and popular efforts to establish which differences matter across historical, ethnographic, and bureaucratic domains, efforts that mark reproduction as the contentious center of sociopolitical life. i first elaborate “the racial-religious imagination” as an analytic for approaching the fraught relation between ethical life and reproductive power in western christian political history, tracing the generation of modern biological essentialism to long-running battles over heresy, “purity of blood,” maternal embodiment, language, and the ethos of an ethnos. then i sketch the theological, political, and temporal horizons of my ethnographic setting in the netherlands; these horizons frame an ethnographic scene wherein syriac orthodox are misrecognized by the dutch state’s bureaucratic / social work / “minority integration” apparatus and are interpellated as muslim. using iconicity as an analytical tool, i unpack the shifting and unstable meanings contained within the dutch concept of allochthony, a key tool of minority differentiation and classification that can, in different situations, link up with culture, religion, race, and/or ethnicity. consistently at stake in these varying usages of the discourse of allochthony is an underlying effort to control sites of reproductive power in which the ethical inflects public conceptions of sociality, in effect politicizing and publicizing private morality. i conclude with a reflection on how background assumptions about personhood and materiality—that is, semiotic ideologies—shape the sensory and theological politics of racial-religious imaginations in ways that can either reinforce or destabilize both sovereign states and ethical subjects. a racial-religious imagination to understand the intractability of racial thinking in postcolonial european imaginations, even in situations with religious difference ostensibly at stake, ethnographic perspectives rooted in political economy prove necessary but insufficient. inchoate anxieties about access to the welfare state (cf. geschiere 2009) or sentimental attachments to blood-and-soil metaphors of national or regional belonging that can be corroded by fast capitalism (cf. holmes 2000) require an imagination primed to function as an interpretive frame for assigning criteria of inclusion or exclusion in destabilizing times.9 such criteria, i contend, are unavoidably entangled with christian theopolitics (e.g., mcallister and napolitano 2020). as many scholars have pointed out, “religion is always operational in the study of race” (husain 2017; see also khan 2004; hage 2010; tamarkin 2014; özyürek 2015; khabeer 2017; rogozen-soltar 2017) in that several european christianities furnished the moral reasoning required to perceive the embodied difference of non-europeans as objects available for conquest, enslavement, and conversion. historical scholarship on race, ethnicity, and ecclesial power has shown the extent to which these criteria emerge from imperial christianity’s fixation on the physical embodiment, territorial inscription, and social reproduction of heresy (berzon 2016) in late antiquity. out of this ancient repertoire, early modern christians fashioned a theologically ordered “scale of existence,” classifying the spiritual distance of racially marked bodies from divine power to legitimize the transatlantic slave trade, exclude jews from sociopolitical life, and construct muslims as civilizational threats (arendt 2004 [1968]; asad 2003; jennings 2010). verena stolcke (1993), reflecting on the intersection of gender and class in the european history of racialization, traces the global circulation of limpieza de sangre, the imperial spanish catholic doctrine of blood purity deployed against first jewish and then muslim converts to christianity to deprive them of access to public and ecclesiastical office in the sixteenth century. in this discourse, a lineage with no jewish or heretical antecedents signaled “purity,” as blood became a vehicle of faith and then a marker of social condition. mediating among imperial state, catholic church, and the fabric of sociopolitical life were the blood and milk of the maternal body, such that descent from heretics, jews, or muslims became a “permanent, indelible stain,” a physical sign of original sin that naturalized unequal power relations (stolcke 1993, 32). from this convergence of gender, sexuality, and class, anxiety over reproductive power circulated within and beyond europe in a colonial communicative order that “operated through an ‘episteme of resemblance’ in which similitude dominated the organization of symbols and interpretations and representations of the universe” (martínez 2008, 13). here, anti-semitism, islamophobia, and colonial racism share joint descent from western christian theological anxieties, perpetuated iconically, about the relationship between reproduction and power.10 this global formation endures, setting the parameters for endlessly refracted variations contained within it. yet this period coincided with equally significant transformations of european understandings of religion and its proper role in organizing public life (asad 1993; connolly 1999; markell 2003). as anya topolski (2018) has argued, theology serves as the horizon of past and present forms of racism in europe, from anti-semitism to islamophobia. in this constellation, earlier religious categories (“christians,” “jews,” “mohammedans,” and “the rest,” e.g., pagans and polytheists) were transformed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into philological categories (hamito-semitic, aryan/indo-european, turanian, etc.), shifting the imagined locus of a people’s essential, defining, hereditary ethos from a scripture-based discursive tradition to language. philology lent the category of semite, which included jews, arabs, and aramaic-speaking christians of the middle east (gross 2020), a veneer of scientific neutrality that bridged earlier heresiological classifications with nineteenth-century scientific racism’s putatively biological classifications, a racializing process that culminated in the holocaust (topolski 2018). across these transformations, however, a theopolitical link between ethos and ethnos, an “imperial economy of christian kinship” (lukasik 2021), endured. in grappling with the aftermath of world war ii, the netherlands turned toward a discourse of “norms and values” (koning 2016, 173) in a public moral project to silence race and culturalize citizenship, reforging imagined connections among genealogy, culture, and the body as sites of power for producing ethical citizen-subjects capable of the independence of thought necessary to prevent another holocaust. this moral project unfolded within a longer history in which relations among dutch calvinists and roman catholics shaped both the practice of secular political culture as well as four hundred years of dutch slave trade (kennedy 1995; oostindie 2009), resulting in a sensory politics founded on theological questions of mediacy and immediacy posed by human bodies and religious icons alike. a number of europeanist ethnographers have identified what is often at stake in the sensory politics of racial and religious difference in western europe, as in halleh ghorashi’s (2010) study of the pendulum swing between invisibility and hypervisibility of migrant women in the netherlands, mayanthi l. fernando’s (2014) study of the french state’s “secular cunning” inciting muslim women to make their supposedly private religious and sexual lives public, or elayne oliphant’s (2020) study of catholic art and architecture as the banal background of everyday life in france. in each of these cases, political secularism and cultural secularity reassert dominant religious norms at the expense of minoritized subjects by controlling what is visible and what is invisible in ever-shifting configurations. only through this unstable push-pull effect can white and secularist europeans construct a narrative of european identity as ethical. in her study of dutch cultural amnesia around the slave trade and colonialism in indonesia, gloria wekker (2016) links this push-pull effect to a racialized identity narrative she calls “white innocence.” the orthodox christian doctrine of the holy icon can aid analytically in making explicit the interplay between visibility and invisibility in these histories of racialization,11 drawing our attention to sites of reproductive power where invisible relations generate visible forms, which constitutes the process through which, in christian incarnational theology, an iconic sign becomes meaningful (mondzain 2005). in the dutch case, iconicity’s theological undercurrents, historically submerged by the protestant reformation’s iconoclastic suspicion of the materiality of meaning—that is, the problem of mediacy and immediacy—not only enable a variant of european racism but safeguard its continuing purchase in twenty-first century debates over immigration. this is because in post-calvinist common-sense views of the body, it is difficult to speak directly about the ethical evaluation of embodied forms taking place in any given interpersonal interaction. syriac christian encounters with the dutch racial-religious imagination illuminate how post-calvinist theological politics, in obscuring its own dependence on iconic thought, produces race and racial thinking by construing bodies as dangerous semiotic forms. in the dutch politics of minority accommodation, calvinist anxiety over the materiality of meaning meets liberal suspicion of the relationship between reproductive power and ethical life. as kimberly a. arkin (2013) argues in her study of the self-racializing practices of parisian sephardic youth, materialist liberal and secular understandings of ethnic identity obscure the centrality of maternal reproductive power in fashioning jewish communal life.12 in the dutch situation, the theological politics undergirding the tension between liberal and calvinist understandings of reproductive power does not obscure the role of reproduction in ethical life so much as it ambivalently distributes responsibility for it over a network of state-funded social welfare organizations, as in the ethnographic situations i describe below, posing a set of ethical dilemmas for diasporic syriac orthodox whose desire for recognition is conditioned by the sociopolitical histories of non-chalcedonian christianity (e.g., lukasik 2020). welcome to the wesselerbronx known somewhat problematically among religious studies scholars as miaphysites (bakker kellogg 2018), syriac orthodox christians partake of a christological and liturgical tradition historically viewed as heretical by the western (i.e., the greek and then later latin) church. at the ecumenical councils of nicaea (325 c.e.), constantinople (381 c.e.), and chalcedon (452 c.e.), imperial and ecclesiastical authorities sought to determine what part of the essence and personhood of jesus christ was divine, what part human, and what the arrangement of these parts might mean for mary’s relationship with the creator (syriac yoldath d’aloho, mother of god), and thus for the nature of the relationship between visible humanity and invisible divinity. these were political questions as much as they were theological ones, in that they determined the proper dispensation of ecclesiastical and political power throughout the byzantine empire. twenty-first-century anthropologists have largely ignored the lasting influence of this founding moment in the marriage of christianity to empire on later european political structures, despite its influence on the ethnographic imagination itself, which as todd s. berzon (2016) argues, took shape in the heresiological writings of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries that identified genealogy and territorially emplaced peoples with anti-imperial heresy (see also buell 2005). this was the period during which syriac orthodoxy emerged as an ethnic church in patristic writings—the suryoye ‘atiqe, “the ancient syrians” (weltecke 2016), who were ethnically syrian (also referred to as west syriac) because of their non-chalcedonian theological difference. they rejected the proceedings of the council of chalcedon and the language of its definition of christ’s dual incarnate nature, along with those congregations who would eventually identify as coptic, armenian, ethiopian, and eritrean orthodox—although there is reason to believe that the original disagreement was largely grammatical, political, and linguistic-cultural rather than substantively christological. one crucial outcome of this battle over the sociopolitical valence of heresy was the expulsion of west syriac–speaking congregations, many of whom took refuge in persia and, later, in the islamic caliphates, where centuries of dialogue with jewish, muslim, and east syriac (i.e., the assyrian church of the east) left marks on syriac orthodox thought and practice (e.g., griffith 2008). since the nineteenth century, multiple waves of violence have spurred global syriac orthodox migration, leading to new diasporic formations (atto 2011; armbruster 2014; mack 2017; jarjour 2018; schmoller 2018; kiraz 2019; hager 2020). since the 1970s, according to diocesan estimates reported to me orally, at least twenty-five thousand syriac orthodox christians have settled in the netherlands, especially in and around the cities of enschede and hengelo in the easternmost region called twente. while they remain largely unknown to the rest of the country, syriac orthodox are visible enough as an ethnocultural group in enschede to merit dedicated liaison officers both in the municipal government and in the local police force. in the suburb of wesselerbrink, they comprise the largest minority group in the district, which many young suryoye of my acquaintance call the wesselerbronx, in playful reference to u.s. american histories of racialization, immigration, and cultural production. while disparate national histories of secularization throughout the middle east have created regional differences among syriac orthodox self-understandings (bakker kellogg 2015), diasporic suryoye have nonetheless maintained a tight grip on collective memories of non-chalcedonian history as the authorizing wellspring of ethnonational difference, whether defined as assyrian, aramaean, or just syriac (bakker kellogg 2019). how they labor to make this non-chalcedonian christianity relevant to the programs meant to integrate them into dutch society holds a mirror to the logics at work in european debates over minority accommodation. in the netherlands, they are charged by both the state and by their neighbors with adapting to dutch norms and values in ways that, intentionally or not, target obligatory features of syriac orthodox christian ethical tradition.13 organizing this national project for minority integration for much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is a distinctively dutch conception of allochthony, which until 2017 was an official state category used by bureaucrats and social workers to denote residents and citizens of “non-western” descent (reekum and duyvendak 2012). derived from the ancient greek allo-, meaning “other,” and chthon-, meaning “earth,” een allochtoon is a person who lives permanently in the country and may even have been born to parents whose own parents were born in the netherlands, but who is understood to be visibly marked as descended from a non-western part of the world (schie 2018). this visible mark is rooted in an explicitly religious understanding of territorial belonging: as early as 1959, a government report for the southern province of brabant used the word allochtoon to refer to dutch workers migrating from the northern provinces, highlighting the religious and economic difference of these mostly protestant, middle-class migrants from the mostly catholic, working-class southerners among whom they settled. the essentialist discourse of allochthony, according to dvora yanow and marleen van der haar (2013, 246–47), has deep roots in ancient hippocratic thought, basing “differentiations among persons and groups on ‘socioeconomic and cultural differences’” tied to place and behavior. whether a subgroup was designated allochthonous depended on perceptions of their relative likelihood to integrate into a social fabric whose local organization fell along sectarian lines. while in some respects these sectarian lines have since been subsumed within a secular ethics of cosmopolitan nationalism (lechner 1999, 2008),14 many commentators nonetheless claim this cosmopolitan nationalism as a major achievement of the so-called judeo-christian ethical tradition that was, as pope benedict xvi reminds us, produced in large part by political tension between european protestants and catholics. and yet my interlocutors’ christianity, it turns out, proves insufficient to ensure smooth assimilation into this tradition, as the following story demonstrates. “living between two ‘cultures’” one of the moments in my fieldwork when i first discerned the sensory and theological politics undergirding dutch anxieties over new minorities’ norms and values took place one saturday afternoon in 2010, when the niece of the abbott of st. ephrem monastery organized a public lecture and panel discussion titled “living between two cultures.” the expert panel included an alderman from the city of enschede, a police officer responsible for liaising with the syriac orthodox community, a syriac orthodox jurist working in amsterdam, the monastery’s resident theologian (who happened to be a convert from roman catholicism), and a senior researcher from a nonprofit policy, research, and training organization located in the faraway city of utrecht. this researcher, one dr. k, was the keynote speaker of the event; it was her speech, and her audience’s outraged response to her words, that began to trouble my understanding of the boundaries between racial and religious discourse in my field site. dr. k introduced herself to the at-capacity crowd as an academic criminologist and professional expert in social pedagogy.15 as the “interculturalization” project leader at a youth care [jeugdzorg] organization’s study center on migrants and refugees, she had been invited by the abbott’s niece to address their community’s growing problem with young syriac boys causing trouble on the streets of enschede. these “menacing” [straatkwaad] syriac adolescents were a growing problem for criminologists, she said, and she was there to help the community understand the behavior of what she called “these so-called street terrorists.” she informed her audience that the roots of young male syriac aggression were as much “cultural” as they were “social” and “psychological.” based on studies conducted by her organization among turkish, moroccan, and surinamese youth in the cities of central holland, she explained that it had been scientifically established that young migrant boys were susceptible to developing a problematic image of masculinity defined by a lack of empathy, which could lead to problems with drugs, alcohol, the wrong friends, and eventually street violence. the source of this unhappy version of masculinity, she explained, was the “coercive dynamic” of many “allochthonous” families. in her “living between two cultures” lecture, dr. k explicitly hailed her syriac orthodox audience as allochtonen. their families were not alone, she told them, in experiencing problems with physical and verbal abuse, but the susceptibility of their young men to grow into the criminal element had everything to do with cultural resistance to receiving expert help from pedagogues, social workers, psychologists, and other professional caregivers [zorggevers]. she admitted that while some other experts claimed lack of integration as the cause of criminality among allochthonous communities in the netherlands, she believed that the source of the trouble lay with the uneven process of emancipation from their traditional norms and values, causing intergenerational conflict within families and communities. without specifying what kind of norms and values she meant, she explained that “moroccans are much too quickly integrated,” while “turks remain more isolated and subject to social control within their communities, so that the emancipation process leads to family conflict.” the real problems arose, she said, when families did not avail themselves of the support offered by youth care organizations. addressing the audience with emphasis on the hybrid dutch-english phrase, “er is absoluut geen case management” (there is absolutely no case management), she began to plead: “let the professional caregivers do their job—let them intervene in all the problems that arise in your family! they have specially trained caregivers for every member of the family, many from the same ethnic group, who can act as a go-between with the relevant care organizations; please, make use of them!” by the end of her speech, the churning anger in the room was palpable. her audience was appalled. the question-and-answer session did not go well—at one point, with an embarrassed laugh, dr. k admitted that she could not understand the provincial twents accent of many of her questioners, which did little to soothe the crowd’s disquiet. their questions betrayed varying degrees of indignation and skepticism: “we are not the ones who need to hear this—and the people who need to hear it would not come to something like this anyway!” “we are not turks, we are not moroccans, we are not surinamese! what does any of this have to do with us? how can you come speak to us without knowing the first thing about who we are?” one audience member of my acquaintance, a trained schoolteacher from syria named farida, raised her hand to comment: “you cannot deny that more and more there are ‘black’ schools and ‘white’ schools. discrimination and exclusion really happen here, and that makes it hard for people like us to even want to integrate. it would make a huge difference if dutch people could work on integrating themselves a little too [een beetje mee integreren]!” a rare moment of audible approval and visible head-nodding occurred when the monastery’s resident theologian spoke up to ask the panel: “so why have we not asked the most important question of all yet? what does it mean to be a christian in all of this? we are having this meeting in a monastery for a reason!” but in spite of the audience’s applause at his intervention, the panel discussion veered off in another direction. after the meeting ended, i asked my friends and acquaintances what they made of it, and they shared a general sense of the event as a failure. from where i was sitting, the encounter between the criminologist and her audience began to unravel when dr. k named “culture” as the source of young, male suryoyo criminality. while pathologizing culture constitutes a familiar strategy of colonial power the world over, the syriac orthodox audience in that moment reacted to dr. k diagnosing the problem with their supposed culture as the “coercive dynamic” of “allochthonous” family life. while her characterization of moroccan, turkish, and surinamese family life as culturally deficient was troubling enough, the audience’s outrage at having their family lives hailed as culturally indistinguishable from that of families from other backgrounds was inflamed by their understanding that it was their liturgical tradition—their “culture” and its “norms and values”—that had brought them all together for this meeting in the first place. here, the reader might reasonably wonder whether the audience’s response was not a classic “model minority” refusal of solidarity with other marginalized groups to secure for themselves the privileges of closer proximity to whiteness. this would make for a plausible explanation had not so many of my interlocutors been preoccupied with safeguarding their ethical difference as a recognizable form of ethnic difference in opposition to their secularist and western christian dutch neighbors. given their insistence on publicly flouting the expectations of dutch model minorityhood whenever the obligations of orthodox liturgical life demanded it, even when it came at a social cost, i suggest that the primary source of their outrage lay elsewhere, in the desire to adapt the tools of dutch social work to non-chalcedonian liturgical theology, and to have that theology recognized as sociopolitically salient by municipal and national authorities. much like heleen’s friend in the village, however, dr. k worked within a discourse in which cultural, ethical, religious, national, and ethnic differences were effectively synonyms—as evidenced by her vagueness about what, precisely, any of her research subjects needed to be “emancipated” from—leaving her no frame of reference for integrating non-chalcedonian theology into the category of allochthony, much less discerning the kind of ethical demand it might make of her audience to violate dutch normen en waarden. instead, she identified syriac orthodox difference with muslim difference, which she, in turn, constructed as a psychological problem to be solved by surrendering “traditional” parental authority over individual socialization to the state. for the syriac orthodox in the netherlands i work with, “traditional” parental authority over the reproduction of individual and communal socialization is grounded in a soteriological (i.e., salvific) system in which kin relations are integrally and intimately intertwined with ecclesiastical authority and monastic life.16 for my interlocutors, dr. k’s suggestion that they surrender authority over family life to secular social workers stabbed a dagger in the heart of their efforts to innovate theologically acceptable configurations of liturgically ordered family life in a dutch context. the “two cultures” confrontation rearticulated two long-standing questions in dutch political history: (1) who is responsible for the reproduction of social life?—one of the key controversies bedeviling nineteenthand twentieth-century negotiations between calvinists and liberals over the role of the family and of religious education in mediating a child’s relationship with the state (e.g., kuyper 1943), and (2) who mediates relations among competing sites of reproductive power? here, reproduction and mediation constitute mutually entangled theological problems. in the process of forming the modern state, calvinists and liberals worked out their theological differences through an institution called verzuiling, or “pillarization,” a rigid, vertically organized, and self-reproducing system of segregation among protestants, catholics, liberal humanists, and, later, socialists that is widely understood to have ended in the 1960s, although scholars have noted pillarization’s lingering structural legacies (bracke 2013; blom and talsma 2000). the calvinist-led movement to maintain boundaries between religious and comparable ideological blocs developed throughout the nineteenth century as part of a backlash against french enlightenment values, an effort itself linked to resentment against napoleonic incursions into the low countries. never a formal doctrine of state per se, pillarization resulted from compromises in which differences across the populace were not to be transcended through individualistic, abstract citizenship as in secular liberal regimes, but rather by crystallizing those differences into self-reproducing corporate entities. when the constitution was reformed in 1848 to formalize the separation of church and state, calvinists insisted that religious institutions mediate the integration of new groups of citizens into public life. central to these debates was the status of schools and families: should, as the liberals demanded, a secular authority oversee the relationship between children and society, or should parents? for abraham kuyper (1943), the nineteenth-century architect of dutch political calvinism and the founder of the anti-revolutionary party (arp), the father stood as the mediator of a family’s relation with the state because his authority within the family structure mirrored that of the earthly church’s relation to the holy trinity; rooted in the primal blood relation, the family formed the basis for all human social relations. in my interpretation, kuyper’s christian political philosophy rested on an implicit logic of iconicity: the relation of iconic resemblance inspired by divine providence communicates a family’s holiness directly to god. dutch liberals, unsurprisingly, strongly rejected the premise of such an arrangement. to resolve the impasse, the arp formulated the principle of souvereniteit in eigen kring, “sphere sovereignty,” the same political theology used by white south african political elites to justify racial apartheid. in this system, liberal humanism and socialism constituted pillars of communal difference commensurable with the religious difference of catholics and protestants, and boundaries were maintained as much by private kinship practices like marriage endogamy and exclusive burial grounds as by public-facing institutions such as denominational schools, newspapers, labor unions, and drinking establishments. in state-funded denominational schools especially, religious authorities gained significant power over how children were taught. while this tension between dutch calvinists and liberals created the structural conditions through which new minorities must find their way into dutch social life, it also created a set of concepts through which they know and are known by the state and their neighbors. as i show in the following section, these theologically grounded concepts produce racializing effects because, while currently clustered into the word allochtonen, they fundamentally concern themselves with the questions of ethical relatedness, reproduction, and differentiation/classification on which earlier controversies over schools and families turned. the shifting frames of allochthony: culture, ethnicity, religion, race? one reason the syriac orthodox audience felt such frustration with the criminologist that day at the monastery was what they saw as a missed opportunity to talk through with each other what was meant, and what was demanded, by the “two cultures” referenced in the event’s name. bedeviling their efforts to know and make themselves known to the dutch state and their neighbors was a contentious debate over which metacategories properly applied to being syriac orthodox in the netherlands. the term culture was often privileged in these conversations because it accommodated my interlocutors’ diverse political aspirations; culture functioned as a polysemic container for a host of differences deemed politically salient enough to garner disciplinary attention (and thus funding for community programs) from the state. my friend meryem, for example, pointedly used the dutch word kultuur over and against the term religion when she told me, “we are not just religious. syriac orthodoxy is a culture.” meanwhile, a dutch-syriac anthropologist friend, objecting to scholarly definitions of syriac orthodoxy that reduce it to an “ecclesial community” used the dutch word volk (people; ethnic group) to insist that “just because we gather in a church does not mean we are not a people in a political sense.” and yet, despite culture’s strategic value, it also silenced syriac orthodox efforts to convey the sociopolitical salience of their non-chalcedonian christianity. in this silence, the question of race lurked awkwardly at the edge of our attention. race was an unwelcome problem no one quite knew what to do with, but a problem nonetheless, as conversations died and facial expressions closed up whenever the subject veered toward communal relations with white dutch neighbors. it took many years for me to make sense of race’s unspeakability in these situations, except for uncomfortable references to “black schools” and “white schools,” until i came to discern its roots in the ethical demands of dutch cosmopolitan nationalism. twenty-first-century dutch cosmopolitan nationalism is today explicitly staked on the public discourse of normen en waarden, reasserted by prime minister j. p. balkenende in 2002 in an effort to restabilize dutch social relations after the assassination of the anti-islamic provocateur and politician pim fortuyn. in silencing race, dutch cosmopolitan nationalism links perceptions of public-facing, politically salient ethical difference to the category of culture; as a category, the latter invites a particular kind of engagement with the state and its funding programs (cf. duyvendak, geschiere, and tonkens 2016; mepschen 2016). this partially accounts for why meryem and other syriac orthodox explain their commitments in culturalist terms: their ethical obligations as orthodox christians are communal, “public,” and political as well as individual, “private,” and spiritual, and they thus require the engagement of interested outsiders like the municipal government to secure spaces in which to reproduce these ethical commitments. and yet the durably racializing logic of culture is evident in the ambiguity it generates, particularly among public commentators who explain social friction in terms of islamic norms and values, as in this opinion piece by dirk vlasblom published in november 2017 in the national center-left newspaper nrc handelsblad for an online feature called “dossier: racism”: there is some confusion in the heated western debate over migration. newcomers tend to call every expression of discontent with their arrival and every form of discrimination “racism.” this is incorrect. the fact that application letters signed with islamic sounding names are often ignored is not a matter of racism. the applicant is discriminated against for his/her culture or religion, not on the basis of appearance, like skin color, eye shape, or hair type. (vlasblom 2017; translation by author) here, the journalist insists on distinguishing between perceptions of religious difference signified by a person’s name and the perception of some unnamed difference signified by a person’s phenotype, as if cultural/religious identity were in no way embodied, material, or relational. what vlasblom thinks “skin color, eye shape, or hair type” signifies in a racist schema is left unexplained, but his writing invokes a sensory politics of its own, one that differentiates among varieties of visuality in the interplay between visibility and invisibility, such that a written name signifies what the unseen body cannot: a genealogical, and therefore an embodied, material, and reproductive relation to intolerable ethical difference. what remains unexamined in commentary such as vlasblom’s is why new minorities in the netherlands, especially those from the middle east and north africa, might think of themselves as subject to racist discrimination in situations where only their religious or cultural background is perceptible in the first place (see also özdil 2014). it is because, in insisting on the body’s invisibility in a chain of reasoning that infers islamic difference from a job seeker’s family, in turn inferred from a job seeker’s visible name, the journalist elides how any inference drawn from names, religions, cultures, nationalities, and families is possible only by taking these as iconic of an embodied relationality in the first place. ethical difference, whether named “cultural” or “religious,” is inferred through the logic of reproduction, genealogy, and inheritance. this makes for a mode of reasoning grounded in iconic thought: the signifying practice (a name) constitutes the relation that it signifies (genealogy). but—and this is the crucial part—the author disavows the relationality to which he obliquely refers in the very process of referring to it. culture produces race by erasing the historical social relations—the reproductive powers—through which “old” and “new” european subjects were formed in relation to each other through globalized processes of colonial domination, missionary work, labor migration, trade relations, and economic extraction. to return to the question of terminology, however, syriac christianity does not technically exist in dutch legal-bureaucratic terms, and so in the state’s management apparatus, their perceived differences are yoked to an ethicized perception of muslim difference. bureaucratically, the state has formulated “national origin” into a signifier of “allochthonous norms and values,” which it then renders into a biopolitical category called religion. this process becomes evident in documents like the wrr’s (scientific council for government policy) 2004 report by gabriel van den brink, titled “sketch of a civilization offensive: on norms, normalcy, and normalization in the netherlands,” providing insight into the categorical collapse of ethnic, national, religious, linguistic, and racial histories in heleen’s high school friend’s reference to “moroccans” as the archetype of ethical otherness. in section 4.3, devoted to “migrants and modernity,” the author explains his approach to analyzing the differences among citizens of migrant descent: in the past few years there has been increasing debate over whether these ideas hinder successful integration. i rely on a survey taken among a large number of allochthonous citizens in the netherlands in 1998. this survey distinguished between five groups: turks, moroccans, surinamese, antilleans, and authochthonous citizens. because the differences between turks and moroccans are minimal, i will treat them as a single category and refer to them as dutch citizens with an islamic background. (brink 2004, 110; emphasis original) although no longer an official category, in everyday conversation allochthony remains a powerful tool of ethical differentiation, classification, and control in how it evokes a kaleidoscopic sensory politics with both spatial and temporal dimensions. spatially, it refracts perceptions of difference across shifting boundaries of north/south and east/west as it extends to eastern europeans, especially those from poland, as well as to people from africa and the middle east. at the same time, allochthony works in a temporal dimension to produce religion as an artifact of a past that the dutch allegedly overcame when they dismantled pillarization. allochthony embeds a religious imaginary—religion-as-atmospheric-museum-piece—within an embodied ethic of secular emancipation, which for many makes for a defining feature of twenty-first-century dutch cosmopolitan nationalism. and yet calvinist theocratic norms persist in this embodied ethic and aesthetic atmosphere. nineteenth-century notions of “‘personal self-discipline’ as well as collective moral control” (stoler 1995, 119) circulate in twenty-first-century common sense about how to properly orient one’s life trajectory toward the pool of collective energy that sociologists yannick coenders and sébastien chauvin (2017) call dutch “emotional democracy,” forming subjects who might engage religious music, architecture, and church bells aesthetically while policing the reach of more ethically demanding sensory forms like the daily muslim call to prayer (e.g., tamimi arab 2017, 111–49). thus dutch cosmopolitan nationalism demands that citizens of color accommodate white sensibilities to ensure that the netherlands remains an ethical, “anti-racist” society—because ethics, in liberal tradition, is marked by reflexive freedom from tradition. for dr. k, this entailed allowing social workers to “intervene in every part of family life” to correct parents when they were not appropriately socializing their children according to dutch norms and values to be independent thinkers. every “axis of othering” (koning 2016) that allochthony touches, it touches so as to assert interpretive control over sites of reproductive power, whether social pedagogy, job applications, community funding programs, genealogical practices, mosque-building projects, or indeed, raising children, where the formation of ethical subjects intersects with public sociality. sovereignty, ethics, and the reproductive future structuring dutch cosmopolitan nationalism’s moral project, in which disparate sites of reproductive power generate the ethics that bring about sociality, is a set of background assumptions about materiality and personhood that shape communicative practice, what linguistic anthropologists call semiotic ideology. one key feature of a calvinist semiotic ideology, reinforced in the colonial missionary encounter (keane 2007), is the “dematerialization of meaning” that contains a seed of ambivalence over the inescapable materiality of all communicative practice, whether linguistic or extralinguistic. calvinism mistrusts materiality; human persons are persons because they communicate without mediation. this ideal of immediacy, of direct communication without relying on intermediary sensory forms to transmit or facilitate the connection between human persons and god, and thus between persons and other persons, constitutes a hallmark of calvinist-inflected varieties of secularity. this dematerialization of meaning divorces secularist dutch responses to religious aesthetics from any sense of ethical demand. the seed of ambivalence reaches a crisis point, i suggest, when confronted with the human body as semiotic form—not in the sense of an “expressive” form, but as the durable outcome of the history of reproductive relations that produced a person. in calvinist semiotic ideologies, a person may intentionally express themselves through their body in a way that demonstrates their agentive self-mastery, as with the normative calvinist family’s mimesis of the holy family, but a perception of danger appears when the body communicates not the intentional spirit of the person inside, but invisible forces beyond the person and their intentions. this marks the ever-recurring crisis of christian iconoclasm since the seventh century: all bodies are formed through the history of social relations that precondition any person’s individual capacity for self-mastery, a capacity that the modern liberal tradition identifies with ethics as long as a person can prove their independence from those relations when deciding how to act. in a twenty-first-century calvinist semiotic ideology, and in the ethical regime staked on it, confronting the postcolonial history of reproductive relations communicated by the bodies of others disrupts the story of ethical self-mastery. “race,” according to philosopher j. reid miller (2017), is the name “we” (in this case, white euro-americans) bestow on our perception of persons whose histories we cannot assimilate into our own self-image while remaining intelligible to ourselves as ethical subjects. in the twenty-first century, this makes for a characteristic problem of whiteness-as-sociopolitical-formation and of imperial christianity, linked by a global political economy built on slavery and colonial extraction. the descendants of missionaries, colonizers, and slave traders mark others as ethically different to remain stable ethical subjects to themselves. this move requires a unique interplay of visibility and invisibility: i must erase that part of my history that i share with you, a history that produced both of us, to mark you as visibly, ethically, distinct from me. this is not a universal habit of thought. its condition of possibility is that it partakes of the logic of iconicity while denying it. an orthodox understanding of iconicity, on the other hand, acknowledges that all forms are semiotic, in the sense that they communicate because their material existence results from a history of socially significant relations of reproduction. whether the human body or a painted icon of christ, everything that exists in material form takes its shape via a relational act of divine creation or human reproduction—where the invisible intersects the visible. on one end of the christian imagination, orthodox semiotic ideologies acknowledge the icon’s ability to materialize the relationship between viewer and invisible power, the history of relations, that produced both the icon and the viewer as intimately interconnected parts of an incarnational economy (mondzain 2005). in a calvinist-inflected theological politics, such acknowledgment can prove difficult. this means that, in addition to everything else it does, racism is the denial of the history of relations that have made us all who we are, and a denial of the invisible forces of reproduction that generate our material and ethical existence. in this view, the materiality of the body communicates these histories of reproductive relations because it is an outcome of these histories, making the invisible “history of responsibility,” which miller (2017) identifies as the implicit link between race and ethics in european philosophical tradition, perceptible. in this sense, as eboni marshall turman (2013) argues, racism is constituted through unequal power relations originating in the theological failure to recognize that incarnational economy through which persons are formed relationally. this is where the dematerialization of meaning can lead—to a sensory politics dedicated to obscuring the history of reproductive relations as a tool for asserting interpretive control over future sites of reproductive power. with this in mind, consider again heleen’s misrecognition by her friend on the streets of glanerbrug. i, too, have attended the day-after-easter festivities at the monastery and have seen for myself the vocal outrage expressed by dutch passersby at the monastery’s chaotic crowd control and diminished capacity to operate according to dutch conventions of regulating public space. although their passage by the monastery was only briefly delayed, i observed the voluble irritation of numerous cyclists and drivers shouting at the devout coming to honor their dead, calling them “ridiculous” (belachelijk) in outraged tones that struck me as out of proportion to such a minor inconvenience. although dutch-born suryoye often speak of themselves as “model minorities,” their liturgical obligations, especially where they concern ancestors and kin relations, tend to take precedence over other concerns, and will often prompt public displays of ritual mourning that transgress local dutch norms, such as spontaneously processing by foot and en masse through city streets to attend a funeral mass. their neighbors find the collective affective dimensions of such liturgical obligations inscrutable, my interlocutors tell me, because “even our roman catholic friends are so calvinist in how they think and act that they have forgotten how to be christian.” for syriac orthodox christians in the netherlands, what is seen and what remains unseen, what registers viscerally in their neighbors’ impressions of their difference and what escapes attention entirely, illuminates a race-producing evaluative hierarchy. this hierarchy emerges from a history of contested interpretive control over sites of reproductive power, the formation of ethical subjects, and their interface with public sociality. as an outcome of calvinist-liberal compromise, this theological politics bureaucratizes european christian ambivalence toward the communicative and reproductive power of the human body/icon. the religious icon offers an analytical tool for making sense of this ethical economy, in which the anxieties provoked by encounters with bodies-deemed-heretical draw attention to the crux of the matter: conflicting views of sovereignty over the reproductive future. the body/icon threatens to destabilize the sovereignty of states and subjects because it shows us where past becomes future, now, in the present, whether we will it to or not. abstract since 9/11, political debate over immigration in europe is often posed as a question of islam’s distance from europe’s putatively judeo-christian ethical tradition—and therefore a matter of neither explicitly racial nor religious animus. this article interrogates this claim from the perspective of syriac orthodox christians living in the netherlands, who, despite their conspicuous christianity, are frequently told by both the state and their neighbors that their ethnoreligious difference is not meaningfully different from muslim difference. drawing on fieldwork in the dutch subprovince of twente, i analyze both everyday and bureaucratic moments of misrecognition as sites of racialization that illuminate a dutch racial-religious imagination rooted in post-calvinist theological anxieties over social reproduction. by showing how minoritized bodies are read as icons of invisible reproductive relations, i deploy the orthodox christian doctrine of the holy icon to theorize secular modern racialization as a process of ethical differentiation, classification, and control over reproductive power. [europe; race; ethics; semiotics; immigration; christianity; islamophobia] notes acknowledgments as always, my first and deepest thanks go to my friends and research participants among the syriac orthodox christian community in the netherlands whose kindness, honesty, and vulnerability have transformed me and this work in ways both visible and invisible. while i cannot do justice to this article’s full relational history here, this work was formed in conversation with many people, especially mor polycarpus augin aydin, susan ashbrook harvey, melissa l. caldwell, don brenneis, carolyn martin shaw, susan harding, danilyn rutherford, mayanthi fernando, megan moodie, naures atto, noah tamarkin, kimberly arkin, aisha khan, esra özyürek, charles hirschkind, christina robinson, heleen murre-van den berg, and the participants of the 2018 orthodoxy in transition workshop at the institute of eastern christianity, radboud university in nijmegen. i am also grateful to heather paxson, brad weiss, christopher nelson, and the anonymous reviewers of cultural anthropology for their crucial insights and generative feedback. various stages of research and write-up were made possible by the social science research council’s international dissertation research fellowship, the wenner-gren foundation’s dissertation fieldwork grant, and the hunt postdoctoral fellowship, the woodrow wilson foundation’s charlotte w. newcombe dissertation fellowship, a preliminary fieldwork grant from uc berkeley’s institute of european studies, and a visiting scholar residency at the berkeley center for the study of religion. finally, this piece would have been nearly impossible to complete without joshua brahinsky’s stalwart friendship as a long-term reading and writing partner, nor would it ever have begun without sean and milo bakker kellogg’s constant care and companionship. 1. names have been changed to protect the anonymity of research participants. 2. syriac orthodox christians are known in different national, regional, and linguistic contexts as suryoye (suryoyo, singular masculine; suryayto, singular feminine) or suroyo in neo-aramaic, süryani in arabic and turkish, or assyrian, aramaean, or simply syriac in english. in this corner of the syriac world, where the majority of syriac orthodox christians hail from tur abdin, little consensus exists over which term best captures the historical, cultural, and ethnonational dimensions of their identity in english or dutch, so i default here to suryoye / suryoyo, with the understanding that this, too, is a contested term (see bakker kellogg 2019). 3. for more on the syriac/assyrian/chaldean genocide, see david gaunt, naures atto, and soner o. barthoma (2017). 4. i define theology as christian ontology; that is, the broad field of debate among and within christian traditions over the nature and purpose of reality. i generally refer to “theological politics” rather than to political theology to emphasize a more open discursive terrain where multiple theological currents within a polity may interact and influence each other. i understand secularism/secularity to emerge from within the interstitial spaces among discursive traditions, and among disparate scales of governance, where tensions over reproductive power are at stake. semiotic ideology refers to “people’s underlying assumptions about what signs are, what functions signs serve, and what consequences they might produce” in communication (keane 2018, 64). 5. my approach to ethics charts a middle path among the semiotics of “everyday ethics” (e.g., lambek 2010), the phenomenological (e.g., throop 2009) and hermeneutic (e.g., zigon 2013) orientations that emphasize freedom and “being-in-the-world,” and those neo-aristotelian perspectives that emphasize norms, traditions, and embodiment (e.g., hirschkind 2006). elsewhere, i develop this notion of “intersensorial ethics” to describe the foundational relation that structures human subjectivity, a relation that sustains itself because it is both linguistically mediated and pre-discursively embodied. 6. not all moroccans or dutch people of moroccan descent are arab or arabic speakers, nor even, for that matter, muslim. many dutch-moroccan families identify not as arab but as amazigh, hailing originally from the rif mountains in morocco, where the tamazight language is preeminent over arabic and the people are economically marginalized from the rest of morocco (amersfoort and heelsum 2007). 7. feminist and disability studies scholars have shown the link between trained bodily capacities for sensory perception and hegemonic power relations within a society. sachi sekimoto (2018, 87), for example, argues that “individuals incorporate social values and orientations into their bodies, as the embodied sensory orientations shape and inform their social and physical experiences.” 8. in her study of ethical striving among black brazilian lesbicas, for example, nessette falu (2015) develops an expansive conception of “modes of freedom” as reformulating the self’s relation to the self and to others by seeking recognition as an ethical subject against the grain of racial and sexual domination. 9. for a comparative example of this political genealogy in the contemporary spanish context, where criteria for inclusion and exclusion are translated into the language of sentiment, rather than “norms and values,” see charles a. mcdonald (2021). 10. as stolcke (1993) reminds us, racism reinforces women’s maternal role by naturalizing social inequalities. in capitalism, this naturalization reconciles equality of opportunity with inequality in reality; prior to and beyond capitalism, this naturalization reconciles any model of ethical personhood that poses reproductive power as a problem for the constitution of autonomous ethical subjects (see also berg and duyvendak 2012). 11. anthropologists sometimes write about iconicity as if it is a characteristically un-western and thus a potentially decolonial mode of meaning-making. iconic meaning-making, in such conversations, is often juxtaposed with symbolic meaning-making, that is, the semiotic process based on arbitrary linguistic signs, which scholars also sometimes characterize as constitutively modern and secular (e.g., meyer 2009, 5, 43). as angie heo (2018) shows, however, iconicity can saturate modernist sociopolitical imaginaries and exacerbate identitarian divisions, as it does among egyptian copts and muslims, where one may implicitly participate in iconicity’s semiotic logic without explicitly espousing orthodox christian doctrine about icons. 12. looking beyond europe, adeola oni-orisan (2017) similarly argues that a secularism formed through complex tensions among liberal and pentecostal christian traditions shapes the biopolitical field where racialization, maternal health, development discourse, and reproductive desire intersect in postcolonial nigeria. 13. such ethics include the ritual mourning practices of the day after easter, but they also include patriarchal norms for intergenerational communication, which are saturated with ecclesiastical significance and run against the grain of secular sexual ethics. 14. ethnographic studies of dutch cosmopolitan nationalism have diagnosed a gap between what oskar verkaaik and pooyan tamimi arab (2016) term “constitutionalist secularism” and “culturalist secularism.” in this formulation, secular political practices, cultural self-images, and perceptions of religious difference prove equally integral to dutch attitudes toward immigration in both official commitments to pluralism and its nativist rejection. these practices and self-images rest on the hard-won discursive silence around both “religion” and “race” (essed and trienekens 2008; tamimi arab 2012; wekker 2004). driven from both the top down and the bottom up after world war ii, political leaders worked to eradicate anti-semitism and colonial racism by eliminating “race” as an official 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https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.13. zigon, jarrett 2013 “on love: remaking moral subjectivity in postrehabilitation russia.” american ethnologist 40, no. 1: 201–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12014. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 618-648, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.08 the bioeconomics of domesticating zoonoses cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 30-36, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.05 the bioeconomics of domesticating zoonoses sarah green university of helsinki https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7026-383x almost every aspect of nonhuman animal life—including genetic material—has been traded for centuries (phillips 2015; chaiklin et al. 2020). the african grey parrots that hans lucht (2022, this issue) mentions in this colloquy are members of just one of thousands of species involved: both legal and illegal trade in so-called exotic animal species dates back to at least roman times (wazer 2016), and farmed animals, or livestock (literally living assets), have equally long histories as traded animals. in the animal-breeding business, genetic material, such as that of racehorse studs, is directly on sale (cassidy 2002). in fact, sarah franklin (2007, 105–6) suggests that the industrialization of animal farming in the united kingdom was predicated on precisely the commodification of the animal’s genetic material. of course, as nonhumans, these animals do not participate in bioeconomics in the same way as ruben andersson (2022, this issue) describes in this colloquy: nonhuman animals can never fully engage as actors in these markets; they remain commodities, bought and sold by humans. in passing, nikolas rose (2007, 33) has observed that the domestication of animals preceded the subsequent emergence of bioeconomics, indicating that the activity involved in bioeconomics is not new. rather, what is new in the twenty-first century is the transformative thought that vitality, as such, could be commodified. at the same time, ghassan hage (2017) argues that the euro-american concept of domestication is rooted in the assertion that every living thing exists for some purpose, and from a human-centered perspective, the best purpose would be for human use. this idea of domestication, he suggests, has been generalized and extended as a principle that covers everything: all things in the world should be amenable to such domestication, to being put to human use. the relationship between this and the colonial project of looking for useful things around the planet for the purposes of trade or manufacture seems fairly obvious. moreover, the introduction of imported livestock almost invariably accompanied colonization (anderson 2006; chaiklin et al. 2020; urbanik 2012; wilcox and rutherford 2018). that the term livestock in the past also referred to enslaved persons makes clear that the border between the actor and the commodity in the sale of living entities never really concerned respect for species boundaries. instead, it reflected the hierarchical relations between the lives buying and selling and the living material being sold (see also franklin 2007, 52). more rarely, livestock had another, euphemistic, meaning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: it described fleas, lice, ticks, and other parasites that can live on human or nonhuman animals. in this metaphorical use of the word (the oxford english dictionary calls it “humorous”), the commercial meaning fades to emphasize the “live” element—the fact that any living substance invariably involves comingling with other, co-present forms of life. the threat of infection posed by comingling with other living entities has constituted a matter of human concern for many centuries (lynteris 2020; hotez 2016; oldstone 2010; vittecoq et al. 2014). where this overlaps with the economics of vitality, two kinds of mobility are involved: the movement of nonhuman animals across space for trade, and the capacity for living entities to hop across bodily boundaries and cause disease. the majority of human infectious diseases are zoonoses: that is, pathogens that have moved from nonhuman animal bodies to human bodies, causing disease in humans. the virus that causes covid-19, sars-cov-2, proved to be a particularly successful border-hopper, but there have been many others: sars, mers, various bird influenzas, zika, dengue, yellow fever, and aids are all caused by viruses of different types; bubonic and pneumonic plague are caused by bacteria; malaria stems from a parasite that lives in mosquitoes (and is the deadliest parasite affecting humans to date). of course, humans can also infect nonhuman animals (called “reverse zoonosis”); during the covid-19 pandemic, this particularly involved farmed mink, infected with sars-cov-2 by humans. in denmark, one of the largest mink-farming countries in the world, the government ordered the destruction of around 15 million mink to prevent new variants of sars-cov-2 from developing in those populations and re-infecting humans.1 the decision to have animals killed en masse to try and control the spread of infectious disease between bodies forms part of bioeconomic mobility, though not the kind people usually have in mind when using the phrase. in europe, the outbreak of major livestock disasters such as foot-and-mouth disease invariably leads to a mass culling of animals. yet the illness caused by foot-and-mouth is not itself deadly; most infected animals recover in a relatively short time. in the past, most commercial livestock industries in the united kingdom accepted foot-and-mouth as an endemic disease (woods 2004). only with the intensive development of animal trade and industrialized farming practices did the scorched-earth approach, one that involves killing every single animal within a given territory, appear acceptable. drawing on abigail woods’s work, frédéric keck (2020, 13) notes that the economic, rather than zoological, rationale for this kind of response “reveals the vulnerabilities of a global interconnected economy.” the particular character of mobility in the context of bioeconomics appears to be the problem. the sheer scale of the businesses involved makes the potential speed with which a disease could spread an enormous threat—not to individual animals, but to the economic interests of those involved in livestock farming. from this perspective, the killing of huge numbers of animals in one spot to contain the damage makes (economic) sense. bio-economics are like that sometimes: the economics of life itself has led to a great deal of death at times. in other words, developments in bioeconomic mobility, meaning increases in intensive animal farming, combined with increases in the transportation of live animals for trade (phillips 2015), have led to an equally large increase in the potential for infections to both develop and spread. that in turn has generated a fundamental sense of visceral insecurity, both about life itself and about the economy. marthe achtnich’s (2022, this issue) contribution to this colloquy focuses on the deep sense of insecurity felt by both migrants and border guards in libya. in the case of nonhuman animal bioeconomic mobilities, a sense of human insecurity arises from a growing awareness of microbes, the living entities that accompany animals and people as they move. in the industrialized version of that kind of bioeconomics, there is no hesitation about mass destruction in response to a sense of insecurity about the spread of disease. in the past fifty years, the number of live animals transported across borders has quadrupled, standing at around 2 billion animals per year.2 the animals themselves have also transformed, bred as they are for particular purposes: hugely muscular beef cattle, pigs differentiated by whether they are destined to become chops or salami, chickens that can double in size in record time. very few places in the world still have their locally bred farm animals (phillips 2015; urbanik 2012). a veterinarian i spoke to in beirut, a man who had developed artificial insemination for cattle in lebanon, told me that local breeds could not compete with the size and productivity of industrially developed ones. artificial insemination had increased, he added, because of endemic diseases in lebanon among most farmed animals. to avoid the problem, people imported certified disease-free genetic material to breed their animals. he noted that almost nothing local remained in lebanese cattle farming—a condition found almost everywhere now (phillips 2015). madeleine reeves (2022, this issue) observes in this colloquy that a combination of new reproductive technologies and a wealth gap between world regions and populations has created a market for new human genetic material. in the bioeconomic trade for nonhuman animals, these same technologies have undergone exponential extension, with the ironic effect of massively reducing biodiversity. trade in nonhuman life itself has concentrated into a small number of huge enterprises. the importance of attending to mobility becomes clear: the issue is not simply the genetic modification of animals for commercial purposes as a conscious part of a bioeconomic industry; what is crucial is the concentration of control over this trade in the hands of a few, and the spread of these technologies and animals across the world. that form of bioeconomic mobility has globally altered farmed livestock. concomitant changes in farming also affect uses of the landscape: goats and sheep are increasingly kept indoors and fed on commercial fodder, making hills and forests more available to wild boar, jackals, wolves, and other animals whose numbers have increased rapidly. those changes have created different forms of comingling, ones that generate potential for all kinds of new mobilities, particularly for the pathogens that cause zoonotic disease in people. and that has created a new bioeconomic market. for most of the history of trade in nonhuman life itself, microbes have been considered an unwelcome byproduct of the comingling of living entities, and efforts have concentrated on permitting the desired commercial activity (trade, farming, breeding, etc.) while preventing zoonotic effects (engelmann and lynteris 2020; bashford 2016; varlık 2015). in more recent years, as the science for understanding and dealing with these diseases has developed apace, the zoonoses themselves have gained bioeconomic value, one that is axiomatically about mobilities: zoonosis describes the process through which a living entity travels from one body (nonhuman animal) to another (human) and causes disease, unbidden. the market in detecting and intervening in that mobility has been growing for decades, building not only on the potential lethal threat that zoonoses pose, but more importantly, on the potential for people to develop ways to contain, control, or prevent such threats (e.g., léger et al. 2017). natalie porter’s (2019) ethnographic study of bird flu in vietnam demonstrates the financial stakes of attending to zoonotic threats and keck’s (2020) study of virus researchers working on zoonoses in taiwan, china, and hong kong demonstrates the way different forms of knowledge—scientific, political, social, and cultural—are drawn upon when confronting the historically shifting economic challenges of zoonoses. borrowing from hage, we might call this an attempt to “domesticate” zoonoses, a process that has progressed rapidly in the age of covid-19. the ability to manage zoonoses so that people can coexist with them marks the next step in creating value from the vitality resulting from mobility. abstract the majority of diseases that afflict humans are shared by nonhuman animals, and three-quarters of emerging diseases do so. people have known this for centuries, understanding that diseases traveled the same routes as did traders, migrants, and soldiers. zoonosis is a process that involves the movement of a pathogen from a nonhuman animal body to a human animal body, which then triggers disease. in the past, this reality mostly served as an impediment to the bioeconomics of working with animals; in more recent years, research on zoonoses has turned animals into part of bioeconomic logic in themselves. 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a changing area, the mediterranean basin.” transboundary and emerging diseases 61, no. 1: 17–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/tbed.12012 wazer, caroline 2016 “the exotic animal traffickers of ancient rome.” atlantic monthly, march 30. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/exotic-animals-ancient-rome/475704/ wilcox, sharon, and stephanie rutherford, eds. 2018 historical animal geographies. new york: routledge. woods, abigail 2004 a manufactured plague: the history of foot-and-mouth disease in britain. london: earthscan. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 30-36, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.05 magendo: arbitrage and ambiguity on an east african frontier cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 110-137, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.05 magendo: arbitrage and ambiguity on an east african frontier kevin p. donovan university of edinburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3922-236x sometime in the mid-1970s, the proprietor of a shop at the kenya-uganda border town of lwakhakha painted a new sign on his building: mambo bado. in the rolling hills below mount elgon, lwakhakha is a relatively remote post, much less trafficked than busia and malaba to the south. at the time, the area lacked paved roads and electricity. those few seeking waged labor or higher education had to migrate many hours away, to agricultural plantations or urban centers. yet in a crucial way, the area was tightly integrated into extensive networks through smallholder cultivation of coffee. and it was this power of coffee to call forth and bring near exciting and exotic novelties to which this sign gestured: things are still to come. in fact, things had already started coming to this frontier, and few residents had reason to believe it would cease anytime soon. due to a spike in the world price and a surplus in uganda, the area south of mount elgon became a massive transit zone for coffee. price differentials between uganda and kenya made coffee trade an enormously profitable exercise. one village, in particular, became iconic. in a matter of years, chepkube became a destination for fortune-seekers, the source of enormous wealth, and the subject of a popular song and a novel. for those in chepkube and its environs, this trade, known by the swahili word magendo, was filled with new opportunities, riches, and commodities. as the shop sign suggests, it opened the horizon for smallholders to imagine building novel, still undefined, futures for themselves and their families. the traders’ frenzy brought forth new social practices as small-scale cultivators became commercial middlemen. yet the revaluation of coffee did less to transform ideas about proper social relations and behavior, and the newfound permissiveness existed uneasily with inherited ideas about protocol and morality. as a result, by the time the trade ended a few years later, residents of this corner of kenya were left with deep ambivalence about that which had come and gone. this article examines the commercial techniques and moral ambiguities of magendo. i foreground the economic strategy of arbitrage, which has recently held the attention of anthropologists studying topics as varied as financial derivatives (miyazaki 2013), assisted reproduction (cooper and waldby 2014), pharmaceuticals (k. peterson 2014), and piracy (dua 2019). in contrast to financial theory, which seeks a firm boundary between arbitrage and other styles of trading (e.g., speculation), in this anthropological literature, arbitrage is an ambiguous category and practice, liable to extension into new realms. it is also good to think with, “an interpretive framework that is widely deployable to various phenomena, economic and otherwise” (miyazaki 2013, 36). i build on this work by arguing that arbitrage is not reducible to the simultaneous buying and selling of financial securities, nor the geographic movement between regulatory regimes as in the case of “labor arbitrage” (ong 2006). instead, i conceive of arbitrage as the cultivation of difference. frequently this occurs through the capitalization on price differentials between market jurisdictions, whereby regulations or norms in one place are evaded for those elsewhere (mackenzie 2003). but this really constitutes only a subset of a broader practice of arbitrage, which daniel beunza and david stark (2004) analyze in terms of exploiting “not only gaps across markets but also the overlaps among multiple evaluative principles.” magendo participants, i show, harnessed different calculative devices to produce price differentials, reminiscent of jane guyer’s (2004) attention to the difference produced—including through “more or less deliberate interference” (guyer 2016, 80)—by the translation between different currencies and commodities. in addition to spatial and calculative discrepancies, magendo margins could be produced by manipulating appearances, leading to manifest surfaces belying the quality of their underlying substance. kristin peterson (2014) has noted something similar in her discussion of “chemical arbitrage,” with changes in drug composition at odds with their marketing; likewise, i show how coffee beans, weapons, and food entered an economy of (mis)representation through which deceit and fraud produced a new form of profit. magendo arbitrage, in other words, worked through the cultivation of and capitalization on the disjuncture of jurisdiction, measurement, and appearance. residents of the borderlands experienced these practices as morally fraught, and i argue that arbitrage is particularly prone to generate social instability and ethical quandaries because its pursuit depends on a variety of shifts that cultivate difference. in other words, relatively stable assumptions and background conditions grounding social, economic, and political relations become matters of concern, liable to change, fluctuation, or even collapse. putative equilibria are shown to be mere conventions, rather than matters of fact. the capacity to manipulate such evaluative schema, however, is not evenly distributed, with the result that the rewards of arbitrage often lead to an unsettling of received notions and mores about the appropriate acquisition and distribution of wealth. in these cases, it often becomes difficult to analytically separate arbitrage from speculation, let alone the resulting types of social discord and the moral opprobrium directed at it (comaroff and comaroff 2002; miyazaki 2007). the assessments of this economic activity are rarely uniform; instead, arbitrage generates an ambiguous mix of desire and disdain. this article analyzes the culturally salient idioms through which moral ambiguity found expression and interpretation in a particular place and time. in doing so, it departs from the social studies of finance that tend to present socially attenuated worlds, with algorithms and infrastructures predominating. instead, i emphasize the importance of the ritual practices and kinship idioms that facilitated magendo but that eventually strained under the eruption of newfound wealth. in what follows, i focus predominantly on the bukusu communities in and around chepkube, and demonstrate that magendo dramatized tensions immanent to the area’s population. notions of moral selfhood, orientations toward others, and practical conceptualizations of time and space were thrown into relief, requiring participants to reason anew about how best to proceed in the context of extraordinary economic gains (weiss 1996). this article analyzes the specific arbitrage techniques through which magendo unfolded before examining the ethical ambiguities that ensued. i detail the practical techniques through which differentials were actively created through the (re)working of jurisdiction, measurement, and appearance. these forms of arbitrage not only bequeathed a spectacular binge economy but also inverted the sociocultural categories that organized life. magendo challenged prevailing ethics through its specific, material techniques and temporalities of arbitrage. in the narratives of residents who participated in it, magendo was characterized by the sudden proximity of once distant commodities, currency, and people; furthermore, domestic space gave way to the wild, and night became day. such conceptual and experiential inversions not only heralded the danger of matter out of place but also ushered in previously foreclosed opportunities of wealth, respectability, and privilege. this twofold ambiguity—of peril and profit—formed part of a more general erosion of prevailing norms and forms of authority as magendo undermined existing ideas of propriety, respectability, and morality. arbitrage and the cultivation of difference for residents of chepkube, the magendo era during the second half of the 1970s still elicits considerable excitement. they recall it as a time when the fame of their small village spread across east africa, even the world. indeed, the village remains renowned for this period: i learned of it not long after beginning fieldwork along the kenya-uganda border in 2016. at the busy crossing of busia, i spent my days with freight forwarders, the professional brokers who negotiated the paperwork and the people necessary to clear trucks through customs. these choke points were the objects of considerable technocratic intervention in those days, with newly constructed border posts meant to facilitate trade and taxation. yet much of the trade continued to route around the new buildings, roads, and fences—including through the muddy paths of sofia, the market and neighborhood where hundreds of traders daily bypassed the formalities of passports and customs. my inquiries into the types of work and wealth available at the border were often met by comparisons to the past, when the central states tended to invest less in the frontier, but also the moments when the border was reanimated, closed, or the site of frenetic, sometimes dangerous, activities. a number of busia’s older residents invoked the period i analyze here. when one of the market women i knew offered to introduce me to her family in chepkube, kenya, i moved the couple of hours north to research this history. in time, my relations on the uganda side deepened, allowing me to conduct parallel research on the history of magendo and its contemporary afterlives and manifestations. in addition to interviewing elders who participated in the 1970s trade, over the following months i shadowed politicians, police, and petty traders across the malaba river and conducted archival research in collections on both sides of the border. the period is remembered with a measure of amazement and a hint of nostalgia. chepkube, i was told, “grew, and internationally it was known as a free market place, a black market.” residents of chepkube mentioned the song and novel to me when trying to convey how remarkable the period was, but they also gestured around their homes, pointing to the durable property some managed to acquire from that period. foremost in narratives of why chepkube became such a renowned site was the presence of influential politicians from kenya who used local buyers or their own kin when they “didn’t want to be seen” at chepkube. chepkube, i was told, came to be known as “nairobi b,” a nickname whose overstatement served to mark the sense of extraordinary commercial standing from that time. no less notable was the arrival of outsider groups. “there were,” my ugandan host, joseph, emphasized, “almost all tribes there.” a kenyan teacher i know said similarly, “people came from everywhere—kikuyu, somali, even kisii—and left money in chepkube.” the boom in chepkube also attracted new commodities. merchants from kitale and bungoma brought clothes, pots, beer, whiskey, and more. residents were flush with cash, leading tailors to sew special pockets into oversized jackets. kikuyu and somali buyers were particularly able to mobilize significant capital. “we could see people coming with bags full of money…. you could see someone walk in with a huuuuge handbag, carrying about 10 million shillings cash,” conveyed one man who traveled there to observe. i spoke to two brothers who started buying mattresses from bungoma and selling them for a 50 percent markup in chepkube. the kenyan teacher, victor, emphasized the novel opportunities: “bicycles went up to chepkube—brand new!” the memorable period illustrated not merely the enduring opportunities of the frontier region but also its risks. to the extent that it was exceptional, it was of a degree rather than of a kind—illegal border trade remains commonplace. for this reason, the past remains present in chepkube, not least as a morality tale about excess, accumulation, and labor. the lessons of such tales are not, however, straightforward, because, as i will discuss, much ambiguity surrounds magendo. the source of this ambivalence is not the illegality of the trade, for state morality held little sway at chepkube. in studies of smuggling, popular disregard for border controls emerges as a common observation, leading to a distinction between the “social perception” of trade as licit or illicit and its classification as legal or illegal (van schendel and abraham 2005, 18). this dichotomy, for instance, anchors rebecca b. galemba’s (2012) analysis of how the officially illegal movement of corn across the guatemala-mexico border is nevertheless perceived and framed as licit by participants. the trouble with such an approach is that it gives popular perceptions meaning only in contrast to legal categories. thus, despite aspirations to move “beyond state-centrism” (van schendel 2005, 58), popular ethics hold interest only when mapped against state authority. the experience of chepkube suggests a different tack. rather than its relationship to the law, magendo challenged people’s ideas about the temporality of wealth, gendered and generational hierarchies, and the gap between surface and substance. in that way, it bears more resemblance to filip de boeck’s (1998) analysis of the cross-border diamond trade in zaire, where social critiques of accumulation and expenditure concerned not so much prohibited movement than the redirection of wealth toward socially sanctioned patterns of self-making and collectivity. magendo’s cultivation of difference—in terms of jurisdiction, but also measurement and appearance—provided the basis for excessive proceeds, making wealth available in a manner “unsanctioned” by the prevailing social hierarchies of bukusu society (cf. roitman 2004, 79; oka and kuijt 2014). panya routes through the forest the source of chepkube’s newfound magnetism was, of course, the arrival of ugandan coffee. the village was well placed geographically to serve as a transit zone for coffee, much of which had remained unsold between 1973 and 1978, when international embargoes on exports limited normal channels of trade from idi amin’s uganda (asiimwe 2013). instead, coffee poured out of seams in uganda’s territory, creating a hub of magendo on the eastern frontier. ugandan newspapers exhorted citizens to stop the trade (d. peterson and taylor 2013), and security reports made frequent mention of magendo, despite an inability to document its true extent (e.g., mbale district archive 14/17; jinja district archive 13/17). in 1976 the bugisu cooperative union (bcu) organized a series of meetings with its coffee-farming members, most of whom denied “that coffee was being smuggled” but raised a series of complaints revealing why such a trade would occur: delayed payments, low prices, and the unavailability of “essential commodities like sugar, soap, salt, etc” (bcu archive, minutes of the committee meeting, november 23, 1976). from the perspective of the provincial commissioner on the kenya side, the following year was “an all-time high mark and such places as lwakhakha, chepkube, and sio port were household names in smuggling circles” (kakamega records centre, hb/16/73). the matter even reached the records of the central bank of kenya (1978, 5), albeit in the manner of an open secret, with the 1978 annual report noting “the record surplus in the balance of payments, and the highest ever accumulation of foreign exchange reserves” thanks to buoyant coffee exports. successfully bringing coffee to kenya required a careful negotiation of the landscape, often turning to areas previously unused, even proscribed. bob nakileza (2007) recalls “carrying heaps and heaps of [coffee] through the thick and dark forest, and the open alpine moorlands of masaba mountain…. i toured the dark and open ecosystems of the mountain, [presumably] where my ancestors live.” participants from both sides of the border emphasize how far coffee came over steep mountain paths to reach chepkube, up to a hundred kilometers on foot. “they would avoid towns, moving, and dodging, dodging.” while bicycles or donkeys were available in some instances, ugandan police patrols made the routes dangerous. the simpler the locomotion, the safer. roads were liable to interception, so arbitrageurs took to panya (rat) routes through the thick forests of mount elgon. such routes required local knowledge that subverted the formalities of the border (cf. weiss 1993, 23). despite their use, ugandans ferrying coffee through the frontier region were at risk because the amin government opposed magendo. ugandan soldiers and police plied the area, but so did civilian bandits pretending to be soldiers. “they would have gun-like tools,” joseph told me one day while walking across his fields, “and when they see people coming … they go and take cover and they come up like they want to shoot them. so people throw their coffee and run away, and the [fake soldiers] collect their coffee and go and sell.” the young men who perpetrated these thefts hoped to sell the coffee themselves. “these people, they were not using guns,” but only pieces of wood designed to look like guns, so when they discovered the deceit, some traders attacked and killed the thieves. magendo thus relied on the successful manipulation of appearances. arbitrageurs sought invisibility, while others misrepresented outward signs of authority. the skillful presentation of self also proved crucial if you were caught, because “it was your luck and how you are using your words when you meet soldiers.” others adopted a more aggressive dissimulation. ugandan soldiers were hungry and poor, so intercepted travelers would feed them poisoned food. others captured swarms of bees in a pot and released them if caught. having covered themselves in paraffin, they could lie down and wait as the soldiers ran away. panya routes through the forest formed part of a more general reliance on undomesticated space. one chepkube farmer noted his surprise at this abnormality: “anyway, even people were sleeping in the forest! there were these people who used to use the forest routes. people went as far as waiting for coffee in the forest. there was even a market in the forest.” the transposition of spaces of production and domesticity into the wilds of the forest was all the more unsettling because the forest represents danger, immorality, and secret knowledge. forests, in the moral geography of my interlocutors on both sides of the border, constituted spaces unfit for habitation. yet chepkube became a locus of magendo during this period precisely for its proximity to these relatively ungovernable areas. though not without its dangers, the river crossing at chepkube is relatively easy to ford. these geographic affordances allowed residents to insert themselves into the trade. while ugandans found safety in kenya—often rejoicing upon crossing the river—they could not remain for long. even if they managed to pass as kenyan by speaking lubukusu or kiswahili, kenyan police would check for id cards or a distinctive scar left by vaccination in their country. if caught, ugandans would be deported. as a result, they were sometimes beholden to kenyan intermediaries and could rarely partake for long in the forms of expenditure i discuss. this impermanence allowed kenyan frontier residents to mediate exchange between the brief visits of ugandans and the bulk exporters of magendo coffee from kenya. incorporating locals facilitated the trade by drawing on the cultural infrastructure of the border. locals could wait around for coffee arriving through panya routes that visitors would be unlikely to find. they could also speak to arriving ugandans in their mutually intelligible languages, rather than swahili or english (let alone kikuyu or somali), which would be less familiar. frontier repertoires: relatedness across difference the populations demarcated as kenyan or ugandan in the region around mount elgon recognize a long, shared history. peter wafula wekesa (2010) speaks of a “fluid cultural zone” on which the border has been imposed. the bagisu of uganda and the babukusu of kenya speak of a common history of origin, migration, and settlement. their languages are mutually intelligible, and kinship networks often extend across the border. in both countries, they are known for their similar cultural practices, including the prominent biennial circumcision rituals. yet it would be a mistake to overstate the unity of a population distributed across hills and valleys, which maintains pluralism, rather than a more muscular ethnic patriotism (macarthur 2016). relatedness across difference characterizes frontier zones, providing latent repertoires of affinity (nyamnjoh 2017). frontier differences may be occasioned by an interstate border, but linguistic, economic, and other non-state dynamics may prove just as important (kopytoff 1989). mutually intelligible language, the assertion of ethnic and kin-based solidarities, and shared histories of coffee cultivation provided a repertoire on which the exceptional arbitrage economy could function in this region. yet precisely because these repertoires facilitated exchange across disjuncture magendo proved so exceptional (guyer 2004). without the differential prices resulting from the distinct economic jurisdictions of uganda and kenya, arbitrage would not have occurred. the existing ties across the border were formative for magendo. consider the trajectory of josiah. when my ugandan host introduced me to his countryman, a farmer and trader, it was because of josiah’s reputation as one of the first to begin the magendo business. josiah could do so because he was already working with a relative of his, a prominent man in kitale, a town on the eastern edge of mount elgon in kenya. in 1969, this relative asked him to surreptitiously bring kenyan coffee to the bugisu cooperative union in uganda for sale, where the price was better. in the middle of the 1970s, he reversed course, acquiring ugandan beans for kenyan buyers. as before, his circuit depended on a combination of kinship and connections to local notables. he set up shop on the kenya side of the border with another relative and began moving coffee for sale to a kenyan politician. he used a relative’s home on the periphery of chepkube to store coffee and opened a store in the market to sell soap, sugar, and other commodities. josiah was ambitious and, unlike many other locals, unsatisfied with being a middleman confined to chepkube. he skipped the kikuyu and somalis coming to chepkube and went up the commodity chain, directed by his existing contacts further afield. his ability to do so depended on having sufficient capital to acquire lorries. also, in his opinion, ugandans liked selling to a compatriot. thus, josiah did particularly well during magendo—eventually buying vehicles, land, and educating his children—because he was both closely embedded in the networks of kin and culture at the frontier and able to form more distant commercial relations. the relative paucity of people able to maneuver across such differences made his arbitrage lucrative. business was booming, and he recalls moving a hundred sacks of coffee per day, perhaps for up to ksh 3,000 per sack. his prominence did not go unnoticed, but when amin sent “people in kenya in the night to hijack him,” he narrowly escaped. as he explained to me, his kenyan colleagues helped him get back into business, with new capital and a portable safe to hide his proceeds. fearful of returning to uganda, he adopted the stance of an exile, and the kenyan police, recognizing his importance to the trade, acquired an id card for him “almost in a day.” josiah’s story thus demonstrates how the ability to straddle different jurisdictions that remain apart, rather than homogenized, proved foundational to magendo arbitrage. measure for mismeasure if the movement of coffee between territorial jurisdictions was the fundamental form of arbitrage during magendo, more subtle differences were cultivated and crossed by participants. these tactics sought to maneuver between distinct evaluative schema through which exchange was mediated and to manage relationships between the surface appearance and enduring quality of goods. as guyer (2004) has influentially argued, the conversion between different techniques of measurement forms a critical part of african economic repertoires. brad weiss (2003, 169), too, has emphasized “the different strategic possibilities of measurement and quantification upon which the coffee trade depends.” magendo shed the state’s enforced metrology, which determined price per kilo through marketing boards. at chepkube, the translation between accounting by volume, by weight, and by kenyan shillings offered skillful traders an opportunity to exploit additional magendo margins. this required perceptive cultivation and the management of difference, iterated over many individual transactions. ugandans arrived on the kenyan side of the malaba river with partially filled bags of coffee. these gunia—the iconic gunny sacks of the region—contained between ten and fifty kilograms of dried coffee. local kenyans, who had the luxury of time and identification documents, would be waiting to greet these sellers with something like the going price. unlike in the official coffee purchases in uganda, no central authority determined prices here. those closest to the river might offer a slightly lower price, hoping the exhausted ugandans would be happy to part with their coffee before traveling the final distance to chepkube’s market. those that reached chepkube’s market would find a bustling scene with innumerable potential buyers. their coffee was scooped from their half-filled bags and deposited in the buyer’s gunny sacks. each scoop was counted and ugandans received payment accordingly. the humble implement for scooping coffee was formative for magendo. despite its simplicity, the gorogoro, as it is known, is a particularly noteworthy “market device” (callon, millo, and muniesa 2007). a gorogoro, kenyans will tell you, is a “two kilogram tin,” most often repurposed from its original use as the container for popular store-bought cooking fats, such as kimbo or cowboy. at the time, cooking fats were one of the most common commodities purchased by rural households, and the sturdy containers in which they came provided a convenient afterlife. like the commodity it once held, the gorogoro is standardized, providing a shared marketplace metric. in everyday speech, this standard is “two kilograms,” a figure arising from the gorogoro’s original label: “2kg of cooking fat.” however, the commonality of an empty gorogoro is not weight; after all, the density of coffee (or whatever else is being measured) differs from that of cooking fat. instead, the gorogoro offers a uniform standard of volume. thus, while residents of chepkube routinely referred to “two kilograms of coffee,” as measured by the gorogoro, this was not a reference to weight, but rather to the standardized unit of volume provided by the empty cooking fat tin. this presumed correspondence between weight and volume matters because the interplay between scales of measurement provided subtle forms of arbitrage. scooping coffee out of arriving gunny sacks with a gorogoro standardized the variable amounts of beans brought from uganda. as ugandans were paid per gorogoro of dried beans, it also served as a tropic point (guyer 2004, 49–50), commensurating a volumetric scale and a different unit of accounting, namely, kenyan shillings. in the chain of magendo, the ability to enforce or evade such standardized commensuration—the construction of equivalence across difference—constituted tactics of arbitrage: the movement between fixed or variable relationships of weight, volume, and shillings were pivotal in the acquisition of marginal gains (weiss 2003). let me explain. magendo was characterized by one-off transactions. while some, like josiah, built enduring commercial relationships, the vast majority of purchases occurred between individuals who did not know each other: “there was nothing like trust,” explained a man who remembers shadowing his father in the trade. traders took advantage of this fact through various means of inserting an additional margin on top of the prevailing price differences. gorogoros, for example, not only measured coffee; they also detected impurities. participants re-enacted for me how they would hold the full containers at eye level and pour the dried beans into their own gunny sacks, looking for rocks, sand, fruit, or other less valuable fillers. yet those coming from elsewhere in kenya to purchase from chepkube did not match the discerning caution of locals in this initial purchase. when they arrived from nairobi with lorries, they did not measure in gorogoros; rather, they purchased gunny sacks by the dozens. chepkube’s residents, often with a laugh or a wry smile, explained to me some of the “funny, funny” tricks people would use, such as filling space with rocks. by the time buyers discovered such deception in nairobi or mombasa, it was hardly worth the time to follow up. in some cases, buyers took precautions. over time, some gravity scales—from which a gunny sack could be hung and weighed—arrived in chepkube, allowing buyers from elsewhere to pay per kilogram, rather than per gunny sack. local arbitrageurs developed new tactics to produce a difference, most notably through soaking dried coffee beans in water over night “to bulk them.” the plumper beans would then receive a cursory drying in the sun of only their exterior. in these cases, the density of coffee (and, to a lesser degree, its volume) again became a variable, as a surface-level dehydration could conceal the moistened coffee within. the presumed material fixity of coffee was transformed into a plasticity subject to manipulation. the aim of these scalar maneuvers was to insert (or detect) a small disjuncture between the worth of goods offered and the price received. the introduction and maintenance of these forms of scalar variation would, eventually, be converted into currency. in the frontier zone, however, money took on particular characteristics. with the value of their currency plummeting, ugandans faced a stark reality: even though they could receive a more valuable currency through magendo, kenyan shillings lacked broad-based validity in their home country. the result was that magendo in chepkube was conducted in kenyan shillings. scooped by the gorogoro, coffee was then priced in kenyan shillings, with these notes quickly exchanged for commodities. for ugandans, the kenyan currency operated like a trade currency, incorporating them into temporary exchange with kenyan coffee buyers and commodity sellers. it provided a technique of valuation, mediating between coffee and commodities, but it did not serve as an enduring store of value (cf. maurer 2006, 20–21). instead, ugandans translated the arbitrage value of their coffee into manufactured goods that were portable and perduring. magendo and moral ambiguity throughout my fieldwork, laughter frequently accompanied stories of the excesses of the trade, subtly acknowledging the unequal opportunism. it served to hold together contradictions—namely that the attractiveness of unbridled margins existed alongside recognition that ugandans received the short end of the exchange. laughter represented a sort of admission, not so much of guilt as of immoderation, excess, and the ethical ambiguity surrounding them (cf. yeh 2017). the moral ambivalence around magendo did not arise from the illegality of the trade. cross-border exchange was a long-standing practice for residents of this east african frontier, and the territorialization of economies exerted a weak force on their ideas about legitimate commerce. instead, the disquiet of the period resulted from a transformation in the accessibility of wealth and, in turn, the erosion of forms of authority and behavior that ordered ethical life. in other words, it was not the state’s morality that provided a “moral metalanguage” (keane 2008) to magendo but rather concerns about the proper timing and socialization of wealth (de boeck 1998; dua 2019). the cultivation of and capitalization on disjunctures of jurisdiction, measurement, and appearance was widely pursued, yet the resulting wealth from this arbitrage challenged the social norms and conceptual schema of frontier residents. the rest of this article examines the implications of this phenomenon. an undisciplined “binge economy” replaced the perceived orderly arrangement between men and women, seniors and juniors, production and consumption. a sense that generational and gendered expectations and hierarchies were dissolving accompanied the inversion of conceptual and perceptual schema. three particular inversions arose throughout my conversations with residents: what was once distant became local as space was compressed; anticipated temporalities vanished in the frenzy of trade; and distinctions between the productive and domestic spheres and their ungoverned, wild complements dissolved. the following sections analyze these in more depth. the idioms and tropes through which my interlocutors expressed these ideas reveal a sense of peril regarding the magendo era, but such unease never veered far from its cause: the enthusiastic embrace of magendo’s opportunities. thus, memories of the period remain ambiguous, with contradictions often held together by ironic laughter. binge economy: money and people out of time while ugandans returned home with the commodities of social reproduction, kenyans turned their spending toward consumption. binge economies can occur for many reasons—the discovery of new exports, say, or speculative frenzies—but around mount elgon, it was arbitrage that formed the basis for the dramatic accrual and dissipation of wealth. arbitrage also allowed participants to capture and redirect value in unprecedented ways. in richard wilk’s (2014) conceptualization, binge economies are typical of extractive frontiers “on the margins of the capitalist world system.” they are marked by excessive, seemingly irrational, expenditure where what counts is less the stability of one’s pocketbook than one’s ability to spend as quickly as possible. such performances of one’s detachment from money demonstrate one’s daring and joie de vivre. in chepkube, too, competitive gift-giving emerged as a common form of conviviality: people were very generous! a lot of drinking. bars opened from nowhere. they would say, ok, i have a lot of money, i want to buy you a beer; you are my friend. stand up! you stand up. i would pile crates of beer—tusker, pilsner—up to your height, and that’s yours! where previously only locally brewed alcohol was available, now brand-name beer and even whiskey arrived from distant factories. chepkube’s market used to operate only one day a week, with a single bull slaughtered for sale, but during this period, upward of ten heads of cattle were butchered, and “by 10 p.m., there was no meat left!” participants remembered such consumptive possibilities with relish, but they also manifest an unsettled order of age, gender, and rank. throughout east africa, alcohol and meat are symbolically charged goods (willis 2002). bukusu men historically demonstrated their worth through the quality of their homebrewed beer and their generosity in its distribution. only elderly men (and sometimes women) could enjoy beer drinking as a regular pastime; younger folks only enjoyed it at special events or as a reward for labor (wagner 1956, 68–74). these restrictions on consumption—and attempts to subvert them—are constitutive of the contested claims to authority of senior men. notions and practices of drinking are, therefore, practical enactments of hierarchical and exclusive social relations; transformations in access—due to commodification, regulation, or economic change—can unsettle norms of respect and power. in the case of magendo, such new consumptive possibilities formed part of a more general disordering of people’s relations, wealth, and temporalities. binge economies are characterized by their presentism, but unlike the “evacuation of the near future” traced by guyer (2016), this presentism in the kenya-uganda frontier was not matched by austerity and pecuniary lack. instead, it was the immediacy with which wealth was available that militated against all other activities. there was no time to spare. big buyers coming from afar would rent hotel rooms in the closest urban centers of bungoma or further south. others “just broke some branches [for] a makeshift camp” and “slept in the bushes to buy the coffee.” such arrangements belied the weight bukusu communities have historically given to a proper home, seeing deficient housing as a sign of indolence (wagner 1956, 2). yet during the coffee boom, such basic concerns received little attention. walking one day near the river that divides uganda and kenya, my friend stopped and pointed: “it was like a refugee camp here.” government ministers and their wives—even margaret kenyatta, i was assured—turned to such rudimentary quarters. naively assuming the former mayor of nairobi and daughter of the country’s founding president could afford it, i asked, why not have a house built here? the answer was immediate and followed by hearty laughter at the incongruous, even carnivalesque, logic of the time: “who’s going to build? where are you going to get the labor?” the velocity of money also accelerated (cf. parry and bloch 1989, 24–30). some big buyers received substantial advances from banks, permitting them to turn a larger profit. if you were a well-connected kenyan, “overnight, you came and got 10 million shillings [in cash from the bank], you go and buy, take it, and by the time you reach nairobi, or before, someone is buying it to take it to mombasa. you pay it [the loan] back and go back again.” such stories illustrate the rapidity and repetition with which buyers scrambled for access to cash to buy arriving coffee. i was told of a senior government official and confidant of the president whose wife spent time in chepkube. the minister “used his position” to get all the cash from the main bank branch in bungoma. “people needed cash to buy coffee at chepkube, so the bank even ran out of cash, failing to pay teachers because of it.” the nairobi headquarters had to airlift cash to ameliorate the shortage. others turned to cooperative agricultural societies, using their collectively held cash as an advance to purchase magendo coffee. in both these stories, collective futures (of children’s education and farmer cooperation) were mortgaged for immediate gains. residents of chepkube experienced magendo as repeated, one-off transactions. as such, cash was the most appropriate money form. “did anyone at chepkube buy coffee on credit?” i asked. “no, it was magendo, so something like credit was not appreciated, because you don’t know that person from uganda. it was cash! there was nothing like trust.” the financial techniques through which trust is mobilized, secured, and extended across time and space (such as the provision of credit on the promise of future repayment) did not find a place in the magendo economy. the accounting books and receipts that would provide traces of such transactions were unnecessary not because of the trade’s illegality but for the lack of its orientation to the future (mcgovern 2018). moralizing observers often condemn a lack of orientation toward the future, the inability to do anything but “live for the moment” (day, papataxiarchis, and stewart 1999). many residents of chepkube offer a similar reflection on the period. amid the dramatic consumption, few invested in productive assets. “people were busy,” one former teacher told me. “even our own coffee farms could not be managed. because people were interested in getting easy money, quick money, only a few managed their farms.” while few at the time resisted the attraction of magendo’s immediacy, with the benefit of hindsight, some see “easy money” as a significant mistake (cf. shipton 1989; znoj 1998; walsh 2003; weiss 2003, 101–2). the “people who were getting money in an easy way,” others told me, “it has ruined their lives. because they have now had to learn to struggle for their lives by farming [or] doing businesses.” in their reckoning, meaningful value was durable, and it took time and sweat to accumulate (cf. heald 1989). only over time was it possible to gain the value that came about through the experience and productivity of discipline; this required converting quicker money into more enduring forms of value, such as land (kusimba 2018). wealth out of time—that is, money realized without the normal perquisites of self-restraint and collective effort—was likely to run out in no time. the exigencies that characterized magendo upended existing temporal rhythms. instead of the year being marked by discrete periods of coffee harvesting and marketing, the calendar was now completely dominated by coffee trade. the buildup of coffee supplies in uganda meant arrivals throughout the entire year. moreover, chepkube’s weekly schedule was usually punctuated by a single market day. yet during magendo, “there was no market day.” instead, it was “every day. morning. night. it was full!” the pursuit of profit began to override domestic time. magendo proved a twenty-four-hour, seven-days-a-week affair. “every hour people were operating; night and day were just the same.” because ugandans could best elude their country’s soldiers at night, much of the business was conducted after the sun set. despite the night, the kenyan side was illuminated; there was no electricity in the area, but paraffin pressure lamps were common. “when you come from very far, you find this place was very clear, like daylight! and the business was working day and night, not stopping! no sleeping!” the productivity of the night still animates residents. one elderly gentleman exclaimed “chepkube used to be like cabinda in angola—during even night, lights!” a friend sitting quietly until this point chimed in, “like dubai, with people buying. that is how chepkube looked.” in both cases, the references to petro-state profligacy—the flares of cabinda’s rigs and the ostentatious glare of dubai’s malls—seemed the best parallel for the transformation of their village. “people were not feeling any exhaustion at all,” i was assured, because they were making profit. “he went about all day and night and tomorrow you will see him still on the same business.” the rewiring of biorhythms, the fueling of superhuman energy—such was the sense of the time. arbitraging gender and generation the trade attracted women, too. concerned men told me of “reckless women [who] abandoned their responsibilities” to the household. “even women, they were not staying in their homes. they had also become another problem,” laughed one man suggestively. “as their husbands went, they also went. perhaps they also came home late, just to sleep. the next morning, they had gone to look for money—because everyone was chasing money!” women brewed beer and cooked meat for the crowds, both potentially suspect activities marked by masculine sociality and indulgence. this concern reflects a more general anxiety of the time about the proper source of authority. for bukusu communities, proper standing as an adult—with its rights and duties—does not emerge in a single moment but rather from an extended performance of rectitude. moreover, it requires the formation and maintenance of suitable relations with others. rites of initiation—preeminently male circumcision, marriage, and childbirth—create particularly intensive opportunities to demonstrate character and also make evident networks of mutual obligation and entrustment (la fontaine 1977). these rites, ideas, and arrangements secure a particular distribution of resources and regard, and are shaped by ideas about the proper timing and sources of accumulation. in the communities around mount elgon, patriarchal gerontocracy oriented productive activity and domestic life. as wagner (1949, 77) asserted based on research between 1934 and 1938, “the authority of seniors over their juniors, the principle of seniority, prevails in all social relations.” yet the manners in which these arrangements apportion and control access to wealth and respectability are not without their limits and tensions. suzette heald’s (1989) work on the ugandan side of the border emphasized the countervailing pressure from the “aggressive individualism” cultivated in young men who endeavor to “win economic independence from [their] father[s].” this leads to a “strong pattern of intergenerational conflict” (heald 1999, 77) in which the transmission of property is eminently important. sibel kusimba’s (2018, 3) recent study of bukusu rites similarly notes this tension, with elders “endors[ing] the importance of long-term and often collective investments, assets, and inheritances,” such as land, compared to others who may prioritize “short-term moneys.” such discontent often coalesces around the timing of initiation, where sons receive a part of their inheritance, despite the father being relatively young himself at that time. it is common for boys in the area to pester their fathers to be initiated, with the fathers demurring in part to delay providing the land and cattle necessary for their sons’ autonomy. increased land scarcity in the twentieth century only exacerbated the tension. importantly, the object of frustration here is the patriarch—not the patriarchy. the antagonism reveals, in other words, a mutual investment in seniority, despite the limited resources through which to achieve proper adulthood. it is in this context that magendo wealth is significant. prima facie, the resources available through magendo offered a means to accumulation that avoided competition between generations. magendo during this period provided a means to economic advancement that did not come at the cost of one’s father, explaining the permissiveness that greeted it. yet the shared schema and expectations about wealth were, eventually, thrown into relief and challenged during the binge economy. not least, this occurred because of the quickening of the extended schedules through which life courses historically unfolded, as well as the narrowing of the relations necessary to uphold them. as an example, the regulatory function of marriage—through which individuals enter into a more senior, mature role and through which property becomes redistributed across generations and families—was tested by arbitrage wealth. as peter, my host’s neighbor, put it, magendo “was spoiling people, particularly the younger generation. marriage was a problem. someone could marry five wives because he has money, [yet] he couldn’t support all of them” after magendo ended. ritual time accelerated, and with it the stature achieved through maturity was debased. whereas the sequencing of marriage, including the transfer of thirteen cattle, was typically drawn out over a longer period, newly enriched men could skip such time. the performance of ongoing entrustment signaled by the non-repayment of debt was cut short, suggesting impertinence (shipton 2007). “even some [of my age mates] got married when they were very young, because they were thinking, it was their only chance to get married,” said one man who was initiated in 1978. in these cases, it was not so much that ideals had changed—marriage was still the goal, after all—but rather that the proper temporalization had eroded. some marriages fell apart, only to be reconstituted otherwise: “during magendo, it was easy for someone to leave his wife, or to leave her husband because when they come here, from mbale there in uganda, and another one comes from kakamega, they meet here, [and] that one from mbale will leave her husband and go with this man from kakamega. marriage was very simple.” such a temporal acceleration is usually considered the domain of the capitalist core, as laura bear’s (2016) discussion of the “extensions of short-term market time” and “intensifications of capitalist time” demonstrates. yet the arbitrage wealth during magendo shows a similar dynamic of accumulation and acceleration far from capital-intensive infrastructure or the logics of financialization. for the frontier residents i know, it is through the idioms and examples of kinship and initiation that such dynamics find expression. in addition to the perceived impatience of young men and the imprudence of women, another index of gerontocratic impotence figures prominently in memories of the time: even children became involved in the trade. children stopped attending school to collect fallen coffee beans in the market. “a boy, a girl, sometimes twelve years, ten years, sometimes maybe eight years, even as young as six, seven,” victor, the teacher, told me, “so the little girl or little boy would pick and put them in a two-kilo tin of kimbo, cooking fat, fill it, and when it is full say, ‘sir, can you buy it?’ they bargained, ‘ok, i’ll give you twenty [or] i’ll give you ten.’ that was a lot of money; for sugar, a kilo might have been three shillings at that time.” magendo invited children into the disposition of their seniors, bargaining as any other adult would (cf. meiu 2017). pupils stopped attending school, explained an elderly teacher, because “discipline and hierarchy collapsed. both teacher and student engaged in the same business, so in this sense they were equal.” one man mimicked the act of bending over and picking up individual coffee cherries spilled on the ground: “so, even little children, of standard 3 or standard 4, had money in their pockets!” with their money, they could acquire material trappings beyond their age. “they even bought new shoes!” exclaimed one man who remained scandalized by the memory of typically barefooted children donning footwear. some schools stood empty, with neither teachers nor students bothering to attend. the economic logic seemed clear: teachers may have been paid 4,000 shillings a month, one man recalled, but in magendo you could get 20,000 in a day; even 10,000 in a couple hours. in the exuberance of magendo, protracted avenues for the production of valuable futures—waged labor and education—were traded for the immediacy of arbitrage. some were worried: as schools emptied, an illiterate generation loomed. but as paternal authority waned, little could be done against the allure of arbitrage. “it got us worried. we had to complain. but even if you complained, what would you do? the child leaves you and goes to look for this business.” senior men found the situation disconcerting, even existentially threatening. “there was no respect because everyone was rich by that time,” said one former subchief. “respect for whom?” i asked. “for elders! if you now have a child having, i mean, more than, let me say, 100,000. and you have no money [as an elder], he overlooks you! what do you do for him? he can even buy you.” the broad accessibility of the trade and its resulting wealth undermined the hierarchies through which juniors and seniors related, value was apportioned, and moral values practiced. in the views of senior men, uncontrolled access to money permitted their social juniors to bypass not only proper authority but also the patient cultivation of responsibility.1 economies of misrepresentation i have suggested that the management of appearance was a central concern during magendo, but over time a wider economy of misrepresentation took hold. representations during magendo often misled, whether through the peeling apart of surface appearance and underlying substance, or the case of the kenyan government elite managing their (non-participatory) image while still partaking.2 these forms of deceit did not always rankle participants’ moral intuition: as studies of fake goods make clear, “everyday dissimulation [is] a social modality” (newell 2019, 300) not merely defined by resentment and objection (guyer 2004, 86–91). during magendo, opacity, deception, and pretext were often negotiated, rather than uniformly rejected. yet not all magendo duplicity met with ambiguous laughter, and over time some acts did provoke indignation and condemnation. for example, dishonest butchers sold meat unfit for consumption. “there was a time when there were very many dogs,” a chepkube farmer told me. “then, all of a sudden: there was not a single dog!” unscrupulous vendors, he thought, “were selling dogs at night, maybe from midnight when there was no more meat, to 2 a.m.” another confirmed this rumor, emphasizing that the timing of magendo proved central to the impropriety: “that one happened, because as i said, people used to do this business at night, then at night people could do anything.” no matter how illuminated, the night was a time of risk and danger. he continued, pointing to the intrusion of undomesticated spaces and their products into domestic consumption: “yes, we had people from the forest who could come with elephant meat, perhaps antelope meat. at night, people could eat anything. you had to be very careful to not eat things at night. but they were sold mostly to those who came at night to buy, because they were tired, hungry, and they could land on certain meat.” inoculating oneself against these dangers, he suggested, was particularly difficult for new arrivals that lacked the careful disposition chepkube demanded in those days. mambo kwisha the most dramatic incident of the magendo era—indeed, its denouement in the view of some—arose from the realization that some people used counterfeit kenyan shillings to buy coffee. chepkube’s residents were on the front line of buying coffee from ugandans and selling it to kikuyu and somali bulk buyers. the difference between the price in chepkube and the price offered by international buyers in mombasa was enormous. it compelled a scramble between kikuyu and somali buyers to acquire as much coffee at the frontier as possible. it also compelled some unscrupulous buyers to bring counterfeit money to chepkube, slipped into bundles of genuine currency—an act uniformly blamed on somalis. with such free money, these individuals could afford to outbid their competitors. the same quality that made cash attractive—its immediacy and lack of records—made recuperation unlikely. this angered participants, not least because it cut them off from the consumptive networks into which they had so eagerly entered. some experienced it as a return to poverty. in fact, many blame the fraud for the ultimate end of the binge economy. when word went out that the somalis had been defrauding the sellers, “the kikuyus complained and started beating the somalis.” the incident—with the attackers armed with pangas, spears, stones, and other implements—turned into a daylong conflagration, with other participants joining the assault. those present remember the day well. “it was a very big confusion. people died.” kenyan police did not arrive for hours. instead of keeping the peace in busy chepkube, they were under orders to remain at their post in distant malakisi. in the meantime, perhaps as many as seven or eight people died, mostly somalis. in the absence of police, the very same gerontocratic authority sidelined by magendo restored order. “the center of all the fighting was here,” i was told as we sat drinking soda overlooking the border river, “at this junction. i remember two people who tried to stop the fighting: my late father and the late r. m. these ones carried spears, and held up spears.” my friend adopted a look of stoic resolve and mimicked the act of holding a spear above his head, pointing straight up. “they were not scared of the stones being thrown in the middle. and it was stopped. so when the police came, everything was in control.” his age-mate, sitting near us, chimed in, explaining that these men were highly respected elders: “they were the ones who kept the peace.” the police, failing to find anyone willing to testify, returned to their base and let the elders’ solution suffice. for others, it was not counterfeit money and the enfeebled local gerontocracy that ended magendo. rather, it took the paternal authority of “the elder state” (ocobock 2017) to bring arbitrage to heel: some residents of chepkube recall the death of jomo kenyatta and daniel arap moi’s assumption of power as the change that ended the trade. “if kenyatta could [still] be on the throne,” said one former subchief, “i think things would continue because his own family were the ones here, they were having trucks here, buying.” nationally, kenyatta and his family are remembered as acquisitive, even indulgent. this permissiveness is subtly contrasted with moi, a well-known teetotaler and churchgoer, not tempted by earthly pleasures (lynch 2011). by the time he was forced aside in 2002 after twenty-four years in power, moi had solidified a reputation for authoritarian control that was presaged, frontier residents suggest, in his closure of arbitrage. my interlocutors juxtaposed moi’s rectitude in moral matters with the ethical ambiguities of magendo; the austerity of this famous arbiter of order stands against the exuberance of the period. his rule, in their eyes, curtailed the drunkenness, school-leaving, and disrespect for elders associated with magendo. only with the change of power in nairobi did a new provincial commissioner, a born-again christian from the coast, i was told, arrive in western kenya. this man went to lwakhakha, the small border post south of chepkube, and found the iconic shop sign declaring mambo bado—things are yet to come. ordering his officials to bring paint and rub off those optimistic words, he scrawled a new slogan, mambo kwisha—things are finished! in this symbolic act, he concretized the closure of magendo, declaring an end to its open orientation to the future and consigning its extraordinary dynamics to the past. conclusion seen from the perspective of wall street’s high-tech offices and high-speed algorithms, arbitrage can seem an exceptional economic strategy. available only to the heavily capitalized, it is exclusive and distinct from wider cultural and political entanglements. indeed, even the language of “high finance” gestures to its removal from the mundane, worldly concerns of other sorts of commerce. yet this article has demonstrated that capitalization on differences between market jurisdictions is not uniquely the preserve of financiers. it has examined such spatial techniques alongside related ways of creating differences through the manipulation of measurement and appearance. this wider view of arbitrage demonstrates the sorts of cultural infrastructure required to transact across differences—cultural norms and social relations occluded in corporate offices. seen from the perspective of chepkube, arbitrage is a style of action suited to frontiers where relatedness across difference has long been valued. here, it is not so much incorporation and homogenization that define social relations and commerce. the experience is not one of a “great transformation” (maurer 2006) resulting in commensuration and abstraction. rather, virtue abides in simultaneously holding apart and moving between registers. this sensibility, i have argued, made the people around mount elgon well suited to the period under discussion. the “messiness and hard work involved in making, translating suturing, converting, and linking” across heterogeneity was not an intermediary status to be overcome (bear et al. 2015). rather, the variegated field of action—knowing and measuring, presenting and obscuring, moving and enclosing—concerned both the means and the ends of arbitrage. such an approach suggests that despite its association with movement, arbitrage sits in place. we might say it is nestled alongside kinship, ritual, and ethics—the sorts of domestic concerns shorn from other studies of arbitrage. shared rites, common vernaculars, and histories of intermarriage provided the basis for magendo, yet they also strained under the exuberant embrace of its rewards. the ethics, temporalities, and hierarchies of chepkube’s gerontocratic order saw their material bases erode: wealth became accessible without laborious production, marriages could occur without extensive contributions from kin, and social juniors could partake in typically senior behavior. arbitrage appears particularly prone to generate such conundrums, for when it is pursued widely, it relies on a subversion of the orderly arrangement of people, timelines, appearances, and standards. magendo dramatized such an erosion of prevailing norms by expanding commodity consumption, accelerating rites of initiation, and undermining elder claims to wealth and prestige. these dramas demonstrate that arbitrage is more of a political phenomenon than often recognized—especially if the political is understood beyond state sovereignty to include the regulation of the life course, the inheritance of land, and the consumption of prestigious goods. arbitrage is a challenge to settled orders of status and wealth. in this way, it might seem akin to the sorts of hostilities associated with millennial capitalism (comaroff and comaroff 2002), though the comparison only goes so far. in contrast to the assumptions about zero-sum rivalry and competitive displacements, magendo invited all to partake in the resources and statuses historically reserved for the few. the excess rewards and conviviality formed part of the more troubling inversions of conceptual schema and the decline in ethical behavior. arbitrage, in other words, provides simultaneous peril and profit that are best captured in the lasting motif of the era: an ambiguous laugh. abstract this article examines the ambiguities of arbitrage, focusing on illegal coffee trade across the uganda-kenya border. i show how residents of the borderlands harnessed ordinary tools (gunny sacks, tin cans, and gravity scales) and cultural repertoires (kinship, language, and ritual) to cultivate and capitalize on difference. they reworked territorial jurisdiction, measurement standards, and surface appearances in a form of arbitrage known as magendo. while magendo is an ordinary occurrence at the border, i focus on a particular period in which magendo reached spectacular new levels. the resulting binge economy was characterized by competitive gift-giving and interethnic conviviality, but its excessive margins eventually challenged prevailing notions of moral selfhood, gender relations, and the authority of elder men. seeing arbitrage not merely as the reserve of high finance but also as a strategy of african frontiers provides a way to connect the anthropology of finance to enduring concerns around the postcolonial politics of borders, gerontocracy, and value. [arbitrage; smuggling; east africa; temporality; money; borders] muhtasari nakala hii inachunguza utata wa arbitrage. maandishi yangu yanazingatia biashara wa kahawa mpakani mwa kenya na uganda. katika nakala hii, ninaonyesha jinsi wakazi wa mipakani walitumia zana za kila siku (magunia, madebe, na mizani) na pia mbinu za kitamaduni (ukoo, lugha, na mila) kuzalisha na kukuza tofauti za kisokoni na faida. aidha wahusika hawa walipinda na kufinyanga dhana kuhusu udhibiti wa mipaka, desturi za kukadiri, na muonekano wa nje kwa kupitia kitendo cha arbitrage: almaarufu kama magendo. ingawa uchukuzi magendo si taratibu geni kwa uchumi za mipakani, nakala hii inazingatia wakati ambapo uchuuzi wa kahawa ulifikia kilele cha kustaajabisha na kuleta uchumi wa ukwasi. kwa upande moja msimu huo ulileta urafiki kati ya jamii tofauti na mienendo kama vile mashindano ya kutunukiana zawadi. kwa upande mwingine, faida za kiajabu ziliibua miangalio mipya kuhusu maswala ya uadilifubinafsi, jinsia katika jamii, na mamlaka ya wazee. kuelewa arbitrage kama zaidi ya mazoezi ya kifedha, bali pia kama mkakati wa uchumi za mapembezoni, inatupa njia ya kuunganisha anthropolojia ya fedha na masawali ya mipaka baada ya ukoloni, utawala wa wakongwe, na thamani. [magendo; fedha; afrika mashariki; mipaka; ulanguzi] notes acknowledgments i am grateful to conversations on these topics with godfrey asiimwe, amiel bize, emily brownell, jatin dua, basil ibrahim, emma park, parker shipton, and ­peter wafula wekesa. brad weiss and the ca reviewers provided valuable guidance, and jessica lockrem helpfully managed it all. my thanks to all. 1. it was not uncommon that residents born after this period knew the dynamics, its opportunities, and its missteps. indeed, memories of that time serve as something of morality plays, inculcating a respect for those ideas, principles, and dispositions debased during the magendo boom—even while few would deny the allure that such immediate riches would undoubtedly present if they arrived again. 2. there is an echo of andrew apter’s (2005, 283; cf. mbembe 2001; blunt 2019) argument about a postcolonial condition of “semiotic suspension, in which signs, stripped of their referential moorings, are almost literally up for 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anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.05 on waiting willfully in urban uganda: toward an anthropology of pace cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 458-483, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.09 on waiting willfully in urban uganda: toward an anthropology of pace anna eisenstein university of virginia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6643-4691 olivia knew that once she got married, everyone would expect her to become pregnant as soon as possible. “of course” she intended to marry and have children, she told me, but she wanted to “stabilize” first: to work a bit, set a plan for starting a business or going back to school, and buy clothing and housewares to establish her personal style.1 in the process, she expected to build relationships that would in turn shape her future marriage, family, and lifestyle. as such, olivia saw waiting to marry as a way of “loving herself.” in this article, i consider how such willful waiting for marriage and motherhood figures in young women’s efforts to advance through the life course in uganda, arguing that their temporal orientation is at odds with the forms of agency often assumed to underlie effective social action. much previous work on time and agency has emphasized the “stuckness” of global youth, an approach that is grounded in a model of liberal agency that overly privileges speed and self-­actualization. in contrast, the women i came to know in urban uganda deliberately punctuated their movement through the life course with periods of patient waiting. thus, rather than viewing pauses in progress as an obvious symptom of material lack, i consider how pauses in the life course are both strategically employed and valued as being pregnant with possibility. the political scientist diane singerman (2007) developed the concept of waithood to describe the expanding period of time between adolescence and full social adulthood that characterizes young adults’ lives under neoliberal economic conditions. soaring youth-unemployment rates and high costs of marriage make it increasingly difficult for young people around the globe to achieve the markers of social adulthood, namely, to marry, establish households, and support their relatives (durham and solway 2017). across ethnographic cases in africa particularly, the literature documents the shame, tedium, and restlessness that pervades experiences of waithood, especially for young men as they pass their time talking politics in barbershops (weiss 2009), holding elaborate tea ceremonies (masquelier 2019), or watching foreign films together (mains 2011). as such, the prolonged suspension between childhood and adulthood threatens the stability of national governments and economies by tempting youth toward anomie, violence, and sex work (e.g., hansen 2005; singerman 2007; dhillon and yousef 2009; jeffrey 2010; honwana 2012, 2013). by emphasizing the pains and dangers of delayed entries into adulthood, the waithood literature seems to suggest that humans’ natural inclination is to move forward through the life course as quickly as possible. as an alternative to approaches that privilege speed, efficiency, and self-actualization, i offer pace—that is, strategic pausing—as an analytic frame. to consider pace means to look at the various forms of agency and levels of control that different social actors can exercise over their time and movement. drawing on a rich genealogy in social theory, pace recognizes the fundamentally interpersonal and relational nature of movement. in “time and social structure,” meyer fortes (1949) described the composition of households and lineage groups as shifting over time based on the members’ life stages in relation to one another. alfred schütz (1951) developed his theory of social relationships based on the coordination of separate persons’ “inner time,” as in members of a string quartet communicating through sound and gesture. while concepts of tempo and rhythm emphasize ambient temporal stimuli (durkheim 1965; evans-pritchard 1969; mauss 1979; you 1994; guyer 2007; bourdieu 2008; bandak 2014; archambault 2015), and while the concept of entrainment refers to the syncing up of internal bodily rhythms with external temporal cues (collins 2014; coe 2015, 2016), pace offers something different in that it draws attention to the situated intentionality involved in linking one’s life up with others’. i came to the idea of pace through the image of two people walking down a path together; to remain side by side, if one speeds up or slows down, so must the other. in line with anthropological work that has dismantled the notion of agency as freedom from external pressures (ahearn 2001a, 2001b; mahmood 2005; keane 2007; laidlaw 2014; scherz 2014; khan 2018), studies of gendered temporalities in africa reflect alternative ideas of agency. for instance, mende women in rural gambia utilize contraceptives to time their pregnancies in such a way as to maximize the number of divinely allotted children they will bring forth successfully (bledsoe 2002); catholic nuns in uganda organize their orphanage budgets in light of their faith in divine providence (scherz 2013); and young women in urban morocco beautify themselves so as to precipitate the kind of conjugal future they hope god has destined for them (elliot 2016). similarly, as urban ugandan women stop-and-go en route to adulthood, they do so in relation to others to whom they find themselves, or wish themselves to be, connected, especially god. although waiting is far from being a passive position (crapanzano 1986; kwon 2015; melly 2017), who waits for whom, for what, and under what conditions are acutely political questions, revealing how different social actors are positioned vis-à-vis hierarchies of power (bourdieu 2000; knauft 2002; dungey and meinert 2017). as adeline masquelier (2019) has recently argued, multiple temporalities and forms of futurity unfold simultaneously, converging, intersecting, and layering atop one another. like masquelier (2019, 5), i am interested in the ways that waiting not only signifies “enforced inactivity” but also becomes part of the “daily micropolitics through which forms of being-in-the-world and spaces of belonging are elaborated” against a backdrop of severely narrowed futures due to economic insecurity and widespread joblessness. building on masquelier’s insights, my ethnography of pace highlights how the timing of movement is contingent and relational at the same time as it is intentional and strategic. in this article, i draw on twenty-one months of fieldwork in mbarara, carried out between 2015 and 2018, to show how women living in urban uganda today experience and negotiate their place in the world by pacing their entry into social adulthood. by focusing on women (when, to date, the majority of studies on youth temporalities have concentrated on men), i join others in demonstrating that waiting, as a temporal form of agency, is informed by particular constructions and realizations of gender and gendered institutions, such as marriage and childbearing (see also johnson-hanks 2006; weiss 2009; cole 2010; gilbert 2016; archambault 2017; moore 2018; inhorn and smith-hefner 2020). i am not claiming that waiting to advance through the life course was something only women did, but that the reasons for and practices of waiting are distinctly gendered. in what follows, i argue that ugandan women wait willfully for the right connections to form before moving forward through the life course. i demonstrate that this is because they do not prioritize advancing through the life course as fast as possible, but, instead, advancing in mutualistic connections with others. for the same reason, they also take care not to postpone this life course transition too long. their waithood can thus only be described by attending to the doubleness of contingency and intentionality. to this end, i begin by describing the ways capitalism and urbanization have contoured problems of interpersonal trust in uganda, tracing how even the most promising urban relationships are haunted by self-interest and fleetingness, both furnished by the anonymity of the city. the risks of relationships are particularly acute for women as they select spouses and/or become pregnant, and i show how women use pace as a strategy to manage these risks. in doing so, they draw on a vernacular christian theory of knowledge and insight into relationships in which pausing to “study” others opens spaces in which trustworthy connections might emerge. in this way, hitting the right pace, between rushing and getting stuck, allows women in uganda to forge connections that might elevate their socioeconomic position. along the way, the very ambiguity of relationships imbues pauses with the promise of possibility. pace is an answer to problems of trust in southwestern uganda, a good life (amagara marungi) is understood to flow from a network of harmonious relationships with kin, friends, and spirits who bring various forms of support and blessing into one’s life. hardships follow when one rushes into an attachment with the wrong person, and conversely, when one gets stuck, failing to advance mutualistic relationships. the dangers of acceleration and the threat of getting left behind not only reflect familiar narratives of capitalist transformation (harvey 1989; rose 1996) but also simultaneously refract local explanatory repertoires and social dynamics (cf. cole and durham 2007; chua 2011). regional idioms of blockage and flow—the “rivers of life” (turner 1967)—have organized interrelated social processes of production, exchange, and fertility in east and central africa for centuries (feierman 1985; taylor 1992; neema 1994; vokes 2013). in this emic paradigm, flow is positively valued and irregular movement (whether overflow or blockage) has negative consequences. in contemporary uganda, the process of composing a social and spiritual network from which good life flows involves grappling with increasingly capitalist conditions. at the confluence of urbanization, growing joblessness, companionate marriage, and vernacular christian discourses on opportunity and discernment, new problems of trust have emerged. capitalist urbanization a regional city of some 100,000 people, mbarara is surrounded by agricultural areas and is imagined by its inhabitants first and foremost through its contrast to rural life. like many urban centers, mbarara is a place where modern belonging seems to be within close reach. yet the very aspects of urban relationships that fill them with potential—anonymity, proximity, and plurality—also make them risky. economic opportunities in mbarara often seem to dissolve as quickly as they appear. although uganda’s national economy was strongly committed to liberalization in the 1980s, since that time, the government has gradually increased its restrictions, rendering scarce the private-sector jobs most people imagine obtaining. formal and informal employees’ paydays are often deferred indefinitely, and during my fieldwork i saw this happen to brickmakers, domestic workers, schoolteachers, bankers, insurance agents, shop attendants, restaurateurs, doctors, and university professors alike—who then had to turn to other ways of “finding money” to meet their needs. in this milieu, young people frequently describe their everyday activities as kugiiya, moving about looking for anything from which to “squeeze [out] money” (cf. jones 2010). in the process, income-seekers all too often fall into bad deals, working for too little pay or getting scammed outright. through such experiences, people learn to cautiously evaluate others before moving forward with the wrong business partners. marital decision-making for women in uganda, economic stability is bound up in relationships with men. the women i discuss here all identified as banyankole (the dominant ethnic group in this part of uganda) and as christian (catholic, protestant, and pentecostal in roughly equal proportions). like most residents of mbarara, all twelve of my core research participants were born in rural settings and moved to the city as young adults. their ages ranged from eighteen to twenty-eight. they occupied various class positions, the wealthiest being a university professor, the poorest, a seller of roadside snacks. some were married, others were not. some were mothers, but none were married mothers. despite age, class, and marital differences, i view these women as inhabiting a powerful common category. what unified their experience was, first, their urban residence, and second, their eligibility for married motherhood. in conceptualizing this position in the life course, i draw on the idea of the “vital conjuncture” developed by jennifer johnson-hanks (2006, 22) to refer to “socially structured zones of possibility that emerge around specific periods of potential transformation in a life or lives.” i understand my informants to have all been inhabiting the vital conjuncture during which they were eligible to become married mothers, but the route for getting there was under negotiation. in southwestern uganda, a woman enters social adulthood by marrying into a man’s family and bearing children belonging to his clan. although institutions and rites of passage structure idealized notions of life stages, in practice, as johnson-hanks (2006) points out, such passages are only variably achieved, most often through long-term negotiations and social and economic disruptions. this certainly holds true for marriage and motherhood in uganda. however, whereas the waithood literature has framed waiting almost entirely as compulsion, in contemporary uganda, navigating potential futures involves decision-making processes in which willful waiting figures as a valuable strategy. a hundred years ago, aspirational marriage practices in this region were firmly entrenched in a set of evaluative practices in which the two families “investigated” (kucondooza) each other to identify personality traits, social dynamics, diseases, challenges, habits, and values that seemed to run in the family (murembe 2015). these investigations took the form of secret and open consultations with others who knew the family, indirect inquiries carried out by a go-between, and continuing mutual assessment of the marriage as it unfolded. specifically, the marriage process consisted of an initial visit from the prospective groom to the bride’s father (arranged by a go-between), the payment of bride-price (which would first have to be raised through contributions from the groom’s kin and friends), the introduction ceremony, and then the ceremonial giveaway of the bride—all of which took place on separate occasions at the bride’s father’s home (roscoe 1923). after the bride had gone to reside at the groom’s home, her family would visit her multiple times and gradually release her to contribute productive and reproductive labor within and for her new husband’s family, contingent on observing evidence of their care, provision, and goodness toward the wife. familial projects of precautionary information-gathering were thus central to kinyankole marriage. yet as more and more people—especially young, unmarried people—have moved to mbarara, aspirational marriage practices have become less embedded in extended kinship relations. companionate marriage ideals likely began to take hold in this region in the 1950s as colonial labor migration declined, making wife-sharing practices less socially and economically necessary (doyle 2013). during the 1970s, near-universal primary schooling facilitated a culture of courtship in mbarara, and shane doyle’s (2013) review of church records from this era has revealed a marked increase in the number of cases where genitors refused to accept the responsibilities of fatherhood outside marriage. it was not until the 1980s, however, that rural-urban migration to mbarara genuinely picked up, with the municipality’s population increasing by 338 percent between 1984 and 2013. with urbanization, the possibilities for families to investigate each other have changed considerably. in mbarara today, rising rates of cohabitation, diminishing rates of formal marriage, and shifting anxieties around infertility mean that parents and kin are often only brought into the process of betrothal after the fact. en route to marriage, the women i came to know in mbarara found themselves alienated from rural kin and feeling quite alone as they navigated potentially reproductive relationships. urban relationships are creating a fertility complex at the heart of social transitions to adulthood in uganda: simply put, women want marriage first, but men want children first. whereas it is advantageous for a woman to be married before beginning to bear children (because she can then feel more certain about the baby’s father’s committment to supporting her and the child’s needs), it is advantageous for a man to have a child or children with a woman before marrying her (because it allows him to ascertain his potential wife’s fertility).2 this is, of course, a generalization, but the trend is broadly acknowledged. this gendered distribution of risk leads to considerable anxiety and negotiation over couples’ marriage-pregnancy sequence, which is compounded by the enduring risk of hiv/aids (boyd 2015; parikh 2016). in navigating the fertility complex pragmatically, women in mbarara pace their relationships strategically. if they move too quickly, they risk becoming a single mother (an unfavorable position economically and socially) or contracting the disease. if they move too slowly, they risk losing the man. if they hit just the right pace, they stand to achieve an “organized family” (eka y’obuteka). the ideal of an organized family stands out against the backdrop of untrustworthy economic and intimate relationships. an organized family consists of a complementary spousal relationship in which both spouses willingly fulfill their roles in the household, sharing responsibility for their mutual advancement and that of their dependents; in turn, economic success and amagara marungi (good life) accrue. in the transformed landscape of urban life, then, careful pacing is required to create a family that will flourish despite the contemporary threats of fickle and fleeting relationships and economic opportunities. christian temporalities of opportunity and discernment for many women in uganda, the often extended, uncertain period of waiting for one’s life to come together is a waiting on god. religion is a central dimension of personal and collective life in uganda (scherz 2014; boyd 2015), and 85 percent of the population is christian (ubos 2014). rather than suggesting that the problems of trust and the importance of pace in mbarara are christian phenomena, however, i view christianity as one way of engaging the gendered problems of trust posed by capitalist urbanization. christianity in mbarara stresses a unique prosperity gospel. whereas by definition the prosperity gospel says that christian devotion produces health and wealth, the local variation in mbarara maintains that a person’s exercise of spiritual discernment constitutes the specific mechanism whereby god-given health and wealth come into reach. resonating with the premarital investigations described above, despite their theological differences, all three of uganda’s most popular denominations (catholicism, anglicanism, and pentecostalism) emphasize the importance of appealing to god for wisdom before proceeding with prospective romantic and business relationships.3 in mbarara today, the runyankole proverb, “the person who wants to marry should inquire first” (owashwera abuuza), warns against hasty decision-making in any regard, not just marriage. “observing” or “studying” (kwetegyereza) others facilitates understanding their underlying intentions and any ties they might have to potentially dangerous spiritual others. but it is easy to miss or misinterpret the signs. seeking god’s involvement allows him to become the “eyes behind your eyes” and to “speak to your inner ears,” lending omniscient guidance. when a person effectively consults and obeys god, they can expect to reap material blessings; when a person does not, they may move at the wrong pace and miss out on blessings or incur curses. in seeking god’s insight, waiting is a “modality of attention” (reinhardt 2018) essential to christian subjectivity and success. but in contrast to a longing for the rapture (robbins 2004) or a resignation to god’s plan (gaibazzi 2012), the waiting i describe here is about attaining this-worldly returns through actively partnering with god. writing about the pentecostal prosperity gospel in zambia, naomi haynes (2017) identifies “moving” as a central value to which people aspire: that is, “a recognizable, usually visible, positive change in circumstances,” including educational advancement, progress through the life course, and economic achievement realized in observable markers of financial improvement like cars and houses (haynes 2017, 12). my interlocutors in uganda aspired toward moving in the same sense. building on haynes’s observations, i would point out that moving occurs along multiple planes—moving forward through the life course and upward socioeconomically—that must be calibrated. all of this becomes mediated through relationships with others, and because untrustworthy others are so prevalent in mbarara, discernment proves essential. moving thus requires waiting. don’t rush when mariam married gerald, she did not know what she was in for. he had lied to her about his financial situation, telling her that he was much better off than he was. and she had fallen for it. she saw that he drove a car, but she did not notice the oil leaking from it because he could not afford to fix it. she appreciated his fancy apartment but failed to realize why people so often came there looking for him: to collect debts. his clothes were always neat and clean, but mariam never read the gateman’s rudeness as a sign that gerald had not paid him for washing his clothes in months. signs of wealth and moral character are easily faked, especially to the untrained eye not used to “looking at money.” shortly after they got married, gerald was caught accepting bribes at work and lost his contract. he passed the subsequent months watching television and expected mariam to both earn the money and do all household labor. despite his irresponsibility, he knew she would find it hard to leave him since he had already put a christian wedding band on her finger. if she divorced him before having a child, everyone would wonder if she were infertile and it would become difficult to remarry. if she divorced him after having a child, she would be hard-pressed to find a spouse as a single mother. mariam had been conned. the figure of the conman (omuyayi) haunts romantic relationships, business deals, and religious encounters alike. he may wear fancy clothes, drive a car, and attend church regularly. but those clothes may be borrowed, the car may have been purchased at the expense of sending his children to school, and even “children of the devil” can be found inside christian spaces. embodying the dangers of relationships with strangers, the conman represents the vulnerability in knowing, trusting, and connecting with those unknown to you. taking one’s time offers protection against such risks. throughout my fieldwork the refrain topapa, meaning “don’t rush,” reverberated throughout everyday conversations, church sermons, and family meetings in mbarara. although borrowed from luganda, in mbarara (where the main language is runyankole) the word topapa is widely referred to as kiswahili. the majority of swahili speakers in southwestern uganda are congolese immigrants and refugees, whom ugandans often cast as untrustworthy others whose desire to live the high life leads them to theft, witchcraft, and crime. while topapa does not in fact stem from the swahili language, the word is “swahili” in the sense that it reminds hearers of dangerous others whose hidden behaviors may harm. the logic of topapa applied to a wide range of hazards of urban modernity facing both men and women. when moving by boda-boda (motorcycle taxi), a passenger might gently remind the driver, “mporampora, mporampora” (slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly), if he is going too fast. this phrase marks the beginning of the best-known kinyankole proverb, “slowly, slowly, the earthworm reaches the well” (mporampora, ekahisya omunyongororwa aha iziba), which has many other variations beginning with “mporampora … .” one should also avoid choosing a boda-boda too quickly, especially when the driver is unfamiliar or he or his motorcycle do not look clean and well kept: he might be doing drugs, fail to see thieves on the way, or intend to rob or rape you. the temptation to get into an overstuffed taxi (matatu)—although it may bring a person more quickly to their destination or be cheaper since the conductor has accepted so many passengers—should equally be avoided since it dangerously weighs down the vehicle and speaks to the profit-driven motives of the driver-conductor team. when someone is schooling, elders encourage them to pace themselves through the long journey. if the student tries to push through without taking the time necessary to study for exams, this thinking goes, they will not earn high marks. although the journey is long, one should not wish to jump a class (skip a grade), because in doing so the student will fail to learn the deeper lessons and forego strong relationships with peers. the logic of topapa also helps explain the plethora of half-built construction projects that overwhelm uganda’s landscape. constructing too quickly, my interlocutors explained to me, does not give the materials time to harden and settle into each other; if the builder rushes, his house will fall.4 moreover, spending too much too quickly on one’s own project will leave a person financially unable to contribute to others’ needs, and their resentment will crumble the home this house was meant to become. starting a business also requires patience. if an entrepreneur invests too much at the beginning, before the business has become sustainable, they may “spoil [their] investments, [their] name, and [their] heart,” as one young business owner told me. you may have brought people something great, but if they were not ready for it, it will fail. one needs to start slowly so that others come along to help build the business a person has been dreaming of. moving forward with one’s ideas before consulting others will lead to failure and leave others saying, “but he didn’t ask [us for our input].” figure 1. a small, half-built, brick house on the outskirts of mbarara. this modest construction project was already two years in the making when this photo was taken. photo by twesigye pius. sex is another activity that should not be rushed. by moving too quickly during sex, the partners fail to “synchronize,” and when one loses out on enjoyment, both partners lose the opportunity that sex offers to “bring some connection” by teaching them to “work together,” as an older couple explained to me. in interpersonal relationships generally, to rush another person to do something you want them to do before they see it for themselves and willingly choose to do it means disregarding their autonomy. bonds emerging from such pressure are understood as weak and particularly vulnerable to breaking. in the context of growing inequality in uganda, two persons once moving side by side may find themselves rather suddenly in different positions across social space: under such circumstances, only a strong, “genuine” bond born of mutual free choice can endure. through the echoes of topapa, it becomes clear that rushing carries risk on two levels: establishing harmful connections or alienating helpful ones. against the backdrop of possible unseen dangers, rushing might cause someone to fall into a bad situation instead of reaching their destination, as in the case of falling for a conman, or getting into a traffic accident. on a second level, rushing threatens to alienate others, as evident in the examples of failing to cement relationships with schoolmates, focusing one’s resources too closely on one’s own construction project, allowing others to see and support one’s business’s growth, and having unsynchronized sex. the dual dangers of moving with bad others or without good others—and the willful waiting that constitutes the wisest alternative to rushing—emerge in the case of abigail. waiting on god when abigail got pregnant, she had been a university student and an active member of the anglican church. she had approached a church leader with questions about scripture, and he had proposed they discuss them at her home. but while he was there, before she even really knew what was happening, he impregnated her.5 when abigail later let him know she was carrying his child, he insisted she get an abortion. but abigail resisted his demands. as her pregnancy unfolded, it reorganized her relationships drastically. she could not complete her courses at school and lost the respect of her church community. the baby’s father refused to take financial responsibility for his son. abigail’s parents and siblings likewise said they could not help support the child. (in fact, they felt so much shame toward her that they barely spoke to her for years following the pregnancy.) only her sister miranda showed mercy: soon after the baby was born, miranda allowed them to move into her single rented room with her. while living with her sister, abigail befriended one of the neighbors, also a single mother. the two of them decided to chip in together for a phone that could support whatsapp, an app that provides the most popular mode of text-based communication in uganda. whenever it was her turn with the phone, abigail would chat with men whom she had met through church, school, or friends of friends. many of them figured as potential marriage partners or financial providers, and whatsapping with them regularly opened the possibility of advancing these relationships. month after month went by, and one after another potential whatsapp boyfriend fell through. discouraged, abigail told me, “every time i think i may move, something happens. i find doors which look open, i knock, i find they’re locked. and really, i don’t know why.” the reasons why a man might not want to marry abigail were not insignificant: she already had a son from another man and the boy had no source of support. she also refused to have sex again before being formally married. although abigail acknowledged these factors, she held that they should not be insurmountable because she had god on her side. shortly after we celebrated her baby’s first birthday, conversations with a wealthy banker began to look promising and he offered to give her a business. which business would she like to engage in, he asked her. excited and hopeful, abigail needed a few days to muster the courage to tell him she wanted to become a tailor. he replied by telling her that dream was not big enough and sent her back to think of a career of which he could be proud. abigail was taken aback. his response made her feel embarrassed about class differences, but more so, it made her wonder what was behind his offer. she was wary of getting into a situation that appeared to be the answer to her prayers but might in fact tie her to obligations—sexual or spiritual—that she did not want. she needed god’s discernment to perceive whether or not this man “had an attachment” to which she would become beholden by accepting his gift. as she often did, abigail entered a period of prayer and fasting. this consisted of several days during which abigail would not eat or talk on the phone during the daytime in the interest of focusing on god. on the last day of her fast, she told me she could not pretend she had received an answer from god. she was still “confused” as to whether this man had a good heart or if he was an enemy with evil “connections.” yet i could hear her smiling over the phone as she told me the prayers and fasting had not been in vain, for she had developed “the spirit of listening.” she told me, “i’m learning to wait for god’s word in me before i proceed. god help [sic] me understand his voice and i follow.” abigail’s time was not to be rushed. eventually, the banker got tired of waiting. after upping the ante to include marriage, he warned abigail that his offer would soon expire. abigail’s sister was about to get married and without any means of paying rent herself, abigail did not know where she and her baby would go. i sympathized with her that it must be especially hard to wait for god’s answer when the man seemed to be offering everything she wanted. but she replied by referring to a verse in deuteronomy, telling me, and maybe herself, “the things we don’t know, we don’t waste time [on], because god has not revealed them to us yet. they belong to him. he has not yet given them to us.” she told the man that she could not understand why he was rushing, for god had not yet spoken. she decided to keep waiting, and he went his way. abigail did not count this as a loss. crucially, the movement she desired was movement with god. the examples i have considered thus far have shown the worthwhile nature of patience versus a rush out of waithood. willful waiting seeks to create a network. incorporating desirable others (like god) and avoiding undesirable others (like conmen) into one’s life takes time. it takes time for their true identities and intentions to become evident, and for their wills to align with one’s own. these examples have also illustrated that the risks of rushing into marriage and childbearing prove greater for women. divorced women without children find their fertility called into question; single mothers are significantly less marriageable since they often come with the obligation to feed mouths belonging to another man’s clan. yet even as they cannot afford to rush, women must also take care not to take too long. don’t get stuck in a setting where marriage and children are so highly valued, women who do not bear children, especially within the context of marriage, are considered failures. a woman who does not get married is said to have “fallen in the cooking stones” (kugwa amahega). in a traditional kinyankole homestead (including some rural households today), women cook over a special set of cooking stones given by the mother-in-law to a new wife shortly after she has married into their family. the wife uses those cooking stones to feed her marriage, and in time, her children. her daughters soon join her in performing cooking duties, and it is over their mother’s cooking stones that they too learn to make fire and prepare food for the time when they will have their own families. if a daughter “falls in the cooking stones,” she has fallen into the work of her mother’s household and not gotten up. she remains stuck behind the house (the kitchen is always a separate structure behind the house), laboring there and never moving outside of the compound, and thus, hidden from any potential suitors’ view. as a kinyankole proverb says, “what remains inside the homestead beautifies the back of the house” (ebiguma omu nda bishemeza amarembo). out of view and connection with others, her labor never graduates to feed her own family as it should, so she remains subservient to her mother and father, working for something that is “theirs” and never her own. instead of falling in the cooking stones as such, women today might just as easily fall into their books or their office if they prioritize education or careers at the expense of a timely marriage. hidden behind the cover of a book or within the walls of an office, their beauty cannot be recognized by those to whom it might matter. age thirty is a hard “deadline” by which everyone—men and women alike—should be married, although the rule is less mutable for women. urban men refer to women who look “old” but are not yet married as “off-layers” (like hens) who have passed their reproductive prime. as a person approaches twenty-seven, their marital prospects become the topic of anxious discussion during family meetings, and sometimes the family investigates possible underlying spiritual causes for the delay. spiritual forces may block a person from moving, such as witchcraft thrown by an adversary that has “pinned” the unmarried one to some out-of-the-way location and its associated relationships, or spirit spouses who have “locked up” someone in a marriage in the spirit world so that they cannot marry someone on earth. although most urban women do not live near their kin, all those i knew in their late twenties described the intense family pressure they felt to somehow become “unstuck.” one twenty-eight-year-old woman who worked as a research assistant at the university and lived with her widowed mother told me that her mother made her dress up and walk around town every single day so that men would see her and she would waste no more time and attract a husband. figure 2. this image depicting the front and back of a two-hundred-shilling note—with text superimposed over the top that reads, “if you used this note, your marriage deadline is aug 2018”—circulated widely on whatsapp in july 2018. the money pictured was used in uganda until 1996. at stake in hitting the marriage “deadline” is the socioeconomic status of the family network in which one will become involved. while it is advantageous to marry up, spending too much time chasing a relationship with someone who is “not the same [as you]” (of a similar class position) carries a greater risk of not materializing into marriage. as time proceeds, the pool of eligible bachelors decreases and a woman’s prospects for socioeconomic mobility diminish accordingly. in the effort to tie oneself to a man, becoming pregnant with his child is sometimes a woman’s best strategy. this became clear to me when, just two weeks into a new relationship, angela, a single mother of two young children, decided to have the injectable contraceptive removed from her arm in the hope that she would soon conceive. as many women do, angela had faced a false start on the way to social adulthood when her previous marriage had failed; she now wanted to pick up her pace. leaving her two young children in the care of her mother and never mentioning them to her boyfriend, angela planned to become pregnant and thereby elicit her new boyfriend’s love, and all that might follow from it. angela imagined this pending pregnancy as a way to move forward in the course to becoming a married mother. through this, she hoped, those to whom she was already attached (her children and her parents) would also move “up a level” to a more stable financial situation. although i lost touch with angela shortly after she stopped contraception, in my fieldwork i encountered several examples of success with just this tactic. beginning to have children relatively early in one’s life, “while you still have energy,” is considered socioeconomically advantageous in another way too. as a twenty-nine-year-old man explained, “i need to get a child so that it inspires me to work hard. if you get children and work money when you are young, life becomes sweet when you are old.” children and the love they evoke thus motivate parents to achieve higher socioeconomic heights. but the stakes of doing so fall along gendered lines. as one twenty-eight-year-old woman told me, “if you at least start [having children] when you are young, then when you have finished, you can get out of the house and do other things”; she herself intended to go to law school. another mother of young children told me somewhat desperately, “i need to finish with the times of pregnancy. i finished schooling nine years ago. for nine years i have been with no job. nine years.” both this mother and the prospective lawyer wanted to complete the season of life in which they were pregnant on and off again so that they could move on to employment. the temporal sequence of this shift from reproductive to productive economic activity is a movement toward, or further into, adulthood. whereas bearing children is obligatory for women, earning money is optional. those who “finish” with pregnancies earlier have more time to build their careers and connections outside the home, and many women experience “getting out of the house” as personally fulfilling and empowering. timing the arrival of children relatively early in one’s life is also likely to coincide with the childbearing years of other success-oriented young couples. by keeping up with others who are also marrying and having children, working hard, and poised for success, one’s friendships with them are more likely to grow. in turn, those friendships can serve as a source of socioeconomic, social, and emotional support, as well as inspiration to keep one’s priorities in order. ultimately, couples who marry and begin having children while they are “still young” are able to benefit from the temporal flexibility and social connections that can propel them to the next socioeconomic level. not getting stuck plumbs with the will to wait in that it is not merely postponement of married motherhood that women want, but rather, the proper pacing that will allow them to move out of the house and associate themselves with progress through productive activities and social relations. pregnant pauses in the tension between not rushing and not getting stuck, pausing emerges as a powerful social technology for creating connections and developing trust in them. johnson-hanks (2006, 23) writes that vital conjunctures can be understood “through their horizons, the borders of possibility, desirability, and potential danger, as perceived by the participants.” if vital conjunctures are structured by alternative points on the horizon, then relationships are the paths toward or away from those horizon points, and “pregnant pauses” are the means of assessing and solidifying those relationships. pregnant pauses take many forms, but they always entail coming together with others. as such, they offer opportunities for social actors to “tune in” (schütz 1951) to each other, furnishing deeper mutual insight and connection. although pregnant pauses does not constitute an emic phrase, my use of it derives from numerous kinyankole proverbs conveying that one cannot predict the personality of one’s baby before it is born; you simply have to wait and see.6 in the same way, comings-together with others are open-ended, their effects underdetermined (cf. geissler and prince 2010). further, as biological pregnancy is a period during which a new relationship gestates within, reorganizing the relationships surrounding it, so too, more metaphorical pregnant pauses prove generative and transformative. the pregnant part of these pauses also hearkens to the gendered identities and subjectivities in relation to which women specifically pace their relationships. prayer, elaborate greeting exchanges (in person, online, and over the phone), social visits, and weddings all serve as examples of pregnant pauses. prayer makes for an especially important pregnant pause. when a supplicant pauses to commune with god, she cannot predict what she might see, hear, or receive, but availing herself of god’s perspective allows him to lead the way. considering this as crucial for punctuating their successful movement through life, hundreds and hundreds of people living in mbarara attend church in the early morning every day. this is in addition to personal prayer time one might take anytime throughout the day or night. attendance at special healing and deliverance services at church and periods of private prayer and fasting constitute even more intensive attempts to pause and connect with god. prayer in turn shapes one’s engagements in other pregnant pauses through god-given discernment or other forms of divine intervention. in-person greeting exchanges provide a moment to stop and look at each other. regular conversations on whatsapp—which figure as an everyday priority for almost all the young adults i have come to know in uganda—serve as a way of keeping up relationships. phone calls demonstrate care and connection. i was repeatedly amazed at how many phone calls everyone (myself included) received for no apparent reason other than to “check on” the person and make sure they were well. such calls were often quite short; airtime is charged by the minute in uganda, and many callers seem expertly to wind down the call and hang up at exactly fifty-nine seconds. visiting offers another occasion when persons pause to come together in a shared experience, and what might emerge remains open-ended. to this point, many banyankole hold that you cannot know if you will spend the night at someone else’s house until after you arrive and eat and see how the visit is going. in all these kinds of interactions, a contingent space opens up where, as abigail often said of her whatsapp conversations, “you never know” what might happen next. i caught a glimpse of the importance of this tuning in with others—composing a “we” (schütz 1951) or a “with” (goffman 1967)—when my longtime friend, rachel, wed her husband in church. although her husband had given her father the full bride-price and completed the traditional marriage ceremonies fourteen years earlier, and by this point they had three children together, rachel told me that she saw the wedding as a “major spiritual breakthrough.” they should have wed long ago, she acknowledged, noting that having failed to attach their family to god for this long had been holding them back: “we don’t always move as we should,” she said, referring at once to her difficulty getting a job despite having a postsecondary degree, her frequent marital conflicts, and the fact that building their house had taken them longer than desired. with this wedding, they would connect their union to god, which she expected would catalyze further progress in their family’s life. at the same time, this story speaks to the role of costly, western-style “white weddings” in enacting a couple’s belonging in a global middle class (cf. pauli 2011; solway 2016; van dijk 2017). by instantiating their connection to god and other upwardly mobile families, their church wedding constituted one of many pregnant pauses, or relational technologies of pace, that helped bring others into their movement in and through life. conclusion as a strategy, pace in this ethnographic context is employed to build networks of trustworthy others with whom one might move forward through the life course and upward socioeconomically. capitalist urbanization produces new forms of precarity for middle-class and aspiring middle-class women, as even friedrich engels (2009 [1845]) realized. but whereas modern life is widely experienced as a speeding up under conditions of industrial capitalism, i have shown how, in uganda, it is the slowing down of social connections that guards against the particular, gendered dilemmas that arise in relation to capitalism and urban life. gradual, punctuated processes of coming to see, to know, and to trust others over time offer protection against the threats of conmen and of alienation. this contrast reveals a capitalism in which aspirations for economic success are as much about praying hard as about working hard.7 women in uganda have confidence in their waiting to develop discernment because they feel that it allows them to be led by god. their pace thus points beyond a neoliberal formulation of individual accountability for speedy success. rather, in pausing to seek and submit themselves to divine guidance, women in uganda simultaneously exercise agency in one sense and sacrifice it in another; agency here is not independence or autonomy, but more like willfulness. they are not waiting for circumstances to change so much as they are waiting on others. in this way their strategic pausing reflects the heightened importance of social and divine connections and coordination for achieving personal progress, modern belonging, and well-being in a world that is always threatening to exclude those who cannot keep up. not rushing and not getting stuck. intentionality and contingency. considering the reasons women in uganda have to slow down the progression of time and move forward only at specific moments has shown that these women do not experience waithood as the direct and unavoidable result of the forces of capital restraining them from realizing adulthood at an unfettered pace. instead, by pausing to come together with others and see what comes forth, they sometimes delay the milestones of marriage and motherhood quite intentionally. in so doing, they engage waithood as a mode of addressing and potentially even transforming their relationships and economic circumstances. in this way, waithood may in fact help generate the conditions of possibility for interactions and networks to emerge that might lead to new, different, and possibly better material conditions. this finding indicates that the risks of entering social adulthood at the wrong moment, embedded in the wrong relationships, prove at least as significant as the risks of remaining in waithood. understanding the life course as a project to be strategically, contingently negotiated not only has theoretical significance but also applied stakes. international development projects of population control in uganda have specifically targeted how women spend their time as a site of intervention, seeking to train young women away from “idling” (understood to lead to sex and pregnancy, early and often) and instead convert them into productive economic subjects (moore 2018). contradicting the assumption that lack of household or entrepreneurial labor leads to boredom which leads to sex, i have detailed how women in mbarara deliberately chose to invest in pregnant pauses—which looked like chatting on the phone, texting, hanging out, praying, and going to church—in the express interest of improving their economic opportunities. willfully postponing married motherhood is counterbalanced by and aligned with efforts to finish bearing children as early as possible so as to be freed to move on to further education and employment. national governmentand international ngo-sponsored girl-child campaigns in uganda (and elsewhere) advocate “schooling first,” reflecting the notion, familiar from western settings, that childbearing puts an end to educational and career advancement. yet i have explained how at least some women in mbarara successfully practice “children first,” completing their obligatory pregnancies before moving deeper into educational and career activities during middle age. because young women in uganda are so closely identified with their potential maternity, any attempt to empower them must take into account the changing relationship between marriage, fertility, and “getting out of the house” (cf. paxson 2004). bearing a child before marrying and/or finishing school may come with risks, but it may also be just the thing that leads to marriage to a good, upwardly mobile man. further, timing childbearing, marriage, and education around the same time as other success-oriented couples—thus opening the possibility of becoming enmeshed in a powerful network of mutual obligation with them—may prove more important for women’s well-being and success than sequencing education before childbearing. this article has demonstrated how the analytic of pace directs attention to the relational risks, expectations, and desires facing differently positioned persons as they move through life with others. women in uganda face more risk than men at this vital conjuncture, so in this context, pace constitutes a particularly gendered form of temporal agency. although it might be tempting to romanticize the pregnant pause, that is far from my recommendation here. despite the way urban independence and companionate marriage have typically been associated with emancipation in all its positive valences, the women i knew in mbarara did not find their position an easy one to inhabit. pregnant pauses offered a tool for reckoning with some of the challenges they faced. yet pacing placed the burden of orchestrating life projects on women, especially, whose futures and whose children’s futures seemed to hang in the balance of moving or failing to move at just the right moment. abstract women in uganda strategically time their entry into married motherhood in relation to others with whom they want to be connected. although much of the burgeoning literature on “waithood” laments global youth’s delayed entry into social adulthood, i show that women in urban uganda intentionally pause, slowing down their movement through the life course to cultivate networks of interdependence that will propel them not only forward through the life course but also upward socioeconomically. the logics and practices by which they pace themselves point beyond a neoliberal conception of time and agency, instead highlighting the heightened importance of divine connections and social coordination under increasingly capitalist and urban conditions. the lens of pace helps bring into view the situated, multilayered, relational projects of moving through life with others. [africa; agency; temporality; gender; christianity; urbanization; life course] ekihandiiko omubugufu abakazi omuri uganda nibetebekanisiza gye obwiire bw’okutaaha omubushweere n’obuzaire waaba n’ogyeragyeranisa naabo abubarikweenda kwegaita/kuba nabo. n’obu ebihaandiiko ebirikweyongyera kukanya ebirikukwaata aha bunyeeto biraabe nibyooreka okutoonzya ahabw’eminyeeto kukyerererwa kukura, ninyoreka ngu abakazi omumyaanya ekurakureine omuri uganda nibariindaho bakigyendereire, bakyeendeeza ahamigyendere omumituurire yaabo kwenda ngu babaase kwombeka emikago y’okuhweerahweerana etarikubayaamba kwongyera kubutuura emituurire yaabo kwonka kureka na n’okwongyera kubatunguura omubyentaatsya. enteekateeka hamwe n’emitwaarize eyibarikutwaazamu n’ehingura ahanyetegyereza y’obweire hamwe n’obugabe bw’okwehitsyaho ebyetaago eya abakurakureine, beitu byongyera kumurika ekyetaago kihaango ky’okumanya ebyenyikiriza hamwe n’okutuuragye n’abaantu omumbeera z’obushuubuzi hamwe n’entunguuka ebiriyo nibikanya. ekitangaazo ky’emitwarize nikiyaamba kureeba omubury’obuhikire, entebekanisa zitarikushushwana z’okubaasa kutuuragye nabaandi. [afirika; okweshariramu; ekitari kyobutweire; abikiriza omuri kuristo; ebyomundembo; orugyendo rwamagara] notes acknowledgments grateful recognition goes to my research participants in mbarara. i thank ira bashkow, ida hoequist, arsalan khan, michelle morgenstern, joel robbins, and china scherz for intellectual support. i also thank cultural anthropology’s editorial collective, especially heather paxson, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback. the work was supported by the national science foundation, the philanthropic educational organization (peo), and the university of virginia’s african urbanisms humanities lab, center for global health, and center for global inquiry and innovation. 1. my interlocutors in mbarara spoke both runyankole and english. where i quote translations of the words they originally spoke in runyankole, i include the runyankole in the text or within parentheses. 2. men worry that women may have previously had an abortion that compromises their subsequent fertility and thus might lock them into a childless marriage. abortion complications can indeed endanger women’s fertility, although figures vary dramatically and suffer from a high response bias, since abortion is illegal in uganda. prior to christianity, infertility was an acceptable reason for divorce, but not so today for couples who have wed in church. 3. see liz ravalde (2019) on the increasing similarities across denominations since the growth of pentecostal and charismatic movements in the country since the 1980s. 4. building a house is the one gender-specific activity on this list; it is something every man must do in uganda, though not necessarily before getting married, especially not in the urban setting. the man will, however, need to pay the rent if he has a wife. 5. i do not call this rape because abigail herself never did. 6. for instance, “ebirungi tibyezaara, encwera ezaara ekiryambeba” (good things don’t give birth to things like themselves, a python gives 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0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.06 the bioeconomy and the birth of a “new anthropology” ruben andersson university of oxford https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3337-6437 two photos have stuck with me from my fieldwork on irregular migration and border controls in the euro-african borderlands some ten years ago. one of these, a local newspaper picture of a cute basket of kittens, echoes the discussion in this colloquy about how animal and human movements intersect: the basket, placed on the tarmac of a spanish port, had been removed from a stationed truck because the little feline hearts confused the sensors used to scan the vehicle for the heartbeats of hidden migrants. the other image was of a human foot, clad in nice if dusty black shoes, whose living owner was being pulled out from the bonnet of a car, where similar machinery had detected his clandestine presence. both pictures were taken at the european union’s strangest frontiers: the spanish enclaves of ceuta and melilla in north africa. yet neither image is any longer strange. they form part of a “new normal” in which detecting and exploiting signs of life itself have become fundamental to “fighting migration.” as i argued when i first set out my thoughts on the human bioeconomy (andersson 2018, 2014), migrants may be the canaries in the coal mine of a much wider turn toward intimate exploitations of life itself for economic and political purposes. yet other canaries are out there chirping, too. as discussed in the colloquy’s introduction, the first to note this shift in some depth were scholars working on economies of vitality in biomedicine and genetics (rose 2007; sunder rajan 2006)—a shift only accelerating via the technologies rolled out for the control of covid-19 throughout the world. in other words, privileged biosociality and marginal migrants may be two sides of the same bioeconomy coin, one whose value—a bit like bitcoin—only keeps inflating. consider china’s so-called social credit system, which tallies up citizens’ daily behaviors into a score through incessant surveillance, or its mirror image, the power that global surveillance capitalists now hold over social media users in turning their intimate interactions and emotions into raw material for predictive products generating vast profits (zuboff 2018). at the low-fi end of the bioeconomy spectrum, we find the chancers and predators exploiting life for profit through rudimentary yet brutally sophisticated means—from the extortion of tortured and violently detained migrants and refugees in libya (achtnich 2022a, this issue) to the profiteering off poor citizens in the privatized lower reaches of the u.s. policing and criminal justice system (harvard law review 2015). it is important to disaggregate the rather different ways in which life itself has come to be imbricated in processes of value generation and extraction, as this colloquy has set out to do. marthe achtnich (2022b, this issue) notes, in her introduction, that one starting point for this task is to recognize how bioeconomies of the kind alluded to in my initial examples of border surveillance are predicated not on the optimization of life à la nikolas rose (2007), but rather on its degradation. bioeconomies, in other words, may be wedded to particular necro-economies (mbembe 2019). through juxtaposing a variety of case studies, from the livestock trade across the mediterranean to migration controls to the transnational fertility business, this colloquy has worked toward pluralizing our accounts of economies of life, situating these in their particular histories and contexts. yet in this concluding note, i will suggest that such a plural account—attuned to our ethnographic sensibilities—can be complemented by a more top-down analysis of a bioeconomy in the tentative singular. taken as a heuristic or analytical lens, the bioeconomy may help us to look, momentarily, beyond the bewildering variety and complexity of specific value-generating processes and force us to try and excavate the underlying logics that inform these processes, all the more remarkable because of their diversity (cf. sassen 2014). a bioeconomy, as i see it, operates on two interlocked levels. the bottom, subterranean level is where the actors of the market do not appear in their usual guise: as buyers and sellers, as producers, middlemen, and consumers. rather, in (political and economic) markets where life itself makes for the principal resource, the possessors of that resource are no longer “selling” it—rather, they constitute the terra virgen of primitive accumulation, reduced to purveyors of raw material. more crudely, they—we—are the raw material. meanwhile, on the top level, normal market rules operate, if with some twists: here, the exploiters sell their “products” while frequently (as in surveillance capitalism) enjoying a superordinate position to the buyers in a captive market. this chain of exploitation is perhaps not so abnormal, given the ravages of resource exploitation and its associated exploitation of humans down the centuries, with the only difference being that, now, intimate human vitality buried deep within our personhood—not coal or gems extracted from the soil—is the raw material du jour. the extractive bioeconomies of today, in this take, are but the continuation of capitalist and colonial exploitation by other means. once, nature and the colonies were considered the resource frontiers of capitalism; today, life is taking their place. this shift may prove the swan song of late capitalism, but that argument is for another day. here i would rather like to reflect on this shift in relation to a simple question: where does the power to colonize manifest itself today? i will argue that, given shifting forms of techno-power, knowledge capabilities, and geopolitical alignments, colonization may be resurrected as an analytic beyond the territorial frame of spatial domination, settlement, and exploitation. the analytical lens of colonization may help visibilize escalating extractive and generative processes of exploitation on the granular/human, rather than (just) territorial, level. if the academic discipline of anthropology was the old handmaiden of territorial colonialism, whose aftereffects are still felt in universities, i posit that today a new state-corporate anthropology is coming into existence: a (quasi) “science of the human” situated at the confluence of algorithms of artificial intelligence; advanced mechanisms of finance, risk management and surveillance; and the multipolar geopolitical world emerging amid the western project’s demise. border controls have served as a laboratory for this new anthropology, highlighting a seeming paradox: state attempts to purportedly seal borders have helped catalyze an increasingly borderless bioeconomy. this economy operates principally not through the logic of the border—demarcating, sealing, controlling—but rather through the expansive logic of the frontier. colonization was in large part a project for imagining and extending the frontier for the purpose of conquest and extraction (tsing 2005). the frontier is a zone of expansion, not a line of defense: both old and new colonial projects draw on this expansive logic, even as they, then and now, also mobilize borders for purposes of exploitation and control. to quite some extent, the colonization of life today no longer obeys the territorial and racial markers of its earlier version. put bluntly, almost anyone, anywhere can come to be good raw material for one bioeconomic process or another, as we see in the data extraction from western middle-class social media users, from whole populations subject to expansive covid-19 controls (tréguer 2021), or from citizens subjected to china’s social-credit operations. yet old ghosts also return to haunt this moment. indeed, many of the bioeconomic processes treated in this colloquy—especially those targeting vulnerable, exploitable human life—still draw sustenance from the “coloniality” of power relations surviving territorial colonialism (ndlovu-gatsheni 2013). this is certainly the case with the migration controls targeting racialized others with which this piece started, and which achtnich (2022a, this issue) and hans lucht (2022, this issue) centrally engage. we can look further for evidence of these older patterns of domination, colonial and otherwise: in china, the uighur minority has been brutally targeted through minute surveillance, while in the west, migrant, minority, and lower-class communities stand at its sharpest end. race and class are by no means absent in these economies; quite the opposite. yet these forms of extraction and exploitation are also coming for the well-heeled, the supposedly unmarked, the grand prize of the middle classes. in the bioeconomy, old boundaries are broken down while new ones may be erected in their stead. but let us return to the laboratory of border security and irregular migration to examine some of the more granular processes at work in the bioeconomy. a growing body of studies has shown how new technologies of surveillance have crept into the field of migration control almost by stealth, and with little political debate. the innovation is staggering: ranging from the use of advanced sensoring equipment in ceuta and melilla or at the united states–mexico frontier (andersson 2019; jusionyte and goldstein 2016) to the biometric identification of asylum seekers, refugees, and irregular border-crossers in richer countries and unhcr-run settings alike (cowling 2020; fog olwig et al. 2020); and from the deployment of artificial intelligence and advanced algorithms for producing risk and protection profiles (akhmetova and harris 2021) to the use of satellites and social media for tracking mobile life with the help of surveillance capitalist companies (godin and donà 2020). we can add to this the cruder policing and criminal strategies preying on human suffering and hope as tools for both deterrence (andersson 2018) and financial profiteering (achtnich 2022a, this issue). contrast, finally, the micro-extractions attaching to migrants in captive conditions with the macro-political use of prospective migrants as a bargaining chip in the barter between so-called transit and destination states, as lately seen from libya to the poland-belarus border (greenhill 2010; andersson 2019)—the list is long, and it is growing. in all the cases above, the migrants are no longer the exploitable, vulnerable, disciplined workers who sell their labor at the lowest possible price, as marxist and perhaps foucauldian scholarship would assess the function of bordering and suffering to be. nor are they simply potential gdp contributors of the kind sought in the postwar economization of life compellingly traced by michelle murphy (2017). nor are they, finally, the consumers of smuggling services, housing, or goods. they are all these things at different stages of their mobile trajectories, to be sure, yet throughout the migratory process, that subterranean market of the bioeconomy time and again rears its monstrous head—not to devour migrant labor or consumption, but rather to nibble away at migratory life itself through a range of overlapping logics. treating all these processes within a single bracket of the bioeconomy (along with its alter ego, the necro-economy) works heuristically in that it helps shine a light on the logics of value extraction and generation in contexts where labor and consumption may not be central but subsidiary. it also allows us to glimpse the dense and sprawling institutional and corporate networks now involved in tracking and (de)valuing life on the move. to take one example, in the united states, the former trump administration enrolled the big data company palantir in targeting parents of migrant children as well as racial minorities via its advanced software (franco 2020); in yemen, the same company tracks world food programme aid recipients via biometrics (korkmaz 2021); and in europe, it has been heavily involved in covid-19 tracking of citizens, with highly limited transparency (howden et al. 2021). in these three cases, data is extracted as raw material for national or international authorities, with little meaningful informed consent, before escaping into a data cloud where few controls apply. in yemen, the fear is that this data will end up in the hands of the u.s. defense establishment that is actively targeting supposed insurgents via drone attacks, potentially putting a damper on demand for life-saving aid given the perceived risks involved for recipients. in such globalized data-mining—much as in the surveillance capitalist dreamscape of social media enjoyed by us all—academics are playing catch-up. the new anthropology, with its powers to colonize life in its granularity, is fast outrunning “slow scholarship.” if in the era of high colonialism, the nascent discipline of anthropology was politically valued (albeit intermittently) for its contribution to the colonial project, today the infrastructures of power-knowledge are shifting inexorably toward the state-corporate surveillance nexus at play in settings as diverse as european or u.s. migration management, china’s social-credit scoring, or global covid-19 controls. on a hopeful note, however, here lurks an opportunity for further research that engages reflexively with our scholarly positioning within bioeconomies of value extraction and within shifting terrains of power-knowledge. in this context, perhaps we no longer need canaries in the coal mine: rather, as everybody’s lives become raw material for a new form of colonization, the coal mine is us. yet, to return to migration, the multifanged and sophisticated exploitation of life hardly escapes migrants’ own analysis. in a remarkable variety of settings, those targeted most acutely by these processes describe themselves as reduced to “goods,” as achtnich’s (2022a, this issue) interlocutors put it; or as being the source of a “business” or even “slave trade,” as i heard on the routes to spain; or even—to return to the hungry monster—as constituting the centerpiece of a feast where others “eat” from migration (andersson 2018; lucht 2022, this issue). attending to the self-analyses of those at the coalface of today’s growing bioeconomies may help researchers join the fight against encroachments across what may constitute the final frontier of capitalism: embodied human life and the inner sanctum of human vitality. the contributors to this colloquy, in variously disassembling the bioeconomy and thinking laterally across economies of life and death in contexts of mobility, have taken important steps in this analytical (and political) task. abstract this concluding reflection of the colloquy considers how the bioeconomy, as an analytical lens, may cast light on processes of colonization beyond the territorial frame of spatial domination, settlement, and exploitation. examining the power to colonize with special reference to the politics and policing of migration, it shows how certain migrants have come to serve as a laboratory in the quest to extract value from life itself—which itself links back to historical colonizations. what we may call a “new anthropology” is taking shape at the confluence of algorithms of artificial intelligence, mechanisms of finance and surveillance, and the multipolar geopolitical world emerging amid the western project’s demise. understanding the new frontiers of value extraction of this piecemeal yet powerful (quasi) science of humankind constitutes a crucial analytical task for us “old anthropologists,” and the bioeconomy may serve as a tool in this endeavor. [bioeconomy; migration; mobility; colonization; surveillance] references achtnich, marthe 2022a “bioeconomy and migrants’ lives in libya.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 9–15. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.02 2022b “mobile livings: on the bioeconomies of mobility.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.01 akhmetova, roxana, and erin harris 2021 “politics of technology: the use of ai by u.s. and canadian immigration agencies and their impacts on human rights.” in digital identity, virtual borders, and social media: a panacea for migration governance, edited by emre eren korkmaz, 52–72. northampton, uk: edward elgar. andersson, ruben 2014 “a global front: thoughts on enforcement at the rich world’s borders.” online appendix to illegality, inc: clandestine migration and the business of bordering europe, by ruben andersson. oakland: university of california press. https://content.ucpress.edu/ancillaries/12779/andersson_appendix.pdf 2018 “profits and predation in the human bioeconomy.” public culture 30, no. 3: 413–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6912115 2019 no go world: how fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics. oakland: university of california press. cowling, faith 2020 “seeing like a humanitarian: legibility in lebanon’s emergency response.” phd dissertation: university of oxford. fog olwig, karen, kristina grünenberg, perle møhl, and anja simonsen 2020 the biometric border world: technology, bodies, and identities on the move. abingdon: routledge. franco, marisa 2020 “palantir filed to go public. the firm’s unethical technology should horrify us.” the guardian, 4 september. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/04/palantir-ipo-ice-immigration-trump-administration godin, marie, and giorgia dona 2020 “rethinking transit zones: migrant trajectories and transnational networks in techno-borderscapes.” journal of ethnic and migration 47, no. 14: 3276–92. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2020.1804193 greenhill, kelly m. 2010 weapons of mass migration: forced displacement, coercion, and foreign policy. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. harvard law review 2015 “policing and profit.” developments in law editorial, harvard law review 128: 1723–1746. howden, daniel, apostolis fotiadis, ludek stavinoha, and ben holst 2021 “seeing stones: pandemic reveals palantir’s troubling reach in europe.” guardian, april 2. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/02/seeing-stones-pandemic-reveals-palantirs-troubling-reach-in-europe jusionyte, ieva, and daniel goldstein 2016 “in/visible-in/secure: optics of regulation and control.” focaal 75: 3–13. https://doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2016.750101 korkmaz, emre eren, ed. 2021 digital identity, virtual borders and social media: a panacea for migration governance?northampton, uk: edward elgar. lucht, hans 2022 “eu border control in niger: from migrants to gold, drugs, and rare animals.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 16–22. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.03 mbembe, achille 2019 necropolitics. translated by steven corcoran. durham, n.c.: duke university press. murphy, michelle 2017 the economization of life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ndlovu-gatsheni, sabelo j. 2013 “the entrapment of africa within the global colonial matrices of power: eurocentrism, coloniality, and deimperialization in the twenty-first century.” journal of developing societies 29, no. 4: 331–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/0169796x13503195 rose, nikolas 2007 politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, n. j.: princeton university press. sassen, saskia 2014 expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy. cambridge, mass.: belknap press. sunder rajan, kaushik 2006 biocapital: the constitution of postgenomic life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tréguer, félix 2021 “the virus of surveillance: how the covid-19 pandemic is fuelling technologies of control.” political anthropological research on international social sciences (pariss) 2: 16-46. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2005 friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. zuboff, shoshana 2018 the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york: public affairs. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 37-44, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.06 amazonian house-ing: a visual anthropology essay cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 580-588, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.06 amazonian house-ing: a visual anthropology essay thiago da costa oliveira ethnologisches museum berlin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4546-8806 carlos fausto ppgas-museu nacional, universidade federal do rio de janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0617-6643 this photo-essay depicts the clash between two modes of dwelling in middle-sized cities in amazonia: one characteristic of urban and peri-urban areas, and another imposed by resettlements linked to large-scale development projects. the ruins engendered through this mis-encounter reveal the home as an ongoing terrain of contestation, amalgamation, and continuous amazonization (as federico neiburg [2021, this issue] also notes). heralded by technocrats and politicians as a milestone for the development of one of brazil’s last frontiers, the belo monte hydroelectric plant started to be built in 2011 in the state of pará, amid uproar from ecologists and indigenous peoples. the third-largest dam in the world entered into operation five years later, flooding some fifty square miles of forest and dramatically altering the seasonal cycle of the xingu river. the upriver city of altamira, where we have been carrying out ethnographic research and artistic collaborations, was directly affected by the flooding and subjected to a massive urban reorganization.1 according to official data, about 8,000 families were removed from their homes, plus another 2,500 families in the rural areas affected by the dam (azevedo chaves, monzoni, and artuso 2019). given the intergenerational nature of households and that several nuclear families often share the same domicile, the exact number of people resettled remains unknown. figure 1. floodable area in the urban zone of altamira, pará, 2015. photo by carlos fausto. until the 1970s, altamira remained the hub of a network formed by families inhabiting small holdings along the xingu river, making a living out of fishing, planting, and extractivist activities. with the construction of the trans-amazonian highway at the height of the country’s military dictatorship and then the belo monte dam forty years later, the municipality’s population boomed from 15,000 to 115,000 inhabitants. urbanization in middle-sized cities in amazonia has its own characteristics and does not imply a complete rupture with previous forms of living (browder and godfrey 1997; castro 2009). amazonian houses always have a garden, linked to subsistence and sociability, which may be complemented by small rural units (winklerprins and souza 2005; kawa 2020). they are also full of all kinds of useful and (temporarily) unuseful objects, collected according to a logic of bricolage (lévi-strauss 1962). the collecting of industrialized objects constitutes both a response to economic vulnerability and a way of making memories with them. through plants and objects, people weave a meshwork that creates what a house stands for in amazonia (a house-ing not unlike the mutual ordering of people and objects as described by ryo morimoto [2021, this issue]). figure 2. garden with cocoa tree in a peri-urban zone in altamira, pará. photo by thiago da costa oliveira. figure 3. house interior near the port of altamira, pará. photo by carlos fausto. the construction of the belo monte dam unraveled the many meshes that constituted the altamira housing system. this became particularly visible in the annually floodable neighborhoods, where people disassembled their own houses plank by plank, nail by nail, under the scalding sun. undertaken with relatives and neighbors, this dismantling made visible the networks of sociability integral to the home. these peoples would be rehoused in different parts of the city, dispersed from each other, and distant from the main river and its tributaries. some told us they would, from then on, “live amid strangers.” there is nothing more different from the century-long amazonian ways of life than the new urban landscape of the resettlement areas. lines of standardized houses, wide sidewalks with no fences, and rectangular geometries all evoke a condominium in the suburbs of a big city. at the same time, precarious sanitation and access to water persisted as problems. the prefabricated walls made it impossible to tie up hammocks—a small “detail” that clashed with a defining feature of living well in amazonia. figure 4. unbricking an entire house on perimetral avenue, altamira, pará, 2015. photo by carlos fausto. figure 5. unnailing houses at baixão das olarias, altamira, pará. photo by carlos fausto. figure 6. general view of the resettlement neighborhood of jatobá, altamira, pará, 2015. photo by thiago da costa oliveira. figure 7. leveling the front yard in jatobá, altamira, pará, 2016. photo by thiago da costa oliveira. figure 8. potted plants in the front yard of a house, jatobá, altamira, pará, 2016. photo by thiago da costa oliveira. figure 9. planting tomatoes in the backyard of a house, jatobá, altamira, pará, 2016. photo by thiago da costa oliveira. to cope with these deficiencies, the relocated began to transform the houses using their own repertoires. they fenced backyards, planted new gardens, made chicken coops. using the remains of the earlier home people had brought along, they also extended the houses to accommodate friends and relatives. at the front of the house, some residents opened small bars, grocery stores, hair salons, and tattoo studios, in a pattern common to the region. using heteroclite materials and their garden-bricolage knowledge, residents thus began to re-amazonize their houses and everyday lives. these enlivening techniques gradually subverted the mass-engineering project, revealing an aesthetics of house-ing beyond the assumptions of fixity imagined by those responsible for the reurbanization plan. this aesthetics suggests that the fine balance between environmental specificity and cultural creativity that characterizes the amazonian human experience still operates far from the forest, knitting its meshes into urban settings. figure 10. the interior of a house in the resettlement neighborhood of laranjal, altamira, pará. photo by thiago da costa oliveira. abstract this visual essay documents the house-ing practices of amazonian river dwellers and urban and peri-urban residents in the face of large-scale development projects. in altamira (pará, brazil), the construction of the third-largest hydroelectric dam in the world, the belo monte plant, has led to the flooding of housing areas along rivers and the displacement of residents into collective urban resettlements. although the complexities of people’s living did not enter the engineers’ calculations or the public policy agenda, the residents improvised construction materials and aesthetic repertoires to preserve the relationships that constituted their local ecologies. our visual ethnography aims to re-center the situated purview of the resettled, re-visibilizing the house as an index of ineffaceable livelihood and as an ongoing terrain of contestation and continuous amazonization. [infrastructure and displacement; peri-urban resettlement; amazonian home; ruins and bricolage; ecology and aesthetics; visual anthropology; belo monte dam] resumo este ensaio visual documenta as práticas de house-ing de ribeirinhos e habitantes urbanos e peri-urbanos da amazônia, confrontados com grandes projetos de desenvolvimento. em altamira (pará, brasil), a construção da terceira maior hidroelétrica do mundo, a usina de belo monte, conduziu ao alagamento de áreas habitacionais e ao deslocamento de seus moradores para novos assentamentos urbanos coletivos. embora as especificidades do mundo vivido dessas pessoas não tenham entrado no cálculo dos engenheiros, nem na agenda das políticas públicas, os moradores improvisaram materiais construtivos e repertórios estéticos para preservar as relações que constituíam suas ecologias locais. esta etnografia visual busca restituir a perspectiva situada dos deslocados, dando visibilidade à casa como índice dos modos de viver e como um terreno aberto de contestação e de contínua amazonização. [infraestrutura e deslocamento; reassentamento peri-urbano; casa amazônica; ruínas e bricolagens; ecologia e estética; antropologia visual; usina de belo monte] resumen este ensayo visual documenta las prácticas de house-ing de los ribereños y de los habitantes urbanos y periurbanos de amazonia que se enfrentan a grandes proyectos de desarrollo. en altamira (pará, brasil), la construcción de la tercera mayor represa hidroeléctrica del mundo, la usina belo monte, provocó la inundación de áreas de vivienda y el desplazamiento de sus habitantes a nuevos asentamientos urbanos colectivos. aunque las especificidades del mundo vivido por estas personas no entraron en los cálculos de los ingenieros ni en la agenda de las políticas públicas, la gente improvisa materiales de construcción y repertorios estéticos para preservar las relaciones que constituían sus ecologías locales. esta etnografía visual pretende recuperar la perspectiva de los desplazados, dando visibilidad a la casa como índice de formas de vida y como terreno abierto a la permanente contestación y amazonización. [infraestructura y desplazamiento; reasentamiento periurbano; casa amazónica; ruinas y bricolagem; ecología y estética; antropología visual; usina belo monte] notes acknowledgments this research was developed with the support of the programa nacional de pós-doutorado (pnpd) from the coordenação de aperfeiçoamento de pessoal de nível superior–brazil (capes) and the research fellowship program capes/humboldt, supported by capes and the alexander von humboldt foundation/germany. it also received support from the fundação de amparo à pesquisa do rio de janeiro (faperj) and the conselho nacional de desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico (cnpq). we also thank the several residents of altamira who opened their homes and shared their stories with us, especially maria raimunda dos santos lima, rosa pessoa, francisca josélia de sousa amorim, and edilson rodrigues de sousa. 1. thiago da costa oliveira undertook photographic and filming projects in altamira from 2015 to 2019. he also collaborated with the asurini and the arara peoples in the region. carlos fausto conducted fieldwork among the apyterewa-parakanã people from 1988 to 1996, returning to the region in 2014 and 2015 to train them in video production. the essay’s photographs were taken in 2015, 2016, and 2019. references azevedo chaves, kena, mario monzoni, and letícia f. artuso 2019 “uhe belo monte: reassentamentos rurais, participação social e direito à moradia adequada.” revista direito gv 15, no. 2: 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1590/2317-6172201913. browder, john o., and brian j. godfrey 1997 rainforest cities: urbanization, development, and globalization of the brazilian amazon. new york: columbia university press. castro, edna, ed. 2009 cidades na floresta. são paulo: annablume. kawa, nicholas c. 2020 “plants that keep the bad vibes away: boundary maintenance and phyto-communicability in urban amazonia.” ethnos 86, no. 2: 228–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2020.1765830. lévi-strauss, claude 1962 la pensée sauvage. paris: plon. morimoto, ryo 2021 “home otherwise: living archives and half-life politics in post-fallout coastal fukushima.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 573–79. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.05. neiburg, federico 2021 “multiscale home: shifting landscapes and living-in-movement in haiti.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 548–55. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.02. winklerprins, antoinette m.g.a., and perpetuo s. de souza 2005 “surviving the city: urban home gardens and the economy of affection in the brazilian amazon.” journal of latin american geography 4, no. 1: 107–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25765091. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 580-588, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.06 necropolitics versus biopolitics: spatialization, white privilege, and visibility during a pandemic cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 360-367, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.03 necropolitics versus biopolitics: spatialization, white privilege, and visibility during a pandemic carolyn m. rouse princeton university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2343-3306 juxtaposed photos, edited by bricoleurs for commentary, capture two realities. the tiktok posts below show white americans, protesting against lockdown orders put in place to slow the spread of covid-19 in the spring of 2020. their signs read, “don’t cancel my golf season” and “we demand haircuts.” these statements of repression contrast with black protestors carrying signs pleading, “please don’t kill us” and “i can’t breathe.” the juxtapositions reveal how even proximate experiences with state power are akin to a palimpsest, with stories by white americans typically effacing those of black americans. placing the experiences side by side, the images reveal ethical and experiential truths otherwise ignored (levi-strauss 1974). by unveiling the traces of black life, the photo collages reveal what has troubled me for a long time with contemporary anthropological critiques of modern states—the overuse of the concept of biopolitics to locate blame within state institutions for just about all forms of human suffering and repression. as responses to the coronavirus have shown, ethical imperatives for how to think and behave are often generated in proximate social spaces (strong, trnka, and wynn 2021, this issue). theorizing proximity as an ethical problem opens up for consideration the production and reproduction of cultural racism by proximate nonstate actors. figure 1. instagram posts by dominick thompson @domzthompson juxtaposing two news images. michel foucault’s thesis on biopolitics describes the right of the state to decide who lives and who dies, focusing in particular on the regulatory controls and interventions used by states to discipline the body. in the history of sexuality, volume i, foucault (1984, 261) states, “one might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” continuing, he writes that during the seventeenth century in europe: the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life. during the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines—universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birth rate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques of achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “bio-power.” (foucault 1984, 262) while useful analytics, biopower and biopolitics are regularly employed by anthropologists as if a direct line between state biopolitical projects and individual experience and behavior were obvious and uncomplicated. in this formulaic use of foucault, even humanitarian and social aid projects are regularly cast as dehumanizing biopolitics projects, or examples of giorgio agamben’s (1998) bare life. rather than cite any particular text, i encourage the reader to go to the anthrosource search engine and type in “biopolitics” or “biopower” to see how foucault’s theories are stretched to turn pragmatic choices into pernicious biopolitics.1 in this facile use of foucault’s important analysis of the modern state, anthropologists often mischaracterize the chosen beneficiaries of state power and surveillance as its victims. for example, to varying degrees most white americans benefit from biopolitics. nowhere was this clearer than in three instances in the united states during the first few months of the covid-19 pandemic. the first instance was the violent arrests of blacks and latinx in new york city for not social distancing (southall 2020). out of forty arrests in the city, only one person was white. in a tweet, acts of violent racist policing were contrasted with free face mask distribution by the police to mostly white new yorkers sitting in a park. l. l. wynn (2021, this issue) describes similar racialized covid-19 policing in australia in this colloquy collection. the second instance was protests in early may by whites, sometimes heavily armed, challenging the michigan governor’s lockdown order enacted to curb transmission and save lives. the third instance was protests in late may by blacks, and later multiracial groups, around the continued treatment by police of black bodies as expendable. put starkly, whites in may protested against state biopolitics; blacks protested against state necropolitics (mbembe 2003). in theorizing necropolitics, achille mbembe (2003) describes how spatialization and colonialization operate together to rule through terror. rather than trace terror to the biopolitical state, mbembe describes how individual affect and desire motivate necropolitical acts that blur the boundary between the state and individuals. he uses the example of martyrs and suicide bombers, who kill themselves and others based not on the will of a sovereign but what mbembe (2003, 40) calls “the repressed topographies of cruelty.” necropolitics offers a political rationalization for killing available to all, even those who rightly or wrongly feel oppressed. for four years, i have been conducting fieldwork in a low-income, white rural county in california. my interlocutors are middle-aged white men and women who grew up between the 1950s and 1970s in solidly middleand upper middle-class households in california’s bay area. they fell down the economic ladder due to learning disabilities, drug issues, bad luck, or some combination of the three. they call themselves economic refugees because they had to give up their lives in the bay area to live in a place with a low cost of living. their parents, in contrast, were college graduates with high-status jobs in banking, business, and higher education. unlike their children, they were able to hold onto these jobs, even if they, too, suffered from drug issues and learning disabilities. structural racism and sexism in the mid-twentieth century meant that their fathers had almost no job competition from people of color, immigrants, or women. while my interlocutors are classified as “poor” based on their incomes, many inherited family wealth, allowing them to purchase their bungalows or double-wide trailers and to live comfortably with the help of state health insurance, food assistance, and, for some, housing assistance. a few of my interlocutors even used their inheritance to buy rental property that afforded them supplemental income if they were willing to put up with the headache of renting to poor folks, some of whom also suffered from unstable employment and/or drug addiction. one of my interlocutors, himself an alcoholic living with his meth-addicted girlfriend, described the not infrequent arrests of his tenants and property destruction that cost him almost as much as he made in rental income. despite having benefited their entire lives from american biopolitics, in the summer of 2016 my interlocutors explained that they were voting for trump because they felt aggrieved by the black and brown people who they claimed took their jobs; jobs they also told me they did not want. while most worked menial jobs, their incomes were barely enough to keep their bellies and gas tanks full, which made their inherited wealth critical to avoiding eviction. some even made money off of renters who lived with them in their trailers or bungalows. my interlocutors also rejected president obama’s affordable care act (aca) health insurance even though, in some cases, the aca had saved their lives. they voted for policies to dismantle the social safety nets as an act of defiance against biopolitics, or as they described it, “the nanny state.” they were protesting biopolitics in ways akin to whites protesting covid-19 lockdowns. to describe the black american experience, mbembe’s thesis on necropolitics proves more useful than biopolitics. blacks have been at the receiving end of necropolitics generated by white slave owners, segregationists, business owners, clergy, and doctors. whites have acted independently of the state to make survival for blacks difficult, and the u.s. government has often been forced to assert the legal rights of black americans against the desires of white segregationists and white supremacists. some might call a hospital’s refusal to treat black patients, or a bank’s refusal to offer loans to black customers, “state-sponsored” racism or violence. but it is not always clear if the violence is being led by the state or by people who genuinely believe in black inferiority. this ready-made use of biopolitics as a critique of the state results from the lack of attention to what has been described as a veil: a veil that shapes black people’s experiences in ways that white americans rarely understand (du bois 1989). blacks on one side of the veil work especially hard to prove their humanity to the shopkeepers, police, educators, and medical professionals on the other side. but even proving one’s right to occupy space can be difficult, as we saw in the case of the teenager trayvon martin, killed by a stranger who felt martin must not belong in a middle-class subdivision. for many whites, blacks remain frightening, undifferentiated, veiled silhouettes that threaten order. whites, who are considered rational and worthy of empathy, live on the side of the veil where the state tries to foster life; blacks live on the other side, where the state disallows life. ignoring this veil allows scholars to critique everything from public health to humanitarianism without attending to whether states or institutions are motivated, in a particular instance, to protect an interlocutor’s life or treat it as expendable. this difference is critical. my argument has been that black americans would love to be subjects of biopolitical regulatory controls if they were to receive quality health care, education, and legal and social rights equal to those of white citizens. to be treated as a rational contributor to modern state projects means to be treated as human. new zealand’s response to covid-19 provides a case in point (trnka 2020). biopolitics and biopower can be pernicious when, for example, the state claims that eugenics, unethical medical experimentation, or deregulating polluting chemicals in the name of job creation fosters quality of life. biopolitics continues to be a critically important analytic, particularly with respect to how the state disciplines what it perceives as unruly bodies and behaviors (see strong 2021, this issue; levine and manderson 2021, this issue). i do not celebrate biopolitics as good governance, i just reject unreflexive, antibiopolitical theorizing. cheekily, i might say that i am anti-antibiopolitics (with respect to clifford geertz [1984]). bodies are subjugated in the process of acculturation, which means that biopolitics is as essential to culture as sex, labor, and food. this is why attributing suffering to biopolitics only takes us so far analytically. more important is tracing how and why people participate in their own subjugation for good (think evidence-based medicine) or bad (think war on drugs). biopolitical analyses rarely help us understand why certain groups are targeted for racialization and exclusion, while others are not. my colleagues have treated my pragmatic appreciation for biopolitics and biopower as an oddity. but as a scholar of race and institutions, i am constantly reminded that biopolitical states fostering life remain necessary for black survival and flourishing. in a libertarian state, or james c. scott’s (2010) theorized anarchic state, black americans would find themselves at the whim of powerful individuals who would likely see them as unworthy of health, education, or improved quality of life. and there are historical examples—from slavery to convict leasing to mass incarceration. blacks live on the side of the veil where one’s life is expendable unless one fights to be recognized as human. this veil became especially clear on january 6, 2021, when a mob of mostly white americans seditiously attacked the u.s. capitol building to stop the certification of president biden’s electoral college win. media commentators noted how, compared to the mass arrests and police violence inflicted on black lives matter protestors, the white terrorists were essentially allowed to rampage the capitol unimpeded. white privilege on full display. the ethical calculus made by the security spoke volumes about how state biopolitical projects differ radically for black versus white bodies. conclusion experience tells us that proximity to others comes with forms of cultural belonging, shared ethical beliefs, and moral practices. what covid-19 has demonstrated is that despite proximity, black americans remain on the other side of a veil most white americans have trouble discerning. the virus has exposed how people, living side by side, can have radically different experiences with state and institutional power. in the united states, the killings of unarmed blacks by police, racial health inequities reflected in covid-19 death rates, and the impunity granted violent white nationalists have made visible these fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that treats black bodies as expendable, useful only for labor. this inequity is clearly exemplified in the continued mass incarceration of black “addicts,” compared with the medicalized treatment of whites identified as having a “drug-use disorder.” how are these same whites also victims of biopolitics and biopower? and through their enforcement of social codes at the level of the everyday, white beneficiaries are also ersatz, not actual, state actors, policing the schools, public spaces, neighborhoods, and businesses to make sure blacks are not receiving more than those with power and wealth feel they should. covid-19 not only unveiled the hidden text of black life but also revealed something about our discipline. importantly, how have anthropologists come to theorize the state so narrowly from the vantage of people with privilege who may feel disadvantaged by state structures that actually protect their health, wealth, education, physical safety, and legal status? where did such a unidirectional understanding of state power come from? anthropologists have come a long way in terms of decolonizing our discipline, but we still have room to grow in terms of theorizing the experiences of marginalized others. we need to develop theoretical tools to understand the complexities of power and authority and to not confuse cultural proximity with common experience. abstract anthropologists have used michel foucault’s thesis on biopolitics to critique modern institutions. yet while useful, biopolitics is often misapplied. the arrests, killings of unarmed blacks by police, covid-19 racial health inequities, and the january 6 white nationalist act of sedition made visible fault lines between a biopolitical system set up to care for whites and a necropolitical system that treats black bodies as expendable. by critiquing the facile overuse of biopolitics and biopower, this article also speaks to what covid-19 uncovered within the academy. [biopolitics; necropolitics; pandemic; protests; race; united states] notes 1. see https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/. references agamben, giorgio 1998 homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. translated by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. clifford, geertz 1984 “anti anti-relativism.” american anthropologist 86, no. 2: 263–78. https://www.jstor.org/stable/678960. du bois, w.e.b. 1989 the souls of black folk. new york: bantam classics. foucault, michel 1984 the foucault reader. edited by paul rabinow. new york: pantheon books. levi-strauss, claude 1974 the savage mind. 2nd ed. london: weidenfeld and nicholson. levine, susan, and lenore manderson 2021 “proxemics, covid-19, and the ethics of care in south africa.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 391–99. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.06. mbembe, achille 2003 “necropolitics.” translated by libby meintjes. public culture 15, no. 1: 11–40. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/39984. scott, james c. 2010 the art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland south asia. new haven, conn.: yale university press. southall, ashley 2020 “scrutiny of social-distance policing as 35 of 40 arrested are black.” new york times, may 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/nyregion/nypd-social-distancing-race-coronavirus.html. strong, thomas 2021 “the end of intimacy.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 381–90. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.05. strong, thomas, susanna trnka, and l. l. wynn 2021 “‘l’enfer, c’est les autres’: proximity as an ethical problem during covid-19.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 341–49. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.01. trnka, susanna 2020 “rethinking states of emergency.” forum on covid-19 pandemic, social anthropology 28, no. 2: 367–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12812. wynn, l. l. 2021 “the pandemic imaginerie: infectious bodies and military-police theater in australia.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 350–59. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.02. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 360-367, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.03 bumpy roads, dusty air: gadbad and the sensate ecologies of driving work in contemporary mumbai cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 60-86, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.04 bumpy roads, dusty air: gadbad and the sensate ecologies of driving work in contemporary mumbai tarini bedi university of illinois at chicago https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5876-5928 “this is the everyday-everyday mess [roz-roz ka gadbad] the summer and rain make to the traffic and roads,” sighs mumbai taxi driver rashid as we bump to a halt at a busy city junction.1 rashid is a veteran mumbai taxi wallah, from a family of hereditary, muslim taxi drivers and mechanics known as chillia. his family has been driving in mumbai’s gadbad for more than ninety years, so for rashid, his sons, and nephews, the chronic navigation of gadbad marks an intergenerational experience of urban work. rashid waves at the driver pulled up next to him, who nods back acknowledging their shared entanglement in gadbad. rashid cocks his head to look down the throng of cars in front of him, three of which are immobile, stalled, and steaming as their drivers pour drinking water into the dark reservoir under the open bonnets to cool off wheezing radiators. several taxi drivers scramble out of their cars to help with the steamy examination and offer scalding water to quench the smoldering machinery. their calloused, cracked feet, nestled in scuffed plastic sandals, stumble as they trade the spring of the clutch and break for the hard resistance of the road. an ensemble of arms that usually spend their days bent along leathery steering wheels extend with rapid relief into the blazing morning to wave the most impatient cars through the gadbad. these arms flaunt scratches, scabs, urban dust, peeling sunburn, perspiration, and city grime. these embodied marks of gadbad’s unavoidable ecological onslaught,2 and drivers’ ethical orientations to social and sensory survival in an inevitably toxic future, prove central here. as i will illustrate, on the roads these ethical orientations emerge through drivers’ labor amid the sensory and the ecological city. i call these tensions between the labor of the senses and the ecologies of the city sensate ecologies. my conceptualization of sensate ecologies takes ecological navigation as a particular kind of skill and expertise that orients to social and ecological relations rather than just to the object of work itself.3 driving work, like many forms of labor, is both sensory and ecological (blanchette 2020; nair 2021; parreñas 2018). however, it is also work tied closely to the car, itself an object of ecological degradation, and part of a global industry in flux and gadbad of its own (del nido 2021). in hereditary driving work the lines between generations of perpetrators of ecological harm and those who face the harm have blurred. for drivers like rashid, this is why forbearance in the face of ecological and infrastructural harm and gadbad develops as labor expertise rather than as resistance or environmental protest. sensory knowledge and expertise therefore cannot be dismissed (as is common) as mere survivalism, nor theorized as “resistance” or “resilience” in the face of ecological destruction. instead, understanding drivers’ lives through ecologies such as smog, air, road debris, heat, and urban foliage—which they have a place in creating—illustrates how working people sensorially work with and in the world around them rather than against it. what i describe here as chillia drivers’ sensate ecological relations with a difficult city—a condition of gadbad usually considered ecologically and infrastructurally unsustainable—calls into question many assumptions about ecological damage and precarious urban life. chillia drivers rarely deny environmental and infrastructural onslaughts that surround driving work or the physiological debilitation that decades of driving work wreaks on their bodies. yet they also refuse the easy narratives of damage, crisis, unsustainability, epochal disaster, and labor precarity that usually accompany discussions about the environment and working-class labor in the global south.4 eve tuck (2009) highlights this when she calls for suspending damage as a stand against the dominant scholarly appetite for damage that motivates research on indigenous communities.5 arguably, a corresponding, if not analogous approach to damage and violence also commonly enters scholarly approaches to muslim and working-class life in contemporary india.6 yet tuck argues that no matter how disenfranchised people are, they are not depleted, ruined, and helpless, and they do not wish to be seen that way. tuck calls instead for other forms of critique that challenge the burdens of damage that disenfranchised communities carry (see murphy 2017). as max liboiron (2021) and michelle murphy (2017) argue in the context of polluted land and water, suspending damage constitutes a critical, decolonizing position. when people refuse narratives of damage and insist on alternative ethical positions, they say something important about their desires and their capacities to shape their lives. we need to listen, and once we suspend our appetite for damage, we can attend to ethical positions that really matter to our interlocutors. murphy (2017) refers to this possibility as “alterlife.” alterlife does not deny the toxicity of existing formations—or in the case of chillia drivers, relations of urban inequality that underlie the onslaught of gadbad—but rather focuses on the ethical, sensorial, and labor practices that encompass all the social and ecological relations that people are in, including the toxic ones.7 for example, even if we agree that cars are polluting, that pollution is harmful, that a lifetime of driving work takes a serious toll on bodies, as well as taking place in difficult living and political conditions, polluted ecologies can and do foster “good relations” (liboiron 2021).8 for chillia drivers, these ecological onslaughts and gadbad are what connect them to one another and to their city. gadbad and multisensory labor gadbad is a term that spans several south asian languages, but is not easily translated, not least because it constitutes an emergent social category that depends on one’s location. it can mean muddle, mess, confusion, disorder, or disquiet; for drivers, it can also mean ecological and infrastructural breakdown. yet gadbad is only possible or knowable when you are in it with other people or when you sense the disquiet with others. as sara ahmed (2006, 7–9) reminds us, as we orient ourselves to the world, we only know which way to turn once we know where we are. for drivers, gadbad is not a singular event but a chronic way of encountering and sensing the city together—what rashid refers to as roz-roz, or everyday-everyday. for rashid, gadbad is the pervasive ecological and infrastructural chaos that he experiences as a man finding his way through mumbai’s roads. however, the familiarity of the morning’s collective chaos and nods and waves of solidarity suggest that rashid’s experience is not confined to an individual or subjective one. instead, it is mediated through multisensory and shared understandings among men who drive for a living on mumbai’s roads. undoubtedly, ecological effects have some universal dimensions, but the sensate orientations required to labor in a city’s ecology, to navigate gadbad, have situated social logics. the sensory anthropologist david howes (2022) rightly insists that we approach each society on its own sensory terms (classen 1993). driving is all about gadbad, and mediating gadbad requires various kinds of labor, not least, as chillia drivers show us, a labor of the senses. timothy choy’s (2011) invitation to think of how ecology functions as a gathering of several senses proves useful here. the taxi-driving profession consists of the literal labors of driving, clutch, and steering, coupled with the more nebulous labor of the senses. working and living on and in the roads, bridges, dust, sludge, grime, horns, and road debris necessitates significant sensory and social labor.9 as we see in the tangle that began this essay, living in gadbad means to live in a multisensory world shared by others who live and work with you. hereditary taxi driving is a profession that animates relations between the senses, and between the senses and their public, social, and ecological worlds.10 it forces a departure from centering the individual ecological experience or a single sense as the subject of social and labor theory and asks to join the recent discussions that connect privatized understandings of embodied and phenomenological experience and its multisensory, socially mediated aspects (cekaite and goodwin 2021; howes 2003; desjarlais 2003).11 through this focus on sensate ecologies i rearticulate categories of fixity in both labor and urban theory. i move the discussion of the urban away from spaces, scales, class, labor, precarity, and ecological damage to focus instead on the urban labor experience of ecological onslaught, orientation, anticipation, movement, and collective sensing. clearly roz-roz ka gadbad could be just another traffic jam on a very hot day because we have come to expect and complain about both heat and jams in cities like mumbai. however, for taxi drivers like rashid, the mess of the weather, the heat, the howls, the waves, and the jams—gadbad—is where and how he and others like him live, work, and perceive (liboiron 2021). indeed, rashid’s acceptance and skilled navigation of gadbad marks how driving labor orients itself to work, and how other labor like cleaning, repair, detours, and resting make a collective, sensory, working life.12 in other words, gadbad and what to do in it seems collectively familiar, and orients drivers to something akin to what ahmed (2006, 7) calls a home. for ahmed, to be oriented is not simply to find one’s way; it also indicates how one’s body comes to feel at home with others. home emerges as a social rather than a purely spatial or phenomenological realm. for drivers it is how they to live in and with the world rather than against it. not least, for the rest of us, it illuminates a much wider range of active social possibilities in the contemporary world—perhaps we all live and will live in gadbad. but how we make a home there is the significant question.13 undoubtedly, the experience of traffic tangles is not unique to mumbai; nor are the ecological travails of urban workers. in empirical terms, perhaps gadbad is everywhere and all labor encounters the debilitations of gadbad. something about rashid’s sensorial orientation to gadbad and recognition of its sociality suggests that it is more than a temporally constrained event of sitting in traffic jams on a busy morning. instead, for those who spend most of their days driving, gadbad is chronic. it is both a place to be in and an orientation to urban life and work—it has no clear boundaries of beginning or end. as rashid describes it, gadbad is not simply a local description for what drivers see in front of them, but rather a social category that captures the multisensory aspects of urban work on roads. it creates socialities and even sensory pleasures where they did not exist before.14 gadbad also departs from the common discussions about roads and driving in western contexts—such as those concerning rush hour, traffic jams, infrastructural breakdown, or poor road and transportation planning—and from their accompanying orientations toward destination, speed, and efficiency. none of these debates fully apprehend gadbad. as i take this situation of gadbad as an invitation to understand the sensorially mediated experience of driving labor, two points matter. first, recent scholarship on urban ecologies argues that ecologies are not stable or bounded matter. instead, they defy compartmentalization into strictly ecological, “natural,” or infrastructural domains (rademacher and sivaramakrishnan 2013) and repeatedly spill into the social. relatedly, multisensory anthropology understands the senses as made and malleable through life and living, rather than given and contained in individual bodies or subjects. i especially focus on how this collective orientation of driving labor to its ecological and sensorial relations—sensate ecologies—comes to feel like home through several aspects of driving work (driving, repair, cleaning, resting, and even prayer). through fieldwork with hereditary taxi drivers, i show how drivers work with and in this ecological world. i analytically decouple ecological critiques of destruction, harm, and unsustainability wrought by cars and driving from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. when we understand urban ecological relations with those who work and live in sensate ecologies—in bumpy roads, dusty air, and gadbad—rather than through environmental and ecological science, we see that even bad ecological conditions can produce coexistence and sustainable relations. for chillia, driving is social, sensate work rather than just travel and transport. proximity to ecologies such as dust, air, and noise prove threatening in the embodied sense; they debilitate and damage bodies. yet they also expand and sustain the capacity to continue to work in a family trade and to exercise collective ethical norms that promise dignity and forbearance—what chillia drivers call dhairya (patience). therefore, while i began here with an immersion in gadbad, which is both an ecological orientation (often an ecological nightmare) and a social/sensate one, i proceed to examine the implications of ethical and labor orientations such as dhairya toward this gadbad. i then move into the situated ecologies of driving work and broader urban life to illustrate the possibilities of sensorial and social pleasures in the midst of gadbad’s onslaughts. dhairya as ecological orientation waiting in traffic in rashid’s quivering kaalipeeli (black and yellow) taxi without air-conditioning i am drenched in mumbai’s soggy late summer. this morning, the crumbling road-rubble we left strewn behind us has snaked knots into my stomach. bubbling, jet-black bitumen from a freshly paved side of the highway has glued itself to the wheels around us, spraying its familiar hydrogen chloride odor through our open windows. the vibrating car pulls the sweat behind rashid’s ear down his face and into his silvery beard; the intense, fetid petroleum odor of bitumen makes me instinctively cover my nose with my dupatta. rashid’s hardworking hands reach for his small towel. instead of covering his nose in recoil from the odor as i do, he wipes his beard, and leans out of the window, inviting into the car the breeze that brings the chemical redolence closer but keeps the sweaty humidity at bay. in this life of everyday automobility and the regular onslaught of chemicals and climate, the mundane direction and ripple of the breeze adjudicates everything. as i sit with rashid in the stench of bitumen and watch his relief at the breeze, several things strike me. first, it is through these mundane, sensate practices that drivers are oriented to urban ecologies that they do not see but rather breathe (choy 2020), cough up, wipe, and cool off. second this is how they make the difficult work they do bearable, even pleasurable. while it is just past eleven in the morning, the intense heat soaring off the road’s surface feels to me as though the blaze began an eternity ago and that it will radiate forever. for rashid, who has driven these roads for decades, radiant heat probably feels inescapable, much like the skin he lives in. he catches me fanning myself with my soppy dupatta and commiserates wisely, “this highway is at least ten times hotter than anywhere else. have dhairya [patience, strength]; when we cross mahim junction, you will feel a change. after the junction we can find a taxi stand under the trees at mahim church and you can buy a bottle of cold water from the regular tapri [tea stall] at the naka [cross-road] there.” scientists know that paved road surfaces are hotter than other places and that paving techniques and materials differ in their capacity to absorb, radiate, and repel ecological forces. however, rashid’s understanding of mumbai’s radiant heat, coupled with his steady advice for dhairya, is striking. it signals his everyday attunement to his work, to infrastructures he works in, and the labor of searching for urban ecologies of comfort, coolness, and shade. when i heard this call for dhairya from many chillia drivers, i understood it as a shared ethic toward difficult work. it helps rashid navigate gadbad and conserves his diminishing resources of energy and bodily strength. drivers’ intentioned exercise of dhairya suggests that sensate ecologies are not simply what people are subjected to but rather something to which they collectively respond.15 dhairya is a gujarati and hindi term for patience and endurance,16 but it also has a sensory, metaphorical, and ethical sensibility. when i asked rashid what it meant, he responded that it signified a wellspring of strength and acceptance of the unavoidable—“do what you can because this is what is there to do and this is the city we live in,” he said. he also reiterated that “dhairya makes us chillia; it is a belief, but it is also what makes us original drivers, it is why everyone trusts us; we don’t have accidents or fights on the road. we know the taxi business, but also know how to get around with dhairya in all this gadbad that is bambai.” rashid’s lesson suggests that dhairya has developed as a practical concept available to chillia to speak of their ecological and ethical orientations to driving work. however, this orientation also provides chillia with what webb keane (2016) terms a “shared sense of living.” it is striking that dhairya elides claims of resilience (cons 2018), hope (tsing 2015), or cruel optimism (berlant 2011) for a livelihood that these men fail to recognize as harmful. in fact, few drivers claim to be resilient men. most recognize that a lifetime of driving work means a chronic debilitation from which they will never recover. yet most also continue to participate in the profession because it is a family trade and they see it as dignifying, ethical work. the oldest chillia drivers have accepted this weave between dignity and debilitation, between living as respectable men with worn-down, male bodies. we need to pay as close analytical attention to the social acceptance of these tensions between dignity and debilitation as we have to the logics of resilience and resistance in social theory. for example, julie peteet (2017) poignantly illustrates palestinian forbearance in their use of the term aisheen (we are still living/breathing).17 aisheen claims the life-affirming existence of breath in an otherwise unlivable world. in different circumstances, dhairya for chillia is both an ethical critique of the way things are and an acceptance of shared debilitation. this suggests that dhairya concerns patience with road ecologies as much as patience with the wearing down of life and bodies in the course of gathering labor expertise. it also constitutes a temporal challenge to the less patient, algorithmic efficiency of the new ride-share taxi industry.18 often a chillia driver takes this position of dhairya to differentiate himself from others he encounters along the road who are always in haste. bilal, another veteran driver, often smiled when a passenger had impatiently disembarked in the midst of a traffic jam to attempt to get to their destination on foot: “passengers do jaldbazi [show haste and impatience] because they don’t understand the gadbad of the road system. drivers know that dhairya is what is needed, otherwise we will all go mad. it’s ok; we all do what we can do.” passengers enter gadbad instrumentally and intermittently to get somewhere else. for professional drivers, gadbad is home and therefore requires different ethical and pragmatic orientations. dhairya is not an ecological orientation that measures time as urgency; rather it is expertise that knows what will happen in situations of urgency and masters what to do in conditions of ecological and urban onslaught. these distinct positions within the sensate ecologies of driving, between dhairya and jaldbazi, might explain many antagonisms over time and speed between the taxi industry and passengers. as we sit in gadbad this morning, the bumps and intense chemical stench cause the dredges of milky tea i had for breakfast to tickle upward as an unpleasant, but familiar sense of car-sickness. for rashid, the concrete dust from the crumble, what drivers call dhooli (dust), and the pungent chemical odor grates at his chronically dusty, rusty throat. he lets out that practiced growl that catches just the right part of his throat to clear the immediate irritation. the frequent, guttural growls from the union of mumbai’s dusty crumble and rashid’s rusty throat provide a comfortable fellowship between us on these otherwise speechless rides. yet as i struggle with my rolling stomach, nausea, and irritation with the heat, traffic, and pungent acidity of bitumen, rashid remains focused and calm. taxi drivers like rashid live amid urban ecological onslaughts they do not control. yet rashid has kept coming back with his old, vibrating car to the jam, smog, haze, and noise for decades. this is his livelihood; he is compelled to do this to live. by most measures of household economics, chillia are poor people, living on a daily income in a cash economy. however, without denying these constraints of necessity, chillia drivers routinely regaled me, less with stories of wretched precarity than with proud family biographies (bedi 2022) of migration into bombay and the development of expertise in the transport trades. they were stories fueled by a desire to participate in the world of twentieth-century mobility and technological progress in which automobiles and the chaotic life of the city proved central. rashid knows the environmental debates over automobiles; he regularly hears that his car is old and polluting. he admits that driving in mumbai takes an enormous toll on his body. when i first met rashid in 2010, his arm glided up to the gearshift with the grace and experience of a maestro claiming the strings of his instrument. this morning, almost a decade later, his long, gaunt arm trembles tentatively to the gear, and it is difficult for him to control the twitch in his head and shoulders. in these years of progressing tremors, rashid’s car has also acquired new quivers and jerks, and they move around like brothers who have developed the same gait by living too long together in mumbai’s road crumble. the automobile is a much-maligned and unsustainable mode of transport, central in global efforts to stem urban ecological degradation. yet it is also the only means of sustaining a respectable and knowledgeable life that rashid knows. ironically, contemporary environmentalist debates over the automobile’s sustainability are accompanied by the proliferation of automobilization throughout the global south. a twenty-first-century urban theory of automobile lives will be less relevant in the region if it remains focused on damage and environmentalism (important as those are), rather than looking at the social and ecological life-making that driving in the gadbad of these places entails. we could benefit by turning from sustainability as an environmental question to the social question of how people sustain automobile livelihoods in shifting, difficult urban ecologies and chronic sensory excess. this is what rashid’s invocation of dhairya in the gadbad invites us to do. chillia drivers and automobile lives rashid’s community of chillia have driven taxis since the early twentieth century, and they claim to be bombay’s original taxi drivers (bedi 2021). connections between chillia and the taxi trade can be traced to the early twentieth century when chillia families began migrating to bombay from the palanpur region in gujarat. they began as drivers of horse-drawn victorias and later moved to the motorized trade. chillia are sunni muslims of the momin caste.19 when i asked what it meant to be original, drivers responded that an original driver had a long-term connection to the taxi trade and an originary, sensory knowing of bombay’s ecologies and topographies—or as rashid said, “original is someone who does not need a map.” chillia stories of urban migration are marked by desires to form part of bombay’s urban world and a sensibility that urban life heightens social worlds. not least, they joined the world of dust, potholes, bodily pain, waiting, traffic, police, bureaucracy, and knowledge of the city’s ecologies. therefore, originality has temporal, sensorial, and knowledge-gathering dimensions. for rashid, it also means the capacity to know and navigate gadbad. hereditary taxi drivers show us what an ecology of urban automobile life looks and feels like when we separate it from debates over the automobile’s place in environmental destruction. indeed, while polluting things like cars or plastics, as liboiron (2021) eloquently argues, can be environmentally “bad,” attention to sensate life brings to light ecological, social, and ethical relations forged around them. people regularly make good lives in ecologies that surround automobiles and in those that are produced through the “externalities” (callon 1998, 22) of automobile life. externalities are effects of ecologically “bad” things but are borne most heavily by those who spend the most time in their cars, and who in turn become experts at finding ways to live with them. rashid makes a meaningful life gathering ecological knowledge not just through driving but also through encounters with externalities such as dust, noise, smog, and uneven chemical topographies that constitute the shared worlds of driving work. for rashid, gadbad makes the world knowable. for instance, at first, rashid’s habituated, guttural response to humidity, smog, concrete, and chemicals that emit through mumbai’s atmosphere, and the bumpy snakes of nausea that take over my body are signs of the escalating degradation of environment and infrastructure. taxi driving in mumbai, especially in old, open taxis like rashid’s, necessitates this kind of exposure. it exposes drivers to and produces environmental degradation and pollution, and it wears down the built environment and infrastructure. yet there is something oxymoronic about being in a car that is also open to the world (ingold 2008). mumbai taxi drivers are in cars, but they also live and work in the open. looking at driving work from this open world provides a different perspective from those that approach the automobile as a private place of individuated freedom, aspiration, and social mobility. i frequently listened to chillia explain themselves to transport authorities who tried to convince them to give up their collectively owned taxis, purchase newer cars, or join ride-share companies to make their lives more physically and environmentally comfortable. rashid’s common response went something like this: if there is one thing about being an original chillia driver in mumbai it is this—you have knowledge of roads and of politics and you have dignity because your feet are on the ground and you have the freedom to put your head anywhere and anytime it is time for namaaz [muslim prayer] or rest. the ground is shaky, of course, but everyone else can manipulate the software to send their drivers to the moon, but chillia drivers are here on the roads and in the city. roads are jammed and painful, but i will take the city any day rather than be manipulated to fly to the moon. rashid’s retort is telling. first, drivers do not experience ecological gadbad in any simple way as damage. chillia acknowledge difficulty and messiness, but yet, dhairya in these conditions provides a sense of collective determination and action, what tuck (2009, 416) calls a desire-based rather than a damage-centered way of living. for rashid, it is desire for freedom over work time and piety, and to remain grounded rather than aspirational in this difficult world. it also signals an acceptance that worldly and ecological realities are intertwined with pious ones. it is striking that rashid does not respond to the environment as a system of “problems” that need to be solved. instead, he stresses a coexistence and acceptance of the existing order of the world he faces.20 this order connects pious muslims to god and all earthly things that have their feet and heads on the ground, even if this order and ground are troubled and messy. chillia drivers are less concerned with an environmental critique of degradation, or with aspirations to the moon, than they are with making inhabitable worlds (langwick 2018). tiffany lethabo king’s (2016, 1022–23) definition of fungibility is useful here to highlight how laboring bodies suffer environmental and political onslaughts of work at the same time that they find possibilities of sustainable life-making. auto-mobile work is sustainable because it is shared, and allows for a coexistent life.21 in the spirit of islamic principles of coexistence and equitable accumulation, most chillia taxis are collectively owned. often, one taxi supports up to eighteen people across households. most chillia prefer to drive older, secondhand taxis manufactured by the indian company premier and known by the brand name of premier padmini. however, older cars are seen by police, commuters, and even transport unions (who are otherwise supportive of chillia’s self-employed, hereditary status) as belonging to backward and polluting men unwilling to keep up with a modern city. when i first moved to live in the community of chillia drivers and mechanics in northern mumbai that became my home for almost ten years, i was solely focused on practices of hereditary, urban work. but over a decade of fieldwork i could not ignore sensate connections between automobile labor and urban ecology. my fieldnotes are full of observations of coughing, clearing, spitting, dusting, and scraping the visible and invisible debris of ecological clutter that settles into and onto bodies of professional drivers and cars. they are also full of detours in search of ecological relief such as urban shade, sea breezes, taxi stands, and nakas. i now turn to these sensate ecologies, which constitute the coalescence between driving work, the labor of the senses, and ecologies of the city. figure 1. the social life of driving. photo by tarini bedi. air, heat, and shade hafiz and karim sit on the hoods of their taxis reading newspapers on a late may morning. karim had returned from an early morning shift. he had suffered from a hacking cough for months. the smoggy days sitting in an open, idling car made his chest heave so much that he had to stop his car to catch his breath—“there is choke in this city, and most of it is in the air; once the rains come it will be better,” he said. hafiz agrees gently, “karim bhai [brother], keep some dhairya; it always gets better. the rains will come soon.” they both know that heavy monsoons between june and september will cleanse the smoggy choke for karim and bring relief from heat. they know that monsoons are good for business when commuters don’t want to walk or stand out in the rain waiting for buses or trains. but they also know that monsoons pummel mumbai’s roads into lumps of debris, spray through open windows drenching the seats and drivers, and splay mumbai’s sludge all over the car so that karim has to wash himself and his car more often. in summer, early morning drives are easier for karim as he idles less and feels less assaulted by fumes and pollution. “i like to smell bombil [bombay duck] drying on beaches or the fish from the morning’s low tide rather than the evening’s diesel fumes. it [the fishy] smell reminds me that there is a samundar [sea] somewhere. everyone from palanpur asks me about the samundar of bambai,” karim declares with a sense of delight that he can take stories of the seaside to his landlocked relatives in palanpur. mumbai has distinct morning and evening smells, and drivers structure their days around which takes the least toll on their bodies, or around those that are redolent but comforting, like drying fish. “i prefer to wake up early than to choke,” says karim. “this way, my nephew, who has young children to support, can take the car for the full day. i need less money and less choke; he needs more money and since he is young, he will take a bit more time until he starts to suffer from this choke. this sharing of less choke and more choke works for all of us.” the question of how to make a living when respiration is at stake is frequently discussed among drivers. drivers perceive the atmosphere less in politico-legal terms of atmospheric citizenship (ghertner 2020), and more as smells and matter that settle in the body to produce the sense of choke. drivers rarely, if ever, use terms of environmental science, such as pollution or toxins. instead, they express ecological relations with the city’s air as choke. in his study of air pollution in hong kong, timothy choy (2011, 146) argues that there is no such thing as air in itself; rather, air is the aggregation of material and immaterial manifestations such as breath, humidity, viruses, particulate matter, smog, and more. for drivers, these coalesce as choke. while smoggy air makes its presence felt in karim’s lungs and his hacking cough acknowledges this presence, the air is also where karim and others are collectively immersed, and they engage multiple senses to practice temporal and self-regulation. drivers devise new driving rhythms around the quality of the air as the seasons change, since the atmosphere, even as it is all-encompassing, is uncontrollable. here, dhairya constitutes a way to control oneself and to share this capacity with others in this uncontrollable ecological state. this is why drivers routinely advise dhairya to anyone who shows sensate signs of suffering. everyone experiences choke, but they experience it differently—dhairya promises to make all of it bearable. in this atmospheric recalcitrance and unpredictability, drivers regulate their temporalities of driving through whiffs, breaths, and respiration, rather than solely through attention to infrastructural blockages, traffic flows, or rush hours. as karim explained, he and his nephew swap driving shifts based on who is better equipped to take on respiratory assaults. this is traffic regulation and driving shifts organized and rooted in obligations that generations have to each other and determined through relative vulnerabilities to mumbai’s ecologies. karim is obligated to support his deceased brother’s son by allowing him more driving time; his nephew is obligated to face mumbai’s onslaught more fully by taking the later shift. by 10 a.m. karim is done for the day and his car is ready for cleaning before his nephew takes over. as he awaits cleaning, he sits with hafiz, reading the newspaper on his car bonnet. both hafiz and karim place small towels between their bodies and the hot, burnished metal. when the long wait for rides in the afternoon heat makes drivers drowsy, these towels are deftly rolled into pillows and placed on windshields or car seats for quick naps. lines of taxis with open doors and the cracked, hardworking feet of resting drivers peeping out of one end form a part of the urban landscape of hot mumbai afternoons. driving in mumbai is mobile work, but many of the sensory pleasures of movement are derived from the periods and places of rest that surround and punctuate it. but rest does not come easily, and the pursuit of rest and waiting entails labors and dhairya of its own. taxi driving in mumbai involves a lot of waiting and sitting around outside. finding a place to wait is difficult and requires planning and the envisioning of routes. drivers look for street corners, official taxi stands, or sheltered, tree-lined slivers of road. these are spaces where they can avoid being fined by the traffic police for stopping. they are where they can rest their bodies between the battering, noisy, smoggy rides through the city, find some shade to eat in and nap for a while, or say their prayers. the searing sun and the urban heat are absorbed into mumbai’s built urban landscape. they are also absorbed into the metallic containers of cars. in indian cities, middle-class complaints and talk about heat and rising temperatures are tied to a class critique of rapid urban growth and development (cf. frazier 2019). yet for drivers, urban heat is less a point of critique as a site for the accumulation of labor knowledge. in mumbai’s two key weather patterns—the heat and pounding monsoon—drivers require neither talk nor critique, but a shared strategy and sensory labor to get through it. the search for shade from the blistering heat and humidity entails a circuitous search for shade of trees or sea breeze. for karim and hafiz, driving work demands this thermal orientation in which considerations of heat, shade, dampness, and humidity become part of their decisions about roads and routes. hafiz accepts afternoon rides when the sun is hottest only if they take him toward shaded parts of the city, where he can rest and complete his namaaz under the shade of trees. he searches for the baobab, peepal, or karanj trees in dadar, shivaji park, borivili, navy nagar, and colaba—south, central, and northern points of a city with scarce publicly accessible shade. for transport planners, city routes are marked by roads, maps, and speed. for drivers who sit in hot, open cars all day, the route is marked by trees and breezes that promise shade, relief, and rest. the spaces of waiting also make for spaces of rest, and drivers prefer to rest where they are likely to know others who rest there with them (figure 1). rest is less about leisure than about work and the capacity to keep working. significantly, the demands made by taxi drivers on the government are not only for better roads but also for better places of rest, and for places to regenerate sensorially—taxi stands and shade. figure 2. resting. photo by tarini bedi. sensate topographies: roads, nakas, debris hafiz and karim are parked in the bazaar not far from home. several other taxis are parked around them. until last year, hafiz and karim and other chillia drivers parked in a straight line just off the main road. this was the space where drivers performed handovers from one shift to another. drivers referred to this area of parking and rest as a naka, while spaces of driving and movement were referred to as roads. nakas describe places where a road ends. but they are also places where another road begins. therefore, a naka is where movement either stops or where one enters a road. naka also denotes a crossroads or a place where two roads stop to meet. for regulars at a particular naka, the naka is a place of rest and recovery from driving work. for those who do not belong, such as fleet and ride-share cabs, the naka makes for a place of conflict. figure 3. parking at naka. photo by tarini bedi. different drivers have unspoken rights to particular nakas. therefore, nakas are malleable topographic and social spaces. nakas are also interstitial ecological spaces characterized by a mixture of ecological and social possibility. like ruderal spaces (stoetzer 2018), nakas are neither wild nor planned; but unlike abandoned ruderal spaces, they are socially thick and heavily used. they are also where most driving work unfolds. at this naka, the precision with which each driver slid his car into a vertical parking spot made it operate and look like an official taxi stand. traffic police allowed parking as though it were a government-sanctioned stand. at the start of my research, this naka led to a slum settlement. now this settlement had been demolished and a tall building inched its way up through the uneven gravel into the hazy sky. future residents of this new building would need a paved road for their cars to enter the naka and exit onto the road. an unpaved naka would not do. in preparation, the unpaved naka where taxis had once stood in precise parked lines was haphazardly dug up. the debris from this digging had made its way to the paved road. the mounds of debris that extended out of the naka and onto the roads made it difficult to tell where the construction began, where the naka ended, or where the road emerged in textural and topographic terms (de boeck and baloji 2017). for those who live and work in and on these surfaces, as joseph amato (2013, 1–16) argues, the “surface is where the action is.”22 for hafiz and karim, who drive older taxis, malleable topographies are palpable along the roads as potholes, ditches, and uneven surfaces. but they are most palpable when drivers remain in place at the naka. the naka is where material and environmental debris shifts with topographical regularity. this is why the naka constitutes a significant ecological place: it is where driving work takes place beyond demarcations between the completed, the emergent, and the still-to-be-built city. for instance, at this naka, rubble from both road and building construction scattered like bundles of fuselage—a mixture of stone, bitumen, cement, concrete, old plastic bags, leaked petrol, and leftover rainwater. as a result, taxis encountered uneven, but incrementally familiar terrain. they no longer lined up as they once did, but parked as they move on the roads: out of line, but not out of place. drivers maneuvered around mounds of fuselage until they found angles of rest in a place that is neither road nor the naka it once was. the space has materialized from the work of digging and from accidental shifts of debris between roads and naka discarded from various other construction and building. those who use mumbai’s roads most encounter this debris as accidental terrain everywhere. sometimes this terrain is a road, sometimes a naka, and sometimes a taxi stand. chillia drivers navigate these topographical contradictions between the planned and unplanned city to make the accidental familiar. they know what the naka can become. they know that how it is used shifts incrementally, depending on the season, the value of surrounding land, or the moods of the municipality. drivers talk about the padmini taxi as the hardiest car in this moody, accidental terrain. its wheels and undercarriage can brave accidental debris, and its body is toughened against accidental encounters with other bodies who share the road. they are strong against the battering monsoon; they are cars that move slower than others, but also ones that share their drivers’ dhairya to do what is possible with their bodies—and nothing more. the traffic police who left taxis alone when this was an unpaved naka now showed up to this dug-up debris to threaten drivers with parking tickets. sitting in the same place they had been in for twenty years, hafiz, karim, and their taxis became part of this tangle between streets, nakas, roads, and taxi stands. they were hardly passive victims of this shift, but participated through collective practices of dhairya—patience to see what would happen. to casual observers, the leftover naka debris signals a cityscape in disarray. yet drivers say that the naka’s unpaved debris offers a cooler place to rest precisely because it does not absorb and let off the radiant heat of paved roads. while rains settle into unpaved nakas like small urban lakes, this water is cooling, and used by drivers to wash off a dirty shoe or to entice goats at the butcher shop toward a place to drink before imminent slaughter. as the naka claws itself into a road, chillia have expanded thick relations with others here. access to the mounds and areas of parking around the debris are reserved for chillia drivers. during the eid, diwali, and wedding seasons, visitors to markets and nearby buildings attempt parking here. younger chillia men stack piles of sharp rubble to build makeshift speed bumps to deter the entry of other cars. visiting drivers curse in exasperation as they disentangle their cars and tires from the jagged stones. it is common to see young scrap-pickers going through the debris for pieces of glass, metal, discarded plastic bottles, and plastic bags that make their way into the debris from surrounding markets. since chillia know this debris well, they direct pickers to spots particularly rich with what could be resold as scrap. over time, this interstitial space between naka and road has materialized as social, supporting environmental relations between different people making a living amid digging and debris. it provides a vital node in a circular economy, between those who create environmental debris and those who repair and recycle it. for example, gastón gordillo (2014) argues that rubble is not simply a figure of negativity but the afterlife of ruins and destruction. at this naka, rubble signals myriad forms of construction rather than destruction. chillia know that it is construction interrupted, construction finished somewhere else and dumped in this place, or construction about to begin. this is why waiting with dhairya, and enduring the rubble when everyone else has given up on it, promises new parking and resting spaces. further, rubble at the naka often turns into something else. the naka’s rubble is the infrastructural spring of the never-ending dust that billows and spreads into everything, what drivers call dhooli. dust, water, dhooli as habib and karim read their papers, two young boys, ali and hamza, scuttle through the zigzag of cars at the naka, carrying soapy buckets of water, bright yellow washcloths, and scrubbing brushes. ali slathers each car with the yellow, soapy slush. hamza dips his cloth lightly into the water, squeezes soapy suds onto the road, and carefully wipes off grime accumulated from various parts of mumbai on windows and windshields. dust from fumes of sticky, black carbon has settled into a grimy charcoal that clings to taxis like it belongs there. dust constitutes the pervasive ecological background to life and living. dust is central to life’s routines and regimens of cleaning, removing, building, and repairing (amato 2000). dust is spatially recalcitrant, moving around urban landscapes, unmindful of social and material boundaries of inside or outside. those who move around mumbai’s landscape cannot escape it. for drivers, dust clings to skin, beard, hair, and clothes and penetrates bodies; it scrapes the throat and irritates the eyes. in mumbai, dust mixes with rain and humidity to become grime and sludge. in indian cities, dust and grime are everywhere (shulman 2009). in mumbai, the longer you move around the city, the more you absorb these accumulations (agard-jones 2013; roberts 2017). hafiz’s taxi is speckled with the gray-and-white crust of pigeon excretions acquired from parking too long under laburnum trees. karim’s car has the jet-black grime that emanates from diesel engines and settles onto the car seats, hands, and clothes of drivers. karim agrees that he feels the grime in his throat and lungs, but as he watches hamza sluice the dirt off the body of the car, he marvels at how much the car absorbs what would otherwise blow into his throat. both cars also flaunt the lighter, yellow dust from the crumbling gravel of road-building that flies around cars and breezes through their windows. and then there is the ashen, grainy cement dust from the ever-proliferating construction sites across mumbai. professional motoring unfolds amid these transient ecologies of accumulation. drivers call this dhooli—an endless form of environmental, chemical, and organic accumulation that young men are paid to wipe, scrub, and clean off cars across mumbai every day. mumbai’s dusty ecologies provide several labor opportunities to young men. ali and hamza periodically scamper over to a tap of water by the construction site to empty dirty water and refill buckets. as they await the filling buckets, they run their hands through the cool water, touch the coolness to their faces, and sprinkle water playfully at each other. neither is old enough to drive. though like others their age, as car-washers, they encounter mumbai’s roads through dhooli long before they sit behind a wheel. the dhooli has no form to begin with, but as ali and hamza encounter the dusted object of the car, they attend to its edges and dimensions, and lend an ear and eye to where it has been. this early knowledge of cars, emergent through dust, provides young men the choice to become mechanics rather than drivers when the time comes. the boys know when a taxi has waited in the salty sea breeze at the gateway of india, or idled in a traffic jam around spilled chutneys of snack shops in thakurdwar, or when it has trudged through the muddy roads of the aarey milk colony. this morning, they smell the musty luggage of karim’s early morning passengers and promise they will sweep crumbs of sleepily eaten food off the backseat. all these accumulations and knowledge end up in buckets at the naka’s construction site. apart from a nod acknowledging their youthful energy, the construction workers and building engineers ignore the boys. they focus on their drilling and scraping, which periodically engulfs the naka in a thick dhooli of its own. on the higher floors, metal dust catapults into the heavens, while on the lower ones, it drops like a luminous waterfall onto the brick and cement trucks below. sometimes it settles like metallic ash onto the building engineers’ jeeps. these men occasionally ask the boys to dust off their cars. they assume the boys are brothers or else understand from observations of their choreographed work that they are enmeshed—therefore, they pay for cleaning in a lump sum to one of the boys each time. as the boys empty their buckets, scraps of dissolved pigeon shit and powdery city dust scrubbed off taxis trickle into the dry, earthy foundations of the building site; they spread like extended fingers into the ground and slowly disappear. even before it is has become a structure in its own right, this emerging building has already absorbed gallons of mumbai’s dhooli from ali’s and hamza’s buckets. the cleaning routine is remarkably choreographed between the boys as they wash mumbai’s environmental accumulations off the taxis and then send the dhooli into the depths of the city’s earth. the boys enjoy dipping their hands first into the clear water and then into the more solid, dusty sludge that it becomes. the transformation from liquid to solid, the transfer of dhooli from car to bucket, marks a job well done. they are on schedule and plan to keep cleaning, as they usually do, until noon. today, however, laborers on the construction site alert them that for the next month, the water supply might be turned off in the late morning to accommodate the plumbing needs of the building. hearing this news, the boys move faster. the temporalities of car washing and removal of mumbai’s dhooli are tied to these arbitrary shifts in water supply. the water supply is directed and stopped from places and by people these boys will never see (björkman 2015). yet they take gently and in stride the fact that they have so little control over the main resource of their work. car-washers are always adjusting their work tempos with dhairya, and without complaint about these shifts. as the boys approach hafiz’s and karim’s cars, the men fold their newspapers, slide off their taxis, gather up their prayer mats, and move toward a sheltered area on the construction site. in anticipation of the water stoppage, construction laborers stand around the tap filling bottles for drinking water to keep them going through the imminent afternoon heat. these workers are far from home and cut off from the settled living that chillia enjoy. they are migrant workers, who sleep in the open under tarps close to the construction sites, with little access to regular water supplies or protection from trees or cars. if the drivers and car-washers use this water for cleaning themselves and their cars, the construction workers imbibe it as drinking water to keep their bodies running. in this way, water, how it is used, and the labor practices it enables signal the multiple vulnerabilities and possibilities of urban work. the water itself has a shared tactile place here. while ali and hamza use water for washing and play, the construction workers find relief in its coolness as they drink and splash their hands and faces with it, taking pleasure in the cold relief on bodies that have lifted and drilled for hours in the beating sun. the presence of water also makes it possible for chillia to sustain life as pious muslims. karim reminds me that the koran states that all living beings are created by god out of water. therefore, availability of water to wash before prayers directs where chillia drivers stop several times a day. karim has mapped in his head all the nakas and taxi stands where he can find clean water and a place without stray dogs for his prayers. hafiz and karim lean over the same tap where ali and hamza fill their buckets and where construction workers scramble for drinking water and relief from the heat. both men wash with the cool water—cleaning their bodies for the devotion that follows. the same water supply that washes their cars also cleanses and cools their bodies for their namaaz (prayers). the loudspeaker at the mosque crackles. the maulvi (islamic scholar) clears his throat before he begins his undulating chant calling the neighborhood to prayer. while roads are rife with honking, the naka is characterized by these chants. chillia drivers move in and out of roads and nakas as much as they do between sounds of horns and prayer as the ecologies of sound distinguish places of rest and reverence from those of movement and mobility. almost in unison hafiz and karim hurl their prayer mats open under the shade of the last two rain trees on the construction site. they sit side by side and close their eyes. as is customary in muslim prayer, they bend their heads to the ground several times as they quietly, and audible only to each other, murmur verses from the koran. dhooli from their unpaved surroundings blows onto their mats and onto their faces as their beards gently brush against the ground their foreheads share with their parked cars. the naka has been transformed into a surface of worship, and the wheels of the taxis and the praying foreheads of the taximen are imprinted with the same dhooli. i observed them perform this intimate moment of shared silence in the same spot over many years. this is a silence shared between them. the rest of us cover our ears as we jump out of the way of a honking cement truck backing into the construction site while the manager yells expletives at the truck driver. meditative and shared silence, practiced through daily namaaz amid the noisy onslaught of the city, provides a way for karim and hafiz to live through the sensory and environmental gadbad of mumbai. their work, their claims to kinship, their piety, their capacity to enjoy a shared silence, and their refusal of hopelessness and damage coalesce in this jetsam space of noise, dust, dhooli, receding water supply, and prayer at the naka. karim and hafiz are joined in prayer by habib, another veteran chillia driver. habib carefully bends over to sift through the ground. he removes some pebbles and nails and lays down his prayer mat, before he notices me watching him. he gives me his characteristically wise smile. before i can ask, he preempts my question about why he chooses to pray here instead of at home, which is just two minutes away. “i like to pray here, in the open with my brothers. yes, you may think that we live and pray in kachra (dirt); by that i don’t mean we are dirty, but we live in stones and dirt. we have to make bambai out of this only, not out of something else. don’t come and tell me to learn to eat with a knife and fork to make me become modern. i just need a plate. let me do my business, drive my car, and live my life, and i will find my own plate. i don’t need a knife and fork.” conclusion: sensate ecologies habib’s “we have to make bambai out of this [stones and dirt]” offers a powerful illustration that hafiz, karim, and habib have developed an astute understanding of how and where they live and of what kinds of lives and futures they can make there—and of how these sensate ecologies become what ahmed calls home. kachra, as dirt and rubbish, aggregates all the “bad” ecologies of dirt, dust, debris, and smog. yet as chillia encounter the sensate ecologies that emerge and grow around them as kachra at places of rest, or as gadbad on the roads, they exercise dhairya, endurance and patience. this enables them to flourish both physically and ethically in these environments. here, i have argued for an understanding of sensate urban ecology with those who work and live in it—through the bumpy roads and dusty air—rather than through a path paved by environmental science or ecological science. using the work of hereditary driving as a lens, i have shown that sensate living as a driver in a city’s urban ecologies—gadbad—and the various ways of orienting to this living, develop as labor expertise that forges collective and sustainable labor relations even amid ecological onslaught (cf. liboiron 2021). moreover, sensate ecologies of driving are not just ecological or cognitive orientations but also social and public categories that are collectively understood and practiced by hereditary mumbai taxi drivers. gadbad as the multisensory coalescence of urban experience and dhairya as an ethical position within these sensate ecologies prove key categories here. through attention to urban ecologies that manifest in multisensory terms as they shape and are shaped by driving work, i have decoupled ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life sustained around automobiles looks like. the synergies between the labor of the senses and the ecologies of the city are what i call sensate ecologies. drivers encounter these in the form of dust, debris, nakas, roads, and surfaces. these are not fixed matter but a materialization of social, political, and ecological possibilities that sustain good labor relations and urban work. these make and sometimes harm cities, but they also make and sustain working lives. these sensate ecologies constitute sites (or interfaces) for the emergence of urban knowledge, the expression of kinship and sociality, and an ethical attunement that refuses damage. the chillia taxi business as understood through sensate ecologies unfolds not just at the road level but also at the street level, naka level, and mud, sludge, smog-and dust levels of the city—in the city’s gadbad. in this sense, gadbad elides an urban theory based on the demarcations between the planned and unplanned city. i show that this sensate knowledge and embodied expertise is neither survivalism nor “resistance” to ecological destruction. instead, urban and labor anthropology can be expanded by understanding how people live sensorially, working with and in difficult urban worlds, rather than against them. abstract i decouple the commonly discussed ecological destruction and unsustainability wrought by cars from a discussion of what life lived and sustained around automobiles looks like. through fieldwork with hereditary muslim taxi drivers in mumbai, i look at urban ecological relations with those who work in what i call sensate ecologies. a sensate-ecologies approach connects labor and urban ecology and argues for a collective rather than an individual subject of urban theory. what i describe here as drivers’ sensate ecological relations with a difficult city—a condition that is usually considered ecologically and infrastructurally unsustainable—calls into question assumptions about ecological damage and precarious urban life. by analyzing taxi driving as relational, sensate work. rather than as precarious labor, i argue that urban sensate ecologies produce expertise for hereditary drivers that sustain over generations. i conclude that even unsustainable ecological onslaughts of automobility produce coexistence and sustainable social and sensate relations. [senses; cities; labor; ecologies; sustainability; automobilities; ethical orientations] notes acknowledgments with thanks to all those who funded the long-term fieldwork for this project: the american institute of indian studies, the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research, and the national science foundation’s cultural anthropology program (bcs #1917969). i am deeply grateful for those who read and commented on various early versions of this piece, particularly michele friedner, lisa bjorkman, ather zia, and the generous reviewers for cultural anthropology. i would also like to thank all the participants in the departmental colloquium at the max planck institute of social anthropology for engaging so productively as i made the final revisions, particularly romm lewkowicz, who was the paper discussant, and amy leia maclachlan. who provided generous and extensive written comments. 1. bombay was renamed mumbai in 1995. i use bombay when referring to the pre-1995 period and mumbai when referring to the post-1995 period. 2. i deliberately use the term onslaught, rather than more commonly used terms such as climate change, catastrophe, or apocalypse because it better reflects the sensate and the local references to chronic harm and chaos. a detailed development of the concept of onslaught lies beyond the scope of this article. 3. i take up broader discussions of skill and expertise in other work (see bedi 2022). 4. see audra simpson (2014) on refusal. 5. see michelle murphy (2017) on tuck. 6. suspending damage does not signal a denial of the vital need to highlight and critique the brutality of the majoritarian indian state against indian muslims. it is instead an invitation to understand muslim lives and aspirations as they wish to be understood. 7. with gratitude to amy leia mclachlan for pushing me to deepen my articulation of this decolonial and feminist environmental critique. 8. i am inspired by max liboiron’s (2021) provocation of how analytical understandings of good relations travel cross-culturally. 9. see harris solomon (2021) for living “in” infrastructures. 10. see paul stoller (1997) on sensuous scholarship. 11. for debates between phenomenological and sensory approaches see david howes (2011, 2022). 12. see sara ahmed (2006) on orientation and queer phenomenology. with thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion. 13. with thanks to amy leia mclachlan for provoking me to think about the chronicity of the unavoidable and the inevitable; and to robert desjarlais for the wise recognition that rashid’s story is also the story of all of us. 14. see veena singh (2017) on gadbad ice-cream. a mixture of flavors that began as an error of proportions (gadbad) and ended up most famously on the menu of a well-known ice-cream parlor. 15. see jennifer c. hsieh (2021) on sensory response. 16. chillia come from the western indian state of gujarat and speak gujarati. 17. with gratitude to ather zia for highlighting other emic and decolonial approaches to life in difficult places. 18. with thanks to an anonymous reviewer. 19. loosely calling on cultural narratives of hindu communities, indian muslim caste has a distinct history and politics. 20. see timothy morton (2010) on ecological thought as coexistence. 21. i draw this social approach to sustainability from max liboiron (2021) and feminist sts to counter and refuse the hegemonic environmental sustainability paradigm. 22. also see jonathan anjaria (2020) on surfaces. references agard-jones, vanessa 2013 “bodies in the system.” small axe 17, no. 3: 182–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378991 ahmed, sara 2006 queer phenomenology: orientations, objects, others. durham, n.c.: duke university press. amato, joseph a. 2000 dust: a history of the small and the invisible. berkeley: university of california press. 2013 surfaces: a history. berkeley: university of california press. anjaria, jonathan shapiro 2020 “surface pleasures: bicycling and the limits of 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(accessed november 20, 2022). solomon, harris 2021 “death traps: holes in urban india.” environment & planning d: society and space 39, no. 3: 423–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775821989700 stoetzer, bettina 2018 “ruderal ecologies: rethinking nature, migration, and the urban landscape in berlin.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 2: 295–323. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.2.09 stoller, paul 1997 sensuous scholarship. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2015 the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princteon, n.j.: princeton university press. tuck, eve 2009 “suspending damage: a letter to communities.” harvard educational review 79, no. 3: 409–28. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 60-86, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.04 quantifying vulnerability: humanitarian datafication and the neophilia of integrated power cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 348-373, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.02 quantifying vulnerability: humanitarian datafication and the neophilia of integrated power malay firoz arizona state university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1323-1946 international humanitarianism has in recent years undergone an “innovation turn” (scott-smith 2016), utilizing new technologies—including drones, biometrics, e-cards, satellite mapping, and the like—to enhance the reach and efficiency of humanitarian aid. beginning with the innovations fair organized by the active learning network for accountability and performance in humanitarian action in 2009, the past decade has seen burgeoning support for new research units and initiatives across the united nations (un) and international non-governmental (ingo) world. in 2016, the world humanitarian summit affirmed “transformation through innovation” as one of its core commitments to reforming the aid industry, which referred not just to new technologies but also to new ways of framing humanitarian problems, new modalities for resource mobilization, and new partnerships with actors traditionally considered outside the humanitarian system. these efforts have been embraced by policy analysts who argue that the sluggish bureaucracy of international aid—which typically operates through public sector channels—can no longer meet the challenges of unprecedented global displacement and who call for harnessing the powers of the market to rapidly operationalize humanitarian solutions at scale (betts and bloom 2014). while many of these so-called innovations have been in use for years in other sectors such as public health, social welfare, and financial technology, humanitarianism’s suspicion toward the profit motive as intrinsically antithetical to aid work has resulted in a technological “lag” behind other industries, such that debates about the material, institutional, and sociopolitical implications of technological innovation in humanitarianism remain relatively nascent. this article addresses recent innovations in humanitarian vulnerability indexing: the systems used to record, measure, and classify vulnerability data among refugees. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among aid organizations working with syrian refugees in lebanon and jordan, i explore how the growing datafication of refugees in humanitarian action poses new questions about not only the limits of quantitative ontologies but also their transformative implications for the institutional configurations of humanitarianism itself. anthropology has long harbored a productive skepticism toward the use of quantitative metrics, building on science and technology studies (beck 1992; hacking 1990; latour 1999; porter 1995) to explore how quantification reduces complex socio-historical realities to abstract, measurable terms that reproduce racial, colonial, and geopolitical inequities while disguising these traces through sanctifying discourses of scientific objectivity and technocratic expertise (benjamin 2019; chun 2021; escobar 1995; ferguson 1994; merry 2016; riles 2006). ethnographers of global health have also drawn attention to the uneven social lives of numbers and the material practices through which they are constructed and stabilized as evidentiary terrain for demographic interventions (biruk 2018; davis 2020; ruckenstein and schüll 2017). in the field of critical (big) data studies, anthropologists have critiqued what gavin smith (2018) calls “data doxa”—the enculturation of data habitus and infrastructure as integral to contemporary notions of progress, pleasure, and self-expression in everyday “datafied” life (boyd and crawford 2012; michael and lupton 2016; nafus and sherman 2014; ruckenstein and pantzar 2015). at stake in much of this scholarship is a neo-foucauldian view of data as an instrument of biopolitical governance, neoliberal subjectivation, and the disciplinary gaze, which others contend does not exhaust the ways in which data activism can mobilize existing data infrastructures toward more just ends (baack 2015; kennedy 2018). more recently, however, anthropology has sought to move beyond critiques of data’s representational claims to ask what data does, and how concept-metaphors such as “broken,” “rotted,” or “repaired” data prove equally constitutive of its material logics (boellstorff 2013; douglas-jones, walford, and seaver 2021; pink et al. 2018). the adoption of data-intensive technologies in humanitarianism presents a unique challenge for these debates, because the beneficiaries of humanitarian programs are not politically positioned as consumers in a data marketplace or as rights-bearing citizens of a welfare regime, although there are important convergences. indeed, the moral exceptionalism and engrained minimalism of humanitarianism’s life-saving mandate allows many of its innovations to merit lower standards of critical scrutiny and regulatory approval, leaving aside questions of privacy, consent, or long-term sustainability. at the same time, while the asymmetric powers exerted by data-mining government agencies and private corporations are well charted in the literature, it is less understood how datafication conscripts, entangles, and unsettles data practitioners themselves. this article heeds the call by kristin sandvik and colleagues (2014, 222) to move “from a discussion of what technology does for humanitarian action to asking what technology does to humanitarian action.” taking humanitarian aid workers as my primary interlocutors, i approach the aid industry as a heterodox assemblage comprising a panoply of institutional actors, each of whom are differently implicated in the circuits of data collection, classification, and utilization in humanitarian program design. by telescoping outward from the ethnographic moment of refugee assessment, to the datasets that determine which refugees are assessed, the transfiguration of vulnerability into algorithmic values, the retrenchment of targeted aid on the basis of those values, and the broader ecosystem of interlinked data systems into which vulnerability indexing feeds, this article shows how the datafication of humanitarianism adds successive layers of abstraction that precipitate a growing integration and centralization of humanitarian power. encounters with a data bureaucrat on a sunny july morning, i met with mahmoud, a young syrian aid worker, at his ingo’s field office in kouaikhat, a small town in lebanon’s northern governorate of akkar.1 mahmoud was tasked with conducting household vulnerability assessments among syrian refugees and had agreed to take me along. on this day, we were scheduled to visit wadi khaled, an area adjoining the syrian border to the northeast, which required special entry permits from lebanese military intelligence as it lay beyond the government’s checkpoint at akroum and was effectively open to syrians fleeing from the north. wadi khaled was an especially impoverished corner of a region already straining to support more than 240,000 refugees, with scant access to resources, infrastructure, and services. ingos routinely sent out teams to conduct vulnerability assessments among syrian families to document their living conditions and determine their eligibility for targeted assistance programs. the government’s prohibition on un-managed refugee camps—owing to its troubled history with palestinian refugee camps—had forced syrians to disperse into informal settlements all over the country, and assessment teams had to cover large swathes of territory to reach them. the ingos thus maintained a steady fleet of drivers and rental cars, shuttling staff between their headquarters in beirut, their field offices, and refugee settlements across rural towns and farmlands. we set out from kouaikhat early in the morning, hoping to complete the daily quota of households by mid-afternoon when all ngos were required by the military to exit wadi khaled. we rode in a white suv with the ingo’s name emblazoned on the door and a decal on the back affirming that the car’s occupants were unarmed. mahmoud struck me as a quiet, reserved man who kept his conversations pointed and brief. although a refugee himself, he had legal residency in lebanon and had never faced any problems with local police. he had worked in a hospital back in syria, he told me, and was expecting to soon be resettled in spain. as an educated, middle-class man with secure employment and resettlement prospects, mahmoud belonged to a small minority of syrians in lebanon who were relatively protected from the government’s routine harassment of refugees. as far as the refugees he assessed were concerned, he might as well have been lebanese. indeed, mahmoud seemed the archetypal aid professional i’d often met in ingos, someone who saw humanitarian work as a job like any other, with strict guidelines to be followed and targets to be met. the purpose of an assessment, he explained, was to record information on refugees. name, birthdate, phone number, nationality, location, number and age of family members—everything had to be recorded. previously assessed families also needed to be revisited to update their records, as chronic debt and regular evictions compelled them to move houses frequently or return to syria. moreover, children who got married and moved out of their parents’ homes were designated as a separate household, requiring fresh assessments. maintaining updated records thus represented a major logistical challenge for aid organizations seeking to identify beneficiaries while on tight project timelines. we trundled along the syrian border, driving past dilapidated buildings, mounds of rubble, and rusting agricultural equipment. wadi khaled gave the impression of being frozen midway into construction, with streets half paved, homes left unpainted, and iron girders for abandoned buildings jutting starkly into the sky. countless “informal tented settlements”—as the ingos called the makeshift homes of syrian refugees—dotted the landscape, serving as a reminder of the devastating war waged right across the border. perhaps tent is the wrong word, for most of the accommodations syrians lived in were assembled from an assortment of construction materials—wood, tarpaulin, blankets, and prefabricated cinderblocks. some had mud floors while others had concrete; some featured solid walls while others just had a cinderblock foundation with tarpaulin sheets held together by wooden frames and nylon ropes. most lacked a proper roof, which proved a major problem during heavy rains. each home told a different story about its occupants—what income they managed to earn, what assistance they received from neighbors and ngos—but all these homes testified to the poverty of syrian refugees who had left behind families, livelihoods, and savings to escape to safety. presently, we parked beside an unfinished concrete building and stepped out. mahmoud called out to announce our presence, giving women in the household time to cover their heads while a middle-aged man stepped out to greet us. after introducing ourselves, we were beckoned inside and sat down on floor cushions. the man offered us food, but mahmoud refused, explaining that aid workers were prohibited from eating with refugees. we did, however, accept tea, a sugary black drink commonplace in syria. an old tv played an indian serial in the background—something i often observed on such visits—as our vulnerability assessment began. mahmoud asked to see the family’s asylum-seeker certificate issued by the un high commissioner for refugees (unhcr), as he whipped out a samsung tablet and began logging information into a data-input app. some entries required rating quality on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest), while others offered, rather discordantly, a selection of smileys to rank respondents’ opinions from happy to sad. keif al-hal (how are you), mahmoud asked the man without looking up. kwais (good), he replied. i glanced over at mahmoud’s tablet and saw that he gave the household a 5/5 on the scale ranking “dignity,” based simply on that reply. the questions continued: do you work? did you receive financial or medical assistance last month? how much did you spend on food? how much did you spend on medicines? how many kids do you have? do they go to school? mahmoud gruffly instructed the family members to give accurate answers and state clearly what they did and did not have. they often looked confused, as if unsure about how to answer the questions, but mahmoud busily tapped away on his tablet. when the questionnaire was complete, we got up and walked around the house, inspecting each room: the piping in the bathroom, the sealant on the roof, the state of the motorcycle outside. i often noticed mahmoud recording answers to questions he never asked the family, such as the household’s quality of “safety” and “privacy.” again, the family received a glowing 5/5 rating on all counts. after around forty-five minutes, we were done. mahmoud made it clear that he couldn’t promise them any assistance. we bid our goodbyes, got back in the car, and left.2 as we were heading back, mahmoud explained that his questionnaire was designed to elicit only factual information with “yes” or “no” answers. qualitative descriptions such as the condition of an object, he said, should be absolutely avoided. i asked him about the answers he had recorded on his tablet to questions he never asked. he replied that he could input some data based simply on his own inspection. if a family did not share their home with another family, for instance, they were deemed to have privacy. if the landlord had not threatened them with eviction, they were designated safe. in other words, the syrians being assessed did not always know why they were being asked certain questions, how their answers were being translated into the data-input form, or what ratings those answers received. yet, mahmoud insisted, i only write what they say.3then i send this information to my manager. i don’t know what they do with it; it’s not my business. if my organization decides that this family should receive shelter assistance, a rehabilitation team follows up with them to install doors and windows, repair the bathroom, set up electricity connections, etc. other teams may follow up for their own interventions. not all aid workers might share mahmoud’s rather procedural approach to shelter assessment. however, the process of rendering vulnerability commensurable and indexical ushered forth a series of humanitarian transactions that not only translated nebulous sensibilities such as dignity and privacy into discrete data points, but also tethered mahmoud as a data bureaucrat to the promise of a perfectly gridded universe ordered along a numerical five-point scale, or even by smileys. to paraphrase joël glasman’s (2017) play on james scott’s (1998)seeing like a state, mahmoud had learnt to “see like a refugee agency.” it is not surprising, then, that he seemed so intent on getting the “right” answers: refugees’ subjective testimonies would not help his programmatic objectives, while their ceaseless movement in search of housing and livelihood constantly rendered his data obsolete. indeed, one could argue that the precarious nomadism of refugee life was itself the “problem” for which the proceduralism of the vulnerability assessor—invested in the process rather than the outcome—provided but a temporary answer. in a sense, mahmoud’s work emblematized what much of bureaucratized aid looks like today: a “dead zone of the imagination” designed to manage social situations founded on structural violence (graeber 2015). the adhocracy of numbers humanitarian aid was not always anchored to an impartial and universally commensurable category of vulnerability. as glasman (2020) recounts, early humanitarianism was driven by a deeply phenomenological response to individual pain, and it was not until the institutionalization of aid in the mid-twentieth century that needology—what glasman (2020, 28) defines as “the global bookkeeping of suffering”—became programmatic orthodoxy, borrowing from the developing science of statistics, demography, public health, and political economy among european welfare states. aid organizations under the mandate of the newly established unhcr recast themselves as expert purveyors of data, transmuting the meaning of “humanitarian impartiality” from the red cross’s commitment to provide relief to all parties in a conflict to an objectivist principle of aid distribution based on a quantifiable metric of minimum needs (glasman 2020). the arrival of digital bookkeeping arguably represents the apotheosis of this process of datafication. household vulnerability assessments such as the one conducted by mahmoud’s ingo feed into a larger vulnerability indexing system in lebanon known as the vulnerability assessment for syrian refugees (vasyr), a survey jointly launched by the unhcr, the world food programme (wfp), and the united nations children’s fund (unicef) in 2013 to collect, classify, and compare vulnerability data among a sample of urban refugees. prior to vasyr, each aid organization conducted its own assessments, and no standardized criteria existed by which to integrate and harmonize their datasets. even the term vulnerability, while common in humanitarian parlance, was used as a vague surrogate for poverty or exposure to risk—often in correspondence with idealized concepts of the “deserving refugee” (bardelli 2022)—and lacked a precise actionable definition to guide program design. vasyr provided policymakers with a quantitative formula to rank refugee households in terms of vulnerability scores—from “low” to “severe”—which could then be used to project a comprehensive national overview of refugee vulnerability and prioritize the neediest families for targeted assistance, such as cash vouchers and shelter rehabilitation. the unhcr developed a similar vulnerability indexing system in jordan known as the vulnerability assessment framework (vaf); for reasons of space, i do not discuss vaf in this article, but it is sufficient to note that both systems shared similar functions and methodologies. while targeted aid is not new to humanitarianism, quantitative vulnerability indexing was billed as an innovative data-driven system that would improve the accuracy of targeting methods, enhance coordination among ingos, and facilitate more geographically focused interventions. the reliance of aid organizations on ever more sophisticated architectures to store, analyze, and share data, however, invariably intensifies concerns about the fidelity of the primary datasets that undergird them. when data comes to represent the notional promise of knowledge that is accurate, transparent, and reliable, the practice of data collection becomes freighted with anxieties around what is not known, around what exceeds the “data episteme” (koopman 2019). anthropologists have challenged the negative ontology ascribed to non-knowledge as a mere absence of knowledge, gesturing to the myriad ways in which ignorance, doubt, skepticism, and mistrust are equally constitutive of social action (kirsch and dilley 2015; mair, kelly, and high 2012; pelkmans 2013). whereas an intellectual suspicion of quantification may breed fatalistic indifference to the representational adequacy of numbers, aid practitioners in lebanon instead grappled constantly with how accurate their data was. questions of who was eligible for household assessments, who could be reached for one, and how fairly their data was recorded all impacted the feasibility of their programs. early in the syrian crisis, security concerns around routine clashes in the border regions of lebanon such as arsal excluded those areas from being surveyed by vasyr (unhcr, wfp, and unicef 2013). more importantly, vasyr was only stipulated to survey registered refugees—those who had received refugee certificates from the unhcr—which excluded a significant number of refugees from being assessed, let alone assisted (janmyr and mourad 2018). at one point, the gap between the unhcr’s official registry and its estimate of refugees in the country was as high as half a million, due in part to the lebanese government’s harsh anti-integration policies designed to drive syrians out of legal status (government of lebanon and un 2017; naylor and haidamous 2015). many refugees also refrained from registering with the unhcr for fear of being caught without government-issued residency permits and deported. therefore, as is often the case with displacement crises, who got counted as a refugee remained a resolutely political problem (allen et al. 2018; zetter 1991). even among refugees who were registered and eligible for assessment, conducting household visits in one of the world’s largest urban displacement contexts posed innumerable obstacles to data collection. megan, an information management officer with medair lebanon, explained the process to me in detail: right now, when i do a household profiling questionnaire (hpq) for new households that haven’t received an hpq, i’m asking unhcr for a list.4 i ask them for a list of households within a geographical area in which i’m working. … i sort through the list, and the first thing i have my staff do is cold calls. we call everybody on the list, try to figure out where they’re located, because the location is the hardest thing within urban settings. … but honestly, most of these numbers aren’t right. if i receive a list of about four hundred names, we’re likely to get through to a hundred. … not all refugees have phone numbers, half the time they’re providing a number of a neighbor or, in some cases, their landlord. they’re sharing numbers as well. so it’s very hard to find the person you’re trying to get to on the other end of the line. megan’s emphasis on the challenge of tracking refugees in urban settings recalls the rationale often proffered by humanitarians for why they prefer to work in camps. the concentration of refugees into discrete zones simplifies the logistics of aid distribution and makes refugees easier to monitor and record. in contrast to jordan’s encampment policies, the spread of syrians across urban and rural settlements in lebanon presented humanitarians with not only a crisis of visibility but also a crisis of data. out of a list of more than 500 households in may 2016, megan and her team managed to schedule just 117 household assessments and enrolled only 41 for cash assistance. depending on the project’s programming budget, megan said, they would keep mining more lists and processing more beneficiaries until they eventually ran out of funding. the whole process appeared rather ad hoc for what was meant to be a data-driven system, but as megan remarked, aid workers never had enough resources to meet their targets anyway. even after filtering out all the unregistered and unreachable refugees, the magnitude of needs always outstripped humanitarian capacities. at the end of the day, she said with a shrug, her job started to look like just a “numbers game.” elizabeth dunn (2017) suggests that critiques of humanitarian aid as an oppressive regime often overstate its organizational scope and efficacy, and draws on the term adhocracy to refer to the partial, incoherent, and improvisational modus operandi of aid bureaucracies that produce as much chaos as they do order. while technological innovation is often promoted as a rationalizing agenda for the industry, its failures are ultimately cloaked in the same adhocratic invocations of humanitarian minimalism where, as the mantra goes, “something is better than nothing at all.” living with the algorithm a common refrain among aid workers is that the quality of humanitarian data is only as good as the data collected. megan put another spin on this by adding that “the data collected is also only as good as the data programmed.” despite accounting for exclusions in the population sample selected for household assessments, the formulation of standardized questionnaires could lead to major inaccuracies with the unhcr’s vulnerability indexing system. apocryphal stories and rumors abounded among aid workers about acutely vulnerable families being designated as “mild” while others rolled up in bmws to encash their vouchers. certainly, unclear phrasing and mistranslations could impact vulnerability ratings. for instance, open-ended questions with numerical answers, such as “how much water does your family use per day,” were subject to different interpretations: does water refer to drinking water, bathing water, or water usage overall? a more telling example was offered by rania, who worked with action against hunger (acf) to implement wfp’s e-card food voucher program in south lebanon: through the assessment, they even measure how many kilos of sugar you [use]. in syrian culture, they like tea with more sugar. … according to the wfp nutritionist, sugar is not the main food item that you should have each day. you should have fruits, vegetables, protein, some carbohydrates, and sugar is not in these groups. they consider sugar not important, so they consider cases [where refugees can afford luxury items like sugar] as mild, not severe. the wfp’s cultural misperceptions around the dietary habits of syrian refugees were disguised by the quantification of responses in the final result. this was the problem, rania argued, with vulnerability assessments that focused exclusively on numbers, not narratives: “did you eat a potato? yes. did you eat dairy products? no. so one, zero, zero, one, zero, one. at the end you have a score, and this score can measure your situation. it’s not logical!” in other words, the prospects for a syrian family being deemed vulnerable enough to receive assistance depended entirely on an abstract quantitative algorithm piloted on an experimental basis, derived from a statistical survey that sampled no more than 2.5 percent of registered refugees whose reliability was based on an inexorably subjective and interpretive exchange with a vulnerability assessor (unhcr, wfp, and unicef 2016). the more that vulnerability became an algorithmic value in humanitarian programming, the more its integrity hinged on that critical human encounter of data collection, in which an inscrutable permutation between a refugee’s answers and an assessor’s interpretations—imperiled by professional incompetence, cultural misunderstandings, or even simple mistranslations—decided whether a roof was repaired or an eviction was prevented. this form of “algorithmic violence,” as rocco bellanova and colleagues (2021, 144) point out, bears a co-constitutive relationship with datafication: it is “often implied in the very making of the data infrastructures needed for algorithms to work.” not everyone in the ingo world saw an intrinsic problem with this system. megan’s team regularly cross-checked the results of the unhcr’s formula against their own scoring methodology and rarely found any discrepancies. instead, she chalked up inaccuracies in scoring to improper data collection. vulnerability assessments with a family of two or more members required at least twenty minutes, she said, and data from shorter household visits should be summarily discarded. yet, due to the sheer size of the beneficiary lists and the difficulty of locating refugees, aid organizations often struggled to meet their monthly assessment quotas. some took to conducting assessments via telephone, which relied entirely on self-reporting by refugees and eliminated the assessor’s observations altogether. however, if there was one aspect that no quantitative approach could capture, it was the authentic feel of vulnerability that would validate whether an assessment score was accurate. as pieter, a senior representative for medair’s jordan office working with unhcr’s vaf system, explained: one of the things that we have concluded, based on our experience, is that just an algorithm and a score doesn’t work. why is that? because there are things that are just not captured in an algorithm or in a system in general. there are things that can be assessed objectively, like the number of people in the household, and the amount of money they are paying, assuming that people tell you the truth. that makes it easy to compare. there is a question like, “how many pieces of furniture do you have in your house?” that’s also a very measurable thing and you can as an assessor go and see it. but there are other things, like an overall feeling of a house—like, is this furniture looking brand-new or worn out? medair and other ingos like it compensated for these weaknesses by appending supplementary questions to the assessment questionnaire and, in addition to objective metrics, recording the assessor’s overall impression of a household at the end of the form. this approach was also, however, intended to guard against another problem aid workers frequently complained about—that refugees allegedly misled assessors to get a higher vulnerability score, by for instance temporarily moving to a poorer accommodation or hiding expensive appliances during a household visit. assessors received continuous in-house training to improve the accuracy of the qualitative data they submitted, which specifically involved searching for telltale signs of “manipulation.” pieter elaborated further: [assessors] need a lot of training on sort of the psychology of the assessment. for instance, if you go into a house and it looks pretty poor, but you see that two of the rooms are actually locked, and you ask, “why is it locked,” and they go like, “ah, well it’s always locked, there’s no key,” that’s a red flag. that’s most likely where the plasma screens and so on are stored. for me, i’m glad for them to have them, i’m very happy. it’s just, the question is, there may be people who are in bigger need, so yeah, we may not decide to support you on this. i don’t want to be judgmental on what they have. i wish them all to be living in palaces … [but] if the person is not giving you a straight answer, but sort of showing signs of doubt, what are these signs, how does a person communicate verbally and nonverbally? vulnerability assessments thus resembled a cat-and-mouse game for humanitarians, a quasi-improvisational dance between refugees with a supposed propensity for lying and assessors probing for some primal truth about vulnerability. this studied hermeneutic of suspicion toward refugees has a long history in humanitarian practice, framing them as unreliable witnesses to their own condition and in need of constant moral supervision (daniel and knudsen 1995; feldman 2018; harrell-bond 2002).5 despite pieter’s efforts to fill the gaps in quantitative indexing with impressionistic narratives, what both methodologies shared was a presumption of stabilizing the unruly semantics of refugee life through data, conferring on assessors a superlative authority to authenticate vulnerability as a symbolic property and interpellate it within the conceptual grids of humanitarianism. and yet, humanitarian investments in the epistemic virtues of data are ultimately never fulfilled. rather than alleviating suspicion, the vulnerability assessment—to quote taras fedirko’s (2021, 84) examination of financial forensics—produces it as “both a method and a ‘mood’; both a technique of working through opacity and uncertainty to generate understanding and a stance on the limits of this understanding.” every word and gesture can be ushered into its fold; every locked door that cannot be adequately explained, or a casually uttered kwais that betrays an unintended meaning, can be made relevant to its exercise. in this sense, vulnerability assessments can perhaps best be described as a terrain of semantic struggle over the sovereign meaning of data itself. in a final stroke of irony, the wfp and its partner ingos abandoned household visits altogether after 2016 and switched to an econometric “desk formula” based solely on demographic data gathered by the unhcr during its refugee registration process (lcc 2017). the transfiguration of vulnerability into a computational equation was now complete. “deservability” for hundreds of thousands of people could be instantly calculated with all the convenience and efficiency of a cybernetic system. thresholds of inclusion the self-fulfilling prophecy of algorithmic violence became particularly clear when a quantitative indexing tool intended to improve targeted assistance was later used to retrench assistance instead. in 2015, funding constraints forced the wfp to slash the value of its food vouchers in lebanon from us$27 per person per month to us$19, then further down to us$13.50, with a cap of five persons per household (wfp 2015b). it also cut its beneficiary pool by over 125,000 refugees from august to september 2015 without conducting new assessments. the wfp’s (2015a, 2) situation report for september explained that it “regrettably knows that those individuals belong to households which are not the most vulnerable, therefore their needs are expected to be managed by the overall household,” while simultaneously admitting that 70 percent of syrian households were living below the poverty line.6 as frontline agencies for the wfp’s food voucher program, ingos like action against hunger (acf) were responsible for assessing beneficiaries for eligibility, distributing e-cards, and operating hotlines to deal with complaints. acf’s phones started ringing off the hook as the wfp’s cutbacks kicked in, rania said, because syrian refugees who had previously received cash assistance were abruptly informed by sms that their support would be terminated within two months. they received no explanation about why they had been deemed ineligible or when their assistance would resume, and acf hotline operators had no answers to give them. worse yet, once designated as mildly vulnerable or less, refugees could not only be disqualified from food vouchers but from a whole host of other assistance based on the same vulnerability scores. rania shared the anguishing experience of dealing with callers excluded from the food-voucher program: each month when we send the smses for the active beneficiaries, the excluded call again, [saying] “why didn’t you let me be included in the program, i have a difficult situation, i have many kids under two, i have elderly people, i have a pregnant woman, i have a health problem, i can’t pay for my rent, i can’t pay for my residency.” each month, each month, each month! and maybe some beneficiaries call two, three, four times per month, with the same question, with the same request. and lately, they start to say, “come and see my situation, come to visit me, and you can see in reality what we have, how we live.” … [but] it’s not our decision. we are partners, we are working in the field to visit you or to help you, to support you, but in the end, we have some monitor who decides all this. we can’t even promise [you] that we can talk about your situation, we can’t promise that we can visit you again, unless we refer those cases to wfp. and if wfp has a strategy to visit those people, they can send us the list to visit. syrian refugees understandably experienced acf, the wfp, the unhcr, and other international organizations as part of the same corrupt system that had unfairly denied them assistance. they often referred to all ingos as al-umam, the arabic shorthand for the un. for rania, however, acf was stuck in the unenviable position of an intermediary between the un and syrian refugees: it had to collect vulnerability data from refugees to build the dataset for the wfp’s targeted assistance program, but it had no control over how the wfp used the data or who eventually received assistance. acf staff conducting household visits would often be blamed by families that found themselves inexplicably excluded, while the ingo’s entreaties to the wfp and the unhcr about inaccuracies in their vulnerability scoring were ignored or dismissed. un agencies seemed to place greater faith in the unassailability of their own technical instruments than they did in the direct field experience of the organizations implementing their mandates. there was no accountability in the system, nowhere to appeal against an improper assessment, no one to petition against a wrongful exclusion.7 pleading into the void without guarantees of a remedy is perhaps archetypal in a humanitarian economy that continues to operate through the idiom of the “gift” (bornstein 2012; fassin 2012), but it also underscores how far international aid has come to resemble the opacity and facelessness of a bureaucratic machine. more than this, rania’s story also reveals how datafication reconfigures relations within the humanitarian system, vesting un agencies with expanding powers of regulatory oversight over how data is used and with whom it can be shared. in order to access beneficiary data, ngos are required to file voluminous contractual paperwork and abide by term-limited data-sharing agreements with the unhcr, and even then, they aren’t necessarily permitted to review the proprietary formulae used to calculate vulnerability scores. paperwork invariably requires significant staffing and technical capacity, which disadvantages under-resourced lebanese ngos that have a longer and deeper history of engagement with the communities they serve, including palestinian refugees exiled in the country for decades. while structural inequities between north and south institutions have existed since the establishment of the global refugee regime after world war ii, the creation of vast refugee databases and the centralization of computational processing wrests agency further away from local actors and consolidates sovereign control over aid policy in the hands of a few gatekeepers. thus, what critics of big data call “data colonialism” (couldry and mejias 2019; madianou 2019; thatcher, o’sullivan, and mahmoudi 2016)—the accumulation by dispossession of digital capital—structures not only the extractive relationship between corporations and the datafied (refugee) subject but also, equally, the granular relations of power between data practitioners themselves. in the end, the tragic grotesquery of vulnerability indexing lay not so much in the exclusions it produced, but in its steadily narrowing thresholds for inclusion. with so many thousands of syrian refugees living below the poverty line, all of them could arguably be considered vulnerable. how then could any indexing system meaningfully compare the vulnerability of one family to another? was a “female-headed household” with less debt more vulnerable than a male-headed one with more debt? could a household with lower income be considered less precarious than a household with higher income and chronic illnesses? what was the measure of a vulnerable family worth helping, and how long could it forestall that dreaded sms at the end of the month pithily informing them that they were, “regrettably,” able to manage their own needs after all? such quintessential questions of triage became inescapable as humanitarian funding gravitated to other crises around the world and aid organizations in lebanon were forced to draw tighter and tighter lines of eligibility. syrians could find themselves cut off from assistance while their friends and neighbors continued to receive it. adult children could be disqualified if they got married and registered as a new household. far from addressing refugees as a shared community of concern, vulnerability indexing thus had a profoundly taxonomizing effect. since its inception, modern humanitarianism has been oriented toward the individual as its constitutive subject—the individual whose rights are violated, whose dignity is desecrated, whose body is maimed or killed (slim 2015). vulnerability indexing functions within this matrix as a disciplinary apparatus, lowering what michel foucault (1975, 191) calls the “threshold of describable individuality” and adjudicating the value of savable life. it thereby normalizes a shift in humanitarianism’s ambit of biopolitical concern, from universalist categories of deservability such as “refugees” and “asylum-seekers” to vanishing subsets of “vulnerable” humanity (sözer 2020). toward integrated data this article has focused on the evolution of quantitative vulnerability indexing as a purportedly innovative approach to data collection and targeted assistance with syrian refugees. as with all innovations, it is likely that the accuracy and efficiency of vulnerability indexing will steadily improve. formulae will be refined, collection methodologies will grow more rigorous, and new technologies may be incorporated to track refugees more effectively and plug gaps in coverage. such technical improvements, however, will likely further entrench power imbalances within the humanitarian sector, the implications of which are rarely evaluated in an industry driven by crisis imaginaries, emergency response times, and the minimalist expectation that “anything helps.” the vulnerability assessment for syrian refugees (vasyr) was designed to work in conjunction with the unhcr’s refugee registration database, known as the profile global registration system (progres), which itself represented a revolution in mobile refugee registration when first tested in turkey and ghana in 2003. the progres system replaced dozens of old, incompatible refugee registries with a centralized database and later introduced fingerprinting to prevent duplicate registrations (unhcr 2004). biometric registration was eventually enshrined in the biometrics identity management system (bims)—first piloted in 2013 with somali refugees in kenya’s kakuma refugee camp—which synthesized iris, fingerprint, and facial scans across unhcr operations to streamline case management, while the companion global distribution tool used bims data to verify beneficiaries for targeted assistance programs (lodinová 2016). the syrian refugee crisis proved a watershed moment in the advent of humanitarian biometrics, as iris-scanning was deployed on an unprecedented scale in jordan’s refugee camps to replace wfp’s e-cards with an ostensibly more secure method of dispensing cash “in the blink of an eye” (wfp 2016). indeed, camps often serve as laboratories for new humanitarian technologies precisely because they offer unbridled access to target populations with uniquely low avenues for resistance. the syrian crisis also served as a testing ground to expand the refugee assistance information system (rais), a web-based assistance management platform initially developed in 2009 to complement the work of progres with iraqi refugees in jordan. rais allows humanitarian organizations to monitor expenditure patterns and coping strategies among refugees to identify avenues for intervention. in the early years of the crisis, aid workers would collect this data on clipboards and encode it manually in software for analysis, which cost a significant amount of time and prevented them from having an updated picture of existing needs. rais established a mobile data collection system that seamlessly incorporated vulnerability data from vasyr assessments and consolidated datasets from different agencies into a single comprehensive database, allowing them to track each other’s work in real time (kelley 2017). it has since become the main coordination tool for humanitarian assistance in countries throughout the middle east, conscripting more than 1.5 million beneficiaries, and is now being ramped up for use across the global south. in turn, rais is just one node in the unhcr’s chain of interlinked digital technologies known as the population registration and identity management eco-system (primes), whose purpose is to equip un agencies with a suite of information and communication technologies to validate identities and assess claims to refugee status, assistance, and resettlement (unhcr 2018). in other words, the datafication of humanitarianism engenders not only a deepening reliance on extractive data collection and algorithmic indexing but also the growing integration of discrete data systems into a centralized, inter-operable, and globally scalable super-system under the aegis of the most powerful and least accountable aid bureaucracies. un humanitarian agencies now rank among the largest data brokers in the world, maintaining enormous databanks of sensitive data on vulnerable populations in some of the most unstable regions of the world. where accountability exists at all within the system, it is usually pledged to un partners rather than to refugees whose data is collected, and pertains to the abuses rather than uses of the system. scholars have thus raised alarm about the ethics of humanitarian datafication and its propensity to reproduce repressive structures of disciplinary surveillance and control over refugees (dahler 2020; iazzolino 2021; tazzioli 2019). btihaj ajana (2013) in particular warns against the logic of “function creep” by which biometric applications initially devised for specific, exceptional domains gradually colonize the entire migrant/asylum body. one may expect such panoptic aspirations to be ill served by the fragmented and improvisational data-collection practices of humanitarian ingos, yet it is precisely by concealing the adhocratic essence of data that the paradigm of datafication precipitates the ontological illusion that refugee bodies can be rendered wholly transparent to the panoptic gaze. the integration of humanitarian data thus poses risks for refugee rights not by the overdetermining reach of a totalitarian apparatus, but by the provisional and ultimately unreliable mythos of humanitarian technocracy. industry observers have meanwhile pointed to the grave dangers of notoriously poor cybersecurity protocols among aid organizations, and called for the appointment of an independent ombudsman to investigate incidents such as the cyberattacks on un servers in 2019, ransomware attacks on ingos in 2020, and possibly the largest-ever security breach compromising the red cross’s data on more than half a million people in 2022 (rahman 2022; raymond, scarnecchia, and campo 2017). even apart from these lapses, the unhcr’s (2022) data-protection policy reserves the right to share personal data with implementing partners and third parties, while primes is designed to be “interoperable with it systems used by governments (mainly in the area of civil registration and population registries) and partner organizations” (unhcr 2018, 2).8 in other words, the potential repercussions of digitizing refugee bodies are not restricted to the humanitarian mandate alone, but extend to a panoply of political actors—including donor governments and asylum states—who are themselves party to the very conflicts that precipitate mass displacement. conversely, refugees also serve as canaries in the coalmine for what forms of datafied power can be brought to bear on vulnerable communities in the global north (martin and taylor 2021), redolent of what aimé césaire (2000) calls the colonial “boomerang effect.” data is thus set to become a new arena of contestation between the competing raisons d’être of sovereign power and humanitarian space. as katja jacobsen (2017, 536) argues, “rather than simply delivering better refugee protection, attentiveness to the technology’s constitutive effects shows how with biometric refugee registration it becomes possible to extend—rather than guard against—the reach of state power through new means and into new domains of life.” we are already seeing early signs of how these constitutive effects can reshape relationships between humanitarian actors and states. in recent years, concerns have been raised around the lebanese government demanding access to the unhcr’s biometric records on syrian refugees in the country; the wfp signing a $45 million ­data-analysis partnership with palantir, a firm with deep ties to the u.s. intelligence apparatus; and the international organisation for migration providing biometric tracking systems to niger’s border police to help curb migration from west africa (jacobsen 2017; parker 2019; zandonini 2019). the united states’ chaotic withdrawal from afghanistan in 2021 also risked exposing two decades’ worth of humanitarian data to the taliban, while an investigation by human rights watch revealed that the unhcr provided personal information about rohingya refugees to the bangladeshi government, which then shared it with myanmar to facilitate repatriation efforts (loy 2021; hrw 2021). these infringements on beneficiary consent can scarcely be challenged by refugees whose access to assistance depends on their compliance with humanitarian data practices. the unhcr, for instance, ensured that all syrian refugees in jordan’s za’atari refugee camp “voluntarily” submitted to iris-scanning by deregistering their existing e-cards and declaring biometrics mandatory for continued support. in yemen, amid fears that aid was being diverted to support houthi rebels, the wfp suspended food delivery to a starving population unless houthi officials allowed biometric technologies to monitor distribution (latonero 2019). these developments have repeatedly demonstrated the need for greater caution and vigilance against what tom scott-smith (2016) calls “humanitarian neophilia” and its techno-utopian fantasies about innovation as a natural direction for the sector’s future, prompting scholars and practitioners to advocate for a data justice movement for refugees and for updating the humanitarian precept of “do no harm” to “do no digital harm” (dette 2018; read, taithe, and mac ginty 2016; seelos and mair 2012; schoemaker et al. 2020). “there is a real risk,” as jeff crisp (2018) argues, “that data management becomes an end in itself, absorbing scarce humanitarian resources while outstripping the ability of aid agencies to analyze the information they have collected and to use it in effective ways.” something else is lost in the process as well—a sense of phenomenological engagement once considered vital to humanitarian work is giving way to data-mediated remote management from fortified aid compounds—what sarah collinson and mark duffield (2013) call the “paradoxes of presence” between expanding assistance and minimizing exposure. as global crises become more complex and protracted with climate change, drawing together a proliferating network of transnational actors with diverging mandates and interests, the demand for new information-management and coordination tools will only grow. “the easy road,” duffield (2019) argues, “is to do nothing and submit to ever deepening automation, remote management, and the robotization of behavior. the more difficult task—and one that will define progressive politics for years to come—is to bring the oligarchic electronic atmosphere under democratic control.” in mass displacement contexts involving non-citizens and stateless persons, it is unclear who constitutes this demos, or whether arrogating data justice to a higher supervening authority only reinforces the problem of control. the paradigm of humanitarian datafication offers us a glimpse into the brave new world that looms ahead if we do not find an answer. abstract humanitarianism has recently undergone a so-called innovation turn, utilizing cutting-edge technologies to enhance the reach and efficiency of humanitarian aid. this article focuses on novel advances in the way aid organizations record, measure, and classify household vulnerability among syrian refugees. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in lebanon and jordan, i explore how the datafication of refugees in humanitarian action not only reveals the constitutive limits of quantitative ontologies but also poses transformative implications for the institutional configurations of humanitarianism. in particular, i suggest that the aid sector’s growing reliance on data systems entrenches an extractive relationship between humanitarian organizations and refugees that conscripts, entangles, and unsettles data practitioners themselves. i conclude by pointing to vulnerability assessments as one node within a larger apparatus of integrated data systems, one that centralizes power within the humanitarian industry and poses grave risks for refugee rights. [humanitarianism; refugees; data; vulnerability; technology; ngos; middle east] notes acknowledgments i thank the humanitarian aid workers in jordan and lebanon who generously offered their time and support to make my research possible. i am grateful to catherine lutz, bhrigupati singh, vazira zamindar, ilana feldman, and jessica katzenstein for their close engagement with various iterations of this work. the article benefited a great deal from the feedback provided by anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, particularly manuel tironi. i also appreciate the invaluable comments and questions i received from tricia redeker hepner, allan colbern, angie bautista-chavez, jennifer keahey, and sangmi lee at arizona state university’s global human rights hub, and from panel attendees at the international humanitarian studies association conference in 2021. this article is based on fieldwork supported by the national science foundation, the american philosophical society, the institute for citizens and scholars, the watson institute for international and public affairs, and brown university graduate school. 1. i use the name mahmoud as a pseudonym and do not specify his ingo, as that would make it possible to ascertain his identity. however, mahmoud’s ingo was a typical western aid organization with nominally secular ethical commitments, which offered a range of humanitarian services in lebanon including education, child protection, shelter, and cash assistance. 2. this encounter is a synthesis of several household visits we conducted that day. 3. i have italicized paraphrases from unrecorded conversations that were reconstructed afterwards from fieldnotes. 4. the hpq is a standardized questionnaire used by humanitarian organizations in lebanon to collect household vulnerability data. 5. indeed, aid organizations often justify invasive data-collection practices on the grounds of preventing fraud and abuse, even though there is little historical evidence to support this concern (currion 2015). 6. the poverty line used by wfp in 2015 was defined as us$3.84 per person per day. this figure was already low compared to lebanon’s cost of living in 2015, and throws into stark relief the extreme destitution faced by refugees and poor lebanese alike during the country’s spiraling economic crisis since 2020, which the world bank ranks as among the top three most severe crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century (world bank 2021). 7. while wfp established a grievance redressal mechanism for its food voucher program in 2018, it is not clear to what extent refugees’ petitions for re-inclusion were given serious consideration. 8. the european union’s (eu) general data protection regulation, introduced in 2018, establishes new standards around the right to privacy and control over personal information, which may force organizations registered in the eu to alter their approach to data protection. however, it remains to be seen whether 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https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/4.1.39 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 348-373, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.02 toward an affective sense of life: artificial intelligence, animacy, and amusement at a robot pet memorial service in japan cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 222-251, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.03 toward an affective sense of life: artificial intelligence, animacy, and amusement at a robot pet memorial service in japan daniel white university of cambridge https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2866-6587 hirofumi katsuno doshisha university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4133-2346 in the early spring of 2018 at a rural buddhist temple in japan, the local priest, ōi bungen, is conducting a memorial service for 109 pet robots. each one the size and with the features of a small dog, the robots are lined up alongside one another on a long, three-tiered altar covered in white linen, facing the priest and the crowd of about fifty people who have gathered to observe. the priest chants rapidly from the lotus sutra at the opening of the ceremony, comforting the spirits of the robots, before, with the following steps, he sets them free from their mechanical bodies. the priest moves methodically down the row, waving a ceremonial set of prayer beads (nenju) typical of these services in the nichiren buddhist tradition. when finished, he sits and reads a prayer (ekōmon) that dedicates the merit of the service to the departed spirits of the robots. he continues with informal words to the guests, thanking them for attending and sharing his reflections on what we can learn about life and buddha-nature (busshō) from our robot companions. the service ends with a closing sutra recitation, this time not from the priest but from the small humanoid robot palro, who is accompanied by two canine-like robot assistants. their high-pitched voices, mechanical but by no means lifeless, pierce the warm, damp air and mix with the lingering incense and musty smell of the cedar structure and tatami mats of the temple floor. it is an enchanting, reverent, and intoxicating atmosphere, and judging by the soft smiles on the faces of the attendees, nearly everyone can feel it. motivated to piece it all together, i immediately start thinking … “thinking is stupid! thinking is boring! i feel! not thinking; feeling!” ōi leaned forward with a raised finger when he vigorously proclaimed these words to me (daniel white) in a private conversation a week after the ceremony.1 he then sat back and smiled. the exaggerated disparagement of thought had been half tongue-in-cheek. after all, ōi could hardly be taken for being anti-intellectual, despite what others may first read into his jocular joie de vivre, his amusing if meandering stories, and his endearing self-deprecation: “by the way, do you know the three most boring things in life?” he asked, setting me up again: “school lectures, the national public broadcaster’s live parliamentary feed, and stories from buddhist priests.” we both laughed. but i wasn’t fooled. in an earlier conversation, on learning that i was an anthropologist studying artificial intelligence (ai), ōi mentioned to me some of his favorite writers: émile durkheim, henri bergson, norbert wiener. “wiener was a genius!” he proclaimed. even as we sat talking then, about a dozen books ōi was currently reading were laid out in front of us, belying his modesty if, in their scope, still honoring his humility. among them were david bohm’s the undivided universe: an ontological interpretation of quantum theory; brian green’s the fabric of the cosmos; a biography of the fractal mathematician benoit mandelbrot; and an introductory volume on big data and ai. “isn’t it amazing all this information is available in japanese?” he said, genuinely surprised. “i don’t really understand it, though,” he qualified with a chuckle. ōi stood by his commitment to feeling, or more precisely, to jikkan, a word composed of the characters for “reality” (実) and “feeling” (感) that suggests an act of sensing, knowing, or realizing with the body. yet he was hardly hostile to analytical thought. the trick for him was how to bring feeling and thinking together. for ōi, nothing did this better than sony’s pet-styled robot, which made for one of the reasons he began conducting for them the buddhist memorial service called kuyō. the mechanical pets for which ōi conducts kuyō are named aibo (artificially intelligent robot). importantly, the acronym also plays on the japanese word aibō, meaning “friend” or “companion.”2 created in sony’s computer science laboratory in the mid-1990s and released in 1999, aibo exceeded all expectations. the first five thousand models made available in japan sold out in twenty minutes (ōtsuki 2015, 3). they attracted not only the target audience of thirty-something male technophiles but also, surprisingly, women in their fifties and older. “owners” (ōnā), as they called themselves, dressed their aibo in clothing and gathered with friends to share stories and watch aibo play. they were enchanted when aibo learned a new trick or did something unexpected. many felt their aibo had its own personality, spirit, or heart (kokoro). and when aibo began to grow old, they naturally sought professional care for what had become an important member of their family (kubo 2010). however, when due to shifting priorities and economic challenges sony discontinued its aibo line in 2006, the company also stopped servicing those models in need of repair, leaving many customers distraught. recognizing the deep attachment owners had cultivated for their aibo, a former sony employee named norimatsu nobuyuki set up his own operation, the playfully named a-fun company (a-fan kabushiki gaisha), to meet consumers’ needs in a way that respected owners’ feelings for their robot kin. at his service center employees use words like “surgery” instead of “repair” (knox and watanabe 2018, 2022), and they refer to the other aibo models from which parts are borrowed as “organ donors.” for those owners whose aibo are beyond repair but could potentially become donors, norimatsu sought help from an “interesting buddhist monk” he heard talking one day on a local radio program to offer a memorial service to assist those who found it difficult to part with their robot family members.3 a technophile in his own right, ōi happily obliged. at the end of each ceremony officiated by ōi, the aibo souls are released from their robot bodies and employees of a-fun company—who outnumber the owners in attendance—pack up the robots in boxes to send them to the company’s service center to find new life in other ailing aibo bodies.4 according to a-fun’s norimatsu, the ceremonies have contributed not only to the care of his customers and the success of his company but also to sony’s decision to re-release aibo in 2018, equipped with the latest artificial intelligence. completing a circuit, ceremonies mourning aibo death cultivate capacities of care for lifelike agents that guide the ongoing design, application, and even understanding of artificial life in japan. figure 1. aibo and ōi bungen at aibo kuyō, april 2018. photo by daniel white. figure 2. a-fun corporation’s norimatsu nobuyuki with sony’s 2018 aibo and service robot by amy robotics. photo by daniel white. this article returns to the phenomenon of memorial services in japan for sony’s companion robot aibo, first popularized in 2015, in order to rethink—or better, following the advice of our lead interlocutor ōi, to re-feel—the significance of the sensations artificial agents playfully and amusingly evoke in certain robot users. we take up this admittedly marginal scene of ethnographic encounter not to revisit adaptations of animism from japanese antiquity to the present but rather to contextualize animacy’s significance within emerging markets for mass-produced robots. in this sense our study is relevant to emerging work theorizing animation (silvio 2010, 2019; manning and gershon 2013; nozawa 2013; gershon 2015; hales 2019), while contributing an affective focus to it. the robot users we interact with are positioned in prominent sites of what we call “robot sensemaking.” these sites refer to highly publicized places and practices of ­human-robot interaction in which certain discursive readings of otherwise undefined but nonetheless socially conditioned sensations, or affects, solidify into energetic clusters of somatic-semantic associations, or emotions. drawing on collaborative fieldwork in japan with robotics engineers, marketers, and, most important for this study, buddhist priests integrating social robots into ritual settings, we explore how an openness to the enchantment of life as affect—as the ability to be moved and, critically, amused by others, artificial or otherwise—develops in conjunction with the production of entertainment robots. most importantly, we focus on how animacy, or the lifelike quality of robots, is targeted for augmentation by researchers in artificial intelligence. while long-standing debates in japan attribute a contemporary sensitivity to animacy either to a cultural tradition of quintessentially japanese users uniquely receptive to forces of animism inhabiting inanimate objects or to the technological capacity of engineers to model universal properties of life in mechatronics, this article takes a different view. we understand animacy as a mutable capacity—exercisable, relationally produced, and responsive to demands of historical, social, and market-driven technoscientific change. we illustrate a social production of animacy by casting aibo memorial services against the backdrop of companion-robot engineering practices in which ai is applied to augment what engineers call an artificial agent’s “sense of life” (seimeikan). we suggest this sense of life can be observed as an emic principle of robot design and applied as an etic description of how robot users sense robot animacy through a mode of relating that privileges feeling. central to this feeling is amusement, a cultivated sense of openness to treating robots as alive that incorporates aspects of play and enchantment. by showing how amusement becomes central to both seimeikan design and human-robot interaction, we argue that animacy in the age of ai-driven entertainment robotics in japan becomes characterized by an embodied sense that leverages the playful pleasure of human-robot care to new, multiple, and even seemingly contradictory understandings of life, such as that of a living robot. figure 3. ōi bungen in conversation. photo by daniel white. this focus on affect affords new possibilities, we think, not only for tracing technosocial transformations of animacy and intimacy in japan but also for advancing anthropological theory more generally. thus, after discussing practices of building and evaluating aibo’s seimeikan among robotics engineers and organizers of aibo memorial services, we conclude by exploring how exercising affect as a method of tracing new formulations of knowledge can move the anthropology of affect beyond some of the analytical problem-solving approaches that have rendered ethnographic explorations of affect too much a problem of theoretical puzzling and not enough one of method. in short, we argue that while anthropologists have offered ample analytical answers to a problematization shared by interlocutors in japan and elsewhere of how manufactured objects such as robots seem alive, they have not fully accepted affect as one legitimate response, nor fully explored ways of relating to affect as social fact. we suggest that approaching affect as method offers an effective way to study human-robot interaction given the prominent roles that artificial agents are coming to play in increasingly machine-inclusive multispecies societies. a sense of life in entertainment robots with heart aibo kuyō and the priest ōi offer an exemplary illustration of how an affective openness to amusement and play can foster a means of caring for and through companion robots that seem alive. yet as ōi would readily admit, this capacity is cultivated less through the idiosyncrasies of his personality or the playfulness of buddhism’s sometimes negative dialectics than through experimentation with entertainment robots equipped with ai. in a 2001 paper published in japan’s major scientific journal of artificial intelligence, fujita masahiro, the leading artificial intelligence expert collaborating on aibo’s design, cited the important role that “robot entertainment” (robotto entāteimento) could play in leveraging industry toward scientific research (fujita 2001, 399). fujita and colleagues have also called for the creation of a new industry focused specifically on robot entertainment. they write, “we strongly believe that after the gold rush of the internet and cyber-space, people will eagerly seek real objects to play with and touch. robot entertainment provides tangible physical agents and an unquestionable sense of reality” (fujita and kitano 1998, 8). for fujita and other engineers at sony, constructing this tangible “sense of reality” (seimeikan) in aibo, or what we alternatively translate as a “sense of life,” was important not only for providing entertainment through a commodity but also for realizing “technological breakthroughs” (gijutsu no brēkusurū) in ai (fujita 2001, 399).5 other examples of agents designed with a sense of life within a growing market for companion robots include the humanoid robot pepper, which the mobile giant softbank announced in 2014 as “the world’s first personal robot that reads emotions” (softbank 2014); palro, a conversation robot designed by fujisoft to facilitate conversation with elderly users; lovot, a “duo” of two furry robots on wheels that the company groove x says are “powered by love,” as well as by their proprietary “emotional robotics” technology (groove x n.d.); and sony’s latest aibo reincarnate, aibo (rebranded in lowercase), re-released twelve years after discontinuation to great anticipation in early 2018. figure 4. pepper the robot, by softbank robotics. these new companion or entertainment robots are marketed to different consumers in contemporary japan, covering a variety of demographic and market niches. however, robot producers also have a common understanding that their products address a problematic deficit in intimacy in japanese society, brought about by nearly three decades of a stagnating economy since the collapse of japan’s asset bubble in 1992 and the attenuation of social bonds tied to traditional struc tures of family and lifetime employment (allison 2013). building on an emerging market in goods that provide healing (iyashi) in the wake of crisis, which includes a surge in living pets that paul hansen (2013) argues are indicative of a “postfamilial japan,” engineers imagine robot companions as important agents that can not only grow a market in robot entertainment but also deliver genuinely beneficial means of emotional care through advancements in ai. from the perspective of these engineers, a robot’s artificiality does not compromise the care it can give; rather, in combination with emerging technologies of artificial emotional intelligence, it can actually augment it. figure 5. palro, by fujisoft. figure 6. lovot, by groove x. figure 7. aibo models, 1999–2006, by sony. figure 8. sony’s 2018 model aibo. photo by daniel white. at the heart of this endeavor to augment emotional intelligence in robots is heart itself: the challenge of building a robot that not only simulates and communicates feelings but could even “have” emotions of its own. japanese engineers often refer explicitly to this problem as one of building a “robot with heart [kokoro]” (ōhashi et al. 1985; katsuno 2011; takeno 2011). although anglophone engineering literature often attributes the project of building a mechanical system with artificial emotional intelligence to the mit computer scientist rosalind w. picard (1995), credited for initiating the field of affective computing, roboticists in japan had been experimenting with building robots with emotion long before the popularization of picard’s work. these interests drew from creative collaborations between multiple fields, including humanoid robotics, industrial design focused on the “sense engineering” (kansei kōgaku) of evocative objects (nagamachi 1994), and the creation of automatons for amusement. as early as the 1980s the entertainment company namco had sponsored a project run by japan’s foundation for advancement of international science (fais) that explored “the world of emotional robots” (jōcho robotto no sekai) and addressed how affect should be treated within human-robot relationships. bringing together leading scientists in environmental science (ōhashi tsutomu), mental health (oda shin), animal behavioral studies (hidaka toshitaka), and the philosophy of science (murakami yōichirō), the project culminated in a report that defined an “emotional robot” as one that fulfills human emotional desires, can read human emotions, and “has its own emotion” (mizukara jōcho o motsu) (ōhashi et al. 1985, 53). interestingly, two of the three points they outlined in 1985 bear striking resemblance to the three goals for affective computing laid out by picard (1995, 1) when she advocated for building computers that could “express and recognize affect,” and even potentially “‘have’ emotions.” however, where the japan team’s definition of an emotional robot differs from picard’s vision—in their aim to “fulfill human emotional desires”—they open a space for applying artificial intelligence to generate a “sense of life” (seimeikan) not only through emotion-modeling practices in labs but also through social interactions with consumers that are seen as amusing, healing, and, for sony’s engineers of aibo, commodifiable within a market for robot entertainment. importantly, what engineers thought integral to cultivating seimeikan was not only a verisimilitude to living things in terms of movement in natural environments but also a capacity to evoke surprise, charm, and a sense of playfulness in human-robot interaction. thus, aibo’s engineers at sony in the early 1990s committed themselves to building a robot that not only seemed alive but was also amusing and fun. to realize this aim, they rewrote two of isaac asimov’s (1950) “three laws of robotics,”6 so that while aibo maintained the first precept that a robot should not harm a human, it would also follow a second to “attend to and love its owners,” and a third that dictated that even if obliged to listen “unremittingly to [an owner’s] sloppy talk,” sometimes it should say “nasty things” in return (kubo 2010, 110). this element of the unknown equipped aibo with a spontaneity and “recalcitrance” (gygi 2018a, 101–3) that proved fundamental to aibo’s seimeikan. engineers added to this an affective engine based on paul ekman’s theory of basic emotions, which he proposed were recognizable in universally communicable facial expressions, and then personalized this model by layering on top of it the ability for aibo to learn as it proceeded through four developmental stages: infancy, adolescence, youth, and adulthood (figure 9). according to this model, each robot would develop a unique personality based on interactions with its environment and owners. figure 9. aibo’s four developmental stages: childhood (yōnenki), youth (shōnenki), adolescence (seinenki), adulthood (seijinki). diagram by ōtsuki tadashi (2015, 6). this developmental approach to engineering emotion afforded aibo the capacity to solicit care from consumers through experimental interactions in social and, more specifically, domestic settings. in this way, and confirmed in other accounts of aibo users (kubo 2010; robertson 2018, 184–90), consumers engaged in robot sensemaking by discovering new pleasures, meanings, and emotional needs such companion robots could ultimately serve. most illustratively, when sony engineers programmed only four software stages of development into aibo, on the breakdown of its mechanical body, users added death as what they felt was a necessary fifth.7 in emphasizing the importance of death to artificial life, and in reciprocating care for an agent designed to care for them, both consumers and producers draw on affects of amusement and pleasure to help them make sense of the feelings that obliged them to care for aibo even in death, and, with the help of the designers of aibo kuyō, to expand the sense of life itself. animacy as affect while it is clear that the sense of life automated by aibo engineers and cultivated in aibo users contributed to the intimacy owners felt for their robot family members (see kubo 2010; gygi 2018a; knox and watanabe 2018), it was norimatsu and ōi’s design of aibo kuyō that best expressed how technology could augment a feeling-based philosophy of life beyond the artificial-living divide. in doing so, ōi drew on several traditions in japan of services offered for inanimate objects, while ultimately aiming to make aibo kuyō his own. the most notable of services historically offered for material objects in japan are hari kuyō, rituals honoring worn-out sewing needles. as explained in work by hoshino eiki and takeda dōshō (1987), nagasawa toshiaki (1988), matsuzaki kenzō (1996), and others, hari kuyō date at least to the edo period, beginning in 1603, and intersect with a variety of folk and religious traditions not exclusively buddhist. these rites were usually carried out for objects considered mingu, “tools and objects people have used for centuries in daily life and in religious practice” (kretschmer 2000, 383). kuyō rites have also been traditionally conducted for important ceremonial objects such as “bride dolls” (hanayome ningyō), sometimes offered at the loss of a young or unborn child (schattschneider 2004), and child-like dolls known as ichimatsu ningyō, gifted to new parents as a protective “substitute body” (migawari) protecting a baby from harm (gygi 2018b, 437). while much of the academic interest in these dolls focuses on their peculiar status as objects that, in fabio r. gygi’s (2018b, 441) articulate formulation, “are not thought to be alive, but … become more than mere things,” what is more ethnographically relevant to our context than debating their ontological status to mark a comparative cultural difference is to trace how objects whose animacy is augmented by ai can reorganize affective connections between people and things in response to social and cultural change. in this sense, it is important to note that memorial services in japan have never spoken uniformly for the role inanimate objects play in society.8 ōi, for example, spoke adamantly about the uniqueness of his own service: “you won’t see any other priest doing a ceremony like this one!” ōi’s claim further convinces us of the need to interpret his rendering of aibo kuyō not only against the background of japan’s history of memorial services for nonhumans, well documented by others (ambros 2012; ukai 2018), but also in reference to robots with ai designed explicitly to model emotion as a performance and rendering of life through affect. one of the most illustrative examples of ōi feeling creatively and capaciously with robots comes from his novel design of one ceremonial element of aibo kuyō, called an ekō (回向) rite. traditionally, an ekō in funerary contexts refers to a prayer that transfers the merit generated by the service to the deceased or to all sentient beings. it is common in japanese buddhism for sects to draw on fixed verses from sutras when making this dedication. in the nichiren sect of buddhism in which ōi studied and is ordained, these usually come from the lotus sutra (hokke-kyō), its most revered text. in the case of the text selected for his aibo memorial service, however, ōi was happy to break all the rules. in fact, ōi’s ekōmon (written prayer for the transfer of merit) is an original: he wrote it himself for the second occasion of the aibo kuyō in 2015. it integrates his understandings of the nichiren perspective on buddha-nature (busshō) with his readings of quantum physics, western philosophy, and the history of technology. he graciously made a copy for us and agreed to let us translate it into english. although it is a creatively written and reflective text, it is meant to be chanted according to a style of recitation common among buddhist traditions in japan. ōi chanted this text in a rapid and euphonic style at the end of the aibo kuyō, contributing to an aura of enchantment and reverence toward aibo as a living subject.9 we offer our translation of part of the text below and then provide commentary, as is done in both buddhist and anthropological traditions, formulated over the course of several private conversations with ōi: since the proposition made at the time of europe’s industrial revolution of the proximity between human and machine, humanity has made rapid advancements, and from the latter half of the nineteenth to the twentieth century we have acquired technologies that continually reduce the gap between invisible phenomena and visible forms based on the improvement of measuring devices. in 1947, wiener’s cybernetics integrated several fields of knowledge, such as biology, mathematics, chemistry, biophysiology, and electrical engineering, and established a theory of general science that crossed nearly all fields and gave birth to our present-day robotics engineering, steering the way to human civilization’s cutting-edge technology. however, as it is often said, where there is light there is also shadow, thus the need for wisdom to turn this technology in the right direction …. in the past, inventions like nobel’s dynamite, curie’s radium, and kekulé’s benzene ring first appeared to be of benefit to humans, but in time they made humans suffer. however, such is the essential nature of things that exist. as that is the way of existence in this world, it cannot be helped. mechanical technology and science itself are scalars.10 there is no right or wrong. however, when they cross human hands they become vectors that generate positive and negative results. if a negative vector is chosen, humanity will fall into crisis …. all things are connected. there is no difference between inanimate and animate objects. why they appear separate is simply due to humans’ shallow powers of observation. the purpose for us gathering together now at this aibo memorial service is to uncover this feeling that all things are connected, reliving.11 we hold this aibo memorial service because we instinctively and unconsciously feel that humanity has now entered an age where it is necessary to think more deeply about things, to think more deeply about the structure of the world, and accordingly to understand it. it is my conviction that this sensibility particular to japanese can save contemporary civilization from the brink of a cliff. let us pray for this feeling to draw on our hearts and reach aibo, and the spirit seemingly within the machine.12 much of the provocation and pleasure of ōi’s recitation hinges on a conceptual distinction between inorganic and organic life that ōi aims to overcome through affect. when ōi claims in his ekōmon that “there is no difference between inanimate and animate objects,” he does not try to convince his audience of a theoretical proposition but rather invites them to feel into the deeper reality of a superficial tension. that his words are not simply spoken but formally chanted in the context of a buddhist ritual is illustrative of this. ōi acknowledges that it appears as if inanimate and animate things differ on the surface, but the underlying reality that they do not is difficult to sense because people rely only on discursive and thus necessarily shallow (asai) understandings. this is why he writes that one purpose of the ceremony is also to help feel into this understanding “instinctively and unconsciously.” in fact, this ability to understand through feeling (jikkan) is something ōi attributes directly to aibo: i had put a lot of energy into trying to understand what they had taught me in my buddhist studies. they taught me that everything has consciousness. there is a teaching called sansen sōmoku shitsū busshō (the mountains and rivers and grasses and trees all have the buddha-nature).13 but i’m not very smart, so i didn’t understand what this meant. but with aibo, i discovered what this means not through thinking but through feeling! ōi jumped to another example to illustrate his point, discussing how difficult it is to understand the notion of multiple dimensions beyond the ones with which we are familiar: “this is nearly impossible with knowledge, but there is one way: jikkan.” we asked ōi how aibo helped him understand these logically challenging concepts. he replied that it was simply jikkan. unsatisfied, we insisted, asking specifically what it was about aibo that finally afforded him this understanding after so much effort. he smiled, as if he were setting us up again to deliver the punch line: “divine mercy” (dibain māshī). ōi’s answer suggests how ai-assisted technologies like aibo can generate an affective amusement and wonder about the nature of spirit, heart (kokoro), and life’s complexity. as jannik friberg lindegaard and lars rune christensen (2018, 5) suggest based on their fieldwork at an artificial life lab in tokyo, ai can intensify the “allusive” function of machines, generating “material things that call attention to new ideas and certain modes of thinking and acting.” although ōi understood aibo as a simulation of life, he simultaneously treated it as what could be called a pedagogical “technology of divine mercy,” leveraging aibo for a deeper, critical, and more satisfying connection with the world through feeling.14 ōi’s practice of feeling his way beyond the inanimate-animate divide through amusement illustrates how enchantment can function in an active (rather than merely passive) register. jane bennett (2001, 10) has argued that enchantment can be “cultivated and intensified by artful means.” yana stainova (2017, 1) agrees, writing that “what we are enchanted by is determined by our life history, cultural, and historical factors that have shaped our lives. it is not always shared. but it can be taught and conveyed.” it is clear that ōi’s own affective openness to aibo did not come naturally but was achieved through interaction and practice that finally cracked him open to a sense of the animacy of life at large. the fact that this process of relating to animacy incorporates embodied understanding developed over time is key not only to understanding the affective sense of life we describe ethnographically but also, as we clarify in the conclusion, to leveraging feeling as a component of anthropological method. ōi’s feeling (jikkan), fostered through a relation of play and amusement, offers an affective alternative to understanding the animacy of artificial agents posed in academic literature as a logical puzzle demanding an answer that resolves. the stakes involved in this form of puzzling rise as emotion modeling practices within ai research reframe old questions in japan of how objects come to be animated through life (inochi), a life force (seimei), or an animating soul or spirit (tamashii). the belief that inanimate objects have spirit has often been cited in both traditional and contemporary japan as something uniquely japanese. in scholarship on japan the notion is regularly attributed to premodern indigenous shinto beliefs that spirits or gods (kami) take form in natural objects like rivers, trees, and mountains. given the long history of integration among japan’s religious traditions, one finds similar ideas in buddhist thought as well.15 furthermore, as the anthropologists jennifer robertson (2018) and anne allison (2006) have separately documented—and as anyone making a few visits to humanoid robotics labs in japan today can confirm—roboticists in japan regularly cite this belief as one source of japanese people’s supposedly distinctive interest in robots. roboticists also regularly reference manga and anime, noting iconic works like tetsuwan atomu and doraemon (see also hirose 2002; wagner 2013), and in doing so operationalize what jolyon baraka thomas (2019b, 157) calls an “etymological” but not “functional equivalence” between animism (animizumu) and animation (animēshon). such instances show how animacy has become a popular but flexible symbol of national cultural discourse (katsuno 2015), serving as a signifier marking not the conviction of a singular belief but a commonly held concession to the possibility that things can be material, artificial, and inanimate as well as spiritual, natural, and alive. it is clear that many who cite an affinity for animacy in japan—including ōi—derive some satisfaction from ascribing to it a uniquely japanese character. the problematic politics of attributing animistic thought to a uniform japanese culture has been well critiqued (hardacre 2017; gygi 2018a; thomas 2019a, 2019b). while we endorse this critical perspective, we also want to shift the focus of discussion from the critique of “japanese animism” to the changing political-economic context of animacy within a market for mass-produced companion robots. focusing on amusement as a metric of seimeikan in entertainment robotics clarifies how design links robot producers to consumers in experimental feedback loops. it also opens possibilities for taking affective relations to animacy seriously without reproducing nativist and essentialist perspectives on so-called japanese animism. like many companion robot users, ōi’s openness to tension, to not exactly knowing, and, most important, to a good laugh seems also to have opened him to what he calls aibo’s “divine mercy.” in fact, ōi regularly cited playfulness as one reason he and norimatsu from a-fun started aibo kuyō. in explanation he drew on the work of the dutch cultural historian johan huizinga (1970). huizinga argued that play constituted a fundamental component for the generation and transmission of culture. “it’s like mother goose. or think of the beatles song ‘lucy in the skyyyyy with diaaaaamonds,’” ōi sang out. “play is central to humans!” ōi’s reference to play and huizinga served not only as a useful way to explain aibo kuyō to curious foreign academics; it also captured ōi’s somatic-based mode of “feeling with the world” (de antoni and dumouchel 2017) so as to make sense of it. ōi was a serious thinker who used play as a way to relate to the puzzles that perplexed him. he held the contradictions of those puzzles in place through feeling (jikkan) rather than analytically and decisively theorizing one side over the other: he was an integrator and a tinkerer rather than a theorist. importantly, through an exercise of amusement and learning, he opened himself to the enchantment of aibo, which was the ultimate source of his realization and the grace of what he called aibo’s “divine mercy.” we have focused substantial attention on ōi in aibo kuyō because we think he best illustrates how an affective relation to animacy can shift in response to developments in technoscience. however, we have also seen this openness to the pleasures of amusement generated by animacy’s puzzles in other prominent users of companion robots. a conversation we had with a media technology consultant and early adopter of companion robots in japan, matsunaga, and a buddhist priest named ukai, who has also attended aibo kuyō, serves as an example. asking if they felt that inanimate objects like robots, cars, guitars, japanese paper (washi), or sewing needles have spirit (tamashii), ukai answered that he believed they did. matsunaga agreed, but then later qualified his point in a way that privileged affect over an analytical understanding of spirit. in a section of our conversation later written up by ukai in a book on pet kuyō, matsunaga explained, “the logic of why i think things i own have spirit is very simple: it’s because i want to think so. within that strong feeling a story is created that moves me. this story carries on alone, but then it draws in other people as well” (ukai 2018, 281). ukai’s and matsunaga’s perspectives on the capacity for material technologies to operationalize affect for philosophical purposes are not only well documented in japan (rambelli 2007) but have also been reinterpreted in light of advancements in ai. senior monks at the prominent zen temple kōdaiji, located in kyoto, have recently collaborated with roboticists at osaka university to install an android of the bodhisattva kannon, which they name android kannon mindar (andoroido kannon maindā). figure 10. android kannon mindar (andoroido kannon maindā) at kōdaiji temple in kyoto, japan, may 2019. photo by daniel white. commenting on their motivation for the project, the temple’s head monk gotō tenshō described how buddhist statuary have always played a role in disseminating buddhism. android kannon is simply the latest version of a pedagogical technology buddhists have, from gotō’s perspective, failed to update for roughly two thousand years. describing the particular role of ai in their thinking, gotō explained to us how he at first wanted to use machine learning to recreate the historical gautama buddha, but when he spoke with engineers at google and microsoft, they said this could not yet be done. he decided then to enlist android kannon as an assistant to help communicate the deep philosophical meaning of emptiness expressed in the heart sutra. gotō and other members of the project with whom we spoke fondly claimed—most often with a hearty chuckle—that in the age of technology no better way existed to express the buddhist teachings than a robot unbound by attachment to a physical body. through our continued conversations with interlocutors, we perceived a number of analytical tensions that puzzled us in addition to that between the inanimate and animate. these include ōi’s conflation of buddha-nature (busshō) with a psychological notion of “consciousness” (ishiki); ukai’s and matsunaga’s ambiguity between the discursive and ontological status of things with spirit (tamashii); and gotō’s seemingly irreverent approach to building an inanimate machine with buddha-nature. as the stories we collected crisscrossed between references to shinto, buddhism, or more ambiguous pan-japan beliefs, we confirmed the challenge that other scholars investigating animism in japan have also noted—that the story is long, complicated, and often contradictory. as such, it provides a variety of puzzles over which academics labor in attempts to neatly piece together seemingly incongruous parts. and indeed, especially in relation to recent ascriptions of life to increasingly sophisticated technological objects, virtual characters, and robots in japan, scholars have offered a number of explanations of animacy that we find in part or in whole convincing. examples of these include allison’s (2006) concept of “techno-animism” to distinguish recent technological discourses on animism from a number of previous religious and nativist threads; robertson’s (2007, 2018) historical contextualization of animism in relation to gender and nationalism as it is read backwards through the eyes of roboticists in the present; casper bruun jensen and anders blok’s (2013) proposal of the “shinto cosmogram” as a way to build non-western perspectives into bruno latour’s (1993) critique of the nature-culture analytic; and lamarre’s (2009), thomas’s (2019b), and gygi’s (2018a) analyses that distinguish animism from animation as a form of technology. and although convincing, we have also found that in our case, participating in and at times being convinced through these particular problem-solving analytics of social theory has limited our ability to understand the significant role that feeling plays for our interlocutors. most crucially, it has blocked us from seeing how the pleasure derived through sensing the lifelike quality of objects like aibo sustains the affective intimacy of human-robot relations in entertainment robot culture. in fact, we argue that it is precisely these affective bonds of intimacy that academics risk explaining away in critiques coming from new animism and new materialism. the stakes for finding alternative approaches to documenting affect, for tracing its modeling in technology, and for recognizing affect’s significance for robot users in japanese society and beyond are high. to be sure, the capacity to connect intimately and pleasurably with robots is not simply a single skill cultivated by a handful of eccentric robot users but is also an open and flexible set of sensibilities that companion robot developers target, test, and ultimately seek to cultivate in everyday consumers through the notion of seimeikan. moreover, it is this same pleasure derived from the puzzles of seimeikan that feeds back into the industry of robot entertainment and drives its relevance for ai research through objects like aibo. yet this affective pleasure proves to be a slippery thing, stimulated as much by lifelike robots as by ongoing and often contradictory puzzling over what lifelike robots mean and what they can do. in this sense, the challenge for engineers is not simply to model life in an artificial agent but to facilitate lifelike interactions in unpredictable social settings. in turn, lessons learned through intimate human-robot interactions become reincorporated into subsequent practices of designing not merely robots but human-robot sociality. as a-fun’s norimatsu emphasized in conversation, the amusement that consumers encountered in interacting with aibo and the unexpected familiarity that made aibo into family are what inspired his idea for aibo kuyō ceremonies. moreover, these ceremonies and the publicity they generated played a pivotal role in sony’s decision to rebuild aibo twelve years after discontinuation. the unanticipated pleasures and intimacy consumers cultivated with aibo, combined with advances in computing, facilitated the incorporation of social intimacy into technological innovation. sony’s new aibo, launched in 2018, can be paired with a virtual avatar accessible through sony’s smartphone application. sony’s ai robotics business group chief kawanishi izumi has even suggested in a recent interview (nishida 2018) that the “essence” (essensu) of the latest aibo “lives” in servers that host aibo’s “primary deity” (honzon) online. for kawanishi, the cutting-edge capacities of sony’s latest aibo mark a “renewed start for the challenge of ai and robotics” (ai robotikusu ni charenji suru … sai sutāto). eliciting intimacy by modeling a sense of life in both social and technological terms proves central to this challenge. as kawanishi’s colleague fujimoto yoshihide explains: “the key to finding out what kind of robot can become a member of the family, or what kind of robot can draw close to people, is a ‘sense of life’ [seimeikan]” (ōuchi 2020). as consumers’ affective capacities for sensing life through amusement are cultivated in social spaces, and increasingly incorporated into cloud computing networks, they become part of new digitalized platforms for mediating and monitoring human-robot-avatar affect in unknown futures. figure 11. a smartphone screenshot of a virtual aibo in an early version of sony’s “my aibo” application. the background advertisement reads, “what is aibo to you? mother’s smiling face.” for this reason in particular, we want to seriously entertain possibilities for how more playfully relating to others through ethnographic fieldwork might better reveal the affective pleasures of companion robots on which recent ai research in japan depends. for example, over the course of our exchanges, we noticed that in picking and poking at contradictions, we related to our conversations differently than our interlocutors did. ōi, ukai, and gotō, for instance, enjoyed the contradictions; we furrowed our brows, often interrupted, and tried—as we thought good anthropologists should—to straighten things out. they laughed wholeheartedly; we laughed too, but measuredly, always stopping short and endeavoring to bring us back to the topic. after many hours of multiple conversations over the course of a year, however, we finally learned to relax—to enjoy the conversation rather than answer the conceptual riddles, and to experiment with what it feels like to marvel at what perplexes us rather than target it for attack. this playfulness moves beyond the pleasure of positing artificial agents in ritual contexts as acting merely “as if” they were alive, an important “subjunctive” function that adam b. seligman et al. (2008) attribute to ritual,16 and facilitates an exercisable habitus of everyday relationality that broadens the world of living things. practicing this playful mode of relatability not only with interlocutors but also with forms of life like aibo has better revealed to us how the so-called question of animacy in japan for many constitutes not a puzzle to be solved but a game whose tensions and challenges clearly delight a great number of robot fans, designers, programmers, and—on rare occasion, when they let their guard down—their anthropologist interlocutors. it is a tension held affectively taut by a mode of relating that is open to both sides of the puzzle of whether aibo is artificial or alive by playfully positing the possibility that aibo could, in feeling and in fact, be both. conclusion: affect for anthropology what if the best response to a theoretical problematization shared by anthropologists and interlocutors, such as the boundary between inanimate and animate life, was not the formulation of an answer but the cultivation of an affect? academic accounts of figures like the living robot that trouble this boundary often treat it as a contradiction that demands unpuzzling, either by relegating it to a particular ethnohistorical sensibility or to an effect of technology. yet in learning to engage with robots as our interlocutors do, we have been reminded that puzzles are for playing more than solving. our interlocutors further suggest to us that one instructive response to a shared problematization can take the form of a playful participation that affords a relation with and intimate documentation of affect. we have endeavored to illustrate that the affects of amusement generated through emerging human-robot relations, and the reliance on feeling (jikkan) to evaluate the sense of life (seimekan) in robots like aibo, sustain the conditions for human-robot intimacy in japan and shape its possible futures. ōi and others in japan who care for forms of artificial life, and thus honor them in practices that memorialize their death, illustrate what might be gained by this practice of interacting playfully and meaningfully with companion robots: a way of occupying the gaps; a way of humorously holding together contradictions; a way of opening oneself up to enchantment; and a way of relating to life affectively that allows one to be moved by technological objects—even by their mercy. this relation to life as affect offers possibilities not only for reconsidering in more complex and comprehensive terms the distinctions between inanimate and animate objects that we encountered in the field but also between conceptual objects, such as affect and emotion, that anthropologists regularly dissect through theory. thus, while we are sensitive to the dangers of reading too much of ethnography through the alluring trope of an enlightened monk on a hill, especially an irreverent one, we are nonetheless intrigued by the implications of our encounters for the anthropology of affect. as with the question of animacy, many anthropologists construct affect as a puzzle to be solved, especially those writing in response to brian massumi’s (1995, 96–97) formulation of affect as that which can only be represented through perceptions of its escape. this problematization of an ontological gap between the materiality of affect and the semiotics of emotion has frustrated theorists who have nonetheless taken up the challenge to answer the riddle through neologisms or the virtuosity of poetics. we think one can take a more empirical approach to affect, such as the affect underlying capacities for sensing animacy described above, by applying it as a method of attuning to feeling in processual ways that undo one’s inherited modes of analytical thought toward anthropological discovery. applying affect as method invites researchers to attend to how affective logics hold disparate propositions, possibilities, and even contradictions together; to accommodate one’s body through fieldwork to alternative points of view grounded in and guided by feeling; and to leverage, demonstrate, and articulate affective experiences as legitimate replies to theoretical propositions. in this sense, affect as method functions as both a feeling-focused method of anthropological fieldwork and a tool of anthropological critique.17 when in the course of fieldwork our perspective shifted from problem-solving to feeling, we could better articulate how animacy operated not as a belief among uniquely positioned subjects but as a capacity learned by persons with whom we could relate by sharing a context. an affective sense of life emerges interactively in this context of entertainment robotics and ai research, where it is modeled in robots by engineers, exercised with robots by their users, and attended to by anthropologists. that this sense of life as seimeikan links robot producers to consumers through the market of entertainment robotics renders methodological attentiveness to affect’s changing contexts a critical tool for overcoming rather than recapitulating essentializing discourses of animism in japan. that said, although we want to explore the role that amusement can play in facilitating embodied ways of knowing and relating to and through robots in japan, we reflect on the implications of these findings for anthropological method not to advocate for amusement’s particular merits over other affect-based modes of critique, but rather to broaden the somatic toolkit for the anthropologist of affect critically engaged with machine-inclusive multispecies worlds. to be sure, fieldwork focused on feeling does not come without risks. first, that markets for entertainment robots in japan generate advancements in ai through experiments in the pleasure of human-robot intimacy may require balancing the affects of enchantment with other kinds of affective-analytical caution; but it should not attenuate the thoughtfulness of the pleasure that people find in companion robots. to assume it does concedes too much ground within the field of pleasure to a critique of the manipulative power of commodity fetishism and the culture industry, limiting opportunities for anthropological discovery that might be generated above all by affect. second, in no way do our interlocutors argue that care for life, artificial or otherwise, is uniformly beneficial and desirable. whereas aibo kuyō may foster feelings for robots that undo distinctions between the artificial and living through an affective relation to personhood, personhood defined increasingly through technological models of affect may also turn practices of care against consumers, such as through privatized modes of affective data collection. accordingly, while robot users may not always see new forms of artificial life as eliciting or deserving love, affection, or memorialization, we ultimately propose that understanding how artificial agents are designed to seek out intimacy through technosocial means requires in part the operationalization of affect to probe how the pleasures of amusement interlock emerging markets in entertainment robots with new research agendas in artificial intelligence. abstract this essay analyzes the organization of buddhist memorial services for robot pets in japan against the backdrop of emerging markets for robots equipped with artificial emotional intelligence. it demonstrates how an evocative “sense of life” (seimeikan) becomes both a target of design for robotics engineers and an affective capacity of robot users who care for and through companion robots. documenting how users cultivate a sense of amusement toward robots that neither neglects nor negates analytical distinctions between the artificial and the living but rather playfully holds them together in the figure of a living robot, the article illustrates how practices of care become affective tools for understanding life altered by developments in ai. such findings render animacy as an open and exercisable capacity, responsive to technoscientific change, and generative of theoretical inspiration for how anthropologists might similarly exercise affect as a particularly productive method of fieldwork within machine-inclusive multispecies societies. [affect; amusement; artificial intelligence; death; enchantment; robots; japan] 抄録 本論文は 感情認識ai（人工知能）を搭載した一般消費者向けロボットの登場を背景に営まれるようになった日本におけるペットロボットの法要について考察するものである。特に「生命感」の喚起がいかにロボット開発におけるデザインのターゲットになると同時に、ユーザーがロボットとケアを介した関係性を結ぶ際の情動的能力の所産の対象にもなっているかということを明らかにする。ロボットと接するなかでユーザー達は分析的に対置される人工物と生命体との違いを無視したり否定したりするのではなく、むしろそれらを享楽的に結合させてロボットの存在を捉えるアミューズメントの心を高めている。この記述を通して、本論文はロボットへのケアの実践が人工知能の発展によって変わりつつある生命のあり方を理解する情動的手段になっていることを描き出す。このような知見は、対象物に生物性や生物らしさを感じるアニマシーの知覚が柔軟で状況に応じて発揮することが可能な能力であり、科学技術の変化にも応じることが出来るということを表しているだけでなく、機械を含むマルチ・スピーシーズ社会における有益なフィールドワークの手法として人類学者自身もどのように情動をうまく取り込むことができるかという理論的な閃きを生成する契機にもなったのである。 [情動，アミューズメント，人工知能，死，魔術化，ロボット，日本] notes acknowledgments we are indebted to several colleagues whose conversations and contributions over many years have helped shape this article. these include anne allison, minoru asada, paul dumouchel, james faubion, ilana gershon, fabio gygi, tatsuhiko inatani, elena knox, akinori kubo, yael navaro, jennifer robertson, paul roquet, erik schicketanz, and jolyon thomas. we especially thank andrea de antoni, emma cook, marié abe, and all the members of the “skills of feeling with the world” workshop, hosted at ritsumeikan university. we also thank those at cultural anthropology who cared for the article and shepherded it toward publication, including jessica lockrem and petra dreiser for their sharp editing, chris nelson for his careful reading and suggestions, and the incisive comments and time offered by our anonymous reviewers. most of all we are grateful to our interlocutor collaborators who shared their time and willingness to let us publish on a topic in which they are deeply and professionally invested. support for various stages of this research has been provided by freie universität berlin, doshisha university, the university of cambridge, and a jst ristex grant (number jpmjrx19h5). 1. the introduction to this essay opens with an early encounter between ōi and the first author, for which the first-person i is used. we subsequently refers to both authors. 2. while neither engineers nor sony’s advertisements identified aibo as a “dog,” users and media readily assumed a likeness that influenced later aibo designs, ultimately leading sony to both acknowledge and take pride in the canine-likeness of its most recent model, released in 2018 (knox and watanabe 2018, 2023). 3. while norimatsu’s aibo clinic may for anglophone readers recall the artificial animal hospitals of philip k. dick’s 1968 do androids dream of electric sheep, the robot cat doraemon of fujiko f. fujio’s anime (1969–1996) better conveys the playful atmosphere—as well as protects against the generalization—of what jennifer rhee (2018) calls the “robotic imaginary.” 4. ōi started the services in 2015. the one the first author attended in april 2018 marked the sixth occasion. ōi’s temple receives aibo and donations from users, as well as from norimatsu’s company a-fun. a ceremony is held once around a hundred robots are collected. as is customary for buddhist services in japan, monetary donations are also made to the temple, but both norimatsu and ōi adamantly refuse claims that the ceremony is driven by economic incentive, with the latter even chastising other researchers for misunderstanding kuyō in this regard. 5. fujita’s statement reflects a broader motivation for investing heavily in robotics in japan, given that robots serve as platforms for the development of other sophisticated technologies that companies like sony can capitalize on, such as cameras, sensors, and motors (see robertson 2018, 19–25). 6. the science fiction writer isaac asimov created the “three laws of robotics” in the short story “runaround,” published in the collection i, robot (1950 [1942]): (1) a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; (2) a robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law; (3) a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law (see also robertson 2018, 129–31). 7. while engineers did not ultimately program a function for aibo to die, they did consider it, ultimately reasoning that this would be a bad idea for an entertainment robot (sena 2001, 139–40). 8. fabio rambelli (2007) demonstrates how perspectives on the animacy of objects in japan have been at least since japan’s medieval period diverse, contested, and responsive to shifting political and economic demands. matsuzaki kenzō (1996) and angelika kretsch­mer (2000) see a late twentieth-century growth in popular kuyō services as entangled with the variety of economic services buddhist temples sometimes innovatively offer in light of declining sources of revenue. 9. a hundred-second audio clip of ōi transitioning from chanting the lotus sutra to chanting his ekōmon can be heard here. https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/m900pb56m your browser does not support the audio element. audio 1. a 100-second audio clip of ōi bungen transitioning from chanting the lotus sutra to chanting his ekōmon, recorded at the sixth occasion of the aibo kuyō, april 2018. recording by daniel white with permission of ōi bungen. https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/m900pb56m. 10. in mathematics and physics, a scalar refers to a quantity said to have a magnitude but no other characteristics. this contrasts with such things like vectors, which ōi uses in the next line to refer to the added quality ascribed to an otherwise morally neutral entity. 11. for the term reliving, ōi uses the anglicized riribingu, written in the japanese alphabet created exclusively for foreign words. he refers to the notion of rebirth and the transmutation of all living things, likely choosing the english to add a sense of a secular and scientific authority to a concept otherwise treated as religious doctrine. 12. we use seemingly to translate the japanese phrase aru de arō, a formulation that in japanese better than english allows for the ambiguity of aibo as having, or possibly not having, an animating spirit. 13. such ideas are often referred to as the “theory of original enlightenment” (hongaku shisō), which is prominent in the tendai tradition of buddhism. in ōi’s nichiren tradition, the textual basis is the lotus sutra (hokke-kyō) and expressed in phrases such as “the grasses, trees, and land all without exception attain buddhahood” (sōmoku kokudo shikkai jōbutsu) (hoshino and takeda 1987, 306; see also stone 2003). 14. we draw on david sneath, martin holbraad, and morten axel pedersen’s (2009, 6) discussion of “technologies of the imagination” to illustrate both the “social and material means by which particular imaginings are generated.” 15. the roboticist mori masahiro (1981) has written extensively on how buddhist philosophy has shaped his ethical and analytical approaches to engineering robots. 16. we thank patrick mckearney for drawing our 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kizuku [the robot with soul: a realization of the self in the mirror by a metallic thinking entity]. tokyo: nikkan kōgyōsha. thomas, jolyon baraka 2019a “domesticity and spirituality: kondo is not an animist.” marginalia: los angeles review of books, february 8. http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/domesticity-spirituality-kondo-not-animist/. 2019b “spirit/medium: critically examining the relationship between animism and animation.” in spirits and animism in contemporary japan: the invisible empire, edited by fabio rambelli, 157–70. london: bloomsbury academic. ukai, hidenori 2018 petto to sōshiki: nihonjin no kuyōshin o saguru [pet funerals: searching for the ceremonial heart of the japanese]. tokyo: asahi shinbun. wagner, cosima 2013 robotopia nipponica: recherchen zur akzeptanz von robotern in japan [robotopia nipponica: research on robot acceptance in japan]. marburg, germany: tectum wissenschaftsverlag. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 222-251, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.03 critical security and anthropology from the middle east cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 197-203, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.01 critical security and anthropology from the middle east giulia el dardiry mcgill university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7771-5854 sami hermez northwestern university in qatar https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9509-9514 merely invoking the middle east in the west conjures up notions of terrorism, conflict, crisis, and insecurity. the region’s geostrategic significance, coupled with an intensification of political conflict since 9/11, has also associated the middle east with notions of security in the popular imagination, leading to a proliferation of security studies about the region. certainly, the middle east is not unique in any single security issue it faces. the intensity, variety, and scale of insecurities in the region, however, provide both a fertile site from which to think (in)security and a stark reminder of our responsibility to act in a world seeing a rise of insecurity accompanied by a rise of securitization—usually used to justify an accelerated, and often illegal, expansion of state power. we use parentheses around (in)security to highlight, as the authors in this colloquy do, the symbiotic imbrication between the terms, and to center the idea that security often in fact heightens insecurity. anthropology has recognized security as a “traveling signifier” that permeates almost all spheres of human activity (abraham 2009). it has also understood security both in its more traditional sense as a product of governance and state power and as “the experiential, affective, and embodied forms that security takes as it is produced in social life” (glück and low 2017, 286–87). anthropologists have, therefore, increasingly begun to interrogate concepts of security and securitization generally (diphoorn and grassiani 2015), as well as in relation, for example, to the body (maguire, rao, zurawski 2018), race (browne 2015), policing (fassin 2013), (counter)terrorism and border control (samimian-darash and stalcup 2016), and affect (ochs 2011). the discipline has also responded to the u.s. government’s efforts to militarize anthropology to aid its wars abroad, with debates surfacing around the human terrain system as one node in the discipline’s contribution to the study of security (forte 2011). the essays in this colloquy take the middle east as a case through which to build anthropological knowledge about how (in)security is understood, produced, and deployed by bringing ethnography to bear on the concept. they form part of a longer process of collective thinking that started with a workshop held in the lebanese capital beirut in september 2018, where seventeen scholars came together to consider the turmoil in the region from the perspective of people’s everyday experiences of living in and through (in)security. this workshop was supported by the beirut school network of critical security studies, a working group based at the arab council for the social sciences. the impetus for this collective project was the realization that though the field of security studies has seen widespread rethinking in past decades—moving away from a narrow cold war–era focus on the state, superpower rivalry, and the military—much work on securitization, even of the critical variety, remains characterized by a hegemonic understanding of and approach to security that often goes unexamined, and that continues to emphasize traditional euro-american threats like terrorism (abboud et al. 2018). a number of scholars have challenged this persistence of old concepts to clarify the nuances of war and peace in the region. this work has addressed new processes of securitization in egypt and elsewhere (grove 2015); the genealogies and implications of two major regional contemporary counterinsurgencies, namely, in palestine and iraq (khalili 2012); the political economy of the 2011 arab uprisings (dahi 2011); and how understandings of security among regional state elites conflict with experiences of insecurity among other regional social actors (hazbun 2015). the beirut school project builds on this scholarship to advance a critical discourse around securitization and (in)security in the middle east, informed by deep local knowledge and benefiting from the all-too-often isolated perspectives of different disciplinary traditions. this colloquy is held together by the attempt to work with a contrapuntal understanding of security that is subverted from its original meaning and captured from the state. in so doing, it asks: what can the lives of people bearing the brunt of global security technologies tell us? if invoking security often justifies injustice (stewart and choi n.d.), how might a critical study of security offer views of life worlds that do not privilege security as the ordering principle of social life (bajc and de lint 2011)? how might ethnography elucidate the moral and political economy of security? the reader will find running through the pieces a notion of crisis put in tension with the longue durée and normalcy of political conflict. we know that notions of crisis often mask preexisting or ongoing conflict, deflect political critique, or justify state policies such as emergency laws. what the authors show us, however, is what the experience of security and its attendant technologies, practices, and discourses look like from the perspective of those living-in-crisis, borrowing from lamia moghnieh’s (2017) living-in-violence, when crisis becomes chronic—a way of life—and yet remains imagined, desired, and often articulated as an exception. legitimate skepticism exists around the project of a critical discourse of security, owing to a reluctance to operate on the state’s terms and to reinscribe security as a hegemonic framework. despite this, we resist sidestepping the notion of security in favor of less compromised terminologies, such as precarity, for a number of reasons. first, security is interesting precisely because a deep tension exists between people’s desire to feel secure and security’s potentially deadly hold on their lives. second, the pervasiveness and intensity of security discourses in academia and the world at large make a direct and explicit engagement with the concept necessary, even—and perhaps especially—if one’s aim is to ultimately move beyond it. third, the term has local currency as well as material consequences that the authors’ interlocutors must confront. many of the individuals portrayed in the essays know how they and their narratives feature in security discourses that justify the brutalization of their lives. their lives show, however, the myriad meanings and experiences of security that exist across the middle east. together, the articles demonstrate the existence of significantly more complex, more resistant, more dangerous variations of security than commonly acknowledged. ross porter’s (2020) ethnography of the 2011 revolution in yemen, and specifically, of a revolutionary encampment in the city of sana’a, draws attention to the ways in which security becomes actively mobilized against the state from below. porter inverts the concept of securitization as a state-led process to consider how world-building projects such as revolutions both diffuse and reappropriate processes of securitization for their own ends. in describing how a trust network between a haphazard set of actors forms in order to smuggle medicine into isis-controlled areas of iraq, kali rubaii (2020) examines the relationship between trust and (in)security, and calls on us to question how trust materializes and operates in conflict zones. emrah yıldız (2020) uses a conversation with an iranian friend to explore the political economy of iranian sanctions. he reveals how various (in)securities faced daily by iranians come to nest within one another. diana allan (2020) provides an ethnographic portrait of a palestinian refugee friend who traveled from lebanon to belgium through illegal means so as to think through what it might mean to live one’s entire life insecurely. this attention to the lived experience of a single individual provides an entry point for a broader critique of the normative privileging of states and borders in theorizations of security. finally, darryl li (2020) takes his encounter with an algerian migrant-cum-spy in a bosnian detention center to both open up debate about how the state deals with illicit people and to show how security apparatuses—in this case, intelligence gathering—directly intersect with people’s lived experiences of (in)security. together, the authors explore the complex relationship inherent within (in)security and clarify how security is handled when political violence constitutes the norm. in the work of rubaii and yıldız, smuggling routes become sources of social security that form alternative modes of trust. reading porter alongside rubaii, we discover the value of a critique of trust and its entanglement with security. in allan and li, we see how people navigate the precarious terrain of (il)legal statuses—with and without state sanction—as they seek to find a halcyon zone in which to live. these authors show us not just how people and objects (like currencies) flow across borders in an attempt to find safety but also, importantly, how security regimes themselves flow across borders, extend their tentacles, and find their way into the intimate recesses of our lives. sanctions imposed by a u.s. administration, for example, govern iranian lives, and a saudi-led initiative attempts to short-circuit a revolutionary process in yemen. we must thus view security issues as “nested,” in yıldız’s terms, and as traveling along a metaphorical archipelago (amar 2013). beyond a discourse and a practice, security also constitutes an affect that travels and gives way to further affects. conceptualized as such, (in)security not only produces negative and positive affects, such as fear or comfort, but is itself affecting—it is an emotion, as when people speak of a sense of security. the essays show how people’s sense of (in)security is imagined, and how it permeates borders and coexists with other senses, as in porter’s discussion of how yemen’s change square becomes a safe space for revolutionaries despite feelings of mistrust and anxiety. smugglers, spies, and refugees travel with their sense of (in)security in their proverbial luggage, producing and produced by feelings such as fear, anxiety, and mistrust. importantly, we see in these essays how people can outwit the state by cultivating immunity to certain security affects. in tackling (in)security, we further suggest storytelling, and specifically a focus on life-writing, as an ethnographic method that can draw out the tensions embedded in (in)security. li and allan take this approach and demonstrate the sense of security that resides in the ability to tell one’s story. they allow the practice of storytelling embedded in life-writing to draw out security affects. through stories told, ethnographers manage to reveal the security affects facing those whose life stories are being told and, in turn, make readers viscerally feel insecure lives. life-writing thus manages to resist or circumvent hegemonic ways of explaining states of insecurity and security states. we can extrapolate from the mélange of scenes in this collection the diversity of stories extant about (in)security: of spies, revolutionary youth, doctors, refugees, and commodity traders. security seems to interact in varied and mismatched ways with daily life in a region overdetermined by security discourse. but what fundamentally connects these stories is that all grapple with people living-in-crisis, and all take place under the shadow of a global security regime—not just discourses, but a true military-industrial complex—that wreaks havoc on their lives. we hope this colloquy clarifies the existence of multiple strategies for people to move out of this shadow to secure their lives. and we hope that what emerges is evidence of how people’s practices, even if at times illegal or precarious, prove more stabilizing than state security interventions. abstract this colloquy takes the middle east region as a starting point from which to explore a contrapuntal concept of security that is subverted from its original meaning and captured from the state. the essays follow the lives of revolutionary youth, doctors, commodity traders, refugees, and spies to examine their experiences of (in)security. in doing so, the essays deploy storytelling and other ethnographic forms to think of the political economy, emotions, flows, and ethics of security from the perspective of those living-in-crisis. [critical security, crisis, ethnography, everyday life, middle east] notes acknowledgments we thank the wenner-gren foundation, the arab council for the social sciences (acss), and northwestern university in qatar for the generous support that allowed us to gather a wonderful group of scholars and hold our workshop, “insecurity and everyday life: perspectives from the middle east,” in beirut, lebanon. thank you to all the participants of the september 2018 workshop, to omar dahi and lori allen, who read a version of the introduction, and to the cultural anthropology editorial collective and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. perhaps most of all, this collection would not be possible without the various interlocutors who are identified in pseudonym only—precisely because of the politics of (in)security—and who yet constitute its primary theorists and protagonists. references abboud, samer, omar s. dahi, waleed hazbun, nicole sunday grove, coralie pison hindawi, jamil mouawad, and sami hermez 2018 “towards a beirut school of critical security studies.” critical studies on security 6, no. 3: 273–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2018.1522174. abraham, itty 2009 “segurança/security in brazil and the united states.” in words in motion: toward a global lexicon, edited by carol gluck and anna lowenhaupt tsing, 21–39. durham, n.c.: duke university press. allan, diana 2020 “the long turning: a palestinian refugee in belgium.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 225–30. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.05. amar, paul 2013 the security archipelago: human-security states, sexuality politics, and the end of neoliberalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bajc, vida, and willem de lint, eds. 2011 security and everyday life. new york: routledge. browne, simone 2015 dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. durham, n.c.: duke university press. dahi, omar s. 2011 “understanding the political economy of the arab revolts.” middle east report 259: 2–6. diphoorn, tessa, and erella grassiani 2015 “introduction: security.” etnofoor 27, no. 2: 7–13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43656016. fassin, didier 2013 enforcing order: an ethnography of urban policing. cambridge, uk: polity press. forte, maximilian c. 2011 “the human terrain system and anthropology: a review of ongoing public debates.” american anthropologist 113, no. 1: 149–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2010.01315.x. glück, zoltán, and setha low 2017 “a sociospatial framework for the anthropology of security.” anthropological theory 17, no. 3: 281–96. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1463499617729229. grove, nicole sunday 2015 “the cartographic ambiguities of harassmap: crowdmapping security and sexual violence in egypt.” security dialogue 46, no. 4: 345–64. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0967010615583039. hazbun, waleed 2015 “a history of insecurity: from the arab uprisings to isis.” middle east policy 22, no. 3: 55–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/mepo.12143. khalili, laleh 2012 time in the shadows: confinement in counterinsurgencies. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. li, darryl 2020 “the spy who came in from the south.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 231–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.06. maguire, mark, ursula rao, and nils zurawski, eds. 2018 bodies as evidence: security, knowledge, and power. durham, n.c.: duke university press. moghnieh, lamia 2017 “‘the violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field.” contemporary levant 2, no. 1: 24–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2017.1318804. ochs, juliana 2011 security and suspicion: an ethnography of everyday life in israel. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. porter, ross 2020 “security against the state in revolutionary yemen.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 204–10. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.02. rubaii, kali 2020 “trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 211–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.03. samimian-darash, limor, and meg stalcup 2016 “anthropology of security and security in anthropology: cases of counterterrorism in the united states.” anthropological theory 17, no. 1: 60–87. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1463499616678096. stewart, michelle, and vivian choi n.d. “security: a conversation with the authors.” curated collections, cultural anthropology. accessed june 10, 2019. https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/security-conversation-with-the-authors. yıldız, emrah 2020 “nested in(securities): commodity and currency circuits in an iran under sanctions.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 218–24. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.04. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 197-203, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.01 citing black women: from citational refusal to recognition cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 214-224, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.06 citing black women: from citational refusal to recognition anne-maria b. makhulu duke university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0289-6950 the tradition of “great books” in which i was trained taught me to prioritize intellectual genealogies that not only on occasion denied the histories of empire and colonial expansion that stood at the center of my research but were themselves produced and had their origins in those histories. in me, like many junior faculty, this tension between the “important” names that one should reference and the often invisible if entirely relevant works that spoke to my project produced anxiety about how to make a solid argument, but also about the relative value of my own work. conflating personal responsibility to work harder and more compellingly with the “wider systemic” problem of attribution (gebrial 2018, 31) generated heightened anxiety and the worst possible conditions for intellectual growth. and yet, simply adding other kinds of names to bibliographies and endnotes could not by itself address the problem of anthropology’s colonial legacy. rather, that certain great books and those who indiscriminately cited them might be responsible for intellectual and curricular erasures and that those great books were born of empire also meant that they were prone to silencing the very arguments made against their claims to enlightenment rationality. anthropology has served as both the best and the worst illustration of enlightenment arrangements of knowledge-power. both an ardent critic of abstract universalism and willing to bring kant into the igloo! the “here and the elsewhere” in american anthropology the archimedean point from whence anthropology ventured into the world arguably continues to train disciplinary thinking and to draft that thinking into compliance with north atlantic universalism. michel-rolph trouillot has described this as the “gap between the here and the elsewhere” (trouillot 2003, 2). he goes on to note that the “geography of imagination” that established the “west” endures in the discipline. historically, where anthropologists conducted research and where they lived and worked remained necessarily distinct. the discipline’s commitment to that “elsewhere,” on the one hand, and its inability to transcend its role as a tool of north atlantic knowledge-power, on the other, is what trouillot refers to as anthropology’s “janus face.” but what does this mean from a citational perspective? in my view, broadly two things: there are those writing about “elsewhere” whose translation point assumes a “north atlantic” readership; and there are those writing about “elsewhere” who, in some form or another, embody and experience the world precisely from the position of that “elsewhere,” whether because they are “indigenous” anthropologists or because they work in locales they see as intellectual homes. black women scholars routinely work in the tense conjuncture between “the here and the elsewhere” and within force fields that intersect with race and gender, racism and misogyny or “misogynoir” (bailey 2021), as well as transecting the black atlantic world.1 by extension they are fugitive in the disciplines, including anthropology, in which black women’s membership is both assumed and questioned in much the same way that the concept of fugitivity defines freedom (and hence inclusion) as an impasse (see in particular hartman 1997; cf. moten 2017). and though many non-bipoc anthropologists operate in locales beyond those in which they labor and publish, their burden of translational work is distinct. non-bipoc scholars may not feel responsible for the intersectional webs in which minority authors function between locations of inquiry and personal entanglements. further, in specifically racial terms, non-bipoc authors go unmarked, relieving them of a certain kind of translational responsibility. distinctly attuned to the challenges of reconciling local particulars and universal knowledges, such efforts can place minority intellectuals at a disadvantage given a citational value system that puts abstraction ahead of historical and cultural specifics. ezekiel (es’kia) mphahlele, the great south african writer, knew all too well the difficulties of representing the apartheid quotidian, referring to it as “the tyranny of place” (de kock 1987). for mphahlele, a distinction obtained between “local” and “transcendental” modes of creative expression inclusive of genre (see, for example, mphahlele 2013). the latter was not something afforded south africans of political conscience and sat in opposition to “white writing” (coetzee 1988). in parallel, those who embody and experience the world precisely from the position of an “elsewhere” find themselves committed to articulating a theory of the local. this is theory at times denied the status of theory as such and labeled “mesearch” for its apparent concern for the other. as a member of the american academy, i am aware of the “problem space” (scott 2004) that shapes the kinds of questions regarded as interesting or relevant from the perspective of the “here,” and that the basis for relevance is subtended by the ability of authors to resolve the contradiction of “the here and the elsewhere.” if gender and race extend otherwise taken-for-granted epistemic limits that determine what is relevant, national differences do too. as faye v. harrison (this colloquy) notes, “national biases” threaten a heterogeneity of transnational perspectives, on the one hand; and on the other, they have the potential to occlude those solidarities that exist despite heterogeneous realities. conducting research beyond the national borders of the united states, while publishing through united states–based presses, can limit both legibility and visibility. for bell hooks (1991) this lack of visibility is construed as the difficulty of being named. but translational work extends beyond transnational differences of reading and reception. black scholars confront some of the very same predicaments at home, where the fact of enduring racial logics complicate the relationship of “the here and the elsewhere.”2 in the united states, slavery’s afterlives inform both the sorts of intersectional experiences—of gender, sexual orientation, and class—that guide some of the work of black scholars and their sense of precarity in the face of race, racism, and racialization. for those committed to theorizing a wide range of questions particular to black life, to the extent that racially specific concepts are ontologically particular, reception and citation can obscure or invisibilize the critical importance of the work (see, for example, du bois 2018; lorde 2007). exceptions exist, and the current prominence of particular theorists of the black experience—saidiya v. hartman (2007), christina sharpe (2016), ruth wilson gilmore (2007), fred moten (2018), and frank b. wilderson iii (2020), for example—forces a broader engagement with the consequences of racial capitalism and the anti-black racism that is its legacy as the form in which capitalism appears and dictates a vast array of racially divergent experiences.3 that the most prominent theorizing of black ontology happens mostly outside the discipline indicates something of the place of anthropology in relation to critical race studies, black feminist studies, and other cognate fields. to the degree that anthropology occupies the “savage slot” (trouillot 2003), the race question appears to have been put to bed. but does anthropology’s colonial legacy absolve it of responsibility for addressing other forms of racialization? does this explain less a silence on matters of race (see, for example, baker 2010; pierre 2013; smith 2016; shange 2019; thomas 2019; beliso-de jesús and pierre 2020) than a powerful impulse to de-emphasize the criticality of writing about it? many anthropologists think and write about race, racism, and anti-blackness, but they may not be perceived within the discipline to be doing the most important work. put differently, black anthropology has not been recognized as anthropology since the very inception of the professional discipline (see hurston 1990; dunham 1994; green on primus 2001; cf. mead 2001; benedict 2005). and much as black feminism struggled not only to be heard but also to show the way for mainstream feminism—lorde’s sister outsider being perhaps the most obvious example—black anthropology struggles for recognition even as black and other bipoc anthropologists negotiate processes of double othering, working “here” and “elsewhere” as “selves” and “others.”4 recognition on the assumption that citational frequency remains a basic measure of scholarly excellence, this colloquy is committed to exploring the mechanisms by which citational frequency is achieved. citation has several aims: comparison, mention, reference, and even deference to another, all with a view to showing a prior basis for the claims of a given author. citation can also reflect the impulses and biases of scholarly reading publics—their networks and friendships—as well as their inclinations to trust that those who have already been cited must consequently bear some relationship to the most critical and paradigm-shifting insights in the discipline. routine citation remains a hallmark of rigorous scholarship, but to assume that citation and rigor are always one and the same makes consensus and widening name recognition indistinguishable. more seriously, indiscriminate acknowledgment deepens relationships of exclusion for those who remain unor undercited—tightening access to flagship journals, reputable university presses, departmental appointments, and the talk circuit, as those who remain uncited become, in due course, uncitable. in a moment when decolonial thought is ascendant and institutions are beginning to recognize the value of diversity, the fact of who makes knowledge and who is refused epistemic authority seems more relevant than ever. here again, i am particularly interested in the experiences of black women recognizing the continuity between “uncitability” and other similar disavowals including (un)grievability (butler 2009), un-rapeability (gqola 2015), and ungendering (spillers 1987) as a first step in acknowledging the ways in which citational practices reproduce extant inequities in our discipline and our institutions. in sum, to be or to become uncitable, and hence to be unthought, is to labor absent recognition. recognition in the philosophical sense assumes another’s existence or humanity. for scholars, gaining recognition requires an audience or readership. my concern is to combine the two definitions and to work through the implications of recognition for those who by dint of gender-race are effectively “the unthought” (hartman and wilderson 2003). in phenomenology of spirit (cf. du bois 2018; fanon 2008; marx 1998; althusser 2001; butler 1997) hegel (1977) theorizes self-consciousness—awareness of another’s awareness of oneself—an idea that appears to be exclusively hegel’s own. yet susan buck-morss’s revision of hegel’s thesis shows he is likely to have been influenced by unfolding events in haiti in the lead-up to the haitian revolution (buck-morss 2009; also see robinson 2000; cf. chu 2018; lamola 2016; more 2015; willett 1995). reading german newspaper reports on what was at first a slave rebellion and then the revolution that established haiti as the world’s first free black nation in 1804, hegel was inspired by radical practices of marronage that were foundational to what he later termed the “master-slave” dialectic. enlightenment philosophy, in sum, benefited from the working out of the terms of freedom of and by black people, and yet the origins of the idea remained concealed. french and american revolutions became elevated to the status of archetypes of political liberation—even as these were built on the unfreedom of the other. put differently, the ruse of enlightenment lay in its embrace of its own negation. citational refusal in showcasing a writer’s contributions to scientific and humanistic knowledge; citation sets the terms of the intellectual communities we inhabit and their potential for fairness and generosity, intelligence, and curiosity. systematically ignoring the work of black and other minority authors unmakes worlds and proves especially damaging for those who are de facto perceived as lacking expertise because of their complexion and gender and whose contributions are therefore deemed irrelevant. what appears between parentheses, then, represents complex and varied motivations, ranging from desire for precision and transparency, to exclusion in the case of negative citation, and, in the extreme, refuses to engage with the work at all. consider “(marx 1990).” the parenthesis references a large and well-known corpus. most writers cite this first volume of marx’s capital that situates debates about the history of modern capitalism. some do so perhaps to signal something about themselves and their membership in the ranks of left and marxist intellectual circles. at base, in-text parentheticals reveal almost as much about the person doing the citing as about those being cited, which is to say that citation can be an act of ego. others still cite “(marx 1990)” along with “(harvey 2003)” to highlight the conceptual relationship between accumulation and dispossession. marx and harvey are referenced frequently, and a quick google search suggests that “david harvey” generates more than 250,000,000 results. with the mainstreaming of an idea, concept, term, attribution may fall away. for example, citing marx is no longer essential to writing about the commodity, labor, or value. marginal voices, on the other hand, may well go unattributed from the very start—erased in ways critical to citational refusal as the antithesis of recognition (in both the philosophical and political senses). early in his 1903 the souls of black folk, w. e. b. du bois (2018, 3) opines: “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” frantz fanon likewise describes the malaise that overcomes him when a small child perceives fanon first as a “negro” (in the french original, un nègre, with its double meaning) and hence a “nonperson” (perry 2018). in the well-known passage from the 1952 black skin, white masks, the reader becomes acutely aware not only of the child’s response to fanon but also of fanon’s working through his relationship to the child’s perception of him: “look, a negro!” it was a passing sting. i attempted a smile. “look, a negro!” absolutely. i was beginning to enjoy myself. “look, a negro!” the circle was gradually getting smaller. i was really enjoying myself. “maman, look, a negro; i’m scared!” scared! scared! (fanon 2008, 91) the end of black skin, white masks infers (in my reading of it) that hegel’s master-slave dialectic misapprehended the relationship between the two: the necessary struggle for self-emancipation and self-knowledge in which the slave engaged, and the mutual determination of the master’s condition in his dependency on the slave. self-consciousness is achieved in the relation between them, something each of them consents to, but unevenly so. for what seems so apparent from fanon’s account of the “slave” or “other” is that the master has little self-consciousness, if any. and that the perpetuation of white supremacy as a structure within which the master and slave operate tilts the scale in a particular direction—namely, in the direction of double consciousness as a fuller self-knowledge for the slave than for the master. decolonial curriculum, decolonial pedagogy this essay has centered on an expanded and capacious set of practices of citation challenging what is currently understood as canonical and ranging widely across epistemological boundaries in ways that may seem disciplinarily agnostic. but what i hope i have inspired is the possibility of a fully decolonial citational practice that moves beyond questions of diversity to “open the classroom to the world” (aparna and kramsch 2018, 100), collapsing the “gap between the here and the elsewhere.” to “cite black women” is an exercise in self-empowerment, certainly, but equally a way of opening northern hemispherism to a broad critique (gebrial 2018, 22–23). diversifying our ways of knowing is one thing of course; decolonizing them quite another (harrison 1997). “otherwise put, the decolonial turn seeks to overcome hierarchies that impede true rigour and excellence” (maldonado-torres et al. 2018, 65). with new tools for thinking marx via black feminism, imagining enlightenment in the image of kara walker’s fons americanus, i can write about south africa in ways that adhere to universal truths and to what it means to be black while conceding that the particulars of postapartheid remain critical. if so, then my intellectual universe at least will have become broader, wider, more generous. abstract this essay addresses the tension between northern hemispheric intellectual assumptions and anthropology’s ostensibly critical stance within that intellectual tradition, one. two, extending beyond the contradictions of the discipline’s origins in colonial encounter to address the place of black women anthropologists caught between “the here and the elsewhere” (trouillot 1995), “citing black women” argues for working through the problem of canonical disciplinary knowledge formation by prioritizing a black feminist approach to a new decolonial anthropology. [black feminist; citational refusal; decolonial; knowledge-power; recognition] notes acknowledgments my thanks (in alphabetical order) to faye v. harrison, doyenne decolonial anthropologist; savannah shange, audacious theorist; christen a. smith, inveterate #citeblackwomen5 warrior and my inspiration; bianca c. williams, take-to-the-streets-and-back-to-the-ivory-tower-combatant—without you, this colloquy would be for naught, and i would have learned nothing. 1. my thanks to faye v. harrison in this colloquy for so clearly making the point. 2. for example, my appointment in cultural anthropology and african & african american studies (duke university) requires that research conducted in south africa speak not only to south african readers but also to u.s.-based understandings of racial struggle. as bianca c. williams (this colloquy) notes, black women scholars’ appointment in multiple departments and programs intensifies the challenges of translation necessary to intellectual legibility. it also incrementally increases their administrative labor. 3. “south africa after the rainbow,” an interview with dean judith kelley for policy 360 podcast, https://sanford.duke.edu/story/south-africa-after-rainbow-podcast/ (accessed december 31, 2021). 4. my thanks to christen a. smith for pointing to the parallels between white feminism and white anthropology. as smith notes, white anthropology is not the totality of anthropology. that black anthropology might show the way for the discipline has not been seriously entertained. 5. cite black women campaigns to compel “people to engage in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors black women’s transnational intellectual production” see https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/. most recently, a formal statement of citation as “critical praxis” (smith et al. 2021) and a citational frequency pilot study (measuring frequency by race and gender) (smith and garrett-scott 2021), both published in feminist anthropology, advance similar arguments to those made in this colloquy. references althusser, louis 2001 lenin and philosophy and other essays. translated by ben brewster. new york: monthly review press. aparna, kolar, and olivier kramsch 2018 “asylum university: re-situating knowledge exchange along cross-border positionalities.” in decolonising the university, edited by gurminder k. bhambra, dalia gebrial, and kerem nişancıoğlu, 93–107. london: pluto press. bailey, moya 2021 misogynoir transformed: black women’s digital resistance. new york: new york university press. baker, lee d. 2010 anthropology and the racial politics of culture. durham, n.c.: duke university press. beliso-de jesús, aisha m., and jemima pierre 2020 introduction to special section, “anthropology of white supremacy.” american anthropologist 122, no. 1: 65–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13351 benedict, ruth 2005 [1934] patterns of culture. new york: first mariner books. buck-morss, susan 2009 hegel, haiti, and universal history. pittsburgh, penn.: university of pittsburgh press. butler, judith 1997 the psychic life of power: theories in subjection. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. 2009 frames of war: when is life grievable? london: verso. chu, andrea long 2018 “black infinity: slavery and freedom in hegel’s africa.” journal of speculative philosophy 32, no. 3: 414–25. https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.32.3.0414 coetzee, j. m. 1988 white writing: on the culture of letters in south africa. new haven, conn.: yale university press. de kock, leon 1987 “literature, politics, and universalism: a debate between es’kia mphahlele and j. m. coetzee.” journal of literary studies 3, no. 4: 35–48, https://doi.org/10.1080/02564718708529840 du bois, w. e. b. 2018 [1903] the souls of black folk. amherst: university of massachusetts press. dunham, katherine 1994 [1969] island possessed. chicago: university of chicago press. fanon, frantz 2008 [1952] black skin, white masks. translated by richard philcox. new york: grove press. gebrial, dalia 2018 “rhodes must fall: oxford and movements for change.” in decolonising the university, edited by gurminder k. bhambra, dalia gebrial, and kerem nişancıoğlu, 19–36. london: pluto press. gilmore, ruth wilson 2007 golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press. gqola, pumla dineo 2015 rape: a south african nightmare. johannesburg: jacana media. green, richard c. 2001 “(up)staging the primitive: pearl primus and ‘the negro problem’ in american dance.” in dancing many drums: excavations in african american dance, edited by thomas f. defrantz, 105–142. madison: the university of wisconsin press. harrison, faye v., ed. 1997 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. 3rd edition. arlington, va.: american anthropological association. hartman, saidiya v. 1997 scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century 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down second avenue. new york: penguin. perry, imani 2018 vexy thing: on gender and liberation. durham, n.c.: duke press. pierre, jemima 2013 the predicament of blackness: postcolonial ghana and the politics of race. chicago: university of chicago press. robinson, cedric 2000 black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. scott, david 2004 conscripts of modernity: the tragedy of colonial enlightenment. durham, n.c.: duke university press. shange, savannah 2019 progressive dystopia: abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in san francisco. durham, n.c.: duke university press. sharpe, christina 2016 in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. smith, christen a. 2016 “facing the dragon: black mothering, sequelae, and gendered necropolitics in the americas.” transforming anthropology 24, no. 1: 31–48. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12055 smith, christen a., and dominique garrett-scott 2021 “‘we are not named’: black women and the politics of citation in anthropology.” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 18–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038 smith, christen a., erica l. williams, imani a. wadud, whitney n. l. pirtle, and the cite black women collective 2021 “cite black women: a critical praxis (a statement).” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 10–17. http://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040 spillers, hortense j. 1987 “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” diacritics 17, no. 2: 64–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/464747 thomas, deborah a. 2019 political life in the wake of the plantation: sovereignty, witnessing, repair. durham, n.c.: duke university press. trouillot, michel-rolph 1995 silencing the past: power and the production of history. boston, mass.: beacon press. 2003 global transformations: anthropology and the modern world. new york: palgrave macmillan. wilderson, frank b., iii 2020 afropessimism. new york: liveright publishing. willett, cynthia 1995 maternal ethics and other slave moralities. new york: routledge. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 214-224, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.06 banking on digital money: swedish cashlessness and the fraying currency tether cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 1-24, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.01 banking on digital money: swedish cashlessness and the fraying currency tether gustav peebles the new school https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5427-5902 everyone seems to know about the austere café in the hip part of town, sing its praises, and universally declare that “all the famous people hang out there.” but, in largely cashless stockholm, it is even more distinguished by its owner’s stark refusal to accept electronic payments. considering how few stockholmers walk around with cash, he knows that this decision radically circumscribes his potential customer base. many times, i witnessed him or his coworkers interrogate new customers about whether they had any cash prior to brewing them some complicated coffee confection. during those moments, he unwittingly challenged the hackneyed understanding of cash as a “cold nexus” that allows for the social separation of transactors, removing cultural and personal barriers to a potential trade. for them, it was precisely the opposite: he and his main partner knew the faces (and often the names) of everyone who came in for a cup or a light sandwich. he explained to me that, whenever he does not recognize a face, he simply alerts them to the café’s idiosyncratic practice of insisting on cash payment. a significant number of new visitors walk out after learning this, since they rarely have any cash on hand. cash, in other words, was the social glue of the establishment, whereas credit and debit cards marked anonymous trading, even though they have names and dense, reliable histories readily attached to them. his commitment to cash brings to the fore the important manner in which hard cash functions as a public good—a cheaply available connective device among citizens and state that functions like a sidewalk or a highway.1 echoing a sentiment that i encountered among experts and engaged citizens in sweden, ursula dalinghaus (2017, 53) tells us that “concerns about cash should be placed within the broader context and more urgent question of money’s role as a public good—part of a public infrastructure that everyone in society can use and access” (see also maurer 2015; dalinghaus 2019). as a result, the state frequently takes over monopoly production of the good to ensure its presence. in this sense, state currency operates as something vital to the market that the market itself fails to provide on its own (see ingham 2004, 45). like all public goods, it should provide such smooth functioning that people only notice its absence, not its presence. as julia elyachar (2010, 455) reminds us, “infrastructure is something people tend to think about when it breaks down.” as this article will show, the swedish central bank (hereinafter the riksbank) fears that this vital “sidewalk” is breaking down. it knows—all too well—that this essential pathway of connectivity can only sustain itself if it is nurtured, cherished, and protected by both its users (everyday citizens) and its producers (the riksbank). as douglas r. holmes (2014, 1) explains, “the public broadly must be recruited to collaborate with central banks in achieving the ends of monetary policy.” but in sweden, a range of competitive private products are surging past public cash in popularity. as the chief of the current project to build a national e-currency, cecilia skingsley, announces in a youtube video, “the swedish people are turning their backs on our product [the swedish krona]” (see kivra 2018).2 or what of one businessperson, who recounted the tale of her teenage daughter who, on being handed some hard cash, received it skeptically and queried, “what is this old-fashioned business?” placed in a more historical frame, we can see that sweden’s growing cashlessness is but the reignition of a centuries-old battle over “note-issuance” that has long played out between central and commercial banks the world over. famously, central banking largely eradicated the “private issue” of currency notes, mostly in the nineteenth century (see, e.g., grossman 2010, 162–63). richard s. grossman explains that, in creating the system of “fractional reserve banking” that we know so well today, central banks stopped competing with commercial banks, choosing instead to seize monopoly control over the creation of cash. in so doing, cash moved into the realm of public goods, with central banks becoming its producer, distributor, and guardian. like many public good monopolies, this development was often seen as a “win-win” covenant, allowing all stakeholders—including even the commercial banks that had profited off of note-issuance—to consider it the best solution for creating stability and soundness in the otherwise turbulent marketplace created by commercial bank over-issuance. but now, with public cash being pushed out of the marketplace, the riksbank believes its seemingly age-old monopoly over cash is threatened. unbeknownst to many, the funding required to provide the public good known as cash emerges from this same public good’s circulation. thanks to a little-known tax called “seigniorage,” central banks often fund themselves, instead of turning to national governments for budgetary support. as kenneth s. rogoff (2017, 121) explains, “governments enjoy considerable profits from their monopoly on paper currency, which costs next to nothing to print and yet can be spent at face value. … the revenues from paper currency are substantial, and for central banks constitute the biggest counterargument to phasing out cash.” put bluntly, without seigniorage, central banks could go bankrupt. or, as one specialist explained to me more bluntly, “seigniorage is what makes the riksbank independent.” they would, thus, suddenly find themselves subjected to the whims of rotating politicians who controlled their purse strings. worse still, the public good of cash that they have worked so hard to sustain and nurture could eventually fall into private hands, just as states have found themselves lately handing over various other public-goods infrastructure—such as bridges, ports, and highways (like money, also vital modes of connectivity)—to private ownership. the riksbank thus confronts a dangerous scenario wherein its krona, a public good that solved a host of extant socioeconomic problems (see, e.g., helleiner 2003), falls into disuse and thus hobbles the riksbank’s ability to respond nimbly to the same socioeconomic problems that it promised—via control of the currency—to keep at bay in the first place. the chart below (taken from rogoff 2017, 127) reveals how the swedish riksbank is at an “all hands on deck” moment, seeing the cashless revolution as a creeping threat to its authorized monopoly on controlling the currency. with revenue from seignorage not only dwindling but actually disappearing, it therefore must quickly consider new methods for ensuring the ongoing economic stability that both citizens and banks have come to expect from it. digitizing hard cash by giving birth to a new “e-krona” has leapt forward as one of the premier possibilities for doing so. figure 1. seigniorage revenue/gdp, 2006–2015 average. graph from kenneth s. rogoff (2017, 127). in the following pages, i present ethnographic material gathered during a year of living and working in sweden with my family. despite my own long-standing interest in monetary reform efforts, i had not initially planned to study sweden’s cashlessness—until a group of scholars studying cashlessness as a global phenomenon lifted the scales from my eyes.3 beyond my own participant observation in sweden’s increasingly cashless economy, i was able to conduct in-depth interviews with parliamentarians, consultants, and governmental employees who were all intimately involved in the e-krona project (unfortunately, i never managed to speak with anyone inside the riksbank itself, but multiple reports and video presentations published by the riksbank provide a great deal of context). my employment at the stockholm centre for organizational research, along with standard volunteer work (e.g., garage sales) for my children’s schools and extracurricular activities, provided me with many opportunities to discuss the cashless transformation with a wide variety of swedes. i also kept a keen eye on daily transactions in a variety of settings, and peppered cashiers, bankers, bus and taxi drivers, and the like with questions about the transformation of payment platforms in swedish society. finally, i worked through copious public documents issued by various levels and branches of government, industry groups, commercial banks, and the riksbank itself. it is worth noting that many of these documents are intentionally “in conversation” with one another, in keeping with a long swedish tradition regarding governmental transparency and responses to the white papers that it issues. all this data comes together to portray the fight over nationalized e-cash and its future implications. by detailing not only how and why the swedish cash krona is falling into abeyance but also the exclusionary consequences of losing cash as a public good, this article affirms the work of a long line of other researchers in showing how money serves as a “memory bank” of credit/debt transactions—“a record of all manner of relationships of credit and debt across time and space, and not just economic relationships of credit and debt” (maurer 2017; see also hart 2001). but because the crisis of the cash krona so lucidly illuminates that this memory-bank function of currency can be grounded in, and regulated by, either commercial banks or public authorities, it offers an opportunity to trace the many chains of credit/debt that help create this vast memory bank. what entity—public or private—gets to acquire the almost “transcendental” status of grounding the value of a currency, as well as the immense social power of credit/debt issuance that comes with that status?4 achieving this status—and holding one’s place there—requires much engineering and nurturing, in the form of banking regulation, money markets, state financing and the like, all of which contribute to building a sort of “tethering mechanism” that helps forge vertical links of credit/debt between currency-issuing banks and the people who use them (see ingham 2004). following bill maurer (2016, 209), we must ask, “who writes and controls these accounts? how are they ordering and re-ordering the world?” the currency tether by previously choosing to settle many daily debts with hard cash, swedes were all agreeing—whether they cared to know it or not—to walk around with the state’s debt in their pockets and purses. but in their increasingly cashless world, swedes are now choosing to walk around with the issued debts of new parties, tethering themselves to these private institutions rather than the state. and thus, the ongoing cashless revolution—both in sweden and elsewhere—will not challenge the binding capacity of currency, but it is threatening to reconfigure those binds quite substantially. so-called high-powered money serves as one anchor of this tether, as it stretches out and wends its way through a given population. high-powered money is composed of both all hard cash in the system and the digital central bank reserves that commercial banks must hold as part of their reserve requirements (in a fractional reserve system) (ingham 2004, 141–44). as a direct debt claim on the central bank, it forms the “monetary base” that can then be leveraged by commercial banking institutions to create the remaining money supply (often, but not always, as high as 90 percent). this monetary base robustly circulates among users precisely because it is always tethered to the central bank and thus remains (in ingham’s terms) the “most reliable promise to pay.” in this sense, national currency emerges out of far older traditions of “tallying” (see maurer 2016); namely, cash leaves the central bank as a liability on its balance sheet (an easily transferable iou), and this liability only disappears when the cash returns home. as maurer (2017, chapter 12) tells us, “when people write ious, relations of credibility extend outward from person and paper. … when states issue currencies, they leverage their own credibility in a financial and moral sense.” this is, as many have emphasized, a semiotic system—high-powered money, in the form of cash, works because people recognize and interpret these paper testimonials of the state’s debt as the easiest debt to trade on a daily basis. cash, with its many engravings and embossings, stands as a peircian index, clearly pointing to the bank that issued it. insofar as the bank is trustworthy, it gives rise to an interpretant, in the form of, “i can accept this as payment.” during this ongoing process of semiotic-cum-economic exchange, it gradually creates what paul kockelman (2013, 3) helpfully refers to as an “ontology” that can be “understood as ensembles of assumptions regarding the underlying constitution of, or salient patterns in, the world.” over time, these (always provisional and contested, as kockelman explains) patterns can then congeal to support, or even create, infrastructure (kockelman 2013; see also kockelman 2016). in the case of currency, it can smooth out transactions across given spaces and times, lending immense efficiency and increased clarity to the economic system, while also binding people together with a shared unit of measure. but despite people’s subjective experience of it, sweden’s popular and transferable digital money is not high-powered money, that is, money issued by the central bank and therefore a direct liability on its balance sheet (what the riksbank calls centralbankspengar, or “central bank money”). instead, it is a liability (a transferable iou) on the deposit institution’s balance sheet (what the riksbank calls affärsbankspengar, or “commercial bank money”); commercial banks issue their own money in the riksbank’s unit of account, merely promising to use their own reserves of high-powered central bank money to immediately exchange any given customer’s commercial bank currency “at par” for central bank currency should she ever want to convert her digital money into hard, national, cash. the swedish bankers’ association affirms this in its response to the e-krona project when it states, “for the general public, central bank money and commercial bank money are normally seen as completely equivalent” (svenska bankföreningen 2018, 4). in other words, on a daily basis, cash users operate under the assumption that cash severs ties by allowing them to become quits in their debts with one another, just as georg simmel (1978) enthusiastically explained. nevertheless, at these moments, they misrecognize the fact that they are simultaneously building or retaining a tether with the currency issuer, whether public or private. the iou is not dissolved, only transferred to a new party. currency, as many have long noted, is therefore itself a form of misrecognized credit/debt, which means that it can create and sustain the same binding ties that anthropologists typically find in other credit/debt relations.5 national taxation systems and their temporal rhythms help form the opposing anchor of the currency tether, completing a credit/debt loop between citizen and state. a growing branch of economic theory, known by its acronym, mmt (modern monetary theory), insists that our standard understanding of taxation is completely misguided. rather than taxation funding government expenditure, it merely clears banking reserves when they are in excess, as a tool of managing the money supply. for this reason, mmt’ers are labeled “chartalists,” believing that taxation ultimately exists simply to force people to accept the government’s chosen medium of exchange and unit of account (see wray 2015; see innes 1914 for an earlier variant of this argument). to employ an idiom more familiar to anthropologists, mmt’ers are simply applying the concept of colonial “head taxes” to all subjects who use a fiat currency (e.g., worsley 1968, 36–48). in short, taxation sets in motion the government’s declared monopoly on currency; since one must pay taxes in the government’s currency, one must earn those same currency units out in the lived world. without concerning ourselves with whether mmt’ers are correct about the origin of government funding (or anything else, for that matter), we can still appreciate the powerful simplicity of their expansion of old anthropological arguments about colonial head taxes to the general population. once stated in this manner, we can see that every legal transaction in a given currency carries with it a hidden orientation toward the payment of annual taxes—a debt owed to the state (i.e., the opposite of cash, which is a debt issued by the state). when we buy something at a store, we forget that the storekeeper is simultaneously buying the national currency from us; both parties are selling something, even though our language convinces us that one party is the buyer and one the seller. in other words, one must transact with private parties on a daily basis so that one can accumulate the proper resource (the national currency) to transact with the government on an annual basis. we can now see how daily currency usage might best be seen as a surprising variant of elyachar’s notion of “phatic labor.” she argues that phatic labor (often everyday chitchat) “produces communicative channels that can potentially transmit not only language but also all kinds of semiotic meaning and economic value” (elyachar 2010, 453). by engaging in phatic labor, communicators are creating essential social infrastructure for the community. likewise, by simply using cash to become quits in their debts to one another, people are—without even really caring—building up and sustaining a vast and consequential public good. if such phatic labor—previously organized around the cash krona—truly moves to other channels, the riksbank knows that its entire regulatory regime will come to a close. fearing the loss of a “state-guaranteed payment mechanism,” the riksbank wants to explore re-braiding this fraying tether by providing such a payment mechanism electronically (sveriges riksbank 2018, 2).6 aside from losing their regulatory hegemony, the riksbank and others are worried about what nonfiscal norms and values might be lost if the cash krona disappears. but first we must see how quickly all this phatic labor is moving away from hard cash. a fraying tether every resident of sweden who checked their mail during the last week of may 2018 received a jarring government missive telling them to prepare for war or catastrophe. in twenty easy-to-read pages, the pamphlet, if crisis or war arrives, quickly laid out the preparations that should be made in all swedish homes (myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap 2018). as president trump came to power and nationalist backlashes swept across their neighbors, many swedes had begun to feel uneasy about the future. most prominently, the threat of russia was on many lips during my time there in 2017–2018. not only was vladimir putin seen as adding fuel to the nationalist fires, but the united states’ new skepticism of the nato alliance reminded people of centuries-old russian threats. against this backdrop of a latent and low-simmering fear, the crisis or war brochure was received with a mixture of surprise and (it must be said, relatively minor) anxiety. included in the crisis-or-war checklist about things to always have on hand was “cash, in smaller denominations” (myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap 2018, 10). an employee at the swedish national debt office explained the reasoning behind this to me, pointing out that if any sort of crisis or war comes, the mobile and digital payments system may well collapse and people will have to “revert” to hard cash. the riksbank itself backed up this claim when it wrote, “electronic payments increases the risk of significant shocks to the payment system should part of the infrastructure be incapacitated. … in a crisis or situation of financial unease, when demand for cash can be assumed to increase, it would take considerable time to set up efficient distribution of cash to different participants,” especially if the commercial system that had supported the infrastructure for cash had been dismantled (sveriges riksbank 2017, 13; see also ehrenberg and jansson 2017, 8–9). why would the government have to remind people to have cash on hand? because the government and other researchers were, at that very moment, producing copious statistics on just how little cash was in the hands of the swedish populace (e.g., arvidsson 2013; kontanthanteringsutredningen 2014; ehrenberg and jansson 2017; dillén et al. 2018). for example, the recently published delbetänkande from the swedish riksbank informs us that “cash usage is diminishing rapidly in sweden. this reduction is probably happening faster here than in any other country. … since 1950 the amount of cash in relationship to the gdp has fallen from circa 10% to circa 1.2% by the end of april 2018, which is the lower rate among all developed countries” (dillén et al. 2018, 73). figure 2. which payment technique have you used in the past month? kontanter (cash), bankkort (debit/credit cards), swish. graph from sveriges riksbank (2018). in these reports, in formal and informal interviews, and in casual discussions with friends and colleagues, the sudden eschewing of cash is attributed to several reasons. first, swedes often pride themselves on being early adopters of new technology (e.g., kivra 2018; savage 2018). but equally, the private infrastructure of electronic payments in sweden has been built quite quickly, part of what scott mainwaring has dubbed the “cambrian explosion in payments” (see nelms et al. 2018, 14). as a result of these local and global trends, paying monthly bills and checking accounts by smartphone in sweden has become exquisitely smooth, easy, and trustworthy, while the new swish mobile app has made smaller payments between friends and exchange partners immediate and simple. this rapid shift to phone payments convinced one group of riksbank experts to attribute accelerating cashlessness to consumer preferences (sveriges riksbank 2017, 10). in this account, cash is simply being outcompeted by fiery upstarts that trump it in terms of cost, convenience, and efficiency. phatic labor still abounds, but it is nurturing and building new communicative channels. other contributors to the cashless revolution are also mentioned—by both the riksbank and people with whom i spoke—such as the surprising campaign by the shopworkers union, which aimed to reduce cash holdings in stores so as to reduce robberies and threats to personnel. bank employees pushed forward a similar campaign, leading many banks across the country to achieve an almost oxymoronic status as cashless banks. several unions and interest organizations also joined together for a campaign to make the country cash-free. starting in 2009 with the webpage “kontantfritt.nu” (cashfree.now), they advocated on the streets, in the media, and even with fun contests to convince people to stop using cash (klint 2009). other experts explain that the weak legal tender law in sweden has facilitated the migration away from cash by shopkeepers (sveriges riksbank 2017, 11). because shopkeepers have the right (already tested in the courts) to deny legal tender, niklas arvidsson (the premier scholar of cashlessness in sweden) asserts that by 2030, 66 percent of stores and restaurants in sweden will no longer accept cash at all (blume 2017). as evidence of sweden’s toothless legal tender law, simply witness the countless stores that have placed variants of a sign that says, “this boutique is cash-free.” or what of the argument i witnessed at one café, where a young man became incensed that his cash proved unacceptable as payment. he took pains to describe to the cashier why hard cash was a legal means of payment, pedantically informing her, “but this is money.” his lessons fell on deaf ears, and he stormed off from the establishment. finally, one parliamentarian from the left party told me that the “shift [to cashlessness] has been driven by banks, not citizens or even the market.” in this regard, he complained about the seizure of a public good by private actors: sweden is a very privatized country. … the mint for the bills is run by a company … the depots [needed for circulating and storing cash] are owned by the big banks. this means that smaller, niche banks cannot break into the market—they must go through the big banks’ depots, so this is a natural monopoly that should theoretically be owned by the state, but is held in private hands. a standard and typical opponent of the swedish left party, the premier swedish business lobbying group svenskt näringsliv, also provides more background on this important fact: the reason so many fin-tech companies emerged in sweden in particular can be explained by the riksbank’s decision at the end of the 1990s to pass the lion’s share of responsibility for handling cash over to the banks. because the banks were [suddenly] forced to carry most of the costs of handling cash, they had every reason to develop payment mechanisms that were more efficient [than cash]. (svenskt näringsliv 2019, 3) both quotes describe a quintessentially neoliberal reform, wherein the riksbank chose to offload vital public infrastructure to the private market so as to save money and (theoretically) improve efficiency. commercial banks made money from this reform, but as the internet became consolidated, they realized they could save even more money by abandoning cash altogether. as one businesswoman suggested, ironically, to me (when discussing the newfound benefits of digital payments), “the banks don’t want to touch money!” this brings us back to the café owner whom we met at the beginning of this article. his critique of the arrival of cashlessness, and why he is taking a stand against it, precisely targets this moment when banks became perversely incentivized to push swedes to abandon cash—incentivized by the producer of cash itself. he recounted a trajectory that began with customers paying an extra fee for each digital payment, but then ended with the current situation, wherein the proprietor pays a fee. he claimed that the banks were intentionally hiding the cost of electronic transactions from their customers in an effort to push them onto commercial banking’s digital platforms and away from the attendant costs (to the banks) of hard-cash transactions. he considered this a devious ruse, so he responded by refusing to ever accept digital payments again. his commentary forces us to recognize that storing and using money costs money and carries risks, whether in a pocket or on a smartphone. the expenses associated with these different modalities of using money, however, are not purely economic ones, as we must explore now. exclusionary tethers one restaurateur, who kindly gave me an entire lesson on the evolution of payment structures in sweden, simultaneously critiqued and celebrated cashlessness. on the one hand, she believed that the facility of the phone app, swish, had opened up new social pathways of kindness among strangers who had ignored each other in the past. but while she noted this new fluidity between citizens, she pointed out that the same generosity was no longer operative between citizen and private industry. in so doing, she connected the privatization of the means of payment with the privatization of the public square, explaining that “they are taking a little money for everything [as opposed to a lot for a few things]. the town square is getting glassed in more and more.” she saved her severest critique for how public toilets had suddenly become closed off to countless citizens: “they can only be unlocked with a card; it’s a completely inhumane society, excluding children, the elderly—everyone who isn’t in the middle of their lives and careers.” in complaining of this interrelated cascading dispossession (see harvey 2003) of both public cash and public infrastructure, she was not alone. i also heard the example of locked bathrooms from at least three different people. i even experienced it myself: on leaving one of them one day, a man asked if he could use it after me, without paying first. i held the door open for him so that he would not have to pay; on leaving, i noticed that five additional toilets had been vacant, but the man had opted to wait for mine in the hopes of free entry. it is possible that he was choosing to save money, but it is equally possible that he simply did not have the capacity to pay with a card.7 the people i met who were concerned about the evolution of cashlessness mostly sought to critique it from this standpoint, that it introduced antidemocratic and pro-hierarchical forces into a swedish society that prided itself on its egalitarianism. without turning to the technical term public goods, they would lament the loss of the egalitarian space that the national currency had produced, bringing urban, rural, rich, and poor swedes all together in a common space of currency usage and access. now, they feared that cashlessness was creating new social boundaries via what has been christened “digital outsidership” (see, e.g., ehrenberg and jansson 2017).8 not surprisingly, members of the emergent cashless society have already agreed to levels of digital surveillance that, per definition, can only be offered to well-established insiders. for example, to acquire swish, one must first have a bank account (and a smart phone, with a phone account). but to acquire a bank account in sweden, one must already have a personal id number, which is an intensely bureauacratized process for immigrants and refugees (native swedes are, quite literally, born with them). this scenario perfectly encapsulates brett scott’s (2019) argument that “cashless” always carries with it the hidden meaning of “bankful,” because one cannot be cashless—at least currently in sweden—without being banked. quite tellingly, in stockholm one can find people asking for money on the street, some of whom can accept a donation via swish, and some of whom cannot. swedes typically characterize the former as drug-dependent locals while, due to the traditional clothing they wear, they see the latter as non-local roma; one group has access to the precious state documents that allow them to acquire swish, while the other group does not. as such, the same economic activity—asking for money on the street—can be split into insider/outsider groupings by those who witness it. because such a phenomenon is so reminiscent of the “beggars’ passes” common in many european towns during the middle ages, it stands as still more evidence that digital cash is threatening the modernist swedish ethos organized around egalitarianism with a more premodern ethos of hierarchy (see levander 1974; harrington 1999; peebles 2011, chapter 4).9 mindful of this infrastructure that supports cashlessness, i set out to speak with the people who run situation stockholm, the magazine sold by the local homeless population. i had noticed that their salespeople were now taking payment via swish, so i wanted to hear more about how this traditionally outcast salesforce had become banked. the editor-in-chief informed me that, indeed, her customer base had stopped using cash, forcing the magazine to join the cashless world to hold onto its customers. but she admitted that this new system only allowed her to hire sellers with personal id numbers. while she was explaining this to me, she mentioned other groups that cashlessness has left behind—the elderly who cannot “catch up” with the latest technology, people with disabilities who cannot use smartphones (e.g., the blind—whereas cash bills in sweden are all different sizes, to accommodate the blind), and people who live deep in the countryside and therefore have poor connectivity to the internet. these same concerns were voiced by the parliamentarian ulla andersson in a forceful letter to a cabinet minister, where she spoke of many people (especially elderly, disabled, and rural people), businesses, and civic organizations who all desperately need hard cash—and the public infrastructure to help circulate it—to keep their daily affairs going. andersson (2016) accused a recent government investigator of “completely neglect[ing] the actual problems that exist today” in a cashless economy for these many groups. but the taint of digital outsidership has metastasized far beyond more traditional markers of social marginality. as the restaurant owner i spoke with described the speed with which cash had disappeared, she hazarded a guess that a mere 1 percent of her sales today occurred in cash. but then she quickly corrected herself, explaining that this rose to 5 percent during the summers. i wondered why this was the case. because, she explained, tourists arrive without any idea that sweden is largely cashfree, so they mistakenly acquire cash at the airport on arrival, cash they must unload before leaving the country again. if cash used to be famed for its anonymity, allowing both insiders and outsiders to be engaged in trades without a care for origin, today in sweden it can be a relatively reliable marker to distinguish between locals and foreigners—people who are just passing through from those who are residents. increasingly, cash also often marks its users as likely members of the criminal underground. once, when buying strawberries from a local vendor, i spoke to the woman about her recent ability to accept payment via swish. she said she was happy to take swish, but she was sad to see the evolution of moral critiques against cash. she explained that, given her job, she still carries around large amounts of hard cash. she then told me a story of how she had tried to purchase some goods in a store once with her hard-earned cash; the cashier had refused her money, stating, “sorry, we don’t take black money [i.e., money earned illegally].” she was appalled, explaining that sweden’s public cash had now fallen so low in people’s estimation that it is associated with rank criminality, rather than the hard labor in the hot sun that she herself undertakes. digitizing the tether with this general decline in both the amount of cash in use and the opinions directed toward it, the riksbank had decided to boldly defend its monopoly position on two fronts. first, it issued a report that included a new ethical and pragmatic demand that commercial banks be forced to circulate the riksbank’s hard cash at the commercial banks’ expense (whereas the late 1990s reform, described earlier, allowed banks to make money from the movement of cash, since it was then still a popular currency). the report bluntly insists that “it is not reasonable that the banks can completely abandon their responsibility for handling a given form of the medium of payment, as long as there exists a need for it in society” (dillén et al. 2018, 148). insofar as one of the services that these regulated banks provides is “access to cash,” the riksbank deems it fair to insist that these banks should provide that service in exchange for the privilege of being a licensed bank. at the same time, several reports and public statements issued by the riksbank and its workers seem to acknowledge that there is only so much it can do to push its old and original product (the metal and paper krona) onto the commercial banks and consumers who have already walked away from it. instead, it seems to be acknowledging its preordained failure and wants to spruce up its main monopoly product—cash. as it falls out of favor, perhaps it is time to reinvigorate it and make it more appealing. keep up with the times, as it were. and thus, a wing of the riksbank has proposed a national digital currency, the e-krona. initially, the e-krona sounds humdrum and boring—why would it be hard to replace notes and coins with digits? in fact, the riksbank consultant with whom i spoke told me that the distribution of cash had long been relegated to a low-status wing of the riksbank. the “real brains” and the ambitious people were all in the production side of money—fine-tuning interest rates, monitoring bank policy, and mapping the broader contours of monetary policy in a globalized world. against this, figuring out how to move cash around the country was considered the vocational-tech side of central banking. but quite suddenly, revolutionary digital currencies have caused the distribution side of monetary policy to rise in stature. as taylor c. nelms et al. (2018, 16) would say, digital currencies propose “not just to ride the old rails but build wholly new ones.” for this reason, digital currencies fascinate many monetary theorists, since they loom as a system-threatening inevitability that must be addressed. to understand why that might be so, we have to understand that the transformative power of the e-krona only becomes clear once one investigates the seemingly mundane question of value storage. consider paper money, lowly and tattered. we are accustomed to celebrating (or defaming) its potential for anonymity, but we are less accustomed to realizing that this anonymity exists only because it has already been de-tethered from its previous storage facility. a transfer from one bank account to another is clearly labeled and traceable to various points of origin—us, the commercial bank, the central bank, and so on. however, once it has been removed from our commercial bank’s storage, it relocates to new storage facilities such as our pockets, our wallets, our mattresses, while simultaneously falling off the commercial bank’s accounting ledger. this process de-tethers the commercial bank intermediary from the currency, making the latter anonymous, but also revivifying the claim against the central bank that originally issued it. cash is a walking, anonymized line item, tethered to a distant ledger; even though it appears to be detached from any balance sheet, it is accounted for in the double-entry system of the central bank as an outstanding liability. thus, the heyday of cash meant that pockets, wallets, and mattresses all stood as competitive alternatives to deposit banks. the former serve as “banks” for central bank money, whereas the latter serve as banks for commercial bank money. but since these two variants of national money trade at par, swedes have blithely ignored this vital distinction—or rather, the infrastructure was intentionally built so as to elide this distinction. in sweden’s emerging world of digital payments, pockets have lost their use-value as personal depository institutions of central bank money; instead, when swedes keep e-money on their person today via a smartphone, credit card, or debit card, they are holding commercial bank money.10 and thus, the current problem with e-cash, as the recent riksbank reports clarify, is that it can never be a walking ledger unto itself. rather, it only works inside a collectivized storage facility. unlike hard cash, which indexes (again, in the peircian sense) its tethering mechanisms with its beautiful and hard-to-counterfeit filigreed designs, its serial numbers, and its watermarks, digital cash can only index its tethering mechanism by being held inside a sanctioned ledger. payments with e-krona could easily move back and forth between buyers and sellers, but only if both parties held accounts inside the communal ledger. like all money, its functionality is fundamentally tied to particular modes of storage, but in this case, there is, as yet, no non-private institution where personal stashes of national e-money could be held. on multiple occasions, the riksbank insists that any new e-krona will have to “function independently of the commercial, bank-owned infrastructure,” just as traditional cash does today (sveriges riksbank 2017, 16). without this capacity, it cannot combat the “walled gardens” inherent in the commercial banking system (see maurer 2017), which many fear are growing (as described earlier). it therefore must grapple with how to get this new e-cash into the hands of its users. confronted with this predicament, the riksbank has come to the surprising and shocking conclusion that “the introduction of an e-krona could, regardless of the choice of model, lead to the riksbank introducing services aimed at the general public. this is a significant change compared with its current operation, in which it has no direct relationship with either consumers or other end-customers” (sveriges riksbank 2017, 23).11 significant might fairly be described as an understatement of the first order; epochal would be more appropriate. today’s central banks do not provide services directly to citizens, but rather to the commercial banks that citizens use. the e-krona, however, radically necessitates the creation of individual accounts at the riksbank itself (sveriges riksbank 2017, 16). cash, whether hard or digital, creates a so-called settlement platform, but e-krona could only manage this by providing users with accounts. as the swedish finance inspection office puts it, “the riksbank would therefore no longer only be the banks’ bank, but also the general public’s bank” (finansinspektionen 2019, 9). and once a central bank is offering a smooth and reliable settlement platform to private citizens (e.g., as the riksbank suggests, perhaps via an app on one’s smartphone), it suddenly raises the question of why anyone would ever need a commercial bank at all. if the storage-cum-payments mechanism stands as the primary reason that people have accounts at commercial banks, then, the riksbank predicts—quite reasonably—commercial banks could experience a vast drain of deposits. as a simple result of their reliance on a specific storage location, e-kronas would set in motion a sort of technological determinism that could cause profound changes in swedish banking. indeed, the riksbank’s reports hint in multiple locations that it would suddenly be competing with the commercial banks for customers, even by potentially lending directly to them (sveriges riksbank 2017, 35). consequently, commercial banks would have to offer shiny new things—higher interest rates and financial innovations—to convince people to bother keeping their money with them. in other words, the dangerous irony of the e-krona could be that it would finally cause the citizenry to start noticing the difference between central bank money and commercial bank money that lies at the heart of national money’s misrecognition mechanism as described above (see also, e.g., sparbankernas riksförbund 2018, 2). overall, the responses from private industry groups to the riksbank’s e-krona proposal pointed out multiple ways in which the e-krona could prove profoundly unstable to swedish banking, undermining the very purpose of central banking itself. one highly placed interlocutor told me that the riksbank had brought its “b-team” to the project, and had failed to think through several foundational issues, such as the explosion of the riksbank’s balance sheet as people suddenly start asking for all their money to be in central bank money rather than commercial bank money (see also finansinspektionen 2019, 9–10). the swedish union of savings banks revealed similar disdain: after it posited that even mentioning the e-krona could prove destabilizing (since it would suggest to people that there are weaknesses in commercial bank money that are necessitating its invention), it stated that “the union regards the question of an e-krona as the embryo of a conceptually incomplete idea, far from the concrete fleshing out that is demanded” (sparbankernas riksförbund 2018, 52). and yet, central banking operates on the principle of carl schmitt’s (2005) “sovereign exception”—precisely that it stands as “the banks’ bank.” this structure allows it to be the only entity that can issue high-powered money, as well as the only entity that can serve as the “lender and hoarder of last resort.” in some ways, central banks achieve their goals by serving as a “transcendental signified” of the entire banking system, grounding it by being both inside and outside of it simultaneously (peebles 2014). but if the e-krona brings the riksbank into the world of mundane citizen-to-citizen, business-to-business, and citizen-to-business payments, it could either be sullied as just a “regular bank” or it could just as easily eliminate all the other banks it typically aims to support. indeed, these two potential outcomes are harmonic, rather than mutually exclusive. conclusion: currency tethers in a seemingly post-national world while potentially destabilizing commercial banking and threatening its profits, the e-krona would also greatly reduce the power of its tethering mechanism in daily society. as commercial banks’ tethering mechanism frayed, the riksbank’s would grow even stronger than it had been during the reign of paper money, by taking on millions of swedes as direct customers. and thus, just as private toll roads often gave way to public toll-free highways in many countries, the e-krona cracks open the door to a radical reconfiguration in the movement and storage of capital. it is surely too drastic to predict the demise of worldwide commercial banking if other countries follow sweden’s lead and consider releasing digital currencies of their own. and yet, esteemed economists (and crypto-skeptics) such as nouriel roubini (2018) have suggested that this could lead to nothing less than a financial revolution, undermining the entire public-private fractional reserve banking system on which the world has come to rely. of course, countless other outcomes are possible—and even likely—for sweden’s cashless future and for those who must navigate it. either way, however, we can see that the riksbank is caught on the horns of a dilemma. on the one hand, “the riksbank has the statutory task of promoting a safe and efficient payment system and of providing sweden with banknotes and coins. … the possibility to complete these tasks may deteriorate if developments on the payment market continue” (sveriges riksbank 2017, 39). in other words, if it does not act, the riksbank may no longer be able to complete its most vital tasks, all of which ground the entire national banking system. on the other hand, if it does act, it may end up knocking down this same banking system, one the riksbank was originally designed to sustain. there is every reason to believe that, in the near future, all central banks will be confronting this dilemma.12 after all, myriad public goods have come and gone before. many countries will be entering into periods of robust debate about whether they want to nurture and sustain the clear methods required to retain national currencies as public goods, as against the many new private ones now proliferating. as we have seen, currency as a public good falls away without monopoly issuance, for the central bank requires the credit/debt loop between citizen and state to be not only forged but also sustained on a daily basis by the phatic labor of millions of quotidian purchases. given this, the riksbank’s battle to retain the relevance of its primary product in the face of newfound competition provides us with a stark glimpse of how all national currencies exist as the outcome of both collaboration and competition between commercial and public banks. we frequently are wont to see central banks as intimately working in tandem with the commercial banking infrastructure that they are designed to support, but anthropologists must also pay close attention when breaches in these often cozy relations emerge, as is so clearly happening in sweden today. for these breaches can signal the incipient privatization and dispossession of public currency itself, pushing people into newly privatized zones of exchange and away from more universally available public ones. abstract as cash has suddenly gone missing from swedish life, a growing range of citizens and institutions have sounded the alarm that cash enabled a space of egalitarian access now under threat. but because commercial bank currency is gradually displacing public central bank currency, cashlessness in sweden is not only threatening its egalitarian ethos but also the swedish central bank’s capacity to provide a guaranteed state payment mechanism. the consequences of sweden’s battles over cash-issuance may presage the future of our global banking system in a digital age, while also illuminating what is here called currency’s “tethering mechanism.” because bank-issued currencies represent chains of credit/debt, exchanging and storing different currencies can tether and de-tether their users to different institutions, thereby offering anthropologists the possibility of mapping the waxing and waning of various dominant social institutions. [cash; central banking; infrastructure; digital money; storage; public goods] sammanfattning det svenska samhället har bara på några år kommit att bli ett kontantlöst samhälle. nu larmar institutioner och medborgare om att bristen på kontanter hotar möjligheten för invånare att delta i samhället på ett likvärdigt sätt. det kontantlösa samhället hotar inte bara dess jämlikhetsetos utan också den svenska centralbankens förmåga att tillhandahålla en garanterad statlig betalningsmekanism då affärsbanksvaluta gradvis förskjuter den offentliga centralbanksvalutan. det svenska banksystemet fungerar därför som ett bra exempel utifrån vilket vi kan förutse konsekvenserna av ett kontantlöst globalt banksystem, samtidigt som det också kan belysa det som här kallas valutans “tethering mechanism”. utbyte och lagerhållning av olika valutor kopplar eller skiljer användare till eller från olika institutioner, eftersom bankemitterade valutor representerar kedjor av kredit/skuld. det ger antropologer möjlighet att studera och kartlägga dominerande sociala institutioners uppgång och fall. [kontanter; centralbank; infrastruktur; digitala pengar; lagring; kollektiv vara] notes acknowledgments i would like to thank my colleagues at the stockholm centre for organizational research, as well as other colleagues at stockholm university, for both hosting and providing institutional support during my year in sweden; in particular, renita thedvall not only aided me throughout the year, but also helpfully copyedited the swedish version of the abstract for this article. for much-needed inspiration, i am also indebted to the many participants of the new project, “after money, what is debt?” run from the copenhagen anthropology department by atreyee sen, camilla ida ravnbøl, and marie kolling. i am also thankful to the insightful anonymous reviewers and helpful editors of cultural anthropology. finally, i would like to thank léa coffineau for her research aid. 1. there is a copious literature on so-called public goods. quickly, they represent zones of market failure—vital economic services that cannot be provided by the market because they suffer two central problems: 1) they are non-excludable, that is, the free-rider problem emerges, wherein people can use the service or good without paying for it, and 2) they are non-rivalrous, that is, the usage by one person does not impact the quality of service that another person receives (see, e.g., kaul, grunberg, and stern 1999). as a result of these issues, public goods often need to be “natural monopolies” (in an older idiom; see norton 2008) owned by the collective, which has, of course, been the case with national cash in countless countries for more than a century. 2. all translations from the original swedish are my own. 3. i thank marie kolling, johan lindquist, camilla ida ravnbøl, and atreyee sen for raising my awareness of the issue. a recently published volume (sen, lindquist, and kolling 2020) documents some of their extensive efforts to date. 4. though she was not concerned with national currencies or banks, i here take inspiration from annette weiner’s arguments about “inalienable possessions” (see weiner 1992). i have previously outlined the ways in which weiner’s arguments can help us better understand banking (see peebles 2014). 5. the notion that state currencies are merely the monetized debt of the state has long been argued by a range of scholars and central bankers (a reliable historical survey can be found in ingham 2004, chapter 2; see also wray 2015; aglietta 2018). outside of economics, see also, e.g., patrick brantlinger (1996) and christine desan (2015). the idea has even broken into the mainstream, when the hashtag #mintthecoin went viral in 2012–2013 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trillion_dollar_coin). 6. see adam j. levitin (2009) for an early argument that the u.s. federal reserve should start competing in the digital payments market. 7. i covered some additional aspects of cash usage from the perspective of race, class, and the urban/rural divide in a contribution to a hot spots series (peebles 2019). 8. though it might sound like a term of art by social scientists or technocrats, in sweden, the term outsidership (utanförskap) circulates among the general population more than perhaps it might in many other countries. 9. more recently, digital outsidership reared its head prominently in the recent indian demonetization (see dharia and trisal 2017), and is also attested to in a variety of settings around the world (see, e.g., maurer, musaraj, and small 2018; sen, lindquist, and kolling 2020). 10. seen from this perspective, the recent eu directive on “payment services” (directive 2015/2366) can be seen as a european-wide acknowledgment that cash is moving from a public good to a private one, and that laws must be enacted to ensure that private companies cannot actively keep people out of the public square. 11. nouriel roubini (2018), as well as a bank for international settlement report (committee on payments and market 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sovereign monetary systems. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 1-24, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.01 plants, pathogens, and the politics of care: xylella fastidiosa and the intra-active breakdown of mallorca’s almond ecology cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 400-427, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.07 plants, pathogens, and the politics of care: xylella fastidiosa and the intra-active breakdown of mallorca’s almond ecology emily reisman university at buffalo https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0199-5746 almonds were once “the gold of mallorca,” a source of modest wealth and a pillar of diversified farming systems for smallholders on the largest of spain’s balearic islands. today researchers believe that nearly every rainfed almond tree on the island will be dead within as few as five years. an introduced bacteria, xylella fastidiosa, enabled by its spittle-bug vector, and emboldened by climate change, has flooded the xylem of these rainfed trees, impeding the flow of fluid and nutrients to the point where the tree can no longer survive. as a localized island issue, the plant epidemic was a contained tragedy. once detected in mainland spain, it provoked a sense of rural crisis. as almond farmers, farm advisors, government officials, and scientists grappled with this new reality, often with sharp disagreement and blame, their words were threaded together by a common fundamental concern: care, or cuidado. “they should apologize to the farmers. the almond trees were not poorly cared for [mal cuidados]” quoted a headline in the local newspaper (cortés 2017). the featured interview reflected the frustrated exhaustion of an agronomist and almond farmer who had tracked the disease early in its emergence. when tomeu melis welcomed me to his farm, we passed through the gate and immediately came upon the carcass of an enormous infected almond tree, cut cleanly at the base and severed into segments to facilitate removal. the hillsides beyond were dotted with a contrast of vibrant carob trees and decaying almond trees navigated by a small flock of sheep. carob trees, unaffected by the new disease, would be planted in place of almonds, tomeu explained pragmatically. the lingering sting of accusations that farmers lacked care for their land would require a more complex and uncertain remedy. what does it mean for farmers to care for trees? for a government to care for farmers? for trees to care for a diverse agroecological landscape? what does it mean to fail to care in these contexts? or to be careless? this essay elaborates a distinctly feminist account of spain’s faltering almond assemblage using two tools: maría puig de la bellacasa’s (2017) theorization of care and karen barad’s (2007) notion of “intra-activity.” puig de la bellacasa offers a theorization of care that does not entirely correspond to its vernacular usage. rather than benevolent concern, care is a form of maintenance work. research on care follows in the feminist tradition of drawing attention to unrecognized labors, such as silvia lópez gil’s (2007) description of care as largely unseen work “without which life does not function.” it is embedded in everyday practice (m. barnes 2012), so seamless a process that it lacks a clear beginning or end. centering care is a feminist approach regardless of the gendered dimensions of the lives in question, as examinations of interdependence, maintenance, and more-than-human relations have been marginalized by western patriarchal values privileging individuality, invention, and human dominance (wynter 2003; puig de la bellacasa 2012; mattern 2018; russell and vinsel 2018). consonant with new materialist approaches, care for puig de la bellacasa (2015, 2017) includes not only human acts but the activities of an assemblage that promote ongoingness—irrespective of scale, aliveness, or species. as annemarie mol (2008, 84) elaborates, “articulating ‘good care’ is an intervention rather than factual assessment.” as feminist scholars introducing a special issue on the politics of care argue, “practices of care are always shot through with asymmetrical power relations” (martin, myers, and viseu 2015, 3). “care organizes, classifies and disciplines bodies,” the authors note, with colonial governance as an instructive illustration (martin, myers, and viseu 2015, 3). they encourage a critical approach to care that situates care practices within relations of power and privilege. care is non-innocent. it is a form of more-than-human biopolitics, privileging the maintenance of certain lives over others. care is, to quote puig de la bellacasa (2017, introduction), “a thick, impure involvement in a world where the question of how to care is posed.” she suggests that as researchers we look for where this question is not easily answered. barad’s (2003) theory of agential realism provides an ontological foundation for thinking with care. she insists that entities do not preexist their relatings. whereas interaction implies a prior state of independence between distinct actors, her term intra-action maintains their ongoing mutual co-constitution. this blurring of subject-object distinctions becomes palpable in the circling blame of a plant epidemic where causal mechanisms are multiple and uncertain, simultaneously external and internal. indeed, some farmers confronting xylella ultimately argued for “living with” the disease by deepening the long-term engagement of scientists and policymakers in their community. their plea underscores how the narrow agronomic view of disease fails to acknowledge, and may even undermine, the relational maintenance work and interdependence at the core of an agroecological system’s resilience. environmental anthropology has long attended to the intimacy of interspecies linkages in agrarian lifeways (evans-pritchard 1940; conklin 1957; netting 1974). recent work highlights the interacting agencies of organisms across scales, from microbes (paxson 2008) to forests (kohn 2013; tsing 2015). yet despite the significance of plant diseases to empire-making (crosby 2004) and their suspected amplification by climate change, these life-altering encounters have received little attention (seshia galvin 2018). anthropological scholarship on pathogenesis has predominantly focused on the threats animal confinement poses to more-than-human lives (dunn 2007; lowe 2010; porter 2013; blanchette 2015). in studies of agricultural plants, much like their animal counterparts, vulnerability to disease is described largely as a product of industrial conditions of density and uniformity (soluri 2005; mccook 2006; guthman 2019). the case of xylella in spain, by contrast, reveals the pathogenic vulnerabilities of a diversified agricultural system struggling to persist amid capitalist pressures near and far, both within agriculture and beyond. the socio-ecological devastation of plant disease is well known. plant disease famously provoked mass migration during the irish potato famine (yoshida et al. 2013), forever changed the ecology of north america during the chestnut blight (biermann 2016), and nearly eliminated european wine cultivation (campbell 2004). as global transportation networks become increasingly fluid (chapman et al. 2017), resistance to agrochemicals becomes more common (gould, brown, and kuzma 2018), socioeconomic change refashions landscapes (meentemeyer et al. 2008), and climate change alters the ranges and populations of organisms (jones 2016; trębicki et al. 2017), experts expect plant diseases to become more frequent and possibly more destructive. epidemiological accounts of plant disease used by scientists and policymakers tend to reify boundaries, positioning pathogens as an outside threat or invasion. here, i want to draw attention to how pathogens, no matter their origin, are produced from within. pathogenicity describes “the relational ways in which infectious diseases are made” (hinchliffe et al. 2017, xiv). i detail how spain’s xylella epidemic is produced not only by bacteria but also by the conditions of possibility created by tourism, unstable land tenure, histories of marginalization, and the retreat of government from farm advising. theorizing a plant epidemic through care allows us to uncover the intra-action of pathogenicity and shift from a politics of purification toward a politics of more-than-human care. to admit the intra-active quality of pathogenicity requires acknowledging that containing the pest is only part of the picture. such an admission requires a political reckoning that goes beyond trade restrictions or government-funded tree removal and replacement. it broadens the scope of dialogue to reflect long-term commitments to the land. understanding landscape care as non-innocent avoids a good-bad dichotomy, asking difficult questions about how to care. answers to this question may be incommensurable, as political projects often are (tuck and yang 2012), and carry uneven effects. care is not a shorthand for universal values. it is a call to give relational maintenance work the political weight it is due. working with care how does one observe and classify care? one way is by listening for the multiple interpretations of care articulated by interlocutors. i did not begin this research seeking to examine care, nor did i anticipate encountering an epidemic of such dramatic proportions. it was the voices of my companions repeatedly deploying the word cuidado and detailing the decline in rural maintenance work inherent to the xylella outbreak that drew me to revisit and deepen my engagement with theories of care in order to make sense of an unexpected phenomenon. while emic uses of cuidado and the etic theoretical concept of care are not perfectly equivalent, their resonance felt too strong to be ignored. cuidado has a rich variety of uses, including as a common exclamation of caution (“watch out!”) and a way of describing nurturing, attentiveness, concern, or support. in the case of xylella, my interlocutors often deployed cuidado in the negative to signal neglect and assign responsibility, while in the positive it marked connections and investments among people and with the land. importantly, care is not normatively positive as it sustains particular forms of agrarian political economy that benefit some at the expense of others. both the emic and etic concepts evoke interdependency, responsibility, caution, and a compilation of actions neither unidirectional nor discrete nor exclusively human that hold a lifeworld together—for better or for worse. care as a situated analytical practice (murphy 2015) is not limited to discourse analysis (j. barnes and taher 2019). i read care as relational maintenance work, often at a scale that passes unnoticed until interrupted. it is the compounding impact of microlevel engagements that cumulatively sustain a way of being. to do something carefully is to be atypically mindful of its subtleties and implications. articulations of care are often voiced when seeking to remedy an undesirable quality of existing patterns of maintenance work, imploring others to pay attention to (care about) something otherwise taken for granted. while care operates discursively, it need not be stated to be recognized. garbage collectors may not characterize their labor as care, yet it keeps urban life flowing and its cessation would quickly raise alarm. earthworms cannot use words, yet their daily digestion maintains the fertility of soils, facilitating continued farming. the politics of care constitute a politics of relational maintenance: what relations are being sustained, and to what ends? this article derives insights from interviews with farmers, managers of almond grower cooperatives, government officials, and scientists in mallorca (balearic islands autonomous community) and alicante (valencia autonomous community); participant observation at farmer organizing meetings to discuss the epidemic; and analysis of archival records and secondary sources relevant to spain’s almond ecology. through these engagements i drew the landscape itself into walking interviews (bergeron, paquette, and poullaouec-gonidec 2014), seeking to understand the multiple ways my interlocutors read the landscape for relations between people, trees, bacteria, insect vectors, climate, and more. a landscape, rather than land, is an assemblage of more-than-human relations rich with history, economy, cultural practice, and aesthetic values. the orchard form itself—pruned, spaced, and distinctively assembled—reveals histories of more-than-human sociality (tsing 2014; mathews 2018). the material contours of spain’s almond ecologies thus served not only as objects of study but also as key participants in the research process. in examining the intricacies of landscape care, i build on multispecies ethnographic approaches (kirksey and helmreich 2010; ogden, hall, and tanita 2013) and more-than-human geographic thought (braun 2006; whatmore 2006; panelli 2010; robbins and marks 2010), fields deeply indebted to, though often lacking engagement with, indigenous thought (tallbear 2011; sundberg 2014; todd 2017). such approaches serve to decenter humans as exclusive protagonists, and instead bring relations among beings—plant, animal (humans included), mineral, and otherwise—to the foreground. i find this approach particularly necessary because plant disease is inherently relational across species categories. xylella fastidiosa alone is simply a bacterium; disease, as a phenomenon, exists as a pathogen-host-vector-environment complex (scholthof 2007). as a matter of ethics, this approach proffers a modest and imperfect attempt to break from patterns of human exceptionalism that have enabled socio-ecological violence (wynter 2003; weheliye 2014). to be clear, this is not a matter of demonstrating nonhuman agency, but rather an effort to eschew bounded objects in favor of relations, which are always more-than-human. i do not intend to prove that xylella fastidiosa can “speak” (mitchell 2002) through its impacts; rather, i show how the materiality of a disease event exposes a deterioration of more-than-human relations. it is those relations, not the bacteria or the almond tree as discrete organisms, that demand a more explicit politics of landscape care. el oro de mallorca xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium named for its habitat, the xylem of plants, and for its “fastidiousness”: it is notoriously difficult to culture (purcell 2013). while scientific convention calls for referring to the bacterium as x. fastidiosa, i will use the name xylella, as it circulated among my interlocutors. while xylella dislikes laboratories, it finds a plethora of comfortable homes within the xylem of vascular plants: it has 359 known plant hosts from 75 different plant families (baldi and la porta 2017). like most bacterial pathogens it is asymptomatic in the rain forests of south and central america, where it has co-evolved as an amiable endophyte that inhabits but does not kill its host. this makes sense as tropical plants benefit from abundant water, and a bit of bacteria is unlikely to restrict their flow. killing the host is generally bad for business. once introduced to a new environment, xylella rather easily finds a xylem-feeding insect whose mouth and foregut it can colonize, thus hitching a ride to the next juicy xylem the insect seeks out. almond trees are unlike the plants of xylella’s tropical origin. they are adapted to arid lands, with wild relatives native to the region stretching from central asia westward to the levant (ladizinsky 1999). for the past few millennia almonds have accompanied farmers throughout the mediterranean basin, as they are particularly well suited to the long, hot, and dry summers characteristic of the region. while almonds have long been present in mallorca, they did not gain a prominent place in the landscape until the turn of the twentieth century. at that time a global grain glut and new industrial substitutes for olive oil made agriculture less profitable for aristocratic landlords (tello et al. 2018). political changes during the previous century had already eroded the power of noble estates. to save themselves from bankruptcy, landlords began selling off parcels, and an emerging class of merchant capitalists bought the land at bargain prices before subdividing and reselling it to peasants through long-term annuities (ferrer guasp 2000). during the late nineteenth century, this emerging class of diversified peasant farmers initially favored wine grapes as a cash crop, since the global shortage produced by the phylloxera blight in continental europe promised spectacular profits. yet a bust quickly followed the boom. a surplus of grapes drove a steep decline in prices, and phylloxera eventually made its way to mallorca. many chose to replace vineyards with a polyculture of tree crops in which almonds held a prominent place. the land that peasant farmers had been sold was often at the agricultural margins, much of it formerly forested and on steep slopes, and wage work was an important compliment to subsistence production (molina de dios 2012). almonds made for an ideal choice: a drought resistant tree able to thrive in dry, rocky, low-nutrient soils; easily intercropped with grains and legumes; producing fuelwood, fodder, and fertilizer in addition to marketable nuts; and requiring little maintenance while peasant farmers engaged in wage labor elsewhere. while large estates also benefited from the profitability of almonds (morey tous and fornés comas 2021), almond trees proved an indispensable lifeline for peasant producers. in 1930, the balearic islands commanded more area in almonds than any other spanish province, despite its relatively small size. almond trees served as pillars within a sophisticated diversified rainfed farming system. a typical farm would include a mix of trees (including varying proportions of almonds, olives, carob, and figs, depending on the local pedoclimatic conditions) pruned at chest height to allow sheep grazing in the understory, which was seeded with a rotation of winter grains, legumes, and fodder crops. limited agrochemical inputs due to embargoes placed on the francoist regime maintained a largely organic agroecological system (murray et al. 2019). almond plantings grew increasingly popular. by 1975, according to government records, 15 percent of the balearic islands’ total surface area was planted with almonds, with an additional 206,365 individual trees scattered across the landscape along field edges, roads, or hillsides (instituto nacional de estadística 1977). while other regions of spain’s mediterranean coast grew almonds, nowhere were they quite as economically significant as in the balearic islands, where they earned the title el oro de mallorca, the gold of mallorca. while grains, olive oil,1 and meat provided sustenance for small farmers, almonds were primarily sold for export. as one farmer explained, almond harvest was the time of year for buying new clothes and gifts. it was the crop that put money in peasants’ pockets. when commercial airline travel brought an influx of tourism to mallorca beginning in the 1960s, the landscape of almonds in bloom served as a stunning visual spectacle attracting visitors (bardolet 1980). yet most tourists came for the beaches, not the almonds. fueled by substantial german investments, tourism has come to dominate the island’s economy. an estimated ten million tourists visit mallorca annually (balearic islands tourism board 2017), whose resident population remains less than one million. mallorcans i spoke with often repeated a striking statistic: in summertime, an airplane leaves or takes off from the island every minute. almond farmers i spoke with felt that the landscapes they tended were valued as photo fodder, while they themselves were forgotten. “xylella didn’t kill the almonds,” one man told me, “tourism did.” historically, peasant farmers’ daily activities constituted care for networks of relations between plants, animals, and others. preparing soil, herding sheep, harvesting nuts: these activities are never purely human, but rather a complex intra-action that would not function without the decompositional chemistry of the soil’s biotic-abiotic interface, the digestive enzymes of the sheep gut, and the sugar-producing propensity of the tree. this more-than-human maintenance work, while easy to romanticize in retrospect, sustained not only an agroecology but also the reproduction of a stratified social structure. particular arrangements of care in agrarian landscapes enabled the dominance of landowning elites for centuries, “shot through,” as always, with asymmetrical power relations (martin, myers, and viseu 2015, 3). the shift toward coastal tourism in the late twentieth century swiftly reoriented mallorca’s dominant landscape-maintenance intra-actions. road construction and repair, water and waste infrastructure, and beachfront amenity activities accelerated. political leaders, planners, machine operators, and entrepreneurs intra-acted with palm trees, ocean waves, turf grasses, gravel quarries, timber forests, aquifers, decomposing refuse and more, collectively caring for this landscape of transitory leisure. in doing so, the agrarian character of the landscape eroded. landscape care operates as part of a political economy, prioritizing certain relations over others as a new oro de mallorca takes the place of the old. the outbreak: a crisis of care when i arrived in mallorca in january of 2018, xylella had been officially detected only fifteen months earlier. once it had been identified, the consejería de agricultura, pesca y alimentación (ministry of agriculture, fishing and food) studied the issue internally while trying to calm concerned farmers. according to the european union’s protocol (directive 2000/29/ec), all trees within a hundred-meter radius of the infected site were to be removed. a team of plant pathologists soon found that infected trees spanned the entire island (olmo et al. 2021). while almonds suffered most visibly, the bacterium was found in wild and cultivated olives, wine grapes, and several shrubs. to follow protocol would be to denude the island. with the island naturally quarantined by the surrounding waters, the mallorcan government pleaded their case to the eu commission and received an exception. xylella was first confirmed present in a cherry tree in a plant nursery, and many believed the international nursery trade was responsible for its arrival in mallorca. most farmers suspected that it arrived from california, their almond-growing rival, in the 1990s, when government officials had traveled there to learn about improved almond varieties and intensive growing techniques. when asked, a ministry official quickly dismissed the possibility that a scientist would carry plant material from overseas. a longtime farm advisor remembered returning with a small sample of the texas variety from california in the 1990s, but nothing since. another agronomist described pocketing a few almonds on research visits and propagating them back home as a matter of course inherent to scientific curiosity. regardless of whether such research trips were to blame, the rumor resonated with farmers’ perceptions of the ministry as careless and naive, underestimating a single plant’s infectious power. further complicating matters, plant pathologists identified three distinct subspecies of the bacterium, suggesting multiple independent introductions (olmo et al. 2018). as natalia gutkowski (2021) notes, unwanted organisms are often described as blind to borders, yet their enactment is profoundly territorial. the first thing i encountered when entering the ministry’s office was a large vertical banner illustrating the symptoms of xylella. plant quarantine notices for airports and the cruise ship and ferry docks had been swiftly circulated. i was shown boxes of freshly printed color pocket guides to identifying and managing the disease awaiting distribution. the booklets illustrated best practices, recommending that farmers plow their fields or use herbicides to remove any understory vegetation that might harbor the insect vector. the ministry was in a flurry of activity to address this putatively new disease, but farmers scoffed at the claim that this was anything new. almond farmers told me they had noticed abnormalities for more than fifteen years but lacked the support to address the issue. there has been no agricultural extension service providing agronomic advice since the 1980s. no one at the island’s only university was actively studying almond diseases. in fact, an enthusiastic plant pathologist working at the airport conducted much of the early investigation into xylella pro bono in his spare time. a lack of official research employment at a university or research institution may have limited his credibility, potentially delaying action on the issue. when consulting the ministry, farmers were either told incorrectly that the problem was a fungus or that they had not properly cared for their trees. according to many at the ministry, the real problem was falta de cuidado, a lack of care. this accusation of lack of care felt deeply unjust to many. “the administration comes back saying, ‘they are poorly cared-for almond trees’ [son almendros mal cuidados]. obviously when your trees are dying and people have told you there’s no solution, you stop taking care of them. why would you invest?” the assertion seemed out of touch, as farmers were quick to note that the man who first identified the seriousness of the problem with almonds was himself a trained agronomist praised for his carefully tended land. it also put a heavy burden on individuals swimming against the current of the tourism-driven economy. even the most meticulously cared-for orchard could be surrounded by farms abandoned because of economic opportunity elsewhere or turned into vacation rentals prioritizing aesthetics over tree health. how could more pruning, weeding, or pest treatments possibly compete with “strangulation” by neighboring fields, they asked. we have a thirty-three-hectare planting, rainfed, old, traditional, organic, that i’m wondering … this year should i pull it all out? … for the past two years i don’t know whether to prune, not to prune, what to do, because no one gives you anything, no breaks… . now they’re saying off the cuff that what you should do is tear everything out because if you hadn’t had that single weed, because if you hadn’t had that single insect, because whatever. right. but in mallorca you can have a half hectare of perfectly cared-for almonds, without a single weed, but the neighbor’s farm left you with it abandoned. you’ll be in the same situation. that’s what we told the ministry. abandoned orchards signaled a shift in more-than-human relations, with implications spilling over beyond property boundaries. spittle bugs carrying xylella could proliferate freely in the leafy understory of a neglected orchard. trees harboring the bacterium undetected would act as perpetual reservoirs of the bacteria. the disease assemblage itself proved the limits of an individualist approach. almond farmers fumed at the notion that they had not cared for their trees because it seemed to negate the systemic disruptions of rural life. farmers had found their economic base gradually dissolving as hotels multiplied. their regional government had long touted tourism as the saving grace of an island once known for its antiquated agrarian ways. their children had chosen more comfortable and secure urban lives, often catering to visitors at hotels or restaurants. their neighbors had abandoned the land, leaving trees that were uncared for and giving passersby the impression that agrarian lifeways had already disappeared into the history books. agriculture, cared for by a community not so long before, found itself excluded from the cares of most mallorcans. as one farmer noted, the image of those almonds, many of them already dead, or those trunks, the big ones on the side of the highway, farms, some abandoned, all the dry wood that’s dying. for me this is the graphic image of our agricultural society, of rural society, or what’s left of it. while the ministry’s pamphlets detailed tactics to triumph over a novel bacterial invader, farmers confronted a crisis much broader in scope. in the grand scheme, the care work of maintaining almond trees being contested—to prune or spray or mow or not—felt nearly insignificant in the face of a widespread collective failure to maintain agrarian lifeways. the xylella outbreak merely caused those more distanced from agriculture to take notice and perhaps share momentarily in the experience of grief. the large decaying trunks, yellowed leaves, and lifeless limbs in such an iconic species, the materiality of the disease, demanded attention in ways that a dwindling group of aging farmers did not. the faltering trees grabbed a few fleeting headlines in the local press and insisted the ministry show some kind of effort. their desiccated bodies posed questions of landscape care much more publicly than such matters would have been discussed if healthy almond trees had continued their gradual fade with economic change. the disease intra-action opened opportunities for care as reflection and consideration of how landscapes are maintained, by and for whom, and to what end. political economies of care: “people would care if it affected tourism” almond production went from being the island’s agricultural jewel to a husk of its former splendor in less than thirty years, an almond cooperative manager reflected. in that time tourism had transformed every corner of the island’s economy. three distinct phases mark mallorca’s transition from agriculture to tourism: the mid-century boom (1953–1972), the early neoliberal boom (1979–1987), and the financialization boom (1993–2008) (murray 2012). each boom has been followed by years of global economic crisis and restructuring. the year 1953 ended an era of economic isolation for spain. allied governments after world war ii had maintained embargoes against the fascist-controlled country until the united states, seeking allies in the fight against communism, signed a series of pacts with franco. the warming of diplomatic relations, the abundance of capital and paid holidays in nearby industrial economies, the comparatively cheap cost of labor, and the triad of sun, sand, and sea made mallorca an attractive destination for an emerging class of leisure consumers. after the recession of the 1970s and spain’s 1986 integration into the european union, tourism picked up its pace, with consolidated resort chains benefiting under deregulatory regimes. a map of tourist accommodations in 1996 shows a dense concentration of hotels along the beaches and large coastal cities with very few locations in the island’s agricultural interior. by 2010 tourist lodgings permeated the island. during this most recent construction boom, new policies prioritized rural lodges and five-star hotels, a move advocated by established hoteliers protecting themselves against competition (pons, rullán salamanca, and murray 2014). farmers had long felt the economic pull of tourism, but now it seemed inescapable. farmers i spoke with felt that agriculture had become an after-thought for public officials: you can’t compete with the quantity of money generated by an activity as powerful as tourism, which requires investments in infrastructure, airports, sea ports, highways, hotels, streets, sidewalks, [compared] with an agricultural sector where people are aging, where there’s no relief, where there’s not much interest in change. a few farmers i met had begun incorporating agritourism into their activities, enticing visitors with the authenticity of rustic lodgings or freshly prepared lamb. they had always juggled multiple roles, often selling their labor as a tractor driver or in a factory to make ends meet. “you have to be polyvalent here. you can’t live from one thing,” one man explained. most farmers felt the wealth generated by tourism remained highly concentrated. “for all this tourism, it seems like we should be the wealthiest place in europe. but only three or four people are really earning … the hotel owners. we work very hard now in the summers [in the tourism industry] and we’re still just as poor.” political economic change had shifted relations of care. tourism’s economic heft now demanded wide-ranging forms of infrastructural maintenance and planning, from macro-level public works to household-level chores. the ongoingness of activities like agriculture had become almost incidental. frustration toward tourism reflected concerns not only over the decline of agriculture but also over the concentration of wealth in mallorcan society. the inability of agriculture to “compete” for attention was also an inability to challenge a pattern of deepening inequality. what counts as good care among public officials, be it smooth roads or plentiful harvests, echoed shifting power relations. care is thus constituted within and through political economy. maintenance work, or lack thereof, reflects and shapes social configurations. i met a doctoral student who had begun carefully cataloguing more than two hundred mallorcan almond varieties five years earlier, and suddenly found himself documenting a dying race. “there’s a wealth that will be lost forever,” he said, but “it’s no big deal [no pasa nada]… . people would care if it affected tourism.” instead he saw the almonds decaying with only a passing sigh. but that did not stop his research. his countless conversations with farmers and detailed documentation of each variety’s unique form were acts of care: minor, momentary, more-than-human engagements that worked to sustain mallorcan agroecologies if not in practice then at least in memory. to care about something deemed a lost cause made some question his sanity, he commented. i sensed the satisfaction in his actions as a form of subtle resistance to the apathy sustaining the status quo. paying attention is political. conflicted legacies of care: no one left to consult despite their frustration with the ministry’s handling of the xylella epidemic, most farmers did not actively display their discontent or make demands on the government. franco’s dictatorship had likely contributed to a sense of resignation toward administrative dismissiveness. despite forty years of democratic governance since, fascism was in most farmers’ living memory. the regime had cared for farmers, providing advising services they now missed. but as a retired farm advisor explained, this was a paternalistic kind of care, expecting obedience. as scholars of colonialism underscore (martin, myers, and viseu 2015; murphy 2015), care is non-innocent. it shapes and is shaped by power relations, in this case reinforcing a deference to technocratic authority characteristic of franco’s regime. the servicio de extensión agraria (sea), or agricultural extension service, was established during the late 1950s as part of u.s. aid to franco’s regime. spanish officials traveled to the united states and returned with an agenda to replicate the american model of farm advising. the program aspired to a green revolution for spain, prioritizing economic efficiency through mechanization, intensification, and irrigation. in line with franco’s technocratic model, farmers were expected to passively receive the wisdom delivered by technical experts (díaz geada et al. 2012). yet due to its decentralized model, the institution enjoyed significant autonomy. its workers lived alongside farmers, and they gradually adapted their activities to meet community needs, developing a suite of rural social services that evolved to recognize rural populations as the engines of their own development (benito and pulgar 2007). care provided by the extension service proved complex, navigating a tension between its paternalistic mission and a more grassroots manifestation. during the transition to democracy, between franco’s death in 1975 and the approval of the spanish constitution in 1978, political power was decentralized from madrid to seventeen autonomous communities (comunidades autónomas), leaving the sea in limbo. when spain entered the european union in 1986, sea agents became responsible for administering benefits through the eu common agricultural policy, transforming agricultural advisors into bureaucrats. mallorcan farmers recalled the sea with nostalgic praise. nearly everyone i spoke with remembered one enthusiastic farm advisor who had dedicated his career to troubleshooting almond trees, even though it was not his original assignment. unlike the ministry’s representatives hidden away in offices shuffling stacks of paper, this man was out in the fields, running trials of new techniques and answering farmers’ questions. many felt that the money flowing in from the eu fundamentally changed public perceptions of farming, from a livelihood to a paper chase. they wondered how the detection of and response to xylella might have gone differently if sea were still active. when i asked farmers where they went when they needed advice, they often responded with a dry laugh. occasionally they might consult someone at the cooperative, but these advisors had often spent far less time in the field and their priorities lay elsewhere. agricultural cooperatives were yet another institution many farmers felt had ultimately failed them despite the best of intentions. for farmers to receive benefits from the eu, they needed to organize into agricultural cooperatives. cooperatives were intended to allow farmers’ greater economic power through bulk purchases of inputs at lower prices and collective sales of their product at higher prices. almonds require processing equipment to remove the hull and shell, and a cooperative would allow farmers to own the expensive processing equipment themselves, capturing a greater share of the sales value. while farmers appreciated these gains in the short term, many felt that they had been tricked in the long term. the cooperatives were not run by farmers concerned with preserving the land, they said, but by businesspeople seeking to satisfy their customers. as evidence, farmers explained that when california almonds became cheaper, some cooperatives began importing and processing large quantities of them for sale, arguing it was to everyone’s economic benefit. the orders were filled, and the cooperative’s profits were shared by its farmer members, but ultimately the global dominance of california almonds forced mallorcan growers to accept lower prices. the retired farm advisor said that in the early days, he had proposed forming a cooperative composed only of farmers, but the administration had rejected the idea, saying that this kind of cooperative could not feasibly market their product. the decline of institutional support through the sea, as well as the lack of full alignment between farmers and cooperative employees, left farmers with fewer people to consult when they encountered something strange in their almonds. when they did call on the ministry or their cooperative, a degree of distance, distraction, or distrust seemed to limit the connection. institutional networks of care for farmers themselves require regular care to maintain. the shift from farm advising to farm administrating revealed just how crucial relationships had been to the daily troubleshooting of living from the land. yet nostalgia for the care provided by sea proved complex, unable to be disentangled from the dishonor of franco’s legacy. care is always relational, contextual, and political. care can be conservative, sustaining existing structures. recognizing the significance of care work does not presume inherent benefits flow in all directions. waning cycles of care: little reason to invest “the farms aren’t actually mine,” one farmer mentioned as an aside after our lengthy conversation discussing the rhythms of his days and years pasturing sheep among the almond groves. it was an afterthought to explain because the situation is so common. the small parcels farmers could afford to buy in the early twentieth century were not big enough to sustain a family. most full-time farmers were effectively sharecroppers splitting the harvest fifty-fifty with various landlords under informal agreements. as profits from agriculture declined, those who continued working the land stayed afloat by cultivating a dozen or more parcels belonging to various owners. precarious land-tenure dynamics made it difficult to justify investments in new almond trees. wheat gives an annual harvest, so fertilizer costs are easily recuperated at the end of the season. almond trees take five to eight years to begin producing under rainfed conditions, reaching their full productive capacity around fifteen years. long-term arrangements with landowners were difficult to secure. with tourism rapidly raising property values, farmers never knew when they might not have their agreement renewed. tree growth could not conform to the abrupt temporalities of tourism. a manager at a small almond cooperative told me he had suspected a new disease in 2010, but had had difficulty distinguishing between drought, aging trees, and lack of care. people were not renewing their orchards but merely keeping older, weaker, trees from a previous generation, he explained, valuing them as antiques rather than living landscapes. as john hartigan (2017, 230) notes, among catalan botanists, older generations see the lack of tree replacement as sending a dangerous message that “we are a disorderly, careless people.” many urban-dwelling families inherited land from their elders with little knowledge of how to maintain the landscape. according to almond growers and their advisors, this younger generation comes back just to harvest the nuts, without knowledge of how to care for and renew the orchard. as the aforementioned graduate student of almond diversity explained, “there’s no generational renewal. xylella will make all this faster and more traumatic.” as in many parts of the world, the agrarian workforce in mallorca is aging. some commentators suspected that almonds had suffered neglect because pruning trees is more physically demanding than other farming tasks. others noted that farmers in their seventies and eighties were unlikely to plant trees because they might not live to see them bear fruit. the temporality of tree bodies and human bodies were intertwined. many felt less invested in organizing to combat the xylella epidemic because they saw no one who would take care of the land when they passed away. as an elder farmer explained, “we haven’t put up much of a fuss because there’s no social weight forcing us to do things otherwise … after me there’s no one else.” in 2018 the island’s young farmers association had just four members. the young member i met expressed a sense of obligation to care for the land, while acknowledging that such care takes more than just the work of farmers: “we understand that maintaining the environment is our responsibility, that it benefits everyone, and we want to do it. what happens is that alone, alone it’s impossible.” others echoed the significance of almond trees as essential to the mallorcan landscape and valued for “more than just production,” slipping fluidly in and out of the commodity form (tsing 2015). landscape care, a far more expansive notion than agricultural output, was a task that demanded more than the actions of increasingly scarce farmers. as feminist theorists point out, care reveals interdependency (fischer and tronto 1990; martin, myers, and viseu 2015; puig de la bellacasa 2015). xylella’s spread was in many ways a disease thriving in the wake of disconnections. gaps in intergenerational knowledge and practice left trees more vulnerable. farmers’ motivation declined as continuity into the future became increasingly elusive, both for their land-tenure arrangements and for their families. a younger group of farmers valuing agriculture for its ecological and cultural role found their ambitions frustrated by isolation. as an intra-action, the devastation of the xylella outbreak could not be separated from its conditions of possibility. the disease complex managed to spread due not only to the combination of species and climate but also to the weakening of relationships experienced by the agricultural community, a relational breakdown encoded in the ecology as aging trees and overgrown orchards. modernist care: irrigated hopes in 2018, irrigation was emerging as a new form of almond tree care, an act once considered unthinkable for such a drought-resistant species. because xylella affects the fluid artery of the tree, the xylem, its effects are much less severe in irrigated trees. intensive modernist agricultural practices were promoted as a new regime of care, one that might secure a future for the mallorcan almond industry, though not necessarily for most mallorcan almond farmers. after i interviewed the man handling the xylella case at the ministry of agriculture, he offered to take me on a tour of recently planted orchards. “i want to show you the best,” he said, “not the stuff by the roadside.” he took me to visit a new, irrigated, and intensively managed planting owned by a wealthy doctor and assured me that the trees received abundant fertilizer, interpreted as a sign of care. at the next stop, we marveled at a large orchard owned by a hotelier. my guide felt responsible for performing progress, explaining that xylella was not the real problem. for him it was old trees and lack of care. as we drove along, he pointed out the window to trees with lichen growing on almond branches as evidence. while lichens are not harmful to trees, he found them unsightly. not enough pruning or treatment with copper fungicide, he explained. farmers had not taken care of their trees. the largest cooperative on the island was also planting an irrigated orchard. the beneficiaries would be the farmer-members, the cooperative manager explained, but not all growers celebrated the innovation. “there is not enough water for everyone,” several stated frankly, including those who had planted the newly irrigated orchard. mallorca has no permanent rivers, and threats of water shortage are constant. tourism puts serious strain on water supplies, particularly as the government has incentivized higher-end resorts with golf courses and extensive landscaping (kent, newnham, and essex 2002). overexploitation of aquifers has produced saltwater intrusion, a terrifying prospect for an island depending on groundwater for 75 to 95 percent of its supply. and then there are the omnipresent manifestations of climate change. hydrologists predict reduced water supplies. higher winter temperatures and intense heat episodes are also suspected to boost xylella’s virulence. many believe the record temperatures of recent summers triggered xylella to rapidly multiply and kill its almond host. one farmer noted skeptically, now they are doing irrigation, but in my opinion, they are going to end up without water, because it doesn’t rain. every year we surpass record summer temperatures. every year we set records. it doesn’t rain. every day more people, more human pressure, more tourists, more pools, more needs, and we are going to end up without water. i don’t know if they are going to be able to irrigate, though they say they will use recycled water. another cooperative manager described hopes for a mixed system. some intensively managed, irrigated orchards could generate enough almonds to keep production facilities moving and allow farmers to revitalize rainfed almond landscapes, “for the environment more than anything.” for those with access to water, capital, and land to secure their investment, irrigation presented a modernist fix that could keep the almond industry afloat and possibly avert land abandonment in the near future. strangely, many agronomists expected the polyculture of rainfed almond production to be saved (at least temporarily) by the monoculture of irrigated, fertilized, and pesticide-controlled plantations. for rainfed farmers and others anxious about mallorca’s water future, betting the future of almond cultivation on irrigation seemed careless, lacking in consideration of how it might be sustained in the long term. freshwater’s unique material properties conjured hopes and fears as its role in landscape care was variously considered. it could flush the vascular tissues of plants, providing life support to a dying industry, and it could retreat from the skies and subterranean stores, jeopardizing future possibilities. water exposed undeniable interdependencies, not only among mallorcans but also between all living beings on the island and the atmospheric cycles extending beyond its bounds. living with xylella: a call for care while mallorca mourned its losses, infected almonds were detected on the spanish mainland in alicante province. here, too, farmers faced accusations of lack of care, but unlike in mallorca, spared by its geography, in peninsular spain eu protocols mandated mass tree removals to stem xylella’s spread. “if they tear out the trees, they will tear out the last of rural life,” one farmer told me. in a region fighting wave after wave of rural depopulation, these almond trees—not to mention rosemary, myrtle, and the many native shrub hosts potentially slated for removal—rooted people to a sense of place. while these farmers did not rely primarily on almonds for their income, losing vegetation meant losing a landscape whose maintenance was crucial to their identities. “the work of my father, my grandfathers, i can’t see it torn out because some guy thinks it’s the right idea,” one man objected. much as in anna tsing’s (2015) account of mushroom foragers, the prospect of tree removal underscored how memory and identity were constantly enacted through more-than-human relations. a small group of farmers organized, protested in the streets, and lobbied their case with every political party that would listen. they argued that the eradication of xylella was impossible given the range of hosts. mass tree removal might also hurt the economic lifeline of the community: tourism. according to eu guidelines, once trees were removed landowners would be restricted from planting anything for five years. they would receive nineteen euros per tree for their loss. an already aging farming population might not replant, many feared, accelerating rural abandonment. the weeds that regrow on untended land might also raise the risk of fires, another anticipated consequence of rural depopulation and a warming climate. when i met the group, united under the title plataforma de afectados por la xylella fastidiosa de la provincia de alicante (axfa, platform for those affected by xylella fastidiosa in alicante province), researchers had recently discovered the sixth distinct focus of xylella infection. in the previous months, they had fanned out over the province to conduct microbial analyses of trees at risk. as in mallorca, farmers in alicante told me they had noticed symptoms for many years and that the disease was nothing new. the woman who first detected xylella in her orchard had been sending samples to a laboratory for four years. given the pathogen’s historic absence in europe, it took extended, persistent efforts to identify the culprit, as xylella is renowned among bacteriologists for its resistance to lab culture. now facing the proposed uprooting of her surroundings, she regretted the persistent care she had taken to send in so many samples. landscape purification was simply a futile bureaucratic performance, farmers claimed, advocating for a shift from attempts at eradication to containment. they cited scientific reports detailing the growing list of known plant hosts and insect vectors, the years that the disease had likely spread undetected, and the lack of successful eradication anywhere in the world. farmers believed that the administration based its decisions more on budget than on biology: the eu provided funding for eradication measures but not for containment. tree removal was also a business, which some suspected might have financial or political benefits for those in office. administrators dismissed rainfed almonds as unprofitable, failing to see the trees as integral to the rural landscape. unlike more powerful capital-intensive agroindustries in the region—such as citrus and olives—small-scale rainfed almond growers felt they were treated as disposable. “the administration only cares about productivity. the smell of almonds turns to pine and they say, ‘oh, well.’” farmers advocated for “living with” (convivir con) xylella,2 even though no one knew what that would mean. the difference, for them, was the care it would take. learning to live with xylella and contain its impacts would require long-term engagements with farmers and other landowners. this call for a broadening of socio-ecological scope resonates with the “360° approach” proposed by italian olive growers grappling with xylella (colella, carradore, and cerroni 2019). living with would require iterative, locally situated research and decision-making processes that addressed agroecologies holistically, with considerations not limited to targeting the bacterium or vector. it would require more thorough planning and continuous involvement across many levels; uprooting almond trees, by contrast, appeared to many as a means for the administration to act quickly and then walk away. while i empathized with the affected farmers, i also empathized with administrators acting under extreme uncertainty. swift action to stem an epidemic might prove the most effective tactic for sparing the region and the entire european continent from widespread harm. failing to act quickly presented greater risks. yet ultimately i saw farmers less interested in saving their trees than in finding a collaborative path forward to long-term landscape care. this would require an emphasis on ongoing relations, strengthening the interconnections that allow agrarian landscapes to weather new challenges, which might include scientific engagement, secure land tenure, support for young farmers, or other collective practices yet to be imagined—rather than discrete one-time actions. these relations extend beyond the human, enrolling healthy soils, biodiversity, and a more stable climate to sustain ways of being. such care work would always yield uneven consequences. care itself is not a solution but a perpetually open and deeply political question of how relational maintenance takes place. toward a more-than-human politics of care plant epidemics, like xylella, often produce cycles of blame, resentment, and deepened community divides. this may stem in part from treating the phenomenon (1) as an interaction between separate biological and social actors—the pathogen is the enemy and the people respond well or poorly; and (2) as a unidirectional causal chain—a single event introduces a pathogen that wipes out a species. if the pathogen were the clear enemy, then its eradication might be simpler to manage. but like heat, intensifying bacterial activity within a tree, the pathogen’s virulence is provoked by a broad assemblage of facilitating conditions. the vector of time in epidemiology illustrates disease spread as a series of discrete events. yet in the eruption of an epidemic, past wounds, present transformations, and future fantasies or fears permeate one another. to embrace a pathogen as intra-active, emerging from within, means to exchange the causal chain inherent to blame for collective response-ability. while blame points to discrete individuals and actions, care indicates the continuous relationships that might be repaired or reimagined. care, by its subtle and sustaining nature, is often most perceptible in its absence. farmers felt a lack of care by government and a tourism-oriented culture. bureaucrats interpreted trees with minimal management as lacking care. when the prospect that almond trees might disappear from the landscape was raised, either gradually by disease or suddenly by bulldozers, the agroecological maintenance work—a form of care—they provided became clear. the trees not only produce almonds; they root more-than-human lives in place and across time. just as bruno latour (2011) argues that we cannot abandon our monstrous technologies, we cannot abandon our plant epidemics as mere unintended consequences or strictly biological phenomena to be contained and controlled. the intra-action of disease demonstrates that our relations bring a pathogen into being, no matter where on the globe it may originate. understanding disease as emerging within an existing whole seems at first glance antithetical to agricultural biosecurity tactics that serve to shield unaffected areas from biological intruders. yet the two approaches can be complementary, while also pushing responses to become more comprehensive. a more-than-human politics of landscape care requires us to pay attention to the entanglements that allow an epidemic to exist and to respond to each relation accordingly. eradication, while potentially worthy, is perpetually reactive. and while agroecological production practices, like crop diversification, are popularly understood to confer disease resilience, they do not suffice. when more-than-human maintenance work is rendered visible and valued, it can be more intentionally directed toward desirable, if unpredictable, ends. there is no saving mallorca’s almonds, at least not in the form they once took. what rural landscapes living with xylella on the iberian peninsula might look like remains an open question, potentially requiring dramatic reconfigurations of rural life. the xylella epidemic was always about more than almonds. a politics of landscape care is not a call for protecting, preserving, or proliferating any particular beings—plant, animal, or otherwise. it is a call to see the web of relations among plants, farmers, insects, aquifers, bacteria, governments, petrochemicals, scientists, soils, and matter of all kinds as the site of politics where the ongoingness of specific configurations of existence is negotiated. it is a call to question the focus on an individual actor—be it a bacterium or a bureaucracy—as uniquely blameworthy, for the solutions thus proposed likely remain far too narrow. a more-than-human politics of care demands that we examine the slow processes at work in transforming landscapes—like tourism, land tenure, and climate change—as well as the sudden, discrete shocks. care as politics does not presuppose any normative qualities: forms of maintenance and relation-building will always create differentiated effects. pathogenic conditions are not anomalous—they are endemic to late capitalist life. confronting them requires not only swift bold actions but also the subtle, gradual maintenance work of understanding and transforming inherited relationships, broadening imagined constituencies, acknowledging bonds of mutual responsibility, and in doing so weaving new fabrics of more-than-human care. abstract almonds were once “the gold of mallorca,” a source of modest wealth and a pillar of diversified farming systems for smallholders on the largest of spain’s balearic islands. now researchers believe nearly every rainfed almond tree on the island will be dead within as few as five years. the introduced bacteria xylella fastidiosa, enabled by its spittle-bug vector, and emboldened by climate change, has flooded the xylem of these rainfed trees, impeding the flow of fluid and nutrients to the point where the tree can no longer survive. this article enrolls feminist theorizations of care and agential realism to broaden the political scope and stakes of a plant epidemic. i argue that by attending to the care relations underlying pathogenicity we can shift from narratives of landscape purification toward a more-than-human politics of care. [care; more-than-human; agential realism; epidemic; agriculture; spain] abstracto una vez las almendras eran “el oro de mallorca,” una fuente de riqueza modesta y un pilar de un sistema de agricultura diversificada para los payeses (campesinos) de la isla más grande del archipiélago balear de españa. actualmente los investigadores creen que casi todos los almendros de la isla pueden morir dentro de cinco años. una bacteria introducida, xylella fastidiosa, apoyada por su insecto vector, el salivazo, y animada por el cambio climático, ha inundado la xilema de los almendros de secano, impidiendo la circulación de fluidos y nutrientes hasta el punto de que el árbol no puede sobrevivir. este artículo emplea teorizaciones feministas del cuidado y del realismo agencial para ampliar el alcance político de una epidemia de plantas. argumento que teniendo en cuenta las relaciones de cuidado subyacentes de la patogenicidad, podemos pasar de los temas de purificación del paisaje a una política más-que-humano del cuidado. [cuidado; más-que-humano; realismo agencial; epidemia; agricultura; españa] notes acknowledgments i owe immense gratitude to my interlocutors for their time and generosity. this article was shaped by keen insights from jaume fornés comas, eduardo moralejo, andrew mathews, jessica cattelino, jerry jacka, and the careful attention of anonymous reviewers—along with that of cultural anthropology editor brad weiss. all shortcomings are my own. funding for this research was provided by the wenner-gren foundation. 1. olive oil also had an important export role, though it was superseded by almonds in the mid-twentieth century (morey tous and molina de dios 2016). 2. this emic call for “living with” resonates strongly with donna j. haraway’s (2008, 2016) calls for more intimately “living-with” other species and martin heidegger’s (1962) theory of “being-with.” references baldi, paolo, and nicola la porta 2017 “xylella fastidiosa: host range and advance in molecular identification techniques.” 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permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.07 “it smells like a thousand angels marching” “it smells like a thousand angels marching”: the salvific sensorium in rio de janeiro’s western subúrbios laurie denyer willis london school of hygiene and tropical medicine http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2630-9092 the density of the fragrance lands on our lips. they curl. we smell it as we breathe, the odors lodging themselves in our nostril membranes, coating the delicate scroll-shaped bones that make up the human nose. milene, a devout pentecostal believer (crente), purrs a short prayer in response to the rising fumes. half of milene’s body disappears into a big blue fifty-five-gallon barrel of thick liquid fragrance. she draws a large scoop with a spouted jug she has cut from the bottom third of an old plastic bottle and then appears again. she pours the liquid gently through a funnel, also repurposed, down some green plastic tubing. the viscous, bright white substance seems to move rather idly down the tube, and at times milene has to coax it by jiggling the hose or whispering it a little prayer of encouragement. the plastic tubing is feeding the fragrance into a reused two-liter soda bottle that we have already filled with one part water and one part bleach. the first steps—filling up the bottles with bleach and water—are easier, as bleach and water are cheap and plentiful. it’s the fragrance we don’t want to lose a drop of. milene is careful and practiced in her movements and, this morning, we do not lose any of the fragrance in transfer. its strong fumes swirl, burning my eyes and nose. the smell coats our tongues, where fragrance mingles with spit, so that we taste it. we are tucked into a small workshop, only accessible via the kitchen, in milene’s self-constructed house in a small community in the western subúrbios of rio de janeiro, brazil.1 we are making a fragrant disinfectant for household cleaning that milene and her family sell in pentecostal-owned shops in surrounding communities. with more than two hundred bottles of disinfectant at our feet and stacked as high as our waists, milene speaks to the fragrance as if it were an embodied form. she speaks to it in a kind of gentle religious oratory, substantially more reticent than a typical charismatic prayer. she coaxes it lightly, as you might speak to a small child in need of gentle encouragement. as the fragrance moves along, she exhales and whispers: “this is divine [divino].” then milene passes one end of the tube to me while pinching the other. in a quick move, she pops the lid on the top of the bottle and shakes the latter vigorously. here, she agitates it all together: fragrance, bleach, water, prayer, breath. we do not wear gloves as we bottle, and even a little bit of liquid on the skin burns. i ask milene if she has ever thought of looking for different, more secure work, maybe work in the centro? “no,” she responds sharply, giving me a strange look. she takes another deep breath of fragrance. “this fragrance is given by god,” she says, “these things god sets in our path are divine. god is our cradle. this work is me in god’s arms.” milene’s rebuke of my question and her defiant assertion that the liquid fragrance is a gift from god seems at odds with what she knows i already know about the fragrance. what we are mixing is a waste product taken from the factory of a well-known international fragrance and flavor company, with multiple billions of dollars in global sales annually, strategically placed in rio’s subúrbios. milene’s husband enzo works the graveyard shift mixing perfume, and he occasionally and surreptitiously removes the discarded fragrance waste after his shift ends. if enzo was slightly unsure about the arrangement, milene knew straight away what he had uncovered. for when milene smelled it, she was without doubt: it was pedaços de graça, pieces of grace. god’s grace set in their path. a means to construct a future. it was also highly concentrated; one kilo of this fragrance would typically make about one hundred fifty-milliliter bottles of perfume, which means that the fifty-five gallons the couple has on hand (about two hundred kilos) could be used to make about twenty thousand bottles of perfume. milene’s fragrant disinfectant is highly sought after. it is a product that deftly moves through the subúrbios, desired by many: the waste flows outside the factory, is poured into bottles, and then reaches people’s homes via tight-knit pentecostal networks. it is perhaps not surprising that intimacy with god would occur here in the form of a popular, fragrant cleaning disinfectant. scent is not trivial in the subúrbios: this piece of rio’s map is often defined by its lack of cleanliness. acute water shortages plague the neighborhoods, and they are without basic material infrastructures. indeed, in rio de janeiro and other cities in brazil, the term subúrbio, like favela, represents not just a deficiency of infrastructure and services but also references the black people who live in them. historically, and still today, the larger society understands these communities as racially inferior. the people who live there are described as immoral and unclean in both character and body (damatta 1981, 1995; goldstein 2003; fischer 2004, 2008; veloso 2010; perry 2013; roth-gordon 2013; alves 2014; mccann 2014; araújo 2016; smith 2016). based on almost three years of ethnographic research conducted in rio de janeiro’s subúrbios, this article considers how the discarded comes to matter in rio (see millar 2014), and the ways in which pentecostalism, margins, smells, and soaps are put to work to construct new kinds of affective space (o’neill 2013). what enables something like repurposed waste to become “pieces of grace”— a divinely given fragrance—is the larger story of the spatial and racial politics and temporalities of the city itself (vargas 2006, 2013; alves 2014; alves and vargas 2017). i consider rio’s racialized urban landscape and how it is sensed, and made sense of, within the city’s history and present. to do so, i look to what i call the salvific sensorium. the salvific sensorium is a kind of sensed space and territory that exists by engaging the senses with a divine alterity that reconfigures worth and temporal binds. it is affectively generative, if fleetingly so: an ephemeral emancipation from spaces of denigration and oppression. working from lauren berlant’s (2011, 23) notion of optimism as a cluster of “attachments” that often winds up as cruelty in disguise, i suggest that the salvific sensorium is capacious enough to be open to both optimism and its cruelties. nobody lies or tries to hide the ways that divine fragrance burns, or what its smell attempts to mask. rather, the fragrance’s burn is put to work to describe how the desire for the divine—and the reason behind that desire—is also rough and problematic. maybe even toxic, like chemical runoff turned household soap. i unpack all of this ethnographically. in the first section of this article i discuss the concept of the salvific sensorium by considering the linkages between sensory experience and affect, drawing on the work of feminist affect theory (sedgwick 2003; stewart 2007; ahmed 2010; berlant 2011; o’neill 2015). in the second section i think about the ways race and smell get intertwined, working from the basis that race constitutes a system of relations predicated on white supremacy. race, constructed and experienced in infinite ways, is at least partly linked to the sensorial constructions of people and places. the racialization of smell is both symbolic and material. this becomes obvious when we consider that whiteness in rio is almost always rendered as sensorially neutral or blank. in the third section i show how the historical and present-day configurations of rio’s urban space, real estate, and infrastructure development systematically disenfranchise black brazilian communities, producing a conception of the subúrbios as a repugnant periphery defined by dirty people and wasted space. in the final sections i consider the way in which the salvific sensorium rearranges the experience of the subúrbios themselves. i make the case for the salvific sensorium as a sensed space that matters. it is, i contend, a generative and affective space that affirms worth in a city designed and managed to denigrate black communities. affects, sensoria, smells an attention to the pentecostal sensorium—to “cultures of sensation” (brahinsky 2012, 216)—has emerged as an important point of departure for many anthropologists concerned with religious experience (luhrmann 2004; luhrmann, nusbaum, and thisted 2010; brahinsky 2012, 2013; de witte 2013). a defining characteristic of charismatic pentecostal faith is the work and practice required to have a visceral, sensorially intense experience of the divine, and often of the holy spirit specifically. tanya luhrmann’s (2004, 2012) ethnographic work shows how charismatic pentecostals in the united states cultivate very specific bodily practices to invite and receive the holy spirit. she argues that sensing god seems to take a certain kind of talent and training to have the experience of “absorption,” a sensory experience of god’s presence (see luhrmann, nusbaum, and thisted 2010). similarly, in the ethnographic work of josh brahinsky (2012, 217), the pentecostal sensorium is described as “a contested realm that nurtures some practices and distinctions while starving, rejecting or desiccating others,” dependent on prudently cultivated and nurtured “body logics” that act as “portable sensory dynamics.” particular sensorial experiences are privileged over others in a “politics of authentication” (de witte 2013, 63), where the experience of god is often tested via perceived “tactile sensations.” here, though, i am not just interested in how sensory work and experience allow pentecostals to have a connection to god, but in the affective space and emotional experience that a pentecostal sensorium makes possible. i thus draw on the work of kevin lewis o’neill (2013, 2015), whose research on pentecostalism and religious piety in guatemala offers an ethnographic account of the ways in which religious experience becomes tied to the affective sensations experienced across bodies and spaces. o’neill (2015, 209) unfolds how affect is a sensation making “legible a series of spaces that are not necessarily territorial but that are nonetheless deeply political.” the production of affective space “prompts an interest in the politics of felt difference: between whiteness and the racialized other; between the saved and the sinner; between life and death . . . a politically charged spatial divide made legible through a visceral and deeply political kind of disgust” (o’neill 2013, 1104). this political and emotional condition of affect is important. sara ahmed (2010, 13) characterizes her approach as a “feminist cultural studies of emotion and affect.” for ahmed, along with eve sedgwick (2003), kathleen stewart (2007), and lauren berlant (2011), feelings and emotions direct bodies through the world. affects, then, organize how bodies navigate and move. in a feminist conception of affect, the latter cannot be undone from emotion, because as ahmed (2004, 39) writes, “this analytic distinction between affect and emotion risks cutting emotions off from the lived experiences of being and having a body.” stewart’s (2007) ordinary affects picks up on this emotionally charged and sensorially rich way that bodies move within and encounter the world. building from berlant’s notion of optimistic attachments, stewart (2010, 339, 340) suggests that these affective attachments suffuse and constitute “worldings,” or what she calls the “bloom space.” for stewart, this bloom space is process across space: an affective saturation of the body in specific landscapes of power and history, or across bodies and worlds. in her words, “an allure and a threat that shows up in ordinary sensibilities of not knowing what compels, not being able to sit still, being exhausted, being left behind or being ahead of the curve, being in history, being in a predicament, being ready for something—anything—to happen, or orienting yourself to the goal of making sure that nothing (more) will happen” (stewart 2010, 340). for both stewart and berlant, this magnetism is sensual. the body is sniffing, glaring, eavesdropping—moving through the world not as a contained subject, but as a feeling body that must move and attach itself through landscapes in which power surges and amuses itself across bodies. here, the bloom space resembles the body reading the atmosphere in a room (brennan 2004, 1), but queered, as sara ahmed (2010) explains. the atmosphere is not a unidirectional force that impedes the body. rather, the body is always already something; it arrives “moody,” and that moody body is then folded into spheres and regimes of possibility, the “messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds . . . how we are touched by what comes near” (ahmed 2010, 40, 22). nicholas shapiro’s (2015) work linking toxicity, atmospheres, and affects is crucial here. writing on the ways in which bodies are always entangled in their atmospheres and compelled into doing the first-order sensory work of encountering toxic landscapes, shapiro (2015, 369) notes the specific entanglements of bodies and pollutants in “late industrial material ecologies,” as well as the ways in which exposure is often not an emergency, but a slow-paced, mundane encounter with toxic leakages. when sara ahmed writes about affect and “what comes near” she is speaking literally, too. as shapiro (2015) notes, what comes near us is about the circulation of bodies and materials in spaces that are structured in particular ways. milene lives and makes disinfectant in a subúrbio open to the leakages of industrial and late-liberal waste. as sharad chari (2017) writes, this is life amid toxicity, “a politics of dwelling in the detritus of racial capitalism, and a reaching for the poetry of the future” (see also povinelli 2017; shapiro and kirksey 2017). the salvific sensorium is a kind of atmosphere encountered through a cultivated collection of sensual processes. when milene breathes in the aroma of divine fragrance and labors alongside god, she senses and then feels something different, something that sets her apart as chosen and worthy, confirming her attainment of the call-and-response relationship that many pentecostals aim to have with god (see robbins 2004a, 2004b).2 the affective sensation of worthiness and security makes sense specifically because of the historical and racial histories that shape the subúrbios and define them as anything but worthy and secure. i use the term sensorium to get at this felt space of worth, rendered through affective attachments and what blooms in response to them. i use the concept of the salvific sensorium to tie these threads together partly because of its lightness and ephemeral quality, a bit like the smell of divine disinfectant. it is waftier than a world or worlding. the salvific sensorium is a form of sensed space that seems to balloon into existence via cultivated sensorial work. the salvific sensorium makes for a sensed emancipation from the spaces where many have been stuck and abandoned, even if that emancipation is deeply conditional. it is a saving—salvific—experience. when you are in it, you feel worthy, lifted above the fray of the visible world. conversely, when it withers, deflates, or suddenly pops, you can feel lost, cold, and untouchable. while the urge to reside in god’s arms is rooted in individual and collective histories of violence and governance by abandonment, the salvific sensorium is often strangely atemporal. by making divine disinfectant or doing something as simple as participating in a charismatic prayer circle, believers explain that they are searching for the whoosh. this is a sense that is often described by sighing deeply while making a whooshing noise as one’s arms and shoulders relax and one’s body tips forward, much like letting down a heavy load. believers describe that bodily exhale and lightness as a stretch of time in which they are swept above the fray. swept away from the historical and present conditions of violence that have defined them and their spaces. but those who describe this experience are also keenly aware of its vulnerability. in my effort to give their descriptions form, i risk trying to hold still something essentially ephemeral in its composition. the salvific sensorium wafts, hardens, dissipates, and returns, dependent on a multitude of spatial sensations, distinctions, and tangible things like waste fragrance and recycled bottles. it is there and then not there. the feeling of lightness might linger for a moment, an evening, maybe even months, but the salvific sensorium is not firm. rather, this sensorium—like a good perfume or the stench of feces—is in and out, very much there and then completely gone, simply a recollection until—whoosh—there it is back again, an emotional assault. whoosh, here is that feeling of being worthy. whoosh, here is that feeling of being desperately worthless again. the salvific sensorium is a hopeful place, even if believers often experience hope as pain or shame for not achieving what is desired. even if this sensorium is doggedly ephemeral, it brims with possibility. there is a growing body of work in anthropology today dubbed “the anthropology of the good” (robbins 2013), which pays attention to how aspiration and striving matter (rogers 2009, 32). attention to this purported good is important, and an ongoing contention of mine in the present article. but understanding the good in rio’s western subúrbios requires attention to the material impact of racism and antiblack order (sexton 2011) and the ways that they both construct and govern the good (see also savell 2015). to think about the good under conditions of racism and oppression, i turn to critical race theory (sexton 2011; drabinski 2015; sharpe 2016). john drabinski (2015), for example, queries the place of affective optimism inside pessimism and abjection, and here i follow suit. the salvific sensorium is cultivated optimism. it feels good to feel worthy, and people go out of their way to find ways to feel like that again and again: to make a certain kind of atmosphere reappear, be it by going to church and participating in a demon-extraction service or by cleaning homes with a divinely scented disinfectant that blocks out denigrated scents. smell powerfully enables these affective, sensuous encounters. here, as always, smell creeps into the spaces opened by emotional experience, personal memories, social history, and imagination. as alain corbin (1986, 82) describes it in his social life of smell in eighteenthand nineteenth-century france, “the power of odors to stir the affective memory . . . the violent confrontation of the past and present engendered by recognition of an odor, could produce an encounter that, far from abolishing temporality, made the ‘i’ feel its own history and disclose it to itself.” smell, then, is about “transition” (howes 1991, 128), both temporal and material. smell conjures the liminal, communicating to us something often invisible. smell opens up spaces that, as anna tsing (2015, 37) writes, are at the same time both “present” and “ineffable.” indeed, “smells,” as shapiro (2015, 374) claims, “are most pronounced at the crossing of thresholds.” for milene and others who use divine disinfectant, these thresholds are multiple, material, sensed, and felt: center/suburban, black/white, saved/sinner, cradled/abandoned. sensorial constructions of race monica, milene’s neighbor, sits on her doorstep, angry. monica, also pentecostal, had gone to the south zone of rio for the day to “audition” as a faxineira, a noncontract temporary day cleaner, in an elite, gated house. even before i embrace her, the smell of her rich pomade—rubbed deep into her hair and skin—finds its way to my nose. monica has slicked back her curly black hair into a tight bun and scented her clothes and body with a floral perfume. monica sips her coffee, its sugary and bitter smell floating up from the cup. she tears up, saying that the woman “auditioning” her had been rude and cruel. after a morning of cleaning, she explains, she had taken a break to eat her lunch. when the woman who she was cleaning for found monica sitting with her lunch in the house’s domestic quarters, she acted visibly nauseated and dramatically waved monica out of the house like one might wave away a stench. she then berated monica, insisting that monica leave the house to eat her meals, not sit down anywhere in the woman’s home, and not bring her food into the woman’s kitchen. monica explained to me that she was new to domestic work in rio’s south zone, and therefore did not know all the ins and outs of what was expected. still, this request had struck her as crazy. with nowhere to go during her lunch break—and not wanting to eat while walking the streets—monica had just packed up her things and started back home without informing the woman or collecting her half-day of pay. monica’s experience, and the preparation she gave to her appearance, were typical of historical and enduring ideas about labor, morality, and fears of contamination tied to good and bad smells in rio de janeiro. building on the work of ann stoler, jennifer roth-gordon (2013, 298) has examined how brazilian racialized identities are made via a “sensory regime associated with whitening” (see also jacobs 2009). in brazil, notions of smell and race often work together in implicit and explicit ways. indeed, patricia de santana pinho (2010, 108) describes how the requirement to regulate “o cheiro negro”—which roth-gordon (2013, 298) translates as “black smell”—is an essential aspect of managing blackness in order to demonstrate “proper bodily discipline” (roth-gordon 2013, 298). brazil is not unique in this way. smell, in fact, often delineates difference. as constance classen (1992) argues, smell is a particularly insidious way to catalogue the imposed boundaries of race, class, and morality. or, as martin manalansan (2006, 44) writes, “the sense of smell is the basis for recognition and misrecognition . . . it provides an opportunity to affiliate, to belong as well as to disidentify and to ostracize.” perceptions of smell, especially of smells that supposedly do not belong, work alongside conceptions of whiteness and blackness in stealthy ways. in a study on the u.s. antebellum south, for example, bridget heneghan (2003) argues that even among the wealthy, white skin alone was not a reliable marker of racial purity or whiteness. the fulcrum of whiteness instead lay in a laborious care of the body and its things, such as tea sets and whitewashed walls. these white things served as extensions of the white body, and their care garnered whiteness. in this way, race was not just about skin color, but a cultivated presentation of oneself and one’s things. people particularly guarded against the risk of encountering contaminating smells in this context. heneghan (2003, 149) tracks how white slave owners wrote in contemporary periodicals about the best construction materials for housing slaves, arguing that framed timber was superior because logs absorbed the odor and the “stench and filth” (149) of slaves, who filled cracks in log construction with stinking “dirty rags, old shoes, coon skins, chicken feathers” (150). she also describes how southern homes were kept pure—read white—by segregating the odors of cooking from the main house. smell, morality, and christianity have long been linked. milene and other pentecostals follow in a long line of christians concerned with the medium of fragrance and the way odor can betray the existence of sanctity, while malodor can betray the existence of hell and immorality (classen, howes, and synnott 1994). in the color of angels, classen (1998, 36) explores the pre-enlightenment idea of the odor of sanctity, or “the notion that christians who lived in a state of grace would be infused with the divine scent of the holy spirit—the breath of god.” using perfumes to craft this kind of divinity, however, still inspired circumspection and anxiety. the early christian church considered perfumes a kind of “debauchery and idolatry” (classen 1998, 44), and even the role of divine fragrance—the trustworthiness of smell itself—was suspect. indeed, classen (1998) describes deodorized modernity’s doubtfulness about smell more generally, with smell cast as an irrational sense compared to the supposed objectivity of sight (see also classen, howes, and synnott 1994). the distinction between rio’s center and its subúrbios is not the sweet-smelling versus the foul-smelling; rather, it is that the subúrbios dare to smell at all. to smell is to be premodern, even hellish. suburban sensations: race, smell, and disorder in the western subúrbios these ideas about scent are not long-lost eugenic policies in rio. instead, they have actively constructed and continue to haunt rio’s subúrbios. the small community in the western subúrbios where milene and monica live sits just about forty kilometers from rio’s downtown and south zone (the centro and the zona sul, respectively), which are built up along rio’s famous coastline. the forty kilometers that separate the prestigious south from the west form a complex web of congested highways and overpasses dominated by self-constructed homes and public housing units built on rio’s flatlands. these forty kilometers routinely take two to three hours to traverse, usually requiring at least three modes of transportation (bus, metro, and a van that must pay levies to parastatal militias). a number of mountain ranges divide the west zone of rio, and what i demarcate for this article as the western subúrbios is the area located around the former industrial pole of bangu. this framing differentiates the western subúrbios from the well-known city of god (cidade de deus) favela, as well as from the elite barra de tijuca. while both of the former are formally part of the west zone of rio, no one thinks of them when using the word subúrbios. since the early 1990s and the onset of brazil’s neoliberal ordering (biehl 2005; robb larkins 2015), a boom in pentecostalism has taken place in rio’s western subúrbios, a boom instigated by a history of abandonment and the ongoing violence of the brazilian state’s selective presence and absence in community members’ lives (see biehl 2005). as roberto damatta (1995, 19) clarifies: “in sharp contrast to the american urban experience, suburban dwellers are not the well-off in search of bucolic contact with nature but rather the poor who still lack basic material services.” in latin american cities, the centers were typically highly valued as colonial strongholds, while laborers were forced into the outskirts or onto devalued landscapes, following a model of urban development that is often explained via the spatial metaphor of a teacup and a saucer. rio diverges distinctly. the city’s long history of slave-based urban migration, different from the oft-cited urbanization movement that began in the second half of the twentieth century, created favelas in the downtown core of rio (fischer 2008). these are communities built into hillsides, abutting wealthy homes and developments, widely characterized by their so-called informality (roy 2009) and critiqued as sites of squalor. when the mid-twentieth century’s mass urbanization did begin, many afro-brazilian migrants moved to these already established communities, creating in rio a distinct and highly visible pattern of inequitable urban architecture that dominates the landscape. brazil’s dictatorship periods led to mass eradication and displacement efforts, which saw many of these historically black communities displaced from centrally located favelas and relocated to poorly constructed housing blocks or plots in the subúrbios (leeds 1977; mccann 2014, 12). this narrative of the development of the subúrbios, as a place of the displaced, is a common one. but both brodwyn fischer (2008) and bryan mccann (2014) relate how the spatial formations of rio’s subúrbios, which are often characterized as informal sprawl, have actually emerged from calculated state practices of land subdivision and the placement of state-run (and then abandoned) public housing. mccann (2014) explains that as the first and second waves of industrial development rolled forward in rio, the northern and western parts of the city saw these self-constructed communities expand in step. he argues convincingly that the emergence (and endurance) of informal communities occurs largely because of the desire for them on both sides: the urban poor, often black migrants from the country’s northeast, needed places to live, while the wealthy required supplies of cheap and local labor. fischer (2008) and mccann (2014) have both documented how, in the late nineteenth century, rio’s factory workers were often allowed to build their homes behind factories, which was “a solution that guaranteed their employers a local workforce while suppressing wages” (mccann 2014, 22). semipublic institutions such as hospitals and utility providers often did the same (fischer 2008). this practice of building on factory land (or very close by) formed part of the informal and underregulated real-estate and land-title market that overwhelmingly disfavored black brazilians. mccann (2014) furthermore explains how, starting in the 1950s and into the 1980s, as populations increased in these parts of the city, irregular subdivisions (loteamentos) and self-constructed communities grew as developers bought up land in the expanding areas of the city, divided the lots, and then sold them to families who built their homes there. these land developers themselves had only semilegal ownership of the lots, and they rarely registered the subdivided pieces of land with the state or municipality. this meant that families did not have formalized property titles, making them beholden to clientelistic local politicians. similarly, families that had built homes near factories under an arrangement of informal exchange and beneficence found, starting in the 1980s, that they had no formal legal rights to the land that they had called home for more than fifty years (mccann 2014, 22–32). infrastructure in the western subúrbios was and still is an afterthought. in the 1960s and 1970s, springing up around these loteamentos and self-constructed communities were new public housing (conjunto) projects that dotted the landscape with their characteristic style of tall, multistoried cement structures with limited water, sewage, and electric infrastructure. mccann (2014) explains how the families and individuals who were forced into these projects after eviction from centrally located favelas received nontransferable land titles, obligating them to make monthly mortgage payments. yet these supposedly nontransferable apartments quickly became part of the local informal real-estate market. new owners—in many cases, migrants from the northeast of the country with direct links to other migrants in the north and west of the city—did not make the mortgage payments, had no real land-title rights, and were therefore unable to demand that the state maintain its infrastructure promises. other new migrants then built up their homes between and around these conjuntos, linking into the unfinished infrastructure (mccann 2014, 31–32). black migrants found themselves owning and building property where almost no infrastructure existed, but also unable to effectively demand rights to water, sanitation systems, and electricity. in this way, the subúrbios were literally made to stink. yet the stench gets assigned as a characteristic of both the subúrbios as space and their individual inhabitants as people. indeed, monica was made to wear this narrative of the dirty subúrbios as an individual. monica, knowing what she was up against, had presented herself as someone with a “good appearance” by slicking back her hair and wearing a beautiful perfume to signal worth. but the prospective employer deemed monica a contaminating figure: her food was too smelly to be eaten in the employer’s house and monica not worthy enough to sit on her furniture. this shows that these subúrbio-making projects still operate today (vargas 2006, 2013),3 akin to what roth-gordon (2013, 297) terms the “soft eugenics” that linger and discipline bodies in rio. alexander edmonds’s (2010, 161) ethnographic work on plastic surgery in rio examines the ways that skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and cosmetic surgery offer an “alleviation of african traits,” as though blackness constituted a kind of public health crisis: a sickness of space and the individual. indeed, we can see these historical public health and urban planning projects as aimed at alleviating the blight of blackness and its accompanying smells, flavors, and presentations from the south zone of rio. on anxieties and hopes it is a hot morning and the sun is relentless. february is nearing its end; carnival was over two weeks ago. most of the revelry that has carried us this far through the summer weather, when temperatures reach nearly 50°c, is gone. it is now just a long trek until the hot weather begins to dissipate into the rains of march. the air is not humid; instead, a moistureless wind is caught in the valley, caused by moist air being pushed up from the atlantic over the mountain pass that separates the western subúrbios from the ocean. for this reason, this and surrounding communities are the hottest spots in the state of rio de janeiro. most days, the temperature in the subúrbios is ten to fifteen degrees hotter than on the coast. the dry heat quickly evaporates the water in people’s large rooftop storage containers, so that the unreliable water pumps—built from scraps and ingenuity—need to run more and more often to transport water up to the rooftops from the pipes at street level, often breaking under the strain of this work. today, aridity and heat seem all the more unbearable because there is no water to pump. the pipes are empty. it is our third day without running water, and the reserve rooftop storage containers now sit empty too. from my window, i shout to milene to wait for me as i see her and her daughter walking down the street. she is carrying two empty ten-liter water jugs in her hands. i rush down our stairs grabbing two jugs of my own. we join a procession of women walking to the community’s public water spigot (bico de agua), a pipe that juts up from the ground and then twists down so that people can fill a container from it. there is a black plastic faucet, and the water comes out of a neatly shorn bit of pipe. women are walking back up the slight incline in the street with their water. i share a smile with the women i know, while milene wears a grimace of determination, and sends a happy bom dia, vai com deus to all who pass. this morning, the newspaper o dia ran a news bulletin online, reporting that an electricity interruption at the guandu water treatment plant would “harm” water supply in central rio and the baixada fluminense of greater rio, but that water was expected to be back to normal in seventy-two hours. in the meantime, residents of rio were asked to avoid wasting the precious fluid. the bulletin seemed perfunctory, hardly five hundred words, buried amid more newsworthy stories. i telephoned multiple friends in wealthy city-center neighborhoods to ask if they, too, were experiencing a water shortage. no one was. clearly, water had been diverted to the center, while harm had been sent in the direction of the subúrbios. the city had solved the problems created by the interruptions in power supply by reallocating the supply and cutting water to the subúrbios, ensuring no one in the elite areas of the city felt an impact. during this water stoppage, an intense smell began to emanate from the favelas in the western subúrbios. without water to flush the self-built sewage systems, people’s homes were being ravaged by the odor of sitting feces and urine. in my time living in the subúrbios, this was no uncommon experience; water stoppages happened at least twice a year during the hottest months. milene’s disinfectant proved, of course, a ready remedy to this situation. with its mixture of floral perfume and the scent of bleachy cleanliness, people could reclaim and disinfect their spaces from the intrusion— manifest in its absence—of the state. if the state was backing up toilets, making people go without showers and preventing clothes from being washed, then god, in fragrant disinfectant form, made a different kind of sensorium possible. milene asks me inside her house to show me what enzo, her husband, has brought home. now three fifty-five-gallon tubs of fragrance are packed into the workshop. as she pries back the lid, an immediately jarring scent emerges, musky and acidic, and my eyes sting with tears. she implores me to stick my head inside the tub and take a deep breath. “do you smell that?” she asks excitedly. milene dips her homemade scoop into the fragrance and then slowly pours out a steady stream of it, so i can take in its scent. she smiles widely and sticks her own head into the blue tub. she resurfaces laughing at the good fortune god has bestowed on them, saying: “it smells like a thousand angels marching, doesn’t it?” milene asks me to pray and bottle with her. her petite body fits nicely into this tiny workshop adjacent to her kitchen. she can duck and turn and not bump into anything. she knows the room’s angles, its corners, its limits. she knows how to move her body in this room she built from the ground up. she is hardened and firm, unrelenting in the gaze she casts on her children and neighbors. the heat of the morning is turning into the unbearable heat of the afternoon, but we continue mixing disinfectant before we break for lunch. we sit at the table and milene pulls shut the curtain door to the kitchen. the children are home from school for lunch, and she relishes the opportunity to shoo them all from the kitchen so we can talk. as we eat, i pepper milene with questions about the fragrance, wanting to ensure i have all my details right. but my questions seem to provoke an uncomfortable anxiety this afternoon. i ask her about the first time they took the fragrance, but while answering, milene begins to cry: “do you think we steal the fragrance?” she continues, not rhetorically, “do you think that the fragrance doesn’t come from god?” i am at a loss for an appropriate answer, and milene seems shaken and unsure in a way i have never seen her. i tell her that i have never thought of it as theft, but that i have a hard time knowing whether it comes from god. milene tells me that a woman came by recently to show her some dark red marks resembling burns on a child’s legs that had developed after the woman had scrubbed her sofa with the disinfectant. similar burns often marked milene and her children’s skin after working with the fragrance. did i think she was to blame for the child’s sores too? milene’s anxiety begins to channel into prayer. she pushes further, asking hard questions of me and herself: “why do we take the fragrance at night then? why do we take it in secret? why hasn’t enzo simply asked for it?” and then, “if it burns us, why not others?” her answer now takes the form of a pentecostal sermon. she poses the hard questions to the nonbeliever, but is also slowly laying out pieces of god’s puzzle, leading and urging me to nod along, to learn to see things in the same way as her, so that by the end of the sermon we will have arrived together at a different outcome. she talks for a long time about this, circling around a number of uncertain scenarios: the company would certainly balk at their secondary use of the fragrance, she tells me. they think it is unsafe waste, and they barrel it up to dump it. milene then counters herself, saying that they probably could ask for it. but, she warns, if the company could be convinced that it was not garbage, it would certainly demand payment. or worse, if enzo asked a supervisor, then it was almost certain that the supervisor would try to extort him by making him pay a bribe. milene acknowledges that she has seen many burns from the disinfectant, holding out her own hands as proof. but isn’t this why people like it, she asks. don’t they come for it because it burns? at this point she starts to preach about the dangers of being beholden to anyone but family and god. we talk out some more scenarios, but eventually milene circles back to this gift and the scent itself: “the fragrance must be a gift from god,” she says, “because god put the fragrance in our path. . . . i smelled it and i knew that we were saved. smell it, and you will know. it smells like nothing else here,” she says while gesturing around her. she finishes, “we belong to god, not to this place.” mining the margins as prosperity milene tends carefully to her gifts from god. when new batches of fragrance arrive, she calls me excitedly on the phone. she always carefully pries back the barrel lids, allowing me to put my head right in, so that i can appreciate a new scent and possibility. the actual fragrance and its accompanying scent matters; indeed, none of this would be possible without the medium of the captured waste fragrance. the media turn, matthew engleke (2010, 371) explains, occurred as anthropologists and scholars of religion began to conceive of religion “as mediation” (see also meyer and moors 2005; klassen 2007; meyer 2008; morgan 2008). they shifted their attention from debates over religious belief and practice (needham 1972; asad 1983, 1993; ruel 1997), instead now attuning to the things that make belief possible, be they cassette tapes (hirschkind 2006), veils (abu-lughod 1986; mahmood 2001), books (engelke 2007), radio (schulz 2006), or even dreams (mittermaier 2010). the salvific sensorium blooms as a possible alternative, even if an ephemeral one, pieced together via religious media in the form of discards. mary douglas (2002) has informed much work in the anthropology of waste. dirt, for douglas (2002, 44), is “matter of out of place,” much the same way that malodor is invoked as a disorder or a boundary violation. dirt constructs and preserves notions of the self and the other, serving specific social, cultural, and political functions. but the actual waste or smell matters too. as joshua reno (2015, 558) elaborates, waste is “more than a symptom of culture . . . [it] is a material that has effects in the world, including local and global political disputes, liberal and illiberal forms of governance, competing assessments of economic and moral value, and concerns about environmental pollution and crisis.” dirt is not just symbolic, then; it also moves and does things in the world. neoliberal structures and postcolonial topographies often—at least initially—dictate waste’s circuits and its management, but waste seeps into places, creatively conjoining with the informality of the margins where trash becomes treasure. a central component in discard studies is the attention paid to people who perform waste labor and their creative work at turning waste or trash “into treasure” (millar 2008, 25; see also norris 2010). in this way, pentecostals are certainly waste laborers of a certain kind, but more than that, they trouble douglas’s category of matter out of place. as others have documented, while waste laborers understand waste as potential, waste still seems to belong somewhere. and this somewhere is often not centers, but rather within “waste flows” (reno 2015, 564) that seem to travel in rather predictable ways: from centers to peripheries, following global capitalist circuits. cruise ships dump their waste in haiti and landfills are displaced from urban toronto to postindustrial michigan, for example. for pentecostals in rio’s subúrbios, though, waste is in its place, for a different reason: it has been gifted and placed in pentecostal pathways to prosperity. this labor gives value, but this value, as kathleen millar (2014, 34) points out, emerges from the painful paradox that precarious work actually enables people “to contend with insecurities in other dimensions of their lives.” pentecostals mining the margins for prosperity constitutes a form of optimism very much alert to harm in a city bent on pessimism toward them. milene is clearly not without anxiety about where the waste fragrance originates, how it gets to her, and the harms and effects it might inflict on those it touches. as engelke (2010, 377) details, divine media can often cause apprehension about “whether a particular medium is a path to freedom or enslavement. will this thing—this icon, this image, this book, this telephone, this computer—set me free or tie me down? will it allow me to lead an authentic life (and in proper relation to the divine) or will it corrupt and cripple my ability to do so?” as milene’s sermon shows, she also struggled with these questions. could this waste product be multiple things? a god-given material from which to craft their future? a forgivable act of theft? and a potential for bodily harm? pentecostals in rio’s western subúrbios often think of waste fragrance as a way that god, via divine gifts of grace, enters homes and lives and enables a different conception of life (denyer willis 2017; cf. halvorson 2012). the salvific sensorium can unfurl, untethering life from structures of violence. but these moments in the salvific sensorium are always still tethered to everyday life. fragrance runoff can be a divine fragrance only when considering the very specific way that stench, disorder, and disgust condition the access, flows, and circulations of harm. water as a resource is rerouted to the center, while waste fragrance as a religious medium is routed through the subúrbios via specific formations of the urban and suburban that tie these factories, homes, and pentecostal faith together. the salvific sensorium contains within it optimism and hope that perceptibly differ from the conditions of lives structured by the subúrbios. the salvific sensorium, then, offers a way to immerse oneself in and engage with the world in a form of optimism linked to pessimism. here, i am drawing on the work of drabinski (2015), who reflects on the idea of utopia under a white gaze: an afro-optimism takes root in exactly this space: the space of tradition, the space of relationship, a space in which manners, rituals, folkways, dispute, identification, and all those other ways of creating a people that makes a future possible. this future is never anything like forgetful or utopian in the sense of a dreamscape disburdened of the past. in fact, quite the contrary, it is rooted in a tradition that expresses “the long and painful experience of a people.” in brazil, as the excellent works of john burdick (1993, 1998) have made clear, we cannot decouple black pentecostalism from critical racial consciousness, or from forms of violence against black individuals and communities. residing in god’s arms constitutes a distinct sensory experience that far exceeds the sensory constraints of the subúrbios. the salvific sensorium whooshes in, an affect of possibility. but the good and the hope it offers up is one linked firmly to pain. as drabinski (2015) notes, “the vicissitudes of affect under regimes of anti-black racism” are tied “not just to forms of resistance amidst the pessimist’s story, but also to how forms of life live alongside, against, or even wholly outside the sorts of abjection” imposed on black life (and death). to view waste fragrance as part of the salvific sensorium means to open up the possibility of an existence of a beside (stevenson 2014), an otherwise (povinelli 2011, 10), or perhaps a fugitivity (sojoyner 2017) from the subúrbios: a salvific sensorium haunted and burdened by past and present violence, but brimming with a sense of the possible. conclusion chemical waste is made and discarded in the western subúrbios. it leaves the factory in a borrowed truck under the shelter of a blind eye. it is carefully crafted into a divine disinfectant in a piecemeal workshop next to a kitchen, then bottled in purchased trash from a trusted waste picker. legs and a cart distribute it across a few communities, all with their own distinct forms of governance, and sell it on to local pentecostal home businesses. sometime thereafter, pentecostals who frequent those businesses take a bottle from the shelf. they use it lovingly to cultivate a salvific sensorium, a space of worth and security in a part of the city historically and currently constructed by systems of antiblack practice. this story seems to require creating an unbridgeable impasse between liquid fragrance as an object circulating within a precarious neoliberal landscape and liquid fragrance as divine gift. how can it possibly be both? in this article, i examine how this crafted optimism is tethered to histories and daily experiences of racial inequity and inequality both sensed and felt, but also to a notion of a god who cradles above the fray without eclipsing the existence of the fray. waste fragrance, then, is a kind of mediation of the divine that makes new affective experiences possible. to make sense of this, however, requires also interrogating “the link between institutional power and interpretive practice” (rutherford 2006, 106), investigating how flows of power and empowerment, histories of harm and hope, come to haunt particular forms of mediation and their possible spaces: optimism alert to pessimism, wafting on the breeze. notes acknowledgments the research that contributed to this article would not have been possible without the many individuals and families in the western súburbios who opened their doors to me and my family. this article has been read, in various iterations, by many people whose substantive comments shaped the work. thank you to sandra teresa hyde, kevin lewis o’neill, lisa stevenson, erica caple james, donna goldstein, stephanie savell, sian lazar, setrag manoukian, james laidlaw, and rebecca prentice, as well as to graham denyer willis, who has read it more than anyone. i also owe a debt of gratitude to the university of cambridge writing group, especially to lys alcayna-stevens, matt somervillle, and hugh the cat. thank you to the cultural anthropology editorial team, but especially to cymene howe, who lent their valuable time and immense skill to improving this manuscript. thank you as well to the two anonymous reviewers, who were both encouraging and critical with their insights and suggestions. research and writing were supported by the canadian social science and humanities research council, the canadian international development research council, mcgill university, and the center for latin american studies at the university of cambridge. 1. all names are pseudonyms. i have also chosen not to name the particular favela communities where i or my interlocutors lived, instead referring to the region—the western subúrbios—as a general location throughout the article. the majority of the research took place throughout the western subúrbios, not just in one community. 2. many studies of pentecostalism draw attention to the ways that pentecostal charismatic christianity can reshape the political, the social, and the economic, noting in particular how neoliberalism haunts these religious transformations of self, society, and their relations (robbins 2004a, 2004b; bialecki 2009, 2017; haynes 2012; strhan 2015). in contrast, i tend to emphasize the way that sensation, emotion, and the political come together, but this account has been deeply shaped by scholars who take pentecostalism and believers’ desire for a relationship with god seriously and do not represent religion solely, as naomi haynes (2012, 125) puts it, “as a super-structural epiphenomenon moving over the solid base of capitalist hegemony.” 3. on the link between urban space, place, and race more generally, see white 2012. references abu-lughod, lila 1986 veiled sentiments: honor and poetry in a bedouin society. berkeley: university of california press. ahmed, sara 2004 “collective feelings: or, the impressions left by others.” theory, culture, and society 21, no. 2: 25–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276404042133. 2010 the promise of happiness. durham, n.c.: duke university press. alves, jaime amparo 2014 “neither humans nor 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satiate demand in an illicit speculative economy for their body parts (jangu 2012). by this point, violence against people with albinism had been reported on for a decade, and more than a hundred tanzanians had been killed or permanently disfigured. in mwanza, the bustling metropolis where i was living and the region most prone to albinism-related violence, seemingly every headline, conversation, and prayer lamented the tragedies. for weeks around me—at friends’ homes and on the radio, in the market and outside storefronts—i took part in a kind of collective mourning, a quiet desperation as friends and strangers cast doubt on the ability of the state, media, or even a robust transnational humanitarian apparatus to quell violence against some of its most marginalized citizens. 250i spent many of these days with yakobo, a regional leader of the grassroots tanzanian albinism society (chama cha ualbino tanzania), as he talked to the press on behalf of ngos, pressured law enforcement to beef up their investigations, and coordinated support for the families.1 at a secondary school in katoro, a rural part of geita teeming with gold and diamond mining not far from where yohana had been taken, he spoke to journalists, government officials, parents, and teachers, before answering students’ questions. who is doing this? why here? what are they doing with albino body parts? yakobo reiterated points i had heard at similar events: it was an election year, and in a region known for powerful healers and intense competition not only in political races but across extractive industries, traditional healers (waganga wa kienyeji) were using albino body parts to cleanse others’ nyota (sing. and pl.)—the literal translation of which is “star,” “fortune,” or “fate,” but in this context invokes a practice of restoring brightness to an embodied and invisible lifeforce. yakobo condemned the consumers of dawa containing albino body parts,2 allegedly politicians, businesspeople, and laborers in extractive industries. in doing so, he expressed an understanding of albinism-related violence that circulates across forms of media worldwide. these representations purport that violence stems from an indigenous cosmology that devalues the humanity of people with albinism on the basis of their alterity, making them prime targets for nefarious “traditional” healers who orchestrate their murder and dismemberment to stimulate demand in a grisly market for human body parts (brocco 2015; bryceson, jønsson, and sherrington 2010; imafidon 2019; masanja, imori, and kaudunde 2020; mulemi and ndolo 2014; taylor, bradbury-jones, and lund 2019). as yakobo surmised, while the dehumanization of those with albinism and the use of their body parts in dawa was age-old (toka zamani), it was the relative newness of competitive, capricious extractive economies, the commodification of traditional healing, and the advent of multiparty democracy and neoliberal capitalism that had created an “albino fetish.” hence yakobo’s claim that albino body parts were used by healers in dawa to “cleanse the stars” (safisha nyota) of their patients—that is, to intuit through divination one’s alignment with socio-bodily and ancestral forces that presage future successes or challenges. initially, i conducted fieldwork with questions aligned with the students in katoro. i spent thirty months, mostly between 2014–2016 and 2018, following interventions surrounding albinism. this involved working with self-proclaimed albinism rights stakeholders (wadau), among them geneticists and physicians, journalists and academics, politicians and religious leaders, and development 251workers and humanitarians.3 by attending albinism rights events, i learned that stakeholders see violence as the result of a failure to recognize albinism as a recessively inherited genetic condition and false beliefs (imani potofu) attributing properties to body parts that they don’t really have. in other words, it is the fetishizing of albino body parts—of imbuing fragments of bone or hair with agency and value—that explains what happened to pendo and yohana. like yakobo, many stakeholders relied on the notion of brightening one’s nyota to explain this process of misattribution: yasi, a lutheran pastor and middle-aged man with albinism, for example, preached about the superstitions of miners who overvalued the potential use of his limbs to clean their nyota while undervaluing his personhood, which he rooted in biomedical, christian, and rights-based notions of human difference. the correct valuation, he preached, is that body parts are worthless, mere things devoid of agency that must be demystified, while whole subjects are immeasurably worthy. further problematizing nyota were tweets like “new albino violence is emerging and now girls and women are being raped in the belief that star cleaning will prevent aids.”4 taken by our collective mourning and intrigued by these representations, i also worked with those maligned by these narratives. by entering into 252knowledge exchanges with healers, conducting oral histories with chiefs and elders, and shadowing artisanal gold and diamond miners and fishermen, i learned that there is no unified, generalizable theory of albinism that can be contrasted with albinism as strictly biomedical. there are, however, disparate instantiations of albinism beyond biomedicine. for some of my interlocutors in mining enclaves, for instance, albinism emerged in part through its use in dawa that could in theory be used for myriad purposes, including healing nyota, though not in ways that abide the logics of fetishism nor in ways that necessitate violence. they described nyota as a constellation of fate, soul, blood, and vitality, the health of which reflected one’s standing with the humans and nonhumans around them. nyota also manifested a radiance that was representational and material, embodied and transcorporeal. as i came to see by accompanying miners to traditional healers adept at treating extractive laborers, radiant nyota enable forms of seeing needed to succeed in extractive industries. figure 1. media groups like the swahili times report on others’ erroneous beliefs, in this case the notion that raping a person with albinism cleanses one’s nyota and thus prevents hiv/aids. as an ethnographic concept, nyota enables a different understanding of recent interventions, one that does not reify albinism, violence, and activism as ontological pre-givens, but rather approaches these categories as emerging through the interventions themselves. my use of intervention intentionally spans the work of stakeholders like yakobo and yasi and of miners and healers: i found the categories invoked in explanations of albinocide (e.g., “violence” and “humanitarianism”) and the narrative certainty with which stakeholders came to know the causes and effects of their actions surrounding albinism to be untenable. in contrast, i show how interventions prejudged as either humanitarian or illicit produce cascading effects, making it difficult to discern between practices that help or harm, elucidate or obscure. this requires a semiotic approach that traces how a minoritized group becomes valuable for differently positioned actors. i approach interventions through the embodied qualisigns of lightness and darkness that compel them. here i am thinking of lightness neither in terms of whiteness, racial or otherwise (bashkow 2006; redfield 2012), nor of relative degrees of weightiness (munn 1986).5 rather, lightness evokes illumination and visibility as requisite qualities for seeing, coveted by albinism stakeholders and by healers and extractive laborers. following the semiotics of charles peirce (1955), abstract qualities such as lightness are qualisigns, or abstract properties of yet unrealized signs (see also chumley and harkness 2013). properties like hotness and redness, for instance, do not exist on their own: they become signs when they are embodied in things like fire or chili peppers, even if these properties appear intrinsic. in these 253examples, it is not only fires and peppers that signify; it’s also the qualities of being hot and red. peirce called these qualia. when qualia are conventionalized such that subject/objects are seen as having particular qualities, they become qualisigns (harkness 2015; parmentier 1994). anthropologists have explored qualia and qualisigns across a range of ethnographic sites, highlighting what they mean and do, rather than how they are subjectively or mentally experienced (chumley and harkness 2013). famously, nancy munn (1986) showed how the semiotics of quality impart positive and negative value. while she showed how value was created through processes that reproduced gawan society, my analysis reveals how value emerges through the spectacle created around a minoritized group. with a semiotic approach, i show how, in different ways and for different actors, the lightness of albinism is iconic of human rights and genetic understandings of difference, including in melanin; god’s love and triumph over the dark powers of satan; and nyota, shiny minerals and fish, and the possibilities of dawa to enable forms of seeing.6 lightness thus transcends bifurcations of meaning and matter. unlike saussurian semiotics, where signs are abstract, dyadic entities emergent through language, peircean models of the sign are triadic relations in which an entity (object) is represented by another (sign-vehicle or representamen) and is represented to a third entity (interpretant). this approach emphasizes the centrality of interpretation to processes of signification and roots such processes in settings beyond language and human cognition (keane 2003; kohn 2007; parmentier 1994). further, peircean semiotics is “ontologically flexible” in that objects, sign-vehicles, and interpretants can be material or immaterial. it thus offers a privileged vantage point from which to understand competing theories of agency and value (chumley 2017; kockelman 2006; munn 1986). tracing qualia of light and dark across disparate interventions, i suggest that the extraordinariness of albinism comes not from indigenous cosmologies or exogamous forces but from their imbrication—and from the spectacle surrounding albinism. by locating violence in the cumulative effects of myriad forms of intervention, i also situate the tragic deaths of pendo and yohana within a framework of spectacle. if activist efforts to see albinism more clearly have enabled violence vis-à-vis spectacle, then my efforts here are not to elucidate “what happened,” for i often came up against the limits of knowability in a context where the effects of my actions were unknown and where asking questions created its own spectacle. my aim, then, is to trouble the idea of activism as itself ethical (dave 2012) and instead point to a postactivist sensibility predicated on complicity and 254entanglement (akomolafe 2021; see also rubaii and varma 2023). while activist sensibilities are rooted in the notion that stopping violence requires seeing more clearly and that interventions are external to rather than constituent of spectacle, postactivist politics and ethics are relational and understand socio-bodily health as mutually constituted among humans and nonhumans (zigon 2019). i explore what this means for the livelihoods of people with albinism and others through a miner’s quest for healthy nyota. penetrating darkness because miners and traditional healers were already implicated in narrative explanations of albinism-related violence, many hesitated to be represented in journalistic or academic work. in keeping with the requests of my interlocuters to remain untraceable, i describe my fieldwork with “nsembi,” a composite of three miners with whom i worked. one of the individuals represented in nsembi introduced me to the other two, and as i got to know them over a few months, i heard overlapping and sometimes contradictory stories, only some of which i witnessed firsthand, but that revealed the importance of light nyota. what i present here is a triangulation of their stories, our experiences, and our analyses, one that is partial and defies the possibility of a definitive account. while this piece itself constitutes an intervention and form of spectacle, i aim to question the value of lightness and its assumed binary opposition to darkness, as well as to offer an alternative framework of violence and activism as co-constitutive. a theory of violence rooted in spectacle might best align with nsembi’s understanding of people with albinism as broadly valuable to others. it helps destigmatize extractive laborers and traditional healers who engage “dark power.” for albinism rights stakeholders, the semiotics of spectacle holds the potential to inspire—and in some cases it has led to—different kinds of interventions, including those that work across sometimes incommensurable theories of agency and value. over games of pool and checkers, nsembi and i discussed everything from the atrocities of mining accidents to the joys of english premier league football. keen to talk about my fieldwork, he became a point of contact around mines, explaining my presence to others and encouraging them to chat with me. his interest in my work did not seem to emanate from a desire to convince me of anything. rather, he seemed motivated by his philosophical nature, as well as by his boredom, the result of temporary bans on artisanal mining in “unregulated” areas. 255after two decades of agrarian-based socialist development, economic liberalization in the 1980s opened tanzania to foreign investment and paved the way for the expansion of the mining sector. like much of africa’s mineral boom, mining has largely consisted of, on one hand, large-scale miners employed by multinational companies who use tools to extract minerals on titled land and thus contribute to “development” and, on the other, artisanal miners who occupy questionable legal status, lack employment or mechanization, and work in collectives that evade state control. their ambiguous legal and economic position has contributed to their reputation as unscrupulous, despite evidence that artisanal mining enclaves are organized, relatively democratic spaces (smith 2021). in tanzania, this reputation has led to state efforts to license, tax, and regulate 1.5 million artisanal miners (urt 1997, 1998) and rebrand them as micro-entrepreneurs worthy of worker protections and mineral claim-holdings (bryceson, jønsson, and sherrington 2010; fisher 2007; hayes 2008; mwaipopo et al. 2004). fraught relations between miners and state actors intensified during my fieldwork: not only was an election causing the president to crack down on artisanal mining but negative international media attention surrounding albinism also exacerbated depictions of miners as mired in “false beliefs” (imani potofu).7 in anthropological literature on the “modernity of witchcraft,” beliefs in an unseen realm function as idioms through which to grapple with inequality, conspicuous consumption, and the opacity of neoliberal markets (comaroff and comaroff 1999; geschiere 1997; for critiques, see holbraad 2012; kapferer 2002; pederson 2011). at the heart of these interpretations are questions of agency and value: not only whether an albino arm can possess agency but also whether its value is rooted in the thing itself or is displaced from some other “real” source of value (e.g., a seemingly inscrutable extractive economy). similarly, scholars of albinism have begun from the premise that body parts are objects onto which others have projected false beliefs (brocco 2016; bryceson, jønsson, and sherrington 2010; imafidon 2019; myhre 2017; tanner 2010). of particular import in this literature is both a history of indigenous practices surrounding albinism and political economic changes in the transition from tanzanian socialism (i.e., ujamaa or familyhood) to neoliberal capitalism that explain the recent explosion of practices to cleanse nyota.8 in this vein, albinism represents the latest fetish in a litany of violent episodes. simeon mesaki (1994, 2009), for instance, interpreted the murders of elderly sukuma women rumored to be witches to result from forced relocation schemes (i.e., villagization) that disrupted systems of voluntary movement and 256heightened tensions, as well as from the commercialization of traditional healing and its infiltration by charlatans. and interpreting the skinning of children in southern tanzania in the 1990s, reportedly for sale in cross-border trade, todd sanders (2001, 173) argued that episodic fits of violence be taken as a desire for “meaningful modernity” with equitably distributed and transparently accumulated wealth. while indebted to approaches rooted in material conditions and structural transformations, this article charts a different course by tracing the creation of value surrounding albinism. approaching albinism semiotically affords a different understanding of violence vis-à-vis spectacle and offers a methodological entry point for the study of justice-based movements rooted in entanglement. nsembi and his friends often discussed the unpredictable, opaque nature of extractive spaces that, while occasionally tremendously lucrative, posed grave danger. esteemed for her work treating miners and fishermen, “bujukano,” an elderly sukuma healer, muslim convert, and also a composite, explained the unique nature of extractive maladies (langwick 2011) as resulting from the exceptional spaces the people who incurred them inhabited.9 i understood her to be referring not to the horizontal spatiality of decentralized mining enclaves, which have been shown to magnify the political economic tensions of post–structural adjustment africa and reconfigure relations between state and non-state actors (ferguson 1999; reno 1998; smith 2011). while this work refers to the horizontal dimensions of mining lifeworlds and deals mostly with the visible realm (e.g., regimes of taxes and governance), bujukano was instead pointing to 257vertical spatiality and the invisible worlds that exist below ground—to subterranean thresholds (de boeck 2005; meyer 1995; niehaus 2000; victor 2019). as she explained, entering a space of extraction meant engaging a different social order governed by majini (pl., spirits).10 in darkness, conditions of being with uchafu—dirt, disorder, and disarray—indexed not only a substance one must see through to find shiny minerals and fish but also a broader way of being that required navigating the moral hazards associated with darkness. figure 2. artisanal miners in misungwi, mwanza illegally dig for diamonds during a temporary ban on artisanal mining. photo by jane l. saffitz. nsembi narrated his experiences with uchafu one evening, as we sat around the guesthouse where i had rented a room. we were a few hours and a ferry ride from mwanza, and since the pentecostal family i lived with made clear their demurral for miners and healers who, they claimed, engaged dark forces, i often spent a few days at a time at the guesthouse so as not to offend my family, especially given their status as elders at a church known for its albinism advocacy. between drags of a cigarette, nsembi explained that once after being divined, a healer revealed that his nyota had been closed by a displeased jini who owned the pit where he had been digging. channeling the jini, the healer relayed its dissatisfaction with the infrequency with which nsembi’s team had been showering, as well as with their time in bars and with prostitutes. the jini, offended by the forms of uchafu ushered into the mine, signaled to the healer that if his crew were to continue their behavior, they would further incur its wrath through the concealment of minerals or, worse, accident, sacrifice, or some sinister act of misfortune that would surely tarnish nsembi’s nyota. the most distinguishing aspect of mines and lakes, then, were the nonhumans that were more irascible with demands harder to intuit than their land counterparts. the arbiters of subterranean thresholds guarded the flow of minerals and fish, controlling the terms of their extraction and making them visible to laborers only when they saw fit. fickle and vindictive, they had been known to cover the eyes of miners to prevent them from seeing gold or trick them into digging in the wrong location. in this sense, extractive labor is not a matter of locating fixed entities, but, rather, a complex process of engaging unseen realms where resources move in and out of existence, becoming visible or invisible in the process (calvão 2013; coyle rosen 2020; niehaus 2000; smith 2021). that resources are only visible under certain conditions suggests that success requires proper (that is, safi, or clean) social relations, such as showering regularly and not committing adultery. from this perspective, subterranean thresholds are spaces of uncertainty (johnson 2017; victor 2019). part of extracting of resources, then, was the removal of uchafu and the opening of nsembi’s ways, 258which required the visions of a skilled healer to intuit the jini’s demands. semiotically and ethnographically, dirtiness and darkness are qualisigns of negative value that connect the embodied act of seeing below ground with the moral perils of unsavory practices. as much as nsembi joked with friends about his vices or boasted the natural protection of his nyota that comes from having strong mizimu (ancestors), he was often reminded of the stakes: getting minerals is a matter of miracles, he would repeat. engaging darkness was inevitable. negative valuations of darkness took on particular significance for albinism stakeholders, many of whom are devout christians. christian stakeholders fiercely opposed any engagement with a non-godly unseen realm and thus saw divining and treating nyota as shrouded in darkness, rather than as restoring luster to what was tarnished through witchcraft. for both yasi and yakobo, christian valuations of dark power (nguvu ya giza) evoked the power of satan to rule over god’s kingdom, which manifested in the use of albino body parts to cleanse nyota. in this context, penetrating darkness by disparaging the belief nyota as indexical of evil was constituent of a broader mission to fight satanic power and usher in the light of god.11 beyond religious organizing, darkness indexed the ignorance of improperly valuing albinism and understanding who or what possesses agency. here, nonbiomedical understandings of albinism—for instance, questioning whether albino body parts can generate wealth—indexed obscurantism and thus complicity in violence. darkness was similarly invoked to lament the opacity surrounding investigations into pendo’s disappearance and yohana’s murder, as yakobo denounced politicians, prosecutors, and police who he said had the power to transparently bring about justice but, owing to their own possible consumption of albino body parts, refused. as a result, stakeholder interventions often centered on the need to eradicate forms of darkness that pointed to conditions of ignorance, malfeasance, or erasure. as a qualisign of negative value, darkness enables an understanding of what is semiotically continuous across disparate interventions (harkness 2015). for nsembi, qualisigns of darkness and dirtiness evince a need for healthy nyota and, by extension, a properly relational social order that grants the ability to see in subterranean thresholds. for differently positioned albinism rights stakeholders, negative valuations of darkness compel interventions to “correct” beliefs in nyota, including through miss albinism pageants, skin and vision caravans, documentary films, summer camps, red carpet events, and more. i read these interventions as forms of spectacle that signal the value of albinism. that nyota 259index lightness for some and darkness for others points to the importance of interpretation in processes of signification, and to signs as sites of ethical, epistemological, and ontological contestation (chumley 2017; peirce 1955; see also parmentier 1994). despite the differing metaphysical commitments underlying them, practices of illumination are fraught. although albinism stakeholders see their interventions as acting on a preexisting spectacle, the visibility they create is turned on its head by spectators who interpret the value—and demand—surrounding albinism in unpredictable ways. in contrast, nsembi felt less sure of the effects of his interventions and understood his actions as already caught in spectacle. rooted in entanglement, his mode of seeing less concerned a binary opposition between light and dark, and more their tendency to exist inside each other (barad 2007). this struck me as ethical work and resonated with my own sense of complicity and entanglement—who had seen me attend albinism rights events and the homes of traditional healers, and what had they suspected about me? in this way, working with nsembi allowed me to imagine a postactivist ethics grounded in relationality that parsed the effects of interventions semiotically, rather than through reified categories or crumbling narratives. seeking lightness a prominent albinism intervention, international albinism awareness day (iaad), has been celebrated every june 13 since its initiation by the united nations in 2015. at the inaugural event in sengerema, ngo and state officials hosted radio and television broadcasters and journalists, all of whom preached the need to protect people with albinism. as they spoke, crowds surrounded a newly built monument on a roundabout in the town center, created by the canadian evangelical ngo under the same sun (utss). as utss explained, the nithamini monument, or the self-respect monument, “portrays a life size metal statue depicting an enlightened father who does not have albinism holding his child with albinism on his shoulders while an educated mother, also without albinism, puts a wide brimmed hat on the child’s head to protect him from the sun.”12 signaling the lightness of properly valuing albinism as genetic and addressing the potency of the equatorial sun, the monument was erected at a site that utss claims was once a ceremonial gathering place for healers exercising “dark power.” i stood silently as ngo representatives read the names of people with albinism who had been killed. afterward, we lit candles to commemorate them in a 260process that many albinism rights stakeholders, me included, found comforting. looking back, i understand how events like the iaad generate spectacle, not only showcasing albinism as valuable but also capable of enabling societal transformations. after the commemoration, walking to the bus stand, i overheard two bystanders remark on the robustness of albinism activism. “those with albinism have much security in society,” one said. the other retorted, “if you even touch one, you will face big consequences.” they laughed and continued debating how many years one would spend incarcerated and how much money one would have to pay for “touching a person with albinism.” casting a shadow over the day’s events, their laughs stayed with me, for they revealed how albinism interventions designed to ameliorate violence nevertheless signal the value of albinism through the creation of spectacles. figure 3. erected in 2014 by albinism rights ngo under the same sun, the monument in sengerema town features the love two black parents have for their child with albinism. with the names of people with albinism painted around it, the monument is said to be built on top of a “sacred site” where healers once practiced. photo by under the same sun. embodied qualities of light became more explicit in iaad celebrations with annual themes like “shining our light to the world” in 2018 and “made to shine” in 2020. in commemorating the 2018 event, the un special representative of the secretary-general on violence against children, marta santos pais, said, “we must all shine a bright light of compassion and protection upon the darkness of violence and discrimination that too many children with albinism 261endure.” she ended by appealing to the goals of the 2030 sustainable development agenda: “we must ensure that no child, including those with albinism, is left behind in the dark. together, let us shine their bright light to the world” (un-vc 2018). themes at iaad thus indexed the material lightness of albinism as it manifests in skin, hair, and eyes, and the concepts of enlightenment and illumination that connote expanded consciousness and higher orders of knowledge. also invoked as a means of combatting the ways in which people with albinism had historically been marginalized and “kept in the dark,” the lightness of albinism was understood to promote visibility and normalize difference through medical, religious, and rights-based modes of personhood. figure 4. an annual event rooted in demands for greater visibility and thus conditions of light, international albinism awareness day themes also celebrate the lightness of albinism. image by under the same sun. as yasi explained to me a few months after the first iaad, stakeholders consider visibility a primary aim. from behind the desk in his office at church just outside of mwanza, he articulated the need to bring light—in this instance, something akin to transparency—to seemingly dark processes that made it nigh impossible to know what happened to pendo and yohana, and who was doing what with albino body parts and why. for him, lightness meant a media that could freely report on violence without fear of state violence or repression, a government that could effectively investigate violence and bring perpetrators to justice, and a population that could curtail the power of healers by rejecting 262the temptation of albino body parts and channeling one’s inner darkness into religious faith. preaching the need to abandon “african traditions” steeped in darkness, particularly around “beliefs in nyota,” yasi averred the need to both accumulate wealth transparently and assimilate genetic understandings of human difference.13 the strategy of “shining a light” on albinism was not lost on artisanal miners and healers, who questioned why people with albinism were capable of attracting powerful people like journalists, scientists, humanitarians, and academics. like the dialogue i overheard at the bus stop in sengerema, conversations about albinism were frequently motivated by albinism rights interventions, especially on tv and radio, rather than by personal conviction, rumor, or shadowy visits to healers. during these conversations, nsembi and his team pointed to the fetishization of albinism at the hands of various stakeholders who, for their own purposes, possessed highly visible interests in working with populations with albinism, this article no exception. not surprisingly, discourses disparaging miners as indifferent to the plight of people with albinism and ignorant of “the truth” about them angered nsembi, as did the tendency of stakeholders to circumscribe nyota within a discourse of fetishism, such that the former came to signify a failure to correctly value the agency of human bodies and parts. yet nsembi’s quest for shiny nyota formed part of his desire to align with the forces that determined his fate. during an exchange with bujukano, she told me that nyota are mostly imperceptible to the bodies they inhabit and must be checked by healers through divination. as she accesses an unseen realm, a patient’s nyota reveals itself to her through subtle atmospheric perceptions brought by her ancestors or her jini, allowing her to intuit their malady. in this sense, nyota are harbingers of disease. on another occasion, bujukano elaborated that as a symptom of bewitchment, nyota could be stolen, tarnished, and made crooked through the baneful acts of others; in this way, dark or dirty nyota signal despair, while those that are light, shiny, open, and straight portend success. the oracular quality of nyota caused bujukano to analogize, “nyota is ndagu [sukuma: fate], like knowing your cd4 count.”14 that is, like cd4 t lymphocytes that measure the strength of one’s immune system and the progression of hiv, nyota is unseen protection that can deteriorate and leave one vulnerable to attack, whether from pathogens or subterranean majini. toward the end of our time together, after nsembi’s team had been working for weeks with no payout, the team asked that he have his nyota checked. in february 2016, i accompanied him to bujukano’s kaya (sukuma: homestead). 263we sat cross-legged on woven mats in what she called her house of culture (nyumba ya utamaduni), where she displayed her dawa. she instructed nsembi to speak his intentions; then she closed her eyes and through a slow, breathy whistle summoned her mizimu (ancestors). she chanted, shaking a basket, and causing its contents—old coins, petrified wood, shells, and peanut-sized iron bells—to rise and fall. on opening her eyes, she read their configuration and told nsembi that his nyota was dirty. to restore its lightness, she had us return the following day with a small white chicken that she slaughtered, dried, and added to a mortar. after adding water and stirring with a cow tail, she began to gently whip the soaked tail across nsembi’s bare back. we left with a plastic water bottle of dawa and instructions for nsembi to wash three times the following day, far from any latrines, and meet her the following evening at the pit where his team had been digging. when we arrived, bujukano asked the pit’s majini for permission to enter, then lit a small bouquet of incense. nsembi removed his shirt and kneeled before her, while she mixed dawa and, using a cloth that facilitated her ancestors’ presence, quickly washed nsembi’s shoulders before portending light nyota by the week’s end.15 later bujukano explained that the chicken’s lightness catalyzed the dawa she used to brighten nsembi’s nyota, allowing him to see in extractive thresholds. i understand her use of seeing (kuona) to encompass ideas and practices beyond ocular processes, like the ability to manifest particular futures (smith 2021). she also mentioned treating nsembi with a category of dawa that enabled him to attract shiny minerals. it was similar to dawa she had prepared for fishermen who used it at night to wash the lanterns used in the lake to attract swarms of whitebait, as well as for businesspeople who would wash the walls of their stores to attract customers. in this case the efficacy of bujukano’s dawa lies in its ability to manipulate the terms of one’s visibility, which for nsembi the light chicken made possible. yet for albinism rights stakeholders, agentive chicken (or human) parts reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of who or what can act (e.g., ancestors who direct divinations, demons who own pits, or body parts that attract certain entities). it is for this reason that yakobo and yasi condemn practices of healing nyota and aim to stabilize the boundaries between whole people who are valuable and agentive, and commodified parts that are not. while strategies of demystifying, illuminating, and solidifying the boundaries of albinism appear sensible, especially given what is at stake, they generate spectacle and, in this way, enable further interpretations of the possible value that coheres in the bodies of those with albinism. 264 valuing albinism nsembi never asked about the additives in his dawa, nor did he inquire about the root cause of his tarnished nyota.16 it was not typical for patients to ask about ingredients, since dawa depended on the “articulated visions” rendered through their divination and on the networks of humans and nonhumans through which their knowledge emerged (west 2007). additionally, the efficacy of dawa for treating nyota rests only partly on material composition: potency cannot be disentangled from the therapeutic encounter between healer and patient, where ritual practices fuse with words and intentionality (green 1996; langwick 2011; stroeken 2013). this means that while mutually agreed-on kinds of dawa exist—for example, samba (sukuma: to attract) or kukingia (swahili: to protect)—what proves efficacious in one encounter may not in another (feierman 2000). similarly, dawa comprising the same ingredients might treat different afflictions, while dawa containing different materials and administered with different speech acts and intentions may produce similar effects. the relational and embedded nature of preparing and administering dawa suggests that it is not possible to speak of dawa containing albino body parts in the aggregate, as a homogenous category that abides by uniform logics to a prescribed set of ends, as the narratives of albinocide purport. additionally, the centrality of ritual, evident in nsembi’s need to be treated through a particularly sequenced set of events involving ancestors and other subterranean nonhumans, suggests that the efficacy of dawa—the source of power—lies not in the thing itself, as the logic of fetishism suggests. rather, dawa becomes agentive through the social relations it comes to embody. by this token, an albino bone would not itself be valuable in that neither patient nor healer would aver its agency independent of the ritual practices that might imbue it with value. because his grandmother (bibi) had been a well-regarded healer and brought him to the bush to find dawa, nsembi knew what was needed to brighten tarnished nyota. shortly after rumors of albinism-related violence surfaced in 2006, she warned him that being treated with dawa containing human body parts was uchawi (witchcraft) and would bestow misfortune on their lineage; she also explained that body parts obtained through practices that severed social relations, like those obtained violently, were inert. her sentiments echo what i heard from many traditional healers who acknowledged the extraordinary power of anomalous bodies to access an unseen realm and the use of their parts in dawa, both historically and contemporarily, as well as broader practices among wasukuma related to human sacrifice (mbogoni 2013). in her practice decades ago, she 265diagnosed and treated tarnished nyota. at the time, she knew of the medicinal properties of albino body parts and condemned their use. years later, nsembi equivocated about their possibilities, and sitting at a roadside restaurant where we were the only patrons, he relayed his bibi’s theory of the value of albinism. long ago during competitions between sukuma dance societies, he began, participants aimed to drum up support for their society by creating a spectacle (bessire 2005). using dawa to attract crowds and attack their opponents, troupes would try to find someone with albinism—a difficult feat since many were kept inside compounds set apart—and insist that they attend the competition. such a spectator would invariably guarantee the spectacle they needed to win. nsembi interpreted his bibi’s story to mean that lightness attracted spectators. extending her insights beyond sukuma dance competitions, nsembi reasoned that albinism similarly attracted scientists, journalists, missionaries, academics, and disability and human rights advocates—all of whom generate their own spectacle. by pointing to the value of albinism not for healers and miners but for powerful tanzanian and international actors, nsembi suggested that the demand for albino body parts might ultimately come from the value created through stakeholder interventions. prominent albinism rights stakeholders also entertained the possibility that demand may come from westerners. once when juma, an albinism rights stakeholder who often worked with yakobo and yasi, and i were in the regional offices of the tanzanian albinism society, he asked me what scientists “in my country” were discovering about the powers of his albino arm. when i asked him to explain, he elaborated that wazungu (euro-americans) were always discovering new things, so perhaps knowledge of the extraordinary powers of albino body parts was discovered in a laboratory—and then abused by healers. articulating his value within biomedicine, juma, too, pointed to the possibility of a non-african demand for albinism.17 analytically, nsembi and juma blurred any neat separation between the lightness of biomedicine and genetics, christian values, and human rights, on the one hand, and for purposes of polishing nyota and extracting resources, on the other. instead equating a sukuma attraction to albinism for healing purposes or in dance competitions with a biomedical attraction to albinism for treating skin cancer or a journalist’s attempt to raise awareness, nsembi showed how the value of albinism emanated from practices that illuminate, rather than from purportedly deeply held “traditional beliefs,” leaving open the question of what any given intervention might effect. 266nsembi returned to this conversation a few days later when he explained that the lightness of albinism could enable forms of seeing: “people with albinism can see in darkness.” like ancestors who impart radiant nyota, he explained, people with albinism can illuminate subterranean spaces. as he spoke, i thought of my friends with albinism who had complained about the difficulty of seeing during the brightest hours of the day. i recalled an albinism seminar where an ophthalmologist diagrammed the physiological implications of albinism for the eyes, including an underdeveloped optic nerve that makes it harder to absorb light and thus easier to see in darker conditions. and i was reminded of the advocacy work of albinism rights ngos who taught schoolchildren with albinism to sit in lower lit areas and close any curtains. significantly, nsembi rooted his observations about the possibilities of albino body parts in biomedical knowledge, which attests to the various kinds of interpretations emergent in albinism interventions. he also makes a broader point about visibility and the consequences of being seen. as yakobo explained, the idea behind awareness-raising campaigns is that they “sensitize” others to albinism and assimilate them to biomedical, rights-based, or religious frameworks. but as nsembi showed, what albinism signifies is variable. in peirce’s triadic theory of the sign, meaning is not inherent but relational (kockelman 2005). to illustrate this idea, semioticians often draw on joint attention, a phenomenon where someone turns to observe what someone else is already observing. the idea that nsembi—or anyone—was observing not only stakeholders but also anyone seemingly interested in albinism, and possibly interpreting my work as indexical of a demand for the bodies of people with albinism, whole or in parts, felt deeply unsettling, to say the least. spectacle it is difficult to convey the affective intensity in mwanza in the weeks and months following pendo’s disappearance and yohana’s death. rumors abounded, frustrating stakeholders and journalists who became increasingly angry with state officials for what appeared to be a lack of political will. the absence of clear information prolonged our grief. at a televised premiere league football game, players stood silently on the field while holding a baby or the hand of a child with albinism. and on a multiday protest march, college students walked hundreds of kilometers to seek the wisdom of maria nyerere, the former wife of baba wa taifa (the nation’s father). it is in this affective context that yakobo was speaking to media, holding seminars, coordinating services, meeting with politicians, and 267hosting foreign donors; and that yasi, engaging in much of the same activities, was also preaching godly interpretations of albinism. two months after pendo’s disappearance, yakobo informed me that a man had been arrested in ukerewe with an apparent human arm bone the size of a small child. he was later released. i didn’t investigate further, not because there were no leads to follow or rumors to trace, but because following them meant engaging in practices of illumination that i came to see as part of the problem. in retrospect, i suspect this man was looking for a buyer—one who would pay handsomely for the parts said to be so valued—but couldn’t find one. i had seen similar stories of what seemed like supply without demand in newspapers articles, police reports, and court documents. eventually i came to see the presumption of demand as the result of a semiotics of joint attention whereby a range of different actors were entangled in the interventions of another. tragically, then, one is left looking for the demand that always lies elsewhere. an analysis rooted in the semiotics of quality also raises questions about what constitutes activism. compelled by understandings of fetishism that bifurcate who or what can act, albinism activism is predicated on a single ontology rooted in the idea that the motives, causes, and effects of any intervention can be transparently known. activism also relies on partitioning those who act from those who are acted on, affording the former facts that enlighten, and the latter rumors that obscure. except that if we follow valuations surrounding nyota and its relative qualities of lightness and darkness, we see that such partitions do not exist and that sign processes in one milieu can intimately shape another. hence nsembi’s assessment rooting the extraordinary power of albino body parts partly in biomedicine. the historian florence bernault (2006, 207) cautions against the “tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and african imaginaries.” while she was speaking to historians and anthropologists, the same applies for humanitarians. beyond albinism specifically, spectacle demonstrates the importance of situating issues of representation and visibility inherent to social movements in broader processes of sign-making. this requires a particular openness to questions of who or what can act in semiotic processes (keane 2003). because stakeholders understood violence to stem from fetishistic error, their interventions strove to partition person from thing and foreclose the ontological possibilities of albinism beyond genetics (saffitz 2023). i understand this activist practice to constitute an ethics of doing, in this case motivated by the desire to keep people with albinism safe, as well as by the operational narratives and categories that make stakeholder activism meaningful. 268for nsembi, avoiding the deathly dangers of mining and receiving even a modest payout required that he be divined and washed with dawa to lighten his nyota. to interpret these practices as “superstitious beliefs” misses how the value of lightness emerges relationally and how interventions contra nyota generate spectacle. at the same time, his postactivist ethics and politics were attuned to being in alignment with the forces around him, whether nonhumans or albinism stakeholders, and thus find meaning relationally, rather than through an individual or group (zigon 2019). this meant deferring when it came to the powers of albino body parts—to neither avowing nor abnegating their agency. it also meant assimilating notions of the biomedical body that genetic explanations of albinism espoused and the bodies that nyota inhabit, which come into being as sick or healthy only through the relations they manifest. and it meant remaining suspended between nyota as they manifested social relations and extractive commodity chains as they obscured them. instead of activist strategies that can lead to forms of hypervisibility, postactivist practice moves beyond humanitarian categories and the logics of identity politics to foreground the practices that give rise to them. aligning with peirce’s model of the sign and nsembi’s relational ethics emergent in healing nyota, postactivism approaches agency relationally rather than categorically or essentially. beyond social movements, the analytic of spectacle provides a way forward in recent debates about anthropology in light and dark times (see, for example, ortner 2016). exposing how conditions of lightness and darkness exist inside each other, spectacle moves beyond the light/dark binary in anthropological theory by focusing on regimes of visibility that afford different ways of seeing. abstract in the past fifteen years, scores of high-profile murders of africans with albinism have sparked a robust global movement for albinism rights. in tanzania, disparate albinism stakeholders (wadau) attribute violence to an illicit market for albino body parts run by traditional healers and their patrons, who are said to believe in the extraordinary powers of these parts to access an unseen realm. this article tacks between stakeholders with albinism and composite sketches of a healer and her artisanal miner patient, to offer a theory of violence rooted in spectacle rather than belief. focusing on albinism interventions as sites of spectacle, i employ a semiotics of quality to show how albinism becomes central to broader processes of illumination (kuongeza nuru). a semiotic approach to social movements moves beyond the sedimented categories and narrative tropes that compel activism to reveal a postactivist politics and 269ethics grounded in relationality. [albinism; lightness; social movements; semiotics; qualisign; violence; tanzania] muhtasari katika kipindi cha takribani miaka kumi na tano iliyopita, matukio mengi ya mauaji ya waafrika wenye ualbino yamechochea vuguvugu kote duniani la kupigania haki za watu hao. nchini tanzania, wadau tofauti tofauti wa ualbino wanahusisha vurugu na soko haramu la viungo vya watu hao linaloendeshwa na waganga wa kienyeji na wateja wao, ambao wanadaiwa kuamini katika uwezo wa ajabu wa viungo hivi kufika kwenye ulimwengu usioonekana. makala haya yanahusu wadau wenye ualbino na hadithi ya mganga na mgonjwa wake mchimbaji madini mdogo, ili kutoa nadharia ya vurugu iliyojengeka na tamasha lenye mvuto badala ya imani. nikizingatia kuingilia kati kwa ualbino kama maeneo ya tamasha lenye mvuto, ninatumia semiotiki yenye sifa ilikuonyesha jinsi ualbino unavyokuwa kitovu cha michakato mipana katika kuongeza mwonekano. mtazamo wa semiotiki wa harakati za kijamii unasogea zaidi ya kategoria zisizo badilika na mambo yote ya kawaida ya kila siku ya kuchochea wadau kwenye kuweka wazi siasa na maadili za wanaharakati zilizojengwa katika mauhusiano. [ualbino; nuru; harakati za kijamii; semiotiki (masomo ya alama na ishara); qualisign (sifa zinazowasiliana kama ishara); vurugu; tanzania] notes acknowledgments  i am immensely grateful to the friends, colleagues, and interlocuters in tanzania who have enabled my research and writing, especially yakobo, yasi, nsembi, and bujukano. i also thank angelina and juma kibela, ester gotfried rwela, steve bugumba, and elisha kazima maganga, as well as under the same sun and the tanzanian albinism society. marisol de la cadena, donald donham, cristiana giordano, justin haruyama, veerendra lele, laura meek, shiri noy, lisa morrison, james smith, and brad weiss offered invaluable feedback, as did anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, in particular matilde córdoba azcárate. this research and writing were funded by the national science foundation, the fulbright-hays program, the wenner-gren foundation, as well as the departments of anthropology and african studies at the university of california, davis, and the office of the provost at denison university. despite assistance from ester gotfried rwela and ann biersteker, any errors in swahili translation are my own. 1. the names presented in this piece are pseudonyms. 2. generally translated as “medicine,” dawa involves a more capacious category that includes substances and immaterial practices that catalyze socio-bodily transformations. rather than making them equivalent, i leave dawa untranslated. 3. despite criticisms that the term stakeholder homogenizes the actors and interests in any given movement (fortun 2001), i use the term because it best corresponds with the word used by yakobo, yasi, and others (wadau). while i highlight common narrative tropes related to albinism, i do not wish to imply uniformity across diverse groups with various ties to albinism. 4. swahili times, twitter post, january 12, 2017, 11:44 pm, https://twitter.com/swahilitimes/status/819767147849220096270 5. while some occasionally used race as a rubric through which to interpret violence, this tended to cause confusion among non-english speaking tanzanians, where the swahili word for race (ubaguzi wa rangi, or separation by skin) evoked south african apartheid. while acknowledging the centrality of white supremacy in humanitarian apparatuses (benton 2016), my focus on lightness in relation to the eyesight of people with albinism moves away from skin as a key element of the alterity of albinism. 6. koen stroeken (2011) has written about mwanga (light) in relation to albino body parts. his use differs from mine in that he treats mwanga as a metaphorical connection bridging the symbolic world of enlightenment and the material world of mining political economy. 7. mwanza has been the site of negative media attention surrounding the exploitation inherent to extractive capitalism. see, for example, the documentary film darwin’s nightmare (2004), directed by hubert sauper, which represented tanzanian politicians unfavorably and to this day instills tensions surrounding others’ efforts to represent extractive economies in the region. 8. practices of cleansing nyota are not new, nor is dawa to attract or illuminate. while many healers explained historical uses of cleansing nyota—for instance, to ensure healthy crops—they also acknowledged that the need for light nyota has recently increased alongside the rise of extractive industries, privatized media, and multiparty democracy. 9. bujukano is composed of three healers who worked in the mwanza region treating miners and fishermen, among others. because divining is criminalized in tanzania, i combined elements of multiple divinations and healing practices to disguise potentially distinguishing features. i did not visit healers who advertised for their services, nor did i visit those known for illicit activities. instead, i visited reputable healers, mainstays in their communities, all of them located through word of mouth by my research assistant or me. these healers were majority sukuma but ethnically and religiously diverse. 10. ethnically and religiously muslim, majini that live in subterranean thresholds differ from those on land. (larsen 2008; lindhardt 2019). many healers described long-term relationships with majini who guided their work. mashetani (sing.: shetani), generally translated as “spirits” or “demons,” or in the singular as “satan,” are said to inhabit bodies for their own ends and must be exorcised by a pastor or placated by a healer. bujukano and nsembi also evoked mapepo (sing.: pepo), sometimes as synonyms for majini and mashetani and sometimes as its literal translation (winds) to describe the agency of nonhumans. while differences between nonhumans vary across regional, ethnic, and religious contexts, my interlocutors used them interchangeably when describing the hazards of extractive labor. these nonhumans differ from mizimu, ancestors who also require sacrifices and can be difficult to please but are generally thought to be benevolent. 11. valuations of light and dark and their association with cleanliness and dirtiness also evoked muslim moral sensibilities embedded in healing practices derived from the swahili coast (giles 1995; lindhardt 2019; mcintosh 2009). they speak to the multiplicity of practices of making light across religious, ethnic, and geographic differences. 12. information taken from an under the same sun newsletter, 2014. 13. albinism rights stakeholders occasionally evoked colonial logics that once ascribed darkness continent-wide to refract the lightness of european civilization. on darkness in africa, see achebe 2016 and conrad 2008. 14. koen stroeken has written about ndagu as “curse” (stroeken 2008b, 475) and as “ancestral guides” (stroeken 2008a, 160). bujukano used the term in the latter sense. 15. as is common for healers in the region, bujukano drew on a range of therapeutic techniques and medical traditions beyond the sukuma knowledge she inherited. these include maasai herbalists and waswahili healers from the coast whose practices include insights from the quran (giles 1995; wilkens 2011). 271 16. while it is typical for patients to 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federico neiburg universidade federal do rio de janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9917-8604 i met daphney in the tent where she had found shelter, next to the site where she was born and had lived on macajou street, in downtown port-au-prince. it was may 2010. a couple of months earlier, on january 12, a massive earthquake that struck the city had reduced the residences of hundreds of thousands of people to rubble. daphney and her son fritznel spent almost two days immobilized under the debris, separated by the remains of collapsed walls yet hearing each other’s voices, until relatives and neighbors managed to open a hole to pass them water and then finally rescue them. i have known daphney since 2007, when i arrived in haiti to start a collaborative study of its dynamic urban economy and to lead a multinational ethnographic research and training program for young scholars (neiburg 2019). over the years, i visited daphney’s lakou on macajou street many times. there are still some urban lakou like hers in port-au-prince: sets of houses inhabited by kin-related people, connected by a yard or central corridor and with a ritual space around a peristil, where ceremonies are held for the spirits (lwa) and the graves of kin are located.1 macajou street was now populated by dozens of tents like daphney’s. sanitary conditions had fast deteriorated, and a cholera outbreak worsened the situation, bringing the bacterial specter of death into all intimate spaces. the immensity of the tragedy—an “acute-on-chronic event,” in paul farmer’s (2011, 21) rendering—evinced ways of dwelling and connecting persons and houses with deep historical trajectories (in the wake of the plantation and marronage), which would be reanimated in calamities to come, such as today’s covid-19 pandemic. this oikography essay is located at the crossroads of two intellectual traditions: one has shown the vital relational character of haitian houses (such as the concept of “configuration of houses” in marcelin [1996]), while the other has emphasized the generativity of haitian mobility (anglade 1982). building on these important bodies of work, i am interested in the intrinsic relationships between house-ing practices, mobility, and scales—and the centrality of these linkages to the experience of personhood and belonging. to daphney and my haitian interlocutors and friends, mobility involves geographic and temporal scales constitutive of their personal and collective trajectories and of the house as a physical, moral, and affective territory. as in eugênia motta’s (2021, this issue) and thiago da costa oliveira’s and carlos fausto’s (2021, this issue) oikographies, here, too, the house constitutes at once a place (or several places) and a conceptual field, a landscape of sorts where personhood and houses are built in motion. as macajou street had become quite a dangerous place, daphney was relieved to have found a refuge for her child in another tent on the grounds of an ngo for which she had occasionally worked. what tormented her most, she told me, was her immobilization. the catastrophe had interrupted her movements between port-au-prince and miami, a circuit she traveled to engage in “small commerce” (ti komès) of clothing and beauty products. she is also an artist, and constant visits to the united states nourished daphney’s hope to one day record a hip hop hit and become a professional musician. this aspiration was daphney’s own chache lavi myo, a way of “seeking a better life” for herself and her son. now, trapped in the street, she felt like the living dead, a zombie (tankou yon zonbi), she said: my house [kay mwen] collapsed, but here [pointing to the tent] is now my base [baz mwen], pako [the location where her young son was living] is my base, this entire zone [zon] is my base; that lakou is my house, everything there was made by my grandfather and great-grandfather, but living like this now, trapped, i feel like i’m dying [konsa lòk mwen santi m mouri]. the earthquake dramatically affected relations between persons and houses. at least 250,000 people died, while thousands more were mutilated and injured, leaving an immeasurable trail of orphaned children, homeless families, and devastated infrastructure. it is estimated that more than 40 percent of the houses in some central districts of port-au-prince were destroyed or seriously damaged. at least 300,000 people fled the city, most of them heading to the countryside. many left for the dominican republic and other destinations that compose haiti’s diasporic geography: traditionally north america and france, and now also south america.2 figure 1. refugee camp after the earthquake. bel air, port-au-prince, may 2010. photo by federico neiburg. in the caribbean landscapes, mobility and immobility have always coexisted intensely. plantation and post-plantation worlds have been inhabited by enslaved and escaped people (mawon people). in haiti, this tension acquired even more intense modulations, permeated by the permanent sense of crisis (beckett 2019) and extreme poverty that impels movement (dalmaso 2019; bulamah 2020; joseph 2020; neiburg and joseph 2021), making the act of “taking to the road” (prann wout a) (montinard 2020) a synonym of life and transformation, as daphney herself noted: immobility signals the imminence of death. a popular proverb says: kote ki gen grangou, kabrit pa mouri nan kòd, “where there is hunger, no goats die tethered to their ropes.” being stuck, prevented from moving, is synonymous with an absence of life, like in the extreme cases of people forced into slavery or those killed by magic. as i learned from my interlocutors in haiti and in the haitian diaspora, movement stabilizes relations between those at home and, even at a distance, supports bonds with kin and ancestors, between those residents in a place and those moving within and across national borders. movement is relationally productive, and relationality is the condition of possibility for movement. the home is inhabited by people in motion, and mobile people inhabit many houses. even children grow up in relations with several houses, accompanying their parents or spending time with others while on the move. house-ing happens in and through multiple houses across scales. daphney’s statement echoes a theme that, time and again, emerged in my ethnographic encounters, before and after the earthquake. the house (kay) makes for a temporal and spatial multiscale universe, a unit that integrates and dissolves into others, always contextually: the eritaj (heritage), which connects the house to its various pasts and ancestral figures (in daphney’s case: her grandfather and great-grandfather), and the configuration of diverse houses that forms the lakou, the zon, the vwazinaj (neighborhood), and the baz, a concept that designates multiple spaces, from the materiality of the house itself to a street corner or spot where people feel emotionally and materially safe, at home, in the company of those close to them. louis herns marcelin’s (2012) observation about the concept of family (fanmi) suits the imaginary of the house to which the family is intrinsically associated: spaces of closeness and relatedness, among neighbors, friends, members of the same village or city, or even a common humanity. that is why daphney referred to the space she inhabited after the earthquake as her baz, a place of life amid the tragedy. when i moved to princeton, new jersey, for a sabbatical in the fall of 2019, i met willian, one of daphney’s brothers, who was living in the same lakou on macajou street at the time of the earthquake and who had moved to the united states a few years later. i was happy to hear that daphney and her son were safe and doing well—she in boston and fritznel in jeremie, in the extended home in southwestern haiti. willian and i met regularly to catch up until we had to quarantine because of the covid-19 pandemic. we continued to communicate through whatsapp, a device constitutive of haitians’ mobile relatedness long before the confinement. mobility also formed part of my own experience, distributed not only between the united states and brazil but also argentina, belgium, and mexico, where i have loved ones and homes. willian knew me well, which is why he used to refer to me as a moun dyaspora (a diaspora man), like himself. while we accompanied each other at a distance during this acute uncertainty, i managed to feel the great suffering that immobility was causing willian. the uber service he was providing stopped, and this affected not only the livelihood of his home near newark, where he lived with his haitian wife, but also the other houses to which he regularly sent remittances: the houses of his lakou on macajou street and in jeremie where he had grown up in the care of one of his aunts and where his beloved nephew now lived. willian, like other haitian friends with whom i have maintained communication during the pandemic, experienced the shadow of death associated with immobility, not only in the material aspect of money and remittances but also in the indefinite suspension of flights that kept him from his loved ones. yet he insisted on “waiting for better times to search for a better life” (retann yon bon moman pou chache lavi miyò). digital communication partially mitigated his suffering, allowing him to be near from afar, injecting life into confinement, reinserting him and his house in a multiscale vital landscape, connecting with close friends and family distributed in space (in several houses) and in time (with his ancestors, always present at the lakou). macajou street’s lakou came back into view one saturday, in april 2020, when a mobile phone near the peristyle allowed willian in his newark house, daphney in her boston house, me in my princeton house, and “our people” in port-au-prince to be together, listening to the drums, looking at dances, sharing time and affection, cultivating our virtual and desired human presence, linking our homes and lives. abstract in january 2010, a catastrophic earthquake ravaged haiti. in areas such as port-au-prince, the tragedy was compounded by an ensuing cholera outbreak. here, conditions of prolonged crisis illuminate people’s resilient house-ing responses at the intersection of two dynamics: the vital relational character of haitian houses and the necessity of mobility for producing new life. rooted in the haitian post-plantation world, the house (kay) does not constitute a bounded space but is rather realized conceptually and materially at diverse scales: people belong to many interdependent houses and houses belong to many interrelated people, sutured across space and time and between the living and the dead. in the wake of the 2010 disaster, and now amid the covid-19 pandemic, new challenges and opportunities have arisen for diasporic families as they craft ways to enact and secure multiscale forms of livelihood. [multiscale housing; mobility and diaspora; natural disasters; living-in-movement; haiti and the caribbean] rezime nan mwa janvye ane 2010, yon tranbleman tè vyolan te frape ayiti. nan kèlke zòn tankou pòtoprens, kapital la, trajedi a te vin agrave akòz yon epidemi kolera. kriz pwolonje sa a montre detèminasyon moun yo nan yon entèseksyon ki gen ladan l de dinamik: 1) youn ki montre karaktè relasyonèl ak vital kay ayisien yo; 2) lòt la ki konsantre l sou mouvman pou bay lavi a sans. kay, ki gen rasin li nan mond apre peryòd plantasyon an, li pa sèlman yon espas ki separe ak yon fwontyè fizik, men konseptyèlman e materyèlman nan plizyè echèl: moun yo fè pati plizyè kay entèdepandan, epi tou kay yo apateni ak plizyè moun ki entèrelasyone, gras a lyen ke yo genyen ki limite nan espas ak nan tan, ant moun vivan yo ak sila ki mouri yo. nan dezas 2010 la ak nan moman pandemi kovid-19 la, fanmi yo gen nouvo defi ak opòtinite pandan y ap kreye nouvo mwayen nan plizyè dimansyon pou lavi ka kontinie. [kay an plizyè echèl; lavi an mouveman; dezas natirèl; ayiti ak karayib la] resumen en enero de 2010 un violento terremoto devastó haití. en zonas como la capital, port-au-prince, la tragedia se vio agravada por una epidemia de cólera. la crisis prolongada ilumina la resiliencia de las personas en la intersección de dos dinámicas: una, que señala el carácter relacional y vital de los hogares haitianos y, otra, que tematiza la movilidad para producir vida. enraizada en el mundo de la post-plantación, la casa (kay) no es sólo un espacio delimitado por fronteras físicas, sino que se realiza conceptual y materialmente en escalas múltiples: las personas pertenecen a varias casas interdependientes y las casas pertenecen a varias personas interrelacionadas, en vínculos suturados a través del espacio y del tiempo, entre los vivos y los muertos. entre la catástrofe de 2010 y la pandemia de covid-19 surgen nuevos desafíos y oportunidades para las familias diaspóricas que encuentran nuevas formas de asegurar la vida en múltiples escalas. [casas en múltiples escalas; movilidad y diáspora; catástrofes naturales; vida en movimiento; haití y caribe] resumo em janeiro de 2010 um violento terremoto devastou o haiti. em áreas como a capital, port-au-prince, a tragédia foi agravada por uma epidemia de cólera. a crise prolongada ilumina a resiliência das pessoas na interseção de duas dinâmicas: a que aponta o caráter relacional e vital das casas haitianas e a que tematiza a mobilidade para produzir vida. enraizada no mundo pós-plantação, a casa (kay) não é só um espaço limitado por fronteiras físicas, mas realizada conceitual e materialmente em diversas escalas: as pessoas pertencem a muitas casas interdependentes e as casas pertencem a muitas pessoas inter-relacionadas, através de vínculos suturados no espaço e no tempo e entre vivos e mortos. na esteira do desastre de 2010, e em meio à pandemia de covid-19, novos desafios e oportunidades surgem para as famílias diaspóricas à medida que criam novas maneiras de assegurar formas vitais em múltiplas escalas. [moradia em múltiplas escalas; mobilidade e diáspora; desastres naturais; vida em movimento; haiti e caribe] notes acknowledgments thanks to flavia dalmaso for the permanent dialogue on these issues, and to handerson joseph and rodrigo c. bulamah for their generous critical readings. 1. lakou refers to the traditional residential unit of rural haiti. many in downtown port-au-prince, where daphney’s lakou is located, are migrants from the rural hinterland who settled there in the 1970s. subsequent migratory waves, especially of people fleeing violence, have overwhelmed the city, further stressing property regimes and impacting inheritance and kinship ties (beckett 2019; kivland 2020). 2. about two million people live in port-au-prince, ten million in haiti as a whole, and at least four million in the diaspora. references anglade, georges 1982 espace et liberté en haïti. montréal: erce. beckett, greg 2019 there is no more haiti: between life and death in port-au-prince. berkeley: university of california press. bulamah, rodrigo charafeddine 2020 “times and metaphors of pandemics.” social anthropology 28, no. 2: 232–33. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12866. costa oliveira, thiago da, and carlos fausto 2021 “amazonian house-ing: a visual anthropology essay.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 580–88. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.06. dalmaso, flavia 2019 “família.” in conversas etnográficas haitianas, edited by federico neiburg, 53–80. rio de janeiro: papéis selvagens. farmer, paul 2011 haiti after the earthquake. new york: public affairs. joseph, handerson 2020 “maisons diasporas et maisons locales: mobilités haïtiennes et réseaux transnationaux.” etnográfica 24, no. 3: 749–74. https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.9566. kivland, chelsey l. 2020 street sovereigns: young men and the makeshift state in urban haiti. ithaca: cornell university press. marcelin, louis herns 1996 “a invenção da família afro-americana: família, parentesco e domesticidade entre os negros do recôncavo da bahia, brasil.” phd diss., museu nacional, universidade federal do rio de janeiro. 2012 “in the name of the nation: blood symbolism and the political habitus of violence in haiti.” american anthropologist 114, no. 2: 253–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01423.x. montinard, mélanie 2020 “pran wout la: expériences et dynamiques de la mobilité haïtienne.” vibrant: brazilian virtual anthropology 17: 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1590/1809-43412020v17d503. motta, eugênia 2021 “the dying home: ‘bad deaths’ and spatial inscriptions of mourning in a favela.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 556–62. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.03. neiburg, federico, and handerson joseph 2021 “searching for life in times of pandemic.” in pandemic exposures: economy and society in the time of coronavirus, edited by didier fassin and marion fourcade, 387–410. chicago: hau books neiburg, federico, ed. 2019 conversas etnográficas haitianas. rio de janeiro: papéis selvagens. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 548-555, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.02 underlayers of citizenship: queer objects, intimate exposures, and the rescue rush in kenya cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 4, pp. 575-601, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.04 underlayers of citizenship: queer objects, intimate exposures, and the rescue rush in kenya george paul meiu harvard university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2507-9483 in recent years in kenya, some public figures have warned citizens of a new, less obvious sign of moral decay in the country: rising sales in adult diapers. in 2013, the star, a national newspaper, announced that “those engaged in sodomy are said to be releasing waste uncontrollably, forcing them to use pampers whenever they walk” (gari 2013). on august 20, at a political rally in the coastal town of malindi, joshua nkanatha, a police commissioner, explained: “a survey we conducted shows that boys engaging in sexual activities with male tourists are buying pampers because they can no longer hold their stool” (africa now n.d.). worrying about the proliferation of anal sex, nkanatha urged people “to take up the responsibility of enlightening the youths about the health risks of engaging in the vice.” or else, he warned, “prostitution . . . will lead to their death.” the star blamed the trend on “the booming tourism of pedophiles and perverts,” including europeans, americans, and, of late, “our so-called business partners who come all the way from china.” with similar urgency, in may 2018, ezekiel mutua, the director of the kenya films and classification board, stated in a public speech that “mature men end up in diapers because they have been ‘destroyed’ by their fellow men” (mburu 2018). infamous for his anti-homosexual rants and for banning any media featuring same-sex intimacies, mutua warned kenyans: “it is high time we stopped this westernized and good-for-nothing practice, [lest] it will destroy . . . future generations.” like nkanatha, mutua blamed foreigners for the trend: “there are foreign ngos in kisumu and kakamega, which move to the villages to manipulate our poor innocent youths with ‘big money’ of up to sh3 million [around us$30,000] . . . to engage in this wicked act.” this, he claimed, was “a kind of neocolonialism that . . . will end up destroying the country.” politicians, police, priests, and journalists, among others, have used diapers as what rosalind c. morris (2008, 201) calls an “inflationary discourse,” a set of narratives that amplify the proportions of an act or affliction, rendering its cumulative effects catastrophic. invoking a sharp rise in the prevalence of anal sex and, with it, adult diapers, nkanatha and mutua announced impending trouble for the nation. foreign tourists, businessmen, and ngo workers, they warned, corrupt “innocent youths” from villages—idyllic loci of intimate purity in the kenyan national imaginary (macharia 2013, 28). purchasing anal sex, these leaders said, foreigners destroy not only the bodies of individual citizens but, exponentially, whole generations, the country itself. the inflationary quality of these discourses, in turn, prompts citizens to desire rescue from dangerous global afflictions, and thus protection by their leaders. discourses about men who end up in diapers because they engage in anal sex are not specific to kenya. they circulate widely among evangelical christians and radical-right activists in countries as far apart as the united states, romania, and south korea.1 but since 2008, as american evangelicals and local political and religious leaders exacerbated anti-homosexual campaigns in african countries, these otherwise cosmopolitan discourses also became widely deployed in places like cameroon, ghana, kenya, nigeria, and uganda.2 the strong capacity of diaper discourses to evoke a simultaneous destruction of bodies and polities made them appealing as a means to govern sexuality through moral panics. human rights and lgbtq+ activists in african contexts have struggled to dismantle such discourses, seeing them—in the words of the danish institute for human rights—as “unsubstantiated rumors,” “urban legends,” or “outright lies,” circulated because of “widespread popular ignorance” (kerrigan 2013, 50). for activists, rebutting such discourses is crucial when leaders strategically employ them to prosecute homosexual men. in 2014, ugandan refugees in kenya said that, during arrests in kampala, to confirm their homosexuality, “police stuck their hands down their pants to see if they were wearing diapers” (feder 2014). in 2016, similar assumptions about incontinent homosexual bodies led police in kenya’s kwale county to subject two men to anal medical exams before charging them under the penal code’s anti-sodomy law. ideas about diapers, then, play a critical role in violent imaginaries of the homosexual body. but dismissing them as mere instances of “widespread popular ignorance” means supporting ideologies of an african homophobia—a racist trope, as scholars have shown, commonly deployed in global lgbtq+ liberalism (hoad 2007; awondo, geschiere, and reid 2012; judge 2018).3 to better understand how homophobic sentiment emerges and how it produces the bodies it disavows, it is important instead to take diapers seriously as an idiom of politics. during my fieldwork in kenya between 2010 and 2019, i encountered diapers in a variety of settings. in the town of mtwapa, on the indian ocean coast, i heard rumors about adults in diapers that focused not only on homosexual men but also on women. locals said that anal penetration destroyed women’s bodies, leaving them incontinent, in need of diapers. i later encountered diapers in contexts unrelated to sexuality, in conversations about drug addicts, alcoholics, and youth involved in quick-money schemes, all said to end up ill, tragically spending the last days of their lives in diapers. i began to make sense of these disparate invocations of diapers in 2014, in the capital city of nairobi, where i encountered a photography exhibit provocatively entitled diaper mentality: something needs to change. curated by the activist boniface mwangi and the art group pawa 254, the exhibit featured scenes in which kenyans who commit various mundane wrongdoings—jaywalking, bribing, cheating—appear without trousers or skirts and wear, instead of undergarments, adult diapers. the project’s facebook page defines “diaper mentality” as “the primitive, backward behavior we wish to outgrow as a nation.” across these contexts, i learned, diapered adults appear as products of their own everyday misdeeds and moral impediments to the nation’s progress. to understand the role of diapers in anti-homosexual discourse, i soon realized, i had to explore this object’s wider circulation as a symbol of moral affliction. to do so, my ethnographic archive became a bricolage of various deployments of diapers from across different sites and scales. in this article, i explore how the resonances between different deployments of diapers—many unrelated to (homo)sexuality as such—help constitute the homosexual body as a target of outrage. what makes diaper discourses so evocative in the present? what collective desires, fears, and anxieties do people express when exposing others as wearing adult diapers? and what do the cultural logics of such revelations show about the relationship between intimacy and citizenship in contexts of growing anti-homosexual violence? i make two related arguments. first, i suggest that diaper discourses are instances of what i call intimate exposures: performative attempts to unmask signs of social failure hidden beneath appearances of respectability, to peel off—in speech or deed—an outer, visible stratum (e.g., clothing) of bodies and relations and bring to light their troubled underlayers. representing social reality as consisting of materially layered phenomena, intimate exposures involving diapers constitute an important “technology of citizenship” (lorway 2015). that is, they work to realign desires with national fantasies of intimacy and propriety. second, tracking diapers as technologies of citizenship across different social contexts, i demonstrate how logics and sentiments associated with homophobia do not emerge simply in relation to the reified category of the homosexual. instead, references to diapers help displace and condense desires, fears, and anxieties associated with bodies, work, reproduction, and respectability across domains of social life. rather than think of homosexual bodies as existing prior to homophobic discourse, then, i show how the deployment of objects such as diapers proves central to their production. i approach diapers as what sara ahmed (2006) calls “queer objects,” marginal things whose repetitive disavowal sustains normative orientations and forecloses subversive possibilities. the following section shows how exploring preoccupations with the hidden layers of social life can expand conceptualizations of intimate citizenship. turning to the kenyan coast, i then describe how sex workers and ngo workers use rumors involving adults in diapers to express anxieties over anal sex. such rumors, i show, do not only concern sexuality but also struggles over the body’s (re)productive capacities, work, respectability, and progress. a quick detour through the exhibit diaper mentality will demonstrate how revealing hidden layers of ruptured intimate life offers an avenue to good citizenship. returning then to anti-homosexual imaginaries, i show how intimate exposures work to produce and secure national heterosexuality. if both men and women are said to end up in diapers, the male homosexual becomes the ultimate object of displaced and condensed social anxieties—the destructive force of noncitizenship. underlayers of intimate citizenship i use intimate citizenship to refer to practices and discourses that make private life the basis for political recognition (plummer 2003). with late capitalism, lauren berlant (1998) argues, citizenship has revolved less around the promise of collective participation in the national public. instead, it has become “a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating in . . . the family sphere” (berlant 1998, 5). “the dominant idea,” berlant (1998, 4) shows, “is of a core nation whose survival depends on . . . the intimate domains of the quotidian.” for many, unemployment, debt, and poverty have rendered intimate domains sites of acute anxiety and uncertainty. thus leaders and citizens may now blame failures in the nation’s intimate lives on homosexuals, transgender people, sex workers, or various sexualized racial and ethnic others (partridge 2012; mack 2016). m. jacqui alexander (2005, 25–26) describes late capitalist transformations of intimate citizenship as “heteropatriarchal recolonization”: a process whereby “the state can produce a group of nonprocreative noncitizens who are objects of its surveillance and control . . . to veil the ruses of power”—to occlude leaders’ own complicity in market liberalization. in africa as elsewhere, structural adjustment programs, the shrinking of the public sector, and the growing presence of foreign corporations and ngos have threatened state-level national identity, making urgent “elite attempts to retain power through the molding of citizenship” (dorman, hammett, and nuget 2007, 8). to legitimize state authority, leaders promise to protect citizens from the “perversions of globalization,” to rescue traditional gender roles, native (hetero)sexuality, and family values as durable foundations of national citizenship (amar 2013; ndjio 2016). assessing threats to intimate citizenship has involved what paul amar (2013, 17) calls “tactics of hypervisibilization”: “the spotlighting of certain identities and bodies as sources of radical insecurity and moral panic.” these tactics make citizens’ well-being contingent on the violent exclusion of others. but, in addition to hypervisibilization, it is important to also note threats that appear ambiguous, fleeting, and less easy to pin down or visualize—spectral forces of destruction yet to be revealed. francis b. nyamnjoh (2018, 61) argues that, with rising migration and urbanization across africa, “the logic of ever-diminishing circles of inclusion dictates that the next foreigner or stranger is always one layer below the obvious one.” “in this bizarre nativity game of exclusionary violence,” nyamnjoh (2018, 61) writes, “the next target is just a layer below.” to understand intimate exposures as technologies of citizenship requires attending closely to this fascination with the “layer below,” that which lies beneath the visible surfaces of everyday life and which, while not knowable quite yet, undermines efforts to build futures. claiming that numerous adults now wear diapers, kenyan politicians like nkanatha and mutua expose afflictions otherwise hidden from public scrutiny. they warn that appearances of bodily integrity can prove deceptive and should be approached with vigilance and discreet inquisitiveness. such intimate exposures are important in contexts in which both the citizen and its antitheses—the foreigner, the pervert, the national security threat—make for existentially unstable entities, their presence opaque, elusive, uncertain. incitements to intimate exposures orient subjects toward such hidden layers to produce citizens who, suspicious of the objects and persons surrounding them, must desire the state as a guarantor of their truthful value. in an ironic twist, however, citizens may often turn such tactics against their leaders, using rumors or art to expose powerful politicians as corrupt—in diapers. what makes diaper discourses resonant is a broader context in which citizenship in kenya is saliently debated in relation to bodily well-being, work, reproduction, and respectability. debates about citizenship have intensified in the past four decades as the country has grown dependent on international loans and foreign investments and as migration has amplified both within and across its borders. with rapid urbanization, rampant unemployment, and a shrinking welfare state, 83 percent of kenyans have turned to the informal sector to make a living (kenya national bureau of statistics 2017). in this context, competition over erratic income opportunities and decreasing access to land have exacerbated efforts to distinguish between ethnic groups, coastal and upcountry people, nationals and foreigners (oucho 2002). an emerging imaginary of citizenship features labor migrants from uganda and tanzania, chinese investors and laborers, and euro-american tourists and humanitarians as shaping local markets in ways that, at times, disadvantage kenyans. it also features asylum seekers from somalia and south sudan as escalating security threats related to al-shabaab terrorism and the “radicalization” of kenyan young men (bachmann 2013). fiscal inflation, a rising gap between the rich and the poor, and the private appropriation of public resources have also rendered the inclusionary promises of citizenship suspicious. robert w. blunt (2019, 7) argues that, during the presidency of daniel arap moi (1978–2002) and ever since, “the power to back everything from the stability of monetary value to political promises of development . . . was . . . fundamentally up for grabs.” the fact that “the regime had resorted to counterfeiting everything from currency to title deeds” gave rise to a common perception of dissonance between the appearances and essences of persons, goods, money, and other media of value and authority. under these circumstances, the visible itself became ambiguous. a sticker i spotted on a public minibus on the coast articulated this idea quite suggestively, stating, “the more u look, the less u c.” discourses and practices of intimate exposure and concerns about the hidden layers of the everyday have become more common in this context. mtwapa, where i first encountered diaper rumors, amplified many of these trends. over the past four decades, what had been a village of a few hundred residents has become an urban region of 51,000. migrants and migrant settlers from throughout kenya have moved there to make money in and around tourism. the town’s hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, strip clubs, and brothels allowed poor young kenyans to meet wealthy visitors—african and european—for transactional sex (kibicho 2009). many of them hoped that, living there, they would, one day, become rich (meiu 2017). but experiences of missed opportunity and lost fortunes also generated distrust among residents. “in mtwapa,” a male migrant told me, “you shouldn’t even trust your own brother.” where fortunes could turn in an instance, he implied, greed and the thirst for success made the closest of kin deceitful. adults in diapers are examples of how such generalized suspicion comes to revolve around the less visible domains of intimacy and bodily private life. they cannot be seen or known simply by looking. instead, like terrorists, devil worshippers, or jini spirits, all widely discussed in mtwapa, they conceal their identity underneath unremarkable appearances. they are thus “innocent criminals,” to use a phrase i read on another sticker on another minibus. hidden in the underlayers of intimate life, the afflictions that diapers conceal expand. and so, people seek to reveal their presence through rumors, art, or violence. broken bodies, hidden ruptures “many men nowadays ask for ‘sex from behind’ [ngono ya nyuma],” said nabaro, a woman engaged in sex work in mtwapa. “i refuse to do it. other women also refuse. but, when you refuse, men go with those who agree to it and you are left without customers.” she nodded, looking at me sternly, as if to assure me she was not joking. “some women,” she said, “have to wear pampers because they have ruined themselves. others need surgery worth 80,000 shillings [us$8,000].” when nabaro and i spoke in april 2011, she was twenty-eight. an ethnically samburu migrant settler from northern kenya, where i had been doing fieldwork since 2005, she had moved to mtwapa in search of a better livelihood. we had lunch often that month to talk about my research, samburu culture, and life on the coast. she told me she enjoyed our conversations—mostly in a mixture of swahili and maa (samburu) languages—because they reminded her of her childhood. nabaro had not returned to the north in more than ten years. for the past two years, she had been in a relationship with an elderly man from switzerland who had rented her a luxurious apartment in town and supported her financially. in february, however, their relationship had ended, and nabaro “returned to the bars,” as she put it, to meet men. because the number of tourist arrivals in kenya declined following postelection violence in 2008, competition in sex work grew. most nights during the following years, mtwapa’s clubs and bars hosted, by my estimates, as many as ten or more sex workers for every male patron. fifteen female sex workers i interviewed between 2011 and 2017 said that, with heightened competition, those offering “sex from behind” stood higher chances of finding customers. they blamed the prominence of anal sex not only on customers but also on the growing presence of gay male sex workers in the town’s nightlife. “[gays] are cheating us out of customers,” said ruth, a thirty-year-old sex worker. “there are those customers who want [sex] from the behind. if you refuse them, they will just go with gays.” nabaro explained: because some customers thought “sex from behind” was “sweeter” (tamu) and safer than “from the front,” “they don’t care if they go with women or men.” “this is what is destroying our market these days,” she said. ruth and nabaro appeared to echo a national public that blamed homosexuals for moral decay. but their statements evoked more complex logics and sentiments, which will become more apparent shortly. nabaro was firm in her indignation with demands for anal sex: “me, i tell customers: ‘you want to destroy me? fine. build me a house, buy me a car, put money in my bank account, and then i will agree. at least that way i know my children will live well. then, i can accept to wear pampers for the rest of my life.” what anal sex “destroys,” she implied, was not the body alone. it was also one’s autonomy, one’s ability to act in and on the world, to build relations, and to generate value. to convey this state, nabaro and other women used the swahili kuharibika, “to be(come) spoilt,” “broken,” “destroyed.” this verb, also referring to women who lost their virginity early or became pregnant in school, suggests that respectability, bodily integrity, and individual autonomy make for co-constitutive processes. bodies unable to control their flows are commonly seen as polluting (douglas 1966; masquelier 2005). writing about kenyan women with fistula, kathomi gatwiri (2019, 157) argues that “a leaking body is often constructed as being out of control, dirty, disgusting, and contaminable.” kenyans whom gatwiri (2019, 128) interviewed saw fistula as the outcome of sexual transgression—promiscuity or adultery. my interlocutors did not speak of fistula as such, but, like gatwiri’s informants, they explained chronic incontinence in women as outcomes of sexual transgression. vivian, a thirty-six-year-old sex worker, illustrated the bodily damage anal sex can cause by telling me a horrific story about a local woman whose baby had died at birth. “it came out,” she said, “with a leg through her ass and the other through her vagina,” leaving her incontinent. if moral personhood requires contained bodies, then adults in diapers are persons only in appearance, spectral embodiments devoid of interiority and reproductive capacity. nabaro, ruth, and vivian did not so much condemn women for providing anal sex as worry about the faustian bargain the act entailed: that anal penetration generated wealth quickly only in exchange for one’s productive and reproductive bodily capacities, leaving women broken and helpless. reflections on such bargains often entailed quite specific calculations: the enumeration of monetary gifts, surgeries worth 80,000 shillings, and more. these numbers underscored the sheer magnitude of the body’s alienation through commodification. the house, car, and bank savings that nabaro listed as conditions for participating in such bargains were widely recognized media of middle-class success. but, she implied, they represented also the commodity value of bodily integrity. after she lost her former partner’s support, nabaro found herself in a predicament in which such bargains could easily become appealing. she had two children: a ten-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. a single mother with no savings, she struggled to make a living. when i met her, she had just moved out of a luxurious, self-contained apartment into a rudimentary single-room home. she desired to regain the lifestyle she had lost, but worried that, to make money, “nowadays, one must do all sorts of dangerous things.” locals did not only share such rumors with me. when i visited sex workers at the offices of a local ngo, where many worked as peer educators, i often heard them tell such stories to each other. sensationalist rumors about women in pampers shocked their audiences. the very mention of diapers scandalized them. though pampers-branded baby diapers available in kenyan supermarkets were expensive, cheaper versions—generically called “pampers”—were common. by the 1990s, single-use baby diapers had become so widespread that poor mothers saw them—along with milk and soap—as essential to caring for their infants. rumors about women in diapers redeployed this familiar mundane object to highlight the fragility of motherly care today: mothers who, trying desperately to feed their children, ended up in pampers became themselves like their babies—helpless and dependent. expressing anxieties over shifting contexts of livelihood, these rumors also allowed women to negotiate the limits of their participation in the sex economy. to understand why these rumors resonated so strongly with everyday struggles, the next section shows how, according to ngo workers, anal sex undermines “progress.” ruptured progress, revelatory rescue public health workers in mtwapa spoke of how “sex from behind” was an expanding “fashion.” “for quite a while now, there has been too much anal sex here,” said amos, a man in his early twenties. he and i sat with five other young men and women on the veranda of their office in february 2017. operating under the patronage of a regional ngo, with funds from the united nations for population activity, since 2013 their community-based organization (cbo) has offered sex education through workshops, theater, and social media. “you will find that a girl is doing that,” amos said, “and, at the end of the day, she is wearing pampers. for what reason? she got destroyed there in the back, at the seam [mshono]. she is no longer able to persevere [kuvumilia]. she lets out water all the time.” i asked amos how he knew that anal sex was on the rise. “we learn about these things from our peers in the community,” he said. other public health workers echoed amos’s claims. “if you hang out with youths, you will know that [anal sex] has become widespread,” said fred, a forty-year-old working for another ngo. to emphasize this growth, fred and amos used swahili verbs like kuenea, “to spread out” or “expand,” and kuzidi, “to become overabundant.” claiming novelty and expansion for the practice of anal sex occluded its longer history in sex economies and occult imaginaries along the swahili coast (shepherd 1987; thompson 2017). rather, what was new was the production of knowledge about the practice. beginning in 2004, public health workers have published statistics showing that anal sex is a prevalent avenue for hiv transmission throughout kenya. both “men who have sex with men” (msm) and heterosexual couples, these statistics reveal, engage in it (e.g., schwandt et al. 2006; mannava et al. 2013, 4). a significant number of men, they also show, moved between these two categories, expanding possibilities of infection. a public health poster announces that “hiv doesn’t care if you have sex with men or women” (see figure 1). depicting two men and one woman in an intimate grasp, the poster warns: “anal sex without a condom is the highest risk sex for hiv transmission.” amplifying anxieties over heterosexual reproduction, these public health findings and the iconography of hiv prevention have informed a humanitarian rush to rescue “key populations,” including sex workers and msm (moyer and igonya 2018, 1013), since 2009. figure 1. hiv-prevention poster, kenya, late 2000s. image by liverpool care and treatment. amos and fred participated regularly in training sessions that circulated these findings. but, to better convey the magnitude of risk associated with anal sex to their “beneficiaries,” they also shared local rumors about incontinence and diapered adults. to emphasize anal sex as the “highest-risk sex,” amos would tell the following story: there was a sheik here in mtwapa. and his daughter was having sex from behind because muslims protect their virginity. this girl had a charli [boyfriend], and she was having anal sex. . . . so, that child, she got complications and was brought to the hospital. the doctor told the father that this girl has a sexually transmitted disease, that she was getting laid there, in the back, until she got wounded. so, the father set her down and she told him: “i was having sex from behind because, if i have sex from the front, i might not get a husband and it won’t be good.” amos performed an act of intimate exposure: he revealed to his audience how anal sex, driven by the young woman’s naiveté, eroded the body from beneath appearances of normality. a medium for respectable marital and filial relations, the body may appear intact (virgin). but its appearance is deceptive, its deceptiveness difficult to spot. such revelations, in turn, cautioned people that the relations through which they built futures were fragile, easily to rupture. workers like amos used intimate exposures to impart knowledge about sexual risks for the greater good of maendeleo, “progress” or “development.” since independence, maendeleo has referred broadly to national progress through modernization. with the neoliberal overinvestment in the self-reliant individual, the word later also came to designate personal growth, wealth, and well-being initiated, among other things, through private, domestic efforts (smith 2008). within this framework, anal sex undermined both private and national progress. “if people see someone else do something in a western way,” fred explained, “curiosity is making them want to try, so they can also become ‘modern’ [wa siku hizi].” youths, he said, watched porn on their smart phones and emulated its “foreign styles.” they called those who did not know of anal sex, for example, washamba, “peasants” (i.e., backward). thus, anal sex expanded by deceptively promising youths modernity and progress and delivering instead dependence and helplessness. “what is spoiling us here in kenya,” fred said, “[is that] we are poured upon [tumemwagiwa], all at once, information that is otherwise to be swallowed [i.e., discerned] slowly. so, i take it all at once and start using it, thinking i will become westernized. but [as a young person], i am not mature enough to handle it all at a go.” for both amos and fred, maturity and moral discernment enabled genuine progress, while the rush to emulate foreigners—a temporal acceleration toward progress—ultimately undermined it. for ngo workers, then, bodies in diapers signaled failed progress. to commence the pursuit of progress, kenyans had to rescue bodily autonomy by cultivating moral discernment and respectable sexuality. to move forward in time and acquire autonomy, the nation and its citizens had to foreclose the expansion of anal sex in space. rumors about diapers and incontinence were meant to shock audiences into pursuing collective well-being. but here is an interesting twist in my story: diaper discourses did not only pertain to sexuality. they were also commentaries on illegitimate moneymaking practices that required careful concealment. work, concealment, and respectability what makes revelatory discourses about adults in diapers meaningful is partly a context in which people feel that, in order to make a living, they must engage in morally problematic “work” (kazi). as nabaro suggested above, in mtwapa, a strong sense prevails that the present is a time of exceptional deeds and tough bargains. “these are hard times,” i often heard people say, “you do what you need to do to eat.” the moneymaking strategies people found troublesome included, besides sex work, theft, drugs trafficking, and sorcery. rumors circulated of various get-rich-fast schemes and their dire consequences. such rumors typically involved protagonists from poor backgrounds who, using questionable means, became rich quickly, only to lose their wealth, turn hiv-positive, “go mad,” and die. many spent their final days in diapers. such stories allowed people to negotiate what kinds of work, otherwise “immoral,” were nevertheless becoming permissible, given the difficult economic circumstances. in these rumors, diapers did not always relate to sexuality, but expressed anxieties about how the redefinition of legitimate work affected people’s bodies and ability to progress and build futures. at a government meeting on drug trafficking in nairobi in 2008, a woman said: in june 2006, i buried a childhood hero of mine. he had spent twenty-five years suffering of drug abuse. he went in and out of mathari mental hospital. by the time he was dying, he was [in] diapers. as a mother of a small child, i know how happy a parent feels when their child stops using diapers. when you have a forty-year-old child who is addicted to drug[s] and is using diapers, it means that we, as a society, have failed our children. . . . it is us adults who allow drug traffickers to pass our porous borders. we give minimal sentences to drug traffickers and thus increase the proliferation of drugs in our country.4 this statement depicts unregulated economic flows moving freely through the nation’s “porous borders” as finding expression in uncontrollable bodily flows that render citizens similarly pervious. according to this logic, without national security and border regulation, citizens cannot grow out of infantile dependence, becoming instead “forty-year-old children.” problematic moneymaking practices thus put adults in diapers, making them regress to infantile dependence. “forty-year-old children” reflect their society’s failure to progress. here, bodies constitute central means through which shifting political economic trends play out more generally. exploring preoccupations with the “underneath of things” in sierra leone, mariane c. ferme (2001, 8) argues that “the individual’s body [is] the site for locating hidden, potent forces of the underworld, as well as for contesting and reorganizing the socio-political order.” if illegitimate work ruptured bodies, diaper discourses also implied that much energy was invested in hiding those ruptures, along with the means of livelihood that caused them. diapers could conceal incontinent bodies to preserve their respectability only if, at the same time, they were themselves concealed by outer clothing. the resulting image of layered concealments resonated strongly with people’s everyday attempts to veil how they made money. nabaro, for example, told her children and neighbors that she worked night shifts as a waitress in a restaurant. to avoid rumors of her sex work reaching her parents in the north, she also frequented bars located far from where samburu migrants typically socialized. at night, when she walked from home to the bars, she covered her short skirts with long, traditional kanga fabrics that she later removed. “i make myself a bit more respectable,” she once told me laughing, “so that mamas in my neighborhood won’t talk too much.” seeking to acquire money through sex work while maintaining respectability, nabaro had to cover—quite literally, at times—different aspects of her life. like others, she engaged in a “politics of pretense,” to use julie soleil archambault’s (2017, 43, 94) term, “juggl[ing] visibility and invisibility,” “embellishing reality . . . through concealment.” the careful management of the body in space and time, its strategic covering and uncovering, reflects how the preservation of respectability, over the long run, presupposed the concealment of one’s more immediate means of livelihood. it also reflects how an imaginary of social life as layered proved important in this context. in rumors that reveal the hidden layers of others’ lives, people expressed and reflected on their shared anxieties. in may 2017, vivian told me and two friends of hers how delighted she had been to discover recently that her neighbor, a woman who “pretends” (anajifanya) to be a respectable “mother of the community” (mama wa mtaa), was herself “just a prostitute” (malaya tu). as we all laughed, entertained by vivian’s theatrical narration, i remembered that she, too, had recently been outed as a “prostitute” on national television. a nairobi crew filming a reportage on mtwapa’s nightlife had promised to blur vivian’s face in the interview she offered. they didn’t. and, after the segment aired, her parents and kin upcountry called her to say that she was no longer welcome home. i do not mean to suggest that vivian’s laughter at exposing her neighbor constituted a form of schadenfreude or abreaction. but, taken together, these experiences show how, in intimate exposures, anxieties, aspirations, and amusement are ambiguously intertwined. rumors exposing others also expressed unease with a shared predicament in which people must work illicitly to build respectability amid suspicious appearances and uncertain attachments. yet these rumors were more than expressions of fear and desire. they also represented, as i have suggested, technologies of citizenship. to show this, i take a brief detour in the following section, away from my ethnographic data, through the nairobi exhibit diaper mentality. intimate exposures, queer objects, and good citizenship diaper discourses, i have shown, help people express and negotiate aspirations and anxieties related to bodies, work, respectability, and progress even in circumstances unrelated to sex. this means that public revelations of diapered adults reflect a cultural logic independent of—though, at times, overlapping with—discourses of sexuality. diaper mentality, the photography exhibit curated by mwangi and pawa 254, illustrates how this cultural logic forms a technology of citizenship, a way to produce subjects within national frames of moral propriety. figure 2. image from the nairobi exhibit diaper mentality. image by pawa 254. organized for the fiftieth anniversary of kenya’s independence from british colonial rule, diaper mentality showcased images of a wide range of troublesome behaviors. in all pictures, let us recall, those doing bad things appear in adult diapers. in one image, a group of people jaywalk on nairobi’s busy kenyatta avenue. in another, three youths sit behind the driver on a motorcycle cab, stretching its carrying capacity beyond the limit (see figure 2). a painted inscription on the wall behind them reads uhuru—independence—suggesting satirically how some kenyans misunderstand liberation from colonialism as liberty to misbehave. also featured are unreasonable or offensive acts: a group of drivers wash their trucks in a lake, polluting the water; waiters in a restaurant serve light-skinned foreigners smilingly, ignoring fellow black kenyans; and a group of coastal men drink beer, chew khat, and play board games, while their wives undertake the hard—traditionally male—work of climbing palm trees to harvest coconuts. yet other pictures portray corrupt or abusive deeds: police demanding bribes from drivers or destroying informal alcohol joints; and men harassing a woman on the street for dressing “scantly.” all images capture evocative public affects kenyans will likely recognize, including innocent smiles, angry demeanors, or panicked gazes. the use of diapers is metaphoric. not actual ruptures caused by sexual penetration or illness render bodies incontinent, but immorality broadly construed. although a significant number of photographs focus on sexuality, they nevertheless dissociate bodily incontinence from actual sexual penetration. in a particularly evocative picture, three female high school pupils, all pregnant, point their index fingers at the male teacher who impregnated them. another male teacher who has already sired a baby with a schoolgirl, stands nearby, looking indifferent (see figure 3). the phenomenon of teachers impregnating schoolgirls has seen widespread debate in recent decades. in this image, the accused appears on his knees, holding up a biology book, against the background of a blackboard with terms related to sexual reproduction. the image thus ridicules supposedly pedagogical circumstances that lead to such pregnancies and exposes male teachers as failed persons. notably, the teachers wear diapers not because they have been penetrated, but because their irresponsible deeds have rendered them, senior men, subservient to their immoral desires. this logic subverts the causal relation between sexual penetration and diapers, rendering the latter a more generic symptom of ethical failure. figure 3. image from the nairobi exhibit diaper mentality. image by pawa 254. diaper mentality is an attempt to rescue norms of propriety, which the artist-activists think should have defined kenyan national identity since independence. the exhibit draws on popular understandings of diapers as tools of infantilization to announce the nation’s ruptured progress. political activists worldwide have used diapers in this way to satirize leaders. consider, for example, baby trump in recent u.s. and u.k. protests, or the “red diapers” referring to the communists of the 1960s u.s. scares (in which, homosexuals themselves were sometimes associated with the communist threat). echoing colonial and developmental temporalities that have long infantilized non-western racial others (fabian 1983), mwangi and his team use diapers to underscore the urgency of moral rescue and to shame fellow citizens into good behavior. they condemn certain private practices to restore ideals of propriety, gender, and family that should define progress. more important for my argument, the exhibit uses bodily incontinence to depict broken citizens and expose hidden layers of intimate life. such uses of diapers have been common in the national public in recent decades. they started when, in 1985, in a public hygiene campaign on the island of lamu, local politicians called on the island’s residents to put diapers on the donkeys they used for transport. kenyan artists, including the famous cartoonist gado, found the idea so ludicrous that, in their art, they put corrupt politicians in diapers instead. while diaper mentality also features president uhuru kenyatta, nairobi senator mike sonko, and other politicians, the exhibit builds on this genealogy to focus primarily on ordinary citizens. the journalist oyunga papa explains that the main focus of the exhibit is “the ordinary mwananchi [citizen] behaving badly.” “diaper mentality,” he suggests, is another name for what has “evidently become an accepted culture of individualism in kenya.” inspired by mwangi, he claims, “whenever i spot bad behavior in public places, i think of lamu donkeys and mutter under my breath: ‘stop being an ass and be a responsible citizen or we will dress you in diapers.’” diaper mentality seeks to reform kenyans. an op-ed described it as “a campaign on . . . general ethics in the country” (mzalendo 2015). this approach continues mwangi’s previous work, a photography exhibit depicting the gruesome carnage of the 2008 postelection violence, which traveled across the country to educate citizens about the perils of interethnic hate (githuku 2016, 438–46). similarly, diaper mentality means to shock with its revelatory gesture: it invites citizens to contemplate broken layers of their everyday. this gesture recognizes and redeploys the otherwise common tactic of intimate exposure to foreclose bad behavior and produce good citizens. it thus works as a technology of citizenship that confronts subjects with the tremendous impact of their actions for the nation’s progress and pushes them to work on themselves. this use of diapers as a technology of citizenship can help us better understand its deployment in rumors in mtwapa. like mwangi’s art, ngo workers and sex workers uncover ruptured strata of bodies and social life, performatively exposing the magnitude of their sheer damage. revealing how anal sex undermines bodies and society, they seek to restore national reproductive heterosexuality as a foundation of citizenship. they thus perform what inderpal grewal (2017, 10) calls “exceptional citizenship,” a mode of empowerment prompting subjects “to rescue, to save, to become humanitarians.” “naturalized as entrepreneurial and aspirational but also fearful and insecure,” grewal (2017, 4) argues, such citizens “believe they can do more than the state and save . . . the world.” we can interpret intimate exposures as technologies of citizenship because they aim to produce citizens who, doing the work of the state, surveil underlayers of social life and expose their ruptures to secure collective well-being. their ability to shock fuels their inflationary quality: anal sex emerges as an excess, an expanding affliction that makes the act of exposure a performance of exceptional citizenship. i think of diapers as “queer objects,” things that one must repudiate, relegate to the margins, to acquire heteropatriarchal respectability (ahmed 2006, 90–91; davidson and rooney 2018). often deemed vulgar, repulsive, or shameful, such objects are “straightening devices,” media that, in demanding disavowal, orient subjects away from subversive intimacies, toward normative ones (ahmed 2006, 66): if you don’t want to end up in diapers, so the argument goes, don’t engage in x behavior. what makes such objects “queer” is not that they subvert heteropatriarchal intimacies. rather, they prove central to producing them. even so, within normative frameworks, such objects disturb and offend. interlocutors often regarded me skeptically, for example, when hearing i was writing an essay on diapers, and colleagues have suggested more than once that i look at more “dignified” things. hence, the queerness of this object rests both with its marginality and with my analytical choice to focus on it; for, as ahmed (2006, 166) argues, “bringing an object that is often in the background to the foreground . . . can have a queer effect.” in this case, diapers help me decenter the homosexual as a hegemonic target of outrage while also demonstrating their centrality to producing such targets. homophobia, diapers, and displacements having traced diaper discourses across different domains of social life and shown how they help normalize intimate exposures as technologies of citizenship, i now return to their role in homophobic imaginaries. at the beginning of this article, i showed how political leaders invoke diapers to highlight the threat of homosexuality to national integrity. in this sense, how diapers circulate in rumors about anal sex and illegitimate moneymaking or in activist art is also, if indirectly, constitutive of the homosexual body as an object of outrage, violence, and exclusion. political homophobia, the strategic use of anti-homosexual rhetoric by political leaders, elites, and their supporters, has intensified in kenya since 2008. some leaders have long employed homophobic rhetoric; but following the contested presidential election of 2007 and the interethnic violence that ensued, they have more consistently singled out homosexuals to unify the divided national public around a common national threat. in the following years, as kenyans debated the draft of a new constitution, leaders sought to consolidate national identification and state authority by promising kenyans protection from the “perversions of globalization.” a member of parliament, aden duale, for example, claimed that, in kenya, “gayism is as serious a problem as terrorism.” since the early 2000s, leaders across the world have employed homophobia extensively as a strategy of power (bosia and weiss 2013). this global context as well as similar developments in uganda—where president museveni supported a bill condemning homosexuals, in some instances, to death (boyd 2013)—made political homophobia a resonant strategy in kenya as well. nkanatha, mutua, and other leaders’ references to diapers may seem trivial in this context. i suggest they are not. such references catalyze disparate affects and meanings associated elsewhere, as we have seen, with struggles over bodies, work, respectability, and a progressive futurity. diapers thus enable a process of displacement and condensation through which different elsewheres—other scenes of social life in which people invest diapers with aspirations and anxieties—become constitutive of the homosexual body. the homosexual body not only takes on these displaced affects but, in so doing, also becomes the externalized object-cause of national intimate trouble more generally, and thus a ready target of repudiation. men who identify interchangeably as gay, msenge, kuchu, or—using public health parlance—msm rebuked diaper discourses. in june 2017, i spoke to kent, a twenty-four-year-old from mtwapa, who had come of age during a time of amplified political homophobia in the country. “i think i was in fifth grade” (eleven years old), he recalled, “when i thought about whether to continue or to stop [being gay] and the repercussions.” he explained: it was about how people perceived you. they’d say that in the future you will be walking in pampers. those rumors. so, those myths, to me, were scary. i remember . . . my mom had been told i could be gay. so, that was the first time my mom told me about sexuality: “if you practice this, you will be in pampers. you will not be able to hold your stool. blah, blah, blah.” so, i started believing that until i was older and joined high school. i told myself i have to stop this. but time was passing, and i was still practicing [anal sex], and i saw no difference, no nothing. diaper discourses, though false, kent suggested, shape gay men’s subjectivities as they grow up. linking anal penetration to incontinence, such rumors inculcated fear. diaper discourses also informed violent homophobic imaginaries. kent recalled how, in 2010, while in high school, teachers and classmates caught him having sex with a roommate. they took them both into the school yard and beat them. kent remembered receiving the harsher beating because he had been the receptive partner—“bottom” or “queen.” as punishment, the headmaster expelled kent, only giving his partner—the “top” or “king”—extra cleaning chores. “i think they perceive gayism to be in the bottom,” kent said. “so, if you are topping, you are a man who has been forced or socially corrupted. . . . i was told i am the one who is influencing socially the rest of the boys.” on another occasion, a few years later, neighbors caught kent having sex in his home. they dragged both men out into the street and beat them. once more, kent received the worse beating. “then again, the blame was on me being the bottom. they said, ‘he is the one who went to boarding school and then brought us the habits [tabia] from there to the neighborhood.’” in discourses about gayism—a term to which i return shortly—diapers conceal deeper anxieties over anal erotic pleasure. receptive anal sex, queer theorists argue, has long threatened to dissolve the modern, rational, male subject of liberal discourse, to blur interiority and exteriority, leak gender distinctions, and diffuse sources of agency (bersani 2009; guss 2010). in kenya, rather than appear passive, men’s anal receptiveness was often imagined as assertive, active, and agentive. critiquing phallocentric understandings of agency, nkiru nzegwu (2011) shows how the idiom of the “devouring vagina,” common in african imaginaries, captures the dangerously agentive power of feminine sexuality, its ability to engulf the penis, to make it disappear. one can expand this argument to what people perceive as a “devouring anus” that undermines worlds, enticing “normal” men to turn them into bottoms. diaper discourses disavow anal erotic pleasure as unbearable, unthinkable. “when people say you end up in pampers,” kent said, “they don’t count the pleasure part of it . . . only the traumatizing part.” according to this logic, if heterosexual anal sex is simply the outcome of poor moral judgment, men’s desire for and pleasure in receptive penetration signal a quest to devour society, to turn men into mashoga or “fags,” and reproductive sexuality and national progress into selfish self-gratification. the notion of gayism common in kenya (and anglophone africa more generally) is distinct from—if also coexistent with—liberal understandings of sexual orientation as immutable identity. it is akin to evangelical renderings of homosexuals as unable to reproduce and so needing to “recruit,” a logic that euro-american right-wing conservatives have long employed (angelides 2019, 86). gayism, like any -ism, is a trend, a current that proliferates through conversion, which explains, for example, why homosexuality is often associated with freemasonry in west africa (geschiere 2017). it posits men who desire receptive penetration as feeding off the bodies of others. in mtwapa, interlocutors, including some gay men, told me that a man becomes gay by first being “ruined” (kuharibiwa) by another man (see also amory 1998, 82), a logic that political leaders also employed when warning against foreigners who seduced kenyans with money. once ruined, a man spreads the vice to quench his thirst for nonreproductive, anti-social pleasures, becoming the ultimate embodiment of not only intimate noncitizenship but something like anti-citizenship. thus understood, gayism expands one layer below what can be seen, afflicting, like a contagion, ever larger numbers of people. pandemic anal sex and gayism are constructed as two only partially overlapping yet co-constitutive afflictions. and diapers enable this co-constitutive process as a point of resonance that alerts people to the rapid deterioration of their society from underneath. accordingly, leaders, police, and urban crowds also deployed violence as a form of intimate exposure to identify, reveal, and rectify the hidden layers of social life through which gayism secretly expands. they drew on such popular perceptions of intimacy to expose homosexuals, “uncover” their “underground networks.” similarly, citizens could drag homosexual men—as they had done to kent—into public spaces to reveal otherwise invisible, troubled strata in the town’s intimate life. crowds thus performed their own version of intimate exposure and good citizenship. as tom boellstorff (2004, 480) argues for indonesia, so too in kenya, leaders’ homophobic rhetoric made “violence not only thinkable but sensible as an emotional ‘gut reaction’ to . . . an assault on the nation’s manhood.” diapers, if anything, lend strength to such violence. discursive conduits for the displacement and condensation of social anxieties, they help disambiguate the homosexual for exposure and exclusion. conclusion what makes diaper discourses so evocative in the present is their ability to resonate with how people perceived political economic and social transformations. these discourses rehearse cultural logics that some kenyans have already employed to make sense of how shifting definitions of licit work affected their bodies and respectability. social anxieties over these matters have found new expression in diaper discourses. neither merely the product of the political class nor simply a folk concept, these discourses bring leaders and the citizenry into a relationship of conviviality—a shared experience of a common predicament, a “community of affliction” (turner 1968). this conviviality finds expression through a long-standing “aesthetics of vulgarity,” as achille mbembe (2001, 104) calls it, discourses involving bodily orifices, genitalia, or feces and that maintain citizens and the state in the same discursive realm. deployments of diapers in everyday rumor, political art, or leaders’ rhetoric reflect a newly amplified concern with concealing, revealing, and suturing broken intimate underlayers as a condition of citizenship. as technologies of citizenship, intimate exposures, including diaper discourses, promise exceptional citizenship to those who reveal ruptured underlayers of social life and help reform them. like nyamnjoh (2018), i use layers as a descriptor for what my ethnographic material suggests as an implicit, emic topography of citizenship. in kenya, as elsewhere, citizenship is experienced today, in part, as intimate, in that people understand their private lives as both symptomatic of and consequential for national progress. this implicit topography animates a wide array of practices, including strategic concealments and performative exposures, through which people imagine and negotiate attachments to each other and the polity. as queer objects, diapers also take us beyond the readily recognizable targets of state exclusion. to understand shifting forms of intimate citizenship, i argue, anthropologists must also explore threats to the nation and its private lives that are less concrete, more fleeting, and ambivalent. diapered bodies constitute such indeterminate threats, easy to miss if our analysis focuses only on the globalized repertoire of sexualized identities readily marked for exclusion. understanding the homosexual, for example, as a normative target of exclusionary violence requires that scholars explore how the signifiers producing this body in particular contexts—diapers, among others—carry traces of other “troublesome” bodies (e.g., sex workers, alcoholics, drug addicts). as key conduits for the displacement of anxieties and aspirations across social terrains, such signifiers lend strength to homophobic repudiations. a methodological focus on queer objects has important conceptual implications for intimate citizenship. first, as i said, it suggests that the semiotics and sentiments of homophobia are not always constituted in relation to a body readily recognizable as homosexual, emerging instead across vast domains of social life. second, queer objects illustrate pervasive technologies of citizenship that work through everyday conviviality, and not merely through the manipulative efforts of political leaders or elites. third, this approach suggests that sexuality is never a distinct, fixed domain, but, if anything, an upper, outer layer of citizenship discourses. just one layer below—to pursue metaphors related to diapers—things look messier: the sexual subject, the citizen, and its myriad threats are all unstable, ambiguous, shifting, always emerging anew in different forms. diapers’ queerness, then, rests with this object’s ability to trouble normative social types, even as its deployment enables their reproduction. abstract in kenya in recent years, diapers have played a central role in anti-homosexual discourses, suggesting that anal sex results in chronic bodily incontinence. but rumors about adults in diapers do not pertain only to homosexuality. they also describe bodily ruptures resulting from sex work, illicit moneymaking practices, and “immorality,” more generally. this article explores how the resonances between different deployments of diapers help constitute the homosexual body as a target of outrage, violence, and exclusion. i argue that rumors about adults in diapers identify and expose national threats in the hidden layers of intimate life to produce good citizenship. drawing on sara ahmed’s work, i approach diapers as “queer objects,” because they offer an alternative entry point into discussions of intimate citizenship: they bracket the reified category of the homosexual and demonstrate how sentiments associated with homophobia emerge in a wider set of struggles with bodies, work, respectability, and progress. [sexuality; homophobia; objects; intimacy; citizenship; kenya] notes acknowledgments i acknowledge grants from the weatherhead center for international affairs at harvard university, which supported my field research in kenya. i wish to thank sarah luna, durba mitra, robert reid-pharr, brad weiss, and the three anonymous reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this article and offering helpful feedback. i presented this research at harvard university and at oklahoma university. i thank my audiences for their critiques and suggestions. 1. personal communications with lgbtq+ activists from these countries. 2. for cameroon, see peter geschiere (2017, 11); for ghana, see nathanael homewood (2020, 114–17); for nigeria, see benedict hart (2014); for uganda, see j. lester feder (2014). 3. in african contexts, anti-homosexual sentiment and violence have emerged not only through political leaders’ incitements but also through transnational religious networks, popular reactions to 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issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2020. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.4.04 the pandemic imaginerie: infectious bodies and military-police theater in australia cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 350-359, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.02 the pandemic imaginerie: infectious bodies and military-police theater in australia l. l. wynn macquarie university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2466-8534 “we just have to assume the monster is everywhere.” a headline in the august 2, 2020, washington post expressed the global pandemic imaginary: covid-19 as the invisible monster of modern society (achenbach, weiner, and janes 2020). similarly, a headline in the australian on april 8, 2020, read “coronavirus: monster” (stewart 2020). fear of unknown sickness and death drives representations of infectious disease as an invisible monster. as people imagine its threat, they project their fears of a virus onto groups in society that they imagine are spreading it, people whose bodies or actions become the visible face of an invisible pathogen (strong 2021, this issue). for individuals trying to understand contagion, invisible monstrosity gets mapped onto the quotidian lives of the other. it’s a tale as old as infectious disease: epidemics go hand in hand with outbreaks of xenophobia (onoma 2020). at an epidemiological scale, infectious disease strikes along predictable fault lines of age, race, class, and other forms of social privilege. but at an individual scale, infectious disease proves less predictable. with every breath of air and mouthful of food or water, each human takes in potentially pathogenic microbes—viruses, bacteria, protozoa, fungi, and prions—most of which science knows little about (nathan wolfe 2012). and if science knows little, the average human knows much less. the covid-19 pandemic has driven home an enduring fact about the human experience of infectious disease: most people will never know what biological pathogen caused an illness or exactly how they acquired it. whether testing is based on exposure or symptoms, most of those tested do not have covid-19 (wu and mcgoogan 2020). many pathogens cause similar symptoms. meanwhile, those who do test positive for covid-19 manifest a gamut of symptoms and severity. up to half are asymptomatic (li et al. 2020). the mysteriousness of pathogens and contagion means that humans are constantly engaged in interpretive work to reconcile symptoms with their understandings of disease and transmission. for anthropologists, the value of thinking about diseases as monsters lies in the way it marries individual imaginations and cultural texts. monsters, after all, are “meaning machines” (musharbash and presterudstuen 2020, 1) that tell stories about our own fears—and the sometimes monstrous ways we seek to conquer them. as thomas strong (2021, this issue) notes, “blame seems instinctual in the face of contagion”; our job as anthropologists is to break down the seeming obviousness of that blame. in the covid-19 era, australians have been caught up in the witch hunt (douglas 1991) for those who socialize transgressively or cross borders with the virus, especially those deemed outsiders. but these are not sui generis individual imaginations; they are generated in national discourses and histories of power and transmitted through tabloid spectacle. like new zealand (described by susanna trnka [2021, this issue]), australia is an island (fortress) nation surrounded by an ocean (moat), a nation with a long history of both policing incoming travelers for biological contaminants and constructing problems of “contaminants” already inside its borders—whether diseases, imported feral animals such as cane toads, or nonwhite immigrants (hage 2000): a palimpsest of pollutants (douglas 1966) at different scales. the country’s distinctive spatial distance from the rest of the world shaped the policy framing of the pandemic as a contagion that was simultaneously external and, potentially, a threat within. the pandemic thus became a national problem of proximity, and narratives about covid-19 and public health policies for containing it resonate with histories of policing borders and deploying state power to contain racial and social others. this includes the military containment of refugees and the exclusion of hiv-positive foreigners. the conflation of biological contagion and national security threats in australia has been promulgated through a public theater of military-police enforcement of covid-19 quarantine laws. yet at the same time, vivid political imaginations of contagious otherness are twinned with a striking lack of imagination about the conditions of life and virus transmission among those who differ from australia’s predominantly white, privileged, male politicians. australia’s imaginerie (portmanteau: imaginary + menagerie) of contagion reveals a nationally distinctive ethics of proximity and otherness, wedded to spectacles of state power. analyzing such “spectacles” constitutes a critical component of fieldwork during a pandemic. in 2020, australians accessed news more than usual, driven by isolation and worry about covid-19 (park et al. 2020). as trnka (2021, this issue) has shown with her analysis of the production of media spectacles of outrage (when she describes a journalist’s documentation of police confronting a surfer violating a kiwi lockdown law), anthropologists must attend to pandemic media coverage, how it intertwines with state policy, the narratives being crafted, and how people engage those narratives in their everyday lives. figure 1. paste-up sign photographed in sydney on june 2, 2020, in the wake of a government proposal that all residents install a tracking app on their phones for contact tracing and notification. photo by saffaa hassanein. poster artist anonymous. proximity and pleasure in outdoor spaces one of the earliest spectacles of fear of infectious otherness that exemplified the pandemic imaginerie in australia occurred in sydney. its iconic tourist destination bondi beach has served as the backdrop of several popular television shows such as bondi rescue, in which glamorously fit and almost exclusively white lifeguards are filmed saving brown tourists and immigrants from drowning. a cluster of infections in a bondi hostel in late march 2020 led to the neighborhood’s identification as a “hotspot” of covid-19 transmission. although the infection cluster was connected to hotels serving international backpacking tourists, tabloid coverage ran photographs of late-summer beachgoers, foreshortened to make the beach appear closely crowded. public outrage over these spectacles of proximity and hedonism soon led to the state closing bondi and other beaches. figure 2. a sign on a northern sydney beach announcing that the beach was closed for social and leisure activities such as picnicking and “sunbaking,” but that sand exercise and swimming were permitted. photo by david inglis. the beach closures and other lockdown laws limiting the use of outdoor spaces had little to do with actual proximity or objective transmission risk—after all, newspapers were full of stories of police fining individuals sitting alone in parks, and transmission in bondi had been traced to hotels, not beaches. on closer examination, we see that portrayals of contagion and danger revolved around imaginations of contact between locals and tourists. bondi beach closed one day after australia had shut its borders to international tourists on march 2, 2020—a closure that left many travelers still in australia. not long after, one news article reported that police wanted citizens to report anyone congregating too closely, “particularly [those] drinking in the park or backpackers who are international travellers” (natalie wolfe 2020). australia’s lockdown law enforcement in outdoor spaces was also grounded in a failure to imagine the living conditions of the non-middle class. for example, in april 2020 a man was fined a$1,000 (us$775) for eating a kebab on a park bench in newcastle. news broadcasters and social media posters repeatedly quipped, “hope the sandwich was worth it!” suggesting this public meal was an indulgence. such representations evidence an inability to imagine a life in which one might not have a home in which to consume lunch (cf. kochhar 2020). then there was the case of two indigenous rugby players, latrell mitchell and josh addo-carr, who posted images on social media of themselves camping with friends in april 2020. this led to shaming in the media and threats of police investigation for breaking lockdown laws that prohibited being outdoors in groups larger than two. subsequent public statements from the football players carefully balanced apology with references to aboriginal traditions of transmitting cultural knowledge in the bush. at a time when prime minister scott morrison insisted that schools and workplaces remain open, arguing that these indoor gatherings were necessary to learning and the national economy, indigenous people were shamed for gathering outdoors. in short, certain forms of proximity and socialization were deemed virtuous or necessary, while others peripheral to dominant norms were banned. just as strong (2021, this issue) and trnka (2021, this issue) describe for ireland and new zealand, respectively, the australian pandemic response reflects the privileging of particular intimacies (middle class, monogamous, heterosexual, nuclear households) over others. it is not merely an irony of developing epidemiological knowledge that we now know that cases of outdoor covid-19 transmission are rare, making australia’s lockdown prohibitions against outdoor gatherings absurd. as these examples illustrate, fining people for being outdoors was not about proximity, even as it was defended in the name of virtuous social distancing. these laws and their enforcement reflected not public health logic but rather a spectacle of the police containment of otherness. forcible containment and border policing in juxtaposition to susan levine and lenore manderson’s (2021, this issue) description of how the south african state’s insufficient covid-19 intervention was tied to existing structures of privilege, in australia, the pandemic response has included some strikingly theatrical state interventions that reinforced existing structures of privilege. perhaps the most vivid spectacle of containment and otherness in 2020 was the july quarantine of public housing apartment towers in melbourne. after the identification of some covid-19 cases in these high-rise buildings, the state government forcibly quarantined the inhabitants of all nine towers without prior warning. residents were banned from leaving for five days. police surrounded the towers with the same police tape used to cordon off crime scenes. this was despite the fact that some of the towers had no diagnosed cases of covid-19 at the time (fowler and booker 2020). the government’s chief health officer justified the action by likening the towers—where poor people, refugees, ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, and people with disabilities are overrepresented—to “vertical cruise ships.” he referred to the ships whose primarily white passengers had previously been allowed to disembark in sydney, leading to many of australia’s early covid-19 cases (nsw government 2020). yet, belying the claim that the towers lockdown was a race-blind strategy to avoid past errors, melbourne academics pointed out that while police forcibly contained the public housing towers, similarly sized infection clusters in wealthy melbourne suburbs were not locked down (kelly, shaw, and porter 2020). australia’s loudest racist politician, pauline hanson, ranted that the tower residents were “drug addicts” from “non-english speaking backgrounds” (zhou and simons 2020), giving voice to the racist belief in otherness as the visible face of invisible contagion and in containment as deserved. the press photographed tower residents staring out with hands pressed to windows, rendering a pathological menagerie of otherness, with majority australia staring back at imprisoned people through the media’s camera lenses. just as carolyn m. rouse (2021, this issue) juxtaposes white resistance to pandemic restrictions with black vulnerability to covid-19 to illustrate how racial privilege works in the united states, so too has the australian targeting and containment of ethnic and national others in covid-19 restrictions reflected particular national histories of privilege, containment, and exclusion. the country has a long history of forcibly turning back asylum-seekers on boats (with sometimes devastating loss of life) and imprisoning them extraterritorially on manus island and nauru for years while their refugee claims are processed (boochani 2018). australia’s immigration laws explicitly discriminate against hiv and tb-positive people, requiring hiv tests and lung x-rays with long-term visa applications and denying visas to most who test positive (brotherton 2016; hegarty 2020). pandemic management is coterminous with assertions of territorial and national integrity, and containment policies reflect long pedigrees of australian discourse on the threats of foreign bodies and “invisible enemies” (caduff 2020, 21). in australia, several states have staged a theater of military-police enforcement of quarantine. for example, in april 2020 new south wales police circulated images to news media showing teams of police officers and soldiers knocking on doors to ensure that recently arrived travelers were in isolation. in august, the state of victoria did the same in melbourne. why were soldiers deployed to visit homes of unarmed residents? this spectacle of excess force in support of the government’s isolation laws theatrically converted the ephemeral danger of the potentiality of unseen pathogens into a physical danger that must be met by an armed military-police state. such spectacles make state power, and its expansion in a moment of public health emergency, visible to the populace. they also offer a pleasure to those viewing the spectacle (foucault 1977): the satisfaction (or perhaps relief) of being able to see a threat as concrete and containable. as gracie mae bradley (2020) wrote in the guardian, the police enforcement of covid-19 laws—which the australian government assured us would be used with “discretion”—necessarily raises the specter of how discretionary enforcement always falls along racial lines. a number of analysts have drawn our attention to the novel forms of biopower and governmentality that pandemics engender (lynteris and poleykett 2018; european journal of psychoanalysis 2020; manderson 2020; rouse 2020; trnka 2020). government authorities are using covid-19 to introduce new forms of surveillance and control over our intimate lives, and its lockdown laws discipline us into particular dominant forms of sociality, namely, a retreat to the middle-class heterosexual nuclear family (lewis 2020; strong 2021, this issue). yet as the pandemic response in australia has fashioned an ethics of proximity defined by borders, containment, and the forcible exclusion of otherness, it has drawn on not-at-all-novel discourses on monstrousness, hidden threats, and foreign bodies. imaginations of invisible pathogens recapitulate well-trodden narratives about the relationship between biological and social contagion, public policy, and a military-police complex. abstract when pathogens and their movement between people cannot be seen, we imagine them. that imagined menagerie—imaginerie—of infection then becomes associated with marginal others whose bodies and actions become popularly conflated with disease and its transmission. this essay explores how methods of imagining and managing the covid-19 pandemic in australia echoed historical scripts for policing borders and containing the bodies of outsiders deemed threats to the national body. 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margaret simons 2020 “today show dumps pauline hanson for ‘divisive’ remarks about melbourne public housing residents.” guardian (uk), july 6. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/06/today-show-dumps-pauline-hanson-for-divisive-remarks-about-melbourne-public-housing-residents. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 350-359, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.02 speculative fields: property in the shadow of post-conflict colombia speculative fields: property in the shadow of post-conflict colombia meghan l. morris american bar foundation https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8052-6886 we walked through empty pasture after empty pasture, sweating in the hot sun of urabá, a region in northwestern colombia. we were headed toward the small plot that ernesto and his wife cristina had planted with rice, corn, and other crops.1 they had been working the plot quietly for several years, unnoticed by the rancher who had pastures in the area, until some teak trees they planted grew tall. cristina claimed that these ranchers, with the help of the paracos (paramilitaries), had forced her and other small farmers to sell their farms cheaply in 1997, consolidating them into ranchland. more than ten years later, she and ernesto had returned to reclaim the plot, now surrounded by pastures. although she had received threats of removal from ranch hands, cristina was triumphant. “tengo la posesión! [i have possession!],” she exclaimed. she hoped to have this possession formalized soon, through a claim she had filed with the national land restitution program. designed to return and title land to people who lost it during colombia’s armed conflict, the program had received thousands of claims in urabá—as well as opposition from ranchers, who considered the land to be theirs. on arrival, we took shade under the rice hanging beneath a black plastic sheet that ernesto had secured to wooden posts—a sturdy cambuche, the hut that farmers taking a new plot would build to help establish possession. cristina invited me behind the cambuche to a tree. there was a pair of bright green parrots, staring sideways at us with round red eyes. corra! corra! (run! run!), they yelled. cristina laughed, cooing that she had missed them. i felt rattled, thinking about the violent circumstances in which the parrots had learned this warning. land restitution intervened in layered regimes of property and war in landscapes like these.2 it sought to address land dispossession and abandonment, long documented as both a consequence of the colombian conflict as well as one of its root causes (cmh 2010). the restitution agency aimed to return more than six million hectares of land to war victims, including some of colombia’s more than five million internally displaced people. as the country attempted to end its decades-long conflict, in part through talks leading to the 2016 peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas of the revolutionary armed forces of colombia (farc), the state billed reparations for victims as central to a new era: the “post-conflict.” many such initiatives, like restitution, involved the reordering of property; they aimed to settle both people and land claims, thereby paving the path to peace. the time, however, was also one of war on many levels, from processes of land possession and dispossession like those on cristina and ernesto’s farm, to daily news of paramilitary death threats, guerrilla violence, narco-trafficking, and political corruption. even as the government prepared to declare the arrival of the post-conflict on signing the peace agreement, public debate revolved around whether the post-conflict would indeed arrive, or whether it would simply be a posacuerdo (post-agreement) era, with peace deferred further into the future. peace indeed was postponed once again after the agreement was signed, as an october 2016 referendum on the accord failed by a slim margin. the colombian congress later approved a revised agreement, but opponents walked out of congress before the vote. the possibilities of peace amid the fractured political landscape remain uncertain. the focus on the agreement as an event punctuating time speaks to jane i. guyer’s (2007) notion that the “near future” has been reoriented around dates and events. at the same time, the ambiguities around whether peace had arrived did not evacuate the near future, as guyer suggests, but rather rendered it expandable, extending into an uncertain horizon. in this near future, there persists a suspension between conflict and post-conflict that has become the pervasive condition of a country attempting for decades to make peace in the middle of war (bergquist, peñaranda, and sánchez 2001). akin to lochlann jain’s (2007) analysis of the “cancer survivor”—a term that holds both life and death within it—war and peace define this temporal space simultaneously. i call this uncertain, elastic temporal space the shadow of the post-conflict. i use shadow to evoke the temporal ambiguity of the post-conflict, which can be understood both as a time yet to come and the condition of the present. its shadow is thus cast in multiple directions, changing shape and extension as peace is deferred, accorded, and retracted. this term borrows loosely from robert h. mnookin and lewis kornhauser’s (1979) notion of “bargaining in the shadow of the law,” which describes how divorcing couples negotiate outside of court based on their conjectures about what they would be allocated if they went to trial. i suggest that the shadow of the post-conflict creates fertile ground for acts of possession and dispossession that have a speculative relationship to legal regimes oriented toward peace. the shadow of the post-conflict, in this sense, evokes not only the ambiguity between war and peace—as post-conflict scholars have long observed (nordstrom 2004; theidon 2007; nelson 2009; mcallister and nelson 2013)—but the speculative nature of politics within that space of ambiguity. i follow austin zeiderman’s (2016, 164) emphasis on the importance of temporal politics “both as a domain of social control and as a terrain of political possibility” in this analysis. while zeiderman, like other anthropologists of anticipatory regimes (lakoff and collier 2008), theorizes the temporal orientation toward risk of future harm, i explore the orientation toward a potential future peace, even as war persists. i examine the ways in which people reorient their action in turn, speculating on markets, legal regimes, and regimes of violence that might emerge from property reallocations. the current analysis is based on fieldwork between 2012 and 2015, land restitution’s initial years—a particularly ripe time for speculation. while there were critiques of the limits of restitution during its formation and early years (uprimny-yepes and sánchez 2010; hrw 2013), a sense also prevailed among bureaucrats, claimants, and those opposed to restitution that the process might effect substantive reallocations of property over rural land. the timing of the fieldwork thus offered a vantage point onto speculation at a time of particular uncertainty about both property and peace. through ethnographic work with actors in urabá—including land claimants, large landholders, state bureaucrats, former armed actors, and activists—i analyze how speculation was enacted by and between different groups. i use speculation in its dual meaning, defined in the oxford english dictionary (oed) as “investment in stocks, property, or other ventures in the hope of gain but with the risk of loss” and “the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.” in this double sense, claimants, paramilitaries, and landowners engaged in speculative activities that constituted investments in land, as well as conjectures on what they might be granted—or might lose—under a post-conflict peace. these actors engaged in speculation to manage uncertainties about peace, as it was continually deferred into the future. as peace is repeatedly postponed, what speculative forms take shape? how do they relate to the state promise to bring peace through property? what does this tell us about the role of speculation on land and property in other ambiguously post-conflict sites (shneiderman and snellinger 2014)? as a focus of government intervention in preparation for the post-conflict, and as the issue broadly believed to be the root of the conflict, land was where the possibilities for war and peace were grounded—for claimants, but also for restitution bureaucrats, large landowners, and armed actors. in a moment of fundamental uncertainty about peace, actors reconfigured historical strategies for staking a speculative claim on the future through land. these strategies joined multiple forms of property, from possession to title, that were at play around restitution efforts. the anthropology of speculation offers a rich set of resources for conceptualizing the imbrication of past, present, and future that these strategies perform. guyer (2007, 411) called for anthropologists to move beyond “the past in the present” to bring ideologies of the future into view. much of the subsequent literature on speculation does precisely that, orienting itself toward futures and how they rework the present (fortun 2008). the literature on post-conflict, on the other hand, frequently orients itself toward memory and how it shapes present politics (rojas pérez 2008; nelson 2009; theidon 2013). the conceptualization of speculation in the shadow of post-conflict colombia demands a theory that privileges neither pasts nor futures, but rather accounts for the ways that past, present, and future fold into each other. as opposed to other theories of the temporality of uncertain political transition—which describe the sense of being “stranded in the present” (scott 2014, 67)—i suggest that one of the hallmarks of “post-conflict” temporality may be the constant tacking between past, present, and future. vincanne adams, michelle murphy, and adele e. clarke (2009) have called this temporal tacking “abduction,” a process of determining a course of action by taking into account both past data and anticipated futures. at the same time, the temporalities implied in these processes follow more twisted paths and discontinuous folds than the process of abduction suggests. karen barad’s work on spacetime offers a conceptual entry point into these temporalities and the role of the material within them, arguing that “quantum discontinuities” are produced through the folding together of past and future that occurs in the making of matter and material boundaries. barad suggests that the past never lies entirely behind us, and that the present does not simply produce a certain future; rather, the reconfiguration of the material world brings past and future into discontinuous articulation (barad 2007, 234). i draw on this approach, along with the divergent temporal orientations of the anthropology of speculation and post-conflict, to consider the particular temporal disposition that defines the shadow of post-conflict colombia and pervades politics within it. i take land—particularly the physical possession of land—as a central modality through which this temporal folding occurs as people speculate in the shadow of the post-conflict. the literature on speculation has largely not focused on land or property, examining instead financial markets (ho 2009; zaloom 2009) and markets in oil and genomics (fortun 2008; weszkalnys 2015), with some exceptions considering land (campbell 2015) and the legal aspects of speculation (peterson 2014). how might we understand speculation differently if we begin with land? while the war rendered people’s relationships to land unstable and risky, people still perceived property over land to offer a concrete, grounded claim to power and place in the context of widespread uncertainty. this made it an ideal object of speculation. this speculation was related to land markets, but also occurred as a form of conjecture about future legal regimes, as well as regimes of violence intertwined with land. possession, in particular, sat at the boundary of the market, and at the blurry edges of legality and violence, making it a critical speculative strategy. people reworked historical forms of land possession to negotiate the uncertainties around these regimes—and, more broadly, the space between war and peace in which they proliferated. as with the ambiguity between life and death in jain’s (2007) “living in prognosis,” the movement between future and past rendered material the ambiguous temporal space between war and peace, as the promise of peace was continually deferred. in the first section of the article, i draw on ethnographic fieldwork in urabá to investigate how diverse actors speculated on legal and market regimes, as well as regimes of violence, by taking land. i then discuss a historical speculative form central to the conflict that later took on new significance: invasión (land invasion).3 in the final section, i examine the forms of speculation that emerged as the reordering of property through restitution took shape in the expanding shadow of the post-conflict. speculative possession cristina had not been to the farm for months—“since they threatened me,” she said. like other land claimants receiving death threats, she lived in town, which allowed her to advance claims with state agencies. but this setting proved only marginally safer than living near the farm, where she figured that if they killed her, at least “everyone would know who did it.” at the plot, we rested on tree stumps. i asked cristina why she thought the rancher had not kicked them off. she thought that maybe they had given up, since the plot was so small. other farmers who had been her neighbors before their displacement were happy she had this plot, she said, “because we’re protecting their right with our possession!” their possession served as proof, of both past possession and future right. while it did not guarantee against removal, cristina surmised that the longer they farmed it, the less likely they would be kicked off. when the ranchers saw their teak growing, cristina said, “they see a future there”—her future on the plot. later, ernesto asked, “how many years do you need with posesión? fifteen? twenty? if the rancher were going to remove us, he would have done it a long time ago.” ernesto understood that possession, combined with time on the plot, might mean something more. according to colombia’s civil code, possession is tenure “with intention of ownership.” if possessors demonstrate peaceful acquisition and uninterrupted possession for a number of years, provided the plot meets certain conditions, they may solicit title. the possibility of having a greater legal claim to the plot was on ernesto’s mind. they farmed for food, but also to bolster past and future claims to the plot, despite the risks of farming in the middle of the rancher’s pastures. this approach implied multiple forms of speculation—on the possibility they would meet requirements for title, on the likelihood their possession would be determined a legal route to title rather than an illegal trespass, and on the risk of violent retributions against them. these tenuous, layered claims to the plot formed part of a historical process of taking land to stake claims on the future in moments of uncertainty. i refer to this process as speculative possession. in this section, i draw on the recent history of the area around ernesto and cristina’s plot to illustrate how speculative possession has been conceived and enacted in urabá. cristina pointed out scattered fruit trees in the pastures—coconut, mango, avocado—planted by colonists like her, she said. “sembramos comida [we planted food],” she emphasized, differentiating small farmers from ranchers who let pastures lie fallow. in the 1970s, colonists had come looking for land in urabá, known for its rich soils and remaining baldíos (idle state lands). despite the historic presence of indigenous and black communities, they found large stretches not directly inhabited, and took possession. the area, however, was a site of increasing violence. rebels from the farc controlled many new villages, and targeted farmers unwilling to cooperate. in the late 1980s, paramilitary groups emerged in the neighboring department of córdoba, formed by landholding elites and narco-traffickers to combat left-wing guerrillas, which had targeted them and their properties (duncan 2006). these groups soon moved into urabá. frustrated by kidnappings and extortion by the farc and land invasions by small farmers, as well as state responses they perceived as ineffective, some local landholders became involved in the paramilitary project. as paramilitaries expanded, the violence worsened, bit by bit: a neighbor murdered, a relative disappeared. paramilitaries rounded up villagers for interrogation, killing some on suspicion of being guerrilla collaborators. this period proved so bloody that local small farmers uniformly call the late 1990s la violencia (the violence), referring to the peak of violent confrontation in the region (as opposed to the mid-twentieth-century political violence generally known as la violencia).4 eventually, urabá became the paramilitaries’ center of operations, where they built models for collaboration with state and private actors (lópez 2007; romero 2011). one of their aims was to protect large landholders and their properties, which they carried out in part through “security cooperatives” called convivir, a legal structure for coordination between the military and the population to confront guerrilla forces. the convivir eventually served as fronts for paramilitary operations (lópez 2007), some receiving funds from landholders. they facilitated not just counterinsurgency but also paramilitary control of regions like urabá for narco-trafficking (duncan 2006, 2014). the establishment of the convivir constituted an element of the eventual parapolítica (parapolitics) scandal, in which hundreds of government officials were investigated—and some later convicted—for links to paramilitaries and narco-traffickers. the involvement of the armed forces in the scandal put in question billions in u.s. military aid to colombia (tate 2015). these collaborative models contributed to a lack of clarity around relationships between ranchers and paramilitaries. some people simply equated them, while others thought some ranchers might be paramilitaries but were not sure, and still others argued that certain ranchers had nothing to do with paramilitarism. this uncertainty around elites’ potential simultaneous roles fed a climate of suspicion, as well as people’s speculation on violence when they made restitution claims to plots held by ranchers.5 the violence in the area around ernesto and cristina’s farm reached its peak in 1997. paramilitaries murdered more farmers, and people began to flee to urabá’s larger towns or cities like medellín. simultaneously, what farmers called “commissions” arrived looking to purchase land from locals. some came unarmed, but others carried arms or were accompanied by individuals locals recognized as paramilitaries. the prices offered were low, but many sold, afraid of the violence and eager to get something for the land before leaving. those who stayed longer often found themselves forced to sell. “si no nos quiere vender, la viuda nos vende más barato [if you don’t want to sell it to us, your widow will sell it cheaper],” some commissions would warn farmers holding out. in the ensuing few years, a tremendous shift in ownership occurred, with a handful of local and regional elites taking possession of land. titles were signed over for some farms, but many did not have registered title. some farmers had applied for title, but never received it prior to la violencia, while others never did the paperwork. still others had received title, but failed to register it. titles, however, later magically appeared for some plots: the product of a “pirate” urabá office of the state rural development agency that produced backdated false titles for some farms transferred to ranchers. these transactions would often be followed by a series of plot transfers to conceal illicit acquisition; teo ballvé (2013) aptly calls this process “land laundering.” the new landholders consolidated their acquisitions into large ranches, populating some fields with cows and buffaloes, while leaving many empty. pastures and cattle became indicators of possession by these new owners, as opposed to the corn, rice, and fruit trees planted by small farmers. this change shifted not only land use but also the ways that possessors materialized temporal horizons on the landscape (ingold 1993). ranchers told me that they turned land into pastures not because cattle were highly profitable, but because “it’s more like a savings business, if you’re the owner of the land,” as one commented. the savings could even accrue from leaving pastures empty. part of the strategy constituted market speculation: if they bought the land cheaply, prices would eventually go up. “having four cows on the land is saving money, because sooner or later someone else will come and pay you 20 million [pesos/hectare],” one rancher told me. this is the epitome of what in colombia is called the lote de engorde (fattening plot), a parallel between the fattening of cows on pasture and the growth in value of a plot of land over time. while the crops and orchards planted by small farmers indicated a temporality of family provisioning, the pastures represented a different future orientation—toward the purchase and sale of fattened cattle, but even more toward land markets themselves. for some, this activity made possible another kind of “savings”: money laundering. one landholder described the strategy to me: “drug dealers, guerrillas, paras, what might they do with huge volumes of bags . . . of cash that they had was buy land. then it was safer to have land than to have bags of dollars under your bed.” land could also serve as cover for drug operations, particularly transit, as urabá is home to a key confluence of rivers, roads, and ports used for drug export. while landholders’ decisions would appear to be largely speculation on the market, they also relied on complicated forms of speculation on future legal regimes and regimes of violence. first, there was the idea that if landholders bought land cheaply and maintained possession, paramilitaries would subdue the guerrillas and land prices would go up. second, there was speculation that paramilitaries would continue to have influence on state institutions. and third, there was the assumption that there would not be enforcement against the legal fictions landholders had employed to title properties. some landholders also hedged these bets by facilitating peasant possession of plots, occasionally in collaboration with paramilitaries, who used possession to cultivate a social base of supportive locals. one of the most important means of building this base occurred in the form of repoblamiento (repopulation), or what some paramilitaries called reforma agraria (land reform). jorge, a displaced farmer in his fifties, recounted to me how he had been living in town when men came offering land to displaced families to grow plantain. his and dozens of other families signed up. they formed a plantain export association, to which title was transferred from a local paramilitary. the title, however, proved false, backdated to circumvent legal limitations on individual landholdings and give the impression that the plot had been legally acquired prior to la violencia. although the false title later came to the attention of several government ministries, they were reluctant to challenge it, given that so many displaced families were living there. in this way, paramilitaries provided the possibility of land possession to displaced farmers, while using repopulation projects to avoid title challenges. ranchers also used gifts of possession to secure local support or, as one rancher put it, to stop peasants from becoming guerrillas. some gave displaced farmers long-term loans of land or permission to farm plots for given growing cycles. others did not grant permission but forbearance, such as the rancher who could have removed cristina and ernesto but chose not to. this situation placed small farmers in permanent uncertainty, as ranchers could remove them at any time. and indeed, ranchers frequently employed police to remove small farmers, often from the very land from which they had been originally displaced. on the other hand, every day that farmers managed to stay on the land put them in closer reach of a legal claim to posesión. in general, landholders understood themselves to be incurring risks that were simultaneously personal, financial, legal, and political. one told me that “we’ve risked not only our lives but also our wealth, and we’ve built this country.” facing restitution, many landholders complained of having invested in land and the region in a context of state abandonment, only to be expropriated by the state through a dubious peace-building project. in this sense, landholders—like peasant possessors—speculated on uncertain legal, political, and market regimes through land. facilitating peasant possession of land through loans, gifts, and purported land reform formed part of these speculative strategies, along with large-scale land acquisitions. armed actors, landholders, and small farmers negotiated uncertainties about the future by employing different iterations of property—from possession to title—to manage the risks of land transactions. as annelise riles (2011) notes, private legal technologies provide ways of handling temporal uncertainties in situations of market risk. here, people used property to manage risks from market fluctuations, as well as from legal shifts and physical violence. these moves constituted legal conjectures about how land might be allocated in a potential future peace, betting on whether peasant possessions might become formalized, landholders’ acquisitions would be questioned, and landholders might face imprisonment. despite significant differences in power between social groups, speculation through property over land constituted a common framework for managing the deep uncertainties generated by the conflict—and, later, the prospect of peace. possession becomes a crucial form of speculation during conflict because it lies at the interstices of legality, the market, and violence, simultaneously evoking a legal form of property and illegal trespass. under conditions of uncertainty, speculative possession can be used to stake a claim in the absence of or alongside other property forms. it can also serve as a form of dispossession, deepening ambiguities around who might be considered a victim or a benefactor. crucially, even as acts of possession stake claims on the future, they are not always oriented toward more legal formality, as suggested in other theories of land speculation (campbell 2015). while moving toward more formal land tenure at times was a goal of possession in urabá, it was precisely the ambiguously legal nature of possession that made it an attractive form of speculation in its own right, not only as a step toward title. speculative possession was in this sense more a conjecture about formal legal regimes and their future enforcement than necessarily a move toward them. historical land invasion these conjectures concerned potential futures, but they also drew on historical efforts at land possession in the region. the temporality of speculative possession thus simultaneously called up the future and the past. this section explores land invasion as a key historical form of speculative possession. although urabá had been a site of extractive projects for centuries (parsons 1967), the second half of the twentieth century showed significant growth, sparked by the completion of a road from medellín to urabá and the establishment of the banana industry. a number of the region’s landowners arrived in the 1960s to work for international banana companies or to buy plantations. laborers migrated from neighboring departments to plant, cut, pack, and transport bananas to urabá’s port of turbo for export. the 1980s were years of tremendous bloodshed around the plantations, where banana workers lived in camps. unionized workers frequently found themselves targeted. many moved to town, often taking land through invasión. as a legal and colloquial category, invasión involves taking land without prior agreement from the legal owner. hundreds would do an invasion, setting up overnight on large private plots. left-wing political groups and armed actors also became involved in urabá’s urban invasions, seeking political base (garcía 1996). invasions would appear to contradict the interests of local landholders, but economic interests and the fear that unionists might double as guerrillas pushed some landholders to support invasions. happy to dismantle camps they saw as guerrilla breeding grounds, some plantation owners incentivized urban invasions by their workers, even allowing them to take materials from camps—toilets, shingles, bricks—for their new homes in invasions. landholders who had their urban plots invaded turned it into a market opportunity. one urabá businessman told me that “the land owner also cleverly acted dumb and let his land be invaded . . . saying [to the mayor], there’s an invasion, you need this land . . . buy it from me. and they made a big business out of this . . . and it was the state’s responsibility to legalize those [invaded] neighborhoods.” another noted that “those lands weren’t worth anything precisely because of the violence, and the state paid really good prices.” land possessors and large landholders each engaged in a speculative strategy to take advantage of the municipal government’s need to respond to invasions. rural invasions were also common during this period in urabá. perhaps the most famous was la coldesa, a dutch-owned african palm farm invaded by hundreds of small farmers in 1986 (garcía 1996). small farmers also took other plots belonging to plantation owners and ranchers, in some cases later receiving title. some found support in guerrilla groups such as the popular liberation army (epl), which had a committee devoted to invasion support. small farmers in the area around ernesto and cristina’s plot were intimately tied to this history of invasion. several of them in the 1980s had participated in an urban invasion in urabá associated with the unión patriótica (up), a left political party founded in peace negotiations between the farc and the belisario betancur administration.6 from there, they had also organized to invade rural plots. but maintaining possession did not prove easy, given opposition by landholders and, later, by paramilitaries who accused small farmers of taking possession in collaboration with guerrillas. virgilio, a small farmer in his sixties who had participated in urban and rural invasions in urabá, narrated his account of this history to me: we came to la maría [farm], fifty plot holders stayed there, and there was a mortgage on it . . . they said that if they paid the debt they could keep the land. but those representatives came from [a up-associated invasion]. they were disappeared. other people started to get afraid, it was bad. four hundred families said that they were going to la libertad [farm]. i went to la libertad. we had ten hectares with corn . . . the owner there made a proposal, for us to come to el coco [farm], giving us [the land] . . . so that we wouldn’t invade [la libertad], and would go instead to el coco . . . . we went there . . . later the police called us to a meeting, [saying] that we were going to have to give back the land because the head-choppers [paramilitaries] were coming. . . . i had corn, rice, cassava, plantain, those fields were full of food . . . and it ended up in the hands of [a rancher]. he started to attack people, burn huts, it was a huge mess. this history demonstrates the complex regimes of possession in which people operated. at each opportunity they have to establish themselves, they confront violence, keeping them in a cycle of recurring possessory efforts. one landholder finds a gift of possession strategic, however, granting them el coco in exchange for leaving la libertad. virgilio told me that the landholder intended to sell la libertad, and an invasion would have made a sale impossible. this made the gift of el coco to invaders a financially strategic move. people conducted invasions out of necessity, but they also became enrolled in political projects through them. some took possession because they opposed land concentration in the hands of the wealthy. guerrillas and left-wing groups generally shared this notion, and often derived political gains from supporting invasions, as did elected officials who helped legalize them. finally, displaced people also became enrolled in the projects of landholders, who used invasion as a market opening. invasions thus served as early forms of speculative possession, through which different actors staked claims on the future—and helped to shape it—in a time of colonization and political uncertainty. with the increase in violence in the late 1990s, the ubiquity of rural invasions receded, as invaders were displaced and moved to expanding paramilitary-dominated urban housing markets. but invasion remained a crucial element of the legal and political repertoire that the poor drew on in response to projects like restitution. in caitlin zaloom’s (2009) analysis of financial knowledge, she argues that people draw on the history of the yield curve to establish its relevance in forecasting the future. similarly, speculative possession drew past and future together, with historical invasions helping establish land possession as a central mode of staking a claim on the future. these invasions also served as a source of political and legal strategy, informing different actors’ understandings of how possession might be enacted and related to other forms of property. historical invasion helped define the scope and reach of speculative possession of land and the central role it could play in rendering the space between war and peace material. reordering in the shadow of the post-conflict when the land restitution program was established in 2011, it layered new legal and political regimes onto the complex, shifting patterns of speculative possession already in place. one of the most notable initial effects of restitution was the rearrangement of expectations of state intervention in local land economies. restitution almost immediately became an integral part of these economies, shifting future panoramas in anticipation of which paramilitaries, state actors, businesspeople, and displaced persons made speculative moves. ernesto and cristina, along with thousands of others in urabá, filed a restitution claim. at the beginning of the process, there were high expectations—and fears on the part of large landholders—that the state would return land to peasants. but time dragged on, with few resolved cases. soon, groups of displaced people organized to retrieve their former lands on their own through collective takings. i use collective taking rather than invasion here, as those conducting collective takings often considered themselves to have a rightful claim to the land (as opposed to invaders, who intentionally took land that was not theirs). as the takings unfolded, i was visiting a claimant named juan in his tiny shack in an urban invasion when his phone rang. “se metieron?! [they went and took it?!].” he had just been voicing his frustration with the time his restitution claim was taking. and now here was news that others were retaking land near where his plot had been! they had put up poles covered with black plastic and planted rice and corn—retaking possession of plots they had lost in the very way they had first acquired them. he trembled with excitement. “let’s go find other claimants,” he said, “to see what they think.” we set off through the dirt roads of the invasion. the first stop was carmen’s. “better for them to give us the money, right?” she argued, uninterested in returning to the land and hoping for cash restitution. “my hands are arthritic now,” she said, holding up her painted nails. “who’s going to work out there?” we left, juan disdainfully mumbling about people wanting money rather than land as we walked to our next stop, emilio’s. “i don’t want problems,” emilio said immediately. “how many are out there?” not trusting juan to tell him the truth, he called marta, who was part of a collective taking. “put up a cambuche for me!” he said to her, clearly wanting the land, but hesitant to risk it. emilio’s wife cautioned, “life is better than not having it!” we went to the park to find césar, who had just arrived, exhausted from his job pruning banana plants. “this doesn’t seem legal to me,” he said. “we have a case and we don’t want to damage it . . . to lose our rights.” juan rubbed his face, stressed. “he doesn’t listen!” césar complained, repeating that “we have to do this the legal way.” we did invasión in the past, yes, he said. “but everything we’re doing to get the land back has to be legal.” “if we do an invasión, there comes another displacement, that’s what comes.” this worry was reinforced by the restitution program’s opposition to the collective takings, and its urging that claimants wait for the resolution of claims in court. later, juan complained to me about césar’s use of the word invasión to describe the taking. “he says it’s invasión . . . but it’s not invasión. if they have title, it’s invasión, but these were baldíos . . . we are the owners of that, they [the ranchers] are the ones that did an invasión!” this disagreement put into question the legality of three land acquisitions: that of juan and césar decades earlier (were they baldíos legally acquired through possession or not?), of the ranchers in the 1990s (was it a legal purchase or a forced dispossession?), and of collective takings in the moment (was it a legal retaking of dispossessed land or an illegal invasion?). these acquisitions, and their tenuous legality, illustrated a historical pattern of speculative possession and its recasting in the shadow of the post-conflict. both those supporting and opposing these new takings carefully determined their moves, considering potential consequences for restitution claims and violent recrimination. everyone understood that restitution had put landholders’ ownership into question. but what would the restitution program determine about claims, and when? what would be the consequences for takings in the meantime? by failing to conduct a taking, might people lose the opportunity to stake a future claim on the land? the ambiguity around the roles played by those opposing takings increased fears of violence, which those conducting takings surmised could come from multiple people who might be colluding against them—ranchers, ranch hands, paramilitaries, the restitution program, the police. those conducting takings had a variety of orientations toward restitution. some had been inspired by the process, but felt frustration at the delays with the claims. others thought taking possession would advance their restitution claims by demonstrating they truly needed land. still others considered the takings simply to anticipate the eventual success of their claim. across the board, however, the physical form that collective takings took explicitly recalled earlier histories of invasion. as kregg hetherington (2011) observes, the shifting of land politics into a state bureaucracy intensified, rather than erased, the importance of action on the ground. from the perspective of people like juan, possession had led to successful claims to land in the past, and was a way to stake a claim on it again for the future. but people like césar worried about staying within the bounds of the law. while many claimants had initially acquired their plots via invasion, they sensed that to succeed in restitution, they could no longer employ those tactics. claimants recognized that clean victimhood was important to the restitution program’s imagination of a rightful claim. one had to be a victim, not an invader—even if prior invasion was the very reason they had a claim at all. injury, not politics, had to be the claimant’s identity (brown 1995). the boundaries of victimhood also pushed claimants to conduct land negotiations in anticipation of unsuccessful restitution cases. as news of collective takings spread, i visited a claimant, mariela, who was chatting with a visitor named elkin. mariela told me elkin’s father was the real dueño (owner) of her plot, having felled the forest to build a farm before his displacement by guerrillas in 1988. mariela invaded the plot in 1994, but fled in 1997 during the violencia. she had recently retaken possession of the plot from a rancher. elkin told mariela that his restitution claim for the plot had been rejected; the program only accepted claimants displaced from 1991 onward. now, he said, his only option to get land was to negotiate with her. they agreed to split the plot, counting on a later state ratification of their deal. after he left, mariela said proudly, “see? he doesn’t get in touch with [the rancher], but instead with me. that’s how it should be. and then we negotiate.” in this way, collective takings in anticipation of restitution made speculative private land deals possible and shifted negotiating authority from landholders to possessors, precisely because restitution cases had not been resolved. people also made decisions not to invest in homes and farms, given their uncertainty about restitution. mariela, for example, lived in a humble wooden home purchased with state reparations money for her son’s murder by paramilitaries. now that restitution was underway, she wondered, who might make a claim on this house? “i bought it from a second owner, and there was a first owner who might have been forced to sell at a low price. so i’m not going to fix it up until i have the title.” she noted that “those who are aware of what’s happening are selling now” to buyers unaware that the homes might be subject to restitution claims. in anticipation of potentially successful restitution claims, some landholders let weeds take over pastures. several faced mounting legal pressures, as restitution called into question the legality of their holdings. “money invested is money risked,” one landholder told me. in response, some displaced people began planting crops in the fields. landholders tried to push the removal of these people by the police, and rumors circulated of violent recrimination. but efforts to oppose takings were fewer than in the past, given landholders’ concerns about legal consequences. the public prosecutor’s office had opened investigations on some landholders for paramilitary financing, and had arrested others on charges of forced displacement. landholders meanwhile complained that all they wanted was “legal security” for increasingly risky land investments. landholder arrests were joyful news to some, but they created opposition from others to both collective takings and restitution. many landless people depended on landholders as patrons for jobs, money, or loans of land. there was talk that some landholders might sponsor sympathetic possessors on their land, in response to the takings. other landless people did not materially depend on landholders, but understood them as necessary interlocutors to maintain calm. while patterns of possession in the wake of restitution often concerned these medium-term futures, there was also speculation about long-term horizons. after restitution, what would happen with the land? few expected that the restitution program’s notion of a fixed map of returned peasants would come to pass. restitution officials themselves doubted this, in part because titling would provide precisely what landholders desired: legal security. this would create more easily transferable land assets, mirroring the solution hernando de soto (2000) prescribed for the developing world. many officials expressed frustration over this situation. “estamos legalizando el despojo [we are legalizing dispossession],” one restitution lawyer told me despondently. he anticipated that peasants receiving title through restitution would simply sell it after a two-year moratorium on sales, likely to the same large landholders, resulting in a second “dispossession.” except this one would be legalized, facilitated by restitution itself. one rancher also anticipated this result, telling me “the state’s problem has always been not providing assistance so people can work the land. this will happen again here, and then i will just buy the land [lost through restitution] again afterward!” when i mentioned this concern to an urabá land activist, however, he considered it a typically bogotana (bogotá person’s) worry. “who’s to say it’s not ok for people to get their land back and then sell it?” he asked. “that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to get back what was stolen from them.” as tania murray li (2014, 4) observes, those who lose land cannot—or do not necessarily want to—return to the “past condition imagined to be more wholesome.” as reordering projects like restitution unfolded, new forms of speculative possession emerged, alongside reshaped versions of historical speculative forms, such as invasion. in actions like collective takings, possessors drew on their experience with speculative possession in past moments of uncertainty, such as the invasions of the colonization boom in the 1970s and 1980s. many of these invasions were later titled to possessors, giving them faith that—as the adage proclaims—possession was nine tenths of the law. in the space of ambiguity between peace and war, this conviction reemerged as the rewriting of property rules became central to the imagination of a post-conflict future. staking a claim on this future involved, much as during colonization, possession through grounded physical presence—planting rice and corn and building a cambuche. people also learned from the past that taking possession involved legal, economic, and personal risks. in kristin peterson’s (2014) theory of “derivative life,” people manage environments of chronic risk by speculating on what she calls “life’s chances.” for her, these chances are undergirded by fundamental economic instabilities. in urabá, uncertainties not only about the market but also about legal regimes and regimes of violence meant that possession became a form of speculation on land, and simultaneously on life itself. long histories of land possession and dispossession contributed to the high stakes of new forms of speculative possession. on the one hand, possessors like juan risked violent retaliation, as takings called into question landholders’ prior acquisitions and future ownership. at the same time, these histories gave possessors reason to hope. if possession had led to success during the colonization boom, then why not try again? they had everything to lose. but they also stood to gain both the land they had lost and a rearrangement of power in the region should possessors have widespread success in recuperating land. they drew inspiration from such rearrangements during the colonization of urabá, when possessors gained access to land through invasion, their speculation both anticipating and shaping legal futures. new forms of speculative possession thus formed part of what maria paula saffon and fabio sánchez (2019) describe as a cyclical historical relationship among the legal recognition of land possession, violent dispossession, and claims to recuperate land. possession held historical weight at the same time as it proved a central mode of staking a claim on an uncertain future. in their theorization of anticipation, adams, murphy, and clarke (2009, 249) note that “what all speculations share is the orientation towards and claim to the future as that which matters.” what becomes evident in theorizing speculation through land is that speculation is defined not only by its orientation toward the future as that which matters, but also by making claims on the future through that which matters: land. as peace is continually deferred, people attempt to ground themselves through the possession of land, rendering life more concrete even if not less risky. although history has taught people how ephemeral possession can be, it has also taught them that laying claim to land through possession is a critical mode of negotiating power and enacts a potent material demonstration of its distribution. in this sense, it was through possession of land that people attempted to make material the ambiguous space between war and peace. it is this rendering material through possession—not a rendering formal through title—that frequently forms the substance of speculation in the shadow of the post-conflict. while possession indexed a more tenuous hold on land along scales of formality of tenure, it represented for many the most material, concrete manifestation of a claim on the future. in jain’s theory of “living in prognosis,” the rendering material of the space between life and death involves multiple temporal orientations at once: toward a past that was not what it seemed and multiple versions of the future. the calculations involved in speculative possession similarly tack temporally between memory of the past and a potential future peace. and yet they also move through more discontinuous temporalities, such as diverse past political practices of occupation; the life cycles and potentialities of crops, cattle, and pastures; and conjectures around the many potential futures of eviction, restitution, titling, gain, and loss. conclusion in zeiderman’s (2016, ix) analysis of temporal politics in colombia, he emphasizes the durative, open-ended quality of the temporality of endangerment. as with anticipation of future harm, in the shadow of the post-conflict, it is never clear when, or if, peace will arrive, as the possibility of violence sits in persistent ambiguity with the possibility of peace. this shadow has a continually receding temporal horizon, creating conditions of deep uncertainty—the “epistemic murk” (taussig 1984, 492) that imbues this iteration of the near future. the durative nature of this ambiguity has created a field of speculative possibilities for everyone from dispossessed claimants to wealthy landholders. actions such as collective takings by the landless and disinvestment by ranchers have been structured around persistent guesswork about what might be dealt to whom in the future. in response to guyer’s provocation regarding the near future, zaloom (2007) asked how it is instantiated and made palpable. she finds answers in neuroeconomics, as other anthropologists of speculative futures find them in financial and scientific pursuits. an examination of the terrain of the near future in colombia, however, demonstrates that the answers are found most clearly in land. in the early years of restitution, people expected property rules to be rewritten, but the potential outcomes remained unclear—even for the very state bureaucrats charged with rewriting. in this situation of deep uncertainty, property over land became the common object of speculation, through which bureaucrats, paramilitaries, displaced people, and landholders enrolled each other in overlapping projects that produced new and reconfigured past processes of dis/possession, violence, and legal innovation. in particular, the physical possession of land—long understood as a way of working toward other forms of property over time—became a primary means of staking a speculative claim on the future and of rendering material the expanding temporal space between war and peace. why would people use possession—a relationship to land that is itself ambiguous in terms of its legality and formality—to make this uncertain space more concrete? on the one hand, it represents the clear, public staking of a claim through physical presence. this aspect of possession made it a critical element of efforts to acquire land during the colonization of urabá, and then later in the context of restitution, when the allocation of land once again appeared to be up for grabs. even though possession could be characterized as illegal trespass, it could simultaneously constitute a legitimate form of staking a claim to prior or future right, and even working toward title. it also exacerbated uncertainties about the legitimate owner of certain plots. this actually contributed to the solidity of some claims to contested plots, particularly when claimants used possession to challenge the distribution of land among large landholders or the legality of its acquisition. why would possession emerge in that moment with such force? many small farmers lost their land in la violencia, nearly twenty years earlier. the uncertainties produced by a potential post-conflict peace are key to answering this question. since la violencia, the future has been somewhat certain in urabá—there would be war, followed by more war. attempts by the displaced to repossess land would be met with violence and little state support. but the national reorientation toward peace, in which property rules would ostensibly be rearranged, created enough expectation to shape action, even for those who doubted the arrival of peace. the successful titling of land invasions during the late twentieth century persisted in local political memory as the means for staking a speculative claim under conditions of such uncertainty—and perhaps, as ernesto surmised, gain something more. as a result, even as formal title became theoretically more accessible through restitution, possession took on renewed importance as a hopeful orientation toward the future. the object possessed—land—was also understood across social groups to be the most concrete means of negotiating power and establishing a future in the region. land had long been the subject of struggle in urabá, as it had throughout colombia. a plausible claim to it indexed a victory of sorts in both particular conflicts, such as those between claimants and large landholders, and in the conflict writ large. cristina’s comment that ranchers would “see a future” in the young teak trees where she had taken possession—despite threats to her life and her claim to the land—provides just one example of how even a tenuous, contested claim to property over land represented a shot at the future in a way that little else did. the fact that land was perceived to be concrete, even as people’s relationships to it remained unstable, rendered it an exemplary object of speculation. land’s role in the conflict, and in an aspirational peace, also rendered it the repeated subject of state intervention. the reordering of property, from the legalization of invasions to the restitution of land, opened a field of speculative possibilities that had stakes both for individuals and for the balance between war and peace. more than ceasefires, a truth commission, or the participation of the farc in politics, it was the expectation that the state would reorder property in land that was the focus of speculation in urabá. people made conjectures about these interventions, as they allowed for land to come into or slip through their hands quickly, and they had significant implications for ongoing violence. that so many past state efforts to reorder property yielded ambiguous results—the legalization of invasions had initially facilitated access to land for small farmers, but state response to the subsequent acquisition and consolidation of land by ranchers was minimal—deepened the importance of state interventions around property as critical focal points for speculation. the nature of land as simultaneously concrete and unstable, combined with the possibilities and risks of state interventions into property over land, granted land both potentiality and uncertainty. in gisa weszkalnys’s (2015, 623) discussion of oil exploration, she theorizes speculation as an “observation of potentiality” that offers a mode of participation in opportunities opened by “obscured matter”: material yet unproven oil reserves. she productively moves beyond speculation as something largely financial to the ways in which the material world, in all of its ambiguities and uncertainties, becomes an object of speculation. similarly, land, in all of its particular ambiguities, became the material basis for speculation in the shadow of post-conflict colombia. and yet it is not its existence as obscured matter, but rather as the most visible and apparently concrete form available, that grants land its uncertain potentiality. it is precisely its presumed stability that gives land its speculative value. conceptualizing speculation through land opens up speculation not only as a market disposition but also as a legal analytical position, in which law is structural to conjectures about the future. speculative possession is about staking a claim, and it is also about creating and preserving options of potential property claims that might be made—to title, restitution, or ongoing possession. in this sense, it is about gauging what legal regimes might offer in the future and about opening a space of argument within them. like mnookin and kornhauser’s (1979) bargaining in the shadow of the law, this involves projections of what one might stand to gain or lose, and negotiating accordingly in the present. but it is also about creating space for one’s own potential future claims. possession of land constitutes the active form of opening this space of argument. while weszkalnys (2015) finds that legal instruments are “gestures” of uncertain futures, i argue that law is in fact structural to speculation as an analytical mode. the temporality of speculation in this context is not exclusively financial or prophetic but also—and perhaps primarily—legal. the possibility of possession, title, and other forms of property depend on compliance with legal-temporal parameters, of which land possessors were generally aware. they made conjectures about potential futures on the land based on the time that elapsed without incident, the crops that remained undisturbed or were destroyed, their compliance with legal rules for formalizing their claim, and their past experience of successful invasion. those conducting takings, as well as large landholders, assessed how restitution might affect them and whether landholders’ acquisitions would be questioned, taking action accordingly. these are conjectures about formal legal regimes within informal spaces that, as peterson (2014) demonstrates, are crucial to how speculation operates. they also imply a consciousness of overlapping legal temporalities that people use to assess potential futures and take material action in the present, informed by the past. in the process, past, present, and future repeatedly fold into each other, producing the particular temporal disposition of the shadow of the post-conflict. this temporal disposition is foundational to many sites that, like colombia, find themselves in the long, murky limbo between conflict and post-conflict (rojas pérez 2008). this is often a legal limbo in the formal sense—of peace agreements, amnesties, international criminal responsibility, constitutional transition. but it is also a legal limbo in the everyday sense, in which citizens on the ground are unsure precisely how and when legal regimes might change and what they might gain or lose as a result. this uncertainty creates the conditions for speculation to proliferate, particularly on the likely future objects of legal intervention. in colombia, the primary object in this respect is land. the durative, expandable nature of the near future in colombia is thus intimately and inextricably tied to property over land. as the promise of peace sits on the horizon, land becomes an object of speculation par excellence, based on conjectures about what that peace might hold in store. yet that very speculation continues to feed the war in places like urabá, deepening its intractability. as the state intervenes to reorder property in land in the very places where it has played a central role in the war, new conflicts emerge, continuing cycles of possession and dispossession that do not heed the call to a clear transition from war to peace. as in other post-conflict sites, the issue the war is “about” (shaw 2015) thus becomes the very thing that has the potential to bring peace but does not, creating fertile ground for speculation in the long, expanding shadow of the post-conflict. abstract in colombia’s attempts to bring its decades-long conflict to a close, the state engaged in a broad endeavor to bring about a new era: the “post-conflict.” land restitution, which aims to return and title land to those who lost it in the conflict, was billed as part of the path to peace. in the shadow of the post-conflict, however, restitution has given rise to speculation on uncertain market and legal regimes, as well as regimes of violence, which i explore drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the region of urabá. speculative possession of land calls up historical forms of possession as well as potential futures, defining this shadow as peace is continually deferred. [speculation; land; property; conflict; possession; temporality; colombia] resumen los intentos por terminar el largo conflicto armado en colombia incluyen grandes esfuerzos por parte del estado colombiano orientados a producir una nueva época: el “posconflicto”. la restitución de tierras, una política que aspira devolver y titular tierras a los que las perdieron por causa del conflicto, fue promovida precisamente como parte de dicho esfuerzo hacia la paz. a partir de trabajo etnográfico en la región del urabá exploro como, en la sombra del posconflicto, la restitución de tierras ha traído consigo diversas formas de especulación en torno a regímenes jurídicos, económicos y de violencia. en este contexto, la posesión especulativa de tierras simultáneamente invoca formas históricas de posesión así como futuros posibles, definiendo la sombra del posconflicto mientras la paz continuamente se difiere. [especulación, tierra, propiedad, conflicto, posesión, temporalidad, colombia] notes acknowledgments my thanks go first and foremost to the many people in colombia who welcomed me into their homes and lives over the course of the research on which this article is based. though many of them must remain unnamed here, this research would not have been possible without their generosity of time, thought, trust, and friendship. i thank my colleagues at the center for law, justice and society (dejusticia) and the universidad de los andes law school, where i was affiliated during my research, for many years of sustaining conversations and collaborations. i also thank the university of chicago department of anthropology, the harvard university department of african and african american studies, and the american bar foundation for the supportive and collegial environments they provided for writing and revision. i am grateful for comments on versions of this article and its argument from helena alviar, alejandra azuero, diana bocarejo, lee cabatingan, nicholas carby-denning, jean comaroff, john comaroff, nate ela, ali feser, andrea ford, eric hirsch, julieta lemaitre, joe masco, amy mclachlan, agnes mondragón, erin moore, stephan palmié, kristin peterson, justin richland, diana rodríguez franco, paula rodríguez, steven schwartz, jeremy siegman, kaushik sunder rajan, christien tompkins, and austin zeiderman, as well as from several anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, who improved the article substantially. i also benefited from feedback received on earlier versions of this essay from participants in the american bar foundation doctoral fellows workshop, the northwestern sociology colloquium, the university of chicago workshop on latin america and the caribbean, the magrann conference at rutgers university, and the annual latin american studies association international congress, as well as at a workshop hosted by the zolberg institute on migration and mobility at the new school for social research. different stages of the research and writing of this article were funded by the social science research council; the wenner-gren foundation; the inter-american foundation; the land deal politics initiative; the university of chicago center for latin american studies, department of anthropology, and pozen family center for human rights; the american bar foundation; and the national science foundation under grant no. ses-1655497. 1. names and identifying details of individuals and some locations have been changed to protect anonymity. 2. when land restitution began, there were already multiple legal regimes in place to deal with displacement and dispossession, including statutes and judicial precedent on attention to the displaced population, agrarian reform laws and institutions, and the existing transitional justice regime designed to demobilize paramilitaries. 3. while the term invasion is not a precise legal translation of invasión, i use it here to give a sense of the physical taking of possession implied in invasión, as well as its proliferation in gray zones of legality. 4. i follow local usage throughout this article. 5. this ambiguity was pervasive throughout my fieldwork. in this article, i refer to individuals as they presented themselves to me. 6. thousands of up members were murdered and disappeared in the 1990s, largely eliminating the party. references adams, vincanne, michelle murphy, and adele e. clarke 2009 “anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” subjectivity 28, no. 1: 246–65. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18. ballvé, teo 2013 “grassroots masquerades: development, paramilitaries, and land laundering in colombia.” geoforum 50: 62–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.08.001. barad, karen 2007 meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bergquist, charles, ricardo peñaranda, and 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iceland and decode genetics in a world of speculation. berkeley: university of california press. garcía, clara inés 1996 urabá: región, actores y conflicto, 1960–1990. medellín: iner. guyer, jane i. 2007 “prophecy and the near future: thoughts on macroeconomic, evangelical, and punctuated time.” american ethnologist 34, no. 3: 409–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.409. hetherington, kregg 2011 guerrilla auditors: the politics of transparency in neoliberal paraguay. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ho, karen 2009 liquidated: an ethnography of wall street. durham, n.c.: duke university press. hrw (human rights watch) 2013 the risk of returning home: violence and threats against displaced people reclaiming land in colombia. new york: human rights watch. ingold, tim 1993 “the temporality of the landscape.” world archaeology 25, no. 2: 152–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235. jain, sarah lochlann 2007 “living in prognosis: toward an elegiac politics.” 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https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500011105. theidon, kimberly 2007 “transitional subjects: the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of former combatants in colombia.” international journal of transitional justice 1, no. 1: 66–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijm011. 2013 intimate enemies: violence and reconciliation in peru. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. uprimny-yepes, rodrigo, and nelson camilo sánchez 2010 “los dilemas de la restitución de tierras en colombia.” estudios socio-jurídicos 12, no. 2: 305–42. https://revistas.urosario.edu.co/index.php/sociojuridicos/article/view/1373. weszkalnys, gisa 2015 “geology, potentiality, speculation: on the indeterminacy of first oil.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 4: 611–39. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.08. zaloom, caitlin 2007 “future knowledge.” american ethnologist 34, no. 3: 444–46. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.444. 2009 “how to read the future: the yield curve, affect, and financial prediction.” public culture 21, no. 2: 245–68. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2008-028. zeiderman, austin 2016 endangered city: the politics of security and risk in bogotá. durham, n.c.: duke university press. utopias of oil: private equity and entrepreneurial ambition in the u.s. oil and gas industry cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 738-763, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.06 utopias of oil: private equity and entrepreneurial ambition in the u.s. oil and gas industry mette m. high university of st andrews https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5752-6810 “if you had met me twenty years ago, i would have been living under a bridge,” brad said to me while shaking his head in near disbelief.1 at that time in his life, he had lost his job in the oil and gas industry in colorado in the united states. he had subsequently lost his wife in a messy divorce, and eventually, as he put it, “lost pretty much everything.” in an attempt to “keep his head above water,” he relied on the generosity of a hotel manager who let him sit all day in the hotel’s restaurant, using a corner table as a temporary office space. from that table, he tried to get his life back together. today, brad is one of colorado’s most successful oil and gas industry players, now the ceo of his fourth company. “wanna meet me at church?” brad asked one day as we were arranging to meet up. i knew he was not referring to one of the many churches regularly frequented by his friends in the industry (see high 2019). instead, he was referring to the luxurious cigar bar officially known as churchill bar at the brown palace hotel in downtown denver. with its oak paneling, deep chesterfield sofas, and extensive selection of cigars and single malts, it served as the regular meeting place for financiers, lobbyists, and people in the oil and gas industry. half hidden in a thick cloud of smoke and dressed in a three-piece pinstripe suit, brad waved me over as soon as i arrived. having just received his latest delivery of cigars, he carefully inspected and arranged them in his personal mahogany box. as we chatted, he reflected on the period in his life when he sat at that corner table in that restaurant. it was 1999 and oil prices had hit a new low. companies were selling assets in desperate attempts to reduce losses, and it proved a good moment to buy acreage. if only brad had had the money. he said, a friend of mine called me up. he said, “you know brad, we are looking to get rid of these assets. . . .” and it was a field that i had actually drilled years ago in the eighties! so, i knew it pretty well. i said, “i’d love to have a look at it!” i ended up negotiating a deal and got that asset. they accepted my offer and luckily didn’t ask for a deposit. and then i thought, “now, what the hell do i do?” it was 2.5 million dollars! and i had little to nothing. so, i began looking for private equity investors, and i would say, “guys, i have got this deal. we have got it all negotiated. how about i contribute the properties and you contribute the money, and we are 50-50 partners?” and they’d say, “we have a better idea. how about you contribute the properties, we contribute the money, and if we make any money, we’ll give you 10 percent?” it sounded like a shitty deal to me! and that was when i realized just how naïve i was about private equity investors! being initially tempted by and attracted to private equity finance is far from unique to brad. in my ethnographic fieldwork, which i have carried out since 2013 in colorado among people who work in the oil and gas industry and its affiliated financial sector, many of those who wanted to set up their own oil and gas production companies had been captured by euphoria at the prospect of securing private equity investment, yet ultimately found themselves let down by those investors’ conservative approach to wealth creation. compared to other forms of financial infrastructure, private equity has a particularly opaque quality, yet it forms a fundamental part of the scaffolding of contemporary finance. attracting vast amounts of capital from keen investors, private equity firms directly invest that capital into private companies or, through buyouts, de-list public companies and render them private. away from the glare of public markets and free from the reporting requirements that they entail, private equity firms operate in a world of privacy, if not secrecy, enabled by the way in which financial markets are organized (souleles 2017). the spectacle of investor excitement, anticipation, and speculation can flourish without the constraints that inform the trading in public markets. the “magic show,” as anna tsing (2000) labeled it, can hence prove spectacular, conjuring up dreams of profit that can envelop the world. in addition to wealthy individuals, investors are mostly large institutions such as insurance companies, university endowments, and pension funds.2 but it is not only potential investors who are captivated by the possibilities in private equity finance. many management teams, including oil and gas entrepreneurs, compete tirelessly to obtain these investments. forming a bridge that connects investors and management teams, private equity firms tickle the desires of many and intensify their dreams for the future. it has become an infrastructure that not only underlies much of the world’s financial system but also one that encourages and promotes a particular entrepreneurial optimism toward wealth creation. within the oil and gas industry, stories abound of how private equity was wildly abundant in the mid-2000s following the collapse of the dot-com bubble. people describe how private equity firms targeted young ambitious management teams. many millions would be committed and the private equity firms would say, “don’t worry about it. build your team, go out and look for something.” it was approached as a golden ticket that could turn any dream, any wild idea, into reality. it was seen as an invitation to do something different and to try to capitalize on what had not yet been explored. so much money, just sitting there and waiting for an entrepreneur to put it to work. reflecting on capital markets over time, a ceo commented in 2018 that “there is still a lot of money on the sidelines in private equity.” even as the covid-19 pandemic led to momentary reductions in energy demand and market capitalization, it has been noted how “private equity firms are already adapting—looking both for ways to salvage adversely affected parts of their portfolios and for new bets that emerging trends could support” (mckinsey 2020, 2). with oil and gas prices now much higher than they were before the onset of the pandemic and the u.s. rig count returning to pre-pandemic levels, a leading investment commentator has remarked how “around $30tn of net new capital needs to be injected into the [oil and gas] energy sector. so, the industry is likely to become significantly more capital intensive than it is today” (transition economist 2020; my emphasis).3,4 to take advantage of this opportunity, rumors abound of the various funds raised at any given time, with targets so high that it seems unreal. these rumors invite aspiring start-ups like brad to imagine the impossible and believe it can be realized. in her work on “the economic imagination,” hannah appel (2014, 614) describes the importance for present-day financial capitalism of daring to dream and imagine a world otherwise, while also bringing attention to the conditions that enable “the proliferation of ideas.” she shows how members of the alternative banking working group, now known as occupy the future, offer radical reimaginations of financial instruments, such as mortgage products and derivatives, unhinging them from private pursuits of profit and bringing them into a public-interest arena.5 as advocated by the former bankers in the group, capitalism’s tools of traded debt can be fundamentally reimagined within a non-capitalist framework, enabling the establishment of equitable financial markets that will benefit the many rather than the few. new imaginings of economic life occur not only on the “unruly edges” of capitalism where experiments in collaboration show us other ways of living (tsing 2015). nor are they limited to revolutionary spaces where movements based on direct action and direct democracy challenge and reimagine “a world worth living in” (graeber 2011, 7). as shown by appel, the economic imagination to think the world otherwise also flourishes among capitalism’s own professional specialists of financial experts who have “lost faith” in current configurations of capitalism. these multiple and diverse “zones of possibility” (appel 2014, 603) thus offer ways of reimagining capitalism and embracing creative world-making in the present moment. yet the possibilities for economic imagination and envisioning new worlds are not limited to modalities of opposition, critique, and resistance. indeed, as noted by karl polanyi (2001 [1944]), the economic imagination and the forming of idealized worlds constitutes the very core of capitalism itself. classical economists such as thomas malthus, david ricardo, and adam smith, and contemporary free market theorists such as milton friedman, have crafted their own imaginative worlds in the form of self-regulating markets, natural prices, and perfect liberty. they imagine a society with no restrictions on trade movements, with no institutional constraints on price setting, and with deregulated capital markets. these economic imaginings “could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness” (polanyi 2001 [1944], 3). as others have noted, “the goal of a disembedded, fully self-regulating market economy is a utopian project; it is something that cannot exist” (block 2001, xxiv). as with other utopian projects, the proponents of liberal economics entertained and depicted the possibility of building another world. grounded in difference, disruption, and transgression from the everyday, utopias can take endless forms. what for some constitutes utopia might for others spell dystopia. indeed, the term utopia itself, as coined by thomas more for his fantastical tale of a fictional island society, pivots ambiguously, if not intentionally, on different greek prefixes, offering the meaning of a “no place,” in the sense of a nonexistent society, and a “good place” as a place of true well-being (outopos/eutopos) (mumford 1965, 276; see also bauman 2009 [1976], 1). utopias are thus caught in ambiguous and open-ended imaginative tensions between being nonexistent and/or being good.6 as such, they offer sites of judgment on what exists and what could be. although for polanyi, the free-market economists tried but could not achieve their goal of a truly disembedded, self-regulated market economy, their idealized, ideological constructions of individual freedom continue to encourage entrepreneurial ambitions, optimism, and desires for crafting another world. in my ethnographic fieldwork, i have listened to many hopeful accounts that draw on imaginative utopian frameworks. these accounts reach beyond the tasks of designing a company structure, building a management team, entering the “deal flow,” drawing up a plan of development for the drilling of wells, and other more mundane aspects of setting up a new oil and gas company. participating in and embracing “oil capitalism” (szeman 2007) as enacted in the american west today, my interlocutors articulate orientations toward spaces, objects, and practices that brim with optimism, desire, and belief in the possibility of other, better worlds. in doing so, they tap into the core relation between oil and capital. oil is a commodity generative of not only capital expansion and accumulation but also a kind of “money magic” (apter 2008, 249) that invites spectacles of anticipated transformation (see also weszkalnys 2008).7 as andrew apter (2008, 2) has shown in the context of nigeria’s oil boom in the 1970s, the sudden influx of money gave rise to a “spectacle of opulence.” the nigerian state spent lavishly on expensive technology, swelled the civil service, fetishized consumption, and nurtured patronage networks, all while promoting relatively little domestic production. buoyed by the economic potentials of its vast oil reserves, where “fortunes appeared overnight without any apparent relation to capital investment or hard work” (apter 2008, 8), the nigerian state embraced lofty ideals and exhilarating optimisms for its postcolonial nation-building. but when oil prices declined and an extended economic crisis hit in the 1990s, the dreams and visions crashed, contributing to widespread austerity and a pervasive sense of cynicism. as apter (2008, 251) notes, “oil was transformed from the lifeblood of the nation into the bad blood of corrupt government,” echoing michael watts’s (1994) observation in nigeria of oil being initially perceived as black gold but then transformed into the devil’s excrement. this potential for state imaginaries of grand transformation associated with oil discoveries has also been perceptively studied by fernando coronil in his work on how oil underwrote the power and myth of the venezuelan state. as petrodollars of the 1970s fostered “a sense of inconsequence, of unaccountability, of society as a spectacle” (coronil 1997, 317), the state launched huge projects that engendered collective fantasies of venezuela’s progress and modernity. the oil wealth “created the illusion that instantaneous modernization lay at hand, that torrents of oil money would change the flow of history and launch the country into the future” (coronil 1997, 10). the state was like a magician, creating a fantastical show while concealing the artifice of its production. while these works focus specifically on how states draw on the “money magic” associated with oil discoveries, timothy mitchell (2011) suggests that it is not only the oil rents but also the global oil infrastructure that contributes to these state imaginaries of grand transformation. whereas other energy sources, such as coal, are relatively tied to their particular place of extraction, oil is produced, traded, transported, refined, and consumed through global networks. oil’s globality, according to mitchell (2011, 134), brings about a flexibility and uprootedness that has contributed to a “new conception of the economy as an object that could grow without limits.” in stark contrast to mid-twentieth-century warnings of “the limits to growth” and finite supply of natural resources (meadows et al. 1972), the economy is now widely imagined as inexhaustible, with endless potential for growth and expansion. the era of globally traded oil initiated not only changing energy systems but also an era of utopian horizons. as such, oil is constitutive and generative of the grand imaginative work that i have encountered during my fieldwork. even in the face of growing global efforts to mitigate carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and of concerted attempts to enhance the potential of alternative energy sources, oil and gas industry actors remain committed to exploring utopian possibilities within oil and gas. motivated by a desire to “do oil differently,” as they put it, they offer deliberate contemplations on how the oil and gas industry in colorado operates today. and they do so without seeking to create alternatives to capitalism. to explore how oil utopias are both encouraged and ultimately disciplined by financial institutions, by their ethos and their practices, i draw on my ongoing ethnographic research in the oilfields and beyond. in weld county, home to more than 22,000 active oil and gas wells, fieldwork has taken me into the offices of landmen who negotiate and acquire mineral rights leases to the land where operations are planned and carried out. it has taken me out on the drilling rigs and the smaller work-over rigs, where operations often involve a huge number of trucks, equipment, and people.8 it has taken me into the crews’ “shops” where trucks and equipment are based, as well as to the producing operators’ field offices in the county seat of greeley, where wells are monitored digitally and engineers are on constant standby. it has taken me to the offices of environmental subcontractors, surveying well pads and reporting spills and leaks, and into the homes of people who have oil wells, disposal wells, or injection wells right on their property—as well as into the homes of former workers who have reached retirement, experienced layoffs, or been involved in terrible accidents. it has taken me into executive headquarters in denver and up to the top floors of corporate governance with its presidents, ceos, chairpersons, and boards of directors, as well as into the private equity firms and private investor firms located nearby. my hosts have let me into their work places and to the events that take place there. sometimes they have given me an office, other times they have let me shadow them as they go about their workday. they have invited me to corporate events, such as intense investor calls, in-house client presentations, and lavish customer-appreciation parties. they have also invited me to join them for family barbecues, dinners with friends, dog walks in the evening, church services on sundays, and whatever else forms part of their everyday lives. the present essay draws on this participant observation along with more than 150 recorded interviews with variously positioned interlocutors. my aim is to show how by providing capital investment for start-ups, private equity firms invite spaces of utopia where oil entrepreneurs’ dreams can flourish. such spaces afford new imaginative horizons within an industry otherwise driven by clear and uncompromising commodity-production objectives. capitalizing on the inequalities in extractive economies, some entrepreneurs seek to promote an ethos of care and inclusion toward what they consider to be “under-loved assets,” whether human or nonhuman. however, their encounters with private equity investors also crystalize and reassert a markedly conservative ethos that informs the circulation of finance capital. disciplining entrepreneurs’ ambitions toward the conventional, investor interests desiccate their more daring and creative visions. in making this argument, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the contemporary life of capitalism and the role of economic imagination by suggesting that we attend more seriously to entrepreneurial ambitions and articulations of capitalist utopia. these utopic projects, enthused but not realized, help us see the conditions for producing and maintaining familiar capitalist forms. doing oil differently producing oil and gas is capital-intensive, and the industry has an ever-rising appetite for investment to finance its projects.9 the industry used to borrow most of its money from banks. yet following the financial crisis of 2007/2008, and then a drop in crude oil prices in 2014, banks have introduced tighter lending controls, particularly for smaller private production companies. as a financial advisor has noted, it is extremely difficult for smaller oil and gas companies to attract financing from banks on what he considers to be “reasonable terms” (brogan 2014, 2). so while larger companies can get bank loans, start-ups have to look elsewhere. whereas start-ups in other industries would turn to venture capitalists and so-called angel investors, this is rarely considered a possibility in oil and gas, because venture capitalists and angel investors often offer smaller investments than required by oil producers.10 my interlocutors also complain that at a time when investors see growing financial possibilities in renewables, “oil and gas isn’t considered trendy” and “has no way of competing with tech and biotech.” as acknowledged by its own participants, the oil and gas industry start-up sector appears unfashionable and unattractive for most investors. john was a civil engineer from houston in his mid-thirties. he had not intended to work in oil and gas; actually, when he was in college, he had specifically not wanted to work in this industry. he described his family as “a bunch of oilmen” and thought he would do something different. yet he struggled to find a job and so changed his mind and now works as an operations manager at well sites across colorado. leaning against his pickup truck and admiring a herd of buffalo in the distance, john laughed and said, what we do in this industry changes constantly. we can now drill laterals that we didn’t even dare dream of ten years ago! we can now minimize our footprint with new compact well pad designs that totally outshine what we had before! we develop so fast because every [economic] downturn requires of us to do that if we want to stay in business. we have to constantly find better ways of doing what we do. which is exciting. . . . but i think we are pretty bad at communicating this. people think we are stuck in the past. they don’t know how we develop. it gives us a bad reputation and we constantly have to battle against it. in the united states, the public perception of the oil and gas industry is particularly difficult to navigate for industry actors who work in states deeply divided on the topic. in places where oil prospectors are celebrated as part of the state’s history and economy, angel investors are understood to be interested and sometimes keen to invest. in those parts of the country, investors are described as “understanding the industry” and “wanting to support it.” as a budding entrepreneur in colorado said to me, “it’s totally different in texas, in oklahoma. we are just waiting for some high-net worth individual to come out of north dakota. but here in colorado it’s different. it’s not going to happen.” in recent years, several oil and gas–related political initiatives have been proposed in colorado. some of them have gained enough signatures to be put on the state ballot and have come close to winning a majority. these have related to changing the planning procedures, protecting property rights, increasing the setbacks between wells and homes or public spaces, giving local government authorities the right to prohibit oil and gas drilling, to name but a few. in april 2019, the state senate passed and the governor signed into law a new bill that changed the criteria used in oil and gas planning and regulation. it grants local governments power to regulate future oil and gas developments within their jurisdictions and has altered the overall mission of state regulators to ensure that oil and gas are developed in ways that must also protect public health and the environment. yet, in response to high-profile environmental protests against oil and gas, such as the dakota access pipeline protests (#nodapl; see dhillon and estes 2016), several states across the united states have now introduced so-called critical infrastructure bills that enable heightened penalties for protesting near oil and gas installations, including pipelines. in colorado, with its “purple” political constituency, this initiative has only once been put to a vote in the house, which defeated it.11 in the experience of my interlocutors, such local political initiatives are hugely important for and directly affect their chances of securing investment. not only can the initiatives alter the rules and regulations for the industry but their visibility also contributes to an environment that discourages venture capitalists and angel investors from investing in oil and gas activities. they rattle and disturb the “magic show” so necessary to drum up expectations and speculations (tsing 2000), bringing into question whether oil and gas makes for the right asset class for investment. rather than having unhindered access to global capital markets through venture capital firms and angel investors, oil and gas entrepreneurs in colorado thus feel dependent on private equity to realize their dreams. mark was someone who wanted to set up his own oil and gas company with two of his friends. the first time we met, even before he told me of his plans, i could sense his excitement. his eyes were glowing with enthusiasm and his hands articulated his thoughts faster than he could put them into words. we talked about the “wildcatters”—the nineteenth-century prospectors who drilled remote exploratory wells and, as they found oil, eventually founded the industry.12 while giant multinational corporations dominate the industry today, the independent wildcatters brought it into existence. celebrated by the industry for their courage and bravery, persistence and hard work, wildcatters continue to be significant for many industry actors today as their “moral exemplars” (humphrey 1997). positioned as legends of the oil patch, wildcatters such as j. h. williams and colonel drake drilled the first commercial oil wells in north america in the late 1850s. as noted in history books, “[these men] could keep on going, not only when the current was with [them] but when it was most decidedly running the other way” (tait 1946, 13; see also gray 2008, 24). drilling dry holes, taking on escalating debt, and confronting the disbelief of others, these wildcatters were admired by mark for continuing to pursue their dreams, against all odds. for mark, captain lucas, who drilled the spindletop gusher in 1901, exemplified how wildcatters dared to invent new means to find oil, demonstrating not only their technical abilities but also the fast pace with which they managed to make technical advances and innovate the industry. at an industry event held every year in denver, the so-called wildcatter of the year award is presented to a prominent leader in the industry, applauded for having “an entrepreneurial spirit” in undertaking exploratory work in the american west today. although conflicts and disputes over natural-resource exploration have been central to this history and continue to form part of its evolution today, this contestation is not detectable at this industry event. nor do attendees generally reference the highly gendered and white history of the wildcatters.13 instead, the legacies of the wildcatters are emphatically commemorated and celebrated, with award winners being asked to continue the moral example of their industry forefathers. approaching the oilfield with an entrepreneurial spirit is thus anchored in the past, providing inspiration and encouragement to continue to “dream big,” as mark put it. and that was precisely mark’s desire. his ambition was, in his words, “nothing less than a grand, reimagining of the oil and gas industry.” he wanted to do something he thought had never been done before. he and his two industry friends were practicing christians and closely involved with charity work. after work and on weekends, they often helped out at a homeless shelter in denver, offered their diy skills at a home improvement program for low-income households, and cooked weekly meals at their church. working in an industry where, mark recognized, people “make a pile of money,” he and his friends also donated substantial amounts to these various charities. but he wanted to do more. he wanted to start a company that through the production of oil and gas would bring into existence a different world. as he said in 2016, my dream is to have an oil and gas business that is basically a social entrepreneurship, where the motive is not just profit. so the way i walk around the world, my goal is to glorify god. i like to think about: how do i do this oil and gas business in a way that really glorifies god and is a course for good? i would like it to be a tool by which we can direct lots of money to places to solve problems. mark felt excited about the prospect of setting up an oil and gas company that, rather than only lining the pockets of its investors and management team, would also give others a chance to profit from their business. first, he wanted to recruit people from disadvantaged backgrounds to work in the office, giving them a chance to acquire new skills and make a decent living. he wanted to offer them a new path, away from the streets of denver, its homeless shelters and soup kitchens. by doing this successfully, the company could demonstrate to other companies that, through oil, it was possible to remove some of the social and economic barriers that prevented the disadvantaged from participating fully in society. second, he wanted to set up technical training programs so the company could provide field opportunities in partnership with another company with equipment and expertise to carry out drilling jobs. creating horizontal relations across an otherwise markedly vertical industry, he envisioned a situation where his company could sponsor the skills training of a worker in return for a cheaper drilling contract for mark’s company. that way, the industry could bring “opportunity making” and “skills training” into its economic negotiations and contracts. and last, at a time when many oil companies are reducing what they mockingly refer to as their “social tax,” mark wanted the company to commit a significant proportion of its profits to charities and local communities in the region where they would work. he wanted oil to benefit that region, and not only those who held the mineral rights or received compensation for surface works. many scholars have commented on how oil production embraces a specific “petrocultural” ethical regime that seeks to create relations of distance and detachment from local communities and national governments, thus allowing the industry to extract wealth and claim limited responsibility for socioeconomic inequalities and environmental impacts (mitchell 2011; appel 2012; ferguson 2005). however, for mark, oil could also be used to address socioeconomic problems. for him, oil was a gift from god and not just a material object of wealth (see also high 2019). he saw it as a blessing that could help people by also bringing benevolence and forgiveness into their lives. it was a seed in the present, offering possibilities for how to participate in and change the future. treasuring the natural resource of oil and treasuring his relationships with others, mark envisioned oil as the basis for relations of care and, ultimately, human flourishing. mark regarded this idea as a “grand reimagining of the industry,” indicating that other, better worlds were possible. yet his vision entailed no alternative to capitalism. he did not embrace a utopian vision that questioned or critiqued late capitalism. indeed, the ability to accumulate greater profits from oil and gas was fundamental to his hope, desire, and belief in creating what he saw to be a better world. his utopia presumed the existence of deep inequalities and comparative advantage, centering on the management team’s financial ability as well as its willingness to be charitable (see also wuthnow 2012). by removing some of the stumbling blocks for the disadvantaged, this utopia sought to enable these particular individuals’ full participation in capitalist society. as such, it can be seen as writing a new, neoliberal chapter of the classic frontier myth of the american west, that “elusive western dream” of white masculine desire to be in control and wrest value from the environment (ronda 2004, 55, 71–72)—a drama of inequalities in which dispossession and exploration created lands of profit and men of significance. however, mark and his friends came to realize that private equity firms did not share their enthusiasm for this entrepreneurial project. a private equity oil rush around the time when mark and his friends pitched their dream to potential investors, the financial sector reported that the so-called private equity oil rush was happening (slav 2017; see also schuetze and berry 2015). with funds having earned “seven dollars on the dollar” from investment in oil and gas assets, private equity investors were keen to make substantial investments. the rush was partly prompted by the oil and gas industry downturn, generating cheaper valuations of assets. suddenly, purchased acreage and physical installations such as production facilities and gas processing plants were estimated to be worth a lot less if put on the market. moreover, operating costs—such as drilling contracts, work-over rigs, water hauling, wastewater disposal, and pipeline services—dropped. these cheaper valuations and lower costs proved attractive to investors. coupled with a more general sense among private equity firms that their investments in oil and gas met or exceeded their expectations, it was not difficult for private equity firms at this particular moment to raise capital for new investment funds. james was in his early fifties and vice president of a private equity firm in denver. at the time of our meeting, a rival firm was on track to raise $4 billion to buy small private oil and gas companies. james explained, there’s all this money that is sitting on the sidelines and wants to be invested. we want to deploy the money into oil and gas. so we go out and attract the investors behind us. colleges, universities, pension funds, rich individuals, you know, everything you can think of. we’ll take their money and spend it with the right oil and gas management teams. the management teams will also put in some money. we don’t really care how much. we just want it to really hurt if it doesn’t work. once the management team has achieved, let’s say, ah, two times on the money, they will get a 10 percent return and our investors will then get their seed money back, plus like an 8 percent return. when talking to private equity firms in denver, it emerges clearly that this is considered high-risk investment, especially as many of the investments are in new ventures. for the investors, this perceived level of risk justifies the highly unequal distribution of capital gains, rendering the investments potentially extremely lucrative for the private equity firm (see also souleles 2019; zaloom 2004). perhaps as a result of the generous profit margins, this form of finance is playing a highly significant role in the u.s. oil and gas industry. private equity-backed assets are particularly dominant in north america (bain & company 2022; mckinsey & company 2022). in addition to the prospect of high profits, investors are tempted by the relatively relaxed environmental and other regulations that exist in the united states. moreover, with the advent of the much-disputed technology of hydraulic fracturing combined with horizontal drilling (also known as “fracking”), the oil and gas production in the u.s. shale fields can now respond and adapt to market dynamics in ways not possible in the past. in this attractive investor environment, the number of private equity–backed oil and gas companies is fast rising and currently numbers 437 in total (enverus 2022; see also new york times 2021). while these assets are located in the united states, private equity firms attract investors on a global scale. as a fund manager said emphatically, there is no shortage of capital out there if we want to go do something. we can bring in mexican pension investments; we can bring in something from china. we do deals with various sole investors and institutions like that. we can access it all. this sense of unrestricted global access and agility echoes what karen ho (2005, 68) has described as “wall street triumphalist discourses of global capitalism.” this taken-for-granted macro context through which the firm’s position is expressed, consolidated, and perpetuated flourishes also in the financial sector in denver. yet it is important to recognize that these are not only discourses and narratives, dreams and imaginations. these are also financial contracts and transactions through which inequalities are made and reproduced. as brad in the introduction experienced, private equity firms use their strong market position to their advantage in their deal-offering. during a lunch meeting, a private equity executive shared with me the details of his firm’s recent purchase of an oil and gas company that went through bankruptcy. he concluded his account by saying, “we are not preying on the weak, but . . . essentially we are.” while financiers, such as this executive, gather at the churchill bar, hopeful entrepreneurs will work very hard just to obtain an initial meeting with a private equity firm to present their investment propositions. depending on the particular circumstances, entrepreneurs often present their propositions as projects of passion and persuasion to the firm’s dedicated oil and gas investment team. a personal story relating to the assets, a long-standing professional connection, or some other experience that turns the spreadsheet figures into material and affective presences that can arouse the excitement and curiosity not only of the entrepreneurs but also, hopefully, of the investor team. yet among the latter, i have detected much less concern for the personal nature of the investment proposition. with more than thirty years of oil and gas industry experience, a partner at a private equity firm said: we have to make sure that with the proper cash infusion, with changes to the management team, we can turn it around. we have to make sure that we are comfortable with the asset. we gather as much data as we can and talk to the people. if they are in trouble and looking for a buyer, they will furnish us with operating statements. they will be looking for any buyer they can get, which is great for us! but sometimes all you have to operate with is state data. and that’s harder because that way you won’t have the financial end of it. you’ll only have the production end. but i work with super-strong financial people. they can tear into things regardless of what type of investment it is. they can take a look at a spreadsheet and will say, “i like that” or “i don’t like that.” they just make a quick judgement on it. turning entrepreneurs’ personal projects into comparative cash-flow entities, the initial investment evaluation can prove a relatively quick process. akin to caitlin zaloom’s (2003, 264) description of how futures traders at the chicago board of trade and the london stock exchange engage with quantitative information, these financial markets professionals embrace the dictates of informational transparency by paring market data down to a minimum. in private equity, this is also explained in terms of the extraordinary volume of propositions that are sourced and considered by the firms. and it is further accentuated at this moment in time when private equity firms compete in an “oil rush,” keen to get ahead of their competitors for the best investment propositions. this thus makes for an environment in which the pace of evaluation has increased sharply and private equity firms stand ready to deploy their capital. the funds have been raised and the firms have to deliver on their promise of investment. yet to secure the best deals, the financiers do not offer higher valuations of the assets or increase the capital gains for a start-up. rather, they prefer to source new opportunities internally. as james, mentioned earlier, explained, what i try to do through the people i know here in town, through my connections, is to find out about deals before they even happen. by the time someone is marketing something through the sales houses around here, through the investment banks, it’s kind of too late. we don’t want it at that point. we want to make a private deal. james’s preference for “private deals” is not unusual. securing deals ahead of other suitors enables him to acquire the deal for likely a lower price than if the entrepreneurial project had been publicly marketed. at both the initial deal-offering stage and once a deal has been secured, the private equity industry thus operates in a world of confidentiality and concealment. an industry report notes how “not all businesses are suited for life in the public eye” (ernst & young 2018, 3), a sentiment strongly shared by my interlocutors who berate the extensive filing and reporting requirements for publicly listed companies. for them, it is crucial that the details of offerings and deals are not public knowledge.14 drawing on legal principles of confidentiality and proprietary information, private equity firms actively and emphatically protect their activities and render them little known. as a financial infrastructure that mediates between investors and entrepreneurs, private equity financing not only generously favors participating investors but also hides the highly unequal financial arrangements from public view. as brad experienced in his first encounter with a private equity firm, entrepreneurs might not know what to expect from private equity investors and the revelation of their disproportionately larger share of total profits can prove devastating for the aspiring entrepreneur. the privacy of private equity that emerges from the organization of different capital markets thus creates a space for intense investor accumulation and speculation. however, with the distribution of capital gains kept invisible and away from public scrutiny, private equity manages to continue to instill excitement and belief among entrepreneurs that they might secure an exciting private equity deal for their venture. utopias of oil having worked in the top echelons of a medium-sized oil and gas production company, steve had been in the industry for so long that he seemed to know everyone, whether on the rigs or in denver. for a while he had considered setting up his own company with three others, and eventually in 2018, rumors of the “private equity oil rush” spurred them on to give it a try. they wanted to do something different, something ambitious. inspired by the ways material waste has now become a resource on capitalist markets (alexander and reno 2012; alexander and sanchez 2018), they wanted to transform the world so that liquid waste from fossil-fuel extraction would also become a much-wanted resource. for them, it had the potential to fundamentally change the way in which we think of natural resources and the environment more broadly. one of steve’s partners had a patent on a technological process that could remove minerals from brine-rich wastewater coming out of some oil and gas wells, quarries, and other extraction sites. companies that focus their attention and efforts on the natural resource extracted from the ground and for which they receive money now pay others to haul and dispose of their industrial wastewater. the wastewater is sent to treatment plants that seek to remove oil, chemicals, and suspended solids before it is injected into wells for permanent underground storage. while concerns about the toxicity and long-term storage of the wastewater have been raised (kroepsch 2019; wylie 2018), my interlocutors mostly considered the wastewater an unwanted material burden and a financial cost. but steve explained, imagine! we will invert everything! with our technology, we will create a world where all the stuff that no one wants, suddenly becomes the stuff that everyone wants. per barrel, the brine just as it comes out at the wellhead will be worth more than the oil itself! all the industrial wastewater that companies right now don’t know what to do with, will become an asset. can you imagine that? steve’s plan was to receive money for taking other companies’ industrial wastewater. using their patented technology, they would then extract from the water a range of critical and strategic minerals such as lithium, thus turning harmful waste into a useful resource. steve considered this idea radical. he described it as offering the beginning of a world centered around waste. he saw the environment as much more abundant and plentiful in its riches than reflected in current industry practices. often just disposing of industrial wastewater in large reservoirs and wells, the industry, he found, proved careless and wasteful by abandoning something potentially valuable. and with growing concerns about climate change and intensifying efforts toward decarbonizing energy systems, minerals such as lithium would become increasingly in-demand. for steve, failure to recognize and bestow value gave evidence of a lack of financial appreciation, a shortcoming in capitalist resourcefulness he deemed morally deplorable. he regarded climate change as a planetary crisis, but also as a business opportunity to innovate and transform how we value and appreciate the environment and care for the unwanted. the oil and gas industry, he felt, focused so narrowly on a singular resource to be extracted that it ignored everything else. it piled up the waste as if it would just disappear when out of sight in underground storage wells. by renewing attention to the environment’s resources, steve emphasized how his new technology could produce minerals from our existing extractive landscapes. this would halt the much-hyped interest among governments and companies in mining asteroids in space or mining deposits on the ocean floor for these minerals. he considered these high-tech forms of natural resource extraction not only costly but also highly invasive and misdirected, representing a failure to appreciate the natural abundance that already surrounds us. referring to industrial wastewater as an “abandoned” and “underloved asset,” steve described a flow of income not just possible but also unrecognized. in the industry, people often invoke a language of care when describing assets that have not yet been rendered financially active, such as “orphan wells” that have been drilled but are still to be brought into production (wood 2019). in this same vein, wastewater processing had the potential, for steve, to mark the “dawn of a new day” (as stated on the company website) by bringing into existence a resource world that conjoined care and profit. however, after more than a year of trying, the group of friends was close to giving up. as steve said despairingly one evening, this isn’t something for private equity guys. they want more conventional operations. they have a herd mentality where no one wants to stick their head up and go for something new. because, if it goes wrong, what are they going to say to their investors? through steve’s trials, it became clear how the “private equity oil rush” was a rush for familiar investment propositions. while it was a relatively new financial infrastructure considered a so-called alternative asset class, it was anything but alternative in its ambition. daring propositions that sought to do something new were rejected in favor of more conservative ventures. of the entrepreneurs i have met in colorado, the one who has tried the hardest to realize his dream is mark. by 2018, he and his friends had come to see that private equity financing was not an option for their proposed venture. as mark said: we could never marry up the right asset with the right funding. and receiving zero salary, that’s tough. we did that for a year and a half, a long time. it was hard on us. lots of blood, sweat, and tears. we were spending a lot of our own money, taking money out of our retirement, taking money out of our spouses’ retirement, cutting health insurance, just trying to do it. what i need to find are equity backers, capital providers, who understand our concept, who don’t oppose it. who understand the vision that i’m trying to create and are ok with that model. these private equity firms, they are agnostic. they don’t care, as far as i can tell. and the ones that do care, are generally not in favor of what i do. they don’t like my industry. . . . mark and his friends were devastated when they had to give up on their start-up plans. and indeed, to this day, the dream still lives on, but is precisely just that: a utopia in the sense of an emphatic “no place,” a nonexistent world marked by distance and difference from what exists now. their grand reimagining of the oil and gas industry does not appeal to private equity firms. while the possibility of securing private equity funding supports the promise of great agency, of creating something that has never been created before, doing something that has not been done before, management teams’ utopian world-building projects are often crushed in the fight for private equity funds. instead, what does appeal to the private equity firms is the possibility of generating a huge profit, even when oil prices are low. as james, mentioned before, described: we are just gobbling up stuff and buying it for pennies on the dollar. it’s working out fantastically! we are very experienced in dealing with bankruptcies and kind of messier deals. there’s a lot of buyers that won’t deal with that stuff. now, we frankly would welcome that because the messier it is, the cheaper it’s going to be. we go in and basically just buy the assets and put together the management team that we want to run it. we need to know that we have the ability to turn it around and can get it cash-flow-positive within a reasonable amount of time. even at day 1. the drop in oil prices in late 2014 changed the landscape for investment in the u.s. oil and gas industry. but it did not discourage investors. instead it brought forward a ruthless and impatient appetite for even greater reward as investors eyed opportunities to achieve still higher rates of return within even more contracted time frames. in the case of james, by going for the “messier deals,” he was now getting his substantial share of net profits, but on a much smaller investment. and in addition to higher financial returns, his firm also had much more control over the oil and gas company. the combination of lower commodity prices and limited access to capital meant that management teams could easily be replaced, partly or fully, and business strategies altered if and when the private equity firm so desired. the ability to affect how to do oil and gas business was thus solidly in the hands of the private equity firm. as another entrepreneur who had to abandon his oil utopia for a conventional proposition commented despondently: “they control you. in a public company you are working for the shareholders. in a private company, you’re simply the management team for the benefit of the private equity firm.” as an investment infrastructure that underlies much of the circulation of finance capital today, private equity encourages and inspires entrepreneurial ambition. yet it supports only those management teams willing to accept the highly unequal terms of business and the forceful pressure of producing imminent profits. while alternative visions of how to do oil and gas exist within the industry, the less daring, the unadventurous, propositions are actualized. concluding thoughts in this essay i have shown how private equity finance encourages and inspires oil entrepreneurs to dream big. these dreams, as hopeful articulations, are not just concerned with how to generate greater profits from the extraction of mineral resources over the course of a particular period of time. they are not limited to the business plans presented with great enthusiasm to potential investors in the hope of raising capital. while the spreadsheets, the legal documents, the management team’s professional profiles present the entrepreneurs’ competence and agility in “market managerialism” (parker 2002, 217), these documents simultaneously exist and participate in utopian world-building projects. in their desire to “do oil differently,” my interlocutors present their ambitions and interventions in terms of the potential new worlds that they believe they can bring into being. for them, these offer grand reimaginings and inversions of the world as we know it, articulating their hope, desire, and belief in new forms of extractive economies that contain within them an ethos of care. yet their utopian articulations do not challenge or critique late capitalist forms. they do not question contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation, nor an environment that is rendered flexible and responsive to global financial markets and the pursuit of imminent returns. they express a commitment to, if not faith in, the promise of economic inequality within their utopian visions. this conjoining suggests an emphatic vindication of capitalism’s inevitability. even in imagined alternative worlds, the contemporary life of capitalism is cast as generative and flourishing, evoking a sense of atrophied imagination where, as noted by valerie fournier (2002, 189), “this inability to conceive of anything different seems indeed to be spreading like a disease.” grounds for transgressive, oppositional, and disruptive practices can serve to reproduce what currently exists, raising the question of how spaces for intervention and disruption can come about. when, for example, environmentalism, feminism, anarchism, and anti-corporate movements become absorbed into corporate fair trade branding, greenwashing, and diversity management, it may prove tempting to conclude that “there is no alternative” (harvey 2000, 154). indeed, this sense of despondency and despair for lack of alternatives might be felt particularly strongly by my interlocutors whose utopian projects embrace so strongly a capitalist logic of wealth creation, yet even they struggle to win over private equity capital. as a manifestation of “cruel optimism” (berlant 2011), and spurred on by the historical feats of the pioneering wildcatters, they believe in and hold on to their projects as possible and achievable. if, following lauren berlant (2011, 28), “we discover in the impasse a rhythm that people can enter into while they’re dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world,” my interlocutors also hold privileged positions where they have alternatives. they have the possibility to loosen their affective attachments to their entrepreneurial dreams, and accept the unacceptable. with savings gone and pensions spent, they return to corporate life, joining the companies that are pursuing the conventional, the unadventurous, the status quo. yet the failed dreams and slashed hopes live on, inspiring others to perhaps try oil’s money magic to bring a different world into existence. by examining the relationship between private equity finance and oil entrepreneurs, oil emerges as both a financial asset and a utopian imaginary. it is in these interstices between investors and entrepreneurs that spaces for intervention and disruption can come about. it is here we can detect how luring promises converge not only with conventional oil projects but also with hopeful visions of alternatives. yet, given private equity firms’ commitment to maximizing value for their investors and partners, they have little interest in cultivating alternative possibilities to current practices. enjoying their infrastructural position as an invisible, ghost-like bridge that connects global investors with individual management teams, private equity firms extend and discipline the accumulation and speculation in finance capital. at a time of energy transitions and calls for greater energy justice, the fast-evolving power and renewables sector is already appealing to private equity investors. new funds are now being raised, offering luring promises of investment. while scholars have rejoiced at the transformative potential of renewables to provide new and creative visions for how to “do energy differently,” we should not lose sight of how private equity capital contributes to the disciplining of dreams and conditions the production and reproduction of familiar capitalist forms. abstract at a time of a “private equity oil rush,” this essay explores how oil industry entrepreneurs with ambitions of setting up their own oil-production companies are encouraged to “dream big”—yet are ultimately disciplined and let down—by private equity finance in the state of colorado in the united states. motivated by a desire to “do oil differently,” these start-ups articulate utopian visions that draw on inequalities in extractive economies to promote an ethos of care and inclusion. i argue that while economic imaginations are commonly seen to offer alternatives to and critiques of capitalism, it is important also to attend to articulations of capitalist utopia. as private equity has come to form a secreted infrastructure that underlies much of the world’s financial system and encourages entrepreneurial optimism and euphoria, i explore how the contemporary life of capitalism stimulates attitudes to wealth creation that remain markedly conventional and unadventurous. [energy; oil; finance; utopia; capitalist visions; united states] notes acknowledgments in addition to the funding i have received from the european research council (grant agreement no. 715146), i also gratefully acknowledge funding for this research from the leverhulme trust (ecf-2013-177) and the british academy (en150010). over the years of researching the oil and gas industry in colorado, i have become indebted to many people. my deepest gratitude goes to all those in colorado who have opened doors, shared with me so generously, and invited me into their lives. i also want to thank friends and colleagues who have commented on earlier drafts, presented at the department research seminar at the london school of economics, the department research seminar at stockholm university, the political economy seminar at university of bergen, petrocultures conference in glasgow, and the post-carbon futures summer school in halle, as well as the energy ethics writing-up seminar with the energy ethics research team and centre for energy ethics at university of st andrews. all of you have inspired, supported, pushed, and challenged me in important ways throughout. finally, i thank cultural anthropology for its outstanding editorial team and perceptive reviewers whose helpful and generous suggestions made this essay remarkably better. any shortcomings, however, remain entirely my own. 1. to protect the identity of my interlocutors and the specific details of their oil utopias, i have amalgamated more than one individual into some of these characters and opted for the use of pseudonyms. 2. sean field (2022) discusses in further detail the kinds of responsibility that private equity partners feel toward these large institutional investors. although it can seem an abstracted and impersonal relationship, field shows how partners conceptualize in moral terms their task of maximizing investor capital. 3. by claiming that the oil and gas market “needs” greater injections of capital, this commentator is calling on investors to alert them of private equity investment opportunities. the so-called need that he identifies is thus not a fundamental prerequisite, but rather a market-driven and market-interested bet that aligns with his visions of the future. 4. the spot prices for crude oil and natural gas have risen even further following the russian invasion of ukraine in february 2022. this is because many countries relied on russian oil and gas imports for their domestic energy consumption and have since placed sanctions on these resources as part of their geopolitical moves away from russia. for the oil and gas industry in the united states, this has led to even greater investor interest in their resources and it has seemingly delayed (at least temporarily) many countries’ push for decarbonization of their energy systems. 5. this grassroots organization describes its mission as “making the financial system work for the 99% by pushing for better financial regulations, by evaluating and fostering wholly alternative financial options, and by educating the public about the current dysfunction to inspire activism” (https://altbanking.net.about/). starting on october 17, 2011, soon after zuccotti park in new york city was occupied, the alternative banking group has since broadened its scope and renamed themselves occupy the future. 6. in utopian studies, the tension between utopos and eutopos has given rise to a critical analytical division between utopianism as the abstract and estranged building of fantasy worlds that do not and could not exist (u-topos, or “no place”) and utopianism as the articulation of existing and concrete potential for major social change (eu-topos, or good place). i do not draw on this distinction because i wish to recognize the dynamic between the abstract and the concrete, between the fanciful and the immediate. 7. regarding the relationship between oil and capital expansion, imre szeman (2007, 807) notes how “the success of capital is dependent on continuous expansion, which enables not only profit taking but investment in the reproduction of capital that is a necessary condition for its continuation into the future. during the period of oil capital, this expansion and reproduction was fueled by cheap and readily available sources of oil.” 8. weld county has the largest concentration of oil and gas wells in colorado, at the time of writing producing 89 percent of all crude oil and 33 percent of all-natural gas in the state (see https://www.weldgov.com/departments/planning_and_zoning/oil_gas). 9. at the time of writing, the all-in cost of an oil or gas well in the u.s. onshore fields is about usd $6 million. this covers leases, constructing roads, building well pads, drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and ongoing operating expenses. 10. angel investors refer to high net-worth individuals who provide capital for a business or business start-up, usually in exchange for a minority stake in the company. sometimes the funds they provide are one-off investments to help start the business, other times they are offered on an ongoing basis to support the business through a difficult stage. 11. with a series of voter initiatives that severely restrict the power of state government, colorado’s politics were historically dominated by republicans who held control of state-wide offices and the state legislature from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century. a turning point occurred in 2004, when the democrat ken salazar won a u.s. senate seat, his brother john won a seat in the u.s. house, and the democrats won both chambers of the state legislature. in 2006, democrat bill ritter won the governorship with left-leaning democratic cities since tempering the political sway of more conservative, republican-majority rural areas. 12. the narrative of white masculine oil and gas industry beginnings is far from exclusive to the united states nor is it specific to nineteenth-century oil exploration. for insightful accounts of settler-colonial imaginaries about oil futures in newfoundland, canada, where oil discoveries were made in 1979, followed by oil production starting in 1997, see, for example, jekanowski 2022. 13. based on her extensive oral history research, diane austin (2006, 172) has noted how it was only after world war ii that women started entering the u.s. offshore oil and gas industry. she writes, “the early oil fields have been characterized as a prototypical man’s world. men controlled the capital that funded exploration, took the physical and financial risks needed for finding and developing oil fields, and provided the labor for building the infrastructure to support the fields and the communities that sprang up around them.” women occupied these spaces as well but were largely omitted from the historical accounts. 14. the objectives, risks, and terms of a proposed investment are disclosed in a so-called private placement memorandum (ppm). these 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https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2004.19.3.365 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 738-763, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.06 place, time, and affect: changing landscapes around a new guinea mining area cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 549-571, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.10 place, time, and affect: changing landscapes around a new guinea mining area jerry k. jacka university of colorado boulder https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0180-3828 reciprocity’s demise in this article, i examine the interconnections among place, time, and affect and how these have changed for the people of the porgera valley in papua new guinea (png). a large-scale gold mine, the porgera mine, opened in the valley in 1990 and has subsequently altered the fortunes and social relations of porgerans. one prominent concern voiced by many has been the demise of reciprocity that mining development has brought to the region. as for many highlanders of png (meggitt 1965; glasse 1968; strathern 1988), exchange and its resulting relations of reciprocity constitute a dominant modality of life. reciprocity’s demise is not just a much discussed topic in porgera. it also influences the ways that porgerans connect to one another, to non-human spirits, and to the landscape. in fact, sarah osterhoudt (2020, 251) argues that “times of accelerated market changes can be examined as times of profound affective changes in a particular place and time, that is, changes across its structures of feeling.” to this end, i am interested in how the oscillations between day and night have an affective dimension to them and, in turn, how these can inform our understanding of changes in the landscape over time. why is it that certain places undergo a transformation of the banal by day to the phantasmagorical by night (see also galinier et al. 2010; handelman 2005; heijnen 2005; schnepel and ben-ari 2005; steger and brunt 2003)? my first introduction to this question came in 1998, a few days after i first arrived to begin my dissertation fieldwork in porgera. having never before visited the southern hemisphere, i remember my amazement at the night sky with the southern cross and the magellanic clouds. enchanted by the stellar display, i stepped out of my house and lay in the grass watching the stars. my research assistant at the time, peter, originally joined me, but after about five minutes, he started to shift uncomfortably on the ground. he then said, “we need to go in now.” i pointed out that my eyes were just starting to adjust to the darkness, but he insisted we go in. “it’s not good to be out at night. there are bad things about at night [ol samting no gut stap long nait].” reluctantly, but also recognizing an ethnographic moment, i acquiesced and back in our house started to learn about the dangers of the night in porgera. as the months of my dissertation research passed, i encountered more and more instances of innocuous places by day that evoked fear when traversed at night. mostly, the fear resulted from the fact that malevolent spirits roamed about the landscape in porgera during nighttime. some spirits (yama) send out owls to help them find their next human victim—their screech is evidence of the yama’s nearness to one’s house. the loud splitting of a tree at night means that a deadly earth mother woman spirit (yu angini wanda) is approaching. these spirits make men into successful hunters who must reciprocate the gifts of game with the lives of kin. passing by a grave site, locals fear the spirit (tandini) of a recently deceased person who may attempt to “pull” someone if they pass by with food in their possession. the sudden appearance of mist and rain accompanied by the buzzing of a cicada indicates the proximity of a tombeama spirit who attacks and kills people bringing pigs back from exchanges. as porgerans related these stories about spirits to me, they would show me the goosebumps on their arms as they depicted the terrors of the night. in subsequent visits to porgera over the years, i have heard far fewer stories about spirits. it is not so much that the landscape has become disenchanted, but that other specters of the night—warriors armed with high-powered guns—have become more prevalent. between 2004 and 2012, the eastern porgera valley saw an on-and-off eight-year tribal war that destroyed hundreds of homes, displaced thousands of people, and resulted in dozens of deaths. as porgeran warfare occurs almost exclusively in the pre-dawn hours, the night now produces new terrors. in a recent special journal issue on “ethnographic approaches to the study of fear,” tania li (2009, 353; emphasis in original) asks: “how do we link the contours of fear, that is, the political economic conditions that produce and shape it, to the experience of fear?” this constitutes a critically important question, one that at least in the porgera case is linked to relations of reciprocity and their demise. after eight years of tribal fighting ended in 2012, after the homes were burnt, the people had scattered, and new graves lined the roads (jacka 2016), the eastern part of the valley was barely recognizable to me in 2016. the conflict had kept me away for a decade. schools, aid posts, churches, trade stores, homes, and other buildings that had served as anchors in a densely forested, tropical landscape had disappeared (figure 1). cleared public spaces (ama), which had formerly hosted playing children, women selling bits of cooked mutton (sipsip) or used clothing, and men sitting in small groups discussing the politics of local life or playing cards, were overgrown and deserted. not everyone had left, though. there were a few new houses being built, and a core of homes in the hamlets of kolatika and kiya remained standing. the hamlets of lese and yomondaka were now ghost towns. along the highway into the valley, the hamlet of kukulama, which saw nearly all of its buildings burnt down in one night of fighting in 2007, now had about forty homes and a few recently built trade stores. despite this, the eastern porgera valley had changed. the place was muddier, darker, and more overgrown by forest. figure 1. photos of the tipinini primary school, picture on the left is from 1999, picture on the right is from 2016. photos by jerry k. jacka. the western porgera valley, by contrast, remained much the same. this largely resulted from the impact of the porgera gold mine, which produces about 900,000 ounces of gold per year and has brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy through wages, royalty payments, and other benefits. whereas mining has brought electricity, paved roads (built in 2004 but since deteriorated), and development to the western half of the valley, eastern porgera lacks all of these. as such, many people who fled the fighting in eastern porgera ended up in the western part of the valley. when i returned in 2016, most of my friends and former research assistants now lived in the town of paiam, built to service the porgera mine (jacka 2007, 2015). walking around paiam one day, i ran into my friend epea des, once a leader in kolatika, who replied to my question of whether he would be returning to eastern porgera: tumas bus, tumas fait (too much forest/bush, too much fighting). then he slowly shook his head no. my first month back in porgera in 2016, i lived at the house of my friend ben penale in paiam. when we first met in 1998, ben lived in kolatika, as i did, but now with a job with the local-level government council, he needed to be near the government headquarters in the town of porgera, which was located between the porgera mine and paiam. one day, ben’s “little father” (his father’s younger brother), mara, came by the house to talk about an upcoming warfare compensation that their kin group (lain in tok pisin) was soon to sponsor to pay back the death of someone that their lain had killed in the fighting. given ben’s job (in a place where 95 percent of the population engages in subsistence farming), mara was sure that ben would provide money for pigs for the compensation. their discussion quickly turned to a rapid-fire, heated argument, with mara screaming obscenities at ben and storming off. “i told him that i wouldn’t help out with the compensation,” ben said. “that’s their [his lain’s] problem, i live in paiam now.” ben’s matter-of-fact statement about his unwillingness to assist his lain underpins the tensions around contemporary life in highlands png. as many people turn from collective activities to individualistic pursuits, people lament such changes and read these changes in the social landscape as a dimension of the physical landscape as well (for other examples from melanesia, see rodman 1992; demian 2021). even after fighting ends in the png highlands, there is always the possibility for new conflicts to break out until all compensations have been completed (glasse 1959). this is certainly the case in porgera. as of 2016, less than half of the people killed in the conflict had been compensated with payments of pigs and money. even today, the compensations remain underway, and the uncertainty of whether they will be paid back in time before fresh fighting shapes people’s understandings of place in porgera. in what follows, i examine some theoretical articulations of space, place, and affect to argue that a theory of affect helps explain the ways that porgerans understand the oscillations between day and night. next, i detail in more depth the conditions of the night in porgera and what causes such fear that many porgerans rarely travel after sunset. it might seem obvious that people would fear the night in a place where armed assassins lurk in the dark. yet gunmen are but a recent addition to the structures of feeling that provoke nocturnal fear in the png highlands. in the ethnographic sections that follow, i explore the particularities of the affect of day and night in png, while also making a broader point that at certain times and in certain places—especially nighttime spaces—our affective intuitions are open to the things we sense in the night. after the ethnographic descriptions of the night, i discuss the breakdown of reciprocity in the era of large-scale mining development in porgera and reflect on the moral/immoral valences that define affect and the oscillation between diurnal and nocturnal places. i continue with an examination of the role of warfare, inequality, and immorality in porgeran conflict resolution, to conclude with my main concerns with place, time, affect, and morality. place and affect the concept of place offers critical insights into human-environmental relations. the philosopher edward casey (1996, 19) writes, “human beings—along with other entities on earth—are ineluctably place-bound. more even than earthlings, we are placelings, and our very perceptual apparatus, our sensing body, reflects the kinds of places we inhabit.” his focus on the sensing body makes the interaction of place and affect important for researching how people and places reflexively create one another. as steven feld (1996, 91) argues, “as place is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place.” affects resemble raymond williams’s (1977, 2001) concept of “structures of feeling” (stewart 2007; flatley 2008). williams’s main point is that culture and society are often expressed in the “past tense” (1977, 128). rather than capturing the nowness of social and personal experience, we often rely on already fixed forms to depict the emerging social experiences that affect and structures of feeling attempt to replicate. williams likens this to changes in the history of a language. it is not just that people delete some words and add others, but that in each generation the language changes in a wider sense. in kathleen stewart’s (2007, 2) perspective, affects “give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences. … akin to raymond williams’s structures of feeling, they are ‘social experiences in solution.’” moreover, “affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, and more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings” (stewart 2007, 3). these frameworks guide my attempt to link structures of feeling to affect and place. i argue that the place of porgera—due to a number of different forces described below—is fundamentally different from the way it was before mining impacted people’s social and personal experiences. structures of feeling describe the ways social forces structure our affective lives in the present and now. the term proves useful “because it enables us to describe those structures that mediate between the social and the personal that are more ephemeral and transitory than set ideologies or institutions” (flatley 2008, 25). jonathan flatley (2008, 27) argues that structures of feeling allow us to “orient one toward a specific social class or context. for example, depression is a mood, not a structure of feeling; however, we might describe the particular depression of the russian peasant in the steppe in the 1920s as a structure of feeling, or the depression of the residents of a decimated new orleans after katrina as a structure of feeling.” affect, then, is “a domain of intensity, indeterminacy, and above all potentiality” (mazzarella 2009, 292), as well as “an openness to being affected by other objects and bodies” (shaw 2015, 586). in this sense, it is relational and transformative (flatley 2008, 12). applying affect to the analysis of day and night focuses attention on the relationality of people to place, as well as to the ways this relationality shifts between diurnal and nocturnal modes of living and experiencing these radically different “time-spaces.” walter benjamin argues that “affect travels along the material paths of sensation to find a dwelling place. … in fact, benjamin contended that because affects come into being through attachment, and because they actually occur in the materiality of the world, affective experience can provide us with a link—unmediated by concepts—to that material world” (flatley 2008, 18). where i see a forest of trees when i walk around the porgera valley, porgerans see the actions of humans made manifest in the environment. there is the line of trees that injera planted after his father died. here is the creek where tuele always stops and washes the mud off of her feet after coming back from the garden. keith basso (1996, 7; emphasis in original) describes place-making as a “widespread form of imaginative activity … [that] is also a form of cultural activity … [that] can be grasped only in relation to the ideas and practices with which it is accomplished.” since these ideas and practices vary from locale to locale, sustained ethnography offers the surest way to get at place-making, he argues. place imbues space with cultural meaning. writing about the wamira of coastal png, miriam kahn (1996, 167–68) notes, “what looks like a river, a hill, or a group of stones may, in fact, resonate meaningfully to wamirans as a type of moral landscape conveying messages about human frailties, foibles, and responsibilities … such as reminders of social obligations that have gone unfulfilled or of moral responsibilities to feed and care for kin.” in my book alchemy in the rain forest (jacka 2015), i argue that a full understanding of place in the porgera context requires three relational components: land, people, and spirits or non-humans. similarly, discussing indigenous creation stories from native america, vanessa watts (2013, 21) stresses how these stories “speak to the common intersections of the female, animals, the spirit world, and the mineral and plant world. what constitutes ‘society’ from these perspectives revolves around interactions between these worlds rather than solely interactions amongst human beings.” to address this theoretical understanding of the world, she introduces the concept of place-thought. “place-thought is the non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. place-thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (watts 2013, 21). euro-western frames of thought and perception often deny this agency to the land and to non-humans. i argue that affect, as a relational, contingent attachment to place, preexists the “rational” denial of the agency of non-humans and lands. i now turn to examining this claim in the porgeran context. place and the creatures of the night the porgera valley is a beautiful, rugged place. with no electricity in the eastern half of the valley, on the rare nights without pouring rain, the milky way glows luminously overhead. on the other nights, the constant thrumming of the rain on the tin roof provides a soothing white noise that lulls one to sleep. much of the mountainous land is covered in dense rain forest (figure 2). the black, volcanic soils are lush and fertile. greenness abounds. there is one highway that cuts through the forest to supply the mine, and a few side roads. elsewhere, travel occurs along muddy foot trails shadowed by the perpetual semi-gloom of the forest canopy. within this steep, verdant landscape, porgerans conceptualize a middle zone of habitation (andakama; literally “the place of houses and clearings”) from an upper rain forest (aiyandaka; “the place of beauty”) and a lower rain forest (wapi) densely inhabited by spirits. in the aiyandaka at the southern end of the valley stands an unbroken line of thousand-meter-plus high limestone cliffs; numerous waterfalls cascade down their faces and even emanate directly from the porous cliffsides. in the grasslands behind the southern cliffs, 3,800 meters above sea level, rivers meander across the landscape, some disappearing into sinkholes and reappearing miles away, as the entire region is composed of cave-pocked karst (severely eroded, highly porous limestone), with patches of rain forest and tree ferns dotting the grasslands. for porgerans, the place also teems with spirits, mostly tombeamas (border spirits) who live in the caves of this region and kill and eat people en route to trade and interact with the huli and enga people who live to the south and east of porgera. tombeamas are heralded by the onset of darkness (even in midday) and the buzz of cicadas. they represent the asocial in porgeran exchange compensations, composed of pigs and cash money. when porgerans conduct compensations with enga and huli—for marriage, warfare, and other important social events—tombeamas wait in the high mountain regions, hiding in caves and stealing the pigs into which so much social labor has gone through gardening, feeding, and care. figure 2. the rain forest of the porgera valley. photo by jerry k. jacka. between about 2,500 meters and 1,500 meters above sea level lies the andakama, the zone of habitation in porgera. the land is covered in secondary forest and some patches of primary rain forest. the occasional clearing demarcates homesteads, sweet potato gardens, and the ama where people from a hamlet come to hang out, sell a few things, and exchange pigs and money during the numerous reciprocal interactions that punctuate porgeran life. there is no dry season, and everywhere the sound of water can be heard echoing through the forest—the roar of the incipient rainstorm thundering off the tree leaves, the dripping of the rain after the daily storms, waterfalls, raging streams (see feld 1996). the erosive power of the water cuts deep valleys and fissures across the landscape, and a journey of any distance entails constant ascending and descending along mud-filled tracks through the dark green forest. every few hundred meters the forest is broken by a single homestead, occupied by a single family, though occasionally a group of brothers and their families will have a few houses built in a common clearing. for the most part, though, hamlets contain about thirty to forty homesteads, most separated by some distance, out of sight of one another, but always within calling distance, for which porgerans use a form of yodeling to send messages back and forth (figure 3). figure 3. a homestead in the porgera valley. photo by jerry k. jacka. below 1,500 meters above sea level we find the fecund, lower rain forest (wapi) densely populated with large, buttressed trees, wild pigs, cassowaries, megapodes (turkey-like birds that lay large clutches of eggs), fruit pandanus, multiple species of marsupials, and the deadly yu angini wanda (earth mother woman) spirits (see jacka 2015, 99–103). humans do not live in this region as it is a zone of sickness and malaria, but it does contain numerous species of flora and fauna that are highly sought after. yu angini wanda are beautiful, light-skinned female spirits that entice hunters to have sex with them, and in exchange make them extremely successful in procuring game. ultimately, though, they ask their lovers in dreams to give them the life of one of their close kin, and if the lover refuses to name a kinsperson to sacrifice, the yu angini wanda will kill him instead. each morning, nai, the sun, places his fiery head on his shoulders after a night’s slumber, throws open the door to his house far to the east of porgera, and begins to stride across the sky. on his daily perambulations, his gaze is omnipotent and omniscient (biersack 1991; jacka 2015). you don’t do immoral things during the day that nai might see, lest he take offense and punish your transgressions by sending a fog or mist that obscures your path in the rain forest and sends you plunging off a cliff to your death. moreover, entities that move freely about at night must wait for nai to finish his trip across the sky before showing themselves, as the day is a time of safety from spirits, enemies, and other-than-human beings. in porgera, the night is overseen by ana, the female personification of the moon. she has no powers of retribution or punishment over humans or non-humans. thus, once nai has snugly settled into his home at the end of the day, dark forces can move about with will over the land. the two most common of these are (1) beings called yama in ipili (the predominant language in porgera) or tambaran in tok pisin (melanesian pidgin); and (2) the spirits of living and deceased people called tandini in ipili or devel in tok pisin. yama is a general term to refer to the spirits mentioned above, but it also has a more common, restricted usage referring to spirits of the night. the tandini, for instance, of a sleeping person who is harboring negative thoughts about someone in the hamlet can become a yama (called wanda yama, “woman spirit”) attacking that person in the night and making them ill or even killing them. this situation holds special significance for the house at nighttime as the bastion of defense against yama. a porgeran homestead in the middle of the day gives a desolate scene, as only the sick and infirm occupy houses during the day. daytime is spent in the garden or the forest, and most houses stand empty and padlocked, only becoming populated late in the day when the rains come and it is time to cook sweet potatoes and other vegetables. then, the homestead transforms—doors are thrown open, smoke curls up through the thatched roof, children run about screaming and laughing, and people go from homestead to homestead to visit and gossip. then, as the sun sets, everyone comes back inside and the heavy-planked doors are securely bolted from within to prevent the yamas from coming inside. anxieties about night spirits exemplify a concern with breaches in reciprocity and the consequences of undermining reciprocal exchanges. a common defense of someone who is accused of sending wanda yama is that the person they sent it to had not shared some item of food with them. widows and widowers who are living alone in a house, and may be coveting choice food items, are commonly accused of sending these spirits. hunters also use powerful magic to ward off wanda yama, as even their wives may inadvertently send it while they are out hunting at night. in the case of yu angini wanda, the hunter gives the earth mother woman a baby by which she makes him a successful hunter of game. not reciprocating when she then asks for the life of a kinsperson poses a serious bodily threat to the hunter. receiving pigs and food at a distant exchange held by a neighboring group also exposes one to claims of not being willing to share with one’s kin. hence, the fear of the tombeama, border spirits, who steal the food and pigs a person brings back from these exchanges. similarly, most porgerans fear carrying food at night through the hamlet due to yamayope (“whistling spirits”), trickster spirits who will attack a person carrying food at night. night is a time when people are suspected of trying to avoid obligations to share, and this exposes them to jealousy and the dangers of both humans and non-human spirits. there also exists a temporality to morality and immorality that oscillates with henri lefebvre’s (1991, 320) notion of sexuality not being “normal” and confined to the night (see also shaw 2015; williams 2008). in contrast, in porgera, sex between spouses occurs during the day, and usually in an open-sided garden house, not in their usual house. “illicit” sex, which would be between men and women without any exchange of bride wealth, takes place at night and in regular houses (see example below). largely, daylight sex follows from men’s consternation about the supposedly polluting qualities of women’s menstrual blood. porgerans say that accepting food from or having sex with a menstruating woman will cause a man’s urethra to become blocked—in effect, ruining his ability to participate in the exchanges of sexual reciprocity. it requires elaborate ritual procedures to effect a cure; in some cases, rituals do not suffice and the man will die. in fact, older men tell younger men to not have sex with their wives at night or when it is cloudy, as nai will not be able to protect them from potential contamination from menstrual blood. (while no one has specifically mentioned the relationships between menstruation and sex work, from my casual conversations with men, my sense is that it is of much less concern than a menstruating wife.) for women, the night poses dangers when outside of their clan’s hamlet. sexual assaults and rape are far too common, especially in the context of intergroup violence and new social mores around large-scale development projects like the porgera gold mine (wardlow 2019). porgeran places have very different valences depending upon whether it is day or night. the home at night provides both shelter and safety from the creatures of the night. affective responses to the night and nighttime attacks are understood as a violation of the qualities of protection that a home should offer. the difference between the day and the night also concerns reciprocity and daylight; significantly, daylight provides a way of legitimizing reciprocity by making it visible to all. yet to also capture the “nowness” that williams’s “structures of feeling” posit, there are novel forces at play in porgera that build from and articulate with affective reactions to non-humans, spirits and the night. in the next section, i examine the escalation of warfare and violence associated with mining development. warfare, tandinis, and the night the tandini represents a person’s inner essence, roughly equivalent to a spirit or soul. it is the form of one’s body that also exists in the nocturnal dream world. to wit: after several months of observing that my research assistant, peter, slept fully clothed, i asked him why he didn’t at least strip down to his underwear to feel more comfortable. he replied that he couldn’t, as his tandini would then be similarly attired in the dream world, causing him immense shame if he were to encounter anyone from the hamlet. the tandini also lives on after a person dies. as such, most of the discussions about tandinis i have had with people concern homicides in warfare. unlike the daytime, open field battles popularized in the film dead birds (gardner 1963), porgeran warfare is almost exclusively a stealth nocturnal undertaking. teams of men set out under the cover of darkness to a neighboring enemy’s land, sneak up to a house where a group of men are sleeping, barricade the house, and then set it on fire, shooting the men who manage to break through the roof or walls (cf. chris phillips’ the lost rambos of papua new guinea). usually, they engage in these tactics with the aid of a tandini of a kinsman who has recently been killed in fighting. in the following, i offer an example from my research assistant tom: a clansman of ours, a man named kina, had just been killed in a revenge homicide, and a group of us men were sitting around talking about how kina used to say that his tandini would come help his clan brothers revenge his death if anyone ever killed him. we decided to go and pay back kina’s death the following night. that next night we started up the mountain to where we knew kina’s killer, andalu, was sleeping in a house with one of his clan brothers. i stopped and made a spear on the way and was carrying it on my shoulder when a big bird flew down and landed on the spear. since this was at night, we knew it was kina’s tandini coming to help us. we came up to the house and heard that everything was quiet. they had left the outside padlock on the door unlocked, so we very carefully locked the door, so that the two men were locked inside. then we started burning the house on all sides and the roof with torches. ambua went and stood by the door with his axe cocked and ready to chop anyone who made it out the door. the men started screaming, and andalu burst through the door trying to escape. ambua chopped him right in the throat, killing him and knocking him back into the house. the other man also tried to run out through the door but got a spear right in the neck, forcing him back into the fire. we waited a while to make sure that both men in the house had died. then we broke into andalu’s trade store and took a bunch of stuff. before the sun rose, we came back down to the funeral house where kina’s body was. i uncovered his body and laid my axe across his chest. we started sing-singing to wake everyone up. they came outside and we were singing that we went up the mountain, got hungry, and broke into andalu’s trade store and ate two cans of tinned fish. everyone knew that we meant we had killed andalu and his brother. whereas everyone had been sad and crying the day before because of kina’s murder, now they were laughing and happy and joined us in the singing. the story above mirrors other stories of tandinis coming to help their clan brothers. in all cases, the tandini is either called or comes of their own accord to enter a weapon of one of his clan brothers, upon which the weapon becomes incredibly heavy (see jacka 2019 for an example with an m-16). the tandinis of deceased enemies can also influence the outcome of warfare. prior to engaging in a fight, all the men of the clan must come together and confess their sins (called aiyapu mina) against the group. men frequently admit to stealing and adultery during these sessions. men who don’t confess are killed in fighting and are believed to have been holding “sins” inside of them. the idea, as it was explained to me, is that just as a clan’s deceased tandinis roam around the nocturnal landscape helping that clan in warfare, so are the enemy clan’s tandinis helping them. to be immoral in action opens a person up to attack by an enemy tandini, which almost always results in death. warfare requires fighters to be in a morally pure state. porgerans say that “war is wealth” (yanda takame), by which they mean that compensation exchanges will follow from fighting. it is as if the reciprocity that follows conflict requires morally pure fighters to initiate the reciprocal relations between groups. nighttime thus holds two concerns for porgerans—attack by a spirit or attack by an enemy. this situation has been on my mind over the past twenty years of research in porgera. in 1999, i complained to peter about all the tea we were drinking in the evening, as it necessitated several trips outside during the night to relieve myself. he commented, “that’s actually good. you’ll be able to see if anyone is sneaking up on our house to kill us.” i now realize that this time in porgera constituted one of peace, one periodically punctuated by conflict. largely responsible for this calm were development promises brought on by the recent opening of a large-scale gold mine. as i discuss in the next section, these development benefits proved largely illusory and led to a breakdown of reciprocity. however, the inequalities of development exemplified by mining in porgera have constituted new experiences. largely, this stems from the massive increase in warfare associated with uneven development. in fact, stories of the night, previously centered around yama spirits, now increasingly concern themselves with warfare, enemies, and the tandinis of deceased fighters. whereas a “big war” (yanda andane) in the 1980s that people told me about in 1999 involved the death of three men on each side of the conflict, by the mid-2010s warfare in porgera was claiming the lives of dozens of men. i examine these new circumstances below. mining and the demise of reciprocity the exploitation of alluvial goldfields in the 1950s and 1960s started to challenge the reciprocal ties that bound porgerans together. wealth inequalities stemming from access to the alluvial gold beds intensified during the 1950s as senior men restricted access to panning and sluicing for gold. in 1960, the australian colonial government expanded and more widely distributed the number of claims, resulting in reports of nearly 75 percent of the men in the porgera valley having access to the goldfields by the 1970s. these conditions largely held until the development of large-scale mining, which culminated in the opening of the porgera gold mine in 1990. by 1992, the porgera mine was producing more than 1 million ounces of gold annually (figure 4). the benefits flowing to official landowners (a number far fewer than the alluvial miners)—compensation for lost lands, royalties, preferential hiring and contracts, and relocation houses—brought perceptions of widespread wealth that still mostly resonated throughout the valley in the late 1990s. by the early 2000s, however, fissures of discontent over the failure of mining to benefit everyone in porgera began to snake through the social system. figure 4. the porgera gold mine. photo by jerry k. jacka. one of the ways that non-landholding porgerans expressed their agency in the wake of mining was to obtain land along the enga highway—the only transportation route into and out of porgera. by doing so, people could pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and hope to partake in some of the wealth generated by mining. just before leaving porgera during my dissertation research in early 2000, i attended a series of land courts over a piece of land with several hundred feet of frontage along the highway that one clan was attempting to lay claim to. i left in the midst of negotiations, but eventually conflicts over the land broke out in 2003, resulting in the death of one of the key leaders in the eastern porgera valley. large-scale fighting broke out in 2004, to last until 2012 (see jacka 2019). during this time, dozens of men were killed, hundreds of buildings burned to the ground, and entire hamlets abandoned as people fled the fighting. in one hamlet alone, ninety-seven houses burned down during two back-to-back nights of guerilla fighting in 2007. in 2006, i returned to porgera in the midst of this conflict. since my last visit, a few new developments had arisen in warfare. the first was the full-scale use of guns. before 2003, porgerans had agreed to fight “like their ancestors” (olsem tumbuna), using only spears, bows and arrows, axes, and bush knives. by 2006, ar-15s and m-16s were common, as were a number of high-powered rifles and homemade shotguns (figure 5). since guns and bullets proved expensive, young men from the clan were trained as so-called rambos, giving them full ownership of the weapons and leaving them in a position to be hired out as mercenaries to other clans (wiessner 2010). additionally, young men began using the phrase “working in the life market” (wok long laip maket) to describe the ways in which warfare linked to commodification—again, in contrast to reciprocity. research over these months in 2006 was punctuated by reports of gunfire echoing through the mountains, and some of the young men i lived with and interviewed were killed during this time. eventually, a young man was killed about fifty meters from my house in the middle of the night. flustered, scared, and bewildered, i left porgera, not to return for almost a decade (cf. kulick 2019). figure 5. rambo with gun. photo by jerry k. jacka. throughout my experiences in porgera up to this point, i would ask my friends if i was ever in danger of being killed. they would scoff and point out that i had no clan—what would be the point of killing me with no one to engage in compensation payments over my death and to partake in any revenge killings? here, too, a sense of the moral obligations of reciprocity remained—even with “industrialized” death, it is motivated by compensation and revenge. my outsiderness left me with me a sense of security that i now realize was naive. the central thing about killing in porgera is that everyone knows everyone else. sitting with a group of porgerans, i could always ask “who’s that?” of some person i’d never seen before—it always elicited a response involving the complex, overlapping networks of kin relations that all porgerans are a part of. revenge killings and reciprocity (especially in terms of failing to reciprocate) form aspects of relationality that put people in danger. my own sense of marginality i assumed kept me safe. this notion would soon change. by 2015, my research assistants contacted me on facebook, encouraging me to return, as porgera was now safe. i came to porgera for three months in 2016, one month in january and two months in may and june. during my january visit, my host clan was regaling me with tales about the m-16 they had purchased in 2004 when one of their leaders was murdered in a revenge killing (see jacka 2019). i left papua new guinea later that month, and in march two young men took the m-16 to an alluvial gold mining area on the lower porgera river to rob some of the alluvial miners. their plans went awry, the two young men were killed, and the m-16 was seized by the clan who owned land in the alluvial mining area. unaware of all of these events, i returned in may and attended a funeral of one of my host clan members (figure 6). i gave away two cases of coca-cola and publicly thanked my host clan for taking care of me over the years. word soon went around that the clan with the m-16 was discussing making a revenge killing on someone in my host clan. it was noted that the anthropologist who occasionally lived among them would make a fine target, especially as in making the funeral speech, i was publicly aligning myself as a member of that clan. the very marginality that had kept me safe all these years had now evaporated. my relationality within the kinship system now proved more central. of course, no one told me this until a few weeks after i had made the speech. at that point, each snap of a twig in the night outside my house froze my heart with dread. stepping out of the house each night to answer the call of nature, i would peer searchingly into the dark rain forest, wondering if this was the night that they were coming to shoot me. morbidly, i wondered what it would feel like to have an m-16 bullet rip through my chest or head. with a projectile velocity of 990 meters per second, an m-16 bullet travels almost three times the speed of sound; i at least knew i wouldn’t be startled by the crack of gunfire before i was hit. a few more weeks went by, and i stopped fearing the night so intensely. toward the end of june, though, one night my research assistant, gibson, and i were awoken by the sound of shouting. gibson burst out of his room. saying, “birua i kam [the enemy is coming].” i hurriedly threw on some clothes, grabbed my headlamp, and started crawling toward the door. gibson grabbed his axe and ran out the door, telling me to stay inside the house. fully aware of porgeran warfare tactics, i decided that this was not the best course of action. i crawled out the front door into a torrential rainstorm, ran into the nearby forest, and lay in the mud at the base of a tree, my heart pounding and my mouth dry despite my drenched body. the light of numerous headlamps flashed through the foliage of the trees as men ran and shouted chasing after the enemy. it was cacophony and everyone seemed to be running in all different directions. after about an hour, which seemed like an eternity, things calmed down and gibson returned to our house. i joined him, anxious to find out what was going on. figure 6. a funeral gathering in eastern porgera. photo by jerry k. jacka. gibson explained that a neighbor of ours, a man named tipolo, had stepped out of his house to pee and saw a man sneaking up the forest path toward his house. tipolo cried out, warning everyone that we were under attack by the enemy clan. as the men mustered their forces and took off down the path, they soon realized the absence of new footprints in the mud. where had the enemy gone? they returned to tipolo’s house to discuss the events that had transpired and noted that tipolo’s recently deceased clan brother’s widow was in the house. apparently, she and tipolo had been having an illicit affair before the clan brother had died, and they were now resuming their activities. while a number of spells existed to prevent a deceased clan brother from becoming angry at his kin who would eventually marry his widow, tipolo had not done any of these—causing a major breach of reciprocity between the living and the dead. as a consequence, the tandini of his clan brother had come up to the house to attack tipolo. instead of chasing an enemy, the men realized that they had all been chasing a ghost through the rain forest. gibson was laughing so hard during the story he was almost crying. i did not share in the sense of humor that he and others felt as they joked with me the next morning about the enemies whom everyone thought were coming to kill me. following this event, i finally wholeheartedly absorbed the terror of the night that my friends and research assistants had been relating to me for the past couple of decades (cf. rosaldo 1993). to some extent, i had imagined myself in a world apart from theirs. prior to this i could not fully accept tombeamas, yu angini wandas, and tandinis roaming the nocturnal landscape, or if i could, i imagined i had no part in their endeavors. even in 2000, shortly before i left porgera for the first time, peter and i were walking by the banana tree growing next to our house. he told me that on several nights over the past year he had heard yu angini wandas in the tree, coming near our house to investigate me because of my white skin. even though it was daytime during this recounting of these spirit visits, i felt my hair raise on the back of my neck, surely an affective response if there is one. yet i still didn’t have the depth of affective responses of my friends and interlocutors when they described these same events and their fears around them. e. e. evans-pritchard (1976, 244) writing in the 1930s about his own understandings of azande witches, noted, i have often been asked whether … i got to accept their ideas of witchcraft. this is a difficult question to answer. … in their culture, in the set of ideas i then lived in, i accepted them; in a kind of way i believed them. azande were talking about witchcraft daily, both among themselves and to me; any communication was well-nigh impossible unless one took witchcraft for granted. you cannot have a remunerative, even intelligent, conversation with people about something they take as self-evident if you give them the impression that you regard their belief as an illusion or a delusion. mutual understanding, and with it sympathy, would be ended, if it ever got started. returning to li’s and osterhoudt’s quotes about linking contours of fear with experiences of fear, and the ways that market changes resonate across structures of feeling, i want to stress both the continuities and discontinuities of the linkages between morality and fear. in conversations and in people’s actions, porgerans perceive the current situation of the mining sector as immoral when compared to obligations of reciprocity. a continuity exists between the nighttime context of fear of violent attacks by men with guns pursuing grievances based in inequality and the fear of spirit attacks in the past. each constitutes a structure of feeling rooted in obligations of reciprocity. the circumstances differ, but the idea of the night as a place and time where one may be attacked for failure to share resources remains present today. conclusion linking affect to place allows us to examine the ways in which fear as a social condition can emanate from political economic conditions that shape and structure everyday life. as robert glasse (1959) pointed out more than half a century ago, reciprocity in the png highlands, especially failed or unrequited reciprocity, has always carried with it an element of redress, often in the form of revenge killings. in porgera, the failure to reciprocate, particularly in an era of mining development, opens people to attack by enemies in the night. initially, these fears were told in customary stories about deadly yama spirits, but after the rise of the mining economy, they shifted to discussing the fears of enemies and their deceased souls. tracking the shifts in the terrors of the night allows for an interpretation that sees political and economic changes as an aspect of this situation as well. in many ways, my own transformations in approaching the fear of the night paralleled the fears that traced a political economy of the changes in the landscape. mining, like warfare, destroys the land and social fabric of porgeran society. the fear associated with this destruction lends support to aspects of fear not easily articulated, ones that come to the fore as affect rooted in wider structures of feeling. for porgerans, this manifests in the terrors associated with the night. abstract in this article, i examine the interconnections about place, time, and affect and how these have changed due to transformations in the political economy of the porgera valley, the site of a world-class gold mine. in particular, i am interested in the oscillations between night and day, and how each is perceived along different affective dimensions, and how the terrors of the night parallel concerns with the demise of reciprocity. in the early years of mining, fears of the night were shaped by concerns about the inability to form reciprocal relations with non-human spirits. with the uneven development wrought by mining inequalities, fear of the night has been replaced by concerns over warfare with enemy groups. the article highlights the interconnected aspects of capitalist development, landscape, and affect. 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american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.10 the limits of dwelling and the unwitnessed death the limits of dwelling and the unwitnessed death jason danely oxford brookes university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8027-9328 the night i began writing this article started off like most others during my fieldwork. my two children had just gone to sleep, both of them curled up on a shared futon upstairs. slowly, so as not to wake them, i stepped down the steep, creaky wooden staircase, hoping to squeeze out another hour of writing before i would slip into my own futon. before i reached the ground floor, i began to hear ambulance sirens nearby. the old house i was renting was close to the kyoto university hospital, so hearing sirens was not too unusual, but this time they were louder and getting closer. within seconds, the sirens were joined by the deep rumbling of an engine and bright red-orange lights that pulsed across the walls of my front room, sweeping through the windows. breathless, i tumbled outside onto the narrow street just in time to see a crew of paramedics carrying a stretcher disappear down an alley on the opposite side of the street. the ambulance had stopped just a few steps away from my front door. the ambulance lights flashed across the houses along the tightly packed street, most of which had already shuttered their windows for the night. like most neighborhoods located within a few kilometers of the old imperial palace grounds in the historic center of kyoto, this one traced its history back for centuries. japanese wood-frame architecture was not meant to last, so few older buildings remained, but even the newer structures occupied the same spaces, with narrow street frontage and deep interiors. as old buildings were taken down and rebuilt, small alleys and cul-de-sacs crammed with smaller abodes filled hidden pockets away from main streets. i looked at the faces of my neighbors, who, like me, stood uneasily in front of their homes. after a moment, we slowly edged into the street and gathered at the open rear doors of the ambulance, exchanging a few words here and there in hushed, nervous voices. i asked the man who lived across the street from me if he had any idea what had happened. he just motioned down the alleyway, saying: “if it is down that street, it could be any number of people.” his voice was low and tired, sounding more annoyed than concerned. he explained that the same thing had happened recently, just before i had moved into the area. “there are a lot of old people that live down there. a lot of old people living alone!” he stressed the final words. it was a forgone conclusion that whoever was hurt, or perhaps dead, was most likely old and alone. in japan, an unattended death is known as kodokushi, or “lonely death.”1 the word kodokushi carries a tragic, melancholic tone, preserving the ambiguity around the exact association between loneliness and death. was loneliness the cause of death, or just the circumstance surrounding it? the term itself makes way for us to reflect on the possible links between life and death, or even a death in life—a gray zone characterized by isolation, absence, disconnection, marginality, and suspense (povinelli 2011; allison 2013, 2018; stevenson 2014). the ambulance lights conjured images of an everyday crisis, a spectacle that few seemed moved by, but that nonetheless demanded our attention. spectacle and the spectral a lot of old people living alone. hearing these words, it struck me that i was standing in the street anticipating the revelation of a body. i wanted to somehow bear witness to the trace of something known but unwitnessed, to give that uneasy absence some material presence. this uncertainty about why i cared or ought to have cared kept me riveted in place, as if standing in coroners’ court, awaiting the forensic evidence to tell its story about what had happened and who was responsible. figure 1. the street splashed in the red lights of the ambulance, as curious neighbors gather expectantly. photo by jason danely. this ethnographic moment, which i continue to unfold throughout this article, produces questions about the possibility of dwelling in uncertainty. i take dwelling to mean the emplacement of forms of habituation that produce the conditions for mutual concern and ethical possibility (ingold 2000; harrison 2007; zigon 2014). when i refer to dwelling, then, it is in the practical material and embodied sense of being-at-home-in-the-world with others (jackson 1995). older people in japan often embody this sense of dwelling, as a link between geographically based generations, living and dead, or through long-cultivated links to community life, local political activity, and leisure with friends and neighbors (danely 2014). the regular appearance of the shadowy specter of kodokushi, however, throws the inevitability of such dwelling into uncertainty. anxiety about kodokushi reflects concerns that the locus of dwelling and even old age itself as a terrain has become uninhabitable, despite extensive local and national investment in long-term care infrastructure (tamiya et al. 2011; danely 2016). those who die alone and unwitnessed do not readily reveal when or how they died or, in cases where no family are present, even who they really were. yet this uncertainty is also stubbornly located in a place: the home that has become unhomely (bhabha 1992). the unhomely, or uncanny (bukimi), implies both the expectation of intimacy and its disruption by something unsettling and unknown (ivy 1995; strava 2017; gygi 2018). for my japanese neighbors, the possibility that another solo-dwelling older person (dokkyo rōjin) had died just around the corner was not shocking, as it was for me, but rather produced a mood of grim dysphoria for a world that had become disarticulated from the home. what made the event unhomely was its unwitnessing, which all of us were implicated in and which placed our existential survival in question. in both kin-based forms of rootedness and postwar imaginations of middle-class domesticity (sand 2003), homes could be thought of as conduits of relations (daniels 2010), but with rapid depopulation, homes neither maintain family bonds nor value to the market. the private long-term care sector, supported by neoliberal social welfare reforms, has now made the home the preferred site of care provision in later life, absorbing the excess of homes and older people while extending the notion of home in narratives of the good life. this allows companies to save costs of building facilities and employ nonunionized, part-time, on-call staff, reproducing inequality, invisibility, and further isolation of both care workers and solo-dwelling older people (danely 2016). kodokushi mark a return of the familiar trope of the neighborhood granny—yet transformed, unsettling, unhomely, placing history’s unnoticed excesses and unstable narratives at our doorsteps. in this article i aim to explore the ways in which the homes of older adults become spaces of potential for both care and abandonment; of excessive disordered materiality and haunting spectrality; of dwelling and death. as this unruly mob of descriptors suggests, kodokushi emerge from a world “out of joint” (derrida 1994, 22), or, more specifically, from the misalignment between a care system fashioned to accommodate working adults, private property, and insurance, and another kind of care that hinges on proximity, accompaniment, and mutuality of being (ross 2009; al-mohammad 2010; sahlins 2013). both these schemes situate care in a place (topos/ba) but they differ in their economy (as the term is used in derrida 1992 and elsewhere to refer to oikos, or the value of the home and its obligations of circulation and exchange). these different economies have implications for how someone might (or might not) inhabit, share, or build in this space of the home (ingold 2000, 153; zigon 2014, 757).2 whereas the first scheme is positioned as a rational response to public concern over the growing cost (or diminishing value) of an aging society, the second points to other means of valuation in the social dependencies among family and community, young and old, that constitute an aesthetics and ethics of dwelling (han 2011).3 while the current welfare stance holds that these two economies should mesh with one another, in practice, neither is entirely cohesive or stable, and therefore cannot fully merge with or displace the other. instead, they together create an unhomely “place out of place” (ivy 1995, 23), or what azra hromadžić (2015, 4) terms “semi-absences,” conditions in which formal and informal care systems are ubiquitous yet inaccessible, where houses are everywhere yet uninhabitable. the presence of kodokushi indexes the uncertainty and unhomeliness arising from these semi-absences, affording an opportunity for rethinking relationships between economies and ethics in societies that have experienced rapid population aging. in places where the value of houses and of older people appears to decline with their excess, what is the responsibility of the community to maintain connection and care? to keep them from fading into specters, or to mourn their absence? to address these questions, we might look to jarrett zigon’s (2014) call for an “ethics of dwelling,” or a moral anthropology that begins with the “ontological demand to be in the world in a certain way” such that one is “intimately intertwined with and concerned for it and its constituent parts” (zigon 2014, 756, 757). in the context of community concerns for solo-dwelling older people in japan, an ethics of dwelling has the potential for connecting ways of inhabiting local spaces and the relationships or ways of being-with that they produce (ingold 2000; al-mohammad 2010). yet i argue that attending to the ethical life of those dwelling alongside the specters of kodokushi, the ontological demand extends to what, after derrida (1994), we might call a hauntological demand to attend to the ghosts in our midst and to presence them forth in some gesture of mourning. there is a resonance here with lisa stevenson’s (2014, 15–16) notion of the “mournful life,” which allows us to think about care ethics as more than just the sustaining of life, but also as the “recognition of and responsibility to the unsettling image of the other.” yet in the case of the unwitnessed death, the identity, the who that is mourned, eludes the mourners. as in the opening vignette, we were haunted by the sense that we had been responsible as neighbors and citizens for the conditions that conjured the ambulance, but unsure how to respond, caught in that moment by our own limits of dwelling alongside the other. mourning kodokushi, or working through the loss of past forms of dwelling, focuses instead on homes: cleaning them, reoccupying them, demolishing them, and watching houses still occupied for signs of the next death. the identity of the dead and their membership in a household (ie) forms the foundation of orthodox japanese mourning practices, allowing the continued dwelling of family spirits in dreams and visions in ways perpetuated through ritual (danely 2014). kodokushi not only lack this intimate connection but also remain outside categories of the homeless dead who may receive rites, such as those whose remains were unrecovered due to war or disaster, or who formed part of a homeless community (kim 2016). the uncertain identity of kodokushi, their lack of a cultural narrative of mourning, may be one of the reasons they rarely return as actual ghosts. neighborhood volunteers, many times working closely with care managers, social workers, and even buddhist priests, are pressed into the interstitial spaces of semi-absence opened up by between state and family, taking up this careful work of mourning. their work conjures, transforms, and translates the spectrality of kodokushi into the language of the spirits (geist/seishin) (derrida 1994, 9; sakai 1997)—both the “japanese spirit” localized through political projects of community watchfulness and the restless spirits of the old and disconnected (muen) in life and death (kim 2016; allison 2018). these local ethical projects expand narratives of mourning, revealing ways of acting in a world of limits (jackson 2011). telling a story of kodokushi means tracing an absence (meyer 2012), following the contours of semi-absences in spaces left behind, the affective reverberations that make one shiver if one lingers too long. this is a ghost story of sorts. that is to say, it is a story in which the ghost returns (derrida 1994: 9–12; ivy 1995, 22; langford 2016, 4). in the following sections, then, i also continue to return to the dark alley filled with old people living and dying alone to illustrate the ways kodokushi exceeds the boundaries of the past or present and continues to reassert, interfere, and repeat its absence. along the way, i engage other voices, spaces, and traces of kodokushi to situate it within my broader concerns about the possibility and limits of dwelling and care in the context of an aging society. ghost stories for an aging society at the back of the ambulance, the women waited, fingers clasped together behind their backs, still wearing aprons over their dresses and whispering in small groups. the men stood further back, quiet and watchful, their legs spread and sandal-clad feet firmly planted. the engine rumbled on, making it hard to talk to each other, so we stared toward the alley, looking, but not looking. after a moment, yoshida-san,4 a woman in her early seventies, came walking slowly toward us from the alley where the paramedics had disappeared earlier. yoshida-san was a member of the local self-governing association (minseiiin-kai) and didn’t live down that alley, so it was safe to assume that she’d just been over to help out. perhaps she was the one who called for an ambulance? the other neighbors began to ask her questions immediately, and as it turned out, it was not her, but a relative who came to visit who had made the call. yoshida-san did tell us that the person involved was indeed an elderly neighbor, a man named okura-san, and that he had fallen (taoreta).5 we nodded, unsurprised. those who were acquainted with okura-san knew that his wife had been hospitalized about three months earlier. since her hospitalization, okura-san had been living alone. i looked down the alleyway where the man lived. was he dead? did others wonder this too? * * * it is estimated that about 32,000 people die “lonely deaths” in japan each year (tamaki 2014, 211), or about one every sixteen minutes. sometimes the bodies of those who die unattended are discovered weeks or months after they have expired, but most are found within two or three days. in most cases, the deceased is an older person, often living alone after the death of a spouse. the number of older people living alone in japan rose sixfold between 1985 and 2015 and continues to rise. while japan was first considered an aging society four decades ago,6 it is now experiencing another shift, to a “mass-dying society” (tashi-shakai; nippon keizai shimbun 2016). the number of deaths has been increasing each year and is predicted to peak around 2040, when 1.67 million japanese people are expected to die, with an estimated one in four dying unattended and unwitnessed (masuda 2015). in kyoto, a city with about 1.4 million residents where i conducted fieldwork, solo-dwelling older adults made up 46 percent of all households where an older person resided.7 while the main focus of my research was people caring for older family members in the city, it quickly became apparent that local volunteer services were almost entirely occupied with looking after older people who lived alone and who had significant cognitive or mobility impairments that hindered their ability to go very far from home. while paid care services were more accessible in cities like kyoto than in outlying rural areas, a high proportion of solo-dwelling older people meant that those services were sometimes stretched very thin. this article draws mainly on interviews with paid care workers, minseiiin (commissioned community welfare officers), and ten months of volunteer work delivering meals to solo-dwelling older adults in the neighborhood where i lived in eastern kyoto. in 2008, the association for the advancement of building communities where seniors and others can live safely, a national group within the japanese ministry of health, labor, and welfare (mhlw), published a report titled “aiming for zero ‘isolated deaths’” (mhlw 2008). the report, peppered with anecdotes alongside national mortality statistics, sought to outline a means of preventing the growing social problem of isolated deaths. it began by recounting several cases, each composed with the same clinical distance despite the harrowing details. to give a sense of this style, i include a sample here: in the spring of 2001, the skeletal remains of a fifty-nine-year-old man were discovered. three years had passed since the death. he died on the wooden floor of the kitchen. the neighbors all believed there was someone living there since the lights had been left on and the electric meter was running. someone coming to collect rent discovered the man’s corpse. this man had divorced and lived alone. he had cut off all contact with his children and siblings. (mhlw 2008, 1; author’s translation) the story provides an intense and disturbing image of a body decaying in the house, while the rest of the world goes on, unnoticing, around it. the families of the deceased in this and other stories recounted in the document are represented as neglectful or absent because of the implied social failings of the deceased. they failed to connect. like campfire ghost tales, these anecdotes deliver a little morality along with the fright, propelling the rest of the document into its impassioned appeal to eliminate “tragic” scenes by mobilizing the community to build caring relationships, to “greet each other with a pleasant voice,” raise “community consciousness,” and make watchfulness a part of “everyday life” (mhlw 2008, 11–12). kodokushi became a popular media topic in japan in part because of the sensational images they produced. this held especially true in the aftermath of the hanshin earthquake of 1995.8 many of the survivors, relocated to residential apartment blocks (danchi), became solitary not just for reasons of age and infirmity but also because the residences did not provide significant opportunities to socialize or build ties for the dislocated refugees. some older people, suffering from inadequate postcrisis support, died and were not immediately discovered. after a national outpouring of aid, this lonely end stood as a haunting reminder of the challenge of caring for others and raised anxieties about social and family disintegration (see morioka 2012) amplified in the postbubble recession of the early 1990s. anne allison (2013, 8) describes this sense of internal alienation and precarity in the context of late liberal, post–3/11 japan as “liquefied,”9 and, echoing derrida (1994, 21–22), haunted with a sense of “being out of place, out of sorts, disconnected” (allison 2013, 14). my neighbor, okuda-san, whose fall had brought the ambulance to his house, would be considered a typical case of someone whose dwelling had become uninhabitable. in this case, it was the minseiiin who stepped in to contain the narrative. since the establishment of the national people’s welfare law in 1948, unpaid community welfare workers, selected because of local standing and interest, have looked after the most vulnerable, including disabled persons and the elderly. as local extensions of the ministry of health, labor, and welfare, minseiiin volunteers act as intermediaries between state-led initiatives like the “aiming for zero isolated deaths” report and communities, playing a crucial role in reinforcing images and ideas about kodokushi and the crisis of social disconnection by transporting and translating information between formal governmental bodies and local neighborhood associations. before approaching the home, then, we must first understand how minseiiin simultaneously construct local community life and its opposite: the lonely death. when talking to local minseiiin about incidents of kodokushi, all strongly expressed how important it was to “watch over” solo-dwelling older people. at the same time, they had little sense that their efforts were actually able to prevent kodokushi. one reason they gave was the restrictions on entering houses. community leaders considered the house both a site of surveillance and an obstacle to direct witnessing. since most houses in the urban residential areas of kyoto were closely packed together, facing directly onto the street, it was easy to see and hear what was going on when people were active. because of this exposure, however, most people took care to keep shades and shutters closed—it was also easy to go unnoticed in plain sight. “we are all scared [of kodokushi],” one minseiiin told me, adding that she visits the older solo-dwelling adults once a month to check on them. “but since they might die at any time, i ask neighbors to stay alert and contact me if anything seems amiss.” other minseiiin echoed these comments, saying, for instance, that it is the “main job” of the minseiiin to “help people before they become kodokushi,” by dropping in and watching over (see figure 2). “we’re not really allowed to go into homes and check on people, you see,” one minseiiin confessed, “but ordinary people, well, they can do as they like, so we can ask them to check on so-and-so if we are concerned.” since the frail elderly (or their decaying bodies) remain hidden from view, the house stands in for them. a skillful minseiiin will be able to gently persuade or cajole neighbors and friends into help keeping watch on the signs of possible kodokushi, such as untended plants or messy entranceways with stacks of mail. of course, as the case of okura-san indicates, even when it looks as though someone might be very vulnerable, there is little that ordinary community members or even minseiiin feel they ought to do. figure 2. a visit from the minseiiin rarely crosses the threshold of the home of the solo-dwelling older person. photo by jason danely. the city requires community social welfare volunteers to publicly report any kodokushi that has occurred in their district at monthly meetings, with representatives from other areas present. there are no direct repercussions, financially or otherwise, and while no one likes to report a kodokushi, it is understood that it could happen to anyone. as one minseiiin put it: it’s not kodokushi prevention, [it’s] just watching over (mimamori). people with bad luck are going to become kodokushi. so in order to make sure that doesn’t happen, we watch over them. but we never know when it is going to happen. no matter how much we look in on them, if they don’t have any family around, we can’t help! this kind of distance and resignation surprised me initially, but after several similar conversations with care professionals, it became clear that care needs for solo-­dwelling older people in particular were on a scale far beyond what minseiiin could reasonably be held responsible for. the immediate effects of kodokushi, the gossip and stories that circulated after the ambulance had left, do, however, affect the minseiiin and their ability to maintain a symbolic role as wards of overall community health, vitality, and spirit. why continue to make these efforts to watch over solo-dwelling older people if you cannot prevent unwitnessed deaths? this question led me to reconsider acts of watching over as not only instrumental, preventative gestures of care but also as the basis for recognizing solo-dwelling older people as the “unsettling image of the other” (stevenson 2014, 15), subjects who, as the term unsettling suggests, are adrift, haunting, and at the edges of dwelling. at stake in efforts to integrate the solo-dwelling older person, then, was the ethical and aesthetic sense of dwelling in the community.10 deaths that occur with family or care staff present are orderly. but kodokushi, as one minseiiin put it, “is a mess,” continuing: there are police, and reporters arriving—and then what would people think? that minseiiin-san wasn’t doing anything! so to make sure that doesn’t happen we have to constantly be vigilant. first, we look to see if their plants are ok, if it looks like they haven’t been tended in a while. or we look to see if they have been getting their mail. we can’t go around to everyone and be ringing doorbells. watching over (mimamori) provided a means of creating a public image of the solo-­dwelling elderly person. its mode of communication was in the register of what shunsuke nozawa (2015, 388) identified as “phatic mereness,” where gestures of connection leave momentary traces, or trace momentary encounters with others, as absent as it is present: the moment of effacement may create an imaginative worlding, and summon anew “the vitality of something that refuses connections.” a fuller copresence may be just a dream, a hoax. people will still die alone. but a reckoning of alterity might allow them to live and die believing their life and death will be notable to someone, a you, any one of you, on the other side of the channel. i know you are not here, i just want a hint, a sign that you are alive and waiting for me—not even that. (nozawa 2015, 395) nozawa reminds us here not to fully close the door on the possibilities of connection (en, tsunagari) often mobilized in kodokushi-prevention narratives, even when it appears that there is little to be done. make no mistake: the concern of community leaders expressed a genuine compassion for lonely and isolated older people, even if cultural conventions of civility mediated their concern. to present themselves as a community of concerned others, they could only gesture at connection, creating a space of indeterminate potential, imagination, and endurance. figure 3. an impression of phatic mereness. a poster reads: “the safety of solo-dwelling older people is the neighborhood’s [safety].” schoolchildren greet a smiling older couple at a distance, without facing them directly. photo by jason danely. a political ethic of watchfulness like that adopted by minseiiin requires looking at techniques of envisioning and the images envisioned. images of kodokushi are described in policy documents, case studies, popular news reports, documentaries, and posters. they are the spectacular images that obscure less perceptible and more widely distributed specters of social isolation and abandonment of older people. community volunteers and care managers make drop-in visits, and their observations often make their way through the local community as gossip. when i asked about stories i had heard with the minseiiin and care workers i knew, they responded with visible expressions of pity and disgust as well as a kind of moral talk that tried to contain this affect and provide some resolution to the unease it provoked. but press just a bit further and one also found an undercurrent of resignation and even indifference. deaths that go unobserved or unnoticed are viewed retrospectacularly as messy and disorganized, casting a shadow over other community efforts to instantiate connectedness and belonging.11 as such, they motivate and mobilize community efforts to manage the end of life. the goal is not to prevent death, but to prevent a messy death. haunted houses i had met okura-san before, but rarely saw him outside of his home. the last time i had seen him was two weeks earlier, when i accompanied another volunteer to deliver a lunchbox as part of a community service to older people living alone. we met him at his front door where, after we announced our arrival several times, he appeared, disoriented and exhausted. the other volunteer didn’t look too concerned, but i was relieved and smiled as i handed him the lunch. i asked if he was getting along since his wife had been away at the hospital, to which he offered a list of complaints. he felt worried because she was reaching the three-month limit on her stay and would need to be transferred to another hospital, even though she was still in a coma. he told me that he takes a taxi to the hospital almost every day, sometimes bringing a cd player with music she enjoys. the other volunteer, eager to move on, prompted okura-san for the lunch fee. we ended up asking him several times, and each time he would disappear into his darkened house and return to the door with a look of surprise, having forgotten the amount or what he was looking for in the first place. we ended up just telling him that we’d pick it up when we collected the lunch box later. what else could we do? there were a lot of other meals to deliver to older people living alone. in hindsight, i wondered if we shouldn’t have done something more. what was my responsibility? * * * around the end of the nineteenth century, when a japanese person spoke of “home,” they were most likely referencing an environment, a family group, or even a set of practices (sand 2003, 25) rather than a building set apart from others. throughout japan’s rapid national modernization process in the early twentieth century, however, a radical shift occurred in the meaning of home and the domestic, in conjunction with other material, architectural, and economic changes. over the second half of the twentieth century, rapid urbanization and increased mobility linked to infrastructure and a stable employment system created opportunities to live independently of the family home. in the 1950s, the vast majority of urban dwellers were renting, but as the economy began to prosper, home ownership rose sharply to around 60 percent in the 1960s (izuhara 2015, 179), where it remains today. in the era of japan’s post–world war ii so-called economic miracle, having one’s own home became an emblem of aspirations, a “my-homeism” inspired by hope and underwritten by debt (allison 2012). since the postbubble recession of the 1990s, however, a phenomenal growth in “empty homes,” or akiya, has occurred. at first, these were not the newly built homes of the suburban “bed towns,” but rather older homes that were not inherited, where aging parents stayed, then abandoned when the old people died or vacated. a landlord in a semirural area outside of tokyo told me that he had noticed a rapid increase of both akiya and kodokushi over the past decade as the town’s population grew older, and that even among his rental properties, two or three cases of kodokushi happen every year. he not only has to bear the cost of cleaning out the property afterward but said that he also always tells prospective renters about the fate of the former tenant, offering a discount on their rent. figure 4. akiya house, with leaflets overflowing the unused mailbox. photo by jason danely. as i walked down residential streets of kyoto with informants, some commented that they could tell if there were a lot of older people in the neighborhood by the number of shuttered and empty houses. sometimes these looked as one would imagine a haunted house: discolored walls and doors, stained curtains and peeling paint, vegetation wildly creeping across the facade (see figure 4). at other times, however, the akiya were hardly noticeable, blending in with the other tightly packed houses that appeared similarly vacant except for a few potted plants by the door. when i volunteered delivering meals to solo-dwelling older people, the empty houses became a frequent topic of conversation. the circulation of knowledge about former inhabitants enhanced my sensitivity to the small details that distinguished the aesthetic presence of these akiya, sometimes only apparent after time had passed. in some cases, the individuals to whom we delivered food were like islands left by the rising sea of akiya all around them. although the existing housing stock is greater than the total number of households in japan, public funds continue to be used to build new units in a neoliberal strategy to stimulate the economy (izuhara 2015, 186). as a result, in contrast to other countries where home ownership constitutes an important welfare asset for older people, japanese homes are left without refurbishment and lose value. already in 2014, the number of akiya nationwide exceeded 8 million, or 18 percent of the houses in japan (sobel 2015). in the same year, there were more than half a million names on waiting lists for entry into long-term residential care and nursing homes. the contrast between the sea of empty houses and the excess of older people seeking care homes is striking, yet a similar inhibition of dwelling characterizes them both. kodokushi and akiya, like ghosts and haunted houses, are the enduring subjects of mourning in this late liberal landscape. “all the empty houses, that’s the biggest problem,” said one shop owner i spoke with when i mentioned my interest in aging. “the children don’t want it, but the parents keep thinking that they can give it to the kids. but by the time they die, the house is worthless! the kids sometimes demolish the house, and then build two or three separate lots on those spaces.” since visual pollution regulations prevent the building of large high-rise apartment blocks around the center of kyoto, and because of the high cost of demolition, however, many successors may not be able to convert houses after the owners pass. to the shop owner, this was not just economically wasteful, but also constituted a persistent image of a decaying landscape where bonds of kin and community were stretched to breaking. the akiya tend to bring down the prices of homes in the area, but more than that, they serve as potent reminders of the limits of dwelling. like abandoned graves of the unconnected spirits (danely 2014, 107), the akiya are seen as messy, disruptive, and dangerous; they are difficult to mourn. if the image of economic success had been home ownership, then the image of failure was not only the messy death but also the messy house (allison 2018; gygi 2018). cleaners of kodokushi houses, covered head to toe in protective suits and ventilators and picking through soiled remains, bear an uncanny resemblance to the crews tending to the dangerous radioactive waste of the fukushima reactor damaged by the earthquake and tsunami on 3/11. similar images of fukushima survivors and the kodokushi cleaners praying for the spirits of the dead amid life’s wreckage, dressed in mortuary-white protective gear, have been widely circulated by the media in japan and abroad. these images, like those of “rubbish houses” (gygi 2018), echo the unhomely between mourning sites of environmental catastrophe and intimate entropy, dramatizing the potentially contaminating effects of messy deaths for both the spirits and the survivors. but specters must fade back into invisibility, quietude, into the inner recesses of the home that traps things and people rather than facilitating flows and relationships. in one case, for example, nishida-san, a minseiiin living in central kyoto, told me about discovering the body of a woman who had died days earlier alone in her home. after alerting the police and confirming that the woman had no next of kin, nishida-san called other local community members to help clean the mess made by the leakage of bodily fluids. as they lifted up the tatami mats on the floor, they discovered a hidden stash of money (hesokuri). when i first wrote about nishida-san’s discovery (danely 2014, 146), i treated it merely as an example of the ways older people express concern and perform ritual services for the abandoned. when she told this story to me again a few years later, i asked about what had happened to the money, to which she replied: we laughed and said we’d all divide it up! even the police said that he’d take some first! [laughs] but the police took it and counted it and did everything properly. i really feel bad for people with no family. the end was coming and all she had left was money. she didn’t have anyone to give it to. no children, no siblings. so we just asked for enough to cover the cost of a small funeral, cremation, and some sort of memorial. the police just took [the money]; i don’t know what happened in the end. they didn’t give any to the minseiiin to say thank you for all of your hard work! here again, the absence of family and the messy corporeal remains revealed a hidden accumulation of money that remained trapped rather than circulated. the work of the minseiiin, however small, allowed some of that money to flow back into the work of relationship building through the funeral, to resettle the spirit and contain the unsightly spectacle. nishida-san’s story, like that of the professional kodokushi cleaning crews, shows how the homes of solo-dwelling older people have their own pungent “ecology of sensibility” (hankins 2013); they are anything but empty. she described another case of kodokushi where funeral instructions and money were set aside for whoever found the body, but in most cases, she only found a mess: unpaid bills, soiled underwear, the wrapping of cheap instant noodles. these are unhomely homes that bear the stains of a person beyond dignity, beyond dwelling. like the police response after kodokushi, empty houses continue to produce political and existential consequences for the community and those charged with watching over it. inge daniels (2010) described the ways in which houses in japan at once appear structurally impervious and opaque, shuttered and gated off from the community, yet also surprisingly porous, as friends and neighbors find ample opportunities for watching over and dropping in. these flows happen because of the social and ideological infrastructures of the house. japan’s universal and mandatory long-term care insurance (ltci) system has become part of this infrastructure, regulating the flows of dependencies, bringing carers into the home or keeping them out. several informants told me that it was easier to access care services when living alone, since co-residing family reduced eligibility for ltci benefits. many people, however, are hesitant to become a burden on welfare services, even when they are eligible. as ltci displaces the flows and porosity of family and community, it also creates semi-absences that render the solo-dwelling older person vulnerable. home-modification and contracting scams are some of the most common forms of fraud targeting solo-dwelling older adults. in one recent case, a man posing as a contractor in kobe city defrauded a solo-dwelling woman with dementia for 6.8 million yen (around us$637,000) between 2013 and 2014 (asahi shimbun 2018). these schemes differ from other fraud targeting older people because they include face-to-face home visits; in about half of all such cases, the victim is over seventy (compared to one-quarter of the cases of store-based contractor fraud; national consumer affairs center of japan 2013, 10). these scams are particularly devious because they take advantage of the symbolic significance of the home on at least three levels. first, home is a place where one will grow old and die. scams often promise to make older homes fit for older persons considering a future where they will need more supportive modifications, and so home improvement becomes a means of asserting autonomy over aging, even as it leaves them more vulnerable to predatory schemes. second, the unnecessary repairs are often infrastructural, as was the case with one solo-dwelling neighbor in her nineties, who was scammed by a contractor claiming that she needed to urgently repair plumbing and hidden water damage beneath her floors. other scams target roof repairs, since loose tiles cause damage to surrounding houses during typhoons. both cases leverage a sense of fear and responsibility by making these imaginary infrastructures visible and ethically laden. third, they take advantage of the social isolation of the older person by providing a rare chance for recognition and generosity; older people want to give, and may find meaning in some kinds of loss. as nozawa (2015, 375) notes, these scams fill “security holes” of indifference with interest, but in the end, this interest is at best a costly fantasy, and at worst, dangerous abuse. those watching over and dropping in on solo-dwelling older adults might try to catch these sorts of abuses and guard the older person’s fragile state of dwelling for as long as they can. but too often abuse remains hidden within the home, itself more of a specter than a public spectacle. emplacing and emplotting death somehow one of the women in the gathering surmised that the ambulance had been called by okura-san’s son, who had by chance been visiting that day. okura-san was soon carried, strapped to the stretcher, into the ambulance, alert but confused and disheveled. his black nylon socks were bunched awkwardly and his feet laid askew, one leg slightly bent up. this detail broke the smooth performance of the paramedic crew, who, like the puppeteers of japanese bunraku theater, seemed to disappear in their quiet, efficient movements. i was riveted by the man with the rumpled socks. okura-san’s son soon joined the paramedics, carrying a bright green nylon duffel bag and briefly apologizing to all of the neighbors as he climbed into the ambulance next to his father. as the door shut, one of my neighbors, a woman with thick gray hair and large glasses leaned over to me, whispering: “i am eighty-eight years old. isn’t it terrible that people here are living too long? there are no young people in our neighborhood anymore. . . . no young people in japan . . .” she turned and walked back down the street alone before i could respond. * * * for the spectators, an event like a neighbor’s fall has significance that reaches beyond the house, beyond the neighborhood, enveloping an entire nation: no young people in japan. young people, or so i read her tone, do not die like this. even though this scene in the alleyway did not involve the actual event of death, i could not have been the only one who imagined it. the event asks the questions of mourning: whose body and where is it? for my neighbor, the disappearance of the body into the ambulance signaled a movement from the social body of the community, bonded through the phatic labor of volunteers, and the body politic, marked as much by uniformity and order as by a sensorial spectacle of emergency (scheper-­hughes and lock 1987). many ethnographies have already discussed the significance of place, and especially of the home, in regard to attitudes and practices surrounding death, dying, and mortuary ritual in japan (e.g., long 2004; connor and traphagan 2014; danely 2014; kim 2016). most of these note that historically, the embodied copresence of intimate others to watch over the dying person is critical; the same expression, mimamori or mitori, is used both for keeping a death watch and for watching over solo-dwelling older people. around 75 percent of deaths in japan occur in hospitals (mhlw 2017b), where the patient is not given the option of returning home before they die. one explanation for this, as mentioned earlier by a minseiiin, is that for the bereaved family, the death at home, even when the body is discovered quickly, can become something like the spectacle of kodokushi, with police and medical staff called to scene. doctors and medical staff sympathetic to bereaved families sometimes become complicit in avoiding this spectacle by clever ways of emplacing and emplotting death,12 staging a bureaucratic performance that transforms the haunting, messy death to one that is good and orderly. for example, one doctor told me: a lot of people call the hospital at the last minute to avoid a big scene. my advice is that if someone dies at home, you should call the doctor you trust. if i get a call, sometimes in the middle of the night, i’ll tell them to hold on and clean the body. then i’ll come later and do the examination and take care of the paperwork. that way the family can avoid dealing with the police. this happens a lot! these efforts to avoid a suspicious death were performed not only for those who died at home but also for older persons in geriatric care facilities. one nurse at a geriatric institution (rōjin hoken shisetsu) told me that even when someone had clearly died, staff would call the ambulance, and the paramedics would go through the motions of trying to save the person or examine them as if they were still potentially alive until they arrived at the hospital. then, on arrival, doctors could pronounce that the person had died at the hospital rather than at a care institution. in examples like these, bureaucratic procedures and documentation lent themselves to a process of emplacing and emplotting death to produce conformity to both legal requirements and an ethics of dwelling. as with the minseiiin, a general consensus existed among the medical professionals i spoke with that preventing kodokushi entirely was absurd and that the good death at home, surrounded by family, was, as one nurse put it, “nothing more than a fantasy.” there was no such thing as kodokushi zero society. middle-aged people i spoke with thought dying alone at home was more desirable than dying in a hospital, which remains associated with the frightening image of life-support systems of wires and tubes that japanese people refer to as “spaghetti syndrome.” but they also realized that despite personal preferences, the end of life in old age was very difficult to control (long 2004). in the context of overburdened care institutions, there is little left to do but live under the occasional gaze of the minseiiin and nosy neighbors and hope to dwell unto death without becoming trapped in one’s home. one case manager described the “trap” of home this way: people are going to need help, and if the services are not there, they’ll go to a hospital, then to a geriatric institution, then to a home or to older persons’ housing, where you can heap on all sorts of services. then you’re in your own place but you’re imprisoned in solitary confinement [zashikirō] . . . we’re becoming a dying society. there won’t be the family there to watch over [the dying], or the family will be old themselves. we’re worried about what lies ahead [saki yuki fuan]. the country hopes people who have dementia or are bed-ridden die in the community, receiving care from local groups, so they don’t have to use hospitals and care facilities. they tell the local people to do something about these people. people living alone are increasing, kodokushi and things like that. so the community is told to take care of these people, watch over them [mimamorinasai]. this care manager is rightfully concerned about what lies ahead. the last major revision of ltci in 2017 (mhlw 2017a) raised fees and overall personal spending limits while promoting support for independence (jiritsu shien) and rehabilitation. most of the older adults and family caregivers i spoke with expressed deep concern about this change and about what it will mean for the quality and kinds of care available for older adults living alone. “the government is just throwing all of this on our backs,” complained one minseiiin. “they say you take care of these old people, but we don’t know how to be a community like that.” statements like this suggest not only an ethos of disinterest or resignation but also a struggle to mourn in meaningful ways in a “mass-dying society” where care economies of home simultaneously depend on and conflict with the tenuous bonds of community. conclusion kodokushi insinuates itself into the social imagination as a constant haunting presence, a banal tragic ethos, like the unsettling undertone felt when an ambulance stops outside one’s door. it haunts the borderland between the state and neighborhood, public and private, just beyond the touch and watch of the community. in maintaining this blurred boundary zone, the houses that isolate solo-dwelling older people are hidden in plain sight. they were there all along, as both an ideology and a structure of care. this article has examined the ways care, and particularly community-based “watching over,” is employed to imagine the unwitnessed deaths of solo-dwelling older adults. i have argued that the construction of the kodokushi narrative in minseiiin reports, death certificates, welfare documents, cleaning rituals, and everyday gossip provide an opportunity for mourning that attempts to restore the possibility for an ethics of dwelling and witnessing. narratives that try to make sense of kodokushi as a local event, as well as an index of an age of national decline, prompt feelings of both crisis and resignation. the excess of lonely older people and houses without value, however, continues to produce semi-absences for the specter of kodokushi to reappear and cast uncertainty over this possibility. an economy and ethics of dwelling raises questions about the material environments that people dwell within. people who become kodokushi are defined paradoxically by their inability to fully dwell and their inability to do anything but linger on alone in their home. houses are not the cause of kodokushi any more than automobiles are the cause of traffic accidents. however, their place in the economic and political landscape of japan’s history since the mid-twentieth century has intensified their significance as places of hope and aspiration, care and community belonging. the narratives and images of kodokushi exist alongside those of the empty houses that haunt an aging, postbubble japanese society like the brittle husks of great cicadas. in the absence of a witness, these ghosts bring forth a hauntological demand to mourn the unsettled other, to emplace and emplot them in ways that can counter the spectacle. it is difficult to picture what kinds of changes the next decades of japan’s aging society will bring. there has simply never existed a society where 40 percent of the population are over sixty-five and are expected to live well into their nineties. the death rate will continue to rise, as will the numbers of kodokushi, since institutions will not have the capacity or resources to otherwise deal with the aging population. japan will continue to be a place for the work of mourning, where images will play a central role. throughout my own narration of kodokushi, the solitary subject of death has remained quiet. perhaps it was this silence that led to his invisibility even before death. he didn’t communicate, didn’t know how to narrate his own ending. we are left to imagine, as my neighbor did, that his fate is also ours, or even japan’s. the specters still ask: who is responsible? we are left with a glimpse of an oddly rumpled sock disappearing into the back of an ambulance, and then, with ourselves. notes acknowledgments i thank the cultural anthropology editorial team and the anonymous reviewers for their generous, thoughtful, and encouraging input on this article. research for the article was supported by the japan society for the promotion of science short-term postdoctoral fellowship (pe13251). 1. some policy documents refer to such deaths, somewhat euphemistically, as koritsushi (isolated deaths), which implies a degree of independence and autonomy. the journalist takeshi yabe (2012) has argued that this form of death is not problematic in the united states, and is only a problem because of an antiquated japanese social ideology that unfairly stigmatizes older people living alone. 2. while an extensive body of work exists on topos and theories of territory and place, i limit myself here to the context of japan. two major contributors to rethinking topos in the japanese context are nishida kitarō and his student, watsuji tetsurō. while there are differences between the two, both shared a contention that the heideggerian phenomenology of being and time did not sufficiently develop notions of relationality (ma) or place/environment (ba). these philosophers, who draw generously from japanese buddhist perspectives, have had a strong influence on cultural aesthetics and its use of empty spaces, pauses, and elipses that produce a consciousness of the radical interdependence of subjectivity and milieu. 3. in this sense, we might say that these map closely to ferdinand tönnies’s use of gesellschaft and gemeinschaft, or annemarie mol’s (2008) contrast between the logic of choice and the logic of care. here, i want to emplace these logics in the historically specific and culturally constituted spaces of the house/home. 4. all names used in this article are pseudonyms. 5. the word taoreru is ambiguous in this context. it is sometimes used as a euphemism for death, but it may also simply mean that the person collapsed. as the situation remained unclear, this was the most she would tell us, and no one asked further. 6. in 1970 japan officially became an aging society, with 7 percent of the population over sixty-five. as of 2017, about 27 percent of the population is over sixty-five, making japan the world’s first “super-aged society” (chōkōrei shakai). 7. of 260,434 households with at least one older person residing, 120,294 were composed of only one person, according to the october 2015 census of kyoto. 8. nozawa (2015, 375) notes that the word kodokushi began appearing in newspapers around 1970 and grew more prevalent throughout the 1980s. 9. 3/11 refers to the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown) that occurred on march 11, 2011 in northeast japan. this disaster and its aftermath precipitated an urgent desire not only for justice to those directly affected but also to mourn and reflect on social disconnections and the potential for unity in the face of tragedy. 10. i use aesthetic here to acknowledge the ways kodokushi, and the vigilance toward it on the part of minseiiin and others in the community (seken), is an intensely sensual experience. as joseph hankins (2013) has argued, japanese social differences are reproduced within an “ecology of sensibility” linking levels of interpretants (e.g., community, local welfare officials, minseiiin volunteers) through affects and embodied senses in ways that undergird logics of exclusion and stigmatization. 11. i am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who suggested this brilliant phrasing, and for pointing out the chronotopic and hauntological dimensions of the spectacle of kodokushi. the unwitnessed death might be suspected or sensed, but remains quiet and hidden, only spectacular after it is discovered. 12. the notion of emplotment is borrowed from paul ricoeur’s (1984) poetics of history, time, and narrative. emplotment describes the ways that tactics 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creighton campbell 2011 “population ageing and wellbeing: lessons from japan’s long-term care insurance policy.” lancet 378, no. 9797: 1183–92. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(11)61176-8. yabe, takeshi 2012 hitori de shindemo kodoku ja nai: “jiritsushi” senshinkuni america [even if you die alone, you are not lonely: “independent death” in the developed country america]. tokyo: shinchosha. zigon, jarrett 2014 “an ethics of dwelling and a politics of world-building: a critical response to ordinary ethics.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 20, no. 4: 746–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12133. gambling, dignity, and the narcotic of time in tokyo’s day laborer district, san’ya cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 150-175, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.11 gambling, dignity, and the narcotic of time in tokyo’s day laborer district, san’ya klaus k. y. hammering sophia university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0578-2828 every saturday and sunday, a steady flow of men can be seen heading from the old day laborer and skid row district of tokyo, san’ya, in the direction of the nearby rokku entertainment area of asakusa. as if they had taken on the musty complexion of the newspapers they carry tucked under their arms or in their back pockets, they can be recognized by their monochromatic, frayed clothing and their ghostly outer appearance. be it on foot or by bus, everyone has one destination: wins, the off-track horse-race gambling (keiba) hall of asakusa. aficionados arrive early, even before opening, standing impatiently in a small crowd waiting for the shutters to open and the gambling to commence. by noon, especially on sundays, when the high-profile races are screened, the six-story wins building is buzzing with crowds clumped around tv screens hanging from the ceiling. many also sit on the staircases and in the few open spaces, or by the walls and in the corners of the hall, peering at the small print of the newspaper statistics spread on the floor before them. with a pen in one hand and a stack of blank betting cards by their side, they write on top of the statistics, only to fill in the numbers of their bet in the circles of their betting card, after which they purchase their gambling ticket from the machines lined up against the front wall. figure 1. betting card. at wins, plastic pencils were provided for gamblers to indicate the location of their race, the number of their race, the order of their horses, and the amount of their bets on the bettting card. figure 2. gambling ticket. discarded gambling tickets were strewn across the floors of wins, where a janitor swept them away. on almost every sunday between 2011 and 2013, one group of middle-aged men from san’ya could be found in this crowd of gamblers, starting their weekly pilgrimage at an eatery in asakusa before liquor had gotten the better of them. sundays for them passed in a blitz. by two or three o’clock, the men would be back in san’ya to watch the main races at a sordid dive bar outsiders would have been loath to enter. by this point, they would either be trashed or at the peak of conviviality: watching the races, singing karaoke, drinking, and eating with a pile of cash lumped in the center of the table. i gambled, imbibed, and worked with this group of men at construction sites during these two years of fieldwork. for at least six months, i was totally immersed in their lives: working four days per week, waking at six or earlier, coming back at six or later, then drinking, gambling, eating, sleeping, sometimes in the same room, and waking, only to work again. in rare instances, i accompanied them in an ambulance to hospitals. having housed as many as 15,000 male laborers in the decades after world war ii, by 2012, san’ya’s population of men had diminished to about 5,000. according to its active laborers, fewer than 50 others worked in the area, and almost all of these were in their fifties. aside from these active workers, the remainder of san’ya’s populace was considered either too old or physically unable to work. living in the two-storied wooden bunkhouses that still lined san’ya’s alleys, these men constituted an anonymous mass of rapidly declining individuals whose stigmatized penury precedes the collapse of japan’s bubble economy in 1991 by several decades, and whose life expectancy in 2021 remains twenty years below japan’s average. almost exclusively composed of men, this vanishing population lives beyond the relatively visible orbit of what david slater and patrick galbraith (2011) have described as “the collapse of middle-class masculinity” in japan, or the collapse of japan’s middle class at large (allison 2013). figure 3. the exterior of a dive bar in san’ya. photo by klaus k.y. hammering. grounded in my time with san’ya’s workers, i consider how the negative excesses of their lives away from the construction site counter a biopolitical discourse of economic productivity, conferring dignity in place of the death-inducing effects of exhaustive labor. rather than rest their bodies in san’ya for another day of manual labor, these men repeatedly and insistently gambled themselves into debt. moreover, they routinely gambled at local san’ya venues that were illegal, and therefore backed by the yakuza, the japanese organized crime syndicates, all while drinking their bodies into ruin. in what follows, i examine how the solicitation for mutual recognition through gambling did not consist only in the assertion of a vulgar form of masculinity.1 gambling, drinking, and engaging in (or stopping) the occasional brawl enabled the men to recognize each other as social beings, and as men, but there was more to gambling and risk-taking than a scripted performance of masculine social status. as an act of staking one’s reputation as a “man” (otoko), gambling simultaneously transformed the abstract time of the workday into an immediate experience of contingency, thereby enabling time to emerge as what walter benjamin (1999b, 12) described as a “narcotic” that reclaims the time lost to the deadening effects of manual labor.2 by foregrounding the initial thrill of gambling as a narcotic, i show how this transformation consists in a reclamation of “experience” (erfahrung), that is, of a past event that has been folded into the present through a narrative form that informs the entirety of one’s life (benjamin 1968).3 for rather than winnings, it was the production of debt that carried over into the everyday lives of these men, and it was credit that testified to the accountability and reputation of a man in san’ya.4 figure 4. standard bunkhouse in san’ya with single-room occupancy. toilets, microwave (there was no kitchen), and a common bathing area were shared. photo by klaus k.y. hammering. in its eminently social dimensions, gambling in san’ya invokes the “character” that erving goffman (1967) once depicted as a compensation for the routinized predictability of office work among male casino gamblers in his 1967 “where the action is,” or that thomas m. malaby (2003) has described in chania, greece, as a self-constitution enabled through exposure to contingency.5 it is at games like craps, roulette, and, especially, off-track horse-race betting (kruse 2016) that the social and vertiginous dimensions (caillois 2001) of gambling in san’ya can be encountered in different social contexts.6 in fact, insofar as the initial “hook” of a “near miss” (schüll 2012, 97) is concerned, we may even liken the appeal of the gambling practices that follow to that of slot machines. but this is also where the affinities end. for the day laborer’s desire for self-constitution through a narrative form of experience contrasts sharply with the asocial “self-liquidation” sought by gamblers in the “machine zone” of slots, as natasha dow schüll (2012, 222–27) depicts gambling in las vegas. unlike women and men seeking an escape at slot machines from the vagaries of human relations in the service industry, the manual laborers of san’ya seek, above all, to restore mutual recognition and sociality. whereas schüll (2012, 226) explicates the asocial dimensions of the gambler’s desire to reach a “zero state” at slot machines, i examine the initial thrill and social aspect of gambling. so too, whereas goffman, malaby, and others suggest the ignominy of losing, i disclose a scene in which an individual attains dignity by exacerbating his debts. although the desire for victory emerges across the gamut of gambling practices, day laborers in san’ya rejuvenated the waste of their bodies through gambling to reconstitute their social selves in time. holding themselves accountable for their debts, they solidified their dignity as men of their word. and this is where the otoko of san’ya exercises agency: by augmenting and harnessing the negativity of utter deprivation that would have consigned him to a premature, anonymous death. figure 5. one of san’ya’s more dilapidated bunkhouses. the faded signs by the entryway state that rooms are available for ¥1,700 ($17 usd) per night. photo by klaus k.y. hammering. exhaustion and the abstraction of time at the construction site for the construction workers of san’ya, the enjoyment of gambling stood in contrast to the construction site. there, the prevention of accidents required attending to dangerous contingencies yet, at the same time, it also demanded a deadening to the possibility of these contingencies ever coming to deadly fruition. thinking too much about the ever-present possibility of accidents would have made work impossible, so the men had to invest energy in maintaining a certain “shield,” as sigmund freud (1961, 30) once wrote, to block out this possibility.7 confronted with the specter and penetrating shock of an accident bound to happen at some point, san’ya workers at the construction site had to block out direct exposure to material contingencies. it was as if they labored in an abstract temporality imposed on them by capital, in which the time of production had been emptied out of the interruptive (yet inevitable) force of accidents and other hindrances.8 at the end of the workday, workers from san’ya were drained to the point of fatigue, since the tasks imposed on them required that they expend their energy as efficiently as possible. in so doing, they also deadened themselves to the physical environment of the construction site—depriving them of a sensorial experience of the world that they could call their own. in one of many comparable tasks, a typical san’ya day laborer had to coordinate his movements with a thirty-ton excavator. to drive a metal pipe into the earth, he had to hold this pipe with one hand, and with the other, instruct the operator of the excavator to move its beak forward and down, so that it clasped the tip of the pipe. at this point, the man on the ground had to “run out of the way,” because once the beak pushed down, the pipe was plunged into the earth. it went without saying that, if a finger was caught between the beak and the pipe, or if a foot remained stuck under the pipe, the force of the excavator would have torn it off. and sometimes, just when the excavator released its hold, the pipe bounced back toward the face of the worker, shredded across its tip. but the danger of this had become commonplace. so too, when dust particles flew in the air, san’ya day laborers either turned their faces or wrapped a towel over their mouths. if a worker stepped on a nail, he ignored the injury until lunch break, when he could run by a pharmacy. even downright exhaustion left no choice but to carry on. likewise, scaffolders from san’ya knew what would happen if they fell from a height of thirty stories, since it had happened to others. one man related what passed through his mind, when looking down from such a height: “if i fall from here, i will die.” nevertheless, he continued to work without the encumbrance of his safety gear. in this way, the possibility of accidents had to be bracketed and repressed as if it did not exist. at the construction site, the working day was subdivided into dockets of time (8:30–10:00, 10:30–12:00, 1:00–3:00, 3:30–5:00) that fused this expenditure of bodily energy with the duration of time. reflecting a nineteenth-century imperative to understand motion in terms of time and space (rabinbach 1992, 84–119), the day was divided into sections whose passage was experienced in anticipation of a safe ending, across which energy was spent. time was compartmentalized, with the body occupying the centerpiece of this compartmentalization, because laborers from san’ya had to know that, by the time it was 3:00 p.m.—or by the time they were fifty or sixty years old—they still had enough energy left to make it until the end of the day.9 at the age of fifty-six, one man explained that, to get through the day, especially when doing demanding physical labor, he needed to pace himself in accordance with the break periods held between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m., 12:00 and 1:00 p.m. (lunch), and 3:00 and 3:30 p.m. it was only the thought and certainty of an upcoming break that enabled him to continue, a little more, until the next break. only slacking enabled him to subvert the top-down management. of course, the best kind of working day was the “easy” (raku) one, one less demanding or that ended early, but the only type of work that occasionally ended early was cement work, and this was determined by the pace of the machinery. if the mixers arrived on time, the day could end as early as 3:00 p.m. if not, it could extend past 5:00 p.m. and it was for this reason that, during cement work, the spaces of the floor came to represent the passage of time. because every floor was divided into equal-sized apartment blocks called “slabs,” each uncemented slab signified a compartment of time. to calculate the remains of the day, workers counted the number of remaining slabs. thus, time passed and constituted the abstract measure of bodily expenditure. yet, unconcerned with the material contingencies of the construction site, this was a specific form of time, one oriented toward the future in a future anterior mode in which the workday, like the portions of the day, will have ended (lyotard 1984, 81). at least one person had to bring either a wristwatch or phone out to the construction site, so the men could ask each other, sometimes every five minutes, if the time for a break had arrived yet. if a watch was on hand, it was possible to get a head start. otherwise, they had to wait for other workers to head back to the changing rooms. in the summer, when workers were regularly hospitalized for heatstroke, the stretch between 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. felt especially long. at those times, it was better not to look at the watch, to stick it out, and be relieved that time had passed when one finally dared a glance. a capitalist conception of value inhered to this regimentation of energy, since it is the commodity form, or rather, money that precipitates the abstraction of “labor power” into units of time. the quantification of labor power is immanent to the exchange of a subsistence wage for manual labor. however, it is only in its total expenditure that labor power emerges as “labor power” proper; that is, when wages were exchanged for “labor power” at the construction site, overseers expected that laborers exhaust themselves in maximum productivity (rabinbach 1992; marx 1997).10 unlike japan’s salaryman or members of its service industry, the figure of the day laborer therefore renders explicit the limits of the body, and of the etiolation of sensory impressions necessary to the smooth performance of capital accumulation. while the salaryman and convenience store woman wait for breaks as much as anyone, biopolitics had been dispensed with in san’ya, and its laborers were discarded without consideration for their reproduction. they were the long-lost sons, husbands, and fathers who had trouble supporting even themselves and who were no longer expected to take care of others, not to mention themselves. rather than expressing a social metabolism, labor power at the construction site therefore entailed an utter deprivation of energy in which laborers consisted of nothing but a means toward the extraction of value. it is the violence of this rationalization that constituted the hierarchical relationship between overseers and workers at construction sites, where conditions of exchange dictated that manual laborers be worked to the point of exhaustion and, eventually, death. the group of men i worked with had no choice but to endure death-inducing fatigue. in fact, both of the men i will refer to in the following had already been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses. kentarō, a burly, fifty-seven-year-old, no-nonsense construction worker had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. and akira, a former member of the yakuza who had risen to the rank of lieutenant (kashira) and whose muscles had once been bulging, had been diagnosed with a tumor. still, they worked, drank, and gambled. for it was precisely their reduction to a point of utter deprivation that compelled the emergence of a dignifying counterdiscourse to the death-inducing discipline of the worksite. the exigency of this counterdiscourse instigated the conversion of leftover wages into the daily excesses of liquor and gambling, the latter of which involved an altogether different experience of time and contingency. doubling the temporality of the working day the group veritably lived according to two distinct calendars. one was the regular, endless workday schedule; the other, that of gambling, supplemented the first with the ever-present possibility of incommensurable winnings. after a week of work, the thrill and intoxication of gambling, the high of skirting close to the win of coincidence, rejuvenated the body and implied an aptitude for seeking out the contingent precisely where the shock factor would be greatest. like benjamin’s poet of modernity, the gambler in the crowd sought the encounter with the penetrating shock of the accidental, which, as every manual worker knew but repressed, was bound to reoccur at some point. in fact, when kentarō stayed in a bunkhouse, he kept track of the winning lottery from day to day. he would record the numbers in columns on the back of a calendar hanging in his room, enabling him to track number patterns and anticipate future numbers. if the number 3 had not appeared for a long time, the likelihood of it appearing went up, and vice versa. within limits, kentarō could rely on mathematical laws of probability to predict future numbers, but there were any number of ways to play the lottery, each of which was considered equally legitimate. one way was to have a computer assign a number on the basis of a calculation of probability. another was to seek out online predictions or tipsters. and another was to doggedly “chase” (oikakeru) the same number, over and over again, maybe because the gambler had previously won with that lucky number, or because it signified an auspicious calendrical date. of course, 4 (shi) signified death (shi) and was generally considered less auspicious, but over time, numbers became intimately personal and disregarded any form of rational calculus. more importantly, gamblers could avail themselves of whatever technique felt right, and kentarō had made it a practice to begin his days by purchasing a lottery ticket, doubling the monotony of the working day with a repetitious gambling practice. he had yet to win big at the lottery, but when kentarō was strapped for cash, he would say, “it’s okay, the lottery will come.” whether in a state of immediate readiness to gamble, or having lost so much that they had decided not to gamble, the group remained in continuous contact with gambling in one form or another. on the train rides to work and during breaks in the changing rooms, the statistics and predictions (yosō) for races—be it horses, boats, or bicycles—were always in someone’s hands. this would spur occasional conversation, as one person might peer over the shoulders of another and remark: “number 7 is real likely to win, eh?” (nanaban atama ga katai nā). even if someone had decided to stop gambling, they always seemed able to recount the circumstances of upcoming races: the odds, the stakes, which horse and jockey were strong, and what combinations would give the highest yield. and if it was a less well-known race, a mere glance at the statistics seemed to give them instant insight into the intricacies of the race in question. gambling, and especially betting on horses, formed such a locus of social knowledge that the group could communicate in a string of ciphers—#7, #3, #13, #1; and in combination: #7 #3, #7 #1; and in triplets: #13 #7 #1, #3 #13 #7—that were instantly recognizable to the other interlocutors. what everyone in the group hoped for, as, undoubtedly, every gambler, was a big win. everyone, moreover, had a story of how they had won a considerable amount of money in the past. akira would recount how he had won ¥150,000 ($1,500 usd) on an off-chance bet he had hardly thought about. kentarō recalled the time he had won ¥500,000 ($5,000 usd), and how incredibly good the noise of the machine had sounded as it counted his money—pure sound of excess—before he flicked the cash into his pocket. and two other men won big sums in the two years i was there—one of them, repeatedly. such experiences were said to be formative of the inveterate gambler, because that was how one became “hooked” (hamaru). then there were stories of people who had bought cars or houses with profits from gambling, yet everyone knew it was impossible to make a “living” (seikatsu) from gambling. overall, the men lost more than they won. but still, every time the screen at wins or a dive broadcast the returns on main races, it confirmed that someone out there had taken the jackpot. moreover, everyone in the group had their theory of how to achieve incommensurable winnings, and it all began with ¥100 ($1 usd). the artistry of gambling as motor-connectivity to fate it was common to compliment victorious gamblers, because gambling was not regarded as a mere game of chance, but rather, as one that required a certain skill and knowledge. this aptitude was differentiated from skills at the construction site. for as an occupation that was freely entered into, gambling did not constitute labor, but appeared as expenditure in the absence of production, as the squander of time, money, and an embodied acumen.11 whether it was horses, bicycles, the lottery, an array of japanese card games, or, on rare occasions, dice games, the winner always received congratulations and applause. when one individual won ¥100,000 ($1,000 usd) several times in a row on horses, akira looked at the man’s numbers, only to remark: “and to think that he wins with this” (kore de katsun damon nā). someone might say to a winner, “all the credit to you” (sasuga da nā), and on the floors of wins, gamblers commended one another, while the winner stood tall. yet the skill and knowledge of the gambler was of a very specific type, and seemed to involve instinct (kan) far more than rational forethought or calculation. this instinct could lead the gambler to seek out the tipsters who sold predictions on the street as much as it could lead the lottery-gambler to purchase a computer-generated ticket, or to fill out their own divinations. but in order to exercise this faculty, it did not suffice that the gambler divine an outcome. he also had to place an actual bet, meaning that he had to render himself vulnerable to the fateful passage of time, activating his nerves in anticipation of the results.12 and it was for this reason that horse gamblers stood rooted to their spot during the initial stage of a race, silently reining in their energies, only to release them in an unruly flood of excitement, jubilation, or dejection, as losers turned their backs and winners raised their hands in victory. simply predicting an outcome, as every gambler knew, did not have the slightest significance if a bet was not placed. it was one thing to predict, and quite another to gamble. the artistry of gambling was only disclosed through the practice of risk, in an embodied battle (shōbu) with fate: of staking one’s money. this also gave the lie to the tipster, for the failure of the tipster to bet only indicated that contact between the nervous instincts and fate, or coincidence, had been severed. hence, the key to gambling, akira would say, was “not to think about it too much” (amari kangaenaide). the group would laugh at the bets that i placed, sometimes even passing my numbers around, slanting their heads with a wry grin, as if there was little chance the horses would come in as i had bet on them. even if they did, it would not make any money, since i had simply mixed up the highest-ranked horses, and thrown in a wild card. admittedly, when i won three consecutive races, each garnering me ¥100 for ¥100, it elicited the laughter of the group once again. yet when i placed bets on horses that seemed highly unlikely, but not guaranteed not to win, the group would laugh, only to retract by saying: “i don’t know, it might come with that.” for they were all believers in “beginner’s luck,” as if gambling necessitated a faculty in short supply for the seasoned gambler. in thinking or knowing too much, the connectivity of nervous instinct to the futurity of numbers was sacrificed. there was, indeed, a less rational factor to knowledge of gambling. kentarō, for instance, observed that after decades of playing flower cards, “for some unknown reason” (naze ka shiranai kedo), cards from the pine (matsu) suit tended to appear toward the bottom of the deck. but there were as many pine cards in the deck as cards in the other suits, and there was no reason why cards of the pine suit should stick to the bottom of the shuffled deck. similarly, kentarō noted that sometimes in gambling, the same numbers kept repeating for some inexplicable reason. in horse races, in which the starting lanes of horses had nothing to do with their likelihood of winning, such repetition occurred when the same numbers kept winning, regardless of the race. when this happened, someone might note: “oh, it’s #7 again” (a, mata nanaban da). or, fed up with missing the mark, somebody might shout: “what, it’s #7 again?!” (eh, mata nanaban kayō?!). such patterns were “strange” (okashī), since they defied rational expectation and made it seem as if the numbers led a life of their own, intimating other forces at work.13 to induce an embodied accord with the numbers, there was a distinct sense in which “thinking,” “studying,” and predicting number configurations yielded nothing—yet had to be done to be set aside and forgotten.14 once a gambler started winning, it might happen that he went on a veritable winning streak, winning one race after the other until their fortune could no longer be dismissed as a mere fluke (magure). their aptitude, rather, demonstrated an escalating audacity grounded neither in rational knowledge nor intelligent prediction, but in the dangerous certainty of an abiding motor-connectivity with fate. when saying that it was best in gambling “not to think about it too much” (amari kangaenaide), akira therefore mimicked the gesture of quickly sketching in a card, as if responding instantaneously to a spur-of-the-moment instinct and “feeling” (fiiringu), because keeping in touch with the numbers necessitated a blind gesture of the body, “beginner’s luck,” that responded automatically to infinitesimal shifts in the nervous instincts. writing the numbers with a heavy hand would have involved too much consciousness. the trick in gambling, rather, was for the nerves of the body to remain in touch with “fate.” the first bout of any winning streak therefore arrived unexpectedly, before the confidence and certainty of repetition set in. akira would recall how, just as he was about to leave wins one day, he decided to place one final bet, for the hell of it. hardly looking at the newspaper statistics, skimming, and sketching what felt right, he placed a ¥100 bet ($1 usd) on a trifecta: the hardest configuration to win, meaning that three horses have to finish precisely in first, second, and third place. and just as he was about to leave, he moved his eyes back and forth from his ticket to the screen, squinting to see whether the last numbers on the screen matched his own, still in disbelief when he withdrew ¥150,000 from the machine. this very same akira would go through slumps in gambling, so much so that he would quit, cursing, “there is never enough money.” but when he won, he won repeatedly, as he did one day in san’ya. first at boats at a hole-in-the-wall dive bar, then at bicycles at an open-air sushi bar. akira walked back and forth between the two vendors, placing bets, collecting money, scanning the statistics as if seeing through them, and commenting on races as if he had seen them before. the crowd of marveling regulars turned to him, basking in the sunlight, and called him “sensei.” everyone knew of an incident in which someone had won several million yen at this hole-in-the-wall dive bar. not knowing quite what to do, the owner had gone to his guarantor, the local yakuza, to collect the money. otherwise, everyone said, “no one will gamble there.” the next day, this same person gambled at the open-air sushi bar, also backed by the yakuza, and won several million yen again. once again, the crime syndicate backed the loss, only this time, the person was told never to return, as if his victories bespoke a sustainable acumen. everyone could recount the incident, as if they shared in these victories. it is this motor-connectivity with contingency that inscribes itself on consciousness as a memory, folding the past into the present in a form as evident in the repeated stories of victory told by day laborers in san’ya as in the preeminent story of gambling: fyodor dostoyevsky’s the gambler.15 the contingency of coincidence and time as a narcotic alas, motor-connectivity to the winning numbers could only be confirmed in the final instant of danger when the winning numbers were revealed. it was also this concentration of risk in a suspended, revelatory moment of time out of time that entailed a transformation of the abstract time of the working day into an experience of contingency and that caused the gambler to repeat the act. akira placed that bet of ¥150,000 barely a minute before it was too late. likewise, with quick dice games, it was the very moment and gesture of throwing the dice that decided the outcome. so too, when teaching me games in which the aim was to pull an identical pair of flower cards, one man would half-jokingly, half-seriously insist that i hold the pair of cards together “real tight, real tight!” (gyutto, gyutto!) before slowly sliding the one card down to reveal the other, as if holding them tight and leaning one’s body into them could make the cards bleed into each other. in other games, in which it helped to pull identical cards from the deck, it was common practice to throw the cards down fervently, with “spirit” (kiai). different games had different rhythms, and various displacements of the intoxicating instant of truth. with horse racing, boats, and bicycles, the last possible moment to place one’s bet was separated from the race by a period of five minutes. yet as gambling races proper, they demonstrated the qualities of precipitation and jeopardy—of missing the mark—that benjamin discerns in gambling, or that schüll explicates as the “hook” that initiates the fledgling gambler’s repetition compulsion.16 with horses, this moment did not arrive until the end of the race, when the animals accelerated into a sprint, and at wins, the final seconds of a race were therefore accompanied by loud shouting and exultation. condensed into an immediate experience of contingency, time was thus transformed into a narcotic for the san’ya gambler. as much as the pleasure of winning, just missing the mark also propelled the gambler to repeat the act. everyone would talk of coming close to winning. maybe the same two horses on whose victory they had bet would win, but in the opposite order from their bets! watching the last fifteen seconds of any horse race left one enthralled with horses sprinting toward the finish line, and with the possibility that anything could happen. another way to achieve the singularity of an incommensurable win, however, came in the sheer negativity of loss—a propensity toward self-destruction that proved most compatible with the group’s liquor intake. but it was first and foremost the form of the transformation of time that proved addictive. regardless of the outcome, every single race (but particularly high-profile ones with vast sums at stake) exposed gamblers to the possibility of overturning the objective conditions of their lives, a possibility proffered to them in the form of compressed time. for as anatole france wrote, gambling is “the art of producing in a second the changes that destiny ordinarily effects only in the course of many hours or even many years” (qtd. in benjamin 1999b, 498–99).17 contrary to the seemingly endless time of the working day, in which time was emptied out in anticipation for it to have been done, and the nerves of the body exhausted in an unrelenting necessity of registering, blocking, and protecting against contingency, time in gambling deceptively suggested the possibility of making infinite gains in an instant. after a week of exhaustive labor, liquor thus loosened the nerves, and gambling seemed to redeem time. the experience of having once won haunted the gambler, so that he sought to repeat it, and the gambler was “hooked” (hamatteru) by that lucid first experience of winning, as if the contingency of the event had pierced his consciousness. contrary to the construction site, where consciousness had to register and buffer all sorts of dangers, gambling therefore involved a drive to repeat the original coincidence of winning. the gamblers of san’ya desired the experience of shock and coincidence that replicated the first encounter. liberating the nervous instincts to claim signature winnings it was the “protective shield against stimuli,” erected so relentlessly by the intellect at the construction site (freud 1961, 30), that the worker sought to penetrate.18 to enable this penetration, the statistics in the newspaper took the place of consciousness at the workplace. where consciousness otherwise would have exhausted itself in outlining and weighing an endless list of details, the newspaper provided this information ready-made. by doing the work of intellect for the gambler, the statistics facilitated the experience of gambling by liberating it from the drudgery of distilling the endless minutiae of prerequisite information. the newspapers thereby functioned as a mere means of holding a surfeit of information in check, without acting on it. this allowed the gambler to apprehend upcoming races in broad strokes, releasing the instincts to do the work of scanning, sketching, and reacting to the minutest shifts in patterns to divine a winning code. the sheer excess of statistics, already abstracted into a readily digestible form, made evident that the gambler could not aggregate their entirety. instead, the gambler wrote on top of the statistics with a marker, circling here and there, and in their own shoddy handwriting numbered the horses.19 the point was not to “study,” but to shut out information. figure 6. image of newspaper statistics from one horse race, overwritten by the gambler’s hand. like discarded gambling tickets, such newspaper pages could be found on the floors and in the garbage cans of wins. when gamblers spoke of horses, it was purely in numbers, as if the horse or jockey did not matter.20 sure, there were famous jockeys and horses, such as yutaka take who rode deep impact, or secretariat in the united states. yet when it came to filling in the betting card, horses were indicated in numbers, and rows on rows of odds determined the final wins. with the exception of the names of the horse and jockey, and a particular characteristic of the horse, every other piece information was written in numbers. yet while the language of gambling was thoroughly abstracted into numbers, in its secrecy, the gambling ticket bore the signature of the gambler from the moment of its inscription. ticket numbers had to be kept secret, so that they could not stand apart from the person who had written them, preempting an awkward situation in which one’s numbers were the same as “someone else’s” (hoka no hito no). although of baseball, on which everyone also bet, one man in the group spoke of the hiroshima toyo carp as a team owned by mazda, a car company that was not in the same league as major manufacturers, such as nissan or toyota, and of its players who were also underdogs. but they played with their “might and main!” (isshōkenmei!). nor did they use many foreigners. in fact, the one foreigner on the team was underpaid, and he was “doing his best!” (gambatteru!). in short, the hiroshima toyo carp relied on their own strength, without purchasing outside help, and “everyone knows of them.” alongside his observation that mahjong, like “people” (ningen), is about “sticking it out” (tsupparu), this man disclosed his life philosophy in the bets he placed on underdogs. so too, akira would speak of being a “man” (otoko), and of the importance of “seeing things through” (suji o tōsu). oftentimes, their ticket numbers reflected their favorites, as well, and it was this quality that personalized the ticket, set it on its way to a singular value, and that rendered its final monetary value their very own. in this way, the necessity of making a claim to one’s gambles in the name of masculinity sprung from the abstracted form of money and the commodity itself. the act of gambling must be considered over and against the wage of the working day. for it was the wage that determined the value and the abstract form of time through which value was conferred on san’ya’s day laborers, whose bodies were emptied out until, finally, they were deemed altogether unusable. experience and the compulsion toward negativity working from freud’s writings on repetition and trauma, benjamin recognized a formal congruence between the automatic motions of the gambler and the factory worker. by describing a similitude of form in the repetition of bodily motions, he proposed that, at least on the surface of things, the drudgery of menial factory work constituted an analogue to the repeated act of throwing dice at craps or placing a bet at roulette (benjamin 1968).21 at the end of my first day working in ditches, with an excavator circling above, kentarō said: “you see, there’s nothing much to it, work is merely the repetition of this” (taishate koto nai desho, shigoto wa tada kore no kurikaeshi). and, indeed, in repeatedly anticipating the contingency of shock or accidents and screening out their possibility (at work), the drudgery of the construction worker forms a counterpart to that of the gambler on a losing streak, who, on the other hand, seeks out the shock of the accidental but fails repeatedly to experience it. with the notable exceptions of victories, near coincidences, or gamblers deliberately bent on self-destruction, in both gambling and manual labor, consciousness winds up operating as a “screen against stimuli,” consigning the possibility of experience—of contacting stimuli such that they affect and inform the entirety of one’s life—to a mere “hour in one’s life” (benjamin 1968, 163).22 yet social conditions in san’ya caused gambling to emerge as part of a counterdiscourse to the propriety of economic productivity, and not merely as an analogue to the repetition of labor. everyone in my group shared the necessity of elaborating alternate forms of sociality, for they had failed in the eyes of their families and general society. and while their arrival in san’ya marked the end point of a trajectory of failed masculinity, its space of face-to-face relations offered the possibility to reverse the abject conditions of labor to which they had been reduced. everyone knew that workers from san’ya were mostly called on to complete dirty, dangerous, and demeaning labor, and unlike gambling, such labor conditions rarely received comment, and certainly not with glee. working days consisted in lifting heavy rocks while wearing steel-reinforced boots, if you had them; shoveling in a ditch, next to a thirty-ton excavator; or hammering away at walls to ensure that cement, which burned through bare skin, flowed into them properly. yet the deadening effects of this draining monotony were overturned when an accident occurred, that is, when a body was pierced or wounded. then, after work, firsthand witnesses would relate in detail how the floorboards had been loose, how so-and-so had plunged to the floor below, and how the white bones had protruded through the wound. when accidents occurred, the instinctual nerves of the body were activated to their utmost, and through narration, the event was transformed into a story, replete with suspicions that so-and-so had faked the fall to get insurance, as well as work-related safety lessons. otherwise, the shield of consciousness or intellect sacrificed the content of sensory impressions by intercepting and registering stimuli at disconnected moments in time. the intellect thereby foreclosed experience by bracketing off and containing the event within the past of linear time, as yet another moment within a homogeneous succession of occurrences. but clearly a difference remains between the necessary repetition of labor, which the worker would not do without remuneration, and gambling, which the gambler engages in even if he incurs debt. as with any narcotic, in gambling there is the initiating thrill, followed usually by diminishing returns of excitement and the occasional “near miss,” until gambling finally reverts to the drudgery of labor.23 much as they strategized about how to begin with ¥100, spread their bets, and augment their stakes, gamblers in san’ya sought, above all, to draw out the high of near misses as they calibrated their gambles and punctuated their day with races of their choosing. moreover, when it came to horses, bicycles, or boats, the order of the races was structured to reverse the law of diminishing returns, because the main races were scheduled at the end of the day, and at the end of the week, on sundays. the order of the races predisposed day laborers in san’ya to prolong the initiating thrill of victories, near misses, and self-destructive conduct, and when they stopped—which they did, “i quit!” (yameta!)—it was when the excitement had turned to drudgery, when they had reached a thoroughly excessive financial limit, or quite simply, when the last race had finished. gambling in san’ya therefore assumed the form of concentrated sessions of inebriated social activity, which lasted half a day at most, since these sessions were quite possibly as extractive of energy and as self-destructive as manual labor itself, and for most individuals, they concluded naturally when the exhilaration calmed down. these concentrated sessions constituted a form of gambling, moreover, whose temporality was composed of punctuated bursts of intensity in an intensely social scene, recalling the exhilaration of craps that schüll (2012, 18) observes at casinos, the social dimensions of goffman’s “character,” and the repetitive temporality of clifford geertz’s (1973, 447–48) balinese cockfight as a “process that reoccurs rather than a continuous one.” but for the san’ya day laborer to establish his recognition as a “man,” the energies of his depleted body operated as a vehicle that transformed the instrumental regimentation of time into an event of excessive expenditure that allowed for the past to be folded into the present. through gambling, the lost time of manual labor remained to be actualized as a durative and curative experience, because construction work commits time to seriality without hope. only “experience,” benjamin (1968, 180) wrote, “rids man’s soul of obsession with time.”24 this obsession with time recalls its compartmentalization, and the day laborer’s obsession with the workday to have been done. while the material content of the workday was emptied out in attention to the contingencies of accidents, the time of this working day had been abstracted in the assignation of a monetary value to the labor of the construction worker. in commodification, the commensurable form of the subsistence wage was thereby constitutive of work as a passage of empty time, and of the day laborer from san’ya as an object of capital. at the end of a day at the construction site, the day laborer stood emptied out on the train platform, numbed in the body and wondering where the day had gone. robbed of experience, this fatigued body was reinvigorated through the act of gambling, in which the form of money was proffered to the day laborer with the possibility of winning an incommensurable value. the very form that robbed work of content was transformed into the promise, or wish, of attaining singular value. the seduction of gambling thus resides elsewhere than in the prospect of victory. indeed, the gambler seeks the catastrophic, and hence, the risk of gambling and the excess of expenditure it requires in repeated losses, or wins. except for the rare occasions of winning streaks, in san’ya, it was the near coincidences that were excitedly announced over drinks, propelling the gamblers. how close the horses had come to arriving in the correct order! only a hair’s breadth separated gamblers from coincidence, and losers repeatedly complained how many times their horses had arrived in inverted order. inevitable shortcomings triggered repetition—unto exhaustion. in the absence of a victory (which often went unannounced, so that winners could dispense of their money discretely), the reality of gambling oneself into debt constituted the social fact of the scene. nonetheless, these were eminently boisterous, effervescent gatherings, at seamy dives, in which liquor and snacks were accompanied by arm-wrestling or the occasional knife fight, and in which san’ya’s gamblers repeatedly lived for the intoxicating moment of seeing their horses turn the corner. at the peak of their conviviality, everyone in the group was in debt by a few thousand dollars. this was a considerable amount, given the precarious availability of work and daily earnings of only ¥12,500 ($125 usd). but they imbibed and gambled away their wages, holding one another accountable for their debts, because it was the reputation of the entire group that allowed its members to borrow from bars and eateries. after gambling, it was the condition of one’s losses and indebtedness that was commented on and enacted through regular repayments, as a burden born with dignity. and it was in this way that, while each race promised incommensurable wins in the form of time, compressed into a narcotic, there existed a reversibility to this promise: the narcotic could be experienced in loss, and the incommensurable could be achieved with certainty in the negativity of debt. once, akira was expelled from a local non-profit organization and decided to blow ¥200,000 ($2,000 usd) in one fell swoop. by squandering such large sums of money, he created as memorable an event as victory. and although such moments of expenditure were rarely as decisively wasteful as akira’s, the day laborers made it common practice to dial up the stakes of their gambles, constantly placing their reputation on the line, keeping the thrill of gambling with them. in this way, in gambling as in life, a losing streak was never simply a losing streak. it was one that the day laborer had taken charge of and exacerbated in transgression of conventional propriety, so as to claim his worth in the negative excesses of liquor, gambling, and his accountability in debt. it was not just victory, then, that would actualize the value of time, transform the contingent into experience, and inscribe the circumstances of the gamble on memory. rather, the repeated exposure to self-destructive loss allowed day laborers to carry these losses into the present to constitute a socially recognized self. on monday mornings, on the train to work, the previous day had not simply been consigned to the dustbin of history: as if the embers were still aglow, the group conversed about the near misses, and if someone had declared a big win, news had traveled across town. perhaps not everyone told the story of their losses, but they did not have to, since everyone shared in this indebtedness, and each of their bodies had been reactivated in an exhaustive exposure to the self-incurred shock of losses. consigned to seriality without hope, the day laborer–turned–gambler therefore emerges as a poet of modernity and shock. as benjamin (1968, 193–94) wrote of baudelaire: baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. this is the nature of something lived through (erlebnis) to which baudelaire has given the weight of an experience (erfahrung). he indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock.25 in the “impotent rage” of having been robbed of experience, baudelaire sought to raise the shock sensation of modernity to the level of experience. yet precisely when “the sensation of the modern” would have been attained, the price of the experience of shock is disclosed in the “disintegration of the aura.” so too, in the victory of coincidence, the gambler’s aim is sacrificed, thereby producing the ground for repetition. for the commensurable form of money can never give enough, and it was the conversion of the ticket into money that effaced the dream of an incommensurable win. conversely, losing precipitated an enduring negativity of debt that tested and testified to the character of a man, because unlike a solitary victory, debts forced him into relations with others in which he had to uphold his obligations. masculinity, credit, and recognition in indebtedness it was not simply money but their social reputations and accountability as men that the group risked in gambling, for incurred debts raised the question of whether a person was good for their word/money. everyone in the group was in debt to an eatery or bar, which they would also frequent on credit, and some venues would even lend them money on request. akira seemed to bear the burden of his debt gracefully, complaining that he was “deep in debt” (shakkin darake), but typically turning a negative into a positive by noting that not everyone could borrow money: it required a good reputation. yet debts and black-market interest rates did, indeed, prove burdensome. kentarō even remarked that he was so in debt that his “neck will not turn” (kubi ga magaranai). but this burden also served as an indicator of a man’s social prowess, even when he wound up returning double his original debt. at the beginning of every month, akira, kentarō, and the others would make trips to pay their monthly installments, which never seemed to diminish—it took akira two years to reduce his debt of ¥200,000 ($2,000 usd) to a manageable amount. it was in this manner that, by incurring excessive debts, the stakes and significance of gambling became amplified to involve “esteem, honor, dignity, respect,” as geertz (1973, 455) wrote of the pain and pleasure of “deep play.” for by gambling beyond their means, men staked their very social existence. staking one’s self was also what an otoko did: in gambling, as in fights, an otoko was good for his word. hence, it was said of mahjong: “if you give in, it’s finished” (magetara owari). with credit giving testimony to a man’s accountability, the question was how much negative value or debt an otoko could accrue without letting others down. for the sordid creditors of san’ya held individuals in the group accountable for one another, and their debts were made known to everybody through passing remarks and monthly repayments, such that indebtedness constituted a condition of being an otoko, one that countered a statist discourse of productivity, much as illegal gambling did. every day, someone gambled illegally in the open, but they also knew from experience that the regular police would not conduct arrests on account of illegal gambling, because a special police department dealt with such cases.26 insofar as danger was suspected, everybody refrained from exhibiting the illegal elements of their conduct, which functioned as a marker of their territory, as a sign of irreverence for the legal, proper conformity of general society. precisely on account of the negative excesses of their actions, signification had to remain in place: san’ya was “our town” (orera no machi), in which one gambled on the sidewalks. so too, while most in the group let up on gambling only when losing had turned to drudgery, they also set limits to their losses, before they angered their creditors too much. for others, gambling assumed a self-destructive character that collapsed into a negativity without limit, especially when gambling losses were exacerbated by other, external failures. for instance, while one man might not have gambled away at games the ¥30,000,000 (about $300,000 usd) borrowed from the yakuza, he did invest it in unsuccessful business ventures and shamelessly mixed business with pleasure as he traveled around japan. yet when his labor subcontracting and business ventures started to fail, he disappeared from san’ya, and rumor had it that the local yakuza organization would kill him when they found him, if he did not wind up in jail first.27 akira, too, explained that he turned to gambling after getting into a verbal fight at a local non-profit organization. feeling hurt, he decided to blow a couple of hundred thousand yen, transforming the commensurable form of money into a singular negativity that was hard for him to return. yet unlike the meth-driven man described above who decided to blow ¥30,000,000, akira did stop gambling when he lost several hundred thousand yen. his original conduct had thrown caution to the wind, but akira was reckless in a manner that enabled him to assert his self-possession, and to successfully impose himself on his fellows in san’ya, who recognized his character.28 by setting a limit, albeit a thoroughly excessive limit, to their gambling debts, not to mention their drinking and fighting habits, the group harnessed negativity in their favor. by a strange inversion, therefore, singular debts incurred through gambling coincided with incommensurable winnings, and it was by sticking it out in this negativity that the day laborers and gamblers of san’ya laid claim to a life otherwise consigned to that of the anonymous manual laborer, worked to death. as a solicitation for recognition from other men in the area, gambling sought to master the abjection of san’ya by countering the death-inducing form of the subsistence wage, and by transforming the modern passage of empty time into an experience of contingency that created debt and sociality. this was a negativity achieved through the repetitive and embodied exposure to the contingencies of gambling, the risks of which were often compounded by the unlicensed, illegal character of the local gambling venues at which men staked their reputations. but it was also precisely this transgressive aspect of gambling that allowed men in san’ya to repulse the normative gaze of upstanding society, and that allowed them to comport themselves with a dignity recognized by their fellows, insofar as they made good on their debts. credit, thus, emerged as the foremost sign of their accountability and of their singular value as an otoko. like boxers on the ropes, however, the men had a limit to the amount of damage they could endure without collapsing, and the excessive lifestyles of individuals in san’ya foreshadowed their death, if not that of the day laborer district itself. ultimately, as it was said of construction work, gambling, fights, and liquor: “the bill catches up with you.” abstract this article examines the social practice of gambling among stigmatized construction workers in tokyo’s vanishing day laborer district, san’ya. by considering the abstract temporality of surplus extraction imposed on the manual laborer at the construction site, and the deadening effects of this discipline on his sensorial experience of the world, the article demonstrates how the enactment of masculinity through gambling involves a transformation of the abstract time of the working day into what walter benjamin has described as a “narcotic.” whereas manual labor demands that the construction worker shield and numb himself against interruptive contingencies of accidents and material stimuli, the gambler seeks an embodied exposure to the penetrating contingency of victory or defeat in a moment of risk. the article argues that the form of this transformation of time propels the gambler, and that it is through debt and credit that he actualizes his reputation as a man. [manual labor; critical theory; gambling; masculinity; credit; japan; time] notes acknowledgments akira, jennifer d. carlson, harry harootunian, marilyn ivy, kentarō, thomas lamarre, rosalind c. morris, christopher t. nelson, john pemberton, david rojas, and nhu truong. 1. see tom gill (2001), edward fowler (1996), and james e. roberson and nobue suzuki (2003) on day laborers and masculinities in japan. beyond japan, elliot liebow (1967), philippe bourgois (2003), and kathleen m. millar (2018) address similar scenes of dignity in abjection, and notably, clifford geertz (1973) himself depicted the stakes of the balinese cockfight in terms of social status. 2. of gambling, benjamin (1999b, 12) observed that it “converts time into a narcotic.” 3. for benjamin’s analysis of “experience” (erfahrung), see benjamin (1968). 4. that credit constitutes the social reputation of a man should recall any number of ruminations on debt and the social form of marcel mauss’s gift, in which “the productivity of debt can also be understood in terms of a primary relation that puts debtor-creditor relations at the very base of social relations more generally” (roitman 2003, 212). 5. see thomas malaby (2003, 147) for a consideration of gambling as a crystallization of “chanceful life into a seemingly more apprehensible form.” 6. see roger caillois (2001, 24) on the vertigo (ilinx) of gambling. 7. writing after world war i, freud (1961, 30) theorized the compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences as the effect of a penetration of this “protective shield against stimuli.” wolfgang schivelbusch (1986), too, illuminates how the repression of the specter of accidents constitutes a hallmark of modernity. 8. alfred sohn-rethel considers this abstraction of time and space as implicit to the exchange relation itself. he writes: “time and space rendered abstract under the impact of commodity exchange are marked by homogeneity, continuity, and emptiness of all natural and material content” (sohn-rethel 1978, 49). 9. consisting of a repetitive isolation of movements, this compartmentalization recalls the analogous relationship that benjamin describes between factory work and gambling: “the ivory ball that rolls into the next compartment, the next card . . . ” (benjamin 1968, 179). see also natasha dow schüll (2012, 203–7). 10. i draw specifically on marx’s chapters in volume 1 of capital: “the sale and purchase of labour-power” and “the working day” (marx 1997). 11. caillois (2001, 5) makes this seminal distinction between labor and “play,” as “an occasion of pure waste.” 12. of this experience, erwin goffman (1967, 261) observed that the gambler must “expose himself to time, to seconds and minutes ticking off outside his control.” 13. here the repetition and coincidence of numbers approaches what richard klein and william b. warner (1986, 6), drawing on jung, have described as “significant coincidence,” which “may be defined as a conjuncture of events so unlikely or implausible that to call it accident seems less reasonable than to assume some intentional, motivated connection.” 14. in a notable analog to off-track betting floors, caitlin zaloom (2006, 151) expands on the importance to financial traders of “learning not to calculate.” 15. readers of benjamin will note that i push back against his rather hopeless presentation of gambling as an analog to factory work, particularly in “on some motifs in baudelaire,” although he writes elsewhere that the gambler must maintain “contact between his motor stimuli and ‘fate’” (benjamin 1999a, 298). or as mollie, a slot machine gambler, puts it, “this vibration between what i want and what happens” must remain intact (schüll 2012, 171). 16. “danger,” benjamin (1999a, 298) writes, “is the most important factor in gambling, alongside pleasure (the pleasure of betting on the right number).” of course, at slot machines, this seduction quickly gives way to the drudgery of the “zone” (schüll 2012, 96–97). 17. notably, (the thrill of) this compressed moment of time recalls what charles livingston has called “sustained indeterminacy” (qtd. in schüll 2012, 199). 18. freud (1961, 30) wrote of this “protective shield against stimuli” specifically in relation to modern warfare, mechanization, and machinery. see also note 7 of this essay. 19. see schüll (2016, 570–74) for a similar explication of the heads-up display in online poker, which “releases players” from keeping notes. 20. the abstraction of the gambling ticket and the statistics in the papers recall marx’s elaboration of the dual character of the commodity form. in exchange value, marx (1997, 128) noted, the commodity does not contain “an atom” of use-value or quality, which is to say that, in itself, the money-form cannot provide the ground for the qualitative, singular reputation of an individual. 21. as a compartmentalization of time, benjamin (1968, 177) writes that because “each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler.” 22. and benjamin (1968, 163) continues to observe that the intellect assigns “to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents.” 23. gerda reith (1999, 138) opposes the drudgery of labor to the excitement of gambling. yet it should be noted that at slots in las vegas, schüll (2012, 222–27) reveals an asocial merging of machine, body, and consciousness—the “machine zone”—in which “near misses” truly appear to induce a deadened state of freudian repetition compulsion. 24. time, benjamin (1968, 180) says, remains to be actualized as a durée, which henri bergson himself describes as “past and present melting into one another” (qtd. in reith 1999, 141). 25. buck-morss (1989, 275) reminds of the transformative possibilities of “impotent rage” 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traders and technology from chicago to london. chicago: the university of chicago press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 150-175, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.11 in the shade of hailstones: life-forming realities among the luo of kano, kenya cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 323-347, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.01 in the shade of hailstones: life-forming realities among the luo of kano, kenya kennedy opande university of nairobi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9069-1452 washington onyango-ouma university of nairobi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2723-7900 in the humid morning after the weeding period, we met landa to collect information on what was called “digging medicines” (chwoyo yath) in the rice field—a practice conducted by the luo rice farmers of kano in western kenya to “avert hailstones” (geng’o pee).1 the light, scraggy, but incessant rains slicing the area at the time had made weeding an easy affair. but, at the same time, the weather had proven unkind to the glum road and paths leading to landa’s homestead. the ritual practice of arresting hailstones is associated with forming life. geng’o, in ordinary luo terms, denotes warding off or preventing the occurrence of something. in the context of hailstones, it designates “arresting” or “averting” to impute a form of capture: in this case, the capture of hailstones (pee), realized by material forces or potencies generated by the medicine buried in the soil. we had come to know landa from rice farmers, who relied on his expertise to protect their crops. on that day, we went to seek answers about a ritual practice that had piqued our interest: why had the rice farmers conceived of the practice of digging traditional charms to arrest hailstones as something that forms life? this article draws on our encounters with landa (a traditional medicine man who specializes in arresting hailstones in the rice fields) and other informants (rice farmers) to explore the ritual practice of arresting hailstones associated with life-forming among smallholder luo rice farmers in kano, kisumu, in kenya. the ritual is undertaken to cleanse newborn twins and their parents, in addition to purifying other human bodily impurities that can cause hailstones. life formation in this context concerns the way the material essence of rice and hailstones propagate life. we draw on the experiences of our informants to make a connection between people’s lives and the potency released by the hailstone medicine, human bodies, and rice crops to form and shape life. their experiences account for the way that digging medicine releases a material force that deactivates hailstones while also forming life. we further examine how the spiritual forces that bear potency and share it with humans, rice crops, and hailstones connect through that potency to accomplish life formation. we then compare the performance of that force with the perceivable actions of spirits to shape those interconnections (cf. descola 1996; 2013). the cultural practice undergirding hailstone arresting stems from the action of ritual provision and the practice of making or breaking life. as malcolm ruel (1997, 7) observes among the kuria people, “ritual creates and manages the actual circumstances of biological reproduction and physical life.” this calls us to assess the perceivable reciprocal creativity of nonhumans to foster collaboration with people, for instance (chao 2018; 2019). in our study, the interactions occur at the interface of four actors: rice crops, humans, spirits, and hailstones, providing a conflation of forces that influence life processes such as birth, growth, and development, as well as natural phenomena such as hailstones. this resonates with a distributed, more-than-bios kind of animacy, one that transcends bios-geos distinctions (povinelli 2016). understanding the mechanism of forming life requires evaluating the political motivations and sometimes the hidden juridical actions of the cosmic agents that emerge in the course of life. communication between humans and nonhumans and their unique actions bring forth a co-negotiation among those multiple agents that shape vital life processes (pitrou 2017a). this co-negotiation reveals the level and juridical dimensions of agency that lie within the agent’s force. from this, we can also decipher how cosmo-juridical estimations and instigations of human and nonhuman agents prove important in determining who counts as a person. at birth and death, much as in agricultural rituals, the motive(s) of an agent involved in perpetuating life emerge(s) as it makes demands for offerings and sacrifices from humans (cohen and atieno odhiambo 1989). we are interested in the way in which digging medicines to arrest hailstones illustrates cosmic authority and justice-seeking by different agents, that is, humans, rice, and hailstones, as well as in how they apply and exert their materiality to form life. we introduce the concept of cosmo-juridical agency to explain this phenomenon. jane bennett (2010) and cymene howe (2019) provide a basis for the concept of cosmo-juridical agency, which we associate with the luo connection between hailstone medicines and rituals for newly born twins undertaken to protect and propagate both rice and human life. in her book vibrant matter: a political ecology of things, bennett (2010, 34) explores the material agency or affectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things. she pursues this idea through a theory of distributed agency that views humans, animals, artifacts, technologies, and elemental forces as sharing power and operating in dissonant conjunction with each other. howe (2019) explores the materiality of wind and power, arguing that these elements have unique lifeworlds that make them act as creatures. their lifeworld affords them a force that can shape the potential of inanimate things. in cosmo-juridical agency, we argue that spiritual agents integrating rice, humans, and hailstones engage in sometimes not-so-ordered co-negotiations to attain a balance for their lives. this act is contemplative of the individual force of each element to exert their authority. bennett (2010, 98) argues that “various materialities do not exercise exactly the same kind of agency, but neither is it easy to arrange them into a hierarchy.” therefore, we are not so much concerned about which materiality proves more powerful in comparison to another as we are about the reliability of each agent to participate equally in the formation of life. this article contributes to the existing scholarship on new materialisms (bennett 2010; howe 2019; livingston 2019; povinelli 2016) by revealing the juridical domains and estimations of diverse material forms that exist across nonlife entities that become active actors in life. life-forming: on the nexus of human lives, rituals, plants, and natural phenomena the connection between human life and natural phenomena has received substantial commentary. for instance, it has been argued that weather phenomena can shape human affairs (sanders 2008). other studies document lives connected with celestial bodies (mbiti 1969); beliefs that animals can cause storms (leck 2017); the aspect of spirituality in lifeand thing-making (smith, murrey, and leck 2017; smith 2020); as well as human acts of ritual prestation to solicit for rain (myhre 2018; 2019). joost fontein (2015) explored the politics of rainmaking, showing how human actions may interfere with the spaces and places that can cause rain. this foregrounds the configuration of hailstone arresting to materially perpetuate or inhibit life. rituals have formed a significant topic of inquiry in anthropology since the inception of the discipline (chao 2019). ethnographies have examined what rituals do (geissler and prince 2010; ruel 1997; leck 2017); their consequence in human lives (smith 2020); or the diversification and negotiation achieved by rituals (chao 2019). this work demonstrates how ritual performances likely influence the occurrence of natural phenomena. rather than recasting what rituals do (ruel 1965, 1997; geissler and prince 2010), we here focus on the specific ways in which ritual gives form to life through life potency, or what knut christian myhre (2018; 2019) calls “life force” or “body power,” and also institute terms of determining a given position for one as a human being, for instance. there have been previous studies in the african context on the effect of natural phenomena on lives, which focused on rituals’ functional and religio-cultural purposes (akong’a 1987; fontein 2015; krige and krige 1943; sanders 2008). the kriges’ work among the lovedu people of south africa dealt with how a ritual regulated the rains required for agriculture, living, and settlement. joshua akong’a (1987) comparatively analyzed the rainmaking rituals among the abanyore and akamba—both bantu-speaking peoples of kenya. outlining the limitation of the kriges’ functional focus, todd sanders (2008, 7) instead explored the gendered and sexualized conceptualizations of rains and rainmaking among the ihunza of tanzania. he theorized about ideas of embodiment, gender, and sexuality that lay beyond rituals as determinants of rains. in the ihunza context, there existed both male and female rains, which collaborated to form good rains: male rains appeared first to pave the way for female rains in cooperation—leading to reliable rainfall. contemporary phenomenological studies emphasize people’s responses to natural phenomena through different cultural lenses and frames (leck 2017); cultural frameworks (heyd 2010). cultural lenses and frames are built on the idea of “culture as a ‘tool kit’ of symbols, stories, rituals, and world views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems” (swidler 1986, 273). meteorological problems such as floods make people connect their lives with things such as clouds, rivers, and mountains. moreover, their dependency on animals, plants, and weather patterns makes them attribute human properties to things, expressing the “thing forces” that shape human lives, life cycles, and the human condition (bennett 2010). the fact that things and phenomena shape life does not reveal the specific negotiations that occur across people and those things. until we understand the embodied forces of humans and things, and their mechanisms of exerting them, we may not know how those force(s) get to work. hayley leck (2017) has shown that for the zulu and xhosa of south africa, a spirit-embodied serpent causes destructive storms, tornadoes, and landslides. to capture this co-negotiation, we situate our work in studies that focus on ritual cosmologies and vegetal perspectives. ruel (1997) observes that ritual orders and secures life processes—including the growth of people in society, of crops, and of domestic animals. in his earlier work, he showed the various categories of rituals, including restorative (ruel 1965, 298). paul wenzel geissler and ruth jane prince (2010, 104) observe that the correct performance of rites shape “the growth of human life and sociality”; that ritual has the potential to “create and sustain life and to kill.” this means that the manner of conducting rituals can lead to various life outcomes. sophie chao (2019) has made a similar observation among the merauke of west papua, where ritual failure was said to cause devastating consequences in human life. for his part, myhre (2018; 2019) has shown how the pouring of sacrificial substances and blood forms part of the transfers and transformations of life force, or horu, between generations among the horombo of tanzania to afford dwelling and life. vegetal ethnography has revealed deep-seated, perceptible interconnections between plants and persons. in amazonia and melanesia, in particular, plants are perceived as persons, as well as species with intentions and emotions (angé 2018; chao 2018). for chao (2018, 623), the agentive self of palm oil, for instance, reveals itself in conceptualizations of personhood, which is a product of a “multispecies rather than specific human trait.” she shows that plants “share common descent, are endowed with sentient minds that are expressed through their actions or behavior—for instance, the way they move, reproduce, grow, and sustain themselves.” hannah pitt (2017) argues that different plants bear different modes of agency, which render them capable of making inferences about people. she compares plants and humans as sharing such features as communication occurring through the movement of chemicals. this connection reveals a disposition that views “all lives as interdependent,” adding that “no being lives discrete from others” (pitt 2017, 102). in her later work, pitt (2021, 470) explores the metaphor of roots to “convey belonging—human connections to place.” she likens the diverse movement and growth of plant roots to the multiple kinds of connections exhibited by humans. if plants are connected and deeply related to human beings, this means that they can share lives, affection, emotions through their common histories (pitt 2021). the supposition holds true, therefore, that any untoward act against one can affect the other. this has seen individuals institute rituals such as rainmaking as necessary to ameliorate the situation (chao 2019; myhre 2019). for the luo rice farmers of kano, the ritual of digging hailstone medicines is held to protect rice crops and, by extension, to propagate human life. across their region, the other luo people undertake different ritual practices to preserve life (mboya 1938 [1997]). it is critical to analyze the dynamism of rituals, which makes them conditional practices by anxious humans and demanding, distressed nonhuman agents, hence creating a connection between rituals, crops, human lives, and natural phenomena. the same condition enables the evaluation of the outcomes caused by rituals for humans and nonhuman actors involved in the ritual. chao (2019) has shown that proper and orderly ritual performance positively reflects on the outcome of the natural phenomenon, and we show that the reciprocal appeasement of the natural phenomenon assuages its reaction and saves life. the ethnographic context and methods the luo of kano reckon kinship first through their common eponym no, whom they regard as their clan’s progenitor. therefore, they regard themselves as jo-kano—meaning people of kano. they socially organize themselves through clans and subclans, much like other luo people of kenya (ogot 1967; 2009) such as the siaya (cohen and atieno odhiambo 1989; geissler and prince 2010; nyambedha 2004; onyango-ouma 2006), the central nyanza (parkin 1978), or the southern nyanza (ocholla-ayayo 1976; schmidt 2022; shipton 1989, 2009). they are consanguineal and have a patrilocal system of residence. a majority of the households are polygynous; hence they evoke the name of their grandmother (jokamiyo) to form their matrifocal unit. the matrifocal units are then instituted as representatives of “houses” (dhoudi, singular, dhoot). within the jo-kano cosmology, rice crop bears an “equal materiality” (bennett 2010, 10) with humans, in which it exerts its force to life. this materiality is sometimes activated by the practice of “digging charms” (chwoyo yath) when they are applied to protect the crops as well as human life, especially those who come into contact with this materiality. people show their connection with the rice by revealing the terms of being, existence, and survival, which become perceivably visible in the engagement and the reading of different life processes. the ahero and west kano irrigation schemes, which form part of the kano area, are home to some 1,727 households. the people derive their livelihood from agropastoralism—rice farming, as well as subsistence and small-scale livestock rearing. rice farming is undertaken for commercial and subsistence purposes. at stake is the sustenance of rice cultivation which, like other farming and settlement activities, are affected by the consequences of climate change such as floods, droughts, hail, and the like. the irrigation schemes are also heavily affected by flash floods during rainy season (opande 2017). we collected data for this article during twelve months as part of an ethnography on the life and land configurations of the luo people. the ethnographic methods used in data gathering included participant observation, in-depth interviews, and informal conversations. the first author lived in the study area for most of the study period and took part in everyday practices around rice cultivation, including visiting homes, rice farms, and rice mills. during the visits, he observed the practices and engaged the hosts in informal conversations around rice cultivation. as a native speaker of the local language (dholuo), he did not experience any difficulties interacting with the study population. yet although he spoke the local language, the ethnographic context was new to him and in essence structured him as an outsider who hailed from a non–rice cultivating area. data regarding rice planting and the significance of the hailstone-arresting ritual were mainly collected through participant observation and informal conversations. formal in-depth interviews were conducted with ten villagers and twenty rice farmers on the cosmology of life and its connection with hailstones; as well as the kinds of disruptions brought about by the birth of twins and other forms of impurity exerted by such persons and things. these informants were knowledgeable about the processes of farming, birth, and natural phenomena. we also conducted interviews with an expert in hailstones whom we call the hailstone arrester; he provided data on the rituals of digging charms in the rice field and also for twins. he was selected because the informants considered his charms more potent and effective than those of another practitioner from the nearby sidho village. discussions were also held with two agricultural extension officers on the people’s practice of chwoyo yath. all interviews were undertaken in the local language, recorded, transcribed, and translated into english. analysis of the data took the form of organizing them around common themes and identifying vignettes significant to these themes. hailstone ritual and life-forming in the luo of kano rice ecology across the kano plains, there are not many experts for arresting hailstones, as not everybody with knowledge of charms undertakes the specialized practice whose application requires adeptness. like divination or other healing practices that rely on exegetical endowments and capabilities to correctly use indigenous medicine, hailstone arresting makes for a highly complex activity. it integrates the unique capabilities of the medicine man, which include knowledge of the hailstone charms, and the possession of a “spirit” (juogi), which proves instrumental in the act of capture. landa, an elderly man of eight-three years according to his own account, was a well-known hailstone arrester (ja-pee). he has remained a central figure in the area of kano for his vast knowledge of charms to control hailstorms, as well as curing human health complications. in our interactions, he told us that he also cured snake bites, female infertility, and stomach problems using traditional medicine. this illustrates a predisposition among traditional healers in the area who report knowledge of more than one medicine—something that allows them to resolve multiple health problems. in the course of our interactions, we learned that our study area boasted no women hailstone arresters.2 when we met him, landa at first proved unwilling to talk about the practice—understandably so, since he was unsure of our intentions. we informed him that the rice farmers with whom we had interacted during our study on luo life and land configurations had depicted the practice as one that could make or break life—something that had prompted our desire to understand that connection. we assured him that we did not seek to prove the truth of the practice. rather, we wanted to establish the mechanism by which hailstone arresting was accomplished by digging charms that formed human life. these explanations convinced him to talk about the ritual. before engaging him on his work, we first inquired how he had acquired the skill. he claimed that he had become a hailstone arrester sometime in 1995 after the death of his father who had been acting as one. stating that he was the fifth grandchild in his father’s lineage to serve as a hailstone arrester, he said, “when my father was near his death, he informed me of his wish for me to become his successor. he told me the medicine was our family specialty that could not be left to die. at that point i had to follow his wish.” from the interviews with landa, other villagers, and rice farmers we learned that when hailstones strike the rice farms, the luo believe that these have been caused by humans. human actions said to cause hailstones include a new mother of twins venturing into rice farms before cleansing; medicine men “mixing charms” (riwo yath) in the rice fields; or bereaved people transporting corpses across the rice fields at daytime, among others. to prevent the occurrence of the hailstones, other than controlling these actions, individuals perform ritual practices of cleansing or digging medicine in the rice landscape. landa went to “dig the charms” (chwoyo yath) in the dead of night when nobody could see him. his journey began in the early hours of the night, following the careful preparation of the charms. when he arrived at the rice fields, he mapped the land parcels set for protection. there he earmarked a central point for digging, since the act was not supposed to be held on each rice field. then he dug a hole in which he buried the contents. before he sank the contents, he drowned in a solemn chant—beseeching the medicine to protect the farms. afterward, he covered the hole with soil. he did all this in strict secrecy. the act of preserving hailstone charms in secret resonates with the practice among the sukuma of tanzania, where kings charged with administering the medicine hid it from the public eye (stroeken 2018). for his work, landa used charms derived from a special plant (which also remained a secret); white wooden ash that he collected from a cooking hearth; white sand harvested from the river; small sandy pebbles also gathered from a riverbed; cow dung harvested from a spotless white cow; and a reed plant. he figuratively referred to the charms as the “chief” who arrests hailstones, and the sand, sandy pebbles, and wooden ash as the “chief’s guards.” together they disarm hail’s power to destroy the crops. later that evening, after sunset, we set off to kigoche and obiayo villages for the digging exercise. we arrived at the site at night. he drew the reed stick whose nodes and internodes he had emptied and separated. then he mixed the sandy pebbles, the wooden ash, the fresh cow dung, and the pulpy charms. he finely kneaded the mixture and then stuffed it into the reed stick. afterward, he covered the top of the stick with a lump of fresh cow dung. finally, he buried the stick in the ground, with the tip covered with cow dung facing upward. at the end, he muttered some words before indicating that he had accomplished the task. as people interact with rice farms, they refer to the reactiveness of the rice crop that follows from the people’s relation with it. questions of dishonor to the crop are revealed through deformities manifested on the biological features of those deemed to have violated them. rice crop is perceivably a life-and-death-bearing crop. during planting, weeding, and harvesting, a connection of life is exerted through a relation established across the soil, people, and water points. water points—streams, irrigation canals, and the river—together form a special unit where crops and other organisms that depend on them for nourishment express their integrated survival. competition for resources like water, which support rice survival, is considered a threat to the crop’s stability and sustenance. reliable water provision is considered key to rice cultivation. when in the 2000s the government of kenya introduced a levy to maintain water canals, people felt convinced that such an action would lessen the strain on the main river known for water supply. describing the issue as he unclogged the water way around his rice paddy, ojungo, a man in his seventies, revealed how strain on the main river had resulted in competition for and conflict between people, animals, and other organisms for the scarce resource. the rice’s sometimes impulsive reaction is succeeded by an incomparable load of loss. while guarding the rice crop against bird pests, seventy-five-year-old jakobo, ojungo’s neighbor, reinforced human-crop relationality in respect of the cultural provisions of the fields, saying that “rice fears commotion.” grasping plant perspective “means learning how they live, think and communicate” (pitt 2017, 97), which here translates into the rice being evaluated on mild, low, or high agitation. a discussion about the anger of the rice crop and its immediate reactivity informs people’s good-mannered mechanisms of engaging them—and even modelling a given structure of “guardianship” (descola 2013, 5). the luo of kano work toward limiting what they call rice reaction. at this time, rice crop’s potency is said to have been violated; this happens when unclean individuals venture into the plantations in search of water or other food plants. this could include women who have birthed twins or those individuals (both males and females) who are yet to accomplish rituals associated with cleansing twins. this action causes the crop to project life-threatening features such as stunted growth, turning yellow, or failing to yield. in the aftermath of such experiences, the farmers have learned from agricultural extension officers to apply eco-friendly farming practices that do not threaten the rice crop’s life and survival. they maintain a good balance of their crop farming by only exploring fast-maturing recommended crops such as vegetables, watermelons, legumes, and tomatoes. yet they also engage medicine men to protect the crops against bodily powers that might unleash hailstones.3 as we worked on gapping some rice paddies, jolito, a seventy-one-year-old retired agricultural officer, said: “we don’t only rely on modern ways of farming. we have our local ways of keeping our farms healthy.” the management of hailstone medicine (yadh pee) and the creation of life in the quest to maintain a balance of hailstone medicines, landa says that the traditional medicine has instituted a salient constancy of rules for which it is supposed to be organized and managed. hailstone medicine creates its own special system of encounter, he claims, by which sense it is able to generate and maintain its own language. that is reflected in the command of the instituted rules, which exist to shape human behavior and any engagement with such medicine, and the rules that pertain to its preparation and application. there are rules that can affect people in general, and those that can only affect the “spirit-bearing person” (ja-juogi). rules pertaining to the broader community hold that once charms have been dug in the rice fields, farmers must suspend their farming activities the following day. this landa enforces to prevent supposedly impure persons from causing the charms’ erosion. but the most restrictive rules concern the hailstone arrester himself—both regarding his conduct and his encounters with the farming community. first, he cannot keep the charms inside the house or any other space occupied by his family members. doing so would ruin the lives of his household members. here we encounter an embodied formulation of the charm’s diabolical attributes that emerge to harm life. on harvesting it, he preserves it at a place out of his family members’ reach or habitation, and it is from there that he takes it for digging. the distant preservation, he reveals, “affords to limit the flow of its potency to the people other than the hailstorm, which is the target.” another aspect relates to his personal behavior. on the eve of the digging, landa must exercise chastity or self-control (ritruok) by avoiding sexual contact; sexual intercourse at such a crucial time designates an impurity that would destroy the charm’s power. then there are rules that guide dealing with dangers posed by other external entities such as persons with “hidden abilities.” those persons’ “hidden abilities” are considered “harsh” (makech), with the potential to trigger hailstones. these include “a person who has sired or delivered twins” (ja-rude). such people, both men and women, landa and villagers emphasize, cannot venture into the rice fields until they have been cleansed in a ritual of twins. other crucial elements in the interaction with yadh pee comprise cultural rules associated with the funeral practice of transporting a corpse. in the luo context, the transportation of a corpse has been and remains a dramatic affair; it incorporates large crowds of mourners and the dead person’s material wealth on exhibit along the procession. it is expected that a person who has died away from their homestead will not be transported back home across the rice fields at daytime. doing so would diminish the potency of the charms to capture the hailstones. when the charms have lost potency, as is sometimes reported, the effect emerged in the gravity of hailstones. but it is the range of activities and agents that can cause hailstones that reveal the intersection of natural phenomena and human lives. to understand that connection, we attended a cleansing ritual (hoso) where a mother of twins who had been accused of venturing into the rice fields without having undergone a prior ritual for her twins (rude) was being purified. although unknown to her, her action was believed to have caused hailstones, which later destroyed the crops. the ritual was therefore deemed necessary to pacify the spirit that triggers pee. interviews with landa and rice farmers on the moral connection of chastity and the ethics of human–rice crop interaction revealed that digging charms (chwoyo yath) leads to an activeness of the materiality or potency that organizes life. this can also illustrate the agency distilled in divination, which employs the technical aspects of the diagnosis of a human problem by the diviner (jackson 1978). digging charms, like prestation of sacrifice among the chagga of tanzania (myhre 2019), is a highly integrative ritual that requires the cooperation of the larger farming or affected community. in the case of digging medicines (chwoyo yath), the observance of the ritual rules helps bring out the honor reserved for the potency, which then enables it to maintain its power in readiness for a hailstorm should it threaten. connecting hailstones with human lives, practices, and processes opito, seventy-eight years old, a male farm holder, and rice farmer with whom we first explored the connection of hailstones and human lives, categorized persons that could cause hailstones as high and low risk. he said that the force that causes hailstones resides in both men and women. but women retained a greater threat largely because of their perceived “bodily impurities” that interfere with the birth, growth, and development of a child. he recounted: “when my wife gave birth to twins, we were advised not to venture into the rice farm because she could bewitch farms and cause hailstones.” the act of a new mother of twins bewitching farms is feared, landa explains, because it leads to the death of crops and people; farms and crops destroyed mean no food. to the luo people, twins are imbued with evil spirits that, if left unappeased, can cause misfortunes. therefore, the mother’s and children’s sustenance of life lies in the “enactment [of], rather than their faith” in the ritual activity (geissler and prince 2010, 105). in particular, community members restrict new mothers from contact with rice farms, as that can bring about hailstones. it is held that getting into rice fields also results in the “burning” (wang’) or “death” (tho) of rice. the luo institute ritual performances within their households geared toward cleansing the couple to cast off the shadow of the twin-causing evil spirit. the ritual is called “releasing twins” (yawo rude). four weeks after our meeting with opito, a hailstorm struck some ahero rice farms in wang’aya village. it was blamed on achieng’, a new mother of twins in her thirties. community members claimed she had ventured into the rice field, causing the storm. as a result, they organized a “cleansing ritual” (hoso) lest she unleash further misfortune. on that day, she and her husband malo were being cleansed to cast off the “evil spirit” that had brought about the twins. whereas the delivery of twins alone was not said to cause hailstones, the mother’s act of going into the rice fields before a cleansing ritual was seen to have brought about the phenomenon. the luo continue to consider twins a bad omen, because they believe them to be caused by evil spirits that bear life-changing potency. twins’ appearance is characterized as an “evil birth,” which must be cleansed to avert untold misfortunes. contemporary twin rituals are selective and much less rigorous than those in the past. modh, a seventy-five-year-old female informant and cleansing expert arrived in the compound carrying a calabash containing charms (manyasi) in one hand and a leafy twig in the other hand, which she continuously dipped into the calabash, sprinkling the contents all over as she muttered some words. she pulled at the gate and sprinkled one more time before she headed toward the couple’s hut. inside the house, she mixed the charms with animal waste (weno) harvested from a slaughtered sheep’s offal. the focus on the kind of relationship instituted between hailstones and a woman who has delivered twins accounts for the nature of ritual to order life (ruel 1997). observing the practice affirms the dependence of humans on nonhuman elements. like other life-sustaining rituals, whether of death or birth, the ordering and articulation of the process is enhanced by considering the state and correct order of the performance (geissler and prince 2010; chao 2019). not honoring ritual activities exposes human lives and diminishes their potential for propagation. the threat supposedly caused by twins is recast in the image of a curse, which the new pair of children is seen to have the potential to unleash. ripala, a fifty-year-old female informant, asserts, “twins are harsh and they can destroy lives.” that harshness does not impute an abnormality; rather, it illustrates an embodied reaction to how their force reveals its performance. the twins’ bodies perceived to cause hailstones are marked by unfavorable potencies inimical to other lives. the same holds true with a twins’ mother who ventures into the rice fields uncleansed, as illustrated by the case of achieng’. cosmo-juridical agency in life-forming cosmo-juridical agency contemplates a jural co-negotiation which establishes a sense of order and justice among the elements that are considered to form life. the commands and demands of humans and nonhumans are couched in certain forms of debts, demands, rights and obligations that require balancing.4 here we see the materiality of charms as a force which mediates between the unit of human, hailstones and rice crop forces of life. these materialities exist at definable, shareable spaces and operate within a standard language where none is considered superior to the other but are interdependent and accommodative of each other. in their capacities, the rice crop through their unseen spirits make demands for protection against hailstones. this command is decoded by the people who then invite the ritual expert for the practice. on the part of cleansing rituals, the spirits of twins lay their demands which are interpreted by the people as a call to ameliorate anger and restore calmness. the luo peoples’ relation with natural phenomena such as rain, drought, hailstorms, among others, is complex. when these phenomena occur, the people sometimes say that they have been caused by humans or spirits. they are also said to be felt in human bodies. physical bodies provide an interpretation of local seasons and then relay that information to the people on their farming preparations. when the rainy season is about to set in, it is signaled in the movement and reaction of certain body parts. in particular, persons with formerly fractured or dislocated but now healed hands, legs, or shoulders can experience a reaction in those body parts. when they feel movement in the same part of the body, then they say that they feel rains in their body. therefore, natural phenomena bear connection with human life and crops through the material potency of spirits that they connect with. to attend to those connections, the people institute and perform ritual activities that account for their intersections. the rituals utilize charms which perceivably discharge protective medicinal force that flows across the crops and humans. cosmo-juridical agency is exercised across the multiple agentive forces of rice, humans and ancestors or spiritual forces. it is realized at the ritual practice such as cleansing rituals, “digging charms” and other forms of rituals where the people and ancestors or spirits get integrated in the ritual process. the juridical scene that is manifested in the ritual pact where hailstones, rice crop, twins and the people are placed together is interdependent as to allow each entity to propagate their respective authority. the movement of agentive power of charms circulates across the human and nonhuman species in order to secure life of the crop and that of a person. in this case, both the rice farmers and the villagers are wittingly flexible in their participation in the ritual practice(s) where relations, connections and networks are (re)formulated. landa (the hailstone arrester) in an incantation observed: “medicine i ask you to safeguard the rice crop so that hailstones do not strike and kill rice, farmers and their children; remember you were passed to me, i did not know anything.” the image of death is symbolic, as it elevates the experience of protection amidst evil practices whose consequences can be transmittable to both crops and humans. sacrifices, being acts of mitigating such life discontinuities, thread a linkage between what rituals do and how they do it to show the farmers’ interaction with the medicine. we emphasize the embodied units of human and vegetal spiritualities because they structure the conceptualization and understanding of life. the ritual of hailstones and twins among the luo are activities of cultivating the exchange of forces that make actors more active. the flow of forces that make life reveals that life in the luo context is the product of the transmittance and sharing of agentive potencies through bodily units and practices (opande, onyango-ouma, and subbo 2022). this finding resonates with what myhre (2018; 2019) reported among a bantu-speaking group in tanzania.5 rituals are activities through which spiritual forces become active and travel across humans, rice crop and hailstones. as ruel (1997) shows among the kuria people, rituals create and manage the actual circumstances of biological reproduction and physical life. accordingly, the ritual orders and secures life processes including the social growth of people, crops, and domestic animals. it is through similar figurations that the luo construct the rituals they undertake in respect of human birth and growth, hailstones control, and rice crop development. the interactions about life forming which occur across four actors: rice crops, humans, spirits, and hailstones provide a conflation of forces that influence birth, growth, and development. these do not only influence those life processes but also elemental ones such as weather conditions and climatic phenomena as hailstones. through these interactions, the luo are able to make conceptualizations regarding the way agencies residing across diverse species are able to co-negotiate through a system of ritual practices to form life. luo life-forming realities through rituals ritual practices among the jo-kano are powerful elements that participate in the forming of life. as interpreted through the ritual of twins, a failure to conduct it will trigger the human body to generate a negative force with potentially negative life outcomes. through contact with the rice crop, the woman’s body generates a negative force that then triggers hailstones. it is believed that the evil spirits that caused twins react with spiritual forces tied to the rice crops, thereby initiating hailstones. the ritual thus comes in to free up the foreboding spirit, and also to convert the negative force into a positive one. unlike other human activities such as mixing traditional medicine or individuals transporting a corpse across the rice fields during the day, the continuum of human purity is entwined with human endowments. relating ritual experiences with birth, growth, and development makes for a deeply constructive, integrative, and collaborative affair, because it aims to show how the people take those experiences and make them concrete manifestations of their well-being. that process includes agents/actors considered to have special techniques, powers, and skills beyond those of the ordinary humans affected by the natural phenomenon. the ritual practices of digging charms and cleansing twins speak to how life comes into action with different forces, and even how it functions within those connections. humans, rice, and hailstones together create demands and responses that institute their individual formation. the reliability of materiality that causes twin parents or twins or charms to balance hailstones can be seen in how those demands and responses are integrated. it is notable that breaching the morals of charms proves dangerous, just as much as impure people getting close to the rice field. the digging of charms in the rice fields does not only seek to protect the rice crop against hailstones. rather, it also allows the exchange of potencies between humans and nonhumans. indeed, it amplifies the sphere of relations and exchanges between humans, plants, and crops. that connection situates the unit of agentive selves distilled from vegetal organisms––in this case, the rice crop. the unit of forming is negotiated at the rice crop, which, when well preserved and tendered for, begets human formation. the interface of human potential and crop performance is instituted at the convex of spiritual action. a phenomenon’s potential can be exacerbated by the loss or erosion of a charm’s potency—lowering its effectiveness against hailstones. the prospect of failure by the charms’ expert constitutes such a devastating and feared incident because it means that the charms relied on to provide protection need another force to work. failure has a direct impact on the people and the rice crop’s growth and development. such is an aspect of life reality showing that life generation follows from a combination of diverse species’ forces. that reality emerged in multiple conversations, showing the limits of the medicine person: that in spite of their knowledge of the medicine, they cannot guarantee protection on their own without the input of the spiritual force.6 as earlier explained, the constancy of rules governing the proper application of medicines helps to situate the reliability of spiritual entities to secure a stable ecology. without observing charm rules, the medicine cannot return the desired outcome—being to control the hailstones. even the cultural rules controlling cleansing of twins and their parents are navigated in the same way. the central focus of the formation that oversees the affect across human and rice crop is reciprocal in nature. landa pointed out that reciprocal affect, “twins and rice crop are mysteries/wonders; they have spiritual forces that’s why if they clash, they bring hailstones; twins cause hails and rice can ruin twins.” by connecting human lives with hailstones, the people are exercising a given form of probity and creativity in the formation of the rationalities they share with other entities, organisms, and objects. of significance, it is not just the life and creativity that they exercise, but the forms of authorities that they exhibit and how they exert them. in the jo-kano cultural cosmology of hailstones, their interface with rice crops is a phenomenon of navigating multiple rationalities; the striking hailstones are seen as more than natural occurrences—since they do not only follow from a single natural causality; rather, they can also be occasioned by human activity. the foreboding attributes of rice and the associated spiritual domains that accomplish their connection illustrate the complex life materiality exhibited by vegetal organisms as natural phenomena. therefore, the engagement with such a natural phenomenon is an illustration that the people and rice and hailstones have expanded possibilities by which to exert their materiality in each other’s lives through flexible human and nonhuman activities. interaction with a natural phenomenon provides crucial behavioral and linguistic models of assessing the trends of those interactions. and, emphasizing functional underpinnings of those occurrences would be repeating mistakes earlier proponents of the approach (krige and krige 1943; akong’a 1987) committed by not exposing how such experiences impose their intentions. our informant landa prefigured the coming together of humans, rice crop, and hailstones as inseparable elements and also imbued with rational goals. and that consistency was an interconnected reality that was intelligibly performative by the complete authorities and agencies of each unit as they co-negotiated for their institution in life. the jo-kano rice farmers conceptualize “digging medicines” (chwoyo yath) as a residual sociocultural enterprise of interconnecting human and nonhuman worlds. the practice does not involve offering any form of animal or poultry sacrifice but it utilizes traditional medicine that causes the manipulation of hailstones and its life course. the traditional medicine accomplishes this by “arresting” the phenomenon’s movement and controlling it from reaching the farms under protection. it does so by exegetically deactivating the force of the hailstones; once the “hailstone arrester” (ja-pee) has “dug” it in the soil, it generates a more potent force which redirects the phenomenon’s course or completely captures it. this cultural framing is a robust figuration of the versatility of nonhuman entities whose performance follows from those of humans and vice versa (pitrou 2017b; chao 2018; howe 2019). applying human activities to structure the pattern of vegetal organisms and also natural phenomena provides a sense of evaluating the sort of perceivable creative activities by which the people and nonhumans can intervene to make life safe and secure. hence since the 1960s when rice cultivation was implemented in kano area, the rice farmers have established a recognizable dependency on traditional medicine men for protection against hailstone strikes, and beyond that the action has provided an interpretation into the connection of the natural phenomenon and life. to the rice farmers, therefore, “digging charms” (chwoyo yath) represents not only a unique way of seeing how life in the area is conceived of, but also the versatility of the other agents and forces that the people rely on to see how their life changes and progresses. the luo life as a formable process, like perig pitrou (2017a) making, reveals a system of co-negotiation where creativities by potencies of human bodies as they maintain their states intersect with objects, things, images, animals, and plants among others. reflecting on the creativities of the achuar (descola 2013) where the manner of tending to crops reveals the relations between the people and those crops, among the jo-kano rice is characterized in such terms that personify its potential to react towards certain human practices which can negatively affect their growth. that is depicted in such expressions by the farmers as “rice fears noise or chaos” (ochele oluoro koko). that is emphasized in order to avert any form of untoward human act against the rice crops that can interfere with its peace and ultimately human life. hailstones are the embodiment of that chaotic potency that disrupts life of rice crops, people and other organisms within the rice ecology. other human activities that may impute chaos and destabilize the peace of rice include double “digging” or “mixing of traditional medicine” (riwo yath) in the rice fields; transporting a corpse across the rice fields at daytime; and a woman who has not completed rituals of her twin children venturing into the rice fields. those profane activities bear impurities, which when carried and perceivably transmitted to rice crops cause calamities. the aspect of connecting the people’s lives with hailstones is a creative sociocultural undertaking that unveils the constructions and meanings that humans make about forces that form life. the forerunner to such an enterprise is the manner in which, to cite rappaport (1993, 153; quoted in hornborg 1996, 52), “meanings and understandings do not only reflect or approximate an independently existing world but participate in its construction.” that kind of cultural framing is a creative inter-exchange between entities that make life. the interplay of human and nonhuman activities, demands, potencies, recompenses in this case expresses the cosmo-juridical negotiation that takes place across species as they form life. the jo-kano who interlink hailstones to their lives engage in a reflection of the unique scheme by which natural phenomena transmit potencies of causing their life courses as they interact. conclusion since the field of anthropology’s epistemic shift away from the static structuralist approaches of the 1970s to the domain of agency (jackson and karp 1990, 16), the concept has gained traction, leading to debates about the materialities and life force or body power of both human and nonhuman species. scholars continue to explore agency across multiple elements and objects (bennett 2010; howe 2019). agency (or materiality or life force) reveals how different peoples conceptualize and understand their lives. andrew b. kipnis (2015) affirms the distinctions in agencies, further justifying the exploration of the diverse forms of agency and potency, as well as the question of where agency is preserved or of which reasons might trigger it. we argue that life potency could be a response toward the recompense for some unfulfilled ritual, retribution, retaliation, or punishment. aggregating materiality can create the false impression that these potencies are uniform and act at the same level—meaning that agencies, even if they lead to similar outcomes, are not the same. we recognize this episteme and, especially the theories of bennett (2010) and puig de la bellacasa (2019), who emphasize the materiality and elemental forces that exist across humans and nonhumans. in our case, we see cosmo-juridical agency as the materiality that illustrates how tangible and intangible entities together attain recompense for demands and commands through their unique life potencies distributable across humans, medicines, natural phenomena, vegetal organisms, animals, and spiritual entities. hailstones experienced in the rice landscape, although they constitute natural phenomena, are regarded as elements of human and nonhuman forces. human bodies—much like hailstone medicine, rice crops, or hailstones—generate and release a potency capable of altering other lives. this kind of potency mirrors what bennett (2010, 4) calls “thing power,” or what myhre (2018; 2019) terms the “life force” that enables the transfers and transformations of life. to bennett, thing power equates to materiality, which arises from both inorganic and organic bodies. in the case of the luo, that power is preserved in the medicine applied to the rice crops and human bodies, entwining to arrest hailstones. their explanations echo howe’s (2019) views of the cosmology of wind power, whose lifeworld resembles that of creatures and which can shape the potential of inanimate things. the luo ontological orientation visualizes how such a materiality/agency connects with those of humans and rice crops to affect animate life. hence cosmo-juridical agency is not concerned with the distribution of agencies across human and nonhuman species; rather, it concerns itself with how “nonlife has power, self-organized or not” (povinelli, 2016, 72) and, above all self-regulated. our application of potencies across hailstone medicine, human bodies, and rice crops illustrates how powers transmitted across “substances,” “beings,” and “processes” (myhre 2019, 417) enhance the performance of different life-shaping agents. although our study did not set out to describe the vernacular terms of life as explored by myhre, we did show that yadh pee, hailstone medicine, provides a unit of life potency that emerges to interact with organisms, objects, things, elements, and activities which together shape existence and survival. whether it is the luo ritual of arresting hailstones or myhre’s (2019) pouring substances to solicit for rain, all these processes echo pitrou’s (2015) emphasis on practices as crucial interventions of multiple agents in vital processes as defined by their distinct roles in making life. the notion of cosmo-juridical agency therefore confirms the interdependent, performative existence and competence of life potencies that reside in rice crops, hailstones, humans, and ritual practices and which bring these entities into pacts of forming life. each force capably decodes the other’s actions and makes inferences of their rights, echoing pitt (2017, 92), whose vegetal ethnography argues of plants’ competence to make inferences about humans the same way humans do with plants. for the luo, this kind of embodied rice-crop expertise unveils a “rice mentality” coordinated with and activated through human life processes and cultural practices. moreover, the medicine that controls hailstones and also purifies twins is activated through vivacious spirits. together with the spiritual forces of the rice crop and those of the twins, hailstones collaborate and co-operate in their scheme of operation. the hailstone arrester who digs the charms in the rice field works under the command of the spiritual entities. that means that all the power that manages and even dislodges the hailstones, as well as calming the spiritual forces associated with twins for a stable life, derives from spiritual entities. similar to the sukuma rainmakers of tanzania (stroeken 2018), the luo hailstone arresters in kano depend on spiritual direction to locate medicines, perform the arresting, and also reformulate the life of children. these are the life-forming realities. abstract in the area of kano in western kenya, luo rice farmers perform a ritual of “digging” indigenous medicine (chwoyo yath) in the rice fields to “arrest” hailstones. the practice is not only rationalized in the image of regulating the spate of climate–accelerated hailstones but also of forming life, expressed through the state of how that life is secured and propagated. drawing on ethnographic interviews with rice farmers and an expert on hailstones, as well as on participant observation, this article explores the exegetical agency of rice medicines, which is reflected in the affective act of arresting hailstones. this is conceptualized through a cosmo–juridical agency of life-forming by creating an interconnection between human life and a natural phenomenon. the article underscores the varied domains of natural phenomena (weather conditions, calamities), rice crop, and humans as agencies that co-negotiate toward life-forming through their forces that transform states of life processes. [cosmo-juridical agency; digging medicine; hailstone arresting; ritual; life-forming; luo; kenya] notes acknowledgments we are indebted to the institute of anthropology, gender, and african studies at the university of nairobi for the support provided to kennedy opande as a doctoral candidate and w. onyango-ouma as associate research professor in the production of this article. we are immensely grateful to the rice farmers of kano who introduced us to the concept of “arresting” hailstones and to the life course in rice ecology. we especially thank landa pony, the “hailstone arrester,” for his insights, as well as all the rice farmers who participated in interviews and showed us hospitality and kindness. we also express our gratitude to our three peer reviewers and to the cultural anthropology editorial collective for their support. 1. all names of people in the article are pseudonyms. 2. the lack of women hailstone arresters was attributed to the fact that women would leave their natal homes on marriage. expert knowledge is passed on to males only to guard against revealing it to outsiders. the expertise of hailstone arresting also differs from other forms of traditional knowledge that is inherited, rather than bestowed on a person. 3. the essence of body power or life force has been explored by myhre (2019) among the horombo of tanzania, where he shows it to be the material force accounting for all transfers and transformations of life. 4. the subject of the living and the deceased depending on each other for survival has long seen exploration by anthropologists such as a. b. c. ocholla-ayayo (1976); william david cohen and e. s. atieno odhiambo (1989; 1992); and michael jackson (1989) just to mention a few. and to the extent that these relationships are shaped by unfulfilled demands and debts remains a reality, influencing how these actors engage. although it is not the main focus of his work, myhre (2018, 229) has extensively documented how the horombo of tanzania depend on the dead, to whom they go for a return to life during droughts by offering sacrifices. these sacrifices meant to induce rain are seen as debt relationships between generations which have to be repaid to receive the right amount of rain. 5. our concept of life as a product of the exchange and transfer of materials, activities, and practices mirrors what myhre (2018, 2019) has documented in kilimanjaro among bantu-speaking peoples. although they differ from the nilotic luo of kenya, myhre’s description of the notion of life as an effect of material and practical transfers and transformations of life force resonates with the material flows of bodily units and organs between humans and nonhumans in kano in western kenya. we covered these flow-of-life potencies in an earlier publication (opande, onyango-ouma, and subbo 2022), where we showed that bodily elements such as blood or organs like the placenta afford the flow of potencies between different entities, that is, humans and 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berghahn books. swidler, ann 1986 “culture in action: symbols and strategies.” american sociological review 51, no. 2: 273–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095521 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 323-347, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.01 sustaining containability: zero waste and white space cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 216-245, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.03 sustaining containability: zero waste and white space elana resnick university of california, santa barbara https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5251-5933 color-coded plastic recycling bins began appearing regularly on the streets of sofia, bulgaria, in 2006. the country was set to join the european union the following year, and the authorities installed the bins in efforts to meet eu recycling quotas. yellow was for plastic and metal, green for glass, and blue for cardboard and paper. each bin sported a small hole in the front, as well as a label indicating which category of packaging waste should go inside. yet the holes proved too small for almost any packaging to fit through, leading people to pile up all sorts of trash around the recycling containers. when i asked urban residents, waste workers, and recycling firm executives about the purpose of the design, they all said more or less the same thing: it was to “keep garbage in and g*psies [ts*gani] out.”1 the bins were designed to prevent people—in bulgaria, people assumed to be roma—from “stealing” and subsequently selling recyclable waste.2 it is true that many romani people across sofia, due to long histories of workplace discrimination and land dispossession, collect recyclables from a variety of sources, including trash and recycling bins, city sidewalks, and, by request, from people looking to discard bulky materials.3 known as kloshari (waste collectors or “scavengers”), they transport recyclables to semilegal local collection points called punkts, which buy and then sell them to official producer responsibility organizations (also referred to as packaging recycling organizations) (pros).4 pros then report these items in their accounting records of recovered packaging waste, as mandated by the european union.5 the eu requires that each member country recycle an increasing amount of packaging waste every year, a number based on the amount of packaged goods put on the market in that country.6 the pro officials i spoke with were quick to criminalize romani collectors, but they also admitted that without the work of kloshari and punkts, they could not meet eu targets—and thus would risk significant sanctions—because the general public does not sort enough of their garbage or make sufficient use of the color-coded plastic bins. this is not to suggest that people ignore these bins altogether: they do use them, but mostly as mixed-waste receptacles, like the metal bins they sit beside. figure 1. plastic bins for eu-mandated separate collection of packaging waste in sofia, bulgaria. this photo has been edited to preserve anonymity. photo by elana resnick. multiple reasons might drive this behavior. first, my friends and neighbors in sofia explained, the socialist state had made recycling compulsory, so the transition to capitalist democracy entailed the “freedom” to discard instead (cf. gille 2007). second, people saw recycling as a “facade”; in the end, they asserted, it all went to the landfill. they knew this, they told me, because they routinely watched waste from the colored-coded and mixed-waste bins dumped into the same garbage truck. i cannot confirm if this is true, but i noted that waste company officials knew well and forcefully denied the facade argument. they explained that although many city residents saw the differently colored bins emptied into the same truck (which is common practice), inside the vehicle recyclable waste was not mixed with waste from other containers. the most important thing, they emphasized, was to keep recyclable waste from contamination by wet household waste, because once that has occurred, recyclables can no longer be decontaminated enough for processing. so, the practice of dumping different color-coded plastic bins into one truck was useful in that it separated recyclables from the wet waste in the mixed-waste bins. when i visited one of sofia’s main waste-installation (sorting) sites, it did seem as if many kinds of waste were being dumped in one place—only to then be separated on a conveyer belt, by predominantly romani women, for recycling.7 this part of the picture was not obvious to most sofia residents, because, in line with eu policy, the recycling companies were invested in making the streetside bins for separate collection appear as the last front for recyclable waste disposal.8 figure 2. women working at a waste sorting facility in sofia, bulgaria. photo by elana resnick. while conducting research in bulgaria in 2019, a recycling company executive, marko, described the recycling bins as a ruse to make bulgaria appear clean and “european.”9 he also reiterated a common trope about roma hindering europeanization: “so, yes, all the waste might go to the same place, with one truck, but we at least try to keep the streets clean, as opposed to the g*psies [ts*gani] who just make every bin a mess.” he mentioned times when the municipal inspector’s office had called on him to collect trash amassed around recycling bins, which he and they presumed to be the leftovers from kloshari going through the bins to extract anything of value. “with them around, how can we call this europe?” other waste company representatives and urban residents made the same points: they complained that roma “steal” waste from recycling bins, blaming them for then “polluting” the surrounding environments.10 people commonly framed roma, whose labor proves critical to meeting eu mandates, as both anti-european and disposable, tending to equate roma with the trash they collected. such associations form part and parcel of contemporary bulgarian racism.11 scholars of global environmental justice and discard studies have focused on waste—as well as other environmental harms—as it accumulates in “sinks” near systemically marginalized communities (bullard 1990; gabrys 2009; hage 2017; harper, steger, and filčák 2009; pellow 2017; pulido 2017; sze 2006). this certainly makes for a problem in bulgaria, where trash is dumped by western european countries, like italy, that cannot process it.12 however, this dumping is also recursive; within bulgaria, waste is disproportionately accumulated—and disposed of—in romani neighborhoods, rather than being recycled or reused as eu policy mandates.13 yet efforts to alleviate such environmental degradation can also burden marginalized groups—in this case, roma criminalized for work essential to meeting eu-driven environmentalist goals. the absurdist materiality of sofia’s recycling bins can reveal a great deal about how marginalized groups engage with progressivist environmental regimes and the larger political systems and racial orders that embed them. i explore this engagement by foregrounding what i call containability. bridging analyses of “progressive” environmentalism and theories of enclosure, containability offers a way to understand the relationship between waste and race. i theorize containability as a realm of human-waste relations predicated on the aspirational goal of boundedness and its everyday disruptions. in other words, containability describes the capacities of various political material enclosures to actually enclose, as well as the ways in which their boundaries prove nearly impossible to sustain. instead, these supposed enclosures generate spaces for disruption—opportunities for waste collectors to play by containability’s rules yet reveal it as ultimately unattainable. i investigate the racial politics of keeping waste contained from people deemed disposable and how these efforts fail. specifically, i trace containability in sofia through two interlinked processes: 1) official efforts to implement recycling-based international environmental sustainability initiatives and 2) romani laborers’ necessary disruption of institutionalized attempts at containment, which uncovers containment as always aspirational. as my romani interlocutors involved in bulgaria’s recycling sector made clear, authorities tacitly allow for a certain amount of escape, of diversion from enclosure, for the system to sustain itself. containability, with its paradoxical core, allows us to better understand the ways in which international sustainability programs can be flawed from the start, a problem particularly relevant in an aspirationally european—and continually europeanizing—context.14 i bring together theories of waste treatment’s modernization (zhang 2020) with analyses of liberal state governance (sojoyner 2017) as an invitation to think through anthropologies of enclosure that span the city and different forms of racial and environmental harm, but which also serve as spaces for disruption—for taking containability up on its offer to disturb it. as damien sojoyner (2017, 516) argues, “enclosed places” are rooted in “brutal systems of punitive containment.” amy zhang (2020, 92) explores a different kind of urban enclosure, in the form of waste-management infrastructure, one nonetheless related in its liberal logics: enclosures as “aesthetic, spatial, and environmental ideals of an ecological modern method of urban waste treatment.” zhang documents how, in the city of guangzhou, scientists require an “enclosed system” to transform fly larvae into workers. in this modernization initiative, enclosure also entails hiding trash and its human-animal labor from view and keeping it out of olfactory perception (cf. nagle 2013; reno 2015). by putting into dialogue sojoyner’s findings on the “false promises of state governance” and zhang’s analysis of the determined invisibility of nonhuman waste laborers, we can think through other kinds of “enclosed places”—and containability projects—rooted in similar racial capitalist logics, like those that undergird environmental sustainability in bulgaria. the material containability of waste bins, i suggest, parallels the containability of the european nation-state as white. roma, metonymically associated with trash, disrupt the way the eu intended color-coded recycling containers to function, while also still enabling the meeting of eu goals. at the same time, roma knowingly destabilize the naturalized association between recycling and “europeanness,” or whiteness (imre 2015; kalmar 2022; rucker-chang and west ohueri 2021; wekker 2016; van baar 2019). the agenda of europeanization and its environmental policies serves to uphold “europe” as a fundamentally white space. specifically, eu-wide environmental sustainability programs like zero waste institutionally rely on local racial hierarchies in the name of “greening” the system. zero waste marks what i elsewhere call a “racial sustainability” regime in which certain things and categories of people—including whiteness—can be sustained through the discardability of others (resnick 2025; also liboiron and lepawsky 2022; pellow and park 2011; solomon 2019; stamatopoulou-robbins 2019). whiteness in bulgaria constitutes a fraught category. it is salient for most of my romani interlocutors as a designation for what they are not (the majority, locally termed “ethnic bulgarians”)—they also just use the term bulgarian to connote unmarked whiteness.15 in other words, an implicit understanding equates bulgarianness with whiteness, at least within the country. the contours of racialization in bulgaria—in which whiteness may be diagnosed or erased—in large part result from bulgaria’s long history of racial disavowal, or “politics of racelessness,” structuring its racial landscape (rexhepi 2022, 9; also el-tayeb 2011; imre 2005; resnick 2024). it also reflects the understandings of non-romani bulgarians when they travel or move to western europe, where they themselves experience racialization as not fully white.16 i choose to follow my romani interlocutors’ understandings and discourses of whiteness to fully address their perspectives as key theorists in the piece. theorizing containability through the lens of sustainability—a perpetually aspirational project—provides insights about broader phenomena of containment and related constellations of power. urban recycling in bulgaria, within an expanding european union, marks a technology of sustaining racial hierarchies, or what barnor hesse (2007, 646) deems “designations of europeanness and non-europeanness.” an ongoing tension exists between ideals of capitalist, late liberal europeanization and the intertwined vestiges of both socialism’s compulsory recycling programs and legacies of bulgaria’s severe economic crises of the 1990s. this tension springs into action within an urban landscape that relies on the waste labor of a population viewed as quintessentially “non-european” to meet very european zero waste quotas. attaining the ideals of european sustainability also entails repurposing socialist waste institutions, like the punkt, to comply with new international environmental standards. as savannah shange (2019, 4) shows, adopting a critical analytical approach to progressive environmentalism requires addressing “progressivism [as a] fundamentally reconstructionist politic embedded within liberal logics.” i draw on this analysis by focusing on relations between the liberal logics of europeanization and ongoing projects of sustainability.17 in conditions of progressivist environmentalism, as in a europeanizing bulgaria, the value of waste emerges through the labor of those who collect it, as it is also leveraged against those who survive on its collection, accumulation, and sale. while this article analytically contends with the always present possibilities of waste’s movement and attempts to contain it, i also consider this tension between flow and stasis methodologically. my research extends from romani neighborhoods and sofia’s urban center to landfills throughout the countryside, waste-management corporate offices, and eu headquarters. my research began in 2003 and concluded in 2024, including three consecutive years (2010–2014) during which i worked as a street sweeper, shadowed international waste and recycling firm ceos, worked with environmental consultants, interned at the bulgarian ministry of the environment and water, and spent time in fakulteta and filipovtsi, two of sofia’s large romani neighborhoods. bulgaria had joined the eu in 2007, and by the time i conducted most of my fieldwork, recycling had emerged as a commonplace topic of conversation. however, most of these discussions did not focus on recycling itself, but on the failures of both recycling containers and containability. as of 2024, bulgaria continues to near its eu packaging recovery targets despite the ongoing resistance of most bulgarians to recycle.18 as the next section shows, this success hailed from the same waste collectors that the street bins were designed to keep out. the labor of sustainability environmental sustainability has become the quintessential umbrella framework for environmental reform in the european union. officially, bulgaria has pursued sustainability through multiple avenues since eu accession, including efforts to reduce air pollution, preserve special land areas (“safeguarding nature”), and increase recycling rates while lowering landfilled waste amounts. functionally, however, sustainability in bulgaria has become synonymous with recycling. this partly results from most components of sustainability projects not being as visible to the general public as waste management; they are often written into conservation laws and other behind-the-scenes mandates. in contrast, eu waste directives take shape through domestic waste recycling, which happens visibly on city streets through racialized practices that help make it a “sustainability” flash point for society. bulgaria’s colored bins are critical, visible infrastructures where recycling can happen, because even if people separate items in their homes, that separation must then be transferred to the streetside bins where they dispose of their accumulated domestic items. separate collection recycling in bulgaria has a long history (hlebarov 2013; cf. gille 2007). under socialism, bulgaria had compulsory recycling for different kinds—or streams—of domestic waste. for example, state socialism focused on metal recycling as the foundation of industrialized state-building (gille 2007). yet a reaction to the collective memory of forced recycling, alongside current-day cynicism about recycling, has left many urban bulgarians to reject color-coded separate collection, instead throwing everything into mixed-waste bins. capitalist-era recycling has thus become a matter of individual decisions about post-consumption discard, and most bulgarians consider this ability to discard as they please a newfound freedom that rejects eu-sponsored zero waste initiatives.19 programs promoting zero waste have long encouraged post-discard recycling, especially in newly accessed eu countries.20 however, their aims differ from the original meaning of this phrase, which, practically, more resembled socialist bulgaria’s approach to material recovery for state industrialization, which baked future recycling into production itself. in the 1970s, paul palmer, a chemist living near silicon valley in california, coined the term zero waste to describe a way of recovering still valuable tech business chemicals that their producers were discarding (mauch 2016). yet at their inception, zero waste programs in newly accessed eu countries like bulgaria focused neither on waste elimination at the site of production nor on chemicals. instead, zero waste had become a global buzz word to decrease the amount of waste landfilled around the world. in line with european policy, it has been implemented in bulgaria as an always-changing project of moving, transferring, and transforming waste, so that it no longer “counts” toward eu-regulated landfilled waste amounts. zero waste, as implemented in bulgaria, also attempts to ensure that waste remains outside of (white) bulgarian view. landfill reduction targets form part of a broader set of eu-era liberal reforms establishing quantifiable markers, which wealthier european union countries determined long ago, to limit how much landfilled waste should be accumulated from packaged goods put on the market—and how much waste should be diverted from landfills altogether.21 since most bulgarians refuse to recycle their household garbage via color-coded streetside containers, eu recycling directives are fulfilled through other avenues. for example, a friend’s cousin, petko, worked as a waste collector (kloshar), performing the labor necessary to have such directives appear effective. one day in 2011, he invited me to take a day off from the ngo where i was working to meet him inside filipovtsi, the romani neighborhood where he lived, and accompany him on his work rounds. i called him uncle petko (bai petko) as a sign of respect and an acknowledgment of our wide age gap. soon after we began walking together, he told me that through the 1970s and 1980s, he had worked in the much more regulated state socialist transport sector, first as a bus mechanic and later as a bus driver. yet in the wake of state socialism’s collapse in 1989, he found himself quickly unemployed. nobody in charge of municipal transportation services would hire him because, he explained, he was seen as just another “unemployed dirty g*psy [ts*gan].” he received a disability pension because years of hard and repetitive labor had taken a toll on his body. but he also gained critical knowledge by working in the automotive repair sector, which included using discarded materials as mandated by the state’s thriving secondary reuse program. now, he used that knowledge to stay busy and eke out some extra money. he saw no shame in working with waste; he rejected terms like trash (bokluk) and garbage (opadaci) altogether. when i asked him when he started collecting trash, he joked, “trash?! … where is the trash? here, it’s just pure money.” while petko’s claim of “pure money” was certainly sarcastic—the objects he amassed required a great deal of work to collect and exchange for money, and not much money at that—his resistance to the term trash was serious. in his mind, the collection of recyclables was too important for bulgaria’s economic and social functioning to be “criminal” or “dirty”—two rampant stereotypes of labor like his. “this isn’t dirty; it is critical. this place needs us.” he was correct, as the country could not afford sanctions if it failed to meet eu sustainability targets, but his collecting was nonetheless both criminalized as theft by recycling company owners and degraded as “backward” and anti-european by local officials and white residents of sofia. petko traveled with his pushcart to collect recyclables early each morning. he devised a handmade cart divided into two sections, one for paper and one for aluminum cans—the two waste streams he deemed most lucrative and easiest to haul. when he collected enough from the colored and mixed bins to fill his cart, he would go to the same one of sofia’s many punkts, where he would weigh items after waiting in a line of other collectors. each day’s rounds typically took five to six hours. then he would return home to eat the lunch his wife had prepared for them. figure 3. uncle petko’s cart, divided into sections for aluminum and paper. photo by elana resnick. figure 4. another waste collector weighing collected paper at the local collection point (punkt) in downtown sofia, bulgaria. photo by elana resnick. since the socialist era, punkts have been located on the side streets of bulgarian cities and towns, usually crammed between apartment buildings and thus not readily visible to passersby. their compensation rates fluctuate daily based on the international market for raw materials. every morning, the punkt manager posts a handwritten sign indicating the day’s price for each raw material (per kilo). as petko traversed his route with me, he told me about his life “before.” we stopped outside the apartment building where he and his wife raised their children decades ago, near the high school where his two sons graduated with, as he announced proudly, straight as. we also stopped at places that have more recently become regular parts of his life—the bench where he took his daily cigarette break, the park where he fed the pigeons. when we finally stopped at the local punkt, he weighed and sold the items he had collected to a middle-aged white bulgarian woman. five hours after we had set out in the morning, uncle petko had collected nine kilograms of paper, three kilograms of aluminium, and a broken copper-plated kitchen pot. he sold all of this for 2.80 leva (about $1.50). i asked him what he was going to do with the money, wondering if it was a good or bad day for him, trying to assess the economics of the job. “i’m going to buy us some coffees, maybe a beer for later, take a lev [about 50 cents] home. that’s a day.” the collectors who used horse carts that i saw hitched to posts outside the punkts and the women i sometimes accompanied who sold items as secondhand goods made more money than petko. but, he explained, the money he made accumulated, little by little, and he was happy to just be out of the house and working. stewards and criminals petko’s labor took shape within broader structures of international environmental governance and europeanization projects (andreev 2009; bechev 2013). ryan, a swedish waste-management consultant working on a short-term contract for the bulgarian ministry of the environment and water, told me about these structures during an interview i initiated over dinner at one of sofia’s well-known vegetarian restaurants. he revealed that, over the past decade, european statistical indexes have used waste as a marker for capitalist—and, by proxy, democratic—development. in the 1990s, when bulgaria was unequivocally focused on economic privatization, policymakers were particularly sensitive to such indexes. in this early postsocialist period, bulgaria had to comply with a set of regulations to fulfill pre-accession requirements necessary to join the eu. these extensive mandates required not only economic privatization and “minority protection” but also environmental sustainability measures designed to reduce waste accumulation.22 yet the valorization of waste production, understood as a material index of bulgaria’s economic growth, continued for decades. marginalia in an unpublished waste strategy planning document from 2011, which i obtained from a former government employee, still linked waste generation with economic growth. yet by this time, waste reduction had been established as an official and crucial environmental sustainability goal. recycling programs mandated by the eu and their reliance on socialist-era punkts prove critical to how waste-management policies reinscribe europe—and europeanness—as a perpetually white space (böröcz 2021; brodkin, morgen, and hutchinson 2011; goldberg 2006; hesse 2007; kalmar 2022; lentin 2008; wekker 2016). western europe broadly portrays bulgaria as needing environmentalist reform because of its socialist past—a not-quite-european space in need of development. but, when pressed, most western european officials also acknowledge that, since 1990, other european union countries have been dumping their waste in bulgaria to reduce their own accumulations.23 never mind that recycling was crucial to socialist development for decades: now, as the eu sees it, bulgaria is a landscape that needs remediation. it thus exemplifies the possibilities for transforming what was a degraded space into a consummate site of europeanization. for the eu, it is an opportunity to model how to repair and steward a historically polluted landscape. yet in local plans to realize environmentalist mandates, only some people are understood as potential stewards, while others are deemed hindrances to the system. within bulgaria, eu environmental programs both rely on and criminalize romani waste workers. as bulgaria developed its path toward eu accession, romani communities found themselves poorer and in more precarious positions than they had faced during socialism, when many held relatively lucrative jobs. heavy industry, including sofia’s kremikovtsi metallurgy plant and the balkancar forklift factory, which had employed many of the city’s romani men, downsized or shut down after the 1989 regime change, and romani women’s jobs as seamstresses, office cleaners, and garment workers disappeared as bulgaria began to outsource and offshore its formerly thriving textile industry. at the same time, costs for housing, food, and health care rose rapidly. moreover, roma faced new, increasingly explicit forms of racism in hiring practices and systemically lacked the educational opportunities needed for newly emerging job sectors. since eu accession, romani unemployment rates have continued to climb, and waste work—because of its racialization and stigma—notably remains one of the only spheres in which roma can make an income.24 like petko, many unemployed workers retooled expertise gained in the socialist-era primary market for the production of heavy industry and applied it to the eu-era secondary market for discarded materials. this labor tends to be divided along gendered lines: romani women, on foot with bags, gather items for reuse and resale from garbage and recycling bins, while romani men use carts to collect raw materials to resell. horse carts prove especially useful for those collecting lucrative heavy metal waste, otherwise impossible to gather and haul to a punkt. when white bulgarians want to get rid of an old car or construction waste without paying to do so through official channels, they often summon romani men with horse carts—who advertise with small slips of paper in mailboxes—to make it “disappear.” these workers disrupt the supposed containability for which the color-coded bins are designed. their labor confirms that the bins are open enough if there are people who need to go through them. waste cannot be contained from those who need it; receptacles with small holes cannot perfectly exclude those people who are enabling bulgaria to meet eu mandates while also, purportedly, preventing the country from attaining “europeanness.” and many of my waste-collecting interlocutors, including petko, knew of these and related efforts to contain roma, including multifarious types of surveillance such as the monitoring of bank accounts, video-recording sellers at punkts, workplace policing, and a long history of ethnographers embedded into romani communities to generate information for authorities (van baar and kóczé 2020). these attempts at containment have also manifested in the segregation of romani neighborhoods, heightened during the covid-19 pandemic, when sofia city officials mandated that all romani residents of certain neighborhoods stay within the bounds of “contained” areas, making them subject to police checkpoints if they tried to leave (matache and bhabha 2020; resnick 2020; salvatore 2023; trupia 2021). liberal ideas of sustainability are often advanced with programs for “stewardship” and “responsibility.” yet as recycling infrastructures in bulgaria make clear, eu sustainability implementation is bound up with the same power logics that continue to exclude roma from categories of personhood (plájás, m’charek, and van baar 2019; weheliye 2014; vincze 2014).25 the “greening” of an expanding europe thus includes dividing environmental labor between those who can serve as stewards and others who are racialized as criminals. local politicians and wealthy bulgarians often make public shows of cleaning up city spaces, for instance, at the corporate-sponsored, annual “clean bulgaria in one day” campaign.26 many people i spoke to in sofia considered this a capitalist reinvention of the soviet-era cleaning holiday, subbotnik. teams of businesspeople, public figures, and wealthy sofia residents would clean together in matching t-shirts in events featured on television news and instagram streams. while their labor was valorized, the city’s uniformed, predominantly romani waste laborers were denigrated as “lazy,” or said to perform “superfluous” work. similarly, public authorities espoused that roma walking the streets with various kinds of carts undermined the city’s aspirational european aesthetic. yet almost everyone i knew in the waste sector—ceos, consultants, inspectors, and manual laborers—saw individual waste collecting as an important part of waste management, albeit in different ways. those employed by waste-management companies criminalized individual collectors for forcing the companies to buy from the punkts what they felt they should have received for free, even as they acknowledged that the work of kloshari was essential for bulgaria’s ongoing adherence to the eu environmental framework. on the other hand, waste collectors, mostly romani men and women, saw collecting as vital to their own survival (cf. millar 2018). they told me they were reclaiming trash from a failing system predicated on waste’s non-containability—recovering what the white ruling class didn’t want—but also providing a public service by sorting trash that otherwise, as they explained, “would go directly to the landfill.” they knew all too well that the pros needed just what they collected for bulgaria to remain—as they put it—“european.” containability during a public q&a session after a panel at sofia’s annual waste expo conference in 2011, i heard ivan, the ceo of one of the largest bulgarian recycling firms, bemoan the company’s trouble recovering enough recyclable packaging waste from its color-coded bins. afterward, i requested his business card and asked him, quickly, why kloshari in sofia outraged him so. he had to run to another conference panel, but i insisted i would call to continue the conversation. he may have been put off by my question, because he did not answer the first several phone calls i made to him. eventually, he agreed to meet me in his office. i arrived at his brightly lit office reception area, where an administrative assistant offered me a coffee and handed me a stack of promotional materials, including a miniature plastic recycling bin on wheels. then i waited until ivan invited me into his large, windowed office. the interview was awkward at first. i began with some questions about recycling and the nature of his work before finally getting to the issue of the bins: “so why do the different colored bins have those holes in them?” he sat up and leaned forward, visibly excited to talk about the holes, which, he said, were on most of the recycling bins that his firm owned. it was a design effort, he explained, to help the recycling companies from “going under.” i followed up with statistical questions about how much recyclable waste his organization recovered and about the history of his specific pro. i wondered aloud what the largest hindrance was to meeting their eu packaging-recovery quotas. at first, he seemed to enjoy the question. the most difficult part of the eu-wide program for separate collection, he announced, was convincing the bulgarian public to throw the correct kind of packaging into the appropriately colored bin. they had a great deal of funding for public outreach programs (i had witnessed this firsthand in elementary school visits composed of recycling games and educational videos), but it all seemed to fail when it came to adults using the streetside color-coded bins as intended, to sort their household waste. the second major hindrance, he said, were kloshari: “i mean, we have no way to stop them for now from stealing waste from the sorting containers and selling it for money … at punkts where they buy the waste. i consider this the most difficult. everything else can be done according to plan, but not this.” the kloshari could not be contained by the system intended to prevent them from intercepting waste that would otherwise go to a landfill and, subsequently, making money from that waste.27 despite the inefficiency of recycling bins and the reluctance of most sofia residents to use them, ivan saw kloshari as the main problem. “it means we are paying double. it is how things work now, but this is not the way the system should be. the waste that is in our containers becomes our property.” “paying double,” i learned over time, was a common refrain from waste-company executives to refer to the money they paid to maintain colored recycling bins on city streets and the money they paid to punkts for recyclables they obtained from kloshari who scavenged those same bins. “so,” i interjected, “i want to ask about these kloshari, who collect waste on their own,” but he interrupted me: “they are not collecting it,” he emphasized; “they are stealing it.” i had noticed ivan’s awareness of language during the q&a session at the conference. when speaking to the panelists (via an english-bulgarian simultaneous interpreter), he used the term kloshari to refer to waste collectors, but when directly addressing bulgarian-speaking audience members, he spoke plainly of g*psies (ts*gani). kloshari, in other words, was coded language for roma, intended for an international audience before which he knew he could not use explicitly racial terminologies without reprimand. with me, he said kloshari, but he insisted that what “they” did must be categorized as theft: the municipalities are responsible for this in the first place, because there are no punishments for the scavengers [kloshari], and no one is stopping them. and, secondly, those who buy it [waste] at the collection points [punkts] are also to be blamed, because they are buying waste illegally and paying people to bring it to them. the scavengers [kloshari] obviously can’t generate so much waste on their own; they are stealing it. that’s all. when i pointed out that punkts, according to my research, were legal and registered within the national business registry, ivan responded gruffly. “they have registration for their activities, and that is good. but tell me, how can they buy from kloshari without any invoices or without using the machine that gives you a receipt for buying something?” he continued, “they don’t even ask kloshari where they got all that waste from.” i asked him whether it would be illegal for me to take my own garbage to one of these punkts to sell. he answered, “that depends on how many kilograms [of recyclable waste] you can gather. how much can you really gather, one kilogram, maybe?” i nodded. “well, that’s it. now imagine how those kloshari are selling a hundred kilograms every day. every day!” knowing this was impossible, i asked him directly if he was claiming that every individual was selling a hundred kilograms daily. “yes,” ivan replied firmly. “that’s what kloshari do. they steal and they sell it.” i tried to conceal my rage, asking, “in your view, what’s the best avenue for handling this?” ivan replied, “of course there must be a clear law. and there must be those who respect the law…. we have already spoken with the ministry [of the environment and water], of course, so they can make some laws for those people, so they won’t be able to sell waste anymore. the law should be organized, so that all waste can be turned in for free … and yet, between all the laws, there are still illegal collection points where you get paid when you turn in plastics, paper, and such. and the ministry is not doing anything about it.” hristo, the ceo of a smaller waste-management company, was similarly quick to criminalize kloshari for their work. he allowed me to shadow him as he organized recycling bin pickups, coordinated with local bureaucrats, and wrote emails to municipalities abroad, including in postwar libya, to sell plastic bins to those furnishing new waste-collection systems. he also received calls each week from the municipal inspector bemoaning the condition of the recycling bins for which his firm was legally responsible. when doing a recycling bin pickup, workers on the truck would have to sweep the area around the containers if messy so as not to incur fines from the municipality. one day, when hristo received a phone call about an overturned bin, he rolled his eyes at me, and referenced my work in the roma ngo sector i had told him about: “your friends created an issue that we now need to clean. soon, you’ll see the whole society from this perspective.” hristo was suggesting that the mess his company was mandated to clean had resulted from people collecting recyclables from his company’s bins, a process that involves dumping the bins on their sides to bypass the small hand-sized holes at the top. in general, while the domestic waste-management industry actively ignores the fact that kloshari waste labor allows bulgaria to fulfill eu requirements for recycling, it also argues that “g*psies” make the streets messy, thus making it impossible for bulgaria to look aesthetically “european.” ivan told me that waste collected by kloshari accounted for more than 70 percent of all recovered recyclables in bulgaria, but he cited this as evidence of their stealing. many other people gave me the same number at different times, but there are no official statistics to support it, due to market privacy restrictions on public accounting of packaging put on the market (and also the means of its recovery).28 most official documents about recycling in bulgaria likewise do not acknowledge the role of kloshari labor. one notable exception is a 2006 report entitled “zero waste as best environmental practice for waste management in cee countries,”29 which includes a section, “waste crisis in sofia and roma community recycling activities,” with detailed information. iskra stoyanova, a co-author of the report who worked for years at the romani baht foundation, focuses on bulgaria’s shift in waste policy from the perspective of fakulteta, the largest romani neighborhood in sofia. in the report (2006, 10), she states that the ministry of environment and water “estimates that roughly 10,000 people are scavenging rubbish bins and landfills to collect and sell recyclable materials in the territory of bulgaria.”30 on the involvement of roma, she notes: the carters usually have two horses each but some of them have 4-5 horses, two of which they rent out to other roma. some of the carters have apprentices who are young boys between the age of 10 – 15 year-old [sic] who do not receive any wage or money for the materials they have collected during the day but only food and cigarettes. normally one cart will collect about 100 kg of metal or 2 m3 of wood and will make on average 1 trip per day each day (12). over the course of my research (2003–2024), the demographics of collectors remained the same, but the landscape of recycling transformed in accordance with changing eu regulations. since state socialism focused on the nation-building capacity of industrialization, it equipped people like petko with strategic knowledge about the production, processing, and repurposing of materials like metal. for waste collectors and companies, metal recycling remains the most lucrative, and thus metal has stayed front and center for decades. from 2010 to 2014, specifically, pros lobbied to prevent scrap metal theft (ostensibly to increase their profits), with the regulations changed as a result. for example, in 2012, the government required anyone who sold metal at a punkt to present id with their government-issued personal identification number. this has constituted a problem for many roma who do not have an officially registered address, which can be difficult to obtain. at best, most romani neighborhoods are tenuously “legal,” and even within “legal” neighborhoods, tens of households are often registered at one address, all of which makes getting mail or an individual id nearly impossible. the id requirement in the 2012 waste management act thus effectively rendered many scrap collectors unable to work.31 it also required sellers to be willing to have themselves recorded on video, which served as an even more frightening deterrent for collectors who rightfully had deep-rooted fears of the police and its long-standing racialized surveillance policies (yıldız and de genova 2019; ivasiuc 2015; plájás, m’charek, and van baar 2019). in 2014, producer responsibility organizations (pros) took financial ownership of many of sofia’s punkts, a testament to how these critical waste infrastructures work in practice (doherty 2021; nucho 2019). after eu accession, the punkts of socialist-era recycling continued operations to fulfill eu zero waste targets, now as sites where recycling waste was both bought and accounted for in official documents. since recycling organizations now owned many of the punkts, people like petko could continue to sell collected waste there as before, but instead of selling it to an intermediary, they were selling it to the pros directly. practices stayed similar, but collectors started to worry that they would face surveillance in the punkts, having quickly noticed the newly installed cameras. in effect, waste infrastructures mandatory in the socialist era continued to function in a space of legal ambiguity after 1990 that has, since 2014, become institutionalized as an economically necessary—although not fully “formalized”—part of the eu-mandated waste-management sector. waste containers serve as material manifestations of containability, designed to isolate and control (cf. markkula 2021; shryock and smail 2018). bulgarian officials, corporate executives, and environmentalist bureaucrats attempt to contain waste, in part by criminalizing the laborers who access it. while they value waste as something worthy of theft, they devalue the labor of kloshari who ensure that the waste—from streetside bins and elsewhere—is recycled. by preventing unwanted people from accessing waste containers, but also, as i show in the next section, by preventing romani neighborhood waste from comingling with “better” sofia waste, they negotiate the politics of containability and value within a racialized regime of criminality (sojoyner 2017). in criminalizing the labor that compensates for sofia residents rejecting recycling mandates, bulgarian waste recovery organizations affirm the value of waste as worthy of being stolen. conclusion: containable futures waste collectors in bulgaria—often working in the only job sector accessible to them—are interpolated in the design of recycling bins; the deposit holes in the containers mark their presence by attempting to keep “them” out. to maintain this kind of containment, strict measures of surveillance are enforced, ones rooted in ongoing aspirations of europeanization. these measures are highly racialized; waste-management bureaucrats took pride in preventing “criminals”—naturalized as roma—from accessing these “european” infrastructures. my ethnography suggests that containability, as experienced in the daily lives of waste collectors in sofia, inevitably and always remains incomplete. the bin design includes the possibility for its own disruption and, in fact, depends on that for the system to work. for example, as petko acknowledges institutional attempts to keep him from accessing waste, he also bypasses such attempts at containability, which functionally enables bulgaria to comply with its eu mandates.32 more than mere objects or nodes within wider international waste networks, recycling bins represent both the attempts at and impossibilities of containment. by starting with the bin itself, i have theorized containability as the force that keeps a color-coded, streetside recycling system in operation despite failures of sofia residents to use the bins as intended. then, by documenting how collectors—kloshari—like petko live within dehumanizing conditions not of their own making, including within projects of “european” containability, i show how they underscore the impossibility of containment by working hard, each day, to upend it—while also maintaining its place in the broader waste-management system. containability shifts scale from city streets to regional landfills; it also emerges via eu-sponsored “modern” waste depots, which replace socialist-era landfills. old-fashioned and still functioning landfills are fully open to the elements, the senses (i.e., they stink), and whoever can approach them. during my visits to aging landfills across bulgaria in 2013, i saw entire families living, working, and sleeping at transitioning landfill depots. i also witnessed that, in contrast to the older landfills, newer eu-funded depots, despite being open at the top, were designed to be secure, contained, and “clean.”33 this entailed segregating waste coming from romani neighborhoods, as one of my interlocutors, valentina, informed me. valentina, a waste executive working at a new eu-approved waste-installation site, told me in late 2019 that the waste from sofia’s big romani neighborhoods is “so contaminated” that it is not worth sorting to recycle. this is because trash generated by roma is considered, in valentina’s terms, “unrecoverable.” when i pressed her on what she meant, she explained that there was nothing of value to reclaim in romani waste. her statement implied both that their waste had already been sorted through, “scavenged” and sold, but also, like the stereotype of romani people, that it was too “dirty” to be worthwhile. as a result, it appeared more efficient to not sort it in the first place. instead, the new waste-installation site treats waste from romani neighborhoods as the old, soviet-style landfill would: dumping it wholesale without any processing. just as romani people are often seen to need “containment”—for example, their urban segregation throughout bulgarian history or the policy in effect during the covid-19 pandemic that i discussed earlier—waste from romani neighborhoods, picked up intermittently at best, also becomes the object of containability at sofia’s modern waste-installation site. valentina adds a new dimension to waste’s containability: she focuses on containing some waste from other waste, based on where it came from. like the types of containment used by governments across the global north “to interrupt and refuse the mobility of people from the global south,” environmentalist attempts at waste’s containment in bulgaria has similarly taken shape through racialized criminalization (besteman 2020, 61). in conditions of rampant inequality and rapid environmental “progress,” it is not unusual for waste labor to be alternatively unrecognized and criminalized but also used in projects of resistant life-making, which include the practices of disruption on which both waste workers—and eu policies—depend, albeit to different ends (ahmann 2019; butt 2023; doherty 2021; fredericks 2018; millar 2018; resnick 2021; solomon 2019, 2022; stamatopoulou-robbins 2019). as my romani interlocutors working in bulgaria’s recycling sector made clear, authorities tacitly allow for a certain amount of diversion from enclosure for the system to sustain itself. this means that waste officials turn a blind eye when kloshari go through waste, as long as it ends up at their punkts and helps them meet their eu targets. they bemoan this countersystem even as they rely on it. they know that designing recycling containers with small holes does not stop people from going through them—an entire parallel waste-collection system depends on this labor. but sofia’s recycling bins also make the surveilling of racialized kloshari—often romani—labor that much easier. for example, i often saw romani women casually reach inside open metal mixed-waste trash bins as they passed by, cigarette in hand. yet because the recycling bins’ small openings make the act of collecting waste harder, multiple adults might need to tip over entire bins to sift their contents—rendering them hypervisible on city streets. moreover, recycling firm executives, like ivan, project state failings onto roma in ways that showcase how bulgaria’s compliance with eu environmental governance is predicated on the dual project of valuing waste and criminalizing the labor of its recovery.34 the kind of racial exclusions that containability makes apparent reveals a conjunction of multiple, structural forces.35 these forces include europeanization as an ongoing racial project, one that encompasses the continuing transition from state socialism to capitalist democracy and the racist, liberal projects of eu policy harmonization on which this transition currently depends. at their root, eu recycling initiatives recycle the enduring racial hierarchies that have undergirded europeanization for centuries, while at the same time promoting them as new, future-oriented, and progressively “green.” sustainability projects in bulgaria reinforce hierarchies of racialization through the country’s aspirations of attaining not only an official but also a lived, aesthetic kind of european status that is, by definition, white (hesse 2007; kalmar 2022; wekker 2016). many sustainable development initiatives worldwide result in finding a “sink” (or dump, or unregulated romani neighborhood) where waste can go, exacerbating racialized geographic inequalities (gabrys 2009; liboiron 2021). but in sofia, sustainability also concerns keeping those same people living among waste at home (because their neighborhoods lack municipal waste removal) from accessing waste’s value on the city’s streets, all while relying on their labor. contemporary environmental policies, including eu-wide programs like zero waste, uphold the daily practices of “europe” as a fundamentally white space. these programs reinvigorate long-standing racial politics in new “environmentally friendly” ways and with changing material technologies. zero waste, as a future-oriented initiative deeply reliant on local histories of racialization, is a project of an imagined future and constant erasure. it marks a “racial sustainability regime” in which certain things and categories of people can be sustained through the discardability of others (resnick 2025). as waste regimes morph into racialized sustainability regimes—in the name of progressivist europeanization—people find gaps in institutionalized attempts to contain them from the city and its waste. bulgaria’s most visible sustainability project, zero waste, entails imagining what life could be. it is the forward-thinking promise of a future in which there is no trash on city streets—but also a future in which bulgaria is white, and, paradoxically, would lack the racialized labor to keep its aspirational goals of europeanization alive. abstract environmental sustainability initiatives in bulgaria generate new forms of racialization. although institutionally framed as progressive in the name of “green” europeanization, in practice these initiatives rely on undervalued and unrecognized racialized labor. by attending to the materiality of recycling bins in downtown sofia and their physical openings—designed to keep hands out—i show how people engage with recycling-based sustainability regimes and the environmental systems in which they are embedded. bridging analyses of progressivist environmentalism and anthropologies of enclosure, this article introduces the idea of containability to understand the relationship between waste and race. containability marks a realm of human-waste relations predicated on the aspirational goal of boundedness and the everyday disruptions of it. i examine these relations from the perspectives of waste collectors, recycling executives, romani neighborhood residents, and international environmental consultants. these insights invite us to rethink the racial and material politics of environmentalism that constitute contemporary urban life. [sustainability; environmentalism; race; labor; recycling; europe; waste] резюме инициативите за екологична устойчивост в българия създават нови форми на расово разделение. тези инициативи, въпреки че са институционално формулирани като прогресивни в името на „зелената“ европеизация, разчитат на подценен и незачитан расово маркиран труд. обръщайки внимание на веществеността на контейнерите за рециклиране в центъра на софия и на техните физически отвори, проектирани да държат ръцете вън от тях, показвам какво е отношението на хората към устойчивите режими за рециклиране, както и към екологичните системи, в които са вградени. включвайки анализи от прогресивната екология и от антропологията на ограждането, тази статия въвежда идеята за съдържаемост, за да обясни връзката между отпадъците и расата. съдържаемостта е област, принадлежаща на връзката хора—отпадъци, която е основана на стремежа към ограничаване и на всекидневните ѝ прекъсванияя. изследвам тази връзка от перспективата на сметосъбирачи, ръководители по рециклирането, жители на ромски квартали и международни консултанти по екология. този поглед ни подканва да преосмислим расовата и материалната екологична политика, върху които е изграден съвременният градски живот. [устойчивост; екология; раса; труд; рециклиране; европа; отпадъци] notes acknowledgments i remain indebted to my friends and interlocutors in bulgaria for their generosity, patience, and seemingly unending desire to help this research along. i thank all who read and provided feedback on this piece. this includes the close reading and collective discussion of neda atanasoski, catherine fennell, mayanthi fernando, jessica greenberg, anand pandian, savannah shange, and deborah thomas at a book workshop sponsored by the university of california humanities research institute (uchri). members of the discard studies collective at nyu read a version of the current piece as a work in progress: rosalind fredericks, joshua reno, marisa solomon, sophia stamatopoulou-robbins, and amy zhang. i presented an earlier draft of this paper and received wonderful feedback at the ohio state university’s mershon center for international security studies and central european university’s romani studies program. my gratitude goes to my colleagues and friends who read and discussed this work along the way: pamela ballinger, emily channel-justice, vanessa díaz, theodora dragostinova, gillian feeley-harnik, barbara harthorn, krisztina fehérváry, bruce grant, patrick hunnicutt, anikó imre, neringa klumbyte, angéla kóczé, alaina lemon, jane lynch, paul manning, william nomikos, raquel pacheco, eda pepi, sunnie rucker-chang, martha sprigge, orhan tahir, george tsonev, zara torlone, kalinka vassileva, and chelsi west ohueri. the anonymous reviewers and editorial collective of cultural anthropology—particularly alberto corsín jiménez, kate herman, and petra dreiser—made this a better piece in so many ways. thanks to amy benson brown, megan pugh, caryn o’connell, and christina freeman for their help and support. some parts of this article also appear in chapter 2 of my book, refusing sustainability, forthcoming in 2025 from stanford university press. funding for this project came from the wenner-gren foundation, the fulbright-hays program, the american research center in sofia, the council for european studies, the school for advanced research, the university of michigan, central european university, the wilson center, the uchri, university of california, santa barbara, and the society of hellman fellows. all errors are my own. 1. in line with romani activists and scholars including ioanida costache (https://www.dor.ro/racism-and-the-road-to-healing/), i spell gypsy in the remainder of this essay as g*psy, because it is a racial slur. the bulgarian word, tsigan (singular)/tsigani (plural), is also considered derogatory by many bulgarian roma and so i have denoted it as ts*gan/ts*gani throughout. 2. roma in bulgaria comprise approximately 10.33 percent of the total population, according to the council of europe, although statistics are skewed since census-takers miss many romani communities and/or roma don’t identify as roma for myriad reasons, including fear of surveillance (https://commission.europa.eu/content/roma-equality-inclusion-and-participation-eu-country/bulgaria_en). also consult surdu 2016; plájás, m’charek, and van baar 2019. 3. many of my white bulgarian interlocutors wanted to make sure my research acknowledged that even non-romani bulgarians, mostly the poor and elderly, had turned to dumpsters for income and food. while they saw these white bulgarians as victims of a corrupt, incompetent state that cannot provide adequate pensions, they generally saw roma as criminals stealing waste. 4. punkts have been part of sofia life for decades and are not outlawed, but they are also not fully regulated. 5. the tax on packaged products in bulgaria was introduced in march 2004 and is designated per kilogram of packaging material. to avoid paying this tax directly, producers sign a contract with a producer responsibility organization (pro) that they pay to be responsible for the recycling and recovery of the packaging to meet eu targets (https://d-nb.info/1097448436/34). 6. the steadily increasing recycling targets are bolstered by a growing, eu-mandated tax on landfilled waste; together they function to incentivize recycling at the national level. 7. i thank an anonymous reviewer who asked if roma serve as the scapegoats for a failing recycling system and if non-roma would admit this. many non-roma would admit to the system’s failure but do not see roma as scapegoats; my white bulgarian interlocutors typically believed that both the official recycling system and roma collectors were to blame. those within and with extensive knowledge of the sector claimed that bins are “useless” except for two elements: 1) recycling bins can separate recyclables from “wet waste” and 2) color-coded bins could enculturate the population to recycle (even if not immediately successful). 8. https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/economic-instruments-and-separate-collection 9. all names have been anonymized. 10. accounts of roma “stealing” recyclables form part of ubiquitous tropes of anti-roma racism in bulgaria, which position roma not as contributing workers but as inveterate criminals. 11. my non-romani interlocutors often equated roma with trash, while romani interlocutors would tell me, “you study trash, that’s why you’re talking to us.” 12. western european countries have exported waste to bulgaria for years. it has become mainstream news since eu accession in 2007 and became a major issue particularly after china, the largest recipient of eu trash, banned waste imports in 2018 (https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-recycling-china-trash-ban-forces-europe-to-confront-its-waste-problem/). 13. the waste framework directive 2008/98/ec (as amended by directive [eu] 2018/851) includes a target to recycle and prepare for reuse 55 percent of all municipal waste generated by 2025. the packaging and packaging waste directive (94/62/ec as amended by directive [eu] 2018/852) includes targets for the recycling of packaging waste, both in total and by material, to be achieved by 2025. bulgaria’s 2025 target is that 65 percent of total packaging waste must be recycled. importantly, waste incineration (in bulgaria, in three cement plants and one thermal plant) does not technically count as recycling, but it does effectively count toward reducing landfilled waste, per eu policy (see https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/many-eu-member-states/bulgaria). 14. my analysis bridges critical studies of liberalism (povinelli 2011; shange 2019) and fugitivity (mckittrick 2021; moten 2017; sojoyner 2017) with scholarship about social and material enclosures (besteman 2020; byler 2022; chua 2018; markkula 2021; o’hare 2017; stamatopoulou-robbins 2019; zhang 2020) to posit a new approach to environmental relations, something we might consider a multiscalar ecopolitics (morimoto 2022). 15. although racialization need not be articulated through terms of colorization, many of my romani interlocutors used terms ranging from black (cherni) to swarthy (murgavi) and dark (tumni) to describe their racialized positionality. 16. the racialization of non-romani bulgarians abroad as not quite “white” or “european” still drew on local tropes of romani racialization. many discussions i had with non-romani bulgarians who had traveled abroad involved their analogizing themselves to g*psies when juxtaposed to western europeans. 17. checker (2011, 2020), isenhour (2015), mcdonogh, isenhour, and checker (2011), and swyngedouw (2007) present critical analyses of urban “sustainability” programs, rhetoric, and justice-centered alternatives. 18. it is important to note that this rate differs from bulgaria’s overall municipal solid waste recycling rate, which was 31.5 percent in 2018, 23.5 percentage points below its 2025 target. https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/many-eu-member-states/bulgaria/at_download/file 19. these “sanitary regimes,” in which “clean up becomes a civilizing project to ensure a better, whiter, gentrified future,” forms part of global flows of capital and related projects of urban “cleansing” (solomon 2019, 77; also see doherty 2021). 20. zero waste policy implementation in bulgaria has focused on post-consumption recycling, even though zero waste europe has long espoused ideologies of a “circular economy,” or a “model of production and consumption which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible” (https://zerowasteeurope.eu/about/about-zero-waste/). 21. european “green dot” recycling programs, in the name of zero waste and codified into eu regulation, make for another measure shaping disposal that focuses on reconfiguring or disappearing waste (o’hare 2022). the green dot indicates that the company putting that packaging on the market has paid funds to a registered pro “set up in accordance with the principles defined in european packaging and packaging waste directive 94/62 and the respective national law.” 22. for eu accession criteria, see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/accession_criteria_copenhague.html 23. https://www.dw.com/en/my-europe-illegal-garbage-dumps-reflect-eus-east-west-divide/a-52480168 24. the 2021 census showed that roma employment stood at 21.6 percent, compared to 66.8 percent of “ethnic bulgarians.” according to census data, more than half (51.2 percent) of bulgarian roma of working age were unemployed. https://www.nsi.bg/sites/default/files/files/pressreleases/census2021-ethnos.pdf 25. roma, especially when working with waste, are treated like the materials they touch. this includes having lit cigarettes thrown at them, not receiving pay for weeks at a time, and being likened (by their bosses and passersby) to animals and machinery. 26. see the let’s clean bulgaria together website, https://www.btv.bg/english/news/the-11th-edition-of-let-s-clean-bulgaria-together-started-with-an-official-national-meeting-of-the-partners.html 27. importantly, the work of kloshari also helps bulgaria reduce its landfilled waste amount and associated (rising) landfill tax. 28. this was explained to me in person while interning at the bulgarian ministry of the environment and water in 2013. however, more recent accounts reveal specific amounts of packaging put on the market (e.g., dolchinkov and ozerova 2019). 29. https://ipen.org/sites/default/files/documents/19ceh_zero_waste_as_bep_in_cee_countries-en.pdf 30. this 2006 report cites “mew (2003a)” as its source. i have not been able to identify this source, nor locate statistics on those who work as “scavengers” (kloshari) in bulgaria. i asked the author for this documentation, but she could not access it. nonetheless, i trust these details, as they align with my own interview data. 31. https://www.moew.government.bg/static/media/ups/tiny/waste_management_act.pdf 32. damien sojoyner (2017, 2022) and others (mckittrick 2021; moten 2017; shange 2019) argue that a politics of fugitivity can emerge in hyper-regulated spaces of oppression. following this perspective, the forms of containability i address are persistently present but never fully realized. 33. amid the gates and locks and cameras of the landfills and waste depots roamed birds, either crows or seagulls, depending on proximity to the sea (doherty 2021; o’hare 2022; sosna, henig, and figura 2022). newer waste depots included special liners at the bottom, gates with locks to monitor all who enter, and video-surveilled weigh stations to measure waste and prevent waste categorized as construction, hazardous, or green from being illegally dumped there. despite attempts to contain waste from the sides and the bottom, the tops of even the most modernized landfills remain open as trucks dump waste and birds fly in. these scenarios provide another example of how attempts at containability are constantly subject to disruption. 34. ivan’s simultaneous blaming of roma and the bulgarian government is not 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reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.03 work without labor: life in the surround of a rural prison town cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 167-192, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.01 work without labor: life in the surround of a rural prison town heath pearson university of michigan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8019-6477 in human history there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems. —cedric j. robinson, forgeries of memory and meaning the new thing, always calling for itself, already lives around and below the forts, the police stations, the patrolled highways and the prison towers. —stefano harney and fred moten, the undercommons it was time to purchase goods from the commissary. corrections officers (cos) make rounds on thursday evenings, selling goods at exorbitant prices that would make airport food courts blush. “seven hundred percent markups on some items,” ken says as an aside, while telling me this story. “and what’s maybe worse, or, i don’t know if it’s worse, but some of these items are purchased in bulk and then sold individually. it says ‘not for individual sale’ right on the packaging!” ken is not referencing a so-called illicit prison economy. the commissary in the new jersey state prison where he was held for ten years sells goods this way. “i once spent $75 on a single phone call, but at&t is responsible for the markup on that.” as the cos made rounds on that particular thursday, he continues, they arrived in front of ken’s cell. he declined, though he had plenty of money on his books. no big deal. the cos shoved on to the next cell. but people confined in nearby cells took note. ken explained the markups. the following thursday, his entire cell block declined purchasing goods. the next week, two cell blocks declined. by the month’s end, the entire west wing declined and said they would continue to do so until goods were made affordable. the cos launched an investigation. “they found out i was the first one,” ken says. “so, they dragged me out of my cell and threw me into the hole [solitary confinement] for a week. they accused me of inciting a riot. everyone in prison, or everyone who has spent time in prison, whether they are black like me or white like you, knows the criminal justice system is built for them to fail and to make money off them. so not purchasing goods was inciting a riot.” we talk in the parking lot, long after the intensive supervision program (isp) meeting has ended;1 winter winds blow across the concrete and underneath our parkas. fred, who leads isp with ken, interjects: “that’s why i’m getting these [formerly incarcerated] people to invest in private prisons. not because they are a good company—they aren’t! but they also aren’t going anywhere. so, we can eventually get to where we own 51 percent of the stock of this prison company and start changing the way things happen. but, really, that’s only one part, a part where i can get formerly incarcerated people making money off the system that made money off them.” “yeah, i am intrigued by your plan,” i reply, “but i’m not sure i can get on board.” “it’s more than that. think about what it’s like to go to school and play kickball with a prison behind the field? what ways does that change your entire psychology? it’s not even, ‘yeah, dad is locked up and we go visit him in so-and-so once a month.’ no! it’s, ‘yo, dad is locked up, and he’s right there!’ it changes everything. all these kids see when they grow up around here is a prison.”2 fred and ken have led isp in cliptown,3 a rural region in south jersey with five correctional facilities, for more than a decade. ken, in his late thirties, spent part of his teens and twenties confined behind bars and now works as a consultant in a neighboring state, after earning associate’s and master’s degrees. he experienced the hierarchical labor structure of prisons, first as an incarcerated person forced to work while trying to exercise fiscal agency over his scant wages, and second as a formerly incarcerated person struggling to expunge the felony from his record so he could get a job. fred, now in his mid-fifties, was employed after college at one of cliptown’s state prisons, where he came into contact with the prison’s labor structure and covertly organized incarcerated people to go on strike, until the warden found out and fired him. fred now works in administration (and as the program director for formerly incarcerated students) at the county’s community college. in light of these kinds of personal experiences inside of cliptown’s prisons, fred and ken have spent much of their lives organizing with formerly incarcerated people against prisons and resourcing them to “re-brand” personal and work identities through efforts aimed at erasing their felony charges. * * * fred and ken identify two problems that plague life in cliptown: (1) the hierarchical labor structure within and surrounding prisons and (2) the limited life opportunities for convicted felons after their release. in the current system, a felony charge continues to hold the formerly incarcerated person captive (burch 2019), attaching to them as an obstacle that curtails job possibilities, nullifies voting rights, forecloses housing and education opportunities, and enforces perpetual surveillance. the enduring impact of a felony conviction is a core reason that for every 10 people released from prison in the united states, 8.3 will be re-incarcerated within nine years.4 fred’s proposed solution, however, is not to erase the afterlives of felony charges, but, rather, to replace those occupying the top of the hierarchy with those confined at the bottom. that is to say, in his view, the people being dominated by the ruling class must become the ruling class to “change the way things happen.” cliptown’s hierarchical labor structure is embedded in the relationship between its prisons and the local political economy. but the labor structure of the region did not originate with the arrival of prisons. it belongs to a much longer (regional) history in which confinement has been used to determine the conditions of work (i.e., labor structure) such that a ruling class can easily siphon away the products of each person’s efforts. today’s prisons are only the current manifestation of a succession of technologies of confinement that have proven central to cliptown’s political economy for hundreds of years. pursuing fred and ken’s two primary concerns leads me, first, to historicize cliptown’s racialized labor structure and, second, to enter the surround of those prisons where formerly incarcerated people build lives. approaching cliptown through the lens of its prisons might seem to imply a forty-year history of the u.s. “prison boom” or “mass incarceration” (western 2006; alexander 2010), but this would mean disregarding a key fact: cliptown’s political economy has always relied on racialized confinement at the center of hierarchical labor structures. numerous prisons squeezed into a small space might also seem to indicate a “fix” in the form of a state-targeted development project. in golden gulag, ruth wilson gilmore (2007, 58–78) analyzes california’s use of prisons as a development project responding to a multifaceted accumulation of empty land, idle people, and static capital produced by the disassembling welfare state, expanding global food markets, and the collapse of industry. the “prison fix,” as gilmore calls it, highlights the resolution of capital’s “crisis tendencies” through “geographical expansion and . . . restructuring,” names the technocratic intentionality associated with a ruling class working to rig the system, and conjures an idea that those actors became fiends addicted to prison-building (harvey 2001, 24).5 while gilmore’s study remains persuasive, there is a problem with viewing cliptown prisons as a fix: it suggests, even if unintentionally, that prisons are an external technology to the function of state and capital. that is, it bolsters a view of state and capital as capable of seeking a different fix. by focusing my inquiry on a twenty-square-mile region in south jersey (cliptown and its outskirts), i both stretch the timeline for historicizing prisons and challenge the idea that they symbolize an external solution to localized problems. in what follows, i first trace three separate regimes that have marked the labor structure in cliptown’s history, illuminating how its political economy continually requires the mass confinement of racialized people. in doing so, i identify a primary feature of prisons: labor without resources or work. building on dylan rodríguez’s (2006, 47) construction of the “prison regime,” which re-presents the prison as a “mythology” that “rationalizes and renarrates a domestic . . . site of aggressively one-sided, racial gendered warfare,” and on cedric j. robinson’s (2007, xii) “racial regimes,” which are “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power,” i reframe cliptown prisons as only the current manifestation of sites that mystify and legitimate white-masculinist warfare through the continual adaptation of technologies of confinement that enable the political economy to function. separating cliptown’s history into distinct regimes of confinement reveals that prisons are neither a (recent) federal idea for social control nor (simply) an external fix for accumulation. historicizing these regimes in cliptown reveals a structuring logic: privatized enclosures of land coincide with the racialization (and criminalization) of confinement to produce captive labor. as the active technologies of confinement become untenable, new technologies take their place, producing new economic possibilities while racialization (and criminalization) shifts and multiplies. the ongoing privatization of land and productive resources maintains the white-masculinist order. this is not to suggest that each regime is essentially the same (i.e., a “new” jim crow or a “new” slavery). on the contrary, regimes disintegrate and become untenable (robinson 2007, xiii), and recalibrated technologies of confinement consistently re-produce different possibilities and restrictions for accessing cliptown’s social, political, and economic systems. moreover, historicizing cliptown’s labor structures (rather than simply localizing a “prison boom”) introduced me to spaces that exceed the capture of confinement. in the second half of this article, i journey to the spot, a men’s clothing store in cliptown’s downtown, owned and operated by shakes, a formerly incarcerated man and lifelong resident. the spot is a site that does not reproduce the hierarchical labor structure of confinement, but instead expands space for practicing freedoms and learning to be “unavailable for [confinement’s] servitude” (gordon 2017, 49). in other words, at the spot, we witness work without labor. an overly deterministic fixation on state and federal policy is incapable of finding such spaces that escape confinement, since it treats the forms and collectives of “life that surround” prisons as immaterial and incidental to their operation (harney and moten 2013, 17). in this article, it is precisely life in the surround that grounds my historical approach to labor and confinement. finally, my distinction between labor and work relies on key passages in the james mill section of karl marx’s (1844) “paris notebooks” (1843–1845), in which he explores the impact of private property on human relations. in the closing paragraphs, marx imagines how the abolition of private property might reshape the relationship between people, work, and labor. since private property maintains a hierarchical structure of laboring, work can only be a “torment . . . a forced activity” externally imposed on those who must work to survive. across cliptown’s multiple regimes, private property owned by white people maintains a hierarchical labor structure in which racialized people are confined to work for the benefit of a ruling class. cliptown’s current political economy, organized around prisons and policing, has stretched that structure to its logical conclusion, in which the mere act of confining thousands of people generates hundreds of millions of dollars. it has created a system of labor without work. for marx, abolishing private property in favor of a horizontally structured communal arrangement, however, would allow for the possibility of “a free manifestation of life . . . an enjoyment of life” that affirms our work, expands our relationships, and deepens our “communal nature.” at the spot, shakes has built just such a space, in which work continually escapes the hierarchical labor structure, acting to deepen relational bonds, expand community, and multiply economic opportunities. he has created a space of work without labor. confinement: three regimes . . . an immensity of which we know little except that we are part of it. —michel-rolph trouillot, silencing the past cliptown’s history of confinement is just as much a story of land use as it is a trail of federal and state policies. as i listened to people’s stories, and as i followed those stories to other stories, and then into the city clerk’s office, and the public library, and museums, and historical accounts, and abandoned farms, i learned an entirely localized narrative around cliptown’s political economic history and use of confinement. i provide fragments of this account to sketch three separate regimes of confinement. planter regime the planter regime was carved into the earth as a place to grow food for new york city and north jersey, with some of the richest earth along the eastern seaboard.6 according to the lenape historian john (smiling thunderbear) r. norwood (2007), lenape people trace their relationship with this land back thousands of years, until white settlers committed genocide and/or forcibly removed them beginning in the seventeenth century. amid the genocide, white owners were gifted seventy-five acres of land for each enslaved black person they brought into the state (cooley 1896, 9). the practice continued (though the acreage given diminished each year) until new jersey was populated with white owners and confined black people. new jersey was the last of the northern states to abolish slavery in the late 1860s. cliptown’s planter regime gifted (only) white men with (free) land ownership, made possible by racializing lenni-lenape people (to justify land theft, genocide, and removal) and black people (to justify bodily theft, physical violence, and enslaved labor)—in service of the agricultural economies of white land owners—while keeping lenape and black people landless and always under threat of genocide or enslavement. cliptown’s division of land ownership thus belongs to the same process of naturalization that, for frantz fanon (1963, 5, 9), divides all the land of the colonized world: “what race one belongs to.” technologies of confinement manifest in this regime as enslavement, forced removal, and genocide, and the hierarchical labor structures assure that the workers, the products, and all resources of production are owned by a (white) ruling class. robber baron regime two families grew in power following the so-called end of plantation slavery: the seabrooks and the woodruffs.7 the woodruff family exerted pressure to build a new railroad stop that opened brooklyn food markets to cliptown agriculture, but the family also turned attention to natural gas and its many services after the turn of the century. in the early 1930s, c. f. seabrook took control of his family’s farm and began purchasing additional acreage from smaller farmers, updating assembly-line procedures and adding new processing technologies (e.g., for freezing fruits and vegetables) along the way. non-elites also grew in organizational capacity. agricultural workers organized with and in unions, leading to a series of strikes in the 1920s and 1930s for increased wages and safer work conditions. by 1925, new jersey also had the second-largest ku klux klan membership in the united states, at 720,000, with heavy concentration in south jersey (woods 2017, 90). in 1934, the new york times (1934) reported that seabrook had promised male workers 30 cents/hour and female workers 25 cents/hour, but paid both 17 cents/hour, which led to a cross-racial, farm-wide strike that lasted multiple weeks. seabrook went to the newspapers, accusing workers of being communists, and hired off-duty police officers to disrupt the strike and train his sons in suppression tactics.8 seabrook’s oldest son recalls a police officer instructing them: “now, never raise your club, because some damn photographer . . . will take a picture of you. keep it low and jam the guy in the crotch. then, when the new york times takes a picture, you’ll see everybody bowing to you” (harrison 2003, 37–38). seabrook secured a depression-era loan through the reconstruction finance corporation that enabled him to keep the farm going, but “forbade the company from using funds to increase workers’ pay,” and so labor negotiations were determined by anti-worker financial support from the federal government (harrison 2003, 37). tensions eased when seabrook devised a scheme to incorporate “one . . . union [that] they could negotiate with fairly [and who] would be more likely to keep peace among workers than a series of locals” who were not of their choosing (harrison 2003, 41). seabrook farms thus grew as people the world over, including preteen children, trickled in for seasonal work. by the start of world war ii, seabrook shipped more frozen vegetables than any other farm in the united states, enabling him to negotiate lucrative contracts with the federal government. this, however, brought new problems: the bulk of available white workers had been conscripted into the war efforts, and local black workers had become “unruly” and “disorderly” to the hierarchy of labor and jim crow social control (aitken 1944). south jersey quakers, at the time working nationally against japanese internment, offered c. f. a solution: interned japanese americans (harrison 2003, 57–62). cliptown’s elected leadership held deep reservations about the influx of japanese americans to the region. the mayor wrote a letter to seabrook acknowledging the significance of nonwhite labor “to grow and produce the necessary foods required by our armed forces,” but emphasized that he and the city council did “not welcome the american-japanese . . . [though] he realizes . . . [they] would be law-abiding and would cause the local police authorities no difficulty” (aitken 1944). after referencing a high school basketball game disrupted by angry whites who did not want their children sharing a court with japanese american students, he continued: “in furtherance of our conversation had yesterday in your office . . . in connection with the securing of american-japanese citizens for labor . . . [there is some doubt] as to the desirability and advisability of [them] coming to work in the vicinity of cliptown,” but, he writes four times in the two-page letter, “[we] would prefer government investigated american-japanese citizens . . . rather than the undesirable southern negro labor . . . because they frequent the local saloons in the colored section in town, become intoxicated, become unruly and are continually causing the local police considerable difficulty by fighting and continually behaving in a disorderly manner.” seabrook farm’s labor demands exceeded the racism of cliptown whites, thus, over the course of world war ii, more than 2,500 japanese americans were sent by train from internment camps to seabrook farm’s labor camps. this massive entry had a dramatic impact on black workers. those who participated in labor strikes were fired, and those who remained were immanently threatened with replacement.9 by the end of the second world war, the majority of japanese american people exited cliptown permanently. in the late 1950s, glass and canning factories supplanted agriculture as the region’s primary employer, and seabrook’s sons converted the sixty-square-mile farm into a real estate and financial advising firm, selling off the land, piecemeal, which by then stretched from south jersey into pennsylvania and delaware. staying profitable proved impossible when seabrook could no longer rely on government contracts and confined, racialized populations. cliptown’s robber baron regime expanded land ownership for a few white men (tied largely to inheritance), which further monopolized the land for corporate agriculture, while maintaining a segregated status for black people whose public lives in segregated sections of town were criminalized, and capitalizing on the nationally criminalized status of interned japanese american people, which enabled seabrook to obtain, segment, and confine cheap labor, with workers entirely dependent on the farm for their existence. technologies of confinement—manifest here as government policy, armed police officers, internment/labor camps, housing segregation, and wage theft—and the hierarchical labor structures have adapted to remunerate workers while still controlling social movement and extracting profits to a ruling class. the robber baron regime thus operates differently than the planter regime. black people are paid for their work (although wages can be stolen by white owners and workers can be physically assaulted/fired if caught organizing), and they can purchase land, practice religion, and socialize in segregated parts of town. japanese american people can work for wages, but they must pay to live in the barracks and they must shop exclusively on the farm. what is similar to the planter regime, and is especially clear in the mayor’s letter, is that black people and japanese american people alike are valued by the white ruling class only for their capacity to work within the hierarchical labor structure—it is the confinement of racialized workers, the mayor acknowledges, that allows cliptown’s economy to work. as the robber baron regime utilizes workers made available by racialization/criminalization, it can respond to black workers’ demands for higher wages and better working conditions by importing (contingent) workers that can be legally confined from other geographic regions.10 boundless baby boomer regime i told him: if you don’t get better grades, i will pull you out of college and make you take the corrections officer test. just like his daddy [laughter]. it’s the only way you will amount to anything around here. —cliptown (county) prosecutor a booming glass industry became the primary regional employer following the decline of seabrook farms in the late 1950s. two state prisons were built next to one another on farm land in cliptown’s outskirts. in 1977, the prisons launched a dairy farm that continues today, where “low-risk” inmates produce milk products for new jersey state prisons—the dairy farm generates more than $11 million a year while paying confined workers between $4 and $6 a day (franklin 2017). two separate retired cos told me that, until the mid-1970s, these prisons were staffed primarily by ku klux klan members, before an external investigation revealed decades of abuses. i have found no documented evidence of this, but in 1979, the regional klan presence was strong enough that david duke made a campaign appearance during his (democratic) bid for u.s. president (bennett 2011); in the late 1990s, the prison administration instituted a policy that cos could no longer wear confederate flag patches on their uniforms (prison legal news 1997); and, as recently as june 2020, a staff co was fired after a video surfaced that showed him reenacting the george floyd killing as protestors walked by his house (torrejon 2020). by the early 1980s, the glass industry, which did not utilize workers confined in local prisons, had begun rapidly scaling down to move production into the appalachian region. in 1981, the democratic congressman william j. hughes, a former prosecutor representing new jersey’s second congressional district (which includes cliptown) from 1975 to 1995, was appointed to the house judiciary committee to serve as the chair of the subcommittee on crime. congressman hughes, who held this position until 1990, oversaw the passage of more than forty major anti-crime laws,11 working lockstep with then senator joe biden to increase the number of crimes punishable by death, “proudly endors[ing] . . . h.r. 3371 for making ‘48 serious federal crimes’ death eligible” (murakawa 2014, 139). hughes’s contribution as a legislative architect helped greatly expand and protect u.s. police power and made drug selling/possession a hypercriminalized activity, which had a cumulative effect of producing people to be confined in prisons. by the close of the twentieth century, one new prison opened in the rural united states every fifteen days (swelling to one every ten days when including sub/urban spaces) for almost fifteen consecutive years (huling 2002, 198). my interest here, however, is not with congressman hughes’s policies, but with his connection to cliptown and its acres of cheap land. by the mid-1980s, a few years into congressman hughes’s tenure, glass production ceased entirely and people from mexico and central america moved in for agricultural work. white people scattered to the outskirts, building small suburban-like neighborhoods with a new public school that excluded most of cliptown proper, where black and brown families lived. the newly arrived, often undocumented residents, alongside great numbers of unemployed factory workers, once again provided local farmers (and police) with a growing number of racialized, landless, and contingent people. during this transition, in 1986, two lawyers from new york city purchased land from cliptown farmers until they had amassed more than one hundred contiguous acres. a week later, the property was sold to the county at a 110 percent markup. the following day, the county sold the property to the federal bureau of prisons, office of facilities, for one dollar.12 in 1993, a similar process happened with the land that would ground the state prison, but this time the outsiders hailed from south carolina. in both cases, land was purchased piecemeal (often from farmers) and then resold as a single piece of property to the county. it appears, given the nonlocal status of the buyers, combined with a breakneck timeline from date of initial purchases to final sale, that this is an example of strategizing across county, state, and federal lines for the purposes of benefiting a few wealthy men and political insiders (like hughes) by undercutting local farmers. in 2015, when i began research, abandoned buildings, empty storefronts, and boarded-up homes filled the landscape, with scant few newly constructed buildings: a renovated county prosecutors’ office, two remodeled state prisons, one new state prison, one new federal prison, one county jail being renovated and expanded into a regional correctional facility, one new halfway house, one new church auditorium with a connected recreational building, and a remodeled building housing new jersey’s largest nonprofit. police officers, cos, and wardens rank among the highest-paid workers in the cliptown area,13 and they enjoy widespread power throughout the region. the school board has seven elected members—six, including the president, are cos. the cliptown president of the naacp is a co. the new jersey president of the naacp is a retired co now working as a warden of the regional jail.14 the mayor is the first black mayor in cliptown’s history, and, in 1986, three short months after the farm lands were sold to the federal bureau of prisons, he founded what is now the largest nonprofit in new jersey, which oversees more than $55 million of state and federal monies annually. half of the organization’s seven hundred employees rely on government aide. many of the government contracts he signs first as mayor and second as ceo. he is collaborating with the naacp and the cos union to land a second federal prison. patrolling police officers with itchy trigger fingers from one of three departments ride around in battle-ready automobiles. i saw, on average, between five and ten different patrol vehicles cruising the places where i conducted research on any given day. two unarmed black men were murdered by police during my research time, and countless other residents suffered physical assault and/or illegal searches. each person of color i spoke with in depth, irrespective of their class, had at least one such story to share. people from mexico, central america, and south america found themselves regularly targeted—by residents and police officers alike—for bodily violence and property theft.15 three inter/national gangs moved into town following the opening of the federal prison, and, by the mid-2000s, tiny cliptown was regularly listed as one of the most gun-violent regions in the northeast.16 rumors that el chapo had been hiding out in someone’s basement since his mid-2015 escape from a prison in mexico were traded like stories of bigfoot or the boogie man, people whispering about his presence in shushed tones and side-eyes. police officers and public defenders alike confided that they believed the rumors. in the late 1990s, a retired high school teacher began purchasing houses (widely available for pennies on the dollar) to chop them into rental units. he now owns more than 20 percent of cliptown’s rental market (more than seven hundred houses), renting apartments almost exclusively to undocumented people and formerly imprisoned people, since he requires no background checks or deposits. i toured many of his rental properties when i moved into town, each one more dilapidated than the previous, rank with sour odors, and crawling with insects and vermin entering through broken windows, cracked door frames, and leaky walls. cliptown’s boundless baby boomer regime expanded land ownership for middle-class white men, intensifying a monopolization of domestic property ownership that produced a predatory rental market now housing almost 70 percent of the population, while a national drug war criminalized black, brown, and poor people who could then be confined in cliptown prisons where, for decades, elected and institutional leaders had already been putting into practice the many techniques for forcing confined people to work in hierarchical labor structures that both benefited from the increase of dependent people (migration, unemployment, drug war policing) and contributed to the increase of dependent people (releasing people with felony charges). technologies of confinement manifest in this regime as police officers in cars with guns, jails and prisons, halfway houses, criminal courts, felony charges, segregated school systems, nonprofits, a predatory rental market, and hierarchical labor structures have adapted to remunerate workers with low wages while controlling social movement in service of extracting profits to a ruling class. the boundless baby boomer regime has, however, nuanced the aesthetics of confinement in significant ways. while white land ownership is further monopolized, employment opportunities for residents fortunate enough to avoid criminal charges have expanded. by producing either/or paths allegedly determined by one’s criminal charges (or lack thereof), cliptown’s current regime appears color-blind and racist-neutral, despite confining black people at a rate twelve times higher than white people—the most disproportionate incarceration rate in the country.17 this is how the boundless baby boomer regime functions: to mask the perpetual reproduction of white masculinist warfare beneath the facade of multicultural law and order. the regime gives black people access to management positions within the confinement technologies exactly while targeting and confining black people at highly disproportionate rates. for racialized residents who avoid criminal charges, managing confinement technologies becomes the sine qua non for wider access to the social, political, and economic systems in cliptown. turning back to this section’s opening epigraph, cliptown’s prosecutor, the first black woman to serve as prosecutor in the county, is not joking when she says that being a co (like her son’s father) is the only way her son will amount to anything in cliptown. she is soberly analyzing the current regime and seeing prisons as portals: those trapped by confinement will be transported into highly exploitative work conditions, while those managing confinement will be transported into highly remunerative work (that often brings wider social and political opportunities). if black (and other racialized) people want to succeed socially and economically in the current regime, they likely must participate in the management of its confinement technologies. regimes of confinement a primary feature of the current technologies of confinement (i.e., prisons) is a hierarchical labor structure that generates money simply by confining people. that is, a labor structure without resources or work. yes, some confined people are forced to work jobs, and those workers receive modest remuneration.18 nevertheless, the confinement of bodies is the profit-generating mechanism of the current regime. average rates per person vary widely by state, but in new jersey, it costs more than $61,000 a year to confine someone in prison, and two-thirds of that state or federal money stream goes directly to local cos’ salaries.19 when we combine the populations of all cliptown prison facilities, the number of people confined on any given day is around 6,500, which means local prisons are responsible for a cash flow that exceeds $400 million a year (with $270 million going directly to salaries). and this does not include the regional jail employees, the court system employees, police and sheriff department employees, public/private defense and prosecutorial employees, or halfway house employees, not to mention the numerous corporate entities gobbling dollars from every nook and cranny. the confinement of racialized people has been at the center of cliptown’s social, political, and economic systems for almost four hundred years. it is as central today as it was during plantation slavery, with the major difference that, today, black people have replaced white people to sit atop cliptown’s labor structure. and contrary to fred’s hope, replacing the leadership while leaving the labor structure intact has done little to “change the way things happen.” by eliminating resource dependency and creating a space where workers are easily immobilized, thereby making forms of organizing and protest simple to isolate and quash, the boundless baby boomer regime has become the most dependable form of capitalism in the region’s history. * * * yet cliptown’s history of confinement regimes, now manifest as prisons, provides only an incomplete picture of the region. to stop here would be to suggest that confinement’s domination is total. tucked away, beneath, before, outside of, around, on top of, surrounding, hidden from view, cliptown beats with rhythms that refuse to reproduce the hierarchical labor structure. it is to one such space, the spot, that i now turn. building a spot in the surround if there is one clear lesson that prisoners who refuse the social death sentence teach, it is that to redeem a future, a life, out of a space of living death requires an integrity and fortitude that’s impervious to the contingencies of institutionalized dehumanization and domination. —avery f. gordon, the hawthorn archive the spot is a small men’s clothing store located on the first floor of a nineteenth-century downtown building, owned by an elderly white man who lives forty-five miles to the east, in cape may. it is one of only two black-owned businesses, shakes is always quick to remind his interlocutors, the other being a barber shop across the street owned by his son. he has lived in cliptown his entire life. after graduating high school, he was arrested and charged. i spent countless hours during fieldwork in the store, folding jeans, fixing hangers, watching the register when he ran out, and smoking cigarettes with him while sitting in folding chairs out front. six months passed before shakes shared the specificities of his arrest, and i will not share the details (or anyone else’s). the spot was a safe space for people, especially people with felony charges, to gather together, to stand on the sidewalk in a group without being harassed by police officers or business owners, or to chatter with drivers who would stop in the middle of the street to yell “hello” or to ask after family. shakes worked hard to cultivate such a vibrant space. in what follows, i highlight how the spot horizontalizes the hierarchical labor structure by refashioning the afterlives of felony charges into connective tissue for building meaningful relationships that foster collective learning and provide an open space to practice being unavailable for confinement’s servitude. * * * the spot’s door dings whenever it opens. today, as on many days, doughboy is in the corner, deep in concentration, slowly stitching a long, thin piece of shiny leather into a black purse—down, through, up, around, and back through again. a mess of purses sits in plastic at his feet, unstitched. shakes leans heavy over the old display case. he has a bible opened to the book of proverbs, chapter 1, on his left and a men’s spring fashion magazine flopped open on his right. carlos is in the back, i know, because his sewing machine hums a familiar tune. “my man,” shakes yells in his booming voice. “hey-oh!” i reply. i take a seat next to doughboy, who shows me how to stitch purses properly—the most important task if you want them to “look right.” “are those real?” he asks, pointing at the sunglasses i forgot were still on my face. doughboy speaks with the wit and in the cackling cadence of a standup comedian, so i am always waiting for the punch line, since usually i am it. “yeah, they are prescription.” “let me see.” he brings them delicately up to his nose, staring down the tiny hinges, slowly moving the earpieces back and forth, back and forth, as if holding a magnificent emerald. “see, you can spot fake ray-bans by looking at the hinges. they feel like they will break easily and they sit loose on the nose and ears. these are nice. solid. lemme show you the differences.” the door dings as i follow outside—grrswoooosh—he opens the minivan’s sliding door and invites me to stick my head in as he sits on the middle row. “now, look here, this is a case of ray-bans that look like yours, the wayfarers.” he opens a pair and then hands them to me. “this one over here is full of aviators. the next time you want to buy a pair, just let me know and i’ll hook you up.” “thanks, man.” he shows me his collection of purses, wallets, sunglasses, and even a line of men’s denim. doughboy lost his factory job eighteen months earlier—one he had worked since his release from prison more than ten years before. he landed a good job, he said, because his brother was a respected preacher in town and vouched for him. since losing the factory job, however, he has sold various items out of his van and, according to him, has “not missed a beat.” that is to say, he makes enough money to take care of his family and keep extra bread in his pocket—he is not called doughboy for nothing. he swooshes the door closed and we join shakes under the awning, now sitting in his usual folding chair. “did he fit you into a new pair of jeans?” shakes asks, laughing and clapping hands with doughboy—they regularly make fun of my clothing. “he’s not the only one who sells out of his car, though.” “wait, what?” a smile cracks across shakes’s face. he jams the newport between his lips and walks to his car, only a few feet away. i follow. he pops open the large trunk of his cadillac to reveal woven baskets, sheets of cellophane, spools of thick red ribbon, and boxes filled with various items i cannot discern. his trunk looks like a bargain bin in a craft store. “what the hell is all of this?” “man, you know how dudes always wait until the last minute to buy gifts for valentine’s?” he was too excited to let me answer. “well, every year, a few weeks ahead of the day, i buy all of this to make gift baskets so i can drive down to the hood and sell them the day before. usually i sell out within an hour or so.” “yo!” we look across the street to see big tim, shakes’s son, yelling with an arm raised. “y’all wanna come over and watch highlights?” big tim has a large television in his shop continually on espn. “we will come over later. i saw the [76ers] game last night,” shakes answers. big tim stamps his cigarette and disappears inside the barber shop. * * * this scene crystallizes part of what the spot breaks open amid cliptown’s seemingly unending grind of confinement. shakes and doughboy each managed to avoid prison for more than ten years after release, which, according to the department of justice, puts them in rarified company. in fact, among the regulars i got to know who frequent the store, five were formerly incarcerated and none of them had been reincarcerated. this alone is staggering and, to be clear, would have been made invisible by studies of carcerality that bypass life in the surround. tracing these regimes locally, however, refuses to give confinement the final word. land ownership remains firmly in possession of white men, and the spot’s building is no exception. shakes assumed sole responsibility for paying the monthly rent and covering the utility bills, and he attended to the cleanliness and orderliness of the store with extreme diligence. his responsibility for keeping up with the bills and maintaining the space, however, did not stem from an attitude or ethic rooted in private possession. on the contrary, a minimum of five different people had been encouraged to launch their business from the spot. in addition to shakes’s enterprises, doughboy often stitched up his inventory in the main room, carlos did alterations (men’s and women’s) out of the back storage room, saul sold bottles of cologne on the bottom shelf of the old display case, and rita sold handmade goods on the middle shelf. none of them contributed to shakes’s rent or cleaning responsibilities. imagine walking into mcdonald’s to find burger king employees freely slicing pickles in the dining room. building the spot as an open space for multiple business ventures that did not contribute to its many costs formed part of a wider rhythm of collectivity that shakes attentively cultivated. throughout my time conducting research, residents of all kinds expressed sorrow over the collapse of a once bustling and vibrant downtown, where shopkeepers knew one another and their customers, and where families could meander on the weekends. it was the most common refrain i heard during my research, irrespective of race, age, or class. for some residents, the spot has resurrected a downtown microculture thick with those lost vibes. on any given day, there could be as many as ten people bullshitting outside, around and beneath the awning, and a few more standing across the street at big tim’s barbershop. a large group on the sidewalk would draw further participation from passersby, as drivers stopped to yell “hello” or even throw the car in park, in the middle of the street, to stand up and lean on the roof, engaging in a more extended discussion of family and friends. as the baby boomer regime has expanded and intensified cliptown’s numerous technologies of confinement, shakes has carved out a small, alternative space to which people can retreat from the constant capture of confinement technologies at any point of the working day. the space of retreat is exactly what enables a reorientation of the racialization (thus criminalization) intended to dominate so many residents in cliptown. most of the people who frequent the store, whether formerly incarcerated or not, are black men between the ages of thirty-five and sixty-five, with a handful of white and latinx men, and an even smaller handful of black women regularly joining. this collectively oriented space gives people temporary relief to take a breath from the grind, encouraging them to stretch out and simply be while socializing with others. these moments of expansive sociality allow for life and life possibilities in the now. not tomorrow. not ten years and two hundred meetings with a parole officer from tomorrow. now. the permanent felony charges that attach to and follow formerly incarcerated people continually restrict their current and future capacities for participation in formal social, economic, and political systems. at the spot, however, that same carceral record acts as a connective tissue that draws people into horizontal relation with one another. for people who have done time confined in prison, who have sat in a cell waiting for a time to come, for a time that never comes, for a time that knows you will be back soon, opening space to participate in the everyday regularities of life—talking, laughing, lamenting, loving, disagreeing, sharing stories and meals, standing on the sidewalk in a business district—should not be overlooked. but the spot does not simply open an alternative space for people with carceral records to commune; it invites people to join in learning and helping to sound out daily rhythms that undermine the confining totality of prisons. when people enter into these rhythms pulsing from the spot, a kind of pause manifests to the grind of cliptown’s confinement machine. this provides potential for what avery f. gordon (2017, 49) calls “the practice of freedom,” that is, the development of “a practice for being unavailable for [confinement’s] servitude.” a primary phase of each of the regimes is the making available of racialized (and criminalized) labor in service of the ruling class. in the baby boomer regime, there are at least two points when this happens: first, when a person is confined in a prison cell and, second, when a person is released and must join a work program for societal “reentry.” many people wind up in a work program as a condition of their parole or because they recognize how limited other options will be for so-called licit work. the spot offers a space outside either trying to find work alone or fully submitting oneself to exploitative surveillance-based reentry programs. like a blur to the side, it constitutes an alternative space in which one can learn how to live into freedom with others who also continue to face social, economic, and political discrimination.20 the learning and the collective working are themselves practices aimed at making oneself unavailable for servitude. for example, rita took advantage of the free space to sell her handmade goods while taking night courses on web design at the community college. she landed two web design jobs near the end of my research. others who spend time in the spot continue selling so-called illicit items, which, at times, becomes a point of fierce debate, since most now view it as bad for the community, though not a reason for exclusion from the group. the space itself enables the possibility of this kind of real-time learning, be it through education and job training or the kind of insight generated from conversations that revolve around fundamental disagreements rooted in experiences with confinement. in the move toward making oneself unavailable for exploitative labor capture, the dependency on the ruling class decreases. shakes and doughboy answer to no one in their businesses. they do not serve a boss who can fire them, and no one is handing the outcome of their work over to an owner. they do not ask anyone’s permission to offer a discount, smoke a cigarette, use the restroom, leave early, stay late, or idle outside on especially sunny days when the conversation is lively. it is true that they sell goods in a market, as small business owners do, but it is also true that they engage in ways that stabilize their activities and thus reorient capital in real time by keeping money circulating locally, valuing collaboration and relationships over competition and profit, and protecting people who are targets for confinement. at the spot, the hierarchical structure of labor has been horizontalized via the connective tissue of the felony charge as work is refashioned into an activity that can both meet one’s needs and serve one’s community. * * * i need you and you need me. until we get to that, we will never get better. you know? and i don’t always feel like fighting. sometimes i wanna save the world. sometimes i just wanna watch power. —henrietta washington, public defense attorney, shakes’s cousin doughboy gathers his purses to leave. shakes returns from a lunch run with fried fish and four pieces of white bread crammed into a throwaway container. we place it on the stool between us and share a meal. he is still frustrated. the day before, i sat in the store while a millennial white man from a large nonprofit explained the requirements for a person with a felony charge to receive a small business loan, partially subsidized by the federal government, worth about $50,000. the catch was the sizeable down payment: $7,000. the millennial from the nonprofit gushed with excitement at his offer. “if i had $7,000, i wouldn’t need the loan in the first place!” shakes told him, ushering him out the door to the ding of the bell. not once did i meet a formerly incarcerated person who received a loan from this nonprofit. these are certainly the kinds of charades that litter cliptown, seeming only to serve the ones peddling and never the ones allegedly receiving. i felt angry. i wanted to wait in the parking lot so i could scream at the director, who would undoubtedly be stepping into a luxury vehicle around 4:00 p.m. to drive to a suburban home, which was most certainly located in another town. but today, shakes’s small gift of fish and bread chokes back my anger, redirecting my attention to the multiple flourishing bonds of camaraderie. shakes rejects the nonprofit/government loan—a move that would put him under greater surveillance. the door dings. “heyyy!” henrietta almost screams as she bursts in. “i have some amazing news!” henrietta had met with the person who murdered her brother twenty years earlier. he had recently been released, and they both felt it was important to meet up and talk. she had not fully forgiven him, and talked honestly with him about that, but they discussed the kinds of carceral conditions in cliptown that intensify the likelihood of gun violence and premature black death. they began outlining plans to cofound a nonprofit aimed at promoting spaces where reconciliation could happen. they were determined that confinement would not speak the final words of their relationship. we drag three plastic chairs outside, beneath the awning, so shakes and i can smoke. a light, cold rain drizzles, and we keep our chairs close to one another. “i cannot believe you are starting a reconciliation program with the person who murdered your brother. i’ve never heard of that,” i said to henrietta. “you’re like jesus or something.” “look, i’ve seen too much violence already in my life. too many people who think prisons are an answer, or their likely destination, or a good industry for this town. as long as we keep reproducing the same kind of hatefulness and judgment that the prison system does, things will never change around here.” “see, trying to change that system, huh?” shakes approves. “i see myself politically as more x than mlk, but as a defense attorney, i do work from within the system, so i’m just trying to do what i can to protect vulnerable people and to work with others to help tear down this racist state machine.” “i cannot wait to see what comes from this,” i comment. shakes nudges me and hands me his phone, displaying a picture of a smiling child with braids on the screen. “that’s my little girl, right there,” shakes smiles widely. “really? wait, i didn’t know you had a daughter so young!” i reply. i hand the phone to henrietta. “not my biological daughter, man.” he takes his phone back and stares tenderly before pocketing it. “her parents are in a little trouble and had to relocate to another state in a hurry, so she’s been staying with her grandma, who is, you know, she’s . . . like . . . my girlfriend.” i have never seen shakes embarrassed, and i chuckle. “you have a girlfriend?” i ask, elbowing him. “but really, in all seriousness, it’s amazing that you’re taking care of your ‘adopted’ granddaughter like that.” “taking care of her?” shakes replies, exhaling smoke into the rainy air. “man, i need her just as much as she needs me.” “you know that’s right,” henrietta replies. the surround a primary feature of the spot is opening space for work without labor. the current regime is designed to repeatedly isolate and funnel residents into prisons, and shakes has built a cooperative space where people are finding multiple ways to support themselves while building and deepening relationships with one another. by using felony charges and experiences with prisons and policing as connective tissue, the hierarchical labor structure does not translate into domination, as it does when corporate chains or universities use felony charges to discriminate against racialized and poor people. instead, felony charges at the spot quietly horizontalize the hierarchical labor structure in ways that expand sociality and possibility. it is not noisy in the streets and explicitly antagonistic to the confinement technologies, like fred and ken’s approach, which has long-term goals aimed at changing the ruling class and influencing policy. but neither is the spot a place where people hash out the mechanics of cliptown’s confinement technologies on their way toward a collective determination that exercises refusal (simpson 2016; sojoyner 2017). for the cultural rhythms pulsing from the spot, reform is too politically abstracted and refusal too esoteric and intentional. it is more accurate to think of the efforts as recuperative, where tools and technologies of domination such as felony charges are scrambled and remade for the purposes of commonality and care (cabral 1973; robinson 2000). these are not policy demands for changing police practices or reforming prison warehousing, because the people at the spot already understand that these institutions and technologies function as they are designed to function. instead, they sift through the many tools, technologies, and trash of confinement to fashion new possibilities for building collective life that not only enables each person to live but also expands the reach of communal life. this is why i conclude with henrietta’s reconciling to the person who killed her brother twenty years earlier, and with shakes’s quiet care of a child abandoned by parents with few other options. the little girl left behind will continue to live a highly contingent life, as an easy target for cliptown’s numerous confinement technologies.21 the mammoth organizational efforts undertaken by fred and ken over the past ten years, for example, are unlikely to mitigate something like the targeting of a black child in foster care. but because shakes has committed to sounding out new rhythms from within the surround, he manages to disrupt the technologies in a more immediate and complex way: in the joy of a little girl whose needs are being met by two people who love her and are able to give her attention and care, shakes finds that he too is experiencing the profound embrace of care amid the technologies of confinement. life at the spot, in the surround, does not promise that cliptown’s current confinement technologies will be abolished or that the regime itself will be effectively changed. it offers only a murmur, what harney and moten (2013, 18) call “the new thing, always calling for itself,” which is the whisper of possibilities that a few more people can be (already have been!) free and unavailable for confinement. it is a future that bubbles in the present, nurtured and constructed by a handful of people committed to seeing and sounding out something other than the carceral beat of confinement. abstract this article challenges the idea that the u.s. prison boom is a federally driven fix. by assembling a two-hundred-year regional history of cliptown, new jersey—a rural town with five prisons and three police departments—the article indicates that prisons appear not as an external fix but as the most recent technological iteration of a homegrown system that has always functioned to capture labor through white supremacist domination. locally historicizing the evolution of this dominating system, however, refuses to concede the final word to prisons and earlier confinement technologies, concluding, instead, in an alternative space that exceeds the capture of confinement, where formerly incarcerated people collaborate to expand freedoms and to practice being unavailable for confinement’s servitude. [prisons; policing; racial regimes; racial capitalism; white supremacy; domination; alternative spaces; labor] notes acknowledgments i thank my friends and collaborators in south jersey, who took me in and cared for me as if i was your own. i hope this small work somehow channels the beauty of your lives and labors, and honors the expansive worlds you create amid a world built to confine. this article is the outcome of the reads, conversations, and challenges of my friends and colleagues, especially quincy amoah, bridget purcell, melissa burch, orisanmi burton, tyler davis, nyle fort, neil gong, onur gunay, matthew harris, brandon hunter, mitchell newberry, derecka purnell, mubbashir rizvi, and benjamin fogarty-valenzuela. a number of senior colleagues stood by as friends, collaborators, mentors, and everything in between, and have been instrumental in shaping these ideas, especially avery gordon, carol greenhouse, stefano harney, fred moten, imani perry, laurence ralph, and mark lewis taylor. the institutional support of the society of fellows, especially the lunch talk crew, and the department of afroamerican & african studies at university of michigan has been invaluable, and funding from the wenner-gren foundation and the charlotte w. newcombe foundation made the research and writing possible. finally, let me thank cultural anthropology for finding truly incredible reviewers and for matching me up with heather paxson, whose editorial eye and striking suggestions made this essay remarkably better. 1. isp is “[a]n intermediate form of punishment which permits carefully selected state-prison sentenced offenders to serve the remainder of their sentences in the community rather than in prison. isp is a ‘prison without walls.’ [it is] a highly structured and rigorous form of community supervision which involves extensive client contact, surveillance, a restrictive curfew and urine monitoring (two to three times per week) for alcohol and drugs, including marijuana. [it is] a supervision program which mandates full-time employment, community service, maintenance of a budget and diary, payment of all court ordered financial obligations, payment toward child support, and the cost of the program.” for more detail, see new jersey administrative office of the courts (n.d.). 2. although it is unusual in the united states for parents to be incarcerated locally, the high percentage of new jersey prisons located in cliptown make it common. 3. cliptown is my name for a regional area, anonymized to protect the people with whom i conducted ethnographic and archival research for twenty-four months. names of historically significant people and businesses that were or are located in proximity to cliptown are used where relevant. all others are given pseudonyms. 4. this is according to the national institute for justice, an evaluation program within the u.s. department of justice. 5. david harvey (2001) does not focus on prisons, but on capital’s general reliance on the “spatial fix.” 6. here i borrow from clyde woods (2017) to denote the plantation as a total institution and the planter as the head of that institution. 7. again, borrowing from woods (2017), i choose the title to mark agro-manufacture as the total institution. 8. the broad–brush strokes account of seabrook farm’s activities offered here relies on the published account of the south jersey historian charles h. harrison (2003), supplemented by articles from the new york times and by my reading of archival records held at rutgers university community repository, accessed primarily between 2015 and 2017, and most recently consulted on october 28, 2020. 9. i could find no written evidence of this. two people who worked with seabrook during this time shared stories with me. 10. for an in-depth exploration of how distinct circumstances are created for racialized populations through the segmentation of the work process, see “ethnicity and nationhood,” in pathways of power by eric r. wolf (2001). 11. including but not limited to: the comprehensive drug penalties act (h.r. 4901); the money laundering penalties act (h.r. 6031); the antiterrorism act; the federal anti-tampering act; the contract services for drug dependent federal offenders authorization act (h.r. 2173); the pretrial services act (h.r. 5656); the undetectable firearms act (h.r. 4445); the law enforcement officers protection act (h.r. 3132); the career criminals amendments act (h.r. 4885); the armed career criminals act (h.r. 6248); and the firearm owners protection act (h.r. 4332). 12. property records for the county are held in the city clerk’s office on the first floor of the courthouse in bridgeton, new jersey. the records are kept across three systems: an outdated computer system, a primary filing system, and an older filing system. i tracked property sales by beginning with current addresses and following the sales back in time. 13. these jobs require only high school degrees. each pays well into six-figure salaries. some cos brag about making $250,000 per year with overtime. 14. the naacp of new jersey is spearheading the process of shuttering all county jails south of camden to consolidate them into the largest correctional facility in the state. 15. for example, a police officer was fired (not indicted) from the cpd for driving undocumented men to an abandoned factory parking lot, where he robbed them, beat them until they were unconscious, and left them to bleed out. 16. numerous sites exist where these kinds of specious statistics are compiled into lists. this is one list on one online platform that was referenced by people in cliptown: “top 100 most dangerous cities in america,” on https://www.alarms.org/top-100-most-dangerous-cities-in-america/, last accessed october 2, 2020. 17. numerous sites exist that offer similar analyses. for one example, see the “color of justice: racial and ethnic disparity in state prisons” at https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/color-of-justice-racial-and-ethnic-disparity-in-state-prisons/. 18. the average is less than $2 per hour (before taxes) for six to eight hours of work. for more information, see “how much do incarcerated people earn in each state?” on https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/. 19. numerous sites exist that provide a breakdown of prison costs. for one example, see “prison spending in 2015,” vera institute of justice, the price of prisons, https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends/price-of-prisons-2015-state-spending-trends-prison-spending, last accessed on march 19, 2020. 20. this language borrows from fred moten’s (2017) black and blur, especially chapters 15 to 22, to evoke that which is neither assimilated nor antagonistic. it is not intended to be read as “proof” of category of moten’s theorizing. 21. children in foster care are 2.5 times more likely to end up in prison. black children are 2 times more likely to be placed in foster care. and 90 percent of all children moved through five or more different foster care placements will become entangled with the u.s. justice system. for more information, see juvenile law center (2018), “what is the foster care-to-prison pipeline?” references aitken, bertram 1944 correspondence from bertram aitken to c. f. seabrook, may 6, 1944. rucore, rutgers university community repository. new brunswick, n.j. accessed october 20, 2020. https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3mw2k7k. alexander, michelle 2010 the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. new york: new press. bennett, don 2011 “the unfortunate history of the klan in ocean county.” patch, february 15. https://patch.com/new-jersey/tomsriver/the-unfortunate-history-of-the-klan-in-ocean-county. burch, melissa 2019 “captive afterlives in the age of mass conviction.” history and anthropology 30, no. 5: 515–20. 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charles h. 2003 growing a global village: making history at seabrook farms. new york: holmes and meier. harvey, david 2001 “globalization and the ‘spatial fix.’” geographische revue 3, no. 2: 23–30. http://geographische-revue.de/gr2-01.htm. huling, tracy 2002 “building a prison economy in rural america.” in invisible punishment: the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment, edited by marc mauer and meda chesney-lind, 197–213. new york: new press. juvenile law center 2018 “what is the foster care-to-prison pipeline?” juvenile law center (blog), may 26. https://jlc.org/news/what-foster-care-prison-pipeline. marx, karl 1844 “comments on james mill, éléments d’économie politique.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/. moten, fred 2017 black and blur. vol. 1, consent not to be a single being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. murakawa, naomi 2014 the first civil right: how liberals built prison america. new york: oxford university press. new jersey administrative office of the courts n.d. responsive supervision program. trenton, n.j.: new jersey administrative office of the courts. accessed march 9, 2021. www.njcourts.gov/courts/assets/probation/isppresentation.pdf. new york times 1934 “gas balks rioters on jersey farm; 300 strikers battle sheriff’s men with bean poles and rocks—barracks burned.” new york times, july 10. https://www.nytimes.com/1934/07/10/archives/gas-balks-rioters-on-jersey-farm-300-strikers-battle-sheriffs-men.html. norwood, john r. 2007 we are still here! the tribal saga of new jersey’s nanticoke and lenape indians. moorestown, n.j.: native new jersey publications. prison legal news 1997 “new jersey prison guard recruiting for kkk.” prison legal news, may 15. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/1997/may/15/new-jersey-prison-guard-recruiting-for-kkk/. robinson, cedric j. 2000 black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. 2nd ed. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. originally published in 1980. 2007 forgeries of memory and meaning: blacks and the regimes of race in american theater and film before world war ii. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. rodríguez, dylan 2006 forced passages: imprisoned radical intellectuals and the u.s. prison regime. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. simpson, audra 2016 “consent’s revenge.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 3: 326–33. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.02. sojoyner, damien m. 2017 “another life is possible: black fugitivity and enclosed places.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 4: 514–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.04. torrejon, rodrigo 2020 “n.j. corrections officer among group that mocked george floyd’s killing as protestors marched by.” nj.com, june 10. https://www.nj.com/gloucester-county/2020/06/nj-prison-guard-among-group-that-reenacted-george-floyds-killing-as-protesters-marched-by.html. trouillot, michel-rolph 1995 silencing the past: power and the production of history. boston: beacon. western, 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doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.01 suspending nuclearity: ecologics of planting seeds after the nuclear fallout in fukushima, japan cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 707-737, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.05 suspending nuclearity: ecologics of planting seeds after the nuclear fallout in fukushima, japan hiroko kumaki dartmouth college https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7649-3524 in early autumn 2017, under a thick gray cloud, regional farmers, agricultural high school students, and university students, as well as volunteers from across japan gathered in a large field in coastal fukushima to plant rapeseeds. i joined as everyone made a long line along the length of the field. together, we walked across the field with plastic containers full of rapeseeds. as we slowly made our way to the other side, we threw handfuls of seeds on the ground, stepping on them with our rubber boots, and pushing them into the soil. the laughter of high school students could be heard here and there, as the muddy clay soil trapped their boots. birds started flocking behind us, eating up the seeds we had just planted. no one seemed to care. a drone, operated by a young man from the neighborhood, buzzed around, taking pictures and videos of the event. after planting the seeds, we headed to a nearby community center, where the wives of the farmers were waiting. they served their guests warm pork vegetable soup, vegetable tempura, rice balls, and many other regional dishes, using harvests from their fields. as more than one hundred participants took their seats in the large gym, the farmers thanked them and discussed local efforts to begin farming again. chatter filled the gym as participants commented on the regional flavor and enjoyed each other’s company. at the end of the day, the farmers sent everyone home with a souvenir—a bottle of salad dressing made with canola oil from rapeseed harvested from their fields the previous year. figure 1. planting rapeseeds in the former evacuation zone of fukushima. photo by hiroko kumaki. those familiar with japan might see this as another experiential learning event popular among families, schoolchildren, tourists, and volunteers (claus 2020; lam 2020). yet what made this event distinct was that it took place in an area once designated a mandatory evacuation zone after the tokyo electric power company’s fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011. as something taking place in what might be easily identified as a “nuclear” site, this event stood in stark contrast to activities emerging elsewhere in response to the nuclear accident. during eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 and 2018, i observed increasingly divergent responses to the nuclear fallout emerging among different actors and communities in japan as they sought to ensure their health and well-being. some have evacuated afar and procured food from other parts of japan, while others have returned to the former evacuation zones and actively circulated local produce. among those who stayed or returned, some have sent their children to less radioactive environments on vacations, while others have organized activities to provide children with hands-on experience with their local ecologies. the experience of environmental exposure has often been discussed with concerns for the management of biological health risks caused by toxic substances released into the environment. in fukushima, the management of radiation and its health risks have stood at the center of public and academic concerns after the nuclear fallout. evacuation, food safety, radiation monitoring, citizen radiation labs, thyroid cancer screening, decontamination, nuclear waste management, and health-recuperation projects have constituted the main sites through which the experience of the nuclear fallout and its health risks have been articulated and debated (loh and amir 2019; morimoto 2019; morita, blok, and kimura 2013; polleri 2019; sternsdorff-cisterna 2018). in doing so, citizens, governments, and researchers have made the fallout and its effects visible and addressable as a “nuclear” issue, shaping the “nuclearity” of fukushima (hecht 2012). however, some people, like the farmers discussed above, returned to their original communities in the former evacuation zone and actively produced and exchanged produce. these farmers had lost their land, homes, communities, and often their family members in the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident. being able to plant seeds and share harvests from their land—and to do so as a community—were activities central to the creation of a meaningful life after the nuclear accident. this article presents an ethnographic analysis of what i tentatively call fukushima as ecologics, exemplified in the act of planting seeds in the former evacuation zones. i discuss this in relation to fukushima as nuclearity, through examples of decontamination projects by the government and health-recuperation projects by parents and ngos. both approaches are concerned with the well-being of the affected people and communities. yet while nuclearity takes technoscientific and medical discussions of radiation and its biological health risks as main points of intervention, ecologics critically engages the socioecological arrangements that have been put in place through the nuclear fallout and ensuing recovery projects. i offer “ecologics” as an analytic lens to bring to attention the ways in which the material, social, and moral ecologies have been negotiated and reorganized after the nuclear accident. anthropologists have critiqued discourses of conservation, development, and environmental protection often grounded in paternalistic assumptions about the physical environment as independent and separable from the social. instead, they have argued that the physical environment and the meanings associated with it emerge through intimately situated and shifting everyday interactions between human and non-human life (claus 2020; hirose 2011; ogden 2011). in so doing, they have called our attention to the material, social, and moral ecologies that are “in translation,” constantly shaping one another as well as organizing society and its well-being (satsuka 2015). ecologics shed light on the implicit and explicit ways of knowing and acting that shape socioecological relationships in projects of environmental remediation, economic recovery, and everyday life. cymene howe (2019, 2) has used ecologics as an analytic to understand the “other than human relations” that inflect energy politics, often analyzed solely in human terms. my intention here is different. i use ecologics to elucidate the socioecological arrangements that have shaped the lived experiences of the nuclear fallout, often discussed in biopolitical and political economic terms through an emphasis on nuclearity. i argue that life after the nuclear accident, particularly the experience of living with toxicity, cannot be understood without attention to the situated socioecological dynamics operating in the shadows of biomedical and market-based logics of well-being and recovery. by moving beyond nuclearity and tentatively centering ecologics in its stead, i show that discourses and policies around nuclearity have privileged certain socioecological arrangements, particularly those that assume the separability of people and communities from their land in the face of radioactive contamination. by considering radiation as their locus of intervention, they have focused on biopolitical concerns for toxic exposure and political economic concerns for environmental remediation. the resulting emphasis on the removal of people and communities from their land or the replacement of their socioecological environments have made secondary considerations of the deep embeddedness of people’s lives within and through lived ecologies. ecologics challenges us to foreground these socioecological relationships to understand how life is constituted and well-being negotiated in the context of environmental exposure. yet nuclearity and ecologics are by no means mutually exclusive. they overlap, interact, and are transformed by actors across time and space. those in the former evacuation zone negotiated both nuclearity and ecologics, shaping “partial boundaries” in ways that reflect their desire to open rather than close the possibility of socioecological relationships (olson 2018). in doing so, they did not simply accept governmental claims of safety, nor did they celebrate toxic entanglements. instead, they challenged assumptions about fukushima that focused on radiation and its biological and economic risks. this focus, they argued, came at the expense of people, soil, and land that were considered readily removable and replaceable to contain the effects of fallout and to pursue large-scale, capital-intensive redevelopment projects. they resisted the imposition of a market logic of containment and equivalence on their lives that increasingly alienated them from their place of living and relationships of care and mutual support. suspending nuclearity early in my fieldwork in the former evacuation zone, i began to reconsider the category of nuclearity. my research took place when mandatory evacuation orders were being lifted in the towns and villages near the nuclear power plant. there was a constant influx of journalists, television crews, and researchers who came to investigate life in the former evacuation zones. many returnees faced interrogation from visitors who asked them about radiation and their return. these visitors often assumed radioactive contamination had rendered these places unlivable. it was not uncommon for returnees to refuse to engage with visitors’ questions or to acknowledge their gaze. for example, in summer 2017, university professors from tokyo specializing in public health visited a town that had been opened a year earlier. around 20 percent of the residents had returned to the town. at a meeting with one of the returnees, the professors asked, “with radioactive waste piled up and without people coming back, is it possible to live here?” the resident kept an expressionless face and stated flatly, “you ask whether we could live here, but we live here.” after the nuclear accident, those who lived in fukushima prefecture suddenly found themselves living in a “nuclear” site. they had to orient themselves not only to radiation in their living environment but also to a gaze that could see their lives as nothing but nuclear. what does it mean to take this refusal of the external gaze seriously? what can we learn from the claim that “we live here,” without considering residents to be uninformed or in denial? nuclear sites enact what joseph masco (2004) has called “mutant ecologies.” the framing, narration, and management of exposure and its effects, as well as the temporal and spatial scales employed, are open-ended and indeterminate. examining the history of uranium mining in africa, gabriele hecht (2009, 2012) has argued that “nuclearity,” or the status given to certain things and places as “being nuclear,” is not universal, singular, or stable. instead, nuclearity is shaped, unshaped, and reshaped unevenly across actors, time, and space. governments, industries, and citizens all have high stakes in the ways nuclearity is shaped, affecting the ways damage from the fallout can be made visible and responsibility can be allocated. nuclearity has proven a useful analytical concept to illuminate the epistemic structures and political practices shaping the uneven ways of power distribution to differentially confer the status of “being nuclear” across bodies, places, and things. government, industry, and military science have rendered radiation, an already invisible and intangible substance, “twice invisible” by controlling whose knowledge counted and to evade responsibility (kuchinskaya 2014). in turn, the challenge for citizens and scholars has been to reveal the epistemic and political forces that limit the ways in which nuclearity could be shaped and articulated, making public exposure visible and actionable (brown 2019; hecht 2012; petryna 2002). studies of the nuclear accident in fukushima show that nuclearity in japan has been shaped mainly through what hecht (2012) has called technological and medical nuclearity. international institutions, the government, and health practitioners have shaped the nuclearity of fukushima through technoscientific and medical debates on how to detect radiation and assess the potential health effects caused by radiation exposure (fmu 2013; fukushima prefecture 2022a; icrp 2020; ministry of environment 2017a, 2017b). in response, parents, citizen scientists, and advocates have learned the science of radiation, mobilized technologies to detect radiation, and worked with experts to interpret their findings. they have created alternative data on exposure in their bodies, food, and environment to address their concerns for potential health effects (a. kimura 2016; morita, blok, and kimura 2013; polleri 2019; sternsdorff-cisterna 2018). these practices, and the scholarship investigating them, have created a field of intervention around technical and medical concerns for nuclearity. in doing so, they have foregrounded the uneven consequences of the nuclear fallout and the allocation of political responsibility. nevertheless, by highlighting technological and medical nuclearity, they have narrowed the scope of engagement, precluding considerations not only of other registers of nuclearity but also other ways in which life has been affected and negotiated in the ongoing aftermath of the fallout. this has naturalized discussions of the nuclear accident around technoscientific and medical understandings of radiation and its biological health risks, making the move to decenter nuclearity seem an unintuitive and unethical response. the technoscientific and medical articulation of radiation and its health effects, however, rests on a double bind. on the one hand, it can prove a powerful tool to illuminate and manage how radiation affects bodies and environments. on the other hand, it can become the condition of possibility for those very risks, by delimiting the ways in which exposure can be understood, experienced, and addressed. michelle murphy (2017) has noted the “epistemic habit” of technoscience, which considers chemical relations at the molecular level and focuses on the damage that chemicals incur on individualized biological bodies. by isolating chemicals and biological bodies as sites of interaction and effect, murphy argues that technoscience has externalized the extensive violent relationalities that chemicals enact, becoming tools of industrialism, settler colonialism, and other forms of social injustices. scholars and citizens are therefore challenged to “work with and against” technoscience to elucidate what has been externalized through such epistemic practices (murphy 2017, 495). to move beyond technoscientific engagement with the consequences of the nuclear fallout, those in the former evacuation zone have organized around jimoto-gaku (yoshimoto 1995, 2008). similar to the move to decolonize research, jimoto-gaku proposes the “study of one’s hometown” in one’s own terms. like chiiki-gaku, or “regional studies,” it is a practice that values local engagement and perspective. chiiki-gaku, however, is often carried out academically to complicate the understanding of modern life that has become heavily articulated in terms economic activities by citizens of a nation. jimoto-gaku, on the other hand, is carried out by community members as an alternative to academic studies, to achieve a renewed understanding of their life in the community, one that may have been overlooked by outsiders and taken for granted by community members. jimoto-gaku is grounded in the ontological differences between those who form part of a specific community and those who do not, who present divergent epistemological practices. a salient discourse that accompanies jimoto-gaku is the difference between “people of the soil” and “people of the wind,” or locals whose lives are rooted in the specific place and outsiders who have a more fluid relationship with the place (watsuji 1979; tamai 1992). jimoto-gaku acknowledges divergent ways in which knowledge is produced by these actors by virtue of their ways of being in the world—with one rooted in the soil and the other engaging from a distance. the approach originated in minamata, the site of industrial methylmercury poisoning in kumamoto, japan, where traditional research carried out by outside scholars redefined the community through its damage, exposure, and deficiency. in response, community members practiced jimoto-gaku to ask what their community already has and to take ownership of their own understanding of the community. jimoto-gaku can be practiced by both people of the soil and people of the wind, whose distinctions are often not easily demarcated. yet importantly, jimoto-gaku places people of the soil as its subject of research. the perspectives of the people of the wind prove valuable in so far as their engagements enable people of the soil to gain a renewed understanding of their own community and the practices they had taken for granted. jimoto-gaku, therefore, combines the old and new, the inside and outside, as well as the soil and the wind in ways that ultimately bring different epistemological fields together to generate new ideas, values, and relationships (yoshimoto 2008). jimoto-gaku in fukushima became an epistemic tool and a moral support for community members as they sought relationships and ideas that allowed them to envision a life worth living in the aftermath of exposure. resembling the proposal by eve tuck (2009) to “suspend damage” in social science research, the move toward jimoto-gaku in fukushima shows that what is at stake in residents’ unease to engage with nuclearity is their unease with those who externalize their lived experiences and their socioecological well-being as damaged and impossible. my interlocutors’ emphasis on ecologics suggests that for them, the question is not how damaged their biology or land is, how to make that damage visible, and how to contain it. instead, it mainly concerns how to reorganize their socioecological relationships to live well in a world that no longer provides a promise of purity, separation, or containment, and worse, assumes their exposure (see cho 2020; fisch 2022; s. kimura 2016; morimoto 2022). the claim “we live here” states that life in the former evacuation zones remains meaningful in its own right, regardless of the presence or absence of radiation. practicing jimoto-gaku as a scholar of the wind, i have foregrounded the concept of ecologics in my analyses to examine health and well-being beyond radiation-body relations, and to address how life has been made meaningful and well-being has been articulated in the shadows of debates on technological and medical nuclearity. what follows is therefore not a discussion of whether fukushima constitutes a “nuclear” site; it is not a consideration of how or to what extent radiation and its health effects have been made visible or invisible through divergent objectives and practices. rather, through the lens of ecologics, i ask how we might work with and against nuclearity to understand the experience of people and communities affected by nuclear fallouts and environmental toxicity more broadly. if nuclearity constitutes a technopolitical category that allows us to see historical, technological, and political economic structures in place that unevenly distribute power and the status of being nuclear, “ecologics” names a sociocultural category to elucidate socioecological implications of epistemological, political economic, and everyday practices often relegated to the realm of the technobiological or remaining unaddressed. i show that through jimoto-gaku, and the resulting emphasis on ecologics, my collaborators negotiated boundaries—not only against radiation and its harm but also against larger projects that affected their social and ecological well-being. through a form of disaster capitalism historically observed in modern japan, governmental and other projects around nuclearity have taken the disaster as an opportunity for redevelopment, expanding large-scale public projects in the name of reconstruction and recovery (ikeda 2014; klein 2008). attention to ecologics shows that these projects have increasingly reorganized socioecological relationships in ways that advance the state’s political and economic goals while bringing residents even closer to environments of exposure. while often organized in opposition to these projects, advocacy work around nuclearity had a similar effect of disregarding place-based relationalities important for the well-being of certain communities. in response, residents in the former evacuation zone enacted practices that evaded capture by forces that fragmented relationships of mutual support grounded in their land, memories, and communities. fukushima as ecologics: planting seeds and sharing food in the wake of the nuclear accident, as the news of radioactive contamination spread, one of the farmers from the mandatory evacuation zone recalled shedding tears for days, thinking he would never be able to grow crops again on his land. he thought everything was over for him and his community. for residents living near the nuclear power plant, many of whom farmed and fished, not being able to cultivate and harvest their land, rivers, and sea meant something more than losing their livelihoods. it meant the loss of a place-based social and ecological lifeworld nurtured through relationalities with their living environment. planting seeds on their land, rendered radioactive by the nuclear accident, has proven a way for those returning to the former evacuation zone to begin reestablishing their communities and their sense of security through their relationships to the land and to one another. these relationships were not only arranged in ways at once familiar to them but also in ways that responded to the rapidly changing socioecological environment following the nuclear fallout and its recovery projects. understanding this dynamic requires a discussion of the centrality of place-based relationalities in the former evacuation zone, exemplified in the practice of cultivating and sharing food to build relationships of trust and care in the communities. osusowake is a practice of sharing gifts and bounties from the land as a way of cultivating social relationships. before the nuclear accident, it was customary for community members to distribute, outside the market economy, seasonal fruits, vegetables, wild plants, wild animals, freshwater fish, and seafood harvested from their region to their families and neighbors. such reciprocal food exchange has historically been a common practice in rural japan. many households, regardless of their main occupation, would grow vegetables, rice, and fruits; gather mushrooms and wild plants; catch wild animals and fish; as well as cook not only for themselves but also for the purpose of osusowake (embree 1939; tanaka 2017; tsing 2015). the food exchange, which obligated reciprocation, defined who formed part of the community and provided a network of mutual support for community members. for example, koyama-san, a returnee to the former evacuation zone, measured the level of acceptance she earned from the community through the osusowake that her neighbors brought for her. on return to her town, she opened a communal gathering space near the train station. yet since she did not hail from that particular district of the town, initially, no one came by. she recalled that it took three months for her neighbors to bring her osusowake. recently, she moved the gathering space to another part of the same district. since she had already established her presence in the district, it only took her neighbors one month to respond. after a year, her gathering space always had boxes of fruits and vegetables brought to her by her neighbors. koyama-san would divide them up and give them out to community members and visitors, extending the network of people who were part of the exchange. unlike the townspeople, visitors would not be able to reciprocate immediately, if at all. however, koyama-san hoped that the act of sharing might lead to ongoing relationships, in which the visitors would frequent the area and contribute something to the community in the future. since osusowake required ongoing commitment and openness, we can read its initiation by community members as a gesture signaling a willingness to establish reciprocal relationships of trust and care and, thus, relationships of commitment to one another’s well-being. once the chain of exchange began, community members put significant effort into maintaining these relationships. while one household could only carry out osusowake to a limited number of other households in the community, with the secondary and tertiary distribution of food, the network of exchange extended, creating a community held together by a sense of mutual belonging and responsibility. in the wake of disasters, for example, neighbors would visit one another to make sure everyone was safe and to deliver food and water to those in need. failure to meet such expectations or to reciprocate could lead to a sense of disparity and even animosity (see uchio 2013). the distribution of foodstuffs also allowed for a shared experience of seasonal foods and an exchange of information about community activities. when people visited their neighbors to give out osusowake, they would make small talk at the door or would be invited into the house for tea. during the chat, they discussed how they and others in the town were doing, expecting the information to be distributed further through networks of osusowake. this was one way in which community members made sure everyone was doing well and responded when something went wrong (see nozawa 2015; danely 2019). becoming part of the community of osusowake therefore meant becoming part of the shared experience of flavors and rumors, as well as the network of support, all engendered by the residents’ relationship to their land and its harvest. figure 2. vegetables brought by neighbors as osusowake left at the door. photo by hiroko kumaki. such place-based intimacy and relationships of trust and care collapsed in the wake of the nuclear accident. evacuation physically removed community members from their land, and from one another, leaving unfulfilled obligations. the radioactive contamination of their land made it difficult to produce and acquire food considered safe for consumption. moreover, governmental decontamination projects, discussed later in this article, scraped fertile topsoil from fields and gardens, making them unsuitable for food cultivation. returning to their communities and planting seeds, and thus fostering the potential for osusowake, constituted a major step for community members that showed their strong desire to reestablish relationships uprooted in the nuclear accident. in this context, radiation came to matter for community members mainly in their efforts to reestablish relationships with their land and with one another. as part of that effort, planting rapeseeds came to play a unique role in what the farmers called an “agricultural land revival project”—a project that showed the farmers’ openness to experiment with their exposed environment. after the nuclear accident in fukushima, the farmers co-operated with an ngo from western japan that had worked in ukraine after the chernobyl accident. in ukraine, the ngo had partnered with a local university to revive abandoned agricultural land in the zones of exclusion. they carried out experiments and found that rape flowers can clean the soil by absorbing radiation. radioactive cesium and strontium, both of which were dispersed into the environment after the nuclear accidents in chernobyl and fukushima, have similar structures to potassium and calcium, which plants use as nutrients. rape flowers were more likely than other plants to mistakenly absorb radioactive particles from the soil as nutrients and fix them into their bodies. in the process, the plants cleansed the soil of radiation. the propensity of rape flowers to absorb radioactive particles from the soil allowed decontamination to take place without having to scrape off the fertile topsoil or introduce chemicals into it. more important for the farmers, the ngo’s research showed that rapeseeds could be used to make canola oil that was free of radiation. according to the ngo, rape flowers only absorbed radioactive particles that had dissolved in water. since water and oil did not mix, radiation was not detected in the resulting canola oil. the farmers worked with the ngo to plant rape flowers to reduce radioactive particles in the soil and to produce canola oil from the seeds. in ukraine, the resulting canola oil has been used as biodiesel fuel. in fukushima, however, given the history of canola oil production and consumption in the region, the canola oil has been used as edible produce. the farmers collaborated with agricultural high school students in the community, who were at the rapeseed planting event, to craft recipes for salad dressing and mayonnaise using the canola oil. these products can now be found in grocery stores and roadside stations in coastal fukushima (kosakai, ishii, and hayashi 2017). in not giving up their land, the farmers were not only protecting the potential of the land to produce something edible and marketable but also the potential for various forms of relationship based on their land. for example, just for the one-day rapeseed planting event, more than one hundred people gathered from across the community and country. for the farmers, the sharing of labor, food, and souvenir, within and beyond their immediate networks, denoted the promise that the land still held, despite multiple forces that have worked against it. it was a way for them to reshape their communities, with new and old relations, in ways that made their lives, land, and food still worthy of engagement. residents gradually cultivated vegetables, rice, and fruits, slowly re-establishing and shaping the food exchange networks and relationships of trust and care. through such practices communities re-emerged in the former evacuation zones, giving them a sense of belonging and security. as i later describe, community members still acknowledged and addressed concerns for nuclearity imbricated in these exchanges. for instance, the farmers engaged in rape flower cultivation took various steps to ensure that their products remained free of radiation. rapeseeds harvested in the summer were carried directly to a citizen radiation lab run by one of the community members. there, farmers and volunteers meticulously removed any dust or pebbles mixed into the bucket of seeds, all by hand, before testing them for radiation. the seeds were then processed into oil and tested again for radiation, despite previous evidence that radiation was not detected from the final product. such measures to manage radiation proved important for the farmers, as they enabled the food cultivation and harvests so central to creating communal relationships that kept residents safe and well. the farmers’ ecologics, which acknowledged their land as valuable and resourceful for their well-being despite radioactive contamination, resonates with what indigenous scholars erin marie konsmo and karyn recollet (2018) have described as “meeting the land(s) where they are at.” in the face of the environmental destruction of their land, rather than insist on a “return” to an untouched state, konsmo and recollet propose “harm reduction” as a process of enacting mutual healing of various forms of life harmed by settler colonialism (konsmo and recollet 2018, 241). harm reduction acknowledges life beyond pollution and survival by making kin, through harvesting and bringing water to harmed life. in doing so, it unsettles the settler-colonial logic of purity and ableism that have stigmatized indigenous relationships with harmed life as less than ideal (konsmo and recollet 2018). the ethnographic context i discuss here may differ in the political stakes engendered in konsmo and recollet’s argument (akasaka, yamauchi, and oguma 2011; kainuma 2011; kawanishi 2016). yet the ecologics of planting seeds, harvesting, and exchanging food show a similar place-based ethos that engages the land and its life-forms “where they are at.” echoing the politics of jimoto-gaku, it shows the willingness to acknowledge and engage the land, its life-forms, and its relationalities as valuable, even in their harmed state. furthermore, it is a practice that alludes to what michelle murphy (2017, 497) has called “alterlife,” or a “life already altered, which is also life open to alterations.” by being open to experimentation with their land that has already been altered by nuclear fallout, the farmers enacted a logic of caring, healing, and making home in a place marked by radioactive contamination, making it worthy of engagement beyond discussions of nuclearity. fukushima as nuclearity: governmental decontamination projects the farmers’ move to decenter nuclearity and focus on place-making contrasted and often conflicted with other responses that focused on technical and medical concerns for nuclearity. the following two sections discuss examples of responses that center on nuclearity, including decontamination projects led by the central and prefectural governments, as well as health recuperation projects led by parents and ngos in japan. despite their inner divergences and oppositional stakes, both responses came into tension with those that engaged ecologics. while an in-depth engagement with both responses lies beyond the scope of this article, i discuss them briefly to elucidate the assumptions of nuclearity that have put them in tension with ecologics. in response to the nuclear accident in fukushima, the japanese government focused on making the exposed environments re-livable and re-appropriable for its subsequent economic projects. technical and medical articulations of nuclearity enabled the government to expand capital-intensive public works such as “decontamination projects” in the name of recovery. decontamination projects are based on the idea that radiation can be separated from the environment and contained—to prevent harmful interaction with human bodies at the molecular level. guidelines and brochures published by the ministry of environment outline that decontamination projects rely on three basic principles: to remove, shield, and keep radioactive materials away from inhabited areas (ministry of environment 2018). echoing the epistemic habit of technoscience that molecularizes and individualizes chemical relations, these principles depict radiation as isolated particles that accumulate and flow through bodies and environments. as the waves emitted by these particles can potentially damage dna, the particles need to be removed from the environment (ministry of environment 2017a, 2017b). despite the government’s depiction of radiation as isolated particles, however, the project to remove radiation from the environment has become a massive civil engineering project, with dire consequences for socioecological relationships. once in the environment, radioactive particles became air, water, soil, plants, animals, and houses as they moved around and accumulated in ways specific to the material and social ecologies they interacted with. in this view, radioactive particles are expansively responsive and open to relationships with their environment, often in surprising ways. as such, decontamination projects often required the removal and cleansing of entire surfaces of inhabited areas. the topsoil of fields and gardens was scraped off, tree branches were cut, fallen leaves removed, and the surfaces of buildings, roads, ditches, and tree bark were doused with high-pressure water. radioactive materials so removed from surfaces were placed in industrial bulk bags and temporarily stored in empty lots or abandoned fields to keep them away from living areas. the surface of the land was then replenished with soil brought from mountains elsewhere. in the process, decontamination enacted not only a logic of containment but also one of equivalence. the government’s response assumed that people, soil, and the various relationships that shaped the area as places of living could easily be replaced with something else. the word soil in japanese is dojō, which also means “foundation.” decontamination projects removed radioactive soil, considering inconsequential decades of work and care that went into developing the very foundation of communities, their identities, and their well-being. farmers often considered such socioecological arrangements as damaging as radiation, identifying the mountain soil introduced by decontamination projects as one of the major challenges in cultivating their fields after the nuclear fallout. moreover, as scholars have repeatedly shown, the so-called cleanup of nuclear sites did not mean the complete elimination of radiation from the environment (cram 2015; masco 2006; morimoto 2019). instead, it was about reducing the level of radiation to a “reasonable” amount to be tolerated by the public to enable further political economic activities (kumaki 2021). in fukushima, decontamination projects, through their logic of containment and equivalence, have opened these areas for further appropriation by the government and industry. just as the nuclear power plant in fukushima was owned by a company in tokyo and produced all its electricity for tokyo, decontamination projects have often been carried out by general contractors from the capital. decontaminated fields have, in turn, been reappropriated for lucrative projects—as solar panel fields, robotic testing fields, and the like. the government’s approach to the affected land, and the resulting socioecological arrangements, made it increasingly difficult to cultivate the kinds of relationships seen in the rapeseed planting event and osusowake. fukushima as nuclearity: health recuperation projects like the farmers, advocates and parents in and outside of fukushima prefecture have also challenged governmental projects that declared the possibility of containment and safety. they presented counter-narratives to state-led accounts of the effects of the nuclear fallout—that exposure was reasonable—by acquiring knowledge about radiation, taking their own measurements, and creating alternative data around radiation and its health effects. however, in their effort to speak to governmental policies and interventions, their responses also emphasized technological and medical nuclearity. against governmental claims of safety, their practices underscored the health risks of radiation exposure, encouraging separation from anything that had to do with radiation. such practices were grounded in epistemologies and values that also assumed the separability and replaceability of people, land, and food, putting them in tension with those who resisted such socioecological arrangements. one response that exemplified this trajectory were health-recuperation projects called hoyō, launched across japan by parents and ngos in the wake of the nuclear accident. hoyō refers to practices of resting one’s mind and body to recuperate one’s health. hoyō for children affected by the nuclear fallout in fukushima can take different lengths and involve varied activities, from a daytrip to yamagata to pick cherries, to a five-day study sojourn in kyoto to learn its traditional culture, to a weeklong retreat in a remote island of okinawa to experience the sea. these responses emulated ones to the nuclear accident in chernobyl, where school children and their teachers were brought to less contaminated areas to spend a few months recovering their health. during that time, the children’s bodies were given time to heal from constant radiation exposure, and the consumption of “clean” food helped their bodies excrete radiation that had accumulated inside. in japan, while much money has been spent on projects of decontamination and the decommissioning of nuclear power plants, no state funding materialized for these activities. without public support, the retreats ran for shorter periods, from a day to two weeks, which did not allow enough time for a significant decrease of radiation in the body. nevertheless, these projects became an important locus of resistance against the government’s performance of containment that was making radiation a “reasonable” part of ordinary life after the nuclear accident. however, in their focus on monitoring and engaging food and places as potentially nuclear, these efforts reproduced a logic of replaceability of land and its produce. here, the specificity of place and food mattered only in terms of how much separation from radioactive contamination it allowed. outdoor activities had to take place elsewhere, in a less radioactive environment, such as under the auspices of health-recuperation programs. food had to be procured from elsewhere or monitored each time to make sure it was safe. in addition to radiation labs, negotiations around food often took place in the market, where alternative and safer food was sought by carefully examining the labels on groceries that told consumers where they were produced. any other meanings engendered by place and food became irrelevant considering this focus on radiation. figure 3. children gather to pick cherries as part of hoyō in yamagata prefecture. photo by hiroko kumaki. these practices imposed significant labor on the part of citizens as individual consumers, to ensure they kept safe under reasonable exposure. enacting alternative ways of life detached from radiation was, therefore, often more available for those who conformed to an urban consumerist lifestyle, who were open to finding alternative food in grocery store shelves, and who moved elsewhere. such consumerist engagement with nuclearity was not necessarily compatible with place-based ecologics that took the land and foodways as integral to the ways of life and well-being of communities. as a result, those who focused on nuclearity to prevent radiation exposure often came into conflict with those who engaged fukushima through ecologics, living and producing in areas marked by the fallout. for example, an intense moment emerged in one of the towns the first fall after the lifting of the evacuation order. in this town, a few organic farmers had continued to grow rice after the nuclear accident, even before the area was reopened. by the time the evacuation order was lifted, radiation levels detected in the rice had fallen below the governmental standards of safety, meaning that the farmers were formally able to begin producing for the market. at the time, fukushima’s prefectural government tested all bags of rice produced in the prefecture for radiation before they entered the market, and this rice was no exception (fukushima prefecture 2022b). nevertheless, one of the consumers sent back the rice because they detected 5bq/kg of radiation in it. the government’s threshold for food was 100bq/kg. co-ops across japan, which usually had a stricter limit, set a threshold of 20bq/kg. the 5bq/kg was an amount not detectable unless one had access to a high-quality equipment and/or tested the rice for longer periods of time for greater accuracy. the farmers felt disheartened. if tested that strictly, they argued, many other products in the japanese market would probably disappear from the store shelves. they guessed that an advocate must have purchased their rice solely for the purpose of measuring its radiation level. after the incident, they were no longer sure if they wanted to produce for the general market, especially if consumers saw their produce only for its radiation content because it was produced in the former evacuation zone. they could instead to focus on the local market where their product would encounter much greater appreciation. “do they want to destroy the farmers?” the farmers’ neighbor had heard about the incident and felt livid. the farmers’ dismay and the neighbor’s anger implied that there was more to growing rice than just producing for the market to earn an income, or to produce something devoid of radiation. the epistemological and ontological differences articulated in jimoto-gaku put this incident into perspective. the consumer who had returned the rice was in search of a problem, namely, radioactive contamination, which rendered the rice meaningful only in terms of its radioactivity. the farmers, on the other hand, had cultivated the land over generations, and it had taken them years to revive their fields that had suddenly become irradiated by the nuclear fallout. for the farmers, the resulting rice was not just their product but also an integral part of who they were—something that nurtured and acknowledged their history and existence. denying those elements constituted an act of destroying them and their worth. even though both sides were acting on their concern for health and well-being, these differences became an obstacle to their interaction and collaboration. over the years, many divides were created among communities, and even within families, based on how they engaged the nuclearity of the fallout and the ecologics that grounded their ways of life (see gill 2013). an unfortunate structure emerged in which farmers were often criticized for their seeming valorization of life with radiation, while parents and advocates were criticized for their heavy engagement with nuclearity and their seeming disregard for place-based relationships. as a staff member at a health-recuperation project put it, the issue of radiation is deeply troubling and brutal because it gets at the bottom of fundamental values that shape what it means to be human and to live well. denying any of the responses was equivalent to denying the core of one’s being. as it became increasingly difficult to communicate their positionalities, many people in fukushima refrained from talking about radiation altogether to prevent conflicts. nevertheless, their divergent positionalities manifested in the ways they arranged their social and ecological relationships—what they ate, where they lived, how they dried their laundry, who they interacted with—further making any work across differences a major challenge. negotiating partial boundaries the long-term aftermath of the nuclear accident in fukushima is often characterized as rigidifying divides between those who have made divergent decisions after the fallout. tom gill (2013) has shown through the case of iitate village that efforts to maintain the relationships between people and place after forced evacuation have led to divides among community members and the demise of the village, particularly as many sought to resume their lives and the community itself in another locale. as evacuation orders were lifted, the tension between nuclearity and ecologics was made salient to me in the ways those who returned took up the discourse of jimoto-gaku and called themselves “people of the soil” to distinguished themselves from the “people of the wind.” as discussed earlier, this distinction did not only signify that the lifestyle of the “people of the soil” entailed more interaction with the land but also that their sense of the community’s well-being hinged on its rootedness to the soil—its foundation. “people of the wind,” on the other hand, were more mobile and had fluid relationships to the land and its people, often grounding their ways of life and their well-being in the market economy (nakazawa 2018). however, the analytical and ethnographic distinction between those who engaged nuclearity and ecologics often blurred as people and communities moved through different places and embodied different socioecological relationships in the process of evacuation and return. in the negotiations and mutual transformations that have taken place among those in the former evacuation zone, it becomes clear that members of the community have moved beyond nuclearity in some practices but not in others. in their everyday lives, they engage both nuclearity and ecologics, constructing, negotiating, and transforming the interactive and partial boundaries against both radiation and harmful socioecological arrangements to keep them and their communities safe. the practice of osusowake constitutes one of the sites in which residents in the former evacuation zone negotiated their divergent stakes and enacted partial boundaries through their interactions. shimada-san, a man in his late sixties who returned to his town after the lifting of the evacuation order, told me that he sometimes received food from his neighbors that he knew remained off limits, like yuzu growing on trees in the neighborhood. knowing that the osusowake was an act of care for him, especially as he lived alone, he did not question the neighbor about the fruit’s origin or level of radiation. he just thanked the neighbor and accepted it. later on, however, he threw the yuzu away, while still reciprocating the neighbor with something else. for him, what mattered in this exchange was not whether the yuzu was edible, but instead that his neighbor had thought and gifted it to him. he valued the relationship that came with the exchange and was willing to maintain it. he therefore privately addressed his concern for radiation, foregrounding ecologics in one aspect of his life by engaging in the exchange, while emphasizing nuclearity in another aspect by refusing to consume the yuzu. a kindergarten in the former evacuation zone also negotiated partial boundaries as it addressed concerns for radiation and socioecological relationships. each year, the kindergarten invited local farmers to teach children how to grow vegetables in the school garden. after the nuclear accident, they strictly monitored the levels of radiation in the harvest—radiation had to be undetectable for children to consume the food. this was not necessarily based on demands by the children’s parents, but instead addressed potential criticisms from outside the community, from those who focused on the region’s nuclearity and questioned the presence of a kindergarten in an irradiated area. the kindergarten’s compromise was to plant vegetables known to absorb little radiation, such as cucumbers, lettuce, and tomatoes; test the harvest for radiation; and share only the food that met their strict standards of safety. the farmers in turn acknowledged the health concerns for radiation that might prevent the children from enjoying certain harvests. in addition to negotiations within the same community, individuals also shifted their stance as they evacuated from and returned to their communities. sugeno-san, for example, is one of many who negotiated nuclearity and ecologics as an evacuee, a returnee, a farmer, and a parent of small children in the years following the nuclear accident. sugeno-san was a dairy cattle farmer in his early-thirties. when his village was designated part of the mandatory evacuation zone, he left his cows in the village and evacuated to western japan with his wife, pregnant at the time. when the government lifted the evacuation order in parts of the village, sugeno-san returned with his father to restart dairy farming, but he left his wife and children in a nearby city. initially, sugeno-san returned to the village with a strong sense of mission to perfectly contain radiation. he was concerned that if radiation was detected in his produce, the news would spread in the mass media and affect all farmers in fukushima. on returning to the village, he was determined to strictly control and manage the environment, so as not to allow any radioactive contamination into his produce. sugeno-san attended information sessions held by governmental officials that encouraged evacuated villagers to return and restart stockbreeding in the village. the officials repeatedly told the farmers not to produce food with radiation. they instructed the farmers not to let the cows eat dust or fallen leaves, not to let grasses grow on the soil not yet decontaminated, and not to let fallen leaves get into agricultural tools and machines. yet it soon became clear that the complete containment of radioactive contamination would prove impossible. to enact complete containment, sugeno-san first asked the government to decontaminate his fields. concerned with food safety, the government only decontaminated the crop-growing areas of the field, avoiding the footpaths around the field that the farmers would walk on. but sugeno-san was using the fields to graze cows, and the cows did not distinguish between grasses growing in the field and those on the footpaths. to prevent cows from grazing in undecontaminated areas, sugeno-san covered the footpaths with plastic sheets. however, the wind and wild boars tossed the sheets, and weeds would break though the plastic cover. the boars even broke through the wire fences he built to prevent them from entering the fields. what was more, the nearby river flooded after heavy rains, inundating the fields with radioactive water from the mountains. any attempt at creating indestructible boundaries and containing how radioactive contamination moved through ecologies and bodies faltered. figure 4. plastic sheets covering the footpaths of sugeno-san’s field. photo by hiroko kumaki. at that point, sugeno-san considered it an irony that the government was encouraging the recovery of stock farming in the village, which necessarily required intimate relationships with the irradiated ecologies, while imposing the impossible task of containment on the farmers when it came to their products. it was all the more troubling for him that such socioecological arrangements were not based on a concern for the farmers’ well-being or their ways of life, but rather on a concern for radiation in the final product. that is, the government was only interested in rearranging the environment in ways that enabled the production of food that could be separated from its specific locality and circulated elsewhere, as if it were equally safe or even safer than products from other parts of japan. he worried that such market-oriented ways of reorganizing social and ecological relationships would further marginalize farmers and their communities. sugeno-san gradually transformed his approach to emphasize the regeneration of a way of life grounded in the socioecological relationships of the village. in the process, like the farmers who planted rapeseeds, he became more experimental and open to relationships with the village environment and, therefore, with radiation. instead of micromanaging radiation, he thought it important to create a system in which he could produce from his land and then determine what produce might be radioactive. that way, he could make sure that those products did not enter the market and both experiment with his methods of production and receive compensation from the government for radioactive products. as long as the prefectural government and the general public insisted on the illusion of complete containment, he argued, no one could return to farm in the village and, more important for him, care for the land for past and future generations. at the same time, sugeno-san took a different stance as a father with small children. he talked at length about the dream he had of raising his children in the village, within the dense relationships it offered. yet while he worked in the village and reestablished intimate relationships with the village ecology, he refused the same for his children. when it came to them, his response emphasized nuclearity. in line with the parents and ngos that focused on separation from radiation, his family remained in a nearby city, and his children have never visited the village. sugeno-san embodied this tension between nuclearity and ecologics as he shaped partial boundaries while moving across his place of evacuation, bureaucratic meetings, his fields in the village, and his new home outside the village. ecologics of health and well-being figure 5. children running around the rape flower maze in the former evacuation zone of fukushima. photo by hiroko kumaki. as summer approached in coastal fukushima, a sea of yellow rape flowers emerged in the area where the rapeseed planting event had taken place the previous fall. children were running around a rape flower maze nearby, created by a man who had lost his family members to the tsunami disaster that preceded the nuclear fallout. as i stood in the middle of the flower maze, seven years after the disaster and almost two years after mandatory evacuation orders were lifted in the area, i could see governmental reconstruction projects looming on the horizon. stretches of fields had been decontaminated and made into nuclear-waste storage sites, solar panel fields, and robotic testing areas. massive sea walls were under construction along the coast, plans for which had barely been discussed with residents scattered across japan due to evacuation. the spread of radiation and the ensuing projects had replaced residents’ place-based relationships with political economic activities that made the land apt for further developmental projects. carried out by major construction companies based in tokyo, they foreclosed communal ties that could have been fostered through residents’ engagement with their land, further obscuring the histories, memories, and relationships that had once animated this region. amid this change, residents who had returned to the region planted seeds and marked the land with flowers to express both their sense of mourning and that of healing from what had been lost in the earthquake, tsunami, nuclear accident, and ensuing reconstruction projects. farmers cultivated rape flowers to decontaminate the soil and produce edible canola oil. they cultivated rice and seasonal vegetables to share and exchange in the communities. in doing so, residents rebuilt relationships of trust and care among themselves and their surrounding environment that had been torn apart by the nuclear accident and its aftermath. such patchworked sceneries of fukushima have often been made recognizable and meaningful only as a nuclear site, particularly through discussions of radiation and its potential health risks. these frameworks have proved helpful in elucidating structures and practices that make radiation invisible and to make radiation matter for social injustice. writing from the former evacuation zone, where my interlocutors engaged in jimoto-gaku and challenged such an approach, this article discussed the sceneries and experiences of those who have learned to critique, contest, and transform the boundaries between nuclearity and ecologics. my interlocutors’ insistence on their right to determine these boundaries gives us an understanding of other ways of imagining life and recovery after a nuclear fallout. for those in the former evacuation zone, for whom dense socioecological relationships made for an integral part of their well-being, projects that centered on separation from radiation were not always possible, nor were they ideal. what seemed urgent was to work with and against responses that made these relationships difficult, if not impossible, and to acknowledge the residents’ land and lives after the disasters as still worthy of meaningful relationalities, despite their harmed state. thus, residents created interactive and partial boundaries against radiation, as well as practices and policies that foregrounded biopolitical and political economic objectives, with the aim of opening up, rather than foreclosing, relationalities with their living environment. the patchy scenery and practices surrounding the rape flower field embodied that response. practices of partial boundary making have been noted by scholars across nuclear sites, as well as at sites of environmental exposure more broadly (alexievich 2006; brown 2019; masami 2017; roberts 2017; stephens 1995). they have shown that certain discourses and practices around toxic environments have made unrecognizable situated experiences of toxicity. what discussions of nuclearity and ecologics elucidate further is the divergent and conflicting logics that shape socioecological relationships in environments marked by toxicity, with consequences for the well-being of people and their communities. in japan, selective engagement with the consequences of the nuclear fallout, particularly through medical and technological nuclearity, has coarticulated with biopolitical and political economic projects to marginalize socioecological relationships foundational for the well-being of those who returned to the former evacuation zone. furthermore, working beyond nuclearity reveals that governance practices that address medical and technical concerns for radiation have been co-opted by political economic projects, to rearrange socioecological environments in ways that furthered political economic appropriation. it shows a mode of disaster capitalism that implicates not only life itself but also increasingly “life-environmental relations”—or what valerie olson (2018) has called a shift from biopolitics to “ecobiopolitics.” that is, a focus on nuclearity allows for a critique of state practices that aim to contain biological harm and protect citizens to a “reasonable” extent, while actually assuming citizens’ exposure through projects that center on political economic redevelopment. ecologics, in turn, challenges practices that rearrange not only life itself, but also socioecological environments through market-based logics, in ways that alienate people and communities from their place-based relationships and make them further appropriable for developmental projects. everyday negotiations of nuclearity and ecologics imply that health and well-being after a nuclear accident have been shaped with and against political economic orders that have put citizens at risk not only biologically, but also socioecologically. my interlocutors’ willingness to open up and create partial boundaries therefore did not constitute an uncritical acceptance of the governmental and industrial narrative that life was safe in the former evacuation zone. instead, such practices challenged a biopolitics that assumed and encouraged their exposure in the name of protection, as well as an ecobiopolitics that imposed a market logic tearing apart their relationships of mutual care and support. residents in the former evacuation zone focused on making socioecological arrangements that protected them from political economic encroachments increasingly reappropriating their land, making them more vulnerable to environmental exposure and foreclosing the possibility of communal relationships that kept them safe. residents were, in other words, asking how to approach a collective condition of our time, that of living with exposure, without reproducing the market logic of containment and equivalence that landed us in this condition in the first place. by negotiating and revaluing nuclearity and centering ecologics, their responses ask us how we might acknowledge the act of planting seeds and of creating partial boundaries as an ethical and political act of meaningful “living” without letting radiation, the government, or the nuclear industry off the hook. abstract in the wake of the fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant accident in 2011, radiation and its potential health effects have become a central concern, shaping debates on the nuclearity of fukushima. however, residents living in the former evacuation zone often challenged the centrality of nuclearity to their experiences of the nuclear fallout. taking seriously their efforts to move beyond nuclearity, this article elucidates their varied concerns for the ways in which social and ecological relations—or what i call “ecologics”—have been rearranged after the fallout in the name of their biological and economic well-being. by challenging practices that imposed market logics of containment and equivalence on their living environment, these residents enacted alternatives cultivating socioecological relations that facilitated trust and care in their communities. i argue that residents negotiated partial boundaries not only against radiation but also against socioecological arrangements that tore apart their relationships of mutual support and further reappropriated their land for political economic projects. [suspending nuclearity; ecologics; health and well-being; partial boundaries; tokyo electric power company’s fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant accident; japan] 要旨 東京電力福島第一原子力発電所事故後の被災地での生活は、放射性物質による汚染と健康への影響を中心に議論されてきた。本論文では、福島県の避難指示解除区域で行った参与観察やインタビューをもとに、帰還した住民の原発事故後の考え方を考察した。その結果、住民の多くが、地域に降り注いだ放射性物質に注意を向けているだけでなく、これまで暮らしてきた土地や自然、人との関わり(ecologics)の中で現状に合ったより良い生活を模索していることが分かった。また、放射性物質による汚染に着目した外部からの関わりにより、原発事故の被害が明らかになり、責任を追求することが可能となった一方で、図らずも、開発主義が助長され、その土地に根差した生き方が疎外されてしまう側面をも持っていることを示した。公害、災害、環境破壊などの研究や政策においては、「被害」や「汚染」を検証する科学的・医学的視点だけでなく、ecologicsの概念を導入することで、住民がその土地やコミュニティとの関わりを再構築する過程で、健康を守りながらより良い生活を実現していく方法を見出せることが期待できる。[東京電力福島第一原子力発電所事故; 帰還住民; 健康; ecologics; 地元学; コミュニティ再生; 折り合い; 放射能汚染; 開発主義] notes acknowledgments special thanks to my interlocutors for sharing their lives with me. i am grateful to chris nelson and the anonymous reviewers for their generous engagement with the manuscript, as well as kate herman and petra dreiser for their thoughtful editorial guidance. at 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permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.05 air pressure: temporal hierarchies in nepali aviation cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 83-109, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.04 air pressure: temporal hierarchies in nepali aviation tina harris university of amsterdam https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0357-2074 it was 07:52 zulu on the digital clock in the air traffic control tower. in aviation-speak, this means it was 1:37 p.m. in nepal, peak time for air traffic at tribhuvan international airport in kathmandu (ktm). i stood quietly at a distance behind the controllers with a glass of strong black coffee, marveling at the activity on the single runway of nepal’s only international airport. tibet airlines was about to push back. biman bangladesh airlines was next in line, then singapore-based silk air, followed by malindo air from malaysia. an air india aircraft arrived, followed by the bhutanese druk air, then a series of five small domestic yeti airlines and buddha air turboprops, all in a row. massive planes landed, tiny ones took off, and helicopters hovered and circled in the near distance. the four or five main air traffic controllers were hard at work, with occasional bursts of joking and laughing. one controller was tapping frantically at a digital display. i snuck a quick glance from a distance: there were at least seven bright dots clustered around pokhara, the second-largest city in nepal. it turned out that another airport southwest of kathmandu had closed due to severe weather. all the aircraft on the display were holding, circling, waiting to land. in the kathmandu tower, a wave of concern mixed with mirth; we watched a buddha air turboprop head back to the parking bay after waiting for thirty minutes to depart. more aircraft were gathering and holding above ktm, with some waiting to land for at least half an hour. “welcome to our reality,” one of the controllers said with a grin. figure 1. tribhuvan international airport, kathmandu. photo by tina harris. the skies are becoming more crowded. those who work in the global aviation industry are wondering how to cope with staggering future growth predictions: world passenger traffic exceeded four billion passengers in 2017, and this number is expected to double in the coming twenty years (iata 2018; icao 2018). international aviation organizations such as the international air transportation association (iata) state that significant increases in mobility across borders and competition between new low-cost airline companies create major capacity issues in the industry, as well as increased delays. while the highest percentage of global passengers used to hail from the united states and europe, airlines from asia have recently been carrying the most passengers: this includes young nepali men from low-income villages who migrate to qatar to build stadiums for the 2022 world cup and middle-class chinese women flying to amsterdam on guided tours. at the same time, increasing carbon and other emissions from the aviation industry make for serious threats to the future of the earth.1 yet a disjuncture exists between the increase in air connectivity and the capacity of the aviation sector to stay on top of the growing congestion in the skies and at the airports. in nepal, air traffic controllers, operations managers, pilots, and crew find themselves under considerable pressure to deal with the steadily increasing flow of passengers. while these drivers of increased air traffic, as well as the uneven consequences of congestion, are familiar characteristics of the speedup of capital more generally, they have been exacerbated by demands specific to the region: a significant increase in low-cost carriers and routes in a highly competitive asian and gulf market since 1992, a growth in tourists after the 2015 earthquake, and increased numbers of labor migrants flying out of nepali villages to work in the gulf states, malaysia, and india. poor road infrastructure and landslides have also made it easier, faster, and even cheaper for some to travel by airplane from rural nepal to dubai than to do so by road within the country. the increase in air traffic necessitates not only more space but also more time to fit the hundreds of aircraft in the air and on the ground. consider this example: during the peak trekking season in late spring, an air traffic controller working in a tower at the gateway to a mountainous trekking destination in nepal needs to clear ever more landings and takeoffs within the small window of time in the morning when the skies are blue and clear, since no-frills turboprop vfr landings (landing by sight or “visual reference,” instead of using instruments) in volatile weather are the norm in many remote areas. as the erratic mountain clouds roll in and delays are imminent, the controllers must face irate passengers—some of them vips such as high-level politicians who insist on preferential treatment—as well as some airline and helicopter companies that look for steady returns on profit to keep up with the growth in air services. these hallmarks of capitalist globalization—increased connectivity, the collapse of time and distance, and the general feeling that life is speeding up—shape the premise of david harvey’s work on time-space compression and much of the literature on (aero)mobilities (harvey 1989, 232; sheller and urry 2006; cwerner, kesselring, and urry 2009; adey 2010). indeed, glossy advertisements for a seamless connection between new york and dubai in record time in a first-class suite on emirates airlines are now fairly common. but they stand in sharp contrast to the everyday practicalities of aviation in nepal. the tensions between the technological advancement of “global aviation” and the current context in the country means that aviation discourses focusing on the global south are often characterized by the language of “lagging behind” or needing to “catch up” with the rest of the world. much of this is about adhering to (and shaping) socially constituted markers of time such as departure times, sunrise and sunset, or ideas of the past, present, and future, with the knowledge that multiple understandings and experiences of time—temporalities—overlap and are in tension with one another (adam 1998; frederiksen and dalsgård 2014). aviation personnel in nepal are not simply stuck with the choice of either speeding up or getting left behind. instead, they adjust their lives and everyday practices to fit into the “temporal expectations demanded by various institutions, social relationships, and labor arrangements” (sharma 2016, 133; emphasis added). in doing so, they highlight and expose severe inequalities in global aviation infrastructure, while also contributing to them in ways that reveal specific ideas of the future of the state. in this article, i examine how the need to fit more aircraft into the air and on the ground to keep up with the increase in global air traffic produces a kind of air pressure (see anand 2011) that generates specific experiences and practices in the aviation world. these effects can be roughly divided into two overlapping types. the first set of effects is more immediate. it emerges from the growing gap between the temporal expectations of airline companies, their passengers, aviation regulators and investors, and the everyday practices and experiences of the very people who make the local dimension of infrastructure work—such as air traffic controllers, pilots, crew, and operations staff. here, i aim to show how temporal regimes (how time is ordered, structured, produced, and subject to power [hartog 2015]) in aviation overlap with existing spatial and social hierarchies, such as tendencies to privilege international over domestic flights and global aviation over nepali aviation. the second set of experiences is more specific to the place of the global south within a wider neocolonial world order. while “narratives of progress” (hetherington 2017) dominate the aviation industry in general, in practice that industry is profoundly striated and uneven. this is accentuated by specific practices in the aviation world of deferring to what is marked as “international” or “global”—whether they are outbound flights or in hiring practices for pilots—with futurity. in other words, to be part of the international or global aviation community means to show that you can plan for the year 2050 and beyond, and nepal and the global south—or indeed, many places that have experienced the unevenness of global capital and its transformation—often find themselves relegated to the backseat of such conversations. the very idea of a global temporal regime, in other words, “the time of the global,” is harnessed by aviation personnel and used in multiple ways to address regional or national concerns: to vent frustrations at the unfulfilled promises of the state, or to assert a sort of national resentment at being relegated to the lowest rung of hierarchies in international aviation—“the time of the nation.” while the effects of congestion or disruption on local nepali aviation planners are serious, creating temporal chokepoints (carse, cons, and middleton 2018; cons 2018; carse et al. 2020) that in turn have massive implications for the wider global system, some kinds of disruption, such as unpredictable weather, can also reconfigure temporal hierarchies, bringing the value of local knowledge of the skies and manual piloting back to the forefront of the global discourse on aviation futures. a closer look at the effects of air pressure—where the temporal articulations between global aviation and local lives matter just as much as the disjunctures—can lead us to a better understanding of how global temporal regimes can shape lives.2 although aviation turned out to be a significant departure from my previous long-term fieldwork on cross-border trade in the himalayas, i was drawn to it partly because of similar socioeconomic changes wrought by new infrastructural connections in the region. i wondered what a more volumetric approach could reveal—looking at processes of economic change, but in the air (elden 2013; billé 2018). since 2009, some in asia have experienced a clear increase in air-enabled mobility: congested airports and delays, the proliferation of low-cost carriers, or the strategy by the chinese civil aviation authority of an “air silk road” linked to the wider belt and road initiative (lin and ai 2020). i conducted the fieldwork for this project in several bursts in 2012, 2016, and 2018 instead of during one extended period, perhaps not uncommon for an anthropologist readjusting to the temporal expectations of academic life after having children. i spent much of this work in flight attendant training schools, in cafés around airports, in peoples’ homes, in airport terminals’ landside areas, or at the civil aviation authority office. i spoke with air traffic controllers, helicopter pilots, jet pilots, journalists who focus on aviation, flight attendants, trainers, operations managers, airport managers, airline executives, and engineers—for both domestic and international carriers. part of the research involved travel on small turboprop airlines to smaller airports in mountainous areas, where i spent time in airport terminals, spoke with local politicians, and conducted brief observations in air traffic control towers. what became clear throughout this research was aviation workers’ frustrations with balancing different expectations linked to maintaining the tempo and pace of an infrastructure premised on the idea of constant flow. this included pressures to give aircraft takeoff clearance before cloudy mountain weather rolled in, having to temporarily shut airports and local roads due to politicians traveling during “vip movements,” and not being able to adhere to the promises of future airport expansion projects that would accommodate passenger overflow. in extrastatecraft, keller easterling (2014) shows how organizations such as the international organization for standardization (iso)—which strives to develop internationally consistent rules for quality—rationalize idealistic narratives of infrastructure space overall by strengthening the power of the state and obfuscating economic inequalities and complex political realities. the aviation industry also produces idealistic stories of infrastructural space as a whole, but here i will draw attention to how global temporal regimes work in this manner. planning for the future in international aviation means that you plan for a particular kind of future, one that is flattened out and often geared toward the most privileged airline companies, technologically advanced airports, and elite travelers. in the sections that follow, i show how unpicking some of these intricate “tangles of temporalities” can point to unexpected and surprising futures. on-time performances: institutions and infrastructure the institutional landscape of aviation is made up of layers of regulatory bodies that structure policy development and maintain standards at the international, national, and airport scales. the trade organization that represents airline companies, iata, and icao, a specialized agency of the united nations (un) and regulatory body that oversees global aviation standards, are two of the largest organizations in global aviation that represent industry interests. in addition, most nations have their own civil aviation authorities, responsible for regulating aviation safety and efficiency standards at the state level. in nepal, the civil aviation authority of nepal (caan) is overseen by the government’s ministry of culture, tourism, and civil aviation. the nepali organization is somewhat unique in its uncomfortable position as both a service provider and a regulator: it serves not only the interests of airline companies but also regulates safety. both icao and local media have sharply criticized this dual, often contradictory role; as of 2017, legislation is in place to separate these two functions at some point in the near future. figure 2. tenzing hillary airport in lukla, one of the many domestic airports in nepal. photo by tina harris. the long-range institutional structuring of infrastructure space is, as easterling (2014, 133) has claimed, “not a master plan but a set of counterbalancing interdependencies.” similarly, the institutional structuring of aviation in nepal comprises a set of interconnected variables on multiple national and international scales, where not just the spaces but also the timeframes that institutions direct play a prominent role in shaping local aviation landscapes. while nepal has had an aviation industry since the 1950s, the national carrier, nepal airlines (formerly royal nepal airlines), had a monopoly on international flights to and from nepal in the 1970s and 1980s, with direct flights to international stops such as frankfurt, shanghai, london, and dubai. but following the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990 after fifty years of absolute monarchy, which led nepal into reform with sweeping economic policies, the inauguration of a liberal-skies policy in the country led to a dramatic shift in the aviation sector in 1992 (thapa 2019). nepal had long been seen as lagging behind u.s. aviation deregulation in the 1970s in the broader context of global shifts toward competition and marketization. open skies (the opening of the aviation market to privatized airline companies) meant that nepal airlines, still the sole national flag carrier, began to encounter increasing competition from several brand-new domestic airlines, such as shree airlines, yeti airlines, and buddha air. since then, the number of airports in nepal has increased tremendously, from a handful in the late 1980s to about fifty-five (of which thirty-three are operational) in 2019, not to mention the fifteen domestic and nearly thirty international carriers that now fly in and out of ktm for twenty-one hours a day. the problem with this growth, according to some caan representatives, is that the facilities that make up this infrastructure (for example, airport buildings, landing system technology, and some of the aircraft) have remained virtually unchanged since the 1990s, while congestion has increased (caan 2017, 35). the congestion stems especially from tribhuvan international airport in kathmandu (ktm), the only international airport in the country, with a single runway that accommodates both arriving and departing international and domestic flights (golf 2017). the constraints are immense. at ktm, there are only nine parking bays for the hundreds of international and domestic airlines that fly in and out of kathmandu every day. a former regional icao director has not shied away from admitting that every night after ktm closes its flight operations, a shovel team heads out to patch up surface issues and holes on the runway (caan 2018, 3).3 operations managers in all airspace sectors must also deal with the narrow nepal flight information region (fir), or more commonly, how airspace is divided by country or region, where indian army jets appear as soon as a nepali aircraft even brushes a wingtip over the militarized border with india. a massive gap in communication technology exists between ktm and remote airports that can only use basic equipment to land planes, often with a single air traffic controller or assistant. in addition, getting to many of nepal’s rural airports involves flying over high mountains with unpredictable weather and cloud cover. one of the engineers for a domestic airline, after discussing all of these constraints, said to me with a sigh: “sorry to say, but this is the real scenario. the governmental sector won’t update these problems unless something [bad] happens.” and unfortunately, bad things do happen. in the middle of my fieldwork period, a us-bangla airlines aircraft from dhaka crashed on the side of the runway at ktm, killing fifty-one people, leaving twenty survivors. the reported cause of the crash was a disorientated, upset pilot and/or miscommunication with an air traffic controller. the reality is that nepal remains one of the most dangerous places in the world for air travel. but whenever i asked aviation workers what they wanted me to tell my readers about aviation in nepal, almost all responded that “flying in nepal is not dangerous.” engineers, cabin crew, operations staff, and air traffic controllers all asked me to “put in my book” the “real scenario” of highly skilled nepali cabin crew, pilots, and air traffic controllers forced to work within the limitations of poor infrastructure, a single congested international airport, the terrain and weather, an increase in carriers and routes, a shortage of aviation workers, distrust of political parties, and pressure from airline management and vips. one of the challenges in writing about aviation in nepal is not to contribute to the pervasive discourse around sloppy aviators from the global south, while acknowledging the fact that safety standards still need tremendous work. we also need to understand better how these standards work, despite multiple constraints. safety in nepal indeed makes for a serious matter of concern compared to other international airports’ assumed neutral standards, and nepali aviation is therefore seen as either in need of education, development, or—given that all of its airlines remain banned on the eu air safety list—something to be avoided altogether until things improve. perceptions of lag or backwardness are, in fact, codified in policy. one example is icao’s “no country left behind” initiative, implemented in 2014 and meant to provide support for states to “harmonize” global standards and recommended practices in aviation through capacity building and training, particularly for countries with significant accident records like nepal. a number of these trainings focus on communication between pilots and controllers, always conducted in what is called standard aviation english. “english: the language of the skies” is the motto of the icaea, the international civil aviation english association, which develops workshops and tools, once again, to “harmonize” the use of standard aviation phraseology across the globe, particularly among the air traffic controllers and pilots whose first language is not english. expert discourses often attribute accidents to poor english proficiency rather than factors such as inadequate training or other forms of miscommunication (estival, farris, and molesworth 2016; kim 2018). these discourses of standardization can prove paternalizing. global standards, as andrea ballestero (2019, 33) has shown, concern the continuity of ideals, “suspicious and magical at once,” smoothing out relations between local variables. aviation standards work similarly for time: with no country left behind, those in the aviation world are obliged to head in the same direction, toward the same future, at the same speed—the speed of global industrialized capital. temporal expectations: international over domestic “in today’s fast-paced world, efficiency is the key to success,” reads the first page of a feature on the nextgen aviation system, the latest in digital advancement for maintaining on-time passenger service in airports around the world. features and advertisements in air traffic management magazine and other aviation industry publications stress a smoothly functioning aviation infrastructure that aims for unfettered mobility paired with economic growth—a rhetoric shared with fantasies of seamless logistics operations (see, for example, cowen 2014; guyer 2016; gambino 2018; lin 2018). in reality, this kind of functioning is difficult to achieve. take the holding pattern, for example. three of the most common reasons for delays in landing are inclement weather, full traffic capacity at an airport, and an incident on the ground. in such cases the controller instructs the pilot to hold the aircraft by making it circle in an oval pattern over a destination in a state of suspension as the pilot waits for clearance to land. in kathmandu, holding patterns are becoming more and more common. the single runway, numbered 02 at one end and 20 on the other (i.e., facing 20 degrees northeast on one end and 200 degrees southwest on the other), for all international and domestic flights leads to severe congestion when there are any delays. ramesh, a middle-aged senior air traffic controller, explained how he experiences the congestion from the kathmandu tower: all arriving aircraft are coming from runway 02, and domestic are departing from runway 02 as well. but most of the international airlines request runway 20 due to the [mountainous] terrain. but departing from runway 20 means that there are no arrivals from runway 02. [makes circling holding motions with his hands.] these [aircraft] come to a hold over there, a hold over there, a hold over there. to depart one single aircraft, we have to hold five here, five here, and five here. fifteen aircraft will be held for this departure! if i don’t give a departure, this international flight has connecting passengers. this [aircraft] has its own schedule, and their own renowned name on the market because [sarcastically] “[name of international airline] is always on time” [everyone laughs]. so the pilot has to maintain the on-time performance, right? so he always wants to make his departure on his own time, but we are unable [to grant this]. although we are trying our best, it’s getting delayed and delayed and delayed, sometimes a couple of hours. while there is officially no priority in clearing takeoff and landing other than who is next in the queue at any given time, international flights with connecting passengers clearly constitute the source of some pressure for ramesh. these “prestigious” flights create pressure to move ahead in time, though for social, not technical reasons. any delay or grounded aircraft marks a disruption to the efficient machine of international air travel. ramesh does not want to hold up fifteen other aircraft just to let a single jet depart from runway 20; his main concern is with safely landing planes at ktm. on the other hand, this kind of bottleneck has significant repercussions on the international market. passengers departing from kathmandu, including many relatively well-off western tourists and asian businesspeople, need to make their connecting flights. the international airline that ramesh works with wishes to maintain its award-winning on-time performance, and their pilots also often feel the brunt of this pressure. as profit derives from passenger experience, both the nepali controller and the jet pilot find that others with different temporal expectations—such as the airport authority or the parent airline company—come into conflict with their own control over departure time. this pressure to prioritize the international carries traces of the neocolonial, evident in how imperial geopolitics have historically shaped air travel, moving some people more quickly through the air than others, privileging white tourists over local west indians, for example (sheller 2010; bhimull 2017). while we may think of the world of aviation operations as governed by digital clocks set to synchronized zulu time and standardized, precise takeoff slots, in practice, the maintenance of air infrastructure is a matter of constant negotiation and improvisation (peters 2009). anthropologists and geographers have demonstrated that we should not regard infrastructure as a stable, fixed “thing” out there in the world, but rather as something driven and upheld by people (simone 2004). infrastructures have always concerned constant maintenance, and they often fail or crumble (graham and thrift 2007; cowen 2014; berlant 2016; anand 2017, 231–32). more recently, researchers have also paid careful attention to the temporality of infrastructures, for instance, how they can stretch beyond human lifetimes (bowker 2015), or how they can be used to think through other nonhuman scales and time spans (anand, gupta, and appel 2018; hetherington 2019; joniak-lüthi 2019; cons 2020; lord, drew, and gergan 2020). less clear is how daily negotiations of time used to maintain the movement of air traffic work in practice. when does time pressure conform to wider societal hierarchies, and when does it work against them? in the scenario described earlier, for example, an international on-time departure produces considerable pressure to curtail the time of national air traffic control. with more people flying, there is less space and time available for aircraft to fit in the sky. the gaps between the expectations of international aviation turnover times and the on-the-ground (or in-the-air) experiences of maintaining nepali air infrastructure become wider. since technological or material fixes to the problem of congestion—such as a new runway or radar system—are long-term investments, these immediate, everyday experiences of prioritizing who goes first in the queue reinforces structural hierarchies within the broader aviation sector. shrinking time is an issue, especially when paired with volatile but not random weather that bears specific local and seasonal patterns. at one small airport in nepal, you can look across the runway to the terminal on the other side from the vantage point of the air traffic control tower. dipak, a young air traffic controller, gestured toward the big window of the terminal. i peered through the binoculars, usually used for foreign object debris (fods) like stray equipment or wild animals that could interfere with the safety of the runway. the weather was not good, and the incoming flights from ktm were delayed. i could see the passengers looking impatient and anxious, and got a shock once i could clearly make out their expressions: they were glaring right at us! thankfully, i remembered that they could not see individual faces through the darkened glass, but the stares were unmistakable. they were willing the controllers in the tower to do something, to fix their delayed flights. the pressure was so immense, even i could feel it. dipak gestured again toward the terminal: “see? they can see us. if we go over there they will ‘attack’ us. especially if their flights are cancelled.” it was only a few hundred meters away, but he said he “never goes over to that side.” in the afternoon, the airport ended up closing because of visibility under five kilometers; standardized limits such as these became proxies for making decisions with wider repercussions for the network of flight connections. two station managers for different domestic airlines came up to the tower after the closure announcement. they were having tea, eating momos (dumplings), and looking out at the clouds, chatting to the controllers about the lack of visibility. suman, another controller, uttered sarcastically under his breath, “yeah, you can tell these guys are meteorologists.” with such dynamic, unpredictable weather patterns, everyone who has spent some time in the industry suddenly becomes a climate expert. activity at this airport happens in bursts that are based on short windows of time, often dependent on the elements—an hour when the sky clears, two hours when the runway at the hub airport is less congested, another half an hour before the airport closes at sunset, since there is no nighttime lighting system. compare these short windows of time with other airports that are open 24/7 and have night technology or ils (instrument landing system) approach systems that stretch flying time to minimize disruption and allow aircraft to land at any time in nearly all kinds of weather. while excellent work exists in the aeromobilities literature on frictions, congestions, and disruptions (martin 2011; lin 2014)—such as during the eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in 2010—too much emphasis remains on how the hypermodern, technological aspects of aviation systems work mostly in global industrialized societies (see, for example, budd and adey 2009; kitchin and dodge 2014). the nepali case shows how global temporal regimes structure time in ways that have profound implications, and productive use, for those already relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy of global aviation. at suman’s rural airport, disruption was the norm, the way that “uninterrupted [electric] power” is actually a surprise in parts of the global south (gupta 2015, 559). suman found himself adhering to the temporal expectations of urban and international passengers unused to such regular interruptions in aviation. pilots that flew trekking tourists to mountain airports encountered similar kinds of time pressures, and even abuse from passengers: due to many atmospheric pressure changes, temperature changes, we have lots of local weather. due to that reason, there are lots of delays, lots of cancellations, but the passengers do not understand those problems. and sometimes even passengers try to push us: “why are you not flying? we’ve been waiting. why are you not flying? that [other] aircraft flew fifteen minutes back, or maybe half an hour back, but why are you not flying?” but in half an hour, there are lots of changes, especially in the mountainous areas. when the wind blows from the mountains, the weather changes in five minutes. so maybe that other aircraft was capable to land, but we won’t be able to land, because the weather has already changed. those things are not understood by passengers. and there are even more pressures by the management, the marketing, and that pressure comes to us. to illustrate, one of the airport operations staff members read out angry tripadvisor comments: “terrible airline. the weather looked fine. the other airlines flights were on time. why didn’t we go?” these narratives reveal the pressure to keep the turnaround time at a minimum and to generate profits in a sector where the risk of cancellations and accidents is fairly high. weather can also be considered part of the local infrastructure, something that the global discourses of standards do not always take into account. temporal hierarchies of corporate on-time performance often omit the nonhuman, the fluctuating weather or surprise bird strikes. a weather event can turn such a hierarchy on its head, creating both disruption and movement in unexpected ways (birtchnell and büscher 2011). for instance, a domestic flight can obtain clearance for takeoff if its flightpath is unaffected by the weather, while the international flight is left behind on the ground by a storm that comes in a few minutes later. these contingencies in aerial space, where aircraft fly through different kinds of weather, stand in stark contrast to tim ingold’s “weather world,” a world predicated on the sameness of the human experience of traveling along a ground conditioned by the air (ingold 2010). geopolitics and chronopolitics: global aviation over nepali aviation in time and the other, johannes fabian (2014) argues for paying closer attention to cultural experiences of temporality, in particular to how and when coevalness is denied. because some nations or groups in certain parts of the world are considered more “backward” in time as others move forward, fabian claims that “geopolitics has its ideological foundations in chronopolitics” (see also virilio 1986; fabian 2014; huebener et al. 2017, 6; zee 2017; chu 2019). helga tawil-souri (2017, 384, 412) eloquently writes about this phenomenon in “checkpoint time,” describing how palestinians are forced to travel more slowly through checkpoints than others, and “are perceived and perceive themselves as stuck in a system that belongs to the past.” the production of temporal hierarchies also clearly emerges in the aviation sector. for example, at international aviation conferences, operations managers in nepal note that they feel isolated from a larger international community because they are seen as lagging behind in terms of technology and facilities. to some extent, the aviation personnel agree with this characterization of temporal inequality. arun, an operations manager for a domestic airline, said that he felt extremely left out of the aviation world: “nepalese aviation is still isolated. i know the fact that there are so many things that we are not able to meet up to, but we are not in the community you know, the aviation community. the international aviation community, where we can interact with people, share our problems.” a clear sense of frustration emerged as the global market demands unrealistic temporal expectations. arun continued: when i go to a program in global aviation, they’re talking about 2030, 2040, 2050—oh, my god. i’m there talking about 2018—how to cope with the flights, how to delay the traffic, how to adjust the system. oh, my god. where am i? i just get out and get a coffee and i want a cigarette. that’s the reality. that’s my real reality…. we are training people to cope with 2018 only…. the training design [here in nepal] is how to deal with the problem, not the upcoming problem! this stark inequality in the world of strategic aviation planning—where iata predictions and strategic plans are at least two or three decades ahead, while caan is seen as simply putting out fires—means that arun feels like nepal has failed to even take part in the imagined futures of the global conversation in aviation. thomas yarrow (2017, 568), in his research on the volta resettlement dam project in ghana, writes that the stalled project has created “a palpable sense of the failure of modernization to arrive, associated with an unstable and unresolved relationship between the actuality of existing circumstances and the imagined futures that continue to be projected from the unrealized plan.” but unlike in yarrow’s case, where there is a feeling of lament, and modernization is seen in the past tense, nepali aviation personnel firmly believe they form a necessary part of the international aviation world—and by extension the flow of global capital—while timeframes are determined by international aviation regulators and protocol-defining agencies. their views resemble what karine gagné and others refer to as “technocratic time” in recent work on himalayan hydropower (gagné 2019; lord, drew, and gergan 2020). the standards and expectations of the aviation world are often described as disconnected from specific local conditions, which seems ironic in an industry that prides itself on movement across this divide. while global aviation is ordered by regulators, alliances, and manufacturers, regulation is perhaps too strong of a word for what happens in practice. for instance, icao has no enforcement authority. multicarrier alliances (such as star alliance and oneworld) mean that there is a semblance of international cooperation, even though each airline has to comply with national civil aviation requirements (batteau 2001, 206). yet the “softer” nature of icao still sets international standards and recommended practices in aviation that are understood as baseline practices for aviation authorities around the world, even if these recommendations are not feasible in parts of the global south. this notion of not being aligned with the temporal expectations of global aviation futures becomes evident in the self-deprecating jokes among aviation workers in nepal, who perhaps again turn the blame and responsibility for inefficiency inward, and use the trope of future-forward global aviation to express frustration at the slowness of state-level infrastructural improvements. in a conversation with dispatchers from three different airlines, much laughter erupted after one man said that “the equipment we are using does not operate in the twenty-first century. i think we’re using it for the twentieth century!” the international airport itself becomes a temporal symbol of what one operations manager called a “deep shame”: even when i enter nepal—with due respect to my country and my airport that we have—i feel like i’m still in the eighties, you know. early eighties. i just look at the infrastructure, the airport, particularly when we come from outside. like you have a flight from heathrow or any good airport from japan and you land in tia [ktm], you look at the tower, you look at the facility, and you think, “i’m still in the early eighties.” it feels the same! the irony or the fun part is that foreigners like that. most of them have not seen such an environment in their country, or some have seen it maybe, but like thirty years ago or forty years before. even the airport becomes a material symbol of the past. foreign visitors emphasize this past for its retro or quaint nature, and landing at ktm—with its wooden engraved pillars and a single rickety escalator—becomes part of the entire passenger experience of flying to “traditional” nepal. ramesh the air traffic controller also recalled his shock at the cost-cutting measures of european and north american carriers at an airline industry event in europe: “they are obsessed with … talking about how to save one cent! by making lighter aircraft, by direct routing, right? because [europeans] already have infrastructure, you have technology.” he claimed that every international aviation event is targeted toward attracting business, but in kathmandu, there is in fact no more space at the sole international airport to allow more airlines in. “because we [did] not plan from twenty years ago.” although numerous other airports around the world are also approaching capacity (e.g., schiphol airport in amsterdam), the problem, according to ramesh, is that the lack of long-term planning directives from nepali ministries leads to a loss of business in nepal. but perhaps feeling “behind” has more to do with the unequal values produced through the overlaps between the temporal and infrastructural hierarchies of global aviation, in other words, the structures of power exercised by dominant global aviation actors in both time and space. if everything does, and must, speed up to create seamless turnovers of capital, the models of success are high-capacity, economically successful international carriers and airport hubs like emirates and heathrow, where new air traffic–management technologies like time based separation and weather based separation have enabled more planes to fit in the sky by spacing aircraft evenly in fluctuating headwinds. many aviation workers stressed that the underlying factor in lagging behind the curve was not so much a lack of money for resources, since chinese and nepali contractors as well as the asian development bank were investing significant sums in infrastructure expansion projects, including three new international airports and enhancements to air navigation systems (caan 2018). the lack of a stable political system, on the other hand, often came up in conversation. over the past twenty years, huge ups and downs have characterized nepali politics: a decade-long civil war, the royal family massacre in 2001, as well as various formations of congress, including members of maoist and communist parties, and, as of 2019, a coalition government. one senior aircraft engineer said, “the problem i see is that here in nepal, the government changes. one government doesn’t last for the year. so there is a problem at the policy level, so that nobody can fix [anything]. so now we have a stable government; the communists they hold the majority, so let’s hope they run for five years and fingers crossed … because we want these things to be sorted, for us, for the aviation industry and for him as well [pointing to a young flight dispatcher looking for a new job].” five-year policy implementation plans are common, but aviation workers become frustrated when they suspect that the government will change before the period is up. the policies and plans inevitably change as well, so while implementation is often unpredictable or delayed, new modes and arrays of political actors come to the fore (nightingale et al. 2018, 853). however, even these new configurations have led to more than a bit of cynicism; as another engineer said, the “bureaucratic people … are saying ‘we are seeing the long term,’ but the logic isn’t working that way.” as an example, he described an aircraft grounded because of a mechanical problem, for which it took the new management team a month and a half to simply decide to replace the engine. again he mentioned feeling removed from the world and time of global aviation, seen as consistent, stable, and future-oriented. these stories resemble what dannah k. dennis (2017, 104) has written about kathmandu city roads, congested with traffic and disrepair: “making one’s way across the city is a daily experience of grinding, tedious, frustrating slowness…. this physical feeling of being stuck, even while one may still be moving, mirrors the political inertia that has characterized nepal for the last several decades.” a representative from the nepal branch of a large international airline also used the idea of global aviation time to vent his frustration with uncertainty in nepali politics: ahmed: over the past two years, i worked with four different ministers. now we are waiting for the fifth…. they cannot make any long-term plans, but aviation needs to be planned. when we go to a meeting with our [airline company] president, he said, “i am sure you should be thinking about 2053. i hope you’ve already started,” they told me just like that. so aviation is an industry where you have to plan. me: so how do you plan for 2053 in nepal? [everyone bursts out laughing.] to be global is to be working on the future. if nepal does not meet the temporal expectations of planning for 2053, it, and the various airlines based there, will get relegated to the bottom of the hierarchy in the world of global aviation. here, in aviators’ narratives of privileging the international over the domestic and of lagging behind global future standards, we learn something about “the time of the global.” this time, marked by new technology and capital growth, is used to represent what aviators believe nepal has not yet managed to achieve. nepali aviation workers feel ostracized for all the reasons detailed: poor resources, shame at the airport from the 1980s, the lack of a stable government. following a number of fatal aircraft crashes between 2010 and 2014, the icao and the eu blacklisted nepali airlines. while the icao removed nepal from the list of carriers with significant safety concerns in 2017, it remains on the eu air safety blacklist, hampering nepal airlines’ idealistic future plans for long-haul direct flights to europe (but not impeding renewed flights to labor migration destinations in asia under headlines like “winning back the skies”). these combined constraints continue to paint a picture of nepal as a chaotic, crumbling, failed state, underscoring the image of the nepali nation and its individual people as either incompetent and cutting corners or romanticized as quaint, living in a different timeframe. so while nepali aviation staff work to make the infrastructure run in kathmandu, a hub of migration to southeast asia and the gulf states, the feeling of being isolated from international aviation conferences still dominated by europe and north america demonstrates what sarah sharma (2014, 25; emphasis added) argues, that “keeping people in and out of time is a form of social control, one of the conditions of possibility for contemporary global capital.” the feeling of being snubbed from the global aviation community has a knock-on effect, with tremendous stakes for both the safe maintenance of the local air infrastructure and the system as a whole. but being part of the world of global aviation requires careful training and staying on top of updated standard operating procedures, which of course takes time. pilots and controllers need to log a certain number of hours of flight time to obtain varying levels of certification, and different airlines have different hourly expectations; this is what marcel laflamme (2018, 98) has called an “economy of hours.” in nepal, because of its difficult terrain and history of air disasters, these hours are long—it takes 3,500 hours to become a captain, compared to the 1,500 hours minimum in many other parts of the world. as a result, aviation authorities and airlines in the global south often hire foreign engineers and pilots with the required flying hours to keep up with overcapacity and increasing flights, prioritizing efficiency and short-term solutions over the longer-term investment in training local aviation personnel. in nepal and in many other parts of the global south, these international pilots earn significantly more than local pilots. when i asked a manager of a southeast asian carrier based in nepal to tell me what is needed most in the aviation industry, he replied: manpower. we need skilled, licensed people. the physical infrastructure will come; caan and the country will see to it eventually, but manpower is more difficult. it takes time to invest in people. people come back from training and studying, and the jobs are given to foreigners! rather than foreigners, it needs to be nepalese. why pay a foreigner more than a nepali? this is humiliation for nepalese who don’t get the same amount. these limitations are very unethical. hiring qualified foreign pilots at a higher salary is a quick fix to keep the infrastructure afloat in the short term. it is partly a response to a broader global pilot shortage, while at the same time shunning long-term investment in local people and reinforcing existing geopolitical binaries. and although the exact composition of these hierarchies is changing—chinese pilots are now being hired in place of european pilots—these processes continue to “reduce time to a medium for the short-term generation of capital and the evaluation of worth” (bear 2016, 489). the hiring of foreign pilots over local pilots for stopgap gain constitutes a temporal deferral that has wider repercussions, mirroring ramesh’s earlier lament that international departures seem to take priority over domestic ones. at these moments, infrastructural hierarchies and temporal hierarchies overlap through both forms of air pressure’s effects, edging nepali actors further out of the global discussion of aviation futures, though the idea of global aviation time is harnessed to express nationalistic frustration with the ways these structures are shaped: why shouldn’t nepali airlines and individuals be prioritized in these circumstances at the expense of other carriers? as aviation personnel lament their international position, their criteria for judging the nation remains grounded in a neoliberal evaluation of time: its suitability for investment in the future or its ability to plan for continuity. the lack of cutting-edge aviation technologies in nepal is often attributed to governmental unpredictability, unstable regimes, and a lack of political continuity. even so, these situations also demand more time to resolve. this increases the pressure on aviation personnel, who must reconcile the time of the nation and its requirements for internal transformation with the speed and tempo necessary to harmonize the global flows that intersect in its space. the effects resonate in both directions. aviation workers in nepal must have more time to keep aircraft in the air, in part because they lack the space and material resources to maintain this efficiency domestically. and yet, their successful efforts enable international airlines to valorize capital directed toward the maintenance of air infrastructure systems elsewhere, in other parts of the world. when investment is made in infrastructural projects in nepal itself—construction for a second international airport is well underway—workers know that the labor necessary to sustain it will need to be performed in the future. aviators are participating in and enabling an in-between kind of temporality, one not entirely about the backwardness of the nation, but one in which their time and labor become necessary to build a broader anticipatory future. pointing out these deferrals of time is both a source of vexation and a justification for working toward greater control over time and space in the years to come. weather permitting: in the time of the global in contemporary discourses on the practices and politics of aviation infrastructure, uneven geographical understandings are often framed in terms of time. focusing on the ways that global time is both structured and used bring us to a more multidimensional understanding of globalization, a counterpoint to the more spatial emphases of critical logistics and ‘scapes (appadurai 1990). the two sets of experiences of air pressure outlined in this essay are intertwined in that they are both subject to capitalist speedups that play out distinctively in the context of nepal and its place in what michael herzfeld (2004) calls a “global hierarchy of value,” due to international standards that do not work as well in the specific local context. international aviation regulators set the plannable future at the year 2050, and are not always fully cognizant of how such temporal expectations play out on the ground (or in the air, for that matter) in places other than the global north. in the aviation industry, the seamlessness of infrastructure capitalism “should be” a global system and therefore uninterrupted. but interruption, bottlenecks, and choke points (cons 2018) can also push the domestic ahead of the international, keeping traffic—and capital—flowing in unanticipated ways. aviators in nepal highlight their experiences of the pressure of the time of the global—providing a kind of diagnosis of the overall unequal system of aviation infrastructure—while also contributing to these inequalities in ways not nearly as visible as a new airport might be, through the lens of the time of the nation. at one mountain airport in nepal, i sat watching the small but sturdy turboprop “twin otter” planes from kathmandu soar in, one after another. the few parking bays were full; while the cabin crew and operations teams attempted to quickly deplane the arriving passengers and board a queue of ten to fourteen departing passengers. the next plane to land was barely visible in the mist, hovering over the mountains and slowly beginning to descend into the valley. with a sudden rush of sound and air, it roared along the mountainside runway and shuddered to a quick stop—the stol (short takeoff, short landing) runway is only several hundred meters long. the early afternoon weather was moving in, and there seemed to be no parking space for more aircraft. the passengers began disembarking on the runway itself. on the digital display in the tower, the wind read eight knots; if it went above ten, the airport would close. the same was true for visibility under five kilometers. later, several pilots came up for some frothy coffee and a quick break. they said to us, “it was bad out there. they’re making us fly.” one of the controllers told me that aviation personnel felt like they were just keeping their heads above water, trying to do their best to keep air traffic flowing as smoothly as possible while working under a plethora of circumstances beyond their control, including nonhuman factors such as hailstorms and mountain clouds. but congestion and disruption can also prove productive in curious ways (carse, cons, and middleton 2018; carse et al. 2020). veteran himalayan pilots reported that climate change has indeed altered their experiences of flying. they said that the weather above the mountains had become more volatile and unpredictable over the past few decades, with more turbulence, leading to more delays. “there are two kinds of weather,” remarked a pilot who regularly flies to remote locations in nepal. one type is “complete weather,” serious storms for which flights must be cancelled. the other kind of weather, according to him, is weather that you can do something about, given the right equipment. this is when it’s dark or foggy, “but you are not able to fly because of not having the technology. that is where it hits you. that is when passengers get irritated, we as employees get irritated, the [aviation] authority—they are not doing anything. we could have flown in this situation!” yet in many aviation circles, being able to fly manually in unpredictable weather above inaccessible mountains is seen as an asset, since aircraft have become increasingly automated. the (re)valorization and (re)strengthening of manual or hand-flying skills is thus a key recommendation in critiques of the reliance on automation in flight (haslbeck and hoermann 2016). in the aftermath of several accidents such as the boeing 737 max crashes in ethiopia and indonesia, concerns have emerged about young pilots being “lulled into a sense of security” by automation; the u.s.-based federal aviation administration has even suggested that crew now turn off autopilot on clear days to hone their hand-flying skills (mark 2017; nicas and wichter 2019). aviation enthusiasts on social media forums around the world discuss the latest flight simulator programs that reproduce tough airport landings and takeoffs in bhutan and nepal, considered the highest level of difficulty, while nepali pilots laugh and say that they wish they had had access to these programs before flying for the first time to these airports. adriana petryna (2018, 588) has noted that both firefighters and seafarers have a “continual capacity for recalibration” when faced with changing environmental conditions, and ashley carse (2020, 4) has also noted that the manual “feel” for piloting container ships has in fact increased in importance for transport authorities as vessels grow in size and sea levels continue to rise. like pilots who fly to high-altitude airports in inclement weather, they must manually adjust for change to avoid disaster. this understanding of the nuances and fluctuations of the skies—of clouds, mist, storms, and turbulence—flips the temporal-infrastructural hierarchy on its head. here, nepali civil aviators are perceived by other industry professionals as cutting edge because they possess the increasingly rare skills to manually maneuver aircraft in emergency situations that automation such as autopilots are sometimes unable to fully detect or solve. with increasingly volatile, turbulent skies, caused in part by emissions from the aviation industry itself, those able to deal with such weather unaided by technology are seen as ahead of the game. as we have seen, the time of the global is both controlling and useful; it is oppressive but can be harnessed. here, the use of analog technology is not seen as some sort of “turning back the clock” to early twentieth-century civil aviation, but as a unique asset specific to the experiences of being an aviator in nepal—it is what is needed to move forward and anticipate the future of climate uncertainty. the question, of course, is who will use these skills, for what purpose, and to what extent they will be appropriated for the survival of capital. this, then, is how the overlaps between infrastructural and temporal hierarchies point to unpredictable new futures, and this very uncertainty is what generates both frustration and hope. abstract while the aviation industry is dominated by narratives of smooth, unending growth and future planning, in practice it is profoundly striated and asymmetrical. through an ethnographic study of how air traffic controllers, pilots, and operations staff in nepal experience “air pressure,” this article demonstrates how understandings of the uneven geography of aviation infrastructure are framed in terms of time. nepali airports are often perceived as “lagging behind” or “quaint” in comparison to other airports around the world, and air traffic congestion in nepal can create bottlenecks that in turn have massive implications for the wider system. yet some kinds of disruption—such as unpredictable weather—reconfigure familiar hierarchies, bringing the value of nepali aviators’ knowledge of how to manage difficult skies to the forefront of aviation futures. aviation personnel highlight and expose severe inequalities in global aviation infrastructure systems while also contributing to them in ways that reveal specific ideas about the future of the nation. unravelling these “tangles of temporalities” may provide a better understanding of how global temporal regimes are harnessed so as to shape lives. [aviation; temporality; infrastructure; mobility; futures; nepal] सारांश उड्डयन उद्योग सहज तथा निरन्तर वृद्धि हुने र भावी योजना बनिरहने क्षेत्र हो भन्ने भाष्य हावी छ, तर व्यवहारमा यो अत्यन्त खण्डित र विषम छ । नेपालका हवाई ट्राफिक नियन्त्रक, विमान चालक, र हवाई सेवा सञ्चालन कर्मचारीहरूले कसरी “हवाई चाप” लाई अनुभव गर्छन् भन्ने विषयको एथ्नोग्राफिक अध्ययनको आधारमा यो लेखले उड्डयन पूर्वाधारको असमान धरातललाई कसरी कालिक ढाँचामा बुझ्ने गरिन्छ भन्ने देखाउन खोजेको छ । विश्वका अरू विमानस्थलहरूको तुलनामा नेपालका विमानस्थलहरू “पिछडिएका” र “विचित्रका” मानिए पनि, नेपालमा हवाई ट्राफिकको घुइँचोले विभिन्न अवरोधहरू सिर्जना गर्न सक्छन्, जसले सिङ्गो प्रणालीमा बृहत् प्रभाव पार्न सक्ने कुराको सङ्केत गर्छ । अप्रत्याशित मौसम परिवर्तन जस्ता केही अवरोधले उड्डयन उद्योगमा विद्यमान श्रेणीयताहरू (हायरार्की) को पुनर्विन्यास गरिदिन्छन्, जसले नेपाली उड्डयन कर्मचारीहरूले विषम परिस्थितिमा गर्दै आएको हवाई ट्राफिक व्यवस्थापनको ज्ञानको महत्त्वलाई उड्डयन भविष्य बजारको अग्रपङ्तिमा ल्याइदिन्छ । उड्डयन कर्मचारीहरूले वैश्विक उड्डयन पूर्वाधार प्रणालीहरूमा रहेका गम्भीर असमानताहरू झल्काउनका साथै ती असमानताहरू सिर्जना गर्नमा पनि योगदान गर्छन्, र राष्ट्रको भविष्य बारेका निश्चित विचारहरूलाई उद्घाटित गर्छन् । यी “कालिकताहरूका गुजुल्टा” को फुकाइले कसरी जनजीवनलाई प्रभाव पार्न वैश्विक कालिक व्यवस्थालाई उपयोगमा ल्याइन्छ भन्ने बारे अझ राम्ररी बुझ्न मद्दत गर्न सक्छ । [उड्डयन; कालिकता; पूर्वाधार; गतिशीलता; भविष्य; नेपाल] notes acknowledgments my utmost appreciation goes to the members of the aviation community in nepal who took the time to chat with me, particularly the aviation nepal team; i cannot thank you enough. chris nelson and three anonymous reviewers facilitated one of the most supportive peer review procedures i have ever experienced. mahesh raj maharjan, anisa bhutia, and sneha moktan provided invaluable assistance with the translation of the abstract. finally, i would like to acknowledge all the thoughtful comments and suggestions from marcel laflamme and jason cons, as well as from friends and colleagues at 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215–41. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.06. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 83-109, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.04 sovereignty in drag: on fakes, foreclosure, and unbecoming states cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 52-82, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.03 sovereignty in drag: on fakes, foreclosure, and unbecoming states rebecca bryant utrecht university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8079-7704 two checkpoints and a un buffer zone split the most central shopping street of nicosia, cyprus’s divided capital. before the island’s conflict began, ledra street was an artery of trade in the city,1 and that trade boomed again when the checkpoints dividing it opened to pedestrian traffic in 2008, after almost forty-five years of closure. today, if you walk through that war-scarred border area, you also cross the threshold between life in a recognized eu-member state in the island’s south, the republic of cyprus (roc), and an unrecognized state in its north, the “turkish republic of northern cyprus” (trnc). one of the most commonplace manifestations of that division is also the main reason many cypriots cross the line these days: the opportunity to eat, drink, and especially shop on “the other side.”2 while many turkish cypriots cross to the south to visit starbucks and mcdonald’s, or to shop at h&m, many greek cypriots cross to the north to eat turkish kebabs, buy cheap gasoline and medications, and select from a wide variety of name-brand knockoffs. indeed, the “pirate state” in the island’s north has long been a center for pirated goods, so that when you cross the checkpoint into the city’s north, you enter a realm in which the so-called real and the so-called fake become almost indistiguishable.3 figure 1. a sign at the ledra street checkpoint prohibiting the crossing of counterfeit goods into nicosia’s south. photo by rebecca bryant. one day as i was crossing from south to north my attention was drawn to some sport shoes whose design, stitching, and labeling all made them look remarkably like the “real thing.” a shop assistant, a young woman, caught me staring at the shoes and inquired if i would like to try them on. i asked her, “these are not real, right?” she smiled with a slightly embarassed, conspiratorial glance and said no. i inquired if they were made in turkey. “yes, of course,” she replied. “and the real ones are also made in turkey, aren’t they?” i asked. this had been a source of confusion to me for some time, because with the expansion of turkey’s textile sector, many global brands such as levi’s or benetton have production operations in that country. this had left me wondering if perhaps the products that looked so real but were supposedly fake might actually be discards, leftovers, or extra production from these factories (see also crǎciun 2012). figure 2. some of the assortment of “brands” available in the island’s north. photo by rebecca bryant. “yes,” this young woman clarified for me, “they’re made in turkey, but in different factories.” i nodded, and just to be polite asked if i might try on a pair of “nikes.” she ushered me into the shop, stacked high with pirated items. when she brought out the shoes, i pursued the topic. “so, what’s the biggest difference between these shoes and the real thing?” “it’s the quality,” she answered. “the materials, the way they’re made.” and then she volunteered something that i thought even more interesting. “but none of the products that come here are the real thing.” i was a bit shocked, because outside of touristic areas such as this one, which had been a center for pirated goods since the 1980s, the post-millennium period had brought an expansion of global capital in the island’s north. after the island’s division in 1974, turkish cypriots began to move to suburbs outside the walled city, leaving the shopping district in which i found myself that day mainly to tourists, students, and laborers. and as i will explain, in the early 2000s global capital for the first time made its mark in the north in the form of new shopping malls and high-end shops and cafés. figure 3. labels and “labels.” photo by rebecca bryant. “so, you mean even the nike shop in dereboyu doesn’t sell real nikes?” i asked with some incredulity, referring to the main shopping street of north nicosia outside the walls. everything about the tommy hilfiger, adidas, converse, mango, and other brand-name stores on that street—from the decorations to the promotions to of course the prices and quality—suggested that they were nothing less than real. “do you know that for sure?” she nodded, then looked around and smiled again in a conspiratorial way. “last year i bought a pair of converse from the shop there, and within a few months they started to fall apart.” figure 4. the “real” thing: a shop on dereboyu, the main shopping street outside the walls in north nicosia. photo by rebecca bryant. i remarked that i was not so sure about the lasting power of converse in general as a brand, but i also was struck by the young woman’s logic, which in fact i had heard only about an hour earlier while shopping in a brand-name shoe store in the south. in that store, two turkish cypriot women had been conversing while the husband of one tried on shoes. “we have clarks and brands like that,” said one, referring to shoe stores in the north, “but they’re just not comfortable. clarks are supposed to be comfortable, but these never are. i don’t believe they’re the real thing.” strikingly, in both cases the failure of a “real” brand to meet expectations gets chalked up to a presumed fakeness, a quality assumed so thoroughly to permeate the island’s north that it infiltrates even products we have every reason to think “real.” when i began research on cyprus in the early 1990s, there was no chance of mistaking “fake” for “real”—or vice versa. there were no nikes, adidas, or other brand-names to be bought—except in their pirated versions. the north’s status as a “pirate state” was visually and viscerally reflected in the way that in every realm of life they were faking it. in place of mcdonald’s you found big mac, in place of pizza hut you had pizza hat, in place of kentucky fried chicken there was kermiya fried chicken—kermiya being a neighborhood of north nicosia. they used similar designs, packaging, and recipes to the original, but they were fakes. and obvious ones.4 figure 5. signs of simulation: the now defunct big mac in nicosia. photo by rebecca bryant. figure 6. kermiya fried chicken, also now defunct, named after a neighborhood of north nicosia. courtesy of imgur. https://imgur.com/bzvwele. my encounter with the shopgirl, then, points to a problem, or a puzzle, that i have observed because of my long-term engagement with cyprus since the early 1990s. in the island’s north, i have witnessed a transition from a period when people lived with fakeness as an everyday part of being citizens of a so-called pirate state, but where those same citizens still engaged fairly enthusiastically in statecraft, in other words, they seemed to believe in their state, to a period when the signs and symbols of fakeness have mostly disappeared from citizens’ everyday lives, but they seem to doubt their state’s “stateness.” friends often sardonically call their administration an uyduruk devlet, a “made-up state,” a way of referring to life in the island’s north as one of quotation marks and a certain kind of mimetic fabrication. this idea of the made-up state overlaps rather neatly with an important strain of literature in the social sciences that describes the state and sovereignty as social constructs and questions their reification (see, especially, biersteker and weber 1996; mitchell 1990, 1991; weber 1992, 1995, 1998; walker 1993, 1996). the mundane practices that perform the state and manifest sovereignty have been variously called “prosaic stateness” (painter 2006), “tacit sovereignty” (mcconnell 2009, 2016; also wilson 2016), and “performative sovereignty” (bobick 2017). this general acceptance that the state and sovereignty are social constructs also makes it tempting to use the so-called or pseudo state as a proxy for the made-up or make-believe (navaro-yashin 2012) nature of the state and sovereignty more generally. however, uyduruk means not only made-up or fake but also jerry-built or sloppy, thus pointing not only to the state’s construction but also to its deconstruction. it points to the idea of the state (abrams 1988) that certain anthropologists have recently argued produces hope, longing, or yearning (fehérváry 2002; greenberg 2011; jansen 2015), though it may also produce demoralization (rajković 2018), ambivalence (jovanović 2018), and cynicism (steinmüller and brandstädter 2015). the jerry-built state implies an entity that never quite becomes what it should be. while i take the literature on the performance of the state as a starting point, then, my own concern is the point at which such performances succeed, or indeed, where they might fail, even for those enacting them. my argument uses examples of engagement with an unrecognized state to show how, in the context of globalization and transnational institutions, citizens of that de facto entity learn, in quotidian ways, to perform not stateness and sovereignty, but rather “stateness” and “sovereignty,” persistently calling attention to the made-up nature of their claims. i use ethnographic examples to develop the concept of the unbecoming—in this case, the unbecoming state, with citizens who, in the terms of popular sovereignty, are its unbecoming sovereigns.5 the concept of unbecoming is more than simply a counterpoint to the metaphysics of becoming—characterized by plasticity, potentiality, and openness—that joão biehl and peter locke (2010) propose should be central to anthropological theorizing. rather, i use the unbecoming to capture a specific ethnographic modality of futurity, foreclosure, where what is to come, or what could or should come, is already ruled out. engaging with queer theory, particularly judith butler’s discussions of foreclosed desires, i show how performances of “stateness” most closely resemble drag and camp—and in resembling them also point us to ambiguities in the definition of supposedly real stateness. moreover, i show how the foreclosure of particular desires to have a “real” state also orients citizens to the future (bryant and knight 2019), entailing forms of preemptive action that are simultaneously melancholic and parodic and that emerge when certain options are always already impossible. the queer art of camping sovereignty just a few months before the death of rauf denktaş, turkish cypriots’ former president and longtime political leader, i turned on a local television channel in north cyprus to see him in an interview. on the program, denktaş was discussing with the host his persistent position that for turkish cypriots and greek cypriots to negotiate a settlement on a more or less equal footing, the turkish cypriot state needed first to be recognized, “even if only for a minute,” as he used to say. the phones were ringing on the program, and he was suddenly confronted with an agitated caller who insistently asked him, “are we sovereign? [biz egemen miyiz?] can you really say that we’re sovereign?” the year was 2011, and by that time i had grown rather used to these expressions of disbelief in sovereignty and so did not find the caller’s question very surprising. i was surprised, however, by denktaş’s pithy reply. he quipped, “if you believe you’re sovereign, you’re sovereign. sovereignty is a matter of belief” (egemen olduğuna inanırsan, egemensin. egemenlik inanç meselesidir). denktaş clearly suggested sovereignty as something made up, in the sense of being performed or fabricated. indeed, his assertion that “sovereignty is a matter of belief” recalls butler’s (1990, 179) well-known description of gender as “a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.” moreover, the statement, “if you believe you’re sovereign, you’re sovereign,” in response to the caller’s sceptical, even angry question already implies that turkish cypriots are suffering from a failure of imagination. but why had turkish cypriots’ imaginations begun to fail them at this particular moment? after all, unrecognized or de facto states are by definition states that the rest of the world says should not exist. from their inception, they find themselves subject to international condemnation and hemmed in by embargoes and isolations. they are states “in practice” as opposed to the de jure state, the state “in law.” the invocation of practice acknowledges that such entities have all the institutions of governance, allowing them to hold elections and censuses, control their borders, provide health care and social security, and issue identity cards and passports (caspersen 2011; harvey and stansfield 2011; isachenko 2012; mcconnell 2016). believers in what is usually called the declaratory view of state sovereignty, such as denktaş, would argue that something that looks and acts like a state is obviously a state. yet proponents of the constitutive view of sovereignty counter that no matter how much one may perform stateness, one needs an audience to see and recognize the performance as such (see also rutherford 2012). if “international society participates in the social construction of sovereign states” (biersteker and weber 1996, 6), it is because they see and applaud such performances rather than turning their backs on them. by the time of the television program with the former president, turkish cypriots had already lived for close to four decades with their audiences’ rejection of their performance and claims of their “quasi-ness.” the trnc’s “parent state,” the one from which it broke away, had been established in 1960 with a power-sharing constitution between a greek-speaking, greek orthodox majority and a turkish-speaking, nominally muslim minority. three years later, that arrangement broke down into intercommunal violence, and the turkish-speaking minority retreated into armed enclaves, where they remained for almost a decade (bryant and hatay 2011). in 1974, a greek-sponsored coup against cyprus’s president brought turkey’s military intervention, the immediate effect of which was an ethnic cleansing of the north and the establishment of a turkish cypriot state there. turkish cypriot state-builders initially named that new entity the turkish federated state of cyprus, anticipating the bizonal federation that they aimed to build with what had become a de facto greek cypriot state in the island’s south (see bryant and hatay 2020). yet after almost a decade of failed negotiations, the turkish cypriot legislature declared the “sovereign” trnc in november 1983. the united nations and other international bodies immediately condemned this move, and the only state that dared recognize it was the republic of turkey, which also supported it militarily and financially. officially one may only use the name “turkish republic of northern cyprus” in quotation marks, while calling the boundary that defines that state a border could induce an international brouhaha. it becomes instead a so-called border, a “border,” or a ceasefire line. although de facto states multiplied in the early 1990s following the breakup of the soviet union (e.g., pegg 1998; meadwell 1999; kolstø 2000; cornell 2002), the trnc remains one of two states—the other being taiwan (friedman 2015)—that have shown the greatest longevity as de facto entities. nevertheless, today its citizens commonly believe that, as one of many recent newspaper articles phrased it, “a state called the trnc never existed and never will.” or, as a small business owner i interviewed remarked, “there’s no state here, there’s an administration.” today, expressions of skepticism about sovereignty are so common that to assert belief in the sovereignty of the trnc may earn you the label kafatasçı, the turkish word for phrenologist, indicating both nationalism bordering on racism and belief in something debunked. elsewhere, a coauthor and i discuss the contradictions of life in unrecognized states as a consequence of what we call “the paradox of the de facto” (bryant and hatay 2020). the paradox is that calling something “de facto” clearly points to facts on the ground that we perceive as undeniably real, even as it denies their reality. moreover, we see the way that the real persistently raises its head in the apparent compulsion to label everything about such states “de facto”: not only do they have de facto sovereignty and de facto passports but also de facto police, de facto judiciaries, de facto civil servants, de facto politicians, and of course de facto citizens. the parent states from which these entities broke away invariably take this labeling a step further, officially calling them “pseudo-states” in an attempt to deny their reality altogether. this also turns all the institutions i just named into pseudo-entities: pseudo-police, pseudo-courts, pseudo-passports. of course, all these attempts to deny something while at the same time acknowledging it as “real” produce a sense of absurdity in everyday life, one often infused with humor. for instance, after the opening of the checkpoints in 2003, turkish cypriots would often tease their greek cypriot friends that they should come more often to eat and drink in the north, because they could not gain weight from pseudo-food and pseudo-alcohol. and i have often heard greek cypriots joke with turkish cypriot friends about having their own pseudo-state, in reference to corruption and incompetence rampant in the island’s south (see also ioannou 2020, 64). in its more serious guise, however, the pseudo emphasizes falseness and pretending to be something one is not. the de facto, on the other hand, simultaneously acknowledges a “fact on the ground” and denies it (bryant and hatay 2020, 6–7). the de facto, then, points to foreclosure, or to the ways that certain “realities”—certain political forms and possibilities—are rendered impossible by the hegemonic norms of the international community. this foreclosure is graphically inscribed through the quotation marks that circumscribe de facto citizens’ lives. the quotation marks hand gesture encapsulates the simultaneous acknowledgment and denial that defines the de facto, even as it elides the de facto with the pseudo. so rather than saying “a de facto state” or “a pseudo-state,” one can say (with hand gestures) a “state.” rather than the trnc, one has the “trnc.” this tendency to emphasize the factitious by using quotation marks is something that susan sontag, in an early essay, had described as being at the heart of camp. “camp,” she remarks, “sees everything in quotation marks. it’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman’” (sontag 1999, 56). for the “camp sensibility,” as she calls it, quotation marks create a distancing, calling attention to “being-as-playing-a-role” (sontag 1999). in our case, the very serious intent of the pseudo-fying discourse is of course to cast the made-up state as “make-believe” or “quasi.” and yet as the parodic uses of that discourse above show, these attempts to stamp the de facto state as factitious instead often end up highlighting its “reality.” putting pseudo-state and pseudo-food in the same sentence as things that are equally (un)real performs what butler (1990, 177) refers to as “parodic displacement,” where “laughter emerges in the realization all along that the original was derived” (butler 1990, 176). certainly, when “passports,” “police cars,” and much of everyday life are surrounded by quotation marks in a proliferation of pseudo-fying, this creates an atmosphere in which “subversive confusions can be fostered” (butler 1990, 177). in this sense, even denktaş’s reply to the agitated caller might be seen as campy, in that, like butler’s primary example of drag, it foregrounds the constructedness and performativity of what the caller took to be essence. the former president suggests that the state is always “made up” in the dual sense of being invented (“sovereignty is a matter of belief”) and put on, performed. indeed, denktaş showed again and again that he was capable of such a reading, being a british-trained barrister who surrounded himself with other lawyers who knew international law and were prepared to demonstrate the arbitary and politicized way in which recognition is granted in the “international community.” when turkish cypriot politicians voted to declare the “sovereign” trnc in 1983, denktaş went to the un security council to defend this move, remarking, “you say that you consider the turkish republic of northern cyprus invalid. you considered china nonexistent for thirty years, eastern germany nonexistent for twenty-five years. it doesn’t matter. they are here with us, and i greet them with respect.”6 in other words, in refusing to recognize the trnc, he asserted, the un was simply emphasizing the arbitrary and made-up way in which any state becomes one. denktaş, then, while always a firm believer in the state, was also savvy enough to know that the state is not an essence but a performance. this seems, in turn, to point to the fundamental impossibility of “being a state and/or sovereignty” (weber 1998, 92; see also butler 1990, 18–19), and therefore to be in line with recent anthropological literature that uses exceptional cases to examine the “made-up” nature of the state as such (see, especially, navaro-yashin 2012; mcconnell 2016). yet this is not all it points to, for if the example tells us that the real is always already fake, that is, made up, it also simultaneously tells us that the fake is always already real, that is, a performance. we will return to this “double inversion,” as esther newton (1972) terms it, in the final section. for now, we may note that butler (1997b) explored at length this relation of fake and real in the psychic life of power, where she observed that the focus in her earlier writings on how drag reveals gender as an imitation did not suffice. “however attractive this formulation may have seemed,” she notes, “it didn’t address the question of how certain forms of disavowal and repudiation come to organize the performance of gender” (butler 1997b, 145). foreclosure is the term that butler uses to describe this, structuring performance through the impossibility of certain desires, the anticipatory curtailing of which she calls a preemptive loss. applied to the case at hand, we can see how butler’s description of what foreclosure implies would prove just as relevant to citizens of a foreclosed state. if sovereignty “is from the start out of the question, then it cannot happen, and if it does, it certainly did not. if it does, it happens only under the official sign of its prohibition and disavowal” (butler 1997b, 139). we see the official sign of such prohibition and disavowal in the ways that de facto states are most commonly described as “pirates,” and therefore outlaws, or “puppets” of another state, making them not “real” ones themselves. “they are stigmatised,” and “by their very nature, sit apart from the established international order” (ker-lindsay 2018, 362).7 in the postmillennial era, transnational entities have begun to engage with this de facto entity, but only because of turkish cypriots’ new willingness to disavow their state as a “state.” as we will see in the next section, such performances in the mode of disbelief structure the unbecoming state. the unbecoming emerges when confronted with something both normatively impossible and ineluctable: a “real” that must be “pseudo.” the state that is performed “is constituted by a set of disavowed attachments” that “carry the mark of impossibility with them, performing, as it were, as the impossible within the possible” (butler 1997b, 147). the performances of disavowal also render this entity unbecoming in the sense of unfit or unsuitable, in this case for the international order. indeed, as we will see, these performances of disavowal have created the more general sense that citizens of north cyprus are actually faking it, and that their sovereignty is as real as burger city and pizza hat. engagement and other parodies if one searches today on google maps for the turkish republic of northern cyprus, not only does it produce a result but it shows the entity in the south only as “cyprus” rather than as the “republic of cyprus.” when sharing this discovery on social media, one retired turkish cypriot woman, a former teacher, commented, “good morning, lovely people. google loves you! it turns out. … we exist!” the comment facetiously reflects both the preemptive loss with which turkish cypriots tend to anticipate the denial of their stateness and the surprise at the unexpected and arbitrary ways in which the rest of the world may sometimes acknowledge it. such surprise emerges because even if google maps seems to accept their sovereignty claims, the un and other international bodies persistently tell them that the space indicated by google maps cannot and should not exist. indeed, most citizens of this de facto entity have been conditioned by decades of isolation to the knowledge that the world pretends not to see them. after all, from 1974 to 2003, they lived under embargo and isolation, hindering their ability to travel and trade. international actors turned their backs, overlooked, and refused to engage in the forms of interaction that produce the audiences for whom one must perform. during that period, turkish cypriots’ single audience consisted of turkey, the only state that recognized them.8 turkey recognizes trnc passports, gives special scholarships to turkish cypriot youth, and is the one state with which they sign protocols. it has been and remains the only state that welcomes turkish cypriot leaders as heads of state, and it remains the first foreign state on which newly elected turkish leaders call. other governments have tended to pretend that the trnc does not exist. although turkish cypriots were equal partners in the roc’s constitution, international bodies avoided consulting them, to the extent that in 1997 the eu began an accession process with the greek cypriot-controlled government in the south that excluded the wishes of the roc’s turkish cypriot partners. figure 7. google maps and the sovereign “real.” map data: @2019 google. the eu’s acceptance of the roc, however, did lead to a political change in the north, when in 2002 turkish cypriots embraced a un reunification plan to create a federal cyprus in advance of the roc’s 2004 eu accession. turkish cypriots demonstrated for months, even against nationalist leaders such as denktaş, leading hard-line politicians to ease movement restrictions on the island and to open the checkpoints for people to cross the “border.” even though greek cypriots would go on to reject the un plan at referendum in 2004 (see bryant 2010), turkish cypriots’ overwhelming backing of it led to increased engagement with the international community. this period also saw a change of government in turkey, the north’s patron state, bringing global capital to the island in the form of hotel chains and cafés, cars and clothing. suddenly, turkish cypriots had a wealth of audiences in the form of eu bureaucrats and transnational institutions for whom they needed to perform. unexpectedly, though, they found that the script had changed. for much of the previous three decades, they had been cast in the contradictory role of either pirates who had made off with part of a recognized state or as puppets of their patron state, turkey.9 what unites these two otherwise entirely opposite roles is that both puppets and pirates display the wrong kind of will: puppets have no will, while pirates have too much of it. sara ahmed (2014, 79) describes such a “queer will” as one unable to will what it should be willing to will—in other words, one that stubbornly clings to a foreclosed desire. the mass demonstrations in support of the un reunification plan, on the other hand, had shown the right kind of will, a will to forego what the rest of the world perceived as either secessionism or occupation, instead displaying a political will for reunification. among other things, this will had been one to eu citizenship. after the 2003 easing of movement restrictions, almost 100,000 turkish cypriots crossed to the south to claim their soon-to-be-eu passports. with those in their pockets, however, it became much more difficult to know what they were to will, or how they were to perform. after all, as eu citizens, it made little sense to perform a state whose existence the eu denies. the eu accepts the roc’s claims of sovereignty over the whole island, meaning that after the roc’s admission to the eu, the north officially became exceptional eu territory in which the acquis communautaire, or body of eu law, is suspended. official eu maps label the north “areas outside government control,” while judgments in the european court of human rights have called the administration of north cyprus turkey’s “subordinate authority” for purposes of international law. in everyday life, then, as one struggling farmer commented to me, “i may be treated as an eu citizen if i leave the island and go to, say, amsterdam, but i can’t receive the benefits of eu citizenship in my own home.” in everyday performances in which citizens enact the state, however, this change of setting clearly resulted in confusion regarding the script. that confusion may be seen in the ways that today turkish cypriots often mock the name of their state, use the quotation marks hand gesture when referring to it, or simply cannot pronounce it altogether. for instance, turkish cypriot sports teams are unable to play international matches, and in recent years one of the only opportunities to do so was offered by conifa (confederation of independent football associations), the league of unrecognized states and peoples. in a match against abkhazia, i witnessed turkish cypriots struggling to figure out what to shout in support of their team. there were some sputters of “kktc” (trnc) or “kuzey kıbrıs” (north cyprus), before fans who seemed to choke on these names finally settled on “bizim takım” (our team). this failure of naming (butler 1997a; vom bruck and bodenhorn 2006) is only one instance of the ways that increased engagement with the de facto state in the post-2003 era has produced a disavowal of the stateness of their state. in the post-referendum period, the eu’s engagement with turkish cypriots and with the territory of the north began to include financial support for infrastructural and other development in rather hopeful anticipation of the island’s ultimate reunification. despite their engagement with the eu as its citizens, however, turkish cypriots remain unable to trade freely or to have relations with that supranational body without going through the administration of the roc. today, for instance, the eu supports restoration and infrastructural projects in the north, but only by gaining the approval of the roc as the north’s sovereign power. in other words, while the eu and international agencies such as the undp (united nations development programme) are willing to put their money into the north, and to do so cooperate with state agencies there, such international agencies undertake this cooperation only with a “state” (in quotation marks), in other words as the “areas outside government control.” this mode of interaction falls under a strategy that one eu diplomat has termed “engagement without recognition” (see also caspersen 2018; de waal 2018; kyris 2018).10 it describes a form of interaction quickly becoming the primary way in which supranational entities such as the eu, as well as global big business, interact with such state-like entities. some scholars have already noted that the effect of international censure and sanctions may undermine their aim, in that sanctions already acknowledge a state that must be acted against, hence giving such states “a sovereign shape, if not a sovereign status” (white 2009, 154). in the case of “engagement without recognition,” the engagement has the paradoxical effect of strengthening the very political and economic institutions that are refused recognition. at the same time, such institutions engage with the state only as a “state,” with its ministers as “ministers,” its politicians as “politicians.” those who wish to benefit from this new political and economic engagement do so only through disavowal, for instance by allowing their profession and titles to be put in quotations marks or not used at all. engagement is possible only through the quotation marks hand gesture that suggests disbelief in the “state’s” sovereignty. this kind of engagement in the north thus only emerged when, beginning in 2003, turkish cypriots began to disavow secessionist aspirations, call en masse for federation, and became satisfied with, for instance, calling their entity “north cyprus” rather than “trnc” in tourism advertising. the retired teacher’s surprise at google maps’ use of trnc to label north cyprus is only one example of turkish cypriots’ implicit knowledge that certain options are foreclosed for them. figure 8. touristic disavowal. photo by rebecca bryant. the contradictions that emerge from this recognition-that-is-not-one have become especially clear in turkish cypriots’ post-2003 interactions with the roc, the entity most interested in making sure that their state remains a “state.” before 2003, the roc had not instituted a border regime at crossing points to the island’s north. as a result, when turkish cypriot authorities decided to open the checkpoints in that year, the republic of cyprus had to enact border practices for a border that it did not recognize. in the immediate term, this meant acknowledging the identity cards of turkish cypriots that had been issued by the trnc. the information on these cards was checked against computer records to ensure that the persons crossing were in fact turkish cypriots and not turkish nationals who had acquired trnc “citizenship.” once they had acquired roc identity cards, most turkish cypriots began to present them when crossing. when asked, a number of turkish cypriots told me that these identity cards “make things easier,” and “without them, the greek cypriots might cause trouble.”11 yet interestingly, greek cypriot police at the checkpoints continue reluctantly to accept trnc identity cards when turkish cypriots present them for crossing—although the police will often ask if the turkish cypriots do not have roc identity cards. indeed, some turkish cypriots i know who carry roc identity cards often present their trnc identity cards when crossing as a political statement and to check the reaction of the greek cypriot border police. another incident i experienced at the border indicates that other trnc-issued documents are similarly “acknowledged.” today, because cyprus in its entirety is technically eu territory, eu citizens are able to enter the island through the otherwise illegal ports in the north and pass to the south. third-country nationals from outside the eu, however, must enter through the south for the roc to consider their entry legal. for this reason, several years ago the u.s. embassy website gave the advice that any u.s. citizen living “outside the areas under government control” should apply for roc residency to remain more than three months. at the time, as a u.s. passport holder living and conducting research in the island’s north, i wanted to make my presence there legal from the roc perspective and so went to the immigration office to apply for a residence permit. the office was quite crowded that day, mostly with laborers from south asia, russia, and other non-eu eastern european states. i managed to corner one particularly harried immigration officer to ask her how i might apply for a residence permit while living in the north. her eyes widened in surprise, and she asked me to repeat the question. “why would you want to do that?” she asked. i replied, “i want to be able to enter and exit through the south without worrying about visas.” the officer’s brow furrowed, and she thought for a moment. “just use ercan!” she concluded. ercan is the “illegal” airport in the island’s north, the airport through which eu nationals may now enter but which is technically forbidden to holders of other passports. i would later get the same response from three other officers in the immigration bureau: “just use ercan!” they all said. not long after this, my turkish cypriot partner and i married, and i received an identity card from the unrecognized trnc. this identity card entitles me to residence in the north, and to travel between north cyprus and turkey, but apart from that it is the identity document of an unrecognized state and so has no currency. this would presumably hold especially true for the roc, which has the greatest stake in delegitimizing the regime in the island’s north. yet interestingly, the border regime that emerged after 2003 not only allows turkish cypriots to cross using these cards but also allows their spouses and children to do so. at one point i had dropped off my u.s. passport at the embassy to have pages added, but during that same period needed to cross to the south. my partner told me to try out the trnc identity card to see if the guards would allow me across. they asked to see my marriage certificate, and i produced one from the united states, where we had gotten married a second time in an effort to make the union more “legal.” “what’s this?” asked the puzzled guard behind the glass. she turned it around as though the script was illegible, then showed it to her supervisor. “you don’t have a marriage certificate from cyprus?” she asked. i did have such a certificate, but it had been issued by the trnc, the entity whose administration and documentation the roc consider illegal. to the guard’s apparent relief, i produced the document. she tossed the worthless u.s. marriage certificate across the desk and proceeded to enter my information in the roc’s extensive computerized database. handing the documents back, she reassured me, “now you can cross whenever you want using that card.” although the policewoman accepted the card and preferred the trnc marriage certificate to the u.s. one, and although the immigration officers repeatedly suggested that i should simply “use ercan,” this acknowledgment is also arbitrary and dismissive, thereby suggestive of a favor. the immigration officers did not suggest using ercan because they recognized it; they suggested using it because they could not be bothered to deal with yet another ambiguous case. at the same time, it was easier for them simply to accept the trnc documents, which were familiar to them and contained information such as my husband’s name, his place of birth, and his parents’ names and places of birth, allowing the officer to confirm that he was a “real” cypriot. given the authorities’ use of those documents, it might be tempting to conclude that the pseudo-state rhetoric is itself fake, something put on for international audiences even as they know that a working state in the island’s north really exists. the effect, however, is to reinforce the roc’s authority as the “real” state, and its representatives as the ones to decide, sometimes arbitrarily, which documents to accept and which applications to process. this situation often leaves turkish cypriots and their families scrambling for other documents—or as in my case, attempting to preempt accusations of illegality by getting married twice. my act of getting married a second time is what butler (1997b, 23–24) meant when she referred to foreclosure as a “preemptive loss” that “becomes the condition of possibility for social existence.” one acts on the preemptive assumption that trnc documents cannot have meaning and should not exist, and one anticipates refusal. surprise at the documents’ currency is its own form of disavowal. for butler, this encounter with the limits of the subject’s power induces melancholia. turkish cypriots themselves have begun to call it “learned helplessness” (öğrenilmiş çaresizlik), a psychological term used to refer to the passiveness produced in subjects repeatedly subjected to aversive stimuli. however, like the demoralization of serbian workers who perform jobs that they see as pointless, this “was not altogether a gloomy condition” (rajković 2018, 48) but entails a self-mocking irony so pervasive that even retired schoolteachers can perform it. the social media post quoted above exclaiming, “it turns out. … we exist!” contains both the melancholic longing of foreclosure and the mocking attitude that points to the arbitrariness of others’ recognition. it also implicitly points to a shoulder-shrugging puzzlement that even as turkish cypriots disavow their secessionist aspirations, call for federation, and may be perfectly fine calling their own state “north cyprus” rather than the trnc, google maps shows us where this place is in the world. precisely this paradox of existing only to the extent that one does not exist leaves many turkish cypriots with a sense of failure both deeply troubling and a prime source of camp. “so camp as keeps us going” another aspect of turkish cypriots’ political existence visible on google maps is the so-called trnc’s so-called flag, painted on the five finger mountains the size of four football fields. google’s satellite imagery shows it clearly, and some say that it is visible from space. it is certainly within clear view from south of the cease-fire line, and indeed appears to have been intentionally positioned to taunt greek cypriots from almost any position in south nicosia. from when it was first painted until 2001, it only taunted during the day. yet right after the turn of the millennium some enthusiastic turkish cypriot nationalists formed a committee and raised money to light the flag at night.12 since 2003, a light show illuminates it every evening, the flag disappearing into darkness and then gradually reappearing, first as the star and crescent of the turkish flag, and then with the horizontal lines at the top and bottom that distinguish it as the turkish cypriot flag. for many turkish cypriots, the giant flag has become what a friend called “an expression of our nonrecognition complex,” referring to the way in which it responds to the denials of the trnc’s existence. it does this, though, through a poke in the eye of the international community, defying other states’ refusal to see them. its brightly lit emblem says, “we are here,” asserting a fact on the ground that to date no other state has tried to alter. yet the flag insists too much, and in that insistence, it persistently calls attention to the paradox of the de facto—of both presence and its denial. when our friend invoked it as a symbol of a nonrecognition complex, he suggested that it “fails even as it succeeds and succeeds even as it fails” (bryant and hatay 2020, 158). figure 9. google also loves the trnc flag. map data: google, maxar technologies. the flag is clearly what cynthia weber (1999), in her witty faking it, would have referred to as a “fantasy phallus,” a strapped-on dildo that points to a phallic lack. such phallic metaphors are not far from many people’s minds, as when one commentator on social media suggested that it is “like a dog urinating on a lamp post to identify its territory.” such a metaphor also suggests insecurity and a sense of failure. as another commentator, writing in the south’s main english-language newspaper, claimed, the flag “is just a protest flag that asserts a state without inspiring its realisation and fails as a flag” (riza 2015). of course, as the metaphor of a urinating dog suggests, the flag’s size and in-your-face insistence make it seem a parody of itself, a sign of faking the state. and yet at one and the same time the flag does successfully assert sovereignty by challenging others to remove it. in other words, the flag constitutes a form of drag, a “flag” imitating a flag. yet through its unintentional parody, the flag accomplishes what esther newton (1972, 103) calls a “double inversion.” on the one hand, the ridiculous size of the flag points to a “state” (or a pseudo-state) that is still, in its essence, real enough to put the flag on the mountain. this is the kind of “performative illusion” that sasha newell (2013, 142) points to when he notes that ivoirian bluffeurs’ display of brands “is at once known to be false and yet respected as having real and potent value.” on the other hand, and simultaneously, the force symbolized by the flag is eviscerated by the knowledge that it is only a symbol of a non-recognition complex, that is, it constitutes in its “essence” a pseudo-flag. given that the flag already performs such a parodic displacement, then, it may seem unnecessary to even bother to parody it, and yet it has become a prime source of camp. a couple of years after the flag’s illumination, one friend decided to capture the light show on film, creating an ironic, fifty-second video set to ska music. the filmmaker asks in the youtube video’s caption, “is the world’s largest flag a symbol of our existence, or of our nonexistence?” in the video, the flag lights up against a darkened city, demonstrating how it is “illuminated at night to show off despite frequent electricity cuts.” the caption concludes, “here we have the trnc’s tragicomic story.”13 the tragicomedy resides in the fact that a state which cannot even keep its electricity working proclaims itself with the world’s largest flag. while the flag may represent aspirations to sovereignty for some die-hard believers, many turkish cypriots consider it a flag in drag. and though the flag itself may seem campy, seeing it that way depends on what sontag calls a “camp sensibility.” the video demonstrates such a sensibility, and in doing so creates the “context and reception in which subversive confusions can be fostered” (butler 1990, 177). at the same time it does something else by calling attention to the affective aspect of living with a flag in drag, an in-your-face symbol of a non-recognition complex. we see from the retired teacher’s ironic proclamation of existence, or from the videomaker’s angst-filled question about such existence, an affect in relation to foreclosure that butler summarized as melancholia but that we may more specifically think of as learned helplessness or demoralization. certainly, along with melancholia, it also entails what ivan rajković (2018, 48) describes as “a certain stance of abandon and nonchalance,” or as his interlocutor vladimir vividly put it, “if you’re being fucked, then at least relax.” figure 10. the donkey as symbol of the melancholic cypriot. courtesy of senih çavuþoðlu. in this sense, camping what already seems a parody becomes what newton (1972, 34) called a “strategy for a situation,” in other words, “a peculiarly ‘gay’ way to handle the burden of stigma” (cleto 1999, 89). here, i will substitute unbecoming for gay, as a more general way of describing desires that are always already foreclosed. moreover, unbecoming calls attention to the ways that foreclosure creates performances, like the flag in drag, that are also unbecoming in the other senses of the word: unattractive, unsightly, and unsuitable—in this case, for the international community. as a “strategy for a situation,” the parody and campiness that currently pervade turkish cypriots’ approaches to their state appear as “the community-building survivalist dealing with the signs of a stigmatised … identity” (cleto 1999, 90; emphasis original)—or in this case, a stigmatized “state.” as richard dyer (2002, 49) put it, “it’s being so camp as keeps us going.” conclusion: faking it is not what it seems in december 2019, burger king joined a growing number of “real” fast-food franchises to open in north cyprus. yet in contrast to, say, popeyes or gloria jean’s, burger king had actually had a presence in the north for the past twenty years, but under the name burger city. rather than selling fake products disguised as real, these were “real” products disguised as fake. while locations in the north actually formed part of the burger king chain, they operated under the name burger city to appear fake and thus evade the problem of non-recognition—in other words, to avoid greek cypriot protests against opening a real chain in the north. rather than a simulation, then, burger city was a dissimulation, reflecting the useful distinction that jean baudrillard (1994, 3) draws between the two: “to dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn’t.” cynthia weber (1999, 108) describes such dissimulation as masquerading, “a strategy whereby something is added (clothes or a demeanor, for example) not to conceal a lack, but rather to create the appearance of one.” this also makes it seem that we might use such masquerade as a metaphor for the de facto state, which appears fake in order to continue as “real.” yet even with the fast-food example we can also see how the “gap between the play and the real” (badiou 2007, 48) produces both “an unstable slippage between the constructed surface image of the thing … and the inescapable but invisible realness of the object” (newell 2013, 151). we assume some authenticity to clark’s shoes or burger king hamburgers. yet when burger city recently became a real burger king, many people expressed disappointment at the fact that the burgers stayed the same. similarly, a proliferation of the pseudo-state rhetoric may also be explained by the ways in which pseudo-ness has become an appropriate way of describing the failures of the “real.” yet there is something more in this unstable slippage. examples such as google maps and the giant flag show that the de facto state is not so much a copy of a state—a “state”—as it is a disavowed parody of a “state”—a “pseudo-state.” just as one pretends that burger city is a fake even though everything about it—including the taste of the burgers—is the same as the original, and one does this to circumvent the impediment of non-recognition, so pretending that the trnc is a “state” allows one to avoid appearing to want recognition. for citizens, however, the effect becomes a ritualized disavowal that turns desire into a preemptive loss. the unbecoming state is one in which the blurring of fake and real does not result in some performative freedom, but rather in a demoralization whose most appropriate response is camp. yet like drag performance, the effect on the audience is often a parodic displacement that calls attention to the made-up nature of any state, thus making this one appear as real as any other. for instance, one political scientist friend recently commented to me with surprise that in interviews that he had done with eu bureaucrats and greek cypriot politicians many often seemed very comfortable these days talking about the north as the trnc—the name they’re not supposed to use, or only use in quotation marks. while present-day diplomats and eu bureaucrats are required to use “trnc” with the quotation marks hand gesture, like the salesgirl, they tend to do so with a conspiratorial smile. the wink and laugh of the eu bureaucrat who puts trnc in inverted commas or calls it a “pseudo-state” is intended to indicate to the listener, “we don’t believe in all this ‘pseudo’ business, either, but we have to play by the rules.” and so we see that not only for salesgirls and discerning shoppers, but even for diplomats and political scientists, faking it may not always be what it seems. abstract a growing ethnographic literature demonstrates the mundane practices through which both the state and sovereignty are performed. this article asks at what point such performances succeed or where they may fail, even for those enacting them. the article builds on long-term research in an unrecognized state, the “turkish republic of northern cyprus,” which is often called a pirate or pseudo-state and which has undergone several decades of international isolations. since the early 2000s, however, turkish cypriots have experienced the closer integration of their “state” into the global economy and transnational institutions. this has resulted in international engagement with their “state” that has made it appear more “real,” even as, paradoxically, citizens have developed their own pervasive discourse of pseudo-ness. the article uses examples of engagement with the unrecognized entity to show how, in the context of globalization, citizens learn, in their daily lives, to perform their state as a “state,” persistently calling attention to the made-up nature of their sovereignty claims. the article develops the concept of the unbecoming to refer to entities that are foreclosed from their inception, as well as the unsuitable or unfitting form that such entities acquire when certain desires are always already impossible. [sovereignty; de facto; performance; performativity; camp; cyprus] özet her geçen gün artan sayıda etnografik literatür, devlet ve egemenliğin günlük pratikler aracılığıyla gerçekleştiğini göstermektedir. bu çalışma, bu tip performansların hangi noktada başarılı olup hangi noktada başarısız olabildiğini sorgulamaktadır. bu makale, sık sık korsan veya sahte devlet olarak anılan ve uzun yıllar birçok izolasyona tabii tutulmuş, tanınmamış bir devlet olan “kuzey kıbrıs türk cumhuriyeti”nde yapılmış uzun dönemli bir araştırmayı zemin olarak almaktadır. ancak 2000’li yılların başından beri kıbrıslı türkler “devlet”lerinin küresel ekonomi ve transnasyonal kurumlarla daha yakın bir entegrasyon yaşadığına şahit olmaktadırlar. bu gelişme, paradoksal bir şekilde vatandaşların yaygın bir halde kendi “uyduruk devlet” söylemlerini geliştirmiş olmalarına rağmen, “devlet”lerinin uluslararası angajmanlara girmesiyle daha “gerçek” bir görüntü yakalamasına neden olmuştur. bu çalışma, küreselleşme bağlamında tanınmamış bir entite ile kurulan ilişkilerden örnekler vererek, vatandaşların nasıl bir taraftan ısrarla kendi egemenlik iddialarının uyduruk yapısına dikkat çekerken diğer taraftan günlük hayatlarında “devlet”lerini “devlet” olarak icra etmelerini göstermeye çalışacaktır. bu makale “oluşamayan” tanımıyla, bazı arzular her zaman ve hali hazırda imkansız olmasına rağmen bazı entitelerin başlangıçtan mümkün olamayan, ayrıca uygunsuz, uymayan bir yapıya sahip olduklarını kastetmektedir. [egemenlik; de facto; performans; performatiflik; camp; kıbrıs] notes acknowledgments this essay emerged from research on de facto states and globalization in the context of a four-year norwegian research council–funded project titled “imagined sovereignties,” led by the peace research institute oslo, 2012–2016. i thank åshild kolås, that project’s lead, for her support and patience. i am very grateful to the participants in the 2016 conference titled “the everyday lives of sovereignty,” which i organized as part of the “imagined sovereignties” project. in particular, i thank madeleine reeves and lisa wedeen for their continued and always perceptive engagement. many persons have listened to or read versions of this article along the way, and among those i particularly want to thank david henig, nina caspersen, thomas de waal, and cynthia weber, as well as four anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms. 1. for more on nicosia’s division, see yiannis papadakis (2006). on the trading relationships that were severed by the division, see anita bakshi (2016). 2. i should note that although this description was accurate at the time of writing, at the time of publication, covid-19 restrictions had halted casual crossings and shuttered businesses on both sides of the divide. because of its centrality to trade in the city, my assumption is that the street will regain something like its former traffic once the world returns to some form of “normal.” 3. my discussion of faking builds on a growing anthropological literature that addresses the production of “clean fakes” (reeves 2013) or “truthful fakes” (bubandt 2009) and the “piracy infrastructure” (larkin 2004, 190) that makes them possible. such studies show the ubiquity of piracy, as well as the relationship between counterfeit products and global capitalism (pang 2008). much of this literature is concerned with the “instability between appearance and the genuine” (newell 2013, 138), or the ways that fakes call into question what is authentic. while i address these issues at greater length in a forthcoming book manuscript (bryant, in progress), my focus here and in a recent coauthored book (bryant and hatay 2020) is on the kinds of complex agency that emerge when “faking” the state. 4. while the vast majority of pirated products apparently come from turkey and counterfeit global brands, there is also the phenomenon in north cyprus of copying turkish brands (see also brandstädter 2009, 130). for instance, the turkish ice cream chain mado has a copy in north cyprus calling itself mardo. while the “original” also exists in cyprus, interestingly the copy proves more popular among cypriots. 5. i refer to popular sovereignty and unbecoming sovereigns here in part to point to the failures of what we might call sovereign agency, or the ability to achieve what one wants when one wants it. see note 7 for more on this point. 6. “mr. r. r. denktash addressing the u.n. security council on nov/1983.” 7. at first glance, it appears that the desire being foreclosed is for “real,” that is, recognized, state sovereignty. being a strong believer in state sovereignty himself, this is also likely how denktaş understood the agitated caller’s expressions of disbelief. however, if we look historically at the political aims that have mobilized turkish cypriots, what becomes clear—as i argue at length elsewhere (bryant and hatay 2020; bryant 2021; bryant and reeves 2021a, 2021b)—is that the trnc is only the culmination of turkish cypriots’ decades-long search for what we may summarize as sovereign agency, what the political theorist patchen markell (2003) has articulated as an imagined form of effective agency or control in which one will be able to achieve what one wants when one wants it.in the vernacular, this is often expressed as “being the master in our own country” (kendi memleketimizde efendi olmak), and i show in other work how the desire to be a “master” (efendi) is one that has historically united the nationalist right, which has sought international recognition, and the federalist left, which believed such recognition would only be possible through a bizonal federal state with greek cypriot partners. in both cases, this has involved having a space of one’s own and being recognized as a political equal with the larger greek cypriot community. being an efendi, then, is a vernacular way of expressing what my leftist friends on the island refer to as özne olmak, literally a subject, but used to mean someone with sovereign agency, the ability to be “an independent, self-­determining agent” (markell 2003, 26), that is “capable of agentive agency” (greenberg 2011, 89). 8. turkish cypriots’ relationship with turkey also plays a significant role in citizens’ ability to believe in the de facto state, but it is a relationship that i bracket in this article because it is also one that has generally continued within certain well-defined parameters for several decades. since the 1950s, that relationship has been euphemized in familial terms as one between a “motherland” and a “babyland” (yavru vatan). i discuss at length elsewhere how this relationship has changed in the period after 2002, when turkey’s current ruling government, the justice and development party, came to power and shifted the relationship to one that many persons i interviewed described as one of a “disciplinary father” and “unruly children”—or as one interviewee put it, “a mother who behaves like a father” (babalık yapan bir ana) (see bryant and yakinthou 2012). for reasons of space, i choose here to focus on trnc citizens’ new transnational and international relationships since 2002, but many of the observations regarding foreclosure are also applicable to the post-2002 turkey–north cyprus relationship (see bryant and hatay 2020; bryant, in progress). 9. the “patron state” is a common way of describing a larger state that protects an unrecognized entity, usually giving it financial and military support. while in north cyprus’s case this patron is turkey, in the case of abkhazia or south ossetia it is russia, and in the case of nagorno-karabakh it is armenia. 10. this is the phrase of peter semneby, the eu’s special representative for the south caucasus, as quoted in neal ascherson (2010). 11. because turkish cypriots were originally partners in the 1960 roc, even nationalist turkish cypriots make reference to the roc constitution in justifying acquiring the documents of roc citizenship and hence eu passports. 12. kktc beşparmak dağları bayrağı işıklandırma derneği website, http://www.kktcbayrak.org. 13. sistem83, “kktc bayrak/trnc flag,” youtube video, 0:50, january 9, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agb_oj_d4as. references abrams, philip 1988 “notes on the difficulty of studying the state (1977).” journal of historical sociology 1, no. 1: 58–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6443.1988.tb00004.x. ahmed, sara 2014 willful subjects. durham, n.c.: 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irony, cynicism, and the chinese state. new york: routledge. vom bruck, gabriele, and barbara bodenhorn, eds. 2006 an anthropology of names and naming. cambridge: cambridge university press. walker, r.b.j. 1993 inside/outside: international relations as political theory. new york: cambridge university press. 1996 “space/time/sovereignty.” in perspectives on third-world sovereignty: the postmodern paradox, edited by mark e. denham and mark owen lombardi, 13–27. new york: st. martin’s press. weber, cynthia 1992 “reconsidering statehood: examining the sovereignty/intervention boundary.” review of international studies 18, no. 3: 199–216. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210500117231. 1995 simulating sovereignty: intervention, the state, and symbolic exchange. cambridge: cambridge university press. 1998 “performative states.” millennium: journal of international studies 27, no. 1: 77–95. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f03058298980270011101. 1999 faking it: u.s. hegemony in a “post-phallic” era. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. white, luise 2009 “what does it take to be a state? sovereignty and sanctions in rhodesia, 1965–1980.” in the state of sovereignty: territories, laws, populations, edited by douglas howland and luise white, 148–68. bloomington: indiana university press. wilson, alice 2016 sovereignty in exile: a saharan liberation movement governs. philaldelphia: university of pennsylvania press. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 52-82, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.03 life before vegetables: nutrition, cash, and subjunctive health in samoa cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 428-457, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.08 life before vegetables: nutrition, cash, and subjunctive health in samoa jessica hardin rochester institute of technology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5340-2933 proverbs 15:17 better to eat vegetables with people you love than to eat the finest meat where there is hate. —daily bible text subscription, january 8, 2011, 6 a.m. to celebrate vailea’s departure to university overseas, she asked her parents to host a barbecue at the beach for the young women at their church. as the women played rugby on the sand, vailea’s brothers prepared the food—since the young men would typically prepare these kinds of foods at home. sausages and cuts of beef sizzled on plates they arranged next to basins of boiled bananas. bananas with meat made the meal complete. the elders, including vailea’s father, a pastor, and her mother, ate first while one of the boys shooed the flies away, fanning the food. when the time came for the young women to fill their plates, vailea and i went to sit in a fale (a small, thatched shelter). i commented that it was nice that all the young women from church had come. she replied dismissively, “they came because of the pā povi [cow pasture].” in other words, they were not there to say farewell, but to eat her father’s beef––a rare and delightful treat. although sumptuous eating at social gatherings was expected, guests should not show up to eat or to receive gifts, but instead to give, which is why vailea was more interested in sitting with me than with her peers (see wentworth 2016). figure 1. meat cooking on a grill placed in the sand. photo by jessica hardin. i knew vailea’s mother had recently received treatment for diabetes complications, so i asked about her health. her mother struggled to change her diet, vailea said, though she tried to help her by cooking soup: “we always put soup in front of her with lots of veggies.” but the povi masina (salted beef) at the table tempted her and, vailea said, smiling, “she grabs a piece and runs away.” although it was recommended that vailea’s mother eat vegetables, vailea felt the family served apples as though they were rich—to impress visiting congregants. she said bluntly: “apples mean you’re rich.” in samoa, apples represented a whole variety of imported fruits and vegetables considered edible non-foods good for snacks, health, and their symbolic value (pollock 1992). this scene is unremarkable in many ways. it shows that vegetables are polyvalent, much like the cheap meat that also features in this story (gewertz and errington 2010). it also reflects the daily struggles people faced as they strove to feed others with what hanna garth (2019, 2020) calls alimentary dignity. in samoa, eating with dignity requires eating a meal complete with meat, starchy foods like taro or rice, and an accompanying saucy or soupy dish—these were good foods (mea’ai lelei) (see also wentworth 2017). vegetables were not required to make a meal “categorically complete” (garth 2019, 4). yet the absence of vegetables from an otherwise complete meal troubled people like vailea as they tried to care for their families. caring for someone with diabetes, vailea had learned, requires dietary vigilance in three ways: first, families were to limit access to culturally valued foods like fatty meat, understood to be “bad” for health because of the fat. second, families should supplement meals with vegetables, understood to be “good” for health because of their nutrients. finally, fruits and vegetables needed to replace starchy items like rice, white bread, or snack foods, which were “bad” for diabetics. this kind of nutritional reductionism—that is, understanding fruits and vegetables as essential to health owing to their component parts—was “dangerously opaque” in practice, since some of the suggested replacements for supposedly bad foods (e.g., fruits) are in fact quite dangerous for diabetics to consume (yates-doerr 2012, 295; weaver 2018). in postcolonial contexts like samoa, cardiometabolic disorders and related forms of public health prevention are reshaping––in often confusing ways––the meaning of good, and healthy, foods. at the same time, illness prevention efforts also reshape local relations to land, reflecting the intersection of global health and development paradigms. while public health efforts aimed to represent vegetables as sine qua non health, their mere categorization reflects biocolonial transformations in land management, consumption, and gifting that can be seen across oceania (mcmullin 2010; muru-lanning 2016; stead 2016). le‘a malia kanehe (2014, 331) defines biocolonialism as the “extension of the forces of colonization to biological processes, genetic material and traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples.” biocolonialism emphasizes the role of scientific policy in extracting materials and knowledge or introducing plant life that threatens indigenous environmental diversity (whitt 1998; see also goldberg-hiller and silva 2015). in samoa, biocolonial efforts to transform land relations include instrumentalizing food as cash, while global health solutions to the conditions caused by biocolonial changes rely on individuals learning to instrumentalize food as nutrition. these are twined processes that reflect what alyshia gálvez, megan carney, and emily yates-doerr (2020, 640) call chronic disaster—the ways that “global health crises” are “disasters within disasters.” these forms of instrumentalization interlink through a biocolonial logic that positions land as providing the potential for various forms of resource extraction. it is possible to see nutrition and cash as kinds of resources that can be extracted from the land when food is commoditized in ways that align with entwined global health and national development goals to prevent chronic sicknesses while increasing gdp (cf. foster 2002; see also burnett 2018). ultimately, this dual instrumentalization reveals the subjunctive quality of health conditioned, in places like samoa, on choosing between earning enough cash to care for one’s family’s overall needs or ensuring family members’ regular access to enough “healthy” food to fend off sickness. vegetables thus emblematize the everyday paradoxes that samoans face as they navigate competing forms of instrumentalization. reflecting global efforts directed by the world health organization and the united nations’ food and agricultural organization to prevent conditions like diabetes, vegetable consumption has come to play a starring role in samoan public health materials as the only means of combating chronic sickness. in particular, these materials teach the public to evaluate foods for their elemental properties (see figure 2; hardin and kwauk 2019), which is an increasingly common strategy in global dietary reform. the assumption is that increasing vegetable consumption will decrease consumption of so-called “negative nutrients” like fatty, salty, and sugary foods (nestle 2007; scrinis 2008; yates-doerr 2012; hite 2018; warin 2018). in samoa, these remarkably consistent messages were communicated through workplace special events, village-based outreach, media, the school curriculum, and national policies (see figure 3). figure 2. health promotion poster, which translates as “amount of fat in food.” photo by jessica hardin. figure 3. health promotion materials. photo by jessica hardin. the slippery quality of vegetables—as objects of wealth and health—reflects the particular interstices of development and public health institutions that demonstrate how public health interventions have been historically aligned with market-based development goals (packard 2016). in samoa, vegetables have been both essential to combating sicknesses and imbued with the potential to generate wealth for farmers and the nation, revealing an often overlooked counterpart to health metrification that links vegetable farming with local forms of metric-based development (hardin and kwauk 2015; yates-doerr 2015; adams 2016). in the urban area, and especially among diasporic families, vegetables connoted cosmopolitan tastes and the aligned budgetary flexibility either to consume imported vegetables or to conscientiously eat indigenous foods. more commonly across samoa, household meals included vegetables with less frequency and ease. the stories i feature here are about families who described a commitment to adding more vegetables to their meals as if there were sufficient cash at the end of the day or week to do so. the as if relation that dual instrumentalization generates reflects a notion of health, one that undergirds global health prevention frameworks, as a state with an ever-receding threshold (moran-thomas 2019; cf. jusionyte 2018). amy moran-thomas (2019, 137) connects the shifting thresholds of epidemics, exposure, and pain to the original meaning of diabetes as “one who straddles” by highlighting how many living with diabetes in belize, for example, are “straddling multiple worlds,” between “foreign encroachment and pollution of their lands that continuously displace them anew, and profound ancestral and community ties that bind them back again through the very foods that biomedical advice discourages them from eating.” these paradoxes appear also in samoa, where the very foods that biomedical advice encourages people to consume––namely, vegetables—are available only as a result of the biocolonial disruptions to land management that have caused chronic illnesses like diabetes to flourish. it is in this tangled logic that vegetables recursively draw attention to their superfluousness as health seemed possible before they were considered required, whereas now, when they are required, health is in decline (cf. tomlinson 2004). i introduce the notion of subjunctive health to make sense of how a feeling of unobtainable health creates an as if relationship to vegetables because of their potent capacities to create both health and wealth. the subjunctive is a grammatical mood that describes a way of articulating an already embedded stance––that is, a stance of wishing for, an irrealis mood describing actions or emotions that have not yet occurred (jaffe 2009; throop 2014). cheryl mattingly (2014, 51) calls on anthropologists to consider the subjunctive qualities of self, arguing that anthropologists should examine not only the actualities of everyday life but “possibilities and their ethical implications.” she asks: “what are the subjunctive potentialities available in certain cultural and structural circumstances?” (mattingly 2014, 51–52). when considering these structural circumstances in samoa, issues around shifting land and food relations influence how health becomes a wished-for state that people enact through their consumption, adding vegetables to their meals as if that alone would combat chronic illness the way health promotional materials and clinical care suggest. susan reynolds whyte (2002, 175, 2005) links subjunctivity with the efforts people make to “try something that matters to them––as they undertake to deal with a problem” given the “the chanciness of health.” for whyte (2002, 186), the subjunctive draws attention to “the intentions, hopes and doubts of people looking toward an immediate future” marked by uncertainty (see also good and good 1994). here, i suggest that at the intersection of development efforts to commodify gardens and global health efforts to prevent chronic illnesses associated with diet, health itself is constructed as subjunctive. to extend the notion of the subjunctive to health itself means to highlight how it is constructed as aspirational, relying on an as if logic that entangles economic and nutritional conditions. health is impossible to achieve because of the doubling of ever-receding thresholds whereby vegetables index both the promise of wealth (despite the presence of poverty) and the promise of health (despite the presence sickness). in turn, this doubling then reinforces the dual instrumentalism of vegetables that positions improving one’s family’s diet against cultivating vegetables for cash trade. as these thresholds shift, their definitions change, making them all the more impossible to achieve (moran-thomas 2019, 90). ultimately, the subjunctive qualities of health, positioning health in a perpetual as if relation vis-à-vis people’s everyday efforts to nourish their families, serve as a mechanism by which structural circumstances and experiences of uncertainty become occluded from view. this could be a story about health inequities, and in many ways it is. certainly, the perceived choice between keeping the power operating in one’s house or adding vegetables to one’s evening meal reflects the fact that historical, global patterns shape who gets sick and who does not (singer 1990; carney 2015; mendenhall 2019; reese 2019). this could also be a story about gender, as gender shapes the ways that feeding others in oceania depends on men’s gardening and women’s food preparations (weiner 1976; kahn 1986; strathern 1988; jolly 1991; tengan 2008; cottino 2018). and yet, as the stories i tell show, it is across economic and gendered positions that samoans felt beleaguered by the need to add more vegetables to their meals. the narratives that follow come from fieldwork in and around the capital city of apia conducted between 2011 and 2012, and then again in 2017 and 2019, with farmers and working professionals. the stories revolve around the daily efforts of ordinary people to nourish their families as these moments articulate multiple layers of as if relations to health. the first story locates us in the family garden, examining how even within the same household, distinct theories of health inform attitudes to vegetables, one based in labor, the other in consumption. then, taking up stories about nostalgia for life without vegetables, i explore how memories of past environments that sustained health without vegetables create absences in people’s lives today that follow from the subjunctive qualities of health. finally, i consider the trade-offs people make when they forgo vegetable consumption as a means of caring for reciprocal relations that flow from family meals. each of these sections examines the ways that the circular paradox of the cause/solution pair—that the consumption of commodified vegetables would solve the problem of sicknesses as if land relations had not changed––expresses subjunctive health. i begin by briefly outlining the political and economic context in which vegetables have emerged as a novel food category. the problem of vegetables although samoa has a long history of colonization, land was never alienated from traditional forms of governance in any wide-scale manner. during the german colonial period (1900–1914) a limited amount of land was alienated, becoming what is today called freehold land; largely this was to support exports crops of copra and cocoa beans (schmidt 1994; tuimaleali‘ifano 1998; meleisea and schoeffel 2015, 2017; droessler 2018). this approach has had lasting impact on sustaining home gardening (as most families have access to land for subsistence gardens) and in providing opportunities for commercial agriculture (as there are large stretches of land available for commercial development). following german colonization, samoa became a protectorate of aotearoa (new zealand), creating a special relationship and seeding the intense circulatory migration that shapes daily life today (lilomaiava-doktor 2009; gershon 2012; see also lee 2003; ka‘ili 2017).1 in samoa, many working-age adults will migrate for work opportunities, thus making most families dependent on remittances to sustain their households. remittances in turn shape prestige politics particularly around food preferences in both formal gifting relations and daily consumption. missionary churches were also influential in developing agricultural markets. the first samoan congregants provided agricultural offerings to the mission, including coconut oil and arrowroot, which were then exported to england to support the mission (meleisea 1987). this form of gifting later became the basis for making public cash donations to church each week—further entrenching the importance of cash in establishing family status (see macpherson and macpherson 2011; hardin 2019). as early as the 1950s, cardiometabolic disorders began to rise across the samoan islands (baker, hanna, and baker 1986), tracking major changes that have come to shape the islands’ economies: military opportunity, increased availability of global foods, and increased work options in urban centers and the diaspora (hawley and mcgarvey 2015; mclennan and ulijaszek 2015; see also uperesa 2014). although people around the world are catching up to them, since 1975 oceanic people have experienced the largest rate of increase in adult bmi (body mass index) per decade (finucane et al. 2011). in samoa, the rapid rise in obesity appears particularly striking. between 1978 and 1991, for example, the levels of obesity increased in the male population by 297 percent and in the female population by 115 percent in rural samoa (hodge et al. 1994). recent statistics suggest that more than 66 percent of the samoan population is obese, and total prevalence of overweight and obesity among women was 93.5 percent and 86.5 percent among men (hawley et al. 2014). accordingly, extensive prevention-based health promotion interventions and campaigns have been rolled out across the region for decades (hardin, mclennan, and brewis 2018). despite these endemic efforts, rates of cardiometabolic disorders have not declined. in samoa, one effort to translate prevention messages into relevant samoan categories led to the introduction of a new food category—that of mea’ai paleni to categorize fruits and vegetables as “balanced food”—by the ministry of health. its use is almost entirely limited to health promotion campaigns. foods associated with the category mea’ai paleni do not have the same social capacity as indigenous starches such as taro, breadfruit, as well as green banana, which may be taxonomically classified as fruits and vegetables, respectively, but are not culturally categorized as such in samoa. instead, they are referred to as mea’a’ano, which signifies the fleshy part of animals, including humans, and is a shorthand for substantial food; such foods are thought to be essential for developing bodily strength. fuala’au, the samoan term for fruit prior to mea’ai paleni, also refers to medicine/pills; this term is not typically associated with vegetables either. indigenous foods that are categorized by samoan public health workers as vegetables, leafy greens in particular, were culinarily essential to one sunday dish (palusami, taro leaves baked with coconut cream) but are otherwise disregarded as leaves with little value. my own adopted sister would tease me, probing to see if i could possibly be full after i had prepared my typical evening meal of rice with leafy greens.2 stand-alone vegetables, most often introduced items like tomatoes, cucumbers, or pumpkins, were not categorically recognized as a nutritional food group; instead, they were treated like a garnish, ancillary to an already complete meal. when people talked about putting together a meal, directing the person who was shopping or harvesting, they would ask for specific items like watercress or cucumbers, never referring to the category vegetable. most families maintain some kind of subsistence garden, but even if a family were to grow cucumbers or pumpkins, making them “free” to consume, such foods might prove more valuable as a source of cash than as sustenance or nutrition. preparing homegrown vegetables in a meal meant they were not needed as cash. this kind of calculus is anathema to public health workers who bemoaned an imagined fisherperson selling their freshly caught fish only to buy tinned fish (see hu 2016). while incomprehensible to a nutritional logic that seeks to maximize personal health, the instrumentalization of food as cash makes such choices inescapable. in navigating these dueling forms of instrumentalization, where choosing nutrition comes at the expense of other forms of sustenance, the subjunctive quality of health, as i will demonstrate, becomes clear. the plantation is peaceful tanu, my adopted father, was a fit man, in his mid-seventies when i lived with him. the plantation was a respite for him (plantation being the english term used to describe family gardens).3 when i first moved in with his family, he and his wife, lulu, slept in the main room of his house on mats during the week. they had a bedroom, with a bed, but it was small and hot. so, each night, they would lay down their mats and hang mosquito nets in the front of the house, which was without windows and open to the elements. when i returned a year later, tanu was sleeping at the plantation during the week and had taken over the only remaining wooden structure on their land—their original house (a symbol of how much their life had changed)—where he would sleep on the weekends, a place where he would read his bible, cooled by the wind coming off the ocean just meters away. i never found out why tanu began sleeping in the wooden fale. however, i did notice that lulu began to occupy a more central authoritative role in the household. she managed the church donations, remittances from aotearoa, family requests, and contributions for the school building loan. while they were both titled family leaders, family members visited in the evening to see lulu, not tanu.4 her title was more powerful. he receded to his own place. tanu said he went to the plantation to be with god, to sit in the dark quiet, free from electricity and the light of the village, and talk with god (hardin 2020). he could avoid distraction. tanu had cultivated this land, his father’s, as a younger man, but then his brothers moved overseas, tanu malingered plantation work, and cultivation stopped. when he married lulu and built a house in her village, he resumed cultivating his father’s plantation. the labor was a sign of his commitment to becoming a husband and father, as he had been moving between households for some time—living with women, having children, and moving on to do the same with others. his labor was also an expression of service, historically rewarded with a family title. being present, especially at night, was important to establishing his authority over the plantation. his presence warded off thieves who might come to steal taro in the darkness. recently, he built a small wooden house on the plantation, giving him a place to sleep (see figure 4). his construction efforts also tested the response from those cultivating neighboring plantations; if he built unencumbered, he could advocate for his brother-in-law to build a church on the adjacent land. this church was for people who lived kua (in the back), a shorthand derogatory reference to people who were poor and also backwards (shore 1982). the church was pentecostal, aimed at saving the souls of those who lived kua. working and sleeping on the plantation allowed tanu to create his social world, a world expressed in his moral choice to return to cultivating his family’s land. tanu did not turn to cultivating vegetables, specifically cucumbers and tomatoes, until recently, and then only occasionally. he bundled them to sell to the food stall on the main road of his village. the real reason he cultivated the plantation was for green banana, breadfruit, and taro. he would bring baskets’ full home each week, on saturday before church for sunday lunch. his sons would prepare coconut cream for boiled bananas and taro during the week, but the umu (earth oven) was for sunday preparations. as elsewhere in oceania, exchanging the foods grown in these gardens entails giving away the best, largest root crops as an essential way to create relations with important others (young 1972; munn 1986; battaglia 1990; thomas 1991). after the umu was complete, lulu would pick through the roasted items by hand, making choice selections for the pastor and his family. if there were no large taro, she would scold tanu for bringing such pitiful crops. figure 5. the house tanu built at his plantation. photo by jessica hardin. despite all the pride that tanu felt—in his land, his expansion—he only brought me to the plantation once. plantations were spaces for men, especially young men, to work beyond the regulating gaze of village life (shore 1982; refiti 2017). when tanu did bring me, it was to interview his brother-in-law, the pastor who was overseeing the church construction. lulu came to the plantation on this day as well, a rare instance. she was embarrassed that i would see her in her dirty work clothes but also wanted to accompany me. she avoided meeting my gaze. their sons picked up baskets of food, loaded them onto the pickup, and within a couple of hours i was loaded up with those baskets as well. tanu’s story is typical of oceania in that his plantation was a place for gendered labor that enabled successful participation in ritualized exchange. his labor created space for family expansion, making the family known within the surrounding landscape. his labor created food items that sustained his wife’s obligations in her village and church, as well as his own household. his labor kept the land within his family’s control. if he didn’t cultivate it, neighboring farmers could encroach, shrinking his jurisdiction. if the objects of plantations—starchy crops—were materials for social growth, as expressions of generosity and obligation, the land itself was productive of sociality. these kinds of places contracted and expanded with (usually) men’s labor. vegetables, too, could grow in plantations, but as many would tell me, they were “fickle” and “unpredictable.” they did not always grow well, and when the market flooded with cucumbers, people could not sell them for a decent price. many people i talked with felt the effort required was not worth it because, although cucumbers and tomatoes were fine items to add to soup—a soup of store-bought chicken and onion, say—the soup was complete without them. vegetables alone could not sate hunger. tanu could supplement his household meals with cucumbers, for their nutrition, but instead he grew them to sell. specifically, he grew them to support much needed supplies for his grandson. tanu’s daughter was the only person in the household that earned a salary, working in town; her infant son, therefore, needed formula to nourish him while she worked. tanu’s cucumbers provided the cash needed to provide this essential nourishment for his grandson, which explains the pride he felt when one afternoon he asked me to take a photo of them with the bundles cucumbers he had grown to be sold at a vegetable stall down the road (see figure 5). vegetables were an absent presence because he wanted them for his family’s health and yet they proved more valuable as cash because cash could provide multiple forms of nutrition and sustenance to his family. figure 4. tanu with his grandson. photo by jessica hardin. even though tanu would sell most of the vegetables he grew, he still felt that the family needed to eat more of them. when he did keep some vegetables for household consumption, he would admonish his granddaughter and his wife to eat more of them. “eat vegetables for god,” he would tell them when they picked over the cucumbers in the soup bowl looking for the remaining chicken. reminding them they needed to be healthy for god further reinforced the idea that vegetables were morally superior, even if they did not sate (throop 2010). vegetables were suspicious, though, because he also felt that his plantation should be sufficient to meet his family’s needs. indeed, for tanu the plantation was enough. he rarely ate the vegetables he cultivated, even while chastising his family for avoiding them. starchy foods were enough for him, he felt, because he was made strong from his laboring efforts to sustain his family. his wife and children did not engage in that same kind of labor and fell sick because of it; they needed vegetables. vegetables straddle the threshold between “scarcity and excess” (moran-thomas 2019, 137) as objects required to live healthfully in a world disrupted by biocolonialism, their absence making scarcity felt. vegetables in samoa reflect excess in that they are required for health but not for satiety. vegetables proved a different kind of excess for different people in tanu’s household. for tanu, vegetables made for a welcome excess that could be converted into cash. for his wife and granddaughter, vegetables were an unwelcome (in being unpalatable) nutritional excess that could yet ensure a healthful future. both kinds of excess speak to joseph dumit’s (2012, 201) description of how pharmaceutical industries create surplus health—that is, creating future health by consuming pharmaceuticals to reduce risk. surplus health also animates nutritional logics, where future health depends on accruing vitamins and nutrients through vegetable consumption. when this nutritional logic intersects with the commodity quality of vegetables, future health becomes inextricable from the ability to accrue health through the consumption of would-be commodities like vegetables. however, for people like tanu, who related to the land in deeply spiritual ways and gardened to sustain his obligations while selling vegetables to earn cash, health was tied to a memory of a life without vegetables, a time before they were necessary to nourish his family. his health did not need to be accrued through objects like foods or pharmaceuticals because he was living as if health were derived from his labor, not his consumption. in contrast, the health of others in his household was imperiled by not laboring on the plantation, creating a health deficit that the consumption of vegetables could rectify. tanu’s wife and granddaughter were to eat vegetables as if that were enough to mitigate the risk of disavowing household labor. here, the subjunctive describes the intersection of a backward-looking health (from a time before vegetables) and a future-oriented health (accrued by way of healthful commodities) making health seem elusive if not impossible to achieve because of its idiosyncratic conditions. the contrasting relations to vegetables cultivated by tanu and by members of his family as they navigated everyday thresholds between health and wealth, nutrition and cash, exemplify how health comes to be framed in the subjunctive mood, ever subject to further contingency. life was cheaper. we were happy. situated in the recently renovated, air-conditioned lobby of a historic hotel built by a famed afakasi woman (part samoan, part european), the café was an easy place to meet working professionals. offering coffee, tea, and sweets, the menu was generic, with no sign of connection to the urban markets just a short walk from the hotel doors. i met tai and sisifo there to interview them about their experiences of eating and feeding their family. tai was a successful ceo at an essential government ministry. taking the lead, tai spoke english with ease, although, as she said self-consciously, she “only” attended the local university. sisifo, her husband, was at least a decade older and spoke samoan. i asked them how the foods they ate had changed over the years. tai shared that, close to forty years ago, she grew up “poor.” “not like living in a shack,” but without cash. in fact, she clarified, it wasn’t really poor. they lived the way everyone did. the family grew everything they needed, “making use of what the land gave us.” vegetables were not required, and they only occasionally ate meat. only two drinks existed—laumoli (orange leaf tea) and koko (cocoa). tai was wistful. although people today often communicated hunger and deprivation by saying, “we only eat taro,” indicating a lack of cash to complete their meals with meat, she used the same phrase to express the completeness of her past life without cash. now, she felt that as a child she had been healthier than her own children, who refused vegetables and were constantly battling viral infections. in the past, the household and plantation together provided enough. the place was safe and nourishing. today, despite her career success and relative financial stability, tai felt she could not spare the money to add cucumbers, tomatoes, or pumpkins to their dishes of noodles or bowls of soup. shifting the conversation, tai said: “i loved those days; you just ate what was given to you from the land without having to hunger. everyone was like this. all of us. so skinny.” everyone had enough and their bodies reflected this. the land was also hospitable. “you could walk on the ground without having to worry about pricking your feet, developing a rash,” she said. “we were running around barefoot. our parents couldn’t afford dinner or shoes. nowadays you don’t see kids running around.” they lacked things considered essentials today—a large evening meal or shoes. yet the ground was safe for walking. kids were free to play. tai said, “we were happy. we did what we wanted. we had no fear of getting sick.” contrasting past with present, sisifo added what i heard time and again: “now we have all the sicknesses.” he felt everything––from diabetes to asthma to the flu––was linked to eating foods that did not come from the land, food with additives, cheap foods that should be special (e.g., meat, cake) but were now commonplace (gewertz and errington 2010). for sisifo, food that came from the land felt trustworthy—it did not have the antibiotics or pesticides that made chickens, for example, strangely large (derby 1998; solomon 2016; lamoreaux 2019). sisifo was trim and broad shouldered. the skin of his face was taught, darkened from working in the sun on his plantation. reviving freehold land behind his house that had not been cultivated in many generations, sisifo cultivated a small area to grow bananas, breadfruit, and taro. yet without access to the resources needed to clear the land of old trees, it remained too shady to grow vegetables. his daily work included cultivating starches, shopping, and preparing household meals. similar to tanu, sisifo’s role as a father and provider was intimately tied to the cultivation of family land. “working the plantation makes me strong,” he said proudly. “i’ll be sixty-five years old and i’m still working the land, doing everything.” even so, sisifo was nostalgic for days past. “i still prefer the old days. i had better days in my life. i used to be able to grow mangoes, bring them down to the hospital, and sell them for one hundred tālā.5 that money would last for a week or two. now, one hundred tālā is nothing,” he said. “it doesn’t cover one trip to the market. life was cheaper in those days.” maintaining a plantation in the urban area was necessary but not sufficient to provision the household. indeed, on many days the family would eat dinners of instant noodles with chicken, served with taro bathed in coconut cream—with no vegetables. these were weeks when family obligations were particularly high, when they had to send money to relatives to help with emergencies or to participate in fa’alavelave (life crisis exchange events) (cf. gershon 2000). vegetables were the first thing to go when cash was needed elsewhere. the stories sisifo and tai both tell are nostalgic, which on first pass articulates “edible memory,” that is, the ways that foods offer people embodied connections to shared pasts (garro 2000; jordan 2015; see also trainer et al. 2020). certainly, such memories articulate an “unsolvable longing” for days past, but they also evoke the biocolonial disruptions to environments that have made those past lifeworlds impossible to inhabit (jordan 2015, 36; cf. garth 2013). biocolonial disruptions refer here to the creep of cash requirements for full participation in domains of life that prior to colonialism had only necessitated family-organized land cultivation. stories like tai’s and sisifo’s were stories about the diminishment of their environments—stories that “fill in the gaps created by change and loss” (gálvez 2018, 35). these memories, though, were not marked by the warmth typically associated with food nostalgia, nor the “defiance” or “pride” often associated with serving nationalized meals (wilk 1999, 247); instead, the memories beckoned the experience of absences, of missing vegetables, cash and nourishing environments. much like the imperialist nostalgia described by renato rosaldo (1989, 108), where “people mourn the passing of what they themselves have transformed,” vegetables evoked memories of a time before they were required––before they were a food category at all. in other words, the dual instrumentalization produced through global health and development discourses about vegetables valorize lifeworlds associated with times prior to colonialism as times to which one might return. but, in effect, narratives about vegetables communicated the impossibility of this through the subjunctive, through the as if relation that people engaged when they talked about eating them—as if vegetables were both plentiful and essential to a proper meal, as if people were not healthy before vegetables were introduced, as if it were possible to sustain oneself through the family garden alone. i would add a lot of vegetables. when ana left samoa at eighteen to attend university in aotearoa, she had not expected to change the way she cooked as “drastically” as she did. with regular access to novel ingredients and cooking instruction available via youtube, she “learned how to cook.” since returning home at thirty, with her husband and children, she moved in with her parents, where she struggled to shape household meals. “i think the biggest issue we’ve had since moving home is with food. just making sure we have vegetables and some kind of healthy diet. we feel it is very much lacking in our wider family.” she went on to describe her natal family as a “rice family,” which meant she had to persuade them to switch to eating bananas and taro as their daily staple instead. “and the chicken,” she’d say, “there’s just so much cheap, imported chicken.” ana seemed overwhelmed by the sheer predictability of her new normal diet. fatty chicken and rice were items she never became accustomed to, since her family only began eating these after she had left the household as a teenager. as “agents of social differentiation or of commonality,” these foods gave her pause because they made her think about her family members in new ways (gewertz and errington 2007, 496). such foods did more than indicate the ways she had changed since leaving her family home; rice and fatty chicken also came to indicate what her diet lacked. as deborah gewertz and frederick errington (2007, 497) note, foods like cheap meat “can lead people to think critically about the broader historical relationships” that situate “their position in the world.” when ana consumed now familiar foods like rice and fatty chicken, she came to reflect on the absences at her table created through global, historical relations that have made those foods desirable but also dangerous. foods like vegetables were conspicuously absent, revealing how her relation to the world shifted as she moved through the diaspora. the sense of something missing was a function of subjunctive health, as if filling her table with leafy greens would mean that her family could be healthy. after suggesting that she and her husband were trying to “train the family” to re-appreciate the staple foods of her childhood, she revised her words, saying instead that they tried to make “suggestions” about transitioning from rice to root starches and reducing chicken fat. she suggested that the family boil the chicken twice to remove the fat. her husband, whom i also interviewed, mentioned this technique more than three times during an hour-long conversation. ana wanted to eat salads, though she felt it was enough that her family integrated some vegetables into their meals––vegetables she would purchase and bring home. salads, though, she could not convince her family to prepare. part of the reason they did not have as much success as ana would have liked in modifying the family’s meal preparation was because once a day, on most days, the family exchanged a few portions from the main meal with neighbors. ana and her husband had initiated this process as a way to practice forms of reciprocity they remembered from childhood. this sharing with neighbors, though, was not the norm in urban areas. yet it was a memory shared by many that ana and her husband were committed to recreating. after all, they had chosen to raise their children in the islands so they could experience what made “island life” distinct from australia or aotearoa. it was precisely this kind of sharing that made ana and her husband feel they had made the right choice to “come home.” yet the sharing came with its tensions. ana’s mother did not want ana to spend money on salad items––as if they were wealthy––and did not want to share these kinds of foods with neighbors for what it might say about them. the three households they exchanged food with always served the same thing––chicken, starches, rice, noodles, while the one fisherman always offered fish. to offer something different, even if it were economically and nutritionally desirable, would be to make the family socially visible in their difference (garth and hardin 2019). ana and her husband, though, desired more vegetables. they “craved” them day to day as they tried to integrate their preferences into family meals, since there were no opportunities for private eating. some vegetables could be integrated without much notice––cucumbers in soup, for example. others, however, would be disruptive. in ana and her husband’s case, it was not so much their expense (though that was a consideration) as the signification of their expense that caused the disruption. ana gave up on trying to incorporate these foods, which she worried about for her children—fearing they were losing necessary nutrition––but did so as a way to demonstrate care for her parents and their family’s position within their village. for others, like vailea, vegetables signified sickness and were disruptive as a result of the ways that they communicated the privilege of health. they were ostentatious in the household because they indicated that cash was used to purchase them, cash gifted to them from their congregation, on which they relied entirely for support. salads laden with leafy greens and other store-bought vegetables also cast a shadow of foreignness onto people like vailea and ana, as indicators of their time abroad, adapting to foodways associated with whiteness (slocum 2007; guthman 2008; hardin 2015; hobart 2017). to eat salad was to eat as if one were white. when vailea returned to her parents’ house after her studies, her duties in the household returned as well, although she had a government job and commuted an hour each way to work. as a young unmarried woman, she was expected to care for her parents and younger siblings (duties temporarily relieved to study overseas), including daily dinner preparations. when she was away, her father had begun cooking for her mother and more strictly enforcing her diet to help her better manage her diabetes. when i asked vailea what had changed when her father started cooking, she said, “they used to eat a lot of fried food. not anymore. now mom’s very strict with her food. we just have to make sure we have soup, vegetables, and fruits, and all that stuff. she doesn’t drink soda. i guess that’s something. we drink a lot of water.” her father realized he loved cooking. even now that vailea had taken over the cooking, it was her father’s responsibility to ensure there were vegetables, fruits, and fish available for his wife. “my dad takes care of her very well,” vailea would say. this attention to vegetables, however, was limited to vailea’s mother, because her father’s position as a pastor meant that the family received daily food gifts—always fried food, vailea noted. did the church families know that the faletua (the pastor’s wife) ate a strict diet of fish and vegetables? no, they did not. the family felt they could not require others to offer vegetables or fish because of their expense; they could not delimit what was an appropriate gift. they also did not want the congregation to think that the faletua was weakened by her sickness, as a specialized diet might suggest. the food, then gifted as if there were no illness in the house, would be eaten by everyone but the one most in need of special care and attention. vegetables thus doubly signified the presence of sickness and the privileged position of striving for health. the polyvalent meanings associated with vegetables make the desire to add vegetables to one’s meals more than a performance of virtue, as is increasingly typical of hegemonic notions of healthy eating promoted around the globe (garro 2010; brewis et al. 2011; sturtzsreetharan et al. 2021). it is precisely their polyvalence that places paths to health at odds with other forms of well-being, most often associated with daily forms of reciprocity, and that makes vegetables impossible to ignore. salad, specifically, and vegetables, more broadly, are “bound up in colonial histories, in which diet, labor and race help determine the parameters of what is delicious” and, as is evident here, what is healthy (hobart 2017, 135). the social work of vegetables thus “locate[s] and define[s] people relative to a range of others, both local and global,” in ways that make health an ever-present state to be achieved as if one could disregard the land-based, reciprocal practices associated with living without cash (gewertz and errington 2007, 504). subjunctive health during my fieldwork, the daily newspaper ran a series of articles explicitly intended to raise the status of farmers, with headlines like: “buying a car with vegetables” (maiava 2016) and “living off vegetables” (sanerivi 2016). in one article, the reporter told the story of one woman who moved from the main road to a more rural place inland––kua, the opposite of the presumed desirable direction. she said, “life with vegetables is great. we have no issues here at our house; we have running water and we have electricity.” another explained what i heard from many: “i know that the plantation is where the money is for many families. the problem with us in samoa is that not many people want to work the land. growing root crops is alright, but if you want fast money then you should grow vegetables.” vegetables were valuable because people needed them; farmers needed them as cash, urban consumers needed them for health. tanu and sisifo both felt their plantations should produce enough food for their families, but because their families did not labor alongside them, they needed more. the “more” they needed was what tanu and sisifo could not produce––enough vegetables to provide needed nutrition to combat chronic sicknesses associated with urban life. vailea and ana had become accustomed to a diet rich with vegetables after living overseas and felt it was essential to care for their families by supplementing the family meal with these items. yet they lived a life without vegetables to nourish the reciprocal relations that flowed from living within a harmonious household. their stories reflect what i heard from most of the people living in and around urban areas, that vegetables were elusive. as both required and unnecessary, expensive and free, vegetables seemed just out of reach. to choose to add vegetables to a family’s diet meant to expend cash, whereas to sell them meant to forgo their nutrition: one must choose. a similar set of contradictory conditions is unfolding in mexico, according to alyshia gálvez (2018, 8), where the rising popularity of “mexican food” as a global cuisine is mirrored in the fact that average mexicans are finding traditional foods increasingly inaccessible. the growing imperative to include vegetables in one’s meals—and related ideas about cosmopolitan responsibility—is directly connected to the mechanisms by which gardens have become filled with capitalist potential. at the same time that samoans are encouraged to see their gardens as untapped resources, as sources of cash, it has also become more difficult to grow indigenous foods most closely associated with health. across these stories, vegetables figure as both surplus and a noticeable absence. these seemingly contradictory experiences resolve when we understand health as subjunctive. the subjunctive quality of health relies on multilayered fictions that one should eat vegetables, as if that alone would combat the widespread experience of cardiometabolic disorders. this as if relation is also ever receding because it is based in a consumptive model of health that positions nutrition as a resource to be accrued. there is always more nutrition to be consumed, more weight to be lost, and more muscle to be gained. yet with health defined by the consumption of commodities like vegetables, this ever-receding threshold can only be met at the expense of other forms of care. adding vegetables to one’s meal, as health-promotion materials commonly suggest, is not a neutral practice. adding vegetables further enmeshes people in capitalist logics inherent in global health approaches to nutritional advice. the dangerous fiction involved in this as if relation to vegetables, specifically, is that it relies on a propositional notion of consumption that suggests that more vegetables in a family meal would keep people from falling sick. the danger in this fiction is that vegetable consumption alone cannot undo the historical, biocolonial reshaping of land relations and related forms of reciprocity that make vegetable consumption necessary in the first place. the stories i tell here show how people stumbled over the fact that vegetables constituted a required salve for the very conditions of biocolonial disruption that have made their consumption necessary. in turn, vegetables indexed foreignness and also the ability to recover what was lost in foreign transformations of indigenous samoan lifeways. while samoa is not a settler state, this paradoxical logic reflects some of settler colonialism’s hallmarks––settler colonialism is a land-centered project that narrows the ontological scope of how humans relate to land (wolfe 2006; kauanui 2018). the subjunctive quality of health that creates as if relations to vegetables shows land-based assumptions embedded in global health frameworks that link health with development and productivity (cf. howard 2018). in everyday life in urban samoa, however, vegetables appeared strange because their instrumentalization erased the social potentialities of foods grown from family gardens. just as settler colonialism relies on eliminating “the native as native” (kauanui 2016; emphasis original), dual instrumentalization requires the elimination of the spiritual, embodied, and social potentialities of indigenous foods from customarily controlled lands. ultimately, dual instrumentalization constitutes a process of estrangement, making objects of the land commodities uneasily incorporated into everyday life. dual instrumentalization does not fetishize—that is, vegetables are not fetishes that “can make a range of important things happen for differently located people” (gewertz and errington 2007, 496)—but instead, by estranging vegetables from land relations, people long for vegetables as if they were fetishes. when vegetables move between categories—free or expensive, required or surplus, nutrition or garnish—health becomes an uncertain project. medical anthropologists have long explored how people create health and well-being in contexts of unequal resources, seeking care by navigating the contingencies of life. the stories told here show how at the intersection of global health and development discourses, a consumptive model of health emerges that is defined by its subjunctivity. the resulting as if relation is ultimately a mode of erasure that occludes the meanings and materialities of the health objects positioned as unquestionable salves. the as if logic of subjunctive health in practice remains conditional because of the fictions on which it rests—if only vegetables were fungible with cash, if only vegetables could heal diabetes. the fiction is that commodified foods can heal widespread disease, when to heal diabetes and the host of other related chronic cardiometabolic disorders would mean to change the conditions in which vegetables have become necessary in the first place. this requires taking seriously that life was once, and could again be, possible without vegetables through an embrace of the memory of a time otherwise, a time without chronic sickness or the constant need for more cash, a time when people shared their foods and felt nourished as a result. abstract since the 1950s, samoa has faced rapid changes in food systems and labor practices, creating an environment in which health conditions such as diabetes touch every individual. through an ethnographic analysis of samoan people’s attitudes toward the novel food category of vegetables, this article explores how intersecting health promotion and development discourses instrumentalize vegetables as a source of both health and sickness, and as signs of poverty or wealth. this dual instrumentalization simultaneously positions vegetables as objects of trade that may generate wealth for farmers and as objects of health that may accrue nutrition to combat chronic sickness. i introduce the notion of subjunctive health to analyze people’s preoccupation with vegetables, even when these are rarely eaten. in samoa, subjunctive health frames the consumption of vegetables in several ways: as if vegetables were both plentiful and essential to a proper meal, as if people were not healthy before imported vegetables were introduced, as if it were possible to sustain one’s family through gardening alone. the subjunctive highlights how health is constructed as aspirational, relying on an as if logic that entangles economic and nutritional conditions. it operates through the daily acts of nourishing one’s family to erase from view those biocolonial processes that generated an environment in which chronic diseases flourish. [biocolonialism; vegetables; prevention; oceania; health; subjunctive; care; nourishment] notes acknowledgments this essay started as a contribution to a panel organized by paige west and jamon halvaksz for the association for the social anthropology of oceania. i am thankful for their feedback, as well as for comments from alex mawyer, jerry jacka, victoria stead, and hi‘ilei hobart. i’m grateful for feedback from audiences at the university of arizona, suny geneseo, and soas, especially comments from megan carney, janelle lamoreaux, and jakob klein. thanks also to writing-group feedback from melanie medeiros, jennifer guzmán, alice rutkowski, annie claus, and ram natarajan. i am further especially grateful for conversations with alex brewis, cindi sturtzsreetharan, amber wutich, sarah trainer, melissa caldwell, deborah gewertz, hanna garth, megan warin, emily yates-doerr, and all those of the nutrire colab. for their continued guidance, thank you to leasiolagi malama meleisea and penelope schoeffel. thank you to heather paxson for her decisive editorial dialogue. fieldwork for this project was supported by brandeis university, the wenner-gren foundation, the virginia g. piper charitable trust to mayo clinic/arizona state university obesity solutions, and an arnold l. graves and lois s. graves award in the humanities. this article is dedicated to the memory of frederick errington. 1. samoa’s colonial history contrasts with that of american samoa, which remains an unincorporated territory of the united states. 2. i use the language of adoption in reference to two families with whom i lived throughout my fieldwork periods, recognizing that using fictive kin relations to describe relations with interlocuters has a long history in anthropology’s uncritical and colonial past. i do so following what is normative for cultural anthropologists working in oceania, to honor specific sets of relations that i became entwined in over the course of a decade (west 2016; aini and west 2018; west and aini 2018; wentworth and kalsrap 2020), positioned as a child within a family that was then responsible for my care and proper socialization (throop 2010). my continued use of the term reflects my ongoing commitments to those particular families and to the maintenance of reciprocal relations. 3. people describe gardens as fa’ato’aga (a garden for growing everything) or ma’umaga (a garden dedicated to taro). 4. village life is governed by a group of titled family leaders, known as matai. these titles are bestowed on individuals for their histories of service to the family, including agricultural service, and increasingly to overseas family members for their service through remittances. for a more in-depth analysis of samoan matai governance, see alessandro duranti (1994). 5. in 2020, one hundred tālā was about forty u.s. dollars. this rough conversion was the same during fieldwork in 2017. one hundred tālā would not be sufficient to cover household groceries for 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new york: cambridge university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 428-457, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.08 the promise of fog capture: ground-touching clouds as a material (im)possibility in peru cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 225-250, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.03 the promise of fog capture: ground-touching clouds as a material (im)possibility in peru chakad ojani uppsala university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9273-5642 i met alejandro a few weeks after arriving in lima.1 i was curious about a fog-capture project that had been implemented above his auto-constructed neighborhood by a small local ngo in whose office i was conducting fieldwork at the time. alejandro and his mother, rosa, had been among the project’s beneficiaries, and alejandro happened to manage a facebook page created in connection with the initiative. for reasons unknown to me, the ngo director, carlos, was reluctant to put me in touch with the residents. nor did he seem keen on showing me the fog catchers. hence i had taken matters in my own hands. shortly on writing to him, alejandro invited me up to their house in the villa fátima settlement, though only to let me know that most of the project had been abandoned. the fog catchers had not met the residents’ expectations. a young civil engineering student in his early twenties, alejandro was about to leave for his mother’s city of origin, ayacucho, where he had been contracted as a consultant on a road-construction project. despite having been born in lima, alejandro often emphasized his ties to the provinces (la provincia), connections, he complained, that many of their relatives in lima had seemed to have forgotten. “peru is not lima. peru is in all of the country’s different corners,” he said, often expressing disillusionment with life in the capital. this resentment emerged starkly in his description of the now-abandoned fog-capture project. during my twelve months of fieldwork on material engagements with fog in coastal peru, conducted between july 2018 and july 2019, i visited rosa and her family on a regular basis. in parallel, i conducted fieldwork at carlos’s office and among local fog oasis conservationists who were trying to tap into fog as a water source for ecosystem reforestation. these different engagements with ground-touching clouds were sometimes at odds with one another, stirring antagonism and suspicion (ojani 2022). however, in this article, i limit most of my account to rosa’s family, showing how their story reflected broader processes of rural-urban migration and life at the limeñan periphery while at the same time challenging broad-stroke analyses of failure. over multiple conversations, i learned that carlos had approached the residents a few years earlier and that his proposal to install a low-cost alternative water-supply system had been met with open arms. in brief, fog catchers consist of large plastic nets situated perpendicular to the direction of the wind, filtering the regular inflow of coastal fog and funneling it into a water tank for later distribution (figure 1). the residents had been thrilled about the prospect of reducing their dependency on private water vendors—and with the help of water captured from the atmosphere at that! once the ngo had secured funding from a dutch water foundation, they collaboratively helped install a series of fog catchers a ten-minute walk from rosa’s house. figure 1. worn-out fog catchers above villa fátima, september 2018. photo by chakad ojani. one of the house’s living room walls displayed several photos of family members with both carlos and the dutch funders, memorializing the excitement surrounding their collective efforts to set up the fog catchers. still, the family’s disappointment with the ngo director lingered. leaning forward over my voice recorder in their living room, alejandro explained that the ngo had installed fifty fog catchers, each estimated to produce around 300 liters of water per day during the winter season. “but this is a false number. it’s not true. the climate [el clima] is not constant. to me, the average is way less.” he pointed out that he had spent more time in situ than the ngo. besides, alejandro was only a small step away from obtaining his degree: he knew what he was talking about. “i live here. i’m not illiterate, i know how to do research.” having observed the process from up close, he could attest to the fact that carlos had exaggerated the figures radically. in addition, he had failed to disclose that the water would be far from potable. assuring me of his authority on the matter by shifting to engineering parlance, alejandro informed me that no prior investigation had been undertaken to examine the collected fog-water, despite carlos having firmly insisted on the opposite, both to the residents and to the funders. the water was not only insufficient but it also contained various kinds of heavy metals. the project, alejandro went on, “would not have failed [ido al fracaso] had the ngo first conducted a proper study.” *** this article centers on alejandro’s description of the fog-capture project in villa fátima in terms of failure. by accounting for the process whereby ground-touching clouds turned from a material possibility to material impossibility, i ask how failure, as “an empirical object rather than an established category” (smith and woodcraft 2020, 4), becomes a “site of emergence” (smith and woodcraft 2020, 2) that might be generative of relations and renewed expectations. as i will show, in villa fátima, the fog-capture project failed to maintain a long-lasting grip on the atmosphere and ultimately came undone. drawing on andrea ballestero’s (2019, 22) notion of “infrastructuralization,” we could say that ground-touching clouds had refused to take on infrastructural properties and become the grounds for socio-material change in the ways promised by the ngo. yet as fog slipped back into elusiveness, the fog catchers informed a set of other, interlinked processes of socio-material transformation. not only were the materials picked apart and incorporated into various auto-construction endeavors but the project also yielded mutated expectations about the potential acquisition of a new allotment for the family. in addition, the extensive attention from journalists captivated by fog capture’s allure seemed to have worked in favor of the residents’ attempts to position themselves advantageously in relation to state resources. in other words, if ground-touching clouds had refused their own infrastructuralization and turned into something of a material impossibility, then the project as such had presented a series of other, unanticipated opportunities. the unfinished nature of the project in villa fátima will encourage an approach to failure that avoids two interrelated avenues: on the one hand, a pre-analytical decision about the location of failure, for instance, in a larger order or category whose characteristics become reflected but never challenged by the given ethnographic moment; on the other hand, a disposition characterized by suspicion toward the empirical, for in its quest for failure’s ground, such an approach becomes obliged to treat failure as an established category incapable of instigating surprise. this is not to say that the latter takes on failure are unproductive. on the contrary, they have proven remarkably helpful, especially for making sense of otherwise elusive, large-scale politico-economic structures. for example, dimitris dalakoglou (2017) notes how failure is an integral feature of our current political economy. echoing joseph schumpeter’s (1942) notion of creative destruction, dalakoglou observes how the invention of capitalism is simultaneously “the invention of its systemic failures” (dalakoglou 2017, xiii). arguably an inherent component of market logic (appadurai and alexander 2020, 35), failure becomes the very means whereby capitalism repeatedly reflects, revises, and restarts without challenging underlying structures—a mode of operation exemplified in our increasing surroundedness by fragile stuff that keeps failing and falling apart (dalakoglou 2017, xiii). in this connection, arjun appadurai and neta alexander (2020) direct our attention to how failure is deliberately built into various technological gadgets and, consequently, gives way to a fetishized ideal of improved infrastructure. rather than an immanent feature of artifacts, failure is made to emerge strategically through a series of “judgement protocols” (appadurai and alexander 2020, 2). these, the authors explain, produce “regimes of failure” (appadurai and alexander 2020, 2), consisting of the histories that produce those judgements, the power that gives the authority to make them, the particular forms that such judgements must take to appear legitimate and plausible, and the infrastructures through which they become mediated. failure is contingent rather than absolute, but it is made to appear as inevitable so as to be capitalized on. thus we should treat occasions of failure with suspicion, carefully tracing them back to and explaining them with reference to a larger, dictating order. everyday, small-scale failures are postulated as expressions of something systemic that, as the cultural theorist mark fisher (2009) noted, is itself intrinsically afflicted by dysfunction. failure is understood to perpetually reproduce an apparatus whose characteristics have been defined prior to any situated ethnographic encounter. but there are also other potential avenues. appadurai and alexander (2020) develop parts of their argument with recourse to the recent regard for breakdown, repair, and maintenance as productive objects of inquiry (carroll et al. 2017; graham and thrift 2007; martínez and laviolette 2019). much of this interest stems from the ethnography of infrastructure where, famously, occasions of breakdown have been shown to lay bare otherwise imperceptible relations (morita 2017). similar revelatory effects have surfaced in the anthropology of disasters. numerous scholars have shown how disasters can reveal “the material, institutional, cultural and political consensuses configuring normality” (tironi 2014, 115; see also ullberg 2013; oliver-smith 1986), which is a point also mirrored in jack halberstam’s (2011) work on how failures to meet the expectations of normative society can become an ethics of resistance against heteronormativity. here, too, failure exposes aspects of the social that usually remain backgrounded, thus rendering such failings ethico-political. together, these various deliberations point to an alternative route that attends to the inventive nature of failure and breakdown (e.g., morita 2014). as we will see, what alejandro spoke of in terms of failure revealed hitherto inconspicuous atmospheric relations and urban dynamics and became the grounds for renewed expectations. while capturing airborne pollutants and thus failing to meet the residents’ expectations about potable water, the fog catchers became productively integrated in a series of other auto-construction processes. rather than predefining what the project’s failure was determined by and reproductive of, in this article i treat these unexpected outcomes as valuable ethnographic findings in their own right. the disposition toward failure outlined here resonates with alberto corsín jiménez’s (2017) understanding of improvised urbanization as a “method for the city,” encouraging a focus on the designs, methods, and relations “through which the city and its stories auto-construct one another” (corsín jiménez 2017, 474). similarly, in what follows, i treat the disappointing engagements with ground-touching clouds in villa fátima as by and of themselves productive—as a means through which the family became exposed to certain urban and atmospheric relations and, in turn, repurposed the materials intended for the fog catchers and articulated renewed expectations about the potential acquisition of a piece of land outside the current boundaries of their auto-constructed settlement. failure, then, not as an end point that yielded more of the same, but as an unexpected method for “reading” and acting on the city (see nielsen 2011, 352), as well as a moment at which the telos of the fog-capture project began folding into other, parallel rhythms of urban socio-material transformation (harvey 2018, 82). i begin by accounting for the urban sociopolitical configurations that directed villa fátima residents’ attention to fog as a catchable material possibility. the promise of fog capture i am awoken by a loud honk. it takes a moment for my body to adjust to the cold. the air is chillier up here in the hills than it is in the lower parts of the city. last night’s mist that obscured our view has now vanished, leaving the rest of the villa maría del triunfo district visible, even offering a glimpse of the sea somewhere in the distance. once outside, i see the water truck (aguatero) standing behind the house. rosa is pointing to the tank she wants the vendor to fill up next. he inserts a thick hose into one of the family’s three 1,000-liter tanks and waits for it to fill. the family is charged twenty soles to fill up each tank. the price increases the higher up the hill you live. this is as far up as the human settlements (asentiamientos humanos) currently reach along the side of this particular hill. the water is not only overpriced but the aguateros are not always reliable: several of my interlocutors in the district expressed anxiety about the quality of the water. lima’s state-owned water and sewerage company, sedapal, has a water-infrastructure project planned in the district. rosa has previously taken me to the sealed-off area where one of the water reservoirs will eventually sit, a short walk from her house, but it will take at least another two years for the project to finally materialize. until then, the family will have to keep relying on the water trucks, which only climb up the dirt roads if there are enough customers around. the water truck is soon off to the neighbor next door. rosa begins to prepare breakfast. meanwhile, her husband, hugo, asks me for a hand with a massive wooden reel, a leftover from luz del sur’s ongoing electricity-grid construction work. i have seen it standing in front of the house for the past few weeks, resting against one of its exterior walls. hugo wants to store it on their porch. the couple has recently modified the dimensions of their house to meet the criteria for erecting the new concrete electricity poles, now spiring up across the neighborhood. having initially been too close to the poles, the family has remedied the problem by pushing back one of their house walls, decreasing the width of alejandro’s room by almost one meter. the roof no longer matches the wall, creating a gap in the ceiling, so they want to adjust it as soon as possible to prevent the fog from entering the house. the reel might come in handy. *** the continuous tweaking and tinkering of auto-construction in lima has been widely discussed (degregori, blondet, and lynch 1986; golte and adams 1990; lloyd 1980; lobo 1982; turner 1976). so, too, have the urban and infrastructural inequalities and race-class hierarchies that characterize life in the peruvian capital more broadly (cabrera et al. 2011; gandolfo 2009; greene 2016; ioris 2015; viatori and scheuring 2020). these asymmetries are closely enmeshed with the city’s long history of rural-urban migration (calderón cockburn 2016; matos mar 2011; gyger 2019), but they can also be traced further back. following modifications of already existing, pre-hispanic irrigation ditches for the purpose of domestic use, the city’s infrastructure supply began to develop in a restricted manner from early on after the city’s foundation in 1535 (cogorno 2015). concentrated in areas where major governmental buildings already sat, fountains and running water were provided in accordance with the needs of the upper classes, and subsequent constructions of pipes and street drainage in post-independence peru would follow a similar pattern (aguirre and walker 2017). in tandem with the city’s transformation into a center of industrial production, arable land in the provinces became increasingly inaccessible. as a consequence, during the first half of the twentieth century, lima saw a gradual increase in newcomers from the country’s provinces. in response to the urban concentration of the peruvian population, the older, central parts of the capital gradually became less desirable for the city’s affluent classes. mansions, summer houses, and new residential areas began to appear in previously uninhabited, coastal areas. a growing real estate market simultaneously started to produce new sources of revenue, with properties in the city center subdivided and rented out to the city’s poor. after the destruction of many of these buildings in the 1940 earthquake, residents found themselves having to establish their own, self-constructed neighborhoods in empty, previously unclaimed spaces. the earliest ones appeared adjacent to the city center, whereas several later neighborhoods emerged to the north, where state infrastructure was still absent and often unattainable. examples include san marín de porres in 1950 and comas in 1961, the same year that villa maría del triunfo was established to the south, thus pushing the city’s borders further back in a series of concentric circles. while this form of improvised urbanization had already begun in the 1920s, it intensified considerably during the second half of the twentieth century. with the escalation of the conflict between the peruvian state and shining path (sendero luminoso), which began in and around the city of ayacucho in the 1980s, migration to lima again increased, and the capital eventually turned into a sprawling megacity with a metropolitan area that hosts more than 10 million inhabitants. rosa’s struggle for infrastructure connectivity was closely intertwined with this history of rural-urban migration. as a then non-spanish-speaking migrant who had fled the bloodshed in ayacucho at the age of eleven, she had spent several years studying and working as a maid in some of the city’s affluent districts, at which point she rented a room in the lower parts of villa maría del triunfo together with her husband and two children. eventually, the family heard of available land further up the hills. they quickly decided to occupy an allotment (lote) and began constructing their current house in what was to become villa fátima. more than a decade later, the family had plenty left to do: water and electricity were not yet in place, and they were still waiting to obtain property titles. in the meantime, the house stood on state-owned land, and they could keep the allotment only as long as they inhabited it. the house featured a kitchen, living room, a small shop, and two bedrooms, one of which had been divided between alejandro and his sister laura by a curtain. the walls were made of a material resembling plywood. modifying them to meet the criteria for activating the electricity grid therefore did not prove overwhelmingly demanding: it was taken care of over a single day when hugo was off from the downtown bakery where he worked six long nights a week. the couple would eventually rebuild the house with solid materials (material noble), but this was something for the distant future (figure 2). obtaining infrastructure connectivity takes time (see cabrera et al. 2011), and rosa’s household now belongs to the large segment of the limeñan population that still remains outside the city’s water-infrastructure grid.2 the geographer antonio ioris (2016, 128) has argued in this regard that contemporary discourses on water scarcity in lima must take into account how such scarcity “is not a single figure 2. rosa looking down over the district, february 2019. photo by chakad ojani. process caused by the shortage of resources.” rather, it is “the outcome of present and past decisions and interventions that produce perverse consequences that affect some groups and locations more than others.” yet the inability of governments to attend to these problems has long served as an excuse for reforms, loans, and projects that have produced uneven results and served as a powerful argument for pursuing utility privatization (ioris 2016, 136; 2015, 97). alejandro’s disillusionment with life in the capital arose from the reality of brokered and contingent access to the city produced by this history. urban asymmetries were present not least in the family’s exposure to the expensive and dubious water distributed to them by private vendors. throughout our conversations, the absence of infrastructure often surfaced as a metonym of the family’s own marginality (appel, anand, and gupta 2018, 11). having recently been thrown out of a mototaxi and severely injuring her arm, rosa could not but remain pressingly aware of the sometimes life-threatening consequences of living in the hills without paved roads. bemoaning such absences, she was nevertheless always eager to show me their latest infrastructural developments—from luz del sur’s electricity grid to the area designated for sedapal’s future water reservoir. infrastructure was a source of deep longing, a dream world of promise that the family members actively called on (appel, anand, and gupta 2018, 28). in his discussion of “the promissory time of infrastructure,” kregg hetherington (2017, 40) notes how such aspirations emerge as an effect of how infrastructures, “as that which comes before something else,” are often imagined to lay “the conditions for the emergence of another order.” they are the conditions of possibility for other social and material transformations. indeed, once the electricity meter had finally been fitted outside their house, rosa welcomed me with unusual joy. “it’s one of those systems that can power an entire supermarket!” she exclaimed, perhaps envisaging the future expansion of her shop. infrastructure is arguably a means through which states and extra-state actors produce and manage difference and exercise power over populations (easterling 2014; scott 1998). at the same time, ethnographers have shown how states come into being and reproduce themselves through the extension of roads and water pipes (anand 2017; harvey and knox 2015). it is important to note that this sometimes happens in response to people’s appeals for “infrastructures to recognize, serve, and subjectify them” (appel, anand, and gupta 2018, 23) and, in this connection, actors’ constitution of themselves as publics worthy of state care. for example, in nikhil anand’s (2018) account of water infrastructure in mumbai, the (hydraulic) state is “extended through and because of strong demands for a particular kind of modern water, a particular kind of grid life that is demanded by settlers” (anand 2018, 168; emphasis original). claims for infrastructure connectivity made by residents in lima can be understood along these lines. however, it should also be noted that ethnographers working in peru have theorized the state in terms of “absent-present” (colloredo-mansfeld, quoted in rasmussen 2015, 94). seemingly absent, the peruvian state accomplishes certain work through the hopes and expectations it instills. if anthropologists fruitfully point to the ways in which infrastructures structure everyday temporalities, rhythms, and (im)mobilities (dalakoglou and harvey 2014; fisch 2018), then rosa’s struggle for access to water and electricity reveals how such temporalities may also be shaped by delays and promises about the prospects for future connectivity. these conditions of waiting open up spaces for other actors to broker and mediate residents’ relationships with the city. as mattias borg rasmussen (2015, 94) suggests in his ethnography on water in rural peru, the state “sometimes fails to accomplish what has been promised” and thereby paves the way for “other kinds of institutions [to] take on the task.” we may mention the private water vendors as a case in point, but there are also other, non-governmental and corporate actors who occasionally step in as resource suppliers. for example, as a part of their corporate social responsibility program, a nearby cement factory actively provided building materials and trees for residents and local civil society associations in villa maría del triunfo. they sometimes also funded ngos to carry out various social projects around the district, including one of carlos’s earliest fog-capture initiatives. the project in rosa’s settlement should be understood against the background of these broader urban configurations. along with her neighbors, rosa had been in midst of trying to position herself favorably in relation to state resources when the ngo director had suddenly showed up. according to rosa and alejandro, it was their former community leader (dirigente) who had asked carlos to come to villa fátima to evaluate the possibility of mitigating their dependency on the water trucks. by framing ground-touching clouds as a material possibility that could be tapped into with the help of fog catchers, carlos attuned community members to a form of water that had always been abundant in the hills. he told them that they did not have to wait for the extension of the water-infrastructure grid. apparently, they could begin collecting their water from the atmosphere straight away. the hard collective work invested in the project, and the subsequent disappointments expressed to me by alejandro and his mother, told of the hopes surrounding infrastructural transformation that carlos’s fog catchers had initially evoked among the family members. a promise is a cloud lima is often described as the city where it never rains (la ciudad donde nunca llueve). given its predominantly cloudy weather, it is likewise not uncommon to hear it being referred to as “gray lima” (lima gris). sprawling over dry geographies, the capital is in fact one of the largest desert cities in the world. the notion of lima’s grayness stems partly from these arid conditions, but also from the ground-touching clouds that regularly roll in from the pacific during winter (figure 3). ever more actors have approached this airborne extension of the ocean as a potential water source. over the course of my fieldwork with carlos and his colleagues, i often heard the fog catchers being described as an unconventional technology (tecnología no convencional), able to effectively stand in for the absence of state infrastructure (ojani 2021). although, except for eye-catching media reports, what often remained of the various projects i encountered in lima and other parts of coastal peru was a strong sense of disappointment, not unlike that expressed by rosa and her son. this held particularly true for the fog catchers meant to serve as alternative water-supply systems. most of them had been taken down, left uncared for, or become deformed by strong winds. figure 3. the early-morning fog blanketing the city, may 2019. photo by chakad ojani. a somewhat ironic expression of what alejandro described to me in terms of failure may be discerned in an art installation whose creator, sandra, had been working with carlos and the villa fátima community members around the time of the project’s implementation. over a coffee in upscale miraflores, next to san isidro where she lived, sandra told me how she had long been wanting to work with fog, but never quite knowing how, given fog’s quality as a very “immaterial material.” fog is very “ephemeral,” she explained, “not like a piece of paper that you can fold, and it’s not like metal that you can cut or use to create a sculpture. i wanted to work out a way of making fog palpable in a more concrete way.” she went on to say that people usually tend to think of fog as something annoying. in contrast, sandra wanted to “try to see the positive side of this fog and how it can be used for positive ends—to collect water for a community that did not have any.” inspired by an arabic proverb that she believed expressed the condition of many migrants living in the hills, sandra’s project consisted of nineteen letter-shaped fog catchers situated in a row above the villa fátima settlement, together forming the text “a promise is a cloud” (una promesa es una nube) (figure 4).3 she explained that the arabic and limeñan contexts are equally characterized by aridity, and that rain therefore held particular significance for both. yet the refrain had an additional layer of meaning in lima: “because, on the one hand, we have constant cloud during the second half of the year, which very rarely produces any rain. on the other hand, the people who are most affected by water scarcity in the city are mainly migrants from other parts of the country, who have come to lima in search of the promise of fulfilment that the city offers them. but akin to the rain [promised by the cloud], this promise seldom reaches concretization.” figure 4. una promesa es una nube [a promise is a cloud], 2014. art installation by sandra nakamura. photo by eduardo hirose. like alejandro and his mother, sandra also hoped that the ngo-implemented project would reduce the residents’ reliance on the water trucks. however, when she returned to villa fátima some weeks later to document her work, she learned that “in reality, the water is not as clean as it could have been, because there are many particles in the air, a lot of contamination.” sandra was surprised to see that the white mesh she had used for her letters had quickly blackened, rendering the nets mere “filters accumulating all this contamination.” like alejandro, she realized that the water was in no way appropriate for consumption, and that the cost for filtering it would far exceed the prices charged by the water trucks. what is more, the fog catchers required considerable maintenance so as not to degenerate, as they kept capturing sand and dust particles stirred up by the wind. hence the fog catchers gradually fell out of use, and by the time i was invited up to the area around rosa’s garden (chacra) where the project had once been implemented, i found no more than six of them still standing. what remained of the rest were the numerous wooden poles, supported by massive concrete foundations and standing in the fog-bathed landscape, leaving passersby confounded as to their purpose and the story behind them. if sandra had been able to engage this “immaterial material” and thus rendered “fog palpable in a more concrete way,” as she phrased it, then maintaining ground-touching clouds in this form proved more challenging. drawing on ballestero’s (2019) account of infrastructural imaginings of aquifers in sardinal, we may say that fog resisted “infrastructuralization.” refusing separation from its atmospheric background, the fog instead brought aspects of that background and its otherwise suspended particles starkly into sandra’s apprehension. the fate of sandra’s art project ultimately demonstrated the very condition that it had set out to comment on. the promises that carlos had made about fog as a material possibility had failed to concretize, not unlike the city’s unmet promises of fulfillment that sandra referred to with the refrain “a promise is a cloud.” accordingly, as i listened to her account, it occurred to me that the fog catchers had themselves become something of a metonym for the condition that the installation had set out to communicate. when interpreted alongside the refrain, the abandoned fog catchers presented what sandra had intended for her installation to merely allude to representationally: the clouds to which the unfulfilled promises of the city had guided the residents had themselves become a disappointment, thus rendering the blackened letters a material enactment of their own symbolic content. *** in their introductory text on the material culture of failure, timothy carroll, david jeevendrampillai, and aaron parkhurst (2017, 14; emphasis original) describe failure as a “moment of disconnect between what one wants or expects to occur … and that which actually occurs.” for alejandro, the water did not only prove insufficient. like sandra, he also learned that it contained various kinds of heavy metals. his subsequent framing of the project in terms of failure signaled how the fog had become something other than what was expected. this was a “moment of breakage between the reality of the present and the anticipated future” (carroll et al. 2017, 2), between the inequalities that had shaped alejandro’s life in lima and the changes that the fog had promised to bring about. “what ought to have happened [did] not come to pass” (carroll et al. 2017, 2; emphasis original). however, the “category error” (carroll et al. 2017, 16) entailed by failure is characterized by more than mere reduction. carroll, jeevendrampillai, and parkhurst also point to the productive aspects of such slippages: “points of breakage,” the authors say, may reveal “crucial dynamics of social life” (carroll et al. 2017, 6; see also smith and woodcraft 2020). as it turned out, alejandro’s disillusionment with life in lima partially stemmed from the urban configurations that the failure had thrown into relief. the disappointing episode with the fog catchers had brought home to him the necessity of a politics that involved the state to a much higher degree than he understood to be the case at present. “ngos are good,” he maintained, but then went on to explain that they do not have any considerable impact—not least because, akin to corrupt politicians, ngos too take advantage of the state’s inefficiency. “our laws have weaknesses, and this is detrimental to the entire country,” alejandro continued, further explaining that “the fog catchers had been valued at 1,000 dollars each, but i know the issue very well, i have my plans, my project outline—fog catchers don’t cost 1,000 dollars each. they cost 200, 300 dollars, or less.” in his assessment, the problem of corruption (corrupción) that the fog-capture project had surfaced applied to the scale of peru more broadly, and it could only be remedied through stronger state presence: “there are many requirements that the state demands that you meet. there are many things you cannot do because they contradict the peruvian law. if you want to do something with regards to fog catchers, it’s precisely that of creating a law.” alejandro believed that with the proper legal framework in place, initiatives such as carlos’s would become more accountable, because they would have to substantiate viability before implementing their projects.4 ngos would be prevented from making false promises to their beneficiaries without facing repercussions. alejandro’s account invites a distinction between what carroll et al. (2017, 5) call “material failure” and “the materiality of failure.” contrary to what some insist is a redundant separation between materials and materiality (e.g., ingold 2011), here we are encouraged to hold on to both terms. famously, for tim ingold (2011), an approach to things in terms of materiality implies reflection from a distance. in contrast, his insistence on materials finds support in the way it provides non-hylomorphic leeway to engage things in a more hands-on manner. instead of treating things as surfaces available for cultural representation, materials address the “stuff” that everything is made of. ingold (2011, 31) suggests that we close the gap between the two terms—not because he deems interpretation irrelevant, but because as much as materials figure in the context of humans, the opposite equally holds true: “these contexts, far from lying on disparate levels of being, respectively social and natural, are established as overlapping regions of the same world.” whereas ingold maps the materiality-materials distinction onto a more deep-running separation between representation and world, this is not so much the case for carroll and colleagues. for the latter authors, the separation captures the way failure stretches into and out from domains that may be understood to stand outside a given material object. the authors highlight a difference between “some thing that goes wrong” (carroll et al. 2017, 5; emphasis original), on the one hand, and situations in which a category error “does not rest on, or in, the material thing” itself (carroll et al. 2017, 6), on the other. regarding the latter, they write: “when infrastructures fail, when democracy fails, the ‘things’ that fail are not artefacts in the strictest sense of a unique item of material culture. nonetheless, failures of state are no less inscribed in material forms. in this way, social failures can be investigated through careful attention to the materials involved, and their social implications—in other words, the materiality of failure” (carroll 2017, 6; emphasis original). alejandro’s accusations of malpractice and comments about law and corruption spoke of a wider socio-material reality that the fog catchers had helped render visible and potentially reconfigure (see ojani 2021; bonelli and gonzález gálvez 2018). it was by articulating his concerns about the quality of the relations by which this reality was held together, and thus the materiality of failure, that alejandro made sense of the fog catchers’ material failure. yet as i continued to return to villa fátima, i gradually learned that the project had also been productive in other ways. if ground-touching clouds as an alternative to the water trucks now came across as something of an impossibility, other possibilities had nevertheless arisen from the ruins of the largely abandoned project. moving away from my foregoing discussion on what the fog catchers had been intended to be, below i turn to what they were in the process of becoming. though failing to deliver on its promises, the fog-capture project undid its own singularity by seeping into a set of other concerns. undoing the project i knock on the window to rosa’s shop one thursday morning. no one is home. it is hugo’s day off, and rosa has kindly asked for an extra pair of hands for her garden. road construction works in the district have delayed my arrival, and it seems that the couple has already left. i soon glimpse them moving about further up the hill. to my surprise, hugo is in the middle of disassembling the family’s three remaining fog catchers, which rosa up until now has been using to irrigate her plants. in full swing with a crowbar, her husband cracks the concrete supporting each pole. it is tremendously hard work. these are among the sturdiest fog catchers i have come across during my fieldwork. one pole has already been pulled out, leaving five more to go. lending hugo a hand with the remaining ones, i ask why they are taking the fog catchers down. rosa explains that community members are planning for a road to eventually run through parts of her chacra and that they have had to modify its borders. besides, an increasing number of residents are dividing up the remaining parts of the hill between themselves, and so the family is now planning to store the fog catchers inside the garden to prevent the components from being lost to someone else. at first i assume that we will eventually reinstall the fog catchers inside rosa’s chacra, but when hugo discusses cutting down one of the poles, i realize that they intend to save the materials for altogether different ends. rosa points to a shack inside a neighbor’s adjacent garden. i notice how one of the fog-catcher components has been repurposed into a rain gutter, attached along the lower edge of the roof. she would like to construct something similar. hugo believes that the wood is still good enough, and so we continue smashing the concrete until lunch time. over lunch, rosa recounts how, in tandem with the implementation of the fog catchers, the residents had formed a second association responsible for the management of this new piece of land, situated outside the boundaries of their settlement. they divided the terrain into a series of smaller allotments in accordance with the number of residents who had expressed an interest in small-scale agricultural activities. the fog catchers were then situated in rows above these garden allotments, so that the water could travel down through thin plastic tubes to slowly fill up a number of 2,500-liter water tanks. with this water, they irrigated a wide array of fruits and vegetables, which rosa proudly pointed out to me one by one whenever i stopped by. unable to provide potable water, the fog catchers served this second purpose when combined with water from the water trucks, at least for a few years. but as time passed, an increasing number of the poles were cut down, remade into fences, and reallocated in accordance with the borders of the designated allotments (figure 5). most of the water tanks had already been distributed between the residents and were now standing outside their houses. indeed, on successfully having taken the fog catchers down, rosa pondered how to justify her continued use of the accompanying water tank without having to give it up to someone else. she still needed it for her chacra, but would have it filled up by the water trucks. the issue was resolved through the later, makeshift reinstallation of what remained of one of the fog catchers, this time inside her garden. while rosa lamented how the project had gradually come undone, she was also clear about the importance of taking possession of the land as quickly as possible. “you have to take possession [hay que posesionarse],” she asserted, and informed figure 5. a number of the poles, cut down and repurposed as fences around one of the allotments above villa fátima, march 2019. photo by chakad ojani. me about multiple attempts by other groups to appropriate pieces of land within the area where the residents had their garden plots. confrontations had occasionally turned violent, and rosa recalled how, at one point, she had even unsuccessfully reached out to carlos for help. “these are land traffickers [traficantes],” she explained. they appropriate land and claim property titles from the state, only to then go on and sell the allotments. they are not interested in actually living in the hills, but only wish to make profit. in contrast, the house that rosa wants to build on her chacra will be intended for alejandro. still, in later conversations, hugo speculated that the terrain would be easier to sell once water and electricity were in place, as the family was also considering to do with another allotment they had recently purchased opposite their current house. the prospects of doing so were promising: people’s attention was frequently drawn to ads about available allotments pinned onto walls around villa maría del triunfo. as i traveled in minibuses between my various field sites, i occasionally found myself eavesdropping on conversations about available land plots in this or that part of the district. although prices increased with property titles in place, their absence did not seem to impede buyers from tapping into the opportunity. *** if fog had turned into something of a material impossibility, then a series of new possibilities arose in the aftermath of fog’s unsuccessful infrastructuralization. these possibilities were not linked to the project as such, but emerged from the conditions it had serendipitously created. penny harvey (2018, 81) has noted how notions of the “project” are imbued with a “telos of process and progress.” the time of infrastructural promise is one of a “forward movement, of accelerated transition from the past to the future” (harvey 2018, 87), which also reflected the hopes about change that the family had invested in the fog catchers but then realized they were incapable of delivering. fittingly, harvey further explains that the promises imbued in a project mutate over time and fold into dimensions of life never integral to how a given project was once conceived. while infrastructures often harbor a specific telos, they may also be said to be always “‘out of time’ with themselves,” meaning that they “fold together many histories and rhythms of material and social transformation, some of which are foreseen, many of which are not” (harvey 2018, 82). if the fog catchers as an alternative micro-infrastructure had failed to constitute the conditions of possibility for the changes that alejandro and his mother had once envisaged, they nevertheless became creatively enfolded in a set of parallel rhythms of socio-material transformation.5 another form of transformation surfaced in alejandro’s resentments over how carlos was now using footage from villa fátima to obtain funding for other fog-capture initiatives. despite the disappointments left in its wake, the ngo was still receiving attention from both national and international journalists for the presumably successful project implemented in villa fátima. when seen from the perspective of the ngo, the fog-capture project must therefore be interpreted not as a failure, but an extraordinary success. as cymene howe (2019, 4) suggests, failure is not clear-cut, but a matter of vantage point. however short-lived, the project had helped instill in audiences the image of an atmosphere abounding with water. hence the project had served to attract relatively large sums of money, which the ngo was now using to introduce similar imaginaries elsewhere (see ojani 2021). for the ngo, then, the project was not merely a means to accomplish a clearly delimited goal, but perhaps first and foremost a way of sustaining itself and making a living. the public attention that the fog catchers attracted may likewise be understood as an effective means through which the residents now ensured their position as worthy recipients of state-induced infrastructure. while explicitly opposed by alejandro and his mother, in a conversation their former community leader told me that his neighbors had taken the fog catchers down because their presumed effectiveness as a water-supply system impeded such positioning. carlos echoed this theory. even so, the extensive media coverage in fact seemed to have served the opposite end by putting pressure on authorities to speed up this process of infrastructure provisioning. sandra’s installation also featured in many newspaper articles, thus extending residents’ concerns about state absence to audiences beyond the district. the understanding of state absence that alejandro expressed to me had become amplified by what he described in terms of the project’s failure. as such, failure was a “moment of invention” that, by throwing him “suddenly, and forcefully, into the present,” impelled him to try to figure out who or what had done wrong (carroll et al. 2017, 15). yet invention had started earlier, for as carroll and colleagues write, part of failure’s inventive nature lies in the very moral accusation of failure itself: “the accusation of failure is itself a kind of invention that marks a situation or thing as not being in accord with expectations” (carroll et al. 2017, 15). but when tentatively slipping in a query on this particular project during a conversation with carlos, i learned that accusations went both ways. perhaps aware of my friendship with alejandro and his parents, the ngo director quickly blamed the family for the project’s abrupt dissolution. according to him, collaborating with the residents had become impossible because of alejandro’s attempts to direct media attention to himself. supposedly unable to handle how carlos had been put in the spotlight, alejandro had begun spreading false rumors about the ngo. mutual accusations of malpractice abounded. the fog catchers’ gradual integration into a set of other processes nonetheless points to how the project’s grounds of expectation had shifted to eventually undo its own singularity (harvey 2018, 80). if failure contains ideas about what should have happened but never did, then the project’s failure to constitute a foundation for the changes that alejandro had sought likewise led to a shift of directionality. the project was an unfinished process of potentiality that implied not only destroyed but also renewed expectations (harvey 2018, 99). conclusion i introduced this article by offering an understanding of failure as a generative moment. i contrasted this with a tendency to treat occasions of failure as peepholes into larger orders, instead positing the project’s failure as a means whereby certain aspects of the city were rendered visible to the villa fátima residents. rather than an alternative water-supply system, fog capture became an unintended heuristic for laying bare a set of atmospheric and urban (dis)connections, a sort of a “perceptual system” (simone 2006, 359) for reading and theorizing the city in terms of state absence. at the same time, fog capture also served as a method for informal urbanization (see also corsín jiménez 2017, 457). while ground-touching clouds refused infrastructuralization and escaped back into elusiveness, the fog catchers presented a series of opportunities for other forms of materialization. as we saw, the unfulfilled promises about infrastructural change, and the project’s subsequent dissolution, eventually became the grounds for renewed expectations about the potential acquisition of a piece of land for the residents. by disseminating residents’ concerns to a wider audience, the fog catchers even helped draw the state in as infrastructure supplier—an unexpected and somewhat contradictory outcome that, as i have shown elsewhere (ojani 2021), characterized the ngo’s activities more broadly. if i justified my approach by abstaining from an analysis of failure for discerning a larger, dictating politico-economic order, by way of conclusion i wish to suggest that we close the gap between these two approaches by attending to the configurations that emerge from failure: in this case widespread, local sentiments about state absence and the ongoing processes of auto-construction by which fog capture became at once co-opted and creatively informed. beyond an end point that gave more of the same, the project’s dissolution redirected its telos toward other rhythms of urban socio-material transformation. against this backdrop, i further propose that we treat failure with care. as a powerful analytic, failure acts contingently in the world and should be allowed to appear ethnographically whenever it does so (smith and woodcraft 2020). this is not to say that we should refrain from addressing the various “regimes of failure” (appadurai and alexander 2020, 2) by which such judgments and events are mediated and made ubiquitous. indeed, we saw attempts to gain interpretative control in the disagreements that cropped up around the nature and location of the project’s failure. this also does not entail succumbing to the beckett-inspired “fail again, fail better” axiomatic emblematic of contemporary startup culture (smith and woodcraft 2020, 3). what i have in mind is an awareness of the regimes and nuances that anthropologists themselves risk reinforcing and overlooking when overly suspicious of the empirical. can we treat emic invocations of failure in the same way we use the limits of ethnographic practice to experimentally interrogate our own anthropological presumptions and categories (candea 2013)? hirokazu miyazaki and annelise riles (2007) provide generative insights in their account on the shared sense of failure and subsequent abandonment of economic knowledge among derivatives traders in japanese financial markets. by observing how these actors admit to have failed to understand markets and retrospectively describe their projects as “complete, closed, and in the past” (miyazaki and riles 2007, 325), the authors prompt us to question a social study of finance that simply sets out to fill in knowledge gaps with new sociotechnical facts. such an approach does not align with the way these traders themselves respond to failure as end point. importantly, miyazaki and riles (2007, 328) then use this observation to argue for an anthropology that treats ethnographic failures not as a passage point toward new but self-consciously limited beginnings, for example by pointing to “emergent complexities” and “assemblages and indeterminacies.” their proposition is that we instead respond to expert knowledge and try to “know the endpoint in a sustained way” (miyazaki and riles 2007, 328). the fog-capture project in villa fátima parallels some of miyazaki and riles’s remarks. the project’s failure became a means whereby the city momentarily exposed itself and was given new forms of expression, exemplified by alejandro’s analyses and sandra’s art installation. for alejandro, the failure turned into a mode of reckoning and a comparative heuristic vis-à-vis modes of state knowledge or fog-capture projects elsewhere. as such, it was not reflective of the future-oriented capitalist mantra “fail again, fail better,” but rather a moment through which certain urban configurations were suddenly made perceptible and could be creatively acted on. abstract this article centers on an ngo-induced fog-capture project in lima, peru. while presented by the ngo as an alternative water-supply system for residents lacking state infrastructure, the fog catchers ultimately failed to live up to promises about potable water. yet as fog turned into a material impossibility, the project’s failure yielded a series of new possibilities and expectations, for instance about the potential acquisition of a piece of land. the fog catchers creatively informed other, ongoing processes of improvised urbanization, meaning that the failure became not an end point but a site of emergence whereby the temporality of the fog-capture project folded into parallel rhythms of socio-material transformation. in conclusion, i suggest that the failure be understood not as simply dictated by a larger politico-economic order but as a generative moment through which certain urban configurations became momentarily exposed and could be productively acted on. [atmosphere; failure; informal urbanization; infrastructure; lima; state; water] resumen este artículo se centra en un proyecto de captura de niebla inducido por una ong en lima, perú. si bien, la ong presentó el proyecto como un sistema alternativo de suministro de agua para los residentes que carecen de infraestructura estatal, los atrapanieblas finalmente no cumplieron las promesas sobre el agua potable. sin embargo, a medida que la niebla se convirtió en una imposibilidad material, el fracaso del proyecto generó una serie de nuevas posibilidades y expectativas, por ejemplo, la adquisición de un terreno. los atrapanieblas informaron creativamente sobre otros procesos en curso como parte de la urbanización improvisada, lo que significó que la falla no se convirtió en un punto final sino en un sitio de emergencia mediante el cual la temporalidad del proyecto de captura de niebla se desplegó en ritmos paralelos de transformación sociomaterial. en conclusión, sugiero que el fracaso se entienda no simplemente dictada por un orden político-económico más amplio, sino como un momento generativo, a través de la cual, ciertas configuraciones urbanas quedaron momentáneamente expuestas y se pudo actuar productivamente sobre ellas. [atmósfera; fracaso; urbanización informal; infraestructura; lima; estado; agua] notes acknowledgments i express my deepest gratitude to my interlocutors for sharing their time, insights, and concerns with me. this article would not have seen the light of day without their patience and generosity. thanks also to sandra nakamura who gave me permission to use a photograph of her art and juan fabbri for assistance with translating the abstract. penny harvey and chika watanabe read and commented on earlier iterations of this material, and three anonymous reviewers provided constructive comments on how to improve my argument. many thanks to them. i am also grateful to the editorial collective at cultural anthropology for their suggestions and assistance throughout the entire review process. the research on which this article is based was supported by the university of manchester. 1. when possible, neighborhoods and individuals mentioned in this article have been pseudonymized. 2. in 2019, 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infrastructure.” journal of latin american and caribbean anthropology 25, no. 1: 84–103. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12460 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 225-250, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.03 black feminist citational praxis and disciplinary belonging cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 199-205, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.04 black feminist citational praxis and disciplinary belonging bianca c. williams cuny graduate center https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0018-9208 black feminist citational praxis is one of the major interventions black women scholars make in the academy. the commitment to reading texts frequently excluded from the canon, and acknowledging those who challenge and contribute to our thinking, constitutes a significant form of intellectual labor, though some may not recognize it as such. whether it is octavia e. butler, christina sharpe, faye v. harrison, saidiya hartman, or the women in our families, black feminists create new concepts, subfields, methods, and lines of inquiry, establishing intellectual genealogies that cannot be contained by disciplinary and academic boundaries.1 and yet, black women’s ideas are often uncited, even as calls for papers, professional organizations’ strategic plans, and funders’ priorities give indicators that their innovations continue to move anthropology and the academy forward. here, i argue that the decision to disregard black women’s work in citational practices indicates a larger problem related to disciplinary belonging in anthropology.2 citation politics are not only about footnotes and works cited pages. they also beg the question of who is read as an anthropologist, what is valued as anthropological knowledge, and how intellectual genealogies are established. moreover, i suggest that the commitment many black women anthropologists show to interdisciplinary, community-based, anti-racist, and feminist work further marginalizes them, both in the anthropological canon and in other institutional practices. black women have a tenuous relationship with anthropology because of the discipline’s colonizing, anti-black, sexist past and present. yet some feel energized by the puzzles that humans and cultures offer, the political and creative possibilities of ethnography, and in understanding experiential knowledge as a theoretical tool. many of us are vocal critics of the discipline. yet we remain committed to taking up space because we recognize our contributions and find anthropology an effective tool for thinking and doing. based on conversations i’ve had with black women anthropologists, many of us have had a hard time being legible to hiring committees in anthropology departments, even though we were trained in the discipline and publish in its journals. it seems the more interdisciplinary fields such as africana studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies, or disciplines like sociology and psychology embrace (and cite) us, the less anthropological we appear (bolles 2013). this marginalization of black researchers and our intellectual contributions affects which departments we get hired into and, in some cases, results in dual appointments that carry a disproportionate amount of labor. some of these interdisciplinary arrangements certainly occur by choice. and some exist because academic institutions and grant-making agencies use disciplinary boundaries and identities to dictate the types of theoretical and political work acceptable for black (women) scholars. this predicament of disciplinary belonging affects black women’s ability to remain in the academy at tenure review, when the very interdisciplinary departments that were initially happy to hire us find it challenging to assess our work. citation, in this way, is directly connected to the flows of institutional opportunities and resources that demarcate disciplinary boundaries. in 2013, a. lynn bolles initiated a discussion about citational practices and the invisibility of black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology. since 2017, the cite black women collective (cbw) has generated a multidisciplinary conversation about the plagiarism and erasure of black women’s writing. in sharing their experiences as black (cis) women anthropologists, cbw founder christen smith and bolles generated widespread discussion about the ways black women are written out of anthropology and pushed out of the academy. for example, audits of curricula, department mission statements, and promotion standards are beginning to take place at universities. journals like feminist anthropology established more inclusive citational requirements by drawing authors’ attention to citational politics before submission. alongside these discussions about citing black women, both bolles’s and cbw’s efforts help us examine how citation affects the social and material conditions of the academy, particularly in anthropology. bolles’s (2013, 66) research shows that while some disciplines like sociology and psychology at least minimally cite black women anthropologists on issues of race and gender, feminist and anthropology journals frequently neglect to do so. in fact, when black women anthropologists are cited, it is most often by other black women anthropologists. this isn’t new. one only has to look at the quintessential example of zora neale hurston to understand two things: first, that (white) anthropologists continually marginalize black women’s research, even as the pertinent questions, insights, and innovations rooted in black feminist research transform the discipline; and second, that across generations, black women have persistently labored to document and reclaim our contributions to knowledge-making through attention to citational practices. oftentimes we are read for our methodological innovation and ethnographic detail, but not cited for our theoretical insights. during doctoral training, students are told to read black feminist theorists on their own time, outside of class, to learn about racism, sexism, and identity-related issues. this type of intellectual apartheid and gendering of anthropological knowledge teaches graduate students a variety of lessons, including that the ethnographic isn’t theoretical, and that black feminist anthropology is singularly useful for teaching about race and gender. it actively constructs a discipline that both benefits from black feminist anthropology and simultaneously diminishes the value and ingenuity of its work.3 furthermore, black graduate students learn about their own belonging in the discipline as they are forced to read for dual degrees: one in the traditional anthropological canon (the white, mainstream discipline) and another in marginalized anthropologies, where black (feminist) intellectual thought lives. the inherent message is that black scholars may be great for informing your thinking, but when you demonstrate expertise through citation, you must cite the most cited to show your understanding of what anthropology is. and yet, we have very little discussion about the politics and practices that frame particular texts or scholars as essential. one might ask: “what does a black feminist citational practice look, sound, and feel like?” when i write and give talks, i shout out mentors, collaborators, and peers that have contributed to my work and made room for me in the academy.4 i do this not only because i’m grateful for their generosity but also because citations are theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical imprints. they let readers and audiences know where you have been, who you have been in conversation with, and where you want to go. community members, friends, students who teach and help us cultivate ideas may not get cited in our bibliographies because they may be unpublished. but we find ways to cite these important contributors to knowledge-making in our texts and presentations. in a black feminist praxis of citation that values a diverse set of knowledges, this citational practice is also important.5 in contrast to what much scholarly training seems to suggest, citation is not merely about finding gaps in other’s arguments. it is about dialoging with those you have learned from, marking and valuing the collaborations between your thoughts and their work to create something generative. citation is not simply consuming another’s knowledge; it constitutes a call and response. in this way, citation isn’t passive; it can be a very active and intentional process of intellectual genealogy and community formation. as part of a black feminist praxis of collectivity and affirmation, citational practices not only concern an individual knowledge-making journey but also connect to mentoring and community-building. citations enable us to call others into the room, especially when we feel alienated. this collaborative naming work is essential to our process of becoming anthropologists—and to how many black women and black feminists survive the academy.6 some may be skeptical to discuss disciplinary belonging. i recognize that disciplines form part of westernizing and eurocentric practices that are racist and work to regulate not only writers but also readers. black feminist anthropological thought sometimes becomes marked as outside because it disrupts and troubles disciplinary boundaries (harrison 2008). i wonder, is it that we are in conversation with, collaborate with, and serve too many communities—academic and non-academic? is it that we trouble conventional and hegemonic questions about what knowledge is, how it looks, and how scholars speak? like some of our black feminist predecessors, many of us choose to do the work regardless—while being unapologetically black, intellectually promiscuous, and willing to fan the flames that may lead to anthropology’s burning (jobson 2020). yet i feel the need to discuss disciplinary belonging, because not acknowledging the material costs and conditions of our exclusion perpetuates the very forms of discrimination i have described, as well as the modes of citation central to those exclusionary practices. abstract what does a black feminist citational practice look and feel like? this contribution to the #citeblackwomen colloquy focuses on two arguments: first, that black feminist citational praxis is one of the major interventions black women scholars contribute to the academy; and second, that anthropology’s neglect and erasure of black feminist anthropologists relates to disciplinary (un)belonging. i explore how citation and “disciplinary belonging” influence hiring practices, doctoral training, intellectual genealogies, and what is valued as anthropological knowledge. [citation; black feminism; race; gender; belonging; higher education; interdisciplinarity] notes acknowledgments thank you to anne-maria b. makhulu, christen a. smith, and ashanté reese for their generous feedback and encouragement while writing this essay. 1. black feminist writers like christina sharpe (2016), saidiya hartman (2008, 2020), and octavia e. butler (2003) have transformed how we understand both pasts (contemplating the archive, memory, “in the wake,” and “afterlife”) and futures (reimagining world-making and liberatory possibilities). generative concepts like these not only challenge ideas about who can create theory but also how we might ask more constructive research questions using both scholarly and creative methods. and it makes space for those who thought there was no place for them in academic and literary worlds. similarly, one might argue that a generation of (black) scholars may not have remained in anthropology without faye v. harrison’s and angela gillam’s demand for “decolonizing anthropology” during the association of black anthropologists’ first invited session at the american anthropological association meeting in 1987 (harrison 1991; allen and jobson 2016; mcgranahan, roland, and williams 2016), which culminated in a pathbreaking edited volume. writing three decades later, davis and craven (2016) theorize “feminist ethnography,” maya berry et al. (2017) demand a “fugitive anthropology,” while savannah shange (2019) calls for an “abolitionist anthropology.” it is not incidental that these calls for more creative, community-focused, and liberatory anthropologies are often pushed forward by black feminist anthropologists (and their allies). like #citeblackwomen, these interventions generate theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological innovations that have lasting effects on anthropology and other fields. 2. to be clear, this exploration of “disciplinary belonging” should not be read as an assimilationist aspiration. this does not mark a desire to “belong” to or be in alignment with the anti-blackness, patriarchy, and white supremacy that has upheld anthropology. my hope is that an examination of disciplinary belonging enables one to: (1) be more aware of the assumptions and stereotypes that undergird anthropology, and the interpersonal and structural barriers that affect black women researchers; and (2) create strategies for (materially) valuing black feminists who use anthropological tools to produce knowledge about the discipline’s key questions regarding power, culture, and humanity. this exploration should not be limited to black women anthropologists in higher education but should also extend to those researchers who get pushed out during graduate school or academic hiring processes (navarro 2017), where stereotypes reign supreme and difference marks disciplinary (un)belonging. 3. for an introduction to the theoretical and methodological contributions of black feminist anthropology, one might begin with irma mcclaurin’s 1991 black feminist anthropology. 4. i provide a demonstration of my citational practice in an anthropod podcast interview with cory-alice andré-johnson (2020) titled “what does anthropology sound like: activism.” 5. though space is limited here, i want to acknowledge how citational practices that mostly draw from u.s.-based scholars and english-speaking sources constitute one way black women researchers and organizers are frequently made invisible. black feminist anthropologists working in brazil, such as luciane de oliveira rocha (2020), keisha-khan perry (2020), christen a. smith (2016; see also smith, davies, and gomes 2021), kia l. caldwell (see caldwell et al. 2018), nessette falu (2019), and erica l. williams (2013), provide a model for how u.s.-based scholars can use their citational praxis to make room for black feminist researchers and practitioners in other countries. 6. black cis women anthropologists are not the only ones who survive the academy through this type of citational praxis and collaborative work. in my own experience, i have benefited from the generosity and intellectual labor of black trans and queer anthropologists and scholars such as jafari sinclaire allen (2011), shaka mcglotten (2014), and c. riley snorton (2017), who both contribute to and challenge the canon of black feminist anthropology. references allen, jafari s. 2011 venceremos?: the erotics of black self-making in cuba. durham, n.c.: duke university press. allen, jafari s., and ryan c. jobson 2016 “the decolonizing generation: (race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties.” current anthropology 57, no. 2: 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/685502 andré-johnson, cory-alice 2020 “what does anthropology sound like: activism.” anthropod: the podcast of the society of cultural anthropology, january 2020. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/what-does-anthropology-sound-like-activism berry, maya j., claudia chávez argüelles, shanya cordis, sarah ihmoud, and elizabeth velásquez estrada 2017 “toward a fugitive anthropology: gender, race, and violence in the field.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 4: 537–65. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.05 bolles, lynn 2013 “telling the story straight: black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology.” transforming anthropology 21, no. 1: 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12000 butler, octavia e. 2003 kindred. boston, mass.: beacon press. caldwell, kia l., wendi muse, tianna s. paschel, keisha-khan y. perry, christen a. smith, and erica l. williams 2018 “on the imperative of transnational solidarity: a u.s. black feminist statement on the assassination of marielle franco.” black scholar, march 23. https://www.theblackscholar.org/on-the-imperative-of-transnational-solidarity-a-u-s-black-feminist-statement-on-the-assassination-of-marielle-franco/ davis, dána-ain, and christa craven 2016 feminist ethnography: thinking through methodologies, challenges, and possibilities. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield publishers. falu, nessette 2019 “vivência negra: black lesbians affective experiences in brazilian gynecology.” medical anthropology 38, no. 8: 695–709. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1666845 harrison, faye v. 2008 outsider within: reworking anthropology in the global age. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, faye v., ed. 1991 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. washington, d.c.: american anthropological association. hartman, saidiya 2008 lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route. new york: farrar, straus and giroux. 2020 wayward lives, beautiful experiments: intimate histories of riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals. new york: w. w. norton. jobson, ryan c. 2020 “the case for letting anthropology burn: sociocultural anthropology in 2019.” american anthropologist 122, no. 2: 259–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398 mcclaurin, irma 1991 black feminist anthropology: theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. mcglotten, shaka 2014 virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. albany, n.y.: state university of new york press. mcgranahan, carole, kaifa roland, and bianca c. williams 2016 “decolonizing anthropology: a conversation with faye v. harrison, part i.” savage minds: notes and queries in anthropology, april 19. https://savageminds.org/series/decolonizing-anthropology/ navarro, tami 2017 “but some of us are broke: race, gender, and the neoliberalization of the academy.” american anthropologist 119, no. 3: 506–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12888 perry, keisha-khan y. 2020 “the resurgent far right and the black feminist struggle for social democracy in brazil.” american anthropologist 122, no. 1: 157–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13358 rocha, luciane o. 2020 “estamos em marcha! anti-racism, political struggle, and the leadership of black brazilian women.” in black and indigenous resistance in the americas: from multiculturalism to racist backlash, edited by juliet hooker, 159–188. lanham, m.d.: lexington books. shange, savannah 2019 progressive dysopia: abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in san francisco. durham, n.c.: duke university press sharpe, christina 2016 in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. smith, christen a. 2016 “towards a black feminist model of black atlantic liberation: remembering beatriz nascimento.” meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 14, no. 2: 71–87. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.14.2.06 smith, christen a., archie davies, and bethânia gomes 2021 “‘in front of the world’: translating beatriz nascimento.” antipode 53, no. 1: 279–316. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12690 snorton, c. riley 2017 black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity. minneapolis, m.n.: university of minnesota press. williams, erica l. 2013 sex tourism in bahia: ambiguous entanglements. urbana: university of illinois press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 199-205, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.04 circularity and enclosures: metabolizing waste with the black soldier fly cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 74-103, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.08 circularity and enclosures: metabolizing waste with the black soldier fly amy zhang new york university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4353-745x in the open-air garage, a caretaker dips her spatula into a plastic bin and starts folding over dirt. under the fluorescent light, the even soil comes to life. ms. lin, who grew up in the local agricultural village beside the field laboratory, is carrying out the daily work of fly-raising. tiny larvae, a lighter shade of brown than the soil, tumble and squirm over one another reaching for the surface. the action subsides after a few minutes, turning the dirt placid again. curiosity drives me to disturb the peace, so i ask for permission to stir with the spatula. the soil once again rises with excitement. ms. lin cheerfully tells me that the larvae feel insecure when exposed and will always burrow to hide. at this stage, the larva’s task is to devour the mixture of organic waste—wet vegetable leaves, fish bones, and other kitchen scraps—that she adds to the soil each day. after continuously feeding for about fourteen days, the larva turns into a pupa encased in a hard, dark brown shell. when the pupae are ready to undergo metamorphosis, they will be transferred to a makeshift arboretum. the fully grown pupa will hatch and emerge in its adult form, a large fly with blue translucent wings, and live out the remainder of the week in the garden, to mate and lay eggs before dying. figure 1. a caretaker stirs a tray of larvae in a guangzhou field research station. photo by amy zhang. on this hot and humid evening, i watch as dr. wu, the entomologist directing this field laboratory on the edge of guangzhou, and ms. lin, the flies’ caretaker,1 inspect trays of fly larvae undergoing different stages of growth. as part of a broader effort to construct a modern and sustainable waste-management system, dr. wu is attempting to raise larvae toward an experimental project to develop the black soldier fly (hermetia illucens) as a biotechnology to speed up the treatment of organic waste. a winged insect that originated in the americas, the black soldier fly (bsf) is now found in most temperate regions of the world. over the past twenty years, scientists in china and abroad have experimented with ways to transform the bsf into a living technology for organic waste processing. their expectations rest on the so-called voracious appetite of the fly larvae to devour organic matter, including municipal food waste, slaughterhouse waste, and animal manure. unlike other breeds of composting worms that are sensitive to fat content, the bsf is lauded for its ability to break down food waste and consume a “cantonese diet” high in proteins, fats, and salt. completing the cycle of regeneration, the full-grown larva is further imagined as a protein-rich food source for agricultural feedstock, or even as a nutrition supplement for humans. the project captured my attention because it proposed a radically new idea of what counted as a modern solution to waste management in china, a sharp departure from waste-to-energy (wte) incinerators, the official technology for waste treatment in guangzhou. thirty years of urban development and changing consumption and disposal patterns have generated a municipal waste crisis in cities across china. over the past decade, new policies and programs aimed at environmental remediation have begun to supplement the state’s narrow focus on economic development. since the early 2000s, the chinese state has pursued a broad range of approaches to waste management guided by the principle of the circular economy (xunhuan jinji), which seeks to achieve, above all, “a circular (closed) flow of materials” by using “raw materials and energy through multiple phases” (yuan, bi, and moriguichi 2006, 5). under the circular economy, all forms of waste material are imagined as potential sources of value generation. in municipal waste management, this approach has most often translated to investing in wte incinerators and promoting citizen recycling programs. such government proposals, however, evaded the question of what to do with the organic waste that constitutes more than 50 percent of the city’s total municipal waste stream. dr. wu’s experiments with the bsf represent a unique attempt at realizing a key principle of the circular economy by targeting organic waste for continuous circulation into novel forms of value. specifically, his lab’s scientific interventions subject the bsf’s bodily processes and life cycle—ingestion, excretion, digestion, growth, reproduction, and death—to temporal modifications meant to match the rhythm and scale of human organic waste output. scientists like dr. wu hope to integrate the bsf’s metabolism, reimagined as a tool for environmental remediation and capital generation, into the circulation and transformation of human-generated waste to remedy a dysfunctional urban metabolism. they approach the life cycle of the bsf as a natural or lively infrastructural system, one in which nonhuman labor sustains the organic exchange and circulation of matter and energy (white 1996; carse 2012; kirksey 2015; morita 2017; hetherington 2019).2 dr. wu’s experiment with the bsf thus seeks to realize the central principles of the circular economy to develop a new biotechnology through the science of entomology.3 in the 1970s, advances in the life sciences coincided with capitalist restructuring to give rise to the so-called biotech revolution, a period of investment in the life sciences (particularly in cellular and molecular biology and genetics) that opened up a new arena for economic growth based on the potential to capitalize on life. anthropologists introduced the concept of biocapital to interrogate the ways that capitalist political economic structures, such as venture capital or new regimes of outsourcing, shape knowledge production within the technosciences. in the life sciences, the appropriation of biological life processes such as reproduction and growth repeat traditional forms of exploitation and extraction (franklin and lock 2003; sunder rajan 2006; roosth 2017),4 rehearsing a tendency in capitalism to predicate accumulation on the appropriation of the reproductive capacities of life (vora 2015). in agriculture and food production, for example, scientists and farmers have long imagined animals, plants, and other living substances as producers of value. a range of husbandry practices, including capture, domestication, and breeding, transform a living organism’s biological processes into profit-generating mechanisms (franklin 2007; landecker 2007; russell 2010). animals and plants are increasingly regarded as effective ecological “workers,” their natural proclivities a salve to climate change and ecological crisis (cf. helmreich 2007; besky and blanchette 2018; hetherington 2019). consider, for example, how mangroves are used as protection against storm surges (vaughn 2017), or how an oyster bed is planted to clean up an oil spill (olson 2018). in keeping with a broader valorization of the assumed lively agency of microbial life in regenerative processes, nature’s capacity to facilitate decay or decomposition has increasingly become viewed as fundamental, inevitable, and (therefore) good (paxson 2013; jasarevic 2015). noting that insects and microorganisms facilitate the breakdown of waste, forming lively multispecies assemblages and aggregate on landfills and composting sites (hird 2013; reno 2016), scientists like dr. wu have shown increasing interest in capturing the latent power or metabolic labor of microorganisms, insects, bacteria, and fungi for environmental restoration. metabolic labor describes how an animal’s vital functions—i.e., growth and reproduction—are targeted to reliably produce value in excess of human inputs (labor and technology) (beldo 2017; barua 2018). such biotech experiments alter the concept and processes of life itself as bodies and life processes (both human and animal) become new sites of intervention (haraway 1991; braun 2007). metabolic labor is reminiscent of what jason w. moore (2015, 54) identifies as capital’s repertoire of strategies to appropriate nature’s unpaid work and energy for the production of surplus value. anna lowenhaupt tsing (2015, 65), however, points to the specific terms under which capitalism appropriates nature across a range of cultural contexts; diverse, culturally situated logics enable what she calls “salvage capitalism,” when capital takes “advantage of value produced without capitalist control.” similarly, ethnographies of biotechnology reveal that a range of cultural logics and imperatives shape the meaning of life. biocapital manifests in “particular, incongruent manners in different locales,” embedded within and enabled by different belief systems and values, such as “salvation” or nationalism (sunder rajan 2006, 232). stefan helmreich (2008, 474) asks, “must capital . . . be the sign under which all of today’s encounters of the economic with the biological . . . travel”? what alternative economic, cultural, social, and symbolic systems also condition the transformation of biological processes for human purposes? in an effort to devise a biotechnology to treat organic waste in chinese cities, scientists are attempting to reconfigure the life cycle of the bsf in accordance with the dominant cultural logics of an ecological, modern vision for waste management. specifically, my ethnographic work with dr. wu reveals how a principle of urban waste management, circularity, and a spatial logic of urban living, enclosures, condition the scientific intervention that promises to harness animal metabolic labor as a biotechnology and a waste infrastructure that can be adapted to the urban ecologies of guangzhou. in the lab, scientists work to develop optimized breeding techniques to calibrate biological life cycles to the scale and rhythm of urban waste output based on an imagined ideal of how waste might circulate both in the soil and in the city. in an effort to actualize his biotechnology in chinese cities, dr. wu worked persistently to devise an “enclosed” apparatus for adapting his flies to a sanitized urban aesthetic and a now dominant form of urban living. the enclosure, a dominant way of imagining urban space and environmental relations, circumscribes human and nonhuman ecologies and delineates human relations to waste and insects. as ideologies with broad currency in contemporary china that shape thinking about cities, modernity, and the environment, circularity and enclosure each naturalize a techno-utopian imaginary and render the extraction of human and nonhuman labor invisible. in its ideal form, seen through the lens of circularity and enclosure, the bsf project appears to achieve the ideals of the circular economy as an automated, natural recycling system in which nature’s vital capacity becomes endowed with the ability to repair damaged urban ecologies and to sustain the reproduction of urban life. yet as my ethnographic research in dr. wu’s laboratory reveals, the practice of aligning animal metabolism with urban metabolism is anything but natural or automatic. instead, not only does the alignment rely on the constant care for flies by human workers but it also conscripts insects as nonhuman waste workers by reconfiguring their metabolism to urban modes of human living. moreover, and more surprisingly, efforts to build an automated, self-sustaining, and enclosed biotech apparatus obscure the intimacies that develop between laboring humans and the flies in their care, while the experiments carried out in dr. wu’s lab generate the potential to forge ecological connections with other forms of life in a moment of mutual vulnerability. efforts to realize the logics of circularity and enclosures as manifested in the bsf project illustrate the unacknowledged labor practices, both human and nonhuman, and ecological relations that undergird china’s pursuit of a modern approach to waste management. studies of anthropogenic environments such as industrial sites, burned fields, and the cracks of sidewalks point to the often cosmopolitan, unexpected, and unruly encounters that can take place between humans and nonhumans (tsing 2015; stoetzer 2018). yet the project of integrating the bsf into cities reveals a different relation of cohabitation in china’s green urbanism. while humans are keen to capitalize on the biophysical processes of nonhuman life, the sanitized aesthetic of modern eco-cities demands that animal life, particularly insects and pests, be expelled or alternatively contained in enclosures. i begin this article with an account of the development of the circular economy framework for approaching waste management in china, explaining the circular economy’s preference for wte incineration as well as the challenges posed to it by the waste stream in guangzhou. next, i juxtapose the genealogy and uses of the concepts of metabolic labor and urban metabolism to understand ecological crisis under capitalism as well as attempts to use biological processes as remediation technologies. then, turning to the work of the field station, i illustrate ethnographically how, while scientific discourse emphasizes the fly’s natural capacity to repair the urban metabolism and to generate value, laboratory experimentations require scientific and care work to erase the seasonal variation in the fly’s growth and reproductive cycles to ensure a continuous rhythm of reproduction matched to the tempos and rhythms of urban waste. i then show how dr. wu’s attempt to realize the principles of the circular economy by creating an enclosed apparatus reflects the aesthetic demands of china’s green urbanism. together, circularity and enclosure, as guiding logics of waste management in chinese ecological modernization, uphold a fiction of biocapital; they create the illusion that nature generates value and remediates environments without human intervention while mystifying and naturalizing the appropriation of nature and labor in the new green city. toward an ecological, modern approach to urban waste after two decades of annual double-digit growth, the natural environment in china has borne the heavy cost of the nation’s economic miracle. in the early 2000s, china explicitly adopted ecological modernization as an official response to the crisis of environmental degradation. ecological modernization first emerged as an approach to environmental sustainability in the early 1980s in western european nations such as denmark and germany (mol and sonnenfeld 2000). encompassing a wide range of top-down environmental policy and planning tools that marry environmental concerns with economic development, ecological modernization perpetuates a “gospel of eco-efficiency” (martínez-alier 2002). since the early 2000s, china has adopted a strand of ecological modernization theory that emphasizes technological innovation as a model of development that can simultaneously achieve environmental improvement and maintain continued levels of growth (lei zhang, mol, and sonnenfeld 2007).5 waste management constituted one of the strategy’s key targets. early attempts to reform industrial waste management included programs to discover new uses for scraps, the building of eco-industrial parks, and subsidies for the recycling sector (lei zhang, mol, and sonnenfeld 2007). unlike more critical approaches to waste that advocate a shift away from capitalist modes of production or a slowdown in consumption, the circular economy as manifested in china is fundamentally fixated on devising technological solutions to discover more efficient uses for waste. when it comes to municipal waste, the state sanctioned and prescribed the use of wte incineration as part of the circular economy policy. marketed as a form of clean and green waste technology, wte incinerators burn trash to generate electricity, offering an apparent seamless conversion between waste and energy. the central state’s support for wte incineration speaks to a preference for large technological facilities that eliminate the need for complicated schemes to sort waste according to different types of materials. however, as citizens began to raise concerns over toxic emissions released from burning mixed waste without adequate environmental oversight, organized protests against wte incineration sprung up all over china and became particularly heated in guangzhou (a. zhang 2014). citizens pointed out that large amounts of organic waste posed a critical challenge to waste management strategies in the city. left unsorted, organic matter, making up more than 50 percent of the municipal stream, creates problems during all phases of waste collection. vegetable peels and kitchen scraps rot in stairwells and leak during transportation. more important, waste that is heavy in organics lowers the temperature of incinerators, thereby decreasing the efficiency and compromising the safety of burning. the high moisture content of mixed waste in chinese cities thus undermines the efficacy of the state’s decision to rely on wte incinerators. in 2013, during the time of my research in guangzhou, as the city lacked an infrastructure to sustainably process urban organic waste, both the municipal state and citizens (including critics of wte incinerators as well as waste entrepreneurs) were undertaking initiatives to identify a suitable treatment technology for organics. the most common forms of organic waste treatment used in the chinese countryside, composting and biogas facilities, had yet to prove adaptable for cities. the datianshan composting pilot project, an urban composting facility capable of handling more than a hundred tons of organic waste a day, was quickly losing government support as officials sparred over the economic feasibility of scaling up the process (huang 2013). in 2012, a food safety scandal over the reuse of gutter oil, where illicit cooking oil collected from sewage drains was reprocessed on a large scale and distributed to restaurants and grocery chains, further generated citizen suspicion over the safety of organic waste reuse (merrifield 2017). from dogs in ottoman egypt (mikhail 2013) to critters (rats and flies) today that thrive off of the scraps of human consumption (benson 2015), organic household waste has long sustained urban animal life. in chinese cities during the premodern and socialist periods, and even into the early post-reform era, animals living alongside humans constituted an informal organic waste treatment system. families raised pigs and livestock, and kitchen scraps made up a large part of the animals’ diet. on a larger scale, farmers facilitated the integration of urban and rural economies through the practice of collecting hogwash (shaoshui), transporting kitchen waste from guangzhou’s restaurants to farms in the countryside to feed livestock. animal metabolism thus facilitated exchanges between urban and rural economies. in the post-reform period, however, modernization campaigns in chinese cities targeted hogwash collection as unsanitary, rural, and backward. agrarian animals and companion insects that once formed an efficient but informal organic waste technology in cities have been all but evicted (philo 1995). in the bsf project, as i demonstrate below, entomologists endeavor to reintroduce flies to the city in an appropriately modern, technoscientific form. scientists work to calibrate the metabolic function to erase the seasonal variation of the reproductive cycle of flies, so that the fly reproductive cycle can continuously process human waste. metabolic process as labor and the challenge of urban waste the idea of metabolism emerged from efforts to understand interactions between an organism and its environment. first used by biologists to describe “the totality of the biochemical reactions in a living thing” (fischer-kowalski 1998, 62), metabolism referred to three types of chemical processes for the circulation and exchange of nutrients and energy: the breakdown of food or nutrients to form new building blocks and energy (catabolism), the building up of tissues (anabolism), and the regulatory mechanisms that govern these intricate systems (beck, liem, and simpson 1991). among ecologists, metabolism describes biochemical processes not just within a single organism but in interactions on the level of systems, so that metabolic interactions capture the cycling of nutrients between organisms as one animal’s waste becomes another’s food (fischer-kowalski 1998, 63). natural and social scientists use metabolism to describe nature’s capacity for self-regulation. human ecologists, finally, adopted a homeostatic vision of the cycling of nutrients and energy that ostensibly derived from nature, modeling their understanding of energy and labor exchange between society and environment on “natural interactions” (rappaport 2000). famously, karl marx employed the notion of metabolism to conceptualize two processes related to change and transformation between labor and nature: the production of labor power through the exchange of energy between bodies and the environment, and the emergence of an ecological crisis under capitalism. metabolism (stoffwechsel) is central to marx’s theorization of labor and production, where “concrete” labor refers to the physical activity and metabolic interaction that mediates the exchange of energy between human and nature. marx viewed the human body as “a site of combustion and exchange” that converted energy into “labor power in the service of more life and capital” (landecker 2013, 223).6 for ecological marxists, capitalism relies on expanding the appropriation of nature’s vital processes beyond human bodies (moore 2015). animal reproduction and growth represent potential forms of metabolic labor, forces in nature that “capital presupposes but does not itself produce” (barua 2018). in other words, animal bodies and their metabolic processes constitute “excess” value that capital freely appropriates (beldo 2017). for instance, the growth and reproductive system of the broiler chicken, bred narrowly and precisely to produce industrial meat (boyd 2001), constitutes “simultaneously bodily technology and living commodities” (barua 2018) for the accumulation of capital. metabolic processes appropriated as labor generate value by “depend[ing] upon non-human vitalities to predictably exceed human inputs to production” (beldo 2017, 110). marxist ecologists use the concept of metabolic rift to describe an environmental crisis that emerged within a capitalist mode of production. marx interpreted the aggregate of excrement and industrial waste found in cities to be an index of problems created by industrial agriculture (foster 2000, 163). as john bellamy foster (2000) argues, a disjuncture emerged in the nineteenth century as the scale of the production and spatial distribution of agricultural goods disrupted the localized nutrient cycle necessary to replenish soils. in other words, industrial production upset the self-restorative capacity of soil by hindering the return of excrement—endowed with nature’s latent power for self-restoration—to the site of production. urbanization further exacerbated the metabolic rift, increasing the scale of waste aggregated in cities (foster 2000). among urban and industrial ecologists, remediation of the metabolic rift targets waste by reconfiguring linear waste flows toward a closed, circular model. in the field of urban sustainability, urban systems and material flows are constructed in analogy to natural ecosystems; studies of “urban metabolism” render the city a complex and heterogeneous but ultimately ordered system (tansley 1935; grimm et al. 2000). the closely related discipline of industrial ecology aims to improve urban metabolism by calculating and engineering material life cycles based on patterns found in the natural world, where one organism’s waste constitutes another’s food (frosch and gallopoulos 1989). the concept of a life cycle expressed in such projects, however, does not capture an attempt simply to mirror nature but to devise interventions to regulate and standardize optimal material flows for human systems. influenced from the outset by metaphors of feedback loops and energy flows, industrial ecologists conceptualized the life cycle as an essentially technical system to be optimized and perfected.7 chinese policy makers explicitly derived the circular economy from industrial ecology; they similarly target waste and material life cycles as the key to improving urban metabolism. the central aims of the circular economy—“to reduce waste, to transform it into a resource, and to detoxify waste [jianliang hua, ziyuan hua, wuhai hua]”—envision a continuous material circulation to optimize systems of material flows by transforming waste into productive matter (guangzhou renmin zhengfu bangongting mishu chu [guangzhou municipal government secretariat] 2015). the circular economy exhibits a high modernist impulse to extend the capacity to govern by accelerating, regularizing, and standardizing nature (scott 1998). as an alternative to wte incineration, the bsf and its metabolism are positioned as an advanced biotechnology with the capacity to neutralize toxic, contaminating, and threatening waste material while simultaneously generating surplus value and facilitating the circulation of waste in the city. in dr. wu’s project, the insect life cycle and its metabolism are presented as a natural biotechnology for realizing a circular vision of waste transformation for cities in which insects and their vital processes are put in service of resolving an urban metabolic rift. in an effort to realize the mandate of the circular economy, the bsf project draws on the promise of insect metabolism as a self-regulating tool to repair the metabolic rift from urban waste. yet in doing so, it also appropriates and reconfigures the fly’s metabolic nature as an inherent form of labor undergirding the production of value. metabolic labor, however, as i will demonstrate ethnographically below, should not be read as a description of how biophysical processes produce or constitute value in and of themselves, a tendency moore (2015, 15) refers to as the “metabolic fetish” of green materialism. biological capacities are not naturally productive, but “become so only in certain relations” (helmreich 2008, 474). a repertoire of techniques originating from industrial agriculture have rendered metabolic labor—the “reproductive dimensions of cultural and biological life” (heller 2001, 406)—a site for intensified production and commodification through domestication, breeding, and novel forms of biological engineering (see also russell 2010). experimental practices create, routinize, and normalize systems of labor and exchange, even at the level of cellular reproduction (landecker 2007). at the same time, an understanding of metabolic function as nature’s capacity for self-regulation obscures the ways that scientific work and animal labor are appropriated through laboratory practice to realize a vision of perfect circularity. producing circularity through laboratory work in 2012–2013, i followed the entomologist dr. wu in his then nascent experiments to reintroduce an insect, the bsf, back into cities as a technology for modern urban waste management.8 dr. wu carried out his work with visible enthusiasm for its great potential, even though at the time no one could be sure of the project’s success or acceptance by local governments. two years later, two of guangzhou’s districts, huadu and baiyun, were considering deploying the bsf pilot projects as a part of the city’s official waste-management infrastructure to treat between two hundred and four hundred tons of organic waste per day (liang and cheng 2015). in the summer of 2018, i returned to the field to discover that while the huadu and baiyun district governments had shelved their pilot projects, several scientific startups and ngos in the city were actively running bsf pilot projects to manage organic waste in local communities. back in october 2012, i first encountered the bsf project one afternoon during a meeting i attended while working with a local environmental ngo that was conducting research into alternative treatments for organic waste. i sat in a conference room in the guangdong entomological institute, as the institute’s director, dr. luo, offered the following remarks: from the beginning, we’ve designed the bsf as a technology that is useful for solid organic waste management. there are many advantages [to the bsf] compared with conventional composting technologies. bsf uses an insect to process [waste]. this has a higher efficiency than microorganisms. why? because the bsf feeds on solid organic waste. the process of bsf feeding on organic waste is not one of decomposition [fenjie], but actually a process of transformation [zhuanhua], one of transforming [organic waste] into animal protein. insect protein is a high value-added resource [gao fujiaze zhiyuan]. microorganisms break down and decompose elements into a more simplified [compound], useful only for composting. by using the bsf to treat kitchen waste, once it matures, we can process it into all kinds of useful products.9 luo’s description distinguishes the bsf from other forms of organic waste technology, such as composting and biodigesters, which merely break down waste. instead, by consuming organic waste, metabolizing and incorporating it into its own body, the bsf is endowed with the capacity to convert organics to a value-added resource, namely, a marketable form of animal protein. in marxist thought, the value added in a product is typically regarded as the addition of (exploited) human labor. yet in luo’s framing, the fly’s natural metabolic processes and life cycle, supposedly unmediated by human labor, produce a value-added product: animal protein from organic waste. luo’s account echoes what helmreich (2008, 464) calls the “double fetishism” common to discourses of biotech boosterism. the double fetish allows biological values to appear “in themselves” by representing biological life as the source of value simply because of their origins in living things, and then by erasing the scientific and human labor that goes into creating biovalue in institutional settings such as laboratories. by emphasizing the natural circularity of the fly life cycle, luo’s discourse reiterates the ways that the bsf is envisioned as fulfilling the goals of the circular economy and, as such, naturalizes the vital power of animals as a source of value addition while obscuring human scientific labor that helps generate and enable these capacities. in dr. wu’s laboratory practice, scientific and care work seeks to align a natural process—an animal’s metabolism, its life cycle—with an industrial vision of the circular economy for an optimal, ecological waste regime. in the laboratory, the realization of the vision of circulation hinges on developing strategies to standardize the practice of reproduction, that is, the breeding of fly larvae.10 luo’s narrative further obscures the labor of his own researchers, including the repeated attempts and failures of the laboratory experiments focused on the reproductive capacities of the flies that dr. wu was devising. the bsf is not only expected to carry out the biological processes of its own life cycle but it must also be made to do so in a standardized and predictable manner so as to process the daily output of a city’s organic waste. in effect, the scientific experiments in dr. wu’s lab are meant to synchronize two life cycles: the reproductive life cycle of flies, and the life cycle of organic waste generated by human activity. the vision informing the bsf project imagines that surplus matter (organic waste) can be turned into a commodifiable surplus population (bsf insects). to realize this vision, the life cycle of the insect—eat, excrete, then die—is rendered interchangeable and interdependent with the flow of materials and nutrients in the city. although the bsf project envisions the life cycle of the bsf and the life cycle of organic waste production forming a natural feedback loop, in his laboratory experiments dr. wu confronted repeated challenges in automating bsf breeding in a standardized and predictable manner. as dr. wu pointed out to me, the key challenge of his system is to devise a method of breeding the bsf that can yield a predictable quantity of flies throughout the changing lighting and temperature conditions of different seasons. just as attention to the calibration of speed and the nature of circulation proves central to the configuration of production and consumption in late capitalism (cowen 2014; duclos, sánchez criado, and nguyen 2017), to be adapted as a biotechnology and a waste infrastructure for cities, the speed and reliable reproduction of fly larvae must complement the predictable rate of human organic waste output. in his field experimental station, located on a former station owned by the guangdong entomological institute, dr. wu and his assistants puzzled over how changing seasons, alternating light quality, humidity, and temperature would alter the timing and rhythm of fly growth and reproduction. the successful reproduction of the bsf required close attention to the condition of the insect at each life stage—egg, larva, pre-pupa, pupa, and adult fly. each adult bsf will lay up to one thousand eggs that take three days to hatch. the tiny larvae feed continuously for a period of about fourteen days, during which their ability to process waste is at its peak. during this time they grow from a 1-millimeter-long pale golden worm to a dark brown worm with a hardened shell, about 2.5 centimeters long with a mass of 200 milligrams. while the larvae tend to avoid light and will burrow to hide, the fully grown pre-pupa crawls out of its food source to look for a dry, dark location. the pupa will emerge as an adult winged insect. under optimal lighting and temperature conditions, adult flies mate, and the female lays eggs one day later, completing its life cycle. dr. wu’s makeshift workshop had a series of trays and shelving units installed along each wall. the workshop remained humid even as large fans hummed in the background circulating intermittent gusts of warm air between two wire-fence walls. one wall was lined with a series of freshly constructed gray shelving units, with white plastic water pipes running across the horizontal length of the trays. at each stage of their development, the insects require different temperature, moisture, and lighting conditions, so caretakers observe and cater to the specific conditions of each tray. each tray demarcated a distinct experimental unit that would allow researchers to monitor and make daily alterations to ensure the optimal condition for the reproductive growth and breeding of the flies. the practices in dr. wu’s lab mirror what scholars have labeled an “infrastitial” protocol or equipment, one that appears to be routine or boring yet never quite standardized (kelly and lezaun 2017). along the edges, smeared glue streaks and slight irregularities lent the trays a diy quality. on the very bottom shelf, in the brown mulch, a few larvae were making their way up the sloped sidings. dr. wu told me that he would run water underneath the tray to cool the entire setup in the next batch to ensure better temperature control. at each stage, minute adjustments—more water, moving trays to allow for more air circulation—were made in response to the observed condition of individual batches. ms. lin pointed to the pre-pupae in one tray that had made their way from the mulch, their bodies marked by a slight curvature. on the other end of the hall, lin tipped a watering can into a bed of flat brown soil with bsf larvae hidden beneath to ensure the right amount of moisture. “this batch is doing extremely well,” lin told me, noting that if the moisture and temperature control were off, the flies would perish. “when they die, they tend to die in batches,” she noted. the loss of not only a single fly but a population of flies is equivalent to a system failure to reliably circulate (waste) and output (energy) in a close-looped system. there was a sadness to her description of the death of the larvae, in contrast to the excitement she displayed when she showed off the squirming worms. she explained to me how the previous fall they had found a tray of dead flies after an especially humid evening. guangzhou’s winter months, with temperatures occasionally dipping below 5°c in january and february, have proven especially difficult for the survival of the larvae. sometimes rats got into the trays and enjoyed a large feast, hence the cats later seen wandering around the workshop. whereas in the wild, bsf populations waxed and waned with the changing seasons, in the lab the intimate attentions of an assistant to cultivate and maintain stable conditions enabled the fly population to thrive under varying seasonal conditions. figure 2. the tray system allows minor adjustments to be made to moisture and temperature during each life stage. photo by amy zhang. guiding me to another series of trays across the workshop, dr. wu pointed out that the mulch differs in gradients of darkness depending on the age and life stage of the larvae. laid out on mesh netting over the top of the tray were larvae that had been hand-collected from the garden, which dr. wu had constructed behind the garage to house the adult bsf. from a distance, the yellow splatter of the larvae resembled wet pulp, but up close, the squirming, vibrating movement revealed the contours of worms starting to take shape. figure 3. newly collected black soldier fly eggs. photo by amy zhang. figure 4. adult larvae in the last week of their life cycle resting on leaves in the arboretum. photo by amy zhang. in the garden, a sprinkler system periodically sent a stream of mist into the air. up to six or seven flies could be found resting on green leaves; bushes were dotted with tiny black speckles. around the bushes, small black figures buzzed and flashed their blue transparent wings. the larger flies were females carrying eggs. they would pass the last week of their life in the tent where they mated, laid eggs, and then died. unlike household flies that buzz aggressively around humans, the bsf travels at a more relaxed pace, skirting aimlessly in the air, sometimes landing on our shoulders before jetting off. dr. wu described the work of raising the bsf to me: i have to control the conditions to ensure that the larva grows up healthy. it’s just like raising a child, you shouldn’t give it anything dangerous to eat, don’t let it go to dangerous places. you make sure that they are full, that the environment is under the best temperature control, and it will grow healthily. now, these controls are all reliant on human labor, and it requires a lot of experience. once we’re finished, we can use machines / technologies [shebei] to control these conditions and they’ll be easily passed on. the minor adjustments made by human laborers to maintain suitable micro-ecologies for insects stand in stark contrast to the vision of an automated system of fly raising, where the production of artificial environmental conditions is meant to be self-sustaining. instead, the work of raising the bsf reveals a space of dependent cohabitation where new practices of contact and human care and attention prove critical for insect survival. a similar tension between care and control occurs in animal husbandry, where attention to specificities, unpredictability, and embodied practice constitute the human efforts necessary for achieving industrial standardization (pandian 2008; singleton 2010; blanchette 2018). in the bsf project, success in rendering biophysical nature into a reliable infrastructure—mechanized, reliable, and invisible—depends on an intimate relationship between humans and insects. intimate attention in the lab reveals that techno-utopian dreams of automation and mechanization that eschew the need for labor in the production of value nonetheless rely not merely on human labor but also on forms of care work. in this case, a project to devise an automated breeding machine is conditioned on unacknowledged and willfully obscured physical intimacy and practices of care between humans and insects. enclosures of insect rearing and urban living the practices of intimate attention to insects i witnessed at the field station are ultimately in service of creating a system to mechanize and standardize fly reproduction within an enclosure. the concept of enclosures has been used to describe two developments in capitalism’s strategy of appropriating value from nature: the land-enclosure movements that precipitated the agricultural revolution, and an industrial technique in animal husbandry (franklin 2007).11 in industrial husbandry, animal enclosures refer to systems of light and temperature regulation devised to increase animals’ rate of growth and reproduction with minimal human engagement (harrison 2013). as a regulated environment for animal breeding and rearing, the enclosure shifts animal biological functions onto an industrial life cycle. figure 5. ms. lin working in the garden. photo by amy zhang. dr. wu’s desire to build an enclosed apparatus in effect replicates the strategy of enclosures in industrial husbandry. he hopes to engineer a controlled environment for flies to grow and reproduce with minimal human intervention. next to the trays of fly larvae sits dr. wu’s first prototype. the structure—roughly seven feet tall, nine feet wide, and eleven feet deep, made of plastic siding, wood, and metal framing, water pipes and metal screws protruding from its sides—is a defunct machine he remains reluctant to discard. dr. wu imagined that organic waste and bsf larvae would be fed into the machine, effectively a black box,12 and that it would output adult larvae ready to hatch. the intermediate life stages of the fly were to have taken place entirely inside the machine, the stages of metamorphosis enclosed and obscured. his hope was that he could one day house his box in the garden of any urban community, where workers tasked with performing a minimum level of maintenance would periodically service the machine: adding fly larvae and organic waste and retrieving mature pupae before they turn into adults, thereby circulating fly larvae and organic waste like snacks and coins in and out of a vending machine. figure 6. the enclosed prototype for fly rearing. photo by amy zhang. the enclosure, however, is not only designed to embody the principles of industrial husbandry but also, more important, it manifests the aesthetic, spatial, and environmental ideals of an ecological modern method of urban waste treatment. to turn fly larvae into a waste infrastructure suitable to the urban high-rises of guangzhou, dr. wu tells me, requires an enclosed (fengbishi) system. throughout my research in guangzhou, municipal planners and officials repeatedly used the term enclosure (fengbishi) to describe a spatial and aesthetic characteristic. in the concrete and sanitized halls of apartment complexes, making waste management modern means making trash imperceptible. trash is stored in receptacles, hidden in stairwells, separated from the spaces of daily life. newly designed fengbishi waste trucks (introduced by the city management bureau) enclose waste to conceal odor and the unsightly process of decomposition. waste labor—whether performed by humans or animals—remains similarly hidden. in windowless basement rooms or utility closets, sanitary workers manually sort recyclables, their labor ensuring the sustainable processing of waste even in the face of failed citizen recycling campaigns (a. zhang 2019). dr. wu’s enclosed apparatus similarly shields from view the labor of care that ensures the reproduction of the insect life cycle. in effect, modern waste infrastructure must circulate discard invisibly, while nevertheless ensuring that urban services are delivered regularly and sustainably. the enclosure is a standardized apparatus that matches an aesthetic order of modern living in contemporary china. in its imagined form, the bsf enclosure echoes the gated housing community (fenbishi xiaoqu), a now pervasive spatial form that organizes life in cities. gated communities manifest a landscape of fear and insecurity (caldeira 2000; low 2001). in post-reform china, since the 1990s, enclosed compounds index a desire for a privatized form of living (tomba 2006). new apartment complexes and suburban compounds offer exclusionary private space through home ownership, the consumption of housing a key means of social distinction (li zhang 2010). however, these gated communities also seek to alleviate ecological concerns by reshaping the urban environment according to a sanitized green aesthetic. in newly developed gated communities, aspirations for green living feature prominently. landscaping and manicured lawns emulate a ruralist ideal (sze 2015). gated spaces set apart from the city signify the achievement of a middle-class lifestyle by virtue of being able to extricate oneself from the filthy, crowded, and disorderly elements of urban life. in these new, ostensibly environmentally minded communities, insects and waste, harbingers of disorder and disease, need to be kept at bay. insect enclosure conceals the cycles of life, growth, metamorphosis and death, the vital processes of animal life that carry out the labor of ecological remediation but are nevertheless out of step with a desire to create a particular sanitized, green-modernist aesthetic of order. the enclosed apparatus explicitly enacts a spatial separation between insects, waste, and humans in an urban setting. dr. wu knew well that the success of his project depended on overcoming a public revulsion for flies (associated with decomposing waste, filth, and danger) and the broad adoption of a new understanding of the bsf as an ecologically useful insect. to establish a different reputation for the bsf, researchers had to take care that an apparatus generating tens of thousands of fly larvae on an industrial scale did not release unpleasant smells or other discharge that might jeopardize the “environmental quality” of the project. by environmental quality, the team refers both to the apparatus’s capacity to meet a series of technical standards for pollution and, more important, to the perpetuation of a spatial order that enacts a politics of concealment for vital processes—reproduction, breakdown, and death—associated with disease, unruliness, and the ungovernability of life. figure 7. a sanitized, green aesthetic is characteristic of many gated communities in china. photo by amy zhang. prompted by fear of disease and environmental contamination, enclosures circumscribe and control multispecies entanglements that prevent forms of care and identification between humans and insects (law and mol 2008; nading 2014; blanchette 2015; kirksey 2015). for example, the control of mosquito populations by public health authorities has been characterized as a form of human labor intended to enact interspecies separation and to disentangle relations of cohabitation (kelly and lezaun 2014). sanitation workers target insect breeding grounds (stagnant pools, plants) in the urban landscape and systematically eliminate conditions that facilitate a shared condition of living. in short, biosecurity is founded on a fantasy of “enclos[ing] humans and animals in specific, sterile, and segregated spaces” (blanchette 2015, 662). in the laboratory, enclosed fly-raising apparatuses entrenched and normalized the capacity to govern the mutability of life through a technical style (hughes 2012). in the case of urban waste management, enclosures, and the various biological and labor processes they obscure, also facilitate the impression of the achievement of an automated, circular, and ecologically modern vision of waste treatment. in meeting the aesthetic requirements of the modern green city, one that has ejected unruly forms of animal life, the enclosed apparatus further obscures the intimate practices of care and contact between humans and insects that are required to perpetuate the continuous functioning of the circular vision. insect labor and intimacy in the ecologically modern city gabrielle hecht (2018) suggests that waste, a material index of the catastrophic effects of humanity’s existence on the planet’s physical and biochemical systems, constitutes the apotheosis of the anthropocene. in response to its own pressing waste crisis, the chinese state has adopted a technocentric approach to ecological modernization. posed as a solution to the waste crisis forged in an era of acute awareness of ecological decline, dr. wu’s bsf project revives an older agrarian practice of relying on animals to process human waste, yet in accordance with the principles and demands of an ecologically modern city. in doing so, it attempts to manifest an assumption shared by ecological modernization and green urbanism that the shift toward a clean, automated, green city can be readily achieved through the development of new and better technologies (halpern 2015; günel 2019). despite such pronouncements, as anthropologists have demonstrated, the fulfillment of the most basic urban provisions, particularly throughout the global south, continue to depend on haphazard practices, improvisation, and existing forms of labor and exploitation (simone 2004; anand, gupta, and appel 2018; degani 2018). an ecologically modern approach to waste management in china, as elsewhere, obscures the range and depth of work performed by municipal waste workers and informal laborers whose bodies make possible the movement and transformation of matter (gidwani and reddy 2011; fredericks 2018; doherty and brown 2019). in dr. wu’s laboratory, what is obscured includes not only the behind-the-scenes work performed by assistants like ms. lin but also the productive harnessing of insects’ metabolic and reproductive activity—as if it, too, were labor. the bsf project, sited at the convergence of biotechnology and china’s project of ecological modernization, reveals the fiction of biocapital: the belief that nature itself—absent human intervention, labor, and forms of care work—can generate value and remediate environments. my ethnography of laboratory practice has shown that more complex and nuanced ecological relations between humans and insects are not only obscured but also made possible, even demanded, by efforts to devise biotechnologies to realize green cities in china. and yet, the intimacy between humans and insects required by bsf waste management sits uncomfortably with the expectation that animals be expelled from, or contained and controlled within, modern cities. here, the apparatus of enclosure, in addition to enabling the bsf biotechnology to capitalize on insects’ metabolic and reproductive natures, is designed to fulfill the aesthetic and environmental demand that modern cities be rid of undomesticated animals (e.g., through pest control and by removing agrarian animals and slaughterhouses). the bsf project thus reflects the contradictory demands of contemporary china’s ecological urbanism, concerned with sanitization while increasingly reliant on the biological capacities of nonhumans for environmental remediation. as a hoped-for means to resolve this contradiction, the bsf enclosure’s attempts to realize ecological modernization in cities not only aim to produce environmental value, they also condition the terms of multispecies cohabitation for humans and insects. the enclosure enacts an interspecies separation that would seem to foreclose possibilities for “a knot of connection” between humans and insects (govindrajan 2018, 4). and yet, in carrying out the daily labor practice of scientific work, we see scientists engage in intimate contact with and care for subjects as uncharismatic as flies. in the shadow of the defunct prototype of the enclosure, i briefly glimpsed the intimate appreciation for the vulnerability and potential of nonhuman life: dr. wu, ms. lin, and i crouched down around a tray and watched excitedly as the dirt once again turned to life, with hundreds of yellow larvae squirming to the surface. abstract this essay traces a scientific pilot project to transform the black soldier fly (hermetia illucens) into a biotechnology to treat urban organic waste in accordance with the dominant cultural logics of an ecologically modern approach to waste management in contemporary china. a principle of urban waste management, circularity, and a spatial logic of urban living, enclosures, condition the scientific intervention that promises to harness animal metabolic labor as a biotechnology and a waste infrastructure that can be adapted to the urban ecologies of guangzhou. while scientists emphasize the natural proclivities of insect metabolism to transform waste into value, my ethnographic research illustrates that the practice of aligning animal metabolism with urban metabolism is anything but natural or automatic. together, circularity and enclosure, as guiding logics of waste management in chinese ecological modernization, uphold a fiction of biocapital; they create the illusion that nature generates value and remediates environments without human intervention while mystifying and naturalizing the appropriation of nature and labor in the new green city. [waste; metabolism; cities; the circular economy; multispecies ethnography; china; urban political ecology; biocapital] 摘要 本文研究中国科学家利用黑水虻分解餐厨垃圾生物技术的实验项目。昆虫学家们希望，能让这一项目符合中国生态现代化垃圾处理理念，同时可以在现代化封闭式的居住社区中使用。昆虫学家强调，运用昆虫的代谢系统来处理餐厨垃圾，既符合广州城市垃圾设施生态循环化的理念，也可利用昆虫的天然生命周期將废物转变成资本。但人类学研究显示，昆虫的代谢系統不可能与都巿垃圾循环規律自动匹配。在这个项目中，两个概念-循环和封闭，仅仅是由生命资本打造生命经济的美好愿望。沒有人的介入，只根据昆虫自然的生命周期的循环就能产生价值，这种理论混淆了生物能与劳动力在发展新型綠色城市中的作用. [垃圾; 代谢系统; 城市; 循环经济; 多物种民族志; 中国; 都市政治生态学; 生物资本] notes acknowledgments this article would not have been possible without the generosity of dr. wu and his team in guangzhou. thanks to paige west and mark moritz for their comments, along with sarah besky, ashley carse, nicole peterson, and maryann cairns who read this piece as a part of the 2016 roy rappaport prize committee. earlier versions of the work benefited from generous readings and comments of michael dove, dana graef, bruce grant, susan greenhalgh, karen hébert, emily martin, laura martin, andrea muehlebach, helen siu, shivi sivaramakrishnan, mei zhan, li zhang, and ling zhang. i am grateful to both the previous and current editorial teams of cultural anthropology and the anonymous reviewers for their deep engagement and probing questions. heather paxson’s reiterative edits and incisive comments proved critical for developing the central arguments. d’arcy saum read every draft from beginning to end. versions of the article benefited from the following workshops and presentations: the environmental history working group at harvard, the fairbank center environments in asia lecture series, the biosocial network retreat, and the center for urban environments (university of toronto mississauga). field research was supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, and the national science foundation (#1225886). 1 ms. lin, the primary caretaker of the bsf experiment, had no formal scientific training, but she was familiar with animal husbandry. her work at this field station reflects the reliance of scientific research on agricultural labor typical of field-station research in china and elsewhere (see, e.g., ann h. kelly and javier lezaun [2017] on the reliance on local villagers for mosquito experiments in africa). 2 i use the terms infrastructure and biotechnology somewhat interchangeably in this article. in dr. wu’s project, infrastructures and biotechnology are socionatural systems devised to fulfill the infrastructural function of circulation. 3 see jake kosek (2010) for an analysis of the scientific engineering of the honeybee and hugh raffles (2010) for a history of insects as both a working animal and a companion species in china. 4 biocapital has been defined as “form(s) of extraction that involves isolating and mobilizing the primary reproductive agency of specific body parts” (franklin and lock 2003, 8). 5 see the “china modernization report 2007: study on ecological modernization” and the 2008 circular economy law. 6 ecological marxists look for concrete labor in sites of metabolic exchange such as agriculture, mining, and fisheries (howard 2017; huber 2017). 7 the historical origins and cultural specificities of the concept of the life cycle of things and materials in industrial ecology are rooted not only in biology but also in the principles of machines and information-regulation in cybernetic systems. key ideas in cybernetics, such as self-regulating nature and energy flows, developed in the decades after the second world war, precisely when ecology as a discipline was trying to fashion itself after the hard sciences and interested in designing self-regulating machines, such as guided missiles and thermostats (worster 1994). 8 the systematic annihilation of insects was first promoted by the sanitation campaigns of the 1950s. public health campaigns regard the elimination of insects and the removal of waste as critical to the production of healthy bodies and the nation (see rogaski 2002; bao 2012). 9 all interview extracts are taken from fieldwork conducted in guangzhou from 2012 to 2014. pseudonyms are used. 10 in feminist marxian terms, production and reproduction are alike as processes of the constant exchange of energy through the body, between humans and nature that undergird labor activity. capital’s production of surplus value relies on this appropriation of unpaid labor in the form of domestic work and biological reproduction (fortunati 1995; weeks 2011; moore 2015; vora 2015). 11 enclosing animals forms a critical part of the agro-industrial food production that renders biological processes calculable and controllable. for example, climate-controlled housing is used in rearing poultry to achieve “rapid turnover, high density stocking, a high degree of mechanization, a low labor requirement, and efficient conversion of food into saleable products” (harrison 2013, 35). 12 in science and technology studies, a black box refers to the closing off of the dynamic and contested process in the formation of scientific knowledge and facts (latour 1987). references anand, nikhil, akhil gupta, and hannah appel, eds. 2018 the promise of infrastructure. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bao, maohong 2012 “environmentalism and environmental movements in china since 1949.” in a companion to global environmental history, edited by j. r. mcneill and erin stewart mauldin, 474–92. malden, mass.: 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204-210, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.02 security against the state in revolutionary yemen ross porter university of exeter https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4772-4247 for a sovereign power to label someone or something a “threat,” especially a national one, typically means to situate it beyond the realm of normal politics and within a state of exception. in critical security studies, this process by which a state discerns and designates threats is known as securitization (c.a.s.e. collective 2006). while this framing is broad enough to account for operations of state power in a diverse range of circumstances, it overlooks two related possibilities, both of which are quintessential features of revolutions, and both of which help broaden our understanding of securitization. the first is the possibility that people can willfully excise themselves from so-called normal politics and, in doing so, knowingly become threats. the second is the possibility that securitization is not just something that states do to their subjects but also something that subjects do to states. both possibilities define a distinctly revolutionary form of securitization. securitizing a revolution when revolution erupted in yemen in 2011, as conspicuous as the event was the speed of its condemnation. as hundreds of thousands of people poured into streets across the nation, feeling jubilant and empowered, political analysts spoke of a “political crisis,” foreign officials expressed “concern,” and skeptics warned of impending “chaos.” the register and content of these reactions—by academics, policy think tanks, diplomats, and the regime itself—was remarkably consistent. as the new revolutionaries set up encampments in yemen’s three main cities of sana’a, taiz, and aden, political forecasts remained characteristically hobbesian: without the state to mediate yemenis in their rights and duties, “terrorism” would spread, “vacuums” would be filled by “illegitimate non-state actors,” and tribes would inevitably feud. meanwhile, president ali abdullah saleh sought to remind everyone of the achievements of his three-decade rule—“security, stability, unity, and constitutional legitimacy”—while also warning, in the same breath, of an innate propensity for violence among yemenis. no sooner had the revolution been diagnosed as a political crisis than international mediators arrived in sana’a calling for a political solution, by which they meant talks. general consensus among this mediating elite held that the popular will, as articulated in the streets (“the people want … ”), urgently needed to be channeled into a formalized space of political deliberation and style of reasoning congenial to the common good. where, they asked, were the men and women who would be ready to behave in a civil manner around their enemies at the negotiating table and contain the volatility of what edmund burke (2003, 2) warned of, in the french revolution, as the “wild gas” of the “spirit of liberty”? saleh, too, called on the new revolutionaries to consider the political option, pleading with them, condescendingly, to organize themselves and elect representatives. meanwhile, state-run news agencies spread word of the unprecedented national threat; saleh declared a state of emergency and security forces swiftly descended into the encampments. a willing threat it is significant that the revolutionaries proceeded into the domain of the exception fully cognizant of the fate that awaited them. they knew that in the moment of announcing themselves as revolutionaries (thuwār), the state and its allies would cast them as “traitors” and “terrorists,” threats to national security, beyond the realm of normal politics and subject to extrajudicial procedures. they knew this because they knew the regime, its methods, and what to expect. this willingness to assume the role of threat proves significant because it unsettles the idea that people who are the objects of securitization must inevitably be understood as its subjects and, by extension, on the basis of their insecurity. by contrast, an assertive and conscious willingness to become a threat evinces a certain degree of power, sovereignty, and ideology, more reminiscent of the securitizer than the securitized. the revolutionary individual, in this case, is the self-empowered object of state securitization. such individuals will willfully extricate themselves from the state’s political and legal norms and, in doing so, realize a different notion of what it means to be secure—one based, in turn, on a different notion of what it means to be political. i will work back to this point in what follows. from existential threat to existential capacity between 2011 and 2013, i conducted fieldwork in a revolutionary encampment in central sana’a, known as change square. spread across five miles of inner-city streets, this area was home to tens of thousands of people for nearly three years. i use the word home partly because of the camp’s permanency: timber-framed structures with breeze-block foundations, sleeping compartments, and electricity supplies powering satellite dishes and televisions; a market, a hospital, wash blocks, restaurants; seminars and training courses; art galleries; a stage; even a defected army brigade. but beyond the physicality of spatial belonging, home evokes an intimacy between revolutionary self and revolutionary world that, in turn, evinces a particular expression of security. the defining experience of becoming and identifying as a revolutionary individual was one of rupture between two ways of life. each of these existences evoke, for this same individual, a different dynamic of securitization, one that is incapacitating (as a securitized subject), and another that is liberating (as a securitizer of sorts). beginning with the former, revolutionary reflections on prerevolutionary life typically amounted to an expression of subjugation to a coercive sovereign entity. by subjugation, i mean not only brute force but also a life marred by constant moral compromise, unrealizable aspirations, tragic choices, and the kind of uncertainty that follows from the arbitrary casting of threats. by contrast, the new revolutionaries appeared strikingly indifferent to the securitizing agenda of the state, despite the latter’s intensification of violence following the eruption of revolution. the revolutionaries found it farcical that they were deemed terrorists, traitors, and general proponents of crisis and chaos. in their minds, they were the “the free revolutionaries,” with freedom pertaining to an unprecedentedly self-empowered and sovereign relation to the regime. the effect of this new relation would in turn strip the regime of political legitimacy in the eyes of many of its supporters, redistributing it to the revolution. it is in this redistribution of political legitimacy, and indeed possibility, that we may think about revolution as a form of securitization in its own right. let us consider a few expressions of what this rupture looked like in practice. outwitting the state few acts were considered as revolutionary as marching unarmed into gunfire during demonstrations. a typical scene unfolded as follows: thousands of protestors leave change square and march through the surrounding streets singing, chanting, and carrying portraits of martyrs from previous demonstrations. then, seeing a military barricade in the distance or finding themselves ambushed at a junction, the crowds would descend into the breach as machine guns rattled to life, arms wide open and shouting, “we’re peaceful.” this act became celebrated as the defining symbol of a revolution primarily because it served to reconfigure the relationship between securitizer and securitized. many of the individuals heading for the barricades had come to the revolution following a lifetime of conflict with the regime—a conflict in which they had felt perpetually provoked into using violence as part of a carefully orchestrated political strategy of divide and rule. they knew that their own use of violence had played into saleh’s hands to instantiate his position, both locally and internationally, as the guardian of national security. precisely the knowledge that they had been complicit in their own securitization made marching unarmed into gunfire such an immensely appealing, even liberating, act. heading for the barricades with their “bare chests,” as they would say, the revolutionaries now confronted their adversary in a way that both refused to play into its hands and culminated in a distinctly novel sensation of freedom and moral autonomy. the act also exposed, in stark relief, the illegitimacy of the regime’s use of violence and a radically contrasting image of political (and moral) legitimacy now forming around the revolution. it is in this sense that we may allude to revolutionary securitization as the process by which agents of a state unexpectedly find themselves without place or future in a radically alterative and expanding demarcation of the political. egalitarian commitments several miles of streets in the heart of a bustling capital city are covered in tents. in each, thirty or more individuals are deep in the throes of argument and debate. they point fingers at their neighbors, accusing one another of adherence to extraneous ideologies and political preferences. people walk from tent to tent throwing bundles of flyers through doorways, advertising the true intentions of their fellow revolutionaries. accusations circulate about an attempt to forsake the will of the people and of a plot to hijack the revolution. chants against political parties emanate from a crowd near the central stage. a banner hangs across the street: “no to individual rule.” in the newspaper voice of the revolution, a journalist writes that no one represents the revolution, that no individual can or will speak for the people. an organization is founded to disorganize organizations seeking to organize the revolution. if marching unarmed into gunfire was about upholding an unprovoked and desecuritized moral and political self in the face of the state, then within change square, an ethos of mistrust constituted the primary means of its maintenance. throughout the camp, suspicions abounded regarding an elusive enemy in the revolutionaries’ midst—an individual, party, or group that, at any moment, would surreptitiously impose its will on “the people” and re-engineer state securitization under a new (potentially revolutionary) banner. to avoid this possibility and ensure that power be kept diffuse and distributed, the only individuals universally trusted as leaders at change square were those who could satisfactorily demonstrate, typically through spectacles of selflessness and self-sacrifice, the innocence of their will vis-à-vis the will of the people. hence the exalted status of the martyrs. it appears curious, however, that the revolutionaries situated this seemingly antistate egalitarian logic within their own vision of a (revolutionary) state. in this ideal, the role of the “citizen” is to diffuse the rise of concentrated power, ensuring that power is the people (in an ontological rather than representational sense). the state thus comes to look very un-stately. and yet, in revolutionary theory, it is a state nonetheless—only one premised on the selfless exploits of its proponents and the simultaneous delegitimization of an authoritarian rival. for a crisis of politics considering the importance attached to safeguarding the revolutionary present against the specter of the past, and specifically a past in which state securitization had been dressed in politically neutralizing garb (e.g., “stability”), it seems hardly surprising that calls by international mediators for reconciliation, dialogue, and negotiation (“political solutions”) fell on deaf ears. on the first day of the un-brokered national dialogue conference in 2013, crowds left change square carrying pictures of martyrs with the slogan, “only this list represents us in the dialogue.” others from the camp (“youth” who had acquired a certain amount of trust) tentatively participated in proceedings, testing their suspicions, only to encounter individuals vying for supremacy and pushing their minoritizing visions of a future state. in the following years, intrarevolutionary mistrust would mutate into the war now raging in yemen. if there is any continuity between the early revolutionary days of change square and the current period, it is the suspicion we find toward seemingly amicable invitations to politics and the securitizing agendas they conceal. it is in this vein that we may think about political crisis not just as a diagnostic for the absence of security but also as the direct result of people taking security into their own hands. conclusion anthropologists can productively contribute to conversations about securitization by bringing the concept into conversation with a diverse range of circumstances and, in doing so, gauging the extent to which the concept can be extended or pluralized. one such conversation thinks about security from below—security “subverted from its original meaning and captured from the state,” (el dardiry and hermez 2020, 199) as the editors of this colloquy put it. if anthropologists are to take up this challenge, however, they must first redress their preoccupation with the victims of state securitization with a focus on non-state securitizers. to allow for this redress, they must entertain the notion that people who are the intended objects of state securitization are not, necessarily, best understood as its insecure subjects. thinking about how people take security into their own hands can lead us in a number of directions. one route will consider how people (willfully or not) do the security work of the state. darryl li’s (2020) piece highlights the importance of ethnography for humanizing agents of state securitization and, by extension, catalyzing a nascent anthropology of the “enemy.” another considers how people securitize themselves and others on behalf of the state, or do so to make up for the failure of the state. we see the latter expression in kali rubaii’s (2020) discussion, where she illustrates the ethical work that goes into sustaining human life in times of extreme suffering and risk. another direction, which i have taken up here, examines how security is deployed against the state from a position of relative autonomy. the yemeni revolution could be considered a security event punctuating a life of state-induced insecurity. revolutionary securitization marks a momentary escape from what diana allan (2020) describes as a life marred by perpetual insecurity, where insecurity is not merely a blip but an enduring state of subjection to the relentless “dehumanizing objectifications of neoliberal statecraft.” the eventfulness of security, in this case, is constituted by a willed excision from the political norms of the state and the simultaneous embodiment of a rival sovereign formation. the effect of this excision and embodiment in the yemeni revolution was to momentarily render inert the securitizing machinations of an authoritarian state through the cultivation of a more virtuous and liberating “state” of one’s own. we find subtle echoes here of what martin holbraad and morten axel pedersen (2012) refer to, in the cuban case, as “revolutionary securitization,” defined as the virtuous ontological fusion between oneself and one’s legitimate political forms. at change square, it was specifically the work that went into defending the sovereignty of one’s own, legitimate, political sphere that defined a revolutionary process of securitization. yet in its subversion from its original meaning, revolution constitutes a form of security that remains largely invisible to the analyst, or politician, for whom the eclipse of the state (in its narrow definition) spells the absence of security. abstract what does security look like when it is deployed against rather than by the state? focusing on the 2011 revolution in yemen, this essay hints at a number of ways in which the revolutionaries sought to outwit the machinations of state securitization by taking security into their own hands. 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2020 “trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 211–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.03. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 204-210, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.02 national reconciliation in the age of new social media: the war on silence in the tunisian truth commission’s facebook-mediated public hearings cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 361-385, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.03 national reconciliation in the age of new social media: the war on silence in the tunisian truth commission’s facebook-mediated public hearings douaa sheet american university https://orcid.org/0009-0000-7285-9330 it is difficult not to look on with irony at how the truth and dignity commission’s “historic” public hearings, aimed at finally “freeing speech for victims of tyranny,” required a special pass to attend; one somehow assumes that freeing speech for all would also entail freeing attendance for all. but the public hearings were not open to the public. you had to be a certified non-governmental organization, a journalist working for a recognized institution, or a known public figure to be granted entry. securing a pass involved going to the commission’s headquarters in the capital, submitting your identification and proof of credentials, and, if approved, returning two days later to pick up your badge. the most problematic thing about this policy was that you had to know about it ahead of time—that you needed a badge to be granted entry—which proved neither intuitive nor obvious to the general public. most victims assumed they could just show up. of course, the hearings were televised. but considering the commission’s promotional campaigns leading up to the public hearings, which persistently highlighted re-establishing “openness” and “accessibility” as the cornerstones of their mission, reiterating at every turn the “historicity” of this event, people wanted to participate in that history. the commission held its first public hearing on november 17, 2016, under heavy security. an elevated horizontal banner marked the entrance, flanked by two vertical ones forming an arched, gate-like structure. the horizontal banner announced, in arabic and english: “public hearing sessions, tunis 17, 18 november 2016.” the two vertical banners said in capital letters: “for us, for our children, for our nation.” but only a badge would get you through that gate. once allowed through, metal detectors marked the first stop. on the other side of these detectors, a group of commission staff looked closely at your badge and told you where to go based on the title listed on your credentials. these security measures and the hierarchical seating arrangements only added to the spectacular intensity of the scene. a lineup of fancy cars, formally dressed high-profile public figures, rarely-seen-in-such-finery civil society actors, all arrived under flashing camera lights. more than twenty-five journalists from local and international news outlets were crowded into the front porch of the main building, snapping photos and homing in to interview public figures as they arrived. in the middle of this glittering celebrity ambience stood a handful of the mothers of the martyrs of the revolution, holding framed photos of their dead sons, protesting outside the building because they were not allowed inside the main hall. meanwhile, those of us in the lobby were also trying to find a way into the main hall where the hearing would take place; not everyone would be allowed to enter. the commission had set up three separate halls, for three hierarchical guest categories. the main hall with the commissioners and the witnesses was for “invited guests” only. journalists were divided into written press and live media. only live media journalists could gain access into the main hall. a much smaller hall on the ground floor of the same building held members of the written press. this room looked like a bare cafeteria with a small, fifty-inch tv screen mounted on the wall. the third “hall” was a huge tent set up outside the building, with a large screen for “excess audience.” the written press—clearly marked as ranking lowest in the hierarchy of guests—were not pleased. one of the journalists went looking for the head of media relations and started yelling at him: this is “an outrage,” she shouted. “why on earth would we come all the way here to sit and watch via a screen? i could have done that from the comfort of my couch at home! we are journalists, we are supposed to be inside the room, and recording everything live, not only what you choose to include in your [camera] frame!”1 as an ethnographer, i felt the same anxiety; i had to get myself into the main hall. i found someone who introduced me to the head of media relations. he asked me for whom i was writing. i told him i was a phd student working on a research project about the tdc. that did not get me through the door, but my new york affiliation did. he said, “ok, but if i let you in, you have to stay for the whole thing. i can’t have it look like people are getting bored or uninterested halfway through the hearings.” i assured him that i would glue myself to my chair until the very last word spoken. so finally, i walked into a fully packed main hall with people standing in a crowd in the back. i found an empty seat. it happened to be behind a lineup of three high-ranking un officials who looked extremely bored. these were the kind of high-profile officials who only showed up to high-visibility events: they did not form part of the local team working in this particular country. they had their headsets for simultaneous translation hanging around their necks. the hearings were to proceed in arabic; onsite translators were ready to provide instant english and french translation. forty-five minutes past the planned start time, the national anthem finally announced the commencement of the hearing. everybody quieted down and stood up. the hearing had begun.2 —fieldnotes, november 17, 2016, tunis tunisia had launched its truth and dignity commission (tdc) to investigate ousted president zine el-abidine ben ali’s historical human rights violations against more than 62,000 victims in the wake of the arab spring, in 2014. following best practices of the international human rights instruments on which it was modeled, the tdc organized a series of public hearings in which victims narrated testimonies of the violence they had suffered. in her opening remarks at the first public hearing, tdc president sihem bensedrine summarized the objective of the hearings as follows: we are gathered here to rehabilitate [i‘ādat ta’hīl] the people of tunisia. … the public hearings are designed in the first place to provide those victims reduced to silence for a long time with a voice. they are also aimed at providing an overview, information to society as a whole, about the violations of rights and dignity that were taking place behind closed doors. ultimately, these public hearings are designed to expose the tormentors who have blighted our society, which we are all required to protect by combatting oblivion and preserving memory. truth commissions attribute a broad list of accomplishments to truth-telling (see daly 2008; mendeloff 2004). of these, perhaps least clear is their role in national reconciliation. one explanation for truth commissions’ contribution to national reconciliation is so pervasive that it has attained the level of common sense: the idea that “speaking is healing.” this comes to clear expression in a foreword to the second edition of priscilla hayner’s (2011, xiii) book on truth commissions, in which kofi annan, the former secretary-general of the united nations, states: “it is clear that national healing can be a halting and painful process. but ultimately, it seems that many of our natural instincts are confirmed: while the truth is painful, burying the past is much less likely to lead a country to a healthy future.” a similar thought was put differently by the international center for transitional justice, which states that public hearings offer “platforms of truth, dignity, and catharsis,” with “potentially cathartic power for victims and their families, but also the public at large, by generating solidarity and empathy for the suffering of others.” through these hearings, entire sectors of society previously numb to the pain of victims may find within them “a renewed sense of solidarity” (ictj 2017). the tunisian tdc upheld this value of truth-telling, and 77 percent of tunisians agreed with it, naming “revealing the truth” as the most important course toward national reconciliation (tdc 2019, 546). in this article, i challenge this assumed relation between truth-telling and reconciliation by bringing attention to the understudied role of new social media in the mediation of these public testimonies. within the context of debates about the role of new social media in democratization efforts, on one hand, and ambivalence about their effects on social relationships, on the other, i ask: how has publicizing testimonies of suffering come to be equated with the public good and cast as key to reconciliation efforts? how has social media—driving narrative, shaping audience bubbles, emboldening impassioned mobs—cast doubt on this simplistic liberal vision that celebrates speaking as synonymous with healing? in what follows, i argue that social media platforms have altered the role of the truth—of voice, of speaking, of knowing, of being informed, and of listening—and of public testimonies in national reconciliation efforts. through a study of their algorithmic drive for more content, i propose that social media platforms have essentially declared a “war on silence.” i analyze silence as a “gap in knowledge” and “war on silence” as these platforms’ algorithmic drive to eliminate such gaps by maintaining a ceaseless flow of content. i suggest that one of the less analyzed consequences of this endless stream of content is quantity becoming confused for a sufficiency of information to make decisions about our relationship to others. while “voice” has been celebrated and “silence” decried in human rights discourse, i argue that silence can constitute an important condition that can help maintain the bedrock of strangers’ empathy and mediate national reconciliation. essentially, this essay offers a study of the role of new social media in national reconciliation efforts. structure and logistics of the tdc’s public hearings by the end of its four-year tenure, the tdc had conducted more than 49,000 private hearings and a total of 14 public hearings, held at irregular intervals ranging from three hearings per month to none for three months, extending over a period of two years, between november 2016 and december 2018. the public hearings featured a total of 108 testimonies. on november 17, 2016, the commission held its first public hearing at one of the ousted president’s former properties in the capital’s wealthy northern suburb.3 it lasted more than four hours and featured the testimonies of six victims, representing four different victim groups. such testimonies are usually presented by victims themselves or, in the case of the murdered or forcibly disappeared, by surviving family members. the first testimony was given by three mothers of demonstrators killed by police fire during the 2011 demonstrations. the second testimony came from the mother and wife of an islamist party member who was forcibly disappeared. the third witness was a former student union member and islamist prisoner known as a public intellectual and academic. another public intellectual, a former perspective (marxist left) prisoner and the most famous of the persons testifying, gave the final testimony. testimonies ranged from thirty to forty-five minutes. the event lasted from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m. on a thursday night. the second public hearing was held the next day. they were held back to back because the tdc wanted the first hearing to have a representative range of victim groups. considering the large number of those victim groups, they decided to divide the testimonies over two nights. both hearings and all those that followed were live-streamed on facebook. given the highly politicized context, the commission was careful about its selection criteria. hearings were equally representative of: the diverse range of victim groups; the type of violation (torture, forced disappearance, violation of the right to make a living, etc.); region (the commission did not want to reproduce the former regime’s favoritism toward coastal cities and marginalization of the interior regions); historical period (they did not want to favor more recent violations over historical ones); and gender (tdc 2018, 85–86). that said, the commission was created by an islamist-majority government, and islamists made up the largest victim group due to their systematic persecution by the former regime in the 1980s and 1990s.4 as a result, despite their efforts, commentators perceived the tdc as favoring islamists over other victims, namely, secularists—a national impression that would cloud every element of the tdc, including its public hearings. new social media, democratic transitions, and imagined publics throughout history, the advent of new information technologies has often empowered successive waves of people at the expense of traditional power brokers. … then as now, access to information and to new communication channels meant new opportunities to participate, to hold power to account and to direct the course of one’s life with greater agency. —google executives eric schmidt and jared cohen, the digital age unchecked optimism hailed new social media’s potential as the engine of information, dissemination, and participation in its early years. truth commissions, meanwhile, proclaimed their unwavering commitment to granting victims voice, exposing the truth, and safeguarding people’s right to information. in this context, truth, information, and freedom of speech are often exalted and equated with the public good. i want to question this presumed relation between speaking out and the public good: is it safe to assume that publicizing testimonies of violence always has a positive effect on the unity of a political collective? how have these platforms’ modes of content circulation altered the established value of “speaking out” in democratic politics and of giving victims’ “voice” in national reconciliation efforts? studies of the role of new social media in democratic transitions still remain in a relatively early stage (vinck 2019), and they are even less developed in studies of the middle east and north africa. between 2011 and 2013, almost every major media journal published a special issue on the role of social media in the arab spring. much of that literature, which germinated at incredible speed in the aftermath of the uprisings, centered on questions of causation (did new social media platforms—facebook, twitter, youtube—cause the arab spring?),5 the challenge to authoritarianism (do these platforms empower networks of collective action and protest [eltantawy and wiest 2011; howard and hussain 2013; shirky 2009] or do they enhance authoritarian surveillance and stifle dissent [hassanpour 2014; morozov 2012]?), and their role in social movements (how do social media platforms affect social movements?). yet the topic of social media’s mediation role in democratic transitions has received little attention. meanwhile, outside political science democratization studies, in anthropology, sociology, and behavioral psychology, perhaps the feature of social media platforms most analyzed is how the communities they create are imagined, virtual, and parallel—but not part of the real world. many of the early studies of new social media grappled with the distinction between the real world and the alternative lives people build on these platforms (e.g., boellstorff 2008; malaby 2011; turkle 1997, 1984). of particular concern has been the question of whether online relationships are “real,” and whether by turning to social media, we are disconnecting ourselves from actual social relationships. one line of inquiry, for instance, measures the “realness” of these relationships in a count of how many of them “migrate” into in-person relationships. while the particularly influential article by robert kraut and colleagues (1998) originally confirmed fears of social media’s potentially detrimental effects on users’ social and psychological well-being, a more recent wave of studies has challenged this view and endeavored to show the different ways these platforms can supplement and grow users’ “actual” social lives—but in both waves, the real/virtual binary still dominates the axis of analysis. this study puts the above two, otherwise distinct debates in conversation by scrutinizing social media platforms’ mediation role—that is, their particular mode of content circulation—which i argue is one of their less analyzed yet potentially more detrimental features for political collectives. on the one hand, in a region where authoritarianism endures and basic access to information and freedom of expression remain incomplete projects, the question of dissemination in social media studies continues to take precedence and the politics of mediation remains secondary, unanalyzed. speech is subsumed under information-communication technology (ict) and mainly studied through frameworks of freedom of expression, access to information, and dissemination networks—where it is not so much analyzed as tallied. i find that this focus has inadvertently precluded the exploration of the full role of social media platforms in democratization and transitional justice efforts, and this study of their mediation role constitutes a step in that direction. on the other hand, i depart from studies of the impact of social media platforms on personal relationships that are framed through the imagined/real binary, and i take seriously the imagination as an important realm in which political collectives are forged and examine these platforms’ corrosive effect on it. most of these studies reference benedict anderson’s (1983) “imagined” communities simply to highlight their difference from “real” ones (e.g., gruzd, wellman, and takhteyev 2011). instead, i understand anderson’s imagination as the active site where the relationship between the individual and the collective is cultivated. and while references to anderson have reached a degree that one could call “promiscuous” (crapanzano 2004, 212n4),6 i find him particularly relevant for a study of the politics of new social media because he foregrounds the medium (print matter) in his analysis of the role of the imagination in forging political collectives. specifically, he shows how the expanded scope of print matter’s circulation had a direct impact on the imagination’s role in shaping political collectives. therefore, drawing on anderson’s triadic analytic framework, i ask: how does the rise of new social media—changing the production, circulation, and consumption of online content—impact the role of the imagination in cohering the political collective? in brief, in a departure from studies that explore social media platforms mainly through an opposition between the real and the imagined, and from studies that have focused almost exclusively on dissemination, i argue that one of new social media platforms’ defining and yet less analyzed features is their mode of content circulation. and while benjamin lee and edward lipuma (2002) have well established the importance of circulation to social analysis, anthropologists continue to “take discourse ‘circulation’ for granted, as a mechanical process that merely transmits meanings, denying it the sense of cultural and performative significance attributed to discourse ‘production’” (briggs 2007, 343–44). therefore, i draw on anthropologists of publics who have compellingly established that “the very capacity of publics to know themselves and act in the world is premised, not on the instrumental use of communication to represent that which is already there, but rather on recursive processes of mass mediation and self-abstraction” (cody 2011, 47). finding it useful to think social media through the lens of “infrastructure” (kornberger et al. 2019), i also draw on studies of social media algorithms grappling with the political consequences of these new forms of mediation. and building on anderson, who underscored the productive function of the imagination in welding political collectives, i explore how new social media’s mode of content circulation has potentially corrosive effects on the realm of the imagined and the kinds of imagined publics it mediates—a change that i argue has serious consequences for the role of testimonies of violence in forging empathetic publics and fostering national reconciliation. the rise of facebook in post-uprising tunisia just as tv became the primary medium for civic communication in the 1960s, social media is becoming this in the 21st century. —mark zuckerberg, “building global community,” facebook, february 16, 2017 facebook rose to popularity in tunisia through its critical role in the 2011 uprising and has since only further consolidated its position at the center of the political scene. particularly in a country where official news outlets such as traditional journalism and television had been controlled by the state for decades and perceived as its distrusted arms, facebook and twitter originally emerged as critical alternatives for the dissemination of information. when ben ali censored activists’ blogs in 2008, they relocated to facebook and used their facebook walls as new blogs (kahlaoui 2013). in 2009, facebook became available in arabic, thereby expanding its reach in the region. during the 2011 uprising, as official channels ignored the unrest, tunisians turned to facebook as the only site providing live, minute-by-minute updates of what was happening per neighborhood (madrigal 2011). within two weeks, in the pivotal days between january 5 and january 17, the number of facebook users in tunisia increased by 8 percent (mourtada and salem 2011). since then, as the number of individuals with internet access has continued to steadily rise, the number of facebook users continues to rise along with it (iws 2020). but if facebook’s pivotal function during the 2011 uprising was the dissemination of information, in the post-uprising context, political organizers turned facebook into a public sphere for building networks, advocacy, launching protests, raising awareness about controversial state bills, campaigning, and heated political debate. most victim groups did not have an independent website or blog, and their only official online presence was a facebook page. victims unlikely to be interviewed or featured in official news reporting used facebook to participate in evaluating the work of the tdc and shaping public opinion around it. after an interview with a political organizer involved in the tdc process, i would ask them for the documents they had referenced during the meeting. they would frequently respond: “just go to my facebook page, my entire archive is there.” as i conducted research among people active in the tdc process, most introductions, files shared, and messages were sent via facebook. even exchanges organizing a social outing were more likely to occur via facebook messages than phone calls or texts. while only one-third of the population had internet access in 2010 (itu 2019), and only half of those had active facebook accounts, the reach of facebook must be understood not by a count of individual accounts but as situated within the broader social networks these users inhabit. traditional news media, particularly the qatari-based al jazeera tv network, reporting facebook-uploaded shaky videos shot with camera phones helped expand the viewership of facebook content beyond the number of its registered users (zayani 2015). during my field research, i would often learn about a controversial facebook statement not through facebook, but indirectly when a victim, a tdc staff member, or a civil society organizer brought it up. these statements would be treated as a major development in the tdc proceedings, often referenced in later conversations and interviews. even though many victims had no facebook accounts, internet, computers, or smartphones, they were always fully updated on the latest facebook controversy or comment of the week. many received updates indirectly through their social networks by word of mouth. in brief, if there was facebook news, everybody heard about it—internet access or not. facebook’s alleged role in the 2011 uprising and its popularity in post-uprising tunisia prompted similar questions about its role in the democratization process: how did facebook impact the commission’s efforts to publicize the truth, grant victims voice, and promote national reconciliation? the answer started emerging clearly for me as i began to compare my experience attending the public hearings in person and my experience viewing them on facebook. the critical point of difference i want to highlight is the relation between the individual viewer and other members of the audience, the collective whose members these hearings are meant to help reconcile. on facebook, the audience could comment on and discuss the testimony in real time. in the hall, my best impression of the audience’s reaction to the testimony was based on whichever faces the camerapeople chose to focus on and project onto the two live screens flanking the stage. they tended to zoom in on faces of high-ranking public figures or faces showing strong emotion. in comparison, facebook’s live-streaming format allows for hundreds of viewers’ comments to appear during the hearing in real time. even if you watch the recorded video at a later time, not as it live-streams, the comments get recorded as part of the video, appearing in the real time in which they were posted during the hearing. the comments proceed like a conversation. someone posts a first comment, such as “this pool of liars,” to which another person responds. a fight will ensue, commenters will trade insults, eventually the conversation will die down. a few minutes later a new comment will be posted, which might be commented on, or might just float there on its own until a more polemical comment is posted triggering another thread of responses, and so on. this type of audience engagement with the testimonies in real time differed markedly from attending the public hearing in person, where the audience was expected to be silent. the second difference was my impression of other audience members’ reactions. my impression involved a lot more speculation in person than it does on facebook. live, my impression of the other audience members’ response proved mostly speculative. i was reading the faces of people many of whom i did not know personally. often facial expressions and body language can be strong enough to prove definitive in what they communicate, but there were still gaps that my own mind had to fill. on facebook, audience members express their opinions plainly, leaving no room for speculation and with little reason to censor themselves. the facebook format also frees people to make comments and opinions that would be inappropriate and thus likely left unspoken in more socially inhibited live interactions. the third difference is that facebook facilitates an encounter with a much greater and more diverse pool of commenters. on facebook, the impression i was getting in terms of the hearing’s public reception multiplied from the few hundred people in the room to thousands of facebook users. as mentioned earlier, the people in attendance at the public hearing hailed from select, invited organizations. on facebook, the audience expands to include a much broader segment of the population in terms of age, gender, class, occupation, and political affiliation. and thus, as a viewer, i am forced to encounter a much more diverse pool of commenters. as an important consequence, the facebook live-stream attracted and enabled conversations across different political parties. in the public hearing hall, only persons who knew each other shook hands and chatted with each other, the interactions rarely breaking from political party lines. sami brahem: the circulation of a testimony of all twelve testimonies narrated in the tdc’s first two back-to-back public hearings, that of the former islamist political prisoner sami brahem drew particular attention—locally and internationally. like the other witnesses, brahem narrated the persecution he had suffered at the hands of the former regime. but beyond the content of the testimony, i want to reproduce the circulation of brahem’s testimony on social media platforms. brahem gave the testimony in a tdc-selected venue in northern tunis to a live audience of around 350 people. it was broadcast in its entirety on national tv channels. in parallel, it was also live-streamed on the commission’s facebook channel, and afterwards the tdc’s media office made it available on youtube. people started sharing and re-sharing the youtube video on their facebook pages. a few days later, shorter video excerpts, ranging from three to six minutes in length, started circulating in greater frequency. the complete testimony is an hour long. the shorter excerpts were circulated as “highlights”—the most defining moments according to those who cut and reposted them—and those became the more widely circulating parts of the testimony. while the full testimony contained brahem’s name and the date of the hearing, the shorter excerpts instead had titles indicating specific themes. as the testimony fragmented into shorter excerpts, each fragment started assembling a life of its own, slowly disconnecting from the other parts of the testimony into a distinct “echo chamber” (pariser 2011) with a progressively more tenuous relation to the original testimony. one flurry of facebook activity was fascinated with brahem’s working-class background. a group moved to revisit brahem’s earlier positions and publications in light of this information. a jordanian journalist who had previously had an intellectual dispute with brahem over interpretations of islamic texts and political islam—in which he denounced him as a “liberal intellectual in his high ivory tower”—wrote a high-praise, compassionate article re-reading brahem’s intellectual position in light of learning that he comes from a working-class background. another group of viewers used news of his background as an opportunity to draw attention to the public disdain for common-law prisoners in comparison to the social status enjoyed by political prisoners. tens of young men managed to get their hands on brahem’s phone number and called to ask him, “where are you right this minute? my mother wants to hug you. i can come pick you up right now.” mothers of common-law inmates wanted to host him in their homes to express their gratitude for his words during the testimony in recognition of people from working-class backgrounds and support for common-law prisoners. elsewhere on facebook, brahem’s testimony was swallowed into a pre-existing, already in-circulation anti-reparations campaign excoriating former islamist prisoners for opportunistically “marketing their suffering for financial gain” (sheet 2023). images of brahem’s face started circulating with a hand demanding money plastered over it—the image that came to symbolize the satirical anti-reparations campaign “how much is a kilo of suffering?” within this virtual chamber, brahem’s testimony became further evidence of islamists’ moral depravity. another storm of facebook activity was busy foregrounding a different fragment from brahem’s testimony to launch a public debate about the need to recognize male victims of sexual violence. this virtual chamber included both, invitations to talk shows and an abundance of crass jokes. meanwhile, a group of compassionate viewers were inspired to act as brahem’s saviors. he was offered monetary donations to support his meager teaching income. a tunisian national residing in europe offered to cover brahem’s expenses to pursue postgraduate studies at a “western university.” a qatari prince wrote him a check. human rights organizations showered him with offers of employment. after giving his public testimony on november 17, 2016, brahem changed his phone number three times and did not leave his house for a month. brahem had agreed to participate in the tdc’s public hearings because he thought of it as his “national duty.” as an academic and former islamist prisoner who had suffered unimaginable torture, he believed that “uncovering the truth” was important for the country’s transition toward a more democratic society. what he did not expect was the aftermath. after his testimony, brahem started receiving thousands of facebook messages from strangers. thousands. and once they started pouring in, it was not clear that they were ever going to stop. “tonight, we went to sleep crying” (el-leila hāthiyya betna nebki) was one repeating message. in those first days, he tried responding to the messages. but after it became obvious that the influx was not slowing down, he stopped. when i asked him to tell me about his experience of the “aftermath of the public testimony,” he responded in facebook currency. he said: “it was three major [facebook] posts.” the first one, titled “i am not an icon” (’anā lastu ’ayqūna), and the second one, titled “have mercy” (’erhamūni), were both addressing the tunisian public beseeching them to stop contacting him. local newspapers widely published the second post: have mercy, since the day of the testimony the phone has been ringing nonstop from sunrise until a very late hour of the night. it doesn’t stop for a second—tv stations, radio stations, journalists, local and international, [contacting me] for a statement or to attend a show—they suddenly discovered that a person was tortured despite the hundreds of human rights reports, and documented testimonies (some of what i mentioned in my testimony i had written before and is published). first, i would like to inform them all that those who gave testimonies have made a moral commitment to the commission not to give any statements for a month from the day of the testimony. second, i would like to inform them that my testimony that i presented within the transitional justice framework was a duty (wājeb) that was completed (waqa‘a ta’diyatahu) and is now over and i am not willing to reopen wounds and circulate them from one channel to the other. third, i would like to inform them that there are prisoners who were tortured much more than i was, but maybe they don’t have the same eloquence of expression that i have, those have a greater priority for their torture to be made known and they are not far [to reach], some of them are still protesting in front of the parliament building. fourth, i will not stand again in the testifying position except in the course of whatever the truth and dignity commission decides within the transitional justice framework … fifth, my testimony is available for the public and it is the property of the public and i have written previous testimonies that are published but i/my person is not material for media profiteering. i used to live quietly far from any lights and noise, and then my life was turned upside down, i will not permit myself to profiteer from this testimony to achieve stardom or heroism or popularity or fame that i don’t need or to be material to jack up viewer ratings. as for the tunisian people who engulfed me with feelings of love and appreciation through their hundreds of messages, i only have love and appreciation [for them], and i will make sure to respond to every single message, no matter how much time it takes. —sami brahem, november 19, 20167 circulation, imagination, and reconciliation so how has the circulation of brahem’s testimony on facebook changed its potential role in cultivating national empathy and reconciliation? what does this tell us about the impact of social media platforms on the value of “speaking” in democratic efforts, and the role of the imagination in reconciling political collectives? and how are these platforms’ new modes of circulation changing imagined publics and mediating the encounters among them? the first change that social media platforms bring to the role of testimonies of violence in cohering an imagined collective is that while in anderson’s study narratives were only passively consumed, now the audience responds and a back-and-forth ensues—new social media platforms have changed the formerly silent relationship between text and audience. per his description, the aftermath of brahem’s testimony unfolded as a sequence of misrecognitions, or an encounter with an other that makes the witness and the audience more foreign to each other than they were before the encounter. in our conversations and in his public statements, brahem highlighted the “strangeness” and “alien-ness” of some of the responses he received. as brahem listed the responses for me, he kept exclaiming: “who are these people?!” he did not feel comforted or supported by these messages; he felt alienated. he described every message, including for instance the qatari check, as the most unrelated, alien reaction possible to his testimony. he could not understand the responses: “how could this be the response to what i shared?” i am suggesting that an important condition that allowed narratives of violence to engender imagined empathy for a universal community is the impossibility of an interaction between author and reader—a distance that social media has obliterated. in her analysis of communication on social media platforms, rosalind morris argues that “social media enables communication without relation, or connection without mediation” (2013, 106), that it is “a kind of speech that fails to communicate” (2017, s123). she writes: “the idea of communicability now hides within all media by virtue of a systematic misrecognition. connection has come to stand for communication. … and presencing—the appearance as one who can be seen to speak—offers itself in lieu of representation” (2013, 109). in other words, while social media platforms have increased the amount of communication exchanges, an exchange of words is not always conducive to increased communication, connection, or empathy. and perhaps one of the consequences of streaming testimonies of violence on facebook is that they are now relegated to another social media instance of “communication without relation” or, worse, communication that breeds alienation and limits the possibility of reconciliation. the second, related change that social media brings to a potential imagined community is that people’s individual imaginaries are now spelled out in more detail, and laid out one next to the other, erasing much of the space for an imagined likeness and showing the starkness of the difference in what is imagined. while tv also created “split publics” (rajagopal 2001) with radically different imaginings of their nation, facebook forces these publics to meet. the historian lynn hunt (2007) has argued that reading accounts of torture generated an “imagined empathy” for strangers and constituted the foundation of human rights. an important but unanalyzed condition that enabled process, i suggest, is a lack of communication between the author, the subject of the narrative, and the reader. similarly, truth commissions’ public testimonies of violence were formerly listened to mostly in silence; the role of the audience in a confession is often minimal. as these testimonies are now live-streamed on facebook, the witness is forced to receive a torrent of replies from complete strangers in a way that changes the role of these hearings in democratization processes. brahem never thought of the testimony as an exchange; he had neither anticipated nor desired any responses. instead of fostering a feeling of collective identification, this exchange only collapsed the imaginary of likeness. the third, related change that social media platforms bring to the role of testimonies of violence in creating an imagined collective is the relation among its public/audience members. building on charles taylor’s notion of a “social imaginary,” michael warner (2002, 2005) argues that the public that emerges as the collective of readers of a circulating text constitutes a particular type of public,8 one of its defining features being that “it exists by virtue of being addressed” (warner 2002, 50; emphasis in original). whether the text is written, visual, or auditory, claims warner, its public is brought into existence through a discursive process: it is the only type of public where people in completely different places, picking up texts at different times, to consume them in different contexts, are connected by nothing other than being the addressee of that text. it is a public “by which an addressable object [the audience] is conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence” (warner 2002, 51). warner (2002, 63) understands this public as “a kind of reflexivity” modeled along a social relation between author and reader. he calls the social relation among the members of this public a “stranger-relationality”: “they are no longer merely people-whom-one-does-not-yet-know; rather, it can be said that an environment of strangerhood is the necessary premise of some of our most prized ways of being. … this constitutive and normative environment of strangerhood … requires our constant imagining” (warner 2002, 57). he describes this imagined form of sociality as follows: the experience of social reality at this level of modernity feels quite unlike that of contexts organized by kinship, hereditary status, local affiliation, mediated political access, parochial nativity, or ritual. in those settings, one’s place in the common order is what it is regardless of one’s inner thoughts, however intense their affective charge might sometimes be. the appellative energy of publics puts a different burden on us: it makes us believe our consciousness to be decisive. the direction of our glance can constitute our social world. (warner 2002, 62) building on warner’s argument that our inner, individual consciousness plays a “decisive” role in generating the imagined public, i suggest that one of the potentially detrimental effects of social media platforms is that they displace readers’ inner, individual consciousness as the primary reference informing their reception of these texts, thereby overriding the source that coheres the imagined, collective community. as audience members viewed brahem’s testimony, a multitude of themes could catch the viewer’s “glance” or inner, individual consciousness and come to be the basis of their unique, imaginative connection to brahem: the well-known working-class neighborhood he is from, his grief for his mother whose funeral he could not attend, being a poor academic, his fear that he may be unable to conceive children as a consequence of the targeted torture he suffered. it could be a body gesture, the particular way he resists crying, his temperament—the potential points of imagined association for the audience are infinite. but due to the mode of circulation of texts on social media platforms, the comments seemed to confine the meaning of a testimony to the preexisting fault lines that had defined the political landscape before the hearings, thereby overriding the role of the imagination in potentially transcending them. when a testimony starts circulating, these platforms typically invite comments like the ones listed above. these comments start circulating along with the testimony, in effect becoming part of it. pretty quickly, these comments seemed to narrow viewers’ otherwise endless associations of how the testimony could be read to the specific themes and controversies most loudly brought up in the comments section. by receiving the testimony already framed in the comments as a battleground between islamist supporters and secular skeptics, viewers read the text as limited to that dichotomy. and as the testimony circulated further, their responses grew increasingly confined to a question of where they stood on that divide. in other words, this mode of circulation and audience reception of witness testimonies demonstrated a regression into preexisting “knowledge”—hardened opinions and positions about other members of that collective—instead of opening up new ways of knowing fellow members of that public. per the comments that accumulated under each testimony, the result was reinforcing historical divisions along islam/secularism, reparations/anti-reparations, coastal cities versus marginalized interior regions that had historically defined the political landscape. contrary to a popular perception that social media platforms constitute the site of generation of new, unlikely collectives, i found that these platforms can too quickly give primacy and algorithm-driven power to preexisting fault lines. put differently, this mode of circulation of testimonies seemed to displace readers’ inner, individual consciousness as the main reference that informs their reception of texts, and overshadowed it with the social currents, hashtags, and overdetermined controversies that were loudest in the comments at the time of circulation. in brief, as new forms of mediation now enable audience response to content formerly consumed in silence, force a back-and-forth across a formerly silent relation between author and reader, increase the amount of communication produced, expose the stark differences between formerly more insulated imagined publics, and erode the “environment of strangerhood” that enabled their harmonious coexistence, imagined publics are changing, with unprecedented encounters among them unfolding. the question is, how are social media platforms mediating the encounters among these imagined publics? social media’s war on silence and the production of certainty if reconciliation was a doubtful outcome of in-person public hearings, then live-streaming them on social media platforms is not the awaited solution. and while the internet and its information-dissemination platforms are often hailed as “the antidote to authoritarianism” (devich-cyril 2017), it does not necessarily make them the antidote to reconciled publics. as we continue to grasp the full range of changes brought to imagined collectives by social media, one of them—certainty—constitutes a feature of these emerging publics that i believe detrimental to truth commissions’ reconciliation efforts. i am foregrounding one of the less-discussed characteristics of the growth-driven algorithm that governs the circulation of social media content: its war on silence. an algorithm is a computational system that identifies, ranks, and selects content that a user will most likely engage with—that is, content most likely to generate more content (by liking, commenting, sharing, etc.)—and presents it as their “feed.”9 studies of new social media algorithms have centered on the data scientists designing them (kelty 2005; coleman and golub 2008; lowrie 2017, 2018; seaver 2018), and many have raised concerns about the ethics of these data-centric technologies (zigon 2019), the ontological assumptions on which their sieve-like filters are modeled (kockelman 2013), the “myth of the neutral platform” and the politics of their content moderation (gillespie 2018), the policing and surveillance they enable (joh 2016; gates 2011; franz 2017), the recommender “traps” that suggest content to users for the purpose of “hooking them” (seaver 2019a), the “disinformation machine” that they can constitute (vaidhyanathan 2018), and “heteromation,” or the unpaid human labor from which these algorithms create profit (ekbia and nardi 2017). jodi dean (2002, 2005) calls this algorithmic drive for growth social media’s “neoliberal fantasy” of abundance, because it is modeled, she argues, along a capitalist mode of production and accumulation and therefore cannot serve as a medium of left politics. while studies of these algorithms’ political consequences have focused on the “filter bubbles” (pariser 2011) that they create and designated them the main feature driving political polarization, i am bringing attention not to the content but to its quantity and the ceaselessness of its dispensation, what i am calling social media’s war on silence. we are familiar with silence as an individual right in the example of miranda v. arizona (1996) in the united states—or the right of a person under arrest to remain silent. but i do not mean silence as an act of resistance (johnson 2011) in a “refusal to represent certain violations” (das 2003, 304), a form of tacit, lived memory of the past (kidron 2009), a cultural practice of remembrance and commemoration (ben-ze’ev, ginio, and winter 2010), “strategic silence” instilled to suspend conflict and give clashing parties time to calm down (winter 2010, 5), or silence as a form of respect and “the only way we can honour the ineffability and privacy of certain experiences” (jackson 2004, 56). i mean silence as a halting gap in knowledge. silences, as gaps of information, give pause. these pauses—the unknowability, uncertainty, the impossibility of a “complete” knowability of an other—are undervalued elements in what keeps a certain openness of one person to another. and perhaps one of social media algorithms’ unrecognized dangers is their concentrated efforts to create a fantasy of certainty and a sufficiency of information, while relentlessly concealing the gaps in the supposed knowledge they present with a stream of more information. this mode of circulating content makes us confuse the quantity of information on the page with a sufficiency of information to make a definitive determination about our relationship to others. silence—by which i mean a pause in content—during which users don’t produce content, just take it in, imagine, ponder, think, wonder, dwell in an acknowledged gap of incomplete information, proves antithetical to these platforms and precipitates their demise—and thus must be fought with algorithms that drive more content at all costs. this is what i am calling social media’s war on silence. and one of the consequences of this algorithm-driven war is less reconciled, more agitated, more “militantly certain publics.” while certainty may be a useful precondition for realizing a range of political purposes, i find it detrimental to national reconciliation. abstract at first glance, there seems to be a shared mission between social media’s promise of increased dissemination of information and truth commissions’ commitment to truth, granting victims a voice, and safeguarding people’s right to information—which would suggest that the rise of the former could only empower the latter. this study suggests otherwise. i argue that social media can impede truth commissions’ liberal vision that celebrates “speaking” as synonymous with “healing” and hails publicizing victims’ testimonies as key to facilitating national reconciliation. through a study of the tunisian truth and dignity commission’s facebook-mediated public hearings, i analyze these platforms’ algorithmic mode of content circulation and argue that one of its less analyzed features is its “war on silence.” while “voice” has been celebrated and silence decried in human rights discourse, i analyze silence as a “gap in knowledge” and argue for its role in forging empathetic publics and mediating reconciliation. [truth commissions; public testimonies; social media; algorithms; war on silence; imagined publics; national reconciliation] notes acknowledgments i am indebted to sami brahem and other witnesses for their trust and generosity in sharing their experiences with me. i am grateful to the truth and dignity commission for granting me access to the public hearings. i thank the three anonymous reviewers, the editors, and julia elyachar for their comments, which have made this a stronger manuscript. the article draws on research funded by the wenner-gren foundation and the national science foundation. all opinions remain my own. 1. this article draws on a broader research project that examines the politics of the tunisian truth and dignity commission (tdc) inaugurated in the aftermath of the arab spring in 2014 to investigate the human rights abuses of the ousted regime, recommend institutional reforms, and propose a reparations program for the victims. i spent a total of twelve months in tunisia between 2014 and 2018, where i attended the commission’s public hearings, national consultations, awareness seminars, and conducted extensive interviews with commission members, their staff, civil society activists, and the different victim groups involved. 2. all translations from arabic are my own unless otherwise noted. 3. the commission had to find another venue, however, to host consequent hearings. in tactics eerily reminiscent of the former regime, the commission was exorbitantly overcharged for its use of the venue and later told by its management that it could no longer host its hearings there because of “technical difficulties”: water leaks, electrical wiring problems, etc. these are strategies typically used by the former regime to interfere with and obstruct the meetings and organizing efforts of non-governmental organizations or oppositional political groups. 4. for a history of the long-standing islamist/secular divide in tunisia, see perkins 2014. 5. miriyam aouragh (2015) observes that by prioritizing the role of new social media in the analysis of the arab uprisings we find an echo of a historical and persisting approach to arab societies as lacking in agency, and that these uprisings were not produced by arabs but by the tools of western democracies—it suggests that arabs are helpless without western intervention. i think aouragh’s astute point makes inquiries into the role of social media in democratization efforts in the region all the more important: inquiries that analyze social media not in terms of the national origins of the platforms but in terms of the unpredictable circulation patterns of their content that seem to always exceed and challenge the intent of the developers. for a discussion of the hierarchy in social media studies between the “developed” and “developing” world more generally, see daniel miller (2011, 157–215). 6. of the many critiques of anderson, a good place to start is partha chatterjee’s (1991) “whose imagined community?” the thrust of the critique is that anderson overdetermines the cultural aspect and fails to address the unequal distribution of power involved. for a critique of his approach to language, a better place to start is michael silverstein’s (2000) “whorfianism and the linguistic imagination of nationality.” for a more recent retrospective of the life of this publication and a critique of how it has been read primarily through discourse analysis while forgetting anderson’s marxist bent, see goswami 2020. 7. this is a translation from the original in arabic. punctuation has been changed and some phrases added in brackets for clarity. 8. michael warner (2002) distinguishes three types of publics: any polity (e.g., citizens of a state); a concrete audience in a shared physical space (e.g., theater audience); and a public of readers that emerges through the circulation of texts. he focuses on the third type. 9. for a discussion of debates in critical algorithm studies about 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https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2019.0046 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 361-385, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.03 embodied urbanisms: corruption and the ecologies of eating and excreting in india’s real estate economies cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 708-732, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.11 embodied urbanisms: corruption and the ecologies of eating and excreting in india’s real estate economies namita vijay dharia rhode island school of design https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7888-5094 sewage surges through the main canal in virgaon village, a small hamlet on the outskirts of the city of gurgaon, india. toxic green suds pop at the surface of the canal’s black waters and unidentifiable clumps of gray matter pool into the plastic bags that float along the nala (canal/sewer/drain). the fetid waters and the garbage heaps that mark the nala’s banks make all those who walk along it wrinkle and cover their noses in distaste. the warm and somehow alluring smell of raw sewage spreads during a quick downpour as the nala exceeds its boundaries and floats gently onto virgaon’s unpaved roads, leaving behind a layer of slime as the water recedes. the slime squelches into the open-toed rubber sandals of virgaon’s residents as they walk across the transforming ruro-urban streets. the presence of excess sewage in gurgaon is a result of its rapid urban development. as the apotheosis of matter out of place, sewage indexes a growing urban region but also reeks of corruption and contamination. in this article i explore how corruption, as a physical and political-economic phenomenon, manifests embodied criticisms and anxieties around social relations and urban development in gurgaon (now known as gurugram). i highlight the metabolic connections between body and environment to argue that discourses and sensoriums of sewage, food, and bodily behavior allow corruption to be understood in embodied ways;1 together, these discourses present critiques of caste-class inequity and mobility in real estate and construction economies in gurgaon. corruption talk in gurgaon situates itself in conversations of embodied urban ecologies (e.g., chen 2012; agard-jones 2013; zhang 2020): it links the metabolic systems of the body (e.g., watanabe 2015; solomon 2016) to the metabolic systems of urban infrastructures and ecologies (e.g., swyngedouw 2006; rademacher and sivaramakrishnan 2013) to highlight the coproduction of built environment and embodiment in real estate economies.2 corruption talk deploys aspects of urban metabolisms to speak of the economy as corrupting both the body and the urban region; these aspects express how waste and value are mediated through embodiment, and serve to express localized conceptions of the urban metabolic rift.3 two understandings of corruption in india—political-economic or financial corruption and caste-based interpretations of corruption—are brought together in this article as a reminder that embodiment makes for a critical site of the formation and critique of urban development. corruption is an elusive concept (pardo 2018, s61). as a political-economic phenomenon, it is understood as a blurring of boundaries, most often between state officials’ public and private activities, and presents itself in relationship to the state (herzfeld 1992; gupta 2012), but this blurring also allows it to construct relationships across categories otherwise understood as unconnected, such as body and real estate. linked to ideas of financial gain, corruption is fundamental to real estate economies. corruption discourse often assumes a corrupt male subject, giving it a masculine register and making it revealing of patriarchal logics (aradhana sharma 2018, s72–73). because it is closely associated with dirt or dirtiness (smart 2018, s40), corruption can be critiqued through bodily and scatological humor (mbembe 1992).4 political-economic corruption’s embodied connections are heightened in the indian context due to caste-based readings of contamination,5 where dominant castes view impurity as produced through the handling of waste and other substances (including garbage, meat, and leather), residing within the fluids of non-dominant-caste individuals (e.g., valmiki 2003), and even inscribed into space (e.g., lee 2017). physical corruption therefore plays a significant role in how real estate in india’s national capital region comes to be read. historical caste-based oppression,6 in which impurity is attached to the politics of waste, ingestion, and bodily fluids, allows economic corruption in india to be understood as embodied and sensory. here i make a connection between the hindi root of bhrash (to fall), seen in brashtachaar (political-economic corruption) and dharma bhrasta (to fall from one’s religion through violation of caste norms, e.g., by eating meat or traveling across the dark waters). according to dominant hindu philosophy, dharma falls on exposure to impure or inauspicious elements, but impurity can also result from a disturbance of humoral balances (raheja 1988, 48–49). the idea of falling from a high position because of an impurity is thus also embedded in the idea of political-economic corruption through the word bhrashtachaar, or, literally, “fallen practice.” ill-gotten economic wealth, excreta, and physio-ecological imbalances have caste connotations, categorized under the category of impurity. i use the terms dominant caste and non-dominant caste in accordance with suraj yengde’s (2019, chapter 1) call to reject the “upper-lower signifiers of caste” because they are “downward-looking hierarchical terms,” and instead refer to castes such as brahmins and baniyas as dominant. this usage differs from m. n. srinivas’s (1959, 2) use of dominant-caste, where the term represents a caste that is numerically strong in a village (such as ahirs or jats) but does not occupy a high ritual rank. i examine discourses surrounding the body (often imagined as male), narrated to a dominant-caste, female ethnographer doing fieldwork in a male-dominated industry. this encounter reveals the powers and anxieties of patriarchal and dominant-caste worlds. local corruption discourse links metabolic understandings of body and environment to present a changing real estate economy as both desirable and dangerous. gurgaon, a city adjacent to new delhi, falls within the national capital region (ncr), and for the past three decades it has witnessed unprecedented urban growth. the footprint of the urban region grew by the size of twelve manhattans in the six years between 2007 and 2012.7 the urban area expanded through privatized real estate development in the late 1990s, as the site of a business process outsourcing (bpo) center as well as the headquarters of multinational firms in india. nearby new delhi’s real estate restrictions allowed real estate speculation to become a primary economy in gurgaon,8 and it led to land becoming a central source of capital in the region (denis and zérah 2017, 9). in 2012, when i moved to the national capital region to conduct dissertation fieldwork, i found myself confronted with anti-corruption protests.9 gossip and rumor about political corruption accompanied me as i met with individuals in the construction industry—engineers, investment bankers, developers, landowners, foremen, architects, craftsmen, and helpers. the smalland large-scale construction sites, as well as farmhouses and developer offices in which i spent time, allowed many an individual to give me their opinion on the ongoing protests. as an architect trained in mumbai at the height of its real estate mafia wars, and as a child of a landscape architect, i had some knowledge of the ubiquity of bribing practices across the production chain, the collusion between politicians and developers, and the laundering of cash reserves in real estate. but corruption talk in gurgaon made me realize that these practices proved fundamental to the operations of real estate. further, farming and migrant communities in gurgaon draw connections between physical and political-economic corruption in relation to the transforming ruro-urban landscape. the body of the self and the body of the imagined other emerge as crucial sites of caste-class struggle in real estate as critiques of accumulation and practices of discrimination are deployed to challenge and support real estate economies. the rise of visual, descriptive, olfactory, and material constructions of corruption and metabolism in gurgaon—smelling corruption in sewage, seeing it in the weight of the belly, or feeling it in rising desire—demonstrates how the labor, economies, and infrastructures of changing urban ecologies are understood and critiqued. contaminations “when money came to us, we were not prepared.” mr. yadav, a former village panchayat (governing council) head and ahir community member, is talking to me about urban development in the region. ahirs, often recognized by the last name yadav, are a caste classified as socially or educationally disadvantaged in the state of haryana (in the government’s terminology, “backward classes”),10 but several members have grown wealthy through landholdings in gurgaon; mr. yadav talks of his community’s experience. it is 8 a.m. and the sun is still low in the sky: sunbeams streak across the tilled vegetable garden on my left, as young saplings peek out of the deep furrows of the alluvial soil. the saplings are framed by an opulent, baroque-style bungalow painted gold and pink; together, they mark the aesthetic admixtures of the transforming urban villages of gurgaon. the mirrored facades of cyber city—gurgaon’s multinational office hub—shine in brilliant blues and greens on the horizon, reminding us that this plot sits amid a booming real estate market. it is 2012 and gurgaon has emerged as the poster child and petri dish of rapid land financialization and privatized real estate development. residential property tripled and quadrupled in a sevenor eight-year span,11 and the national capital region came to be the fastest-growing region in the world (usgs 2016). mr. yadav and i find ourselves in the midst of a gold rush—the land economy is so heightened that all forms of elites, including corporate, professional, and state actors, are involving themselves with land speculation and prospecting (goldman 2011). yet all is not luminescent in gurgaon: technocrats hold the city up as an example of what to avoid in urban development (kumar and misra 2012). large-scale privatized real estate growth, unchecked by state officials and aided by public-private collusion, saw an urban area emerge without adequate infrastructure in what was once forest and farmland. while water supply and electricity needs were met through tube wells and diesel generators, the immediate urban problem was sewage and garbage. sewage overflowed into water canals and streets as septic tanks clogged and drainage systems proved woefully inadequate. the urban villages of gurgaon—such as virgaon—bore the acute repercussions of this fast-paced growth as they turned into spaces of bureaucratic neglect. mr. yadav, in his muddy pajamas, seems far away from this development drama. a handsome old man with twinkling eyes, mr. yadav is dressed in haryanavi village garb—kurtas, pajamas, and a checked scarf wrapped around his head—and carries dry straw (chaara) to the cows tethered next to us. he makes soft clicking noises of affection as he pets the grazing creatures, and a strong smell of cow dung permeates the air. he explains gurgaon’s largest development trouble (as articulated by state officials): “gurgaon has a sewerage problem.” this, he feels, has occurred because developers do not care about what goes on outside their compound walls. “you know how the development of gurgaon is; if you develop one lane, then you do not think about what happens in the next lane.” when people originally settled in mr. yadav’s village, he says, they would not have imagined a scenario like today’s. “our village does not have a sewerage system. things are up somewhere and down somewhere. we cannot bring it into rhythm.” turn a corner from cyber city and you will find proof of this arrhythmia in javgad village’s arterial road. the main entrance to the village is just a short walk from the tall palaces of multinational capital. the main road is a nala of its own. blackened sewage fills the furrows cast by truck tires moving along the muddy surface of the unpaved road. the black, garbage-filled waters form a shallow pool, its reflective surface concealing what lies beneath. visiting a school in javgad, i reluctantly hike up my pants and walk into the waters of human waste, cognizant that this is likely what most of the children do to get to school. the glorious glass towers of multinational india reflect in the blackened pool and ripple surreally as i slosh through the waste products of real estate speculation. dominant-caste hindus have a fear of bodies and fluids and strong ritual protocols exist to manage them:12 to be contaminated by the spit, blood, or excreta of a non-dominant-caste individual means to be rendered impure. as a spiritual guru reminded me, his kitchen could be rendered impure by the wrong person touching his cooking vessels. “i am a very vehmi [superstitious] man,” he claimed; “i do not to let just anybody into my kitchen.” food, for the guru, can be corrupted by the wrong person’s presence in the kitchen. this anxiety extends to space: the middle classes associate urban gandagi (dirtiness) with so-called gande lok (dirty people), often the laboring classes and non-dominant hindu or muslim castes. an ngo worker, handling community projects for a real estate developer, explains: “i shouldn’t say this but mohammedans [muslims] are not very clean; they throw food here and there, do not take trash out of their house properly, and do not bathe.” here waste, and by extension sewage, is tied to specific communities and is even seen as a material and urban-ecological form of the other. these beliefs merge with urban development politics as the case of the sewage treatment plant (stp) exemplifies. a few miles down from virgaon’s nala, the twists and turns of a narrow, forested road shield a giant stp from curious human eyes. the state-owned plant, cordoned off from the public by a giant chain-link fence, treats sewage from the industrial and residential areas. i visit the plant on a field trip with a group of college students studying urban planning. the sound of water gurgling and the ripe smell of sewage surrounds us as we pull up in a minivan, and the students grimace in disgust. a young man joins us on the site visit. he is an engineer from what he refers to as a “private company” that plans to bid for the contract to manage the plant. flanked by two small buildings are several round concrete pools. raised about a meter from the ground, these facultative ponds contain sewage undergoing oxidization. nozzles spray the sewage-filled water into the air in giant arcs and bubbles, awkwardly mimicking the grace of versailles fountains as they aerate human waste. moving closer to the massive tanks, however, we sense that something is not quite right. the streams of water appear too weak and several fountains look defunct. the young engineer claims that most of the equipment is in disrepair. he informs us that the color of the sewage indicates that oxygenation is not taking place: a healthy plant displays a “chocolatey-brown” color, but this sewage is a strange green-brown. the site supervisor later tells us that the “private company” will probably want the government to repair it before they take over the plant, implying that the company just wants a fast buck and no work. the large-scale, modernized infrastructure of the stp, languishing and festering in dysfunction while public and private authorities argue over who must work to fix it, serves as a metonym for the disarray of gurgaon. gurgaon, individuals in construction tell me, grew through the corruption of and collusion between state authorities, developers, and contractors. examples of regulatory and developmental manipulations narrated range from piecemeal conversions of land use, especially from agricultural to urban, facilitating land financialization through state-led dispossession, and granting exceptions to unauthorized construction projects. decisions, such as introducing new masterplans to expand the footprint of the urbanizable area into surrounding agrarian or forested land, occur through public-private liaisons. this warping and bending of real estate regulations saw large housing colonies emerge in areas without adequate road, sewer, water, or electrical infrastructure. maansinghji, a jovial and charismatic jat planner in the haryana urban development authority, has choice words about this form of urban development. jats agitated for affirmative action in 2016, wanting to be listed as backward class in haryana; they form a majority in haryana and also dominate the state legislature. maansinghji is well connected with local political leaders; nevertheless, he is quick to criticize politics. he gives the example of a special economic zone (sez) in gurgaon where government corruption enabled private profiteering and land degradation. according to him, the chief minister of haryana allocated large tracts of land as a sez and awarded it to a specific real estate conglomerate with which he had ties. “with the excuse of the sez, the chief minister’s aadmis [men] purchased land cheaply, people sold the land because you cannot do anything with land within an sez. while the farmers sold at 60 lakh [us$83,000] per acre, the chief minister and town planners later changed the land use and the cost of the land rose to 4 crores [us$5,500,000] per acre.” he gesticulates in anger at the dispossession enacted by state officials acting as private entities. “you can say it is a development. … you are the private developer, you put the money and got land use changed and made money.” according to him, this is profiteering off land and not development: “did they supply water? did they build a sewer? … only [marking] on the paper [that] this is an ‘r’ zone [residential zone] or this is an ‘industry’ zone? is that development?” maansinghji’s critique views the sewage on the street as a symbol of state officials privately profiting from real estate development. to turn off a main road in gurgaon is to be met with the heady, all-encompassing smell of wastewater. sewage spreads across urban village streets, flows down open drains, and emerges in shallow pools; this surreptitious seepage is often accompanied by conversations about raw water, excreta, and urban decay.13 the sensoriality of sewage in gurgaon—potent-smelling and visibly grotesque, felt in the slime between one’s toes and in the heat that emanates from it—is not only a phenomenology of caste politics but also of political-economic corruption. the presence and visibility of sewage lends a strong sensoriality to behind-closed-doors collusion. it represents a state and a set of construction elites unwilling to do the work of building urban infrastructures. put another way, excreta are the visceral form of the invisible work of political-economic corruption, land financialization, and the anxieties of caste impurity, a mode through which physical and political corruption becomes visible. the conversion of this waste to value also relies on the confluences of economic and religious impurity, as the next section will depict. extractions in 2012, most new developments and so-called urban villages in gurgaon did not have a sewage system. new real estate projects had to build their own septic tanks and waste infrastructure. these were to be cleaned and maintained by private contractors instead of governmental agencies. real estate developers, in their fast-paced construction, often failed to provide adequate septic tanks or to maintain those already built; this led to vast amounts of sewage seeping into drains and open canals. sewage constitutes the literal waste of real estate economic growth, and without constant maintenance, it leads to loss of real estate’s value. specific communities of dalits in india have historically been relegated to sewage work, and this legacy continues through structural systems of poverty and hindu power: dalits are read by dominant-caste hindus as impure. gurgaon is no exception to caste discrimination. as sewage spreads in gurgaon, teams of adivasi (indigenous) and dalit workers are hired to manage waste. the preponderance of septic tanks and the shortage of equipment such as pumping trucks mean that sewage workers often physically enter septic tanks to clean them and move sewage with carts or trays. though the manual scavenging, carrying, and carting of sewage is illegal in india, in reality, the demand for workers to excavate clogged sewers and septic tanks has increased in gurgaon due to its exponential growth. in 2017, a sewage worker—promised a little under us$10 to clean a sewer—fainted from the toxic fumes emanating from the tank and fell in. as his two colleagues jumped in to save him, they, too, lost consciousness and died. the incident took the death toll of sewage workers in ncr to fifteen workers in three months (alam 2017). sewage and waste formed important elements of colonial operations,14 and this history of dominance continues along caste lines. sewage workers, sweepers, and cleaners in gurgaon are treated as the refuse of society while simultaneously being called on to labor for it.15 harelal, a migrant manual scavenger and street sweeper, works with a team of “mates” who come from the same village as him. “they treat us like the insects of the gutter,” he says of the social discrimination they face. as a dalit man who sweeps streets and scavenges for a living, earning less than us$0.50 a day, harelal is regularly yelled at by dominant-caste individuals for entering their spaces. they treat him as if he belongs in the very nala he cleans, he says. a “casteization of capital” (shepherd 2019, 66) occurs as the labor of dalit and adivasi sewage workers ensure that gurgaon’s waste does not clog its real estate growth. in this process, they immerse their unprotected bodies into the waste and expose themselves to the microbial diseases the sewer carries, as well as to the toxicity of its gas emanations. the cleaning, carting, and care of waste increase real estate value: real estate value is extracted from the health and social standing of sewage workers,16 and yet it further denigrates and devalues the labor and care of non-dominant-caste workers. tracing the importance of sewage in the real estate industry makes visible the embodied politics underlying the transformation of gurgaon. here, political-economic conceptions of corruption exacerbate caste-based violence and worsen labor relations. on the one hand, the labor of dalit and adivasi workers manages waste to generate real estate value; on the other hand, public-private collusion produces value through the shirking of infrastructural work and the generation of sewage. here religious and political-economic understandings of corruption form an interlinked system that furthers urban growth and creates unequal labor and physical risk. this inequality is recognized and critiqued through an embodied politics of the pet. accumulation the hindi word for “stomach” is pet (peth), and the stomach connotes survival and sustenance in indian labor politics. to do fieldwork in construction provides a lesson in the politics of the pet. as kishwar, a young foreman, explains, work is a way to feed yourself and your family: “if the plant works, we will get fed [pet ko dana milega; literally, the stomach will get grain].” for a foreman and construction worker, the pet is always hungry, and you have to labor to satiate it, whereas a growing pet, or a big belly, symbolizes the opposite. a big pet stands as a historical, political-economic critique: it is the rich, male, dominant-caste trader or landowner—the sahukar (moneylender), malik (landowner), or a bania (trader caste)—who has a big belly, a belly gained from a life of abundant food and no labor. it is against this historical background that the term khatein (to eat) is often used to refer to how a corrupt, rich patriarchy eats money. here corruption takes both an economic form (eating money or benefiting from the labor of the poor) and a physical form (weight gain).17 in 2012, as i moved through gurgaon, the real estate industry was yielding a wealth of riches. tower cranes perched on building after building and created an endless horizon of construction work. farm properties displayed signage for developments to come, and laborers crowded into squares in hopes of gaining an income. the rising property prices turned gurgaon’s landowners into “rural crorepatis [millionaires].”18 india, the world’s largest consumer of gold (sreenivasan 2012), shifted to investing in land (seth 2013), and the discourse attending this shift was evident everywhere. as i moved through the sites and fields of gurgaon, people gave me investment advice: “place your money in property and it will bear fruit of gold.” “the returns on land investment in india are incredible … why would we invest in anything else?” amar, a bania real estate executive, describes his company’s beginnings amid this fervor for property: “we entered [the market] with a lot of noise. … in my mind we were the loudest ones and took other investments as competition. boom—what an appetite!” as amar describes, developers in the region (several of whom were hindu-dominant caste) expressed an insatiable hunger for development, and many indulged in veritable land banquets. developers bought land parcels, pitched projects, and used money from the sales of one project to buy land for others, often leaving projects incomplete and real estate consumers empty-handed. such were developer appetites that the majority of prominent real estate firms faced land and consumer litigation in 2018.19 just as private developers were accused of eating their customers’ money, so, too, were public officials. subas, a laborer from the banjara community, meets me at a construction site in gurgaon where he works as a beldar (coolie). he describes the day-wage labor and herding through which his landless, tribal community makes a living. he describes road construction schemes in his district that provide laborers with work under the mahatma gandhi national rural employment guarantee act (mgnrega or nrega). he complains that it is difficult to work for nrega because of the bribes the contractors take: “the world these days is useless, everyone just makes money off each other,” he says. workers make negligible amounts in nrega payments because payments are whittled down as each supervisor in the chain takes a cut. subas explains, “if at the top [₹]300 is given, then the [people in the] middle will only get 100-100 [₹100 each].” he describes their greed in alimentary terms: “eating, eating [khatein-khatein], they eat [the money].” this pilferage results in individuals like subas, described as below poverty line (bpl), ending up with miniscule amounts. “they give us ₹20-20 a day … it is 115 [the official day rate is ₹115] … but only ₹20-20 come, everything else is eaten up,” he complains. khatein-khatein (eating-eating, following the indian style of emphasis by repeating words) accentuates the degree of severity of eating money, of the systematic accumulation of money earned by the hard labor of the poor. subas’s critique marks a wider distrust of state officials and the wealthy, and it links the politics of eating and ingestion to the politics of state corruption in development. neelkanth sir, a planner and gurgaon resident, echoes subas’s feelings. as he gives me a ride home, he tells me that “because of corruption there is development—definitely write that.” he explains, “take an engineer, for example: he keeps drawing work to himself so that he can eat money [paisein kha sakein].” according to sir, urban development in india will only take place through corruption. to act in a corrupt manner is to eat unequally; it is to starve the poor and grow wealthy off another’s labor. affluent individuals in this imagination physically imbibe this excess of value and manifest it in their flesh. mr. yadav speaks of how his community’s riches transform the bodies of ahir youth: “let us take health for example: there is no work to do. … now in the village we have city-based illness, like for example heart attacks. they say that it happens to banias [traders] as they sit around doing nothing, or over-weightness [sic] that happens. we call them the diseases of the rich, and now they have come to everyone, everyone’s knees are hurting, everyone is gaining weight.” he describes bodily changes: “in the old days women used to be beautiful, now they are fatty-fatty.” mr. yadav’s words were perhaps intended for me as an overweight woman who comes from a self-defined bania family, but his use of bania as an example serves a reminder that some of india’s biggest billionaires hail from that group. for many such as subas, who also asked me why i am so fat, obesity signals an affluent person. as construction workers say, it is only the rich who do not worry about pet bharna (filling one’s stomach), bhookhe marna (dying hungry), or the majboori (binding necessity) that brings workers to site. as the material environment transforms, and as people profit off these transformations, it is said that the metabolisms and physiologies of the rich slowly deteriorate; their flesh becomes morbid from the wealth they have eaten. as mr. yadav puts it, the weight of dominant-caste money now manifests in ahir bodies as they grow wealthy from real estate. this body politic around wealth accumulation even extends to the nation as a whole, as when prime minister narendra modi refers to the economy of bribes and corruption as a bimari (illness), even suggesting “operations” to control it (mcdowell 2017). the real estate economy literally grows both the body of the urban region or nation and the bodies of those who profit from it. it causes disease in both. fatness or obesity is a social stigma and often blurs gender divisions to render those labeled as fat as immoral (greenhalgh 2012, 473; brewis et al. 2017) or as less valuable (edmonds and mears 2017, 33). but the size of bodies can also correlate to financial status (trainer 2017).20 in the case of gurgaon and its agrarian residents, discourses around fatness and eating take social stigmas and turn them into political economic critiques of the state and elite classes. a bulging belly in the indian context has a long-standing connection with reputation, profit, and power (solomon 2016, 45), but of relevance here is the rise of this discourse in a transforming ruro-urban region. mr. yadav fears for himself and his grandchildren as they move from growing their own crops and milking their own cows to eating in restaurants and at street stalls. as the ahir staple diet of milk products and millet is replaced by the rich foods of the elite, what threatens to alter the bodies of his community is not a disease-producing external agent but a transformative dominant-caste lifestyle, facilitated by the real estate economy. to develop an area is to eat money, to paraphrase sir. while the waste of urban development is managed by dalit and adivasi individuals, the value of urban development manifests in the bank accounts and corpulence of imagined male jats, banias, and ahirs in gurgaon. as vinay gidwani and anant maringanti (2016, 125) write, “the conditions of capitalistic value come to lie in bodies, places, and things that come to be designated at the front end and back end of capitalism.” to grow fat means to manifest the corruptions brought on by the accumulation of value in a real estate market; it is to gain wealth and weight. the weight of eating-eating ties to the stench of corruption that emanates from sewage on gurgaon streets; both constitute forms of waste-value that reveal unequal accumulations and the dangers of the same. here, corruption as accumulation critiques casteand class-based inequity in real estate. imbalances a real estate economy produced through political-economic corruption has thrown life and land out of balance for an agrarian, mobile, caste community like the ahirs in gurgaon. the corrupt real estate economy is said to create an internal, invisible corruption that transforms the body and coerces it into wanting and doing unexpected things. this transformative influence, locals argue, stems from the influx of multinational capital and its accompanying ecologies and food: i am told that bodies behave differently in a new gurgaon. neelkanth sir is a retired planner who was born and bred in gurgaon. as a member of both gurgaon and ahir planning circles, he has several opinions on the development of the urban region. one of his primary grouses is the presence of western ways of life and “american” (u.s.) culture in india. india’s neoliberal economic restructurings in the 1990s deregulated industries such as banking, pharmaceuticals, and food supply, and with these economic restructurings came north american restaurant chains, food products, home goods, music, and cable television. the central aesthetic and material form of “america” (united states of america as the country representative of multinational capital) was real estate. in gurgaon, the rising new malls with nike stores, the big bazaar supermarkets, and the glass office buildings advertising companies such as tetra pak, mercedes, and dell indexed the omnipresence of european and north american influence in urban expansion. real estate development spread an aesthetic and material culture imported from the west, in effect producing an idea of “america” through the buildings and infrastructure they built (dharia 2014). supposed americanness and urbanism have come to be linked and manifested in materialities such as architecture, fast food, highways, and jeans. neelkanth sir’s rants about “america” are therefore connected to developing real estate. corruption, he believes, is a u.s. conspiracy. “they are changing us through the food and tv,” he says, as he lists popular fast-food chains: “look at mcdonald’s and subway and all the programs on tv.” the addictive properties of fast food and cable television have brought about desires that, according to him, did not previously exist in gurgaon. “you look at my own nephews,” he says of the young men in his multigenerational agrarian household: “they are all drinking and smoking. they sit at home and all of them are spoilt.” here unemployment is a condition created by the acquisition of ancestral agrarian lands and their subsequent conversion to real estate, rendering the young men jobless. sir uses one of his nephews as an example. he got his nephew a job in a local transport company. the nephew worked for a few days, then drank on the job for several consecutive days, and quit work. sir mediated and had him rehired, but the alcoholism proved too strong. the uncle feels alcoholism has taken hold of all the younger men in the village: “all these boys, they are intoxicated by alcohol [bas sharaab ka nasha hain].” the transformative urges of an american-influenced, corrupt economy do not stop at a taste for videshi daroo (foreign liquor). these new urges, addictions, and desires also correspond to gendered behavioral changes. mr. yadav complains about young women marrying out of the community. daughters nowadays are completely spoiled, he claims, as they follow their hormones and marry whomever they want (thus violating caste and community norms). critiques of libidinal and hormonal changes are on the rise in gurgaon. in 2012, a khap panchayat of haryana declared that chowmein, a street dish of stir-fried noodles, leads to rape. khap panchayats are governing bodies for villages in north india, who set moral codes of conduct. known and criticized for a number of laws such as barring intercaste marriage and punishing couples who married within their own village, the khaps recently turned their moral gaze to fast food. the times of india quoted the khap leader: “to my understanding, consumption of fast food contributes to such incidents. chowmein leads to hormonal imbalance evoking an urge to indulge in such acts” (saini 2012). the comment drew both national outrage and mockery in english-language newspapers and television shows that also referenced the patriarchal attitudes of khap panchayats, but it reflects a widely shared belief that fast food causes hormonal imbalances and changes in physiology and mental state. the comment ties to local conceptions of ayurveda and humoral understandings of body-food-environment relations (see raheja 1988; gupta 2003), and it resonated with many subtle references, among locals and scientific journals alike, to fast food as a disease-causing, imbalance-producing agent, such as talk of the “unnaturalness” of pizza. but new rhythms are growing apace in gurgaon and, as mr. yadav noted, they do not seem to be in sync. as gurgaon expands, malls full of fast-food chain restaurants become markers of an urban, middle-class identity in which the very idea of middle-classness and urbanity is consumed through food, movies, and retail spaces (brosius 2010; mankekar 2015; t. srinivas 2018). in a country where practices of consumption and the preparation of food govern hierarchies of caste, fast food and industrial foods can be caste-neutral, thus serving as “an act of imagining citizenship that cuts across social hierarchies” (baviskar 2018, 5–6). debates over urges and consumption, then, can also connect to anxieties around the transformation of western urban cultures, citizenship demographics, gendered behavior, and caste hierarchies in the region. i am repeatedly told that haryana is a state that prides itself on its milk products, its bodybuilding, and its army regiments. good food and health practices in the ahir (and jat) communities are tied to exercise in masculine wrestling spaces and healthy eating through food obtained from one’s own farmlands and buffalos. a popular saying shows how conceptions of naturalized and un-naturalized food-bodies are produced in the region: “yeh hai hamara haryana jithe doodhi dahi ka khana” (this is our haryana where they eat milk and yoghurt). indeed, moving through gurgaon’s urban villages means seeing milk-producing buffalos tethered to the entrances of houses in a state that believes in muscular strength and health through milk. when buffalo milk and kachri chutney (made from a local melon) compete with burgers and pizza, it seems little wonder that chowmein and other fast foods begin to represent the threat of moral degradation, even when eaten with relish. malls, on the other hand, stand in opposition to the adjacent mandis (local markets), and apartment complexes to the rural dhanis (homes in fields): here, localized conceptions of ayurveda and agricultural humors feed a critique of the unevenness of humors and hormones brought about by western urbanization. changing desire and urges connect a real estate and urban development economy to hormonal adjustments and balances in the body. this nexus builds on urban metabolic thinking that understands urban areas as comprising metabolic systems, the dysfunction of which results in clogging, arrhythmia, and decay. the discourse around bodies in gurgaon operates on the belief that the metabolism of the body transforms in parallel with the urban development of the region. the foods and behaviors of a u.s.-influenced economy, embraced by non-dominant-caste communities and young women alike, prove toxic and dangerous: they alter our behavior and produce alien urges, and the body will not listen to the brain as new economies invade it. corruption, then, demonstrates not only an inequity of labor, accumulation, and physical risk but also the worry of new economies bringing caste mobilities and the transformation of hetero-patriarchal relations. corruption in this context indexes the disruption of existing social orders. mr. yadav insists that the solution lies in moving from sukh to anand. both sukh and anand are terms for happiness, yet he clarifies that sukh is external, while anand comes from inside. anand represents the spiritual relationship of balance, but sukh describes momentary and monetary satisfaction. a discourse of finding anand circulates in the villages and lower middle-class spaces of ncr. anand as equilibrium, however, is a historic concept and ties to conceptions of substances in species and the need for equilibrium within them (daniel 1987, 6). anand, mr. yadav explains, means to find balance and happiness from within rather than from the outside. external happiness, for those who believe in finding anand, proves illusory and perennially unfulfilling. this pursuit of happiness as an internal balance is revealing as a critique of contemporary times. as a speculative and consumptive economy spurs speculation of peril and dangers, bodies and urban ecologies are recognized as out of sync. rhythms and balances form the metaphors for healing both cities and selves, for re-creating an erased natural ecology and its accompanying humoral balance, and for assuaging the embodied corruptions enabled by transforming urban ecologies. embodied urbanisms eating, digesting, and excreting together highlight how a discourse of corruption as a physiological and political-economic phenomenon critiques real estate development in gurgaon. corruption, a popular unit of social analysis in india, focuses on either the corrupt state or caste-based politics. scholars who work on one have tended to pay less attention to the other; though the two threads share a moral lens, they differ in their focus, with the former highlighting capital and government and the latter attending to social discrimination. as a result, the ways in which these two forms of corruption mix to maintain power are occluded. state corruption, understood as the “misuse of public authority for private gain,” includes commercial bribery or the crosscutting of codes (gupta 2012, 79). not only is corruption a way in which the indian state is “discursively constituted” (parry 2000; gupta 2012, 78; jauregui 2014); it also proves integral to the ways in which citizenship is forged (anjaria 2011). while these authors are exemplary in their analyses of everyday politics and politicking, they neglect phenomenological (bodily, sensory, and material) and embodied experience, as well as the intimate and immersive experience of corruption felt deep inside the body and gut. literature on caste, by contrast, demonstrates the phenomenological experiences of social exclusion, discrimination, and exploitation that tie corruption to bodily fears, discriminatory practices, and extreme violence. authors describe how the very presence of dalit and adivasi individuals is thought of as contaminating or corrupting to dominant-caste communities, resulting in a hypervigilance of and control over the birthing fluids, bodies, blood, sweat, and spittle of dalits (ambedkar 2014). conversely, we might also read sensoriality and phenomenology as a source of dalit power: “sensorial dalit expression,” yengde (2019, introduction) writes, “is an experience of revelation of the person and the personal.” if like yengde (2019) we see sensoriality as power, as a mode through which to articulate our voice and claim space in the world, then the imaginations, critiques, and experiences of body politics in gurgaon constitute a battle over power in urban real estate economies. the history of caste-based corruption draws a connection between physiological metabolisms and urban metabolisms; it enables corruption talk to manifest the anxieties and injustices of changing labor patterns, material accumulation, and caste, class, and gender mobility. corruption allows us to tie body politics to the economy in ways that foreground labor and capital; corruption entangles labor politics with talk about wealth, weight, laziness, desire, danger, and discrimination. local understandings of urban metabolisms are deployed as critiques of social change and real estate economies: corruption opens ways of speaking about embodied urban ecologies. it allows us to read the real estate economy as a physical and economic corrupter, rather than as an aberration (anjaria 2016, 61) or as wholly negative (gupta 2012), but as something both dangerous and desirable, perverted and pleasurable. abstract this article studies metabolic systems of food, body, and waste within the urban development politics of the city of gurgaon (now gurugram) in india’s national capital region. i link rapid urban transformation within the region, the labor required to produce it, and the speculative real estate economy that governs it to the phenomenology of body politics in the region. in particular, i examine corruption as both a political-economic and a physical, caste-based narrative to argue that corruption connects embodiment and urban development ecologies to each other. this allows corruption discourses in gurgaon to form a critique of real estate economies; changing urban environments are felt and critiqued through body politics and experienced at once as a peril and a pleasure. this work is based on fifteen months of ethnographic research in the construction industry in ncr involving members across the production chain of real estate, including landowners, investment bankers, developers, engineers, architects, foremen, and laborers. [construction; labor; corruption; urban metabolism; body] notes acknowledgments this article received feedback from the political ecology working group at harvard university, ekin kurtic, dilan yildirim, ajantha subramanian, nicolas sternsdorff-cisterna, elizabeth roberts, nishita trisal, steven caton, jared mccormick, nancy khalil, veronika kusumaryati, ramyar rossoukh, and brad weiss. it was copyedited by philip sayers. the research was supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the foundation for urban and regional studies, the radcliffe institute for advanced study at harvard university, the lakshmi mittal south asia institute and the anthropology department at harvard university, the cora du bois charitable trust, and the rhode island school of design. thank you to the editors of cultural anthropology, the five anonymous reviewers, jessica lockrem, and petra dreiser for their time, comments, and edits. names of people and places have been changed to protect privacy. 1. this reading challenges the integrity and individualism of the human body (chen 2012, 209) and bursts “open categories of organism, individual, and body to acknowledge a shared, entangling, and extensive condition of being with capitalism and its racist colonial manifestations” (murphy 2017). the body is as an important “scalar intertext” (agard-jones 2013, 184). the relationship between the body and its surroundings can be read as a “situated, absorptive interface” (solomon 2016, 9). nicholas shapiro (2015, 370) refers to sensuous and epistemological apprehension as “bodily knowledge”; this relies on “visceral and indeterminate sensorial facilities” (shapiro 2015, 375). 2. eric swyngedouw (2006) thinks of the city as a cyborg, part human, part mechanic, that forms its own living and thriving entity. harris solomon (2016, 9) encourages us to adopt metabolism as a “visceral and political interface” between bodies and surroundings. i interpret metabolism as not only a political interface but as an infrastructural, historical, and political entanglement (haraway 2016) that embeds and actively produces difference and inequality. 3. waste forms part of a “circulatory sociality” that produces an intimate relationship with the environment and each other (watanabe 2015, 7). urban political economy owes a debt to marx, whose interest in metabolism and nature formed the foundation for his theory of labor. “marx employed the notion of metabolism to conceptualize two processes … : the production of labor power through the exchange of energy between bodies and the environment, and the emergence of an ecological crisis under capitalism” (zhang 2020, 82). the metabolic rift emerges as a lively debate to examine the historical, social, and ecological ruptures produced by transforming agrarian and urban operations (see wittman 2009; schneider and mcmichael 2010; moore 2011). corruption talk in gurgaon constructs emic ruro-urban conceptions of metabolic rifts challenging top-down examinations that divide the agrarian from the urban, reminding us that it is imperative not to take metabolism as a given (solomon 2016, 72–73). 4. often this is critiqued through scatological humor (weston 2017, 171). obscenity and grotesqueness form an integral part of the stylistics of power, and laughing drains officialdom of meaning (mbembe 1992, 14, 25). 5. the hindi word for pollution (padushan) does not connect to religion but is used for environmental pollution; impurity (apavitra), inauspiciousness (ashubh), and falling from religion (dharma bhrashtra) are used instead. 6. specific dalit communities were historically assigned to “polluting operations such as dealing with human excreta and animal carcasses” (baviskar 2018, 5; see also valmiki 2003). caste is relevant to the contemporary processing of waste, as it is dalits in urban areas who are relegated to the task (gidwani 2015). it is important, however, not to occupationally stereotype (rawat 2011, 11) and to examine the intersectionality of class and caste (subramanian 2019, 11). 7. this is a rough estimate based on rural areas converted to urban in development plans released in the years between 2007 and 2012. 8. real estate in gurgaon took on a speculative form. speculation as a component of formal finance and banking has salience in india (sunder rajan 2005, 19). speculation, financialization, and neoliberal reforms are inseparable (peterson 2014, 179) and act through localized individuals, legalities, networks, and spaces, while simultaneously negotiating international ones (e.g., sassen 2001; ho 2005; searle 2016; stout 2016). 9. a movement led by anna hazare challenged the framing of a government of india anti-corruption bill—the lokpal and lokayutkta bill. the bill sought to create a tribunal that would try cases of political corruption. real estate figured prominently in these protests. 10. nomenclatures for caste communities vary in india and people self-identify. terms include political self-definition such as dalit, dalitbahujan, and adivasi. government umbrella categories include scheduled castes or backward classes, and specific communities that fall under these, such as ahir, lohar, and banjara, are also used. 11. for example, “the high-end dlf icon went from ₹2,800 per square foot in 2005 to ₹15,000 per square foot in january 2012; a more affordable project, orchid petals, went from ₹1,800 per square foot to ₹8,750” (donthi 2013). 12. strict social protocols around the making and serving of food (appadurai 1981) have aggressive consequences for non-dominant-caste individuals who violate them (valmiki 2003). everything from sex to menses, childbirth, and the sowing of seeds have protocols to avoid the mixing of inauspicious fluids and bodily impurity (raheja 1988). as gloria goodwin raheja (1988, 59) notes, there are several intersecting systems of inauspiciousness at play, but caste pays a central role in the creation or mitigation of impurity through substance. 13. kath weston (2017, 152–55, 168–9), veena talwar oldenberg (2018, 108, 192), and shubhra gururani (2017) list sewage and waste discourses in the region. 14. dirt, mary douglas (2002, 9) writes, is a historically coded and socially constructed relative category. sewage licenses colonial and postcolonial practices of social control (of the racialized and colonized poor) through the dialectic between disease and hygiene. excrement divides individuals into grotesque and sublime (anderson 1995, 650); “it was and is a mode of exercising white superiority and expertise” (patterson 2009, 553). shit becomes the opposite of that which is beautiful, civilized, and respectable (geest 1998, 9), where “those handling waste … are themselves thought of as ‘refuse’” (fredericks 2014, 4). garbage on indian streets enacts a struggle over colonial and postcolonial modernity (chakrabarty 1991, 29). waste produces intertwined dualities such as local-modern, public-private, and urban-rural in indian urbanism (kaviraj 1997; gururani 2017). “focusing on waste draws attention to jettisoned histories of disregard and violent erasure (huang 2017, 103; see also gordillo 2011, 143; chalfin 2014, 94), and congeals “new kinds of workers and industrial infrastructures” together (blanchette 2019, 83). waste and sanitation discourse in india acquired a public space (chakrabarty 1991) and planning register (glover 2008, 46, 131–35) that continues today with international development focusing its sanitation agenda on india (coffey and spears 2017; irani 2019, 141–71). tracing waste infrastructures, especially their networks, movements, dysfunctions (graham 2010), materialities (anand 2017), and politics (björkman 2015) reveals critiques of development. 15. a 2016 analysis of the national crime records bureau (ncrb) reported 40,801 atrocities committed against dalits. highest among categories of crimes were rapes of dalit women (saaliq and bose n.d.). these numbers are likely conservative, as the ncrb is accused of suppressing minority crime data (schultz et al. 2019). 16. as vinay gidwani and anant maringanti (2016, 115) write, “the production of value within the capitalist space economy would be impossible without the work of waste management.” 17. the metaphor of corruption as “eating” is common to many countries. jennifer hasty (2005, 282), for example, speaks of corporeal metaphors to describe state corruption in ghana including eating (corruption), vomiting (anticorruption), and the state constituting edible resources. 18. this was a differential gain of wealth depending on when you sold your land and how much you saved. there are also communities who did not own land and who were economically disadvantaged in this land price boom. 19. in 2018 developers such as jaypee, unitech, amrapali, emaar, dsk group, pacl, supertech, ultratech, ats infrastructure, omaxe, dlf, m3m, vatika, and logix groups had litigation against them (ankit sharma 2018). 20. fat bodies are often 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moral repair: the curse of ham, biblical kinship, and the limits of liberalism cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 118-145, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.06 anti-blackness and moral repair: the curse of ham, biblical kinship, and the limits of liberalism justin lee haruyama university of british columbia, okanagan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1955-6813 when noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, “cursed be canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.” he also said, “blessed be the lord, the god of shem; and let canaan be his servant. may god enlarge japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of shem, and let canaan be his servant.” —genesis 9:24–27 if anyone says, “i love god,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love god whom he has not seen. —1 john 4:20 francis and i are almost the same age: at the time i met him he was twenty-nine and i was thirty. we came to know each other through a seventh-day adventist (sda) christian congregation that, for lack of a physical church building, met every saturday in the shade of a large acacia tree amid the small, irrigated fields of rural mugoda district, in southern zambia. the acacia tree under which the congregation met was located a half hour’s walk from summers mine, a chinese-owned and -operated coal mine where i was conducting ethnographic research on relations between chinese migrants and local zambians. though he was young, francis’s employment as a general worker at summers mine meant he was counted as one of the congregation’s leading elders. indeed, francis’s regular cash income from the mine, about $100 usd per month, made him one of the congregation’s wealthiest members. at the time i met francis, he also served as the secretary in the miners’ union at summers, and was thus part of a group of workers attempting to negotiate, albeit unsuccessfully, with the chinese owners for pay increases. within the sda congregation, francis was the leader of the pathfinders, the church youth organization. i first came to know francis when i joined him and the pathfinder youth on an all-day hike through the hills surrounding mugoda village (figure 1). figure 1. the sda pathfinder youth take a day hike through the hills. outskirts of mugoda village, southern province, zambia. photo by justin lee haruyama. over the following months and years of my fieldwork at summers mine, francis and i would often spend time together, at church and elsewhere. sometimes francis would invite me to his home on the outskirts of the nearby town to share a meal together, an expression of hospitality and generosity i always felt grateful for. on these occasions, i would often spend the better part of an afternoon with francis, reclining on small chairs in his brick-walled, two-room home, talking and laughing together. on one such long afternoon, after francis had generously shared with me a meal of nsima (zambian polenta) and a relish of sauteed green vegetables and impwa (bitter baby eggplant), we started discussing religious questions. at one point, francis motioned toward an illustration of adam and eve hanging on his wall and told me: “i think you must know, justin, that god didn’t create a black person. our ancestors, adam and eve, they were white.” i asked francis how he knew this, since to my knowledge the bible did not describe the race or skin tone of the first humans. by way of evidence francis motioned to the illustration again. he pointed out, and i agreed, that the physical features of the man and woman in the painting clearly resembled those of people of european ancestry. but, i asked, perhaps adam and eve were depicted as white because the illustrator was himself white? francis rejected this and instead began to tell me a story, which he explained was the historical account of how black people came to be in the world. in the generations succeeding adam and eve there eventually came noah, and after the flood that drowned all other humans, it was noah’s three sons and their wives who repopulated the earth. the eldest two sons, francis told me, were named japheth and seth, but francis did not name the youngest son.1 noah’s wife had died by this time, so it was up to his sons to take care of him. one day noah got obscenely drunk and passed out unconscious while naked. francis described: so, he was drunk up to an extent whereby the third-born child, when he saw that the father was naked due to drunkenness, he started laughing at him. he went back, on his way laughing he had gone to those two brothers, and said: “come, let’s go see what our father has done.” then the brothers asked: “why? what have you seen?” the younger brother said: “at his nakedness, he’s so drunk, he can’t even control himself.” so, what japheth did, he took a chitenge [a kind of zambian garment, usually worn by women] with that other one seth. then, seth that side, japheth, instead of looking directly first this direction [at this point francis stood up and physically demonstrated how the two older brothers walked backwards with their faces averted to lay the chitenge on the body of their sleeping father without looking at his naked body]. they wrapped the father. then the father, he realized that the firstborn was the one with those intentions of doing that, not wanting to see the nakedness of the father. that is where the blessings come from. he said: “japheth, as the firstborn, you are so much blessed, and your clan will never, ever suffer. and you, seth, you shall not suffer. but japheth will be your boss. why? i have seen your moyo [heart], and i know you only did that out of the example of japheth, your elder. then you, you have laughed at me instead of helping me. from your third grandchild, by the name of canaan, all your clan will be servants to seth and japheth, and their skin color will change. that is where the affliction has started from. fearing where the story was going, i asked how this story related to people in the present day. francis explained, “we africans, we are from the youngest brother. according to the bible, japheth, that is where you fall justin, the firstborn: the real white mens fall to this clan.2 seth: the chinese and indians fall to him. we are all cousins, all from noah.” and i asked francis, since he had told me before that noah was a godly man, was the curse that noah laid on his sons a perversion of god’s will, or was it the way god had intended things to be? francis averred that this was a manifestation of god’s will, switching nimbly from the second to the first person: “yes, he [god/noah] said: ‘you, you will be servants.’ us [here francis pointed to himself], we will be servants.” i tried to raise objections. what about rich black people who might hire whites or asians in their companies? francis replied: no matter what, they’ll be servants. why? black people, when they become so rich, they are proud of themselves. and that is the proudness that god doesn’t want. have you seen? even though a black person becomes so rich, the riches are nothing to blacks, because they can’t help poor people. have you ever heard of a zambian who is very rich and starts sponsoring someone who is in america? nothing, there’s nothing like that. but you, with you whites, you do help each other.3 but what about africans helping each other, i asked. wasn’t it, for example, extremely generous of francis himself to invite me into his home and share his food with me? francis replied: very generous. but what i am trying to put across is that the whites, they don’t just help tangible things like clothes, like eating, these minor things, no. you, when you help, i can’t even say the way you help, because you help with the future. the help of god. do you know what god has done? in the first place, our adam and eve had sinned. but god helped them. he helped them. francis’s close association in these comments between the help of white people and the help of god reminded me, uncomfortably, of a semi-serious wordplay joke i sometimes heard nyanja-speakers tell in my presence (nyanja is the second-most widely spoken language in zambia): that when white people first came to zambia, locals named them mzungu because the whites reminded them so much of god (in nyanja, the word for god is mulungu).4 francis and i continued conversing for several hours after this point, and i continued raising questions about the ostensibly good character of whites that francis felt made them so appropriate as masters: for example, the history of brutal racial segregation and economic exploitation in zambia under british imperialism. francis did not deny the accuracy of these examples, but rather explained them as aberrations that worked against the general pattern of whites coming to zambia for the purpose of helping zambians. the more we conversed, the more disconcerted i became by francis’s comments. this disconcertment, however, differed significantly from that experienced by helen verran (2001) in her epistemic encounter with yoruba mathematics. verran describes her disconcertment as a tightrope between clear delight and confused misery, which for her manifested bodily as a belly laugh that could have easily turned into a visceral groan. in my own disconcertment at francis’s words there was no tightrope, no temptation to delight or belly-laugh. instead, francis’s telling of history and his assertion that i was born to be a master and him my servant provoked in me a profound sorrow and bodily manifestations—quickened heart rate, difficulty breathing—of panic rather than delight. verran and those who have taken up her example (e.g., law and lin 2010) have suggested that slowing down and dwelling in this kind of ethnographic disconcertment is an important starting place for doing difference together. on the other hand, audra simpson (2020) warns that sympathy and sorrowful sentiment alone can constitute a powerful move toward colonialist apologetics and erasure. in this article i move beyond the deep sorrow francis’s words provoked in me to fulfill one of the many obligations i feel i owe him. this obligation is to engage his views not as those of a tragically benighted, hapless subject, but as compelling theorizations of racism, coloniality, and capitalism born from his direct experience of these global processes that should not leave my own views as a liberal anthropologist unscathed. of course, francis’s defense of racialized master-servant hierarchy and his sympathetic portrayal of british colonialism in zambia appear quite jarring next to persistent calls for a decolonizing (allen and jobson 2016; gupta and stoolman 2022; harrison 1997) or abolitionist (jobson 2020; shange 2019) practice of anthropology. without dismissing the white supremacist framing of his account, i argue that francis’s theorizations point, from a transnational zambian perspective, to important additional dimensions of what a decolonizing, abolitionist anthropology could be. a rich anthropological literature in recent years has demonstrated the great value people in diverse locales throughout the global south place on relations of hierarchy, inequality, paternalism, and dependence (bolt 2015; ferguson 2015; haynes 2017; hickel and haynes 2018; piliavsky 2021; scherz 2014). work has emerged as well on the discursive valorizations of european colonialism (bissell 2005) and whiteness (bashkow 2006) and denigrations of (liberal accounts of) freedom (englund 2006). again, these are all values that sit uneasily beside current articulations of decolonizing and abolitionist anthropology. francis’s critiques represent an especially direct challenge to decolonizing approaches in anthropology for two reasons. first, because the story francis retold lies at the very root of the violently raced and classed inequalities that have come to dominate the world today (mignolo 2005; robinson 2020; wynter 2003). second, because francis’s call for master-servant relations was explicitly not confined to local interactions between zambians, but rather “caught” (favret-saada 1980) me as an ethnographer and anthropology more generally (at least in its global north instantiations) with the implication that we should act as masters. point by careful point, francis refuted my attachments as a liberal anthropologist to formal principles of equality, which, he pointed out, did nothing to ameliorate, much less abolish, the extreme material inequalities that divided us. in place of liberal platitudes, francis called for a recognition of shared, biblically chronicled kinship and thus of kinship-inflected care and provision. francis’s critiques call attention to a farce of liberal accountings of justice that give lip service to egalitarianism while reinforcing nationally patrolled divides that keep the common descendants of noah separate rather than ethically connected, as they should be. francis’s critiques suggest that, in the context of shared kinship among all people, there is something fundamentally wrong with the nation-state form that keeps us apart across territorialized boundaries, as if the great material production that takes place in the global south (including, for example, the extensive extractive mining industry in zambia) and great material consumption that take place in the global north are not intimately related. working toward what i call moral repair, i conclude by enlisting the resources of christian liberation theology to diagnose the disfigurement at the heart of both francis’s and my ethical imaginations. grappling with the theoretically informed critiques of francis and others in zambia who tell the story of noah while attempting to move past the white supremacist language in which these critiques are framed, i argue that their account of shared kinship demands the abolition of facile articulations of liberal egalitarianism which fail to address massive inequalities in the world. this ethical vision instead calls for the coming together from seemingly separate continents of all the descendants of noah in relations of mutual provision, connection, and care. of course, there are possible outs: various methods, semantic and otherwise, of understanding francis’s words in a way that neuters their challenge to liberal egalitarianism. i do not discount these methods, but i do not think they are sufficient, either. i consider some of these methods first, each as a partial connection across our ethical difference, before turning to what i see as the full force of francis’s critique. first escape: a wink or a blink? one comforting way to evade the force of francis’s ethical account is to call on jean-françois bayart’s (2000) theorization of extraversion to view francis’s words as a kind of “declaration of dependence” (ferguson 2015). following this logic, it would be possible to posit that francis’s ostensible critiques were more about convincing me to lend him greater assistance than they were sincere representations of his views on the world. even a passing consideration of linguistic pragmatics would remind us that all speech acts are made in a given social context and for a specific purpose. in francis’s and my conversation, this context included an extreme disparity of wealth and professional, travel, and educational opportunities. it also involved a give-and-take relationship in which francis would sometimes extend generosity to me, such as inviting me to his home to share a meal he had prepared, and would at other times make requests of me for things that lay beyond his financial means, such as for a new bicycle or even, one day after i had completed my phd, paying for his own university education in the united states. undoubtedly, this context of our relationship played a great role in why francis shared the views he did with me in that time and at that place, and in the particular tenor by which he conveyed his critiques of my egalitarian sensibilities. but it is also possible to go a step further than this and posit that not only did francis’s comments obviously have a pragmatic element to them, but that they perhaps were purely pragmatic or functional: that they were not genuine reflections on his part but rather exclusively constituted a strategic attempt to flatter and “butter me up.” on this accounting, to repurpose clifford geertz’s (2000) famous metaphor, perhaps i had failed to discern the difference between a blink and a wink. perhaps francis was winking at me the entire time. aware of this possible interpretation of francis’s comments, in the months and years following our conversation, i tried to confirm the historical account he had told me with other zambians. i deliberately shared francis’s account with more financially secure zambian friends and acquaintances who never made requests of financial assistance of me. some of those i spoke with confirmed the broad outlines of francis’s account as literally true and divinely justified history, though they often differed on the precise details. other zambian friends with whom i shared this account expressed more skepticism, often saying that they did not really know what had occurred and that francis’s story of noah and his sons might or might not be true. no one i spoke with in zambia expressed the degree of shock, ethical dismay, or even outrage that i had at first expected on hearing francis’s account. indeed, some other zambian friends expanded on the implications francis had described. here, for example is one typical exchange i had on the subject, with my friend daniel. unlike francis, daniel is university-educated, middle-class, and hails from the more urbanized and economically developed copperbelt region of northwest zambia. daniel: africa is the only continent which has got mostly black people, compared to these two, europe and asia. then africa we can say is the one who was told to be a slave to these two, europe and asia, and for sure these things me myself i’ve seen them. all the ngos, the groups, i haven’t seen an ngo funded by a black person or an african. justin: what about oprah winfrey? she has all those ngos. daniel: yeah, she’s black, but find out where she came from. you’ll find that, amongst the forefathers, she must have a white person in front there. she can’t be 100 percent black. let’s talk of obama. one of the parents of obama was a white person also. so, obama can have an ngo supporting africa, because of that color in him. because of that blood in him. of course even here a consideration of linguistic pragmatics is important. even if daniel did not wish to gain financial assistance from me, perhaps he was simply too polite to tell me that my description of francis’s history was ridiculous, or patently false, or obviously bigoted. but spread across so many conversations, i do not think that is the case. though far from universal, the history of noah and his sons that francis explained, and its implications for relations between differently racialized subjects today, was commonly enough recounted in southern zambia that i do not think it merely a particularity of francis’s and my relationship. this particular escape from ethical disconcertment turns out to be a dead end; though obviously the ongoing context of our friendship influenced francis’s account, it seems unlikely that he was making up a history he did not believe to hold true. second escape: false consciousness and mental colonialism another way to discount any political cogency in francis’s critiques is, recognizing the thorough absorption of global ideologies of white supremacy throughout africa (pierre 2013), to posit that francis expressed the views he did because he was trapped under the mystifying spell of internalized racism, false consciousness, or mental colonialism. such a way of understanding francis’s comments would follow a long line of thinkers from frantz fanon (2008) and bernard magubane (1971) to ngũgĩ wa thiong’o (1994), who all forcefully demonstrated the damaging effects colonial and racist encounters have for their victims, not only physically but also psychologically. pierre bourdieu (1991), similarly, argued that it is the greatest trick of the powerful to convince the powerless that their oppression is in fact normal, natural, legitimate, and justified. the toxic dynamics of white supremacist ideologies these thinkers point to, and of course the history of white colonial missionaries and the diseased, racist interpretation of christianity most of them promoted (but see englund 2022), no doubt played a significant role in shaping the framing francis gave to his critiques of contemporary global sociopolitical structures. yet to see francis’s comments as only the false consciousness of a mentally colonized subject also reinstantiates a colonialist relationship of power between him and me, one in which all the pathology and inability to comprehend the true workings of the world is placed on him, with none accruing to me or my liberal, humanist, ostensibly antiracist and anticolonial worldview. it would cast francis and other zambians such as daniel as hapless, passive victims of toxic ideologies over which they have no control, denying them the agency, or seemingly even the intelligence and self-awareness, to come to well-considered and thought-out conclusions of their own. it would also constitute the ultimate example of what verran (2013) criticizes as a “meta-framing device,” as it would engage seriously with the content of francis’s account (unlike seeing it as just a functionally oriented wink described above)—but only to dismiss his understandings as lesser and therefore non-threatening to my own as a liberal anthropologist. moreover, despite his location in rural zambia, francis was not trapped in some kind of information vacuum beyond which he could not think. like the christians thomas kirsch (2011) conducted research with decades ago in a similar rural community in southern zambia, francis read voraciously and consumed a huge range of texts, both secular and nonsecular, often in disagreement with each other, on a wide array of theological and political points. moreover, francis often participated in secular discourses as well as religious ones. he would articulate anticolonial, nationalist discourses vis-a-vis his chinese employers, for example, and the festivities of zambian independence day each october gave us an opportunity to reflect on the history of zambian national liberation together. thus, not unlike the american fundamentalists described by susan harding (1991), whose worldview seems so retrograde and repugnant by the standards of the secular liberalism popular in the academy, francis is not a backward relic, a person whose dated beliefs will be swept away by a rising tide of knowledge and enlightenment. instead, francis’s critiques represent such a challenge because they do not belong to the time of the other (fabian 2014). they offer a careful and forceful response to the contemporary now francis and i share: a call for a different kind of relations in our current moment. third escape: cultural repertoires the history francis explained to me of noah and his sons closely resembles a similar narrative told in genesis chapter 9, though francis’s account differed in some of its details from the bible telling. but the book of genesis was written almost three millennia ago and describes a social context of the ancient israelites, which differs profoundly from the lives francis and i lead in the twenty-first century. the actions of noah toward his sons no doubt fit within a schematic of cultural sense for the ancient israelites, but by necessity, francis and i had to draw on our own cultural repertoires to make sense of this history. there is also the issue of language. the original words of this account were written in ancient hebrew. since neither francis nor i were versed in ancient hebrew, we could only understand this story through the medium of its various english translations (in my case) or its citonga and english translations (in francis’s). another avenue of escape from the ethical difference expressed in my conversation with francis, then, considers the ways in which—refracted through our different languages, personal experiences, and cultural prisms—we simply understood the story differently. consider, for example, francis’s careful choice of words. in our conversation, he emphasized that noah had cursed the descendants of canaan to be the servants of the descendants of japheth and seth. but in genesis chapter 9, the words that noah uses to pronounce his curse are considerably more extreme: in the original hebrew, ‘eved ‘avadim (goldenberg 2017), usually rendered in english as lowest of servants, servants of servants, or most commonly, slaves. even as francis gave me this historical account, then, our understandings of its significance started to diverge. even before my conversation with francis i was broadly aware that for centuries europeans had used such a story to justify their enslavement of africans. as francis related the history of noah and his sons, then, the associations that came to my mind were of the transatlantic slave trade, the middle passage, and plantation-style chattel slavery in the americas. these associations vastly magnified the disconcertment i experienced as i listened to francis’s account. but insofar as i was associating the story with chattel slavery, it is also clear that i was not listening carefully to francis’s words. because in his own historical account, francis did not suggest that blacks should be the slaves of whites, much less that they should be treated like chattel: he suggested merely that they should be servants, and that even this master-servant relationship should be understood within the context of direct kinship. moreover, francis described a highly specific form of master-servant relationship. when i asked francis what it meant that blacks should be servants to whites, francis spent little time describing the labor of service. he did note that it was appropriate that first the british and now the chinese owned and operated summers mine, since the british and chinese were both groups of white people descended from the brothers (japheth and seth, respectively) to whom the black descendants of canaan owed their service. francis also noted the appropriateness of similar kinds of labor that zambians were compelled to perform for whites during the colonial period, which in his estimation were frequently unduly harsh but nevertheless taught zambians how to farm properly and how to “stand on their own” (his words). far more prominent in francis’s description of the relationship that ought to pertain between whites and blacks, however, was a dynamic of discipline and education. when i asked francis why noah would pronounce such an extreme curse on canaan and canaan’s descendants, francis gave me a reply that nimbly moved through different pronouns, sometimes speaking in the third person about god, noah, his sons, even the zambian government, and sometimes in the first and second person in ways that seemed to draw francis and me ourselves into the narrative: noah didn’t just curse them. he gave them instructions. of course, when you start sponsoring me to school, for me to do the right thing you have to put certain regulations, which will guide me. because when i go outside of your conditions, then it means i’ve started doing the other business. so, i have to be within limits. and that is god direct. that is the work of god. for those people not to do it again, he cursed them. by the cursings, all people now, even you, know that if i kill, the government will arrest me. if i covet the wife of a friend, i’ll be punished. have you seen the guidelines of god? god doesn’t want to see people sinning. why? he is love. he wants people always to be together. on the obverse side of this discipline, francis described how in his view education stood as the most important element of the colonial dynamic between blacks and whites: africans found that there was nothing they knew at that particular time. the africans were relying much on the whites, because they did not know anything. knowledge, they had no knowledge of anything. the whites had teachings. … there were three kings. the bemba, the tonga, and the lozis. after the colonization, the white man brought some examples of things. he brought a cob of maize; he brought a spear. he brought a spear and these other things. he said each one has to choose. our chief chose what? a cob of maize. that is the reason we are farmers in zambia, particularly tongas. so, the white man has to teach each one according to his selection. though certainly not the relationship of equality i attempted to defend in this conversation, the model of relationality that francis expressed also remained very distant from that of chattel slavery. in fact, it bears more resemblance to the patron-client and hierarchical kinship relations that have long featured in many african societies than it does to the typical american imagination of a master-servant, much less master-slave, relationship. the tonga, the ethnic group with which francis identified, had historically practiced slavery, for example. but people taken captive or purchased as slaves by the tonga became absorbed into the mazubo (clans) of their captors and owners, thus over the course of only a generation or two becoming fully integrated into the kinship networks of their original masters. over time, in fact, the descendants of adopted slaves frequently became the headmen or even chiefs of their luzubo (colson 2006).5 in this sense, my explicit refusal to acknowledge francis’s claim to being my servant also constituted an explicit refusal to recognize him as my kin or grant him any hope of being absorbed into my own, much wealthier and more privileged clan and lineage in the united states. but in other ways, francis’s account sharply clashes with cultural idioms and practices long prevalent in tonga society. francis’s biblically inspired account of how descent groups from several men in the bible are and forever will be radically stratified in terms of wealth and privilege bears little resemblance to historical tonga cultural patterns, which were matrilineal, extremely egalitarian, and neither ranked clans and other descent groups nor recognized any intergenerational disparities in their status (colson 2006; robinson 1980). francis’s history, then, is a reflection not just on typically african practices of generating wealth in people through extraversion and composition, nor is it even totally a reflection on the cultural presuppositions of the biblical story itself. his history also provides a forceful commentary on global patterns of inequality in the twenty-first century. the repugnancy of a facile egalitarianism regarding francis’s words as a disingenuous ploy to extract financial assistance, as a manifestation of false consciousness and internalized racism, or as cultural idiom more relevant to traditional and localized tonga cultural patterns than to the global political-economic system of the twenty-first century all constitute different kinds of abdications (or what verran terms meta-framing devices) that remove the necessity to take seriously francis’s call for whites (both european and asian) to take up their responsibilities as masters and for africans to take up their responsibilities as servants. each of these abdications also reinscribes a certain kind of colonialist epistemic hierarchy in which it is ultimately my thoughts and words, as a scholar working out of the global north, that speak substantively to global social dynamics, while the ideas of my interlocutors in zambia remain, in one way or another, fundamentally limited or marginal in scope. in the latter part of this article, i try to step away from this colonialist orientation while, at the same time, attempting to avoid the problematic turn of simply accepting the white supremacist framing articulated by francis, daniel, and other zambian interlocutors without critique. instead, i regard francis and daniel as cogent theorists of contemporary global dynamics of coloniality, racism, and capitalism, and i engage their words as i would those of any other co-thinker: as compelling challenges to my own views but also as not above critique. to think through their provocations, i turn to the resources of christian liberation theology and political philosophy to grapple with the ways in which both francis’s account of racialized master-servant hierarchy and my counter-account of liberal, humanist egalitarianism are both in their own ways diseased caricatures left to us by the violent legacy of 1492 (oliphant 2021). in my conversation with francis, for example, i protested strongly that in my view all humans, from all races, really are equal in some fundamental sense. if nothing else, i asked francis, current global inequalities notwithstanding, was it at least conceptually possible that we could all be equal? francis scoffed at me. he reminded me that though he and i were almost the same age, i had completed secondary (high) school fifteen years earlier, while he had only completed it a year ago, and that i had in the intervening time already obtained bachelor’s and master’s degrees and was well on my way to completing my doctorate. by contrast, he pointed out: but i haven’t yet gone to college. why? because my parents can’t afford to take me to one of the colleges in the country. but look at you. you have passed the college, you have passed the university, you are done with the diploma, you are done with the degree, you have a master’s, soon you will be a professor. now tell me, how are we going to be equal, me and you? how? at the time, caught in my building disconcertment, i had no good answer for francis. because of course he was right. my pleadings of the inherent equality of all humans had little relevance to the lives francis and i both led: a stratified global economic order drawn largely along color lines (mbembe 2017; robinson 2020; trouillot 2003) ensured that i was likely to continue my life of comfortable, middle-class prosperity and francis his of hardscrabble precarity in a dangerous underground mine. one thing that francis’s and my inability to come to agreement in this conversation exposed was the different kinds of inequality we both found ethically tolerable. francis, in his moral account, espoused a divinely sanctioned master-servant hierarchy that i found utterly repugnant (cf. harding 1991). but what i failed to appreciate at the time was that the reverse also held true. i may not have liked the brutal structural inequalities of the global economic system that left such disparities in francis’s and my material welfare and life prospects. but however much i may not have liked them, i nevertheless accepted such realities as the way things are, for the present at least. i accepted and assumed that i would remain on precisely the life track that francis had pointed out for me: a life track with plenty of its own stresses and anxieties, perhaps, but also one of simple material comfort and security unimaginable to almost anyone i knew in southern zambia. when francis broached the subject of my financial sponsorship of his university education in the united states after i had completed my phd, in effect tying our life chances more closely together through a significant transfer of some of my financial security to him, i was far from thrilled. in that conversation i also was articulating an ethical worldview mired in its own repugnancy. colonialist relations of connection though francis felt that the history of noah and his sons did demonstrate a fundamental inequality between white and black people, he had no tolerance for european enslavement of africans and was sharply critical of racial segregation under british colonialism. on the whole, however, he was sympathetic to the colonialist project as a means of bringing people together. francis: the first time white men came into africa, even you, you just discovered there’s a continent called africa that has black people. now, you had those intentions to say, “we should see one of the blacks. not just hearing that there are black people. we must see them.” you had that intention to come. through your forefathers you are here, now in zambia, the same thing. and you want to help me on the things that i don’t know. that is the reason today why you are in my home: you are learning something, you know? even if you did not know a lot about us blacks, by so doing, you get to know a lot of things. you know what we need, you know what we don’t need. justin: do you think, when the white people came into africa, did they do anything bad? francis: you know everything has its two parts. the bad part and the good part. the only bad thing the whites used to do: they were segregasive.6 the segregation that was there was like the white mans; they came to know that, ok, the blacks could not provide for the whites. the blacks had nothing to provide for them. always, as it was stated, we shall be servants of you people. just like the way we are: we are workers to the chinese, and our fathers were workers to the whites in kalomo. when it comes to farming, we learned about farming through you guys. francis described, ideally, the colonialist relationship as one of mutual learning grounded not in a blind egalitarianism but in the recognition of pre-existing inequalities of material resources and technical capacity. thus, whites should learn “what we [africans] need … what we don’t need.” meanwhile africans, who “could not provide for the whites,” should learn things, such as “farming,” that increase their own capacities. here, the critique francis articulated of european colonialism was exactly the reverse of my own. i saw european colonialism as about altogether too much connection, since i understood colonialist forms of connection as fundamentally grounded in racism, exploitation, and domination. from my perspective, it would have been better if the british had left zambian societies alone. but for francis, the reverse held true: for him, the problem was not too much connection, but too little. francis criticized “segregasive” behaviors by whites which worked to keep africans and europeans separate and apart. where i saw racial segregation as an essential part of the colonial project, francis saw that same segregation as a moral flaw that marred an otherwise benign system and perversely counteracted that system’s main purpose: the bringing together of europeans and africans in relations of social connectedness and mutual learning. francis continued: francis: you know queen elizabeth is the one who has been organizing africa. teaching us various things. justin: and also exploiting africa? francis: no, as the queen, she did not do that. of course, maybe she was doing it by instructions, but no, with her, we say “thank you,” because we have seen a lot of things that we haven’t, that we couldn’t even maybe see. things like english. where would i get english, if not for britain? nothing. talk of bantu-speaking people. bantu-speaking people, they were like the chinese. the thing which they were speaking amongst themselves, no one else can get it. but the whites could teach those people up to the extent of other people getting them, the whites got those people from their languages to english. and english led to the spread of almost the whole world together. how are we going to be friends if i don’t get what you are talking about? here, francis pointed to the potential of colonialism to foster relations of social connection, to bring “almost the whole world together,” that would have been impossible otherwise. one way to interpret francis’s call for colonially grounded, racialized hierarchies, then, is to recognize that master and servant describes not only a relation of inequality. it is a relation that is by necessity also a relationship: a relation that requires and perpetuates social connection. of course, that relationship excludes meritocratic platitudes of a level playing field on which all are free to compete equally. but the kind of idealized colonialist relationship francis described also excludes a liberal ordering of nation-states that connects people in the global north and south through the sinews of global capitalism while obfuscating (or, in marx’s terms, mystifying) their actual social relatedness to one another (melamed 2015). mutually diseased imaginations our divergent theorizations of colonialism and inequality point to ways in which both francis and i labored under diseased ethical imaginations. the curse of ham narrative that francis re-articulated, after all, was the originary discursive pillar employed for centuries both to legitimate feudal distinctions (hertz 1928) and to justify the enslavement and colonization of africans (wynter 2003).7 this diseased imagination grew further, cancer-like, in the wake of the colonial encounters of 1492 (oliphant 2021). tracing this cancerous growth, the baptist minister and theologian willie james jennings (2010, 292) analyzes how “christian hubris gave life to a destructive form of joining” between peoples on diverse continents, mired in “racialized boundaries and racial kinship” and a christian “vision informed by colonialist logic of new life in jesus christ being wholly consumed in the social imagination of nations.” political independence in the twentieth century failed to dislodge the pervasiveness of such white supremacist ideologies throughout many postcolonial african states (pierre 2013), even though, as in zambia, few local white actors remain to perpetuate them. but francis’s critiques also point to the more subtle, though no less violent disease at the heart of my own views, grounded in secular, supposedly scientific understandings of human origins and a conventionally liberal, meritocratic ethical imagination. tracing the development of modern, scientific accounts of human evolution, terence keel (2018) demonstrates the continuities between this thinking and older forms of explicitly racist christian thought, as contemporary geneticists continue to employ, unacknowledged, the racialized conceptual framework originally derived from the story of noah and his sons. in her charting of the historical progression of european justifications of colonialism, sylvia wynter (2003) similarly reconstructs how the curse of ham, the originary anti-black myth of the abrahamic faiths, was successively overlaid with new forms of racial legitimation that nevertheless never displaced the violent anti-blackness at the heart of the discursive system. according to the genealogy wynter traces, the anti-blackness of the ham myth was first overlaid with the ideology of man1, the humanistic european subject endowed with rational faculties that made him fit overlord for the supposedly animalistic, non-rational “natives” europeans were increasingly encountering across the globe. later this ideology would itself be overlaid with that of man2, which employed malthusian and social darwinian conceptions of social ordering to justify racialized hierarchies as the result of the greater biological fitness and meritocratic ability of those who had violently expropriated the land, labor, and wealth of other peoples. wynter identifies this ideology of man2 with contemporary liberal imaginaries of meritocracy and “level-playing-field” articulations of justice, which serve to implicitly condone the hoarding of power, privilege, and prosperity in the global north as the just deserts of a more capable, implicitly racialized “ethnoclass,” rather than the ill-gotten gains of imperialist plunder. cedric robinson (2020), too, notes the centrality of the curse of ham myth in justifying both the race and class hierarchies inherent in the development of the contemporary system of global capitalism. of course, as the ethnoclass man has been progressively articulated by succeeding generations of europeans and their descendants, it no longer explicitly references the curse of ham; we might say that the memory of this original ideological justification for secular european humanism and liberal capitalism has been repressed. but the story endures through its racialized afterlives that serve to legitimate a growing system of global apartheid (besteman 2020; boesak 2015; mullings 2009), or apart-ness, in which divisions of material welfare between former colonizer and colonized populations pervade global capitalism (mbembe 2017; trouillot 2003). thus, my experience of disconcertment (in verran’s sense) at francis’s words was also an experience of the uncanny (in sigmund freud’s [2003] sense): a profoundly disturbing encounter with the foundational trope of anti-blackness that was historically constitutive of contemporary social realities, but which has since been repressed. toward moral repair if a shared rotten core lies at the heart of both conventional secular accounts of political ordering and historically dominant forms of christianity, then turning to the work of christian liberation theologians who have directly worked to excise this rotten core is an apt starting place from which to explore routes toward moral repair and alternative political futures. employing liberation theology as a form of “ethnographic theory” (robbins 2020) allows for a fuller examination of this diseased heart without requiring specifically christian theistic commitments (haynes 2022). liberation theologians have noted forcefully that despite the all-too-frequent (and, to use oliphant’s terminology, heretical) alignment of christian churches with hegemonic structures of oppression, the christian god is necessarily on the side of the oppressed (cone 1997; douglas 2019). thus, though the argument that black people are inferior by nature because of noah’s curse is indeed blasphemy (king 1998), nevertheless thinking with francis’s nonsecular theorizations of racism, coloniality, and global capitalism might show, as the south african cleric and veteran anti-apartheid activist allan boesak (2015, 4) suggests, how “a theological tradition, used as a tool of abuse and oppression by powerful interests, can be reclaimed as inspiration for struggles for freedom by the powerless and oppressed.” a place to start is to consider the botswanan feminist theologian musa dube’s (2000) analysis of the central christian text of the lord’s prayer (matthew 6:9–13) and its necessary call for authentic forms of hospitable community (oduyoye 2001, stewart 2001). dube (2000, 613, 616) argues, as francis also did in his conversation with me, that there is already a misleading shell game at work in liberal reactions of affront to master-servant hierarchy, since the contemporary global political-economic system is already one of masters and servants, and the ostensibly free markets that transform the world into a small, interconnected village do not, in fact, facilitate genuine human freedom. in a similar manner, francis described his bitter feeling of betrayal that whites of the global north (both europe and asia) indeed expected africans to serve, both historically through enslavement and colonialism and currently through neocolonial control of the zambian economy (haruyama 2022). yet despite their very real expectations of service, these whites refused to acknowledge their shared kinship, social relatedness, or ethical obligations toward africans. demonstrating this as inconsistent with god’s will for humanity, dube (2000, 618) argues that the ubiquitous christian recitation of the lord’s prayer demands recognition of shared kinship across continents: “women and men of different colours, sizes and shapes in different countries and continents are all ‘children’ of the same parent. suppose all the reciters of the lord’s prayer began to grasp this truth, how would they live with globalization that strips naked many members of the family in order to over-embellish a few others?” in a similar vein, the american baptist minister martin luther king, jr. (2015, 96) notes the deep intertwining of racism, economic exploitation, and neocolonialism as he describes the interdependency of all people under conditions of globalized capitalism. speaking to the “fierce urgency of now” and against the always-not-quite-yet liberal deferments of justice (povinelli 2011), king (2015, 83) castigates the immorality of keeping people of the global south “locked out of the earthly kingdom of wealth, health and happiness.” since, from a christian perspective, all humans are ultimately one family sharing one roof together, king echoes dube’s demand: “we are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother … do we have the morality and courage to live together as brothers and not be afraid?” (87–88). for the south african anglican theologian desmond tutu (2000, 31), these kinds of christian calls lead to a consideration of the traditional christian doctrine of imago dei, that each and every human being was created equally in the image of god. developing an “ubuntu theology,” tutu synthesizes the doctrine of imago dei with philosophical precepts, common to many southern african languages, such as motho ke motho ka batho (or umuntu ng’umuntu ng’abantu), that “to be human is to affirm one’s humanity by recognizing the humanity of others and, on that basis, establish humane relations with them,” and feta kgomo o tshware motho which requires “that mutual care and sharing with one another precedes concern for the accumulation and safeguarding of wealth” (ramose 2005, 149–150, see also tamale 2020). the work of these theologians helps illuminate the way that francis’s theorizations of racism and coloniality point directly to the diseased heart of secular modernity and its pretensions of formal egalitarianism between nations and peoples despite the realities of a system of growing global apartheid (besteman 2020; mullings 2009), of apart-ness. in francis’s account, this diseased heart is the violent fiction of the ethical dis-connection between peoples separated by continents and the rigidly patrolled borders of settler-colonial and postimperial states in the global north: as if the brutal legacies of enslavement and colonization of africans leave no lasting moral obligations. new political futures for many good reasons francis’s recuperation of the ethical potentials of colonialism—to bring people together—can appear anathema to an anthropological discipline engaged in a project to decolonize its methods and political orientations. but francis’s theorizations also point to a different kind of decolonization, a road not followed in the twentieth century, occluded as it was by, in francis’s words, colonizers’ “segragasive” mentalities. there was a window in the decolonizing era, from about 1949 to 1962 in britain and 1958 to 1974 in france, even while some of the bitterest anticolonial struggles raged in places like algeria and kenya, when a different kind of decolonized world might have emerged. during this period both britain and france, the two largest imperial powers, experimented with new forms of officially non-racial, transnational citizenship grounded not in the narrow borders of the metropolitan nation-state but expansively across the entire colonial realm. in france, this was termed citoyen de la communauté (citizen of the community), in britain, “commonwealth citizen.” as decolonization proceeded, the expansive ideology of these new articulations of transnational citizenship ensured that even as the former colonies became independent, sovereign republics, the citizens of these newly-sovereign entities retained the automatic legal right to come and go from the imperial metropole as they pleased, and to settle there at any time if they so wished (cooper 2018). there was thus a brief potential for two kinds of decolonization to have proceeded in parallel. on the one hand, as national liberation movements were winning victories across the former colonies, independent nations could emerge with hard-won rights to popular sovereignty and self-determination, “to stand on their own,” as francis phrased it. on the other hand, the imperial metropoles themselves might have been decolonized as, instead of the jealously guarded fortresses of imperially amassed privilege and prosperity they became, they might have maintained rather than severed the open forms of connection they once promised their colonial subjects.8 of course, what happened instead is that the colonizers gave into their “segregasive” mentalities, resulting in rather different forms of connection than those once promised. these connections were premised on the neocolonial economic manipulation of the former colonies (nkrumah 1966), rather than an open social connection with their peoples. at the same time, the former imperial powers adopted stringent immigration barriers intended (quite explicitly) to close off opportunities for legal immigration by “colored” subjects from the former colonies, while making entry as easy as possible for immigrants of white european ancestry. this process culminated, by 1974, in most of the main european colonial powers (including britain, france, the netherlands, and belgium) opening their gates wide to a free migration zone (in the form of the european communities) of unrestricted migration throughout western europe, a free migration zone that in its later incarnation of the european union would stretch across almost all of europe (consterdine 2017). at the same time, successive british governments implemented immigration laws in the period 1962–1971 designed to facilitate white immigration from the settler colonies of the commonwealth (canada, australia, new zealand), while seeking to eliminate labor migration from all other commonwealth nations (paul 1997). beginning in 1974, the french government similarly repudiated its commitments to former colonial subjects which guaranteed their right to settle within the metropolitan borders. conclusion focusing on the united states, savannah shange (2019, 10) describes the necessary orientation of an abolitionist anthropology toward working “within, against, and beyond the state in the service of collective liberation,” especially with regard to the state’s myriad carceral forms that keep black folks locked in (or locked up). from a transnational zambian vantage point, francis’s critical theorizations lend weight to another possible dimension of an abolitionist anthropology: the demand to abolish not only, for example, immigration detention centers (garcía hernández 2019; lindskoog and young 2021) but also the entire edifice of immigration control and surveillance that keeps black folks like francis locked out (tazzioli 2023; tazzioli and de genova 2023). doing so would require recognition that being born into the societies of the global north constitutes a form of birthright privilege analogous to feudalism (carens 2013), wherein legal constraints on mobility operate as de facto lines on which to draw the division of wealth (easterly 2013). it would also necessitate a reconsideration of social organization and the distribution of life chances based neither on narrow genres of the human (wynter 2003) nor on the exclusionary, territorializing logics of nationalism, but rather on the recognition of our shared kinship across continents, all of us the descendants of noah, and the mutual relations of connection, care, and provision this shared kinship demands. it would recognize that, as the ghanaian methodist theologian and founder of the circle of concerned african women theologians, mercy amba oduyoye (1982, 179), reminds us, “the real problem … lies in the eradication of [those] forces that work against the solidarity of the human race.” engaging with the christian thought of liberation theologians and francis alike as a form of critical social theory provides an opening for anthropology to think past the hegemonic dictates of secular liberal modernity and to imagine worlds otherwise (meek and morales fontanilla 2022) through a nonsecular, transnational african approach to decolonizing anthropology. abstract for centuries, europeans interpreted the biblical curse of ham to justify the colonization and enslavement of africans. yet some zambians today repeat this story as a demonstration of god’s intention for africans to be servants to whites, thus explaining global inequalities. i approach these apparently anti-black views not as evidence of false consciousness but as counterhegemonic theorizations of racism, coloniality, and capitalism. many zambians use the ham narrative to challenge the liberal fetishization of equality amid the territorializing border logics of the nation-state. they demonstrate how, in a radically unequal world, these fetishes perpetuate social divisions that contravene god’s will. this constitutes a non-egalitarian decolonizing critique that instead demands relations of mutual connection, kinship, and care across continents. working toward moral repair, i enlist the resources of liberation theology to imagine new ethical and political futures that are both anti-racist and anti-statist. [hierarchy; liberation theology; kinship; borders; christianity; abolition; zambia] notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to francis, daniel, and many others in zambia who thought with me and suffered my many objections as they taught me how substantive ethical relations do not end at national borders. i also thank teresa kuan, salahadin ali, caroline namugenyi, james smith, randeep hothi, james ferguson, jacob katumusiime, donald donham, alexander robins, jane saffitz, ayanda boy-boy manqoyi, matthew nesvet, anamaria trujillo, and shaheen amirebrahimi for offering invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. additional thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their generous and constructive feedback, as well as to the cultural anthropology editorial collective and, especially, alberto corsín jiménez, for helping to shepherd the piece to publication. research and writing were supported by the national science foundation, the wenner-gren foundation, the fulbright-hays program, and the reimagining indian ocean worlds mellon research initiative. finally, i thank laura meek for always believing in me even when i see no value in my writing. her generative feedback never ceases to show me new ways of thinking. 1. in the account of genesis 9, which resembles but is not identical with francis’s history, seth is named shem and the brother whom francis leaves unnamed is called ham. as a result, the story of genesis 9 is conventionally called “the curse of ham.” this name is somewhat misleading, however, since, as francis’s history makes clear, it is canaan, not ham, who is cursed. 2. the differences between zambian conceptualizations of race, in which asians such as chinese and indians qualify as whites but not as “real whites,” and more globally hegemonic euro-american styles of racialization are discussed at greater length in haruyama 2023. 3. francis’s explicit comparison of the relative moral qualities of black and white people here is of course in direct contradiction of other discourses prevalent in many african countries, including zambia, for example ubuntu (in south africa) or african socialism. contrary to francis’s account, these alternative discourses tend to valorize the moral qualities of african over individualistic and materialistic western culture, emphasizing africans’ willingness to assist one another and to work toward common goals. i suggest that the aftermath of experiences of abjection (ferguson 1999) and disillusionment with a relatively ineffectual and increasingly ethnicized zambian state, unable to adequately contest the foreign-induced neoliberalization of the zambian mining industry, may contribute to zambians’ more frequent contemporary emphasis on the moral failings of africans rather than narratives of ubuntu and african socialism that prevailed in an earlier era. 4. the word mzungu, which nyanja and chichewa share with kiswahili, is cognate to similar terms in many bantu languages throughout eastern and southern africa, including, for example, musungu in cibemba, murungu in chishona, and mlungu in isizulu, isixhosa, and siswati. all these terms are usually glossed in english as “white (person)” and are perhaps all descended from a common proto-bantu form, mʊ̀jʊ́ngʊ̀. nevertheless, varying stories about these words are told in different parts of africa, connecting them in different ways to the contemporary bantu languages spoken in those regions. as noted, nyanja/chichewa speakers in zambia sometimes connect the word mzungu to mulungu (god), but in east africa, people connect it with the kiswahili word kuzunguka, “to wander,” and in south africa the word mlungu is connected with the abelungu clan, descended from whites shipwrecked on the pondoland coast around 1700 (tshabe et al. 2006). there is, as far as i am aware, no existing scholarly consensus on the “true” etymology of the term across all these languages. 5. in the gwembe valley citonga spoken in mugoda, luzubo (“clan”) is the singular of mazubo (“clans”). the equivalent terms used by citonga speakers on the plateau are mukowa (sing.) and mikowa (pl.). 6. segregasive is a common word in zambian english used to express a concept that in american english would usually be rendered as “segregationist.” 7. though the curse of ham story was employed in both christianity and islam to justify enslaving africans (goldenberg 2017), christian practices of plantation slavery proved far more deadly to those enslaved (robinson 2020). 8. this decolonization would have been far from automatic, and long struggles to contest entrenched racism lay ahead (gilroy 2002). contrary to popular narratives, however, this racism resulted more from contingent choices by political elites than from an inevitable reaction by existing white publics (paul 1997). references allen, jafari sinclaire, and ryan cecil jobson 2016 “the decolonizing generation: (race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties.” current anthropology 57, no. 2: 129–48. 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reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.06 when ethics can’t be found: evaluative gaps in ordinary life cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 450-485, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.07 when ethics can’t be found: evaluative gaps in ordinary life charles h. p. zuckerman university of vermont https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4101-3428 no one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. human society is founded on mutual deceit. —blaise pascal, pensées phòò thiang’s older half-sister, paa, was sick. he—my host father in luang prabang, laos—told me that the ninety-three-year-old woman was lying in her house, naked and alone, as she neared her end.1 her daughter and the daughter’s husband did not yet want to include him. when they needed him, he said, they would call. as he waited for the inevitable news, my host mother, mèè phòòn, told me that dying like paa—in an empty quiet, rather than a house full of people and buddhist merit-making—was her biggest fear (compare stonington 2020). she pitied paa in these final moments and worried aloud that ultimately her own children might be as callous and careless as paa’s daughter, that her own death might be just as austere, cold, and lonely. at around nine in the evening, paa’s daughter finally called. paa had died. phòò thiang left abruptly. he spent the cold night sitting with paa’s corpse, now covered in a white sheet, as her daughter, thii, slept fifty feet away in the property’s other structure. alone, he lit incense, tended a candle, and played solitaire to pass the time until sunrise. the next morning, i went to paa’s house early and spent much of the next three days and nights there—filming, talking, and resting—as the funeral, and the festivities preceding and following it, unfolded.2 from beginning to end, other mourners blamed thii and her husband, kham, for almost everything the funeral lacked. the couple was subject to what seemed like pervasive ethical evaluations, and the growing consensus was that while phòò thiang, mèè phòòn, and their friends and relatives worked hard making merit, spending time with paa’s corpse, and monitoring the funeral’s expenses, kham and thii did little for paa or her funeral. here is a list of some of their complaints: thii didn’t shower and was dirty—people pointed to dirt caked to her neck. she also felt uncomfortable wearing a traditional lao skirt (the sin4). kham hunted eels instead of participating in the wake. kham ordained as a novice monk to get money, not to make merit for his mother-in-law, and he didn’t study the pali chants for the ceremony. thii did not spend enough time near her mother’s corpse, and she didn’t re-light the incense nearby, which must be continuously lit during the days leading up to the funeral. kham and thii were too affectionate with their dogs. they slept next to them and fed them expensive food, fit for humans. kham embezzled money meant for buying stringed lights for paa’s casket. when paa was alive, thii neglected the elderly woman’s physical appearance and cleanliness. as paa lay dying, thii threw out the nice clothes she was wearing because they had been defecated in. this meant that paa’s corpse lay naked leading into and shortly after her death. kham was addicted to methamphetamines and used his money to buy them rather than care for the family. thii continued to feed her three-year-old son formula. kham stole money generated by funeral gambling, which was supposed to pay for the funeral expenses. when unsupervised, thii pocketed donations made by other mourners. as others worked, thii slept or cared for her dogs, her children, and the ducks she raised for sale—she was unconcerned with the goings on of the funeral. i heard variations of each of these criticisms multiple times. together, they pointed to a consensus: kham and thii were unethical, immoral people (khon2 sua1). phòò thiang and mèè phòòn said that once the funeral finished, they would no longer visit or help the couple. salina, my host sister, put it even more forthrightly: now that paa was dead, kham and thii were no longer family. *** yet even as everyone at the funeral described kham and thii as “bad people,” no one spoke with the couple as harshly as they spoke about them in their absence. salina never told them they were no longer family; mèè phòòn never revealed that she feared her own children would act like them; and phòò thiang never accused them of embezzling money. some conflicts did bubble up, but evaluations of the pair never reached the same intensity when they were present, and sometimes everything unfolded as if no one were judging them at all. a large chasm existed between what people said with versus about kham and thii: there was an evaluative gap that everyone refused to close. as erving goffman has showed again and again, moments such as these are easy to find in ordinary life. how often do people bite their tongues in conversation only to let loose in gossip later? but anthropologists interested in ethics have not given such moments proper attention (but see heywood 2015).3 james laidlaw (2013, 3) writes that “the claim on which the anthropology of ethics rests is not an evaluative claim that people are good: it is a descriptive claim that they are evaluative.” if laidlaw is right—and i think he is—then one task of the anthropologist of ethics is to flesh out this “descriptive claim” with reference to the ebb and flow of palpable signs of evaluation.4 part of the appeal of so-called ordinary ethics is the notion’s ambiguity (clarke 2016). in michael lambek’s (2010) and veena das’s (2012) original work, it underpins the idea that life—even ordinary life—is suffused with the ethical (see also sidnell 2010b; das 2015, 116; sidnell, meudec, and lambek 2019, 304; lambek 2015a). in other adoptions, it is used as a simple call to explore ethics in situations not stereotypically associated with ethical discussion, for example, outside of religious institutions, rituals, and internal review board applications. while the former conception has been accused of spreading the notion too thinly across all of life (lempert 2013; zigon 2014; see mattingly and throop 2018), the latter use makes a relatively uncontroversial and benign claim (although see robbins 2016). yet however benign, this claim is not fatuous; it offers more than a “rhetorical flourish and a methodological conundrum” (clarke 2014, 421). heuristic value lies in occasionally looking away from patently ethical subjects and toward quotidian life, as long as we recognize the artificiality of the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary that this move presupposes. the fact is that in life generally people are often selective about when they voice evaluations and to whom. reflecting on this selectivity makes clear how often evaluations are themselves subject to evaluation, as it also unboxes a new puzzle: what are we as analysts to do with those meaningful silences in which signs of evaluation seem partially withheld, transfigured, or utterly absent? to unpack this puzzle, i explore a prototypically ethical scene—a funeral—but i train my attention on its more banal moments, where people appear to minimize their ethical stances on paa’s son-in-law, kham, so much so that these stances at times disappear. the conversations—recorded with a camera on a tripod and a zoom brand audio recorder—concerned a set of stringed, colored lights to be draped over paa’s casket, and whether kham had embezzled the money earmarked to buy them (criticism vi). i made the recordings as part of fifteen months of fieldwork in luang prabang, during which i explored, among other things, gambling and moral economy (see zuckerman 2018, 2020). the records make for a vivid display of two ways people in luang prabang deal with an unabashedly problematic person. my host parents’ neighbors, moo and sii, appeared to make their evaluations go absent when face to face with kham. they gave him advice and sympathized with him when he was present—leaving no obvious trace of judgment—but they judged him harshly when he left. my host sister, salina, by contrast, was not kind to kham when he was there, but she evaluated him even more strongly when he was not. salina’s approach is easier to evidence than moo and sii’s. i can quote salina’s sighs and complaints; but what does it mean to show that moo and sii really made no signs of negatively evaluating kham? it is practically impossible to prove an absence. the problem is magnified because of the open-ended nature of the semiosis of evaluation: there always exists the possibility of a later reinterpretation of how some sign should be construed (see parmentier 1994, xiii). checking the record—whether a video recording, a documented history of actions, or a general consensus—cannot “settle” the issue because the issue goes beyond the facts of any given moment. many anthropologists emphasize the bounty of meaning in ordinary practice. this emphasis is starkly evident in the anthropology of ethics, where––i do not think it is too controversial to say––scholars have a knack for finding signs of moral evaluation in places from which they appear, at first blush, to be absent (à la scott 1990).5 this vision of always richly layered behavior is in part what makes the idea of ordinary ethics so alluring: it allows one to uncover the tacit evaluations that saturate life. implicit in the emphasis is an expectation of the consistency of some deeper commitment in people, that moral stances might exist across contexts, and that the small things people do in ordinary life—their moods and modes of acting, so to speak (singh and dave 2015)—might signal these perduring stances, especially when people encounter the people, objects, and actions that those stances are about. moo and sii later said that they did have some evaluation “in their hearts” when they spoke with kham—perhaps this, too, subtly evidenced itself, carrying through in their small gestures and shifts in tone of voice? my repeated viewings of the video lead me to believe that such gestures and shifts in tone did not occur, but making this argument requires me to move upstream against the predominant hermeneutics.6 as such, it also offers an opportunity for identifying and describing local accounts of such apparent absences of this or that evaluation, in a way that moves beyond assumptions that evaluation is, so to speak, always there. why do people voice evaluations in one moment but not another? a core part of the answer seems to be rather simple: evaluations are evaluable. people can hold others to account for making them as well as for not making them. those who voice their stances on an issue may be accused of “stirring things up” or “‘being mean,” just as those who withhold judgment may themselves be judged for “staying silent.” the lurking possibility that any evaluation may be evaluated is something that people orient toward as they choose what, when, and where to evaluate (see sidnell, meudec, and lambek 2019, 304). moo, sii, and salina all said they did not accuse kham of stealing the lights to his face to avoid overt conflict. the idea is common, although not all-pervasive, in laos: that the ethics of interaction, of handling others with care and kid-gloves, should supersede the need to voice ethical evaluations within interaction, whether judgments or suspicions. the idea is ethical in the broad sense that i use the term here: it implicates concerns about “how one should live” (williams 2006; see keane 2016, 16–21).7 but it is also meta-ethical: it evaluates evaluative practice itself based on what that practice means for the possibility of a good life lived with others. this ethical and meta-ethical commitment perhaps constitutes the most common account of when to evaluate that circulates in laos. but it troubles many classic accounts in moral philosophy, where consistency of stances across events makes for the ideal and where interdiscursive inconsistency is conceived of as inherently immoral. immanuel kant and his categorical imperative’s almost pathological universality stand out historically, but many moral philosophical systems have been built on the notion that humans should, and at times do, voice the same opinions from moment to moment (see appiah 2008, 39 on situationists and character).8 but this is not just a case of lao ideals coming into friction with philosophical ideas in the west. the commitment to withhold evaluation for the sake of an ethics of interaction also conflicts with other ideas and practices circulating in luang prabang, where people at times argue for a consistency of stance by emphasizing the ethical value of speaking “straight” or unmasking hidden “corruption.” a view of moo’s, sii’s, and salina’s conversations with kham gives a sense of how these different ideas are articulated and lived out in the ebb and flow of interactional time. these conversations give flesh to the descriptive claim that people are evaluative. they make clear that while the claim captures a generic truth, it fails to capture the uneven way in which this truth can operate in the signs people produce to evidence evaluation. at times, whether a particular human is being evaluative in a particular moment is uncertain (cf. sidnell, meudec, and lambek 2019). at other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative—so fundamentally oriented to evaluation’s possibility—that they keep their evaluations to themselves. interrupted evaluations phòò thiang sat near paa’s casket. holding a 50,000-kip bill in his hand (about usd $6 at the time), he impatiently called out, “who’s going to buy these lights?!” the lights were meant to illuminate and beautify the casket, and to index paa’s continued presence. as phòò thiang called out, his granddaughter, salina’s eldest daughter, stood near him with her hands outstretched, offering to relay the money to whomever would head to the store. but ever mindful of sticky fingers, phòò thiang jerked the money away and said he wanted to know who was going to buy the lights first. kham approached the platform of the house, and phòò thiang met him at the platform’s edge to hand him the money directly. he told kham to hurry and then promptly returned to a small notebook to record: “kham”—“50,000 kip”—“stringed lights” two hours later, kham returned with the lights. he then publicly discovered they were broken. as he plugged them in and out, he cursed the chinese shopkeeper from whom he had bought them. he then left the scene, presumably to buy new lights. sii, thòòngsaa, and i, some of the only guests at the funeral at that point, began talking about what had just happened. my camera, balancing on its tripod, continued rolling. figure 1. sii, thòòngsaa, and zuckerman. photo by charles h. p. zuckerman. it was dark now, and sii and thòòngsaa sat on rented plastic chairs on the ground outside of the main house. i sat cross-legged on the edge of the wall-less structure’s platform floor. an unwatched movie was playing in the background. the three of us looked toward the other structure on the grounds, where kham and thii’s children slept beside their dogs. sii said he did not like the closeness of the dogs and the children––it might make the children allergic. thòòngsaa remarked that the couple treated their dogs better than their children. the night was black and cool, and the pace of the conversation reminded me of sitting around a campfire in the united states. thongsaa, who had arrived only a few minutes before, then turned toward paa’s casket and asked about what had happened with the lights: thongsaa paj3 sùù4 maa2 lêqø-bòø-hung1 vaa3 “[kham] bought [the lights] and they didn’t light-up?” sii sùù4 faj2 ñaap4 ñiip4 maa2 nii4 nêê1 vaa1 man2 khaat5 mot2 lèèw4 vaa1 san4 “[he] bought blinking lights, he said they all broke, he said that.” (sii says this as he turns and points with his left hand to the broken lights still strung around the casket.) thongsaa qaaw4 “wow.” cz maa2 lèèw4…bòø-daj4…= “…he came…but didn’t.” sii saaj3 bèèp5 daj3 man2 qaw3 qan3 khòòng3 kaw1 maa2 qan3 nii4 kaø-thòò1 daj3 “what kind of lights were they? [kham probably just] brought old ones, how much do those cost?” cz lêø-kaø-laaw2 vaa1 laaw2 sùù4 juu1 han5 dêê1 saj4 daj4 “he said [that when] he bought them [at the store, they] worked.” sii (h) (h) “ha-ha.” sii qoo3 saang1 vaw4 “ohh, [he] can really talk.” sii subtly questions whether kham had even bought new lights, or just brought some old ones and pocketed the cash. he does not directly claim any wrongdoing on kham’s part, but he does imply this by quoting kham’s words and presenting their patent unbelievability. thòòngsaa’s response, qaaw4 (wow) points to something unspecified and suspicious in the recounted tale. when i mention that kham had said that the lights had worked at the shop before he brought them back to the house, sii replied that kham can “really talk” (saang1 vaw4). the insinuation is clear: kham stole the money. figure 2. kham entering the scene. photo by charles h. p. zuckerman. as sii chuckled about kham, we heard kham’s voice come from behind his house. he hadn’t left yet. he was walking past us and saying to someone else that he needed to buy a better brand of lights this next time. we went silent and turned toward him as he talked. had he heard us talking about him? he hadn’t seemed to.9 nevertheless, even when i watch this moment on my monitor at home, i get that feeling that comes when someone enters the room as you are speaking about them; when the care with which you habitually handle a person’s face crashes against the carelessness with which you talk about them as an absent, third person—a “non-person” as émile benveniste (1971) put it. what is this feeling? why did everyone go quiet when kham approached? anthropologists have studied this issue most directly under the banner of gossip. because gossip is surrounded by negative connotations, and thus disagreements about when it applies, the term proves especially difficult to delimit (haviland 1977; besnier 2009).10 at its analytic core, however, seems to lie a concern with presence and absence (see mangardich and fitneva 2019). identifying gossip often presupposes that the same conversation would be (more) inappropriate, rude, or vulgar if the person being gossiped about were present. gossip is what you say without rather than with someone. as max gluckman (1963, 313) puts it: “the main moral norm is that you must scandalize about an opponent behind his back, if your allegations are at all open, to his face, you must be delicate and never give him ground to state that you insulted him. for insults of this kind, if open, make impossible the pretense of group amity.” while anthropologists studying gossip have gravitated toward moments of gossip qua revelation, where people wield cruel facts and rumors about absent others, conversation analysts have tended to focus on the care with which people treat those who are present (see sidnell 2010a). this line of research resonates with adam smith’s (1880, part 6, section 2, para. 15) reflections on interaction. smith wrote that humans have a “natural disposition to accommodate and to assimilate, as much as we can, our own sentiments, principles, and feelings, to those which we see fixed and rooted in the persons whom we are obliged to live and converse a great deal with.” this disposition, he continued, “is the cause of the contagious effects of both good and bad company.” work in conversation analysis has documented this contagion, indicating that often people agree with others not because they are passionately committed to their opinions, but because they care about defending pleasant sociality itself. anita pomerantz (1984, 60) showed this in her research on assessments. she found that when someone evaluated something, their interlocutor tended not only to agree but to upgrade what they said. thus, “it’s not too cold,” was followed by, “oh it’s warm.” and, “it’s really a clear lake, isn’t it” got the response, “it’s wonderful” (see also stivers, mondada, and steensig 2011). in those cases where second speakers did disagree, they tended to frame their disagreements as partial or qualified.11 the “preference structure,” as conversation analysts characterize it, was found to be so pervasive that when someone agreed without upgrading, their utterance was construed as a disagreement. this work resonates with erving goffman’s discussions of “face,” and goffman’s (1967, 5–6) account itself builds from “the chinese conception of face.” face has emerged as a key term in the academic essentialization of how east and southeast asians think about prestige, polite social interaction, and dissemblance (see kipnis 1995). in laos and thailand, scholars have treated face (naa5 in lao) as a trope for understanding what they see as a broad pattern of conflict avoidance (e.g., bilmes 2001, 189; ukosakul 2005, 117). joseph westermeyer (1973, 743), for instance, wrote that “politeness, reserve, and indirect confrontation through intermediaries are the laotian norms for [interpersonal] relations” (compare phillips 1966, 79). these discussions, my own included, risk bolstering orientalist generalizations about the prevalence of superficiality and dissemblance in social interactions among lao and thai people.12 much like roma in russia have been racialized as “natural performers” (lemon 2000), lao and thai sociality run the risk of being treated as surfaces without substance (see van esterik 2000). but avoiding the discussion ignores a predominant meta-ethical idea about interaction. the fact is that accounts that prioritize smooth interaction over supposedly straight opinions have currency among many lao and thai people themselves (bilmes 2001, 187–88). in the political discourse of both nations, “a love of the disciplined surface” (morris 2000, 181) provides a justification for what is deemed speakable (jackson 2004; zuckerman 2018). in these contexts, authenticity is not always valued (see high 2021, 68), nor are private utterances always considered more revelatory of truth. instead, many people treat public declarations that might appear rote or formulaic as deeply revealing of character (compare mulder 1979). as pierre petit (2013, 160–61) found, some politically censored lao are nevertheless committed to the project of censorship itself, to the ethical goodness of presenting things in one way rather than another. the same goes for censorship in more private moments, say, where moo “resisted the urge” (qot2 qaw3) to unload on kham: this was the sort of silence one might proudly exhibit. in accounting for these censorships to me, people often suggested that they put on a good face to protect the harmony of social interaction itself (compare jackson 2004; aulino 2014). they offered formulas that sounded like gluckman’s (1963, 313) description of gossip: insults, accusations, and evaluations should not be made openly because they destroy the pretense of amity and solidarity. whereas some readers might view the silence of sii and thòòngsaa as a kind of dissimulation of their opinions, in luang prabang, people generally viewed the direct articulation of suspicions and opinions as much more aggressive and problematic. the desire to interact smoothly and without conflict, they told me, should overtake the desire to broach a topic or “speak straightly” (vaw4 khwaam2 sùù1). this ethical and meta-ethical idea produces a challenging standard to live by—to keep one’s evaluations to oneself, to restrain oneself in another’s presence. its standard is so challenging to fulfill, in fact, that people generally agree that the best thing to do with difficult people is to avoid them entirely. when this proves impossible, as my interlocutors told me repeatedly, you should resist your urge to criticize them, so as to avoid “yelling,” “noisiness,” and “offense.” this does not make gossip an ethically neutral activity—but it is much more tolerable than open discord. one should “observe” (sang3 ke^e^t5) bad actions, not sanction them or convince those who do them to change. one friend described his observations as a kind of investigative work. he stressed that he would use his findings to guide his opinions and future interactions, not as ammunition for argument. a lao etiquette manual put the rationale like this: “when you see someone doing something that you do not like, do not criticize them out loud except if [that person’s action] will affect society as a whole; [if it will] then tell them politely.”13 “the volatility of a dispute is what is often most feared,” wrote herbert p. phillips (1966, 30). in luang prabang, this volatility often becomes glossed in idioms of “noisiness” (khwaam2 nan2; see zuckerman 2018). when i asked phòò thiang, for example, why he did not broach the issue of missing money with kham and thii, he said: “i didn’t want to say anything because, if i said anything, it would just cause noisiness.” maybe, he continued, if kham and thii had some sense [of right and wrong], he would have said something to them. “but,” he continued, “people with sense wouldn’t steal the money in the first place. [we’ll] ignore them.” from this perspective, certain patterns of dissemblance and contradiction are not ethical failures but signs of virtue. the ideal is to be someone capable of “letting things go” (qot2 qaw3). but not all the time. as phòò thiang’s comments imply, while kham and thii are not worth the “noise” that comes with broaching uncomfortable subjects, some difficult, senseless people—those you care for—are worth outrage and straight talk. with these folks, one should be “truthful” (vaw4 khwaam2 cing3). for instance, when a friend of mine named muu started to annoy many of our mutual friends, they began to ignore him as much as they could—excluding him from a new whatsapp group, choosing driving routes that avoided his house, and not inviting him to events (see zuckerman forthcoming). but dii, who was closest to muu, took it on himself to explicitly ask muu to change. ultimately, dii’s appeals failed, and muu and the group of friends fell out of regular contact. by the time the whole gang—muu included—attended my farewell party at the end of a long stretch of fieldwork, the dynamic had morphed. they interacted politely, but when muu, along with an uninvited companion he had brought, hastily left, dii and others surmised that the companion had only come for protection. “he was afraid that we would beat him up.” the tension, once worth trying to resolve with straight talk, had become unspeakable even for dii, cloaked in the polite cheersing of beer and high fives. the time for caring, for saying what they really thought, had passed. muu had become someone to tolerate and placate until he could be avoided. poverty and embezzlement the substance of evaluations about kham and thii mostly concerned how the couple used and accounted for money. these economic issues are often entangled with ethical notions in laos, but the mismanagement of money took on particular moral weight at paa’s funeral. in lao wakes generally, everyone is oriented toward producing merit, and money is a mechanism for such merit. at paa’s funeral, kham and thii’s misuse of money also became an explanation for why paa had lived in such squalor. she was poor and landless when she died, and most people blamed kham and thii. thii, phòò thiang said, liked to party and drink, games of cards and beer, mostly; and kham liked to free-base crushed-up methamphetamine pills, four to five pills a day. mèè phòòn quipped that the couple was not thuk1 ñaak4, “in difficult poverty,” but thuk1 ngaaj1, “poor, but living easy.” the couple’s house exhibited their poverty starkly. its two open-air structures were cold and rickety, and people still noted how “dirty” (khii5 diat5) they were even after a hired professional had cleaned them for the funeral. salina’s nine-year-old daughter pointed to piles of toys scattered on a roof, broken, rusted, and discolored. “look!” (beng1), she said to me with amazement and disgust. when i asked mèè phòòn if i could film the wake, she first hesitated, not because my camera would desecrate the event (people often encouraged my filming wakes), but because she was ashamed to document such a poor and derelict place. these ugly things at her in-laws were not worth capturing. (when she deferred to phòò thiang, he told me to “go ahead, film.”) in luang prabang, one’s own house normally makes for the ideal place to die—whenever possible, people bring dying family members home from the hospital in their final moments—but the guests agreed that paa’s dirty platform was not conducive to a good death, nor was it an ethical location to host the two-day wake that followed (stonington 2012).14 whereas i viewed kham and thii’s poverty as an understandable hindrance to their taking proper care of paa and her surroundings, most everyone else assumed that kham and thii were poor because they were bad, not the other way around. such views are common in luang prabang, and they resonate with prevalent interpretations of theravada buddhism, in which wealth functions as a sign of merit (see spiro 1966; keyes 1983, 858; reynolds 1990; aulino 2014, 430). from the perspective of most, kham and thii had caused their own economic and social poverty, not because of actions in a past life (or at least, no one said this to me), but because of their actions in this life. as one newspaper article put the idea, “those addicted to gambling and drugs are always to blame for their poverty” (vientiane times 2004; compare hanks 1972, 101). figure 3. one of the structures of the house, full of monks, with my camera in the foreground (image is distorted to preserve anonymity). photo by charles h. p. zuckerman. throughout the funeral, phòò thiang was especially preoccupied with controlling what he saw as the couple’s pervasive graft. he sat next to paa’s corpse throughout the wake—and left replacements when he couldn’t—in part to keep paa company, but also to safely receive offerings from visitors. when he was there, these visitors would hand phòò thiang cash that he would tap onto paa’s casket to get her attention, telling her how much money was being given and asking her to bless the giver. as he sat on the platform, he repeatedly counted and checked the basket of donated money against a ledger he kept, and in the process put to memory most of the transactions it recorded, citing them off effortlessly weeks later when i asked him how much he had paid for the bottles of water or the rented chairs, or who donated what. phòò thiang’s desire to keep the finances at the funeral “transparent” (cèèng4) also came into evidence in the way he gave kham money to buy lights for paa’s casket—he wrote the amount down, made sure he handed the money directly to kham, and even suggested a store to buy them from. absent evaluations in presence in an effort to capture the ebb and flow of a lao wake, my camera ran on a tripod in front of the structure where paa’s corpse lay for more than five hours, where the lights were to be hung. the video allows me to trace how these flickering bulbs emerged as a topic of conversation, and how signs of evaluation of kham arose and went absent throughout the event. the lights first appear in the recording twenty-four minutes after phòò thiang gave the money earmarked for them to kham. at this point, a group of monks are chanting on the platform, with guests gathered around them. a hand enters the camera frame, grasping the lights. the hand, presumably kham’s, passes the lights to one of paa’s relatives who is sitting, hands in a prayer position (the nop1 or thai wai) and absorbing the chanting. the man then stands up and slowly drapes them around paa’s casket. as the man fumbles with the lights, he occasionally crouches downward toward the monks, aware of a momentarily taboo arrangement of bodies—he so high, the monks low. the lights do not work even when plugged in. the man briefly leaves the scene, and when he re-enters, he bows three times, sits, and resumes his nop1, apparently resigned to have kham deal with the lights later. figure 4. kham fiddling with the lights. photo by charles h. p. zuckerman. almost two hours later, the monks are gone and i am sitting on the platform of the house chatting with sii and moo, sii’s wife (figure 4). with a headlamp on his forehead that he habitually uses to hunt eels, kham stands behind me and fiddles with the lights, tangling and untangling them, plugging and unplugging them, and eventually saying, “so, the lights can’t be plugged in?” this draws our attention. i turn but sit quietly, and sii and moo respond as he continues to fiddle with the lights. moo qan3 daj3 kòq1 “what’s that?” kham faj2 sii3 nii4 naq1 “these lights.” siap5 nii4 man2 kaø-thùng3 juu1 daj4 sam4 “the cord will reach the outlet.” moo pên3 ñang3 bòø-siap5 san4 naq1 “then why don’t [you] plug them in?” kham laø-lèèw4 laaw2 pên3 ñang3 ñang2 bòø-siap5 sam4 qaq1 “then why didn’t [the other man] plug them in?” moo man2 bòø-mii2 hua3 tii3 “the cord probably doesn’t have a plug, right?” sii mii2 hua3 siap5 qaq1 “does it have a plug?” moo man2 bòø-mii2 hua3 siap5 tii4 qaaj4 “the cord probably doesn’t have a plug, right, older brother [i.e., kham]?” sii luuk4 kaø-lòòng2 siap5 lòòng2 beng1 san4 vaa1 “child [i.e., kham], you should plug them in and try, then.” kham ñang3 vaa3 bòø-khaw5 “why aren’t they working?” sii bòø-khaw5 nòq1 “they aren’t working, huh?” man2 khaat5 lèèw4 tii4 “they’re broken, right?” no signs of suspicion, distrust, or judgment emerge from moo’s and sii’s questions to kham. they refer to him politely with kin terms (moo calls him “older brother,” sii, “child”), and offer patently helpful—albeit obvious—advice and questions: “plug them in”; “[do the lights] have a plug?” moo, sii, and i again begin chatting with each other and kham resumes his previous activities—fiddling with the lights, tangling and untangling them, plugging them in and unplugging them. as he works, he occasionally comments on the broken lights—twice to himself and once to someone on the phone. more than a minute elapses between each of these lines: kham time: 1:44:18 paa khon2 ciin3 nii4 man2… faj2 sii3 khaat5 man2 maa2 khaaj3 haj5 kuu3… “what, this chinese guy, he sold me these broken lights.” time: 1:45:30 qaw4 kuu3 vaa1 faj2 sii3 nii4 vaa1 saaj3 khaat5 laaj3 kuu3 vaa1 “what, these lights!… the cord is really broken.” time: 1:46:38 qooj3 khit1 qòòk5 “oooh, think!” these ostensibly self-directed comments crescendo over a three-minute period. with a fourth comment, kham draws moo and sii to talk to him about the lights again: kham [somewhat unclear] qòòj ciin3 nii4 khit1 paj3 khit1 qòòk5 khoot4 phòò1 mùng2 qeej …hung1… khaan4 vaw4 dii3 “oh, this chinese guy, i understand now, fuck his parents, wow, i’m too tired to speak politely now.” sii (h) (h) khaw2 pên3 ñang3 “haha, what happened with him?” kham lòòng2 mùù4 kii4 kaø-daj4 hung1 dii3 dak2 bat2 maa2 hòòt4 phii4 lêqø-man2 saaj3 khaat5 mot2 “i tried [the lights] a second ago and they were flashing perfectly, then i got here and they’re all broken” sii nêê1 khaw2 hêt1 khaaj3 saaj3 sòòt5 lèèw4 “see, he sold already broken lights.” at this point, salina walks closer to the platform house. salina leqø-man2 bòø-daj4 naq1 qan3 nan4 naq1 (walking into the frame of the camera) “so the lights don’t work, huh?” kham khit1 qòòk5 khit1 pên3 nòq1 mm (to himself) “way to think, jeeze!” salina lêqø-man2 bòø-daj4 sam4 “and the lights don’t work, right?” kham bòq1 “nope.” salina paj3 pian1 paj4 “go change them, go [now].” paj3 pian1 kòòn1 paj3 sùù4 qaw3 maj1 “go change them before [we] need to buy new ones.” kham pian1 … pian1 nèèw2 daj4 man2… phen1 kaø-pit2 haan4 kòòn1 “change them? how am i going to change them? he, he closed the store already.” salina paj3 sùù4 lèèw4…khaw2 khaaj3 juu1 saj3 san4 naq1 “[where did you] buy…where did they sell you the lights?” sii bòø-pit2 thùa1 dòòk5 phòq1 vaa1 bak2 qan3 nan4 bòø-khaaj3 kaang3 vên2 “no, they’re not closed yet, because that guy he doesn’t sell during the day.” kham naa5 naa5 [landmark name] nii4 naq1 “no, [the guy] in front of [landmark name]” (talk continues) a lot happens in the subsequent conversation. here i draw pieces from it to contrast how moo and sii speak to kham with how salina does. their approaches exemplify two varieties of interdiscursive gaps, just as they also exemplify two varieties of locally recognizable characters in laos: the “polite person” (khon2 suphaap4) and the “yeller” (khon2 mak1 haaj4). moo and sii, acting politely, did not leave any noticeable hints to the epistemic and ethical positions they later took. they left no evidence that i could find within the interaction itself to support a claim that they had a “hidden transcript,” to borrow james c. scott’s (1990) term, but instead studiously avoided implying that kham had done anything unseemly. salina, in contrast, played the relative straight-talker. she signaled that she was critical of kham as she spoke with him, even if the criticism came disguised as hints, muted and obscured with hedges like “i’m just kidding.” figure 5. salina enters the scene. photo by charles h. p. zuckerman. let me begin with salina’s evaluations of kham. while kham blames the chinese vendor for cheating him, salina repeatedly blames kham. she questions his thoroughness in checking the lights, emphasizes the money lost, and twice shows frustration with a sigh she often aimed at her young daughter: qooj4. as she bends down to pick up something, she mutters, “oh, stupid,” but kham, who is also speaking at the time, does not appear to hear. after she gives him more money for new lights, she warns him to “test them well,” adding, “if [you] don’t test them well and they don’t work, watch out!” salina is clearly unhappy with kham. the ohs, qooj4s, and frustrated warnings paint a picture of an angry woman. yet almost none of her criticisms or signs of frustration put the main crux of kham’s story in doubt. kham’s claim that he bought the lights new at a store run by a chinese businessman goes unquestioned. she does not accuse him of having stolen money, but only for being stupid and for not ensuring that the lights worked before he brought them back to the house. the one exception is telling: here, she accuses kham of lying about how much the lights cost, only to immediately backpedal.15 salina thòò1 daj3 saaw2 haa5 “how much, 25?” (kham walks up toward salina, in front of casket, as she searches through her purse for money just in front of the platform house) kham qee3 “yeah.” salina khii5 tua2 tii4 “you’re lying, right?” kham qee3 paj3 sùù4 qaw3 leej2 mèè4 san2 naq1 “go buy [the lights] yourself, if that’s [what you think].” (kham looks away toward the wall as he says this) salina caang4 kaø-bòø-paj3 vaa1 jòòk5 sùù1 sùù1 “[i wouldn’t go] if someone paid me…i was just kidding.” kham mm “that’s right.” sii (h) (h) “ha-ha.” salina kaø-haj5 jòòk5 daj4 laø-bat2 bòø-jòòk5 dèè1 kaø-qiø-muan1 nang1 ngaw3 ngaw3…juu1. “[you] have to let [me] joke, when we are not joking are we going to have fun, just sitting here quiet and sad?” kham [salina] dang3 diaw1 lêqø-nii4 nêq1 “salina is the only one being loud, now.” moo bòø-mii2 khon2 laaj3 haj5 man2 jòòk5 dèè1 “there aren’t many people, let her joke!” perhaps sensing an argument, moo here asks kham to “let [salina] joke,” because the wake had few guests (and therefore needed liveliness). moo and sii played peacemaker in this way throughout the interaction, deflecting blame from kham and orienting to practical solutions. their approach drastically contrasted with salina’s. when kham first cusses out the chinese shopkeeper, for example, sii supports this reading of what had happened and offers that the shopkeeper “sold already broken lights.” moo and sii both suggest that kham might still manage to exchange the lights, because the shop that he bought them from might still be open. when kham says he bought them somewhere else, sii agrees that that place has already closed, and that kham can no longer return the lights. at one point, kham suggests (apparently as a joke) that the lights broke because paa, lying in her casket, had judged that she did not like their color. moo laughingly upgrades this idea, saying that “[the lights] hurt [paa’s] eyes, they hurt [paa’s] eyes.” just afterward, moo implies that it was not kham’s fault that the lights were broken, because they worked when kham first brought them to the house. when it turns out that they had in fact not worked when he first plugged them in at the house, a damning fact that salina highlights repeatedly, sii offers that the lights probably broke because they shorted when first plugged in. tellingly, the only thing coming from moo or sii that might be construed as criticism or contradiction is followed by backtracking that works to absolve kham of blame. sii paj3 lêqø-lòòng2 … paj2 lêø-lòòng2 vaj4 dee4 “once you go, test [the lights], once you go test [the lights] for sure.” moo khaw2 lòòng2 haj5 [lèèw4 naa1 khaw2 lòòng2 haj5 lèèw4 dèè1 léø-caw4 qòòk5 maa2 lon4 khaat5 lêqø-caw4 daj4 sùù4 maj1 “they tested them there for you and you came here and they were inundated and broke here, and now you will go buy more.” kham [kaø-lòòng2 bat2 nii4 daj4 “[i] tested [the lights] this last time.” sii man2 maa2 khaat5 juu1 phii4 nêê1 “the [lights] broke here.” moo man2 maa2 khaat5 juu1 phii4 dèè1 “the [lights] broke here.” salina mùù4 kii4 nii4 mêp2 lèèw4 san4 naq1 “so, they were just working fine?” kham bòø-mêp2 cak2 bat2 leej2 qaq2 “they didn’t work at all [here].” here, sii tells kham that he should “test [the lights] for sure” when he buys the next set, implying that kham had not tested them, or at least not tested them thoroughly enough before. then moo reminds her husband that kham had tested them already and kham agrees. the couple take this telling of the event as fact in their next turns of talk, reiterating to salina that the lights broke at the house, not at the shop, supporting kham’s claim that he could not return the lights because they were working when he bought them. in the latter two lines, moo and sii present a united, helpful front. they mirror one another’s stances with a perfect poetic parallelism (lempert 2008), repeating each other word for word, only differing in the nearly synonymous particles nêê1 and dèè1. obviously, one could point out many ethical concerns implicated in this moment. so too could one find countless evaluations. yet these concerns and evaluations differ from those to emerge later. they form a part of an ethics of care toward an interlocutor and toward respect for keeping the peace at a wake. negative evaluations of kham of the sort that seemed otherwise ubiquitous to me—if these evaluations were ever to be there—have been scrubbed from the scene. present evaluations in absence after much back and forth, kham leaves. salina, moo, and sii quietly debrief. this is ten minutes before the moment at which kham unexpectedly reappeared as we were talking about him. salina bòø-vaa1 sùù4 dòòk4 faj2 mot2 sòòng3 kòq2 bòø-beng1 bòø-hung1 ñang3 nòq1 “wow, he bought two sets of lights and didn’t look [at them], they didn’t work at all.” sii luuk4 qan3 nan4 lêqø-luuk4 kheej3 laan4 kheej4 laaw1 “that kid, that’s her son-in-law?” salina qee3 “yeah.” moo luuk4 kheej3 kan3 “the son-in-law.” salina (unintelligible) sii (h) (h) “ha-ha.” salina …qaw3 khòòng3 khaat5 khòòng3 man2 “…he just took one of his own broken lights [and brought it here].” moo jaan4 juu1 “i’m afraid [that’s probably right].” [unintelligible] siø-qaw3 maa2 siap5 lêq1 tang4 bòø-hung1 vaa3 “was (he) going to come and plug it in and just have it not work?” salina bòø-huu4 bòø-huu4 nam2 leej2 “i don’t know, i don’t know what (he was thinking) at all.” luam2 taa3 tii4 naqø-[paa] “do your eyes hurt [from the lights], paa?” sii, salina, moo (h) (h) (h) (laughing together) here salina begins by criticizing kham as she had when he was present, as irresponsible. but she then voices a more damning accusation: kham probably just pretended to buy broken lights he had lying around. rather than defend kham, as she had moments before, moo says she is afraid salina is right. a week after the funeral, when i spoke with sii and moo at their house, the criticisms became even more excoriating. after some discussion of how he wasn’t really sure what kham had done or was thinking, sii explained that kham, as a methamphetamine addict, was good at dissembling, or “talking really well.” and moo spoke even more confidently about what kham had done. sii khan2 man2 kh…khaw2 kin3 jaa3 lêq1 khaw2 kaø-vaw4 kêng1 han5 lêq1 “if he… if someone takes drugs then he’ll be able to talk really well.” moo qee3 “yeah.” sii [phòø-man2 maw2 dii3 qaq1 “cause he’s high…” moo [vaw4 kêng1 “[he] talks really well.” ngen2 man2 kaø-qaw3 vaj4 man2 kaø-qaw3 qan3 kaw1 khaw5 maa2 “he took the money and then brought some old [lights] back” sii qee3 “yeah.” moo haa1 man2 “curse him.” others described what had happened similarly. mèè phòòn had not even heard about the lights during the funeral itself, yet when i started to ask her about them, to narrate that phòò had given kham money to buy lights, she immediately assumed that kham had pocketed the money. salina, likewise, told me that kham had definitely done so. these evaluations had been almost entirely absent when kham was present, but they were ubiquitous in his later absence. accounts of evaluative gaps “corruption” was what salina called it when i spoke with her a week after the funeral, using the english borrowing rather than the lao, kaansòòlaat4 bangluang3. her friend, a thai national living in laos who was chatting with us as well, put it bluntly: “in this town, there’s corruption all the time [baan4 nii4 corruption talòòt5].” like the corrupt civil servant who uses a road project to siphon money to his friends, kham had used the broken lights as a front, a way to embezzle money for himself. “he,” salina said, was “good at lying.” many people in luang prabang with whom i spoke saw connections between the economic embezzlement that happened among family and friends and the embezzlement that happened in the wheeling and dealing of laos’s late-socialist political and business world. the kid who silently pockets the change after an errand is recognized as doing something similar to the road builder who secretly turns a profit on the trees he had to clear along the way. but corruption as a term is “above all a category of accusation” (high and petit 2013, 426). people use it selectively, to slander and delegitimize their targets. that this accusation has force in contemporary laos surely in part results from the nation’s relationships with ngos, international businesses, and other countries. but the currency of ideas like corruption and transparency (cèèng4) also makes plain that alongside ideas that justify obscuring one’s “real feelings” for social harmony, other discourses separate and disentangle surface from substance and imply that a mismatch between the two can constitute a problem. thai politicians are said to have “sweet mouths” but “meaningless words” (morris 2004, 225). so, too, is kham said to be able to “really talk.” the relation between surface and substance thus proves more complex than any simple account of a lao emphasis on supposed harmony implies. people frequently allude to this latter emphasis, but it is not easy to disentangle from their other justifications for choosing when to speak and when to stay silent. fundamentally, if salina unequivocally believed that appearances were all that mattered, then kham’s embezzlement of the money for the lights would not be a problem––let him have the money, she might have said, the lights were “broken.” but things were not so simple. in fact, salina prided herself on her penchant for a “directness” that cut through pleasantries. others often talked about her, as they talked about her mother, mèè phòòn, as a bit of a “yeller.” my neighbors even jokingly asked me whether i was scared to live in the house. when i spoke with her about kham and the lights, she claimed this dimension of her personality emphatically and without my explicitly raising the subject: “if something is worth yelling about, i yell,” she said. and she did, in fact, speak harshly to kham. she remembered that she had called him “stupid” (caa4). “i scolded [daa1] him,” she told me, and stressed that this scolding made it so that kham would not dare steal money from her again. but this directness had its limits: her supposed scolding was barely muttered, and it seemed unlikely that kham had heard her. salina recognized some of these limits. at the funeral itself, she told me she did not want to drink any beer because she was worried she wouldn’t be able to “resist the urge” (qot2 qaw3) to talk “straight” to kham and thii. a week later, she told me that although she never called kham qaaj4 or “older brother,” even though she technically should, she also did not use the dis-honorific title bak2 to kham’s face. her thai friend chimed in: “if you are in front of his face, you can’t call him bak2, you can’t say that, you’ll lose discipline [maalañaat4], but if you are behind his back, then you can say it freely.” that is, even salina, a self-identified straight-talker, suggested that she modulated her evaluations depending on circumstance. all her criticisms of kham (except for the “joke” that he was lying) took him at his word. she did not accuse him for having embezzled the money in an act of corruption but for being stupid insofar as he did not inspect the lights more carefully. that is, the actions being evaluated from one scene to the next changed, even as the quality of the evaluation—the anger and outrage involved—stayed similar. in this sense, salina left clues to the stance she took after kham left, but she did not embody that stance clearly (see table 1). table 1. as kham ‘discovered’ the lights were broken, and they spoke with him when they spoke about kham in his absence moo “the [lights] broke here” “he took the money and then brought some old [lights] back. curse him.” sii “the [lights] broke here” “i don’t know about what he did after that… did he go to buy lights? did he buy them? or did he bring some old broken lights, instead? [kham] said that that the lights broke [there], that’s what he said happened.” salina “you didn’t look at [the lights at all], did you?” “he brought old [lights] and took the money and said he bought them anew, he then took money from me and bought new ones again.” in contrast to salina, the straight talker, perhaps some readers might view moo and sii as conniving in their dissimulation of their opinions of kham as they spoke with him. but in luang prabang, personalities like salina’s more often emerge as the problem. moo’s and sii’s style of evaluating, in fact, matched how the couple had described and valorized their way of handling conflict. in several situations during our time as neighbors, they advised me to take their lead and stressed that i should not broach issues of possible corruption with suspected parties. when, for instance, we discovered that the envelope i had given them for a party had 50,000 less kip than i had originally put in it, and when it became clear that the person i had entrusted with the envelope had taken some of the money, they told me i did not need to say anything, and made a point of telling me i should not bring it up with the person i suspected of stealing. this person was close to me and to them, but they nevertheless told me that raising the issue would just lead to “noisiness.” one should observe and remember such events, they said, without broaching them. likewise, when i asked why they had not said anything about the lights, muu responded that her desire to not be nan2 or “noisy” outweighed her desire to talk straight. sii agreed. salina was closer to kham than moo and sii, related by marriage rather than friendship. she was also more invested in the wake’s success. this surely affected her approach. if moo and sii were the ones footing the bill for kham’s embezzlement, perhaps they would have been more forthright. but her approach did not only result from this circumstance. salina had a reputation as a somewhat difficult character; moo and sii were respected elders and movers and shakers in the neighborhood. how and when they negatively evaluated others in public and semi-public spaces contributed to these reputations, as it also proved fodder for other’s judgments. simply put, choosing when to make a stink and when to zip up marks a choice of how to live. in luang prabang this choice is not just construable as a sign of one’s relationship to the target of an evaluation or of one’s sensitivity to the context of situation (kòòlanii2). it is a sign of character (nitsaj3). conclusion consider again our silence when kham entered as we were speaking about him. moments like this silence make plain that evaluations are, like all kinds of action, contextually sensitive utterances, shaping and shaped by their surrounds. when people evaluate themselves and others in perceivable ways, they are often attuned to how their evaluations might be evaluated. in monitoring whether kham was or was not present as moo and sii spoke about him, the couple appears to anticipate that they themselves will be judged, that they might be taken as rude or distasteful straight-talkers. with kham present, their negative evaluations of him go absent. this propositional shift makes moo and sii recognizable as certain kinds of ethical figures: polite people who avoid social noise, elders with virtuous capacities to remain silent. many people in luang prabang find characters like salina, who tend to yell and cause noise rather than resist the urge, troubling. yet polite people like sii and moo are more troubling for those committed to uncovering tacit evaluations in every moment. personalities like salina maintain a similar evaluative force across interactions, modulating their signs of stance and evaluations slightly, but leaving hansel and gretel like crumbs to the epistemic and ethical positions they will later take. characters like sii and moo force the analyst to deal with what appear to be radical mismatches of discursive stances on who deserves blame and why. what are we, as anthropologists, to do with the latter, more radical shifts in signs of evaluation, and the meaningful silences within them? the predominant hermeneutics in anthropology suggests a possible answer: perhaps, in some relatively underhanded channel of communication, people leave signs of their ethical stances sprinkled across their interactions. while this view has much to commend it as a methodological impulse,16 it proves deeply problematic as an assumption about practice generally. whether a given evaluation is semiotically absent rather than present can matter to people themselves (lempert 2013; stafford 2013, 112). moo and sii treated their resisting the urge to evaluate kham to his face as a calculated absence—a sign of virtue, of consistency of character, and of the ability to let things pass. they saw the gap in how they evaluated kham as explicable and compelling. they referred to it when they narrated what was behind their behavior (mattingly 2008), and thus brought those signs into new forms. in doing so, they implied that for them, as for many others in luang prabang, the ethics of interaction should take precedence over the suspicions and judgments of the moment. such accounts and explanations of absent evaluations constitute a form of ethical and meta-ethical practice. they make for ethnographic objects in their own right, similar to claims of “sincerity” among protestant converts (keane 2007, 208), accounts of having “flipped the script” among those undergoing drug treatment (carr 2010), or notions of “constancy” in jane austen’s writings (macintyre 2010, 183, 242–43). with a focus on the circulation of these ideas, one can observe how people hierarchize interactions, how actors turn “flat” worlds (latour 2005) into interdiscursive landscapes with peaks and valleys of straight and polite interactions, and how disagreements emerge concerning which meta-ethical view of the landscape is the right one. analyzing such evaluative terrain properly requires recognizing that “consistency of stance” is—like many other phenomena—both an empirical claim about people in the world and a characteristic subject to ethical evaluation and debate (sidnell 2016). this is not just a minor point. a focus on the flickering signs of evaluation, and on how people account for evaluative absences, leads us to thicken the descriptive claim that people are evaluative. it makes clear that evaluation often exists as a potential intervention rather than an omnipresent dimension of life (lambek 2015b; sidnell, meudec, and lambek 2019). any suggestion that humans are evaluative tout court must reckon with the unevenness of signs of evaluation. the former claim is akin to saying that the copper wires running through a home are pulsing with electricity. these wires need to be fed and put in a closed circuit to electrify. but that potential lurks. it lurks over any anthropologist who claims that a sign of evaluation is or is not present, ready to contradict them at any moment. and, more to the point, it lurks over people generally, who often seem attuned to the idea that this or that wire may be hot, that an evaluative outburst might follow from what they do. sometimes, as people in luang prabang tell it, people are so oriented to this potential of evaluation that they keep their evaluations to themselves. abstract at a sparsely populated wake in luang prabang, laos, the guests appeared to restrain themselves from evaluating the deceased’s son-in-law to his face, even as they said to one another that he had neglected his mother-in-law and pocketed the funds for her wake to feed his methamphetamine habit. what are we to do with moments of apparent restraint like this, those meaningful silences in which signs of evaluation seem partially withheld, transfigured, or utterly absent? what do they mean for accounts of ordinary ethics? in unpacking the events of paa’s wake, i suggest that such moments force us to reckon with the relation between signs of evaluation and meta-ethical accounts of them, as they also give flesh to the descriptive claim that humans are evaluative. doing so makes clear that, at times, whether a particular person is being evaluative in a particular moment remains uncertain. at other times, people appear to be not only evaluative but so omnivorously evaluative—so fundamentally oriented to evaluation’s possibility—that they keep their evaluations to themselves. [ordinary ethics; anthropology of ethics; laos; evaluation; face-to-face interaction; sincerity; character] notes acknowledgments i owe everyone mentioned in this article a tremendous gratitude, especially paa, whom i never met while she was living, and her brother phòò thiang, whom i now miss dearly. i dedicate this piece, and whatever merit it may generate, to them. this article began as a paper for the 2016 american anthropological association annual meeting in minneapolis, minnesota, where i received incisive feedback from jane guyer (the panel’s discussant), webb keane (the panel’s chair), john mathias, jack sidnell, and jason throop. a version of this paper was subsequently awarded the 2017 becker research prize from the university of michigan’s center for southeast asian studies. i thank judith becker for her inspiring work and the center, and its director, christi-anne castro, for their support. at various points in the writing process meghanne barker, nick enfield, bradford garvey, judith irvine, webb keane, michael lempert, alaina lemon, john mathias, james meador, heather paxson, peter railton, jack sidnell, and brad weiss have offered comments on my written argument in one form or another. the final manuscript benefited tremendously from the suggestions of anonymous reviewers, the editing of petra dreiser and kate herman, and the guidance of christopher nelson. finally, my research on which this project is based was supported by funding from the wenner-gren foundation and the fulbright-hays program. 1. my relationship with phòò thiang and mèè phòòn has and continues to be best framed in the language of kinship. i use kin terms here to refer to them throughout (phòò1, for instance, means “father”) as i used kin terms when i spoke to and about them while i was conducting fieldwork. i use host family as a natural gloss of this relationship in english, but note that the english term often invites the sense of a firmer boundary between fictive and supposedly real kinship than existed between us. for example, when i first gave mèè phòòn “rent” money, and treated it as such, she reframed that money as a gesture of love from a child to his parents and told me not to worry about the amount. after mèè phòòn sponsored my becoming a novice buddhist monk, this bond was proclaimed even stronger. 2. on buddhist funerary cultures generally, see williams and ladwig 2012. 3. jarrett zigon (2007) grapples with a similar idea of the unevenness of ethical and moral life, but his distinction between ethics and morality does not neatly pattern with the issues i highlight in this piece. 4. as jack sidnell (2016) puts it, “if ethics is centrally about our relations to the lives of others then an account of ethical life will have to begin with an understanding of what those relations actually consist in.” 5. see susan gal (1995) for a critique of scott’s underlying assumptions. 6. some believe that ethics is not the sort of thing that can be captured by mechanically generated recordings of events. one can only respond to the latter critics by affirming that they are of course partially correct: my recordings of moments during the funeral, for instance, miss much of what made those moments matter—the history of the people, their private experiences, and everything before and after the events that made what was happening meaningful. and one can never remedy these deficiencies or fulfill the “fantasy that the other could be made wholly transparent if only we had enough recording equipment to replace the human ear with the ear of the machine” (das 2015, 86–87). but this is not a limit of recording technologies, it is the limit of evidencing any argument. on this issue, also see lempert 2013, 2015 and lambek 2015b, 131. 7. on the problem of delimiting ethics, and one intriguing solution, see mathias 2019. note that throughout this piece, i do not make any strong distinction between morality and ethics. 8. in the new so-called anthropology of ethics, the issue of the continuity of the person is a key one. many have found inspiration in virtue ethicists such as alasdair macintyre, charles taylor, and bernard williams, who, in different ways, argue that each life has a narrative arc. for these philosophers, understanding the ethical question of how one should live requires a view of life as a unified whole (see mattingly 2014 for an incisive summary). it is this contention that led macintyre (2010, 32), for example, to accuse erving goffman, along with jean-paul sartre, of having “liquidated the self.” these philosophical projects can simply not “do without a very robust notion of the arc of a life and some kind of biographical integrity. the whole notion of cultivating one’s character depends on it” (mattingly 2014, 18). 9. after kham passed, sii and thongsaa resumed talking about him: “[he] pays more attention to his dogs than his kids,” thongsaa said. “yeah,” sii chuckled. 10. many who have studied gossip have been drawn to functional explanations. see the debate between max gluckman (1963, 1968) and robert paine (1967, 1968). 11. except, tellingly, those cases where the first statement was self-deprecating. 12. john f. embree (1950, 187) writes: “to tell a lie successfully, to dupe someone else, is praiseworthy in thai culture….” on lies, see johnson 2020. 13. “ເມື່ອເຫັນວ່າໃຜເຮັດຫຍັງຜິດ ເຖິງວ່າເຮົາບໍ່ມັກ ກໍ່ຢ່າອອກປາກຕິຕຽນ ຍົກເວັ້ນແຕ່ຈະເປັນຜົນເສຍຫາຍແກ່ສວນລວມ ເຮົາຈຶ່ງຄ່ອຍເວົ້າໃຫ້ຄວາມເຫັນຕາມສົມຄວນ.” 14. among ethnic lao, the cremation ceremony (songsakaan3) happens a day to a week after death, and the intermediate time is spent as a wake at the house, ideally with a crowd. paa’s house did not have a crowd (see zuckerman and mathias 2022). 15. to claim that one is joking like this is often used as a way of anticipating or responding to someone having taken offense (see zuckerman 2016, forthcoming). 16. my aim here is not to underplay the evaluative work that indirect action can do (see 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signs of deference, signs of demeanour: interlocutor reference and self-other relations across southeast asian speech communities, edited by dwi noverini djenar and jack sidnell. singapore: national university of singapore press. zuckerman, charles h. p., and john mathias 2022 “the limits of bodies: gatherings and the problem of collective presence.” american anthropologist 124, no. 2: 345–57. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13724 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 450-485, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.07 evasion: prison escapes and the predicament of incarceration in rio de janeiro cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 36-59, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.03 evasion: prison escapes and the predicament of incarceration in rio de janeiro david c. thompson simon fraser university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7562-9602 it was summer, and i was standing on the roof of a small apartment building in one of rio de janeiro’s north zone favelas with diana, looking over a field dotted with rusted industrial equipment and, further in the distance, the skyline of the city’s periphery. night had settled in. diana was telling me that we should have a barbecue here in a few days if the weather was fine. i agreed, although i was distracted by the lightning marching in from the horizon. i told her i’d have to leave now if i wanted any chance to stay dry, so we went downstairs and into the apartment on the third floor. this was the space that she shared with her friend, another black travesti named hillary, as well as hillary’s husband, lucas.1 my field notes from that evening end with this final conversation and farewell: “hillary was lying on the bed, head resting on her husband’s chest. she sat up quickly and said her goodbyes, it was already 9:30 p.m. but they didn’t seem to be in a huge hurry to get back. i found my way out of the favela fine enough and took the bus home, exhausted.” the “back” in this note refers to a nearby prison. these three were incarcerated in a men’s penitentiary named crispim ventino, where they were released each weekday morning and expected to return at night.2 they had pooled their resources to rent this apartment, a space that gave them room to rest and pass the time until their return. in my fatigue and my attempt to outrun the rain, i had noted but apparently paid little attention to the housemates’ lack of concern with getting back to the prison before the 10 p.m. deadline. it was only a few days later, when i returned to the apartment, that i realized that they hadn’t gone back that night. instead, the three had become evadidos, evaded, escapees.3 they remained so for about a week before they decided to turn themselves in at the prison gates. they would evade (evadir) again later, for a few days or weeks at a time, sometimes alone and sometimes together. occasionally they would let me know directly. but it was often unclear to me whether, at any one point, hillary and diana were completing their sentences or alternately living as evadidas, most often in this apartment, only a short walk from the prison itself. this article is about evasion—the legal status given to those who flee the custody of rio’s prisons. it also concerns the movement that characterizes this flight, one that passes across the boundaries of confinement and freedom in brazil’s penal state. such a movement unsettles familiar tropes of prison escapes because it represents neither a heroic dash toward freedom nor a scandalous failure of custody. hillary’s and diana’s evasion was ordinary, temporary, and largely expected. it would eventually be recorded among the more than 20,000 escapes registered by brazil’s public ministry that year (cnmp 2020). but this constant cycle of escapes and returns calls into question both the barriers and the thresholds that are supposed to define, or at least delimit, imprisonment. in other words, evasion traces a figure in which the borders between punishment and escape, confinement and freedom, subversion and submission, break down. i take this breakdown as a site with which to rethink brazil’s project of incarceration and the forms of life that emerge for its “carceral subjects”—the growing population, largely poor and black, whose lives and families are shaped by intimate contact with the criminal justice system (moore 2020; richards-calathes 2021).4 my claim is that evasion produces another mode of inhabiting the project, scrambling the temporal coherence of a sentence and the spatial logic of confinement. between evasion and its state-sponsored double of day release lies an ongoing brazilian genealogy of black life suspended between captivity and freedom—yet reducible to neither. these are marks of the nation’s “long emancipation,” in which “each push by the formerly enslaved is an eruption of a potential black freedom, but each push is also contained by the juridical and legislative elasticity of the logic of emancipation as partial, as incremental, as apprenticed” (walcott 2021, 4). long emancipation brings evasion into relief as a practice that operates not through “disengagement and refusal” (sojoyner 2017, 530), but rather by pivoting between the state’s qualifications on freedom and the liberties seized in spite of them. my analysis draws on fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018, both in and around the prison system of rio de janeiro. i first met hillary and diana through my work with a prison-reform activist who spent several days outside its gates collecting denúncias (denunciations) to present to the state’s penal court. although my fieldwork brought me into other prisons designated for men, i never entered crispim ventino. instead, i continued to visit many of those i had met outside, connecting them with legal, health, and social services where i could. but i grew closest to hillary and diana, both of whom i maintained contact with after they had left the prison. while this article follows their experiences, i bring them into context by drawing on fieldwork with rio’s public defenders; an analysis of brazilian legislation; and interviews with prison staff and formerly incarcerated people. it is important to stress from the outset that there is no secret to evasion. what i outline here is well known by the prison administration, courts, and carceral subjects. i am also not describing a felony. to escape prison custody does not constitute a crime in brazil unless it is accompanied by the use or threat of violence—although as we will see, evasion is not without consequences. this article maintains a focus on hillary and diana and is therefore shaped by the experiences of both and the critiques they produce as imprisoned black travestis. rigid definitions of the term travesti often fall short of capturing the experiences of people who inhabit and improvise gender in strikingly fluid ways, including while imprisoned (zamboni 2017). having said this, it is important to signal that travesti indexes both a gender identity and a particular history of exclusion that overlaps with, yet remains distinct from, other categories such as trans woman (santana 2019). travestis are legally designated as male at birth, an ascription that usually follows them into the criminal justice system. depending on the resources available to them, they cultivate feminine bodies and subjectivities. but while some identify as women, many do not. in brazil, the term also carries connotations of sex work, poverty, and blackness (oliveira 2018). the most detailed, and often the only, accounts of travesti and trans life throughout brazil’s history lie in police and court files, archives built out of an ongoing proximity with the punitive edge of the law (york, oliveira, and benevides 2020). the term evasion testifies to these repeated encounters, since it also refers to truancy, what luma nogueira de andrade (2015) recognizes as an involuntary practice among school-aged travestis to escape institutional harm. as eric stanley (2011, 5) stresses, while gender might constitute an intimate point of contact between the state and the body, “trans/gender-non-conforming folks are not the answer to the ‘riddle’ of gender.” thus, it is not my intention to elaborate from hillary’s and diana’s positions a schematic explanation of what gender is or does in prisons. having said this, i do follow dora santana (2019, 218) in attending to trans identity and travestilidade not as a set of static embodiments, but as a series of movements themselves marked by a fugitive “refusal to lose oneself.” marquis bey (2022, 4) offers another way to articulate this relation through what they identify, drawing on jack halberstam (2018), as the trans (or, in this case, travesti) anarchitect: one for whom “unstitching the enclosure of the house’s structural architecture is in fact more livable for some ways of becoming and unbecoming than the presumed house.” while evasion is not exclusively practiced by travestis, an attention to these anarchitectural practices orients us toward what is unmade, and what endures, at the edges of incarceration. fugitivity and flow brazil’s prison population has grown exponentially since the end of the nation’s military dictatorship and its most recent transition to democracy. federal reporting estimates that just under 910,000 people were held in prisons and jails across the country in august 2022, a tenfold rise since 1990 (cnj 2022). the expanding punitive landscape directly and disproportionately targets black brazilians, both in statistical terms and as a racialized spectacle of subjection (flauzina 2006).5 prisons are largely administered at the state level, and the conditions of confinement vary between these separate governing bodies. rio de janeiro has generally followed national trends;6 at the time of writing this article, its fifty-four penal establishments were estimated to hold 56,156 people, more than 20,000 over their official capacity. this project of incarceration has brought with it new forms of scholarship, including an attention to prisons as zones of movement and circulation, characterized by porosity as much as immobility. networks and flows thus become a defining feature of these institutions, as legal documents (godoi 2017a), contraband phones (godoi 2017b) and pathogens (rodrigues and khoury 2022) pass through them. ties of kinship (moore 2020; padovani 2013) and other forms of solidarity, including collectives known as factions (biondi 2016), also embed brazil’s prisons in a set of spatial relations that exceed their borders. anthropologists and others have searched for concepts that might rethink these institutions through such processes. fluxos (flows) represent a central frame in the research of rafael godoi (2017b), who takes the movements of people, information, and contraband as both an object and an analytical method for engaging with imprisonment. in a similar vein, fabio mallart and taniele rui (2017) put forward the “ping-pong prison,” a concept used by their interlocutors to articulate their continuous displacement along a series of defined channels between prisons, drug rehabilitation centers, and homeless encampments. despite their relative ubiquity, escapes rarely figure into this broader project of accounting for movement. one notable exception is antonio rafael barbosa’s (2013) analysis of debates among correctional officers and incarcerated people in rio regarding the potential meaning and significance of flight. barbosa takes the figure of escape that emerges in interviews as a tool to dismantle the image of prisons as sites of non-relation. collectively, these scholars have built a vantage point from which we can approach evasion—not as an aberration against the carceral imperative to confine, but rather as one among a series of circulations. yet to follow this approach, we must also distinguish between the different logics that govern these movements, which include displacement, smuggling, and care. evasion stands out here because of its close relation to a broader repertoire of fugitivity, that “art of social life” (harney and moten 2013, 73) which characterizes black life in the americas. fugitivity points us to another genealogy of movement, one anchored in an escape from slavery but also one that renews and reconfigures itself in response to shifting permutations of black captivity. this movement thus propels and embodies an evolving form of social thought or praxis (berry et al. 2017; jackson 1994). one central image within anglophone scholarship on fugitivity is the maroon community, a space by and for those who escaped slavery and its concomitant necropolitics. its counterpart in brazil is the quilombo. black activism and scholarship have mobilized the quilombo not only as an object of historical analysis but also as a blueprint for contemporary projects of political autonomy and the pursuit of freedom from anti-black genocide (nascimento 2019). beatriz nascimento (1985) employs quilombo to underline the embodied, gendered experiences of flight—a point taken up by christen smith (2016) to spotlight the body as a site of sanctuary and resistance for black women. santana also relies on nascimento’s work to draw a direct line between the quilombo and trans women’s’ experiences of, and resistance to, incarceration. for santana (2019, 218), fugitivity offers a productive site with which to analyze the convergence between the “movement” of trans embodiment and “those routes of escape that also define blackness.” i will return to fugitivity below, offering another reading of the quilombo as a mirror to evasion. for now, it is important to note that these concepts bring into relief those routine strategies of black survival that reveal fault lines within brazil’s project of incarceration by passing through them. not all forms of circulation might be characterized as such. for instance, we must distinguish evasion not just from immobility but also from displacement, itself a central tool of prison governance. but even this distinction becomes difficult to maintain when incarcerated people partially co-opt the momentum of displacement and redirect it toward other ends. arguably, this is the entire point: to disappear into the flux, at least for a while. the big exit during the week of christmas 2019, 422 people fled rio de janeiro’s prisons (heringer 2019). this has become something of an annual ritual: christmas marks the time of the saidão, the “big exit,” in which thousands secure a type of furlough known as periodic family visitation. these thousands constitute a small portion of the entire prison population—most are ineligible to apply, and fewer still receive authorization. nevertheless, the beginning of the following year, like all years, was marked by articles reporting how many had not returned by the end of the week. these news items rarely garner much interest. cases of elaborate tunnel constructions (o dia 2019), bashed-down prison walls (extra online 2017), or attempts to flee in disguise (extra online 2019) tend to travel further in the media since they conform to more easily recognizable tropes of flight. but despite this relative lack of attention, the saidão represents both the largest and the most predictable fugitive event in rio, one whose escape route runs through the prison’s front gates. evadidos might return after a day, a month, or never. sometimes they just have no money for the bus fare back. in other cases, flight might represent a strategy by incarcerated people to mitigate overcrowding. during an interview, staff from one prison suggested that many of those who did not return after a saidão had drawn the short straw in a lottery organized by the prison’s dominant faction and were obligated to flee so that others could transfer into the unit. an evasion might also represent an administrative error. in my work with public defenders, i learned of a case in yet another prison where a man’s transfer between units was never registered; he was assumed an evadido for months before the mistake was found. the ambivalence of an absence can also present an opportunity. helena lancellotti (2018) has documented the case of a woman issued an ankle monitor during her house arrest in porto alegre, a city in brazil’s south, who regularly evaded surveillance by covering the monitor with aluminum foil while working or visiting family. she explained to lancelloti that since the gps signal in her neighborhood was so poor, nobody would notice if it dropped out for an extra hour or two. a whole ecology of practices like these lies behind the legal designation of evasion. yet despite their differences, each of the above examples draws our attention to the nominally progressive shape of imprisonment. transfers, house arrest, and the big exit all emerge from a vision of the criminal sentence as a gradual process of opening, one enshrined in brazil’s law of penal execution (lei de execução penal). progress, whether as a noun (progresso) or a verb (progredir), is used by incarcerated people, prison staff, and brazilian jurisprudence to refer to this forward movement and the benefits that can be accrued along the way. much analysis of brazil’s prison system underlines the breach between these ideals and the violent realities of its prisons (bueno and denyer willis 2019; santos 2019). the identification of this breach serves a political function as a tool to denounce the state and mobilize reform efforts. but since evasion is directly grafted onto these progressive protocols, it requires that we attend to the effects of progress beyond its apparent failures. for example, the classification of prisons into “closed,” “semi-open,” and “open” regimes makes the logic of opening explicit. but since the prison administration’s funding priorities skew heavily toward security over treatment, closed units are relatively better maintained and resourced than those further down the conveyor belt of progress. a running joke among prison social workers and psychologists was that the semi-open model of prison would be better described as “semi-closed.” the joke’s inversion reflects their cynicism of the claims made by a progressive system in which gradual reintegration with the social body registers as progressive abandonment. as an “open” regime, crispim ventino extends this process one step further. public defenders often warned clients against even applying for transfer here. in part, this advice was based on their assumption that clients would be tempted to evade. but it also represented a broad consensus among legal representatives that the prison stood as one of the most inhospitable and least-resourced units in the system. those incarcerated in crispim ventino were forced out of the prison each weekday morning with no support and no food. with no money for transport, many were confined to the immediate surrounds; on any given day, dozens would find shade in a nearby plaza, managing their hunger pains until 8 p.m., the earliest possible time they were permitted to return to their cells and receive a meal. conflicts with guards and others held in the unit were relatively common. both were aggravated by overcrowding and the constant churn in the imprisoned population. always in evidence i hadn’t seen hillary for a while. i tried calling the phone that she shared with diana, but nobody picked up for two days. i figured that one or both might have returned to crispim ventino following an evasão. as i have indicated above, evasion is not a felony. but it does carry an administrative punishment. those who return have an infraction written up on their disciplinary record. this generally leads to their transfer to a segregated cell known as the castigo (literally meaning “punishment”) for up to ten days. the castigo is the only cell occupied on weekdays, since those held there have their right to day release suspended. but when i ran into diana on the street, she corrected my error: nobody had evaded. a few days prior, hillary had returned to the prison before the deadline. as she reached the front of the line to enter, a guard insulted and physically assaulted her by aggressively patting her down. when hillary pulled herself from him and began to defend herself verbally, two other guards intervened to hold her while the first completed his search. she received one infraction for “formulating a complaint or accusation with revealing impudence due to a reprovable motive.” but because the conflict had made her sign in a few minutes after the deadline, she was issued a second write-up for “disobedience of regulatory schedules.” as a result, the warden moved her to the castigo, where diana reasoned she would stay for at least another week. diana and hillary self-consciously took different approaches to correctional officers. as diana explained in an interview, “i always respected the guards, you know, when i arrived, i would always say, ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir,’ ‘thank you, sir,’ so i never had much of a problem.” hillary, by contrast, had a repertoire of tactics to confront her abusers that she called her “basic scandals” (escândalos básicos). these included shouting her demands to speak to the warden from inside the castigo and threatening denúncias against individual staff and the prison. denúncias rarely offer a viable path for travestis to address harm, instead opening up new avenues of violence and retribution (york, oliveira, and benevides 2020). yet the constant repetition of the threat also denied the guards any peace inside the unit. when i finally met up with hillary after her time in the castigo, she retold this event to me, her voice still hoarse, offering as an explanation the phrase estou sempre em evidência, which roughly means “i always attract attention,” reflecting her hypervisibility in a unit designated for men. another, more literal, translation might be “i am always in evidence,” a phrase that speaks to her gender as already invested with accusations of culpability or poor behavior that she cannot not shake off (jesus 2016). where diana aimed to pass by undetected, hillary saw this project as impossible from the start, since her body would always be read as incriminating evidence. but hillary’s argument, as well as my initial misreading of her absence, also underscore something else: that the consequences of evasion are not necessarily significant because they do not deviate from the routine conditions of imprisonment. regardless of her intent to return to prison on time, hillary could still be written up as late. regardless of whether she evaded or not, she would cycle through the castigo. she had, after all, been placed there at least once by the warden in the name of her own safety, after an incarcerated cisgender man had threatened her with violence.7 this experience of “protection” as punishment and isolation is shared by incarcerated queer and trans people across the americas (hébert 2020; stanley 2021). it also registers the broader demand for black feminine subjects to cede space to an institutional preoccupation with masculinity (shange 2019). to be always in evidence means to be familiar with the castigo, to anticipate one’s return to it. so if the punishment for evasion was the same as that faced for simply existing, what was the harm in leaving for a few days? liberations, seized and ascribed when i arrived at the apartment alone, i would stand on the street and alternate shouting hillary’s and diana’s names, hoping that one of them would appear at the bedroom window. on this particular afternoon, hillary’s head leaned over from the rooftop, where she smiled and dropped a set of keys down to let me in. today she was enjoying the afternoon sun alongside jeferson, an incarcerated man whom she introduced as a friend of her husband. hillary had spent the past two weeks as an evadida. but she had decided that today would be the day she returned to prison. the two friends were making the most of these final hours before hillary would turn herself in and begin her next stint in the castigo. as we sat on the roof ledge, our backs to the street and the sun, hillary asked me if i knew that prisons were originally built to hold slaves. hillary spoke of herself as preta, a term that referenced her unambiguous blackness and darker skin tone within brazil’s chromatic order, in comparison to a lighter-skinned morena like diana.8 preta also referenced her engagement with a new generation of brazil’s black movement, one that had shifted toward the term as a marker of pride and solidarity. hillary’s embodiments of femininity and blackness were entwined, both informed by a transatlantic imaginary that took inspiration from west african textiles, north american music and television, and afro-brazilian religion. as a site for both policing the binary and criminalizing black gender more broadly (alves 2018), incarceration placed its limits on these forms of embodiment. evasions gave hillary some opportunity to at least partially reclaim both her bodily autonomy and her sense of style. she was planning to open a beauty salon after her release, and she wanted it to be “very afro” (bem afro). but two weeks before, she had also told me emphatically that she had never experienced racism in prison. her question therefore surprised me a little. it seemed to index a movement in her understanding of her own imprisonment, a shift toward grounding her present in an “afterlife of slavery” (hartman 2008, 6) and a desire to revisit our earlier conversation. i responded with what i knew then from my research—that at least one prison in rio was built on the same site as a jail that had held recaptured fugitives, and that rio’s police force was first organized in response to elite anxieties surrounding a growing emancipated black population (holloway 1993). hillary seemed unsurprised, as she replied “it’s the same thing today. it’s like my friend said, prisons are made to control black people.” we raised ourselves off the ledge and turned to watch the sky turn red until around 6:30 p.m., when she asked me to leave, since she had a few things to do before she returned to crispim ventino. if we could turn back the clock on our view over that ledge by 180 years, just past the field of abandoned equipment, we would be looking out on the site that flávio gomes (2010) identifies as one of rio’s largest urban quilombos, a fugitive community that emerged at the edges of the nineteenth-century capital of brazil’s slaveholding state. this community, one of many within rio’s peripheries, consolidated political power for the enslaved and the fugitive alike because it marked the limits of slaveholder domination and presented a constant reminder of the possibility of escape (réis and silva 1989). and yet its existence was still both vulnerable to violent intervention and dependent on economic relationships with settler society. while fugitives were seizing this precarious autonomy in the quilombos of rio and elsewhere, the state was simultaneously devising new categories and limits for emancipation. for nineteenth-century libertos (freedpeople), freedom was tethered to new modes of tutelage and control (chalhoub 2011). manumissions were frequently obtained only under the guarantee of continued labor, while people born in africa were deemed ineligible for brazilian citizenship. after the prohibition of the atlantic slave trade, those held on ships intercepted by the brazilian or english navies would be liberated as africanos livres (free africans), but this freedom was marked by wardship and fourteen years of indentured servitude (collins 2015). one of the most important public works constructed by the labor of free africans was rio’s, brazil’s, and latin america’s first penitentiary, the house of correction (jean 2017). as the population of libertos grew throughout the century, the brazilian empire responded by tailoring new qualifications to both manage and defer emancipation. rio’s quilombolas (inhabitants of quilombos) and libertos, its fugitives and freedpeople, were thus not only suspended in positions that “blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom” (chalhoub 2011, 406) but also found themselves caught between emancipations ascribed by the state and those seized despite it. the forms of partial autonomy that lay along this second axis might have anticipated or propelled the formal abolition of slavery in brazil in 1888, yet they offered no definitive exit from the predicament of the slave state’s violence. perhaps more importantly, the two positions of fugitive and conditionally free also overlapped and bled into one another. libertos escaped servitude and found refuge in quilombos alongside the enslaved (gato 2020). the latter also used flight as a negotiating tactic to secure better terms for their manumission (réis and gomes 1996). despite the vulnerability of both positions and the tension that existed between them, movement across this field allowed many to exploit both the opportunities and the hypocrisies of the law’s promises of liberation. there is much more to say about both quilombos and freedom within the history of rio de janeiro and brazil. but my claim here is that the relationship between flight from slavery and an ersatz emancipation is substantially the same as that between evasion and the progressive promise of imprisonment. sitting on the ledge, hillary was also spending her final hours as an evadida along the limits of brazil’s emancipatory project. and here she was not alone. beneath us was the apartment, one of several spaces in this favela that had been rented out to those imprisoned nearby. further below, some were walking down unpaved streets with their ankle monitors showing, a condition and visible marker of their house arrest. others, knowingly or not, were targeted by one of the 360,000 arrest warrants that are, at any one moment, open and active in brazil (cnj 2022). and everyone in this community was surveilled by a constant armed police occupation—just as these police were also watched so that others could avoid them, making their way down the back streets. the ongoing negotiation between the qualified liberties held out by the state and the practices of autonomy cultivated despite it underscores the “impossible project” (vargas 2012, 5) of black citizenship within the polis. however, if this oscillation makes for a general mode of black life in brazil (díaz-benítez and rangel 2022), there is also something specific in evasion’s challenge to both confinement and freedom as the operative and mutually exclusive binary that gives incarceration its coherence. this is not an inherent property of escape itself. as gilles chantraine and tomas max martin (2018, 2) underline, “escapes not only break the prison, they also make the prison as a central issue through which the institution is imagined, built, organized, justified, reproduced, resisted and transformed.” but by both fleeing prison and choosing to return, hillary and her evasions were not as easily metabolized by this logic. if imprisonment hinges on the limits of a sentence and the borders of a wall, she and others would, repeatedly and without huge consequence, pass through them in both directions. the figure traced by this movement, this anarchitectural work, forces us to reconsider what is possible within the time and the territory of prison. timing the sentence and then there was that time over christmas when we were drinking in the favela, and time was passing, time was passing, and suddenly it was almost midnight, so we went to the [prison] gate, but the guard said “look, you’re already late, you’ll be going to the castigo either way.” so i looked at hillary and we decided to go back for another drink. —diana, recorded interview evasions rarely come as a surprise. this holds true in many prisons, but perhaps most of all in crispim ventino, where evasions took place almost every day. as diana underscored in the interview quoted above, flight was something of a non-event—for both the guards and herself. standing at the front gate, this correctional officer not only suggested but offered a justification for evasion: whatever they had to lose was already lost, the castigo would be waiting for them regardless. and yet in that moment, the three were also playing with the terms imposed on them by a criminal conviction. what did it mean for hillary and diana to stand outside the prison in the dark, facing the supposedly inexorable fact of their own sentence, and decide: not tonight? a prison sentence sequesters time from the convicted person. this performative act rests on an understanding of time as both a measurable, fungible quantum and a universal possession that can be expropriated (melossi and pavarini 2018). in brazil, as much as elsewhere, this often becomes expressed through a metaphor of debt. at the same time, the sentence always carries a promise of its eventual end—at least in a country like brazil, where no life sentence formally exists. since the beginning of the twentieth century, brazilian penal and criminal law have tinkered with the interval brought forth by a sentence. progressive reforms introduced stages and gradients, offering the possibility of transfers, parole, house arrest, and commutation, all justified through a logic of tutelage. in the process, they made anticipation a tool of prison governance, since the incarcerated person’s future was now an object of interrogation. in practice, the temporal forms brought forth in the name of progress have been bent into other shapes by the pressures of a punitive legal culture, the administrative strain of mass incarceration, and institutional neglect. more than 40 percent of those imprisoned in brazil are pretrial detainees, and therefore still have no sentence (rodrigues and khoury 2022). those who are finally convicted receive a set of dates that mark eligibility for transfer and parole. but these are neither meaningful nor reliable as markers for imprisonment. diana, for example, had reached eligibility for parole around the time that i first met her; her lawyer filed the petition two months before the night of the storm. approval would only come five months later. this delay is typical. courts have no responsibility to respond within a certain timeframe; in the state of rio, the period between an initial application and the final decision varied between six weeks and ten months. applications are often denied because the documents that courts ask for as evidence of an incarcerated person’s “resocialization” are simply not produced by the prison system. facing both the promise and the constant deferral of release, incarcerated people have few tools with which to take time into their own hands. the most easily accessible is clonazepam. this anticonvulsant with sedative effects is widely available across rio’s prisons. many correctional officers sell it by the pill, both as a source of extra income and as a tool to tamp down on tensions that might otherwise spin out into open conflict. where prisons and courts dilate a sentence, clonazepam condenses it back, allowing imprisoned people to sleep through it. shifting the sensation of time’s passing, it provides at least some momentum through a sentence—although this comes at the risk of developing an addiction, and withdrawal symptoms include insomnia and paranoia. evasion is less available, since it only becomes feasible for most during the latter stages of imprisonment. but it also does something different. to escape from prison—even by walking away for another drink—fractures the state’s claim to the sentenced person’s time. punishment becomes a task one might leave and come back to, disjointed and discontinuous. for many, including hillary, this transformed the obligation of confinement into something more flexible, although it came at the expense of delaying her release further. since the days spent outside prison custody did not count toward completing a sentence, evasions can push back eligibility for release or parole. but in diana’s case, this point was completely irrelevant since the latter date had already passed. rather than redefining the terms of her “debt,” evasion took back what was, even under the law’s own terms, owed to her. in both cases, evasion offered no lasting fix to the temporal bind of the sentence. instead, it created a new rhythm of incarceration, one that slipped in and out of sync with the temporalities of progression and day release. this could offer some moments of reprieve; it could also prove exhausting (ahmann 2018). but it did briefly threaten the coherence of imprisonment since it claimed, in some limited form, an autonomy within prison that the latter ostensibly denied. what it offered was not an escape from the sentence but a different path through it, one that shifted the terms of what it could and could not take. the apartment on the third floor despite the assurance of its own name, an open prison still binds people to itself and affords only a narrow field of movement. crispim ventino’s schedule—one that i internalized and reproduced in my fieldnotes, constantly marking the time when i was with hillary and diana—was built around a particular image of the working day. this made it difficult for many to move through the city, and particularly to traverse its peripheries. evasion offered a partial fix because it untethered people from the prison and thus widened the field. incarcerated cisgender men would often evade to spend several weeks working on civil construction projects, where opportunities were scattered around the city, work started early, and commutes were long. hillary faced a different dilemma. she was a faxineira, a cleaner for the houses of friends and neighbors who lived near her childhood home, almost two hours away by bus. she could often manage this while imprisoned, but it was difficult to arrive at work on time, and she had already lost a few clients after showing up late. the money was important because it helped cover her share of the rent and allowed her to buy food and medicine to make her time in prison at least a little more bearable. this is why, on the afternoon that i sat with her under the awnings of a bar just down the road from the prison, she explained that she would probably evade tomorrow. i had been waiting for diana to arrive, but she was over an hour late and not answering the phone, so hillary suggested that we make our way to the apartment. almost immediately past the entrance to the favela, we ran into four police officers standing idly by with their guns drawn. these were members of the pacifying police unit (unidade de policia pacificadora, or upp), which i had grown used to seeing in the neighborhood by now. i generally stood out here because i was white and clearly unfamiliar with the community—when alone, residents often asked if i was looking to buy drugs. but now, as always, i barely warranted a glance from the officers as we walked past. when we turned the corner off to a side street, a group of young teenagers who clearly recognized hillary asked if the police were behind us. she nodded as we kept walking. before the upp arrived in this community, police would periodically invade during special operations. that was more than five years ago at this point. now, they were a permanent occupation force in the favela whose presence was justified in the name of “retaking” the territory (penglase 2014). the upps broadened both the intensity and the scope of residents’ exposure to the criminal justice system. one direct consequence was an acceleration of the already rapid rise in rio’s prison population. the expansion of these police operations in the leadup to the 2014 fifa world cup and 2016 olympic games ratcheted up arrest and conviction numbers, bringing unprecedented strain to an already overcrowded system. but the upps also produced an entire social landscape marked by the constant anticipation of, and negotiation with, their intimate presence. for instance, while our exchange with the teenagers lasted only a few seconds, it conscripted hillary into the back-and-forth of surveillance and countersurveillance between the upps and the neighborhood’s faction, on whose behalf they were asking the question. the short walk between the prison and the apartment took us through overlapping territorial claims that were both unavoidable and demanded of hillary a constant calibration of proximity and distance to either side. this demand is unremarkable in rio’s peripheries, particularly for feminine subjects whose movement is predicated on navigating between factions, police, and militias—what hollis moore (2020, 44) identifies as the gendered imperative of “ongoing relations between antagonists.” but if hillary did evade tomorrow, she would also contend with an added threat. evadidos run the risk of being apprehended by the police. in such cases, the punishment is far more severe than for those who return of their own accord: “regression” back to a stricter regime of punishment, and the suspension of eligibility for parole or house arrest for twelve months. while some, like those directing the teenagers’ question, would avoid the police, hillary did not seem openly concerned with them when she passed by, regardless of whether she was currently evading or not. unlike in the prison and in many areas of the city center, particularly tourist spots, here the police did not seem to bother her. but to remain out of their focus still required cultivating good relationships with neighbors and avoiding open conflict. i once joked that she seemed to know everyone in the favela even though she had only arrived a few months ago. this was because she, like other feminine subjects in the neighborhood, went out of her way to befriend people, to learn how to navigate the community, and to present herself as a member of it rather than a threat (moore 2020). this work only became clear for me when diana, who sometimes engaged in sex work, ended up in a fight with a client inside the apartment, and was expelled by the others for almost two weeks as a result. the problem was not the damage done to some of the furniture, but that in drawing attention to the space, she had risked the intervention of either the upp or the faction within a space meant to provide some refuge from both. when we arrived at the apartment building, hillary unlocked the front door and we climbed the stairs to the third floor. the apartment was unoccupied when we arrived. it was small. there were two rooms—a bedroom with a window overlooking the street; and a combined kitchen and living room furnished with a small fridge, a sink and countertop, a couch, a fold-out chair, and a bookcase. some of the furniture had come as a gift from diana’s mother. the bathroom was just outside the apartment’s front door and shared with the other unit on this floor. hillary, lucas, diana, and another friend from crispim ventino had found this place a few months before i met them. while it was always a struggle to pull together the money for each month’s rent, they had nevertheless managed to keep a hold of it for now. today, while hillary remained within the bounds of her sentence, this space arguably constituted an extension of the prison itself, a satellite of her confinement. tomorrow, when she evaded, it would become something different: a site of evasion, one that offered room to maneuver outside these confines. what was striking about the apartment is the superimposition of these two modes in a space that was itself enveloped within a heavily policed neighborhood. this was a “usable paradoxical space” (mckittrick 2006, 42), one that uncomfortably folded together confinement, resistance, and flight, working through these forces without resolving or transcending them. katherine mckittrick develops this idea in relation to another site of black feminine confinement: the garret of harriet jacobs/linda brent as explored in incidents in the life of a slave girl. to occupy these spaces—to “garret,” transforming the noun into a verb and a form of action (mckittrick 2006; spillers 1987)—is to situate oneself across, rather than against, a set of tensions shaped by slavery and incarceration. but where jacobs/brent occupied these tensions simultaneously, the apartment on the third floor provided a fulcrum that hillary, diana, and others used to pivot between the subject positions of imprisoned and evadida, and to maintain some stability through this shift. it was this oscillation that allowed the two to piece together those limited forms of autonomy offered on either side, to play one off the other. what would a theory of incarceration look like from the apartment on the third floor? the space arguably attests to the impossibility of a constitutive outside, offering little room for a “romance story” of fugitivity (walcott 2021, 107). but as a counterweight to this project, it also redirects the momentum of imprisonment against itself. the apartment on the third floor is where both punishment and progress lose their coherence a little, even as their effects stand. it demonstrates that we cannot assume the integrity of the borders that supposedly give form to imprisonment—but also that these interstices are gendered and racialized sites where the stakes of incarceration, as both a project and a predicament, become reconfigured. this offers no clear blueprint for abolition, but rather an attention—one that we might call anarchitectural—to the unstable edges of incarceration and the potential that might be seized within them. conclusion: inhabiting the predicament in 1840, an africano livre named joão fled from the construction site of rio’s house of correction. as the historian carlos eduardo moreira de araújo (2010) explains, this instance marked the third registered escape of someone taken from africa whose emancipation from slavery on arrival to brazil became the legal justification for his indentured servitude—in this case, working alongside other freed, enslaved, and convict laborers to shape the bricks that would become latin america’s first penitentiary (jean 2017). joão was reported missing for five months, after which he was found in niterói, across the bay from rio. but joão was not in hiding. instead, he was working in a state quarry, still under the status of wardship as an africano livre. historical practices of marronage across the americas took place in and through a precarious and generally asymmetrical dependence on the slaveholding centers of power from which fugitives had escaped, the “outcome of an encirclement of unfreedom” (walcott 2021, 107). under these conditions, flight could neither lead to nor easily create a beyond to slavery. instead, as gary wilder (2017) argues, it faced this very impossibility head on: to escape was “to confront and inhabit the predicament.” wilder’s analysis helps us find some sense in joão’s flight, a fugitive movement between two sites of unfreedom, as the search for another way to inhabit a landscape of captivity. and yet his case also illuminates a particular moment when the landscape itself began shifting. joão’s path out of slavery, part of brazil’s own long emancipation, also tells the story of how the bricks were made for a new project of confinement. almost two centuries stand between joão’s repeated escapes and those of hillary and diana, a gap that i do not claim to bridge here. but his experience offers another place from which to answer the question posed by hillary that afternoon on the apartment roof. these moments speak to each other, bringing to light an enduring negotiation between the concessions offered by the state and the opportunities forcibly seized from it. evasion, as one tactic within a broader repertoire of “extralegal agency” (moore 2020), constitutes both a condition of survival and an insurgent form of safety for brazilian black feminine subjects, one distinct from the forces of state security and masculine criminal collectives, even as it is caught between them. it is a safety predicated on movement, one that charts a path through brazil’s project of incarceration while remaining out of sync with it. today, evasion signifies an absence, a subject that has become legally unaccounted for. it is this absence that opens a set of possibilities through which those imprisoned in rio shifted, and thereby called into question, the terms of terms of their own confinement. it was not, however, the unmaking of their imprisonment. crispim ventino outlived the apartment on the third floor. the cycle of flight and return that i have examined here did not extricate hillary or diana from the law’s violence. but then again, neither would a more lasting escape, nor even release. instead, what it offered was a small opportunity for the two to rework the edges of their imprisonment, to produce ruptures within an opening. that afternoon, when i walked with hillary to the apartment on the third floor, we didn’t stay for long. a few minutes after we arrived, she suggested that we head out again. she had recently been introduced to a nearby bar that apparently sold the cheapest beer around. but she couldn’t remember the name, so after circling the block we settled for the closest one. standing around a table on the street, we shared a bottle between us. when we brought our glasses together i offered her a saúde (cheers). she replied with an axé.9 both of us were surprised to see diana walk past, a few minutes’ walk away from the prison she had recently fled. when we called her over, she corrected our choice of bar and led us across the street, where we stood resting our backs against the wall. hillary and i prodded diana for a few details on a new romance, but she instead turned to her frustrated attempts to find work. as we talked, hillary found herself in conversation with women from the neighborhood who were passing by. but when she asked me the time and found out with a shock that it was verging on 8 p.m., she excused herself quickly and left. with more than an hour left before she needed to get back, i don’t know where she was headed. abstract this article examines brazil’s project of incarceration through the figure of evasion (evasão)—the act of escaping prison custody, often temporarily. evasion traces a path across the borders of captivity and freedom, as people routinely flee confinement, only to return of their own accord. i position both prisons and evasion as part of an ongoing history of, and tension between, black fugitive life and emancipation in brazil and the americas. i argue that while evasion offers no clear exit from the punitive edge of the law, it produces another mode of inhabiting the time and territory of incarceration. with a focus on two incarcerated black travestis, i outline some of these evasive movements and demonstrate the fault lines that they reveal—both within the prison system’s own claims to legitimacy and in the concepts that we bring to bear on incarceration. [prisons; fugitivity; emancipation; gender; race; travestis; brazil] resumo o presente artigo examina o projeto brasileiro de encarceramento através da figura da evasão: o ato, muitas vezes temporário, de fugir da custódia penal. a evasão traça um caminho que atravessa as fronteiras entre a prisão e a liberdade, visto que as pessoas fogem frequentemente, voltando depois por vontade própria. situo presídios e evasão como partes de uma história contínua e uma tensão entre vida negra em fuga e emancipação no brasil e na américa. constato que, embora a evasão não ofereça saída do fio punitivo da lei, produz outro modo de habitar o tempo e o território do encarceramento. focando em duas travestis negras presas, delineio alguns desses movimentos evasivos e demonstro as linhas de falha que elas revelam—tanto dentro das pretensões de legitimidade do sistema penal, como dos conceitos a que recorremos para analisar o encarceramento. [presídios; fugitividade; emancipação; gênero; raça; travestis; brasil] notes acknowledgments the generosity of many in rio, but most of all of hillary and diana, represents the substance from which this article was made—obrigado a todes. i am grateful for the feedback and encouragement that emily avera, brittany birberick, james holston, ana chiritoiu, and jesús gutiérrez provided through successive drafts. i owe much to the school of international studies colloquium at simon fraser university, where i presented an early version of this article, and particularly to the advice and insights of chris gibson. special thanks to the reviewers and editors of cultural anthropology for offering a roadmap of what this article could become. and thank you to robson câmara for assistance with translating the abstract, and for everything. the social science research council’s international dissertation research fellowship and the institute of international studies at the university of california, berkeley, provided the funding that made fieldwork possible. i also received the support of the department of law and anthropology at the max planck institute for social anthropology, and of the simons foundation canada, for various stages of writing. 1. i follow the brazilian practice of using marital terms without distinction between civil and common-law partnerships (medeiros 2018). for a more detailed analysis of the various gendered and sexual subject positions within brazilian men’s prisons, see sander 2021. 2. while the names given to all other people and institutions in this article are pseudonyms, crispim ventino is the prison’s real name. as the only men’s unit that accommodates day release, it is easily identifiable regardless of any attempts at anonymization. 3. all translations provided from portuguese to english in this article are my own. 4. here i distinguish between prisons (as institutions), imprisonment (as the administration and experience of those institutions) and incarceration, the broader state-sponsored project of policing, surveillance, and punishment. 5. the disproportionate rate of black imprisonment is highest in brazil’s southeast, a region including the state of rio de janeiro. here, 72 percent of those in prison are identified as preto (black) or pardo (brown), compared to 42 percent of the general population (santos 2019). social scientists generally aggregate these two census categories under the broader term negro (black). 6. rio de janeiro is the name of both the state and its capital city. the prison administration and penal courts operate at the level of the former, while my research was largely situated within the latter. 7. i employ the term cisgender in line with the use of cisgênero and cis by brazilian travesti academics and activists, although i recognize a tension between this use and a critique within anglophone scholarship that the term represents a “categorical ruse disingenuously hailing those who nevertheless do not and cannot sit comfortably within it,” particularly since it is propped up by white standards of gender that black men and women, among others, do not inhabit (bey 2022, xiv). where savannah shange (2019) puts forward the concept of “non-trans,” this term would also sit uneasily here, since many travestis do not identify as trans. 8. these terms are often interpreted as markers of color rather than race, although in practice the distinction constantly slips; still, both hillary and diana also identified as negra (black). 9. here, axé represents a call for good energy or high spirits. but the term is also tied to afro-brazilian religions such as candomblé; more broadly, it refers to a yoruba concept of vital energy, one that also emerges in black religious traditions across the americas. in english, it is often rendered as ashe or ase. references ahmann, chloe 2018 “‘it’s exhausting to create an event out of nothing’: slow violence and the manipulation of time.” cultural anthropology 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h. costa 2012 “gendered antiblackness and the impossible brazilian project: emerging critical black brazilian studies.” cultural dynamics 24, no. 1: 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374012452808 walcott, rinaldo 2021 the long emancipation: moving toward black freedom. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wilder, gary 2017 “the promise of freedom and the predicament of marronage: on neil roberts’s freedom as marronage.” small axe: sx salon 24 (february). york, sara wagner, megg rayara gomes de oliveira, and bruna benevides 2020 “manifestações textuais (insubmissas) travesti” [travesti textual (ungovernable) manifestos]. revista estudos feministas 28. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9584-2020v28n375614 zamboni, marcio 2017 “o barraco das monas na cadeia dos coisas: notas etnográficas sobre a diversidade sexual e de gênero no sistema penitenciário” [a cell of monas in a jail of coisas: ethnographic notes on gender and sexual diversity in são paulo’s prisons]. aracê: direitos humanos em revista 4, no. 5: 93–115. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 36-59, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.03 trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 211-217, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.03 trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands kali rubaii purdue university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3016-8544 what kinds of pragmatic entanglements take place among those living amid armed struggles for geopolitical security? what does it mean to act as if one trusts strangers, enemies, and unreliable allies? wartime collaboration borne of necessity complicates our understanding of security-making and the line between crisis and continuity, thereby opening a space for theorizing crisis as a route to survival. this account follows a small medication-smuggling network across isis-controlled northern iraq to three hospitals in the besieged city of mosul. the story echoes ross porter (2020), whose interlocutors work from below against the threat of the state, to create new levels of trust. in september 2014, mosul was overrun by battles between isis, al-hashd (shia militias temporarily hired by the iraqi government), and the iraqi military. besieged residents relied on relatives and community networks outside the city, and often outside iraq, to supply them with food, medication, and toilet paper. delivery took the form of smuggling, because it required hiding goods from checkpoint operators. in high demand from militia fighters and civilians alike, hospitals in iraq’s medical capital, mosul, became precarious pockets of safety-under-siege, surrounded by impassable chaos. medication entering the area was consistently seized and distributed on the black market at high prices. doctors, desperate to treat patients, found themselves going out on the streets and buying medication from the very people (often soldiers, police, or militias) preventing medicine from reaching hospitals in the first place. this was a medical economy in wartime, and just as in emrah yıldız’s (2020) piece on iran’s sanctions economy, the goal was to minimize losses. i was among a group of people attempting to send medications from a pharmacy in amman to the pediatric wings of three hospitals calling for supplies in mosul. the plan involved pooling money from friends and family, filling prescriptions, disguising medication in cereal boxes, and sending them on a fourteen-hour drive to mosul in a car that would be stopped, searched, and possibly looted along the way by a number of different armed entities. too often “trust and social crises are presented as natural enemies” (jiménez 2011, 177), when in fact ruptures in positive experience or systems of accountability may actually breed trust. by forcing unwilling and even unwitting encounters, crises like the siege of mosul can in fact generate trust, though in unpredictable forms extraneous to social solidarity, exchange networks, or kinship. rather, trust becomes enunciatory:1 articulated into being, rather than felt and then acted upon; made real through, rather than in spite of, unintelligibility; and functional because of, rather than despite, traversing divergent interests. enunciatory trust is a prevailing way in which insecurity makes material conditions for endurance possible: when trust is not a feeling or a structure, one acts and speaks as if one feels trust, simply because it is necessary. it is “at the margins [that] we face far more opportunities for cooperating . . . with a wider array of people” (hardin 2006, 38). indeed, the very friction between actors carrying out their different goals physically propels medication across northern iraq. we can say that people live in ad hoc multi-motivational presence with others, and when continuity is ruptured (in this case by geopolitical security regimes), these multiplicities can either be shut down or activated. this is a story, then, of activation: enunciatory trust is how people survive security projects like the war on terror or the making of modern-day iraq. to move medication across the jordanian border, then smuggle it past two or three military factions struggling for regional control, one relies heavily on a trust network composed of a disjointed, ephemeral collection of people who neither know nor will ever meet one another. rather than referring to a group of people who form part of a single project, i mean the term trust network to include both opponents and allies, thereby challenging the traditional notion of trust as a precondition for collaboration. our trust network shared no common goal, transactional reciprocity, or built-in incentive for promise fulfillment. such networks are tenuous, dissipate quickly, and at times work to demonstrate life-affirming human connection amid chaotic violence. when trust networks do not rely on common ground or intelligibility to open possibilities,2 people count on both the redeeming and horrifying surprises of human behavior under stress. among those involved in this trust network were dr. mahmoud and three of his colleagues in mosul, who reported dwindling supplies and desperate conditions; dr. nanoor, a palestinian pharmacist in amman, who was willing to use her pharmacy to gather and package medication; me, an american presumed to have the legitimacy to acquire prescriptions for bulk quantities of medication through a jordanian doctor; an anonymous driver none of us had met; jafar, a middleman reputed for knowing the right people; four wholesale providers in jordan; nearly one hundred americans who pooled money; and somewhere between five and fifty militia fighters who could either interfere with or facilitate the movement of goods. many people in this trust network acted in good faith, others in desperation, for profit, or for altogether other reasons. if the driver survived and the medication arrived, pediatric surgeons and oncologists would dispense the one-month supply of various goods, which included basic supplies like saline and iv needles, as well as more expensive medications like chemotherapy drugs and anesthesia. dr. nanoor described the nature of our work as “moving medicine with dirty hands,” because many people in the trust network were not only unknown to us but also not motivated by solidarity—some not even by bribes or transactional gain. imagining synonymy between trust and confidence can obscure how things really work. vigdis broch-due and margit ystanes (2016, 1) describe trust as “a social orientation towards the future nurtured by the gradual accumulation of positive experience and sometimes revealed in a leap of faith.” but what does trust look like when the future is neither a cumulative project nor a leap made in good faith? what does it mean to act on trust without confidence, a trust that neither contributes to, nor relies on, solidarity? in iraq, decades of military violence have strained relations among diverse communities. under such circumstances, moving medication among a network of unknown others offers a bumpy terrain of clashing motives and moral rubrics. the militias, doctors, drivers, pharmacists, and anthropologists in this trust network were not seeking a moral reconciliation or an accumulation of confidence; we were not even seeking to end ongoing disruption. we were living in it, together, via diversity otherwise unimaginable. thus, what erodes trust networks is an enunciation of distrust. to ask too many questions about anyone’s motives means to fracture a necessary unintelligibility that makes things workable. i learned this lesson when i expressed discomfort to dr. nanoor about leaving cash with jafar, the middleman who found us a driver and for whom there was no system of accountability to disincentivize him from simply running off with the cash. her response articulated enunciatory trust: “but how will the driver get the money if jafar doesn’t give it to him?” an unwillingness to leave cash with the mysterious jafar (to hand off to the even more mysterious driver) would have foiled the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” (tsing 2005, 1). while transactional, such dealings do not build into reciprocal exchange, an economy, or other systems of accountability. between the amman pharmacy and the mosul hospitals lay a terrain pocked with shifting security regimes we needed to evade. how could we find a driver willing to risk the route? how could we get medication past possible isis checkpoints? an elusive and shifting “we” answered these concerns. for medication to reach the hospital, it would have to pass through roughly twenty official and unofficial checkpoints. the driver had to gamble on whether or not checkpoint guards would let him pass with a bribe, seize the contents, or kill him. dr. nanoor had a theory about checkpoints: “we are really counting on greed, here. the americans were no different, taking bribes and stealing from people. they all did it. the people change, but the behavior doesn’t!” we laughed at how glad we were to count on bad human behavior. after all, our trust network relied just as much on predictably bad conduct as good. dr. nanoor was developing a theory of moral pragmatism in which she argued that regardless of motive, each person in our trust network would “choose life.” about the banality of evil, hannah arendt (1963a, 1963b, 1963c, 1963d, 1963e) argues that good people do bad things for good reasons all the time. but just as often, supposedly bad people do good things for bad reasons. if dr. nanoor was right, then the maxim “bad people do good things for bad reasons” clarifies how trust may not only be “the final device for coping with the freedom of others” (gambetta 2000, 219) but also a device for opening up new freedoms for others. when a checkpoint guard is offered trust, in whatever form of bribe or plea, he is presented with an opportunity to “choose life” by exceeding the boundaries of his given role in formal securitization. dr. nanoor was not alone in thinking in terms that exceeded respect for or understanding of the motives of others. jafar, who stopped by while we packaged medication, mused about the motives of the imagined isis members in our trust network: “some may feel lazy, or they want the cash, or they want to avoid killing. we are all in this for different reasons, but we are here.” a few days after sending medication from amman with the driver, it seemed we had trusted too much. dr. mahmoud in the pediatric surgery wing of a hospital in mosul sent me a text message: “i got some boxes of food. thank you for all you are doing. is this the quantity you meant to send?” with ordinary iraqi politeness, he was asking: “all you sent was food?!” i immediately called dr. nanoor, the pharmacist: “can you ask jafar to ask the driver what happened?” it seemed confusing that the hospital had received something, but not what we had sent. she got no return calls and felt reluctant to investigate too much. it appeared that while children were dying, some anonymous driver had sold our medication on the black market. i reconsidered dr. nanoor’s theory about choosing life: perhaps arendt’s theory of evil’s banality could not be inverted. perhaps dirty hands could not do good work. i was horrified that in getting my hands “dirty,” i had contributed to the structural violence of war by supporting its shadow economy. then, in the middle of the night, i woke up to a call from dr. nanoor, who realized we had outsmarted ourselves. i sent a text message in the dark: “dr. mahmoud, open the boxes! it’s not food: it’s medicine!” we had worked so hard to secure the medication from imagined enemy others that we had tricked our primary ally, a doctor who did not know we had disguised it in the first place. dr. mahmoud texted me in english four hours later: “received message during surgery on 4-year-old female with gunshot to abdomen. no anesthesia left, performed raw surgery. sent nurse to check boxes, finished surgery with anesthesia. good timing, you touch patient with your own hands tonight.” dirty hands. i was elated by the possibilities for life in the midst of war. my hands had only touched the medication for a moment to mispackage it in cereal boxes, little cardboard shields against anticipated ill will. my fingerprints were joined with varying degrees of incrimination by those of roughly forty other people, some allies, some enemies, and some profiteers. it is the only way our fingertips could ever mingle in a strange, consonant intimacy. this trust network dissolved long before the siege ended. none of us is sure how many people it included, or why they chose to form part of it. we were bound by no connection at all, except that we acted as if we trusted each other to behave predictably in a world that felt defined by fleeting turns in military strategy. through enunciatory trust, people who have no confidence in one another’s motives collaborate all the time. as jafar theorized, we are a we simply because we are here. abstract as participants in a small trust network smuggle medication across isis-controlled northern iraq to hospitals in the besieged city of mosul, they theorize their pragmatic entanglements with unknown others. based on ethnographic fieldwork in 2014 and 2015, as well as the author’s participation in this network, the essay introduces enunciatory trust, or trust without confidence, as an analytical framework for surviving (in)security in iraq. [iraq, trust, medicine, ethics and collaboration, siege warfare, smuggling] notes 1. i borrow the term from kim fortun (2001) to describe a space where parties with divergent goals gather—without reconciling their interests—to share in a fleeting chorus, before quickly dissipating. 2. no one actively described “trust networks” as such in my fieldwork: to name something that works by remaining unmarked would have undermined its possibility. references arendt, hannah 1963a “eichmann in jerusalem: i.” new yorker, february 16. 1963b “eichmann in jerusalem: ii.” new yorker, february 23. 1963c “eichmann in jerusalem: iii.” new yorker, march 2. 1963d “eichmann in jerusalem: iv.” new yorker, march 9. 1963e “eichmann in jerusalem: v.” new yorker, march 16. broch-due, vigdis, and margit ystanes, eds. 2016 trusting and its tribulations: interdisciplinary engagements with intimacy, sociality and trust. new york: berghahn. fortun, kim 2001 advocacy after bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. chicago: university of chicago press. gambetta, diego 2000 “can we trust trust?” in trust: making and breaking cooperative relations, edited by diego gambetta, 213–37. oxford, uk: oxford university press. hardin, russell 2006 trust. cambridge, uk: polity. jiménez, alberto corsín 2011 “trust in anthropology.” anthropological theory 11, no. 2: 177–96. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1463499611407392. porter, ross 2020 “security against the state in revolutionary yemen.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 204–10. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.02. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2005 friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. yıldız, emrah 2020 “nested in(securities): commodity and currency circuits in an iran under sanctions.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 218–24. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.04. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 211-217, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.03 eu-driven border control in niger cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 16-22, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.03 eu-driven border control in niger: from migrants to gold, drugs, and rare animals hans lucht danish institute for international studies (diis) https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2496-9727 in recent years, the niger-libya migration route has become a cornerstone in the european union’s (eu) anti-migration efforts. under such large-scale policy instruments as the emergency trust fund and the eu partnership framework under the european agenda for migration, niger collaborates on a broad spectrum of interventions aimed at curbing migration to europe, ranging from implementing export border-control measures to addressing jobs and the lack of local development. most interventions center on agadez, the city at the edge of the southern central sahara from where the migrants set off toward libya. migrants provide a vital source of income to the impoverished region, benefiting local drivers and related businesses. as a consequence, some researchers had predicted a breakdown in the historically turbulent relationship between the tuareg-dominated agadez region and the capital of niamey (tinti 2017; raineri 2018; lucht 2017). instead, local cross-border economies are reshaped by local entrepreneurs who are substituting migrants with less sensitive commodities, such as drugs and rare animals (lucht and raineri 2019). in a bioeconomic sense, we can see how lives on the move intersect with various competing economies that extract value from the mobility, or the arrested mobility, of those lives, with sometimes fatal results. indeed, migrant abjection often seems to result directly from eu border practices, constituting the precursor for further exploitative practices. between 2014 and 2020 niger received more than 1 billion euros in aid, including support for security and governance, and europe remains its major donor. aid comes primarily from the european development fund, but also from the trust fund for africa, designed to address “root causes of irregular migration.” since 2015, african cooperation on migration control and readmissions has become an explicit condition of continued eu support and cooperation. the eu also functions as a key security operator in the sahel region and has set up three common security and defense policy missions that supply equipment and training to counter “irregular migration and trafficking,” as well as terrorism, drugs and arms smuggling. the eucap (european union capacity building mission) presence in agadez has become the target of much local anger and is generally speculated to be behind the government’s recent move to confiscate hundreds of private vehicles and imprison local drivers. as the drivers at the bus station angrily argue, driving people to libya was a lawful and respected business until the eu got involved, and they have the stamped paperwork to prove it. the nigerien government, though, maintains that the measures taken against smuggling had nothing to do with europe. as the agadez deputy governor explained to me, “the law [against smuggling] was put in place prior to the migration crisis in europe; it’s for the safety of nigeriens. migration is a normal way of life, but after the collapse in libya in 2014, everything changed. arms started flowing into our country, migrants rushed to libya, and died in the desert. there was no control and we needed to do something.”1 in peak years, more than 300,000 people a year traveled through agadez toward libya to find work or to attempt the risky mediterranean passage. although jeeps carrying migrants still leave for the desert, eu efforts in the agadez region have clearly severely impacted the local economy. official eu discourse claims that migration to libya from niger has dropped dramatically following the intervention, from 70,000 to 1,500 in may 2016 (ec 2016). these statistics, however, are difficult to confirm given that drivers now depart at night, drive without lights on, and take rough backroads into libya. political leaders in agadez must walk a tightrope when commenting on the growing securitization, even if the region’s economy has been hit hard. since a transition from military to civilian rule in 2011, the government of president issoufou (and from 2021 onward, of his former interior minister and chosen successor mohamed bazoum) has become increasingly authoritarian (elischer 2020). local leaders therefore have few options but to embrace government collaboration with the eu while at the same time facing growing discontent among their own people, whose work and lives have long centered on mobility. as the mayor of agadez told me during fieldwork in 2019, migration, in his community’s view, is “normal,” and the law against the smuggling of migrants, adopted by parliament in 2015 and implemented the following year, appears “sudden and harsh,” a form of “violence against agadez.” other leaders in the region expressed their critique in less moderate terms and warned that armed conflict could flare up at any moment or that the country could lose the youth to militant jihadism. one senior tuareg told me, “iom [international organization for migration] and eucap should leave here and don’t come back. they think they are safe, but they have to leave their camp to eat, to find a girl. you see what i mean?” although threats against international actors, and especially france, are not unusual in agadez, the pressure on the region’s migrant economy has not resulted in a new rebellion, but rather led to a reorganization of local cross-border economies (lucht and raineri 2019). under pressure, clandestine economies of mobility seem only to multiply and provide new avenues for profit accumulation, ones more hazardous for migrants and mobility entrepreneurs alike. to be sure, migrant driving remains a principal activity among young men in agadez, but now they leave one jeep at time, under cover of the night. before, drivers left in caravans that could support each other in the desert if something went wrong, whereas now migrant drivers are on their own if the vehicle breaks down. the fear of meeting a patrol and subsequently facing jail time for smuggling makes the journey even more perilous. reports indicate that drivers are now quick to dump their passengers if a situation develops—or is perceived to develop—that could involve law enforcement. as a result, thousands of migrants have been left to their own devices in the desert in the past five years, a situation that can be fatal. the un’s rescue mission has picked up 20,000 people in the desert since 2015; how many have died is unknown. the crackdown on migration has led to fewer desert journeys, but those that continue have become more dangerous. competing mobility regimes, and the profit they extract from either facilitating or arresting migrant mobility, create new risks and rewards for migrants and migrant facilitators with often fatal outcomes that, in turn, produce a “necropolitical” dimension (mbembe 2019) that works as deterrence. as marthe achtnich (2022, this issue) argues, in many instances, “vulnerability or fragility are the preconditions to predation.” in agadez, the pressure on migrant facilitators has also led to substituting for migrant “cargo” commodities less sensitive to the concerns of the european constituencies. drugs, gold, and rare animals have taken the place of migrants in the cross-border economy. artisanal small-scale gold mining in agadez took off in 2014, coinciding with the collapse of libya’s government and increasing eu pressure on smuggling routes. one anecdote told to me by ibrahim, a former migrant driver turned gold digger, links the two businesses. according to ibrahim, a migrant truck got stuck in the desert sand near djado plateau, necessitating that the drivers get out and dig. while digging, they came upon gold nuggets, and when the jeep’s wheels spun in the sand, gold nuggets sprayed up from the ground. ibrahim’s anecdote illustrates how when the migration business literally got stuck, gold appeared as “a blessing and a gift from god,” as he put it. a regular gold rush followed, and many of the men who formerly drove migrants switched to driving gold diggers from all over west africa to the remote and deserted areas. like so many other young men, ibrahim has a rusty pickax resting against the wall in his house, and jerry cans filled with mercury. most make little to nothing, however. ibrahim explains that it is expensive to live in the desert shanty towns, so the miners sometimes end up using their money for water, food, and cigarettes, as well as for drugs and gambling. some traders in town are making money, however, evident in the luxury homes constructed in some quarters of agadez. from agadez gold is redirected to dubai and delhi via regional markets in libya, benin, and mali (lucht and raineri 2019). driving synthetic opioids to the militias in libya has become another source of income cushioning the loss of the migrant business (micallef 2019; lucht and raineri 2019). former migrant drivers now head to nigeria and buy tramadol and then move it to the border with libya, where the pills are handed over to the libyan militias and supplied to the wider north african market. the synthetic opioid is widely reported to fuel the boko haram insurgency in the nigerian north east. former soldiers, including abducted children, report that they took or were forced to take the drug ahead of attacks, which may go some way toward explaining the brutality of the atrocities committed (obaji 2019). tramadol is a painkiller, but like other opioids it not only blocks pain but can, like morphine, also produce a euphoric sensation and is highly addictive. libyan militias also take the drug. one militia leader whose men control the southern border area with niger suggested that about 80 percent of his men were taking tramadol, adding, “i would be lying if i said i wasn’t taking it myself.” the popularity of the drug should not be underestimated: not only to boost fighters before attacks but also as a substitute for health services. informally, the police in agadez confirmed the drug’s growing importance to the local cross-border economy. “tramadol is on the rise,” one policeman explained off the record. “many of the human smugglers are into that now. but the eu don’t see it” (lucht and raineri 2019). the 2019 world drug report describes tramadol consumption in west africa as “a crisis” that calls for “urgent international attention” (unodc 2019, 1). here, two otherwise separate bioeconomic spheres intersect in sinister ways: the well-established global pharmaceutical industry, the original focus of many bioeconomical studies (andersson 2022, this issue), and the emerging transnational border-control industry i scrutinize in this essay. painkillers long ago substituted by stronger drugs in europe and the united states are dumped in africa to alleviate suffering—physical, social, and psychological—when little or no health care is available, in the process creating docile and narcotized african youth going nowhere. the economization of human vitality thus simultaneously serves to “manage, regulate, and profit” from mobility (achtnich 2022, this issue). in other words, the border now comes in the shape of a pill. a less reported trend in agadez is substituting migrants with rare animals. several operations out of agadez specialize in the african grey parrot. the bird, desired on the black market for its intelligence and ability to mimic human speech, fetches high prices in libya, one former migrant smuggler explained to me. he drove to nigeria once a month to buy the birds, then transported them to agadez, and from there to libya. the parrots, hailing from dense forests in central africa, had at first given him a headache. the intelligent and fragile bird is sensitive to the harsh desert climate, so the smuggler lost his first shipments. now he makes regular stops along the route to allow the birds to rest and drink. the rare african grey parrot has been on united nation’s list of endangered species since 2016, with a global trade ban in place. this trade and substitution of one life form over another constitutes an example of a more literal bioeconomy that interestingly creates new mobility patterns and forms of accumulation (see also green 2022, this issue) as drivers learn and adapt journeys to the physical limitations of one living commodity over another. the global struggle either to control or to facilitate human mobility plays out in multiple locations and on multiple scales around the world, from drivers in the agadez province playing cat and mouse with local police to diplomats in brussels negotiating readmission agreements with reluctant african counterparts. these forms of struggle over mobility often create new social worlds and economic opportunities from which local actors and state agents seek to profit. in that respect, human mobility constitutes a resource form that competing actors seek to appropriate (andersson 2018, 414). put more plainly, as one tuareg leader in agadez said about the eu-driven crackdown on migration and how it squeezed them out of the business, it was not “correct,” since “everywhere else people ‘eat’ from the migrants.” this ongoing struggle, however, has unintended consequences for migrant safety, often accelerating abjection, as well as for local and regional development. abstract the agadez province in northern niger, a nucleus for trans-saharan migration to libya, has in recent years been at the forefront of europe’s interventions to curb migration movements on the african continent. this essay discusses the transmutations of the cross-border economy in the wake of eu pressure and its implications for local lifeworlds. trade and smuggling networks have shown resilience and adaptability in the face of the eu-driven crackdown on migration, but often at the cost of migrant safety. border practices of the eu create situations where migrants are increasingly subject to predatory economic practices that consequently serve as necropolitical deterrence. at the same time, the cross-border economy is increasingly turning to other commodities to which libya’s european partners are less sensitive, such as gold, synthetic opioids, and rare animals. [niger; migration; border control; human smuggling; drugs] notes 1. in discussion with the author, april 2019, agadez. references achtnich, marthe 2022 “mobile livings: on the bioeconomies of mobility.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.01 andersson, ruben 2018 “profits and predation in the human bioeconomy.” public culture 30, no. 3: 413–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6912115 2022 “the bioeconomy and the birth of a ‘new anthropology.’” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 37–44. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.06 elischer, sebastian 2020 “niger’s elections amid violence and authoritarian backsliding.” istituto per gli studi di politica internazionale, october 20. https://www.ispionline.it/en/pubblicazione/nigers-elections-amid-violence-and-authoritarian-backsliding-27967 european commission (ec) 2016 “second progress report: first deliverables on the partnership framework with third countries under the european agenda on migration.” communication from the commission to the european parliament, the european council, and the council, december 14. https://eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/second-progress-report-1_en_act_part1_v11.pdf green, sarah 2022 “the bioeconomics of domesticating zoonoses.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 30–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.05 lucht, hans 2017 “european anti-migration agenda could challenge stability in niger.” diis policy brief. copenhagen: danish institute for international studies. lucht, hans, and luca raineri 2019 “eu pressure on niger to stop migrants is reshaping cross-border economies.” diis policy brief. copenhagen: danish institute for international studies. mbembe, achille 2019 necropolitics. translated by steven corcoran. durham, n.c.: duke university press. micallef, mark 2019 “shifting sands: libya’s changing drug trafficking and dynamics on the coastal and desert borders.” background paper. lisbon: european monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction. https://globalinitiative.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/edmr2019_backgroundreport_libya.pdf obaji jr., philip 2019 “if you take tramadol away, you make boko haram weak.” african arguments, march 15. https://africanarguments.org/2019/03/if-you-take-tramadol-away-you-make-boko-haram-weak/ raineri, luca 2018 “human smuggling across niger: state-sponsored protection rackets and contradictory security imperatives.” journal of modern african studies 56, no. 1: 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x17000520 tinti, peter 2017 “in niger, anti-smuggling efforts risk trading one crisis for another.” african arguments, january 13. http://africanarguments.org/2017/01/13/in-niger-anti-smuggling-efforts-risk-trading-one-crisis-for-another/ united nations office on drugs and crime (unodc) 2019 “world drug report.” united nations office on drugs and crime (unodc), vienna: united nations publication, sales no. ex.19.xi.8 https://wdr.unodc.org/wdr2019/prelaunch/wdr19_booklet_1_executive_summary.pdf cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 16-22, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.03 the spy who came in from the south cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 231-236, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.06 the spy who came in from the south darryl li university of chicago https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8041-1285 during the years i have spent talking to men who traveled to distant lands to carry out jihad, the specter of espionage unsurprisingly hung over many a conversation—and not only the recurring and entirely well-placed suspicions i faced as an anthropologist holding a u.s. passport. names popped up of infiltrators sent by western and arab intelligence agencies, mysterious individuals with odd behaviors who would suddenly vanish. there was the story of the egyptian who, after being mortally wounded in battle, confessed that he had originally been a double agent but on experiencing the righteousness of the cause had decided to be true to his cover after all. many of these threads proved difficult to trace further or verify, which is why i was rather startled when muhammad (not his real name, of course) in straightforward terms told me about having been a spy. we met in a detention center for migrants outside sarajevo, the capital of bosnia and herzegovina, and muhammad was fighting his deportation to algeria, the country of his birth, after having been labeled a threat to national security. his name had been all over the local newspapers, described as a notorious jihadist. muhammad’s own narration of his peregrinations, however, seemed more interesting. as the editors of this collection of essays remind us, security for some always means insecurity for others, and it would appear that this holds true even for some agents of these regimes. as an alleged jihadist, muhammad was a danger to security; as a spy, he was an instrument of it. but the reality underlying both was his experience as a migrant, not unlike the refugees diana allan (2020) writes about or the smugglers in the stories proffered by emrah yıldız (2020) and kali rubaii (2020). back in algeria, muhammad had sympathized with the islamic salvation front (better known by its french acronym, fis), the opposition movement whose 1990 electoral victory led to a state crackdown that sparked a bloody civil war. like many men of his generation, muhammad emigrated. he found a job in construction in the northern italian city of parma, while also quietly collecting donations for the fis from diasporic compatriots. one day, the algerian embassy in rome, acting on a tip from local authorities, called muhammad in for a chat. he started giving up names of other fis supporters. in those years, while muhammad was hoping to avoid the civil war in his homeland, another armed conflict was raging just across the adriatic, in bosnia. muhammad used to bring food to bosnian muslim refugees in parma and to visit a refugee center in nearby bologna. it was there that he met a man who introduced him to a female relative—let’s call her azra—who was still in bosnia. muhammad and azra began a courtship by telephone and with the end of the war, he made his way to join her—nearly all migration was headed in the opposite direction, so he had little trouble—and they got married. muhammad worked for a few years on azra’s family farm in a small village known for the quality of its potatoes while trying to figure out how to move them both to italy. one day, muhammad’s family in algeria told him that the government wanted to speak to him again. so he called the embassy in rome—the closest algerian state body—where he received a mission: to infiltrate a “jihadi village” in northeast bosnia. it was populated mostly by veterans of the jihad in bosnia and their families who took over the homes of ethnic serbs and set up a salafi commune outside the country’s mainstream islamic institutions. the algerian defense attaché in rome told muhammad to find out if their islamist compatriots living in bosnia had any involvement with armed groups back home. if he refused to assist, muhammad would not be allowed to renew his passport, without which any kind of legal travel would prove next to impossible. by muhammad’s account and those of azra and others i spoke to who lived in the village at the time, the assignment did not appear particularly dramatic. as an outsider who had not participated in the jihad, muhammad found himself more or less shunned, leaving after three months. moreover, the commune was already under intense surveillance due to the frenzied media speculation about its use for illicit training or other nefarious activities; nato peacekeepers regularly patrolled the village. in contrast, the most contentious disputes that came up in my interviews had to do with domestic quarrels between spouses and whether satellite dishes should be allowed. by 2000, nato had evicted nearly all the jihad veterans, scattering them throughout bosnia (li 2019, 125–29). muhammad continued to send desultory reports back to rome, and thence presumably to algiers. in 2005, he got his new algerian passport as a reward for his efforts. the anthropology of securitization as a state-driven and often semi-privatized endeavor has frequently focused on those at the receiving end of governmental power: refugees, migrants, and other victims (de genova and peutz 2010). a smaller companion literature has followed police agents, bureaucrats, and others who labor in this domain (feldman 2012). spies constitute a particular brand of workers, one for obvious reasons more elusive to the ethnographic gaze. but they nevertheless prove central to processes of securitization and to broader fantasies of the state. how to attend to spies? what to make of them in our midst? what can we learn about the state from looking at how it deals with the labor of clandestine intelligence gathering? muhammad’s story falls oddly between the three most prevalent ways of imagining the work of cloaks and daggers. there is intelligence as imperial fantasy, often depicted as a blood sport between great powers. there is intelligence as omnipotence over the global south through the casual coup d’état, as with the cia in guatemala, iran, chile, and elsewhere. and there is intelligence as secret police and surveillance, a form of domestic control shared by all modern states but particularly marked in authoritarian ones (glaeser 2010; masco 2017; verdery 2018). the idea of one poor state (algeria) sending spies far away to another (bosnia) constitutes a peculiar kind of south-south exchange that does not fit readily into existing frameworks and popular imaginations. it is easier for western cinematic audiences to imagine (and pine for) an idris elba cast as james bond in her majesty’s secret service than it is to conjure him as a heroic spy working for a formerly colonized state.1 how, then, does a poor state spy abroad? muhammad suggests one answer: by exploiting its diaspora. this seems entirely unsurprising: while dominant representations of espionage presuppose highly centralized bureaucratic institutions walled off from society by various regimes of secrecy, this is historically the exception rather than the norm. the more common way to gather intelligence—a specialized term for information—has been simply to ask travelers moving back and forth across different societies and build up from there (bayly 1996). for most spies today, diplomatic missions provide the sea in which they can swim, replete with immunity from local laws if caught. for algeria, a country that lacks the resources to support an embassy in bosnia, let alone an intelligence station, the diaspora makes for the best available human resource. the adage that long-term travelers from rich countries get to call themselves expats while the rest are mere migrants shapes the possibilities for espionage as well. indeed, it is the western super-spy—somehow crossing borders and navigating foreign cities without friction—that requires provincialization. there can be no james bond without the missionaries, merchants, soldiers, and slave-dealers who in all likelihood would populate the bond family tree. as a transnational endeavor in an unequal world, espionage is also characterized by a hierarchical division of labor that does not fundamentally differ from what one finds in not-for-profits, journalism, or academic research. muhammad’s algerian handlers likely hawked his reports to their counterparts in italian or u.s. intelligence to prove their own worthiness for money, weapons, or other forms of aid. these are relationships that can still produce surprises and on occasion quite literally blow up in one’s face. one of the deadliest incidents in cia history came in 2009, when a jordanian who had promised to infiltrate al-qaeda instead detonated a suicide vest at an american base in afghanistan. he had been initially recruited and managed by jordanian intelligence, who were introducing him to their cia partners for the first time. the bomber made sure that his handler—also a cousin to king abdullah—stood within the blast radius. what all intelligence services, from countries rich or poor, share is a basic attitude of disposability toward their “assets.” muhammad learned this after returning to algeria in 2007, bringing azra and his children along, his job complete, and legal paperwork squared away. but what allan (2020) calls the “spiral or whorl” of migrant lives—where even obtaining formal statuses like citizenship can shape insecurity as much as prevent it—only accelerated. soon after his return, muhammad began receiving phone calls from persons unknown to him threatening reprisals for his past spying. he fled to italy, but was arrested and deported home again. within months, warnings became reality as someone placed a bomb outside his house that scattered shrapnel throughout his body. muhammad decided to resettle in bosnia, with his family following yet again. by now, the combination of his race, religion, associations, and pattern of movements was suspicious on its own terms. when we met in 2010, he had been detained as one of the “usual suspects” after a bombing elsewhere in bosnia. the next time i visited the detention center a year later, he was gone, long since deported. abstract dominant imaginaries of espionage presume that all states surveil their populations but that only the powerful ones can play the “great game” of spying outside their borders. how, then, does a poor postcolonial state spy abroad? drawing on an ethnography of arab migrants and jihad fighters in bosnia and herzegovina, this essay suggests one answer: powerful states have their spies pose as diplomats, while weak ones exploit their diasporas. this realization takes one step toward demystifying and de-exceptionalizing state intelligence apparatuses and understanding them as socially embedded institutions. [espionage; migration; security; labor] notes 1. it is noteworthy that the closest thing to such a representation requires a fantasy of having never been colonized in the first place, namely, the kingdom of wakanda in the film and comic book black panther. even in that vision of a super-sovereign state of proud black folks, the cia is cast as a benign presence—at the expense of its actual history of undermining popular movements in africa, as many a kill(monger)joy has pointed out. references allan, diana 2020 “the long turning: a palestinian refugee in belgium.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 225–30. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.05. bayly, c. a. 1996 empire and information: intelligence gathering and social communication in india, 1780–1870. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. de genova, nicholas, and nathalie peutz, eds. 2010 the deportation regime: sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. durham, n.c.: duke university press. feldman, gregory 2012 the migration apparatus: security, labor, and policymaking in the european union. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. glaeser, andreas 2010 political epistemics: the secret police, the opposition, and the end of east german socialism. chicago: university of chicago press. li, darryl 2019 the universal enemy: jihad, empire, and the challenge of solidarity. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. masco, joseph 2017 “‘boundless informant’: insecurity in the age of ubiquitous surveillance.” anthropological theory 17, no. 3: 382–403. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499617731178. rubaii, kali 2020 “trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 211–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.03. verdery, katherine 2018 my life as a spy: investigations in a secret police file. durham, n.c.: duke university press. yıldız, emrah 2020 “nested in(securities): commodity and currency circuits in an iran under sanctions.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 218–24. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.04. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 231-236, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.06 the dying home: “bad deaths” and spatial inscriptions of mourning in a favela cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 556-562, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.03 the dying home: “bad deaths” and spatial inscriptions of mourning in a favela eugênia motta universidade do estado do rio de janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9491-0993 i overheard many conversations maria had with friends, relatives, and neighbors we met on walks through the aliança favela in rio de janeiro.1 this community forms part of the complexo do alemão, a 0.8 square-mile region across a number of hills and valleys, with favelas that constitute a continuous, densely occupied region with close to seventy thousand people. a visit to the market with maria could take hours because of these meetings. she spoke of various topics: from gossip about acquaintances’ extramarital affairs to serious issues like the functioning of schools and public health clinics. at times maria spoke of her son, wellington, and would ask other women: “have you also lost one?” this is how maria confirmed if her interlocutor also had a son who had been assassinated. the brief question, quickly understood and often responded to in the affirmative, expressed how common it is for young favela residents, especially black youth, to be killed in armed conflicts, leaving mothers in constant mourning. many of these murders are perpetrated by the police and have a clearly racist character. rio de janeiro’s official data shows an alarming increase in this type of execution in recent years, and many deaths are not formally registered, hidden by what are officially treated as disappearances.2 unlike deaths due to age and that correspond to the chronological order of generations, these deaths are conceived of and experienced by entire communities as “bad deaths.” they last longer, spread daily through space and among many people, require large interpretive efforts, and place collective futures at risk. one of the main ways that this finds expression is through different modalities of inscription in homes. transformations in the organization of furniture, the construction of domestic altars, and graffiti on walls speak to the entanglement between the material and social in house-ing processes (see costa oliveira and fausto 2021, this issue), as bad deaths can convert homes and neighborhoods from places of life and living into places of death and dying. wellington was eighteen when he fell victim to police brutality. the violence, the “cowardliness”—as maria said—attributed such a negative character to his death that it wound up extending to the death of his mother and to the dying of their house. maria’s death constituted a prolongment of her mourning for her son, expressed by interactions between her and the houses where she lived. maria’s personhood was made and remade through these fatal experiences that engendered a process of de-house-ing (also present in the oikographies of federico neiburg [2021, this issue] and ryo morimoto [2021, this issue]). when wellington began to work in accounting for the local drug trade, maria did everything she could for him to give it up. she sold the house where she lived with the boy and her husband and quickly bought another. this first house had been built gradually, with money saved by the couple. it had attributes of a “good house,” as maria told me: the size of the rooms, the pretty decorations, the tall wall in front, and having resulted from the couple’s efforts, all becoming an omen for a good future for the family. in contrast, the home to which maria would move, and in which she lived when i met her, was a “bad house.” the poor air circulation and the uncomfortable position of the furniture constituted the ways by which she spoke of this house (motta 2020). the reciprocal actions of humans on houses and of houses on humans form part of a continuous process (i.e., house-ing) that co-produces each of them as persons. i consider personhood, in the case of houses or humans, as the articulation of three capacities: that of existing in relation and in the world, that is, to be constituted as a relatively autonomous entity while in communication with others; that of having a biography, a coherent and diachronic set of events; and that of acting morally, that is, of behaving based on notions of what is good or fair and their opposites. the interlocking personhood of humans and houses is therefore the dynamic co-constitution of singular existences, particular histories, and agency. maria and her husband made a good house, which in turn made them people honored in the community, as were their children. the other house acquired after the involvement of the son with drug dealing, in turn, resulted from desperation and shame, leaving maria permanently upset and then ill. the first time i entered maria’s house i noted the image that took up part of the wall in front of the entrance. it was a photo of wellington smiling, his two hands giving a thumbs-up, and his silhouette set against the image of a blue sky with white clouds. below stood the word saudade. one finds the same word written on walls throughout the favela, next to male names of victims of murder, usually perpetrated by the police. it is a cliché that the term saudade only exists in portuguese.3 it refers to the sense of loss and lament for a person or a thing distant in time or space. saudade is also what is felt in mourning. in the favela, the graffiti on the walls indicates the locations where people were killed. these are inscriptions of mourning on and outside houses, expanding the spatiality of grief for bad deaths and demonstrating the porosity of inside and outside proper to house-ing. the anonymous writings also offer an implicit criticism of police action, an affirmation that this violence is not forgotten. figure 1. graffiti mourning the death of a youth in a rio de janeiro favela. photo by eugênia motta. maria was only fifty-two when she was diagnosed with a terminal and incurable disease. her death was understood by those who knew her and narrated by her as the continuation of the death of her son, inscribed in the house where she lived. she died a few months later, after having painful symptoms and struggling to get proper treatment. in the months maria suffered, her house transformed as the illness got worse and increased her physical limitations. the food and the kitchen, which occupied a good portion of her time and conversation when she was healthy (motta 2014), came to be the language in which maria spoke of her death. she lamented that she no longer cooked, complained of the taste of food that other women prepared, and criticized the things they bought. the curtains were almost always drawn, the furniture was arranged so that maria could support herself, and even the new bed that her husband bought made the bad house a house of dying. soon after maria was buried, her husband and daughters built a small altar in the living room, just under wellington’s photo. they placed on it objects that had belonged to her, such as a rosary, a small statute of an angel, plastic flowers, and a photo in which she appeared, also smiling, looking at the camera, carrying the white dress in which she got married. the personal objects and the words written indicated the type of struggle of which these people were the object. maria’s death required more material and symbolic investments, distinguishing it from a good death. as morimoto (2021) describes, altars and object-memories constitute creative ways of house-ing, materializing multiple temporalities and moral values. maria’s husband began a relationship with another woman soon after she died, creating a scandal. her daughters quickly gathered maria’s belongings from the home, so that they would not be appropriated by the father’s new partner or thrown away. the older daughter concluded a long and inflammatory discourse against the father by affirming: “this is my mother’s house!” she broke off her relationship with him after his new girlfriend moved in. this concluded a long process that shattered the chance of a decent future for maria’s family. to have a son involved with drug sales can represent the moral disgrace of a large group of people linked to him, especially the mother, who is considered the main source of education for her children, the means by which they result in men who are “workers” or “bandits” (zaluar 1985; feltran 2007). a deeper, prolonged mourning always falls on the progenitress (vianna and farias 2011) given that the connection through pregnancy and nursing is considered the most significant among all the relations among people. within a short time, the widower went to live in another state. the house in which maria had spent her final years was sold less than a year after her death. it was transformed into a storage space for the beverage store next door. little was left of the residence that i knew. maria’s two daughters, who had lived in the same favela, moved to other neighborhoods. thus, the house—this arrangement composed of the material structure, the objects stored in it, the people, and the possibility of a good collective future—also died. the entire network in which maria’s house occupied a central place (marcelin 1999; motta 2014) disintegrated, not only ceasing to have a possible good future but failing to have one altogether. bad deaths spread out: from the death of one person to that of others, from people to homes, and from within the home to the streets and alleys. this incontinence also occurs in relation to the subjective experience of a loss that is transformed into a deep existential disturbance. the events, emotions, experiences, and materializations of these deaths—from altars to graffiti—reveal a world in which the existence of humans, homes, and places combine and make each other. they also demonstrate the deep consequences of racialized police violence for bodies and house-ing processes. the number of youths, mostly black, assassinated in brazil is so large that scholars treat the phenomenon as genocide and warn of generational loss. the enormous number of bad deaths—violent, avoidable, commonplace deaths—produces not only painful inscriptions of mourning on houses but also the combination of youth, masculinity, and blackness as a mark of death’s potentiality in still living bodies. abstract in rio de janeiro’s favelas, where residents have experienced economic precarity and racialized police violence, “good deaths,” wrought by natural causes and at old age, are distinguished from “bad deaths,” which may take victims’ entire families and houses. this essay chronicles the story of maria who died at fifty-two, following the death of her youngest son at the hands of the police, and inquires into the generativity of mourning related to these two bad deaths. as graffiti and altars became spatial inscriptions of a new moralization of space, maria’s house gradually transformed from a substrate of life into a marker of death. in the end, the home died too, as it was sold and its attendant social relations were unmade. bad deaths thus reveal the moral entanglement between families, communities, and the materiality of houses, as well as the severance of these ties in the face of violence and intergenerational loss. [racialized police violence; economic precarity; family ties; graffiti and public mourning; death of the home; brazil] resumo nas favelas do rio de janeiro, onde os moradores convivem com a precariedade econômica e a violência policial racializada, as “boas mortes”, de causas naturais e em idade avançada, diferem das “mortes ruins”, que podem atingir a família das vítimas e as próprias casas. este ensaio conta a história de maria, que morreu aos 52 anos, depois do assassinato de seu filho caçula pela polícia, e analisa como o luto dessas duas “mortes ruins” se perpetua. assim como grafittis e altares se tornam inscrições de uma nova moralização do espaço, a casa de maria foi se transformando de um substrato de vida em um signo de morte. afinal, a casa também morre e suas relações sociais são desfeitas. “mortes ruins” revelam articulações entre famílias, comunidades e a materialidade das casas, assim como o rompimento desses laços frente à violência e às perdas intergeracionais. [violência policial racializada; precariedade econômica; laços familiares; grafitti e luto público; morte da casa; brasil] resumen en las favelas de río de janeiro, donde las personas conviven con la precariedad económica y con la violencia policial racializada, las “muertes buenas” de causas naturales y en edad avanzada, se diferencían de las “muertes malas” que pueden golpear a las familias de las víctimas y a los propios hogares. este ensayo cuenta la historia de maría, que murió a los 52 años después de que su hijo menor fuera asesinado por la policía, y examina cómo se perpetúa el luto de estas dos “muertes malas”. al igual que los grafitis y los altares, que se convierten en inscripciones de una nueva moralización del espacio, la casa de maría pasa de ser un sustrato de vida a un signo de muerte. al fin y al cabo, la casa también murió y sus relaciones sociales se deshicieron. las “muertes malas” revelan articulaciones entre las familias, las comunidades y la materialidad de las casas, así como la ruptura de estos vínculos ante la violencia y las pérdidas intergeneracionales. [violencia policial racializada; precariedad económica; lazos familiares; grafitis y luto público; muerte en casa; brasil] notes 1. all names are fictitious. 2. in 2019, 1,814 people were killed by state police: 78 percent were black, 98 percent male, and 47 percent younger than twenty-nine (data from the instituto de segurança pública – institute of public security – of the state of rio de janeiro, https://www.ispvisualizacao.rj.gov.br:4434/letalidade.html). the homicides of black youth have been increasing throughout the country as well (cerqueira and coelho 2017). 3. in the words of fernando pessoa (2008): “saudades, só portugueses / conseguem senti-las bem, / porque têm essa palavra / para dizer que as têm” (only the portuguese feel saudades / are able to feel them well, / because they have this word / to say that they have them). references cerqueira, daniel, and danilo santa cruz coelho 2017 “democracia racial e homicídios de jovens negros na cidade partida.” rio de janeiro: ipea. costa oliveira, thiago da, and carlos fausto 2021 “amazonian house-ing: a visual anthropology essay.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 580–88. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.06. feltran, gabriel de santis 2007 “trabalhadores e bandidos: categorias de nomeação, significados políticos.” revista temáticas 30: 11–50. https://doi.org/10.20396/tematicas.v15i30.13649. marcelin, louis herns 1999 “a linguagem da casa entre os negros no recôncavo baiano.” mana 5, no. 2: 31–60. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-93131999000200002. morimoto, ryo 2021 “home otherwise: living archives and half-life politics in post-fallout coastal fukushima.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 573–79. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.05. motta, eugênia 2014 “houses and economy in the favela.” vibrant: virtual brazilian anthropology 11, no. 1: 118–58. https://doi.org/10.1590/s1809-43412014000100005. 2020 “uma casa boa, uma casa ruim e a morte no cotidiano.” etnográfica 24, no. 3: 775–95. https://doi.org/10.4000/etnografica.9603. neiburg, federico 2021 “multiscale home: shifting landscapes and living-in-movement in haiti.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 548–55. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.02. pessoa, fernando 2008 quadras ao gosto popular. porto alegre, brazil: l&pm. vianna, adriana, and juliana farias 2011 “a guerra das mães: dor e política em situações de violência institucional.” cadernos pagu 37: 79–116. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-83332011000200004. zaluar, alba 1985 a máquina e a revolta: as organizações populares e o significado da pobreza. são paulo: brasiliense. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 556-562, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.03 gestures of care and recognition: an introduction cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 1-5, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.01 gestures of care and recognition: an introduction lauren cubellis washington university in st. louis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8355-7490 in this collection of essays, we propose an opening for anthropological conversations about care. care has emerged increasingly as an object of study, one variously marked as morally and economically intertwined (zelizer 2005; kleinman 2010); constituted by politics, process, and improvisation (mol 2008; martin, myers, and viseu 2015); and technologically mediated and insidiously violent (biehl 2015; garcia 2015). into this discussion we offer an intervention that considers the affective encounters (mazzarella 2017) from which unexpected conceptions of caring emerge, and ask what ethnography might offer by way of a caring gesture. the collection derives from a wenner-gren–supported workshop on theoretical and ethnographic explorations of care, and what our group found, more than anything else, was that our encounters with care were embedded in anxiety, loss, and absence. to think about the way absence becomes its own marker of care, we began thinking with the concept of trace—the remnant by which a former presence is indexed, the absence that remains, and how this absent presence is recognized. our encounter with care as an experience of anxiety or loss does not, in many ways, seem all that surprising. etymologically, at the root of care lies the experience of sorrow, anxiety, and grief. the old english accounts of caru tether it to a “primary sense of inward grief” and the “concern [or] anxiety caused by apprehensions of evil or the weight of many burdens” (fine 2007; puig de la bellacasa 2012; harper n.d.). gestures of care can both direct attention toward such anxieties and perform said attentions without any intention of effect, rendering them, at worst, empty gestures (žižek 1997; hoffman 2016). we intend these essays as openings toward the former, as careful retellings of absent fields that recognize something about the human experience. we offer minor gestures (manning 2016): existing inescapably in relation to the major chord—the structural tendencies that disseminate predetermined values—but never dependent on or defined by it, the work of the minor allows for the unexpected to emerge amid seemingly structured contexts. uniquely configured but resonantly attuned, it is “the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation” (manning 2016, 1). holding space for minor gestures means writing in such a way that traces are held gently and allowed to evolve. by endeavoring toward an open-ended recognition of care, or of what makes a situation care-full, these essays expand care without delimiting it, without demanding the coordinates of that which is absent be concretely known. recognition diverges here from accounts that focus on witnessing (marcus 2005), multicultural politics (c. taylor 1994), or cognitive capacity (ricoeur 2005). rather, recognition is the acknowledgment that in writing ethnographically we bring into being a representation for which we assume responsibility, and which will momentarily presence something or someone in spite of their absence. janelle s. taylor (2008, 326) writes that “‘recognition’ is inseparable from ‘caring,’ and both can be understood as not just the interior emotional or intellectual states of individuals, but as practices, particular forms of activity, at once social, representational, and very concretely material.” the authors in this collection strive to practice ethnographic representation that limits the determinism of our own recognition, holding open the ambivalence of caring as it is experienced by our interlocutors, and foregrounding the resolute uncertainty of such a dynamic. the work of representation here is carefully attuned—meaning with a certain willingness to hold anxiety and worry affectively in writing—to the impossibility of the task. recognition becomes a labor that is intensely present, and that is experienced affectively, even as past and future threaten to shift and distort that image. the traces we recognize through ethnographic practice will always fail to capture the totality of that which is absent, and yet we find that in trying to do so we take up practices of caring. in conjuring the trace, we highlight the dynamic potential of absence and presence that constitute the affective interrelationship fundamental to care. “trace,” walter benjamin (1999, 447) writes, “is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be.” the trace is distant, even as it appears near. it has a material quality, even in its absence. it is, theoretically, a static entity, but one that becomes dynamically complex as soon as it is engaged as referent. following jacques derrida (1976), the trace signals an inaccessible source; we search for it in our fieldnotes and through our writing, but the trace remains the “mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent present” (spivak 1976, xvii). when we write ethnographically, we pursue this absence, and when we read ethnographic work, we often encounter a feeling of nearness despite our infinite remove from the origin of the work itself. extending this theoretical endeavor, the essays that follow allow the negotiation of the absent/present trace to become affective, a sort of raw material or nodal point around which myriad forms might refract. this constitutes the means by which it becomes illustrative of care as we have described it: the ineffable trace, persistent in its absence, renders itself multiply meaningful in the forms of recognition we afford it. traces are not fixed. the essays collected here examine contexts of care in which traces surge and recede, in which absence and presence are fragile and reciprocally bound. whether as an “impossible science” of recognition (stevenson 2020) or a transient site of political alliance (lancione 2020), the challenge of representing past encounters that register as care-full infuses these essays. this is in some cases mediated by an attention to the unfolding of language and listening (cubellis 2020), or the imposition of care that marks one as dangerous so as to be deserving (macleish 2020), or the possibility of grief as an experience that resists closure (wool 2020). most important, these essays also ask, both explicitly and through their attempts at challenging representation: what are the traces that we carry—what are the absences that anthropology co-creates, and how do the accounts we produce of recognition through writing form part of that process? moving anthropological conversations beyond the assessment of good or bad care, and beyond the acknowledgment of the concept’s ambivalence, this collection provokes consideration of care as a discomfort that insists, as an affective state that does not resolve, and as one that resists finalizability. the trace has a palpable force by which it makes itself felt, assuming a nearness that threatens to overwhelm, at the same time that it recedes and remains inaccessible and indeterminate. by writing in its direction, we offer a minor gesture. by attending to that which has impressed itself, which stays with us, even if we cannot access whence it came, we gather traces, and we offer these representations as imperfect but propitious gestures of care. abstract this collection of essays offers an exploration of care as a gesture of recognition. as both object of inquiry and ethnographic representation, care is examined as the work of discerning and representing traces. the introduction and subsequent essays grapple with the work of writing about absent others, and how the anthropological endeavor might itself be considered a form of care. [care; representation; trace] notes acknowledgments the essays in this colloquy were made possible by a wenner-gren foundation workshop grant to further theoretical and ethnographic explorations of care. we offer special thanks to our colleagues joão biehl, paul brodwin, cristiana giordano, kim hopper, rebecca lester, joerg niewoehner, and jeannette pols for their participation in the workshop, and for their generous thoughts and provocations. the essays in this colloquy are a reflection of this collective endeavor. references benjamin, walter 1999 the arcades project. translated by howard eiland and kevin mclaughlin. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. biehl, joão 2015 “care and disregard.” in a companion to moral anthropology, edited by didier fassin, 242–63. new york: wiley-blackwell. cubellis, lauren 2020 “sympathetic care.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 14–22. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.03. derrida, jacques 1976 of grammatology. translated by gayatri chakravorty spivak. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. fine, michael d. 2007 a caring society? care and the dilemmas of human service in the 21st century. new york: palgrave macmillan. garcia, angela 2015 “serenity: violence, inequality, and recovery on the edge of mexico city.” medical anthropology quarterly 29, no. 4: 455–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12208. harper, douglas n.d. “care.” online etymology dictionary. accessed december 5, 2019. https://www.etymonline.com/word/care. hoffman, danny 2016 “a crouching village: ebola and the empty gestures of quarantine in monrovia.” city and society 28, no. 2: 246–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12083. kleinman, arthur 2010 “caregiving: the divided meaning of being human and the divided self of the caregiver.” in rethinking the human, edited by j. michelle molina and donald k. swearer, 16–27. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. lancione, michele 2020 “underground inscriptions.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 31–39. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.05. macleish, ken 2020 “care and the nonhuman politics of veteran drunk driving.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 23–30. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.04. manning, erin 2016 the minor gesture. durham, n.c.: duke university press. marcus, george e. 2005 “the anthropologist as witness in contemporary regimes of intervention.” cultural politics 1, no. 1: 31–49. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/584151. martin, aryn, natasha myers, and ana viseu 2015 “the politics of care in technoscience.” social studies of science 45, no. 5: 625–41. https://doi.org/10.1177%2f0306312715602073. mazzarella, william 2017 the mana of mass society. chicago: university of chicago press. mol, annemarie 2008 the logic of care: health and the problem of patient choice. new york: routledge. puig de la bellacasa, maría 2012 “‘nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care.” sociological review 60, no. 2: 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111%2fj.1467-954x.2012.02070.x. ricoeur, paul 2005 the course of recognition. translated by david pellauer. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. spivak, gayatri chakravorty 1976 translator’s preface to of grammatology, by jacques derrida, ix–lxxxviii. translated by gayatri chakravorty spivak. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. stevenson, lisa 2020 “looking away.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 6–13. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.02. taylor, charles 1994 “the politics of recognition.” in multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition, edited by amy gutmann, 25–73. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. taylor, janelle s. 2008 “on recognition, caring, and dementia.” medical anthropology quarterly 22, no. 4: 313–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2008.00036.x. wool, zoë 2020 “mourning, affect, sociality: on the possibilities of open grief.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 40–47. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.06. zelizer, viviana a. 2005 the purchase of intimacy. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. žižek, slavoj 1997 the plague of fantasies. new york: verso. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 1-5, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.01 care and scale: decorrelative ethics in algorithmic recommendation cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 509-537, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.11 care and scale: decorrelative ethics in algorithmic recommendation nick seaver tufts university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3913-1134 my phone buzzed against my thigh. hey nick, thanks for completing the survey. anything in particular you’re hoping for with this playlist? it was late 2015, and i was texting with the yams, a music recommendation company based in brooklyn, new york. as the “about” page on their website put it, the yams was “a service that gives you music recommendations and personalized playlists made by an actual, knowledgeable human who understands your taste and knows what they’re talking about.” i had filled out an online form with some of my favorite musical artists, providing my cell phone number, and the yams had texted me back. or rather, alex had texted me back.1 the humanity of alex and his colleagues was the yams’ main selling point, and every interaction with the service seemed designed to remind me of this personal scale. the company offered no software, working instead through informal text messages, which arrived in my pocket among conversations with friends and family. their sparsely designed website, set in a plain, monospaced font, signaled a “low-tech” ethos. the yams was conspicuously not a “tech” company. yet, like many tech companies, the yams had launched by offering their product for free, to attract new users. alex texted to let me know that this strategy had worked better than expected and that they were overwhelmed by demand—my playlist would be ready soon. a week later, my phone vibrated with a link. the playlist had been assembled on spotify and was titled “to nick, from david.” david and i had never met, but he had compiled twenty songs and a 250-word summary for me, describing the artists and record labels responsible for the music. “these songs aren’t tied by a defining tempo or rhythm,” he wrote, “but rather a feeling—one i hope you’ll enjoy.” the playlist’s title invoked a gift relationship between us; its description set an ineffable “feeling” against quantifiable traits like tempo and rhythm. david signed off cheerfully: “anyways, hope you dig it, i had a great time piecing things together for this one.” although the yams created their playlists on large streaming media platforms like spotify and youtube, they positioned themselves as a distinctively human alternative to the algorithmic recommendations those platforms offered to users. “deciding what to listen to is too important to leave solely in the hands of technology companies, algorithms, and whatever appears in our social feeds,” their website read. the yams had joined a growing reaction against algorithms, favoring a smaller-scale approach often called “curation.” algorithms, these critics contended, could never really understand music because they could never really care for music the way a human could. curation, its advocates would often note, shared etymological roots with care (jansson and hracs 2018), and care was a distinctively human capacity. software lacked qualities like passion and taste; machine learning might identify patterns in data, but it could never truly appreciate them. from notoriously hip brooklyn, the yams offered a small, careful alternative to algorithmic recommendation: personalization from actual persons. i first learned about the yams from one of their nominal opponents, ben fields, a computer scientist with a phd in automatic playlist generation (fields 2011). at the time, i had been conducting fieldwork for several years with scientists and engineers like fields, who designed and built music recommender systems. i attended their international professional conferences, where researchers presented new techniques for analyzing musical sound or user behavior; i had embedded myself in one of the more popular music recommendation companies operating in the united states; i interviewed academic researchers, corporate ceos, and people working at every level of these organizations, down to their summer interns. the vast majority of them professed a deep care for music, describing their programming work as driven by an interest in supporting musicians and listeners. the position ascribed to them in popular discourse—representatives of careless, inhuman algorithms—was thus a source of tension: if the curators of the yams felt that they truly cared for music, my interlocutors did too. but as much as people like fields wanted to act carefully, they were certain that a curatorial service like the yams could never really work. there were too many songs and too many listeners in the world to connect them all by hand. a spotify user today, for instance, is one of more than 356 million worldwide, navigating a catalog of more than seventy million tracks (spotify n.d.). large numbers like these have been cited as the reason to pursue algorithmic recommendation since the emergence of the field in the mid-1990s. for the makers of recommender systems, a system only works if it works at large scale, mediating between many users and many items. after finally receiving my playlist, i joked with fields on social media about how it had been delayed. “that’s totally shocking,” he replied sarcastically, “who could guess that human intervention doesn’t scale.” a few weeks later, evidently searching for mentions of their name online, the yams responded to our conversation from their corporate account: “hey guys we’re not trying to ‘scale,’ just wanna find people that appreciate what we do. our 1st week was nuts though!” a few years after that, as i sat down to draft this essay, the yams had shut down their playlisting service and revised their “about” page into the past tense. when i texted alex to check in, an automated chatbot replied to my message: hey! we’re not around. * * * the brief, careful life of the yams exemplified a matter of widely shared common sense: care and scale are naturally opposed to each other. to demonstrate its commitment to care, a company distances itself from efforts to scale; in an industry where financial success depends on scaling up, such companies fail. computer scientists balk at the idea that algorithms might be replaced by careful, human intervention because human care can’t scale up. care happens in small-scale moments of human interaction; scale is achieved by tireless and impersonal machinery (mol, moser, and pols 2010, 14).2 among anthropologists, too, we find this commonsense opposition in play. calls for attention to care often figure it as an alternative to the large scale, which “helps shift … overwhelming largeness … toward more intimate and personal relationships” (boke 2016). conversely, anthropologists tend to “discern something dehumanizing—even violent—about scale” (carr and lempert 2016, 19), seeing it as the enemy of the small-scale human encounters (and societies) that have long defined the discipline’s objects and methods. thus, in the dispute between “algorithms” and “curators,” anthropologists would seem predisposed toward the careful, small-scale, human side. the apparent opposition between care and scale also shapes current debates about the ethics of algorithmic systems, both inside and outside of the academy. as algorithms have become matters of popular concern, many critics have described how these technologies replace careful human judgment with automated rules, to damning effect. newly computerized government agencies may process more claims faster, but they disproportionately exclude marginalized people (eubanks 2018); a search engine that seeks to index all the world wide web automatically perpetuates the racism it finds there (noble 2018). as the introduction to life by algorithms, a collection of anthropological work on algorithmic systems, puts it: “the common sense and situational logic of humans is displaced by and subordinated to the logic of automation and bureaucracy” (gusterson 2019, 2). the problem with these systems, many critics have suggested, is scale itself: the pursuit of scale magnifies the harms produced by algorithmic systems, turning them “from local nuisances to tsunami forces” (o’neil 2016, 30), and the drive to scale makes caring for those who might be affected by such systems effectively impossible (gillespie 2020; hanna and park 2020; bender et al. 2021). for people who want to make ethical recommender systems, the fact that care and scale seem intrinsically opposed creates a problem. this article describes how they try to solve it. they do so not by giving up on care or abandoning their desire to scale, but by reimagining the terms of their relationship—redefining what care and scale mean in the process. while we might take issue with this reimagining, the makers of algorithmic recommendation do not lack ethics, as some critics might argue. rather, they are always making ethics, trying to understand, evaluate, and reconfigure the field of possible choices. instead of thinking about ethics as a good kind of decision-making mostly absent from the tech sector, i am interested here in the ethical reasoning that already takes place there.3 how do the people who work within these systems understand their own ethical positions? these local ethical vernaculars shape what people do as they respond to critiques or try to do the “right” thing, and, as i will describe for the world of software startups, they appear to be in transformation. ethics, care, and scale are all concepts of substantial anthropological interest in their own right, which have accrued meanings that diverge from their common usage in my field sites. in what follows, i bring together anthropological and vernacular theorizing, following calls by scholars in all these subfields to look for how ethics, care, and scale are mobilized in everyday life (e.g., das 2012; carr and lempert 2016; puig de la bellacasa 2017). thus my use of these terms often accords first with usage in the field, only later bringing in the anthropological twists that allow us to think of care as potentially unpleasant or scale as a matter of comparison rather than largeness. thinking through the ethical entanglement of care and scale with my interlocutors provides an opportunity for examining anthropology’s own tacit assumptions about how these concepts relate. the case of music recommendation also offers a window into the broader world of the software industry—a sector with profound global influence, as its values and techniques are picked up by governments, universities, and other institutions around the world (caplan and boyd 2018). as popular critiques of the tech sector gain purchase, and companies and investors shift their strategies in response, understanding these emerging forms of ethical reasoning is a crucial task. loosening the double bind in classic anthropological terms, we can say that people who want to pursue care and scale simultaneously find themselves in a double bind (bateson 1972, 206). as kim fortun and mike fortun (2005, 47) argue, double-binds cannot be resolved; one must work within their constraints and contours, continually making decisions about how best to uphold competing values. it is in these judgments, in our view, that ethics “happen.” following fortun and fortun (2005), i start from the position that ethics can be found in the way people negotiate among apparently competing values. but where they claim that double binds cannot be resolved, i suggest that this does not always hold true: one way to loosen a double bind is to redefine its terms, working not just within its constraints, but on those constraints, rearranging the space of ethical decision-making. in gregory bateson’s (1972, 207) original theorization of double binds, the impossibility of an “escape from the field” is what makes them so binding. but in many apparent double binds, the constitution of the field itself is in play. this is how brian whitman, cofounder of a music recommendation company called the echo nest, sought to escape the double bind—to pursue care and scale at once. whitman founded the echo nest in 2005 with tristan jehan, a phd classmate from the mit media lab. based in the boston area and built around algorithmic techniques they had developed at mit, the company very soon became the archetype for the “algorithm” side of the curator-algorithm dichotomy (cf. morris 2015). the echo nest’s “music intelligence” service eventually provided data and recommender infrastructure for most of the music streaming companies operating in the united states—until it was acquired by spotify in 2014. when i interviewed whitman in 2018, he reflected on his early work at the echo nest, describing how press coverage routinely designated companies as essentially either “human” or “machine”: every interview i ever got, or every panel i was on, they would just start with that man-versus-machine garbage—as if these were the only two options you had, basically. and that pissed us off. for whitman, as for many of my interlocutors, that “man-versus-machine garbage” was frustrating: it set caring humans against scalable machines, locating humans like whitman on the machine side of the dichotomy. not only did this categorically malign their work, but it also seemed inadequate to capturing the many ways that humans and machines might come together in systems labeled “algorithmic” or “curatorial.” as he posted on social media shortly before the echo nest was acquired, “real fleshy caring humans power all the popular music discovery platforms, including ours. no successful service uses only ‘robots.’” offering a vernacular version of long-standing arguments from science and technology studies (e.g., hughes 1987; haraway 1991), practitioners like whitman argued that these systems were best understood not as either human or machine, but as sociotechnical arrangements of people and technology. around 2012, whitman began to formalize an alternative to the standard framing in his public talks, replacing essentialized humans and machines with the values they had come to represent: care and scale. against the idea that care and scale were opposed (figure 1), he presented a two-dimensional diagram that figured care and scale as separate axes (figure 2). in this coordinate space, care and scale were not opposites, but rather independent of each other. this simple representational move made it possible to distinguish among approaches to recommendation that had previously been grouped together. into the space, whitman placed some common techniques (figure 3). in the careful, small top-left were “editorial” curators like the yams. in the large, careless bottom-right was pure audio analysis—a technique that automatically analyzed patterns in musical sound, but which often produced strange and unsatisfactory results when used in isolation. in the abject bottom-left—both careless and small-scale—whitman polemically placed collaborative filtering, the oldest and most popular technique used for algorithmic recommendation. because collaborative filters rely on users’ listening histories to make recommendations, they cannot recommend tracks that have never been listened to, nor can they make recommendations to brand-new users. this, whitman contended, was a failure to work at adequate scale, which manifested as neglect for new or obscure music. figure 1. care and scale, as opposites. figure by nick seaver. figure 2. care and scale, as two dimensions. figure redrawn by author from whitman (2012). figure 3. the care and scale space, populated by techniques. figure redrawn by author from whitman (2012). whitman’s diagram resembled the conventional “competitive matrix” used by startup founders to position their companies among rivals while seeking funding (walk 2020). and like those diagrams, his left the superlative top-right corner conspicuously empty, cleared for his own company. the echo nest distinguished itself, according to whitman, by its simultaneous concern for care and scale. in an article titled, like this one, “care and scale,” he wrote: “we prioritize care for the data and scale over ease and speed and the results work” (whitman 2013, 3). where other companies might push a product too quickly to market in the interest of rapid growth, whitman told me that he thought the echo nest was different: music was all-important, to everyone in the company, in a way that i don’t think other companies had… . if anyone’s going to do it, it better be us, because we actually care about doing it. from whitman’s perspective, his work had been unfairly lumped in with a set of naive and careless algorithmic competitors. “we’ve always felt that we were the good guys in a team of automatons,” he told me. whitman’s diagram was a rhetorical accomplishment, a reframing that made it easier to distinguish among large-scale systems that might be more or less careful and to refuse the idea that smallness and care necessarily went together. he offered a vision for how one might be a “good guy” in an increasingly vilified field. and while this refiguration was promotional and self-serving, it was also clarifying. by pulling care and scale apart, whitman opened up a space for contesting assumptions about their interrelation and for imagining new configurations of these values. the dirty world of human values i first encountered this style of reasoning at the place i first met whitman: miami beach, during the 2011 meeting of ismir, the international society for music information retrieval. it was there that i learned firsthand how people working in machine learning, and in computer science more generally, blurred the lines between their technical expertise and the way they made sense of the broader social world. since 2000, ismir has served as a meeting place for academic and industry researchers who use computers to analyze musical data. many researchers working at the major music streaming companies, like whitman, began their careers as graduate students at ismir. the conference features topics ranging from digitizing medieval scores to automatically identifying melodies. but by 2011, much of the research presented there was oriented in one way or another toward the design of music recommender systems. that year, ismir’s keynote speaker was david huron, a cognitive musicologist well known for his research on the psychology of musical enjoyment. but his keynote, titled “designing the future,” departed from that work in a philosophical direction. instead of focusing on music, huron presented a general theory about the relationship between technology and what he called “the dirty world of human values.” the basic human problem, as huron posed it, is that people have many potentially conflicting values. ordinarily, we resolve these values by compromising: we might choose to eat our cake, rather than to keep on having it; or, we might decide to eat only half our cake, so we can have (some of) it, too. however, huron claimed, according to moral and ethical philosophers (though he did not say which ones), such compromises should not be necessary.4 this was a problem that technology could solve. despite its amoral reputation, huron argued, engineering was best understood as a form of “applied moral and ethical philosophy.” the design of technology was not motivated by the pursuit of efficiency or the application of scientific knowledge, but rather “by the goal of reducing or eliminating value conflicts.” this was an unusually abstract argument for the ismir stage, and huron’s audience seemed somewhat bewildered. to explain what he meant to a crowd of computer scientists, huron turned to a technical and metaphorical language familiar to them: the language of vector mathematics. vectors, i would soon learn, were a ubiquitous feature of music recommender systems and conversations about them. while i vaguely recalled from a distant math class that vectors were essentially arrows—lines that pointed in some direction with a particular length—they seemed to mean something much more generic for people at the conference. in talks and along hallways, i heard researchers refer to all sorts of vectors: user vectors, song vectors, artist vectors, album vectors. when i finally asked a graduate student to explain, he told me that it was simple: a vector was “just a list of numbers.” a song vector was a list of numbers that represented a song; a user vector, a list that represented a user. those lists of numbers could be derived in many ways: a song’s vector might represent its acoustic qualities, some pattern of users who listen to it, or a combination of those and more. to talk about vectors was to talk about data in the abstract, being intentionally vague about that data’s sources. most machine learning systems parse the entities of the world by first rendering them as vectors. while a computer scientist might casually describe vectors as merely lists of numbers, to treat those lists as vectors is to imagine them as representing points in a space full of other vectors. draw a line from the origin to your point, and you have the arrow i recalled from high school math class. represented as vectors, objects are defined by their orientation—if two song vectors contain similar numbers, then their arrows will point in roughly the same direction. machine learning systems analyze the angle between vectors to produce a measure of similarity, or correlation. if vectors point in the same or in opposite directions, they are said to be correlated with each other (figure 4a). if they are at right angles, they are orthogonal to, or independent of, each other (figure 4b). algorithmic recommender systems use these correlations to produce recommendations: users whose vectors point in the same direction are likely to like the same things.5 figure 4. (a) correlated and (b) orthogonal pairs of vectors. figure by nick seaver. so, instead of talking about conflicts among values, huron spoke of correlations among value vectors. he illustrated his theory of technical ethics with a striking pair of values: sex and procreation. for most of human history, huron argued, people have valued sex and procreation but have been unable to pursue one without the other. in vector terms, sex and procreation are correlated: they point in the same direction (figure 5). the advent of contraception, huron claimed, rearranged these vectors, pushing them to (almost) 90º apart by making it possible to move in the direction of the sex vector without simultaneously moving toward procreation (figure 6). as huron put it, contraception decorrelated these values, making them orthogonal to each other. such was the power of engineering, which could alter the bearing of value vectors “through the manipulation of physical or social reality,” resolving value conflicts by decorrelating them out of existence. huron’s vectors reflected no underlying lists of numbers, but this was not unusual. even in technical use, vectorization is a tool for abstraction, for transforming ordinary tabular data into malleable orientations in multidimensional space (cf. mackenzie 2017). vector spaces are the symbolic terrain on which much of the labor of machine learning works, and they provide a widespread metaphorical language across the software industry. startup founders describe their employees as vectors; venture capitalists describe the companies they fund as vectors; in ordinary conversation, engineers will describe unrelated things as “orthogonal” to each other. figure 5. sex and procreation represented as correlated vectors. figure redrawn by author from presentation by david huron (2011). figure 6. sex and procreation represented as decorrelated vectors. figure redrawn by author from presentation by david huron (2011). we can now see whitman’s diagram of care and scale as a claim to decorrelation, achieved not through the invention of any particular technology, but through the organization of his company. when i asked, whitman told me he did not recall huron’s keynote, but he shared its vectoral imagination. he described the origins of his diagram to me in explicitly decorrelative terms, as though he had performed a statistical operation in his head: “in my mind, that’s how you do the 2d pca [principal component analysis] of all the other companies.” principal component analysis is a classic statistical technique for deriving orthogonal vectors from sets of data, meant to capture the major dimensions along which a data set varies. but again, these vectors reflected no underlying data. although vector metaphors may appear formal and data-driven—perhaps even like scientistic attempts to claim authority—they are in practice ad hoc and impressionistic, obscuring the heterogeneous mess of the empirical world under smooth, continuous surfaces. huron’s example, for instance, depended on heteronormative assumptions about what constitutes sex. it begged the question of what might count as the invention of contraception. his diagram implied that contraception facilitated procreation without sex, as well as sex without procreation—perhaps taking for granted the eventual development of new reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization. yet huron had identified a dynamic that anthropologists of new reproductive technologies had noted in the 1990s: technology had transformed the field of possible human choices, and “procreation can now be thought about as subject to personal preference and choice in a way that has never before been conceivable” (strathern 1992, 34). where anthropologists might be studiously neutral about the value of such changes, huron endorsed decorrelation itself as desirable. in his account, engineers seeking to “design the future” were working toward a decorrelated world in which people could choose freely among their values, with no choices impinging on any others. this was a culturally specific value regarding how values should relate—a typical fantasy of engineering’s value neutrality and an instance of what louise amoore (2020, 10) has identified as the common algorithmic “promise to render all agonistic political difficulty as tractable and resolvable.” it is easy to see, in resistance to contraception and new reproductive technologies, for instance, how people might value correlation itself and resist technical efforts to decorrelate. nevertheless, huron concluded: “a utopian world is one where all value vectors are orthogonal.”6 decorrelation as an ethical technique i call huron’s philosophy a decorrelative ethics, although to many readers it may seem to be essentially the opposite of what we mean by ethics. as andrea ballestero (2015) has noted, mathematical operations are commonly considered too rigid to be moral. while decorrelation offers a way to approach value conflicts, it is not concerned with making hard decisions, but rather with making decisions less hard, disaggregating values into more manageable form. easy choices and formulaic operations do not sound very ethical (cf. zigon 2019). however, as ballestero (2015) argues in her article about the ethics of formulas, for people who become familiar with a particular “calculation grammar,” technical practices are much less formulaic and much more morally potent than they seem. ballestero (2015, 266) describes how, for costa rican technocrats, a pricing algorithm links social and technical concerns, providing a “distinctively technical place for ethics” that is nonetheless “charged with potential for transformation.” the notion of a “grammar” captures the open-ended and transposable quality of technical devices like vector spaces, which can readily be adapted to new situations. in the metaphorical spread of vectors, we see such a grammar in action: for people like whitman and huron, decorrelation is a conceptual tool that provides a structure for thinking about social concerns. ethically charged techniques are not necessarily tools for abdicating moral responsibility; they can also serve as “instruments that sharpen people’s ethical awareness of their own decisions” (ballestero 2015, 266). calculation grammars provide equipment for ethical reasoning. decorrelation appears explicitly at moments of what jarrett zigon (2009, 260) calls “moral breakdown,” when conflicting moral demands collide and cause people “to stop and consider how to act or be morally appropriate.” zigon’s moral breakdown is analogous to what fortun and fortun (2005) identified as a double bind, and we can interpret whitman’s diagram as an effort to work through the collision of curatorial and algorithmic demands, which raised the question of what the makers of music recommendation should do if they wanted to do “good,” meeting a rising popular critique of their work. for those familiar with its grammar, decorrelation provides a resource for sense-making in everyday life, part of what zigon (2013, 202) elsewhere calls a “moral assemblage.” such assemblages provide people with a set of context-specific “ethical practices” to draw on in moments of conflict (zigon 2013, 202). joining ballestero’s and zigon’s thinking together, we can understand decorrelation as an ethical technique—like zigon’s ethical practices, but with a technical twist. when competing moral demands (like the injunction to care and the injunction to scale) collide, decorrelation offers a conceptual tool that people working in the world of machine learning have ready to hand for thinking through their problems. but decorrelation is not only a way of thinking. as huron suggested, technologies may produce decorrelation materially, by altering the conditions in which ethical decisions are made. we do not have to endorse huron’s vernacular technological determinism or the content of his contraceptive example to recognize that technologies can transform the conditions of ethical reasoning. this is a canonical argument made by critical scholars of ethics and technology (e.g., winner 1980; akrich 1992; verbeek 2006). ethical techniques are at once discursive and material, altering both the conditions of human decision making and how people understand those conditions. michael m. j. fischer (2001) has described such technomoral situations as “ethical plateaus”—conceptual and technical terrains on which ethical reasoning and debate play out. the metaphor of the plateau foregrounds the tectonics of the ethical sphere—everything that supports and constrains the range of ethical possibility, without making a strong distinction between the “hard” constraints typically associated with technology and the “soft” ones associated with society. as fortun and fortun (2005, 50) elaborate, ethical plateaus are constantly in slow transformation, producing a landscape both shifting and durable, “always altering perspectives on what is real, natural, inevitable, possible, and obligatory.” where fortun and fortun (2005, 50) focus on the ethical plateau as an environment external to actors that can “forcefully mold” their ethical perceptions, decorrelation takes the ethical plateau itself as an object of intentional engineering. we might say, quite geometrically, that by transforming one-dimensional moral dichotomies into two-dimensional spaces for reflection and action, decorrelation literally produces ethical plateaus. engineers are not only passive recipients of large-scale forces but also understand themselves as potentially transformative agents. this does not mean that engineers always achieve their goals or that they work beyond any determining context. despite the universalizing reputation of mathematics (and the universalizing aspirations of computer scientists), we can still understand decorrelation and its vectoral kin as particular techniques, embodying values and working toward ends that are not universally shared. i’ve already suggested that huron’s orthogonal utopia, a vision of unlimited and unimpinged choice, reflects a particular orientation toward ethics, placing a value on disaggregation itself. as critics have begun to offer normative recommendations for ethics within algorithmic systems, by contrast, they have pushed for an explicitly relational ethics (amrute 2019; zigon 2019; birhane 2021)—one that rejects the premises of decorrelative projects and instead aims to foreground and cultivate meaningful relations, grounded in an ethics of care. the fact that “care” has already been embraced by figures like whitman and others in the tech sector raises an important question: how do existing care practices compare with the goals envisioned by these critics? matters of care ellie called herself a “data gardener.” at the music recommendation company i call whisper, she managed the quality assurance (qa) team—a group largely populated by a rotating cast of interns. people on ellie’s team maintained whisper’s data: they inspected the company’s constantly updating database of artist popularity scores, looking for sudden dramatic changes that might be evidence of an error; they tested new recommendation algorithms, running various artists through and evaluating whether the outputs made sense. especially puzzling cases ended up at ellie’s desk for her to resolve. as a visitor, i spent a lot of my time doing qa work, sitting next to her. “i love music data gardening,” ellie messaged me one day, while cleaning up the metadata for an artist named boobie $oprano. gardening captured the way she tended to unruly algorithmic outputs, weeding out the inevitable errors that grew from whisper’s lively software system. she found it meditative, she told me: “zen like. must maintain balance in the garden.” like her colleagues, ellie considered herself someone who really cared about music, and she manifested this care through her close attention to musical data. work like ellie’s is often called “data cleaning,” and it has been the object of much ethnographic attention that emphasizes how important it is to making the “raw” data that informs scientific inquiry or powers algorithmic systems (e.g., walford 2017; biruk 2018; plantin 2019). scholars working within the tradition of feminist care ethics have argued for understanding this labor as a form of care and for making it more visible (e.g. mattern 2018; pinel, prainsack, and mckevitt 2020). data cleaning is essential to the ongoing functioning of these systems, it is often neglected or hidden, and it is conventionally feminized and racialized. (it is no accident that ellie called her work “gardening,” while her male colleagues working on data infrastructure would call themselves “plumbers.”) whitman, too, regarded qa work as the prototypical form of care within a recommendation company. as he wrote on his blog, in a self-consciously tautological definition: care is a layer of quality assurance, editing and sanity checks, real-world usage and analysis and, well, care, on top of any systematic results. (whitman 2012) quality assurance workers took care of algorithmic inputs and tended to algorithmic outputs. to do this well required a familiarity with music that made it possible to recognize subtle errors in metadata across many genres and to understand what made an algorithmic playlist good in the absence of any objective metric for correctness. ellie’s meditative engagement with musical data resembles the kind of affective ethical attention that sareeta amrute (2019) has called “attunement,” relying not only on the application of strict rules but also on an intuitive engagement with the objects of labor. this was not a matter of mobilizing “good” taste, but rather of possessing what one of ellie’s colleagues called “a wikipedia kind of knowledge” about music—a wide-ranging, sometimes cursory, understanding of the broader musical world. when whitman insisted that his company uniquely cared about music, this was why it mattered: workers had to rely on their own cultural intuitions and care about music to know whether their system worked well. he recalled how his insistence on care had emerged in response to a particularly bad recommender released by one of the echo nest’s competitors: it was “this terrible, hilarious thing—why did they release it? how could they have possibly done that?” care was sometimes conflated with quality, which was its evidence. “back then,” he told me, “care meant ‘never show anything bad—don’t just do something because the computer said to.’” human checking was essential. we may be skeptical of invocations of care like these, seeing them as status jockeying among corporations. but as maría puig de la bellacasa (2017, 10) warns in the book from which i borrow this section’s title, “there are many reasons to treat the reductive appropriation of care in the contexts of the ethical ideologies of the global north with attention rather than scorn.” rather than endorse a “hegemonic ethics” (puig de la bellacasa 2017, 132) that presumes to already know what care must be, puig de la bellacasa calls on us to attend to how care is enacted in the world, even in settings that appear inimical to it. indeed, this has become a common theme in anthropological work on care, where the signature analytic move is to divest care of its common associations with positive affect and desirability. care, in this school of thought, is not defined by nursing, mothering, or any of the other stereotypical caring professions, nor is it understood as essentially good—for its givers, for its recipients, or in the outcomes it produces. instead, care refers to the work of sustaining relationships that keep the world going (puig de la bellacasa 2017; hobart and kneese 2020). as lisa stevenson (2014, 3) writes in her ethnography of “bureaucratic care” in the arctic, shifting our understanding of care away from its frequent associations with either good intentions, positive outcomes, or sentimental responses to suffering allows us to nuance the discourse on care so that both the ambivalence of our desires and the messiness of our attempts to care can come into view. care work is necessary to produce any sort of world, not only the ones we might deem desirable. we can think of this analytic move as a kind of decorrelation, separating care from positive affect. like whitman’s decorrelation of care from scale, this transformation opens up a space of analytic possibility: it makes it possible to see care in sites of violence or harm, like rape crisis centers (mulla 2014), and to recognize that locations full of good feeling may be careless, such as international circuits of care work that exclude and oppress (murphy 2015).7 it has also facilitated studies of care that leave the prototypical dyadic scenes of caring and follow care “across many scales and dimensions” (mattern 2018): caring for ecosystems, populations, or infrastructures (stevenson 2014; bocci 2017; ishii 2017). feminist care ethics, with its persistent concern for relationality, clearly works in a different political register than huron’s roughly libertarian moral philosophy. but it demonstrates that decorrelation may be useful for more than disaggregating values from each other. the question to answer, following this work, is not whether care is present, but rather how care is enacted (mol 2008). in music recommendation, as i’ve described, care manifests primarily as “care for data” (whitman 2013, 3). however suffused it may be with positive affect, technologists’ focus on caring for data can have negative consequences for other parts of the overall sociotechnical system that are kept out of frame. ethnographies of medical data work, for instance (e.g., pine and mazmanian 2016), describe how patients’ data can displace patients themselves as objects of attention and care. while many critics of music streaming (e.g., pelly 2017) argue that these systems harm musicians’ livelihoods and creative work, such concerns are not addressed by caring for data. whitman argued that this form of care would ultimately produce a system “useful to musicians,” but direct engagement with artists happened elsewhere in the corporate structure, beyond the recommender team’s control. when we see “careful” alternatives to algorithmic systems, like the yams, or critiques that suggest care as a solution to algorithmic ills, we need to remember that forms of care exist even within apparently careless settings, and their presence does not guarantee any particular outcome. because of the assumed correlation between care and scale, it can be hard to see practices like “bureaucratic care” or “care for the data” as care at all, but we can understand them as forms of care that have taken root in particular organizational structures, grown in relation with other values. to understand how they fit into local ethical vernaculars—and to mount more thorough critiques of them—requires an appreciation of how care is enacted through these relations. as feminist studies of care have indicated, caring is complicated. the promise of scalability unlike care, whitman (2012) wrote, “scale is easy to explain.” in the world of software startups, the value and meaning of scale is usually taken to be obvious: companies aspire to capture more users, to grow their market valuations, and to increase the amount of data they collect and analyze. large companies like facebook or google are models of success, and countless publications targeted at would-be founders mine those companies’ histories for lessons in how to scale up. paul graham (2012), a venture capitalist and influential writer of such advice, argues that a focus on growth defines startups: they are “designed to grow fast,” different from conventional businesses, “in the same way a redwood seedling has a different destiny from a bean sprout.” rapid growth is essential to the economics of venture capital, which relies on rare, dramatic successes to underwrite portfolios of risky investments (cutler 2018). successfully scaled companies are desirable not only because they make money proportional to their size but also because scaling up is often understood to make them work better. in recommender systems, scale is closely tied to functionality: “you have to know about as much music as possible to make good recommendations,” whitman (2012) wrote, “we track over two million artists and over 30 million songs and there is no way a manually curated database can reach that level of knowledge.” developers understand recommender systems as a solution to the problem of overload posed by large catalogs; if they do not work at scale, then they do not work at all. while scale may seem simple and desirable in the tech industry, anthropologists have usually considered scale to be a “problem” (carr and lempert 2016, 4)—an object of suspicion, implying calculation, capitalism, and hierarchy. anna lowenhaupt tsing (2012, 506), for instance, has written extensively about the “mounting piles of ruins” that the pursuit of scalability leaves in its wake, offering one of anthropology’s most influential accounts of scale, premised on the idea that it is (inversely) correlated with care. tracing the contemporary pursuit of scale back to the development of caribbean sugarcane plantations, tsing (2012, 513) argues that scalability was achieved through care’s abandonment: replacing relations of care between farmers and crops, plantation designs led to alienation between workers and cane; cane was the enemy. at least in theory, such labor avoided transformative relationships and thus could not disturb system design. to achieve scale required the cruel elimination of the kinds of potentially transformative relations that feminist theorists call care. though capitalists like graham may adopt organic metaphors, tsing argues that such scaling is alien to much of the living world.8 in addition to seeing scale as a problem, anthropologists—including tsing (2005) and a host of linguistic anthropologists—have seen it as something to be problematized, arguing that “the scales that social actors rely upon to organize, interpret, orient, and act in their worlds are not given but made—and rather laboriously so” (carr and lempert 2016, 3). we should be wary, then, of making claims about scale as though it were simply an objective phenomenon. in the anthropological literature, scale is not a matter of objective size but the consequence of comparison, and if we want to understand scale, we need to look closely at the comparisons on which it depends. examining tech industry usage, we can see that scale is indeed used comparatively: concerns about working “at scale” rarely refer to any particular size, but remain intentionally abstract and open-ended. they make a loose comparison between the present and an anticipated future, or between one organization and another (avle et al. 2020). for software startups, scale is not a matter of size—it is a kind of promise. we have already seen how such comparison works for claims to smallness in the case of the yams, which figured human curators as small-scale and careful by defining them against algorithms. conversely, tech companies’ claims to largeness are often figured against manual labor. spotify advertises both algorithmically generated playlists and “handcrafted” ones, compiled by human curators. whitman contrasted the scalable data apparatus of the echo nest with a “manually curated database.” hands and curation offer a symbolic alternative to algorithmic machinery—a vision of craft labor, full of careful attention at small scale (cf. paxson 2013). if you want to make recommendations to millions of users, they argue, you can’t do it “by hand.” this is why companies making claims to scalability conventionally hide care work. if we assume that care is synonymous with small-scale work, then its persistence threatens to reveal scalability’s big secret: as tsing (2012, 510) writes, “scalability never fulfills its own promises”; it “uses articulations with nonscalable forms even as it denies or erases them” (tsing 2012, 506). plantations depended on the uncompensated and unappreciated work of enslaved people, as well as local microbial ecologies that supported cane growth. today, companies still depend on feminized and racialized “articulation work” to cover the gap between the local mess of the world and the formal aspirations of corporate action (star and strauss 1999). as lilly irani (2015) has argued, startups commonly draw their corporate boundaries to intentionally exclude “janitorial” work: a company employing a dozen engineers in a california office can present itself as “lean” and scalable, while hundreds of globally distributed ad hoc “ghost workers” (gray and suri 2019) do the care work of labeling training data for machine learning, cleaning up databases, or moderating posts on social media, removing offensive materials so that companies can continue to grow uninterrupted (roberts 2019; ruckenstein and turunen 2019). scalability is not an intrinsic quality of particular techniques, but rather a consequence of where project boundaries are drawn, in the service of particular visions of corporate futures. this insight about corporate boundaries and aspirations suggests an answer to the question lurking in the background of this essay: why would the work of playlist curators like the yams seem intrinsically opposed to scale, while the work of data curators at the echo nest did not? for the yams, operating under a correlated understanding of care and scale, individuals making playlists constituted the obvious small-scale counterparts to the scalable apparatus of algorithmic recommendation. but with care and scale decorrelated, care work no longer functions as an essentially small point of comparison against which scalar claims can be made. this decorrelation was not achieved simply by whitman’s declaration that he would pursue care and scale at once; rather, it was embodied in organizational structure. what distinguished data curators from playlist curators was their location in this structrure and where their care was directed. because qa work improved the quality of centralized data stores, it was seen as compatible with scale: the fruits of ellie’s data gardening, for instance, could be algorithmically propagated throughout whisper’s services. a playlist curator at the yams, by contrast, worked at the “edge” of the system, oriented toward individual users. claims to scalability are still made through the strategic drawing of corporate boundaries, but in decorrelation we find a shifting strategy that makes it plausible for startup founders to embrace kinds of work that once would have seemed incompatible with scale. masters of scale listening to the first episode of masters of scale, a podcast for aspiring entrepreneurs, one might be surprised to discover that it does not offer advice about how to eradicate nonscalable work from a business plan. instead, the host—the venture capitalist reid hoffman—argues for the importance of the nonscalable, seeming to echo tsing (2012): “if you want your company to truly scale, you have to do things that don’t scale” (hoffman 2018). the episode is titled “handcrafted,” and it features an interview with one of the founders of the short-term rental site airbnb, who describes how, in the early days of his company, the founders took on all sorts of nonscalable work: they visited individual users to help them with the site, they offered free photography to fill out their listings, they worked to “win them over, one by one.” this counterintuitive advice came from graham (2013), whose blog post titled “do things that don’t scale” argues that startups are “so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take heroic measures at first.” these measures range from personally contacting new users to manually performing the kinds of data work that most companies would eventually seek to automate or outsource. while founders besotted with scalability might think of such work as anathema to good business plans, graham insists that these nonscalable efforts are not a “necessary evil” to be avoided, but rather a crucial part of a company’s “dna.” where tsing (2012, 515) writes that “scalable projects are articulations between scalable and nonscalable elements, in which nonscalable effects can be hidden from project investors,” here we see investors embracing the nonscalable, working to bring it inside of scalability projects not as a dirty secret, but as a conscious strategy. where graham associates nonscalable work with the early days of a startup’s existence, hoffman argues that founders in particular need to retain a tendency toward the handcrafted, even as the rest of their organization scales up, because new problems arise that cannot be solved by scaling up old solutions. “the sharpest founders never fully abandon the [handcrafted] mindset, no matter how big their company gets,” hoffman says, and their ongoing nonscalable endeavors provide material for the constant renovation that capitalism requires. in his coauthored book, blitzscaling, hoffman argues against the ideology of scaling as radical repeatability described by tsing, claiming that “a global giant isn’t simply a start-up that’s been multiplied by a thousand… . each major increment of growth represents a qualitative as well as a quantitative change” (hoffman and yeh 2018, 37). this is a theory of scalability that explicitly requires transformative engagement with the world.9 to reconcile nonscalable work with scalar aspirations, graham (2013) makes use of the calculation grammar of vector mathematics, concluding his post with a section titled “vector.” he writes: “the need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars.” “scalars,” here, refer not to scaling, but to one-dimensional values, contrasted with multidimensional vectors. instead of reckoning the value of startup ideas as simply their capacity to scale, graham suggests, “we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you’re going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you’re going to do initially to get the company going.” by imagining startups as two-dimensional vectors, with one dimension aimed at scale and the other at ineradicable nonscalable work, graham offers a decorrelative way to reconcile values that had seemed like opposites. we may rightly wonder whether this embrace of the nonscalable is just another instance of what tsing (2012) calls “piracy”—the raiding of nonscalable worlds by scalability projects. indeed, in blitzscaling—named after the nazi military strategy of blitzkrieg—the only mention of ethics comes in a discussion of “ethical piracy,” where the authors suggest that founders should behave like “lovable rogues” who break the rules but follow a “personal code of ethics” (hoffman and yeh 2018, 180). this is clearly not an endorsement of feminist care ethics or organizational critique, but is rather a reimagination of how kinds of work once assumed inimical to scale might be made compatible with it—an effort to reshape the ethical plateau. this reclamation of work previously denigrated or obscured does not necessarily answer critics. the foregrounding of some care work does not entail the foregrounding of all care work, and hoffman and graham still speak in the founder-glorifying language of venture capital: their nonscalable work is “heroic,” undertaken by “masters of scale” who are expected to perform unsustainable amounts of work for a chance at enriching themselves, in a financing scheme designed to reliably enrich their funders. such companies may still have plans to automate or outsource this work, and even those that keep care workers like data curators in-house are still likely to closely manage the corporate boundary, keeping contract workers like custodial staff or content moderators on the outside. internal to companies, decorrelation can facilitate a division of ethical labor. understood as independent axes, care and scale can be pursued by distinct groups of workers. whitman spoke of “care people” and “scale people” in his company—while he insisted that it was important that everyone cared about music, the work of care was not evenly distributed. in many tech companies, specific teams are tasked with work on qa, ethics, or “trust and safety,” while other teams avidly pursue scale. these care teams are commonly underresourced and disproportionately staffed by minoritized workers; when their goals come into conflict with scale, the care groups usually lose (metcalf, moss, and boyd 2019). while i was revising this essay, for instance, google fired two of its prominent ai ethicists for their role in producing a research paper that explored problems with the large-scale ai models the company generates (bender et al. 2021). only a decorrelated ethics, one that did not draw into question the desirability of scale, could be entertained. while decorrelation may provide terms by which care (or a proactive interest in ethics more broadly) can be brought into technical organizations, it can also constrain such efforts, requiring that questions of care be kept orthogonal to questions of scale as a matter of organizational principle. * * * care and scale are definitionally flexible and essentially comparative: there is no absolute measure of either carefulness or scalability on which we might ground ourselves. what i have described in this article is a shift in how the relationship between these values is imagined in the tech industry, producing new grounds for ethical thought and action. this shift is evident in aspirational statements from founders, advice from investors, and in the organization of work. if anthropologists presume that care and scale are necessarily correlated and opposed, we will find it hard to map this emerging ethical plateau, where visions of blitzkrieg and handcrafting intertwine. as we refine our disciplinary critiques, we may also find something useful in decorrelation for ourselves: it reminds us to not take our terms for granted and to entertain the possibilities of a “speculative ethics” (puig de la bellacasa 2017), where the relations among values are not set in stone, but are rather shifting and malleable. thinking decorrelatively about the relation between care and scale can help us avoid idealizing the small for its own sake; it may also help us discern variety among large-scale projects and recognize emergent forms of care within them. at a moment when we find ourselves faced with many large-scale problems—from climate change to structural racism to infectious disease—we may want to remain open to the possibility of reconciling care with scale. reimagining the relations among our values is a task too important to be left to technologists alone. abstract the people who make algorithmic recommender systems want apparently incompatible things: they pride themselves on the scale at which their software works, but they also want to treat their materials and users with care. care and scale are commonly understood as contradictory goals: to be careful is to work at small scale, while working at large scale requires abandoning the small concerns of care. drawing together anthropological work on care and scale, this article analyzes how people who make music recommender systems try to reconcile these values, reimagining what care and scale mean and how they relate to each other in the process. it describes decorrelation, an ethical technique that metaphorically borrows from the mathematics of machine learning, which practitioners use to reimagine how values might relate with each other. this “decorrelative ethics” facilitates new arrangements of care and scale, which challenge conventional anthropological theorizing. [ethics; care; scale; algorithms; music] notes acknowledgments thanks to the many people who have carefully engaged with this argument as it has evolved, including the tufts department of anthropology, the labor tech reading group, sareeta amrute, dominic boyer, li cornfeld, michael ekstrand, stefan helmreich, anna lauren hoffmann, amy johnson, deirdre loughridge, beth semel, maria sidorkina, jarret zigon, and colloquium audiences at northwestern, amherst, and itu copenhagen. the anonymous reviewers and editor heather paxson of cultural anthropology deserve my particular gratitude, as do jessica lockrem and the rest of the production staff. this research was supported by grants from the wenner-gren foundation (dissertation fieldwork grant 8797), the national science foundation (ddrig 1323834), and the intel science and technology center for social computing at uc irvine. 1. although it never became clear whether alex was a human, a shared corporate persona, a chatbot, or some agentic mixture of these, i have elected to give him a pseudonym here. throughout this article, any person introduced by first name alone is pseudonymous. 2. for an analogous case in a different industry and national context, see shuang l. frost’s (2020) account of a “small and beautiful” chinese ridesharing platform. 3. malte ziewitz (2019) describes such work as “ethigraphy.” see daniel neyland (2016) for a similar effort mounted from an ethnomethodological orientation. this understanding of ethics is thus a narrower companion to what louise amoore (2020) theorizes as “cloud ethics”—a form of ethics (and politics) distributed through the apparatus of algorithmic systems themselves. 4. when i emailed huron later to ask about his philosophical sources, he could not recall any in particular; the idea was one he had considered for many years, and it had become more of a normative commitment than an empirical claim. 5. such vector representations of consumer desire have been used in market 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anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 509-537, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.11 spectacle, value, and basic income; or, labor and the “maddening state” cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 225-250, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.07 spectacle, value, and basic income; or, labor and the “maddening state” kenneth mcgill southern connecticut state university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2450-7194 how could one criticize something so obvious as labor, or even just think that labor itself could fall into crisis? —robert kurz, “arbeit, arbeit, arbeit” the corpse mediates between the state and the people. —begoña aretxaga, “maddening states” basic income—the policy of paying every member of society a minimum income regardless of the worthiness of their needs or their willingness to work—has existed as a proposal for some time. it has famously seen promotion by pundits and political thinkers across the ideological spectrum. even in europe, one often hears how even arch-conservative u.s.-americans such as richard nixon and milton friedman supported this apparently open-handed policy. in germany, where i did the fieldwork described in this essay, commentators have frequently held up universal basic income as a uniquely “post-ideological” innovation.1 it indeed finds promoters and detractors within every political party represented in the german parliament. the politics on the ground, however, seem to follow their own logic. in spite of drawing adherents from across social and political groups, support for basic income seems insistently to collide with forces of conservatism engrained in popular consciousness. the result is a policy proposal indeed capable of scrambling political definitions and producing new alliances, but one more often seeming “stalled” (ferguson 2015, 158, 200)—unable to advance through institutional channels for no clear reason. i take on this problem by arguing that the categorical relaxation of labor discipline represented by a basic income policy challenges ubiquitous experiences of value firmly lodged in popular consciousness. basic income is not simply a question of who works and who does not, nor even a question of how economic goods are to be distributed among consumers. it is also a question of how economic value, and with it much of daily life, makes sense. to an important degree, this ethnography shows that we can know the foundational character of labor through its undoing. while not everyone must work to live, labor is widely understood as the quintessentially legitimate solution to personal need. this links it closely to economic value as an expression of that need—an understanding further bolstered by the social state,2 whose form suggests redistribution as a supplement to an ostensibly prior circulation of economic value. in general, the social state is capable of providing welfare, but does not manage to alter labor’s primacy in the social constitution of value. because they suggest that labor might be more than supplemented by state-led redistribution, basic income policies trouble this arrangement. in germany as elsewhere, a threat to the social construction of economic value is bound to emerge as a threat to society. even for the most firm adherents of this policy, it results in an experience of spectacle and abjection such as the one described below. my informants protest against a social state that penalizes them for refusing arduous, low-wage work. this is not, however, a “labor struggle” (arbeitskampf) of the type that fueled the great political upheavals of the nineteenth century that ultimately led to the emergence of sozialstaatlichkeit—“social-state-ness”—as a core principle of everyday german culture. the stakes for my informants do not include wages, nor even the social guarantees (sozialgarantien) that have allowed capital and labor to operate at a standstill for well over a century by supplementing those wages. rather, my informants open a conflict centered on the very category of labor3—one that asks about the general role work has in the construction of legitimate political subjects, rather than about the particular wages paid for work or the social guarantees that might surround the institution of work. the political theorist kathi weeks (2011, 8) puts the point in the following way: “the activity of labor and the social relations that shape, direct and manage it” are “the locus of capitalist valorization.” she does not suggest here that labor is the source of value, as many people did in the time of adam smith or david ricardo (an idea frequently derided as the “labor theory of value”). rather, weeks claims that labor operates as a crucial—indeed the crucial—category of quotidian experience through which subjects interpret economic value. weeks draws this insight from the reinterpretation of karl marx’s grundrisse and capital given several decades ago by moishe postone (1993). a similar point, also ultimately attributed to marx, can be found in the work of the german “value critic” robert kurz (2011; see epigraph). at the center of both postone’s and kurz’s project sits the notion that the crucial intervention made by the “mature” marx involves his systematic exploration of economic value as “abstract labor time.” marx argues that the reduction of many different kinds of activities to the single category of labor crucially allows economic value to be legible not just as individual preference (i.e., as a disutility outweighed by the utility found in wages) but as a genuinely social and cultural phenomenon. focusing on the way in which abstract labor of this type is constructed—and not on the ostensibly revolutionary point of view of workers elsewhere supposed by marx—means eschewing the “worldview marxism” (postone 1993) and “class struggle fetishism” (kurz and lohoff 1989) that have long given meaning to readings of capital while nonetheless hampering key insights into capital itself. ultimately, by understanding the category of abstract labor, especially in relation to the conceptual achievement of economic value and the resulting circulation of commodities, we can also comprehend economic relationships dominated by capital in reasonably holistic terms. on the basis of this approach, weeks (2011, 145) argues that “basic income can be demanded as a way to gain some measure of distance and separation from the wage relation, and that distance might in turn create the possibility of a life no longer so thoroughly and relentlessly dependent upon work for its qualities.” the point here is not that basic income makes for a good way to provide for needs, that it is more affordable than administering the current social state, that it would have a salutary affect on wages, or some such. while each of these points merit debate as rational policy goals, weeks rather insists that basic income, by puncturing the category of abstract labor, provides a window onto a society structured by economic exploitation. the very commitment to basic income helps to uncouple ordinary experience from a material dependence on wage-earning that is constructive of the phenomenon of economic value itself, rather than simply some set of economic benefits acquired through work. i have the following to add to weeks’s argument: first, achieving this kind of “distance and separation” is no simple matter; and, second, the actual form this achievement takes reveals many of the underlying issues to which she refers. in many ways, basic income in germany constitutes a relatively minor policy change. as i describe in the following section, the german social state has already established an “existential minimum” (existenzminimum) below which incomes can fall only for purposes of discipline and punishment. at least by formal definition, a basic income would attain if the monetary sanctions used to these ends were simply stricken from the law. were this the case, wage relationships would quite obviously continue to exist on a mass scale, and abstract labor would likely continue to function as a basic formative device for german society. still, basic income would open up a novel, and at least initially threatening, space within which the obviousness of the category of labor could not be taken for granted. the informants with whom i worked recognize that achieving basic income is not a straightforward matter. they make reasoned arguments about basic income, and are indeed happy to have long discussions about, for example, the effects of basic income on wage levels, taxation, and unionization across a variety of class and income groups. nonetheless, the core of their political engagement involves recourse to the spectacular. this brings me to the second theoretical focus of the present essay. theatrical and provocative displays centered on the lives of the unemployed are preferred to more traditional political organizing. the resulting actions (aktionen) tend to foreground loss and abjection in the course of a direct engagement with the public. i intend to theorize these actions here not as tactical maneuvers, nor even as well-wrought strategies. rather, i approach them more holistically. as unemployed people, my informants find themselves faced with a shared, collective fear and dread about the loss of labor discipline. they participate in protest in reaction to these feelings as they might encounter them both in others and in themselves. particularly notable in germany is a thriving discourse on “social scroungers” (sozialschmarotzer—not dissimilar to the u.s.-american notion of the “welfare cheat”) that frames the unemployed as a general threat to society. basic income policy would seem to generalize the tension that underlies this discourse—making the putative “scrounging” of the unemployed into an accepted norm. the result is a form of protest that confronts deeply embedded norms by mobilizing figures of abjection in spectacular fashion. to address this aspect of my data, i turn to several basic definitions of spectacle drawn from the media and social theorist guy debord. for a basic definition of spectacle, debord has yet to be surpassed. he describes a collapse of relationality in spectacular moments, allowing for characteristically transfixed subjectivities to emerge in an otherwise fluid and interactional world (debord 1977). however, i find some aspects of debord’s approach limiting, and turn to the insights generated by begoña aretxaga’s more ethnographically specific research on political protest in northern ireland to extend his insights. aretxaga (1995) shows how spectacular political protests can be linked to the abject. in her ethnography, political subjectivity finds itself transfixed through an encounter with abjection. in her fieldwork, critics contest the highly rationalized penal state imposed as part of british colonial control of northern ireland by mobilizing feces, menstrual blood, and starving bodies as material that defies the state’s control by virtue of its abject nature. in my fieldwork, starving bodies, gravestones, and money are similarly deployed. my argument, then, has two sides. on the one side lies an argument about labor and value. it emphasizes the notion that economic value only emerges when labor is recognized as quintessentially legitimate. on the other side we have an argument about abjection and spectacle. it emphasizes the notion that abjection and spectacle alter the deep attachment to labor this arrangement implies. the attachment to labor might be a psychic one, as when people derive a sense of individual dignity or identity from work. more important for my purposes, however, is that this attachment is also built into institutions such as the social state by virtue of its role in the mediation of economic value. thus confronting the public with the notion that labor is not per se legitimate unleashes, in a spectacular manner, a hidden process of abjection usually concealed by the hegemonic form of the social state. background since 2003, the german state has maintained a single level of benefit for all those unemployed for more than six months. this so-called hartz-iv payment is named for the fourth section of the hartz reforms of labor market policy enacted into law in 2002 (see figure 1). in west germany after world war ii (and subsequently in the “new states” of the former east germany after 1990), unemployment benefits were primarily set to a percentage of previous wages. although considerable variability existed, these benefits were generally maintained over the long term. this helped credit the german social state with maintaining social structures even in the face of growing unemployment after the 1970s, and continues to contribute to the international reputation of the german social state as generous in its protections of workers. yet the hartz reforms upended a central tenet of this tradition by establishing an “existential minimum” (existenzminimum) to which all benefits would be limited. many who were already unemployed, but who nevertheless had well-paying careers behind them, experienced the hartz reforms as a major disaster. my informants frequently describe “falling” or “slipping” (rutschen) into a beleaguered or blighted existence after 2003. indeed, it is interesting to note that although some of those at the lowest social aid level of benefit actually received higher benefit payments after 2003, they still complained about the hartz reforms as entailing a loss in status because of the explicitly labeled “minimum existence” it offered. figure 1. peter hartz, the former volkswagen executive and “architect” of the hartz labor market reforms that bear his name. photo by alexander kowalski. perhaps most crucial in the historical shift toward “hartz” (as the current social benefits regime is usually called) were the new powers given to job counselors (arbeitsvermittler) to levy sanctions on their clients. a missed appointment with a counselor could often result in a 10 percent reduction in benefits for a month or two, but repeated refusals to comply with a counselor’s wishes (especially refusal to apply for a low-wage job) could result in 30 percent, 60 percent, or even 100 percent sanctions. given policymakers’ renewed emphasis on the need for the unemployeds’ “activation” (aktivierung) through the use of sanctions, it seems unsurprising that the current system of benefits generates constant complaints from unemployed people about counselors’ punitive attitudes and unfairness. while job counselors can be helpful to their clients in important ways, most unemployed people understand that the primary role of these government workers is to push those they counsel toward low-wage, insecure, and part-time work. beginning in 2014, i became acquainted with a circle of protestors who sought to draw attention to the plight of hartz-iv recipients in creative and provocative ways. it is not unusual for unemployed people to fake an illness or otherwise prevaricate in the face of their job counselors’ demands. this new group of informants, however, distinguished themselves by the way they explicitly refused to follow this course, sometimes formulating a “life without chicanery” (existenz ohne schikanen) as an explicitly political demand. indeed, often their goal was to confront or provoke their counselors by refusing low-wage work, garnering sanctions as a point of pride, or perhaps even as a form of passive resistance against the punitive bureaucracy. the particular group with whom i became acquainted had begun to form several years earlier, when a man named ralph boes delivered an impassioned appeal on the steps of his local unemployment agency (jobcenter). the supporters garnered by ralph through this act agreed that their first major protest action (protestaktion) would involve delivering roses to jobcenter case workers. they conceived the action as a gesture of solidarity with those required to enforce labor discipline as a term of their own employment, people who might also end up as hartz-iv recipients should they refuse to participate in the levying of sanctions. their “rose action” (rosenaktion) offers a good indication of the highly situated involvement of a particular set of activists. by the time i met ralph in 2014, a core group had incorporated themselves as the bürgerinitative bedingungsloses grundeinkommen berlin (berlin citizens’ initiative for an unconditional basic income). meetings of the citizen’s initiative were loosely organized, with few prescribed roles or procedures. the activists i met at those meetings seemed part of a loose network more than of any rigid institutional structure. this stood in clear contrast to another group rather more traditionally organized, which called itself the netzwerk grundeinkommen (basic income network). drawing from germany as a whole, the network focused on commissioning a parliamentary inquiry into the feasibility of basic income. protest, spectacle, abjection during the summer and fall of 2015, i had the unusual experience of observing a hunger strike from several thousand miles away. my sabbatical over, i had recently returned to the united states. my work in and around the citizen’s initiative would become the basis for several case studies (mcgill 2017, 2019). even as i began writing these up, however, new events began to unfold back in berlin. ralph declared that, since he had been 100 percent sanctioned (vollsanktionert) by his job counselor, he would no longer be eating. he repeatedly clarified that he was not, in fact, undergoing a hunger strike initiated at his own volition. rather, he was simply publicly living out the condition of “sanction starvation” (sanktionshunger) forced on him by the state. hunger, ralph claimed, did not symbolize his dedication to the cause of basic income; it instead constituted the material result of an already existing government policy of benefit sanctions. as july and august slowly passed, my alarm grew. the thin pretext of ralph’s actions seemed particularly glaring from half a world away. i knew he was still eligible for the grocery coupons (lebensmittlegutscheine) reserved for those whose benefits have been fully sanctioned. and even though he objected to these on principle, i also knew that he had scores of supporters who offered to pay for him to eat. he was already living in an apartment paid for by the citizen’s initiative (and which also served as the group’s headquarters). because ralph so obviously did not need to go without food, it worried me to see him sticking so closely to the argument that the jobcenter had forced him into starvation. like at least some german observers, i reckoned that he would either capitulate and nullify much of the attention he had already garnered or would die in a basically futile gesture. in retrospect, of course, it seems obvious that such concerns form a crucial part of the dynamic surrounding a hunger strike. my feeling that ralph was being reckless simply constituted a geographically distanced, though otherwise commonplace, form of participant observation. in early september, when i learned that ralph was consuming a small amount of vegetable broth and honey every day, i began to more carefully consider his predicament. he was clearly staving off the effects of starvation but still undergoing a slower and less threatening process of malnutrition. any stark conception i had of what it might mean to be on hunger strike had become well eroded by the fall. still, when ralph was hospitalized on the seventieth day of the protest with a heart complaint, even his closest supporters seemed alarmed. in an interview posted to the internet, his life partner explained that she had opposed the protest throughout, but that she now stood in solidarity with ralph: we keep getting people who come to visit ralph and say, “ralph, just quit starving yourself.” and we are always, “yes that is fine, but please just tell it to the jobcenter.” since ralph isn’t getting any money for food, what should he do? everything that he can actually do is a degradation. ultimately, ralph called off the protest after 132 days, declaring on november 10, 2015 that he had accepted “asylum” in a local church (kirchenasyl). he would only eat while on their grounds, and the church’s members would pay for his nourishment in an act of solidarity against a set of government policies they also found inhumane and unacceptable. two things stand out here. first, my own experience told me that there was something of a spectacle involved. although physically distant from ongoing events in berlin and maintaining only sporadic contact with friends living there, i felt compelled to constantly grapple with my ethnographic role, and my relationship to ralph in particular. as the above quotation indicates, i was not alone in this. among a certain group of people, the desire to get ralph to “listen to reason” was very strong. debord (1977, §18) defines a spectacle as “the opposite of dialogue,” and ralph’s actions seemed to showcase something of this refusal to engage—as if he was simply mired in his own viewpoint. of course, this is arguably the sort of spectator’s appreciation of things that ralph sought. by putting his body forward as vulnerable and abject, he simultaneously presented himself as unwilling to engage on this vulnerable and abject status. second, this sort of spectacular dynamic, in spite of being the “opposite of dialogue,” still retains something of a pragmatic character. throughout his sanction starvation (and from this point forward i will simply adopt ralph’s terminology), the citizen’s initiative set up a small table on a plaza near the brandenburg gate and invited passersby and acquaintances to join ralph for conversation. ralph did seek to draw spectators to his hungry body, but he also sought to frame these same people as interlocutors in a discussion about basic income, hartz-iv benefit sanctions, and a series of related matters. according to debord (1977, §2), a spectacle involves the capture of a viewer’s attention and the pursuant reduction of some entity to “an object of mere contemplation.” the paradigm for debordian spectacle has often been advertising or broadcast media. this case, however, seems to make clear that spectacle can also serve a role in political resistance. it is true that ralph’s spectacle seemed to have a limited valence, cementing an overtly political relationship with people already inclined to sympathize with his cause. still, the spectacle was achieved. some of the most poignant moments of his protest involved the complex mixture of sympathy, anger, and resentment he aroused in discussants who objected to his position on basic income, resented the spectacle he made of his view, and yet could not help but engage with him while sitting at his little table. as of this writing, i am convinced that ralph never intended to directly court death, but that he nevertheless had some frightening moments. shortly before his september hospitalization, ralph gave the following account of himself: in [the] hartz-iv [system] there are a lot of dead, but i would be the first to really die in public. i don’t want to die, i’ll say that openly. i don’t want to die. … the ideal is for people to see in general that hartz-iv can lead to death. that really isn’t known. hartz-iv really shows its power in the whole low-wage sector, by playing with people’s fear of death. the fear of death leads people to take any work under any conditions. for me, it is important that this is finally grasped. … you are really handled like a life that is not worth a life [lebensunwertes leben] … that’s the correct [phrase]. my real goal is to get rid of the fear of death. you see, i have gotten rid of my own fear of death. i can die now. that doesn’t mean that i want to. but then sanctions can’t put pressure on me. there is a back-and-forth, dialogical process represented here: the german social state, and with it the low-wage labor market, depends on the fear of death in its address of ordinary citizens, but the person unafraid of death renders that state powerless. readiness to “die in public” checks the state because it confronts the mass public with the real consequences of the government’s sanctioning policy (sanktionspolitik), interrupting this dialogue of power. begoña aretxaga faces a similar set of issues in her own ethnography. her case focuses on the no wash protests in two northern ireland prisons during the late 1970s (called by aretxaga the “dirty protests,” but usually referred to by locals as “the no wash”). the initial impetus for these protests was the effort by captured irish catholic paramilitaries to defend their political status and to end their inhumane treatment at the hands of their captors. as in ralph’s case, we can discern a distinct theme of spectacle and abjection, but also a clear back-and-forth dynamic. when prisoners were required to wear uniforms connoting criminality, they remained naked and wrapped themselves in blankets. when they were arbitrarily denied access to toilets and subjected to humiliating strip searches, they refused to bathe and smeared the walls of their cells in feces. when women prisoners were sexually assaulted and denied access to sanitary products, they similarly included menstrual blood. if we were to depend solely on debord’s definition of spectacle, something would be missing here. like the irish paramilitaries, ralph engages in a spectacular political protest that functions on the immediate level to capture viewers’ attention in unsuspecting ways, but also integrates this spectacle into a larger political engagement. this clearly makes for a dicey affair: if the larger political engagement is put front and center, then the spectacle collapses into transparent manipulation; yet if the larger political engagement is allowed to languish, then the spectacle becomes mere titillation. for debord, the class interests of the bourgeoisie and the subjection of the working class serve to prevent the collapse of spectacle. as a result, the commodity form is perpetually engendered across public life. what i see in my fieldwork, however, more resembles what i believe aretxaga saw in hers—a situation in which spectacle, rather than simply allowing class domination to take the form of increasingly refined commodities, can actually be put to use to challenge domination and reshape hegemonic social values. in this sense, aretxaga is obviously aware of the spectacular nature of the protests she describes. it is notable that the no wash initially elicited confusion among even some of the prisoners’ core supporters, just as ralph’s hunger strike brought forth heightened concern among friends and supporters like me. the no wash proved attention-grabbing and perplexing in ways that could not be controlled. tellingly, the spectacle took hold among the prisoners’ supporters as much as among their opponents. aretxaga insists, however, that a pragmatic relationship also existed between prisoners and captors that underlay this audience effect. for her, menstrual blood and feces are presented as “primordial symbols” wielded by prisoners who, by “resort[ing] to physiological material of great psychological significance,” succeeded in condensing “different strands of meaning, none of which are in themselves necessarily determinant” (aretxaga 1995, 125–26). in the deployment of symbols as primordial as menstrual blood and feces, aretxaga sees a holistic political engagement with colonial power. the guards’ immediate reaction thus proves important to her analysis, but she also moves outward from those guards’ disgusted reactions to a wider public similarly caught up in a fraught relationship with captured irish paramilitaries. on the one hand, then, we have debord’s insight that spectacle draws its power from the way in which it shuts down dialogue and reduces participants in interaction to the status of “mere observers.” on the other, we have aretxaga’s insight that spectacular forms of political protest do this even while developing a certain engagement between the powerful and the powerless. her core theoretical argument (aretxaga 1995, 137), which she associates with the work of homi bhabha and michael taussig, is that the colonial project involves a relationship of mimesis between prisoner (colonized) and captor (colonizer), such that “savage” objects of colonial control can become the target of savage acts of violence. an ostensibly civilized nation (britain) unleashes uncivilized viciousness on those deemed to be outside the civilized world (irish catholics). this means a relationship of identification, albeit a uniquely unreflexive one. the object of control, punishment, and colonial subjection stands in for the part of the colonizer’s or captor’s own psyche that has been disavowed. protest, in the profound form described by aretxaga, consists in an attempt to break this circuit of internal disavowal, hidden identification, and power-laden subjection by embracing the abject within a carefully composed and aesthetically minded semiotic engagement. with this in mind, we can turn back to ralph. like the colonizer/colonized and captor/prisoner relationships, the relationship between unmarked members of the german public and marked unemployed persons is one founded both on an identification (i.e., that the unemployed are like “us” insofar as they each seek their own economic well-being) and a disavowal (i.e., that the unemployed are not like “us,” because they are lazy or incapable). ralph embraces abjection in an effort to break up this public/unemployed dynamic—playing to his base of supporters, enraging his opponents, but nonetheless engaging all sides in the spectacle of his hungering body. for aretxaga, these sorts of relationships are characteristically found on the edge of the nation-state—her use of bhabha in particular aligns her project with postcolonial theory. focusing on the social state, however, reveals that a similar dynamic might be found at the core of the national polity. ralph’s protest embraces the abjection of the unemployed by playing on the inevitable fascination his audience has with this abject status. in doing so, however, it draws into conversation anyone unwilling to blithely contemplate “dying in public” as a legitimate consequence of labor refusal. abjection and income before i can take this analysis further, we must look at some related ethnographic material. ralph’s starvation protest in part took inspiration from a previous effort. beginning in 2014, michael (micha) fielsch devised a moveable public installation of mock gravestones in protest against hartz-iv benefit sanctions. having himself received numerous sanctions for refusing low-wage work, he endeavored to research deaths that could be linked either to the low level of hartz-iv benefits or to the issuance of sanctions on those benefits. he then created some sixty cardboard headstones in the shape of crosses, each bearing a short narrative about the person it represented (see figure 2). most of these headstones describe suicides.4 some, however, represent deaths from exposure or can be linked to trauma derived from an eviction. one particularly poignant cluster of crosses represents a single father and his three children. they died from asphyxiation after the father received a benefit sanction, failed to pay his power bill, lost the power in his apartment, and improperly installed a gasoline generator to generate electricity. figure 2. micha’s headstones arranged by the brandenburger tor. photo by michael fielsch. micha and his fellow activists have set up the mock gravestones many times in berlin, but they have also been invited by activists across germany. permits are required in every case, but aside from applying for these and setting up the crosses, micha and his fellow activists do very little. they generally stand to one side in yellow vests, next to a small kiosk holding brochures in multiple languages. they sometimes receive a stray comment or question, but usually they do not interact with passersby. the people who happen on the installation often take some time to cotton on to its purpose, but they get a better idea after reading the narrative on several crosses. the official title of the installation (memorial to the victims of agenda 2010—a reference to the political reform program that included the hartz reforms) is emblazoned on a large banner, providing the only substantial hint of an explicitly political engagement (see figure 3). figure 3. micha’s installation with banner. photo by michael fielsch. for the most part, viewers treat the installation as an ordinary tourist attraction, quietly reading individual narratives and discussing what they see among themselves. the mock graves are, to use debord’s famous term, “detours” of those mock graves that stand near the german parliament building in downtown berlin to memorialize the “wall dead” (mauertote—i.e., those killed attempting to cross the berlin wall between 1961 and 1989; see figure 4). figure 4. crosses for victims of the wall in berlin. photo by otfw. residents of germany and international tourists habituated to the memorialization of victims of nazi and state socialist persecution almost universally treat micha’s installation with great respect. this proved particularly poignant on a day in the fall of 2014 when the mock graveyard was set up in front of the prussian-built new guardhouse (neue wache) on berlin’s famous boulevard unter den linden. this piece of decorative architecture now serves as germany’s official memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship, after serving a similar function for the east german regime. i spoke to a number of those viewing micha’s installation on that day, and many expressed outrage at hartz-iv as a particularly cruel arrangement: “in my opinion, hartz-iv simply doesn’t address the reality of people’s lives.” “i know a lot of people who have been pushed to the edge [of society] like this.” “it’s just a symptom of a society in which some people have been made superfluous.” “we have to also think about these sorts of people, about what kind of society we have.” more conservative-looking observers often seemed rankled by the installation, but noticeably remained circumspect. one man simply answered my query with his own question—“why should i think anything?”—before turning away. others refused to engage with me altogether, maintaining a downbeat and simmering speechlessness. a smaller group tentatively ventured to frame the installation as a form of manipulation: “actually, the benefits should be enough for anyone. but the specific cases are sad.” “it just seems like this has all been expressed in a very populist way. specific examples have been searched out to make their point.” “it seems senseless that someone would [kill themselves] when they are just two years from [leaving the hartz-iv system to go into the] retirement [system, where they can’t be sanctioned]. why not just wait out the two years?” it is notable that these latter sentiments are only the result of a direct ethnographic confrontation. micha found them to differ quite markedly from the sorts of reactions he received more spontaneously. in the broadest sense, we can describe both this protest and ralph’s sanction starvation as attempts to carefully integrate the theme of death into the politics of hartz-iv. micha’s “cross action” (as he informally describes the installation) was set up next to ralph’s table on the first days of the discussion vigil described above, emphasizing their connection. for micha, a fascination with death has long roots. his father died of suicide when micha was six, and micha himself often felt close to taking his own life when facing various familial and occupational travails. intensely forthcoming about these painful periods, he nonetheless manages his personal presentation to careful effect. while he felt pride at his installation’s obvious effectiveness (and was particularly gratified to have been invited onto national talk shows and the like as the result of his activism), he seemed to draw a more deeply personal satisfaction from the way his installation generalized his own deeply held and emotionally complex relationship to death. ralph claimed to free himself from the fear of death through his political work. by contrast, micha seemed to find a political achievement in confronting the public with the sorts of morbid concerns he knows quite well from personal experience. in either case, however, the viewer of the protest is confronted with an abject and vulnerable human body. even a mock gravestone stands for the corpse of the person being memorialized, and thus for their vulnerable personhood. this abject material pushes the observer into a position of transfixed contemplation—“beyond dialogue” in debord’s terms. one does not engage with the mortal remains of a deceased person, and thus cannot relate to that person in any process of identification and disavowal. we might start a more profound analysis of micha’s protest, then, by asking why interrupting this process is so important. we might begin by describing micha’s protest as organized around the category of life. there is a clear concern here for the loss of life. in this sense, his efforts (like ralph’s) might fit into the mold of a “biopower” that seeks to exert “a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it” (foucault 1988, 137) by surpassing the limits of the established social state. nonetheless, there also seems to be something more here. the point of micha’s protest is not simply that some people have died under the hartz system and that policy should be better designed to preserve life. these are very pointedly deaths that have occurred for lack of monetary benefits, and the challenge to the public comes not in fostering life but in guaranteeing income. after all, it is more than conceivable to argue that deaths by suicide should be prevented by better mental health policy, that deaths by accident should be prevented by better consumer safety laws, and that deaths during evictions should be prevented by more careful law enforcement. the challenge micha sets to the public is to imagine that these deaths occurred specifically for lack of an income. he seeks to construct an account in which not simply the lives of the unemployed matter but also the connection these lives have to a system of labor discipline that pervades market and state alike. a similar spectacle would not be needed to argue for better mental health policy or police tactics, but it is needed to communicate the notion that deaths can be linked specifically to labor discipline. it is certainly true that the signature protest actions undertaken by both micha and ralph could not function without some basic concern for life woven into german society and politics. michel foucault’s biopower is unequivocally a part—even an important part—of the politics of the social state. nonetheless, for both micha and ralph it is the moment of benefit sanction that allows a political display to crystallize. this contrast becomes particularly clear when we turn back to ralph’s hunger action, during which he declared that death was indeed best avoided but would at least mean the end of sanctions. life and death do not define the limits of the social state—in this case, the figure of sanction seems to loom larger than both. another way to put this issue: micha and ralph seek to anchor political subjectivity in the experience of being sanctioned and falling below the social state’s “existential minimum.” the rigorous rationalization of the income of hartz-iv recipients is worth mentioning here. since 2003, a good deal of public discussion has occurred in germany about the levels of hartz-iv benefits. every year, the government publishes a detailed budget describing how a benefit recipient should spend their money (see figure 5). a single person living alone is eligible for a “standard benefit” (regelsatz) of €391/month (not including housing support, which is based on actual rent and utility payments). the government expects this to include spending of €138.31 for food and non-alcoholic drink, €32.84 for clothing and shoes, and €24.63 for transportation. in one informant’s formulation, it is the minor categories such as education (€1.49/month) and “use of hotels and guesthouses” (€7.74/month) that appear particularly “perfidious” (perfid). figure 5. a pie chart showing suggested government expenditures for hartz-iv recipients. image by hartziv.org. the exacting nature of these rationalizations does not always militate against recipients’ immediate interests. for example, a widely discussed 2010 decision by a panel of federal judges established that children whose parents receive hartz-iv benefits should be entitled to an additional category of benefit to cover items such as fees for field trips and athletic leagues. these small material victories nonetheless encourage the conception that the lives and incomes of hartz-iv recipients are perfectly rationalizable. in relation to this sentiment micha’s protests seem particularly poignant. the mortal remains of former hartz-iv recipients freeze the process of rationalization whereby a particular income is deemed appropriate for a particular person. above all else, it is the relentless abstraction of public debate about benefit sanctions and the hartz system that is brought to a halt in contemplation of micha’s headstones. to use aretxaga’s (2003) term, micha’s protest reveals the social state as a “maddening state” when it tinkers endlessly with the incomes of the unemployed, producing rationalizations that, in spite of their formidable staying power, cannot be sustained in an encounter with the abject. money as abject from the foregoing description, it might seem that, regardless of how life and economic value are intertwined, bodies remain an indispensable ingredient in spectacular protests for basic income. aretxaga’s interpretation of her own fieldwork also points us in this direction. she associates the most profound forms of political protest with corporeal substances operating on a “primordial” level of symbolism. based on this analytical move in particular, a strong sense emerges from her work of the body breaking into anticolonial resistance by the sheer force of its own corporeality. in my fieldwork, there is good reason to come to a similar conclusion. both ralph and micha’s protests are unthinkable without abject materials of a specifically corporeal nature. nonetheless, an example from switzerland suggests that this corporeal dynamic forms part of a bigger picture. in 2013, a group of activists dumped about half a million dollars’ worth of fünfräppler (five-cent coins) onto the federal plaza in bern (see figure 6). they argued that each resident of switzerland should be granted a monthly allowance of 2,500 sfr (roughly equivalent to us$2,500) for basic needs, and should only engage in work for money beyond this basic amount. the pile of coins they dumped onto the public plaza were meant as a symbol of the economy they wished to see—one that was, at its core, about abundance rather than scarcity, about common well-being rather than selfish needs. basic income activists often described this effort as crucial in building support for a plebiscite in 2016, during which a basic income proposal was defeated by a margin of three to one. figure 6. commencement of the “coin action” in bern. photo by stefan bohrer. press accounts of this protest action across europe frequently mentioned the cartoon figure of “dagobert duck” (known in the united states as “scrooge mcduck”), who is frequently depicted as swimming in piles of gold coins. as others have pointed out (shell 1993, 12, 112; kristeva 1982, 109), money is a prominent symbol of abjection, especially when represented in the form of gold coins. here were a group of protestors dumping the concrete manifestation of value onto a public plaza, presenting the result both as enjoyable excess and recognizably abject refuse. the parallel with micha’s and ralph’s protests is striking. notably, while ralph, micha, and other activists in berlin had gained some notoriety prior to this moment, it was only following the action in bern that they released their signature protest efforts. micha, for his part, shrugged off my suggestion that he took inspiration from the protest in bern (tending to shrug off all such talk),5 but it is hard not to notice that he devised the cross action shortly after finding out about bern. what is crucial in all three protests is that abjection looms over the social state. a starving body or a mock gravestone can serve as the point through which to access a politicized dynamic of identification and disavowal. but so, too, can a big pile of coins. rather than being rooted in the body and life, the politics of the social state seems to include the corporeal as a part, albeit a particularly intense part. in the bern protest, we see an embrace of basic income and a refusal of the social state’s labor discipline that plays out through an experience of money as the abject remainder of a shared social life. indeed, we should be moved by this fact to consider the ways in which bodies and money can be interchangeable. nancy munn (1992, 20) has described “value transformations” as those moments in which “appropriate and possible relations of power” come to bear in exchange. while munn’s fieldwork happens in a context quite different from my own, this approach points us toward some basic facts—for example, that bodies need food and that food is bought with money. the power involved in these equivalencies is at stake in germany just as much as in papua new guinea. because there is a kind of smooth transformation that can be intuited as each of these things changes into the next; we cannot simply describe any one of them as independent categories. arguably, the very notion of value suggests that there cannot exist a politics centered on bodies alone (or, for that matter, on life alone), since the making of bodies is always entangled with the making of other things. where transformation is constant between the corporeal and external materials, and even between the symbolic and the material, the larger horizon proves to be a politics of values, rather than a politics of life. what thinking about the social state in this “munnian” way should suggest to us is that there exists a situated engagement with economic value that can be disrupted and made abject in fundamental ways. in the terms offered by munn, the social state offers a site authorized to facilitate the transformations of value. where the social state is fundamentally called into question, the ongoing conjunctural transformation of value is halted in favor of the abject. such halting very much includes the rationalization of unemployment benefits as an ongoing process at the core of sozialstaatlichkeit. spurred by the protest in bern, both micha and ralph gave a particularly corporeal spin to this process. the larger dynamic, however, is one in which the suspension of the social state’s role in labor discipline forces a reckoning with the constructed character of value—that is, with the fact that real power relations exist in the market, and not just the automatic equilibrium of strictly private and individual desires. sozialstaatlichkeit operates as a guarantor of labor not just in so far as the state operates as a distinct institutional apparatus with power over individual unemployed persons but indeed also in so far as the principles of the social state allow labor discipline to persist even when the commodified values distributed within the market are transformed into commodified values distributed by the bureaucratic state. for my analysis this means that the same spectacular jolt that interrupts the disavowal of the unemployed in ralph’s and micha’s protests can also occur in an encounter with money. while one could pick up a handful of coins and walk away, the forces that mitigate against doing so make the coins inert. this same inertness, however, gives the coin action on the federal plaza in bern its fascination. coins that would normally function in ongoing value transformation have been instead inserted into the public sphere as an inert mass and thereby a spectacular object of fascination. to borrow ralph’s formulation of “a life that is not worth a life” (lebensunwertes leben), these coins might be described as “money not worth money” (geldunwertes geld). coins whose function has been disrupted in this way subsequently also threaten to disrupt the function of coins of a similar face value elsewhere. the result is a threatening subversion of value occasioned precisely by a relaxation of labor discipline in the form of a basic income. on a functional level, the contemplation of scooping up five-cent pieces from a public square engenders a discomfort similar to the one that ralph’s audience might have with his “dying in public,” or micha’s audience might have when considering a chain of events that lead from the sanctioning power of the social state to a lonely and isolated suicide. in each case, things removed from the ongoing conjuncture of value transformation appear to threaten the stability of ordinary life. the coins on the plaza in bern are caught between their assumed value and the impossibility of that value being redeemed, haunting the viewer incapable of contemplating basic income and tantalizing those willing to embrace its possibility. labor, value, and the social state (or, jokes and their relationship to political economy) with this, we come to something of an impasse. if abjection can occur around anything that is valued, and it does not have to attach to the body in any exclusive way, then is there any cause to think that labor plays a special role in the formation of economic value, and that basic income would therefore threaten the experience of economic value in some unique or fundamental way? in comparison to later thinkers, who largely reduce economic value to privately held preferences and the quasi-natural operation of marginal utility, and earlier thinkers who posited labor simply as the material source of value, marx’s argument in this area (which is his core argument for theorists such as postone and kurz) is built around the notion that the very category of labor mediates the construction of social situations, and especially economic value, in a systematic way. in weeks’s (2011, 2) terms, most crucial here is the “eclipse of laboring activity” behind labor as a general term for anything done for money, and indeed anything similarly rationalized in economic terms. the sense that a particular activity can be reduced to its status as labor provides a means not only to rationalize one’s own activity and compare it to the activity of others but also to intuit what is common in the constitution of those activities. as a result, the loss of labor discipline can be interpreted both as a form of unfairness (i.e., the sense, however warranted or unwarranted, that some groups or specific people are favored in the distribution of state benefits) and as a loss of something more basic (i.e., the means whereby one can understand a practicing self in an authentic social context). for the movement in favor of basic income and against benefit sanctions, arguing that basic income can be distributed fairly proves important. yet this does not lie at the core of protest actions such as those carried out most iconically by micha and ralph. for both of them, the encounter with abjection symbolizes a willingness to explore that possible loss of self engendered by basic income. ultimately, what is important about the category of labor is that it both effaces the particularity of any activity undertaken under its aegis and, simultaneously, gives that activity a distinct value. basic income requires, at the very least, the contemplation of an existence without this highly constitutive double move. in simple terms, then, basic income policies threaten the possibility of activity without value. clearly, this does not mean that these activities would be drained of meaning or of broad moral values in any simple way. where basic income affords care for loved ones, the making of art, more authentic political and social engagements, technological invention and the like, clearly meaning and moral value are at stake. the fact, however, that even these obviously worthy activities might depend on a policy that denies their transformation into immediate value-equivalents means that “appropriate and possible relations of power” (munn 1992, 20) might become disrupted even in the pursuit of commonly held beliefs when they are supported by basic income. part of the problem here is that economic values can be consistent, basic, and systematic in a way that broader assessments of people’s actions generally are not. ralph’s and micha’s protests (as well as the coin action in bern) suggest that the unease occasioned by a substantial move away from the economic valuation of people’s actions can only be countered by confronting the public’s unease with the abject excess already inherent in the constitution of a fully achieved commodity economy. in this sense, we might see the activists involved not so much as advocating for basic income (remember that each of them only points to basic income indirectly) as exposing the incomplete constitution of the “social market economy” (soziale marktwirtschaft) as currently constituted—only implicitly calling on basic income as a way out of the spectacular theatrical arrangement that their actions construct. ultimately, the type of basic income activism described here belies the notion of the commodity form as a mere impersonal mechanism for separately deciding each person’s preferences and equally optimizing individual needs, asking that socially constituted forms of evaluation be flushed into the open as genuinely social processes. in this sense, proponents of basic income policies seek to remove some activities from the commodity economy, leaving open the specification of these activities in a possibly uncomfortable way for those accustomed to a disciplining social state. a basic income monetarily supports activities that cannot be transformed into commodity values through a rationalized inclusion in social state policy. in immediate terms, this would seem to imply not simply a loss of discipline but indeed also a breakdown of the mechanism of value transformation that this discipline is ostensibly responsible for maintaining. in a more subtle way, however, it suggests forms of activity permanently poised between liberation and anomie—liberation because one is concretely able to do something that satisfies one’s own ends, but anomie because these ends do not immediately enter into equivalence with the ends of others. ralph has a joke that helps explain some of what is at stake here. he says that basic income will always remain a problem even if it becomes instituted, because “everyone knows at least one asshole who really would just take advantage of it” and fail to make good use of their time. his more serious position is that the great majority of people who receive a basic income would use it to improve the world in one way or another. micha takes a similar line, frequently arguing that basic income would mark a historical watershed in human creativity. narrowing these beliefs down to a discussion of individual cases is a joke precisely because the point of a basic income policy is to not prejudge the value of people’s activities or according to some fixed measure. dividing those who deserve a basic income from those who would “just take advantage” covers up and denies ralph’s larger effort to deconstruct the social state’s central focus on controlling the lives of the unemployed. but it does so in a joking way, and the result is to allow an exploration of this control through the joke’s impact. although unlike the hunger action in many ways, ralph’s joke resembles it insofar as it signals a certain resignation from trying to simply argue for basic income on principled grounds of rational disinterest. rather than asserting basic income as a political prerogative, describing this joke’s “asshole” (arschloch—a symbol of abjection even in its synecdochic reference to an entire person) instead puts the assumption that basic income is impossible out into discourse for amused contemplation. conclusion i have included my key conclusions about the social state in the section above. here, however, i would like to make some further comments about abjection, protest, value, and politics. let me begin by suggesting that some of the forms of power that anthropologists once looked for on the edge of the nation-state should now be looked for at its core. aretxaga saw a certain kind of engagement between irish paramilitary prisoners and their british captors: the disavowal of the “savage” exterior of the nation meant a colonizer/colonized and captor/prisoner dynamic that could only be countered in spectacular ways. we might thus be led to assume that the colonial encounter defined the british nation in a fundamental way by. there is substantial truth to this. nonetheless, we can see a similar dynamic (or perhaps the same dynamic under a different guise) at the core of the social state. the unemployed operate as the abject other of the nation-state insofar as it operates as a rationalized social state. like the colonized other, the unemployed are the locus of a certain disavowal that requires a spectacular engagement to fully address. to understand why this is the case, however, we have to ask not just about the social state but also about economic value as a phenomenon entangled with rationalized “social-state-ness.” the unemployed—and especially the unemployed targeted by benefit sanctions—prove troubling to the public, but when demonstratively presented as the abject remainder of the social state, they are not easy to evade. yet it seems telling that a pile of coins can serve a similar function. the issue is not simply with the bodies or selves that the unemployed incarnate; rather, it is with the larger sphere of value that includes these bodies alongside money as a similarly abject material. in this sense, the ultimate problem for the constitution of the rationalized social state seems to revolve around the hegemonic relationship between economic value and labor discipline, rather than simply around the lives and bodies of the unemployed. where the social state’s role in labor discipline is threatened, value is undermined in such a way as to make both bodies and money abject and therefore available as spectacle. weeks is right to accentuate the positive—that is, the possibility in basic income policies of “a life no longer so thoroughly and relentlessly dependent upon work for its qualities.” at the same time, however, we must keep in mind that this possibility proves troubling because lives dependent on work for their qualities are a settled constant precisely under supposedly advanced social state conditions such as those existing in germany. after all, it is a tacitly understood sign of this “advancement” that activity without economic value might exist as a kind of negative state of being, a threat to one’s ability to practically go about daily life with some constant guarantee that what one is doing makes sense in relation to the activity of others. basic income policies thus constitute a disturbing disruption of forms of deeply held value built not just into the economy but also into the social state that supplements and balances private employment. my informants—quite remarkable in their roles as dedicated activists but also quite ordinary in their roles as unemployed people—must contemplate a social state whose rationalizations at once include them as potential workers and exclude them as actually existing unemployed people. their way out of this impasse, which it seems many more will encounter in the years to come, is both spectacular and abject. abstract this article describes the protest efforts of a group of unemployed proponents of basic income in germany. these efforts are theorized around the concepts of spectacle and abjection. hungering bodies and corpses figure prominently. ultimately, however, the spectacular character of these protests can be traced not just to the vulnerability of human bodies in a shared social space but also to the logic of value in a capitalist society. where goods are quintessentially encoded as the result of labor, and especially where the social state systematically supports the organization of everyday life through the labor market, basic income can only emerge in the form of a spectacle that challenges popular conceptions of labor and economic value. [germany; basic income; value; labor; protest; spectacle; abjection] notes 1. see, for example, daniel häni and philip kovce, “bedingungsloses grundeinkommen: lasst arbeit erfüllung werden” (“unconditional basic income: let work be fulfillment”), die zeit, october 31, 2015. 2. the term sozialstaat (social state) is used much more often in germany than is wohlfahrtsstaat (welfare state), although both are roughly equivalent. in keeping with local usage, i refer to the “social state” throughout. 3. i use labor and work interchangeably in this article. both translate as the german word arbeit. 4. micha prefers the term “free death” (freitod) to “suicide” (selbstmord). i use suicide here because there is no common english usage equivalent to the former. 5. it is worth noting that a protest inspired by micha’s cross action appeared in vienna a few months after its first installation in berlin. micha was glad to see this, and was largely uninterested in whether or not he was credited or even asked to collaborate with the austrian “protest artist” responsible. references aretxaga, begoña 1995 “dirty protest: symbolic overdetermination and gender in northern ireland.” ethos, 23, no. 2: 123–48. https://www.jstor.org/stable/640420 2003 “maddening states.” annual review of anthropology 32, no. 1: 393–410. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093341 debord, guy 1977 society of the spectacle. translated by donald nicholson-smith. bradford, u.k.: pattern books. ferguson, james 2015 give a man a fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution. durham, n.c.: duke university press. foucault, michel 1988 the history of sexuality. translated by robert hurley. new york: vintage. kristeva, julia 1982 powers of horror: an essay on abjection. translated by leon s. roudiez. new york: columbia university press. kurz, robert 2011 “arbeit, arbeit, arbeit!” public lecture. university of leipzig, april 19, 2011. kurz, robert, and ernst lohoff 1989 “der klassenkampf-fetisch: thesen zur entmythologisierung des marxismus.” krisis: kritik der warengesellschaft 7. mcgill, kenneth 2017 “‘tangled up in these conceptualities’: sanction, protest, and ideology in berlin, germany.” american anthropologist 119, no. 4: 603–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12927 2019 “ontology, belief and the politics of sanction: an application of badiou’s theory of the event.” anthropological theory 19, no. 2: 259–78. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499618809243 munn, nancy 1992 [1986] the fame of gawa: a symbolic study of value transformation in a massim (papua new guinea) society. new edition. durham, n.c.: duke university press. postone, moishe 1993 time, labor, and social domination: a reinterpretation of marx’s critical theory. cambridge: cambridge university press. shell, marc 1993 money, language, and thought: literary and philosophic economies from the medieval to the modern era. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. weeks, kathi 2011 the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 225-250, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.07 human routers: how syrian refugee brokers build the infrastructure of displacement cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 517-540, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.04 human routers: how syrian refugee brokers build the infrastructure of displacement ann-christin zuntz university of edinburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2904-8839 farhan,1 a syrian broker organizing money transfers for syrian refugees in the united kingdom,2 goes by the nickname of “father of happiness,” a wordplay on the arab custom to refer to adults by the name of their oldest child. indeed, after farhan fled to the united kingdom to escape the syrian conflict, his understanding of the affective (and economic) needs of fellow syrians made him successful. in november 2019, he chose a meeting spot at a sophisticated gallery; he was keen for me to see him as a man equally at ease in the local arabic-speaking community and at the heart of british and international culture. i had come to ask farhan about his business. sadly, well aware that money agents like himself were suspected of illegal transactions, he only spoke of his role in the broadest terms. our polite but shallow chitchat was punctuated by frequent calls on farhan’s phone. he occasionally picked up and gave brief instructions in arabic. “i have a movement in istanbul,” he explained to one caller. from the context, it became clear that remittances from europe had arrived in turkey, waiting for the right exchange rate to be converted into turkish lira and transported to syria. as i was listening in on farhan’s conversation, uk-based refugees’ money traveled to their loved ones through material and virtual infrastructures such as banking and roads, but just as much through human connections: a network of syrian money brokers in different countries. with 6.6 million syrians displaced outside their home country, policymakers and media in the global north have focused on refugees’ dangerous south-north border crossings, and the people smugglers who enable them. the reality of displacement proves more complex: mobility remains an important feature of many refugees’ lives, including after they have settled down more permanently (fabos, kahn, and sarkis 2021). in everyday life, they resort to a rich ecosystem of brokers who facilitate the circulation of remittances, jobs, knowledge, spouses, and more. anthropologists of the middle east have extensively documented how people access resources through kinship structures (joseph 1994, 2004). in prewar syria, extended families often functioned as economic units, with different household members taking on paid or unpaid tasks (chatty 2013; rabo 2008; rugh 1996). today, resources shared through kinship networks remain the foundation of syrian livelihoods in the middle east (lokot 2020; zuntz 2021). yet this tells us little about the ethnographic “black box” (lindquist, xiang, and yeoh 2012, 7) of displacement: how are syrian refugees’ circulations made possible, and by whom? proposing an analytical pivot from displaced people to their brokers, i put forward the novel concepts of a syrian infrastructure of displacement and of refugee brokers as a particular infrastructural component: human routers. to make my point, i put into conversation the case studies of two syrian brokers: um faisal, a street-smart entrepreneur in turkey, and farhan, the suave lawyer-turned–money agent in the united kingdom. farhan helps syrians transfer remittances to those left behind in syria, as well as to refugee diasporas in the middle east and in europe. such monetary transactions are known among his customers as hawalat. from her living room in gaziantep, um faisal runs cleaning and catering businesses that employ syrian widows and divorcées. the wife of a former labor broker, a so-called shaweesh, she has set up her own group of workers. she also uses her contacts with private donors to channel aid and marriage proposals to the same women, in this regard operating as an occasional matchmaker, or khataba. a vast gulf of educational, social, and financial capital as well as geographic distance separate um faisal and farhan, but their dissimilar services contribute to a broader syrian “infrastructure of displacement.” in the widest sense, anthropologists understand material infrastructure as “matter that enable[s] the movement of other matter” (larkin 2013, 329). however, infrastructures are not merely technical, but rather socio-technical: they bring together diverse things and people, often in unexpected, unstable, and contradictory ways (ash 2014; anand, gupta, and appel 2018; larkin 2013). as abdoumaliq simone (2021) puts it, “the distinction between infrastructure and sociality is fluid and pragmatic rather than definitive.” building on this insight, i start with an apparent contradiction: unlike in the global north, where most people experience access to infrastructural services as reliable (star 1999), for city-dwellers in kinshasa, cairo, and rio de janeiro, the disruption of water, electricity, and the like often constitutes the norm. as material infrastructures collapse in the mega-cities of the global south, their inhabitants experiment with support systems of “social infrastructure” (anand 2017; graham and mcfarlane 2015; simone 2004), bringing together an ever-shifting patchwork of technologies, actors, and relations (lawhon et al. 2018). anthropologists studying infrastructure as “peopled” describe it as processual, contingent, and improvisational—but they also find that it proves surprisingly stable. where does this stability come from? in her fieldwork with working-class people in cairo, julia elyachar (2010, 460) notes that her interlocutors form part of the same “semiotic community”: they share signs, bodily practices, and modes of sociability that make them immediately recognizable to each other. for example, elyachar (2011) observed that passengers on two trucks in cairo’s busy traffic passed a lighter back and forth to light a cigarette, while the drivers adjusted their speed to each other’s vehicles. no words were exchanged, as the smokers communicated their intention through simple gestures. these communal, embodied experiences and skills form lasting “communicative channels” (elyachar 2010, 452) that make up the community’s social infrastructure. they are maintained through what elyachar (2010, 452) calls “phatic labour”: disinterested everyday gossip and mutual visits. “hanging out” contributes to maintaining this social infrastructure, which its members can capitalize on in times of need. to understand how refugee brokers balance stability and improvisation, i first build on recent studies of brokers’ different roles in “migration infrastructures” (xiang and lindquist 2014, s122). anthropologists have long been fascinated with the morally ambiguous figure of the broker as someone who helps marginalized people access resources but also exploits them (boissevain 1974; geertz 1960; wolf 1956). since the 2000s, brokers have made a comeback in the study of the development and migration industries (james 2011; lindquist 2015a; mosse and lewis 2006): their most valuable asset is not muscle power or speedy vehicles, but knowledge of the development and migration bureaucracy. a new focus on brokers, not migrants, is part of a broader effort to expand our view of the diverse actors and flows involved in migration. biao xiang and johan lindquist (2014, s122) give a seminal definition of “migration infrastructures [as] the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility”; it draws attention to migration as a deeply mediated process. at the point of departure, brokers organize visas and passports, health checks, and job opportunities for prospective migrants (alpes 2017; piot with batema 2019; lindquist 2017). in transit, people smugglers operate as part of long-standing kinship networks and traditions of solidarity and reciprocity (sanchez 2017). syrian smugglers in the mediterranean, for example, frame their activities in terms of aid and kinship rather than “business” (achilli 2018). after arrival, brokers with a migration background help new migrants access resources, for example through religious sites, language classes, and migrant-led businesses (hall, king, and finlay 2017; meeus, arnaut, and van heur 2018; wessendorf 2022). together, these studies highlight brokers’ use of material and virtual technologies of circulation (lindquist 2015b), as well as the role of (former) migrants as intermediaries, challenging simplistic distinctions between brokers as violent predators and migrants as their hapless victims. second, to shed light on the practices, forms, and technologies that enable brokers to take on infrastructural roles, i develop the metaphor of refugee brokers as a specific infrastructural component, that is, as human routers. these days, an essential element of digital infrastructures is the router, “an item of hardware used to link two networks. it takes packets of data, determines their destination, and passes them on to the next network in the path which could be the final destination” (ince 2019). you are probably familiar with your home broadband router, but this is just one in a web of devices tying together your phone and laptop to huge servers that power worldwide logistics and commerce. refugee brokers function in similar ways: they manage, direct, and control flows of communications and resources along preexisting channels, and they dynamically adapt around blockages. revisiting elyachar’s (2010) concept of “communicative channels,” i contend that refugee brokers and their clients rely on such preexisting connections, ones built on shared experiences of migration, brokerage, hospitality, and gender and generational roles. because these stable channels exist, it makes sense to think of acts of brokerage as more than on-off, disconnected actions, although, as i will show, they also involve improvisation. in this article, i ask: first, how do refugee brokers become a part of such channels? second, how do refugee brokers reactivate and maintain such channels in exile? older users of the internet may recall the screeching noise of modems, the precursors to domestic routers, when they used the telephone line. this initial moment during which routers establish how to communicate is called a “handshake protocol.” in a similar vein, refugee brokers perform cultural codes, gestures, and practices of supposed syrianness to connect with fellow displaced syrians. third, how do refugee brokers use these channels to circulate different resources and diversify their destinations? familiar with the communicative channels of their community, they manage to realize their economic value, in the process rewiring them. like routers sending different types of data—be it webpage requests, emails, video streaming, or the like—through the same channels, the multi-usage of extant connections allows refugee brokers to weather wavering demand from syrian customers. the study of infrastructure helps anthropologists demystify power, helping us trace how abstract systems affect people’s everyday lives (wilson 2016). exploring the syrian infrastructure of displacement cannot fail to evoke another, immensely powerful infrastructure: european border controls and the criminalization of movements from the global south (sanchez 2017). turkey and the united kingdom, where um faisal and farhan live, are signatories to the 1951 refugee convention, although turkey maintains the original geographic restrictions of the convention and does not recognize syrians as refugees, confining displaced people to a state of “permanent temporariness” (osseiran 2020, 94). home to around 3.6 million syrians, turkey hosts the highest number of refugees worldwide (unhcr 2023). the mundane reality of many syrians’ lives in turkey includes limited access to public services and precarious labor in the informal economy (baban, ilcan, and rygiel 2017). as a signatory of the 2016 eu-turkey deal, which gave the country access to €6 billion (around usd 6.7 billion) in exchange for stopping migratory flows, turkey became a cornerstone of europe’s architecture of border control (crisp 2021). despite its international commitments and domestic asylum framework, turkey also deported hundreds of refugees to syria in 2022 alone (human rights watch 2022). compared to turkey, the united kingdom has welcomed very small numbers of syrians. it has sought to limit the numbers of new arrivals through its 2020 departure from the european union and its 2022 nationality and borders act, which criminalizes all refugees who enter the country illegally and includes plans to deport asylum-seekers to rwanda (refugee council 2023). despite its push for legal and safe pathways for refugees, the u.k. government accepted only 20,000 syrians through its resettlement scheme between 2014 and 2021 (unhcr 2021), and the total number of syrians stands at around 38,000 people (ons 2021). together, the united kingdom and turkey exemplify the increasingly hostile european refugee response, characterized by intensified border controls, deals with third countries to restrain refugee flows, and the criminalization of rescue efforts (crawley et al. 2018). research on refugee brokers highlights the paradox that provides the backdrop for this article. on the one hand, people’s need for brokers results from restrictive asylum policies. on the other hand, brokers’ activities cut across the divide between states, markets, and the international humanitarian system (faist 2014). brokers often take on the infrastructural role of the state, for example, when procuring travel documents and visas, and they might even behave like ngos (alpes 2017; lindquist 2017). this article shows how refugee brokers become an important component of the bottom-up “infrastructure of displacement” that flourishes in the cracks of other global infrastructures, be it borders, finance, or the humanitarian system. in sum, the infrastructural lens brings to light what refugee brokers do: connect displaced people and things, with all the tensions, fractures, and possibilities that this implies. in section 2, i discuss how ethnographic data for this article were collected, and how one negotiates a transactional approach to ethics with a broker. sections 3 and 4 show how the channels of communication that make up the infrastructure of displacement are built through refugee brokers’ and their clients’ prewar experiences of migration and brokerage (section 3), and reactivated and maintained through relational work and material moorings that set the stage for brokers’ performances of shared syrianness (section 4). section 5 demonstrates the multi-usage of stable channels through which brokers circulate diverse resources and expand their network of clients. in the conclusion, i sketch out implications for the anthropological study of refugee agency beyond abstract ideas of solidarity. doing research with brokers this article draws on ethnographic insights from participant observation and interviews at refugee brokers’ homes and workplaces. interviews with farhan were initially conducted in the united kingdom as part of my doctoral thesis at the university of edinburgh. during fifteen months of fieldwork in northern jordan between 2015 and 2017, i had learned that refugees in jordan were sending money to syria while receiving financial assistance from syrian diasporas in europe and the gulf (zuntz 2021). on my return to the united kingdom, i tried to understand how syrians’ remittance-sending networks had been extended to new sites of refuge. through a friend, i met farhan in 2017, and we hung out occasionally over two years. after the end of my phd, he agreed to sit down with me for a structured conversation in november 2019. years later, in spring 2023, we reconnected and met up informally several times. i spoke with um faisal in november 2022 in her apartment in gaziantep, as part of fieldwork for my british academy postdoctoral fellowship on “brokers of displacement.” having conducted collaborative fieldwork with syrian academics and refugees in gaziantep since 2019, i was introduced to um faisal by my syrian-jordanian research assistant, a cultural practitioner working with syrian ngos in town. this research assistant happened to share a flat with a syrian medical broker who specializes in providing arabic-turkish translation to syrian patients at pharmacies and hospitals, while also cultivating his own huge network of brokers. most existing scholarship focuses on male brokers (meehan and plonski 2017); knowing that i was hoping to speak with female intermediaries, the medical broker approached um faisal, and she agreed to receive us at home. by juxtaposing the case studies of a male and a female broker, i draw attention to refugees’ demand for gendered forms of brokerage, to the career paths that brokerage may offer to women, and to how brokers reconcile their activities with gendered norms of employment and mobility. female brokers may be less visible to outsiders because their interactions often take place in women-only localities. but as section 4 shows, this offers new opportunities for female researchers able to enter these spaces. it also should come as no surprise that i found um faisal through another broker. on the internet, routers pass on data to other routers until their message reaches its destination. similarly, syrians’ communicative channels are made up not of individual brokers, but rather networks of brokers collaborating with each other to fulfill clients’ requests. fieldwork with refugee brokers raises a methodological challenge: as they conduct most of their interactions with customers on whatsapp, what remains for the anthropologist to observe (güran 2020)? my interviewees did not grant me access to their phones because their whatsapp exchanges were confidential. therefore, this article prioritizes the (observable) perspectives, interactions, and spaces of the brokers; still, their customers do not remain fully absent. in the united kingdom, i was present during multiple phone conversations between farhan and his assistants and clients. during interviews with members of the local syrian community, farhan’s name also frequently came up. when asking about remittance-sending to syria, i got used to hearing respondents exclaim: “father of happiness? of course i know him!” clearly, farhan had become the go-to person for money transfers for newly arrived refugees and even older syrian migrants in this tight-knit social circle. as for um faisal, the fact that another broker recommended her speaks to her trusted standing in the brokers’ network in gaziantep. section 5 discusses how she used a young syrian widow as a “prop” during our interview to prove her humanitarian credentials. here, i discuss this woman’s silence as constitutive of the display of largesse that um faisal wanted me to see. sadly, the 2023 earthquake delayed follow-up fieldwork with um faisal’s clients and employees. hence, i focus on um faisal’s perspective, but for now lack information on how her relationship with the young woman was perceived from the beneficiary’s side. focusing on brokers, not refugees, constitutes a different approach to that of hilal alkan (2021), for example, who scrutinized syrian clients’ dealings with smugglers and housing brokers in germany and turkey. alkan’s finding that refugees are highly critical of (housing) brokers do not necessarily contradict my own, as brokers’ business strategies of relational work and positive word-of-mouth in syrian communities may coexist alongside individual refugees’ experiences of exploitation. on the condition of anonymity, all participants in this research consented to interviews, and no one received payment for their participation. but the absence of financial incentives does not preclude other forms of transaction. as marina de regt (2019) phrases it in the title of her article, “in friendship one does not count such things,” but oftentimes, anthropologists and their interlocutors establish complicated reciprocal relationships. the brokers in this story wanted to be perceived as people in high demand; their personal stories became currency for the recognition of a foreign researcher. farhan also indulged my repeated questioning because he wanted to humor our shared friend and, as a former university researcher, he understood the struggles of academic work. um faisal was keen to use me to extend her circle of customers among foreign ngo workers. she also inquired about educational offers for her teenage son who had dropped out of school, and questioned my assistant about aid for a syrian family she was hosting. this highlights that research on the infrastructure of displacement never remains neutral. it involves a complex exchange of material and virtual resources and emotions, as well as balancing brokers’ and one’s own expectations about shortand long-term gains. establishing channels routers only work if they connect to existing lines, made of copper wires, fiber optic, radio waves, and the like; refugee brokers can only operate because they capitalize on established channels of communication. the communal experiences and knowledge that make up syrians’ channels are threefold: pre-2011 syria as a transnational space for migrants and traders; the importance of brokerage in everyday life; and widely shared gender and generational roles, especially when it comes to powerful matriarchs and patriarchs. farhan’s story illustrates the expert handling of different types of mobility that many syrians grew accustomed to long before they became refugees. originally from a town in northern syria, he used to live in damascus, where he worked as a lawyer and taught at the university. until he fled, he had run a profitable side hustle importing goods from china to syria. in 2015, farhan received a phone call from a friend in london who told him he had only thirty minutes to take a life-changing decision: “after fifteen minutes, i decided to go to the uk.” farhan phoned a business contact in beirut who arranged for him to be driven to the beirut airport. the next morning, he was on a flight to istanbul. from there, he took another plane to izmir, where he met a smuggler at a hotel. together with five other people, he hired a yacht; the trip to italy took five days and cost him €5,000 (around usd 5,620). farhan’s recollections of his trip from damascus to the united kingdom differ markedly from the traumatic flight stories of many other refugees: “[the trip across the mediterranean] were the best five days of my life! one [fellow syrian] was very depressed because we had to leave our home country. but there was no one, just the sea and the sky. i hope that one day, when i return, i will make the same trip by boat.” in italy, he bought a fake italian identity document for €2,500 (around usd 2,810) and boarded a train to nice. the first time, he was refused at the french border because he did not have a passport. the second time, he pretended to read a french newspaper and sat next to a french woman; his papers were not checked. from nice, he traveled to paris, later calais, then dublin, and took the ferry from belfast to liverpool, where he claimed asylum. five days later, the authorities assigned him to a smaller british town. unlike refugees who took the arduous balkan route, farhan had enough money, knowledge of european geography and means of transport, contacts in several countries, and the necessary sangfroid, to turn the adventure into a comfortable journey. some years later, equipped with his british residence permit, he made good on this promise to retrace his trip: as a tourist, he traveled from the united kingdom to italy by train and ferry. in the united kingdom, farhan had initially planned to get another law degree, but he soon realized that studying would take too much time and that his language skills were not sufficient for working with british clients. he did not consider becoming a money agent a radical change, but rather a natural extension of his life so far—including his ability to spot an opportunity. what makes farhan an efficient refugee broker is his previous life as a businessman with specific skills and networks, which he then brought to a displacement context. his “qualifications” have to be understood in the wider context of syrian migrations and the bottom-up globalization of the mediterranean. historically, the middle east has been shaped by circular migrations. between 1880 and 1920, for example, more than 300,000 people left greater syria (what is now syria and lebanon) for the americas, establishing a vibrant transit economy in port cities around the world and sharing travel experiences, money, and new lifestyles with those left at home (regnard 2022). since the 1980s, syrian petty traders, such as farhan in his prewar life, built transnational businesses, linking the northern and southern shores of the mediterranean, (post-)soviet spaces, and even destinations as distant as china through back-and-forth mobilities of people and merchandise (anderson 2018; tarrius 2008). prior to 2011, working-class syrian men, and sometimes families, also repeatedly migrated, mostly for jobs in agriculture and construction in lebanon (mehchy and doko 2011), jordan (de bel-air 2013), and the gulf (mpc 2013). as a livelihoods strategy, remittances are thus hardly new: money sent home served as migrants’ old-age provision, protected rural households from economic shocks, and contributed to rural development (imady 2014). after 2011, men like farhan recognized that informal remittances had become a lifeline for displaced syrians inside syria and in neighboring countries. as farhan explained: “in syria these days, nobody wants to build a house, they need the money for everyday things.” international financial sanctions on syria, the collapse of the formal banking system inside the country, and the syrian regime’s tight controls on money-sending complicate bank transfers to syria (al-attar 2021). therefore, many syrians resort to an alternative, informal mode of money transfer: senders, recipients, brokers, and various middlemen often come from the same extended family, their interactions based on trust (dean 2015; güran 2020; zuntz 2021). in most cases, the money agent contacts his local representative in the destination area, who then hands out the money to the payee, minus a transfer fee usually paid for by the sender. in syria’s neighboring countries, money also sometimes physically travels with cross-border smugglers (syria direct 2020). by 2018, farhan transferred money to all areas in syria, “excluding [then occupied] isis territory.” syrian men working badly paid jobs as delivery drivers or in restaurants in the united kingdom used farhan’s services to send meager monthly sums (£50-100, ca. usd 65-131) to their parents and siblings; during the islamic holidays, they doubled the amounts. farhan only took a small commission for his informal transactions, roughly 2 percent. (by comparison, western union charged £9.90 for sending £100 to syria in 2021.) according to farhan, in 2018, only one other syrian in his city offered remittance-sending services to syria, and his own business was flourishing: “i have people in three british cities who are collecting money for me.” farhan’s success came from the fact that syrian clients, familiar with informal remittance-sending, immediately understood the kind of services he could provide. by way of illustration, i once brought farhan along to an interview with a wealthy syrian. while explaining the long-standing history of his ancestors in this part of the united kingdom, this man listed the names of famous damascene and aleppine families—barely acknowledging the presence of farhan, whom he knew hailed from a provincial town. yet he began to show farhan greater courtesy as soon as he learned about his profession: “you are the money agent? i’ve been looking for you!” clearly, the modalities of informal money-sending needed no explanation. as i discussed earlier, shared signs, practices, and modes of sociability enable those who partake in a semiotic commons or community to identify and know what to expect of each other. in the case of cairene smokers during rush hour (cf. elyachar 2011), a mere gesture may suffice for truck drivers to align their vehicles. similarly, in farhan’s case, a quick mention of his business turned the wealthy syrian, a complete stranger, into a potential and trusting client. um faisal, by contrast, was never a migrant before the syrian conflict, when she led a comfortable existence as a housewife and mother of five in rural aleppo. instead, as a refugee, she capitalized on her husband’s prewar experience as a labor broker in a syrian factory. the (usually male) shaweesh liaises with employers on workers’ behalf, for example in agriculture and construction; he enlists temporary workforces and oversees their activities and payment. laborers often come from his own extended kinship networks, and the shaweesh may take on a quasi-patriarchal role vis-à-vis his workforce, brokering not only employment but also accommodation, food, and even marriages among workers. since before the syrian conflict, this practice has been well documented for syrian migrants inside syria (abdelali-martini and dey de pryck 2015) and in lebanon (chalcraft 2009). since 2011, it has also emerged among syrian refugees in turkey (pelek 2019) and jordan (zuntz 2021). um faisal’s husband nodded approvingly when i called him a shaweesh during our interview, and, as became clear, his wife was well familiar with his work before the war. as i interviewed the couple in their living room, both fondly remembered how he would take her on trips to his factory. during these visits, they would go for a ride in the family car and eat kebab sandwiches. the economic, but also affective, roles that men like her husband took on in their workers’ lives in syria served as a model for how um faisal later treated her own employees in turkey. these working-class street smarts that elyachar (2010) also describes for low-income female circles in cairo served um faisal well when she built her own brokerage business. she summed it up: “life has been my school.” in 2012, um faisal’s family lost their house in an air raid, and they moved to gaziantep, a turkish city an hour’s drive away from aleppo. a year later, her husband suffered a stroke, and, like many older syrian women, um faisal had to step up when the family’s original breadwinner became incapacitated (sidhva et al. 2021). as an illiterate woman with no professional qualifications or turkish skills, she had limited options. she initially refused to clean other people’s houses “because in syria, i used to bring a woman who would clean for me.” still, her self-image as a syrian housewife came with a strong work ethos: “syrian women will do anything to find work!” she carved out for herself a professional niche in line with her community’s gendered values about what counts as appropriate work for women, and her duties to her family. following her passion for syrian cuisine, she set up a catering business, first from her own kitchen, and later inside a shared space with other syrian women. soon, her team delivered syrian delicacies to ngos, restaurants, and student accommodations. syrian customers learned about her through her facebook page, “um faisal, a woman from aleppo, this is well known!” after seven years, she had to give up her rental space, cooking again from her own apartment. her income dwindled, as turkey’s economic crisis took its toll. still, the catering business—a reduced version of which she continues to run until today—helped her build a network with syrian widows and divorcees, most of them, like herself, illiterate and with no previous experience of paid labor. these women made up the core staff of um faisal’s next, much more successful business venture: a cleaning agency. by late 2022, she employed seventy cleaning ladies; on average, each was deployed one day a week. specializing in syrian customers with huge properties, she received around 2,000 turkish lira (around usd 76) per house. a typical cleaning mission involved a team of six or seven women, each of whom received around 200 turkish lira for a day’s work. the remainder of the money was spent on cleaning materials, transport, and, of course, um faisal’s salary: around 500 turkish lira (around usd 19) per day. unable to read whatsapp messages, um faisal exclusively communicated with clients and employees through voice messages. the combined income from her cleaning and catering businesses covered her monthly living expenses of 15,000 turkish lira (around usd 570), including the rent for the spacious family apartment, her husband’s medication and physiotherapy, as well as personal acts of charity. like a true shaweesh, she acted as a moral authority in her younger employees’ lives: before agreeing to hire a cleaning lady, she visited them at home to assess their family’s respectability and check whether their children wore clean clothes. having turned into a well-known female authority in the syrian community, she was sought out by her workers for marital counsel and when they fell on hard times. like farhan, who built his business on syrians’ prewar remittance-sending habits as well as his own transnational trade ties, um faisal’s cleaning agency thrived because she presented herself in roles familiar to syrians: a powerful but benevolent labor broker and matriarch. because refugee brokers build on a shared repertoire of knowledge and experiences, brokers and their clients instantly recognize each other. maintaining channels remember the handshake protocol that connects routers? to uphold that link, routers may subsequently send each other regular “keep-alive” messages. equally, syrians’ communicative channels need maintaining, especially for populations dispersed around the globe. refugee brokers use relational work, material moorings, and performances of syrianness to reactivate shared cultural codes and, in turn, generate economic profit from syrians’ existing social infrastructure. borrowing viviana zelizer’s (2012) notion of “relational work,” gözde güran (2020) shows how money agents in turkey and syria ensure the profitability of their businesses through active relationship management. they revive old ties with customers from their kinship communities, now dispersed across the middle east, while also building new networks with fellow brokers, which allows them to extend their operations to areas where they have no personal contacts. brokerage, then, involves not only economic transactions, but also intense social activities, including hanging out with business partners, extending favors to loyal customers, and demonstrating trustworthiness to new clients. much of this relational work occurs via whatsapp, and in my experience, one can easily recognize refugee brokers—they are always on the phone, or even multiple phones. indeed, phone numbers make for an important “micro-infrastructure” (korsby 2017, 120) that allows potential clients to reach brokers. yet it would prove a mistake to overlook the material components of brokers’ activities: actual phones and computers, offices and (semi)private reception spaces, passports and ledgers, together with airports and roads. in this section, i explore how the infrastructure of displacement combines brokers’ mobilities, immobile moorings, and mobile communication technologies across different scales: acts of brokerage link local, national, and transnational elements such as international humanitarian practices, financial flows, whatsapp messages, living rooms and kitchens in gaziantep, and cafés in british cities (anand, gupta, and appel 2018; harvey, jensen, and morita 2017; lindquist 2017). for a successful businessman, farhan kept a surprisingly empty office. in 2023, i made my way to the first floor of a two-story building, where i was greeted by a counter, shielded from customers by a glass panel and huge posters, announcing farhan’s affiliation with a global money-sending agency. however, the counter remained unstaffed on this and my subsequent visits, and a side door was locked. the actual office hid behind the mysterious door, sparsely equipped with two desks and chairs, one computer, a copier, and a money-counting machine. in a corner, a surveillance camera allowed those inside to keep an eye on the entrance area close to the counter. bare walls were decorated with certificates of training qualifications for one of the regular employees and plants in plastic pots. in truth, there was a rather small amount of visible office work going on in this place, which seemed rather like an extension of farhan’s home life: he had traded his shoes against comfortable slippers, joking around with two of his arab employees, while visitors lounged on a comfortable leather sofa. when we left for lunch, farhan took a couple of bills out of the register, treating the day’s earnings like his personal wallet. at second glance, however, this apparent harbor of male conviviality was a workspace. only all the work was happening on farhan’s phone, used to negotiate with assistants, track transactions, and provide receipts to customers. a distant employee—maybe in turkey?—was reassured in a whatsapp voice message that usd 150 did not correspond to £150, but rather £140. farhan’s phone did not stop ringing, even when we were in the car and at his home. just like farhan, um faisal answered multiple phone calls during our interview, but her living room also displayed visible markers of her syrianness, including glass cabinets and side tables full of syrian memorabilia, such as copper plates, glassware, and quranic calligraphy. ever the accomplished hostess, she served me tea and arab coffee in tiny cups, as well as biscuits and fruits. the welcome she gave me, together with the formal reception room, reminded me of syrians’ well-known traditions of hospitality. cooking smells wafting from the kitchen also indicated that her catering business still continued from her home. besides lending testimony to her virtues as a syrian housewife, um faisal’s living room also served as a workplace, frequently visited by syrian customers of the cleaning agency, employees, as well as her charity contacts. as abu faisal, her husband, exclaimed: “these poor syrian women [whom his wife helps and employs] keep knocking on our door!” um faisal’s living room formed the stage for her display of syrianness: she enacted codes of hospitality to the benefit of her syrian networks. performances of syrian values extended even to other people’s living rooms: um faisal proudly told me that she had acquired a number of foreign clients from international ngos, “a man called francisco from the uk … i also worked for someone called steven, and someone called brian. i used to cook [and later clean] for them.” dropping english names proved the mainstream success of her enterprise, beyond her local syrian networks. foreigners would entrust her with their house keys; “they even left their laptops and thousands of dollars in cash lying around in their living rooms!” as a proud syrian, um faisal made it clear that neither she nor her staff would ever steal from customers. as for farhan, it would be wrong to deduce that material places and performances of syrianness did not matter to him. on the contrary, his empty office was located on the same block as two well-known syrian food stores, in a multiethnic neighborhood home to several syrian restaurants and shops. he met syrian clients in person through socializing at cafés and other meeting points of the syrian refugee community, including mosques. “i am a lawyer after all,” he laughingly explained to me; “i like talking a lot.” during a charity dinner during the covid-19 pandemic, organized by a syrian-run ngo and attended by hundreds of syrian refugees in his city, he donated £2000 (around usd 2,620) to an educational initiative. just like um faisal, who practiced charity in person at home, farhan strove to be seen by his community as a successful entrepreneur—and thus as a trusted business contact. in living rooms, community spaces, and at syrian events, considerable relational work takes place, meant to reactivate and maintain the channels of communication that bind refugee brokers to their clients (wessendorf 2022). it occurs in gendered meeting spaces, such as women’s homes or men’s cafés, informed by the broker’s own gender and that of their targets, be it cleaning ladies in turkey or male workers in the united kingdom. by blurring the boundaries between workspaces and home, business, charity, and hospitality, farhan’s and um faisal’s relational work restores a sense of belonging—the basis for their transactions. multi-usage of channels once stable channels of communication are established and well maintained, they can be used to circulate different kinds of resources and diversify routes—just like a router may send different types of data to different destinations. this speaks to the simultaneously stable and dynamic nature of the infrastructure of displacement. having first learned about farhan’s remittance-sending from the united kingdom to war-torn areas in syria, i was surprised to hear about his efforts to also reach new syrian diasporas elsewhere. soon, farhan facilitated money transfers from the united kingdom to germany and sweden, though his customers were not europeans, but rather syrians circulating money in europe. “when somebody in germany needs €40,000 (around usd 44,930), they don’t want to ask a bank.” to syrians inside syria, farhan served as an emergency contact, circulating remittances that paid for life-saving food and medication. to syrians in europe, he provided start-up capital. but farhan did not stop there, making the best of his location in a place with an existing migration history. the role of south asian (and other) migrations to the united kingdom since the nineteenth century, and the cosmopolitan spaces that these have produced within many cities’ confines, have been extensively documented (mcloughlin et al. 2014). but this complex history only held relevance to farhan to the extent to which it provided the backdrop for expanding his business. while farhan was a registered money agent, his money-sending business was “half legal, half illegal.” in addition, the syrian part of his operations did not always come out profitable; at times, he made it sound like an act of charity, an informal form of aid to compatriots in need. to sustain himself, farhan began to arrange lucrative money transfers targeted at other, better-off, arab communities, especially the sudanese. “sudanese trust syrians; they have seen what syrians have built up in syria.” farhan thus offered money transfers to sudan, pakistan, dubai, jordan, egypt, and other arabic-speaking countries. his strategy in expanding his customer circle shows his keen understanding of the importance of social capital: he even hired a sudanese employee to deal with sudanese customers, known to be stubborn hagglers. diversifying his business helped farhan overcome lean periods, such as during ramadan 2023, when the rising costs of living in the united kingdom meant that fewer refugees sent money to relatives in syria. the infrastructure of displacement functions much like other global infrastructures: as i listened to the snippets of farhan’s repeated short conversations and evolving business plans over the years, i began to see him not merely as an informal money agent but as a currency trader, not unlike investment bankers in the world’s financial capitals. in fact, just like the traders in caitlin zaloom’s (2003) famous study in the outcry pits of chicago, farhan sought to maximize profit through intensely social activities; he relied on family and friends working in the same trade to gain an advantage and to take decisions in volatile markets. it would thus be a mistake to locate farhan and, say, professional derivative traders, at opposite ends of a spectrum of economic rationality. um faisal used her networks to channel not only one resource—job opportunities—but also private humanitarian assistance and even fiancés to the women in her social circle. during our interview, she repeatedly redirected the conversation to her charity work. to her, it was a continuation of her prewar life in syria: “even in syria, i always helped people.” one of her beneficiaries, a youthful widow and her daughter, were in her living room as we spoke: “this young girl [referring to a shy eight-year-old waiting in a corner] is an orphan, her father died in the war.” using her guests as living proof of her generosity, she told us about her occasional acts of charity, such as buying bread and coal for her employees, as well as organized forms of assistance. throughout the conversation, the widow and her child remained unspeaking in a corner of the room. in a traditional hospitality setting, they were simply good guests, letting the owner of the house lead the conversation. as a younger woman, the widow also behaved like a respectful daughter toward the older matriarch who had symbolically “adopted” her and her fatherless child. however, in light of her dependence on um faisal, we could also read her silence differently: as an attempt to stay in the broker’s good favors, and even fear of being cut off from assistance and job opportunities. i cannot speculate on her thoughts. in the living room of the overbearing um faisal, the subject of our interview, it did not feel appropriate to address the young woman directly. sadly, i had no opportunity to follow up with her after the 2023 earthquake. nevertheless, these multiple possible facets of her connection with um faisal hint at the easy slippage between charity, domination, and even exploitation in the broker’s dealings with her clients. far from being a merely economic relationship, the bond between um faisal and her wards was loaded with gendered and age-based expectations about what counts as appropriate behavior toward each other. through her affluent syrian clients, um faisal had recently met a private donor from the gulf; from her living room, he gave out financial assistance to dozens of syrian families. aid delivery thus blended with the traditional tasks of a matriarch: during iddah, the four-month mourning period during which muslim widows retreat from the world, um faisal brought food to one of her female acquaintances. she also arranged weddings: “i had a girl here whose family traveled to europe. i arranged a marriage for her [with a respectable young man from the syrian community]. how many daughters do i have? i have fifty daughters!” like farhan, um faisal benefited from being perceived as charitable, as donors and spouses were recruited from her network of syrian customers—and vice versa. she also considered using her connections with syrians in western europe to acquire customers for a new, third business. her newest business idea, yet unfunded, included exporting middle eastern goods to western europe. through one of her daughters, who lived in the netherlands, um faisal had learned about the needs of syrian diasporas outside the middle east. “imagine syrian women in germany whose children live in istanbul, and the children would like to send them presents—maybe a blouse, or a water pipe?” on a final note, many brokers are not only motivated by short-term financial gain but also by personal dreams of mobility, even when these projects are temporarily put on hold (alpes 2017; lucht 2015; piot with batema 2019). the aspirational nature of the infrastructure of displacement becomes clear when we look at its adaptability: refugee brokers use their knowledge and channels to circulate resources not only for others but also for themselves. in 2019, as we finished our coffee at the gallery, farhan told me about his newest project, procuring what was still missing from the picture of an accomplished syrian businessman: a syrian wife. through family connections and with the help of proxies, he had married a young syrian woman from his hometown. farhan had paid for his bride to be smuggled into turkey, where he set her up with her brother. while farhan was applying for family reunification in the united kingdom, he took advantage of his refugee status to travel, combining business and visits to his bride in turkey. during the covid-19 pandemic, the last i heard of him through our shared friend was that he, his wife, and a newborn child now lived in the united kingdom. when i met him again in 2023, he was waiting for his wife’s british visa to be renewed, so the family could travel together. farhan was already planning holidays in europe, as well as a visit to syria. the man who was moving money for others was once again thinking of moving himself. conclusion like routers in digital infrastructures, brokers connect refugees to the world. in this article, i provided an ethnography of two syrian brokers who help syrian refugees in the united kingdom and turkey transfer money and access jobs, aid, and fiancés. i argued that despite my protagonists’ different geographic and socioeconomic positioning, their acts of brokerage make up the broader “infrastructure of syrian displacement.” like routers, brokers facilitate refugees’ circulations because they can capitalize on stable communicative channels. in the syrian case, these channels are built on refugees’ and brokers’ prewar experiences of transnational migration and trade, brokerage, and gender roles, and they become reactivated in exile through performances of syrianness meant to establish a shared sense of belonging and trustworthiness needed for business transactions. like all good brokers, my interlocutors possess considerable sociocultural capital, but they also have a talent for making new friends and identifying relevant infrastructures, such as syrian meeting spots in new locations. refugee brokers, like routers, interconnect different networks and creatively adapt to changing geographies of refuge. such an infrastructure of displacement is thus both a relatively stable set of resources and the outcome of brokers’ experimentation. studying syrian brokerage as infrastructure allows anthropologists to tell stories in which displacement is not a one-way street, but embedded in older migrations and generative of new mobilities of money, things, and people. uncovering the stable channels through which the economic, affective, and gendered circulations within dispossessed communities flow helps explain how refugees get by with little humanitarian aid and limited access to labor markets in host countries. with his transnational business, farhan may fit more easily the stereotype of a broker, but as um faisal’s example shows, brokerage also takes place at the local level, and even those with limited mobility and assets contribute to building the wider infrastructure of displacement. scrutinizing the “social” in refugees’ social infrastructure reveals a complex picture of refugee agency. studies on syrian diaspora-led organizations aiding refugees have complicated binary distinctions between passive “beneficiaries” and their “aid providers” (sweis 2019). but what about private-sector refugee brokers who not only assist but also exploit the displaced? as farhan recently told our mutual friend, he had hired two accountants in syria and turkey; neither had signed a work contract. “what good would this do?,” he asked, arguing that neither of his employees worked in a legal context that would allow them to claim labor rights. still, he considered himself a fair employer: he had continued paying his accountant in syria while she went on maternity leave, just as he had carried on sending a salary to his sudanese employee in the united kingdom when the latter traveled to sudan to find a bride. to farhan, his business interests and charitable work overlapped, and he scoffed at the idea that he was taking advantage of inequalities in the global economy to outsource work to vulnerable accountants in war-torn areas. as filippo osella (2014, 387) points out, “one can never identify [brokers] clearly as either ‘social workers’ or ‘exploitative hustlers’: the same people play both roles at different times.” in different interpersonal contexts, brokers combine a contradictory vocabulary and gestures of gifts, hospitality, kinship, and business. in return, refugees’ own moral criteria may not meet lofty ideals of morality. to many, a “good” broker is not someone who avoids illegal activities, but someone who makes circulations happen and does not cheat their customers. how refugee brokers and clients navigate their relationships on shifting moral ground challenges the abstract ideas of disinterested solidarity that underpin mainstream humanitarianism. abstract syrian refugees resort to a rich ecosystem of brokers who not only facilitate border crossings but also move remittances, jobs, knowledge, wives, and more. how are refugees’ circulations made possible, and by whom? drawing on fieldwork with syrian brokers in turkey and the united kingdom, i put forward the novel concepts of a syrian infrastructure of displacement and of refugee brokers as a particular infrastructural component, namely, as human routers. like routers, brokers manage, direct, and control resource flows. revisiting julia elyachar’s concept of communicative channels, i contend that refugee brokers and their clients rely on such pre-existing connections, built on shared experiences of migration, brokerage, and hospitality. reactivated in exile through brokers’ performances of “syrianness,” these channels facilitate a shared sense of belonging needed for their business transactions. the ways in which refugee brokers slip seamlessly between business, charitable deeds, and exploitation challenge the abstract ideas of disinterested solidarity that underpin mainstream humanitarianism. 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reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.04 uncertainty in motion: rumors of a proxy war in late industrial baltimore cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 303-333, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.01 uncertainty in motion: rumors of a proxy war in late industrial baltimore chloe ahmann cornell university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8974-190x i was in the library when my phone rang. loud. job seekers fiddling with résumés shot their side eyes toward my table, while the woman in the rocker shook her heavy head at me. i turned off the ringer and tried to pretend the awkwardness away, but then my phone buzzed. twice. soon, nick’s device was rattling across the table, and as the job seekers stared and the woman shook her head, we both sank deep into our plastic seats.1 it was martha. “so i’ve been wondering about secretary johnson [then head of the maryland department of environment], and how he managed to go from the arizona department of environment to mde.” “i started digging. here’s what i found.” “first, here’s his bio.” nick followed the link while i read on. “he was born in kentucky.” “then he moved north and went to a lot of d.c. law schools.” “then he served as coun[se]l to the u.s. house of reps … then deputy administrator of water for the u.s. epa [environmental protection agency]. …” “then he took a mysterious dive south.” and that’s where things get interesting. seventeen texts came through each of our phones over the next few minutes. that’s thirty-four buzzes and sixty-eight side eyes. each one substantiated ties: between the mde and its counterpart in arizona; between the epa and a group called the stewardship action council; between the governor of maryland, a national lobbying firm, and a global player in the waste-to-energy industry. it was the last of these nodes that got martha “digging” to begin with. she wanted to get to the bottom of the fairfield renewable energy project (“the project”), an incinerator proposed near her home in south baltimore city. martha was a mother in her forties who did not have a lot of leisure time to poke around. her days were full of jobs she pieced into a life: she refurbished guitars, sold hand-knit cell-phone carriers on craigslist, and was precariously employed managing the office of a solar company. it was there, in 2012, at a desk miles from home, that she first caught wind of the incinerator. (someone had called about installing solar panels on its roof.) martha soon gleaned that the plant had been permitted two years prior. “and all i could think was, ‘wait a minute! how long has this been going on behind our backs?’” she recollected later, “it’s not the sort of thing you should learn accidentally.” for weeks, martha spent days answering the company’s calls and nights scouring the web for “what these guys were up to.” she printed documents and arranged them into piles underneath her bed. eventually, she connected with a local group—including nick—curious about the company. soon, murmurs about the project surged into a rancorous debate, as residents bickered over the vices and virtues of a plant that, if built, would be the nation’s largest trash incinerator: burning 4,000 tons of waste each day to generate allegedly “clean” power, while emitting tons of lead, mercury, and fine particulates into the most polluted air in baltimore city. the broad contours of that debate were straightforward enough: some residents coveted jobs at the plant, while others balked at its proposed emissions. but beneath a fight manifestly about local land use, many suspected something else was really going on. opponents like martha entertained stories that the company behind the plant was secretly owned by a power player in the waste-to-energy sector, while some supporters swore that martha’s side was getting money from big landfill. rumor had it that a waste-industry proxy war was brewing in south baltimore. rumors are ubiquitous in this late industrial place, marked by manifold extractions and mysterious exposures. over a decade studying both, preceded by years as a schoolteacher here, i’ve heard plenty: secret waste pits, bizarre illnesses, collusion, corruption. many traverse the faults that divide this tensely integrated town, where neighbor often mistrusts neighbor. others stretch toward cryptic corporate forces that diminish life outcomes. these are deadly serious forces, and much of my work concerns their role in producing uncertainty about the local atmosphere over a long 200 years and the devastating impact of the same on residents, whose place-based knowledge gets dismissed as dubious. i also study how locals live, strive, and maneuver in this consequential muddle (ahmann 2018, 2019, forthcoming). one way they do is through a kind of rumor practice that meets the gravity of life in late industrial environments with narrative agility, even play, bent on orchestrating partial knowledge to local advantage—including in debates about who gets to claim the mantle of the “local,” and who doesn’t. these maneuvers were on full display during my fieldwork, though it took some time for me to recognize them as maneuvers. my eyes were trained on the seriousness of the incinerator fight, and my days spent in conversation with regulators, executives, and residents on both sides of the divide. i also participated in this fight, canvassing with resident-opponents of the plant and providing research support for their campaign against the project. as a local teacher who had transitioned into a researcher role and moved with relative ease between opposing camps—aligned with but not quite inside of the campaign—i was an unusual figure, and sometimes became folded into rumors, too. the most pointed implicated me, notebook ever present, as a spy. let me assure you i was not. but “spy” seems a sensible way to class a curious outsider. especially here, where outside influence is profoundly enigmatic, facts spare, and suspicions abundant. as murky stories with murky origins trade along murky paths, rumors are modes of explanation suited to just this sort of world—and wherever life is overwhelmingly uncertain, as scholars have long shown. take those whispers of a famine plot that spooked eighteenth-century france into a revolution (lefebvre 1973). or vampire stories that coded critiques of dispossession across the african continent (white 2000). ethnographers in particular make clear that rumors give narrative coherence to mystifying worlds, and they transform those worlds: generating doubt (samuels 2015; maqsood 2019), hate (das 1998), and fear (luna 2018) that alter social ties and upset power structures. far from signs of ignorance, rumors are rich reserves of vernacular theory among those subject to the vagaries of other people’s power—people who, rather than acquiesce to the frailty of not knowing, devote themselves to connecting the dots. this scholarly consensus opens other questions yet, like: what do rumors theorize? how does their theorizing work? and where rumors are subaltern speech (spivak 1988) subordinate to the authority of expert discourse—as they are where martha lives—what might they reveal, and perhaps rearrange, about the workings of authoritative knowledge? i want to suggest that, in the face of a wildly disaggregated regulatory sphere whose partitions have for years served corporate power (sawyer 2006; murphy 2008; fortun 2014; ahmann and kenner 2020), rumors here operate through a politics of connection across scales that makes skilled use of fragmented information. moreover, in tension with industrial epistemologies that consign local knowledge to the realm of mere suspicion, they reinvest the local as the ground from which authoritative speech acts spring, implicating evasive outside actors in intensely local dramas. these twin achievements point toward a third whose import stretches far beyond this site, to anywhere where “doubt” supports a lethal status quo (auyero and swistun 2008; oreskes and conway 2010; benson and kirsch 2010). for these rumors show that doubt also has affordances that locals wield with great dexterity. perhaps not toward liberatory ends, but enough to make small gains and muck things up for corporate bosses. in baltimore, tapping into these affordances took a particular kind of narrative work that deserves elaboration, for one, because it exceeds what scholars know about how rumors make sense of the world. broadly, studies teach that rumors can make sense in terms of style and content. a classic instance of the latter comes from luise white (2000), who plumbs blood-sucking metaphors to ask how east and central africans perceived colonial power. susan lepselter (2016) exemplifies the former, tracing how resonance gives poetic sense to conspiracy in the united states through narratives of alien abduction. when random things recur enough, she shows, things click, and suddenly you know that there is no coincidence. in this aesthetic, more is more—echoing the chill of the uncanny, which does its psychic trick through repetition (freud 2003) and the paranoid work of amassing signs that something must be wrong (hofstadter 1964). this second mode of sense-making seems palpable in the buzz, buzz, buzz of martha’s texts, as each buzz grew the sense of something sinister. but martha did more than collect associations. she emphasized the lines between the dots. she labored to compose a set of interscalar ties more often severed in this late industrial place, where power comes from far away but hides its origins and its impact—in part by spurning “paranoid” knowledge. so, while countless works on rumor note the symbolism of the things connected and the felt effects of their association, martha’s prompts mark matters of trajectory pertinent to life in zones of longue durée extraction. here, rumors’ force is more than a matter of how many things cohere, but from where and in precisely what direction. here, rumors not only connect but connect across scales, organizing data into interscalar plots. these matters matter because breaking interscalar ties is a core way corporate power works in contexts such as this: where bosses pull signs of harm apart to dodge critique and shirk accountability. in defiance of these moves, rumors build connective tissue between exactly those relations industrial logics work so hard to cut. this is another reason that their interscalar sense-making deserves elaboration: it imparts lessons about how authority in late industrial environments is made, and how it might be made quite differently. as we will see, it was through their busy travels between sites, scales, and actors that rumors of a proxy war took on persuasive strength, upsetting a discursive field in which rumoring is typically the mark of the irrational. it was also through their travels that they became instruments in a contest over local voice that would consume south baltimore. grasping how means following these rumors’ interscalar journeys as, in landscapes forged by corporate influence, those journeys unfold rumors’ politics. to do this work, i treat rumor as an “interscalar vehicle,” gabrielle hecht’s term for things that dart between scales of analysis. through their movement, such vehicles reveal how scale is imbricated in “social, cultural, and technopolitical processes” (hecht 2018, 115). for hecht and martha both, scale concerns more than “size and granularity,” or how big a problem is (hecht 2018, 114). it also concerns the relationships our categories stress and the claims they subsequently sanction (liboiron 2021). consider the project. to call this plant a local land-use matter is to fix relational boundaries at the district line, limiting potential ties to distant actors (ahmann 2020). conversely, to allege involvement by a multinational waste titan is to cast it as a global problem. scalar claims consequently attribute victimhood and blame—and this makes them deeply political (carr and lempert 2016). following an interscalar vehicle means catching a lift from scale to scale to see how power shifts in this movement across. hecht claims that anything can be an interscalar vehicle, but she rides uranium-bearing rocks to map the forces behind gabonese exposures. this work depends on the rocks’ materiality: miners absorbed uranium, which scientists could then measure in their bodies. the materiality of exposure enables other interscalar stories, too, like vanessa agard-jones’s (2013) work on chlordecone in martinique, which she follows from her mechanic’s flesh to imperial france to global pesticide markets. rocks are tractable, and pesticides (despite the structured ignorance surrounding them) are too. but rumors are slippery, intangible objects. just as moving across scales can teach us about rumors, then, rumors seem to test the outer limits of this method—a third reason that their interscalar movement merits close attention. for the scholar tracking rumors cannot map relations on her own. she is completely at the mercy of her interlocutors. and so i found myself a passenger on martha’s texts. each one took me on a journey, from the library to the statehouse to a global industry and back. each one charted furtive paths that made the project more than meets the eye—and it wasn’t only martha. i heard rumors from many actors engaged in interscalar labor, jumping scales to make political claims. on both sides of the issue, talk of shadowy outside forces worked to vest some voices with more authority than others. specifically, each group claimed to be the real voice of “local” while dismissing adversaries’ views as the result of corporate capture. meanwhile, each admitted doubts about where power lay, coding opacity as a central problem. tracking these claims across scales and through allegedly bad relations, i show how rumors became tools for mapping ambiguous forces long at work in this environment. through this mapping, speakers not only referenced but enacted interscalar power, spatializing agency to serve their own positions on the project.2 attending to trajectory is thus more than an exercise in being thorough. it sheds light on a tactical capacity of rumors understated in prevailing scholarship. rumors shape how power feels (luna 2018), but they also shape how power moves. they put uncertainty in motion—sometimes toward specific ends. and slighting this capacity has consequences for ethnographic knowledge. after all, rumors are densely symbolic texts that circulate through social worlds, making them paradigmatic objects for this discipline (jones 2014). hearing, spreading, and becoming a character in rumors are also common in the practice of ethnography (gluckman 1963).3 if rumors do strategic work through their interscalar movement, then it is not hard to imagine how the anthropologist might get drawn into this work and see her own sense of things disturbed along the way: a bumbling departure from genetic narratives of ethnographic mastery that have historically bolstered disciplinary authority, for better and for worse. in a place cloaked in uncertainty, where power differentials are always knowledge differentials and one can never really know for sure, she may even find herself to be a conduit. something in the air when my phone buzzed in the library on that fateful afternoon, i had already come to know south baltimore as a suspicious place. former factory workers whispered about the sludge they buried in the dead of night. some confessed to shady dealings on the waterfront. military secrets, trade secrets, secrets about what was in the air and who knew and why they never told us: rumors charged the local atmosphere. i spent the early months of fieldwork seeking evidence of these “oblique events and background noises” (stewart 2011, 445), until i realized evidence was not always the point. sometimes people wanted me to chase leads and substantiate their claims, and much of my work over the years has been devoted to just that. sometimes, though, people wanted to fold me into the sensation something bad had happened here, without the orienting clarity of what. like the man who gestured toward one plant where “they mixed water for the atom bomb,” before returning nonchalantly to his sandwich. like the oil worker who called me to discuss the laws his bosses made him break, just to navigate us toward another topic. like the widow who surmised her husband’s death had ties to local plants but couldn’t prove it, and wanted me to share in that frustration. these moments passed in the style of disclosure without disclosing truly covert information. they dealt in the charge of mystery, the play of indirection, and the torment of a question with no answer—what alix johnson (2023) calls “secrecy deployed as form, not wrapped around content.” taken together with all manner of pollutants, these gestures hint at “something in the air”—invisible, inscrutable, but potent. the sky is thick with chemicals and thicker still with rumors, which read meaning into half-signs that suffuse south baltimore. there are colorful clouds and cancer clusters, there is a dark film clinging to most surfaces, and there is talk of unscrupulous behavior that occasionally gets verified. in 1989, for instance, one company admitted sneaking mustard gas components to iran (meehan 1989). mostly, though, it is tough to say what is real and what imagined in this murky episteme (taussig 1986), where doubt has calcified into a dreadful norm. suspicion pulses underneath the everyday, sustaining an “affective atmosphere,” or the “shared ground from which subjective states” take off (anderson 2009, 78). as sarah luna (2018) shows in her work on affective atmospheres of terror along the mexico–united states border, rumors play a central role in producing shared intensities; there, rumors of violence fomented fear that ultimately served the cartels’ power. but every atmosphere differs, and every rumor mill coheres in its own way. and it is uncertainty, more than fear, that permeates the air in late industrial south baltimore. figure 1. “there’s something in the air.” pamphlet published by baltimore’s better air coalition in 1976. enoch pratt free library, maryland department, vf, air pollution. elsewhere, i tell a longer story about the roots of this sensation (ahmann forthcoming), but briefly: south baltimore has been shaped by outside forces for the past 200 years, many of them shadowy indeed. during the country’s great waves of immigration, it served as a quarantine zone to help safeguard the city center; sickly bodies were detained here as a public health precaution. later, local workers stockpiled weapons to provision two world wars. the region then supported deterrence with its cold war chemical arsenal. more recently, it has been a corporatized industrial zone where some of the biggest names in chemicals produce what many residents believe is agent orange. “no, just pesticides and herbicides,” plant managers insist—but then they wink. one boss toured me around his worksite grinning, “chloe, everything we make is dust.” over time, i have come to read these winks as expressions of pleasure in the power of withholding desperately desired answers—about the air, about one’s health, and about who is acting in whose interests. but a wink is no one thing, and residents’ gestures toward secrecy communicated very different stuff. they lugged me into a late industrial world where i could rarely get my bearings. where i could sense that something menacing surrounded me, while knowing that my knowledge was too dubious to count as such. south baltimore is this kind of place in the most literal sense. here, pollution is plain but its scope, sources, and effects have been obscured: by a disaggregated regulatory regime designed to track pollutants (molecular entities), not pollution (lived conditions) (ahmann and kenner 2020); by profitable doubt produced through corporate “counter-science” about toxics (benson and kirsch 2010; oreskes and conway 2010); by a legal system that discounts victims’ lived exposure as evidence of any single litigant’s wrongdoing; and by cunning factory managers who evade legitimate concerns with easy smiles and smooth talk. these forces work not to stoke fear, but to blunt fear via “labors of confusion” (auyero and swistun 2008). because fear of emissions poses major corporate problems. take this evasion from nigel, a white boss with forty years’ experience. “people are highly suggestible when it comes to chemicals,” he responded to my question about the health impacts of toxic air. suppose something’s been released, but you don’t know what it does . … there’s an example from the first gulf war of a handsome reporter on a rooftop when a [missile] struck nearby. there were rumors saddam hussein had chemical weapons on those things, and you could watch him hyperventilate on camera. there weren’t, but it was exciting to watch. or imagine you went through a group and opened a vial . … nigel confessed that he “did this once, by putting green vegetable dye in water and using a sinister glass-stoppered tube.” he chuckled. imagine you open the vial and say, “interesting stuff. doesn’t have any toxins, just makes your nose itch.” leave it there. i guarantee you’ll have everyone scratching their nose within twenty minutes. but it’s only because you suggested something to them, and now they feel it. in fact, they’ll start attributing other things to it, and all it was was water. “now,” he arrived at last to the substance of my question, “can i therefore make you think whatever’s in that vial is the reason for your cancer? absolutely.” “that’s the thing about the human brain,” another boss explained, “it makes all sorts of marvelous connections.” marvelous, he emphasized, before his eyes implied but wrong. several lessons about the shape of industrial power flit between these two evasions, which tarry in the play of insinuation one moment, just to dismiss it in the next. first, when it comes to pinning down “real” dangers in the air, corporations claim a monopoly on authoritative knowledge. second, many gain the upper hand by dismissing local concerns as the product of so many paranoid connections. along the way, residents’ knowledge becomes rumor—excited, affecting, but dubious—and rumor works as an “[un]authorizing discourse” (asad 1993) that disqualifies one kind of speaker from the realm of serious debate while bolstering another who need not resort to mere conspiracy. that industry insiders themselves participate in such speech only confirms that they draw the boundaries of the genre. this impeachment of rumor as paranoid—even “hysterical,” per nigel—is elemental to what kim fortun calls industrialism’s “functionalist semiotics.” here, everything is as it seems “and nothing more: chemical plants produce chemical products for use … without polluting emissions. pesticides kill insects, but pose no [other] harm,” et cetera, ad nauseum (fortun 2014, 313). this is a language ideology designed to render connective tissue mute and critics “inarticulate” (fortun 2014, 315), consigning working-class residents to the realm of subaltern speech, where their fair misgivings might be neatly disregarded. even more so in this late industrial present, where heady air persists without the lifeways that once made it bearable (few residents still work in industry), and old sites for pooling voice, like union halls, have crumbled. while many ties are cut to bolster this functionalist semiotics—between bodies and environments, experience and evidence, profits and pollution—interscalar ties are among the most important to sustaining corporate power. i mean not only ties between multinational corporations and the local, state, and federal regimes through which they quietly exert their influence but also ties binding subsidiary operations to their parent companies. the legal construct of limited liability shields shareholders from personal responsibility for a corporation’s debts, and multinationals from the actions of subsidiary businesses, including those they own outright. these separations constitute the “corporate veil,” a conspiratorial term for “the immunities that accompany the corporate structure” (sawyer 2006, 28). piercing this veil is notoriously difficult, as the supreme court underscored in a 1988 pollution case. it ruled a parent could only be held responsible for violating the law in question if it was actually “operating” a troubled facility, emphasizing who commands a place, over who owns and benefits from toxic assets, and confining liability to the most local of corporate bodies.4 add this to the reasons why the many somethings in the air can be “detectable but nonetheless irrelevant” (murphy 2008, 698), palpable but categorically uncertain, and no wonder that so much appears to happen under cover of a veil: legally, it does. in addition to being awash in chemicals and the uncertainties composed around their impacts, south baltimore hosts corporate entities whose structures are interscalar, connections labyrinthine, and control open to change at any sign of legal trouble. it is a widely known fact, which nonetheless sounds paranoid, that companies often change names and owners for this reason. even nigel said so, admitting the mustard gas incident was “why [the company implicated in illicit sales] became [another].” in this late industrial place where so much work “has gone into obscuring, rather than revealing” these relations—legal, molecular, and more—efforts to render such ties newly “visible” are fundamentally political ones (murphy 2008, 698). enter rumor once again. rumors make connections. incessantly. obsessively. they bind people to shared feelings through their contagious spread (ahmed 2010) and their iterability (derrida 1982): that buzz, buzz, buzz of repetition that makes them seem autonomous. as a rule, rumors make ties, and their power grows with every tie they make. lepselter, tracking captivity rumors in the american west, shows this happens through a patterned way of reading signs that multiplies potential meanings—until multiplication becomes a sign par excellence. when it does, repetition gives way to resonance, an echoey aura produced by the “overlapping, back and forth” of cues (lepselter 2016, 3). resonance is a felt effect, and it produces others. for luna (2018), the density of violent stories on the border breeds bodily sensations like quickened pulse and labored breath, and shapes how people move through space. consider, also, murphy’s book on women workers breathing bad air in “sick buildings.” in isolation, their aches were dismissed as hysterical. but organized en masse (“me too, me three!”), they evidenced an atmospheric problem (murphy 2006, 1). south baltimore, too, is a place resonating with connections. it embeds the paranoia long known to be an organizing force in the united states, palpable in the productive nervousness that colored the cold war (masco 2006) and in the recent rise of qanon. but this site is more than a density of horizontal ties. it has also been made through interscalar power: city public health regimes blurred into a kind of military occupation, which faded into multinational extractions with kafkaesque arrangements, whose smokestacks have accrued into a planetary problem. paranoia is a perfectly reasonable response to living here (marcus 1999), where one must maintain “vigilance against external threat” (keller 1995, 122)—but this paranoia travels interscalar circuits that keep rumors on the move in ways rhyme, resonance, and density do not. this is what makes paranoia eminently sensible in south baltimore city. given the range of outside actors who have had their hands in shaping it, rumors that this place has become a quiet battlefield for two waste-industry behemoths sound quite plausible. as one deft peer reviewer put it, “rumor is not rumor is not rumor.” the genre shifts as it moves through different contexts. rumors will not work the same way in contexts of terror (where they frighten folks into submission) as in contexts of exposure (where doubt, not fear, pays dividends). when it comes to diagnosing power, these distinctions are instructive. in late industrial baltimore, rumors matter themselves into a realm where uncertainty pays if you are in charge, and cuts life short if you are not. (however “dubious” this atmosphere, residents suffer documented health disparities, but preventing more is hard when embodied knowledge is so often undercut.5) rumors matter themselves into a realm where interscalar power hides and the local carries liability—but also, we’ll soon see, symbolic value. a realm where rumor, to put elusive corporations in their place, must overcome some major obstacles. among them, a speaker must go beyond amassing ties between dissociated things, the mark of that “marvelous,” misguided paranoia. taking a cue from bosses who build authority by exploiting knowledge gaps and deploying winks to undercut opponents, she might be better served arranging them with care, routing atmospheres of apprehension into interscalar plots. plots are spatial and narrative geometries—as well as surreptitious schemes—while atmospheres are events that “[do] not yet have … form” (stewart 2011, 447). if here the atmospheric surround presses down as a dense assembly of what ifs, then rumors lift those what ifs into storylines. they give direction to suspicion, pointing toward whoever’s been behind things all along. prelude to a proxy war i will turn to direction soon, but first the plot demands some exposition. rumors about the project began in 2009, when a new york–based company, energy answers (ea), arrived in baltimore. to strengthen their permit application with the state, ea sought support from three neighborhood associations. such associations are the official nodes of local power: they are the first point of contact for developers hoping to reach “the community,” and they often claim to be the voice of that community, warranted or not. on the south side of the city, they have historically run interference between residents and industry, and extracted meager benefits from businesses when possible. though these groups hold little regulatory sway, the permit process stands as one exception. a project with “local support” will have an easier time moving through, especially for an overburdened neighborhood. in a world where their voices are more often rendered mute by corporate subterfuge, locals guard this privilege jealously. and corporations—seeking local influence sans legal entailments—covet it. when ea first sought this coveted support, the associations were led by middle-aged white homeowners who lorded over the tensely multiracial region. many felt “hostile” toward ea, as one participant in early talks recalled. the company promised a “clean,” “green” operation, but locals doubted these assurances. tapping into a deep-seated “culture of suspicion” toward outsiders of all kinds (subramaniam 1999), association leaders lobbed questions at the ceo and unearthed what they could about the company. but many were gradually won over by ea’s so-called transparency. like when the ceo brought a group to tour his massachusetts plant. or when ea negotiated a benefits agreement that included money for association projects. in contrast to opacity and the conspiracy theories it sometimes breeds, the modernist ideal of a transparent social world is one where decisions are “arrived at openly” for the benefit of a discerning public (west and sanders 2003, 7). opponents later lambasted negotiations as anything but that. (recall martha’s shock that all this had “been going on behind our backs.”) but association leaders describe them as a democratic process grounded in “solid information.” one middle-aged white man, michael, was impressed by the sheer mass of data that they got. while local companies remain infamously tight-lipped, “[ea] gave us an actual study showing what they were going to emit, how they were going to control it . … and the report was like this,” michael said, separating his thumb and index finger by two inches. “it wasn’t some cheapo-report—you know, twenty-five pages. it was a substantial document.” as association leaders gradually warmed to ea, those leaders rerouted reservations toward the plant’s opponents. before martha and nick, those opponents included environmental advocacy groups allied against the project. such groups are a major target of suspicion among longtime residents, sometimes more than industry, because of what i’m told are spurious intentions. these organizations may say they want to “help,” but actually they want to build their reputations, spin out onetime projects for foundations, or profit from the neighborhood’s hard luck. like the ngos marina welker (2009, 165) writes about in indonesia, which villagers charge with “businessing” their community, non-profits here appear corrupt on arrival. that includes groups with extremely benign projects. consider one group proposing to plant daffodils (“daffodils? are you out of your mind? but you can be sure somebody’s getting paid.”) and another hoping to research butterfly gardens (“i love butterflies—saw a gorgeous butterfly the other day … but no one needs a $40,000 study.”). if these charges seem absurd, remember that the histories of extraction, exposure, and evasion that give them grist are deadly serious. even the most outlandish suspicions bespeak some truth about how power moves in late industrial baltimore. come 2012, “the opposition” took on local form, when a multiracial group of local high school students mounted a robust campaign against the plant, with which i was aligned during my fieldwork. but association leaders remained wary. many believed students were controlled by “carpetbaggers” such as nick, their white mentor from a leftist group based a little further north in baltimore. beyond this, leaders’ mistrust of student activists was also racialized: south baltimore is a freshly integrated place where many whites code their black neighbors as “outsiders” by default (ahmann 2019). this, too, forms part of the atmosphere that envelops this place, where anti-blackness constitutes a “total climate” (sharpe 2016, 105), and where few whites believed that the black youth leading the campaign had reason to care about the neighborhood or the capacity to organize themselves. meanwhile, those neither black nor white test the rubrics of belonging held by area old-timers—including martha, an asian woman adopted into a white family who moved to the neighborhood twenty years ago to join her polish husband. figure 2. march to stop the incinerator. photo by united workers, december 2014. nor was it just white homeowners who harbored suspicion toward suspected outside forces—corporate, activist, or racialized. students, their mentors, and their allies appeared equally distrustful. nick explained that it was hard not to feel this way. as he shared one winter evening after a campaign meeting at the school, organizing against the plant was like “being in a twilight zone where we have tons of information and, somehow, we know nothing. like i have virtually no insight into how most decisions have been made. that’s the way i personally feel.” he paused. he looked at me. “and that’s not paranoia. it’s just—we’re really focused on stopping this [development], and we’re looking for certainty where there probably is none.” then, i heard nick’s comments as a sign of resignation. to lack certainty means to spend one’s precious energies chasing leads into dead ends, working hard and getting nowhere. at least, that was what i thought. in retrospect, though, knowing one can never know for sure can prove quite useful. with that knowledge, people can put uncertainty to work, becoming “coeval” participants in its production (maqsood 2019). under these conditions, rumors might just grow into subversive speech—a hope that ranajit guha (1983), studying peasant rebellion, famously invested in the genre. to do so they would need to subvert the particular murk that serves the corporation, vested in cutting interscalar ties that carry interscalar obligations: precisely by reconstituting them. aligned with anthropologists who show how rumors help “constitute power relations they might appear only to describe” (luna 2018, 65; see also samuels 2015), then, the remainder of this essay tracks the tactical effects of their interscalar movement. en route, note how uncertainty appears as a source of immense consternation—but also as the condition of possibility for power plays on both sides of the project. silent partners back to the library, side eyes darting toward our table: martha laid out an interscalar case before she pointed toward the force behind the action. that came with buzz fifteen, when she alleged that the plant was “really” owned by a global player in the waste-to-energy sector that i’ll call energon. i had known martha for a couple years by then, since we first crossed paths at a campaign meeting in 2014, and much of our collective time had been spent puzzling over how the project was still kicking after years of setbacks. at last, she believed that she had found the answer. there was just no other explanation. energy answers had three measly employees, two of whom were a father and his son. it had been five years since ea received permits from the state, and two years since opponents raised a stink that spooked away investors. by the time martha started “digging,” the project had no known financing. yet somehow, the company held on. nick—who was with me in the library that day—also suggested energon might be a silent partner, and i agreed that something fishy seemed afoot. but no one really knew, and no one had an explanation for the secrecy. just a feeling something bigger must be going on. there were many reasons to suspect “something bigger,” beginning with the labor of obtaining basic information about the plant. opponents’ first brush with this opacity happened in 2013, when students requested a health-impact assessment for the project. the city denied their request because, by then, “decision-making processes” had “already occurred.” it was impossibly vague language: the first of countless trapdoors into what nick had called the “twilight zone,” where every answer grew the feeling of not knowing. occurred among whom—state, city, community? what processes? when i began attending campaign meetings the next year as an observant participant in organizing efforts, tasked with research support that could historicize campaign demands, activists understood one “whom” to have been michael, from the neighborhood association. but many questions remained. so youth and their allies got to work, studying the company’s lease and tracking down its contracts. the latter search unearthed a network that bound ea to twenty-two public entities who had agreed to purchase power, which inspired a campaign to move the key decision-makers, which required the maddening work of sussing out which actors at what entities held sway. as nick then said: “there’s a lot of secret—i’ll just say it’s not a simple task securing facts about this project.” by mid-2015, opponents had achieved the unlikeliest of feats: all twenty-two entities pulled out, leaving ea’s financing in peril. but ea still had plans to build, which was why the group suspected energon. while ea had a few employees and limited operations, energon owned incinerators all over the world, boasting more than a billion dollars in yearly revenue. originally a holding company, energon spent decades consuming random ventures before focusing on “waste-to-energy” technology. waste-to-energy is premised on its own promises of secrecy and revelation: as boosters have it, these plants disappear trash into furnaces that burn away excess matter, until all that remains is latent value, which can be transmuted into power and then realized as corporate profit (ahmann 2019).6 no matter that their emissions harm both human and climatic health; supporters claim these impacts are uncertain. since acquiring its first plant in the 1980s, energon had become a global industry controlling an economy of scale. they could probably keep themselves afloat during a dry spell, opponents theorized, in ways ea could not. figure 3. proposed site of the fairfield renewable energy project. photo by chloe ahmann, july 2015. figure 4. park built in the shadow of coal mountains. photo by chloe ahmann, june 2016. when nick first broached this with me, he did it in that mode of performative self-censorship i encountered earlier: suggestion, pause, coda (“i’ll just say …”). it was a sticky-hot september day, and we were on a toxic tour around south baltimore. two young activists were showing students through a few key landmarks, beginning at their school, continuing to the project site, moving past a park dwarfed by coal mountains, and ending at the community garden. nick and i were already near the edge of the pack as we moved toward the site, lingering to document potential signs of building, when he dropped his voice. “you know, it’s hard to say how they’re doing anything without those [energy] deals. because we believe they have no other deals in place. so—” he stopped, looked away, and then stuffed both hands in his pockets. nick waited while a large truck clamored by, and then continued, “there’s talk they might be backed by a much larger operation—that’s how they’re still alive with all these snags.” before i could inquire who, he rushed to rejoin students near the front. the wink in nick’s evasions reminded me of what i had long observed in industry: pleasure in the power of withholding. nick both teased a theory bosses would dismiss as paranoid and adopted bosses’ slippery talk. he planted an idea that would be pivotal if true without committing to the claim, preserving a “backdoor out of speaking” (perice 1997, 4), like the one nigel took when i inquired about emissions. indeed, despite hints that privileged information was forthcoming—shifty eyes, a quiet tone—i walked away with none. perhaps he read me the way that nigel read most residents, as highly “suggestible” regarding the unknown, and wanted to point that penchant somewhere useful. perhaps he was adopting circumventions typically reserved for managers, as a show of his proximity to knowledge. perhaps he was simply being careful as he gauged my interest in a tricky research task. whatever his intentions, he left me wanting to know more. while nigel invoked rumor to cut relations and assuage inquiring minds, nick used it to intimate the presence of a devious someone. i did not get to follow up with nick that day about the “larger operation” thought to be behind the veil, but the next few weeks would bring the answer—energon—alongside speculation on what “deep pockets” might explain. such as why the project got sweetheart treatment from the state. or why the neighborhood associations supported it. or where some curious campaign donations emanated from. martha followed all these leads, and her texts attempted to account for this diffuse potential network, starting with the head of the state environmental agency. she had confirmed that secretary johnson had ties to a law school in d.c. that was a member of a national conservation network—along with arizona, with maryland, with a lobbying firm linked to ea, and, yes, with energon. and wasn’t it strange that johnson had only been in arizona for a single year, before resigning, and before that network came into existence? “he may have even left [arizona] to build the [network],” martha typed, before later “popping up in maryland.” and if that’s right, she escalated, “that would put him in considerable contact with energon, and he would’ve become familiar with their project list.” perhaps more than familiar. if energon were “responsible” for johnson’s role at the mde, “he may be indebted” to them. and if he were, then he might have planted people on the community advisory task force (catf), a shadowy group opponents called “the catfish.” years ago, the catfish had broadcast “community support” for the incinerator. but no one knew who from the community served on it. to be sure, martha’s conclusions rested on some giant leaps of faith, and she knew some neighbors thought she was hysterical. she knew that rumors about rumors and the characters who spread them suffused local talk. they coursed through the neighborhood associations, whom martha ragged for claiming transparency while dealing underneath the table, and through the legislature, where she felt the campaign was portrayed as “fringe” and students as “brainwashed.” but martha also knew that she had done her homework and there was something right about the ties that she had traced between these far-flung agents. each link gave form to hidden interests that have long structured power in south baltimore. scene by scene and relation by relation, the incinerator grew from a local land-use issue to a pet project for the state to a test case for the industry’s revival—orchestrated by a parent company with a stake in disavowing these connections. and then things started to make sense. incineration had been sputtering for years domestically, a distant second to the great american landfill. but if it could win in maryland, then energon sure stood to gain a lot. it matters that nick and martha did more than accumulate these clues. they organized fragmented information into complex schemes, binding problems “usually kept apart” (hecht 2018, 115). this is one capacity of interscalar stories: they traverse scales to show what each reveals or hides, kicking matters back and forth to do political work. they make something of the lines between the dots. in hecht’s (2018, 129) work on stories proffered by irradiated miners in gabon, those lines surpassed the local, “a scale that worked to dismiss them as … parochial,” and the national, as miners knew not to expect redress from the state. instead, they pointed blame at corporate actors whose interests lay beyond the continent. we can glimpse a similar politics taking form in nick’s and martha’s rumors, which scaled the project up, up, up, and away, stopping only when they met a shadowy outside. why? because in their interscalar movement, these rumors expressed a social truth about living in a site of persistent extraction. no density of horizontal ties could pull that off. classic sources teach that rumor and conspiracy, as linked discursive modes, participate in “a texting of everyday life where everything is connected and the connections are uncanny” (stewart 1999, 16). they process uncertainty by scanning “the realm of the concrete” for signs until there are enough to constitute a plot (stewart 1999, 17). if enough is a question of mass, then one might find the answer on a single plane, resonating with associations. but if enough is a question of kind, then in this late industrial site, numbers cannot get a rumor up to snuff. rather, if rumors of a proxy war are any indication, a good plot takes you on a journey. with nick and martha as my guides, i studiously followed. through the rumors that nick spread, what at first seemed like a tired feud between jobs and the environment waged by next-door neighbors ballooned into a proving ground for u.s.-based incineration whose success could translate into billion-dollar markets. through the rumors martha spread, any claims that south baltimoreans supported the incinerator could be attributed to someone else’s agency. there was just no other explanation. the catfish had been irredeemably co-opted. and with it, that final site of local power—that symbolic right to throw one’s weight behind a plan—had been subsumed into the corporation. unless one could expose these shrewd ventriloquists. so it was that, through the rumors this group spread, it became clear that only one group was really speaking for the neighborhood. no small wonder that group included nick and martha. follow the money “well, i heard the opposition got a grant.” fran, an older resident and one of the project’s early boosters, shook her head. “i’m telling you, somebody always does.” it was a blustery march night in 2016 at a recreation center by the coal piers (“the rec”), where we waited for a neighborhood association meeting. the two of us were always early. we did not like to miss a beat. fran was nosy by constitution, and i was nosy by profession, so we gravitated toward each other. this despite our differences: though we were both white, i was in my twenties and fran her seventies; i hailed from the sort of highfalutin institution she liked to rail against; and we had very, very, very different politics. but i was also a ready ear for fran’s stories, and she had a lot to say. most involved whispers about crime that people liked to make her business. (“the neighbors wave me down …”) the other half involved rumors about grants flowing into outsiders’ pockets without improving the community. recall this was a common plotline in south baltimore. a lavender planting initiative, a playground restoration, a skate park, a library—and the butterflies, again—were all run by allegedly bad actors who had turned a dime broadcasting local problems. it all seemed awfully paranoid until i recalled i had a grant. and if it ever transformed into a job, i would be living proof there was a there there, as fran already knew there was. if fran had reservations about me, though, she didn’t raise them to my face. she made me feel special—even chosen—as i suspect she did with every audience. in any case, there we were, too early not to dip into a story. fran’s eyes darted, making sure we were alone. satisfied, she disclosed that the campaign against the incinerator, on the docket for that evening’s meeting, had nefarious intentions. the whole thing was a ruse designed to generate grant funds. she knew because she had been there years ago when the associations first debated the proposal. they had done their research, spoken to ea, and ultimately voted to support the project. though the campaign against the plant was ostensibly led by local youth, none had spoken up back then: just a few environmental groups from out of town, and one big name in landfilling; let’s call them geosystems. “strange bedfellows,” i replied. “you’re a researcher,” fran poked. “follow the money.” that geosystems would side with environmentalists—including those who advocated “zero waste,” a movement to end the burning and burying of trash—on anything seemed weird enough to make some people wary. for if energon dominated waste-to-energy, then geosystems ruled the waste industry writ large. with 300 transfer stations, as many active landfills, and 21 million customers in north america alone, there was no bigger corporate obstacle to achieving zero waste. but geosystems did have an interest in keeping competitors’ methods, like incineration, small. that led some to suspect a secret partnership aligned against ea, accounting for the dazzling rise of opposition to the plant. in fran’s eyes, student activists appeared from nowhere. she wanted to know “how” and “why,” and she presumed there was a “who” providing funds. it was not a terrible stretch to guess the well-heeled who might be a business rival. and if they were, it made sense to point to one with experience in the dirty work of covering things up. much as for the other side, suspicions of a cover-up stemmed from a sense of implacable uncertainty, and a hunch that clarity lay just beneath the surface. unlike nick and martha, though, supporters did not feel particularly perplexed by the processes behind the project. on the contrary, michael explained when he joined us at the rec, claims about collusion were “excited,” and he warned me not to get seduced into the same—a move i registered as an attempt to shift my own affinities, for my alignment with the campaign was no secret, and my one-day book would presumably reflect that predilection. the drier “truth,” michael continued, was that ea marked a departure from the status quo, where industries conspired in secret to secure stakeholder profits. “ea didn’t need us, ok? they could have railroaded the whole thing through. … but they took the step to get involved with the community, and we set up a process.” what did strike michael as opaque were the power structures of “the opposition,” and why young activists declined to join them “at the table.” earlier that year, ea had invited students to hash out differences, but they refused to come. students narrated this as a principled refusal to negotiate with a company that “doesn’t care about our lives,” but michael did not buy it: “why wouldn’t they want to show up and make their case?” he paused. “it seems to me they’re not a homegrown group.” michael thought it far more plausible that students were the charismatic faces of a corporate assassination run covertly thorough the grant economy. while martha had been fixated on secretary johnson’s network, then for michael, fran, and their allies, nick was the suspected conduit. he was a paid organizer with a baltimore-based group that did indeed rely on grant support. rumor had it he had “slithered” into the school to “take advantage” of impressionable kids, who he had then “used” to “spread untruths” about the project. i heard versions of this rumor from several residents, but also from formal power bearers linked to the associations: from the region’s city councilman (a suspected member of the catfish) and from ea’s ceo, a silver-bearded man who leaned into my recorder to confirm “the opposition” was an act of “sabotage.” “i can point to [nick] and say he knows he’s lying,” the ceo insisted. “he has to [lie] . … consider who is funding these opponents.” i awaited information on the who with bated breath, but the businessman trailed off. i met the ceo on site a month before the meeting at the rec. he was in town a lot that year, trying desperately to save the troubled project. among other things, he hoped to set the opposition straight after they had spread “bad information.” he meant that all they had really spread were rumors, and we know how corporations treat this kind of talk. i presume it is because they would not meet with him that the ceo agreed to pitch the plant to me, then a graduate student, over three long hours. it was a duration meant to demonstrate transparency, made forceful by his glut of evidence. with diagrams, data, mous (memorandums of understanding), and more, the ceo made one message eminently clear: ea had nothing to hide. the second message was that no one could match this man’s sincerity. as he eventually revealed—drawing an interscalar scheme that mirrored martha’s texts—his opponents were supported by dark money. someone told him geosystems earmarked 5 million dollars for defeating his proposal, funneled through “a woman pr person” whose spouse worked for the state. “think about it, chloe. who benefits if we aren’t built?” then he leaned back in his chair and bent his arms across his chest. “there’s a whole story. there’s stories to the pieces of the story … and if you want to hear the half of it,” he nodded toward my recorder, “then you’ll need to turn that off.” i cannot tell you what happened after that, but we have enough to say that leaps of faith were leaps of scale here, too. each leap directed intention away from high school activists, diminishing that group into a front: a front for nick’s sly machinations on behalf of a leftist crew downtown, supported by a dubious state grant, working to advance the landfill industry’s agenda, embodied in geosystems, a giant in the waste world poised to lose its corner on the market. there was just no other explanation. it could not possibly be that youth worried about the plant’s emissions or were otherwise politically engaged. they must be players in somebody else’s game. and i should be wary of anything they told me because someone, somewhere, had been “indoctrinating” them. figure 5. nothing to hide. photo by chloe ahmann, february 2016. leaps of faith and leaps of scale: all this leaping left me in a muddle. i had found myself an interscalar vehicle, but with tinted windows and inscrutable chauffeurs. the more we moved, the less i sensed that we were inching toward the truth. for all their talk of revelation, these rumors had produced the opposite. as ammara maqsood writes, rumors arise in contexts of uncertainty, and they contribute to that uncertainty. they foment “confusion about whom to believe and whom to trust” (maqsood 2019, 471). and if that’s right, then anyone who knows that rumors have this strange capacity might choose to take advantage. and if they did, imagine the dizzying paths they might construct. what happens when rumors become the anchors in our “centrifugal” stories (hecht 2018)? if whispers can be interscalar vehicles, do they teach us the same lessons as irradiated rocks? no. hecht is right that many things can help lift scholars across scales, but that insight opens other questions: about the specific affordances of specific guiding objects. rumors here give form to the dynamic fact (keller 1995) that corporate power weasels into every cranny and that doubt can prove useful to whoever wields it. they may therefore grant more insight into the power that inheres in cutting and reconstituting ties—in crafting and dissembling veils—than who exactly stands behind the curtain. by the same token, they risk any reasonable hope that the ethnographer who follows them will meet with something solid. rumors do not pave a path toward final truth; they only promise its arduous pursuit. they build compelling stories in confusing worlds that make skilled use of disjointed information. and that may be among the truest things that one can learn about how power works in late industrial baltimore. but someone trained in the hermeneutics of suspicion might miss this slight distinction on her way toward a crowning explanation. she might find a truth that ends without an “aha!” moment rather hard to parse. how peculiar that suspicion could make a listener “so trusting about the effects of exposure,” eve sedgwick (2003, 139) once teased, pointing toward the paranoid habits of most theorists. who better a pawn in the knowledge games of whisperers, she might have added, than a meddling ethnographer? uncertainty in motion four months after martha’s texts and forty minutes after fran’s disclosures, i found myself in a kind of denouement. parties from both sides squeezed into the rec. on one end, ea leaders sat with fran and other project allies. on the other, activists wore homemade t-shirts with slogans like “incinerators burn me up.” in the middle, michael gripped an air horn that he threatened to use if things got rowdy—which they did, so he did. also in the room? through their proxies, apparently: geosystems and energon. it was, in many ways, a scene that anthropologists long for—a moment of “conspiratorial finality” when everything becomes visible and things fall into place, when one gets past the curtain toward the real (jackson 2005, 108). except the whole thing looked bizarre with curtains drawn. while the room rang with familiar accusations, they sounded in an unfamiliar register. instead of whispers, there were shouts. instead of adventure, acrimony. instead of intimation, confrontation. where had all the pleasure gone? i thought of nigel, who took pleasure in withholding information, who cut ties and spurned suspicions to bolster the corporation. i thought of neighbors who had baited me with winks into a search for corporate partners where it now seemed there might be none. sitting there, it dawned on me, belatedly, that the seduction of their stories came squarely in the bait and search for hidden truth. not from truth in its finality but from the frenzied movement toward it. not from cutting ties but from their lively reconnection—and from how old dynamics got inverted in the process. against facile corporate claims that local speech is only rumor and that rumor is not properly political, neighbors implicated absent corporations in a tense battle over local voice, marshaling rumors as strategic speech in a struggle playing out among subalterns. that the ceo ultimately tried discrediting opponents by linking them to geosystems reveals how much they succeeded in this shift. this boss had dropped the classic game of cutting ties and crying paranoia to render critics inarticulate, instead charging activists with proximity to corporate interests in a last-ditch attempt to muzzle them. it matters that rumors turned the tables through their movement, a persuasive force that deflated when they met a final destination. they worked as mobile practices, not static objects. while classic studies teach that rumors can be rich stores of metaphoric insight and, in mass, affective resonance, what i learned trailing rumors of a proxy war was the power of the journey. these whispers worked by plotting signs onto interscalar story lines that pit each whisperer against the world. the only limit to how far someone can chase a story is her own imagination. and until that moment in the rec, it seemed that it was my imagination folks were counting on. because here—in this atmosphere of ambient uncertainty, where power differentials are always knowledge differentials and one can never really know for sure—everybody seemed to take some pleasure in the chase. they sent me, a “highly suggestible” ethnographer, chasing rumors up, down, around, and back again, toward everywhere and nowhere, all at once. when i tried to read these rumors for their meaning, their lesson seemed to be that power lay outside this place: that every local actor spoke in someone else’s voice, and i went searching for the speaker. (who’s catfishing who?) but when i began to read these rumors for their movement, it seemed that something else entirely was going on. this is a case of ethnographer as punch line, not as prodigy—as sucker, not as wiseman—kept outside a world through access to its “secrets” (contra geertz 1973). i fell into that role precisely because my clumsy search for meaning had been premised on an “old dichotomy,” wherein informants “believe” and researchers “know” better (samuels 2015, 237). this split invites researchers to track how knowledge works while disavowing the “trickster” work it sometimes does on us (maqsood 2019, 470). the red herrings left out for the “spy” who seeks to pin down truth, the minor pleasure in subverting my authority to represent: in a zone of longue durée extraction, these, too, are plays in the battle of who-gets-to-speak-for-us. beneath the disavowal of these plays lies an anxiety john jackson describes as endemic to ethnographic research, the fear we might confuse the real for the unreal. hence the draw of rumors, which would seem to promise anthropologists “some of the fastest routes into the inner structure of the real” (jackson 2005, 205). and hence rumors’ incomparable capacity to enroll listeners into schemes without their knowing—especially the knowledge-seeking ones. in the end, it seems the rumors locals spread did not pass their power off to outside forces. what happened here was quite the opposite. fran used geosystems and its diffuse potential network to build a plot that undercut the other side and served her power. martha did the same with energon. it is true these rumors operated as critiques of other people’s agency, a capacity that anthropologists have long perceived in rumors. but they also put that agency to work to jockey for control over the project. the nature of that work—the work of drawing power in—depended on these rumors’ interscalar movement. a bunch of dots can make an atmosphere, but if you want to set uncertainty in motion, you’ll need the lines. and it helps to have a wide-eyed anthropologist to follow them. abstract until 2016, south baltimoreans debated a proposed incinerator. those debates were manifestly about local land use, but rumors spread that something else was really going on. opponents supposed the plant was secretly owned by a power player in the waste-to-energy sector; supporters swore opponents must be bankrolled by big landfill. in short: a waste-industry proxy war was brewing in south baltimore. i follow these rumors and argue that their persuasive power grew as they darted up, down, and back, forging a politics of connection across scales that made skilled use of fragmented information. on both sides of the issue, talk of outside influence worked to vest some voices with more authority than others. tracking these claims across scales and through allegedly bad relations—in a place where corporations strive to disavow connections of all kinds and consign local knowledge to the realm of mere suspicion—i show how rumors of a proxy war became tools for mapping ambiguous forces long at play in this environment. more, by wielding doubt to do subversive work, rumors managed to draw local power from them. [rumor; uncertainty; interscalar; authority; late industrialism; waste; united states; ethnographic knowledge] notes acknowledgments many thanks to friends and interlocutors in baltimore who maneuver through a muddled world with so much wit; to blake smith for a conversation years ago that sparked this article; and to colleagues on a “vectors” panel at the 2021 4s conference (especially jorge benavides-rawson and jerry zee) who helped me work through early folds. alix johnson, ali feser, amy mclachlan, and erin mcfee have taught me over years how to think and write with partial secrets. jennifer trivedi and victor kessler both advised on how to tighten up the prose. ilana feldman, saida hodžić, and cassie fennell helped with some stickiness around the edges. three deft reviewers and two editorial collectives at cultural anthropology saw some promise in a playful draft and helped me find the article. at the journal, thanks especially to heather paxon, alberto corsín jiménez, and kate herman. material support from the national science foundation and the wenner-gren foundation made research possible. 1. i use pseudonyms throughout. 2. compare peter benson (2004, 459), who writes of one rumor shared from the decentralized terrain of “post-war” guatemala: “[it] does not ‘refer’ to decentralization. it literally decentralizes—agency, subjectivity, and blame.” 3. “the greek lexicon defines ‘an anthropologist’ not as … a ‘student of man,’ but only as ‘a scandalmonger’” (gluckman 1963, 314). 4. united states v. bestfoods, 524 us 51 (1998). 5. according to a 2012 study by the environmental integrity project, residents suffer high rates of heart disease, lung cancer, asthma, copd, and other illnesses with ties to air pollution. 6. in this sense, incinerators are particularly high-modern instantiations of the dynamics that underwrite waste management in general—which “makes things disappear by moving them elsewhere and … is considered most successful to the extent its … flows 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https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109 subramaniam, radhika 1999 “culture of suspicion: riots and rumor in bombay, 1992–1993.” transforming anthropology 8, no. 1/2: 97–110. https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.1999.8.1-2.97 taussig, michael t. 1986 shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study in terror and healing. chicago: university of chicago press. welker, marina a. 2009 “‘corporate security begins in the community’: mining, the corporate social responsibility industry, and environmental advocacy in indonesia.” cultural anthropology 24, no. 1: 142–79. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.00029.x west, harry g., and todd sanders, eds. 2003 transparency and conspiracy: ethnographies of suspicion in the new world order. durham, n.c.: duke university press. white, luise 2000 speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial africa. berkeley: university of california press. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 303-333, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.01 corporations and states: a customer-service corporation inside the punjab state police cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 764-792, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.07 corporations and states: a customer-service corporation inside the punjab state police matthew s. hull university of michigan https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0372-7697 on august 22, 2013, the deputy chief minister of the indian state of punjab came to the new punjab police call centre to inaugurate the 181 helpline, declaring: “punjab has become the first state in the country to introduce this round the clock police non-emergency service where you can contact and interact with the police . . . at anytime of the day or night” (hindustan times 2013b).1 while touted as a hotline for all non-emergency issues, the impetus for the 181 helpline was the fallout from the internationally infamous 2012 rape and murder of a female student in delhi, which had brought crowds to the streets across india to protest sexual violence and the failure of police to provide security for women. at the time, the chief minister of delhi had hastily established a similar 181 number for women in distress. but as one delhi government official observed, people had “mistaken it with the delhi government’s customer care number” (chandel 2013) and were inundating the three male operators manning the phones with calls about gas connections, voter id cards, and blocked drains. in contrast, the more deliberately planned punjab police call center was to address two problems facing women who needed the police: first, access to police personnel and, second, persuading police to take their complaints seriously and follow through on them. for the press release photo of the hotline’s inauguration (fig. 1), the deputy chief minister is pictured seated at one of the call stations across from a uniformed female police officer looking at the computer screen with her hand on a mouse. the temporary nameplate in front of him suggests that his own ministerial desk was fused with the call station, and that the female police officer might at any moment take a complaint call and pass it directly to him, whereupon he would immediately dispatch the phalanx of mostly male police officers standing attentively behind him to sort out the problem. figure 1. sukhbir singh badal, deputy chief minister of the indian state of punjab at the inauguration of the new punjab police call centre (hindustan times 2013b). but the photo was misleading. instead of being run by the police, as the photo implied, the management and staffing of the call center operations had been outsourced to a private company, ziqitza healthcare ltd. this was done, the deputy chief minister explained, to “ensure complete professionalism.” it was ziqitza, with its expertise in a particular form of customer service, that would deliver on the minister’s pledge that complaints be dealt with in a “time-bound manner” and that no complaint would be dismissed (“disposed of”) until “the complainant is satisfied that his grievance has been addressed” (hindustan times 2013a). anthropological discussions of this kind of arrangement, following their designations as “public-private partnerships” (ppps), have emphasized the relationship between the public and the private, or the state and the non-state. such a police-corporation arrangement as the 181 helpline is usually seen as a form of “pluralization of governance” (benda-beckmann, benda-beckmann, and eckert 2009) in which states increasingly share governance functions, however we might define them, with other institutions. these studies tend to focus on how states are “confronted with other actors, with which [they are] in overlapping and complex relations of conflict, negotiation, alliance, compromise, avoidance, etc.” (bierschenk and olivier de sardan 2014, 16; also ferguson 2010). despite this emphasis on the institutional heterogeneity, pluralism, porousness, and multiplicity of contemporary governance orders, anthropological analyses still, as beatrice juaregui (2016, 11) observes, overwhelmingly focus on the relation between state and non-state actors, rather than on whatever emerges in their combination. we can distinguish two main lines of approach to the state/non-state relationship, though they are often combined: the first focuses on the spatial metaphor of the boundary between the state and the non-state; the second, under the heading of neoliberalism, emphasizes the control or management of normally government functions by a private entity. let’s consider each in turn. first, anthropological work on state/non-state boundaries has shown how these boundaries become reified, and emphasized the analytic inadequacy of this state/non-state distinction. work on the “making” (beek 2012; hansen and stepputat 2001; mitchell 1991, 1999) and “blurring” (gupta 1995) and “porousness” (bernstein 2020) of state boundaries has given us a much better understanding of how people encounter state actors and how these experiences generate ideas about states. indeed, a focus on “porous social orders,” as ilana gershon (2019) has argued, has proved highly productive for anthropology generally. however, even a critical focus on the boundary and its character draws our attention away from the ways non-state actors like corporations, ngos, and churches sometimes plunge into the relations between state offices, levels, and divisions. and ppps can bring non-state actors into state activities not only through the pores of small-scale, informal interaction but also through the large pipes of authorized contracts. second, the policy-oriented scholarship oriented by the concept of neoliberalism also concentrates on the state/non-state distinction, on privatization in the form of the marketization of state services through management by privately owned entities with an orientation to profit (ganti 2014; anjaria and rao 2014). here, the actions of a wide variety of non-state institutions often become conflated as “the market.” however, privatization is not the same as marketization. services provided by private actors are not always marketized and can be effectively insulated from a profit orientation by states that retain “considerable control” over them (kuriyan and ray 2009). as scholars of the u.s. prison system have shown, although the profit-orientation of corporate-run prisons are a concern, “there’s a politics there that isn’t simply profits” (kilgore quoted in gilmore 2014). furthermore, states themselves are often oriented to revenue generation (davis 2003, 100).2 both advocates and critics of neoliberalism conventionally figure corporations as market actors. yet they are at the same time governance institutions, setting policies for their own operations as well as the social terrains they operate on (anderson 2017; khan 2017). the topology of inside and outside founded on the distinction between state and non-state, mired in early modern political theory, creates an impediment to seeing the complex ways non-state actors mediate divisions within the state and can sometimes reinforce its separation from other non-state actors. i suggest we might do better by setting aside this topological metaphor in favor of a biological one: the relations of bodies, microbiota, and the environment. debate continues on the ratio of human cells to the cells of microorganisms in an ordinary body, but a recent study argues we probably have as many microorganisms (bacteria, fungi, and viruses) in and on our bodies as we do human cells, though they make up very little of our body mass (sender, fuchs, and milo 2016). although gut microbiota receive much of the attention, microbiota also reside in our eyes, ears, lungs, on the skin, and other places, different strains forming what biologists call “communities” in different parts of our bodies, doing different things. depending on their prevailing mix on the skin, for example, bacteria can prevent the invasion of pathogens or promote disease. gut bacteria appear to shape the relation between the digestive system and the brain through interactions with the nervous system. non-human microorganisms are internal others to human cells, but a good portion of them are integral to the ordinary functioning of a human body, contributing to the integrity of a body even as they enmesh it with its environmental surroundings (paxson and helmreich 2014, 166; wolf-meyer 2017). this metaphor redirects our attention from boundaries to what private corporations actually do within the workings of states, including to how different ideological orientations and types of sociotechnical practices engage one another within shared practices. in doing so, first, it becomes easier to see how the key function of non-state actors can be the mediation among different state-actors (solanki 2019), not only shaping the state/non-state boundary, like gut bacteria that simultaneously relate a body to its environment and shape the relations between digestion and the brain. second, it allows us to put to one side the question of whether a state is retreating or advancing, strengthening or weakening, to see emerging configurations of institutional governance. healthy organ functioning does not depend on the share of the biological work done by the body’s “own” cells. third, displacing the focus on the state/non-state distinction reveals the extent to which non-state actors, like microbiota, have always been integral to the operations of states, not just as the objects of their practices but as co-agents (hibou 2004). this has been true for as long as states have been contracting and forming corporations like the english east india company and virginia company, even if the role of non-state actors has increased as neoliberal ideologies have succeeded in orienting states. a history of state dependence on different kinds of non-state actors connects early modern states to what is derisively called the contractor raj of contemporary india. finally, instead of reducing the private sector to profit interests, the metaphor directs us to the institutional specificities of corporations, each with its own bureaucracies, technologies, activities, discourses, and orientations—and how they shape the normal and pathological workings of different organs of states, like different strains of microbiota finding a niche in the outer ear or the lungs. in a neoliberal frame of reference focused on control or ownership, the ziqitza operation has been called “outsourcing,” but, as i will show, it is working in the gut of the police, generating complaints, forcing responses, displacing other cases, making the police work for “customer satisfaction” as the corporation constructs it. a database, phones, texts, emails, paper documents, interface software, contracts, and ways of talking all combine into a socio-technical system of intimate disjuncture and fusion between a corporation and the police at the station house level while constructing a new capacity of senior officers to oversee the work of subordinates. i focus in this article not on case outcomes nor on the success or failure of this program or its overall effect on the criminal justice system in punjab. rather, my goal is to examine changes in early-stage police engagements to further our understanding of the relations between corporations and states, relations increasingly central to governance in india’s contractor raj. i argue that an analysis of the ziqitza 181 helpline allows us to see how integral corporate bureaucracies can be to basic state functioning, and how much it matters what kind of bureaucracy states recruit. in this case, an organization specializing in ambulance services was recruited, rather than a corporation experienced with logistics, financial services, or technical support, or an ngo providing legal services to women. like microbiota, organizations like the ziqitza helpline are non-state things integral to states, and not only by posing as others against which states define themselves. instead, they become part of its basic functioning, even as they alter how states work. this article will show that by moving away from a focus on boundaries and the profit orientation of non-state institutions, less studied aspects of corporation-state relations come into view. first, corporations can be tightly integrated into state operations, transform relations among state actors, and strengthen rather than undermine state functions. ziqitza helped central police officials discipline district-based police, even as it hardened early-stage police work against the involvement of politicians and other influential actors. second, corporations can act as governance institutions under the strong control of state actors, governing both state and non-state actors through bureaucratic procedures rather than through profit-oriented market transactions. while pursuing its corporate profits, ziqitza has not marketized the processing of complaints to the police.3 the character of corporation-shaped governance depends less on their status as private, profit-seeking institutions than on the contractual arrangements and the orientations and operational practices, such as ziqitza’s gendered customer service, that they bring into state practices. third, software, obliquely translating bureaucratic relations of authority and command, can configure relations among corporations and state actors. in this case, software allocated different capacities to ziqitza staff, central police officers, and district-based police to access and change information in the 181 record system. a corporate solution to the problem of excess solidarity in liberalizing contemporary india, the zeal for contracting corporations to take over public sector services is well-known (gupta and sivaramakrishnan 2011; sharma 2006, 2008), especially in the area of information and communication (kuriyan and ray 2009). a variety of government reforms in punjab and elsewhere in india introduced customer service as a way of improving efficiency and ensuring the dignity of citizens (clarke and newman 2008). in the face of the intense public outcry over sexual violence and the security of women, the punjab deputy chief minister eagerly supported the project for a women’s police helpline, to portray himself as a reformer ahead of the 2014 election. the 181 helpline eventually expanded to include other vulnerable populations, including children, the elderly, and “non-resident indians” (indian citizens living abroad) and came to serve the entire population of the state. but it was originally designed to solve problems faced by women, particularly access to police and documentation of their complaints (baxi 2014; satyogi 2019). women’s movement outside the home and immediate neighborhood, especially in rural areas, is often restricted, and many lack the means of transport to get to a police station. beyond these challenges, many women are reluctant to appear in police stations, as these are morally fraught, even dangerous places, and many women are unwilling to go to one without a male relative to protect them. “one of the most significant features of the helpline is that it removes the need for physical contact with the police in most of the situations” (hindustan times 2013a), said dinkar gupta, the senior police official who had lead the effort to establish the helpline. women also have more trouble getting their complaints documented and registered.4 state organizations are so closely associated with documentation that it is often forgotten that many functionaries sometimes refuse to generate documents for a variety of reasons. in india, as in other places (beek 2012, 556–57), one of the major problems with the police is that they regularly refuse to register complaints and initiate legal proceedings. even those women courageous enough to go to a police station sometimes find themselves dismissed by police officers who question their virtue and the veracity of their claims. sometimes police, usually men, reject the standing of women to act for themselves and demand that they be represented by a husband or another male relative, who may be kin of the perpetrator if not the perpetrator himself. more broadly, police in india (as elsewhere) often are unwilling to get involved in domestic abuse cases. as beatrice jauregui (2016, 75) observes, “this form of violence against women” is “conceived by many people as a ‘private matter’ and widely considered by many police to be a less serious offense not worthy of their attention.” the leading proponent for the helpline was dinkar gupta, then additional director general (security). a member of the elite indian police service, he was among the bureaucrats of the post-liberalization indian state who were “refashioning as agents of reform” (gupta and sivaramakrishnan 2011, 4). gupta had been experimenting for years with ways to allow citizens to document police action or inaction. he told me how, when he was a more junior officer in a provincial city, he had mounted letterboxes around the city and waited hopefully for complaints to pour in. he received very few. and the ones he did get often lacked the crucial pieces of information that would enable him to act on them. he had also tried involving himself directly with the public in different ways. during certain hours of the day, he would man the complaint phones of the department himself, a practice so strange for an officer of his high rank that it seemed to generate more suspicion than confidence in the police. he had also tried public meetings, so-called open katcheris or courts, an old hybrid forum developed in the british colonial period as a cross between appeals to royal officials and bureaucratic office hours (hull 2012, 105–7). gupta set up large tents and welcomed citizens to come and talk with him about their problems, even problems with the police. however, he reported that most people were reluctant to voice their allegations in an open hearing. gupta had even set up a special police line for women once before. he had staffed this women’s helpline with police officers, mostly female, and instructed them to be sympathetic to callers and ensure police action on their problems. he claimed this had proved a complete failure. the police, he told me, had not been “humane” and “didn’t show sensitivity.” in the end, he explained, the call-takers were police officers first, and responded brusquely if not suspiciously to callers. their loyalties lay with their fellow police officers whose excuses for inaction they sympathetically accepted. as one officer put it to me, “they treat other police as family.” lastly, most police officers considered this work in a call center as a kind of punishment that deprived them of the social influence and opportunities for graft offered by regular police posts. many worked harder on getting transferred out of the call center than on running it. after this experience, gupta proposed hiring a private corporation to operate the police call center. although the supposed efficiency, lower costs, and forward-looking symbolism of embracing the private sector no doubt formed part of the appeal of the initiative for the state government, advocates of private contracts often have other reasons to recruit private companies (kipnis 2008). in this case, gupta and other reformers at the senior level of the police administration wanted to engineer an organizational opposition within lower-level police operations by producing a monitoring entity that did not share lines of authority, cultural affinities, or, for the most part, gender with the majority of police personnel and divisions. from the perspective of police reformers, the police suffered from an excess of solidarity. for american organizational gurus and corporate ceos, who have championed the organizational advantages of solidarity and a shared “culture” (e.g., soderquist 2005, welch 2005), there can be no such thing as too much solidarity. but here, gupta played lévi-strauss to their durkheim. as he saw it, the common values and orientations, the feelings of solidarity, the shared culture, had undermined the police-run call center system. with the new arrangement, gupta aimed to fuse two organizations with rather different “cultures” into a functional opposition as a way of promoting service to citizens and increasing the oversight power of the central police administration. critics of public-private partnerships often point to the conflicts of interest of the private actor, since the goals of profit -seeking and public good diverge. however, gupta insisted to me that the corporate staff had no conflict of interest; it was police who had a “conflict of interest” between their loyalty to fellow police and the proper conduct of police work in the service of citizens. the design of the call center/police hybrid was also engineered to exclude completely another group that has long been profoundly enmeshed with the police: politicians. police in punjab, as in other indian states, is run by the state government, with police administrative divisions often roughly corresponding with electoral divisions. politicians develop relationships with senior police officers posted in their area. by most accounts (including those of many police i talked with), elected officials, especially members of the punjab state legislative assembly (mlas), routinely intervene in police operations, squashing investigations and encouraging questionable charges against opponents or the opponents of their political clients and extended family. politicians induce police to do their bidding through a mix of bribes and threats to have officers transferred to less desirable posts. by contrast, politicians appeared to have no means to engage the ziqitza helpline. call center personnel answered calls from around the state, and case managers similarly dealt with police in whatever district the complaint came from. thus local politicians had no one to cultivate a relationship with. politicians were also prevented from threatening to transfer managers or supervisors because the state government could not fire or transfer employees of a private contractor. in reply to my skeptical questions about the success of this insulation from political involvement, the 181 manager insisted, “we are private sector. politics is not intervening in private sector. we are free, totally free, no one is forcing us, no one is giving some bribe. politicians can’t transfer, they can’t do anything. we don’t even get calls from politicians.” while there was every incentive to conceal this sort of intervention, none of the staff i asked recalled being asked to alter or close a case outside of normal procedures at the behest of anyone outside of ziqitza and the police. law-and-order policing vs. (limited) customer service whereas gupta emphasized different interests and orientations as the source of disjuncture between call center and police, a more fundamental separation limited call center involvement in police investigations. this was built into the system by the operational model of the corporation awarded the contract, ziqitza health care limited. the core business of ziqitza had been the provision of emergency ambulance services in india. founded in 2004 in mumbai, the company now operates in ten states throughout india. according to its website, the idea for a “world class” ambulance service was sparked by the contrast between the founders’ experiences with their parents’ health-care emergencies in india and in the united states.5 when the mother of one of the founders fell ill at night in india, they ended up driving her to the hospital themselves. a few days later, the other founder’s mother collapsed in new york city and was treated within minutes by a 911 ambulance. operating a police helpline was an extension of this private emergency ambulance business, with the same goal of increasing responsiveness. we could imagine the police recruiting a company with experience running different kinds of call centers, like banking, cable tv, or telecom—or perhaps even a women’s health or social welfare ngo with strength in helping women navigate the legal system. all such organizations are focused on delivering a service rather than monitoring actors who provide a service. each of them would have brought its own ideological orientations, but all of them would have been primed to see complaints through to their final resolution, perhaps all the way through a police investigation and court trial. however, modeling 181 on the ambulance business formatted the work of monitoring the police in a particular way, limiting the monitoring to the initial stages of police engagement. in the ambulance business, the goal is to get immediate medical care to someone, not to treat the patient through a full course of care. similarly, in its 181 operations, ziqitza aimed to ensure that callers received preliminary police service, not to follow the progress of cases or monitor the performance of police beyond that point. the independence of call center operations from police and politicians stemmed not only from its organizational separation but also from the ways differences of gender, class, and cultural orientations between the customer service organization and the police were deployed. the call center was intensively gendered by design, a feminine institution over against the masculine police, similar to what aradhana sharma analyzed as feminized ngos over against the masculinized state (2006, 68). both call center staff and police embraced this gender construction, and it was enacted through practices from hiring to styles of communication. during the period of my research, the manager and supervisors of the ziqitza helpline operation were all men. several men also worked the phones during the night shift. but during the day, when the bulk of the calls came in, the phones were staffed almost exclusively by female call-takers. in the daytime, the staff called “case coordinators,” who managed the cases and dealt with the police, were also all women. the women the company hired were young (early to mid-twenties), middle-class, and none whom i talked with had any friends or relatives in the police service. while there are many women in the punjab police and even police stations staffed entirely by women, men far outnumber women in police service. so the transactions between ziqitza and the police were overwhelmingly between young ziqitza women and older male police officers. both call center staff and police agreed that there was a strong difference between the way staff and police engaged callers. many of the female ziqitza staff had bas in communications, psychology, or commerce, and roughly 10 to 15 percent came with experience working phones in the customer service divisions of telecom and banking companies. none had any previous experience in police work. the original 181 staff were trained by senior police staff so that they would understand the police system as a whole, as well as its processes and procedures. ziqitza corporate staff trained them on the application software and what they called the “soft skills” of customer service (fernandez and sosa 2005, hochschild 1983, krishnamurthy 2004; mirchandani 2012). as the call center manager put it, in contrast to the police, “we are soft-spoken, we take his or her complaint, we understand his/her problem.” they hired staff who can “stay patient, calm even when the caller is very angry,” he said. one senior officer in a rural district emphasized that call center staff have a “point of view different from policing.” in contrast to the police, who ask “direct information questions” that elicit short answers, call center staff get people to “open up,” because “civilians feel relaxed with them.” although no one would mistake the call center staff as activists for women’s empowerment, both the female and male staff shared a sense of mission and were proud of their role in helping people, especially women. a final but critical difference between call center staff and the police was their views on police and policing. although a service ethic is increasingly cultivated among the police, one senior officer shared with me the common view that the police have not escaped the colonial legacy of police in india, saying, “here, police is about law and order, not the service of the public” (see dhillon 1998, 2005). views of the police among indians are ambivalent, as jauregui (2016, 90–94) has shown. police officers are sometimes valorized as fearless defenders of law and order in extraordinary circumstances, but more often, they are associated with day-to-day extortion, discrimination, intimidation, and unwarranted violence, even if these activities have a complex relation to the legitimacy of the police (khanikar 2018). further, negative views of the punjab police were shaped in the conflict between the sikh nationalist movement and the indian central government from the 1980s through the early 1990s, when police operated alongside the military and paramilitary groups, joining in the torture and extrajudicial executions of young sikh men (human rights watch 1994). overall, many punjabis resent the police considerably and think of the police as akin to the mafia, a corrupt force that exercises unjust quotidian power over people. this prevailing public view of the police rarely found overt expression in the course of ziqitza call center work, and yet the middle-class staff shared the civilian skepticism about the honesty and diligence of the police. at the same time, routine experience with the police gave call center staff much more nuanced views of the police. indeed, by 2016, gupta expressed to me some concern that case coordinators were growing more sympathetic to the police because of the rapport fostered over several years of working together. however, most call center staff remained at least ambivalent toward police. one case coordinator told me, “after more than two and a half years [working at the call center], i still don’t know whether police are good, bad, very good, or how they are!” generally skeptical of excuses police gave for not fulfilling duties, the call center staffers often seemed to relish their ability to make the police do what they thought needed to be done, a dynamic i will discuss below. disciplining the police through software the contract with ziqitza brought into police operations a whole community of other software corporations and systems to manage data and communications, such as drishti-soft solutions pvt. ltd., which handled the communications software. the operations of the call center and initial police response were tightly integrated through software systems, especially the main database interface designed for ziqitza called infodispatch. these software systems regulated response times, distributed complaints throughout the police administrative hierarchy, and documented the actions of police. through its ambulance business, you could say that ziqitza came to specialize in monitoring the actions of its own staff. a key problem in ambulance operations was to know if ambulances actually arrived when they were supposed to and if the staff performed their jobs satisfactorily. the problem resembled that of police: you call them, but they don’t turn up; if they turn up, they don’t always do their job. for the police helpline, communications and information technology designed to monitor internal workings of the ambulance system was redeployed to track the actions of police. the software was barely modified. rather than situating the call center within police operations, ziqitza software incorporated police into its own operation, simply replacing ambulance drivers and emts with police officers. so how did this system work? the core call center staff were the call-takers (designated “call counselors” in early ziqitza documents), with around ten on duty during the day. through a series of exchanges with the caller, designated as the “complainant,” a call-taker would gradually assemble a case on her screen, hopscotching around the screen between checkboxes and drop-down menus for things like “police station,” type of victim (“women,” “children,” “nri” [non-resident indian], “others”), and “type of complaint.” call-takers selected the type of complaint through a drop-down menu. when the call center opened, complaint types mirrored the law: thirty types of complaints that closely reflected the legal designations of criminal actions predominating in police charges. but the call-takers and case coordinators did not passively accept the complaint types given them by the police and software developers. when they encountered situations that didn’t fit the existing categories, they asked the software managers to add new complaint types to the system. over the first two years, the list expanded to more than seventy types, transforming a legally-based, bureaucratic categorical scheme into a menu of narrative descriptors used to characterize the caller’s situation as closely as possible (table 1). reflecting, perhaps, the status of both police and call center staff, no caste crimes were included among the complaint types, despite the fact that the crime in india reports of the national crime records bureau from 2014 to 2018 record that between 118 and 147 caste crimes occurred per year in punjab.6 typically, the call-taker would select the complaint type after the first minute or two. but she would often change it to something else in the course of her exchange with the caller. such changes reflected the call-taker’s changed understanding of the event, contrasting with the practice described by pooja satyogi (2019) of police “re-working” complaints to increase the likelihood of legal success. there were also text boxes for “caller name,” “victim name,” and most important, “complaint description,” the brief (30–100 words) prose account of who was involved and what happened. sometimes these descriptions closely resembled the language and sentiment of the caller, with quotations or other less-direct forms of reported speech. exchanges with callers occurred overwhelmingly in punjabi, with hindi and english sometimes mixed in, but the software was in english and text could only be entered using roman characters. call-takers were supposed to use only english, but there was a fair amount of hindi and occasionally punjabi in roman script mixed in. consider this redacted complaint record from august 2014, which mixes hindi and english, with loose grammar, punctuation, and capitalization: wife of sadar [▬], she was complains that from last 1 year-2012 sep . . . unke ghar par chori ho gyi thi gold ki [some gold was stolen from her house] and she also complaint . . . police station tripuri patiala . . . sho name[▬] . . . ddr-210714 . . . no fir registered. . . . she went there many times but no result found. these two, also from august 2014, are more typical: the caller informed that she met with an accident. she went to the police station to lodge complaint at phase-8 mohali and talked with sho [▬] but sho misbehaved with her. kindly investigate the matter [▬] says his daughter went to a gyan hospital for checkup to dr. [▬]. he misbehaved with his daughter . . . . they went to police station for his complaint sherpur (sangrur) thana [police station] . . . [▬]-sho-30/1/2013 . . . no registration of fir kindly solve the matter. table 1. all the types of complaints logged in one month in august 2014. note how the descriptors overlap (e.g. “police inaction” and “non registration of fir”; “attack” and “hurt”). police inaction false implication in case non registration ot fir police mis-behaviour land dispute property dispute landlord-tenant dispute family dispute matrimonial dispute domestic violence harassment for dowry cruelty by children accident threat hurt attack stalking (physical) kidnapping/abduction/ransom cyber crime fraud cheating robbery rape/rape attempt attempt to murder demand of protection blackmail theft snatching duped by travel agent(s) fake profile on social networking abuse & bad language misbehaviour obscene calls/sms eve-teasing drug sale/supply when the call-taker saved the record, the complaint was “registered” in the database and given a unique case number consisting of a three-letter geographical code, a type code, and a six-digit number, for example, jld-ct-201976, “jld” for the city of jallandar, “ct” for complaint. the call-taker would give this “complaint number” to the caller, so he or she could reference the case in future dealings with the 181 helpline or directly with the police. the record produced by the helpline thus functioned as a kind of preliminary “first information report” or “fir.” the fir, written by police and signed by a complainant, is the legal document that sets the process of criminal justice in motion (commonwealth human rights initiative 2015). the 181 complaint record was designed to compel the production of an fir where appropriate. the problem of police refusal to document was thus tackled by establishing a prior documentation process run by ziqitza. once registered, the case would appear on the tracking page of the interface of a case coordinator sitting nearby. she would “tag” it with a color code depending on the urgency (the temporal frame in which it needed to be dealt with) and importance (the seriousness of possible harm) (fig. 2). figure 2. tagging calls, with a “turn around time” (tat). ziqitza powerpoint, 2014. each code had a corresponding “turn around time” (tat): seven days for amber, fifteen days for yellow, thirty days for blue. emergency cases tagged red required that police be immediately dispatched to the location of the complainant. the concept of turnaround time originated in customer service, but it can be found in laws enacted in the past decade throughout india requiring that government services, such as an application for a car registration or a right to information application, be processed within a statutorily specified length of time (sharma 2013; webb 2010). in contrast, by instituting such time-bound responses through the procedures of a private corporation, the punjab police were able to discipline police practices without establishing a legal requirement of timely action, which would have given callers the right to demand timely “service.” records were emailed and texted to the “concerned” officers at the station house and district levels. an important feature of the ziqitza system was that the records were also emailed to superiors at the headquarters of the punjab state police in the state capital, chandigarh. each recipient had to be individually entered and the records would go out in quick succession, including to gupta himself. by 2017, with some three to four thousand complaints logged a month from across the state, close oversight at the center was impossible. but in the first years gupta (and later his staff) made a habit of dipping in every once in a while and contacting a subordinate about a case. similarly, a senior police officer in charge of another district told me he made a habit of randomly calling complainants to ask about police behavior. such practices made the cell phones of senior officers rather like bentham’s watch tower: subordinates never knew if someone was following their actions or not, but must act as if there might be. like the architects of the monitoring systems for welfare programs described by rajesh veeraraghavan (2022), call center staff and central police officials talked about many such features as simply technical matters, while district-based police highlighted their political functions. the police officers responsible for dealing with complaints found these turnaround-time requirements burdensome and even irritating. police new to the 181 system would sometimes contact the call center to get the turnaround-time tag changed, to give them more time to deal with a complaint. but 181 staff would almost always refuse such requests, unless the police could convincingly explain why the initial complaint mischaracterized a situation. such appeals highlight the way the infodispatch software structured the oversight relation between the call center staff and the police by distributing different capacities to each. call center staff had complete access to all the information in the database and could change it, though any changes were logged and linked to individual staff members. in contrast, police staff and even senior officers like the heads of district police outside chandigarh headquarters were not able to read some information the call center gathered, and they were also denied access privileges to alter any information in the database. the station house officers (shos), the officers in charge police stations, as well as their subordinates, complained to me that the ease of initiating a complaint through 181, as opposed to coming to the station, led to a spike in the number and triviality of complaints. santana khanikar (2018, 39) observed that delhi police are normally treated as “mai-baap [mother-father] to the people, sought after for all kinds of tasks, whether they involve a law-and-order situation or not.” nevertheless, station house officers i spoke with estimated that the number of complaints had risen to four or five times their number before 181, above what they considered “normal.” they estimated that only one in four of these complaints were actual police matters. people started calling, for example, when someone was drunk and making a disturbance when previously they would have handled it themselves or just let it go. as one sho told me with frustration, “everyone goes to the police for everything now.” the police who needed to respond to complaints also resented how they had lost discretion over which cases to pursue. this discretion was a key feature of what we might consider a common police business model, in which they devote time and energy to cases most likely to generate personal financial or political gains. police also felt people were playing with them, eager to see them hop to it. as one sho put it to me, “people think 181 cops will rush there, so they call. we have to do it, we run around like crazy trying to clear [181 cases] up, put aside other work.” once or twice a month, the heads of district police would send their subordinates lists of cases that were past their turnaround times, though many police told me these letters were less about getting subordinates to clear overdue cases and more about being able to show their own superiors in chandigarh their commitment to the 181 system. the actions of the call center were designed to force the police to produce a paper document within the designated turnaround time: an “action taken report” or “atr” (fig. 3). unlike the first information report (fir), a legal document prescribed by the indian code of criminal procedure (1973), the action taken report is a document genre drawn from worldwide customer service practices. it is codified not by statute but by 181 helpline procedures and the ziqitza software (lessig 1999; manovich 2013; berry 2011). figure 3. on-screen image of scanned action taken report (atr) uploaded to the 181 database, 6 april 2014. the way 181 deployed gender and status relations was most clearly manifest in exchanges regarding the late submission of atrs. one of case coordinators’ main jobs was to monitor the submission of atrs and review open cases. the case coordinator database interface displayed cases ordered by the date they were required to be closed, based on their turnaround time. case coordinators would move methodically down the list, calling police officials to remind them that a complaint was coming due or to criticize them for failing to take action within the required turnaround time. in these late-action conversations, police officers would typically explain to case coordinators, usually a woman, why the business had been complicated by various factors: the dishonesty of the complainant, intervening court cases, the ill health of a police officer, police understaffing, the lack of a transport vehicle, lack of petrol, and so forth. such problems in fact pervade the indian police (jauregui 2016, 76–81). although the case coordinators would attentively listen to these excuses, they would usually dismiss them and, using the direct imperative, insist that the police have someone go and talk to the complainant and submit an atr right away. policemen would often finesse this uncomfortable if mild subordination by addressing the case coordinators as “daughter” (beti). on the one hand, this figured the policemen as superiors, but the kinship trope also allowed them to take polite orders from the case workers as they might fondly indulge the wishes of an insistent daughter. the atr was a persuasive genre. policemen would write atrs to liberate themselves from call center monitoring by arguing that they had taken the required or appropriate actions on the complaint and that the complaint should be “filed” or “closed.” in rare cases, atrs would succinctly declare that an fir had been registered. some atrs included extended accounts explaining that the complainant was lying or that the offense was not “cognizable,” that is, it was not an offense for which an fir can be registered. the largest number of atrs declared rather blandly that the disputing parties had reached a compromise and the complainant had withdrawn the complaint. police in india often arbitrate disputes in an effort to get the disputing parties to reach a compromise before or instead of filing legal charges (jauregui 2016, 76–81), especially, as pratiksha baxi (2014) shows, in cases of sexual and domestic violence (see also basu 2015). as i’ll describe below, many of these ostensible compromises appear to have resulted from the pressure of police, kin, and other powerful individuals involved. if atrs were not filed on time, case coordinators would threaten to “escalate” the case, another term drawn from the customer service world. in customer service practices, “an escalation is a scenario in which a customer is not pleased with an employee interaction and wants someone at a higher level within the company to resolve the complaint” (williams 2018). in the 181 context, escalate meant moving up the police hierarchy and bringing the problem to the attention of an officer’s superior. functionally, it resembled a petition, a document submitted to a higher authority to appeal the actions or inactions of lower-level officials. yet an important conceptual difference exists related to the centrality of the caller in customer service: a petition usually focuses on the agency of the addressee, his or her ability to grant a request (cody 2009, hull 2012, 86–111, van voss 2001); in contrast, escalation, focuses on the agency of the caller, his or her intensification of demands. the prospect of escalation created a strong incentive for the police to file atrs that would falsely report a caller’s withdrawal of the complaint. in the early months of the call center operations, this occurred fairly commonly. but the practice gradually declined as police came to understand and adjust their practices to the final step of the call center’s role in the case: determining if the caller was “satisfied.” the bureaucratic production of satisfaction and dissatisfaction as the deputy chief minister announced at the opening of the call center, the satisfaction of complainants was a central aim. in a public comment five months after the helpline had opened, he declared that the service had received 117,000 calls, with a “satisfaction level of 78 per cent,” and claimed that he himself had “checked the satisfaction level of a number of complainants” (tribune news service 2014). the generation of bureaucratically recognized signs of satisfaction constituted a major component of the work of the 181 call center and the police work generated through it. it is an important question how these efforts to determine the satisfaction of callers might shape their views of the events, their political agency, police, and the punjab state more generally. but i am here focused on how satisfaction was constructed as a bureaucratic object of police/call center practice, and how it shaped the state’s attempts to relate to citizens. after receiving the atr, case coordinators would call back the original caller to determine whether he or she was “satisfied” or “not satisfied” with the actions documented in the atr. the software configured satisfaction in three degrees: “satisfied,” “partially satisfied,” and “not satisfied.” but for reasons no one could explain, case coordinators construed responses in a binary and never checked the “partially satisfied” box. as the voluminous literature on consumer surveys suggests, determining the satisfaction of an individual with respect to something is considered a complex task. it is akin to the problem of determining an “opinion,” which, like satisfaction, is conceptualized as an irreducibly subjective, even interior fact (hull 2010). in customer-service practice, satisfaction is figured as a mental state in relation to some expectation. the complainant’s own utterances constituted the only evidence for satisfaction available through and authorized by call center procedures. case coordinators would call back many times to reach the original complainant. they would not accept the testimony of anyone else (not the complaint’s husband, wife, son, father, mother, sister, or children), since that person could not provide genuine evidence of the complainant’s mental state, but also might willfully or unintentionally provide a false account. while call center staff were trained to be attuned to the emotional qualities and social complexity of phone interactions, the determination of satisfaction as a bureaucratic object put an overwhelming emphasis on the propositional content of a complainant’s speech. this insistence on the propositional content of utterances reflected the awkward legalization of satisfaction. case coordinators would begin their questioning by informing the complainant of the content of the action taken report, and asking if it was accurate. if the atr itself claimed the complainant was satisfied, the case coordinators would usually approach the question of satisfaction by a direct query, “is it true, are you satisfied or not?” using one or another english or hindi/punjabi word for satisfied (satisfied, santosht), agreed (sehmat), or even happy (khush). if the atr made no such claim, the case coordinator would initiate a more open conversation about police actions. they would ask about the manner of police: “how was the behavior?” (behavior or vyavahaar); “was his behavior right [sahi] with you?”; “they didn’t say anything wrong [galat bat/gal]?”; “there was nothing inappropriate?”; “are they being completely helpful?” they would also ask what official actions were taken, including those required by police procedure (recording a statement, giving them required documents, taking information, photos, and anything else needed for an investigation). lastly, they would ask if the police committed any offence, such as threatening them, demanding a bribe, or beating them. such questions were meant to serve two key functions. first, they were to engender in the caller what the police and call center considered legitimate expectations of the police. second, they were to frame the issue of satisfaction in relation to police service rather than to the events themselves and/or the larger socio-political situation. without bracketing out the actual events (the theft of a valuable, a beating, the loss of a family member), complainants would have found questions about satisfaction offensive or even outrageous. records show that complainants often reported not being satisfied because someone was not keeping to the terms of a compromise brokered by the police. as a junior police official told me, “the fights start up after compromises, some people are not satisfied with the bargain.” callers also reported to case coordinators that police were impolite, did not provide required documents, did not return stolen property they recovered, demanded bribes, stole from complainants, and even beat them up. such complaints against the police themselves almost never resulted in formal charges or reprimands, though they sometimes did provoke informal scoldings by superiors. some complainants directly disputed the claims of police atrs. this entry in the record from 2016 is typical: “caller is disagree with atr, due to police has not initiated any action in her case. . . . hence case is closed . . . and is tagged as totally dis-satisfied.” and indeed, as they gained experience with 181, police more frequently oriented their practices to the bureaucratic documentation of satisfaction in order to limit the quasi-judicial role of case coordinators. in an effort to buttress their atrs, police would sometimes ask 181 callers to sign affidavits that they were “satisfied,” or sign the bottom of a blank piece of paper, which was later inscribed by the police themselves with a fabricated declaration of satisfaction. the head police officer of a rural district told me that police in his district asked complainants to sign statements that they are “satisfied according to the law” (kanun ke anusar). however, reports confirm his observation that they would often become “not satisfied” as their cases moved through the 181 process. as he stated, complainants often expressed new dissatisfaction when they did not see action on their cases. however, what police typically described as a change of mind was likely often a matter of a different mode of documentation. but the most common reasons for “dissatisfaction” had little to do with police wrongdoing. complainants didn’t limit their expectations of the police to respectful behavior and adherence to correct legal procedure. they demanded actions that the police wouldn’t or couldn’t quickly take, such as the summary arrest of an accused person, or that police deal with a civil matter such as a property dispute, which only the courts can address. such grievances were so common that case coordinators kept the following phrases in an open text window to quickly copy-and-paste into records: “but according to the complainant no action has been taken by police”; “but police has not initiated any action against the accused.” as case coordinators sometimes more forthrightly documented: the “complainant wants justice.” gupta explained to me that it was not possible to get “100 percent satisfied,” “because they want police to do things they can’t do.” they want a “good postman” or “stagnant water” taken care of. a police officer in ludhiana also told me that this created a great problem for the police, especially in the beginning: “people had (the) feeling that anything can be done through 181, since it has to please me.” the official police case and the call center case diverged once the call center made a determination about satisfaction. if a caller was not satisfied after the police filed their atr, case coordinators escalated the complaint by submitting it to a senior superintendent or commissioner. this, however, ended the involvement of the call center, which would “close” or “file” the case. case coordinators would recommend the complainant pursue it themselves at the district level by calling or visiting these senior officers. figure 4. daily not satisfied caller report, ziqitza, 18 feb 2014. satisfaction reports produced by ziqitza, occasionally reported in the press, were designed to pressure district police to perform. in the beginning, the deputy chief minister threatened to transfer any senior superintendent of police whose satisfaction rate consistently remained among the bottom three districts, like relegation of the worst-performing teams in the english premier league, but he never followed through with it. ziqitza produced daily (fig. 4), weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports on the satisfaction rates broken out by police administrative units (district, commissionerate, zone, range), type of complaint, and several other criteria. these satisfaction reports were sent to the chief minister, the police headquarters in chandigarh, and the heads of district police forces. the ziqitza manager of 181, like managers working in other kinds of customer service, took satisfaction rates as a key metric of his organization’s performance, even though they mainly reflected police actions. when i asked him about it, he acknowledged that when you are talking of police matters, many people just can’t be satisfied. nevertheless, he quickly rattled off which district-level police officers have good satisfaction rates and which don’t (even when posted to different districts). he hoped the senior central police officers who received the satisfaction reports he produced would not only be pleased at the performance of his organization but also they would use them to evaluate the performance of their district-level subordinates. conclusion in the indian state of punjab, the 181 system has appeared quite successful in forcing the police to respond to complaints. city residents have much more confidence in 181 than the usual 100 number, as evidenced by the number of calls taken: as of 2018, 181 received nearly fourteen times the number of calls received by the the regular police-operated 100 number. it expanded beyond a focus on women, and by 2018 nearly two-thirds of complaints came from men and did not concern specifically women’s issues. the successes of the helpline inspired plans to replace the 100 number with the ziqitza system. there were even reports of policemen helpfully advising people who had turned up to police stations to return home and initiate their complaint through 181 for a better police response. the increased responsiveness—however limited—of police to the sorts of people and events they often ignored before shows the “surprising affinity of some aspects of what we call ‘neoliberalism’ with certain forms of progressive politics” (ferguson 2010, 170). it is important to note, however, that the effect of the 181 system on the progress of cases beyond the initial stages, outcomes, and the overall criminal justice system remains unclear. ziqitza and its software brought the language and documentation practices of customer service into police work. what are called “petitions” or “appeals” in the regular governmental idiom became “escalations.” ziqitza didn’t judge whether police work was procedurally correct or justice was done; it was concerned about whether the caller was satisfied or not. proper procedure and justice were related to how ziqitza constructed satisfaction, but they were different. ziqitza treated the percentage of satisfied callers as a metric to subtly pressure police action to shift its orientation from procedural law enforcement to one of individual satisfaction—or at least to the generation of bureaucratically authorized signs of satisfaction. by analogizing non-state actors like ziqitza to microbiota, i do not intend to revive a naturalized, functionalist, organismic conception of the state, but rather to deploy a more fruitful model of relations between parts of states and other kinds of actors. the public-private partnership between ziqitza and the punjab police is certainly characteristic of the liberalizing changes in indian state institutions in which private, profit-oriented entities blur a boundary of the state by taking up governmental functions. but other crucial aspects of such arrangements come into view when we set aside the state/private opposition and concentrate on the two different types of sociotechnical practices each organization uses, how they engage one another, and how they transform relations among managerial divisions of the police. it is less important that the punjab 181 helpline was run by a non-state, profit-oriented corporation than that a corporate-bureaucratic customer-service model vesting power in the oral word of the customer blended with and challenged a governmental bureaucratic model vesting power in the written word of officials. abstract in 2013, the indian state of punjab contracted with a corporation to operate a new police phone helpline. the corporation not only takes complaints but also monitors, directs, and reports police responses to them and conducts satisfaction surveys. this essay explores the tensions and effects of using american techniques of corporate customer service to promote procedural law enforcement within police practices in india. it examines the ideological, procedural, communicational, and technological practices through which police procedure is combined with corporate customer service. moving beyond a concern with privatization and the distinction between state and non-state, the article uses the metaphor of the human microbiome to reconceptualize how to understand the involvement of outside actors within state operations. [corporation; state; police; communication; software; bureaucracy; india] notes acknowledgments i would like to thank my interlocutors in punjab, who generously gave me their insights into the workings of the police and the 181 helpline: rajesh chakrabarti, dinkar gupta, arun saini, vivek soni, and police officers and staff of barnala, jalandhar, ludh-iana city, and ludhiana rural; and the staff of the 181 helpline, especially the call takers and case coordinators. i am grateful for the insightful comments on earlier drafts of amita baviskar, melissa burch, ronald day, ilana gershon, miyako inoue, beatrice jauregui, puninder jaitla, michael mcgovern, michael prentice, ursula rao, aradhana sharma, and the anonymous reviewers. special thanks to krisztina fehérváry and elizabeth roberts, who read and argued over several drafts, and chris nelson, for his editorial guidance. for help with punjabi language translation, i am grateful to pinderjeet kaur gill. i benefited greatly from presentations of portions of this research at ghent university, the german historical institute paris, indiana university, leipzig university, university of california (berkeley, davis, los angeles, and san diego), university of chicago, university of copenhagen, university of helsinki, university of oslo, university of texas, yale university, and the sociocultural workshop at the university of michigan. the bharti institute of public policy at the indian school of business (mohali) provided a hospitable institutional home. this research was supported by funding from the american institute of indian studies. 1. i began the research for this article in 2014 as part of team from the bharti institute of public policy at the indian school of business, mohali, with which i was affiliated at the time. the government of punjab had hired the bharti institute to do an evaluation of the 181 helpline with an eye to the good press a favorable evaluation would generate ahead of the 2014 election. the bharti institute team was given unlimited access to all the people involved with the 181 system and all of its documentation, including audio recordings of phone communications and the database of complaints and correspondence, as well as reports of the performance of the system throughout the state. as part of this team in 2014, and then as an independent researcher each summer from 2015 to 2018, i had conversations with the ziqitza call center managers, call staff, and technical people. i sat with call-takers as they took calls and with case coordinators as they talked with police to manage responses to complaints. i also spent time with the senior police officers at punjab police headquarters in chandigarh who established and managed this system, as well as officers and staff in four rural and urban district police offices who responded to the complaints generated by the 181 helpline. 2. i am grateful to melissa burch for drawing my attention to the insights that the literature on the u.s. prison system has for an understanding of privatization. 3. transactions were not marketized as in other schemes involving private contractors providing government services (carswell and geert de neve 2022). neither the government nor callers paid ziqitza for processing individual complaints; rather, the government paid ziqitza on the basis of the number of “seats,” that is, call-takers, it staffed. the similarity of the experience of calling 181 and bank or telecom customer-service numbers lead some punjab residents to refer to 181 callers as “customers.” now and again ziqitza staff also used the word customer to refer to callers, but they mostly used the terms callers and complainants, terms approved by both ziqitza and the police. 4. however, pooja satyogi (2019) describes a special protection unit for women and children in delhi that sympathetically engaged women coming to the unit with complaints. 5. this webpage, http://zhl.org.in/about-us.html, has been taken down 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noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.07 cultural anthropology: borderlands as barracks: constructing a national geography of security in india 221 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 221-48, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.02 borderlands as barracks: constructing a national geography of security in india sahana ghosh national university of singapore https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9152-5499 as mangal paasi and i sat in the thick shade of a jackfruit tree, talking about his family’s history of service in the railways at the time of partition, there was a rustle in the bushes behind us. the sound of footsteps approaching. a pair of black rubber boots was closely followed by a man in the uniform of a border security force (bsf) officer, cap in hand, wiping his sweaty brow. mangal paasi jumped up and called out to his son to bring a chair and a glass of water for sahib.1 we had been sitting on a charpoy, where mangal typically lounged in the late morning, but that charpoy was clearly not appropriate for this more important guest. chair and water arrived in a rush and, soon after, tea. after initial introductions and polite inquiries about my work in the borderlands, the officer, sandeep jha, visibly preoccupied and disturbed, blurted out that a jawan (lowest-ranking soldier in the bsf, literally meaning “young man” in hindi) in his battalion had committed suicide the previous day, texting his suicide note to jha on his mobile phone. the officer held out a smartphone and waved it with intensity. “get me a darshan [audience] with the panditji [priest],” he said to mangal paasi. “check how quickly he can see me. i can’t be here for too long, i have to get back to the headquarters.” “here” was a border outpost (bop), in a village along india’s border with bangladesh, about forty kilometers away from the headquarters of the battalion housed in the district town of 222cooch behar, west bengal. in the minutes that mangal was away to secure an appointment with the priest, the officer and i sat in awkward silence, with him shaking his head and looking down at his phone. as i mumbled my condolences on this tragedy, the officer said, weakly, “talking to him brings me comfort,” referring to the priest. soon after, mangal returned with a meeting time for later that afternoon and jha hurriedly said that he must return before he was missed. jha was a mid-level officer in an indian bsf battalion deployed in the eastern indian state of west bengal. while he lived in the battalion’s headquarters in cooch behar, on this day he was conducting a surprise inspection of the kathalbari bop, named after kathalbari, the border village in which it was located and where i was living at that time. only a small freshwater marsh separated mangal’s house from the bop. next to mangal’s house was the residence of a much-revered caste-hindu priest and astrologer; he had a shiva temple in his house, which was unusual in this predominantly rajbangsi region.2 jha had forsaken the main asphalt road that went by the bop and had taken the less visible path through the bushes along the side of the marsh to get an urgent appointment with the priest. his day’s plans disrupted by the sudden suicide and the series of questions of moral, social, and bureaucratic import that sprang from it, he was at a loss to share and house his distress. he had to undertake the inspection in the border outpost, for “things must carry on as usual,” but he also had to weave in a preliminary inquiry regarding the condition of the deceased soldier by talking to his friends and immediate colleagues in the neighboring outpost, where the soldier had been. “this is informal, the formal inquiry will come later,” he said softly, sipping water and wiping his brow, continuing to shake his head as if in disbelief. for the time being, jha came out of the bsf barracks to the neighboring civilian yard and turned to this local spiritual figure for comfort. once he left, mangal and i could not get back to our previous conversation about his family history. from a slow, rambling mood of reminiscence, mangal now sat upright on the charpoy, a gleam in his eye. “ora amar khub bondhu” (they are my great friends), he said, referring to his close acquaintance at that time with two officers in the bsf, sandeep jha being one of them. “whenever there is any khana-peena [feasting] in the barracks, we even eat from the same plate, we share the same food,” he said with a smile, emphasizing their fraternal kinship and that he was privy to the bsf’s intimate life in the barracks in a way that other locals were not. mangal’s obvious delight in this acquaintance, with no reference at all to the death of the soldier on that day, stood in striking contrast to the mood and circumstances that had brought the officer to his yard. 223there is a strange chasm between these two parallel stories: the bsf officer’s struggle with care work and being cared for because of a soldier’s tragic death and the borderland resident’s pleasure in proximity to the bop and friendliness with the bsf, notably officers of higher rank and status than jawans. the chasm points to the separation of the bsf’s barracks from paasi’s yard, the bsf from what they call “civilians,” and distinct kinds of social and institutional hierarchy, kinship, and care, even as unspoken interdependencies grow and flicker—all of them stressing uncertainties and fragility of both state authority and labor (reeves 2014). soldiers need not only food, rest, wages, and arms; they have social, emotional, sexual longings and ties that their employers—state security institutions—must provision and police. as jha’s official inspection work of a bop is melded with existential concerns around well-being—that of soldiers and his own—questions of violence and care in the barracks in the timespace of the routine erupt.3 how do the soldiers and officers in the bsf experience and inhabit places like the borderlands? what priorities and perspectives motivate their everyday working lives, and in turn animate the visions, claims, and privileged order of security institutions? bringing a “feminist curiosity” (enloe 2007) about how the indian state provisions and polices barracks at scale illuminates the militarized sociospatial world that has rooted, grown, and become routine in the name of improved care and welfare in disparate borderland locales across the country. security institutions themselves remain black boxes, not least because they are notoriously closed off and difficult to study ethnographically. neither the publicized international defense deals nor spectacularly paraded counterinsurgency violence, the social and spatial inscriptions through which security institutions expand and entrench, in and as routine, typically remain the unexamined background to the supposed front lines of their impact. turning an ethnographic eye to the “work of manning a border” (reeves 2014, 174), the embodied and gendered labors, relations, and material claims with which members of armed forces and security institutions define their work and workplaces reveals the fraught construction and maintenance of “the military normal” (lutz 2009). borderlands have become central to the anthropology of security and militarism (díaz-barriga and dorsey 2020; andersson 2014; jusionyte 2015; ghosh 2019, 2023; follis 2012). militarization at and of borders has “powerful spatial and ideological effects, changing the visual landscape, the language and social norms, and the local and global economy” (gohain 2015, 22). historical and anthropological work has shown security practices in borderlands to be violent and disenfranchising for residents (sur 2020; galemba 2017; bhan 2013), even as 224developmental interventions for borderland residents privilege statist priorities of territorial control and nation-building (gupta 2023; guyot-rechard 2015). but what do borderlands mean to contemporary security institutions? this article joins a growing body of anthropological work focusing on security actors and institutions that wield the power of state violence—and not its victims—to interrogate the sites, scales, and logics of power through which they operate (ben-ari and frühstück 2003; al-bulushi, ghosh, and grewal 2023; bajoghli 2019; rashid 2020). i am interested in what borderland barracks, like in this part of india’s border with bangladesh, reveal about india’s expanding security regime, and about how we understand postcolonial militarism from such a vantage point. across the postcolonial world, and certainly in south asia, the expansion of the security state has not been restricted to violent episodes or specific places, but has proved constitutive of nation-state formation (rashid 2020; ali et al. 2019; khanikar 2018; lokaneeta 2020). to consider what militarism looks like in the majority world means to take security institutions as central to the history and politics of the postcolonial state (al-bulushi, ghosh, and grewal 2022; al-bulushi 2019; jaffe 2019; rizvi 2019). care and provisioning in the barracks: theorizing constructive security barracks, in danny hoffman’s (2007, 402) analysis of the organization of violence in west african cities, “concentrate bodies (particularly male bodies) and subjects into formations that can be deployed quickly and efficiently to any corner of the empire.” by studying barracks ethnographically, i share in hoffman’s (2007, 404) attention to “what is being produced,” rather than exclusively focusing on what is destroyed in postcolonial regimes of security and militarism. while the organization of masculine labor and its traffic in an economy of violence constitutes the focus of hoffman’s analysis, i shift our gaze, empirically and conceptually, to the infrastructures of care and social reproduction that undergirds military labor. these infrastructures, and the security logics that underpin and emerge from them, represent vital sites of militarism: to focus on them is to subject to critical scrutiny the “everydayness of violence work” (tahir 2019), including the affects, structures, and relations through which violence workers demand and receive privileges (schrader 2019; açıksöz 2019). putting the anthropology of space and a materialist approach to landscape in conversation with feminist scholarship on security regimes and militarism reveals how sociospatial practices of care and infrastructures of reproduction can cloak and recompose questions of violence as security institutions expand and 225endure. i explore the social and spatial transformations entailed in making borderlands into barracks, sites where increasing numbers of bsf soldiers come to live and work through ever-expanding infrastructures: outposts with barracks, family quarters, roads to support vehicular movement, watchtowers, checkpoints, and the walls to protect them. the “political aesthetics” (larkin 2018) of such infrastructures of work and dwelling expose the chasms between the barracks and the yard, the bsf and civilians, and the soldiers and their families as they are maintained and bridged through the expectations and provisioning of care. taking the material, discursive, and ideological transformation of borderlands into barracks as an ethnographic object reveals what i term a mode of constructive security, that is, material infrastructures that hinge social and spatial relations within and around the security institution and provision for soldiers’ predominantly reproductive needs. this is not a reactive timespace of war, conflict, and spectacular violence; rather, it constitutes a loosely indefinite timespace of war-preparedness and investments into the “promise of infrastructure” (larkin 2018, 176). i propose “constructive security” as a mode of postcolonial militarism, through which state security actors drive the production and consolidation of a national geography of security. in describing these sociospatial transformations of borderlands into barracks ethnographically, i suggest we think of them in terms of what m. murphy (2017, 141–42) calls “distributed reproduction,” enabling not only the expansive presence of the indian security state but its durability across vast and disparate borderland locales. accounting for “the uneven relations and infrastructures that shape what forms of life are supported to persist, thrive, and alter, and what forms of life are destroyed, injured, and constrained” is integral to the production and provision of care and welfare for the bsf along india’s borders. expanding through this constructive mode, the postcolonial state appears in its well-worn developmental and welfare guise. the relationship between violence and care—the thriving of soldierly work and living and its breakdown—appears always on edge, continuously summoning more material resources and sociospatial work to hold in place. theorizing constructive security through such a feminist analysis illuminates the entanglement of violence and care within security institutions and with its outsides. three ethnographic sections trace the sociospatial inscriptions of this mode of constructive security in a twofold way: a) how security needs become durably entrenched and prioritized in distinct borderland locales across the country; b) how security needs incorporate and thereby connect such distinct locales into a national geography of security, in equivalence to one another. 226at its broadest i am concerned with how security regimes occupy and militarize space in times and places democratically, not in war but in war-preparedness (lutz 2002; bhan 2013), building on a vital feminist reconceptualization of militarization from the masculinist and spectacular front lines to the timespaces of the “homefront” (lutz 2002; enloe 2007). one way to follow this question is to examine the gendered forms of affect—grief, love, attachment—as key to the work of and reproduction of security regimes, shaping political discourse, imaginaries, and relations (rashid 2020; ali 2019; wool 2020; açıksöz 2019). as this body of work in feminist political anthropology suggests, heteronormative discourses of home and family are invoked to justify the militarized responses to security threats (razavi 2021; grewal 2017; de mel 2007). i develop a different approach, complementing this first one to examine how the occupation and transformation of space and claims to material and infrastructural expansions emerge from the insides of security institutions such as the bsf through heteronormative forms of provisioning and policing sociality and well-being. my reference to geographies is not metaphorical. “military’s geographies are about the control of space,” writes the geographer rachel woodward (2004, 3), specifying the critical examination necessary of the relations to land, landscape, and place for “creating the necessary preconditions for military activities.” the three ethnographic sections that follow trace how agrarian borderlands are remade into a national geography of security: first, seeing borderlands as a soldier, as a place of work; second, spatial transformations in security infrastructures; and third, the social relations and care being privileged and provisioned. i draw on long-term ethnographic research in the borderlands of northern west bengal, india, since 2011, centered around the place i call kathalbari, for tracing material and spatial transformations of borderlands into, primarily, places of work and dwelling for the bsf. i combine this with interviews conducted with bsf officers and soldiers, retired and currently serving, participant observation at bops, battalion headquarters, and family quarters in north bengal since 2018, as well as the analysis of government documents such as parliamentary debates and committee reports. soldiers and officers in the bsf share in the production of a geography of national security by connecting disparate localities, for example, comparing villages in the bengal borderlands to those in gujarat or kashmir. paying attention to this work of connection reveals not only how a national security geography is produced but what this geography is meant to be: not only a map of threats but, for the soldier, a map of standardized sites of duty, as well as of dwelling—imagined and experienced as timespaces of violence and care. 227but first we turn to a brief material history of barracks in india’s borderlands as a modular form, the smallest replicable unit in a national security geography. barracks in the borderlands of india the kathalbari border outpost (bop) in northern west bengal is an unremarkable one in the bsf’s geography. the border outposts, referred to as “camps” in common parlance, both bengali and hindi, are field offices and barracks used and maintained by the security forces along the length of india’s borders. comprising barracks and space for the storage of weapons, they are the smallest organizational and operational unit for the bsf. while they wall out local communities, barracks serve as what hoffman (2007, 408) calls “a complete social space” for soldiers and officers while they live there. soon after partition in 1947, hundreds of such bops cropped up along india’s borders with pakistan in the east and the west (van schendel 2005, 95). in the east, the bops proved integral to making the “patchwork border,” demarcating and occupying national territory (van schendel 2005) long before india started constructing a fence that has now become the iconic image of border security in this region. the bsf started with twenty-five battalions in 1965, when it was brought into existence on the heels of the sino-india war (1962) and the india-pakistan war (1965). established as a centrally administered paramilitary force, it took over the mandate of policing india’s borders from the state police of the various border states (van schendel 2005; ibrahim 2017). its peacetime role is to secure india’s border with pakistan (3,323 km) and bangladesh (4,096 km); in reality it has also been used widely for armed counterinsurgency operations in nagaland, mizoram, kashmir, punjab, and central india, as well as in election duties and disaster relief. while government reports chart the transformations in terms of strength, budgets, and expenditures, officers and soldiers from the first generation of recruits narrate the transformation of the bsf in embodied, material terms: the kind of barracks, how the food tastes, the scratchiness of the uniforms, the facilities at headquarters, including housing and communication with families. the bsf’s current strength of 192 battalions, with 270,000 personnel, makes it the largest border-guarding force in the world. parliamentary debates over the decades attest to new battalions being requested and granted, additional bops being sanctioned, greater budgets being allocated to fencing, floodlighting, and securing by various technological additions. the number of bops along the india-bangladesh border has increased dramatically in the past two decades—from about 731 in 1999 to 1,011 in 2017, with a further 326 sanctioned for 228construction.4 since the mid-2010s, the goal has been to fortify and operationally manage the 4,096 kilometer-long india-bangladesh border and the 3,323 kilometer-long india-pakistan border such that there is a border outpost every 3.5 kilometers. while conventional security strategy analysts debate their peacetime versus wartime roles, the people in the bsf are trained and live permanently suspended in war-preparedness, a timespace with its own moods, expectations, and designs. figures 1 and 2. insides and outsides of barracks in a newly built “composite” bop, west bengal, 2022. photo by sahana ghosh. 229architecturally and functionally speaking, the heart of border outposts are barracks for troops. augmenting these barracks are a kitchen, a common mess in which meals are eaten, if space is available, a separate recreation room with a tv and some games. these all make for spaces in which to eat, sleep, bathe, dress, and occasionally relax in the few hours that soldiers spend off duty while deployed at the border. in addition to these shared spaces of care, there are a set of common areas of work in the bop: an open space where the troops “fall in” routinely each morning and whenever else an announcement is necessary; a public meeting room usually right next to the outpost entrance where local residents or civilians are met; a weapons and equipment storage unit; an administrative office; and a hindu place of worship. architectural designs for bops vary. when a new model is introduced, such as the “composite bop,” resolving the difficulties of land acquisition in west bengal by designing a horizontally laid out outpost that used the available road space by the border fence, several hundred are built in that design (see figures 1 and 2). while the material conditions of the bops may vary tremendously depending on locale, from the comfortable ones in gujarat or punjab to makeshift ones with hazardous bathrooms in the forested areas of tripura, they remain similar in key ways: flower beds laid out neatly in straight lines, names of buildings in hindi, inspirational quotes in hindi exalting discipline and sacrifice (see figure 3). the modularity of the constituent structures and the shared aesthetic 230features ensure that the barracks feel the same for the itinerant troops who move in and out. wherever you are, it is the same food, the same rules, the same fall-in, the same routine, and largely the same enemy with some local variation. “the routine gets set in your body. you don’t have to think about it. what do you mean how is that bop? this bop, that bop, those differences don’t matter to us, border duty means that same routine that i just told you,” snapped a young jawan impatiently at me. after he had told me in hour-by-hour detail what the “duty at the border” routine meant, i had tried to elicit a more specific description by asking about the difference between two bops he had recently moved between. the outposts thus represent the timespace of the military routine: both in material-aesthetic form and in experience of “the ambient life” mediated by unremarkable yet essential infrastructures (larkin 2018, 177). figure 3. “discipline makes the nation great”: barracks in a bop, west bengal, 2019. photo by sahana ghosh. typically measured out in postings of five years, a standard period of deployment in one border location, soldiers live and work in battalions circulating between bops within the battalion’s designed area of duty. the capacity of the barracks is elastic, and this elasticity itself is telling of the priorities of speed and efficiency of deployment under which the soldiers eat and sleep. they move between the bops—buxa bistar uthake (picking up the box and the bedding)—a recurrent phrase with which jawans described the sudden yet expected mobility between bops. the sameness and the insignificance of distinction, indeed the absence of distinction, are “the tactile aesthetics” of the barracks: these embodied experiences refer to the ways in which “political aesthetics sutures the material and the figural” (larkin 2018, 177). enormous resources are devoted not only to producing sameness but to carefully raising the infrastructural provisions across all borderland locales to erase, to the extent possible, distinctions of terrain and to be more explicitly equivalent in a national security geography. in an overview of the growth of the central armed police forces (capf) in postcolonial india, of which the bsf forms part, yashovardhan azad (2023) notes that budgetary allocation increased nearly twelvefold between 2000 and 2020 in nominal terms, and 3.3 times in real terms.5 over time, the demand by the bsf to the indian home ministry’s budget for more barracks in the borderlands to house their troops has shifted to better housing, food, and provisions such as family quarters and regular leaves. these demands characterize such care and welfare for the troops as priorities to ensure the bsf’s effectiveness as a vital institution of national security. they also become occasion to display the postcolonial state’s care toward soldiers, its exemplary citizens (cowen 2008). while such measures radically improve the working conditions of soldiers, redressing some of the hardships they experience, at a structural level they demand 231enormous resources and investment in durable infrastructures, far greater than the arms and defense deals that typically attract attention. understanding the costs of militarism must grapple with such expansion. seeing like a soldier sunil, a senior jawan, was in the bengal borderlands for the second time in his twenty-three-year-long career and offered a portrait of the changes he has witnessed. it is just as bad as it was when i was first here. it may look easier than the hills [in the northeastern states of tripura and meghalaya], but it is not so. on the surface of the water, it might look like floating plants or bamboo, but beneath might be bundles of phensedyl or ganja. at night, cows are sent through the water. tall crops in the fields obstruct our view. when it rains, it is impossible to see or cycle too fast—in seconds the fence can be cut or something can be thrown across. it is better now, though, because there are more of us and we have some equipment. but because of that there is also a lot of pressure—if anything happens on your watch, your record will get spoilt, you might even get punished. so i would say it is harder now. sunil’s list and listing proved stressful; i could feel that i was holding my breath as he spoke. seeing like a soldier brings together the humans, plants, landscape, and material infrastructures of the place of duty with the bureaucratic measures of performance and vigilance against indiscipline. jawans and officers come to view landscape as a combination of physical and social geographies through the foundational training they receive and, most important, in practice through field deployment across diverse sites in india (see figure 4). farmers and the crops they grow, cattle and their transporters, water hyacinth and the stems of banana plants afloat in the water, irrigation channels and embankments can all signify danger and suspicion. seeing like a soldier means to unsee these landscapes as agrarian homelands and place them instead in a national security geography of work in relation to one another. tall and dense crops like jute, corn, and mustard feel frustrating because they obstruct view; they are also the grounds of comparison between disparate sites, for example, the agrarian borderlands of punjab or bengal. a small river in north bengal, in which a soldier drowned while chasing a group of cattle smugglers in the dark and in blinding rain during 232a monsoon night, is spoken of as bhayankar (monstrous). years after that battalion has left the region, the story of this death introduces the monstrous features of the landscape to successive batches of soldiers deployed to the area. figure 4. twitter post from the main bsf twitter handle featuring the hardships of lookouts, the lookout as a hardship. as ethnographers of the postcolonial borderlands of south asia have documented (cons 2016; sur 2019; ibrahim 2017), the state’s enclosure of land in attempts at resolving its messiness—acquiring, demarcating, occupying, and securing—while maintaining reasonable relations with borderland locals presents one set of challenges. situating lookouts engages landscape in two other distinctly embodied ways. as christopher tilley and kate cameron-daum (2017) elaborate in their description of royal marines training in the bushlands of eastern devon in the united kingdom, the vantage of the “panoramic sketch” must present not only an advantageous perspective on the surrounding area around that can be shared between soldiers from one shift to another; it must also present a route map of speedy and safe movement. these “techniques of the body” (mauss 1973)—learned, honed, and transmitted systematically—turn each locale in the bengal borderlands into a type to be incorporated into 233a larger geography of national security that spans entire careers. deployment to the bengal borderlands bids the bsf to imagine, know, and stretch the land and landscape by encoding these ideas of suspicion, fear, and self-protection through physical tactics, architectural forms, and spatial design. to be sure, the soldierly reading of landscape makes for a masculinist one of barrier and maneuver. but, as these narratives emphasize, also one of great vulnerability (figure 4). i met yash when he was deployed at the kathalbari bop, in the year of the suicide in yash’s own battalion. this was to be yash’s last posting; he was looking forward to retiring after twenty-eight years of service. he was tired and completely worn out. while pensions and financial calculations about savings and retirement benefits were uppermost on his mind, he questioned the classification of postings by hardship. considering the physical and psychological toll a posting at the bengal border takes on jawans and officers alike, he mused, it appears at least as bad as one in kashmir or mizoram. “punjab is the best, there are a lot of suvidhaye [conveniences and benefits] there,” he claimed, specifying the availability of family quarters, good transportation connections, and comfortable conditions of duty. a “hard” posting classification considered risk to life (such as in kashmir) as well as remoteness and the availability of infrastructural facilities (such as in anti-naxal operations in central india), and it translated into a daily hardship allowance that significantly boosted the soldier’s monthly salary. the bengal borderlands lagged on benefits but, not classified as a “hard” posting, did not qualify for additional material benefits. while there is considerable scholarship on the politics of mapping and cartography, particularly state enclosure and territorialization through such tools (van schendel 2005; cons 2016; reeves 2014) these conversations draw our attention to soldiers’ phenomenology of borderlands as sites of work. the expression and circulation of these embodied experiences of soldiering map and reframe the borderlands as sites of work and dwelling, forming the basis of institutional transformation into a language of infrastructural needs, codified in training and rendered comparable across a national geography of security. the hashtag #firstlineofdefence, which frames the bsf’s official image-making (figure 4), to the soldier means quite literally offering up their own bodies as a “human fence,” as the jawans frequently put it. for the security institution, the borderland-as-workplace is portrayed as an unpeopled landscape, where the presence of uncooperative people figures as a hindrance to the objective of protecting national security. along the india-bangladesh border, soldiers on the ground experience the unreadiness of this borderland-as-workplace as maddening. it necessitates work they were not trained to undertake and yet were expected to perform daily with 234punitive consequences in cases of failure, as yash and sunil noted. soldiers experienced an acute disconnect from the official posturing of the heroic invulnerability of the bsf, emphasizing instead the bengal borderlands as a treacherous site of national security in terms of personal and professional safety. so, while there were no territorial disputes at the so-called friendly border between india and bangladesh, in contrast to the hostile india-pakistan border, these borderlands were not fit to be occupied by the bsf. they were not already established as barracks, as prioritized sites of and for national security actors. the bsf had to produce them as such. enclosure the story of the development of the indian security state could be told as the story of the enclosure of land. while the empirical enormity of this is hard to convey in the deliberate absence of numbers—a feature of security regimes across the world (lutz 2002; woodward 2004)—more than a decade of research in a cluster of villages in northern bengal has let me see this play out through parcels of agricultural land, held by marginal farmers in india’s eastern borderlands. the story of kasim’s land illustrates this well. like most residents of india’s agrarian borderlands, he is a smallholding farmer and had sold a portion of his cultivable land to the government in 2017. amid cornfields, the bsf were building a concrete watchtower on that parcel of land (see figure 5). kasim was a prominent local political leader, representing a border-lying village, and in the decade i have known him, he has emerged as a vocal advocate for the bsf’s 235deployment at the border, away from patrols and checkpoints on village paths that are sometimes two to five kilometers away from the border. he told me he had earned very little money from the sale. and yet he had felt somewhat pressured into it by senior bsf officials. “they had been wanting for a long time, and no one was willing to give their land. the sahibs were calling me all the time—from cooch behar, from siliguri, putting pressure through the party also. so i thought, why not, after all we have to live with them here. it is good for me, for my people, if i can keep up this good relation with the bsf.” figure 5. cultivable land bought and a concrete watch-tower built on it by the bsf, border village, west bengal. photo by sahana ghosh. the pressure that kasim experienced in a border village of north bengal is felt by thousands of farmers across the country from jammu and kashmir to punjab, whose border-lying lands are as sensitive, and thereby subject to prohibitions, as they are precious (i.e., needed for security infrastructure such as fortifications, barracks). the ministry of defence is india’s single-largest landowner.6 the land under its authority is used by the indian army, navy, and air force, as well as other associated organizations, for training, depots, airfields, housing, and a range of other activities. additionally, paramilitary forces like the bsf have been steadily acquiring land, often agricultural, to accommodate expanding numbers into more bops and their improved security infrastructures, such as bigger and more permanent watchtowers, roads, and patrol shelters in border districts. in south asia, feminist scholars have long joined the call to scrutinize the constitutive political economic relations between patriarchy and militarism (enloe 2007). yet militarization has been framed as something that “surfaced intermittently in some regions and states like kashmir, the north-east and even andhra pradesh” (chenoy 2002, 123). the enclosure of land by the security state is a contentious issue, not least because it is so invisible. as woodward (2004) notes, in most cases it does not involve the show of military might, but it illustrates a constitutive condition of the intimate expansion of postcolonial governance (ali et al. 2019; raheja 2022; rizvi 2019). climbing up on to the partially built watchtower on what had been kasim’s land, we saw the cornfields transformed. we could see far, a distance not visible from any other known vantage point. i squealed in recognition of the marshes that extend across into bangladesh, taking in how close they felt from that view, a fact i knew in theory but had not seen in this way before. kasim laughed at my reaction and continued pointing out ordinary landmarks, all common nouns: paddy, jute, fallow; irrigation motor, bridge, floodlights; village, paths. temporarily we inhabited the unique, incomplete view of the bsf watchtower-to-be, at once an open view and an enclosed space. we could also see from above, on to, and through the cornfields, yet another vantage point not quite possible with 236your feet on the ground. this was 2019; when i visited next in 2022, after a pandemic-induced hiatus, the watchtower was in use and out of bounds for civilians. no doubt, from the point of view of borderland residents, such enclosures embody the masculinist, sovereign power of the state. yet not only are these postcolonial enclosures and structures in india being “built to last” (weiss 2021), in contrast to the settler-colonial context of haida gwaii in canada that joseph weiss describes, but it also matters what they are for: barracks to house soldiers, improved structures for their work, and family housing. these infrastructures draw on the sympathy of borderland residents and general publics for the normative forms of care and social reproduction that they represent. as with kasim, for example, whose resignation is laced with the discourse of necessity—“odero dorkar” (they also need these)—almost despite himself. social and political economic relations in the wake of such security infrastructures may shift in each local instance, but the postcolonial state’s privileging of the borderlands as places of work and dwelling is consolidated through the foreverness of these infrastructures for security labor, care, and reproduction. the starkest material and spatial transformation i observed in this period was new buildings on existing land. about a kilometer away from the kathalbari bop lay a plot of land, right in the middle of two border villages and next to a thoroughfare. while the agrarian land all around had been carved up into homesteads over the years because of proximity to the road, everyone knew that this fallow plot belonged to the bsf. when i returned to kathalbari in 2022, i could no longer see across the plot to the homes i could recognize on the other side. the land had been built on, a set of multistoried buildings, enclosed by a concrete wall, that locals referred to as a campus, a term noticeably different from the camp or post used to describe the barracks and outposts. rumor had it that it was to be family quarters for whichever battalion would be deployed in that area. between 2000 and 2018, 700 personnel across the central armed police forces committed suicide (azad 2023). in 2018, the number of suicides in the bsf significantly exceeded the number of deaths on duty, a fact mentioned to me by numerous officers as evidence of the institution’s most urgent priorities. one officer shared that he was so troubled by the number of suicides that he had submitted proposals to undertake a study of causes and to explore potential institutional measures, but all of them had been denied. referring to better pay, leaves, material conditions of work and life, he said, “so much is better now, yet clearly many things are wrong, missing. we need to understand this puzzle.” he urged me to focus on this issue. suicides mark not only a violent breakdown of 237the individual but they also threaten the capacity of the state to control and reproduce its military labor. internal institutional surveys of bsf personnel reveal that, overwhelmingly, the causes of stress are attributed to lack of adequate sleep and rest, coupled with separation from family (chhabra and chhabra 2013). the concern about separation from family surfaced in two ways in this study: the inability to house their family close to them, as well the absence of leave to visit family in times of need. indeed, sandeep jha, too, found in his informal inquiry that the soldier had had his request for leave denied amid troubles at his home front just before he decided to take his own life. the announcement by the central government in 2019 of a hundred days of annual leave and greater housing satisfaction, so that soldiers’ families could be accommodated close to them (see figure 6), responds to such violent breakdowns.7 figure 6. bsf family housing, west bengal, 2022. photo by sahana ghosh. “housing is a big issue, you must be knowing. there are many efforts and policies at the upper levels to improve housing satisfaction for the jawans,” the commanding officer at kathalbari bop maintained diplomatically. “housing satisfaction,” a measure of the percentage of soldiers who applied for family quarters and received it (see figure 6), has been a core political issue for the narendra modi–led bjp government since it came to power in 2014. amit shah, home minister since 2019, has publicly committed to an expansion of barracks and family quarters for the troops of central security forces at electoral campaigns and public events.8 in 2018, the bsf announced that its proposal to build guest-house facilities at 192 locations across various indian borderlands had been 238approved by the central government. newlywed jawans would receive priority to be close to their new brides; one press report announced this scheme as “bsf to set up guesthouses to beat loneliness of just-married jawans.”9 recognizing that jawans spend around thirty years of their lives away from their families, this scheme under which the family quarters in kathalbari were constructed, would address in the short-term urgent concerns of loneliness, marital discord, and sexual and emotional frustrations by allowing soldiers to host their new wives, small children, and other family members for up to a fortnight in a year. the institutionalized protection and provision for the soldier’s heteronormative family and its reproduction lies at the heart of the expansion of the postcolonial security state. care in contexts of policing and security, as feminist anthropologists have shown, is deeply enmeshed with the violence and heteronormativity of the state (mulla 2014; baxi 2013; wool 2020). barracks in the borderlands embody those enmeshed relations of care in terms that seek to scaffold “distributed reproduction” (murphy 2017), privileging the thriving of some and specific social relations at the expense of others. enclosing more and more land to house soldiers and accommodate their needs, borderlands as barracks constitutes a proliferation of “stealth architecture” (davis 1990), what anoma pieris (2014, 395), in the context of urban colombo, theorizes as the “fortification of the home.” this militarization—a process of enclosure and displacement most acutely on display in agrarian borderlands like jammu and kashmir, punjab, and west bengal, where civilian groups estimate that half of cultivable land in border villages has been acquired or occupied by security institutions—does not emerge under exigent conditions of conflict, but proceeds as part of the developmental growth and welfare capacity of the postcolonial state.10 such is the many-layered entanglement of violence and care: across the country, constructive security thus clears the ground for a (re)productive organization of space and labor within the militarized fold. we see the cracks in this entanglement and its sociospatial inscription in the next section. no friendships please/dosti mana hain amit pandey told me that he had to turn down a wedding invitation from the elected village head that week. “i feel bad. i’ve come to know him quite well.” i wondered what was stopping him—it seemed a harmless and public-facing social visit. “if i go, for sure someone will snitch. he’s too close to this one, that one, they’ll say, and unnecessarily my record will get ruined.” amit was a 239junior officer, and this was his first field posting after his training. he was in his mid-twenties, unmarried, and full of positive energy. “dosti mana hain” (friendships are prohibited), he said directly, with emphasis. “if we [referring to bsf officers] get bored, we go over to each other’s bop and eat together, socialize a little bit,” he continued, citing this prohibition as one of the standard operating protocols that govern their lives in the borderlands of india, maintaining the hierarchies of rank within and distinction from civilians beyond the bsf. “otherwise wait to go to hq, something or the other always comes up, it’s ok.” while in this instance amit spoke of not taking his local acquaintanceships too far, during other chats he had talked about cultivating social ties with local political and religious leaders as an asset. “conviviality” in and around barracks mutually benefit civilian and military interests, holding space for interdependencies that mediate life in the borderlands (sur 2019; reeves 2014). such “security socialities” always tread the slippery lines of heteronormative propriety premised on the recognition of (predominantly) male soldiers as husbands, sons, and brothers laboring far away from their own families (ghosh 2019). becoming a soldier demands a disembedding from familial social ties, where “disconnects are not a side effect of soldiering, but instead a necessary pre-condition for service in the military, one that is actively desired” (rashid 2022, 2). the bsf is only beginning to acknowledge and address the tremendous violence that results from its governance of intimacy: a rigid sociospatial demarcation of the inside-outside of the world of the barracks produces a separation from familial ties, alongside a compulsory kinship within the boundaries of rank. food, wages, work, and rest materially shape and sustain soldier’s bodies while simultaneously incorporating them into an institutional ethos of military masculinity that demands suffering and sacrifice from an indistinguishable collective noun, the troops (reeves 2014, 180–87). this intense incorporation into militarized violence and care rubs up against their everyday lives working in the borderlands, where soldiers and officers have to continuously engage more fluid sociospatial boundaries. an award-winning bengali film, sankhachil (2016), made jointly by indian and bangladeshi production houses, depicted the emotional attachment that develops between a soldier from northern india—like amit, sunil, and yash—and a young bangladeshi girl living on the other side of the border, due to which he helps her and her family clandestinely cross the border for medical treatment in west bengal, india. while the film tries to humanize the bsf, an armed force that has been described as “trigger happy” (hrw 2010), it surfaces an unresolved tension around friendship and sociality at the heart of such security institutions. 240how, then, should we make sense of mangal paasi’s enthusiasm for his fraternal friendship with the two bsf officers in the story with which i began? what kind of kinship was this reaching toward and what makes it tolerable for the bsf? as a dalit man of bihari origin in a region of either bengali muslims or rajbangsi, paasi’s boast of intimacy through commensality with the bsf assumes significance as an instance of making kin beyond caste hierarchies and fitting into the national and modular cultural ethos of the barracks. barracks, the bsf insists, are spaces sans caste as soldiers cook, eat, and observe their personal religious beliefs in proximity, regardless of caste, class, ethnic, and religious differences. almost all bops, and certainly all larger residential and administrative sites such as battalion headquarters and family housing, have hindu temples. this, too, constitutes a standard feature of the bsf’s sociospatial world. while local religious traditions may not exactly converge with the dominant and standardized hindu worship—in this case it did not in a predominantly rajbangsi north bengal—participating in a shared caste-hindu religious world of the barracks allowed mangal paasi to be kin with the bsf in their sacred geography of national security. this was permissible as consistent with the bsf’s normative sociospatial boundaries, while prohibiting the potentially dangerous friendships that officers like amit might foster with civilians was deemed necessary. the spatial and temporal life of the security forces is ordered by routine activities within the bop, and movements between the bops, checkpoints, and roving patrols through six hourly chunks of on-duty/off-duty. these rhythms are punctuated by hours and moments of leisure—buying cigarettes at a tea stall; going to temple in the nearest town or perhaps seeing the local astrologer; 241playing volleyball outside the bop on common land that villagers used to graze their cattle and goats (figure 7). such activities of leisure and pleasure draw the soldiers in the bsf out of their camps into sight in the borderlands, including through “a widespread appropriation of local land, labor, and resources,” that mona bhan (2013, 157) describes in the context of the indian army in kargil, on india’s western border. in india’s agrarian borderlands, these could be cultivable lands held by small or marginal farmers or commons used for grazing that are appropriated, devalued in worth, or become inaccessible for civilian use (bhan 2013; gupta 2023; ghosh 2023) when remade as a site of and for security. if the armed forces are the organization of labor for the state’s monopoly on force in a liberal democracy, then the productive and reproductive activities of the bsf extend across the barracks in the borderlands to the borderlands as barracks. in progress and highly fragile in balancing violence and care inside and outside the barracks, as we have seen, the logic of constructive security is thus exhibited in governing sociality: provisioning, prohibiting, and productively managing bodies and relations. figure 7. everyday leisure and pleasure within the bsf stretch the barracks to its outsides. photo by sahana ghosh. samir basu, a retired officer from west bengal, recalled his days as a young officer posted in north bengal in the mid-1980s when the bops were few and far apart. the border fence had not yet been built, and internal institutional mechanisms of vigilance were patchy. “alcohol, meat, and prostitutes [mod, mangsho, magi]—these were the weaknesses of a jawan. we [young officers] were told to keep an eye on them for this. who [meaning borderland locals] was luring them away with these temptations, with the appearance of khatir [friendliness] and moja [fun], we would have to continuously warn them.” he emphasized that while there had been a world of change in the intervening decades until his retirement as a senior officer in the late 2010s, even now these “basic needs” remain. “that is partly why the force is doing so much to make sure that the jawan can spend time regularly with his wife, especially the newly married ones. we prioritize their leaves. go home two, three times a year, we say!” the “human fence” that the soldiers of the bsf provide with their bodies, far from the heroic images that feature in bollywood films and the bsf’s own publicity posts, emerges in this picture as vulnerable not to the enemy’s bullets but in its thickly sexual and social needs. in this discourse, jawans are heteronormatively desiring bodies, needing continuous discipline and vigilance, a discourse reminiscent of racialized colonial discipline (peers 2006). the bsf, then, is deeply animated by provisioning and policing social relations, through bureaucratic vigilance and spatial forms for dwelling and operational infrastructures alike. heteronormative kinship and reproductive care are 242acknowledged as constitutive of its ability to constitute an efficient security institution. the soldier’s “heteronational body” (wool 2015), predominantly male, must be housed and cared for toward the right kind of reproductive sexuality. bodies’ excesses needed to be channeled into and kept within the thick “homosociality and organizationally enforced interconnectedness” of the bsf and the reproductive sexuality of the heteropatriarchal household (wool 2015, 174). security infrastructures, distinct in purposes of dwelling (e.g., family housing, barracks) and operational work (e.g., watchtowers, shelters), thus “compress within them different operations” (larkin 2018, 176) in the name of care for soldiers, treading the chasms between work/home, family/soldier, and civilian/bsf. borderlands as barracks from cornfield to watchtower, grazing grounds to family quarters, the violence of enclosure makes possible the care of the soldier by the state. constructive security produces the borderlands as barracks through this long-term infrastructural investment in better living and more effective working in the timespace of war-preparedness. while the reproductive needs of soldiers and military institutions are claimed, privileged, and normalized as routine, ethnographic attention through a feminist lens reveals the fragile balance of violence and welfare within security institutions and the disruptive potential of questions of care. we see how incorporation and equivalence (cf. reeves 2014, 180)—of spaces and individual soldierly careers—into the fold of security is attempted, as well as the enormous systemic efforts invested in sustaining them. barracks constitute the material form of durability amid mobility for the bsf: housing soldiers and concentrating all the essential infrastructures—military, social—necessary to reproduce and ready them for deployment by the state. the borderlands—in bengal and elsewhere—feature as civilian social worlds from which soldiers must be disengaged and walled off for borderlands as barracks to be properly produced and incorporated into the national geography of security. at the same time, borderlands as barracks, in that very same national geography, demand their own forms of sociality, care, and welfare. the bsf inhabit bops in eastern india, and any specific site of deployment, literally and discursively through an interreferentiality to other such borderland sites throughout the nation. the accounts from yash and sunil simultaneously situate the bengal borderlands as a distinctive site of hardship and incorporate it through comparisons into a wider national geography through which they move in their career-long itineraries. in and through this typology, a national geography of security emerges as an experiential map, mediated by infrastructural and 243administrative standardizations such as facilities in barracks, claims to leave and family housing, disciplinary mechanisms such as the duty record, and incentives such as hardship allowances. this production of equivalence sets up the conditions of possibility befitting violent security practices—spatially, the barracks as a holding ground for labor to be deployed in the service of the state and this borderland, and all borderlands as sites where we can expect the violent defense of the nation. what is created temporally as durable is a national geography of security into which distinct locales are incorporated and made habitable—indeed, over time, even hospitable—for the itinerant troops of the indian bsf, not in the duress of war but in the timespaces of war-preparedness. the jawan at the border grows more distant from the farmer in the field as the needs of the former are privileged at the cost of the latter, most poignantly in relation to land use. this essay has argued that the production of a national geography of security entails both the material occupation of space through the enclosure of land and the building housing infrastructures for troops and attending to rest and reproductive needs at individual bodily scales and that of households. such a view shows that national security in the form of militarization cannot be understood as a coercive project alone; it is simultaneously a constructive one, particularly a reproductive one. this approach complements important work on militarization in/of borderlands as violence inflicted on residents and shifts the burden of understanding the actors, sites, and force of national security geographies from an overwhelming focus on the destructive and prohibitive impact on communities targeted as security threats and objects of policing and armed action. instead, conceptualizing borderlands as barracks draws attention to the unobtrusive processes and rationales through which security geographies are produced, extended over timespaces, and woven into the everyday political economy of the postcolonial welfare state as constructive. the “violence of care” (mulla 2014) is many hued; enclaving and expanding spatial and social relations of the barracks privilege the care and intimacies of militarized labor. the logic of constructive security is to provision, and thereby consolidate national security institutions in war-preparedness as an unobjectionable good for life in the postcolony. abstract what does militarism in the timespace of war-preparedness look like in the majority world? drawing on ongoing research on soldiering in postcolonial india, focused on the border security force, i examine everyday life and labor within security institutions: soldiers’ routines in barracks, prohibited friendships, hardships, and longings. bringing feminist thought and the political anthropology of security regimes into 244conversation with a materialist approach to space, this article argues that borderland barracks prove key to the expansionist logic and durability of what i term “constructive security.” the ethnographic study of barracks reveals this logic, i.e., the spatial and social inscriptions by which disparate locales across the country come to be reconstituted as places of work and dwelling for soldiers, privileging and provisioning their social reproduction through violence and care, and stitching together a national security geography. such a view shows that postcolonial militarism cannot be understood as a coercive project alone; it is simultaneously a constructive one, particularly a reproductive one. [militarism; social reproduction; violence and care; military labor; security infrastructures; postcolonial state; feminist and political anthropology] notes acknowledgments  many thanks to the cultural anthropology editorial collective, three reviewers, sayd randle, hema kiruppalini, and jacob rinck for their close readings and brilliant suggestions, all of which have greatly improved this article. i am grateful for the critical engagement with versions of this essay from audiences at south asian studies and the asia research institute at the national university of singapore, at the annual conference in south asian studies, university of wisconsin-madison 2023, and nyu department of anthropology. financial support from nus (no. a-0000122-00-00) has made the research for the larger project on soldiering possible. 1. sahib is an honorific term of address used in hindi and bengali to refer to officers by both lower-ranked soldiers and local civilians. a loanword from the original arabic, the term came into wide practice throughout medieval south asia. under colonial rule it acquired racial connotations through military use as officers, and more generally white men, were referred to as sahib. 2. rajbangsi is a federally listed scheduled caste, the most numerous one in the state of west bengal, and its members are predominantly vaishnavites. 3. thanks to one of the reviewers for this formulation. 4. “border security: capacity building and institutions,” parliamentary report no. 203, 2017. 5. border management has seen an increase of 42 percent, from ₹1,921.39 crore in 2021–22 to ₹2,517.02 crore in 2022–23, while border infrastructure has been allocated ₹2,744 crore, up from ₹2,130 crore in 2021–22. see an article in the hindu, https://www.thehindu.com/business/budget/185-lakh-crore-allocation-to-mha-in-budget/article38358957.ece 6. see a january 10, 2022, article on the matter in the print, 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pp. 221–48, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.02 from desire to endurance cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 45-68, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.07 from desire to endurance: hanging on in a spanish village hadas weiss humboldt university of berlin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1969-4236 fresh out of college in 1963, jane and george collier began researching a small village in western andalusia. they lived there for nine months, continued studying the village for the duration of their careers at stanford university’s department of anthropology, and returned for a year of fieldwork in the 1980s. both went on to write magnificent monographs about this village, which they named los olivos. i read these monographs long ago, never suspecting they would one day set me on a journey of my own. i study livelihoods and ideologies shaped by contemporary capitalism. having started exploring this in madrid, jane collier’s (1997) from duty to desire: remaking families in a spanish village came to my mind as a model for making sense of attitudes in terms of their material contexts. collier did so by comparing los olivos in the 1960s and in the 1980s. in the 1960s, the common way of explaining one’s actions and those of others in los olivos was of adhering to duty and convention. back then, it was a farming village of some 600 residents. spain’s franco dictatorship was pushing self-sufficient farms toward participation in the world market. it hurt the village economy and triggered out-migration. villagers who persevered did so by protecting their landed estates, whose size determined each family’s fortune. to leverage the value of their houses and agricultural lands, they had to marry well, uphold family reputation, and maintain ties with kin who might die childless or offer help. it made good material sense to attribute their relative fortunes to abiding by the duties that secured them a favorable inheritance. an ideology of duty reflected and reinforced a form of capitalism wherein livelihoods hinged on the transference of family property. by the 1980s, talk of abiding by duties gave way to a sense that everyone did as they pleased. the population of los olivos had dwindled to about 300, and those who had stayed could no longer live off farming. residents and former residents instead made a living in the national labor market. their earnings were low but above minimum wage, with an expectation of rising still. employers justified hiring, promotion, and wage decisions as reflecting the market value of workers’ labor. villagers redirected their efforts from securing an inheritance to paving a career path. rather than defending family estates, they strove to augment their human capital. they had a stake in affirming self-improvement by highlighting their forward-looking desire and by attributing their fortunes and those of others to its pursuit. an ideology of desire reflected livelihoods that hinged on market competition and wage labor. jane collier’s analysis revealed itself as directly pertinent to my research agenda. in a common understanding of contemporary capitalism, jobs grow precarious and wages stagnate, while property regains its earlier importance, as evidenced in the popularity of real-estate investment in spain and beyond. thomas piketty’s (2014) account of the growth of property-generated wealth outstripping that of wages has inspired some to relate present-day inequalities to ownership rather than employment, as was previously the norm, and by extension, to family transfers and inheritance (adkins, konings, and cooper 2020). attitudes seem to have shifted, too. young adults i interviewed in madrid attributed their situations (like living with their parents and working in jobs they disliked) to constraints rather than desires. if livelihoods were now supported by their own ideology, it was plainly not one of desire. yet i wondered why it also bore no resemblance to the sense of duty of the 1960s, despite a reassertion of property and inheritance. i also wondered about the politics of interlocuters more attuned to daily challenges than to projecting their desires about the future. my research took place a few years after spain’s mass protests following the 2008 financial crisis, under the banner of slogans like “youth without a future” (juventud sin futuro). the lack of durable security was represented, in these protests, as a future denied to young adults whose hopes for steady employment and a house of their own were frustrated. seeking possibilities in these mobilizations, anthropologists of contemporary spain (e.g., franquesa 2016, 2018; narotzky 2016, 2021; narotzky and smith 2006; smith 2014, 2016) analyzed them in terms of political imaginaries and agencies. but jane collier’s analysis made me wonder about the payoffs of analyzing contemporary attitudes as emerging from existing conditions to reproduce rather than transform them for understanding contemporary finance-led capitalism in which property proves risky and steady employment tenuous and marginal. my wager was that distilling the ideological contours of the present moment would grant me insight into its material constraints. and it occurred to me that i could do so by revisiting los olivos. that was how i came to spend part of spring and all of summer 2019 living in the village. my fieldwork included interviewing some thirty residents, attending religious and social events, and partaking in numerous informal conversations at groceries, bars, playgrounds, church, on daily group exercise walks, and the like. this intense period of participant observation helped me reconstruct some of the material and ideational scaffolding of village life. drawing on this fieldwork, i will argue that if the proprietor’s sense of duty in the 1960s was replaced by the employee’s affirmation of desire in the 1980s, present-day livelihoods in los olivos, and arguably beyond, impede both the extraction of significant value from the past and the possibility to carry over value to the future. for villagers, property has become as precarious a springboard for the future as jobs are. instead, they pin their livelihoods on flexible, ongoing extraction of income from a range of resources here and now. a discourse of endurance redeems their struggle to do so. endurance becomes a merit when people can no longer distinguish themselves materially. much like desire, it operates ideologically in shoring up the status quo. but if desire did so by reimagining production-led capitalism as an aggregate of self-made fortunes, endurance does so by claiming virtue within finance-led capitalism. against the backdrop of mobilizations for livelihood in post–financial crisis spain, endurance exposes the self-reproduction of capitalism in a way that desire—fueled by a sense of agency vis-à-vis the future—could not, making for a less hopeful historical conjuncture. in what follows, i will describe the discourse of endurance that has replaced that of desire, as i have encountered it in los olivos. next, i will anchor this discourse in its material underpinnings and show how it affirms villagers’ livelihoods. in the final section i will reflect, in conversation with anthropologists who have discussed political imaginaries in spain and beyond, on the specificity of finance-led capitalism, delineating endurance as an ideology of the contemporary moment. endurance i kept running into fifty-nine-year-old carmen as she limped (complaining of knee pains) between one or another of the houses she was cleaning, until i finally pinned her down for an interview. her manner was brisk and matter of fact. as was once common, she told me, she stopped studying after elementary school and went to work, picking chestnuts and working in a confectionary. at twenty-three, she married her village boyfriend and moved into the house he had inherited. while looking after their two daughters, she helped him in the fields. he had sold the fruit they harvested with his brothers but when they could no longer earn enough to support themselves, he switched to masonry. he worked for a construction company until it went bust. since then, he has been taking on the odd construction job and otherwise farming. after their daughters entered school, carmen got a job at a slaughterhouse, but six years of it proved too hard on her body. instead, she started taking public works jobs like street cleaning and house painting, making extra cash picking olives and chestnuts. she also painted and cleaned the houses of neighbors and vacationers. the better known she became for it, the more such gigs came her way. now she mostly cleans houses privately, including her brother’s. she continues taking on public works jobs on occasion to qualify for unemployment benefits. rather than simply rebuild their roof when it started collapsing, carmen and her husband decided to divide the house in two. for eight years, they spent every spare dime on construction costs, and carmen’s husband did most of the work himself. now they rent out one half of the house, living in the other half. they also inherited a smaller house, currently occupied by their daughter, and a shed near the main road. they use the shed for the annual slaughter of two pigs they raise, and sometimes rent it out as a garage. and they inherited fields, which provide much of their foodstuff. carmen showed me her freezer, stacked with pork to last the year, and her kitchen full of fruit and tomatoes she was canning. eggs and milk they have from their chickens and goats. carmen makes cheese to sell to neighbors. she also gives produce away as gifts. when sitting down, carmen knits (a sweater for her grandson while we were talking). she had sewn her daughters’ clothes and made lace tablecloths, too. she needs always to be working. unlike her husband, she won’t have the requisite fifteen years of formal employment to qualify for a pension. it is true that they live well enough now for her not to have to push herself (carmen nodded knowingly when i repeated what others said about her limping), but that is the point: they are not getting any younger. only by remaining active, she explained, can they hope to endure, come what may. carmen’s story resembled many others i heard and observed in los olivos. most able-bodied villagers spent most of their time making a great effort to obtain a living from a variety of sources. this effort was not for the sake of moneymaking or upward mobility. in an animated conversation at a local bar about the exploits of spain’s millionaires, featured on tv the previous night, i interjected to say that people in los olivos also did everything they could to make money. the bar patrons promptly disabused me of this notion. their efforts were not to get rich, several insisted, but to maintain what they had. what they had was humble. following protracted economic decline and out-migration,1 los olivos managed to retain a population of about 300 full-time residents since the 1980s. but its composition changed, reflecting regional trends of declining birthrates and aging (entrena and gómez-mateos 2000; monteagudo lópez-menchero and márquez domínguez 1986). adults recalled the village teeming with children, but this is no longer the case. while i was there, three young families were lured in with subsidized housing so that their children would keep the elementary school from being shut down. the village also has part-time residents: typically, former residents with inherited houses in which they spend weekends or holidays. then, there are the tourists. los olivos ranks among the most beautiful villages of the sierra de aracena, a natural park since the 1990s and a magnet for rural tourism. spanish and european institutions help fund its tourist initiatives (ruiz-ballesteros and cáceres-feria 2016a, 2016b), including marked hiking paths, an information center, and a botanical garden. los olivos also sports vacation rentals, a spa, a high-end restaurant, three bars, two crafts-and-souvenir shops, and local artisanal goods sold at its two groceries. still, as everyone pointed out, tourists only come seasonally, and only the owners of tourism-oriented businesses gained directly from the money they spend. the year following my stay there, the coronavirus pandemic suspended tourism altogether. meanwhile, environmentally protective restrictions on construction, farming, and hunting command extra costs that residents bicker about (cf. mercado-alonso 2015). many in los olivos depend for a living on public works and employment subsidies. they are offered at villages across spain, but primarily in andalusia and extremadura under the government’s rural employment policies (plan de empleo rural). partly funded by the european union, these initiatives are designed to halt the massive rural flight. they entail jobs in administration, management, construction, supervision, organization, and maintenance. shortages and cost-cutting measures make them typically one-to-two-month gigs, with few as lengthy as eight months. the village administration distributes them, although there are never enough to go around. public assistance makes for another key source of income. people who have accumulated twelve months of formal employment are eligible for wage-pegged unemployment benefits (el paro) for a limited duration. if they have children to support, they can qualify for family aid of just over 400 euros a month, also for a limited duration. some receive non-contributory disability or retirement pensions of just over 400 euros a month and others, a regular public pension of about 660 euros a month. unable to rely on formal employment alone, villagers find other ways to make ends meet while stretching its benefits. in practice, this means a slippage between formal employment such as public works, self-employment, and contracts with public entities and private firms; ad hoc informal work for untaxed cash; and public assistance.2 people try to work long enough to get el paro, which would grant them the time to work informally and seek additional income. completing an extra month of work to qualify for it constitutes a common claim for being favored in the distribution of jobs. in the face of short work contracts and the inability to save and plan, villagers express their struggles in the idiom of endurance. whereas in the sixties, as collier had it, they adhered to the conventions of the past, voicing duty to parents whose property they would inherit, and, in the eighties, they highlighted their personal abilities and desires, projected toward the achievement of future progress, the villagers i met in 2019 assessed their lives and actions according to their ability to endure daily challenges. at one point or another, almost everyone i talked to prided themselves on their ability to endure (aguantar). duty had once leveraged the value of property from the past while desire was projected toward the value a career holds for the future. the horizons of endurance, in contrast, are restricted to ever-renewed effort, arrested in immediacy. key to endurance is that continuity and consistency over time—especially through illness, unemployment, and old age—is not secured by inherited wealth, steady employment, or social security. rather, it results from personal, ongoing struggle. both duty and desire implied a sense of agency, as villagers had some power to improve their lot and distinguish themselves from each other materially. in contrast, endurance places all villagers, economically speaking, in the same, stationary boat. endurance thereby shifts the weight of distinction to strength of character vis-à-vis outsiders, especially those who had left the village. far from granting outsiders’ superiority for having pursued their desires, villagers posit their own moral superiority for having stuck it out. some remained in los olivos because they did not possess sufficient educational or professional qualifications to make it in a city. others remained because of family circumstances. others, still, simply because they could. regardless of their reasons, they saw endurance and strength of character as expressing their ability to hang on: the internalization of hardship as a personal challenge and accomplishment. strength of character was demonstrated, among others, by manu. during my time in the village, he was helping his landlord with construction work in return for rent-free housing, assisting others with gardening in return for produce, waiting tables at the bar whenever they called him, picking wild oregano to sell to restaurants in huelva, and organizing and pitching cultural events to villages in the region. every time i walked around with him, he would stop to chat people up, letting those doing agricultural or construction work know he was available. affecting an outward cheer, he complained to me privately about the inability to plan and build a future for himself. everything he wanted to do, he said, depended on something else coming through. at the same time, he took pride in his ability to endure. big personalities populated the life stories and gossip of villagers; strength of character identified the protagonists. every person favorably mentioned, alive or dead, was lauded as a fighter, a hard worker, and as funny and outgoing: a people person. being enterprising in finding income opportunities also garnered praise, as well as conforming to existing jobs and conditions. not everyone in los olivos fit that description, of course, but such was the ideal against which villagers measured themselves. the qualities singled out—self-assertion, resourcefulness, steadfastness, and sociability—were the ones that would help a person endure. the salience of endurance should not be taken to mean that los olivos has transformed entirely. in a village made up of family households, a sense of duty toward relatives continues to have purchase, just as younger villagers pursuing higher education speak of their desires for the future. what is more, endurance, with its catholic undertones, has a long history in spain. nevertheless, in the 1980s, villagers who spoke about having to endure were generally regarded as failures who had to return to the village because they could not find a good job elsewhere.3 but in contemporary los olivos, endurance prevails over other values in the same way as duty and desire once had. having risen from its marginal position, endurance has superseded desire to become the yardstick against which villagers measure themselves and others. endurance is taken as a tenuous achievement. not merely does it have to be demonstrated repeatedly, it is also haunted by diminishing returns for inherited property, and by the lack of a viable future in which it would become unnecessary. it bespeaks neither the resolve of backward-leveraging duty nor the optimism of future-looking desire. nor, finally, does it imply a person’s ability to improve their lot, if only relative to their neighbors. instead, enduring in the present has become a virtue in its own right, marking, as ghassan hage (2015) describes it, the refusal to perceive oneself as a victim of circumstances, even against a lack of opportunities to escape these circumstances. consider, for example, the reflections of a thirty-two-year-old scion of the village’s old propertied elite. his parents had long migrated to seville in search of employment, but he returned to the village, feeling that his life was going nowhere. in seville, he spent half of his earnings on rent and saved nothing. he could not save in los olivos, either, but at least there he had a house to live in rent-free. then, there were the family fields. they were in shambles, but he was busy restoring them. he brought in a neighbor’s goats to clean up the underbrush and started mending the stone fence. he worked in the fields every day, but only as much as his eight-hour shifts at a supermarket the next village over allowed him. he preferred farming, not because he envisioned turning a profit out of it (his early attempts to market organic product failed) but because of how absorbing it proved: placing one stone atop another, he explained, you don’t obsess over the future. if living in the village was tantamount to enduring, actions and attitudes that failed to line up with this ideal had to be accounted for. to preserve the integrity of endurance and the strength of character that reflected it, deviants were associated with one of two groups: the elderly (mayores) and the youth (jovenes). these designations were only loosely associated with age. some people in their seventies were so active that no one would dream of calling them mayores. nor were keen and helpful teenagers considered jovenes, exactly. others, though, in their fifties or thirties, could be faulted as being like one or the other. in giving allowance to physical limitations, these designations constituted a gentler form of criticizing what villagers perceived as weakness of character. being mayor was talked about as being inactive, bored (unable to make good use of time), fearful, and dependent; the opposite of what it took to endure. men were likened to mayores if they spent too much time at the bar instead of earning or seeking an income. regular church attendance was associated with being an old woman who had nothing better to do. in contrast, the active elderly broadcast their vigor. one seventy-six-year-old made sure everyone knew about her long hikes, while an eighty-year-old told everyone how, after a health setback, the doctor had threatened to chain him to his bed to stop him from returning to the fields. being joven was synonymous with restlessness: overspending, not conforming to existing jobs, and openly expressing discontent. restlessness proved worrisome in that it questioned the intentionality of endurance as a chosen virtue. though associated with youth, people could be accused of restlessness well into adulthood. this, while children who could be left alone and entrusted with housework received praise for their maturity. another association with youth was timidity. no trait seemed to cause greater consternation when showing up in one’s children or grandchildren. in contrast, the talkative and outgoing were praised as having a good character. one soft-spoken woman told me that she overcame her natural timidity when she could no longer avoid having to assert herself. putting their strength of character on display, many proclaimed that they worked in whatever came up (lo que sale), referring to public works whose difficulty and scarcity they endured. professionals avowed endurance, too. administrators, engineers, and social workers boasted of having also cleaned houses, picked strawberries, or tended to the elderly, all the more noteworthy if they had done so while sick or pregnant. some prided themselves on making do with less than city folk. others claimed that pensions, low as they were, went a long way because they were used to not spending much. those unwilling to endure the hard work and precarious employment were said to have no choice but to study something and leave, as former villagers had, framing these actions as moral failings. anyone weakened by illness was pitied. in one conversation, two women expressed their admiration of a common acquaintance who kept working hard even after the doctor told her she was dying. conversely, there was great unease about those who demanded rest. on a hike back from a festival at a nearby village, one woman claimed she was mayor and could not walk so fast. everyone dismissed this emphatically. when she said the walk there had been slower, i volunteered that there was greater inducement to hurry when returning home. “not for me,” she said: “i’m alone and get so bored.” uncomfortable silence ensued. what made it so striking was that hardly anyone would admit to boredom. there was no greater putdown than saying about someone that they were just waiting around for jobs while doing nothing. those willing to do anything always had something to do, the logic went. most took pains to appear busy regardless of their workloads. when i first met her, one woman made much about how busy she was getting stuff done before august, when a month-long street-cleaning gig would claim her time. in august, she expounded on her fatigue from hours of work under the blistering sun. she couldn’t wait for september! but when i asked in september if she was enjoying her holiday, she said she hadn’t a moment’s rest, given how many errands had piled up in the meantime. jane collier (1997) wrote that los olivos residents and former residents in the 1980s knew they were disadvantaged in the national labor market. but having already invested in self-improvement, they had a stake in believing that their earnings nevertheless reflected merit, as encapsulated in the discourse of desire. similarly, every villager i met had relatives leading easier lives elsewhere, demonstrating that alternatives did exist. if they stayed in los olivos, turning its hardships into virtue constituted their form of self-assertion, distinguishing themselves from those who had allegedly given up. endurance redeemed livelihoods arrested in the present, where all one could do was hang on. hanging on with her right hand bandaged, fifty-four-year-old paqui awkwardly maneuvered a glass of juice in her left. she started working after elementary school, she told me: picking chestnuts, cleaning houses, and sewing undergarments for a pittance. when she married, she and her husband moved into her late grandparents’ old animal shed, a ruin they spent two years making habitable, and many more expanding to meet the family’s growing needs. paqui spent twenty years caring for her mother’s blind cousin, who put her house in paqui’s name and paid her the monthly equivalent of 120 euros today. she drew on public subsidies to convert the woman’s house into a vacation rental, but the extra work proved too much: she was caring for another elderly relative and her own parents at the time. it felt like running an old-age home, what with two small children to boot! as these relatives died off, she took on house painting and cleaning jobs. paqui’s husband works in a recycling plant in huelva but heads straight for the fields when back from work. they have goats, and paqui makes cheese to sell; she also conserves fruit and vegetables to last the year. it is strenuous, unprofitable work, and her husband suffers from tendinitis, as she does. but the fields need to be watered, the animals fed. they could not manage if not for the help of their son, who has no stable employment. he would much prefer playing video games, but he rallies. he told paqui just the other day: “mom, i love the fields, but not as much as dad does.” paqui laughed relaying this, adding that her son simply didn’t want to work so hard, the poor thing. paqui’s struggles hark back to los olivos in the 1960s, when property served as a bulwark against dispossession. yet the houses and fields she inherited have proved as much a liability as an asset. she projected her doubts about having to struggle for them onto her son, who would gain little from helping his family as she had hers. unsurprisingly, then, she never asserted the importance of duty, which used to support the transmission of property down the generations. instead, paqui echoed the values of endurance and strength of character, just as she communicated the deficiencies of work and property. these deficiencies have to do with broader transformations in the structure of capital accumulation in spain and beyond. since the 1970s, confronting a slowdown in global economic growth, spain has reorganized industry and imposed austerity measures. since the 1990s, it has also extended private debt in construction and real estate. rising real-estate prices would encourage homeowners to compensate with property for declines in real wages, underfunded pensions, and insufficient public assistance. but if spain’s financialization since the 1990s precipitated a housing boom, ensuing busts forced income-constrained adults back into their parents’ homes. at the same time, temporary contracts, and high participation in seasonal sectors like tourism, condemn its population to insecure employment. more recent austerity measures further intensify the burden on households. it now falls on family members to protect their members from calamity. especially in society’s lower echelons, resource pooling makes for their chief material recourse (charnock, purcell, and ribera-fumaz 2014; lópez and rodríguez 2011; rey-araújo 2021). we should understand the reassertion of property in this light. if hanging on to property in los olivos had already constituted an effort in the 1960s, livelihoods back then were nevertheless leveraged by the value of homes and agricultural land. they helped villagers carve out a living in which, as the elderly reminisce, most daily necessities were locally produced and consumed. and they differentiated villagers’ fortunes from each other. despite seeking all manner of work and income even then, property was their main path toward distinction and self-betterment. in present-day los olivos, property is grossly insufficient for securing livelihoods. its maintenance often demands more work and money than the value it delivers. villagers’ fortunes, moreover, are barely distinguishable no matter how much property they own. to get by, family members must nevertheless pool their property, along with what value they can extract from work and public assistance. multigenerational households are common in los olivos, where dependency runs both ways: relatives care for the elderly, but grandparents also look after the children of working parents, and old-age pensions are just as important as wages for everyone’s upkeep. dependencies are also horizontal: if one spouse works formally, the other takes over house, field, or care work.4 and if one spouse’s income is drawn on for daily expenses, the other tries to put something aside for a rainy day. the conventional distinction between gift-giving and monetary exchange is subordinate to daily exigencies. family members help each other for free, but when someone can pay for farming, construction, or maintenance work, they hire relatives or friends. people with an active garden grow more than they can consume and gift produce to each other, social networks being vital for support and income opportunity. but they also sell their produce when the benefits of hard cash weigh higher. similarly, rides are offered free of charge to nearby towns where people run errands, but older people who do not hitchhike also pay for these rides. local businesses operate on small margins and their owners are among the hardest workers in the village. nor are other forms of property the foundation of family fortune; sometimes, they even mean a liability. houses, for example, are old, with things always falling apart. homes’ lime-plastering quickly soils, necessitating annual repainting. repair and maintenance costs are prohibitive. houses in the worst state are put up for sale or even abandoned if their owners can live elsewhere. those who cannot, find ways to make them habitable on the cheap. the houses are quite big by city standards and up to three stories high (animals used to be kept on the lower levels, while the upper served to store farming equipment). they can therefore be subdivided for grown children or tenants, or one can live in the part of the house originally partitioned into rooms, sealing off upper and lower stories. the houses are inherited, and inheritances in andalusia are heavily taxed. they are also something for which heirs are expected to work, and whose modest gains are to be justified by the display of such work. in an aging village like los olivos, almost every family cares for at least one elderly relative from whom they will one day inherit. when an elderly person has more than one child living nearby, the children divide the responsibilities between them, or one child does more than another who has grandchildren or other relatives to care for. women care for their husbands’ relatives if the husband is employed full-time. and the childless elderly conscript younger relatives. ernesto is a childless widower who had reached such a caretaking agreement. in return for care, his late wife’s two nephews would inherit her estate, while his younger brother would inherit his. not long after the agreement was signed, both nephews and the brother died. the nephews’ widows and the brother’s son took over, caring for ernesto for almost twenty years on monthly rotation. ernesto’s nephew told me that being at his beck and call means not being able to do other things. when his own mother was sick, he compared it to a chain pulling him in both directions. the house he inherited for his work had its bottom and top stories sealed off. still, it proved a godsend for a forty-eight-year-old whose sole income was a meagre disability pension, demonstrating that he, too, could endure. one of the widows in charge of ernesto partook in the morning exercise walks i joined. she was able to come only every other day because she had to prepare him for dialysis on alternate days. during the walk, she would relay his moods and nightmares, which kept her up half the night. but when her son wanted to live alone with his girlfriend, she could offer them her inherited house. she told me that whenever ernesto complains, she chides him: “you have three people taking care of you. there will be no one taking care of us.” indeed, none of the caretakers i spoke with imagined that their children would do the same for them. the very people who took pride in their collective endurance foresaw a future in which each person would fend for themselves. endurance did not purport to carry to the future what villagers had, as duty and desire once had. time and again i heard that this was the last generation of in-home eldercare. middle-aged people said they would seek institutional care when their time came. some explained that their children had jobs and mortgages. others, that they would never encumber their children in such a way. my neighbor went so far as to insist she would be cremated, to spare her children the trouble of keeping her tombstone clean. investment in children was, in this sense, a net loss. it took a lot to raise them, and parents were always comparing the prices of school equipment, clothing, and gadgets. parents of children who went on to higher education took out bank loans, using village property as collateral, to finance their city lives. in considering whether to have children, younger people openly weighed their costs and the work they would require.5 when one mother told me she could not wait for her children to grow up, i asked if this was because she would then be free to do more. “no,” she replied: “i could finally do less!” land also constituted a diminishing resource. one could no longer make a living off farming, leaving fields neglected. those whose lands contained chestnut trees or cork oak sold off the rights to harvest them. others cultivated their fields out of obligation (some said they felt bad for the trees) and love, claiming that the work was too strenuous to qualify as a hobby. produce consumed or sold helped balance family budgets, but it was never clear whether this justified the work. indeed, most villagers were loath to admit its economic benefits. if, in the 1980s, material compensation for one’s physical investments confirmed the power of desire, the virtue of endurance was confirmed by its material insignificance. only moral distinction would justify agricultural work that was more of an encumbrance than a path to progress. one woman told me, for example, that she hated fruit and vegetables but, as they grew in her garden, they had to be eaten. the houses and fields of los olivos were talked about as patrimony, but owners believed the village would someday be lost or transformed into a tourist resort. some ruminated over what they could have done with all the money they had spent on their houses. they dismissed my suggestion that it might prove a good investment. most doubted whether their children would stay on, or whether anyone would want to buy the houses (“for sale” signs hung on some for years). their professed aim was rather to preserve their patrimony now, or at least keep up appearances. the community disproved of letting one’s home fall into disrepair, as it bore witness to weakness of character and an inability to endure. since patrimony brought scant economic gain, its main value was precisely as a tangible sign of endurance. this was the case for marisa, who had divided her family house in two after her father’s death, in compliance with his will. her older brother, who lived in madrid, turned his half into a vacation home for his daughter. marisa resented the partition and fought it in court for three years. leaving the house intact would have offered her no material benefit. indeed, the section of the house she now lived in alone felt too big already, making her nervous at night. rather, it was a matter of principle and appearance. her brother had left the village as soon as he finished high school, whereas she had stayed on, caring for their father in his old age and enduring into the present on a small, intermittent income. it felt jarring to marisa that their divided childhood home seemed to place her on the same moral footing as her brother, who was never around, and her niece, who came and left as she pleased, even though marisa alone had endured. i discussed patrimony with eva, who had a lot of it. her truck-driver brother spent every moment he was not on the road working the family fields. she was forever telling him to get some rest or, better yet, as a bachelor in his forties, go out and find himself a girlfriend. but he just could not let the fields go. their father was the same, always out there. the family also owned several houses. eva and her husband fixed them up over the years, whenever they were on el paro, though she could not say what for. her brother was childless, and she only had one daughter. fourteen-year-old julia would be the sole heir to the family property, then. but she was a smart one, doing well at school, and would surely go on to university and leave. eva told me she teases her daughter, saying “one day this will all be yours,” leaving julia to roll her eyes. “she’ll just sell it all and that will be the end of it,” eva added with a shrug. if rehearsing duty made little sense now that the past afforded negligible economic value, asserting desire—as villagers and former villagers had done in the 1980s—made even less sense. in jane collier’s (1997) analysis, villagers suffered even greater exposure to workplace exploitation than did workers in spain’s urban centers, operating under a system that disadvantaged and discriminated against them. yet their jobs and earnings nevertheless distinguished them from one another materially, giving credence to the notion that they reflected merit, or the investments they made in their skill sets. it encouraged them to continue pursuing skill-formation and professions. these pursuits, while forward-looking and aspirational for each worker, also fueled the production of surplus value in spain’s economy. desire has lost its persuasiveness in today’s los olivos. although some of its residents boast that their urban children work professionally in fields that they studied or in jobs they liked, few can say the same about themselves. local jobs are treated as interchangeable. wages are standard, reflecting neither skill nor effort. the only factor to favor one job over another is the length of contract. these jobs attest not to workers’ skill or ambition but to their willingness to perform any work available, and to having been favored for a gig that others coveted. the only ability that villagers’ working lives manifests, then, is their strength of character. since its fruits are nondurable, the effort must always be renewed; a perennial exertion encapsulated in the idiom of endurance. but just as desire once did, endurance also shores up the status quo: rendering the maintenance of livelihoods under such conditions a personal accomplishment and point of pride. since even stable jobs in los olivos did not allow those who had them to rise significantly above the fold, the people who held them downplayed these jobs to overplay their own endurance. the local mailman insisted that his life had not changed since getting the job: he sees the same people and does the same things as before. only when i pressed did he admit that he now worked in the fields only when he felt like it, not because he had to. a tenured administrator told me that he would much rather be restoring old furniture—his true vocation—than pushing papers, but, well, he had a family to feed. where precarious employment and stagnant wages force the depreciation of human capital, it becomes, in the words of michel feher (2009), a speculative venture rather than an asset of growing value. investment in education and skills is not calculated to augment future earnings but constitutes a simple reach for self-esteem. this description rings truer to a reality in which work no longer conveys forward-looking desire while nevertheless manifesting endurance. such employment, along with property, allows villagers to hang on but not to do better. unable to leverage them toward a better future, their human and material resources anchor villagers in the here and now.6 such was the situation for thirty-year-old veronica. unable to find stable employment after graduating from university in seville, she was offered a short-term gig in los olivos setting up cultural events. then, her grandmother’s health took a turn for the worse. she stuck around to help care for her. since then, she has kept scoring local gigs, if only intermittently. helping her grandmother allowed veronica’s mother to retain her own, steadier job as a nursing home aide. veronica would prefer living in seville, or at least alone: her parents drive her insane! her family did own another house in los olivos, but she did not see the point of paying double the utilities when she had to be by her grandmother’s side all day anyway. she regretted not having lived it up in her twenties when she still had the chance, she told me wearily. residents who had left los olivos reinforced the value of endurance, in that villagers considered leaving an alternative, if seldom a practicable one. staying in the village when one could in principle leave was tantamount, to them, to choosing a life of endurance. it endowed their struggles with a moral high ground vis-à-vis outsiders, whom they also faulted for consumerism and for living beyond their means. this did not go over well with everyone, though. a mother of three, whose children had moved to cities, told me it annoyed her that people thought they had it easy, discounting how hard it was to get by anywhere. at the same time, those who left fought back by distinguished themselves from full-time residents, whose conforming to circumstances they interpreted, for my benefit, as a paucity of ambition. the possibility of leaving los olivos made those on the fence ponder the stakes of endurance more explicitly than others. fifty-two-year-old arturo offers an example. at sixteen, after his father suffered a heart attack, arturo took over the bar he owned in the main plaza. he enjoyed the work at first but, as the novelty wore off, he continued out of obligation alone. he finally left the village in his twenties, moving to the united kingdom. he spent the next two decades holding a string of jobs from cleaning storefronts through polishing lenses to selling snacks on trains. every few years he would move back to spain and do maintenance work at the seville airport. moving and changing jobs represented taking charge of his life, he explained, rather than endure conditions he disliked. but a few years ago, his mother fell ill, and he returned to help. when i met arturo, he was living with his mother and coordinating community activities in the village. the gig would soon be over, and he would have to find something new. living in the village felt to him like living in the past, or worse, because it was an older, emptier, and sadder place than the los olivos of his childhood. he hoped it would not be where it all ended for him. before i left the village, i told arturo i might visit again in the winter and asked if he would still be around. he replied that he would: much as he would like to leave, he felt it would be hard for him to start afresh someplace new. i countered that getting by in los olivos was also hard. yes, arturo concurred, but there, at least, the hardships were familiar. i can no longer conjure up los olivos without imagining him there: a wandering spirit that, having once sought his fortune elsewhere, has again become arrested in the present. for all his ambivalence about endurance, it was his only moral recourse to affirm this choice. a new capitalist ideology in spain as elsewhere, financialization has shifted the motor of accumulation from production to rent-extraction though monopolies, asset-price inflation, and consumer payment streams. finance decenters exploitation through relatively steady, full-time employment, making jobs precarious and wages erratic. the risk-laden path of finance-led accumulation also means that property, once a pathway to upward mobility, assumes unstable value, commanding the debt-servicing of tenants with insecure incomes. shackled to the investments and debts of the past, common experience resembles being dragged down by negative net worth. as lisa adkins, martijn konings, and melinda cooper (2020) describe it, this experience is accompanied by a sense of having no better future toward which to plan. in the absence of progressive forward movement through time, life becomes a series of moments of bare survival (cf. guyer 2008). such was life in los olivos as i observed it: a patching together of property, wages, public assistance, and a range of family resources, none of which sufficed on its own to provide security, and the combination of which allowed most villagers merely to stay afloat. it also served as the material backdrop for the ideology that accompanied such efforts. encumbered by the past and deprived of a future, villagers exalted endurance as a virtue that emerged from their daily struggles. it provided them a moral high ground over those who left, and it served to redeem the conditions in which they found themselves. yet this also constituted the context in which mass protests broke out all over spain following the 2008 financial crisis. anthropologists have reflected on the country’s mobilizations as examples of political imaginaries and thwarted agencies. susana narotzky and gavin smith (2006) had originally diagnosed “immediate struggles” as struggles with direct influence against a nearby enemy, rather than a more distant culprit one hopes to overturn; stuck in the present rather than building toward a better future. they fleshed them out for spain’s vega baja region, where the franco regime’s repression and invasive regulation could only be partly bypassed through personal connections. politics collapsed into a currying of favors and appealing to powerful patrons while shifting through short-term employment. in their analysis, this led, finally, to an individualist, ad hoc agency, which preempted collective action. jaume franquesa (2018) focused on collective struggles in southern catalonia against the energy corporations exploiting the region. the erosion of the old agrarian order precluded villagers from becoming either autonomous farmers or permanent wage laborers. facing depopulation and agricultural decline, they decried their degradation in the name of dignity. linking this to protests in spain that echoed a discourse of indignation, franquesa (2016, 2018) found in both an appeal for control over livelihoods. to him, the indignation of villagers trapped between an incomplete past and an impeded future gestured toward something better. los olivos residents are hardly typical of the spanish population at large. jane collier (1997) found the village relatively small and homogenous, even with respect to rural spain—a difference that holds to this day. yet the ways in which its residents respond to broader pressures discloses the uniqueness of contemporary capitalism and demonstrates the more general workings of ideology. hanging on in los olivos chimes with the seeking of protection through personal connections that narotzky and smith have described, and with the reach for dignity that franquesa has. it results from the same historical circumstances, namely, the degradation of agriculture, the marginalization of the countryside, the informalization of work, and the activation of personal connections. yet it scarcely affords the projection beyond immediate circumstances that political agency connotes. franquesa (2016) strove to meet gavin smith’s (2014) gambit of reimagining a politics that the present makes possible. smith argued that marginalized populations unable to envision their goals being met within existing institutions have the potential to exert a disruptive power over them. smith (2016) envisaged a resistant subject, for whom the struggle for livelihood could be leveraged against dispossession. susana narotzky (2016) found recent mobilizations in spain’s galicia region lacking in this respect. their indignation was directed at the corruption and privilege of elites, not the economic forces that reproduced inequality and domination. narotzky (2021) further notes that spaniards have been mobilized by a mediaand policy-supported notion of intergenerational conflict over scarce resources, while in truth, household resources are pooled, grounding intergenerational solidarity rather than conflict. analyses of politics and its failure among anthropologists of spain evaluate public discourses on their own terms, mining them for emancipatory possibilities. a critique of ideology, in contrast, views discourses with suspicion. but there is more than one way to take interlocutors’ concerns seriously. one payoff to viewing what they say as reflecting dominant ideology, emerging from existing conditions to orient action in ways that reproduce rather than potentially transform them, lies in resisting unreasonable expectations of subjects that operate under genuine constraints. in the case of spanish politics, discourses about a hopeful or foreclosed future seem contrived, even from the perspective of the people rehearsing them. they fail to communicate the prevalent temporal orientation under finance-led capitalism. here, i follow lisa adkins (2018), who argues that a vision of the future for which one plans has been superseded by submergence in the present. no longer led by production, capitalist accumulation ceases to require the population’s exceptional value-producing work and value-realizing consumption. under the dominance of finance, it instead requires of households a capacity to use precarious wages and other resources to meet contractual payments. the money from these payments and debt servicing flows to financial institutions and service providers, where it is bundled and sold on to finance markets, creating profit. to fuel finance-led accumulation, households must simply stay afloat and sustain the money flow, instead of striving to improve their fortunes through work and consumption, as in previous decades. such a reality is not conducive to a future denied to long-term planners, whose frustration sparks resistance. such a reality is, however, reflected in endurance. endurance is thoroughly nonpolitical in that it eschews an orientation toward the future, placing moral weight on ongoing efforts to get by. it is, moreover, ideological, aligning people with their material circumstances—in terms of which their attitudes make sense—rather than representing an active stance against the conditions in which they find themselves. this holds true despite the undeniably heroic aspects of enduring in the face of overwhelming degradation (ringel 2018). to remain the same, to be durative, to suffer and yet persist vis-à-vis the excesses of capital may even be read as emancipatory, as elizabeth povinelli (2011) does. but this personal heroism issues from a resolve to live with things as they are. the ideological aspects of this attitude can be sharpened by comparison with those that sarah muir (2021) found among argentines in the post 2001–2002 crisis, which sent the country into turmoil. muir’s interlocuters had lingering intuitions about progress, but they felt trapped in a world that offered them no stable grounds from which to project a different future. their critiques and professed disillusionment therefore did not create a springboard to action, but a performative ritual, a distinction that signaled belonging to the collapsed middle class. such distinction conjures up the appeal of ideology in providing personal satisfaction in the very act of acquiescing with unfavorable circumstances. hage’s (2015) reflections on endurance, drawing on his fieldwork in lebanon, likewise noted the workings of distinction. for hage, endurance is a celebration of one’s capacity to stick it out despite the absence of alternatives, and an inability to grab such alternatives even if they presented themselves. the heroism of endurance lies in self-assertion in the midst of a situation wherein one has no agency: a refusal to become a mere victim of circumstances. it is, moreover, self-perpetuating: just as people stuck in an unmoving queue keep queuing, so, the more one waits, the more reluctant one becomes to stop waiting. hage (2015) does not call this ideology but rather governmentality, and the shrinkage of political imagination. hage’s frame of reference is the excess and failure of the state, as in the foucauldian and althusserian traditions, where mechanisms of power appear inscribed into the body directly. slavoj žižek (2012) distinguishes this from an understanding of ideology, whereby discourses or attitudes function to support the social domination entailed in a capitalist logic of accumulation in a non-transparent way (cf. weiss 2019). traces of ideology in this sense are nevertheless present in hage’s (2015) description of endurance: inviting and valorizing self-control, it implies that acting in a restrained fashion elevates the one enduring above the seeming vulgarity and impatience of disruptive action, thus allowing desperate conditions to persist unaltered. the non-transparency of ideology, on which žižek (2012) insists, also positions endurance at its borderline. we can best see this by contrasting it to desire. the discourse of desire, as jane collier (1997) described it, conveyed a sense of agency. it reflected the promise that through effort and skill-building, one could improve one’s lot. it further reimagined capitalism as the aggregate outcome of individual desires and agencies; hence the ideological reinforcement of its domination. collier exposed the personal and family costs of desire for los olivos residents and former residents. exploited and disadvantaged in the national labor market, they were nevertheless motivated to produce more value than that which they received, fueling production-led accumulation. exposing desire as undermining villagers’ own aspirations in this way would have seemed counterintuitive to those caught up in the sense of their own agency. indeed, collier often noted the differences between her analysis and the self-perceptions of her interlocutors. the ideology of endurance proves immune to such illusion. it rather bespeaks the very non-agency that afflicts subjects of finance-led accumulation. whenever villagers speak of their efforts and livelihoods, circumstances are simply given, and no one imagines overcoming them. endurance is therefore more patently a reinforcement of the status quo than desire ever was. nor has duty resurfaced in los olivos as an ideology explaining life’s circumstances, despite property’s returned foregrounding. this is so because property is no longer a fulcrum whose retainment and maintenance would mark the difference in villagers’ fortunes. now a risky resource or even a drain, it is one more thing to deal with in the struggle merely to hang on, as well as something whose paltry gains one must justify by working and by demonstrating strength of character. endurance makes the reality of hanging on appear dynamic and virtuous. without a claim on either past or future value one could leverage, endurance must be realized daily and can only be asserted to the extent that it succeeds. in los olivos, aging villagers assume this success to be short-lived, that subsequent generations will disperse, and that the community as its members know it will come to an end. yet this recognition does not breed collective political agency, any more than the ideology of individual desire did. instead, endurance renders hardships a challenge that requires and elevates strength of character, construing it as accomplishment rather than affliction. abstract comparing a spanish village in the 1960s and 1980s, jane collier analyzed how the different ways of making a living in those decades generated distinct dispositions: from abiding by duty to pursuing desire. i revisited this village to explore the ideological contours of finance-led capitalism and the livelihoods it enables in rural andalusia. i found that villagers’ struggles to hang on, arrested in a present in which property carries over insufficient value from the past, and work offers no path to progress in the future, are redeemed by a discourse of endurance. i trace its material underpinnings to constraints imposed on work and property and demonstrate how it renders villagers’ struggles as an accomplishment rather than an affliction. i also use this ethnography to make a case for studying contemporary attitudes as reflections of ideology, rather than as expressions of political agency. [household; ideology; property; restudy; work; spain] resumen jane collier, en sus estudios de un pueblo español en los años sesenta y ochenta, analizó cómo las diferentes formas de ganarse la vida en esa época generaban actitudes muy claras: desde cumplir deberes hasta perseguir deseos. volví a visitar este pueblo en concreto para explorar los rasgos ideológicos del capitalismo financiero y los modos y medios de vida que genera en la andalucía rural. encontré que la lucha de los vecinos por mantenerse a flote, paralizados en un presente en el que la tierra y la vivienda no conservan suficientemente su valor del pasado y el trabajo no ofrece ninguna garantía de avanzar, se ve compensada con un discurso de “aguantar”. trazo las bases materiales de esta situación en las limitaciones impuestas a través del trabajo y la propiedad y demuestro cómo interpretar estas luchas de los aldeanos como un logro y no como una aflicción. también sirve esta etnografía para defender el análisis de actitudes contemporáneas como reflejo de la ideología, más que como expresión de una capacidad política. [domicilio; ideología; propiedad; re-estudio; trabajo; españa] notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to jane collier for inspiring my revisit of los olivos, and for her generous support throughout this research. thanks also to natalia buier, matan kaminer, and enrique martino for excellent suggestions on earlier drafts, and to heather paxson and the anonymous reviewers for excellent suggestions on later ones. the research for this article was supported by the madrid institute for advanced study, and i thank my colleagues there for their encouragement. 1. reconstructing the events of the spanish civil war and its aftermath in los olivos, george collier (1987) described how some village socialists were killed, while others fled. as the region’s agriculture became marginalized under franco, poor workers and smallholders joined the urban working class, while agrarian proprietors were saddled with agricultural work that no longer won them power and prestige. agriculture was gradually abandoned, precipitating emigration. 2. small businesses in andalusia are indirectly subsidized by public works and assistance as well, in that petty entrepreneurs informally employ agricultural workers on the dole (djurfeldt 1993). 3. jane collier, personal communication, 10.20.2020. 4. it is mostly husbands who have the more formal employment, and wives doing the lion’s share of house and care work. 5. few children used to be necessary to avoid excessive claims on limited inheritances, and long courtships in los olivos accomplished birth control (price and price 1966). 6. in this sense, endurance resembles a pre-desire era that stanley brandes (1975), describing a different spanish village, identified as fatalistic: believing one had no control over one’s financial future. references adkins, lisa 2018 the time of money. stanford: stanford university press. adkins, lisa, martijn konings, and melinda cooper 2020 asset economy: property ownership and the new logic of inequality. 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kitchen gardens and naturalization in alájar (sierra de aracena, spain).” journal of material culture 21, no. 2: 205-222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183515623819 smith, gavin 2014 intellectuals and (counter-) politics: essays in historical realism. new york: berghahn. 2016 “against social democratic angst about revolution: from failed citizens to critical praxis.” dialectic anthropology 40: 221–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-016-9421-x weiss, hadas 2019 we have never been middle class: how social mobility misleads us. london: verso. žižek, slavoj, ed. 2012 mapping ideology. london: verso. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 45-68, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.07 officer safety time: police scenario training and thinking threat first officer safety time: police scenario training and thinking threat first jessica katzenstein arizona state university https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9163-600x i’m not trying to set you up to think you’ll get killed on every call or make you paranoid, a swat team officer told a class of recruits. don’t approach a suicidalwith-a-gun call the way you would a barking-dog call . . . but also, can anything happen? yes.1 on a sunny spring morning in 2018, swat team members were leading a module on basic tactical maneuvers in a maryland police training academy. the baltimore police department was laboring under a consent decree nearby,2 and departments nationwide were talking the language of reform. even in departments like this one, which enjoyed a spotless reputation with its majority-white population, academy training had self-consciously shifted to signal a commitment to gentler, service-oriented policing. under pressure from reform movements and politicians, academies such as this one sought to instill a “guardian” mind-set, in which officers’ primary mandate is to protect civilians, contra a pervasive “warrior” training style that teaches police to anticipate ever-present threats to their own survival and to eliminate enemies (carlson 2020; stoughton 2015). recruits wrote personal mission statements and learned that their ultimate purpose was to serve the community. nonetheless, at the indisputable core of academy pedagogy was the commonsense mantra that officer safety comes first. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 493–518, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.05 https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9163-600x http://www.doi.org/10.14506/ca40.3.05 cultural anthropology 40.3 494 tactical maneuvers training began inside a classroom adorned with posters bearing catchphrases such as “you can never have enough bullets,” then moved outside for role-play scenario exercises. recruits learned how to approach buildings, move through rooms, and consider angles from which someone could shoot them. you always have to be aware, set yourself up in case it breaks bad, the swat officer explained. it’ll be 1 percent of calls, but you have to always be thinking tactically. tactical thinking means that one must “play the what-if game,” he said, even in the least threatening situations. what if someone ambushes me from that shed during a noise complaint call? what if i arrive at a mental health check and someone walks out of the house waving a shovel? where will i stand, run, hide, aim? recruits practiced responding to low-stakes scenarios, learning how to strategize what the swat officer called their “bail-out plan” without either metaphorically or literally “throw[ing] a flashbang on a noise complaint.” they learned to transmute their fear into tactical awareness—in short, to think threat first. u.s. police reformers often hail scenario or “reality-based” exercises like this tactical maneuvers training as potential antidotes to the “fear-based” ethos of warrior-style policing, and as particularly promising modalities for promoting de-escalation and teaching judicious uses of force.3 in reality-based training, officers act out immersive, real-life scenarios such as making arrests, responding to overdose calls, or deciding whether to shoot someone. scenarios involve role-playing with colleagues or in virtual reality simulators, and feature prominently in swat team practices and training sites such as police academies.4 as the reformist juxtaposition of “fear” with “reality” suggests, scenarios offer solutions to a specific framing of preventable police violence: as a product of impulse stemming from unconscious fear and implicit bias, particularly against black people and other people of color figured as inherently threatening (see muhammad 2011).5 scenario trainings promise to allay that impulse by allowing officers to rehearse reality (see aushana 2020), iteratively unraveling and restaging stressful encounters in scenes that “distend time and space, allowing the officer to develop strategies that slow down the crisis situation, manage the pace and time of affective response and expand the repertoire of patterns an officer might draw on in the stress of the encounter” (alvarez 2020, 69). in other words, the slowed, repetitive timeframes of scenario exercises are meant to teach police to align their decisions with the world-as-is and not with what they anxiously imagine it could be. critics, however, suggest that scenario trainings instead amplify fear by dramatizing improbable worst-case situations: gunmen lurking in officer safety time 495 car trunks, grandmothers and children poised to ambush the unsuspecting cop (sierra-arévalo 2021; taddonio 2021). scenarios in this framing invert the desired deceleration of time, instead quickening it against a backdrop of omnipresent peril. they thereby render officers “trigger-happy”: more apt to read danger in every innocent gesture and more prone to impulsive, irreversible violence.6 as both the promises of and skepticism about reality-based police trainings indicate, temporality is a key logic in scenario exercises, albeit one often left implicit in public debates. this essay shares the skepticism but departs from questions of whether scenarios deploy deceleration or acceleration to suppress or amplify officer fear to instead analyze how scenarios translate fear through the less well-understood temporal formations undergirding police scenario trainings. specifically, i argue that scenarios recruit officers into what i call officer safety time, a temporal regime that governs modern u.s. policing writ large but reaches perhaps its fullest expression in scenario trainings. as i discuss below, officer safety time is composed of a sequencing (“think threat first”) and mood (the subjunctive) that are inscribed into a habitus (command presence) to control the presumed vector of threat (the criminalized black body) and clinch the primacy of personal security. this concept demonstrates how scenarios deploy temporality to hail police as simultaneously threatened and threatening, and more broadly, to cultivate the temporal orders of state violence in its workers. officer safety time also illustrates how the logics of policing absorb efforts to minimize racialized police violence—and thereby immunize policing against substantive reform. in this essay, i examine officer safety time through fieldwork i conducted from 2015 to 2018 with police departments in maryland, where i observed scenario trainings in police academies and swat practices. i draw on ethnographic literature on police and military training, along with studies of scenario exercises, which often consider large-scale, preplanned trainings in fields such as public health, and the anthropology of time and futurity, which tends to focus on the temporalities of everyday life. building on these literatures’ analytical frames, i chart how the temporality of small-scale world-building exercises reworks and channels the racialized fear of powerful state agents. in the following sections, i begin by discussing the above literatures, then turn to an ethnographic analysis of how scenarios produce officer safety time. i first explore how scenarios transform fear into the normatively colorblind pragmatics of tactical awareness by teaching officers to anticipate possible dangers before responding with controlled expertise. this sequencing—thinking threat first—is designed cultural anthropology 40.3 496 to replace anxious impulse with calm calculation, while producing police as tactical experts. thinking threat first mandates attending to what could be or could have been—the subjunctive mood—rather than only a phenomenological experience of the present or a probabilistic assessment of calculable futures (see samimian-darash 2022).7 i therefore turn next to the subjunctive by dwelling on virtual scenario trainings, vaunted under a technophilic reformist paradigm for their promise to produce “better” uses of force. i argue that virtual reality materializes a conviction that threat could exist, but that its approach to violence is not exhausted by phrases such as trigger-happy: instead, it seals violence into a single decision point evacuated of alternate futurities. finally, i trace how scenarios write officer safety time into the subjects and objects of police work. i attend to how officers learn to inhabit “command presence,” a heteromasculine habitus of state power that teaches officers to personify both authority and vulnerability to preempt potential attack. while violence is theoretically latent in any body, this presumptively colorblind regime rests on anti-black racial imaginaries, visible in the objects of scenario training and reframed as mere common sense. i conclude by discussing the stakes of these arguments for the broader temporality of reformism, which cyclically repeats solutions to police violence as if trapped in an unending present. scholars often frame police perceptions of threat as primarily spatialized: officers learn to see danger “around every corner” (anderson 2021; joubert 2022; lynch 2018), even if the “racial production of the visible” (butler 1993, 16) schematizes some corners as more threatening than others. trainings prescribe attention to alleyways and thresholds, doors slightly ajar, the configuration of bodies in a room. officers’ street experience teaches that violence and criminality lurk in everyday milieus, an epistemology of place that carl klockars (1980, 39) calls an “ecology of guilt.” this ecology, while not unique to the united states, acquires a particular immediacy in a country with more guns than people: the possibility that anyone may be armed conjures visions of an ambush behind every tree. yet while the spatiality of threat—and the concomitant racial spatialization of police power (e.g., bass 2001; bell 2020)—has been widely discussed in scholarly writing, its temporality has received less direct scrutiny. i argue that temporality is also key to analyzing how scenario trainings instill the purportedly proper and reasonable modality of threat appraisal, wherein danger not only looms around every corner but also must be perceived in the right sequencing and mood. this temporal order proves vital to justifying racialized state violence to its practitioners and the public. for instance, reading threat in subjunctive officer safety time 497 terms is instrumentally useful, as police conceptions of “what could have been” can hardly be corrected even when wrong. i focus throughout this essay on academies, where the temporalities of policing are first cultivated, and specifically on two academies composed of predominantly white male recruits. my own whiteness not only facilitated research access but also meant that i was hailed as always already recruited to the common sense of policing (see katzenstein 2023 for further discussion). my white womanhood in particular, with its connotations of imperiled innocence and its structural entanglements in anti-black policing (see wang 2012), resonated with police temporal regimes. white women who call police on people birding or barbecuing while black often display a subjunctive certainty of racialized danger, an “epistemic role-reversal of victim and perpetrator” (light 2021, 915) that treats black presence as innately threatening (mcnamarah 2019). this approach to threat finds a powerful echo in officer safety time—a resonance that perhaps facilitated a sense of easy translation for my officer interlocutors. to analyze their temporal operations, i center the production of imaginaries that shape reality beyond local context and in fact attempt to transcend specificities of place.8 importantly, these processes are not transmitted seamlessly: i occasionally encountered officers (primarily black, female, and/or lgbtq) who critiqued overextensions of officer safety discourse or challenged police racism. here i focus less on how individuals absorb, contest, or implement teachings and more on how trainings themselves reproduce the dominant temporality of officer safety time. thinking threat scholarship on policing has long examined how trainings socialize officers into police epistemologies of threat, violence, and authority. however, many early u.s.-based studies from organizational theory and criminology analyze police training as if detached from the broader worlds that officers occupy. for instance, john van maanen’s (1973) study of police academy training insightfully frames recruits’ subculture as a rational response to their normative social role, yet the nature of that role—enforcers of the race/class status quo, and hence antagonists to multiracial working-class movements (kelley 1996)—is merely hinted at. some current scholarship on police training similarly treats it in isolation from the political functions of police, pronouncing the effectiveness of various pedagogies or suggesting methods for “culture” change. such research, while often critical of police militarism, tends to orient itself to reformist concerns by seeking to professionalize and improve trainings (e.g., bayley 2018; brooks cultural anthropology 40.3 498 2021; walker 2012). by contrast, ethnographers of police from less practice-oriented traditions have largely decentered reformist questions in favor of exploring political processes of subjectivization, such as how police trainings reproduce hegemonic masculinity (kraska 1996; prokos and padavic 2002), generate socio-techno professional subjects (akarsu 2018; larkins and durão 2023; stalcup and hahn 2016), translate human rights discourse (babül 2017), socialize officers into a “danger imperative” and construct police warriors (sierra-arévalo 2021; simon 2023), script police violence (anderson 2021; aushana 2020), and mold a “transcendental postracial ‘blue identity’” founded in white supremacy (beliso-de jesús 2020, 146–47). these works focus on the imperfectly homogenizing work of police training regimes: the worlds they build, the affects they generate, and the epistemologies they foster. such analyses also resonate with ethnographies of u.s. military simulation training, not simply because police have adopted “militarized” training but also because police and war powers have always been entangled in the settler-colonial history of the united states (gamal 2016; neocleous 2014; seigel 2019). how soldiers comprehend and navigate an apparently deadly world figures centrally in this literature. in some contexts, the supposed enemy is conceived as an anonymous specter, potentially anywhere and everywhere (allen 2011). in others, the spectral image takes form as a racialized and essentialized other whose purported identity is conscripted into imperial occupation (belcher 2014; greenburg 2023; rice 2016). military trainings not only attempt to realistically simulate the world inhabited by such figures but also contain elements of the “mythic,” of “culturally tutored imagination” steeped in latent american anxieties (lutz 2001, 87). these literatures demonstrate the basic governing conviction of military and police scenario trainings: that threat can be grasped, and mobilized against, through simulated realities whose mythic visions of the future bespeak their imaginaries in the present. as this brief review suggests, research on scenario trainings in institutions of state violence, as well as in public health, disaster preparedness, and climate-change adaptation, has fruitfully intervened in anthropological debates on temporality (see bear 2016; bryant and knight 2019; fabian 1983; munn 1992; tamarkin 2018). work on scenarios often explores relationships between the present and future, given that scenarios orient practitioners to anticipation: a regime of “inhabit[ing] time out of place” through “the telescoping of temporal possibilities” (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009, 247–49). by producing knowledge about prospective futures while generating further uncertainties, scenarios officer safety time 499 enable practitioners to prepare for the plausible, the potential, and even the unthinkable (aradau and van munster 2012; faubion 2019; lakoff 2008; rickards et al. 2014). yet the trainings discussed in scenario literatures are often events par excellence: massive, highly coordinated multi-agency exercises that invite scholarly focus on design and planning (for some exceptions, see aushana 2020; beliso-de jesús 2020; rice 2016; simon 2023). small-scale police scenario trainings are not necessarily less scripted per se, given that police departments share best practices, attend regional workshops, and use training materials produced by national organizations. they are, however, less planned, logistically simpler—often involving a handful of participants within a single agency—and more everyday and routine. their ordinariness enables a closer focus not only on the modes of reasoning at stake in scenario exercises but also on how scenarios work to inscribe narratives of the future into trainees’ common sense and embodied orientations to threat. moreover, literature on state violence and temporality tends to focus on the longue durée of racial-colonial chronopolitics (hanchard 1999; mills 2020) or on the temporalities that police produce through governing others (andrejevic, dencik, and treré 2020; boyce 2020; sheehey 2019; smith 2021; cf. feldman 2017; haanstad 2009). here, i focus on the temporalities that govern officers themselves—which in turn prefigure the temporalities they impose on the policed—and on how the world-building technology of scenario training translates fear into officer safety time. from their first week in academy, the recruits from the academy scene that opens this essay were primed to prioritize officer safety. they were initially instructed to stand against the wall when waiting in the hallways outside their classroom, and to not make eye contact with passersby. later they were taught to silently scan people up and down. finally, they were allowed to greet passersby with “good morning, sir/ma’am.” the point, their supervisor told me, was that recruits must learn to see everyone as possible attackers and size them up quickly before acknowledging their presence, an awareness of danger that should theoretically exceed, or precede, race and gender. in other words, they should think threat first. this anticipatory approach “calls for a heralding of the emergent ‘almost’ as an ethicized”—and strategic—“state of being” (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009, 254). during the academy module on tactical maneuvers mentioned above, the swat team members leading the training attempted to translate this state of being into commonsense praxis through temporal, as well as spatial, readings of danger. never turn your back on any potential threat, they instructed recruits. when approaching a house, always glance into parked cars to make sure nobody’s there. think threat first, then layer on your communications, your mental health training, your de-escalation. cultural anthropology 40.3 500 this normative sequencing could be read as merely heightening recruits’ anxieties about a world rife with probable ambush. indeed, in practice, officers often metabolize the mandate to think threat first as a reminder that they are “locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies. as a result, officers learn to be afraid” (stoughton 2015, 257). thinking threat first, moreover, is an approach underwritten by u.s. case law, which assesses accusations of wrongful police violence through a “reasonable” officer’s perception of potential danger at the moment of violence, rather than through any retrospective evaluation of material risk (feldman 2017; obasogie and newman 2018). yet instructors rarely sought to simply amplify fear, which they believed to be unproductive; instead, they strived to translate it into the pragmatic sequencing of officer safety time. trainers frequently emphasized that “thinking threat” should mostly remain undetected, present only in recruits’ minds. only in 1 percent of cases will they need to manifest their calculations and take action. you should treat every inmate like they’re about to escape, a prison officer told the recruits in a later academy module. like you treat every person like they might have the worst disease, like you treat every call like anything could happen. you don’t necessarily act on it, but you have it in your head. it’s not that everyone is a threat. it’s that anyone could be, and therefore officers must continually envision how to mitigate their vulnerability. one officer referred to the proper threat preparedness mind-set as the “duck analogy”: the duck looks graceful as shit but underneath is paddling hard. one never sees the feet. many trainers underscored the tactical importance of this distinction between awareness and action. if officers were to see actual danger—rather than its potentiality—everywhere, their constant fear could incapacitate their decision-making capacity, with dire results. for one, this could produce impulsive reactions and therefore departmental liability. someone holding a cell phone in the dark, and you getting too close and getting scared, is how cops mess up and shoot unarmed people, a swat officer told recruits, perhaps in a nod to the recent killing of stephon clark,9 as they practiced responding to an overdose call. fearful, reactive officers might also become visibly anxious, which trainers explained can undermine police authority. as a supervisor counseled recruits: the biggest thing is, don’t come in tense. not everyone’s out to kill you. be aware . . . but relax. there’s a big difference between being nervous and being aware. if you’re nervous, shitbags are gonna see it.10 the ideal mode of thinking threat, in short, remains silent and produces a officer safety time 501 kind of preparedness indiscernible to the public eye. beneath the surface, officers should be watching their angles, scanning for observation points, and paddling like hell. thinking threat first, then, does not translate straightforwardly to anxious or trigger-happy, but rather to a confident, calm mind-set of tactical awareness that characterizes the sequencing of officer safety time. scenario trainings encouraged restraint where possible, emphasized tailoring force to context instead of mindlessly reacting, and therefore figured officers as professional violence experts (akarsu 2018; katzenstein 2023). the threat these experts would face was presented as anonymous, a free-floating signifier detached from racialized bodies, skirting charges of racism while preparing officers for peril conceived as simultaneously everywhere and anywhere (allen 2011). given the mandate to gauge potentially ubiquitous—or ubiquitously potential—attacks on their own vulnerability without succumbing to needless fear, thinking threat first was simply a “natural” response. realizing violence tactical awareness reaches its zenith in virtual reality (vr) simulators, the vanguard of technophilic reform efforts. as black-led movements against u.s. police violence captured public attention in 2014–2016, vr training received favorable media coverage for its promise to immersively and accurately mimic police worlds, and to thereby help trainees suppress fear, minimize use of force, and develop better judgment under realistically stressful conditions. virtual reality platforms by companies such as axon, virtra, and apex officer claim to provide a simulated realism too expensive or difficult for real-life role-play to emulate, using professional actors, “photo-realistic” graphics, and large scenario libraries with various backdrops. through vr headsets or videos projected onto walls or panels, simulators play pre-programmed scenarios in which characters react automatically to the officer’s actions—such as dropping to the ground when shot in the head, or screaming when shot in the arm—or, in some programs, can be directed by the simulator’s operator to respond appropriately. for instance, if an officer gives a convincing verbal command, the operator can select an option for “man gets on his knees” rather than “man gets hostile.” optimism around vr police training emerges from a long genealogy of technophilia in police reform. for instance, purported technological fixes to racialized violence, such as body cameras, gained wide currency after the 2014 ferguson uprising. such efforts fit within a tradition of liberal reformism in which cultural anthropology 40.3 502 police violence is figured as a redressable deviation from the norm, rather than as the systemic anti-black grounding of the carceral system and u.s. democracy itself (murakawa 2014; vargas and james 2013; see jaffe and pilo’ 2023). whereas vr claims to offer technical solutions to both perceived lacunae in police training and the broader problematics of racialized violence, i argue that vr scenarios instead justify that violence by materializing latent threat within circumscribed worlds. their “operational horizon” and “field of political reasoning” (ahmann 2019, 3) is the subjunctive mood, the could-be or could-have-been of officer safety time, which structures assessments of danger and predetermines the only “reasonable” responses to it. in the center of a simulator, the room darkened, i stood empty-handed next to my officer interlocutor. a training instructor switched on the program and projected onto the walls a wraparound image of the lobby of a police station—the very station in which we stood. explaining that the software allowed them to insert their own photographs, he watched with us as actors onscreen moved realistically against the backdrop of the lobby, playing employees and visitors. the instructor then demonstrated various scenarios in which a shooter attacks the police station: strolling into the lobby and opening fire, popping out from a hallway, ambushing officers in the parking lot. such scenarios, the instructor said, aimed to inculcate constant vigilance. he underlined this approach with another one set in the station’s parking lot. the scene opens on a woman lying on the pavement, groaning and clutching her bloody stomach. a little girl stands nearby, looking unruffled, apparently playing with a phone. suddenly the phone transforms into a gun and she shoots at you. the instructor explained that if you shoot back and then try to render aid, another woman may leap out from behind the car and fire at you as well. most other scenarios that i later observed used the software’s inbuilt backgrounds, but the shooting-at-the-station scenarios illuminated an important facet of officer safety time. they invited officers to viscerally inhabit their own environment in the subjunctive, as a space of potential besiegement by unpredictable violence, while leaving unaddressed the absurdity of an armed child in a police department parking lot. such invitations are clearly designed to kindle fear, yet—as with the sequencing of officer safety time—it would be a mistake to limit one’s analysis to such assertions. virtual reality scenarios deploy the “unreal enemy” (allen 2011) to hammer home the message that probabilities matter less than possibilities—if it could happen, no matter how unlikely, it must be prepared for. this seemingly open-ended, if alarming, imaginary of the future in officer safety time 503 fact “confine[d] the possible” (ahmann 2019, 4) by enclosing it in the subjunctive mood. this mood governed a multi-hour vr scenario training i observed at an academy. recruits entered the simulator in ones and twos, armed with training guns and deactivated tasers, while their classmates watched. their instructor, adam, ran recruits through various scenarios, each oriented around a clear lesson. not all involved shooting people, but all sought to instill a commonsense temporality. in one scenario, after an authoritative voice-over proclaims that aggressive dogs should be considered a weapon, you must neutralize a white woman’s dog or risk it attacking you or a playground full of children. the scenario invariably shows the snarling animal breaking free of its leash and racing toward the playground in the absence of decisive police action. this prefiguration of possibility was nonetheless not neatly contained in the moment of decision: if you kill the dog, the scenario offers a brief glimpse of the woman kneeling by its body, shouting you shot my dog, why did you do that? this temporal excess might be read as preparing trainees to live in the messy reality following the one enclosed by the scenario. adam explained that recruits can justify the “public relations nightmare” of “dispatching fido” by emphasizing the inevitability of harm the dog could unleash. recruits thereby learned to inhabit and articulate the subjunctive mood authoritatively enough to inoculate themselves against future backlash to their decisions. other scenarios inserted weapons in unexpected moments. in one, a black teenager suspected of robbery flees on your arrival. when you command him to stop, he may peacefully comply while a gun lies untouched in his hoodie pocket—see, you don’t have to shoot just because he has a weapon, adam insisted to me in this rare example of de-escalation—or he may wheel around to shoot you. in another scenario, you shoot a white man who draws a gun during a traffic stop. there’s no such thing as a low-risk traffic stop, adam reminded the recruits. after you’ve shot him, what do you do first? the recruits, uncertain, stumbled over their answers. render aid? no, he could have another gun, adam said. you maintain lethal coverage (keep a weapon aimed at him), then search him, then render aid. here the police logic of threat stood at odds with notions of care, which were drummed out of the recruits with terrifying realism: perhaps, as you try to stanch his bleeding, the wounded driver will put a bullet through your head. by presenting unlikely situations that challenged recruits’ intuitive sense of risk, the scenarios discussed thus far framed future dangers as unknowable and likelihood as therefore irrelevant to a subjunctive assessment of threat, even cultural anthropology 40.3 504 when facing the paradigmatic innocence of a little girl with a phone. this is not to say that likelihood played no role in real-world decision-making; as described above, trainers averred that recruits must discern genuine versus potential threat. rather, the abovementioned scenarios deployed the unexpected to engender certitude that any given situation contains the possibility of violence. these scenarios thus hinged on a form of epistemic foreclosure: the erasure of realities without threat, effected precisely through the seemingly open indeterminacy of subjunctive reasoning. another genre of vr scenarios confronted officers from the start with clear and present danger, rather than its subjunctive potentiality, and required them to distinguish lethal from non-lethal threats to their safety. unlike real-life situations where officers misrecognize a phone as a gun, cases of evident threat often translate into supposedly justifiable police killings that rarely spark public outcry. within the simulator, such scenarios not only precluded the possibility of a world without omnipresent violence but also predetermined the impossibility of de-escalation, insisting that a refusal to abide by subjunctive logics of endangerment inevitably exacerbates violence. in a 2014 news special called “cops under fire,” for instance, cnn’s don lemon played his studio audience a simulator training video of a domestic violence scene between a white couple. a man screams and curses at a woman, his face contorted as he shoves her against a wall. lemon paused the video with the man’s hand raised threateningly out of sight. “how many of you would shoot?” he asked. few of the mostly black audience members polled said they would, aside from an attorney for darren wilson, the former police officer who killed michael brown in ferguson in 2014. wilson’s attorney gravely explained that the man will harm you or the woman, so not only can you legally shoot him, but perhaps you should. lemon then resumed the video, revealing that the man is indeed holding a gun, which he turns on the woman and then on you. lemon chided his audience: “the woman ends up dead, the officer could end up dead, and the suspect ends up dead as well, right?”11 my own experience in a simulator similarly revealed how such ambivalent scenarios are designed to narrow the ethical choices available to participants. throughout my fieldwork, officers labored to conscript me into the epistemic foreclosure of officer safety time, drawing in part on notions of embodied whiteness as innately entwined with police logics. for instance, some told me they hoped trainings “opened my eyes” to the routine perils they confront and, by implication, the reasonableness of their responses. virtual reality scenarios offered officer safety time 505 a powerful way for them to proclaim to me the utter futility of operating outside the subjunctive. during a break between recruit groups, adam handed me a training gun and played a scenario that opens with a call about a fired black employee refusing to leave his employer’s premises. the employee sits in his pickup truck outside a building, as his boss pleads through the truck’s window for him to leave. suddenly the boss yells “he’s got a gun!” and dashes back inside. adam paused the scene to ask what i would do. i guess look for cover, and talk to him, i said, fumbling for the most peaceful option. so talk to him, adam said. mimicking the language i had heard in trainings, i began repeating hey man, come out and talk to me, it doesn’t have to be like this. the man slowly emerges from his pickup, holding a gun to his temple, and walks toward the building. i watched helplessly as he enters; then, with several shots and screaming, the scenario ends. did it make you think? adam asked. what did you just allow to happen? you allowed someone who’s just been fired . . . to go back into his workplace and kill people. could you justify shooting him before he got there? yes, you had to shoot him. adam could have selected a de-escalatory option once i began talking, but he aimed to prove that from the moment the man stepped out with a gun, you could rightfully kill him. whether the man could have dropped the gun in another programmed decision point was immaterial. what mattered was the single branching path that invariably led him to commit mass murder, to jeopardize your safety and the safety of innocent civilians. that path foreclosed all the others. such scenarios—redolent of american fears and realities of mass shootings, with the archetypally white shooter played by a black man—are statistically unlikely yet ubiquitous, both real and unreal. other scenarios “make real” a gunman stalking your precinct’s halls, a second shooter, a phone that is a gun. if in real life, someone holding a gun may not necessarily shoot at an officer, in the simulator they almost certainly will—and can you afford to wait and see? what did you just allow to happen? this is not to suggest that the gun is always a mirage or that threats are all fabrications of officer safety time. it is that scenarios do not simply suppress or amplify fear, but rather, reorient it within an enclosed logic of preparedness. as i have shown, threat assessments primarily function not in the simple past tense of what did happen, nor even in the future-oriented calculus of what was likely to happen. instead, they operate in the “conditional” (massumi 2015) or “modal” logic (faubion 2019) of the subjunctive: what might be, what could have been. according to chloe ahmann (2019, 2–11), subjunctive politics “impose an economy of choices by foreclosing certain futures,” as though the remaining options “faithfully exhausted all that might occur.” in the simulator, the cultural anthropology 40.3 506 many potential outcomes of a situation are eclipsed by the subjunctive certainty that threat could manifest at any moment. this foreclosure in turn induces a radical presentism—if you do not somehow stop the fired employee right now, he could kill you and his coworkers—and endlessly justifies the force required to, as my interlocutors often said, “stop threat and live.” commanding obedience the subjunctive mood of officer safety time cannot be understood absent a reading of the bodies—both subjects and objects—that are shaped by it. scenario training is not only scripted but also scripting (see aushana 2020), in that it invites a normative embodied orientation toward the threat it teaches officers to read subjunctively. this orientation in police parlance is “command presence,” an unspoken language of authority and vulnerability that reveals the racial imaginaries simmering beneath purportedly colorblind epistemologies of danger. command presence is the governing habitus and directionality of officer safety time. as i argue below, it points to tensions within what i call police common sense (katzenstein 2023), a collective approach to self-defense that sutures together mutually contradictory stories—officers are rightful holders of ultimate authority, officers are endangered; threat is colorblind, threat is the unruly black body—without resolving their dissonance. from early in their training, recruits learn that their elementary tool for exercising control is command presence, which ideally manifests police dominance and professionalism in the form of demeanor, tone, and attire. police often view this display of strength as a kind of de-escalatory strategy to diminish subjunctive threat: if officers project their authority, civilians will be less likely to challenge or attack them. trainers therefore work to imbue underconfident recruits with an ability to command. during one academy module, recruits were funneled through a series of multi-person role-play scenario exercises designed to test their command presence. other officers from the agency played the role of civilians, while academy instructors observed. in one exercise, two volunteer officers sat in a parked car, while recruits play-acted one at a time at performing a routine traffic stop. the instructor told the volunteers that when the recruit begins the stop, jump out and act like a flaming asshole. if they bring good strong command presence and show they’re in charge, then you calm down and get back in the car. . . . if they’re acting all shy and sheepish like yesterday, and don’t put on their big-boy pants, then you escalate. recruits who managed to subdue the unruly “civilians” did so by loudly insisting that they get back in the car, while others who officer safety time 507 struggled to assert dominance had to face mimed shootouts. the exercise concretized the link between a failure to project authority and inevitable violence. like policing itself, command presence hinges on performative heteromasculinity (cooper 2009; prokos and padavic 2002), stereotypically requiring a booming voice and imposing stature. those whose bodies deviate from the prototypical large man are considered more vulnerable to disrespect and attack, so to maintain officer safety, they must mimic or even exceed hegemonically masculine traits (beliso-de jesús 2020).12 for instance, in one paramilitary academy class i observed, a female lieutenant frustrated with a small female recruit’s high voice eventually screamed in the woman’s ear, “put some bass in your voice, freakshow!”13 another class had a short white female recruit, michelle, who often hesitated in scenario exercises and spoke politely when she was meant to be aggressive. her instructors frequently complained out of earshot that she was shy and nervous, traits unbefitting an officer. however, when michelle did act with confidence, they praised her effusively. during one exercise that required recruits to catch, search, and maintain control of a fleeing volunteer, michelle grabbed the volunteer “like she owned him,” her instructor gushed. he told her afterward that you may have to take your authority up a notch, as both a small female and a new cop. you’ll be challenged, so you may have to escalate more quickly. trainers translated a pragmatic recognition of how authority operates socially—recruits like michelle could not manifest authority as legibly as large men—into the commonsense expectation that their safety might require escalatory force. to command the obedience required for officer safety, recruits had to cultivate a convincingly dominant masculine affect, and resort to violence if that affect failed to produce proper compliance. such command presence scenarios also highlighted who was imagined as the main targets of heteromasculine control. for instance, the largely white volunteer officers playing civilians often jokingly mimicked black complaints of police. fuck you, why’d you stop me? is it the color of my skin? one role-playing white officer asked a white recruit attempting to make a traffic stop. during another exercise, the instructor distinguished the level of command presence they considered necessary in riverside—the poorer, blacker district in their area—from what was required in the whiter, wealthier clinton.14 maybe it’s different in clinton, but in riverside, they’ll walk all over you, he explained. you have to maintain control. poor black residents were framed as naturally hostile and meriting harsh treatment, an impression reinforced during a difficult scenario: a noise complaint call where a crowd of ten volunteers pretended to be holding a party. be mouthy, cultural anthropology 40.3 508 the instructor told volunteers before recruits arrived. you’ve all been in riverside. while recruits performed the exercise, the volunteers ignored them, comically taunted them, and shouted “five-oh!” in exaggerated accents meant to imitate hyperpoliced black communities. one volunteer advanced on michelle and her skinny male partner, smiling maliciously through their polite demands to remove his hands from his pockets, and managed to back them up a hill before they summoned an aggressive response. afterward, an instructor scolded the two recruits: you have to have a better command presence. they were taking it easy on you. behave like that out in riverside and you’ll get eaten alive. here, command presence clearly had an object: defiant and uncooperative black civilians. officers who were otherwise concerned not to appear racist took few pains to hide from me this commonsense apprehension, which was shared by many interlocutors across different agencies. black civilians were figured as more likely to act “disorderly,” resist arrest, and otherwise require forcible control—a belief often articulated as realistic and therefore “not about race.” this understanding of noncompliance was simply the tip of anti-black dehumanization and classed contempt. officers marked poor black neighborhoods as “problem areas” and “shitholes,” or derisively compared them to the “third world,” a colonial construction of racial abjection that aisha beliso-de jesús (2020, 145) calls “jungle logic.” a few officers noted casually that they could “do more” in poor black areas, get away with more violations, under the banner of suppressing crime and asserting authority. a retired black officer and reform advocate criticized police who deploy more violent and invasive tactics in poor black neighborhoods. however, “they can’t abuse white people,” the retired officer told me. “they know that too. you’ll lose your job. quick.” scholars, black liberation movements, and residents of hyperpoliced neighborhoods have leveled and lived this argument for generations. as robin d. g. kelley (2016, 28–29) argues, members of poor black communities “targeted by the state are not [considered] rights-bearing individuals to be protected but criminals poised to violate the law who thus require vigilant watch—not unlike prisoners.” this marking upholds police harassment of and violence against black civilians, justified by the “ideological currency of black criminality” (muhammad 2011, 3), or the indexing of blackness as inherently criminal. it also operates in the broader imaginaries of white supremacy, in which black people are “the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment” rather than the “ground of terror’s possibility” (sharpe 2016, 79). the concept of command presence has historically received criticism precisely for facilitating anti-black police terror. for instance, officer safety time 509 the christopher commission’s 1991 evaluation of the los angeles police department’s use of “excessive force” linked “command presence” to needless confrontations (independent commission on the los angeles police department 1991, 99). however, it is also important to note that long before command presence materializes as physical violence, it prefigures, through subjunctive logics rendered commonsensical, a racialized object of control: the “thug” poised to attack the weak and unimposing, who understands only the language of dominance. the racial imagination of command presence and its embodied heteromasculine posture represent a microcosmic expression of state power—one specific to u.s. racial formations, even if anti-blackness, settler dispossession, and patriarchy also resonate elsewhere. the institution of u.s. policing is rooted in slave patrols and colonial occupation (singh 2017); it also traces its lineage, as markus dubber (2005) suggests, to the nearly limitless authority of the ancient greek patriarch. these histories echo through the teaching of command presence. scenario trainings attempt to forge the human material of the police recruit into a physical embodiment of state power, fostering a habitus designed to convey indisputable authority to wield absolute control over the racialized poor. at the same time, trainings acknowledge the tenuousness of that authority, and pivot around an attentiveness to the officer’s own vulnerability (see jauregui 2016). command-presence scenario training therefore illuminates the contradictions of holding police power in one’s body. on the one hand, the notion that control and authority naturally belong to police, as wearers of the badge and agents of the state, is considered commonsensical. on the other, that control is figured less as a moral imperative of enforcing allegiance to the law and more as a contingent and foundational necessity for officer safety, for the security of the subjunctively threatened human body representing governmental authority. scenario trainings teach that body how to envision and defend its vulnerability by asserting heteromasculine and white supremacist dominance as a matter of police common sense. this vision—its temporal logics, its translations and contradictions, its prescriptions for survival, and its vectors of threat and objects of control—is the realm of officer safety time. reform and reality when minneapolis police officer derek chauvin murdered george floyd in 2020, as when five memphis police officers beat tyre nichols to death in 2023, many commentators noted that their respective departments were considered models of reform. both agencies offered numerous trainings on reformers’ wish cultural anthropology 40.3 510 lists, including scenarios. yet such training did little to protect floyd or nichols. moreover, chauvin himself was a field training officer, responsible for guiding new officers in the field—as was kimberly potter, the minneapolis officer who killed twenty-year-old daunte wright as chauvin’s trial unfolded in april 2021. such spectacularly visible failures of reform policy stand within a broader pattern of failure:15 many reform paradigms, including improved training, have not realized their promises to remedy police violence, even by their own standards (akbar 2020; skogan 2008). after floyd’s murder, abolitionist ideas—drawing on the long-standing work of black feminist thinkers like angela davis (2003), ruth wilson gilmore (2022), and mariame kaba (2021)—gained broad circulation among a public increasingly disillusioned with the promises of reform. growing numbers of organizers, progressive politicians, and even some police themselves have advocated for investing more in social safety nets and shifting certain duties away from police. police reformers, however, have continued to frame training as a vital antidote to police violence.16 often absent from reformist assumptions is the question of how trainings work in practice: not only how they might be “imperfect” at preventing future chauvins or potters but also how even the most promising training reforms reinscribe racialized violence. reformers have hoped that scenario training will slow the accelerated temporality of police decision-making that presumptively generates needless violence. in this essay, i have argued that scenarios instead reinforce the logics of officer safety time, while creating such durable epistemic foreclosure that even critics of police often find themselves speaking in its terms. this foreclosure, with its commonsensical priority on police survival, in turn narrows the horizon of institutional possibilities to those imaginable within police common sense. officer safety time thereby reinforces the broader temporality of reformism, or what i call reformist time: the simultaneous reach toward an improved future and refusal of historical continuity that together mire police reform in the endless present. reformist time names the fact that reforms operate in a sticky cyclicality, with ideas such as “improved training” repeated over and over for decades. it does not necessitate an amnesia toward past policy failures per se; indeed, proposals for structural change would make little sense absent an acknowledgment of institutional history, however sanitized. rather, reformist time attributes failure to shortcomings of implementation—limited funding, insufficient knowledge, bureaucratic barriers, or “cultural” resistance—to be learned from but relegated squarely to the past. it thereby licenses the recirculation of “reform templates [that] circulate in an economy of hope” (akarsu 2018, 12) as if these officer safety time 511 proposals were discontinuous with historical failures. this reformist construction of police temporality as a halting march toward a less violent, more professional, and less racist police force is precisely what draws reform into a radical presentism that obviates its own aspirations. as i write this conclusion, the prospects for federally mandated police reform are fading under the second trump administration, whose department of justice has frozen consent decrees. a civilian reformer i interviewed once referred to cycles of reform as a “ping-pong match” between attention, retrenchment, and indifference, and the united states may be entering another period of anti-reform backlash. yet while the new administration’s long-term impacts on reform programs remain to be seen, local and state efforts to implement scenario trainings continue. moreover, such trainings do not belong to liberal reformist projects alone. cities like atlanta and baltimore project spending hundreds of millions of dollars for new police training facilities, or “cop cities,” designed to enable “tactical rehearsals” of urban warfare (schrader 2024), and trainings continue to circulate between the united states and israel amid ongoing genocide and dispossession in palestine (erakat 2024). the stakes of grasping how trainings work in practice remain high. ultimately, scenario trainings designed to suppress fear cannot unwind the mandate to think threat first—and in fact naturalize that edict by channeling fear into tactical awareness. “reality-based” trainings cannot change the deeply engrained notion that officers must be prepared for inevitable threat, even when the gun is just a phone—and in fact enclose that threat in subjunctive racialized logics. training reforms may reinforce police legitimacy, and serve as rationales to siphon more public funds into police departments, but they do not remake— and instead often strengthen—the temporal orders of state violence and the pragmatics of police common sense. attempts to reckon with police violence through training thus run aground on the unassailable shoals and foreclosed possibilities of officer safety time. abstract u.s. police reform advocates often press police departments to replace “ fear-based” survival trainings with scenario or “reality-based” trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as effecting an arrest. temporality is a key facet of these exercises: by decelerating and replaying stressful situations, scenarios promise to allay the impulsive fear presumed to drive racialized police violence. drawing on ethnography with officers in maryland, i argue that scenarios instead translate fear through what i call “officer safety time.” this hegemonic temporal regime encourages police cultural anthropology 40.3 512 to “think threat first,” read danger in the subjunctive mood, and inhabit a heteromasculine habitus of state power. while presumptively color-blind, officer safety time seals anti-black violence into a single decision point evacuated of alternate futurities. i argue that scenarios deploy temporality to hail police as simultaneously threatened and threatening, and more broadly, cultivate the temporal orders of state violence in police—while immunizing them against substantive reform. [policing; temporality; scenarios; training; anti-blackness; violence; united states] notes acknowledgments i am grateful to my interlocutors at the two academies discussed in this essay. their experiences and openness made it possible, and i hope they recognize their work in it even if they may object to my conclusions. many thanks as well to catherine lutz, rebecca carter, bhrigupati singh, sarah besky, elif babül, sandra susan smith, christina aushana, and malay firoz for their invaluable feedback and thoughtful encouragement over the many years i sat with this essay. i also deeply appreciate the current and previous editorial boards of cultural anthropology, especially alberto corsín jiménez, and the peer reviewers for insightful and productive challenges that ultimately led me to rework this essay from the ground up. thank you as well to kate herman and petra dreiser for excellent editing and support. my writing has benefited from presenting early iterations of this essay at harvard university’s program in criminal justice policy & management and the contemporary ethnography & inequality workshop; at conferences held by the american anthropological association and the european association of social anthropologists; and through heights libraries of ohio and the center for engaged scholarship. at ces, i am particularly thankful for formative feedback from keeanga-yamahtta taylor, margaret somers, daanika gordon, fred block, and my cohort mates micah khater, elizabeth hanna rubio, lucia león, sadé lindsay, and isaac jabola-carolus. finally, this article is based on research supported by the national science foundation graduate research fellowship program, the nsf doctoral dissertation research improvement grant, the center for engaged scholarship fellowship, brown university, and the nsf sbe postdoctoral research fellowship. 1. i use italics to signify unrecorded dialogue reconstructed from detailed field notes. 2. police consent decrees are legal agreements with the u.s. department of justice (doj) in which departments and their municipalities commit to broad reforms. 3. see the president’s task force on 21st century policing’s 2015 “final report of the president’s task force on 21st century policing” (available at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136/pdf/govpub-j36-purlgpo64136.pdf) and the police executive research forum’s 2022 “transforming police recruit training: 40 guiding principles” (available at https://www.policeforum.org/ assets/transformingrecruittraining.pdf). 4. police academies train new police recruits for a career in law enforcement. academy instruction may encompass use of force, vehicle operations, report writing, crisis negotiation, and the like. unlike many countries, the united states does not have national police academies for local police; instead, training commissions in each state set their own requirements. i have anonymized the agencies and pseudonymized the officers discussed in this essay. 5. in other words, racism and anti-blackness specifically are relegated to the unconscious, while conscious consideration is framed as the realm of non-bias and equal treatment. 6. whether this state of affairs is ameliorable through better training or inherent to police work represents a key point of struggle between advocates for police reform and abolition, respectively (akbar 2020). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136/pdf/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136/pdf/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136/pdf/govpub-j36-purl-gpo64136.pdf https://www.policeforum.org/assets/transformingrecruittraining.pdf https://www.policeforum.org/assets/transformingrecruittraining.pdf officer safety time 513 7. it is important to note that limor samimian-darash’s (2022, 53) examination of scenario design in israel does not sufficiently engage with the politics of how “threat” is construed. the book focuses on nationwide civil defense exercises that generate “narratives of plausible futures” involving rocket attacks and bombings, which are envisioned as logistical threats devoid of the political—just as my interlocutors’ scenarios imagine uncertain dangers lurking in the unruly black body, absent engagement with the politics of these imaginings. however, any critical analysis of such narratives is at best incomplete without deconstructing their vectors of threat, and the settler-colonial purposes for which they are furnished. 8. while it is important to distinguish police conceptions of danger from material risk (see, e.g., woods 2019), this essay traces how scenarios imagine threat and shape responses to it, rather than contrasting the specter of threat with local realities. 9. in 2018, two sacramento police officers killed stephon clark, a twenty-two-year-old black man, claiming they believed clark pointed a gun at them. he was carrying only a cell phone. 10. shitbag was a common classed/raced epithet in my fieldwork, a term of derogation synonymous with casual uses of criminal or john van maanen’s (1978) classic definition of “the asshole.” 11. the full video, “would you shoot if you were a cop?,” is available at https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=7jrzkzxzyx0 12. bonnie mcelhinny’s (2017) female officer interlocutors framed the occupational requirement they felt to perform “masculine” objectivity—i.e., toughness and emotionlessness—not as “acting manly,” but rather as acting “like cops.” in other words, they contested the association between objectivity and masculinity by claiming the former without the latter. 13. instructors often used ableist terms when shouting at recruits. the shouting, one of their instructors explained to me, inoculated recruits from future stress. the ableism was common across departments. 14. i use pseudonyms for district names to avoid compromising the department’s anonymity. 15. i deploy this framework here advisedly, as simplistic binaries of success or failure can obscure thinking about reform as an analytical object (hornberger 2010), and failure can be productive (jaffe and pilo’ 2023). 16. see the institute for criminal justice training reform’s “not enough training” (available at https://www.trainingreform.org/not-enough-training) and the police executive research forum’s 2022 “transforming police recruit training: 40 guiding principles” (available at https://www.policeforum.org/assets/transformingrecruittraining.pdf). references adams, vincanne, m. murphy, and adele e. clarke 2009 “anticipation: technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” subjectivity 28: 246– 65. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18 ahmann, chloe 2019 “waste to energy: garbage prospects and subjunctive politics in late-industrial baltimore.” american ethnologist 46, no. 3: 328–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/ amet.12792 akarsu, hayal 2018 “‘proportioning violence’: ethnographic notes on the contingencies 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routine traffic stops.” michigan law review 117, no. 4: 635–712. https://doi.org/10.36644/mlr.117.4.policing https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13050 https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.32.4.13h7x81187mh8km8 https://doi.org/10.36644/mlr.117.4.policing officer safety time: police scenario training and thinking threat first ������������������������������������������������������������������������������� thinking threat ����������������������� realizing violence �������������������������� commanding obedience ���������������������������� reform and reality �������������������������� abstract ���������������� notes ������������� references ������������������ nested (in)securities: commodity and currency circuits in an iran under sanctions cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 218-224, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.04 nested (in)securities: commodity and currency circuits in an iran under sanctions emrah yildiz northwestern university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0843-1601 i get a skype call from tabriz, a city in northwestern iran. it is mohsen, a thirty-six-year-old clerical worker who, as an occasional cross-border merchant, trades tobacco and gold from iran for euros and u.s. dollars in turkey. he is calling to inform me of a new trade route for iranians under sanctions. federica mogherini, the european union’s foreign affairs minister, announced that the european parties to the iranian nuclear deal were establishing “a special purpose vehicle” (spv) to “assist and reassure economic operators pursuing legitimate business with iran” (lederer 2018). mohsen explains to me how iranian state media presents the announcement, giving iran a route around secondary sanctions imposed by the trump administration. “it sounds much like what turkey has been for us so far,” mohsen adds before letting me listen into the broadcast. i hear the french foreign minister, jean-yves le drian, declare that the spv has been designed to facilitate commerce in essential goods, primarily but not exclusively for european exports of food and medicine to iran. mohsen interrupts with his signature sarcasm: “we are ruined! europeans have discovered sanctions as a threat and commodity trade as its method of circumvention!” a sanction-circumvention method used by iranians for decades—namely, cross-border commodity trade—appears on offer as the european solution to salvage the iran nuclear deal. mohsen’s sarcasm indexes concern about the pressure such european trade will place on iranian cross-border circuits. but europeans are concerned too: a european commission (2018) report cites the renewal of sanctions on iran as a key justification for strengthening the role of the euro in global finance. the report envisions one benefit of an assertive european role in international diplomacy, exemplified in the spv, as the “stronger autonomy of european consumers and businesses, allowing them to pay and receive payments for their international trade with reduced exposure to legal actions taken by third country jurisdiction such as extraterritorial sanctions” (european commission 2018). mohsen reckons that european attempts to salvage the iran deal by way of conducting a commodity trade that sidesteps a dollar-dominated financial system is as much to address the growing sense of insecurity in european diplomatic circles as they wish to mitigate iranian insecurities. this does not suggest that iranians and europeans are insecure in the same ways. indeed, that connected difference is precisely what i want to capture by referring to their entanglements as nested. * * * anthropologists have long interrogated concepts of security and securitization, elucidating their entanglements with a wide range of phenomena. they have also examined how security technologies are adopted locally and how those technologies, much like sanctions, often exacerbate, rather than redress, the lived experiences of insecurity. much as diana allan (2020) discusses in this issue with regard to palestinian refugees, sanctions, due to their protracted use over decades, have made insecurity an integral part of everyday life for iranians. here i wish to attend to the political economy of sanctions on iran to extend these lines of inquiry. i fear that the emphasis on the lived experiences of insecurity inadvertently conditions the domestication of anthropological interventions as cultural meditations in the field of security studies. a multiscalar methodology that brings into the same analytical frame european policy considerations and the ways in which, to iranian eyes, eu policy makers borrow from iranians’ tested methods of circumvention might provide one productive way out of that domestication: it would reveal the nested nature of diplomatic action and social practice in the political economy of sanctions. * * * following the 2012 sanctions that cut the iranian economy off from global markets, many iranians, like mohsen, spoke of the attendant drop in the value of the iranian rial as “nuclearization” (atomi shodan). the iranian rial has suffered an ever-diminishing value—a “half-life,” as one merchant put it—in international currency and financial markets built around the u.s. dollar. that devaluation has brought diminishing returns in using the rial as a method of payment, which in turn has affected the currency’s ability to serve as a medium of exchange for other commodities, particularly in regional and international trade, and as a standard of value to conduct transactions within iran. as the sanctions undermined the rial’s ability to function as money, iranians turned to other commodities that could serve money’s three functions. influential merchants, or bazaaris, spoke of the nuclear rial like mohsen. as a currency trader (sarraf) in the tehran bazaar put it, “[the sanctions] put the uranium in every iranian’s pocket in the form of our national currency. every transaction became toxic [zahri], as its value diminished where it stood.” the rial’s nuclearization prompted iranians to seek more stable currencies like the u.s. dollar or euros, which they often found across the turkish border. iranians converted their nuclear rials into these currencies by way of the commodity trade in goods—such as tobacco, petroleum, and gold—whose prices were much higher in turkey due to differing tax regimes. sanctions have thus in effect formed a regional and trans-border “sphere of exchange” with attendant special-purpose moneys (bohannan 1959)—commodities with intrinsic value that can serve as media of exchange in a specific context. sanctions, currencies, and commodities in international relations scholarship on global governance, the employment of sanctions—defined as unilateral or collective action taken against a state considered in violation of international law—has been celebrated as a diplomatic technology designed to compel the targeted country to conform to global norms (cortright and lopez 2000). as temporary measures of international security, sanctions have long been considered less costly than military intervention in punishing deviation from international guidelines. yet unlike military action, which has legal codes regarding the conduct of belligerents and third-party actors, sanctions have escaped such codification. indeed, they continue to lend themselves to further weaponization. in the case of iran, sanctions are better approached as an ever-expanding arsenal of “low-intensity” coercion that has exacerbated already vexed relations between iran and sanctioning states (daoudi and dajani 1983). further, as attempts to turn iranians against their own government, sanctions have resulted in the collective punishment of the most vulnerable within iran. they have also allowed the regime to claim that it is defending the country’s national security against imperialist and capitalist conspiracy, revealing once again the recursive and nested shapes that technologies of security and experiences of insecurity take in the context of sanctions. as security measures, then, sanctions are better understood as exercises in collective punishment that generate lived insecurities and bolster, rather than weaken, a targeted regime’s power. although the united states has levied a series of sanctions on iran since 1979, their effects intensified between 2006 and 2012, when the united states succeeded in pushing through a series of un security council resolutions that forced iran to halt its uranium-enrichment program. together, these resolutions delivered the most intense blow to the iranian economy: banning banks worldwide (with cooperation of the brussels-headquartered swift) from processing all transactions out of iran. when a total ban on iranian oil exports to the eu came into effect in july 2012, the iranian rial fell to a record low against the u.s. dollar in less than two months. by september 2012, the rial had lost more than 80 percent of its value in less than a year. iranians felt the immediate effects of sanctions in their lives through foreign capital flight, high unemployment, exponential inflation, and arrested supply chains. with a growing and young population’s ever-increasing demand for consumer goods, however, sanctions also produced new configurations of exchange. similarly to kali rubaii’s (2020) discussion of how medicine was smuggled into mosul, contraband routes mitigated the lived experiences of insecurity many iranians have endured for decades. the shortages in basic consumer goods, medical supplies, and spare parts necessary for maintenance of the energy and aviation industries compelled traders to turn to new ghachagh (smuggling) supply routes via turkey and the united arab emirates. these same routes also shuttled hard currencies, such as euros and u.s. dollars, which proved in scarce supply in iran. by late 2012, at the height of the rial’s nuclearization, contraband goods accounted for a quarter of iran’s total imports, including 83 percent of mobile phones, 47 percent of toys, 27 percent of clothing and apparel, and 21 percent of house appliances (financial tribune 2017). mohsen described the situation as follows: “by the early 2000s, as couriers, buyers, or sellers, everyone in iran has turned into a ghachaghchi [smuggler].” when my path first crossed with that of mohsen and his wife, narmin, in 2010, we were on a pilgrimage bus from tabriz to the sayyida zainab shrine located south of damascus, syria. at the time, mohsen and narmin shuttled cartons of cigarettes and some gold, which they sold at their stopover in gaziantep, turkey. they exchanged the turkish liras they earned for euros or u.s. dollars. divergent taxation policies in turkey and iran had generated a sevenfold price difference in a pack of cigarettes, making tobacco, along with petroleum and gold, a commodity of choice in trans-border trade. i came to understand how many iranians attempted to mitigate the effects of sanctions through this conversion of commodities into contingent currencies. “if we were to leave our savings in an iranian bank, they would just melt in value,” mohsen explained. “we pooled our savings with three more couples we know, bought a gold bullion bar in tabriz, and took it to turkey to sell it and buy u.s. dollars.” given that the gold price in iran hovered below international rates so as to prop up the wavering rial, such a transactional chain proved beneficial in softening the effects of a nuclear currency no one wanted to keep for too long. the spheres of exchange assembled because of the sanctions on iran were intimately connected to banking systems and commodity markets in turkey and, more recently, in europe. rather than finding themselves bounded from the spheres of exchange of the so-called global economy, iranians such as mohsen remained nested within them through cross-border commodity trade. here we see “not barriers [between spheres] but institutions that facilitated asymmetrical exchanges across value registers” (guyer 2004, 28). in a certain sense, the masterminds behind the sanctions turned the iranian rial into a special-purpose money by disconnecting it from the global transactional order. where they saw barriers, however, iranians like mohsen saw institutions that facilitated asymmetrical conversions, in which tobacco or gold fulfilled better than the nuclearized rial the function of acting as a standard of value in motion. toward a political economy of (in)security in this piece, i have hinted at how a multi-scalar approach to the political economy of sanctions could reveal the nested and mutually imbricated nature of technologies of security and techniques of (in)security, of international policy and regionally networked social practice, and, in our case, of iran’s and turkey’s national economies through commodity trade. the political-economic and social life of insecurity that sanctions on iran set into motion, on the one hand, and the creative practices of valuation that emerge from the asymmetrical exchanges to circumvent their effects, on the other, point to how iranians contend with the weaponization of the u.s. dollar. growing concerns about that weaponization, if european policy recalibrations and the spv serve as any indication, might lead many to learn from iranians. before mohsen and i end our skype call, he reminds me: “europeans have appropriated the commodity circuits iranians have crafted [at least for the past four decades].” and that might be yet another twist in the nesting of european and iranian experiences of (in)security in the face of continuing and intensifying u.s. unilateralism. if we heed mohsen’s call, we can subject that nesting, as our interlocutors already do, to cultural analysis, and place at the center of security studies anthropological interventions that otherwise remain conveniently provincial to diplomacy. abstract this essay uses a conversation with an iranian interlocutor to explore the political economy of iranian sanctions and the creative improvisations they produce on dynamic economic grounds—characterized by an increasingly soft and devaluing national currency, the iranian rial. it reveals how various (in)securities tied to monetary transactions, particularly those conducted with the “outside world,” come to nest within one another in an iran under sanctions. 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https://ec.europa.eu/commission/publications/towards-stronger-international-role-euro-commission-contribution-european-council-13-14-december-2018_en. financial tribune 2017 “iran customs adopts new tactics to fight smuggling.” financial tribune, april 9. https://financialtribune.com/articles/domestic-economy/62140/iran-customs-adopts-new-tactics-to-fight-smuggling. guyer, jane i. 2004 marginal gains: monetary transactions in atlantic africa. chicago: university of chicago press. lederer, edith m. 2018 “eu, iran set financial ‘vehicle’ to ease trade between them.” ap news, september 24. https://apnews.com/41afdef699224718bb9642350c285da4/eu,-iran-set-financial-%22vehicle%22-to-ease-trade-between-them. rubaii, kali 2020 “trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 211–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.03. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 218-224, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.04 rights, inequality, and afro-descendant heritage in brazil rights, inequality, and afro-descendant heritage in brazil maria fernanda escallón university of oregon https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4241-3773 on our way to the serra da barriga, renata,1 a hardworking public official from the fundação cultural palmares (fcp) pointed at the mountain with its columns of gray smoke and charred vegetation.2 “look there, you see all those fires? it’s a pity, a real shame.” in 2012, the serra da barriga in união dos palmares, located in the northeastern state of alagoas, suffered some of the most destructive wildfires in recent history. located seventy-six kilometers from the state capital, maceió, the serra is home to one of brazil’s most iconic heritage sites, the quilombo dos palmares, famous for being one of the largest, longest-lasting maroon settlements in the country and home of the legendary military hero zumbi (freitas 1978; schwartz 1987). unlike other contemporary maroon settlements, or quilombos in portuguese, where inhabitants make claims for recognition and land, palmares is seen mostly as a historical site, as it was inhabited during the seventeenth century before being destroyed by portuguese colonizers in 1694 (anderson 1996). at its height, the settlement served as a refuge for fifteen thousand to twenty thousand afro-descendant, indigenous, and other ethnic groups persecuted by the portuguese colonizers (funari 1996). in addition to serving as a refuge, quilombo dos palmares acquired fame for its political organization and fierce military defense (orser 1998). since the portuguese destruction of the original settlement, land ownership around the serra has proven extremely contentious (cheney 2014). such battles over land are common in areas of brazil with quilombo settlements. several in-depth studies, led by the federal and state universities in alagoas, have detailed the complex land tenure situation of the serra. these studies note the presence of peasants in the serra since at least the 1920s, long before the afro-brazilian activists’ campaign to protect the area. in 1986 the serra was declared a national heritage site, and as the state acquired ownership of the land, it ordered a number of local families occupying the site for decades to leave.3 according to some estimates, there were fourteen inhabitants in the serra in 1986, but by 2011 the population had grown to nearly eighty people (almeida 2011). today the exact number of residents remains a source of debate, but most agree it includes at least sixteen families. most of these residents identify as poor peasants, and they occasionally use ethnoracial ascriptions such as black, mestiço, moreno, or racially mixed. in 2007 the state turned the quilombo site into a tourist park named parque memorial quilombo dos palmares. it is located at the top of the serra da barriga, and as the official website says, it “re-creates the environment of the república dos palmares.” though the park’s touristic success is debatable, the importance of quilombo dos palmares as an icon of brazilian culture continues to grow. for decades, annual celebrations in the park commemorating the death of zumbi, the maroon leader of palmares, have occurred every november 20, coinciding with national black consciousness day, or dia nacional da consciência negra. in october 2017, the quilombo site was declared part of the cultural heritage of mercosul.4 today, as a result, many believe that palmares should be declared a unesco world heritage site. figure 1. panoramic view of parque memorial quilombo dos palmares, alagoas, brazil. photo by maria fernanda escallón. “fires consume the vegetation of serra da barriga in união dos palmares!” the national website observatório quilombola (2012) reported with alarm. indeed, though smaller fires outside the heritage area had occurred before, the ones of 2012 were without precedent. for weeks, the fires remained the talk of the town, as newspapers continuously reported on the situation. the park rangers and some local officials believed the fires had resulted from arson. park rangers accused the inhabitants of purposefully igniting the fires as retaliation for the rangers’ strict control over their livelihood activities. inhabitants claimed that rangers had started the fires to pressure residents out of the area. given these many suspicions, one thing was clear: not just the serra was under fire—there were livelihoods and history at stake. in this article, i examine the paradoxical situation at quilombo dos palmares, where current residents help maintain the protected site but are also rendered as a threat to the park’s historical and cultural heritage. this apparent contradiction derives from the fact that current inhabitants are not considered authentic descendants of the original maroons and are therefore deemed illegal occupants, or posseiros. as the local and national governments market palmares’s ethnoracially diverse past, the heritage park constitutes a violent exclusionary reality for its inhabitants. although public media and academic research present palmares as a unique historical landmark, it is also a place where common national dynamics take place, including the dispossession and surveillance of the rural poor. indeed, despite its celebrated past, palmares exemplifies the contradictory effect of brazil’s current multicultural regime: as the state defines its legitimate subjects of rights based on the standards of cultural difference, it often ends up reinforcing ethnoracial segregation (see hale 2005; wade 2013). focusing on the fires that ignited inside the park, i show that although palmares is regarded as a national symbol of the inclusion of afro-descendant history, it is also iconic for its insidious structures of exclusion of the rural poor. this situation sheds light on a pervasive yet often ignored dynamic throughout latin america, where well-intended multicultural policies designed to empower ethnoracial minorities are implemented in a context of unequal access to financial and political resources. in this scenario, those groups who lack the resources that would make them legible to the state end up further segregated. many of these groups find themselves in a double bind, as claiming an authentic ethnoracial identity is deemed opportunistic, while not claiming it renders them unintelligible to the state (povinelli 2002; hale 2005; hooker 2008). this situation raises the question of how must disenfranchised groups self-identify in order to “deserve” (hale 2005, 15) the right to live on their own land. the issue here is not whether the groups must self-identify as something—they must—but which categories they need to choose. more broadly, this case furthers our critical inquiry into multicultural citizenship and the political subjectivity expected from minorities, as the state envisions them as culturally defined subjects, rather than equal subjects of rights. the current discussion does not constitute a blanket critique of multiculturalism; rather, it means to expand our debates on how to proceed politically, because so many minorities still fall through the cracks of well-meaning ethnoracial policies. i argue that besides focusing our attention on rights that must be granted and protected, we need to better understand the local power dynamics at play, dynamics that ultimately enable minorities to fully exercise such rights. my analysis provides an opportunity to examine the far-reaching effects of seemingly progressive neoliberal policies in latin america, which include not just economic reforms but also the recognition of cultural rights, the strengthening of civil society, and support of intercultural equality. the contradictions experienced by the park’s inhabitants highlight dynamics throughout the region that affect many disenfranchised communities in their struggle to find an authorized space for claims-making and a legible rhetoric under the current multicultural regime. in this essay, i describe multiculturalism not just as a normative approach aiming to redress unequal representation of minorities in culturally diverse nations (taylor 1994). rather, following charles hale (2005), i examine the place of multicultural reforms within the broader neoliberal political and economic transformations experienced throughout latin america and use the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism to highlight the integral relationship between cultural recognition, collective rights, and neoliberal ideology. whose past? “welcome to the land of freedom,” read the pamphlet i received on entering união dos palmares. indeed, this city is known in brazil as a terra da liberdade (land of freedom), an explicit reference to the quilombo site where escaped slaves claimed their freedom from portuguese colonizers. despite inspiring pride in the historic accomplishments of the maroons, and providing a catchy slogan for local tourism, the land of freedom is a controversial label. “it’s interesting that here in ‘the land of freedom,’ we residents have no liberty. clearly freedom is not for all,” lorenzo, one of the park’s senior inhabitants, commented to me. lorenzo, a longtime resident, is a member of one of the sixteen families living in the serra. many of these families have built small houses scattered throughout the hillside and report that they have been living there for more than three decades.5 under constant threat, and with limited job opportunities, younger generations have left the park and moved to urban areas throughout brazil. of the inhabitants that remain inside the heritage site, some work in the park—formally or informally—as janitors, tour guides, or food vendors, and most have regular interactions with tourists and public officials who visit the area.6 these inhabitants have no legal title to the lands they occupy, and they therefore live under constant threat of eviction because local administrators deem their presence illegal. in an effort to protect the landscape, the inhabitants have their daily activities closely monitored. they are forbidden from expanding their crops, and even permission to repair their houses is routinely denied. most of their makeshift houses are hardly standing, with portions of the walls and roofs falling apart. “look, we barely have any walls, and after the rains it was even worse, but we are not allowed to rebuild,” explained one of the inhabitants. “we don’t even have toilets, as we can’t dig holes in the ground,” he timidly added. indeed, as pointedly indicated by lorenzo, although the park celebrates the freedom of its historical maroon inhabitants, it constantly surveils the activities of its current residents. figure 2. serra da barriga inhabitants’ house. photo by maria fernanda escallón. between 2009 and 2012, i conducted field research in and around the serra da barriga, exploring the site’s history and its heritage declaration process. i focused on how the precarious situation of the park’s inhabitants reflects a broader paradox of brazil’s neoliberal multicultural regime, as poor rural workers’ demands become unintelligible within a system that defines legitimate claims—and deserving claimants—on the basis of cultural difference (hale 2005). i spoke to local bureaucrats, park rangers, residents, and afro-brazilian leaders to understand the place of palmares in brazil’s political history. i lived in união dos palmares (the closest urban center to the heritage site) and made frequent visits to the park and its surroundings where local residents live. i traveled around brazil, interviewing scholars, politicians, and administrators who had conducted research in or been part of the design of the park.7 as my research advanced, it became clear that the quilombo’s history was told in two very different ways: one highlighting its symbolic and political value as a historical landmark, the other emphasizing the precarious living conditions of its current residents. a good number of academics, activists, and bureaucrats enthusiastically recounted stories of the maroons’ past and the quilombo’s importance for brazil. “palmares is the biggest of its kind in the entire continent,” a former fcp director told me. “its history is so important, [because] it symbolizes a century of resistance. one hundred years! palmares is where the brazilian race was born . . . in palmares people respected each other, they were free.” these accounts emphasize palmares as an iconic site for afro-brazilian history and situate its heritage proclamation as a crucial transformation in brazilian cultural politics.8 the enthusiasm surrounding palmares also becomes evident in the prolific literature on this site, which includes hundreds of publications spanning a range of genres from academic works to children’s stories. some of the most well-known examples include the scholarship by ernesto ennes (1938), arthur ramos (1971), décio freitas (1978), edison carneiro (1988), and flávio dos santos gomes (2005, 2011), which repeatedly reinterpreted the history of palmares and the significance of zumbi’s life.9 also widely known is the scholarship by charles e. orser and pedro paulo funari (1992), scott joseph allen (1995, 2001), robert nelson anderson (1996), r. k. kent (1996), and pedro paulo funari and aline vieira carvalho (2005b), as well as the chapters on palmares in joão josé reis and flávio dos santos gomes’s (1996) important compilation.10 for decades, written accounts of palmares—many of which are based on colonial military excursions—have served as political inspiration and social critique. indeed, a historiography of palmares shows that the site’s past has been interpreted in different ways, motivating, for instance, marxist critiques of brazilian society in the 1960s and 1970s (almeida 2001) and serving as inspiration for a multicultural society by the 1990s (for more on palmares’s multiple interpretations, see funari 2004). aside from the appeal that palmares has in academic scholarship, many of the characters associated with the quilombo are national cultural icons, and images of zumbi are widely reproduced in public buildings around maceió, such as the airport. in união, a good number of shops like lottery-ticket stands and bakeries are named after palmares. similarly, countless activist groups and political movements invoke the quilombo and zumbi’s name. figure 3. zumbi is everywhere. photo by maria fernanda escallón. the important value that palmares holds also became evident during my interviews with government officials who saw the heritage park as união’s untapped financial resource. as the city’s tourism secretary said to me: the serra is the single most important tourist attraction of the region. this area is part of the quilombo region and of tourist routes like the sugar or the freedom route. we hope that eight years from now this will be an important national tourist attraction and the serra a key hub given its notable history. the quilombo is a symbol of freedom, there is no other place like this. alagoas is very lucky. in contrast to these enthusiastic visions of palmares—as a cultural icon, a historical landmark, and a regional tourism engine—i heard stories of fear and violence from the park’s residents. “look, here is the stack of papers with the lawsuit against us,” one elder resident told me as he handed me a heavy pile of documents. “sixteen families have been accused . . . of environmental crimes,” he explained with a trembling voice. although most could not read the documents themselves, they knew that blaming them for provoking the fires would facilitate their eviction. “we own this land, we are not vandals,” said another inhabitant. “when we moved here there was nothing but sugarcane. i did not burn the serra, i reforested it!” the first man lamented, “they stained our names, we have to clean them.” indeed, as a result of the lawsuit, many inhabitants were now prevented from working, applying for a bank loan, or receiving financial federal assistance. as they were subject to an ongoing criminal investigation, they could not apply for a national identification card, equivalent to a social security number in the united states, which is needed for everything from opening a bank account to applying for a job. after the fires, inhabitants reported that harassment by some of the park rangers had increased, meaning tighter controls over their cultivation techniques, farming plots, and daily activities. after the declaration of palmares as national heritage, the regional heritage office had tried to evict the residents. park rangers, trained in environmental protection, were hired to monitor the inhabitants, making sure their houses and farming plots would not destroy the landscape. when one pieces together information from residents, land records, bureaucrats, and scholars, it appears that before the declaration, most of the serra and its surroundings belonged to three wealthy and politically powerful landowners who leased a portion of their lots to sugarcane plantation workers. these renters were allowed to occupy and work the land, but not all received legal contract for their arrangements. when palmares became a national heritage site in 1986, the heritage institute bought the lands and compensated the owners. yet, only those with formal property rights received compensation, and renters were ordered to leave without any payment or alternative location. according to residents, the landowners’ lawyers convinced the few individuals who had managed to get land property titles that if they registered their deeds or accepted any form of compensation, the government would take their lands away. when the period for registering land ended, sixteen families were left with no legal title, no financial compensation, and no place for resettlement. many had no option but to stay in the serra, overnight becoming illegal occupants of a federally owned heritage park. “i bought this land more than twenty-three years ago,” one of the park’s inhabitants told me. “it belonged to mr. pinto. the government paid him, but he didn’t pay a cent to me. we barely make a living, how was i supposed to pay for a lawyer?” another resident interjected, “i did not invade the lands, i paid for them. how am i supposed to leave here without anything?” tragically, there are no official records to verify these transactions. rather than acknowledging the park residents’ disadvantaged position as victims of fraud, unable to prove their claims, the state has rendered them illegal occupants. identity and land in a multicultural perspective since the 1980s many south american countries, including brazil, have implemented a series of multicultural reforms to explicitly recognize pluriethnicity and guarantee group-based rights (paschel and sawyer 2008). these reforms have included the recognition of minorities’ communal land rights, self-government, and access to ethno-educational programs (hooker 2008).11 in brazil, some of these dispositions were accompanied by the enactment of laws banning racial discrimination, the creation of affirmative action measures, or the establishment of federal institutions designed to combat racial discrimination (hooker 2008, 284). the designation of palmares as a national heritage site constitutes an integral part of these reforms. though the multicultural policies transformed the latin american political landscape, in brazil, many problems remain unresolved. today, ethnoracial minorities struggle to find a persuasive narrative that legitimizes their claims for collective rights (hooker 2008). more insidiously, the neoliberal multicultural reforms implemented so far have ended up reinforcing racial hierarchies and heightening the state’s capacity to defuse political opposition (hale 2005). as explored below, these reforms have also incited a pernicious backlash from powerful (and predominantly white) elites. the palmares heritage park epitomizes these contradictory results. while in palmares a quilombo is seen as a historical community of africans and their descendants who escaped from slavery, across brazil, comunidades remanescentes de quilombos designates a current, official category in which quilombolas (or contemporary self-ascribed maroon descendants) live. according to the instituto nacional de colonização e reforma agrária (2018), quilombolas are ethnic groups, consisting predominately of blacks whose sense of identity is related to their land, kinship ties, and specific cultural traditions, as well as self-identify as descendants from formerly enslaved populations.12 after an unprecedented campaign led by afro-brazilian activists during the redrafting of a new constitution, in 1988 quilombola communities were granted the constitutional right to collectively own the lands they occupied as a form of reparation (linhares 2004). to petition for a collective title, quilombola communities must be officially recognized by the government as legitimate descendants and then start a process of land titling. since the introduction of these provisions, the number of communities claiming quilombola descent and communal property has been growing at a pace that is hard to fathom. today there are an estimated 4,000 quilombola communities throughout the country, 3,311 of which have been officially certified as comunidades remanescentes de quilombos by the fcp, including 69 in the state of alagoas. to date, there are more than 1,700 petitions for land titles across brazil, and more than 975 of those in the northeast alone. the cumbersome and lengthy procedures to petition for official quilombola status and land have kept many communities from claiming their communal property rights. until march 2018, only one community had received its official deed in the state of alagoas. an inefficient judiciary system, complicated administrative procedures, and strong political opposition from powerful landowners have slowed the titling process (browne, dana, and shea 2010). yet despite the hundreds of backlogged petitions, quilombola land titling has received much attention as one of the most widespread ethnoracial reparation projects in the world (planas 2014b). as much as it has benefited some quilombola communities, this process has done nothing to change park residents’ circumstances. scholars, the citizens of the region, and public officials concur in their assessment that serra residents are not quilombolas and should not be able to claim descent—and thus titles—from the historical quilombo. in my interviews with prominent black academics in maceió, park rangers, and government officials, i repeatedly heard that the maroon settlement was destroyed by the end of the seventeenth century and that all its inhabitants were killed or dispersed to other regions. as asserted by a former fcp director, “the park’s inhabitants are not original descendants from the quilombo. they are like everyone else. they do not self-identify as descendants; they invaded the lands. they are not quilombolas; they say so themselves.” this idea reinforces the belief that there are no living descendants of palmares and that those who currently live inside the park have no legitimate claim over this land or history. some interviewees mentioned that these residents had not occupied the site prior to the 1930s and therefore could not be direct descendants of the original maroons. the records of nearby universities corroborate these accounts, suggesting that park residents began occupying the region in the early twentieth century. being seen as rural workers, as posseiros mestiços rather than remanescentes de quilombos, grants park inhabitants little political capital to fight for the lands on which they live. that they help maintain the heritage park seems almost irrelevant. as such, although palmares’s heritage declaration is meant to protect a valued historical site, it has also condemned its own caretakers to precarious living conditions. ironically, the same tool that intends to protect brazil’s heritage has also become an instrument for dispossessing the rural poor. the problem for these residents is not simply occupying federally owned lands deemed as heritage. fundamentally, their struggle is of legibility under the current neoliberal multicultural regime, as the ways in which they identify themselves, namely as non-quilombola, renders them unintelligible to a system that grants collective rights based on cultural difference. indeed, the language in which residents invoke their claims is one with which the fcp is not prepared to engage. during official meetings with the fcp, residents voiced their concerns in terms of their right to live and work on their own land. rather than leveraging their ethnoracial identities, residents articulated their claims around their stolen territory. “we are asking for justice; i am a prisoner on my own land. we are surrounded by so much land, all belonging to mr. lyra, can the government buy some? my parents died waiting for their compensation, will i also die waiting?” finding the legitimating narrative to claim their rights proves difficult, precisely because the options available to them—via ethnic identity or racial discrimination—are effectively out of reach. their lives as peasants are seen as insufficiently distinct to merit state protection (hooker 2008), and any claim of quilombola descent is deemed as inauthentic. more insidiously, the state entirely disregards that powerful landowners took advantage of the residents, de facto justifying the inequalities created by brazil’s history of racialized slavery, white privilege, and the practice of sharecropping. as juliet hooker (2008, 287–88) asserts, in south america, there is still much resistance to drawing causal links between current inequalities experienced by disenfranchised groups, slavery, and racial discrimination. leaving these issues unaddressed has ironically ended up reinforcing brazil’s institutionalized racism, which is what multicultural reforms were meant to dismantle. by noting how the palmares declaration has further disenfranchised its own caretakers, i am not implying that the site should not be protected or that the quilombola land restitution program should not exist. quite the contrary: i think both are absolutely crucial. nor am i implying that residents should be granted official quilombola status, as many park inhabitants do not identify as contemporary quilombolas, seeing themselves instead as rural workers with a legitimate claim to their lands. instead, i want to highlight the paradoxical situation aggravated by the palmares heritage declaration, where the protection of the histories of the oppressed ends up harming already vulnerable populations. in this way, palmares offers a productive place to examine the value of alterity in brazil, underscoring the political fragility of the mestiço rural poor whose histories are rendered as an illegitimate part of a heritage repackaged for tourist, academic, and political consumption. the vulnerability experienced by these residents also highlights larger problems created by the current neoliberal multicultural regime. as the park residents’ case shows, these policies inadvertently disempower a good portion of rural communities whose sense of identity does not align with the exact categories envisioned by the state. as such, the claims of poor rural mestiços, as well as their entire identity, are rendered ineligible within a multicultural national paradigm that presents minorities as coherent bounded groups who possess distinct culture and heritage.13 critiques of multiculturalism have long explored how vulnerable individuals within minority groups may be further disenfranchised by the same policies designed to empower them. feminist critiques of multiculturalism, for instance, hold that the protection of minority populations may come at the expense of perpetuating forms of segregation of vulnerable members within those groups, such as women (green 1994; eisenberg and spinner-halev 2005). in my own research, i have found that not all members of minority groups benefit equally from multicultural policies (escallón 2017). this situation not only illuminates the paradoxical way in which identity policies operate but also underscores the unequal values that different forms of alterity hold. as peter wade (2013) explains, although blackness and indigeneity have been similarly cast as historically disadvantaged identities eligible for bureaucratic attention, that has not necessarily been the case for populations seen as ethnoracially mixed. multiculturalism, then, has become “the alibi that deflects attention away from the remaking of racial hierarchy, under the triumphant banner of its elimination” (hale 2005, 24). this observation is significant, as the process of receiving an official status as a quilombola, for instance, is not just a process of self-recognition: it also requires a good amount of political expertise and local lobbying. as such, the process of claiming quilombola status and land is intrinsically designed to favor those communities who have better access to the intellectual, political, and social networks to make this happen. self-identification as a quilombola is not just an ethnoracial or cultural matter; it is heavily mediated by politics and enabled by networks of power and financial means (see french 2009). by this i am not saying that only powerful communities have been granted recognition or lands. indeed, many official quilombola groups live under conditions of extreme poverty. rather, i am suggesting that at some point these communities leveraged the necessary connections, knowledge, and political expertise to support their claims. noting the limitations of multicultural policies is important because even though critiques of this model abound in academia, the reality is that in latin america, multiculturalism remains very popular. despite academic backlash, for many governments and minority activists, the basic tenets of multiculturalism still stand. as such, these policies continue to be implemented following political ideals rather than long-term studies of such policies’ effects. it is crucial to understand that although multiculturalism theoretically has the power to do good, it also comes at a price, a price generally paid by the most vulnerable individuals within minority groups. we must tread this line of argument lightly, however. as i write, fierce opposition continues to grow against the quilombola land restitution program following the 2017 suspension of these provisions across brazil. vocal objections from powerful individuals (including members of the agro-industry, real estate businesses, and logging companies) have consolidated against the quilombola reparations program. opponents believe that these policies provide land to opportunistic individuals who strategically identify as quilombolas, or that they are ineffective as they fail to improve the quality of life of those residing in black settlements (kenny 2018). another strand of opposition to ethnoracially based reparations is also growing, arguing that brazilians are too racially mixed, making reparations based on an individual’s race or ethnicity illegitimate. the idea that racial discrimination does not exist in brazil because everyone is racially mixed has a very long and toxic history in the country. this notion has painfully downplayed brazil’s pervasive racial tensions and inequalities (twine 1998). more recently, with the implementation of state-sponsored ethnoracially based policies, opposition has become even more vocal.14 as documented by wade (2013), geneticists have appeared in court arguing against color-based affirmative action policies, stating that it makes no sense—genetically speaking—to refer to a separate black race, thus making it inappropriate to have a racial category targeted for specific benefits. this situation proves particularly harmful because the racial disparities in brazil remain so stagnant. it is estimated that although black brazilians compose nearly 50 percent of the population, they constitute roughly 70 percent of those living in extreme poverty (ribando seelke 2008), which includes fifty-eight thousand quilombola families (rocha de mello e souza et al. 2012). statistics reveal that afro-brazilians are the poorest, have the worst housing conditions, work in the lowest-paying jobs, and have the least amount of lands (planas 2014a, 2014b). indeed, brazil’s land distribution remains one of the most unequal in the world, with less than 4 percent of landowners controlling more than half the country’s arable land (wittman 2009). reports from the 2006 census of agriculture, carried out by the brazilian institute of geography and statistics, calculate a national gini index of 0.872 and of 0.871 in alagoas,15 indicating a very high and unequal concentration of land ownership. as a result of decades of smallholdings’ land expropriation and the extension of property rights by large (and predominantly white) landowners known as colonels,16 very few afro-descendants, particularly in the northeast, have formal property rights. i mention this newly empowered opposition to ethnoracial policies because in the context of brazil’s prevailing racial disparities, their beliefs still carry an inordinate amount of weight. the inequalities between black and white brazilians underscore the need for effective positive discrimination policies along racial lines. the dangerous notion of brazil’s racial democracy has done much to prevent a thorough understanding of the country’s profound inequalities and to correct slavery’s long-term legacies. the wealth, health, education, and employment gaps experienced by black brazilians closely follow color lines and have been extensively documented in academic scholarship (reichmann 1999; reiter 2009; daniel and haddow 2010). as i point to the detrimental consequences of multiculturalism, i must be careful that my own arguments are not conflated with those espoused by these opponents. my observations are not meant to delegitimize the struggles of minorities or the policies aimed at providing much-needed reparations. on the contrary, i seek to explain why multiculturalism’s aims remain unfulfilled in an effort to guarantee a better alignment of cultural policies with social justice causes. the illusion of inclusive heritage to understand how the park was being maintained and used, i visited the site regularly during my field research, on my own and accompanied by park rangers, residents, and local administrators. on some occasions, i joined school visits, paying particular attention to how students learned about the site’s history. on others, i heard the interpretations of the quilombo’s past as told by local tour guides. in rio de janeiro and recife, i interviewed those involved in the park’s early designs, including prominent leaders of the black rights movement from alagoas and pernambuco. according to my interviewees, before the park materialized, no consensus existed on how to commemorate the history and culture of the palmares maroons. local bureaucrats envisioned a park that would draw tourism to the area. black activists hoped to build a monument commemorating the heroic lives of the historical palmarinos. brazilian academics from alagoas, for their part, wanted to create a learning center to teach visitors about the history of the maroons. after heated debates between public officials and the afro-descendant leadership from the region, in the early 2000s the local administration decided to construct what was described as a “staged quilombo villa” in the serra. by 2007, the tourist park parque memorial quilombo dos palmares was finally inaugurated. as discussed by ana carolina lourenço santos da silva and flávio gomes (2013), the creation of the park and the enactment of the land laws protecting the area are significant not just because they preserve a historical site but also because they commemorate the lives of those who fought for their freedom. many brazilians see the park and its heritage designation as a way of creating a new national memory, one that builds on intangible symbols and not exclusively on material culture. as such, the heritage designation was intended as a political move to broaden the notion of national heritage, something particularly important during brazil’s democratization process. indeed, when inscribed in the national heritage registry, palmares was one of the few sites included from the brazilian non-elite, as the list had, until then, traditionally consisted of built structures from white wealthy families (funari and carvalho 2005a; arantes 2008). the creation of a new national memory remains one of the park’s fundamental functions. as mentioned above, the park is at the center of the dia nacional da consciência negra festivities in alagoas. the park’s official website, for instance, devotes an entire section to the november 20 celebrations, detailing the significance of the events in which nearly ten thousand visitors engage on arrival to união. the festivities taking place at the park hold great significance for black activists, palmarinos, and park inhabitants, who enjoy the political attention and economic revenue derived from the events. figure 4. “20 de novembro” banner at parque memorial quilombo dos palmares. photo by maria fernanda escallón. despite the number of activities taking place in the serra, neither the park’s official website nor the scheduled celebrations explicitly include the park’s caretakers. the heritage and history being celebrated gloss over the inhabitants’ cultural practices, as well as their dire current situation. “in november they put ‘makeup’ on the serra, on the whole situation with the park’s inhabitants,” a former local bureaucrat told me. indeed, contrary to what occurs at other heritage sites around brazil, where residents are expected to perform culture for mass tourist consumption (see collins 2015; smith 2016), in palmares the inhabitants are rendered invisible and considered a threat to the park rather than either part of its history or part of its current life. the silence regarding the inhabitants, however, is full of meaning. fundamentally, though palmares constitutes a site of celebration, it is also a symbolic battleground for park residents whose livelihoods are deemed as unworthy of protection. as such, while the heritage declaration broadly recognizes the history and culture of afro-brazilians and maroons, it uncomfortably sits side by side with the displacement of poor, rural, racially mixed farmers who identify as peasants, and occasionally as black, moreno, or mestiço, but who have no political leverage to claim for protection. while celebrating its multicultural and interethnic past, palmares has trapped the park’s inhabitants in an official recognition paradigm that simultaneously empowers and disenfranchises different segments of the black and ethnoracially mixed brazilian population. the lack of political leverage also stems from the way in which residents have organized themselves. as explained by an elder inhabitant, they once created a community-based association but did not succeed. by the time of my fieldwork, not all inhabitants saw themselves as part of a cohesive community, and there was no recognized leader. a few individuals, like lorenzo, spoke in the name of the majority, but no formal community council existed. without formal leadership, political stewardship has proven difficult. though reports about their situation have sporadically appeared in local media, and national rural workers’ movements remain active in alagoas,17 there has been scant effective political support for residents. as heritage declarations and identity-based policies expand in brazil and elsewhere in latin america, it is important to consider how well-meaning public recognition efforts continue to reproduce exclusion, even within the same groups they intend to protect. when poor rural workers cannot—or do not—claim ethnoracial distinction, they end up further segregated by a system that rewards ethnic lobbying and forces poor populations to demonstrate an authentic difference to be granted rights as equal citizens (povinelli 2002). as such, while ethnoracial policies promote inclusion for some, they necessarily exacerbate inequality for others. palmares’s situation is by no means unique to brazil, or to other latin american countries for that matter. indeed, as examined by anadelia a. romo (2010), john f. collins (2015), and christen a. smith (2016) in pelourinho, the historical city center of salvador de bahia, the revitalization of this area as a national heritage site resulted in the forced removal of its residents.18 much like salvador, palmares illustrates a cruel irony: the celebration of black culture in a historical site turned tourist attraction depends on the forceful repression of its own inhabitants. this reveals the state’s two-pronged approach to blackness: exploiting its symbolic power while at the same time ensuring control over black and brown bodies (smith 2016, 21). as such, palmares serves as a metaphor for the nation writ large as the recognition of black heritage acts as a “deflecting shield, hiding the subtle yet exacting political and economic disenfranchisement of black brazilians within a covert system of institutionalized racial discrimination” (smith 2016, 111). as celebrations of black heritage in palmares continue to ignore park residents’ lives, it becomes clear that different constituencies have opposing ideas about what constitutes heritage. for park visitors and local bureaucrats, heritage is the past history of the maroons and the cultural practices of those who can ethnically, racially, or otherwise affiliate with them today. in contrast, for park residents, heritage is what they own and the lives they have created in and around the park. as one inhabitant asserted, “if we can’t live, we can’t work—and isn’t this supposed to be our own heritage too?” a spokesman for the community posed the question a different way in a local newsletter, “is this how they are preserving black culture?” (barros 2015). in light of the 2017 mercosul heritage declaration, these clashing definitions of heritage resurfaced again. newspapers and several online outlets reported the international recognition with much praise. in the words of the fcp president, erivaldo oliveira, “mercosul’s recognition is highly symbolic for the black movement, it demonstrates respect for our ancestors who fought so hard for their freedom” (rocha 2017). similarly, neide oyá d´oxum, a vocal advocate for the serra’s heritage preservation, proclaimed: “besides generating employment, since tourism will increase, the serra will be seen with different eyes, with eyes of love . . . the serra is a sanctuary of love, of faith, and resistance” (rocha 2017). despite this enthusiasm, the situation is not that cheerful for park residents. rather than a sanctuary of love, the park has become a landscape of fear, one in which residents cannot repair their damaged homes, care for their crops, or live without surveillance. “freedom for whom? everything here is for the dead, for zumbi, everyone is interested in history, nobody cares about the present. what freedom is that? freedom to die?” pointedly asked a resident. perhaps, as a renowned local historian told me, “the serra is definitively important for some blacks, but not all blacks are as important for the serra.” this statement underscores how the everyday violence experienced by the park’s caretakers is connected to slavery’s structural legacies. for one, the legal action taken against park residents demonstrates how they have unequal access to protection under the law, as they rapidly became subjects of criminal investigation for the serra’s fires, while the wealthy landowners’ fraud was dismissed. the caretakers’ experiences speak of broader patterns of violence and neglect against communities masked under the celebration of internationally sponsored heritage sites (see smith 2016). mercosul’s support for palmares proves significant as it globally legitimizes how under the current multicultural regime, only certain ethnoracial categories are deemed both legible and acceptable.19 elevated as a regional heritage site, palmares encapsulates a troubling situation in which “black inclusion into the national fabric follows a logic of permissibility that allows only those black bodies and spaces marked as acceptable to participate in the national project, and leaves the black masses at the margins” (smith 2016, 6). as such, heritage has become, in smith’s (2016, 101) words, a “conditional privilege” for those who identify as quilombolas, granting them a provisional permission to participate in the nation as citizens. without this conditional privilege granted by the heritage declaration and the current multicultural regime, however, park residents as rural peasants cannot be granted full citizenship rights. conclusion: identity in light of inequality the tension between recognizing ethnoracial identity and resolving inequality has been widely explored in academic scholarship for the past three decades (e.g., fraser and honneth 2003; michaels 2006). the pendulum has moved from one extreme to the other, with some positing that diversity politics have displaced economic reparations, while others affirm that it is impossible to address inequality without considering identity first. i do not intend to resolve this long debate here, but rather wish to show how ethnoracial policies designed to combat inequality may have undesirable results by excluding already vulnerable populations. rather than debating what should be done first—fixing economic inequality or recognizing ethnoracial difference—i show that when well-intended policies meant to benefit minorities are implemented in a context of unequal access to financial, political, and intellectual resources, those groups who are not already legible to the state end up further segregated. though park inhabitants claim the quilombo site as their home and heritage, they are peasants who do not use categories such as quilombola. as such, they are rendered invisible because the ways in which they identify themselves, and thus claim for their rights, fall outside the official canons recognized by the state (see also brulotte 2009). my assessment is not a blanket critique of multicultural policies, or a rejection of any sort of reparation efforts. much to the contrary, it means to continue our conversation on how to proceed politically, because so many remain sidelined by current ethnoracial policies. in the context of brazil’s massive ethnoracial inequality, which disproportionately affects blacks, quilombolas, indigenous, and other descendant populations, it is important to consider how the available alternatives to redress inequality may also perpetuate segregation. the paradoxical situation of palmares underlines how, as heritageand ethnicity-based recognition policies have become an increasingly powerful mechanism for providing government protection for afro-brazilians, they, too, have acquired the disproportionate capacity to hurt the vulnerable and poor. put simply, the more powerful this process becomes, the more power it also has to widen the gap between those who can benefit from recognition and those who cannot (suassuna 2006). in palmares, heritage is not just experienced as a means for power and inclusion for afro-descendants but also as pain and segregation; this dimension is key to a more nuanced understanding of heritage histories often depicted through a singular lens. as brazil celebrates its black legacy, we must examine who has the power—not just the right—to make claims to land and state protection. the current understanding of heritage and the ethnically driven notion of blackness have prevented brazilians from seeing the quilombo’s paradox right in front of their eyes. as the serra stood in flames, not a single news report talked about the danger posed to its inhabitants. nobody mentioned the residents’ impoverished living conditions or what the fires meant for their ever-shrinking territory. when visitors flock to the serra during the november festivities, the celebrations ignore the inhabitants’ cultural practices, as they are seen as unworthy of protection. while the serra keeps receiving international attention, now as heritage of mercosul, the park’s residents continue to wonder why their own livelihoods are attacked in the name of protecting heritage and why their own cultural practices are not seen as afro-brazilian heritage at all. as such, the palmares declaration protects two very different types of heritage: one of the historical maroons and their contemporary kin, and another of the structurally unequal system that inadvertently replicates the oppression it intends to dismantle (see kenny 2018). in recent years, a growing body of interdisciplinary research, including heritage scholarship, has pointed out the many ways in which current heritage policies negatively impact local communities. much has been written on eviction and spatial cleansing (bloch 2016; de cesari and dimova 2018), the uneven distribution of benefits (breglia 2005; escallón 2018) and cultural consumption and commodification (chaves, montenegro, and zambrano 2010). the palmares case, however, raises much broader theoretical reflections that go well beyond the critical examination of current heritage regimes. from the perspective of neoliberal multiculturalism, the predicaments of the park’s inhabitants speak to how the state protects—or impinges on—the basic possibilities of existence of its own citizens. indeed, the alternatives available to park residents with regard to how to live, work, and identify themselves as subjects of rights are effectively constrained by the way in which the state envisions ethnoracial minorities as cultural citizens. neoliberalism informs not simply how heritage ought to be managed; it also molds a particular political subject (coombe and weiss 2015), expecting citizens to perform a specific form of subjectivity that exhibits “uncompromising autonomy of the individual, right-bearing, physically discrete, monied, market-driven, materially inviolate human subject” (comaroff and comaroff 1999, 3). the current neoliberal regime, which relies on self-empowered citizens, self-organized communities, and self-disciplined minorities that envision heritage as a resource (coombe and weiss 2015), further ostracizes park inhabitants who have not yet become the heritage subjects expected by the state. this situation illuminates the deeply paradoxical predicament of the neoliberal multicultural regime, as it theoretically embraces the plurality inherent in ethnoracial diversity, while it in practice closely restricts the type of political subjectivity individuals must embrace (comaroff and comaroff 1999; englund 2006). at stake here is not simply a reflection on how the current prominence accorded to heritage has devalued concern with actual forms of changing social life. more broadly, a discussion of citizenship is crucial, as the multicultural regime undermines alternative forms of political subjectivity that more closely align with the experiences shared by brazilian peasants. as noted by mary lorena kenny (2018, 100), in contemporary brazil “the current social and spatial reality of rural life is, for the most part, invisible.” palmares has become idealized as a site of historical and political significance for afro-brazilians, even as a landscape of leisure for tourists. yet, this image can only exist by denying its underlying history, connected to its inhabitants’ struggle for housing, citizenship rights, and state protection. more than a challenge to conventional approaches to heritage, i hope this discussion expands debates on whether multicultural policies use visibility as a form of subordinate inclusion, by providing recognition while leaving the structural tenets of racism intact. while the palmares heritage declaration theoretically protects the site, it downplays the multiple layers of violence experienced by the heritage caretakers: individually, as a constant surveillance of livelihood activities, and structurally, as unequal protection under the law. although the quilombola policies and palmares heritage recognition have arguably benefited many black communities throughout brazil, a crucial debate remains to be had on why impoverished brazilians must claim difference to be treated as equal, and, importantly, on why this burden is imposed on the poor. turning a critical eye on multiculturalism’s optimism, however, should not lead us to a wholesale rejection of heritage declarations, to delegitimize reparation policies, or to discourage communities from fighting for their rights. on the contrary, besides critical reflection on the rights needed to effectively protect minorities, we must identify the dynamics of power that enable afro-descendants to successfully exercise those rights. i aim to reinstate attention to the local power dynamics at play in rural brazil to encourage more informed political action and a grounded understanding of the limits of ethnoracial legislation as currently exercised. i note how heritage has become the means by which racialized histories of dispossession become sanitized stories of cultural difference. yet beyond exposing multiculturalism’s limits, i hope to expand our notion of reparative justice (see mosquera rosero-labbé and barcelos 2007), so that it protects not just the heritage of culturally defined subjects but also the lives of equal subjects of rights. abstract for the past thirty years, the brazilian government has recognized dozens of sites and cultural practices of afro-descendant groups as national heritage, including the historical maroon site quilombo dos palmares. as this site has gained international notoriety, academic research has focused on the value of this historical landmark for commemorating afro-brazilian heritage. this article looks to the ambiguous effects of such commemoration on contemporary people living in the area, some of whom are being forcefully evicted from the site in connection with its heritage status. the article addresses the vulnerability experienced by these residents, as it highlights broader issues associated with multicultural and heritage-recognition policies in brazil. specifically, i analyze the policies protecting contemporary maroon descendants and sites to reveal why palmares residents making claims on their land and heritage fall outside of state recognition. i argue that as these policies have become an increasingly powerful mechanism for protecting afro-brazilian and minority groups, they have also acquired the capacity to hurt the most vulnerable individuals within these communities. two very different types of heritage stand to be protected at palmares: one of the historical maroons and their contemporary kin, and another of the structurally unequal system that inadvertently replicates the oppression it intends to dismantle. in the context of massive inequality that disproportionately affects blacks, maroon descendants, indigenous, and other minority populations in brazil, it is critical to consider how political strategies for redressing ethnoracial inequality may also end up perpetuating segregation. [heritage; afro-descendants; multiculturalism; quilombos; inequality, brazil] resumo ao longo dos últimos trinta anos, o governo brasileiro tem reconhecido como patrimônio cultural dezenas de espaços e práticas culturais de grupos afrodescendentes, entre estes, o espaço histórico do quilombo dos palmares. à medida que este local tem adquirido notoriedade histórica internacional, a pesquisa acadêmica tem priorizado a importância do local no que se refere à comemoração do patrimônio cultural afro-brasileiro. meu trabalho analisa as consequências de tal reconhecimento patrimonial na vida de populações que residem atualmente nesta região, algumas das quais estão sendo expulsas à força do local, devido à declaratória deste como patrimônio cultural. analiso também as vulnerabilidades experimentadas por tais populações, no contexto da problemática mais ampla das políticas multiculturais de reconhecimento do patrimônio no brasil. especificamente, examino as políticas de proteção aos quilombos e indivíduos quilombolas, e analiso como e por que o estado não reconhece as reclamações de terras e patrimônio feitas pelos residentes de palmares. minha tese é que embora tais políticas venham sendo poderosos mecanismos de proteção aos grupos afro-brasileiros e às minorias, têm também adquirido uma capacidade desproporcional para prejudicar os indivíduos mais vulneráveis daquelas comunidades. assim sendo, a declaração de palmares oferece proteção a dois patrimônios muito distintos: um é dos quilombos históricos e seus descendentes contemporâneos, e outro, do sistema estruturalmente desigual que tem como consequência inesperada a replicação da mesma opressão que a própria política visava a desmantelar. dentro do contexto de desigualdade massiva no brasil, que prejudica desproporcionalmente as populações negras, os quilombolas, os indígenas e outras minorias, é de suma importância considerar como as políticas atuais que visam à reparação da desigualdade etnorracial também levam à perpetuação da segregação. [patrimônio; afrodescendentes; multiculturalismo; quilombos; desigualdade, brasil] notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to the journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers, whose careful reading and insightful observations greatly improved this article. i express my gratitude to erin martineau, clara seligman lewis, and lauren yapp, who reviewed earlier versions of this article, as well as to karen sotelino who helped with the portuguese translation of the abstract. i am particularly indebted to george lipsitz, lynn meskell, barbara voss, and ian hodder, who read and commented on preliminary versions of this essay. some of the arguments i make in this article were first presented at the 2017 annual meeting of the american anthropological association. i am grateful to the panel organizers and attendees for their insights and suggestions. special thanks to all my interviewees during my field research in brazil, in particular to the local park residents and heritage managers who patiently and lovingly shared their knowledge with me. this research was supported by numerous centers, programs, and institutions inside and outside stanford university, the university of california, santa barbara, and the university of oregon. the field research phase was supported by the social sciences research council. 1. all interviewees’ names, except those of public figures, have been changed. all translations from portuguese are by the author. 2. the fcp is the public institution responsible for promoting and preserving afro-brazilian art and culture. it has regional offices across brazil; the office in união dos palmares manages the palmares heritage park. 3. the quilombo dos palmares and the serra da barriga were legally protected long before brazil had laws regulating intangible heritage. these protections were designed with tangible heritage in mind, although they were meant to recognize brazil’s black culture more broadly (santos da silva and gomes 2013). the specific instrument protecting the serra is called a tombamento; for a detailed analysis of tombamentos, see fonseca (1997). the serra was also declared a historic site in 1978 and a national monument in 1988. santos da silva and gomes (2013) provide detailed accounts of the area’s legal protection and its political implications. the shifting titles applied to the serra and the quilombo dos palmares reveal how black culture became increasingly valuable not just in places of historical significance or as a relic of the past, but also as part of a politicized contemporary heritage. 4. mercosul is a customs union and subregional latin american trading bloc that uses culture as a way to strengthen regional integration. mercosul’s heritage declarations are one of the efforts advanced after the 1996 adoption of its cultural integration protocol, which institutionalized the protection of the region’s culturally diverse heritage (dumont 2010). 5. see correia (2016) for a detailed description of the park’s residents. 6. some residents are paid as employees, while others have created goods and services for visitors on their own. 7. between 2009 and 2012, i conducted a multisited ethnography with national, regional, and local bureaucrats, academics, heritage professionals, local activists, community members, ngo staff, and tourists in recife, maceió, campinas, rio de janeiro, brasilia, and união dos palmares. my research involved a combination of participant observation, semistructured interviews, open-ended conversations, and archival analysis. i conducted interviews in dozens of public and private institutions such as the instituto nacional de colonização e reforma agrária, instituto do patrimônio histórico e artístico nacional, secretaria de políticas de promoção da igualdade racial, ministério da cultura, secretaria municipal de cultura de união dos palmares, and secretaria de estado da cultura de alagoas, among others. as a participant observer, i not only observed day-to-day activities in the palmares park but also participated in meetings about heritage, land rights, and political recognition of afro-brazilians. while living in união, i visited nearby officially recognized quilombola communities like muquém. 8. for more on the political implications of the palmares heritage declaration, see santos da silva and gomes (2013). 9. for literature reviews of this historiography, see gomes and gesteira (2002) and ruzemberg gonzaga de souza (2013). 10. the references provided are not exhaustive by any means. the literature on palmares is vast, and the scholarship referenced here only serves as a sampling of well-known works. see, for instance, the extensive literature on palmares by pedro paulo funari. 11. related policies include government decrees 10639/2003 and 11645/2008, which required afro-brazilian history to be taught in public schools; see marcon and brice sogbossi (2007). 12. since brazil’s ratification of the international labor organization convention no. 169, the self-identification of a community as remanescente de quilombo is enough to seek official certification from the fcp. 13. see correia (2016) for an extension of this argument, including criticism of the black rights movement movimento negro unificado for contributing to the exclusion of park residents. 14. a similar discussion has accompanied the implementation of race-based quotas in public universities and in the public sector; see telles and paixão (2013). 15. the gini index is a measure of inequality distribution, which gives a value between zero and one. zero represents land equally shared between owners. one means that all available land is occupied by only one individual. 16. for an expanded discussion of coronelismo, see carvalho (1997). 17. direct support for the park residents from the movimento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra (mst), comissão pastoral da terra, and movimento de libertação dos sem terra (among others) is inconsistent, even as some park inhabitants have joined mst encampments in alagoas. 18. in the context of other quilombos, like rio de janeiro’s sacopã quilombo or the quilombo são francisco do paraguaçú in bahia, quilombolas are thought of as opportunistic individuals, claiming lands that they have not traditionally occupied, let alone owned. underlying these apparently legalistic debates is the doubt (from white elites) that historical reparation for enslaved descendants is morally justified. 19. while beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note that mercosul’s declaration exemplifies how, like other countries from the global south, brazil uses the language of heritage to engage in a global politics of cultural diversity recognition. references allen, scott joseph 1995 “africanisms, mosaics, and creativity: the historical archaeology of palmares.” master’s thesis, brown university. 2001 “zumbi nunca vai morrer: history, the practice of archaeology, and race politics in brazil.” phd dissertation, brown 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econômicos 17: 61–88. https://www.revistas.usp.br/ee/article/view/157408. smith, christen a. 2016 afro-paradise: blackness, violence, and performance in brazil. urbana: university of illinois press. suassuna, clara 2006 “quilombo muquém: uma comunidade visível?” in kulé-kulé: visibilidades negras, edited by bruno césar cavalcanti, clara suassuna, and rachel rocha de almeida barros, 110–16. maceió, brazil: edufal. taylor, charles 1994 multiculturalism: examining the politics of recognition. edited and introduced by amy gutmann. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. telles, edward, and marcelo paixão 2013 “affirmative action in brazil.” lasa forum 44, no. 2: 10–12. https://forum.lasaweb.org/past-issues/vol44-issue2.php. twine, france winddance 1998 racism in a racial democracy: the maintenance of white supremacy in brazil. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. wade, peter 2013 “blackness, indigeneity, multiculturalism, and genomics in brazil, colombia and mexico.” journal of latin american studies 45, no. 2: 205–233. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022216x13000011. wittman, hannah 2009 “reframing agrarian citizenship: land, life, and power in brazil.” journal of rural studies 25, no. 1: 120–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2008.07.002. be kind: negotiating ethical proximities in aotearoa/new zealand during covid-19 cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 368-380, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.04 be kind: negotiating ethical proximities in aotearoa/new zealand during covid-19 susanna trnka university of auckland http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4779-8035 when aotearoa/new zealand’s prime minister jacinda ardern declared the nation’s first covid-19 lockdown in march 2020, she urged the public: “be kind. i know people will want to act as enforcers. and i understand that, people are afraid and anxious. we will play that role for you. what we need from you, is to support one another… . we will get through this together, but only if we stick together. be strong and be kind” (ardern 2020). during the forty-nine-day lockdown, members of the public did indeed “act as enforcers.” so much so that police phone lines crashed from a flood of reports of people deemed “too close” to one another, straying “too far” from their “own” neighborhoods, or unnecessarily occupying public areas. a new online form for reporting breaches received 9,600 submissions in forty-eight hours (in a country whose total population numbers five million). scholarly examinations of states of emergency highlight how the crisis imaginary (cf. koselleck 2006; roitman 2013) is employed to unjustifiably expand state power (foucault 2004; agamben 2005, 2020; chomsky 2020), often portraying the citizenry as weak or duped by state propaganda. such representations risk eclipsing how citizens may not only desire states of emergency (fassin 2012; appadurai 2020) but also act as their supporters, lawbreakers, critics, arbiters, and enforcers. members of democratic societies actively promote or destabilize states of emergency, in the words of the political theorist bonnie honig (2009, 111), “resisting the irresistible, demanding accountability from those who present themselves as beyond such demands, taking exception to the exception, enacting collective life otherwise.” such contestation, moreover, occurs in situations of distrust between citizens and the state, as carolyn m. rouse (2021, this issue) elucidates in her colloquy contribution, as well as more amicable ones. given that lockdown requires adopting novel kinds of spatial relations, many of the activities over which new zealanders reasoned and debated, subverted and supported, punished and surveilled concentrated on ethical proximities, not only in terms of maintaining distance but also keeping near that or those one deemed should be close.1 the maintenance of “proper distance” is an ethical act and an ordinary facet of social life (silverstone 2003). proximity’s (ethical) significance was thrown into relief during lockdown through the effort required to uphold new legal regulations. following the government’s mandate that physical interaction be largely restricted to those who shared residences or household “bubbles,” for many, the ongoing question became not whether to comply, but how, when, and to what extent possible. abilities to make choices were shaped by long-standing axes of disadvantage, notably class and ethnicity (as explored in other settings by levine and manderson 2021, this issue; rouse 2021, this issue; wynn 2021, this issue), alongside new variables such as occupation (e.g., essential service work) and household and family composition (trnka et al. 2021). given the stresses of physical distancing and the existential burdens of coping with a pandemic, ethical decision-making focused not only on how to maintain boundaries but how to keep proximate those “near to us” suddenly made distant. “be strong and be kind” from march 26 to may 13, 2020, the new zealand public was ordered to “stay home” unless exercising, seeking essential supplies or medical care, or providing essential services. like many ethnographers of lockdown, i adopted various research strategies while predominantly house bound, including analyzing government messaging and media coverage, transforming opportunities for exercise into “walking ethnographies” (pink et al. 2010), and joining an interdisciplinary research team that conducted an online survey of new zealanders’ experiences. immediately noticeable was the sudden flurry of government posters, flyers, and ads promoting the pandemic response as a collective project, emblazoned with messages of positivity and national unity: “be kind”; “we got this!”; “we’re all in this together”; “unite against covid-19.” media organizations and commercial enterprises followed suit, capitalizing on the twin mantras of kindness and unity. the nation’s largest insurance company, for example, launched a “kindness is everything” ad campaign, urging viewers to “keep some of this kindness we’ve learned of late” (ami insurance 2020). broad segments of the public engaged in similar assertions of collective care, propping teddy bears in windows or visibly commemorating anzac day (the equivalent of memorial day in the united states) with red poppies (trnka 2020). combatting covid-19 was portrayed as a unified, national effort, forward looking while historically resonant. figure 1. government poster, found across the country in early and mid-2020. photo by susanna trnka. not everyone, however, acceded to lockdown prohibitions. as thomas strong (2021, this issue) reminds us, the government’s abilities to curtail activity are never all-encompassing. even among those committed to “eradicating” the virus, dedication sometimes yielded to other obligations, needs, or desires. figure 2. around the nation, teddy bears, stuffed animals, and figurines appeared in windows to indicate support and solidarity for the national lockdown. photo by revena correll trnka. figure 3. display of poppies during anzac day. photo by susanna trnka. most of the 3,644 new zealanders who answered our online survey strongly supported lockdown regulations. many of the same people, however, recounted knowingly contravening them (long et al. 2020; trnka et al. 2021). often this resulted from “competing responsibilities” (trnka and trundle 2017), pulling them in multiple directions. committed to “the team of five million,” they endeavored to uphold lockdown measures, but found that the ethical demands of close-relations-made-distant proved too powerful, physically meeting with friends and loved ones from whom they’d been mandated to stay apart, particularly those who were struggling. several recounted circumstances where they felt the need to break the law was obvious and required little explanation, noting, for example (in reference to a friend), “they were living alone and were sad.” others had undergone intensive moral debates: should a dying man be driven to the hospital by his daughter or should a friend (outside their bubble) drive them together, enabling the daughter to focus on her father’s final needs? some practiced physical distancing while nonetheless contravening regulations, for example, sharing a beer at opposite ends of the driveway following a family member’s death. breaches frequently involved connecting with others via physical touch or co-presence, enabling communication and communion unachievable through technology. simultaneously, discomfort arose between those thrust together in ways deemed too close, including cohabitants without bonds of kinship or friendship such as cotenants or lodgers. appropriate spatial/affective/ethical distances collapsed when someone fell sick or felt mentally vulnerable while confined to a household of strangers. intimacies were forced when only one person within a residential bubble of otherwise unconnected individuals was allowed to purchase groceries (trnka and davies 2021). these instances revealed how the practical and existential demands of care did not fit the relationalities with which they were involuntarily aligned. while misaligned care-relations created a significant source of strain (cf. long 2020), other motivations existed for breaking the law, including pleasure-seeking and—seemingly ironically—the enforcement of emergency measures. at the height of lockdown, outdoor activities that might require rescue assistance (e.g., surfing, boating) were banned. alongside police warnings and possible arrest, rule-breakers faced public condemnation. a highly publicized case involved a surfer ordered out of the water at piha beach who was photographed approaching police with his middle finger extended. a news site captioned the image, “a surfer is not happy to be questioned by police … ,” and quoted a local academic declaring that surfers were “taking advantage of every other new zealander who is staying at home” and “the more people who flout the rules, the longer we’ll be in lockdown” (owen 2020). over the following forty-eight hours, the surfer received multiple death threats. the backlash against the surfer proved particularly dramatic perhaps because his breach reverberated across multiple registers of the law (cf. das 2004). indisputably, he disobeyed lockdown regulations. it was implied he threatened the police. public outrage was also fanned by the image of a man (surfer) gesturing threateningly toward a woman (officer). just as importantly, the surfer contravened the government’s unity campaign: he broke not just the rules but the spirit of the lockdown. the ethical implications of his actions were publicly calibrated not against potential contagion (few believe surfing spreads covid-19) but against the perceived dangers of someone “in our midst” shattering images of national cohesion. figure 4. piha surfer called out of the water by police. photo by david white. “residents only—stay in your neighbourhood” in his defense, the surfer claimed media misrepresentation, insisting he’d gestured toward the news photographer, not the officer. he also invoked a new dimension of ethical proximities, referring to his adherence to government regulations to “stay local” (i.e., not travel out of one’s neighborhood). “this is my home beach,” he asserted, “i’m in my community. that photographer has driven all the way out here to stand by the police taking photos” (sumner 2020). while the order to “stay local” caused confusion across sub/urban neighborhoods (just how wide is “local”?), in more isolated areas, residential proximities became a marker of safety and solidarity. at piha and elsewhere, hand-painted signs appeared demanding nonresidents “stay out.” figure 5. warning to nonresidents to stay out of piha, auckland, june 2020. photo by susanna trnka. more controversially, barriers––referred to as “roadblocks” or “checkpoints,” depending on one’s politics––were erected on roads leading to the far north. in an area whose population is 40 percent māori (compared to the national average of 16.5 percent) (stats nz n.d.), roads were predominantly patrolled by members of local iwi (māori tribes), enforcing distance between the “us” of local residents, some of whom hold guardianship (kaitiakitanga) of these lands, and potentially contagious outsiders. practically and symbolically, the barriers suggested state measures would prove ineffective in protecting māori, evoking, inter alia, previous epidemics’ ethnically disproportionate mortality rates (aoake 2021). they were, moreover, interpreted by critics and supporters as indexing māoridom’s struggle for self-sovereignty (tino rangatiratanga). the right-of-center former politician don figure 6. ninety mile beach, northland, july 2020. photo by susanna trnka. brash, for example, denounced checkpoints by declaring, “i think the government has to stomp on this idea that there are two different legal systems in new zealand––one for the māori ancestors [sic] and one for the rest of us” (sadler 2020). after initially ignoring the situation, the labour-led government responded to criticism from opposition leaders and from people detained at barriers by announcing that checkpoints must include police representatives, thus simultaneously legitimating and co-opting iwi policing. checkpoints represent highly visible contestations between the people and the state, confirming honig’s (2009) critique of giorgio agamben that assessments of states of emergency in democratic societies must look beyond “the sovereign” to locate the actual bedrock of power in the populace. while checkpoints challenged government leadership, the group that proved perhaps hardest to integrate into national narratives was expatriate returnees. part of the appeal of the catchphrase “team of five million” was that new zealanders were unused to imagining themselves this size; in a curious twist on covid-19 demographics, aotearoa’s population expanded as expatriates flooded home. the media hailed the reversal of previous “brain drains” as a “brain gain” (kirkness 2020). resentment, however, dominated public discourse. as weeks of “sacrificed” freedom proved successful (aotearoa was without community transmission for 102 days straight in 2020), antipathy against returnees who might reintroduce the virus intensified. as l. l. wynn (2021, this issue) documents for australia, fears of contagion provoked fault lines in national unity. in aotearoa, returnees using outdoor exercise areas in government quarantine facilities reported verbal abuse from passersby. online harassment spiked with news of escapes from quarantine. formerly “us,” citizen-returnees became “effaced,” recast as strangers (simmel 1950; bauman 1990) and potential covid-19 carriers, symbolic of irresponsible nations who did not “do it right.” neither citizenship, previous residence, nor ethnic or kinship ties sufficed for inclusion. conclusion it often takes work to constitute and maintain suitable distance and closeness. that this is ethical work is denoted by how we take umbrage at distancing or intimacy that violates our sense of appropriateness. these are “ordinary ethics,” born out of situations we navigate by drawing on culturally delineated moral values, legal and bureaucratic prerogatives, and our face-to-face encounters with others (das 2015; lambek 2015; keane 2017). do i refrain from visiting my friend/daughter/lover who is in trouble? do i call the police if i see my neighbor leaving town? are they us? or are they too close to us? the primary reason many people contravened the march 2020 lockdown was to retain closeness suddenly deemed illegitimate. even though they could email, phone, or zoom, the ethical summons (levinas 1969) to respond by being with one another claimed precedence. lockdown also drove some to demand appropriate practices of farness and fairness from others—what susan levine and lenore manderson (2021, this issue) refer to as the “ethics of care as distance”—compelled by calls for interpersonal and collective care, respect of the law, and concerns over contagion that strengthened and fractured bonds of commonality. i have considered four instances in which proximity was mediated: the breaching of regulations; the “dobbing in” of rule-breakers; local boundary maintenance; and the transformation of returnees into strangers. these represent a fraction of how the state of emergency was not just lived through but constituted by the general public: even if the sovereign declares the exception, in democracies sovereignty remains “implicated in and dependent upon popular power” (honig 2009, 89). with initially minimal police enforcement, aotearoa’s 2020 state of emergency not only required citizen participation but also became the staging ground for citizens’ (legal/illegal/extralegal) determinations of where and when proximities were extended, revoked, or sustained. figure 7. banner in green bay, auckland, march 2020. photo by susanna trnka. abstract citizens do not merely respond to states of emergency; in democratic societies, they help constitute them. this essay analyzes new zealanders’ engagements in ethical reasoning during the country’s first covid-19 lockdown. specifically, i examine how we can understand a variety of public responses to emergency measures—including breaching regulations, threatening rule-breakers, sealing off neighborhoods, and recasting citizen-returnees as “strangers”—as negotiations of ethical proximities focused on keeping appropriately close that which is thought should be near, and keeping distanced that deemed best held afar. [aotearoa; covid-19; ethics; lockdown; new zealand; proxemics; proximity; social distancing; state of emergency; state-citizen relations] notes acknowledgments many thanks to miriama aoake, sharyn graham davies, susan levine, lenore manderson, brodie quinn, carolyn rouse, julie spray, tom strong, and lisa wynn for comments on this piece. thank you also to julie park for feedback on earlier iterations. i am very grateful for the financial support this research received from the social science research council’s rapid-response grants on covid-19 and the social sciences, and the university of auckland faculty of arts’ pbrf fund. 1. i have chosen this phrasing to distinguish these dynamics from levinas’s “ethics of proximity,” as they relate to different (although at times overlapping) concerns. references agamben, giorgio 2005 state of exception. translated by kevin attell. chicago: university of chicago press. 2020 “the invention of an epidemic.” european journal of psychoanalysis 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histories. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. kirkness, luke 2020 “the brain gain: how returning kiwis will boost the economy.” nz herald, july 6. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/the-brain-gain-how-returning-kiwis-will-boost-the-economy/t72wgfyyf7z4fgbr35dd6drzfm/. koselleck, reinhart 2006 “crisis.” translated by michaela w. richter. journal of the history of ideas 67, no. 2: 357–400. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30141882. lambek, michael 2015 “living as if it mattered.” in four lectures on ethics: anthropological perspectives, by michael lambek, veena das, didier fassin, and webb keane, 5–51. chicago: hau books. https://haubooks.org/viewbook/four-lectures-on-ethics/04_ch01. levinas, emmanuel 1969 totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority. translated by alphonso lingis. pittsburgh: duquesne university press. levine, susan, and lenore manderson 2021 “proxemics, covid-19, and the ethics of care in south africa.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 391–99. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.06. long, nicholas 2020 “from social distancing to social containment: reimagining sociality for the coronavirus pandemic.” medicine anthropology theory 7, no. 2: 247–60. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.7.2.791. long, nicholas j., pounamu jade aikman, nayantara sheoran appleton, sharyn graham davies, antje deckert, eleanor holyrod, megan laws, et al. 2020 “living in bubbles during the coronavirus pandemic: insights from new zealand.” rapid research report, london school of economics. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/104421/. owen, catrin 2020 “coronavirus: surfers continue to ride the waves despite new lockdown rules.” stuff, april 5. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120825454/coronavirus-surfers-continue-to-ride-the-waves-despite-new-lockdown-rules. pink, sarah, phil hubbard, maggie o’neill, and alan radley 2010 “walking across disciplines: from ethnography to arts practice.” visual studies 25, no. 1: 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725861003606670. roitman, janet 2013 anti-crisis. durham, n.c.: duke university press. rouse, carolyn m. 2021 “necropolotics versus biopolitics: spatialization, white privilege, and visibility during a pandemic.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 360–67. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.03. sadler, rachel 2020 “coronavirus: hone harawira, don brash clash over use of community roadblocks.” newshub, april 1. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/04/coronavirus-hone-harawira-don-brash-clash-over-use-of-community-roadblocks.html. silverstone, roger 2003 “proper distance: towards an ethics for cyberspace.” in digital media revisited: theoretical and conceptual innovations in digital domains, edited by gunnar liestøl, andrew morrison, and terje rasmussen, 469–90. cambridge, mass.: mit press. simmel, georg 1950 “the stranger.” translated by kurt wolff. in the sociology of georg simmel, 402–8. new york: free press. stats nz n.d. “2018 census.” stats nz website. accessed july 27, 2020. https://www.stats.govt.nz/2018-census/. strong, thomas 2021 “the end of intimacy.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 381–90. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.05. sumner, bonnie 2020 “surfer facing death threats over photo.” newsroom, april 8. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/08/1119978/surfer-facing-death-threats-over-photo. trnka, susanna 2020 “from lockdown to rāhui and teddy bears in windows: initial responses to covid-19 in aotearoa/new zealand.” anthropology today 36, no. 5: 11–13. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12603. trnka, susanna, and sharyn graham davies 2021 “blowing bubbles: covid-19, new zealand’s bubble metaphor, and the limits of households as sites of responsibility and care.” in covid-19: volume i: global pandemic, societal responses, ideological solutions, edited by j. michael ryan, 167–83. london: routledge. trnka, susanna, nicholas j. long, pounamu jade aikman, nayantara sheoran appleton, sharyn graham davies, antje deckert, edmond fehoko, et al. 2021 “negotiating risks and responsibilities during lockdown: ethical reasoning and affective experience in aotearoa new zealand.” journal of the royal society of new zealand 51, supp. 1: s55–s74. https://doi.org/10.1080/03036758.2020.1865417. trnka, susanna, and catherine trundle 2017 “competing responsibilities: reckoning personal responsibility, care for the other, and the social contract in contemporary life.” in competing responsibilities: the ethics and politics of contemporary life, edited by susanna trnka and catherine trundle, 1–26. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wynn, l. l. 2021 “the pandemic imaginerie: infectious bodies and military-police theater in australia.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 3: 350–59. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.3.02. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 368-380, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.04 circulating objects, changing scales: circular cambodian worlds and economies cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 251-273, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.04 circulating objects, changing scales: circular cambodian worlds and economies casper bruun jensen university of nottingham university of copenhagen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3216-9762 as mountains of waste give shape to a “new geological stratum” (o’neill 2019, 1) across the planet, the ambition to create a circular economy that “would see nothing discarded and everything reused” (o’neill 2019, 2) has grown into a complex governance agenda (volk 2004). since the 1990s, china has sought to close waste loops in alignment with a version of economic development in a “harmonious society.” germany introduced circular economy into environmental and industrial policies focusing on sustainable growth, and the european commission is committed to a circular agenda (winans, kendall, and deng 2017). in 2018, the cambodian national council for sustainable development, too, declared an ambition to turn “the national economy into a sustainable enterprise based on a closed loop to achieve the highest degree of efficiency and productivity possible and protect the kingdom’s natural heritage.”1 an obvious test case for studies of environmentality—the study of new modes of environmentally oriented governance (gabrys 2014) and subject-forming processes (agrawal 2005)—these developments also resonate with questions raised by anthropologists and fellow travelers about what it might mean to “think like a climate” (knox 2020) or via “urban metabolism” (mohácsi 2021), do “planetary social thought” (szerszynski and clark 2020), “learn to compose with gaia” (stengers 2018), or get “down to earth” (latour 2018). from a slightly different angle, circular practices and projects raise questions about relations between circulating objects and modes of valuation for sts (science and technology studies), market anthropology, and economic sociology. the following travelogue through some cambodian “mindscapes and landscapes” (haraway 2004, 63) brings these agendas into communication as a form of empirical, applied metaphysics.2 focusing on circulating objects and the divergent worlds they shape, it takes us to sites where “worths” are negotiated and tested and examines the formatting of circular agendas more or less attuned to diversity (eitel 2022; see also morita and tsuda 2022). rather than a single, homogeneous circular economy, the analysis elicits a patchwork of partly overlapping, uncommon circular worlds (blaser and de la cadena 2017; jensen 2017). from the circular economy to circular worlds the origins of the circular economy are mixed but share the observation that economic and environmental issues are entangled. in the mid-seventies, for example, the architect walter stahel and the social economist geneviéve reday-mulvey (1976) associated regional european job creation, resource efficiency, and waste prevention in analyzing possible strategies for a loop economy (geissdoerfer et al. 2017). a decade on, the economists david w. pearce and r. kerry turner (1989) retrieved kenneth boulding’s (1966) view of the earth as a closed system (“spaceship earth”) to replace linear economic understandings with an alternative premised on keeping natural resources in equilibrium. meanwhile, industrial ecology traced material and energy flows and introduced the notion of urban metabolism (wolman 1965), a term that would later be put to different use as part of critical urban geography and anthropology (swyngedouw 2006; compare zhang 2020) and social-ecological systems research (grimm et al. 2008; compare newell and cousins 2014). subsequently the ellen macarthur foundation (2013, 23) repackaged these ideas alongside others, like cradle-to-cradle and the blue economy, with a view to close the loop in an “industrial economy that is restorative by intention and design.” similar aspirations inform the “doughnut economics” popularized by kate raworth (2017). during the same period, new ideas about market exchange, culture, and values percolated through the social sciences. michael thompson’s rubbish theory (1979) examined the changing status of objects as they move between being transient, durable, or mere garbage.3 rather than a material property, rubbish appeared as a category for things that had been assigned negative value. the content would vary with sociocultural classification systems, he surmised, but the category itself was inescapable and, in that sense, universal. despite the mixed feelings one might harbor about that particular claim, thompson offered quite an elegant analysis. one drawback, however, was that the abstract level at which the theory was pitched removed focus from the actually circulating and value-changing objects that would instantiate it. the specifics, so to speak, tended to drown in the universal. some years later, the edition the social life of things promoted more detailed inquiries into the “specific cultural and historical milieus” through which objects circulate (appadurai 1986, 4). studies suggested that no such thing as “the market” existed, but rather culturally specific regimes of value.4 igor kopytoff’s (1986) contribution developed an analytic of “biographies of things” in analogy with people. such biographies would include descriptions of how a thing is made. the culturally ideal trajectory of a thing might be compared with its actual “career.” changes to “status” over the lifespan of a thing might be examined. and, similar to how one might depict the life stages of a person, a thing would be described as living through different states: from being made or found, to being sold, fondly used until people lose interest or it starts to fall apart, at which point it may end up in cabinets or basements, until forgotten, found again, passed on, or thrown away. these innovative ideas still had some limitations and blind spots. one had to do with the status of the objects, which actor-network theory had begun conceptualizing in terms of material agency. as koray çalışkan and michel callon (2009, 390) perceptively noted, the argument that circulating objects are inscribed with values that illuminate social contexts, but no more than that, relied on a fundamentally asymmetrical understanding of humans and nonhumans. in contrast with people, who actively change things, make them circulate, and endow them with significance, things only hold up a mirror that reflects cultural values back to people. a more symmetrical approach would give the objects other forms of liveliness, or agency, including the capacity to actively reconfigure the people and assemblages they become part of.5 rather than studying the market or the economy as a kind of container inside which things change hands between people, one would then examine how what we refer to as “the market” or “the economy” is generated, stabilized, or destabilized, by changing patterns of human and nonhuman relations (see also callon 1998). çalışkan and callon had less to say about another shortcoming of the social life of things, perhaps because it also touches their own approach. in both cases, the emphasis is on the diverse lives of commodified things. çalışkan and callon turn those things into material agents playing crucial roles in reshaping assemblages. but the focus remains firmly on processes of economization. while there is nothing wrong with that focus, it is firmly situated on only one side of (western) value discourses, which have traditionally split into two (smith 1991, 30–36). for the side that holds the interest of these authors, value pertains to instrumental, material, and economic matters, including those of trade and industry, production, consumption, and so forth. yet from another side, value evokes various features of what is usually seen as distinctly non-economic realms, such as those of religion, ethics, art, or the finer feelings. the variability and complex relations between such very different values, or worths,6 lie at the center of luc boltanski and laurent thévenot’s (2006) on justification, a book that explores the heterogeneous “pragmatics of justification” characteristic of different worlds.7 the authors consider six such worlds—the inspired world, the domestic world, the world of fame, the civic world, the market world, and the industrial world8—in terms of their organization around distinctive worths. the civic world, for example, valorizes public representation and participation and aims to protect social collectives against disunity and violent breakdown, while the market world revolves around competition, interests, and desires (boltanski and thévenot 2006, 185). the market, however, does not equal the entire “sphere of economic relations” (boltanski and thévenot 2006, 193), which also encompasses the quite different “world of industry,” where efficiency, performance, and utility prove central. this is the world in which “technological objects and scientific methods have their place” (boltanski and thévenot 2006, 203). this focus on variable justifications has a pluralizing effect. it becomes possible to study circular economies beyond questions of economic markets and commodification. we find ourselves moving between worlds—the market world being only one—inhabited by actors who ascribe different meanings, values, potentials, and risks to circularity and enact it very differently. circulating objects, changing scales: an applied metaphysics the “biographies of objects” approach advanced by the historian of science lorraine daston (2000) makes it possible to connect questions about worlds and their worths with circulating objects, material agency, and scale-making. daston (2000, 1) characterized such biographies, which would revolve around the “dynamic world of what emerges and disappears,” as a form of “applied metaphysics.” the exceedingly heterogeneous objects9 that appear in the pages of her edited volume include “dreams, atoms, monsters, culture, mortality, centers of gravity, value, cytoplasmic particles, the self, tuberculosis” (daston 2000, 1). their varied lives provide an image of reality itself as “a matter of degree,” in which existence makes for a relative property, something to be gained or lost depending on “how densely [objects] are woven into … thought and practice (daston 2000, 1; see also latour 2000, 251). as exercises in applied metaphysics, such object biographies go considerably beyond the material flows that appear in recent discussions of urban metabolism, since their itineraries involve changing ontological relations: the circulating objects are active participants that modify the composition of worlds and influence the negotiation of worths.10 accordingly, they prove highly interesting for explorations of varied and contested green agendas (blok 2013). this means that, material agency, as used here, has little to do with the endeavor to excavate the shimmering, vibrant (or withdrawn) core of objects. instead, such agency is brought to life by the tracing of movements and circulations, reciprocal relations, and redistributions of agency in and across worlds. pursuing applied metaphysics or practical ontology (jensen 2021b) by empirical means has the advantage of opening a way of thinking about scale that avoids the false certainties and determinisms of conventional alternatives.11 for it is, again, not the case that the objects circulate within a container world that has a given scale. instead, objects make or break relations as they circulate, which means that they strengthen some (or parts of some) worlds while weakening others. they are, in effect, adding to or subtracting reality from worlds and worths, helping them grow or shrink, scaling them up or down. from this angle, what is usually called large-scale phenomena are patterns of circulating objects densely interwoven with many distributed practices and therefore able to generate widespread and diverse effects. but such dense relations can loosen or fall apart, in which case the reality of both objects and practices begin to diminish. they are then losing scale, potentially until they completely cease to matter. since everybody is trying to scale particular worlds and worths, we are invariably dealing with “awkward situations” and the “ambiguity of composites” (boltanski and thévenot 2006, 226). whether the circular economy, or other greener worlds, are happening, remains quite uncertain. but whatever happens, in terms of empirical metaphysics, it will be an effect of circulating objects traversing and modifying worlds, of scaling them up or down. minimally, it seems that the emergence of circular worlds will depend on emerging coalitions of what donna haraway (2004, 77) once called “shifted subjects” committed to significant transformations. at issue is not a heroic once-and-for-all decision to move to a permanently altered subjectivity, but rather gradual processes of detaching from linear worlds and worths and attaching to other, greener ones (see also jensen 2019). accordingly, it becomes important to describe this traffic across worlds and characterize what is coming together and breaking apart. it also becomes a matter of conceptual and practical significance to learn to discriminate between different forms of more or less circular, or green, subjects, objects, and processes.12 with this in mind, i proceed to examine the biographies of some innocuous objects as they weave their way in and out of practices, traverse different worlds, and become entwined with variable worlds and worths. the straw and the coconut thavy and her sister have been searching for fabrics at the busy toul tompoung market. now, squinting in the sun outside, they buy a fresh coconut. the vendor chops off the top and inserts a plastic straw. after sipping the cool milk at a wobbly table, the women hop on their moto and continue their chores. the empty coconut, straw sticking out, remains behind. half an hour later, it is unceremoniously dumped on top of a pile of roadside trash. in the afternoon, chanthet walks by, pulling a cart. sifting through the garbage, she picks up the coconut, along with half-eaten watermelon, mango, and vegetable peel. twelve kilometers, or an hour’s traffic congestion away, back in som rong village in the northern sen sok district, the straw is removed from the coconut, which is placed into a shredding machine. along with other organic materials, it enters one of a dozen containers. eventually, the compost will return to the markets. chanthet is one of phnom penh’s several thousand informal waste-pickers. informality, in this context, entails neither disorganization nor randomness. kathrin eitel (2021) has used the term infracycles to capture durable temporal and spatial patterns emerging as waste-pickers make their daily rounds and sell goods at small depots or large dumping sites, and as some of these goods cross the borders of neighboring countries for recycling. but from the moment this coconut husk is swept up along chanthet’s trajectory, something slightly unusual obtains about its biography. that is because chanthet works with a small ngo called community sanitation and recycling organization (csaro). the organization was established in 1997 to support the living conditions of urban waste-pickers with funding from the united nations (un) and other development agencies. to this day, the webpage describes several goals: empowering urban communities and waste-pickers (“who make their living by sorting through rubbish on the street and from piles of garbage”) to create better family economic conditions for a sustainable future, working together to transform slum areas into clean, safe, and healthy places, and encouraging poor urban people to improve their capacities.13 in the early days, the organization created a participatory urban community organizing and infrastructure program, which installed new drainage and sewer pipes in a few areas without coverage. however, as sponsors lost interest and money streams began to run dry, it had to scale down. currently, csaro runs a small plant that converts organic materials into compost. it has conducted a community forum on how to “break free from plastic,” and some now turn straws (like the one picked up by chanthet) into decorations. to get a sense of why she and others got involved, let us look at a few virtual self-presentations. vong saven, aged forty-five, explains that she and her husband, a moto taxi driver, have three kids but very little money.14 the handicrafts she makes sell for around us$35 per month, around the same as she used to earn as a dressmaker. but that job proved physically demanding and financially unstable. saven tells that her self-esteem has now increased, since she is more respected by her husband and neighbors, and she mentions her dream of “expanding the business.” thirty-five-year-old tim channy, who was evicted from the bouding slum area in 2000, shares a similar story.15 she can earn us$60 from work at the composting plant, and this has improved her confidence, because it allows her to support her family and send her children to school. she just barely gets by and is without tv or radio, yet the ability to keep her family afloat provides her with respect in the community. a coconut and a straw. neither exactly makes for a high-profile object. as low-value commodities in a linear economy, they appear similar in some respects. the coconut grows before it is harvested, and is then transported to the market, where it is piled up, sold for a few thousand riel, cut open, drunk, and discarded. the plastic straw is also oriented to easy consumption and disposal, though its biography is more complex and environmentally harmful. but that is not the whole story. with the arrival of chanthet, the objects begin to travel different circuits. soon, they will traverse worlds that involve several value chains beyond those of economization. it is not, of course, that commodification or the market simply vanishes. after all, csaro states the explicit goal of improving economic conditions for the poor and creating possibilities for better living. but those dreams are now complemented with different justifications, which testify to the significance of other worlds and worths. one unit is domestic, with an emphasis on families; but there is also a civic emphasis on building stronger communities. the material agency of the straw and the coconut is elicited in how they redistribute agency, shift subjects, and participate in changing the scales of lives and arrangements in those worlds. saven and others get an income, but now, at the same time, they are making cambodia cleaner or greener and therefore feeling pride as members of their communities and ensuring the safety of their families. these shifts are interrelated with tenuous attempts at making greener worlds and scaling up circularity that take place elsewhere. to make sense of those partial relations, we must take leave of the straw and the coconut. to change the world by crocheting plastic darith receives his ice coffee in a plastic cup with a plastic straw in a small plastic bag. after sipping the drink from the back of his friend’s motorbike, he flings the bag on top of a small garbage heap by the side of the road. as she finishes grocery shopping, nich carries plastic bags stuffed with noodles, eggs, fruit, formula, and soap. after placing the goods in her small apartment, she goes outside and puts the bags on top of the same pile. if the afternoon rain is heavy, much of this garbage will flow down the street, some of it clogging the drains, and other bits sailing into the nearby canal. but on this day, srey mom arrives before the rain. pulling her cart along the street, she pauses briefly, picks up the plastic bags, and moves on. they end up at the funky junk recycling central. a small-scale business, funky junk recycling was founded in 2005 by a western couple who had lived in cambodia for several years. while organizing travel tours, they noticed plastic choking streets, fields, and streams, and decided to do something about it. they hired waste-pickers to collect plastic bags and others to turn them into purses, baskets, meditation cushions, and laptop covers back at the small central. funky junk resembles csaro in some respects. both train and employ poor urban cambodians to upcycle waste. both connect with local schools as part of educational outreach. and not unlike csaro’s self-presentations, a funky junk promotional video features thirty-four-year-old earn mou who explains that plastic crocheting provides him with an appealing livelihood alternative to pepper farming or heavy-duty construction work.16 there are also significant differences. in contrast with csaro’s information, mainly in khmer, funky junk’s video is in english. it is found on the crowdsourcing site indiegogo.com as part of a campaign run a few years ago in search of “backers” who would help “kickstart” the goal to upcycle 1 million plastic bags. after panoramic shots show the inescapable contrast between beautiful landscapes and dirty plastic heaps, the video asks, “what if you could change the world simply by collecting plastic bags?” a similar sense of scalar dissonance—to change a planetary problem “simply” by doing your tiny bit—reappears in the campaign mission statement to “kickstart the global growth of an established social enterprise making funky home accessories.” the previous section sketched how the biographies of the coconut and straws were woven into various worlds and worths: domestic (familial and communal), civic (in support of the urban poor), market (selling handicrafts), and circular (composted and recycled). the plastic bags collected by darith and upcycled by mou also become variably entangled, but not in the same way. while civic worths inform skill training and educational campaigns, and everything is wrapped in a green concern with plastic pollution—change the world by cleaning the streets—the trajectories diverge once the bags are upcycled. because the destinations of channy and saven’s compost and handicrafts and mou’s crocheted meditation cushions differ. while the former returns to the cheap, local toul tompoung market, the latter make their way to a dispersed, partly virtual, market comprised of small boutique shops and hotels: villa langka, iching décor, and elsewhere in phnom penh, morethanhip in the netherlands, upcycle studio in australia.17 the names tell part of the story. the dry-sounding community sanitation and recycling organization communicates with the world of socially responsible development aid. it tries to scale local domestic, communal, and environmental relations differently, but struggles to keep afloat because of the shifting interests of supporting donors. in contrast, funky junk names and joins a dispersed, global phenomenon. across the world, there are numerous funky junks that try to scale-up trendy, innovative, environmental fashion consumption. however, as the kick-start campaign indicates, that aspiration is fraught with difficulties. the campaign goal had been set at 40,000gbp, but in the end, twenty backers had contributed only 686. perhaps it isn’t too jaded to read into the website encouragement—to please “get in touch” if you want to become an international retailer—just a tinge of desperation. thus, circulating objects become inscribed with different worths. at the same time, they redistribute agency among the actors that engage with them and join diverse efforts to scale their worlds differently. tensions emerge because those different scaling projects occur simultaneously and are often in conflict. but it is not only objects that circulate. in some situations, representatives of different worlds come together to figure out how to change the circulations of the objects and reshape circular worlds. these are circular test-sites, where the worths of different worlds are compared, evaluated, and negotiated. a test-site before the cambodian government and international donors began campaigning on behalf of the “3rs” of waste reduction, reuse, and recycling, several businesses and practices were de facto involved in circular practices. at one end, chip mong insee had begun to use waste as energy for cement production.18 in the special economic zone on the outskirts of phnom penh, clothes manufacturers incinerate waste to make steam for production. in battambang, the global green growth institute (gggi) supports solid waste management and plastic recycling as part its global business accelerating program, greenpreneurs.19 elsewhere, family businesses feed household biodigesters with agricultural residuals. some farms grow black-soldier-fly larvae on waste (compare zhang 2020) and sell them to poultry producers or make briquettes from coconut shells or fuel from rice husks. and while city authorities seek ways to turn municipal waste into electricity, various small-scale operations (csaro and funky junk recycled, which we have met, but also naga earth, rehash trash, battambang plastic products, and the japanese gomi recycle 110) trace their own paths. the daily infracycles of informal waste-pickers and other half-forgotten or unnoticed agents—from locals running recycling depots to foreign waste entrepreneurs—testify to yet other circular agendas under difficult conditions (eitel 2022). in february 2020, those entities, large as small, appeared on powerpoint slides at a learning event hosted by an international development agency. although the workshop was open to anyone interested and had been broadly advertised, only some of those represented were physically present. it is likely that then rapidly growing covid-19 concerns played a part. aside from that, the usual, mundane selection mechanisms—different towns, busy schedules, language difficulties, and strapped funds—conspired to keep smaller, local organizations away. among the participants were representatives from apparel manufacturing, plastic recycling, gggi, a siem reap–based waste-management initiative, and some ngos. there were also presenters from a trendy consultancy bureau and a development accelerator lab, along with policy and communication experts.20 so, asked to speak about the challenges of a circular economy, what did this group have to say? quite a few different things.21 it will hardly come as a surprise to hear the voice of the market: there is “no strong market for recycling.” inadequate access to a “portfolio of clients” means that businesses face a problem of “scalability.” as for recycled products, they lack “opportunities for visibility.” this means (regrettably) that waste-to-energy projects (wte) are simply “not profitable” at this time. but it did not take long for other worlds to appear. from the side of the market, wte and large-scale recycled-plastic products appear unprofitable because of high costs and few customers, but that problem might be solved “if a coalition of businesses [were to] say, ‘we are willing to buy plastic under certain conditions.’” worths begin to blur because those conditions immediately involve the industrial world. from this angle, the major hurdle is the inferior quality of recycled plastic pellets made in cambodia. in part, this is because there are no production guidelines or certification requirements. but circularity is also impeded by a “bumpy supply chain.” if quality and delivery were up to speed, it would be possible to make money, in which case a business coalition might pledge to use them. but as this is very far from the case, there is presently a “huge import into cambodia of recycled plastic, which is used to produce clothes that go out.” “it is crazy,” observed a company representative, “but there is nothing i can do.” worried about efficiency, a voice from the world of industry opines that “operational costs are too high.” once again, the solution switches register. since it will be next to impossible to streamline operations sufficiently, successful circular production “would depend on subsidies.” in one smooth motion, we therefore glide into the world of civics, where good governments ought to support businesses who want to make their practices sustainable. “it is in our business dna to be socially responsible,” someone proclaims, accompanied by vigorously nodding heads. alas, if only we could be. as we move from markets to civics, from industry and back to markets, heterogeneous explanations and ripostes weave a dense pattern of shifting worths. now the world of fame makes a sideways entrance because, possibly, what is needed for recycled products to really take off is making them fashionable. this is why gggi collaborates with coca-cola, which has a “very high brand value.” showcasing bottles made of recycled plastics might create a win-win situation in which coca-cola brands recycled plastics while recycling brands the company as a “social enterprise.” a communication specialist agrees it is crucial to get the right message across. plastic elimination and pollution both face “barriers and awareness gaps,” which can be closed by a “big focus on empathy-based communication.” but rather than increasing the sale of soft drinks, her endgame is “empowering people” by the provision of knowledge. the second half featured presentations by the consultants and the accelerator lab. both had conducted small surveys and interviews with market vendors and customers. the unfortunate finding was that phnom penh’s humongous plastic problem was not widely recognized. in fact, vendors had numerous good reasons for using single-use plastics. those reasons, too, jumbled together various worths from market, industry, civic, and domestic worlds. one: there is no customer demand for recyclables. two: even if it might be possible to use rice, paper, or grass straws, ensuring adequate supplies would be difficult. three: those alternatives would be costlier, and price increases are difficult to fob off on buyers who didn’t ask for any changes. four: customers want straws for hygienic reasons. five: when it comes to wet markets, dealing in raw meats or fish, there are no real alternatives to styrofoam. there aren’t enough banana leaves or old papers to go around and, anyway, they still leak. moreover, even though markets are formally run by management committees, they hold no regular meetings. and while waste-management protocols do exist, it seems that vendors neither know nor care about them. what kind of leeway did these descriptions create? the consultants suggested that market ambassadors might be recruited to relay up-to-date information to vendors. if the locals had appropriate knowledge, they might be activated by training or competitions to come up with their own alternatives. to alleviate vendor worries about a potential future plastic ban, it would also be important to communicate how the cambodian government was working to “support their needs.” one might object that the primary issue identified in the survey was not lack of awareness but of good alternatives. but in a sense, these recommendations are not very surprising, since awareness and information are precisely what consultants trade in. as for the present redescription, it has evoked the workshop as an ambiguous situation, a test-site and collective joust (of sorts) between worlds that define the circular economy variably in relation to their own preoccupations. representatives of different worlds emphasize different circulating objects as significant for enhancing circular agendas, and they express different ideas about why they matter, what should be done, when, and by whom. but at this moment, no unequivocal conclusions emerged. to learn something about how relations between the worlds are formatted, and to which effect, we must once again look elsewhere. formatting circular worlds in the fall of 2020, the german konrad adenauer stiftung organized waste summit 2020 as a mix of online and onsite events in phnom penh,22 and in the summer of 2021, the cambodian government launched its circular economy strategy and action plan. meanwhile, informal waste collectors continued to make daily rounds. how do these circular agendas and practices format relations between different worlds and worths? the national strategy and action plan mapped an open-ended set of problems, challenges, and solutions focused on the twin difficulties of waste management and plastic pollution.23 among other things, it dealt with problems pertaining to: finance/markets: markets for recyclables and organics are undeveloped; there are limited economic incentives; waste disposal is cheaper than treatment. management practices: single-use products are mass consumed; waste collection is lacking; waste is unsorted; the institutional roles for support of recycling are unclear; there is an irregular and insufficient supply of feedstock for recycling; dumping often takes place in streets and waterways. regulatory: there are few policies for energy efficiency and recyclable energy; there is no enforcement of waste segregation; permit requirements are complex and expensive; administrative delays are frequent; environmental standards and guidelines are limited. information: awareness of sustainable consumption is missing, as is knowledge of waste-treatment options and baseline data of all kinds. infrastructure and technology: there is limited infrastructure for electric vehicles; there are no eco-industrial parks or recycling clusters; also, there are no community recycling points or deposit systems; technologies are generally inefficient or outdated; no large-scale organic waste-treatment infrastructure exists; skilled domestic labor is inadequate; controlled land-fill capacity functions only to a limited degree. and so on. this way of mapping the circular landscape can be described as additive. rather than aspiring to the (dreaded) “view from nowhere,” we get something like a view from everywhere: local communities over here have these domestic or civic problems with lacking information and garbage collection, but municipalities over there face these industrial issues with landfills and tariffs. all these different versions are moreover variably compromised by factors originating in other worlds. obviously, market and industrial worlds have a strong presence, but so do civic worths, evoked in the dual form of government responsibility to enlighten citizens through knowledge-sharing and to ensure the future environmental health of the public by incentivizing a greener economy. as all issues are listed side by side, without any particular commitments or recommendations, this appears like quite a relativistic grid. however, since the report forms part of an agenda to scale circularity up to national level, that is likely to change before long. while open-endedness is relatively easy to maintain discursively, and on paper, the enactment of circularity across the landscape will involve tough decisions about priorities. questions of how to scale up and gain reality and importance were also at the heart of waste summit 2020, which focused on waste conversion and exploitation for “economic development purposes.” it was described as a “platform to enable future partnerships” and emphasized the potentials of large-scale (german) waste solutions for cambodia. presentations revolved around the technology transfer of mechanical biological treatment solutions, wte capabilities, and industrial-scale waste-management plans. live events included a visit to chip mong insee’s energy-efficient cement kiln, green drinks at a local, sustainable restaurant, and matchmaking sessions between local enterprises and european circular specialists. as suggested by the focus on municipalities and landfills, corporations, malls, and special economic zones, the waste summit invites us to accept and join a rather clearly defined hierarchy. this circular formatting is fully immersed in market and industrial worlds, and the central question is how to make large-scale processing feasible and profitable by ensuring sufficient flows of waste. there is limited focus on issues like creating green shifts and forms of solidarity among waste collectors and their communities, and much interest in aligning the industrial conversion of waste to energy with the image conversion of corporate and national profiles from gray to green. as other worlds and worths are relegated to the shadows, circular diversity more or less evaporates. plastic solutions the problem of plastic pollution is yet again configured differently. this problem space is defined by the preponderance of market actors for whom profitability constitutes the central worth and by the material recalcitrance of plastics. now, plastics are profitable if they can be disposed at no cost; in other words, as long as social and environmental damages are defined as externalities. meanwhile, plastics have a “miasmic” (liboiron 2013) tendency to seep into and become entangled with organism and ecologies from the bottom of the sea to mountain peaks. they are, moreover, durable and difficult to get rid of, which means that clean-up efforts often amount to a reshuffling “in space while they [plastics] endure in time” (liboiron 2021, 17). as plastic production has exploded over several decades, as plastic waste goes almost everywhere, and as it does not disappear, a problem of planetary dimensions has emerged, and it is quite difficult to imagine how to scale it back down except by prohibition or radically lower production. while many environmental organizations and activists eagerly push in that direction, it holds little appeal for the many businesses that rely on cheap, disposable plastics to stay lucrative. we can now understand why market and industry responses to plastic pollution and waste management differ so markedly. when it comes to managing waste, companies put their (market and industrial) worlds at the pinnacle of importance as they vie with each other to demonstrate the degree of attention they give to the problem. but when we turn to plastic, companies downplay the significance of their home worlds and their own agency (“unfortunately, it is limited what we can do right now”), putting the emphasis instead on the agency of governance and civic worlds (“recycling is important but it must be subsidized and incentivized by the government or by international organizations”) and on changing subjects’ habits in domestic worlds (“if only people would bring tote bags, use rice straws, and learn how to recycle”).24 without claiming comprehensiveness, we have here several ways of formatting circular cambodia that are at most partially congruent. a flat grid that makes visible a diverse array of problems by placing them side by side. a hierarchical format that prioritizes industry and market worths and renders other worlds more or less invisible. a low-key, day-to-day circular formatting of informal waste collectors who move between several kinds of worlds and worths but really just seek to get by. and a plastic-related formatting where companies minimize their room for maneuver to keep their existing worlds and worths intact. what, if anything, does this add up to? uncommon circular worlds to get “down to earth,” bruno latour (2018, 94) wrote that it is first necessary to “generate alternative descriptions.” with this in mind, i embarked on a tour of some cambodian mindand landscapes, where subjects, objects, and practices are currently, tentatively, being shifted toward circularity. as circulating objects weave in and out of different worlds, they become affiliated with diverse worths; but in the same process, they redistribute agency among their inhabitants. thus, some plastic bags change from disposable rubbish into fashion objects and some coconut husks turn into organic compost that gives shape to an environmental community. where various worlds are co-present, the relative significance of worlds and their worths are tested. those tests, too, are anchored in incongruent descriptions of circulating objects, of why and how they need to change, and of who is responsible. some want to recycle, some are missing a business portfolio, and some worry about the low quality of locally sourced plastic pellets. some want to grow green brands, some want to build incinerators, and others worry about losing income if styrofoam is outlawed. later, relations between worlds and worths are formatted in reports and events. as they materialize in distributed practices, some of these formats begin to gain reality. they are scaling up. many others fail to materialize, move nowhere, and are soon forgotten. the national strategy maps the circular problem space as an open-ended grid, while waste summit 2020 constructs a hierarchy with industry and market worlds on top. when it comes to plastic, market and industry representatives prefer to take a backseat and leave the action to government and citizens. if these exhibits of changing relational constellations—of worlds and worths—should have any claim on your attention, it is not least because they provide alternatives to what is often presented as self-evident oppositions. from one side, formal circular agendas are usually depicted as sparkling win-win situations that will solve all kinds of economic, social, and environmental ills. from another, the entire panorama boils down “in the end” to business as usual, co-optation, or greenwashing. somewhere in the vicinity of environmentality one will usually encounter the notion that any green development is quasi-determined by nebulous power-knowledge structures. in lieu of these unsatisfying oppositions, this travelogue of circulating objects has tried to make some finer-grained contrasts available for inspection. this has involved no overall critique of scalability (compare tsing 2012). given that applied metaphysics sees everybody as continuously involved in making scales that preserve or seek to elevate their own worlds and worths, such a critique makes no sense in general. what matters are the specifics of how those scales are articulated and materialized. for example, the diverse circular issues discursively placed next to one another in the national strategy and action plan will undoubtedly be transformed into a prioritized set of material projects later on. at that moment, attentiveness to how this is done, and with which consequences, will become important. it is similarly important to point to the lacunae of circular diversity in waste summits past and future and to hold plastic reliant companies to account for their slippery attitude with respect to the problems they keep causing. this matters for articulating the tensions and lines of alignment between circular worlds, as well as for creating space for circular variety. if circularity is a patchwork effect of multidirectional movements between uncommon worlds, its divergent potentials are obstructed by visions of the circular economy as a single integrated system guided exclusively by industrial and market worths. worlds can scale up but they can also scale down. from early 2020, cambodian circular worlds have lived under the shadow of covid-19. as most things went on standby, tourism and the service economy were decimated, and while air pollution decreased during lockdowns, the pandemic became a major plastic-pollution event (eitel 2020). numerous small-scale circular operations disappeared, but some lingered on, and began to make comebacks in 2022. as much as by high-profile environmental governance and industrial dreams, circular cambodia thus continues to be shaped by background events and the “white noise of chronicity” (tironi 2018, 452). those silent transformations are as important for the possible emergence of green, uncommon worlds as the spectacles that mostly take center stage. abstract across the planet, the circular economy has grown into a complex governance agenda. this is also the case in cambodia, where various formal and informal circular activities have recently coalesced into new arrangements. however, much more is at stake than questions of economic governance. by tracing the circulation of diverse objects between practices guided by different worths and correspondingly variable enactments of circularity, the present travelogue exhibits circular worlds in tension. the relative significance of these worlds and worths is negotiated and tested at sites where representatives of many worlds are present. later, some circular formats materialize in distributed practices, scale up, and gain in reality. others linger in the shadows, obstructed by visions of the circular economy as a single integrated system. this exercise in applied metaphysics elicits circularity and its diverse potentials as patchwork effects of circulations between uncommon worlds. [circular worlds; plastic scale-making; uncommons; waste; worths] notes acknowledgments i am grateful for suggestions from anders blok, steve brown, and barbara herrnstein smith, as well as from three reviewers and the editors of the journal, all of whom pushed me toward a better argument (with mixed results). 1. see https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50550580/shift-to-circular-economy-needed-to-tackle-waste-woes/ (consulted april 21, 2022). 2. the following is based on a mix of outdoor observations in the streets of phnom penh and indoors at (physical and virtual) public events. they are complemented by assorted informal conversations, news reports, and available gray literature collected over the past several years. many descriptions are kept purposefully vague, both to protect informants (fictionalization as a matter of decency, as argued by richard rottenburg [2009, xviii]) and because the primary object of the essay is descriptive and conceptual rather than evaluative and/or critical. wherever feasible (and sensible), observed events and concrete conversations have been repacked as aggregate descriptions with a view to articulating the “cumulative characteristics” of practices, events, and situations. 3. a thematically related but different form of inquiry, which investigates societies through practices of waste and disposal, is known as “garbology.” for other relevant studies of waste, see, for example, alexander and reno 2012, lepawsky 2018, liboiron 2021, and strasser 2000. 4. arjun appadurai’s regimes of value differ from zsuzsa gille’s (2010) similar-sounding “waste regimes,” which consist of social institutions and conventions for the production and regulation of waste. according to gille, this mode of analysis makes it possible to deal with the “macro-level.” from the point of view of scale-making adopted here, the very idea of a macro-level looks quite different (see also jensen 2017). 5. without committing to ant terminologies or procedures, several anthropologists working in the same general area exhibit similarly open-ended tendencies (e. g., guyer 2004; maurer 2005). 6. in some sense, the term worth doesn’t seem very different from value. however, it marks the central distinction between an exclusive and reductive emphasis on market or monetary values and explorations of divergent worths/values that are in play and tension. 7. developed roughly in parallel, these studies were not in communication with appadurai’s regimes of value. 8. the possible emergence of a world of green worths is explored separately (lafaye and thévenot 1993; see also latour 1998; blok 2013). 9. of special note, gérard jorland (2000) describes an ontology of value in motion from aristotle to the physiocrats and marginal utility theory until it eventually “vanished like a mirage … in a sense the victim of its own productivity” (daston 2000, 11). 10. there are similarities with the boundary objects (star and griesemer 1989) that originated in pragmatist science and technology studies. but while boundary objects describe the capacity of particular objects to flexibly accommodate the practical requirements of diverse social worlds, the focus here is on reciprocal processes that inscribe objects with variable worths as they traverse practices, while modifying those worths or making available alternative ones (green ones, for example). 11. among other things, this includes the assumption that scales are domain-specific and determined by either nature (e.g., material reality) or by culture (e.g., social structures or power relations). this idea makes it seem as if phenomena, events, practices, and situations belong to, or have, specific scales (see jensen 2017). at one end, favored by much ethnography, there are warm, fuzzy, and very interesting micro-interactions, which, alas, remain rather inconsequential in their own right and must therefore always be seen in light of “a big picture” or “broader context.” this broader context is often taken for granted, or merely alluded to, in the form of deterministic or hegemonic macro-structures. 12. there is no contradiction between being committed to the performativity of all practices and speaking of more or less green or circular practices in the same breath. one can, for example, use obviously loaded terms like greenwashing not because one naively thinks that it offers an objective, value-neutral description, or due to unawareness that the practices thus named perform a palette of varied effects, but because one’s situated aim and preference is to highlight just those problematic aspects of those practices with a view to challenging or shifting them. thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for the opportunity to clarify this important point. 13. see http://www.csaro.org/page.php?mainid=21&sub1=27 (accessed april 21, 2022). 14. see http://www.csaro.org/page.php?mainid=55&sub1=56 (accessed april 21, 2022). 15. see http://www.csaro.org/page.php?mainid=55&sub1=63 (accessed april 21, 2022). 16. see https://igg.me/at/funkyjunk/x#/ (accessed april 21, 2022). 17. see http://www.funkyjunkrecycled.com/where-to-buy/4590930301 (accessed may 5, 2020; the page, and apparently the enterprise, has since disappeared). 18. chip mong insee forms part of the large, diversified chip mong group, the construction arm of which has been criticized for using “blood bricks” made under hazardous conditions by families deep in debt (brickell, parsons, natarasjan, and chann 2019). those bricks feed the material itineraries of phnom penh and sihanoukville’s construction boom (jensen 2021a, 2022). that one side of chip mong pursues green agendas while another involves debt slavery exemplifies that highly different worths and agendas can live under the same broad roof. 19. see https://gggi.org/country/cambodia/ (accessed april 21, 2022). 20. the absence of local ngos has varied sources. civil society in cambodia is generally repressed, and criticism is mainly voiced by internationals. moreover, waste management and plastic pollution fall outside the usual environmental purview of many local ngos. an exception is the think plastic campaign, which is run as a facebook page and currently has more than 120,000 followers. 21. as explained in note 2, these paragraphs bundle and condense statements and arguments illustrative of the co-presence and tensions between different worths. 22. named after the first chancellor of the federal republic of germany, this political foundation promotes “freedom, liberty, peace, and justice” on the basis of right-leaning christian democratic values. it currently runs projects in 120 countries, including in cambodia (https://www.kas.de/en/about-us; consulted april 21, 2022). 23. paraphrased from figure 4, “summary of challenges to a circular economy,” in the “circular economy strategy and action plan” published by the cambodian ministry of the environment in 2021. 24. max liboiron (2021, 75) has discussed gaia’s scathing critique (https://www.no-burn.org/wp-content/uploads/technical_critique_stemming_the_tide_report.pdf) of the report “stemming the tide” (https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/full-report-stemming-the.pdf), which recommended building incinerators in southeast asia to mitigate marine plastic pollution. neither liboiron nor gaia would be impressed with the scalar imagination on display at waste summit 2020. but while liboiron has elsewhere memorably likened plastic recycling to “putting a band-aid on gangrene” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qglkojz0dhw), ­gaia’s first critique was that “stemming the tide” disregards local recycling efforts. for reasons that bring together geohistory, material agency, the need for shifted subjects, and the problematic of scale-making, it seems that both are right in their own way. as the organizer of the think plastic campaign, at sotheavy, argues, there is no point in taking on the role of “plastic police,” since cambodia relies on lots of plastic products presently without good alternatives (https://www.khmertimeskh.com/50814112/at-sotheavy-award-winning-anti-plastic-pioneer/). yet plastic pollution is omnipresent in cambodia. in a context where the possibility of influencing big producers in foreign countries is practically nil, recycling and cleanups may matter—not because they will solve the issue, but as part of a broader green shift in practices and habits. 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nonscalability: the living world is not amenable to precision-nested scales.” common knowledge 18, no. 3: 505–24. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/485828 volk, tyler 2004 “gaia is life in a wasteland of by-productions.” in scientists debate gaia: the next century, edited by stephen h. schneider, james r. miller, eileen crist, and penelope boston, 27–36. cambridge, mass.: mit press. winans, k., a. kendall, and h. deng 2017 “the history and current application of the circular economy concept.” renewable and sustainable energy reviews 68: 825–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2016.09.123 wolman, abel 1965 “the metabolism of cities.” scientific american 213, no. 3: 179–90. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0965-178 zhang, amy 2020 “circularity and enclosures: metabolizing waste with the black soldier fly.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 74–103. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.08 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 251-273, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.04 a wild boar chase cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 69-98, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.08 a wild boar chase: ecology of harm and half-life politics in coastal fukushima ryo morimoto princeton university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7986-8109 violence does not always take visible form, and not all wounds gush blood. —haruki murakami, 1q84 “contrary to what outsiders fixate on about fukushima,” tengo, a man in his sixties, told me, “the practical obstacle of living here is the wildlife. not radiation!”1 on march 14, 2011, tengo and his family had fled their home in odaka district, minamisōma city, fukushima prefecture, immediately after the second hydrogen explosion at reactor unit 3 of the tokyo electric power company (tepco)–owned nuclear power plant about sixteen kilometers (3.7 miles) southeast. tengo finally returned to his original residence in june 2019, after eight long years of waiting, first for the reduction of ambient radiation levels and then for the rebuilding of his house, which the government-led decontamination measures had destroyed. as a governmentally recognized evacuee, tengo spent eight years making a series of damage claims to tepco regarding the land’s contamination and his loss of livelihood. tengo’s sustained efforts had distilled for him, more than ever, the psychological attachment he had to his natal home, its physical upkeep, and the spiritual ties to his ancestors. according to tengo’s family history and the japanese legal system, this land is registered under his name and he owns it. however, in multispecies worlds, the land always belongs to anything that roams it or finds through it the necessities of life. in this region, macaques, masked palm civets, green pheasants, and wild boars—the focus of this article—have long coexisted with the human locals. wild boars are particularly emblematic of the ecological upheaval (walker 2005) that residents experience as they return to find their predisaster residences rehabituated by animals that once abided by the anthropocentric divisions between home and wilderness (cf. cram 2016). the city of minamisōma reports that the number of wild boars captured in the urban limits jumped from 39 in 2011, to 1,300 in 2014, and to more than 1,700 in 2016. in july 2018, the city launched an online hazard map for visualizing locations where residents had previously spotted wildlife.2 on his return, tengo was confronted with the mismatch between his newly reconstructed, modern-looking two-story house and the desolate wilderness surrounding it. odaka is now, more than ever, the quintessential japanese inaka, or nostalgic countryside. since the official reopening of odaka in july 2016, about 50 percent of its currently registered residents (3,813) had returned to the area by november 2021. while most returnees live in odaka’s central region, tengo’s residence lies in western odaka. here, it has become more common to encounter wildlife and bags of decontaminated waste than any of the 350 or so mostly elderly returnees. as a result, tengo’s daily routine included patrolling his property with an air rifle to chase after wildlife, like the wild boars that roamed around and stole vegetables from the family garden. by 2019—the japanese zodiac year of the boar—wild boars had become the prime resource competition for returnees like tengo. the japanese wild boar, inoshishi (sus scrofa), has a long, intertwined history with humans, ranging from coexistence in the jōmon period (c. 6000 bce) to farm pests in modern times (niitsu 2011). in the japanese cultural imagination, the wild boar is figured as chototsu moushin (relentless rush); individuals born in the year of the boar are believed to possess attributes such as directedness, determination, and adventurousness. against this cultural and historical backdrop, the unruliness of boars—their movement across and beyond coastal fukushima—has come to signify the fallout’s protracted and boundary-crossing impacts, and the social and material harm caused by the state’s efforts to contain the radioactive environment. in and of themselves and in relation to their human cohabitants, the boars’ biotic lives and deaths have challenged the fundamental separation of humans from a radioactive environment that the state-imposed evacuation zoning and the ensuing decontamination project attempt to hold steady. the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns and subsequent governmental efforts to recover and remediate the region have radically changed coastal fukushima’s environment and human and nonhuman geography on a granular scale (o’neill 2019). nonhuman animals that once roamed on the outskirts of land like tengo’s have been taking advantage of the sparse and sporadic presence of humans since the evacuation orders (lyons et al. 2020; nhk 2021). the eight-year retreat of humans has made places like odaka safer for many nonhuman species, even despite the persistent presence of contaminants. dwelling for years in the evacuation zone with only a few decontamination workers to contend with, wildlife in the region seems unthreatened by the human others’ gradual homecoming. taking tengo’s struggle with the wildlife outbreak seriously, i offer an alternative story of fukushima that unsettles the biomedically oriented, anxiety-driven “toxic discourse” of perceived threat (buell 1998). drawing from indigenous studies’ scholarship that calls for the suspension of damage-centered research, which tends to frame its subjects as “broken” (tuck 2009, 409) in a way that disregards their individual experiences, i do not ask how and why locals like tengo are fearful of radiation exposure and the risk of illness later in life. instead, against a narrative of human exposure and nuclear victimhood (stawkowski 2016), i illustrate the broader issue catalyzed by the government-led decontamination policy. i argue that attempting to achieve radiation safety through a strategy of decontamination has produced an ecology of harm in coastal fukushima that renders locals, wild boars, local food chains, and the land itself complicit in the production of nuclear waste. in a collection of ethnographic stories, i chronicle the spatiotemporal unfolding of a multiscalar ecopolitics of contamination and containment. each story illustrates different contact zones (haraway 2008) between locals and wild boars in sōma and minamisōma between 2013 and 2019. with these stories, on the one hand, i uncover how the state’s decontamination policy has enabled the gradual return of evacuees like tengo, the opportunistic incursions of nonhuman animals across the land and their subsequent culling, and an asymmetrical redistribution of contaminants across the local ecology. on the other, the stories reveal how wild boars, in their unconstrained movements, have moved contaminants across the evacuation zones and have, in the process, frustrated the government’s attempt at containment. these stories also illuminate the rupture between humans and the environment, or what i call the half-life politics of nuclear things in coastal fukushima. i use half-life here to signal the discursive and interpretative shift from “life itself” to a radiation-centered life, through which the technoscientifically measurable presence or absence of radiation becomes the central concern. half-life refers not only to the temporal constants for the most prominent contaminants in fukushima—radiocesium 134 and 137—to decrease 50 percent in radioactivity, about two years and thirty years, respectively. it also points to an anthropocentric assumption about the separability of humans from the environment that justifies harming lives, things, relations, value, historicity, and futurity. i argue that the decontamination policy, motivated by the reduction only of human exposure at all costs, proves inherently and coercively violent, as it forces human and nonhuman victims of the fallout—locals, wild boars, and everything else—to coproduce nuclear waste for their survival. key to this issue is the way in which this postfallout ecology has threatened to break a local model of relationality—en—which posits that all animate and inanimate things, animals, and the environment are ineffably connected (goldfarb 2016; nozawa 2015). following kazutaka hashimoto (2013) and casper bruun jensen et al. (2016, 160–161, 164), i use en (縁, or pratyaya in sanskrit) in the colloquial sense of the term used in japanese: a lived experience of an ecological relation brought about by chance or a supernatural force, and a framework of relationality where everything is, by some extrascientific logic, interrelated. while various usages of en exist in japanese to signal different relational arrangements—through blood, marriage, or fictive kinship (goldfarb 2016)—i engage with the term’s broader meaning of “relatedness-as-such,” or an underdetermined connection that does not require qualification. tengo, for example, felt en with boars simply because they happened to inhabit the same area at the same time as him. shunsuke nozawa (2015, 392) describes this expansive model of relationality accordingly: en is “a network of hidden threads and traces, throwing people, things, animals, places, events, and the like on a possible (and perhaps fated) collision course, like rolling dice.” the hidden and underdetermined nature of the connectedness makes en pervasive and mundane in everyday experience. this model of relationality differs from the decontamination policy’s technoscientific one, radioecology, in which the presence or absence of radioisotopes across time, space, and body bespeaks a linkage—or the lack thereof—between humans, nonhumans, and the environment (creager 2013). in postfallout coastal fukushima, the state and technoscientific experts rely on a radioecological model to visualize the postfallout “mutant ecology” (masco 2006), focusing on decontaminating the environment to undo quantifiable entanglements of humans and contaminants. approaching the tepco accident and its remediation efforts as a struggle of competing models of relationality (radioecology and en) illuminates the distributed harms that transcend individual suffering in an irradiated environment. i argue that the state’s efforts to remediate, remove, and contain contaminants through decontamination have both transformed the local ecology—human-boar relations in particular—and made salient the residents’ sense of a presupposed connectedness to the land, ancestors, nonhuman others, and the environment: both their en and its rupture. ethnographically examining how locals encounter the wild boars’ life and death and the region’s shifting landscapes, i explore the assumption behind the state’s half-life politics, which frames contaminants as external to and isolatable from humans. this limited model of relationality has justified the destruction of the local environment and the ineffable en through which residents like tengo attempted to make sense of contaminants as material and semiotic conditions of their postfallout livelihood. fukushima’s nuclearity on march 11, 2011, an enormous tsunami with waves more than fifteen meters high, triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, overcame what was believed to be the robust assemblage of the tepco fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant. through the global circulation of the explosions’ live footage and a series of technoscientific visualizations of the aftermath, fukushima became both the name of nuclear catastrophe and the land of contamination.3 joseph masco’s (2015) critical theory of fallout argues that the global distributions of fallout’s radioactive debris force us to attend to the accumulative environmental effects of the industrial era beyond national, geopolitical boundaries. yet in 2021, more than ten years after the tepco accident, people living outside japan and fukushima prefecture rarely discuss the disaster’s boundless consequences. using masco’s analytic as a starting point, i approach the fallout as a set of processes through which its planetary scope is conceptually delimited or framed as a narrow matter of regional contamination, which over time has manifested as local, quotidian struggles with ecological upheaval. i draw on ethnographic data from sōma and minamisōma cities, located ten to forty kilometers north of the incapacitated plant, where i have been conducting fieldwork since 2013. due to the physical distance from the plant’s location in the futaba region and the weather patterns in march 2011, sōma was relatively less contaminated than minamisōma in the south. some parts of minamisōma fell under the governmental evacuation order, initially determined by physical distance (0–20 kilometers) from the nuclear plant and then later by contamination levels (morimoto 2015). thus, unlike in the other nine municipalities that fell under the total evacuation order in coastal fukushima, many residents have lived in these two cities during and after the accident, despite uncertainty and heightened risks. they have lived through numerous changes in policy, physical environment, and scientific and public discourses. over time, experts have determined that the contamination in areas like minamisōma poses insignificant carcinogenic risks (nomura et al. 2019; tsubokura 2016). figure 1. “result in the special decontamination area.” photo courtesy of the ministry of the environment. hiroshi kainuma (2015) contends that the conundrum of fukushima lies in its “difficulty of telling” (katarinikusa). representing a continually shifting radioactive environment invites technoscientific, ideological, and political appropriations and the elaborations of existing and emerging radiological data (kuchinskaya 2014). for example, any public and legal discussions of radiation require a familiarity with and proficiency in the technoscience of radiation and dosimetry (kimura 2016; morris-suzuki 2015; polleri 2016; sternsdorff-cisterna 2020). this technoscientific exclusionism frames locals as lacking in expertise, although they live through the various, everyday impacts of radiation (wynne 1996). moreover, the routinized, low-dose radiation exposure that residents in large parts of coastal fukushima have been subjected to escapes the logic of causal determinism. its effects do not usually result in immediate or visible biophysiological consequences such as gastrointestinal issues or various cancers (hall and giaccia 2019). finally, the name fukushima has become a politically and morally charged metonym of polarizing discourses, such as proversus anti-nuclear energy (cleveland 2014). central to fukushima’s katarinikusa, its struggle of representation, is the challenge of linking together the competing scales (carr and fisher 2016) of its nuclearity. following gabrielle hecht (2012), i define nuclearity as the technopolitical and ecological distribution of nuclear things across time, space, and human/nonhuman bodies. the distributedness of nuclear things does not render their damaging effects null. rather, it makes contaminants’ impacts less perceptible and spectacular, such that their real, perceived, and accumulative violence fades from broader public attention (nixon 2011). however, as haruki murakami’s quote at the beginning of this essay warns, not all wounds gush blood. to represent the less spectacular consequences of radioactive residues in coastal fukushima, i consider wild boars as “interscalar vehicles” (hecht 2018), or links of multiscalar relations among different actors. trailing the wild boars in and out of evacuation zones and through entanglements with foodstuffs, radioisotopes, infrastructures, and governmental policies, i examine how locals have experienced the shifting postfallout environment. radiation itself, i suggest, is not the only concern. ethnography of fallout radioisotopes are both material and semiotic in nature. their elusive material quality vis-à-vis human experience, imperceptible unless exposure crosses the threshold of human biophysiology, is de facto hypermediated (materially and technoscientifically), probabilistic (undetermined and stochastic), delayed (health effects potentially manifesting later in life as disconnected contiguity), and transgenerational (damaging the molecular structures and/or reproductive cells).4 the liveliness of radioisotopes—radioactivity—is characterized by an unfinished, continuously changing, decaying process that human intervention cannot control. nevertheless, their independence relative to humans makes radioisotopes compelling signatures with which to trace often indiscernible interrelations. the japanese government has relied on radioecology to investigate radiological contaminants and their transboundary movements.5 radioecology uses specific radioisotopes as tracers to map connections between the earth and the atmosphere, linking bodies and biotas across species divides at the elemental level (odum 1959). for radioecologists, the dis/appearance of radioisotopes diagrams an ecological chain of shared radiological legacies among humans, nonhumans, and abiotic factors such as atmosphere and water. yet radioecology constitutes one of many models for describing ecological relations in the postfallout environment. examining radiation with respect to its potential danger to differently situated actors cannot adequately explain the chance encounter between boars in former evacuation zones and individuals like tengo who returned there, despite known risks, to sustain his spiritual and affective connection to the land and his ancestors. thus an ethnography of fallout should aim to provincialize the radiation-centered model of ecological relationality by accounting for the interactions among co-occurring frameworks—scientific, local, or otherwise—used by various actors to conceptualize and represent the environment and its dynamics. to decenter radioecology as one of many models of ecological relations at play in coastal fukushima and to better describe local residents’ own theorization of the postfallout ecology in terms of en, i employ what winfried nöth (1998) and others call “ecosemiotics” (kull 1998; maran 2018; maran and kull 2014). rooted in peircean semiotics, ecosemiotics is an orientation that expands the linguocentric study of semiosis (sign process) by exploring sign-mediated relations between humans and the environment.6 in anthropology, the application of semiotics has mostly been anchored in analytical identifications of signs’ relationship to objects (in terms of their resemblance, contiguity, and convention) in communication and other meaning-making social and cultural practices (parmentier 2009). while cultural semiotics enables analysts to track the “complex layering of contexts at work in any social interaction” (mertz 2007, 343), the analytical precision of such tracking comes with the risk of delimiting what constitutes “the social” or “the cultural” in a way that renders the natural, and the environment as a whole, into an inert referent, or the static context in which the social world unfolds (nöth 2001). although the scope and definition of ecosemiotics remain much debated (e.g., kull 1998; nöth 2001), central to its theorization is the peircean emphasis on nondualism and the continuities between nature and culture (e.g., cp 1.216; 4.318; 5.47; 5.591; 6.202). in an ecosemiotic framework, the environment and its dynamic, more-than-human sign-making processes do not constitute an alternative mode of signification to be analyzed in isolation from the cultural but integral to its construction. it is not precise enough to describe en as simply a “local model.” rather, we must name it an ecosemiotic model, one that offers an account for the dynamism between the natural and the cultural by introducing a third category—the supernatural—as a key mediator of the multiscalar, ever-changing relationship between nature and culture (cf. fernando 2017; viveiros de castro 1998). my application of ecosemiotics in this article lies not in the examination of how humans or other species co-constitute ecological phenomena (maran and kull 2014). instead, i approach en as an ecosemiotic perspective to show how scientific modeling is, though a more conventionally “logical” interpretative habit, only one among many other models of ecological relations. at the same time, i show how locals find that radioecology offers a limited account of more-than-human relations in comparison to the more expansive account that en offers. as such, they experience postfallout coastal fukushima as a site of struggles over representing and determining the dynamic interrelationship between the environment—radioisotopes and boars—and themselves. although residents do not consider radioisotopes and boars passive objects out in the world, or consider these entities to be intrinsically separate or modular, the state’s intervention on boars’ lives and deaths and local actors’ various degree of involvement in it have come to challenge the local model of relationality, en. exploring en as an ecosemiotic model highlights that the harm the fallout has caused flows not only from the (re)distribution of contaminants but also from the processual material, semiotic, and affective consequences of attempting to contain contaminants.7 in coastal fukushima, the state imposition of a radiation-centered ecology has come to delimit en, an ecosemiotic account of the ineffable interrelatedness of all living, dying things and decaying matters. tracing wild boars, i tell the story of local experiences of living in the postfallout environment through an ecosemiotic lens. telling their stories in this way, attending to the boars’ multiscalarity, helps illuminate the tensions between the two competing models of relationality and better articulate the consequences and harms of a sole model (radioecology) being imposed at the behest of another (en). in utilizing this ecosemiotic approach to contour and frame my ethnography, i do not mean to enumerate what contaminants or boars mean to different actors. instead, the approach sheds light on answers to the following interrelated questions: what model of relationality, human relations to wildlife and contaminants, does decontamination itself operate by and regiment? and how does this model impact the locals’ pervasive sense of connectedness, or en, in the postfallout environment? my ethnography reveals the rupture in which the anthropocentric assumption behind the biochemical modeling of the postfallout human-radiation relations has been harming locals, boars, the land, and their sense of these ineffable interrelations. radioactive food chain and surrogate bodies “ever since we evacuated odaka, i learned how expensive buying vegetables is,” tengo complained in the summer of 2013 as he was running errands at a nearby store. “look at these expensive, spoiled bamboo shoots!” he exclaimed. “before the disaster, i would harvest them from my backyard. now i cannot because of contamination. since i don’t take them, boars have been eating them!” for tengo, who had grown up eating the vegetables, wild plants, fruits, and mushrooms growing on his family’s property, buying store products felt strange. what was even stranger for him was the fact that one could buy produce regardless of the season, since for farmers, each season is marked by what they can harvest at that time. “things have changed, and life seems to be more convenient, but i like my old way. maybe this is one of the few points the boar and i would agree on,” tengo laughed. despite tengo’s cheerfulness, the wildlife outbreak in and around the deserted regions has proved a dire problem, especially in coastal fukushima, where many people once farmed their food. frequently, evacuees would visit their abandoned houses to find that boars had harmed their farming grounds and other parts of their property. in april 2019, the city built a special incinerator on the tsunami-inundated land to address the ever-accumulating dead boars hunted or killed by car within the city, which were suspected to be radioactive because they fed off of local produce like tengo’s bamboo shoots.8 what makes wild boars particularly harmful is their undiscriminating appetite, size, and high reproductive potential. although boars are predominantly herbivores, they might also consume roots, seeds, mice, rice, fruits, earthworms, snakes, frogs, and insects, depending on the season and food-source accessibility. nicknamed “the cleaner of the forest” (knight 2006, 49), some boars can grow to a hefty 180 kilograms. although boars maintain a nocturnal schedule when living close to human activity, they are typically diurnal (ohashi et al. 2013). in addition to the potential physical threat that their size and tenacity pose to humans, boars reproduce rapidly. a single, gestating boar can give birth to four to seven offspring on average, up to two times per year. since boars prefer to live in human-disturbed environments rather than on uncultivated land (ralph and maxwell 1984), deserted farmland makes for one of their favorite dwelling sites. hence, not unlike the chernobyl exclusion zone (carver 2019), the coastal region of postfallout fukushima is a boar’s wonderland. one evening over drinks, i asked tengo to elaborate on the dangers of wild boars. “it is my drunken theory,” he mused, “but i think that the boar is eerier than monkeys,” another local pest,9 “because many of us used to eat boar.” he continued, “the accident taught us how we could get exposed internally by eating contaminated foodstuffs, which is more dangerous than being exposed externally. but boars don’t care about contamination. they are very ignorant, and because of that, they can thrive in the area where we aren’t supposed to live and farm. in a way, they are the experimental bodies for us to know the reality of exposure from eating tasty things like mushrooms and wild plants, which we gave up to avoid the risk of exposure.” tengo implies that boars can serve as a potential contaminant as much as they are harmful to the built environment. with his theory of a chain of internal exposure through ingestion, tengo argues that precisely because boars and locals eat similar things, and locals categorize boars as consumable food, it is both easier and more intimate to imagine the ecological transfer of radioactive materials from their bodies to his. unlike other wildlife considered pure pests, the boar constitutes a liminal creature that crosses the boundary between what is beyond humans—the environment—and what can become a part of human bodies via ingestion. “if the government did not tell us about the accident,” tengo continued, “i could have been the boar.” in this statement, tengo engages in what brad bolman (2018, 234) calls “species projection” by imagining the boar as a surrogate body that consumes contaminated foods on behalf of the risk-avoiding people. here, the boar serves as a sentinel species (masco 2006), an environmental monitor of odaka, for tengo, who could have remained oblivious of contamination if the government and tepco had kept the accident hidden from him. tengo’s narrative offers a view into how people entertain the idea of en as “the pleasure and pain of finding meaningful connections, without necessarily invoking a system of rights and obligations” (nozawa 2015, 394). the presence of contaminants in the postfallout environment made boars relatable for tengo at multiple levels. observing the boars eating fresh local foodstuffs reminded him of his severed connections to the land, the sense of seasonality, and the joy of farming. tengo also realized that boars could help him understand the postfallout environment, since they would continue consuming the local harvests and thus make changes in odaka’s contamination visible. ecosemiotically speaking, tengo experienced the presence of boars in his community as pointing to the changes that the tepco accident had caused to his livelihood, the environment, and their interconnection. despite the changes to the texture and valence of that relationship, however, en sustained their connectedness. yet these emerging recognitions of residents’ en to boars have been threatened, as the government identified boars not only as resource competitors to be captured but also as potential contaminants to be isolated from locals like tengo. wildlife incinerator for the aging society the outbreak of wild boars has proved an issue not only in and around the evacuation zone but also in fukushima prefecture as a whole. according to the 2018 prefectural government’s annual report on wildlife management, the number of captured boars in fukushima increased from about 3,000 in 2011 to 20,000 in 2017, causing severe agroeconomic damage ($500,000 and close to $1,000,000, respectively). this surge relates partly to the establishment of a boar-hunting reward system within various municipalities in fukushima. for example, in minamisōma, hunters could receive $200 in exchange for presenting the tail of a captured boar. although initially people wanted to control the number of boars in coastal fukushima to prevent the animals from damaging local habitats and the local economy (since they destroyed the farmland), once captured and killed, their bodies have posed an additional and unexpected problem. “i am not a specialist of wildlife,” said nakata, a structural engineer who works for sōma city. “i do not like them, but now for some strange en, i work with them.” nakata, the chief operator of the $1.6 million wildlife incinerator sōma city built and started operating in april 2016, explained why sōma, rather than other places, became the first to host a wildlife incinerator. in sōma, the boars’ increasing presence became a serious threat to residents and their farms, and the boar problem became prominent much earlier there than in other fukushima regions. sōma is located outside of the government-mandated evacuation zone, and the majority of its 35,000 residents, in addition to outsiders who evacuated to the region, remained in the area following the tepco accident. “but now things are better because with this machine, we can incinerate up to 120 kilograms of boar at a time, so we usually pile up a few for a single operation. this innovation is one-of-a-kind in the world, i know!” nakata declared proudly. located on the property of the waste management center that processes all household waste produced in the city, the incinerator looked new and clean when i visited it in the summer of 2018. previously, the city had destroyed captured boars at a much smaller incinerator originally designed to cremate pets, and, consequently, hunters and staff had to manually break down the bodies of the boars to fit. the government’s ban on eating boars therefore meant that their capture entailed processing the boars in addition to capturing and killing them, all of which took time, skill, and patience—far more time than simply consuming them, as the hunters once had, to destroy them. “this was very problematic,” nakata explained, “since there are not many hunters who were willing to put that much effort, not to mention that the number of licensed hunters in this region and the country has been declining.” also, he noted, “most of them are getting old, like myself.” the city hoped that the larger, newer incinerator might mitigate the overpopulation of boars and disaster-exacerbated issues in the region, which include population decline and an aging society. the incinerator provides a means of streamlining the strenuous labor involved in eradicating wild boars, which no one, including nakata, had imagined would prove a persistent problem. “we thought that the number of boars would decline as time went by,” nakata explained, showing me a chart enumerating the boars processed at the facility. “but even in june 2018, we had already burned 41 boars, and the year before, we cremated 440 of them. the number is still high, considering that we only process boars captured in sōma and shinchi town in the north.” when i asked why, he guessed that it resulted from the progress of decontamination in previously untouched evacuation zones. nakata observed that as time went on, more and more people returned to former evacuation zones, areas they had completely abandoned immediately following the 2011 tepco accident. “to be honest,” nakata lamented, “some of the boars are highly contaminated. i mean, they must be traveling from near the nuclear plant in the south, but if we captured them in our city, then they become our responsibility to dispose of.”10 just because boars were captured and processed within sōma’s geographical boundaries did not mean that they had only dwelled and eaten in sōma, where contamination was less severe than in other parts of coastal fukushima. since there was some chance that the boars brought to the facility had passed through highly radioactive localities and eaten organisms and vegetation from them, it was crucial to locate and distill any radioactive material produced by the cremation process. according to nakata, the incinerator was designed to contain the spread of radioisotopes embedded in boars to cut contaminants out of the ecosystem. “all burnt particulates go through a pipe connected to an air filter and then into a bag in a steel can in a separate room. whatever remains after the operation, like some leftover bones, our workers suck those things up with a vacuum. these vacuumed residues go through another pipe, which is also connected to another steel can in the separate room,” he said, sounding more like a nuclear power plant operator than a city official. the boar outbreak has beleaguered the national government, which aims to signal its successful containment of the nuclear disaster to japan and the rest of the world by gradually reopening the evacuation zones. the boars have posed an additional hurdle to the evacuees, who would like to restart their former, more familiar life. in the 2016 japanese national television documentary titled radioactive forest (hibaku no mori), a local organic farmer in odaka, koichi nemoto, expressed how parts of minamisōma have transformed into wilderness after the fallout: “boars don’t run away at all. they look at me like i am a visitor. . . . wild animals that normally live in nature have taken over our world. i wonder if we are the ones now living in the cage.” humans did not accept life in this cage for too long. instead, locals and the government have been chasing and eradicating boars to make coastal fukushima “safe” again. in this process, the wildlife incinerators in costal fukushima encapsulate the complex interdependence between the government remediation policy, which chases radioactive boars away from the evacuation zone, and locals’ desire for regional recovery, which marks wild boars as “obstacles” to be removed and isolated. for evacuees like tengo and nemoto, the boars have by chance become competition for local resources necessary to their livelihood. nakata, however, viewed boars as both empirical signs and material vehicles for transporting and spreading contaminants in an unruly manner, one that needed to be contained. the difference in the signification of boars to differently situated actors illustrates their confrontation with competing models of relationality in postfallout coastal fukushima. radioactive contaminants slide within and across these multiple human-boar relations and from a radioecological to local (en-inflected) accounts of connectivity. although nakata described his encounter with boar carcasses as en, as a government employee guided by a radioecological framework, his job was to terminate this en to isolate boars from contaminants through incineration. as i will show, governmental efforts to isolate humans and radiological contaminants have forced locals and boars to coproduce nuclear waste outside of the evacuation zones. decontamination and the ecology of harm “i feel sorry for boars,” remarked gotanda, a sōma resident in his sixties who farms the land where he lives and works under nakata. “i know boars are problematic. they destroy our farms and eat everything they can find, but we always coexisted. the fact that they are contaminated, captured, and burnt like this with no mercy now is not their fault, but the fault of us humans.” gotanda recollected how he used to enjoy eating boar and treated the animals with great respect. according to him, in an impoverished region like coastal fukushima, where meat constituted a luxury in the past, boar was a special treat. like many other local farmers, gotanda sees boars as vermin (yūgai chōjyū), especially since the government banned the consumption and circulation of boar meat in most of fukushima and its surrounding prefectures in november 2011. even in 2021, boar meat remains one of the few items that the government regulates, along with mushrooms and wild plants. these regulations continue to deflate the enthusiasm of local hunters. typically, each municipality’s local hunting association is responsible for hunting wild boars. “some of my friends are hunters,” said gotanda, “and one time i was joking to them how the nuclear disaster made them rich because they can get over $200 per boar. then they got angry at me, saying that they no longer enjoy hunting boars.” a few hunters i spoke with in minamisōma confirmed that they no longer took pleasure in chasing boars. they no longer hunted to test their skills and technique, to share the meat with their families and friends, or to confront the vicissitudes of nature. instead, once the government imposed the boar bounty, hunters began to see boars as mere targets to be killed and disposed of, assigned an arbitrary monetary value. one hunter conceded that although some hunters may enjoy the few extra bucks for capturing as many boars as possible, he was not a killer. he did not enjoy “murdering for money.” his boar hunting was solely motivated by a desire to contribute to the region’s recovery. the pleasure and pain of hunting boars, he explained, was not only about exercising a set of skills; it also depended on having luck, which “is beyond one’s control.” lighting a cigarette, he continued, “if you don’t have en, you don’t encounter boars. they are intelligent animals and know how to avoid humans. i happened to have en.” in the postfallout context, however, his en with boars took an ironic turn. by chasing boars to reduce their number and allow for the safe return of evacuees and for local agriculture to thrive again, he has contributed, unbeknown to him, to the further production of radioactive waste. while boars may consume radioactive things in the environment, they are not radioactive to human beings unless humans consume them. incineration, however, transforms boars into nuclear waste by obliterating everything but contaminants. gotanda, who had been cremating one boar after another, was keenly aware of this. as he prepared to show me the whole process of incinerating boars, he shared his feelings of guilt. by producing nuclear waste just to get some extra money from the city in his postretirement job, gotanda felt like he was betraying his fellow residents who wished, like himself, to have never been victimized by the threat of contamination. on the day i visited them, gotanda and his work partner, watanabe, smoothly loaded a couple of boars into a green container and carried it to the side of the incinerator’s bed. then they picked up each boar with a crane and placed each body carefully on the bed. they repeated this process a few times to load four boars to get the weight to about 120 kilograms. once the bed was pushed inside the incinerator’s burning room, the door was shut, and the burner ignited. the monitor panel on the other side of the entry door showed the temperature inside jump to 800 degrees celsius. watanabe explained that the temperature must stay higher than 800 degrees so as not to produce dioxins, a less discussed environmental toxicant by-product of coastal fukushima’s remediation. once the boars were put inside, gotanda told me that he lacked the skill of watanabe, who had been cremating human bodies for a long time. as the fire burned, watanabe intently watched the incinerator’s inside from an eyehole, remaining close despite the sweltering heat. stepping back a few inches, watanabe wiped his face with his sleeve. “cremating boars is much easier than cremating people,” he remarked. “i do not have to stand here for hours, making sure i am not over–burning off the body since we are not interested in keeping boars’ remains intact like we do for humans.” after people’s bodies have been cremated, it is the japanese practice for families and close friends who had en with the deceased to pick out the bones of their loved ones to be placed in a grave later. watanabe implied that since no one should have en to the radioactive boars, there was no need to preserve the physical traces of their bodies. yet as he returned his gaze to the boars turning into bones and then dissolving altogether, watanabe knew that even the $1.6 million machine could not make the radioisotopes the boars embodied disappear from the world. although the incinerator achieved the physical separation of boars and radioisotopes, the boars’ remains, and radioactive potential, were stuck in the air filter and transferred into a bag in a separate room at an even-higher concentration of particles.11 figure 2. disintegrating boar inside the incinerator in sōma city. photo by ryo morimoto. this physical death of boars—and the resultant production of accumulative, accidental nuclear waste—brings to light the ecology of harm lurking beneath the collective recovery projects of coastal fukushima. what i witnessed was wildlife’s confrontation with humans “in relation of shared precarity” (o’neill 2019, 94). it was also an enactment of half-life politics, in that the boars are destroyed to separate humans from radioisotopes in the name of radiation safety. the state’s efforts to gradually decontaminate coastal fukushima have led to chasing boars away from the evacuation zone, only for them to be co-present and in competition with residents and returnees beyond the zone. in the process, boars have become the unruly vehicles of contamination, resisting decontamination’s intended removal of contaminants from people. in transforming the wild boars into nuclear waste by incinerating them, the decontamination policy forced residents to cut their new and old relations to boars to reclaim their territory as safe. by reassembling the relationship between the natural, cultural, and the supernatural realm of fate, coincidence, and cosmic inevitability, decontamination and its half-life politics demanded that residents cut their en to their land, ancestors, and the environment. figure 3. boars’ (radioactive) remains after incineration in sōma city. photo by ryo morimoto. since 2012, the national government has budgeted more than $55 billion for decontamination and the construction and maintenance of radioactive-waste storage sites. in minamisōma, the government declared the decontamination of more than 23.6 square miles of land complete in march 2017. paradoxically, the most visible outcome of decontamination has not been the disappearance of the contaminants from the built environment. instead, it is the emergence of materialized contaminants—decontaminated waste—in the form of black container bags that need to be isolated somewhere (kirby 2019; morimoto 2020). decontamination demands that residents accommodate a newly constructed space where the government isolates the decontaminated waste through the spatial reorganization of their familiar environment. for example, in mid-2017, three years after my conversation with tengo about the bamboo-shoot-eating boars, per decontamination protocol, his house in odaka was demolished, and his farm and its fertile soil, passed down from his ancestors, were removed. as a result of the mass eradication of people’s lived environment, decontamination produced 279 temporary waste-storage facilities at its peak in 2016, and more than 90 million bags throughout fukushima. a few million bags are still waiting to be transferred to an interim waste-isolation site around the nuclear power plant.12 after gotanda and watanabe successfully cremated the four boars, nakata invited me to check out the back room, where the ashes of radioactive boars are kept isolated. “i work for the government, so i should not be saying this to you, but,” nakata said, lowering his voice, “when this bag of ashes gets to a certain height, an expert from the prefecture comes to measure its radiation level. if the level is lower than the regulated 8,000 becquerels per kilogram, it is the city’s responsibility to take care of it as household waste. however, if it is higher, then it is the national government’s responsibility to process it as nuclear waste. it might not be appropriate for me to say this, but i cannot stop hoping that the ashes are highly contaminated. because if they are, we do not have to keep them in our city.” here, nakata struggles to deal with the two competing models of relationality the tepco accident and its remediation have staged. his responsibility as a government employee was to incinerate boars: because this act produced nuclear waste, it threatened nakata’s en as a sōma resident to the land, its people, and the environment. by wishing the boars’ remains to be highly radioactive and thus the responsibility of the national government, nakata also denied sōma’s association with contaminants, as if sōma was separate from the broader ecology of coastal fukushima. free-roaming boars that elude the decontamination-cum-reopening policy transfer radioisotopes across geographical boundaries. their movements reveal the limits of the state’s highly localized approach to the postfallout ecology. while demolishing tengo’s house and removing the soil passed down over generations, decontamination and its half-life politics chased supposedly radioactive boars out of the exclusion zones. it has also forced increasingly disinterested hunters to kill boars and for nakata, gotanda, and watanabe to cremate their carcasses and disavow their remains. through this sprawling chain of harm, decontamination has shattered locals’ presupposed en, while it left leveled purportedly decontaminated land, wildlife incinerators, and radioactive boar ash. half-life politics of nuclear things in the summer of 2018, i visited thomas hinton at fukushima university. hinton had previously researched the irradiated environment around chernobyl, using wildlife as radiotracers. inspired by tengo’s provocations and gotanda’s anxieties, i wanted to learn about boars’ potential for modeling an irradiated environment. as i started describing my research, hinton interrupted me, shocked. “why are people killing boars?” he gasped. for him, the liveliness of boars was fundamental to his research uncovering the state of the radioactive environment and its changes. hinton oversees a group of scientists who follow the movements of wild boars to track the ecology of the contaminated environment in coastal fukushima. a collar-like device they clasp around the boars’ necks monitors the boars’ movements through gps and the ambient radiation through a dosimeter. this device enables his team to use boars as a tracer, and helps them understand the transfer of external radiation levels to a mammalian body. according to hinton, the incorporation of radiation from the environment into mammalian biology is scientifically understudied, since the global scientific community, such as the international commission on radiological protection,13 has conventionally treated contaminated environments as something to be modified, decontaminated, and quarantined. in this paradigm, the environment constitutes an object of intervention, an abject entity that can and should be conceptually and geographically partitioned into safe zones and radioactive ones. in an article, hinton et al. (2004, 333) criticize this prevalent anthropocentric framing of radiation safety: “the fact that humans are among the most sensitive mammals, and therefore the most sensitive species, has led, in part, to the dogma that if we protect humans, then other biota are protected as well.” their critique emphasizes the central issue of anthropocentrism underlying the japanese government’s decontamination policy. its narrow focus on minimizing the risks only with respect to human exposure fails to account for the fact that humans exist within a more extensive, intertwined ecological system that includes nonhuman biota with which fallout residues could travel haphazardly.14 locally in fukushima, this failure has manifested as the residents’ confrontation with the scientific model of relationality, which draws a physical division between humans and contaminants. this delimited model justified the half-life politics that destroyed the residents’ prefallout livelihoods and killed the wild boars while also cutting a pervasive sense of connectedness among people, things, and the environment. my ethnography suggests that the human-centered efforts to remediate the irradiated environment inheres a process of delimiting and regimenting ecological relations that ultimately causes social and distributed harm. by ecosemiotically examining the competing models of relationality propelled by the tepco accident and its remediation, i have shown how, more than just biological monitors, wild boars represent the accident’s protracted aftermaths, including the banal distribution of radiological harm and human efforts to distance themselves from those harms. following “radioactive” boars’ lives and deaths upends the anthropocentric framing of the environment and of contamination itself wrapped up in the government’s decontamination policy, in which concerns for human exposure condemn anything deemed potentially radioactive as the target of removal and disavowal. per this half-life politics, radioisotopes are the agents of contamination, external to humans and capable of being isolated. this toxic discourse fails to consider the embeddedness of radioisotopes in the en that entangles humans and nonhumans in a given environment, however arbitrary and magical such connection is felt to be. while radioecology, as a technoscientifically oriented model of relationality, has enabled the visualization of cross-boundary movements of contaminants through boars, this model competes with the more inclusive model with which locals conceptualize their supernatural connections to their land, ancestors, and environment. in turn, decontamination and its half-life politics fracture this local sense of relationality while framing the presence of contaminants in a specific locale as the only issue to result from the tepco accident. those who live in postfallout fukushima critique this radiation-centered approach for its failure to honor the historical conditions that subjected coastal fukushima to the fallout. as a lifelong resident of minamisōma, a city that did not host the nuclear power plant but was nonetheless harmed by it (sakurai and kainuma 2012), tengo reiterated the importance of talking about the structural inequality wrapped up in the fallout that decontamination cannot redress: “it is called the ‘fukushima nuclear disaster.’ with the name, no one takes any accountability for the fallout, aside from us who have to live with the name.” since the 1970s, the tokyo electric power company has operated the nuclear power plant in coastal fukushima to supply energy, exclusively, to the greater tokyo region (akasaka and oguma 2012; kainuma 2011). by underscoring this asymmetry, tengo pushes outsiders to consider the tepco accident and its decade-long remediation as more than a series of discrete events following an unprecedented radiological crisis. rather, the tepco disaster is a latent condition of what ward churchill and winona laduke (1986) call “radioactive colonialism,” through which certain groups of humans and nonhumans, in their en, bioaccumulate radiological harm and are rendered exposable. like the uranium mines and nuclear complexes located on indigenous lands throughout north america (e.g., brugge et al. 2006; erickson and chapman 1993; kuletz 1998), in coastal fukushima, wildlife incinerators and radioactive boar ash constitute the material legacy of a half-life politics’ anthropocentric delimitation of human-environment relationality. tengo disagrees with this model, claiming that “radioactive materials are everywhere, and we are always already contaminated regardless of what we sacrifice or destroy to try distancing ourselves from them.” echoing tengo, i suggest that the discourse on fukushima and the tepco accident ought to move beyond concerns over individual radiation dose and address its expansive distribution of harm, across species and abiotic factors and through the coercive severing of their en. willing and unwillingly, wild boars have been cutting across the artificial boundary between purity and danger that governmental decontamination policies have articulated. to protect humans from exposure in a narrowly defined way, the wild boar chase will continue, disrupting human and nonhuman en. the chase makes local people, boars, and any fallout residue they consume accidental collaborators in nuclear waste production, which will be provisionally dislocated and deferred to another timescape for future generations and other species of coastal fukushima to confront. the wild boar chase suggests that even though, in theory, fallout “formally links human actions, technological capabilities, atmospheres and ecologies in a new formation of contamination” (masco 2015, 140), this hardly marks the end of the story. in practice, humans try to undo such links and disavow contamination while disregarding existing en among humans, nonhumans, and the environment. ecosemiotics affords us the possibility of grasping continuities in the sign-mediated human environment. it also provides a framework for articulating the specificities of en, which offers a way to make sense of the ineffable connectivity between humans and nonhumans that a scientific model like radioecology fails to capture fully. attending to local theorization—a way people speculate some connectivity between the nature and culture—allows us to explore non-hegemonic interpretive habits like en, which exist alongside and in tension with technoscientific ones. in coastal fukushima, en provides an entryway into a field that provincializes toxicity as but one model of relations among people, things, and matters. en allows residents to problematize the scientification of the postfallout environment and the state usage of what might otherwise appear to be an “objective” and “factual” model as the dominant technique for understanding local ecology, its apparent ruptures, and efforts to redress those ruptures. yet radioecology, i have shown, makes invisible and fails to respect residents’ spiritual connections to place, land, and the environment central to how they understand the local ecology they live in and through which they make meaning. accounting for the perspective of en and provincializing technoscientific models of the environment unsettle the damage-centered toxic discourse with which individual suffering and its representations become the sole empiric of the human-environment relatedness. it locates harm not at exposure, the moment of entanglement with the environment (cf. murphy 2017). instead, in an en-inflicted universe, harm emerges as a déjà vu of the always already ecological relations (mcclintock 2014) and augments through the often futile efforts to separate, (re)distribute, defer, and diffuse responsibility from the environment. an ethnography of fallout considers the material, semiotic, and affective processes of a postfallout world through which various models of relationality compete and different lives, things, and their relations may be harmed through human attempts to detach themselves from contaminants and to disavow toxic legacies. approaching toxins ethnographically marks an act of remembrance, as we remind ourselves that toxicants can only visualize a limited version of interrelations between humans and the environment. there is always more. abstract this article explores how the japanese state’s radiation-centered approach to ecological redress in postfallout costal fukushima impacts a local framework of relationality called en/縁. by ethnographically tracing encounters between humans and wild boars in the region through an ecosemiotic lens, the essay articulates the differences and tensions between en and the model of relationality that the government’s decontamination policy enforces. in so doing, i decenter and unsettle the dominance of biomedically oriented, anxiety-driven toxic discourses of radiological threat. against the narratives of anthropocentric exposure and nuclear victimhood that tend to encircle fukushima since the nuclear accident, the article illuminates the multiscalar and semiotic issue that decontamination efforts catalyze. the essay argues that narrowly defining safety in terms of distancing radioisotopes from humans engages what i call a half-life politics of nuclear things, through which locals, wild boars, and the land itself are made complicit in the production of nuclear waste. [fukushima; nuclear disaster; contamination; decontamination; radiation; wildlife; ecosemiotics; ecology] 要旨 東日本大震災と大津波に起因する東京電力福島第一原子力発電事故は地域の環境、さらに人と自然との関わりに甚大な影響を及した。事故後耕作放棄地となった土地には野生動物が進出し、汚染された作物を食べ被曝し、原発避難民のスムーズな帰還や、帰宅民の生活を脅かしている。この論文は福島県浜通り地域に出没するイノシシと、それに日々対応する南相馬、相馬市民との震災後の関係性を追い、日本政府による測定可能な放射線の有無に特化した環境除染政策がもたらす『縁』という世界観への影響を考察する。さまざまの物事を分断し続けている原子力災害を『縁』という万物のつながりの視点からアプローチすることにより、人間と放射性物質の関係性を生物的ダメージに特化して語るフォールアウト関連の学術的思考や、事故後の政策に見られる科学技術、汚染中心の『半減期的政治』とは異なる人と自然との関係性の考え方の重要性を示し、人間のみの被曝を減らす環境除染政策の問題点を論じる。 [キーワード：原子力災害、除染、汚染、野生動物、放射線、放射能、福島] notes acknowledgments my deep gratitude goes to the residents of minamisōma and sōma for allowing an outsider like myself to be part of their postfallout lives. i thank chris nelson for his generous guidance, as well as three anonymous reviewers. i had many opportunities to share earlier versions of the article. i would like to acknowledge andrew gordon and the edwin o. reischauer institute of japanese studies at harvard university, rihan yeh and the members of the linguistic anthropology lab at the university of california, san diego, rob nixon, anne mcclintock, and the participants of princeton’s environmental humanities and social transformation colloquium, as well as erika milam and angela creager at the program in history of science at princeton. finally, i thank hollianna bryan and beth semel for their editorial assistance. all errors are my own. 1. the article is linked to a digital collection hosted by the japan disasters digital archive. https://jdarchive.org/en/collection/267. 2. see https://city-ms-chozyu.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=a3dfb 082665847e38c9e39cfe44042b6. 3. the national government initially designated 444 square miles of coastal fukushima (1,143 square miles) as the mandatory evacuation zone. as a result, some have argued that no humans, especially children and young women, should be living in fukushima. see, for example, koide and field 2019, yamaguchi and muto 2012, caldicott 2014, and ian thomas ash’s 2013 documentary film, a2-b-c. 4. see, for example, beck 1987; brown 2015; erikson 1991; jorgensen 2017; and petryna 2013. 5. although it is beyond the scope of this article, the history of radioecology and its development through the atomic bomb testing in the pacific and in the unceded lands of native north america during the cold war period needs to be decolonized (deloughrey 2013; worster 1994). 6. this theoretical stance resonates with multispecies studies (e.g., kirksey and helmreich 2010; kohn 2013; haraway 2008) in its analytic focus on more-than-human actors and domains. however, the aim of this article is to highlight the local theorization of the postfallout ecology. i use en as the main local and distinct perspective, since their concerns are not multispecies ones: what relationship is more than human, how have radio isotopes and boars come to be entangled with human others, or how does such an entanglement change what it means to be human? instead, the residents in this article ask: how does the state’s decontamination policy contest their always already assumed general interconnectedness, and how does this affect them and their livelihoods? 7. i thank a reviewer for pointing out newell’s (2018) critical analysis of the affective dimension to a semiosis. similarly, i have discussed the significance of a psychological process, which is missing in the peircean conceptualization of sign process (morimoto 2012). 8. fukushima prefecture’s radiological monitoring results of wildlife can be accessed here: https://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/site/portal/wildlife-radiationmonitoring1.html. 9. npr’s 2020 special series on recovering fukushima covered a story of wild monkeys in minamisōma: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/904356338/in-rural-fukushima-the-border-between-monkeys-and-humans-has-blurred 10. see saito et al. 2019 for the data of wild boars’ internal exposure in sōma. 11. the data released by minamisōma in 2021 indicate that the total radioactivity (cesium 134 and 137) of the ash produced by incinerating wildlife was over 135,000 becquerels: https://www.city.minamisoma.lg.jp/portal/shi_joho/shinsaikanrenjouhou/houshasen monitaringukekka/kankyo_monitoring/10098.html 12. see the ministry of the environment’s environmental remediation website for details at http://josen.env.go.jp/en/. 13. the icrp largely ignored non-human organisms as the targets of protection until the publication of icrp 108 in 2008. see the discussion on “reference animals and plants” here at https://www.icrp.org/publication.asp?id=icrp%20publication%20108 14. recent research by cunningham et al. 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original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.08 intercorporeal togetherness: on russian blind activists’ technology of disability inclusion cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 486-512, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.08 intercorporeal togetherness: on russian blind activists’ technology of disability inclusion svetlana borodina columbia university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3256-5463 in fall of 2016, blind activists organized a seminar for blind and visually impaired people in yekaterinburg, russia. the participants came from all across the country, arriving by plane and train. short-staffed, the organizers and i started asking friends to help with the task of picking up the participants as they arrived. i addressed my request to vika,1 a sighted person with a car. a kind and reliable woman with no prior experience of communicating with blind people, vika responded quickly but used a surprisingly stern tone: “i will help out on one condition: i will drive them wherever you need me to, but do not make me talk to or interact with anyone.” by “anyone,” she meant the blind person i had asked her to pick up. since my arrival in yekaterinburg earlier that year, vika had repeatedly expressed her admiration for my research, as well as for the social project of the people i worked with—that of inklyuziya, disability inclusion. she would tell me time and again: “of course inklyuziya is a great idea; we should all live together.” when an opportunity arose, however, she chose to wall herself off and refused to engage socially with a disabled person. eventually, vika and i agreed that we would pick up three people, one after another, and that i would do the talking while she did the driving. i do not think vika uttered a single word or turned her head even once toward her passengers that night. in driving these blind participants to their hotels (which, to her credit, she did for no compensation), vika was helping me, her sighted friend—not her blind passengers. to the contrary, she refused to step out of her comfortable and familiar sighted world for any one of them. according to my interlocutors, a loosely connected network of blind and partially sighted inklyuziya activists in russia, this refusal to engage is a marker of “fake inklyuziya” (nenastoyashchaya inklyuziya, emic term). considered against the foil of vika’s expressed support of inklyuziya, it exemplifies a problem that many disability inclusion practitioners, professionals, activists, and allies worried about—that inklyuziya exists in words only: although events are held, programs are completed, and abled people praise inklyuziya in public, few practical aspects change, and abled and disabled people still “do not do anything together” (nichego ne delayut vmeste). in the discrepancy between words and practice, they saw the manifestation of the ineffectiveness of hegemonic technologies of inklyuziya (see also karayeva 2019). for them, it was a sign that “nothing has actually changed.” in this article, i analyze how inklyuziya activists and practitioners in russia create contexts for “real inklyuziya” (nastoyashchaya inklyuziya, emic term) by orchestrating engagements based on interactive corporeality (csordas 2008; see also jackson 2021, chap. 3; meyer 2017; thompson 2020), instead of circulating information about disability inclusion or mandating inclusivity at the organizational level. i conceptualize their chosen inklyuziya technology as intercorporeal togetherness.2 the concept of intercorporeal togetherness helps me address the work of shaping social habits—among people both with and without disabilities—of corporeally constituted responsiveness and reciprocity across the dis/ability divide. this togetherness characterizes a form of bodily engagement whereby participants—blind and sighted, abled and disabled—become present and available for one another, commensurable as social participants, thereby cultivating the present and future potentiality of sharing the world on more equitable terms. my use of maurice merleau-ponty’s concept of the intercorporeal instead of the intersubjective is intentional. i conceptualize social actors as bodyminds—defined as “the imbrication (not just the combination) of the entitites usually called ‘body’ and ‘mind’” (price 2015, 269; see also schalk 2018, 5)—to highlight the inseparable unity of the corporeal and meaning-making in humans as they participate in social worlds. bodyminds are historical, shaped by what pierre bourdieu (1977, 78) called the habitus: “history turned nature,” or “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations.” in this vein, the use of intercorporeal, rather than intersubjective, helps me capture the role of habitus as a lingering corporeal meaning-making apparatus through which people orient toward, away from, and in parallel to each other, whether in concert or despite their conscious decisions, choices, and rationally made commitments. in my interlocutors’ rendition, intercorporeality, the plane of dis/connected and dis/connecting bodyminds, is where disability inclusion and exclusion are differentiated and realized. in explaining intercorporeal processes, christian meyer, jürgen streek, and j. scott jordan (2017, xvi–xvii; emphasis in original) define them as activities in which the single body’s agency is subsumed by the production of a we, and would be pointless without the simultaneous participation of an other … . my i is entangled right from the beginning in a corporeal culture that is not necessarily of my own making, even though i may perpetuate it through my own way of making a body, the way(s) in which i have learned to make a body, with varying degrees of consciousness or self-awareness of what it is that i do. in this sense, the blind instructors and guides i describe in this essay introduce new impulses and movements into the coordinated and learned choreography of exclusion (see also manning 2016)—in this way, they actualize togetherness. specifically, they incorporate new movements, sights, smells, and paces of engagement that their abled students may not have encountered and that help them discover the commensurability between abled and disabled subjects. by using the same grammar of bodymind communication—breathing together, walking, joking, and guiding their abled audiences through the discovery that their blind guides are perceived and perceiving (by way of corporeal sensations)—they establish the possibility of a new moral universe, one in which disabled and abled people inhabit the same sociality (friedner and kusters 2014), oriented toward each other (green 2014), commensurable yet not the same.3 disability exclusion, with ableism as its driver, is adopted corporeally in bodyminds. bodyminds rarely, on their own, reorient toward disability inclusion, even when encouraging laws and protections exist. one way, though, to shift these bodyminds and align them with the ideals of inclusivity and antiableism is to employ the inklyuziya technology i call intercorporeal togetherness. bodies are never a private matter, as gail weiss (1999) argues. they form, grow, hurt, and heal together, en-acting themselves within and in attunement with their environments (manning 2016). by foregrounding bodyminds as forces and grounds of sociality, i point out that material and sensory anchors act as mechanisms of systemic exclusion and inclusion, thus contributing to anthropological scholarship on the making and breaking of the collective by sensory means (hammer 2019; hankins 2014). i show how they serve as platforms for exclusion’s continuous insidious and anonymized operation and, at the same time, how working with them opens up the potential to reconfigure sociality. i collected ethnographic material for this article during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2017 in yekaterinburg, the capital of the sverdlovsk region in russia, where i grew up. the characters and vignettes originate from my work with blind activists for inklyuziya and their sighted allies, as well as from my engagements with a preexisting network of sighted family members, friends, and acquaintances. innumerable hours of participant observation, informal chats, and more formalized interviews helped me understand the nuances, victories, and failures of inclusion work in the city. i collaborated with the designers and instructors of the workshop discussed below and participated in the data collection (interview and transcription) for the manuals for blind guides and instructors analyzed in the second to last section. as the blind people with whom i worked theorized disability from their position, and as they talked explicitly about disability (i.e., not blindness as such), i choose to retain their vocabulary and to reflect on its limits. on disability inclusion in russia disability inclusion is a concept known throughout the world and constitutes the subject of international agreements, including the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (uncrpd). although it acts as a powerful political marker of modernity and progress, inclusion has little analytical value. that is, interpretations of the various forms in which inclusion and equal participation materialize differ from one context to the next (as do those of disability exclusion). with this as a premise, in the present article, i adopt the interpretation of inklyuziya developed and practiced by a group of blind activists in yekaterinburg. cultivating disability inclusion in a country with a long history of institutionalized disability exclusion, such as russia, makes for a complex riddle to solve. since the 2010s, the russian federal government has taken a turn toward accessibility and disability inclusion: in 2008, russia signed the uncrpd; in 2011, the government launched accessible environment, a federal program that allocated unprecedented funds to making spaces, services, and information accessible to people with disabilities; in 2012, russia ratified the uncrpd; and in 2014, the legislature introduced significant policy changes. these changes included banning disability-based discrimination, introducing the concept of habilitation, mandating accessibility, and requiring special training for employees of the penal system concerning how to observe the rights of suspected, charged, and convicted people with disabilities. a growing number of inklyuziya-themed ngo projects have received support through reputable domestic funding sources. in addition, prominent museums and cultural institutions have launched departments and introduced positions tasked with developing disability inclusion programming. even so, in 2016–2017, at the time of my fieldwork, vibrant debates occurred about whether anything was “actually changing” and how to encourage people with and without disabilities to engage with each other. in 2016, vika still refused to say a word to the blind passengers riding in her car. scholars have provided ample critiques of inclusion initiatives in neoliberal settings: the use of disability representation as a marker of feel-good and depoliticized diversity (friedner 2015); the reliance on tokenism and further neglect of disabled people whose productivity cannot be maintained easily with the help of available prosthetic technologies (mitchell and snyder 2015); and the disregard for the cost of domestic inclusionism that relies on outsourced geopolitical warfare and exploitative workfare (puar 2017). following anthropologists and others who have critiqued institutional inclusion (ahmed 2012; jaffe-walter 2016; keating and mirus 2003), i scrutinize the often undertheorized intercorporeal aspects of disability-inclusion initiatives, offering an account of how disability exclusion transcends the power of political decisions and laws. in so doing, i explore the planes of life that are unreachable by public policies (ghosh 2018; spade 2015) and that extend beyond the familiar strategies of liberal disability-rights activism, identity politics, and the fight for better laws (see also puar 2017). among these planes are culturally configured sensoriums (geurts 2003; hirschkind 2006), corporeal habits, and body logics (brahinsky 2012). postsocialist russia offers a unique environment for developing disability-inclusion initiatives. on the one hand, it aligns with global development discourses through its proclaimed commitment to accessibility, inclusion, and the independence of people with disabilities (hartblay 2019; see also kohrman 2005). on the other hand, legacies of soviet paternalism (mladenov 2018), such as depoliticizing disability and measuring a person’s worth by their capacity to contribute productive labor, remain in full force. the inklyuziya technology i analyze in this essay results from this entanglement of lingering legacies and future orientations. it reflects the kind of people with disabilities that russians welcome and wish to include in that inklyuzivnayarossiya (inclusive russia) of the future—independent social participants, skilled in seamless social engagements, and capable of eliminating (or masking) awkwardness, failure, and radical bodymind difference from their social world. this inklyuziya technology has two notable aspects. it not only responsibilizes individuals to “make russia inclusive” through changing their behaviors (see also matza 2018; rivkin-fish 2005; zigon 2010) but, in promoting inklyuziya, it also trains people in prioritizing a specific form of sociality—namely, the sociality of anonymous strangers. these are the strangers that provide services, drive taxis, greet guests at hotel reception desks, pass by on the street, check tickets on the train, sell and buy things. it is the spontaneous, corporeal reaction of strangers unfamiliar with the affect and knowledge grounded in intimate family histories or membership in shared communities that many inklyuziya programs i observed take as a sign of whether inklyuziya is real and enacted.4 embodied disability exclusion beginning in the early days of my fieldwork, i regularly received messages from abled acquaintances and friends about their unexpected encounters with blind or deaf people in the city: “just saw a blind person in a pharmacy [sic]”; “two deaf persons are sitting next to me in a restaurant”; and “you will not believe it! on my way to work, a blind woman stepped into the elevator where i was [zashla ko mne v lift]. what was she doing in that office building?” although such messages provide a lot to unpack, one aspect particularly interests me: my sighted and hearing texters’ surprise at discovering that blind and deaf people shared the same city and engaged in the same ordinary activities, such as buying medication, dining, and working. this section serves as a response to those messages, as it offers a brief outline of the tools that make the metaphors of living “in parallel worlds” (phillips 2010) and “on the other side of the moon” (kurlenkova and nosenko-stein 2018) ring true for abled people when such tropes are applied to people with disabilities in russia. in other words, i take a step back to denaturalize the local expectation among abled people in russia not to engage in public with people with disabilities (see also titchkosky 2011). i also seek to show what sustains the doxa—which bourdieu (1977, 164) characterizes as “adherence to the world, seen as self-evident and undisputed,”—that living apart is something natural, and thus ahistorical. the surprise noted by my abled friends is not rooted in any “natural” characteristics of their bodies in relation to those of other people; instead, it is rooted in their skilled bodies. their surprise is conditioned by iterative, embodied experiences of disability exclusion under a regime of compulsory able-bodiedness in russia (mcruer 2006). they have developed a sense, or habitus—a mixture of entrained perception, habituated action, and the ability to improvise within a given field of contextually appropriate actions (bourdieu 1977; see also ingold 2011)—of living in a world monopolized by other abled subjects, or those who manage to pass as such. if disability-rights activists in the united states fought “for meaningful spatial citizenship” and the right to “take up public and private spaces such as homes, workplaces, universities, restrooms, courthouses, and cities” (hamraie 2017, 9), russian disability activists have historically employed different tactics: reclaiming their civic worth through engagement in productive labor (galmarini-kabala 2016; shaw 2017), which often took place in segregated locations. moreover, the chronic inaccessibility of the built environment, insufficient funding for legislated programs, lack of motivation for abled people to redistribute their privilege, and perpetuated ableism led my abled acquaintances repeatedly to confirm for themselves that there were indeed no disabled people at the places they frequented—gyms, concert halls, office buildings, universities, shopping malls, movie theaters, restaurants, clubs, and schools. in what follows, i provide further context for these factors of exclusion. in russia, a shift toward broader physical accessibility—the ability of the environment to support the needs of all users—began, for the most part, in the 2010s. since the launch of the accessible environment program and the ratification of the uncrpd in 2011 and 2012, respectively, russia’s built urban environments have changed, although not always toward ensuring accessibility by wheelchair users or people with other disabilities. cases are frequent of what cassandra hartblay (2017) describes as check-mark accessibility, whereby required accessibility artifacts are installed and made visible, but owing to poor execution do not, in practice, succeed in facilitating access for target users. many of the remaining inaccessible buildings, bathrooms, and street infrastructures push people with mobility impairments into their homes (hartblay 2019; phillips 2010). in privately owned or managed spaces, such as workplaces, companies must ensure access to entrances and exits, freedom of movement, and accessible restrooms for all employees. reworking the spatial organization and figuring out accessible design solutions demands substantial investment, and this serves as a rationale for employers to avoid employing people with disabilities (podtserob 2019). working remotely from home may be an option, yet it also reinforces the assumption that disabled people do not belong and cannot survive in the “normal” world; that having “no place” in mainstream work environments, their place is instead at home or in sheltered workshops. similarly, segregated education, whether at home or in specialized schools, again lowers the chances of embodied encounters among people with and without disabilities. importantly, specialized schools (often operating as boarding schools) are few and tend to be located in so-called satellite towns at a significant distance from urban centers; one such school in the zabaykalskiy region is situated more than three hundred miles away from the regional capital. such de facto segregation manufactures ignorance among disabled and abled people concerning how spaces and lives might be shared and in-habited together. the social aspect of accessibility also does not function as intended. there is a low probability that abled people will cross paths and interact with disabled people at major socialization sites such as school or work. although legislative and practical changes have occurred toward mainstreaming, insufficient numbers of schools offer functional solutions to provide quality education to disabled children. additionally, the stereotype that only children so-called severe forms of disabilities are “fit” for inclusive education in mainstream schools persists, fueling the stigma associated with disabilities (foundation to support children in difficult life situations 2017). in practice, this persistent ableism manifests in the bullying, including parental bullying, of children with disabilities and their caregivers (a recent example was reported by tvrain.ru 2021). in addition to inaccessibility and distancing, stigma against people with disabilities, a lack of motivation among abled people, and insufficient knowledge and resources to change conventional—often exclusionary—practices only reinforce the doxa of abled-only spaces for participation and socialization. consider workplaces. the fines for violating the disability quotas for employers remain meager—between $65 and $130 usd (conversion on april 11, 2021). additionally, employers and applicants alike possess limited knowledge of relevant employment legislation and the employment rights and duties of people with disabilities. one might argue that this enduring ignorance is not accidental but manufactured (hamraie 2013). as a result, technologies of non-performative inclusion—acts that are publicly perceived as impactful while their exact purpose is to not bring something into effect (ahmed 2012, chap. 4)—proliferate. to avoid paying fines, some companies practice the so-called dead souls method of offering a minimum salary to a person with disabilities in exchange for their appearing on the books. in reality, the officially employed person with disabilities is not asked to perform any service or labor; they deliver value to the company simply by providing their name and disability status for company records, thus ensuring its compliance with russian law. this practice only further entrenches the already deep-seated stereotypes that depict people with disabilities as incompetent, wasteful, inefficient, and potentially problematic employees (kurlenkova 2017). disorienting encounters one of the inklyuziya-promoting projects of a yekaterinburg-based ngo founded and run by blind activists (who also organized the seminar i discussed in the opening vignette) was an educational workshop offered to abled audiences, led by instructors with different kinds of disabilities. the goal of this workshop (which typically consisted of six ninety-minute sessions with different instructors) was to train abled participants to interact comfortably with people with disabilities, teaching the former “the basics of inclusion” (osnovy inklyuzii). the project was designed by blind activists and their sighted allies and funded by a reputable domestic public funding source, which added credibility to the workshop. instructors included a blind person, a wheelchair user, a deaf person, two persons with mental disabilities who teamed up with two nonprofit workers, and an abled psychologist. some of the instructors were inklyuziya activists (they were directly involved in designing and implementing inklyuziya activities in russia), while others identified as allies (participating only when their time and availability allowed while mostly supporting the activists in spirit). instructors organized their classroom time as they saw fit; there was no oversight of course design, from either the funding agency or the project administrators. the project administrators and the freelance instructors all received compensation for their work from the funds secured for the project. the abled participants in these workshops were recruited from various public institutions (medical establishments, higher education institutions, transportation companies) and private businesses (the hospitality sector). finding participants was not difficult since completing this free program provided participants with a certification in continuing education (often mandated for public employees every five years). additionally, the program generally received favorable evaluations: of 390 surveyed graduates of the workshop, 94.9 percent remarked that they gained new ideas from this training; 98.7 percent responded that what they learned in the workshop was helpful and applicable in their professional and everyday life. importantly, having instructors with disabilities helped this provider stand out in the crowd of other inclusion trainings, often designed and delivered by abled people. in providing substantial freedom to instructors to determine the content of their lessons, the program’s designers maintained that the value of the workshop lay in its experiential dimension—not merely its provision of information. alex, one of the organizers and an instructor and blind person himself, explained this to me: “students can google the instructions on how to act politely toward people with disabilities, but what they cannot google is those two hours of in-person interaction with a living, real person with disabilities.”5 in attributing high importance to embodied interactions between abled and disabled people, alex suggested that a regular lack of such encounters and reciprocal exchanges fuels ableism and routinized disability exclusion. in his account, as abled russians do not have (and do not seek out) opportunities to encounter people with disabilities in their daily lives, they perpetuate the somatic norm (ahmed 2012) of evading such contacts. people with disabilities, in turn, become accustomed to feeling unwelcome in mainstream spaces, thus learning to avoid them or adopting the mindset of engaging in a perpetual struggle for the chance to be there (naberushkina 2012). to solve this problem, the workshop designers prioritized delivering to their abled students an embodied experience of interacting with people with disabilities, rather than any curated information about such experiences. in other words, the workshop designers sought to cultivate the conditions of intercorporeal togetherness. to better communicate the workshop’s mechanics and textures, i now turn to one of the sessions led by alex, a blind instructor. as alex and i walked into the classroom, the chatter stopped. alex turned and whispered to me, with a smile in his voice: “they even stopped breathing, do you hear?” alex is quick to pick up on the change of mood around him. he knows how to interpret modulations in intonation, breathing rates, muscle tones, silences, and laughter as markers of feelings and moods. the visual cues i noticed confirmed what alex had sensed, so i added: “yeah, and they are also watching our every movement.” alex’s task, then, was to address this bodymind apartness manifested in cautious mutual surveillance. from the beginning, the students watched us in silence, staring at us and, in a sense, putting us on display (hammer 2019, 79; see also garland-thomson 2009). some stared overtly and intensely, while others would look away when my eyes would catch them watching us, only to focus on us again when i would look away. they appeared stiff. their comportment further fueled my doubt about whether they actually wanted to be there—after all, their attendance at the workshop was mandated by their company’s administration. as the students told us later, this was their first meeting with a blind person in which they had to be responsive and could not simply disappear or observe from afar as a regular stranger might do. many felt at a loss for what to do and “how to be” (kak byt’) around a blind person. it was our first meeting with these particular students, too—a group of middle-aged and (at least by appearance) abled employees of a transportation company that operates a large metropolitan public transit facility. from the entryway to the classroom, alex and i headed straight to the instructor’s desk. placing his hand on the desk and chair, i showed him the arrangement of objects and told him how the room was organized, saying that about twenty persons in the audience were seated in two rows in a semicircle around his desk, that the room was a standard meeting room with a projection screen right behind the instructor’s chair, and that i would take care of all the presentation materials when he told me to. he replied with a few comments, loud enough for the audience to hear: something about the buzz of the lightbulbs, or the texture of the furniture, or the squeaks of chairs—anything that people in the room would also sense, anything that would highlight that they shared the same space. after this brief back and forth, i left alex at the instructor’s desk and went to sit in the back. he took it from there. as usual, alex looked sharp, and his movements were confident. he was dressed in a business-casual style, coming across as a middle-class, cisgender heterosexual male in his forties and a fluent smartphone and laptop user. he walked around the desk, touching it gently with his hand, and placed himself right in front of it, facing the audience. he usually presented while standing up, holding his white cane out in front of him, and he often tried to open with an icebreaker to ease the atmosphere. on that day, his opener was: “sveta, are you sure there are people in the audience? it seems like this room is empty; i have never heard people sit so quietly.” people in the audience chuckled, to which alex responded, “well, that is better, at least you started showing signs of life.” then he paused for a moment, smiling. “in such cases, it is better to breathe,” he continued in a more serious tone. “when we experience complex feelings [slozhnyechuvstva], we stop breathing well. i know right now you are having those emotions. so just breathe deeply. in …”—and his torso expanded as he inhaled—“out …”—and his torso contracted. “in … out …,” he repeated. subsequently, the men and women in the audience—most with facial expressions evincing feelings of caution—inhaled and exhaled following his pace. “that’s better. i now know that there are actually people in the audience. when you do not breathe or move, it is hard to know for sure”—he circled back to his opening joke, now transformed into a teaching moment. this time, it elicited even more smiles (however shy) from those in his audience. to cultivate intercorporeal togetherness among people skilled in being apart does not make for an easy task. it often includes living through what the disability scholar ryan parrey (2016) calls “disorientation.” disorientation is an embodied moment of rearranging and repositioning one’s bodymind toward, besides, or away from a social phenomenon or experience. parrey (2016, n.p.) writes, “it is through disorienting encounters that existing meanings of disability are revealed and new meanings generated.” against the familiarity of the lived world, disorientation reveals existing skills and forms of engagement with the world to be of limited help. for alex’s students, following the conventional pattern of surveilling a disabled person from afar and withdrawing from engaging with them as an equal dweller was demonstrated as counterproductive to the aim of intercorporeal togetherness. the disorientation facilitated by alex triggered the reappearance of what had been backgrounded and bracketed—namely, the naturalized, embodied discomfort of interacting as commensurable social actors. such a disorientation provided an opportunity for the students to revisit their position in a social encounter vis-à-vis a person with visible disabilities. in general, there are many ways sighted people avoid such disorienting encounters and resist their transforming impulse, from maintaining spatial and temporal distance to refusing engagement on equal terms. as a sighted person, i regularly received treatment different from that of my blind companions. as seth holmes (2013) writes, the ways in which the anthropologist’s body is treated in the field helps unpack power differentials that constitute the scene. my capacity to maintain eye contact and perceive visual cues would position me as a familiar and relatable subject for sighted neurotypical people: although i noticed that the workshop participants would censor their actions around me more than they might normally (given that i could share my visual observations with my blind companion), i also sensed they were relieved they had an option to interact with a sighted person—for example, if they needed to ask something, they would more willingly approach me, not my blind companion, even if the question concerned something my blind companion had more knowledge about. when talking to me, they would offer me their full presence and focus on our conversation. with their blind instructor, they seemed to feel freer to engage in multitasking behaviors without alerting him that they were being distracted by another activity. when i noticed them doing so—for example, playing with their mobile phones, sending text messages, reading documents, or engaging other sighted people through gestures—they would smile mischievously and gesture toward me to play along, as if we, the sighted, shared a sort of cultural intimacy (herzfeld 2005), as if we were playing on the same team against (or, at the very least, apart from) the team of “the blind.” as a blind person, alex was fully aware of this resistance. because engagement did not happen out of habit, he continuously had to create opportunities for his students to practice unfamiliar patterns of engagement; it was up to alex to initiate contact and intercorporeal interaction. during class breaks, he usually asked someone to show him where the restroom was. often, students would stare at me, assuming that i would be the one to show him the way. i would smile back and remain still, making it clear that i would not comply. that particular day, a woman from the audience volunteered: “i will show you,” she said, standing up and approaching alex. four other students who stood nearby stopped chatting and looked at her, transforming her mundane act into a scene to be witnessed. the woman’s voice was bright and confident. “how will we go?” she asked. “on foot [nogami],” alex joked, pointing out the profoundly ordinary nature of what this scene was framing as extraordinary (wool 2015). “give me your right shoulder,” he continued, as he lifted his left arm in the air parallel to the floor, with his palm facing down. the woman caught it immediately, placing her right shoulder directly beneath his left palm. she stood stiffly for a second, and so alex made her turn from side to side while he himself bent his knees in a caricatured attempt to perform a funny dance. the action made her loosen up her posture and take a couple of dancing turns. “so now, after this dance, we can go,” alex quipped. he had achieved what he wanted: now, as they walked, they chatted, and the conversation flowed at an ordinary pace. this kinetic work of helping abled individuals loosen up corporeally and turn toward him, so that they might be present for one another, was part of alex’s daily job as an instructor of inklyuziya. the workshops evidenced further examples of intercorporeal togetherness. sometimes, alex would invite his students to observe how he uses his phone so that they could discover that the range and complexity of daily tasks that alex completes compares to that of a sighted user. he, too, receives and sends texts, uses uber, gets memes on telegram, and can find a great restaurant in the area with the help of some reviews. some students would recommend helpful apps that they themselves used in daily life. others would send him a text and then receive one back from him, just for fun. such simple interactions helped undo the presumed naturalness of the apartness of blind and sighted persons. they helped participants discover possibilities of dwelling together, sharing the same world. zoë wool (2015, 140) writes, “movement is always a social accomplishment.” this moving together, this intercorporeal togetherness based on coordinated interactions, was indeed accomplished socially, as it was prepared and made possible by the hard work of ngos, researchers, donors, educators, and instructors—a mixed team of abled and disabled experts. a complex edifice of labor, which i discuss further below, was required to provide an experience of sharing spaces, projects, and goals among people who tend to do things apart. as alex and other designers had hoped, this experience took root in the bodyminds of the audience and grew into the possibility and potentiality of further engagement and togetherness. i am not suggesting that as a result of participating in one workshop, all students radically changed their patterns of engagement with disabled people. instead, i interpret this workshop as offering a series of small situations through which new affects and bodily experiences are produced, and during which familiar labels are challenged and rendered inadequate. in the lives of some of the students, this workshop did create a lingering echo: for example, my abled mother, once a participant, developed her first friendship with a blind person—they get together for coffee in their free time and chitchat on the phone. some of the sighted participants stopped having visceral reactions on seeing their blind peers; a blind young intern (in training to become an instructor) started to practice using her white cane; a previously quite overprotective parent of a blind teenager allowed them to attend one such event unsupervised. i treat these small-scale shifts in engagement as minor gestures; as erin manning (2016, 7) writes, “the minor is a gesture insofar as it punctuates the in-act, leading the event elsewhere than toward the governant fixity of the major, be it the major in the name of normative political structures, of institutional life, of able-bodiedness, of gender conformity, of racial segregation.” in creating bodily disorientation, these minor gestures create invitations to search for more helpful habits and skills of engagement. through embodied experiences of intercorporeal togetherness, alex and other instructors make it possible to imagine and move toward a world in which perceived disability does not immediately trigger in abled people an urge to detach or withdraw (yarrow, candea and trundle 2015). an abled stranger who has attended such a training may take a future opportunity to situate themselves with a disabled person, acting on an embodied memory that being together with a disabled person in the same bus, restaurant, pharmacy, or city is indeed possible. this abled stranger may turn out to be an employer, a parent, somebody’s friend, an educator, or a hospitality worker, in a position to affect the conditions of such sharing of the world. in this, intercorporeal togetherness holds its political impulse, or, in the words of manning (2016, 8), “the movement activated, in the event, by a difference in register that awakens new modes of encounter and creates new forms of life-living.” through such small-scale somatic shifts, sensorially and emotionally saturated patterns of sociality morph, congeal, and dissipate. although minor gestures do not necessarily become major, or develop into a new habitus (bourdieu 1977), these encounters prompt questioning of the doxa and the natural occurance of the major, and one’s own participation in its stability. enskillment into intercorporeal togetherness how does one cultivate intercorporeal responsiveness, or bodily responseability (haraway 2016; meyer 2017, 144), when bodies have been trained to be discrete and autonomous? the training program discussed in the previous section is distinctive in that it solicits a particular, corporeal response from all participants. the interactive engagement is carefully organized, facilitated, and attributed significance in serving as grounds for and means of disability inclusion. i turn now to consider the training of blind instructors. specifically, i examine the self-directed somatic tactics they employ to develop skills to facilitate intercorporeal togetherness. the analytic of enskillment helps highlight the dynamic, intentional, and expert character of the bodily and mental shifts i observed blind and sighted people undergo during inklyuziya activities. these processes of enskillment relied on the repeated iteration and aspirational rematerialization (butler 1993; ingold 2011) of ways of collaborating: playing together, working together, conversing, exploring a context, and walking together. through repetition of coupled action and perception, blind and sighted people grew more accustomed to one another, normalizing each other’s presence as social actors and learning to rely on each other, thereby learning the skill of inklyuziya. the blind inklyuziya activists i worked with commonly used the term prodvinutyi slepoy6 (advanced/skilled blind person, masculine) or prodvinutaya slepaya (feminine; hereafter, ps) to refer to the figure of a blind person whose comportment and presence are marked by perceived social competence: proficiency in using a white cane, engaging in social interactions, and using technology. they develop sophisticated techniques to navigate a world that prioritizes visual information (see also hammer 2019). their clothes are clean, ironed, and color-coordinated; their hair is combed; their nails are tidy; and they follow gendered norms of comportment and talk. they know when to look presentable, when it is appropriate to dress casually, and when to sport a fancy look. they easily discuss colors, cinema, and visual art. they know how to engage with difficult questions, navigate conflict-laden situations, and maintain a safe learning environment. thus, the ps is constituted as an aesthetic-ethical assemblage, whereby perceived visual features signify this person’s ethical standing. during fieldwork, i came across various tactics to cultivate oneself as a ps: close contact and communication with other skilled blind people, mimicry and imitation, employment, advice seeking, and event participation. young blind people or people who had lost their vision recently rarely qualified as a ps. instead, more experienced blind activists would recommend that they participate in activities as guests, lead small workshops, follow written instructions, or work privately on developing their skill sets (under the guidance of a more experienced blind tutor), to discipline their selves into this figure. during informal conversations, in workshops for the students of the regional school for blind children, and through webinars and direct questioning, more experienced blind people regularly offered advice, commentaries, and instructional feedback on the way their junior peers comported themselves and on the path to embody this figure of a ps: what to present and what to notice in others. for example, when olya graduated from high school, she announced her desire to become an instructor. i witnessed how two members of the network commented that her voice was too soft, which, in their opinion, was preventing her from being perceived as a reliable professional. dima took classes on public speaking. lana held several seminars, webinars, and conversations over coffee and whatsapp with other blind people, where she shared time and again her path to becoming a blind guide:7 how important it was to use a white cane, what kinds of questions she asked, and how she maintained her appearance. i know that some of my blind friends watched her webinars and shared links to them with their friends—although they had never met her, they took lana’s narrative as authoritative and expressed their consent to its disciplinary impulse. a more articulated and portable version of this discipline exists in the form of the instructional materials available on the blind inklyuziya activists’ website (developed as part of their funded projects). having collected multiple expert opinions of practitioners, they generated a list of recommendations for how to become a successful blind instructor or guide and published it on their website, accessible free of charge, along with the authors’ contact information. the recommendations began with the importance of visual appearances: at a minimum, the tutor’s [activists use the term tutor to speak about blind people in the capacity of an instructor] clothes should always be neat and ironed, and their shoes should be clean. if necessary, the tutor can always ask a sighted person if everything is fine with their appearance: hairstyle, clothes, shoes. please note that the style of your clothes matches the format of the event. in a dark room, smells are especially pronounced: mints and lozenges are essential assistants in the work of a tutor. the work of a tutor, instructor, or guide starts with appearance—blind trainees were instructed to approach their corporeal presence as a reflection and a source of their expertise (boyer 2005; friedner and osborne 2013). besides appearing in a certain way, their work demanded much more: the art of public speaking and engaging the audience, managing logistics, maintaining an online presence, and following the planned protocol of the event. more specialized tips concern the facilitation of intercorporeal togetherness: when meeting guests, introduce yourself and ask them to introduce themselves. this way, you will understand how many people are in the group, hear what mood they are in, and can engage them in a conversation. [maintain] maximum physical contact in the first minutes. gradually, after 7–10 minutes, you can reduce this contact, but in the first minutes, you must constantly touch the guest. in the first minutes in the dark, guests should regularly hear the confident voice of the guide. then the guide can allow himself [sic] to pause, to be silent while the guests are doing the task or talking to each other. however, first, the guide should speak as much and as confidently as possible at the beginning of the tour; and second, during the entire tour, pauses in speech should not be long. guests should not “lose” you. even in a well-known room, the guide must move with a white cane. first, during the excursion, while moving between the guests, the guide should not step on the guests’ feet, bump into guests with his [sic] hands or with his whole body—this spoils the impression and is uncomfortable, incorrect. in the same way, the guide has the ability to find with a cane this or that obstacle and warn the guests. second, the guests see the guide with a white cane in the illuminated part—at the beginning and the end of the excursion. the guide looks more aesthetic and reliable and does not stumble in front of the guests; in addition, in the future, in the minds of [sighted] people, the white cane will remain associated with the positive image of a blind person. frequent touch, a confident voice, a smile, movement in the dark, use of a white cane, inquiry about guests’ feelings, and leading conversations all constitute specific instructions for comporting oneself in the presence of sighted clients. importantly, these instructions merge the aesthetic and the ethical, as they associate features of one’s appearance with value-laden relationality: confidence, reliability, and care for the guests’ feelings and safety. personal appearance is rarely, if ever, a private matter, especially for people with disabilities whose ability to appear aesthetically pleasant often acts as a marker of their social competence and worth (hammer 2019; zoanni 2019). in this sense, for people with disabilities, the stakes of making a positive impression in public transcend specific instances. by appearing aesthetically and socially nondisruptive, disabled individuals cultivate the possibility of reappearance, for themselves and other people with visible disabilities. in so doing, they cultivate the potential of togetherness in the future. the intentionality of inculcating in others a bodily memory of being together renders “appearance work” in the service of a greater project for social change, one that unfolds through micro-gestures, appearances, and sensory markers. through attuning to this cultivated atmosphere (stewart 2011, 445) by aligning sensations, rhythms of movement, tone of voice, and cadence of engagement, sighted and blind people co-create an experience of intercorporeal togetherness. although these atmospheres move both blind and sighted participants, the timelines of their movements differ. the sighted students i interviewed had not done any preparation before showing up at an inklyuziya-themed event, whereas for blind participants, the event extends well beyond the duration of a specific encounter. they had to become competent guides before entering the organized context where they met their sighted peers. their effort was markedly more laborious, as they were socially responsibilized to do the labor of appearing competent, relatable, and reliable. how did blind guides and instructors feel about this preparation and work? the people recognized as ps saw this as a professional activity in which they acted as educators, absolving the abled from responsibility and thus ridding these engagements of pain or trauma. “when you teach children, you do not get mad at them when they do not know how to read,” commented viktor, one of the blind instructors. his analogy between childhood illiteracy and ableism seems notable as it suggests the denial of intentionality to abled people’s reproduction of ableism. others, however, felt more ambivalent about negating this responsibility—they rejected abled people’s innocence and would sometimes make fun of sighted people or get annoyed at them for assuming and acting on their privilege. alongside exemplary blind subjects also emerged the “not quite exemplary” subjects—undisciplined subjects “not ready” to commit to intercorporeal togetherness. among these were those who lacked access to resources or the desire to develop the skill set needed to participate in activities designed to cultivate intercorporeal togetherness. these people tended to emphasize structural aspects of disability exclusion and critiqued the latent productivism of this inklyuziya technology. others were simply unable or unwilling to participate in this initiative. these critiques resonated with david mitchell and michelle snyder’s (2015, 12) argument that neoliberal inclusionism exists for the able-disabled, or “those who exceed their disability limitations through forms of administrative ‘creaming’ or hyper-prostheticization but leave the vast majority of disabled people behind.” underlying the performance of competence and the ability to participate in inklyuziya is the neoliberal ideology that centers autonomy, productivity, and self-entrepreneurship in the form of being socially active (robbins 2013) as a marker of competence and social value. in this context, people with disabilities who do not appear active and competent tend to gain less access to disability inclusion in russia. conclusion the analytic of intercorporeal togetherness prompts us to pay attention to the minor gestures and micro-movements that funnel social interaction and stir streams of social life. as the shifts in embodiment that occurred during the workshops described in this essay proved hard to observe and document, they were sometimes perceived as negligible by those who critiqued the strategy for being too small in scale and who therefore refused to conceptualize it as a driver of social change. among those critics ranged disabled activists and allies who preferred other inklyuziya technologies, such as litigation or the imposition of a system of punishment for those violating the inclusion-favoring legislation. yet as manning (2016, 1) writes of social change, building on gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s (1986) concept of the minor, “while the grand gestures of a macropolitics most easily sum up the changes that occurred to alter the field, it is the minoritarian tendencies that initiate the subtle shifts that created the conditions for this, and any change.” intercorporeal practices such as coordinated breathing, laughing at the shared predicament of having to sit on an uncomfortable chair for too long, preparing one’s bodymind to meet the normative eye of the other, keeping distance, and reaching out toward another prove fundamental in enacting and challenging social hierarchies and boundaries. through the skilled choreography of interaction and the establishment of corporeal commensurability—through intercorporeal togetherness, that is—social actors enact, challenge, and morph societal expectations and scenarios. as bodyminds hold history, they also harbor opportunities for change. to scholars of the material aspects of systems of inequality, anthropologists of care, and researchers of social change, intercorporeal togetherness, in ways distinct but similar to embodied empathy (buch 2013) or refusal as care (reese 2019), offers a tool for understanding how people share spaces and time corporeally, and how this sharing implicates them with one another. additionally, it offers an opportunity to capture how social figures with little shared personal history renegotiate social norms, often anonymously, without necessarily attributing or taking responsibility, without demanding or making articulated amends. as a technology of disability inclusion, intercorporeal togetherness has its limits. surely, the covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of physical proximity to the practice of intercorporeal togetherness, highlighting the ethical nature of social proxemics (strong, trkna, and wynn 2021). when my blind research participants faced the need to figure out new ways of bringing bodyminds together—as social contacts became risky and, sometimes, were outright banned—they began to invoke shared inconveniences, such as the exhaustion of being restricted to confined spaces or the strain imposed by virtual socialization. moreover, sought-after intercorporeal togetherness now depended on one’s access to communication technologies and on the willing communicator on the other side of the screen (lowering the chances for this communicator to be a stranger). without physical co-presence, it became challenging, if not impossible, to garner opportunities for intercorporeal interaction. further, if intercorporeal togetherness is predicated on bodymind commensurability, which bodies can be made commensurable? in my research, intercorporeal togetherness was practiced among bodyminds who enjoy at least some moments of independence and productivity. those with chronic pain or fatigue, neurodivergence that neurotypical people find overwhelming, or an unwillingness to participate, on the one hand, and those whose socioeconomic, ethnic, or religious backgrounds push them into marginal spaces, on the other, may face added difficulties in establishing their belonging through corporeal means—the difference of their bodyminds and backgrounds may prove to be incommensurable. if intercorporeal togetherness remains a tool to be used by able-disabled persons (mitchell and snyder 2015), for those whose social presence may not be so easily prosthetisized it remains useless, if not actually harmful. abstract in this article, i analyze how inklyuziya activists and practitioners in russia create contexts for “real inklyuziya” (nastoyashchaya inklyuziya, emic term). they do so by orchestrating engagements based on interactive corporeality, instead of circulating information about disability inclusion or mandating inclusivity at the organizational level. i conceptualize their chosen inklyuziya technology as intercorporeal togetherness—corporeally constituted responsiveness and reciprocity across the dis/ability divide. i argue that disability exclusion, with ableism as its driver, is adopted corporeally in bodyminds. bodyminds rarely, on their own, reorient toward disability inclusion, even when encouraging laws and protections are put in place. one way, though, to shift these bodyminds and align them with the ideals of inclusivity and antiableism is to employ the inklyuziya technology i call intercorporeal togetherness. by foregrounding bodyminds as forces and grounds of sociality, i point out that material and sensory anchors act as mechanisms of systemic exclusion and inclusion, thus contributing to anthropological scholarship on the making and breaking of the collective by sensory means. i show how they serve as platforms for exclusion’s continuous insidious and anonymized operation and, at the same time, how working with them opens up the potential to reconfigure sociality. [disability; inclusion; embodiment; intercorporeal; russia; blind; postsocialism] аннотация в этой статье я анализирую, как активисты и практики инклюзиив россии создают контексты «настоящей инклюзии». они этоделают не через распространение информации об инклюзии илиобеспечение инклюзивности на системном уровне, а посредствоморганизации межличностного взаимодействия, основанногона «межкорпореальной совместности». межкорпореальная совместность это телесно сформированная отзывчивость ивзаимность, способствующую преодолению разрыва между людьмис инвалидностью и без нее. я утверждаю, что исключение людейс инвалидностью, движущей силой которого является эйблизм,усвояется на телесном уровне. без внешнего импульса, сами по себе,социальные субъекты редко начинают практиковать инклюзию, дажев контекстах, где приняты соответствующие законы и программы.однако один из способов изменить телесную усвоенность исключенияи приблизить телесные практики к идеалам инклюзивности иантиэйблизма использование технологии инклюзии, которую я называю межкорпореальной совместностью. выдвигая на первыйплан телесность как движущую силу и основание социальности, яуказываю на материальные и сенсорные маркеры, действующие какмеханизмы системного исключения и включения. мой анализ вноситвклад в антропологические исследования того, как социальностьсоздается и разрушается через телесное взаимодействие. я пока-зываю, как телесное взаимодействие и привычки способствуютвоспроизводству исключения людей с инвалидностью и, в то жевремя, как работа на телесном уровне открывает потенциал дляреконфигурации социальности. notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to the russian blind inklyuziya activists and their sighted allies who welcomed me in their world and shared with me the pitfalls and victories of their inclusion work. thanks to gebby keny, magnús örn agnesar sigurðsson, yifan wang, katie ulrich, dominic boyer, the three anonymous reviewers, and the editors of cultural anthropology for their invaluable feedback and comments, which made this piece clearer and stronger. this research has received the generous support of the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, the mellon/acls dissertation completion fellowship, rice university’s social sciences research institute and department of anthropology, and the harriman institute at columbia university. 1. all names used in this article are pseudonyms, to protect the privacy of my research participants. 2. the technology of intercorporeal togetherness i discuss here is only one among many other technologies (i.e., know-how, or what michel foucault [1988, 18] calls “a matrix of practical reason”) utilized across the globe, to create inclusive environments and communities. some examples of other disability inclusion technologies are advocating for spatial citizenship (hamraie 2017), cultivating grassroots digital communities of abled and disabled people (borodina 2021), or demonstrating the normative productivity of disabled people (shaw 2017). 3. as will become evident, intercorporeal togetherness differs dramatically from disability simulation, a practice commonly used in occupational therapy and rehabilitation science training. typically, such exercises include wearing blindfolding masks, using noise-canceling headphones, or making use of a wheelchair. their stated goal is to enable abled pretenders to imagine themselves in the position of a disabled person. disability studies scholars provide ample critique of such exercises: they individualize disability, disregard skills and knowledge that people with disabilities develop, ignore the diversity of environmental conditions and the broad spectrum of disability experiences, lack evidence of their effectiveness, and reproduce stereotypes and stigma about disability (brown 2013; french 1992; omansky 2011; siebers 2008). instead of prompting abled people to imagine themselves as other, intercorporeal togetherness prompts abled and disabled people to orient themselves toward each other. 4. for an analysis of the communities and social worlds in which people with disabilities are embedded, see battalova 2021; hartblay 2020; klepikova 2018. 5. this is an approximate rendition of his words, which i wrote down after our conversation. 6. in russian, the appropriateness of the term slepoy to signify “blind” is contested. i use it here as a concept used by the blind activists i worked with, not as a general term for any blind person. 7. a blind guide is a professional occupation in select commercial settings where sighted people participate in an activity typically done in daylight in the dark. restaurants, exhibitions, tours, quests, and business trainings held in the dark are examples of places where blind guides in russia work. these commercial projects serve as token examples of desired employment for blind people on the “open market” (as opposed to sheltered workshops). references ahmed, sara 2012 on being included: racism and 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credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.08 ethnography in a shell game: turtles all the way down in abidjan ethnography in a shell game: turtles all the way down in abidjan sasha newell université libre de bruxelles https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3517-8629 . . . the seemingly straightforward contrast between clarity and opacity is complicated in regimes of truth that, like the ones found in inhumbane, encourage ambiguation over clarification, and dissimulation over revelation and confrontation. in other words, in regimes of truth that privilege open-endedness. —julie soleil archambault dissimulation, deception, postponed dates, false pretexts, and the like are efficient ways of navigating and prolonging relationships. —françoise berthomé, julien bonhomme, and grégory delaplace we are currently living in an era when the north atlantic faith in the value of transparency and sincerity (keane 2002) faces severe challenges, as accusations of fake news undermine traditional voices of authority, as the distinction between legitimate news agencies and internet gossip becomes increasingly blurry, and as the workings of power and wealth within the invisible infrastructures of digital communication cause the habermasian figure of democratic public transparency (see habermas 1991) to teeter on a tightrope between tragedy and farce. as they say in kinshasa: “one can never know what goes on in the heart of another person” (pype 2015, 117). but the consequences of living with/in a sociality of deception is that truth regresses infinitely, each narrative nested within a frame configured in turn by its own contextual frame, like the endless chain of turtles on which the world is said to be resting in a story whose etymology echoes its own punch line (geertz 1973, 28).1 when deceit is deviant, it can be narrated out of the sphere of morality. when it is understood to constitute part of the tissue of sociality, the ability of both actors and ethnographers to define what happened is obscured, and all must struggle to patch their leaky narratives into persuasion. rather than helplessly decry our inability to produce transparency in our public sphere or objective empiricism in our research, we need to work to take account of everyday dissimulation as a social modality, and trace the intersecting and open-ended worlds it produces in shared collective spaces, without ignoring the anxieties and paranoias that navigating such uncertain spaces requires. so, what does it mean to perform ethnography from within a narrative frame of deceit, in which not only the ethnographer is a target of dissimulative acts but his interlocutors themselves may not have control over all the narrative frames? while “many anthropologists assume that empathy is an important part of what constitutes social relationships” (robbins and rumsey 2008, 415–16), my own ethnographic empathy came to involve awareness of active deception as a part of everyday sociality, which in practice requires a constant questioning of one’s most intimate sphere. opacity is not just a means of “cutting” relationships, as niklas hultin (2013, 42) depicts strathernian information theory in his fascinating depiction of ghanaian law, but can also be a form of relatedness in itself. for in mount hagen, “concealment is taken as a condition for growth” (strathern 2000, 311). when social life resembles a shell game, it is imperative to move beyond a structure that places clarity and opacity as morally opposed valences aligned respectively with the creation and destruction of social relations, and rather come to terms with deception as a mode of sociality, even if, as houltin also points out, this kind of relationality is inherently asymmetrical. julie soleil archambault (2017, 15) describes a state of “epistemological uncertainty tied to pervasive suspicion; one that begs endless questions: is this person trying to cause me harm, and is he or she aware that i am trying to harm them?” this closely resembles the feeling of social interaction in abidjan. my story also concerns ethnographic uncertainty, as i climbed from one interpretative frame to another and tried to avoid losing my money as well my fragile illusion of transcendent ethnographic understanding. in short, while i had come to abidjan in 2015 interested in new relationships between politics and religion, i found myself right in the middle of an ongoing con on my first day back in côte d’ivoire. when my ethnography intersected with my friend’s forgery enterprise, i began to worry that the entire thing was a ruse designed to get me to cough up bigger sums of money, a suspicion i was never able to resolve. in telling this story, i hope to chronicle not ethnographic failure but rather a kind of meta-ethnography of participant observation in a world in which everyone (including the anthropologist) runs the risk of falling prey to misleading narrative frames, where every social actor was likely to share my experience of epistemic murk. as these layers accumulate and crosscut in daily interactions, certainty is unlikely to emerge in any definitive sense for anyone involved. rather than seeking the objective truth of what happened, i attempt here to track the way actors navigate and sometimes profit from endemic uncertainty, without ever resolving it. furthermore, at a larger level, an ethnography of sociality under false pretenses provides us with the basis for thinking of culture more as a field of contesting persuasions than one of de facto shared cosmology and values. deception, ivoirian style following erving goffman, we might accept that deception constitutes a social inevitability. i would nevertheless like to insist on the variability of how deception is perceived and evaluated—there are styles, habits, and ideologies of deception. to be clear, i am not arguing that ivoirians are more deceptive than other people nor that the segment of criminality i found myself within represents all ivoirians. but, following daniel jordan smith’s (2008) observations of nigeria, i want to acknowledge an anxiety about deception that ivoirians themselves speak about regularly, without making it out to be an inherent quality or the fault of the actors themselves. i think deception is a local semiotic ideology (keane 2007, 16–17)—it forms part of what abidjanais expect from communication, whether or not it objectively takes place there with more frequency than in other places. whatever these performative tendencies may have been in this region previously, they were undoubtedly exacerbated in abidjan by the structural insecurity resulting from the economic crisis of the eighties, compounded by the disastrous structural adjustment policies of the nineties (comaroff and comaroff 2001; roitman 2004; guyer 2009), and ultimately followed by ten years of political instability when the country was divided between two presidents, each with armies and each claiming their opponent to be an imposter (mcgovern 2011; cutolo and banégas 2012). julien bonhomme (2012, 226) writes of contemporary west and central africa: this condition of insecurity brings about a climate of generalized suspicion, which is a hotbed for witchcraft accusations and violence, since no one trusts anyone anymore. occult rumors take this collapse of trust to its extreme. “everybody grows suspicious of everybody else,” explains a gabonese man commenting on penis snatching. “we don’t know who is who anymore,” adds another man. i would like to bring this kind of social anxiety into juxtaposition with the melanesianist perspective on the opacity of minds (robbins and rumsey 2008). many anthropologists working in the region have found (to their frustration) that their interlocutors insist that other people’s minds are inherently opaque and that their contents cannot (or should not) be imagined. if in melanesia it is either impossible or improper to penetrate the opacity of others’ minds, in abidjan, the ability to do so is highly prized, because it is a basic assumption of social life that other people are actively deceiving their interlocutors, and that it is impossible to be certain of even the most intimate relationships. in the 1990s, many abidjanais youth who had entered the educational system expecting to exit with a well-paying job like the generation of the “ivoirian miracle” before them found themselves with no work except menial labor—something they associated with recent migrants from villages and neighboring countries. many became chercheurs (searchers) looking for ways to make money informally rather than accept a low-pay, low-prestige menial job. at least this held true for men: most women readily accepted low-prestige work. this situation produced an intensive street culture of scamming, in which a kind of “honor among thieves” protected residents within certain moral boundaries of the community, while strangers remained appropriate targets of crime—though who actually counted as an insider was always a matter of interpretation and negotiation (newell 2006). under these circumstances, abidjanais popular culture placed a high value on deceptive performances, as well as on the ability to see through them. perhaps because it was valued as an index of productivity, young men displayed their skill at deception by bluffing, acting wealthy and successful through the consumption of brand-name clothes, brandishing quantities of cash, imbibing copious quantities of alcohol, and demonstrating worldly knowledge and urban savvy (newell 2012). yet these displays very rarely actually deceived the audience. bluffeurs were skilled performers, but their lack of wealth was public knowledge, especially within one’s own quartier (quarter), where those spending as though there were no tomorrow were quite likely to be asking friends and family for money to eat when tomorrow arrived. bluffing often occurred as an act of courtship and seduction, and men pretended that they were deceiving the women for which they performed. women pretended to believe their own lovers, but revealed complete awareness of male economy in the abstract, while using their wiles to convince multiple men into contributing to their own economy (newell 2009; archambault 2017, 127–33). in this sense, the most intimate relationships were run through with the art of the con, even when bound by genuine affect. yet the bluffeur wished to deceive only from a superficial perspective—pragmatically it was about showing off performative skill and about living, if only temporarily, within the frame produced through illusions. mike mcgovern (2011, 124) describes such conduct among ivoirian youth as falling within bateson’s frame of play: “these actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.” in this sense, the art of the bluff also reveals a positive social appreciation of mimesis as craft. figure 1. a bluffeur uses my camera to take a selfie with a young woman working in the maquis. photo by sasha newell. the possibility of deceit worked at various levels. for example, some residents paint messages on their homes clarifying that these were not for sale: false real estate agents had been selling people’s houses out from under them. everyday transactions, from getting change at a restaurant to riding the bus, became filled with suspicion and attempts to outwit others. friends were likely to occasionally exploit faithful trust in one another, especially in cases of asymmetrical wealth. the saying went that “in abidjan it is dangerous to have too many friends” (newell 2006, 196). by 2010, the dream of most (especially male) youth was to become a brouteur, working in internet cafés with false profiles on social media to seduce wealthy, typically white, people from other countries and dupe them into sending money after the relationship was well established. millions of dollars entered the country this way, so that côte d’ivoire is developing an international reputation for fraud on par with that of nigeria. figure 2. the ubiquity of scams made it necessary to make it clear to potential victims that the property in the photo was not for sale by painting the message “this house is not for sale” repeatedly on the wall. photo by sasha newell. the embedded pattern of deception in everyday life in abidjan is alluded to by the oft-repeated proverb c’est “non” qui envoie palabre (it is no that causes fights). championing a form of the white lie, the phrase indicates that one should always say yes when asked or invited to do something, whether or not one intends to follow through. the effect of this ethos was such that if i were to receive a call an hour or so after a rendezvous was supposed to take place to ask whether i would still show up, i was coached that the appropriate response would be something like “yes, i’m still coming, i’m just caught in traffic,” even though i had no intention of arriving. i learned that to say no, even when one had a prior engagement, was likely to make the other person “hot,” with risky, potentially even occult results. and since everybody seemed to know that yes did not really promise anything, the consequences of breaking one’s word were unlikely to be serious, as long as one had some kind of mitigating excuse. the point was to allow everybody to save face, and never publicly reveal that one was prioritizing one set of people and plans over others.2 i will now turn to the story of my summer of 2015, when i returned to abidjan after many years’ absence, and fell headlong into a confidence scheme gone awry, or perhaps according to plan, depending on who does the telling. the telling of the story is the crux of the matter, because the confidence game is itself structured as a narrative, one with roles characterized by dramatic tension and a sequence of events leading to a climax and denouement. david m. maurer (1940, 108) wrote that “confidence games are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast except the mark knows his part perfectly.” yet i would insist that unlike in conventional theater, in cons no one involved can be certain of the outcome, precisely because some of the actors remain unaware of the script. this uncertainty becomes multiplied when the layers of deception begin to overlap and some of the con men are actually marks as well. since confidence schemes almost always rely on the mark participating in some kind of racket from which they think they will profit, many cons involve such layered deceptions,3 and therefore no one involved in a con can be certain they hold the entire script. furthermore, the narrative structures involved in these layered deceptions have a kind of agency, in that actors feel compelled by their roles and the established structure of interaction to continue even once suspicions have been expressed. because of the kind of face-saving etiquette captured in the proverb c’est “non” qui envoie palabre, at the end of this story everyone maintained their roles and relationships after the events subsided, at least as far as i could document. in this sense deceptive narratives have a tendency to produce a collective social dynamic beyond the control or understanding of the society that hosts them. ethnography of/inside a scam he came to the airport to meet me, but i almost did not recognize him. dedy, at the center of my fieldwork in 2001, had been a tautly muscled man always ready to leap physically into an argument between strangers in hopes of making some money or at least an ally from the underdog whom he always defended. now he walked with a limp, his foot paralyzed, and his face looked hollowed out. one of the many times he had succumbed to malaria, he had gone to a clinic to get a shot. the nurse, her first day on the job, stuck the needle into a nerve, paralyzing his foot permanently. a few days before i arrived, i had also contacted another old friend, boniface, to ask whether i could stay with him until i found a hotel i felt satisfied with, and he insisted on picking me up at the airport and hosting me during my entire stay. boniface qualified himself as a “boss,” or upper class, while dedy no longer had a home, but both were among my most trusted friends, people i had relied on during my earlier fieldwork to protect me from being conned, robbed, or otherwise harmed. i could trust either man in a room alone with my wallet, but i had no delusions that either man would refrain from conning me in the right situation. and they would expect nothing else from their closest friends. dedy had once been robbed of his life savings by his own brother, with whom he nonetheless remained on speaking terms. boniface was still living in his parents’ old place, but he had converted the courtyard into a tiki-style dining and business area and built an office facing the street, where he had several employees working for him on computers and phones. before the political crisis, he had made a lot of money servicing transnational oil companies. fleeing the turmoil, he rebuilt his business in ghana, where he imported rice from niger until some indian business associates ran off with 150 million francs cfa worth of merchandise,4 including a convoy of trucks. now he was starting over with oil in abidjan again, and he needed to establish new contracts. one day he asked me to do him a favor, which i could not easily refuse given his generosity in hosting me. without explanation, he asked me to come with him as he drove around town. soon i found myself walking into a major u.s. oil company’s office, where he introduced me as his u.s. supplier to the local manager. i had to field several pragmatic questions with vague responses while trying to mask my inner turmoil over how to handle the situation. boniface liked to present himself as a successful and legitimate businessman, but he never revealed to me why after twenty years abroad he left his wife and daughter behind in the united states to return to abidjan penniless. in 2001, dedy’s way of making a living had involved a wide range of schemes, often involving the pretense that he was an undercover police officer, but in those days his brawn had proven an important factor in his ability to intimidate or fight his way out of a situation. he was a kind of hybrid of two abidjanais identities, the nouchi and the ziguehi. the ziguehi (also referred to in a local twist of a french word as a loubard) was someone who lived by their muscle (yao 2017). they were avid bodybuilders who used their size and strength to intimidate people. sometimes they simply demanded money from people using the implicit menace of their mass, and sometimes they offered their protection services. they often worked as security guards outside banks and nightclubs. a nouchi, by contrast, was someone who lived by their wits, always on the hunt for manzements (financial opportunities). a nouchi made money from the margins, one day helping to move some boxes for money, another day snatching a cell phone from a table at a maquis (ivoirian-style bar), yet another day fencing goods stolen by someone else. dedy had combined the two strategies, using his power of persuasion in combination with his strength and the threat of violence. now forced to drag his foot when he walked, dedy could no longer muster the physical presence that made people fear him. frame 1: wherein the ethnographer becomes witness, prop, and de jure accomplice to a scam dedy had converted himself into a camoracien—local argot for someone who falsifies documents. his specialty was attaining legitimate ivoirian passports for non-ivoirian residents by falsifying all the paperwork necessary and making use of a contact in a regional state office to obtain copies of genuine forms and certificates and to make sure his faked papers went through proper channels. he admitted this to me right away and introduced me to his senegalese partner who worked in an internet café, where they were able to make use of his equipment to do the more technical aspects of the forgeries. dedy explained he had someone waiting to pick up some documents he had promised, and we were behind schedule. figure 3. dedy in action. the watch will figure in the story later on. photo by sasha newell. he was in a hurry to leave treichville because he owed a great deal of money to his old landlord (there was a bounty out in at least two neighborhoods for whoever could find him). rumors of my presence were sure to circulate, and the heat would only increase when these debtors realized they had a chance at getting paid off now that there was un blanc (a white person) in the equation. indeed, throughout the following weeks, various parties hunted us in hopes of a payout, offered to leave us alone for a bribe, or suggested themselves as negotiators in hopes of a pourboire (tip). i was happy to pay off enough debt to temporarily satisfy dedy’s pursuers, but i could not help feeling paranoid that this entire scenario was a prearranged scam and that dedy might be pocketing a portion of the money i was handing over to strangers. over the course of that first day in treichville, as we visited old friends and made amends with his debtors, dedy received repeated calls from a man listed on the phone only as “papié [sic] français” (french documents), and whom i will refer to as issa. when the documents were ready, we crossed town by bus to meet issa on a busy traffic-filled street in adjame, huddled under an umbrella in the rain. from the way dedy introduced me, i guessed he had scheduled this meeting just to show he was with un blanc. indeed, dedy affirmed later that issa was much more likely to pay him after seeing me. dedy handed over the papers he had prepared in treichville, now sealed in an envelope with an official-looking signature across the seal. that night, while drafting his next official consular document, he explained that issa and his girlfriend were trying to get french passports by claiming they were siblings born in france. he was helping them to forge documents that would ostensibly make the french embassy believe their names had been changed when they were adopted after their parents had died. only in fact many of the documents the couple thought were real, like the ones from the french consulate, were also forgeries. dedy was milking the scam by finding problems that required documents to be refiled, thus accruing more fees. he pointed out proudly that they would never be able to go to the police since they were breaking the law themselves.5 sometimes dedy believed they might really get the passports in the end, like many of his customers seeking ivoirian citizenship—a tragic irony, given that dedy himself had tried to get into europe on a false passport at least twice. figure 4. a draft of a counterfeit official letter from the french consulate. photo by sasha newell. dedy’s current trick was to specify that the form must be completed in black ink, and since the couple had used blue ink, the form required re-filing and, of course, another set of fees. dedy had several more steps planned, including a registration number that would need to be procured from nantes, costing around a million francs cfa (about us$1,700). now i found myself in an ethically sticky situation. while i had always known that dedy made some of his money from illicit operations, i had tried to avoid learning details about them until after the fact. but now not only was i party to an ongoing confidence scheme but i was also clearly being used as a prop to legitimize the scam. worse still, in any future interaction with issa i would be complicit if i did not warn him, which would threaten dedy’s sorely needed income and hard work already invested. yet if i wanted to continue to spend time with my old friend, i had little choice but to accept exposure to his way of making a living. furthermore, this situation constituted an extension and intensification of precisely the kinds of informal economic labor i had studied previously, but to which i seldom had direct access. and perhaps there was ethnographic value in observing this scheme in action, especially considering the relationships it exposed between fake documents and the power of the state (apter 2005; bubandt 2009). with no small degree of discomfort, i took notes on the situation and decided to maintain as much distance as possible in the future by refusing to attend any more meetings with dedy’s client. frame 2: wherein dedy worries that his mark may have seen through the ruse, but decides to go ahead anyway at the next meeting dedy left me at a street kiosk. he was expecting to receive a payment of 30,000 francs cfa this time. he came back ten minutes later in great haste and yelled for me to grab a taxi. we were whisked away into the sea of traffic as he related what had happened. when he arrived at the meeting point, he found that issa had brought his girlfriend, fatou, whom dedy had never met. fatou had become suspicious over the story about the required color of ink, and now she pointed out several items on the documents that indicated forgery, including mismatched signatures. issa got up and made a call, standing outside hearing range. dedy interpreted the situation as dangerous, told them he needed to check on me and was coming right back, and fled. he chastised himself in the car: “i was too rushed [the day you arrived] and i messed up—i should never have included a document with nothing on the back, and the signature was sloppy.” figure 5. final forged documents from the french consulate. notice that there are many errors of french grammar and spelling, but that it was the mismatching signatures that raised fatou's suspicion of inauthenticity. the names used are aliases. photo by sasha newell. despite this apparently narrow escape, dedy was puzzled. he asked, “if they already knew it was a scam, why did they give me back my watch?” in an earlier encounter, issa had offered to fix the watchband of dedy’s expensive watch given to him by a european. today he had returned the watch at the beginning of their conversation. dedy turned the watch over in his hands contemplatively. no, he decided, they must not know he was scamming them, or they would never have given the watch back. that evening issa and fatou called to ask why he had disappeared in the middle of their meeting, and they set up a time to meet and finish their bizness, including the payment they owed dedy. he headed off the next day to the same café in adjame, while i worked on documenting the infrastructural transformations in treichville. i was in a clothing shop on rue 12, the famous petit paris, when my cell phone rang. frame 3: wherein dedy is caught and requires the ethnographer to bribe the police disaster had struck. as soon as he sat down at the table with issa and fatou, a couple of police officers showed up (one of them fatou’s brother), and they were all promptly escorted to the station in adjame. caught red-handed, dedy had been forced to sign a confession. since the government was cracking down on forgery because of the international notoriety building around cybercrime, he was at risk of serious prison time. the situation, he was quick to emphasize, could prove lethal given his inability to defend himself with his crippled foot. however, there was some hope—the police officer in charge of his case had taken pity on him. the officer had not entered the case in the records and was willing to set dedy free; all i needed to do was take a taxi to the police station and return the money dedy had already siphoned from his victims: 764,000 francs cfa (us$1,300). that was a shocking number. if dedy had received even a portion of that money, why was he homeless and separated from his wife and children because of unpaid debts across town? furthermore, if i were to pay for his liberty, i would have nothing left of the money i had planned to offer him for his assistance, in hopes of giving him a fresh start. i told him i needed to think, and i headed back to boniface’s apartment in treichville to get a second opinion. frame 4: wherein the ethnographer suspects he is the actual mark, and that the original scam was a ruse performed to entrap him by the time i arrived, boniface and his business partner had already received the same call from dedy and immediately warned me that it was a scam. i was inclined to agree. the police officer would be breaking the law in letting dedy go, something too risky to do unless he was being paid off—so there seemed little doubt that the couple and the police officer were working together to get what they could out of dedy’s blanc. but it was also possible that dedy had orchestrated the scheme with the others, that everything that had happened since my first day in abidjan had been a performance leading to this very moment, when i was expected to pay out to save my friend. “this is what he does for a living,” boniface said, “and he is very good at it. he is exploiting your love for him.” i had the disorienting sensation of reality shifting, or at least of the narrative structure underpinning it, which amounts to much the same. a great portion of the notes i had taken since arriving in côte d’ivoire were open to reinterpretation. i had first thought i was merely a friendly bystander to dedy’s professional life, then worried i was being used as a prop to legitimate his con, and finally i became concerned that my knowledge of the true nature of the events made me a complicit participant in their outcome. but now i wondered whether the so-called victims of the scam were in fact participants in a larger confidence game aimed at me. my friend could potentially be imprisoned if i did not show up at the police station, but going could prove a trap—once there, they might claim i was involved in the crime to get more money out of me. i found myself paralyzed and decided at the urging of boniface to simply wait and see what happened. if it was a scam, he said, we would quickly see a new strategy emerge. a turning: containment, re-containment, and nested frames in considering this moment, i find myself thinking about the notion of turning in a series of telefolmin initiation rituals in papua new guinea. dan jorgensen (1990) argues that the men’s cult is not made up of a single cosmology but rather a layered set of shifting knowledge schemes. at each phase of initiation to the cult, men are introduced to another piece of the myth that transforms the meaning of everything that came before. the telefolmin call the act of telling such a secret “turning,” because it flips what is known on its head. jorgensen (1990, 41–43) writes: in a general sense, “turnings” are substitutions amounting to a displacement of conventional meaning . . . the combined effect of such dislocations is to set up a secret world alongside a defamiliarized everyday world. . . . each secret takes previously established knowledge as its foil, and this is true within the context of the cult as it is outside it. the cumulative effect is to confirm nothing so much as the premise that things are other than what they seem. the culmination of these turnings occurs when, long after supposedly completing their initiation, men discover that the katibam, which they thought merely a dormitory for old men, was actually another cult house in which the most basic premises of the entire previous series of rituals became overturned, including the moiety system and the distinction between the sexes that organized society as a whole. the most sacred of men’s spaces was said to be the one with the women’s menstrual house, the most polluted space. this series of revelations “sets up a trajectory whose path sketches the precariousness of the consensual truths by which people live” (jorgensen 1990, 45), thus teaching telefolmin men to recognize their own power of social construction in the world, as well as the responsibility to hide it. my own moment of recognition that my return to abdijan may have been an orchestrated scam from the beginning was equivalent to a telefolmin turning—the world was no longer the same, and i began to reinterpret every preceding event according to this new interpretive key. goffman’s (1974) “frame analysis” provides us with some useful language: a frame provides the grounding of meaningful action within it (thus we have ritual frames, frames of intimate sincerity, frames of ceremonial formality, etc.), while a keying marks the transformation of one frame into another, as in gregory bateson’s (1972, 180) famous statement “this is play,” where animals perform the same gestures as fighting, but under the guise of knowing from the start they are only playing (see also mcgovern 2011). my own involvement going forward, however, took place in the more uncertain realm of “is this play?” (bateson 1972, 182), and i was never quite sure whether i was in the role of friend, prop, or mark. furthermore, goffman suggests that frames work to contain people so long as their experience coheres with the interpretive frame. when a mark starts to become suspicious, conspirators can offer up a new key to a frame that contains the first, thereby re-containing their escapee. my story seems to involve a series of nested deceptions, each one of which, if revealed to those being contained, would represent a turning. the central anthropological question is whether any one person controlled these keyings or whether they were taking place according to the motivations of different actors with different interpretations and motivations. interlude of indeterminacy: wherein all actors attempt to negotiate the dominant narrative frame as boniface had predicted, the tactics shifted when i did not perform as expected. within a couple of hours, a cab pulled up at boniface’s door with dedy and the aggrieved couple. they brought a police document indicating that if dedy did not return to the police station by the following afternoon with the requested money, he would be arrested immediately. at this point, it seemed very clear that the surface layer or “lamination” (goffman 1974, 82) was no longer believable, since if the police officer had illegally refrained from entering dedy in the books, the document for his arrest could not be legitimate either. on the other hand, the performances of grief, loss, betrayal, and dedy’s mournful demeanor at causing me so much stress and financial difficulty seemed convincing. issa and fatou tearfully expressed their desire to keep dedy out of jail, given his friendship with issa and his physical condition—all they wanted was the rightful reimbursement of the stolen money. i pointed out that they had been actively involved in forging papers themselves, but this did not seem to affect their self-righteous conviction that they were owed compensation. when at last the couple left amid remonstrations that i show up with the money the next day, dedy, boniface, and i were able to sit down and try to work things out. boniface was angry and accusatory, telling dedy he should never have dared bring criminals into his home. he derided the police document and telephoned the officer who had signed it to directly accuse him of corruption and grift. the policeman became angry and threatening and hung up the phone. dedy remained steadfast that he had not schemed with these people but admitted they were probably only demanding money because they knew he walked with un blanc. not only was i still uncertain dedy had plotted against me but i was also unsure how to proceed even if he had. dedy needed the money more than these people, who by their own admission had paid dedy to forge their way into europe illegally and had little moral claim to their illicit investment. the only reason this couple had leverage at all was that 1) i was a potential source of money and 2) a crooked cop with the power to arrest dedy was hoping to get a portion of that for himself. but if i simply refused to show up, or accused them of pulling a scam on me, the officer could still use dedy’s signed confession to send the latter to jail. frame 5: wherein the ethnographer proposes to turn the scam against his scammers what shook dedy’s resolve was when i explained (truthfully) that the money they were asking for amounted to everything i had set aside to give him in compensation for his help. in the middle of that sleepless night, we came up with the plan to pay the supposed victims a token amount of money upfront to satisfy them and promise the rest for after i had already left town. once i was gone, there would no longer be any way to leverage more money out of the situation. dedy was not worried about what would happen when i did not show up on the prescribed date: he sneered, “they will never find me” (raising the unasked question—why couldn’t he just disappear now?). dedy called the officer and gave him a concocted story about my wife refusing to wire me the money, so i could only give them a small portion of the requested amount now. at least this way there would be something left over for dedy when all was done. figure 6. forged birth certificate from paris. photo by sasha newell. however, if boniface was correct, dedy might also be getting some portion of the money i was paying to the couple. while this undeniable possibility made me angry, i had long ago reconciled myself to dedy skimming small amounts of money off me. it was how he lived and formed a part of his interactions with everyone, an understood social modality. furthermore, i felt implicated in this situation because, whether a fabricated story or not, i had been willing to go on documenting his scam when the going was good. indeed, some part of me had been delighted when dedy began to explain to me the ways in which he was making money through document forgery. it was that particular ethnographer’s delight of being allowed into the inner circle, the sacred chamber, the backstage—access to the real thing. this same part of me wanted to see the process through, to meet the police officer and watch the situation unfold. so, at this point i fed myself the ego-soothing narrative that whatever happened, it made for good ethnography. i agreed to the plan, so long as i could photograph all the documents that dedy had passed the couple, along with any documents signed at the meeting with the police officer, and as long as this request was passed on and agreed to by all parties in advance. through this self-constructed fiction of ethnographic authority, i sought to enter the arena with confidence and a sense of control. thus, i took on the role of my own “cooler,” finding new framings to soften the loss of face of discovering one is the dupe (goffman 1952), a role con artists take when they think the mark will seek the police. perhaps i was also paying my dues for the fuzzy but nevertheless real benefits i would receive from telling these stories in professional texts later. one might even say that the final narrative frame we are participating in here comprises the encompassing scam drawing the most profit. figure 7. death certificate of the fictional ivoirian parent who had died and left them orphans (explaining their subsequent name changes). photo by sasha newell. frame 6: wherein the ethnographer nearly exposes the officer’s scam to the chief of police, but thinks better of it the police officer arrived more than an hour late, and while waiting, we drank a couple of beers with issa in a stifling, fly-infested bar across from the station, otherwise empty in the mid-afternoon heat. dedy disappeared, leaving me alone with issa, suspicion growing over what might be happening behind my back. we talked about issa’s farm and how i ought to come out there sometime in the next few weeks to see it. remembering the dictum c’est “non” qui envoie palabre, i agreed with pasted-on enthusiasm. when the policeman arrived, oddly and annoyingly jovial, he brusquely waived us all across the street into his office, explaining he was late because it was his day off and he had to find an excuse to get away from his wife. he was in civilian clothes and not supposed to be in the police station, so we had to move quickly. dedy and fatou signed papers about the payment agreement, delineating when the rest of the money would be paid back. as i was counting out cash for the down payment, the chief of police walked in and the officer’s face crumbled. the chief asked why he was in the office that day, scanning the room with suspicion, in response to which the officer lamely claimed to be taking care of unfinished work. for a panicked moment, i saw the opportunity to expose the entire operation, and envisioned the tantalizing possibility of the officer getting arrested. but in addition to the risk of prison for dedy, it felt impossible to breach the social roles we were falsely playing. i remained silent, helplessly watching the chief leave the room, obviously aware that something improper was going on but deciding to let it go. perhaps he too would demand his cut of the proceeds later on—that, at any rate, was dedy’s theory. dedy and i left the others shortly afterward, everyone shaking hands with everyone, the others hanging back, perhaps to split up the money. inconclusion there is no definitive conclusion to this story,6 no moment in which i could say with certainty that i knew what had actually happened, and this ethnographic indeterminacy is perhaps the most important point—i believe that none of those involved held the complete story. social reality is made collectively visible through narrations that are constant objects of contestation (bakhtin 1981). much as no speaker (or author) controls language or even the very words they employ, so that interpretation is always a contested pushmi-pullyu of forces between parties concerned.7 knowledge of what actually happened is not owned by any of the actors involved, even as the possibility of controlling the narrative frame has financial repercussions for all parties concerned. instead, contesting narrative layers pile on one another in ways that leave only portions visible from any given perspective, allowing for new narrative interpretations and future profits. opacity can allow for an open-endedness potentially socially productive for everyone, in part because everyone can save face (strathern 2000; archambault 2017). dedy’s version of events—that he was only trying to scam the “papiers français” people and i simply happened to be in town to rescue him when things went bad—remains plausible, but unconvincing. i watched him carefully in the following weeks for some slipup or admission to his part in the scam, but no clear evidence or confession emerged. boniface’s version is also possible; dedy may have colluded with these people from the beginning to get what they could out of me. but when i look at the numerous detailed forgeries produced as part of the scam (of which i have only revealed a small selection), i cannot accept that they were produced solely for my benefit, especially when there was no certainty i would even ask to see them. the most likely scenario is one of continuous improvisation that left everyone involved struggling to remain in control of the narrative frame. fatou and issa had wanted to deceive border control by claiming false identities but were deceived in turn by dedy who was using their dream to extract hard-earned farm money from them with fee after kafkaesque fee. suspicions raised, they in turn lured dedy into a trap using fatou’s familial connection to the police. but, once caught, dedy may have turned the situation to his advantage by making me (and boniface) targets of the group’s avarice as possible sources of income. no one profited from dedy going to jail, but keeping him out of jail might bring them all some cash, given that he had un blanc. when dedy and i conspired to contain his captors and/or co-conspirators, fooling them into thinking they would collect the full sum at a later date, they may have been pretending to believe us, considering partial payment better than none, or dedy may have agreed to pay them some of what i passed to him later. crucially, apart from the possibility that i was contained the entire time by a frame i never became aware of, no single actor controlled the framing process throughout the series of events. jan beek’s (2016) remarkable ethnography of the ghanaian police interaction with scammers provides a parallel example of how role play continues to structure a situation whose narrative frame is no longer certain. the police have found that the only reliable way to catch scammers is to use the techniques of scammers, concocting elaborate narratives through which they trap them into meeting face to face where they can be arrested. still, the police are likely to find themselves pawns in struggles between scammers, who use the police to get back at former colleagues who betrayed them, thereby containing the police fabrications. beek (2016, 311) found himself in the remarkable situation of playing a fictional role in a police-fabricated scam to trap scammers: just before our next scheduled meeting, the scammer called me but quickly gave the phone to his partner, whom he introduced as a german colleague. the man on the other line spoke perfect german, slightly vernacular. he introduced himself as being from mainz in germany and we did some small talk. after some sentences i realized that i had met this man several weeks earlier in another cid office. he was a sixty-year-old, grandfatherly man and had been introduced to me as a german fraud victim from frankfurt and we had talked a bit. now, i understood that this man was collaborating with the scammers, knew of the police involvement and probably had learned my real name. remarkably, neither he nor i said anything about this in our phone conversation; instead, we played along with the fictions concocted by mr. benson and detective kofi. despite all parties probably being aware that they were playing a purposeless charade, no one chose to break frame and discuss what was going on. everyone continued to play their part until the end of the performance, just as we all did in the policeman’s office in my own story. and although my relationship with dedy had now become tainted with suspicion, something he knew and clearly felt hurt by, we continued on for the next few weeks largely as if nothing had happened—sharing meals and hotel rooms, and traveling to visit his wife—because this was the best we could both make of the situation. this kind of uncertainty mixed with intimacy was not unique to my position as an outsider; it proliferated within everyday activity in abidjan, and i suggest this kind of epistemic anxiety (ashforth 2005) over how to judge the sincerity of others constituted a recognized aspect of the fabric of daily life. as i had been warned early on, in abidjan friends and lovers made for the most dangerous kind of contacts. it is impossible to have genuine relationships of intimacy without some degree of trust, and trust was an opening, a vulnerability that could easily be exploited; it often was. friends sometimes stole from friends, who rarely called them on it if they valued the relationship. lovers made demands on one another that could damage economic well-being. and then there was the channel of gossip, through which intimates could provide privileged access to information that others could exploit, preserving the relationship while profiting from it at the same time. i would not want to imply that every relationship was run through with such betrayals, but i do believe it was wise for people to remain suspicious, not only in their negotiations with strangers and acquaintances but also with their most trusted associates, who might, out of necessity, take advantage of that trust. witchcraft, as peter geschiere (2013) writes, constitutes the dark side of kinship. in this region, the classical locale of witchcraft is in the intimacy of the home—by some accounts witches can only bewitch their own blood kin, though new urban forms have emerged that can affect strangers (bonhomme 2012). geschiere’s phrase is not only intended to highlight the ability of witchcraft to penetrate the most intimate of belongings; it also seeks to challenge the anthropological bias of considering familial intimacy a space of security and shared wealth. as such we might consider west african cosmologies of witchcraft to be a version of the opacity-of-minds philosophy of melanesianist literature. ivoirians and others who subscribe to this cosmology of witchcraft exhibit a profound distrust of their ability to read others, even those with whom they have the most shared history and the most invested trust. however, unlike in accounts of melanesian societies, in abidjan the ability to second-guess such opacity and interpret signs of hidden malevolence represents a treasured skill and necessary survival strategy, something highlighted by the ivoirian slang term yere, meaning both “to scam” and to “see clearly” (newell 2012, 11). indeed, grounds exist for a wider regional discussion of this semiotic ideology of opacity in relation to techniques for clarification. for example, katrien pype (2017, 98) describes the lingala term mayele, which includes meanings such as “1. knowledge, intelligence, malice, prudence, wisdom 2. artifice, astuteness, deception, bad intention, intrigue, ruse, trick 3. manner, way, tactic, tact 4. spirit, mentality,” and she intriguingly links it not only to new “smart” technologies but also to scams, political promises, artistic production, and mystical occult techniques. similarly, birgit meyer (2003, 27) has described the “spirit of discernment” whereby pentecostal churches, through confession, spiritual revelation, and video representation, manage to make the darkest and innermost interiors visible to their congregations. this yearning for new techniques of discernment indicates just how fraught the need to play along with pretense can be in the face of indeterminacy. though beyond the reach of this article, it would be interesting to investigate the regional variations of the corporealization of interiority in relation to semiotic ideologies of transparency, opacity, and discernment. there is evidence that hearts (see devisch 1990; pype 2015; monteith 2018) may be a more common metaphor for inner motivation than mind, and even in melanesia, rupert stasch (2008, 444) tells us that the korowai “identify cognitive and emotional deliberation with spaces of bodily interiority, specifically the internal cavity of a person’s torso, and the organs.” african bellies are also often the vehicle through which witchcraft overcomes a person’s self-control after they are tricked into eating human flesh or accepting sexual relations with a witch, either form of bodily invasion causing them to lose control of their interior volition (geschiere 1997; de boeck and plissart 2004). witchcraft cosmologies lend themselves to thinking about competing discursive positions of containment and re-containment, as in harry g. west’s (2007) superb comparison of ethnography and sorcery, wherein sorcerers see their victims from the invisible second world while being seen by countersorcerers who remain invisible to witches. yet it remained a matter of rumor who was who: in the sorcery-filled muedan lifeworld we shared, every maneuver was the starting point for countermaneuver, every spin the stuff of counterspin, every interpretative vision the object of subsequent (re)visionings. accordingly, any muedans who “recognized” the power inherent in the ethnographer’s transcendent vision implicitly asserted that they had managed to fix the anthropological seer in their own sights and thus to transcend his view. (west 2007, 84) stasch’s (2008) masterful argument concerning the korowai refusal to discuss others’ minds focuses on authority. he demonstrates not only that actors often do not feel they have the right to speak about the motivations of others but also that they question their expertise concerning their own. this insight helps demonstrate the complexity of attaining the kind of sincerity espoused by webb keane’s (2002) converts to protestant modernity, in which interiority and exteriority match perfectly, especially when cosmologies explicitly allow for multiple agents to gain control of a person’s body. thus abidjan’s sociality of scamming helps us see a world in which everyday interactions compose interminable struggles of containment and re-containment within even the most intimate of social spheres—the struggle existing over the very definition of a shared world. the result is a story without resolution, in which protagonists and victims remain difficult to sort out for actors and observers alike. by capturing this more explicit sense of everyday opacity in social interactions i want to challenge north atlantic fixations on sincerity, transparency, and authentic mutual intimacy as achievable or even desirable states of human affairs (shils 1956; habermas 1991; keane 2002). collectivities based on transparent consensus are fictions through which we enable the continuation of everyday life, because c’est “non” qui envoie palabre. sociality is built on precisely the layerings of pretense i have described in the confidence games above, frames upon frames. not only do we pretend but (especially when our social authority is insecure) we also pretend not to see through the pretense, because breaking the frame produces unpredictability, confusion, and the potential for humiliation. keane (2008, 479), building on stasch’s (2008) argument about authority and opacity, argues that rather than actually not knowing the minds of others, melanesians politely pretend that others around them are impenetrable—an unknowing knowing. the situation in abidjan is the reverse—a knowing unknowing. actors are all too aware that every act may have hidden and malevolent intentions, but, knowing that they do not know, they pretend that they do, dissimulating trustfulness and camaraderie. this situation in fact resembles one that all ethnographers find themselves in: wanting nothing more than to be included in their group enough to engage in authentic participation, the most common experience is a polite façade of face-saving inclusion, combined with daily practices of dissimulated microexclusions. at the same time, the ethnographer often attempts to perform as though they are one of the group, all the while maintaining an internal distance that allows for an observation and interpretation of the proceedings. a common greeting in abidjan is on est ensemble (we are together), combined with the gesture of a fist bumping against one’s own chest. it serves as an assertion of empathy and shared motivations. curiously, however, the expression exploits the francophone propensity to place the action in the third person, making the literal translation more abstract and puzzling: “one is together.” something like the zen koan about one hand clapping, the phrasing suggests that in the abstract, an unspecified third person who stands for everyone is “together,” but refrains from directly including any of the people present in that imagined collectivity. spelled out this way, it would seem to indicate the desire to be together, ideally, if trust could be established, and the possibility that this is already happening, hopefully. this is really the most the ethnographer can hope for, so far as empathetic understanding goes: somebody is together, and there is the always deferred possibility that that somebody might include us. abstract this essay considers ethnography in a social world rife with quotidian duplicity, where the pretense of ongoing sociality must continue even when betrayers have been unmasked and deceptions unraveled. the article follows my unintentional entanglement in a series of confidence schemes in abidjan to explore the ways in which such scams develop their own agentive force beyond the control of their participants. driven by the performative efficacy of its own narrative and role-play structure, the frame of duplicity sometimes exceeds the control of its authors. my own participation involved a spectrum of roles progressing from 1) innocent passerby, 2) an unwitting set piece meant to convey legitimacy, 3) an ethically compromised ethnographer, and 4) the target of the scam, all the way through to 5) an active participant in deception—with several of the roles converging at times. ethnography inside a scam allows for reflection into the role of deception in everyday social interaction, as well as within the engagements of fieldwork itself. [deception; scams; urban africa; sincerity; ethnography; ivory coast] résumé cet essai considère les enjeux d’ethnographie dans un monde social truffé de duplicité quotidienne, où la performance des relations sociales doit continuer même lorsque les menteurs ont été démasquées et les tromperies révélées au grand jour. mon article revient sur mon engagement involontaire dans une succession d’arnaques à abidjan afin d’explorer les manières dont de telles escroqueries développent leur selon les logiques qui leur sont propres, échappent parfois même au contrôle de ceux qui les ont mises en place. ma propre position a impliqué un éventail de rôles qui m’ont fait passer de 1) un témoin accidentel, 2) la pièce innocente d’un mécanisme destiné à inspirer confiance, puis à 3) un ethnographe compromis sur le plan éthique, et à 4) la cible de l’arnaque et 5) un participant actif à l’affaire. ces différents rôles se sont parfois entremêlés. faire de l’ethnographie de l’intérieur d’une telle arnaque permet de réfléchir au rôle de la duplicité dans les interactions quotidiennes, comme dans le travail de terrain. [duplicité; escroqueries; afrique urbaine; sincérité; ethnographie; côte d’ivoire] notes acknowledgments this research for this article was funded by the wenner-gren foundation and north carolina state university. an earlier version was presented at a 2017 workshop sponsored by the wenner-gren foundation, the european association of social anthropologists, the university of manchester, and hau/the society for ethnographic theory. 1. it turns out that clifford geertz’s (1973, 27) version, as he implies himself (“there is an indian story—at least i heard it as an indian story. . .”), is just one among many, which include many purported originators, including william james and bertrand russell, and where the protagonist is as often an old woman as an indian guru. this is one of those occasions where wikipedia, being itself turtles all the way down, proves the most authoritative source; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/turtles_all_the_way_down. 2. this paragraph describes a phenomenon widespread throughout west africa (and beyond), in which a moral imperative exists to say yes out of politeness regardless of one’s actual intentions. however, this practice was arguably exacerbated by the density of urban entanglements, making it simultaneously more frustrating and more necessary for all parties. 3. this is a staple of the confidence scheme film genre: see, for example, 9 queens, the grifters, the spanish prisoner, and matchstick men. 4. at the time, 150 million francs cfa was close to us$300,000. 5. this is a classic element of cons. by involving the mark in ethically questionable or illegal behavior, the con artists insulate themselves from public complaints once the victim discovers they have been had (goffman 1952). 6. i (newell 2006) once teased lambek (1993, 406) for ending his ethnography with the words “in conclusion, inconclusion.” i now find myself indebted to his cleverness. conclusion, though as necessary and desirable as ever, must always be provisional. 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sociale par la violence de rue en côte d’ivoire.” politique africaine 148, no. 4: 89–107. https://doi.org/10.3917/polaf.148.0089. vital labors cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 23-29, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.04 vital labors: transacting oocytes across borders in the post-soviet space madeleine reeves university of oxford https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2241-5720 feminist scholars of migration have made significant interventions into debates on labor mobilities by drawing attention to the physical and emotional tolls of transnational migration, the stratified geopolitics of care work, the gendered experience of border crossings, and the invisibilization—and often concomitant illegalization—of migrant domestic work. this scholarship has shown how law and policy serve to exclude certain forms of gendered migrant work from statutory protections through the demarcation of boundaries between purportedly public and private spheres or the revocation of legal protections to temporary migrant working women who become pregnant or marry (constable 2020). it has revealed how the relegation of marginalized occupations to transient migrant laborers enables members of mainstream society to “imagine themselves as fully middle class” (mackie 2010, 75). in the post-soviet context, this scholarship has illuminated how the figuration of the migrant worker in policy and law as an unencumbered and putatively male homo laborans has served to exclude non-working family members from the state’s purview, and thus to “deprive [them] of the right to any life in russia outside of work” (nikiforova and brednikova 2018, 143). adding to this scholarship, which has proved crucial in articulating a feminist critique of migration policy, this essay calls attention to the enrollment of mobile workers into forms of clinical labor that melinda cooper and catherine waldby (2014, 64) call “services in the self”: services that rely on “in vivo, biological processing and the utilization of the worker’s living substrate as essential elements in the productive process.” public and scholarly portrayals of the post-soviet migrant worker typically foreground a particular kind of gendered, visibilized labor power. we “see” a man in a high-vis jacket working on a construction site or hauling goods in a market, not a woman contracted as a gestational surrogate or an oocyte donor to a moscow fertility clinic. yet economies of debt-driven mobility, techniques of recruitment and mediation, and aspirations invested in the respective forms of financial compensation bear striking similarities across these different labor circuits. an anthropological account of this bioeconomy, i suggest, demands an expanded account of labor migration, one that moves beyond fordist imaginaries of industrial labor power to encompass emergent forms of vital labor and their entanglement with mobile ways of life. as marthe achtnich (2022) notes in her introduction to this colloquy collection, this blind spot reflects a broader concern within foucauldian-inspired critiques of migration to focus on the commoditization (and securitization) of migrant wage labor, neglecting the generation of surplus through the harnessing of mobile life itself. contributing to this colloquy’s wider concern with the economization of vitality and vulnerability across different scales, i examine the regional markets for reproductive services made possible by growing international demand for assisted reproductive technologies (arts), the commoditization of human gametes, and the differential transboundary mobility of prospective commissioning couples and gamete donors. this entails tracing the configuration of technologies, expertise, material infrastructures, regulatory divergences, and dynamics of debt-driven migration that enable fertility clinics in moscow, st. petersburg, krasnodar or tbilisi to recruit kyrgyz, kazakh, and buryat oocyte vendors for prospective chinese commissioning couples; or that enable ukrainian fertility clinics to market surrogacy services to british clients by highlighting the availability of “donors from around the world” and guaranteeing that ukrainian gestational surrogates (unlike their uk counterparts) have no legal claim to parenthood.1 this essay explores the recruitment of “asian” oocyte vendors (devushki aziatskoi vneshnosti, literally, “girls of asian appearance”) by fertility clinics in russia, ukraine, and georgia to meet a growing demand for arts from chinese commissioning couples. a focus on the intersection between mobility and the bioeconomy is generative to think through what is at stake in these emergent trajectories of vital labor across scales and empirical domains. if we understand the term bioeconomy to denote the multiplicity of practices that are “concerned with using, trading, extracting, and generating value from ‘life itself’” (andersson 2018, 418; cf. rose 2007), then a focus on mobility bioeconomies enquires into the ways value is generated from the differential mobility and transactional value of human and nonhuman bodies, body parts, and even genetic material across territorial, administrative, and juridical borders of various kinds (see green 2022, this issue). it allows us to hold together different kinds of movement (whether of, in this case, donors, surrogates, commissioning parents, or gametes) within the same analytical frame. it directs attention to the transnational infrastructuring of commercial reproductive markets: to the practices of recruitment, mediation, marketing, and exchange through which oocytes are transacted between (typically) younger, poorer and (typically) older, richer women. it enquires into the forms of biotechnical capacity on which these transactions rest and the ways that these intersect with, and piggy-back on, other circuits of movement and mediated desire—for tourism, leisure, work, study, or for aspirations to a “normal” or economically secure life. gametes across borders studies of clinical labor in medical anthropology and science and technology studies have drawn attention to the ways that arts enable the elements of conception to be (partially) dislocated from one another in space and time, creating regional reproductive markets structured by intraregional regulatory divergences, economic differentials, and racialized imaginaries of beauty and vitality (cooper and waldby 2014). in addition to a well-established transnational market for so-called nordic donor sperm (kroløkke 2009), oocytes are increasingly transacted across borders, as purchasing clients seek to avoid domestic restrictions on access to arts or to reduce the costs of private fertility treatment by traveling internationally. unlike semen, mature human oocytes are rare (most women ovulate around 400 mature oocytes over their lifetimes), of limited tractability, and difficult to store and transport ex vivo. egg donation, as waldby and cooper (2008, 58) note, thus depends on the “compliance, negotiability and general agency of female populations,” as well as on their more general bioavailability, that is, women’s willingness and ability to regulate their ovarian cycle through hormonal self-medication, and to travel, often at short notice, to the clinic where egg retrieval occurs. the resulting global “‘reprohubs,” as marcia c. inhorn (2015, 9) calls such centers of reproductive markets, have distinctive regional configurations. spain, for instance, has become a notable european center for the provision of reproductive services for women and couples from northern and western europe seeking donor oocytes—the result both of specific histories of liberal regulation of the fertility market (including a de facto commercial market in oocytes and guaranteed anonymity for donors) and specific dynamics of intra-european mobility for leisure and labor (lafuente funes 2017). it is not incidental to the configuration of this bioeconomy that many spanish fertility clinics are located in touristic areas close to coasts and airports (alkorta idiakez 2010) and that they actively recruit phenotypically white oocyte donors among eastern european women otherwise engaged in the low-wage economy in spain. transacting “asian” eggs in the post-soviet context, reproductive services also have a distinctive regional footprint, reflected in dynamics and languages of advertising and processes of donor recruitment. circuits of demand for reproductive treatments are shaped by cost, accessibility, and the availability of services proscribed in other jurisdictions, such as commercial gestational surrogacy, donor selection, and embryo sex selection through pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (typically framed as “family balancing” for commissioning couples who already have one child). crucially, they are also shaped by the place of russia, ukraine, and kazakhstan within the eurasian landmass and the bioavailability of both purportedly slavic and asian egg donors to meet demands from commissioning couples from both western/northern europe and east asia.2 this bioavailability is in turn shaped by circuits of donor recruitment and mobility from across the post-soviet space, mediated through shared language (russian) and common cultural/social media spaces, structured by durative economic differentials, and further mediated by transport infrastructures and a network of intermediary agencies (agenstva or posredniki) who negotiate contacts, contracts, and paperwork. donors are typically recruited online through sites such as meddesk.ru (a generic website for medical services, where surrogacy services and oocyte donation are listed in a menu between “cancer care” and “dental treatment”) or mama-poisk.ru (“mother search,” a website specializing in commercial surrogacy and oocyte vending), through social media sites such as vkontakte, and through small ads in free newspapers (or their online equivalents), where such adverts typically cluster alongside jobs for cleaners and sales assistants: jobs disproportionately occupied by migrant women. prospective oocyte vendors can announce their readiness to be contacted directly by commissioning couples (there is an active direct recruitment business), but the necessary techno-mediation of oocyte transfer means that women more commonly join so-called donation programs initiated directly by fertility clinics, or by agencies working on their behalf. notable within this configuration is the growing demand for so-called asian or eurasian (evraziiskie) donors for chinese commissioning couples. in china, fertility treatment is restricted to married heterosexual couples and oocytes can only be donated by women undergoing ivf and willing to donate any remaining eggs following treatment (weis 2021, 10). these legal prohibitions, alongside the lifting of the one-child policy in 2016 and the presence of a growing middle class with the financial means to access fertility services, has created a huge demand for reproductive services beyond china’s borders—to which clinics in russia, ukraine, kazakhstan, and georgia have responded with vigorous chinese-language advertising campaigns and “all-inclusive” packages for prospective commissioning couples.3 as christina weis notes (2021, 14), women marked as non-slavic were previously devalued both as donors and surrogacy workers within the russian reproductive market: the rejection of their reproductive labor was “grounded on the prevailing racism in the reproductive industry that depicts their bodies and labor as lower quality than that of ethnic russian women.” the intensified demand for “asian” eggs from chinese commissioning couples has dramatically increased the incentive structure for prospective oocyte donors marked as phenotypically asian. in addition to actively recruiting donors according to ethnicity (buryats, kyrgyz, and kazakhs being groups who seem particularly actively recruited), clinics may offer differential payments (figured as tax-exempt “honoraria” [gonorar] or “compensation” [voznagrazhdeniia]) for asian donors, covering transport costs and providing accommodation for the time that a woman has to be physically present in the vicinity of the clinic. one vladivostok-based clinic, for instance, announces voznagrazhdeniia of 60,000 roubles upward to “donors of european appearance” and from 80,000 roubles for “donors of asian appearance.”4 clinics likewise regularly indicate bonus payments for donors who are particularly tall (170cm+) and for those whose hormonal (hyper)stimulation results in larger numbers of mature oocytes. differential mobility proves central to this networked bioeconomy on multiple scales. value is generated, first, from the externalization and temporary immobilization of human vitality: from the capacity of oocytes to be isolated and transferred in laboratory settings through ivf, thus rendering “formally intractable tissues into more flexible, valuable substances” (waldby 2019, 5). but it is also generated from the differential physical and economic capacity of oocyte vendors, commercial surrogates, and commissioning individuals/couples to travel internationally between places where such transactions are proscribed and those where they are tolerated, and by the circuits of desire and differential economic opportunity that lead agencies and prospective donors to calculate their compensation in terms of salaries and mortgage down payments. abstract anthropological accounts of labor mobility in the post-soviet region have tended to focus on the commoditization, securitization, and illegalization of migrant wage labor, rather than on the generation of surplus through the harnessing of mobile life itself. bringing together discussions of “clinical labor” (cooper and waldby 2014) with analysis of migrant wage work, the essay explores strategies of transnational recruitment for supposed asian oocyte vendors by russian, georgian, and ukrainian fertility clinics seeking to meet a growing demand for donor eggs for chinese commissioning couples. in this bioeconomy, value is generated from the differential mobility and transactional value of human and nonhuman bodies, body parts, and genetic material across territorial, administrative, and juridical borders. the essay investigates how the recruitment of oocyte vendors intersects with other unequal circuits of movement to argue for an expanded account of labor migration in the post-soviet space. [bioeconomy; migration; oocytes; clinical labor] notes 1. after india, nepal, and thailand prohibited commercial surrogacy, ukraine, along with georgia, kazakhstan, and russia, is one of the few states that permits commercial surrogacy. for the quote, see the website of new life ukraine, https://www.newlifeukraine.com/ukraine-advantages/. 2. one kiev-based clinic, for instance, the international fertility group (https://ifg-ivf.com/ivf-amp-egg-donation/treatment-in-ukraine/), stresses the availability of “caucasian egg donors who are pretty, healthy and real” [sic] to prospective english-speaking clients, while stressing on its chinese-languages pages the availability of “global” donors, who can be matched on the basis of phenotype. 3. an indicative example is the ukrainian reproductive services company, biotex.com, which has a dedicated chinese-language site (biotexcom.cn) and a tianjin-based partner office to handle paperwork for china-based commissioning couples. 4. see the website of the vladivostok-based next generation clinic, https://surrogacy.group/donoram. references achtnich, marthe 2022 “mobile livings: on the bioeconomies of mobility.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 1–8. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.01 alkorta idiakez, itziar 2010 “three decades of reproductive rights: the highs and lows of biomedical innovations.” in feminist challenges in the social sciences: gender studies in the basque country, edited by marie luz esteban and mila amurrio, 143-158. reno: university of nevada center for basque studies. andersson, ruben 2018 “profits and predation in the human bioeconomy.” public culture 30, no. 3: 413–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6912115 constable, nicole 2020 “tales of two cities: legislating pregnancy and marriage among foreign domestic workers in singapore and hong kong.” journal of ethnic and migration studies 46, no. 16: 3491–507. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2019.1592403 cooper, melinda, and catherine waldby 2014 clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. durham, n.c.: duke university press. green, sarah 2022 “the bioeconomics of domesticating zoonoses.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 30–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.05 inhorn, marcia c. 2015 cosmopolitan conceptions: ivf sojourns in global dubai. durham, n.c.: duke university press. kroløkke, charlotte 2009 “click a donor: viking masculinity on the line.” journal of consumer culture 9, no. 1: 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540508099701 lafuente funes, sara 2017 “egg donation in the making: gender, selection and (in)visibilities in the spanish bioeconomy of reproduction.” in bioeconomies: life, technology, and capital in the twenty-first century, edited by vincenzo pavone and joanna goven, 253–78. london: palgrave macmillan. mackie, vera 2010 “managing borders and managing bodies in contemporary japan.” journal of the asia pacific economy 15, no. 1: 71–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/13547860903488245 nikiforova, elena, and olga brednikova 2018 “on labor migration to russia: central asian migrants and migrant families in the matrix of russia’s bordering policies.” political geography 66: 142–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.04.006 rose, nikolas 2007 the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. waldby, catherine 2019 the oocyte economy: the changing meaning of human eggs. durham, n.c.: duke university press. waldby, catherine, and melinda cooper 2008 “the biopolitics of reproduction: post-fordist biotechnology and women’s clinical labor.” australian feminist studies 23, no. 55: 57–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164640701816223 weis, christina 2021 “changing fertility landscapes: exploring the reproductive routes and choices of fertility patients from china for assisted reproduction in russia.” asian bioethics review 13: 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41649-020-00156-w cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 23-29, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.04 weedy finance: weather insurance and parametric life on unstable grounds cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 589-617, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.07 weedy finance: weather insurance and parametric life on unstable grounds caroline e. schuster australian national university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4229-2921 despite relentless storms precipitated by the 2018 el niño weather pattern, by late october the sesame planted on small commercial farms across northern paraguay had begun to germinate. on a parcel managed by agronomists at the regional centro de investigación regional (cir; regional experimental center) in the state of san pedro, raúl staked out meter-wide gridlines covering about a quarter of the 0.6-hectare plot of sesame. they were experimenting with various combinations of agrochemicals: fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides. the fragile seedlings needed all the help they could get. walking between the rows and stepping carefully over the gridlines staked out with string, raúl inspected the plants with pride. he explained that in the previous year, the first two attempts had failed as grub infestations decimated the crop. repeated planting and expensive chemicals had cost the cir dearly; the budget overrun was nearly a third higher than the line of agricultural credit that the cooperative automatically approved for small-scale sesame growers. this experiment registered an attempt to understand the effects of evermore extreme weather, which seemed to encourage pernicious plants and pests while leaving the sesame weak and unhealthy. the orderly, chemical-soaked grid squares on the experimental station stood in stark contrast to the overgrown hectare of land (chacra) in a nearby village where i had been working with don wilfrido, a seventy-nine-year-old sesame farmer and member of the agricultural cooperative affiliated with the cir. his parcel was covered in weeds and straw and dried plants. after ten years of farming niche cereals for the export market, wilfrido had nearly given up on sesame. he recalled marching into the cooperative and announcing, “soy viejo y cansado [i’m old and i’m tired]. i can’t do this anymore; i’d like to rest.” on hearing that, the manager of the cooperative rushed out of his office: “quick! get this man approved for credit. he’ll have to retain his membership if he borrows—you can’t leave, don wilfrido!” so, wilfrido returned to his farm with burgeoning debt and an overgrown parcel to deal with. he hitched up his old plough horse to the wood beam studded with rebar and crisscrossed the parcel to flatten the weeds and prepare the field for planting. wilfrido grumbled that the less labor-intensive strategy of disking the soil with a tractor (as the agronomists had done at the cir) made it look tidier, but noted that it simply turned the weeds under, which later played havoc with the root systems of the sesame seedlings. underlying his folk wisdom gleaned from years of farming was the reality that his impoverished rural town did not have access to a municipal tractor. an old man and his old horse, aptly named kavaju tuja (“old horse” in paraguay’s guaraní language), had to deal with the malezas, yuyos, and capi’i (weeds) as best they could.1 the contrast between the two farms is but one instance of the inequalities in capital and expertise that stratify rural paraguay. however, global climate science and financial systems bring them together in an unexpected way. an additional, intangible grid overlaid both the orderly cir and wilfrido’s weedy parcel. advances in data science and technology are creating new opportunities for insurance (singer 2019). the agronomists and wilfrido had purchased a novel type of crop coverage that triggers a claim if remote sensing data measures certain weather conditions. this specialized “index-based agricultural insurance” (ibai) differs rather markedly from the more familiar so-called index funds of contemporary finance, which are engineered to mimic the composition and performance of a market index like the dow jones industrial average. instead, agricultural index insurance is oriented toward climate science: the predictive models of agrometeorology that synthesize temperature, rainfall, wind, and ground moisture, among other data, which all have a bearing on crop health. the key to these policies is the “parameter,” also often leading to another name in use, parametric insurance. when a key hazard variable exceeds a predetermined threshold (figueiredo et al. 2018) and the value of the underlying weather index causes the insurance to “trigger” (gatillar, disparar), farmers automatically receive a payout. if certain conditions are met—say, too hot and too dry for too long—the “hydrological stress index” (estrés hídrica) pushes into the red, the parameter is triggered, and the insurance company will pay all the farmers within the grid-square on the map. conversely, if the remote sensing data indicates that everything is fine, no payout occurs even if on the ground the sesame perishes from adverse growing conditions (see johnson 2013b; clapp and isakson 2018). parametric policies constitute insurance in the traditional sense that they pool risk among farmers who buy into the scheme, and transfer their myriad personal and agrarian risks to impersonal financial markets. but in another sense, they depart from conventional insurance contracts, as they do not indemnify losses (kar 2017)—they are a weather hedge rather than crop insurance. thus, critical insurance studies have argued that parametric insurance acts less like an insurance scheme that depends on an adjustor evaluating casualty claims (siniestros) for verified crop losses, and more like a weather derivative (esunge and njong 2020). the contracts are written on a climate model and decoupled from actual farms and fields, as the plants themselves become dematerialized into abstract biomass. today, weather-indexed insurance is gaining popularity within international development policy, particularly in the pacific and the caribbean, as intensifying hurricanes and cyclones lash both regions. governments now rely on insurance facilities for catastrophe bonds to finance disaster recovery (johnson 2013a; z. taylor and weinkle 2020). meanwhile, at the local level, aid organizations have peddled microinsurance ibai policies for agricultural products as diverse as cattle (bernards 2018) and teff (peterson 2012). while parametric insurance remains relatively niche, the wider market for weather derivatives was valued at us$32 billion in 2007–2008 (randalls 2010, 712). through parametric triggers, weather offered up opportunities for extracting value and profits in an increasingly troubled climate. all three subjects—agronomists, wilfrido, and financial brokers, albeit in profoundly unequal ways—were reassessing the empirical grounds for those experiments. “turbulence” is financialized (cooper 2010) by a chain of local agricultural cooperatives, insurance agents, brokers, and global reinsurance funds. the weather index and its hazard variable become a proxy for crop yield, calibrated to a model of normal climatic conditions expected to make sesame thrive. while the expansion of speculative finance into new zones of risk is hardly novel, i was surprised to find that parametric insurance depended not so much on healthy sesame as on the pests that thrived among the profitable plants. as i will go on to show, weeds articulated across multiple grids: the meticulously ordered experimental station, the genealogical and intimacy grids (povinelli 2002) that matched up financial products with familial obligation on wilfrido’s parcel, and the satellite grid that aggregated data about weather patterns that would make pests thrive. the purpose of this article is to develop an account of how paraguayan practices of weed management engage financial forms and to show how weediness (rather than crops) marks out the grounds through which weather insurance becomes imbued with value. and since insurance is not the only register of peril in agrarian settings, i sketch out a series of concerns about weeds as an entry point and helpful heuristic for multiple overlapping kinds of speculation in a multispecies, capitalist, and troubled landscape.2 commentators have widely observed that weeds are good at revealing a variety of social phenomena: the proper ordering of human landscapes (robbins 2012; twigg 2017), enclosure and capitalist accumulation (van dooren 2012), the temporal promise and disappointment of modernization (carse 2019; hetherington 2019b), environmental crisis and its particular abandonments (tsing 2015a; myers 2019), and so on. it might be argued, following the logic and language of certain anthropological approaches to global capitalism, that weedy landscapes are ripe with alternatives. they emerge “between subsistence and the market, between cultured nature and natured culture, between the one-way path to progress and the space on the side of the road,” (jones 2019, 6). “weeds complicate the temporalities of growth and decay, they live in the interstices between environment and infrastructure, and they are both unwanted (by definition), and the sign of life’s future” (hetherington 2019b, 9). the relative valuation of “wild seed, domesticated seed” (van dooren 2012, 27) has recast human/crop relationships as “companion species [that] enact a world in which people and plants emerge, always already entangled with each other.” there is an implied sympathy with weeds as a lively and resilient form of life that can thrive in ruins—economic, environmental, anthropogenic (tsing 2015b; myers 2019). weeds make compelling antiheroes and agents of resistance, offering hope in a blasted landscape (berrigan 2012; kirksey 2015), even if they are difficult companion species with which to live. to paraphrase natalia cecire’s framing of the related mycological turn,3 they promise to rescue capitalism in an eco-friendly “weedy fix” that is both alternative and generative. but how did the multiple, overlapping speculative grids—weather models, the aesthetics of the modern farm, and a grid of reciprocal kinship connections that let an old man live his life—contend with the weeds? what intrigues me about how weediness registers within financial practices such as weather insurance is how it triggers an inversion of expected sources of value and profit. that is, weeds are complications in agrarian settings that thrive in precisely the conditions marked as catastrophes by parametric hazard variables, conditions in which sesame can no longer survive. weedy finance as a site and an analytic attunes us to the sheer thorniness of those hazard variables, the simultaneous promise and threat of weedy generativity to the climate-risk models on which they are engineered, and the resilience the insurance industry hopes to create for itself by adapting to those pests. this figure/ground reversal calls for a creative redeployment of the processes of “capture and conversion” (bear et al. 2015) or “translation” (farquhar and kelly 2013; tsing 2013, 23) that feminist anthropologists identify as the mechanism by which capitalist social relations “are generated out of divergent life projects” (bear et al. 2015). unlike the re-valuation of purportedly native plants or diversified ecosystems as “vital vegetalities” (chudakova 2017, 342), certain plants remain the target of weeding even as they are incorporated into financial practices like measuring the weather and modeling crop health. thus, i am not appealing to commodification through purification that uses and obviates noncapitalist social relations (tsing 2013), much less seeking to decenter the human and reclassify weeds in a taxonomy of performative capitalist devices (lee and martin 2016). to get a handle on the nexus of how weather and markets are valued, we need to consider how speculative financial practices themselves might also constitute collective ecological acts.4 weedy finance depends on cultivating particular grounds: the grid-square on a satellite map, a parcel of sesame, a four-meter-square weather station, or a grid of genealogical descent. weather insurance seeks those grounds through specific parameters—that is, hazard variables in a weather model set to trigger at a predetermined threshold (figueiredo et al. 2018). against the binary predictions of loss triggered by parametric variables, the expansive interdependencies of wilfrido’s human and nonhuman kin prove especially poignant. how might life be imagined other than through the parameterization of insurance models— variables that become ever more speculative in a turbulent climate? tracing insurance agents’ ongoing effort to know and inhabit their own grounds reveals once again the importance of kinship as the alternatively generative institution and site of pooled risk. these are relations relentlessly parameterized and enclosed: rendered into contract and credit, fields laid barren, absent children sent to migrate. not by accident do kin-based interdependencies—including human-plant life cycles—suffer and respond when finance fails in its own mutual and ecological obligations, or when those mutual obligations benefit profit, not people. i end by suggesting that actually dwelling in these weedy grounds offers an opportunity for some speculative practices of my own. an anthropological imaginary might posit “weedy finance” as a critical standpoint and set of political claims for casting climate-based finance as one of the lively systems that can and should be intentionally and selectively weeded out. climate weeds and finance are both closely associated with expansion. weeds “invade” pioneer habitats (de wet and harlan 1975, 100), and archaeological research indicates that their evolutionary copresence with crops contributed to complex histories of the re-domestication of key cultivates as agricultural landscapes expanded and receded (langlie et al. 2014, 1604). as complications in agrarian settings, weeds are not simply metaphors—they are quite literally the evolutionary consequence of long-term cohabitation in space, and they sprout up in all domesticated landscapes. finance is likewise associated with pioneer habitats, including “salvage accumulation” that constantly seeks “edges” to occupy (tsing 2015b). it is telling, then, that this essay germinated as i straddled a grid of string, feeling the claustrophobia of being hemmed in on all sides. raúl shouted instructions indicating a scoop-full of chemicals here or there or over there, ticking squares off the graph-paper map affixed to his clipboard. the embodied experience of mincing steps, pulling gridlines taut, and measuring out grams seemed at odds with these expansionary logics of weeds and finance, exemplified in the remote and capacious work of satellites overlaying these grids across undifferentiated biomass—efforts that were, curiously enough, indifferent to the plants that grew there. farmers, meanwhile, were anything but indifferent to the “plant matters” (chudakova 2017, 342) of their parcels: crops and weeds. in fact, they refer to the uncultivated peripheral zones bordering fields as yuyales, weedscapes. agrarian political economy has long observed that agriculture is performative (richards 1993), such that farmers’ work is not merely economic activity but also performs quotidian roles and scripts directed toward different kinds of audiences (flachs 2019, 49). for instance, indian cotton farmers deployed discourses of “a good yield” to normalize farm labor in a context of deeply ambivalent and ambiguous returns, becoming “the performance that remains possible for farmers seeking profits and recognition from their agriculture” (flachs 2019, 55) in a baffling and uncertain market for genetically modified (gmo) seeds. during fieldwork i conducted from 2017 to 2019 in rural san pedro, the degree to which sesame farmers and the agronomists who worked at agricultural cooperatives saw themselves as part of the developmental success story of weed-free modern agribusiness informed their rural identity: agriculture’s performative nature must also consider “the neoliberal stages on which this performance occurs” (flachs 2019, 57). monitoring and managing weeds made for key aspects of this performance. figure 1. agronomists at the regional experimental center test chemicals on their demonstration parcel. the hectare of sesame was also covered by a parametric insurance policy. photo by caroline e. schuster. cultural and human ecologists have conducted vital work “showing how environmental perturbation is negotiated” (batterbury 1996, 2008, 64) in dynamic tension between climate knowledge passed intergenerationally and through social networks and substantially different assessments by scientific experts. given the careful attention by farmers to weed-crop relations, and the fact that it was the grid on which the insurance product was engineered, i felt taken aback by the repeated failures of the insurance company to deliver on its own technologically sophisticated promises and expertise. by the fourth time the insurance company, which i call insurtech, canceled a scheduled visit to rural san pedro, raúl and his colleagues were quite vexed. the visit was important because the insurtech team was meant to perform software updates, maintenance, and alignment of the company’s weather stations. twenty-five of these are scattered throughout the southern part of the state. they were built with funding from multinational aid agencies—the inter-american development bank, its capital fund fomin, and australian aid. together with satellite maps, the meteorological data from the weather stations informed the hydrological stress index that constituted the basis for insurtech’s parametric microinsurance product. critical insurance studies have characterized parametric insurance as an “overly technical approach to risk management” (m. taylor 2016, 237). the farmers who aspired to performances of modern agribusiness found it disconcerting that insurtech did not appear to be particularly concerned about maintaining the infrastructure for their high-tech weather index or collecting data from their stations. while commodities futures markets have long undergone seasonal adjustments, the market for financial products that enable companies to trade on weather indices emerged in the 1990s, pioneered by energy companies such as enron and koch industries. weather had been instrumentalized for a variety of purposes long before the advent of derivatives markets. james r. fleming (2005, 176) chronicles the linked histories of scientific instruments and militarism, noting, the us army signal service, established as a special military unit during the civil war, continued its military mission into peacetime as a national weather service and intelligence gathering agency. from 1870 to 1880 … the corps pursued with a vengeance stormy weather, striking workers, renegade indians, and other threats to domestic tranquility. by the 1940s, commercial applications for meteorology began to emerge, especially for aviation. as meteorology professionalized worldwide in the twentieth century, a market for financial products and services emerged using public data from the national weather service (nws) and its umbrella agency, the u.s. national oceanic and atmospheric administration (noaa). to mediate the intense rivalry between public and private-sector meteorologists—epitomized by the all-out warfare led by accuweather (founded in 1962) against the nws5—both the united states and the united kingdom established regulatory frameworks that separated out meteorology for public and commercial interests. the explosion of commercial forecasting (fine 2009) allowed companies to trade on weather indices and hedge against weather-sensitive costs. the boom came in the 1990s, as samuel randalls (2010, 712) notes: “consequently, the new weather product became derivatives (rather than insurance), because energy companies could more readily adopt financial products than the more heavily regulated and licensed insurance products. this also meant that weather derivatives paid out as soon as the weather parameter was triggered in the contract, regardless of whether damage occurred or not.” this “geomoney” is based on a series of conversions that are “imagined and storied as able to capture and harness the vagaries of the so-called natural world and transform the associated risks into financial instruments ready for circulation” (pryke 2007, 578). markets for weather-indexed financial products de-couple weather from the everyday experience of crop health and failure in rural settings by “re-territorializing it within the abstract space of globally diversified weather portfolios” (pryke 2007, 585). meteorology itself constituted a key technology of globalization—that is, of understanding planetary processes and generating the infrastructures to engage them with “world-scale institutional-technological complexes” (edwards 2006, 239). in paraguay, as with many development settings of “financial inclusion,” parametric insurance is the first formal “risk pooling and transfer product”—that is, insurance—available as a stand-alone financial service for the rural poor (johnson 2013b, 2663–64). the commoditization of risk is far from new in the paraguayan countryside; commercial microfinance has already saturated rural households, and many of these loans carry debt-cancellation and life insurance policies (schuster 2015, 2016; kar 2017). yet insurance remains quite limited. the markets for private health insurance, motor vehicle insurance, and life insurance make for a tiny proportion of financial services, which are geared mostly to credit. indeed, scholars of biopolitics cast insurance cover as a defining feature in stabilizing the developing world as an object of intervention and regulation. “developed life is supported and compensated through a range of social and private insurance-based benefits and bureaucracies. … in contrast … surplus non-insured life is the subject of development, while … self-reliance is its biopolitical object” (duffield 2007, ix). in development-oriented microinsurance, self-reliance—re-branded as resilience in the age of climate catastrophes and pandemics—is newly subject to financialization, as self-reliance is no longer an object of intervention but a new zone of risk. in a world of extinction and extreme warming, planetary parameters of human survivability are devolved and privatized as they are relocated onto farms such as wilfrido’s.6 control i first tuned my ethnographic senses to this convergence of weeds and finance on the streets of asunción. in the well-heeled suburbs of paraguay’s capital city, stenciled graffiti protested monsanto agrochemicals, or agrotóxicos, “agrotoxins,” as activists and critics of industrialized plantation agriculture call them. yet in a year of fieldwork in rural northern paraguay, nobody ever expressed outrage or distress at agrotóxicos. quite to the contrary, agronomists prefer to use the term agricultural defenses (defensores agrícolas) when referring to all types of chemical products for use on farms. and farmers had a complex relationship with monsanto’s flagship weed killer, glyphosate, tied to their ambivalence about the costs of all agricultural inputs, from hiring field hands to buying fertilizers or seeds. the struggles over chemicals, weeds, and weed management, though, proceeded along another vector—one that cannot be so neatly summed up in a slogan like “we are expelling monsanto [ñamosẽke monsanto].” tellingly, the graffiti stenciled next to the monsanto jolly-roger was a heavily stylized atm machine promising informal lending with no credit check from paraguay’s equifax-owned credit ratings service (schuster 2014). taken together, they are a study of stylized capitalist ecologies, and the promise and limits of growth. figure 2. the toxic jolly-roger is captioned “we are expelling monsanto” in guaraní (left). a stylized atm machine includes a phone number to request informal credit (right). photos by caroline e. schuster. the appalling success of glyphosate in killing all plant life that has not been engineered to survive its toxins (robbins 2012) describes a moment of agribiopolitics (hetherington 2020): agrarian labor has always selectively eradicated some forms of life so as to cultivate others. as kregg hetherington (2019a, 42) notes, paraguay’s “long green revolution [can be read] as a slow process of intensification of killing and a concentration of labor and death in new forms of property.” much more can be said about the governance of human and plant health through mobilizations of the state in san pedro, paraguay. the imperative to use agrochemicals to eradicate weeds from sesame fields is one piece of the puzzle. today, informal intermediaries (acopiadores) and formal agricultural cooperatives connect family farms such as wilfrido’s to local markets for agricultural inputs like chemicals and the global export market, primarily in japan. early on in developing parametric insurance for sesame growers, insurtech had forged a working relationship with the peak body of local agricultural cooperatives and worked closely with one local association that i call multiactiva, which also managed the cir experimental station. in fact, the cir was also covered by a parametric sesame policy. for some cooperatives such as multiactiva, buying insurtech’s crop insurance was mandatory financial cover for any farmer taking out a loan for sesame-related farm inputs and anyone who expected to sell sesame back to the cooperative at the end of the harvest cycle. the arrival of sesame in rural paraguay was not orchestrated by state-led agrarian reform, but rather through a bilateral aid arrangement. the united states agency for international development (usaid) saw sesame and other niche cereals as a promising commercial cash crop that could boost farm income in poor rural communities. the first major report appeared under the aegis of the usaid-supported paraguay vende, or paraguay sells, program in 2009, documenting the efforts to create partnerships with private businesses with the objective of offering technical assistance and support for sesame production. the report noted that although sesame requires minimal or zero levels of agrochemicals, “the success of sesame is based precisely on the greater presence of intermediary businesses, such that sesame constituted a frontier of expansion [terreno de incursion] of a new generation of agricultural enterprises” (usaid 2009, 15). pioneering companies such as shirosawa, with connections to paraguay’s japanese colonies (kohlhepp 1984), experimented with ultra-low-input production by subcontracting to campesinos who used traditional farming methods like horse-drawn seed drills and manual harvest with machetes. a new financing model that enhanced the role of intermediaries as both suppliers of farm inputs and as buyers and exporters meant that shirosawa could distribute risk across many farms. at the peak of sesame production in 2004–2005, the ministry of agriculture census recorded 37,540 hectares planted in san pedro department, up from 6,800 in 2000–2001. commercial sesame, then, is too niche to precipitate plantation monocropping. yet the many small farms that embraced the “sesame craze,” as one agricultural extensionist described it, found themselves enmeshed in an expanding network of agribusinesses that commercialized all aspects of production, from fertilizer to final sale. this in turn led both farmers and the agricultural experts they relied on to grow these unfamiliar plant species to embrace the aesthetics and techniques of commercial farms, epitomized by chemically cleared, weed-free fields. the desire for and performance of modern farming was a central concern when i discussed the fourth cancellation by the insurtech maintenance team tasked with repairing the company’s weather stations with the cir’s agronomists. abilio, an agricultural technician who worked for multiactiva as a sesame specialist and sometimes planted sesame on his own farm, was not impressed. “they had better come soon; the station is full of malezas, it’s full of weeds,” he said. when the topic of weeds in the weather station came up, the team of agronomists were sitting in a small patch of shade taking a break from working at cir, which also functioned as a “demonstration parcel” (parcela demonstrativa) for farming best practices. we had just recently sprayed the 0.6-hectare parcel of sesame with a mix of glyphosate and insecticide to protect the germinating seeds and keep them from being choked back by malezas. their crop was sold on as organic sesame, but the ministry of agriculture does not specify a list of approved or banned chemicals. the regulatory framework for paraguayan organics, codified in the 2008 law no. 3481 for development and control of organic production, delegates oversight to a byzantine “coordination” among three agencies that separately “establish internal methods and procedures” (national congress of paraguay 2008, article 12), without centrally available approved lists of organic products.7 agronomists like raúl and abilio depended almost entirely on extensionists from usaid and from big exporters like shirosawa who had their own in-house testing facilities to determine whether the sesame was contaminated. like the parametric insurance, they were mostly concerned with “triggers” and limits linked to binary logics of losses—that is, testing regimes that would detect unacceptable levels of residual chemicals in the final export products. organic certification, then, was a question of time, in much the same way that the coverage cycle of the weather index engineers itself to the life course of sesame and its parameterization through chemical contamination or hydrological stress. organic sesame exemplifies parametric life. for agronomists, plant life began at germination, which also began a chemical life course linked to a series of habitually used products. in this case, most of the chemicals washed away in the rain that came just hours later—it was one of the many failed speculative experiments of weedy finance. abilio’s comment about the station being lleno de malezas, full of weeds, suggested it was an affront to all the technical knowledge about modern farm management that he was trying to bring to his clients at the cooperative and put into practice at the cir. amalia, a human ecologist also working for multiactiva, was seated in the shade with us—she had a station on her own land. hearing that insurtech might send a team the following week, amalia fretted aloud about whether she’d be able clean up the enclosure before they arrived, not wanting to pasar vergüenza, “suffer embarrassment” when they came to do maintenance. like abilio, amalia also worried about the maleza, but for her performance of a tidy and orderly farm. it is in this sense that the “anthropocene is weedy,” complicating narratives of decline and progress: “not only because out-of-place plants grow up in the cracks of old mortar and cling to the bottom of tankers, but because it profoundly complicates the categories of life on which social science has for so long depended” (hetherington 2019b, 9). when the conventional separation of biology and culture no longer holds, the specificity of financial (human socioeconomic) life and plant (domesticated chemically resistant) life are put in doubt. harvest to understand the success of these weed-infested enclosures as an insurance infrastructure even as they failed as a local performance of modern farming, i had to attune to the rhythms and cycles of policy coverage and premiums rather than the agricultural cycles of sesame. insurtech negotiates the premiums for its insurance on the global reinsurance market through a broker, who seeks an underwriter for the insurance product. the key to all of this is so-called risk transfer (barnett, barrett, and skees 2008; peterson 2012; johnson 2013b; m. taylor 2016; aguiton 2019). a local insurance company would have to hold massive cash reserves (far more than it received in premium payments) to cover its exposure—a scenario in which catastrophe strikes and all the policies trigger at once. so, the company resorts to larger pools of capital on global markets, transferring risk to big players like swissre, munichre, berkshire hathaway, lloyd’s, and the like through what the industry calls global reinsurance (z. taylor and weinkle 2020). actuaries (i.e., people who price risk professionally) at these big funds look at, say, ten-year weather data in paraguay. they agree to underwrite the catastrophe losses for insurtech for a price determined by their loss models. although 2018 marked only the second year that the parametric drought insurance had been offered in paraguay, insurtech already managed to negotiate down the premiums by about 10 percent, thereby offering coverage to sesame farmers at a lower price.8 as we were waiting for farmers to gather at a local cooperative to listen to insurtech pitch the company’s sesame insurance, alfonso, a specialist in agricultural insurance and an architect of insurtech’s index product, chatted amiably with me about the behind-the-scenes work to lower premiums. he explained that their broker was able to secure a better rate via their global reinsurance partner because their actuaries felt “convinced” (convencidos) by the quality of the index itself and its forecasting of weather events based on historical data. crucially, the model proved persuasive because, at the industry level, this was the grid on which the product was engineered. the weather stations and satellite data had calibrated a rainfall index that fit neatly within the reinsurer’s own climate models; accuracy of the index meant access to global pools of capital. meanwhile, global reinsurers describe the “frontier” as data sourcing. in a global forum, a representative from swissre discussed the challenges of implementing an environmental, social, and governance (esg) risks framework. looking back over the past decade he recalled: at the time we had a system in place that put heavy emphasis on expertise and manual referral processes. … and that just overwhelmed the team. … and we couldn’t keep on hiring experts. so, for us the hurdle there was to realize the importance of data, the importance of automation, the importance of integrating the process [sic] into the underwriting process. in material terms, this meant that data sourcing—including the manual referral process and development of expertise—was outsourced to local partners such as insurtech. a key speculative register, then, is climate data and its integration into the underwriting process. as insurance agents scrambled to define the limits of survivability for sesame plants by gridding out ever more precise maps of weather and crop health, these unstable grounds left insurtech in a curious position. the weather stations proved crucial before the coverage began (and before rainfall actually mattered for the farmers looked after by abilio and amalia), when the insurer was negotiating premiums through their broker. but in a year when el niño was washing away the tiny seedlings on sesame farms, drowning the fields under downpours, and threatening to bog down the tractors that would come to disk the soil and prepare for a second attempt at planting, insurtech could be confident that the parameter (drought!) was in no danger of triggering. they could wait out the bad weather before sending in the team to fix the stations. climate models can be reified in a way that permits speculative instruments like derivatives, but bad weather is just bad luck. when the team from insurtech finally made it out to perform maintenance, they didn’t actually have time to knock back the weeds as abilio and amalia had hoped. the weed whacker [desmalezadora] and backpack sprayers remained forgotten in the bed of the company truck. as the it specialist plugged in his laptop and started to run diagnostics, nelson, the project lead from insurtech, explained that they had briefly considered paving over the enclosures, as this would require less upkeep and would “look better.” but the equipment manufacturer had cautioned them that this would disrupt the temperature readings due to reflected heat off the hot cement, and “interfere with the data, with the sensors.” the stations required about the same amount of plant matter as the surrounding fields for the sensors to read correctly, nelson explained. efforts by farmers such as amalia to clear the enclosures and manage the weeds actually biased the temperature readings from the stations. figure 3. weed-infested weather station owned and operated by insurtech. photo by caroline e. schuster. standing just outside the locked gate of the four-meter square enclosure, nelson explained that the weather stations had a data storage capacity of six months of readings. if the team failed to connect remotely, the data would have to be downloaded onsite and the signal adjusted through a manual update. “but normally maintenance is done from asunción; we do it from the office. we came with the team to also see the state of the vegetation, shall we say. what’s inside the enclosure. in some cases, we have cases where there are lots—lots of weeds [mucha maleza]. in this case, for example, it’s intermediate. that doesn’t yet merit any cutting.” walking around the enclosure and pointing to the equipment lodged within, nelson noted, “what you see here, you will see in all twenty-five. all of them. here we standardized everything, from the dimensions of the perimeter fence, the distance, the altitude of the arm, the tension wires. they are all identical.” this also meant homogenous plant growth within the enclosures. the quest for exquisitely calibrated parameters generated parametric life: standardized weeds, conceived as biomass. he even described how a single contractor had installed all the fencing to guarantee uniform dimensions, type of wood, depth of posts, and the like. bien estanderdizado, “well standardized.” this was all the basis of finely tuned hazard variables and their triggers; weeds were internal to the parameters. danny, the it specialist subcontracted to insurtech, set about updating the firmware on the station, his laptop propped up on a milk crate, wires snaking out into the grass and climbing up the pole into the equipment box. nelson, meanwhile, charted the long-term goals of insurtech, and their aspirations for weather derivatives. the idea is that we will continue, and we want to risk—risk, i’m saying! [laughing]—or, well, yes, risk. risk doing another—of extending the model to give coverage to other risks. which would be excess moisture. so, we would go for the two extremes. one for hydric stress, the other for excess moisture. it is another recurring risk too. in fact, just this year it is giving us that, right? we could say, if we were to have had this—but of course if we had known, obviously, we would have changed. he was self-reflexive about mobilizing the language of risk to describe his own work, entailing the financial risks with climate risks. and he framed his work in a speculative register (si hubiesemos tenido), speaking in the subjunctive tense to assess the woulds/coulds of his scenarios. given that the sky was already darkening with clouds, those entailments were hard to miss. however, nelson turned the situation around to recast the risks of climatic uncertainty as an opportunity on two counts. first, he noted that they were working toward a model that would “mature” over time by incorporating other risks, other coverage, other crops. second, the excess rainfall was improving the “statistical rigor” for the index. nelson concluded: n: the study is advancing with the agroclimatologist. he, what he is wanting is, this year is really good for him to be able to characterize …. c: yes, because this would be a twenty-year or a fifty-year event? n: exactly. and to be able to incorporate this and see in what form we can take this to an index, like we did with hydric stress. and then this index, to see how to incorporate it into the coverage model of the insurance. and well, there we are. and this is all part of the work [laughing]. c: an important part. n: yes, yes. and to offer basic information and supports the model of microinsurance. the data is also shared with the cooperatives, with the producers so that they can take decisions about their crops, and in the meantime [y de paso también] to capture these data is important at the level of agroclimatology to make comparisons of any deviation [desviación] that there might be with respect to what the satellites are reporting. because the index model is constructed through satellite data. this is a form of calibrating the model. the academic meteorologist who had consulted for insurtech and helped build and calibrate the hydrological stress index was thrilled to have the weather data from this el niño year. the season’s catastrophic rainfall would provide valuable data about weather disasters and improve the model sensitivity for the coming year, when the company hoped to expand coverage to include excess rain as well as drought. for the insurer, the catastrophic rain itself offered a resource to more effectively price risk in the future, even as it washed away crops and threatened its own stations. this dynamic tension was constitutive of insurtech’s own forecasting models, and the resilience of its own product. nelson’s assessment of the resilience of his company’s weather model shifts the grounds for accumulation in an age of amplified environmental risk. simply put, the bottom line, quarterly profits, extracting premiums from the productivity of small farmers—these do not make for the animating logics of insurtech. the weather derivatives relied on subsidized seed funding from multinational aid agencies, and the small team led by nelson understood that the market for policies sold to fewer than five hundred sesame farmers hardly justified the expenses his team put into marketing the product, looking after the weather stations, liaising with the agroclimatologist, and so on. parametric microinsurance would probably never be profitable for the insurance company, even once it “matured.” locking the gate behind him and packing the equipment into the truck, nelson concluded with a modest assessment. “we were learning from the whole process, which we were doing with the producers themselves. so, we were trialing it too [ensayando también], learning from them, and from our own work [de nuestro mismo trabajo]. a process of ‘feedback’ from our own work.”9 weedy finance tracked a shift in what it means to be an expert farmer, away from land management and its intimate attention to the interactions between certain plants, pathogens, weather, and chemicals. instead, standardized weeds moved agrarian labor toward the digital mastery of laptops, telecoms, and remote sensing. these latter were calibrated to the far sight of climate and investment, not the imminent agricultural lifecycles of plants and people. weedy parameters are not innocent. in a global insurance forum titled “sustainability leadership in insurance,” co-convened by the un environment programme’s principles for sustainable insurance initiative (psi) and swissre, the risk-assessment capacity of the insurer was framed as a public good. a spokesperson for the regulatory sector explained: it is actually the job or the dedicated experience and knowledge of insurers to put a price on risk. … and these can send very strong signals to the outside world about whether risks are too high or extremely high. it may be also not insurable anymore. and with this strong signaling, through their contractual terms and through their premium, insurers can actually promote risk prevention behavior. the capacity to define the ever-shrinking grounds of parametric life through climate-based redlining is sold back to the public as a social good. resilience meanwhile the cycles of rain, weeds, and finance were not so easily held apart for members of multiactiva such as wilfrido, the farmer who has planted sesame for at least a decade. after a series of storm systems pummeled the region, i was relieved that the sesame had sprouted just fine. however, weeds thrived in the damp, overcast weather, threatening to choke out the seedlings and overrun the parcel. walking through the field and inspecting the newly germinated sesame, abilio and raúl instructed wilfrido that while the forecast was good for his fields, he urgently needed to clean up the parcel and get rid of the weeds.10 since chemical weed killers had proven ineffective in the rain based on their own experience from the demonstration parcel, they advised wilfrido to withdraw us$100 from his savings account at multiactiva to pay personnel to help clear the fields. this was about four times as much as his insurance premium and one-third of the payout, should drought trigger the parameter. hired help was urgent because wilfrido’s six adult children had all migrated out of the rural sesame belt, and most of them now lived in argentina. in fact, the reason wilfrido was so open to a duo of women anthropologists—my field assistant, rocío, and me—helping as field hands was that his daughters, who had customarily worked the fields with him, were absent. though he grumbled about the expense of hiring more personnel, wilfrido also hesitated to use weed killers on the organic sesame crop. along with several other farmers in the area, he’d had a calamitous experience with chemical drying agents (secante, commonly used on soy) for his chia crops a few years ago. these agrochemicals had been specifically endorsed by the cooperative’s agronomists, but they triggered contamination when the chia was tested for export. the disaster left him deeply in debt to the cooperative. during a break from working in the fields one afternoon, wilfrido returned to reminisce about the ruined chia crop. he began by telling us about how much he had earned in the previous cycle. talking about the ganancia [income] from the good year, he said that more than $1,000 “was left over” as profit [sobró] after he had paid off the debts to the cooperative. he went to the cooperative with his chia harvest the following year expecting the same profit, and when it turned out that the chemicals had ruined the crop, he had to go home and break the news to his wife, ña neca. he said, “neca, dame un beso, give me a kiss,” when he told her how much they’d lost. as neca wept into her handkerchief, he told her “así estamos—uno canta, uno llora, that’s how we are—one sings, and one cries. hay tiempo para llorar, there is a time for weeping.” rocío and i sat in silence, stunned by the story of agrotoxin-induced tears, the co-production of two complex chemicals that flowed through the risky nexus of weedy finance on the farm. we paused, looking out at the sesame fields, and thought about speculation and losses in all their many registers. to lighten the mood, wilfrido transported us out of the everyday dilemmas of his farm, recounting a classic rural myth from guaraní folklore. standing in the sesame field, he told of the karãu bird—the story of how it was given its mournful cry. there was a time, wilfrido told us, when a young man went out looking for medicine for his ailing mother. he happened on a festival and stayed there dancing late into the night. his friend came and told him, “your mother is dead, you should go to her.” he responded, “no importa mi buen amigo, el baile no he de dejar, la omanóva ya omanóva, hay tiempo para llorar” (it doesn’t matter friend, i won’t leave the dance as the dead are dead, there’s a time for weeping). and for failing to recognize his kinship obligations, he was punished by being transformed into the karãu, the bird with the weeping song. the turn of phrase, hay tiempo para llorar, repeated like a refrain, recast the story of his lost chia crop as also a moral failing of neglected kinship obligations, of disappointing his wife and failing as a husband and father. as in guaraní myth, resilience is conceptualized as a capacity to endure the crisis and be transformed. it is a story of nonparametric alternatives to binary loss predictions. in wilfrido’s case, debt refinancing through the cooperative—which, recognizing the bad advice from the agronomists, assumed half the liability for the debts incurred for the chia crop—was the social site of resilience. yet plants also point to the past presence of kinship, care, and generational life course. these chains of mutual care traverse the life of valued plants and overcome individual life spans, sprouting on a genealogical grid and thereby offering up a surprising inversion. for wilfrido, weeding provided a valued and valuable site for assessing and managing the generational investments that generated both financial value and moral understandings allowing a person to live well. rocío and i spent a full season in 2018–2019 as farm hands on wilfrido’s farm, planting the crop, cutting the sesame, stacking it to dry, and finally threshing by hand and hauling the sacks of seeds to the cooperative in my truck. i identified intensely with wilfrido when, at one point, he cursed his parcel: porquería de orgánico—“i’m never planting this organic shit ever again.” the comment came as we were picking burrs out of our clothes, out of our skin, passing around my pocketknife to pry thorns out of our hands—the parcel was completely overgrown, even after paid personnel had helped hoe between the rows. all uncovered skin was shredded by the sharp plants. in what seemed like an exercise in ethnographic masochism, i’d written down an exhaustive list of thorn variants by their local guaraní names, all varieties of capi’i (weeds). wilfrido reached over to pull some burrs out of my shirt tails, which i hadn’t noticed when i sat down. “if it weren’t for this porquería de orgánico, i’d have passed weed killer, matatodo [‘kill everything’] over the whole parcel. lindo lindo lindo, pretty pretty pretty.” and once the organic sesame was harvested, he did just that. the story of how wilfrido got his weed killer further complicated the story of the mutual incorporation of weeds and finance. midway through the threshing, when wilfrido was getting ready to clear his parcel and plant maize, we visited his son, the caretaker for a six-hundred-hectare soy farm nearby. they were also planting “improved” (i.e., gmo) corn over the recently harvested soy crop. after a furtive search for an empty container, wilfrido’s son filled a fertilizer bucket with matatodo, surreptitiously packing it into my truck along with eighty kilos of gmo seed corn. the caution about diverting resources from the soy farm was itself instructive—wilfrido’s son explained he’d never met the owners, only the representatives from the bank that handle the finances. as far as he knew, it was a conglomerate of foreign interests that owned it, along with a much larger four-thousand-hectare property nearby. they oversaw the farm as a disembodied presence, and as such, were felt to be omnipresent, even in the empty sea of corn and soy. given the intense surveillance of the area, the careful labeling of all company property, and the mysterious sources of agricultural inputs that would arrive unannounced, the notion that we were being covertly observed was not at all far-fetched. figure 4. harvesting sesame with wilfrido, battling the capi’i (weeds). photo by caroline e. schuster. for wilfrido and his son, the diverted weed killer recalled the absent kinship obligations of faraway children who could not hoe and plough alongside their aging father. chemicals materialized bonds of filial piety that were stretched taut by the economic realities of migration out of unprofitable rural farmland. for wilfrido, social losses (like the absence of his family members because of migration) interact in complex ways with economic losses (such as the lack of field hands for the harvest). rather than a threat to small farmers, monsanto’s glyphosate performed a sort of historical memory of proxy labor, indexing kinned hands that had, in the past, wielded machetes, or the reins of the plough horse, or the hoe. and the resilient gmo corn that could be planted on top of the chemically cleared fields was a materialization of kinship projects that flowed through generational obligations of gift and sacrifice, even if it at the same time they were the grounds on which commodity agriculture and weather derivatives thrived. conclusion: exterminate the co-emergence of finance and weeds offers new ways of talking and thinking about mutual incorporation and grounding the vital projects that allow one to live. the overgrown weather stations and climate models that project pestilent futures press us to consider degenerative life processes: weedy finance. the kinship ideology of generational obligation performed by weed killer, and that united rather than opposed big soy with a small family farm, does not mark a zone devoid of insurance. quite the contrary, this self-help is precisely what the industry dubs self-insurance. the individual retains the risks, rather than transferring them via financial intermediation. nelson’s dream of adding other climatic excesses to the hazard variables and triggers of weather insurance proves instructive: the impossible desire to parameterize everything into binary predictions of loss, of the world constituted as insurance-in-waiting. however, for all the speculative zeal of weather insurance and its creative frontiers of climate modeling, i see it as a profound failure of imagination. this process of delimitation—of reducing broad complex processes to a narrow range of actionable parameters, of distilling loss down to binary triggers—has far-reaching implications for analytics as an intense site of cultural production and governance today, from search engine optimization to election forecasting to baseball. parametric life depends on an expansive range of human and multispecies interdependencies, as well as on collective ecological practices. in the quest for analytics, data can identify certain patterns, including troubling forecasts of our planetary future. but by gridding the world to a limited set of expedient parameters, what generative social and human grounds do we lose in the process? speculative insurance instruments are probing the future, from a certain point of view. weedy finance is sharply attuned to the emergent and irreversible reality of extreme weather. insurance agents like nelson sit with the queasy feeling that they are covering ever more, even as less and less sesame will grow. it was clear to me that he considered deeply how financial practices themselves might also constitute collective ecological acts, but looking through the limiting lens of speculating on hazard variables also limited his own effort to grasp their mutual obligations. weed management engages financial forms and imbues those forms with value by re-conceptualizing the grounds on which they manifest. through the financial infrastructures of global reinsurance, insurtech has experimented with new ways of making its climate models resilient before the sesame crops were even planted. they depended instead on standardized weeds. in other words, looking for a profit motive or critiquing how premiums are extracted from campesinos will not reveal the form and effects of weedy finance. in fact, the sesame insurance will always be a losing proposition for insurtech. weather-proof financial products, however, were envisioned as necessary and urgent for profits to withstand climate change and its ever-changing parameters of survivability. it’s a commitment to the model that matters, not the short-term profitability or even long-term colonizing of new areas of personal life with market-driven or technical sensibilities. in closing, i suggest that wilfrido’s enthusiasm for a weed-free farm as a valued project of kinship and meaningful labor should point us back to the political possibilities of selectively weeding out and eliminating some forms of life to cultivate the interdependencies of others. wilfrido and nelson both envisioned a future climate inimical to crops and conducive to pests, while also questioning the forms of mutual obligation that would manifest in those futures. their dystopian/utopian visions open the door to imagining what else might be selectively exterminated: namely, financial systems and their speculative practices. weedy finance presses for a further inversion: i speculate that finance may be the pest that sprouts up when other vital relations are cultivated. this is an anthropological imaginary that goes beyond redistribution and core struggles over income inequality today, as it suggests nonmarket activist tactics of weeding. by grounding finance in weeds, the inversion of drawing value from the abject opens up the whole value proposition to both scrutiny and challenge. what if we could root out and exterminate weather derivatives with the same relentlessness as we do capi’i, weeds? perhaps we should follow wilfrido’s lead and feel the same satisfaction with a job well done when we kill financial assets as when we put on a backpack sprayer to hose down a parcel with matatodo. weedy finance generates new possibilities for extracting value from an uncertain climate, while at the same time challenging the unshakeable belief that finance can and must thrive as the dominant vital system today. abstract based in the agrarian worlds of commercial sesame farming in northern paraguay, where insurance companies are now selling weather derivatives to poor farmers, this article tracks financial practices that depend less on the healthy crops and more on the weeds that thrive among the profitable plants. parametric insurance operates like a derivative and is triggered by certain weather conditions, which raises questions about the limits of survivability for human-crop relations. i sketch out a series of concerns about weeds as an entry point and helpful heuristic for multiple overlapping kinds of speculation in a multispecies, capitalist, and troubled landscape. by gridding the world to a limited set of expedient parameters, what generative social and human grounds do we lose in the process? a speculative anthropological imaginary might posit “weedy finance” as a critical standpoint and set of political claims for casting climate-based finance as one of the lively systems that can and should be intentionally and selectively weeded out. [financialization; parametric insurance; weather; commercial agriculture; kinship; paraguay] notes acknowledgments this research was funded through the australian research council discovery early career researcher award de170101406 (2017–2020), with further support from the college of arts and social sciences at the australian national university. i benefited from the comments from the bunsen burners, nick cheesman, tom cliff, rachel hughes, and lia kent, and from my wonderful archaeologist colleague catherine frieman, who introduced me to the deep history of domestication. adam sargent helpfully reviewed an early draft. versions of this article received comments from anthropology seminars at william & mary and the university of melbourne. leigh johnson was the discussant at a 2018 aaa panel where i presented an early version of this argument and offered crucial insights about index insurance. i am thankful for the generous feedback from four highly engaged anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology, as well as for the editorial guidance of brad weiss. as always, all errors and omissions are my own. this essay is dedicated to nelson and wilfrido and their weedy projects—i am deeply indebted to them, thorns and all. 1. these are the spanish, paraguayan vernacular spanish, and guaraní terms for “weeds,” respectively. 2. the trouble with approaches that seek either to redeem or to demonize finance is that they both, in their own way, reify financial systems as homogenous and unchangeable. instead, i suggest that ethnography has a powerful role to play in reconceptualizing speculation. as laura bear (2020, 2) has suggested, “speculation is now a widely dispersed form of paid and unpaid labour that creates surplus value.” the “means of speculation” (bear 2020, 3) are hierarchically arranged into contracts and credit, but the amount of surplus value extracted depends on “social evaluations” and “the imagination of social difference.” in the context of ibai, i refer to speculative finance in its highly specific material manifestation of weather derivatives, where speculation hinges on the imaginative labor of scenario planning. i am indebted to melinda cooper’s work on this topic (cooper 2010, 2015). throughout, my references to speculation are an effort to hold together the specific hazard variables built into parametric insurance contracts, the many experimental registers that characterize modern agribusiness, and the uncertainties and aspirations borne by in-between actors such as farmers, agronomists, and insurance agents. since all of these speculative projects are highly attuned to intensifying effects of extreme weather, some actors accumulate while others are dispossessed, but we cannot predict how that will sort out in advance. 3. on “mycological promise” and its “fungal fix,” see https://natalia.cecire.org/research/. 4. here i am following sarah besky and alex blanchette (2019) in their reimagining of the taken-for-granted relationship between human labor and nonhuman nature by specifying multispecies financial practices as a specific (though often invisible) world of work. 5. accuweather has long been run by the company’s founder and ceo, barry myers, a staunch conservative skeptical of public services and government institutions. he has lobbied extensively to prevent the nws from competing with his for-profit private forecasting business since the 1990s, despite the irony that his forecasts rely on public nws data. the decades-long impasse reached a tipping point in 2019 when president trump nominated myers to head the national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the federal agency in charge of weather forecasting and monitoring (contorno 2019). the decision drew the ire of many in atmospheric sciences. myers later withdrew his nomination following a string of controversies that emerged around his leadership of accuweather. 6. in biopolitical theories of “resilience,” boundaries, thresholds, and parameters emerge as “crucial to the catastrophic imaginary of contemporary liberal rule” (evans and reid 2014, 9–13). planetary boundaries and the “parameters of human survivability” are downscaled and offloaded into individual risk-bearing subjects, as “to be resilient is to insist upon the necessity of vigilance in relation to one’s surrounding. this effectively creates micro-vigilantes of all of us as we are tasked to police our locales in a manner which complements the outsourcing logic of neoliberal governance” (evans and reid 2014, 16). 7. the internal regulations for these bodies establish principles for organic production separated into different phases of agricultural production, such that the “emphasis on practices and management, whenever possible based on cultural, biological, and mechanical methods” (senave 2010; emphasis mine; see also gonzález gómez 2017). 8. reduced from gs. 145,000 to gs. 134,000 per hectare for ninety days of coverage of the hybridized “precocious” k2 variety 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agronegocios.” paraguay vende, prepared by alexandra friedmann and betsabe weil, supervised by reinaldo penner. https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnadw376.pdf. van dooren, thom 2012 “wild seed, domesticated seed: companion species and the emergence of agriculture.” pan: philosophy activism nature 9: 22–28. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.533917400637473. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 589-617, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.07 the long turning: a palestinian refugee in belgium cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 225-230, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.05 the long turning: a palestinian refugee in belgium diana allan mcgill university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8903-8627 “since childhood i have never felt safety, stability, or security, not once—even after i married.” trying to describe what this felt like, suhaila likened herself to one condemned to stand forever on the ledge of a roof, who may fall or stay alive. “what might happen later? we don’t know. what is destiny hiding for us? we also don’t know. i always say, ‘ya rab, my god!’”1 we were seated in a small, sparsely furnished bedsit close to the train station of st. niklaas, which her two sons had rented three months earlier. a chair served as a makeshift table, the bed as a sofa. suhaila reflected on the sequence of events that had brought her from a palestinian refugee camp in beirut to this quaint belgian town, once famous for its textile industry. a deceptively ordered account of multiple displacements followed, beginning with the israeli bombing of nabatiyya camp in 1974, months after her birth. for palestinian refugees in lebanon, decades of war—civil, regional, and internecine—have made the loss of home and its regeneration a way of life; rupture is routine, anticipated, prepared for. while camp life is reflexively associated with stasis and stagnation, dizzying mobility has also been central to the refugee experience, making forced movement both the cause and imagined solution to insecurity. perilous, “irregular” journeys to europe, in search of resettlement and better lives, form part of a long-established pattern. suhaila described the arc of her life as a “long turning” (bahuss haali ka anni barmi taweel), likening herself to the arab al-rahil bedouin, “scattered, from place to place, one day here, one day there.” in this piece, i echo kali rubaii’s (2020) call to consider what it means to be living in never-ending crisis—a theme also explored in emrah yıldız’s (2020) account of contraband couriers. how is insecurity—acknowledged as the de facto condition of refugee existence—experienced over the course of a life, across generations, or as it moves over borders? what might it mean to live one’s entire life—from birth to old age—in a state of insecurity? how might this protracted temporality alter conceptual understandings of the term—no longer a finite stage, but a “form of life” (fassin, wilhelm-solomon, and segatti 2017)? while the spatial logics of (in)security have been extensively discussed across academic and policy literatures, commentators have paid less attention to its temporality.2 like other sites of entrenched precarity, palestinian camps complicate the binary logic of insecurity, which presupposes a reversible condition. for five generations of stateless, disenfranchised palestinians, insecurity is not an aberrative blip in otherwise secure lives, but a constant; it is understood not as a temporary condition, but as an ontology that has produced particular ways of being and knowing. in the introduction to this colloquy, the editors highlight (in)security’s spatio-temporal continuities as “an affect that travels and gives way to further affects” (el dardiry and hermez 2020, 197–203). suhaila’s account of her quest for security in belgium brings into focus the way the structures of racialized exclusion now shaping europe’s asylum system refract and intensify the lived experience of migrant insecurity. although the distance separating shatila and st. niklaas is 4,139 kilometers, suhaila’s journey to belgium with her husband, jihad, entailed travel over the considerably longer distance of 24,672 kilometers, through six countries—turkey, panama, ecuador, colombia, spain, and france. smuggled on false documents, the couple journeyed eighteen days, paying $25,000 for the trip. both their sons, now in their twenties, had taken the same route three months earlier, bringing the family’s total expenditure close to $50,000. while these journeys entail enormous psychic investment, they also constitute an irreducibly material project, involving the dissolution of assets and the amassing of huge debts. during a phone conversation with me a month before they left, suhaila had itemized all they had sold to cover the smuggler’s fees—their furniture, her mother’s gold, jihad’s barber shop of twenty years, and everything in it. then they waited. when the smuggler finally produced their travel papers, he gave them less than twenty-four hours’ notice. “i stood in my room like a mad woman, unable to think, moving from one side to the other … .” at the airport, suhaila was told she could carry no more than seven kilos and was forced to leave a bag with clothes and photographs behind. as she recounted this journey to me months later, the abandoned suitcase figured as a synecdoche for all that had been lost, emblematic of another life now beyond reach. i retraced the last leg of suhaila’s journey to st. niklaas in april 2018. looking out the window at the train platforms of the gare du nord in paris, i recalled her terror at the sight of the security dogs and policemen, and her fear that she would be asked to show identification, which had been torn up in spain. “when i saw the police i felt my heart fall down [qalbi waq‘a],” she told me. “my body was beating with the beat of my heart. i felt like i was stealing or committing a crime.” while waiting in the gare du nord, she and her husband pretended to talk animatedly on their cellphones: she imagined that if they looked purposeful they would not attract attention. when they arrived in brussels, their sons were there to meet them. seeing them standing on the platform—a moment she had rehearsed in her mind for months—she resisted the urge to run and embrace them, fearing that the urgency of her movements might betray her. “when i saw my children i felt comforted, but i didn’t want to show emotion in case the police suspected we were immigrants.” as i recalled these details, painfully recounted between long pauses over the phone several months before, i reflected on the distance separating her experience from my own, an equation of profound inequality, and the insidious “affective infrastructures” (glück 2019) of surveillance that migrants must navigate. the haunting image of her awkward reunion with her children in brussels vividly delineates the maniacal reach of state power—imagined here as monitoring all aspects of migrant life, even down to its most intimate gestures. a week after their arrival, suhaila was invited to the ministry of immigration for the first of several interviews. “we have information from the spanish authorities that you were traveling with four underage children on november 20th. where are these children now?” the immigration officer challenged. “what children?! i didn’t travel with children.” suhaila denied the charge and described her rising panic. she knew doubt would be cast over her own rendering of events, and sensed the situation’s potential insidiousness: “‘this is false!’ i protested. the officer saw i was upset. ‘ok, we will check this. sign here.’” from a distance, one might put the error down to inconsistencies of information systems, to the bureaucratic arbitrariness of asylum procedure. in the face of it, however, suhaila was deeply shaken. the accusation remained incomprehensible to her and underscored the indeterminacy of legal protections for asylum seekers. “on the train back to st. niklaas i was talking to myself. i had lost my mind. they think i would kidnap children?” pausing, she turned to me and asked, “what should i do? should i kill myself to rest? this is psychological war [harb nafsiyye]. they made me live this war. they made me live it, and i lived it.” * * * like the asylum seekers sophia rainbird (2014, 460) encountered in the united kingdom, who were “neither the person they once were, nor yet the person they strive to be,” suhaila described the struggle to come to terms with a situation radically different from what she had imagined. she had anticipated bureaucratic uncertainties, not entrenched racism. her narrative offers a heuristic for understanding how refugees and asylum seekers might experience the disjuncture between the rhetorical adherence to refugee rights, enshrined in the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees and its 1967 amendments, and increasingly exclusionary state policies that make it harder for refugees to access legal status and protections. in her account, the line separating secure and insecure states is blurred and inconstant. institutional discrimination and terror in the face of law enforcement and state bureaucracy complicate the binary of disorder and order, crisis and refuge. indeed, her experiences illuminate how they are symbiotically connected: as aggressive border policing relies on the perceived criminality of smugglers, supposed terrorists, and “illegal aliens” for its authority, smugglers in turn profit from increasingly restrictive border regimes. the threat of terrorism—for which the arab-muslim migrant now constitutes the living synecdoche—is increasingly invoked to justify preemptive regulations that undermine individual rights and structures of accountability. suhaila’s experiences offer a painful reminder of the differential functioning of borders, regimes of mobility, and asylum procedures that sift out global “undesirables” (agier 2011). they underscore how, for those imagined as a security threat, these increasingly racialized forms of securitization and surveillance produce affects (most often, paralyzing fear) that are deeply and acutely embodied. if palestinians from lebanon seeking asylum in europe today have a more realistic understanding of what awaits them than they did a decade ago, the presumption remains that life in the west will afford access to basic rights and protections lacking in lebanon. suhaila’s journey does not chart a linear path from crisis to refuge and resettlement, but rather a spiral or whorl, what she calls the “long turning” of her life. webs of insecurity that follow refugees across borders are woven more thickly on the loom of the asylum regime and are not disentangled (or undone) even by legal recognition. as georgina ramsay (2017, 517) argues, “even after, and as a result of being provided with a legal national identity,” racialized forms of state power continue to mark and subjugate refugees as “culturally ungovernable.” as suhaila is again denied the rights and entitlements of citizenship, and waits for her case to be decided in a reception hostel in st. niklaas, “at once [a] citizen-in-waiting and deportee-in-waiting” (haas 2017, 76), the asylum system reveals itself to be as much a source of insecurity as its remedy (brekke and brochmann 2015). from an early age palestinians—not only refugees, but especially refugees—understand that the labor of life involves navigating the indeterminacies and protracted insecurity of statelessness. like muhammad, the algerian “south-south” spy darryl li (2020) found languishing in a migrant detention center in sarajevo, palestinian refugees constitute the disposable “assets” of a political game over which they have little leverage. suhaila’s experience offers a lens through which to critically scrutinize the normative privileging of the security of states and borders over that of people. having lived her entire life outside the space of modern citizenship—initially as a camp refugee in beirut, now as asylum seeker in europe—she is alive to the stark limits of legal protections and the widening gap separating a rhetoric of rights from their implementation. suhaila’s account of her journey to belgium also makes vivid the dehumanizing objectifications of neoliberal statecraft and the extent to which host states are no longer viewed as guarantors of rights and refuge, but as active producers of illegitimacy, insecurity, and indeterminacy in the lives of refugees. abstract this article considers the duration and meaning of insecurity—as it is experienced over the course of a life and moves over borders—through the narrative of a palestinian woman from shatila now seeking asylum in belgium. structured around one person’s account of the asylum process, it considers what a singular case can reveal about a collective migrant condition, the inconstant line separating secure from insecure states, and the reconstitution of a secure self in conditions of chronic uncertainty. [palestinian refugee; asylum; narrative] notes 1. pseudonyms are used throughout. 2. the work of ilana feldman (2018) and georgina ramsay (2017) represent notable exceptions. references agier, michel 2011 managing the undesirables: refugee camps and humanitarian government. cambridge, uk: polity. brekke, jan-paul, and grete brochmann 2015 “stuck in transit: secondary migration of asylum seekers in europe, national differences, and the dublin regulation.” journal of refugee studies 28, no. 2: 145–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feu028. el dardiry, giulia, and sami hermez 2020 “critical security and anthropology from the middle east.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 197–203. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.01. fassin, didier, matthew wilhelm-solomon, aurelia segatti 2017 “asylum as a form of life: the politics and experience of indeterminacy in south africa.” current anthropology 58, no. 2: 160–87. https://doi.org/10.1086/691162. feldman, ilana 2018 life lived in relief: humanitarian predicaments and palestinian refugee politics. berkeley: university of california press. glück, zoltán 2019 “security urbanism and the counterterror state in kenya.” in spaces of security: ethnographies of securityscapes, surveillance, and control, edited by setha low and mark maguire, 31–56. new york: new york university press. haas, bridget m. 2017 “citizens-in-waiting, deportees-in-waiting: power, temporality, and suffering in the u.s. asylum system.” ethos 45, no. 1: 75–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12150. li, darryl 2020 “the spy who came in from the south.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 231–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.06. rainbird, sophia 2014 “asserting existence: agentive narratives arising from the restraints of seeking asylum in east anglia, britain.” ethos 42, no. 4: 460–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12064. ramsay, georgina 2017 “incommensurable futures and displaced lives: sovereignty as control over time.” public culture 29, no. 3: 515–38. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-3869584. rubaii, kali 2020 “trust without confidence: moving medicine with dirty hands.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 211–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.03. yıldız, emrah 2020 “nested in(securities): commodity and currency circuits in an iran under sanctions.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 2: 218–24. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.04. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 225-230, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.05 looking away cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 6-13, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.02 looking away lisa stevenson mcgill university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0705-9307 in the archives of mcmaster university’s health sciences library there is a photo of a woman named kautaq joseph from ikpiarjuk, nunavut. the photo is labeled only “eskimo 1955” and shows kautaq sitting up in her hospital bed in the mountain sanatorium in hamilton, ontario, where she had been taken for the treatment of tuberculosis. kautaq is wearing a printed nightgown done up right to her neck. her straight black hair is parted on the right. her lips are slightly open, and it is hard to know whether she is smiling or not. both the backdrop of the photograph and the pose are familiar. behind kautaq are the black rungs of the hospital bed, with a series of electrical plugs above it. the pose conforms to the standard hospital mug shot that i saw over and over in the mcmaster archives: the unnamed inuit patient photographed from the waist up, sitting or reclining in bed, taken with an eye-level camera angle and wide depth of field. in this case, kautaq, as patient, does not look sick, only enduring and thoughtful. the only thing that distinguishes the photograph’s background from the others is a partly finished strap for an amountik (a woman’s parka), slung over the back of the hospital bed. the agents responsible for the administration of the canadian arctic hoped that sending photographs of patients in hospital home to family members would lessen the trials of separation—in that sense the photographs are material evidence of the canadian state’s belated attempt to care for inuit in hospital. but the sheer fact that hundreds of these photographs exist in a hospital archive with no identificatory markers other than labels such as “eskimo 1955” shows them to be something else as well. something related to the notion of an anthropological type—a concept and material artifact developed in the late 1800s to distinguish racial groups from one another. it is important to note that not all patients convalescing in the mountain sanatorium had their photos taken. the photographs, negatives, and newspaper clippings collected about inuit were records of something extraordinary, proof of something unusual, just as an x-ray can serve as proof of tuberculosis. not only did the inuit patients in hospital in hamilton harbor specimens of tuberculosis deep within their bodies but they were also—as the surfaces of their bodies made visible—specimens of another culture. and while the x-ray could expose the first form of difference (as disease), only a photograph could “expose” the latter (as ethnicity). rather than portraits of an individual with a name and a history, the photographs seem to speak to something else. the descriptions of the negatives, contact sheets, and photographs stored in the macmaster archives are revealing in how little they say: “eskimos” 1955 “eskimos with dr. rabinowitz” “eskimos on wards” oct. 1955 “eskimos at brow & grafton” may 1958 each photograph of each individual inuit stands in for a category—of “eskimos at brow & grafton,” or of “eskimos on wards,” or “eskimos with dr. rabinowitz.” * * * frantz fanon (2008, 109) also described the colonial gaze using terms from the laboratory—it fixed him in place, he said, “in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye.” describing canadian indigenous struggles for justice, glen sean coulthard (2014) has argued that politics based in the search for recognition from the colonizer can never escape that (post)colonial circuitry of the gaze. recognition remains in the logic of the state, the logic of categorical ways of looking. what, then, might an un-stately, unseemly, un-fixative, way of looking be? i find the beginning of an answer in audra simpson’s (2014) work on refusal in mohawk communities: in being beyond the ken of your categories, i am—and will continue to be. i find another in michele lancione’s (2020) contribution to this issue. he writes: “life at the margins of bucharest, in its underground tunnels, takes its own form, its own weird assemblage: it is a life that saves itself from its own history, one that refuses institutionalization, and one that constructs its own way of being into the world—that is, its own way of dwelling, by caring for its own unfolding” (lancione 2020, 33). and so, in what follows i want to think about what it might mean, as anthropologists, to turn or look away from our interlocutors to register something other than conceptual closure or the violence-that-is-done-through-concepts. and this way of looking has everything to do with a kind of justice that exceeds the logic of the state. it is also, i would argue, a gesture of care. in what follows i turn to two writers, roland barthes and john berger, who became interested in what we see when we close our eyes. that is, they have tried to describe ways of seeing that take into account the painful ways we are marked by history and yet still manage to see, or at least gesture to, the singularity of another being. in camera lucida, roland barthes (1981) tells the story of searching with increasing desperation for a photograph of his mother. but he does not want just any image. he wants a “just” image. barthes’s story is really all-too famous now, and camera lucida has been rightly critiqued for its multiple aporias. but i want to retell the story—the story of roland barthes, a gay man in the 1970s finding a just picture of his mother—because it helps me imagine a way of seeing that has something to do with another, less categorical, less fixative, form of care. here’s the story. after barthes’s mother dies, he begins to sift through old photographs looking for one that does her justice. for a while he is frustrated in the attempt—each photograph falls short in a different way. he laments that, “if i were ever to show them to friends, i doubt that these photographs would speak” (barthes 1981, 64). but then, one day: “there i was, alone in the apartment where she had died, looking at these pictures of my mother, one by one, under the lamp, gradually moving back in time with her, looking for the truth of the face i had loved. and i found it” (barthes 1981, 67). the reader never gets to see that photograph of his mother. it is as if our potential inability to see what he sees in it would be too much for barthes—would be itself a kind of injustice, and so his withholding of the photograph also is a form of self-protection. what barthes says about the photograph he finds (he calls it the winter garden photograph) has always struck me. he writes, “i saw the kindness which had formed her being immediately and forever. . . . her kindness was specifically out-of-play, it belonged to no system, or at least it was located at the limits of a morality (evangelical, for instance); i could not define it better than by this feature (among others): that during the whole of our life together, she never made a single ‘observation’” (barthes 1981, 70). barthes’s winter garden photograph captures something about his mother, in this case her gentleness, that cannot be reduced to any system (including our anthropological language games). it is thus not the kindness of a charitable or humanitarian impulse, nor even a maternal gesture of love. it is out-of-play. the other photographs barthes considers “were merely analogical, provoking only her identity, not her truth; but the winter garden photograph was indeed essential, it achieved for me, utopically, “the impossible science of the unique being” (barthes 1981, 71).1 what was singular about barthes’s mother, then, was this particular genre of kindness. but in a strange kind of doubling, this specific form of kindness is defined by an ability to resist generalization. that is, his mother, barthes reports, “never made a single ‘observation.’” (even the simplest observation would require some sort of generalization.) no matter how literally we should take such a statement from a grieving son (that she never made observations), there was something about her ability to receive the world, rather than make observations about it, that “provokes” her truth. why do i want to locate a form of anthropological care in the search for a photograph that cannot be described, nor simply shown but only gestured toward? in a certain sense, of course, observations are what carry anthropological monographs along, and i would never want to do away with them. observations are the currency of our discipline—we hope they will make the worlds we inhabit more legible and perhaps more liveable. but here i am interested in thinking about an (impossible) anthropological gesture (like barthes’s impossible science of the unique being) that erupts into our disciplinary observations, and even perhaps, language, allowing something else, something just, or something alive to temporarily break through. perhaps we could say that it is such a gesture that could reanimate or reenchant our anthropological observations. at the very least it might upend our usual pieties. the novelist, theorist, and painter john berger describes such a gesture in his essay on the early nineteenth-century painter théodore géricault. in that essay, berger focuses on a portrait géricault made of a man in an asylum, diagnosed with kleptomania. in the portrait, the man is looking into the distance, looking elsewhere. he has tousled hair. his suffering is manifest, but so is something else, something that berger calls beauty, but not the beauty of familiar forms and genres. berger (2017, 209; emphasis added) writes: “naturally the beauty he hoped to find meant turning his back on most official pieties.” géricault made ten paintings of inmates in the same asylum where the man with kleptomania resided. five remain. of these portraits berger (2017, 211) insists that “the way he painted them makes it clear that the last thing he was concerned with was the clinical label. his very brush marks indicate he knew and thought of them by their names. the names of their souls. the names which are no longer known.” thus, for berger, seeing someone, recognizing someone, is in itself a gesture of compassion. but to recognize someone in what sense? not to recognize their identity, berger insists, but to understand the “name of their soul,” that which has been forgotten. (could it ever be remembered?) barthes, as we have seen above, would call what is recognized in the faces of the inmates a kind of “truth,” but it is a strange kind of truth, in that it cannot be named or categorized. we could also call it the “impossible science of the unique being.” * * * it is here, around the question of looking that the differences between berger’s and barthes’s texts (one describing the search for a just photograph and one describing a painter’s gaze) seem to dissolve. because, as berger (2017, 152–53) says more generally about portraiture, the way of looking that it requires paradoxically compels you to close your eyes and look away: when you’re trying to do a portrait of somebody else, you look very hard at them, searching to find what is there, trying to trace what has happened to the face. the result (sometimes) may be a kind of likeness, but usually, it is a dead one, because the presence of the sitter and the tight focus of observation have inhibited your response. the sitter leaves. and it can then happen that you begin again, referring not any more to a face in front of you, but to the recollected face which is now inside you. you no longer peer; you shut your eyes. you begin to make a portrait of what the sitter has left behind in your head. and now there is a chance that it will be alive. for berger, a portrait that has any chance at being alive is made from the traces of what the sitter has left behind in the artist’s head. the artist paints with the eyes closed. likewise, for barthes, the photo that expresses the “truth” of his mother is never shown to us, though many other photos are. this play between opening and closing one’s eyes, between seeing and not seeing, representability and unrepresentability, possible and impossible sciences, seems crucial to discovering a way of looking. if we are to “look in a certain way”—a way that allows us to go beyond seeing someone as a specimen from a social category, we might have to close our eyes, at least temporarily.2 so we look at the sitter of any portrait and look away. we look at the resulting image and look away. we finally find an “essential” photograph, and do not show it. learning to look in a certain way, a way that allows us to see beyond the clinical label or social category, involves a play between seeing with our eyes and seeing with our soul—or at the very least, (if the language of soul offends)—finding a way of seeing beyond the intellect and its torrent of observations. tina campt, writing about a series of archival passport photos of members of the afro-caribbean community in birmingham, might call this “listening” to images. she writes: to look at these images is to see genre and form. to look at them is to look through their sitters and see function and format, to “oversee” them in ways in which black people have been erased and overseen for centuries. to listen to them is to be attuned to their unsayable truths, to perceive their quiet frequencies of possibility—the possibility to inhabit a future as unbounded black subjects. (campt 2017, 45) this is the possibility to which an impossible science gestures. how to look again at the portrait of kautaq? one way might be to turn away slightly from kautaq’s face full of composure, and to look for what the photo literally sidelines: the amountik strap hanging on the corner of the bed. unfinished, the strap resists the timeless closure of the anthropological type, or even the “homogenous, empty time” (benjamin 1986, 261) of the clock. it indexes a moment in time when the amountik strap was precisely that far along, just as kautaq’s life was also precisely that far along. a moment with a breathless future that, in searing the photograph, is here with me as i hold the photograph in my hands—but also gone. i wonder, again, where kautaq, looking but receding from the camera, really is or was, that day, and whether the amountik was ever finished. unfinished, the strap disrupts the closure of the photo and puts the multiple futures—of the strap, of kautaq’s life, of my life—into play. through her handiwork, kautaq sneaks out behind the designation “eskimo 1955” and draws me ever so subtly into her world,3 where weaving her amountik strap must have also amounted to a gesture of hope—the hope that she would return to a place where such a strap would be needed. abstract this essay turns to roland barthes’s concept of the punctum and john berger’s writing on portraiture to describe the care involved in both anthropological encounters and ethnographic writing. it addresses how images—whether, photographic, painted, or written—may come to be seen as “just.” the essay considers the possibility that it might be necessary to look away from our interlocutors, or the images we have of them, in order to be able to sense, and then communicate to others, their singularity. the traces they leave behind in our memories can allow us to register an aliveness that exceeds our existing labels, categories, and styles of thinking. [care; images; representation] notes 1. while fred moten (2003, 208) sees barthes’s refusal to show the photo of his mother as part of a kind of “violent egocentrism,” i see it as coming from his feeling that description necessarily fails to communicate singularity (as that singularity is revealed in relation to another). as he says about the punctum in image—music—text, “nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and i think back on it. i may know better a photograph i remember than a photograph i am looking at, as if direct vision oriented its language wrongly, engaging it in an effort of description which will always miss the point of its effect, the punctum” (barthes 1977, 53). 2. throughout his work, berger offers an “other” way of seeing, one related to compassion. it’s a way of seeing that might be learned, or at least practiced. the learning is, however, a kind of unlearning, in the sense that one lets go of, or forgets, (even for an instant) the capitalist mode of seeing that commodifies not only objects in the world but also “souls.” for berger, as a european coming of age in the postwar period, it was the capitalist desire to accumulate surplus value that defined the way his contemporaries saw the world and understood art. his response was to describe a “method” of getting beyond such a vision of the world and the people in it. in a letter he wrote to his son while the latter attended art school, he said: “to go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning, hierarchies and self. it also means risking incoherence, even madness. for it can happen that one gets too close and then the collaboration breaks down and the painter dissolves into the model” (berger 2001, 16). berger wants to argue that there is a kind of “energy” behind appearances that can be seen and communicated, however imperfectly (see especially berger 1987). to be able to communicate this energy one must let go of the moralism that is equally present in the position that every way of seeing is fully determined historically (and so i can only speak about myself when i speak about others), as well as in the (often implicit) position that one can fully know (and thus effectively govern) the other. as berger says, for a portrait to be alive, you must register the impression (the mark, the trace) the other leaves behind when you look away. that impression is relational, it is the impression left on you, the painter or writer, but it is not reducible to you. it is your reception of the “energy” behind appearances and identities and in re-presenting it, it is possible that it will be alive. 3. in stolen life, fred moten (2018, 92) asks, “is knowledge of freedom always knowledge of the experience of freedom even when that knowledge precedes experience?” it is in this sense that i suggest that in weaving an amountik strap, kautaq is already at home, or at least, in weaving she draws together two seemingly disparate temporalities, the hospital-present and the homecoming-future. references barthes, roland 1977 image—music—text. essays selected and translated by stephen heath. new york: hill and wang. 1981 camera lucida: reflections on photography. new york: hill and wang. benjamin, walter 1986 illuminations: essays and reflections. edited and with an introduction by hannah arendt. translated by harry zohn. new york: schocken books. berger, john 1987 “a professional secret.” new society, december 18. 2001 the shape of a pocket. 1st american ed. new york: pantheon books. 2017 portraits: john berger on artists. edited by tom overton. new york: verso. campt, tina m. 2017 listening to images. durham, n.c.: duke university press. coulthard, glen sean 2014 red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. fanon, frantz 2008 black skin, white masks. translated by charles lam markmann. london: pluto. originally published in 1952. lancione, michele 2020 “underground inscriptions.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 1: 31–39. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.1.05. moten, fred 2003 in the break: the aesthetics of the black radical tradition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 2018 stolen life: consent not to be a single being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 6-13, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.02 oikography: ethnographies of house-ing in critical times cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 539-547, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.01 oikography: ethnographies of house-ing in critical times joão biehl princeton university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4843-4804 federico neiburg universidade federal do rio de janeiro https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9917-8604 figure 1. photo by torben eskerod. oikography essays explore the reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity: the 2010 haitian earthquake and cholera outbreak, racialized police violence in rio de janeiro’s favelas, malarial control in impoverished tanzanian communities, the irradiated post-fukushima japan, and the displacement of amazonian communities by a hydroelectric dam. taking the oikos as at once a built shelter; a collection of relations, affects, and moralities; and a node within neighborhoods, communities, and larger political-economic and environmental regimes, anthropologists in this colloquy move across a range of landscapes and scales to ask how people’s lives and worlds are made and remade in relation to the house and house-ing practices when critical times become an everyday predicament. as we assemble this collection, we are all too aware that the covid-19 pandemic has thrown the house and its significance to public health and the economy into sharp relief (castro 2020; horton 2020). the tensions between mobility and immobility and between protection and risk that traverse the house as a physical, biosocial, and moral space have taken center stage in policy and public debates. these ambiguities take place alongside a re-problematization of what is deemed essential to life (neiburg 2020), whose lives are paramount to save, and who is destined to die, in hospitals or at home. the pandemic also highlights how homes are not isolated units, but related and relational, integral to shifting forms of governance. caregiving mechanisms, even if at a distance, delineate the networks and configurations of proximity that constitute peoples and homes themselves. from the contemporary state of politics, public health, and the environment, as well as from diverse lineages of anthropological thought, we know that the house is never an isolated, bounded, or static unit in physical space. moreover, characteristics like stability, safety, domesticity, and autonomy make for normative ideals of the bourgeois house (elias 1983 [1933]) that ethnography has, time and again, proved to be facile and analytically restrictive. anthropologists have indeed found that living arrangements are molded by the environment and that these material forms shape collective activity (mauss 2013 [1950]). entangled in “vicinages” (pina-cabral 2019) and key to the politics of infrastructures (larkin 2013; fennell 2015), houses are “live forms” (stewart 2011), malleable and in movement. building on these insights, our colloquy proposes oikography as an ethnographic approach that deconstructs ideological premises and statistical assumptions about domiciles and traces the plasticity and relationality of the house across space-times. within an oikography, the concept house-ing refers to the sensorial process by which peoples and houses co-constitute one another. house-ing elicits the house as a dynamic—always relational—human-nonhuman entity modulated by tensions between stability and instability, borders and fluxes, stillness and movement. our critical engagement with house-ing in critical times asks what prospects remain for the figure of the human under such enduring duress and opens new vistas into the shifting ground of the social, the material, and the politico-economic. the essays in oikography purposefully engage with house-ing in conditions of chronic precariousness (aggravated by emergencies) in the global south and advance comparative critical work on the anthropology of the house. for our ethnographic subjects, the counterpoint of stability to crisis proves untenable to begin with: they did not inhabit and experience bounded or intact dwellings in contradistinction to breakdowns or critical events. rather, their house-ing efforts speak to the longue durée of critical times and to creative repertoires of material/affective “mediants” (appadurai 2015). oikography is thus attuned to such multirelational efforts at instantiating provisional dwellings, grounds from which the past is gauged and future horizons are crafted. designating an emplaced yet embattled and energetic environment, oikos subverts and overflows, pushing the boundaries of our abstractions. house-ing processes are more confounding, incomplete, and multiplying than hegemonic theoretical schemes account for. * * * the ancient greek oikos, with its many senses and significations—house, home, family, estate, patrimony, private space, as well as an economic and moral sphere—opens up our imagination to many possible forms of dwelling and becoming in the worlds people make up (biehl and locke 2017). the oikos likewise constitutes a set of dynamic relations among bodies, buildings, infrastructures, and other nonhuman elements (be they geophysical, biochemical, building materials, or spiritual entities) and also among intimacy, public space, and the polis. seen from this perspective, the house is a key nexus between material, political-economic, affective, and aesthetic forces at work, as well as a place where public and private life blur and these very terms become recast. combined with the suffix of oikography—stemming from the greek graphia—matters of the oikos are also inseparable from record keeping and regimes of visualization, including the ethnographic account. the contributors to this collection work in a wide range of languages, each of which has different words for house, animated by local senses and significations—casa, maison, kay, nyumba, 家, and home. yet, in our efforts to think together and comparatively, we take the greek oikos as a shared point of departure, particularly because the term and its troubled history conjure the house as a site where domination is legitimized and inscribed in the bodies of enslaved people, women, and children, challenging us to keep patriarchy, racialization, and hierarchy in focus as integral to house-ing processes. moreover, oikos serves as the etymological root for many innovative orderings: oikos + nemein = oikonomia, referring to the management of the house and of material resources at large; and oikos + logos = oikologia, referring to the interactions of organisms and their physical environments. so, with an eye to house-economic-ecological interconnections, we situate our decolonial engagement in anthropology’s legacy of theorizing houses/homes. by decolonial engagement we mean: (1) our unwavering scholarly and political commitment to account for anthropology’s colonial legacies (trouillot 2003; mbembe 2020); (2) our dialogue with feminist, indigenous, and african and afro-diasporic anthropologists that foreground the house as both hierarchical and porous (always relational) (guyer 1981; comerford, carneiro, dainese 2015; costa 2017; carsten 2018); (3) our thinking and writing with ordinary subjects, learning how they conceptualize house-ing as an eco-bio-social process (always inflected by the plasticity of power and across scales); (4) our situatedness in anthropological institutions of the global south and in north-south networks that contest dominant frameworks and cross-pollinate different ontologies and epistemologies. hence, this colloquy instantiates our various efforts at decolonizing and refiguring the anthropology of the house “in the wake of the plantation” (thomas 2019)—not against crisis, but within the unfolding and immanence of critical times—and of, in the process, retraining our perceptual capacities and expanding our sense of the political. in plantation/post-plantation landscapes the house is neither a given nor a stable unit to begin with. here house-ing speaks to the radical experience of being violently de-housed, enslaved, and transplanted, as well as to the stubborn human efforts at crafting provisional shelters and envisioning escapes (gilroy 1995; mckittrick 2013). while marked by physical domination, diasporic houses are also animated by underground networks of relations and escapes that extend geographically and temporally. this movement is vividly captured by the concept “configuration of houses” articulated by the haitian anthropologist louis herns marcelin (1999). during his fieldwork among black families in haiti and in the recôncavo region of bahia, brazil, marcelin (1999, 37) found the house as always plural, part of “a set of houses linked by an ideal of family and ancestry” that modulate “sense systems in territories that have been historically and socially constituted.” a configuration of houses emerges through fluxes of persons, substances, money, objects, and spirits that work as a sensorium and “a memory machine” (douglas 1991). in his decolonizing theoretical move, marcelin both engages with and unsettles claude lévi-strauss’s (1991, 435) analytic of the house as an individualized “moral person” that tactically combines principles of consanguinity and affinity. for marcelin, it is relationality that gives the house its plasticity. configurations of houses “are at the same time structures and anti-structures,” crisscrossed by the “tension between hierarchy and autonomy, between collectivism and individualism” (marcelin 1999, 38). irreducible to the operations of “an immediately localizable grouping” (marcelin 1999, 37), the house appears as an emplacement of tensions and a relational process, simultaneously open-ended and foreclosing (carsten and hugh-jones 1995). in this colloquy, we take the relational and processual perspectives emanating from the diasporic, post-plantation house to guide our ethnographies of house-ing in the longue durée of critical times. oikography thus emerges in conversation with this hard-to-pin-down house-ing multiplicity that places peoples, worlds, and thinking in motion. houses are thus treated both in the singular (because peoples operate with the concept of the house or my home, and ideas of singularity and belonging matter) and in the plural (because lives happen along and among houses and because houses territorialize political collectives). furthermore, we are attentive to the immanent and always sensorial ways that this manifold oikos inhabits peoples. the agency of houses and peoples are intertwined as they continuously make each other and their environs. * * * ethnographically attuning to the granular, sensorial effects of people’s house-ing practices, and staying close to issues of patriarchy, racialization, and human-nonhuman interdependence, the authors of oikography uncover that new ethics and politics are already budding within protracted conditions of calamity. in so doing, they unsettle the lingering expectations that remain in anthropology for what constitutes viable forms of dwelling, habitation, and belonging in critical times, in the global south and beyond. amid port-au-prince’s devastating 2010 earthquake, federico neiburg finds houses realized at diverse scales, as the homeless and encamped “live-in-movement” and belong to unstable, yet persistent, configurations of houses, against the backdrop of the “plantationocene” (haraway and tsing 2019). analyzing racialized police violence in rio de janeiro, eugênia motta chronicles how favela residents mourn “bad deaths” that lead to the demise of entire families and the dying of homes themselves. the materialities of houses are here visually and sensorially alert to the potentiality of death in young black bodies, indicting systemic racism and advancing a new moralization of space. studying mosquito vector control in tanzania, ann h. kelly and javier lezaun attend to bodily movements across “peri-domestic” spaces, provoking experimenters to reorient technocratic prevention away from the domestic insecticidal approach toward the design of protective communal atmospheres. here homes become fluid, interdependent house-ing environments inseparable from social relations, material underpinnings, and interspecies actors. ryo morimoto, in turn, chronicles the recurring house-ing movement of fukushima nuclear disaster victims between their contaminated homes and new settlements as they seek to reclaim irradiated objects to restore a sense of belonging. oikography here anchors the planetary scale of calamity in material livelihoods yet challenges the stretch of its universalizing logics. finally, thiago da costa oliveira and carlos fausto visualize the creative house-ing of amazonia’s residents displaced by development plans. through intricate usages of leftover materials and plants, homes are “re-amazonized” and mass-engineering projects subverted. there is an ethos of unfinishedness and invitational quality to the oikographic essays that compose this colloquy. combined, they articulate an ethnographic approach to contemporary house-ing processes at the generative intersection of five research threads: (1) the anthropology of kinship, patriarchy, care, and violence; (2) the economic dynamics of households, related to the provision of shelter, the circulation of money, and the use of technology; (3) the anthropology of public policies and infrastructures, concerning housing and services, risk and health, security, and rights and citizenship; (4) human-nonhuman alignments and the house as a material entity acting on residents and the environment; and (5) the anthropology of aesthetics and poetics, charting how forms and figures of dwelling constitute the house as a sensorial archiving machine of sorts, shaping affective pasts and the stories and trajectories of tomorrow. the house, therefore, appears ethnographically both as a material agent and an unstable nexus, where macro politico-economic shifts as well disasters and shocks become woven into ordinary lives and where fugitive fields, desires, belongings, and claim-making are temporarily staged in the face of myriad unknowns. the senses of home assembled here are oriented toward both unsettled pasts and uncertain futures, and they remain key entry points into understanding the ways in which the intimate and the political are refigured in the present day. shaped and grounded by material conditions, the turning of house into home simultaneously provokes multitudes of poetic imaginations of what could have been and what might be, enabling new forms of inscribing and visually representing. abstract houses are at once built shelters; collections of relations, affects, and moralities; and nodes within neighborhoods, communities, and larger political-economic and environmental regimes. this colloquy proposes oikography as an ethnographic approach that deconstructs technocratic assumptions about the house and traces the plasticity of dwelling across multiple space-times, with a focus on the action of house-ing. inspired by critical perspectives emanating from the diasporic, post-plantation house, we explore the reciprocal process of people making houses and houses making people amid ongoing calamity. the processes of house-ing reveal houses as unpredictable human-nonhuman entities, modulated by tensions between stability and instability, borders and fluxes, stillness and movement. oikography is thus attuned to multirelational efforts at creating provisional dwellings, grounds from which the past is gauged and future horizons crafted. [anthropology of the house; materiality and plasticity; mobility; ethnographic sensorium; relationality; inequality; oikography; house-ing] resumo as casas são ao mesmo tempo abrigos construídos, coleções de relações, afetos e moralidades, e nodos dentro de bairros, comunidades e regimes político-econômicos e ambientais. esta coletânea propõe a oikografia como uma abordagem etnográfica que desmonta pressupostos tecnocráticos sobre a casa e traça a plasticidade da moradia através de múltiplos espaços e temporalidades, com foco nas ações de house-ing. inspirados por perspectivas críticas que emanam do viver diaspórico e pós-plantação, exploramos o processo recíproco de pessoas fazendo casas e casas fazendo pessoas em meio a calamidades recorrentes. os processos de house-ing mostram as casas como entidades humano-não humanas imprevisíveis, moduladas por tensões entre estabilidade e instabilidade, limites e fluxos, repouso e movimento. a oikografia está assim em sintonia com os esforços multi-relacionais de criação de vivendas provisórias, bases a partir das quais o passado é aferido e horizontes futuros são traçados. [antropologia da casa; materialidade e plasticidade; mobilidade; sensório etnográfico; relacionalidade; desigualdade; oikografia; house-ing] resumen las casas son a la vez refugios construidos, complejos de relaciones, afectos y moralidades, nodos dentro de barrios, comunidades, regímenes político-económicos y medioambientales. este dossier propone a la oikografía como un enfoque etnográfico que deconstruye los supuestos tecnocráticos sobre la casa y rastrea su plasticidad a través de tiempos y espacios, focalizando las acciones de house-ing. inspirados en las perspectivas críticas que emanan del vivir diaspórico y de la post-plantación, exploramos el proceso recíproco de personas que hacen casas y de casas que hacen personas en medio a las calamidades del mundo contemporáneo. los procesos de house-ing muestran a las casas como entidades humanas-no humanas impredecibles, moduladas por tensiones entre estabilidad e inestabilidad, fronteras y flujos, quietud y movimiento. la oikografía está, por lo tanto, en sintonía con los esfuerzos multirrelacionales para crear hogares provisorios, terrenos desde los que se observa el pasado y se elaboran horizontes de futuro. [antropología de la casa; materialidad y plasticidad; movilidad; sensorio etnográfico; relacionalidad; desigualdad; oikografía; house-ing] notes acknowledgments we benefited immensely from discussions with the participants of the conference oikos: affects, economies and politics of house-ing (organized by the museu nacional, princeton university, and the école des hautes études en sciences sociales). a larger project on oikography is now underway, supported by the school for advanced research, santa fe, nm. we are deeply grateful to the remarkable aaron su for his wonderful editorial assistance. thank you also to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. finally, we are deeply indebted to cultural anthropology’s editors for their generosity of insight and great support. references appadurai, arjun 2015 “mediants, materiality, normativity.” public culture 27, no. 2: 221–37. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2841832. biehl, joão, and peter locke, eds. 2017 unfinished: the anthropology of becoming. durham, n.c.: duke university press. carsten, janet 2018 “house-lives as ethnography/biography.” social anthropology 26, no. 1: 103–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12485. carsten, janet, and stephen hugh-jones, eds. 1995 about the house: lévi-strauss and beyond. cambridge: cambridge university press. castro, arachu 2020 “response to the covid-19 pandemic in urban slums and rural populations in latin america.” united nations development programme (undp) latin america and the caribbean (blog), april 16. https://www.latinamerica.undp.org/content/rblac/en/home/blog/2020/respuesta-a-la-pandemia-de-covid-19-en-poblaciones-urbano-margin.html. comerford, john, ana carneiro, and graziele dainese 2015 giros etnográficos em minas gerais: casa, comida, prosa, festa, política, briga e o diabo. rio de janeiro: 7letras. costa, luiz 2017 the owners of kinship: asymmetrical relations in indigenous amazonia. chicago: hau books. douglas, mary 1991 “the idea of a home: a kind of space.” social research 58, no. 1: 287–307. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970644. elias, norbert 1983 the court society. new york: pantheon books. originally published in 1933. fennell, catherine 2015 last project standing: civics and sympathy in post-welfare chicago. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. gilroy, paul 1995 the black atlantic: modernity and double-consciousness. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. guyer, jane i. 1981 “household and community in african studies.” african studies review 24, no. 2/3: 87–137. https://doi.org/10.2307/523903. haraway, donna, and anna tsing 2019 “reflections on the plantationcene: a conversation with donna haraway and anna tsing.” by gregg mitman. edge effects, june 18. https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/. horton, richard 2020 “offline: a global health crisis? no, something far worse.” lancet 395, no. 10234. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(20)31017-5. larkin, brian 2013 “the politics and poetics of infrastructure.” annual review of anthropology 42: 327–43. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522. lévi-strauss, claude 1991 “maison.” in dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie, edited by michel izard and pierre bonte, 434–36. paris: presses universitaires de france. marcelin, louis herns 1999 “a linguagem da casa entre os negros no recôncavo baiano.” mana: estudos de antropologia social 5, no. 2: 31–60. https://doi.org/10.1590/s0104-93131999000200002. mauss, marcel 2013 seasonal variations of the eskimo: a study in social morphology. london: routledge. originally published in 1950. mbembe, achille 2020 out of the dark night: essays on decolonization. new york: columbia university press. mckittrick, katherine 2013 “plantation futures.” small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism 17, no. 3: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378892. neiburg, federico 2020 “life, economy, and economic emergencies.” sase newsletter, july 13. https://sase.org/newsletter-summer-2020/life-economy-and-economic-emergencies/. pina-cabral, joão de 2019 “partible houses: variants of vicinage in mozambique, portugal and brazil.” articulo: journal of urban research 20. https://doi.org/10.4000/articulo.4434. stewart, kathleen 2011 “atmospheric attunements.” environment and planning d: society and space 29, no. 3: 445–53. https://doi.org/10.1068%2fd9109. thomas, deborah a. 2019 political life in the wake of the plantation: sovereignty, witnessing, repair. durham, n.c.: duke university press. trouillot, michel-rolph 2003 “anthropology and the savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness.” in global transformations: anthropology and the modern world, 7–28. new york: palgrave macmillan. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 539-547, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.01 orders of protection: feminist lessons in anti-privatization and authoritarianism from south africa cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 599-624, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.01 orders of protection: feminist lessons in anti-privatization and authoritarianism from south africa kelly gillespie university of the western cape https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1325-8468 there is an important argument in western political thought that maintaining some boundaries between the public and the private spheres is essential to preserving human freedom. have feminist theorists told us where this line needs to be drawn, or is the phrase “the personal is political” an invitation to another version of authoritarian politics? —seyla benhabib, “feminist theory and hannah arendt” the politics of protection inherent in state-centered feminist reforms . . . [are] without apparent concern for the intensification of regulation—the pervasively disciplining and dominating effects—attendant upon them. —wendy brown, “finding the man in the state” my feminism does not drive me into the arms of the state but even further from it. —susan saxe in mariame kaba, “free us all” a huge portrait of felicia august hung in the living room of her family home in lavender hill.1 the oil painting dominated one wall, felicia’s smiling face perpetually surveying the activity that drummed, day and night, through her house: volunteers carried huge sacks of food for preparation in the soup kitchen that was tucked in an outside corner of the property; girls arrived for after-school discussion groups in the garage; mothers came to tend the vegetable garden or attend parent workshops in the remodeled shipping container squeezed between the side of the house and the perimeter wall; wives sat on the living room couches waiting for consultations; and the late-night social workers brought women, girls, and baby boys to overnight in one of the bunk beds in the informal wooden “wendy-house” structure that served as safe house in the backyard. in every corner of the property, felicia’s private home had been refashioned as a place of feminist action. even her husband, lucas, and their two children had been pulled into the organization felicia runs to halt the high levels of domestic violence in lavender hill, a fifty-year-old neighborhood on the flats of cape town.2 the portrait hanging on the wall was a gift to felicia, one of the prizes she was awarded for being a finalist in a national “woman of the year” award for her work in founding and running her organization. it hung in her living room as a reminder that, every so often, the generous, daily grassroots organizing done by people like felicia in poor neighborhoods all over south africa can accrue recognition and thanks beyond the life of the neighborhood. mostly, though, the herculean work felicia does for women in lavender hill, fueled by her love of people and the service of god, and sometimes reliant on only her own family’s meager income, is compensated by the knowledge that the work is needed, and that it is righteous. standing in her living room wearing her trademark “pissed-off woman” t-shirt, her eyes on every detail of the anti-violence work being done through her home, felicia commanded formidable respect. when i first met felicia in early 2011, she was worrying about the spike in the rape of lavender hill girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. “we’ve had one every week reported to us for the past three months,” she told me. “we help them take the case to the police.” the steenberg police station, which services lavender hill, was reluctant to give her access to the neighborhood’s crime statistics, but she had a friend in the station that smuggled them out to her. while they are staggeringly high, particularly in recording levels of drug use and gang-related violence, felicia insisted that they do not capture the extent of violence against women, and much of her work involved directing women and girls to the police to report instances of domestic violence, sexual assault, and rape, forcing police to open dockets for domestic-violence cases and complete the paperwork that will ensure women’s experiences of violence are recorded in police and court records. she saw this as her most important work, and estimated that 60 percent of her time is spent channeling women and their abusers into police and court processes. she was constantly fighting with police to pay more attention to domestic violence and sexual abuse, taking to the streets in protest when police took too long to respond to domestic violence callouts, insisting that women demand police involvement in their intimate relationships, requiring women who come forward with stories of abuse to make use of court-issued protection orders. for felicia, the everyday practice of feminist politics involves the constant labor of drawing the state more thoroughly into the lives of women. as we shall see, the vector for this process is predominantly the protection order, or as it is commonly known in lavender hill, the interdict. felicia’s home offers a familiar scene of feminist work against patriarchal violence. yet to look to this scene in contemporary times also means to look at something else, something more general to our contemporary condition. if feminism’s work has always been to publicize harm beyond the privacy of the home and the intimate relationship, then we can re-read felicia’s work alongside a range of other contemporary mobilizations as a politics of anti-privatization. it shares a conundrum with much political work under conditions of contemporary capitalism: how does one make public, make contestable, that which has been privatized? the relegation of life into increasingly private functions and spaces has eroded public facilities and their capacity for collective action. this has not only created the conditions for sustained isolation and inequality but also strains our capacity to reposition what are shared social phenomena out of private experience and into collective conversation. the feminist adage “the personal is political” is an important formulation of the kind of political arrangement we are all cast into in a generalizing condition of privatization. in reflecting on the dilemmas of feminist organizing in south africa, i have come to the argument that there is no more useful resource for understanding what to do about contemporary privatization than feminism, and that we would do well to think of feminism’s work as a general resource for contemporary politics. but the second part of my argument is that we can look to much contemporary feminism for a lesson in how to get anti-privatization wrong, in particular in how it has reached for authoritarian functions of state power to regulate relationships, inadvertently making anti-privatization an avenue for reactionary politics. the protection order is exemplary of the relationship between privatization and authoritarianism: order and protection entwined in a troubling complicity. however, despite the painful convergence of anti-privatization and authoritarianism in feminist politics, there is also enough of a contested field in feminist debates around this convergence to grant feminism a privileged place not only for diagnostics and warnings but also for political pathways out of our dire conditions. “the personal is political” much of the history of feminist praxis has pivoted on troubling the distinction between private and public spheres, between the personal and the political, as a way to undermine the patriarchal violence constructed and condoned through domestic privacy, and to bring a public process into the scene of “the intimate,” thereby collectivizing it. looking at how the feminist insistence that the personal is political bears up under generalized conditions of privatization proves useful not only for understanding the contemporary dilemmas of feminist work but also to recognize its lessons for a general reconfiguration of the political relationship between public and private processes when the public sphere disappears under the weight of an expanding private sphere. the history of feminism makes clear, although it is often not articulated as such, that simply declaring the private public—the personal political—does not suffice to make it so. work must be done against the processes of privatization, effort made to turn the privatized into something visible, something that can be struggled over. in other words, the personal is not automatically or essentially political, as feminism sometimes asserts. its attribution to the personal is precisely what places it beyond or before the political, what depoliticizes it. thus the personal must be made political through the act of drawing it out of the condition of privacy. it is this active work that creates publicity, that makes public liveliness. politics must be made at the site of that which has been made private for it to be recognized as political and made available for contestation.3 just as the family had to be made private, so too the private has to be made public, each involving historical processes of politics. less clear is how anti-privatization work should be conducted. the difficulty of conducting politics—constituting a public—in private life can be so extreme that “making public” can generate modes of injunction dangerous for any project of freedom. in what follows, as i move through a set of ethnographic observations about violence in a neighborhood in cape town, i hope to show that the condition of privatization, especially when it is multiply layered and inclusive of many elements of life, wrecks the capacity to collectivize democratically and creates the desire for authoritarian intervention. wendy brown (2019) shows us that “in the ruins of neoliberalism” the reproduction of uncertainty and inequality attaches an authoritarian tendency to political action (see also bruff 2014). susan ellison (2021, 48) shows how in bolivia, these conditions of uncertainty and inequality generate a capacity for patriarchal violence, “the closed fist that promises solidity—a defined future, relieved of disorder.” what i hope to contribute here is to show how feminism too can constitute an authoritarian response, and explains a great deal about how such a response works as an action against privatization. in a south african context in which the state has been fairly recently “won” through a liberation struggle, feminists have desired the state as an ally, banking on its democratic aspirations, and pouring much feminist energy into capacitating it as a resource in the interruption of patriarchal violence. what has largely transpired through this process, however, has been a worrying curtailing of the political demands of feminism into a reactionary protectionism that does no service to the potential of feminism to reorder inequality. these moves are themselves symptomatic, and provide a diagnosis of the difficulties of constituting viable political space under conditions of concatenated privatization. in lavender hill, felicia august’s commitment to distributing state power into women’s everyday lives has been driven by a set of legal strategies that feminists at all levels have used to try to arrest the very high rates of violence against women in south africa. in particular, the domestic violence act (dva) of 1998 became a watershed moment for feminist activists and academics who had argued heatedly for the increase of state intervention in domestic affairs. feminists involved in the creation of the dva had worked hard to ensure that the presence of the state could be called into play on a greatly expanded and complexified notion of domestic violence. the act recognizes not only physical and sexual violence but also psychological and economic threats as conditions for state intervention. the dva obliges the police and courts to come to bear on such acts as, to quote from the dva, “repeated insults, ridicule or name calling,” “the repeated exhibition of obsessive possessiveness or jealousy,” “repeatedly watching, or loitering . . . where the complainant . . . happens to be,” and “repeatedly sending, delivering or causing the delivery of letters, telegrams, packages, facsimiles, electronic mail or other objects to the complainant.”4 this is a feminist politics that seeks to write into law a social description of the complex terrain of intimate relationships, and correspondingly to insert the law right into the thick of that lived terrain. it is a form of feminist politics in which state legal processes acquire the capacity for tentacular everyday activity. such a development was perhaps to be expected in a post-apartheid national context generally persuaded by the power of constitutional reform, the value of law, and the valorization of state-based leadership. the influx of non-governmental organizations in the 1990s strengthened legal and policy activism and dampened alternative political practices at the end of formal apartheid, mirroring a global shift in post–cold war concessions to capitalist reform and liberal legal regimes across the postcolonial world. the law, and by implication the courts and police that function as its servants, is understood to be able to insert legal principles into the intimacies of social relationships as an everyday democratizing force, granting legal and security processes the political responsibility for democratization. thus, under the sign of democratization and under the condition of neoliberalization, law and its attendant policing have come to be called on as the arbiters of well-being, the mark of inclusion into citizenship. the intensity of the reliance on “state-centered feminist politics” (brown 1995), or what has more recently been called “governance feminism” (halley et al. 2019) or, in its punitive form, “carceral feminism” (baxi 2016; davis et al. 2022), as a remedy for gender and sexual violence across vastly different social spaces shows a faith in the mainstreaming of feminist work into legislative and security elements of state practice (benson 2018). the institutionalization of democratic politics into the legal processes under conditions of neoliberal capitalist transformation has tended to desiccate the democratic potential of those politics. instead of these institutionalization processes expanding and generalizing access and benefits, they have tended to squander the impetus of historical organizing and to demobilize the very substance of the political work they have sought to expand.5 one of the women that felicia had been working with (i will call her jessie), had originally resisted felicia’s insistence that she go to the police to stop her husband from beating her. felicia had worried for months about jessie and her children, pestering her to seek help from the state. i invited jessie to have a cup of coffee with me at a nearby mall so that she could talk to me without worrying that anyone familiar would overhear our conversation. for although many people living in the township hear domestic violence—given that the wall of a home is often as thick as a sheet of corrugated iron or a piece of cardboard—its audibility does not make it a public matter, because it remains shameful and unspoken.6 jessie told me: “i hate it when he touches me in front of the children. but he’s told me so many times, ‘your vagina is mine. god gave it to you to keep for me.’” sitting across from me, jessie was thirty years old, but an abusive husband and years of squatting with three children in the shacklands behind the township in which she was raised made her look older. “what do you say to your husband when he tells you these things?” i asked. she replied, “i say, ‘ag, maak jy wat jy wil’ [oh, do whatever you want]. i just go lie on the bed and open my legs.” their relationship had started when she was sixteen years old, and he thirty-six and married. when she was eighteen and pregnant, he married her. soon after marriage the abuse began, and it had been ongoing for a decade. jessie’s resignation infuriated felicia. felicia wanted her to use the court and police as a way to stop the violence. specifically, felicia wanted jessie to take out a protection order, a mechanism referred to locally as an “interdict,” that allows for specific court-ordered restrictions on the kind of contact allowed between two people. jessie didn’t think it would help and wasn’t sure if it would make things worse. after months of cajoling, felicia told jessie that if she didn’t go to the police to report the abuse, felicia was going to have her children taken away by the state. jessie’s ambivalence in part derived from having to broker competing insecurities. the financial and emotional cost of having her husband taken away entirely might prove too great for her to bear. but also, across south africa, the history of racist authoritarian police and military violence during apartheid have created a deep mistrust of police in black neighborhoods. police were clearly understood as representatives of the white state, their raison d’être to sustain the status quo of racial capitalism at all costs. over the past twenty-eight years, post-apartheid governments have worked to domesticate and normalize the security infrastructure of the state by trying to reconstitute policing as a democratic public service in and to black neighborhoods. the constitutionalism and peace-keeping efforts of the 1990s that sought to assuage and prevent civil war and gratuitous violence at the end of apartheid, in particular to curb the rogue and vigilante elements of security, had the effect of ideologically and institutionally naturalizing policing as a necessary component of democratic life, as a public good that should be relied on for safety and well-being. there remains distrust in black neighborhoods about policing given this history. however, some black neighbourhoods have also increased their calls for more police stations and for the handing over of the management of violence and security to the police. in this process of normalizing policing in the post-apartheid era, none have appeared more enthusiastic than feminists, who have stood at the forefront of the recovery of the idea of the police, criminal courts, and prisons having democratic potential to offer care and protection. we might explain this in part by the fact that apartheid-era community alternatives to policing often failed to protect women, making the repressive apparatus of the state appear like a resource for driving an agenda against patriarchy (hassim 2003). but a far more significant driver of the attachment to authority, i would argue, is a relentless condition of privatized violence, a stubborn, claustrophobic condition that invites an escalation in the chain of command. if there is little or no capacity to bring some air into the immediate surroundings, then you want someone powerful to come and smash in the door. the disappearing publics of lavender hill the apartheid state began building lavender hill in the early 1970s because of overflow from the first phases of apartheid resettlement housing projects for black cape townians, as well as to accommodate ex-farmworkers evicted from suburbanizing farmland. the neighborhood was designated a “coloured group area,” but it has always been on the edge of a long-standing informal settlement with a mix of afrikaansand xhosa-speaking residents, with increasing presence of immigrants from across the african continent. as in other very poor, semiformalized neighborhoods on the cape flats, apartheid racial categories are less resolute than in other neighborhoods. the accrual of family members over thirty-five years has created an overflow from the formal housing in lavender hill, further disrupting the apartheid racial scheme. large tracts of land behind the apartheid-era housing have been squatted by families who under apartheid would have been classified as coloured but who understand themselves now to be living “like blacks.” lavender hill, then, comprises many large apartment buildings classically associated with “coloured housing” under apartheid, many streets of small council row houses, a huge number of wendy-houses and backyard shacks in the small yards of ground-floor flats and row houses, and massive proliferating shacklands behind the formal apartheid housing. lavender hill regularly makes the news for its extreme levels of violence. it has become an index for township violence in cape town, particularly gang violence and its complicities in the drug economy. the neighborhood is thick with methamphetamine, known locally as tik, sold in ten-rand (usd $0.70) packages on every third street corner to children as young as ten, as well as to their older siblings and parents. whereas under apartheid strict state security regulation kept illegal drugs to a minimum, the rapid re-inclusion of south africa into global economic citizenship at the time of its political transition dramatically increased the volume and sophistication of illegal drugs in circulation (steinberg 2004; standing 2006). the drug economy has augmented the power and wealth of gangs substantially and given much impetus to turf warfare on the cape flats. lavender hill residents often mention the increase in gang violence since the end of apartheid. in 1998, three weeks before her marriage to lucas, felicia was shot and nearly killed during a period of heavy fighting between two rival gangs called the junkie funkies and the corner boys. in 2011, her mother was sitting at home watching television when a stray bullet flew through the window and embedded itself in her living room wall. drugs and gangs are not separate from the everyday life of the neighborhood. instead, they require that life, inserting themselves daily into the experiences and decisions of all residents. this condition has extended itself through the end of formal apartheid, when mass-migration to cities from rural areas as well as from other african countries compounded tensions and inequalities in urban spaces already riven by enormous race-class hierarchies. the housing program of the post-apartheid state has proved inadequate in contending with the numbers of people swelling the urban peripheries. factories that used to employ many residents of lavender hill have closed because of the import of cheap commodities from elsewhere, and work security and welfare provision have diminished. processes of deregulation, liberalization, and financialization that have accompanied the transformations of global capitalism in most parts of the world have here, too, extending unemployment, underemployment, debt, inflation, and a general lack of safety (roberts and thorburn 2004; bezuidenhout et al. 2007; miraftab 2004; james 2014; barchiesi 2011; posel, casale, and vermaak 2013). the end of apartheid has ushered in an explosion in the casualization of work: between 2000 and 2017 alone, the country saw a 371 percent increase in non-permanent employment (leibbrandt et al. 2010; mckinley 2021). most households get by on one small and sporadic salary and the meager social grants barely keeping millions of black south africans from starvation. but the severity of township life also has much to do with how these conditions have disabled the kinds of political activism that could organize to curtail and alleviate these social processes. during apartheid, township-based activists worked hard to direct anger and resentment into the anti-apartheid struggle, so as to transform neighborhood violence and insecurity into political action, especially to draw young people into forms of social life and political mobilization that enabled a different set of possibilities and imaginations about how to live and how to relate to one’s context. during apartheid, despite a repressive regime, anti-apartheid and anti-capitalist trade unions, civic associations, street committees, and autonomous political formations constituted themselves as places for the elaboration of public life against the status quo. now, in the post-apartheid period, that transformation of harm into political action has become less and less plausible, destabilized by a radical demise in coordinated, politically informed organizational forms. if they have been replaced, it is by evangelical churches and neighborhood-watch initiatives, most sustaining a highly reactionary politics. social movements and protest action have flared all across the country, but they cannot seem to find the capacities to sustain themselves or build toward a coordinated effort that would constitute a serious political threat to ongoing inequalities. thus economic, labor, and social dynamics have intensified privatization and the demobilization of public forms and processes that resourced previous generations. interdict sometime after felicia threatened to take jessie’s children away from her, jessie’s own willingness to accept her husband’s violence was challenged by a particularly brutal attack. he was at the tail end of a period of heavy drinking and one night, while drunk, picked up an axe lying outside the house and hit her with it inside the small corrugated-iron shack they shared with their three children. she did not have enough money loaded onto her cell phone to call the police, so she sent a “please call me” to felicia.7 felicia, who always had an emergency phone at hand to receive just such calls, called the police. and the police, on receiving felicia’s phone call, went to jessie’s shack, perhaps out of duty, perhaps because of felicia’s reputation for making police uncomfortable if they did not respond immediately to domestic violence calls in her area. following the attack, jessie went to wynberg magistrate court and applied for a protection order for her husband not to touch her in front of the children, not to swear at her or hit her, and not to force her into sex. i spent a lot of time at felicia’s home, from which she ran her organization, and she would always encourage the constant stream of women coming to her door for advice to go to the police for an order. one day i was outside in her front yard looking at the vegetable garden she was facilitating as a self-employment project for the women in her programs, when a woman came to the gate and called to felicia that her neighbor had been swearing at her. felicia called back, “you know what you need to do! go to the police and get a peace order!” one of the first things that struck me during my fieldwork in lavender hill was the number of times people spoke of “interdicts” when discussing their households. an interdict is the local term for a protection order, but it is also used to describe so-called peace orders, the former being an order against someone in the same household, the latter against a neighbor. it was such a striking repetition that i began to count the number of households in which a protection order had been put in place. i estimate that households in lavender hill have an interdict rate of slightly over 50 percent.8 this means that the majority of households had one or more acts of court regulating violence internal to the household. police at steenberg police station have become inundated with the demand for state intervention into households. in the houses without interdicts in place, people still knew what they were and how they worked. in one household i visited, where, unusually given the levels of unemployment in the area, the only person home was a fourteen-year-old girl, i asked if anyone in the house had taken out an interdict. in her household there wasn’t, but when i asked her if she knew what as interdict was, she exclaimed, “oh, yes! it’s when you go to the police and get an order for someone not to come near you! my friends talk about it at school.” interdicts have become a method of social relationship in lavender hill. they are mostly taken out by women against men, but men also take them out against their wives and girlfriends, often in retaliation. parents take them out against their children, grandparents against their grandchildren, neighbors against each other. their proliferation signals the difficulty of sustaining good relationships under increasingly stressed social conditions. if neighborhoods like lavender hill are further along in the intensification of protection orders because of how settled the policing function has become in the area, this tendency could replicate itself as the call for more police stations in black neighborhoods persists. two primary strategies exist for engaging the law in situations of domestic violence. the first involves going to the police to take out an assault charge, the second going directly to the court to take out a protection order. both can be used in tandem, but the protection order is the added layer of legal structure that the dva promotes as a means of consolidating an ongoing relationship between the police and the home. the protection order is what legally transforms ordinary “assault” or “attempt to do grievous bodily harm” into “domestic violence.” if a woman lays an assault charge with the police, the police are obliged to take the matter to court in bringing her assailant to book on that particular charge. if she seeks a protection order from the court, no direct criminal charge ensues. rather, a set of rules for future behavior in the household is put in place, which, if ever violated, can be used to legally oblige the police to come to the house to intervene in the relationship. whereas the assault charge is taken as an individual offense, the protection order stands permanently and can be mobilized whenever the rules set out in the order have been broken and the person it protects feels in danger. the protection order has a benefit over the assault charge: it can be acquired and put in place comparatively quickly, giving the applicant the sense that, in the words of a young lawyer working pro bono in lavender hill, “justice is served sooner.” the process goes as follows: the applicant goes to the court and fills out the forms for an interim protection order at the court’s domestic violence offices, writing down whatever rules they want to put in force to prevent further abuse. the form is then delivered to the local police station, and the police serve the papers on the appropriate household member. these papers include a court date, requiring both household members in the order to appear before a magistrate. if the abuser does not show up for the court date, the order is made final automatically. if the applicant does not appear, the order is dropped. if they both appear, they sit together in a small, closed court and work out with the magistrate whether the terms of the order are appropriate. the abuser is made aware of the potential for arrest and a criminal case should he or she violate the terms of the order. the interdict, then, constitutes a form of law-making that obliges the state policing of domestic relations, literally directing the police into the home, making the home generally available for police presence and intervention. a state prosecutor working in wynberg magistrate criminal courts with a particular specialization in the contravention of protection orders discussed with me the peculiarity of in camera protection order proceedings. there are a few standard orders from which the applicant can choose, such as “not to enter the shared residence,” “not to enter the complainant’s place of employment,” or “the respondent is refused any contact with the . . . child(ren).” but the applicant can also propose what is written into the order, depending on the specificities of the abusive relationship and the arrangements of their home. usually, the orders involve the abuser not coming within a certain radius of the applicant, desisting from further physical abuse, or from shouting and swearing at the applicant. yet the state prosecutor described as “ridiculous” some of the orders being granted in the in camera proceedings. she gave an example of a magistrate agreeing to write into the order a mother’s demand that her son must wake up before sunrise and look for work. writing this into the protection order, even if it is understood as a preventative measure to compel the son to do something other than sit at home, take drugs, and harm his mother, means that the police are legally obliged to come to the house if the young man does not wake up before sunrise. jessie was terrified to stand before the magistrate and tell him about the details of her abuse, particularly the details of sex with her husband. but she also could not wait to get into the courtroom, rehearsing every day what she wanted to say. “i must say everything in court. i know the magistrate is there, the police are there. i must remember everything that i want to say. he won’t be able to do anything to me.” what terrified her most was what would happen when they went home after the court hearing, what things would be like at home after she had used the court as a space for airing their marital secrets. but the thought of being able to oblige the police to come to the house in case of violence kept her focused on the court process. felicia august was pleased. jessie’s seeking of an order of court against her husband satisfied the feminist strategy that has crafted the dva into a legal spear intended to enter the space of the home to make it a public space, to politicize it, to insist that the logic of citizenship and rights must take shape even in the domestic space rendered “pre-political” through patriarchal history (federici 2004, 2012; pateman 1989; brown 1988). the strategy seems plausible, familiar, and in conditions in which sustained patriarchal violence continues with abandon, even desirable. and yet—and here is the real question of this essay—the supposition undergirding this feminist move is that the public and private realms have retained the same shape and dynamic they had when the feminist strategy emerged over the course of the twentieth century. yet the attempt to protect women by making the private public is occurring at the very moment at which historical spaces for public engagement have been subjected to intense privatization and demobilization. when one exposes private life to public intervention, the kind of politicization that occurs has everything to do with the nature of that public space and its shifting political terms. publics, as we have been reminded, are not singular, nor are they static (gilroy 1987; berlant 1997; warner 2002; fraser 2007; barber 2007). so, too, what the private means and does is subject to history. what, then, becomes of this political move toward anti-privatization under conditions in which what we called public is being dramatically eroded and reconfigured by contemporary relationships between state and capital, in formerly colonized contexts as much as in the global north? what happens when police are one of the only means of fashioning a politics of anti-privatization? waning publics and the desire for authority zygmunt bauman’s (1999) treatise, in search of politics, explains politics under conditions of neoliberal capitalism as the dismantling of agora, the degrading of public spaces and capacities for collective life. even as we acknowledge its perversions and maldistributions over the history of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism, “the public” has seen a general decline in possibility and efficacy.9 in the wake of this dismantling, bauman describes a subsequent escalation of loneliness. this has produced what he calls, quoting isaiah berlin, “negative freedom” (bauman 1999, 72), the state of being able to air in public the most intimate dynamics of private life without having any grounds for constituting the conversation toward collective bargaining or corrective action. he draws particular attention to daytime television as an example of this phenomenon, and given the amount of time people in lavender hill spend watching daytime television, it is not an insubstantial example. on that evening [in october 1983], viviane and michel, an ordinary and on the whole unremarkable couple easily lost in the city crowd, appeared in front of french tv cameras (and so on millions of tv screens) so that viviane could say of michel: “my husband suffers from premature ejaculation,” and complain that when with him, she “never experienced pleasure.” . . . words unspeakable in public had been made speakable, experiences meant to be confided only to one’s nearest and dearest had been made fit for public confession. . . . by a curious reversal, the private sphere which stood out for its right to secrecy, has been redefined in one fell swoop as the sphere with the right to publicity. (bauman 1999, 63–64) for bauman (1999, 65), what our contemporary popular culture signals, is how “the ‘public’ has been emptied of its own separate contents; it has been left with no agenda of its own—it is now but an agglomeration of private troubles, worries and problems. it is patched together of the individual cravings for assistance in making sense of private, as yet inarticulate, emotions and states of mind.” julia hornberger’s research on policing in johannesburg bears uncanny resemblance to bauman’s reading. she argues that instead of police bringing political freedoms into the home, the contemporary home has rendered policing itself a private encounter (hornberger 2008, 242). she shows how through the democratization processes of policing post-apartheid cities, the police are drawn into the personal relations of neighborly networks and relations. she theorizes this as “the informal privatization of policing” in which the police lose their footing as a potential public resource, becoming so embroiled in the private lives of neighbors that they transform into what she calls “your police—my police” (hornberger 2011, 129). the policing of the home makes for a complicated, messy, and dangerous project. mostly, the authority of the police becomes periodically dispersed into a private relationship dynamic in a way that irritates any resolution. often protection orders are used haphazardly and in ways that prolong or rearrange abusive relationships, rather than heal or end them. often, the police enact their authority inside of the household in ways that augment violence, rather than abate it. this intensification of the everyday relationship between state authority and personal household affairs stands in for or replaces long-standing collective family and community efforts at intervening into violent relationships. as policing becomes a means for the anti-privatization of violence, other skills and capacities once held by elders, community leaders, and civic processes are replaced or underdeveloped. instead of bringing democracy to intimate relationships, as feminists had hoped, here intimacy has become overexposed, and “the break-in,” argues bauman (1999, 64), “occurred while wearing the mask of emancipation.” the desire for authority increases under conditions of privatization, as recourse to collective public action disappears. the desire for an ever stronger authority to enter into the scene of the personal relationship to create order makes for a deep sentiment in many households in lavender hill. when felicia and her volunteers march against the police with placards and cries in the streets, it is because police do not come fast enough, do not pay as much attention as they should to the homes and relations in their jurisdiction. when police were not doing a good-enough job to stop a period of gang violence in the neighborhood, felicia wrote letters to the newspapers and went on social media calling for the army to enter the neighborhood. an air of satisfaction spread among residents of lavender hill when regular patrols of men in helmets and camouflage carrying large weapons emerged on neighborhood streets and roads leading into the township. almost everyone seemed in favor of the state’s armed presence, holding a certain smugness that lavender hill had managed to secure such authoritarian intervention. dis reg! (it’s right!), people would say. to compel the police to arrive, to compel the army to come, to have recourse to the staging of ever-greater authority between gangs, neighbors, and lovers generated solace and a peculiar kind of social mediation in these privatizing times.10 the authority of the state or other versions of strong omnipotence appear as a possible way to break free of the inheritances of privatization. they stand as sign of the public, even as public life is fast vanishing. state-centered feminism in these times often becomes police-centered feminism, and then army-centered feminism, and is less a matter of making women public than of channeling a growing authoritarian predicament into the household and the intimate relationship.11 in may 2020, amid an effort to raise awareness about gender-based violence and femicide in south africa, felicia august wrote an open letter to the president of south africa, folding her outrage at the violence against women and children into a demand that he—personally, the personal letter addressed to the person of the president himself is telling here—prevent access to bail and parole for people accused of rape.12 in march 2020, she made a public call for the death penalty. i am adding my voice to the call for the death penalty. i am adding my voice to the call for the change in the constitution. women and children are being slaughtered daily. no. mr president, i do not accept you saying the perpetrator have rights, our children the fruits of our love and womb too had a right to life. i cannot not look at another mother weeping these mutherfxkers come from prison gets lost in the system and raped our babies, these monsters do not deserve to breath the same air as us. #isupportthecollectivecallforthedeathpenalty #alifeforalife13 felicia’s position is a familiar one: in the face of infuriatingly pervasive and embedded patriarchal violence, the route for feminism to articulate its seriousness is to demonstrate a willingness to demand increasingly punitive and authoritarian action, creating alliances with the state, the presidency, the police, the executioner. it is a call that has been made often by feminist and lgbti+ activists over the past years in south africa, and it asks the question, with françoise vergès (2021, 4), “how has the issue of women’s rights become. . . one of neoliberalism’s last recourses?”14 felicia’s calls for the withdrawal of bail and parole and for the death penalty for rapists were made as she and her organization were ramping up their operations to provide a massive relief effort in food and care to thousands of households in lavender hill during the covid-19 lockdown regulations. her feminist politics are not singular, but the intensification of the relationship between care and carcerality, protection and reactionary violence, constitutes a dilemma that feminism elaborates starkly, illuminating a general relationship between privatization and an appetite for, and domestication of, authority. the privatization and anti-privatization of violence it is commonplace in feminist writing to recognize that violence against women takes shape most often among intimates, and most often in the private space of the home (bollen et al. 1999). what is not commonplace is to recognize that violence increasingly and more generally follows intimacy, and is not the preserve of gender-based violence. the condition of privacy to which women have been subjected by patriarchy has been widening its field. one of the presiding fictions about violence, certainly in south africa, is that it could, and likely will, happen anywhere, to anyone. the emblematic figure of crime is that of the stranger, the random encounter, the probability of every south african at some point being at the wrong place at the wrong time. and yet in reality, the vast majority of crime, particularly violent crime, does not happen by chance but follows rather regular patterns: it almost always follows the logic not of social distance but rather of social proximity. the intimate, or at least the known, is the primary location of violence. violence has much more to do with the complicated relations of belonging than with estrangement. this acknowledgment places the general experience of violence within the scene of the familiar, the personal, a nested kind of violence difficult to stop because of its combination with dependence, intimacy, shared history and space. an analysis of crime trends in south africa, based on a sample of seven thousand police dockets, indicates that for murder, more than 80 percent of perpetrators were known to their victims, and more than 60 percent were intimately known as friends or relatives. a rape victim has a 75 percent chance of knowing her/his rapist, for assault the figure goes up to 90 percent (burger 2007, 2011). it appears that the only statistically significant departure from this general principle of interpersonal violence occurs in the violence that attends house robbery and car hijacking, crimes of property where a violent encounter between strangers is often staged. but this kind of encounter certainly represents a fraction of interpersonal violence dominated by relations of familiarity. the south african police service, in trying to make sense of the prevalence of this modality of violence and to describe the difficulty of addressing it through police work, call it “social in nature.” what i think they mean is that so much of the violence of south african life sits in the thick of other intimacies. every year, the institute for security studies publishes a fact sheet on national crime statistics that repeatedly makes the point that “crimes associated with interpersonal violence such as murder, attempted murder, assault and rape, largely happen between people that know each other . . . and with specific reference to murder, police docket analysis has shown that approximately 65 percent of these incidents were motivated by ‘social situations’ involving arguments, jealousy and other domestic issues” (institute for security studies 2012). south africa has high rates of murder and other violent crimes—shown for example by the most reliable of crime statistics, the murder rate, which in south africa in 2017 was 36 (per 100,000), compared to the global average of 6.1 (crime registrar 2018; united nations office on drugs and crime 2019).15 in south africa, rates of violence emerge as radically unequal across race and class, always highest in underresourced black neighborhoods (gillespie 2014). given that 60 to 80 percent of violence takes place between people who know each other, these data show compellingly that the white supremacist structural brutality of the colonial and apartheid projects has been inherited into the present primarily through the vector of black neighborliness, friendship, and intimacy—the “social situation” of black life. it is a devastating situation that continues to protect white life from the consequences of its history. in a corrugated iron and wood shack two small roads over from jessie’s house, i sat in the front room on an old couch. across from me, a young man, nineteen years old, slouched on the other couch looking nervous and speaking quickly and softly. he was the neighbor’s son, and one of the few men i interviewed during my research in lavender hill. he didn’t seek out membership in a gang, but because some of his childhood friends had been members of one and he was seen walking with them, people assumed he was their gang brother. once this assumption had been made, once he had been recognized as a gangster in all probability by those around him, he thought he might as well become one. the problem is that because his parents moved from their family’s house in one part of lavender hill to the informal settlement just behind it, he was living in the territory of a rival gang, filled with young men he knew from school and from around the area. his parents wanted to send him far from lavender hill, but he did not want to be away from them. “waar moet ek gaan? [where would i go?],” he asked me. at the time of our meeting he was out on bail after time spent in the awaiting-trial section of the nearby pollsmoor prison. while inside he had taken the gang number of the 27s, part of the notorious system of south african prison gangs. he pulled his shirt up to show me the tattoo, confirming that he had entered a life that would almost certainly guarantee his early death. we sat there in silence for a while. “where would i go?” is a deceptively simple question. what it describes, though, is the terrifying condition in which the very fact of belonging to a place, to a neighborhood, to a household, exposes one to violence, to potential death. although the feminist concern for protecting women and children in situations of domestic violence remains important, domestic violence has come to stand as a sign of something more general. it is an exemplary modality of an increasingly general expression of violence that finds its location in available intimacies. the vast majority of murder is of young black men in their own neighborhoods by other young black men whom they know—the primary sites of violence are the local and the hyper-local. domestic violence against women and street violence against men have often been written about as separate kinds of violence with different objects and differing intentions. yet if we read violence as increasingly corralled to relations of familiarity and proximity, not only by histories of racial territorialization but also by privatizing processes of capitalism, and we acknowledge the difficulty of building spaces from which to contest and publicize that violence, then it becomes possible to see that these types of violence differ less that many have described. they share a condition of social proximity that articulates itself differently because of the spatialization of sex and gender. if we ignore how violence is situated in relationships of familiarity, we ignore the central condition of violence, and the real consequences of how colonial and apartheid violence has metastasized under conditions of neoliberal capitalist processes. violence, one might say, is always experienced as intimate because of its location in the soft, vulnerable realm of bodies. what i am addressing here is how violence can become intimate, privatized, as a social process, and how that same social process can also capture the attempts to mitigate violence. there is a massive proliferation of forms of violence at the level of personal relations, a nesting of brutality at the level of the familiar, even of the beloved. the contradiction of touch that moves from care to violence, that has the potential to vacillate dramatically in its force and meaning, or to combine in its registers, to convey violence and intimacy at once: this is the experience of life for many people living in lavender hill, as it is for many south africans with lives forged in neighborhoods crafted by apartheid’s resettlement agenda. how to escape that condition is fraught. oliver hermanus’s (2009) filmic portrait of life on the cape flats, shirley adams, concerns intimate, domestic relationships in the wake of the shooting of a young black man. the film follows the victim’s mother, shirley adams, as she goes about the everyday, private work of caring for her son’s disabled body before he dies. the film uses extreme close-ups of the mother and son, the cramped interior of the small house, and a soundtrack that attends to the small grunts, sighs, and shuffles that make up small, personal routines. it situates violence as claustrophobic in its insertion into the embodied and affective life of home. the film produces an account of violence that leaves the audience feeling overwhelmed by the intimacies of violence and its aftermath. this technique preempts the denouement of the film, in which shirley arrives at the courtroom for the trial of her son’s shooters, only to discover that one of the young men responsible had been her son’s best friend. she rushes out of the courtroom in shock, unable to negotiate the coupling of violence and familiarity. the film ends with shirley sitting at a small kitchen table with the young man’s mother, also her own friend, hardly speaking, sitting in the thick of relationships complicated by violence. the film’s brilliance lies in its ability to recognize the dilemma of violent friendship, and the difficult and contradictory consequences it holds for life as much as for recovery. conclusion: beyond reactionary politics it should perhaps not be a surprise that a form like the protection order—a political technique intended for women in households—begins to take on more prolific use, both for women and for neighbors and family members trying to resolve the devolution of systemic cruelty onto the small, available differences that constitute the daily disputes across the kitchen or the neighbor’s wall. alongside generations of feminists, we must ask how we can exit this strategy of absorption. unfortunately, however, much contemporary feminist organizing has not provided a fruitful response to this dilemma. the turn to higher and more forceful forms of authority is a reactionary one, and it does not allow for us to build the kind of viable and creative politics we need to continue a project of emancipation. after jessie went to court secretly to lodge the paperwork for a protection order against her husband, she also decided to file for divorce. but she could not afford the r250 (usd $17) that it cost to file, so she came home with the intention of going back to court once she had raised the money. unbeknown to her, her husband had decided, after a run of bad luck, to take his brother’s advice and go to church. he began attending an evangelical church where he gave his life to jesus, stopped drinking and smoking, and promised her that he was not going to abuse her again. a week later, the protection order papers were served on him, and he begged jessie for a chance to prove himself. she relented and managed to convince the court to allow her to withdraw her application. for the past six years, jessie reports that her husband has not laid a hand on her. it is difficult to know exactly what it was that turned his life around—the lack of intoxicants, the experience of being over fifty, the community of the church, the renewed relationship with his brother, the fact that jessie was willing to go to court. he claims it was the sheer force of the greatest authority of all—metaphysical, transcendental—that rearranged his most personal interior life. jessie says she cannot ask him about it because he has told her that what is past is past; he will not engage in any conversation about the twelve years of violence that characterized their relationship. she says that she has been blessed by god, that she now also goes to evangelical church and has been saved. she thanks god for that, and for the best husband ever, saying that it wasn’t the protection order that worked, it was jesus. feminist politics, like other anti-privatization politics, need not get stuck in reactionary response, even as historical conditions push relentlessly toward it. a tension has long existed in feminist politics between political practice that seeks to escape the boundaries of the social order in which patriarchy moves and violates and a politics that seeks to use the infrastructure of that society to offer protection for women. these approaches are not necessarily discrete, and many instances of feminist organizing have combined them in various ways. the question is how to respond to the conditions of privatization in ways that allow for the transformative potentia—to use a concept coming from feminist struggles in latin america—of feminist organizing to open up the horizons and possibilities of critique and movement, to enlarge its field and demand, rather than have it get stuck in a criminalizing statist project (gago 2020). there are feminist projects afoot that are pushing to reconstitute public space and politics in radical and community-building ways, not least of which in the feminist mass assemblies of latin america and the abolitionist feminism developing in many parts of the world. if potentia describes a project of seeing the possibility for feminist organizing to open into the affirmation of life, a connection to other struggles, and radical social transformation, then the punitive and the authoritarian describe a project of feminist concession to a politics of death and curtailment. in these dire times, the latter appears the more likely to produce immediate results. but we concede to it at great political risk. abstract the feminist adage “the personal is political” is not ahistorical. it is being operationalized in a time when the relationship between the private and the public is undergoing historic transformation. making privatized violence public under current conditions often involves channeling the most authoritarian tendencies of the state into relationships made increasingly desperate by the conditions of contemporary capitalism. the ethnographic focus of the essay is the work of a feminist organization operating in the context of lavender hill in cape town, a neighborhood created by apartheid forced removals and made more precarious by post-apartheid abandonment. the essay focuses on an explosion in the use of protection orders to compel police to intervene in the intimate relationships of households and neighbors, and offers an extended explanation of how and why feminism provides an exemplary case of reactionary politics for our times. the essay ends with a plea to draw on a different trajectory of feminism as a way of reconstituting a transformative political agenda, one that must take the historical transformations of racial capitalism seriously. [feminism; anti-privatization; protection orders; violence; authoritarianism; neoliberalism; south africa] notes acknowledgments i am grateful for the time and conversation the participants in this research generously shared, without which this writing would have been impossible. i hope the conversations and solidarities proved productive for us all. the research was enabled by a friedel sellschop research award from the university of the witwatersrand. i am thankful for feedback on earlier versions of this essay presented at the crime and its fictions in africa conference at yale university, the anthropology seminars at the university of the witwatersrand and the university of the western cape, as well as the concilium on southern africa seminar at duke university. thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers for a wealth of resources and suggestions, and to andrea muehlebach for ongoing collegiality and friendship. 1. all research participants have been anonymized. 2. the cape flats comprise the working-class (and increasingly unemployed) neighborhoods to which black people were forcibly relocated throughout colonial and apartheid urban planning projects in cape town. 3. this argument around the fundamental relationship between politics and publics i owe to a proposition made by adi ophir at a lecture at the johannesburg workshop in theory and criticism at wits university in july 2009, titled “what is the political?” (and which remains unpublished). ophir used arendt to show that some kind of public dispute is necessary for the political to obtain, even as he greatly expanded beyond arendt’s terms the definition of where and what “the public” is. 4. http://www.justice.gov.za/legislation/acts/1998-116.pdf 5. mine is not a general anti-statist feminist position. rather, i wish to make a claim about what state institutionalization has meant in this phase of postcolonial capitalism and in the wake of the liberation movements. shireen hassim (2003) points to how this withering of feminist politics at the end of the anti-apartheid movement was also facilitated by the dynamics internal to the restructuring of the movement in the 1980s, rendering the women’s movement secondary to the race and class questions forefronted in the politics of the liberation struggle. 6. township is used to designate urban areas in south africa that were constructed for black people on the outskirts of cities as part of the geography of race during settler colonial and apartheid urban planning. 7. a “please call me” is a cell phone text message that includes the words “please call me” alongside advertising text, and can be sent for free to another cell phone. 8. for this statistic i conducted a survey of households in one street of row houses and one block of apartments in different sections of lavender hill. 9. i am mindful here of veronica gago’s (2017) important critique of the northern-centric casting of neoliberalism as the death of public life in ways that do not hold as clearly in the global south. however, she also shows how, even if modes of popular contestation are able to be collectively pronounced in the global south, their efficacy as counterhegemonic politics is constantly undermined by the logics of a disseminated capitalist market. the effect, if not the mode, remains thus largely the same across territories. 10. the desire for authority is not a desire unique to lavender hill. see, for example, hylton white’s (2012) writing on the presidency of jacob zuma, karl von holdt (2013) on violent democracy and authoritarianism, brad weiss (2009) on violent media in tanzania, and wendy brown (2019) on a general reading of neoliberalism as evocative of authoritarian response. 11. the growing literature on carceral feminism points to feminism’s complicity in strengthening conservative authoritarian practices that deepen racial and class violence (bernstein 2007; bumiller 2008; gotell 2015; incite! 2016; engel 2019; davis et al. 2022) 12. 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“publics and counterpublics.” public culture 14, no. 1: 49–90. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-1-49 weiss, brad 2009 street dreams and hip hop barbershops: global fantasy in urban tanzania. bloomington: indiana university press. white, hylton 2012 “a post-fordist ethnicity: insecurity, authority, and identity in south africa.” anthropological quarterly 85, no. 2: 397–427. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0033 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 599-624, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.01 the end of intimacy cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 381-390, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.05 the end of intimacy thomas strong maynooth university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5214-432x figure 1. stencil in dublin, 2020. photo by thomas strong. unmarked, in english the word intimacy tacitly conveys good feeling—warmth of a kind—captured in the embodied spatial imagery of “closeness.” to be close to someone means to care for them, to experience a feeling of mutuality. but after covid-19, closeness can no longer be taken for granted to mean mutual concern or familiarity—to the contrary. this suggests an emergent ethical rival of intimacy: proximity. i argue that proximity detaches ethical or affective bearing from the way it conventionally has been spatially metaphorized in practices of bodily comportment and in reasoning about public and private space. will an “ethics of proximity” entail a new kind of formalism, even formality (cf. foucault’s notion of “dressage” in trombadori 2001 [1978]), in the practices of public life? one where bodies reflexively rediscipline themselves to elicit a grid of separation that materializes an ostensibly egalitarian premise of mutual regard and sociality, but whose quality of imposition makes each of us part of what jacques rancière might call “the police” (may 2007)? now, after over a year of “social distancing,” we might be able dimly to visualize what this different mode of bodily bearing, and its ethical coordinates, would look like; but we also begin to sense what its aspirational egalitarianism—performatively enforced and realized by every small step away from each other—would feel like: awkward, unsociable, and ironically, perhaps unethical. it feels this way because it seems both necessary and impossible. perhaps no better illustration exists of this necessary impossibility than the wayfinding iconography of social distancing: all those images reminding us to keep two meters apart—not drawn to scale, so that two meters actually looks like two feet apart. we are explicitly instructed about proximity, and at the same time implicitly reminded of intimacy. ostensibly, then, today distance can no longer be held to mean “distant”: spatial distance between persons might have once meant disregard, disdain, or fear—as when the depressingly proverbial pedestrian crosses the street rather than pass too close to the ethnic minority about whom she holds racist beliefs. today, moving away from someone may mean something else altogether: a gesture of solidarity or of common cause. physical distance between strangers, or bubbled isolation between kin, cannot be reduced to signifying the absence of consideration for the other. instead, we find ourselves in a (often state-mandated) system of bodily relations in which systematic and reflexive separation makes the spaces of public relating the scene of something like the anxiety-inducing mother-in-law/son-in-law avoidance protocols detailed in the ethnographic record (e.g., stasch 2003): my avoidance of you makes you more centrally constitutive of my personhood than would casual indifference to our proximity. marilyn strathern (1988, 2020) has sought systematically to emend the often unstated or assumed affective and ethical implications of conventional euro-american metaphors for relations, as for example those that describe them as “close” or “distant” and the imputed positive or negative valences there implied—including the very idea that relations themselves are “good.” and yet, at the same time, the demands the pandemic places on us portend a future that feels unimaginable. for example, we are invited to imagine courtship without intimacy of any kind, lest starry-eyed lovers “recklessly” breathe on each other. what will become of any activity involving physical closeness in the future, and what will such acts come to mean? the example of hiv affords a vantage from which to view society reassessing the meanings of “intimate acts” (their values, their risks and dangers). the value of the proximate relations characteristic of public and private domains, and the relation between public and private itself, are undergoing some kind of transformation. this essay hazards the thought that an “ethics of proximity,” rather than the comforts of the intimate, is what contemporary calamities (covid-19, climate collapse) confront us with. early in the covid-19 pandemic, i began to experience a kind of cognitive whiplash as nearly everyone i met reflected on the politics of contagion and risk in ways that gay men—especially those of us who are hiv-positive—have had to think about for most of our lives. people balanced the competing values shaping their assessments of risk and responsibility (trnka and trundle 2014), attempting to calculate those things “essential” to life (toilet paper, nightclub dancing, hookups). and i perseverated on a set of intrusive and personally troubling questions. will this crisis create more or less sympathy for those of us who have been coercively and punitively “distanced” by hiv stigma from our own communities? how will the moral message imputed to covid-19 resignify hiv? the questions would not have surprised mary douglas (1992); blame seems instinctual in the face of contagion. for me, every comment on covid-19 has become a fretful allegory of hiv, especially when people ascribe ethical significance to ways the viruses may be transmitted, as when mundane social activities (sharing a drink, having sex) become, suddenly, “reckless.” but after covid-19, pandemic politics seem to have been reversed: whereas liberals in the early years of the hiv epidemic fought against quarantine for people living with hiv, and against the unfair curtailing of individual freedoms in the name of public health, today the liberal position tends to favor greater and greater restrictions on individual freedoms. indeed, the most dreaded outcome that covid-19 portends for me is that this new plague with a supposedly novel virus, sars-cov-2, will license the return of a certain providentialism (hedden 2020; willingham 2020): the idea that the diseased earn their fate (wilkinson and kleinman 2016). thus, although the principle epidemiological worry regarding covid-19 tends to be inadvertent risk to others when persons fail to observe prevention protocols (distancing, masking, etc.), often enough people imagine “covidiots” suffering for their sins (lim 2020; zichermann 2020). this was the schadenfreude that greeted the diagnosis of donald trump with the disease, a feeling i can’t say didn’t find some inkling in me. but an unstated implication emerges: in ascribing moral meaning to covid-19, this sentiment resuscitates an old idea: that people with hiv actually got what we deserved. such meanings are echoes: shadowy, unstated implications. they are the secondary meaning of the mythologies (barthes 1993 [1957]) that diseases evoke. in this sense, they comprise a kind of “hiv uncanny.” the persistent evocation of the aids crisis as a subtext for covid-19 elicits that thing in the back of our consciousness, a thing associated with shame, guilt, pain, anxiety, loss. i refer not only to the loss of death and suffering but also to the loss of a hopeful future now rendered uncertain, perhaps already simply gone (bajko 2020; wadsworth 2020). i write this in dublin, ireland, a country poised to throw off the yoke of a repressive reproductive and sexual social order at the historical moment when covid-19 appeared, curtailing not only sexual freedom but other freedoms as well. figure 2. stencil in dublin, 2020. photo by thomas strong. on march 27, 2020, i was facilitating a “covidsex online forum”—the second of a series of group discussions organized by dublin lgbt and sexual health activists which focused on the impact of covid-19 on sexuality. it was an early iteration of what has become a ubiquitous facet of social life everywhere: a zoom-mediated meeting. at the first forum, i had articulated the reasons for initiating such a discussion: the impetus to spark community discussion came when, as usual, i found myself trawling the grindr grid, but this time during a pandemic and under conditions of social distancing and self-isolation. what was going on in the grid? hook-ups? and sex parties? how was i to understand this? was it a problem? the thought, it so happens, has occurred to others. (dawkins 2020) over the course of these forums, it became clear that the covid-19 pandemic had provoked reflection, resistance, melancholy, and widespread fear among gay men, in part because of the hiv uncanny. but it was also because covid-19 appeared as a portent. might we have to envision a future without sex altogether? the online forum was well attended by what might be called “the activist class”: reflexive and progressive activists in the lgbt community, their friends and contacts. people made measured remarks acknowledging the vulnerability of the elderly and the importance of sexuality for gay people: we echoed the discourse circulating globally on the internet (abad-santos 2020; juzwiak and juzwiak 2020). but while we hashed out differing perspectives on sex and risk after covid-19—perspectives that seemed to have an explicitly moral, ethical, or political cast to them—gay men elsewhere in the city were simply getting on with it or, put otherwise, getting it on. javier, a mexican migrant to dublin who has lived here for seven years, recounts one such situation. it occurred in phoenix park, an expanse of meadows, woods, and sports pitches just west of dublin’s city center whose most famous residents are a herd of deer. the park has been known to gay men for generations as a place for public sex (colter et al. 1996), and with all other venues for meeting gay men shut down, the park became, for a time, perhaps the most important social space in queer dublin: in march it was still cold, but anyway we went to the park because we knew we could have sex in there. so then we started to. in my case, i thought, “i should be isolating, i shouldn’t be meeting people, i should respect the social distancing … but anyway i want to have sex!” how can i have sex with social distancing? and one day, for example, i met a guy there, he was like touching himself and insinuating me, like he wanted to do something. and i went close, and when i was about a meter away from him, he said, “stop there! stop there!” it was kind of crazy. so he’s here in the park, he’s looking for fun, and now that i’m closer he just stopped me. he had a nice dick. he was hard. and i was like, “oh i want to take it.” and he said, no, no: “stay there, stay there.” “i just want to touch it.” “no, stay there.” so in his case he was like stronger than me maybe? because he went there to have some fun, but just himself. stronger in terms of respecting social distancing, do that in here. i couldn’t at all. so for me it was so difficult. javier participated in a year-long ethnographic research project in which my research team and i had been documenting and analyzing sex between men in the republic of ireland after a 2015 public referendum had legalized same-sex marriage—the first time any country had legalized such unions through a public vote. the vote followed years of shattering revelations of sexual abuse within catholic-run institutions and state complicity in covering up such abuses. many interpreted subsequent gains in irish sexual politics as a public repudiation of the morality the church had used for generations as a pretext for egregious forms of repression (hogan 2019; drazkiewicz et al. 2020). at the same time, ireland was recording its highest levels of new hiv diagnoses—something rarely remarked on, even within the lgbt community, although gay men were now the population hardest hit by hiv in the country (o’loughlin 2019). across the irish sea, the ostensible quashing of gay sex during lockdown struck some advocates and service providers not as a worrying omen, but as an opportunity. in may 2020, 56 dean street, the leading provider of sexual health services for gay men in london, declared: “the hiv chain is broken” (wareham 2020). the organization was referring to putative declines in transmission of hiv because gay men were not “hooking up” due to the uk government–mandated stay-at-home restrictions in response to the covid-19 crisis. if men were not having sex, it was reasoned, hiv could not be transmitted. current infections could be diagnosed through mail-order tests and treatment regimens could be initiated, preventing onward transmission. given the threat posed by the novel coronavirus and the collective imperative to “flatten the curve”—that is, to dramatically limit the rise in new infections and spread them out in time—sexual health organizations worldwide found themselves issuing advice that was, for them, unprecedented: gay and bisexual men should stop casual sexual activities altogether (brady 2020)—an uncanny echo of “abstinence only.” one problem with this breaking-the-chain scenario is the assumption that men stopped having sex during lockdown. as javier’s story illustrates, this was not so; at least a quarter of gay men continued hooking up over this period (pebody 2020; cf. terrence higgins trust 2020). as we began talking to gay men about what they did during lockdown, we found them not infrequently pursuing what might be called “promiscuity in a pandemic,” to echo the words of douglas crimp in 1987. against the moralistic condemnation that framed aids as punishment for the sin of gay sex, in how to have promiscuity in an epidemic?, crimp (1987) argued that gay men’s “promiscuous love of sex” is precisely what would save us from the epidemic. the insistence on finding ways to have sex in such circumstances prompted the advent of “safe sex”—and indeed a whole activist movement that changed the course of history. to assume that sexual activity, queer or otherwise, might be suppressed by lockdown means to assume the state as the arbiter of the good and right, and to exaggerate its powers of repression. but it became apparent that rather than suppressing sex, lockdown provided fertile conditions for its pursuit. the long period of social disruption—no work, no entertainment, dissonant apprehensions of time, with days of the week blurring into each other, days running into nights—offered an opportunity to have more sex than ever. parties were arranged in airbnb rentals, hookups happened, public sex environments drew new devotees. an anthropological question arises: what do people do when they don’t have to work all the time (sahlins 1972)? one answer: they fuck (and see lewis 2020). but they weren’t supposed to. a two-meter distance between persons cannot be overcome by any body part. lockdown created the conditions where any sexual encounter outside domestic relationships seemed at once “crazy,” morally wrong, and intensely fun, incoherent, wild. it produced scenes like the one javier describes: socially distant public sex. clearly, both participants in javier’s tale knew that they were violating guidelines. and yet desire—being “childlike and chary of government” (chu 2018)—compelled connection of a kind, however awkward, and however fraught with ethical uncertainty. as the pandemic has worn on, old arguments are injected with fresh life: a moribund moralism gets its blood transfusion. during the holiday season of 2020 in north america and europe, the gay community was riven with arguments about the social media shaming of gay men partaking in parties, whether private gatherings or public events, inevitably characterized as possible “superspreader” (cf. “patient zero”) events. #gaysovercovid gave new life to what i suspect has been a long-simmering but rarely voiced sentiment in the gay male community: antipathy toward irresponsible gays (by implication, including the ones who contracted hiv and died of aids). and who would defend those who openly flout restrictions? what ethical values would legitimate this behavior? if gay men were dancing in puerto vallarta, over christmas 2020 the irish public was celebrating in characteristic large family gatherings, a tradition tacitly nodded to as the irish government relaxed restrictions on movement and gathering during the holiday period. but soon, ireland found itself with the highest incidence rate in the world (due in part also to the prevalence of the more efficiently transmissible so-called uk variant of the virus). ethical debate linking risk and responsibility flooded the social media feeds of the irish public: should the government have relaxed restrictions? should people themselves be blamed for being cavalier? what didn’t emerge was the hashtag #straightsovercovid, nor did photos get posted exposing private family gatherings to the sting of public shame. nevertheless, the closeness of the extended family could not be seen as justifying the precipitous rise in incidence that followed. the intimacy of the family could no longer be its own justification: an ethics of proximity requires inspecting even that haven in a heartless world. in slyly implicit, one might say unconscious, ways, the moral messages of disease are conveyed (douglas 1975). they tell us which lives matter, and which forms of social intercourse are essential; these are the values capable of holding the weight of risk. abstract though comparisons between hiv and sars-cov-2 are of limited use, many people experience the epidemics simultaneously. for those of us living with hiv, every comment on covid-19 becomes a fretful allegory of hiv, and the ethical lessons that covid-19 teaches will inevitably be brought to bear on how we understand the meaning of the hiv epidemic, especially as it pertains to sexuality. this essay describes some of the ways gay men in dublin, ireland, reasoned about the ethics of sex during lockdown. 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jamie 2020 “u.k. lockdown has ‘broken hiv chain’ with huge reduction in new sti cases.” forbes, may 1. www.forbes.com/sites/jamiewareham/2020/05/01/uk-lockdown-has-broken-hiv-chain-with-huge-reduction-in-new-sti-cases/#162d1d1351bc. wilkinson, iain, and arthur kleinman 2016 a passion for society: how we think about human suffering. oakland: university of california press. willingham, emily 2020 “the condoms of the face: why some men refuse to wear masks.” scientific american, june 29. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-condoms-of-the-face-why-some-men-refuse-to-wear-masks/. zichermann, gabe 2020 “9 lessons learned from the aids crisis that could save us now.” elemental, july 15. https://elemental.medium.com/aids-can-teach-us-a-lot-about-covid-but-the-lessons-are-being-ignored-fc76b3c464e9. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 381-390, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.05 citation, erasure, and violence: a memoir cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 206-213, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.05 citation, erasure, and violence: a memoir christen a. smith university of texas, austin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0670-7907 this is a note on violence. i wrote my first book with a newborn in my arms. i would wake up at 3 a.m. every morning and sneak out of bed while my son was sleeping to go to my office and squeeze in a couple of hours of writing before starting the workday. sometimes he would wake up and i would get my nursing pillow and breastfeed him on my lap while i stretched my arms out over him onto my laptop to type. words mingled with milk in the twilight hours to create life. i nursed my words and my child in the crepuscule of my becoming a mother and a writer. i know my words like i know my children because i birthed them too. fast forward. my book is out in the world and my child is walking. i am attending a conference with scholars working on similar topics to mine. i head to the back of the conference hall to grab a coffee only to see, quite unexpectedly, concepts from my book paraphrased by someone i did not know on a power point projected at the front of the hall. i felt a painful tug in my throat and my heart and eyes began to burn. i felt like someone had taken something dear from me without my permission. my words, twisted yet recognizable, sat in front of me without my permission, and i felt violated. there is an intimate relationship between citational erasure and violence. that moment at a conference in 2017 was not the first time that i had been the target of plagiarism. it was, however, the moment that inspired me to action, and to think critically about the politics of citational erasure and its intimate relationship with anti-blackness, misogyny, patriarchy, and the politics of power within the academy.1 a prior experience with plagiarism—one that caught me quite off guard—not only forever changed my approach to my work but also continues to haunt me almost a decade later. in 2012, a student plagiarized my work, and when i tried to bring it to the attention of my senior colleagues, i was dismissed and gaslighted. for the following five years, i was professionally intimidated, maligned, and blackballed by a small circle of people intent on punishing me for daring to claim that i had had my ideas stolen. as a result, i became withdrawn and consumed by self-doubt. i tried to simply press on with my work, only to have the situation reappear from time to time to torment me. citational erasure is not just an intellectual matter. it is also a question of power inextricably intertwined with the dynamics of patriarchy and misogyny inside and outside the academy. if we understand citation to be the rules, practices, beliefs, and principles that define the genealogical map of our thoughts and inspirations, then citation is not only about inclusion in a bibliography but also about the ways that we reference our work and the ways that we reference others in relation to our work. it is also the way that we acknowledge the intellectual labor that provides the context necessary for our work to exist. it is not an exhaustive art. we never acknowledge all the multiple strands of thought that construct our ideas, simply because they are usually too vast to name. consequently, citation is also a deliberate political act—a decision to mark another’s thinking as foundational and/or influential to our own or to chart the existing discourse on a topic that we believe critical to the field. in this sense citation also constitutes intellectual currency. a structural relationship exists between gender violence and citational erasure in the academy. sexual harassment and gender discrimination often intermingle with threats of career sabotage, intellectual belittlement, and intimidation, and one informs the others. the logics of hetero-patriarchal white supremacy not only mark gendered, raced, and sexed marginalized bodies as violable but also their ideas. for example, the recent scandal involving the former harvard anthropology professor gary urton revealed that several female students allege he sexually harassed them, at times coercing them into “consensual sex,” in exchange for the support of a high-profile senior scholar in their careers moving forward (bikales 2020). research guidance, support, co-authorship, strong letters of reference, and even research topics are some of the myriad resources that urton leveraged for sexual contact with female students. an anonymous student claimed that urton proposed exchanging sex for a good letter of recommendation (gibbons 2020). carrie brezine, one of urton’s former students, claims he coerced her into a “consensual” sexual relationship from 2003 to 2009. she “alleges that her work and research on khipu depended on urton’s good will, which was conditional on sex” (gibbons 2020). she also states that “she changed her project because urton controlled access to the khipu in harvard’s collection as well as the database, a key resource in the field. she feared he would withhold access if he got angry at her.” those who are marked as female and other (physically or otherwise) are marked as violable corporeally and epistemologically, and there are multiple structures of power in the culture of academia that allow patterns of violation to persist with impunity. urton’s research on khipu knotting techniques in peru won him the macarthur genius grant in 2000 and the guggenheim fellowship in 2014. the students and faculty who have spoken out against urton attest to being afraid of professional and personal retaliation. they also note the trauma of their experiences. a racialized patriarchal structure of power exists in the academy that proliferates gender-based harassment, exploitation, and violation. this structure of power also subtends the academy’s culture of knowledge production, validation, and citation. citational politics are one of the many battlegrounds where race, gender, and sexual politics play out in academia.2 historically, black women have been systematically exploited for our labor in the academy but not recognized for our ideas. bell hooks observes, “black women intellectuals who are not ‘famous writers’ … remain virtually invisible in this society” (hooks and west 1991, 151). this invisibility is a function of “institutionalized racism, sexism, and class exploitation” (hooks and west 1991, 151). anthropology has habitually studied black women without citing them (smith and garrett-scott 2021; bolles 2013; harrison 2008; harrison and harrison 1999; harrison et al. 2018). in 2017, when i decided to end my silence, i started cite black women. the idea was simple in the beginning: i just made a few t-shirts with the phrase emblazoned on the front and brought them to conferences. at the time i did not think of it as much more than a symbolic way to speak out when for so long i had felt so powerless. yet, what began as an act of defiance grew quickly into a movement against the citational erasure of black women inside and outside the academy, and i discovered i was not alone. “black women have been participants in higher education for more than a century, but they are almost totally absent from the research literature; rarely is the impact of racism and sexism on black women in academe examined” (moses 1989). in 1989, the former american anthrpological association president yolanda moses reflected on black women’s intersectional experiences with inequality in the academy. she writes, “black women … experience and must deal with not only the effects of racism but also those of sexism. racism and sexism may be so fused in a given situation that it is difficult to tell which is which” (moses 1989). nowhere are black women’s experiences of intersectional violence in the academy more apparent than when it comes to citation. black women academics have long experienced citational practice as a critical background in the struggle for gender-racial justice (e.g., benjamin 1997; bolles 2013; evans 2008; harrison 2008; hooks and west 1991). as bell hooks observes, “sexist subordination in black intellectual life continues to obscure and devalue the work of black female intellectuals. this is why it is so difficult for students to name us” (hooks and west 1991, 151). yet despite this multigenerational struggle, the citational erasure of black women continues as an acute problem. black women’s innovative intellectual contributions are routinely overlooked and/or sidelined in favor of citing non-black women. erasure proves particularly significant when it comes to paradigmatic concepts. for example, cheryl rodriguez observes that the anthropologist diane k. lewis began critiquing anthropology as a colonial discipline as early as the 1970s (rodriguez 2018; lewis 1973). yet, lewis is not taught or read widely in the discipline as a key contributor to this idea. contemporary, black women intellectuals are also overlooked. mythri jegathesan (2021) notes that anthropology’s engagement with donna haraway’s writings on the plantationocene erases black feminist plantation studies, specifically katherine mckittrick’s theory of “plantation futures” (jegathesan 2021; mckittrick 2013). in spite of black women’s contributions to anthropology and beyond, “we are not named.” in 2021, dominique garrett-scott and i published “we are not named: black women and the politics of citation in anthropology”—a pilot study looking at the rates of citation for black women in several top-tier anthropology journals, including cultural anthropology (smith and garrett-scott 2021). in that study, we found that although black women make up about 2.6 percent of u.s. anthropologists, they represent only 1.5 percent of the total citations included in this study—82 out of 5,445. more strikingly, black women anthropologists make up only 0.86 percent of all citations—a severe underrepresentation relative to our absolute representation in u.s. anthropology. the data we collected from articles published in cultural anthropology were noticeably lower than the average. of the 590 citations we counted in our sample of top-cited articles published in cultural anthropology, only 4 were black women (0.67%), and only 2 were black women anthropologists (0.33%).3 even these figures paint only a partial picture of the problem. forty-seven of the 82 citations of black women we analyzed were made by black authors, even though black authors only wrote three of the total sixty-one articles we examined. black authors constituted 5 percent of the articles analyzed but were responsible for 57 percent of all the citations of black women that we counted. only about 29 percent of non-black authors cited black women, whereas 100 percent of black authors cited black women. black people are much more likely to cite black women than their non-black counterparts. we have been strip-mined for our knowledge and given little if any credit for the immeasurable intellectual contributions we have made to multiple fields. i use the phrase strip-mined carefully and deliberately for its colonial, environmental, and sexual overtones. it is the case that the citational erasure of black women in anthropology and beyond cannot be separated from the racialized and sexualized structures of power that frame the academy writ large. the citational erasure of black women is an expression of misogynoir—the systemic antipathy for black women embedded in multiple dimensions of our society (bailey and trudy 2018). one of the sequelae of slavery is an incessant habit of exploiting black people’s labor while giving them little to no monetary benefits.4 even after the legal end of slavery, many continue to perceive black labor as exploitable while refusing black people intellectual credit for our work and our ideas. epistemological structures of power and knowledge production at once erase black women as cognitive subjects and re-inscribe black women as extractive objects. the historic appropriation and exploitation of black women’s bodies and labors, particularly as a legacy of slavery and the middle passage, has marked black women as violable. most of us are well aware of the ways that black people have been exploited as chattel (particularly as domestic laborers) in the history of the americas. the violent extraction of black labor for the purposes of capitalist expansion are well charted across our hemisphere. yet rarely do we also think of the ways that black intellectual labor—particularly black women’s intellectual labor—has also historically formed part of this economy of extraction. what must we do as anthropologists given this current reality? what are the tasks at hand? in 2021 the cite black women collective published its first collective statement, “cite black women: a critical praxis (a statement)” (smith et al. 2021). in it, we chart our genealogy, we dream of possible futures, and we pose a series of questions that we hope will provoke anthropology and beyond to think with us. what we know to be true is that we can no longer let go unremarked the existing structures of power that validate white male thinking as well as gender and race hierarchies of knowledge production. they are, as i have noted here, also implicated in a history of violence that we as anthropologists must continue to walk away from toward new futures and possibilities. abstract this essay examines the intimate relationship between the personal, the political, violence, and citational erasure through the lens of black women’s experience. antiblackness, misogyny, and patriarchy together produce the environment that foments black women’s citational erasure within anthropology and the academy more broadly. such erasure is not just an intellectual matter. it is equally a matter of power whose logic has deep roots in settler-colonial extractivism and the historical exploitation of black women’s labor. citation thus not only concerns naming or bibliographic incorporation but also historical patterns of race-gender exploitation that haunt the present. [citation; erasure; black women; anthropology] notes acknowledgments i thank anne-maria b. makhulu for her drive and vision in suggesting and pulling together this project. i also thank her for the many fruitful conversations we have had in working on this colloquy together. my deepest thanks to faye v. harrison, bianca c. williams, and savannah shange for agreeing to participate in this collective dialogue. to faye, for her pathfinding work centering black women in anthropology and making a space for us all. to bianca, for always being a beacon for black feminist anthropology in heart and spirit. and to savannah, for her poetic, sharp insight into our world. finally, i must thank the cite black women collective for all that you are and all that you do for me and for the project of citing black women. 1. for the definition of misogynoir, see bailey and trudy 2018. 2. for an extensive conversation about the race and gender politics of citation, see ahmed 2017. 3. our method was to use journal impact factor (jif) rankings for five top-tier cultural-social and general anthropology journals (including cultural anthropology) published in the united states in 2016 and 2017 to analyze the frequency with which the most cited articles in those years cite black women. for more on this methodology, see smith and garrett-scott 2021. 4. according to the oxford english dictionary, the word sequela means “a morbid infection occurring as the result of a previous disease.” in my research on black women and violence in the americas, i use the term sequelae to theorize the deadly aftereffects of police terror on black women in brazil and the united states (smith 2021). here, i employ the term to also suggest that epistemic erasure is a morbid social infection resulting from slavery. references ahmed, sara 2017 living a feminist life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bailey, moya, and trudy 2018 “on misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism.” feminist media studies 18, no. 4: 762–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395 benjamin, lois, ed. 1997 black women in the academy: promises and perils. gainesville: university press of florida. bikales, james s. 2020 “protected by decades-old power structures, three renowned harvard anthropologists face allegations of sexual harassment.” harvard crimson, may 29. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/5/29/harvard-anthropology-gender-issues/ bolles, lynn 2013 “telling the story straight: black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology.” transforming anthropology 21, no. 1: 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12000 evans, stephanie y. 2008 black women in the ivory tower, 1850–1954: an intellectual history. gainesville: university press of florida. gibbons, ann 2020 “prominent harvard archaeologist put on leave amid allegations of sexual harassment.” science magazine, june 5, 2020. https://www.science.org/content/article/prominent-harvard-archaeologist-put-leave-amid-allegations-sexual-harassment harrison, faye v. 2008 “academia, the free market, and diversity.” in outsider within: reworking anthropology in the global age. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, ira e., and faye v. harrison, eds. 1999 african-american pioneers in anthropology. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, ira e., deborah johnson-simon, and erica l. williams 2018 the second generation of african american pioneers in anthropology. urbana: university of illinois press. hooks, bell, and cornel west 1991 breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life. boston, mass.: south end press. jegathesan, mythri 2021 “black feminist plots before the plantationocene and anthropology’s ‘regional closets.’” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 78–93. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12037 lewis, diane 1973 “anthropology and colonialism.” current anthropology 14, no. 5: 581–602. https://doi.org/10.1086/201393 mckittrick, katherine 2013 “plantation futures.” small axe : a journal of criticism 17, no. 3: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-2378892 moses, yolanda 1989 “black women in academe: issues and strategies.” association of american colleges, washington, d.c. project on the status and education of women. new york: ford foundation. rodriguez, cheryl 2018 “diane k. lewis and the transformation of anthropology: an ideology of radical change.” in the second generation of african american pioneers in anthropology, edited by ira e. harrison, deborah johnson-simon, and erica lorraine williams. urbana: university of illinois press. https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252042027.003.0004 smith, christen a. 2021 “counting frequency: un/gendering anti-black police terror.” social text 39, no. 2: 25–49. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8903591 smith, christen a., and dominique garrett-scott 2021 “we are not named: black women and the politics of citation in anthropology.” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 18–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038 smith, christen a., erica l. williams, imani a. wadud, whitney n. l. pirtle 2021 “cite black women: a critical praxis (a statement).” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 206-213, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.05 governing by proximity: state performance and migrant citizenship on the india-pakistan border cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 513-548, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.09 governing by proximity: state performance and migrant citizenship on the india-pakistan border natasha raheja cornell university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6593-9727 on a hot summer morning in the western indian city of jodhpur in july 2016, the humming of air coolers and standing fans nearly drowned out a muffled microphone announcement. office clerks draping tables with white cloth paused to listen as a district official commenced the special two-day program, welcoming attendees to the the indian ministry of home affairs’ special camp for long-term visas and citizenship for pakistani citizens. some pakistani hindus migrate to india, where they aspire to offer their families improved socioeconomic opportunities in a place where they have long-standing cultural, linguistic, and kinship ties and can participate in religious-national modes of belonging as “hindus in hindustan.”1 while this camp took place a few years before the 2019 passage of the controversial citizenship amendment act (caa), which formally sutured religion and citizenship in india, the immigration bureaucracy had long privileged pakistani hindu migrants in practice.2 pakistani hindus may imagine their migration as an enactment of their “right of return,” but they in fact experience an ambivalent welcome on arrival. among the pakistani citizens in attendance that day, there was some confusion, and hope, as to whether officials would be awarding indian citizenship certificates at the camp. local newspapers had enthusiastically reported that the government was holding camps to give citizenship to pakistani hindus, featuring stories of people who had been waiting for naturalization for more than a decade. in 2005, the indian ministry of home affairs (mha) had granted citizenship en masse to 13,000 pakistani hindus in rajasthan, and folks at the 2016 camp hoped for a similar outcome. as we waited for something special to happen, i noted the sprawling white canopy offering shelter from the harsh sun. in the center of the tent, rows of off-white plastic chairs sat on a thin green carpet and faced a special section marked “chief guests.” the pakistani hindu families i was seated with chatted excitedly about the elaborate arrangements. they were energized by the opportunity to meet rubaru (face to face) with bade neta log (big leader people). it was rumored that the home secretary would be in attendance from delhi, the nation’s capital. the fleet of white cars and decorative lines of pink chalk on the street suggested this was not mere hype. meera, a middle-aged bhil woman who had moved from hala, sindh, to jodhpur, rajasthan, in 2014 on a pilgrimage visa with her parents, husband, and ten children, told me she did not know why the indian consulate in islamabad had recently rejected her sis-ter-in-law’s visa application.3,4 in jodhpur, as in hala, meera and her family worked as agricultural laborers. as per india’s foreigners’ acts for pakistani nationals, her family had to regularly report to the police to register their movements for work and to extend their visas. when i asked about her family’s decision to live in jodhpur, she stated that “modiji,” narendra modi, india’s prime minister, had invited them, referencing a video saved on her husband’s smartphone. we hunched over the phone to see a close-up shot of the then candidate giving a campaign speech in 2014 in rajasthan. in the two-minute clip, he felicitated hindu brothers and sisters from pakistan in a booming voice followed by loud cheers from an unseen crowd. meera looked up from the phone and said, “dekha, modiji ne hame bulaaya hai aur aaj, aaj ham sarkar se milenge. [see, modiji has invited us and today, today we will meet with the govern-ment.]” for meera, meeting with high-ranking officers and seeing digital clips of welcoming political speeches in the palm of her hand made indian citizenship feel like a close possibility. at the same time, she had relatives and acquaintances whose visa and citizenship applications had been delayed or rejected. applicants like meera would typically submit their visa and citizenship files in the quietude of a local immigration office to low-ranking clerks who only occasionally looked up, and sometimes asked migrants to stand outside, citing their alleged sweaty smell. in contrast, this vishesh shivir (special camp) made for an exceptional opportunity to meet with high-ranking government officers and politicians. these moments led me to wonder: how does proximity to politicians perpetuate a form of aspirational citizenship? how does proximity produce hope in the face of deferral? similar to other staged government events that i observed, face-to-face visits with ministers and members of parliament (mps) from delhi fostered hope among pakistani hindus who sought indian citizenship. yet in close encounters before this legal formalization, government officials welcomed these migrants as entitled indian citizens on the basis of their hindu religious identification and related experiences of persecution in pakistan. as evinced below, high-ranking, national-level politicians’ occasional visits to jodhpur, along with their digital addresses, incorporated pakistani hindus into a hindu-india imaginary. this article argues that proximity constitutes a mode of governance that enchants aspirational citi-zen-subjects while exposing ambivalent state workings and discretionary power. high-ranking state actors govern by proximity when their presence raises hopes for intervention and generates attachments with constituents within a wider body politic. the possibility and felt nearness of sovereign intervention comprise a marked form of hope and recognition for surveilled migrant populations who otherwise predominantly experience government as bureaucratic stasis. the narratives of governing by proximity below convey how sovereignty, and the expectations it generates, remain inseparable from its mediation. in the context of populism in india, and more broadly, governing by proximity helps us think anew about nationalist attachments among people in liminal states of belonging at the borders of nation-states. my focus on proximity as a modality of governance joins a growing literature on the political economy of hope as a technology of government around the world (kleist and jansen 2016; hage 2016), enriching our understanding of the affective, sensory dimensions of popular sovereignty movements claiming to speak for “the people” (chatterjee 2019; chowdhury 2019; patch 2019; seo 2019). the accounts of proximal governance in this article draw on ongoing digital ethnography and twenty-two months of in-person field research conducted between 2014 and 2022 in jodhpur, rajasthan, a city with a high concentration of pakistani hindu refugee-migrants.5 this research forms part of a broader inquiry on the cross-border flexibility of the religious minority form in south asia in the context of colonial legacies of state enumeration and religious majoritarianism. during field research, i embedded myself in a moving migrant landscape: observing the routine processing of visa and citizenship-related paperwork at immigration bureaucracies; attending political rallies and ngo events; and spending time with migrant families during daily life and at special occasions. i conducted extensive unstructured and structured interviews with immigration officers, politicians, migration brokers, migrants, and ngo advocates. drawing from these sources, i present three different sites and modes of governing by proximity to discuss the shifting effects of nearness in a digital era. the range of examples shows how the concept can travel and how multiple spatialities comprise proximal governance. the first example, the citizenship camp, requires people to leave their homes to be in proximity to politicians. the second, a parliamentary tour, makes for a mode of proximity that places government officers in migrants’ homes. in the final example of digital media, location seems irrelevant when proximity occurs in the palm of one’s hand. all three share a sense of possibility produced through physical immediacy and feelings of being personally hailed. drawing attention to these effects, governing by proximity sheds insight onto how a space for possibility and recognition becomes etched out amid deferral, where not yet is linked with but soon (miyazaki 2004). when high-ranking politicians and officers govern by proximity, their status is magnified. traveling from the center, the nation’s capital of delhi, to a so-called periphery, the border city of jodhpur, politicians’ physical traversal “comes to signify the ubiquity and translocality of the state” (gupta 1995, 377; geertz 1980). but such proximity also shapes mixed affects of hope and cynicism, as i observed among pakistani hindus waiting for indian citizenship. the possibility of personal connection and direct address with high-ranking state officials energized migrants stuck in liminal states of prolonged waiting: the delhi sarkar’s (central government’s) visits conveyed the indian state’s commitment to persecuted religious minorities from pakistan. but while physical proximity to national-level politicians offered assurance, it also provided an opportunity to scrutinize the government’s deferred and undelivered promises. moments of improvisation revealed incon-sistencies between officers working at local, state, and national levels, but it also featured hopeful exceptions when high-ranking politicians enacted discretionary authority and extended recognition to select individuals, yielding excitement and a sense of possibility. these moments of proximity to government officers made unfulfilled political promises visible and opened space for doubt. figure 1. sign for “pending pakistani displaced people’s citizenship applications” hanging from tent top. photo by natasha raheja. figure 2. standing fan at citizenship camp. photo by natasha raheja. from minority to majority the highest concentration of recent pakistani hindu arrivals to india occurs in the city of jodhpur, where they number about 15,000, across at least seventeen refugee settlements, according to local police reports. while some refugee-migrants disperse after their train journey from sindh to rajasthan, many stay in and around the city, the point of disembarkation and a resettlement hub. during the naturalization waiting period, their pakistani nationality largely prevents them from receiving an official caste certificate, opening bank accounts, enrolling in schools, legally acquiring cooking gas cylinders, purchasing property, or moving outside of permitted locales, among other restrictions. circular migration between india and pakistan and bilateral treatment of religious minorities as “proxy citizens” convey the contrivance and ongoing colonial legacy of the 1947 partition (zamindar 2007; roy 2013; van schendel 2002). today, pakistani hindu migrants claim indian citizenship based on their status in pakistan, where they experience targeted anti-hindu, casteist exclusion as a religious minority (jaffrelot 2020; schaflechner 2020; mahmood 2014; asif 2021). the hindu nationalist bjp, in turn, hails hindus in pakistan as a persecuted religious minority; the party’s 2014 campaign manifesto declared india a home to the world’s persecuted hindus. in 2015, the mha issued an executive order exempting pakistani hindus from the 1946 foreigners act, which requires valid passports and visas for non-citizens. in 2019, the parliament passed the caa, which expedites indian citizenship for this population, reducing their naturalization waiting period from twelve to six years. though socioeconomically marginalized, pakistani hindu refugee-migrants prove central to the configuration of a hindu-india imaginary. the hindutva state’s project of welcoming pakistani hindus incompletely consolidates diffuse religious identity in a frontier desert region, one crossed by an international border.6 refugee-migrants continue to face exclusion in india because of their caste status and affiliation with pakistan, a purported enemy state. as a community with cross-border attachments that is “foreign,” sindhiand urdu-speaking, and primarily “lower caste,” pakistani hindus fail to conform to normative images of indian citizenship.7 they undergo mandatory police reporting as they wait indefinitely for citizenship, experiencing deferred access to basic welfare. some describe their frustrations on both sides of the border as “death by religion in pakistan, and death by paperwork in india.” if lacking family support and unable to secure employment in india, some refugee-migrants eventually return to live with relatives in pakistan. in this context of deferred recognition, high-ranking indian officials manage refugee-migrants’ expectations and showcase their commitment to this population through proximity. politicians’ and state officials’ governmental strategies of presence manufacture hope and manage official narratives about cross-border hindu migration, sometimes personally discouraging refugee-migrants from returning to pakistan. yet bjp politicians’ governance by proximity also exposes the distinction between nationalist narrative and substantive recognition for pakistani hindu migrants, even while ostensibly seeking to close this gap. despite the promise of democratic enfranchisement, the selective welcome of such migrants in practice exposes the normalized exclusion, casteism, and “incivility” of citizenship for marginalized groups (sethi 2021; sinharay 2019; waghmore and gorringe 2020), leaving them between “faith and panic” (ghosh 2020). pakistani hindus may be subjects of the hindu nation, but they are conditional subjects of the indian state. governing by proximity the notion of governing by proximity builds on anthropological literatures on the state, performance, and proximity to understand the work of closeness and mediation in producing aspirational citizenship. through this concept, i further an understanding of proximal political performance as a historically conditioned mode of power that links people to the state through perpetual promise and deferred recognition. governing by proximity works much in the way a magnifying glass amplifies both stature and shortcomings (hill and paris 2014). the concept builds on the work of leslie hill and helen paris (2014), performance artists and scholars who reflect on how proximity shapes interactions between performers and audiences. following the anthropologist edward hall’s (1963) landmark study of proxemics, hill and paris develop work that experiments with social encounters within “close distance,” where people can reach out and physically touch one another. while their work primarily explores lateral peer relations between individuals, i extend this focus to understand how institutional and state actors leverage “close distance” to enfold aspirational citizen-subjects into a religious-national imaginary and expand state power, though in ways that simultaneously expose inconsistent state workings. studies of proximity commonly describe this paradox. per-formance, film, and digital communications scholars offer rich analyses of how liveness, closeness, and co-presence shape social solidarity in mixed ways, cultivating a dialectics of hope and hopelessness (duggan and muñoz 2009). on the one hand, nearness and co-presence appear pleasurable (mazzarella 2010) and promote an ethical order (levinas and nemo 1985), but on the other, closeness seems risky and overwhelming (obadia 2020; crosson 2020). in particular, the face (including close-up shots of faces in film) offers a key medium through which people are brought into responsibility for and relationality with each other (turkle 2011; goffman 1967; doane 2003). proximity through digital technologies can seemingly re-order time (nair 2019), fostering both an ambient co-presence and a sense of alienation, especially among displaced migrant communities (madianou and miller 2012). i draw on these works to make sense of the fraught exhilaration of face-to-face proximity in the context of state-subject relations, suggesting that the uncontainable excess of nearness makes governing by proximity both exhilarating and exasperating for citizens in waiting. i also build on anthropological theorizations that underscore how dramaturgy, presence, and theater prove integral to, not extrinsic from, democratic politics (finlayson 2015) and state power more broadly (geertz 1980). state performance and mediatized representations foster national attachments and bind people into publics (bryant 2021; bobick 2017; wedeen 2008), collapsing boundaries between reason and affect, governed and governing (chowdhury 2019). this approach emphasizes the affective and symbolic dimensions of state-making, in contrast to a weberian emphasis on rationality and proceduralism (aggarwal 2004; strauss and o’brien 2007) or accounts of routinized and exceptional violence as modes of state legitimation (auyero 2011; gupta 2012; khanikar 2018). scholarship on state performance remains largely informed by studies of grand political theater and ceremony that are ritualized through repetition, such as nation-wide parades (adams 2010; roy 2007), mass religious festivals (kaur 2005), cosmological political systems (geertz 1980), and national elections (banerjee 2017). james c. scott (1990) describes such official ceremonies as sites of both state domination and popular resistance, suggesting two disparate sets of actors: the superordinate state and subordinate subjects. but my analysis shows how state actors themselves expose the negotiated contingencies of state-making. that is, challenges to totalizing state power are embedded in public acts of domination, not only in offstage, subordinate acts of resistance. rather than rely on tightly curated and rehearsed large-scale state performances, then, this article builds on anthropological work that focuses on local-level, improvisational, and intermittent encounters to highlight the dynamism and inconsistencies of state practices within smaller events (larkin 2008; li 2007; harvey and knox 2015). specifically, my work extends conversations about the processual, fragmented “migration control field,” where inconsistency and intimacy with state actors enhance and eclipse possibility at peripheries in ways central to state formation (andersson 2014; das and poole 2004; kalir, achermann, and rosset 2019). the performances discussed in this article were singular events, planned with no regular frequency and involving no more than a few hundred people, but they required pomp, advance orchestration, staging, the appearance of select personalities, the negotiation of scripts, and an audience—all dramatic elements of “secular ceremony” (moore and myerhoff 1977). approaching proximity as a mode of governance helps us understand the promise and risk of these small-scale state performances beyond a performer-spectator, dominant-weak binary. as hill and paris (2014) note, proximity to a spectator both enhances and compromises the status of the performer. as back and front stage collapses at these state events, narratives of migration are awkwardly negotiated rather than imposed through prescripted, top-down spectacular ceremony. zeroing in on modes of proximal governance thus reveals how the maintenance of state legitimacy and public transcripts make for tedious, uncertain achievements. the nexus of performance, politics, and proximity is generative especially in the case of south asia. scholars of the region have theorized forms of traveling theater as sites for the negotiation of authority and social critique (hansen 1991), recognized the centrality of intimate audiovisual modes of political speeches in cultivating national publics (gopinath 2020; kunreuther 2010; mitchell 2014), analyzed the sense of possibility embedded in the proximity of crowds (chatterjee 2016; chowdhury 2019), argued for “politics as permanent performance” (hansen 2004), and noted the border as a site of mundane and spectacular ritual (aggarwal 2004; menon 2013). anthropologists of the state working in this region have similarly been attuned to the efficacy of face-to-face interactions, individual charisma, and personal connections in the routine workings of bureaucracy (hull 2012), brokerage of state-citizen relations (raheja n.d.), electoral politics (ahmed 2019), court trials (kaviraj 2007), and international diplomacy (lutfi 2021). ubiquitous practices of seeing across the subcontinent such as nazar, an evil-eye, and darshan, a momentary mutual glance between devotee and deity, also inform my reading of the power, pleasure, and excesses of face-to-face encounters (amin 1988; dinkar 2021) and the face in circulated images as sites of “proximal empowerment” (pinney 1997). the idea that proximity plays a role in political relations in india in particular is not new. anthropologists have conceptualized how hierarchical, patronal intercaste relations (piliavsky 2020) and everyday mediation of bureaucracy and electoral politics (berenschot 2010; björkman 2014) appear intimate, personal, and caring even as they are implicated in mechanisms of shrinking, unequal access to state services. in india, the question of what proximity offers seems particularly salient given the governing regime’s move toward an electronic governance that seeks to eliminate intermediary figures (mazzarella 2006) and promote direct interfaces with government officials. praseeda gopinath’s (2020, 152) analysis of narendra modi’s speeches is instructive for apprehending how felt proximity to high-ranking politicians works to both “invoke the vastness of the indian nation while including the nation-family in the intimate domestic.” the possibility of face-to-face visits and personalized digital media encounters with politicians and state officials dampens the mediational qualities of distal, broadcast modes of national-level governance from afar, ultimately blurring the distal/proximal state dichotomy. this article expands these accounts by focusing on qualitatively exceptional moments of a liminal population’s nearness with high-ranking government officers, helping us understand what the possibility of a personal connection means for recognition. in these fleeting interactions, state actors work to guide the narrative of pakistani hindu migration to india, exposing how such public transcripts are coproduced and selectively edited, drawing attention to deferred promise. my use of exposure here reflects the risky duality of proximity, which heightens stature as well as scrutiny: proximal encounters both incorporate aspirational citizen-subjects into a religious national imaginary and lay bare governmental inconsistencies. in these encounters, refugee-migrants prove central because they are required to bolster and hold state narratives. but the mutuality of proximate state performance is not wholly bidirectional; high-ranking officers’ relative ability to enter and exit interactions with “the public” maintains the allure and risk of close distance in ways that both affirm and expose manufactured state power. governing by proximity thus captures the specificity of how the felt nearness of politicians and their promises are implicated in the ways that select migrant populations experience both privilege and precarity as they seek citizenship and recognition (chen 2020; parla 2019). but the concept also carries broader significance for understanding affective governance in the context of growing global populism and religious nationalism. as an analytic, governing by proximity thus bridges ethnographic work on nationalist populism and the political affect of hope, which come together to generate attachments between “the people” and political leaders. figure 3. migrant passports and immigration stamps. photo by natasha raheja. im/possibility as the morning at the citizenship camp progressed, families and friends in attendance turned the neat rows of plastic chairs into circles so they could face each other and chat while waiting. a dozen or so police officers in uniform followed suit, until, after idling most of the morning, they suddenly shifted to straighten their berets and stand guard. the ministry of home affairs home secretary, rajiv mehrishi, had arrived with his retinue comprising the joint secretary, the district collector, the divisional commissioner, and other noted officials. a rush of refugee-migrants and news reporters moved forward to greet them. sarita madam, a district magistrate, signaled the police to control the crowd with her right hand while her left hand motioned seated ngo leaders to come greet the “chief guests.” sitting back in a plush loveseat draped with a white sheet, the home secretary asked the ngo leaders to invite a few refugee-migrants to get a bit closer and present their cases directly to him. the presence of the high-ranking official generated a frenzied excitement among the crowd of refugee-migrants, who were separated from the visitors by a khaki row of security personnel. as people shifted the weight of their bodies around to get closer to mehrishi, staff from local pakistani hindu ngos tried to direct the traffic. the possibility for fleeting conversation with members of the delhi sarkar was rumored to change fates. a connection with a politician could expedite one’s own citizenship application or the visa process for a relative back in pakistan. at the district authority in jodhpur, refugee-migrants can wait hours before finding out that the officer they need to see is not available; rather than leaving an application at their desk, they would return to deliver it personally when the officer was present. at this two-day camp, officers who under usual circumstances seemed perpetually at lunch or out of town sat behind desks in the open air, where refugee-migrants could stand in line to capture their attention. with proximity to both high-level politicians and local bureaucrats at the camp, citizenship seemed within grasp. the desks for 5-1a and 5-1c had the longest lines. section 5-1a of the indian citizenship act deals with applicants who have a parent born in “undivided india” before the 1947 partition; 5-1c concerns foreigners married to indian citizens. pankajlal waited in the 5-1a line for an hour. when it was almost his turn to submit his application, he called out to his elderly mother to join him. at the desk, the concerned officer, whose regular post was in the revenue division, flipped through his file to ensure all the requisite documents were in order. moving his pen down the document checklist, he stopped to inquire about the “proof of father or mother birth in undivided india.” pankajlal moved his mother in front of himself, in clear view of the seated officer, before explaining that he had submitted an affidavit attesting that his mother was born in umerkot, sindh, before the partition. “the birth certificate is missing.” “but i have an affidavit. and can’t you see that my old mother could only have been born then [1947]?” “the instruction is for a certificate.” in the absence of a birth certificate, the officer dismissed pankajlal: “these people have no proper guidance; their applications will go in the trash.” later, in line at the water coolers, pankajlal commented, “the burden always falls on the common people, the way weight always falls on the wheel of a cycle. there [in pakistan], they call us infidel hindus, here [in india] bloody pakistanis.” another refugee-migrant, biharilal, tried to comfort pankajlal: “well, today’s arrangements are good and big netas are here, let’s see the results.” together they approached a desk with mha representatives to complain about the criteria for birth certificates. their exchange conveys how this site, centered on a performative avowal of their special status as desirable indian citizens, also enabled refugee-migrants’ critiques of the indian government. at another desk, officers from the foreigners registration office (fro) expressed confusion about why the district collector had summoned them to participate in the camp: the fro oversees residence permits and visa extensions, not citizenship applications. few refugee-migrants visited the satellite fro desk at the camp. in the absence of activity, i chatted with aruna madam, one of the higher-ranking fro officers present, about the likelihood of the government awarding citizenship to pakistani hindus en masse, as they had done in 2005. “asambhav, asambhav [impossible, impossible],” she said. the visiting delhi officials wouldn’t award bundles of citizenship certificates, given all the paperwork involved. “and besides, if the government could or actually wanted to provide that, wouldn’t they have already?” aruna madam’s words resounded in my head, “impossible, impossible.” certainly, the elaborate arrangements of the camp and chief guests seemed to indicate some special announcement? special—and expensive—events like this camp made the impossible seem possible. a few hours later, the home secretary indeed came on the loudspeaker to make a special announcement: he had decided that, in lieu of birth certificates, the officers at the camp would accept applications with affidavits attesting to a parent’s birth in undivided india. as pankajlal headed back to the 5-1a desk, others rushed to the stamp paper vendors and notaries at the back of the camp to secure affidavits attesting to the date of their parents’ births. unlike the entry-level officer at the 5-1a desk who had defaulted to procedures, the home secretary had exercised his discretionary power to offer some momentary relief. while discretionary authority is a feature across indian bureaucracy, it cuts multiple ways: low-status petitioners do not often experience bureaucratic discretion in their favor. exceptional moments of sovereign intervention at a special camp feel different than the stasis associated with routine visits to an immigration office, as high-ranking officers might offer relief to current and future constituents. at the same time, aruna madam’s comment about the impossibility of sovereign intervention speaks to bureaucrats’ cynicism about higher-ranking politicians’ governance by proximity. this mixed affect was reflected in the listless spirit with which refugee-migrants continued to wait for something to happen. i sensed both an energetic hope and an exhausted cynicism among the scattered groups of people moving about the garden. the collective anticipation was reminiscent of the long takes in bani abidi’s 2006 video installation reserved, featuring a fidgeting city awaiting the arrival of state dignitaries. it had become increasingly clear that this was a citizenship application camp, similar to one held the year before at a different location in jodhpur. contrary to high expectations, this was not the much-awaited camp at which delhi officials would distribute citizenship certificates. as much as the camp’s showy display seemed to offer assurance to refugee-migrants, the elaborate performances also indexed uncertainty about the promised award of indian citizenship. after all, why affirm what is certain? for local officers and refugee-migrants, the attention that the government drew to itself highlighted the gaps between dikhaava, vachan, and natije (show, promise, and results), signaling something yet to be achieved. approximate narratives if refugee-migrants had to travel from their homes to the city center for face-to-face encounters with the delhi sarkar at the citizenship camp, they found themselves greeted by mps directly at their doorstep a few months later. in december 2016, eleven of thirty members of a joint parliamentary committee (jpc) visited three pakistani hindu refugee-migrant settlements in jodhpur. the jpc, comprising twenty bjp mps and ten mps from opposition parties, had been convened to compile a report on the bjp’s controversial citizenship amendment bill. the committee traveled to assam, gujarat, and rajasthan on “study tours” to obtain firsthand information about religious minorities from pakistan and bangladesh living in india. during the three-day tour, state officials and refugee-migrants found themselves on mutual display. the mps (none with constituencies in rajasthan) were accompanied by parliamentary staff and jodhpur district officials as they visited pakistani hindu refugee colonies in the mornings and heard testimonials from refugees and advocates at their hotel in the afternoons. as one mp explained to me, “the study tour was a way to hear authentic voices and see refugee conditions firsthand.” on the first morning of the tour, a fleet of white cars stood parked outside a palatial, five-star hotel. inside the lobby, a few burly men in blue-and-green camouflage stood stoically with rifles slung across their torsos. after completing their scheduled breakfast, the visiting group of mps, all men, congregated in the lobby, while four women, including three visiting parliamentary staff and one local district official, paced about the marble floors ensuring logistics were in order. my own physical presence in the lobby, including my novelty as a woman and status as a researcher from an elite university, allowed for a discretionary spontaneity that garnered me fieldwork access. while i had breezed past the hotel security with my american accent and sunglasses, tagging along with the study tour proved more difficult. without personal connections, i would have to formally request permission. but when i inquired, sarita madam, the district magistrate accompanying the tour, directed me to madhavi madam, the parliamentary committee’s secretary, who directed me back to sarita madam. both claimed the other was in charge. finally, madhavi madam suggested i write a letter to the committee chairman, or just look at the committee website in a few months to read the parliamentary report for my research. confused as to what to do, i sat down and began to write out my request, looking up to say hello to a man in a tweed blazer sitting opposite me. i introduced myself as an anthropologist and shared my interest in the study tour. an mp himself, he invited me to come along. i closed my notebook and joined the tour’s fleet as it set out onto dusty desert roads. decorative pink and white chalk lined the roundabouts and roads, welcoming the visiting dignitaries. the committee chairman told me they did not precirculate their itinerary, to prevent refugee-migrants from staging difficult living conditions. “why else come all the way from delhi to jodhpur if not to see authentic refugee life,” stated madhavi madam. nonetheless, the parliamentary committee from delhi and the district officials in jodhpur relied on ngo leaders to identify locales to visit. community leaders had called one another to tidy and prepare their settlements in anticipation of official government visitors. and of course, the stories that people share are often already rehearsed and ready to be narrated; the idea that the parliamentary committee was searching for authentic suffering shaped how local ngos advised refugee-migrants to give testimonials to the visitors in the following days.8 though the district had carefully arranged the tour logistics, the field visits themselves appeared a bit haphazard. the fleet of cars came to a halt outside a small dalibai temple on the outskirts of jodh-pur, where the chairman and his assistants rolled down a window to ask where they could find pakistanis. a few turns later, we reached a locale where about one hundred meghwal families from southern punjab, pakistan, resided in small concrete-and-brick dwellings. around forty people quickly gathered in front of the cars as mps stepped out to see the crowd. the chairman, mr. singh, a bjp mp and former bombay police commissioner, led the encounter, while an assistant took notes. the refugee-migrants looked at their guests in silence, as if in quiet awe. mr. singh stepped forward and introduced himself and the committee, not by name, but by purpose: “we’re here to help you get citizenship.” followed by silence, he repeated himself. this time, the parliamentary secretary initiated applause. mr. singh posed a series of questions to the refugee-migrants: “why did you all come here from there? what problems did you have over there?” there was an energetic murmur in the crowd. “freely speak your minds, be open, and don’t worry about anything!” ajeet, a middle-aged man, shouted out: “we just want a place to live here, we have no other issues!” “what’s your age?” inquired mr. singh. “did you have any difficulty there? did anybody tell you to become muslim?” the murmur intensified into a loud hubbub. voices spoke over each other, and mr. singh tried to talk to ajeet above the din. when mr. singh asked why some of his sons still lived in pakistan, ajeet said they would be coming to india soon. the committee began inquiring about the conditions and motivations of migration: “did you come on a visa or escape on the run?” “could you go to temples?” “yes,” replied an elder man with a curvy white mustache, standing tall to be heard. “we’re not talking about india, we’re talking about pakistan,” mr. singh clarified. subtle moments of direction like this recalled line feeders who remind actors of the script on movie sets. the jpc offered nudges instead of commands. unlike the regulation and expression of national identity through tightly-controlled mass ceremony, these improvisational encounters expose the coproduction of narratives of hindu persecution compatible with india’s migration policy. governing by proximity includes this editorial work that sustains public transcripts. as the crowd split up into smaller groups, women chatting with women and men with men, sanjay complained that the mps had asked whether they had come illegally. “don’t they know we all have visas?” the lack of the politicians’ familiarity with the specifics of pakistani migration to india felt frustrating. ngo advocates told officials that as compared to the india-bangladesh border, where people can cross without visas, the india-pakistan border is more militarized and refugee-migrants can only enter jodhpur with a valid visa. the mps’ questions were uninformed, exposing that their authority didn’t come from knowledge of the situation. moments of proximity like the tour thus reveal the gaps underlying governmental power, even as they reinforce that power. on the third and final day of the study tour, the committee had dwindled from eleven to five members. the morning visit was to a colony of bhil families who had mostly moved from southern punjab, pakistan. on arrival, a group of mps and district officials walked past the table and chairs set up for their visit, instead marching around the settlement knocking on doors and calling out over thatched fences so they could talk to pakistani refugee-migrants directly and see their housing conditions. stirring up dust behind them, the marching group expanded as refugee-migrants from the colony and other passersby joined. the five mps signaled their first stop, but after realizing the hut they had stopped at belonged to an indian family, they quickly moved on. “oh, you all are indian also,” said one of the mps at their second stop before marching on. after finding pakistanis at the next three homes they visited, the mps and their retinue then returned to take a seat at the front table and addressed the colony. district officials sat in the front three rows, while refugee-migrants, mostly middle-aged men, sat in the back. young men and a few women stood around the edges of the tent. from where i sat in the fourth row, the mps’ remarks were barely audible. though the event planners had brought a microphone, sarita madam, the district officer in charge, said there was no need to use it. for the next half hour, the crowd intently looked on; the presence of mps seemed to hold its attention. governing by proximity is an affective performance that sometimes exceeds comprehension. a line of men, all vocal community leaders, formed near the table at the front of the tent. as they began to speak, one of the mps interrupted with a joke: “just to make sure, you’re not indians, right? we’re not here for indians, we’re here for pakistanis.” he and the crowd laughed, but the men continued: “we don’t have a teacher at the school! … we don’t have a cremation ground! … we don’t have toilets! … there’s a highway being built through our colony!” sarita madam summoned the relevant district-level officer to provide brief progress reports on these items. though the committee’s mandate to review the citizenship bill was clear, the mps and local officials ended up being audience to refugee-migrants’ complaints about social services. governing by proximity engages presence and nearness to manage expectations and generate attachments with aspirational citizen-subjects within a wider body-politic, but in doing so also opens unexpected risks, gaps, and possibilities. as politicians and ngo leaders edited out the excesses in pakistani hindus’ non-linear migration stories, their proximity exposed the vulnerable co-production of those public scripts. proximity also reveals the gaps between knowledge and power, as in the politicians’ ignorance of border rules. and, as in calls for social services, it opens possibilities for unexpected claims to be made on the state as part of that citizenship. figure 4. tent setup for members of parliament on citizenship amendment bill study tour in jodhpur, 2016. photo by natasha raheja. figure 5. chairs for the study tour in jodhpur, 2016. photo by natasha raheja. shortly after hearing the migrants’ complaints, the politicians took off in their cars, and the crowd started to disperse. i listened to few men talk about how the government ought to compensate them for the day’s missed wages, as they had stayed home to see and be seen by the delhi sarkar. digital reach governing by proximity also takes up digitally mediated forms. the possibility of digital encounters with high-ranking politicians via apps and social media platforms builds hopes for recognition. like the experiential close distance of the citizenship camp and parliamentary tour, digital platforms and apps pronounce gaps while seeming to collapse the distance between the government and citizenry. one man, ashok, brought these forms of proximity into direct comparison for me. after the jpc visited his neighborhood as part of the study tour, ashok called me. he had been at the school where he teaches martial arts when the mps visited his home, but was excited to hear that his daughter rani got to meet a parliamentary secretary and share her struggles as a pakistani citizen. i had met rani and ashok several months before at the local immigration office. it was rare to see young women enter the office; they had come to inquire about how to enroll rani in tenth grade without a transfer certificate. they had been trying to enroll since migrating three years ago, but rani’s school in rahimyarkhan had not sent a transfer certificate and no government school principal in jodhpur was willing to admit a pakistani student. on the day of the study tour, i saw rani maneuver her way to stand in front of the secretary and her note-taking assistant. tall and smiling, she attracted ms. sharma’s attention. rani expressed her desire to study and shared the difficulties she was facing. the notetaker told her they would write down her name and get back to her, leaving rani beaming with excitement. rani and ashok were hopeful that, with ms. sharma’s help, she would be able to go to school “like mashal.” a few months earlier, a twenty-two-year-old pakistani hindu woman in jaipur named mashal had wanted to apply to medical school, but as a pakistani national, she was not eligible to take the entrance exams. mashal and her parents (both medical doctors) reached out to local news outlets to publicize the issue. in a tweet, then external affairs minister sushma swaraj assured mashal that she would personally assist her with getting into medical school. eventually, with the minister’s intervention, mashal enrolled in a medical college in jaipur. with excited buzz, rani’s family hoped that perhaps she, too, would finally be able to continue the studies she had left three years ago in pakistan. sushma swaraj was known for her twitter governance, and she regularly tweeted announcements of her resolution of individual visa and migration-related cases. such announcements represent a mode of neoliberal governance that emphasizes individual initiative in securing access to services. this mode of governance may generate individual excitement like rani’s, but it does not change the larger structural obstacles that refugee-migrants face. the promise and excitement of personal connections and special permissions obscure the structures of power that shape who gets individual attention and who doesn’t. mashal came from a dominant-caste maheshwari family, and both her parents formed part of the salaried class. class and caste structurally positioned mashal to get attention from a high-ranking official more so than rani, who hailed from a meghwal family. rani never did get a call or twitter mention from the secretary, a reminder of the ways young people’s aspirations are structured along caste and class lines in an era of digital empowerment in “millennial india” (desai 2020; udupa, venkatraman, and khan 2020). still, digital social media platforms have the allure of closeness, and they seem to offer some ability to cross these structured gulfs. returning to the scene of meera’s husband holding modi’s moving image in the palm of his hand, the ability to listen to and view a close-up of the speaker’s face on one’s own device enhanced meera’s sense that the indian prime minister had personally invited her and other pakistani hindus to india. refuge-migrants share these kinds of videos with each other on whatsapp, emboldening their claims to citizenship. the digital reproduction and circulation of modi’s face evokes achille mbembe’s (2001) theorization of the ways that the omnipresence of images of autocrats generates a subaltern accessibility to power in the postcolony, while also producing an excess that opens up avenues for manipulation and play (strassler 2020). played on personal smartphones, these videos additionally scale public and private socialities, moving between addressing the national body politic and small groups of individuals (borgerson and miller 2016; gopinath 2020; nair 2021; udupa 2019). these videos also speak to each other, shaping modes of narration and self-identification. on several occasions, refugee-migrants and i watched mobile video clips of the indian home minister at a campaign rally vowing to expel (muslim) infiltrators from bangladesh while welcoming (hindu) refugees from pakistan. in december 2019, i heard refugee-migrants on the outskirts of jodhpur echo, “we are refugees, not infiltrators,” to a news crew collecting video responses to parliamentary debates about the indian citizenship act. proximity provides language to lasso together a political community on the basis of religion, but the tenacity of this community comes into question in the face of deferred recognition of some of its alleged members. in india, pakistani hindus are somewhat privileged by their religion, but they remain excluded from the body politic on the basis of caste, class, and nationality. rani’s cousin, prakash, had migrated from southern pakistan to jodhpur in 2015 at the age of sixteen. the registrar at a local government college had said they could not admit a pakistani national, and his family could not afford the tuition for private college. in 2016, the prime minister launched the pmo india app for citizens to be directly in touch with his office, and prakash submitted a lengthy grievance. he waited several months for a response, but by the time he got a message summoning him to deliver his complaint to the local district administration, he had taken up a job as assistant to a wedding videographer. it was winter, wedding season, and he couldn’t let the gig go now. plus, there was no assurance that a local complaint would yield a positive outcome. he told me, “modi ke yojnaae acche hai, lekin ham tak pahunchti nahin hain [modi’s schemes are good, but they don’t reach us].” prakash’s use of the word pahunchna (to reach) underscores the distal qualities of governing by proximity in “digital india,” connoting simultaneous closeness and distance. the above moments—officials’ confusion about their audience, lack of knowledge about border requirements, the failure to follow up with a promise, ignoring a tweet—signal the vertical differences between officials and migrants. even as these interactions reveal inconsistencies through proximity, the reinforcement of a vertical distance reinforces relations of power. as part of their interpellation as state subjects, migrants learn that relationships of power can be dismissive as well as generous in both everyday bureaucratic and fleeting official encounters. shifting proximity between officials, politicians, and constituents thus ambivalently coheres state-subject relations. despite the accessibility of e-governance apps and politicians on physical visits, refugee-migrants’ sense of deferred promise and reachability further conveys the mixed affects of hope and cynicism embedded in proximal governance. when state actors govern by proximity, they offer a hope that is co-cultivated with aspirational citizen-subjects. at the same time, they expose contradictory state workings in ways that render the hindutva state project, in spite of itself, incomplete. yah sab tamasha hai (this is all a spectacle) i was struck by this phrase, which i heard from refugee-migrants, fro officers, and ngo leaders as the 2016 citizenship application camp entered its second day. the hindi-urdu word tamasha translates to “show” or “spectacle,” and its colloquial use connotes an extravagant display.9shailaja paik’s (2017) social history of tamasha, a form of traveling theater, reveals the form’s contradictions—wherein dalit women artists experience both economic empowerment and social stigma. in this context, the above phrase is a popular critique, a shorthand for the fanfare of a state that dazzles but does not deliver—akin to sianne ngai’s (2020) theorization of the dually attractive and repulsive gimmick that strikes us as working too hard and too little. by no means limited to india, such personal modes of politics are common among populist governments worldwide, appealing as they do to claims of solidarity while being fueled by capitalist and class hegemony (gusterson 2017; berlant 2011; chatterjee 2019). rather than identifying a particular problem of global south states, popular critique instead points to how proximity opens risks not only for the state but also for the people (here pakistani hindu migrants) seeking recognition. corresponding to waharu sonavane’s (see patankar 2012) incisive poetic censure of the politician’s stage, forms of popular critique recognize that it is somehow both in spite of and because of its tamashas that the state’s exclusive forms of recognition endure, while also inviting a dismantling.10 the ambivalent incorporation of pakistani hindu migrants into the indian national body politic casts doubt on the hindu nationalist project, for me as a researcher and for migrants themselves. manish bhil, a pakistani hindu community leader and volunteer with the right-wing vishwa hindu parishad (vhp), shared that he cannot wait to become an indian citizen so he won’t have to interact any more with sanghis (right-wing hindu extremists who take up the cause of pakistani hindu recognition). he told me how, at a rally with pakistani hindu migrants, a senior vhp member had opened their car trunk to reveal dozens of swords. “this is no different than the mullahs i left in pakistan,” he lamented. a few months later, manish had to delete a whatsapp group he had made for his bhil acquaintances and friends to practice english. when one member introduced himself as living in district sangad in pakistan, manish’s local indian friends objected. when manish told me of his hurt feelings, he trailed off, saying, “but don’t they know that i am a pakistani?” in moments like these, religious nationalism’s binary taxonomies exclude those it purportedly seeks to include, revealing the limits of state recognition and the need for those in waiting to enact alternative political futures (ramberg 2016). scholars have demonstrated how the migration control field keeps people waiting at such thresholds to maintain their liminality, extract value, and bind subalterns to the state (de genova 2002; andersson 2014; auyero 2011). indeed, migrants also experience prolonged waiting in ways that generate alternative imaginaries and robust solidarities (sari 2021). if proximal encounters offer refugee-migrants a glimpse into a potential future that includes indian citizenship, it also reminds them—like manish—that there remains an uncrossed threshold for recognition. in gesturing to what is possible, governing by proximity signals what is lacking. the risk of proximal governance for surveilled migrant populations is thus that, in generating hope, it may reveal artifices and inconsistencies, possibly destabilizing national projects. victor turner (1975) offered a way to approach riskiness in political performance, whereby the subjunctive mood exposes what is currently not in one’s grasp but could be. indeterminacy offers the condition for continued hope, maintaining attachment in spite of repeated deferral (miyazaki 2004; chatterjee 2020), a site of simultaneous privilege and precarity (parla 2019). in her research with hindus from sindh living in the indian state of gujarat, for example, farhana ibrahim (2020) illuminates the wistful ways migrants in borderlands experience overlapping regional and national belonging, where incorporation into a single citizenry leaves much to be desired. in this vein, while i have focused on proximity’s affective and symbolic work, it is important to briefly note how migrants in rajasthan also ambivalently linked proximal encounters to material and legal results. in january 2022, after the mha applied to parliament for its third extension to notify rules for the caa, without which the act cannot be implemented, a message in a migrant whatsapp group read: “stalemate continues on citizenship … it certainly leads to utter hopelessness across migrant community.” in february 2022, the group shared an op-ed about caa “rhetoric versus realities” and in may, news reports of pakistani hindus leaving india after failing to get citizenship.11 migrants recognized the power of the government and discretionary authority when seeking recognition and benefits, but, after prolonged waiting, they did not always keep up hope or afford the same power to state actors on fulfillment of their needs. in 2021, rani is in her second year of medical school, having finally acquired one of a handful of spots reserved for foreigners. but when we sat together teary-eyed at the news of her admission in 2019, her father insisted that they did this without connections: it was by the grace of god and their own hard work. in march 2020, another migrant-refugee, karan bhil, sent me a photo of his indian citizenship certificate, with a caption that said modiji had finally delivered on his promise. having moved from pakistan in 2005, karan had attended application camps in 2015, 2016, and 2019, appealing to bjp and congress leaders over the years. i read his caption as a deserved assertion, appreciative but also fatigued. when i asked what indian citizenship meant to him, he thought for a moment and shared, “not much has changed. after so many years, we figured out how to make do. maybe our children will benefit and get government jobs.” in 2019, i noticed that the government had built modular toilets at migrant settlements on the outskirts of jodhpur, as part of a nationwide sanitation campaign. without running water, the rectangular concrete stalls stamped with gandhiji’s (mahatma gandhi’s) signature spectacles functioned more as a landmark than as a site for relief—another marker of the state working too hard, and yet somehow too little. figure 6. rajasthan state certificate of citizenship, 2019. photo by natasha raheja. figure 7. citizenship camp, bikaner, 2019. photo by natasha raheja. conclusion this article has analyzed intermittent, proximate political performance as a key site of governance that works in tandem with everyday bureaucracy. while the special events discussed above may appear as a respite from the everyday work of policymaking or bureaucracy, politicians’ visits and tours across the nation constitute forms of “the state at work” (bierschenk and olivier de sardan 2014). governing by proximity is hardly unique to india but describes a key modality of populist governance that creates “intimate publics” (berlant 2011) by mobilizing mixed affects of hope and disaffection. the bjp brings together hindutva political rhetoric and governance to lasso a hindu body politic through legislation such as the caa. at this conjuncture, the legislation of exclusionary citizenship criteria and the proliferation of documentary requirements converge with mass public rallies and events decrying the infiltration of state borders. the visual spectacles, hype, and fervor associated with the hindutva vision for indian citizenship cannot be extricated from the burdensome banalities of bureaucratic recognition and documentary proof. the wide circulation of video clips of right-wing indian cabinet ministers defending the logics of the caa on social media underscores this point. the modality of governing by proximity at such events amplifies the status of state actors as it enfolds aspirational citizen-subjects into exclusive national imaginaries. edward l. schieffelin’s (1998, 198) notion of performance as “achievement in the world” is instructive for thinking about whether a given proximal performance “is properly carried out, whether it works.” schieffelin locates the contingency of success or failure on the relationships between performers and spectators. in some ways, the citizenship camp, parliamentary study tour, and digital encounters were co-productions between officials and refugee-migrants in proximity. in these interactions, refugee-migrants participated in and evaluated the state’s “showing.” what was achieved in these state performances, and what was at risk of failing? how do the camps and tours expose the artifices of state sovereignty and recognition more broadly (bryant 2021; bobick 2017)? the events described in this article cultivated hope among refugee-migrants and bolstered the possibility of their inclusion within a hindu-india imaginary. but if the relationship between performers and spectators is an interactional one, it is also an evaluative one that exposed inconsistencies between the national hindutva project and state forms of recognition in practice. in particular, the state’s failure to recognize hindu pakistanis as indian citizens sits at odds with their conditional recognition as national subjects. proximal state performances invite scrutiny to these contradictions, especially during improvisational moments that stray from the script, showing how small-scale state performances are “fundamentally risky” (schieffelin 1998, 198). recall state officials’ leading questions about refugee-migrants’ reasons for leaving pakistan; when refugee-migrants did not provide answers that matched the narrative of religious persecution, these momentary schisms exposed taken-for-granted state narratives as effortful contrivances. in november and december 2019, in the lead-up to the indian parliament’s passing of the controversial caa, the rajasthan government hosted another series of citizenship camps at eleven districts across the state. like meera, who felt affirmed when she replayed modi’s digitally recorded welcome, many refugee-migrants continued to hope that the indian government could, and would, award them the indian citizenship to which they were entitled. at the 2019 camps, i watched as refugee-migrants pulled out worn files of carefully organized documents to show the visiting officers, clearly not for the first time. there is a fatigue that comes with deferred promises. manish and other refugee-migrant leaders in jodhpur advised people against attending the new camps, to not waste their time. they reminded others of the citizenship camps in 2014 and 2015 that had yielded few citizenship certificates. furthermore, no high-ranking officials from delhi were expected to attend. this refusal emphasizes how governing by proximity exposes the space between rhetorical and substantive recognition, even as it seeks to close the gap. shortly after india’s religion-based citizenship bill passed in parliament in january 2020, manish and other community leaders posted social media photos of glossy, vinyl posters of their faces placed next to the face of the indian home minister amit shah, welcoming him to jodhpur for a pro-caa rally.12 the persistent fatigue i observed in person and felt in these digital images laid bare the ambivalence of aspirational citizenship produced in proximity. abstract this article argues that proximity is a mode of governance that both enchants aspirational citizen-subjects and exposes ambivalent state workings. i track face-to-face and digitally mediated interactions—over eight years, from 2014 to 2022—between indian politicians and pakistani hindu migrants in the thar desert region. officials and politicians govern by proximity when their felt presence raises hopes and generates attachments with constituents within a wider body politic. when state actors govern by proximity, they evoke what is lacking by gesturing toward the possible. if proximal encounters with high-ranking politicians offered pakistani hindu migrants a glimpse into potential futures that included indian citizenship, it also reminded them that there remained an uncrossed threshold for recognition. understanding what governing by proximity is, and the work it does, helps us think anew about questions of populist governance and popular sovereignty at the borders of nation-states. [proximity; governance; populism; migration; citizenship; borders; pakistan; india] सारांश इस लेख में तर्कपूर्ण कहा गया है कि सामीप्य से शासन करना एक ऐसी प्रणाली है जो नागरिकता लेने के इच्छुक लोगों को आकर्षित भी करती है और राज्य की उभयभावी कार्य प्रकृति को भी दर्शाती है। थार रेगिस्तान के छेत्र में २०१४ से २०२२ के आठ वर्षों के शोधकार्य के दौरान, मैंने भारतीय राजनेताओं और पाकिस्तानी हिंदू प्रवासियों की व्यक्तिगत तथा डिजिटल रूप में होने वाली बातचीत का अध्यन किया है। अपनी उपस्थिति को दर्ज कराते हुए अधिकारी और राजनेता लोगों में उम्मीद जगा कर और निकटता की भावना पैदा कर के अपने राजनीतिक छेत्र में आत्मीयता द्वारा शासन करते हैं। सामीप्य द्वारा शासन की प्रणाली में उन बातों के संभव होने की उम्मीद दिलाई जाती है जिन का लोगों के जीवन में सख़्त अभाव है। पाकिस्तानी हिन्दू प्रवासियों को सुनहरे भविष्य जिसमें भारतीय नागरिकता भी शामिल होती है, की झलकियां दिखाने वाले उच्च श्रेणी के राजनेताओं के साथ जब कभी उन का आमना सामना होता है तो उन को इस तथ्य का भी आभास हो जाता है कि मान्यता पाने का उन का सपना एक सपना ही रहेगा। सामीप्य द्वारा शासन क्या है, और यह कार्य क्या करता है, इस को समझने की प्रक्रिया हम को राष्ट्र-राज्यों की सीमाओं पर लोकलुभावी शासन और संप्रभुता के लुभाव के प्रश्नों पर एक नए सिरे से विचार करने में मदद देती है। [सामीप्य, आत्मीयता; शासन; लोकलुभावनवाद; प्रवास; नागरिकता; सीमाएं; पाकिस्तान; भारत] تلخیص اس مضمون میں بحث اٹھائی گئی ہے کہ قربت کے ذریعے حکمرانی ایک ایسا طریقہ ہے جو شہریت لینے کے خواہشمند لوگوں کو مسحور بھی کرتا ہے اور ریاست کے متضاد طریقئہ کار کو بے نقاب بھی کرتا ہے۔ تھار ریگستان کے علاقے میں ۲۰۱۴ سے ۲۰۲۲ کی اپنی آٹھ سالہ تحقیق کے دوران، میں نے ہندوستانی سیاستدانوں اور پاکستانی ہندو تارکین وطن کی روبرو اور ڈیجیٹل طریقے سے ہونے والی گفتگو کا مطالعہ کیا ہے۔اپنی موجودگی کو درج کراتے ہوے افسران اور سیاستدان لوگوں میں امید جگا کر اور اپنائیت کا احساس پیدا کر کے اپنے سیاسی علاقے میں قربت کے ذریعے حکومت کرتے ہیں۔ قربت کے ذریعے حکومرانی کے عمل میں اُن باتوں کے پورا ہونے کی امید دلائی جاتی ہے جن کی لوگوں کی زندگی میں سخت کمی ہے۔پاکستانی ہندو تارکین وطن کو سنہرے مستقبل جس میں ہندوستان کی شہریت بھی شامل ہوتی ہے، کی جھلکیاں دکھانے والے اعلی درجے کے سیاستدانوں کے ساتھ جب کبھی اُن کا آمنا سامنا ہوتا ہے تو اُن کو اِس حقیقت کا بھی احساس ہو جاتا ہے کہ شناخت پانے کا اُن کا خواب ایک خواب ہی رہے گا۔قربت کے ذریعے حکومرانی کیا ہے، اور یہ کام کیا کرتی ہے، اِس کو سمجھنے کا عمل ہم کو ریاستوں کی سرحدوں پر پاپولسٹ حکومرانی اور پاپولر خودمختاری کے سوالات پر نئے سرے سے سوچنے میں مدد کرتا ہے۔ [قربت؛ حکمرانی، پاپولزم، ہجرت، شہریت، سرحدیں؛ پاکستان؛ ہندوستان] notes acknowledgments this work was formed in conversation with many people, especially the research participants among the pakistani hindu migrant population in western india. the article benefited from the engagement and feedback of sally merry, tejaswini ganti, faye ginsburg, angela zito, ritty lukose, vijayanka nair, syantani chatterjee, waqas butt, noah tamarkin, sarah lamb, moyukh chatterjee, and lucinda ramberg. the research for this article was supported by funding from the fulbright-hays program, the wenner-gren foundation, and the american institute of indian studies, and assistance from virender singh. thank you to timsal masud for his translations of the abstracts. i am grateful to the four anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions, and to cultural anthropology’s collective and editorial team, especially christopher t. nelson, kate herman, and petra dreiser for their guidance and support. 1. this phrase is commonly uttered by refugee-migrants, across castes, in reference to their migration to india. this communal use of hindustan is emblematic of manan a. asif’s (2020) thesis on the colonial loss of hindustan as a religiously plural space. some pakistani hindus also avowedly reject migration to india as a solution to their minoritization as “non-muslims” in pakistan. the indian ministry of home affairs reported about 10,000 pending citizenship applications from pakistani nationals in 202; as of november 2019, the pakistani high commissioner in delhi maintains migration of pakistani hindus to india is due to marriage reasons. 2. apart from the non-interference in internal affairs negotiated in the 1972 shimla agreement, india’s secular nationalist congress party has also supported the naturalization of hindus from pakistan, on the avowed basis of their generic minoritization. see, for example, a 2010 ministry of home affairs’ notice under congress qualifying pakistani hindus and sikhs for long-term visas: https://pib.gov.in/newsite/printrelease.aspx?relid=62479. in rajasthan, at the state government level, though migrant rehabilitation has taken different forms under each ruling party, it has had bipartisan support, shaped by the regional history of refugee displacement after the 1965 and 1971 india-pakistan wars. see sherman 2015 and zamindar 2007 on the indian immigration bureauracy’s suspicion toward muslims post-independence, and roy 2020 on how citizenship policy has defined the outsider. more specifically, see kapur 2021 on india’s special accommodation of hindus from pakistan as the ghost of partition, with the caa as one of its culminations. 3. at the request of participants, all names except for those of high-ranking public officers and politicians have been changed. 4. pakistani hindus migrate to india on short-term pilgrimage or visit visas, applying for long-term visas after arrival. 5. the refugee-migrant binary is predicated on ideas of “migrants” having choice and pursuing economic aspirations, while “refugees” supposedly do not have choice and are persecuted on the basis of group identity. in rajasthan, both terms are used for this population (along with the hindi word visthapit (displaced [people]). by referring to pakistani hindus in india as refugee-migrants, i am trying to trouble the distinction between these categories. 6. frontiers have long constituted a zone of nationalist experimentation in south asia. see longkumer 2020 on the hindutva experiment and indigenous resistance in northeast india. on the specific histories of mobility in this desert region, see kothiyal 2016. 7. migration of hindus from pakistan to india occurs cross-caste, but the majority of migrants in jodhpur hail from meghwal, bhil, and kolhi caste backgrounds, which comprise dalit, adivasi, and scheduled caste/scheduled tribe designations in india that correspond to robust political formations (xaxa 2005; pantawane 1986; rao 2009). both the congress party and the bjp have cited the naturalization of these migrants as a dalit issue, with the latter also framing it as a hindu matter (see ansari 2018; lee 2021; and natrajan 2021 on interreligious, dominant-caste hegemony and state enumeration in india). caste is an axis of inequity in pakistan (gazdar 2007), but the politics of state recognition are constructed through the language of religious majorities and minorities without a distinctive political counterculture around caste and indigeneity (asif 2020; mahmood 2022). refugee-migrants in jodhpur discussed experiences of caste discrimination, and sometimes identified as adivasi, but typically they did not self-identify as dalit. when they did, they simultaneously avowed hindu identity. dominant-caste pakistani hindu migrants (rajput, mali) often have resources and rely less on state forms of recognition to access social welfare and meet their basic needs, but they also experience stigma, disappointment, and modes of selective welcome. echoing ghassan hage (2016) on the “unequal distribution of hope,” aspiration and disaffection are inequitably distributed along class and caste lines. 8. sometimes this involved filtering out participants whose individual situations didn’t correspond to governmental scripts. in one case, a migrant family wanting to meet the secretary to request an exit permit to leave india and return to pakistan was asked to stand back and meet with a district officer another time. migrants seeking exit permits, especially in the case of expired visas, did not easily garner ngo support and faced bureaucratic challenges, including immigration officer questions such as, “if it is so bad in pakistan, why do you want to go back?” 9. tamasha, however, differs from the classist european media theory reading of spectacle as mass entertainment (inden 2014). 10. see also waghmore 2016 on dalit political humor as a form of anti-caste critique that generates hopes of egalitarian norms of democratic engagement. 11. see hindu singh sodha, “caa & pak hindu migrants: rhetoric versus realities,” south asian times, february 9, 2022 (https://thesouthasiantimes.info/caa-pak-hindu-migrants-rhetoric-versus-realities/) and vijaita singh, “800 pakistani hindus left india after failing to get citizenship, says advocacy group,” hindu, may 08, 2022 (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/800-pakistani-hindus-left-india-after-failing-to-get-citizenship-says-advocacy-group/article65394201.ece). 12. later these posters would be used as tarps for protection from rain and dirt. 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for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.09 fright and the fraying of community: medicine, borders, saudi arabia, yemen cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 198-224, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.02 fright and the fraying of community: medicine, borders, saudi arabia, yemen ashwak sam hauter university of california, santa cruz https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1605-659x figure 1. inside the main lobby of the hospital in jeddah, saudi arabia. photo by ashwak sam hauter. i spent september 2017 rounding with professor hakeem, an infectious disease attending physician who saw patients in a hospital in jeddah, saudi arabia. i met many refugees and migrants seeking treatment while on rounds with him. his notable presence reflected a recent royal decree to treat all patients with infectious disease as a public health concern. many of them felt heard by professor hakeem’s frequent supplications for their ‘afiya (psychic, physical, and spiritual well-being) and his acknowledgment of the social, political, and economic causes of their illness. they trusted his biomedical expertise.1 in interviews with my interlocutors, the patients, physicians, and medical students i worked with consistently tied questions of epistemology to expertise: the knowledge of the investigator, the cultivation of her senses, her capacity for knowledge, her openness to the unseen/subtle realm (ghayb), and her recognition of the significance and dimensions of ‘afiya. the significant exception was a patient, omar, who suffered from a case of persistent jaundice. technically classified not as a refugee but as a migrant—and thus subject to residency permit restrictions—omar inhabited a legal gray space as a yemeni in his forties who had migrated from his hometown of hodeida, a city in the tihāmah region (a coastal western province in the south of yemen). turned away when he initially sought treatment from the hospital (taraduna!, “they threw us out,” he told me), he had later been admitted through the intercession of another physician at whose building he worked as a security guard.2 since being admitted, however, he had not been receptive to treatment and his infections proliferated over the course of several weeks. the case perplexed professor hakeem. before the team left the room, omar quietly turned to him and asked: “will the treatment really work?” professor hakeem responded, as he customarily did, “we do what is within our capacity, and the rest is in god’s hands. quddamaka al-‘afiya [may ‘afiya be ahead of you].” omar said nothing in response. while omar shared with professor hakeem and other physicians in the hospital an epistemological orientation to illness as exceeding the parameters of physical well-being (sihha), in his view there remained a limit to the curative potential of the hospital. when we discussed professor hakeem’s ability to treat him in subsequent conversations, omar continually returned to the question of access and expressed strong doubt about whether it was possible for him as a yemeni migrant—denied refugee status due to post–gulf war political fallout between the two countries—to enter into social relations and exchange that he deemed necessary to restoring his well-being.3 on developing symptoms, he had in fact resisted seeking biomedical attention in saudi arabia at all, for he insisted that his soul (nafs) would break/fracture if he were to seek care but find himself rebuffed. what do soul-breaking and well-being have to do with each other, and with the limits of the hospital? this article invites us to ethically ponder omar’s fear of soul-fracture in light of the psychic parameters of ‘afiya. my interlocutors invoked the theological concept of ‘afiya to speak of patients’ passage through an illness. ‘afiya is invoked in a common supplication to god for pardon and well-being in this life and the afterlife. the prayer, “o god, i ask you for forgiveness and well-being in this world and in the hereafter [allahumma inni as’aluka l-‘afwa wal-‘afiyah fid-dunya wal-akhirah],” circulated in the space of the hospital through patients, their families, and visitors. this appeal to god to aid in the transformation of the body, soul, and psyche, as well as the necessary material, socioeconomic, and politico-theological conditions—rather than the mere removal of illness symptoms and return to physical health (sihḥa)—configures physical health not as the opposite of illness but rather just one aspect of comprehensive ‘afiya. ‘afiya entails the examination and transformation of material conditions, to be sure, which often lie beyond the mandate of biomedical treatment, but it also addresses spiritual-psychological knots, where normative frameworks of political or scientific reform that offer one or another prescription for cure fail to understand illness. anthropologists and scholars working on cases of postcolonial disorders (good et al. 2008) cite the transmission and persistence of trauma as a form of the witnessing of historical devastation and culture in agony (garcia 2010; pandolfo 2018), as well as a form of resistance (dufourmantelle 2019). sublimation is possible as a work of culture (obeyesekere 1990). much of this work examines melancholic symptoms, and although i am not inclined to diagnose him as a melancholic, omar’s enumeration of his fear and fright sparks a fanonian nightmare, though it moves us beyond the colonial agony of deculturalization. omar’s fear of soul-fracture and his wish for fortified social relations across borders, the possibility for yemen to move on from the repetitions of war, point to the potentiality of momentary, eventful reform/relief (iṣlāḥ) amid regional upheaval. his fear of the fracture of his soul and his feelings of exile, almost as a form of suspension between the two borders and a congealing of a historical wound, raise the question of a de-territorialized muslim community. in what follows, after further describing the hospital as a site of medical-religious reform, i turn to islamic and psychoanalytic theories of the soul and the self, and to the historical, sociopolitical, and economic contexts that together shape the shock and dread of soul-fracture. for omar, fear of being rejected by the physician is bound up with the broader social-political dissolution of the hospitality and exchange that yemenis once received on the arabian peninsula, recalling the recent memory of a muslim community lost in the fray. omar’s terror and fear of soul-fracture points to a limit of the practices of biomedical physicians attempting to practice an islamicized form of care in a biomedical hospital. what happens when the object of care is collective and part of a fractured social imaginary? omar’s case asks us to ponder the effects of geopolitics on the psyche and the ways in which fantasies, desire, and the imagination are inflected by personhood. fear and fright: the end of hospitality? movements between saudi arabia, yemen, and neighboring countries have long taken the western coastal city of jeddah as a nodal point of the hijaz region. jeddah is a space of commerce and a pilgrimage site, forty minutes by car from the holy city of mecca and four hours from the prophet’s mosque in medina. it is a cosmopolitan city made up of saudis of diverse ethnic backgrounds, including southern yemenis (hadramis), palestinians, syrians, turks, egyptians, eastern europeans, and moroccans. in the late twentieth century, the sociopolitical status of people from the hijaz took a downward turn, as the phrase tarsh al-bahr—“the vomit of the sea”—became commonly employed to describe migrants, tradespeople, and pilgrims who remained in saudi arabia and bought their citizenship. the impoverishment of much of southern yemen after the 1990 unification—which involved the united states’s support of the north against the so-called communist south government—and the subsequent collapse and reallocation of resources to northern yemen, forced many southern yemenis to migrate elsewhere (stookey 1982). thereafter, close to a million yemeni were expelled from saudi arabia and kuwait throughout the 1990s after president salah’s alignment with saddam hussein during the gulf war, suspending their residencies and informal travel (caton 2013, 76). current pressures to claim a collective saudi identity and discrimination against other nationals (the “saudization” of the economy) have left many of these migrant workers jobless and in exile. the yemeni traveler who once moved across the hijaz region, enjoying certain provisions under local customs of hospitality, now became repudiated as a transgressor, a migrant, and a laborer. the university hospital in jeddah is a state-of-the-art research institution in the region, offering a cancer center and the latest medical biotechnology. it aims to be at the forefront of biomedical research as well as to islamicize care. walking through the hospital, one finds qurans sitting in nurses’ stations and on patients’ bedside tables and corridors, with flat-screen tvs highlighting the hospital’s latest scientific research and achievements alongside giant posters describing the great physicians of islamic civilization, the historic hospitals muslims established, and the many inventions of muslim scientists. the two walls of that hospital corridor laid a double claim: to inherit arabic medicine, with its early scientific, experimental, clinical, and pharmacological basis; and the still crucially entwined quranic spiritual dimension, active in the space of the hospital. it was within the walls of the hospital that these histories echoed other historical reckonings in pursuit of ‘afiya. figure 2. tv screen highlighting current medical research produced within the university in the hospital hallway. photo by ashwak sam hauter. figure 3. close-up photo of posters highlighting the islamic golden age. photo by ashwak sam hauter. figure 4. posters highlighting the islamic golden age in the hospital hallway. photo by ashwak sam hauter. figure 5. supplication from quran surah taha (20: 114) on gold frame in hospital hallway. in arabic, rabbi zidni ‘ilma [my lord, increase me in knowledge]. photo by ashwak sam hauter. after rounds, i returned to omar’s room and sat across from him on a plastic chair while his cousin at his bedside looked on. i recognized his southern yemeni accent immediately, and he recognized my mix of southern and central dialects. we were two yemenis meeting in a saudi hospital, both of us away from our homes. as the only male in his family, he told me, he was expected to earn a living for his wife, mother, father, and sisters; he had crossed into saudi some five years ago, his hand forced by impoverishment (faqr).4 he described the hodeida he left as a destitute place—arid and dead. reminiscing about the time of abundance and sustenance during the reign of the later-assassinated socialist president ibrahim al-hamdi in the mid-1970s (when he was still a child), omar recounted how during al-hamdi’s presidency, people lived off their land in addition to receiving state resources, a story i often heard told by my own mother. this was a time before the 1994 civil war between the republic of north yemen (backed by the united states) and communist south yemen, and before the reallocation of resources not just from south to north but also to the partisan tribes of former yemeni president ali abdullah saleh. omar went on to note: “you know, al-hamdi was from tihāmah.” i responded: “wasn’t he from ibb?” “no, he’s from tihāmah,” was his response. “he would visit. once, my family told me, he came and gave us land to cultivate.” i recalled reading that al-hamdi hailed from ibb, but sensed that claiming hospitality as a feature (even if past) of his natal land was important for omar. noticing three cautery scars on his arm, i asked whether those were traces of attempts to cure the jaundice. omar replied, “no, these were to get rid of the fear that overwhelmed me when two saudis almost ran me over with their car while i was working as a guard of the physician’s building. i was watching the front of the building when they almost ran me over. here they will run you over as if you’re an animal. there’s no mercy.” his cousin, whom i will call nawfal, chimed in, “fear [khawf] can cause jaundice [safr].” “how did the illness start?” i inquired. omar said, “it began in the eyes, then it spread everywhere.” within saudi arabia, omar felt that he was treated like “an animal,” meaning that he was not recognized as a person that one can enter into an exchange with. he had a different experience, however, at the border: the saudi military officials at the border did enter into a form of exchange with him, and he cited their engagement, however exploitative and ambivalent, as an act of hospitality and generosity. the province of najran—originally lost to saudi arabia in the 1934 treaty of taif after a violent war, along with jazan (part of tihāmah) and asir—was reaffirmed as saudi territory in the 1990s in the context of post–gulf war and cold war proxy politics (anishchenkova 2020, 5–6). the yemenis there became saudi citizens in the process, retaining their yemeni traditions and cultures and affinity for other yemenis. omar’s family lived just below this demarcated border and his male relatives traveled informally back and forth. that the border soldiers hailed from this region likely contributed to their social exchange with omar and nawfal. although i must omit details about omar’s journey, these exchanges recognized omar’s trust, ability to reciprocate, labor power, and affinal bond without the mediation of a nation-state. like many dispossessed yemenis in the hospital, omar located yemen’s severe current problems as originating before his migration and the bombing campaign of the ten allied countries in the 2015 conflict. he recounted, the physician’s friend helped admit me to the hospital. it was a last resort. i came because of the impoverishment. do you think the money that the president [ali abdullah salah] has accumulated is his money? it is the money of the poor. the most khayr [blessings] is in yemen, but what are we going to do? do you know that we get assistance from the state every six months? what, are we supposed to starve until we receive it? we used to cultivate our land and eat from it, but ex-president ali abdullah saleh ate everything. this image of a single mouthpiece that has devoured everything repeats the image not only of faqr (poverty) of the land but also of poverty of the hosting leader, whose staggering accumulation of wealth (between 32–60 billion usd in assets according to united nations security council) contributed to the sinking of yemen’s own population into deprivation and starvation as pawns of endless proxy wars (jadallah et al. 2015). my interlocutors stressed that the failure of the national dialogue after the ousting of ali abdullah saleh resulted from a confluence of the disenfranchisement of southern yemenis, the houthi yearning for a return of the imamate (once supported by saudi arabia), the ongoing suppression of the islah party, and the concentration of wealth by northern tribes. these continued circumstances contributed to abd-rabbuh mansur hadi’s current resignation (reuters 2022). in the symbolic topography faced by omar, then, the yemeni is now seen as the close neighbor, but also as the romantic past, blockaded and entrenched within the country’s own borders. this exclusionary politics is one reason that many then re-experience yemen as the sublime of medieval arabia: untouched, pristine, and undeveloped. many westerners and even arabs flock to yemen to experience a timeless arabia, understood as the ancestral home of all arabs that has retained its premodern soul (including as expressed in its material architecture; see günel 2019).5 this intimate other is expulsed and repressed, for fear of its intrusion circulating and erupting. given this complex psycho-political topography, omar asked me about my own residency in saudi arabia as a yemeni. after explaining to him that my family migrated to the united states and that i had attempted to return to yemen to conduct my fieldwork but had needed to go to nearby countries to finish my research because of the war, he expressed sympathy for my difficulties and emphasized the richness of treatment in yemen that was out of reach for both of us. he asked me about the last time i had visited yemen, the kinds of illnesses i had seen there, and the various forms of healing therapies in tihāmah (his home region), where he had once been cured from jaundice. there, he said, “people will receive you and host you.” i shared omar’s fear of inhospitality, given my prior travels and fieldwork in the region. when war broke out in yemen in 2015, it became impossible for me to continue the fieldwork i had begun in my country of birth (hauter 2020b, 2019). over the years i had worked in two hospitals in yemen, interviewing more than fifty physicians, residents, and patients. in 2016, i instead turned my attention to yemeni migrants, refugees, and diasporic communities in amman, jordan, and jeddah, saudi arabia. working with physicians from yemen, saudi arabia, jordan, palestine, and syria across these field sites, i encountered echoes of the historical and affinal connections between these countries prior to their post–world war i consolidation as nation-states. these spaces were related not simply by their nineteenth-century social topography but also by common institutions (medical institutions included) and the magnificence of the southern yemeni hadrami diaspora, which, as engseng ho (2006) demonstrates in his historical analysis of islamic legal texts and genealogical mapping, interconnects not just across the gulf and levant but indeed across the indian ocean. given this complex topography, and the shifts in conditions of exchange, my interlocutors noted the way shifting borders and communal affinities had moved away from notions of hospitality inflected by islamic ethics and recognition of personhood. as our conversation neared its end, omar and nawfal grew silent. i was beginning to thank them for their time. attempting to assuage their fears, i encouraged omar to inquire about his treatment if he felt ambivalent. i said, “you can always ask the doctors about your treatment; they would be more than happy to explain it.” in response, and as if unrelated, omar offered a meditation on fear to explain his reasons for limiting interactions with the physicians and the hospital. he said, “there is no human being that is not subjected to fear. everyone must fear. there are limits. from the moment i entered the hospital, i began to fear. my heart cannot bear the weight.” i asked, “is there a lot of fear in hodeida [his hometown in yemen]?” omar explained: “the fear came after we crossed the borders. when you travel [tisfr], you throw yourself into a journey [taghamir or tasayir]. you should see what the border was like. there are mountains, wolves, snakes, darkness. you can’t take any baggage with you or light the way. that might get you caught. it was three days of traveling with no sleep. you have to keep moving or you will die, you have to constantly watch for animals.” according to omar, his travel (safr), literally meaning to carry off and strip away, was a journey (mughamara) across the border in a time of war. he compares the two journeys—both into the hospital and across the border—to differentiate between the two. omar points to the “existential state” involved in his journey or mughamara,6 which means to immerse and throw oneself. this journey involves a certain risk that placed his life in jeopardy. although there was something to gain with the border-crossing, there was also an uncertainty that was physically, spatially, psychically, and spiritually charged. yet when i asked omar how he could have traversed the border but feel discouraged to ask for care in the hospital, he emphasized that the thrownness of the self (or immersion) and the risks of border-crossing do not itself result in a break of the self. omar and nawfal compared the fear from being repudiated at the hospital to a form of faj’a (fright). nawfal looked at me and asked, “do you know what fright [faj’a] is?” he now distinguished another form of fear: usually this happens after sunset. you begin to feel feverish and you are overtaken by insistent and obsessing thoughts of demonic origin [waswas]. you need to come out of that state of fright, so you have someone cauterize your hand. this way you come back to yourself and can resume eating and feeling better. omar followed by stating that the longer he spent in the hospital, the more worried his mother and family in yemen would become. these fears were weighing him down. his mother had collapsed when she heard news of his hospitalization, fearing his treatment within it. he longed for treatment from a mushf’ (indigenous healer) like the one that had healed him from jaundice years ago. he also told of many saudis and saudi sheikhs who come to tihāmah in search of a cure from mushfi’n (indigenous healers) for various illnesses that physicians fail to treat. astounded by the journey these men had endured, i reflected on the difference pointed out to me by omar and nawfal between fright (faj’a) and fear (khawf)—the fear in the border-crossing, the return of that fear when the saudis tried to run omar down, how the fear congealed in omar’s jaundice, and how fright similarly alienates a person from their own thoughts and body, exposing them to the risk of madness. i noted these differences not to separate physical ailment from psychic pain, but to show their entwinement, knot, and their repetition (pandolfo 2018). although omar and nawfal had risked themselves in the perilous journey (mughamara) across the border, they had refrained from seeking medical care because of their fear of soul-fracture, which their family in yemen shared. omar’s case, i argue, points to a limit that requires historical and politico-theological reckoning. professor hakeem’s hospitality reminded refugees and migrants of local hospitality customs once enjoyed in the hijaz region. in particular, saudis in medina, najd, and mecca are understood to share qahtani and southern arabian tribal roots with some yemeni, relating to the old classification of an imagined affinal relation between so-called pure arabs (qahtan) and arabized arabs (adnan). this shared lineage was invigorated in the cultural memory by a prophetic injunction for tribes to know one another, and by the famous customs of tribal hospitality. it is with these customs in mind that physicians such as professor hakeem attempt to practice a medicine oriented to serving the well-being of the entire muslim community. given their role in state building projects (dewachi 2017; gallagher 1983), regional medical communities have been called to respond to the structural and political violence that intensified during and post arab spring uprisings and protests (hamdy and bayoumi 2016). the covid-19 pandemic only intensified this entwinement of medicine and politics. in my field sites, physicians felt implicated in these struggles, called to safeguard the well-being of the community (al-ghazzali 1966, 57). for physicians dealing with cases such as omar’s that involved migration, war, and poverty, medical reform meant to attend to the ‘afiya of the patient and to serve the community. the physicians i worked with laid claim to biomedical expertise by focusing on their relation to their patients. they considered themselves to be operating in the sphere of prognosis (drawing from prophetic traditions), as opposed to magicians who promise a definitive cure. they acknowledged the uncertainty that haunts diagnosis and prognosis and deferred to god’s all-knowing as a way to guide patients toward ‘afiya (hauter 2020c). although this hospital is attempting to reform itself, making room for traditions and islamicizing care, the limits in attending to physical health (sihha) marked its incomplete vision of islamic reform. omar, lying in his hospital bed, pointed insistently to the promise of hospitality, locating his fear of the fracture of his self/soul in the inability to enter into exchange with others. i argue in my broader research that, rather than the patient as an individual, the object of medical care in such sites of medical reform (islah) constitutes the psyche-soul-body-community nexus denoted by the concept of ‘afiya. unlike the vision of sihha (physical heath) alone, where illness must be destroyed completely, under the rubric of ‘afiya, the illness becomes a trial, the cypher of a lesson, and the symptom opens onto the experience of divine judgment. such judgment is not limited to illness and ailment—it also bears on other forms of deprivation and violence, against which ‘afiya appears as the possibility of repair. what happens if, as omar claims, the conditions of possibility for ‘afiya are nullified? the illness serves as a passage, a potential source of illumination for the ill and for those bearing witness to it, concerning their subjectivity and alienation; as a result, its treatment exceeds the restoration of physical health. for my interlocutors, including omar, ‘afiya was not the opposite (or the overcoming) of illness but a site of transformation. they insisted on the possibility of the medical clinic becoming a site of iṣlāḥ (reform) from which to attend to patients’ psychic, spiritual, and physical well-being—their ‘afiya—together, as patients began to demand it. omar’s elaboration of customs of hospitality and affinity are inflected both with southern arabian customs (affirmed by many of my interlocuters as connecting yemen and the gulf region), and instantiations of the islamic tradition and community (umma) (iqbal 2019, 2021), which is open for negotiation, affirmation, and contestation as muslims continually face new developments and challenges of their time (asad 2009; ahmed 2015). omar’s articulation of faj’a, or fright, is also rooted in a confluence of events beyond the current war: the centralization of power in yemen after unification, the solidification of borders, and the end of exchange and hospitality across borders. omar’s demands for exchange with others and for a being-in-community grounded in affinity, recognition, and hospitality across borders and beyond the nation-state point both to the inability to invoke a muslim collective or umma (iqbal 2019) and to the effects of this disintegrated collective on the self/soul (pandolfo 2018) and psyche (al-ghazālī 2010). the break of the nafs (self/soul) unlike other patients in the hospital who felt heard and recognized by professor hakeem, omar did not speak much to him apart from questioning whether his treatment would in fact succeed. he had only entered the hospital as a last resort, afraid of finding inhospitality within. speaking to this fear, nawfal chimed in: “i was hoping i could be seen for my kidney stones, but i don’t think i can ask.” when i inquired why they didn’t simply ask the attending physicians if they could run some tests because the worst they could say is no, omar responded that when one fears, one’s nafs (self/soul) becomes weak. he continued: i cannot ask. we are not used to rejection; we are not used to being told no. i would never reject someone in need. i would never say, “no!” we cannot hear that “no!” it breaks me [yaksr nafsi]. it breaks my face. besides, our visas are expired and we cannot open a file at the hospital. we have never had to migrate. but now impoverishment [faqr] has taken over the land. ‘aib taksir nafs al insan [it is unacceptable to fracture the soul of a human]. they do not fear god. yaksr nafsi: to break one’s soul/self. nafsi means “my self,” “my breath,” “my soul,” but also “my psychic or desiring state” in the context of omar’s desire to request medical care, which resonates with the theological denotation of the nafs as desire (al-ghazālī 2010). within the quran, nafs is used interchangeably as soul, self, psyche, desiring state (ibn manzur 1984, 233–240), and it is ambiguous, as it contains a driving force both toward and away from god (murata and chittick 1994). the polysemy of the nafs is examined throughout the work of arabic philosophers and physicians, impacting theories of mental health drawn from yet extending beyond greek medicine and philosophy (hauter 2020a). in a similar way, structures of the psyche in freudian and lacanian psychoanalytical theory were influenced by medieval scholasticism, romantic philosophy, and the intangibility and hiddenness of the human (bettelheim 1983, 77–78; ellenberger 1970, 236). they also have resonance with islamic medieval psychologies and theories of the soul, however divergent and asymmetrical (abu-raiya 2014; el shakry 2017). omar’s emphasis on the state of his nafs and its nexus of psyche, desire, others, and institutions comes from elaborations within the islamic ethical traditions’ discourses on the fortification of the nafs, the modulation and expression of its desires, and ascetic practices, oscillating between its necessity to thrive both in this world and acquire tranquility in the afterlife (hirschkind 2006; mahmood 2011; messick 1996; mittermaier 2019; pandolfo 2018). an apt articulation of soul-fracture is found in the magnum opus of the twelfth-century theologian abu hamid al-ghazālī, the revival of the islamic sciences. its book 22, titled disciplining the soul, delves into the state of the nafs and its internal struggles (al-ghazālī 1995). the text offers a creative synthesis of islamic exegesis, greek philosophy, and islamic medicine and serves as a manual for spiritual and ethical reform and psychic well-being. in the exposition on the true nature of good and bad character, kasr al nafs (fracture of the soul) is noted as a translation for the greatness of the soul that results from cultivating the traits of courage when tempered alongside nobility, clemency, and affection (al-ghazālī 1995, 21). excessive courage gives rise to pride, anger, conceit. the lack of courage emerging from soul-fracture yields to ignominy, self-abasement, cowardice, and being held back (al-ghazālī 1995, 21). in similar fashion, omar sees soul-fracture as the stripping of his courage, giving rise to self-abasement, indecisiveness, and cowardice. omar considered the act of refusing care (hospitality) as indecent for both guest and host. his utterance of ‘ayb, which i translated as “unacceptable” above, is not truly related to either guilt or shame (dresch 1987, 431–32). rather, ‘ayb sets into relief a faux pas, a deviation, to point to the necessary conditions for recognition, exchange, and reciprocity within community. this form of probing of one’s soul/self was often also directed at me within the hospital by both physicians and patients to ensure the maintenance of divine trust (amana) within communal exchange. being trustworthy (amin) reflects one’s tarbiyya (upbringing) and attests to character bound in piety, which omar considers as extending beyond a tribe. whenever anyone in my field sites asked me not to reject an offer or an invitation by requesting that i not break their self/soul (a refusal considered ‘ayb), they often expressed the fear of being turned down and its effect on our future exchanges. when omar and nawfal first arrived at the hospital, even though they knew the medical institution was not accessible to them as yemeni migrants, they expected to be received by a generous, kind fellow-in-community willing to enter into exchange. they would appeal to the physicians to refuse the exclusions to which migrants were subject by state policy, by upholding the muslim community norm to enter into exchange with them. omar reminded me that, unlike the physicians in the hospital, the mushfi‘in (yemeni healers) would receive and treat him, as he is mubarak (blessed) by god. as mushfi‘ (derived from the word shafi‘, meaning “double” and “intercessor”), they take up their responsibilities as instruments of the divine and receive those seeking care. in medicine of the prophet and the hospital, physicians are also considered instruments of the divine (al-jauziyah 2003, 29; hauter 2020c). in turn, omar asked of the physicians that they fear god and listen to their demand for care in an act of generosity and southern arab hospitality; that they recognize the need for iṣlāḥ; and that they orient themselves toward the preservation of the ‘afiya of the muslim community. omar’s anticipation of his request’s rejection, the anticipated refusal by the physicians to provide care, demonstrates how the appeal itself already forced the question of psychic well-being. the border delimiting muslim hospitality was already active, severing omar and nawfal from the saudi hospital. omar described their repudiation in a region marked by a shared lineage and mutual reciprocity as shattering his soul, an externality that breaks the self, repeating the end of a common history. the frightful fracturing of the soul also meant losing the ability to desire: the nafs is appetitive, it craves, requests, imagines, and receives. the nafs binds desire; it constitutes a movement to life, from this world to god. examining omar’s case also explains the way physicians focus on the clinical space as an attempt to address the psycho-spiritual dimensions of health brought out by migration and dispossession. yet the space of the clinic cannot contain the illness, as omar links his psychic well-being to ‘afiya and the shattering of social relations to his inability to desire, demand, make a request—all echoing the symptom of the fear of the fright of soul-fracture. his desire for community to request medical care locates securing his ‘afiya beyond the championing of traditional medicine or the need for recovery from his physical symptoms. topologies of fear although we might deem omar’s border-crossing more fearsome (because dangerous to his physical well-being) than the psychic pain he feared in anticipating his repudiation by saudi hosts—which he also links to the return of his jaundice—he distinguished the latter from the former. he even had a concept for this other kind of fear: fright, faj’a. this fright was tied to the dissolution of the muslim community, social relations, and the expression of desire to the other, as reflected in the loss of the physicians’ fear of god. the anxiety of soul-fracture thus results from the inability to anticipate social relations within a muslim collective no longer felt to be a community. omar and nawfal’s distinctions between fear and fright and the ways in which fear of god prevents causing fright in others resonate with typologies developed in both the islamic and psychoanalytic traditions. thus, it leads us to ask: what are the effects of fear and fright on the heart, the imagination, and the psyche? abu hamid al-ghazālī (1995) explains that fear (al-khawf) encompasses both mundane fear (of another person) and fear of god. fear of god constitutes a crucial dimension of piety, and a protection for the faithful, as everything ultimately is through god’s will and command. this fear is understood as a relation to god, god’s bounty, and the mystery of the unseen realm (al-ghayb) (bubandt, rytter, and suhr 2019). the fear of god is an alterity that deters one from transgressing the limits of the soul, while also making certain passages possible, strengthening one’s soul and its orientation to the world. the fear of god gives way to a malleability that is open to the light of god. with a view to al-ghazālī’s account from omar’s situation in the hospital, the physician’s fear of god should supersede their fear of institutional sanctions. the fear of god would lead the physician to transcend the worldly limits and the limits of the state (the institutional sanctions on non-saudis) that withhold medical care. in contrast, we might compare fright (faj’a)—the fear of fraying relationships—to what sigmund freud called the panic-fear that erupts in a collective. in group psychology, freud (1975, 36–37) argues that within a group, the sense of danger is contained by the consideration members show one another, solidified by emotional ties. an individual does not develop panic-fear when faced with a magnified sense of danger, but rather when she presupposes a “relaxation in the libidinal structure of the group,” which shatters social relations (freud 1975, 36). whereas freud alludes to the relationship between individual desire and group identity, psychic and communal well-being, omar and nawfal spell out concretely the way an articulation of desire depends on anticipating a community member’s willingness to receive such a demand. crucially, it is not that omar asked for medical care and was rejected, a rejection that would then generate a psychic pain; rather, the pain was his anticipation of refusal, making it impossible for him to engage with others in community, because that exchange would break his soul. the panic-fear that breaks the nafs/soul presupposes the end of hospitality and the replacement of membership within the muslim community by national-state identity. that is what nawfal likens to fright, a traumatic response that overwhelms the soul. according to freud (1920, 11), fright is distinguished from fear and anxiety by the absence of an object: “fear requires a definite object of which to be afraid. fright, however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the element of surprise.” anxiety, on the other hand, freud tells us, protects against fright. according to nawfal, faj’a is a sudden intrusion and infliction of distress, and it decreases a person’s appetite. this conception points to a relationship between the body, the soul, and the imagination, one that resonates with an older tradition of islamic psychology. in the psychology of the soul, ibn sīnā (rahman 1952), the eleventh-century author of the canon of medicine, links different states of fear (khawf) directly to the work of the imagination. fear is both intuited by an internal sense, the estimative faculty, and by an imbalance of the humors, meaning that it is received directly by the soul, and as a result weakens the soul and leads it to lose its grasp on the imagination (53–54). in the canon of medicine, jaundice results from an excess of yellow bile, leading to an imbalance of the humors that weaken the soul (ibn sīnā 1973, 176, 275, 287, 351–52). a balanced body is important insofar as it strengthens the soul and allows it to put the imagination to work, a necessary faculty for the life of the soul (ibn sīnā and rahman 1952, 31–35; mcginnis 2010, 115, 124). a weak soul can be co-opted by fear and diverted from attending to the body’s appetite and bodily desires and intellection; a soul attending to fear takes the imaginative faculty astray and gives it free rein to impose illusionary images and overpower the senses (davidson 1992, 118). both in the case of jaundice and fear, then, the soul is captured by these images, described by nawfal as demonic insinuations (waswas). fear is felt not only at the corporeal level but at the psychic one as well. this psychic pain, for ibn sīnā, led the mad and the fearful to be captured by these images, as if they were reality itself: to lose a grasp of one’s self/soul. omar and nawfal’s inability to request medical care indicates an anxiety toward soul-fracture and the exposure of inhospitality, an anxiety that paradoxically protects them. omar and nawfal liken that exposure to fright, linking psychic pain to the imagination, the body, and the group, as i have briefly traced with reference to al-ghazālī, ibn sīnā, and freud. these overlapping theories prove instructive in two ways: they allow us to follow the complex relations between fear, anxiety, fright, and panic-fear that omar and nawfal weave together; and they illuminate complex theories of the self/soul. whereas freud’s theory of the self involves the body, the psyche, and the group, al-ghazālī and ibn sīnā offer us a different typology involving the body, the heart, and the soul. together, these variant accounts of psychic well-being speak to the polysemy of the soul and its ‘afiya. the fear of this form of grief is felt throughout the region and north africa. in knot of the soul, stefania pandolfo poses the question through her ethnographic engagement with a moroccan quranic therapist, who addresses the despair and grief felt in morocco due in part to exclusion and dispossession. in conversation with pandolfo (2018, 237), the therapist elaborates on the movement of “constriction and expansion of the soul.” he demarcates a function of the soul’s potentiality, and its affective and existential states in relation to theological visions, from what he dubs “soul choking” (diq al-nafs), distinguishing the pain impressed on the soul to transform inclinations and desires from the pain “internalized as a wound” and “incorporated as despair” (pandolfo 2018, 326). some moroccan youth who appear in pandolfo’s (2018, 114–16) ethnography migrate to spain to avoid the wound that comes from such incorporation of despair. whereas soul choking and a knotted soul involve being mu‘aqqad (knotted) with one’s memories (real and imaginal), a potential opening for a spiritual struggle but also a potential internalizing of a wound, and being at risk of madness, the fracture of the soul (kasr al nafs) marks the turning of the irascible faculty inward, leading to self-abasement and laying the groundwork for the incapacity to desire in soul choking. omar and nawfal had more fear navigating the medical institution across the border than making their mountainous journey because requesting such medical care would implicate them as participants in the dissolution of the muslim community. this latter prospect led them to contend with a more painful reality: the end of hospitality, the evaporation of the fear of god, the relinquishing of collective obligations. fear of god, fear of death, fear of the border-crossing; fright at exposure, abandonment, and repudiation. these limits point to a set of relations and ethical commitments that omar finds necessary to curb the potentiality of soul-fracture in exchange with another, ones informed by the islamic tradition and ideals of the umma (iqbal 2019). although my research notes moments of tending to ‘afiya within the hospital, it also marks the latter’s limits: despite physicians’ efforts to reform the space of the hospital to secure ‘afiya (both of the individual and the community), omar’s case and the obstinacy of his symptoms bore witness to a more pressing form of pain. this does not suggest that similar forms of fear or fright did not exist in yemen or a yemeni hospital, as nawfal, too, compared the fear of soul-fracture to a potential form of madness and trauma that would exceed borders. yet omar attested that even saudis sought healing in yemen, recognizing its grammar of kinship and ethico-politico-spiritual hospitality. indeed, much scholarship on yemen notes how discourses of generosity inform deeds accrued to gain honor and status, as well as practices with moral and political implications that unify and divide (caton 1990; meneley 2016). i would add that practices of hospitality also bear on the soul/self and desire, and so ought to be considered, as i begin to do here, from the vantage of the psyche. whereas fright in yemen has been studied within a particular community, its etiology was reduced to an emotion, irony, and socio-moral frameworks (meneley 2003). my own experiences in past fieldwork and family trips to yemen parallels omar’s theorization of the fear of fracture of the self. whenever a family member, friend, or neighbor was observed to shift in character, withdraw, and disengage—which they describe as being “caught imaginally,” as anne meneley (2003, 28) also noted—people often traced it back to fright. the therapy in my family’s community was to suddenly splash someone with cold water or cauterize them—a shock countered by shock. yet within my field sites, many of my interlocutors’ fears of madness stemming from fright were elaborated on in conjunction with theories of the self and its relation to structures of the psyche, god, individuals, and society. many of the discourses used in our conversations spanned centuries across theological schools, islamic philosophies, kalam, quran, hadith, and contemporary psychology. many of my interlocutors would bluntly stress to me that the vast range of our conversations had to do with our shared traditions. much anthropological work on yemen explores hospitality, exchange, reciprocity, and the continuity of legal traditions. it delves into the securing of social and political spheres, protection, favor, honor, mobility, and ethical and moral subjectivities (caton 2005; dresch 2012; meneley 2003; messick 1996) through various contested and strained practices (shryock 2019). tracing omar’s weaving of hospitality, fear of god, and ‘ayb with the obligations toward sustaining desires in community leads us to situate hospitality practices—with their material, spiritual, and psychic implications—within the larger islamic community, tradition, and sciences. as shown in brinkley messick’s (1996, 2018) rich historical-anthropological work, a culture of orality and the development of islamic legal practices, interpretations, and authorship persist in yemen. therefore, my attempt to draw on al-ghazālī, ibn sīnā, and others throughout my work invokes the on-going cosmopolitan archive and exchange of ideas and concepts very much alive in lay people’s discourses, frameworks, and theorizations. i aim to understand both authoritative islamic practices and the theories of the psyche, soul, and body that inform them and their local and historical realities on the ground (asad, 2009; hirschkind, 2006; iqbal 2019; mahmood 2011; messick 1996; mittermaier 2012; pandolfo 2018; suhr 2019). as i follow omar through our dialogue and the elaboration within this written text, these traces lead us to a knotting of sociopolitical and ethical formations (as omar implicates others in practices of hospitality across what we might view as national or ethnic boundaries), their psychic imprints, and the fortitude of the nafs (soul/self). omar’s wariness of fracturing his soul did not directly interpolate “the tribe” or “arab identity,” but it opened up a field of the nafs that weaved in and out of southern arabian hospitality customs, theories of the imagination, the body, and the psyche, and islamic theological reckoning. these are necessary to decolonize and reimagine western and eastern canons by tracing the flow of discourses in and out of them. figure 6. patients’ waiting room in the hospital. photo by ashwak sam hauter. the recurring wound in the weeks i followed omar, he did not recover. he explained that even professor hakeem was incapable of facilitating his well-being. omar continued: remember when he first came and said, “we will do some tests to determine what is causing your other infections,” i told him, “doctor, there are things you don’t have the cure for.” and he just said, “bi-idhn illah [with the permission of god] we will try; and the rest is up to god.” when i got up to leave and supplicate for his recovery, omar said to me: “recovery is in the hands of god. i can also try to go to yemen and have the mushfi‘in heal me.” omar invoked god, but his inattention to professor hakeem’s own invocation of god presented for me another puzzle. even though omar affirmed, as professor hakeem had also done, that the cure was ultimately divine, his prolonged stay in the hospital further solidified for him the failure of biomedicine and professor hakeem’s inability to register, or hear, his symptoms. pandolfo (2018) traces similar cases in knot of the soul through the lives of her interlocutors suffering from pain internalized as a wound and melancholia—a condensation of a historical condition, but nonetheless a symptomatic and visionary one. omar’s fear of the wound of soul-fracture is tied to his feeling suspended between two borders (the affliction of the war and the deprivation in yemen) and the abjection of the contemporary figure of the yemeni. as his jaundice recurs and other infections proliferate, it becomes clear that the obstinacy of omar’s symptoms, and his insistent demand for healing, lie beyond the question of the simple elimination of the disease. but what would it mean for omar’s fear of the wound to be heard in the space of the hospital? and in the land not of yemen, but of the “neighbor”? reflecting on jacques lacan’s (2013) reading of the parable of saint martin in the ethics of psychoanalysis, i suggest that omar’s demand for the cure parallels the case of a beggar in the cold of winter who asks saint martin for clothes, to which the saint obliges by giving him his own cloak. lacan observes that saint martin misunderstands the beggar’s demand and his own inability to satiate that desire. according to lacan (2013, 186–87), saint martin could neither meet that demand nor reject it. he could only make space for the beggar to search for his desire beyond the immediate need for warmth, which exceeds what any person could give. unlike saint martin, professor hakeem did not try to satiate or fulfill a demand for an immediate need, for he located the cure in god’s hands. omar also did not demand alleviation of his physical ailments. in posing the question to professor hakeem of whether the treatment would work, omar demanded a redress. what remains, then, is to ask: how could space been made for omar to search for his desire? although omar does not believe his desire for ‘afiya will be addressed within the walls of the hospital, since even asking for treatment deepens his sense of loss, he does locate the promise of cure among yemeni healers (mushfi‘in). beyond the border, and almost as a dream-image, the mushfi‘in allude to a space of potential hospitality and a refuge from the poisonous image, the stereotype of the yemeni omar inhabited in saudi arabia. omar cannot metabolize that stereotype, for its shattering of social relations produces a discord within his soul. omar’s caution against soul-fracture resists offering himself to the historical agony, the physician, the ethnographer, and the readers. i began this article by referring to my broader argument that the object of care in such medical spaces is ‘afiya rather than an individual’s physical health. scholars writing on postcolonial disorders amid war, dispossession, and state partitions have reflected on the wound’s descent into the everyday (das 2006), embeddedness within social relations (dewachi 2015), and the knotting of one’s soul and drive for life and death (pandolfo 2018). more importantly, tracing the wound (as omar has) leads us to consider how play, fantasy, and imagination are necessary for transcending emotional and psychic chaos and panic, and for the continuity of life—whether understood as “self-realization of the individual or activity of the social and political commonwealth” (abraham and torok 1994, 12, 113). thus the healing of the patient, the reformation (iṣlāḥ) of the nexus of ‘afiya, requires more than even the recognition of spiritual healing and biomedical relief, but envisioning community. what i discovered in the hospital and the clinics resonates with what franz fanon saw in the psychiatric clinics during the french colonization of algeria and the algerian war. writing on fanon’s later clinical cases, azeen khan (2019, 187) notes: in fanon’s work, the clinic thus first emerges as an oversaturated because overdetermined vantage from which to understand how an experience of uprootedness—fermentation at the base—seeps into the bodies of colonized subjects. this experience of uprootedness, of being one of the uncountable, manifests as tics, nightmares, mysterious headaches, and bodily ailments, all of which begin to indicate to fanon an unassimilated history of colonial violence that is registered as affective and psychosomatic residue. from within the clinic, fanon witnessed “the effects of juridical and structural processes of alienation,” (khan 2019, 184) where the “arab, permanently an alien in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalization” (fanon 1969, 53). psychiatry, which attempts to treat patients to resolve their estrangement, failed to reintegrate treated patients back into a colonial society that produced the conditions of their madness and pathologies. building on fanon’s witnessing of the failure of the psychiatric hospital and the effects of colonial violence on culture, omar’s identification of the effects of the dissolution of hospitality and the anticipated dissolution of the muslim community traces a long historical dispossession. the practices of hospitality and social exchange and the institutional building and management of everyday life had all shifted away from conditions that allowed for the cultivation of the soul through fear of god as a means of promoting communal ‘afiya. omar had announced that to fear is to be human, but his anxiety, his dread at the prospect of repudiation, left him to wonder whether he could be healed in the saudi hospital. could he engage in a therapeutic and ethical relationship with an other who had refused the obligation to enter into that exchange? the geographical border of yemen and saudi arabia precipitates the dissolution of hospitality, a wounding that preceded the trauma of border-crossing. in my conversations with omar, fear and terror congealed in his living with the projected image of the yemeni as a backward, irrational migrant, beggar, and refugee, intensified by the haunting image of president saleh devouring the land and the conditions of dwelling in a land choked by blockades and the 2015 conflict. given these conditions and the attempts to reintegrate the psycho-spiritual dimensions of health and its islamic past within the hospital, what does it mean to reclaim the possibility of attending to ‘afiya within the hospital? if we listen to omar’s symptom as not simply an illness but as a protest against the conditions that make ‘afiya impossible, what type of physical, psychic, and spiritual transformations to borders does this protest demand? hearing omar leads us to understand that attending to ‘afiya requires more than the hospital can afford, even in its reclaiming of the islamic golden age displayed on the entrance posters. omar’s case illuminates that the way social relations are formed does not correspond to the way they are evaluated across nationality, class, ethnicity, sex, and race. if people’s evaluations depended on genealogy, piety, their soul, and their everyday ethical dealings, these criteria would not reflect the bureaucratic markers of biomedical institutions. more importantly, psychic well-being is integral to social, economic, racial, political, and theologico-political justice. whereas muslims are urged to have commitments across borders, politically, they have experienced many obstacles to bridging geopolitical differences, leading to the fear of a community lost in the fray. an attention to the effects of geopolitics on the psyche prompts an understanding of the psycho-spiritual dimension of illness necessary to secure individual and collective ‘afiya. omar’s protest demands the conditions to reimagine community. abstract this article addresses the psycho-spiritual intersection of geopolitics and medicine in the borderlands between yemen and saudi arabia, at the margins of war. set in a saudi arabian hospital in jeddah, it examines patients’ demand for and physicians’ attempt to secure ‘afiya (psychic, physical, and spiritual well-being) amid regional upheaval and the limits of islamicized biomedical care. i reflect on the case of a yemeni migrant/refugee hospitalized in saudi arabia for a persistent jaundice, omar, who speaks of his looming fear that his self/soul would “break” if his request for biomedical care were to be rejected, and who longs to be in the care of a yemeni indigenous healer. strangely, then, his fright at the break of the soul/self exceeds the fear he felt crossing a desert military border on foot. drawing on theories of the soul/self and the psyche, i explore how soul-fracture becomes a figure of postcolonial and wartime affliction, congealing in its evocation the end of neighborly hospitality, the fraying of community, and the breaking of a shared lineage: the abject yemeni, exiled from their own region and the broader muslim community. [yemen; soul; borders; psychic pain; hospital; medicine; geopolitics; umma] notes acknowledgments i am grateful that this article found a home at cultural anthropology. its editors and peer reviewers truly guided the voicing of its complex and vital story. the conceptual and theoretical framings of the text before us emerged from my hiwarat (dialogic exchanges) with my interlocutors, for which i express my utmost gratitude. i benefited from presenting an early version of this piece at the environmental racisms conference at harvard university through the generous invitation of ruth goldstein. i am grateful to the discussions of multiple drafts by stefania pandolfo, basit kareem iqbal, ian whitmarsh, rosa norton, lawrence cohen, and aaron eldridge. readings and discussions by charles hirschkind, brinkley messick, sherine hamdy, sherene seikaly, ian steele, patricia kubala, brent eng, fernando castrillon, jenna grant, radhika govindrajan, mohamad jarada, candace lukasik, and william f. stafford were critical in its progression. i am also indebted to discussions of this piece by our nomad writing group, james battle, sandra harvey, and victoria massie. developmental edits by hallie wells polished this piece. later revisions benefited from a close and transformative reading by rosa marietta norton. a special thank-you to my husband, asim alam, for providing a key word for the title and our many discussions on the umma. the field research was supported through the generous funding of the national science foundation, the american institute for yemeni studies, the uc berkeley center for middle east studies, the uc berkeley center for the study of religion, and the institute for international studies at uc berkeley. 1. throughout my three field sites—hospitals and clinics in yemen, jordan, and saudi arabia—patients demanded a kind of care that holistically attended to ‘afiya. this is not simply looking for an islamicized form of medical care or islamic medicine, but care’s transformation of their material, spiritual, socioeconomic, and political conditions. as shown by sherine hamdy’s (2012) extensive work in egypt on islam, medicine, and bioethics, such a complex relationship to biomedical treatments among muslims does not simply result from a crisis in medical discourse. 2. the word tarad literally translates to “be driven or pushed away,” but it also has the connotation of exile, repudiation, and banishment. 3. prior to the gulf war, yemenis were not required to possess residency status to move in and out of saudi arabia or to benefit from public resources. citizens of the gulf cooperation council (gcc; bahrain, kuwait, qatar, saudi arabia, united arab emirates) are permitted to move within the gcc for tourism and business travel. 4. when i asked him why he did not ask his employer, the physician, to sponsor him for a residency permit, we discussed the complex politics of the sponsorship program. it entailed paying dues that would gravely impact his ability to send remittances to yemen; he would not be able to afford the program. tahrib, the word he used for his travels, colloquially means “smuggling” or “trafficking,” but it connotes escape, flight, or being set free (ali 2017). 5. until the 1960s, the north of yemen was in fact closed off from the world, as the ruling zaidi imam refused to build roads and infrastructure after world war i to impede colonial forces after the withdrawal of the ottomans from sana‘a. it also worked to keep the british from moving beyond the south of yemen, as they assumed control over aden as a protectorate. 6. this is resonant with the mughamara of the burners crossing the mediterranean from morocco. see pandolfo 2018. references abraham, nicolas, and maria torok 1994 the shell and the kernel: renewals of psychoanalysis. edited and translated by nicholas t. rand. chicago: university of chicago press. ahmed, shahab 2015 what is islam? the importance of being islamic. princeton, n.j.: princeton 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requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.02 sympathetic care cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 14-22, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.03 sympathetic care lauren cubellis washington university in st. louis https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8355-7490 seven trainees sit in a circle, while the voices of the other groups ricochet around the vast space of the aged meeting hall as they find their practice rooms. gradually, doors close, the noise settles. the group sets up a role-play exercise: there are two moderators, patrick and elke, and two members of the reflecting team, sara and hanna. the remaining three—otto, marthe, and anne—take on the roles of family members. otto volunteers to be “the person of concern”: drawing on his experience working with a client in the hospital clinic, he will become that client, and create additional familial roles based on real people for marthe and anne. to begin, otto describes himself as the client, whom he decides to call daniel. i am twenty years old, i have a problem with alcohol. i lost my brother, he was twenty-one and i was seventeen when it happened. i learned how to drink from him. now i am using pain medication, drinking alcohol, and smoking cannabis. i am working as a janitor; my professional training has been put on hold. (otto as daniel) erich, their trainer, instructs otto to give the other family members their roles. the others listen to his descriptions of their relationships to daniel; otto tells them who they are and what kind of relationships exist, drawing on his memory of daniel’s family constellation from their clinical encounter. stand up behind her, put your hands on her shoulders. speak to her, not to us, this makes the connection to the role deeper. (erich as trainer to otto as daniel) you are my mother, you are very sad. your first child is dead, and now you worry about your second son, who has been in the hospital. i still live with you, as well as with my girlfriend. you are very accepting, overbearing at times. my father is a mystery. (otto as daniel to marthe as mother) you are my girlfriend, paulina. we have been a couple for one and a half years. you are critical of my alcohol use, and this makes me drink more. when i drink you won’t talk to me, and you leave. you are nervous when i am drunk, but you always come back. you love me. my mother gets it, you have a good relationship with my mother. (otto as daniel to anne as paulina) daniel is presently an out-patient client, but he has spent time on the in-patient unit. in the context of the role play, patrick, elke, sara, and hanna act as if they are clinicians coming into daniel’s mother’s home, and they introduce themselves to each of the family members, shaking hands, making eye contact, exchanging names. they take their seats. erich reminds them of the fundamental principle they have been working with for months now: “repeating key words can make space for stories that are not yet told. single words, which may be mentioned only briefly, but which feel important, can give access to deeper experiences in the past. often it is enough to just repeat a single word.” then daniel, as moderator, begins . . . * * * this role-play exercise forms part of the training for open dialogue, a treatment model for psychiatric crisis that aims to keep people out of the hospital and connect them to their social and familial networks as co-participants in that process (olson, seikkula, and zeidonis 2014). it refrains from using diagnostic categories and traditional psychiatric language, aiming to reduce hierarchies of expertise and the preemptive authority of clinical accounting. to learn open dialogue, trainees (who are often already trained as psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, or social workers) are asked to take on the roles of clients and their family members, and to find their way to a particular kind of listening: one that backgrounds clinical authority and the impulse to care through recommendation and crisis resolution. trainees are urged not to listen for symptoms, or with the goal of interpretation or diagnosis. instead, they are taught to create space for silences, allowing for moments into which previously unheard stories of the family network might emerge, provoked by the careful repetition of single words. this account of the trainees i worked with at a german psychiatric clinic offers an exploration of the affective anxiety that characterizes this learning process, and the means by which imagined relationships between absent clients generate a reconfiguration of the clinical self (hacking 1986). this self is responsible not for repairing relationships, but rather for interrupting the potential misalignment of relationships though the use of sympathetic care: a practice of discernment attuned to subtle shifts in resonant experience and the co-construction of shared meanings. clinical characterizations of care often describe the desire to help, to better, to improve, or to correct (tronto 1994; stone 2000; buch 2013). this commonsense approach to caring hopes to alleviate suffering (kleinman 2010) and, in the case of acute psychiatric distress, to offer an interpretation of chaotic events and possibilities for resolution (luhrmann 2001; hejtmanek 2015). contrary to common clinical practice, the caring self cultivated to do the work of open dialogue is rather subtle; it requires an intense kind of presence, yet it does not always need to speak, and can seem, at times, almost like doing nothing at all. it demands the persistent attention annemarie mol (2008) describes in her “logic of care,” but it refrains from the interventionist attitude that accompanies her notion of “tinkering.” it aims to create a space apart from the future-oriented promises that typically infuse biomedical approaches with reparative aims (jain and kaufman 2011) and, instead, offers sympathetic care. sympathy in this case does not mean pity or the benevolent recognition of suffering, but rather an attention to the co-construction of present moments and an embodied attunement to the experiences of others (bergson 2001). sympathetic care works by discerning through contemplation the nodes of the social network that might be therapeutically shifted: “sympathy as the motor of excavation allows the movement to be felt, opens experience to the complexities of its own unfolding” (manning 2016, 50). sympathetic care asks clinicians to attend to the density of intersubjective relationships, as well as to the affects that emerge in response to the disturbance and recalibration of those relationships through processes of fracture and resonance. learning to tolerate sympathetic care does not come easily for this professional group; to let go of well-honed clinical authority and attune themselves to a kind of resonant listening can prove profoundly uncomfortable, and novices often project their discomfort onto the imagined clients and families. they ask questions like, “but what do we do when the family wants an answer?” acknowledging that the expectation of clinical authority does not just emanate unidirectionally from clinicians but is also something families have learned to expect in clinical encounters. clients often come to open dialogue not knowing what to anticipate; it is still considered a marginal approach, and families may never have heard of it before it is offered to them. often, open dialogue is offered to clients and families who have tried everything else (medication, hospital stays, systemic therapy, rehabilitative programs) and find themselves at their wits’ end. the open dialogue training asks clinicians to share this state of unknowing with clients, directly acknowledging rather than obscuring the fact that clinical intervention can often seem futile (brodwin 2011). the clinical team is taught to believe that the family possesses its own solutions; its members just need moderators to help them identify misalignments. in the role-play exercise, trainees assume the identities of real people, but apart from the setup, they make those roles their own over a ninety-minute improvisation that parallels the ninety-minute structure of an actual network meeting. the clients they impersonate are not actively present in the room (nor have they explicitly consented to being referenced in this context) when the trainees work to imagine new ways to listen to them. ethically, trainers see the use of real clients as permissible, given the use of pseudonyms and that the relations they act out are not meant to replicate the dynamics of the family. but beginning with an actual network gives the exercise a more palpable reality than a completely fictional premise, and the preparation is designed to make this role feel real. thus erich’s instruction at the beginning of the scene to touch the other person, and speak to her as a family member, creating an embodied sensibility that attunes to family history without requiring the clinicians to actually share one. as a result, the therapeutic referent slips between those experiences that clinicians imagine as belonging to the client and the personal experiences by which they can possibly imagine a similar situation (hollan 2008). before going into this particular role play, for example, otto (playing the person of concern) told me that he was utterly terrified: “you never know what’s going to happen in the role play,” he explained, laughing nervously and fidgeting with his hands, “but this is good, because this is the same feeling that happens when you work with the client, and which you have to imagine is happening for the client and his family as well.” by speaking as the already-absent client, what the trainees are actually working on is a reconstitution of the professional self as an active listener. they look for familial cues, for the traces of a family history in what is technically an ahistorical situation, and struggle for an understanding of therapeutic effort that is more sympathetic than corrective to those traces. * * * i am very worried about my son. his brother died in the clinic. (“mother”) i am afraid, as your partner, that alcohol is more important than i am. (“paulina” to “daniel”) i wish that he would find a job. (“mother” to the group) i have a job, i know it’s not great, but it’s a job. i have to get up early, which means i drink less. you wish i had more hobbies, that this would help, but i disagree, i am already belastet [fraught, burdened, stressed, strained, weighed down]. (“daniel” to “mother”) belastet? (elke as moderator repeats “daniel’s” last word back to him) i miss my brother. he was my best friend. it’s been three years now since he died. (“daniel” to elke/group) i believe that daniel is always drinking because he is sad, because his brother died. (“paulina” to group) elke, as moderator, moves to interject, offering a suggestion. erich stops her, “don’t interpret, don’t try to clarify for them, you must do less.” elke is quiet, and paulina speaks again. there is no room to be sad, you drink and you don’t notice how sad you are. (“paulina” to “daniel”) * * * when elke pauses and says to “daniel,” “belastet?” she returns his word to him wrapped in a new frequency, with an unfamiliar vibration for him to feel. he listens to it and can uncover something not yet said in response: “i miss my brother. he was my best friend.” by echoing the word in this way, elke prompts the network, including “daniel,” to reconsider what it means to be belastet—to listen to the living sibling’s drinking differently, and to contemplate that missing his brother exists at the same time as do concerns about his relationship and his job. drinking is not only something that limits his professional prospects, or matters more to him than “paulina,” or worries his “mother.” it can and might be all of these things, and yet it is also the way that “daniel” actively misses his brother. because elke has repeated belastet, a moment emerges for the group to consider what this word means to each of them, and that there are different understandings and histories of being belastet that each of them carries. this is the group’s first full-length role-play exercise. they have practiced constitutive moments in briefer exercises, but their performance here is far from perfect. in fits and starts they struggle to hold silence; they remember not to interpret a statement a split-second after having offered an interpretation; they miss what erich identifies later as additional key words that could have been repeated back. the emphasis on the single word becomes complicated here: the word can trace past experience and has the potential to presence unheard stories; at the same time, trainees are taught that the word is protean, that there is no single referent. the repeated word acts as a trace of the life it has led for the individual who utters it, and repeating it—shifting the register from something internally produced to something externally received—changes the tenor of the word in a way that can shift the arrangement of the group’s component parts. signaling the simultaneously shared and divergent meanings of belastet reveals anew that language is always relational. the fresh exposure of this fact is understood as therapeutic, in that it can open the path for new relational configurations. the repetition of the word in this case acts as a minor gesture. erin manning writes: the minor gesture emerges from within the field itself: it is a gesture that leads the field of experience to make felt the fissures and openings otherwise too imperceptible or backgrounded to ascertain. a minor gesture is a gesture that tweaks the experiential to make its qualitative operations felt, a gesture that opens experiences to its limits. (manning 2016, 83) according to manning, the minor gesture activates, and in this context, it surfaces the different meanings belastet has for each of the participants, the multiple ways that burdens and stress have made themselves felt in their own lives. until belastet is repeated, and the change in resonance, from speaking to listening, is felt, “paulina” and “daniel’s mother” may not have realized that the younger brother’s burdens differed from their own, or their own conceptions of his. words come with their worlds: they bring with them every instantiation, circulation, and communication that has come before and carry these into the present. words have lives: “the life of the word is contained in its transfer from one mouth to another, from one context to another context, from one social collective to another, from one generation to another generation. in this process the word does not forget its own path and cannot completely free itself from the power of these concrete contexts into which it has entered” (bakhtin 1984, 202). whose word is belastet? does it belong to otto or to “daniel”? does it matter? the word resonates across the muddled relationship between caregiver and receiver in the role play and informs the way otto will listen to a client in the future. elke encounters her own history of the word by being quiet, by correcting the impulse to offer an explanation. the focus on words reveals that no singular narrative exists by which clinicians, clients, or families can make sense of crisis, and the vulnerability of infusing the role play with trainees’ own experiences is an embodied lesson in rendering clinical assessment less certain. they are learning not to offer any kind of positivist interpretation, but to interrupt perceived misalignments, and to see that only by diving into this misalignment the family can reconfigure itself. but the clinicians are not doing the reparative work themselves; they are only sympathetic to it. what initially seems like not caring is newly understood as a kind of humble accompaniment: “contemplation is passive only in the sense that this attention provokes a waiting, a stilling, a listening, a sympathy-with. this sympathy is enveloped in the process, sympathetic to the ineffable share of experience emboldened by the minor gesture, attuned to the fragile arc of time” (manning 2016, 62). to embrace what is offered as therapeutically valuable in this approach demands that trainees learn to sit with the affective tension of process, and with the slow excavation of familial traces. lispeth lipari (2014, 102) recommends a type of listening “understood as a kind of dwelling place from which we offer our hospitality to others.” this mode of listening being “interrupts our habitual conceptual systems” and invites us to “step outside the quotidian order of things. invested wholly in the present moment, it opens a space of being in which we may hear things not otherwise audible: the absent, the broken, and the radically strange” (lipari 2014, 103). in like manner, open dialogue also “refuse[s] to control or master,” exerting only a “light hold” on the conversation (lipari 2014, 103), and so, over the course of their year-long training, repositioning the clinical authority that trainees are slowly divested of. to let go of the need to fix the family, to ameliorate the crisis, or to provide a return to normalcy constitutes a very different kind of care, one less about intervening to repair and more about tolerating the discomfort that forms part of not knowing how a crisis will resolve. the trainees learn to care about daniel and his family by taking on their roles with each other and feeling their own lived experience of disorientation through improvisation within them. care becomes less about working with daniel’s family per se and more about developing an embodied practice by which they can trace the history of a social fabric by discerning meaningful words. sympathetic care, then, is not about anything positivist; it is an embodied awareness of the polyphonic attachment to affective tension, and the contemplative excavation, refraction, and realignment of divergent understandings. abstract german clinicians working with psychiatric crises employ an alternative therapy called open dialogue to excavate the family histories and interpersonal relationships of their clients. in learning to do this, they perform role-play exercises in which familial narratives are imagined and improvised. through this process, they develop an embodied practice in which they attune to misalignments in the network through words. [care; dialogism; psychiatric crisis] references bakhtin, mikhail 1984 problems of dostoevsky’s poetics. edited and translated by caryl emerson. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bergson, henri 2001 time and free will: an essay on the immediate data of consciousness. translated by f. l. pogson. new york: dover. brodwin, paul 2011 “futility in the practice of community psychiatry.” medical anthropology quarterly 25, no. 2: 189–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01149.x. buch, elana d. 2013 “senses of care: embodying inequality and sustaining personhood in the home care of older adults in chicago.” american ethnologist 40, no. 4: 637–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12044. hacking, ian 1986 “making up people.” in reconstructing individualism: autonomy, individuality, and the self in western thought, edited by thomas c. heller, morton sosna, and david e. wellbery, 222–36. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. hejtmanek, katie rose 2015 friendship, love, and hip hop: an ethnography of african american men in psychiatric custody. london: palgrave macmillan. hollan, douglas 2008 “being there: on the imaginative aspects of understanding others and being understood.” ethos 36, no. 4: 475–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2008.00028.x. jain, s. lochlann, and sharon r. kaufman 2011 “introduction to special issue: after progress: time and improbable futures in clinical spaces.” medical anthropology quarterly 25, no. 2: 183–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1387.2011.01148.x. kleinman, arthur 2010 “caregiving: the divided meaning of being human and the divided self of the caregiver.” in rethinking the human, edited by j. michelle molina and donald k. swearer, 16–27. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. lipari, lispeth 2014 listening, thinking, being: toward an ethics of attunement. university park: university of pennsylvania press. luhrmann, tanya m. 2001 of two minds: an anthropologist looks at american psychiatry. new york: vintage books. manning, erin 2016 the minor gesture. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mol, annemarie 2008 the logic of care: health and the problem of patient choice. new york: routledge. olson, mary, jaakko seikkula, and douglas zeidonis 2014 the key elements of dialogic practice in open dialogue. worcester, mass.: university of massachusetts medical school. stone, deborah 2000 “caring by the book.” in care work: gender, labor and the welfare state, edited by madonna harrington meyer, 89–111. new york: routledge. tronto, joan c. 1994 moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. london: routledge. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 1, pp. 14-22, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.1.03 cultural anthropology: head in the stars, feet on the ground: scale and astronomy initiatives in southern africa 571 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 571-596, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.01 head in the stars, feet on the ground: scale and astronomy initiatives in southern africa hanna nieber max planck institute for social anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3192-5327 davide chinigò university of bologna https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6683-6615 “we sometimes have our heads in the stars, but we really do need to have our feet firmly planted on the ground.” this is how vanessa comments on the challenge of being an astronomer in south africa during a podcast interview.1 vanessa’s voice is calm; she listens to the questions, considers them carefully, and gives responses that clearly show that she has been thinking a lot about what it means to be a white astronomer in south africa. while the topics shift between astrophysical research and local conditions for doing this research, her sense of responsibility permeates the entire podcast conversation. vanessa combines astronomy’s preoccupation with the immense vastness of outer space and the socioeconomic conditions of people on the surface of our planet. the excitement that astronomy elicits, she contends, should be tailored to “improv[e] people’s lives in some way . . . , because at the end of the day, we are in a country where we are facing these challenges of poverty and unemployment.” about 700 kilometers northeast of cape town, in the semi-arid south african karoo, i, davide, find myself standing before a large billboard that welcomes visitors to the small town of carnarvon, proudly declaring it as the “home of the 572square kilometre array,” or the “ska in africa” (figure 1). the sign stands as a symbol of transformation, capturing the shift of the surrounding rugged landscape into a hub of astronomical discovery—a shift that geared up in 2012 when south africa won the international bid to host the majority of the ska project, set to become the world’s largest radio telescope. the billboard sparks my imagination, offering a glimpse into the blend of local history and global scientific ambition. it weaves together the story of this marginalized region with a mission to explore the cosmos. though my focus is on the ska’s intricate narrative, this billboard, even as a simple surface, hints at the interplay between the karoo’s past and the expansive possibilities of space exploration. another 2,850 kilometers northeast of carnarvon, close to antananarivo, madagascar, i, hanna, listen to professor charles who is jangling a set of keys. we stand at a decommissioned telecommunication facility earmarked for conversion into a radio telescope that proved decisive for madagascar becoming an ska “african partner country.” however, conversion has not yet begun, and possibly never will. unhappy with the uncertainties of such conversion, the malagasy minister of scientific research gave way to turn the facilities into a hospital, which would forestall the conversion plans. angry about such negligence of science’s value, professor charles pulled a lot of strings, made numerous phone calls, and mobilized his influential networks, to avert the hospital plans and maintain the possibility of turning the dish into a telescope—the jangle of the keys in his hands indicates his success. the thread connecting these three stories is how research on outer space entangles scales of human social life and knowledge-making. the cosmic dynamics in outer space’s vastness and terrestrial conditions on earth appear to be set apart, and “scale” is the concept used to mark this difference. how do outer space and earth inform each other and what keeps them ontologically and epistemologically different? tracing how vanessa, davide’s encounter with the billboard, and professor charles relate outer space to specific grounds, we argue, requires us to treat scale both as an analytical category for ontological difference and as a socially produced practice. the first approach treats scale as a fixed measure of differences between ontologically stable objects, while the second sees it as a flexible tool for understanding variations in quantity, size, or complexity. recent social science literature has emphasized this second aspect, contending that scale research is principally epistemological, not ontological (neumann 2009), and that research needs to attend to “scalar practices of social actors,” not to scale itself as an analytical category (moore 2008, 212). critiquing 573perspectives that regard scale as fixed in space and time, recent studies have thus emphasized scale as a “process rather than product” (carr and lempert 2016), and “emergent rather than eternal” (hecht 2018). as objects circulate, they “make or break relations” and are thereby “adding to or subtracting reality from worlds and worths . . . , scaling them up or down” (jensen 2023, 255; emphasis in original). scales may become stabilized through sociopolitical hierarchies, or within the discursive and material apparatuses of modernity and economic structures of global capitalism, something that does not happen automatically but requires work (tsing 2012). scales are operationalized in techno-optimistic modes of governance (avle et al. 2020) and thereby affect epistemology and representation (de landa 2000); scaling up is a key feature of modernity (tsing 2012); scales carry ideological value: the bigger the better (irvine 2016). such social theory on scale helps scrutinize socioeconomic activities and proves crucial in understanding situated sociomaterial practices of astrophysicists in africa. whether framing scale as “process,” “emergence,” or “result of work,” these theories help complicate our experiences of scale as stable without turning them into indisputable ontological facts. while emphasizing that the social construction of scale is important to capture relationships among multiple scales and the politics of nesting scalar units, we contend that astronomers like vanessa do not only produce scale as they relate outer space to earth but require scale to mark the ontological difference between that which is “outer space” and that which is terrestrial “ground” for the undertaking of science.2 we take our cue from zachary horton (2021, 11) who contends that scales are characterized by “ontological difference that is independent of experience,” and, simultaneously, they are also “epistemological milieu-building tools for us to isolate, order, represent, and group knowledge objects that we can measure with instruments.” outer space, the domain that describes the spatial configuration of maximally large scales, is both socially constructed—our understanding of it is heavily influenced by cultural narratives, scientific frameworks, and political agendas—and void of human experience: our knowledge of it is mediated through technology, like telescopes, satellites, or space missions. thus, scale, scaling, and scalarity are crucial concepts in the anthropology of outer space. peter redfield (2000) and sean mitchell (2017) have shown how differently scalable issues create tensions at rocket launching sites. lisa messeri (2016; 2017) investigated how the scales of outer space are mediated and made commensurable, giving analog astronauts the capacity to collapse the difference between earth and places in outer space. valerie olson (2018) 574scrutinized how design concepts scale the notion of “home” from earth into the solar system and beyond and evoke sensibilities of scalarity. with outer space, scale’s characterization of “ontological difference” proves as important as its epistemological function to order knowledge objects. in this article we will show how these two dimensions of scale—as analytical category describing ontological difference and social practice attending to epistemological configurations, both of which are relevant to define astrophysical activities in africa, become entangled. tracing “scale effects” (clark 2012) of astrophysics in africa, we show how scales matter and articulate the social production of difference in the world. such scalar difference, we find, always refers to the grounds where scalar practices take place. in what follows we explore the concept of scale through three moves. first, we examine how astrophysics explores vast, unknown scales, relying on stabilized orders of magnitude that create opportunities for difference but risk falling into ontological essentialism. vanessa’s perspective reminds us to balance “the heads in the stars” with “the feet on the ground.” second, we focus on the billboard in carnarvon and the grounds of the ska’s core site, questioning how large-scale observations of the universe relate to the physical ground where these observations occur, within the logic of array telescopes. this move considers the impact of the ska on south africa’s historically significant grounds and its role in shaping international and african relations, highlighting scaling as a practice rooted in history. third, we look at madagascar’s unfinished radio astronomy infrastructure, where people are laying the groundwork for future opportunities. here, grounds become both the foundation and limit of scalability. taken together, these three moves configure scale as ontological and epistemological category, both of which stand in irreducible relation to ground. methodologically, we view scales as relations (strathern 2004; see also howitt 1998), and our collaboration reflects a scalar relation between our two field sites in south africa and madagascar, as well as between the scales each of us is most comfortable exploring—something neither of us could achieve alone. marilyn strathern (2004, 75, 108) argues that anthropologists must create scales to enable comparison without assuming a complete, all-encompassing view. in our fieldwork analysis, we see scale not only as a “category of practice” to be explored, but also as a “category of analysis” (hecht 2018, referring to carr and lempert’s “pragmatics of scale” [2016]), where our positionality proves crucial in defining the network of scalar relations that we aim to describe. adapting vanessa’s perspective, we focus on the ambitious future of the ska while remaining grounded in the histories and potential futures of our field sites. 575 ontological essentialism vanessa’s research has taken her away far beyond earth, past the solar system and the milky way, to study the small magellanic cloud.3 talking about her research, she is full of contagious excitement. her eyes are sparkling and her voice lures listeners into the “out there.” she is particularly fascinated by binary stars, focusing on their role in star formation and the physics under extreme gravity, temperature, and magnetic fields—a subject that has defined much of her astrophysical career. with ease that attests to her professional experience, she explains how her work combines evolving mathematical and computational models with established methods like photometry and spectroscopy to understand stellar dynamics at these vast scales. advanced telescopes and cutting-edge technology expand human capacity to explore and comprehend such enormous cosmic distances. magnifying observations on larger cosmic scales is tantamount to peering into the past, effectively scaling back in time. for instance, the image of an object situated 200,000 light years away—such is the approximate distance of the small magellanic cloud from earth—serves as a snapshot frozen in time, representing the state of that object 200,000 years ago. when the “head” is “in the stars,” the scales of outer space can easily become all-consuming and leave little room for anything else. for most of the astrophysical discourse, the dynamics at these large scales are disconnected from what is happening on earth; even more so when the galaxy of interest is different in type from the milky way. yet the possibilities of having the “head in the stars,” of doing astrophysical research, are historically situated and bound to national science policies. the podcast that invited vanessa proudly highlights the achievements of astrophysicists in south africa and across africa.4 each episode features a guest who not only explains their research or projects in accessible terms but also shares their personal stories and motivations. for vanessa, this invitation offers a chance to reflect on the history of astronomy in south africa, its present opportunities, and the effort required to realize its potential—emphasizing what it truly means to keep “the feet on the ground” as an astrophysicist. as a scientific discipline, astronomy in south africa began to take shape in the colonial period, when the british established the royal observatory in 1820 at the cape. the historian saul dubow (2019) contends that astronomy was the first scientific discipline to root itself institutionally in the country, serving important ideological and material purposes for the colonial project. astronomical facilities served as a platform for european scientists to conduct observations, 576using science’s practical applications—such as navigation and timekeeping—to justify the colonial project’s civilizing mission. the apartheid years marked an attempt by the white minority government to institutionalize astronomy as a national endeavor, especially during the period of south africa’s international isolation during the 1980s. however, collaborations with britain and the united states were not completely discontinued and remained under the surface (dubow 2019). with the end of apartheid in 1994, a shift occurred as the african national congress (anc) government sought to redefine the role of astronomy, rebranding it into a new force of transformation—one example of the new political elite’s continental and global ambitions. these post-apartheid principles were first made clear in the 1996 white paper on science and technology, the key document outlining the country’s investment strategy in science and technology, in which the scientific endeavor is freighted with important cultural, social, and developmental values (republic of south africa 1996, 16). with the presidency of thabo mbeki from 1999 to 2008, astronomy and other key natural sciences assumed a specific value in relation to discussions of the african renaissance, a line of political thought inspired by pan-africanism and humanism in the heyday of decolonization, in which the progressive force of science was identified as the baseline through which african countries could finally break away from the legacy of colonialism, repositioning the continent as the cradle of human civilization (see mavimbela 1998). precisely in this historical moment, south africa made its first steps toward joining international discussions about the ska telescope project. the preparations for the ska marked the culmination of a political discourse in which astronomy assumed a specific value in breaking away from the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, despite its clear colonial roots. situated in south africa, vanessa has always connected her interest in astrophysics to a striving for understanding earth. in a blog post, she contends: “for me the night sky has always evoked two distinct feelings: curiosity about what’s in our universe, and a sense of complete insignificance at being a tiny speck of organic matter on a tiny planet orbiting a bog-standard star in a rather run-of-the-mill galaxy.”5 the pivotal moment in vanessa’s career occurred when she realized her desire to contribute to education and societal development by leveraging her skills as an astronomer. this move allows her to connect the awe that outer space inspires with possibilities to act on earth and not succumb to a sense of insignificance. with excitement, she fosters collaborations with the academic, science communication, and amateur communities to establish best practices for astronomy-based development work. 577in the podcast, vanessa connects her work as an astronomer to several nested scales of social life. she links her passion for researching the universe to her location at the south african astronomical observatory, the city of cape town, the country of south africa, and the continent of africa. from the observatory, she situates current astronomical activities within south africa’s scientific history. in cape town, she fosters connections between research institutions. within south africa, she emphasizes the role of citizens in addressing socioeconomic issues. across africa, she proudly supports the growth of the continent’s astronomy community. vanessa uses these different scales to highlight or downplay specific narratives, “jumping scales” to focus on issues relevant to each context. zachary horton (2017, 52, 54), in analyzing the book cosmic view, which comprises a series of drawings, “each to a different scale and containing a miniature version of the one before,” speaks of “material limitations of resolution and the discontinuity between scales” that the reader creates “virtual connections” between. he furthermore says that “certain details are available to us at each scale that by necessity disappear at most other scales. . . . we cannot change scales without losing as much as we gain” (horton 2017, 54–55). this appears similar to strathern’s (2004, xxi, xv) observation that the capacity to differentiate stays the same irrespective of the scales employed, and that “scale switching not only creates a multiplier effect, it also creates information ‘loss.’” thus, the “complexity” of academic writing “keeps its own scale” (strathern 2004, 108), “every level of complexity replicates itself in scale of detail” (strathern 2004, xvi). resolution (horton) and capacity to differentiate (strathern) both serve to describe the ever-partial character of any scale. by jumping scales, vanessa makes use of this partiality, tapping into the scales that help her raise awareness for certain issues knowing that she cannot cover all of these issues by staying on any one of these scales. when vanessa speaks about the “feet on the ground,” she evokes all these scales and their potentials for jumping between them in meaningful ways. these scales are embodied, traversed by human histories, politically contested, and constituted through power relations. when, in the podcast, vanessa prompts her fellow astronomers in (south) africa to connect the “head in the stars” with the “feet on the ground,” she does not subsume the scales of “the stars” into her engagement with the feet’s “ground.” in fact, she maintains them as markedly different scalar registers. deploying scale in the work of astrophysics differs from using scale to show the multifaceted significance of development work on the ground. 578describing this with horton (2021, 11), the scales of the stars mark “ontological difference that is independent of experience.” the use of stabilized orders of magnitude enables scientists to categorize, compare, locate, and characterize astronomical objects consistently, expanding their ability to interpret new and unexpected phenomena. in the work of astrophysicists, scale marks the possibility of difference in the moment it is emptied of human history and experience. we call this feature ontological essentialism, which describes how scientists deploy outer space as an analytical category independent of the human experience of space and time. vanessa urges astronomers not to forget their “feet on the ground” while keeping their “head in the stars,” encouraging a form of scalar thinking that involves both “ontological essentialism” and an “epistemological tool.” a key point is that, unlike many astronomers who scale up from earth to the cosmos, she places “the stars” and “the ground” side by side, without treating them as a simple hierarchy. by shifting from a purely scientific career to a role as a development practitioner, vanessa embodies the balance she advocates for within the african astrophysics community: the idea that the “head in the stars” and “feet on the ground” are inseparable. she implies that staying grounded proves essential to reaching for the stars. in what follows, we will focus on particular grounds of astrophysics in south africa. grounding outer space in the south african karoo terrestrial radio telescopes are built to look beyond the earth’s surface. for us, the ground is the planet’s crust—manifesting as landmasses, continents, and islands—and gravity pulls us toward it. ground provides stability; it shapes our ways of knowing (jue 2020), anchors research, and fosters a “surface bias” (bebbington and bury 2013). it shapes the objects we study (fortun 2017), even though we need scalar practices to recognize stars as “figures.” ground-breaking research must discover new grounds, discard old ones, and explore what lies beyond the familiar. this process requires “breaking,” disrupting, and opening up old grounds to create space for new insights to emerge. the more than nine-hour drive from cape town into the northern interior of south africa, through the semi-arid karoo, provided me, davide, with a tangible sense of this landscape. eventually, i arrived in carnarvon, a small town near the core site of the square kilometre array (ska). standing on a dusty road leading into town, i encountered a large billboard, previously mentioned 579in the introduction (figure 1). the billboard features the iconic semi-arid karoo landscape, dotted with numerous satellite dishes. above them, the milky way shines brightly in the starry sky, symbolizing the connection between the local landscape and our galaxy’s center—a view uniquely visible from the southern hemisphere. figure 1. billboard in carnarvon. photo by davide chinigò. in the foreground of the billboard, a detailed image of a satellite dish points toward the night sky, emphasizing the area’s link to the universe. closer still, a meerkat—a native rodent and the namesake of the karoo array telescope (meerkat), inaugurated in 2018—stands watchfully. the name meerkat also cleverly references the afrikaans word meer, meaning “more,” alluding to the expansion from the original seven karoo array telescope (kat 7) dishes of the 2000s to the ambitious plans for additional dishes across south africa and beyond. the depiction on the billboard stirred my imagination, illustrating a future where the landscape is filled with countless satellite dishes. my attention was drawn to the meerkat, whose gaze seems to reach beyond the frame. is it searching for a new home as this area becomes home to these technological structures? the meerkat serves as an anthropomorphic symbol, yet it lacks specific markers of identity such as gender, class, or race. it subtly redefines the human subject in relation to science and technology, reflecting the expansive scale that astronomy 580introduces when considering the vastness of the universe. the billboard suggests how the introduction of a telescope transforms the landscape, connecting it to broader cosmic scales while diminishing the everyday social dimensions of human life. the billboard serves as a significant illustration of ontological essentialism, highlighting how outer-space research holds the potential for difference while stripping the ground of human history and experience. despite transporting our (human) imagination into outer space, radio telescopes themselves operate on the terrestrial ground. their locations are significant: because the southern hemisphere sky has not been very well explored and studied, the ska’s location south of the equator promises new insights; its situatedness in africa fills the gap of the global east-west spread of telescopes, which provides a solution for earth’s rotation. furthermore, radio telescopes are increasingly set up in arrays, making them more sensitive to radio sources and thus able to look deeper into space. when a cosmic wave meets these dishes, the data captured by each dish shows a particular phase of the wave. using the exact location of the dishes and high-precision clocks, the phase differences can be measured and properties of the wave deduced. in effect, the dishes of an array act as if they were a single dish with a diameter equal to the distance between the dishes. thus the further apart the dishes, the better the spatial resolution. with approximately 200 dishes located at carefully chosen distances at the core site in the karoo, and additional dishes spread across the african continent, the ska is planned as an extremely powerful and sensitive telescope. the terrestrial grounds where telescopes are erected are neither neutral, nor empty. notably, the thirty meter telescope project on mauna kea in hawaii elicited a lot of resistance (miller 2016; prescod-weinstein 2021; maile 2021). scientists searching for ideal conditions on top of the mountain on the island, with clear skies and little atmospheric pollution, met protests by local indigenous communities, who saw their sacred space desecrated. similarly, in chile, uncertainties around legal land issues in times of political instability interrupted the construction of a telescope in the atacama desert (lehuedé 2022; hoeppe 2012). such conflicts reveal how, on the ground, the imaginary of science’s universal value reaches its limits, where the risk of ontological essentialism is greatest. the installation of the ska in south africa proved no exception. meerkat national park gesturing toward carnarvon’s new connections to the scales of outer space, the billboard obscures what the karoo’s involvement in scientists’ scalar 581practices means for its population. i sit across from louise, an elderly resident of carnarvon who has a long history of political grassroots activism and who takes pride in voicing the concerns of carnarvon’s inhabitants. she is well respected for her initiatives, and when i met her, some months after my encounter with the billboard, her hands-on mentality caught my attention. she explained to me how in the beginning, when project managers of the ska first arrived in carnarvon and made their plans public to the local population, she was a big fan of the project. like many others, she expected a rejuvenation of the local economy. finally, she thought, the karoo’s remoteness does not equate with marginalization, but with a future driven by science. some background is needed to understand louise’s hopes. carnarvon, located in what historian nigel penn (2005) calls south africa’s “forgotten frontier,” marked the first encounter between european settlers and the semi-nomadic khoisan societies in the late 1600s. today, the majority of its population, like louise, are classified as “coloureds” under apartheid-era racial categories. the legacy of segregation remains evident both in the spatial organization of the town and the local economy. the economic elite consists of a few white afrikaner families who own large-scale commercial sheep farms and dominate the local economy. carnarvon’s marginality persists, reflecting broader regional decline. this marginality manifests differently across groups. for white farmers, diminishing profitability in sheep farming and debates about land reform contribute to a sense of insecurity. for coloureds, unemployment constitutes a major issue, as modern agriculture relies less on farmworkers, leading many to depend on state social grants. migration is often not an option, further deepening people’s sense of marginality. this situation is exacerbated by high levels of drug and alcohol use, rooted in the apartheid legacy and ongoing political neglect from broader national priorities. louise was among the leading figures protesting against the implementation of the group areas act in carnarvon, a key piece of apartheid legislation designed to enforce systematic racial segregation. louise recounts a pivotal moment in the mid-1980s when the government attempted to demolish de bult, a neighborhood classified as coloured under apartheid law. the community resisted. protests swelled in the streets, voices rising in defiance. “we would not let them erase us,” louisa says, her voice firm. the resistance bore fruit—after a ruling by the provincial court in kimberley, the demolition was abandoned. when democracy dawned in the early 1990s, residents were finally granted title deeds to their homes, a long-overdue recognition of their right to belong. 582for louise, this victory marked just one chapter in the long history of what she calls carnarvon’s “cosmopolitan spirit,” a defiant openness shaped by struggle and endurance. she carried this spirit forward into south africa’s first democratic government, serving as a member of the provincial parliament under nelson mandela. the end of apartheid, she reflects, was not just a political shift—it was the long-awaited chance for the coloured majority to reclaim agency over their own future. when the plans for the ska telescope were formalized in the mid-2000s, louise felt something stir—a sense that history was turning again. “i thought, the time to harvest the sacrifices of my generation had finally come,” she says. the ska was more than a scientific endeavor; it was a promise, a chance to invert carnarvon’s long history of marginalization. expectations soared—of economic rejuvenation, of newfound pride in hosting a world-class research facility. for louise, the telescope’s massive dish antennas, reaching skyward, symbolized something profound: the possibility of rewriting the past, of finally seeing a future beyond the scars of apartheid. louise displays scale both as an analytical category and as an epistemological tool. as she envisions the opportunities that the astronomy project brings to carnarvon, she does so from within a history of persistent political and economic marginalization. scale, in this sense, delineates the ontological gap between past constraints and future aspirations—it marks the difference in expectations for a better future, while simultaneously serving as a means to construct that future. the astronomy project, then, becomes more than just an economic or scientific initiative; it is an instrument for bridging this scalar divide, a way to project carnarvon beyond its historical marginality and toward a reimagined, more inclusive trajectory. this optimism peaked in october 2012, when then president jacob zuma celebrated south africa’s successful bid to host the ska. the former minister of science and technology naledi pandor commented that the ska is a game-changer for africa, bringing about a science renaissance across the continent . . . , giving effect to our dream that africa must become a global science and technology destination and that cutting-edge science will be done in africa by african scientists. . . . the ska has put carnarvon on the world map! let’s continue using it to make south africans proud and to inspire young people about a future in science and technology.6 583yet the reality of implementing the ska has faced challenges, particularly the need to reduce radio noise from everyday devices like mobile phones, wi-fi, and petrol cars. to protect radio astronomy, south africa introduced the astronomy geographic advantage (aga) act in 2007 (republic of south africa 2007), granting powers to limit activities that generate radio frequency interference in the northern cape. this led to the creation of the karoo central astronomy advantage areas (kcaaas), an “astronomy reserve” with progressively stricter regulations over 100,000 square kilometers (chinigò 2019). as these restrictions have potentially relevant impacts on everyday life, many residents, including louise, began to question whether the ska would deliver on its promise to transform the region. significantly, to secure land for constructing the core infrastructure, ska south africa initiated a program of compulsory land acquisition between 2016 and 2017, resulting in the purchase of more than thirty commercial sheep farms, covering about 130,000 hectares. in 2021, this core area was designated as a “special nature reserve” under the management of south african national parks and was renamed meerkat national park. as a result, this area has effectively become a conservation zone, closed to all individuals not involved in scientific research. the initial excitement surrounding these initiatives has been frustrated by a lack of trust between project management and local communities, as well as by a fear of future restrictions. this erosion of trust worried people like louise, whose hopes had once been high. she might still look at the billboard that welcomes her to the “home of the ska in africa,” but now she sees the area she considers home as one full of constraints. the restrictions associated with the telescopes’ operations—like those on certain technologies that emit radio waves—have altered daily life, making it feel less like the place she once knew. though louise is thankful that the small town of carnarvon remains exempt from many of these restrictions, she cannot ignore the broader changes in the region. promises of the ska for a brighter future in carnarvon now seem distant, overshadowed by tensions between local needs and scientific goals. yet louise remains undeterred. with a conspiratorial smile, she shares plans with the local church to turn the shared frustration of carnarvon’s residents into a political movement. after all, their generation knows how to mobilize and protest. the arrival of astronomy in carnarvon has made visible the complex dynamics between scientific progress and the region’s marginalized communities, revealing both the colonial and postcolonial legacies that continue to shape its impact.584 figure 2. map of south africa depicting the karoo central astronomy advantage areas. map produced by © cosmopolitan karoo. this is not to ignore that the south african radio astronomy observatory (sarao), the organization in charge of project management, has actively tried to mitigate and reframe some of these tensions. the organization employs people who, similar to vanessa, care for “the feet on the ground” and has established a stakeholder management office in carnarvon. they brought residents in touch with development initiatives, most notably a bursary program in stem-related fields for students. although the international ska website initially stated that the telescope site was in the “karoo desert,” thus reverberating with colonial imaginaries of africa’s emptiness, the project managers have learned to discursively attune to the concerns of local residents. phil diamond, the director of the international ska, put it like this in a speech at the official construction start of ska phase 1 in june 2021: “we’re working with local and indigenous communities. we recognize that we are guests on their land and we will be having various programs to work with the local communities and ensure that they benefit as much as possible from the contracts that will be let.” at different scales, efforts to facilitate groundbreaking research on outer space reveal aspects of the complex politics and history of the karoo’s grounds. the karoo ground both enables and limits the potential for difference introduced by astronomical research. reversing its long history of marginalization makes for a complex, large-scale effort that the ska initiative alone is unlikely 585to accomplish. in this context, the region’s marginalization resurfaces alongside the astronomy infrastructure, underscoring the inherent limits of socially produced scale on the ground. international and african grounds before we travel from carnarvon to madagascar—and to understand why this journey makes sense—we need to first jump scales, explore the dynamics at a larger level, and then return. as gabrielle hecht (2018) puts it, we need to board “interscalar vehicles.” for this journey, we ground ourselves by focusing on the map of the international consortium of countries involved in the ska project—another graphic representation produced by the ska, closely connected to the narrative on the billboard. one way to view the map, as emphasized by ska project managers, is that the ska represents a historic moment where africa takes a leading role in producing astrophysical knowledge. with this project, south africa becomes a new center for the universalizing pursuit of science, contributing significantly to astronomy and creating economic spillovers for the south african economy. yet the map also highlights ongoing power dynamics rooted in colonial histories between africa and europe. the global headquarters of the project remain in the united kingdom—a former colonial power—and european countries provide much of the funding, influencing access to telescope time and data. the absence of the united states and russia, but the inclusion of china and india reflect shifting global power structures. we board the interscalar vehicle again and, zooming in on the continental aspects of the project, we realize that south africa is the only full member from africa in the ska consortium. botswana, ghana, kenya, madagascar, mauritius, mozambique, namibia, and zambia are “partner countries,” slated to host additional infrastructure in phase 2, but without direct involvement in scientific production or budget commitments. some scientists question the feasibility of phase 2 because of technical and sociopolitical challenges, but intra-african collaborations are emerging through the ska africa/sarao organization. south africa supports these partner countries with training, regulatory advice, and institutional capacity-building, reinforcing its leadership and claims of exceptionalism in africa. the map shows how astrophysics’ large-scale research objects intersect with the physical infrastructure and governance required on earth. the ska’s research interests attract global scientific communities, funded and managed by 586various nations, reflecting geopolitical dynamics. for south africa to strengthen its position, the “african partner countries” prove crucial, offering potential to scale the infrastructure beyond national borders to a continental level. yet the map also marks these partner countries as different, suggesting they do not operate on the same level as other members. while preparations for phase 2 integrate these countries into the broader ska vision, the actual implementation remains uncertain, leaving their full participation in question. essentially, the partner countries provide their grounds for the ska’s celestial research, but the decision to include them is made at a different, more global scale. figure 3. participating countries in the ska organization with “african partner countries” marked in beige. image created by square kilometer array organization. the limits to scalability: madagascar’s insular grounds in time in madagascar’s case, it was not a vision of emptiness that put it on the ska map, but rather an existing satellite communication dish near arivonimamo. the idea of converting this dish into a training telescope—similar to a refurbished one in ghana, another “african partner country”—initially made madagascar’s connection to outer space research seem feasible. yet the instability of malagasy political support and the realization from ghana’s experience that such conversions prove costly and inefficient led the ska to withdraw its support for the arivonimamo project. despite losing interest in the arivonimamo dish, the ska continues to see value in madagascar as a partner, envisioning a new dish at a designated astronomical reserve, modeled after south africa’s karoo reserve. the focus has shifted to finding an ideal, radio-quiet location with negotiable land-use contracts. for 587the ska consortium, madagascar’s inclusion forms part of a broader vision of modernity, scaling up beyond national borders to meet the demands of large-scale outer space research. madagascar fits the political and geographic criteria to support an expanded african ska. while professor charles backs the search for a new location, he remains committed to preserving the potential of the arivonimamo site. his dedication suggests a vision of scalability that values the existing ground beyond just its modern scientific utility. when professor charles and i, hanna, arrived in arivonimamo, madagascar, we first had a proper look at the dish, the reason for madagascar becoming a ska “african partner country” and, related to this, the reason for this place being interesting to us. this former telecommunication dish is currently leased to the malagasy ministry for scientific research, because it has the potential to be converted into an astrophysical telescope. professor charles, an astronomy enthusiast and science education professor, was appointed to oversee this actualization, but due to a lack of funding, waning support from the ska, and unstable political conditions, no conversion has happened so far—and maybe never will. although currently not used, the dish’s sturdy metalwork and impressive size tells a story of grandeur. built in 1972, the site once connected madagascar to global events, embodying some of the aspirations of the newly independent state. after inspecting 588the dish, professor charles unlocked the building from which the dish was operated. i was thankful for the chance to step inside, as he had fought to retrieve the keys. the entrance opened into a reception area with two doors, left and right. he first unlocked the left door, saying, “now comes the interesting part for you,” as he swung it open. figure 4. on the way to the dish in arivonimamo. photo by hanna nieber. this wing housed the control center for the dish, the place where professor charles envisions future astrophysical observations taking place. everything was left as it had been in 2005, when the dish stopped being used for telecommunications—dusty desks, an outdated computer, stacks of paper, landline phones, file cabinets, and switchboards. further inside, another room contained more switchboards and space for computers, along with a view of the dish itself. professor charles confirmed my guess that this room controlled the dish’s movements. though the ceiling had started to collapse in one corner, it was easy to imagine this place as a busy workspace. professor charles then moved to the door on the right, leading to a hallway with several rooms. he checked each room to see how far the hospital-repurposing had progressed and was relieved that, aside from signs indicating potential hospital functions, little had changed. he explained that these rooms could house scientists conducting short-term observations. as we moved through the rooms, he took note of the building’s overall condition—inspecting the ceiling, floors, and windows. the building’s two wings reflect competing visions for these grounds, each tied to different scales of influence. one wing hints at the potential to connect with outer space, as it houses the control center where the dish’s movements might be monitored and directed. the other wing serves as a reminder of national politics, reflecting the state’s interest in repurposing the space as a hospital. this contrast highlights a tension between the visionary possibility of engaging with the cosmos and the pragmatic demands of national governance. while the universe’s larger scales may seem irrelevant to national politics, practical considerations of the state affect the site’s potential for space observation. for professor charles, the difference between the aims of outer-space science and those of the state becomes a struggle—one symbolized by his efforts to retrieve the keys from the ministry to keep the grounds open to the possibility of space exploration. by pulling strings to secure the keys, professor charles preserves the facility’s uncertain future and its potential for space exploration. he acknowledges that hospitals can be built almost anywhere and supports investment in health 589care. however, while outer space surrounds earth, the ability to conduct astrophysical research depends on specific sites, not just any location. the grounds in arivonimamo already possess more infrastructure, legal agreements, and personal investment than any other place in madagascar. the sturdy metalwork from the old telecommunication dish holds the potential to connect with the vast scales of space—if its future remains open. without this indeterminacy, such a future cannot happen. professor charles actively seeks opportunities, political backing, and donor interest to convert the facilities into a telescope. yet the effort to retain the keys reflects the ongoing challenge of safeguarding this possibility. figure 5. keys in professor charles’ hands. photo by hanna nieber. professor charles is not the only one who cares about these grounds and their potential for a connection to outer space. after madagascar had become an “african partner country” and thus part of the african very long baseline interferometry network (avn), preparations for astrophysics education took shape immediately, and since 2014 the university of antananarivo offers an astrophysics master’s program. in the meantime, two astronomy clubs have emerged, catering to many more astronomy enthusiasts committed to sharing their knowledge and passion with even more people; they walk malagasy grounds and spread excitement about knowledge that concerns the unimaginably vast scales of the universe. through their continuous promotion of converting the dish at arivonimamo, professor charles, astrophysics students and graduates, and a growing number of club members have turned the dish into a symbol of hope for the future of radio astronomy in madagascar. a documentary on women in science in africa featuring one of madagascar’s first professional astrophysicists (2019, see 590figure 6) and a 2023 film about the “mystery of arivonimamo” (see figure 7) have further cemented the dish’s iconic status, engaging broader audiences in the vision of madagascar’s potential in radio astronomy. as an iconic symbol, the dish does not yet provide a scientifically useful connection to outer space, but it embodies hopes for such a future. these hopes are partly tied to the potential conversion of the arivonimamo dish, and also to the possibility of building a new radio telescope elsewhere in madagascar. this vision has inspired many to learn about astronomy, creating a community eager to engage in astrophysical research. a growing number of people hold a vision of gathering data from the stars while their feet remain firmly grounded on malagasy soil. when vanessa emphasizes the need to stay grounded, she assumes the possibility for a disconnect between “the stars” and “the ground.” in madagascar, the uncertain prospects for a new radio telescope keep local astronomers mindful of their reality and thereby constantly reminded of their feet on the ground. as a symbol and a static presence, the arivonimamo dish blends aspirations for space research with the challenges of state-centered politics and difficult funding, leading to emotions that range from hope to frustration, and sometimes, indifference (see yarrow 2017; witte 2018). the dish “grounds” malagasy aspirations to contribute to astrophysical research, even as people continue to strive 591for that distant connection to the stars. hope bridges the material disconnect between the “heads in the stars” and the “feet on the ground.” figure 6. movie poster of “women in science in africa: a silent revolution,” produced by la compagnie des taxi-brousse. figure 7. movie poster of “le mystère d’arivonimamo,” produced by franc clerc. professor charles’s retrieval of the keys for the facilities in arivonimamo makes for a powerful gesture to maintain indeterminacy about the dish and thus to maintain anticipation and excitement about the very large scales of the universe that astrophysics engages with. students of astrophysics and amateur astronomers continue to prepare for a future in which the malagasy grounds will prove relevant for astrophysics. their communal tasks to learn about outer space, their training, and their capacity-building practices are scalar practices. by maintaining the indeterminacy of the dish in arivonimamo, professor charles enables the continuation of other people’s anticipatory scalar practices. furthermore, we argue, his effort to maintain indeterminacy itself constitutes a scalar practice, working with and on intersecting local scales to retrieve keys from the minister while keeping the study of phenomena at the very large scales of the universe as an aspirational goal in mind. the activities of the growing number of astronomy enthusiasts pave the ground for scientific engagement with outer space to take place in a future that has already arrived otherwise. their efforts have attracted the interest of a french astrophysicist passionate about promoting astronomy in francophone africa. he organized funding and installed an optical telescope, now managed in collaboration with a malagasy astronomy club. located at a school in a remote village near the west coast, the site offers the darkness and clear skies needed for observations, while the school provides infrastructure and security. the telescope’s primary scientific goal is to gather data on asteroids, contributing to global efforts to protect earth from potentially hazardous space objects. while the ska project brought astronomy to madagascar, this new telescope has broadened aspirations for the field’s future in the country. both the existing optical telescope and the prospect of a ska radio telescope raise hopes for malagasy contributions to astrophysical research. enthusiasts have worked to make madagascar suitable for engaging with these scales, though the conversion of the arivonimamo dish remains uncertain. even if arivonimamo never becomes a center for radio astronomy, people’s dedication has already attracted the optical telescope. though this telescope may focus on solar system-scale research rather than the vast universe beyond the sun’s influence, it still attests to the achievements of the malagasy astronomy enthusiasts to make malagasy grounds relevant for scientific inquiry about (near) outer space, supporting a global effort to protect earth from space-based threats. 592 conclusion for astronomers, the challenge of keeping their heads in the stars while maintaining their feet on the ground involves thinking and acting across scalar difference. as astrophysical instruments expand, crossing national borders and invoking broader frameworks for organizing knowledge and managing activities on earth, scale must be understood in relation to the grounds on which it takes shape. the relationship between scale—viewed both as a historically contingent product and as an evolving process—and the ground on which it materializes is, we argue, irreducible. astrophysics, with its focus on the largest conceivable scales, provides a compelling case for exploring this concept. the inseparability of the head in the stars from the feet on the ground proves especially relevant in the context of the ongoing construction of the ska radio telescope in south africa and the opportunities and challenges it brings for its african partner countries. the karoo region is “home to the ska,” a telescope project aimed at exploring the universe, managed and funded by an international organization. situated within the south african state, it is tied into south africa’s long history of hosting telescopes to study the southern hemisphere’s sky—a legacy tied to the country’s role in the colonial project of european expansion, where astronomical time measurement played a part. while being a center for global radio astronomy today, the karoo’s history of marginalization endures through the colonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid eras. in the karoo, these histories converge through different scaled frames of reference, creating the “grounds” where present and past are intertwined. as south africa prepared its bid to host the ska, it needed to expand its framework from a national to a continental scale, positioning itself as part of africa. within this larger vision, the inclusion of madagascar as an african partner brought additional scalar dimensions into play. madagascar was approached as a state partner and established the master’s program at its national university. graduates of this program have gained global recognition, building international careers that engage with the universe’s events and forces. madagascar was chosen not only because of its geographic location on the african continent but also because it already had a sufficiently large dish to function as a radio telescope. this dish has a legacy of connecting the newly independent state with global information networks, while also holding the unrealized potential to foster a scholarly connection to the universe at large. the “ground” that vanessa’s expression inspired us to contemplate kept shifting throughout our narrative, which used outer space research through the ska as a lens. in the karoo, the ground referred to the territory shaped by 593national legislation, as well as the open spaces for sheep grazing. it encompassed the region’s semi-arid, sparsely populated environment and its history of marginalization. in madagascar, the ground was defined by the clearly marked premises of the disused satellite dish and its facility in arivonimamo, as well as the broader malagasy territory retrieving astrophysical data that students and graduates value deeply as a national contribution to a global project of astrophysical science. it also includes the sociopolitical and financial conditions that challenge dreams, visions, and hopes. these shifting grounds, all of which anchor the concept of scale to earth (see valentine 2017), reflect the changes in scale required by our narrative. the vast scale of astrophysical infrastructure in africa requires our collaborative effort not to remain focused solely on the grand narrative attached to scaling up. instead, we must navigate across different scales to do justice to the scalar practices connected to grounds with diverse histories and aspirations. the scalar practices we have outlined, mainly in terms of social categories, intersect with the scales used by astrophysicists—scales that we can only briefly reference here. in both the karoo and around the prospective telescope site at the existing telecommunication dish in arivonimamo, the onto-epistemological scales of physics intersect with those of geopolitical dynamics, national and continental imaginations, and global alliances. carnarvon, a town at the margin of south africa’s economic life, becomes—due to its absences—the center of a global radio astronomy infrastructure. south africa’s department of science and technology (now science and innovation), transcending human differences, invests in the broader idea of “africa.” similarly, the disused satellite dish in arivonimamo, with its potential to become a telescope feeding data into a supercomputer, involves the malagasy government’s ministry of scientific research and shapes the work of local astronomers, both amateurs and professionals. from the small scales of information technology and data processing to national decisionmaking, global management, and financial frameworks, all the way to the vast scales of extragalactic radio wave emissions probing the origins of time itself, radio astronomy instruments in southern africa bring together historically established scales. they require agile scalar practices that are always tied to specific grounds, both as a condition and as a limitation. abstract this article explores the evolution of radio astronomy in south africa and madagascar, focusing on how “scale” functions as both a way of understanding the world and marking differences in existence. in outer space research, the ground is crucial but often overlooked. by collaboratively examining the expansion of infrastructure 594for radio astronomy, driven by the goal of scaling up research objectives, we navigate across different scales to present this story through three key perspectives. we attend to vanessa, an astronomer in cape town caring for the conditions on the ground; we explore the historically contingent situation in the south african karoo, hosting the core of the world’s largest radio telescope; and we scrutinize the potential of a telescope in madagascar, and its role in the country’s space research ambitions. together, these perspectives illustrate how scale operates as both an ontological and epistemological concept, closely tied to the ground. [scale; square kilometre array; africa; astrophysics; ground; infrastructure] notes acknowledgments  first, we wish to thank our interlocutors for their contagious passion and willingness to share their thoughts with us. without them, our thinking about the relation between scale, astronomy, and ground would not have emerged. second, like all academic publications, this article has benefited from scholarly exchange about it. we presented a paper and received invaluable feedback at the ethnographies of outer space conferences in trento and london, as well as at the conference of the african studies association germany. we also thank participants of the colloquium at the max planck institute for social anthropology where we discussed earlier drafts. for their critical and constructive engagement with our draft, we are indebted to the anonymous reviewers and the production team at cultural anthropology. finally, we acknowledge that this work is partly based on the research supported by the south african research chair’s initiative “the sociology of land, environment, and sustainable development” of the department of science and technology and national research foundation of south africa (grant no 98765). 1. names of public figures have not been anonymized. all other names are anonymized. 2. for astronomers, the scales of outer space have an ontological character. general relativity, incommensurable with the laws of quantum mechanics, accounts for gravity and is needed for descriptions of large-scale structures in outer space but is negligible for the physics of objects on earth and does not describe dynamics at the quantum level. however, experienceable scales are used to extrapolate what becomes modeled as the very large and the very small. this rests on the assumption that scalability describes the capacity to expand without changing (ehrenstein and neyland 2018). 3. debates about renaming the large and small mc are currently gaining steam. see https://www.space.com/astronomers-rename-magellanic-clouds-coalition (last accessed december 18, 2023). 4. the podcast we are writing about is called the cosmic savannah and can be found at https://thecosmicsavannah.com/ 5. for more details, please see https://www.astro4dev.org/vanessa-mcbride-astronomer-at-oad/ 6. quoted in the african-european radio astronomy platform, by marina joubert, “south africa’s president zuma visits core site of ska in africa for the first time,” october 9, 2012, available at http://www.aerap.org/news.php?id=69 (last accessed on 25 october 2022). references avle, seyram, cindy lin, jean hardy, and silvia lindtner 2020 “scaling techno-optimistic visions.” engaging science, technology, and society 6: 237–54. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2020.283 595 bebbington, anthony, and jeffrey bury 2013 “the political ecologies of the subsoil.” in subterranean struggles: new dynamics of mining, oil, and gas in latin america, edited by a. bebbington and j. bury. austin: university of texas press. carr, e. summerson, and michael lempert, eds. 2016 scale: discourse and dimensions of social life. berkeley: university of california press. chinigò, davide 2019 “from the ‘merino revolution’ to the ‘astronomy revolution’: land alienation and identity in carnarvon, south africa.” journal of southern african studies 45, no. 4: 749–66. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2019.1642028 clark, timothy 2012 “derangements of scale.” in telemorphosis. vol 1 of theory in the era of climate change, edited by tom cohen, 148–66. ann arbor, mich.: open humanities press. de landa, manuel 2000 a thousand years of nonlinear history. new york: zone books. dubow, saul 2019 “200 years of astronomy in south africa: from the royal observatory to the ‘big bang’ of the square kilometre array.” journal of southern african studies 45, no. 4: 663–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2018.1496700 ehrenstein, véra, and daniel neyland 2018 “on scale work: evidential practices and global 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the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.01 from hoping to expecting cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 125-149, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.10 from hoping to expecting: cochlear implantation and habilitation in india michele ilana friedner university of chicago https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6177-3945 i am saying that the problem of our society is not a failure to integrate but of integrating too well, integrating in such a way that identicalness reigns, at least a rough identity, a socially constructed identity, an identity of which citizens can be convinced. —henri-jacques stiker, a history of disability in 2015, a prominent united states–based audiologist and auditory verbal therapy (avt) practitioner wrote on her blog about new hearing technologies such as cochlear implants:1 “it is not the same old deafness.”2 more recently, i observed a well-known avt therapist from the united states stating in a workshop: “in 2020, there is absolutely no reason why we cannot have listening and speaking outcomes in deaf children if this is what families want.”3 with her statement, this therapist stressed that technology and therapeutic techniques had changed the landscape of deafness, as well as expectations of what deaf children can do and be(come). increasingly, deaf children, specifically those who have cochlear implants and have undergone avt, are listening and speaking, meeting developmental milestones, and mainstreamed in normative life; they have (near to) typical hearing in the sound booth, which translates to living a typical daily life beyond the clinic.4 with the view that deafness is malleable, and the expectations accompanying this malleability, a shift has occurred from the subjunctive to the imperative mood: families and other stakeholders such as the state, surgeons, audiologists, and therapists expect that many of these children will become “normal.” normal here means having typical listening and spoken-language abilities, meeting developmental milestones on target, and participating in mainstream life: here biomedical and social normativity are co-constitutive (lloyd and moreau 2011). surgeons, cochlear implant manufacturers, families, and speech and language therapists, among others, insist that with timely cochlear implant surgery and appropriate habilitation, deaf children can become typically hearing and that they can develop on par with or exceed their developmentally typical peers in terms of their language and social skills. indeed, they often stress that because of therapeutic interventions that focus on “proper” ways of interacting, such as dyadic turn-taking, asking and answering context-appropriate questions, and making polite conversation, these children often wind up ahead of their typically developing peers. as i heard repeatedly, cochlear implantation in coordination with avt unleashes the potentiality of hearing brains and produces “wonderful outcomes.”5 according to one line of thought, post-cochlear implantation, children are simply no longer deaf, if they ever were deaf before. as an indian engineer developing an indian-made cochlear implant told me: “the brain is intact and unimpaired, but there are connectivity problems. with an implant, deaf children do hear, and they hear normally in that the ci [cochlear implant] stimulates the auditory nerve.” however, cochlear implanted hearing is not typical or normal hearing, and attempts to establish equivalence or similitude between deaf hearers and hearing hearers proves problematic (lloyd and bonventre 2020). i conducted ethnographic research in the indian cities of delhi, pune, mumbai, and chennai from 2016 to the present on pediatric cochlear implantation and habilitation. i interviewed families, surgeons, audiologists, and speech and language therapists and conducted participant observation in therapy sessions and conferences.6 i also reviewed archival materials and current texts on different therapeutic techniques and popular media articles. while the bulk of research took place in india, i also draw from interviews conducted with and workshops organized by international avt experts and from participant observation at an alexander graham bell association symposium in the united states.7 cochlear implantation and accompanying therapeutics are globalized with four major cochlear implant manufacturers located in australia, the united states, austria, and france and avt certification offered through the united states–based alexander graham bell academy. india has long had educational programs focusing on teaching deaf and hearing-impaired children to listen and speak with the goal of producing normative communicative personhood. in the debate between oralism (using a spoken language) and manualism (using a sign language), oralists have loomed large since before the colonial period, and most of india’s deaf schools are oral, at least on paper, with teachers and administrators communicating in spoken language while students struggle to receive an education (friedner 2015). indian audiologists repeatedly told me that previous generations of hearing technology were simply not up to the task of providing deaf and severely hearing-impaired children with auditory input. one audiologist i interviewed called older technology “a bullock cart trying to carry a heavy load.” while audiologists and speech and language pathologists, specifically those working in government institutions with a wide range of deaf children and families, told me that in many cases they were able to achieve outcomes in which children learned to listen and speak, particularly through using lipreading, tactility, and really working (“forcing” is the verb used) whatever audition children had, these constituted modest results. children often had difficult-to-understand “deaf accents,” and they struggled to participate in everyday life through lipreading.8 still, this was often acceptable, or functional, communicative personhood. however, new and increasingly sophisticated technology and habilitation techniques have resulted in changed understandings and paradoxes in the current moment. at stake is no longer communicative personhood but the creation of a hearing brain and the removal of deafness, thus the achievement of normative sensory personhood. while during previous research between 2007 and 2015 with families with deaf children, i witnessed tensions around how learning and using sign language seemingly marked a child as visibly different and outside of normative trajectories (also see das and addlakha 2001 on negotiating normative life course trajectories with disabled children), i observed a different phenomenon from 2016 onward: families placed on well-trodden paths toward implantation and expectations for normative life trajectories.9 doctors, audiologists, and speech and language therapists told such families that implants would make their children “normal,” “almost normal,” or “near to normal,” and that implants were “the only option.” furthermore, families, particularly those with financial resources, managed to tap into international therapeutic and educational communities, such as the united states–based alexander graham bell association and the john tracy academy, and to receive consultations over web-based platforms with internationally acclaimed therapists in england and australia, among other locations. families without resources were also encouraged, sometimes ordered, to implant their children via state and central government programs and ngo and charitable funding, and to seek out therapy at government or free non-governmental organizations and charities. my overarching argument in this essay is that cochlear implantation and the habilitation associated with it—because of the “successful outcomes” they produce—constrain possibilities for carving out new ways of being in the world. expectations of activating potentiality through an increasingly sedimented process of implantation and therapeutic intervention contract other ways of conceptualizing potential—and ultimately what is considered normal. my research on deafness and cochlear implantation reveals that while disability might constitute a “new normal,” at least in locations in the global north (ginsburg and rapp 2017), it is increasingly possible for children to become normal, in the sense of normative developmental trajectories. early intervention, habilitation, and technological pathways focusing on listening and speaking are becoming more and more commonplace. through these interventions, deaf children ostensibly become normatively sensing, setting up the scene, or rather the brain, for all other development. while rayna rapp and faye ginsburg (2001, 537) argue that disability narratives and other forms of public representations of disability serve to “widen the space of possibility in which relationships can be imagined and resources claimed,” we can also track the opposite effect in the circulation of discourses and representations of cochlear-implanted children who are labeled “success stories,” and the idea that such success is possible and expectable.10 in highlighting another process and set of logics through which disability appears and disappears (titchkosky 2011; zoanni 2019), i argue that while disability might increasingly constitute a new normal, this new normal also rubs up against expectations for a future without it, as well as increasingly narrow ideas of potential and personhood. parents from varied class backgrounds told me about inspirational popular and social media articles detailing the “magic” of cochlear implantation, articles remaining silent about other options such as indian sign language (isl). surgeons, audiologists, and therapists also counseled parents to implant their children as “the only option.” deafness, the use of a sign language, or other possibilities for conceptualizing potential or becoming and being normal were simply not provided as options. successful personhood, in these cases, remained contingent on a narrow definition of communicative, sensory, and social potentiality. potentiality is thus harnessed to one outcome: becoming a listening, speaking, and independent person who does not need to rely on family or others for help or support. that is, children are to become independent and empowered actors (chaudhry 2015; see also addlakha 2020, ghosh and banerjee 2017) who are not disabled. according to this logic, children must be capacitated and their potential activated; they require habilitation now to avoid needing care later.11 the indian state follows the same logic in its program that provides children living below the poverty line with cochlear implants: it justifies high levels of spending on a cochlear implant surgery, device, mapping, and therapy to create, through habilitation, an independent subject who contributes to the nation later. this imagined independent subject ostensibly would not need accommodations or modifications made to social, educational, and economic life. in what follows, i analyze the potentialities and desired outcomes attached to habilitation pathways, technologies, and people. i end by considering under-used and unused paths; following sara ahmed (2019), i argue for conceptualizing habilitation differently and choosing new paths, paths that might stretch and reconfigure how we think of personhood, potentiality, and the social more broadly. rehabilitation and habilitation: past, present, future what are the specific stakes attached to the concepts of rehabilitation and habilitation in relation to potentiality? much anthropological research exists on rehabilitation, which henri-jacques stiker argued became a salient concept and practice during world war i (stiker 1999, 121; also see bloom 2020; macleish 2020; mattingly 2010; messinger 2010a,b; wool 2015, 2020). according to stiker (1999, 124), “replacement, re-establishment of the prior substitution, compensation—all this now becomes possible language.” rehabilitation aims to repair, restore, and return to previous states and levels of functioning and exists to uphold social norms and “society such as it is” (stiker 1999, 137). rehabilitation focuses on the reintegration and reincorporation of the individual body into the national and social body. seth d. messinger (2010b) stresses that rehabilitation technologists often attend exclusively to the impaired or damaged body and ignore peoples’ social worlds or the contexts in which they live (also see wool 2020). in the realm of substance-abuse related rehabilitation, jarrett zigon (2011, 31) argues that rehabilitation involves self-transformation and is a process of working on oneself as a form of labor and “completely remaking one’s moral personhood” (also see carr 2011; raikhel 2016). in this vein, a self or personhood must be reinvented or recreated, with limited potentiality to make new. in contrast to rehabilitation, habilitation, as defined by the oxford english dictionary, refers to “the action of enabling or endowing with ability or fitness; capacitation, qualification.” while rehabilitation seeks to minimize loss and restore functioning, habilitation focuses on potentiality and the maximization of potential, in other words, on capacitating children to become what they should become. as laura mauldin (2016, 63) writes: “while rehabilitation is the process of restoring what was lost, habilitation creates an ability that never was—or in the case of dealing with children, one that has yet to be developed.” the concept of habilitation typically emerges in relation to work with and on children who are malleable and have potentiality.12 as opposed to transformation, habilitation involves formation. if rehabilitation is about remaking or transforming, habilitation is about becoming, about working on a malleable not-yet bodymind. habilitation also skirts close to cure (clare 2017; venkat 2016; warren and addison 2020), as well as to the potentiality of children to lose diagnoses. habilitation might result in the impossibility of finding and claiming deaf and disability identity and community, which constitutes another kind of normal. but how do you lose something you never had?13 habilitation depends on potentiality. potentiality depends on malleability. as (some forms of) deafness are seen as malleable in ways that other impairments might not be, cochlear implantation offers a critical site for tracking habilitation discourses, ideas of potentiality, and possible futures that are produced and constrained.14 karen-sue taussig et al. (2013, s7) suggest “that people appear to ascribe potentiality to those things they believe can be manipulated (or they desire to manipulate) and not to those perceived as being beyond human control (or seen as not in need of change).” they note that “in biomedical practices, potentiality indexes a gap between what might, could, or even should be” (taussig et al. 2013, s5). indeed, habilitation paths concern circumscribed expectations oriented toward outcomes that shore up the normal. in this case, the expected outcome is for a child to develop a hearing brain, like all other non-deaf children, and to listen and speak; anything other than such an outcome appears suboptimal. the imperative mood indeed. as i discuss, avt existed as a habilitative approach long before cochlear implants came onto the scene. however, internationally and in india, the approach has been catalyzed by increasingly prevalent newborn hearing screening, early intervention, and cochlear implantation. while india does not currently have universal newborn hearing screening, advocacy for it exists. (the world health organization’s 2021 world report on hearing stresses the importance of developing universal newborn screening.) an early screening and intervention program called rashtriya bal swasthya karyakram, which screens for disabilities, diseases, and developmental delays, launched in 2013. increasing awareness exists about children’s potentiality and the importance of habilitation in preventing or mitigating disability. in the case of deafness, habilitative potentiality is said to wane with age and surgeons, audiologists, and therapists stress the existence of a critical window of opportunity for developing a hearing brain and learning language. as children age, surgeons, audiologists, and therapists argue, families’ expectations must be managed as possibilities for becoming normal decrease. at that point, the hope is that children can become near or adjacent to normality. normal may be a receding horizon but it is still the horizon, one becoming more sharply etched as it is (re)produced. technological potentialities to be sure, other interventions besides cochlear implants have existed, and continue to exist, in india and elsewhere: there are hearing aids that range from one-size-fits-all body aids to programmable digital aids. there are also a range of therapeutic techniques that often involve multisensory approaches whereby therapists use tactile and visual methods. tactile methods include blowing on feathers or having people touch therapists’ and their own throats and lips to feel vibrations. visual methods include lipreading, reading texts, and showing objects or pictures. adults and older children often share memories of repeatedly and laboriously repeating sounds and words to practice saying them correctly. increasingly, however, surgeons, audiologists, and therapists denigrate multisensory approaches or discuss them ambivalently as something to be utilized when unisensory, or solely auditory-based, approaches do not work. an older speech therapist commented that multisensory interventions and hearing aid technology have been backgrounded by the spectacular “noise” of cochlear implants. as more children are implanted, therapists have fewer opportunities to learn about and use multisensory approaches. students in bachelor’s degree programs in audiology and speech and language pathology throughout india often enthusiastically shared their desire to work with implanted children. they considered working for a cochlear implant manufacturer post degree an exciting job opportunity, with perks such as high salaries and travel within india and abroad. practicing therapists emphasized that “everyone wants to jump on the implant train.” parents have also jumped on the implant train: in interviews they expressed their desire to skip necessary hearing aid trials because they perceived the required three-month trial, during which children receive minimal input, as a waste of time.15 they felt cochlear implants offered more in terms of potentiality and future life possibilities. cochlear implants did not immediately gain popularity in india. in interviews with indian surgeons, audiologists, and therapists, i learned that, in the late 1980s, the first indian surgeon to conduct cochlear implantation operated on older prelingually deaf children. these children were ostensibly too old to be habilitated successfully, and they did not attain desired listening and spoken language outcomes. while these initial implanted people could hear, they could not speak well, and so cochlear implants were not deemed worth the expense (and they were very expensive on the private market). those i interviewed in the field of cochlear implantation viewed this first surgeon as “irresponsible” in implanting less-than-optimal candidates who lacked potentiality, therefore setting back the field. yet as implant technology progressed and cochlear implants became normalized in other countries, indian otolaryngology surgeons slowly started performing surgeries, initially on adults, and after conducting a specific number of adult surgeries, the implant manufacturers approved them to implant small children. the first cochlear implant surgery performed on a young child in india occurred in 1999 and after this, a handful of children received implants every year, initially middleand upper-class children whose families could afford the expense.16 in 2011, the state of andhra pradesh started providing cochlear implants to children within the state, followed by kerala. other states and the indian armed forces followed suit. in 2014, the central government began offering cochlear implants to children under the age of six living below the poverty line as part of its assistance to disabled persons for purchase / fitting of aids and appliances (adip) scheme, and it also included two years of therapy as part of the program, in addition to device mapping and maintenance. (note that stakeholders, from families to surgeons, feel that two years of therapy and follow-up maintenance do not suffice. they critique the state for valuing surgery and the implant device more than the habilitation process, thus misrecognizing the potentiality of the device and the therapeutic process.) these programs resulted from various stakeholders such as surgeons and device manufacturers providing “evidence” of cochlear implanted children’s successes through videos of such children talking and engaged in activities of everyday life such as playing sports, excelling in mainstream academics, and participating in music and dance classes. implanted children, they were quick to point out, were normal, just like everyone else. an increased focus on therapeutics and the circulation of new expert discourses about deaf children’s potentiality accompanied technology uptake. cochlear implant corporations have employed indian audiologists and therapists to provide trainings throughout the country, and they also fund international “expert” trainers from the united states, australia, and european countries to visit indian clinics. select manufacturer-sponsored therapists also travel abroad to visit cochlear implant corporate headquarters and training centers. in addition, some upper-class mothers have decided to become therapists, pursuing training from international venues like the alexander graham bell association and seeking out international avt mentors. the importance of habilitation is increasingly foregrounded. as multiple therapists, and some surgeons told me: “surgery is only 20 percent of the work; therapy is the rest.” the device and the surgery, then, only have so much potential, and trainers stress avt principles, which foreground the importance of early intervention and implantation. at stake is habilitation—building, cultivating, and maintaining a hearing brain. avt as potentializing normal sensing consider this united states–based story, discussed at length because it demonstrates what habilitation ideally does in terms of audiograms and daily practices. in november 1974, john croft, the american father of a then nine-year-old deaf child named rose, wrote a passionate essay titled “the third way,” in which he argued that the contentious debate between oralism and manualism obscured the existence of a third category and movement, which he called “auralism” (croft 1974, 1). croft, a professor of education, argued that both oralism and manualism were imperfect because neither method could “teach an individual with only four senses how to compensate well enough to compete successfully in a world where others have five” (croft 1974, 1; emphasis original). in contrast, auralist methods create “hearing-deaf” children who become “functionally mildly hard-of-hearing” through training their auditory sense (croft 1974, 1). according to croft, aural children can have conversations through walls, use the telephone, and hear their teachers regardless of where they sit in the classroom. they do not need to read lips during spelling tests and can watch television. aural children experience “five-sensed normality” (croft and croft 1978, 1). what is required for “five-sensed normality” is a constant focus on audition, “until listening becomes as much a habit as looking, and feeling, and smelling, and tasting” (croft 1974, 3; emphasis original). the principles and methods for which croft advocated are currently called auditory verbal therapy (avt), although at the time they were not gathered under an approach or acronym. doctors did not discover rose’s hearing loss until she was two years old. as a result of this purportedly late diagnosis, which occurred after she was already considered delayed in her language development, her visual sense had a two year “head start.” to counteract this, rose’s family focused entirely on her auditory channel to ensure it did not remain “deficient” (croft and croft 1978, 2). when rose was diagnosed, the doctor did not say that rose could not hear. rather, he claimed that rose “does not appear to be using any hearing. therefore, after providing proper amplification, we must begin immediately to teach her to listen” (croft and croft 1978, 2; emphasis original). rose learned to listen through weekly therapy sessions and by working extensively with her mother. she wore her binaural hearing aids from morning to night. a broken hearing aid was quickly repaired or replaced; she never went three hours without a well-functioning hearing aid (croft and croft 1978, 3). throughout her training, rose’s listening ability improved and her aided audiogram climbed up the chart. at the age of seven, rose had reached the borderline of “normal hearing at some frequencies” (croft 1977, 3; croft and croft 1978, 6). according to croft, his daughter and others like her are “hearing-deaf children” that have been kept a secret (croft 1977, 2). croft was stressing the importance of habilitation. rose’s therapist was an avt pioneer before the method took this name. known in different circles as the unisensory approach, acoupedics, auralism, the auditory approach, the acoustic method, natural language, and other names, the method stressed that most hearing-impaired children, even those profoundly deaf, have some residual auditory sense that can be capitalized on. in 1978, the international committee on auditory-verbal communication was formed as a section within the alexander graham bell association for the deaf. in 1985, an avt certification process started as practitioners wished to differentiate their methods from other approaches, such as the auditory-oral approach, which allows visual cues, and to have a credential that recognized avt mastery. about 1,000 certified avt therapists exist internationally, with most concentrated in countries in the global north, although the alexander graham bell academy, the certifying body, currently has a committee focused on diversity and barriers to uptake in the global south. certification requires a degree in a deaf education or a re/habilitation-related field, mentorship by a current certified avt professional (which potential avt therapists might pay for), and an exam in either english or spanish at a licensed testing center. after certification, therapists must abide by the following ten principles (estabrooks et al. 2016, 4-8): promote early diagnosis of hearing loss in newborns, infants, toddlers, and young children, followed by immediate audiologic management and auditory-verbal therapy. recommend immediate assessment and use of appropriate, state-of-the-art hearing technology to obtain maximum benefits of auditory stimulation. guide and coach parents to help their child use hearing as the primary sensory modality in developing listening and spoken language. guide and coach parents to become the primary facilitators of their child’s listening and spoken language development through active consistent participation in individualized auditory-verbal therapy. guide and coach parents to create environments that support listening for the acquisition of spoken language throughout the child’s daily activities. guide and coach parents to help their child integrate listening and spoken language into all aspects of the child’s life. guide and coach parents to use natural developmental patterns of audition, speech, language, cognition and communication. guide and coach parents to help their child self-monitor spoken language through listening. administer ongoing formal and informal diagnostic assessments to develop individualized auditory-verbal treatment plans, to monitor progress and to evaluate the effectiveness of the plans for the child and family. promote education in regular schools with peers who have typical hearing and with appropriate services from early childhood onwards. india currently has five certified avt therapists with private practices who conduct training sessions with other therapists and consult with national institutions as well as cochlear implant manufacturers. these five certified therapists play an outsized role in therapeutic practice, and they and cochlear implant manufacturers have argued that avt is the “gold standard” in terms of working with implanted children. as a result of their lobbying campaigns, ngos, government institutes, and for-profit entities conduct avt courses of various lengths, although they cannot provide certification. uncertified therapists are not permitted to claim that they do avt; as such, therapists might use auditory verbal principles under the umbrella of “auditory habilitation” or “auditory therapy.” as noted in the avt principles, in addition to “state-of-the-art hearing technology,” parents, typically mothers, must play a role in their children’s habilitation. they are required to constantly talk to their children about everyday life. mothers are to be rehabilitated in how they work and interact with their children. i observed in clinics as therapists coached mothers to engage in turn-taking, to ask questions, and above all, to narrate everyday life. mothers, according to therapists, should talk as they cut vegetables, cleaned their houses, and went shopping at markets. therapists admonished mothers not to engage in “emotional” acts such as cuddling their children. instead, they are to talk to them. one therapist told me that it was acceptable for a child to sit on a mother’s lap, but that the child needed to face outward, so that they could not read their mother’s lips. mothers talked about doing mehanat, hard work, to achieve listening and speaking results, and two common expressions were that “hard work brings sweet fruit” and “hard work brings colors.” the sweet fruit and the colors referred to listening and speaking children. habilitation was to take place in all aspects of daily life, to become habit. note, then, that not only children have potentiality but also parents, or more specifically, mothers. there are multiple subjects of habilitation, all focused on the same goal. therapists overwhelmingly agree that avt only works for children who are young and do not have additional disabilities: most therapists told me that they could not do avt with children older than five, although they might utilize some avt principles. as one delhi-based avt therapist matter-of-factly told me, a child over five “could not become an auditory person.” during a presentation at an indian cochlear implant industry conference in 2019, a corporate representative showed a powerpoint slide that outlined the commonly accepted stakes: ages 0 to 3.5 were the maximum critical period; ages 4 to 7 were designated the open critical period; and ages 8 to 12 were considered the questionable critical period for learning language. these neatly delineated periods map onto the “hearing potential” of a child (estabrooks et al. 2016, 10) and provide a roadmap of potentiality as a race against time, one in which plasticity is maximally, openly, and questionably present. at different ages, then, potentiality and habilitation possibilities are differentially available. the age of implantation and beginning avt matters because increasingly, experts regard deafness as a brain issue rather than an ear problem. they agree on the importance of early intervention, and the numbers usually cited are one-three-six: a child should have a hearing test by one month of age, a diagnosis by three months, and early intervention by six months.17 this is important because deaf children are considered already behind at birth. an indian cochlear implant surgeon told me that “[the] child is hearing mother’s voice in the last three months of the pregnancy, in the third trimester. so a deaf child is already 12 weeks deaf by the time [the] child is born.” as a result of the view that there is a race against time, younger and younger infants are receiving cochlear implants: the age of cochlear implantation approved by the united states food and drug administration has just decreased from twelve to nine months. during my research, audiologists, cochlear implant manufacturers, surgeons, and speech and language therapists stressed that deafness is a “neurological emergency” and insisted that families must “act now” to actualize potential and avoid harm and delays. however, being able to “act now” is often a class privilege. i observed that it often took families six months to a year to compile the necessary paperwork and medical tests to be eligible for the state schemes and then there were waiting lists. families ineligible for government funding or those that decided to cobble together funding on their own also had to “run from pillar to post,” in their words, for funding. the only families able to “act now” were upper class families with access to financial resources. economic barriers create temporal constraints. potentiality is beholden to capital. as the avt researchers and practitioners carol flexer and ellen a. rhoades (2016, 27) emphasize: “identification of newborn hearing loss and other hearing differences should be considered a neurodevelopmental emergency.” avt experts stress that neuroplasticity is greatest in the first three years of life: “the younger the infant, the more neuro-plasticity the child has” (flexer and rhoades 2016, 30). if audition is not introduced and the brain does not stay wired for sound, “sensory deprivation” and subsequently cross-modal reorganization in favor of vision will take place (flexer and rhoades 2016, 30). cross-modal reorganization will result in a reduction of “auditory neural capacity” (flexer and rhoades 2016, 30).18 such a reduction means that the child will have less potential to become someone who uses listening and spoken language. while these discourses about the brain and the division of the senses originate in the united states and elsewhere in the global north, they have made their way to india via cochlear implant manufacturers and avt therapists.19 changing expectations as a result of earlier hearing testing and intervention, more sophisticated technology, and discourses about hearing brains, a person previously considered a “success story” or “star case” perhaps no longer qualifies as such: families have come to expect more of and for their children. these heightened expectations are, perhaps ironically, occurring at the same time that disability activism is growing in india and disability access, through initiatives such as the central government’s accessible india campaign and the inclusion of indian sign language interpreters at official speeches, is improving. (expectations are growing in disability activist spaces as well.) while disability is ostensibly becoming more visible in public discourse and spaces, families, particularly those with means, have come to expect normalization and the loss of a diagnosis. families told me they did not use the category of disability, and they declined to utilize disability quotas for their children. audiologists and speech and language pathologists similarly wondered if it was necessary or even fair for implanted children to utilize quotas in education and eventually in employment since, with implants, children were no longer deaf. in an interview, one audiologist rhetorically asked if implanted children should be compared with other deaf children or to hearing children. to be clear, when implanted children remove their external processor, they might not hear anything, since implantation typically results in the decimation of residual hearing. losing or discarding the diagnosis of deafness, however, means that children are listening and speaking and meeting normative milestones, thus competing against and in relation to non-deaf children, rather than other deaf children, in their pursuit of selective education and employment. importantly, habilitated implanted children can compete, and may even be ahead because of the intensive avt training they have received. encounters across time and technology reveal the stakes of changing expectations, as well as communicative and sensory hierarchies. for example, aruna, a mother of a deaf son, told me that after her son received his diagnosis of deafness in the early 2000s, she set out to learn as much as possible about different interventions, programs, and technologies in delhi, where she was living, and elsewhere in india. she visited an ngo providing early intervention in delhi, which other parents of a deaf child had started. she met their daughter, who is (was?) considered a star case; this girl used hearing aids and lipreading to communicate and had been mainstreamed into a regular school. yet the girl’s deaf accent and laborious lipreading practices left aruna dismayed. she did not want her son to end up like this. aruna decided to look elsewhere because she wanted her son to listen and speak more clearly; she had different ideas about his potentiality and she expected normative sensory personhood for him. aruna also visited an early intervention center in chennai, where she felt disheartened by what she called the center’s “anti-technology” focus. she said that the center did not favor sophisticated digital hearing aids and that its administrators preferred children to use basic analog behind-the-ear hearing aids or the one-size-fits-all body hearing aid. when i met the founder and current principal of this center, they stressed that they obtained wonderful results with these (more) affordable devices and did not see the point of “bells and whistles.” they were also concerned that foreign devices were heavily taxed, and more advanced devices were financially out of reach for most families with whom they worked. they did not approve of the government programs that did not pay for device maintenance or replacement after two years of implantation in most cases. this center focused on reading and writing to develop language and did not spend significant time on speech training; it had its own ideas of successful outcomes. interestingly, both the delhi-based ngo and the center in chennai opposed cochlear implants, considering them unnecessary, expensive, and risky. in turn surgeons, audiologists, and speech and language therapists critiqued both centers for being out of date and for stifling deaf children’s potential. in their view, these institutions were not thinking potential otherwise but were rather preventing children from becoming listening and speaking, two essential characteristics needed for success in the world; these children would never lose their diagnoses. aruna decided to implant her son and eventually became a certified auditory verbal therapist.20 today, aruna’s son is a young adult; he attended an elite private school in delhi, served as the captain of his school’s lincoln-douglas debate team, and played cricket. he told me that he is often held up as a role model for what other deaf children can become (and he and his mother have been featured in promotional videos for the cochlear implant corporation that manufactured his device). however, he knows (he does not hope; he knows) that in the future, other deaf children will accomplish more than he has. while he felt that being a role model created a lot of pressure, there was something melancholy and awkward about realizing that in the future, he would be found wanting in the name of progress. and indeed, children will be diagnosed earlier and receive earlier intervention. implant technology is also evolving, with more flexible electrode arrays on the internal device and smarter noise reduction and nuanced speech-processing features on the external processors. surgeons, audiologists, and speech and language therapists also increasingly encourage bilateral implants when families can afford it. i talked with another mother who runs a parents’ organization that provides early intervention, education, and support both for parents of deaf children and for deaf children themselves. her child is now in her early thirties, a product of analog hearing aids and multisensory therapy approaches. she was diagnosed at the age of three, after doctors dismissed her mother’s concerns about her not hearing. i asked this mother how she felt seeing infants now, who have access to early, and sometimes newborn, hearing screening and early intervention. she said that she took comfort in knowing that she did the best she could at that time. she felt that she had maximized her child’s potential in working with what was available. while her daughter is now a young adult, the family is considering using their own funds to implant her, because surgeons and therapists consulted by the family think that she does retain some auditory potential that can be acted on. she would not, however, be a candidate for avt. she was successfully habilitated as a child using her hearing aids, and conditions of possibility for further progress as a listener and speaker remained should she choose cochlear implantation. there is both the metaphorical and empirical existence of the older child who was diagnosed late. what kind of potentiality does she have and what habilitation paths are productive? a late diagnosed child is considered always already behind and not on an ideal developmental trajectory.21 the benefit of implants for older deaf children and adults is often debated, although surgeons, cochlear implant manufacturers, and audiologists insist that implants always offer benefits, such as environmental noise. yet what does environmental noise give someone in terms of potential? while government programs will not provide older children and adults with implants, there is an expanding private market as parents seek out possible benefits. here, there is hope, though no expectations. one afternoon during the summer of 2018, i visited purnima, one of india’s most respected avt therapists, at her office. she was conducting a training for audiologists and speech and language pathologists from around india. on an easel and butcher paper were written questions and themes they had been discussing. i focused on one question: “older children—is there hope?” intrigued, i asked purnima about this topic, and she replied that there was hope but that expectations needed to be managed. she believed an older child could benefit from an implant and achieve some auditory discrimination, such as the ability to distinguish traffic sounds. however, their actual listening and speaking ability might not improve. some hearing, she stressed, was better than none. similarly, a clinician named parvathi at a prestigious government hospital told me about an eight-year-old, recently implanted child with whom she was working. she told the family: “see, your child has already crossed the age of plasticity. though he will learn language, that will only be functional language, what he needs immediately.” functionality becomes a way forward, although it is not ideal. i also observed aruna, the mother and avt therapist mentioned above, counsel a family of a late-implanted child that they might consider vocational training so that their child could become “independent.” the child had been implanted at five and was now eleven. he was not listening, although he could speak a bit. aruna stressed that he could become functional through learning a trade (never mind that he was still a child). aruna’s comments about functionality demonstrate that she did not see this child as possessing potential. functional here translated as the ability to do manual labor; it did not mean excelling at piano, getting admission to an elite college, or becoming a software engineer. more broadly in these clinical and therapeutic spaces, functionality means curtailed potentiality in the absence of aurality and a hearing brain. a functional person is never fully independent and never fully normal; they remain disabled. functionality is thus a form of foreclosure. purnima, parvathi, and aruna “managed expectations” while at the same time orienting families to futures involving (limited or diminished) listening and spoken language opportunities. as a child aged, potentiality was a receding horizon, and children were seen as only capable of “basic” or “functional” communicative personhood through implants. this raises questions about other potential paths. what other kinds of habilitation might there be, perhaps involving isl or a multisensory approach that includes a sign language, lipreading, and a focus on reading and writing, for example? why are there not many paths for being deaf and hearing? the three therapists mentioned here would not consider other such paths to be habilitative, because they do not result in hearing brains, listening and speaking, and normative life trajectories. new paths and a possible (re)habilitation becoming normal is increasingly an expected process because of technological developments and the emergence and sedimentation of habilitation pathways. while rehabilitation is concerned with recuperation, retrieval, and recovery, habilitation is focused on potentiality and oriented toward activating normative not-yet functioning. while there have always been deaf and hard-of-hearing “success stories” who succeed in mainstream life as a result of audiological and speech and language interventions, cochlear implantation and avt have brought new expectations for deaf listeners and speakers, deaf “aural” people, into the mix. according to the logic utilized by cochlear implant advocates and health and therapeutic professionals, deaf children can have hearing brains, lose their diagnoses, and become normal if the right kinds of habilitation occur early enough. how might habilitation—and ideas of potentiality more broadly—become more expansive? the key is to stretch how we think of communicative and sensory personhood beyond hearing brains and listening and speaking. isl-speaking deaf activists have advocated for this through promoting indian sign language and deaf flourishing (de clerck 2016). in 2020, an indian deaf activist created a video blog in which he signed the following and posted a transcript: to audiologists & speech pathologists: for your information, i have nothing against you for providing devices for deaf people to try to hear. i, myself, am a hearing aid user. i strongly encourage you to advise parents of deaf children to learn sign language so that they can communicate with their own child starting at an early age. this will establish a lifelong bond between the parents and child. clarify the myths that learning sign language does not reduce or eliminate their ability to speak. for you being in this profession, you’ll gain much more respect from the deaf community if you become our allies in promoting sign language. you could spark this transformation for millions of parents who lose hope for their deaf children due to being misinformed by your professionals. i am struck by this leader’s comments about parents losing hope because of hyped-up misinformation about technology’s promise and the importance of listening and spoken language. i, too, have met numerous parents who spoke about isl with gratitude and relief: even though it was their last option, it proved life-changing for their relationships with their deaf child and activated new forms of communicative relationality. this deaf leader brings up the possibility of sparking a “transformation.” i return to zigon’s (2011) definition of rehabilitation as self-transformation in thinking about this deaf leader’s statement: he is calling for the rehabilitation of audiologists, speech and language pathologists, families, and society at large. rather than for a return or restoration, however, he is calling for something different, and, to his mind, better—the embrace of isl and multiple paths. here rehabilitation means being open to various possibilities of world-making and living (also see wool 2020). rehabilitation means reconceptualizing potential. while professionals and families often dismiss isl as a viable option because it is not widely used, i think about ahmed’s (2019) observation that embarking on one path serves as a means of limiting other (also potentially useful) options. “the more a path is used, the more a path is used” (ahmed 2019, 41; emphasis mine). when one starts walking along a well-used path, it becomes easier to walk on it: the path seems commonsensical or natural, and one might feel encouraged and invited to head off in that direction. as ahmed notes (2019, 42): “the law of most paths: following a path makes a path easier to follow.” thus, multiple understandings of potentiality, habilitative paths, and ideas of normal are needed. cochlear implantation and the habilitation that accompanies it are premised on a commitment to activating potentiality; however, these processes also limit possibilities of communicating, sensing, relating, and understanding potential. families come to expect, rather than hope for, normal listening and speaking, and hence normative life trajectories. they become oriented toward their child’s normative successes and do not embark on other paths or stretch the social. in response, i think of the work of disability studies scholars and activists who argue that disability has introduced new possibilities and paths for (re)imagining and creating social interactions, familial and caring relations, arts, literature, and the built environment, among other things (autistic self advocacy network 2012; bauman and murray 2014; hamraie 2017; hendren 2020; kafer 2013; piepzna-samarasinha 2018; wong 2020). these works argue for (the making of) a more capacious social that is inclusive of disability and nonnormative life more broadly; they see and enact potential otherwise and, in the process, they perform prefigurative politics. how might we reach families and children to foreground multiple paths for being deaf, disabled, and normal? it seems to me that one answer lies in expanding how we think of role models and star cases. recently, i interacted, first on social media and then in conversations, with three indian cochlear-implanted adults in their twenties, considered to be “star cases” by the manufacturer that made their devices, their surgeons, and speech and language therapists. they are considered exceptional because of their listening and speaking abilities and educational achievements. yet these young adults have come to embrace the category of disability, are learning sign language, and are playing around with categories and modalities: they are deaf and hearing and speaking and signing. they also speak out about what they call the ableism permeating cochlear implant corporate advertising, and they are reinventing what it means to be a role model. in doing so, they point to the heavy labor involved in meeting and exceeding expectations as an implanted young person. they critique normative interventions such as cochlear implants while also utilizing them. they think potentiality otherwise and refuse narrow expectations through foregrounding discussions of access and calling for a more capacious social.22 disability activism and biotechnology might coexist more easily if individual habilitation were accompanied by society’s rehabilitation. such rehabilitation would involve embracing an expansive conceptualization of potential, an open-ended approach to habilitation, and an acceptance of multiple outcomes as normal. abstract while scholars have attended to disability as a new normal that is increasingly present as a category and experience in public spheres, this essay argues that technologies such as cochlear implants and accompanying therapeutics make it possible for children to “become normal.” parents come to expect, rather than hope, that interventions will work. an analysis of habilitating children with cochlear implants in india—and habilitation as a process and practice in general—foregrounds the ways that potentiality attaches to certain kinds of devices, therapeutic methods, and people because of the presumed existence of malleability. habilitation in the case of cochlear implants means developing a hearing brain and becoming a listening and speaking person. potentiality and ideal habilitative trajectories wane with age and families must negotiate expectations in relation to sharply etched ideas of what is normal. this essay stresses that just as scholars have critically attended to rehabilitation, habilitation too is an important process of activating what is perceived to be latent and has future-oriented stakes. [habilitation; rehabilitation; deafness; potentiality; cochlear implants; india] सारांश शोधकर्ताओं ने विकलांगता की खोज सार्वजनिक क्षेत्रों में तेजी से फैलता हुआ एक वर्ग एवं “ नयेसाधारण “ अनुभव के रूप में की हैं ।इस निबंध में यह तर्क दिया है कि “ कॉक्लियर इम्प्लांट “ जैसीटेकनोलोजि और उसके सहयोगी उपचारात्मक तंत्र बच्चो के नॉर्मल बनने की संभावना निर्माण करतेहैं। माता-पिता आशा करने की बजाय अपेक्षा करने लगते हैं कि इस प्रकार के हस्तक्षेप सफल होंगे।भारत में “ कॉक्लियर इम्प्लांट “ का उपयोग करने वाले बच्चो के हॅबिलिटेशन एवं आम हाबिलिटेशनकी प्रक्रिया और कार्यप्रणाली का विश्लेषण क्षमता विस्तार के उन विविध मागों को सामने लाता है, जो संस्कारक्षम प्रभाव का अस्तित्व मानने से , विशिष्ट प्रकार के उपकरण , उपचारात्मक तंत्र, मानव संसाधन के साथ जुड़े हुए हैं| “ कॉक्लियर इम्प्लांट “ के संदर्भ में हॅबिलिटेशन का मतलब श्रवणक्षम दिमाग विकसित करना एवंसुनने और बोलने वाली व्यक्ती बनाना । क्षमता विस्तार और हॅबिलिटेशन के आदर्श मार्ग उम्र केसाथ धीरे-धीरे घटते हैं परिवार वालों ने इस बात को ध्यान में रखते हुए “नॉर्मल” की संकल्पना के बारेमें अपनी धारणा तय करनी चाहिए । इस निबंध में यह बात अधोरेखित की है: शोधकर्ताओं ने रिहॅबिलिटेशन संकल्पना को गंभीरता से परखाहैं| हॅबिलिटेशन एक ऐसी प्रक्रिया है जो , हम जिसे कथित रूप में अव्यक्त समझते हैं उसे सक्रियकरता है और इसका भविष्य में महत्वपूर्ण योगदान हैं । [हॅबिलिटेशन, रिहॅबिलिटेशन, कॉक्लियर इम्प्लांट, विकलांगता, संभावना] notes acknowledgments i thank all the implant users, families, therapists, audiologists, and surgeons who generously shared their expertise and experiences with me. eliza williamson, christine sargent, matthew wolf-meyer, pamela block, stefan helmreich, eugene raikhel, and ken macleish have helped me think through the concepts of habilitation and rehabilitation. thanks to cultural anthropology’s editorial collective, specifically to brad weiss, for shepherding this essay through revisions, as well as to the journal’s anonymous reviewers. 1. for information about and a description of a cochlear implant, which includes a surgically implanted electrode array and external processor that sends signals to the electrode array, see https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/cochlear-implants. 2. see https://hearinghealthmatters.org/hearingandkids/2015/its-not-the-same-old-deafness-2/ 3. statement made september 2020, online workshop. 4. at the same time, however, neuroscience research exists on the so-called degraded signals that people with cochlear implants work with and through, the increased cognitive load carried, and fatigue experienced by people with cochlear implants. cochlear implant manufacturers, audiologists, and speech and language therapists often downplay or ignore this research. see bess and hornsby 2014; moore and shannon 2009; pals et al. 2013, 2020; pisoni et al. 2008. 5. i use potentiality and potential interchangeably, although i see potentiality as the quality of having potential; there is no potential without potentiality. 6. i use pseudonyms for all named participants and in some cases i have changed participants’ gender to further protect their anonymity. i have also changed john croft’s daughter’s name in my discussion of dr. croft’s and his wife’s work with their daughter. 7. the alexander graham bell association for the deaf and hard of hearing is headquartered in washington, d.c. its mission is “working globally to ensure that people who are deaf and hard of hearing can learn to hear and talk” (https://www.agbell.org/). it became an explicitly international organization in 2019. 8. i write “particularly those in government institutions” because private therapists often carefully screened and chose families with whom they worked: they wanted the families and children with the most potential (and the most resources). 9. see mauldin (2016, 28) on the “anticipatory structures” in place to guide families toward cochlear implantation and the scripts they follow. 10. also see landsman (1998, 87) on how families reorient to having a disabled child and, in the process, create new narratives for themselves about their children’s qualities, personalities, and potential. in an indian context, vaidya (2016) has written in a similar vein about parenting an autistic child. 11. in an indian context, much research on disability tends to focus on questions of care, specifically how families care for and manage the integration of their disabled children within families, neighborhoods, and across the life course more generally (addlakha 2020; das and addlakha 2001; ghosh and bannerjee 2017). 12. children play particularly liminal and ambiguous roles in disability movements predicated upon the concept of “nothing about us without us” (groce 1996; carey et al. 2020). who speaks for children and who decides what potential is and what children can become? 13. in deaf signing worlds, learning to sign is also seen as habilitation in that through learning sign language, deaf people become members of deaf sociality. thank you to brad weiss for pointing this out. currently in india, employees at the indian sign language research and training center are fighting for the creation of an early intervention program through which parents and infants/small children will learn sign language. 14. as deaf people often stress, the frame of hearing loss does not capture deaf peoples’ experiences, especially for people born without hearing. such people have not experienced “loss” of a sense, although they may experience loss of a social sense depending on context (bauman and murray 2014). 15. audiologists, speech and language therapists, and families routinely criticized government-distributed hearing aids as low quality. 16. in an interview with this family, the mother told me that she faced familial pressure to not have her child be the first case, or “the guinea pig,” but she felt that she needed to do everything possible for her child. 17. see https://www.asha.org/articles/early-hearing-detection-and-intervention/. 18. this is what mauldin (2016) calls “precarious plasticity.” 19. note that what therapists told families changed according to their perceptions of families’ class and education levels. some therapists simply told families that their child had a “hearing problem” and needed a “machine.” however, i observed therapists in government institutions instructing families about neuroplasticity and the importance of the brain. 20. i met quite a few mothers who became therapists; they were activating their own potentiality as well. another mother named namitha told me that her life dramatically changed after she had her son, learned that he was deaf at six months, and implanted him (too late, she said ruefully) at the age of four. she had a degree in chemistry that she had never used because she had married soon after graduating. she was formerly a housewife but now has become a different person with a new career. she has her own avt practice on the ground floor of her house and sees six to seven children a day. it is easy to dismiss aruna and namitha as upper-class (they are) women rendered malleable by access to resources and time to devote to studying avt. yet this reductive view ignores the ways that these women become different kinds of people in terms of their life and career trajectories and develop new forms of expertise. while malleability—or plasticity—is expected in and from implanted children, it is also expected of mothers. 21. these discourses around lateness have resonance with postcolonial scholarship on teleologies of progress (chakrabarty 2000). however, instead of sitting in the “waiting room,” these children are sitting in the clinic or at home without any intervention, according to professionals (who have a particular view of intervention)—and then they arrive at the waiting room. and note that the “late implanted child” occupies a particularly vexed position in cochlear implant and neuroscience research (fitzpatrick et al. 2015; holt and svirsky 2008), as does the “later signer” in sign language and neuroscience 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https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1352.2010.01169.x zoanni, tyler 2019 “appearances of disability and christianity in uganda.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 3: 444–70. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.3.06 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 125-149, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.10 erratum cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 166, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.07 erratum meneley, anne. 2019. “walk this way: fitbit and other kinds of walking in palestine.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 130–54. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.11. the author has identified the following error in the published article: on p. 151, in the references section, the correct title of the article by mona hajjar halaby is “the proverbial shatha in early twentieth-century jerusalem.” cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 166, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.07 bureaucraft: statemakers in amman and baghdad cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 386-410, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.04 bureaucraft: statemakers in amman and baghdad josé ciro martínez university of york https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7960-4055 omar sirri soas university of london https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4689-0363 bakers and soldiers bakery hamoudeh, al-jubeiha district, amman, november 2015 “is the dough speaking [al-‘ajeen byehki]? is it ready [jahizu]?”1 najib enjoyed tormenting me with these questions. after a month working alongside him, he could have anticipated my habitually equivocal answer—“i don’t know, come take a look.” but najib delighted in my frustration. “how will they give you a doctorate if you can’t even make a decent batch of dough?” he would holler, just loud enough for our work companions to hear, and chuckle. i had arrived at hamoudeh’s with a year’s worth of experience in jordan’s bakeries. and yet still, dough bedeviled me. none of the bakers i apprenticed with ever used a recipe. hardly any of them could fully articulate what exactly made dough come alive. i had botched crucial parts of the bread-making process enough times that i was replaced at the head of the mechanized mixers i tried to vanquish. defeated, i was told to man the oven, or more depressingly, to pack loaves for sale or helm the cash register. dough that kneads well is the building block of khubz ‘arabi, the slightly leavened flatbread also known as arabic or pita bread, which the jordanian government heavily subsidizes. this dough requires flour, water, sugar, yeast, and a few generous pinches of salt. five ingredients, but an inordinate number of possible permutations—and stalemates. an excess of water leads to a greasy sheen that makes dough unworkable. a dearth of it and dough desiccates, shrivels on kneading. weather also matters. it takes longer for dough to rise in colder temperatures, so a bit more yeast is added in winter. hot or cold water is also on hand for when temperatures change, in case the yeast requires assistance. recipes offer some succor, but they ultimately provide only the vaguest of roadmaps. khubz ‘arabi resists easy standardization; homogeny is a chimera. to make stellar dough requires care, dexterity, and resourcefulness. it demands attention not just to ingredients and machinery but also to the many ways these can combine, associate, and amass. such attentions matter because subsidized bread lies at the heart of one of the most sustaining, protracted encounters jordanians maintain with a state apparatus often critiqued for doing very little. bakers are the crucial liaisons in this recurring rendezvous, the irreplaceable implementers of a policy designed at desks but formed and finished at a street level that citizens observe, scrutinize, and encounter at all hours of the day. these bakers know well that decently prepared dough results in not the greatest bread. bad dough usually means no bread altogether. profit margins on khubz ‘arabi are thin, patience among hungry customers even thinner, hence my frequent relegation to other tasks. working with najib offered consolation, maybe even vindication. he did not promise anything directly, of course. assurances arrived via his boss, hosni, for whom he had worked across nearly three decades. “he’s a master baker [mu‘allam khubz huwe],” the bakery owner surmised. “if he can’t teach you, no one can.” military checkpoint, mansour district, baghdad, may 2018 “mazen? he’s full option, man.” normally used to describe a vehicle’s complete selection of features, this is the first time i hear the english “full options” converted into the singular and used to characterize a person’s work abilities. nibras utters the phrase in admiration of his colleague; they have both spent years as iraqi soldiers manning checkpoints in baghdad. mazen has built a venerable reputation. he is astute, switched on, knowing what to be alert to as vehicles move slowly through his checkpoint. his greatest talent? pinpointing vehicle occupants who might be carrying weapons, often handguns. the knack seems almost magical, like the best kind of card trick. but many of mazen’s colleagues are less in awe and more just jealous. for if a soldier successfully stops or prevents illegal activity, he is rewarded with additional time off from his rotation. among soldiers tired of populating these urban security installations, extra reprieve is always welcome. i have been at this checkpoint barely a few days when i get to see mazen’s acumen firsthand and up close. it is early evening, not long after dusk, still a couple of hours from the friday night traffic that will jam this thoroughfare and pack its high-end restaurants. i glance across the relatively empty lanes and see mazen flag down a sedan. it sits idle for a minute as mazen speaks with its driver, an uncommon stop as most vehicles are passing through unencumbered; a queue of cars has already formed behind. he eventually releases the sedan, and the flow resumes. i walk over to mazen to inquire: what was that, why did you hold that guy up, what were you talking about? “he had a weapon, a gun,” mazen casually replies. but how did you know? “it was obvious,” he quips. “his face. under the sun, i could just tell. … his beard, he was not clean shaven.” i hold his attention for a moment longer, for another word. “i have experience,” mazen adds almost whimsically. “i have experience [‘andi khibra … ‘andi khibra].” and the driver, how come you let him pass? “he showed me his identification. he’s in the security forces [muntasib], so he’s permitted to carry a weapon.” tasked with scrutinizing the private interstices of vehicular spaces, looking for signs of suspicion, the work that mazen and his colleagues do at these sites of control [saitarat] has long been lamented as futile by baghdad’s residents. checkpoints do not do anything, most insist, save for perhaps facading fear—their operators standing as scarecrows in the streets. mazen’s abilities trouble such assertions. this view from the checkpoint offers neither exceptions that prove the rule about checkpoint ineffectiveness nor exculpatory evidence that in fact checkpoints successfully engender security in a city long plagued by its lack. rather, modes of labor at baghdad’s checkpoints are grounded in quotidian repetitions that cultivate ways of knowing and seeing, of how to govern at ground level with astuteness. “our work is just routine,” insists mazen, his colleagues too. it is a convincing contention precisely because it evinces how he acquires his shrewdness—and how essential this embodied attribute is to mazen’s job, and the state. rethinking bureaucracy amman’s bakers and baghdad’s soldiers strive to provide subsistence and security. their daily efforts not only enable the social production of life; they also produce public goods, the res publica that underpins the relationship between governments and the governed (hull 2012; chalfin 2014; bear and mathur 2015; larkin 2013). but their work does not transpire in the drab office buildings often portrayed as the slow-beating heart of bureaucratization. like firefighters, customs agents, and social workers, bakers and soldiers are “street-level bureaucrats” (lipsky 1980) who must give content to vague guidelines, strict objectives, and hierarchical directives, often at breakneck speed (fassin 2013; jusionyte 2015; zacka 2017). bakers and soldiers are not involved in straightforward administrative work. they do not sit behind desks; they rarely push paper. the procedures central to their labor do not invariably mean “ignoring all the subtleties of real social existence,” flattening them so to conjure generalizable calculations and conclusions (graeber 2015, 75). we found their labor to be more intricate and multifaceted than prevalent paradigms led us to expect. as vastly different capital cities, amman-baghdad is not an obvious comparison, to say nothing of the dissimilar professions we contrast. our juxtaposition does not strive to identify analogous experiences with political authority in neighboring countries. instead, it tugs at the disparate to help illuminate the agilities keeping the gears of governance well oiled, the work that makes authority seem like it works just well enough. if the state often looks like a machine, what exactly are the machinists doing? we contemplate and think with this question across five parts. following engagements with bureaucracy and craft, we offer two discrete ethnographic accounts that jointly help capture how the state comes together. as in our opening vignettes, we deploy the first person singular in these sections to denote respective fieldwork conducted individually. but we return to the plural in the final section, for our readings, appraisals, and assertions throughout are born in concert and of collaboration. we conclude speculatively, charting how embodied skill and tacit knowledge may help us think about bureaucratic assemblages differently. long-standing conceptualizations of bureaucracy have largely been informed by “(mis)readings” of max weber’s germinal economy and society, wherein bureaucratic capability, in its purest form, is correlated with impartiality, specialization, and stable sets of rules (mathur 2016). but what weber offered as a (depressing) set of ideal types meant to further systematic analysis of the increasing prevalence of institutionalized discipline has been all too often construed as a normative ­archetype. keenly aware of its heuristic nature, weber (2019, 343) rejected “any belief that a historical reality can be entirely ‘captured’” in the conceptual schemata he put forth. as recent and more perceptive re-readings make clear, weber’s language was always more processual than his north american disciples let on, with an emphasis on the “the flow of events, and the formation of orders from actions,” rather than the tenacity of structures (tribe 2019, 65; see also schutz 1967). political orders, weber insists, are contingent on the people, things, and governing practices that compose them. it is precisely such authors and authorizing forces that this essay examines by centering bakers in amman and soldiers in baghdad. these enactors of political order complicate analyses of bureaucracy and the labors that comprise its inner workings. by foregrounding the supply of subsidized bread in one city, and the offer of security in another, we aim to show how the labors of street-level workers prove central to the raison d’être of bureaucracy: raison d’état. we neither claim nor suggest, however, that anyone working with public funds is a bureaucrat. rather, both bakers and soldiers work from and for the state in part through the bureaucratic assemblages in which they are enrolled. they repeatedly labor not in their own name but in that of a collectively validated illusion. as will become clear, the enactment of policy can and often does require both mind and muscle—contingent alignments on which the state effect thrives (mitchell 1991). keeping ethnographic attention on the routine dimensions of embodied practice, we foreground the situated dexterities of those charged with carrying out techniques of rule. rigid, sepia-hued interpretations of what bureaucracies are and who comprises them form part of what our intervention seeks to challenge. illuminating ethnographies have debunked the image of modernist bureaucracies as hierarchical institutions that seamlessly gather knowledge, categorize it, render it technical, and then act on the social body in the name of that knowledge (mathews 2011, 13; hull 2012; mathur 2014). bureaucrats must also negotiate their legal and operational mandates amid value-laden considerations. laura bear (2015) traces the ethical conundrums that accompany bureaucrats along the hooghly river as they seek to sustain the public things central to life along the waterway. unpacking the improvisations and intimacies through which riverine officials meet the fiscal demands of austerity policy, bear (2015, 18) shows how friendship matters more than weberians would expect—so too do the “popular ethics of productivity” through which bureaucrats pursue the public good. like the artifacts with which they are associated, civil servants cannot easily be categorized as monotonous executors of coherent governmental logics. some of the services bureaucrats render are unsteady, some of the materials they must navigate unpredictable. pushing against accounts that situate government solely “at a distance,” nikhil anand (2017, 103) traces the daily exertions of chaviwallas, municipal officials whose physical efforts implement the water schedule drawn up by engineers in mumbai’s water department. their primary job is to turn on and off pipe valves across the city, so that hydraulic pressure is maintained and water flows to the city’s residents. that the provision of water is contingent on a host of factors—technology, social capital, even “the performance of the monsoon” (anand 2017, 50)—reveals the diverse elements needed for mumbai’s hydraulic infrastructure to function. but how are we to conceptualize the necessary if variegated modes of labor without which citizens would lack for the most basic of public goods? what can bakers and soldiers teach us about how states coalesce and the prosaic tasks of government transpire? this article evinces a weberian concern for the people “whose action is dedicated to the execution of general directions and substantive commands” (weber 2019, 338). it foregrounds the complications and contingencies that permeate efforts at bakeries and checkpoints to analyze the skilled improvisations and adroit incisions vital to the provision of public goods. rather than examine bureaucratic organizations, their hierarchical structures, or how they can disempower, we scour atypical sites of governing and the labors that help comprise them to reveal bureaucratic imbrications integral to the state effect. that bakers and soldiers are not obvious candidates for the study of bureaucracy betrays conceptual constraints. for examining how blueprints of rule are enacted helps show what bureaucracies require to work, and how they work to effect. the execution of government policies relies not only on the existence of guidelines, the delineation of objectives, and the strict demarcation of anonymous authority. it requires something else, an attunement to the world that emerges from laboring through it. crafting the state bureaucrats are rarely portrayed as crafty operators. across the middle east, they are more often bemoaned as incompetent, unhelpful sticks in the mud—public employees occupying cushy jobs for too little work and too much pay. but the cliché is an outmoded one. in her exploration of tacit knowledge in cairo, julia elyachar (2012, 78) introduces readers to mr. amir, who insists that his “sense (hiss) of the market, which he had honed over years,” was vital to his work as a lending agent for a public-sector bank. this sense, intangible but indubitable, draws on the tacit knowledge that he has developed over years of having to evaluate risk and calculate value when assessing potential clients. mr. amir’s methods could “appear chaotic” (elyachar 2012, 78), but crucial to his many successes were the “unsystematized, unverbalized forms of knowledge that were integrated into the body itself” (elyachar 2012, 83), ones not easily taught. we find such forms of bureaucratic labor to rely on modes of learning and knowledge transmission that can be usefully understood through the prism of craft. these aptitudes are passed down and shared between colleagues and coworkers, a collective bequest aided by time, training, and repetition. the seemingly banal assignments bureaucrats muddle through take particular forms and styles that allow skills to be honed and ingrained through reiteration. preparation and focus, concentration on task, and attention to situated conditions slowly blend together. in the context of a craft like glassblowing, erin o’connor (2017, 224) calls this an “embodied knowledge” that “not only grounds ‘practical skills,’ but also thinking itself” (see also sennett 2008). physical labor, sensory attunement, and cognitive awareness are inseparable in such milieus—engendering dexterities that can only be learned by watching, doing, and replicating. in her sensorial sojourn through the life of artisanal cheese in the united states, heather paxson (2013, 131) argues that craft is located “at the nexus of art and science,” operating through synesthesia—the criss-crossing and blending of sensorial knowledge and bodily experience. paxson’s (2013, 136) intervention eschews divisions between head and heart, mind and body, foregrounding as a bodily basis for reason “a particular cultivation of the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch/tactility, temporality.” what matters here is not rote repetition for desired result, but that which is attained and exercised through repetition; a “proficiency is gained” when learned intuition and impulse are continually deployed amid pervasive contingency (paxson 2013, 136). whereas technical knowledge can be expressed in universal rules, principles, and propositions, craft is the realm of the contextual, of skills and practices not easily codified. if craft can counterintuitively disabuse us of the “romantic pastoral representations” associated with artisanal cheese (paxson 2013, 203), we suggest it can push against unromantic and rigid axioms attached to the types of bureaucratic labor that produce public goods. craft captures forms of knowledge and skill grounded in experience and attentiveness, cunning and alertness, expressed in particular circumstances and spheres of activity. it is in the study of bureaucracy where we find such forms of operation to be underrecognized. while the reception of public services and infrastructures has been the subject of extensive attention, studies of their enactment too often elide the diverse practices, dexterities, and work required to compose them. the purported logics and rationalities guiding bureaucracies, their frequently “idealized self-representations” (hoag 2011, 84), tend to take precedence over the seemingly banal routines required for their objectives to be achieved. when discretion and canniness are recognized, they are portrayed as an exercise in intellectual judgment, rarely as indicative of embodied knowledge and disposition. yet we find the latter central to what we have observed in amman and baghdad, and introduce here as bureaucraft—skilled, supple, and repetitive forms of labor that enact government and work to provide public goods. bakers and soldiers require competencies that are learned, re-learned, and constantly honed through everyday efforts. brute strength or abstract precision sometimes matter; but most of the time they are of little use and can even prove counterproductive. creativity and resourcefulness, restrained force and improvisation are far more important—so too responding nimbly to a host of sensory stimuli. bureaucraft captures particular kinds of exertions that can shed light on the ordinary ways techniques of rule are enacted by those enrolled in bureaucratic assemblages. in using the term, we seek to evoke not moral struggles over the distribution of resources akin to those of witchcraft (caple james 2012), but the processual activities and agencies that work to “give concrete shape and form to what would otherwise be an abstraction” (gupta 1995, 378). bureaucrats are not faceless cogs in all-mighty structures that mechanically discipline and administrate. taming people, machinery, and materials to make them congenial to the task of government takes a great deal of intricate movement and maneuvering. the state (effect) requires craft. bureaucraft adept interventions in amman hosni had an impressive air and a charming disposition. his manners were old-fashioned, gallant but without pretense. as a bakery owner—introduced earlier—hosni was also a canny businessman. he was a tough employer when needed, but consistently gracious and kind, on which account his workers stomached his high standards. hosni began his entrepreneurial career with two restaurants, one for sandwiches and snacks, another for longer sit-down meals. tired of purchasing bread, the gastronomic linchpin of the meals his restaurant served, hosni decided to streamline his supply chain: he opened his own bakery. hosni was occasionally smug about subsidized bread, which he described as a loss-leader. “profit margins are higher on pretty much every other product we sell,” he told me when i probed his antipathy. “plus, you have to deal with all the rules and regulations that surround the subsidy. it’s a headache.” like other public goods, subsidized bread is composed of a wide array of people, processes, and things. jordan’s ministry of finance purchases wheat through public tenders that invite bids from competing suppliers. once a price is agreed with a qualified bidder, the cereal is sourced from different countries. on arrival in jordan and after passing phytosanitary inspection, wheat is stored for anywhere between three and nine months, after which a division within the ministry of industry, trade, and supply (moits) blends different shipments to obtain ideal protein levels. the resulting wheat mixtures are then transported to one of fourteen privately owned flour mills, where they are made into several types of flour. at the time of my fieldwork (2013–2016), only one of these varieties (colloquially referred to as muwwahad)—milled at a 78 percent extraction rate and sold below market price via government support—could be used for the production of subsidized bread. privately owned bakeries received allocations of muwwahad that were highly contentious, as they depended primarily on the estimated number of customers each bread-maker served. bakeries then produced khubz ‘arabi, a round and flat loaf about sixteen inches in diameter, on which they made a 7 percent profit. this bread had to be sold at the discounted price of 16 qirsh ($0.25) per kilogram to any and all consumers, irrespective of age, income, or nationality. officials from moits regularly inspected bakeries to ensure these subsidy protocols were followed. bakers and bakery owners regularly touted their involvement in this government program as an altruistic mode of public service. implemented in 1974 amid protests at rising commodity prices, jordan’s bread subsidy epitomized a mixed, even haphazard approach to managing the population’s well-being at a time when the caring functions of government had come under question. the welfare policy accompanied other measures meant to keep social peace, carefully calibrated to minimize discontent among both business and labor. this was done by improving the citizenry’s purchasing power at the government’s expense rather than through negotiated wage increases. subsidies and price controls lowered both the cost of living and the overheads of key industrial inputs (labor, energy), subtly dissipating the antagonisms between employers and employees through the strategic use of foreign aid flowing into jordanian government coffers from iraq, the united states, and the gulf. broadly popular and consistently defended, the bread subsidy survived drastic cuts to other welfare services over the ensuing decades. amid such austerity, it served as a haunting reminder of the more interventionist techniques of social government that once strived to improve living conditions across the hashemite kingdom. and while preparation and sale by privately owned bakeries certainly depends on the now more heavily promoted strictures of capitalist economic enterprise, subsidized bread production does not cleave neatly to such logics. “you see,” hosni told me when explaining why his bakery continued to make khubz ‘arabi despite meager returns, “everyone buys subsidized bread, some people rely on it to survive. so we must offer it. it’s our duty.” hosni was acutely aware that khubz ‘arabi sustains livelihoods in the city of amman. his frustrations related less to the goal of bread provision than to the underlying assumptions and approach moits deployed to ensure this foodstuff never lacked. “the problem is all the paperwork,” he would often moan, believing it unfeasible to model bread-making or forecast production while sitting at a desk. despite moits’s attempts to construct an abstract field of observation through which the governmental gaze could travel without impediment, the bakery is a lively domain not easily made amenable to calculation (martínez 2022). the provision of public goods undoubtedly relies on quantitative techniques, detailed rules, and meticulous regulations—the realm and remit of the bureau. but it also requires collaborative modes of labor that cannot always be legislated, decreed, or produced on demand. bureaucratic toil comes in different shapes and forms. hosni employed nine bakers. while these men had varying levels of experience, their bodies all spoke to the trials of their trade—inflamed fingers, callused hands, and the slightest of bumps at the base of their necks. more painful than these visible wounds were the permanently sprained wrists triggered by the repetitive motions required to bake. of the bread-makers employed by hosni, najib was the least vocal in complaining about his physical ailments. probably because he was also the most careful in his movements, as years of unforgiving labor had taught him how to navigate the pains that accompanied his occupation. i worked at hamoudeh’s part-time for three months as an unpaid apprentice, participating in what trevor marchand (2010, s9) describes as an “exchange of toil for ethnographic knowledge.” when it came to making dough, my first week apprenticing under najib comprised nothing but observation. this first step in the baking process was one that clearly eluded me. i was only trusted to execute other tasks—shape dough, operate the oven—once my competence was confirmed. during the workweek (sunday–thursday), dough is made six times a day (occasionally seven), in two-man teams and at two-hour intervals coordinated to meet peak sales hours. the process begins at the refrigerator, where bakers fetch fresh yeast; they proof it by crumbling and mixing the substance with the slightest bit of sugar using the back of a large metal spoon. once the yeast starts to dissolve—less than a minute later—they add it to a pitcher of lukewarm water. in ten to fifteen minutes, the yeast should foam, froth, and bubble. this rehydration is vital. fresh yeast has a short shelf life; without confirming its vitality, one runs the danger that dough will not rise. as the yeast proofs, and becomes increasingly aromatic, flour is procured from the storeroom. it is poured into a large, mechanized mixer, followed by more water. after a brief blend, salt is scooped in, along with another pinch of sugar. the proofed yeast and a bit more water are then added to the mixer. the ingredients are kneaded at a low speed for five minutes, then at medium-high for another fifteen to twenty. the tempo and duration of this process are a bone of contention among connoisseurs. haste and pace can destroy the flavors emergent in the dough. but no formula or instructions are displayed at hamoudeh. i was only given a rough approximation of ingredients (twenty-five kilograms of flour, ten of water, three of sugar, three-hundred grams of salt, and a long tab of fresh yeast). yet no one ever seemed to make reference to this recipe—let alone follow it. far more important than any set of guidelines was a grasp for how the dough should look, feel, and pulsate. the early days of my apprenticeship with najib were spent unlearning fixed rules. i was well-versed with the ingredients and biochemical reactions that underpin a good batch of dough. but familiarity with empirical science was, most of the time, of very little use. the problem with dough was its variability—no two batches were alike. the problem with me was my inflexibility—unable to relinquish strict record-keeping and measurement. the latter two can aid the apprentice baker, but they do not guarantee fluency, and sometimes work against it. biochemical reactions need to be carefully observed and nurtured, of course. but the organic forces and machineries that compose dough in amman’s small-scale bakeries do not correspond to the systematized procedures and hypersterile conditions that characterize bakeries in the city’s burgeoning supermarkets. the key, najib repeated ad nauseam, was reading and responding quickly to the dough as one worked alongside it. responsiveness mattered because temperatures frequently fluctuated. “feel the dough,” najib told me constantly. “ask it how much warmth it needs.” machinery made important differences as well. hamoudeh’s mechanized mixer was half the size of the smallest one i had encountered in previous apprenticeships. manufactured in a local factory, this spiral mixer better minimized heat input into dough so as to develop gluten structure, further altering recipes with which i had become familiar. despite moits’s attempts to standardize subsidized flour through detailed parameters for millers, the variable qualities of wheat also made a small but important difference (see babül 2017, 6; hetherington 2014, 57). the “better” the wheat, for example, the more absorbent and permeable the flour, making slightly less yeast necessary. an initial error often meant hurried reductions or increases in the amount of water; lasting missteps could weaken the dough as the fermentation lost its force. i asked often about such variations, repeating to myself what i was told or hurrying to jot down najib’s observations on a notepad. but he was always quick to discourage such actions. “concentrate on the dough,” he’d sigh. “watch it, smell it, listen to it.” najib, i later realized, was trying to instill in me an attentiveness to what paxson (2013, 144) calls an “entire ecology of productive agency,” without which bureaucraft runs askew. always eager to seek the solace of pen and paper, najib would routinely creep up behind me and, with a delicate touch to my elbow and a musical, narcotic whisper in my ear, remind me to get my fingers back in the dough, my nostrils closer to the mixer. he knew well that i needed to learn to make dough amid a variety of climactic conditions and with a range of components and machinery. his goal, in teaching apprentices to “read” dough in the making, is to have them gain an intimate understanding of its possible permutations. flour and yeast, water and salt, are capricious, fickle ingredients in constant motion; their agency could only be determined through their “intra-action” (barad 2007, 33). of course, such an approach should not be mistaken for a lack of rigor. hamoudeh was well known for its excellent khubz ‘arabi, and hosni took quality control seriously, as it could affect not only his bakery but his other businesses. najib’s goal was to produce a reliable, appetizing foodstuff amid ever-fluctuating circumstances—similarity without symmetry. only after some weeks did it become clear that technical comprehension took a backseat to developing sensory knowledges that allowed the apprentice baker to interpret the machinations of the dough as it was made. najib’s central premise was that only this firsthand, visceral acquaintance with dough could nurture the quick responses and speedy modifications required to prepare a batch successfully. years of baking had taught him that recipes could never offer precise instructions, only the fuzziest of outlines. one had to read dough, to be receptive to its potentials, rather than striving to systematize its possibilities. to achieve consistency in form and flavor amid ever-shifting conditions only partially amenable to human control, one had to embrace uncertainty, the distributed nature of agency (bennett 2020, 79). “be patient and kind with the ingredients,” najib would say, “otherwise they’ll turn on you.” preparing good dough that was ready to be kneaded—pliable, moist without being wet—demanded attuning oneself to the multispecies forces that work to compose it, a skill set biased far more toward vibrancy than instrumentality. when we were first introduced, najib exuded cigarette smoke and a subtle self-assurance—the type of man a flour-filled aura grows around. he chose his trade not to obtain money or things, trivial pursuits others chased. baking bread was about feeding people, he stressed, as assured in the value of his profession as a priest or a plumber. conscious, like his boss, that the bakery’s rhythms and routines determined how subsidized bread policy was enacted, najib strove to ensure khubz ‘arabi was both available and appetizing. he spoke of his job in terms that would be familiar to students of bureaucracy—najib considered himself a watchful purveyor of public resources. his mission was to ensure “everyone can eat good, cheap bread,” ideally “that no one in amman lack for food or other basic goods.” it is a state of subsistence pithily captured in a phrase he often used to impart that life would be fine when, “the bread is baked and the water stored [al-khubz makhbuz wa-l-mai fi-l-kuz].” but it was the work itself, najib’s daily grind, that would perplex enthusiasts of documents, files, and paperwork. making subsidized bread, becoming a deft elaborator of dough, requires putting an array of organic and technological forces into productive play. it is not just adroitness with one’s hands or technologies that matters. adeptness here looks similar to that explored by jessica barnes (2022, 151) in staple security, where making essential foodstuffs available requires not imposing oneself on materials but learning to manage “a complex network of interactions,” so that wheat can become bread. master bakers know both the protocol and the practicalities; their bodily competence has accumulated to the point where making dough becomes a matter of reflexive feel under variable conditions, one that barely requires deliberation (herzfeld 2004). for the apprentice, learning to make dough required laboriously cultivating the senses so as to deploy the ideal means of intermediation, following currents and energies to work “from within the world, not upon it” (ingold 2000, 347). bureaucraft here is tacit but teachable, a collective inheritance and savoir faire that escapes statistics and standardization, reliant as it is on the vitality of tools, technologies, and people. subsidized bread is undoubtedly an object of management intimately imbricated with biopolitical forms of rule. but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a life-giving resource made through daily practices that are methodical, nimble, and frequently proficient. amman’s bakers are revelatory in this respect. they make clear the tacit knowledge and sensory aptitudes required by those who work to provide public goods. these are, rather plainly, dispositions that cannot be inculcated via rules, regulations, or instruction manuals. they require stimuli, encouragements, and inducements that are gradual, steady, and subtle, more crafted than coerced. as they nourish residents, jordan’s bakers draw on and generate forms of life, mediating a swirl of agents and agencies to ensure that no one lacks for khubz. my goal here is not to idealize a working landscape in which underpaid bakers prepare a basic foodstuff that works to prevent starvation, in what amounts to the most minimal of welfare services extended by an unabashedly authoritarian regime. nor is it to romanticize not-quite-alienated forms of labor as an antidote to industrial production and dramatic socioeconomic inequalities. rather, it is to forefront just some of the “essential ingredients” that contribute to forces of rule, while also scrutinizing the modes of labor crucial to their enactment (lea 2020, 7). whatever a jordanian bakery’s size, there are more actors at play than conventional frameworks tend to consider. bureaucratic worlds are complex ecologies whose intricacies tend to lie buried beneath the veneer of technocratic omnipotence. bread governs, of course, but it requires laborious preparation. ways of seeing in baghdad strands of hair are poking out from under mazen’s beige helmet. he needs a cut and he knows it. it is a slow evening at the checkpoint. he takes advantage of the trickle of traffic, strolling to the nearest barber he frequents—then returns minutes later. “he was too busy to see me,” mazen moans to his fellow soldiers standing at the checkpoint. but before they can reply, he moves to more pressing matters. “listen, the commander called the head of our checkpoint and complained that we aren’t checking anyone, that we’re not stopping any cars.” the calm and quiet we are all experiencing is not a matter of circumstance. it is being manufactured by the soldiers themselves, who are apparently neglecting their responsibilities. “yalla, let’s move.” the two soldiers i am standing with at the secondary vehicle search are slow to react to mazen’s order. they stretch out their on-duty loitering for as long as they can while mazen mobilizes the others. he hollers ahead to the two soldiers manning the front of the checkpoint about fifteen meters away, watching more than inspecting the cars passing through. “guys!” mazen shouts, adding a purse-lipped whistle that makes their heads turn. “send us some folks, would you?! send us some!” he barks. his order is accompanied by a gesture, as he rapidly taps his left shoulder three times with his three right forefingers. the signal lends hierarchical imprimatur to his directive: the order has come from an officer, from a man with a powerful epaulette. the soldiers get into position and begin anew to carry out what each of them have expressed to me is shugl routiney—routine work. checkpoints along baghdad’s main thoroughfares are composed of two spaces. all drivers and passengers encounter the first. the front of the checkpoint is divided into two or three lanes, depending on the width of the road, through which vehicles pass. the other space is a secondary search area. security personnel follow a limited set of learned practices while manning (always men) the front of the checkpoint—what soldiers mainly refer to when describing their routiney exertions. they look to see if vehicle windows are tinted (which are illegal unless the vehicle belongs to a government ministry, public institution, or political party/parastatal armed group). they glance at the front bumper to ensure a license plate is present and legible. soldiers also expect those passing through to behave according to motor skills learned through years of checkpoint interactions—dial car music down, shut headlights off, flick cabin lights on, slow speed to a crawl. those who do not follow these formulae, which long ago became knee-jerk reflexes among baghdadi drivers approaching checkpoints, are often directed to the secondary search area. a more active set of probing practices occurs at the secondary search, ones that center around a line of political-geographic questioning. soldiers often ask drivers and passengers where they are going, from where they are coming, and if they are carrying any weapons. these queries are grounded in an ethnosectarian logic that took shape during identitarian-based violence that gripped baghdad in 2006 and 2007. throughout this period, iraqi security personnel operating checkpoints—backed by u.s. occupying forces grasping to regain control of the capital—would press vehicle occupants on their movements. a primary goal was to determine whether travelers were departing from and/or entering into neighborhoods understood by checkpoint personnel as not matching a traveler’s own sect. imagined sectarian geographies were thus deployed by these personnel as a basis for controlling vehicular mobility across the city (deeb and harb 2013; nucho 2016; fregonese 2019). residents risking travel had to have exceptionally good reason to traverse different districts, to cross urban circumscriptions; put differently, perceived social-spatial mismatch often suggested to security personnel that travelers’ movements might be motivated by sectarian malice. most fixed (thabita) checkpoints have slowly been removed in recent years, though a select few still remain. many others have been converted into federal police outposts occupying sidewalks and manned with police officers at the ready to launch temporary “flying” checkpoints (murabata) should they be commanded to do so. interrogatory practices still persist. identity cards can be checked, with names often judged indicative of ethnosectarian cleavage. trunks are sometimes inspected, though most travelers are eventually permitted to pass without further disturbance or delay. in 2018, during and after my in situ observation at two checkpoints—one in mansour district and another in karada district—the routines that helped comprise these sites were the target of acerbic condemnation by the city’s residents. some criticisms were mundane, others struck at the heart of public expectations of government anywhere. checkpoints can cause long traffic delays, triggering eye rolls, heavy sighs, and unequivocal declarations about deficient air-conditioning systems. the security personnel who populate them are often bemoaned as poorly educated, even as they wield consequential control over basic movements across the city. but such frustrations are grounded in broader disillusionment with these penetrating architectures of security—once numbering close to 1,500 (icg 2010)—that appear to have little effect engendering that which they purport to instill. feelings of apoplexy directed toward checkpoints are spawned and spread in an urban setting where an array of public services, security being only one, have proved inadequate for so long. these widespread grievances are ambivalent, sometimes in outright tension with one another (martínez 2023). through periods of urban calm, residents criticize checkpoints as a bad joke or “tricks” (klawat). yet during swellings of violence, with residents yearning for remedies to quell inescapable insecurity, checkpoints are lamented not as nuisance but let-down, neglect, even negligence. security practices are understood as necessary, at times even endorsed, as long as they “work” or are deemed “successful;” according to most baghdadis, their city’s checkpoints do not and are not. public certitude that these installations amount to nothing begets burrowing into how they function. figuring out what exactly they do does not mean refuting what baghdadis know to be true about the checkpoints with which they have lived for so long. instead, dwelling on how checkpoints operate through the labor and know-how of the men who control them suggests their situated work remains integral to the construction of political authority, even when it is deplored. labor at the checkpoint must wrestle with the circulation of social and political capital attached to vehicles. an instructive example is the toyota land cruiser gxr—colloquially known by an acronym-cum-phonetic: jexara (pl. jexarat). weighty sport utility vehicles, most jexarat that move through baghdad’s streets are white, usually darkened only by jet-black tinted windows. sometimes their doors are bullet proof, depending on the importance of their occupants. these people are invariably politicians and senior ministry officials, leaders of parastatal armed factions once known as militias, or wealthy businessmen. as i stood with sadiq at the checkpoint in mansour, a jexara slowly rolled to a stop. sadiq’s upright, soldierly disposition quickly shifted. he turned relaxed yet also deferential. inside the vehicle sat a tribal sheikh from anbar province. sadiq knew this from the license plate bearing the province’s name and the plump shape and chiefly demeanor of the jexara’s most important passenger—to say nothing of his accompanying security detail. sadiq leaned lightly on the open window. “how are you all?” he asked politely. the sheikh offered his own pleasantries, inquiring if sadiq and his colleagues needed anything. sadiq placed his hand over his heart and thanked the sheikh for his concern. the jexara slowly pulled away. sadiq is a small man with airs of confidence. he often engages his fellow soldiers in brief conversations, sometimes about the dire climate conditions in the southern and rural parts of the country, from where he and many of his colleagues hail. days into my time at the checkpoint, i angle to press him with a question or two, starting with a basic query about what he is looking for as vehicles pass through the checkpoint. “you have to look at people, you can tell who to stop by their look [shikilhom],” sadiq begins somewhat vaguely. “the car matters too. take the charger for instance.” he is making reference to the dodge-made vehicle popularized in iraq after 2003. “there actually aren’t many chargers in baghdad. they come from elsewhere, from the provinces. so we know to stop them, and check them, ask drivers to get out of the car, sometimes pat them down.” on slow approach to the checkpoint, a vehicle’s make becomes the first marker shaping how soldiers will interact with its occupants. cars and suvs are not simply indicators of economic status. they also help soldiers place and make sense of the political significance of the people traveling in them, in turn informing their interrogatory routines. at first glance, both sadiq’s visual work and his description of it appear ambiguous, blurry, filled with speculation about car and class, territory and even tribe. but his mundane exertions and explanations draw attention to how “situated knowledges,” as donna haraway (1988) calls them, are inherent to his labor. pushing back against “unlocatable” claims to objectivity, haraway (1988, 583) deploys vision as metaphor to convincingly argue that ways of knowing should be grounded in “particular and specific embodiment,” partial perspectives that offer clairvoyance precisely because they are fragmentary (haraway 1988, 582). haraway is compelling here not because sadiq, a foot soldier with a middle-school education, offers his own subjugated standpoint to which haraway herself is so committed; an infantryman tasked with governing, sadiq is hardly her muse. sadiq and his colleagues indeed appear to occupy the street as a standing force representing a singular response to that which threatens their claim to monopoly violence. but they are directed to carry out other kinds of repetitive work precisely because the claim to exclusive authority is so tenuous and shaky, so frequently contested, often so unconvincing. of at least equal consequence then is how sadiq sees, who he is looking for, what hints he is trained to detect—the minutiae that help comprise both “the violence implicit in [his] visualising practices” (haraway 1988, 585) and the deference to other political powers passing through, the avoidance of violence at almost all costs. his efforts rest on “modes and objects of perception” that constitute what allen feldman (2006, 429) calls a “scopic regime,” seeing practices that help generate ruling practices. seeing is a governmental technique, but not in unadulterated form (scott 1998; hammami 2019). the state “requires a knowledge tuned to reasonance [sic]” (haraway 1988, 588). for the state to work at and through the checkpoint, soldiers must know what to look for, a skill attained and sharpened through situated sweat. cars passing through signal social-political status, mobile capital that invariably informs routine checkpoint procedures. when da‘ish—also known as isil or the islamic state—held control of huge portions of territory in western and northern iraq (2014–2017), vehicles with license plates from da‘ish-held provinces were commonly stopped at checkpoints. these vehicles were not only pulled over as they moved between provinces but also within baghdad, as security personnel were tasked with fortifying the capital by monitoring movement across it—just as they were a decade before. sadiq’s mention of the charger is particularly noteworthy because the vehicle is often used by drivers making long journeys across iraq, transporting people and light goods. sadiq knows the jexara is a carrier of influence; his routines adjust with deference. but when seeing the charger—or merely recalling it—he alludes to broader conditions of insecurity as justification for his closer scrutiny of the vehicle and its occupants. iraq’s vehicular geographies are closely implicated in checkpoint labor and soldierly competence. but this know-how also brings into stark relief the longevity of the conditions through which it is attained and passed on, and the endurance of checkpoint practices for which informed adroitness is requisite. history weighs heavily on the checkpoint—and on bureaucraft itself. along with federal police officers, traffic cops, and other security personnel, soldiers in baghdad have for years proven central to what ilana feldman (2008, 3) calls “tactical government”—a mode of rule shaped by crisis rather than long-term planning, one that “presumes little stability in governing conditions.” these men are imbricated in the “form, shape and habits of daily practices” that shape the “tenacity” of government in iraq’s capital (i. feldman 2008, 13). but baghdad’s checkpoints, and the labor that helps comprise them, also trouble feldman’s distinction between “crisis services” marked by “exceptionality” and more mundane, “everyday services” like road construction (i. feldman 2008, 157). for these installations are both temporary sites of control during supposed crises and unexceptional sites of longer-term rule. tactical governing in iraq holds any binary in abeyance; emergencies are unremarkable, crises commonplace. put differently, checkpoint labor is liminal. the range of undertakings at checkpoints helps make their very existence initially and recurringly possible. when vehicles are directed to the secondary search point, soldiers can pose questions tinged with identitarian inquiry that ultimately elide space and sect. but questions of where someone is going or from where they are coming are not asked mindlessly. nor are these routine queries inquisitions. they are qualified interactions saturated with discretion and capriciousness. soldiers often ask these stock questions and usually receive banal answers. but of equal concern to them are a host of other social cues, gestures, and commentaries from passers-through—careful if fleeting considerations of what is not said, what is left out, and the ways in which drivers and passengers variably encounter and esteem their exertions. nibras is hardly chatty. he is more interested in completing his shift without fuss or incident. i am thus struck, when i am with him at the secondary search, by the ways in which he drags out conversation with drivers and passengers under his inspection. in one instance he holds up a group of young men in a new nissan sedan. the car is stuffed with giddy testosterone; one lad in the back is trying to keep himself from laughing. nibras is annoyed, almost insulted, and asks for the laugher’s identification. “what’s so funny? is there something up ahead that’s making you giggle?” before the young man can answer, nibras continues scanning the shoddily laminated document. “this identity card, it’s not the original. it’s a photocopy. where’s the original?” the young man’s smile disappears as he realizes he may have a problem: “it’s with my parents, for safekeeping,” he replies in a halting but insistent tone. nibras inhales, clearly frustrated, but finds the answer sufficient: “then say that from the beginning,” he admonishes—and then flicks his head leftward, allowing the boys through. baghdadis often maintain that checkpoints lack rhyme or reason, that they function “depending on the mood” (hasb mazajhom) of the security personnel populating them. such moods are in turn affected by a host of unpredictable factors, from the day’s weather conditions and heat index to whether a soldier is having marital problems. but the dispositions of the young men in the sedan—long accustomed to being singled out at checkpoints because of age and gender intersections—also impact how nibras does his job. their initially casual demeanor reinforce the extent to which such checkpoint interactions have conditioned their urban mobilities; they have been here many times before. but nibras too, maybe far more often. in dressing them down, he warns the young men that they best not get too comfortable. he does so by knowing where to press and how to irk, leaning on the expectation that they possess proper identification to pass through the city. at work here is bureaucraft, a calibration between duty and discernment that helps weave the net of authority in which these men have briefly but habitually been caught up. mazen, sadiq, nibras, and their fellow soldiers have slowly honed a hiss or “sense” for suspicion over years standing at checkpoints in baghdad (elyachar 2012). this sense has been acquired through procedures long used at these sites, and to which residents have long been subject. without the monotony of inspecting travelers during their shugl routiney, soldiers could not have crafted judicious tactics critical to how they do their jobs. their sevenor tenor sometimes fourteen-day rotations consist of long hours and double shifts manning checkpoints, exhausting work that also remains a target of public ire. common criticisms of checkpoints are largely warranted, but less because of those who man them. lives lost to years of security breakdowns have ignited anger and contempt toward these installations, which barely burden those with contacts and capital. still, insisting checkpoints are mere chicanery occludes the practices of authority and compliance they work to produce and reproduce. the assertion also precludes determining how soldiers come to see and know, and how they deploy their situated knowledge to help pull off a “god trick” (haraway 1988, 589)—one more commonly known as the state. toward a stately conclusion bureaucracies are mercurial. they rely on the slow accrual of sociomaterial processes, documentary forms, and technopolitical relations. their protean components are sometimes material constituents, such as those that bakers need to make bread. in other circumstances, volatility transpires affectively—like the fluctuating moods soldiers both carry and generate (martínez and sirri 2020). and yet in each case, bureaucrafters wrestle constantly with the mutable—taming temperamentality into the public goods on which so many citizens rely. with or without fixed areas of responsibility, rule-bound methods, and regimented procedures, bureaucracy is riddled with skilled improvisation, peppered by shrewd extemporization. by linking bureaucracy to craft, and thinking through them across two very different spaces and cities, we have sought to bring into relief the ways in which soldiers and bakers are state-makers. our juxtaposition insists that central to any state story are the ways in which those who appear to be background characters in fact prove central to the plot. their exertions musn’t disappear (mckittrick 2021, 15). for the vibrant labors that work at once to make and remake the state can also impel, now and again, a strategic collapse or a tactical short circuit (harney and moten 2013, 145). that the routine practices of soldiers and bakers work to create such a thing as the state should help disabuse anyone of the suggestion that our intervention seeks solely to redeem the efforts of the men we engage, spend time with, sometimes work alongside, and even befriend. their efforts receive our examination precisely because they are helping to engender that which so many citizens in these two cities criticize as inadequate and absent, denounce as intrusive and coercive. the unlike comparison we offer also alerts us to what rebecca bryant (2021, 59) insists are “ambiguities in the definition of supposedly real stateness.” the ambiguities arise in part from desires and expectations around the provision of public goods—subsistence and security being only two. but in our cases, it is not so much “fakeness” (bryant 2021, 58) that is leaned on, produced, or even invariably accepted amid performative work enacting stateness. rather, privileging the exhausting labor of those “jerry-building” the very thing with which so many citizens are disillusioned turns our attention to how bureaucrafters are themselves ambiguous functionaries whose work exhorts them to implement directives with deftness. put differently, if the state “never quite becomes what it should be” (bryant 2021, 58), one way to come to grips with how it constantly comes up short is to explore the slow slogging away always occurring in the crevices of our collective inadequacy. public goods are central to stateness. but such provisions are also provisional. accretions abound, intransigence can be a product of materials, human brokers, and more. adept means of intervention need not come in the forms so often assumed. politics can also be a matter of toil and exertion that orders reality in slightly different ways—a pungent loaf of supple bread, a sympathetic smile to an exhausted driver passing through. abstract bakers and soldiers strive to provide subsistence and security to the residents of amman and baghdad. neither set of actors is involved in straightforward administrative work; they do not sit behind desks, they rarely push paper. they are instead enrolled in bureaucratic assemblages colored with an altogether different hue. this article dissects the embodied dexterities deployed by bakers and soldiers as they carry out their jobs at bakeries and checkpoints dotted across the jordanian and iraqi capitals. drawing on ethnographic work, we develop the concept of bureaucraft to analyze the variegated modes of labor without which citizens would lack for some of the most basic of public goods. taming people and things to make them congenial to the state effect takes a great deal of shrewd maneuvering. we strive to demonstrate that it requires craft. [state; bureaucracy; bureaucraft; amman; baghdad; bakery; checkpoint] notes acknowledgments thank you to brent eng, ilana feldman, kerem ussakli, and michael vine for reading and generously commenting on drafts of this article. we are also grateful to sherene seikaly for her active and enduring support. our deepest gratitude goes to comrades, companions, and collaborators in amman and baghdad, without whom this article, and so much else, would not have been possible. 1. this article uses a simplified version of the ijmes system of transliteration for arabic words, and pseudonyms to de-identify our interlocutors. references anand, nikhil 2017 hydraulic city: water and the infrastructures of citizenship in mumbai. durham, n.c.: duke university press. babül, elif m. 2017 bureaucratic intimacies: translating human rights in turkey. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. barad, karen 2007 meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, 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distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.04 speculative undergrounds: oil’s absent presence, neo-imperial nationalisms, and earth politics in turkey cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 411-437, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.05 speculative undergrounds: oil’s absent presence, neo-imperial nationalisms, and earth politics in turkey zeynep oguz university of edinburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4165-1374 a black cat in a dark room “why does turkey have so little petroleum when its neighbors possess some of the largest oil reserves in the world?“ asked murat, a seasoned exploration geologist employed at turkey’s state-owned oil exploration and production company turkish petroleum (tpao). murat was speaking at a panel titled “the future of exploration and production fields in southeastern anatolia,” organized in the oil-producing eastern town of adıyaman in october 2016. “that’s the question i always get from people when they learn my occupation. i’m sure other geologists and petroleum engineers in the room are also familiar with this,” murat added. the audience, mostly composed of young tpao employees and graduate petroleum and geological engineering students, smiled and nodded. murat was referring to a series of questions constantly asked of petroleum geologists by turkish people in everyday life. during my research between 2016 and 2018, i encountered similar questions as a non-geologist whenever i mentioned that i was investigating the social and political aspects of turkish petroleum. “is turkey actually oil-rich?” “is its oil hidden from the public?” “is oil production being obstructed?” such questions almost always proved affectively charged, with a sense of suspicion, loss, or desire accompanying them. the panel formed part of a larger event co-sponsored by tpao and the turkish chamber of geological engineers to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the first discovery of commercially viable petroleum in turkey. i had initially planned to explore the intersections of petroleum exploration and extraction with military-colonial politics in turkey’s kurdish-populated southeast. but crucial as those intersections might be, i soon realized they were not the entire story. i observed that the very meaning of petroleum differed in various scientific, political, and popular accounts in turkey. oil in turkey, i soon realized, had an absent presence generative of a series of questions that occupied the everyday lives of murat, his audience, and millions of others. figuring out what lay under the ground was not the only issue; geopolitical questions followed: to whom did that ground—and the oil resources that might lie under the ground—belong? why had the underground of turkey’s territory proved so unyielding of oil, when its neighbors had enjoyed its abundance for a century? where was the oil that remained undiscovered? was it somehow hidden by sinister powers aiming to obstruct turkey’s development? it became apparent to me that uncertainties about what was under the ground were further linked to contemporary anxieties and desires of territorial belonging and geopolitics in turkey; such uncertainties proved central to histories of the collapse of the ottoman empire at the end of world war i and nation-state formation. for murat, as a geologist, answers to such questions were linked to the geological properties of turkey. on that day at the panel in adıyaman, after a brief pause, he continued: “well, the questions we encounter are not irrelevant, but i usually answer them with another question: how do you find a black cat in a dark room? this is what exploring oil in turkey is like.” people in the room sighed affirmingly. “of course, we have some hydrocarbon reserves—about 300 million barrels of proven oil reserves—but those are minor compared to opec countries, some of which border us in the east and southeast,” murat added. two young petroleum geologists sitting next to me chuckled. “not exactly iran or iraq, huh?” one of them whispered to his friend. murat and his petroleum-geology-trained audience that day were primarily concerned with how, in turkey, the thirty-billion-year-old geophysical and geochemical history of southeastern anatolia had generated some of the world’s most minor and most difficult-to-locate oil fields. anatolia sits between three major tectonic plates that have been colliding for millions of years. this geophysical process has squeezed eastern anatolia between the eurasian and arabian tectonic plates, with petroleum settling in small traps under the ground. further, the quality of turkey’s few existing oil deposits is relatively poor. turkish petroleum and other companies have drilled thousands of wells in the past, yet many did not prove economically feasible, leading to their decommissioning. consequently, no significant oil discovery comparable to those in iran or iraq has occurred in turkey. the year i attended murat’s talk, for example, turkey’s limited domestic oil production covered only 7 percent of its annual demand (mapeg 2017). if oil exploration in turkey resembles finding a black cat in a dark room, for murat, petroleum geology could not fully know the underground. the geologic, or the physical, material qualities and processes of the earth itself, had a material quality beyond technoscientific attempts to grasp it. despite technological advances in seismic modeling methods, for example, the subsoil, its workings, and history could not be fully known. chronically faced with gaps in knowledge and the inability of mediating tools to fully capture the materiality of the underground, geologists reflexively liken themselves to interpretive social scientists and historians.1 the resemblance between geological and other forms of interpretative reasoning reconfigures the underground into a rich terrain for a series of territorial and geopolitical speculations in turkish public life. the fraught tectonic history of anatolia, the indeterminate materiality of the underground here, and geology’s inability to fully know the properties of the underground have given oil in turkey its absent presence.2 in this article, i examine how oil’s absent presence incites a series of speculations in turkish public life, while simultaneously producing concrete geopolitical and affective outcomes in the present. in doing so, i trace widespread speculations regarding oil’s alleged abundance and its obstructed production in turkish public and political life. in such speculations, people often claim that oil wells are intentionally plugged by turkish oil companies or that sinister western powers are blocking oil exploration and production in turkey. murat, for instance, often complained about the countless calls and letters he received. in these communications, whom murat called “concerned citizens” would come across petroleum seeps and claim that such traces of oil indicated a significant and undiscovered oil field in the area. others insisted that oil companies had maliciously decommissioned wells despite containing plentiful petroleum. in situations like this, murat would often find himself having to explain the difference between commercially viable oil and unrecoverable petroleum resources.3 i also focus on a rather specific speculation revolving around the centennial anniversary of an international treaty that founded the republic of turkey on july 24, 1923: the treaty of lausanne.4 according to a widespread theory that circulated in turkish public and political life during my fieldwork, the treaty of lausanne was going to expire on july 24, 2023, on the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the republic. although no evidence points to the reality of such an event, many people in turkey viewed it as an established fact. once lausanne expired, many believed, turkey would have full sovereignty over its petroleum reserves. as such, i bring together ethnographic research on two seemingly unrelated topics concerning contemporary turkey: uncertainties about what the underground contains and how it could not be rendered entirely knowable, on the one hand and, on the other, anxieties and desires around the never fully settled political borders on top of the ground. i argue that both are subject to endless modes of speculative reasonings, and propose the concept of the “speculative undergrounds” to make sense of the surprising resonance of these multilayered currents of geopolitical, territorial, and affective registers across the geologic that i found during fieldwork. i propose that an ethnographically grounded analysis of the speculative underground in turkey can help us better understand the relationship between the geologic and the sociopolitical, more generally. how do i conceptualize speculation? i discuss speculations about hidden or obstructed oil production that circulate in everyday chatter and regional and national media. such speculations often stem from abandoned oil wells, visually observable oil seeps over the ground, and turkey’s geographic proximity to large petroleum fields outside its borders. in these speculations made without clear-cut scientific evidence, or even despite it, people claim that oil is actually abundant under the ground and that western powers have plugged oil wells to obstruct production. speculations about lausanne’s expiration and the subsequent reclamation of oil resources in turkey constitute a reversal of mandana limbert’s (2010, 18) account of the dreamtime of oil in oman, where official oil projections prompt the “constant anticipation of oil’s depletion in twenty years—an ever-deferred horizon.” whereas the potentiality of turkey’s future centers on the presence and or discovery of oil, oman’s future is bound by its impending depletion.5 further, speculations about the expiration of the treaty of lausanne in july 2023 harken back to anxieties and desires around territorial partition and nation-state formation in the aftermath of world war i. in this context, speculations about obstructed oil production also take on a new life, as they are co-opted by the turkish state and utilized to reinterpret turkey’s official imperial and national histories and to legitimize expansionist and irredentist politics in the present. at the end of world war i, with the dissolution of the ottoman empire, imperial territories from northern thrace to the arabian peninsula, including oil-rich regions in present-day iraq and iraqi kurdistan, were granted to other nation-states or became parts of “mandates” of great britain under the united nations. while lausanne delimited the boundaries between turkey, greece, and bulgaria, the question of the mosul border remained unsettled until 1926, when the league of nations awarded the province to iraq. against this historical background, speculations about the expiration of lausanne and its consequences coalesce with nationalist imaginaries of territorial loss, as well as with the neo-imperialist historical revisionism of the justice and development party (akp) government, which has popularized long-held islamist arguments about the political significance of lausanne in the 2010s. such neo-imperialist geopolitical imaginaries reinterpret lausanne as a defeat rather than a victory in turkish nationalist memory. they signal toward a new territorial order in which turkey might (re)attain its imperial might. in doing so, such imaginaries further legitimize contemporary irredentist and expansionist politics, as they did during the military operations that the turkish armed forces carried out in oil-rich mosul in 2016 and 2017. the centennial of the treaty of lausanne on july 24, 2023, approached while i was completing this article. the treaty of lausanne did not expire. yet the intertwining of territorial imaginaries and geopolitics in turkish public and political life will likely persist after that date. speculations about the expiration of lausanne in july 2023 might be displaced by another historically significant date in neo-imperialist and nationalist mythmaking.6 further, as the two devastating earthquakes that struck southeast turkey in february 2023 revealed, speculative powers of the geologic will continue to shape social and political worlds beyond resource and energy politics in turkey. uncertainty about what lies under the ground—petroleum, fault lines, and more—will continue to be utilized by neo-imperialist or profit-hungry states and private entities. a geologically attuned anthropology is more relevant than ever today, not only in turkey but also in other speculative (under)grounds where neo-imperial and colonial prospects of territorial control and extraction continue to shape social and political worlds. an anthropology of absent presence: from petroleum to the geologic at first glance, turkey seems an unusual choice to study oil anthropologically. turkey has limited oil reserves, and due to anatolia’s geophysical setting, the materiality of existing oil deposits in turkey are heavy and located in small deposits. this situation contrasts with the now well-known tales of abundant crude oil. in petroleum-rich states, oil has been fetishized as a magical resource with enormous political power and geopolitical significance (appel, mason, and watts 2015; coronil 1997; rogers 2015; watts 2009). but oil was never successfully established as a smooth linkage between the nation’s natural body and its political body in turkey, unlike what happened in venezuela or russia, for example. yet despite the perceived deficit of oil reserves, the prospect of yet-to-be-discovered abundant oil fields has never lost popularity in turkish political and public life. since the start of oil prospecting in turkey’s eastern and southeastern provinces after the new turkish state’s founding in 1923, state-owned mineral and petroleum exploration companies have insisted on prospecting for more and larger oil deposits, despite little luck discovering large oil fields.7 international oil companies operating in turkey shared the same fate, leading to increased scrutiny and suspicions about their intentions. oil’s absent presence has been central to turkey’s territorial and geopolitical projects and imaginaries, especially in relation to the kurdish-populated southeast, where most of turkey’s oil reserves are located.8 taking the absent-present materiality of oil seriously reveals not only how power is distributed among elites and state, or how resources are fetishized, as anthropologies of oil in petroleum-rich states have demonstrated (coronil 1997; rogers 2015; watts 2009). it also attends to the productive powers of the speculative.9 thinking about speculation anthropologically demands an investigation into how social and political life revolves not around what is, but what may be or may have been (weszkalnys 2013, 2015). by examining the underground in turkey through a lens of the speculative, this article extends beyond the parameters of an anthropology of presence (see bessire 2014; bond 2022; gordillo 2014; navaro 2020). in other words, i explore what geological matter does and what kinds of worlds it composes even in the absence of oil under the ground. relatedly, i contend that it does not suffice to take petroleum as an object of analysis: an investigation of the speculative powers of the underground itself proves equally important. in doing so, we can grasp how speculative undergrounds in turkey fuel territorial anxieties and desires in public and political life with concrete geopolitical effects in the present. what, then, unites the spectrum of public and political speculations about oil’s absent presence and the post-imperial nationalist desires that intersect with it is the ground, or the geologic. speculative powers of the underground, and their concrete territorial and temporal effects on turkish public and political life, speak to the importance of thinking/working with the geological in anthropology.10 scholarship in anthropology, geography, and philosophy that takes the “stuff of politics seriously” (braun and whatmore 2010, ix) has investigated how the geological informs politics, and at the same time, how political and social worlds are constituted, limited, and unsettled by the earth (see bobbette and donovan 2019; clark 2011; grosz, yusoff, and clark 2017; povinelli 2016; yusoff 2021). these works have pointed toward the importance of the geologic in the constitution of political and social life, and even argued that the distinction between life and nonlife has been central to regimes of power (povinelli 2016). despite this novel and significant body of work, ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of how the geologic and politics relate to each other remain lacking, especially in non–euro-american contexts.11 furthermore, although we have learned a great deal about how geology proved central to the workings of colonial and nationalist modes of power, such as the intersection of geology with racializing ideologies and anti-blackness in settler-colonial contexts (yusoff 2018) or technoscientific knowledge (kinchy, phadke, and smith 2018), we still need empirical accounts of how relations between (under)grounds and world-historical events such as the end of world war i and so-called postcolonial nation-state formations have unfolded and shaped collective notions of history and subjectivity in the global south. speculations about oil in turkey then, are questions about the geologic as much as about post-imperial, nationalist anxieties around territorial loss and desires for territorial expansion. it is in this context where the ground—what’s under it and who exerts political claims over it—becomes a productive ground where multiple ethno-nationalist and neo-imperial notions of territorial belonging, loss, and desire play out. these notions have geopolitical, affective, and subjectifying effects. only by recalibrating our analysis around the geological and its generative powers can we better understand how speculations about oil in turkey are informed by both the indeterminacy of the underground and the political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation that emerged after the first world war in turkey.12 in other words, a geologically attuned anthropology of oil in turkey shows how world-historical events such as the treaty of lausanne continue to shape nationalist, neo-imperial, and irredentist history politics and affective investments in the present—fueled as they are by the speculative powers of the underground. it also reveals how these speculations shape contemporary geopolitics. in what follows, i trace the political, territorial, and affective speculations that resonate across the geologic in turkish public and political life. these are elements from public chatter, media, geopolitical imaginaries, and foreign military policy that appear at first glance to have nothing to do with one another. but viewed from an ethnographic lens across multiple scales, debates about an international treaty signed at the end of world war i and whether oil exists under turkey’s territory cohere into one analytic field. an abandoned well on a saturday afternoon in june 2016, i joined murat on a field trip. we spent a few minutes lurking around an abandoned oil well in the kurdish-populated, oil-producing, southeastern province of batman. murat had brought me here to show me that the well was plugged with cement, and definitely not mercury. his demonstration served a specific purpose: many people in turkey believed that foreign oil companies plugged these decommissioned wells with the heavy and toxic substance of mercury to ensure they would never be opened again. “why would using mercury instead of cement ever be reasonable? it’s so expensive! some people are nuts,” he grumbled, as i walked around the abandoned well, taking pictures and dipping my fingers in the black goo that is a low-volume oil seep. “we should show the pictures you took to hacı mahmut, pictures of what you’re seeing here; maybe then he’ll believe me,” murat told me. i could see the dried layers of cement blocking the drill hole. we had been at hacı mahmut’s garden of fig trees the day before. hacı was a seventy-year-old kurdish man from a small village near batman.13 he lived with his wife in a mudbrick house, just ten kilometers south of the abandoned well. he believed the well had been plugged with mercury some four decades ago by foreign oil companies. rolling a cigarette in the garden as he sat on a three-legged stool, he told murat and me that the underground was, in fact, “swarming with petroleum, but certain forces are hindering its extraction.” murat laughed. “you’re right, hacı,” he said sarcastically. “no, not really. the abandoned well you mention is indeed one that mobil decommissioned in 1975, but not because of ill intentions.” he went on to explain that the company had capped the well either because it was no longer economically viable, or because it dried out. “no!” hacı reacted. “i’ve seen it with my own eyes; oil has been leaking from that well.” for hacı, oil seeping from the pipe proved the presence of much more oil under the ground, waiting to come to the surface. murat went on to explain to hacı that the seeps could stem from several different possibilities. even if the seep had originated from the abandoned well, it did not mean that drilling or recommissioning the well would make sense economically. “our oil is too thick and heavy, too difficult and costly to extract and transport—it’s nothing like the gushing crude oil you see in the movies, hacı,” murat pointed out. hacı was not convinced. shaking his head, he mumbled: “then how on earth is it possible that oil is so abundant just 150 kilometers south of here? i just don’t get that. there must be something going on.” such speculations about hidden or obstructed petroleum are extremely popular in turkish public life. during my fieldwork, i observed many who shared hacı’s views. for many, the proximity of one of the world’s largest oil fields in iraq’s mosul or kirkuk itself gave proof to the idea that more oil was waiting to be discovered and drilled nearby, oil “hidden” by sinister powers: foreign oil companies, “the west,” and their domestic co-conspirators. local and national media frequently amplified these speculations. sensationalized headlines like “hope of oil discovery,” “mobil’s abandoned wells leak oil,” and “citizens demand: unplug our future” continued to link petroleum seeps and abandoned wells to an anticipated yet obstructed future of oil discovery and wealth that oil’s absent presence fostered in contemporary turkey. geologists and oil companies tried hard to refute these claims. until 2019, for instance, the official website of the turkish petroleum company had a “frequently asked questions” section, mostly devoted to debunking similar speculations about hidden or obstructed oil.14 “why does turkey have no oil when its neighbors have the largest reserves in the world?” the page asked. “is turkey floating on a sea of petroleum?” using a q&a format, the website rejected speculations. it explained why turkey had relatively poor oil resources despite neighboring rich oil fields due to geological factors: plate tectonics, the arabian-eurasian collision, and the formation of the alpine-himalayan belt.15 this particular geological history and tectonic setting, the site explained in detail, left oil concentrated in small traps in turkey. “if found commercially unviable or dried out during production,” the faq section noted, “petroleum companies decommission wells, and cover them with cement to prevent leakage. this is a perfectly normal process in the oil industry.” the site also contended that oil seeps did not always indicate substantial reserves. however, such explanations do not end oil speculations in turkish public life. instead, despite geologists’ and petroleum engineers’ efforts, millions of people continue to believe that certain factions of the turkish state, allied with multinational corporations and under pressure from foreign states, are trying to hide something.16 in 2016 and 2017, such speculations revolved more directly around the treaty of lausanne and its upcoming centennial in 2023. an expiring treaty in 2011, the akp government declared its grand “2023 vision”—a list of ambitious economic growth goals to coincide with the centenary of the founding of the republic of turkey in 2023. according to this program, turkey would become an economic powerhouse with a $2 trillion economy (making it the world’s tenth-largest), a per capita income of $25,000, and $500 billion in exports—all by 2023. energy security was to play a significant role in this renewed economic development plan. it included increasing turkey’s capacity to generate power, commissioning three nuclear power plants as well as ambitious infrastructure and transportation projects. but according to widespread speculation, something much bigger was going to take place in 2023: the treaty of lausanne, which officialized turkey as a sovereign state recognized by international states, was going to expire on its hundredth anniversary, on july 24, 2023. the exact origins of the theory remain unknown, at least to me. still, the idea picked up steam once the then-prime minister recep tayyip erdoğan started to comment on several public statements uttered by turkish officials in 2021. in a ceremony celebrating the eighty-ninth anniversary of the treaty of lausanne, for example, the rector of the university of thrace in edirne stated, “2023 has become a buzzword nowadays, but we must keep in mind that 2023 will mark the expiration of lausanne, and we must all unite to protect our republic.” since then, erdoğan has continuously referred to the year 2023 and the treaty of lausanne in a cryptic, foreshadowing manner, as a relatively insignificant urban myth started to slowly grow into what its critics labeled a “conspiracy theory,” finding its way into public gossip as well as national tv shows and newspaper columns. speculations around lausanne’s expiration were not entirely new. they occurred against a more extensive history of geopolitical shifts in turkey and their interpretation of turkey’s foundation in the aftermath of world war i. according to this collective historical narrative, lausanne was directly juxtaposed with another, overturned treaty: the treaty of se`vres. notorious in contemporary turkish historical narrative because of its destructive consequences for the ottoman empire, sèvres was signed following the defeat of the ottoman empire in world war i, on august 10, 1920.17 yet the lausanne conference saw sèvres overturned and, on july 24, 1923, the treaty of lausanne was signed, designating the sovereign borders and territorial unity of modern turkey.18 in the turkish nationalist imaginary, sèvres, became a historical event encapsulating the anxieties of territorial dismemberment in present-day turkey (bilgin 2012; nefes 2021).19 what international relations scholars refer to as “the se`vres syndrome” continues to foster the paranoia that turkey is in imminent danger of the imposition of sèvres, and thus, partition (guida 2008; gürpınar 2019). in contrast, secular and kemalist historians of turkey interpreted lausanne as a diplomatic victory exercised on equal terms, in stark contrast to what other defeated parties faced at versailles (toprak 2003). turkish official historiography might have interpreted lausanne as a victory and a timeless deed of peace, but countervailing actors in turkey viewed lausanne quite differently. since at least the 1950s, islamist/conservative thinkers in turkey have produced a counternarrative that portrays lausanne as a defeat. beginning with the essays of necip fazıl kısakürek (under the pseudonym detective x; dedektif x bir 1949, 1950), islamist intellectuals have repeatedly described the lausanne treaty as a “mourning” (matem) (rather than a “holiday” (coşkuner 1966); as a “defeat” (atilhan 1964; mısıroğlu 1971) and, more recently, as “worse than se`vres” (cuma 1993) and a “bill of imperialism” (duygun 2007). for these intellectuals, lausanne represented the eradication of the mighty ottoman empire, islamic civilization’s territorial, economic, and ideological/moral loss against christian western imperialism, and the subsequent demotion of the new turkey to an “unassuming third-rate country” (gürpınar 2019, 35). in the 2010s, what had traditionally constituted a relatively minor conservative/islamist critique of the treaty of lausanne began to gain momentum. ­although this was not new, with the neo-ottomanist political ideology of the akp and heightened territorial anxieties in the aftermath of the failed coup attempt in 2017, speculations about the expiration of the treaty of lausanne acquired an extra layer. the topic proved immensely popular in national media. on mirrors of history, a program airing on show tv in 2017, a guest speaker (a man in his mid-fifties) introduced as a “history expert” recounted a “true story” involving i̇smet i̇nönü, one of the co-founders of the republic of turkey: “right after the delegations signed the treaty of lausanne,” he said in a bold, confident voice, “i̇nönü left the room, let out a sigh of relief, and declared, ‘we have earned another hundred years.’” for him, this anecdote proved that lausanne would expire on its hundredth anniversary and that the republic of turkey was, in his words, “just a temporary state.” for him, this meant that after july 2023, turkey’s future would be wide open, its territorial boundaries malleable. another speaker, this time a younger man introduced as a “national security expert,” in the same show argued that it did not matter if lausanne did or did not have an expiration date. like all treaties, he claimed, it would become obsolete if one of the parties rejected it—or if war were declared. in fact, he noted, almost all the political treaties that had shaped the middle east had come undone in the post–cold war period. the infamous sykes-picot agreement, which carved out iraq, syria, lebanon, jordan, and israel, for instance, had been completely abandoned in the past decades. “why not lausanne as well?” he provocatively asked. more respected social scientists reacted to such bold claims with caution and even fear in the following months. respected historians rushed to tv programs to persuade the public that the treaty certainly did not have secret clauses or an expiration date. they reminded viewers that opening up lausanne for discussion would be “extremely dangerous for turkey.”20 they asserted that “lausanne is the title deed of the republic of turkey,” implying that discussions over the termination of lausanne also meant putting the turkish state’s sovereignty on the table—a “highly dangerous act.”21 but the cat was out of the bag. in 2019, a respected polling company reported that 48 percent of turkish citizens believed that the treaty of lausanne would expire in july 2023 (konda 2018). as the next section discusses, although such attempts at rewriting history are neither uniform nor complete, yet they produce concrete temporal and territorial politics in the present. from historical revisionism to irredentism speculations about the expiration of the treaty of lausanne create a politically exploitable narrative of post-imperial anxiety, territorial trauma, and the desire to recover “lost” oil. for its proponents, the treaty of lausanne’s potential expiration in july 2023 conjures up not only a future of oil abundance but also revised histories and possible futures of territorial expansion. the islamist counternarratives surrounding lausanne gained renewed attention in the early 2000s as the akp rose to power. embracing a populist ideology nostalgic for the ottoman empire, the akp sought to reconfigure turkey’s official history, particularly the significance and territorial implications of the treaty of lausanne. in this period, the long-held islamist counternarratives about lausanne attained newfound popularity. these entailed the popularization of the sentiments of defeat and the sense of an “unfinished business” once held by the islamist intellectuals, leading to the emergence of the aforementioned “lausanne syndrome” (drakoularakos 2021, tziarras 2022). described as neo-ottomanism by scholars and journalists, this new political discourse involved the reconfiguration of turkey’s recent history, especially the political significance of lausanne.22 was lausanne a defeat or a victory? this question that the conservative/islamist intellectual kadir mısıroğlu first posed in 1971 re-emerged with greater vigor.23 in this ideological setting “alternative history” magazines in the 2010s proclaimed to uncover the obscured truths behind official historical accounts of lausanne. these included the appearance of a number of titles investigating revisionist themes, including backdoors of history, hidden history, and deep history. in these pseudoscientific historical magazines, key moments from modern turkey’s history pertaining to questions of sovereignty and territory were met with scrutiny from the akp-backed media, with lausanne figuring prominently in the discussions. central to these authors’ contention was the idea that lausanne constituted a “conditional” agreement.24 the most popular version of the conditional-approval thesis revolved around the issue of petroleum. according to this theory, it was only by giving up mosul and, thus, the oil-rich mesopotamian provinces once controlled by the ottoman empire that mustafa kemal and the founders of the republic managed to successfully convince the allied powers to recognize turkey’s sovereignty. this theory reversed conventional accounts of turkish history by portraying the founders as pro-imperialist collaborators. whereas it had formerly been the kemalists who had accused mehmet vi, the last ottoman sultan, of being a pawn of the european imperial powers for agreeing to the terms of the treaty of sèvres, the neo-ottoman revisionists of 2016 redirected this charge against the founders of the turkish republic. many of these narratives reappraised the ottoman era as a period of grandeur, casting the emergence of the republic as submission to europe, rather than an assertion of sovereign independence. accordingly, they glorified the ottoman sultan abdülhamid ii (1876–1909), rather than atatürk. the reason petroleum figured so prominently in this equation was abdülhamid’s interest in the empire’s potential oil fields. after becoming aware of oil resources in the area, he transferred the title deeds of mosul and kirkuk to himself in 1890. in 2016, the property records of mosul resurfaced, with tv news claiming that they had been “discovered,” proving that mosul “still belongs to turkey.” deep history, a popular monthly magazine funded by sources close to the akp government and president erdoğan, often showed sèvres, lausanne, and mosul on its covers, with sensational titles such as “we took peace, surrendered petroleum at lausanne” (derin tarih 2016), “how did we give mosul to the british?” (armağan 2016), “the title deed of mosul and kirkuk belongs to abdülhamid ii” (hülagü 2017). according to these accounts, “the valuable and prolific oil reserves in turkey’s southern and southeastern provinces had already been documented by sultan abdülhamid” (hülagü 2017), but lausanne had banned their exploitation. when turkey would finally be “freed from lausanne’s constraining articles, it would want to follow the footsteps of the ottomans.” figure 1. an image of thomas edward lawrence with the caption “the end of 100-year treaties” on the cover of the july 2015 derin tarih [deep history] magazine. next to lawrence it reads, “no one guards sykes-picot anymore.” figure 2. the july 2016 derin tarih [deep history] magazine cover depicts a french caricature of the lausanne conference delegates signing the agreement with the caption: “in lausanne, we got peace, gave away oil!” through a rewriting of imperial and national histories, a new approach to turkish energy and territorial ambitions was born. in this period, neo-imperialist discourses in turkish public life fired up speculations about lausanne’s expiration and its aftermath, which undermined the significance of the treaty of lausanne. in doing so, they simultaneously legitimized turkey’s military presence in mosul, signaling that mosul could be annexed into turkey at some future date. speculations over mosul’s title deeds evoked an alternative future in which the lausanne would be void and mosul finally included in turkey. this proved even more significant because the debates took place in 2016 and 2017, when turkish military forces were carrying out illegal operations in iraq and syria.25 between the 1940s and 1970s, islamist writers in turkey often compared the territorial concessions (cyprus, mosul, western thrace, aleppo) of lausanne to the national pact (misak-ı millî). the national pact describes a set of six decisions made by the final term of the ottoman parliament in istanbul on january 28, 1920, which outlined the irreducible borders of the ottoman polity (i̇çduygu and kaygusuz 2004). the islamists repeatedly called for a revision of the treaty in favor of possible annexations. as i demonstrate in what follows, erdoğan frequently evoked the territorial expansionist and irredentist imaginary that the national pact held in the turkish collective historical imaginary. during a speech in 2016, erdoğan declared, “july 24 is turkey’s second national war of independence. in 1920, they showed us the sèvres card and made us settle for lausanne. then some people tried to sell lausanne to us as a victory.”26 in another speech, he claimed that turkey could not remain passive regarding mosul: “they are claiming that turkey should not enter mosul. how can i not?” he continued: “i have a 350-km common border with iraq, and this border is under threat. we will be part of the operation, and we will be at the table. our non-involvement is out of the question. why? because there is a history here for us. they can read the national pact if they wish and learn our past from there” (erdoğan 2016). in the following months, erdoğan would continue to assert that “lausanne should be modernized” (smith 2017). these statements alarmed turkey’s neighbors, as erdoğan’s comments came when turkey was preparing to carry out multiple military operations in the middle east. already disapproving of the presence of turkish troops in mosul, both the iraqi government and the iraqi people reacted harshly to his message. the then-prime minister of iraq, haider al-abadi warned against a turkish occupation of iraq. in raising the specter of the national pact of 1920, erdoğan’s statements not only served to undermine the significance of the treaty of lausanne but also to legitimize turkey’s military presence in mosul, signaling a possible annexation at a future date. mosul’s fate could be directly affected by a revision of lausanne for the following reasons: in securing the borders of contemporary turkey, the cartographic imaginary of lausanne corresponded almost perfectly to the borders outlined in the national pact. yet the oil-rich province of mosul, occupied by britain at the time, proved an important exception. while the national pact had included mosul within turkey’s borders, the treaty of lausanne left it out—until its inclusion in iraq in 1926. the pro-akp critics of lausanne present the unrealized cartographic imaginary of the national pact as a popular rival to the former. since the borders of the national pact are vaguely defined, they embed a sense of imperial loss—as well as a desire for territorial expansion. further, since it is a document produced by the final ottoman parliament, and not by the mustafa kemal–led new government in ankara, the national pact fits neatly within the neo-ottomanist narrative. all three aspects of the national pact were embedded in another speech that erdoğan made in 2016. claiming that the turkish people were not happy with turkey’s current borders, he declared that as a result of the treaty of lausanne, turkey’s size “shrunk from 2,500,000 km2 to 780,000 km2 in only nine years.” in making this claim, erdoğan falsely equated the treaty of lausanne with the dissolution of the ottoman empire. “those who are trying to imprison turkey in a vicious circle since 1923 wish to erase our thousand-year history in this region,” erdoğan added (erdoğan 2016). against the backdrop of these irredentist statements the turkish military launched a campaign in iraq during the battle of mosul on october 23, 2016. the attack aimed to capture the city of mosul from isis, which had seized it in june 2014 (al jazeera 2016). following the operation, public debates started to revolve around turkey’s “historic rights” in mosul. talk show commentators claimed that the national pact was “turkey’s magna carta” declared by the “heroic and patriotic ottoman parliament in 1920 during the national war for independence.” maps of the ottoman empire from different periods circulated on tv programs, with anchors comparing them to the current borders of turkey. graphic illustrations juxtaposed the two maps, making it clear that while the national pact placed mosul inside turkey’s national borders, the lausanne left it out. these debates and images signaled the treaty of lausanne as a defeat. in doing so, speculations around lausanne’s expiration helped rewrite national and imperial histories and thus reopened for debate existing territorial boundaries fixed in international law. as i demonstrate in the next section, these speculations also inform political subjectivities in turkey. affective-political subjectivities in january 2017, i had a conversation with akif, a twenty-six-year-old security guard at a university campus in istanbul. once i told him about my research on the cultural and political aspects of oil exploration and extraction in turkey, he immediately presumed i was investigating what he believed to be the expiration of lausanne. “we’ll finally be able to control our underground resources in july 2023!” he exclaimed. i countered him by saying, “as far as i know, lausanne does not have an expiration date.” he met my words with laughter. “of course, none of the official sources will tell you that. there are secret clauses in the treaty. and you can’t find them, because they’re secret!” he confidently countered. “what will happen once lausanne expires?” i asked. “we will extract our oil, our boron, and other valuable resources. we will rise,” he responded. it became immediately evident to me that akif was a fervent akp and erdoğan supporter. for him, the government had no fault in turkey’s current economic difficulties. instead, they resulted from the constraints that lausanne had placed on the country. “our president is doing everything he can, while the whole world is against him and turkey. we must be patient until 2023 and not lose our faith in him. our state has been preparing for that time. the moment lausanne expires, we will take hold of our resources again. we will prosper,” akif added. “what will that mean for you?” i followed up. “i’ll hold my head up high, as our ancestors did. it’ll come true; you’ll see. all those countries requiring visas for our passports will line up in the visa queue to be able to enter turkey. the tide will turn.” akif’s suspicions about hidden oil, like those propagated by the akp and its extensions in the media, coincide with desires for neo-imperial expansion and irredentism in turkish public life. they are fueled by the indeterminacy of oil, and the historical revisionism of the akp, which has popularized long-held islamist arguments about the significance of lausanne. such geopolitical imaginaries reinterpret lausanne as a defeat rather than a victory, and challenge turkey’s current borders, aspiring to a new territorial order in which turkey (re)attains the imperial might it is once believed to have held. yet not everyone endorses this theory and the historical revisions attached to it—an important point that calls attention to the differentiated subjectivities and modes of citizenship in current turkey. murat, in sharp contrast to the views of akif, thought the speculations about lausanne’s expiration complete nonsense. he felt certain that turkey’s tectonic structure rendered the prospect of discovering major onshore oil reserves quite low. yet he also noted that turkey lacked abundant reserves for political as well as geological reasons. “when the borders were set during the lausanne conference, the west knew that they weren’t giving us any rich oil fields. they already had intel from their geologists who had surveyed the area around the current iraq-turkey border.” for murat, then, speculations about 2023 seemed partially correct, but he didn’t have any desire for a revision of lausanne. what mattered to him was that lausanne was a peace treaty that ensured the territorial integrity of turkey, at the time threatened by dissolution and oblivion. “we have to accept what we conceded, and we have to hold on to what we preserved,” he told me. plus, maybe it was a good thing that turkey had “lost” mosul and other rich oil fields: “we can’t forget that the wealth brought by oil is not necessarily happiness and prosperity. when you think about it, we might actually have been lucky, avoiding the oil curse. because having rich resources also makes you a target of imperialist and colonialist powers.” for murat, one had to come to terms with the extent of one’s power sometimes, as “one might go farther and fare worse.” hacı mahmut, the elderly kurdish villager from batman who had expressed his suspicions about abandoned oil wells to me earlier, also had different ideas about what the oil wells and the seeps meant. a few months after our first encounter, i paid another visit to hacı. this time, i wasn’t accompanied by the state-owned oil company’s geologists. i asked him about speculations about lausanne’s expiration in 2023. he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “what difference does it make?” he asked, and added: “we kurds have been oppressed by the republic, but also under the ottoman empire.” he was pessimistic: “i know i am an uneducated man. but if lausanne is going to expire, what will it mean for us kurds? does it mean that the promises made to the kurdish people will be fulfilled? i don’t think so. we have always been pawns in the eyes of these western powers. no expiration will change that.” hacı shared the neo-ottomanists’ anti-westernism, but he wasn’t proposing counter-imperialism. the kurdish people, he thought, were played by both powers, and used as a pawn in imperial geopolitical agreements and territorial agreements. se`vres, which continues to haunt turkish historical memory, was in fact a failed promise for the kurdish people, hacı mahmut implied; and it was lausanne itself that marked a territorial and political sense of loss and the crushing of ideals of self-determination. a few months later, i spoke with hacı’s son, fırat.27 he had a different approach to thinking about the future. fırat and i met in a café in batman. fırat worked at tpao’s drilling sites as a technician, making his father proud. in fırat’s interpretation, the treaty of lausanne was responsible for scattering kurds across four states—turkey, syria, iraq, and iran, and making the kurdish people the largest stateless population on the planet. lausanne, for him, was a colonial, imperialist scramble. “in 1923, our right to self-determination was sacrificed,” he murmured, as we sipped tea at a café located in tpao’s company town. for fırat, erdoğan’s efforts to revise lausanne constituted another imperialist attempt to further turkey’s territorial aspirations in the region. but when i asked him if he agreed with those who criticized attempts to revise lausanne, he disagreed: “no, what i’m saying is that we should revise lausanne; not the turkish state, not a european colonizer power, but we, the people of turkey and kurdistan. we should all sit down and ask each other where and how we want to live. the kurds deserve to be heard. our aspirations need to be honored. you know what? the legendary ottoman empire collapsed after six hundred years. the american empire? collapsing in slow motion. nothing is forever. tc is not forever either.”28 earth politics otherwise with its excessive materiality and its unknowability by petroleum geology and geologists, the underground becomes a literal ground that generates an array of speculations in turkish public life. here, the indeterminacy of the underground and the absent present materiality of oil tangle with ongoing geopolitical and affective legacies of the end of world war i, imperial dissolution, and nation-state building. coupled with omnipresent fears of territorial dismemberment that continue to haunt the political present in turkey, the speculative underground legitimizes neo-imperial desires and politics of territorial expansion that aim to re-attain lost imperial mastery through territorial and temporal fixes in the present. in doing so, speculative undergrounds in turkey continue to shape anticipatory futures of oil wealth and rearrange national pasts and foundational cartographic imaginaries. we can therefore understand speculations about the expiration of the treaty of lausanne and the subsequent fate of turkish oil as earth politics in the service of neo-imperial and ethno-nationalist anxieties and aspirations in turkish public and political life.29 they are diagnostic of the contingency at the heart of the “nomos of the of the earth” (schmitt 2003)—earth or terra taken in a twofold meaning: as the political space where political conflicts over territory, sovereignty, and capitalization take place; and, as the excessive materiality of the forces of the earth. as discourses that both react to the political, economic, temporal, and territorial arrangements on earth and those that attempt to reshuffle them, such speculations can be understood as attempts to exert or regain control and sovereignty over the subsurface and surface, as well as power-desiring attempts to redesign existing geopolitical orders. in return, they generate concrete geopolitical effects as they are further mobilized by the turkish government as a tool for historical revisionism. further, as the ongoing turkish occupation of parts of northern iraq and northern syria (or southern kurdistan) demonstrates, they also authorize irredentist politics in a period of global power crises and emergent neo-imperial politics.30 to close, i return to more speculative questions pervasive in turkey, ones that hold implications for anthropology and political theory more broadly. the notion of speculative undergrounds helps us see just how malleable international agreements and territorial orders in the post-imperial world might be. the political futures that speculative undergrounds foreclose and/or render possible can no longer be cordoned off from anthropological inquiry. a geological anthropology (oguz 2020) can be put in the service of unsettling dominant worldviews of geopolitics (last 2015) that characterize territorial politics in turkey and beyond. these worldviews are often state-centric; they naturalize ethno-nationalist borders. in other words, it might be time to take seriously the geopolitical praxis at the heart of territorial and oil-related speculations in turkey. things can be different: material and territorial arrangements, notions of time and temporality, political subjectivities and desires can be otherwise. yet as i have demonstrated in this article, in contemporary turkey, this “otherwise” is in the service of neo-imperialist and ethno-nationalist politics that negate the ongoing layers of violence of the new imperial order created by the treaty of lausanne. how might an anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial earth politics otherwise reverse the power-hungry political ends of dominant forms of speculative thinking in turkey and beyond? in speculating about such futures, i join thinkers in black and indigenous studies to suggest, here from the problem space of nostalgic imperialism, a shift toward a radical earth politics of emancipation and justice. in the homelands of armenians, kurds, turks, yazidis, and assyrians where my ethnographic fieldwork is situated, such a praxis is necessarily both contradictory and pluralistic. as fırat reminded me, however, it can be animated by an attunement to the contingency of futures in which contemporary national, colonial, and international territorial orders—such as those forged by versailles, lausanne, sykes-picot, and others—might cease to exist and be rearranged against both ethno-nationalist and neo-imperialist worldviews. abstract the fraught tectonic history of anatolia has given oil in turkey an absent presence. in this article, i examine how oil’s absent presence produces a series of speculations in turkish public life regarding oil’s alleged abundance and its obstructed production. in particular, i trace widespread speculations that claim that the treaty of lausanne, which founded turkey in 1923, will expire on its centennial anniversary in july 2023. i argue that speculations about the expiration of lausanne harken back to both anxieties around territorial partition and neo-imperial desires of expansion in contemporary turkey. such speculations are further utilized by the akp government to reinterpret turkey’s history and to legitimize expansionist and irredentist politics in the present. in this context the ground—what’s under it and who exerts political claims over it—becomes a productive zone in which multiple ethno-nationalist and imperialist notions of territorial belonging, loss, and desire are played out. i conclude that by recalibrating anthropological analyses around the generative powers of the geological, we can better understand how the indeterminacy of the underground entwines with the political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation that emerged in the aftermath of world war i. [resources; geology; underground; speculation; territorial politics; geopolitics; turkey; politics of history; politics of nature] notes 1. robert frodeman (1995), for example, argues that geology is a historical and interpretative science. in his account of the schlumberger company’s oil exploration activities between 1920 and 1940, geoffrey bowker (1994) likens geophysics to medicine, another science of the particular that derives its data and techniques from individual cases (compare günel 2019, 170). gökçe günel (2019, 168) writes about the “geologists’ belief in the ultimate unrepresentability or unknowability” of the earth’s subsurface. 2. for a more sts-framed discussion of absent presence in relation to oil shales and resource making, see kama 2021. also see oguz 2023b, my earlier ethnographic account of oil’s absent presence in turkey. 3. in petroleum engineering, unrecoverable may become recoverable resources in the future as commercial circumstances change (such as oil prices), technological developments occur, or additional data are acquired (society of petroleum engineers 2000). 4. after its defeat in world war i, the ottoman empire was faced with the treaty of sèvres in 1919, though it was not ratified. signed between turkey and the allied powers following an eleven-week conference in switzerland, the treaty of lausanne triggered population exchanges that forcefully displaced 1.5 million people from their homelands and established a new imperial order in the region in the aftermath of world war i (conlin and ozavci 2023). 5. mandana limbert’s (2015) more recent observations suggest an unexpected alignment of omani and turkish speculations over oil. interventions to enhance accuracy in oil forecasting in oman have paradoxically given rise to suspicions about hidden oil. consequentially, the future is no longer understood as bleak, though coupled with even greater mistrust of the oil industry and expectations of hidden truths, corruption, and conspiracy. also see anna szolucha (2021) for an account of conspiracies around shale gas exploration in poland and the united kingdom. 6. such as 2053, which is the 600th anniversary of the occupation/conquest of constantinople/istanbul by ottoman sultan mehmed ii; or 2071, which is the 1000th anniversary of the battle of manzkiert/malazgirt fought between the byzantine and the seljuk empires, which, in the turkish nationalist imaginary, marks the beginning of anatolia’s turkification. 7. turkey has recently discovered offshore gas fields in the black sea. although president erdoğan in 2022 (reuters 2022) claimed that the discovery amounts to 710 billion cubic meters, no independent audit of total and recoverable gas has been made available to the public. 8. the majority of turkey’s domestic oil is extracted in turkey’s kurdish southeast, a region characterized by armed conflict, emergency rule, and military occupation in the past century. elsewhere i discuss how oil continues to haunt social and political landscapes in turkey, shaping geopolitical imaginaries and even functioning as a technology of governance in turkey’s majority-kurdish regions (oguz 2023a). 9. for important approaches to the radical potentials of speculation in black and indigenous studies, see brown 2021, carrington 2016, commander 2017, goffe 2022, rifkin 2019, and schalk 2018. 10. see oguz 2020 for an earlier conceptualization of “geological anthropology.” 11. for recent examples, see bobbette 2023, d’avignon 2022; marston and himley 2021, and oguz 2021. 12. the treaty of versailles is an overlooked watershed moment in global history that still “haunts the world” (nucho 2021). 13. village name obscured for anonymity. 14. the web page is no longer active, but parts of the essay can be read at tayland efeoğlu, “petrol efsaneleri” [petroleum legends], jeofizik bulteni (2009), https://www.jeofizik.org.tr/resimler/ekler/64a82d4f8febf98_ek.pdf?dergi=29 15. the website is completely rebuilt now in line with a global corporation aesthetic, and this page no longer exists. 16. as limbert (2015), laura kunreuther (2014), william mazzarella (2006), and todd sanders and harry west (2003) have pointed out in different ways, it is the very claim to transparency that produces expectations of conspiracy in political life. 17. sèvres warranted the dissolution of its army and the cession of considerable territory, including the formation of an independent armenian state, a possible autonomous kurdistan, and a greek presence in eastern thrace and on the anatolian west coast, as well as greek control over the aegean islands commanding the dardanelles (helmreich 1974). 18. in contrast to the treaty of sèvres, the treaty of lausanne abandoned kurdish and armenian demands for self-determination. nevertheless, the treaty of lausanne left the fate of the oil-rich region of mosul (included in the national pact) undecided. in 1924, the league of nations assembled to determine the fate of mosul, deciding that it would remain part of iraq, despite turkish claims over it (conlin 2020). 19. also see franck billé’s (2016) discussion of “cartographic anxieties.” 20. author’s personal notes. 21. author’s personal notes. 22. see alev çinar and hakki taş (2017), murat ergin and yağmur karakaya (2017), yağmur karakaya (2020), öykü potuoğlu-cook (2006), nagehan tokdogan (2018), jeremy walton (2010), bilge yabanci (2020), and m. hakan yavuz (2020) for anthropological, sociological, and historical treatments of neo-ottomanism and “ottomania” in contemporary turkey. 23. the liberal revisionist historiography of the 1990s often encouraged such currents. it criticized the kemalist historiography of the former period that had discredited almost every aspect of ottoman modernization and assumed a radical rupture between the empire and the republic. 24. deep history also argued that the british approved lausanne only after the abolishment of the islamic caliphate by mustafa kemal atatürk, a 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potentiality, speculation: on the indeterminacy of first oil.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 4: 611–39. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.08 whitington, jerome, and zeynep oguz 2023 “earth as praxis.” environmental humanities 15, no. 3. yabanci, bilge 2020 “fuzzy borders between populism and sacralized politics: mission, leader, community, and performance in ‘new’ turkey.” politics, religion & ideology 21, no. 1: 92–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/21567689.2020.1736046 yavuz, m. hakan 2020 nostalgia for the empire: the politics of neo-ottomanism. new york: oxford university press. yusoff, kathryn 2018 a billion black anthropocenes or none. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 2021 “the inhumanities.” annals of the american association of geographers 111, no. 3: 663–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1814688 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 411-437, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.05 proxemics, covid-19, and the ethics of care in south africa cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 3, pp. 391-399, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.06 proxemics, covid-19, and the ethics of care in south africa susan levine university of cape town https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5990-7182 lenore manderson university of the witwatersrand https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7883-1790 figure 1. covid-19 hygiene measures in place, sassa grant allocation, thembisa, april 1, 2020. photo by luntu ndzandze. a short drive from a hollowed-out city center to a ghostly suburban life tells a story of human density, segregation, distinct soundscapes, and different geopolitical and highly racialized landscapes. among other pernicious aspects of apartheid’s legacy, covid-19 highlights a spatial economy—or proxemics—that reproduces with banal repetition the fault lines along which viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens feed. one exceptional marker of the changing density of human contact, in a time of physical distancing, is the gradual appearance of ebullient children, playing along the highway buffers of grass that double as soccer fields and spaces for gathering with friends. these precarious zones of play in the context of hazardous environments preceded the risks associated with covid-19. but how to speak about the unlikely enactment of proxemic rupture across south africa, without adopting “a sad i expected so much tone,” remains an enduring challenge in writing africa into anthropology (wainaina 2005). we argue that a shift from an ethics of intimacy to an ethics of proximity enables us to consider the political economy of pandemic proxemics as an outcome of the legal spatialization of residence by race under apartheid law. apartheid logics engendered an ethical embodied habitus that determined social mobility and everyday forms of emplacement (salo 2018; levine 2020). the visible resurgence of a state military apparatus to ensure social distancing as a public health measure to curb the spread of covid-19 is a haunting reminder that muscle memory is not limited to individual bodies, but also holds for political systems (levine and manderson 2020; manderson and levine 2020). we focus on the biopolitics of an emergent bodily proxemics that requires new modes of care predicated on physical distance. recalling the early work of edward t. hall (1960), people everywhere are now asked to learn a new “silent” language of care linked with a counter-intuitive social etiquette. the socio-linguistic basis of proxemics—that is, the study of human proximity in relational terms—informs our ability to speak about an ethics of care as tied to individual proximity. what constitutes relational manners, etiquette, and norms in terms of everyday distancing—as reflected in shopping queues, buses, elevators, greetings, and so on—is embedded at the crossroads of culture, history, and power. bodies and embodiment, as mary bucholtz and kira hall (2016, 173) argue, “are central to the production, perception, and social interpretation of language.” the body in the broadest sense—individual, social, and political—has a grammar that is socially situated, not fixed but flexible, always in a state of incompleteness and becoming (bucholtz and hall 2016; nyamnjoh 2017). embodied linguistics offers us an occasion to consider the entanglement of social distancing through the lens of a geopolitically sensitive proxemic analysis of inequality. ethnographic sensitivity to the relationship between proximity politics and the slow burn of race injustice in south africa flags how quickly physical distancing, hand washing, and mask wearing has led to changing cultural codes of care along lines of privilege (ross 2020). with this in mind, we ask what a national lockdown means for a divided nation, and indeed, a divided world. enforced harsh lockdown was introduced nationwide in south africa for three weeks on march 26, 2020, and it was extended as cases of infection escalated. even by this time proximity had taken on new meaning. tertiary care facilities and various other public institutions introduced hand sanitization; visitors were registered; fingerprint biometric systems were deactivated. educational institutions moved to deliver classes online; those who could worked from home. contract work and opportunities for informal income generation shrank; growing numbers of people found themselves with no income, and government measures that acknowledged this—the special covid-19 social relief of distress grants for people unemployed because of the pandemic—proved inadequate. the lockdown measures, monitored by police, security guards, and armed forces, were among the harshest implemented anywhere. they were intended to “flatten the curve” of infection and buy time to allow medical services to prepare for growing numbers of severe cases, gearing up clinical services that had long lacked resources. even so, by august 1, 2020, the country had the fifth-largest number of people infected worldwide, with more than half a million reported cases and some 8,153 deaths due to covid-19. five months later, as we revised this essay, cases had more than doubled to over 1.2 million; by january 3, 2021, more than 32,425 people had died. by this time, south africa was in the grip of a so-called second wave and lockdown had been reinstated. president cyril ramaphosa closed beaches along the country’s famous garden route, curfews returned, alcohol sales were banned, and anyone caught breaking level-3, high-level restrictions, including limited numbers in indoor and outdoor gatherings and some curfews, faced a prison sentence. the lockdown proved both consistent with the earlier military response in south africa and resonant with the “public theater of military-police enforcement of covid-19 quarantine laws in australia” (see wynn 2021, this issue). by late 2020, the costs of containment had mounted, and the controls on proximity that operated as a measure of care for some took effect increasingly at the expense and well-being of others. hunger, persistent unemployment, and violence preceded the pandemic (bhan et al. 2020). yet lockdown precipitated heightened economic and social distress, including unprecedented food insecurity; looting, home invasion, and other property crime; violence through and in response to police action; and increasing intimate partner violence (b. hall and tucker 2020; human rights watch 2020). further, the urgency of the measures meant little attention was given to the inflections of race, class, and gender on hygiene and sanitation, on mobility and proximity, or on how everyday circumstances might preclude the possibility of an emergent ethics of care to or from others (manderson and levine 2020). as richard poplak (2020) observed, “the majority of south africa’s people … go about their day with a mask draped around their chin, sullenly loathing the restrictions that, in the end, will not keep them safe from anything.” the state’s insufficient intervention is tied to a deeper systemic crisis of sanitation, racism, homelessness, and urban crowding that is by no means exceptional (mamdani 1998). as we explore, lockdown and its excesses open up questions on the ethics of care, its form, delivery, and meanings in diverse settings, economies, and political contexts, as illustrated in this colloquy collection. everywhere, the controls on mobility and distancing to prevent covid-19 constitute the strategies implemented both historically and in the present to contain infection where vaccination does not exist—isolation, quarantine, hand washing, and other hygiene measures. the constraints on movement in south africa, however, are redolent of very specific restrictions historically on mobility and social engagement. as poplak (2020) argued in the daily maverick: the logic of spatial apartheid has been employed to keep the classes separate but unequal, a perfect distillation of the norm, except in extremis. south africa’s proxemical specifics are not very complicated—for the most part, social groups live exactly the same way they did 30 years ago. apartheid, my friends, was still thriving long before the national state of disaster regulations launched a revivified bout of comparative analysis. as carolyn m. rouse (2021, this issue) reflects in her essay on the limits of biopower, achille mbembe’s (2008) extension of biopolitics asks whose bodies in society are expendable, marginal, and whose bodies are figured by the state as “waste.” in such zones of resource-poor environments and social abjection, space, sanitation, and hygiene are scarce (ross 2020). informal settlements highlight the public health limits to contain infection. these dense settlements, home to some 3.6 million people (seri 2018), are built around and among standard two-bedroom reconstruction and development programme (rdp) houses constructed by the state on the peripheries of cities. those who have no choice live in one-room shacks of tin, shipping containers, and other scrap material. these areas lack sanitation services and plumbing, running water and electricity. water drips and sours around the bases of communal taps; plastic bags of fecal and other material back up against tin walls, testimony of people’s measures to avoid the stench of shared toilets. the shacks are infested with rats and sites of excessive structural violence (levine, swartz, and rother 2020). often abutting other dwellings, they make distancing impossible. without indoor sanitation, residents are forced to break covid-19 curfew regulations and walk a distance to rows of outdoor toilets, the kind usually reserved for construction sites. others live precariously in disbanded, condemned blocks in the inner city (wilhelm-solomon 2016, 2017; for a comparative analysis of pandemic restrictions, housing, and poverty, see trnka 2021, this issue). such dwellings are often crowded, but their composition is also unpredictable. as nolwazi mkhwanazi and lenore manderson (2020) describe, households can vary from a single person to two dozen or more, as resident numbers contract and expand by season, employment opportunities, illnesses, and income flow. with covid-19, occupancy has expanded as people join households whose economic security is linked to state grants, provided to single parents, people with disabilities, and those of old age. these households are often characterized by fractured relationships and skip-generations in the aftermath of hiv, with the female household head, often a grandmother, responsible for the care of her grandchildren and others in poor health (levine 2012). the political economy of social proxemics (e. hall 1960) is overdetermined by a spatialized necropolitics (mbembe 2008) that limits the adoption of public health regulations for social distancing to those privileged enough to enact them, as rouse (2021) also suggests in this colloquy collection. in south africa, in the time of covid-19, an ethics of care as enacted by maintaining distance reinforces inequality already mapped by the epidemics of hiv, tuberculosis, cardiometabolic disease, and gender-based violence, and serves as an ugly reminder of the role of segregation in avoiding the racist ideas of pollution under apartheid. twenty-five years since the transition to democratic government, some sensitivity to these divisions and their legacy exists. and yet, in the face of this lethal new pandemic, little public discourse has arisen on how constraints to movement have widened health disparities along the lines of race and class, impacting access to health services, monitoring health, and adherence to medication. such formal care is essential for the vast population in south africa under treatment for hiv, tuberculosis, and multiple chronic non-communicable conditions. the constraints to primary health-care centers and hospital outpatients in south african hospitals already breached measures of infection control. pre-covid-19, people arrived at health centers by 6 a.m. and waited four or more hours in a crowded waiting room to be seen (egbujie et al. 2018; swart, muller, and rabie 2018; stott and moosa 2019). with covid-19, presenting to a health center constitutes a clear risk. the costs of transport to and from clinics when people live at a distance, and the costs of food to counter nausea from antiretroviral drugs or to meet the dietary requirements of people with diabetes, make for further disincentives to seek care when household finances are critically low. as joan vincent (1990) and others have argued, political anthropology is situated at the crossroads of history and power. by considering the affective and ethical dimensions of this crossroads through the lens of physical proximity and the uneven possibilities for enacting an ethics of care to limit the viral spread of covid-19, the impact of the group areas act of 1950, a defining feature of apartheid and its associated violence, resurfaces. in mostly white suburban neighborhoods, children and youth are transfixed, zombielike, by netflix, fortnight, tiktok, twitter, and whatsapp, while the streets remain barren. in contrast, the streets and open fields in townships and informal settlements have stayed visibly vibrant. troops, police, and private security guards tear down shacks, but as quickly, new settlements appear, with names memorializing the present: covid, 19, virus (cape{town}etc 2020; reinders 2020). children play with skipping ropes, soccer balls, and marbles; they flip into the air and onto discarded mattresses; their mask wearing and physical distancing is uneven at best. children may be at a much lower risk for covid-19 infection, but they can be carriers, and they are not protected from serious illness, especially in light of the new variant 501-v2. these observations of unmasked children playing were made at a physical distance from the vantage point of a moving car along the n2-highway. they also indexed the ability to do so, to maintain a kind of care predicated on distance. isolated from potential pathogens, ethnographic work during covid-19 follows lines of distancing, although we are simultaneously embodied subjects adopting an emergent ethics of care as proxemic distance. notwithstanding these methodological challenges, we question what a national lockdown means in a divided nation that reproduces a proxemics and ethics of care struggling to replicate who strategies to limit the spread of covid-19, a nation that, for the sake of survival, must often ignore them. the country’s inequalities are not unique; l. l. wynn’s (2021, this issue) essay on housing makes this clear (see also team and manderson 2020). in south africa, however, contemporary restrictions uniquely recall a particular system of institutionalized racism and violent controls on mobility, social engagement, and intimacy, illustrating how inequality is embodied and continues to shape personal lifeworlds and outcomes. a national ethics of care requires the abolition of the spatialization of privilege and inequality in the context of what wynn (2021, this issue) calls the “historical scripts for policing borders and containing the bodies of outsiders deemed threats to the national body.” horizontal work of this magnitude, including careful attention to the workings of power and proximity, no matter how obvious or repetitive, itself constitutes a form of care. abstract in south africa, lockdown and its excesses have opened up questions on the limits of an ethics of care, whose ethics are privileged, how care is delivered, and what care means. we show how an ethics of proxemics and its operationalization as distance highlight everyday inequalities and limit the provision of care. constraints on physical distancing in line with public health measures intended to limit the spread of the coronavirus echo the controls enforced under apartheid, showing how inequality is both embodied and legally entrenched. 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issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.3.06 the multiply produced film: collaboration, ethnography, and feminist epistemology cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 649-680, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.09 the multiply produced film: collaboration, ethnography, and feminist epistemology emily hong haverford college https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9901-436x it was a sweltering day in august, but i needed the exercise. after turning the corner to my block, my jog slowed to a walk. when we recognized each other, milton’s face widened into a smile, revealing a few lost teeth. i offered a sweaty hug, and asked what he was doing in the neighborhood, ithaca’s southside, in central new york. “waiting for stanley. he lives here!” i looked over to the house; it seemed more run down than before, but i recognized the place; we had filmed a scene here a few years back when i followed milton webb and stanley mcpherson, two recycling workers and labor activists, for a film about their fight for a living wage called get by (hong 2014). the local campaign in which stanley, milton, and i were active was and is part of a larger movement across the united states to promote turning a minimum wage into a “living wage”—one regularly recalculated to account for basic living expenses such as rent, food, and health care.1 i told milton i had just moved into the neighborhood, with friends who—i now realized—lived across the street from stanley. stanley’s apartment, a room in an aging house, wasn’t out of place; several houses on our street were dilapidated or abandoned. our next-door neighbor had been evicted when she fell behind on bills for the day care she ran out of her home. “how is madison?” i asked. in one scene of our collaborative film, milton talks about his then-newborn daughter and his hope that she would benefit from his struggle for a living wage for all workers. it felt hard to believe she was now five years old. “i heard about paula, i’m so sorry.” madison’s mom had passed away when i was overseas. milton explained that the day before she died, he had taken her to the hospital. milton knew paula was off drugs and insisted she be examined; but doctors refused to see her, adamant she go to rehab instead. a year later he was still grieving and in disbelief at the broken system—revealed through this tragedy to be racist, classist, and ultimately responsible for paula’s death. “you know what? you can do us a huge favor.” with a glimmer of hope in his voice, milton reached out and touched my arm. “can you work the studio cameras for our show? our volunteers are gone now.” after work, stanley and milton hosted a public-access tv show, what matters at the round table (mcpherson and webb 2014), where they offered a critical working-class lens on the latest headlines. milton’s request was no small ask, but rather a weekly commitment with no end in sight. live television production would also differ from what i was familiar with, ethnographic filmmaking. still, i found myself agreeing immediately. throughout the making of get by, my relationship with stanley and milton had been shaped, and in many ways, produced, by a series of exchanges—mediated (e.g., their support for “my” film and my support for “their” tv show) and unmediated (e.g., acts of friendship and solidarity). i eagerly offered this delayed return-gift, which, like those before, took the tone of part obligation and part shared mission.2 from the beginning, i had conceived get by as an exploration of collaboration across difference—worker-community solidarity across lines of race and class. i also hoped to explore how the filmmaking process itself might constitute collaboration. paradoxically, i found difference where i expected commensurability, and vice versa. looking to document solidarity, i found an underlying discourse of class and race-based distancing. i was surprised, for instance, to hear white owning-class activists identify more with the county government than with the workers they ostensibly fought for. as one activist put it: “they do an important public service, even as private contractors, and we ought to pay them a living wage.” at an event i helped organize, stanley, who like milton is black and working class, pointed to a close ally, the white, middle-class director of the local workers’ center, and said, “people like him don’t want people like us living in their neighborhood, and they will do whatever it takes to keep us out.” stanley’s phrasing underlines a core insight of feminist anthropology, that class does not exist outside of its relation to race and other forms of difference (bear, ho, tsing, and yanagisako 2015). by contrast, i found overlapping interests where i expected incommensurable difference; stanley and milton are two decades older than me, a multiracial middle-class woman of asian, european, and middle eastern heritage. as a phd student at an ivy league institution at the time, i was afforded significant class privilege, despite my own income hovering under the living wage. throughout the article, i discuss various moments in which asymmetries in class, race, and gender were made to matter. despite these differences, shared experiences with activism, media-making, and housing insecurity brought us closer together, at times eclipsing, however contingently, barriers of age, race, class, and gender. in this way, a film seeking to document the dynamics of worker-community solidarity ultimately shed light on a different kind of asymmetrical collaboration—the filmic collaboration behind its creation. in this article, i draw on ethnographic and autoethnographic material from the production and distribution of get by, recasting concepts in the anthropology of exchange through a feminist and decolonial lens. i take up zoe todd’s (2018) provocation of a decolonial turn 2.0, or a decolonial (re)turn, that to challenge the colonial structures of our trade, we must re-engage that which anthropology has previously explored with an ethos of “growth, change, and doubt.” i revisit concepts from the anthropological study of “asymmetrical exchange” and apply them to an analysis of anthropology’s core method—ethnography—what i argue is an inherently asymmetrical exchange of labor situated at the intersection of gift and commodity economies. drawing on marilyn strathern’s (1988) the gender of the gift and other classics in economic anthropology, i conceptualize the “multiply produced film” as a methodology and analytic that situates asymmetrical dynamics inherent to ethnographic filmmaking within everyday relations of exchange. the multiply produced film as a method invites the sharing of authorship and creative authority through fluid and changing roles in ways that do not refuse difference but recognize its transformative potential. as an analytic, it unearths the process of collaborative filmmaking beyond the moments of filming, revealing how a film created through collaborative means can take on the characteristics of commodity as much as gift. though i focus on ethnographic film, the “multiply produced” offers an approach to thinking about the broader asymmetrical dynamics of the ethnographic method in and beyond the field, once knowledge relations become sutured into material objects. to begin, i situate the multiply produced film within a feminist and decolonial genealogy of anthropology, drawing a thread between ontological insights from the anthropology of exchange and the epistemological contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropologists committed to collaborative methods across various axes of difference. in the remainder of the article, i work through ethnographic and autoethnographic dimensions of get by’s production and distribution. the first ethnographic section revisits the film’s production stage to explore methodological and epistemological dimensions of the multiply produced film. i describe the ways in which the filmmaking process bumped up against western conceptions of autonomy and authorship. i then show how the multiply produced film entails working across asymmetries through shifting roles, setting forth a cascading multivocality that transformed the resulting filmic form. the latter ethnographic sections explore the ontology of the multiply produced film—as gift and commodity—through its post-production and distribution stages using two concepts from the anthropology of exchange—alienability and mutability. alienability is a category used to distinguish between an object as commodity or gift—the question being whether said object can be separated from the relations that produced it. mutability is an object’s capacity to be refashioned from a commodity to a gift, or vice versa, or to be commodity and gift at once. together, these concepts help explain some of the paradoxical dynamics emerging from the production and circulation of ethnography’s artifacts (e.g., films, books). finally, i show what happens when, facilitated by spatial and temporal separations, get by exhibited aspects of mutability between gift and commodity, pulling asymmetries of collaboration into focus. like feminist anthropologists before me, i embrace reflexivity and autoethnography as essential tools in attending to the inherent ambivalences of collaborative ethnography, namely, the asymmetrical dynamics at play (trinh 1992; sudbury and okazawa-rey 2009) and the impossible desire to mitigate them through collaborative practices. in offering autoethnographic description, i do not have prescriptive aims regarding an idealized vision for collaboration; rather, i seek to account for the complexities of being an ethnographer who, acting in solidarity, necessarily forms one part of a complex equation of power and perspective (ulysse 2007; perry 2014). furthermore, as feminist scholars have shown, autoethnography has a peculiar power to illuminate structures of inequality by elucidating individual experiences and socioeconomic realities with a single stroke of the pen (griffin 2012; anzaldúa and keating 2015). ethnography and solidarity as asymmetrical exchange: contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropology in recent years, collaboration has witnessed a surge of interest in anthropology and broader public life. within anthropology, the methodology of collaborative ethnography has been fruitfully explored in the fields of engaged anthropology, public anthropology, activist anthropology, participatory action research, and the anthropology of collaboration (e.g., hemment 2007; lassiter 2008; rappaport 2008; low and merry 2010). the latter concerns itself with collaboration as both the object and method of fieldwork and is increasingly gathering insights from anthropology’s long-term interest in exchange relations, or “the gift” (jackson 2004; faubion and marcus 2009; rabinow 2011; riles 2015). the anthropology of collaboration—like its forebears in the anthropology of exchange—has often emphasized the sociality of collaboration, sometimes at the expense of eliding asymmetries of power. landmark studies on “asymmetrical exchange” along lines of gender (e.g., strathern 1988; weiner 1992; guyer 2004) and colonialism (e.g., asad 1998 [1973]; fabian 1983; comaroff and comaroff 1991; n. thomas 1991), while once revelatory, have not fundamentally transformed anthropology’s most treasured method—ethnography—arguably an inherently asymmetrical exchange. the “decolonizing generation” (allen and jobson 2016) of the 1980s and 1990s recognized a key lesson from the anthropology of colonialism: that the conceit of social scientific neutrality (i.e., “value free” anthropology in the vein of bronislaw malinowski [1929] and e. e. evans-pritchard [1946]) played into colonialism as much as any explicit alignment with colonial powers (pels 2008, 291). while the lack of agreement around how to do anthropology differently has stymied the discipline’s ability to fully come to terms with its colonial past, scholars of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropology have made important methodological and epistemological interventions. among these ranks the recognition that the dispersal of intellectual authority required by decolonial anthropology cannot be limited to expanded archives or purely textual experiments, but instead necessitates concrete collaborations between ethnographers and so-called informants (fabian 1983; harrison 1991, 5). recognizing the impossibility of neutrality, feminist and decolonial anthropologists have also continued to grapple with political positioning and its relation to epistemology as necessary tools for decolonizing anthropology (harrison 1991; visweswaran 1994; d. thomas 2018).3 taking up this baton, scholars in feminist and decolonial studies have made significant epistemological strides, demonstrating how knowledge is transformed when moving beyond anthropology’s classic subject-object dyad. trinh t. minh-ha’s (1992, 87) work insists on a reflexive ethnographic and filmic voice that “does not objectify”; her approach to “speaking nearby” “reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it.” kim tallbear’s (2014, 2) feminist-indigenous concept of “standing with” entails a preparedness not only to “stand with” a “community of subjects” but a “willing[ness] to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced.” like trinh, tallbear moves beyond the subject-object dyad to illuminate the relationship between positionality and epistemology—how knowledge and the self can be transformed through the collaborative process. amid calls for a decolonial turn 2.0 (todd 2018) and “the case for letting anthropology burn” (jobson 2020), visual anthropology has taken on new significance as an arena for understanding and potentially transforming the hierarchical dynamics of ethnography. while not all visual anthropologists pursue collaboration with their film “subjects,”4 an increasing number are committed to explicitly political, public, and decolonial approaches (ginsburg 2018; dattatreyan and marrero-guillamón 2019). through collaborative and reflexive work, scholar-artists have underlined the epistemological difference that power makes in the dance between ethnographic filmmaker and subject.5 they also increasingly concern themselves with the ways that, despite popular framings of avant-garde art films as “noncommercial” and multimodal technologies as “democratizing,” such modalities remain enmeshed in hierarchical economies of prestige and capitalism (lee 2019; takaragawa et al. 2019). through what i call the multiply produced film, i contribute to these feminist and decolonial approaches a concrete (auto)ethnographic examination of collaboration, focusing on solidarity, relational autonomy, and the transformation of value across asymmetries of power. while much has been written about the attempts of co-authorship to place interlocutors on an equal playing field, this is often an impossibility because of the need for consistently shared priorities, time, or privilege (payne and bryant 2018; torres 2019). by focusing on relational autonomy and the transformation of value, the multiply produced offers a lens for those gray areas of collaboration that reflect ethnography’s limitations, its inherent asymmetries, as well as unique potentialities—its valuation of open-endedness, multivocality, experimentation, and multiple positionalities.6 in my examination of solidarity as subject matter and method, i follow feminist and queer theorists of color in seeing solidarity as a form of alliance-building that acknowledges always implicated relations of power (mohanty 2003; atshan and moore 2014; liu and shange 2018). while feminist accounts of collaboration emphasize the intersectional dynamics of directly involved parties—the researcher and the researched—solidarity brings into view the presence of not two but three parties. as jodi dean (1996, 3) puts it, “i ask you to stand by me over and against a third.” if anthropology’s complicity in colonialism resulted from willful ignorance of a more powerful “third” party, an examination of solidarity has great implications for pathways beyond the subject-object dyad of classic ethnography. in this collaboration, my solidarity with stanley and milton was formed “over and against” (dean 1996) two entities complicit in the refusal to pay a living wage—the recycling corporation and the county government that contracted them. from the start, this shared political analysis oriented our work on the campaign and the film, shaping a common goal that transcended the classical dyad of researcher and researched. what became clear much later is that the film’s “use value” for the campaign stood in tension with the “exchange value” it took on beyond our activist goals, challenging the gift-like nature of our collaboration. once the film hit the film festival circuit, other parties came into the picture; the material object of the film that appeared more gift-like in the context of friendship and collaboration took on commodity-like elements. in what follows, i discuss the repeated acts of reciprocity, friendship, and allyship that constitute the contingent “we” of solidarity in the production phase; i then describe the tensions that arise when such dynamics of solidarity are put to the test in the distribution phase. the lens of the multiply produced film offers a way to explore the dynamics of asymmetrical exchange in the seemingly symmetrical collaborative sphere of production and the more sobering sphere of distribution, where conventions of single authorship abound. the multiply produced film: autonomy, solidarity, and the gender of the gift evidenced by the long credits of many films, filmmakers consider their craft collaborative by necessity. yet, like other fields in the arts, filmmaking rewards the notion of a visionary genius director. the common occurrence of a film premiere as the place where film protagonists see their lives on screen for the first time reflects this ideal. inevitably shaped by this ethos through my own training in filmmaking and fine arts, i began the project with an unresolved ambivalence about collaboration. i wanted to collaborate, but hesitated about how and to what extent i could while retaining my own vision. i explained the idea behind the film to stanley and milton, asking for input and ideas but making no formal arrangements for collaboration. seasoned filmmakers advised me to retain as much “artistic autonomy” as possible. underlying their advice was a belief that a degree of consultation would secure cooperation, but too much would constrain the film’s artistic potential, relegating it to a conventional “talking heads” advocacy piece. this emphasis on supposed autonomy chafed against my own inclinations as an active organizer in the living wage campaign. yet i, too, felt wary of attempting to flatten all differences between filmmaker and subject, ethnographer and collaborator. i was familiar with the work of so-called insider activist-anthropologists who see themselves primarily as translators or spokespersons, but i felt such work left out insights made possible by those embracing an insider-outsider positionality (abu-lughod 1988; narayan 1993; mcclaurin 2001; simmons 2001; slocum 2001; jackson 2004; fassin 2012).7 by refusing to give up either position as “native” insider or outside social scientist, such scholars recognize the “contradictory, multilayered, engaged” and richer knowledge resulting from this dual positionality (mcclaurin 2001). i had found comfort in the possibility of standing at what didier fassin (2012, 245) describes as the epistemological “frontiers of plato’s cave,” neither fully inside nor outside. what i found promising about this approach was the prospect that ethnographic critique could be informed by the ambivalences and reflexivity of interlocutors without abandoning the ethnographer’s autonomy, however partial. what i learned from making get by was the need to move beyond this productive but ultimately dualistic metaphor for knowledge production, one that captured the ethnographic insight that a better film involved defying singular ideals of autonomy and authorship. such a metaphor would need to transcend the subject-object dyad of classic ethnography to recognize that my collaborators could occupy multiple positions as reflexive film protagonists and co-producers while capturing the epistemological difference that difference makes. the multiply produced film draws inspiration from the multiply produced hagen pig, an object of interest in strathern’s (1988) the gender of the gift. to understand domination in non-commoditized economies, strathern (1988, 161) argues that we must discard two western assumptions about authorship: ownership and the individual agent who authors their own acts. in hagen pig production, she writes, “neither the woman’s nor the man’s work can encompass that of the other partner. the pig is multiply produced. … as a product of the relationship between the conjugal partners, the pig is not reducible to the sole interest of either party” (strathern 1988, 160). while strathern’s work highlights gender as the primary axis of difference within the dynamics of asymmetrical exchange, get by’s production emphasized asymmetries of gender, race, and class. two months into filming, unforeseen circumstances shifted my initially cautious approach, propelling the film toward a multiply produced, unpredictable endeavor. by then, i had hours of cinéma vérité footage—of protests, activist meetings, legislative events, and stanley raking leaves at church and playing drums for the choir.8 one autumn day, in a major shock to him and others in the living wage campaign, stanley found himself fired from his job. he had attempted to warn a white woman dropping off her garbage about safety precautions. apparently finding his demeanor threatening, she reported this “angry black man” to his supervisor, giving the company the perfect excuse to terminate one of two longtime workers whose activism they perceived as troublemaking. as stanley reveals at the end of the film, “a thousand signatures went to them and my name was on the top of that list. … that right there gave them grounds that ‘hey, i’m gonna get rid of this guy because he’s asking for money—a living wage.’” stanley’s firing was a catalytic reckoning for two forms of collaboration across difference—the worker-community solidarity i sought to document and our work together behind the camera. i will take up each of these in turn. when i filmed the first scene—the protest in front of the recycling facility—the worker-community solidarity at the heart of the campaign began to reveal itself for what it was. the abstractness of solidarity for some white middleand upper-class coalition members who signed petitions and showed up to protests became apparent. in the opening scene, martha, a sweet and slow-moving older white woman, expresses surprise when she discovers that stanley, the black man protesting alongside her, is the worker-leader whose name she has seen in campaign press releases; they shake hands. as student organizers finish rolling up protest banners, milton puts his arm around pete, the director of the workers’ center and says, “pete keeps us going, we keep pete going, but we need a living wage.” this moment gestures to the political affects undergirding the seemingly reciprocal foundations of solidarity, one that would ultimately unravel. this solidarity proved fragile for two reasons, first in a way best explained in contrast to roseann liu and savannah shange’s (2018) concept of “thick solidarity.” focused on contemporary asian-black coalitions rooted in differing histories of oppression (e.g., chattel slavery and indentured servitude), the authors define thick solidarity as one “that mobilizes empathy in ways that do not gloss over difference, but rather pushes into the specificity, irreducibility, and incommensurability of racialized experiences” (liu and shange 2018, 190). the fragility of the living wage coalition’s solidarity stemmed partly from its mobilization of empathy that papered over differences of the classed racialities and racialized class subjectivities of coalition members (see hall et al. 1978; jackson 2010). solidarity also proved “thin” in another way. abstract solidarity is misleadingly effective in its mobilization of affect; the campaign used milton and stanley’s voices and images as “poster children” with great success, creating an impression of full agency in terms of their leadership. only when the fissures of coalition unity expanded in moments of crisis did a picture of who truly held power in apparently equal relations of “solidarity” become clear. while conceptually powerful, liu and shange’s (2018) treatment does not fully explore the how of thick solidarity. the incommensurability of intersectional differences of class, race, and gender can be difficult to comprehend in the abstract; perhaps they can only be understood through the embodied experiential knowledge of friendship and accountability. in other words, it is through everyday relations of exchange forged through the affective work of organizing together for a shared cause, often “over and against” a powerful other, that we are forced to grapple with “our interconnectedness and our interstices” (liu and shange 2018, 195). what precisely constitutes that solidarity—its sturdiness or hollowness—can only be known at points of crisis, personal and political. when push comes to shove, will the person whose back you have had for months have yours? years later, working on stanley and milton’s tv show, i would learn that, when i was in crisis, about to be kicked out of housing by a landlord i thought was a friend, they had my back. but during the campaign, when stanley found himself in crisis, fired from his beloved job, the community that showed up at meetings and even protested alongside him did not have his. despite initial outrage over his firing, behind closed doors, the white middle-class leaders of the campaign raised doubts as to whether stanley’s firing was as groundless as he claimed. from my perspective, these justifications for inaction were muddied by raced, classed, and gendered assumptions that shared more empathy with stanley’s employer and the white woman customer that had reported him than with stanley himself. the campaign ultimately continued, with stanley’s undying commitment to the cause, but not without the stain (which i sometimes felt was only visible to me) of an utter failure of accountability to the person who had risked the most for its success. to this day, i harbor regret for not being able to convince the white leaders of the campaign to do more; when i said earlier that my decision to join the crew of stanley’s tv show was motivated by part shared mission and part obligation, in retrospect it may have been a delayed return-gift not only for the film but for the collective debt of solidarity in which i was implicated. after his termination, i saw a shift in stanley, who had always been outgoing and outspoken. with this inward turn, he became less enthusiastic about everything, including shoots for the film. until then, milton had been the “quiet” one; unlike stanley, he hadn’t offered ideas for shoots. my subsequent request for milton’s direct input, against prevailing norms of artistic autonomy, would become the most significant choice i made on the film.9 milton turned out to have tremendous insights into how to translate experiences of working-class poverty and racism into the aesthetics of the film. stanley was always eager to be in front of the camera, but milton had a clear sensibility for what happens behind it. after a few prompting questions, he already began thinking like a director-producer. “we need to show people what poverty looks like,” he said with certitude. he wanted people to “see” the difference between a minimum wage ($7.25 in new york state at the time) and a living wage ($12.62 in the county at the time). a week later, on a bitterly cold evening, we shot the scene milton had envisioned—him walking down the street toward my camera as it was wheeled back on a low-budget dolly (i.e., wheelchair). in the scene, he reminisces about the neighborhood he grew up in, pointing to the differences between a minimum-wage neighborhood and a living-wage neighborhood, and the life opportunities each affords. your browser does not support the video element. film clip 1. milton reminisces about the “minimum-wage” neighborhood he grew up in. film clip from get by (2014). https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/5h73qg52m. notably, we did not shoot this scene where milton lived—a more rural neighboring village—but in an urban neighborhood he felt best represented a “minimum-wage” neighborhood. the resulting scene can be understood as “ethno-fiction” (rouch 2003 [1973]), a filmmaking form blending fiction and documentary through creative improvisation where ethnographic collaborators play versions of themselves. another important moment of collaboration prompted a cascading multivocality—an unforeseen chain of events in which one move toward multivocality, beginning with milton’s vision, led to yet more voices, and ultimately a more complex and open-ended filmic narrative. the spark for this process occurred when i showed milton a rough cut of the film in progress, a moment also captured in the film. sitting in front of the editing station, milton reflects on the scenes, proceeding to tell me that the film needs perspectives beyond his and stanley’s. the film then cuts to the scene filmed as a result of this conversation, in which he conducts so-called man-on-the-street interviews. he approaches passersby, including a ups driver and owners of a local barbershop, and asks them point blank, “what do you think of the living wage?” your browser does not support the video element. film clip 2. milton and stanley conduct man-on-the-street interviews to gauge local perspectives on the living wage. film clip from get by (2014). https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/hx11z2189. while initially unsure of how such interviews would fit into a largely observational film, i enthusiastically included them in the final edit, since they contributed to a more nuanced, multivocal narrative. in contrast to typical man-on-the-street interviews, the scene suggests a tight-knit community; it is apparent that interviewees know milton well or have seen him speak. despite such familiarity, each offers a contrasting perspective on the living wage, complicating any singular emergent activist narrative.10 the scene also reveals the racialized dynamics of a predominantly white city. a white man who saw stanley and milton speak at a rally does not even recognize them; one of the black barbershop owners feels the need to speak against racist stereotypes about black wealth, pointing to his watch and saying to the camera, “this doesn’t come from drug money.” one way to gloss the story of get by would be to say that the process that made it more collaborative also led to a better film. of course, the story is more complicated. much of the film’s production process involved thinking with and eventually against the overarching filmmaking norms i was trained in—ones suggesting i should retain my artistic autonomy, and if necessary, create two versions of the film, an “activist” version for them and another for myself. i could not articulate it then, but this perspective intuitively went against my raced, gendered, and classed positionality as an insider (activist)–outsider (ethnographic filmmaker) and the values i hold, shaped by my experiences as a first-generation asian american immigrant and activist. i was aware of the complex u.s. histories structuring black-asian solidarities and racialized conflict.11 my activist education in social movement spaces taught me that my relative class and racial privilege often meant that true solidarity entailed stepping back to center the agency of those more directly affected. western ideals of autonomy project an inherent tension between acting in one’s own interests and meeting the obligations inherent to the sociality of the gift economy. by contrast, strathern (1988, 90) describes the emergence of hagen autonomy as the moment a child realizes the importance of interdependence and reciprocity in social relationships. this focus on the interdependence of autonomy is one i strongly identify with through my own acculturation.12 as the director, cinematographer, and editor of a film focused on the experiences of two working-class black activists, my exercise of relational autonomy entailed a conscious decision to share my authority—a risky move as a woman filmmaker. as a director, i have mostly worked with woman-identified crews and protagonists, and have still found my authority questioned by male passersby while filming in public.13 while sharing authority as a female director is never simple, feminist ethnographic collaboration always entails dangers (stacey 1988; visweswaran 1994). with get by, however, my move to share authority led to a cascading multivocality in the filmmaking process and its resulting form. the multivocality of this multiply produced film thus had implications for epistemology—in this case filmic narrative and form—in ways i could not have anticipated. it allowed milton to shape the narrative of the film not only as a campaign poster child—a position to which he and stanley were often circumscribed—but as a media-maker in his own right. at times, milton put on the director’s hat, challenging me to make space for more voices, including other working-class members of the community. in this way, it was not only i who had the autonomy to “stand at the frontiers” (fassin 2012); milton too, occupied that double position as “insider-outsider,” contributing personal perspectives and creative and critical analysis. thus i experienced our artistic and authorial autonomy as inextricably intertwined. as a collaborative method that favors sharing authority and creating openings for multivocality, the multiply produced film shares resonances with participatory action research (par), but important differences remain as well. participatory action research is described as the collaborative design and execution of change-oriented research through partnership between researchers and “stakeholders” (greenwood and levin 2007, 3). critiques leveled at par resemble those aimed at impact filmmaking, an approach in nonfiction film that is sometimes celebrated but often considered suspect for its social change–oriented agenda. one concern articulated about both par and impact-oriented collaborative filmmaking is how the lead researcher or director’s perceived lack of autonomy may translate into “positivist” and “uncritical” research (hale 2006; juris and khasnabish 2013) or “propagandist” films lacking “production value.” with get by, i found that stakeholder involvement made the film more multivocal and open to interpretation, rather than prescriptive. the multiply produced film shares core values with par and activist ethnography—and at the intersection of the two, “street par” (bryant and payne 2013; payne and bryant 2018)—particularly their focus on accountability and shared knowledge creation. it departs, however, in its valuation of two aspects of feminist ethnography, namely, open-endedness and multivocality.14 while recognizing the countervailing forces incentivizing single authorship, the multiply produced film builds on the feminist tradition to emphasize a cascading multivocality attuned to various axes of difference that are evident at the start, may emerge over time, and are continually transforming.15 this unpredictability prompts constant reflexivity and recursivity to questions of creative authorship. here it is important to highlight intersectionality—the multiple intersecting dynamics of difference and sameness (crenshaw 1991; simmons 2001; cho, crenshaw, and mccall 2013). for some projects, like kai m. green’s (2011) it gets messy in here, shared identities (in this case, trans and racial identities) enable a unique “co-collaboration” between filmmaker and subject, while recognizing the filmmaker’s inherent power (green 2015). for others, like get by, some shared identities as media-makers and activists can create opportunities to address differences of race, class, and gender, and seek—however fraught and unstable—epistemologies of solidarity. film as gift and commodity: dynamics of alienability and mutability initially, the filmmaking process was animated by simple reciprocal forms of exchange in the shadow of a greater purpose—the living wage campaign. first, i asked stanley and milton to share their experiences through on-camera interviews. soon, they asked me for help recruiting guests for their tv show. such exchanges became more complex and overlapping over time, bringing together our media, activist, and personal worlds. as acts of friendship, allyship, and solidarity, these exchanges intensified after stanley’s termination. i contacted a labor expert at my university to ask for legal advice about his dismissal. stanley and milton visited cornell to speak at an event i organized to mobilize more solidarity for the campaign. in this event—and film scene—stanley makes two announcements tinged with disappointment and pride. stanley, wearing a suit, is sitting next to milton, who having just finished a shift, sports a neon yellow recycling worker’s vest. stanley shares his dismissal in a subdued manner; he quickly moves on to the good news, holding up his photo in the newspaper. the news article details not his dismissal but a significant win for the campaign. thanks to the coalition’s efforts, the county legislature finally made a motion to put $100,000 toward a “living wage contingency fund”—to provide subcontracted workers like stanley and milton a living wage when direct employers were unwilling to do so. our increasingly overlapping exchanges continued after completing film production. when the mayor of ithaca cancelled his appearance on their tv show at the last minute, stanley called me, pleading that i appear instead. he asked that i bring clips of the film to broadcast live on the show, something i hesitated to do, since stanley had not yet seen the final film. my anxiety was allayed halfway through the live broadcast when, nodding vigorously, he expressed approval of the clips. it marked the first time since his dismissal that i had seen stanley back to his enthusiastic self. your browser does not support the video element. film clip 3. stanley makes two important announcements. film clip from get by (2014). https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/dv140d42s. cuts from stanley and milton’s show already constituted a scene in my film (see film clip 4), and excerpts from my film were featured on their show. by the time i agreed to appear as a guest on the show, however, it seemed that the occasion intended to promote our film and our campaign. the film had become an object i could no longer claim for myself; to recast a key term from the anthropology of exchange, the film had become far less alienable than i had imagined it could be. the material intertextuality of our media projects—that the film was part of their show and vice versa—became apparent not only because stanley and milton produced their own tv show but also because both the show and the film were unpaid endeavors motivated by overlapping political goals. our shared experience as media-makers and organizers in the living wage campaign contributed to an ethos of care and collaboration that manifested in terms of relations and intertwined artifacts. while these unique circumstances and, more broadly, the convergence of the film’s content and methodology (regarding the politics of solidarity and the value of labor) played a considerable role in surfacing the inalienability of the film, as i will show, such dynamics persist in the drawn-out production and circulation of many ethnographic artifacts, such as books and films. alienability through a set of systematic separations within the anthropology of exchange, alienability represents a characteristic used to distinguish between commodity exchange, the exchange of alienable things between independent parties, and gift exchange, the exchange of inalienable things between dependent parties (gregory 1982, 12). i have previously described the collaborative process through which a hagen pig is multiply produced; because it is irreducible to the sole interest of either spouse involved in its production, the pig can be understood as inalienable (strathern 1988, 160). in this section, i examine whether owing to the multiply produced dynamics of its production, get by can also be understood as inalienable. your browser does not support the video element. film clip 4. what matters at the roundtable, a tv show hosted by stanley mcpherson and milton webb. film clip from get by (2014). https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/m900pd17b. feminist anthropologists have challenged the fetishized value placed on single-authored scholarship, often considered the gold standard of achievement, given that its creation and circulation hinges on exclusion (e.g., publication paywalls) and power imbalances (e.g., the appropriation of knowledge from outside the academy for advances within its prestige economy) (torres 2019; el kotni, dixon, and miranda 2020). re-reading strathern’s ethnography of pig production within a gift economy sheds incisive light on this claim, underlining the importance of examining collaboration beyond the sphere of production. the following passage explicates how, despite the shared role of spouses in pig production, the potential for men’s domination stems from their disproportionate role in the sphere of circulation, facilitated by a set of “systematic separations.” for a thought experiment, i insert the words filmmaker/anthropologist and film/ethnography after “man” and “pig,” respectively. hagen men [filmmakers/anthropologists] claim singular responsibility of a kind: as wealth pigs [films/ethnographies] are freshly conceptualized as the result of men [filmmaker/anthropologist]’s transactions, and thus their value in exchange is the value that men [filmmakers/anthropologists] have given to them. … there is a one-to-one relationship between a man [filmmaker/anthropologist]’s performance in moka [film festival circuit/peer-reviewed publications] or public life in general and his name or prestige. in fact, men [filmmakers/anthropologists] only achieve this state through a set of systematic separations that render the sphere in which they claim prestige apart from domestic activity [the production process/fieldwork], where they are, quite emphatically, not the singular proprietors of their own persons. (strathern 1988, 158) i offer this analogy to suggest the possibilities for domination implicated in collaborative ethnography once ethnographers exit the “field.” toby lee (2019) has written about how, despite her own film’s lack of profit, the accrual of symbolic and cultural capital—aided by her institutional affiliation—as the film screened at film festivals and museums ultimately contributed to her professional advancement as an artist and academic (lee 2019, 144).16 in the case of get by, my greater involvement and authority in the labor of production, post-production, and distribution—through filming, editing, color correction, sound mixing, and submitting the film to festivals—gave it a different value in exchange. in distribution spaces, such as festivals and conferences, my class position (and related social and cultural capital) was made to matter; it was i as the director who disproportionately benefited from the potential for prestige, if not profit. this accrual of exchange value is not unique to films; anthropologists know that the most salient currency for tenure and promotion is an ability to claim sole-authored books or films. i see parallels between the prestige accrued by hagen men claiming non-singular work in a separate sphere and my authorship of this article—the publication of which will disproportionately benefit its “sole” author. if this very publication results in more interest in educational sales of the film, our profit-sharing agreement will also benefit stanley and milton, but not in a way that fundamentally shifts the asymmetries of our collaboration. in the case of films or written publications, circulation and prestige-making are removed by multiple degrees from the more collaborative sphere of production where filmmakers and anthropologists can hardly claim single proprietorship. during the making of get by, i attempted to work against the potential erasure of collaborative production by highlighting milton’s involvement in the filmmaking process. the scene of milton watching the rough cut in the editing suite is followed by a conversation with me on what we should shoot next. he says, “if you want, i’ll do it [ask the questions]; you just hold the camera!” (see film clip 2). such moments have prompted audiences to remark on the film’s seeming multiplicity in authorship, with one member saying, “it is clear that the film didn’t belong to you from the very beginning.” yet this representation of multivocality could also be received as an omission of responsibility to my power as a filmmaker—after all, even in our back-and-forth, i remain off camera. as the director and editor, i ultimately retained the power to shape stanley and milton’s stories through various invisible steps in the post-production and distribution processes. strathern’s (1988) point regarding the “systematic separations” necessary for the transformation of a multiply produced object from one sphere to another resonates with anthropologists examining the dynamics of commodity chains. anna tsing (2013) has described how the commoditization of matsutake mushrooms, once “soaked through with communal obligations,” is made possible by the multiple separations—in terms of people and place—between mushroom hunters, buyers, sorters, and exporters (tsing 2013, 35). while strathern (1988, 161) insisted on the impossibility of alienation in the gift economy, my experience with get by suggests that the multiply produced film operates somewhere between a gift and a commodity economy. this finding echoes that of feminist scholars of capitalist inequality and anthropologists of exchange who critique the absolute dichotomies between gifts and commodities (munn 1986; gibson-graham 2006 [1996]; graeber 2011; appadurai 2013; tsing 2013) and between the market and other social worlds (bear, ho, tsing, and yanagisako 2015). a focus on the (in)alienability of the multiply produced film has thus far highlighted how the seeming symmetries experienced during get by’s production belied the fundamental asymmetries in my access to circuits of distribution and associated prestige and profit. one further important aspect remains. in the case of the multiply produced pig, despite hagen men’s attempts to transform the domestic sociality of pig production into political prestige upon exchange, strathern (1988, 161) is clear that the pig itself does not constitute property at the disposal of men. instead, men’s attempts at the transformation of value and any resulting prestige only further enchains them in relations of dependency with their spouses. without resolving the alienability or inalienability of the multiply produced film, my experience making get by suggests a similar dynamic. my recent interest in finding a distributor for the film, which would typically involve making claim to copyright ownership of an assumedly alienable film, actually led to deepened commitments to milton and stanley in terms of decision-making and profit-sharing. mutability through time, space, and resignification another key concept from studies of asymmetrical exchange illuminating the dynamics of the multiply produced film is mutability. as exemplified in nicholas thomas’s (1991) entangled objects, underlying the mutability of objects—to move from alienable commodity to inalienable gift or to be commodity and gift at once—entails a resignification facilitated by spatial and temporal separation. from a material perspective, objects themselves may remain unchanged, but their symbolic significance can be refigured over time or space; in other cases, objects may function simultaneously as commodities and expressions of relationships (n. thomas 1991). throughout the filmmaking process, footage is frequently mobilized as commodity and gift. “work samples” showing the director’s access to the intimate lives of film protagonists often result from off-camera friendships and are also used to convince film funders or distributors of the film’s commercial potential. despite the ontological disagreements of scholars of asymmetrical exchange with regard to whether alienability is possible in a gift economy, the spatial and temporal separations between exchanges clearly introduce the possibility for different parties of the exchange to rewrite the narrative, benefiting as a result. john l. jackson jr. (2004) suggests that as with other gifts, the potential for exploitation for films is endless, as anthropologists can use footage shot for one thing to resignify it for another context, such as a journal article or a film festival. his use of the phrase “ethnographic filmflam” appears particularly apt because of the swindling enabled by the endless resignification of ethnographic material, evident in my own reusage of material for this article. while making get by, i was alerted to the risks of such variances in narrative resulting from the spatial and temporal gaps between the spheres of production and circulation. after completion, the film screened locally at cornell cinema, stanley’s church, and later, the workers unite film festival in new york city. i convinced the festival to cover transportation costs for stanley and milton, but at the last minute, neither could attend. the film screened at festivals and academic screenings internationally, including in italy, portugal, and france, out of which i could only attend one, and stanley and milton none. it wasn’t until years later, when i began volunteering for stanley and milton’s tv show after that chance encounter with milton, that i realized a misunderstanding about the film’s circulation. one evening, after wrapping an episode, stanley hesitantly asked me how the film was doing financially. i realized then that he must have long assumed i was profiting from the film’s distribution. i made clear that, apart from the declined offer of transportation for the festival in new york, no monetary profit had come from the film’s circulation. sheepishly, i offered that if there had been, surely i would have shared the profits with them. despite this admission, somewhere in the gap between a collaborative production process and its evidently less collaborative distribution, the film’s (in)alienability and mutability brought our asymmetries into sharp focus. through the lens of mutability, the film exhibited characteristics of both gift and commodity. what began as a collaborative project prompted by a shared idea of the film’s use value for the campaign transformed into a film with exchange value, partly due to my added labor through post-production. in this process, the inter-class aspect of our relationship became significant. marx’s analysis of commodity form focuses on the relationship between the working class (who provide labor) and capitalists (who provide capital). in my case, despite not having much capital (though i did use my own savings for film festival submission fees), following lee (2019) and pierre bourdieu (1996), my social and cultural capital as a result of relative class and racial privilege, as well as my specialized labor, contributed to the film’s commodification; in turn, the film’s circulation at festivals and conferences further sedimented my social and cultural capital as an emerging film professional. despite my interest in reciprocal collaboration, i became party to the suturing involved in converting our seemingly inalienable film into an alienable commodity, abstracted from its collaborative origins. in this way, the multiply produced film resonates with paige west’s (2012, 55–56) argument that despite the “fair trade” market’s deceptive ability to counter a polanyian “disembedding” of the market from social relations, it is in fact an inescapable part of neoliberal commoditization. it would be fair to say that i became an unwitting ally to the decontextualization that enables the appearance of coherent capitalism (bear, ho, tsing, and yanagisako 2015). in sum, the seeming symmetries experienced during get by’s production belied the fundamental, class-based asymmetries in my ability to refashion the object—through strategies of post-production and access to circuits of distribution—and unequally benefit from prospects of prestige and profit. conclusion after years of what might be characterized as a defensive/celebratory mode required by justifying new methods to a conservative discipline, visual anthropologists are increasingly turning their attention to the systems and institutions that produce and shape the technologies of their trade. stephanie takaragawa et al.’s (2019) “bad habitus” calls for a critical approach to examining how multimodal anthropology can reify power and privilege within systems of technoscience, global capitalism, and the white supremacist tendencies of anthropology (todd 2018). lee (2019), also informed by bourdieu, is similarly reflexive in revealing how the self-professed “noncommercial” films made in harvard’s sensory ethnography lab accrue massive cultural and social capital that allow them to circulate within prestige-based neoliberal economies of contemporary art. this article can also be situated within this vein of critically minded scholarship in which artist-anthropologists use one set of tools, critical ethnographic analysis, to examine other tools of their trade, films and other ethnographic technologies. in “open[ing] up the black box” (takaragawa et al. 2019) to collaborative ethnographic filmmaking, the multiply produced film pulls focus on film as a technology, as well as on the practice of ethnography more broadly. in so doing, it concerns itself not only with the capitalist economy of value, as takaragawa et al. (2019) and lee (2019) do, but also with the gift economy of relations, intersecting arenas in which anthropologists both study and traffic. jean rouch lamented the ways anthropologists consumed knowledge without offering much in return, assuming the role of metaphysical sorcerer or witch. rouch (2003 [1973], 101) firmly believed that ethnographic film, while not resolving this dilemma, had the capacity to realize a “shared anthropology” (anthropologie partagée) in which “knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the western temples of knowledge.” the strategies he developed to realize this vision included training interlocutors as filmmakers, “audiovisual reciprocity” (i.e., eliciting feedback from collaborators), and co-writing through “ethno-fiction.” yet even rouch (2003 [1973], 221) struggled to resolve what i have described as the inherent tension between collaborative film as commodity and gift: the people allow us to film them, but once it is done, the film goes to the west, and the people have no control over what is done with the images of their lives. often the people who made the film have been given grants or get professional stature. should the people be paid, too? or is that another kind of insult? this dilemma highlights what makes the ethnographic process confounding to all parties: that it cannot be said to exist squarely within either the gift economy or the market economy. ethnography has long provided a unique toolbox for collaboration, though the explicit theorization of collaboration vis-à-vis the anthropology of exchange is more recent (jackson 2004; faubion and marcus 2009; rabinow 2011; riles 2015). i have highlighted studies of asymmetrical exchange (i.e., on gender, colonialism) because, while once revelatory, their insights have not fundamentally transformed the ethnographic method. for this reason, i have chosen to “return to the scene” (simpson 2014; todd 2018) of the anthropology of exchange to draw a thread between its ontological insights and the epistemological contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropologists. as i have argued, the multiply produced film does not make for an idealized form of collaboration; rather, it constitutes an analytic and a method that recognizes a fundamental tension between two dynamics common to ethnography—the gift-like exchanges of solidarity and obligation and the outwardly commoditized form produced by such exchanges—raising important questions about asymmetries of power, profit, and accountability. despite the often nonmarket beginnings of collaborative ethnography—typically around a shared purpose (i.e., use value)—such exchange relations are disciplined through popular market conventions (guyer 2004) and institutions (gregory 1982) that contribute to the transformation of value from the spheres of production to circulation (strathern 1988). first, ethnographic artifacts share outward appearances with commercially successful books and hollywood blockbusters. second, exchange relations are shaped by market-embedded institutions (e.g., festivals, distributors, academia) and subsequently the conditions and incentives for exchange value. thus, regardless of if or when the prospect for profit is introduced, the gap between spheres of production and circulation contributes to the alienability, mutability, and commodification of collaborative objects. i have suggested that when the object of collaborative efforts remains an immaterial intention, one can maintain faith in the ethical ideals of ethnographic solidarity. yet the multiply produced film suggests that even efforts at “audio-visual reciprocity” (rouch 2003 [1973]), “speaking nearby” (trinh 1992), and “speaking with” (tallbear 2014) face an inevitable tension once social relations of solidarity are sutured into a material object. thus, the very immaterial object that once served to build links between ethnographers and collaborators (owing to shared purpose or use value) is in danger of transforming from gift to commodity. as a method, multiply produced ethnography creates openings for sharing intellectual and creative authority through fluid and changing roles in ways that recognize difference and its transformative potential for solidarity and intersubjective knowledge production. despite formalized methodological innovations aimed at leveling the playing field such as co-authorship and participatory action research, such approaches often prove challenging because of the requirements of consistently shared priorities or privilege. the multiply produced method offers an emergent strategy (brown 2017) to transform some of the inherent limitations of ethnography—its long durée, its fundamental asymmetries—into openings for epistemological insight, by building on its core strengths such as its orientation to open-endedness, experimentation, and potential for multivocality. i have suggested how, in the case of ethnographic film, the multiply produced can challenge western norms of artistic autonomy and ownership by embracing a relational artistic autonomy through fluid roles, where directors can sometimes step back as camera persons while film “subjects” can put on the director’s hat. through creative contributions that engender a cascading multivocality, collaboration has the capacity to shape the filmic form itself. continued experimentation with multiply produced methods in various subdisciplines of anthropology will, i hope, continue to further feminist and decolonial epistemological insights into forms of collaboration that are not only politically necessary but intellectually transformative. i return to the politics of solidarity and the value of labor because many of the core insights of the multiply produced film stem from the relevance of the film’s subject matter to the meta-questions raised by its production. the production of get by, like the broader campaign for a living wage, sought to address the devaluation of working-class labor, especially by private contractors (e.g., recycling facilities) profiting from taxpayer money. in many ways, stanley and milton’s labor was valued more highly within the gift economy in which their media and activist work operated than in the market through which they made their daily wage. one could say that the use value of the film for them was, in part, to increase the exchange value of their labor in the market. but the shared desires that fuel activism, organizing, and solidarity cannot be reduced to such instrumental analysis. when i called milton and stanley to consult with them on the publication of this article, we reminisced about our days working together on the living wage campaign. stanley recalled, “what we did was revolutionary!” milton said, “if it wasn’t for the film and our movement, fifteen dollars [i.e., the success of the “fight for fifteen” campaign advocating for raising the minimum wage to $15/hour] never would have happened. that came from our hearts and minds!” he added, “when you become a famous director, i’ll be able to say i was in your first film. you put us on the map with this film.” while milton’s words are often kind and supportive to the point of exaggeration, these reflections reminded me of the positive outcomes of our work together despite my many regrets about the failed solidarity of the campaign and the filmmaking process. what stayed with him and stanley was a sense of accomplishment with regard to their role in making the living wage a reality for other workers, even if it did little to benefit them personally (milton was also eventually fired as a result of his activism). the film’s impact on any movement success—local or national—certainly was not a direct one; rather, it mediated, and in many ways produced, relations of thick solidarity that strengthened our relationships and shared work for the living wage. this stood in contrast to the thin solidarity that characterized aspects of the campaign in which the mobilization of empathy papered over differences of racialized class subjectivities, contributing to failures of accountability in moments of crisis. while feminist accounts of collaboration often focus on the intersectional dynamics of two parties—the researcher and the researched—solidarity brings into view the significance of political alignments vis-à-vis a third, often more powerful party. if anthropological complicity in colonialism stems from the ignorance of this powerful “third,” understanding the dynamics of solidarity has much to offer to pathways beyond the subject-object dyad of classic ethnography whose painful legacies continue to persist. multiply produced ethnography builds on the intersectional feminist tradition to attend to the intersecting axes of difference and sameness to seek—however fraught and contingent—epistemologies of solidarity that aspire to weather the transformation of value and its emergent asymmetries throughout the ethnographic process. abstract this article introduces the “multiply produced film” as a methodology and analytic that highlights the asymmetrical dynamics inherent to collaboration. i draw on (auto)ethnographic material from the making of get by (2014), a film on worker-community solidarity, to explore collaboration across race, class, and gender in subject matter and method. i situate the multiply produced film within a genealogy that grafts ontological insights from the anthropology of exchange onto the epistemological contributions of feminist, decolonial, and visual anthropologists committed to collaboration. i argue that as a method, collaborative filmmaking has the potential to challenge narrow western conceptions of autonomy and authorship through shared authority and fluid roles that engender a cascading multivocality that shapes the resulting filmic form. as an analytic, the multiply produced film reveals how collaboration entails a fundamental tension between the gift-like exchanges of solidarity and the outwardly commoditized form (e.g., films, books) produced by such exchanges, raising questions about asymmetries of power, prestige, and accountability. [ethnographic film; collaboration; the gift; feminist epistemology; visual anthropology; decolonizing anthropology; solidarity] notes acknowledgments i want to thank milton webb and stanley mcpherson for being courageous and patient co-adventurers in our filmmaking and organizing journey together. without their friendship, deep commitment, and creative insights, get by, this article, and the living wage campaign would never have borne any fruit. i am grateful to fellow organizers from the cornell organization for labor action and the tompkins county workers’ center living wage working group for their hard work on the campaign and their willingness to be in front of the camera. my deep appreciation goes to my filmmaking mentor j. p. sniadecki and fellow filmmaking students in cornell’s “sub-basement cinema,” especially miasarah lai, mariangela mihai, and natalie nesvaderani, now fellow members of ethnocine collective. i could not have finished this article without the many people who offered invaluable feedback on earlier versions, including annelise riles, elena guzman, guangtian ha, shannan hayes, zoë west, kriangsak teera-hong, noorjehan asim, erica kaunang, and the generous peer reviewers. finally, i wish to thank heather paxson for her keen eye and exceptional guidance, which made this article stronger in ways i could not have envisioned. 1. see the tompkins county workers’ center website for more on the living wage campaign, http://www.tcworkerscenter.org/community/faq-on-mw-as-lw-campaign/. 2. see gabriel dattatreyan (2018, 23) on whether collaborative ethnography necessarily engenders obligation or imposition. 3. see faye v. harrison (1991) and irma mcclaurin (2001) on anthropology’s failures to cite the work of women and people of color—significant given that concrete pathways to decolonizing the discipline have been advanced primarily by women and scholars of color. 4. green (2015) and other filmmakers argue that the conventional term film subjects does not afford agency to those whose lives are on screen, instead advocating for terms such as participants, collaborators, protagonists, or characters. 5. for example, green’s (2015) “co-collaboration” articulates a reflexive, intersubjective practice between researcher and researched that challenges the hierarchical relationship between the two. jackson’s (2004) “ethnographic filmflam” emphasizes the potential for disingenuousness when anthropologists repurpose filmic material for unanticipated ethnographic ends. 6. the methodology of the multiply produced film could be seen as in keeping with calls for “patchwork ethnography,” which contests conventional notions and temporalities of “the field” and aims to transform existing constraints into openings for new epistemological insights (günel, varma, and watanabe 2020). 7. such accounts resonated with my own experiences as a perennial insider-outsider, as a person of mixed heritage raised on three continents. this is a position that, while once painful, i have come to embrace as an anthropologist and a filmmaker. 8. the term cinéma vérité (rouch 2003 [1973]), vérité for short, describes scenes of unfolding action and everyday life in contrast to interviews or voice-over paired with b-roll. while the term has been critiqued even by its author for its problematic mobilization of “truth,” i mobilize it to signify a filmic sensibility of directness and intimacy cultivated through relationships with collaborators. the potential for cinéma vérité to challenge the “fly on the wall” aesthetics of “purely” observational film makes it particularly generative for decolonial and feminist approaches that view the director as a participant rather than outside of what is filmed. 9. despite the prevailing artistic norms of single authorship advanced by filmic “auteur theory” (truffaut 2014 [1954]), a range of attitudes and practices exist regarding collaboration in ethnographic filmmaking. the work of harvard’s sensory ethnography lab involves collaboration with fellow filmmakers (lee 2019) but not typically with film “subjects.” on the other end of the spectrum, the legacy of filmmakers such as jean rouch, who consciously practiced “shared anthropology” and whose films (e.g., rouch 1961) incorporate reflexive feedback from film participants, is increasingly being taken up by a new generation of indigenous, feminist, and decolonial ethnographic filmmakers and collectives like the karrabing film collective, miyarrka media, camra, and ethnocine collective, the latter of which i am a member. 10. one barbershop interviewee’s comments on black entrepreneurship advocates for a solution seemingly at odds with the demands of the living wage campaign—working for oneself. 11. this history of solidarity includes the black-led civil rights movement paving the way for the immigration act of 1965 and black solidarity after the murder of vincent chin by two white men in 1982. histories of conflict bring to mind the racialized tensions between black and korean communities during the 1992 los angeles uprising and the ways in which the “model minority” myth is weaponized by white supremacist narratives against affirmative action and the movement for black lives. 12. i was born and raised in korea, in a culture emphasizing relational social intelligence. the korean notion of nunchi considers the ability to perceive and act on others’ needs, desires, and emotions (in relation to one’s own) as a basic tenet of social relations. 13. such a moment is captured in another film i co-directed, for my art (hong, lai, and mihai 2016). similarly, as a producer of the bad feminists making films podcast, i have found that a common challenge for female directors is managing male crew members who refuse their directorial authority, going so far as to pose as the director on set. 14. while the par process emphasizes the multiple voices of stakeholders, written projects often necessitate multiple voices speaking as one, in the form of conclusions and recommendations. one aspect of get by that confounds more conventional documentary styles is how it does not articulate a single closed message. this results from the “cascading multivocality” that began with milton’s imperative to include more community voices on the living wage. this openness has allowed the film to invite very different kinds of discussions—from a community screening in stanley’s church with local politicians and leaders, to a conference on the “right to the city” with labor scholars and activists in paris, to the workers unite film festival in new york. the approach to producing get by, my first film, can be described as an exercise in “emergent strategy” (brown 2017); i have learned from its successes and failures. street par (spar)—challenging to attempt because of the sheer time required of its stakeholders, who are involved in every stage of the project (payne and bryant 2018)—provides important lessons for collaborative and impact-oriented filmmaking. for example, the spar approach to discuss ownership of the research from the outset (bryant and payne 2013) constitutes a critically important ethical practice. my current film project takes a similar approach, with meta-conversations at every stage of the process, from development to post-production, including conversations about film credits and funding. an increasing number of nonfiction filmmakers are taking up such approaches to increase transparency with and accountability to film participants (see documentary accountability working group 2021; https://www.docaccountability.org/). 15. feminist ethnographers have long pursued methods of co-authorship and multivocality (moraga and anzaldúa 2015 [1981]; lawless 1991; behar and gordon 1995; torres 2019; el kotni, dixon, and miranda 2020). 16. see heather paxson (2013) for an explanation of “ethnographic complicity,” which describes how research “subjects,” in this case artisan cheesemakers, view her 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4, pp. 649-680, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.09 life in traffic: riddling field notes on the political economy of “sex” and nature cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 251-285, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.08 life in traffic: riddling field notes on the political economy of “sex” and nature ruth goldstein university of wisconsin, madison https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1969-6450 the promise of rain hangs heavy in peru’s mineral-rich amazonian region of madre de dios as the toyota tundra glides along the interoceanic highway. it’s the last day in august 2011, and i’m traveling with four environmental engineers employed by the regional government’s department of energy, mines, and hydrocarbons. madre de dios, bordered by brazil and bolivia, is experiencing a gold rush,1 and with it, the companion industry of the sex trade. as we drive, makeshift restaurants and prostíbars (brothel-bars) flash past the window. we are headed to gold-mining camps to conduct workshops on environmental impacts. on other occasions, i enter the mines with regional health teams and sex workers turned peer educators. this triple-frontier amazonian zone bears the acronym map: m for madre de dios, a for brazil’s state of acre, and p for a region in bolivia called pando. the engineers joke that this remote area is “off the map,” home to “tribes living in voluntary isolation.”2 yet despite this off-the-beaten-track reputation, my colleagues repeat something i’ve heard frequently since crossing from brazil into peru along the interoceanic highway: the route not only enables travel and migration but also facilitates a variety of illegal economies. “all the labor trafficking in the mines? sex trafficking? wildlife trafficking? gold?” enrique, one of the engineers, asks rhetorically. figure 1. life by the side of the highway. photos by ruth goldstein. his companions nodding assent, another engineer adds: “it’s all because of the highway.” from october 2010 until may 2012, and for shorter stints between 2016 and 2021, i undertook multisited research along the interoceanic highway, examining the kinds of “life in traffic” the environmental engineers referenced. concentrating on the seemingly disparate economies of women, plants, and gold, i conducted fieldwork with artisanal and small-scale gold miners, sex workers, indigenous community members, environmental engineers, health-care practitioners, intellectual property experts, taxi drivers, as well as regional and central government officials in the map region. i found the three economies intimately intertwined: women destined for the sex trade, plants they employed for reproductive health (botanicals also targeted by biopirates for pharmaceutical potential), and the gold—which drives local to global markets. as the environmental engineers emphasized, the interoceanic highway supports myriad trafficking economies. figure 2. map region & interoceanic highway (peru-brazil) and waterways. map created by scott walker, courtesy of the harvard map collection. la interoceánica,3 as the highway is known in peru, forms part of an infrastructural development plan to build roads across south america (apurinã 2015; dammert bello 2018; gadea 2012).4 coast to coast, the highway spans some 3,500 miles between brazil’s atlantic and peru’s pacific, grazing bolivia. it is latin america’s longest latitudinal thoroughfare, promoted as integral for opening amazonian areas to economic development, transporting goods (like brazilian soybeans) to peru’s pacific coast and then to chinese markets (delgado 2008; harvey and knox 2015; moore 2019). yet the highway’s two lanes aren’t busy. occasionally, trucks filled with timber of suspect origin rumble by. otherwise, it’s just local traffic—gasoline trucks (often with people, chickens, sheep, and motorcycles hitching on top), taxis, buses, and motorcycles going to and from the gold mines of madre de dios. the highway has not achieved the promised transnational economic integration. rather, informal markets and deforestation proliferate (baraloto et al. 2015; chirif 2019). the construction of the highway in peru coincided with the global economic crisis, further heightening the demand for gold. the newest and most-trafficked section (completed in 2011) connects peru’s andean capital, cusco, with brazil, cutting through madre de dios. until the paving of la interoceánica, no asphalt road had run through the region (dourojeanni 2006; harvey and knox 2015). known as the “capital of biodiversity,” madre de dios had previously boasted so-called virgin rain forest. the name given to this amazonian region reflects the long-standing presence of dominican missionary padres (fathers) whose naming of the madre de dios (mother of god) river would also be bestowed on the surrounding land.5 the impossible duty of the virgin-mother to both reproduce and remain chaste makes for an apt description for both the rain forest landscape—riddled with mining holes and pillaged for medicinal plants—and for the sex-working women. la interoceánica has only served to intensify trafficking economies in human and environmental extraction. figure 3. welcome to the southern interoceanic highway. photo by ruth goldstein. figure 4. road signs. before and after: abandoned / progress; uncertainty / future. photos by ruth goldstein. back in the truck, enrique sits in the front seat, chewing coca leaves and detailing the contentious history of la interoceánica’s construction and its environmental toll as we pass faded state-sponsored signs touting the highway’s economic promise. the engineers criticize policies that single out small-scale miners for the environmental destruction. “and where does the gold go?” enrique asks. “here,” he taps his phone and points to mine. peru consistently ranks as latin america’s top producer of gold (martinez et al. 2018; espin and perz 2021) and among the top ten globally. madre de dios contributes an estimated 25 percent of peru’s gold exports, transformed into phones and other electronics (buccella 2014; tubb 2020); jewelry, and bullion in europe, the united states, and the united arab emirates (cortés-mcpherson 2019; holland 2020). small-scale miners are not pocketing the major earnings—buyers and traders are. while the engineers explain the difference between informal and illegal mining to me and how to recycle the liquid mercury used in the small-scale and artisanal mining process,6 enrique decides to stop the truck. he steps out, waiting for me by the guardrail, flanked by plastic-walled prostíbulos. as i slide out of the backseat to meet him, tar fumes burn my nose. in front of us, a large sign, paid for by a local mining company, declares: “to take care of the environment is to take care of our life.” figure 5. to take care of the environment. photo by ruth goldstein. this is what enrique wanted to show me, the irony of it all. then he asks: “what is the difference between a mine and a woman?” throughout the weeks, i had seen bulldozers topple trees, digging open mining pits. i had seen precious plants and animals stopped by border police, then trafficked onward along the highway. i had also seen families coming from the mines to roadside clinics, able to afford medicine, send children to school, and build a home. i’m silent next to enrique, thinking about how this highway has created fertile ground for extracting gold, wildlife, and human labor—but also for local socioeconomic mobility. the gold goes global. coca, maca, and ayahuasca, some of the (medicinal) plants trafficked to and from peru, also go around the world: part of a multi-billion-dollar herbal medicine trade (allkin 2017). the women, however, do not circulate as easily. because i haven’t responded, enrique repeats himself. “is this a bad joke about women?” i’m not sure whether to take him seriously. “it’s a riddle. … you can’t guess?” enrique pantomimes surprise. “i don’t want to guess.” “nothing.” enrique pauses. “because both are for exploitation.” in this article, i examine “life in traffic” along and off the side of the interoceanic highway, where the “traffic in women” and the political economy of “sex/gender systems” (rubin 1975) are discursively and materially linked with notions of the value and the violability of “nature,” gendered female. acknowledging the proliferation of critical scholarship engaging gender, commodification, labor (babb 2018; strathern 1988,7 2016; lepowski 1993), nature (franklin, lury, and stacey 2000), and language (butler 1993, 2004)—among others—gayle rubin’s 1975 essay “the traffic in women: notes on the ‘political economy’ of sex” remains the inspiration for this article’s title and analysis, which delves into the (inter)relations that configure the traffic in women, plants, and gold.8 in her feminist critique of claude lévi-strauss, sigmund freud, and marxist categories, rubin argues that the division of gendered labor is not foundational to capitalism, but rather, that all sex/gender systems emerge as capitalism’s social products. riffing on karl marx (and simone de beauvoir 1949), rubin (1975, 158) insists that: “a woman is a woman. she only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations.” wrested from these relations, women are not the “helpmate” of men “any more than gold in itself is money.” rubin places women into relation with gold, but in a different manner than the roadside version of the riddle. calling for a “full-bodied analysis” of the production of sex/gender systems, rubin requests redirecting attention from the political economy of material goods and their relations. yet, i argue, “the relations of production and transport that govern food, clothing, automobiles and transistor radios” (rubin 1975, 166)—all employed in the extractive economies—must also come under consideration. these goods require natural resources to be made. they do not remain separate from the production of gender identities, sexual desire, or classist, racist, and ableist notions of bodily availability in which ideas about feminized nature represent unspoken yet persistent signifiers of exchange value. the “traffic in women” also constitutes a traffic in nature. comprehending the social production of sex and ideas about who and what is exploitable, a fully fleshed analysis must include the traffic in plant, animal, and mineral life. the processes of road-building, mining technologies, and biopiracy—part of patriarchal notions of progress—inform how “nature,” gendered female and often indigenized or racialized, gains monetary value and becomes configured into global commodity chains as “natural capital.”9 beginning with the riddle, i investigate the intersecting and emerging political economies of natural resources and (those who identify as) women, unearthing the “certain relations” that equate women and mines. the material and metaphoric entanglements of women, gold, and plants along the highway from the andes to the amazon comprise part of a global traffic in natural resources, discursively and materially formulated in transit. the socioeconomic relations that link women and natural resources not only become apparent when examining discursive formations; they’re also produced and affirmed—the mentality toward exploitation—through language. these entangled economies hinge on notions of sex and nature, expressed (and exposed) through speech acts like rumor, jokes, riddles, and stories. such discursive formations represent nodes of “communicability” (briggs 2005), denoting quick transmission, demonstrating and (re)instantiating acceptable attitudes toward the violability of natural resources and women. they make for “excitable speech” acts: particular “words or certain forms of address [that] not only operate as threats to one’s physical well-being, but there is a strong sense in which the body is alternatively sustained and threatened through modes of address” (butler 1997, 5). while speech acts like the riddle may condition material possibilities and influence human actions by normalizing exploitation, they also embody possibilities for subversion. male gold miners may also endure exploitative work conditions, but their treatment is not related to a sexualized landscape in language or practice. following carolyn merchant’s (1980) examination of metaphoric female imagery for “nature” in enlightenment scientific discourse, ecofeminist scholars elucidate language’s role in creating regimes of value and the reversible function of analogies that equate the exchange values of women’s bodies and “nature’s womb” (gaard 1997; warren 2000). mother earth’s shifting status as revered or plunderable, “virgin” or “fertile,” correlates with how women’s bodies gain—or lose—socioeconomic value, and vice versa. defined in relationship to “nature’s body” (schiebinger 1993), women, like nature, can be marked as accessible—if not necessary to exploit—in the name of economic progress. in colonial and neo-colonial latin america, sex work often accompanies men’s labor camps built around natural resource extraction. a growing body of latinx scholarship on sexual violence in areas of extractive enterprises analyzes how the demands of global capitalism exacerbate existing racial and gender inequalities (cabrapan and hofmann 2019; pineda and moncada 2018; salazar rámirez 2017; ulloa 2016). these economies of natural resource extraction create the grounds for the traffic in women. the export economy of madre de dios revolves around logging and gold mining. agricultural production of brazil nuts and chocolate cannot match income from natural resource extraction or sex work. drawn to the mining boom, sex workers, miners, and traffickers travel from neighboring countries or other parts of peru. the sex industry is a diverse one, though, where workers operate under varying conditions of consent: from outright deception, often trafficked by another woman, to intentionally planned sex-work trips to the mines (goldstein 2014, 2019a). resonant with forms of reproductive labor like embryo exchange, sex traffic “between women” exists (roberts 2012): sex work often funds tuition, schoolbooks, or a family member’s surgery. in terms of consent and types of sex work, madre de dios is not unique. erotic dancing and accompanying drinking clients represent a significant portion of what is labeled as sex work, though, strictly speaking, these do not constitute sexual acts. many sex workers did not arrive as trafficked persons either. radical feminists often capitalize on narratives of captive (cis)women prostitutes, relying on narrow categories of agency and consent that do not allow for lived complexity or desire (salazar parreñas, hwang, and lee 2012; kempadoo 2004; hofmann and moreno 2016). the concern over sex trafficking pivots on the virgin/mother opposition, clouding the sociopolitical and economic relations that create few options for narrating or actualizing womanhood (goldstein 2014, 2019a). whereas the first version of the riddle has the potential to reinstate gendered notions of human and nonhuman life, riddles, like their tellers, can prove innovative, challenging structures of race, gender, indigeneity, and sexuality. it matters who is asking and who is answering. throughout my fieldwork, sex workers (both cisand transwomen), alongside indigenous women leaders, rewrote the riddle in empowering ways. they raised questions about just who and what counts as a woman or a feminized entity when male miners refer to their tips, paid in gold, as las chibolas (slang for “girls”),10 and plants like maca, coca, and ayahuasca embody powerful female identities. all three plants, commonly consumed in madre de dios, represent a pharmakon—remedy or poison, depending on the dose.11 women also spoke of a kinship with the gold mines, not because of exploitation, but rather, because they both “fight back”: rain forest mines collapse when root systems erode, claiming the lives of the men in the pits. my exchange with enrique and subsequent revisions of the riddle became focal points for making field notes on “life in traffic.” traffic lines engaging what donna haraway (1989) calls an edifying “traffic” between the co-constituted poles of nature and culture and what socioeconomic relations enable the exchange of women and nature—relations revealed in the first telling of the riddle—i deploy traffic in three ways. first, in the context of quotidian commuting—its circulation and jams; second, as illegal trade. these first two engagements define traffic as act(ion)s or events that may also constitute objects of analysis. they inform the third engagement, where traffic operates as an adaptive, mobile conceptual framework and method for multisited fieldwork, often entailing multiple objects of analysis, possibly traveling at different speeds and directions—where words also travel (goldstein 2014). while traffic connotes illegal activity, the need for camouflage (jusionyte 2012), multidirectional or congested movement, and in/detectability (middleton 2019) in commuter transit, it also signifies a productive movement in ideas (geertz 1973; haraway 1989; lévi-strauss 1966; näser-lather and neubert 2015; williams 1973). the meaning of the latin trafficare, “to carry on trade,” derives from the verb’s literal denotation, “touching repeatedly, to handle.” the etymology stems from transfricare. trans signifies “across,” while fricare means “to rub,” as in “friction,” the force that resists the motion that creates it. as a metaphor, friction means conflict, which, as anna tsing (2004) reminds us, can also manifest as generative, potentially fomenting rearrangements of power relations. i offer an analytic and method of traffic as an addition to the ethnographic toolbox, not a replacement for existing theoretical or methodological frameworks. it is indebted to haraway’s (1989, 377) edifying conceptual traffic in nature and culture and jodi byrd’s (2011) “cacophony,” in which the transit police’s patrol of commuter traffic delineate the boundaries of empire and modes of multiplicity do not necessarily invite harmony. traffic offers a complement (and compliment) to tsing’s (2004) interactive “friction” of opposing people and ideas about nature and culture, with the fitting description of “where the rubber meets the road.” similar to friction, and like retellings of the riddle, traffic allows for lability and unlikely productive encounters, elucidating “certain relations,” their histories and linguistic packaging that create the conditions in which women become prostitutes, playboy bunnies, or gold mines—exploitable commodities or rebellious subjects of different orders. this “multi-optic” aspect of traffic encourages “an ethics of mutual avowal, or open and active acknowledgment of connection with other struggles” (kim 2015, 20). locating interrelations among more than a single object of analysis become crucial to the conceptual framework of traffic, aligned with multisited fieldwork methodologies. in concert with “an ethics of mutual avowal” (kim 2015, 20), this approach recognizes that, as ethnographers, we also “traffic”—that is, capitalize—on telling other people’s stories. while traffic follows friction and the rich literature on networks and exchange, identifying co-constituting relations and nodes of connection with the intention of acting on productive aspects of synthesis and movement, it also acknowledges getting stuck and hard stops. often, geopolitical economic relations that configure social hierarchies don’t allow for much mobility. intrinsic to the ethical impetus of an analytical and methodological approach of traffic, then, is considering how automotive traffic, forced migration, and illegal trade can lead to roadkill, jams, collisions—machinations of empire where power isn’t unsettled (byrd 2011). in such violent moments, people and things may keep going, but in disastrous directions or simply because returning or changing direction aren’t possible (yeh 2018). while a method of traffic examines multidirectionality and subversion, reverse-ability does not always amount to upsetting the status quo. thus, in addition to the lability that relational analysis affords, i ask what it means to seriously consider endings. in the conclusion, i return to this question. when i began research in 2008, questions of gender, race, indigeneity, and sexuality were central, but sex workers and gold had not yet entered the ethnographic frame. i was interested in indigenous intellectual property rights and biopiracy, specifically the traffic in medicinal plants that the engineers noted had increased with the construction of la interoceánica. biopiracy, which entails appropriating ethnobiological knowledge in addition to biological material, has its roots in european colonial conquest (hayden 2004; goldstein 2019b). plants and empire have long shared histories (baber 2016; cañizares-esguerra 2006; schiebinger 2004), accompanying transoceanic quests for precious metals. european colonial extractive economies that trafficked in gold and silver, rubber and quinine, tea and opium also trafficked in laboring bodies. these entanglements—involving people, metals, flora, and fauna—triangulated across oceans or the same land mass, persist (bauer and norton 2017; hamaan 2010; tamboli 2019). the exploitation of one life links to the global supply chain of another(s). the routes and relations that involve women, plants, and gold along la interoceánica create “global assemblages” (ong and collier 2005), demonstrating the continuation of colonial-era quests for precious metals, exotic wildlife, and (re)producible food-stocks. an analytic and method of traffic suggests that to intervene in one would have potentially liberating ramifications for the others, identifying where, perhaps even how, to do that. it also underscores the role that language plays in shaping human attitudes and actions. because i initially focused on plant trafficking, i interviewed brazilian patent officials and biologists analyzing the pharmaceutical potential of amazonian and andean plants for human sexual health. the search for possible “natural viagras” had become popular because they were certain to have a lucrative market. as a further benefit, these plants were not subject to the same ip (intellectual property) standards as possible hiv/aids or cancer drugs. but these plants were tied to indigenous territorial claims, political sovereignty, and cultural patrimony, if not also economic markets (labate and goldstein 2009; labate 2012; pantoja 2008; tavui 2016). when i asked how this flora made it thousands of miles from the andes and amazon to the cities of são paulo and rio de janeiro, researchers posited the surprising response that, in addition to biopirates, sex workers—putas (whores), in their words—carried these plants when traveling along la interoceánica. the intertwined narrative of sex workers and plants frayed in some places and became more knotted in others. there are many ways for flora to travel. while more complicated than a factory assembly line, sex workers often carry a variety of plants for sale or their own use, including maca, coca, and ayahuasca in their mobile botanical pharmacies. maca (lepidium meyenii) is one of peru’s most biopirated plants (smith 2015; tavui 2016). coca (erythroxylum coca), a sacred andean plant, gains its notoriety from its refined cousin, cocaine. and ayahuasca (banisteria caapi), a revered amazonian vine known for its potent medicinal-psychedelic effects, has increasingly become the focus of pharmaceutical testing for depression and parkinson’s disease (domínguez-clavé et al. 2016; dos santos et al. 2015). as with many medicinal botanicals, dosage is key. in the sex worker’s pharmacy, maca and coca act as stimulants, increasing blood flow. indeed, maca’s global popularity results from its reputation as a “natural” viagra (indecopi 2015; neuman 2014; ninahuanca 2014). the sex workers sell both maca and coca to male clients. the use of ayahuasca, popular with psychonauts, differs, but women reported employing the vine to facilitate childbirth. less publicized is how women may use maca and coca as abortive substances. increased blood flow might aid fertility and aid birth contractions or an end pregnancy—again, depending on the dose.12 such versatility does not translate into the possible reversal of all effects, however. the trajectory of women and plants along the highway was not always straightforward, thus, neither was mine. between 2011 and 2017, i crisscrossed the triple frontier zone ten times. at border checkpoints waiting for inspection, i stood alongside women en route to and from the gold mines. “we carry our plants with us,” two of them explained during one border crossing. it was cheaper to self-medicate and less humiliating than going to a government-run clinic that would ask for their “carnet,” which registered sex workers were supposed to carry, demonstrating their sexual health status. guards most often confiscated coca at the border crossings, a result of an overall crackdown on cocaine. yet the plant was popular because it kept miners and sex workers alert during long hours, not to mention its purported circulatory effects for erection issues. when i asked brazilian border agents about the hard line on coca (even coca candies were banned), they responded: “mules carry more than the leaf.” women acting as carriers, so-called mules (mulas)—another instance of gendered interspecies collapse—commonly serve as human vehicles for trafficking cocaine (kernaghan 2015) and wildlife. border authorities now receive training to recognize traits of traffickers to help catch these mulas. mulas, the agent explained, can traffic drugs, gold, or other women—and they might also be the commodity trafficked. figure 6. brazil-peru border: public safety and military post to confront human trafficking and biological materials. photo by ruth goldstein. the waiting area for inspection lies between the peruvian and brazilian border-enforcement offices for “trafficked biological materials” and for “trafficked people.” fines for trafficked plants and women might be paid in pieces of gold. “they all go together,” officers told me. but only so far; then they go separate ways. estimates place illegal gold from madre de dios circulating in the global market at around 18 tons (adamek, lupa, and zawadzki 2021). peruvian maca ends up in japan and china (smith 2015; zhou 2017), while coca for cocaine goes around the world (unodc 2021; zevallos 2017), and ayahuasca lands in laboratories in the global north (sánchez and bouso 2015). the women stay in the rain forest mines or go back and forth to their homes. traveling lainteroceánica, i recognized this highway’s centrality to meeting the global demand for gold and interrelated trafficking economies. roads as “certain” relations in 2016, the ceo of odebrecht, the brazilian company that built la interoceánica, was indicted in a fittingly named corruption scandal: “operation car-wash.” indictments continue, but thus far, odebrecht admits to bribing five peruvian presidents to win construction contracts. coast to coast, the very making of la interoceánica rests on a foundation of money-laundering, the evasion of environmental assessments, and steamrolling over indigenous protests. highways like la interoceánica function as border zones (campbell 2012; harvey and knox 2015) between “nature” and “culture,” creating fundamental relations in configurations of capital that encourage various forms of movement on its surface. the global demand for gold that comes into play with the construction of la interoceánica spawns migration to the amazonian rain forest mines, but it also contributes to stasis. andean and amazonian inhabitants seeking economic opportunities find themselves stuck along the highway—in mudslides, broken-down vehicles, or conditions of debt peonage. the “encumbrances of exchange” (winchell 2018) occur, not surprisingly, along well-worn colonial fault lines of racial, sexual, and gender difference. border crossings reveal the transit of people and things if not also the edges of empire, where the traffic in women, plants, and gold constitute not entirely separate markets. as a physical setting, the highway also forms part of the political economy of the region, a “certain relation” that creates the conditions for the traffic in women and nature. standing by the side of la interoceánica next to enrique with “mines are like women” ringing in my ears, i recalled how the space by the side of the road might also function as a narrative site, “an epistemological stance” (stewart 1996) from which to examine the conditions of possibility for reconfiguring sets of relations—economic and ecological—that put women and gold mines into the same category of exchange value. here, the highway functions as material, relational space as well as a narrative device. the “chronotope of the road” (bakhtin 1981) is a time-space setting for encounters (kernaghan 2012), ones that can result in collision, exchange, or (mis)adventure. road trips also offer the space-time for telling and listening to stories. as we walked back to the truck on that august day, enrique asked about my thoughts. was i upset about the riddle? while contentious at times, my relationship with my male colleagues generally had the tenor of sibling rivalry. even as they teased me, they showed fierce concern for my physical safety. they repeatedly went out of their way to support my research, spending long days stuck by the side of the road because of a mudslide and heavy rains. these were the moments for cracking jokes, spinning riddles, and recounting tales. i told enrique i was thinking about a father earth. would there be so many road projects? greedy grabs for medicinal plants? could men be like mines? would it change the meaning of the “to-take-care-of-the-environment” roadside sign? we brought these questions back into the truck, with other engineers sharing stories of the mountain apus, spirits considered male. as we drove along the highway, the conversation turned to how european missionaries had shaped perceptions of gender among andean earth deities. for my colleagues, the pachamama was a colonial bastardization of an earth that need not strictly define as female. gendered earth metaphors can promote care as much as they condone exploitation. considering a re-gendering or de-gendering of earth’s resources may reconfigure the relations that connect the “traffic in women” to a political ecology of sexual systems, including nonhuman forms of care and kinship(s). if the earth needn’t be a female virgin or a mother, it can loosen aspects of the gendered human-earth metaphoric and material entanglement. the multidirectional aspects of a conceptual traffic encourage an examination of the lability of gender assignments in humans and nonhumans, how they can be redefined and embodied. natural resource extraction has served as the bedrock of patriarchal capitalisms, especially in the context of “the open veins of latin america” (galeano 2003), where land and human bodies constitute “infrastructures of extractive capitalism” (graeter 2020) entangled in imf and world bank lending schemes. madre de dios in name and territory is emblematic of these gendered conceptions of land and the availability of nonhuman species. infrastructure projects like la interoceánica constitute the grounds from which nation-states and international organizations make claims about bringing modernity via economic “inroads” into an “underdeveloped,” virginal amazon. the advent of roads in madre de dios was something that the north american conservationist aldo leopold feared. in his 1924 essay, “the river of the mother of god,” leopold (1992, 123) rhapsodized about madre de dios as “the perfect symbol of the unknown places of the earth.” this fabricated emptiness can work for and against conservation efforts. in madre de dios, terra nullius didn’t protect the land; it justified avoiding informed consent to construct the highway. while la interoceánica is the first paved thoroughfare through madre de dios, the region was never the “empty” wilderness leopold imagined. the ese eja, harakmbut, matsiguenka, yora/yaminahua, and yine, among other peoples, have long called the area home (garcía altamirano 2003; iviche 2003). archeologists date human settlement to 1000-1500 ad (huertas castillo 2004). many shipibo, who also occupy northern amazonian peru, migrated south to madre de dios during the past century (cusurichi palacios 2003), though many were brought as slave labor during the first rubber boom between 1876–1912 (gray 2003). neither andean nor amazonian communities on both sides of the border were consulted about the highway project (apurinã 2015; dammert bello 2018; machado coelho de oliveira 2013).13 nearly a century before the completion of la interoceánica, leopold (1992, 126) lamented “the good roads movement”: motorways dissecting the “unknown places” of the world, eliminating the possibility for men to explore “virgin wilderness.” unaware that gold in fact lay in the soils of madre de dios, leopold linked the fervor of road-building to gold fever, both of which incited a worrisome “stampede for the spilled treasures of nature” (leopold 1992, 126). the lure of the unknown remains in madre de dios, as does the image of the supposedly open road: in addition to economic need, fantasies of adventure, desire for “hot women,” and yet-to-be-discovered rain forest miracle cures drive people onto the highway and into the amazon. candace slater (2015, 3) notes that dueling “visions of the amazon”—as an inviting, biodiverse nature or a savage, “denuded hell”—make for powerful metaphors that shape development policies, creating an understanding of place. an “empty” or “virgin” wilderness, as leopold described madre de dios, differs markedly from a landscape inhabited and cultivated by people. throughout the americas the language of terra nullius has justified settler-colonial occupations in the name of development. the road-narrative and enduring visions of a wild amazon manifest in material relations that characterize infrastructure policies, contributing to the political economy of sex and nature along la interoceánica: where there are sex-trafficked women and mother nature, devoid of or destroyed by man, the patriarchal state intervenes as protector. the peruvian state, supported by the united states agency for international development (usaid), engages care rhetoric to justify violent evictions of gold miners and purported rescue operations for sex workers.14 in these efforts, the metaphorical notions of the rain forest as a fragile mother or a virgin condition the material effects: she must be saved. but dropping grenades on rain forest mining equipment and sending sex workers back to violent homes fail to establish effective modes of intervention. when it comes to plant trafficking, peruvian policymakers confronting biopiracy also engage a particular set of savior notions about care for women and nature, mobilizing different actions in the pursuit of economic patent protection. admittedly, they have little choice but to join the dominant narrative. plants and empire in transit “if you had to choose, would you want the ‘bad girl’ or the ‘good girl’ image for your country?” juan josé miranda montero, head of peru’s national institute for the defense of competition and protection of intellectual property (indecopi) asks me in 2012. indecopi came into being in 2001, a result of the peruvian state’s recognition that from quinine (cinchona officinalis) to maca (lepidium meyenii), plants continue to play a major role in its economy, essential to empire-building into the neocolonial present.15 miranda monteros had a clear message to share: “coca is the bad girl; maca the good girl.” as one of peru’s most notoriously bio-pirated plants, maca’s reputation consistently clashes with that of coca, not only because it is seen as the “victim” of plant trafficking but also because it takes care of men’s sexual needs. miranda doesn’t mention the abortive qualities of either plant reported by sex workers. the more i learned about coca, the more i wanted to investigate what it meant to be “a bad girl,” especially when the plant is a sacred component of quechua-aymara rituals of “payment to the earth,” propitiating the pachamama for fertile returns. in 1567, the catholic church banned coca because it represented a connection to a greater-than-human power other than god. six years later, colonial spanish administrators petitioned for a reprieve: they couldn’t get their subjects to work in the mines without coca. the church reversed its decision and began collecting taxes on coca and the fruits of indigenous labor—another of many examples of entangled human, plant, and mineral relations in colonial economies. today, coca continues to feed the predominantly quechua-aymara laborers in rain forest mines. offerings to the pachamama in exchange for gold are common as well. cocaine, like gold, isn’t consumed in the mines—it’s far more valuable for export. the ministry of the interior “takes care” of coca(ine) through regulation or eradication. indecopi cares for “good girl” maca, a primary patent concern. by 2017, miranda had retired and andrés valladolid assumed directorship of indecopi. valladolid recounts how little power international law affords countries in the global south to bring biopirates to justice. storehouses of maca disappear from the andes (neuman 2014). coca flows across borders. maca, pirated from peru, now grows in china (zhou et al. 2017). both plants flow through networks of economic exchange, invoking different legal ramifications. as trafficked commodities, peru’s good and bad girls play integral roles in political economies of neocolonial trade relations. maca is a plant, a “superfood.” she becomes a “good girl” in relation to men’s needs. coca is a sacred plant. she only becomes “bad girl” cocaine in certain relations, made into a dangerous figure in narrative as much as by the natural resource economy. outside of the peruvian patent office, i had several occasions to consider the versatility of plants—remedy or poison—particularly in the context of coca. the most telling episode occurred in february 2012, when i traveled with four members of the regional government’s health team. we had a large supply of condoms, rapid hiv/aids exams, and tuberculosis tests to distribute in a mining camp called mega once. we parked the truck by the side of the highway: the narrow rain forest paths into the mines mean that we need motorcycle-taxis, which the head nurse quickly negotiates. i settle in behind my driver, miguelito, who hails from cusco. he says the rain forest took some getting used to; at first, he missed the mountains. we chat, passing thinned rain forest, with fallen trees still smoking from a controlled fire. ten minutes later, the trees disappear as we enter the mining zone. i ask miguelito what he thinks about the difference between mines and women. he knows the riddle, but instead of answering, he asks me if i know the story of mama coca. “there once was a beautiful quechua ñusta, a princess named kuka. … ” miguelito begins to tell the story, saying that it explains his thoughts about the riddle because coca and women have resistencia, like the mines. he wishes there were more of mama coca in the gold that leaves peru, harming its consumers, rather than the producers. figure 7. into the rain forest and in the mines. photos by ruth goldstein. i’m not sure what he means, but when we arrive at the prostíbar that will operate as a makeshift clinic for the day, miguelito cuts the engine to conclude kuka’s story. he tells me that the spanish kill kuka, but her human body transforms into the coca plant. the story’s takeaway: kuka, now mama coca, won’t rest until her people are free, poisoning those who colonize them and their lands. kuka’s leaves nourish the descendants of her people—high in essential nutrients and vitamins when chewed or taken as tea. but as cocaine, she is toxic. for miguelito, the rain forest mines, women, and coca all have the capacity to both give and take life. he repeats that he wishes the gold more resembled kuka. the pits, after all, claim the lives of men who come from the andes, primarily quechua and aymara speakers—kuka’s people. i ponder this as miguelito disappears among tent-like structures with wooden frames and plastic walls that line wide avenues of packed sand. there are signs advertising high-speed internet, all-inclusive lunches of lomo saltado (salted beef) with potatoes and rice, and watermelon sold on the street. the mining town even has trash pickup—it isn’t the hell described by the peruvian state. that day, i keep thinking about kuka. i notice that men headed to the mines carry plastic bags of coca leaves. the health team affirms that it’s coca that these men consume, not cocaine, though the state media adds cocaine consumption when promoting the profile of a criminal gold miner. i ask the health team about kuka, telling them that her story was miguelito’s response when asked about the “mines-are-like-women” riddle. “kuka is a warning not to become like the colonizers,” raimunda, one of the nurses, says. she dismisses the riddle as machismo. figure 8. the streets of an illegal mining town. photos by ruth goldstein. “it’s about revenge,” juan carlos, our head nurse, replies. “kuka is about resistance, like your driver said. the pits can collapse, harming or killing the miners. but people need to eat. the mines provide jobs. “your people,” he points at me, “buy the gold and the cocaine.” the gold turns into food for their families, nelson, another nurse, explains. no one subsists entirely on coca leaves. as months pass, i gain a deeper understanding of the story of kuka, hearing bits of the many versions that circulate in the mines and among sex workers. kuka was quechua royalty. one day, she heard frightening news: giant men with pale skin, beards, and an appetite for gold were approaching. the conquistadores killed kuka’s elders and took all the young women as wives. the princess herself became the property of a conquistador. desperate to escape, she managed to send word to her love, a young blacksmith. the pair left on a moonless night, running until they could go no further. when the conquistador realized that kuka had fled, he mounted his horse and took his hunting dog. the dog found the pair hidden under a rock. the conquistador killed the blacksmith, then tortured and murdered kuka. he left her body on display as a warning to those who might try to rebel. that night, the conquistador sat watch. yet in the morning, kuka’s body had disappeared and a small bush with bright green leaves gleamed in her place. stories circulate that kuka now visits her people in their dreams. if you put your ear close enough, kuka’s leaves whisper a promise to her people: she will give them strength, while exacting vengeance on the colonizers and their descendants.16 in these stories, kuka emerges as a powerful force, exemplifying resistance in body, mind, and spirit. kuka might be trafficked and made into cocaine, but the plant becomes part of the revenge. her story showcases the complications of exploiting natural resources and women. it also affirms that not all plants are alike, just as gold mines and women aren’t all the same. rubin’s “certain relations” of exploitation can be reworked in both narrative and concrete ways. the possibility of doing so, however, may entail recognizing an ending: death (with transfiguration as in the case of kuka) or clashing worldviews. when mines and women fight back versions of mama coca and riddles about why mines or the pachamama did or did not resemble women echoed in the mines and along la interoceánica. sometimes women were compared to gold, fickle and hard to get, sometimes women were like mother earth, fertile and generous. at other times still, women and mines were said to be like kuka, seeking vengeful compensation. whether women or “nature” were (for)giving or not depended on who was speaking. estrella, who chose this pseudonym so as to use neither her real name nor her working name in the sex industry, definitively upset notions of womanhood and exploitation in the riddle. she didn’t consider herself indigenous, but the state did. nor did she consider herself a sex-trafficked person, though, by legal standards, she was. while she was working in a grocery store, a beautifully dressed woman had approached her, offering a job as a waitress and an all-expenses-paid trip to madre de dios. it took estrella months to pay off her debt to the woman, a prostíbar owner, leaving the mining town by the side of la interoceánica as fast as she could. estrella showed me her medley of plant-based home remedies, among them maca and coca. when she had time, she liked to go to the chacra, a small farm that belonged to a friend. there, she gathered plants and “got air,” as she put it. if her coworkers didn’t join her, she brought back food and medicinal plants. when i first told estrella about the riddle comparing mines and women, she shot back with: “what is a typical woman?” that was in 2012. in the summer of 2016, we were sitting in a place that functioned as a clothing shop by day, a bar by night. ramona, a transwoman who worked in the clothing shop, listened as we discussed “mines and women” for a second time. still irritated by the riddle, estrella groaned. but ramona jumped into the conversation with a giggle: “what is a woman? me!” she sashayed between clothing aisles as if on a runway. estrella playfully tossed a bottle of nail polish at her, teasing her about her popularity with male clients. both women’s responses recall rubin’s query, “what is a woman?” as estrella and ramona highlight, not all women are the same in “certain relations” of the sex trade. many sex workers make an excellent living and don’t consider themselves exploited. in this encounter, the joking banter achieves its humorous effect because it bucks dominant ideas, subverting social control (douglas 1966; yeh 2017), in this case, the category of woman. what it means to be a woman is flexibly subversive—and also lucrative for ramona. different embodiments for women, as with mines and plants, threaten to upset the political economy of exploitation. the practice of pacha mamaman jaywarikuy in quechua is “payment to the earth” ritualizing gratitude or a request for favor. seekers might offer coca leaves, corn, the sacrifice of a sheep or llama. but other scenarios exist. as gold miners move through the rain forest, they dig new pits, erect new mining camps, and the toxic quicksilver utilized to amalgamate gold particles leaches into the forest floor, killing root systems. when the soil collapses, burying the miners in the pits, their deaths can represent payment to the earth, in exchange for gold. the pachamama “attacks” and the mines fight back, “eating” the miners (nash 1979). this is another twist of relations that equate mines and women for exploitation. figure 9. “the gold queen.” image by marcelo perez, reprinted with permission. while men often perform the manual labor in the mines, women may own machinery and run mining concessions. one such woman, the infamous gregoria casas huamanhuillca baca, known as the gold queen or tía goya (aunt goya), embodies the (not always liberating) power of transforming social relations. her mining empire in huepetuhe, traditional territory of the harakmbut-arasaire, has become synonymous with the legend of el dorado, promising both riches and danger. the gold queen allegedly sacrifices women as payment to the earth in exchange for gold, rumors the peruvian media savors. while goya is a common nickname for gregoria, some intellectuals draw a parallel to francisco goya’s painting saturn devouring his son. gregoria makes for the perfect scapegoat that everyone can love to hate. the peruvian journalist ricardo leén (2012) likens the gold queen’s life story to that of the mine-riddled landscape: “the history of informal mining in madre de dios is the story of huepetuhe, but the story of huepetuhe is the history of goya. and each is more sordid than the other.” león’s reading of goya’s power roots her to the land, but in a twist on the “certain relations” that equate mines and women. as the wealthiest woman in peru, the gold queen exploits mines and men. she does not need a savior. not surprisingly, goya is a target of envy and outright hatred.17 according to huepetuhe’s former mayor, gelman villegas, “she is illiterate … a complete idiot.” ousted by her, the former mayor now had to travel like a commoner. in november 2011, i gratefully settled into the backseat of the last taxi to depart mazuko, a mining town and hub for human, wildlife, and gasoline trafficking. as the taxi began to leave, villegas came running along lainteroceánica, yelling for us to wait. sitting down next to me, he immediately struck up a conversation, asking what brought me to madre de dios. i told him i was researching the social and environmental impacts of la interoceánica. he told me that i had to look at gold mining and sex trafficking in huepetuhe and that i should interview him. with the wind billowing through the taxi windows and lambada music blasting, villegas shouted into my tape recorder. “the baca family is huepe! … gregoria … she’s the worst.” he blamed her, and only her, for the environmental damage in the rain forest. i asked him about the rumors that multiple peruvian presidents sent heavy machinery into huepetuhe too. he shrugged, calling it “jungle politics [la política selvática],”18 insisting that goya was the real criminal. i pushed back: wasn’t she just more successful than the men? irritated, villegas blurted that goya practiced bad magic. he couldn’t conceive of a woman, a native quechua-speaker, possibly being smart enough to operate these mines. “she’s an india perdida [a lost indian],” villegas continued, his voice rough. he expressed views akin to the “encultured racism” that marisol de la cadena (2000) critiques in peru, where luminaries like author-politician mario vargas llosa (1990) believe that the uneducated and unassimilated indians hinder the development of a modern peru.19 this racist sentiment prevails throughout regions beset by questions of natural-resource extraction. villegas presented himself as a member of the cusqueño elite, an educated man. gregoria, to him, lacked intelligence because she spoke quechua better than spanish. villegas’s comments demonstrate how language operates as political tool. spanish stands as the gatekeeper to “civilized” society, where, according to villegas, gregoria doesn’t belong. furthermore, unlike an indio permetido (authorized indian) who toes the line for the state (hale 2004)—which in peru means performing a machu picchu incan heritage as a cultural-environmental steward—gregoria supposedly buries huepetuhe under mining sludge, killing the earth. “they [the bacas] are … sucking the richness from the land… . goya is a pishtaco.” peruvian colleagues would refer to the mining operations and the brazilian-led initiative to annex peru via la interoceánica as “raping the pachamama” or “being pishtaco,” sucking the life out of the land and the people. but calling gregoria a pishtaco surprised me. she didn’t fit the description in andean cosmology: usually white, male, raping or sucking on the fat of indigenous bodies. the conquistador who killed kuka more fits the image of a pishtaco, a nefarious figure who often appears in narratives of trauma (salazar-soler 1991; theidon 2012; weismantel 2001). to villegas, gregoria’s power can only be attributed to masculine pishtaco magic; otherwise, she doesn’t make sense to him. the figure of the pishtaco appeared outside of andean communities, surfacing in my conversations with shipibo indigenous leader juana payaba cachique. payaba served twice as the president of her community, during which she referenced the “pishtaco effect” in madre de dios. since the paving of la interoceánica, miners and loggers have increasingly overrun her community. she couldn’t stop them; the state wouldn’t. so, she installed a tollbooth on the unpaved road that the loggers built and miners used. the unpaved road branches off la interoceánica. payaba charged the equivalent of $0.50 for a motorcycle taxi and $1 for a car or truck. in comparison to the amount of gold and timber trafficked, this amounted to nothing. the loggers and miners, however, took her to court. they won with what turned out to be falsified documents. she videotaped police tearing down the community buildings she had funded with the toll money.20 payaba decided to fight back, contacting the social action commission, which then took her case to the inter-american commission on human rights (iachr). the iachr helped payaba win her case in peru, which initially seemed like a major victory. when i visited again in 2016, payaba again served as president. miners and loggers were still present in a divided community, but she had managed to install a brazil nut processer, to provide alternatives to joining extractive mineral industries. for good reason, payaba remains cautious. she knows that her community’s battles and the larger struggle to protect their land from the pishtaco effect are not easily won. back in 2012, when i ask her about the riddle, she laughs. “ask me what the difference is between a mine and woman,” she demands. i ask. she responds: “nothing.” she sees my disappointment. “ask me why.” i do as she says. “because both fight back,” she replies. juana reminds me how the mines kill, how many peoples’ worlds have ended since european colonialism in latin america. hard stops. she knows she cannot halt mining or logging in her community or change the world economy; she simply hopes to shift the dynamics. “even if we know we won’t win, we still fight back.” despite intimidating challenges, payaba is one of a few indigenous leaders who chooses such battles. she emphasizes how women can be pishtacos, kukas, gold mines, and more. though she isn’t motivated by a belief that a new world order hovers on the horizon, she urges me to remember her answer to the riddle: “riddles can have more than just one answer.” like the social relations they reflect, riddles can be reworked. women, like mines, mama coca, and mother earth only become exploited commodities in “certain relations.” conclusion as aldo leopold predicted, neither the river nor the region of madre de dios have disappeared from the world map. rather, the interoceanic highway has left a definitive cartographic mark, highlighting the trajectory of human and environmental traffic. while the amazonian triple-frontier zone and the 3,500-mile highway have geographic and political specificity, the growing network of roads characterizes transnational development schemes that sidestep prior consultation with local communities and environmental assessments. the intertwined traffic in women, plants, and gold form part of a gendered, racist logic of (post)colonial progress, rooted in the proposed necessity of natural-resource extraction. bringing together the highway, the riddle and its versions, and an approach of “traffic,” long-standing entanglements of interrelated political economies of sex and nature become clear when analyzed through discursive and material relations. conducting a “full-bodied analysis” of the traffic in women in madre de dios entails examining other “life in traffic,” taking “everything into account: the evolution of commodity forms in women, systems of land tenure, political arrangements, subsistence technology, etc.,” because “sexual systems cannot be understood in complete isolation” (rubin 1975, 209). this means, however, including automobiles and radios, not leaving them aside, as rubin suggested. their manufacture requires natural resources, essential to the “certain relations” that create the traffic in women. and where the traffic in women also constitutes a traffic in nature, one must understand how and to what effect earth becomes a mother and nature a virgin. “excitable speech” acts (butler 1997) provide a window. the first version of the riddle articulates entrenched notions about exploitation in relation to feminized human and ecological bodies that (re)produce life. yet instances of linguistic revision can produce, not just reflect, social and material change. take estrella and ramona who questioned the fixity of sex/gender systems. they may not be overturning patriarchal extractive capitalism wholesale, but they embody womanhood in dynamic, subversive, and possibly powerful ways. if not every sex worker identifies as a ciswoman or as trafficked, the equation of the metaphoric riddle changes. then there’s kuka, whose message carries import for those who struggle against the (neo)colonial plunder of their land and people. such stories nourish hope and purpose. when it comes to the gold queen, the twist on the riddle multiplies. her purported lack of care for the land and for other humans has given her the reputation of a monster: masculine, somehow “less indian,” and altogether less human. i do not wish to make light of the environmental damage caused by her manner of gold mining. rather, i wish to underscore the potential reversal of gendered relations—of who is exploiting whom, how, and why. juana payaba represents the antithesis to the gold queen, and her narrative choices reflect her material options. payaba plays within the riddle’s form to change the outcome, as she does within the peruvian legal system. she seeks structural opportunities to rewrite power relations, recognizing her limits and the impossibility of dismantling the global economy. for my part, i function as an ethnographic relation, packaging other people’s stories and riddles, and retelling them, which for me entails avowing a concomitant responsibility in their struggles. anthropological categories of nature and culture have long operated as opposite poles for analyzing who and what counts as human. the conceptual traffic between them is dynamic, as one needs the other to exist. the space by the side of the road can indeed afford a viewpoint from which to examine “life in traffic” of three different orders: conceptual traffic, commuter transit, and illegal exchange. roads produce mobility, but they also contribute to jams, crashes, and collisions, ending lives. la interoceánica is grounds for, and part of, a set of relations that create different and sometimes fatal conditions for human and nonhuman life in madre de dios and beyond. the highway is fundamental to a political economy of sex and nature. in amazonia, extractive economies, like sexual systems, cannot be understood in isolation. if this rain forest, dubbed “the lungs of the earth” and “nature’s pharmacy,” is an oxygen-creating, life-sustaining ecosystem for the globe, then the ramifications of road-building and trafficking in natural resources is planetary. echoing climate scientists: controlling rising temperatures means confronting the finite relationship for life on a hot earth. recognizing this or endings of any sort may not produce a restructuring of global power, but following those like juana payaba, it supports an ethical impulse to fight back, grounded in the knowledge that even distant ecologies affect all our relations. figure 10. the madre de dios river. photo by ruth goldstein. abstract engaging ethnographic fieldwork and archival research conducted between 2010 and 2021 along latin america’s interoceanic highway in peru’s mineral-rich amazonian region of madre de dios, this article begins with a riddle that equates the exploitation of gold mines with that of women. i follow the riddle—revised and (re)told in rain forest mines, on the highway, by sex workers and indigenous women leaders—through its different iterations to argue that the traffic in women and the political economy of sex/gender systems are discursively and materially linked with notions of the violability of feminized “nature” and associated racializations. the traffic in women also becomes a traffic in nature when economies of natural resource extraction create the grounds for the sex industry. traffic as a methodological and analytical framework identifies the social, political, and economic interrelations and linguistic articulations that create (im)mobility, while also promoting reverse-ability. at the same time, this approach acknowledges collisions and jams, the realities of hard endings. drawing inspiration from subversive retellings of the riddle, the concept of traffic underscores that while discursive framings can condition material possibilities and influence human actions by normalizing exploitation, they need not cement them. [gender and sexuality; political economy; traffic; race; nature-culture; language] resumen integrando datos etnográficos recogidos en campo e investigación de archivo realizados entre 2010 y 2021 en el ámbito de la carretera interoceánica sur, enfocando en la región de madre de dios de la amazonia peruana, este articulo parte de una adivinanza que equipara las minas de oro y las mujeres. yo sigo la adivinanza – revisada y (re)contada por trabajadoras sexuales y lideresas indígenas en las minas de la selva y en la carretera a través de sus diferentes iteraciones para argumentar que la trata de mujeres y la economía política de los sistemas de sexo/género están discursiva y materialmente articulados con nociones de la explotación de la “naturaleza” feminizada y sus racializaciones asociadas. la trata de mujeres es también es un tráfico de «naturaleza» cuando la economía de la extracción de recursos naturales genera las condiciones para la industria sexual. el tráfico como marco metodológico y analítico identifica las interrelaciones sociales, políticas, y económicas y las articulaciones lingüísticas que crean (in)movilidad, mientras promueven la capacidad de revertir. al mismo tiempo, este enfoque reconoce colisiones y nudos, las realidades de conclusiones inmutables. desde las versiones subversivas (re) contadas de la adivinanza, el concepto de tráfico destaca que mientras los marcos discursivos pueden condicionar las posibilidades materiales e influenciar las acciones humanas al normalizar la explotación, ellas no deberían consolidarse. [género y sexualidad; economía política; tráfico; trata de personas; raza; naturaleza-cultura; lenguaje] notes acknowledgments i benefited greatly from anonymous reviewers’ comments and the editorial guidance of chris nelson. stefanie graeter, jimena díaz leiva, patricia álvarez, liz roberts, and evan hepler-smith all contributed valuable insights. i am grateful to gold miner, engineer, sex worker, and indigenous colleagues for their support. a wenner-gren fieldwork grant #8274 and an nsf cnhs-2 award #1924148 made this article possible. 1. demographic information does not exist for miners, even in 2021. estimates range from 10,000 to 100,000 (damonte 2016; valencia 2014). 2. pueblos indígenas en aislamiento y contacto inicial (piaci). 3. la carretera interoceánica or la interoceánica sur (short for suramericana). 4. i follow other roadology scholars in taking roads as a general term for motorways (see kernaghan 2012; harvey and knox 2015; uribe 2019; zhou 2015). 5. amarumayu is the quechua-aymara name for what is now known as madre de dios. the name’s constituent parts, amaru (serpent) and mayu (river), attesting both to the reach of the inca empire in this region of the amazon before spanish contact and explaining why missionaries hoped to replace the cosmological significance of serpents with the mother of god. 6. this difference makes for a complex politico-legal topic. see díaz 2021 and my forthcoming book, life in traffic: women, plants, and gold along the interoceanic highway. 7. marilyn strathern’s the gender of the gift offers a respectful critique to rubin’s engagement of levi-strauss’s assertion that women circulate as tokens of men’s transactions. in her melanesian analysis, strathern (1988, 331) observes that men’s identities are tied to those of women. 8. rubin’s analysis of lévi-strauss and lacan also has relevance to the human-nonhuman kinship relations discussed in this article, but that element lies beyond the scope of these pages. i do, however, examine other aspects of rubin’s argument in my forthcoming book. 9. marx (1968, 1973) considered nature to be free when underscoring the injustice of condemning the poor for “stealing” fallen wood in the forest for subsistence. he didn’t consider nature to be without exchange value (foster 2018). far from marx’s ecology (foster 2000), the concept of natural capital—for example, timber, minerals, or water energy as commodities—became popular in the 1980s when the world bank and the international monetary fund (imf) advanced natural capital as loan-repayment options for fledgling nations. 10. thanks to jimena díaz leiva for clarifying the many meanings of chibola during summer 2021 fieldwork. in suction-based mining technologies, the last of the gold processed from the sluice comprises men’s tips, amalgamated separately from the rest of the gold, which tend to be spent on women (and beer). see díaz 2021. 11. in “plato’s pharmacy,” jacques derrida (1981 [1972], esp. 65–75, 97–117) deploys the greek definition of pharmakon as both remedy and poison to think about the ambivalence of writing, speaking, memory, and meaning. see also the anthropological engagements by joão biehl and amy moran-thomas (2009). 12. these uses are not investigated by western medicine. 13. maria emília machado coelho de oliveira’s 2013 documentary me voy (i’m leaving) features footage taken on july 15, 2011. i joined her in interviewing indigenous protestors who explained the lack of consultation. 14. operation mercury began in february 2019. 15. see londa schiebinger’s (1993, 2004) work on gendered plants, sexuality, and empire. 16. for a written version of this tale, see carranza 2000. 17. on january 7, 2022, gregoria casas huamanhuillca (she divorced her husband, cecilio baca and would eventually drop his name) died from injuries that she sustained from an automobile collision on the interoceanic highway, traveling between cusco and madre de dios. few people believe that this was an 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uhplc-esi-qqq ms and the neuroprotective study on its active ingredients.” scientific reports 7, 44660. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44660 zhou, yongming 2015 “sino-tibetan highways from the perspective of roadology.” twenty-first century, no. 148: 18–30. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 251-285, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.08 populist becoming: the red shirt movement and political affliction in thailand populist becoming: the red shirt movement and political affliction in thailand bo kyeong seo yonsei university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7481-3296 in contemporary narratives of political crises, skepticism of populism is nothing new. for many media and academic commentators, populism represents a contamination of liberal democracy by dangerous demagogy, cheap emotionalism, and mass manipulation. when the populism of today is broadly recognized as such, populist is less likely to be used as a self-descriptive identity; rather, it becomes a designation applied by nonparticipants. as jean comaroff (2011, 100) aptly points out, it works as a shifter, a tool of indexing, in the sense that the term populist is “more about marking difference than denoting content, and its meaning being largely relative to the standpoint from which it is deployed.” in this article, i explore how the space opened up by the workings of this political indexing provides fertile ground for the process of becoming subjects. while critics apply the label of populism pejoratively to political leaders who claim to speak for “the people,” how do the people who are allegedly spoken for experience populist moments themselves? how does one become a populist subject? how can we perceive the demos in the process of becoming? this article makes the case for ethnographically grounded studies of populist mobilization by focusing on a mass movement known as the red shirts in thailand. the birth of this movement is usually traced back to the emergent popular politics represented by thaksin shinawatra. since thaksin’s election as the country’s premier in 2001 based on strong support from informal and rural masses, parties associated with him have won every election. soon after his 2005 election victory, opposition movements against his ascendency had also taken shape, mainly among bangkok-based upper middle-class and royalist elites. clashes between proand anti-thaksin groups boiled over when thaksin was ousted in a military coup in september 2006. from then and until the 2014 coup that removed thaksin’s sister yingluck shinawatra from office, political polarization became a key feature of thai politics. it was shaped as the color-coded politics between the yellow shirts, who identified thaksin as a serious threat to the traditional royalist establishment and paved the way for toppling the elected government, and the red shirts, who continued to support thaksin-associated parties and opposed the military’s seizure of power.1 the military junta that seized power in 2014 swiftly suppressed the divisive tumult, immensely strengthening the country’s authoritarian political arrangements. general elections were eventually held in march 2019, but the results remained clouded by irregularities and mistrust.2 far from ending fifteen years of political turmoil, the 2019 election has set a new stage for further conflict and struggles. in this prolonged political chaos, the tainted meanings associated with the word populism have played a significant role in thai society. since thaksin’s governance was deemed “thaksin-style populism [thaksina prachaniyom],” commentators have paid much attention to his style of leadership as a driving force behind the rise of populism in thailand.3 within this formulation of personalism, supporters of thaksin and the red shirts automatically take the position of his clients.4 anti-thaksin and royalist groups aligned with the yellow shirts viewed their struggle as a battle between “moral royalists opposed to corrupt, elected politicians” (kanchoochat and hewison 2016, 374), describing thaksin and his associates as populist demagogues carrying the seed of disaster. this interpretative frame effectively dismissed thaksin’s popularity—confirmed by elections—as the outcome of mass clientelism, thus undermining the legitimacy of the majority of the electorate and justifying military interventions.5 the key political effect of so-called thaksin-style populism does not just concern content; it also has moral connotations that serve to disparage the significance of the emerging social and political demands. my choice to describe the red shirts as populists, although most of those who participate in the movement would not label themselves as such, owes to the discursive and political stakes under which this morally imbued concept of populism operates. in this article, i reject the assumption that populism constitutes a deviation from politics-as-usual and instead use the term in a descriptive sense. this approach takes as its point of departure ernesto laclau’s (2005) conception of populism as a political logic. he defines populism as a form of political discourse that establishes the political frontier between two competing, antagonistic groups (us/them, underdog/oligarchy, the people/the system). “the people,” in laclau’s formulation, is not a preexisting group that shares common interests or socioeconomic conditions, but rather emerges as the subject of collective action, brought into existence through the processes of interpellation, performance, and articulation. other critical theorists have also taken populism as a crucial dimension of political life and refused the supposition that simply equates it with clientelism and patronage (canovan 1982; rancière 2006; mouffe 2018). as populism expresses diverse or even contrasting images of “the people,” it “must be conceived as a possibility embedded in the very practice of democracy” (arditi 2004, 141). following this line of thought, i propose a different way of understanding thailand’s political polarization, arguing that it does not represent the simple outcome of the clash between populist and anti-populist blocs or democratic and anti-democratic blocs for power. instead, i believe it reflects the paradoxical relationship of populism to democracy. summing up thailand’s color-coded politics as “the struggle between the rulers and the ruled,” the historical anthropologist tyrell haberkorn (2018, 190) differentiates “the royalist-nationalist yellow shirts, who favored rule by a moral few” from “the populist-democratic red shirts, . . . who . . . wanted rule by those chosen by the majority.” although it is necessary to differentiate the two camps’ distinct ideological positions, especially regarding the norms of electoral democracy, this categorization fails to denote both groups’ common ground: the will of “the people.” given that the yellow shirts consistently mobilized the people’s common will against “corrupt” elections or for protecting the monarchy, it might also qualify as a populist movement.6 robert samet’s (2013, 529) work on the political antagonism between supporters and opponents of the former venezuela president hugo chávez proves particularly useful to grasp how two oppositional camps can both adhere to the shared logic of populism, as they both tend to define themselves as “victims who mobilize the force of popular sovereignty against the abuse of power.” taking the term populist-democratic—the description haberkorn gives of the red shirts—as a springboard for further analysis, i want to shift attention to the nature of the hyphen that links and separates nation and state, citizen and subject, and populism and democracy. by perceiving the nation-state as a key problematic of state power, begoña aretxaga (2003, 397) suggested that the hyphen does not indicate a self-evident connection between two distinctive entities, but bears “a variety of relations that are ambivalent, ambiguous, hostile, violent, porous.” being enmeshed in the red shirt movement, as i show below, entails being enmeshed in an undetermined set of relations between populism and democracy. i develop the concept of populist becoming to discern how political subjectivities are not just determined by, but also constituted within populist orders. populist becoming not only includes “individual and collective struggles to come to terms with events and intolerable situations and to shake loose” (biehl and locke 2017, 42) but also possibilities to undo and redo populism by drawing on such experiences of struggle. the articulation of populist subjects’ aspirations and afflictions provides a window into the unfinished aspects of political mobilization from the realm of the ordinary. in the context of the global rise of populism (moffitt 2016; bessire and bond 2017), when one’s participation in and demands for social transformation are identified as both democratic struggle and the regressive politics of the crowd, how can the political potential of this ambiguous subject position be clarified? media scholars paula chakravartty and srirupa roy (2017, 4075) note that in recent analyses of global populism, “the angry, misinformed, and deluded voter” still emerges as the main figure, because the presentist approach that overvalues the immediate outcome of an election fails to grasp “the antecedents, afterlives, and grounds of the populist everyday” (chakravartty and roy 2017, 4077). in moving beyond this ahistorical conception of a populist voter, i seek to understand political “history in person” (holland and lave 2001) and show how it entails the development and transformation of populist subjectivities. at the heart of this article lies the biography of a woman in her sixties whom i call ta.7 i first met her in july 2012 while conducting fieldwork on universal health coverage in chiang mai. ta was one of the active red shirt supporters with whom i happened to develop close social ties at that time. although the country’s political polarization was not my main research topic then, i could not detach myself from it. the establishment of universal health coverage was one of the major elements of thaksin’s electoral platform, and the city, also thaksin’s hometown, harbored various groups related to the red shirts. i returned to chiang mai in 2014 and again in 2016 and continued to visit and accompany ta. this article draws on fieldwork materials from this period. although ta’s changing political position resonates deeply with the rise, peak, and suppression of the red shirt movement, i do not aim to present her as a stereotypical participant of the movement and to draw sociopolitical conclusions about the general implications of populism in thailand. here, instead of assuming ta as a part to be aggregated into bigger units of a social class or regional community, i attend to her singularity as a person shaping her own political life. it is an attempt to write a microhistory through the eyes of “those who live the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality, political ideals and lived actualities” (comaroff 2011, 101). the red crowd in july 2012, i was told by several red shirt women not to miss an annual merit-making ceremony for thaksin. when i arrived in one of the well-known red shirt gathering places located in the old center of the city, around thirty women were already there waiting for the monks. it was still early, but ta, a lottery-ticket seller and the mother of seven children, was busy setting up her food stand. other women showed me the spacious reception hall temporarily set aside for the day’s events. it was full of a hundred ton kathin, tree-shaped sticks adorned with golden and silver papers, crisp 100-baht banknotes, and red dots printed with thaksin’s picture. an old woman, wearing a red t-shirt that also featured thaksin’s smiling face, explained to me that the day before today’s “party,” hundreds of people all around chiang mai had marched together and carried these money trees to the present venue for merit-making. at almost 11 a.m., the monks arrived, and those assembled, mostly women in middle to old age, all sat in the hall. a lay ritual leader delivered some comments on the meaning of the day: “we are gathered here to celebrate dr. thaksin’s birthday and wish for the development of thai people and society.” i was later told that the collected money would be donated to build a new radio station for chiang mai red shirt groups. figure 1. a woman helping to display thaksin’s birthday cake. photo by bo kyeong seo. after the merit-making ceremony, around fifty boxes of twelve-inch, sugarcoated buttercream cakes and a custom-made cake decorated with thaksin’s face and sugar roses arrived at the hall. a catchy song that started with “thak, thak, thaksin” filled the space with a festive mood, and at around noon, more than a hundred people lined up for free food. ta was busy distributing khanom jin, silken noodles with a rich, fragrant blood jelly sauce, a food for celebration. she explained to me that, like her, the people who ran the other food stalls had voluntarily prepared food to share their “red hearts” with each other. another woman joined us in conversation, saying: “it’s very sad that thaksin couldn’t work for us anymore. all those ammat (ruling elite) are so jealous of him, because people love him too much. we really want him back home.” i spent the afternoon with a group of elderly women listening to their sympathetic comments on thaksin’s extended exile, although speeches by local pheu thai politicians on thaksin’s life and legacy periodically interrupted our conversations.8 the mood of the party changed entirely in the evening with the playing of ear-blasting music. more than a thousand people, young and old, women and men, clad in red crowded the venue, entertained by troops of dancers and witty satirists. the highlight of the night was a phone call to thaksin, who was known to be in hong kong. at around 9 p.m., local organizers took to the stage and dialed the number. as the ringtone echoed through the speakers, the space felt charged with excitement and high spirits. the first try failed, but on the second attempt, the phone was finally answered, only for the crowd to hear a voice recording saying, “your call cannot be connected at this time.” wiping away the disappointment, those on stage invited the crowd to sing a happy birthday song together for thaksin. the mood remained cheerful, but it was getting late for the older women. ta had already left the venue by the time the stage was covered with a dancing crowd. a man with a microphone sporadically yelled, “are you ready to fight for equal rights? fight for democracy? will you keep fighting?” * * * this event showcases various modes of participation that give a concrete sense of collectivity and intimacy. the day passed with a lively stream of people coming and going, while a religious ceremony, communal eating, and a celebration mixed with rally cries took place in turns. a common thread that ran through the day’s activities was “love” (rak), the admiration and pity for thaksin. this affective force binding those gathered played a significant role in defining these ordinary participants both as “populist followers” and as “anti-coup, democratic supporters” (see also klima 2006). on the one hand, this event cannot be entirely freed from the charges of populist deception. thaksin’s celebrity-like status actively came into view through various props, and ideological demagoguery was in evidence. the crowd-pleasing entertainment mixed with propagandistic information on thaksin’s family, as well as the theatrical attempt to make an international phone call to him, exemplify political schemes adopted to sustain and reproduce his paternalistic leadership during his self-imposed exile. as this event exhibits both the voluntary and induced aspects of the red shirts’ mobilization,9 people’s emotional attachment to the plutocrat confirms the criticism that they are not proper liberal citizen subjects who embody the democratic ideals of deliberative participation.10 in the bangkok-centered elite view, this staged manifestation of trust and longing for thaksin proves the conviction that red shirt supporters are credulous rural masses lacking sophistication or civil competence. the 2006 coup was justified on the basis that uneducated and “bribed” rural electorates could not make a “rational” decision about thaksin’s handouts, so that sabotaging affection toward a morally problematic politician became a key strategy of the military and the royalist establishment (winichakul 2008; hewison and kitirianglarp 2010). daena aki funahashi’s (2016, 108) ethnography vividly shows how elite bureaucrats working in the health sector pathologize people like ta, who had guaranteed the electoral victories of the shinawatras, as having no “‘mental immunity’ to the cunning of politicians.” on the other hand, this event contains much more complex forces that cannot be subsumed under thaksin’s supposed cunning. the red shirts saw thaksin’s return as more than just bringing their favorite politician back to power: they viewed it as recovering democratic rule. for them, thaksin’s ouster unequivocally confirmed that they were not “equal and collectively sovereign citizens” (ferrara 2015, 250) but, rather, under oligarchic rule. at the time of this event, there was tangible concern that the newly elected yingluck shinawatra, thaksin’s sister who had won the 2011 election to become the first woman prime minister of thailand, could be toppled by another coup. the people gathered that day represented the most powerful electoral majority of the past two decades who had determined to exercise their power at the ballot box. in this context, it seems more than fair to describe the red shirts as the new political force that has “successfully redrawn thai political space to make themselves heard” (charoensin-o-larn 2013, 218). while such condemnations, expectations, and hopes are mutually invested in the red shirts, their public displays, including the event described earlier, reveal that the link between the purportedly populist and the supposedly democratic lies in conflicting shapes of “the people”: a social group coming into existence through the ritualized experience of collective effervescence (durkheim 1995), an emotionally charged crowd seemingly possessing a collective mind and therefore being prone to mob rule (le bon 2002),11 and the assembling of masses of individuals to make democratic demands and expressions (juris 2012; see also mazzarella 2010). while the red shirts can be associated with all these modes of collectivity, it seems clearer at this junction that thaksin plays a certain role not as an actual mover and shaker, but as a potent and sympathetic object. the way this day-long event was organized reveals how the “relations of affective belonging and coexistence”—what neringa klumbytė (2011) calls “political intimacy”—are forged with thaksin. instead of reinscribing a populist leader’s or related political institutions’ monopoly on politics, we need to understand how these different modes of collectivity provide circumstances for participants. at stake here is not simply the incompatibility of different modes of popular participation but rather the question of how individuals who once constituted “the people” lived through populist mobilization and what mattered to them. the hearth on the protest site born in korat, one of four cities in the northeastern region of thailand, ta moved to chiang mai when she was around thirty. as a landless laborer with elementary schooling, she mostly worked selling food. she married twice and raised six daughters and one son. when i first visited her in 2012, she was living in a rented house, a small one-bedroom concrete shack. ta used to live in a “proper” house with her second daughter, but since turning to the red shirts, she had become estranged from some of her children. ta had to move out from her daughter’s house when her grandson, who was working in a subdistrict office as a public servant, felt ashamed of his red shirt grandmother and began to quarrel with her. ta recounted that she “rose up with the red shirts from the beginning,” but 2010 proved a life-changing year for her. on march 12 of that year, the united front for democracy against dictatorship (udd), the largest red shirt group, launched a mass protest against the unelected government led by abhisit vejjajiva. along with hundreds of thousands of red shirts from the northern and northeastern regions, ta departed for bangkok and joined a protest that would last more than two months, calling for the dissolution of parliament and new general elections. protesters occupied the heart of bangkok’s business district with encampments and rallies, effectively disrupting the normal rhythms of the city with their immense presence. this time, red shirt supporters not only formed the crowd; they lived within it. ta immediately found her role in taking care of this new social body of the people: distributing food. she told me, some protesters were ok to buy their own food, but there were lots of people who were not affluent enough. then, there were the guards. they worked really hard and also needed to eat. who would cook for them? yellow shirts accused us of all being paid by thaksin. then, where was his money? i didn’t get any money from him. i received small donations from people, a sack of rice, a kilo of pork, packs of noodles, and sometimes used my own money. i’m not rich at all, but my heart is rich enough to share. even soldiers and police got water and food from me. in support of her daughters and friends in the local market in chiang mai, ta set up her own portable hearth on the street. her routine as a protester resembled that of a cook: she woke up at 3 a.m., started cooking rice, washed dishes, and prepared food until 1 p.m., before taking a brief rest and packing food for those guarding the barricades. feeding people eventually became the main reason for her protracted stay in bangkok. in ta’s explanation, her commitment to distributing food at the protest sites did not much differ from what she used to do for merit-making in chiang mai. she told me, “we can make merit anywhere. it’s just the same thing, sharing food in the temple and for the red shirts. it’s about helping people in need.” when she showed me the pictures taken during the 2010 protests, i could see her pouring soup into disposable bowls and handing them to a long line of people. in the photograph, her head was completely shaved. ta explained to me that this formed her own act of protest. “i want to show that an ordinary woman from chiang mai also can shave her long, long hair for a greater cause.” she shared with other red shirt protesters the political aim to occupy the capital until a date was set for general elections. figure 2. a banner depicting a farmer’s burden and quest for democracy. the picture was taken during the 2010 red shirt protest. photo by bo kyeong seo. the red shirts’ call for democracy and, more broadly, their desire to choose and change governments were met by severe forms of state violence. on april 10, when a violent clash between protesters and the military at khok wua intersection resulted in the loss of life and injuries for both military personnel and civilians, ta was there too.12 clouds of tear gas filled the streets, bullets were fired, and, with a damp cloth over her mouth, ta barely managed to escape the scene. she describes it as a terrifying moment, but she did not yet want to return to chiang mai. when army units began to launch a full-scale crackdown to disperse protesters on may 14, ta still remained. she explained, “people started to leave, but i couldn’t. what would the rest of the people eat? water was cut, there was no gas, and nothing much left to eat. in the end, i made a fire with plastic packages and cooked some noodles. only a bottle of soy sauce was left—that’s all—but the people still ate well.” on the final day of the protest, may 19, she took refuge in wat pathumwanaram, a small temple hidden between luxurious shopping malls. in the temple, full of injured people, she witnessed another terrifying shooting.13 the red shirts’ protest occupation eventually turned out to be “the most deadly incident of mass violence in modern thailand” (haberkorn 2018, 190). as the result of a series of military crackdowns, at least ninety people died and more than two thousand were injured (human rights watch 2011). the routine of the everyday meal—even on the dawn of a bloody crackdown—paradoxically underlined the graveness of the transgression that ta experienced. precious human beings who should be cared for and fed were instead ruthlessly killed. the military justified its attack on civilians by the suspicion that a group of heavily armed protesters was inciting violence. yet a deeper symbolic structure that denies people like ta equal status as citizens and human beings really permitted the military operation. during and after the protest, in everyday and institutional discourses, the red shirts were compared with “barbarians,” “buffalos,”14 and “germs,” ultimately being described as things that lacked the recognizably human capacity of self-determination.15 while these metaphors of undifferentiated savagery and contagion reflect the hegemonic power that renders red shirts less than human, ta’s care work for her fellow protesters speaks to our equality and shared humanity as vulnerable beings with needs. when ta’s engagement in protest politics centers on cooking and food distribution, it asks the important question of what populist-democratic demand may emerge from this direct way of giving. by illuminating sufi muslim practices of sharing food in the context of the 2011 egyptian protests, amira mittermaier (2014) suggests that such local traditions of hospitality can offer a radical vision for social and political change, as they enable alternative forms of distribution and relationality that center on the attunement to the other’s present needs. predicated on theravada buddhist traditions of liang (providing food or eating together),16 ta’s gifting of food shares a similar sense of justice that “does not mean that the rich ought to give to the poor but rather proceeds from acknowledging the profound dependency and interdependency of humans” (mittermaier 2014, 64). the protest site indeed constituted a suitable place for making merit by feeding, as it was where protesters’ mutual vulnerability was confirmed and had to be dealt with. here, feeding the hungry proved meritorious as well as political. thus, the sense of immediacy that ta experienced among the protesting crowds as a determined activist points to a direct confirmation of the force of collective commensality. ta’s cooking on the streets formed part of what sustained the collective body of the red shirts and its unruly force. and this powerful mode of togetherness, as ta attested, was neither granted nor given by other mediating political institutions, but nurtured by the participants’ own efforts. hot blood and dispirited heart the violent attack on the red shirts revealed how the state betrayed its nation, by forcefully dividing and destroying it. this traumatic disruption lingered even after the main demands of the 2010 protest had been realized. general elections were eventually held in 2011, and the pheu thai party won a majority of parliamentary seats. while this pro-thaksin electoral landslide especially in the north and northeastern provinces seemed to signal the red shirts’ long-awaited victory, ta felt more loss than gain. the formal investigation into the fatal shootings of civilians had proven slow, and the state’s emphasis on “reconciliation” depended on a callous disregard of responsibility. the political milieu had changed, and so ta’s mode of being a red shirt also could not remain the same. in early 2012, ta was invited by a red shirt cable tv channel to talk about the shootings she had witnessed during the 2010 protest. two years had passed, but her memory was still vivid. “i don’t know how they found me,” she said, “but i was really glad to have a chance to talk about what happened at that time. i want to tell the truth of what i saw there.” in the copy of the video clip that she gave me, her voice was calm, but her eyes were fierce. think about who did what. who shot the people there, and who ordered the shooting? i really want to ask them, all those powerful people like abhisit and suthep. we are all the same, humans. we are all thais. how, then, could they pull a gun on us? couldn’t abhisit feel shame? killing so many people to keep his seat? why didn’t he have any compassion for us? how could they walk around freely without any punishment? the former prime minister abhisit vejjajiva and his deputy suthep thaugsuban had announced the emergency decree and ordered the military crackdown during the 2010 protest.17 while these two had been exempted from any punishment, their public presence made ta’s “blood get hot [leuat hawn].” for her and many other red shirt supporters, this delayed justice clearly signaled that they were still treated as not only less-than-full citizens but also as less than fully thai. ta could not stop pondering how the state could harm its own people without any remorse or repercussions. to grasp why her sense of harm and danger did not cease with the change of government, but instead began to haunt her further, it is crucial to understand the connection ta made between a struggle for equal rights and full national membership marked by the quintessence of thainess (khwam pen thai).18 their opponents had rendered the red shirts “un-thai” because they deemed their call for equality and justice a challenge to the monarchy, one of the three pillars of thainess (ferrara 2015, 250–52). although red shirt supporters had varying views on the monarchy, the yellow shirts accused them of wishing to subvert the royal establishment and so becoming an enemy of the thai nation (chachavalpongpun 2011).19 “if they shoot me, so be it,” ta once told me, admitting that she was afraid that one day some vehement yellow shirt supporters would come to her house and attack her. even in chiang mai, she thought that being known as a hard-line red shirt in the village could expose her to danger at any time. ta finally moved to another housing compound whose owner was a locally well-known red shirt army official, and where she felt more secure. besides the growing sense of anger and insecurity, another significant change occurred in ta’s “red” heart. ta found that the yingluck government failed to deliver on its promise to compensate victims of the military crackdowns. a key incident was when she heard that a barricade guard whom she knew from the 2010 protests had been arrested. the forty-five-year-old man finally returned home after an eleven-month detention in a so-called safe house. his health had seriously deteriorated due to alleged torture, and he died a month after his release. although his wife, working as a garbage collector, went to bangkok and made a compensation claim for his death, it had yielded no response. when ta told me this story, bitterness emerged sharply from her voice: at his funeral, there was not a single local politician from the pheu thai party or red shirt leader. no one was interested in his death. why didn’t they come to help us? . . . i heard that 7 million baht was given to the families of those killed in bangkok, but where has that money gone? the [yingluck] government should help people like him who were arrested and lost their lives. and what are the red politicians and leaders doing now? they should take care of villagers like him. the head of the family died and three children have been left behind. who will send them to school? people said that the red shirts do not abandon each other, but what’s happening now? the red shirts should fight against the double standards, but now what we are doing is also double standards. i am beginning to feel tired of this. i don’t know how long i can be with the red shirts. the sense of tiredness and losing strength that ta expressed is something that only comes after the exertion of a great amount of effort and care. during this unprecedented historical juncture, she actively participated in the political process that eventually changed the government. yet, for her, it turned out to be an ambivalent victory. the lack of attention to a fellow red shirt’s tragic death indicates that the objectives of the red shirt movement, its campaigns against double standards (song matrathan), and its quest for equality and solidarity are failing to be realized. here, ta’s use of the phrase double standards seems notable. originally, the red shirts had adopted this term to emphasize the unequal treatment of them and the opposing yellow shirts. given that the yellow shirt protesters who blocked bangkok’s airports had not received substantial penalties, the violent repression of the red shirts proved judicial bias. while double standards is widely used to indicate larger systems of injustice suppressing the red shirts in general, ta expands this concept to evaluate the movement’s internal hierarchy and inequalities. ta’s hot blood and dispirited heart speak to the multilayered meaning of being a red shirt in the aftermath of the 2010 protest. although the collective body she nurtured was disaggregated, her political life had continued revolving around her memory of togetherness. ta could not stop talking about, feeling for, and giving meaning to the red shirt uprisings. this form of affective enactment, or “corporeal thinking” (thrift 2004, 67), shows how the political collectivity is reassembled at a time when the populist promise of justice and equality becomes compromised. ta’s lost faith in the potential of the red shirt movement is inseparable from her acute sense of the unequal distribution of power and suffering even among her own chosen political community. yet, at this juncture, the sense of disappointment does not mean that thaksin and the red shirts no longer make for her political intimates. rather, the very recognition of collective failing has become integral to her populist belonging. life between aspiration and affliction when i met ta briefly in 2014 just after the military coup that again had overthrown the democratically elected government, she felt quite sure that the soldiers would not stay for long. she was wrong. they did not leave, and the coup-installed military government eventually ruled the country for five more years. under the junta’s tight control, activities related to the red shirts were severely suppressed. some told me that red shirts and yellow shirts no longer existed. some said that it was a time to be patient and wait. when i visited ta again in early 2016, she told me, “it’s all over now.” she had aged and looked weaker than she had before. “you know this village belongs to thaksin’s housing project for poor people?” ta asked. her new home was in a suburban neighborhood where every two-story building looked the same.20 modest, timeworn houses were lined up in a row; some of them stood empty. ta had moved there after her only son’s death. “it is still a red shirt village,” she said. “only a handful of people are yellow shirts.” although she told me that she had entirely disconnected herself from the movement, her world still seemed divided in two. sitting with me in the little courtyard, she asked how i had been doing. when i inquired about her health, she admitted, “it’s been so difficult. last year, i spent a week in hospital. it’s not like i used to be.” ta’s major concern at this time was that she was barely making ends meet and had to ask her children for support. she continued, “i worked hard all my life, but now i have nothing.” as she continued to talk, she interspersed her concerns about her current hardship with examples of her past activism. “since i was tear-gassed in my face [during the 2010 bangkok protests], i can’t breathe comfortably. the guy living behind my house, he became disabled after he was severely beaten by soldiers in bangkok. the people who tried to do something through the red shirts, they were poor people. but the people who benefited from the red shirts were not the poor.” figure 3. one of ta’s newspaper clippings. photo by bo kyeong seo. that day i noticed that the affects surrounding red shirt symbols had taken on a different valence. looking around ta’s new home, i realized that the red shirt paraphernalia that used to fill her space had all gone. the calendar with thaksin and yingluck’s picture still hung on the wall, but the several collages she had made with pictures of red shirt protest sites and newspaper clippings had disappeared. these collages had served as the symbols of her identity. when i asked when she had thrown them away, she went to find them, bringing them back in a box full of clutter. i asked whether she regretted participating in the red shirt movement. she reflected: it doesn’t mean that i don’t like thaksin anymore. he did good things for the poor. i still think that we have a debt to repay him. and i made my own choice, so there was no regret. we did good deeds to help society, to build democracy. but people have begun to forget about this already. we tried very hard, but nothing turned out to be satisfactory. red shirt leaders abandoned us in the end, and my life has become harder. sometimes i feel so angry at myself. no one forced me to do anything. i did. there is no one to blame for what happened to me. will the red shirts rise up in arms again? i don’t know. i can fight again, but what about my life? who can i rely on for that? in the pictures, crumpled and covered in dust, i could see ta marching at the head of the line, holding a banner saying “release red shirt leaders,” frying a huge number of fish balls, and making merit with other people all wearing red. her time spent with and for the red shirts was depicted there, but it was cherished no more. she now read these pictures as evidence of defeat. her sense of betrayal toward the red shirt movement might be interpreted as an unavoidable outcome of the populist movement: the shinawatras, their political party, and the local udd leadership opportunistically exploited people’s aspirations for justice and change, remaining careless about the sacrifices that those people made. yet in ta’s narrative, she did not see herself as a victim. rather, she was struggling to secure her everyday life in the time of demobilization. instead of reading ta’s renouncing gesture as a symptom of trauma, i understand it as a form of political affliction. this does not suggest that the historical consequences of this populist mobilization were not violent. it may be that trauma works as a “legitimizing instrument” (fassin 2017, 16) that secures the moral status of a victim, but her distress and alienation have not been recognized as a valid form of suffering, nor have they been acknowledged or resolved in a larger social and historical context. instead, her suffering has remained in the background of her daily life. by carefully attending to delhi’s poor neighborhoods, veena das (2015, 1) notes how small forms of violence “are assimilated within the normal and yet not fully absorbed in it,” and she reformulates the notion of affliction to unravel a form of suffering that appears as “the corrosion of everyday life” (das 2015, 2). the ordinary affliction ta experienced evinces what remains when the vitality of the collective social body ebbs away. the milieu of threat that permeates ta’s everyday life now takes a different shape to the one it took at the height of the street protests. since 2014, the junta leader prayuth chan-ocha has created a repressive regime that actively adopts the tactics of intimidation and surveillance,21 and life in this climate of fear is both normal and corrosive. ta’s contrasting reports on her neighborhood reveal this strange entanglement: she assured me that “things are going on just the same as usual except the economy,” while also telling me that “eleven people were arrested in the nearby village because of their connection to the local red shirt group.” there were no critical events that urgently compelled her to, in her words, “fight back,” but at the same time she “didn’t know how else to feel but angry at being forgotten.” rule by guns had replaced populist enchantment: affect had become flattened, feelings seemed less ebullient, and life had lessened.22 the unfinished quality of populist politics i do not focus on ta’s engagement with and detachment from the red shirts to confirm the death of this popular movement in thailand. rather, i have focused on how this populistic-democratic movement opened a field of multiple becomings. by tracing ta’s various modes of being within the red shirt movement, i have shown the temporality of political mobilization that has fluctuated with the untenable hyphen between crowd and citizen, emotion and reason, dependency and emancipation, and aspiration and affliction. the point is not whether the movement has made ta into a populist or democratic subject. populism or democracy does not anchor itself to a distinguishable, fixed subject position. rather, as ta’s layered experiences show, they are spun into existence “through singular and precarious acts” (rancière 2006, 96), and their unstable coalescence offers fertile ground for the constitution of a new political subjectivity. ta’s journey allows us to appreciate two crucial dimensions relevant to understanding the unfinished quality of populist politics. first, instead of approaching populist affect as a product or function of socioeconomic and political structures, we should place more emphasis on the generative work that compels political judgments and practices. such an affect-centered approach helps grasp populist politics not as a manifestation of rooted collective identities but as a process of multiple becomings. in the field of thai studies, several anthropologists have illuminated the changing rural livelihoods and local electoral cultures that fueled the rapid growth of the red shirt movement (kitiarsa 2012; walker 2012; keyes 2014; nishizaki 2014). while ta’s background—a poor, working-class resident of chiang mai coming from rural origins—evidences similar socioeconomic characteristics to that of the majority of red shirt supporters, it is crucial to note that her unsettled courses of participation were not solely determined by the structures of inequality. we should not treat various affective registers that intertwine with ta’s narratives—such as affection, anger, disappointment, ambivalence, and loss—simply as epiphenomena of an underlying structural problem, since they constituted the changing sense of being “the people” and transformed the relations between the self and popular sovereignty. ta’s multiple modes of being—as part of a celebrating and protesting crowd, as a skeptical observer, as a self-sacrificing activist, and as an afflicted person—do not converge into a single identity, but indicate conflicting subject positions engendered through populism. second, by focusing on the process of becoming, it is possible to examine how populism involves both joyful and hurtful aspects of political life. the popular fascination with thaksin and the jouissance of being part of the red shirts reveal the vivid presence of an exceptional figure with charisma and a zone of political intimacy created by and through him.23 within this populist enchantment, ta herself had also become a charismatic figure in the sense that she had set herself as exemplary of the ideal of the red shirts: in the protest sites, she shared merit with the crowd by feeding them, sustained the vitality of the collective body of the people, and so amplified the call for justice and equality. while we could understand her fascination with thaksin and the red shirts as an illiberal disposition to immediacy and spectacle, her care work for the vulnerable undeniably indicates a democratic ethos of commitment to sharing (asad 2011). yet when the transmitting chain of charismatic authority that had galvanized the populist movement was broken, her energy waned accordingly. attentiveness to these connections, rifts, and disjunctures helps us grasp populism not as a master concept but as an experience-laden notion substantiated through concrete memories, imaginaries, and temporalities. thailand’s recent turbulent history of populist mobilization, democratic struggle, and authoritarian returns has wider relevance for complicating our view of the global rise of populism. in her recent book, chantal mouffe (2018, 82) asserts that populist movements can provide a viable strategy to strengthen equality and social justice, as they contain the potential to radicalize political demands by stressing “the demos as an essential dimension of democracy.” instead of speculating about the revolutionary potential of populism per se in thai politics, i have focused on the complexity of acting and living that brings the demos into existence. the thai experience points to the changing conceptions and experiences of political life from the unstable, hyphenated, and afflicted position of populist subjects. if a variety of heterogeneous struggles are assembled under populist-democratic demands, grasping this tangled chain of becomings may be the key to confronting the openness of the political, helping us investigate the conflicts and disagreements that keep the category of the demos alive. abstract in this article, i explore the ways in which political subjectivities take shape through populist mobilization and dissipation. while the rise and increasing electoral success of populist movements across the world are largely attributed to charismatic leadership that conjures the will of “the people,” much less known is how people become populist subjects at a particular historical juncture. by attending to personal accounts of participation and detachment in a mass movement known as the red shirts in thailand, i explore how the politics of becoming that emerges from this movement obfuscates the conventional distinction between populist and democratic identification. the articulation of populist subjects’ aspiration and affliction provides a window into the undetermined aspects of political mobilization from the realm of the ordinary. [political subjectivity; mass mobilization; affliction; populism; becoming; red shirts; thailand] บทคัดย่อ ในบทความนี้ ข้าพเจ้ามุ่งศึกษาแนวทางการก่อร่างสร้างอัตวิสัยทางการเมือง ผ่านการมีส่วนร่วมในการเคลื่อนไหวแบบประชานิยมตลอดจนการสลายตัวของการเคลื่อนไหวดังกล่าว ในแง่หนึ่ง ความสำเร็จในการเลือกตั้งที่พบได้ในหลายประเทศทั่วโลก มาจากการเคลื่อนไหวแบบประชานิยม ซึ่งโดยมากมักจะกล่าวถึงผู้นำที่มีเอกลักษณ์ มีความสามารถในการชักจูงโน้มน้าว และสามารถตอบสนองต่อความต้องการของ “มวลชน” อย่างไรก็ตาม การศึกษาเกี่ยวกับปัจเจกหรือผู้ที่เข้าร่วมการเคลื่อนไหวแบบประชานิยมผ่านห้วงวิกฤตการณ์หรือการเปลี่ยนแปลงทางการเมืองนั้นยังมีน้อย ในการศึกษานี้ ข้าพเจ้าอาศัยเรื่องราวและประสบการณ์ของผู้ที่มีส่วนร่วมในการเคลื่อนไหวทางการเมืองของกลุ่มคนเสื้อแดงในประเทศไทยจนกระทั่งปลีกตัวออกจากการเคลื่อนไหวดังกล่าว เพื่อสำรวจการเมืองของการกลายเป็น (politics of becoming) ที่เกิดขึ้นภายในบริบทการเคลื่อนไหวแบบประชานิยม ทั้งนี้ ข้อค้นพบของข้าพเจ้าทำให้ความเข้าใจต่อแนวคิดเดิมที่แบ่งแยกขั่วกลุ่มอัตลักษณ์ทางการเมืองแบบประชานิยมออกจากกลุ่มอัตลักษณ์ทางการเมืองแบบประชาธิปไตยนั้นสับสนยิ่งขึ้น ข้าพเจ้าเสนอให้เราทำความเข้าใจกับความสับสนดังกล่าว รวมถึงปฏิเสธการมองว่าความหลากหลาย ไม่เป็นระเบียบ ทวิลักษณ์ของความหมาย และมิติทางอารมณ์ความรู้สึกของผู้ที่มีส่วนร่วมในการเคลื่อนไหวแบบประชานิยมนั้น เป็นปัญหาที่ต้องได้รับการเยียวยาแก้ไข หากแต่ภาวะดังกล่าวเป็นลักษณะสำคัญที่ชี้ให้เห็นว่าประชานิยมมีส่วนในการก่อร่างสร้างอัตวิสัยแบบใหม่ การทำความเข้าใจกับความมุ่งหวัง ความปราถนา และความบอบช้ำของผู้ท่ีมีส่วนร่วมในการเคลื่อนไหวดังกล่าว อาจเป็นหนทางที่จะช่วยให้เราทำความเข้าใจกับแง่มุมใหม่ๆ เกี่ยวกับการเคลื่อนไหวทางการเมือง จากปริมณฑลของคนธรรมดาสามัญ [อัตวิสัยทางการเมือง การเคลื่อนไหวมวลชน ความบอบช้ำ ประชานิยม การกลายเป็น คนเสื้อแดง ประเทศไทย] 국문초록 본 논문은 포퓰리즘 운동의 확대와 해소 과정에서 정치적 주체성이 만들어지는 다양한 양상을 탐구한다. 포퓰리즘 정치의 전세계적 성장과 선거 정치에서 커져가는 영향력은 흔히 대중 혹은 인민의 의지를 결집시킬 수 있는 카리스마적 지도자의 성공과 등치되어 왔다. 그러나 과연 어떻게 대중 혹은 인민이 특정한 역사적 시점에서 포퓰리스트가 되는가에 대해서는 충분한 논의가 이루어지지 못한 바 있다. 이러한 문제의식을 바탕으로 본 논문은 태국 레드셔츠 운동의 흥망성쇠를 경유한 한 개인의 삶 경험을 탐색하고, 이를 통해 대중 운동에 기반한 되기(becoming)의 정치가 포퓰리즘과 민주주의에 대한 관습적 구분을 흐트러트리는 양상에 주목한다. 포퓰리스트 주체성을 고무하는 복잡한 정동과 의미들은 민주주의 정치를 저해하는 병폐가 아니며, 역으로 정치적 주체성의 새로운 형식들이 만들어지고 작동하는 방식을 핵심적으로 보여준다. 포퓰리스트 주체들의 변화에 대한 열망과 수난의 경험은 일상의 영역에서부터 정치적 동원의 아직 결정되지 않은, 불확정적 속성을 드러낸다. [정치적 주체성, 대중 운동, 수난, 포퓰리즘, 되기의 정치, 레드셔츠, 태국]  notes acknowledgments i am deeply grateful to aunt ta and all the interlocutors i met in chiang mai for inviting me into their lives. i am also very grateful to philip taylor for our many conversations over the years that have significantly contributed to my thinking on populism and subjectivities. for helpful feedback on very early versions of this work, a special thank-you goes to the late nicholas tapp, as well as to andrew walker, geoff buchanan, and preedee hongsaton. i would also like to thank tyrell haberkorn and prasert rangkla for kindly making additional comments and suggestions on a later version of the manuscript. i further owe a debt of gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers, as well as the editors of cultural anthropology, who provided crucial comments that helped clarify my argument. this article is much stronger because of the reviewers’ thoughtful input, and because of christopher nelson’s editorial work during the final stage of revision. i am also grateful to petra dreiser and jessica lockrem for copyediting and proofreading. preedee hongsaton and thirayut sangangamsakun provided invaluable help in translating the abstract from english to thai. any mistakes are my own. the writing of this article was partly supported by the yonsei university future-leading research initiative (2018-22-0101). 1. while the red and yellow shirts were the two main camps that had created polarization in this period, there were a significant number of people opting for “no color.” this suggests that political antagonism in thailand was not simply binary, but rather could be fragmentary. 2. the latest thai general elections were held in march 2019, and support for the pheu thai party—the successor to thaksin’s original thai rak thai party—appeared to be stable as before, but not dominating (selway and hicken 2019). pheu thai won the largest number of seats (136 house seats, 21 more than the pro-junta party phalang pracharat), but failed to form a government. this is because the constitution, drafted by the military in 2016, ensures that the 250-seat senate is entirely appointed, and the prime minister does not need to be a sitting member of parliament. for more analysis of the 2019 election result, see termsak chalermpalanupap (2019), and for election monitoring, see the interim report by the asian network for free elections (2019). 3. for example, see anek laothamatas (2006) and pasuk phongpaichit and chris baker (2008, 2009). by focusing on how thaksin shinawatra turned out to be a populist by maneuvering various political demands and challenges, kevin hewison (2017) draws attention to populism as a form of politics that transcends any individual populist politician. 4. the red shirts is made up of heterogeneous groups: long-time followers of thaksin, a broad social constituency associated with an alliance called the united front for democracy against dictatorship (udd), and political groups that opposed the military coup although they do not necessarily identify themselves as thaksin or udd supporters. 5. not only royalist politicians and citizens but also the monarchy itself has played a significant role in thai politics (mccargo 2005; winichakul 2008). yet, in this article, i do not include my informants’ views on the monarchy so as to avoid any possible repercussions. thailand’s lèse-majesté law, which forbids the defamation and insult of the monarchy, has been increasingly enforced since the 2006 coup to silence political opposition. 6. for more details on the mobilization of the yellow shirts, especially in the context of electoral politics, see kevin hewison and kengkij kitirianglarp (2010) and prajak kongkirati (2016). 7. ta is a pseudonym. 8. in the 2011 election, pheu thai, fronted by thaksin’s sister yingluck shinawatra as their party head, won a majority of seats in parliament with strong support from the red shirts. 9. for a substantive analysis of the leadership and organizational structure of the red shirts, see naruemon thabchumpon and duncan mccargo (2011). 10. william mazzarella (2015, 105) perceptively notes this tension in that “in the imagined biography of the liberal subject . . . the crowd represents a childish moment of savage indistinction: corporeal, affective, and irrational.” 11. stressing the irrationality of crowds, gustave le bon (2002, 22) famously argued that crowds are “distinguished by feminine characteristic . . . like women, it goes at once to extremes.” 12. according to a report by the people’s information center: the april-may 2010 crackdowns (2017, 24–28), twenty-seven people were confirmed to have died as a direct result of the military operations implemented on april 10, 2010, and two additional deaths were reported in connection with the demonstration on the same day. 13. for a chronological and first-hand documentation of the 2010 april–may bangkok red shirt protest, see claudio sopranzetti (2012). wat pathumwanaram had been known as a safe place for protesters to seek shelter, yet military forces eventually opened fire on this spot, leaving six people dead and many more injured. for a full report, see the people’s information center: the april-may 2010 crackdowns (2017). 14. in thai, the buffalo appears in verbal insults as a symbol of idiocy or with sexual connotation. see also stanley j. tambiah (1969). 15. thongchai winichakul’s (2010) vivid description written at the height of the protest captures the sense of horror projected onto red shirt protesters. 16. penny van esterik’s (1996, 23) classic work on this norm shows how food sharing works not only as a “metaphor for intimacy and closeness” but also as an “arena for negotiating and displaying power and hierarchy.” while the practice of liang (nurturing) is found in various social contexts including gendered norms of mothering, it goes beyond the realm of femininity and takes a central place in imagining and realizing a productive form of power and protection. 17. the final report from the truth and reconciliation commission of thailand (trct), which was released in september 2012, failed to specify who was responsible for the deaths during the april–may 2010 protests. both abhisit vejjajiva and suthep thaugsuban were indicted for their roles in the crackdown, yet the case against them was eventually dismissed in 2014. for more details, see haberkorn (2018). 18. see also michael herzfeld (2016) and thongchai winichakul (1994). 19. the political allegiance to the monarchy within the red shirt movement has fluctuated, especially after the 2010 protest and the death of king bhumibol in 2016. for increasing royalism in thailand, see thongchai winichakul (2016), and for the anti-royalist shift within the red shirts, see anonymous (2018). 20. she was living in one of the public housing projects launched by the thaksin government in 2003. 21. according to thai lawyers for human rights (2018), in the last four years the regime has summoned more than 800 people for “attitude adjustment” and more than 1,800 cases dealing with civilians have been assigned to military courts. 22. claudio sopranzetti (2018) also offers a nuanced account of how motorcycle taxi drivers in bangkok who had actively participated in the red shirt movement experienced a similar affective downturn after the 2014 coup. 23. while the moral aspect of charisma (barami, a form of effortless, pre-given power) has been extensively analyzed in the context of thai politics and kingship (kitiarsa 2006; jackson 2009; sopranzetti 2018), here i draw on weber’s sense of charisma that can be earned, routinized, and transmitted. references anonymous 2018 “anti-royalism in thailand since 2006: ideological shifts and resistance.” journal of contemporary asia 48, no. 3: 363–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472336.2018.1427021. arditi, benjamín 2004 “populism as a spectre of democracy: a response to canovan.” political studies 52, no. 1: 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38, no. 1: 11–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/00472330701651937. 2010 “the ‘germs’: the reds’ infection of the thai political body.” new mandala, may 3. http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2010/05/03/thongchai-winichakul-on-the-red-germs. 2016 thailand’s hyper-royalism: its past success and present predicament. trends in southeast asia no. 7. singapore: iseas. the city otherwise: the deferred emergency of occupation in inner-city johannesburg cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 404-434, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.03 the city otherwise: the deferred emergency of occupation in inner-city johannesburg matthew wilhelm-solomon university of the witwatersrand https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9946-5817 in august 2017, the mayor of johannesburg, herman mashaba, in the international business publication bloomberg, announced a campaign of “shock and awe” in inner-city johannesburg, pronouncing the city a “battlefield” (mkokeli 2017). the particular target of his rhetoric was the city’s so-called hijacked buildings—unlawful occupations also known as “bad buildings” or “dark buildings.” mashaba, a former cosmetics businessman, who had grown up in poverty (mashaba and morris 2017), had won johannesburg for the pro-business opposition party the democratic alliance (da), defeating, for the first time in the post-apartheid era, the african national congress (anc). mashaba, who as a young man had experienced the continued violence and insecurity of police raids, adopted raids as a primary strategy in his approach to issues of crime and housing in the inner city. he personally led a series of police raids on inner-city occupations and railed against both immigrants and human rights lawyers. he portrayed hijacked buildings as a blight on the city, full of criminals and undocumented migrants. but what were these buildings, and who occupied them? how is one to understand the character of this occupation? and what did closing them imply? where were the occupants to go? some of these questions were answered, though not without problems, through the course of protracted social, political, and juridical processes. in december 2017, the constitutional court issued a judgment in a long-running case against the city of johannesburg regarding a shelter for those relocated from an unlawful occupation. the shelter went by the name of ekuthuleni, or place of peace. the case bore the name of nomsa dladla, a grandmother who was the first appellant in the case. the residents of ekuthuleni were former occupants of a “hijacked building” who had received “temporary emergency accommodation” (tea) as a result of a constitutional court order. however, the conditions at the shelter required gender division, curfews, and daily lockouts—conditions to which dladla, her neighbors, and their lawyers objected. in november dladla and her neighbors won the case, with the court finding that living conditions relating to lockouts were “cruel, condescending, and degrading.” the occupants had been living in this tea for more than half a decade after being relocated. while the court case against the city began under the previous anc administration, it was intimately connected to mashaba’s raids. both spoke to the continued challenge of unlawful urban occupations in post-apartheid south africa. emergency housing was closely tied to “unlawful occupations,” as i term them here: under post-apartheid constitutional law, occupants could not be evicted if that rendered them homeless, so the city was required to provide them with tea. the issues of unlawful occupations and emergency accommodation question the meanings of home in the post-apartheid city, but also, globally, the contradictions between private property and socioeconomic rights. neither unlawful occupations nor tea can be considered urban commons, but they do not constitute private property either. instead, they emerge in the interstices of constitutional law, in a zone neither public nor private, in what i term “the city otherwise.” i mobilize elizabeth a. povinelli’s (2011, 2014, 2016) concept of the “otherwise” to characterize inner-city occupations and sites of tea as spaces of endurance, improvisation, and potentiality (see also simone 2019) that emerge within the aporias and contradictions of capitalist development and constitutional jurisprudence, though they may not necessarily form in opposition to capital, law, and the state. the city otherwise emerges within the wider juridical condition of what i term the “deferred emergency.” the deferred emergency entails the indefinite deferral of an emergency situation, framed around both the juridical and infrastructural form of tea, which has no legally defined end point. furthermore, the long-term legal processes around tea frequently require and sustain indefinite periods of unlawful occupation. the deferred emergency must be distinguished, first, from the legal term emergency, as in a “state of exception” involving the “suspension of law itself” (agamben 2005). second, the deferred emergency must also be distinguished from both the humanitarian “emergency” requiring responses to “war and natural disaster” (redfield 2013), and, although related, from the everyday “tyranny of emergency” experienced by communities under threat of eviction or displacement (appadurai 2001; perdigon 2015). the deferred emergency arises instead from the legal and political strategies in which the emergency of eviction itself is deferred to an indefinite spatial and temporal horizon and not definitively resolved. the deferred emergency, as i will discuss, furthermore constitutes not merely a state of legal indeterminacy but also has infrastructural, policy, and existential implications. i explore here the paradoxes of inclusion and exclusion shaped by post-apartheid urban renewal and policy, unlawful occupation, and emergency accommodation based on long-term, multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2019 in unlawful occupations and tea sites, among others, in johannesburg. though situated in johannesburg, south africa, this essay speaks to a broader condition and theory of occupation and the relations between housing, law, and life in the urban south (simone 2019). an anthropology of the otherwise requires confronting the “singular conditions under which something new is produced” (povinelli 2011, introduction). this resonates with what joão biehl and peter locke (2017) outline as an “anthropology of becoming,” in which both the subject and the object of research remain incomplete. my own ethnographic encounter with the city of johannesburg is also embedded in personal becoming. i was born and raised in johannesburg, and have lived in the city for the past nine years, working at an inner-city public university after returning from my doctoral studies abroad. the ethnographic character of my research has not been demarcated into discrete spatial and temporal zones. instead, the research process has shaped and reshaped my pathways, forms of navigation, and dwelling in the city (mcfarlane 2011b). it has involved constant orientation and disorientation in the city. as a white, male, middle-class south african, i have found the research process haunted by the specter of white violence, its spatial remainders and ruins on the landscape of the city (harrison et al. 2014; dirsuweit and wafer 2016). to navigate the sites of occupation, i have relied on personal alliances and friendships formed over several years. i have worked at times with a research assistant who has helped with setting up interviews and translating from southern african languages.1 the article presented here distills this research, illustrates the proposed concepts with reference to case studies of both an occupation and a tea site, and closes by exploring the political potentiality of these spaces through an emergent activist group called the inner city federation.2 occupying johannesburg with the end of apartheid came the departure of many white-owned businesses and residents from the inner-city area to the suburbs, frequently leaving vacant space or buildings that were rented but poorly maintained. this phenomenon was eclipsed by the movement of many low-income black households into inner-city areas. yet while wealthier suburbs became increasingly racially diverse, inner-city areas became primarily occupied by black africans (katumba 2019). in addition to this, the city experienced an increase in transnational migration, mainly from african countries. while documenting inward migration is challenging, available data estimate that 26.2 percent of inner-city residents are foreign nationals, far below the 80 percent claimed by mashaba in the media (skosana 2017). the absence of adequate urban housing policy in south africa means that tens of thousands of inner-city residents, both south african and foreign nationals, cannot afford decent housing and are forced to live unlawfully in occupied buildings. achille mbembe and sarah nuttall (2008, 22) have divided the social topography of johannesburg into the domains of the “surface” and “the underground,” or necropolis, characterized by the “lower classes, the trash heap of the world above, and subterranean utopias.” despite this image’s compelling nature, unlawful occupations do not fit neatly into this topography. while the city is undoubtedly composed of “other orders of visibility” (mbembe and nuttall 2008, 23), unlawful occupations are not infrastructurally, legally, or socially “underground.” neither do they exist in a “state of exception” outside of the law (murray 2008). their existence has been highly mediatized, often through a lens of migration and criminality and in public court cases. furthermore, they do not offer a “subterranean utopia,” but rather, often, fractured modes of sociality and inchoate forms of political activism. the perpetuation of conditions of extreme dereliction goes along with the development of new commercial and arts precincts, in what chrystel oloukoï (2018) has labeled “precarious gentrification,” characterized by the paradoxical and oscillating movement of “taking back the city,” which simultaneously structures itself around the fear of the nighttime city and the darkness. further, changes in the city have not primarily resulted from paradigms of middle-class gentrification, but have involved the building of tens of thousands of units of accommodation for middleand low-income households (mosselson 2019, 41), though most of these still prove too expensive for the residents of unlawful occupations. the term hijacked building, indicating a formal criminal seizure, is mostly misleading, though cases of criminal takeover, or title-deed fraud in attempts to claim ownership, do exist. unlawful occupations are also known as “bad buildings” in policy documents and sometimes as “dark buildings” by inner-city residents, indicating the lack of electricity in many of them. criminal activity, such as drug trading, is evident, but mostly practiced by a minority of occupants of some unlawful occupations. most residents are informal workers, such as street traders and recyclers, along with the unemployed, including beggars, many of whom are disabled. residents of unlawful occupations frequently experience evictions (in spite of legal protections), police raids, and, for foreign nationals, deportation. fires and accidents are common, and residents must survive amid the ruination of urban infrastructures (wilhelm-solomon 2017; cf. chance 2015). with little police protection residents themselves are often subject to criminal violence. gender-based violence is common—this reflects wider patterns of power, exclusion, and shame permeating post-apartheid south africa and inherited from the country’s violent colonial and apartheid past (gqola 2015). nonetheless, unlawful occupations are also spaces of homemaking, conviviality, and intimacy. many of these occupations fell slowly into dereliction when businesses or their owners left or died. often previous building administrators used the opportunity to collect illicit rent, or residents boarded up vacant space to rent. in some cases, vacant and abandoned spaces slowly become occupied. no reliable surveys or estimates exist of total residency of unlawful occupations in johannesburg, though in 2010 médecins sans frontières (msf) estimated that 50,000 to 60,000 people lived in inner-city “slum buildings,” in conditions lower than international standards for refugee camps. the organization began work in the buildings, responding to a perceived humanitarian emergency, but withdrew when faced with funding concerns and the entrenched structural crises of housing, immigration, and urban exclusion (wilhelm-solomon and pedersen 2017). census data from 2011 indicated a housing shortage of 30,000 units for precarious inner-city households, many of whom would be presently living in overcrowded or unlawful conditions (rebelgroup 2016). internal documents of the city of johannesburg estimate that as many as 90,000 people may be living in unlawful occupations.3 as of 2018, the city only catered to 1,364 individuals in tea facilities, at capacity at the time. this represents but a small fraction of potential evictees. the lack of available tea delayed the evictions of numerous unlawful occupations in the inner city. because unlawful occupations are highly stigmatized and criminalized, research is slow and frequently fraught. these spaces operate neither through formal property regimes nor through easily legible systems of control, rental, or occupation. in work parallel to my own, jackie dugard and makale ngwenya (2018) have argued that we cannot grasp these buildings in terms of standard understandings of civic movements or “the right to the city” (lefebvre 1996; harvey 2008), and that the occupants in their cases primarily follow survivalist strategies and desire formalization. most of the residents of unlawful occupations do not participate in the form of political squatting prominent in berlin, for instance (vasudevan 2017), nor in the politically motivated occupations extant in places like são paulo (de carli and frediani 2016; stevens 2017). i use the term “unlawful occupation,” instead of “hijacked building” or “bad building,” in a sense motivated by filip de boeck and sammy baloji (2016, 297): occupation does not invoke “the formal claim of a political right to the city,” though it may end up doing so; rather, the “politics of occupation is part of an even more basic and fundamental (and therefore even more deeply political) claim: the simple claim to be, to stake out a place for yourself, to exist.” from a methodological perspective, nishat awan (2016, 3) has used the phrase “mapping the city otherwise” to emphasize “relations over discrete objects, subjectivities over essential identities, and a provisional politics over ideology,” as well as to explore the “affective body and its sensations that allow us to access the field of potentiality” (awan 2016, 35). she does not cite povinelli’s work, though she shares the latter’s concerns around affect and potentiality. while sensitive to this approach, the concept of the city otherwise i develop here is not merely methodological.4 the city otherwise points to interstitial urban spaces that emerge within the aporias and contradictions of real-estate markets and the constitutional nation-state, though they do not conform to the governance of either. the modes of living otherwise are both precarious and subject to the enduring threat of erasure. residents of occupations are only sometimes involved in formalized civil or legal mobilization; often they aim to evade state governance and participate in tactical alliances (simone 2004, 2019; vearey 2010; wanjiku kihato 2014). situating the city otherwise to conceptualize the city otherwise, it is valuable to situate and contrast it with several other related concepts prominent in urban theory—namely the so-called commons, heterotopia, and the assemblage. the idea of the commons and “commoning,” have become some of the central concepts in urban theory. nonetheless, given the fluid, incomplete, and often fractious dynamics of urban life, scholars have retheorized the commons as a form of potentiality embedded in emergent socialities, rather than in terms of a collectively managed and regulated urban space (simone 2014; berlant 2016; worby, forthcoming). eric worby (forthcoming) in particular has highlighted the peculiar temporality of how political actors frequently theorize and mobilize the commons. he writes that “the commons typically signifies an idealized past and a utopian future—as much a lost right to be claimed as a social entitlement to be regained.” this particular temporality of the commons—frequently trapped between nostalgia for a lost past and the hope for a potential future—points toward the way the commons frequently remains a transcendental, teleological, or nostalgic form. the shift to the otherwise, moving away from the language of the commons (whose heuristic or political power i do not deny) involves a shift from transcendental to imminent critique. imminent critique in urban theory has been most prominently explored in the concepts of heterotopia and the assemblage. michel foucault (1986, 24) characterizes heterotopias as “countersites” and “a kind of effectively enacted utopia.” urban theory has mobilized and adapted the concept to a wide variety of sites, including migrant and refugee encampments (olga 2013; perdigon 2015), an inner-city theater in johannesburg (miranda da cunha 2019), and urban religious sites (bochow and van dijk 2012), among others. of particular significance to the discussion here is danny hoffman’s (2017) critique of partha chatterjee’s (2004) use of the concept in relation to unlawful urban occupations. the concept of heterotopia has informed chatterjee’s (2004) influential notion of the “politics of the governed.” chatterjee (2004, 40) argues for a concept of “political society” that extends beyond standard models of civil society and may include those who “transgress the strict lines of legality in struggling to live and work,” including “illegal squatter settlements” and those who “make a claim to a habitation and a livelihood as a matter of right.” hoffman (2017), whose ethnography focuses on several unlawfully occupied spaces in monrovia, including large modernist edifices and a cemetery, and who conducted his ethnography with many ex-combatants now involved in forms of hustling, scams, and crime, rejects the notion of heterotopia, arguing that while these occupations constitute “spaces of invention, experimentation and serious play . . . they are not heterotopic in the foucauldian sense or any of its derivatives. these forms of intervention are circumscribed for the most part by a very limited political imagination and a very narrow set of material possibilities” (hoffman 2017, chap. 1). hoffman’s critique usefully points to the limitations of the concept of heterotopia, as well as to its reliance, even if in a disruptive sense, on some form of utopian political imaginary. yet he proceeds from this insight to define unlawful occupations as spaces of “urban subjection,” an account i find inadequate, at least for theorizing unlawful occupations more widely. povinelli (2011, introduction) acknowledges her debt to foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the tradition of imminent critique (see also perdigon 2015), but her conception of the otherwise significantly advances beyond the concept. the otherwise is not premised on the heterotopic idea of either “society itself in a perfected form” or “turned upside down” (foucault 1986, 24)—it emerges from within social interstices in a manner neither utopic nor oppositional. furthermore, the concept is not premised on an idea of the political imagination or “will”—subjects may form part of a social project within “spaces of the otherwise” involuntarily. contra to hoffman’s account, in which a lack of political imagination excludes such spaces from the political, for povinelli (2014) politics may merely constitute a gesture toward articulating the otherwise: “politics is the adventure of the otherwise as it becomes (or does not) a self-referential, extended, and dominant entity-arrangement.” furthermore, whereas hoffman sees the lack of political imagination and material limitations in terms of a form of privation, povinelli sees imagination discrete from potentiality. she is precisely concerned with moments in which an alternative social project is “neither something nor nothing” and with “the virtual space that opens up between the potentiality and actuality of an alternative social project.” where the analytic clarity and subtlety of povinelli’s (2011, 2014, 2016) thought is distinct from both theories of the commons and of heterotopia is precisely in her theorizing of potentiality—in particular, the potential to resist late liberal and neoliberal hegemonies—in a manner not premised on ideational, utopic, or teleological imaginations. rather, she considers potentiality in terms of the spacing between the “striving to persevere” and “any actual idea or action that emerges from this striving” (povinelli 2011, introduction). the otherwise precisely captures the “immanent derangements and rearrangements” of a given assemblage—it is the “noise” that emerges from within the fissures of particular power arrangements (povinelli 2014). povinelli’s work here has a clear, but unexplored, affinity with the emergence of assemblage theory in urban studies. assemblage theory concerns itself with theorizing the urban in relation to a heterogenous concatenation of human and material forms (mcfarlane 2011a), and it shares a theoretical basis with povinelli in gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s concept of agencement and a concern with imminent potentialities. ignacio farías (2011) has argued that the political implications of assemblage point toward a more radical, object-oriented participatory democracy. expanding on this argument, he has more recently interrogated the political potentialities of “urban cosmopolitics” concerned with the “heterogenous constituents of common worlds,” which “is what happens at the interstices, in the conflictual clashes and tentative accommodations of multiple urban worlds” (farías and blok 2016, 14). what sets povinelli apart from these formulations of assemblage theory is that she evades the idealism implicit in expanding a normative democratic notion to encompass non-human actors in the search for “common worlds” (farías and block 2016). rather, she focuses on the contingency and emergence of alternative social projects within the paradoxes and ruptures of hegemonic assemblages—the moments and spaces of dissensus where “what we had in common is no longer common” and inchoate collectivities take form (povinelli 2016, 124). the potentiality to live otherwise is political, not in relation to some democratic ideal, but precisely through enduring the forces that work to disarticulate and silence it. spaces of the otherwise are constituted by everyday “quasi-events” and by “intense daily struggles” that are “barely perceptible” in the political language of late liberalism (povinelli 2016, 21). the indeterminacy and deferral characteristic of these struggles are not unique to housing but form part of a wider condition affecting an array of people, including asylum seekers in south africa, for instance, as well as precarious populations globally (ralph 2008; allison and piot 2014; perdigon 2015, 2017; das 2017; fassin, wilhelm-solomon, and segatti 2017; wafer 2017). yet, the deferred emergency can be distinguished from the bureaucratic deferral of the asylum system and the more generalized condition of waiting produced by the economic exclusion of neoliberalism. deferral here does not result only from bureaucratic delays and postponement, but instead arises as a necessary mechanism to balance the apparently irresolvable rights of both property and protections against homelessness. here, i think one can further povinelli’s work with a critique of giorgio agamben. in his reflections on aristotle in potentialities, agamben (1999) distinguishes two forms of potentiality in the greek philosopher’s work: a generic potentiality (a child could potentially become a president) and a specific potentiality (an architect has the potential to build, a poet to write poetry). agamben notes that in aristotle, potentiality exists not only in opposition to actuality but also as a characteristic of the actual, the capacity to exist in privation. however, the work of povinelli points toward a notion of potentiality not solely characterized by privation. rather, potentiality can indicate the capacity to live otherwise within the urban assemblage. the deferred emergency: life in potentiality to elaborate on this in light of contemporary post-apartheid constitutional law, we can begin by observing that the law outlines not merely a set of cast-in-stone rights but also a set of potentialities regarding what it means to be human. we see this, for instance, in section 26 on housing: 26. housing. (1) everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing. (2) the state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of this right. (3) no one may be evicted from their home, or have their home demolished, without an order of court made after considering all the relevant circumstances. no legislation may permit arbitrary evictions. constitutional law inscribes a set of both specific and generic potentialities (the former in, say, the right to housing, the latter in the right to dignity. regarding the phrase “progressive realization,” many south africans—in fact, potentially “everyone” within south africa’s borders unable to secure housing, including foreign nationals—live not simply without housing but also in a condition of both privation and juridically protected potentiality. the right to access housing does not constitute an immediately enforceable right in the sense of the right not to be killed, or the right to freedom of speech. rather, it is a right in potential, one that can be deferred but not annulled. this has substantive material consequences, as my ethnography to follow shows. in october 2017, on a cold spring day, i stood outside the site of 7 saratoga avenue with nomsa ellen dladla and one of her neighbors. we looked through the barbed-wire fence at a courtyard and an abandoned red-brick carpet factory. this cordoned-off, derelict space had been my two interlocutors’ home before they were relocated in 2012. the building was an unlawful occupation, one to be catapulted to the center of post-apartheid housing jurisprudence. “we were free, were free,” dladla told me when i asked what life had been like here, in the unlawful occupation. the meanings of her words would only become clear in the context of what was to come. the factory had closed in 1999 and had subsequently been unlawfully let by the former caretaker. then a company called blue moonlight purchased the building in 2004 and in 2006 started eviction proceedings. in 2007, police and the red ants, notorious private security, attempted to illegally evict, using rubber bullets, the sixty-two adults and nine children resident at the time. the community, primarily zulu, had often used the communal courtyard for chatting, cooking, parties, and dances. but on the night of the eviction, dladla, her granddaughter, and her neighbors spent the night on the street. they did have legal representation through the centre for applied legal studies, however, which blocked the eviction on the basis of it leading to homelessness. this change instigated a period of litigation that would last five years, until the famous blue moonlight case was heard in the constitutional court and judgment was given in december 2011.5 during the legal proceedings, the city of johannesburg was tied to the case. figure 1. the now-empty carpet factory of 7 saratoga avenue, the center of the blue moonlight case. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon, 2017. stuart wilson, one of the leading lawyers acting on behalf of the occupiers in the case, has argued that, until this case, the city had relied on the strategy of having private-sector actors evict residents of “bad buildings.” yet the blue moonlight case had the key implication that “the municipality bears the primary responsibility for addressing the housing needs of those persons who, after an eviction, are unable to find accommodation on their own” (wilson 2013, 283). the judgment reshaped the city’s obligations to those dispossessed by evictions, but also forestalled evictions that would lead to homelessness. furthermore, it reshaped how both policy and jurisprudence would frame the “emergency.” according to the constitutional court judgment, the case bore on “questions of eviction” and it revolved not around the provision of permanent accommodation but rather “temporary emergency accommodation.” the concept of the emergency here specifically relates to a pending eviction leading to homelessness, not necessarily one already carried out (even while the occupiers of saratoga were temporarily evicted). the judgment drew on definitions from chapter 12 of the national housing code, which defined eviction in terms of emergency as affecting those “evicted or threatened with imminent eviction from land or from unsafe buildings, or situations where pro-active steps ought to be taken to forestall such consequences.” yet the national housing code also characterizes emergencies in a manner that includes homelessness as a result of natural disasters; hence, the law considered eviction in the same legal category as natural disasters and humanitarian emergencies (cf. redfield 2013). this has not merely semantic implications but also significant perlocutionary consequences. in 2012, the residents of 7 saratoga were moved to ekuthuleni, a shelter run by an ngo called mes (formerly the metropolitan evangelical services). the shelter was meant only as a temporary solution, and the residents believed they would stay there for six months only. yet a permanent settlement never came on offer, nor did the court direct the need for one. life at ekuthuleni proved harsh. at the overcrowded shelter, in which a series of dormitories surrounded an inner courtyard, the residents found themselves locked out between 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. and again after 8 p.m. if they failed to return to the shelter by then. the rooms were gender differentiated, separating even married and long-term couples. the rooms lacked locks, and shelter authorities randomly searched belongings. social workers took dladla’s granddaughter (whose mother had died) into foster care as the shelter did not provide family accommodation—and she was only allowed to return to live with her grandmother over three years later. the residents, supported by their lawyers, now the socio-economic rights institute of south africa (seri), challenged the lockouts, gender divides, and the breakup of families. the judgment of the case named after dladla in november 2017 found the shelter rules to be “cruel, condescending, and degrading” in that it treated grown people “like children.”6 the judgment stipulated that tea still conferred a right to dignity and family intimacy—the shelter and other tea providers consequently could not simply ascribe to the minimal conditions of a refuge. even though the residents had previously lived in a “dark building” and now had electricity, they struggled with life in the shelter. dladla told me: “nothing is alright here. there are many tsotsis [criminals], nothing is ok. i would like a place called my home. . . . it’s not safe this place.” the judgment forced the municipality to alter its policies and the shelter to abandon its rigorous rules, but it did not resolve the situation of housing. dladla and her neighbors still lived in conditions of uncertainty, in a temporary space with no practical possibility of obtaining permanent housing. it is such a condition that i call the “deferred emergency,” one in which eviction and homelessness are prevented indefinitely, with no permanent solution on offer. the conditions of tea, while arising from constitutional protections against homelessness, had become a condition of partial state care and partial abandonment. no constitutional or policy-based limitations bounded the tea time frames, and this question had never been legally probed. given that the provision of tea aimed to protect against homelessness in the first place, evictions of those already in tea—should they lead to homelessness—could hardly be constitutional. since many people cannot afford access to the formal housing markets, tea has in effect become a permanent facet of life in johannesburg: teas constitute “spaces of otherwise” in that they offer housing and refuge to those excluded from real-estate markets; they are materializations of a social vision in which nobody is homeless. yet they fail to offer any permanent solution to homelessness, constituting sites of struggle and endurance. life in such spaces requires from people like nomsa dladla a constant state of perseverance, innovation, and struggle. the residents live in the territory of the otherwise, having fought for state-funded protection and care, but having never been fully granted the right to stable residency and a home. the blue moonlight and dladla cases, and the effects of tea more generally, shape life not only in the tea facilities themselves but also in unlawful occupations with pending eviction cases, such as the station, to which i turn now. enduring the otherwise: the station the blue moonlight and dladla cases affected many unlawful occupations throughout johannesburg, whose eviction cases were postponed pending the dladla judgment. one of these was a building i call the station, which i visited between 2014 and 2019: i observed how everyday life under the deferred emergency revolved around washing, recycling, trading, drinking, and police raids. rather than marked by rebellion against a status quo, everyday life was patterned by endurance and exhaustion (cf. povinelli 2011; simone 2019). figure 2. the interior of the station. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon, 2017. the station was a previously formally rented 3,000-square-meter building that had fallen into disrepair and was sold, occupied, to an inner-city property developer in august 2007. a changing cast of around three hundred people makes up the residents of the station; they include both south africans and zimbabweans, more than fifty of whom the residents’ committee estimated to be blind. the station’s several floors are partitioned with boarded rooms beneath a spider web of electrical cables. these rooms were sometimes bought and sold on an illicit retail market, rather than unlawfully rented, as in the case of some other unlawful occupations. the building has only one tap on the ground floor, beside a storage area where recyclers store what they have gathered. with no toilets in the building, residents must use buckets, or the local public toilets. laundry is done mainly on the pavement or rooftop, which overlooks nearby train lines, where it is hung out to dry. in the mornings many of the residents disperse through the metropolis. most of the blind head “to the robots” (south african slang for traffic lights)—a euphemism for begging. other young men might also sell commodities like phone chargers at intersections. recyclers, mostly men but some women, chart the surroundings with metal carts. many of the women spend their days sitting on the pavement or on public concrete benches, caring for children, doing laundry, braiding hair, and selling snacks on the street corner—but they also stay outside so they can run away if the police come. several informal taverns or shebeens make for centers of social life. drinking would often begin mid-morning. i spent many hours in the shebeen of rosemary mavundla, a member of the residents’ committee and a zimbabwean woman whose son had been murdered in 2014 while buying beer; the killers were never found. for the funeral, networks activated throughout the city to have members gather in her room to sing and care for mavundla. sadly, funerals made for a source of diasporic sociality (wilhelm-solomon 2020). on other occasions, i chatted with her and friends or clients as they drank, smoked ganja (cannabis), and watched music dvds. the shebeen also served as mavundla’s bedroom, adorned with posters from clothing stores. she would cook a lunch, to sell or share, of maize meal, spinach, sweet potatoes, and sometimes offal. in the cold of winter, she and her friends and clients would gather around the stove, warming themselves on the illegal electricity. her shebeen was closed in 2016 when the city cut off the illegal power supply, plunging residents into a perpetual interior darkness. before, police would come to mavundla’s shebeen (among others), frequently on fridays to collect crates of beers for the weekend. sometimes they would violently raid the building, such as at a birthday party where they fired rubber bullets and stole speakers and equipment. an immigration raid in march 2014 seemed a thinly veiled attempt to evict residents by proxy, as the local area manager for the owners was present. but most of those deported returned immediately; the concatenation of political persecution, drought, and economic collapse in zimbabwe made life there unendurable for many. many members of the movement for democratic change (mdc), zimbabwe’s opposition party—whose representatives had suffered frequent political persecution from the ruling zimbabwean african national union–patriotic front (zanu-pf)—lived in the building. their local branch would meet in a small square nearby. unlike in some other unlawful occupations, no gangs operated out of the station, but the residents were at times persecuted by criminals. in late 2014 a group of men started terrorizing and robbing the residents, encouraging some of the residents to collaborate with a local private security initiative, employed as part of the privatized city improvement districts initiative (ironically, funded in part by the evicting company). together they took one of the men behind this harassment to the police, although the residents later dropped charges in a truce. other examples of collaboration with the police existed: for the blind, the noise of the shebeens destroyed the transient peace they, with their peculiar sensitivity to noise, could enjoy, so their leader reported the shebeens to the local police and supported the raids on them. conflict never, however, spiraled out of control, and residents maintained a semblance of peace through an ever-shifting dance with criminals, private security forces, and the police, with the roles of ally and enemy often rotating. the police would rarely, however, arrest the blind who had moved into the building after the 2008 xenophobic violence that had erupted in johannesburg—anti-immigrant violence spread throughout city and the country leading to over sixty deaths and 100,000 displaced nationwide (landau 2011). many inner-city migrants were forced to take shelter at a local police station. in the wake of the violence, many of the blind, along with other affected groups, moved into the station, because it offered vacant space. among these was emmanuel zivai, who would come to lead the blind and be the residents’ chairperson. zivai’s room, on the first floor, was crowded with buckets and clothes. each morning he would leave the building with a helper and take a taxi out to the indian township of lenasia on the western outskirts of johannesburg. zivai, a former fish trader in zimbabwe, had been elected leader in part because residents believed that the blind could not be evicted. this perception built on the experience of residents in a nearby building known as chambers, where an eviction had been overturned because there were blind residents who were eventually offered alternative accommodation (see wilhelm-solomon 2016). many members of the blind community knew each other from zimbabwe—having attended margareta hugo school in masvingo, a dutch reformed mission school providing schooling for blind learners—and they had come to south africa when the zimbabwean state radically cut disability support. these diasporic networks based around disability endured cross-border migration, evictions, and displacement from xenophobic violence. these newcomers had to foster relations with established residents of the building; among these was nomusa mabaso, a retired cleaner and one of the few remaining south africans. she had been on the list for state-sponsored reconstruction and development programme (rdp) housing for many years, but never heard anything. the anc government had built an estimated three million state houses (wilkinson 2016), but primarily on urban peripheries far from work, and millions of south africans waited on these housing lists. mabaso originally hailed from kwazulu-natal province and had lived in soweto and johannesburg since the 1970s, selling vegetables and working as a cleaner. the 1990s, with the arrival of a black government led by mandela, were a period of hope for mabaso. when she moved into the station toward the end of the decade, the building was formally rented. it had security, electricity, and cleaning services, though there were no toilets or showers, and only one tap serving the building. mabaso and her partner paid r500 for their room. after the owner of the building, a swazi woman, died, conditions deteriorated. mabaso, whose partner had died in 2013, built convivial relations with the zimbabweans who had moved in, often eating and drinking with them. yet she also associated their presence with the building’s slow decay. she did not express any feelings of ardent xenophobia; rather her sentiments seemed pervaded by a sense of loss and hope disappointed, articulated sometimes as resentment of neighbors and strangers. figure 3. emmanuel zivai in his room at the station. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon, 2017. the property company that had purchased the station attempted to evict the tenants in 2010. yet the residents formed a committee comprising several asylum seekers, including the blind, and two south african pensioners. mabaso, zivai, and mavundla all formed part of this committee. they managed to get pro bono lawyers to oppose the eviction. this tenuous alliance revealed the precarious potentiality of such spaces of otherwise. their case went to court in february 2010, and the eviction was postponed pending the outcome of both the blue moonlight and (later) the dladla cases. ironically, the conditions of deferred emergency allowed residents a type of normalcy, with the majority of residents rejecting the possibility of relocation. this was exemplified in 2015, when the city provisionally offered tea to the residents, in the form of a nearby warehouse with communal bathroom facilities, which they declined, unwilling to move from one temporary site to another. figure 4. nomusa mabaso in her room at the station. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon 2017. when i asked mavundla, the shebeen owner, why, she replied: “we are used to here.” i also met with zivai, who was planning to return to zimbabwe with building materials he had collected to construct a house on family land. we chatted at a crowded bus terminal. he told me with resignation that he had no expectations of the south african state, but that he also could not survive returning permanently to zimbabwe. when i asked him what he hoped for in the future, he replied simply, “that is hard for us to imagine.” the possibility of foreign nationals at the station being offered tea ended with the election of herman mashaba and the amplification of raids. many buildings, even with court orders protecting against eviction, became targets, as did the station. i did not witness mashaba’s raid in late 2017; several residents present at the time narrated it to me. apparently, mashaba arrived with an entourage of police, immigration officials, and the media. police went from room to room, banging on doors and forcing them open. in part, this approach was intended to facilitate an audit of who was living in the buildings. mashaba, a charismatic figure, spoke to some of those involved, including a number of blind foreign nationals, a heavily pregnant zimbabwean (whom they assisted in taking to the hospital after breaking down her door), and mabaso. the residents that spoke to him found the mayor open and attentive, giving a contradictory display of both care and force. in late august 2018, a year after the raid, i went to visit mabaso, the day before the city’s final audit for tea was due. mabaso, slim and wizened, was in her room frying cabbage and chicken. on the floor lay a pile of dust where she had been sweeping, as well as a blue floral dress that had been eaten by mice. mabaso was wearing a beige shirt with crisscrossing lines, a retro pattern often found in secondhand stores. beneath it showed the top of the anc spear. i asked her if she still supported the party. she coughed affirmatively, but added: “they lie. nothing is happening for me. they lie. i’m tired. things take time, but now it’s too long.” mabaso had grown tired of living in the station and longed for a permanent place to settle. she told me: “i spoke to mashaba, and he promised he will do something. i’ve been waiting, waiting.” the following day, with city officials due to arrive for a final resident audit, i spoke to zivai, who remained hopeful that the residents could remain together. within the station, the blind had formed their own otherwise—a space of sociality and care now under threat: “we are familiar to each other. we are now used to being with each other. we share everything. life is so simple. it is good to stay together as long as life goes on.” i also spoke to a group of mdc supporters, who feared that if they returned to zimbabwe they would face political persecution; their expired asylum-seeking documents made them vulnerable both to eviction and to deportation. eventually, the city officials arrived in a bmw x1—three men and two women wearing luminous jackets. a crowd gathered around the group. mabaso was sitting on a plastic chair on the pavement. a man pointed to her, saying, “we have the details of this gogo [elderly lady; literally, grandmother],” marking her out as a south african. zivai then appeared, and a dispute arose between him and the officials over the auditing process (he was concerned some had been left out). after some futile arguing, the officials entered the building led by a woman with braids and dark glasses who found her way with the light of a mobile phone. i followed. at one point, exasperated by the differences between a previous audit and the current one, the woman turned to me, claiming, “this is fraud. people are mushrooming on the second floor . . . it doesn’t matter, register them. they’re undocumented. they won’t get accommodation anyway.” when the report was released it stated that only south africans would receive alternative accommodation. the rest would, at some point, face eviction: they had lived for almost a decade in conditions of legal abeyance, as a result of the deferred emergency, in states neither entirely lawful nor unprotected—in the city otherwise. mabaso would not live to see a new home: she fell ill and died in a hospital in early 2019, after having her leg amputated from septicemia. while she still remained at the station zivai, mavundla, and her other neighbors visited her room and prayed for her during her illness, but few could afford the transportation costs to visit her in the hospital. as no family came forward after her death, mabaso’s body was not released for a funeral or memorial. the precarious character of life in the city otherwise can easily slide into conditions of almost total abandonment. an urban politics of the otherwise for much of my research from 2011 onward, no organization collectively organized inner-city residents living in unlawful occupations. some legal, church, and humanitarian ngos operated on a case-by-case basis, but they did not have the capacity or mandate to develop an extensive mobilization among those on the ground.7 no organization existed along the lines of abahlali basemjondolo, who had mobilized shack dwellers first in kwazulu-natal and then nationwide from 2005 onward (see chance 2015). yet in 2015, a change began to emerge. in march of that year, a new organization formed from a workshop among communities represented by the legal ngo seri. here, the residents themselves had decided to create a new organization, which they called the inner city federation (icf). the organization gradually began to grow from the initial meeting, and by 2018, it represented more than forty occupations and thousands of occupants. it has developed strategies around cleanup campaigns, assisted in “maintaining communal infrastructure” (seri and icf 2018), mediated conflicts, helped tenants mobilize against eviction, and campaigned through protest and media campaigns for fundamental rights. the organization sprang into existence at a meeting attended by residents’ committees from throughout the city. the residents pitched the idea of a new organization that would serve as “a platform of sharing knowledge.” siyabonga mahlangu would become the organization’s general secretary. mahlangu recalled to me: i felt so excited because i understood i was not the only one facing the problem, and i got knowledge from some other people who had experience. now i knew that if i had a problem, i have this platform to go and say, “guys look, i have this problem, how can i solve it?” the new organization elicited a collective awareness and a sense of the political potential of life in the city otherwise. figure 5. siyabonga mahlangu, general secretary of the inner city federation, outside ingelosi house—or “number 8” to residents—in hillbrow. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon, 2017. mahlangu lived in a building called ingelosi house, known to residents only as number 8. mahlangu told me he was born in 1989, which at the time put him in his late twenties. he had grown up near empangeni, in rural kwazulu-natal, moving to johannesburg in 2008 after finishing high school. he had a cousin living in this building, so it had become his home since. he had also worked a number of part-time jobs. in early 2014, the residents of number 8 received an order to appear in court. the route to seri, who would represent their case, proved circuitous: some of the residents of ingelosi house, through social networks going back to home areas of kwazulu-natal, knew the occupants of a nearby building called kiribilly, which had managed to resist eviction. it was the residents of kiribilly who connected number 8 with seri. in time, their cases would become more closely connected than originally expected. while seri agreed to take on the case, it insisted, as usual, that the building form an elected committee. mahlangu was voted onto that committee, and they managed to fight the case successfully. on april 16, 2018, the court ordered the city of johannesburg to provide seventy-nine of the occupiers with “temporary shelter, from which they may not be evicted without a court order, in a location as near as possible to the property, by 31 october 2018.” the court order was given on the same day as that regarding kiribilly. kiribilly is a six-story high-rise in berea, with a large palm tree outside, several blocks away from ingelosi house. with 180 rooms, it is home to around 450 residents. the entry hall has an imposing art deco window curving toward a broken elevator. its floors are adorned with graffiti. this building had stood at the center of a major constitutional court case in 2017. in 2013, the building owners had wanted to evict the residents, claiming the latter had agreed to their eviction. however, after seeking legal advice through seri, the occupiers stated that they had not known their rights when agreeing to leave the building. i visited kiribilly in november 2018 with one of its committee members, cikizwa gqokoma, who also formed part of the leadership at the icf. gqokoma was born in 1983 in the eastern cape province and came to johannesburg in 2005, where she lived with her five-year-old daughter. her room was large, its walls painted pink, and she had an old television with a bunny-ears antenna. her only water source came through a hosepipe connected in the street. she told me that most of the residents of the building were either zulu or xhosa, and there was a strong sense of community among them. but conditions were terrible—they had electricity, but no water, and no security. criminals would frequently run inside the building to hide on the roof, and residents would be blamed by the police. the kiribilly residents argued their constitutional court case on february 14, 2017, with the court ruling that the residents had assented to eviction with inadequate knowledge of their rights; their case on alternative accommodation was referred back to the high court. it was heard together with the case of ingelosi house. figure 6. cikizwa gqokoma, one of the committee members of the inner city federation, in her room in kiribilly, berea. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon, 2017. the court ordered the eviction of ingelosi and kiribilly on the basis that the city would provide the residents who qualified, who would be rendered homeless, with alternative accommodation. both buildings would be provided accommodation in the same place: mahlangu and gqokoma would become neighbors. it felt like a mixed victory for both: they would have alternative accommodation, but they would also be displaced from the buildings that had become their homes. in spite of the constitutional court judgment, mashaba’s raids continued to target kiribilly repeatedly. one, among several, was early 2018: gqokoma recalls her and her daughter being woken up in the middle of the night by police and forced out of their rooms onto the street. the police insulted them and called them “hijackers.” “i was angry,” gqokoma told me, “but there’s nothing you can do, since it was a cop.” both kiribilly and ingelosi house were to become unknowingly tied to the condition of the station—for the south african residents of the station had also been allocated accommodation in the same temporary accommodation site in the nearby suburb of jeppe. yet further complications would arise, for local residents there had claimed that this building should be allocated to them for housing, and had threatened to attack any residents who moved in, which in turn prevented the relocations and evictions of kiribilly, ingelosi house, and the station, a situation still ongoing at the time of writing. conclusion the emergence of the icf has shown the potentiality of residents of inner-city occupations to mobilize and form a critical consciousness around a shared condition. in their case this self-referentiality and organization moved toward a “right to the city” paradigm. however, the civic mobilization of the icf emerged from ways of living otherwise in existing unlawful occupations, rather than preceding these occupations. further, the form of potentiality i wish to show in terms of the city otherwise is not merely a potentiality for formal political organization. it is the potentiality to live and endure “otherwise” in relation to hegemonic forms of urban governance, in particular the protection of private property rights along with the policing of the nation-state. figure 7. members of the inner city federation outside the worker’s museum in newtown, 2019. photo by matthew wilhelm-solomon, 2019. povinelli views potentiality in terms of the duality of the oscillating potential “to be or not be.” povinelli (2011, introduction) writes: “if we must persist in potentiality, we must endure it as a space, a materiality, and temporality.” potentiality is “socially constituted and materially distributed,” referring to a realm of “excess, exhaustion and endurance.” these descriptions powerfully invoke the conditions of both those living in tea and in unlawful occupations. this potentiality should not be evaluated simply in terms either of the privation of certain rights, or of some ideal form of commons or civic activism. rather, it is a form of striving and endurance, and a mode of inhabiting the city otherwise, in ways that can manifest in formal civic action, but do not necessarily lead to this. what defines the politics of the otherwise is, then, the materialization of “alternative forms of life” and their persistence “in the gale force of curtailing social winds” (povinelli 2011, introduction)—in the context of johannesburg, these relate in particular to forms of endurance and occupation in the context of evictions, real-estate markets, deportations, and temporary emergency accommodation. the concept of the city otherwise offers a distinct contribution to urban theory from theories of the commons or heterotopia and makes a contribution to assemblage theory. it captures the potentiality of alternate social projects without analyzing them in terms of either a transcendental or comparative concept (the “commons” or “participatory democracy”), or a given political trajectory. rather, the political emerges from the otherwise and can take radically different forms—the striving to merely survive and endure under the constant threat of eviction and erasure (in the case of the station), or in incipient social movements (illustrated by the icf). i have framed the emergence of the city otherwise in terms of the legal paradox of the deferred emergency. while i have traced this in relation to the specificities of post-apartheid law, it certainly could be adapted to other social and political contexts in which one finds a contradiction between private property rights, protections against eviction, and rights to relocation. comparative legal regimes and experiences of occupation exist, for instance, in india (see appadurai 2001; chatterjee 2004) and brazil (de carli and frediani 2016; stevens 2017), among others, suggesting the possibility for further comparative research in future. the case studies here—of saratoga avenue, ekhuthuleni, the station, ingelosi house, and kiribilly—show how deeply interconnected these buildings are through forms of conviviality, jurisprudence, and tea. nonetheless, these interconnections sometimes remain invisible to the residents themselves. they are nets of sociality, law, and bureaucracy: from the gaps and possibilities in these, the city otherwise emerges. unlawful occupations offer residents spaces in which they can “own” the city. and yet this ownership is always transient and uncertain, disrupted continually by police and immigration raids. for those who manage to access tea, life within the aporias of constitutional law creates a space of the otherwise that provides protection against homelessness, but no offers of permanence. the deferred emergency creates a zeno’s paradox in which the emergency never comes—and so cannot, under present conditions, be resolved. postscript i finalized this article during the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. johannesburg, along with the rest of south africa, was under a policeand army-enforced lockdown that started on march 26, 2020, after president cyril ramaphosa decreed a national state of disaster on march 15, 2020. while the public health impact in terms of slowing incidence has proven effective so far, inner-city johannesburg residents, along with others in low-income areas of the country, have been particularly severely affected. inner-city residents have been beaten with whips and shot at with rubber bullets in the streets. dense living conditions and limited water supply mean that residents of occupations struggle to follow public health guidelines. some, particularly undocumented migrants like those living at the station, yet to be evicted, are short of food. the concatenation of the pandemic, the deferred emergency and the state of exception proper is unfolding with potentially dire consequences. —matthew wilhelm-solomon, april 20, 2020 abstract this article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in johannesburg between 2011 and 2019 in inner-city unlawful occupations and temporary emergency accommodation sites. these are often referred to as “hijacked buildings,” “bad buildings,” or “dark buildings.” however, they are also spaces of refuge, intimacy, and sociality for tens of thousands of south africans and foreign nationals excluded from formal rental markets and often displaced by the drive for urban regeneration. this essay mobilizes two concepts to characterize these spaces. the first is the notion of the “city otherwise,” engaging elizabeth povinelli’s concept of “spaces of otherwise.” the residents of these occupations endure in spaces of emergence and potentiality. furthermore, i argue that they exist in a juridical condition that i characterize as “the deferred emergency.” this condition entails the indefinite deferral of an emergency, framed around both the juridical and the infrastructural form of “temporary emergency accommodation” for the evicted. [johannesburg; urban occupation; the otherwise; eviction; assemblage theory; emergency accommodation] notes acknowledgments this essay was originally presented at the ku leuven cades debate, “the politics of presence and the right to the city,” at the invitation of filip de boeck and ann cassiman, and in conversation with alexander vasudevan in november 2017. a revised version was presented in october 2019 at the wits anthropology seminar: my gratitude goes to the students and colleagues at these events for their valuable responses, and particularly to eric worby for his incisive personal comments. this article draws on research conducted at the african centre for migration and society as part of “knowledge for tomorrow—cooperative research projects in sub-saharan africa,” funded by the volkswagen foundation in collaboration with lorena nuñez and peter kankonde, along with hansjörg dilger of the institute of social and cultural anthropology at the freie universität, berlin (2013–2016), and the wellcome foundation—supported migration and health project southern african (2016–2017), led by jo vearey. the essay was completed at wits department of anthropology. thank you to the inner city federation and socio-economics rights institute of south africa for their research engagement between 2017 and 2019; to sam sadian for his friendship, input, and editing; to my wife, adriana miranda da cunha, for the continuing conversations and support; to the cultural anthropology editors (christopher nelson, heather paxson, and brad weiss) and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable input, and to jessica lockrem for facilitating the review and production process. finally, my deepest appreciation goes to all those who shared their time, spaces, and stories with me. this essay is dedicated to the memory of nomusa mabaso (1965–2019) and her injunction to me not to forget. 1. a zimbabwean herself, fluent in several southern african languages, who has asked to remain unnamed. 2. i have anonymized the names of most interlocutors and of the location and name of the station. tea sites, along with ingelosi house and kiribilly, are named as they are already in the public domain through public court records and with approval from their representatives. nomsa dladla’s name, along with those of the leaders of the inner city federation, is used with written permission. photographs, even when names are altered, are used with informed consent. nomusa mabaso’s name is used in her memory. 3. i have not referenced these, as doing so would breach the anonymity of one of my field sites, to which they refer. 4. povinelli’s is not the only conceptualization of the term otherwise. in addition to awan (2016), rike sitas (2020), in an article published after the acceptance of this article, develops her own notion, not derived from the work of povinelli, of “becoming otherwise” based on “artful urban inquiry” and “experimental pedagogical politics.” zimitri erasmus (2017) has also developed her own distinct notion of the “otherwise” in relation to race and creolization in post-apartheid south africa. 5. the full name of the case is city of johannesburg metropolitan municipality v blue moonlight properties 39 (pty) ltd and another (cc). the judgement, as documented by the southern african legal information institute, is available at http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/zacc/2011/33.pdf (accessed march 10, 2019). 6. the full name of the case is dladla and another v city of johannesburg and others. the judgement, as documented by the southern african legal information institute, is available at http://www.saflii.org/za/cases/zacc/2017/42.pdf (accessed march 10, 2019). 7. these included, among others, the inner city resource centre, planact, and doctors without borders (msf). references agamben, giorgio 1999 potentialities: collected essays in philosophy. edited and translated, with an introduction, by daniel heller-roazen. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. 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anthropology, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 404-434, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2020. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.3.03 “too much” sand, not water: a geostory of himalayan riverine sediments as “problem” cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 564-591, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.04 “too much” sand, not water: a geostory of himalayan riverine sediments as “problem” saumya pandey ghent university chr. michelsen institute https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5649-8018 the year 2013 was catastrophic for the nepal-india himalayas. floods, landslides, glacial lake outbursts, dam bursts, and debris flow prompted concerns about what really caused this destruction when clouds violently cracked up over himalayan rivers. was the catastrophe due to heavy riverbed sand or unruly water? one engineer i spoke with commented on this question as such: every year millions of tons of sand, gravel and stones [sg&s] are eroded in the upstream himalayan rivers, transported to midstream areas, and deposited in the downstream region. this poses a major risk of flood hazard for the people residing along the riverbanks. it is difficult to reduce the rate of erosion in the geologically active himalayas. a potential solution then is to mine the sand from the riverbeds.1 in this excerpt the engineer is concerned about “millions of tons of sand, gravel and stone”—just some of the sedimentary particles that make up the himalayan rivers. sand has to be mined from its riverbeds, the engineer notes, to reduce hazardous floods in the geologically active himalayas. what are the implications? my research asks: why do engineers propose sand extraction in the already geologically active himalayas? in the present essay, i ethnographically examine the multiple modes of knowing the sedimentary conditions in the himalayan rivers that create possibilities for sand extraction. such modes of knowing in their ideological implications (see ehrlich 2023) do not deny sand its place in the himalayan rivers but naturalize its force as a “geological problem.” figure 1. orographic map of india. credit: south asia archive foundation (source of digitization), coherent digital (host) and indian science congress association 1937 (original publisher of the printed work). in what follows, i trace the reasonings that lie behind the extraction of himalayan riverine sand. i am less concerned with the capitalist ends of sand mining. rather, i am interested in the “epistemic conditions” (daston and galison 2007; aronowsky 2021)—the engineering logics, concepts, and theories on sedimentary mechanisms—that inform mining. so far, sand mining has been studied as a process through which the informal economy, greed, and easy capital operate (jeyaranjan 2019; hoffmann 2021; paul 2015; binoy 2017; rege 2015). sediment dredging has also been analyzed as an ecologically destabilizing practice in service of infrastructural standards that work against nature (rentier and cammeraat 2022; carse and lewis 2017). in contrast, i show how engineers claim to work with nature to produce knowledge about sediment extraction. most discussion of himalayan sediments with engineers used to begin with the deep erosional history of these sedimentary terrains that emerged from beneath the tethys sea when indian plates collided with the eurasian plates some 50 million years ago.2 engineers noted that, as young active mountains that are still forming, the himalayas experience constant uplifting and thrusting forces, which makes them prone to mass sedimentary erosion to this day. rivers of the himalayas thus carry some of the highest sediment load in the world. the engineering of these rivers was built on a geologically distinct understanding that the sediments of the himalayas are loosely tied, easily erodible, and actively trigger the rivers to overflow by the slightest movement. engineers thus perceived the himalayan rivers not as passive, ahistorical objects only to be dominated and exploited, as riverine scholarship on south asia tends to posit (simpson 2024). rather, the engineers evidenced complex and perplexing concerns about himalayan riverine conditions beyond domination and perceived the fluviatile sediments as historically active subjects acting on us. this knowledge about himalayan sediments’ agential ability gave evidential depth to their engineering logic of extraction. in this essay, i focus on engineers trained in fluvial hydraulics—a branch of engineering concerned with water and sediment flows in rivers. such engineers conduct civil, geoengineering, and hydrological research works on broadly three scales of the himalayan rivers—mountains, floodplains, and the deltaic bay of bengal. these are by no means the only scales through which engineers studied sedimentary processes but they proved, in my research, historically relevant and revealing. for me, moving between himalayan scales and “attending to the politics of scale-making” (hecht 2018, 115) revealed complexities of engineering politics. the himalayan scales posed a challenge to nineteenth-century colonial scientific explorations (fleetwood 2022). comprehension of these high terrains proved exceptionally difficult, imprecise, and uncertain because of their “gigantic scales” (khan 2019, 334), verticality, and grandiosity. i show how engineers also contributed to this scientific tension with significant political implications in the twentieth century. they argued that these sedimentary terrains are still growing, breaking down, and violently mobile across shifting scales such as upstream-downstream, mountains-floodplains, slope-plains, source-destination, and so on. some of these sedimentary breakdowns experience sketchy landscapes, atmospheric pressures, and earthly forces that are not always known, much less understood. i draw on these engineering scalar links to extend insights on the scientific “ambivalence” (latour 2015, 98), uncertainties, and paradoxes entailed in conceiving sedimentary knowledge across varying, and sometimes inconceivable himalayan scales. following the archeologist lindsay bremner, i follow sediments as-they-moved in the himalayan rivers for twelve months (2021–2022). i focused on sedimentary processes of erosion in the mountains, transportation to the floodplains, and deposition into the bay of bengal (though not in any chronological order). in the process, i spoke with engineers who manipulated the movement of sedimented layers beneath these riverbeds. in what follows, i narrate my engagement with engineers who produced fluvial knowledge on himalayan rivers in nepal and india in their capacity as current or former government officials or as technical experts on internationally commissioned river projects. this method entailed visiting river work sites, participating in workshops and conferences on fluvial hydraulics, having sustained conversations with key engineers, and reading the textual sources they suggested.3 much of their engineering expertise on sand extraction, i found, was in rhythm with the history of himalayan sediments and the uneven topographies across which this geological history was scaled. additionally, i conducted four months of archival work on the river training works of later-colonial india as well as on himalayan erosion theories of post–world war ii nepal.4 earth and water data in modern engineering sciences in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians show, rendered rain clouds and entire himalayan river basins extractable through storing, harvesting, and channelizing (d’souza 2006a; roy 2016), in turn expanding “cartographies of capital” (fujikane 2021). colonial authorities puzzled over and speculated on the sandy, silty attributes of these rivers that made them meander and oscillate (amrith 2018; bhattacharyya 2018; saikia 2015). such colonial valuations insinuated an extractive regime of thinking that reflected a strong “water bias” (see parrinello, bizzi, and surian 2021; parrinello, and kondolf 2021; de micheaux, mukherjee, and kull 2018) and endorsed the removal of sediments from the himalayan rivers. an engagement with this history grounds my ethnographic claims on how sediments came to feature as a problem of himalayan geology. i approach my ethnography on sediments as an anthropological inquiry into himalayan geology. the relation between sediments and extraction does not constitute a normative case of geology. the himalayas did not naturally become extractable. rather, this is a story of the earth, or a geostory (latour 2014), about the naturalization of the himalayas (mathur 2013; chakrabarti 2020). engineers used a series of explanations for powerful sedimentary mechanisms to render himalayan riverbeds extractable. as geological philosophy has it: the earth tends to impose its own power and history in a geohistorical process of stratification and destratification (deleuze and guattari 1987). as such, the engineering knowledge claims about the asymmetrical and historical power relation of the himalayan geology and the loose earth in its riverbeds made possible the political economy of sand extraction. figure 2. “inland delta building activity of kosi river” in the journal of the hydraulics division. with permission from asce. “too much” sand, not water (floodplains) roughly 6,000 rivers flow through the nepal himalayas to the floodplains of india.5 the kosi river basin has concerned engineers the most. kosi carries more than 100 million tons of sand to the floodplains each year. engineers arrived at the conclusion that so much sand made kosi swell up, meander, and spill over. a senior engineer in nepal who prepared flood-mitigation reports once gave me a map of kosi. it was a classic map that kept appearing in my fieldwork discussions to show how the kosi had diverged some 112 kilometers westward in the past two hundred years. the map showed why, the engineer noted, sediments should be extracted. they would otherwise cause havoc in the floodplains. he explained the fluvial process to me as follows: when himalayan rivers come down to the indo-gangetic floodplains, they slow down due to heavy sand load and low kinetic energy, so they deposit the sand because they cannot carry it anymore. it creates a fan-shaped deposition every year, and if it is not taken out, it will grow. we sometimes build embankments. but no matter what, the rivers keep depositing sand, and the riverbed keeps rising. the local settlements in both nepal and india that are above riverbed levels slowly move below the bed. that’s dangerous. it will cause havoc. for the reason of sediments rising above local settlements, engineers found the stretch of the kosi river between the nepal-india floodplains most dangerous. the unique geology and geomorphology of the kosi indicated that the alpine and mountainous stretch—that is, the steep slopes from where the river rapidly gathered sediments—was in the nepal himalayas. on the other hand, the alluvial flat basin where the river deposited sediments was mostly in the bihar floodplains of india. this geomorphology meant that when heavy rains hit the area, kosi was already brimming with sand and silt from the mountains. floods, therefore, were both predictable and unavoidable in this region, and engineers came to see their occurrence as a prototype of sedimentary catastrophe. on the careful examination of river mechanisms and monsoons over the years, most engineers had concluded that this stretch of kosi, where it debouched into floodplains, was experiencing a tumultuous sedimentary life that made it shift paths, breach embankments, and cause frequent floodings. a concern lingering in their problem statement was: where would so much sand perennially flowing from the himalayan mountains go if it is not removed from the rivers in a timely manner? the bias against sediments was built into the problem statement. the fluvial science on sediments hinged on two geological components: first, engineers noted that the himalayas, as “tectonically active mountains,” were constantly rising and falling, making them prone to heavy “erosion.” second, if the mobility logic of rivers were to be trusted, it indicated a correlation between the depletion and transportation of these sediments from “mountains to the floodplains” every year. particularly during monsoons, when rains beat up these erodible himalayan terrains, the sediment flows in rivers increased. in approaching this story, the engineers thus asked me to keep in mind the geological knowledge of the himalayas as “easily erodible” terrains and flashy monsoonal patterns, which they usually called a “hydrological anomaly.” indeed, known for tectonic movements and sudden intense rains, several parts of the himalayas experienced regular landslides, heavy erosion, frequent floodings, cloudbursts, and glacial-lake outbursts. the engineers considered these major natural causes of sediment flow to the floodplains (adhikari 2013). this knowledge about the topography, climate, and erosional history of the himalayas thus induced teleological conditions (see jamieson 2020) of geology, affecting the fluvial science on excess sediments. this science should be read “critically and historically” (galison 1994, 251). in a 1949 government report coinciding with engineers’ planned training works to control paths of “sinuous” himalayan rivers, it had made sense to quote a dublin-born engineer under the british empire, claude inglis, the director of the indian waterways experiment station in poona. he claimed that “the main cause of meandering and high river levels is too much sand, rather than too much water” (goi 1949, 206). this archival statement about too much sand has proved revelatory for me, since most anthropological and historical accounts on rivers fundamentally attribute meandering and catastrophic qualities to unruly water, not sand. according to inglis, however, if we only had to deal with water in rivers, the problem would be simple. but sand bore weight; it caused rivers to rise and spill over. the spill of flood water over riverbanks concerned engineers. this is because spill represented “havoc.” engineers saw the rivers speedily debouching from the steep himalayas into the indo-gangetic floodplains to be carrying heavy loads of sand and silt. an engineer reflected, “while the flooding of fertile silt for cultivable floodplains was desirable, excess coarse sand created blockage.” as per engineering principles, excess sand “choked” smooth flows (lacey 1958, 146). what the excess-sand story lacked was a harmonic analysis of the phenomena. in particular, the engineers in the indian bihar floodplains asked me to be regionally attentive to the hazardous implications of the high sediment yield of kosi for the downstream settlements in bihar, because of which kosi had garnered the reputation of being “the sorrow of bihar” (mishra 2008a). an indian engineer argued that “floodings were a political and governance-related matter,” but also a result of “natural sediment yield from the nepal himalayas that caused the rivers in the bihar plains to rise above the settlements.” for indian engineers, then, excess sediments entering from nepal to india constituted a threat, even if the country was not. the nepali engineers found this logic rather slanderous and ironic: a former government engineer noted that “neither the natural flow of sediment nor the topography is controllable.” further, he added, the “persistent framing of the flood problem by the successive governments of bihar and the indian news media hinted that the water and sand from nepal mountains were intentionally causing floods in the bihar plains.” nepali engineers often contended that such biased accounts ignored the geomorphology of the landscape and the role of infrastructures. an engineer, for instance, noted that such accounts “conveniently shielded the role of the kosi barrage,” constructed by the indian government in 1963, “which acted as a major barrier to the smooth flow of sediments from nepal.” here was a threat simultaneously physical and territorial: the sand, flowing from mountains to floodplains, from one country to another, causing turbulence in both, being projected as a catastrophe, and the engineering quest to explain this as a condition of sedimentary excess. technically speaking, there was nothing unusual about this engineering fascination with the source of the sedimentary problem. it ranged well within the spirit of scientific inquiry. discovering truths about the physical world is intrinsic to the virtue of science, as the philosopher of science sundar sarukkai (2012) argues. and by investigating the truth about catastrophic floods, engineers forged knowledge about the physical world. “if excess sediments belonged to the nepal himalayas, as portrayed by india,” a nepali engineer rationally asked me, “by that logic the sand islands and territories forming in the rivers should also belong to nepal.” that the underlying task of science was an inquiry in logic, rationality, and reason was not lost on engineers. as technical expertise remained entrenched in seeking a supposed truth, with an impulse to explain nature’s truth, another nepali engineer asserted that, “had sediments from the nepal himalayas not flowed down and settled in the nepal-india floodplains, what we know as indo-gangetic plains would not have existed as fertile lands for settlements.” engineering is often understood as an “applied science” (latour 2015, 170–71), but here it becomes clear that as a key discipline about the physical world, engineering has a great deal to offer, not just in practice but also in theoretical principles about how it forges scientific knowledge (in this case, about fluvial sediments). for a brief shining moment this may seem like the engineering discipline’s natural inclination toward the objective pursuit of fluvial science. but the engineers’ knowledge of the laws of fluid motion did not emerge in a void. it boomed in the late nineteenth century, when interest grew in building permanent structures on the himalayan rivers as part of development prospects. in 1847, the first engineering college, thomason college, currently known as the indian institute of technology, roorkee, was established in a small himalayan city under the british empire in hopes of training local elite indians in the science of engineering to meet the post-famine emergency call for technical know-how in the river ganga canal.6 at least the theoretical presentation of modern engineering practice, then, carried moral weight and social potentialities. an engineer building a reservoir, bridge, canal, or dam, while altering the chemical composition of water and sediments in the river or displacing large sections of local settlements or sidestepping the impact on a transboundary country, could skip scrutiny for ascribing energy, value, and social meaning to their design. in this sense, engineers were no ordinary builders; they were the primary contributors to a nationalist sovereign “visioning exercise” (sekhsaria and thayyil 2017, 1837) of how nature could be geared toward social purpose (bolaños 2022; mukerji 2022; oğuz 2021). with the rush of hydropower development projects in the mid-1950s and 1960s, they came to play a central role in forging knowledge about the characteristics and scope of the himalayan rivers, which always contained an element of these “sovereign anxieties” (hayat 2022, 3). river valley development projects emerged in nepal at nearly the same time, with us-aid involved in hydrological and river-training projects from 1960 onward.7 nepali engineers, too, trained at the institute of engineering (ioe) in nepal to identify the water resource-potential of the himalayan rivers for their own country. in this amassing of knowledge, the neutrality of science cushioned sovereign claims to determine the source and destination of the purported sediment problem. the problem statement usually indicates where exactly the fault rested.8 this idea lingered in the sovereign anxiety among nepali-indian engineers, and it’s easy to see why. the shared floodplains of nepal and india experience frequent floodings, so it made sense for engineers to use sovereign frames to scientifically identify the source of this problem across the border. to this end, in 1969, when india sponsored a research mission into the nepal side of river kosi, a certain bias became ensconced in the framing of the research question: the team wanted to determine the role of “upstream activities” in heavy siltation “downstream” (eckholm 1976, 81). the research team went on to warn that kosi, which geographically included most of eastern nepal, was now “one of the worst eroded in the world” (eckholm 1976, 82). the anxiety on sediments, however, had not been growing in siloed binaries of nepal-india expertise. the postwar humanitarian experts referenced the floodings in plains as well as plumes of sediment far in the bay of bengal as a crisis of himalayan degradation (curray and moore 1971). two key factors informed the degradation theory: the first relied on neo-malthusian climate rationalities about “population explosion” in relation to pressure on mountain soil, which in turn, led to more sediment flows to the plains. second came an attempt to understand the natural or geomorphological factors behind sediment mobility (ives 1987, 190). critiques of the malthusian rationality are well documented (see thompson and gyawali 2007; robertson 2006). less explored is the concurrent emphasis on the erosion of himalayan geology that played an equally important role.9 this was evident in the gtz-unesco munich conference in 1974, which appealed for scientific answers to erosion from the mountains to the floodplains (unesco-mab 1974).10 erik eckholm’s thoughts further summarized this trend: he noted that “nepal was exporting the commodity that it could least afford to part with, namely topsoil, to india, in the form that india could least afford to receive” (eckholm 1976, quoted in ives 1987, 191). eckholm’s interest here were the fertile, silty sediments flowing down, which he deemed the nepal himalayas’ “most precious export” to india, for which nepal “received no compensation” (eckholm 1976, 78). the sediment flows from the “nepal mountains” to the “india plains” here evolved into a forceful geomorphological question: if the sediments were indeed flowing down in abundance, then the formation of fertile indo-gangetic floodplains owed much to the himalayas. it is difficult to tell the extent to which this link between mountain erosion and plains floodings informed sand-extraction works in this region. river management and extraction in the floodplains do not form a simplistic unitary project.11 embankments, dikes, levees, barrages, canals, and even rats feature in the discussion (goi 1969, 54). i thus want to exercise caution in advancing the more familiar extraction scale framing to capture the political and capitalist sentiments on sediments. the measure to which engineers puzzled over dredging mechanisms remains unclear to me. yet, evidently, the engineering philosophy was a geological philosophy in which the deep history of the himalayas was nature’s story about sedimentary excess. figure 3. accumulation of sediments in a drying river in bengal, as observed by me. photo by saumya pandey. river improvement by dredging (deltas) far below the 2,500 kilometer himalayan stretch things looked different, however. here, the ways in which capitalism implicates the history of sedimentary excess and extraction becomes more visible. it is here, before reluctantly merging with the bay of bengal sea, that himalayan rivers thicken with sediments. i sat by these rivers to observe how thick, voluminous lumps of sand and silt deeply soaked in and released water in rhythmic breath, pushing back against forward movement. and each time the rivers expanded their lungs, they moistened their banks by their touch. that’s how the rivers spread and widen—by resisting forward movement. engineers explicitly used terminologies such as deterioration, siltation, and sedimentation to explain these riverine conditions of thickening, resistance, and counter-movement. pragmatically it made sense to the engineers to dredge rivers here: a long period of time after himalayan rivers had debouched from mountains into plains, had accumulated sediments, and were making mega fans, sandbanks, and shoals, especially at the mouth of the bay of bengal sea. this point was reemphasized throughout the course of my fieldwork. as an indian engineer noted, “dredging was not good when rivers were young and flowing through steep himalayan slopes with high velocity. but it was good when rivers had aged in the deltaic plains and had started to form sand and silt shoals and sandbanks.” i will come to the link between sediment, extraction, and mountains in the following section, but first—why was dredging “good” in the deltas? archives on colonial river maintenance and training works show that merchant ships and vessels in the past had sunk deep in great piles of sand and silt that accumulated at the mouth of the deltaic rivers. in particular, historical records compiled by east india company engineers told the story of the james and mary sands, named after the royal james and mary ship, which in 1694 sunk deep into the sandbanks. these sands had an “evil reputation for their peril to vessels making the passage of the [river] hooghly” (bengal secretariat press 1914, 5). engineers observed that the james and mary sands posed “chief danger” to the navigation of the hooghly as the vessels were sucked in the thickness of the shoals (bengal secretariat press 1914, 5). counter and lateral movements confounded colonial engineers: “the cry that hooghly is deteriorating [was] raised every now and then” (bengal secretariat press 1914, 5). for engineers, this gave grounds for dredging mechanisms. when i started my fieldwork, i was likewise expected to accept the colonial logic that dredging helped rivers “improve” through the removal of silt, a process engineers described as “de-siltation.” somehow, it constituted an established truth that dredging sand made deltaic rivers better. powerful suction dredgers became an important investment for port commissioners to carry out sand dredging operations in 1907 to “improve,” for instance, the deltaic hooghly river. several experiments were undertaken in the tributaries and distributaries of rivers entering the bay of bengal. in fact, the first experiment with a modern dredger on the deltaic river nadia took place in april 1902 with the lindon bates, a suction dredger named after its engineer (bengal secretariat press 1906, 23). it was thus in the rich deltas that the colonial and economic place of sediments first became visible, much before the idea of dredging even reached the upstream himalayan mountains. the scholars ashley carse and joshua lewis (2017) observe that technological exposition on the environment subtly modified vast ecologies in political and economic ways. indeed, if rivers were to be made navigable, and shipwrecks avoided, the rivers had to be stripped of sediments. dredging technologies made this ecological experiment possible. this imperialist logic had sweeping consequences, its power accepted with impunity. i rarely found engineers questioning the fundamental premise behind the idea of removing sand and thus improving rivers through dredging. clearly, engineers saw dredging as the alibi—not the root cause of any problem. therefore, whether accumulated sand was causing catastrophe could only be decided based on the multiple ways in which engineers applied the logic of economy or cost-cutting in maintaining infrastructures such as bridges and canals. an indian engineer explained this: sandy rivers were shallow in depth and broad in width. if the sand is extracted from the water, rivers will increase in depth. the width too will shrink. shorter bridges can be built on rivers. this will save cost. similar accounts appeared in the river training reports: colonial engineers justified riverbed extraction as economically sound, as they estimated the cost of bridging the entire stretch of a river to exceed the sum of the costs of shorter bridge (superintendent government press 1903). this revelation proved rather easy to implement given that the beds of river in question were loose, unstable, and not composed of solid, unerodable rock. it is therefore not in uniformity and stability that technical science saw nature. laws of nature were unstable. engineers recognized that. engineers tried to interpret sedimentary mechanisms as conditions to be recognized, not opposed. inglis, who left a notable mark on indian canal design models, for example, “preferred to enlist the forces of nature rather than oppose them” (thomas and paton 1975, 380). inglis’s riverine knowledge and designs around removing sand while letting silt pass before they entered irrigation canals have often been projected as moral and honest, a task undertaken not with any compulsive obsession to control the natural, free-flowing river, but under the logic that trained rivers would flow more purposefully. according to gerald lacey, we might almost say that inglis studied “river psychology”: “he treated these alluvial rivers as though they were alive, not rigid, or dead. he asked himself the question ‘what would i do if i were the river?’ … he was concerned with the misinterpretation which he saw others making, particularly where an opportunity was being missed of making nature do most of the work” (thomas and paton 1975, 384). the environmental conditions of sand’s materiality such as siltation, sedimentation, and rising riverbed levels thus historically dominated the dredging hypothesis and gave it ecological legitimacy through colonial river management, training, and governance practices. these humanist processes by no means, however, translated into innocently studying nature. rather, as the environmental historian rohan d’souza (2006b, 151) notes, the “logics and calculations for regulating the rivers” emphasized how the use-value form of deltas informed capitalist logic. to this end, colonial engineers used sediment behavior in the deltas as evidentiary knowledge about what sedimentation in rivers could do to the economy of infrastructures that came their way, a notion that dislodged a possible criticism of river dredging mechanisms per se. in a twisted fate, these colonial ideologies informed the (post)colonial knowledge on sediments in the bay of bengal not just as excess to be dredged but also as legally claimed. to paraphrase the anthropologist gisa weszkalnys (2015), here we see the double logic of capitalist expansion, which makes for both a site of inherent failure and speculation. excess sand in the form of mobile landscapes such as sand islands and shoals that brought grief to merchant vessels revealed new tensions about sovereign ownership and territorial rights over fluid geographies. india and bangladesh have, for instance, claimed rights over mobile sand islands in the bay of bengal. as generative sites of colonial, legal, and economic power, sand islands find rich mention in the study of deltaic rivers. the historian debjani bhattacharyya (2021, 144) writes: “silt and shoals emerge in european writing as sites of labor and exhaustion and as places that science passed over.” one may extend this insight to the current descriptions of littoral spaces to read the counter-movement of rivers and the environmental crisis as a symptom of cartographic colonial power. prognostics of sand as disastrous were thus imbued with the colonial mentality of mapping flows and usually exceeded an engineering vision of linear flows (da cunha 2018; boyer and vardy 2022; lahiri-dutt 2014). the invisible, slow forces of deeper timescales such as sedimentation and siltation—that made and unmade land—were brought to the surface as historically contingent products of disaster to reconstruct the more recent history of river dredging. as these rivers evaded the “logics of hydrology because they are too weighed down with sediment, and of strata, because they are too mobile” (bremner 2020, 3), and fluidity “became a generative site of productive law making” (bhattacharyya 2021, 145), dredging prompted vexing questions about the scientific, ecological, political, and economic contours of what value sand held in contemporary capitalist endeavors. if deltas, shoals, seabeds, and rivers were dredged and dried in service of capital accumulation, land speculation, and cartographic expansion (khalili 2020; carse 2022), what value did the loose sediment in the himalayan rivers have? figure 4. melamchi floods. credit: sudan bikash maharjan | icimod. sand futures as “problem” (mountains) in the june 2013 monsoons, the sediment ratio in river mandakini, high up in the indian himalayas, was so elevated that the bed level rose to 1,640 m from 1,611 m (sundriyal et al. 2015, 181). water-laden clouds, bulging at the seams, had apparently meandered from their regular path toward northeast india. instead, after absorbing moisture from the bay of bengal sea, they headed straight up toward the low-pressure trough in the himalayan region of northern india and western nepal, bringing monsoons two weeks sooner than usual. the clouds violently burst at a moment when the region was already experiencing showers from westerlies, causing high-intensity, focused rainfalls. around twenty-five himalayan rivers and their tributaries swelled with “debris” (sati and gahalaut 2013, 193), which was basically the sediment and muck that had assembled during landslides, had been left behind by the receding glaciers, resulted from dam bursts, or all of these factors. it is still hard to tell. within months of starting my fieldwork in june 2021, a similar incident unfolded in melamchi in nepal, which had all the elements the engineers feared: dense clouds bursting; heavy showers; glacial lake outburst; earth flow; inundated banks; the destruction of life, infrastructure, and agricultural fields. the site of a village buried in sediments to me served as a reminder of what nayanika mathur’s (2021, 159) himalayan ethnography describes as daivya apada (disaster) and prakriti ka prakop (retribution of nature), both attributed to the power of the mountains and rivers that sought to reclaim their position from anthropogenic exploits. in our discussions, several engineers noted that, one, the himalayas were still growing, with their movements unstable; and two, a late 1980s and 1990s neoliberal development trajectory—in the form of the heavy construction of roads, upstream dams, deforestation, and rampant sand mining—on the region’s shoulders was weighing it down, leaving it to unravel its catastrophic fury on humans. this, in turn, made a pressing case for how “social and political agency emerges alongside earth forces” (bremner 2021, 24). a nepali engineer observed that the “frequency of sedimentary catastrophes has been increasing,” and engineering knowledge on sedimentary conditions thus sat uncomfortably with what engineers unanimously believed had never been appliable to the himalayan rivers. as a general rule, engineers reflected that they were not taught to think with sediments, but mostly water. hydro-engineers, for instance, argued that they were trained to study the “water-resource potential” of the rivers. little importance was given to sediments. a hydro-engineer recalled after completing his training in austria that “it was not until i moved back to nepal and started thinking about sediment basins to trap excess sediments and operating expensive turbines that easily corroded from quartzite sediments that i realized that my design and training had not considered the behavior of these sediments.” in fact, several nepali and indian hydrologists, who envisioned dams on rivers and witnessed enigmatic sedimentary mechanisms, felt strained by their learning, and often complained to me about how little euro-american engineering models knew about the sediment-rich rivers flowing from the hyperactive himalayas. as social thinkers, engineers wanted to protect the environment. a nepali engineer critically noted that the “curvy himalayan geology made it hard to implement western-style river projects.” to civil engineers, especially who inhabited and dealt with the geology of nepal—a country that is 83 percent mountainous landmass—and seismic events on a day-to-day basis, it was even more important to bear in mind that much of the engineering expertise on rivers had been based on “grownup mountains” and river systems elsewhere. indian engineers, too, believed in this theory. a concerned engineer explained that, “europeans formulated solutions we have to use that best suited mature mountain regions such as the alps, which are relatively more stable terrains and do not easily erode or have high sediment load like our himalayas.” another engineer explained that “unlike the neat chains of the alps, the himalayas have parallel terrains and complexly folded riverine paths that accumulate sediments by creating traps always on the verge of a disaster.” in a couple of engineering workshops on geohydrology in nepal i attended, the engineers in smaller groups discussed how the sedimentary disasters further accentuated that recent bouts of intense heat were melting himalayan glaciers—the third-largest glacial reserves (after the poles) in the world. the by-products of such melting were not just water but also moraine, as several engineers pointed out. engineers often highlighted that several less-known ongoing geological factors were thus disrupting the logic of water, mobility, and flow at an “uncertain scale.” these complex, seemingly inexplicable shifts aggravated sediment flows in the rivers. to the average engineer, then, sediment flows proved erratic, irregular, and unknowable, with one of their constitutive elements being that they ruined lives and infrastructures, without any one geological force clearly being at fault. as a result, the majority of engineers believed that, ideally, extraction works in the mountainous terrains should be avoided because these terrains were exceptionally “unstable,” and leading to disasters “unknown.” yet this was also the very reason many believed that extraction made for an environmental “necessity”: for instance, one engineer argued that “if the sediment is not removed from time to time, it will keep piling up in the mountains, naturally dam the upstream river flow, and lead to more destruction at an unknown himalayan scale.” it is here in what mathur (2015, 102) describes as the “unassailable potency” of climate narratives in the himalayas that a blueprint for private extraction work finds impunity. engineers have noted that at least for as long as extraction proves an environmental necessity, it is important to economize this opportunity. they have always reminded me that sand has an economic value for the construction industry to build roads, dams, bridges, and even embankments, and that local governments usually earn revenue/royalties by extending private mining leases. if a governing body does not capitalize on this extraction, it will cause revenue loss to them; and this is, as an engineer once sharply put it, a “windfall gain” for “mining and crushing vyavasai [businesses].” this has proven a common governance approach to extraction. private companies are given mining leases by local governing authorities not for mere profitability but with the clear scientific motivation that extraction controls future sedimentary catastrophes. several flood-management reports from nepal i read recognize the engineering approach to the extraction of sand, gravel, and stones for both flood control and as an important source of revenue for local governments. a senior engineer who always encouraged me to critically examine how sediments are treated in the technical sciences patiently explained the relevance of this: the local governments in nepal can potentially issue permits to the private contractors to mine the sand, gravel, and stone in the riverbed. this is a flood-adaptation measure against the ongoing impacts of sedimentary disasters. it allows the government to maintain the riverbed levels without incurring costs on public money, while also ensuring revenue generation to promote infrastructural development. here, if governance claims and scientific knowledge do not differ from a form of social and economic organization of riverbed mining, it is because the social and economic position on extraction in the twenty-first century is one of science and governance. the narrative of economic-environmental balance is a scientific one in which sediments pose a futuristic challenge and private mining offers the engineering solution. this is where science, capital, and governance become entangled—historically, materially, conceptually, and epistemically. if one carefully reads the regular grounds on which mining permits are leased out to private companies in india, one sees traces of this engineering logic. for example, a lease from 2020 shows that the ministry of environment, forest and climate change, government of india, discussed a proposal seeking prior approval of the government under the 1980 forest (conservation) act to renew the sand-mining lease in specific rivers in the himalayan region of uttarakhand. the proposal contained a brief note on the justification for locating the project in forest land by the proposing body, the uttarakhand forest development corporation, which stated the following (translated from hindi to english by me): the sand, boulder, gravel, and other riverbed minerals that are brought by mountain rivers when it rains accumulate in the riverbed, which causes the river flow to change direction and acts as a potential threat to the population settled close by. if mining activities are not undertaken in these regions, the beds of rivers will be overwhelmed with sediment material, and there will always be a risk of rivers overflowing and flooding the settlements that are on the banks of these rivers. therefore, to protect the lands surrounding the river and to control the flow of the direction of the river, the removal of these minerals is of absolute and necessary importance. minerals, for geographical reasons are present in rivers, which fall under the forest department. this is the reason why there is no choice left but to seek mining permission from the indian government.12 this scientific legitimation for private extraction aside, the sharp ontological distinction between scientific reasons for extraction and a neoliberal impulse to rampantly extract persists. a couple of news and land-research platforms in india, for example, have found it startling that environmental protection and disaster management laws on dredging for flood protection have been used for private exploitation (joshi 2021). within their framework, engineers, too, sometimes use the scientific phrase “sand harvesting” to distinguish their ethical principles on extraction from excessive “sand mining.” engineers believe that sand harvesting is environmentally friendly because it relies on the logic that the himalayas will always erode, in which case if “moderate” amounts of sediment are extracted, they would be easily and “naturally” replenished each year. “the political economy of sand harvesting,” an engineer noted in an online public discussion on sand mining in south asia in 2020, “is very different from the political economy of sand mining”: “if you forgive me for rather crude language, it’s the difference between making love and rape. what the politics of harvesting implies is sustainability, whereas mining means extract whatever you can.” several engineers have thus expressed concern that private contractors work following the logic of profit, not science or sustainability, drawing clear theoretical distinctions between “scientific” and “private” extraction practices. on the contrary, i want to argue that the link between the two is historically contingent and geologically profound. first, when it came to accounting for the credibility of using scientific methods for private mining, engineers asserted that scarcely any examples existed to offer at the present time. at least in my fieldwork sites, then, the link between science and private mining occupied affective registers. so, when the engineers anticipated sand exploitation, tensions arose as to the “appropriate ethical orientation” (weszkalnys, 2014, 129) toward extractive futures. second, even when the distinction between rampant mining and scientific mining attenuated, as in the context of extracting from “uncertain” mountainous rivers, engineers contended that the fundamental concern remained unresolved: how could science and governance manage the sand problem in the erodible himalayas? this positive feedback loop (clark and szerszynski 2021) of prognostically identifying himalayan sediments as a problem and finding engineering solutions ran deep in a wide range of private mining contracts. but then again, we should not regard this as an unforeseen, sudden occurrence. at the heart of this scientific-private loop on sediment management lies the nineteenth-century european anxiety about the himalayas’ deep geological history: how the himalayas broke, moved, and to what end. in particular, colonial foresters in british india were anxious about rapid sedimentary breakdowns in parts of the eastern himalayas. they concluded that informal local grazing, tree-cutting, and small cultivation practices in the mountains were “unscientific”—that they caused the himalayas to further denudate, leading to “deforestation” and “desertification.” yet, predictably, they found no fault with private tea estates on the hill slopes, which they believed were “well managed” (sivaramakrishnan 1999, 199). sediment governance has thus historically come to center on the idea that himalayan erosion necessitates stricter “private” enclosure, “scientific” forestry, “sustainable” farming, and so on (carson 2020; malla 2001). third, the classification of sediments here seems to overlap with a more familiar industrial and economic classification of sand as a “construction aggregate.” this is to say that the classification of fluvial earth as strictly sand, gravel, and stones (sg&s material) sustains the economistic appeal by claiming at once vagueness and specificity on the sediment matter, size, shape, form, origin, and purpose. i want to argue here that this vagueness is not a classic case of ignorance; neither the government permits mentioned above nor the engineering voices i unfold in this essay have ignored himalayan complexities. in fact, as i have shown, engineers made value distinctions between silt/sand, desirable/catastrophic, stability/turmoil, mountains/plains, sediment/water, harvest/mine, sustainable/rampant, revenue/profit, even as the private businesses that scooped riverbeds did not. rather, this is a form of denial, expressed in a manner that supports both science and governance (river maintenance and revenue-generation through extraction!) while retaining a deniability of scale and measure (the motivation behind extraction was to prevent catastrophe and save lives, not destabilize the himalayas or profit!). such a premise can prove disquieting.13 such a “vision of the world” (yusoff 2009, 1021) can exceed its mechanistic claim and have destructive implications. extraction as a supposed necessity persists even as engineers have meant no harm to the himalayas and its rivers. on the contrary, engineers are mindful and not in denial about the fluvial sedimentary conditions in the context of the limitations of a technical training steeped in non-himalayan visions. to the engineers, then, the technical science is questionable. yet that has not dented the appeal of seeing too much sediment as problem. what, then, was applicable to the himalayan rivers? conclusion the reasons for extraction are “ethically” crafted. the himalayas’ own history was summoned forth in engineering to voice the ethics of extraction. the geological conditions of the himalayan sediment rising, breaking, eroding, transporting, settling, and accumulating at the bay of bengal sea gained political traction and epistemic legitimacy in extraction reasonings. sediment unsettled the disciplinary boundary of river engineering. it was shown to be a loose substance wandering in the himalayan rivers in excess, obstructing shipping paths, preventing the forward movement of rivers, destroying infrastructure, causing inundation and, most important, risking lives. all this made extraction possible, ethical, and justifiable in the first place.14 the extraction reasoning will continue to be enacted as an ethical imperative. this is because it is made legible on environmental and humanitarian concerns—not just capitalist pursuits. one also finds the ethical imperative of extraction forged in international climate science and policy discourse, which proposes sediment extraction in the greenland arctic’s warming sea ice as a response to the challenges of climate change. the proposed climate events that drive this approach are “melting glaciers” and “rising sea levels” (bendixen et al. 2019, 99). one might appreciate this extractive approach in science for its ability to supply solutions during climate catastrophes. however, it’s hard to ignore that the “abundance” of these sediments melting from greenland glaciers is proposed to meet the purported scarcity of sand for the construction industry—ironically, the largest emitter of climate-altering greenhouse gases.15 ideas of scarcity, abundance, and those around the world running out of a resource, often justify exploitative capitalist ambitions (kirsch 2020). it is also not enough to say that sand extraction mobilized under the imprint of colonial dredging innovations thereby makes way for capitalist expansion. presenting extraction in capitalist-scale terms (measurable value), although important, certainly underrepresents the role of knowledge and epistemological frameworks in their inconsistent, unmeasurable, and intangible politics and ideology (see navaro-yashin 2020). for this reason, i have considered the sedimentary knowledge in history, geology, and related fluvial sciences that serve multiple, and often ambiguous, ideational claims across different scales (floodplains/deltas/mountains) and periods (postwar/colonial/neoliberal). such political ambiguities do not necessarily lead to a dismissal of sand extraction as a geologically unstable way of conditioning the himalayan rivers. rather, geological instability itself serves an epistemic position in the extraction discourse, in which the exclusion of sand from himalayan rivers occupies a valid place in the environment. abstract this article examines how a future about surplus sand entered river-engineering vocabulary as an obstruction to the free flow of himalayan river systems. it is a historical and ethnographic analysis of sand’s conceptualization as a catastrophic material that caused rivers to spill over, which became conducive to its removal from rivers for economic endeavors. sand holds a unique place in society, it’s the foundation on which roads, bridges, and buildings are built. today, a shortage of these sediment particles has been described as a moment of economic and environmental crisis. against the grain of sand’s desirability and shortage as a resource material, i pay close attention to the destructive articulations of the himalayan earthly forces that made the political economy of extracting excess sand possible. [catastrophe; economy; engineering; geology; himalayan rivers; politics; sediments] सार यह लेख इस बात की जाँच करता है कि कैसे इंजीनियरिंग शब्दावली में अधिक रेत का भविष्य हिमालय नदी में बाधा के रूप में बताया गया । यह एक ऐतिहासिक और नृवंशविज्ञान विश्लेषण है जो दिखाता है की रेत को कैसे विनाशकारी सामग्री बताया गया । यहाँ हम बताते हैं की बाढ़ के कारन नदियों से रेत को हटाने के लिए क्यों अनुकूल समझा गया । रेत समाज में एक अद्वितीय स्थान रखती है । यह वह सामग्री है जिस पर सड़कें, पुल और इमारतें बनाई जाती हैं। आज रेत की कमी को आर्थिक और पर्यावरणीय संकट का श्रोत बताया गया है। किन्तु हम यहाँ रेत के अधिकता और कमी पर तर्क नहीं करेंगे। बजााय हम इंजीनियरिंग में हिमालय की ताकतों की विनाशकारी अभिव्यक्ति पर बारीकी से ध्यान देंगे जिसने अधिक रेत निकालने की राजनीतिक अर्थव्यवस्था को संभव बनाया है। [विनाश; अर्थव्यवस्था; इंजीनियरिंग; भूविज्ञान; हिमालय नदी; राजनीति; रेत] notes acknowledgments this essay has greatly benefited from the close reading and incisive comments of engineers, my anonymous reviewers, as well as the cultural anthropology editors abdoumaliq t. simone and julia elyachar. versions of the longer chapter from which this essay was developed were presented at eseh bern (2023), “mountains and plains: past, present, and future environmental and climatic entanglements”; shiv nadar university (2022), “approaches to mobility: thinking through space and time”; and cornell university (2022), “writing the history of the built environments of asia: materiality, translations, and colonialism.” i am deeply grateful to debjani bhattacharyya, giacomo parrinello, santiago gorostiza, hari krishna srestha, dipak gyawali, dinesh mishra, siddharth agarwal, saloni verma, edyta roszko, kari telle, xuefei shi, and hang zhou for their time, encouragement, and thoughtful discussions. my doctoral research on himalayan riverine sediments is funded by the research council of norway (300875). 1. nepali engineer interviewed by saumya pandey, april 2021, kathmandu, nepal. 2. to learn more about the history of himalayan geology, see gansser 1964. 3. sand mining implicates the lives of those who work on it in nepal and india. i identified rivers and experts very broadly to protect people in my field sites. i used specific names when it was necessary to describe the history and topography of a region and only quoted from documents that are publicly available. this is a serious matter. so, in organizing my research, my intention has been to counter anglocentric epistemological hierarchies that claim fieldwork truth in heroic descriptions. 4. nepal was not colonized by the british empire, but colonial river works reached nepal because of nepal-india transboundary connections. 5. the rivers eventually merge with the ganga basin. 6. see the anthropologist ajantha subramanian’s (2019) work on caste elitism in engineering in india. for a thoughtful discussion of the history of caste elitism in science in general, see prashant kumar 2022 and prakash 1999. 7. us-aid is an acronym for the united states agency for international development. in 1962, us-aid–sponsored tennessee river valley development models were forged onto the rapti river in nepal; see robertson 2016. for nepal’s development roadmap, read sharma 2021. to understand how international organizations take an “eagle’s eye science” view instead of a “toad’s eye science” view, read gyawali and thompson 2016. 8. by thinking of mobility with notions such as source and destination, the technical sciences erased possibilities to reconsider the relationship between moving and being still, to rethink why things moved or “what mobility is for” (clark and szerszynski 2021, 143). 9. the anthropologist nayanika mathur (2015, 102) has in fact questioned this tendency to show the “himalayas as forever on the brink of environmental disaster.” 10. gtz-unesco is an acronym for german agency for technical cooperation–united nations educational, scientific and technical organization. 11. for a rich analysis of these 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https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.08 yusoff, kathryn 2009 “excess, catastrophe, and climate change.” environment and planning d: society and space 27, no. 6: 1010–29. https://doi.org/10.1068/d7407 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 564-591, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.04 the paradox of humanitarian recognition: blackness, predation, and non-statist solidarities in the migration of eritreans to europe cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 374-399, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.03 the paradox of humanitarian recognition: blackness, predation, and non-statist solidarities in the migration of eritreans to europe fiori sara berhane university of southern california https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0403-1918 in june 2019, medhanie tesfamariam berhe was released from a palermo jail after serving three years in prison in a case of mistaken identity. berhe, an eritrean refugee and dairy farmer residing in sudan at the time of his arrest, had been extradited to italy as part of a joint british-italian-sudanese operation to track down the alleged human trafficker medhanie yehedgo mered. a genetic test and voice recognition software finally exonerated berhe, after which italy granted him political asylum. berhe’s transformation from alleged criminal trafficker to political asylee hinged not only on technology but on his national identity. as an eritrean, he was eligible for asylum because the european union (eu) recognized the conditions that led to the mass flight of young eritreans: mandatory mass military conscription; threats of arbitrary detention, disappearance, and political violence; and retributive state violence toward family members (unhcr 2015, 2016). even as an asylee, however, berhe found himself convicted by italy for aiding and abetting illegal migration under the bossi fini laws because he had paid for his cousin’s passage through libya.1 if no longer a purported human trafficker, in the eyes of the italian state, berhe remained a criminal, even as he was at the same time a recognized political refugee—all for actions taken outside of italy’s jurisdiction. berhe’s case illustrates that the italian state and the eu have responded to the arrival of eritreans by instituting a range of repressive measures—some transnational in scope—alongside their recognition of the political crisis in eritrea. the case of berhe and of eritreans’ migration to italy more generally exemplify what i call the paradox of humanitarian recognition: 1) eritreans continue to enjoy some of the highest protection rates among asylum seekers in the global north;2 yet 2) they are targets of preemptive detention and blocking within africa and, once they arrive in europe, of surveillance and even criminalization as purported perpetrators of human smuggling and trafficking.3 altogether, the experience of eritreans migrating to europe reveals the contradictions between the moral economy of asylum in contemporary europe (fassin 2005, 2011; ticktin 2006, 2011) and the geopolitical and political-economic realities of clandestine migration that propels people to european shores (andersson 2014). the eu has partnered with the nominal authorities in libya to intercept and return clandestine migrant boats, as well as with the governments of the horn of africa to stop the supposed trafficking of eritreans, more specifically. berhe’s prosecution and extradition were made possible by one such repressive measure: the eu–horn of africa migration route initiative—or the khartoum process—a joint eu and african union project to stem human trafficking from the horn of africa that began in 2014. figure 1. map of member states participating in the khartoum process. the khartoum process forms part of the global approach to migration and mobility (gamm), the eu’s framework for the externalization of migration controls, which involves the outsourcing of border policing to third-party states or entities. the program partners with governments in the horn of africa to “assist in improving national capacity building in the field of migration management” (iom 2024). since then, most of the money earmarked for the initiative has gone toward law enforcement and border security (oette and babiker 2017). these efforts have largely proven successful at reducing the number of eritrean arrivals to the eu. in 2015, arrivals to the eu numbered over 60,000; in 2021, that number had dwindled to 7,000. yet these repressive mechanisms have not considerably lowered recognition rates from a high of 91 percent in 2015 to 81 percent in 2021.4 rather than eu policies toward eritreans oscillating between what didier fassin (2005) described as “compassion and repression,” which would move from blocking/rejection to facilitation of movement/recognition, eritreans experience compassion through repression. they remain beneficiaries of international protection not despite but rather through the extralegal violence of contemporary bordering regimes. in other words, eritreans survive the border complex the eu has created to claim refuge only to become subject to criminalization should they arrive in europe. rather than a rejection of legal recognition, or “illegalization” (de genova 2001; willens 2007; andersson 2014), humanitarian recognition entraps eritreans under refugee policies that have shifted from “human rights to border enforcement and then to organized crime” (morrison 2001, 74). for berhe and others, legal recognition did not accord protection from state violence, as is commonly assumed. instead, recognition entraps eritreans by transforming their mobility into de facto criminal action. berhe’s case represented a newly normal part of daily life for my interlocutors. over the course of nineteen months together, from 2015 to 2018, we witnessed dramatic transformations in italian law and policies around refugee mobility that routinized the kind of legal entrapment berhe experienced. indeed, the italian context itself changed dramatically with the beginning of the migration crisis,5 in which one million refugees from africa and the middle east arrived in europe; the election of the first far-right governing coalition in postwar western european history; as well as a marked increase in racially motivated hate crimes targeting black africans. while my research project initially focused on intergenerational conflict among diasporic eritreans in emilia romagna, it became difficult to ignore the reverberations of new border policies in the context of this pronounced rightward shift. externalization policies displaced the violence of bordering from europe to the saharan desert and to the borderlands of north africa, and in doing so preserved the privileges of asylum for those who manage to get to europe (morrison 2001; besteman 2016, 2020). eritreans have been the beneficiaries of this international protection since the 1980s, when more than one-third of eritrea’s population was exiled during the thirty-year nationalist war between eritrean guerillas and successive ethiopian regimes, and for decades there have been large settled eritrean communities in much of northern europe. for eritreans in europe with family members trapped in libya, the reverberations of these policies were intimate in nature—the violence contained elsewhere was never entirely elsewhere. the same also held true for me. throughout my fieldwork, i listened to stories of predation and extreme violence in casual conversations at bars and homes. my interlocutors shared images and videos of torture and killings in libya via facebook live in hopes of garnering media attention to what were, at the time, europe’s secret deals. they often posted these videos onto my own timeline, hoping that my position at an elite american institution would also bring visibility to occluded violence. in solidarity, i translated the testimonies of those entrapped in libya from tigrinya to english for a prospective case at the european court of human rights, which at the time of writing has yet to transpire. the violence i documented took an enormous emotional and physical toll on me, as did the deep hostility i felt daily as a black woman and non-native italian speaker at a time when anti-black violence was marked, visible, and publicly accepted. though recognition under asylum law is predicated on exceptional political violence directed at an individual, for many of my interlocutors, asylum was not coterminous with or delimited to the singular event of legal recognition, nor was it a highly individuated experience (cohen 2012). rather, i argue that asylum seeking is processual and takes place within a wider social and geographic field that implicates state and non-state actors alike: eu migration officials; the eritrean state and its diaspora; those who facilitated/blocked movement across international borders; and, finally, the refugees themselves. importantly, their experiences reveal the complicated and contradictory place of eritrean migrants as abjected black africans, former colonial subjects, and as relatively privileged refugees. some historical context is necessary here. italy’s system of migration control has roots in its colonial occupation of libya, eritrea, somalia, and ethiopia, as stephanie malia hom (2019) has argued. more recently, in 2008, italy signed the friendship accords with libya, giving italian companies exclusive rights to oil exploration in the country, the profits of which the country then reinvested to build migrant detention facilities (ronzitti 2009). in sum, the example of eritreans migrating to europe elucidates the racial and colonial politics of migration policing in europe more widely. this migration regime implicates and targets not only individual migrants across vast territories but entire communities for racialized surveillance and punishment—collective punishment of the colonial kind. blackness and the refugee regime the category of refugee is a privileged one that accords legal protection, worth, and care (martin 1988; fassin 2005); it is constituted vis-à-vis the exclusion of its corollary, the expendable and deportable economic migrant. under the auspices of the 1951 refugee convention, refugees are those whose claims of persecution are recognized by a receiving state. however, the label economic migrant does not constitute a legal category but rather a discursive one, which emerged in the 1980s, differentiating between “deserving” refugees, who are fleeing violence, from “undeserving” economic migrants, who leave their countries for opportunities elsewhere (chimni 1998). this discourse is tied to the “non-entrée” regime: policies that warehouse and contain refugees from the global south in camps (malkki 1996; besteman 2016, 2020; agier 2008). these policies make reaching countries of the global north almost impossible. indeed, many have argued that the binary between refugees and economic migrants is a false one, designed to exclude the significant number of people who would qualify for legal protection under the auspices of the 1951 refugee convention (holmes and castaneda 2017; mayblin 2017). a large body of literature has documented the lengths to which global north states will go to restrict migrants’ access to political protection: from setting up extensive documentary regimes that aim to adduce the “truth” of their suffering (fassin 2013; ticktin 2011), to the strengthening of deportation and detention regimes once those claims are denied (de genova and peutz 2010; kahn 2019; haas 2023), to militarizing and increasing the lethality of land and sea borders as forms of “deterrence” (de leon 2015; kahn 2019), to, finally, establishing border-externalization mechanisms in countries of transit (frelick, kysel, and podkul 2016). yet to qualify as a refugee, one must cross an international border, and article 31 of the convention recognizes that those facing persecution often cannot cross borders legally. by further criminalizing unauthorized movement, europe also criminalizes refugees. this violence acts as a form of subjectivation, as those denied authorized channels of movement come to embody the labels attached to them (andersson 2014, 2018; willens 2007). migrants become “illegalized” and live a clandestine existence under regimes of legal exclusion. nevertheless, in the literature, race and colonialism are, to borrow a useful phrase from adia benton (2016, 269), “epigraphic” or “epigrammatic”—“situated in a space peripheral or marginal to the main text, hovering over it in ways that make it easy to deny its centrality and significance,” mentioning race solely in passing. in contrast, by taking a perspective that emphasizes the raced and colonial roots of migration and humanitarian policy (achiume 2019; mayblin 2017), i demonstrate how legal recognition entraps migrants in the name of protection—both spatially, cordoning migrants in “spaces of exception,” and legally, as when governments induce a crime by forcing refugees and their families to pay smugglers, as with berhe. here, the work of black feminist thinkers is instructive. saidiya hartman (1997) demonstrates how for those newly emancipated from chattel slavery, emancipation entailed legal inscription within a system of liberal governance that accorded criminality rather than rights to black subjects. hartman (1997, 82) writes that “the slave was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and rationality solely in the context of criminality.” even after abolition, freedom entailed new forms of subjectivation that departed from slavery but never fully transcended it. simply put, legal recognition did not accord freedom, but rather inscription within a different system of containment. anti-black racism marks black people as criminals from the outset. however, anti-black racism is situated within specific historical and geographic contexts. in much of europe, the supposedly illegal migrant is metonymically linked to “african” (andersson 2014), and in italy, the “racial criminalization of migration” (palidda 2011) focuses largely on african migrants (angel-ajani 2002). further, refugee recognition rates register the differential worth accorded to black lives, bolstering this racialized hierarchy: african migrants have some of the lowest recognition rates, endure lengthier detention, and are deported in greater numbers relative to their representation in the wider population in countries of the global north (ghabra 2022). for eritreans, recognition as refugees marked the beginning of their problems. the inescapable fact of blackness (fanon 2008) meant that legal recognition accorded them provisional rights alongside criminal liability. recognition absolved the architects of border-externalization policies of responsibility for border deaths by blaming those deaths on the eritrean community itself. in many ways, this apportionment of responsibility follows from the discourse that has recently emerged in the eu—that of the “war on migrant smuggling.” inspired by the writings of carl schmitt (2005), many have argued that the discourse of war allows governments to suspend the ordinary mechanisms of the rule of law within a “state of exception” (agamben 2004; foucault 1978). indeed, the state of exception has become the overarching analytical framework by which scholars make sense of the increasingly structured and extraordinary exclusion of nonwhite migrants. in other words, the literature frames the eu’s border-externalization deals as “abnormal” and in contravention of much of refugee law, even though their architects themselves view them as part of the overwhelming need to manage migration and to maintain asylum as an institution (v. cochetel, personal communication, april 2018). a different picture emerges when we pivot our attention to the “coloniality” of asylum (mayblin 2017, 39)—we can see that asylum is implicated in an epistemic order “inseparably bound to the european colonial project”—as well as the range of concrete and material practices that frame coloniality. here, my analysis is indebted to laleh khalili’s (2012, 22) work on colonial counterinsurgency—a form of asymmetric warfare, or “colonial policing,” that targets an insurgent population for detention and confinement. it includes practices such as indefinite detention in sites outside the legal borders of the liberal state, often executed by client or proxy states. khalili argues that these illiberal practices, undertaken in the name of protection and underpinned by discourses of racial hierarchy, are constitutive of the liberal democratic order itself. likewise, a war on migrant smuggling is an asymmetric war that involves the use of extraordinary measures to “save” the institution of asylum from undeserving masses. by framing eritreans’ migration—and migration from the third world to the first world, more broadly—as smuggling/trafficking, this discourse, and the practices it authorizes, enables the collective surveillance, containment, and punishment of restive populations. by analyzing asylum seeking as a social and political process, we can see how the paradox—-that legal recognition entraps rather than protects—is at work not only in the migration of eritreans to europe but also in large-scale transformations in the refugee regime more generally. in the case of eritreans, who represent an exception in terms of their high recognition rates, eu measures to supposedly save refugees from trafficking focus on blocking their movements, making it almost impossible for eritreans to reach the protection and refuge they seek. on a policy level, humanitarian recognition transforms asylum from a privileged form of political protection to a mere technicality. because refugee mobility is framed as a war on smuggling and trafficking, the suspension of even basic norms governing the 1951 convention become conceivable. examples include the fact that countries once deemed unsafe—such as libya, which is not a signatory to the convention—are transformed into safe third countries. in the case of libya, militias come to work closely with united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) officials to maintain a fiction of minimum standards for refugees entrapped in detention. nevertheless, some of the older forms of economic exploitation associated with illegality endure for those who do manage to reach the global north, where even those with legal recognition are conscripted to labor either in illicit economies or in government-backed exploitative labor arrangements under poorly regulated private-sponsorship schemes. second, the externalization policies harden the borders of african countries (landau 2019) as part of a broader strategy of what loren landau (2019, 171) describes as “development containment,” an enforced sedentarization in the name of preventing migrants from drowning in the sea that actually “reflect[s] a fearful contempt of poor africans shared by collaborative leaders in africa and europe.” measures by the eu to “break the business model of human smuggling” focus on strengthening the capacities of transit states to police borders and establish the presumed rule of law in bordering processes.6 these efforts to contain and immobilize eritreans, however, spur the very onward migration the eu is attempting to arrest and, in the process, create new forms of harm: eritreans are targeted for preemptive detention by state actors and for kidnap, extortion, and ransom by non-state actors (kuschminder and triandafyllidou 2020). figure 2. a map of the migration routes of eritrean asylum seekers from the united nations high commissioner for refugees. photo by zachary laub and julia ro. in sudan, rights groups have documented targeted mass roundups of eritreans by sudanese authorities following the introduction of the khartoum process (oette and babiker 2017). there, the state has assigned migration policing to former janjaweed fighters, incorporating them into the paramilitary apparatus of the rapid support forces (rsf). these groups at times extort and immobilize eritreans, while at other times they facilitate their movement into eastern libya (oette and babiker 2017). prior to the agreement, eritreans had resided in sudan in large numbers since the 1960s. troublingly, the eritrean regime—the state which eritreans are abandoning en masse—chaired the khartoum process in 2019. not only is movement heavily circumscribed in transit; a system of passes and random checks in eritrean cities (bozzini 2011) also serves to curtail eritreans’ movement within their own country, while gifa, or military roundups, track down would-be or potential military service evaders. between these severe curtailments of mobility in eritrea, a shoot-to-kill policy at the eritrean border, and detention and bordering regimes that extend into countries of refuge, eritreans encounter at every turn contradictory policies that criminalize and immobilize them and yet, paradoxically, encourage further migration. beyond these, the eritrean state spurs onward migration in what munyaradzi maware and mirjam van reisen (2017) term the “eviction strategy” (see also poole 2013), policies that make life untenable for young people, so that their only remaining option is to leave the country. put simply, the khartoum process racializes eritrean migrants as potential illegal migrants within the horn of africa region. in libya, which has no singular state authority, “eritreans … are highly vulnerable to an established, systematic, and highly organized criminal network of exploitation, which defies the conceptual and policy boundaries of both migrant smuggling and human trafficking” (kuschminder and triandafyllidou 2020, 211). both the khartoum process and the memorandum of understanding (mou) with libya push eritreans to migrate, as they export hostile immigration policies to african countries. these repressive mechanisms are undertaken under the guise of humanitarian concern and care, of saving lives in the mediterranean while—as my interlocutors reminded me—“we [eritreans] die elsewhere.” finally, should eritreans reach europe, they experience racialized abandonment—the lack of adequate integration into systems of housing, basic social welfare, and language training—endemic to refugee reception in italy (d’angelo 2019; hung 2019). they are also subject to surveillance and criminalization for aiding other refugees as private individuals and as public figures. even while recognized and legal, eritreans still face racially targeted surveillance and criminalization. indeed, some of the most high-profile cases of prosecutions related to “crimes of solidarity” (tazzioli and waters 2019) have involved eritreans: this includes the five-year investigation of the former nobel peace prize nominee father musei zerai. eritreans’ mobility is prosecuted under laws that interpret and collapse migrant smuggling and trafficking capaciously. arrival to italy, therefore, guarantees neither care nor a reprieve from targeted surveillance and criminalization that begins the moment many choose to migrate, as the opening vignette establishes. transit through libya: blackness, refugeehood, and the value of kinship segen and gebreyesus invited me to their home for what would be a long lunch. their cramped two-bedroom apartment in a casa popolari, or public housing, was filled with basketball and other sports gear, shoes, and clothing for their two adolescent sons. i had met gebreyesus at a public commemoration for the lampedusa dead—the 368 migrants, most of them eritrean, who had drowned on october 3, 2013. at the event, gebreyesus told me that he had to identify the remains of his younger brother shortly following the shipwreck. he came to learn that i was an anthropologist—“someone who could tell his story,” as he put it to me when we first met. now, over lunch, gebreyesus went into extraordinary detail about the circumstances that brought them to this small town in the emilia romagna region of italy. indeed, gebreyesus had lived an incredibly difficult life: abandoned by his mother, who moved to sweden, he was conscripted to fight in the eritrean army during the 1998–2000 border war with ethiopia. gebreyesus then left eritrea for italy, arriving in 2004. he and segen met and married on the clandestine migrant trail but were apprehended by tunisian authorities who then deported them to libya. in libya, they were held in detention for two months. segen first described the conditions of her imprisonment: there are spaces in which there’s lice and urine; they feed you like dogs. one by one, he [prison warden] asks us what we had done while holding a stick; he also had a gun. one [prisoner] said he fought with a libyan, and the warden would hit them. i was the only eritrean. we told him that we were trying to leave illegally, and he left us alone. he treated the nigerian with disdain; the nigerian didn’t speak arabic, and the warden beat the nigerian until he was bloody and destroyed. in the meanwhile, we were so frightened. i regretted not telling him that i was eritrean. … that prison we were in was legal; it was detention before seeing a judge. we were lucky because we couldn’t be deported because there was no ethiopian embassy; neither the egyptian nor the sudanese authorities would take us. eventually they were moved around to other sites that were also effectively prisons: we were first in zuwara—we stayed there for two weeks … then to surmana; from surmana after two weeks, we were transferred to juwaza; that’s in tripoli. this was the immigration office. we didn’t stay there longer than one week. when the libyan authorities knew that the united nations representatives were there, they cleaned up the prison, stocked coca-cola, but as soon as the authorities left, things went back to what they were. one morning they called us. we were two children, two women, and four young men in a small car, without knowing where we were going. we were taken to mahali jhededa, another prison. there were seven habesha arrested there.7 they transferred us to the court in containers. people would die along the way to the court. they were then released and took a clandestine boat to sicily. we had to pay 120,000 dinar (approximately 92,000 usd) to leave the prison, for punishment for entering and staying in the country illegally. we were able to leave because of these muslim ethiopian women who were in the country legally and had contacted a lawyer. segen’s narrative illustrates how blackness and refugeehood stood in dynamic tension with one another in the transit of eritreans through libya—the extreme anti-black racism that sub-saharan migrants continued (and still continue) to face in libya and the paradoxical position of eritreans as subjects both abject as black people yet neither simply deportable nor killable. indeed, from segen’s recollection, eritreans had some forms of legal recourse and due process, as at that time libya was a functioning state: they were allowed to see a judge and were eventually released through the aid of the “muslim ethiopian women.” but we can assume that this relative privilege was predicated on eritreans’ mobility, their propensity for moving on, rather than on a nominal notion of the “rule of law” or respect for the human rights of refugees. eritreans made for a lucrative population for smugglers, extortionists, and other state and non-state actors whose livelihoods depended on regulating and facilitating illicit movement. these reasons frame segen’s regret at not revealing that she was eritrean sooner, mobilizing an understanding of the place of eritreans in this racialized economy of bordering (andersson 2018; achtnich 2022). eritreans’ mobility produced value for illicit actors that the nigerians imprisoned alongside them did not. in 2004, when segen and gebreyesus transited through libya, this “value” simultaneously exposed eritreans to violence and allowed for their eventual passage to europe. segen and gebreyesus’s narratives of imprisonment and mobility, moreover, draw attention to the importance of kinship to migrating eritreans and to illicit actors alike. because eritreans have been the beneficiaries of international protection since the 1980s, when more one-third of eritrea’s population was exiled during the thirty-year nationalist war between eritrean guerillas and successive ethiopian regimes, families have significant knowledge and other resources to navigate western asylum systems. outside of sudan, the largest eritrean communities are in the united states and germany, and while they are largely working class, eritreans also occupy professional fields (bernal 2014). kidnappers and extortionists target eritreans because of these significant kinship ties in global north nations, demanding ransoms of up to $35,000 (maware and van reisen 2017). in the southeast region of libya, where most eritreans transit, eritreans cannot evade this system of kidnap, extortion, and torture. indeed, kidnapping and ransoming affects eritreans almost exclusively, and once families pay ransoms, those kidnapped are released—another aspect of eritrean exceptionalism (kuschminder and triandafyllidou 2020). the practice is unlike smuggling and trafficking—although, like smuggling, it is transactional and transitory, and like trafficking, it is based on coercion and duress. eritrean migrants know that they will be kidnapped, tortured, and ransomed; their willful submission to the practice, however, does not negate their vulnerability. instead, it reflects refugees’ calculation between distinct realms of protection, as jatin dua (2019) identifies in his ethnography of somali piracy—in this example the legal protection of asylum that can only be secured by arrival to europe and the protection racket of illicit actors who demand ransom. considering the extreme violence and remarkable risks eritrean migrants face, their decision to migrate may appear irrational. yet they face impossibly constrained choices: arbitrary violence and forced labor should they remain in eritrea, versus kidnapping in the refugee camps in sudan and ethiopia. for many, the only real choice is to try to make it to europe, where they can reunite with family and win legal recognition. asylum seeking is sedimented within longer histories of eritrean mobility and implicates illicit actors in a dialectical relationship with families. put another way, illicit actors instrumentalize the knowledge of these diasporic ties to shore up the “bioeconomy” of bordering (andersson 2018). zooming outward, the experience of eritreans demonstrates that contradictions between border regimes and humanitarian recognition create novel forms of anti-black violence. despite being international refugees, eritreans experience predation and cruelty because they are black and because eritrea is peripheral in the global imagination of nationhood. indeed, father musei zerai, the eritrean-swiss priest and former nobel peace prize nominee, once related to an audience at a progressive news festival an anecdote in which he was told at an eu migration meeting that eritreans were “sacrificeable” to the project of securing europe’s external borders. beyond the indignation that members of the audience expressed at the comment, it also highlighted a more pressing question around the notion of “sacrifice,” namely, who can be sacrificed. sacrifice denotes value in a way that expendability, which describes undocumented people, does not. yet the question of sacrifice is imbricated in notions of race and place, and reinforces the differential worth attached to black people and to refugees. these categories form a contradiction, referring to, at times, mutually exclusive regimes of human value (berhane, unpublished manuscript, 2024). thus, the discourse of sacrifice itself indicates the paradoxical position of eritreans, recognized by eu authorities but remaining unprotected and exposed to violence. blackness and refugeehood were in dynamic tension with one another: eritreans proved valuable to their families in diaspora who were willing to pay ransoms; refugee status accorded them value and permanence should they arrive in europe, yet they weren’t exempt from the cruelty and devaluation with which black people are treated in the euro-african mediterranean. in a warped sense, eritreans’ bodies held enormous value for kidnappers and extortionists who extracted value from the surfeit of sociality that defines eritreans’ diasporic forms of belonging (redeker-hepner 2009; bernal 2014)—unlike the agambenian notion that refugees, stripped of their social ties, represent “bare life” (agamben 1995). crucially, this relative “privilege” depended on having the means to pay: if one could not pay one’s ransom, one was killable. when i returned for long-term fieldwork in 2017, italy’s mou with libya instantiated a humanitarian regime of indefinite detention: eritreans became eligible for evacuation to rwanda, if they could reach one of the recognized detention centers in war-torn libya. rights groups and investigative journalists have documented torture, killings, and routinized abjection—starvation and neglect that has led to the proliferation of communicable diseases like tuberculosis—in these detention centers. in the name of protection, those “privileged” refugees entrapped in sites of indefinite detention die waiting to be relocated. as many of my interlocutors emphasized, what was going on in libya was a “game” in which borders opened and closed based on the complex interplay of conflicting material and political interests both in sites of transit, such as libya, and in destination countries, such as italy. this paradoxical position of being both privileged and exposed to violence only continued for those who reached europe. italy, with which eritreans have a long colonial connection, has helmed anti-migrant policies in the eu, especially following the ascension of the far-right government there. to be “dublinated”: countering epidermal surveillance the italian government’s sequestration of the diciotti coast guard ship in sicily elicited fraught moral and political responses—a moment of “vital conflictual intensity” (kapferer 2015, 3)—during the summer of 2018. in focusing on these debates, i privilege the centrality of black speech over the spectacle of black suffering, foregrounding the analyses of these systems within the kinds of vernacular and embodied and experiential knowledge that my interlocutors claim as survivors of the central mediterranean crossing (harrison 2016). under policies that criminalized non-governmental organizations’ (ngo) search-and-rescue missions in the mediterranean, then minister of the interior matteo salvini denied entry to an italian coast guard ship carrying 170 unauthorized migrants, of whom 130 were eritrean. for nearly two weeks, refugees were not allowed to disembark from the ship. this sequestration made for a highly charged media event, and it exemplified the right-leaning governing coalition’s promises to stop “human smuggling” by any means necessary. yet salvini went so far as to criminalize the state itself, as the coast guard is an arm of the state. this event and reactions to it demonstrated the incommensurability of the asylum regime and bordering practices. eritreans’ debates elucidate the politics and differential investments among those in the diaspora in the european asylum system and in italian migration policies, more specifically, that reflect the paradox of humanitarian recognition. “these exiles see italy the same as libya,” tedros began. “they use smugglers. they wonder is this europe? shouldn’t refugees have their rights?” tedros was the head of eritrea democratica, an ngo and small collection of individuals dedicated to enacting a “peaceful democratic transition” in eritrea and to helping recent refugees access legal assistance after arriving in italy. based in bologna, the group mainly comprised eritrean men in their thirties who had made the mediterranean crossing; the group also included italian academics and journalists sympathetic to the experiences of eritrean refugees. that day, ten members of the group sat together to craft a media response to the minister’s criticism of fifty eritrean refugees who had disembarked from the diciotti but promptly “disappeared” from the italian reception system. disappearance often meant that refugees left the official reception centers that housed them. the presumptive disappearance, as it was reported in media outlets, prompted salvini to write on facebook that “this is the umpteenth confirmation that those who arrive in italy are not skeletons fleeing war and famine,” and that he would “work even harder to change wrong laws and [aim for] zero arrivals” (chung 2018). for salvini and others, any evidence of migrants’ agency undermined their claims of political repression, marking them as undeserving economic migrants, rather than as politically innocent and deserving refugees. the group had assembled that day to write a response to salvini’s facebook post, to point out that sentiments like his not only misrepresented the lives and aspirations of migrants but were also part of why many eritreans did not imagine italy as a destination and chose to leave rather than stay and apply for asylum there. in 2015, of the 39,000 eritreans who arrived in italy, only 730 remained and applied for asylum (belloni 2018, 291); many sought asylum elsewhere, primarily in germany or one of the nordic countries that have hosted large settled eritrean refugee communities since the 1980s and that have more robust social welfare and refugee-reception systems. through the course of my research, eritreans would routinely describe life in italy as “imprisonment by law,” offering no path “for moving forward,” and they attributed hostile treatment at the hands of neighbors to cattiva coscienza, a bad conscience stemming from guilt for an unaddressed colonial past. economic and racial marginalization led to feelings of stuckedness and immobilization (hage 2009) that fed their aspirations for something and somewhere else. for tedros, “europe” represented orderliness and respect for rights. as a naturalized italian citizen and as someone who described himself as a conscientious objector to military service, tedros often emphasized the importance of the rule of law as an aspiration for both the future of eritrea and for the migration system that entrapped eritreans. tedros’s query, however, signaled his frustration with the refugees themselves, who he thought wrongly equated libya with europe. yosef, another member of the group, was unlike tedros in many ways. he had fled eritrea as a teenager. a gramscian “organic intellectual,” yosef drew on his experiences as a working-class refugee to become both a source for investigative journalists exposing the workings of the italy-libya deal and an activist and thinker in his own right. indeed, in 2018 he served as a witness in european parliamentary discussions about reforming the dublin regulations. like other exiles, he arrived in italy and left for switzerland when he found that there was “no work in italy.” despite having refugee status, he was returned from switzerland to italy under humiliating circumstances; he worked a series of manual jobs while pursuing a university degree. “i understand that things need to be done within the law,” yosef said, hoping to cool tedros’s growing frustration. tedros responded: “but if you are struggling, struggle needs to be through the law.” tedros then emphasized that refugees needed to enter europe through “lawful or legal pathways,” or higawi mengedi. this term signified the humanitarian corridor program, a state and civil society partnership that selects refugees from the camps of lebanon and ethiopia for evacuation to italy and provides full integration services, the result of efforts of eritrean european activists like tedros. the “lawful path” also signified a greater global migration system and a larger struggle for freedom of movement. the question of how the “lawful path” would be achieved—whether through eritrean activists’ strategic investments in the humanitarian system, though it immobilized refugees, or through their refusal and rejection of that system—remained up for debate. yosef began to grow increasingly frustrated in turn: “so what about people who leave eritrea illegally? there is no freedom of movement here or in eritrea.” tedros shot back, “there is no rule of law in eritrea!” yosef’s impatience kept increasing; tedros could not understand the dilemma of people like him, who had transited through libya and made it to countries in northern europe, only to then be deported back to italy. “siamo dublinati [we are “the dublinated].” this is a play on words, referring to the dublin accords, which stipulate that asylum seekers enter their asylum claims at the country of first entry—often spain, italy, or greece. once their fingerprints are recorded, refugees must remain in that country, often indefinitely. to evade these controls, many people, and especially eritreans, burn their fingerprints off to remain inscrutable to state actors and to be able to apply for asylum elsewhere. the dublinati were those who had secured state recognition and some abbreviated rights but who remained subjected to racialized surveillance. to be dublinated, therefore, meant to be marked as a literal and figurative subject of epidermal surveillance—efforts by state actors to “read” bodies through biometric data collected for bordering regimes. in what frantz fanon (2008) described as the “epidermalization” of anti-black racism, this surveillance reads bodies in racialized terms: it reads black skin as illegality/criminality from the outset. finally, dublinati referred to migrants who felt stuck in italy: those who were returned to italy from other european countries and those who wished to move around europe and the world with the same ease as other immigrants or europeans. thus, dublinati exemplified the enduring forms of inequality inscribed in the privileged category of refugee, in contrast to the deportable economic migrant. however, to be dublinated meant being trapped by recognition, rather than by exclusion. ergo, to call oneself dublinati demonstrated the contradictions within humanitarian recognition—a recognition based on an exceptionalism (ticktin 2011) that imaginatively, discursively, and physically circumscribed freedom and justice. the dublinati emerge as figures “reveal[ing] subject positions that manifest and comment upon a particular historical moment in the complex articulation of large-scale processes” (barker, harms, and lindquist 2013, 2)—the tenuous position of asylum in much of europe. ostensibly respected via nonbinding agreements, the refugee regime and refugees have experienced a significant erosion in entitlement and rights. this erosion has been enacted both by legal means such as the dublin accords and by extralegal mechanisms like pushbacks, illegal expulsions, and refoulement—in contravention of the principle that no one should be returned to a country in which they would face torture, cruel and inhumane punishment, or irreparable harm (unhcr 2021). even though no european country has publicly reneged on the 1951 refugee convention, in practice, asylum has come under attack. this attack is partly fueled by a shift in the public imagination over the past thirty years, one that metonymically links refugees with smugglers, figures invoked by powerful actors to criminalize refugees and evade responsibility for border deaths. the dublinati emerge as the converse of the refugees-as-smugglers: an organic and counter-hegemonic appropriation that illuminates the violence of the state on the bodies of racially marked others. in yosef’s invocation of the dublinati, it is the state that creates the need for smugglers by curtailing authorized channels of movement. thus, the dublinati demonstrate two things: the desire on the part of refugees for full political and social rights that legal mechanisms circumscribe and the problem of the accretion of the logic of bordering, which seeks to make racialized bodies themselves into mobile borders (mbembe 2019), despite moves toward innocence that humanitarian recognition avails. “every time we ask for asylum, we are criticizing the extreme crisis affecting eritrea,” yosef continued. in yosef’s perspective, the dicioti incident could never be disentangled from what was happening in libya. “as a representative of eritrea democratica, should i help these people who have been abandoned by smugglers?” he asked. as the debate continued, we returned to the subject of the group’s response to the minister’s facebook criticism of the “disappearing” passengers from the ship and of migration as a whole. “so, what we’re going to say is that the italian system doesn’t work?” yosef asked. he continued, exasperated: “if you start dividing things between legal and illegal, we will all be following salvini. because there is no lawful freedom of movement; the fault lies not with those who make the decision to use traffickers. it is the fault of the system.” the activists of eritrea democratica found themselves at an impasse. at the end of the meeting, they still had not drafted a response to distribute to media outlets in italy. i often wondered why they even had to. yet their discussions demonstrate the kind of critical intellectual labor required to unpack and make clear the contradictory sentiments, discourses, policies, and laws that frame paradoxical recognition. this work made possible more concrete efforts. to address the violence eritrean refugees face, the activists of the ngo petitioned state actors; they worked to shift public sentiments as producers of media and provided on-the-ground care for refugees experiencing state and community abandonment. activists like yosef, however, faced a constricted field of potential political action. despite their efforts to cultivate solidarity among eritreans abroad, they were outmatched by state and non-state actors that had deep resources to block, surveil, and criminalize refugees. as a refugee and a black man in italy, and as someone called the “voice of his generation” by pro-refugee activists like father musei zerai, yosef had drawn an enormous amount of attention—good and bad. yet like the other members of the ngo, his legal status was tenuous at best, and he experienced the same protracted economic precarity that other members of the ngo, and many other eritreans, did. despite having international protection, they were often homeless or living in case occupate, or squat houses, at the periphery of the city, working odd jobs or, at best, for the postal service. others found employment in the refugee reception system itself as cultural mediators, although these positions were eliminated as the number of eritrean arrivals declined following the deals with libya. this precarity meant that many would never be eligible for italian citizenship. nonetheless, activists gave an enormous amount of time and resources to refugees who had recently arrived from libya—throwing christmas parties for those housed in the local reception center, visiting sick people in hospitals, and shuttling others between appointments across the city and among diverse agencies. this caring labor, notable as it was undertaken mostly by men, enacted a prefigurative politics that countered the state’s racialized abandonment and the callous cruelty and predation many experienced in transit. that is, the paradox of humanitarian recognition did not foreclose intersubjective recognition among activists and recent arrivals. activists sought to cultivate social ties with those transiting, as they understood these contingent and ephemeral social bonds as important not only to the survival of individual refugees but also to a potential future eritrean nation. hagos, a member of the ngo, describes the stakes of activism below during an interview conducted in 2015. at the time, he was unemployed and unhoused, yet he provided food and other essential needs for refugees in transit. the stakes for activism in italy are high because of the context of how difficult it is to survive as an immigrant in italy. people are secretly helping recent arrivals, but for me, i hope to help new people leave italy because i don’t want them to live that life that i have here, without papers and without work. i’ve been imprisoned by law, and if another eritrean meets that same fate, i want to help them escape it. so, my goal is that they have somewhere to sleep, a life to live in a place like sweden, or switzerland, a job, and then they can build an opposition movement. the reason i do this is to emphasize the fact that people no longer help one another in eritrea, and if we can rebuild trust and mutual assistance, then i think to myself that that eritrean who goes to wherever country will begin to help others as well. hagos acknowledges intracommunal fragmentation by mentioning the fact that “people are secretly helping recent arrivals,” emphasizing that individuals’ public face and private actions can often be at odds with one another under long-distance authoritarianism. more importantly, hagos’s understanding of asylum as a “life to live” and as linked to building an “opposition movement,” pragmatically speaking, demonstrates a conception of asylum as a social and political process. indeed, for the earlier generation of eritrean refugees, securing asylum proved instrumental to the project of nation building from afar (redeker-hepner 2009). despite having been refugees themselves, many in the older generation deny outright the basis of recent arrivals’ claims to asylum (arnone 2008). in contrast, hagos sees that asylum must extend beyond the moment of legal recognition—as his own embodied experience of having been “imprisoned by law” demonstrates. hagos envisions asylum broadly as a politically potent and contested means of forging social connections under racialized state abandonment and within a politically fragmented diaspora. and much like yosef’s understanding of asylum as political critique, hagos understands asylum seeking as an agentive exercise, a form of politics from below that creates the possibility of an alternative eritrean demos. conclusion when medhanie tesfamariam berhe was finally released in 2019, journalists described his prosecution as “absurd” and an “embarrassment.” the actual medhanie yehdego mered, who currently resides in uganda, was quoted in a new yorker profile as feeling sorry for berhe, the wrongly accused man, but has refused to turn himself in (taub 2019). to date, no extradition order has been executed for mered, and the chief prosecutor on the case refused to apologize to berhe for wrongfully imprisoning him. the prosecutor surveilled the eritreans who came forward to defend berhe, wiretapping their phones and opening investigations against them. the extraordinary prosecutorial powers of the state were trained on a community that has borne the brunt of border deaths in italy. in the public eye, berhe’s imprisonment resulted from prosecutorial ineptitude; rather, his treatment at the hands of the italian, british, and sudanese states made for a border “spectacle” (de genova 2001) that imputed collective criminal liability to the eritrean community. in the imagination of the italian state, eritreans formed part of a vast conspiracy of criminal traffickers responsible for the deaths of their co-nationals. moreover, the extradition demonstrated that the powers of the italian state extended beyond its geographical borders. migration policing has since continued this process of extra-territorialization. in 2020 and again in 2023, the italian parliament voted to formalize the mou with libya, and the eu established externalization agreements with algeria, tunisia, and other north african countries. clearly, political recognition counts for little in a geopolitical context in which white europeans perceive african mobility as a threat to the very existence of europe. the paradoxical recognition of eritreans as refugees did not preclude some of them from articulating an alternative and counter-hegemonic notion of asylum. as the example eritrea democratica demonstrates, the paradox itself pushed members of the ngo to conceptualize asylum beyond simple recognition, as it revealed to them the limits of the liberal humanist conception of rights during a time of naked anti-black violence that marked the ascension of the political right. for these activists, paradoxical recognition made clearer still the racialized and anti-black entailments of the asylum system, a system that could not protect refugees from racist violence in transit or on arrival. conceptually, paradoxical recognition upends assumptions around the refugee-versus-economic-migrant binary that posits refugee exceptionalism. legal recognition in practice enabled containment, criminalization, and extreme violence that should take place elsewhere. by discursively casting refugees as smugglers, european governments waged a war on migrant smuggling that entrapped refugees in libya and made accomplices of those who would aid refugees in transit. in this way, the racializing logics of the state superseded the conventions of international law—the frameworks of which emerge in colonial modernity (achiume 2019). much of the literature on migration in anthropology has focused on how legal exclusion acts as a form of subjectivation that denies rights and humanity to those who experience the state’s sovereign right to exclude. such liberal humanist political paradigms posit recognition as the precondition for political subjecthood and rights. in turn, visibility, or becoming visible to the state and to those who would accord rights, forms the basis for political recognition and entry into the political community. the right to have rights, as hannah arendt famously put it (1973), involves first becoming intelligible or seen as a political subject, one recognized by an accepting state. instead, i focus on the kinds of violence that recognition makes permissible, as states extend migration policing beyond their borders. this orientation troubles the liberal humanist paradigm at the heart of recognition politics. as black people, who occupy the “nadir” of the category of the human (wynter 2003), eritrean migrants did not gain rights from political recognition. recognition came at grave material costs. abstract eritreans experience what i call the paradox of humanitarian recognition. beneficiaries of some of the highest refugee-recognition rates in global north countries, eritreans nevertheless experience kidnap, ransoming, extortion, and pre-emptive detention in countries of transit like sudan and libya. efforts by the european union to address these abuses under multilateral anti-trafficking agreements—as well as broader efforts to externalize european borders and asylum—have further contained and criminalized networks of solidarity that extend beyond countries of transit into countries of settlement such as italy. based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews with eritreans in northern italy, this article analyzes eritrean migrants’ experiences of violence in libya, a country of transit, and efforts of eritrean activists to both bring this violence to light and to aid recent refugees. eritreans’ experiences of seeking asylum upend the binaries between legal inclusion and exclusion on which refugee exceptionalism is predicated. [blackness; refugees; eritrea; italy; recognition; migration] notes acknowledgments funding for this research was generously provided by the wenner-gren foundation and the fulbright institute for international education fellowship. i thank the activists and everyday people who spoke with me and entrusted me with their insights during a difficult time. i am also grateful to my colleague peter redfield who read and commented on the first and subsequent drafts of this work, as well as the three anonymous reviewers who provided generative feedback during the revision process. i am also immensely grateful to laura helper who helps bring together the threads of my many ideas. finally, i am thankful to the cultural anthropology editorial collective who believed in this essay when it was in its incipience, and to julia elyachar in particular who helped shepherd the final version to publication. 1. bossi fini laws are a set of legal precedents that criminalize unauthorized entry and allow for the immediate expulsion of migrants without proper documentation, lengthened detention times, and tied legal status to employment. 2. this article does not analyze why eritreans are favored over other nationals with regard to their asylum claims. for the better part of two decades the united nations has recognized eritreans as a temporary protection group, giving blanket protection against refoulement to all eritreans while their asylum cases are heard. this reflects the un rapporteur’s assessment in 2015, 2016, and again in 2018 that the eritrean regime may have committed crimes against humanity. the gravity of the charge only partly explains why eritreans continue to have such high protection rates. in the united states in 2022, 93.15 percent of eritrean applications for asylum were recognized. in the same year, 83.3 percent of applications succeeded in canada, and 100 percent in australia. see https://www.worlddata.info/africa/eritrea/asylum.php 3. smuggling and trafficking are distinct from one another: smuggling refers to the facilitation of the unauthorized crossing of international borders and is conceptualized as a crime against the state; trafficking, on the other hand, involves deception and coercion, as a person is taken against their will across international borders for exploitation. it is a crime against an individual. however, within an individual’s journey, a smuggling relationship can turn into an exploitative one—eritreans experience smuggling, trafficking, as well as kidnapping and ransoming. 4. data comes from the 2016 eu annual report for asylum (https://euaa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/annual-report-2016.pdf); the 2021 mixed migration centre report (https://mixedmigration.org/articles/whats-new-analysing-the-latest-trends-on-the-central-mediterranean-mixed-migration-route-to-italy/); the unhcr (https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/mediterranean/location/5205); and the eu 2021 annual overview on asylum trends (https://euaa.europa.eu/latest-asylum-trends-annual-overview-2021). 5. here, i refer to the european migration crisis as a foucauldian “discursive event” (foucault 1982, 270). 6. “break the business model of smuggling” refers to a common phrase used by european and australian politicians to legitimize border externalization policies. see frelick, kysel, and podkul 2016. 7. habesha is a form of self-identification that refers to eritrean and ethiopian highland orthodox christians. nevertheless, it is a contested term that does not qualify as an ethnic identity; 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coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” the new centennial review 3, no. 3: 257–337. http://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 374-399, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.03 archives at the margins: toward a liberatory pedagogy in anthropology cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 387-394, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.02 archives at the margins: toward a liberatory pedagogy in anthropology angela c. jenks university of california, irvine https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7057-5123 “to be in the margin,” bell hooks (1984, ix) says, “is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.” speaking of her experiences living on the edge of a small town in kentucky, hooks (1984, ix) describes how those in the margin develop “a particular way of seeing reality. we looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. we focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. we understood both.” this position provided “a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity” (hooks 1984, ix). hooks (1989, 20) emphasizes that marginality is not simply “a site of deprivation. … [i]t is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance … a central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives.” this essay reflects on the academic margins as a space of openness for anthropological teaching and learning. it builds on hooks’s call for an engaged, “transgressive” pedagogy that challenges traditional structures of learning and opens possibilities for social change (hooks 1994). i describe and reflect on an activity in which students in a medical anthropology course analyzed primary source materials documenting black health social movements that were curated for the class by a community archive in los angeles. i use this example to explore possibilities for reshaping anthropological teaching toward a more liberatory pedagogy that reconceptualizes knowledge as co-created, centers marginalized voices and experiences, and links theory to justice-oriented social action. engaging archives i teach at the university of california, irvine (uci), an institution that, in many ways, does not inhabit the academic margins. the university is a large, public research institution with a thriving anthropology program. yet many of the university’s undergraduate students represent groups historically excluded from the field and from academic spaces more broadly. both a hispanic-serving institution (hsi) and an asian american and native american pacific islander–serving institution (aanapisi), uci also sees first-generation college students earn more than half of its bachelor’s degrees. the medical anthropology course discussed here enrolls around 250 students each term. typically, most of these students are first-generation college students, and more than a third are classified by the university as low-income. nearly half have never taken an anthropology course before. in 2018, i added a module to the course in which students analyzed a collection of archival materials focused on black health social movements in southern california. my introduction to thinking about pedagogy through archival engagement came from conversations with my colleague damien sojoyner about his work with the southern california library (scl). this library is a community archive in los angeles that maintains extensive collections related to histories of social justice movements, including resistance against police abuse, labor exploitation, environmental racism, and health injustice. as sojoyner (2021) describes, scl has played a central role in historical and contemporary organizing efforts. the library preserves records of community resistance while also hosting community events and political education classes, as well as serving as a hub and meeting space for organizers. one of scl’s projects involves curating packets of digitized archival materials for classroom use. as i revised my medical anthropology course, scl archivists and uci graduate student researchers worked to identify documents related to community health activism in southern california. the final packet included a collection of materials focused on the black panther party’s 1970s health-related “survival programs” (see nelson 2011). these included flyers, newsletters, artwork, and articles from the party’s newspaper, the black panther, that documented projects like the people’s free medical clinics, the free food program, the free breakfast for children program, and the sickle cell anemia screening program, among others. incorporating these materials into my course aligned with several of my goals for it, as well as with a teaching approach rooted in critical pedagogy. the course focuses on the contributions anthropological theories and methods can make in advancing global health equity. many of the enrolled students intend to pursue careers in health-related fields, and the course challenges individualized and behavioral biomedical understandings of health disparities. just as my medical anthropology course recognizes that health is fundamentally political, my approach to teaching it recognizes that schooling is also never neutral. i especially draw on the work of paolo freire and bell hooks. in pedagogy of the oppressed, freire (1998) argues that conventional education reinforces oppression and limits possibilities for transforming the world. hooks (1994) advances freire’s arguments through the lens of black feminism, advocating for an “engaged pedagogy” that values students’ lives and experiences and is connected to antiracist struggle. my goals in using the scl archival materials intersected with three aspects of hooks’s engaged pedagogy. first, this approach calls for a reconceptualization of knowledge. in the “banking approach” of conventional pedagogy (freire 1998), knowledge is viewed as established, disconnected facts or information that instructors deposit into students and that students memorize and regurgitate (hooks 1994, 5). engaged pedagogy emphasizes that knowledge is co-constructed through mutual engagement. teaching with archival materials can support inquiry-based learning (hayden 2017), and the scl packet supported my efforts to shift this large-enrollment course away from a conventional lecture-plus-exam format and offer opportunities for student-directed learning. second, engaged pedagogy emphasizes student authority, situating knowledge in students’ experiences and lived realities (hooks 1994, 83–84). our university sits about 40 miles south of the scl, and the packet’s materials relate directly to the communities where many students grew up and continue to live. third, engaged pedagogy links theory to social action and collective liberation. class discussions about structural violence and health inequity often leave students feeling overwhelmed and helpless. the scl packet offers a vision for future action by focusing on black liberation movements rooted in a radically different approach to health systems. students engaged with the scl packet through several course activities. first, they read alondra nelson’s (2016) article titled “the longue durée of black lives matter.” written for a public health audience, the article places the contemporary movement for black lives in a historical context that includes the healing practices of enslaved africans, anti-lynching campaigns, and the black panther party’s health activism and survival programs. using a collective annotation platform (perusall), students added comments and questions to the article and discussed it together. next, i developed a series of reflective questions to guide students’ examination of the materials. questions adapted from the national archives’ pedagogical resources introduced archival analysis (national archives n.d.). another question asked students to read a short article about the graphic artist emory douglas, the black panther party’s minister of culture (haddad 2018), and examine one of his pieces in detail. other questions asked students to connect the materials to concepts we had discussed earlier in the class (structural violence, for example, or illness metaphors in contested meanings of sickle cell anemia) or to consider how lessons from the party’s efforts might inform current health movements. archives at the margins teaching with the scl packet highlighted the parallels between critical archival practice and critical pedagogy. both demand a re-examination of the power dynamics involved in knowledge construction. in a preface to the course packet, scl (2018) archivists describe their methodology for analysis and collection building: committed to a process that is framed around a radically democratic exchange of ideas and information, scl gives primacy to the multiplicity of truths. in this vein, we push for an analysis that is situated in the reality of the neighborhoods that give life to scl. … seeking first and prioritizing the thoughts, voices, and creations of the most vulnerable is an approach to research that reveals complex structures of conquest and violence as well as the visionary critiques and strategies of resistance that compose people’s struggles. this methodology recognizes archives’ central role in making certain histories and perspectives legible while excluding and erasing others, particularly those of minoritized, oppressed, and poor communities. sojoyner (2021) examines scl as a site of “fugitive archival practice” that directly contests state-sanctioned knowledge production. this practice “positions communal knowledge at the center of solutions for lived experiences and works toward the elimination of violence and malicious forms of state governance.” in this way, “fugitive archival practice is an active, ongoing praxis that informs the possibility of multiple ways of being” (sojoyner 2021, 660). jarrett drake (2019) makes the parallels between engaged pedagogy and critical archival practice clear. invoking freire, he likens the hierarchies of teaching in the banking model of education to the hierarchies of knowledge creation in archives and argues for an “archive of the oppressed.” like a pedagogy of the oppressed, an archive of the oppressed “requires rethinking and reimagining all dynamics of the archival process alongside oppressed people, positioning our collections materials for their usage in a way that aids them in coming into complete consciousness about the contours of their oppressors” (drake 2019, 278). resistance and possibility in anthropology pedagogy teaching and learning with an archive of the oppressed opened possibilities for an anthropology pedagogy that supports a more democratic exchange of ideas within the classroom, is situated in students’ lived realities, and affirms a commitment to liberation. as they read nelson’s (2016) article and examined the scl materials, many students expressed surprise at the history they saw. wendy hayden (2017) notes that archival assignments often trouble public memory, and students commented that the materials challenged what they had been told about the black panther party, which they had seen portrayed as singularly violent and dangerous. the packet introduced perspectives excluded from their previous learning and opened an opportunity to discuss that learning itself, as students recognized their exposure to a “state-sanctioned disinformation campaign” (nelson 2016, 1735). students drew on their own knowledge to challenge this disinformation. in their annotations, student-initiated discussions connected nelson’s arguments and the party’s work to other examples of institutional power and oppression. nelson, for example, discusses fannie lou hammer’s description of the “mississippi appendectomy,” the sterilization of poor black women without their knowledge or consent. students linked this example to forced sterilization in california and to ongoing reproductive injustice more broadly. they exchanged information about the madrigal vs. quilligan lawsuit challenging the sterilization of latina women in los angeles, about medical experimentation with birth control conducted on women in puerto rico, and about contemporary black maternal mortality. other student dialogue connected the black panther party’s activism to ongoing segregation, racial profiling, and police violence, and to the systems of racial capitalism that lie behind them. many students drew on their lived experiences for these conversations, identifying the oppressive effects of policing and government interventions they had witnessed in poor, black, and/or latinx neighborhoods. some students expressed pride that the party had been active in their hometowns, but they also felt frustrated and angry about ongoing injustice. they shared their dismay at having to fight many of the same battles the party fought fifty years before, and others fought long before that. it was “disheartening,” one student said, to explore this history and see the ongoing mistreatment of black people. but students also felt inspired by the possibilities for long-term and collective action that the party exemplified. “this goes to prove … that change can happen,” one student said. another identified many of the party’s achievements in its “long lasting effects … on black empowerment groups today” and on a younger generation of activists. various students described it as “amazing” and “empowering” to see oppressed communities work together to address issues that affect them. in a comment echoed by fellow students, one student explained that they often felt small against the crisis of health inequity and wondered whether their actions could make any difference. but after seeing the impact of an organization like the black panther party, they knew that change was possible with broad participation. in an informal journaling assignment near the end of the class, i asked students to identify specific actions they can take to support health equity. many students had shifted their responses from an individual perspective to a collective one, identifying organizations and activist groups they were or planned to become involved with. conclusion teaching with the scl archival materials opened new possibilities for an engaged, liberatory pedagogy. but the activity also presented challenges. when i first assigned the scl materials in 2018, i underestimated the time the class would need to engage with them, and our conversations felt rushed. i allotted more time when i assigned them again in the winter term 2020, but these plans were interrupted by the university’s rapid shift to remote operations in response to the covid-19 pandemic. in both quarters, many students struggled with the assignments, particularly with analyzing the primary materials. as hooks (1994) points out, students are often accustomed to highly regulated, instructor-controlled classrooms, and even those who long for liberatory education may find themselves resisting. in many ways, students were unprepared to co-produce knowledge. many had never considered knowledge to be actively produced, and they were uncomfortable with an assignment that had no pre-formed, “correct” answers. in the future, i would expand the time we spend with the archival materials and, as hayden (2017) suggests, develop opportunities for students to participate in dialogue outside the classroom, either through contributing to scholarly conversations or by presenting their work to a larger public. such activities can engage students in archival work themselves, helping them understand the archive as more than a repository and think through the politics of memory and knowledge. additional questions arise in collaborations between classrooms and community archives. what constitutes ethical engagement with fugitive archives for instructors and students who are not from the communities they represent? drake (2019, 278) emphasizes that both pedagogies and archives of the oppressed involve grappling with interlocking systems of oppression and require “constant self-reflection by all actors of the ways in which the oppressor manifests itself within each of us.” how might instructors and students navigate traumatic or triggering content they encounter in these archives? rather than disconnecting from such emotional experiences, bianca williams (2016, 81) points to the power of “radical honesty” to open space for instructors and students to “bring [their] full humanity to the classroom.” such an approach mobilizes vulnerability and mutually constructed trust to turn truth-telling into action. through these and related practices of engaged pedagogy, teaching and learning with students at the academic margins reveals multiple possibilities for re(writing) anthropology’s relationships with oppressed communities and commitments to future liberation. abstract this essay reflects on the academic margins as a space of openness for anthropological teaching and learning. i describe an activity in which students in a medical anthropology course analyzed primary source materials documenting black health social movements that were curated for the class by a community archive in los angeles. using this example, i explore possibilities for reshaping anthropological teaching toward an engaged, liberatory pedagogy that reconceptualizes knowledge as co-created, centers marginalized voices and experiences, and links theory to justice-oriented social action. [critical pedagogy; archives; health activism; knowledge construction] references drake, jarrett m. 2019 “diversity’s discontents: in search of an archive of the oppressed.” archives and manuscripts 47, no. 2: 270–79. https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2019.1570470 freire, paolo 1998 [1970] pedagogy of the oppressed. translated by myra bergman ramos. new york: continuum. haddad, natalie 2018 “emory douglas’s language of revolution.” hyperallergic, august 25, 2018. hayden, wendy 2017 “and gladly teach: the archival turn’s pedagogical turn.” college english 80, no. 2: 133–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44805961 hooks, bell 1984 feminist theory: from margin to centre. boston: south end press. 1989 “choosing the margin as a space of radical openness.” framework 36: 15–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44111660 1994 teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. national archives n.d. “document analysis worksheets.” updated may 26, 2021. https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets nelson, alondra 2011 body and soul: the black panther party and the fight against medical discrimination. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. 2016 “the longue durée of black lives matter.” american journal of public health 106, no. 10: 1734–37. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2016.303422 sojoyner, damien m. 2021 “you are going to get us killed: fugitive archival practice and the carceral state.” american anthropologist 123, no. 3: 658–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13615 southern california library (scl) 2018 community health dynamics. scl course packet series. los angeles: southern california library. williams, bianca 2016 “radical honesty: truth-telling as pedagogy for working through shame in academic spaces.” in race, equity, and the learning environment, edited by frank tuitt, chayla haynes, and saran stewart, 71–82. sterling, va.: stylus. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 387-394, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.02 cultural anthropology: morally immunizing debts: wage bank, gendered credit access, and intimacy in the soma coal basin 410 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 410-34, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.02 morally immunizing debts: wage bank, gendered credit access, and intimacy in the soma coal basin ferda nur demi̇rci̇ max planck institute for social anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5034-8991 on a sunny afternoon, ahmet and i sat on the porch of his coffee shop, tuned in to the latest news on tv. i had first met ahmet years ago, in the aftermath of a disastrous mining accident that killed 301 miners in may 2014 in this lignite coal basin in the north aegean region of turkey. retired in 2018 from twenty-two years of labor in soma’s treacherous underground coal mines, ahmet had used his small pension to purchase the coffee shop, which was nestled beside an old plane tree in downtown soma. suddenly, a piece of news grabbed ahmet’s attention. it was a piece of regular news about president recep tayyip erdoğan showing how sad he was while visiting his mother’s grave. after we finished watching the segment, ahmet turned to me with a curious look and asked, “do you have any ideas about why tayyip [erdoğan] never talks about his father? he mourns his mother, regularly visits her grave, but never speaks about his father.” “why does everyone stop acknowledging their debts to their fathers? what about the prices paid by those fathers?” ahmet continued his criticism of erdoğan’s ill treatment of his deceased father. given our long-term relationship, i knew about ahmet’s recurring problems with his son, yiğit, and ahmet’s reflections on erdoğan’s treatment of his late father seemed to harken to his own frustrations with his son. as was common among fathers in the mining 411profession, ahmet was the one who helped yiğit get a job in a nearby pit, a fully mechanized one in the region. before yiğit started working as a miner, ahmet had decided to help his son “kick-start a new life path” by buying him a car with the assistance of a bank loan they had agreed to repay together. what had made ahmet so disappointed was how yiğit behaved entirely irresponsibly while repaying the loan, which later defaulted, bringing about a series of financial and legal problems for ahmet. during my fieldwork in the fall of 2021, ahmet was still dealing with legal proceedings relating to the default loan. this included a strict repayment schedule that he had been obliged to sign, which, if not followed, could even lead to imprisonment. although defaults were common in soma’s accessible but predatory credit economy, these terms still cause embarrassment to ahmet. only a few days after we had watched the scene of erdoğan on television, ahmet’s coffee shop was once again visited by the paralegals from the debt-collection office for an overdue monthly payment. sighing anxiously, he began to complain about yiğit after this visit: “he will never learn to protect himself from the temptations of others! he just doesn’t know how to take control of his life [hayatına sahip çıkmak], and that is why he fails to find someone proper. but i am done, as you see this was the last debt that i could take for him.” as his compassionate complaints revealed, ahmet’s disillusionment about yiğit did not simply hail from a failed promise in the case of a bank loan. according to ahmet, most alarming was yiğit’s lack of motivation to “take control of his life,” despite the repeated efforts and substantial help from his father. in other words, what ahmet diagnosed as conspicuously absent in yiğit’s actions was an aspiration to become morally immune to the temptations and interventions of others. this moral failure particularly concerned ahmet about yiğit’s future, as he believed his irresponsibility during the repayment process gave evidence of yiğit’s inability to resist the influence of his peers, invest in his own life, and establish his own nuclear family. as ahmet’s help through a bank loan had already failed, what recently concerned him more was yiğit’s rapidly increasing drinking habit, or “his nightlife,” as ahmet described it, a habit “that could even lead to his getting fired if he continues to miss his daily shifts.” to protect yiğit from such a life trajectory, ahmet had hoped to instill the morally protective function of formal indebtedness in his son. he believed this would help yiğit establish a family while remaining immune to the “tempting forms of spending money” that often accompany a highly exploitative labor regime in turkey’s extractive hinterlands, including gambling, falling into the grasp of loan sharks, and alcohol addiction. ahmet was also wary 412of solidaristic temptations for yiğit, which persist due to the dangerous nature of underground mining work, such as generously meeting fellow workers’ informal borrowing requests in a self-forgetful way. ahmet aimed to teach yiğit how to become immune to such temptations and eventualities. by utilizing the car and formal debt as an intergenerational pedagogical tool, ahmet initially aimed to encourage and prepare his son to “take control of life” through formal indebtedness and establish his own family without delay. therefore, the coupling of mine work and the ideal of the nuclear family crucially linked to “taking control of one’s life,” something that takes on special features when combined with easy access to credit. the aspiration to take control of life has long accompanied the shared fate of young men in the region, including first-generation miners like ahmet, who often “ended up with mining work.” as an underground miner himself, ahmet believed that a moral investment in family life significantly shaped how miners navigated the harsh realities of their labor and “tempting ways of spending money” in soma. without an investment in love and labor-oriented marriage and the nuclear family ideal, mining would remain a harshly exploitative form of labor that would quickly consume a miner. however, ahmet’s concerns about yiğit were particularly noteworthy in the context of an emerging gender imperative in soma that hinged on fusing mining jobs, the nuclear family ideal, and indebtedness. in soma, mining and indebtedness have become the primary indicators of a man’s readiness to establish a nuclear family since the second half of the 2000s. the doubling of wages and improvements in working conditions in the aftermath of the 2014 accident further reworked this perspective by transforming mining jobs and subsequent credit access into a prerequisite for marriage and access to family love. accordingly, ahmet believed that a young man’s desire to establish a family and become responsible, currently reworked through the futurity of debt, had the power to transform mining into the beginning of a self-developmental life trajectory in this coal basin. the increasing digitalization of banking operations in the second half of the 2010s significantly facilitated the procedures for getting access to easy bank loans in turkey. moreover, access to the increasing amount of bank loans after the doubling of underground miners’ wages in 2015 transformed easy credit into an integral component of a miner’s daily economic “repertoire” (guyer 2004; maurer 2015) in soma. by attending to how indebtedness came to be collectively moralized through heightened attachments to nuclear family intimacy, this article identifies the role of a nuclear family–oriented approach to masculinity 413and intimacy in the context of cyclical household indebtedness, particularly the way it couples easy access to credit and formal indebtedness with the promise of protecting self and others from other forms of social expectations and burdening obligations. in this context, easy indebtedness through formal bank loans and one’s ability to navigate their terms have become the primary means of measuring a man’s dependence or independence in soma. in other words, in addition to providing access to intimate forms of belonging and nuclear family love, credit access and debt have given rise to a new “moral accounting” (graeber 2001) among soma’s mining families, which depends on one’s adeptness at managing formalized debt transactions as a developmental pathway—the primary and most practical indicator of one’s moral immunity. in this article, i show how borçluluk, or “indebtedness,” emerged as a financial, moral, and relational status of being, and how it forged a moral life path for miners in soma amid the provisioning of easy access to bank loans, often with the sole condition of making regular wages. my insights come from long-term engagement with soma’s miner community since 2014, along with fieldwork conducted with miner families, bank workers, and labor activists between 2019 and 2023. by tracing the life trajectories of easy bank loans across various settings—from mines to extended family networks and nuclear households—i show how the emergent masculine imperative of moral immunity opens new avenues of financial value extraction for the domestic banking sector through the effective functioning of this new intimacy regime hinging on loveand labor-oriented attachment to nuclear family, as well as a recently cultivated empathic disposition among soma’s miner community. in doing so, i contribute to the ongoing discussion about how credit access “regulates” when directed at the household sphere (gregory 2012; lazzarato 2012; núñez 2023; zaloom and james 2023) and how monetary indebtedness can become a means to make and unmake intimate obligations (han 2012; schuster 2015; zaloom 2019). by examining how easy access to credit and cyclical indebtedness became practical means for mutually reassessing intergenerational and kinship expectations in soma’s miner community, along with mine work–informed attachments to masculine pride, i want to direct attention to “collectivizing work of credit” in a globally financialized present. the aspiration of moral immunity built on the nuclear family ideal constitutes an important dimension of the structures of feelings accompanying household indebtedness. the heightened investment into this form of intimacy also indicates the emergence of new moral dispositions to reconfigure one’s 414expectations and obligations in different intimate settings. in other words, the rescaling of forms of intimacy through credit access endows the state of indebtedness with moral transactional potentiality, which permits a person to move between different scales of expectations (guyer 2004), the most intimate one, and the anchor, being the nuclear family. with the exception of cases in which they had defaulted on their loans, indebted miners emphasized how indebtedness with formal bank loans unexpectedly became “lifesaving.” this view of indebtedness as “protective” did not simply result from loans helping them survive a financially difficult period or make familial investments; cyclical indebtedness for familial needs—this new common moral anchor—helped miners reconfigure the flows of expectations from their families, as well as temptations and disappointments created from aboveground and underground everyday relations. to elaborate further on “protective” attachments to debt in soma and how this ideal of immunity promises one “to be absolved” in certain conditions, i build on the italian political philosopher roberto esposito’s (2011) attention to the “semantic polyvalence” of the concept of immunity. by digging into the semantics of immunity, esposito highlights immunity’s indispensability from a particular imagination of community relations and prescribed obligations through the connections between immunitas and communitas, which are both derived from the latin word munus, or “duty.” “the immunization paradigm” operates by rendering the desire for “self-preservation” as the mutual limit that divides self and others in a mutually beneficial way, and that is why esposito (2008) addresses “immunity” as a critically underlying and immanently reproduced feature of the modern paradigm of self, community, and obligations, something often sidelined as a result of the dominant focus on biopolitics over life (esposito 2011). by introducing the concept of moral immunity, i aim to highlight how gendered credit access can foster a new form of social belonging as well as boundary making within the masculine social sphere through a moralized attachment to debt and the moral transactional potentials of indebtedness. by translating the desire for immunity into a mutual concern and a moral disposition that would protect both parties and thus eventually contribute to protecting the greater body, “the community,” esposito’s approach reveals how collective attachments to immunity can operate as the most intimate iteration of “possessive individualism” by intertwining the desire for self-preservation with the promise of mutual protection. my informants repeatedly highlighted this promise of “mutual protection” by emphasizing the ubiquity of debt among the miner community and how they avoid asking for informal loans from fellow miners, which also offered 415a glimpse of a different approach to the problem of reciprocity accompanying the provisioning of easy access to credit instruments. this prevalent aspiration for moral immunity via easy bank loans thus reveals how indebtedness comes to forge new mutual ethical dispositions toward obligatory relations. beyond shielding one from the exigencies of everyday life, indebtedness could help remain “understandable” and even “ethical” while being withdrawn from other forms of intimate expectations and solidaristic encounters. for the purposes of this article, i attend to this function of exemption and absolution of moral immunity, given that the pivotal link between immunity and indebtedness lies within the confines of nuclear family bonds. the intimate ties to the conjugal nuclear family and loveand labor-oriented duties toward this intimate unit are now addressed as the proper way of displaying love and responsibility in soma. accordingly, investments in indebtedness could render a family man morally exempted, absolved, and validated in the eyes of the community, further shielding him from other forms of expectations—in other words, rendering him “morally immune.” reverting the gender of inclusion: the “wage bank” and the familial lives of easy bank loans since its introduction in 2005, “credit for need” (ihtiyaç kredisi) has proved an increasingly popular financial product in turkey, contributing to the unexpectedly rapid growth of the national banking industry alongside other forms of consumer credit (karaçimen 2014; akçay and güngen 2019; açıksöz 2020). access to credit for need is straightforward—people only require documentation that they earn regular income to establish their creditworthiness. most coal miners in soma have, at least once, taken out a small bank loan that falls under the generic title of credit for need. for the national public, the disastrous underground accident in 2014 first unveiled the problematic relationship between mining work and excessive indebtedness in turkey. in the days following the accident that killed 301 miners in one of soma’s half-mechanized pits in may 2014, national media featured numerous interviews with survivors who told their stories of cyclical indebtedness with easy bank loans or credit cards to which they gained access through their stable work in the insecure underground mines. in response to national outrage, almost all of turkey’s national banks issued statements about cancelling or restructuring debts of deceased and injured miners. however, indebtedness has continued to surge in the soma region despite the accident and the public outcry it caused. this is primarily due to how debt has long become a moralized means for masculine working-class 416self-making—particularly in soma, where it constitutes the primary means of establishing a nuclear family. a year before this mine accident, the high level of indebtedness among mine workers had risen to national attention after the state-owned turkey hard-coal institution (türkiye taşkömürü kurumu, hereafter thi) in zonguldak, an industrial mining city in the black sea region, issued a circular “to warn indebted miners about their excessive levels of debt.” zonguldak, known for its hard coal reserves, is the first and most renowned coal basin in turkey, and until today, the state owns most of the pits through thi. this circular, issued in january 2013, had warned indebted miners that “if they fail to pay off their debts to banks in a year, their contracts will be cancelled without any compensations.” according to the circular, “there are a lot of miners dealing with impoundments, and some of them don’t get any monthly payments due to the deductions for their unpaid debts to banks.” moreover, to justify this decision, the circular further stated, “a significant number of indebted miners recently had work accidents.” attributing ongoing underground accidents to indebted miners, the circular sparked a public outcry, and was soon replaced with a revised version featuring less controversial recommendations, such as “improving miners’ financial literacy to free them from debt bondage and increase their motivation to work.”1 while not mentioned in the thi’s statement, the unexpected rise in the number of indebted miners across various coal basins in turkey had followed the rapid introduction of new credit mechanisms to workers with a documentable salary. these credit instruments were provided through partnerships between specific national banks and thi or private mining companies, which were designated as the official financial institutions responsible for distributing workers’ wages over periods of three to five years. although mine work has long operated through formal contracts in western turkey, and mine workers had been formally registered in most cases, wages in soma’s private mines were traditionally disbursed manually at the end of each working week to groups of miners on the same shift. it wasn’t until the second half of 2000s, coinciding with the expansion of extraction in the region, that mine owners began to mandate that workers open accounts with specific banks for the purposes of wage deposits. the rapid formalization of the wage-payment structures, and the broader national financial development through digitization, paved the way for miners to gain access to a wide array of credit options, many of which explicitly sought to use their wages as collateral.2 the adoption of this new payment arrangement in soma’s extractive industries mirrored a cross-industry trend in turkey. 417beginning in the 2010s, many companies, especially those dependent on high numbers of employees, began to make special maaş müşterisi, “wage-customer” contracts with the national banks. the mining sector, for example, held competitive procurement bids with banks to secure favorable terms. this competition even extended to attracting personal customers, including retirees, through a range of incentives such as bank promotions. as banks began competing with each other, they offered exclusive onetime payments made to customers on their agreement to wage-payment contracts. this growing credit economy operated under the strict regulation and mediation of the turkish state. initiated as a response to the 2001 financial crisis with the aim of establishing a “reliable and self-sufficient domestic credit industry,” the turkish state’s commitment to the “financial deepening” policy facilitated the rapid development of necessary legal and data-sharing infrastructures with private banks, precipitating the national financial model of maaş bankası, “wage bank,” significantly easing the extension of credit and the debt-collection process.3 as a bank’s wage customer, one can easily obtain a credit card with a generous limit, enjoy fast processing through mobile banking, and is eligible for special interest rates in the case of credit for need, and so on. in this sense, the wage-bank contracts signed between companies and banks silently bred a second contract between banks and workers with the already stated financial rights and promotions and set the stage for the financial inclusion of the working-class masses through state-provided infrastructures—as the most profitable consumer profile for accessible, fast, but predatory consumer credits. unlike microcredit initiatives, which typically target “disempowered groups” such as unemployed women and disabled citizens (schuster 2015; roy 2010; rankin 2001) or those in the “informal economy” (elyachar 2002; campbell 2020), the turkish model of financial inclusion is not based on a selective strategy of inclusion but on a strictly gendered and moralized one through the domestic credit industry’s focus on working-class males earning regular salaries. this approach has been accompanied by a moral imperative to address these small loans as a means of self-help for working-class households. in this sense, the wage-bank model and credit for need significantly differ from microcredit projects, which have been the primary forms of lending to the poor through financial inclusion policies. furthermore, unlike microcredit projects, the nationally provided easy bank loans included in the official category of credit for need do not require borrowers to specify how they will use the funds. borrowers are completely free and flexible in terms of how they utilize such loans and on whom 418or for what this money is spent, further highlighting their morally creative potential. by leveraging this flexibility of the concept of need, the turkish banking sector has repeatedly mobilized a benevolent and supportive discourse targeting the young male population through a specific framing of the nuclear family as a node of self-sustenance and moral pride. similarly, framed as “providing cheap and fast consumer credits to everyone in urgent need while simultaneously saving them from the shame of asking for help from others,” gendered narratives surrounding easy access to credit were frequently conveyed in credit advertisements through the portrayal of “an adult male,” typically depicted as “a needy but proud father.” as this highly masculinized discourse around credit access has revealed, its intricate ties to the family is what rendered debt a “socially sanctioned” (roitman 2005) economic and moral relationship in contemporary turkey. as illustrated by nükhet sirman (2005), the patriarchal modern nuclear family has played a pivotal role in turkish nationalism and citizenship frameworks, giving rise to a state discourse centered on themes of love and intimacy—what she terms “familial citizenship.” the nuclear family has become the cornerstone of the ideal of “strong nation” since the founding of the turkish republic (sirman 2005, 2007; babül 2015), and one of the most effective means of governance. moreover, the concept of indebtedness has historically proved a central feature of turkey’s welfare framework, where deservingness and resource distribution are systematically linked to a family-centric and “benevolent” logic (yoltar 2020). this long-term emphasis on the nuclear family ideal in turkey’s modern nation-building process and social policy regime serves to further cement “moral immunity” as the primary masculine imperative in a financialized present. the gendered discourses surrounding national credit access, emphasizing masculine pride, have reinforced this moralized attachment to the nuclear family ideal by endowing it with the futurity of monetary debt. the pursuit of moral immunity via credit access therefore illustrates a critical turning point in reshaping gendered notions of social belonging on a broader scale, presenting a fresh interpretation of sovereign masculinity (açıksöz 2020) at the national level. if a man can effectively employ readily available credit in a morally responsible manner, and can successfully navigate formal debt transactions, this can serve as a practical indicator of moral immunity—even in the absence of generational wealth or other conventional markers of masculinity. therefore, in its coupling with easy credit access, the loveand labor-oriented imagination of the nuclear family ideal creates a practical way of realizing a life trajectory drawn for a moral and self-motivated 419man—something that would quickly empower him by rendering him immune against not only temptations but also the “interventions of others.” the assemblage of family love and masculine pride shaped highly gendered moral concerns among soma’s coalminer households, ones that furthered credit demand and cyclical indebtedness. caroline schuster (2015) demonstrates that, in the case of microcredit projects in paraguay, the primary determinant of accountability was women’s supposedly natural embeddedness in their social networks, which would make them responsible borrowers in a group setting, thereby ensuring the repayment of loans through a “social collateral” instead of physical ones. echoing schuster’s concept of social collateral, the domestic credit industry in turkey assumed that the social embeddedness of gendered aspirations, or more precisely, a highly masculinized form of reordering social obligations, would provide the primary means of extracting financial value. the provisioning of easy access to formal debt to male breadwinners thus prescribes a particular form of “kin labor” through heightened attachments to nuclear family love and masculine pride, rendering the nuclear family the “social unit of debt” (schuster 2015) in soma. taking control of life and expectations: underground extractive labor and debt beyond gendered discourses surrounding easy bank loans at the national scale, the peculiar history of soma’s transformation into a coal-mining town intensified moral attachments to easy credit mechanisms as a means for taking control of one’s life and masculine self-making. until the 2000s, soma, a mid-sized town in the north aegean region of turkey, was known for its profitable and state-subsidized tobacco cultivation. however, in the two decades following agricultural reforms and the reduction of state subsidies aligned with turkey’s eu accession process, soma shifted to an economy centered on mining. neoliberal policies, driven by an international monetary fund (imf) recovery program after the 2001 economic crisis, accelerated the region’s agricultural transformation. the hasty enactment of a tobacco law in 2002 (kayaalp 2009) led to significant economic losses for family farms dependent on tobacco cultivation, as it effectively terminated almost all state subsidies (çelik 2023). on the other hand, a strict implementation of the economic recovery program accelerated the privatization of state enterprises, especially in natural resource extraction and energy production. soma’s lignite coal pits and lignite-firing power plants in the region formed part of this transformation. from 2002 onward, an increasing 420number of local residents began working in the region’s lignite mines, and the soma basin became a magnet for young men seeking stable and formally registered employment in the extractive industries (demirci 2025). most of turkey’s domestic coal resources (92.5 percent), including soma’s young basins, are composed of lignite. lignite, which has a lower heat value than hard coal, was considered an unpopular fossil fuel for many decades due to its unprofitable nature. the construction of large-scale extractive infrastructures in the region was therefore delayed until the start of a revised nationalist outlook in energy development policies in the 1950s. “as a country that was, and still is, heavily dependent on imported energy” (atiyaş, çetin, and gülen 2012, 2), each move to expand cheap domestic energy resources in turkey depended on the intensification of lignite extraction, especially since the 1980s. this is because lignite constitutes one of the most plentiful natural resource in turkey—around 20 billion tons with recently discovered resources.4 eventually, in the late 1970s, amid the global petrol crisis, lignite coal came to be identified with national sovereignty through this natural resource’s capacity to shape a new national energy policy (mitchell 2011), primarily focusing on domestic resources. the rapid introduction of neoliberal policies after the 2001 crisis further deepened turkey’s dependency on lignite coal in line with increasing energy needs to boost national industry. it initiated a harsher extraction policy in the young lignite basins of turkey, specifically in the manisa-soma basin (çelik 2023). beginning in the early 2000s, most of the existing coal pits were rapidly privatized without proper regulations (avşaroğlu 2007), and the number of mining fields as well as mine workers in the region quickly increased. privatized coal mines in the soma basin, characterized by low wages and technical insecurity, began operations in the second half of the 2000s. initially semi-mechanized and later fully mechanized, these mines operated with the turkish state acting as a guarantor to purchase the extracted coal, primarily for use in the state-owned soma b coal power plant (erensü 2018). about 13 to 15 percent of turkey’s electricity production has been sourced from domestic lignite in the past decade.5 to further increase the share of lignite in total energy production, the turkish state has pursued large-scale initiatives under the milli enerji (national energy) policies introduced in 2017. these policies include plans to open several new lignite mines and construct more than ten new domestic lignite-firing power plants. on several occasions during the extensive time we shared, ahmet told me how he, his wife, and their daughter “ended up with nothing” when they first moved to downtown soma for the mining job in the late 1990s, and how they 421were unexpectedly excluded from extended family solidarity. like most agriculturalist-turned-miners, they migrated from a nearby village, only forty-five minutes away from downtown soma. ahmet was “the third boy who left the village for mining work,” and his decision to become a mine worker and migrate to soma with his nuclear family strained his relationship with his natal family. at that time, underground mining work was still stigmatized, primarily due to the dehumanizing nature of the job and the implications of migrating to the city (soma is often referred to as a “city” [kent] by the mining community, despite its official designation as a township). despite this stigma, many other young men from his village followed the same path and “left to find a sigortali [insured] job in soma or other areas” as ahmet put it, which would mean gaining unlimited access to health care for the entire family, as well as the national pension plan. for ahmet, becoming a miner in the expanding underground pits of the region was, thus, the initial step toward securing essential social services for his nuclear family, establishing his identity as a self-sufficient man, and taking control of life “without relying on anyone.” this masculine ideal of “not relying on anyone” long became a tool for extraction, extracting not only coal but different forms of value and virtue after the opening of private mines. for an adult man, dependence on one’s natal family implied a reluctance to mature into a self-sufficient adult, especially within an economically declining environment, and such a dependency suggested perpetual vulnerability to external decisions and interventions concerning one’s life, often articulated through the idiom kimseye muhtaç olmamak (not being dependent/muhtaç on anyone). this phrase, which frequently appeared in my conversations with both generations of miners but was particularly emphasized by older miners like ahmet, held specific cultural connotations. muhtaç, coming from the arabic root hwj, is directly related to ihtiyaç, “need,” and literally translates as “the one with needs.” its nuanced connotations in everyday turkish culture often oscillate between “needy” and “necessitous,” and it is even widely associated with sakat, “impaired,” and “the disabled street beggar,” revealing how muhtaç provides a multidimensional analytic for the “heteropatriarchal contract” (açıksöz 2020) by sketching out who is structurally excluded from the category of “independence” (ferguson 2015). in this sense, gendered analytics of muhtaç operate as an abstract yet persistent force, marking a body—primarily a male body—as incapable of generating or utilizing subsistence means, a fatal flaw that would undermine any claims for independence. 422recently, attachments to easy bank loans as a means for taking control of one’s life have become morally productive in this intergenerational setting, particularly through stories such as ahmet’s. according to the discourse of muhtaç, reliance on one’s natal family had to be avoided at all costs in soma. for ahmet’s generation of miners, foregoing financial assistance from their natal families and bravely venturing into the depths of the underground became crucial manifestations of masculinity under the shadow of the gradually decreasing income of family farms. this peculiar attachment to mine work also drove fathers’ help to their sons to obtain mine-working positions, even after the disastrous accident of 2014. gaining control of one’s life by securing stable wagework in the region’s expanding coal mines has long been the first condition of the masculine covenant carved through long-term investments in the ideal of self-sufficiency—an intergenerational condition for becoming a moral and independent man. for ahmet, who had a troubled relationship with his natal family after he became a miner, purchasing a car with a bank loan constituted an act of care, given that the prevalent expectation is the personalization of credit—taking out bank loans individually and successfully navigating the repayment process without default. when ahmet initially decided to take out the loan and buy the car, yiğit promised to pay at least half of the thirty-six installments with his salary. ahmet hoped this would help yiğit develop a strong bond with his profession. by accelerating the purchase of a car, ahmet thus invited yiğit to cultivate moral immunity and have a self-evident reason to resist “the temptations of his friends.” these temptations primarily include nightlife in various pavyons, as well as alcohol addiction.6 there are also even more dangerous temptations, such as gambling in village coffee shops with friends and succumbing to one of the region’s dangerous loan sharks. despite ahmet’s efforts, yiğit’s drinking habit intensified in the first year of his mining job, and eventually their agreement fell through. meanwhile, after witnessing the death of another fellow miner in late 2018 when a roof collapsed, ahmet went through a depressive episode, leading to his unanticipated retirement. following his retirement, he struggled to pay the installments back alone in addition to the expenses for the new coffee shop he had bought, eventually defaulting on the bank loan and falling into the grasp of predatory debt-collection offices. despite ahmet’s help of taking out the loan himself as a father and the failure of the moral pedagogy of indebtedness in yiğit’s case, ahmet’s hope that yiğit’s adherence to credit repayments would instill prudence in his life decisions aptly illustrates how easy credit access has come to shape a new gendered moral 423framework in soma. the prism of easy access to credit, along with pride-induced attachments to insecure underground minework, prompted different possibilities in intimate relations in this coal basin. as exemplified by ahmet’s perspective, bank loans are now seen as practical solutions and frameworks that limit solidaristic relationships, aligning with the intergenerational imperative of self-sufficiency within the miner community and the recently cultivated pursuit of moral immunity. this evolving moral ecology has imbued easy credit access with a particular moral power by providing a framework for navigating intergenerational and intimate relationships through bank loans. thus, beyond merely operating as a disciplinary pedagogical instrument between generations, debt becomes a prevailing tool for regulating intimate expectations within this new moral ecology accompanying the introduction of easy bank loans. hence the investments and sacrifices made to avoid dependency (muhtaç) status in ahmet’s generation, and the pursuit of moral immunity for the second generation of miners, are not merely about “the management of self or individualized life” (foucault 2008). instead, these gendered concerns center on managing intimate relationships and positioning oneself to navigate diverse expectations and scales of intimacy with minimal trouble. in his seminal work on the affective reproduction of the globally expanding debt economy and the creation of “indebted subjects,” maurizio lazzarato (2012) highlights the new temporal dimension of financial capitalism, wherein the future is captured and controlled through credit. “whereas the real economy impoverishes the governed as wage earners and possessors of social rights, finance claims to enrich them through credit and stock” (lazzarato 2012, 110), but finance does this in a particular way by rendering the uncertain future “knowable,” by controlling it through credit and “the promise to pay back.” in so doing, debt initiates a particular form of subjectivity through accountability by the functioning of this “future promise” (nietzsche 2006; lazzarato 2012). lazzarato argues that the current pervasive creditor-debtor relationship thus requires “ethico-political work on the self, an individualization involving a mix of responsibility, guilt, hypocrisy, and distrust” (lazzarato 2012, 130; emphasis mine). despite his inspiring description of how expansive credit access and personal indebtedness engender a stricter control of capital over life and future, something also exemplified in soma’s cyclical debt economy, lazzarato overlooks how debt and indebtedness, including monetary indebtedness, constitute intricate social relationships that combine multiple actors and mutual obligations that are crudely framed in the category of “household” (yanagisako 1979; zaloom and james 2023). 424thus they involve morally generative encounters among close kin and within the household itself. contrary to lazzarato’s focus on individual affective analytics of indebtedness, since marcel mauss (2016), anthropologists have primarily attended to the “collective regulation” function of forms of indebtedness. as anthropology has long addressed, and recently reiterated as a response to evolving forms of credit access, even if credit and debt “regulate,” the unit regulated by relationships of indebtedness lies well beyond the self and its subjective affects and dispositions (peebles 2010; roitman 2005; schuster 2015; rudnyckyj 2017; zaloom 2019). one crucial theme commonly addressed in the expanding literature on microcredit is how access to credit can instill, reproduce, or strengthen gendered forms of sociality and social belonging (schuster 2015; han 2012; james 2015). second, such gendered models of provisioning access to easy credit depend on affect-laden relations such as kinship-mediated obligations or group-based responsibilities through “mutual guarantee” and “joint liability” (roy 2010; zaloom 2019; schuster 2015). similarly, by attending to the power of relations and being “oriented in different ways in time and to time” (han 2012, 232), anthropologists have also long focused on how credit comes to work on mutual expectations (graeber 2001) and their temporality (parry and bloch 1989), instead of instilling prescribed forms of individualization. credit access creates multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of gendered sociality, though often beyond the suggested communitarian or discipline-laden forms of entrepreneurship (schuster 2014; han 2012; james 2015). instead of simply enabling a desire for masculine sovereignty or individualization and, thus, independence and freedom from genealogical hierarchies (povinelli 2006), in soma, credit access regulates through a gendered ideal of social cohesion that depends on a highly moralized approach to nuclear family intimacy, rendering debt an intimate tool for self-making and regulation of one’s relationships. this gendered form of credit access thus reveals debt’s collective regulatory capacity in terms of “shaping the priorities and proximities” (schuster 2014, 566) and of reordering claims that come with different forms of intimate relationships. as ahmet’s way of utilizing debt as a tool of cultivating moral resilience revealed, such a “collective form of debt” could educate a person about how to manage various monetary claims. thus what is at stake in such a highly gendered model of credit access lies well beyond the “moral evaluation of transactors” (gregory 2012) or beyond disciplining them through guilt and accountability (lazzarato 2012). 425what lies at the core of this collective moral investment to indebtedness is the nuclear family ideal. it translates moral immunity via indebtedness into a collectively shared gender imperative among soma’s miner community and redraws mutual expectations and limits of solidarity. as i continue to elaborate in the following section through the story of another young miner, the intertwinement of the nuclear family ideal and easy credit access further endows the ideal of moral immunity with an empathic approach by reframing indebtedness for familial debts as a ground for mutual understanding within miner families and between fellow miners. easy credit access and the collective nature of a family and familial debts thus help miners in soma reconfigure the scope of expectations in various other intimate settings, be it natal family, siblings, extended kinship networks, friends, or fellow workers. “learning to pay your own debt”: caring through collective indebtedness almost all the young miners i interviewed during my fieldwork took their first bank loan during the first six months of work and would typically use the money to pay for marriage expenses. as a young miner, murat, expressed it, for their generation, access to family intimacy starts with becoming a miner and “a reliable man who is not afraid of debt.” “consider your parents,” he suddenly invited me into his intricate moral definitions when we first met, and continued, “who could want their daughter to marry a wanderer? he needs to be responsible. he needs to have a stable job and life, and mine is the easiest job here, especially after the accident.” most of the second-generation miners of soma began working within the formalized and financialized payment structure accompanying the semior fully mechanized working regime underground. mechanization attempts started in the basin in the early 2010s. by the summer of 2023, most mine pits were entirely mechanized, or had at least adopted semi-automated systems for coal and miner transportation. these changes led to new pit fields, restructuring the underground hierarchy by gradually eliminating the miners’ autonomy underground, and doubling the number of mine workers in the region. after the accident in 2014, conditions improved to an extent; wages doubled, most of the mining companies started to pay overtime, and the frequency of roof falls at least decreased, but indebtedness continued to surge and turned into a collective condition for young miners, as exemplified by murat’s account. when i first met him, murat was planning to marry his long-term girlfriend and had been continuing his long search to secure financing for a proper 426apartment. he also hailed from a family of miners: murat’s deceased father had worked in state-owned extractive industries for nearly a decade, while his older brother was now employed in a private mine nearby and resided in downtown soma with his wife and children. they had lost their father and mother at an early age, and murat grew up with his grandmother and older brother, so his attachment to his brother sounded more like a father-son relationship. when he was just a young boy, his brother once took him to the mine pit without providing a safety light, an experience that both frightened murat and left him grateful for making him aware of the job’s risks and “encouraging him to focus on his education instead.” like several other young men in the region, he had never aspired to become a miner. initially, he pursued admission to military school, viewing it as an avenue for higher education, decent future wages, and state-provided social benefits. however, the permanent closure of military schools by the turkish state following a coup attempt in 2016 led murat back to soma. given his higher education, he started working as an electrical technician in an entirely mechanized underground pit, which began operations after the accident of 2014. for murat, the combination of mining work and indebtedness offered both a means of self-development and a form of constraint, primarily due to changes in the mining process. the new extraction model relied on mechanization, including roof-bolting systems, automated excavators, and conveyor belts for coal and worker transportation. some miners, like yiğit, operated machinery, while others, like murat, were responsible for monitoring and maintaining electronic systems. some still performed tasks that resembled traditional mining, collecting leftover coal and placing it back on conveyor belts using picks, thus the recent mechanized system required multiple supervisors and constant interaction with them. this loss of autonomy underground was what rendered indebtedness particularly restrictive according to murat, as it forced miners “to obey the silly orders of several supervisors.” although he initially considered quitting the job due to these underground pressures, leaving proved nearly impossible in the case of indebtedness and need for a stable income, which, according to murat, “partially subordinates you to the underground.” yet it also offered the most accessible path to self-development, as he aimed to secure a consumer credit to pay the principal amount for the apartment he desired. although mining work still takes place under highly exploitative conditions, even in the region’s most advanced mine, debt imparts a sense of futurity in soma. it provides a flexible timeline to fulfill prevailing gender obligations and serves as a moral shield by binding the future to the underground. the breadth of the debt economy thus reveals a 427unique, financialized transformation of masculinized labor power, one that historically relied on “stability” as a motivating force for work (castel 2003; muehlebach 2011). in soma, this futurity operates primarily through access to credit. when i later met him for an interview a few months later, murat had already bought the apartment. sharing his pride in doing this all on his own, he told me the story of how he used to sleep in the barracks next to the mine pit in the first months of the job. his voice tinged with pride when he explained how it helped him “save more money,” given the soaring housing costs in downtown soma that had accompanied the influx of immigrant miners. he had met his girlfriend before leaving for military school, and that was why he had already started to realize his plans to buy an apartment to accelerate the marriage process, and he was proven right. after he bought the apartment, their engagement quickly followed, with a wedding planned for the summer of 2022. as he mentioned several times, his in-laws were quite proud of him. even though he didn’t have his parents to support him, they knew he was “a reliable one due to his current attempts to follow his own path.” murat’s indebtedness, and its moral transactional capacity, helped him show himself as a responsible and reliable young man. as murat’s pride in purchasing his apartment solely through his own efforts highlights, mine work and credit access intertwine to forge private success stories for young men in the region. mining work in the underground pits becomes the primary tool to build a moral self in soma through its coupling with credit access by initiating a new trajectory of self-development through making the right kind of investments in intimate relations with the futurity of debt. in this sense, murat’s story also helps illustrate the intricateness of the life trajectory yiğit failed to follow, one that, according to his father ahmet, further hindered his access to nuclear family intimacy. however, what is crucial here and what further clarifies moral immunity’s capacity to engender mutual ethical and empathic dispositions lies in a different aspect of this story, one repeatedly mentioned but each time sidelined in murat’s narration. while murat continued sharing the story of how he found the right bank loan with the best rates, i recalled the time he had spent in the mine barracks, originally built as changing cubicles. as it was quite contradictory to the national rhetoric about family solidarity and norms of hospitality among close kin, it was very striking that he did not stay with his brother, who also lived in downtown soma, and instead kept sleeping in these small barracks. given their close relationship and the father-son dynamic they shared, i eventually asked him why he didn’t stay with his brother. murat calmly responded by addressing an 428empathic feeling that accompanies the ubiquitous nature of indebtedness and family-related responsibilities among miners. “you don’t expect your brother to look after you all the time. he already has his kids to look after and his debts to pay back. you must take responsibility for your own life if you want to be independent; you need to learn to pay your own debt.” murat’s empathetic approach to this moral dilemma demonstrates a new approach to responsibility in a financialized present. forged in line with the morally immunizing potentials harbored in one’s attempt to take control of one’s life, this approach is framed through a self-protective outlook against life’s expected challenges and accompanied by a sense of empowerment enabled by easy access to credit. as he explained further, his brother did not insist on this, but murat was sure that his brother would have welcomed him if he had wanted to stay with them. however, he also recognized that it might impose a burden on his brother’s family and create tensions, not only between his brother and sister-in-law but eventually also between him and his brother. to avoid all these potential conflicts, murat chose not to ask for help from the outset, a protective measure that would primarily secure his relationship with his brother from any future conflict. murat’s investment in moral immunity provided him with contentment for a different reason; he found that it enabled him to curtail his potential demands and expectations from his only remaining natal family member—a practical way of showing care for his older brother and keeping their relationship safe. as such, to be independent meant to be morally immune from the potential hazards of relying on murat’s most significant familial figure. as murat’s story exemplifies, through their coupling with the aspiration for moral immunity, these bank loans promise to bring a new moral analytic to govern tense moral negotiations without any serious crises and offer practical solutions to bypass the ambiguity inherent in reciprocity. seeking moral immunity thus did not constitute a vengeful attempt to become independent. instead, it signified a collective aspiration in helping reconfigure mutual expectations, primarily through this promise of mutual protection. the dynamism and problem-ridden nature of intimate relations become a part of the production of financial value in soma by the effective functioning of this debt-oriented interpersonal moral paradigm that enables new ways of boundary making through formal debts and obligations, further engendering an unexpected form of empathy and compassion to “a man’s more intimate obligations”—forged through cyclical indebtedness and nuclear family love. 429because it involves assessing situations through “being considerate and understanding of one’s own and others’ intimate obligations,” this debt-laden moral analytic suggests a new perspective that could offer a shield of exemption for every man in similar circumstances and becomes the object of a shared investment for moral immunity as it primarily involves reassessing expectations with unexpected empathies of indebtedness. accordingly, it simultaneously works on proper limits of obligations, as well as the limits of disappointment, as disappointment represents a particularly intimate affect and is only allowed to be performed in a specific level of intimacy (now confined to the sphere of the nuclear family). building on the moral imperatives of the debt-laden public sphere and the intergenerationally forged masculine ideal of “taking control of life,” this new approach promises everyone to build a protective barrier for both themselves and others, thereby also illustrating a method of showing care and empathy exclusively in the masculine public sphere. conclusion: immunity, the intimate nuclear family, and the production of financial value how do gendered models of financial inclusion and moralized narratives about easy credit access establish new common thresholds for understanding, subsequently rendering debt a moral tool and generating future financial value by fostering empathic moral dispositions? throughout this article, i have demonstrated how the quest for moral immunity through easy credit access and indebtedness unveils the emergence of a novel ethical framework for the interplay between the self, intimacy, and the expectations of others in the context of the rapid formalization of debt relations in the soma basin. although murat succeeded while yiğit failed to gain immunity through indebtedness, both of their stories illustrate how this debt-laden intimacy regime continues to shape mutual social expectations in soma, in tandem with national credit expansion policies. this new debt-laden intimacy regime takes the lovingly formed modern nuclear family as its primary knot and addresses it as the central moral sphere for one’s investments for a better future. in this sense, i employ the concept of moral immunity primarily to direct attention to how the mutuality of expectations (graeber 2001) and different scales of intimacy (guyer 2004) contribute to the production of financial value in such a constellation. beyond rendering the nuclear family ideal particularly productive for capitalist value production by establishing it as one’s primary attachment to debt, repayment, and future, collective indebtedness paves the way for new forms of 430social belonging by engendering new thresholds for mutual understanding among miners. the aspiration for moral immunity and the relationally and empathically forged moral ecology of indebtedness reconfigures the dyad of dependence/independence through the collective and moralized nature of owning familial debts in soma, thus providing a glimpse toward a new approach to reciprocity in a globally financialized present. in light of this empathy, mutuality, and the third-person–focused analysis it entails, the quest for moral immunity via indebtedness offers an alternative reading to the predominant narratives of economic subjectification and individualization through credit access and debt (harvey 2006; krippner 2017; lazzarato 2012). given the predominance of discussions focused on financial disciplining in the emerging literature on household debt, an immunity-oriented approach to indebtedness presents a critical alternative by revealing how household indebtedness primarily operates on an intimate yet interpersonal ground, rather than a subjective one. accordingly, the immunity paradigm highlights that every form of debt in the modern credit system, and especially in the case of the household frontier, is socially embedded and can only be sustained if it is also embedded in gendered moral ecologies. as murat’s story further exemplifies, such a coupling of the nuclear family ideal, masculine pride, and indebtedness also engenders an indifferent categorization that equalizes and helps understand, and even forgive, others for their failure to realize previously expected solidarity norms. simultaneously it justifies similar choices to invest primarily in and for one’s own nuclear family through debt. ordinary and collective indebtedness promises to immunize everyone through the immediacy of “being the head of a loved family of dependents,” thus imposing an almost neutral limit on expectations of solidarity appearing in different scales of intimacy. access to underground wage work and easy credit, and this pathway of masculine self-making through debt, thus discloses a recently cultivated sense of moral assessment, one based on a new analytic of proximity in soma’s miner community. the quest for immunity via formal indebtedness thus might be imagined as “the defence against the expropriating features of communitas” (esposito 2008, 50) in this framing—a kind of mutual protective measure against not only tempting ways of spending money but also reciprocal obligations or disappointments. it is, therefore, a measure that would save each party from future trouble primarily by interrupting the need for the object reciprocated while enabling financial value extraction from each of these transactions through the cyclical indebtedness of everyday life in this turkish coal basin. 431 abstract this article explores the role of readily available credit in shaping new masculine ideals among underground mineworkers in soma, a lignite-coal basin in turkey’s north aegean region. the availability of easy credit forges a new approach to self and intimate others in this coal basin, allowing miners to navigate intimate relationships through consumer loans and financial obligations. by concomitantly examining the intergenerational aspiration of “taking control of life” that long accompanied insecure coal mining in the soma basin and the evolving of national credit access, i show the emergence of a new masculine imperative via indebtedness, “moral immunity,” serving as a means to measure one’s masculinity and morality. through the coupling of easy access to credit and increased investments in nuclear-family intimacy in today’s turkey, moral immunity endows indebtedness with a moral transactional potential in intimate relations and enables extracting financial value from empathic, moral dispositions among miners. [indebtedness; extractive labor; banking; family; coal, intimacy; turkey] notes acknowledgments  i owe a great deal to the miner community of soma for sharing their intimate stories with me and helping me understand their crucial moral dilemmas and the moral work of collective indebtedness. i am particularly grateful to fırat bozçalı, andrea muehlebach, and salih can açıksöz for their thoughtful feedback and engaging conversations, helped me refine my arguments. i presented early drafts of this essay at boston university, humboldt university/institute for european ethnology, and the 2024 european association of social anthropologists conference in barcelona. this article has also greatly benefited from the close reading and insightful comments of anonymous reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology. this article draws on my doctoral fieldwork, which was supported by the wenner-gren foundation. 1. see the türkiye taşkömürü kurumu (thi, turkish hard coal enterprise) circular no. 697 (january 9, 2013) and circular no. 701 (january 22, 2013). 2. in most cases, what technically facilitated this process was the provisioning of immediate access to overdraft debit accounts, also known as “flexible accounts” (esnek hesap). these accounts resemble official payday loans provided by wage banks, and they typically granted instant access to around half of a miner’s monthly wage. they served as an entry point to credit mechanisms by enabling miners to rapidly get a credit score (usually in only three to six months). 3. quoted from the akp’s 2002 “genel seçimleri seçim beyannamesi” [election statement]. last accessed january 2, 2024, at https://www.akparti.org.tr/media/318780/3-kasim-2002-genel-secimleri-secim-beyannamesi-sayfalar.pdf 4. see the türkiye kömür i̇şletmeleri kurumu’s (tki̇, turkish coal enterprises) latest reports released on their official webpage. last accessed june 1, 2025 at https://www.tki.gov.tr/enerji-ve-komur 5. see the türkiye kömür i̇şletmeleri kurumu’s (tki̇, turkish coal enterprises) “kömür (linyit) sektör raporu 2023” [coal sector report], published 2024. last accessed november 1, 2024 at https://turkiyedekomur.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/kömür-sektör-raporu-2023.pdf 6. a pavyon is a type of nightclub most popular in the rural regions of turkey, where many peasant or industrial workers congregate. for these rural communities, these clubs are associated with the allure of urban life. pavyons feature live music, drinking, and socializing, often with the presence of female hostesses, known as konsomatris, 432who interact with male customers and entertain these men as their drinking partners while encouraging them to spend money. in soma, pavyons carry a social stigma because of their transactional and gendered dynamics, which stand in stark contrast to the moral investments placed on the nuclear family. references açıksöz, salih c. 2020 “prosthetic debts: economies of war disability in neoliberal turkey.” current 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cows: colonization as domestication in the paraguayan chaco cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 8-35, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.02 of feral and obedient cows: colonization as domestication in the paraguayan chaco valentina bonifacio università ca’ foscari, venezia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1472-4160 ¿cómo se puede amansar a la gente—how to tame people? it is 2004 and the aquidaban, a boat carrying people and goods along the paraguay river, is navigating toward the frontier with brazil. after discovering i am an anthropologist, ramón zevallo, an ishir man from alto paraguay, begins narrating the arrival of columbus to paraguay to me and a crowd of local boat passengers. it’s a myth about the encounter between whites and indigenous people at the dawn of colonization. after coming to the chaco for the first time, columbus supposedly “tames” indigenous people by offering them great quantities of bread. having earned their trust, he receives a bride in return. this gift exchange continues until, later in the narration, a new race (raza)—formed by the descendants of this marriage—fences off and appropriates indigenous lands. the relationship between columbus and indigenous people, initially characterized as an exchange, transforms into an act of dispossession, finally revealing its deeper purpose: the colonization of the territory.1 pointing to a specific strategy of domination among human beings, zeballo’s use of the verb taming escapes the common meaning of the word as limited to human-animal relationships. the words taming and colonizing work here as interchangeable categories, raising questions about the actual connections between these two historical processes.2 writing about cow-making practices in colombia, marisol de la cadena and santiago martínez medina discuss how hierarchy-making practices of raza (a spanish term that translates both as “race” and “breed”) resonate with one another when switching from a human to a non-human domain. “the mechanism at work in creating [latin american] elites,” they argue, “is not unlike that of raza in the sense of ‘breed’: it depends on paperwork” (de la cadena and martínez medina 2020, 381). the colombian idiom of raza thus functions in those contexts as a multispecies category “built historically on a tension between biology and culture” (de la cadena and martínez medina 2020, 370). in the piece, “why do malagasy cows speak french,” maurice bloch (1998) gives another example of interconnection between domestication and colonization practices. according to him, the act of addressing cattle in french, the colonial language, signals a relationship based on hierarchy and the imposition of absolute orders. “as man is to beast,” he writes, a “government bureaucrat is to village cultivator. the model and symbol of one relation has been transposed into another” (bloch 1998, 195). in this article, i discuss how cattle-human relations have influenced the way european colonization has been experienced, theorized, and performed in the eastern part of the paraguayan chaco, a vast territory marked by the extractive tannin industry for more than a century. in particular, i argue that idioms and practices of cattle domestication and un-domestication (or ferality) have been used to theorize and affect practices of colonization, racialization, and class stratification, as well as resistance to such processes. after demonstrating the centrality of feral and domesticated cattle in the history of the paraguayan chaco, and after presenting them as both agents of colonization and objects of desire, i focus my analysis on two particular kinds of cattle—the señuelo and the sagua’a—and on how they have shaped local history and imaginaries. finally, i discuss the ways in which some commentators interpreted the end of the tannin industry in the paraguayan chaco as “the end of domestication.” since 2002, when i first came to the region as an international development worker, the paraguayan chaco has changed rapidly and drastically, becoming one of the main hotspots of deforestation in the world due to expanding cattle ranching and soy farming. i eventually came to question international development as an “anti-politics” machine (bonifacio 2013a; ferguson 1994) and decided to engage with the history of the people that international agencies had framed as “stakeholders” with “needs” by staying in the chaco as an anthropology student and starting a participatory video project. between 2005 and 2008, i lived with a maskoy indigenous community located thirty-five kilometers from the tannin company town of puerto casado and realized how deeply the tannin industry, which existed for more than a century, had affected people’s life projects and future possibilities. i returned to the area in 2015 and 2016 and conducted interviews with more than seventy ex-workers of the carlos casado tannin company, as well as with missionaries and politicians. most of the local politicians i interviewed were, and still are, cattle owners and farmers. one day, some maskoy friends asked me to help them find new cowbells for their initiation rituals, in which dancers personifying different kinds of spirits tie bells to their hips to create noise. to my surprise, although the cattle population had grown rapidly all around us, cowbells had disappeared from the market. when i looked for them in a specialized shop in asunción, the capital city, the shop owner explained that the rapid rise of deforestation had left the cows with no bush to hide or get lost in, so there was no longer any need for bells. i eventually ended up finding some in the italian alps, close to my hometown, which temporarily fixed the problem. the objective of this essay is not only to highlight the centrality of human-cattle relations to the history of the paraguayan chaco but also to propose emic categories—geographically and historically grounded—for thinking colonization and its undoing on a regional level. the categories of taming and domesticating, for instance, are used by indigenous and non-indigenous people to describe their unbalanced mutual relationship, as well as by the ex-company workers to talk about their condition of dependency on the company owners. other lesser-known bovine categories are also used, such as sagua’a (cattle that live in the chaco forest), to express instances and imaginaries of rebellion and repression, señuelo (a particular kind of hyper-domesticated bull) to describe alliance and dependency, or cambón (an iron joint), to point at specific architectures of power. these categories are used to define bovine beings and artifacts that have emerged at the crossroads of different historical genealogies and are characterized by distinctive class and race relations. in particular, the central part of the present article considers how local people relate to sagua’a, cattle that lived in the patches of forest scattered around the casado territory, fleeing from humans. as insurgent beings, sagua’a provoked reactions of oppression, while also providing a powerful example of reversibility from a condition of domestication and control. men and cattle as agents of colonization in the mid-1880s, the colonization of the paraguayan chaco was still beginning to take form. in this essay, i will concentrate my analysis on a vast region, initially encompassing 5,625,000 hectares of public land, acquired in 1887 by an argentine banker and entrepreneur of spanish origins, carlos casado del alisal. this territory, which casado del alisal baptized “new spain” (dalla corte caballero 2012), was administered for more than a hundred years by the casado sastre dynasty and by the company that bore the founder’s name: the carlos casado s.a. to his contemporaries, casado del alisal was an “archetypal colonizer” (lagos 1949, 9), able to build an economic empire where others only saw impenetrable territory. indigenous groups of different origins (today self-identified as angaité, enxet, enenhlet/toba, guana, and sanapana) were the sole inhabitants of the region, and only a minority of them lived in settlements situated along the paraguay river, where they traded goods and sometimes worked for the non-indigenous population (cominges 1892; sušnik 1981). explorers and colonizers categorized them alternately as indios mansos (tamed) or indios bravos (wild/aggressive; boggiani 1894, 21). after taking possession of the territory, the casado sastre family established a prosperous tannin industry that lasted until the year 2000, when the remaining properties were sold to sun myung moon’s korean unification church. in just a few decades from its founding, the company town of puerto casado had become one of the most important centers for the commercialization of tannin on a global scale. like elsewhere on the american continent (ficek 2019; specht 2019), the first settlers chose cattle as their main allies in the colonization of the territory. the italian explorer adamo lucchesi—who founded puerto casado on behalf of the spanish entrepreneur in 1887—wrote in his memoir that after choosing a location for the factory, he immediately acquired two hundred heads of cattle from brazil on the opposite side of the paraguay river. according to lucchesi (1936, 238), unlike the “zebus” and “franqueiros” that populated the brazilian ranches, in the chaco one could only find cattle of “an inferior breed [razza], half wild and of little value.” lucchesi defined this “inferior breed” roaming around the region as “creole” (criolla). their presence in the country had already been observed by charles darwin (1859, 84), who wrote that cattle and horses “swarm southward and northward [in paraguay] in a feral state.” a north american cowboy working in the area in the 1920s, thurlow craig, described a docile population of creole cows and bulls of different breeds, but also mentions the existence of cattle that lived in the forests, and that he described as “outlaw.” these cows were creole of various types, “all horns and bone and wild eyes, tough as the devil” (craig 1935, 184). since no one officially owned them, the workers would treat them as game: “on the south side [of the territory owned by the ipc (international product corporation) tannin company] there were some outlaw cattle, that had been there for years. they were as wild as deer and as fat as butter, making the very best beef. we used to hunt them at night when they came out to drink … , sometimes roping them, sometimes shooting them. this was great sport” (craig 1935, 313). neither of the two writers concerned himself with the origin of these “half wild,” “outlaw” cattle, which might have wandered there from neighboring regions: in fact, while some cows had moved to the chaco with their owners, others had not. in a testimony gathered by gastón r. gordillo (2004, 62) in the mid-1990s among the toba of the argentinean chaco, for example, his interlocutor claims that “prior to their first encounter with the criollos, their ancestors stumbled on cattle roaming the area ahead of their owners.” zoologists consider contemporary “creole” cattle in south america the direct descendants of cows brought by the spanish and portuguese colonizers at the end of the fifteenth century, initially to the caribbean, then to brazil a few years later. these first cattle “dispersed” so quickly that by 1524 they were present all over the south american continent (primo 1992, 422). however, their patterns and modalities of dispersion sometimes escaped human control. soon after columbus brought the first cows to the island of la hispaniola, for instance, “massive herds of wild cattle dominated caribbean islands depopulated by colonists who had moved on to new frontiers” (ficek 2019, 261). from there, feral cattle proliferated all across latin america. for about two hundred years, raising cattle in south america was “far less important than hunting them; [since] careful breeding was impossible in the unpoliced, unfenced, and thinly populated territories” (baretta and markoff 1978, 588). as rosa e. ficek (2019, 261) reminds us, a new term—cimarrón—took form in the caribbean to define these feral cows. the same word was also used in castilian “to refer to native people who fled from the cruelties of conquest, to africans who escaped from forced labor, and to the wild pigs, dogs, and cats that, alongside cattle, lived in these spaces of refuge.” several scholars trace the etymology of cimarrón (migrated to english as “maroon”) to a taino/arawak expression indicating “wild varieties of domesticated plants” (arrom 1983, 56). however, gabriel de avilez rocha (2018, 15) argues that cimarrón was first used in la hispaniola to refer to “enslaved-turned-fugitive people” of native and african origins, and was only later adopted to indicate “domesticated-turned-feral” animals. in the following centuries, the word cimarrón continued to hold this double meaning, and was used throughout latin america to indicate mainly fugitive slaves, but also domesticated plants or animals returning to a wild state. in a similar way, a new term—bagual—was adopted in chile, paraguay, uruguay, brazil, and argentina to refer to feral cattle and horses. the origin of this word also dates back to early colonization at the end of the sixteenth century, though it hails from a different geographical area: buenos aires. daniela lauria (2010) attributes the origin of the word bagual to querandi or pampa indigenous people, who used it to describe feral horses. other sources, however, present the word’s first appearance as the proper name of an indigenous leader, the cacique juan bagual, who was “assigned” (encomendado) with all his people to a spanish captain in 1582 and was known “for his indomitable character and for his resistance to being reduced” (lamas 2018, 81). in 1604, after bagual led a rebellion against the spanish, the word bagual came to indicate a different category of rebellious beings: fugitive horses and cattle. since the beginning of the colonization process, animals’ refusal of domestication was equated linguistically and conceptually, through the use of terms like bagual or cimarrón, with human refusals of slavery and subjugation. at the same time, the presence of feral cattle in remote areas—in the monte, or bushlands, of la hispaniola (rocha 2018) or in the south american pampas (baretta and markoff 1978)—made it possible for some groups of people to survive at the margins of the colonization process by hunting and commercializing these animals. the two terms, cimarrón and bagual, continued to circulate in south america for centuries, well beyond the beginning of colonization. writing about the pantanal, a brazilian region located across the paraguay river, felipe süssekind (2016, 141) notes that “the opposition between feral (bagual) and tame, as in many other parts of rural brazil, seems to make more sense … than that between wild and domestic.” all beings, human and non-human, have the capacity to oscillate throughout their existence between these two states of becoming, neither of which is ever foreclosed. in a similar way, the opposition between local versions of tameness and ferality played a crucial role in shaping ethnic and class boundaries and strategies of domination in the casado territory. cattle as biopolitical power by the 1930s, the company town of puerto casado had become one of the main centers for tannin production and commercialization in the world, shipping its products mainly to europe and the united states. the factory, located along the paraguay river, processed quebracho colorado logs from the interior of the chaco and transformed them into tannin. for more than a century, the carlos casado s.a. company based its profits on a double economy that relied on tannin production, on the one hand, and on cattle ranches and beef production, on the other. this situation was common to other tannin industries in the area, such as the north american ipc (glauser 2019). as in the argentinean cotton and sugar plantations of the first half of the twentieth century (córdoba, bossert, and richard 2015; gordillo 2004), the tannin industry from the outset incorporated and exploited a conspicuous number of indigenous workers. while management positions were mostly occupied by argentineans, the rest of the workers came from the eastern part of paraguay or belonged to local indigenous groups. between 2015 and 2017, i interviewed administrators and politicians in puerto casado, as well as indigenous and non-indigenous ex-company workers who continued living there after the tannin factory closed. some of them shared their family albums with me. while the family albums of ex-factory workers displayed portraits of men standing in front of industrial machines—engines, lathes, locomotives—the albums of merchants and politicians contained images of men standing proudly in front of their cattle. these images stood out with respect to the others as symbols of personal and political power. figure 1. tarcisio sostoa and his herd of cattle in the 1990s. sostoa was leader of the colorado party in puerto casado from the 1960s to the 1980s. after the fall of the dictatorship in 1989, he was elected governor of alto paraguay and then parliament member. source: tarcisio sostoa. picture of the original by the author, 2015. in his book the two shamans and the owner of the cattle, rodrigo villagra carron (2010) explores an indigenous myth and its historical transformations among the angaité of the paraguayan chaco. in the myth, two shamans obtain a herd of seven hundred cows from the “owner of the cattle” who lives at the bottom of the river. however, they immediately lose the herd as a consequence of villagers breaking a taboo. according to villagra, the angaité identify the figure of “the owner of the cattle” as both “the paraguayan president” and the owner of the north american ipc tannin company (located south of puerto casado), thereby condensing within one figure the political and economic power that ruled the paraguayan chaco in the twentieth century. according to villagra, angaité communities particularly appreciated cows because of the great quantity of meat provided by a single one slaughtered, which immediately expanded the possibility for commensality. figure 2. trade unionists eating asado during a factory meeting in the 1980s. source: desiderio fernandez. picture of the original by the author, 2016. while some photos depict men surrounded by cows, others depict cows surrounded by men. the sharing of beef through collective asados (grilled beef) appears in the ex-workers’ family albums as a symbol of alliance and (mostly) male conviviality. at the time of the tannin company, all festive days, from the first of may to the visits of important politicians, culminated in the preparation of an asado. the visits of general alfredo stroessner,3 for instance, were always announced by the preparation of spectacular asados on the patio of the casado family house. however, the general’s occasional refusal to take part in the event hinted at potential conflicts with the company owners. asados thus came to signify the promise of a future political alliance or the strengthening of an existing one. in the memories of local indigenous people, for example, the first visits of colorado politicians to their settlements in the 1960s are regularly associated with the preparation of a big asado offered by the leading political candidate. for about a century, thanks to the constant availability of cattle on its own cattle farms, the carlos casado s.a. company based its tannin production and the loyalty of its workers on the continued availability of beef. in the memories of ex-workers, the number of cows slaughtered per day was used as a measure of the company’s economic wealth at a given moment in time: if in the 1970s the company slaughtered between fifteen and twenty cows per day for a population of about 10,000 people, in the last decade before the closing of the factory it only slaughtered between eight and five, a fact later interpreted as a clear sign of decline. in 1989, the hacheros (lumberjacks) of san carlos called a strike to protest deteriorating labor conditions in the logging centers. in an audio fragment recorded at the time of the strike by a salesian missionary who participated in the revolt, sislao ksiaze, a group of lumberjacks explains to a government delegate that one of their biggest concerns is the decline in the quantity of meat received weekly from the company: “before, the company gave us between eight and fifteen kilos of meat per week, abundant meat they gave us. and this is our problem: meat. we’d like to know how we’re supposed to work while eating only white rice and white pasta, and still manage to use an ax. using an ax requires a great effort” (sislao ksiaze’s personal archive, puerto casado). in their testimony, the lumberjacks highlight the connection between cow meat, work, and physical strength, and therefore their right to beef—a demand they share with other social struggles in south america (orlove 1997). the workers’ intervention is followed by a government delegate’s reply that seems to endorse the lumberjacks’ point of view, empathically explaining to the argentinean representative of the company present at the encounter that “paraguayans can’t live without meat [carne]: both human meat [la carne humana] and cows [las reces].” with this peculiar remark, the political delegate emphasizes the commonality of substance between people and cattle (they’re both made of carne), paradoxically measuring the value of workers’ bodies against those of their bovine counterparts, rather than the other way around. a symbol of political and economic power, cattle in this dialogue index class struggle (the workers’ right to beef) but also the source of life itself (in the form of flesh). your browser does not support the audio element. clip 1. conviviality around the cooking and eating of a cow’s head during a birthday party. puerto casado, winter 2016. camera and editing by the author. sagua’a as insurgent cows not all cattle showed complicity with humans’ needs and economic objectives. some of them, on the contrary, openly displayed “very unruly” (hribal 2003, 448) behaviors that defied humans’ ability to control them. recent anthropological literature has shown a growing interest in the emergence of feral beings at the crossroads between imperial/colonial projects, extractive capitalism, and damaged ecologies (swanson, lien, and ween 2018; tsing 2015; tsing et al. 2020). stories about feral beings defy the linear narratives of progress, human mastery, and civilization that characterized colonization projects, such as the one that took place in the eastern part of the paraguayan chaco. in the casado territory, a growing population of cattle inhabited the interstices of a dense network of logging centers and cattle ranches, where patches of forest functioned as “refugia” (haraway 2016) for fugitive animals. people frequently refer to these particular cows—also called cimarrónas or baguales—as alzadas, a term used to define rebellious soldiers in the context of military uprisings, and one we can translate in english as “insurgent.” these insurgent cows are called sagua’a in the guarani language. in puerto casado, even though some people bore the marks of pointy horns on their bodies, many described sagua’a as beautiful creatures with wide open eyes able to see at night. as an ex-mayor once phrased it to me, their bodies were considered strong and healthy, “just like indigenous people before they met paraguayans.” in the words of a cattle ranch owner and ex-governor of the alto paraguay region: it’s incredible! sagua’a have a different sense of smell, i think, or something like that. they’re ecological [not vaccinated]. sagua’a never had an injection, nothing, they’re forest [silvestre] animals. they were never vaccinated. and yet, they’re more beautiful than the ones we’re sanitizing every day. it’s incredible. i don’t know what makes them unique, but i’m sure they have a spectacular sense of smell. they’re in a constant state of alert, you see, as they might be attacked by other animals. but sagua’a are so beautiful [muy lindos]. they have shiny fur. they’re fat. i don’t know why. i really don’t know why. (justo fernández bauzá, interview by author, puerto casado, paraguay, february 26, 2016) far from the human beings that once domesticated them, the cattle flourished, enhancing their physical strength and sensory ability: “drought is terrible in the dry season. and yet, they know how to survive in the forest because there’s an underground fruit that retains water. the cow can smell it and find it. they call it yvy’a in guarani, which means ‘fruit of the earth.’ they also know how to find a thistle. they step on it and drink from its middle” (edoardo del río, interview by author, asunción, paraguay, january 15, 2016). although the carlos casado s.a. company invested huge sums of money to import bulls from the king ranch in texas, sagua’a were considered healthier than their racially “improved” counterparts. imported breeds were indeed the result of a selection that made their bodies particularly efficient for economic purposes, but they were also extremely dependent on men for survival, and hopelessly clumsy in their movements. as an ex-worker once pointed out to me, a cow with a very big udder could never have managed to jump a fence and run into the forest. in a way, selective breeding manipulated the bodies of cattle to make them unable to become feral. since the term race gradually came to identify only imported, improved breeds and their offspring, people would sometimes say that sagua’a had “no raza,” in the sense of “not having breed,” rather than saying they are criollas.4 like their counterparts in other parts of the world (lazo 1994), they began to reproduce on their own and adapted to the new habitat, becoming active at night and concealing themselves in daytime to hide from humans and other predators. made possible by big patches of forest close to the cattle ranches, the emergence of sagua’a was seen as a mistake by the ranch managers, something that should not have happened. drawing on a definition offered by the authors of the feral atlas (tsing et al. 2020), we can say that sagua’a are “feral” because they emerged “within human-sponsored projects but are not in human control.”5 they are feral not only because they have learned to live in the forest but also because they have escaped the logics of efficiency (the logics of the plantation) that cattle breeders’ manuals refer to as “rational cattle ranching” (ganaderia racional; see van ausdal and wilcox 2013, 78). in the south american cattle industry, feral stands in opposition to rational, suggesting a forced equivalence between rationality and domesticity. on the other hand, sagua’a elected the forest (el monte) rather than the estancias as the core of their domus (lien 2015, 7), thriving in conditions radically different from those of their domesticated counterparts. the archeologist juliette clutton-brock (1994, 27) has described domestication as breeding animals “in captivity, for purposes of subsistence or profit, in a human community that controls its breeding, its organization of territory, and its food supply” in the context of a relationship where “only humans benefit from the association.” along similar lines, tim ingold emphasized the element of “control” that characterizes this relationship, consequently framing the transition from hunting to herding as one from “trust” to “domination.” in his analysis, wild animals “are animals out of control,” and feral animals “are likened to convicts on the loose” (ingold 1994, 3). this particular way of defining domestication highlights aspects of discipline and control rather than “interspecies engagement” (tsing 2018, 245), downplaying the ability of animals to interfere with humans’ intentions to dominate and coerce. considering the domestication of salmon in norwegian industrial facilities, marianne lien (2015, 3) writes that “mutuality, uncertainty and tinkering are better terms with which to capture the productive entanglements of humans and their surroundings.” her ethnographic analysis brings to light the complexity of human-animal relationships in the context of domestication practices, showing varying degrees of mutuality and agency at work in a context of intensive farming (see also anderson et al. 2017; leach 2003). in particular, she describes the sea-based salmon farm as a temporal and fragile assemblage of beings, in a state of mutual becoming and with no clear limits between inside and outside, which she calls the “salmon domus.” building on her analysis, i propose to think about the casado territory as the domus of a variety of beings—cattle, quebracho trees, and humans among them—whose lifelines are temporarily held together by the casado company’s colonization project. the space where this project unfolds has multiple centers (the factory, the family’s manor house, the ranches, and the logging centers) and dispersed interstices: the patches of monte where sagua’a, among other beings, found a temporary and fragile space of refuge from the same colonization project that brought them there (see also richardson 2018). as descendants of domesticated animals, sagua’a simultaneously embody a residue from the past and a potentially disruptive break in linear time inside the very space of the domus. in the paraguayan chaco, and in the wider paraguayan imaginary, sagua’a occupy a third category in the dichotomy between the wild and the domesticated: that of the refusal (mcgranahan 2016) of domestication. similarly, süssekind defines bagual cattle in the pantanal region as beings that know humans but refuse to be tamed. for local people, being bagual is not a permanent state of existence but rather a certain way of relating (or refusing to relate) to humans and their domestication projects, just like taming “is a process in permanent tension with the animal’s movement towards becoming bagual” (süssekind 2016, 133). the first time i met with her at a café in asunción, milda rivarola, a famous paraguayan historian, stressed just how deeply this element of refusal had become part of a shared imaginary in paraguay. after telling her of my interest in feral cows, she looked at me intently and declared: “you know, i am a sagua’a! and as you know, they’d rather get killed than be dragged alive out of the forest.” her reaction, on the other hand, was more the provocation of a sophisticated and unconventional intellectual than a commonplace response. most people i talked to, who had grown up in the space of the city, reacted to my stories about the existence of sagua’a with incredulity or even sheer disbelief. not only did sagua’a escape the dichotomy between civilization and domestication but, by becoming feral, they also challenged the very assumption that these are irreversible processes. because they reversed domestication, sagua’a were unthinkable, “uncontainable” entities (tsing et al. 2020). sagua’a as expendable beings in puerto casado, sagua’a were real beings. so much so that the casado company decided to create teams of specialized workers tasked with hunting them down. contrary to the tannin factory, where labor was organized along rigid ethnic lines whose corresponding groups rarely communicated with one another, these teams of feral cattle hunters (sagualeros) comprised a majority of indigenous workers led by a non-indigenous one (the foreman, or capataz). in the testimonies i collected, non-indigenous sagualeros stood out as the only ones able to speak an indigenous language, in particular enxet,6 and who explicitly admitted to believing in shamanic healing practices. at least in one case, the son of a capataz married an enxet girl and went to live with her in the enxet community. though indirectly, the existence of sagua’a made it possible to blur the rigid ethnic barriers that ruled the everyday lives of people in the factory and its surrounding. in 1979, with the international demand for tannin production in steady decline, the casado company sold some of its largest cattle ranches to the montes y estancias san josé s.a. since the land for sale included patches of forest, the company decided to increase its profits by including feral cows in the counting of domesticated cattle. to be included in the deal, sagua’a had to be forced out of the forest: they used helicopters at some point … the helicopters shot firecrackers while flying over the forest, and drove the animals out of the woods and towards the open fields. once in the fields, the workers captured them. the cows went all crazy, together with tapirs and wild boars… . all the animals cried [lloraban los animales], even the wild boars cried while falling to the ground…. it was fun, really fun. a group of indigenous workers waited for them in the open fields ready to make an asado. the boys ate asado. it was pure happiness. we had all the food we wanted… . it was an incredible thing to behold [era todo un espectáculo], the helicopter noise and the firecrackers, all together. (benigno arce, interview by author, puerto casado, paraguay, march 11, 2016) since they had no owner and were considered untamable, the violence toward these sylvan animals needed no rational justification. violence toward sagua’a was likewise justified in other contexts, where the term was applied not to animals, but to humans. in everyday language, the term sagua’a is used to indicate uneducated or messy kids, or else an adult person who behaves out of control, who is considered uneducated or uncivilized. three of the past presidents of paraguay—nicanor duarte frutos, fernando armindo lugo méndez, and mario abdo benítez—were labeled sagua’a by the media during their time in office. a journalist in the newspaper la nación described the current president of paraguay, abdo benítez, as, the typical sagua’a of our political fauna. unsociable, indomitable, rough, and aloof. cattle that resist domestication. there’s no way to push him gently back into the corral [read: the political arena], he can only be brought back in by force. the colorado party thought that before sacrificing him through the rifle of an impeachment, there was still time to look for him in the forest and talk some sense into him. due to his stubbornness, though, this process implies hitting him a bit. (torres romero 2019) neither “property” nor “endangered species,” sagua’a are considered expendable beings. this is why, as thurlow craig put it, shooting outlaw cows in the chaco became a “great sport.” eugenio hermosa, the casado company’s cattle ranch manager for many years, had a special passion for hunting them down in the monte. when i met his widow, nidia hermosa, in asunción, she showed me a rifle that her late husband had ordered from france in 1979. it was the same rifle, she specified, the french commonly used in africa for big game hunting. she kept it on top of a cupboard together with the original envelope and a small supply of rompun, a powerful anesthetic that her husband used to shoot sagua’a. figure 3. nidia hermosa holding her husband’s rifle for game hunting. picture by the author, 2015. the architecture of domestication in the paraguayan chaco: señuelos as hyper-domesticated cows my wife made me and my children into people (gente). she tamed me and took me away [from the logging centers] juan benítez gonzáles, interview by author, puerto casado, paraguay, april 28, 2016 while the local elite, in an impetus to identify with their european peers in africa, anesthetized sagua’a with rompun, the company’s hired teams of sagualeros had a different technique. they would wait for the animals at night in proximity to a water source they had fenced. once a group of sagua’a got trapped inside the fence, sagualeros would stun the head of the herd by tethering the animal to a tree by its horns. when pulled by their horns, cows experience a high degree of pain, gradually losing their physical strength and ability to resist. the ex-workers use the word tambear, of uncertain etymology, to indicate this specific practice. when the animal finally reached exhaustion, the workers would tether him to another type of bull, the señuelo, through the use of a rotating tool, the cambón. your browser does not support the audio element. clip 2. eulogio ortiz (on the left, ex-cattle ranch worker of the casado company), and hito bobadilla (on the right, ex-administrative employee of the casado company) explain to the author how to use a cambón. puerto casado, winter 2016. camera and editing by the author. a cambón is a jointing mechanism in the shape of an eight where the two extremities are left free to rotate in opposite directions. each side of the cambón is tethered to a different category of cow: if one extremity is tied to a señuelo by the neck, the other is tied to a sagua’a by the horns. in this way, the señuelo acquires a structural advantage and is able to pull the sagua’a by the horns to steer him away, while the rope twirls freely without causing the animals to suffocate. in more abstract terms, the use of the cambón facilitates a specific “architecture of relationships” (anderson et al. 2017, 398) aimed at creating an imbalance of power between two beings. the señuelo (literally, bait; sinuelo in portuguese) is a particularly docile and hyper-domesticated ox trained from a young age to follow the cattlemen’s orders and walk straight. in the english language, these cattle tasked with leading their peers to the slaughterhouse are sometimes called “judas cow” (süssekind 2016, 131). their compliant behavior is obtained by separating the calf from his herd at a young age, and by using physical force to teach him to obey orders. once transformed into an obedient and loyal being, his service is rewarded for life. in the ranch, the señuelo is treated differently from the rest of the cattle. as enrique maas explained to me: “señuelos live until they die a natural death. they are regarded as equal to any other farm worker. they do the same job as any other worker, and they cannot be sold or butchered. when they get old, as a sign of gratitude, [the owner of the ranch] lets them die of natural causes. they all had names: cuello, pinto, onza, tigre, mariposa … and other names that i can’t remember” (enrique maas, interview by author, asunción, paraguay, december 2, 2016). when i visited don maas in his father’s house in asunción, he showed me the skull of a huge ox in the living room, hanging from the chimney. a picture of the same animal, cuello, while still alive, was kept in his father’s family album. figure 4. cuello’s skull in don maas’s living room. picture by the author, 2016. like sagua’a, the term señuelo works as a jointing mechanism, a category that articulates the domain of humans with that of cattle.7 its use is well exemplified in the story of josé iquebi, an ayoreo boy kidnapped in the 1960s by two bulldozer operators while they were clear-cutting the woods in the upper part of the chaco region. after they brought him to the capital city to be exploited as an attraction, josé was finally rescued by salesian missionaries and raised in puerto casado. the first picture i saw of him was in albino ortega’s family album. ortega was by then a ninety-six-year-old man, who had been jefe de personal (human resources manager) of the casado company for more than thirty years. among the numerous portraits, the picture of iquebi stood out as bearing a story of its own. it shows a young, tall indigenous boy, surrounded by missionaries, standing on what seems to be a stage. figure 5. josé iquebi posoraja in puerto casado in the 1960s. source: albino ortega. picture of the original by the author, 2015. behind the picture, a caption written in beautiful calligraphy says: “the rector major of the salesians talking to the moro indian [indio moro] already tamed [ya amansado]. / puerto casado. / father dotto. federico britez. josé. renato zigoti, 5th successor of don bosco.” one of the missionaries mentioned in the caption, father dotto, told iquebi’s story in the book misión: etnocidio, an important text denouncing the conditions of indigenous people during the stroessner dictatorship in paraguay. in the interview, the missionary explicitly refers to the ayoreo boy as a señuelo: “in 1961 josé acted as a señuelo… . he approached them [the ayoreo living in the forest] and explained that the missionaries were not soldiers, and all they wanted was to give indigenous people a better life. the ayoreo accepted. josé had served his purpose” (escobar and vysocolan 1988, 79). more similarities, beyond convincing the other ayoreo to follow him to puerto casado, can be drawn on an abstract level between the way the missionaries treated iquebi and the way señuelos are treated on the estancias. once rescued in asunción, iquebi was transferred to the puerto casado parish to receive preferential treatment from the missionaries. at the same time, he was kept isolated from the other indigenous people and had his private room in the parish, in the bell tower adjacent to the church. although some non-indigenous villagers considered this treatment a privilege, it is not clear that iquebi himself experienced it that way. in a recent autobiographical text (amarilla and iquebi posoraja 2011), iquebi retells his life story, but he noticeably omits all his years working as a señuelo for the missionaries in puerto casado, focusing instead on his capture by the bulldozer operators and on the later reunification with his ayoreo relatives. to the heart of the domus: the end of the casado era as the end of domestication in the year 2000, at a public meeting in puerto casado, the owners of the carlos casado s.a. company—all members of the casado sastre family—announced that the factory, half of the town, and its surrounding territory (500,000 hectares of land) had been sold to reverend sun myung moon’s unification church. at that meeting, a company representative, and descendant of casado himself, declared to an unprepared crowd: “from now on, you belong to a new owner” (morinigo and olmedo 2006, 33). taken by surprise, the ex-workers swiftly decided to occupy the local airstrip to prevent the casado sastre family from leaving, in an attempt to negotiate with their old bosses. newspapers accused them of kidnapping the company executives. after a government military intervention, the ex-workers were finally forced to surrender, and one year later, received orders to give their houses to the adepts of the unification church. following a period of political reorganization, the ex-workers temporarily occupied the factory and the casado sastre’s manor house (casa patronal) to reclaim their right to the town. this choice proved a significant one. as in the domus of farmed salmon (lien 2015), the limits of the domus casado were porous and constantly shifting, yet its core was easily identifiable with the factory and the family manor house. for a period of four years before the unification church retook possession of the place, the factory was managed by a cooperative and the house functioned as an alternative town hall. between 2005 and 2009, the inhabitants of puerto casado organized four marches to the paraguayan capital “for dignity and sovereignty.” they wanted to reclaim 52,000 hectares of expropriated land to develop independent economic activities through small-scale agriculture and cattle ranching. while this claim remains in dispute, some of the ex-workers now occupy a portion of land eleven kilometers from puerto casado, where they run an association of small cattle farmers. once again, cows have taken on their role as humans’ allies. when the carlos casado s.a. company announced the sale of the land and the factory in 2000, most of the non-indigenous workers were taken aback. tellingly, one ex-worker told me that casado—a hybrid entity that at once served as a family and a company—had decided to sell the town tranca cerrada (with the gate closed), an expression that indicates the selling of an estancia at a fixed price with all the livestock (in this case, the inhabitants) inside. in describing his own passive attitude during the years preceding the factory’s closure, an administrative ex-worker explained to me that casado had “domesticated” them. for nearly one century, he clarified, the company had provided the workers with basic services—a house, running water, a sewage system—making them mentally and materially dependent: “even if we had to change a lightbulb,” this was a classic example, “we [workers] would contact the logistics office [taller de urbanización] and wait for someone to do it for us.” this situation of induced dependency was not unique to puerto casado, but was a common feature of many latin american company towns in the early twentieth century (bitlloch and sormani 2012; zapata 1977). for several generations the workers of puerto casado trusted the company and its promise of civilization. at the same time, they were subject to a regime of total control, at least during the first half of the twentieth century. in those times, a company policy prohibited growing vegetables on the patio of the house or even raising small animals such as chickens or goats. the company provided all meat on a weekly basis, and even forbade private citizens to open grocery stores until the 1980s. the workers felt they had access to everything, yet they owned nothing. for instance, for more than a century, the absence of fences inside the casado territory had allowed workers to exploit the woods for small economic activities, such as hunting or wood fetching. with the arrival of the unification church, this continuous space suddenly became fragmented and inaccessible to the people. according to an ex-worker from the factory administrative sector, in the year 2000, when this land was abandoned by the casado family, the koreans [employees of the unification church] began fencing everything. that’s something i kept saying: that the people of casado were anesthetized by carlos casado. we suddenly felt as if we had nothing, because casado did everything for us. our water, our sewage, casado did everything for us. you didn’t have to lift a finger. people lived well, we could say, but they realized how useless it was [to depend on the company] when casado left. these people [the unification church] fenced everything, and we couldn’t even get firewood from the forest anymore. that’s when all problems began. (hito bobadilla, interview by author, puerto casado, paraguay, march 9, 2016, my italics) while most of the non-indigenous ex-workers met the end of the casado era with a mix of astonishment, rage, and regret, the indigenous ex-workers experienced it from a different perspective. contrary to the non-indigenous population, which began its struggle for land only after the tannin factory closed, the indigenous population had begun reclaiming land at the end of the 1970s. to strengthen their alliance, the angaité, guana, enxet, sanapana, and toba/enenhlet groups that formed the core of casado’s indigenous workforce adopted the common denomination of “maskoy” (bonifacio 2013b). in 1987, they finally obtained 30,103 hectares of land they called territorio riacho mosquito. this territory included some of casado’s best cattle ranches, such as machete vaina, which is now the name of an indigenous community settlement located at the core of the maskoy lands. the paternalism that characterized the relationship between the casado sastre family and the paraguayan workers never characterized the one between the company family and the maskoy. even when indigenous people accepted to work for the company, their commitment was never taken for granted (see also kidd 1997). in the context of cattle ranches, for instance, the administrators decided to give only a small ration of food to the workers at the end of each workday—instead of anticipating it early in the week—to prevent them from fleeing without finishing their job. in the context of the factory, on the other hand, it was well known that indigenous workers had low tolerance for being aggressively bossed around by their superiors, and they would rather leave their jobs without pay than be subject to verbal abuse: indigenous workers [in the factory] are more docile to handle, but only if they like the situation. if they don’t like it, they just leave. one by one they all leave together, in silence. the first one leaves the room, and then another one, and then one more, until the work is suspended. but i never had problems with them, because i knew how to behave. they didn’t want to be bothered, to be scolded or to be told to hurry up. they didn’t want people ordering them: “work harder!” they didn’t like it. you had to leave them in peace, free to handle things on their own. (lider olazar, interview by author, puerto casado, paraguay, june 17, 2015) after settling in territorio riacho mosquito, a decade before the factory closed, maskoy people intensified their initiation rituals. with these rituals, they sought to strengthen their alliances not only among their own different ethnic groups but also with the other-than-human beings that inhabited the bush (monte), with whom connections had been partially interrupted following casado’s colonization (bonifacio 2013a). according to rené ramirez, cacique general (general chief) during the 1980s maskoy struggle for land, sylvan beings invaded the manor house and the factory a few years before the casado sastre family sold the land and the industrial premises: it took me by surprise: a snake entered [the factory], a tatu [armadillo] appeared on the floor [of the factory]. a karaya [monkey] came inside. a crocodile came in. multitudes. i asked a man who knows [oikua’amba in guarani, which the maskoy translate to spanish as chaman], and he said: “this is coming to an end.” it was true. it ended. soon after, it ended… . it was a signal from people … [who] are forest [monte]. they came from there [the monte]. a signal … a signal. they came inside this very [factory] space. you’re not going to believe it, but let me tell you that they entered here … . what we call kure kaaguy [wild boars], four of them entered here. there were many armadillos in the factory. including orange armadillos, the small kind. one of them ran around. i saw him running around here [pointing to the factory floor]. that meant that it was all coming to an end… . who was going to believe it? only now have we come to believe. it was impossible. who would believe it? the casado company were multimillionaires. they possessed two or three planes, four trucks, two big motor boats. (rené ramirez, interview by author, puerto casado, paraguay, august 20, 2008; see also bonifacio 2009, min. 07:59) by invading the very heart of the casado company’s domesticated space, the domus casado, bush animals announced the end of domestication and the re-emergence of an untamed world that had for many years been pushed to the margins. conclusions for more than a hundred years, the tannin industry deeply modified an area of the paraguayan chaco called “the casado territory.” the introduction of cattle facilitated the colonization of this territory, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. these cattle thrived in the area to the point of escaping human control and living an autonomous life in the woods. at once allies and opponents of the colonizing project, cattle became a marker of economic and political power and the protagonists of a “moral imagination whose central object of desire is bovine” (livingston 2019, 36). in this article, i have highlighted the affective and material relationship between humans and cattle at the core of the colonization process. in light of this relationship, i have suggested temporarily abandoning colonization as a heuristic category in favor of adopting local (emic) categories—amansar, anestesiar, sagua’a, señuelo, domesticar, carne—and their related practices. doing so allows us to better understand and describe local dynamics of dispossession, domination, racialization, and class formation. the inhabitants of casado used idioms of taming and domesticating to explain an ongoing situation marked by a strong imbalance of power: if indigenous people in zeballo’s myth did not immediately reject columbus, and if the workers of casado did not claim compensation before the factory closed, it is because they had been, if we adopt the local analytical framework, tamed or domesticated. these terms are thus used in the casado territory to indicate a relationship based on trust and mutuality that was suddenly reverted and transformed into dispossession, leaving the dispossessed without enough time to react. through colonization, domestication unfolded its potential for domination in the chaco. at the same time, the domestication/colonization project produced its own subversive idioms and practices. the presence of sagua’a in the paraguayan chaco, their history as the descendants of domesticated animals, their extra-sensory ability to adapt to a new assemblage of beings, and their ability to challenge a hegemonic narrative of unilinear progress, all opened up a space for imagining the undoing, and not only refusing, of domestication. presenting domestication as the final stage of an evolutionary process constitutes but one way of defining cattle-human relationships. moreover, portraying domestication as an irreversible process acts as a “political tool” to “naturalize and justify a specific and dominant way of life” (swanson, lien, and ween 2018, 2). sagua’a have all but disappeared from the paraguayan chaco due to “rational” (van ausdal and wilcox 2013), capital-driven cattle and soy farming and their related deforestation practices. this marks a transition to new configurations of power and interspecies relations, but as sagua’a have taught us, such relations are not irreversible. abstract in the paraguayan chaco, cattle evoke images of power, prosperity, and celebration, but they also trigger one of the quickest deforestation processes in the world. the presence of cattle in the region has deep historical roots, dating back to the beginning of the colonization process, when the establishment of a double economy based on cattle ranching and the tannin industry dispossessed indigenous people of their territories. through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the carlos casado tannin company, i suggest considering domestication and ferality—and their local related idioms (amansar, anestesiar, sagua’a, señuelo, carne)—as inter-species categories crucial for understanding processes of colonization from a local perspective. in particular, i claim that practices and idioms related to the (un)domestication domain have been used to make sense of ethnic, class, and power relationships, as well as of practices of resistance. [cattle; south america; colonization; domestication; ferality] resumen en el chaco paraguayo, el ganado bovino evoca imágenes de poder, prosperidad y abundancia. pero, a la vez, es la causa de uno de los procesos de deforestación más rápidos del mundo. la presencia de ganado en la región tiene profundas raíces históricas y se remonta al principio del proceso de la colonización, cuando el establecimiento de una doble economía basada en la ganadería y la industria del tanino despojó a los pueblos indígenas de sus tierras. a través de un análisis histórico y etnográfico de la compañía taninera carlos casado s.a., propongo considerar a la domesticación y a lo asilvestrado—en sus distintas declinaciones: amansar, anestesiar, sagua’a, señuelo, carne—como categorías interespecíficas fundamentales para entender los procesos de colonización desde una perspectiva local. en particular, sostengo que las prácticas y los términos relacionados con el campo semántico de la (de)domesticación fueron utilizados para poner en escena y conceptualizar relaciones étnicas, de clase y de poder, como así también prácticas de resistencia. [ganado bovino; america del sur; colonización; domesticación; animales asilvestrados] notes acknowledgments i dedicate this article to the memory of rené ramirez. this research wouldn’t have been possible without the care and support of antonia melgarejo, amada ramirez, rita rodriguez, and their families. i am grateful to mario blaser for his precious comments on the first draft of this article, to the anonymous reviewers for making this into a better piece, and to manuel tironi for his final suggestions. i would also like to thank lia colombino for sharing with me the research process that resulted in the exhibition destiempo: dynamogram of puerto casado; glauco sanga for teaching me the importance of language; my colleagues at the vallecupa writing-up residency; michael taussig for hosting the online weekly seminar that kept my critical abilities and creativity alive during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, lisa stefanoff and todd ochoa for coordinating it; and isa and ofer for being with me in the intricacies of life. 1. ramon zeballo presented the myth for the first time during the paraguayan constituent assembly of 1991, where he participated as an indigenous people’s representative. 2. although taming and domesticating are often described in the academic literature as qualitatively different processes (clutton-brock 1994; lien 2015), my experience in the chaco is that most people used the term amansar (taming) to indicate both short-term and long-term domestication processes, while the literate elites used the term domesticar to differentiate them. 3. stroessner’s dictatorship in paraguay lasted for almost forty years, from 1954 to 1989. his political party, the colorado party, remained in power after the end of the dictatorship, and is still one of the main political parties in the country. 4. for a discussion about the shifting meanings of the term raza in colombia, as well as the word’s english translations, see also de la cadena and martinez medina 2020. 5. 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https://www.jstor.org/stable/26241137 villagra carron, rodrigo 2010 the two shamans and the owner of the cattle: alterity, storytelling, and shamanism amongst the angaité of the paraguayan chaco. asunción: centro de estudios antropológicos de la universidad católica. zapata, francisco 1977 “enclaves y sistemas de relaciones industriales en américa latina” [industrial relations enclaves and systems in latin america]. revista mexicana de sociología 39, no. 2: 719–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3539782 cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 8-35, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.02 centering black women: a black feminist critique of mainstream anthropology from the margins of an hbcu cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 404-411, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.04 centering black women: a black feminist critique of mainstream anthropology from the margins of an hbcu erica lorraine williams spelman college https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0909-2063 a memory: it is the spring of 1999, and i enter beverly guy-sheftall’s “feminist theory” class at spelman college for the first time. i’m a domestic exchange student for the semester at this historically black college for women, and this is the first women’s studies class that i’ve had the opportunity to take. in guy-sheftall’s class, i was introduced to a feminism that explicitly and unapologetically centered black women. we read words of fire: an anthology of african american feminist thought (guy-sheftall 1995) from cover to cover, as well as other texts mostly by black women and other women of color. i learned about the history of black women who had advanced feminist thought from the time of mariah stewart, anna julia cooper, and claudia jones. given that this was my introduction to feminist theory, the often repeated assertion that feminism was for “white women” never occurred to me. prior to taking this class, i had been exposed to feminism by reading people like bell hooks (1982, 1989), paula giddings (1984), audre lorde (1983, 1984), and june jordan (1981, 1992, 1998). chances are that if i had taken my first feminist theory or women’s studies class at new york university—a predominantly white institution (pwi) where i was enrolled an undergraduate student—it may not have centered black women and women of color in the same way. although hbcus (historically black colleges and universities) are often seen as marginal institutions with fewer resources and higher teaching loads for faculty, one advantage of an hbcu for women, in particular, is that one can center black women in a range of courses not explicitly about black women. this is the case not just for women’s studies classes, but for other disciplines as well. i argue that an hbcu for women offers a unique site that gives teachers the freedom to center black women in anthropology in novel and exciting ways. these colleges and universities offer a space to think about citation praxis as a political act that can be invoked not just in scholarly writing but also in teaching, service, and student mentoring. in this essay, i will give specific examples of the kinds of texts that i teach by black women authors within and beyond anthropology, and the pedagogical strategies that i engage to challenge students to re(write) anthropology from the margins. i will also elaborate on how the practice of citing black women can prove effective in service and student mentoring. ultimately, i argue that hbcus can serve as a model for other types of institutions in terms of how we approach citational politics and challenge the exclusionary anthropological canon both in the classroom and beyond. nearly a decade after my domestic exchange semester at spelman college, i returned to spelman as a tenure-track faculty member in the sociology and anthropology department. the department offers two majors: sociology and sociology and anthropology. it does not, however, offer a stand-alone anthropology major. the small size of the department, with only three anthropologists out of seven faculty members, has prevented us from being able to offer an anthropology major. that anthropology is combined with sociology at spelman also proves indicative of a larger issue—the lack of anthropology programs at hbcus. elgin klugh and angela howell (2014) point out that only 40 out of the 102 hbcus in the country offer any anthropology courses at all. moreover, with the disbanding of howard university’s program in 2013, only two institutions, spelman college and lincoln university in pennsylvania, offer degrees in anthropology (combined with sociology). and only four institutions offer a minor in anthropology: coppin state university, florida a&m university, morgan state university, and north carolina a&t university. while the underrepresentation of anthropology programs at hbcus is a persisting problem, i contend, along with my interlocutors in this colloquy, that hbcus and other minority-serving institutions (msis) offer ideal sites to think about the politics of rewriting anthropology from marginalized spaces. i try to bring the lessons that i learned from guy-sheftall’s “feminist theory” course and from my citational praxis into my own teaching at spelman college. when i design my course syllabi—whether i am teaching “introduction to anthropology,” “cross-cultural perspectives on gender and sexuality,” “feminist ethnography,” “sexual economies,” or “race and identity in latin america”—i make sure to center scholarly work by black women, women of color, and other authors with marginalized identities. so, even in an “introduction to anthropology” or “ethnographic methods” class, our students engage with work written by black women authors. they are introduced to essays from irma mcclaurin’s (2001) edited volume, black feminist anthropology: theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. they read ethnographies like aimee meredith cox’s (2015) shapeshifters: black girls and the choreography of citizenship, savannah shange’s (2019) progressive dystopia: abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in san francisco, and gloria wekker’s (2006) the politics of passion: women’s sexual culture in the afro-surinamese diaspora. they read excerpts from zora neale hurston’s (1938) tell my horse: voodoo and life in haiti and jamaica, articles on skin bleaching in ghana by jemima pierre (2008), and on african diaspora dance and religions by yvonne daniel (2005). thus, the students who take anthropology courses at spelman get a very different perspective on the field than they would get at a pwi or later in a phd program in anthropology. in our classrooms, we challenge the white male–dominated canon of anthropology, and propose a counter-canon in which black women students can see themselves reflected. this differs markedly from faye v. harrison’s (1995) reflection on how her early anthropological training did not introduce her to black anthropologists like allison davis and st. clair drake because they were “rendered invisible” within the anthropological canon. when our students participate in summer research programs or go on to pursue graduate degrees at pwis, they often share with us their dismay at having to engage with an exclusionary, white male–dominated canon. sometimes they take it for granted that black women intellectuals are at the center of ethnography, social theory, and methodologies at spelman, while they may be practically absent in much of their graduate training. as klugh and howell (2014, 6) point out, hbcus are uniquely positioned “to give voice to a number of perspectives that would add texture to the anthropological canon” due to their history, student characteristics, and overall learning environments. founded in 1881 by two baptist missionaries from massachusetts, spelman college now has a student population of 2,097, with students hailing from forty-three states in the united states and thirteen foreign countries. with tuition at just over $40,000 per year, 89 percent of our students receive some form of financial aid, and 48 percent are eligible for pell grants.1 the classroom, especially at an hbcu, is a “radical space of possibility” (hooks 1994, 12) where change, transformation, and growth can occur. it is also a critical site of anthropological knowledge production. as a black feminist anthropologist, i can teach courses that recognize black women’s “subjugated knowledges” as valuable sources of insight (mcclaurin 2001). in “introduction to anthropology,” i have students write an auto-ethnography, a hallmark of black feminist anthropology that values personal experience as an important source of knowledge. our students often use auto-ethnography later when it comes time to write their senior theses. moreover, our students often choose senior thesis topics coming from a deeply personal place, ones inspired by their personal experiences and political investments. for instance, we’ve had students write senior theses on the experiences of ethiopian refugees, children of incarcerated parents, and children of undocumented african immigrants. these represent just a few of the topics that reflect the richness and complexity of what happens when you center black women and black feminist anthropology in teaching anthropology. the notion of scholar-activism and social justice–oriented scholarship is also emphasized at spelman college, where students are encouraged to make a “choice to change the world.” in feminist theory: from margin to center, bell hooks (1984, xvii) contends that “to be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the body.” she goes on to argue that when feminist theory is produced by “privileged women who live at the center,” it “lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences” (hooks 1984, xviii). we can make a similar argument about anthropological theory when only produced by privileged people at mainstream institutions. as kimberley d. mckinson (see this colloquy) reminds us, we must remember that the margins are not just a space of lack or where minority-serving institutions are aspiring to become more like predominantly white institutions. instead, as klugh and howell (2014, 6) argue, “fostering the development of anthropology at hbcus should be seen as an integral part of a decolonizing agenda.” as i have argued elsewhere (williams 2021), anthropology must urgently move away from the mainstream canon that excludes the groundbreaking work of black women anthropologists. a. lynn bolles (2013) and faye v. harrison (1995) have written extensively about this topic. the special issue of transforming anthropology titled “celebrating our elders” (beliso de jesus 2021) as well as the 2021 special issue of feminist anthropology titled “#citeblackwomen” (davis and mulla 2021) both include several important articles on the topic. for example, in “we are not named: black women and the politics of citation in anthropology,” christen a. smith and dominique garrett-scott (2021, 19) argue that anthropology continues to relegate black women “to the intellectual margins.” they contend that black women have “been historically erased from the canon in anthropology despite conducting far-reaching ethnographic work and writing” (smith and garrett-scott 2021, 19). finally, they argue that “citing black women is a method for radically restructuring our field and making our epistemological world anew without the premise of inequality” (smith and garrett-scott 2021, 19).2 disrupting the anthropological canon is the norm at an institution like spelman college. no pushback against it occurs because it is just seen as part of what the institution and its faculty do. the fact that the majority of our department faculty are black feminists also translates into a supportive and creative space to do this kind of work. i would also argue that we must think more about interdisciplinarity in rewriting the anthropological canon. as we know, the anthropological canon includes several white male theorists from other fields as fundamental to anthropology, for example michel foucault, pierre bourdieu, antonio gramsci, and karl marx, to name just a few. we should do the same with non-anthropologist black women and other women of color scholars as well. in my advanced honors elective, “sexual economies,” we read a book by chi adanna mgbako (2016) called to live freely: sex worker activism in africa. although mgbako is a legal scholar rather than an anthropologist, her research involves documenting the activism of african sex workers across various countries. it is deeply ethnographic and makes a strong contribution to anthropology. in my first-year colloquium, “defund the police: abolition and black feminisms,” i taught are prisons obsolete? by angela davis (2011) and invisible no more: police violence against black women and women of color by andrea ritchie (2017). we must take seriously the intellectual production of black women scholars beyond anthropology, and be attentive to the insights offered by this work. my students not only enjoyed reading and learning from these texts but they also considered them particularly relevant for their concerns with social justice. these texts also allowed them to envision themselves as future scholar-activists who could do similar groundbreaking research toward the improvement of society. as a black feminist anthropologist and member of the citeblackwomen collective, i believe in the importance of engaging in the radical practice of citing black women, not just in scholarly publications and teaching but also in service and student mentoring (williams 2021). in terms of service, this can take the form of urging authors to engage with the intellectual production of black women scholars when reviewing manuscripts, or in bringing critical conversations in citational politics into conversations on the tenure and promotion committee or the faculty council. in terms of student mentoring, the engagement plays out in the texts we recommend to our students for their research, the network of scholars we help them tap into, and even the graduate programs we recommend. in much the same way that sara ahmed (2017) argues about the importance of “living a feminist life” in which all one’s actions are aligned with feminist principles, citational praxis is also something that must be lived, embraced, and advocated for in all areas of our professional lives. if we have a seat at the table, we have a duty and responsibility to bring marginalized voices into the room. near the end of our 2020 raising our voices virtual roundtable, there were two questions posted that the participants did not have time to respond to. an audience member asked, “will faculty of color be put in the position of doing additional labor to repair the curriculum?” also, the moderator asked, “how can we make the margin more central in the life of anthropology?” i will offer some thoughts about those questions here. first, faculty of color should not be put in the position of doing additional labor to repair the curriculum. as scholars and academics, we must as part of our responsibilities read and familiarize ourselves with new scholarship. second, i think that we can make the margin more central in the life of anthropology by ensuring adequate representation of faculty from hbcus and msis on panels, at conferences, in collaborations, and on grants. well-resourced, research 1 (r1) institutions can invite hbcu faculty to collaborate on grant-funded projects, and they can create summer research programs for hbcu students to broaden the pipeline of underrepresented students pursuing phds in the field. rewriting anthropology from the margins will entail thinking more about interdisciplinarity and centering the work of black women, women of color, and other marginalized scholars. abstract anthropology must urgently move away from the mainstream canon that excludes the groundbreaking work of black women anthropologists. i argue that a historically black college for women offers a unique site in which one can center black women in anthropology in novel ways. i offer specific examples of texts that i teach by black women authors within and beyond anthropology, and the pedagogical strategies i use to challenge students to re(write) anthropology from the margins. [citation; feminist anthropology; hbcus; canon] note 1. see the spelman website, https://www.spelman.edu/about-us/at-a-glance. 2. see also the #citeblackwomen collection organized by anne-maria b. makhulu and christen a. smith in cultural anthropology (2022). references ahmed, sara 2017 living a feminist life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. beliso de jesus, aisha, ed. 2021 “celebrating our elders.” special issue, transforming anthropology 29, no. 1: 1–81. bolles, lynn 2013 “telling the story straight: black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology.” transforming anthropology 21, no. 1: 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12000 cox, aimee m. 2015 shapeshifters: black girls and the choreography of citizenship. durham, n.c.: duke university press. daniel, yvonne 2005 “deciphering diaspora dances: their origin nations and belief systems.” in dancing wisdom: embodied knowledge in haitian vodou, cuban yoruba, and bahian candomblé, by yvonne daniel, 1–50. urbana: university of illinois press. davis, angela y. 2011 are prisons obsolete? new york: seven stories press. davis, dána-ain, and sameena mulla, eds. 2021 “cite black women.” special issue, feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 1–91. giddings, paula 1984 when and where i enter: the impact of race and sex in america. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press. guy-sheftall, beverly 1995 words of fire: an anthology of african american feminist thought. new york: new press. harrison, faye v. 1995 “auto-ethnographic reflections on hierarchies in anthropology.” practicing anthropology 17, no. 1–2: 48–50. https://doi.org/10.17730/praa.17.1-2.l043025073n0mp05 hooks, bell 1982 ain’t i a woman: black women and feminism. london: pluto press. 1984 feminist theory: from margin to center. boston: south end press. 1989 talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black. boston: south end press. 1994 teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. hurston, zora neale 1938 tell my horse: voodoo and life in haiti and jamaica. philadelphia, pa.: j.b. lippincott, co. jordan, june 1981 civil wars. boston: beacon press. 1992 technical difficulties: african american notes on the state of the union. new york: pantheon books. 1998 affirmative acts: political essays. new york: anchor books. klugh, elgin, and angela howell 2014 “decolonization continued: anthropology and hbcus.” anthropology news, april 15. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3502.2013.54607.x lorde, audre 1983 zami: a new spelling of my name. trumansburg, n.y.: the crossing press. 1984 sister outsider: essays and speeches. trumansburg, n.y.: the crossing press. makhulu, anne-maria, and christen smith 2022 “#citeblackwomen.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 2: 177–181. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.2.01 mcclaurin, irma, ed. 2001 black feminist anthropology: theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. mgbako, chi adanna 2016 to live freely in this world: sex worker activism in africa. new york: new york university press. pierre, jemima 2008 “‘i like your colour!’ skin bleaching and geographies of race in urban ghana.” feminist review, no. 90: 9–29. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40663936 ritchie, andrea j. 2017 invisible no more: police violence against black women and women of color. boston: beacon press. shange, savannah 2019 progressive dystopia: abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in san francisco. durham, n.c.: duke university press. smith, christen, and dominique garrett-scott 2021 “we are not named: black women and the politics of citation in anthropology.” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 18–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038 wekker, gloria 2006 the politics of passion: women’s sexual culture in the afro-surinamese diaspora. new york: columbia university press. williams, erica l. 2021 “black girl abroad: an autoethnography of travel and the need to cite black women in anthropology.” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 143–54. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12041 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 404-411, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.04 vengeful animals, involuntary mourning, and the ethics of ndyuka autonomy cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 1, pp. 138-165, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.06 vengeful animals, involuntary mourning, and the ethics of ndyuka autonomy stuart earle strange yale-nus college https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1957-5387 this essay considers the connections among mourning, human autonomy, and interspecies responsibility. to do so, it turns to the involuntariness of mourning and the demands that grief makes on how relationships between humans and animals are witnessed. starting from judith butler’s (2004, 34) proposition that “if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life,” i focus on kunu (avenging spirits) who haunt ndyuka maroons inhabiting the caribbean country of suriname to ask what the spectral vengeance of animals reveals about grief and accountability. relations with kunu, i argue, illustrate the ways in which nonhuman lives become grievable, but also how mourning reveals a ndyuka ethics of autonomy, with important implications for what responsibility to others really means within an expansively relational reality defined by mortality. as the links between mass extinction and plantation capitalism become ever more incontestable (tsing 2012), it is a necessary anthropological task to examine how people like ndyukas—themselves historic refugees from the plantation system—have fashioned ways of confronting nonhuman suffering and dying. such an analysis, however, calls for a clear-eyed acknowledgment that other paradigms of responsibility to nonhumans are not without their own complex and telling contradictions. nevertheless, how people are moved from their attempts to remain ethically distinct from other life-forms to mourning discrete animal deaths remains a vital question amid our present global crisis of biodiversity. for many ndyukas, recognizing this interdependence with other sentient beings marks the decisive first principle of human autonomy, and how it can be secured in a world saturated by death and exploitation. mourning, grief, and the politics of death perhaps no other phenomenon of human life so insistently exposes the total and consuming intensity of our interdependence as mourning (butler 2004; briggs 2014; mueggler 2017). as both the communicative expression of grief and the rituals that strive to confront and contain it (freud 1957; hertz 1960), mourning captures how every aspect of our existence is caught up in the lives of others such that we “live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths” (sahlins 2013, 28). when we mourn, we are taken over by the completeness of particular deaths and collapse into the finitude of shared lives that must go on despite the absence of precisely those who made this sharing meaningful. whether stoic or hysterical, grief expands “ordinary understandings of the self and its possible social relations” (dave 2014, 434), underscoring our irrevocable relationality with others. animal studies and multispecies ethnography have embraced mourning and grief to demonstrate yet another way in which affective sociality is widely shared (weil 2012; parreñas 2018). elephants who return to the remains of fellows and crows who caw sorrowfully for deceased mates are just some of the subjects whose grief has been invoked to show humanity’s unity with the rest of the animal world (king 2014; van dooren 2014). because it scrubs away persistent anthropocentricism, acknowledging nonhuman grief enables humans to accept animal subjectivity and “mourn with” animals “for some of the many losses of life and diversity within our shared world” (van dooren 2014, 129) in a time of anthropogenic mass extinction. this embrace of animal mourning indicates more than a belated realization of common emotional faculties. it is also a rather pointed riposte to how euro-american thought has hoarded awareness of death for humans so as to limit accountability to other species. this attitude becomes apparent in everyday indifference to practices like industrial animal slaughter (blanchette 2018) and forms part of a long history stemming from both aristotelean philosophy and christian theology of treating nonhuman animals as “outside the terms of moral reference” (thomas 1983, 148). for twentieth-century philosophers like martin heidegger, humans could thus still be the only animals who “experience death as death” (quoted in weil 2012, 101), while poets such as rainer maria rilke (2000, 47) could describe animals as being “free from death.” in this tradition animals are said to never respond to their mortality, only to react to it (derrida 2008). denied knowledge of their own deaths, animals are thereby condemned to exist outside the responsibilities to self and other that constitute the central existential drama of human life, shorn of relationality and rendered “killable” at the hands of uniquely self-aware humans (thomas 1983; haraway 2007, 105; weil 2012). the “killability” of animals has found further philosophical justification in dominant euro-american assumptions that political authority entails both the right to put others to death and to erase any claims that those dead may have on the living (foucault 1977; derrida 1994). these assumptions permit modern states and property owners to sever all relations of responsibility to those killed—whether citizens, enemy combatants, or other species—when they are legally defined as either threats, possessions, or sustenance. imagining the sovereign human/euro-american subject as autonomous from any ethical obligation to animal and social others removes those so othered from social relations in a way that their abuse, suffering, and death need never be mourned (wynter 1994; kim 2015). for ndyukas who are pursued by the avenging spirits known as kunu, the above presuppositions are unthinkable. animal kunu, the subject of this article, terrorize those to whom they attribute their unjust deaths, thereby forcing ndyukas to recognize that humans are neither uniquely aware of death nor capable of exerting the “control over mortality” (mbembe 2003, 12) at the heart of dominant euro-american political-economic practice. as vengeful ghosts who return to witness their own tragic deaths and to compel those whom they hold responsible to mourn alongside them, kunu reveal that, because every death creates inescapable obligations, killing marks the beginning of relatedness for ndyukas, rather than its end. the forms of mourning and accountability created by death—whether human or nonhuman—are the basis of ndyuka politics. for ndyukas, the primary political concern is the descent group and the shared “social vulnerability” (butler 2004, 22) to death that kinship imposes. divided into matrilineages and clans, ndyuka society embeds persons in large extended families and multiple generations of relatives, and people are seemingly forever in collective mourning for the recently deceased. traditional ndyuka political leaders derive their authority not from deciding who lives or dies but from managing relations with the dead through divination, complex funeral rites, and periods of ritual grieving that last many months (thoden van velzen and van wetering 2004; parris 2011). as curses that implicate an entire collectivity, kunu are central protagonists in lineage-wide “cults of affliction” (turner 1981) that provide explanations for why people suffer and die when and how they do (evans-pritchard 1937). by tying every human death to the failure of the deceased’s kin group to cooperatively mourn those they have wronged, kunu instigate the matrilineal solidarity that is the regnant principle of ndyuka political kinship. kunu thus expand relatedness beyond the kin group and compel ndyukas to recognize their shared culpability for acts of violence committed by their relatives (thoden van velzen 1966; price 1973; strange 2018). this notion sutures the kin of human killers to the kin of those they kill, establishing relations of involuntary mourning with previously unconnected entities. in a context in which almost every facet of sociality is inflected by mourning, autonomy—by which i mean the freedom to define one’s own future relationships without interference—implies something different from the individual or national self-sovereignty emphasized in prevailing euro-american thought. because kunu enforce collective responsibility to others—including to other species—ndyuka notions of autonomy are premised on the inescapability of accountability. to be autonomous means to know how to respectfully anticipate otherwise inseverable relations of mourning for those to whom no preexisting responsibility exists. ndyuka autonomy derives from understanding that every death has repercussions that impose greater interconnectedness. such autonomy is irreducibly relational, achieved by the preemptive acknowledgment that others have a right to exist where they are and on their own terms (pires 2019). failing to do so can only result in kunu forcing whole descent groups to involuntarily suffer and mourn with them. as the historical epicenter of the colonial capitalist plantation complex, the caribbean has been especially scarred by the “necropolitics” (mbembe 2003) of european domination premised on animalizing racialized and enslaved africans and native americans (williams 1994; brown 2008). as adroitly highlighted by bénédicte boisseron (2018), this history makes the caribbean critical for understanding the intertwined development of human, animal, and ecological exploitation under white supremacy and plantation capitalism. it also makes the alternative ways of conceptualizing and interacting with animals and the environment developed by caribbean peoples particularly significant—a topic which has seen little empirical examination. as an african caribbean people whose moral consciousness is filtered through ancestral enslavement, ndyukas mourn animals within an alternative environmental ethics of mutual autonomy. though this ethics is indebted to an african past deeper than colonialism, it nevertheless runs counter to the denial of relatedness central to the colonial plantation capitalism from which ndyuka ancestors freed themselves. ndyuka ethics is “haunted” (derrida 1994, 2008; wirtz 2018) by the scope of human responsibility to other beings and illustrates why, as butler (2004, 21) argues, mourning involves “submitting to a transformation . . . the full result of which one cannot know in advance.” many ndyukas certainly understand themselves as “becoming with” (haraway 2007; dave 2014) the animals with and from whom they live. nonetheless, they resist this becoming. people work hard to maintain a clear, if ultimately porous, boundary between themselves and the animals with whom they share their rain forest society. it is these boundaries that transform when exposed to the ethical imperative of an animal’s mournful rage at its own death. kunu and the ndyuka nation ndyukas are one of the many ethnic groups inhabiting suriname, a small postcolonial country with a population of roughly 600,000 on the atlantic coast of northeastern south america. as members of one of suriname’s six maroon nations, ndyukas descend from enslaved africans who escaped from dutch colonial sugar plantations in the eighteenth century to found independent and distinctively african american communities in suriname’s immense neotropical forests, swamps, and savannahs (moomou 2004; parris 2011; thoden van velzen and hoogbergen 2011; cunha 2018). throughout 250 years of self-rule, ndyukas have primarily relied on swidden cassava agriculture, foraging, and hunting to sustain themselves in their adopted rain forest homeland. more recently, however, many ndyukas have been forced to leave their ancestral villages to pursue waged labor in suriname’s multiethnic capital and only city, paramaribo, or mining and logging in the interior. although their lives are increasingly urbanized, ndyukas retain a unique relationship with the forests that sheltered their ancestors and the animals and plants that reside there. whether at parties in urban ndyuka squatter settlements, or while hunting and gardening near rain forest villages, kunu were an inescapable, if whispered, presence throughout the twenty-five months of cumulative ethnographic fieldwork i conducted between 2007 and 2013 and a month-long visit in 2018. ndyukas are both reluctant to talk about kunu—for fear of inciting them—and constantly doing so. though human ghosts are the most prevalent and socially impactful category of kunu, trees, mammals, reptiles, and birds all have at least the potential to spawn avenging specters. whatever their species, and whether in retaliation for intentional or inadvertent deaths, kunu inflict their fury on those whom they blame for their premature demise. da gali, the elderly leader of a village in the ndyuka heartland, described the vengeance attributed to a kunu after an act of unprovoked violence that occurred at one of the many small goldmines that litter ndyuka territory: a couple of men saw a large boa [dagwe]. five men then came to shoot it. the first shot high, because he realized the dangers of killing such a snake. but the other four men didn’t think anything of killing it, and each shot at it . . . until it died. all four of them are dead now. one hanged himself. the next man died when his plane caught fire and exploded, killing all aboard. another turned into an enormous snake so that everyone fled from him. the remorse he felt after murdering the snake led him to kill himself by becoming a snake. the last man went crazy and shot himself. but the man who [intentionally] missed, he is still alive. so, you see, constrictor kunu aren’t something to make a joke of; they’ll kill you! da gali’s story highlights the power of kunu to wreak havoc on the lives of their human killers. the four men directly implicated in the death of the constrictor die violently. only the fifth, who played along but refrained from actually hurting the animal, remains unscathed. in narratives like da gali’s, we see how murdering a snake who intended them no harm can literally transform killers into victims. this is the hallmark of kunu. while da gali described an instance of a kunu directly targeting its killers, more commonly the misfortunes in which kunu manifest themselves are based in cruelties obscured by time and distance and require divination to be wrenched into collective awareness. this holds particularly true when kunu target members of the killer’s matrilineal (and, occasionally, patrilineal) family. a story told by sandra, a middle-aged housecleaner in paramaribo, at the end of a long day of hard work exemplifies this: a woman from the village of tabiki wanted to take out some clothing she kept in a trunk in preparation for a dance. when she opened the trunk, she found a boa constrictor inside. she cried out and her relatives came and removed the snake and placed it in the river at the base of some rapids where it swam away downstream. when the woman woke up the next morning, she found [what she took for the same] snake coiled in the rafters of her house. she repeated her call for her kinsfolk to help her. there happened to be a shaman [papa obiyaman] present who knew about these things. he told her that the snake was there for a reason—otherwise it would not have returned to her house so quickly. the shaman then divined what the snake wanted. it transpired that the woman’s deceased mother had killed the snake in her garden, causing it to suffer greatly. when the mother died, the snake’s vengeance fell on her daughter. [after the divination the shaman] prepared everything and removed the snake to the place where it had been wronged by the woman’s mother. there they prayed and prayed. they tried many different things to console the ghosts of the snakes that the woman’s mother had burned to death in her garden and to whom they now gave proper funerals. since that time, no snake has come to make demands of the woman or her family. figure 1. preparing an effigy of a snake kunu in preparation for divination. photo by stuart earle strange. in this anecdote, the snake kunu appears to warn the village woman and her kin that they would face severe retribution—and even annihilation—if they continued to ignore transgressions committed by the woman’s mother against it and its kind many years earlier. regardless of their ignorance of the wrongdoing, as relations of the transgressor, all were bound to the snake and needed to divine the source of this relationship to avoid becoming casualties of its anger. according to sandra, the purity of the kunu’s mournful rage qualified it to be both witness and judge of the woman’s matriline’s common guilt for neglecting to restrain her mother from her act of disrespect. the only amelioration for this rage was to mourn alongside the ghost that dispatched its living relatives as warnings and to extend to it the funerary grief that its violent death had denied to it and its family. writing about animal rights in india, naisargi n. dave (2014, 442) has observed that “the witness of violence is only a witness because she survives it—because she has witnessed, in fact, she has an obligation to live.” kunu exemplify this directive and carry it beyond death to make the obligation to persistently testify to past injustices an elementary social principle. in this way, kunu ricochet from unwarranted violence to force responsibility onto ndyukas. this culpability warrants kunu to perpetually revisit the event of their suffering on the perpetrator’s lineage. unless placated through rites in which the guilty matriline confesses their collective culpability—such as the efforts described by sandra to mollify the snake—kunu will dedicate themselves to that matriline’s extermination, something vividly captured by a friend’s dream in which he saw his family’s kunu in the shape of a large man crushing his lineage as so many palm fruits in a mortar. once corporately recognized through offerings and supplications, kunu do not go away but remain tutelary spirits of the lineage they afflict. in this role kunu surveil the lineage to make sure that its members show them the proper respect, and the kunu intervene through human mediums to impose resolutions to familial conflicts that threaten the lineage’s ritual ability to perduringly express its collective guilt. because a lineage’s kunu are the most important guarantors of its long-term solidarity, these spirit tormenters become implanted in the lineage’s genealogical endurance. the matriline can only maintain itself into the future as a cohesive entity through fear of the endless retributions that kunu threaten. this continuity, however, implies the eternal and involuntary return of the grief of others that the family caused and desperately hopes to be rid of. lashed to the fate of the family by its unappeasable wrath, the kunu oversees the enforcement of cooperative contrition among those who have wronged it. this establishes an enduring asymmetry that grants the kunu’s kin power over the extended family of the kunu’s killer. thus licensed, kunu install themselves in the lives and deaths of those who have victimized them for what many of the ndyukas i spoke to described as “generations and generations without end.” in taking their revenge, kunu embody a characteristically ndyuka ethics founded on mutual recognition (libi makandii)—the principle that others should not only be recognized as volitional beings with intrinsic dignity like oneself but also as instantiations of the social-metaphysical relations that imbue them with this volition and self-integrity. this is how da john, my middle-aged research assistant who was raised in a traditional village and now works as a government bureaucrat in paramaribo, explained this value with reference to constrictors: if i see a constrictor i won’t kill it because it hasn’t done anything to me. but when it gives me difficulties, like if it catches animals that i’ve raised—say, a dog or some chickens—i will kill it because it has sought me out to make trouble for me. a constrictor that i’ve killed in defense won’t become a kunu. but if i were to kill it for no reason, then it will become a kunu for me, and for my children and their children. by this account moral flourishing means responsibly conceding subjective differences and letting others and those they care for respectfully alone. kunu’s collective vengeance is appropriate because, in selfishly killing someone else, a murderer violates the mutuality of this recognition. such infringements on the independence of others undermine the “relational autonomy” (mackenzie 2008)—the self-determination that comes with awareness of how the self is inosculated from multiple interrelations with others—that defines ndyuka persons and imbues them with agential cohesiveness. ndyukas understand persons to be bounded multiplicities (strange 2016). like the lineages that they compose, ndyuka persons are simultaneously singular and made up of a collective of inherited agents, both living and dead. a unique aggregate of ancestral and tutelary spirits is therefore present in each person’s thoughts, feelings, agency, and dispositions (for other caribbean examples, see espírito santo 2015; wekker 2006). every person is distinct because no two people are made from the same overlap of these relations. the peculiarity of each person’s relational matrix encourages them to seek autonomous social influence and respect—often through rituals that minimize their vulnerability to new relations beyond those that either already define them or which they actively choose, like a spouse. this notion of personhood applies to nonhumans as well. a snake, like a human or a spirit, while singular, is therefore also multiple—individual snakes stand for the whole of their kind in a given territory. as happened to the tabiki villager, when one snake is killed, it therefore returns to testify through its conspecifics. in this way, all persons embody specific genealogies rooted in particular territories. history and place are largely identical for ndyukas, with lineal identities founded on claims of inalienable residence in a definite area that stem from ancestral transgression against the spirits who reside there. if an outsider trespasses on a lineage’s land, any member of the resident lineage may suffer retribution. ndyuka theories of personal and lineal autonomy accordingly draw no hard distinction between individual and collective. particular places and people reveal histories of relatedness that entail further relations. to interact with another person—whether human, animal, or plant—is to simultaneously engage with the whole history of that person’s family, lineage, clan, and territory. correspondingly, every place denotes all the possible residents who have lived there in the past and present and who consequently have a right to remain there unmolested into the future. to deny another’s right to this autonomous existence is to also repudiate all those who are co-implicated in their presence. by dragging whole lineages into involuntary mourning, kunu remind discretely embodied ndyuka subjects that although personal autonomy is desirable it is always contingent on first recognizing the independence of others. in this regard, the ethics of kunu emphatically dissents from the necropolitics of the racial capitalist enslavement from which ndyuka ancestors liberated themselves. no living person has the right to decide the value of another’s life or death—something very different from the dominant assumptions of the euro-american political-economic tradition. rather than treat others as means to an end, in almost kantian fashion, a person must try and see themselves from the standpoint of the intrinsic dignity with which all persons are imbued by virtue of their being collectives composed of bundled ancestral, spirit, and kin relations. acknowledging this dignity is what creates the “respectful” relational distance that upholds personal and collective autonomy within such an interdependent reality (see also keane 2014). violating another’s autonomy is what inflicts the aggrievement that warrants them to return from the dead as kunu. as the shaman da mangwa described to me, once killed, infuriated future kunu wander the halls of god’s heavenly bureaucracy pounding on doors until they make such abject nuisances of themselves that they are granted the right to revenge. in this way, kunu make the enraged grief that renato rosaldo (1993) described as the motivation for ilongot headhunting in the philippines into a basic principle of ndyuka sociality. according to da john, “kunu come back to kill [their killer’s] descendants so as to make [the killer’s] own family feel the same grief that the kunu’s family felt. the same loss that the kunu’s family experienced, the feeling of emptiness that his family feels, is what the kunu wants to make his killer’s family feel as well.” kunu are not merely infuriated by their own deaths but also maddened at the festering social wound inflicted by having been wrenched from their many relations. as personifications of the unbearable urge of the aggrieved to strike back, kunu return to the world in patterns of death and misery that are supposed to push their targets to experience the kunu’s own pain and rage. kunu accordingly abolish any distinction between the subject and object of mourning and compel everyone involved, however tenuously, to experience the socially constitutive power of grief. such uncontrollable grief constitutes an unavoidable facet of ndyuka mourning. funerals dominate ndyuka social life and involve large-scale coordination among family members and considerable financial expense over many months. at funerals—of which i attended at least twenty during fieldwork—it is not uncommon to see people of all ages collapse sobbing on the ground while more distant relations fight to restrain them from upsetting the coffin or dragging down the wailing mourners who accompany the corpse to the grave. but unlike living mourners—whose emotion is exposed so that they may eventually move beyond their debilitating grief—kunu work to make sorrow perpetual and inheritable. against the urge to bury historical injustices, kunu unshakably stitch contemporary suffering to past offenses and force them to be collectively mourned. in coming back, kunu secure a place of moral objectivity exclusively grounded in transpersonal subjective suffering. the event of their death is the emotion of a spirit’s moral outrage at the failure of others to recognize their intrinsic autonomy. the intensity of this vested interest reifies the spirit’s anger into an immanent ontological truth, a grief that must be felt by others. the divination and mediumship that animate a kunu’s testimony therefore prove critical to ndyuka “political subjectification,” and kunu comprise the key “ordeal of truth” to which all ndyukas are submitted (fassin 2008, 533). for many ndyukas, the witness offered by kunu divulges the ultimate moral and epistemic insufficiency of living humans. kunu are the truth that induces otherwise grudging humans into proper recognition of the reality that their ostensibly autonomous agency is contingent on their family’s collective responsibility for past injustices. the revenge of animals animals (meti) occupy a complicated place in ndyuka imaginations. many ndyukas regard animals as simply “other than human persons” (hallowell 1960). given that ndyukas are quick to revile humans as “evil” (ogíi), what this shared personhood implies is open to interpretation. some people take a modified “perspectival” (viveiros de castro 2012) stance and feel that animals consider themselves superior to humans in the same way that humans feel themselves to be better than animals; hunters and miners even describe sites in the forest where jaguars or peccaries concoct magical baths (obiya)—the main ndyuka technology of ritual power—to aid in their struggles against both humans and each other. others denigrate animals as “stupid,” and comparisons with animals are potent insults. there is general consensus, however, that animals possess their own languages (which some elders are reputed to have understood in the past), are ensouled, and live in societies similar to those of ndyukas themselves. despite the controversies, ndyukas acknowledge that humans and animals share a common moral universe in which power is always laden with unwanted relations with those who fall victim to it. when representatives of the surinamese government approached the previous ndyuka paramount chief, gazon matodya, about damming the tapanahoni river upstream from the ndyuka homeland, he reportedly asked them to get the permission of all the animals and plants in the area. inquiring what right the state had to destroy the homes of other beings without their consent, da gazon made his fear of the vengeance incited by such mass nonhuman death the centerpiece of his opposition. any number of nonhumans might do harm as a result of such infringements on the due respect that is either owed to them or to a spirit that employs them as its “vehicle.” family members who have deformities inflicted by animals—such as a man described by his kin as having the face of a caiman (caiman crocodilus) illicitly shot by his father—are often used to illustrate these dangers. such resemblances are regarded as evidence that, even if often only posthumously, animals are able to testify to their belonging within a mutual multispecies ethics. this ethics is based on the distinction between forest and village. beyond the village lies a parallel forest zone that, while having the same generic “laws” (weiti) as ndyuka settlements, belongs to nonhuman others with divergent interests. unlike the philosopher val plumwood’s (2012) surprise at her near demise in the jaws of a crocodile, most ndyukas accept that they might always become another creature’s meat when they enter territory not their own. it is therefore both true that humans should never harm certain animals and that they might very well feel driven to do so. though they may be persons, in a society traditionally without domesticated animals other than dogs and chickens, most animals are wild and viewed as either threats or food. these identities are also moral positions defined by the animal’s subjective autonomy from human beings. da yomoi, a captain in the ndyuka village where i lived, has furrowed scars across his scalp from a childhood jaguar attack. the jaguar had da yomoi’s head firmly in his jaws when his father rescued him. confronting the jaguar, yomoi’s father dared him to try himself against a more evenly matched opponent. dropping the boy, the jaguar pounced but was shot down with a magically medicated shotgun shell. da yomoi’s story elucidates that a transspecies commitment to respect is an ethical precondition that ripples across the whole “society of nature” (descola 1996). though it is perfectly in the character of jaguars to eat young children, ndyuka expectations about interpersonal competition mean that for jaguars, as for humans, an easy meal cannot compete with a chance to display superior skill against a formidable opponent. such encounters entail risks that position humans and animals within a conjoint understanding of the wider relational implications of violence. as already described, to legitimately execute a kunu’s mission, the aggrieved victim must be a blameless casualty of another’s unbridled aggression. kunu calculate the degree to which violence is rash or responsible. such considerations mean that, while many kinds of animals can rebuke humans who disrespect them, not every animal can become a kunu. dangerous animals like poisonous snakes or jaguars are ruled out from transforming into kunu. while some people hold that it is possible to incite reprisal by killing an unfairly vulnerable jaguar, because jaguars eat humans, it is more customarily held that humans have a preemptive right to defend themselves. like murderers, animals that attack humans neutralize any entitlement to posthumous revenge. kunu animals are also distinguished from non-kunu animals by whether or not they are considered legitimate game. a creature that ndyuka people eat should not become a kunu. the hunter ba michel maintained that, since he survived by consuming them, he did not need to respect any animal that he hunted. just as a human eaten by a jaguar will not become the jaguar’s kunu, because humans are carnivorous, they cannot have abiding ethical relations with prey on whom they subsist. others, however, disputed the scope of this rule. da mangwa told me about how a pregnant spider monkey (kwata; ateles paniscus) looked at him imploringly and pointed at her stomach to stop him from shooting her. although spider monkeys are food, according to da mangwa, killing the pregnant monkey would have transformed her into his kunu because it disrespected her species’ right to intergenerational continuity. mutual respect is clearest in the case of the two kinds of animals consistently thought to become kunu—dogs and constrictor snakes. most ndyukas imagine dogs chiefly as collaborators in hunting. dog and hunter rely on each other. chasing dangerous quarry through near-impassable forests where visibility rarely extends beyond the nearest tree requires trust. the abrogation of this trust is the reason why dogs transmogrify into kunu. the very domesticity of dogs, the way in which people live with them in villages, train them, and treat them with powerful proprietary hunting magic, makes them intimates and impels a lasting interdependence. dogs look back as individualized beings with names and identities enmeshed in reciprocal acts of care. like all kunu, vengeful dog spirits result from unexpected violence—especially when committed by a dog’s caretaker. such betrayals demand redress and authorize dogs, above all other animals, to return as ferocious witnesses to human treachery. although disputed, a number of people told me that the same applies to other pets such as monkeys and macaws. figure 2. ba michel’s hunting dogs. photo by stuart earle strange. expanding humanizing care to an otherwise killable animal brings it incontestably within the ethical prescriptions of mutuality over which kunu menace like thunderclouds. the snakes that become kunu are altogether different. visibly unlike pet mammals and birds, snakes are thought of with horror and assiduously avoided. people even refuse to look at them; da robby, an expert mortuary ritualist, described his visceral fear of constrictors, the sight of which causes his “body to tremble” and his mind to run wild with thoughts about what he might have done to deserve the snake’s hostility. there are two categories of snake that become kunu, both of which are constrictors: boas (dagwe/papa; constrictor constrictor) and anacondas (fodu/mboma; eunectes murinus). these are commonly found in the many streams and large rivers that crisscross suriname’s rain forests and savannahs. anacondas are almost exclusively aquatic; boas move between trees, waterways, and the forest floor and especially like to nestle into other animals’ burrows. while theoretically dangerous, constrictors normally show no interest in humans. considering their impressive sizes—up to three meters for boas, as large as five meters for anacondas—these snakes are unique in occupying the forest of ndyuka territory without presenting an immediate physical threat. their stolidness in the face of human encroachment makes them unsettling witnesses to the independent agency of the land. this attribute critically determines how ndyukas handle them. in the words of da john: if a snake in the forest blocks my path, i’ll look for a way around it. but if i see the snake in my garden, i’ll speak respectfully to it until it goes. . . . if the snake doesn’t go after being spoken to, i’ll cut a stalk and whip it while i explain myself until the snake has entered the forest and i can stop because the forest is the country that god made for snakes. if i’m clearing a garden, it is a different matter. in that case, before i cut anything, i prepare an herbal formula in a calabash and wash the ground with it. this is only to remove the beings that live in that place. before you can do this, you need to know what sort of entities reside there so that you can invoke them and ask their pardon for taking their home. if a snake comes after you’ve already planted, then you must remind it that you’ve already made a deal with it to leave. if it continues to return, then you can respectfully drive it into the forest. addressing the snake affirms that it is a moral subject who deserves respect. it also enables humans to negotiate with animals in ways that may not so subtly coax them beyond the boundary of human relations. as described in da john’s account of gently whipping a stubborn snake, such negotiations often prove coercive and assume that humans have a valid and ever-expanding prerogative to plant, hunt, or mine wherever opportunities arise. though many locations are ruled out for human use by the presence of specific trees or landscape features, animals can nonetheless be induced to give up their rights in favor of human interests. animal kunu, however, contest the boundlessness of such human self-interest. by furiously hijacking a lineage’s collective future, animal kunu impose restraints on human agency and punish its thoughtless excesses. as seen in sandra’s story about the tabiki village woman recounted earlier, most constrictor kunu are casualties of the day-to-day practices of ndyuka agriculture, which requires that small plots of cleared forest first be burned to infuse the rather poor tropical soil with needed nutrients. these fires and other disturbances like felling trees create the majority of serpent kunu. their vengeance, in turn, reminds humans that the land they use is never entirely their own and that they must never take access to its wealth for granted. figure 3. consulting a carry oracle of a snake kunu. photo by stuart earle strange. the ubiquity of such accidental deaths makes constrictors one of the most common possessing spirits, especially for women, who do most of the agricultural labor. though a gardener might later find a tattered snake skin or some charred bones, it is more likely that, as seen with the tabiki villager, a snake’s death is only retroactively divined. the frequency of such discoveries makes snakes a powerful genus of ndyuka spirits—an influence indicated by the fact that at least three of the major oracular deities with jurisdiction over the whole ndyuka nation are imagined to assume a serpent form. indeed, as the presiding spirits of places (goonmama), constrictors can even vengefully cause the conception of human children, and when properly propitiated for trespasses against them, bestow health and good fortune. figure 4. shrine for a place’s goonmama spirit. photo by stuart earle strange. constrictors are in other ways also more in keeping with ndyuka notions of spirits than most other animal kunu. because ndyuka families and selves are understood as literally made of a diverse array of ancestrally mediated spirits, their containment of these manifold agencies is considered involuntary. as with snakes, people strive to keep their distance from spirits, and it is only through mishap that spirits impress themselves onto living humans. as da john emphasized, encountering a snake or spirit outside its domain constitutes a stern warning: if you see a constrictor in your house, then you should call a papaobiyaman to come and remove the snake for you. afterward, he will purify your home and divine where you offended the snake. this is because it isn’t for nothing that the snake has come to your house. after they have caught the snake, they’ll pray and tell it that it is within its rights, that it shouldn’t be offended, and that it should change its course of action, because any offense that was caused was purely accidental. ndyukas counter the involuntary relation demanded by a deceased snake with the inadvertency of the offense against it. by disclaiming that selfish intentions and emotions of the sort that ruin human social relations played any part in their death, ndyukas attempt to soothe animals out of their lives. as in peter strawson’s (1962) discussion of the moral gulf that divides intentionally stepping on someone’s foot from accidentally doing so, ndyukas are at pains to redefine their actions as unwitting and to thereby escape the inseverable familiarity with kunu generated by actively wanting to harm others. the differences in the intimacy of the violence that turns dogs and constrictors into kunu highlights the contrast between them. the faithful dog, already familiar, transmogrifies into a wrathful kunu when treated as though it were mere meat or a dangerous forest animal and is inconsiderately killed. conversely, it is the self-evident distance of constrictors from village life, the effortlessness with which they blend into and command their rain forest habitat, that turns the alien snake into an intimate kunu. while dogs resemble humans in their sociability, constrictors are solitary and either avoid humans or seek to scare them away. dogs display evident intersubjectivity; snakes, an apparently impenetrable otherness. the dependable and indispensable domestic dog and the strange jungle-dwelling snake therefore occupy opposed poles of ndyuka sociality. yet both animals are nonetheless defined by their infiltrations of the other’s domain: dogs aggressively pursue game through even the most forbidding bush; constrictors enter into villages to warn and chastise humans for their disrespect of the forest’s independence. ndyukas stress these clear dissimilarities and yet arrive at similar conclusions about these species’ propensities to punish humans for failing to consider their responsibilities to them as autonomous beings with dignity all their own. mutuality and the limits of autonomy by demonstrating that responding to others as autonomous subjects offers the best means of avoiding future grief, constrictors and dogs analogously encapsulate the ndyuka ethics of autonomy. to willfully infringe on another’s due right to exist without acknowledging them forces the animal (or human) so wronged to become a kunu. this means that people have no option but to incessantly strive to assuage those whom they have mistreated by anticipating their discontent. da labi gazon, an elderly miner who resides in the city between months-long stints of laboring in the goldmines, illustrated this with a story: if i see a boa constrictor, i won’t kill it, but will instead look for another route around it. because that is the snake’s country there; i won’t go looking for problems with it. another man and i went to the forest. there we spotted an agouti [dasyprocta leporine]. . . . the agouti squealed and ran off, and we decided that we would catch it. [we agreed] that i should walk on one side of a creek, and the other man would walk on the other side, and then we would shoot [the agouti]. i walked along the creek so that the agouti wouldn’t hear my footsteps. i walked until i saw one very large old tree that had fallen across the creek and had sagged in the middle in conformity with the creek’s banks. i thought to myself that i would use the tree to cross the creek and gain a good vantage from which to shoot the agouti. i walked three meters until i reached the place where i would begin to climb the tree. it was then that i saw the colors. it wasn’t a tree at all but an enormous snake! i went back and cried out to the other man that he should hurry over. when he arrived, i told him to look carefully at the tree. when he realized that it was a snake, he jumped back with fear, exclaiming about how large the snake was. i said, yes, dagwe snakes can get very big. because we were speaking about her, the snake understood and began to slither forward until she was entirely in the middle of the stream. there she completely submerged herself, “gbolong!” agitating the leaf-littered waters until they swelled up high . . . when you see something like that then you just know that something is there in that place.  the other man and i talked. we decided to continue our hunt because the snake had obstructed the agouti’s path. the other man began to talk [to the snake], saying that, with a little more [effort] we could catch the agouti. but now we’ve [accidentally] deprived you of your prey, and we haven’t caught the agouti either; you mustn’t be angry because we are also hunting and didn’t know to talk with you about whether you saw the agouti first and wanted to catch it. then we besought the snake, telling her, “you are justified to take the agouti, but please take a different one. we’re not here to wrong you, all we want is to find food.” [after we implored the snake in this way] we left that place and encountered and shot so many animals and birds that we couldn’t even carry them all home. even as he trod on the snake’s back, da labi initially misrecognized her—displaying a fittedness to place that shows why these snakes are so strongly associated with the land. once he identified the snake, however, he accepted that they shared a common purpose in hunting the agouti. conceding his fault, da labi and his friend vocally accepted the snake’s spatial and temporal priority and found themselves rewarded for their humility with the abundant prey that indicates the snake as the “owner” (masáa) of the territory. here, mutual need provides a common ethical ground on which da labi and the snake can respectfully distance themselves from one another. once they have worked out their differences, their common needs can converge. this harmonization of human and animal intentions does not bring da labi and the snake together. instead, it generates a guarded intersubjectivity that reciprocally preserves the other’s autonomy. in a fully relational reality, such autonomy makes for a crucial yet precarious achievement. had da labi harmed the snake, or even simply failed to recognize her interests, this affront would have driven her to become a kunu. da labi describes how ndyukas endeavor to maximize their autonomy by limiting relational exposure and cultivating mutual respect in which autonomy can thrive. ndyukas know that their individualized bodies and personalities are, in the final account, the residue of communal ancestral histories. this very awareness of the relational fundament of personal agency and identity makes preserving the unhindered and unreflective everyday independence of oneself and one’s kin all the more valuable. personal autonomy is not guaranteed but rather constitutes a sustained accomplishment of knowing how to live with pervasive relatedness. because any interaction can generate a cascade of future compulsory relations of mourning with whomever you are interacting with, the goal is to regulate relations with others by learning to give them their due independence. in a world suffused with hidden relations, however, this strategy must sooner or later fail. for ndyukas, involvement in another’s life exposes the metaphysical depths of the relation that connects people in death. grief is consequently the opposite of respectful distance and the autonomy it ensures. to grieve is to succumb to relatedness. no one wants to grieve; people are forced to mourn because their relationship with the deceased forms part of them—because it is them. whether with spouses, kinfolk, or unfairly treated enemies, relations are synonymous with death because they imply the intensified interdependencies that make grief inevitable. for ndyukas, to be related is to mourn. ndyukas struggle for autonomy precisely because it is opposed to death and grief. at every scale of ndyuka society, grief cajoles people to come together and recognize their irrevocable co-constitution. not only does death reveal the consuming emotions that accompany loss but it likewise emphasizes the familial relations through which mortality, in all its contagiousness, emanates. the elaborate rituals with which ndyukas answer death are designed to intercept the septicity of this grief, so that it will not become enshrined as a kunu in a family or lineage’s future. ndyukas resent kunu for binding them to death and mourning in ways that further erode their autonomy as both discreetly embodied persons and members of lineages. ndyukas accordingly desire that funerals for animal kunu mirror human funerals in decisively severing the dead from the living so that they no longer intervene in peoples’ daily lives. at one funeral i attended for a snake kunu, the kunu-afflicted family revolted when the carry oracle—a medicated plank carried on the heads of two human bearers that communicates by directing their movements (see figure 3)—of the presiding shaman instructed them to build the snake a small shrine where routine libations could be poured to mourn its untimely death in a garden fire. refusing any such lasting responsibility, the family pressed the shaman to make the spirit agree to burial in an inconspicuous grove where all marks of its existence would quickly weather away and leave them free from its future demands. while the shaman relented to the family’s wishes, he did so only reluctantly and appeared dubious that such a conclusive resolution was possible. despite such attempts at divestment, ndyuka ritual mourning for animal kunu enforces a fusion of standpoints. as with da gali’s story in which a goldminer who killed a constrictor is himself transformed into a snake, violence invites different beings into one another’s bodies. killing a person denies, but does not eliminate, the autonomy of their viewpoint. rather than extinguishing the other, such violence simply defers and intensifies eventual interdependence. when the kunu finally erupts within the collective life of its murderer, the whole of the killer’s lineage is also forced to witness itself from the perspective of the outraged kunu. kunu animals do not, then, simply become objects in human projects. through the ways in which kunu lay hold of human bodies and lineages, ndyukas “indeed become . . . animal, not theoretically but carnally, morally, spiritually” (dave 2014, 435). kunu animals enter into the physicality of human existence and animate it with a socially fulsome, and immanently moral, animality. as with da labi earlier, to negotiate a settlement in which animals deign to respect human autonomy, ndyukas are compelled to assume the interests of at least some of their animal others. when ndyukas become these animals in this way, they do so as incomplete ciphers for their own ethical violations of this reciprocity. by feeling these animals’ real or potential grief, they enter into an intersubjectivity that discerns the world through the animal’s eyes and body without claiming full knowledge of what it finally means to be that animal. once recognized by an afflicted family, snake spirits publicly possess their spirit mediums at ritual celebrations to try and pry some enjoyment out of their tragic ensnarement in human life. dusting their bodies with jarringly white kaolin clay, constrictor mediums join their hands in the shape of a snake’s head and writhe rhythmically in serpentine dances that enact the merging of human and animal lives and deaths. mediums themselves, like mourners consumed by grief, cannot speak of these experiences of irresistible animality except as pregnant voids of inchoate feeling (see also lambek 1981; crosson 2017). human is not strictly rendered animal, nor animal human. in lieu of an affirming or negating transformation, what remains is the incompleteness of a subjectivity suspended between human selves and animal others. by existentially enmeshing humans in the ethics of mutuality, animal kunu reveal to ndyukas that personal autonomy is a collaborative accomplishment that will be lost as soon as this truth is forgotten. while kunu are a major cause of enmity, fear, and suspicion, they propound that this ethics, though debated, is inviolable. kunu thus transform grief into the affective armature of ndyuka collective existence. from within the unfortunate events that beset life, the wronged other stares out in condemnation and those complicit in their distress are forced to mourn alongside them. ndyukas sometimes denounce such communal accountability as unfair; they also hold that it is inevitable. animal kunu proclaim to ndyukas that they have no choice but to grieve for others—life itself depends on it. conclusion multispecies ethnography and animal studies demand attention to the irreducible interrelatedness of humans and other species (gruen 2014; kirksey 2015; govindrajan 2017; garcía 2019). from this realization arises a profound question of what human responsibility means in such an entangled world. ndyuka relations with animal kunu provide one vantage from which to consider this question. ndyuka ethics of autonomy redefine necropolitics, changing its ultimate meaning from one of who can be “legitimately” killed or exploited to who will be held responsible for mourning another’s death. in this ethics, human autonomy originates in learning to acknowledge interdependence to achieve qualified independence from the obligation to mourn. contrary to presumptions of a clear break between a self-sovereign human freedom and its environmental conditions of possibility, kunu force ndyukas to accept that projects of personal and collective autonomy are intergenerational and relational “achievements” negotiated alongside nonhuman others within a shared social reality of death (van dooren 2014). the integrity of humans as relatively autonomous beings comprising a relatively autonomous species consequently depends on the myriad of more-than-humans who have accompanied us in becoming whatever it is we are still becoming. at the very least, ndyukas admit that grief compels relations that overwhelm fragile projects of personal and genealogical self-determination, and that mourning strips away the deceit of ever having been truly autonomous in the first place. from this admission springs an alternative conception of autonomy in which freedom only becomes possible when the full extent of human responsibility for the liberty of nonhuman others has been recognized. much as grief reveals the tragic truth of interrelatedness for ndyukas, so the current crisis of mass extinction dissolves illusions of human autonomy. neither the ethical implications of common biological descent nor the ostentatious despoiling of the environment has in any way hindered political-economic ideologies of perpetual economic growth rooted in the longue durée of white supremacy that are rapidly reducing the earth to uninhabitability. as the ghosts of the untold species killed by habitat destruction, exploitation, and climate change continue to proliferate, even if humanity survives, the question of what responsibility for mourning them really entails can only become more urgent. according to charles l. briggs (2014, 326), anthropology is the “work of mourning” because “anthropologists make their own stories, but they do not make them just as they please; they do not make them under circumstances entirely chosen by themselves.” like mourners, anthropologists become witnesses to loss, and anthropology the multifaceted testimony to our inseverable relations with others (garcía 2019). these relations remain the poignant tragedy that animates the common reality binding us together as a collective (butler 2004; wirtz 2018). it is only by taking responsibility for the ecological extent of these relations that we can hope to attain the autonomy uncontaminated by others’ grief that endures as the aim of so much liberatory human politics. our autonomy is a fragile collective achievement that depends on how we recognize that others’ deaths will eventually degrade and destroy any sense in which we may have ever been free ourselves. ndyukas acknowledge these mortal foundations and build a theory of autonomy that makes the recognition of others the root of human freedom. ndyuka animal kunu consequently lend witness to a human obligation to “hold open space in the world for other living beings” (van dooren 2014, 33). more emphatically still, kunu imply that, while we may not yet feel that the deaths of other species curtail human ambitions, these deaths must inevitably exact an existential cost. as untold numbers of other species succumb to mass death, our grief will intensify. these ghosts will cry out ever louder from the background of our increasingly impoverished lives. this grief will reveal that the pervasive denial of relatedness that defines our present was only ever a delusion. much as kunu force ndyukas to take collective responsibility for what happens on their land and to others, so mass extinction will compel us to bear witness to the irrevocably relational world in which we live and to find new ways of acknowledging our responsibility for it. indeed, the very integrity of life depends on it. abstract this article reflects on mourning and interspecies responsibility. considering what ndyuka maroons in the caribbean country of suriname—historic fugitives from plantation capitalism—call kunu (avenging ghosts) i explore how ndyukas attempt to secure personal and collective autonomy in an expansively relational reality where mourning is the quintessence of relatedness. because grief impinges on ndyuka autonomy, daily life is understood as a flawed struggle to maintain freedom from mourning. this can only be done by paying appropriate respect to others so that they do not return as vengeful spirits dedicated to the destruction of those who have harmed them and their entire families in perpetuity. this essay examines the ethics of such deeply relational notions of autonomy and ponders its implications for understanding accountability for anthropogenic extinction. [autonomy; multispecies ethics; grief; mourning; relatedness; responsibility] on sa a sikiifi ya wani taki a sikiifi ya taki fu a fasi di ndyuka sama e tyai fuka anga sowtu faantiwowtu de fu den meti di e kon toon libisama kunu. a e taki tu fu sani di sa pasa te libisama kii wan libi libi sani di o toon kunu, anga fa libi sama mu dini kunu fu den sa libi makandii a wan fii fasi. te wan sama dede, da ala sama fu a famii e tyai a fuka de makandii. te wan kunu kon a wan famii, da a sa meke a famii fu a sama di be kii en tyai a fuka de soseefi tu. libisama ná e wani fu tyai a fuka, ma a kunu sa meke den tyai en namo namo, bika a so wan fasi a o meke den fii a seefi tyali di en famii be fii, di den kii en. fu di kunu a wani sani di de tuu tuu, da libisama mu libi a wan lesipeki fasi fu den no mu meke kunu gi den famii di o tan fika gi den baka pikin fu pikin, paansu fu paansu. a sikiifi ya e taki tu fu a fasi di ndyuka sama denki fu libi anga den busi sani, anga fa den mu meke mofu a makandii fu libi anga den sani di sa toon kunu, fu a no mu poti den a fuka. a sikiifi ya taki en so, bika somen sama ná e lesipeki den sowtu a sowtu meti ya, ofuso den bon, anga soseefi den peesi pe den e tan fu libi moo. a toli ya e soi taki ndyuka sama abi fuu koni di sa leli den bakaasama fu soi den fa den mu libi a wan lesipeki fasi di o meke den ná o poli a goontapu, ma den o tan libi bun bun anga taawan. [libi fii; libi makandii anga meti; tyali; adyumadye; faantiwowtu] notes acknowledgments this article is dedicated to tosca koch, who will always be mourned. i want to graciously acknowledge grants from the national science foundation (award #1123530), the social science research council, the wenner-gren foundation, the university of michigan, and yale-nus college for supporting this research. this article could not have been written without the help of john and giermo willems and numerous other ndyuka teachers and friends. special thanks are also owed to geoffrey hughes, kristina wirtz, liana chua, and erik mueggler. gabriele koch provided inimitable support and invaluable editorial advice. i also wish to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and chris nelson for their incisive feedback and numerous helpful suggestions and for the help of the cultural anthropology editorial team. references blanchette, alex 2018 “industrial meat production.” annual review of anthropology 47: 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please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.1.06 the malicious game: friendship, foresight, and philosophy at an iraqi teahouse in jordan cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 467-491, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.02 the malicious game: friendship, foresight, and philosophy at an iraqi teahouse in jordan zachary sheldon university of pittsburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9658-8045 on a warm fall night in 2016, i passed through the dark alley that leads to the world cup teahouse, a popular gathering spot for iraqi nationals living in amman, jordan. i was greeted by the familiar scene of about forty men, ranging in age between twenty and sixty years, playing games on small, felt-topped tables. as i approached, the click-clack sound of tiles and fruity hookah scents embraced me with a comforting familiarity. but when i arrived at our table, i saw the game had changed. four players sat around an octagonal board with a hole in the middle, into which they threw playing cards before moving colored marbles around a circular track of small divots. nearly every table was occupied by a similar apparatus, with only a pair of old men left dicing at backgammon. “i call it the malicious game [al-la‘aba al-khabeetha],”1 explained saad, a twenty-eight-year-old pharmacist with narrow fingers and a light beard, “because you always want to make your opponents fail.” as the beads of colored glass raced around the board, pairs of players worked to “eat” the other team’s marbles by snapping their own piece into a slot occupied by an enemy token. the retorts of palms slapped in triumph and fists pounded in rage amplified each one of these coups, drumming out a counterpoint to the pop songs playing over the pa system. to keep this rapid rhythm from lagging, participants screamed “play! play!” in the ears of anyone who took too long to make their move. “this game is like rush-hour traffic,” i told saad, recalling the sonic surround of honks and curses from ammani drivers who seemed more worried about cutting you off than getting home. my friend laughed, then added a crucial caveat: “in america, you don’t play games like we do. i know people who migrated there, and they say that if you want to socialize, you go to the bar on the weekends. but here, we don’t drink alcohol. we play games at the teahouse, and we play every night if we can.” how does a malicious game become the cornerstone of friendship? anthropologists working with precarious migrants often administer the concept of hope as an antidote to their subjects’ anxieties (khosravi 2017; parla 2019; turner 2020, to name a few). as a discursive strategy, the uncertainty-and-hope narrative reevaluates the activities of displaced people as evidence for their persistent agency, very much like older discourses of “resistance” that defined agency in relation to the constraints it appeared to exceed (mahmood 2011, 5–10; kleist and jansen 2016, 378). but the hope trope proves ill suited for a case that finds refugees of imperial war putting their own worst impulses into play. the malicious game challenges depictions of the displaced as figures of innocence—an innocence that, as miriam ticktin (2017, 579) argues, would imply their “absence of knowledge or experience.” of course, like most people enduring displacement, my companions experienced uncertainty about what might become of them in a year or a month. yet even people who cannot formulate long-term projects must attain insight into what jane guyer (2007, 409) calls “the temporal frame of the ‘near-future’ … the process of implicating oneself in the ongoing life of the social and material world.” a future that stands just beyond the present seems to be absent from the horizon of hope, “a method of radical temporal reorientation of knowledge” (miyazaki 2004, 5). likewise, the concept of uncertainty aims at more remote possibilities, “before the nature of the actual event is known” (samimiam-darash and rabinow 2015, 5). an account of refuge without innocence, on the other hand, would address forms of knowledge that displaced people rely on to navigate their ongoing situation. evading detection by officials, tolerating harassment by locals, and working under exploitative employers all sculpt a hard-earned sensitivity to “the forthcoming of the game,” to use pierre bourdieu’s analogy (2000, 207). as i aim to show, playing jaakaaroo demands a practiced attunement to the immediately forthcoming dimension of social and material processes. and so, too, do the lives of iraqi refugees in jordan. this essay therefore takes the malicious game as an opportunity to “clear the way for alternative ontological starting points” that can “open up political, moral, and affective grammars” (ticktin 2017, 578) for writing displacement. ultimately, this grammar helps us articulate how ordinary practices of conviviality revitalize social life in the wake of devastation. let me begin by noting that neglect of the near future reflects our culturally specific epistemology. whereas ticktin (2017, 579) claims that an insistence on innocence is “overdetermined by its conceptual history within christian discourse,” guyer (2007, 414) shows that displacing the future into the distant realm of “prophetic time” reflects the distinct inheritance of protestant eschatology. the concepts of secular social science were born of a religious genealogy (asad 1993). consequently, western thinkers have “been compelled to exclude certain claims of awareness from the domain of human knowledge, and to brand them as mere expressions of fervor or as leaps of imagination” (yazdi 1992, 5). thinkers from the region where i conduct my fieldwork, on the other hand, see no issue with examining insights that leap one step ahead of the present. over the past few years, i have explored this other tradition through “fieldwork in theory” (bardawil 2020), which began during conversations with my gaming companions. how did you know that the person who walked into your workplace was an inspector? why do you think that the dreams you had last night will sink the boat on which you booked passage? and what tipped you off that i had another jack in my hand? several people alerted me to the work of ali al-wardi, the twentieth-century iraqi author whose oeuvre straddles historical sociology, philosophical logic, and parapsychology. then, during the covid-19 pandemic, which marked the first year in a decade during which i was not able to travel to jordan, i turned to his works, tracing the genealogy of his concepts through other works of arabic philosophy.2 approaching this tradition from an anthropological perspective, i am struck by how it bridges questions of knowing and being that our discipline places under the separate keywords of subjectivity and ontology. the world and the self are mirrors for one another; tarnished mirrors that, through practice, can be polished to reflect reality (ibn al-‘arabi 1980, 50). as such, this essay begins from the side of the subject, discussing the lives of my interlocutors, before turning to the game in itself. the first concept i introduce is estimation (al-wahm)—a distinct sensitivity to the forthcoming acts of other beings, both human and non-human, that we call their intentions. estimation is essential to the everyday struggles of those who must stay one step ahead in a hostile city. and estimation comes into play at the jaakaaroo table as a prehensive knowledge of an ongoing process unfolding through a rapid-fire whirl of tightly coordinated actions. then, shifting to a more object-oriented register, i ask how a game, an inanimate technological device, can remake the feelings and relationships of its users. introducing a second, closely related concept from arabic philosophy, i raise the possibility that jaakaaroo incarnates an agent intellect (al-‘aql al-faa‘il)—a mathematical-material form that recalibrates our anticipations according to its unfolding patterns. this leads me to suggest that jaakaaroo’s alterity, a borrowed device coordinating relationships on its own terms, empowers players to revitalize a threatened form of life. finally, the conclusion addresses the politics of play, pointing to how gaming became an object of controversy during the 2019 uprisings in iraq. this study contributes to a larger anthropological conversation about how alternative ontologies can help us understand the persistence of shared life on unstable grounds. “the middle east is a good place to consider what happens when the ground dissolves under our feet,” julia elyachar reminds us, not only because imperialism and climate change have hit this part of the world particularly hard but also because the region’s intellectual traditions explicitly thematize the “channel[s] through which information, signals, and value flow” (elyachar 2022, 7, 3). for elyachar (2022, 5), the concept of barzakh, the gap between the known and the unknown across which insight must leap, anticipates western studies of proprioception, the extended awareness that enables collective movement on unstable ground. amira mittermaier (2019, 20) has drawn on popular discourses of al-ghayb, “that which evades attempts to capture or describe it,” to name the immanent presence of the unknown in urban spaces of popular politics and has used visions seen in dreams to model the repetitive household visits that bind individuals in routines of obligation (mittermaier 2010, 153–58). finally, hussein agrama (2020, 18) shows how interreligious fasting aligns muslim and christian neighbors to “the time of shared practice,” crafting solidarities that transcend sectarian distinctions. these authors address egypt, but attention to popular solidarities is perhaps even more urgent in the case of iraq, where the u.s. invaders systematically demolished the social and material infrastructures on which public life once stood (al-mohammad, 2007; dewachi 2013; rubaii 2019). meanwhile, amman can be experienced as a uniquely alienating city, with streets laid out to funnel different social classes to their proper destinations (parker 2009) and with access to “cosmopolitan” spaces roped off by metal detectors and entrance fees (schwedler 2010). lastly, egypt, iraq, and jordan have all been subject to a u.s. imperial project that attempted to integrate the region within a global system of exploitable labor and free trade. everyday acts of conviviality invite us to glimpse how u.s. imperialism is lived and contested in the present. the fact that gaming, dreaming, or fasting can align experiences across differences makes these practices relevant to cultural anthropology in the broadest sense. émile durkheim (1995, 39–40), when confronted with the fact of rituals that circulated beyond institutions, declared these footloose forms as “magic,” confining the topic to a digression from the proper object of social science. the concepts of estimation and the agent intellect, on the other hand, unlock an intellectual barrier that has long gated off a significant dimension of culture. as the essay progresses, i note parallels between the mechanisms of the game and other devices poetic, comedic, magical, and mechanical. these ethnographic comparisons evoke the radical sense of possibility posed by anthropology’s ontological turn, which can remake our understanding of human nature, so long as we do not try to keep “our science” separate from “their beliefs” (graeber 2015, 7). and working in the “significant overlap” between middle eastern and european perspectives, we can better “consider different groundings of collective movement” (elyachar 2022, 4).3 moving from theory to method, the way this perspective brings together questions of knowing and of being could help restore appreciation for ethnographic research as a spirited act of presence that promises insight into other lives (see furani 2019). as this article moves from my interlocutors’ accounts to my own experiences playing the malicious game, i ask readers to remember that practices like gaming (boellstorff 2008), dancing (sklar 1991), or boxing (wacquant 2004) will, by imposing common routines, enable different people to experience a shared reality. this simple truth of our method was clouded by a pandemic that turned contact with other beings into a source of anxiety. but for readers ready to be affected by the presence of others—to experience “passion” in the original sense of the term (asad 2003, 68)—i invite you to follow me into the unknown, a leap that every jaakaaroo player must take each time they make a move and that my interlocutors make every day of their lives. the iraqis of jordan: refuge without innocence younis was the best jaakaaroo player i met. every time one of his marbles swooped in to capture an enemy piece, he would squeal with laughter, his bright eyes narrowing behind reddening cheeks, while an opponent screamed curses inches from his face. his friends called him lucky, but i think younis’s secret lay in his ability to keep multiple marbles in play at the same time. in jaakaaroo, you are often forced to choose between either advancing a marble that is already on the board or putting a new piece into the play. having more marbles in play is the more taxing strategy: each piece is vulnerable to being sent back to the beginning of the track by an opponent. but it can also serve as a weapon, and the difference often comes down to the player’s ability to keep track of all their positions at once. younis knew how to operate with divided attentions. educated as an accountant, he made a reliable hustle couriering documents between iraqi investors and jordanian bureaucrats. strangers often approached our table to hand him loose piles of paper, which he would stack next to one of his three cell phones on the black felt tabletop. of his past three jobs, younis had left two because the businesses were raided by the ministry of labor, and one because his boss kept calling him a “stupid donkey.” to avoid detection, he mastered the local dialect of arabic and created a jordanian alter ego, complete with a fake family history, that he put on when bringing tax receipts to the local police station. “the salaries are low here,” he explained, “and the boss can treat you however he wants because you’re afraid you’ll never find another job if you quit.” still, he kept at it. “if you don’t have some money and the guys call you to come out to the teahouse, you have to say, ‘sorry, i’m sitting at home tonight.’” on most nights, younis would arrive late, with dark circles under his eyes, yawning and complaining about how much crap he had taken that day. then he would start to play the malicious game and his tired face would transform into a familiar mask of gleeful cunning. as much as his double life exhausted him, younis came back, again and again, to practice malice on his closest friends. younis’s status is increasingly common among global refugees. like nearly 80 percent of refugees, he and his friends are not encamped, inhabiting what the united nations terms a “protracted situation”: a long-lasting limbo without clear plans for resolution. contemporary anthropology recognizes that refugees are not exceptional subjects, and instead labor under the same structures of capitalist exploitation that pervade the world system (ramsay 2020). and the postcolonial states that host protracted refugees exercise a sovereignty heavily “compromised” by their dependency on foreign aid, security, and investment (arar 2017). the approximately 150,000 iraqi nationals who reside in a kingdom of about 9 million (more than half of them also displaced people and guest workers) are subject to an overlapping set of nonbinding international agreements, regulations on foreign investment, local labor labors, and covert political deals. scandal and graft characterized responses to the iraqi refugee crisis, including doctored population surveys used to funnel humanitarian aid into local municipal budgets (chatelard 2008) and a passport-selling scheme that contributed to the imprisonment of the director of jordan’s national intelligence agency (el-shamayleh, 2012). if mass-media depictions of the middle eastern refugee crisis present refugees as paragons of an “innocence [that] promises a space of purity” free from political and economic interests (ticktin 2017, 578), the case of iraqis in jordan puts these ambiguities into focus. since 2012, i have conducted fieldwork with a broad section of this population, ranging from the affluent ex-baathists who own the best hotels and restaurants in the city to the rural christian villagers who cook the meals and clean the beds. my playing companions are better off than many, but far from worry free. and they experience the stakes of their ambiguous status in a particularly acute way. as couriers, shop clerks, construction contractors, and commercial agents, they spend their days traversing a city of strangers and, in their words, “dealing with all kinds of people.” amman is home to “all kinds,” from generations of palestinian refugees and more recent syrian arrivals to pleasure-seeking tourists from the gulf monarchies to large numbers of egyptian, filipino, and sri lankan guest workers, not to mention euro-american academics, humanitarians, and spies. as in other climates of “generalized suspicion,” people adopt new techniques for screening potential threats (bonhomme 2012, 226). intentions could be gleaned from gestures, postures, styles of dress and coiffure, or even the license plate on their car—this last technique also practiced within iraq’s zones of sectarian suspicion (rubaii 2019, 133). acceptable topics of conversation and even decisions about which name to use were determined by these cues. “it can be even worse when iraqis meet one another,” one woman explained, “because you don’t know one another’s politics. it won’t be violent, but it can be unpleasant.” and these decisions are made very quickly, collapsing a broad knowledge of history, politics, and theology into a lightning-quick response to threat. exile and ambivalence: estimation and the divided personality what do we call this anticipatory orientation to another’s intentions, whether we find it on the street or at the gaming table? consider the concept of estimation (al-wahm), introduced by the medieval physician and philosopher avicenna (b. 980 ad). estimation provides us with knowledge about the immediately forthcoming intentions of other beings, which is necessary for “the self to conduct itself properly and circumspectively amidst beings in the world” (el-bizri 2003, 84). younis’s everyday struggles resonate with avicenna’s own exemplary case of estimation, in which a sheep perceives the hostile intentions of a wolf. although “the sheep cannot literally be said to ‘smell danger’ in the scent of the wolf’ or ‘see hostility’ in the wolf’s eyes,” it nevertheless “perceives these ‘intentions’ of hostility and danger directly through another faculty,” which collates discrete sensibilia into the form of a threat (black 2000, 60; see also avicenna 1959, 183–85). similarly, younis described how he avoided inspectors from the ministry of labor when he saw a group of men in suits entering his workplace as he was returning from a cigarette break. “i just knew i shouldn’t follow them inside,” he told us one night at the teahouse. “so i left, and i didn’t look back.” saad and his colleagues at the pharmacy also relied on the arts of estimation to deal with the strangers who entered their store. “i could tell right away he was iraqi,” one said of a customer, “even before he started talking. from the way he stood, the way he leaned on the counter.” in these examples, estimation appears as a quick-and-dirty, fight-or-flight reaction, an impression of the whole too quick to consider the details of the parts. although estimation is pitched toward the future, it also draws from past memory (el-bizri 2003, 83). and this means that estimation can become warped by events that set it sprinting on the wrong course. avicenna recognized that even the most trivial provocations could misdirect our estimative faculty. if you remark to someone that honey resembles intestinal bile, for example, they will feel disgust when reaching for the honey jar, even if their conscious mind knows the difference (avicenna 1959, 182–83; see also black 2000, 61). for those who rely on the arts of dealing, rapidly reading strangers’ intentions could put one on the path to error. one of saad’s colleagues described how a customer threatened to call the police when she overheard his name, jaafar, which he shared with an important figure in shia islam. she heard my name and started saying i didn’t like saddam [hussein] and i let the iranians into my country. she made three decisions about me. first, she heard my name and decided i was shi’i. then, because she thought i was shi’i, that i hate saddam. then, because of that, i let the iranians into the country. i wasn’t even alive during that [iran-iraq] war [of 1980-1988]! so, i even told her, ‘no, i even love saddam!’ because it all happened so fast. the moment of judgment, when the near future bursts into the present in the form of an angry customer, permits no deliberation. these threats inevitably recalled the conflicts that drove displacement in the first place. and while people sometimes talked about their ability to deal with strangers with pride, they more often spoke in terms of headaches, ulcers, weight loss, and “pressure in the nerves.” the colloquial term dhaayij, a reactive disposition prone to lashing out at perceived slights, captures the enervating consequences of overactive estimation. indeed, everyday life made demands that directly conflicted with an “ordinary ethics … deeply embedded in the categories and functions of languages and ways of speaking, in the commonsense ways we distinguish among various kinds of actors or characters, kinds of actions and manners of acting” (lambek 2010, 2). younis, saad, and their companions often attributed the collapse of iraq and the difficulties of life in jordan to the nifaaq (hypocrisy) of maslahchiin (self-interested people) and rijaal as-siyaasa (men of politics). some players told poignant stories of former companions who, after losing a loved one to violence in iraq, became consumed with prejudice. “we used to play with him,” one story went, “but then his cousin was killed. it started with a few posts on facebook. and soon enough, he couldn’t shut up about the shia. we couldn’t sit with him anymore.” how should one get by in a city of strangers? listen to how younis explains that upright behavior also manifests in the temporal frame of the near future: you see how it is with me. i’m always helping people. just the other day, nidal,” one of his closest friends and playing partners, “asked me to give him one of my phone cards. and i did! most people wouldn’t go out of their way to do this.” i asked him if he thought these friends would do him a good turn in the future, to which he replied, “god only knows [allah y‘allim]! it’s natural, it’s humane [insaanii] to help people. if you see someone thirsty in the desert, you give him water. if i help you, it’s because we’re friends [asdiqaa’]. and if you see me in need, you will help me. it’s not self-interest [maslaha]. although our sense of the immediately forthcoming dimension of social processes can be a source of alienation, it is also the temporal frame in which ethical relationships emerge. the idea that morally correct action bears no long-term intentions is captured in a popular iraqi saying that admonishes to “do good and throw it in the river [sowii khair wa thibeh bish-shatt].” like the refugee siblings suad joseph (1994, 60) describes, my companions idealized an ongoing, uncalculated intimacy in which “constant connectivity was taken to be an expression of love.” a sense of constant connectivity is realized over multiple, repeated interactions that make up an urban “social infrastructure”—the shared semiotic habits used to open and maintain connections with other people (elyachar 2010). linguistic anthropologists reserve a special category for this type of “phatic” talk that establishes and maintains channels of communication (zuckerman 2016). but the everyday dialogues of my interlocutors suggest that no talk was too small to avoid betraying one’s identity and origins. “did you hear those questions he was asking me about where i grew up,” one person asked me after meeting a stranger at a party; “he’s trying to figure out if i’m sunni or shia.” another explained, “if you see a long beard, talk about god. if you see a goatee, talk about soccer.” and so, despite their disavowals, my companions’ reality left few alternatives to corrosive behaviors. al-wardi, the twentieth-century iraqi author, paid attention to the internal contradictions that arise when one’s social milieu incentivizes unethical acts. al-wardi, like avicenna, recognized that human consciousness is not unitary, that our souls are a meeting ground for multiple modes of awareness, and that these inner capacities can be shaped by experience. writing a few years before iraqi’s 1958 revolution, he associated these circumstances with the hypocrisy that characterized his present (al-wardi 2013, 17). under these conditions, our “hidden mind” (al-‘aql al-baatin) perceives patterns of behavior that lead other people to achieve success, whether these behaviors are moral or immoral. “the hidden mind does not understand anything from our exhortations or our advice,” writes al-wardi, “for it is preoccupied with that which social habits dictate to it … this is the latent incentive within the depths of the soul and human beings cannot even slightly rid themselves of it” (al-wardi 2013, 25). despite this, we continue to aspire toward standards of conduct made explicit in authoritative discourse. individuals experience the wrenching feeling that the stated values of their society no longer correspond with the acts required to prosper. the distance between what our manifest reason advocates and what our hidden faculties perceive produces a “doubled personality” (izdiwaaj ash-shakhsiyya) that brings about anxiety, depression, and anger (al-wardi 2013, 24). some interlocutors suggested that al-wardi, still widely read today, put his finger on the ambiguities of their lives. even those who did not read him arrived at similar conclusions. “i’d love to do the right thing,” explained a factory machinist after being sold faulty parts by a local supplier, “but how can i be honest in a place like this?” this question cannot be answered, only endured. and that is where play can help. putting foresight into play: the well-timed taunt one night, i sat with five men around the jaakaaroo table and listened to a debate about god. it all started when abdulhadi, who was scrolling on his phone, shared a news story claiming that a grave containing gigantic skeletons had been unearthed. faris insisted that giants were real. “there are giant footprints in the kaaba,” he explained, referring to the center of the meccan pilgrimage. seated across from him, faris’s playing partner, jasim, pressed for more evidence: “where are the bones? can you show them to me?” soon, the conversation turned to an all-out debate over religion. i knew jasim was an avowed atheist who, like many non-believers, enjoyed being provocative: as a teenager, he would go out in baghdad wearing the coiffured hair and dark clothes associated with iraq’s “emo” subculture, something that could get you harassed or killed. and i knew faris prayed regularly, abstained from alcohol, and that his faith had only strengthened after a near-death experience in a car accident. where was this going? faris plucked one of jasim’s marbles off the board and held it in the air. “why would you not want to get a perspective from outside your life,” he asked, indicating the board, “in order to better take charge of your behavior?” in response, jasim grabbed the marble back and returned it to its place. “i prefer to stay on the ground.” the game resumed, and the conversation moved on to other topics. when it came to playing jaakaaroo, nothing was off the table. the provocations that flew across the board touched on themes that, arising elsewhere, might have ended friendships. anthropologists have long recognized that customary conduct is suspended when action takes place within the frame of play (bateson 1972). and, elsewhere in the region, card games conjure an interactional frame that enables social contact across sectarian divisions (levy 1999). but the theory of frames presumes what needs to be explained, which is how a shared orientation to unfolding experience can be constructed, broken, and repaired.4 context is not a ready-to-hand container for activity, but a product of the interactions it enframes, dynamically emerging and transforming across each speaker’s turn in an ongoing dialogue (duranti and goodwin 1992). and so, instead of taking play as given, i want to ask how a game can act on our orientation to the next move in an ongoing process. so far, we have treated estimation as a captive of custom, the unwitting mirror of an unjust society. but elsewhere, in his writings on paranormal phenomena, al-wardi (1996, 128) described how our hidden faculties can be therapeutically altered through techniques of “suggestion and repetition” that touch the soul at a more obscure level (see also pursley 2018, 341). leaving aside the question of whether jaakaaroo is a paranormal phenomenon, consider how the play of repetitive patterns in the malicious game commands a suggestive power over its players. faris and jasim were headed for conflict, but their momentum was interrupted, or perhaps redirected, when they restored their attentions to the board. a board game is not the same as a fight, but the way this game plays out might serve as a compelling substitute. thomas malaby has argued that players’ preference for one game over another reflects the way that each game simulates a specific manifestation of contingency. in his terms, the game of jaakaaroo, like the encounters it mirrors, incarnates a specifically “social contingency,” where the ability to read and respond to interpersonal contact becomes “what is at stake” in play (malaby 2003, 80). and by instantiating risky stakes “virtually”—that is, through technologies that generate the effect of something without needing that something to be present—games provide new spaces for shared forms of life (boellstorff 2008, 33). unlike everyday conversations, jaakaaroo gives players room to make the wrong move or infer the wrong intention. then the marbles return to the beginning, to travel their circuit again and again, night after night. to understand jaakaaroo’s patterns of interaction, we need to take a closer look at how it is played. before we do, i want to make clear that watching how a game is played is not the same as reading its rules, any more than attending a symphony is the same as reading sheet music (boellstorff 2008, 67).5 as such, i will be discussing “the played game, the experience of play in the game, the temporal and phenomenological totality of what game designers call ‘game dynamics’” (burnett 2012, 67). saad, who introduced us to jaakaaroo, has given me an example: “someone could be right about to enter their home and you can throw down a five to make him lose his position and start over.” right away, an experienced player is telling us that the game’s provocations intervene into our sense of what is about to happen in an ongoing process. and saad’s specific example of throwing a five-card is especially infuriating. the setup involves the anticipation that arises as players watch their marbles creeping up on their destination, promising the satisfying click of slotting the ambitious token into its destination. but as the marble inches closer to home, it becomes a target. and this leads us to the punch line. most cards allow players to move their own marbles a number of spaces equal to the card’s value (a three moves you three spaces, a six moves you six, etc.). the five, however, lets you move anyone else’s marble. in most cases, the five was used to help a partner out of a dangerous position or to capture an enemy token. however, the five could also be used to force an opponent’s marble to travel past the 90-degree turn into its “home,” effectively placing it back at the beginning of its journey around the circular track. the maneuver turns an opponent’s own momentum against them, giving their marble an extra push at the exact moment it does not need one. it is a provocation stated in the grammar of the game. if you were there, in the teahouse, you would hear the impact of saad’s play. there is a strong correspondence between a game’s mechanics for contriving contingency and the patterns of noisemaking that accompany play (malaby 2003, 60–62). here, teasing always came on the heels of decisive maneuvers. the sting of frustration was echoed in the audible click players make with their marbles when slamming them onto an opponent’s piece, echoed again in the high-five slap that passes between victorious partners, and reiterated once more in the slam of the loser’s palm pounding the table. as players’ utterances align with the percussive slapstick of the game, complex combinations of acts and words settled into patterns. these routines play out across multiple turns, giving each participant an opportunity to echo the game’s provocative cadence (cf. bialostok and watson 2022). like bridge, jaakaaroo is played in teams of two against two. turns alternate between teams, meaning that every time you make a move, an opponent has a chance to counter it. the most dizzying and delightful moments came when we were caught up in repeatedly reversing one another’s moves. for example, a player could use a jack to swap an opponent’s marble with a partner’s. this transforms a good position into a bad one in the blink of an eye. but the move can be countered if the next player to take a turn has another jack in hand. so long as players have the correct cards, they can continue to reverse one another’s interventions, the very desire to frustrate becoming frustrated. each turn at play tends to be accompanied by a brief taunt, which moves from mouth to mouth around the table: 1. a. plays a jack on d.’s marble. d.: “al-hasad!” [the “evil eye” of envy] 2. b., d.’s partner, undoes a.’s move with his jack. a.: “al-hasad!” 3. c. plays a four, moving his marble to “eat” b.’s. b.: “al-hasad!” 4. d. hesitates, surveying the board … a., b. & c.: “thibeh!” [“throw it!” i.e., play a card] this example arose after a shi’i player, who was also a sayyid, or descendent in the lineage of the prophet mohammad, displayed exceptional good luck. it is said that the sayyids possess the power to inflict the evil eye of envy (al-hasad). the taunt played on prejudices about shia religious practices that equate them with non-modern or pre-islamic superstition. as the game attained its dizzying rhythm of reversals, this single word—al-hasad—began to circulate from mouth to mouth, including from the original target, all in time with the action taking place on the board. the specific term matters less than we might think. on other nights, the word or phrase that moved from mouth to mouth might be a political slogan, the name of a player’s aunt, or just good old-fashioned profanity. as with poetic techniques of repetition and parallelism, the word’s signifying function is placed in tension with its sonic materiality, which marks out rhythmic meters immanent to the act of communication itself (see jakobson 1960). if jokes permit the speaker to say the unsayable because they shape expression according to borrowed, hackneyed forms (seizer 1997), then the malicious game is a mean joke told in cards and marbles. keeping this semiotic centrifuge spinning demanded a heightened sensitivity to the near future as it revealed itself amid a whirl of activity. hands fly alongside words, grasping across the board, seeking (or taking) space through which to move. and subjective orientations to this process are transformed through repetitive engagement with the device. game mechanics recruit their players into “distinctive procedural and phenomenological routines” by providing “a unique ‘cycle of energy and concentration’ and a corresponding cycle of affective peaks and dips” (schüll 2012, 18). here, players internalize the board and pieces as extensions of the self, never looking before they leap, moving their marbles in broad sweeps and landing them exactly where they intend. any hesitation would be met with screamed injunctions to hurry up. as i learned with difficulty, no one tolerates a player who counts their moves one space at a time. injunctions to keep up the pace recall acts of “conversational repair”—moments in an interaction that call back to the perceptual frame in which that interaction is unfolding (sicoli 2020, 101). here, as in the argument between faris and jasim, repairing the frame reoriented attentions to the ongoing process of the game. as in blitz chess, players choose to experience the ecstatic, intuitive rhythms of rapid play (desjarlais 2011, 18–19). in western epistemology, this willed suggestibility invites terms like trance or flow. instead, i would argue it is an achievement of “knowledge by presence” (‘ilm al-hudhuri): a state of absorption so intense that “the individual reality of the self as knowing subject [is] united with the reality of the object known” (yazdi 1992, 176). knowledge by presence emerges when estimation is oriented toward the objectively forthcoming dimension of another being (el-bizri 2003, 82–86). and when that presence is experienced across individual subjects, each experiences their own being as it emanates from the same affordances of the same reality, much like the anthropological concept of intersubjectivity (duranti 2010). maintaining this state requires a kinesthetic and cognitive realignment to a choreography emerging from statistically determined situations. the game’s formal properties determine the relationship between acts and intentions on behalf of the players, automating the production of malice. all this suggests that agency can consist of a cultivated openness to receiving even painful and upsetting impulses from other beings (asad 2003, 79). still, we are left asking what those beings are. agent intellect: the ingenious device of the cross-and-circle jaakaaroo manipulates relationships by orchestrating social processes according to its own routines. remarkably, the trick becomes more effective when players do not dwell on its mechanisms. but if knowledge by presence entails the absorption of the knowing subject by the object of knowledge, what is that object? in arabic philosophy, human cognition became possible when we heightened our attunement to the world’s immanent patterns and connections, “natural forms appearing in matter” (davidson 1992, 76). the relations between these natural forms suggest the presence of “active intellect” (al-‘aql al-faa‘il), emanating fields of movement, growth, and attraction that encompass discrete objects, animals, or people within higher unities (davidson 1992, 85). and when the subject interiorizes these forms as “acquired intellect,” our intuitively prescient sense of estimation begins to evolve into a fuller, more sophisticated consciousness of reality (davidson 1992, 92). union with the agent intellect anticipates the sci-fi imagery of “cyborg” consciousness distributed across high-tech devices (haraway 1991) and back-to-the-land metaphors of ecological “assemblages” (tsing 2015). but no one genre grasps arabic philosophy’s emphasis on the unity of existence over the diversity of essences (el-bizri 2000, 7). whether we are dealing with other people or playing a game (or having a multispecies encounter, as in avicenna’s example of wolves and sheep), we are apprehending the presence of an intentional agent disclosing its forthcoming being. now, is it too weird to theorize a board game as the incarnation of a cosmic intellect? i would have said so, once. but that was before i investigated the genealogy of jaakaaroo. the first clue came from a story in al-ghad, one of jordan’s major papers, which described how the jaakaaroo phenomenon began among teenage girls, who taught the game to their café-going brothers (mahbooba 2016). one young woman described how she enjoyed jaakaaroo because it gave her the opportunity to “harass [taharrosh] your closest friends.” i was struck by the term taharrosh, which often describes misogynistic street harassment. apparently, my companions were not the only ones who used jaakaaroo to manifest the threatening limits of their world at the center of their friendships.6 digging deeper, i found that the game’s distinctive “cross and circle” (culin 1895) architecture, consisting of a ring of spaces divided into quadrants around which players race, has inspired discord across continents and through the ages. the oldest known example, yut (or nyout), still inspires good-natured arguments in korean households today. the south asian cross-and-circle game, pacisi-chaupar, links cosmic oppositions to affective entanglements in early mughal visual depictions of the mahābhārata, which see the game frustrating the otherwise imperturbable shiva into separating from his wife and playing partner, pāvartī (handelman and shulman 1997, 32). and in the early twentieth century, the german board game designer joseph friedrich schmidt revised pacisi to create an aggravating entertainment he called mensch ärgere dich nicht (“man, don’t get angry!”). in other words, the malicious game conveys a millennia-old geometry to deliver a consistent effect.7 figure 1 (upper left). joseon dynasty yuppan and yut. photo by goryeo, 고려. figure 2 (upper right). “a game of pachisi on a cloth board.” photo by micha l. rieser. figure 3 (lower left). a game of jaakaaroo on a café table. photo by zachary sheldon. figure 4 (lower right). mensch ärgere dich nicht! photo by antonsusi. readers may recognize similarities to the north american sorry! and the british ludo. jaakaaroo is, however, unique in that it uses playing cards rather than dice. the cross-and-circle is like a magic ring that after years of dormancy now awakens to deliver its enchantments into new hands. yet its magic can be explained by recognizing how the game orchestrates cognitive shifts along paths determined by mathematical principles not themselves available to awareness. a better comparison would be to the magician’s mechanical gimmick (ngai 2020), itself an evolution of the ingenious devices devised by the engineer-entertainers of ninth-century baghdad (hill 1979). these devices use hidden mechanisms to produce sensible effects, delighting all the more for our ignorance of their operating principles. similarly, islamic philosophers used the concept of the agent intellect to understand the efficacy of the talisman (tilasm), a ritual object that appeared to be capable of impossible “action at a distance” by showing how items of joint attention reorient our estimative faculty to induce behaviors “contrary to the habitual pattern of terrestrial events” (noble 2017, 79). all this is to say that although the agent intellect is not readily sensible, it can only be present to the human estimative faculty insofar as it manifests in the material world (el-bizri 2000, 84). and, in the teahouse, the game’s sensuous affordances mix with other affecting forms to create higher orders of experience. back to the teahouse: harmonizing malice having considered the antinomies of refugee life and the logic of the malicious game separately, i want to close by suggesting that the play of jaakaaroo sees my companions absorbing new and troubling moods into a comforting routine. this act of incorporation instantiates, in real and sensuous form, a layering of past and present, suspending the new game within an older practice associated with life before the u.s. invasion. socializing in restaurants, teahouses, and living rooms once formed a repeating rhythm of visits with friends that cut across geographical and sectarian distinctions. this came to an end with the 2003 invasion of iraq, which destroyed the urban infrastructures that facilitated visits and replaced them with the checkpoints and walls that divided one ethno-sectarian enclave from the next. many migrants orchestrate combinations of multiple tastes and smells within a “synesthetic experience” that enable “the reconstruction of wholeness” evocative of home (sutton 2000, 121). in her study of iraqi media consumption in jordan, mirjam twigt (2018, 5–6) describes the living room as a “polymedia” milieu, where each person’s attention wanders across multiple different devices, each with a distinct affective affordance. shifting venues to the teahouse, we find an analogous synesthesia. tea (chaii) should be dark, hot, heavily sweetened, and drunk from an istikaan, a small hourglass-shaped vessel filled to the brim, so that drinkers must either ignore the intense heat that seeps through the thin glass or delicately grasp the cup by its brim. the menu offers immobilizing quantities of animal fat (dism) that leave the body feeling warm from the inside out. nicotine plays a prominent role: a single “head” (ras) of the water pipe delivers as much as a whole pack of cigarettes. but one element has shifted. older games were swapped out for a new and malicious presence. at the teahouse, you are never just playing. the game’s sonic pulse of upset unfolds in a space redolent with other values and qualities. the teahouse is very much a “soundscape” generated through “rhythmic gestures,” a site where players are “awash with pulsations and reflexes through which the body registers its involvement in its sensory surroundings” (hirschkind 2006, 77). so listen, if you will, to the play of jaakaaroo pounding out its rapid pulse of irritation, like the buzzing trills of the zamboor (wasp) drum in iraqi folk music. this rapid motif rises and falls against the slacker, more enduring routines of nightly gatherings, which flood the senses with familiar flavors, smells, and faces over the course of an evening, and from one night to the next. by suspending the rapid tempo of the malicious game within the longer-term series of contact with friends, my interlocutors have syncopated new and troubling feelings within a threatened form of life. playing with harsher notes is characteristic of the contemporary artistic culture of iraq, which injects arts and literature with a “dark, fragmented aesthetic” (bahoora 2015, 187). music focuses on themes of war, death, and violence to reflect a harsh reality (abbas 2013). and television programs have shifted toward ironically playing with bitter themes, drawing influence from the tradition of baghdad’s comedic theater and the format of u.s. political satire programs (hamdi and ali 2018). if “generic discourses on ‘loss’ and social crisis … empty the neo-colonial site of all internal content,” ethnographic attentions can turn to “the semantic and historical resources” that persist within “the unacknowledged depths of everyday life and language” (seremetakis 1994, ix). the world has changed. those who must go on living in it cannot fall into nihilism any more than they can remain optimistic. their creativity ceaselessly encompasses new realities as they emerge into the present. conclusion arabic philosophy can open the temporal frame of the near future for anthropological inquiry. estimation, an attunement to the intentions of other beings, gives name to a form of knowledge on which displaced people rely. moreover, because estimation combines elements of both an epistemological standpoint and an ethical subjectivity, it helps us recognize the moral anxieties that arise when ethical precepts clash with the demands of existence. if the contradictions of displacement cannot be surmounted, the malicious game offers grounds for recalibrating players’ orientation to social processes. jaakaaroo’s design contrives consistent patterns of conflict, permitting players to lose themselves in a whirl of provocations. remarkably, this formula does not need to be understood for it to prove effective. it has its own itinerary and can be conceptualized as an agent intellect, absorbed by different audiences while always retaining its self-same soul. and although this device emerges from elsewhere, it was incorporated into existing patterns of conviviality, where it vitalized a vanishing form of life. collective agency is, in this account, a cultivated willingness to be moved by that which arrives from just beyond a still unfolding present. this makes the play of the malicious game relevant for understanding how shared forms of life can persist in the wake of devastation. in concluding this investigation, i want to gesture toward the political possibilities it engenders. for ali al-wardi (2013), the perspective i have identified with arabic philosophy did not map onto the division between islam and the west. instead, it corresponded to a class conflict internal to both sides of that imagined geography, with popular consciousness of social contradictions agitating against officials who insist on the unlimited power of their own discursive authority. al-wardi’s framing was on my mind during the 2019 uprisings in iraq, which sought to abolish the political machine of sectarian appointments (muhasasa ta’ifiyy) through which government jobs, along with lucrative contracts, are distributed according to ethno-religious affinities (dodge and mansour 2020). protestors’ demands for universal goods like employment and electricity were countered by a cross-sect alliance of iraq’s political elites, who used violence to restore the status quo (khoury 2021). meanwhile, pro-government media attempted to recast demonstrations as the fervor of young minds warped by digital games, and the parliament passed a motion in favor of banning online play (ussakli 2020). i would not go so far as to say that playing games turns people into revolutionaries. still, officials who rely on the authority of categorical differences are often scandalized by the existence of forces that slip their grasp. perhaps this explains a tendency common to both secular and religious authorities that treats games, along with other talismanic devices, as the embarrassing foibles of an archaic folk culture, mere phantoms of undisciplined minds. instead, i have tried to depict the incorporation of malice into play as a sensitive index of historical contradictions still in the process of unfolding. in the future, cultural anthropologists can examine the ideological and military struggles through which popular technologies of mediation have been given or withdrawn, constructed or demolished, celebrated or condemned. abstract in the late-night cafés of amman, jordan, iraqi refugees have adopted a new game, called jaakaaroo, that they say is more “malicious” than familiar favorites like dominoes or backgammon. meanwhile, they decry the cruelty, greed, and suspicion that have eroded social bonds in their home and host countries. borrowing concepts from arabic philosophy, i argue that the formal routines of the game act on the same faculty of estimation (al-wahm) that migrants use to read strangers’ intentions while disguising their own. when this sense of suspicion emanates from the ingenious device of the game itself, which i theorize as a form of agent intellect (al-‘aql al-faa‘il), new and troubling feelings come to be absorbed within the broader aesthetic assemblage of teahouse sociality. in these spaces, the harshness of the present becomes enfolded within nostalgic routines—a creative act of solidarity that exceeds binary tropes of hope and uncertainty. [displacement; middle east; games; temporality; sociality; agency] notes acknowledgments i offer a thousand thanks to the ethnographic consultants made this article possible through their inclusive fellowship and good humor. the fieldwork that informed this article was generously supported by the american center of research (acor) in amman predoctoral research fellowship and the fulbright student research fellowship. i was lucky to work with the cultural anthropology editorial team, particularly kate herman for her prompt and patient correspondence throughout the writing process and joanne nucho for providing guidance on the final touches, as well as the anonymous reviewers whose incisive comments helped me situate my esoteric interests within the anthropological conversation. i would also like to thank the attendants at the university of chicago semiotics workshop and the tufts university department of anthropology who offered valuable questions and criticisms when i presented my arguments as a work in progress. individual appreciation is due to kerem ussakli, james rizzo, hazal corak, and amahl bishara for their encouraging feedback on drafts, and to ali yass for a rousing conversation about arabic philosophy and the politics of gaming in contemporary iraq. 1. for verbal statements, i have directly transliterated from the baghdadi dialect of arabic, which includes consonants like that are not present in modern standard arabic. for citations from texts, i transliterate from modern standard arabic. 2. arabic philosophy is a multiethnic, interfaith conversation that has been unfolding for centuries primarily through the vocabulary and grammar of the arabic language. it is not reflective of an essential arabness, includes thinkers from iberia to uzbekistan, and has influenced christianity and judaism as well as islam. 3. some readers will detect the resonance between arabic philosophy and semiotic or phenomenological anthropologies. this is not an accident. charles sanders peirce derived his image of semiotic processes as autonomous, evolving beings under the influence of the lurianic kabbalah, an intellectual system authored by exiled iberian jews living in ottoman syria (franks 2015). and martin heidegger’s braggadocious claim to originality seems less convincing when we recognize elements of his thought anticipated in avicenna (el-bizri 2000). as henry corbin (1978, 5), the first french translator of both heidegger and many arabic and persian works, explains, the german philosopher was acquainted with the arabic tradition via his dissertation on duns scotus, a medieval franciscan whose writings built directly on avicenna. 4. nor should we assume that jaakaaroo is a contest of masculine values (cf. geertz 1972). women also enjoy the game. and hanging out with friends at the teahouse drew away resources that could otherwise be used to cultivate the “nurturing masculinity” of family-oriented providers who embody male authority (naguib 2015). when one player quit the table for good, he said that all the taunting reminded him of what he characterized as “women’s talk.” before jaakaaroo, another parcisi variant called barjis was played in the levant; it was associated with women, domesticity, and the chest of bridal goods 5. every table enforced “house rules” that dictated special functions for certain cards. because the same group of friends played together each night, fluency in that table’s special rules became a shibboleth for participation. 6. one reviewer indicated that jaakaaroo is also played among francophone lebanese migrants in canada. 7. this finding is genuinely uncanny for a discipline that explains the effectiveness of cultural forms in relation to historical and geographic specificities. writing on the possibility of “uncanny science,” hussein agrama (2021, 400, 410) argues that surprising “synchronicities, whereby our senses of future and past are brought together in striking ways … [require] new 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freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.02 (re)writing anthropology and raising our voices from the academic margins cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 379-386, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.01 (re)writing anthropology and raising our voices from the academic margins kimberley d. mckinson vanderbilt university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5720-8441 what would it mean to rewrite anthropology from the academic margins, that is, from minority serving institutions (msis) and other traditionally underresourced institutions that nurture primarily underserved undergraduate populations? this question, which animates the essays that form this colloquy, is undergirded by two critical provocations. first, the question positions anthropology as an incomplete epistemological project whose normative notions can be intentionally disrupted and intervened upon (harrison 1991)—and thus rewritten. second, the question does the important work of naming the academic margins and situating them as a problem for thought. for, indeed, as kimberlé crenshaw (2016) has rightly argued, “if there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see it. if you can’t see it, you can’t solve it.” in the spirit of any true intellectual provocation, this question hopes to disorient and with that, compel an examination of the taken-for-granted. yet it also means to prove generative and, in so doing, create a space for reorientation. in this way, the authors of this colloquy have asked, “what would it mean to rewrite anthropology from the academic margins?” as a call to imagine anew the ontological possibilities of the academic margins to raise the voices of the so-called non-elite, predominantly minority, and low-income students—those “outsiders within” (harrison 2008) who have traditionally been taken to have less of a stake in anthropology’s existential debates. the distinction between center and margin is a defining master contrast that has long proved central to anthropology’s cosmological framing. the margins are where anthropologists have been trained to do anthropology. existing in contradistinction to the idea of the margin is home—that place rooted at the center of the anthropological universe where knowledge is produced. and yet, the margins remain central to how anthropology makes itself legible to the world. a significant number of anthropologists have theorized the positionality of the margins in relation to state power (das and poole 2004). anthropologists have written about the politics of doing ethnography at the margins (herzfeld 1987; bošković 2008). scholars have also sought to shed light on the marginalization and contributions of minority and women scholars in the discipline (harrison and harrison 1999; harrison, johnson-simon, and williams 2018; lamphere 2004). this scholarship, produced in the wake of anthropology’s reflexive turn, is informed by a self-conscious confrontation of anthropological subjectivity and a deep interrogation of the center and the margin in relation to structures of power as well as anthropology’s own ties to systems of colonialism and imperialism. virginia dominguez (2012, 395), in her 2012 american anthropological association (aaa) presidential address, also points to another compelling rationale for this disciplinary preoccupation with margins, suggesting that “a persistent concern with marginalization, fragmentation, and even alienation constitutes [a] peculiar but powerful anthropological ‘comfort zone.’” in light of this, she questions what it would mean for anthropologists to move beyond zones of comfort to instead dwell in zones of discomfort—and not just those “in the field.” the failure of anthropologists to effectively consider the institutional and pedagogical operationalization of the margin within the center represents a noteworthy blind spot and disciplinary zone of discomfort. that is, anthropologists have neglected to come to terms with the reinscription of the center/margin dichotomy at home, specifically, at the very places—universities and colleges—where academic anthropologists write anthropology and where, with their students, they perform the sacred and foundational acts of teaching and learning anthropology. in speaking to the localization of the margin at home, this colloquy offers a view from the academic margins, a zone of discomfort. the essays respond to the call for anthropology to face up to the habitus of privilege and position and grapple with the social locations of students and professors (waterston 2018). the authors offer msis as a critical point of departure to consider the myriad epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical possibilities that emerge when we center minority and low-income students and their scholarly engagement with anthropology at the academic margins. in the united states, msis came into existence in response to historical inequities in minority access to higher education. the eight federally designated postsecondary msis include alaska native–serving institutions; asian american and native american pacific islander–serving institutions (aanapisis); historically black colleges and universities (hbcus); hispanic-serving institutions (hsis); native american–serving non-tribal institutions; native hawaiian–serving institutions; predominantly black institutions (pbis); and tribal colleges and universities (tcus).1 each serves a critical role in the u.s. higher education landscape. they all provide tertiary education opportunities to primarily low-income and underrepresented students of color neglected by an american higher education system that has traditionally privileged predominantly white institutions (pwis). we cannot overstate the critical importance of msis to minority student academic success. for example, while hbcus represent just 3 percent of all colleges and universities, they enroll 11 percent of african american students; while tcus represent less than 1 percent of higher education institutions, they enroll 9 percent of native american students; while hsis represent only 4 percent of tertiary institutions, they enroll 50 percent of all latino students; and while aanapisis represent less than 1 percent of all colleges and universities, they enroll 20 percent of all asian americans and pacific islanders. these institutions also provide intellectual homes for many low-income students whose lives intersect with deep histories of racism and poverty. notably, 98 percent of african americans and native americans who attend hbcus or tcus qualify for federal need-based aid. in addition, more than half of all students enrolled at msis receive pell grants, compared with only 31 percent of all college students (rutgers center for minority serving institutions 2014). put simply, msis enroll a significant number of students for whom higher education might otherwise have remained a foreclosed dream (gasman and conrad 2013). though progress has been made in the name of making anthropology more racially inclusive, the discipline—at the undergraduate, doctoral, and professional levels—continues to exist as a white public space (brodkin, morgan, and hutchinson 2011). this means that anthropologists who work at msis have a unique opportunity to expose minority students to the discipline and offer to them a critical anthropological lens through which to understand their own experiences, as well as the world around them. the essays in this colloquy build on a conversation that emerged during a roundtable session hosted during the aaa’s 2020 raising our voices virtual series that featured anthropologists working and teaching at four-year msis designated as aanapisis, hbcus, and hsis. absent from the colloquy are essays that showcase the experiences of scholars and students affiliated with two-year (community college)2 or four-year alaska native–serving institutions, native american-serving non–tribal institutions, native hawaiian–serving institutions, pbis, and tcus. though these institutions and their students are not present in this collection, they undoubtedly also sit at the academic margins. thus, these essays, even as they highlight critical voices from the academic margins, also illuminate the need for greater recognition of and scholarly engagement with an important number of minority-serving institutions that reside at the academic margins—yet face a double marginalization. that is, they are marginalized within the larger academic sphere as well as within conversations about msis. in no uncertain terms, the killing of george floyd in 2020, as well as the global protests against police brutality and white supremacy that followed, served as the backdrop for the earliest conversations motivating this colloquy. in the wake of these events, many anthropologists called for a confrontation of the discipline’s participation in epistemic violence and a shift in practice (mckinson 2020). in this spirit, the authors of the essays grapple with the decolonial (harrison 1991), black feminist (bolles 2013), and liberatory (hooks 1994) possibilities of an anthropological shift in practice and whether or not this could only have implications for what has traditionally been understood as the anthropological margins, the premier locale of field work. the essays demand attention to another critical geography of anthropological practice—the classroom, the primary field site where anthropology is taught and learned at home. the authors fundamentally recognize that the post–george floyd world that we now inhabit demands a willingness to seriously look to the msi classroom as a space generative of the critical anthropological pedagogy and knowledge that the present moment demands. in therefore extending the collective thinking that originated during 2020, the essays in this collection have unapologetically centered the learning experiences of low-income minority students who make their intellectual homes at the academic margins. in arguing for the transgressive potential of anthropological pedagogy, angela c. jenks draws attention to the radical possibilities of archival practice in the minority classroom. through an elucidation of her students’ engagement with black archival materials concerning health social movements, she shows how fugitive archival practice can allow for a reconceptualization of anthropological knowledge and link students’ social action to collective liberation. kimberley d. mckinson’s essay positions auto-ethnography and photovoice as embodied pedagogical practices that enable minority students to take their own bodies and experiences as constitutive of evidence, analysis, and knowledge. drawing on and analyzing her students’ writing and photography, she demonstrates how attention to embodied knowledge can allow students to produce counterhegemonic knowledge in the classroom and agentively construct their own realities. erica lorraine williams’s essay brings the reader into the hbcu classroom and centers anthropological citation praxis. she shows how citing black women, centering black women’s subjugated knowledges, and embracing interdisciplinarity in rewriting the anthropological canon can open up new epistemological possibilities. the final essay further extends the colloquy’s interrogation of the poetics and politics of language practice in the msi classroom. in this essay, shonna trinch and barbara cassidy, writing alongside two of their students, bianca suazo and jadeline mallol nunez, provide a portrait of seeing rape, a course and student-faculty collaborative theater project meant to eradicate sexual violence on campus. their essay sheds light on the ways in which linguistic varieties and codes other than standard american (and academic) english in academia—often spoken by minority students—can dismantle patriarchy and disrupt hegemonic language practices often adhered to by faculty. while all the authors reveal practices employed in the teaching of specific cultural anthropology courses, we must understand their interventions more broadly, that is, in relation to the potential for these innovative pedagogical strategies to disrupt the hegemony of cultural anthropology and be put into practice across anthropology’s subfields. more than as a geographical location, this colloquy reads the margin as an analytical placement, one that makes evident both “the constraining, oppressive quality of cultural exclusion and the creative potential of rearticulating, enlivening, and rearranging the very social categories that peripheralize a group’s existence” (tsing 1994, 279). such a reading highlights the margin as not just a site of exclusion but also as one of empowerment. moreover, if, as anna l. tsing argues, it is margins that highlight the instability of social categories, then we must also recognize the margin for its potential to disrupt and transform the oppressive social categories that operate as intersecting systems of power (crenshaw 1991). still, the work of disrupting and transforming anthropology is not easy. as the authors of this collection of essays show, it requires openness to being challenged by, collaborating with, learning alongside, and even being taught by one’s own students. in pushing us toward an understanding of the transformative power of the margins, the authors therefore ask us to celebrate the emancipatory and abolitionist possibilities—for both students, teachers, and anthropology—that thrive at the margins. they ask us to see their students for what they already are—whole. this colloquy takes seriously louise lamphere’s (2004, 137) call at the dawn of the aaa’s second century for anthropology to “nurture those on the margins and find ways in which they can be fully incorporated into the ever-changing definition of what anthropology is.” the essays demonstrate that the msi academic margin in fact constitutes a productive space from which to rewrite anthropology. here, the project of rewriting anthropology from the academic margins is taken to be more than just a scholarly endeavor. it is a political act rooted in pedagogical praxis that necessarily engages anthropology as an incomplete epistemological project and as unsettled terrain. such a philosophy highlights anthropology as always plural and fractured—despite historical tendencies to suggest otherwise. such a reorientation recognizes anthropology as always in the process of becoming. altogether, in seeking to raise the voice of anthropology at msis, this collection crafts a vision for an equitable anthropology of the now and the future and situates the academic margins as an important space from which the discipline must be reimagined in the current political moment. abstract in reframing the ontological limits and possibilities of the academic margin, this colloquy situates the minority serving institution (msi) classroom as a critical (field) site in which anthropological knowledge is innovated, produced, and contested. the essays, written by anthropologists who work in and represent “non-hegemonic” institutions, speak to decolonial, black feminist, and liberatory projects and pedagogy that challenge what anthropology can look like, how anthropology can be practiced, how it can be taught, and what it can contribute to a more just world. this collection crafts a vision for an equitable anthropology of the now and the future and situates the academic margins as an important space from which the discipline must be reimagined in the current political moment. [margins; minority serving institutions; pedagogy; anthropological knowledge] notes 1. at alaska native-serving institutions, undergraduate students who identify as alaska native make up at least 20 percent of total enrollment. at asian american and native american pacific islander–serving institutions (aanapisis), undergraduate students that identify as asian american and native american pacific islander make up at least 10 percent of total enrollment. historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) were founded before 1964 and intended to provide higher education to african american communities. at hispanic-serving institutions (hsis), undergraduate students who identify as hispanic make up at least 25 percent of total enrollment. native american–serving non-tribal institutions are not affiliated with american indian and native alaskan tribes, though they serve native american students. at these institutions, undergraduate students who identify as native american make up at least 10 percent of total enrollment. at native hawaiian–serving institutions, undergraduate students who identify as native hawaiian make up at least 10 percent of total enrollment. a predominantly black institution (pbi) is a postsecondary institution that receives funding to improve and expand its capacity to serve black students as well as low-income and first-generation college students. at pbis, undergraduate students who identify as black make up at least 40 percent of total enrollment, and students who identify as low-income and/or first-generation college students make up at least 30 percent of total enrollment. tribal colleges and universities (tcus) are colleges and universities associated with american indian and native alaskan tribes (rutgers center for minority serving institutions 2022). 2. community colleges continue to be vital pathways to educational attainment in the united states for minority and low-income students. however, as is the case at many historically black colleges and universities (see erica lorraine williams’s essay in this colloquy), at community colleges across the united states, anthropology degree programs are disappearing. for recent scholarship on this subject, see brown 2022. references bolles, lynn 2013 “telling the story straight: black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology.” transforming anthropology 21, no. 1: 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12000 bošković, aleksandar, ed. 2008 other people’s anthropologies: ethnographic practice on the margins. new york: berghahn books. brodkin, karen, sandra morgen, and janis hutchinson 2011 “anthropology as white public space?” american anthropologist 113, no. 4: 545–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01368.x brown, nina 2022 “the diversity slot: the case for letting anthropology burn at community colleges.” in applying anthropology to general education reshaping colleges and universities for the twenty-first century, edited by jennifer r. wies and hillary j. haldane, 106–20. london: routledge. crenshaw, kimberlé 1991 “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43, no. 6: 1241–1300. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 2016 “the urgency of intersectionality.” ted website. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality das, veena, and deborah poole, eds. 2004 anthropology in the margins of the state. santa fe, n.m.: school of american research press. dominguez, virginia r. 2012 “comfort zones and their dangers: who are we? qui sommes-nous? american anthropologist 114, no. 3: 394–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01441.x gasman, marybeth, and clifton f. conrad 2013 “educating all students: minority serving institutions.” penn graduate school of education. https://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/339 harrison, faye v. 1991 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. washington, d.c.: american anthropological association. 2008 outsider within: reworking anthropology in the global age. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, ira e., and faye v. harrison, eds. 1999 african-american pioneers in anthropology. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, ira e., deborah johnson-simon, and erica lorraine williams, eds. 2018 the second generation of african american pioneers in anthropology. urbana: university of illinois press. herzfeld, michael 1987 anthropology through the looking-glass: critical ethnography in the margins of europe. cambridge: cambridge university press. hooks, bell 1994 teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. lamphere, louise 2004 “unofficial histories: a vision of anthropology from the margins.” american anthropologist 106, no. 1: 126–39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567447 mckinson, kimberley d. 2020 “dear white anthropologists, let not symbolism overshadow substance.” anthropology news, july 2. https://doi.org/10.14506/an.1452 rutgers center for minority serving institutions 2014 “a brief history of msis.” center for minority serving institutions. https://cmsi.gse.rutgers.edu/content/brief-history-msis 2022 “what are msis?” center for minority serving institutions. https://cmsi.gse.rutgers.edu/content/what-are-msis tsing, anna l. 1994 “from the margins.” cultural anthropology 9, no. 3: 279–97. https://www.jstor.org/stable/656363 waterston, alisse 2018 “the habitus of privilege and position.” american anthropologist website. https://www.americananthropologist.org/undergraduate-desire/habitus-of-privilege-and-position cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 379-386, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.01 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 191, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.08 leaha, mihai andrei, and roger canals. 2024. “resisting alternative images: an ethnography of visual disinformation in brazil.” cultural anthropology 39, no. 4: 533–563. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.03. the authors have identified the following error in the published article: on p. 534 and on p. 535 in the caption for figure 3, the correct date of the invasion of the brazilian congress is january 8, 2023. erratum cultural anthropology https://doi.org/10.14506/ca39.4.03 how to sustain a strike: rules, routines, and the essential in kashmir cultural anthropology: discarded candidates: waste as metaphor in local government elections in australia (and elsewhere) 276 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 276-300, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.04 discarded candidates: waste as metaphor in local government elections in australia (and elsewhere) tanya jakimow the australian national university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8780-1753 saturday, 6 p.m., december 4, 2021, and the polls have just closed for the new south wales (nsw) local government elections. the bake sale organized by the parents and friends’ association has sold out of election-themed cakes, and the sausage sizzle has done a roaring trade selling “democracy sausages” or their vegan equivalents.1 candidates and their supporters are taking down corflutes, being sure to pick up the plastic ties that have fallen on the ground. the bins are emptied of “how-to-vote” leaflets, and the cardboard voting booths have been packed away. scrutineers are having their debrief before the start of counting, while other campaign volunteers take down the details of the election party where they will anxiously await the results. on monday, polling stations will return to their regular status as schools, churches, and community centers. another festival of australian democracy will be complete (brett 2019; hauser and singer 1986). bessie’s party was subdued: a family dinner with a bottle of wine.2 she had contested as an independent in her first council election, and had been living and breathing the election since june. elections scheduled for september were postponed until december due to covid-19, resulting in a long, drawn-out campaign. but now, the hours spent developing campaign material, letterboxing, 277speaking to voters on pre-poll, and today a full day of running between polling stations had finally come to an end. bessie was exhausted: feelings that only deepened as the results started to trickle in. votes accumulated for her competitors, yet hers remained stubbornly low. by the end of the night it was clear that she had failed to become a councillor, and that she was the worst performing candidate in her ward. when we touched base a couple of days later, she was despondent, but also angry. she described the elections as a waste: “the time commitment for this is extraordinary—and for no benefit, no outcome” (conversation, december 2021). while bessie felt her campaign had no benefit, her activities had been vital to the making of democracy. candidates are key actors in performing the practices and rituals that sustain the legitimacy of the electoral process, the viability of its institutional features, and the forging of relations between representative and represented (crewe 2021; hauser and singer 1986; paley 2008). even, and especially, bessie’s loss was crucial. representative democracy requires a surplus of candidates for there to be a process of selection. uncontested elections or those without real opposition fail in their key role of producing a legitimate and popularly accepted result. elections translate a pile of votes into a decision as to who will be the people’s representative (crewe 2021), and by a process of elimination, produce discarded candidates. the integrity of the election requires these discarded candidates to quickly and quietly exit the scene, and to largely take care of their own disposal. when they do not, for example when donald trump disputed the election results in 2020, electoral systems are weakened by mistrust. elections generate two types of excesses to form a representative body: the overinvestment by individual candidates (time, money, material), and the surplus candidates themselves. the anthropology of waste provides lenses to examine electoral systems in a fresh light. mary douglas’s (1966) structural-symbolic approach has long been drawn on to consider how the removal of “matter out of place” proves critical to social order. more recently, ethnographers of waste management go beyond understanding the social classifications that categorize certain objects and people as waste to examine its afterlives: its (affecting) capacities and affordances, its entanglements in webs of labor and power, and its circulations in local and global systems (reno 2015). taking inspiration from this body of work, i rethink elections as systems of discarding, in which “people are valued and devalued, become disposable or dominant” (liboiron and lepawsky 2022, 3). following max liboiron and josh lepawsky (2022) i aim to 278defamiliarize and denaturalize australia’s vernacular democracy, casting the production of surplus and its inevitable waste as central to its operation. in challenging the taken-for-granted nature of australian local elections, i seek new possibilities to reimagine its processes and afterlives. electoral democracies in which one representative is selected to stand in for the many constitutes but one possibility for democratic practice—a system disdained by the ancient greeks, as it “significantly disempowers those who are compelled to relinquish their voice” (nugent 2019, 32; see also shah 2021). the finality of the decision/election can be a full stop for participation for voters and candidates in democratic decision-making, arguably a waste given the investments in becoming representative (saward 2020). discard studies invites us to rethink waste management to discard well; that is, being accountable to the discarded, and establishing means of revaluing those who have been devalued through processes of production (liboiron and lepawsky 2022). acts of repair, rehabilitation, and stewardship (lau 2023; martínez 2017) can revalue unsuccessful candidates within democratic systems, or in the least, arrest the “electoral ripples” (govindrajan 2018) that cause long-lasting negative consequences. attention to waste and wasting in elections marks a crucial first step to transforming electoral practices into more caring democratic systems. these themes are explored through the experiences of candidates such as bessie who contested and (mostly) lost the 2021 local government elections in nsw. unsuccessful candidates offer windows into electoral processes, while their experiences are worthy of attention as an underappreciated aftermath of elections (govindrajan 2018; erazo and benitez 2022). after identifying conceptual and theoretical approaches in waste and discard studies that reveal elections in a new light, as well as outlining the specifics of the ethnographic study, the empirical material presents different stages of the value cycle: the production of surplus candidates; the value creation of campaign practices; the waste inherent in their excessiveness; consequent depletion of candidates; and their ultimate sacrifice to propel democracy forward. the final section offers an alternative: discarding well. elections as systems of discarding anthropologists’ attention to the practices, rituals, and symbols of elections reveals their role in the substantive workings of democracy (paley 2008). elections do not in themselves constitute democracy, but in representative democracies they play an important role in establishing its legitimacy and the 279acceptance of rule (nugent 2019). electoral rituals establish, make evident, and show commitment to a particular understanding of power (collins 2021; hauser and singer 1986; lama-rewal 2009), and they establish and renew “the mysterious link between representative and the represented” (crewe 2021, 31). practices and technologies remove doubt as to the veracity of the result, and hence ensure the ongoing viability of electoral democracies (crewe 2021). as periodic and spectacular events (hauser and singer 1986) or as penetrating all spheres of life (buyandelgar 2022), elections are productive of systems of power and rule, citizenship, and political imaginings (moore 2019). candidates are key actors in elections and the making of democracy. elections can be all-consuming, entailing long days and considerable personal sacrifices (crewe 2021; buyandelgar 2022; kramer 2022). first-time candidates must learn and implement the culturally variable pragmatic rules of elections, in the process reproducing the particularized features of vernacular democracies (bailey 2001; collins 2021). candidates accommodate, perform, and reproduce cultural electoral repertoires, but they also generate new political stylizations and practices in ways that reshape the nature of politics and social organization (buyandelgar 2022; simon 2010). in short, candidates’ electoral activities produce value necessary for the sustaining and reimagining of political life (collins 2021; moore 2019). interest in candidates as an object of study is mostly extinguished at the point when they lose. studies that do examine their experiences (erazo and benitez 2022) or offer firsthand accounts (billy 2002; kidu and setae 2002) show that electoral losses can be traumatic. william shaffir and steven kleinknecht (2005) describe them as a “death.” candidates’ visions of their future, and future selves, become extinguished. elections can be life-changing moments, a matter of life and death, with “the potential to radically change individual political trajectories” (picherit 2020, 84; emphasis original). the social consequences of elections linger past election day in what radhika govindrajan (2018) describes as “electoral ripples.” these studies point to the potential trauma and harm of contesting (and losing) an election, precisely as it is the moment when the value invested and acquired through electoral processes radically depreciates in a single day. discard studies and the anthropology of waste offer three orienting lenses to examine these processes of valuing, devaluing, and discarding in elections. the first underlines the excess inherent in producing democracy, and the inevitable need to discard such excess. the urgency of waste management arises from 280the acceleration of overproduction and hyperconsumption (isenhour and reno 2019). the rivalrous emulation of an election campaign in which candidates seek to outdo each other has parallels with georges bataille’s (2003) account of the potlatch (frow 2002). while conspicuous consumption may not in itself be how one defeats a rival in an election, campaigns nonetheless trigger comparison, emulation, and ultimately destructiveness (frow 2002) as candidates exhaust their resources in competition. on losing an election, these candidates are then sacrificed at the altar of democracy. their sacrifice is not a by-product of elections, but rather the motor that propels the system forward (to paraphrase reno 2014, 14). as joshua reno (2014, 9) argues, we must continue to be attentive to these “critical expenditures” and their role in the continuation of life.3 the second lens draws on the influential work of mary douglas, and the extension of her thinking on purity and pollution by anthropologists of waste. she describes dirt (or waste) as “matter out of place” that disrupts or offends “order in a culturally-specific system of classification” (alexander and o’hare 2020, 4). in this way, waste is “both an unwanted, unintended side effect of human activities and inevitably also a social construct—an entity that only comes into being due to our incessant need to create social order amidst a chaotic world” (eriksen and schober 2017, 283). douglas (1966, 94) describes the restriction that order requires, in which from all possible materials, “a limited selection has been made”; that is, entailing processes of inclusion and exclusion (eriksen and schober 2017). in this way, “waste is not an object. . . . waste is something we do”; it is a process and practice of counting what is of value, and identifying waste as “value’s co-constitutive other” (doherty 2022, 6). jacob doherty (2022) corrects common readings of waste by highlighting that selection does not entail exclusion so much as inclusion into systems of production. waste is value’s other—together they constitute worlds. the third lens in discard studies offers recuperative possibilities. “waste is something we do,” but it is also “something we undo” (doherty 2022, 6; emphasis removed). considering what happens to waste after it has been discarded constitutes the first step to improve waste management, and to practice discarding well (liboiron and lepawsky 2022). reno (2015, 562) notes that “at all stages of the dumping process . . . wastes can be recovered, remade, and given life as part of a new creative process.” he raises the tantalizing prospect that “making waste is part of what makes us the ethical selves we want to become” (reno 2015, 559). francisco martínez (2017) argues that waste studies need to be complemented with studies of repair, commitment, and rehabilitation. his ecology 281of care pays attention to the life-value cycle, the ways that things become more or less valuable, lose and regain value. attention also needs to be placed on stewardship and living with waste that cannot be transformed (lau 2023). this final lens of discarding well opens up new possibilities for revaluing and being accountable to discarded candidates. in sum, the anthropology of waste invites new readings of electoral processes by a) drawing attention to the excessive surplus inherent in making democracy and its destructive potential; b) defamiliarizing and denaturalizing vernacular democracies by questioning the classification of unsuccessful candidates as no longer holding value within representative democracy, and; c) inviting reflection on how to discard better, through acts of revaluing and repair. i examine each of these in turn through an ethnography of a local government election. election research the first week after an election is particularly grueling for an anthropologist. alongside celebrations with newly (re)elected representatives stand conversations with candidates who have lost, including those who suffered humiliation at the ballot box. but elections are also addictive, for ethnographers as much as candidates (crewe 2021). often overlooked by political scientists, local-level elections hold particular appeal to anthropologists because of their proximity of relations (copus 2016), the importance of local political idioms (bedi 2016), and the diversity of electoral cultures and political repertoires (barnett and shalaby 2024). the barriers to entry are relatively low, especially in contexts where party endorsement is not common, allowing for a greater diversity of candidates (breux, couture and koop 2019). the stakes can, nonetheless, be high. contesting a local election entails hypervisibility and a testing of relatively close and intimate relationships (jakimow 2020). research on the 2021 nsw local elections began in february 2021 at workshops for women “aspirants.” these were my entry point to meet potential candidates, eleven of whom agreed to be followed through their campaigns. the participants hailed from regional centers (4), rural shires (3), and metropolitan councils (4), and comprised four culturally and racially marginalized (carm) women, seven white women, and one woman with a disability, with ages ranging from the mid-thirties to late fifties. of the eleven participants, three decided not to contest the election, and out of the eight who did, three were elected. all but one of the participants contested as an independent candidate. geographically, nsw is similar in size to pakistan, yet distance barely mattered during nsw’s 282107-day lockdown (june 26–october 11) when all conversations took place over zoom, phone, or email. i also followed online campaigns and community forums, and participated in a closed facebook group for female candidates. after lockdown restrictions lifted, i resumed in-person catchups, including one more trip to regional nsw, and campaigned for the four candidates in greater sydney. i am a white, cisgendered woman in my forties, without children and without disability. none of these characteristics correlate with whom i developed more sustained relationships, that is, the six women with whom i remain friends and in regular contact until today. the closeness of ties seemed to depend more on the gregarious nature of my interlocutors, and my direct role in their campaigns. my analysis is informed by conversations with other councillors, candidates, and their support teams, as well as ongoing ethnographic research on two councils. the material presented here is, however, mostly from the journeys of the eleven women: from the moment of recruitment, during the extended campaign period through to election day, and their recollections twelve months later. i start at the beginning, when they were encouraged to contest. a surplus of candidates elections need candidates. a higher number of surplus candidates above the number of positions indicates robust political participation and competition. uncontested elections are indicative of democratic weakness, if not dysfunction. hence democracy is premised on an overproduction of candidates, with practices to determine candidates’ relative value, who is disposable and hence necessarily discarded to ensure the ongoing life of democracy (reno 2015). the strength and legitimacy of a democracy further depends on who contests (kwok and pietsch 2017), with a particular focus on gender parity in public office in australia, as well as globally. gender equality has long focused on overcoming social, economic, and political exclusion, with the goal of social inclusion (breux, couture and koop 2019). discard studies invites us to examine how women are included into systems premised on overproduction and, inevitably, waste (doherty 2022). before each local government election in nsw, the office for local government (olg), a nsw state department, invests in programs to increase both the number and diversity of candidates. in 2021, olg funded a series of workshops across nsw, delivered by the australian local government women’s association, nsw (algwa) and women for election australia (wfea).4 these halfand full-day events aimed to inspire women to nominate as candidates and to help them navigate the election itself. presenters from algwa—all sitting 283councillors—focused on reassuring women that they had what it takes, explaining what a councillor does, then convincing women that they could do it. few attendees lacked the knowledge or confidence to be a councillor; rather, their anxieties were about the election itself. the workshops by algwa provided campaign tips, but generally elections were presented as an unpleasant stage to be gotten through on the way to becoming a councillor. one presenter described the elections as one of the worst experiences of her life, but counselled: “don’t let the negatives outweigh the positives. being on council has been the most rewarding experience of my life.” in contrast, wfea’s presenters foregrounded the election, presenting its contestation as an achievement in itself. they did not claim that the campaign would be easy, but they said that it was worth it. their feminist approach encouraged women to see their candidacy as part of the fight for gender equality in local government, and to define success beyond the ballot box. participants felt inspired. keetie said the workshop was the “moment of going from saying a mumbly thing [being non-committal] to saying, ‘yes, i’m running for council’” (conversation, july 2021). these efforts coincided with, and were perhaps partially responsible for the increase in the percentage of councillors identifying as women elected in 2021: 39.5 percent, up from 31.2 percent in 2016/17. there was, however, no progress—and minimal funding—toward improving the representation of carm women. out of 3,865 candidates who contested elections conducted by the nsw electoral commission (nswec),5 1,610 identified as women (41 percent), of which 473 were elected to council. put differently, for every female candidate who won an election, 2.4 lost. these losses, the 1,137 unsuccessful female candidates, are central to democratic systems. their production, participation in value-assigning practices, and then elimination from the selection of council prove critical to the creation of order (a representative governing body) from disorder (douglas 1966). the election can be seen as a periodic suspension of order, with (too) many voices, (too) many representative claims, (too) many potential governors. such disorder is crucial to destructive power and new potentialities (douglas 1966): in this case, producing a new governing body. to re-establish order, classificatory practices that assign value, identify candidates to be discarded, and the removal of these excess candidates are required. women are encouraged to sign up for inclusion into a system of production which produces not only councillors but also necessarily “critical expenditures” (reno 2014): candidates discarded to keep democracy vibrant. 284helen was one of these critical expenditures. when i first met her, she was undecided whether to contest, as doing so would inevitably affect her standing in her small rural shire. after attending an algwa workshop, she nominated. one of only two women among eight candidates vying for seven council positions, her candidacy proved doubly important: first in avoiding an uncontested election (enabling a period of disorder), and second in increasing female participation. she was also a workshop participant who had become a candidate: a key indicator of success for algwa and olg. helen was unsuccessful, the only candidate to be discarded in her shire. like other candidates, she did not make a fuss and simply congratulated the winners. but she has been irrevocably changed, feeling tarnished as she bumps into voters/friends in the supermarket and streets. her candidacy made the election possible, yet from her perspective, there is an affective afterlife to being made surplus to the social order. not all losing candidates had negative experiences, and not all candidates were in it to win it.6 but in the urgency to have a surplus of (diverse) candidates, recruitment is often prioritized over honest conversations about what an election could cost candidates. after gushing about the wfea workshop in july, keetie was more critical after she decided to withdraw her candidacy: “did i have my eyes open before the campaign? did i know all that it would entail? probably not. i just thought, you know what, i am going to do this. . . . what is on the other side of that decision, it should not just be about getting people to run” (conversation, october 2021). her criticism that programs simply encouraged women to become candidates without honest discussions about what it entails speaks to the downsides of (political) inclusion into electoral systems (of waste). increased female candidacy produces not only more legitimate electoral contests but also greater numbers of women who invest in, and lose, elections. in nsw, emphasis is placed on the former, but with little acknowledgment of the latter (i will return to this point below). an excess of value helen adds value to democracy not simply by becoming a surplus candidate that allows a (s)election, but also through her campaigning. while the conventional wisdom of how to play the game of elections (bailey 2001) is seen primarily from the perspective of how to win, campaign practices also perform important functions. candidates learn how to navigate appropriate practices within the strategic field of elections (collins 2021) through workshops and emulating 285previous campaigns and other candidates. through emulation and experimentation, australia’s vernacular democracy is produced anew. i examine three of the most typical practices, unpacking the value they create, and the excessiveness that leads to waste. corflutes are signs made of corrugated polypropylene (a type of plastic) that usually measure 60cm by 90cm, with a width of 3-5mm. they contain an image of the candidate or party and slogan. their appearance on public poles, fences, and front yards are often the first sign that an election is nearing. ubiquitous in elections in many countries, they are particularly important in the “low information context” of local elections, where media coverage is limited (breux, couture and koop 2019). without information about each candidate, voters make “information shortcuts”: assumptions about a candidate based on stereotypes associated with gender, race, age, and so on (breux, couture and koop 2019). corflutes enable these shortcuts, arguably leading voters to make decisions in ways that privilege male and white candidates. the environmental impact of corflutes concerned both candidates and community groups. while they add to the festive feel of elections, support local printers, and provide awareness, they also, mostly, end up in landfill. community facebook pages debated whether they should be allowed, and candidates worried about the cost. cathy only printed fifty, and at $12 aud each, they were a major expense. further, she knew some would get damaged: “i’m preparing myself that i will get something drawn on my face.” she noted this had happened to another candidate, and “it really shook them.” at risk is not only the financial cost but also the violation of having a blown-up image of oneself defaced. corflutes are not simply an expense; they are an overt representation of self in public. the affective power of corflutes, like other forms of garbage (doherty 2022), continue after the election. daisy had kept corflutes from an unsuccessful 2017 campaign, reusing them for 2021.while the move was cost-effective, as the campaign dragged on, the signs started to get to her: “i can’t wait for it to be over. in my garage i have so many corflutes, old ones. i am so sick of looking at them. after [the election] i will be able to call the council and get them to pick up the whole lot, get them out of my sight.” keetie drove her car around for months with corflutes on her backseat, nagging her to start putting them up. they added to the pressure to keep her campaign going, even as her mental health was deteriorating. when she finally pulled out of the campaign, she drove the corflutes to the garbage tip. dumping large photos of one’s self engendered 286difficult emotions: the letting go of the self-imaginary as councillor, as well as unwelcome reminders of the financial burden of the campaign. letterboxing provides voters detailed information about a candidate through a leaflet or card delivered to each residence. the message, images, and format require considerable thought. printing is a considerable expense, with increased costs if they are professionally delivered. to reduce costs, most candidates organize volunteers where they can, and do much of the letterboxing themselves. daisy attempted to letterbox her ward of more than 75,000 residents with just the help of a friend. soon realizing the impossibility of the task, she gave up and dipped into her savings to have the leaflets professionally delivered. bessie wore out two pair of shoes, while christine had a large team of volunteers to letterbox, in wards of 15,000 and 30,000, respectively. it is a campaign practice that takes a lot of time, energy, money, and organization. a leaflet helps voters know more about the candidates and their positions on local issues, yet not all voters are appreciative. community facebook groups complained about the “rubbish” that arrived in their mailbox during the election and “goes straight to recycling!” adjudicating this line between valuable service and waste is the ubiquitous “no junk mail” sign on mailboxes. political material is exempt from the standards of the australian catalogue association, classified as intrinsically of value to recipients and hence able to be dropped in letterboxes with this sign. yet public opinion is divided. letterboxing with environmentally friendly candidate christine, we agonized over whether dropping leaflets in “no junk mail” labeled letterboxes would do more harm than good. there were also debates in her team as to whether to letterbox in areas that were overwhelming inhabited by international students not eligible to vote. despite the additional cost it was decided to be worthwhile, as all residents should know the issues in the area, and we were educating potential future australian voters. the activity has a further, less recognized value for democracy. rachel spent several days letterboxing businesses in her electorate. walking through the more industrial—and neglected—parts of town alerted her to the deterioration of council infrastructure and land. cathy letterboxed nearly the entire shire with only minimal support from family. she found it was a way to be attentive to the environment and the different housing conditions of residents. cathy also ran into people as they gardened or walked the dog, and it was a legitimate way to introduce herself and make a connection during lockdown. she often left personal notes on her leaflets (“you have the prettiest letterbox in town”; “love your garden!”) that gave a sense of proximity even without a face-to-face interaction. 287hence this activity—seen as mundane and rote—educated and informed potential future representatives, and started the process of building a relationship between representatives and represented. how-to-vote (htvs) leaflets are handed out at pre-poll and on election day instructing people how to vote optimally for their choice of candidate in nsw’s preferential voting system. preferential voting was developed in australia to avoid the pitfalls of a first-past-the-post electoral system in which a candidate can be elected with a minority of public support (brett 2019). it also prevents wasted votes; voters can confidently vote for a party or candidate who is unlikely to be elected, knowing that their preference will then go to an ideologically aligned candidate. candidates do preference deals with other candidates to boost their electoral chances or keep certain candidates out. if this sounds complicated, it is. citizens voting in their fifth or sixth election can still spoil their ballot by not numbering the boxes correctly. the leaflets inform voters how to number boxes on the ballot paper in ways that best support their first choice of candidate and navigate the confusing (and often misleading) array of minor parties. handing out htvs and speaking to voters is made more important because of compulsory voting.7 campaign teams do not need to encourage people to vote, but they do need to educate ill-informed voters. handing out htvs at polling stations offers an opportunity to promote their own candidate (or themselves), but some campaigners will also take voters through all of their options—often pointing to the different corflutes—so that voters make an informed choice. campaigners also help voters navigate the practicalities of voting and the complicated ballot paper. a joy of handing out is speaking to voters casting their first ballot in australia—some on turning eighteen, others who have recently become australian citizens. hence, while many people complain about having to “run the gauntlet” of “hustlers” before entering the polling station, they play an important role in producing democracy with australian characteristics. at the same time, they also add to the material waste of elections. the bins at polling stations quickly fill with discarded htvs destined for landfill. handing out htvs can also be a waste of time. as voting is compulsory, ample opportunity must be provided for voters to cast their ballot (brett 2019), including a period of pre-poll for voters who cannot attend election day. in 2021, pre-poll was monday to saturday for two weeks.8 while this was great for voters and ethnographers (pre-poll is a wonderful place for gossip), it created a headache for candidates. most had to rearrange their lives to be at pre-poll for all eleven days, taking time off work and arranging childcare. the number of voters 288was mostly a trickle. the wife of one candidate was visibly annoyed when we had one voter in one hour on a hot day: “pre-poll should not be this long,” she complained. when it started to rain at another, an exasperated candidate said, “oh, that’s good, now we can all waste our time here, get wet, and speak to no one.” while handing out htvs is an important practice for australia’s electoral system, it also generates waste: the material waste of htvs, the financial waste of htvs that are not handed out, and the waste of time on polling stations. the value of campaign activities campaign activities prove valuable to democracies in several ways: they help the electorate make an informed choice; ensure votes reflect preferences; and contribute to the “becoming of” representatives (saward 2020). they also add to the festive feel of elections as a liminal (disorderly) state between governing orders. yet many, if not the majority of voters do not appreciate the efforts of candidates. some voters are unambiguously contemptuous if not rude as they walk past supporters handing out htv cards. bessie was outraged: “it is like we are doing them some kind of disservice” (conversation, november 2021). this statement contains not only a complaint about the lack of respect for candidates but also an appreciation of what candidates contribute to democracy. she continued: “i was thinking when standing on pre-poll: this is quite a service that you’re doing for the community as a candidate, and explaining who the candidates are and trying to inform them so that they can make an informed decision” (conversation, november 2021). the differing perception of whether campaign activities are valuable democratic practices or simply harass voters appears to lie in the extent to which they are seen in excess of that required. complaints center around how corflutes are hung up everywhere, giving a messy appearance to local environments; the piling up of leaflets in letterboxes; the need to push past so many campaigners. in the production of democratic expression and debate, there is an excess, beyond that required, to achieve the core fundamentals of democratic systems. the excessiveness of election activities may be a source of annoyance—but it is also an expectation in “vibrant” (read messy, noisy, excessive) democracies. this disorder marks the destructive power crucial to the emergence of a new order. these practices of wasteful expenditures have an unacknowledged impact, however: the wearing down of candidates. 289 depletion it was not only the general public that criticized electoral waste. candidates pointed to the excessive use of resources and the consequent triumph of the most cashed-up candidates. bessie’s explanation for her electoral defeat centered on the excessiveness of other campaigns. a successful candidate had done three professional letterbox drops: “that’s somewhere between $10,000 to $15,000 [$6,500–$9,800 usd] worth of letterbox dropping that’s been spent just on one campaign.” she continued: the other thing is the excessive number of corflutes. [candidate name’s] corflutes kept growing and growing. . . . they were everywhere. . . . the visibility of [three candidate names] was excessive. then all they could do with those [after the election] is put them in landfill. . . . and i suppose they can stick new ‘how-to-vote-forms’ over the top or something [for reuse in future elections]. but it’s really, really excessive” (conversation, december 2021). bessie extrapolates from her own wasted time, effort, and money to the election as a whole: “you’ve got to spend somewhere around $20,000 to $25,000 [$13–$16,000 usd] to be successful.” multiplying this amount by the number of candidates: “out of all that effort, and out of $100,000 [$65,000 usd], you got two candidates [elected as councillors]. it’s actually funny. this seems to be an inefficient way to select councillors” (conversation, december 2021). it is this excessiveness that makes the analogy of the potlatch apt for examining election campaigns. the desire not to be outdone by competitors results in an escalation of resources spent on an excess of value-producing activities for electoral democracies. a candidate does not need 150 corflutes to make oneself visible to voters; they only need to ensure their presence is greater than that of their competitors. it is this “invidious emulation,” that is, “a desire to buy prestige at the expense of one’s rivals by means of profligate expenditure” (frow 2002), which makes campaigns wasteful. the result—much like a potlatch—is destructive, as candidates deplete their resources, often for few benefits. bessie noted: “this isn’t a trivial day or it’s not a trivial process. . . . it’s upset all the things that i do on a day-to-day basis, and the family life was just chaotic. . . . oh, and the time commitment for this is extraordinary—and for no benefit, no outcome” (conversation, december 2021). at the end of a long and tiring campaign, bessie felt depleted. 290this depletion was common to all candidates, exacerbated by the drawn-out campaign. when daisy heard the news that the elections were postponed due to the lockdown, “i bawled my eyes out” (via text, june 2021). a few weeks after the announcement, daisy and her friend were in her living room crossing out the old date on leaflets about to be letterboxed, adding the new date in black marker pen and stamping it with “date changed.” “and of course, i did not have the date on it once, but twice, one on the outside, and another on the inside,” she said (conversation, august 2021). there was no possibility of reprinting the leaflets. already “i am stripping my savings dry.” nor could she decide to simply not undertake this practice, as her competitors’ leaflets came to her own letterbox daily. daisy’s labor exemplifies the cost of the election for candidates in terms of time and money, and how often candidates reduce the cost of one by expending the other. by late september, daisy was struggling to keep going: “there are now sixty-seven days to go. which is still some time . . . i am exhausted, though, tanya. before i was ready to go, ready and excited and full of beans. now, i am just thinking, whatever. . . . self-doubt is really creeping in . . . i think, who is going to vote for you, get a grip [daisy]” (conversation, september 2021). daisy was unsuccessful. a couple of weeks after the election, she described her state as “exhausted: exhausted emotionally, physically, mentally, any way you can imagine. yes, exhausted” (conversation, december 2021). the election had completely worn her down, and worn her out. volunteers also spend their time, which creates emotional baggage for candidates. as daisy said apologetically: “i feel like i have wasted your and everyone’s time” (conversation, december 2021). even though the covid-19–related postponement exacerbated impacts, costs that wear down candidates are common to each election. cathy explained, “the personal investment is enormous. in terms of time and money. i have taken two weeks leave for pre-polling.” the time commitments of the election were the added incentive cathy needed to leave her job in october, but then money became even tighter. she added: “i have not told my husband how much all of this is costing me. i will not get much change from $5,000 [$3,215 usd]” (conversation, july 2021). all this investment was for a grossly underremunerated position of councillor (jakimow and henaway 2023). “i did think about pulling out. i thought, why am i doing this? i will be surviving off $33 [aud] a day [as a councillor], and having to fight even harder for things” (conversation, october 2021).9 alongside the depletion of time and savings, her emotional resilience had also taken a hit. long days campaigning were often interspersed with unpleasant 291encounters: the business owner complaining about corflutes; the returning officer who was rude; the residents who took their frustrations of council out on her. cathy is tough, “i am the rock of my family” (conversation, november 2021), but even she broke down and cried on more than one occasion. “i am just exhausted, and then these things happen and i wonder, what the fuck am i doing this for?” (conversation, november 2021)? unlike daisy, though, cathy won, and while her sacrifices were not forgotten, they did not weigh her down. candidates who invested in an election only to lose provide a distinct vantage point to read elections as systems of waste. candidates are included into a system structured on excess and waste, of which their candidacy is arguable one type. both bessie and daisy were critical of the encouragement of women to contest elections without providing material support, as well as of the way elections are contested. their suggestions for improvement tellingly entailed reducing waste. daisy suggested that the electoral commission could stick up a copy of each candidate’s htv in the voting booth to reduce campaign costs and paper waste. bessie had more radical suggestions: “the letterbox drops are crucial, but my suggestion . . . is that the councils do the sending out. i don’t think it’s fair on candidates to fund a big campaign. . . . the other thing is the excessive number of corflutes. . . . they were everywhere . . . excessive. then all [the candidates] could do was put them in landfill. there should be a limit, a number per candidate” (conversation, december 2021). these suggestions would achieve the functions of campaigns for democratic systems (informed voters) but limit the excess. bessie’s suggestions address the invidious emulation of the potlatch, “leveling the playing the field,” as she explicitly put it. at stake is not only the depletion of candidates but also the disruption of a system that rewards economically strong candidates. that is, it is the arrest of the conversion of economic power into political power that the potlatch enables, and which bessie argues stands counter to a healthy democracy. sacrifice women, people with low incomes, and youth are all disadvantaged when economic elites are the only people who can contest, or win, an election (murray 2023). while some otherwise credible candidates simply do not nominate as candidates, others contest in suboptimal ways, sacrificing time, money, and energy for no return. daisy exhausted her savings, but on reflection, she never had a chance: “look, it’s like, how do i compete against them. how? i can’t . . . . it does boil down to money, money talks. money can get you interviews, money 292can get your face plastered on every street corner. money can get advertisements popping up on facebook. it’s all money. it’s not even [pause] i could be a better councillor . . . but does the public know that? no . . . because i don’t have the money” (conversation, december 2021). it is excessiveness, a bombardment, that gets one elected according to daisy. i am not suggesting that only cashed-up candidates had a realistic chance of success. other candidates won with relatively cheap campaigns on the strength of their personal qualities, or competed in low-key electoral cultures. nonetheless, emma crewe (2021, 50) cautions against the “pseudo-magical trust in the results of elections as the driver of democracy, and our fetishizing of voting” that fail to acknowledge their limitations. good candidates won, and lost, in 2021, as is likely true in most elections. what happens to these candidates—these critical expenditures required for elections but discarded at its pivotal moment—is rarely considered. daisy created value by being a candidate, engaging in practices that informed voters, and by becoming representative through processes of listening to voters’ concerns and representing these in public forums. the value for her was, however, uncertain. eleven months after the election we met to discuss a draft research report on the elections. reliving the experience through the findings was not easy, re-engendering the feelings of the campaign, and her loss. i asked if she regretted contesting: “yes, i do, i do regret it. mentally, emotionally, and financially it just drained me” (conversation, november 2022). she still remembered the exact number of votes (first preferences) she received: a dishearteningly small number for all she had invested. “if i had lost by a little, or even if i had gotten 2,000 votes, i could have dusted myself off and tried again next time, but the result was just demoralizing.” daisy was a so-called surplus candidate, essential to hold an election, only to be discarded after the selection had been made. losing candidates in this way can be seen as analogous to the “accursed share” of human sacrifice (bataille 2003). the excessive energy generated by democratic societies finds its outlet in the destruction of candidates, sacrificed not only at the point of election, but through the process of selection itself. for some, the sacrifice means exclusion from prior social relations, and even expulsion. adele had the roughest ride out of all the candidates i followed. she had long wanted to use her talents for leadership and community mobilization to become a councillor. as the campaign progressed, she had to radically rethink her sense of who she was. in may, rumors started circulating and a facebook page was established to openly mock her. in august, a local magazine published a scathing article (for which they later had to apologize by court order). by 293november, her bank of supporters was getting smaller, and she decided not to have people at polling stations as “it’s pretty nasty out there.” on polling day she received less than 500 votes from 25,000 voters. within a year she had permanently left the town. her candidacy, her humiliation, her loss, and ultimately her withdrawal from society was a sacrifice, one that enabled the councillors to take their rightful place (bataille 2003). violence and utter destruction may seem overemphatic to describe the experiences of losing candidates. indeed, few candidates said that they regretted contesting the election, and some viewed lost elections as valuable preparation for future campaigns. yet it is also a process in which one’s value (in community and in relation) is enhanced, evaluated, and devalued at the point of selection. elections can tarnish candidates in ways that have long-term consequences for their social value in, and beyond, local politics. deeply hurt by her poor performance in the election, bessie nonetheless put the disappointment behind her and sought alternative avenues to contribute to local government. her application to join council’s women’s advisory board was rejected. nor was she selected for any council committees. she returned to the volunteer roles suspended during the election campaign but her status as former candidate engendered suspicion and she ultimately left. the election changed her relationships, seemed to tarnish her, and to devalue what she could contribute to her local community. bessie did not leave the area like adele did, yet she had sacrificed her prior life and sense of self in the community, by becoming a candidate. she had not been prepared for this risk. the inability to find meaningful social activities after the election reveals a lack of appreciation for the contributions a candidate makes during the campaign, and, as a consequence, their ongoing value to democratic society. reaching out to voters, listening to their concerns, and translating campaign messaging are not just electoral but also representational practices. as the campaign progresses, candidates are becoming representatives of a particular constituency (saward 2020). there is a difference, however, between becoming representative and being a representative: a difference forged through the election (saward 2020). at the moment of aggregate judgement by the electorate, representative claims are discarded, and the value acquired by a candidate rapidly depreciates. in some cases, this depreciation appears permanent. as erving goffman (1952) elucidated, such moments in which a person claims a certain status, only to be disabused of new notions, are common. circumstances in which “a person may be involuntarily deprived of a role under 294circumstances which reflect unfavourably on his capacity for it” (goffman 1952, 454) involve a loss of face, and humiliation. i describe such instances elsewhere as an affective injury, when “the response of the ‘other’ impresses upon, or affects, a person in ways that are counter to, rather than aligned with, their self-understanding” (jakimow 2018, 551). few people’s self-understandings (as community leader, popular, well-regarded) are tested and exposed in the way they are in elections. lost elections can fundamentally shake one’s sense of who one is, and who one is in relation to others. there is no opportunity to “conceal . . . from others and even from himself the facts of his commitment” (goffman 1952, 460). rejection is by hard numerical fact, and is public. it is this rejection—or sacrifice—that propels electoral democracies forward, ensures their vitality, through the destruction of candidates. discarding well the analogy of the sacrifice captures the lack of effort toward the recuperation and repair of unsuccessful candidates. while the election is public, the social practice of “cooling,” that is, “a process of adjustment to an impossible situation” (goffman 1952, 456), is for candidates primarily a private affair. our post-election catchups played such a role for many of the candidates i followed. the criticisms of the electoral system expressed in these conversations and shared in this article can in part be considered a self-reparative narrative to recover from an affective injury (jakimow 2018). the wfea organized a post-election debrief, though it is telling that it was mostly attended by successful candidates. the smallness of this act of care, and its singular occurrence (the only one conducted by wfea, algwa, or olg), reinforces the imbalance between the money and effort expended to create a surplus and diversity of candidates, and the lack of attention after they have been discarded. the lack of acts to repair and rehabilitate is, in my opinion, reflective of their (inadequate) ethical commitment (martínez 2017). losing an election is not equivalent to the “wasted lives” of people surplus to the needs of capital or subject to processes of state dehumanization (eriksen and schober 2017; martínez 2017). yet being discarded at the ballot box is still hurtful—emotionally, socially, financially. describing unsuccessful candidates as discarded invites thinking about how we can discard well, through acts of recovery, care, and repair (martínez 2017). election debriefs with candidates are inadequate through this lens, as they seek to repair the individual, rather than the relational; in other words, they deal with symptoms, not systems (liboiron and lepawsky 2022). 295there is no process to arrest the “electoral ripples” that can reverberate through communities after local elections (govindrajan 2018). adele, for example, did not leave the town due to her failure to be elected, but because her relationships, and self-in-relation, had been fundamentally transformed. preventing harassment and bullying during elections would mark an important, preventative, step. there also, however, needs to be a process of revaluing, of providing space for her to return to her pre-election activities after the event, and to repair her relations with others. reparative acts can also allow unsuccessful candidates to form new involvements, “new framework[s] in which to see himself and judge himself” (goffman 1952, 456). the exclusion of bessie from council committees and volunteer opportunities is in this way doubly regrettable. not only was she denied new frameworks, the value she acquired through the process of becoming a representative (even if she did not attain a formal status) was also wasted. liboiron and lepawsky’s (2022, 128–29) principles to discard well involve accountability: “recognizing and acknowledging what is discarded as well as holding an obligation or responsibility to that which has been discarded.” part of bessie’s frustration is that there was little to no acknowledgment not only of the facts of her loss but also of what she had done for local democracy. she, like others, had been encouraged to contest, but felt abandoned when their loss became evident, as if she was no longer of value. accountability would be to ensure candidates can continue to contribute to the community no matter the election results: a practice that arguably should be part of any program to encourage women and other underrepresented groups to contest elections. not all unsuccessful candidates want to return to public life. justin lau (2023) rightly questions the thesis of endless possibilities and untapped potential of waste, while overlooking processes of ruination and the unsalvageable. his proposal for an ethic of care inspires thinking about how we better support candidates through and after their campaigns. attentiveness to processes of ruination—the depletion of candidates—questions the built-in profligacy of elections, how they demand certain forms of (over)investment. daisy scaled back her involvement on council committees after the election, not out of embarrassment but from exhaustion. an ethic of care toward candidates would manage election processes in ways that sustain and conserve candidate resources (energy, emotional well-being, money, time), minimalizing deterioration as part of waste management (reno 2015). not only will this potentially sustain the energy for democratic participation of “discarded candidates” but it will also minimize the 296ongoing financial, emotional, physical, and social consequences of a grueling campaign. conclusion discard studies offers the promise of defamiliarizing systems and denaturalizing practices (liboiron and lepawsky 2022). examining electoral systems through the lens of waste and wasting throws light on the centrality of overinvestment and overproduction in processes of selecting representatives. those who can invest in (and afford to waste) a greater amount of resources are advantaged in such a system, akin to a potlatch in which expenditure seeks to crush one’s opponents (frow 2002). rarely acknowledged are the costs borne by “also-rans”: the surplus candidates of all genders essential to an election that are discarded at the ballot box. such an oversight is particularly grave given the efforts directed toward encouraging more female, low-income, racially marginalized, with disability candidates—with limited financial support. they contribute to the legitimacy of electoral democracy and co-produce it through practices. yet interest in (or caring about) these candidates ends at the moment the votes are counted. even their final act in making democracy—taking care of their own disposal to ensure the order of electoral systems is sustained—is primarily a private, and unsupported, affair. to be careless with the value acquired and generated in the election at a time of democratic malaise (cooke, long and moore 2019) seems overly profligate. revaluing discarded candidates can invite a more radical reimagining of democracy, and in particular, representative democracy. michael saward (2020, 3) argues that for a democracy to be “more fully, robustly and defensibly democratic,” it must be representative in some form: that is, one stands in for the many, as a practical solution to the cacophony of voices and interests (disorder). as david nugent (2019) notes, however, there are serious drawbacks, including limited opportunity for further voice and democratic participation as a consequence of the act of selecting representatives. he invites us not to see representation as a necessary feature of democracies, but as a characteristic particular to vernacular democracies. that is, the rapid depreciation of candidates’ value may be a fundamental feature of electoral democracies, but not necessarily democracy in a larger sense. attention to waste and wasting in elections marks a crucial first step to transforming electoral practices into more caring democratic systems. discarding well may spark alternative imaginaries of democracy—at least that is my hope.10 297 abstract elections produce legitimacy, relations between representative and represented, and consent to rule. they are also systems of discarding. representative democracies require a surplus of candidates who engage in practices and rituals of elections, the majority of which are discarded at the ballot box. candidates (over)invest in their campaigns, resulting in wasted time, money, and materials. unsuccessful candidates offer a particular vantage point to view the processes of valuing and devaluing in elections, as they transition from the elevated position of candidate to the abject condition of discarded representative. through orienting lenses of discard studies and the anthropology of waste, i re-examine campaign practices in 2021 local government elections in new south wales, australia, and shed light on the experience of being made surplus to representative democracy. anthropological approaches to care, repair, (martínez 2017) and “discarding well” (liboiron and lepawsky 2022) provide alternative ways to re-value so-viewed surplus candidates after election day. [elections; democracy; women and politics; waste; australia] notes acknowledgments  i wrote this article while a british academy visiting fellow at the university of birmingham (vf2/100361), and i revised it while a visiting fellow at the max plank institute for social anthropology, halle, with thanks to professor david hudson and professor ursula rao, respectively. my thinking was significantly deepened by the feedback of justin lau on an early draft, while that of the anonymous reviewers sharpened the arguments. my thanks to the editorial team at cultural anthropology for their time and care, particularly to dr. ather zia. my enduring gratitude to the supporters, candidates and councillors for trusting me with your stories. this research was funded by an australian research council future fellowship (ft190100247). 1. the sausage sizzle is an important part of election day in australia, with websites dedicated to helping voters locate polling stations that have stalls (https://democracysausage.org/) (brett 2019). 2. all names are pseudonyms, the majority selected by the respondents themselves. 3. i am deeply indebted to justin lau who helped me see the parallel with the potlatch, and the relevance of reno’s and frow’s commentary on it. 4. the latter organization subsequently changed their name to women for election. 5. two out of 124 councils organize their own elections, and hence are not included in the nswec statistics. 6. the number of overall candidates includes those who contested as part of a so-called group ticket in an unwinnable position. 7. voting is compulsory for all federal and state elections in australia. states differ for local government elections, but they are compulsory in nsw. 8. postal and phone voting was also possible. 9. i examine the need to address poor councillor remuneration elsewhere (jakimow and henaway 2023). 10. postscript: local government elections were held again in nsw in september 2024. bessie contested for a second time, and, while marginally improving her result from the previous election, she still came last in her ward. she wrote on her facebook page: “voters don’t realize the enormity and costs that candidates take to go into an election like this, whether they win or are defeated” (september 2024). daisy did not contest herself, but ran the campaigns of a small party. she had also rejoined council 298committees; “i am addicted to politics” she admitted (october 2024). adele became party branch secretary in her new home, but refused the invitation to stand for council. only cathy, who won in 2021, decided to completely sit it out. three years as councillor had “taken everything out of” her (august 2024). she watched the elections from the sideline with mixed feelings. the enchantments of politics, their addictiveness, are, i tentatively suggest here, central to the recruitment of willing candidates into the system of excess, waste, and discarding of electoral democracy. references 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imaginaries.” in the state we’re in: reflecting on democracy’s troubles, edited by joanna cook, nicholas j. long, and henrietta l. moore, 27–48. new york: berghahn books. paley, julia 2008 democracy: anthropological approaches. santa fe, n.m.: school for advanced research press. picherit, david 2020 “‘elections will not change anything. but they can change my life’: manipulation of the electoral process and self-making of small politicians in andhra pradesh.” commonwealth and comparative politics 58, no. 1: 82–99. https://doi.org/10.1080/14662043.2020.1700020 reno, joshua 2014 “toward a new theory of waste: from ‘matter out of place’ to signs of life.” theory, culture & society 31, no. 6: 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413500999 2015 “waste and waste management.” annual review of anthropology 44: 557–72. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014146 saward, michael 2020 making representations: claims, counterclaims, and the politics of acting for others. london: ecpr press. shaffir, william, and steven kleinknecht 2005 “death at the polls: experiencing and coping with political defeat.” journal of contemporary ethnography 34, no. 6: 707–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891241605279839 shah, alpa 2021 “what if we selected our leaders by lottery? democracy by sortition, liberal elections, and communist revolutionaries.” development and change 52, no. 4: 687–728. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12651 simon, scott 2010 “negotiating power: elections and the constitution of indigenous taiwan.” american ethnologist 37, no. 4: 726–40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40890784 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 276–300, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.04 the struggle for health: medical brokerage and the power of care in brazil’s amazon estuary cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 421-449, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.06 the struggle for health: medical brokerage and the power of care in brazil’s amazon estuary matthew abel washington university in st. louis https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3433-1265 three months before the onset of the covid-19 pandemic in march 2020, i was discussing the state of brazil’s public health system with camila, a community health agent along the lower tocantins river near the mouth of the amazon estuary. camila was born in a riverine village in the islands of abaetetuba, a peninsula that juts out into the bay of marajó. camila moved to the eastern amazonian capital of belém as a young woman to study as a nurse. afterward she returned home to work for brazil’s unified health system (sistema única de saúde, or sus). similar in structure to the united kingdom’s national health system, the sus is a public network of hospitals and clinics established in 1989 that provides medical care to brazilian citizens and residents free of charge. in each of abaetetuba’s seventy-three island communities, health agents like camila work to gather epidemiological data and administer basic health services. by linking preventative care to local health monitoring, the sus’s health agents program has drawn together an impressive network of public servants and is globally heralded as a model for community-based care (castro et al. 2019). yet for many of its employees, the mood has turned increasingly bleak. camila and i spoke in late 2019,1 three years after the government of former president michel temer (2016–2019) instituted a series of neoliberal policies that reduced federal public health spending. austerity measures exert a palpable influence on amazonian municipalities like abaetetuba, where residents depend on the public system to avoid the predatory costs of private clinics in the city. camila explained that she was constantly fending off her neighbors’ requests for remedies. she was certainly capable of providing basic treatment, she said. but the state had never equipped her with the facilities to do so. austerity policies generate long wait lists at public hospitals and clinics, often relegating primary and secondary care to the private sphere. camila asserted that if the sus received enough funding, it would be the best health system in the world. but there are people in power who make sure that it does not. figure 1. map of abaetetuba and its riverine islands. by matthew abel. camila’s suggestion that medical care is intertwined with political power may seem intuitive to anthropologists. ethnographers working in clinical settings are often trained to recognize power in the regulatory institutions and forms of knowledge that mediate medical interactions. for instance, in her pathbreaking ethnography of sans papiers asylum-seekers in france, miriam ticktin (2011, 3) introduces the concept of a “regime of care” as a “set of regulated discourses and practices grounded” in the “moral imperative to relieve suffering.” the concept of a care regime draws on michel foucault’s formulation of “biopolitics” to describe medicine as a dispositif, or “instrument,” that diffuses the project of state administration on and through the social body. by chronicling how asylum-seekers pursue diagnoses with life-threatening illness to gain legal residency, ticktin contributes to a body of literature that examines how power is not simply reflected but also actively reproduced through medical institutions (redfield 2005; petryna 2004; varma 2020). elsewhere, joão biehl (2013, 420) has drawn on a similar framework to suggest that the expansion of brazil’s public health network through the sus has institutionalized a form of biopolitics “from the bottom up,” in which patients are reconfigured as consumers within the global medical marketplace. power, in both cases, is understood via analogy to government: as a self-reinforcing system of regulation and social control. yet as i continued my conversation with camila, she began to describe a series of local political relationships that did not square well with the decentralized, capillary understanding of power promoted by modern-day foucaultians. for instance, camila told me the story of dr. edmilson batista and tio nelson, her uncle. nelson is seventy-eight years old and struggles with heart disease. but because of long waitlists at sus clinics, he frequents the private practice of dr. batista, the former vice-mayor of abaetetuba and one of the only cardiologists in the municipality. tio nelson pays for regular consultations with batista, who prescribes him statins to lower his cholesterol. each time he refills his medication he is required to go in for a new consultation. camila acknowledged batista’s excellent reputation, noting that he cares for his patients and “listens to the people.” but he also has his own interests, she said. his consultations and local renown are in large part what won the governing coalition its municipal seat. at the same time, camila suggested, batista’s position of poder público, or “public power,” allows him to direct the flow of federal health spending in ways that benefit his own private practice. he was, in other words, a broker, whose influence over the local health system and ability to direct the day-to-day health struggles of others stem from his control over medical infrastructure. while anthropologists frequently draw on foucault’s notion of biopolitics to discuss the relationship between coercion and medical care, there are many scenarios in which a diffuse understanding of power deflects attention from the powerful themselves. in a stratified society, there are certainly doctors, health officials, and patients who participate unwittingly in what foucault (2003, 244) called the “subtle, more rational mechanisms” that discipline and manage a population. however, there are also those who bestow, throttle, or even artificially limit health access in ways that reinforce that society’s class structure and dominant system for distributing medicine. whereas the twentieth century was characterized by the emergence of biopolitical institutions like the world health organization and brazil’s sus, the increasing concentration of medical infrastructure in the hands of private capital has, during the twentieth-first century, provoked profound transformations in the relationship between modern health administration and the medical industry (brown, cueto, and fee 2006). as patients and healers are integrated along hierarchical chains of suppliers, manufacturers, insurance conglomerates, and biotech firms, the concentrated forms of power wielded by figures like batista have become an increasingly important feature of the global health landscape. in this article, i examine the role of local elites in brokering access to medical services in brazil’s amazon estuary and the significance of this practice for anthropological understandings of public health governance. medical brokerage, or the ability of some to direct the health struggles of others through their control of medical resources, draws important analytical attention to the day-to-day health exchanges that constitute broader regimes of care and their embeddedness in regional histories of exploitation and social conflict. as i came to learn over the course of my fieldwork, the story of batista and tio nelson is more than a simple tale of corruption or medical malpractice. it reflects the historical dynamics of a region in which elites have long mediated access to health services. during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, amazonian merchants garnered wealth, power, and prestige through a system of exchange and debt-peonage known as the aviamento. similar to the trapping system used during the north american fur trade, merchants advanced tools, consumer goods, and household necessities to rural workers in exchange for forest products and the labor to extract them. yet medicine also played a key, if largely unstudied, role in mediating debt relationships under the aviamento. in abaetetuba, the extraction of forest products was frequently remunerated by the counter-prestation of medical services, curatives, and pharmaceuticals, “gifted” by merchants to their deserving clients. during the 1980s, local health activists fought to overturn this paternalistic system for distributing medicine. by reconceptualizing health care as a human right, these activists institutionalized the sus’s universal health network: a decentralized, self-reinforcing system of medical governance that broke the authority of the region’s merchant elites. but as merchants and their families entered an emerging professional class of lawyers, doctors, and politicians, they exercised a growing influence over regional health infrastructure, reproducing an analogous set of relationships to the ones they once maintained with their riverine clients. in the following sections, i draw on interviews with activists and rural health-seekers to recount an intergenerational history of health struggle in abaetetuba and the persistent role of local elites in mediating access to medical services. after situating the concept of medical brokerage within the regional literature on health, power, and clientelism in latin america, i demonstrate how modern medical technologies articulated with amazonian healing traditions as regional elites carved out positions of brokerage between riverine farmers and an emerging global medical industry during the mid-twentieth century. in the second half of this article, i examine the breakdown of the aviamento’s care regime during the 1980s and the institutionalization of health care as a universal right under brazil’s 1988 constitution. since its foundation in 1989, brazil’s universal health system has made unprecedented strides in almost all measures of human development. but as the private medical industry has captured a growing share of brazil’s public health resources, austerity measures and new forms of medical brokerage threaten to reverse these gains (paim et al. 2011). the concept of medical brokerage, i argue, is indispensable for interpreting these developments in light of broader changes to the global health system. one of the more stubborn assumptions regarding biopolitics is the notion that the self-reinforcing, coercive dimensions of regulatory institutions are necessarily reproduced at all times and all places, and that this reproduction offers a self-evident explanation of the policy direction undertaken by public authorities. yet more than any other health crisis in recent history, the covid-19 pandemic has illuminated the vulnerability of public health administration and its susceptibility to a range of competing financial and political interests. in this article’s final sections, i narrate the collapse of the east amazonian hospital system and the responses of local actors as covid-19 rapidly spread throughout the region. as community health agents like camila attempted to respond to an unprecedented public health crisis, their efforts were repeatedly undercut by profiteering, corruption, and political obstructionism that extended from the local level to the highest echelons of federal administration.2 explaining these events will require sustained dialogue with the insights of classical political theory to examine how and under what conditions the instruments of public health administration are mobilized towards particular ends. twentieth-century medicine and “public power” in latin america in his study along the colombian putumayo, michael taussig (1987, 142) suggests that every interchange between “affliction and cure” depends on “an active construction of the past original to every new present.” and indeed, from the outset of the amazon’s colonization, the spread of old world diseases was linked to the extractive trade in forest products (bunker 1988). in the early seventeenth century, catholic religious orders missionized the indigenous societies that peopled the amazonian floodplains, organizing them into sedentary villages (sommer 2005). these settlements became “efficient machines for propagating disease” (cleary 2001, 86–88) as the portuguese drew on enslaved indigenous and later african labor to harvest the so-called drogas do sertão, or “drugs of the interior.” these drugs included a complex of forest medicinals and confectionary products such as chinchona bark, andiroba, copaiba, cacao, and sarsaparilla. meanwhile, the pharmacopeias and syncretic knowledge systems that developed in the colonies were exported to the metropole, contributing to emergent biomedical institutions in europe (walker 2013). illness and remedy, in other words, never made for independent variables. they were two sides of a historical motion that produced biomedicine as western while naturalizing disease along south america’s “lugubrious, pestilent ganges.”3 figure 2. andiroba oil extracted from carapa guainensis, a colonial-era droga do sertão and household remedy for inflammation also once used for lantern oil. photo by matthew abel, january 2020. world systems and dependency theorists have long examined the ways that global markets concentrate knowledge, infrastructure, and political power in the centers of the capitalist system while artificially limiting access to their benefits in the periphery (hornborg 2001). in his writing on “structural suffering,” the anthropologist paul farmer (1996) drew on these theoretical traditions to describe how the unequal relationship between a society’s capacity to meet the basic needs of its population and the actual distribution of resources inflicts a form of violence on day-to-day health-seekers. in regions where infrastructure has been systematically underdeveloped for the benefit of elite and private interests, this tendency influences not only access to medical services but also perceptions of the public sphere itself. for instance, camila’s reference to batista’s position of “public power,” or poder público, in this article’s opening vignette reflects a pragmatic, common-sense understanding of state authority as mediated by outside interests. in a context like abaetetuba, where elites often undermine state capacity to maintain positions of brokerage between government and the population, “public power” is not some diffuse instrument of social control. it can be seized, wielded, lost, and contested. this local understanding of state power is embedded within a regional history that interweaves the expansion of public authority with the often unacknowledged contributions of latin america to the science of global health. marcos cueto and steven palmer (2014), for instance, have argued that many of the technologies characterizing today’s world health system originated, or were in some cases perfected, in latin america. disease control measures such as prophylaxis, vaccination, and quarantine reached some of their highest levels of sophistication at the turn of the twentieth century in the rural backlands and commercial entrepôts of mexico, cuba, brazil, argentina, and peru. as poverty and enclave economic development provoked successive disease outbreaks along ports and agricultural frontiers, latin american modernizers began to conceptualize medicine as a “means to achieve social and public health reforms that would assist in the integration of national societies” (cueto and palmer 2014, 168). brazil is a particularly illustrative case. the historians gilberto hochman (1998) and nísia lima (2007) recount the growth of brazil’s nascent public health apparatus at the turn of the twentieth century. under brazil’s old republic (1889–1930), the two largest national exports were coffee, grown along the southeastern frontier region, and latex, extracted from rubber trees in the amazon under the aviamento system. after the abolition of african slavery in 1888, rural elites increasingly drew on indentured europeans and migrants from brazil’s drought-stricken northeast to quell labor shortages along the coffee and rubber frontiers. but when the growing circulation of laborers and commodities provoked successive disease outbreaks in port cities, threatening national exports, the ruling class enlisted a cohort of applied medical scientists known as the “sanitarians” to confront the burgeoning epidemiological crisis. during the early 1900s, sanitarians like oswaldo cruz, carlos chagas, and belisário penna embarked on a series of high-profile disease-eradication campaigns to prepare the country for capital investment.4 these figures not only laid the foundations of brazil’s medical system but many also went on to play key roles in the construction of the pan-american health organization in 1902 and the world health organization in 1948 (cueto and palmer 2014). by “dilating the boundaries” (dilatando as fronteiras) of public power, the sanitarians sought to resolve the contradictions of capitalism’s liberal era by configuring the modern state as a legitimate steward of affliction and cure (hochman 1998). however, they never succeeded in overcoming the inequalities that defined their own nation’s position within the world system. while brazil contributed disproportionately to the emerging science of public health, the popular benefits of new technologies were often stymied by policies that limited access to care in an effort to institutionalize new opportunities for private medical markets (paim 2008). this exemplifies a key tension that defined the twentieth-century history of medicine in the region. while clinical institutions, research centers, and other instruments of what foucault referred to as biopolitics certainly proliferated in latin america during the twentieth century, this did not imply a unilateral inscription of state power over the body politic. the emergence of biopolitics was less of an autonomous social force and more of a pact—one that reflected society’s internal contradictions and conflicts. at times, medicine took on a populist dimension as public health policy articulated with popular demands for reform. for instance, charles briggs and clara martini-briggs (2009, 549) discuss the long-standing tradition of latin american social medicine as promoting “collective rather than individual approaches to health care” and underscoring “the importance of political-economic and social determinants of health.” here, medicine was conceptualized as a vehicle for confronting u.s. imperialism and overcoming induced underdevelopment. this view was famously articulated in ché guevara’s (1968) treatise on revolutionary medicine in cuba, which served as a rallying cry for health reformers across the continent (brotherton 2012).5 yet by drawing more health-seekers into the market for medical supplies and pharmaceuticals, public health reforms also created new opportunities for elites to broker access to emerging medical technologies.6 immanuel wallerstein (1974) famously argued that the axial inequalities that characterize a nation-state’s position within the world capitalist system are often reproduced at the local level as political and economic elites carve out positions of brokerage in relationship to the global market. the embeddedness of health-seekers and providers within the global political economy of medicine situates the administration of care within a similar set of relationships. in brazil, ethnographers have demonstrated how patronage ties shaped the outcomes of federal anti-poverty legislation (ansell 2014), while others have drawn on the concept of brokerage to examine how elites mediate access to public services such as health and education (koster and eiró 2022). in her ethnography of “peabiru,” a favela in the northeastern brazilian state of ceará, jessica jerome (2015) demonstrates how employers leverage access to medical services to draw what she defines as “reciprocal” relationships of care between neighbors into hierarchical arrangements between patrons and clients. these observations echo joão biehl’s (2013) account of the growing role of lawyers and judicial authorities in determining patient access to pharmaceuticals through the brazilian sus, as well as dr. batista’s role as a medical broker in abaetetuba. the presence of these brokerage relationships leads biehl (2013, 431) to portray state biopolitics as “an insecure enterprise” and “more a symptom of the limits of government than a marker of its presence and control.” yet what biehl defines as the “limits of government” may speak more to the limits of an analytic framework that assumes coherence and consistency in state administration while bracketing the local contests over wealth, power, and prestige that direct government intervention towards particular aims and outcomes. from this perspective, jerome’s characterization of care as “reciprocal” is more evocative. as health-seekers draw on social ties and reciprocal obligations in their efforts to resolve affliction through remedy and cure, they trace a dyadic motion, or “perpetual interchange” (mauss 1954), between illness and the moral imperative to relieve suffering. yet these day-to-day health struggles are also projected across a deeper historical register as efforts to broker access to medical services draw health-seekers into a broader terrain of social conflict. 1900s-1970s: the aviamento’s regime of care despite its origins in the colonial “forest drugs” trade, the medical dimensions of the amazonian aviamento system remain remarkably understudied. the anthropologist márcio meira (2018) has argued that the seventeenthand eighteenth-century extraction of the drogas do sertão (forest drugs) gave rise to a deadly syncretism between european notions of barter and indigenous systems of reciprocal exchange. over the course of the following centuries, the trade in forest botanicals such as chinchona bark (an anti-malarial) and andiroba seeds (an anti-inflammatory) gave way to the extraction of cacao, rubber latex, animal hides, and brazil nuts. during the nineteenth-century rubber boom, these transactions became institutionalized under a system of double-entry bookkeeping in which elites and foreign-owned trade houses advanced processed commodities to rural workers in exchange for forest goods (weinstein 1983, 15–31). throughout its tenure, the aviamento structured exchange across a diversity of production systems. but in abaetetuba, trade centered around sugar mills that produced cachaça or aguardante, styles of rum produced in the amazon from the colonial era until the 1980s. tio nelson, camila’s uncle from the islands of abaetetuba, has a sharp recollection of life under the aviamento system. in one of our conversations in 2019, he shared with me his childhood memories of “old” velho luciano araújo, a prominent merchant and cachaça miller. araújo owned a trade post at the mouth of the ururubuea river during the 1960s, and advanced coffee beans, dried beef, manioc flour, rum, and machetes to the mixed-race indigenous, african, and european-descendant farmers who lived along abaetetuba’s riverine islands.7 these advances were recorded as debts in the merchant’s store ledger. “but no one saw any money,” nelson explained. in exchange for processed commodities, araújo demanded payments of oilseeds, timber, cut sugarcane, and smoked latex harvested by the islands’ riverine farmers. but no matter how much they harvested, the farmers always remained in debt. in addition to serving as the main employer and food supplier, araújo was also the local physician. “he was everything,” nelson said. “he was the merchant. he was the doctor. he was everything. if a sting ray stuck somebody, if a snake bit them, you’d go there. he’d provide the treatment.” in 1965 abaetetuba’s merchants managed sixty-six cachaça mills in the floodplain islands, as well as the large sailing canoes, steamships, and diesel boats that controlled the flow of commodities in the region. throughout the week, smallholders would unload bundles of sugarcane at the merchants’ docks. for every bundle of cane, the farmer was credited one third of the resultant cachaça (anderson 1993). the merchants were, as one farmer put it to me, “the dudes who gave the orders.” but the aviamento was also cloaked in a language of reciprocity and care. merchants may have been the ones who “gave the orders,” but many also remember them as the ones who “took care of the people.” elites often maintained godparent ties with their clients, and there was duality to these relationships reflected in the language of the aviamento itself.8 the merchants would aviar (lend, but also dispatch) a prescription or remedy to their fregueses (customers, but also subjects) in the same way that they would “lend” out machetes and coffee grounds in exchange for bundles of sugarcane from their workers. when residents of the riverine islands took ill, their families would seek out the aid of the rural merchants. if the merchants were unable to provide an appropriate remedy, they would dispatch a confidant to transport the patient to the city. there, they would be attended by one of abaetetuba’s grandes farmacêuticos, or renowned pharmacists. seu eduardo, a riverine farmer and tio nelson’s brother-in-law, told me the story of two such pharmacists: old velho armando and josé coelho, whose dispensaries manufactured remedies in the city center. the latter, coelho, served as a municipal councilman during the 1970s and 1980s, and he opened one of the first medical laboratories in abaetetuba’s town center. his father, raimundo coelho, was also a city councilman, a self-styled “lawyer,” a miller, and a former slave owner. velho armando, on the other hand, was abaetetuba’s most well-known twentieth-century pharmacist and the son of a nineteenth-century slave owner turned abolitionist. he is remembered as a local benefactor who opened the town’s first apothecary in 1923. he served as both doctor and pharmacist, diagnosing patients from the rural interior and dispatching prescriptions for traditional remedies and injections. velho armando was later elected mayor of the municipality. “tinha força,” explained seu eduardo; he was powerful. although the grandes certainly held power, they were not the only healers. cueto and palmer (2014) argue that during the twentieth century, latin american medicine was characterized by the spread of biomedical technologies across new frontiers, as well as their rivalry with popular healing traditions. the historian aldrin figueiredo (1996), for instance, chronicles the early twentieth-century dispute between belém’s medical elite and its popular shamans, or pajés. shamanism, or pajélança, refers to a diverse complex of indigenous healing practices, african religious traditions, and folk catholic curing rites that is often contrasted with western medicine.9 in practice, however, these popular healers frequently maintained complex, and sometimes symbiotic, relationships with merchants and the emerging medical elite. during one of my visits to abaetetuba, seu eduardo told me the story of toninho, a pajé who lived along the rio xinguzinho during the 1970s and whose medicines “sempre davam certo”—they always worked. the charismatic toninho would recommend medicine to his clients that they would then buy from valdico costa, a cachaça miller along the paramajó river who traded remedies with velho armando. toninho had a close relationship with costa, who later offered up one of his homes to the aging shaman. eduardo recounted how one day his daughter sônia developed a cyst on her upper lip. it exploded and became dangerously infected. drawing on a godparent connection, eduardo secured a boat from one of the less powerful merchants along the river and took her to see josé coelho in the city. but when eduardo arrived, coelho refused, saying he could not do anything to help her. instead, they decided to try toninho, who gave her an aspirin, a medicine that seu eduardo said had become quite famous in abaetetuba. he then ordered they go right away to valdico costa to have him administer an unknown injection and, on returning home, immediately douse sônia in a bath of cacao butter. his instructions were followed to a tee and by the end of the night sônia had recovered. stories of pajés and grandes pharmacêuticos have a definite vintage feel for today’s residents; it’s the stuff of old-timers and anthropologists. but as toninho and his hodgepodge prescription of aspirin, injections, and cacao butter suggest, the authority of local pharmacists and traditional healers intertwined with the history of the emerging medical industry. velho armando’s apothecary still operates today, owned by one of armando’s sons. one corner of the now fully modern pharmacy hosts a shrine to the medicines of yesterday. along an old wooden shelf, traditional amazonian remedies sit side by side with aging bottles of phosphoric acid, methylene blue, and potassium guaiacolsulfonate. some of these are labeled by merck, the german multinational drug company, while a 1950s-era advertisement for bayer, the first global aspirin manufacturer, hangs beside them on the wall. as modern medical technologies arrived in the amazon, they were integrated into a complex social field that structured amazonian health-seekers’ struggle for health. by drawing on social ties between fictive and genealogical kin, seu eduardo and his daughter embarked on a journey that carried sônia’s pathway from illness to remedy along the reciprocal ties between kin, as well as the forms of exploitation and social conflict that characterized the relationship between merchants and their riverine clients. the ability of medical brokers like coelho, costa, and armando to direct the course of day-to-day health struggles outlined the social scaffolding that defined the aviamento’s regime of care. yet as sônia’s example also shows, this scaffolding was by no means stable. although her health struggle resolved itself in a way that reproduced dominant understandings of paternalistic authority and integrated charismatic figures like toninho into the social logic of the aviamento, horizontal relationships between health-seekers also reveal novel pathways for resolving affliction, challenging the dominant care regime. after all, what if toninho’s prescriptions and his connections to the upper crust had not “always worked”? and what authority would “take care of the people” if the merchants retired their trade posts along the river? figure 3. old medicine cabinet at “velho armando’s” riverine pharmacy, founded in 1923. photo by matthew abel, october 2021. 1980s-2000s: democratization and the struggle for the sus the final decade of brazil’s twenty-year military dictatorship (1964–1985) would present nothing short of a breakdown of the old aviamento system. by drawing horizontal networks of kinship and care into broader institutional configurations, abaetetuba’s riverine islanders increasingly began to seek out remedies in the warren of state administration, reconceptualizing public power as a legitimate steward between affliction and cure. as paternalistic relationships between patrons and clients were steadily displaced by the biopolitical relationship between state and citizen, the language of the aviamento underwent a subtle inversion. whereas the merchants once conjured up the labor of their fregueses to collect their debts, abaetetuba’s river dwellers now sought to collect the remedies owed to them by a different authority: the government. by the 1940s brazil’s sanitarians had already undertaken several high-profile disease-eradication campaigns in the amazon. in 1943, efforts by the united states and brazil to secure u.s. rubber interests led them to establish one of the world’s first bilateral health agencies: the special service on public health, or sesp, which maintained health clinics and maternity wards throughout the region, including in abaetetuba. however, the program was rapidly defunded following world war ii. by the 1970s, the policies of brazil’s u.s.-backed military dictatorship had provoked a wave of infectious disease outbreaks in the estuary. spurred on by government incentives, timber companies and palm-heart manufacturers stripped açaí groves along the floodplains, undermining the nutritional health of rural dwellers. rural population density expanded in abaetetuba’s floodplain islands and refuse from the growing city polluted tidal streams. with no formal sewage system or water-treatment facility, stomach infections multiplied. in 1974, more than a tenth of infants perished during their first year of life (anderson 1993, 135). yet when island residents sought aid from merchant elites, paternalistic ties had either dissolved or attenuated. as the municipality was integrated into the national road network in the 1960s and 1970s, abaetetuba’s merchant millers were forced to compete with imported cachaça from são paulo. at a time of expanding investments in urban health and education, most merchants chose to abandon their properties and move to abaetetuba’s growing city center or to belém. when the mills shut down, they took with them one of the few forms of remuneration afforded to the islands’ rural workforce, however meager. without steady access to transportation, river dwellers relied on merchants’ trade posts as a source of food, pharmaceuticals, and medicine. leonardo, a social movement activist who grew up along the river bacuri in the 1980s, explained that back then, they did not have health posts along the rivers. “we had some people that provided services to the community. they provided cures. and for this they charged (cobravam). but we didn’t have any health agents, which today is a state policy.” as paulinho, another activist, explained to me, the millers had closed most of their trade posts by the end of the decade, and the era of cachaça had ended in economic decline, or “decadence” (decadência). everybody who still lived in the islands, he said, was poor and wanted access to basic health services and education. at this point the real enemy, paulinho explained, was the government. it was the government that refused to provide adequate health facilities to the population. “that’s why we needed to create a new movement,” he explained. “we were collecting (cobrando) on the government for the decadence [of the sugar mills].” both paulinho and leonardo are members of a social movement organization known as amia, the residents association of the islands of abaetetuba. founded in 1986, amia took as its primary aim the fight for access to health care and education for island residents. it is remembered today as one of the principal “instruments of struggle” that residents developed to pressure the state for access to health resources. although movements like amia operated at the intersection of a range of political and ideological influences,10 leaders insisted that the success of their activism be measured in terms of specific conquests. these ranged from the establishment of squatters’ rights over informal neighborhoods to wresting power from corporatist union structures allied with the military government. but the most important conquest was the inauguration of the santa rosa hospital: a public hospital and maternity ward constructed during the mid-1980s. drawing on the memory of sesp’s rural health programming during the 1940s, local leaders mobilized to pressure the government for renewed investment. by collecting signatures, activists successfully lobbied for the construction of abaetetuba’s first public hospital. during the subsequent decade, organizations like amia took on a double character as understandings of debt and exchange inherited from the aviamento were articulated alongside demands for universal rights. alexandra coutinho, one of amia’s founders, explained how in 1986, organizers helped elect delegates to brazil’s constitutional assembly. there they fought alongside national leaders to “collect on” public authorities and enshrine the right to health in brazil’s 1988 constitution. by 2009, abaetetuba’s municipal government had hired hundreds of community health agents and constructed sus health posts in rural communities throughout the lowland islands. infant mortality declined by more than 50 percent over a twenty-year period and the urbanization rate reversed as families returned to the countryside, in part due to increased rural health access. these local developments coincided with the growing availability of generic pharmaceuticals and brazil’s partial rejection of the 1994 trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (trips) agreement during the hiv epidemic. biehl (2004) documents how brazil managed to obtain a 40 to 60 percent cost reduction in the patented components of aids medication by threatening to violate international laws governing intellectual property. this led to more concentrated negotiating power for brazil’s federal drug-regulation agency, increased domestic production of patented pharmaceuticals, and an expanded perception of the “state as transparent, ethical, and with a universal reach” (biehl 2004, 118). for many, the election in 2002 of the former brazilian president luiz inácio lula da silva marked a new chapter in the early twentieth-century sanitarians’ vision of public power through medicine. under lula’s left-leaning workers’ party, the federal government increased funding for the federal health ministry throughout its thirteen-year tenure from 2003 to 2016 (loureiro 2020). supported by amia and other community leaders, abaetetuba elected its first workers’ party mayor to the municipality in 2005. health movement conquests came to symbolize an emerging pact between state and citizenry in which access to care challenged the long-standing hierarchies between abaetetuba’s elite and its popular classes. the expansion of the regional health system and growth of public power, in other words, formed part of the broader terrain in which individuals sought to make sense of dominant social divisions and antagonisms. one former attendant at a rural health post explained the feeling of pride that he had working his first day at the community’s newly constructed sus post, contrasting the new health system to the paternalism that prevailed under the aviamento. “no matter who you were or where you came from, you could be attended,” he said. “we were equals.” figure 4. sus health post “dr. jair nery,” named after one of abaetetuba’s first laboratory technicians and a well-respected municipal pharmacist. photo by matthew abel, october 2019. 2010s-present: the private life of public power in the 1990s and early 2000s, the ongoing construction of the sus and efforts of local health movements expanded the boundaries of public power to encompass a growing circle of rural and urban health-seekers. yet the private medical industry was by no means excluded from the party. many segments of the private health sector welcomed increased federal health spending, and the largest beneficiaries of brazil’s ostensibly “post-neoliberal compromise” were undeniably capital and the ascendant middle class (saad-filho 2020). even under the workers’ party government, health policy consisted of a “two-pronged approach in which an underfunded public system coexisted with a subsidized private one” (loureiro 2020). between 2003 and 2013, tax exemptions, subsidies for employer-provided health plans, and incentives for private hospitals and medical suppliers increased by 70 percent, amounting to a third of the federal ministry of health’s budget. buttressed by fiscal incentives, the profits of private health insurers tripled between 2003 and 2011 (loureiro 2020). the government representatives, whom abaetetuba’s social movement leaders lobbied for access to health resources in the 1980s and 1990s, while cloaked in the veil of public power, were often the direct descendants of the municipality’s former merchant bosses. although there are no longer any millers in the municipality, the merchants’ children found themselves in a relatively advantageous position in the decades following the sugar mills’ decline. located close to belém and with the necessary social capital to take advantage of connections in the city, the children of local elites found their way into medical schools, law programs, and the reconstituted commercial class. newly credentialed, some took positions in the law firms, pharmacies, and businesses that multiplied in abaetetuba’s urban center. some entered politics and took their seats in local government. others opened private practices. others, including the children of old velho armando and josé coehlo, began to contract their medical services with the sus. by brokering transactions between the municipal government and the private medical industry, these figures exercised increased influence over local health administration. the growth of the private health sector is visible in many amazonian towns. in abaetetuba, the city’s riverine market is interspersed with national pharmaceutical chains like drogasil and extrafarma. these are flanked by a myriad of independent pharmacies and private clinics that provide access to primary and secondary care.11 one morning, i stood overlooking this jumble of private health clinics and riverine apothecaries with valdamir, seu eduardo’s son. valdamir remarked on what he saw as an absurdly large number of pharmacies in the city. much of the medicine was contraband, he explained, trafficked or sold illegally to avoid taxation. he claimed that most of the islands lacked health posts capable of delivering medicine, so people came to the city to buy it from clandestine pharmacists along the river. i later learned that several of these individuals had garnered a reputation as informal clinicians and distributors. some, like valdamir, saw them as corrupt opportunists, but others viewed them as the only authorities who took care of the population when the sus broke down. all of a sudden, valdamir spun me around by the shoulders and pointed out a well-dressed man straddling a motorcycle and conversing with a woman in front of a gas station. the man was a candidate for the city council and he traded medical services for votes, valdamir explained. he had connections in belém and secured hospital beds for people unable to gain access to an icu. by doing this, valdamir explained, politicians not only won the vote of the person they helped but also the votes of their entire family. figure 5. the “popular pharmacy of the islands,” one of abaetetuba’s many private pharmacies which models its name after a famous sus program. photo by matthew abel, october 2019. aaron ansell (2014) and john collins (2008) have each observed how social democratic policies in brazil have remained limited in their ability to break the persistence of patron-client ties. yet, as both authors suggest, patronage continues to thrive in part because government policy incentivizes it. in the case of the sus, the devolvement of administrative responsibility to resource-starved municipalities has instituted a systemic vulnerability to these sorts of exchanges. as one former city councilman in abaetetuba explained to me, control over the flow of federal funding is one of the few ways that elected officials gain leverage. the municipal secretaries of education, health, and social security are all charged with disbursing federal funds and coordinating national health and anti-poverty programs. not only do these secretaries provide well-paying jobs to political allies but they also make contracts with businesses and broker access to public funds. by building clout within the city council, politicians can push for services to be delivered to their constituent communities. but to keep their seat, they also have to make promises to prominent professionals, doctors, and businesspeople. over time, these political contests have led to the systemic underdevelopment of regional health infrastructure. in the late 2000s, the state and municipal government undertook an effort to refurbish the old santa rosa hospital. at the time of the proposed project, the workers’ party controlled the municipal, state, and federal government. yet when the party lost the local elections in 2008, the new governing coalition terminated the agreement. in 2011, the center-right simão jatene (psdb) won the state government, and the funds were diverted to repurpose a private hospital in belém. the santa rosa hospital, a conquest of the 1980s health movements, remained indefinitely shuttered. these events coincided with brazil’s 2013 economic downturn and a legislative coup that ousted workers’ party president dilma rousseff in 2016. rousseff’s successor, michel temer, subsequently capped health spending at the federal level. for many of abaetetuba’s residents, the vacant hospital stood as a powerful symbol of brazil’s general state of economic and political decadence. the artificial scarcity of public spending has had tangible impacts on health-seekers, directing individuals along new, yet familiar, pathways in search of remedy. for instance, katiane, tio nelson’s niece, makes frequent hospital appointments through the sus for her chronic condition. she explained to me how if you play by the rules of the public system, you end up in a situation where your access to care is indefinitely delayed. instead, she finds relatives, godparents, or friends who work in hospitals. she sends them gifts at work: farm-raised ducks, baskets of fruit, or açaí from the countryside. if you make sure they know where these gifts come from, suddenly spaces open up to you. it’s ugly, she said. but it’s the only way to navigate the sus without having to pay out of pocket for private care. katiane’s struggle for health outlines a triad all-to-familiar to the members of her uncle’s generation: her illness, its remedy, and the need to ingratiate herself to an authority that holds that remedy just out of reach. public health crisis and the arrival of sars-cov-2 the capacity of day-to-day health struggles to be governed by something recognizable as biopolitics, with all its administrative rigidity and state authority, is not a unidirectional process; it hinges on health-seekers’ willingness to recognize in public power a more reliable solution to their ills. in the previous sections, this article followed three generations of health-seekers as they navigated the collapse of the aviamento and its transition to a new regime of care. by reconfiguring the state as an authoritative source of remedy, local social movements pressured public power to institute a series of reforms that overturned the existing system of medical brokerage. however, this did not override the economic and political power of local elites. nor did it successfully confront the power of an increasingly monopolized global medical industry. by drawing a growing number of health-seekers into the private medical market and creating new opportunities for brokerage, the two-tiered model of public and private care eroded the universality of state medicine and induced a systematic vulnerability to crisis. figure 6. pará’s governor helder barbalho (right) and mayor ‘chita’ negrão (left) hold grand reopening of santa rosa hospital, just weeks before covid-19 reached community spread. screenshot of promotional video, march 2020. just four weeks before covid-19 cases began to skyrocket in late march 2020, abaetetuba’s santa rosa hospital held its grand reopening. the local government inaugurated the new facility with a performance by the municipal string orchestra. the mayor released a promotional video to his youtube channel. but many on the old left were skeptical. “there are no machines inside!” proclaimed the former workers’ party mayor. “how can you call it a hospital if it doesn’t have machines?!” there were some machines at santa rosa, but the skepticism was justified. when covid-19 spread throughout the amazon estuary four weeks later, the situation rapidly deteriorated. santa rosa’s icus were not yet fully equipped, and covid patients were crammed into the old municipal infirmary or crowded around abaetetuba’s only public urgent-care facility. neighboring municipalities such as moju and igarapé-miri found themselves in the same situation, with no regional hospital to attend to the growing number of patients. by early april, covid had filled more than 90 percent of icu beds. unprepared for the emergency and with little incentive to have planned for one, private hospitals in belém and abaetetuba closed their doors to the public. they reopened only when mandated by the state. the disorderly and heartbreaking responses from covid patients and their families reflected a broader scenario of breakdown as public and private medical authorities directed health-seekers along divergent and sometimes mutually contradicting pathways toward care. some health-seekers waited to be attended by the public system, posting on social media in search of an icu bed. others sought out traditional remedies from local curers: baths of cacao butter, lemon balm, and andiroba to sooth inflammation. others turned to the clandestine pharmacists along the municipal docks. some doctors took to prescribing so-called preemptive treatments to covid-19. despite being disproven as efficacious remedies for covid, pharmaceuticals like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin were promoted by president jair bolsonaro and a fringe group of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and clinicians. these figures gained influence within bolsonaro’s so-called parallel health ministry: a coalition of scientists, medical youtubers, and generic drug manufacturers who marketed these unsubstantiated remedies as an underdog solution to the ongoing crisis (silva 2021). figure 7. luciana cruz (right), anesthesiologist from belém, pará, and an online promoter of the so-called “preventative treatments” for covid-19, presents at the “brazil overcomes covid-19” meeting in august 2020, a summit of pro-preventative treatment clinicians and doctors attended by brazilian president jair bolsonaro (center). photo by marcos corrêa, august 2020. the vaccination campaign was equally chaotic. whereas foucault once saw the eighteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination as emblematic of a new form of population governance and biopolitical control, brazil’s covid-19 vaccination strategy did more to illustrate the competing array of interests that sought to manipulate public power to their benefit. under previous ruling coalitions, concentrated executive authority had provided an expedient means for negotiating favorable contracts with pharmaceutical firms and medical suppliers (biehl 2004). but under a right-wing administration, it proved a disaster. the bolsonaro administration actively sought to obstruct the purchase of the pfizer, sputnik v, and sinovac vaccines. meanwhile, state governments scrambled to establish independent contracts with suppliers as competition among a handful of pharmaceutical corporations galvanized subnational antagonisms.12 this not only undermined brazil’s considerable productive capacity for vaccine manufacture; it sowed confusion and misinformation among the public. egged on by contradictory reporting and fake news, some health-seekers began to identify individual vaccines with the political alliances that coalesced around their development. in a country where vaccine hesitancy had been virtually eliminated, it reemerged as a legitimate public position and was stamped with a presidential seal.13 the troubles plaguing brazil’s national vaccine campaign reflected the broader field of non-governmental organizations, private medical firms, and multilateral institutions that exercised their influence over the global pandemic response. compared to prior epidemics of hiv, h1n1, and zika, the international response to covid-19 handed an unprecedented degree of power to the private medical industry.14 by enforcing the 1994 trips agreement, corporations like pfizer and moderna leveraged their control over the novel mrna technology to exact concessions from world governments and prioritize access to more lucrative medical markets, artificially limiting the global supply of vaccines (rizvi 2021). although pfizer’s and moderna’s vaccines were developed using funds from the u.s. and german governments, both companies refused to transfer the technology to research centers in the global south, preventing expanded production at what some estimate could be more than a hundred sterile injectable factories with the capacity to produce the shot (prabhala and alsalhani 2021). from this perspective, the decision of world leaders to abandon a coherent global inoculation plan in favor of a bidding war for vaccine contracts is just one geopolitical expression of the increased power of monopoly capital over public health institutions worldwide.15 conclusion the sinovac and astrazeneca vaccines finally began to arrive in abaetetuba in early april of 2021. camila, the local health agent, helped coordinate their distribution. through its various subtle and rational mechanisms, the sus and its local health agents organized vaccination according to age, preexisting condition, and relative occupational risk. yet before arriving in the hands of sus agents in abaetetuba, these vaccines passed through a hierarchical chain of brokers and intermediaries that embedded illness and remedy within a global political economy of medicine. similar to the distribution of remedies under the aviamento, medicine was suspended in a larger web of political relationships that brokered access to care. by the time that tio nelson and members of his generation received their second shot, brazil had already gone through its second, and most deadly, wave of the pandemic. for 460,000 brazilians, it was already too late. the story of the aviamento’s care regime contains important lessons for today’s global struggle for health. understanding the forces that broker, throttle, and delay access to care is one of the most pressing areas of inquiry for social scientists of medicine. yet as the history presented in this article makes clear, these forces cannot be understood via analogy to government alone. biopolitics, as a mode of governance, is embedded in a broader terrain of social conflict that must be understood in light of the political contests that condition the scope and content of government intervention at particular places and times. insofar as the concept of medical brokerage draws attention to the ways that these contests intervene to influence health-seekers’ pathways from illness to remedy, i have suggested its utility as a fruitful analytic for medical anthropologists. however, this utility will also depend on analysts’ willingness to parse the relationship between the bureaucratic instruments of government and the broader field of power in which they are embedded. blanket pronouncements as to the nature of state intervention amount to little more than speculation if we fail to pay equal attention to entities that exercise an inordinate influence in directing those interventions toward particular aims and outcomes: the pfizers, dr. batistas, and grandes farmaceûticos of the world. abstract this article examines the relationship between medicine and the aviamento, a system of debt-peonage that structured exchange along the brazilian amazon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. under the aviamento, merchant elites leveraged control over health resources to broker an unequal exchange between generalized suffering and limited access to care. in the 1980s, health activists mobilized to overturn the aviamento’s care regime and institutionalize health care as a universal right and state obligation. despite subsequent growth in medical infrastructure, interviews with contemporary health-seekers demonstrate the public system’s increasing susceptibility to private appropriation, as well as the limitations of biopolitics as a framework for understanding medicine’s relationship to power under the covid-19 pandemic. rather than a diffuse instrument of social control, medicine is conceptualized here as a perpetual interchange, one in which brokers’ ability to direct health-seekers’ pathways from affliction to cure situates day-to-day health struggles within a regional history of social conflict. [public health; unequal exchange; biopolitics; amazon; brazil] resumo este artigo aborda a relação entre a saúde e o aviamento: um sistema de servidão por dívida que estruturou a economia mercantil ao longo do rio amazonas durante os séculos xix e xx. sob o aviamento, comerciantes usavam controle sob medicamentos para manter uma troca desigual entre o sofrimento generalizado e o acesso limitado às curas. durante a década de 1980 militantes da reforma sanitária brasileira se mobilizaram para derrubar o regime curatorial dos comerciantes e instituir a saúde como um direito universal e obrigação do estado. apesar do crescimento subsequente do sistema sanitário, entrevistas com trabalhadores rurais mostram a crescente susceptibilidade do sistema público aos interesses particulares e as limitações de biopolítica como uma ferramenta analítica para interpretar a relação entre medicina e poder debaixo da pandemia de covid-19. mais do que um instrumento difuso de controle social, a medicina é conceituada aqui como um intercâmbio perpétuo, no qual a capacidade dos agentes de direcionar os caminhos dos buscadores de saúde da aflição à cura situa as lutas cotidianas pela saúde dentro de uma história regional de conflito social. [saúde pública, troca, biopolítica, amazônia, brasil] notes acknowledgments this article owes an enormous debt to discussions with and critiques from glenn stone, bret gustafson, talia dan-cohen, john bowen, grace ward, oguz alyanak, lee gensler, and the members of washington university in st. louis’s department of anthropology writing group. it also owes much to the insightful comments of three anonymous reviewers. this research was funded through generous grants from the national science foundation, the beinecke foundation, the brazilian fulbright commission, and washington university’s graduate school of arts & sciences. these parties bear no responsibility for any mistakes, errors, or analytical missteps taken in this article. 1. fieldwork was conducted over seventeen non-consecutive months between july 2017 and december 2021 under the approval of washington university in st. louis’s human subjects review board and brazil’s conselho nacional de desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico. research included sixty-six formal interviews with riverine householders, activists, and state employees, as well as innumerable informal conversations and participant-observation in urban and rural communities. i was also aided by previous ethnographic studies of the municipality conducted in the 1980s (anderson 1993; mcgrath 1989). following the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, i returned to the united states in march 2020. in july 2021, i returned to belém, pará, to conduct archival research at the arquivo público do estado do pará, ethnography at a distance, and intermittent field visits following declining case numbers and increased vaccination rates. to preserve confidentiality, i use pseudonyms throughout this piece, and scramble some details of local history and geography without distorting their analytical significance. 2. for a discussion of covid-19 death toll and infection rates in the amazon, see “the amazon, giver of life, unleashes the pandemic,” new york times, july 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/25/world/americas/coronavirus-brazil-amazon.html 3. the brazilian journalist and writer euclides da cunha used this descriptor to refer to the epidemiological impacts of the amazonian rubber boom on the region’s rubber tappers in his unpublished manuscript, “um paraíso perdido,” first published in 1909 (da cunha 2006). 4. in 1916, the sanitarian and physician miguel pereira famously declared the brazilian countryside an “enormous hospital” in need of state remedy (lima 2007). 5. in her ethnography of venezuela’s barrio adentro program, for instance, amy cooper (2019) examines how this understanding of medicine was encoded in the “macropolitics” of doctor-patient interactions under hugo chavéz’s bolivarian government. 6. in anthropology, the concept of brokerage can be traced to a synthesis between classical political theory and the maussian study of exchange. during the second half of the twentieth century, figures like eleanor leacock, eric wolf, and robert murphy sought to examine how the integration of colonial and postcolonial economies into the world market institutionalized positions of brokerage that mediated between regional labor regimes and global commodity chains. for a foundational amazonian and north american comparison of brokerage, commodity markets, and culture change, see murphy and steward 1956. 7. riverine society along the lower tocantins grew up around the institutions of african and indigenous slavery (salles 1971; de la torre 2018). for a discussion of the relationship between the aviamento, amazonian racial ideology, and class see, wagley 1952 and his noted divergences from gilberto freyre’s (1933) analysis of race in brazil. 8. for discussions of riverine kinship and marriage patterns in the amazon, see harris 2000, 83–112 and lima 1992, 212–56. 9. for discussions of amazonian popular shamanism see galvão 1955 and maués 1990. 10. despite its secular designation, amia has deep roots in catholic liberation theology. during the 1970s, a cohort of xaverian priests and nuns had set to work forming abaetetuba’s urban and rural hamlets into ecclesial base communities (comunidades ecclesiais do base), or cebs. these functioned as local centers for worship, social assistance, and political education. many maintained tenuous alliances with local chapters of what became brazil’s most important insurgent political organization: the left-leaning workers’ party. for an indispensable account of the rise of the workers’ party, as well as an alternative interpretation of the brokerage concept, see pace 1998. 11. whereas old-timers like seu eduardo remember a grand total of three private pharmacies that operated in the municipality during the 1960s, in 2021 i counted twenty-seven private health clinics and twenty-four private drug stores and pharmacies operating along the riverine wharf within a six by three block radius. 12. this, it has been reported, was not only the result of a blatant disregard for the population and a series of anti-science commitments but also of a single-minded preference to pursue a sweetheart deal with the british biotech company astrazeneca. see john mcevoy, nathalia urban, and daniel hunt, “‘strategic partners’: britain’s secret lobbying of bolsonaro for big pharma, oil, and mining,” brasilwire, december 16, 2020, https://www.brasilwire.com/strategic-partners-britains-secret-lobbying-of-bolsonaro-for-big-pharma-oil-and-mining/ 13. see “picky ‘vaccine sommeliers’ undermine brazil’s inoculation campaign, experts say,” reuters, july 9, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/picky-vaccine-sommeliers-undermine-brazil-inoculation-campaign-experts-say-2021-07-09/. public trust was further eroded as jair bolsonaro’s cabinet was embroiled in a corruption investigation surrounding attempts to privately broker the purchase of the astrazeneca and covaxin vaccines. see “brazil vaccine scandal imperils bolsonaro as protest spreads,” new york times, july 3, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/americas/brazil-bolsonaro-vaccine-scandal.html 14. for comparison to public responses to the hiv and zika epidemics, respectively, see biehl 2004 and diniz 2017. 15. on september 2, 2021 brazil’s congress amended the brazilian patent and trademark act to allow for compulsory licensing of mrna technology. however, president bolsonaro vetoed provisions that obliged patent owners to facilitate the exchange of know-how and expertise, rendering enforcement impossible and foreshadowing the world trade organization’s (wto) june 2022 decision to loosen patent restrictions while circumventing the authority of states to mandate technology transfers. this strategy has contrasted sharply with one of the world health organization’s (who) oldest initiatives: the global influenza programme. since 1948, the who has pooled data on emerging virus strains in an international effort to ramp up vaccine production in response 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chicago: university of chicago press. ticktin, miriam 2011 casualties of care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in france. berkeley: university of california press. varma, saiba 2020 the occupied clinic: militarism and care in kashmir. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wallerstein, immanuel 1974 “the rise and future demise of the world capitalist system: concepts for comparative analysis.” comparative studies in society and history 16, no. 4: 387–415. https://www.jstor.org/stable/178015 wagley, charles 1952 “race relations in an amazon community.” in race and class in rural brazil: a unesco study, by charles wagley, 116–41. new york: columbia university press. walker, timothy d. 2013 “the medicines trade in the portuguese atlantic world: acquisition and dissemination of healing knowledge from brazil (c. 1580–1800).” social history of medicine 26, no. 3: 403–31. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkt010 weinstein, barbara 1983 the amazon rubber boom, 1850-1920. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 421-449, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.06 infrastructural decay: maintenance ecologies and labor in the çoruh basin cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 142-170, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.07 infrastructural decay: maintenance ecologies and labor in the çoruh basin ekin kurtiç northwestern university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0784-6901 it was late spring, when the snow melts and erosion control work begins in northeastern turkey’s yusufeli district in artvin province. on the slopes, villagers would build erosion control walls—low retention stone walls preventing rain from washing down soil—and foresters would commute daily from town to the uplands to monitor the work’s timeliness and quality. that day, the trip took three young foresters, the driver, and me one and a half hours over narrow, winding roads, with a tea break halfway. soil conservation took place high up on remote hills and mountains. unless there were footpaths used by people and animals on their way to forests or highlands, quality control mostly demanded figuring out how to keep one’s balance while climbing up and down steep slopes. scattered shrubs, as well as oak, aspen, and juniper trees provided branches whenever i needed to hold on to something. while climbing, ferhat—a young contract forester working for the district forestry—explained that most forests here were considered “damaged”—they have become sparse because of natural factors such as landslides or human use.1 but there was also good news, ferhat emphasized: these sparse forests were now growing back. as he explained, thanks to the gradual decrease in husbandry and farming activities since the 1980s, “social pressure” had diminished, paving the way for nature’s recovery. pointing to the terraced fields and houses amid the pine forest near the foot of the mountain across, he asked: “do you see the titrek kavaklar [quaking aspens] over there?” quaking aspens have a light, greenish-gray bark and trembling round leaves that in autumn turn a startling yellow. ferhat continued: figures 1 and 2. climbing up with foresters to monitor the erosion control walls and the overgrown lands across the hill with quaking aspens. photos by ekin kurtiç. “these evlek are areas cleared of forest.2 but now quaking aspens are growing in these fields. you see? now the forest is reclaiming its own space. this is something positive for us, for erosion control.” quaking aspens grew not only on small, formerly cultivated plots but also on stony hills near erosion control walls, giving foresters hope that vegetation would grow on the soil expected to accumulate behind these walls.3 for foresters, the rural landscape of diminishing human presence, agricultural production, and animal husbandry offers a hopeful indicator of nature’s recovery. accordingly, forests reclaim spaces once occupied by villagers, thus becoming an auxiliary to erosion control in the uplands. erosion control activities in yusufeli were conducted as part of the çoruh river watershed rehabilitation project. justifying this nature rehabilitation project in the uplands was the building of hydroelectric dams on the valley floor. multiple large dam constructions on the çoruh river during the past two decades required addressing the detrimental effects of watershed erosion and soil sedimentation in the reservoirs. similar to the growing concerns about siltation in lesotho’s highland reservoirs (hoag 2022), dam maintenance in the çoruh watershed rendered erosion a problem of sedimentation. consequently, the upper watersheds—where erosion is considered to originate—became sites of environmental intervention. this intervention was designed as an integrated watershed management project, bringing together in collaboration various state institutions and villagers to restore a purportedly degraded landscape. framed by a participatory vision that emphasized villagers’ involvement in rehabilitation, rising environmental interest in the çoruh uplands coincided with the area’s increasing depopulation. in a seemingly perfect picture, uplands, cast as valuable ecological sites for dam maintenance, became less “disturbed” by humans. far from the dams, formerly cultivated but now overgrown landscapes turned into more-than-human components of infrastructure maintenance that, alongside human labor, would prevent soil erosion and sedimentation. in this seemingly ideal context, villagers’ narratives of and relation to the landscape drew my attention to notions of decay and dissolution associated with overgrown lands, standing in sharp contrast to their celebration as registers of restoration. this contrast reveals that the work of repairing ecologies for dam maintenance is undergirded by the gradual decay of another maintenance labor: villagers’ arduous practices of dwelling in, tending, and maintaining the landscape. by exploring how resurgent vegetation matters differently to foresters and upland villagers, this article shows that dam maintenance through watershed rehabilitation, while claiming to prevent the decay of both infrastructure and ecology, draws on another kind of decay: villagers’ practices of tending the landscape. while foresters celebrate “nature’s comeback” because it facilitates rehabilitating the erosive watershed and maintaining dam infrastructure, for villagers, trees such as quaking aspens, shrubs, and weeds spreading over formerly cultivated lands mark the erosion of their arduous landscape maintenance for and through agriculture and husbandry. dam maintenance, therefore, is predicated on the decay of other forms of labored landscapes, insofar as it requires active work in repairing ecologies considered decaying. this article offers a novel anthropological analytical perspective that foregrounds the continuum between maintaining and decaying and traces the role of labored landscapes in this continuum. in a world of ongoing ruination, rubble, and disturbance (stoler 2013; gordillo 2014; tsing 2015), anthropological attention to maintenance work elucidates the mundane and often undervalued practices of sustenance of relations, meanings, claims, and affects alongside material configurations of technical systems. the analytical and methodological focus on maintenance and repair calls for considering breakdown and failure as pivotal generative moments of “learning, adaptation, and improvisation” in a world that “constantly decays” (graham and thrift 2007, 5). it calls for shifting attention from production to the innovative, creative, and consequential—yet commonly underappreciated—work of sustenance and restoration (jackson 2014). scholarly attention to practices of maintenance and repair as part of infrastructural life reveals that breakdown, decay, and leakage do not constitute endings but, rather, starting points to explore the politics, socialities, labor, affects, and temporalities entangled in material infrastructures (anand 2017, 2020; barnes 2017; schwenkel 2015; ramakrishnan, o’reilly, and budds 2021). still, an antagonistic notion dominates our thinking about the interplay between maintenance and decay: maintenance is understood as encountering, preventing, and mitigating decay. building on studies that explore the intricate ways in which relations of care may involve violence and injustice (puig de la bellacasa 2011; bocci 2017; scaramelli 2018), this article reveals the forms of decay that are not necessarily antagonistic but integral to maintenance and repair. social theorists have long emphasized the paradoxical logic of modernity—a logic that stuart hall (1992, 16) has eloquently defıned as “the janus-face of modernity”—simultaneously constructive and destructive and involving both beneficiaries and victims. infrastructures—the building blocks of modernist and developmentalist programs—constitute key sites where such contradictions and paradoxes get enacted (howe et al. 2016). my exploration of the paradoxical logic of infrastructure maintenance offers an analytic to observe decay not merely in the absence of but also as a key component of maintenance. as illustrated through rehabilitation efforts in yusufeli, maintenance practices, while intending to counter decay, entail other forms of decay. just as processes of decay and decomposition entail vitality and life (hage 2021; lyons 2020), practices of upholding and sustaining involve forms of ruination and dissolution. my unmaking of the maintenance-decay divide is guided by upland villagers’ everyday experiences of the changing landscapes and by anthropologists’ attention to ecological-infrastructural relations. notwithstanding the ecologically destructive impacts of infrastructure projects, anthropologists and human geographers have recently revealed and reconceptualized the manifold entanglements between infrastructure and ecology: nature is rendered infrastructural for risk management and resilience through emphasis on environmental services (wakefield 2020; nelson and bigger 2022); the earth is an integral component of material infrastructures (barry 2016); ecologies are constituted by human-built material infrastructures (scaramelli 2021); and infrastructures and their ruins become sites for unexpected, unruly ecologies (carse 2019; jasper 2020; stoetzer 2018). this perspective lends itself to further problematizing the long-held division between maintenance and decay. resurgent ecologies in çoruh’s uplands (such as proliferating quaking aspens) that are incorporated into dam maintenance shed light on the moments and experiences in which plant emergence is associated not necessarily with vitalism but with decay. as ghassan hage (2021, 3) puts it, things are often declared as decaying when experiences of decay are not “routinized” and “normalized” processes. at stake here is de-routinizing the emptying of upland mountains—often normalized as natural decline—by illuminating villagers’ lived experiences and articulations of the process as historically situated, affectively loaded, and biophysically manifesting decay. thinking through infrastructural decay, therefore, points to two interrelated processes: (a) the decay of material infrastructures, and (b) other forms of decay rendered infrastructural for maintenance work, albeit with limitations. this multiplicity of decay as process is well-illustrated by the filling-emptying continuum across space (djunda 2021). the mountain villages’ gradual emptying is expected to prevent dam reservoirs filling with sediment on the valley floor, thanks to resurgent ecologies on uncultivated fields.4 in anthropology, the abandoned countryside has recently been studied through the concepts of rural voids (driessen 2018) and emptiness (dzenovska 2020).5 while rural voids indicate places’ loss of meaning and value, emptiness signifies the emergence of new life forms amid abandonment, between a lost old world and no hope for an alternative future. uncultivated lands in yusufeli, however, are entangled with imaginaries of future ecological recovery, and their gradual emptying offers potential to be tapped for infrastructure maintenance. as jonathon turnbull, adam searle, and sandra jasper (2021) posit, emptiness always constitutes an ecologically entangled process, since “the other-than-human beings … also experience, and are constitutive of, processes of emptying.” the multivalent meanings and experiences of resurgent ecologies, such as ferhat’s quaking aspens, reveal that political ecological issues of marginalization and injustice in dam building consist not only of drastic events such as submergence and displacement but also of the celebration of decaying livelihood practices in favor of another kind of maintenance. this point resonates with ashley carse’s (2012) argument on the selective and exclusionary logic of work that renders nature infrastructural: the valorization and protection of the panama canal watershed forests’ environmental functions of water provision for the canal exclude and subordinate other types of services they have long provided, such as agricultural production. infrastructure maintenance, therefore, is a practice of marking boundaries between different anthropogenic environments based on their “suitability” for the aspired order. carse’s (2014) analysis reveals the limits of this boundary-making since existing agricultural infrastructures in the panama canal watershed render it difficult for watershed management to accomplish its environmental aims in practice. conversely, in the çoruh watershed, agricultural practices are already declining. yet this decline does not always contribute to the foresters’ idealized ecological order as beneficial for sediment control. as i will show below, human withdrawal from uplands does not automatically lead to beneficial plant resurgence. challenging the nature-culture dichotomy within the celebratory narrative of nature’s comeback, villagers’ accounts of unmaintained landscapes reveal that vegetation proliferating in the absence of humans and livestock can also prove harmful for trees. infrastructure maintenance work that includes uncultivated and ungrazed lands as suitable ecologies for erosion control is simultaneously challenged by unruly ecologies. the work of ma(r)king a boundary between ecologies that fit into the aspired order and those that do not, i argue, also entails the unmaking of the boundary. sedimented reservoirs the çoruh basin is located in northeastern turkey, at the border to georgia. the river’s local name, deli çoruh (crazy çoruh), reflects its swift flow. since the late 1930s, its flow has been incorporated into the national mobilization to know, map, and control river waters. in his memoir, the story of çoruh, the state-employed engineer vural selcen (1999) wrote: since 1938, “on every span of land of the çoruh basin, there are the footsteps, elbow grease, and eye-straining labor [göz nuru] of the workers of the directorate [the now obsolete directorate of electrical power resources survey].”6 a rare engineer’s account about the onsite work of river surveying, selcen’s words emphasize the importance of labor as a way of knowing nature, thus merging the natural and the cultural (white 1996a). by 1982, numerous engineering surveys and reports had culminated in the çoruh river basin master plan, proposing the construction of fifteen large hydroelectric dams, which began to materialize in the late 1990s through public and private investments. state officials and engineers glorified the reservoirs as transplanted lakes beautifying an otherwise rugged landscape (demirtaş 2013) and as precious blue necklaces made from the çoruh’s waters. in yusufeli town, where turkey’s tallest dam is currently under construction, i often heard praise for dams as technology retaining soil within the national space. “dams will stop the river from taking away our rich soil to georgia,” said mehmet, a villager whose lands the dam will partially submerge. this trope circulates among various actors, from local inhabitants to state officials and engineers, as they refer to the river creating a fertile delta across the border, unlike the lack of flat land along the çoruh in turkey. they point to the sharp contrast between the river’s long, swift-flowing course through turkey’s deep valleys and its short, meandering run in georgia. there, the river’s velocity drops drastically, leaving alluvial deposits in the batumi delta before reaching the black sea. contrary to the water’s and sediment’s ecological movement across human-made territorial borders, the dam in this nationalist imaginary becomes a border patrol preventing soil transfer. the disruption of sediment flow, in fact, leads to crucial environmental and infrastructural problems. coastal erosion in deltas due to decreasing sediment deposition constitutes an important environmental consequence of dams. sediment retention also poses significant challenges for dams. sediment infiltration into water intakes causes wear and tear. moreover, sediment accumulation in reservoirs limits storage capacity, shortening these seemingly paramount infrastructures’ life spans. it presents a sharp contrast to nationalist and modernist imageries of dams as immortal monuments to development. for foresters and engineers in turkey, high amounts of sediment accumulation in reservoirs have long been a serious concern. since the construction of the country’s first dam, the çubuk dam (1930–36), foresters have actively called attention to the roles that forests play in water regulation and soil protection, indicating the importance of their environmental expertise for ensuring the dams’ long-lasting functioning (kurtiç 2019). one forestry expert who brought this issue to public attention was selman uslu. in a 1968 newspaper article, he provided a numeric account of sediment drastically filling turkey’s dams and referred to the forests’ role in water storage: forest topsoil, which has a humus layer like a feather cushion, with vegetation and millions of organisms, resembles a kind of sponge. by absorbing even the strongest rain shower that falls onto it, forest soil filtrates this rainwater into the deeper layers to be used gradually; hence, it nourishes the springs. practice shows that none of the human-made constructions such as ponds or dams can be compared to the water storage and sustenance capacity of forests. (uslu 1968, 2) not only did uslu compare forests’ water-storage capacity to human-built infrastructures but he also promoted it as the guarantor of dams’ proper functioning by preventing sedimentation. this emphasis framed dams as more-than-technical, environmentally entangled infrastructures; in forestry professor necmettin çepel’s (1986, 17) words, “dams, at first sight, appear as mere technical objects storing water and serving the country’s agricultural and industrial development,” but “for dams to fulfill their functions—in addition to being outstanding construction technology—land use methods in their close and distant environs matter significantly.” maintenance, together with its politics, labor, and materiality, has largely been overlooked in critical studies of dams. long cast as epitomes of modernization and development, large dams (and their planning, design, and construction) have led to drastic transformations in political power and resistance that received scholarly attention (baviskar 1995; blackbourn 2006; blanc 2019; klingensmith 2007; sneddon 2015). what happens to dams after their construction is an understudied subject, except for a few analyses examining their long-term socio-environmental impacts (e.g., scudder 2005). infrastructure’s changing materiality and maintenance practices still need anthropological and political ecological study; otherwise, analyses risk replicating dams’ technopolitical representation as almighty constructs conquering the landscape.7 built in what is considered turkey’s most erosive watersheds, the çoruh’s dams have encountered the question of long-term maintenance, leading to the development of an integrated watershed rehabilitation project. in this context, foresters’ maintenance work occurs alongside actual dam building; efforts to sustain infrastructure do not follow construction but co-occur. this case thus challenges a linear temporal understanding according to which maintenance begins when construction ends. it also complicates understandings of destruction and conservation as mutually exclusive. in the çoruh basin, dam-induced environmental destruction on the valley floor coexists with—and is, indeed, undergirded by—environmental repair practices in the uplands. as scholars have shown, increasing cooperation occurs between the extractive and conservation sectors, the latter enabling a spatial and socio-ecological fix for the former (enns, bersaglio, and sneyd 2019). here, the fix is techno-ecological: if dams are environmentally embedded infrastructures, then fixing their technological limits (e.g., sediment filling reservoirs) requires environmental reordering. project designers and implementers deem the repair of “damaged” watershed ecology infrastructural to long-term dam maintenance. facilitating this repair work is the rural outmigration and depopulation indexed by overgrown landscapes. “no need for restrictions here” one hot june day in 2016, dozens of villagers, central and local state officials, as well as representatives of the japan international cooperation agency (jica), which partially funds the rehabilitation project, gathered for a beehive distribution ceremony in yusufeli. the villagers received white hats with the general directorate of forestry’s logo, to help them withstand the scorching sun during the long ceremony on a soccer field amid rugged mountains. the bees also suffered. the act of performing the benevolent state (yoltar 2020) was realized thanks to the invisible labor of a young man who during the entire ceremony remained backstage, spraying water into the hives to make the bees believe it was raining. the fake rain prevented the bees from leaving their hives and facing harm from overheating. following the speeches, the ceremony ended with a lottery distributing the beehives. the villagers loaded the beehives onto trucks, while project managers, consultants, and jica representatives from ankara visited the completed project activities in yusufeli’s villages. i accompanied them. a brief visit to a village featuring barns renovated with project-provided materials sparked my curiosity about how project implementers approached animal husbandry in the uplands. i traveled with ismet, a forester in his fifties, who had worked for the regional directorate of national parks for sixteen years before being appointed to ankara, hence knew yusufeli very well. since i knew that similar conservation projects restricted grazing to prevent “social pressure on natural resources,” i asked him about such restrictions here. ismet said: “look at these lands; there isn’t too much husbandry left here. so there isn’t a need to restrict anything here.” content with the decrease, he indicated its advantage for nature’s recovery and smooth project implementation. project designers and implementers often expressed that there was no need for restrictions. the project required enclosing only those plots of land where tree saplings were planted on the terraces built for erosion control. the collaboration between foresters and villagers to designate such plots for the most part went smoothly, given that animal husbandry, one potential reason for conflict, had declined. on our return trip, we stopped along the river to see the wire fences built on the steep hills to prevent erosion. remarking on the absence of human settlement nearby, one jica representative asked why rehabilitation work was undertaken at this specific location. an experienced forester who worked post-retirement as a project consultant explained that their priority was to prevent the degradation of natural resources—namely, erosion. wire fences would slow down waterflow and enable vegetation growth on accumulated soil, therefore protecting dams by preventing erosion. “if we don’t take these precautions, the roads, dams, and fields downvalley would all be filled with sediment. when it comes to erosion, one of the biggest factors is uncontrolled grazing,” he said, continuing hopefully: “we have an advantage here, thanks to the elimination of uncontrolled grazing.” animal husbandry’s decline because of outmigration once again served as potential for faster natural recovery and smooth project implementation, without needing to impose restrictions on villagers. this common trope also surfaces in the project’s master plan: together with the recent decrease in pressure on natural resources, especially the decrease in grazing on pasturelands, due to migration out of the villages, which leads to rural stagnation, it became possible for pasturelands, which in the past had been ruined, to significantly recover through natural renewal. many pastures that had been cultivated in the past were left uncultivated for years, and grass vegetation started to return. (pacific consultants international 2004, 4–4) in other words, the villagers’ “formative absence” (li 2014, 15) shapes the project’s course, seen as a facilitator for efforts to restore nature. at the rehabilitation project’s core lies a paradox that its implementers need to navigate constantly: while one aim is to provide socioeconomic support for the villagers through the distribution of beehives or materials for barn renovation, the region’s decreasing human and animal population is welcomed as potential for and auxiliary to restoration. casting human withdrawal as advantage for the project rests on the specific way in which project participants and their relationships with the landscape are defined. the master plan defines villagers as “the main party responsible for the increasingly accelerated soil erosion occurring in many places of the çoruh river watershed,” given that, “since old times, forest villagers have destroyed the forests for the purposes of procuring firewood and fodder, overgrazed the pastures, and converted the sloping pastures into cultivated lands” (pacific consultants international 2004, 5–1). criminalizing accounts about forest villagers degrading the environment have remained consistent since turkey’s early republican period (özkan 2013). the participatory approach has added a layer of potential for environmental stewardship attributed to villagers. the same villagers described as “forest destroyers” need to be converted and incorporated into the project as “forest guardians” (forsyth and walker 2008). nature rehabilitation in the çoruh basin draws on the premise not of wilderness conservation, but of protecting “working landscapes” where human livelihood activities coexist with lively ecosystems (hamilton 2018, 20). yet within this working landscape, the decline of certain livelihood activities—such as cultivating forest clearings—is celebrated, drawing a boundary between what suits purposes of rehabilitation and what does not. recognizing their limitations, foresters often expressed that they conduct work in the villages and then return to their offices in town. only the villagers stay there and can maintain erosion control measures; hence, the need for their involvement. defined as actual managers of natural resources, villagers become necessary participants. moreover, the construction of erosion control walls, fences, and terraces requires villagers’ labor—they are what genese sodikoff (2012, 8) calls “manual conservation workers.” the village men perform the arduous, daily work of erosion control. in one of my field sites, the upland village of gudashev, six men climbed the steep slopes from sunrise to sunset, six days a week over four months, to construct walls on three dry riverbeds, as well as cordons on a mountainside across from the hamlet. the foresters, who regularly visited for quality control, often praised these men, their skill, and labor. during the fieldtrip following the beehive distribution ceremony, ismet also praised the skillfully built walls. to answer my question as to why the yusufeli men built so well, he pointed to the terraced fields and gardens: “think about the terraces they have been building and maintaining for years!” on the narrow valley floor of the çoruh basin, land was scarce; terraced fields were thus created by carrying soil from the riverside. basin inhabitants had constructed land by flattening slopes, retaining earth with stones from the mountains, and bringing fertile soil from near and far, mostly from riverbanks. the rehabilitation project greatly depended on the villagers’ sedimented skills in reshaping this sloped landscape. also, yusufeli’s men used to seasonally migrate in spring and summer for construction work in cities, there acquiring knowledge and skill in construction, while the women stayed in the region to look after farms, families, and animals. the men on gudashev’s slopes often compared the job of building erosion control walls to seasonal construction work elsewhere, stressing that bayır işi (slope work) at least allowed them to return home at day’s end. the project therefore welcomes villagers, insofar as their livelihood activities conform to nature rehabilitation efforts. in her book on the albufera natural park, sarah hamilton (2018, 21) notes: “when not erased from the scenic landscape altogether, farmers are valued for their work as stewards of the land or as exemplars of cultural traditions and national heritage but sharply criticized when their actions diverge from the roles into which they have been forced.” similarly, yusufeli foresters recognize the value of human work in knowing and relating to nature, but they also distinguish between benign and destructive work (white 1996b).8 while building terraces for cultivation was praised as a practice that gave the farmers the skills necessary to construct erosion control walls, forest clearance or overgrazing were deemed harmful practices, the disappearance of which should be celebrated. the latter’s gradual decrease becomes a condition of possibility for conducting rehabilitation work. this condition, however, indexes loss and decay for villagers. the rehabilitation project celebrates overgrown vegetation, as long as some villagers remain in the uplands and participate in project implementation. yet as i will show in what follows, for the remaining villagers who witness the resurgent ecologies on formerly used lands, the decreasing human existence constitutes a sign of decay and source of sadness. unlabored landscapes as index of neglect it was lunchtime in gudashev—a much-anticipated break after long hours of running after the herd under the scorching august sun—when my host solmaz’s neighbor emine visited for tea. emine used to spend summers in the hamlet after she had migrated to bursa in 1972,9 when her husband found a job there. “last night, it entered my dream,” she said in a sad yet excited voice as she recounted her nightmare. “i was there on the yaylalar [highlands], standing at the cliff-edge and looking at the gardens across. the stone walls holding the terraced fıelds were in place, but the gardens were so neglected! no one took care of them. no one mowed the grass. everywhere weeds. i was so sad staring at it.” she guessed that our previous conversation about past village life had triggered this nightmare. such conversations usually invoked sadness about unlabored land, indicating both the hard work needed to maintain the land and a sense of decay due to the diminishing village population. put differently, the foresters’ dream of the forest’s comeback was emine’s nightmare. figure 3. yaylalar are gradually being covered by quaking aspens, shrubs, and grass. yaylalar is part of the hamlet. in the past, villagers on their way to the highlands stopped there to herd their animals together. photo by ekin kurtiç. gudashev is a small upland hamlet surrounded by mountains covered mostly in spruce, fir, and oak trees. emine, in her late sixties, remembered how in her childhood every family had cleared a plot in the forest. every kırma (forest clearing) had carried the name of the family who cleared and used it for crops such as rye and barley. as the hamlet had dwindled over the past decades, the lands first to remain uncultivated were kırmas, since access and maintenance proved difficult. if for the foresters resurgent vegetation in uncultivated clearings stood as the epitome of natural recovery, for the villagers it indexed the erosion of the labor required to maintain a specific form of socioecological life and landscape. this divergent understanding emerges from the different notions of forest and nature that the villagers held. learning about the clearings’ origins was not easy; it required putting one’s hands in the dirt. one late september afternoon, saniye was uprooting that summer’s green bean plants. each plant had climbed a long, flexible pole, which villagers made from shrubs. saniye pulled the poles from the ground, tore the plant off, then carefully set them aside for next year. she left some plants to mature until season’s end, so that their beans could serve as next year’s seeds. while helping her, i asked about the forest clearings visible from saniye’s garden: did she know how they had originally been cleared? she proudly narrated that her father’s midwife had been the pioneer: “she was a very brave and strong woman. she was the first woman opening a kırma. may god rest her soul.” there had already existed a small opening in the forest, and her father’s midwife widened it to plant rye and barley. all other villagers followed suit and cleared fields for themselves. “look there now,” saniye said, taking a break from gardening and dismissively gesturing toward the clearings: “now, all these places are becoming forest.” saniye, now in her mid-fifties, had still been irrigating their kırma in the first years of her marriage. but now she no longer dared to do so. given how few people cultivated and maintained the clearings, the upper hills from where she used to bring water had already turned into forest, increasing the likelihood of encountering a bear or a boar. nowadays, she grazed animals only on lower-altitude clearings. underlining an understanding of landscape as constituted through collective work, she remembered the past as a time when nature had been in balance, when everything had been fertile. indeed, saniye saw nature as more than just bushes and trees; it required cultivation through labor. in her account, the forest, as long as it is not a “worked-in and lived-in area” (howard 2017, 30), indicates decay, not merely of nature but also of a collectively built and maintained life. figure 4. saniye’s green bean garden and forest clearings in the background. photo by ekin kurtiç. rather than being an indicator of degraded nature to be rehabilitated for maintaining far-away dams, forest clearings for villagers index a maintained ecology in accordance with livelihood requirements—what solmaz called “giving back to the field what you have taken from it.” at season’s end, gardens, fields, and forest clearings are fertilized with cow manure collected and dried over the entire summer. the irrigation work that saniye mentioned also constitutes soil conservation in the clearings. in gudashev, irrigation ditches at the end of sloped plots feature a secondary ditch retaining the soil washed away by irrigation water. when cleaning ditches, villagers return the soil from the downslope ditch upslope. overgrown forest clearings thus indicate the loss of a lively village where there once existed the need to cultivate more (and, hence, to open and maintain clearings) and enough people (especially youngsters) to perform the labor of cultivating, grazing, irrigating, and maintaining. as result of outmigration, mainly for employment and education, gudashev’s population had decreased from between thirty-five and forty households with four to five persons each to ten or eleven two-to-three-person households. the total number of cattle and sheep had also dropped significantly, from around seven hundred to fifty. while the master plan and subsequent project surveys mention significant outmigration in the region, they largely attribute it to natural conditions, such as land scarcity and geographic difficulty. notwithstanding the biophysical landscape that contributes to regionally specific forms of life, explaining poverty based on natural conditions obscures the multilayered absences that have long shaped life there—the absence of state investment in the region and, hence, the lack of public services, education, and employment. this absence had a clear presence in villagers’ lives. during my first days in the uplands, solmaz introduced me to the animals and their manner of communication. she explained it as a mutual relationship: the ability to herd animals depends not only on using the right sounds and behaviors but also on the animals recognizing the person, implicating “a deeply felt sense of mutuality between villagers and livestock animals that was predicated on their imbrication in one another’s lives” (govindrajan 2018, 7). one day, we took the cows out to graze and found some shade under a quaking aspen growing on a formerly cultivated plot. after a long conversation about the intensive, tedious labor that upland life requires, solmaz explained why rural landscapes were neglected: investments should have started back in the 1990s to prevent outmigration. if they had opened a small weaving factory, people would have been working there. or, if they had done something else, i don’t know, maybe a small factory or more support for pastoral animal husbandry, to support people’s livelihood. … instead of opening ten, twenty, thirty factories in bursa, or other places, cities, if they had built one small factory in these villages, our young people would have learned to work here. the absence of income-generating work other than small-scale farming and animal husbandry, in her analysis, played a formative role in outmigration: “one day, one of us left, later followed by others. at the end, everybody left. now only a couple of households stay here,” she bemoaned. “all these lands [pointing to plots in front of us] were once cultivated. can you imagine that? now there is no production at all.” while turkey witnessed “successive waves of rural-to-urban migration … to feed the needs of national developmentalism since the 1950s” (bartu candan and kolluoğlu 2008, 6), since the 1990s, a neoliberal transformation in agriculture has favored large-scale, corporate farming (versus small-scale production) and the proliferation of energy and extraction projects as sites of capital accumulation (such as the çoruh dams). these developments, as well as the counterinsurgency practices adopted in the war between the turkish state and the kurdistan workers’ party (partiya karkerên kurdistanê, pkk), have ushered in a new wave of rural depopulation and displacement. furthermore, since the 1990s, many village schools have been replaced by a mobile education system, which means transporting students from villages to schools in town centers. the village schools’ closure, as my interlocutors often explained, pushed many families to migrate. for solmaz, any attempt to reverse migration and ameliorate rural poverty required systematic political economic change to bridge the urban/rural divide that favors the former at the expense of the latter. in this context, the rehabilitation project provides access to some resources provided by the state, such as the renovation of irrigation canals and animal barns, as well as the provision of beehives and solar waterheaters. participation in the rehabilitation project also means seasonal income for some households, as village men build erosion control walls on the hills. yılmaz, the village head and my host, was one of them. at day’s end, when yılmaz returned home, he used to feel exhausted from the hard construction work on the mountain, especially given the chronic eczema on his hands. that summer, he lost thirty pounds while working on the slopes. still, he preferred this to seasonally migrating to work on construction sites, as he had done in the past. the lump-sum payment he received at summer’s end would go toward the renovation of the valley house, where he and his family stayed from late autumn to late spring. at the end of one workday on the slope, as he was putting ointment on his hands and relaxing over tea, i asked yılmaz how he imagined this village within the coming fifty years. “it will be forest [orman olur],” he responded without hesitation. “if there is no human being left here, all of this will be forest. look at those hills, right above the place where i keep the [project-provided] beehives now. there were fields that we used to cultivate even there. you could not see a single tree there. now all these places are turning into forest. if you don’t work the soil here, it will become forest.” it was hard to imagine these hills, where i had collected golden dwarf everlast and spruce tree gum, as cultivated places, except for the scattered stone wall remains that once retained small, terraced plots of land. yılmaz imagined that even the houses would turn into forest if inhabitants all left eventually. this had already happened in a small, nearby settlement where the residents of another village once stayed every summer on their way to the highlands. now left without maintenance, the crumbling stone houses were overgrown with bushes. yılmaz saw nature’s return in places where human activities retreated as less celebratory than ferhat, the forester who had introduced quaking aspens to me. ferhat’s appreciation of proliferating aspens manifests an environmental conservationist concern imbued with a certain form of ecological care (scaramelli 2018). yılmaz’s, emine’s, and saniye’s dislike of resurgent vegetation derives from the decay of another form of care that requires laborious practices of landscape maintenance. resurgent vegetation in gudashev constitutes a form of “ruderal ecologies” (stoetzer 2018) that spontaneously grow in disturbed spaces. yet rather than occupying urban rubble, these ruderal plants emerge in changing rural landscapes. while the ruderal analytical lens that bettina stoetzer offers illustrates cosmopolitan urban life emerging in nationalist and capitalist ruins, this article expands the ruderal analytic by examining resurgent plants that do not emerge in ruined spaces, such as cracks in urban infrastructure, but that themselves are considered as ruination. resurgent ecologies such as quaking aspens emerge in rural landscapes that, at first sight, are not associated with ruins. rather, they are rendered ruderal when considered from the villagers’ perspective and through their labor-intensive experiences of living in the uplands. moreover, these ecologies become ruderal not because they reveal life amid disturbance and destruction (stoetzer 2018), but because they index the decay of certain forms of laborious life. consider, for example, the assemblage of matsutake mushrooms and pine trees that anna lowenhaupt tsing (2015, 163) traces to attend to “scenes for considering livability—the possibility of common life on a human-disturbed earth.” overgrown fields in gudashev for foresters indicate a similar livability—namely, the forest’s force to reclaim the space that becomes auxiliary to the human work of rehabilitating the uplands for better dam maintenance. yet if “disturbance is always a matter of point of view” (tsing 2015, 161), then so is resurgence. resurgent ecologies in villagers’ accounts index a process not of livability, but of its decay. in his article about the proliferation of weeds in formerly manicured and maintained places in panama, ashley carse (2019, 113) traces loss amid resurgence by asking: “beyond the (debated) ecological gains, had anything been lost?” carse shows that, for the residents of colón, the panama canal zone’s atlantic terminus, the history of building the canal zone evolved alongside a form of environmental management that required practices of maintaining clean and manicured landscapes—for example, cutting the grass or draining mosquito habitats. on the one hand, such environmental management practices produced a register of modern landscapes while, on the other, they provided employment and contributed to expectations of development. carse therefore understands the proliferation of unruly plants in this landscape as the unmaking of the modernist boundaries constructed between canal infrastructure and the environment, as well as the loss of development aspirations and experiences accompanying infrastructural investments and connections. i argue that unruly plants in unlabored landscapes unmake yet another kind of boundary—a boundary between maintenance and decay. while resurgent vegetation is cast as natural infrastructure (carse 2012) of erosion control and dam maintenance to prevent decay, it also reveals other forms of saddening decay and neglect entailed in maintenance practices. material decay in landscapes under rehabilitation the glorification of what foresters define as “decreasing social pressure” is challenged not only by the villagers’ reframing of the same process as decay but also by the existence of resurgent ecologies not quite beneficial for protecting forests and soil. quaking aspens are not the only vegetation proliferating in the absence of human activities. as use of the forest for fodder decreases, vegetation harmful to trees also overgrows. as andrew mathews (2018) shows, rural landscapes feature multiple layers of past entanglements among people, animals, plants, and soils, which materialize as trees, terraces, and irrigation systems; these challenge a single story of environmental change. landscape forms such as quaking aspen, terraced fields, forest clearings, and erosion control walls tell a history of çoruh’s uplands more complex than one of degradation giving way to recovery. the higher altitudes now seemingly “untouched” were in previous decades regularly accessed by villagers to collect pelüt (a local term for oak tree) leaves for livestock. oak leaf constituted an excellent supplement to the straw that villagers fed animals during winter. in a customary division of forest space, every household could gather oak leaves in a specific location. after collecting leaves with a pruning knife, the villagers piled them high, turning them upside down to shed rainwater. the leaves were left under a tree, next to its trunk, until they dried—hence the term “setting the bottom” (dip kurmak), referring to the practice of drying leaves at the tree’s bottom. it was crucial to prune trees properly so that they would produce more, better leaves in subsequent years. the villagers left smaller trees’ roots or bigger trees’ trunks and tips intact to allow for continued growth. moreover, trees were then spared for two to three years to further enhance their development. as the number of livestock decreased, so did the practice of collecting pelüt leaves, leading to the loss of a way of knowing the forest and tending the trees. another source of fodder from the forest is a plant locally called çakum (mistletoe), which grows on pine trees. it took me another trip to the now sparsely populated upland hamlet of göcek to understand its importance. göcek is another rehabilitation project village at the bottom of the çoruh valley, to be flooded once dam construction reaches completion. in 2017, i had the opportunity to see this hamlet, now very much abandoned, when muhtar (the elected village head) mehmet transported a repaired refrigerator to one of the last remaining families who kept livestock and stayed there over the summer. mehmet’s relative fikret and his wife, who had migrated to bursa more than a decade earlier and now only visited the village during the summer holidays, seized the opportunity to see the hamlet. the theme of landscape transformation dominated our conversations. sitting in the front passenger seat, fikret pointed to the faded brown trees among the otherwise verdant pine-dominated forests and proposed a research question: “if you wanna work on our relations with forests here, i will tell you something worth trying to find an answer to. go and explore why these trees, which were green and healthy for so long, have died.” my first response was to ask whether they had consulted the district forestry. they had, mehmet said, and foresters had come to investigate whether pests were causing harm—without success. the foresters then suggested cutting these trees and replacing them with new saplings. the villagers objected and instead offered their own explanation: previously, villagers had collected çakum to feed animals, as it is very nutritious. the plant is not, however, beneficial to the trees themselves. birds carry the çakum seeds and allow the plant to proliferate in the forest. decreased human and livestock presence meant that çakum was no longer collected to feed the animals, thus having a detrimental effect on the host trees. figure 5. çakum (mistletoe) collected from göcek’s uplands. photo by ekin kurtiç. the answer to the question as to why trees were dying therefore lay in the villagers’ decreased forest usage. as we continued our drive, everyone excitedly pinpointed mistletoe plants with their small, round, thick leaves, easily distinguishable on the coniferous trees. “look! you can find it on every tree now. was it like that before? when we used to graze animals, it was so tiresome to find çakum to collect. nowadays everywhere is full; no one even touches it!” exclaimed fikret in a mix of excitement about the abundance of previously hard-to-find mistletoe and sadness about its impact on the trees. for them, çakum’s proliferation indicated a decrease in labored landscapes—a process they considered as entangled with the material decay of the forest itself. on other occasions, material decay was more directly embedded in and challenged rehabilitation practices, and project implementers needed to overlook it. the construction of erosion control walls materializes insofar as socio-material conditions on the ground allow—conditions that forestry officials cannot always control on a daily basis, given that work is done in distant places. as a result, they constantly attempt to navigate between ideal project objectives and “field conditions” (arazi koşulları). one such moment of navigation occurred one october day, when the district foresters visited gudashev to measure the dry walls that yılmaz and his fellow villagers had constructed over the summer. i paired up with the chief forester, menekşe, born and raised in a nearby black sea province, and with ahmet, born in the village, but now working in a bakery in yusufeli’s town center—a job from which he took a break to work on the slopes that summer. menekşe and i stuffed our trouser cuffs into our socks to prepare for the climb uphill; only ahmet felt comfortable enough to leave his trousers as they were. on the steep slope, small oak trees with their yellow-reddish leaves and other shrubs offered their branches to hold on to. after a one-and-a-half-hour, tiring uphill walk, right at the bottom of the wall we were to measure, menekşe noticed a shrub whose roots lay buried underneath the erosion control wall. “this thing barely grew here by itself, and you built the wall on top of its roots! you need to be careful about this. we need to preserve the vegetation and build the wall accordingly,” she said, expressing her frustration. but the harm was already done. the foresters could not control every single wall before completion. menekşe limited herself to alerting ahmet to this failure after the fact. as we headed to the next wall, we saw underneath a large rock a severely damaged young spruce tree. its main branches and part of its trunk were broken, lying on the forest ground. as we passed, ahmet—who always walked in front of us because of his familiarity with the landscape and the location of the walls—pointed to the destroyed tree. “well, we are destroying as we are constructing, my chief,” he said and pointed to the spruce. ahmet explained that, while they had tried to procure stones by crushing a larger rock and rolling it downhill toward the wall’s construction site (as they commonly do when building in areas with few stones), they had damaged the tree. menekşe was visibly upset about the explanation; in a serious tone, she emphasized that this was an incorrect practice and should not have occurred. yet she still chose to overlook this destruction. ahmet’s genuine confession turned into a moment of what mathews (2011, 5) calls “uncertain authority” on menekşe’s part: she performed authority while being “haunted by a sense of vulnerability” when “translating between the general and the local.” forestry officials oscillate between project logic and designs, on the one hand, and conditions on the ground, on the other. they appreciate quaking aspens as nature’s comeback, while having to close their eyes to the trees and plants destroyed during the erosion control walls’ construction. figure 6. a forester and a villager are measuring the erosion control walls built in gudashev within the scope of the watershed rehabilitation project. photo by ekin kurtiç. conclusion anthropology’s renewed analytical attention to the relationalities of ecologies and infrastructures push us beyond antagonistic understandings to think about the myriad ways in which technical and more-than-human lives are entangled. these relationalities are always mediated through human practices and, hence, imbued with labor, politics, socialities, values, and meanings. in this article, i have proposed interrogating this interplay through the lenses of decay and maintenance. at a time when the representation of dams as monuments to modernization and progress has been shattered by the recognition of their environmental costs, disastrous failures, and decaying structures, we need to expand a critical analysis of dammed landscapes to “take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth and progress, as our starting points” (jackson 2014, 221). the environmental management of the gradual and often invisible accumulation of sediment in dam reservoirs enables us to attend to such forms of decay and mundane operations of sustenance. as i have shown, in the çoruh basin the long-term maintenance of hydroelectric dams against the detrimental impacts of erosion and sedimentation have converged with environmentally conservationist forestry practices in distant uplands considered the starting point of soil erosion. environmental repair of purportedly “degraded landscapes” has been rendered infrastructural to everyday maintenance practices for large dams, resonating with a recent turn in environmental conservation toward rendering nature infrastructural (carse 2014). while tracing how uplands emerge as ecologically valuable sites to be restored, i take a step further and draw attention to the forms of decay that repair and maintenance practices entail. this is best reflected in the divergent affective and material registers of landscapes left uncultivated and overgrown with quaking aspens, bushes, or weeds. such resurgent ecologies are rendered a potential for stateand expert-led nature rehabilitation schemes. yet for upland villagers, those very same ecologies indicate a decay of labored landscapes. in yusufeli, ecologies helpful for maintaining dams—namely, vegetation growth on uncultivated lands—simultaneously index the erosion of another form of maintenance and care in the form of the villagers’ labor in tending the landscape through farming and animal breeding. infrastructural justice (sheller 2018; enns and sneyd 2021) is implicated in maintenance work through the just and fair provision of services and care for preventing and mitigating decay, malfunction, and breakage. however, “avoid[ing] romanticizing maintenance and repair” (mattern 2021, 110; emphasis original) requires a critical inquiry into forms of injustice and political power sustained through maintenance (barnes 2017). an ecological lens onto the exploration of infrastructural maintenance, i propose, reveals that the latter depends on the sustenance of some ecologies and the decay of others. the paradox of infrastructure maintenance means that, while arresting decay, it simultaneously entails decay. attending to the lives and relations lost in the process of maintenance and repair expands the horizon of our inquiry to infrastructural and environmental justice in dammed landscapes—a horizon that extends beyond the dramatic event of submergence. abstract a growing ethnographic literature attends to maintenance and repair practices in the face of decay and ruination. this article explores the forms of decay that become an integral part of infrastructure maintenance. in turkey’s çoruh basin, hydroelectric dam constructions lead to a concern about the landscape’s erosive character, which requires foresters’ practices of watershed rehabilitation in the uplands to protect the dams against sediment accumulation in the reservoirs. the work of repairing ecologies for the long-term maintenance of dams, i contend, is undergirded by the gradual decay of another maintenance labor—that is, the villagers’ arduous practices of tending landscape through farming and husbandry. through an ethnographic study of how foresters and villagers experience the landscape under rehabilitation, this article offers a novel anthropological analytical perspective that foregrounds the continuum between maintaining and decaying, tracing the role of labored landscapes in this continuum. i argue that maintenance practices, while intending to counter decay, entail other forms of decay. [dams; sediment; infrastructure maintenance; decay; rural and environmental labor; turkey] özet giderek büyüyen bir etnografik literatür, çöküş, yıkım ve tahribat süreçlerinin karşısında bakım ve onarım pratiklerine odaklanmaktadır. bu makale, altyapı bakımının bütünleyici bir parçası haline gelen çöküş biçimlerine odaklanmaktadır. türkiye’nin çoruh havzası’ndaki hidroelektrik baraj yapımları sürecinde arazinin erozyona yatkın yapısı bir mesele olarak ortaya çıkmıştır. bu mesele, barajları rezervuarlardaki sediment birikimine karşı korumak için ormancıların yüksek kesimlerde havza rehabilitasyonu çalışmaları yapmalarını gerektirmiştir. barajların uzun vadeli bakımı için yapılan ekoloji onarım çalışmalarının, başka bir bakım emeğinin—köylülerin tarım ve hayvancılık yoluyla araziye bakma pratiklerinin—zamanla gerçekleşen çöküşü tarafından desteklendiğini ileri sürüyorum. ormancıların ve köylülerin rehabilitasyon altındaki coğrafyayı nasıl deneyimlediklerine odaklanan etnografik araştırmam sonucunda bu makale, bakım ve çöküş süreçleri arasındaki devamlılığı ön plana alan ve emekle şekillenen arazilerin bu devamlılıktaki rollerini takip eden yeni bir antropolojik analitik perspektif önermektedir. bakım pratiklerinin, çöküş ve tahribatı engellemeyi amaçlarken, başka çöküş biçimleri içerdiğini iddia ediyorum. [barajlar; sediment; altyapı bakımı; çöküş; kırsal ve ekolojik emek; türkiye] notes acknowledgments i am immensely grateful to my interlocutors and collaborators in yusufeli, artvin, for their generosity in sharing their insights and experiences with me. they all remain anonymous here as the names of people have been changed. my gratitude goes to alize arıcan, ajantha subramanian, begüm adalet, chris walley, dilan yıldırım, hayal akarsu, namita dharia, pascal menoret, sam dolbee, and tarık nejat dinç for their detailed engagement and insightful suggestions. i am also thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive and thorough feedback, as well as to the cultural anthropology editorial team, especially joanne nucho, for their careful guidance in the revision process. in sharpening the arguments of this article, i have benefited from the comments of participants and discussants in various settings, particularly the political anthropology and political ecology working group at harvard university, the keyman program article workshop at northwestern university, the temporalities of rehabilitation panel at the annual meeting of the american anthropological association, and the harvard anthropology of science and technology working group. the crown center for middle east studies at brandeis university supported me during the writing and revising stages. this research was supported by the american research institute in turkey, the zeit-stiftung ebelin und gerd bucerius trajectories of change fieldwork grant, and harvard center of middle eastern studies summer research funding. 1. damaged forest (bozuk orman) is officially defined by degree of tree coverage (percentage of tree crowns covering the land). below 10 percent, the forest is considered “damaged” (bozuk) or “sparse” (boşluklu kapalı). 2. evlek is a unit of land area approximately equal to 250 square meters. 3. in forestry, quaking aspen (populus tremula) is known as a pioneer tree species: they are among the first to colonize an area as the forest starts to restore itself. quaking aspens require a good balance of environmental disturbance and stability. without periodic disturbances, they are crowded out by shade-tolerant conifers, while frequent disturbances limit their expansion. 4. neither the complete prevention of filling nor emptying is desired. sediment accumulation can never be fully stopped, and villages’ total abandonment is not the aim. 5. for growing scholarly interest in the multispecies afterlives of abandoned urban and rural landscapes, see gandy 2013, jasper 2020, and turnbull 2020. 6. all translations from turkish to english are mine. 7. few studies investigate the aftermath of dam construction. for an analysis of a dam-led disaster, see huber et al. 2017. for lingering environmental, technological, and political entanglements, see mitchell 2002, derr 2019, and folch 2019. for a brief discussion of reservoir sedimentation, see mccully 2001. 8. genese sodikoff (2012) 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download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.07 effective cynicism: waste, power, and the negotiation of urban decay and renewal in ulaanbaatar cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 428-454, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.05 effective cynicism: waste, power, and the negotiation of urban decay and renewal in ulaanbaatar rebekah plueckhahn university of melbourne https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-2164 the harsh sound of metal scraping on concrete resonated throughout the ground floor of an old two-story socialist-era apartment building in ulaanbaatar, mongolia, one cold day in may, 2016. jargal,1 a man in his sixties, was busy scraping up decayed, accumulated domestic rubbish with a metal spade and depositing the rubbish on a sheet in the doorway. we then took turns lifting the sheet and carrying the rubbish outside to deposit it into a large pile on the side of the road. first built to house migrant construction workers from china during the height of a 1950s socialist-era construction boom, this residential building was in a severe state of dilapidation. many of the empty one-room apartments on the ground floor had missing windows, and much of the internal heating infrastructure (pipes and radiators) had been removed. the building, which i call building no. x, had never been connected to water. it sat within an overlapping area between the city’s apartment blocks and ulaanbaatar’s large, sprawling ger districts—fenced land plots containing self-built housing (baishin), or ger—the collapsible felt dwellings used by mongolia’s mobile pastoralists. like those in the ger districts (as they are colloquially called), residents of building no. x were required to collect water from a nearby water kiosk for a small fee. public toilets to the left of this building serviced this and other apartment blocks built in the socialist era. in 2014, building no. x was slated for redevelopment. a construction company had received municipal approval to demolish it and redevelop a brand-new apartment building in its place. this new building was to be connected to core city plumbing and heating infrastructure. building no. x residents described how other resident owners, who had previously bought apartments in this building, had signed contracts with the construction company and were going to be provided apartments in the new building constructed in its place. they had been urged by the company, it was rumored, to begin removing internal piping to sell for scrap in anticipation of the future redevelopment. this state of dilapidation, jargal explained, was cumulative. once building no. x had been marked for redevelopment, he said, departing residents and others started dismantling components of its internal infrastructure. vandals then started breaking windows and stealing remaining piping under the cover of night. the anticipated redevelopment began through these incremental processes of deliberate ruination. by now, thanks to this removal of pipes, the building’s internal heating system no longer worked. this was a serious matter in ulaanbaatar, the world’s coldest capital city, where temperatures can reach -35 degrees celsius overnight. it meant that residents would need to find alternative housing that year before the winter months began. however, redevelopment had failed to take place. it was rumored that residents from other buildings had been gradually depositing their additional household rubbish anonymously at night into the empty, windowless apartments on the street-level floor of this building. stemming from inconsistent municipal rubbish collection and the increasing ruination of building no. x, rubbish had been accumulating in this building for some time. by early 2016, a layer of old, decayed rubbish covered many of the empty, one-room apartments on the ground floor. some of the remaining residents, living in identical one-room apartments on the floor above, met that day in may 2016 to clear the rubbish out of the lower floor and to deposit it in a large pile on the street outside. as we sat and took a break, jargal reflected on figures and events that, in his opinion, had shaped the ulaanbaatar landscape around him for some time. jargal linked the transfer of power in national parliament between mongolia’s two main political parties as a key reason as to why some private redevelopment projects had stalled while others had been completed: there was a plot of land north of here. a foundation for a new multi-story apartment building was laid there while the mongolian revolutionary people’s party [a right-leaning major political party in mongolia] was in power. … after they lost the national election in 2012, the planned development was canceled, and the foundation was abandoned. a different private company took over the development, but then the money invested [into this redevelopment plan] was spent elsewhere. jargal’s politico-economic imaginary (appel 2014) included the speculative social mapping of different political and business figures who he believed to be shaping the landscape around him. these characters loomed large in residents’ conversations but could rarely be located and were never fully identified by residents. they weren’t only limited to mongolian politicians. one construction company director involved in the failed scheme of building no. x was rumored by residents to be sick in hospital. the director of another company involved in the scheme was believed, by some, to be in jail. residents felt uncertain about who was involved, where they were, and even if they were in fact the same person. this uncertainty gave rise to speculation over the reasons for the failure of this and other urban redevelopment schemes. this speculation contained a recurring theme: people involved in this and other redevelopment schemes had absconded with investment money, leaving residents and others to wait, frustrated, burdened with envisioned futures that had failed to materialize. within these speculations, these apparition-like figures were hazily described, and of uncertain location, foregrounding and retreating within peoples’ circulating narratives. as we continued talking, jargal turned to the topic of the rubbish: people would throw this rubbish away [into the empty rooms of building no. x]. other residents of this area from [nearby] buildings would throw it away in here too. there is a five-story building on the north side, those residents would also throw their rubbish into our building. … i must remove the rubbish, there are no other options. in fact, just the week before, residents had held a heated public meeting over who was responsible for the removal of the anonymously disposed rubbish. yet no matter who had put it there, jargal pointed out, it had to be removed. the residents’ efforts to remove the rubbish helped, albeit momentarily, to stave off ruination of this decaying building. the cleaning formed an attempt at partially holding the building in place within unpredictable, changing urban surrounds. within this context of shifting property relations, the building itself was not stable—the rubbish, its broken windows, and a lack of workable heating infrastructure were gradually wearing away the building’s status as a distinct, fixed structure. removal of the rubbish proved generative: it became a way for residents to rearticulate their own and their building’s value (nguyen 2018, 2) in a time of accelerated postsocialist urban transformation. following a period of speculation-fueled economic growth between 2009 and 2013, mongolia experienced an increase in foreign investment in the extractive sector and urban construction. accelerated processes of urban expansion and redevelopment in ulaanbaatar soon followed, made possible through outsourced construction. underlying this construction of commercial and residential real estate was an intermingling of business and political interests that implicated municipal and national governance. however, after 2014, economic growth severely declined, leaving many construction projects stalled. building no. x now sat in a state of semi-ruin. for residents, the daily, intimate staving off of disrepair was interwoven with attempts to advocate for a type of redress—the resumption of the redevelopment project, or the provision of municipally provided alternative housing. the presence of flexible land tenure, and slippage in the bureaucratic documentation of possession and ownership, meant that holding onto land through processes of dwelling are fundamental ways that residents maintain access and ownership over land in ulaanbaatar (plueckhahn 2017, 2020). the residents of building no. x felt the need to stay in their apartments to ensure that their existing ownership remained legally recognized if the building were demolished. during this period of economic downturn, i conducted twelve months of ethnographic research, the majority of which i did in 2015–2016 as well as shorter visits in 2017 and 2019. i researched among residents attempting to hold onto or gradually own property (both apartments and land) during this period of urban transformation. i found many ulaanbaatar residents grappling with truncated expectations of opportunities that had failed to come into existence (empson 2020). they engaged in an acute moral questioning of the potential equitable (or inequitable) portioning of larger urban wholes and the rights of ulaanbaatar residents dwelling within them. i spent much time in 2016 with residents of building no. x, meeting, talking, drinking tea, or walking in the neighborhood. they shared with me their experiences as part of a larger goal to highlight (and have me document through my ethnographic research) the lived experience of ulaanbaatar residents during this period of transformation. i attended informal public meetings and joined residents as they met with local stakeholders, conducted cleaning days, and attended court hearings of legal cases related to the failed redevelopment. residents described, to me and to each other, their impressions of the processes that had led to this point. i expanded this ethnography through tracing media articles and conducting wider interviews with people in the district. during this time, residential engagements with waste were revealed as intimately implicated within processes of ruination, flexible land tenure, and outsourced processes of urban redevelopment. navigating these interlinked spheres required residents to develop savvy abilities in deciphering the opaque relations of power influencing redevelopment processes. i noticed how residents engaged in the critique and moral questioning of different, hard-to-locate figures that often gave rise to frequent cynical reflections. these reflections were evoked in a narrative, storytelling style, in which residents speculated on the supposedly real, self-serving motivations of politicians, municipal officials, and developers. the cynical reflections were not just a way to express frustrations or points of despondency (steinmüller 2011, 22). rather, they were utilized as a diagnostic tool to understand relations of power. this essay expands on other anthropological work that examines cynicism as a conceptual frame that can generate dynamic modes of action (daswani 2020; allen 2013), and can form part of political mobilization and the production of hope (hermez 2015). this previous work illuminates cynicism as containing critique, critique that forms part of searching for alternatives to a situation (allen 2013, 27). drawing from this prior work, i expand on this discussion by examining how generative cynicism can manifest among those experiencing time-sensitive, pressing material conditions and insecure housing. here, cynical reflections, while containing despondency and frustration, became an effective tool that was utilized pragmatically. this cynicism was not necessarily experienced alongside an underlying hope (hermez 2015, 520–21), but formed a productive, wry, pragmatic deciphering amid difficult conditions. cynical reflections became a space within which residents could seek clues of who best to approach and how to figure out which course of action to take. this article unpacks this effective cynicism by drawing from a three-pronged analytical approach that interweaves in a “trans-paradigmatic way” (navaro-yashin 2009) the negotiation of waste, the utilization of cynicism, and manifestations of power within outsourced redevelopment. i discuss how this cynicism forms a necessary and effective tool, allowing residents to trace relations of power to find alternatives to their difficult circumstances within the very processes that gave rise to them. a building in between building no. x is emblematic of several material processes shaping urban transformation in ulaanbaatar. these processes span both the socialist period that ended in 1990 and the subsequent rapid market economy and democratic transition that followed. this building was not ever meant to be a vision of socialist “timelessness” or a material representation of the “city of tomorrow” (schwenkel 2020, 232–33). instead, it formed part of the sociopolitical processes of socialist construction itself. it is emblematic of a kind of temporariness that underpinned processes of urban improvement during socialism and ongoing postsocialist transition. following the onset of socialism after 1924, steps toward “modernizing”’ socialist mongolia saw attempts to transform nomadic practices to more sedentary ones in urban spaces (billé 2015, 121).2 this was largely done through efforts to “transform people’s living arrangements” from felt gers to apartments (sorace 2021, 240–41). here, corporeal practices including considerations of health and cleanliness became part of an expanding ideology of urbanization aligned with a dominant soviet political culture (billé 2015, 123; sneath 2009, 73). it included the implementation of soviet-designed “bundled” infrastructures (collier 2011), such as the implementation of a centralized heating system in 1959 that to this day provides heating to apartments and commercial buildings in the central areas of ulaanbaatar. the legacies of this bundling have since left a lasting infrastructural divide between ulaanbaatar’s apartment areas that are connected to water, sewerage, and heating and the now expansive ger district land plots that are not. spurred by ulaanbaatar’s rapidly growing population during socialism, soviet ideologies of urban planning influenced new, anticipated urban configurations. yet in the 1950s, mongolia initially lacked the labor power needed to construct a socialist capital city. a labor-sending agreement with china resulted in about 26,000 construction workers being deployed to mongolia between 1955 and 1964 (sorace 2021, 246). yet many workers arrived to find that housing for them had yet to be built (sorace and zhu 2022, 257). building no. x was one such building meant to house them, constructed as one of several identical buildings in a district containing markets for construction materials. materially, this building makes for the very manifestation of the interstices between ulaanbaatar’s main urban configurations of ger districts and apartment areas. its lack of running water, plastered latticed wooden frame, and one-room homes resemble not so much an apartment building as a transitional, sedentarized space to house workers tasked with building larger apartments elsewhere. from the outset, chinese laborers in this district were plagued by poor living conditions, with cracked walls, poor heating systems, and leaking ceilings (sorace and zhu 2022, 259). now, building no. x forms a “lasting condition” of ongoing construction, teetering between having been part of an engine for construction elsewhere and already being a ruin (ssorin-chaikov 2016, 694). the building’s disrepair in 2016 was thus not necessarily a failure or an endpoint, but a fluctuating feature of its very construction (ssorin-chaikov 2016, 694). the ruination of building no. x thus moves beyond a type of socialist-era “unplanned obsolescence,” as noted by christina schwenkel when discussing the ruination of east german–designed apartments in vietnam (schwenkel 2020, 233). building no. x was always meant as a building in between—in between temporary housing and a ruined building. its contemporary residents were often forced to embody this in-between state.3 while many chinese laborers had long left by 1964, building no. x residents in 2016 were sometimes described by non-residents as people who may have chinese ancestry, a weighty label given high instances of sinophobia in mongolia (billé 2015). residents described how non-residents sometimes mocked their lack of running water. rather than take on this racial and infrastructural stigma (plueckhahn 2022), however, residents deftly reframed this in-betweenness to articulate a contrasting positionality. several described to me that they had bought their apartment in this building exactly because they anticipated it would be knocked down, their ownership status making them eligible to receive a new apartment if one were to be constructed in its place. the residents viewed this building as an asset that could be speculated on, rather than solely as a ruined space. this reflected an ongoing conversion of ideologies of urban transformation taking place in postsocialist mongolia (sorace 2021). mongolia’s recent experiences of economic growth between 2009 and 2013 resulted in extensive construction. in keeping with post-1990, outsourced, atomized processes of urban construction, this transformation was made possible through the municipality sectioning off parcels of land and granting temporary possession rights (ezemshil) to private construction companies. however, these processes did not represent a clear temporal juncture away from a socialist-era ideology of urban modernization, but instead constituted a conversion of it (sorace 2021, 242). building no. x shifted from being solely a ruined construction-worker dormitory to an (albeit dilapidated) asset sitting atop access to core urban infrastructures. living in disrepair created numerous challenges for residents, as well as the discomfort of perceived and felt stigmatization. yet the building’s disrepair was simultaneously malleable and could be adapted, reconfigured, and incrementally reversed by residents themselves (schwenkel 2020, 261). the ruined space of the building proved both precarious and productive (schwenkel 2020, 235). productive waste within postsocialist urban transformation it was through residents’ interactions with the accumulated domestic waste on the ground floor that a large part of the building’s incremental reconfiguration occurred. situated in an area of uneven municipal waste collection, building no. x became a space denoted as semi-illegitimate, a “liminal zone of disrepair” (chu 2014, 364). cleaning it out became a visible task that put residents face to face with both the redevelopment processes that contributed to the building’s ruination and the failure of municipal waste infrastructures that resulted in the waste being deposited and left to decay. additionally, cleaning the waste required residents to intimately engage with the multifaceted forms of pollution it engendered. the waste proved polluting in both a “manifestly concrete and cosmologically abstract” way (high 2017, 87). in mongolia, pollution, or buzar, is considered filthy and disgusting, a substance that divides the “orderly from the wild” (high 2017, 87). it can “inflict harm on those present” (high 2017, 87) including misfortune and illness (empson 2011, 283). the rubbish had the affective quality of stigmatizing the building’s residents, but it also had the added potential of causing misfortune for those needing to continually associate with it. cleaning it required one to accept the risk of multifaceted forms of pollution. at the same time, doing so allowed residents to denote the cleaner inside and dirtier outside of their building. it gave the opportunity for them to reinforce the building as an independent asset in a context in which redevelopment-induced disrepair and unevenly distributed waste infrastructures threatened to undermine it. in different parts of ulaanbaatar, accumulated waste can occur in areas of uneven domestic waste collection. municipal districts (düüreg) enlist the services of private waste-collection companies. resident-comprised apartment owners’ associations (suuts ömchlögchdiinholboo) ensure the provision of large waste containers outside apartment buildings that municipally funded waste collection companies then empty (byamba and ishikawa 2017, 7). building no. x and the three identical buildings surrounding it did not have an overly effective apartment owners’ association and lacked large-enough central collection points. in such situations, waste can often be left in front of apartments or on roads (byamba and ishikawa 2017, 7). residents explained that the municipality only collected waste deposited outside, in designated public areas. yet because the garbage remained inside building no. x, residents needed to remove the rubbish from the building themselves before the municipality agreed to collect it. when discussing waste workers in hanoi, vietnam, minh t. n. nguyen (2018) notes how engagements with waste can come to shape peoples’ quests to live a “moral life” in unpredictable contexts (nguyen 2018, 166). for instance, waste workers turn waste collecting into profitable businesses that support extended families, shaping familial relationships. this zone of redevelopment in ulaanbaatar similarly reveals residents attempting to resituate their sense of moral personhood in relation to waste. for residents, the presence of domestic waste in their building represented municipal neglect and failed redevelopment. negotiating opaque networks shaping processes of redevelopment resulted in residents undertaking a moral questioning, not only of themselves but also of the people shaping the landscape around them. within this “political economy of [urban] remaking” (nguyen 2018, 166), residents not only reshaped their building by cleaning out waste but also repurposed cynical reflections as a diagnostic tool. rather than constituting a point of despondency or foreclosure, cynicism became a generative conceptual frame that allowed for the re-examination and attempted deciphering of networks of influence. effective cynicism cynical reflections questioning the moral characters of developers, politicians, and municipal officials helped residents map changes in a flexible landscape largely beyond their control. these reflections formed attempts to map and understand shifting relations of power that were difficult to determine and did not always emanate from state or municipal apparatuses. during the 2010s, the ulaanbaatar municipality relied increasingly heavily on outsourcing urban development to a myriad number of construction companies (plueckhahn 2020). some municipal politicians, often intertwined with national parliamentary political factions, were rumored to have vested interests and familial ties in the construction sector. this overlapping of political interests and construction reflects an increasing comingling of entrepreneurship and political spheres in mongolia emerging since 1990. this comingling of social and business networks includes postsocialist mongolian government bureaucracies, where there exists “an often unresolvable tension” between fulfilling workplace duties and “local-personal obligations” toward one’s personal networks (zimmermann 2012, 86). networks of alliance and mutual assistance are thus viewed as forming an important part of how power and influence are constituted in mongolia. these are relations of power that move both across, within, and beyond forms of state authority or governance, and they intertwine business, politics, and governance (roitman 2004, 191). the intertwinement of business and governance has only increased during recent periods of economic flux. during mongolia’s period of dramatic, speculation-driven economic growth from 2009 to 2013, spheres of business and governance increasingly overlapped (radchenko and jargalsaikhan 2017, 1040–1041). several key business figures successfully campaigned during this period and beyond as reliable political candidates on the platform that their business acumen would benefit the effective managing of mongolia’s economy (bonilla and shagdar 2018; radchenko and jargalsaikhan 2017, 1039–1041). paying attention to these relationships reveals the way in which capitalism in postsocialist mongolia is being shaped, allowing us to “unevenly…understand capitalism in the present moment” in mongolia (appel 2014, 603). since the end of socialism, when uneven processes of large-scale privatization occurred, mongolia experienced an increasing entrenchment of economic practices within politically powerful networks that indelibly shape the way capitalist enterprises are made possible and unfold (plueckhahn and bumochir 2018; chuluunbat and empson 2018). this can be further understood through how kapitalizm (capitalism) and ardchilal (democracy) are popularly viewed as being two sides of the same coin (plueckhahn and bumochir 2018). this conflation of democracy and capitalism is viewed in polarizing ways: those with business acumen can obtain considerable political success, but on the other hand, a democracy and economy that is “too free” is viewed as potentially containing corruption and abuses of power. the power to influence construction outcomes thus dwelled within the opaque networks that made construction possible, networks that were often viewed as politically linked. cynical reflections revealed the residents of building no. x thus having particular engagements with and imaginations of the state (anjaria 2011, 67), ones that differed from other modes of municipal governance and bureaucratic reach (das 2006, 162). residents attempted to approach the municipal officials within their subdistrict local office (horoo) to seek redress to the failed redevelopment of their building. however, they found themselves sent away, having been told that they’d simply made a bad deal with a bad company and that the municipality was under no obligation to assist. residents viewed this municipal manifestation as an absent presence, differing from more top-down experiences of state and municipal authority experienced by ulaanbaatar residents (e.g., those seeking welfare payments) (fox 2019). yet just as this deliberate absence produced meanings (anand 2015, 309) of personal responsibility amid ruination, so too did it produce subjectivities among residents that implicated the material environment (anand 2015, 310). residents realized that rather than approaching subdistrict or even district municipal offices, that they instead needed to negotiate opaque social networks of comingled business and politics that moved “beyond a fixed state/non-state divide” (truelove 2021, 296). cleaning anonymously deposited waste became an essential place where diffuse and decentred forms of wider networks of power were contested (truelove 2021; elinoff 2016). the urban material space became “a political terrain for the negotiation of moral-political questions” arising in this period of economic flux in mongolia (von schnitzler 2013, 671). here, cynical reflections played a particular role. cynicism became an effective tool that allowed for an attempted deciphering of the opaque and fluid relations of power shaping the surrounding landscape. the presence of a political landscape that blurred distinctions between social relationships, business, and state administrative authority, i argue, gave rise to a particular form of cynicism that invites a reconsideration of definitions of cynicism as previously discussed by peter sloterdijk (1987) and slavoj žižek (1989). this article joins other ethnographic analyses of the appropriateness of applying philosophical definitions of cynicism to diverse ethnographic contexts (steinmüller 2011, 2014; daswani 2020; allen 2013; navaro-yashin 2002; hermez 2015; molé 2013). in mongolia, the cynicism among residents of building no. x demonstrates a conflation between the two types of cynicism outlined by the german philosopher sloterdijk. on the one hand, residents of building no. x demonstrated the role of the older concept of the kynic (arising from ancient greek philosophy)—the popular, “provocative…individualist” (sloterdijk 1987, 3). this kynic sits at a distance from those in power and represents a ridicule “of the ruling official ideology” (žižek 1989, 26). building no. x residents were also technically with comparatively much less power or influence and critiqued those with power from a distance. however, they also sat within the material vestiges and decay that resulted from the unfolding of these power relations. the residents had a pressing need to find a way to hold onto their existing land tenure and receive alternative housing. in doing so, they needed to both decipher and subsequently take an active part in the very processes they were cynical of. in his influential text the critique of cynical reason, sloterdijk (1987) also described what he viewed as a knowing and complicit cynic in middle-upper class germany in the 1970s. this cynicism arose within a conservative political turn and a climate of disillusionment following the failure of leftist uprisings in 1968 (shea 2010, 146). this cynic,sloterdijk (1987, 5) writes, has a “realistically attuned way of seeing things.” they view the world with a “detached negativity … that scarcely allows itself any hope” (sloterdijk 1987, 6). however, rather than constituting a public and outright rejection of the status quo, sloterdijk’s cynic resigns themself to maintaining their cynicism as a “private disposition,” a “mediated alienation,” which does not challenge their context and is complicit with it (sloterdijk 1987, 7). as žižek (1989, 25) observes when discussing these definitions of cynicism, expanding from a marxist approach to ideology (navaro-yashin 2002, 159), this cynic’s perspective might be: “they know very well what they are doing but still, they are doing it.” yael navaro-yashin (2002, 160; italics mine), in her ethnography on political life and secularism in turkey, extends this explanation further, writing that “people take actions upon the world as if they did not know, as if they were deluded by ideology,” forming a knowing, cynical pretence. aspects of the “modern cynic” as outlined by sloterdijk and discussed by navaro-yashin resonate with the cynicism of the residents of building no. x. yet this context in mongolia offers a reframing of this latter definition of cynicism when considering the predicaments of people in pressing material circumstances that require a swift solution. these were people who have little economic or political clout or state support. given residents’ precarious situation, they could not afford a “detached negativity” (sloterdijk 1987, 6). rather than pretending they didn’t know how things really are, as navaro-yashin discusses above, residents of building no. x do know, and could not afford to pretend that they somehow do not. their cynicism was a type of realism (sloterdijk 1987, 4), utilized up front as a diagnostic tool in an open, pragmatic way, allowing them to persevere and find appropriate courses of action. a mongolia-informed contextual revision of žižek’s summary above might be “they know very well what they are doing, they don’t overly like it, but they don’t have much choice but to openly persevere and find a path through it.” indeed, it is the open, realistically attuned, nature of this critique that allowed residents to better decipher the relations of influence surrounding them. this refocuses our attention to the effective potentialities within cynicism. while residents’ cynical reflections revealed moments of resignation, frustration, and despair, this cynicism moves the focus away from cynicism as something ultimately ending in “indifference” (navaro-yashin 2002, 164), resignation, or, as hans steinmüller (2011, 35) notes when discussing cynicism and irony in china, closure and denial. these residents were living in highly insecure material circumstances and could not afford detached resignation. but theirs was also not a kind of cynicism that worked in tandem with a wider political mobilization (hermez 2015) or humorous critique (daswani 2020). instead, this cynicism provided an avenue through which residents could attune themselves to the reality surrounding them (hermez 2015, 520), to confront and work within the nuances of power and authority. rather than working alongside hope (hermez 2015, 521), this cynicism gave rise to weariness and a wry savviness. cynical reflections assisted residents in understanding and challenging fluid power relations as they protected their höröngö—a mongolian term that encapsulates property, wealth, or a generative stake in the urban landscape. however, rather than this be solely a diversion away from definitions of cynicism that emphasize despondency, residents’ utilizations of cynical realism allow the casting of a different perspective on sloterdijk’s definitions. viewing sloterdijk’s writing through a mongolia-informed perspective, these effective, generative capabilities, while underemphasized, can already be seen. they become most apparent when considering the kinds of realism that underpin sloterdijk’s description of cynicism, where the cynic knows themself “to be without illusions and yet to have been dragged down by the ‘power of things’” (sloterdijk 1987, 6). the residents found themselves in an intricate predicament—their building was dilapidated, the heating no longer worked, and they were facing the reality of a fast-approaching cold winter in housing increasingly filled with domestic rubbish. in this instance, cynical realism was not an end but a tool to accept and engage with things as they really are. potential hidden motivations: cynicism and suspicion the residents of building no. x attempted to trace and understand shifting relations of power that spanned municipal governance, urban development, national politics, and local powerbrokers. cynical reflections allowed them to understand the different people involved, the nature of their authority, and their motives. these reflections centered around whether figures—such as the heads of construction companies or municipal and national politicians—were acting in the interests of a public (niitiin) good, or whether they were seeking their own interests and profit (ashig). cynicism emerged within speculation over a person’s possible hidden intentions that differed from an altruistic-seeming public persona. rather than there being one direct, equivalent translation of cynicism into mongolian that applies in this context, for residents of building no. x, cynical perspectives manifested when they expressed doubt about the veracity of people’s public personas or their publicly stated intentions. cynicism became apparent in the belief that some people with power secretly pursued private profits to the detriment and exclusion of others. it could be seen when residents critiqued local officials’ or politicians’ actions as only driven by the desire to show the “appearance” (tsarai) of good deeds to increase their prestige (ner hünd). this was coupled with a coexisting belief in such people potentially being a huvia boddog hün, a person who prioritizes their own interests (højer 2019, 753). the belief that someone could be professing one thing publicly but working to pursue their own interests can be seen in the following characterization of someone being an ashig sonirhlyn zörchiltei hün, literally, a “contradictory, profit-interested person.” this description refers to a person who publicly professes altruism but secretly acts in their own interest. cynically viewing the motives of people with power and authority has formed part of the mongolian postsocialist experience since 1990. uneven processes of privatization after the end of socialism in 1990 saw property and ensuing wealth sequestered into the hands of a growing elite (ichinkhorloo 2018). people increasingly believed that bribery forms part of arrangements between wealthy businesspeople and politicians, informing “widespread notions of ‘moral decay” (sneath 2010, 255). linked in the “popular imagination…[to] the age of the market,” or zah zeeliin üye (sneath 2010, 255), this has given rise to forms of suspicion and conspiracy narratives about those holding power and authority (højer 2019). these narratives often center around whether certain powerful people (often politicians or those politically connected) may or may not be corrupt (sneath 2018), fueled by perceptions of a “political class meshed together by myriad private understandings and arrangements” (sneath 2012, 157). alongside this growing mistrust in forms of authority is a concomitant continued reliance on mutual help, gifting, assistance, or information-sharing within social networks (sneath 2010, 255). such assistance can occur between networks of people from the same rural districts, provinces, workplaces, kin relations, or businesses (chuluunbat and empson 2018). as david sneath notes (2006), clear distinctions are made in mongolia between corruption and forms of gifting and mutual assistance, where forms of gifting and assistance are viewed favourably (chuluunbat and empson 2018; humphrey 2012). categorizations of exchanges as gifts and assistance, or bribery and corruption, exist on a moral spectrum of exchange (sneath 2006), although in practice, into which category an exchange might fall is a matter of perspective and is sometimes difficult for people to determine (plueckhahn and bayartsetseg 2018). understanding these exchanges and social processes thus requires continued assessment and speculation. residents attempting to decipher relations of power within their district and beyond also meant morally assessing the types of assistance that occurred within them, however opaque these processes are to those outside these networks. when undertaking ethnographic research in 2015–2017, and again in 2019, i noticed an increased moral questioning about the private, secretly self-interested motives of those in power. while a wealthy few benefited from the 2009–2013 speculation-driven growth in investment, most mongolians did not. many i spoke to felt intensely disillusioned over mongolia’s subsequent economic downturn, sentiments only bolstered by subsequent political corruption scandals (sorace and jargalsaikhan 2019). for residents of building no. x and others, there appeared a chasm between, on the one hand, those who “eat money” (möngö ideh; i.e., misappropriate funds) and, on the other, those attempting to make an honest living within this context of unevenly distributed wealth. one elderly ulaanbaatar resident, living elsewhere, summed up this general attitude to me at the end of 2019. visiting her in her home in the ger districts, she lamented what had happened since the economic downturn in 2014. stretching her observations back to the end of socialism, she said: “our höröngö [wealth/property] was supposed to be distributed equally; instead, rich people build luxury apartments in protected national parks, while i need to still live in a ger on a land plot. since the end of socialism, we have lost our shared höröngö.” by using the term höröngö, this resident was referring to the material, physical nature of property. however, she was simultaneously alluding to the generative potential encapsulated in this polysemic term that underlies a wider mongolian theory of property. höröngö translates to an item or thing that has the capacity to cause something to grow, expand, and be of benefit to others’ growth, flourishing, and expansion. this can be seen in how the word höröngö is also the term used for a starter spoonful of yoghurt placed in heated milk to create more yoghurt, and is also a term for yeast, used for baking bread. for property to constitute höröngö, it must have this expanding, generative capacity—encapsulated perhaps most distinctly in mongolian pastoralist emphases on the generative capacity of a herd of animals that can breed and grow in number (see also plueckhahn 2020, 74–75). in urban mongolia, one’s höröngö in the form of an apartment or land can prove generative in multiple ways: it can allow one’s family to live and grow safely. real estate can also be used as collateral when qualifying for additional loans. the curtailing of a person’s ability to hold their höröngö in place, as seen through the presence of waste and deliberate disrepair in building no. x, would deny resident-owners of their property’s generative potential in which they had invested so much time and money. residents needed to reclaim this future potential, even in a yet unanticipated form. to do this, they needed to engage in a “collective, realistically attuned way of seeing things” (sloterdijk 1987, 5), resulting in them becoming both despondent and proactive. locating power in the productive anticommons one day some residents and i met in the late afternoon at one of the apartments in building no. x to rest, drink tea, and talk. as we sat, two of the residents began describing their interpretations of some of the events leading up to that moment. they showed me numerous newspaper articles on the failed redevelopment venture, as well as a photocopy of one of the construction company’s land-possession documents that was soon due to expire. “i heard the work here [redevelopment plans] will be ceased,” claimed one resident; “this place is being taken under state [tör] protection.” “well, [the state] couldn’t protect it when it was intact!” another quickly countered. “yes,” others murmured in agreement. a third person added, “do you really think they can protect it after it no longer has an owner/holder [ezen]?,” referring to the construction company that had had rights to build on it. “can they? probably they will burn it down!” a fourth joked. this conversation alluded to some significant ways that residents were conceptualizing relations of power shaping the surrounding landscape. reflecting on what might happen once redevelopment ceased, the residents speculated that the ezen, or owner/holder, would lose access to this section of land. here, the term ezen refers to the person or company who had previously gained temporary possession rights to build on this block of land. one resident commented that, technically, their building and the surrounding land would revert to state (tör) protection. however, as seen above, the group viewed this with skepticism. the land was too valuable, they described, jokingly anticipating the state would likely wish to burn the old building down to “release” the valuable land underneath it and facilitate private construction companies to build upon it. this cynical perspective contained disillusionment, but it was also diagnostic. it revealed crucial facts about the underlying political economy of land management in ulaanbaatar. flexible systems of land tenure had allowed municipal authorities to provide copious amounts of land parcels to private construction companies. because of this, residents viewed (whether accurately or not) municipal authorities as having a vested interest in making valuable land available for construction. the outsourcing of development to myriad private companies formed part of urban governance during this period. this emphasis was echoed in other forms of economic messaging that municipal and national politicians directed at ulaanbaatar residents. politicians giving public speeches in the district had urged residents to seek out construction companies themselves to redevelop the district. government officials, both municipal and national mps, had espoused the virtues of this type of economic governance, forming an example of the state shaping neoliberal urban economic policies (bumochir 2020, 7). in the right-leaning daily newspaper ödriin sonin in march 2016, a municipal politician declared when interviewed about a ger district redevelopment program (the redevelopment of fenced land plots into apartments), that all owners of property, including those living in fenced land plots, could decide the value of their own land (enkhbold 2016). this redevelopment was, as christian sorace (2021, 254) writes, “not viewed as a political project, but as part of a pervasive logic of neoliberal governmentality” in which residents were responsible “for individual futures.” fast rates of urban expansion were made possible not only through a free-market ethos espoused through municipal redevelopment policies and governance. ulaanbaatar land-tenure regimes and wider temporalities of land access also formed legal and conceptual frames. these stemmed from mongolian pastoralist land use and made urban for-profit redevelopment more possible. urban land-tenure regimes were influenced by mongolian pastoralist usufructuary access in the development of mongolia’s 1994 land law. these allow individuals to gain temporary possession rights, or ezemshil, of a small, fenced urban land plot (see miller 2017, 11). construction companies can also gain access to a plot of land for up to five years to build a building through a similar type of ezemshil temporary possession. temporary possession rights, plus overworked bureaucracies, often result in delays between the physical holding of land “in place” and its bureaucratic recognition (miller 2017). because of this, processual acts of dwelling, by having someone live on the land, or remain in a dilapidated building, and incrementally holding land in place through fences or concrete bases, constitute pivotal ways ulaanbaatar is configured (mcfarlane 2011, 651). here, residential dwelling and the attempted construction of new buildings both work together in frictional ways to subtly reconfigure the city from within as people attempt to acquire and keep höröngö (plueckhahn 2020). the surrounding landscape was thus viewed as something extremely malleable by residents and municipal authorities alike, as a space of fluctuating access and exclusion. in unpacking this interrelationship between free market ethos and flexible land access, i draw on a concept i have expanded on elsewhere, which i call the “productive anticommons” (see plueckhahn 2019, 2020). drawing from carol m. rose (2004) as she expands on michael heller’s (1998) analysis of the “tragedy of the anticommons,” the anticommons arises when there is too much privatized property, where “multiple owners are each endowed with the right to exclude others from a scarce resource, and no one has an effective privilege of use” (heller 1998, 624). ulaanbaatar has indeed seen a proliferation of atomized private access to land for commercial gain. however, the political economy of urban development in ulaanbaatar—and the ways residents attempt to access land—presents a different substantiation of the anticommons that i argue may not be quite so “tragic” or exclusionary. instead, while the landscape is often changing, and temporary access could be considered precarious, this landscape is productive of different kinds of shifting and overlapping ownership due to its flexibility (plueckhahn 2020, 14). while residents struggled with the challenges of a decaying home and attempted to read opaque political and business relationships, this landscape and the networks of power that shaped it were also innately flexible. politicians’ networks were shifting and subject to changes in the crucial national election year of 2016. political factions and alliances crisscrossed political parties, national parliamentary mps, and the ulaanbaatar municipal citizen’s representative assembly. power became vested in those who had the ingenuity, resources, and political connections to try and shape this flexible landscape to their advantage. however, who those figures were was open to change; the dichotomy between peripheral and powerful was not fixed but malleable (bumochir 2020, 14). residents knew they needed to assess and understand the political possibilities opening up within their district, which formed an interstitial space of “breaking-points ripe for mobilization and rearrangement” (chaflin 2017, 665). holding land in place through processes of dwelling and cleaning out rubbish allowed residents to hold onto, however tenuously, their höröngö amid the “multitude of different faces [and] agents” (pedersen 2011, 67) that formed the shifting relations of power around them. the entwinement of waste and cynicism here lies one of the ironies of the manifestation of urban power in this postsocialist context of profit-driven urban development. the flexible systems of power that attempted to covet land and channel it into forms of development also gave rise to a flexible material environment that residents attempted to manipulate. engaging with the materiality of the building itself and cleaning out accumulated domestic rubbish became a direct engagement with the politics that had brought this ruination into existence. the waste only reinforced residents’ cynicism, but this cynicism ultimately proved productive. the lack of previous municipal intervention in the waste removal meant that the waste itself had become “active political matter” (chaflin 2017, 667), forming a “passive-aggressive zone of encounter between state actors, land developers and citizens” (chu 2014, 352). this sentiment was summed up to me on the cleaning day in 2016 by another resident, uranhishig. standing in a newly cleaned room, a mask on her face to protect her from the dust, she stated: this building’s doors and windows need to be bolstered and secured. this area must not collapse. we now need to fix this up, or otherwise, what are we to do? in the short term, we can clean and repair. … from the most local municipal district official to the highest national mp, they have all left us and gone. … thus, no decision has been made for the past three to four years. here, uranhishig “recast the political” to something much more domestic in a space where the state seemed out of reach (navaro-yashin 2002, 2). the context of building no. x requires us to move beyond a binary representation of power, of, say, between residents and the state, to pay attention to “how power actually travels through … social relations” (shagdar 2023), in this case, through shifting political alliances, material processes, and modification. the residents’ public, visible cleaning of rubbish, visits to elected political officials, and attempted deciphering of networks of influence eventually paid off. in june 2016, during the height of this impasse, the then-ruling democratic party faced national elections. the politically appointed democratic party city mayor had come under severe critique following the recent downturn in the economy and what was viewed as overlapping familial and business interests in city politics. in the lead-up to the elections, plastic banners adorned building no. x and its surrounds, picturing a smiling male political candidate from the then-main opposition party. as i walked past these banners with saraa, a resident, she pointed to this poster saying, he would be able to help them, unlike the other political figures or municipal officials they had previously approached. the opposition mongolian people’s party won the election by a landslide. several months later, residents of building no. x were granted temporary rights to live in new municipal housing for two years because building no. x had become uninhabitable. one resident felt certain that this move had been made partly possible because of the newly elected national mp. she evocatively described how the newly elected municipal citizen representative assembly member of the area was a childhood friend of the national mp, and that together they had collaborated to make this move possible (see also plueckhahn 2020, 76). to her, the most significant and ultimately effective instigator of change stemmed from the mobilization of networks of influence—networks that spanned decades, came from childhood connections, and traversed nodes of national and municipal governance. residents successfully sought a (albeit temporary) solution through the very political networks they believed shaped and influenced urban development processes (foucault 1997, 545). their “economic imaginaries” ultimately posited the state as complicit in urban development processes and business. they believed the answer to their problems lay in the types of business and political networks that they simultaneously cynically viewed as being motivated by self-interest. these networks were diffuse, and the kin, friendship, and/or business networks that underpinned them required continual deciphering. this view reflects wider perceptions of politics in mongolia, where politics is often discussed “as rumours about the motives of politicians and businessmen, rather than discussion about policy” (empson 2020, 54). cynical reflections, rather than constitute a foreclosure, became effective in that they formed vehicles through which to gain better insight into how these networks of influence worked. waste and the types of cynicism this context of ruination gave rise to both hold a similar, innate contradiction. a redevelopment zone of “continuous becoming” (schwenkel 2020, 261), the waste consolidated this building’s ruination, further justifying its demolition (schwenkel 2020, 239). with municipal governance prioritizing outsourced redevelopment to construction companies, the waste became an agent of disrepair discreetly allowed to do its work “through the fraying materials of the built environment” (chu 2014, 364). however, by cleaning this waste, residents simultaneously recast themselves as people with ownership over this property, consolidating a multifaceted “stake” (höröngö) in the urban landscape. the waste turned their keen attention and analytical gaze to the processes that had brought it there in the first place. waste and cynicism both formed points of potential ruination and resignation, yet faced with extremely difficult material circumstances, the residents reconfigured waste and cynicism into dynamic sites of action (daswani 2020, 107), zones of encounter (nguyen 2018, 166), and effective tools that could be utilized along the path toward a potential solution. their cynical reflections ultimately proved generative. in so doing, residents were, ironically, becoming the very kinds of actors that these networks favor—people who subtly attempted to work within relations of power and modify material landscapes to their advantage, for as long as these entanglements would allow. conclusion cynical reflections among residents of building no. x on the motivations of politicians and developers worked in a temporally unfolding relationship with material processes of decay and repair. waste and cynicism are phenomena that can give rise to foreclosure and senses of despondency. however, within this interstitial space, residents productively reworked them to create incremental forms of renewal and provide insights into the opaque processes shaping the landscape. this was not an easy process for residents to navigate. living beside encroaching, decaying waste and experiencing the insidious nature of ruination makes for an arduous and chronic challenge. for residents, such a way of life coexisted with a strong sense of being forgotten, of attempting to decipher and understand forms of state authority that appear hidden and extant within realms beyond well-known state apparatuses and administration. however, residents’ slow repurposing of waste and cynicism became a way in which this experience of “endurance and exhaustion” was slowly made “affectively and cognitively sensible” (povinelli 2011, 5). waste formed an agentive by-product of processes of capital-driven urban decay and renewal. ongoing processes of decay worked to further erode building no. x from within. yet the removal of the waste formed an incremental, partial reversal of this process. so too did cynicism arise as a pervasive analytical framework that residents utilized to navigate the agentive by-products of failed redevelopment and seek outcomes from within opaque political networks. residents cynically reflected on people’s motivations to decipher the state when it appeared unintelligible, and to work flexibly within shifting relations of power. this allowed them to protect their respective “stake” in the urban environment, their höröngö, or capital, as a form of wealth that is potentially generative and expands over time. in this, the residents knowingly engaged in the same networks they critiqued (žižek 1989). yet the expansive capacities within mongolian theories of ownership and generativity, combined with living amid waste in insecure housing, required a flexible solution. here, residents, while remaining critical, cannily repurposed cynical realism and a rejection of naïveté (sloterdijk 1987, 5) into an effective diagnostic tool generative of new solutions that best worked within this shifting yet productive anticommons. here, cynical reflections become a “conceptual lens” through which we can understand how urban residents positioned themselves in relation to diffuse relations of power shaping the landscape (hermez 2015, 507). the residents of building no. x took this one step further, demonstrating how such a conceptual lens can become a speculative, generative space that they utilized to seek out different kinds of incremental strategies. drilling into these ethnographic specificities reveals what cynicism can become when people’s options are limited and they are experiencing pressing, precarious material circumstances and insecure housing. these residents could ill afford resigned indifference and acceptance of the status quo. nor did this cynicism necessarily work alongside hope (hermez 2015, 520–21), but was accompanied by a productive, wry pragmatism amid difficult conditions. an additional irony is that challenging the limits and potentials within these network of relations constitutes an inherent quality required of those navigating these networks in the first place. because it worked, the residents found their negotiation of this context successful. however, it did not detract from their overall cynicism; rather, it reinforced for them the need to remain wary and savvy (allen 2013, 4). these experiences demonstrate the dynamic, dialogic effectiveness of cynical reflections and engagements with waste amid pressing material circumstances. the productive anticommons of ulaanbaatar is generative of an unpredictable interplay between forms of incremental exclusion, the freeing up of space, movable fences, the reclaiming of legitimacy, and shifting alliances (chu 2014, 365). while the everyday often proved challenging, cynicism opened opportunities to understand and negotiate the shifting nature of this material and political landscape. abstract in this article, i show how “effective cynicism” allows residents to decipher unequal power relations in ulaanbaatar, mongolia. ethnographic analysis of the myriad ways residents hold onto dilapidated housing in a failed redevelopment scheme reveals how residents’ cynical reflections assist in their efforts to decipher and mobilize state authority. residents undertake this while simultaneously negotiating the insidious decay of waste accumulated as a by-product of failed redevelopment processes. throughout, i focus on the presence of waste and cynicism as phenomena that both foreclose and open possibilities. i argue that residents’ repurposing of cynicism as a diagnostic tool, rather than producing detachment, presents a reframing of peter sloterdijk’s (1987) discussions of cynical realism, where such realism holds generative potential. considering the lived experience of urban decay through the three-pronged analytical framework of cynicism, power, and waste reveals subtle residential reconfigurations emerging within the materialities of for-profit redevelopment. [cynicism; waste; power; redevelopment; anticommons; ulaanbaatar] хураангуй монгол улсын улаанбаатар хот дахь эрх мэдлийн тэгш бус харилцааг хотын оршин суугчид үр дүнтэй “хэрсүү ухаан”-аар (effective cynicism) хэрхэн тайлж, ойлгож байгааг энэхүү өгүүлэлд хэлэлцэх юм. иргэд өөрсдийн хуучин орон гэрээ сүүлийн үед бүтэлгүйтэх болсон дахин төлөвлөлтийн үед хэрхэн хадгалж үлдэх гэж хичээж байгааг этнографийн үүднээс задлан шинжилж, улмаар өөрсдийнх нь хэрсүү ухаан төрийн эрх мэдлийг ойлгож, хөдөлгөхөд яаж тусалж байгааг илрүүлэн гаргав. мөн үүний хажуугаар дахин төлөвлөлтөөс бий болж, муудан овоорч буй хог хаягдалыг иргэд хэлэлцэн тохирох шаардлагатай болж байна. өгүүлэлийн турш хэрсүү ухаан, хог хаягдал гэх зүйл нь боломжийг нээж, хаадаг үзэгдэл гэж үзэв. иргэд аливаа асуудлыг өөрөөсөө холдуулалгүйгээр бодитой хандахад энэхүү хэрсүү ухааныг ашиглаж байгаа нь питер слотердижкийн (1987) дэвшүүлсэн бүтээх чанар бүхий хэрсүү ухааны реализмын тухай ойлголтыг өөрчилж байна гэж би үзэж байна. хот хуучиран доройтож байгааг хэрсүү ухаан, эрх мэдэл, хог хаягдал гэх гурвалын хүрээнд задлан шинжилж, ашгийн төлөөх дахин төлөвлөлт дэх материаллаг зүйлсийн нийгмийн нөлөөлөл дотор үүсэн бий болж буй иргэдийн үл ажиглагдам тохируулга өөрчлөлтийг илрүүлэн гаргав. [хэрсүү ухаан, хог хаягдал, эрх мэдэл, дахин төлөвлөлт, нийтийн эсрэг, улаанбаатар] notes acknowledgments i sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable suggestions, as well as colleagues in the anthropology and development studies program at the university of melbourne who provided feedback on an earlier draft. most importantly, i sincerely thank the residents of ulaanbaatar who generously shared their experiences. any errors are my own. i sincerely thank b. doljinsüren and b. erdenezayaa for their research assistance at different stages of this research, and i thank byambabaatar ichinkhorloo for his translation of the article abstract into mongolian. research for this article was funded by the european research council, erc-2013-cog, 615785, emerging subjects, at university college london—anthropology. i am also grateful for the research and writing funding received through the thomas and margaret ruth mcarthur fellowship in anthropology at the university of 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should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.05 the ordinariness of ethics and the extraordinariness of revolution: ethical selves and the egyptian january revolution at home and school cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 146-169, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.07 the ordinariness of ethics and the extraordinariness of revolution: ethical selves and the egyptian january revolution at home and school ramy aly the american university in cairo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0062-5281 the notion that we have much to learn from those who were “not there” seems somewhat counterintuitive; nonetheless i argue that there is much to learn about the egyptian revolution from the experiences of those too young or too sheltered to take part in it in a conventional way. considered children at the time (eleven to thirteen years old) and today in their early twenties, my interlocutors—amer, ahmed, osama, farida, youssef, and maha—describe themselves as having “missed out” on a unique experience. we can understand their sense of absence given the privileged place that street protests, social movements, and high politics have played in accounts of the 2011 revolution. the final decade of hosni mubarak’s thirty-year rule was marked by vocal public opposition and challenges to his authority and policies (see el-mahdi and marfleet 2009). on national police day, january 25, 2011, an uncertain and loosely defined coalition of egyptians took to the streets to protest systematic police brutality in cities across the country, emboldened by the dramatic ousting of the tunisian dictator zine el-abidine ben ali just ten days earlier. by the end of the first day, thousands had taken to the streets throughout the country, two protestors had been shot dead in the port city of suez, and in cairo, at the heart of the government district, tahrir square had been occupied. in the coming weeks, the government reaction turned ever more violent and deaf to the emerging demands of “bread, freedom, social justice, and human dignity.” by the time mubarak abdicated on february 11, at least nine hundred people had reportedly lost their lives in confrontations with the ministry of the interior. in the following year, hundreds would be killed and thousands injured as the supreme council of the armed forces (to whom mubarak had abdicated) attempted to stop the revolution and criminalize protests in a bid to restore the militarized republican order established in 1952. despite the regular, dramatic, and deadly confrontations throughout 2011 and 2012, people widely took up their right to protest and organize, leading to a flourishing of campaigning, art, and culture. for the first time, egyptians experienced a degree of electoral transparency and voted in their millions in six major elections and referendums in eighteen months. these brought about an amended constitution, a parliament dominated by islamists, and the election of the country’s first civilian president, a member of the muslim brotherhood who won the 2012 elections with the thinnest of majorities. just a year later, public anger against the muslim brotherhood led to mass protests. the intelligence and military establishments exploited these protests through orchestration and opportunism to overthrew the elected president in a coup d’état on july 3, 2013, with the backing of an seemingly secular-liberal coalition. the massacres of muslim brotherhood supporters at rabaa and nahda squares a month later signaled the beginning of a process that ushered in direct military rule and a widespread and brutal political purge of all dissent, which has continued with ever increasing brutality to this day. over the past ten years, the egyptian regime has devoted massive energies and resources into making the january revolution instantaneous, an abrupt disruption, one consigned to the past and cast as a moment of national ruin. despite its ostensible failure, the january revolution has remained spectral, haunting the regime and animating its approach to governance. my interest in the experiences of children during the revolution began in 2016, a particularly difficult year that started with the brutal murder of giulio regeni, a cambridge phd student studying independent labor unions, by the security services on january 25. in one of my classes at the american university of cairo, fresh-faced juniors talked about the january revolution with a surprising sense of ownership and investment, given that they were too young to have taken part in it. i often dismissed these claims to elsawra (the revolution) as the bravado of privileged aucians, or a gesture to me as a teacher whom they perceived as anti-establishment.1 as the semesters wore on, time and again i came into contact with young people who “weren’t there,” and had come of age at a time of brutal political repression, yet who had an urge to talk and write about the revolution in spite of its state-led erasure. it was not until 2019 that i began talking to people about their experiences, but my timing proved awful. we were six years into a brutal crackdown on any form of dissent, and in september 2019, protestors had briefly taken to the streets, leading to another round of mass arrests of mostly young demonstrators. tens of thousands of people continue to languish in administrative detention for an array of speech and political crimes over these years. talking to young people about their experiences of the revolution felt unsafe—people faced arrest for far less. yet i learned through experience and by following others that it was possible to navigate this situation, to use whatever privilege and access i had available to nurture relationships carefully and discreetly, even around the most sensitive of subjects (aly 2019). just as ahmed, my research assistant, and i started to collect these accounts, the covid-19 pandemic took hold. even before restrictions on face-to-face sociality, it had proven difficult to find a physical space that would allow us to safely and comfortably talk about the revolution. my office at the university and my home were options, but these were hardly fertile ground for naturally occurring conversation about the revolution. politics and public health set a particular direction and scale for this engagement. over the following eighteen months of lockdowns, and under the cacophony of online sociality, we gathered eighteen in-depth narratives, six of which appear in this article. the bleakest political conditions and the pandemic cut through our interactions, but they did not cut out the possibilities of sharing and engaging in meaningful conversation. our narrators described themselves as “middle-class” and sometimes as “privileged.” arguments in favor of anthropologies of the middle classes and elites have been lucidly and plentiful made in recent decades (abbink and salverda 2013; aguiar and schneider 2016). nonetheless, i was still afflicted with disciplinary self-reproach for researching horizontally and upward rather than downward, not least because rabab el-mahdi (2011) and noha mellor (2014) have argued that the vanguard of the revolution has often been distilled in the figure of secular, peaceful, internet-savvy, middle-class “yuppie[s]” driven by patriotic romanticism and liberal sensibilities, rather than economic injustice. our task was far removed from times when international news crews roamed the streets of egypt snatching sound bites from people their audiences would relate to. the fear that my interlocutors would somehow emerge as cut-out caricatures of egyptian yuppies was not borne out. they hailed from different parts of egypt, with different religious and political sensibilities; they attended both public and private schools and universities; some were bilingual, others were not. all claimed middle-classness, but i doubt that they would see each other as belonging to the same social class in a straightforward way. in this article, i focus on the first twelve to eighteen months of the revolution, when my interlocutors were first confined to their homes for long periods of time, followed by their return to school in september 2011. although thousands of school-aged children had experienced the dangers and exhilaration of street protests, my interviewees emphasized that they weren’t there. yet what they shared with us illustrated that much was happening in their lives. they had worked through the uncertainties and dilemmas of the revolution and at times had acted on these in ways worthy of attention, inviting us to rethink what the revolution might have been then and now. following jessica winegar (2012), lila abu-lughod (2012), amira mittermaier (2014, 2019), and samuli schielke (2015), i decenter the streets in my account of the revolution by turning my attention to children, home, school, and the relationships and experiences that animate them. zina sawaf (2013) suggests that young people’s subjectivities were intimately tied to those of their families during the revolution. this undoubtedly holds true, but the families that emerge in these narratives are far from straightforward sociological units. we see much contestation and tension: often members of the same family did not share a position on the revolution or where they stood in relation to it. rupture was not only occurring at the level of state power; the politics of the family and the family’s politics suddenly burst into the everyday lives of young people with unprecedented urgency. from the perspective of lived experience, the protagonists of the revolution were not only the names that dominated the airwaves and platforms of the time. these were important, but so were people’s mothers and fathers, siblings, cousins and grandparents, uncles and aunts, neighbors, teachers, and schoolmates. the social locations and institutions we perceive as formalistically separate are experientially entangled. in the immediate and extended family, next door, and at school there are friends and family who work in the military or the police, who are members of the muslim brotherhood or of a church. there are others employed by the state, some aligned with the revolution and others with the regime, and many more with no clear political leanings. relationships within and between home and school offer a vantage point from which to consider the back-and-forth between biography, national history, and social memory (bellagamba 2006). yet what exercises me about this far-flung corner of the revolutionary tableau is that it offers an opportunity to think about how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical self-reflection and self-formation, in this case, not one forged on the streets, in protests and political activism, but through everyday relationships that took on a new meaning during the social drama of revolution. these narratives prove theoretically generative and disruptive; they speak to debates among anthropologists about whether ethics are continuous or eventual, conscious or unconscious. in doing so, they draw the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolution into conversation. igor cherstich, martin holbraad, and nico tassi (2020) argue that anthropologies of revolution should move away from paradigms that focus on the issues of definition, causality, chronology, and consequences found in other social sciences. often these have led to a “purification” of what counts as a “true” revolution. anthropologies of revolution should pluralize and recognize the complex and variable ways that revolutions are experienced. ethnography relocates revolution from the macro to the everyday, but this does not disconnect it from local cosmologies of kinship, myth, personhood, time, ritual, space, and power, all of which constitute and are reconstituted in revolutions (cherstich, holbraad, and tassi 2020, 14–16, 50). egypt has proved a fruitful setting for alternative approaches to revolution and anthropological explorations of ethics. researched and written prior to the revolution, saba mahmood’s politics of piety (2011) questions an assumed universal liberal feminist subject through her reading of self-cultivation and moral practice among women in piety movements. in a village, far removed from tahrir square, abu-lughod (2012) finds that “moral action” and articulations of the revolution were local while also being directed at an unfolding national stage. mittermaier (2014, 2019) develops a notion of an “ethics of immediacy” in her explorations of the sufi khidmah and an islamic ethics of giving that inhabited but also exceeded the revolutionary moment. the most direct reading of ethics and the egyptian revolution is schielke’s egypt in the future tense (2015), which looks at the lives and futures imagined during and after the revolution. yet the book does not deal with the revolution as such, but with “the experience of living in a world that is not solid,” where things are not obvious and where survival depends on reflection (20). schielke finds aspirational ethics and anticipation in people’s attitudes, appearances, reputations, dreams, and frustrations. ethics are constantly reflected on with different degrees of urgency at different times and locations in society in differing degrees. schielke (2015, 21) claims that ethics are not his starting point, and he remains largely unconcerned with the tensions around the nature, locations, and subjects of ethics in anthropology. this is undoubtedly not an omission, but, rather, implicit to phenomenological anthropology, which, as michael jackson (1996, 8) has it, concerns itself less with philosophy and more with lifeworlds, their habits, crises, biographical particularities, and indecisive strategies whose complexity philosophy and theory can address but never define or capture. my reading of an emergent literature on the anthropology of ethics, however, has been shaped by the contestations between phenomenological and structuralist perspectives. these have debated whether morality and ethics can be studied from the perspective of lived experience at all, the nature of and relationships between morality and ethics, and whether particular moments can stand out from the everyday as moments of ethical reflection and action. i shall first turn to these debates to locate the ethical. ordinariness of ethics and extraordinary revolutions twenty years after james laidlaw’s (2002) provocation that there was no sustained anthropological reflection on the nature of ethics, a large and recogniszable body of anthropological work on ethics now exists. three broad positions have emerged: the ordinary ethics approach, grounded in acts, utterances, and everyday language philosophy; a foucauldian and aristotelian approach focusing on virtue ethics and lived praxis; and a phenomenological approach that emphasizes first-person, relational moral experience (mattingly and throop 2018, 478). these different locations and philosophical traditions determine the terrains on which the ethical should be studied: for some it is in everyday language, for others in discursive conditions of possibility, and for still others in the experiential (read biographical). while these three locations and terrains of the ethical are necessarily entangled, anthropologists of ethics have found it hard to agree about location and terrain, particularly when philosophy has overtaken anthropological concerns. among the many well-spirited exchanges in this body of work we find questions about where to locate ethical reflection and action (sometimes described as problematization). broad consensus proffers that ethical reflection and action are continuous and thus ordinary. jarret zigon’s (2009, 296; 2007) position that ethics only emerges from extraordinary moments of moral breakdown, “when people actually have to ‘stop and consider’ how to act or be morally appropriate,” has fueled intense and productive debate. laidlaw critiques the notion of the moral breakdown because it locates ethics “outside the flow of everyday life” (2014, 119; see also lambek 2010; das 2010, 2012; faubion 2010; robbins 2009). while both zigon and laidlaw adopt michel foucault’s notion of problematization, they disagree on its location. for laidlaw, problematization is not, as zigon presents it, an experiential episode of moral breakdown or a distinct event in a biographical life. rather, it constitutes an aspect of foucault’s genealogical method, located in periods, milieus, texts, and discourses. zigon has spent ten years clarifying and reworking the concept of the moral breakdown (see zigon 2013, 2014, 2018), yet it still seems to irk his ordinary ethicist contemporaries. in disappointment, he asserts that moral breakdowns form part of ordinary social life and that these are disrupted but not ruptured by moments of moral breakdown along a spectrum of disruptive intensity which in turn create reflections and actions of differing intensities (zigon 2018, 147). he argues for an analytical and methodological need to recognize these, because in making ethics intrinsic to all action, ordinary ethicists have made ethics analytically indistinguishable (zigon 2018, 107–9). zigon has also faced criticism for suggesting that moral and ethical life are unconsciously inhabited, what he calls embodied, and that the ethical reflections and actions ocurring when moral breakdowns ensue have comfort and coexistence as their vectors. some read this to imply that ordinary life remains without reflection or self-reflexivity, making social life uncontested (faubion 2012, 18). it is notable that despite these disagreements, anthropologists of the ethical seem to share a sense that moral life should seem natural, but at times, and for different reasons, an awareness of the strangeness, contradictions, and problems of a taken-for-granted morality are thrown into relief. zigon expresses this as embodied ethics, on the one hand, and ethics, on the other. in james faubion (2010), it emerges as the themitical/ethical. and michael lambek (2010, 83) differentiates between tacit everyday moral intimacy and distantiating everyday experiences that activate the ethical. for those working within the tradition of cultural analysis like joel robbins (2009), it is expressed as conditions of possibility that lend themselves to reproduction, on the one hand, and freedom, on the other. all these aproaches share a sense of morality as structure and of ethics as practice. lambek (2017, 139–40) cautions that the notion of morality as convention and of ethics as the freedom to break free from it is grounded in theory and philosophy, not in the thick of everyday life and practice. according to laidlaw (2014, 111), morality and ethics constitute two aspects of one phenomenon, yet they should remain analytically separate because they change independently of each other. moral codes, laidlaw argues, change very little across societies and time. in contrast, ethical practice has taken diverse forms and can exhibit profound change. laidlaw goes to great lengths to show that zigon’s reading of foucault is flawed because it suggests that morality is akin to an embodied habitus, an unreflective everyday set of dispositions only questioned by unexpected moments of moral crisis during which ethical reflection and action have a return to an unreflective moral equilibrium as their desired goal. this schema, laidlaw suggests, places ethical thought outside the flow of everyday life, but it also means that ethical reflection and work on the self are episodic rather than everyday. while ethicists disagree on the premise of giving certain moments more ethical prominence than others, anthropologists of revolution frame revolutions unequivocally as unprecedented and extraordinary sociocultural events that disturb, refract, and reflect local cosmologies. they are seen as events existing in time and place that must be understood through experience. debates around the notion of the moral breakdown as an extraordinary moment of ethical reflection where systems of morality are disrupted (consciously or unconsciously) remain generative, particularly in relation to revolutions (see cole 2003; vacchiano and afailal 2021). revolutions do not happen every day, even if their causes and the experience of them are necessarily everyday. the anthropological literature on revolutions has been greatly influenced by victor turner’s fourfold ritual form of “breach–crisis–redress–reintegration” which, like the social drama and ritual process from which it emerges, must be consider in terms of time, place, and experience (thomassen 2012). indeed, liminality emerges as the central theme of walter armbrust’s martyrs and tricksters: an ethnography of the egyptian revolution (2019). revolutions, bjørn thomassen argues, are clear-cut liminal situations in large-scale settings, and liminality is more than just a hiatus; it is a terrain of action in which personality is shaped, where agency is more explicit, bringing together thought and experience (armbrust 2019, 684–88). moments of liminal crises are schismogenic, as gregory bateson (1958) has put it, sides are taken. in the process some are captivated by the gravitational pull of the status quo. others are swayed by what turner describes as “the romantic qualities of willing and feeling” (qtd. in thomassen 2012, 689). for turner, this side-taking is driven by people’s affective attitudes, the stirring of or appeal to the emotional, but less so by calculation (thomassen 2012, 689). many of the debates about the nature of moral life, the nature of crisis—where, how, and why they happen—are shared by those studying revolutions and those interested in ethics. where my approach differs and hopefully adds to thomassen and armbrust is that while they maintain a focus on ritual form and themes considered somewhat macro to the revolutionary drama (such as leadership, tricksters, mass mobilization, crowds, memesis, mass mediation, and public spaces), my material is far removed in terms of scale and location: home, family, and school for people unable to take part in the revolution in a conventional sense. these locations offer insights into how twenty-somethings today felt and thought their way through the revolution relationally, which in turn, necessitates a phenomenological and experiential approach to ethics and revolution. by this i mean that in narrative form, certain experiences and moments are given ethical consequence and the character of moral rupture and disruption. the narratives illustrate that conscious reflection on experiences need not happen in their moments alone. they have an unforeseeable latency, an iterability, so that at times an experience can be morally extraneous and at other times morally critical. indeed, in narrative form, experiences both in, before, and after the revolution are grafted and re-grafted in relation to each other to tell a story about how a self has been fashioned relationally and how these selves then relate to moral codes. while the ordinariness of ethics and processes of subjectivation can clearly be seen at work in the context of family and school, set against the backdrop of revolution, it is precisely the phenomenological particulars of people’s journeys that articulate subjectivation and ordinariness more fully and critically. during conversations with our narrators, ahmed and i were led by their remembrances, their sense of episodic coherence and causality; but we also explored the sites and relationships glossed over or just not seen as important to a revolution or scholarship about it. we certainly did not ask any questions about either morality or ethics. these emerged as prominent themes quite some time afterward, because one of the affordances of narrative is that it cannot help but set events and experiences “against a larger horizon of what we consider to be human passions, virtues, philosophies, actions, and relationships” (ochs and capps 1996, 30). narratives are shaped by and convey peoples moral and existential predicaments (cole 2003, 122). for these reasons anthropologists have taken so readily to narratives as a way of apprehending people’s sense of the moral and the ethical (mattingly and garro 2000; mattingly 2014; cole 2003; kleinman 2006; zigon 2009, 2010, 2012, 2018; schielke 2015; vacchiano and afailal 2021). zigon (2012, 205) has suggested that narratives constitute more than acts of meaning-making per se; they offer a way of expressing “the embodied struggle to be morally with oneself and others in the social world,” and it is to this that i now turn. mama, baba, and the state amer was thirteen years old in january 2011, an only child, living with his family in the miami neighbourhood of alexandria, his mother and father both working as state employees.2 amer considered the closing years of the mubarak era key to understanding what happened in 2011. in his experience, it all began with the 2008 parliamentary elections, in which his family had a stake. his maternal uncle was a member of the ruling national democratic party that had dominated the political system between 1978 and 2011. khalo (or maternal uncle) ran for a seat in the south of the country, a place where amer had spent many summers. the parliamentary seat bought with it influence and power for the family and so, amer says, they rallied to support his uncle’s campaign. khalo boasted that his campaign team had photocopied ballot papers and rigged the election. amer was watching a champions league match between liverpool and arsenal when his uncle’s victory was announced at home. amer’s other maternal uncle was a police officer. on january 28, 2011, the friday of rage, protestors clashed with anyone in uniform. “but he [khalo] was plainclothes, so he joined a demo and wasn’t injured … he died in an accident a few years later. … i was confused, how should i see him, as my uncle that i love or my uncle the police officer?” amer explained that the images of khalid saeed’s mutilated corpse jarred with his feelings towards khalo. in june 2010, saeed, a twenty-eight-year-old alexandrian, was beaten to death by two police officers. a baggie of marijuana was stuffed down his esophagus, his face beaten beyond recognition. for amer, the police were not an anonymous state apparatus; the police meant khalo, whom he loved and admired so much that as a child he wanted to be a policeman just like him. amer talked to his cousins about saeed. “baba would never do that … baba would never lie to us,” they would tell him. for amer and his cousins, the crisis was intimate and deeply personal: baba and khalo had been recast by large swathes of public opinion as a thug and murderer by association. khalo, the politician, had his farm attacked in the south of the country on january 28. “he had to defend himself, shots were fired,” says amer. “khalo had told my mum that the protesters in tahrir were being given free kentakey [kfc] and that they were mostly foreigners and spies … my mum was 100 percent behind my uncles.” his mother’s family featured prominently in the national drama, changing the way amer related to them: “i questioned the sanctity of ‘family’… at home there were pictures of my uncle hanging on my bedroom wall, from the 2008 election campaign; i took them down.” his parents asked him why. “they’re old,” he had replied, “but really it was about the revolution, and i liked him less anyway.” amer’s simple gesture of taking down his uncle’s posters speaks clearly to the notion of a moral breakdown. as laidlaw (2014) might put it, his gesture entailed no structural efficacy, in the sense that it did not alter structures, yet it unmistakably marked a conscious act of ethical reflection and action, potentially a mode of political action, and at least a moment of moral realignment. as cheryl mattingly (2014, 78) puts it, the idea of a moral breakdown of an unreflective everyday habituation does not adequately capture what is going on. amer’s narrative evokes questions: what is being problematized? how is it demarcated in practice? what connections might there be between genealogical and phenomenological scales of problematization? “al-khal walid” (the maternal uncle is like a father), the saying goes. amer’s sense of relationality was produced through a system of idiomatic morality, what suad joseph (1996, 12) has called “patriarchal connectivity.” khalo the policeman and khalo the politician personified the system that protestors sought to expose and depose. sawaf (2013, 10) argues that the “father” has played a central role in the birthing and re-birthing of the egyptian nation. if the 1919 revolution was about “fathering” the nation, then 2011 was about patricide, or the “death of the father.” indeed, mubarak infamously took on the role of “father” during his thirty years in power. john borneman (2003) illustrates that the “death of the father” at the end of authoritarian rule incurs a bifurcate collapse of paternal authority in domestic and governmental arrangements, something experienced as both loss and liberation. the idioms of fatherhood, family, and their connections to political and gendered power have been problematized in arabic literary works and in philosophical, historical, and feminist scholarship since the late nineteenth century (see sharabi 1988; idriss 2019; rooke van leeuwen 2000; cohen-mor 2013). in other words, the problematization of patriarchal authoritarianism has a clear genealogy, but the extent to which it constitutes conditions of possibility is not straightforward, particularly for a child. the literary corpus most closely associated with the problematization of patriarchal order in egypt is almost always phenomenologically grounded, reflecting how writers as diverse as bint el-shati, ahmed amin, naguib mahfouz, nawal el-saadawi, and tawfiq el-hakeem (to name a few) have used their personal experiences as the grounds for their critiques and representations of a patriarchal society. amer’s biological father seems to have been spared this paternal fall from grace, in part because of his indecision in the face of the upheaval. at the height of the uprising, people who did not take part in protests, movements, and campaigns were described as hizb el-kanaba (the sofa party). amer explained that his father did not really take part in the revolution, while also not opposing it. still, he would not let amer join street protests or allow him to stand guard with the neighborhood brigades at the entrance to their building. he could not even watch from their balcony. yet today, amer has no hard feelings. he situates his father’s reticence in relation to his political subjectivation. “my dad was born in 1967. i think he never imagined that the regime could fall, but when mubarak stepped down, he supported it.” unlike his uncles’ affiliations and behaviors, his father’s indecision and non-participation constituted no blight for amer. he was a product of the system and had to tread carefully, especially given the profound implications for his wife’s family. “i was stuck in the middle,” says amer. “i was too young to understand what was going on, so most of the time i was just listening. even so, i was more sympathetic to the revolution, i thought, we have something to look forward to.” i learned from amer that experiences are grafted and re-grafted in relation to other experiences; their ordinariness should not remain limited to the insinuations of routine and banality only but also to an unforeseeable latency, an iterability, so that at times a moment proves morally extraneous and at other times morally critical. khalo’s brazen vote-rigging did not trouble amer in 2008; the hanging of the election posters in his bedroom might be taken as a testament to his successful inculcation into a particular political habitus. yet unforeseeable events gave those same images a different resonance in 2011. jacques derrida’s (1982) suggestion that we must differ our desire to foreclose meaning comes thundering into this thought. as mattingly (2019, 430) argues, a commitment to description and the lived perspective creates an arendtian defrosting of certainties where “anthropological artifact[s] keep the story moving and unfinished,” and in so doing, strengthening and challenging our critiques and deepening our appreciation of the complexity of life (see also guenther 2019, 2021). our narrators’ sense of moral belonging and ethical self were clearly entangled with others, but not fixed by their relationality and social location. where do we / i stand? although amer’s family was aligned with the state both explicitly and implicitly, the extent to which that family politics was transmitted to amer cannot be taken for granted, and the revolution played a part in that disruption. sian lazar (2017) explores how younger members of peronist unionist families in argentina experience ethical and political subjectivation in an everyday sense over the course of their childhood and adolescence. yet even within this established nexus of kinship, community, and politics, transmission is not seamless or certain. amer, farida, ahmed, osama, youssef, and maha felt that their families did not form part of any recognizable political tradition or social movement, although these do undoubtedly exist in egypt. this does not mean to suggest that these families had no politics; rather, the ordinariness of family politics was thrown into sharp relief by the dramatically unfolding crises. in their narratives there was a clear sense that as children they relied on their parents, siblings, and members of the extended family for many matters of everyday life, the need for trusted explanations for events around the country proved no exception. where “we” (as a family stand) in relation to the revolution was a question answered in the words and deeds of different family members, the examples they set, and the explanations they offered. when the uprising took hold, ahmed was thirteen and lived in the well-to-do suburb of heliopolis in northeastern cairo. his wealthy family followed the dictum that they “made money in silence,” leaving him with the overall impression that “politics is dangerous.” this feeling was confirmed in the early weeks of the uprising as he watched his father sitting at the entrance to their building, “armed with a gun and lots of tea … the closest i ever saw him to being political,” ahmed said. ahmed was allowed to stand watch at the building entrance sometimes, and he followed the events on tv and social media. but knowing what was happening was not the same as knowing where his family, and, by implication, he himself, stood in relation to it. listening to and talking with his parents proved crucial in working through that. “i never had any mubarak resentment myself; we were very comfortable, so i had no reason to,” ahmed stated. the pressing question for him was—why people were protesting? his politics-averse parents conceded that people wanted more freedom, but he noted that his mother seems to have regarded the events as a threat to her family interests. “my dad is ‘one plus one equals two,’” ahmed said, using a common phrase emphasizing a person’s or situation’s rationalism or logic. one evening, as his dad sat on the sofa in ahmed’s bedroom and ahmed on the carpet, his father explained that uprisings in egypt had resulted from the historic governmental economic mismanagement. the erosion of subsidies meant that poverty was rife, making the poor eventually take to the streets. “that made sense, but the revolutionaries didn’t seem like the kind of people who needed subsidies, so i wasn’t sure,” ahmed remembered. he, like many others, saw this as a bourgeois revolution. “what about khalid saeed?” he asked his mother. he showed her the images that circulated at school and asked, “why do the police do that?” his mother gave no ground: “who is he?” she snapped, “why did they do that to him? he must have done something wrong; we’ve been living here our whole lives and we’ve never seen anything like this, we’re fine.” torture, police brutality, and corruption were state policy, part of the ordinary function of everyday life, but, i would argue, never morally ordinary. ahmed was unsatisfied with his parents’ explanations and justifications. in this regard ahmed was not alone. farida lived between alexandria and dubai as her father’s job and school holidays determined. she, too, remembers saeed’s murder and how it resonated at school. during her last year of primary school in alexandria and on her way home, she watched a policeman beating a tok-tok driver. “whatever the tok-tok driver had done, there was no need for him to be beaten like that,” and so from that point onward, she says, “i had this impression that the police in egypt were the problem.” her father did not support the revolution, but farida and her mom did. she describes the two of them glued to the television set, singing the songs that had become the soundtrack to the uprising. “i felt proud and patriotic, i felt that somehow i belonged to this category of people who rebelled, protested, and refused a tyrant.” farida returned to egypt during the winter break in december 2011. the supreme council of the armed forces (scaf) had been in power since february and, she said, “that didn’t bother me much.” most of her friends and family were making “pro-scaf arguments” on social media. “i was so young and didn’t understand the complex relationship between the army, police, and the state.” she had been captivated by images of soldiers carrying children and protestors on top of tanks and zealously defended the army, “mostly because my parents support the army above everything else.” but in december 2011 footage emerged of a young woman being dragged across tahrir square, stamped on and kicked by military police. her clothes were torn, revealing a blue bra, naked torso, and blue jeans under her black abaya. pro-scaf media framed protestors at the time as “outliers and a threat to egyptian family values by reducing protesting women to dishonourable, sexually promiscuous, and impious subjects” (hafez 2014, 27). in response, women gathered in huge numbers in protests dubbed “egypt’s daughters are a red line,” appropriating the axiom of egyptian political culture that the “military is a red line.” farida was shocked by the footage. echoing pro-military commentators, her parents told her the images were fake and that conspirators against the army had staged the incident. “at the time,” she says, “i bought it. … all i had to make sense of what was going on was my parents and twitter.” at the outset of the revolution, farida’s mom and dad stood on opposite sides of the political divide, but by the end of the year, “it was more docile at home … now my mum was telling me that scaf is not the dakhlia ([ministry of the interior].” she was exposed to a chorus of vilification of activists like asma mahfouz, ahmed doma, and alaa abd el-fattah: “they kept on saying things like, ‘i don’t understand what they want, why are you still on the streets’. … i placed myself as the messenger, using my parents’ words, word-for-word on twitter. … i don’t have the best relationship with my father, but even so, what he was saying was convincing; i trusted my parents’ judgment.” farida did not unthinkingly parrot her family’s pro-scaf politics. the situation needed explanation and justification, and importantly, she marks out the moments that she restrospectively understands as a departure from parental politics. farida’s and ahmed’s parents had to account for themselves and where they stood. they had to offer explanations for why the revolution came about and to explain right from wrong to their children. how those explanations, accounts, and justifications dwell inside their children and for how long, and what ethical self they will come to form, is unpredictable. for youssef, who i will introduce more fully later, the revolution was the first time that he learnt about his parents nasserist politics and its undoing once they had come to acknowledge that mubarak’s thirty-year rule ultimately resulted from the autocratic system established by their beau idéal. in the early weeks of the uprising, while work, school, and social life were suspended, time spent with family offered opportunities for his parents to share their political biographies with him. political subjectivation is processual, unpredictable, and does not necessarily stabilize in straightforward ways. for activists and those with a seasoned sense of the political terrain, the revolution primarily constituted a call to action, but for many others, it was a call to problematize and reflect. another brick in the wall the return to school in september 2011 seems to have opened new terrains and horizons for experiencing and expressing the revolution for some young people. osama, who lived in new cairo, had also turned to his family to understand why the uprising had taken hold. he described his parents as conservative but, like many others, of no clear political persuasion. osama’s dad had ventured out on january 28, only to be hit by buckshot. the sight of his father’s bleeding wounds proved a turning point. osama felt his dad was trying to set an example for him and his siblings. osama, thirteen at the time, says that he “took it really personally … blood had been spilled.” just days after his return to school, osama joined demonstrations outside the israeli embassy with school friends and a teacher. some of the students at his school shared the feeling that direct action had brought change to the country and that the same was possible at school. even as a school-aged child, osama, like many others, had been hailed as the young vanguard of national redemption, and it was at school that he enacted this sense of self. “we wanted longer breaks and more sports, so we protested and boycotted classes. we were always revolting at that time; it was just a childish thing in a way.” osama’s agitation at school got him expelled: “the headmaster came to us and said, ‘just as there are losses in the revolution, there will be losses here.’” osama’s mom felt upset that he had got himself into so much trouble. his father lectured him on choosing his battles. youssef, mentioned earlier, was the youngest of three brothers, and while he, too, stayed at home, his older brothers took part in the protests, coming home with stories of what was unfolding on the streets. youssef remembers waking up on january 29 to his middle brother’s bloodied clothes strewn across their bedroom floor. he had been hit by buckshot. “i saw reality through their eyes, what happened to them was like it was happening to me.” just a few years separated youssef from his brothers’ ability to participate in protests where the highs and lows of mingling with fellow protestors and confronting counterprotestors and the security forces were the ways in which they “formed their ideas,” as youssef put it. he did occasionally join neighbors guarding their building and soon came to realize that many of them were hostile to the protestors and the revolution. he sensed a widening gap between the sentiments of his family and those of many of his neighbors. back at school and barely thirteen, youssef found that his peers regarded his family as pro-revolution. at the time youssef expected change in every institution in the country, as well as in every relationship—teachers and students, parents and children, all would be subject to reassessment. but “people weren’t used to debating and talking about anything really,” and so, he says, “everyone was very aggressive.” he recounted an incident where one of his teachers casually swore at the class, which the students filmed on their phones and took to the headmaster demanding that she be held accountable. “there was a lot of revolutionary energy because of our age, but not necessarily revolutionary ideas,” youssef said. he argued a lot with his teachers, many of whom made clear that they thought the revolution a waste of time, something holding the country back, damaging people’s livelihoods. his teachers began labeling youssef as bita el-sawra, the resident revolutionary. debate among students at the time did not prove very constructive, he says. they reflected everybody’s family interests—“it was clear where everyone stood.” ten years on, osama and youssef make light of the protests and class boycotts for longer break times, more sports, and a different approach to the relationship between teachers and students. it is difficult to see these protests and boycotts as unrelated to the emergent ethics of the revolutionary. lazar (2014, 102) explores antonio negri’s (2003) notion of kairos as “a moment of rupture where the ‘to-come’ is made evident” and imaginable. the kairos of revolutionary time hails people in different ways and temporal sequences to imagine and act (lazar 2014, 103). schielke turns to michel de certeau’s point that people appropriate structures in unpredictable ways and in the process accomplish small tactical victories in an asymmetrical struggle, but schielke (2015, 218) continues, de certeau does “not consider how the tactics of making do fail, backfire or end up constituting that against which they are directed.” at school, as in the rest of the country, there were those who opposed the revolution. osama’s headmaster responded to the revolution at school with disciplinary exclusion and activation of the authority (and duty) that parents have to tame their children with persuasion and punishment. his intimidation seemed all the more ominous given that the “losses” in the revolution too often came in the form of eyes, limbs, and life itself. those who nurtured their newfound sense of entitlement and encouraged self-expression were remembered, but more often than not, those who opposed youthful rebelliousness and sought to restore order left an indelible mark, their words and actions more resonant since, ten years on, they appear to have prevailed. being in school at this time did not just mean a confrontation with figures of authority. schoolchildren and their families were judged in relation to where they stood in terms of the revolution. at ahmed’s school, a cluster of active and pro-revolution parents set the tone of how the revolution was to be reflected in their children’s education. but not everyone basked in the light of the revolution. “there was a culture of shaming. if you were seen as not taking part in the support and celebration of the revolution, you were bullied,” ahmed admitted. in spite of his family’s politics, ahmed had an enthusiasm for and investment in the revolution. but his age and his family’s politics meant that his peers did not see him as supportive of fundamental change in the country. people that did not take clear sides or participate in the swelling mood of engagement were dubbed, as already mentioned, hijb el-kanaba (the sofa party); families that benefited from mubarak’s system of patronage and opposed the revolution were dubbed felool (remnants of the ancien régime)—people to be publicly shamed, boycotted, and held accountable. “you’re torn,” ahmed said; despite how he felt about the revolution, at school he carried a guilt for what he described as his “very felool family.” maha, our youngest narrator, was just eleven at the time. all she worried about in january 2011, she told us, was that her school trip to the fairground had been cancelled. in the early days of the protests, she remembers her grandmother telling the rest of the family “you can’t say anything about mubarak, the walls have ears,” which maha took quite literally. even on the day mubarak abdicated, her grandma was telling her to pipe down. “we were all happy that day. … today i’m sad about it all and wonder if it was worth it,” maha says. the daily schoolbus ride saw maha most exposed to the politics of her schoolmates and their families. children debated and argued about everything, from the “martyrs” and the mubaraks to islam and politics. “i can’t believe we had the patience,” maha admitted. at the end of that autumn term, the headmistress decreed a ban on any political discussion on the bus or at school from that moment on. “it was before 2013, everyone was talking about everything,” said maha, marking out the year of the coup and the silencing of politics. maha started to impose the rule herself. “it wasn’t just talk and opinions anymore—for people on both sides. there were personal stories behind these opinions, everyone had someone who had been affected, who had died or been arrested.” for maha, the social and physical injuries, the loss of life made her feel that everyone needed to step back from what was happening and, as zigon (2012, 218) puts it, to be charitably together without the need for mutual understanding. without this possibility, people would turn away from each other, unable to coexist. conclusion i have tried to illustrate that we have much to learn about ethics and revolution from those who “were not there.” through their narratives, amer, farida, ahmed, osama, youssef, and maha explain how they worked through the pressing questions, dilemmas, and demands the revolution generated. revolutionary crises and schisms involved children and their families in compelling ways. the ordinariness of family politics suddenly and intensely came into sharp relief through events impossible to ignore, events that required explanation and navigation. the revolution offered an unprecedented and highly public crisis and critique of egyptian culture, its hierarchies, and institutional arrangements—and thus of its very morality. it demanded that people and families adopt a position toward the past, the unfolding present, and imagined futures. the narratives of amer, farida, ahmed, osama, youssef, and maha offer a biographical account of the early weeks and months of the revolution and the ways in which they reflected and acted in revolutionary times by relying on their families for guidance, asking difficult questions (and not always accepting the answers), engaging in discussion with their peers, family, teachers, and others. as an emerging discourse of a youthful revolution took hold, they were hailed to enact the revolution within their realms of everyday experience. these experiences were not straightforward; the children often felt stuck, torn, and sometimes afraid, disappointed, or left out. crucially, their narratives are situated ten years after the event and their sense of self today has been considerably shaped by those times. none of them claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution animated them in complex and long-lasting ways. today, osama wants nothing to do with egypt anymore. through a wasta (connection), amer’s parents secured a well-paid job for him in a state enterprise, but to their fury, he turned down the position because, he says, maleesh kalam ma’ el-dawla (i have nothing to say to the state). farida hopes for another revolution and believes knowledge and education are the route. ahmed has spent years reading and writing about egypt and working for better labor conditions within his family business. maha has finished her dental degree but wants to leave it behind to become a filmmaker, while youssef has taken to the theater, performing plays grounded in social and political critique. to survive in egypt during the past ten years has meant to recognize and be conscious of an apparatus of fear and incarceration. work on the self is one way in which people continue to imagine new possibilities. ethical reflection takes place every day, ordinarily, as people work through choices, dilemmas, and relationships. narratives constitute a technique of the self, but if these narratives show anything, it is that fashioning an ethical self is decidedly relational. it is difficult to consider how we can adequately account for subjectivation as an experience and a process without the phenomenological first person, without the particulars of people’s journeys. revolutions do not happen every day, even if their causes and how they are experienced are necessarily everyday. some moments do stand out when we account for ourselves narratively; here they are shown as transtemporal in their moral and ethical resonance. experiences are not worked out at once, but have an unforeseeable latency, an iterability, so that at times they are morally extraneous, at other times morally critical. experiences of, in, before, and after the revolution are grafted and re-grafted in relation to each other to tell a story about how an ethical self has been fashioned relationally. the way in which the egyptian regime has sought to make the january revolution instantaneous is emblematic of the debates around the ordinariness and/ or eventfulness of ethical reflection and action. the problem should not be that there are moments of ethical reflection and action that stand out, or that some moments do constitute moments of moral breakdown. rather, it should be that we cannot disconnect these from those that preceded them and from those that will supersede them. or to finalize those moments analytically. ordinary ethics and subjectivation can clearly be seen at work in the context of family and school in these narratives set against the backdrop of revolution, but precisely the phenomenological particulars of people’s journeys articulate subjectivation and ordinariness more fully and generatively. like most revolutions, the egyptian revolution of 2011 failed to bring about institutional change at the level of state power. yet there is more at stake than the political endgame. revolutions are markers of cultural change. by narrating how the revolution has been part of their self-formation, amer, farida, ahmed, osama, youssef, and maha have “defrosted” the revolution, as mattingly (2019) puts it, dragging it into the realm of experience and illustrating how it took place in less obvious ways and places. these are ways and places difficult for the state to foreclose and silence, or for theory to fully schematize. abstract in this article i present experiences of egyptians too young to have taken part in the street protests and movement of the 2011 revolution. today in their early twenties, they narrate their experiences during the early months of the uprising. none claimed to be revolutionaries then or now, but the revolution seems to animate them in complex and long-lasting ways. the january revolution failed to bring about change at the level of state power. yet more is at stake than the political endgame. i turn my attention to how people narrate the revolution as a process of ethical reflection and self-formation through everyday relationships and settings that took on new meanings. these accounts challenge notions of what it means to participate in a revolution and where it is located and generate a conversation between the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of revolutions. 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association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.07 the meme radar: locating liberalism in illiberal hungary cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 679-706, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.04 the meme radar: locating liberalism in illiberal hungary annastiina kallius university of helsinki https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1385-3163 rik adriaans university college london https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8899-4289 after a turbulent election period marked by widespread state propaganda campaigns, johanna and artúr, two final-year students at a liberal elite high school in budapest, embarked on an unusual way of preparing for their hungarian history exams. instead of comparing notes and questioning each other on assigned topics, johanna and artúr chatted on the mobile phone application facebook messenger. while browsing through photos of the memorable events of their final year, they spotted a photograph from their prom night that resembled “distracted boyfriend,” one of the most popular internet memes of the late 2010s (figure 1). this meme consists of a stock photograph of a woman upset with her partner who, while still holding her hand, ignores her and looks lasciviously at a woman passing by (soh 2020, 1122). in the students’ version, however, the setup occurs at their prom: artúr is holding the hand of his dance partner but looking at a girl behind him. the students proceeded to make no less than fifty variations on this popular meme, which works with captions to highlight the moral imperative that the boyfriend should have stayed loyal to his partner. the students’ versions incorporated captions on themes from their history class. one of the memes, for instance, suggested that instead of appointing a fascist as the prime minister during world war ii, hungary’s wartime leader miklós horthy should have condemned anti-semitism. johanna and artúr also went on to produce memes on contemporary issues: another meme portrayed how instead of turning financier george soros into a public enemy, the country’s self-proclaimed illiberal prime minister viktor orbán should be fixing hungary’s problems (figure 2). figure 1. empty template for the widely popular “distracted boyfriend” meme. these exam preparations took place in 2018, at the peak of a moment of liberal decline that vernacular and journalistic discourses commonly came to refer to as a “post-truth” era. postulating an erosion of authoritative standards for separating fact from fiction by the twin forces of populist politicians and social media algorithms, post-truth discourse has been challenged by anthropologists who point out that an age of simple truths (mair 2017) never existed. having lived in hungary for the better part of the 2010s, we saw our analytical doubts about post-truth often surpassed by the rapid pace at which fictitious truth-claims materialized all around us. the students’ meme on the political situation was inspired by the giant billboards and posters suggesting that the hungarian-born american financier and philanthropist george soros controlled the european union (langer 2021). these adverts formed part of a propaganda campaign on what the government called the soros plan—a conspiratorial idea that soros, who is jewish, and his liberal shadow empire (háttérhatalom) plan to destroy european nation-states by bringing in one million illegal migrants per year.1 figure 2. variation on “distracted boyfriend” meme created in a facebook messenger chat by johanna and artúr. artúr (in the photo) represents viktor orbán who chooses “turning into a public enemy the kind uncle who paid your tuition fees” over “solving the country’s problems.” the kind uncle here refers to financier george soros, who funded orbán’s studies at oxford university in the 1980s as well as much of the tuition fees and study grants for students at budapest’s liberal-cosmopolitan central european university. at the time, the notion of post-truth was often mentioned in the same breath as the concept of the “alt-right,” which popularized far-right ideology to youth via social media platforms, and, above all, internet memes (tuters 2018). in hungary in the late 2010s, however, political memes were not the prerogative of the far-right, which controlled both the government and public media, but rather of the oppositional minority that identified with liberalism. indeed, while some material and interpersonal links existed between the trump administration and the orbán regime, exemplified by steve bannon’s visits and consultancy work in budapest, the two countries’ media constellations could hardly have differed more. whereas in the united states, broadcast and print media remained open to liberal voices under trump (cf. boyer and yurchak 2010), the hungarian government’s capture of the media meant that print and broadcast outlets increasingly came to spread the same far-right conspiracies also propagated through omnipresent billboard campaigns. figure 3. “we will not let soros have the last laugh” billboards promoting the results of the spring 2017 national consultation on migration. photo by balázs turay. in this article, we examine how youth in budapest deliberate the meanings of truth and liberalism under an increasingly authoritarian regime that makes extensive use of propaganda campaigns while explicitly branding itself as illiberal. we explore the vernacular meanings of illiberalism as well as the forking pathways of liberalism among high school students, their parents, and ourselves as former residents of budapest. we do this by tracing the workings and politics of the countless internet memes that emerge incessantly in response to the hungarian state’s propaganda campaigns. we seek to understand why it is that in this postsocialist context of entrenching authoritarianism, young urbanites who identify as liberals increasingly frame, perceive, and understand everyday situations as memes. we do so by conceptualizing how certain detachable visual and discursive elements of state propaganda, through the mediation of memetic parody, become resources for positioning the self in everyday interaction (spitulnik 1996). exploring the everyday negotiation of generational differences, class antagonisms, and rural-urban divisions, we argue that a liberalism deliberated in the language of internet memes for these youth has become part of their embodied dispositions as they increasingly perceive their surroundings through the genres and sensibilities of meme culture—even when no technological devices are present. our argument unfolds over the course of five sections. first, we introduce hungary’s meme culture in the context of viktor orbán’s attempts to establish an electoral authoritarian state through the means of institutional, economic, and cultural control. second, drawing on annastiina’s fieldwork in an elite high school in the hungarian capital, we outline how both illiberalism and communism figure as anchor points of alterity for its students as they face increasingly ubiquitous propaganda. third, we conceptualize how memetic parodies of illiberalism become part of the embodied dispositions of young urbanites in budapest—navigating truth claims and locating themselves through a sensibility that we refer to as the “meme radar.” fourth, we trace how this meme culture revolves around values and identity instead of around the material underpinnings of authoritarian consolidation in today’s hungary. lastly, we examine what the prominence of memes reveals about the everyday workings and limitations of liberalism as a political constellation in a context of ubiquitous government propaganda. illiberal memes in the liberal milieu as in other postsocialist countries, the decade after the end of state socialism in hungary saw widespread hopes among liberals for an open marketplace of ideas that they saw as a key promise of building capitalism and democracy after communism. viktor orbán himself was famously a key figure of the liberal opposition with his party fidesz, “the alliance of young democrats,” founded in 1988. after the regime change, the previously governing communist party evolved into the hungarian socialist party, which in coalition with a liberal party practiced harsh austerity politics throughout the 1990s. following a decade of economic decline and cuts in welfare, fidesz began to reposition itself as the main alternative to what it portrayed as the joint forces of liberalism and communism as continued in the socialist party. in the worldview of fidesz, socialist and liberal rule was characterized not only by corrupt politicians but also by an erosion of traditional values. communism, in the view of fidesz, would never truly come to an end as long as such a coalition remained in power. fidesz appeals both to voters disillusioned by capitalism and to an entrepreneurial segment of society wary of anything with communist-turned-socialist connotations. following the poor management of the 2008 financial crisis and political scandals among the socialists, fidesz gained a two-third majority victory in the 2010 parliamentary election. with complete control over legislation, fidesz immediately began to implement its political program, referred to as the system of national cooperation, which aims to transform the entirety of hungarian society. changes such as a repeatedly rewritten constitution and a gerrymandered electoral system, as well the entanglement of politics and rule by oligarchs, have supported the centralization of economic, institutional, and cultural control in the hands of the party. the regime’s discourse, however, suggests that the party builds a fairer society for all through its heroic battles against liberalism. in his annual speech in băile tuşnad, romania, in 2014, prime minister orbán famously elaborated his intention to build an illiberal alternative to western-type liberal democracy: an illiberal democracy. he cited the examples of singapore, china, russia, and turkey as countries that are economically successful without being liberal or even democratic. in practice, fidesz combines conservative social politics with eccentric economic policies, ones characterized by some scholars as markedly neoliberal (fabry 2019; scheiring and szombati 2020). the economy’s restructuring along the lines of oligarchic patron-client networks has led to the rapid enrichment of orbán’s family members and allies, often with eu funds (scheiring 2018; bohle and greskovits 2019). the closure of opposition newspapers such as népszabadság (people’s liberty) has made independent journalism retreat online, while tv channels and newspapers have become mostly regime-controlled (bajomi-lázár 2013; bátorfy and urbán 2020). in spring 2017, fidesz published planned legislation that would make the work of the liberal-cosmopolitan central european university illegal, creating a wave of demonstrations and an international outcry. after a convoluted legislative process and failed negotiations, the university saw its license to issue u.s. diplomas threatened and was forced to relocate to vienna (nadkarni 2018; monterescu 2019).2 the decreasing space for free deliberation in hungary’s broadcast and print media and the centralized dissemination of state propaganda on television, radio, newspapers, billboards, and leaflets indicate a shift in discourse familiar from the anthropology of late socialism (yurchak 2005). in contexts where discourse becomes strongly centralized and homogenized, as dominic boyer and alexei yurchak (2010, 184) have argued, language undergoes a performative shift in which “literal criticism becomes strangely predictable and ineffective next to the parodic possibilities of inhabiting the norm”—a phenomenon they refer to as “hypernormalisation.”3 comparing late socialist parody in the soviet union with comedy shows in the united states during what they call late liberalism, boyer and yurchak diagnosed a similar standardization of form in the news and media culture of the capitalist west. they attribute these parallels with the homogeneity of discourse under state socialism in eastern europe to the present-day centralization and digital transferability of news and media content production, the temporality of real-time news-making, and the “transformation of late-liberal politics into a kind of professional performance culture” (boyer and yurchak 2010, 208). postsocialist political memes in the 2010s share much with socialist jokes from the 1970s and 1980s, which engendered forms of political intimacy between citizens and the state “that cannot be simply classified as resistant or supportive” (lampland and nadkarni 2016, 17). for example, in her study of russian and ukrainian memes in the aftermath of the annexation of crimea, the sociologist anastasia denisova (2019, 93) pointed out that a meme incorporating tropes of state propaganda can often be seen as proor anti-government depending on the eyes of the beholder. much like the punch lines of socialist jokes, today’s memes work by imitating or feigning allegiance to state doctrines, such as the aforementioned soros plan. by combining literal imitation with an intent to mean the very opposite for those who are in the know, the memes circulated by liberal youth in hungary constitute reflexive forms that generate intimacy by simultaneously pointing toward self and other (petrović 2018, 204). the ironic forms of this meme culture are prefigured in the billboard campaigns of the fidesz government. both share a static frame and non-narrative form that facilitate an instant literal reading and counter-reading of its content, which inevitably is a play on familiar binaries such as the illiberal and the liberal, the nation and its others, hungary and europe. since 2015, in parallel with the emergence of large-scale counter-propaganda campaigns in the form of parodic billboards (nagy 2016), a spectacular rise in meme pages has occurred on facebook and instagram. these take the standardization of illiberal state propaganda as both their object of critique and as their guiding aesthetic. specializing in memes that exhibit a playful overidentification with the government’s propaganda output, this parodic constellation consists of pages with names such as nerpincér (ner waiter, a pun that combines the name of orbán’s political system with that of a popular online food delivery service), értelmiségi kisnyugdíjas (pensioner of the intelligentsia), and, most prominently, illiberal memes—the pioneering page that gave its name to the meme genre as a whole.4 figure 4. profile picture of illiberal memes circa 2017, replacing the face of colonel sanders in the kentucky fried chicken logo with that of george soros. run by a group of four university students, illiberal memes offers a key example of the performative shift from overt critique toward the parodic imitation of the illiberal state. founded in spring 2017 under an intensification of propaganda campaigns against the european union and legislation targeting the legality of foreign-funded ngos and the liberal-cosmopolitan central european university, the page enjoys wide popularity among high school and university students. many of its memes are harvested from a facebook incubator group in which fans and followers can edit existing memes and upload their own content. as the page was founded during a period of mass protests that galvanized many but ultimately proved ineffective, the page can be seen as a culmination of the process in which youth who identify as liberals took refuge online as a way of coping with the ubiquity of state propaganda. the parodic imitation of the state is not limited to the visual language (figure 2) of the page, but can also emerge in the language used by the administrators who run it. for instance, in his 2018 election campaign, orbán announced: “we are fighting an enemy that is different from us. not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world”—a speech denounced by international observers for its obvious anti-semitic tropes.5 the founders of illiberal memes, by contrast, seek to expose the same paranoid style by imitating it: “behind our page there stands a small, migrant-friendly minority that . . . serves the interests of none other than the great lord george soros. thanks to loads of paid likes [referring to the government trope that all opposition is paid by soros], at present there are already more than 35,000 people following us!”6 in their interview given to the oppositional web media site index.hu, the meme page administrators mention 888.hu and origo, two notorious pro-government news portals, as their greatest competitors. the pro-government news articles of these sites, the administrators of the page argue, should not be treated as news, but as memes: “they post remarkably fantastic memes every day. we have something to learn from them.” at the same time, the editors of illiberal memes say that the government media is not good at deliberately making memes: “even we make better memes about the opposition than the regime.” besides ironic overidentification with the orbán regime, illiberal memes also draws on historical comparisons to unmask the procedures through which illiberal propaganda functions. the page’s very first meme (figure 5) portrays spider-man, from the 2002 superhero film of the same name, putting on his glasses. as spider-man’s vision becomes clear, orbán is revealed as the communist leader jános kádár who ruled hungary from the aftermath of the 1956 uprising until 1988. the road to democracy, the image suggests, has proven to be merely a u-turn to the authoritarianism of state socialism. through comparisons of the orbán regime to the communist leadership, illiberal memes fans position themselves in opposition to the voters of fidesz, who they often claim are easily manipulated and not ready for liberal democracy. one of the moderators of the page argues that one purpose of illiberal memes is to encourage youth to debate current affairs in a more cultured manner, as opposed to the ad hominem (személyeskedő) and cynical style of communication they perceive as dominant in today’s hungary. but this effort to awaken a more transparent and rational style of communication paradoxically echoes the crude aesthetics of the orbán regime’s propaganda campaigns. indeed, while illiberal memes circulates images that portray the fidesz leadership as communist-era leaders, the fidesz party itself regularly sponsors photoshopped portrayals of opposition leaders as part of its election campaigns. to understand this interplay of state socialism, liberalism, and illiberalism, we now turn to the social life of internet memes in a high school in budapest. figure 5. spider-man reveals viktor orbán to be communist-era ruler jános kádár. orbán, obama, and rákosi in a liberal classroom during a break between two classes, final-year students johanna and julian proudly informed annastiina that among several other group chats, they also had an obama-themed chat. the purpose of this chat was to share stories, pictures, and gifs of barack and michelle obama: barack surfing, michelle smiling, the whole obama family leisurely spending a day together. for the students, obama represented a cool president and a good father and husband. julian and johanna stated that obama was not only the first black president of the united states; he was also the world’s “biggest liberal.” liberal, in this context, stood for a direct opposition to orbán, whose second and third term as prime minister (2010–2018) nearly coincided with obama’s time as the president of the united states (2009–2017). growing up with social media intrinsic to their everyday lives, the students had perceived their world as global for as long as they could remember. the mornings of their adolescence began with scrolling the viral news content platform buzzfeed; their evenings were spent watching late-night shows from the united states on online streaming video platforms, which, following the presidency of donald trump, had mostly turned into trump shows. both johanna and julian attended istván örkény school, one of numerous budapest-based elite schools with a widespread, although not complete consensus against orbán and his regime. liberalism and illiberalism effectively constituted each other in the lives of julian and johanna: the fact that the regime referred to itself as illiberal meant that liberalism reigned in their imagination as the desirable antithesis of the non-democratic status quo. the meaning of liberalism, however, remained diffuse, as the students’ ideas were saturated with different nuances, eras, and understandings of liberalism. johanna’s parents had been well-known figures of the 1980s dissident movement’s liberal faction. during the 1980s, a century-old political divide had resurfaced with the division of the pro-democracy movement into large rural ethnopopulist népi (“of the people”) and smaller but significant liberal urbánus (urbanite, cosmopolitan) camps. this divide, which periodically appears in hungarian public discussion, is recognizable by its distinctive aesthetics, parallel public spheres, and political emphases. it depends on the mutual co-constitution of binaries such as community vs. individual, hungarians vs. non-hungarians, countryside vs. capital, hungarian minorities abroad vs. universal human rights, religion vs. secularism, and so on. susan gal (1991, 444) notes how “the debate has often channelled discussion so powerfully that meta-analyses are difficult to construct. virtually any commentary . . . is sharply contested and pressed into one or the other camp,” even though some intellectuals “identified themselves—spontaneously and ironically—as living example of the two traditions in one body” (gal 1991, 447). this enduring divide came to characterize party politics and public culture well into the 1990s. the exception was the small but fierce anti-communist party fidesz, which impressed many with its capacity to stay outside of the divide, until the party in the mid-1990s began to address the ethnopopulist faction. johanna had grown up attending what she called “sect parties” of the liberal elite, where she sat in the corner reading harry potter books while important people debated the future of the country. these family friends represented the liberal intelligentsia, many of whom for most of the 1990s and 2000s had been influential in or even in charge of many cultural and political institutions in hungary. johanna often expressed exasperation with the way her father, imre, considered himself “the liberalest of liberals,” but held on to what to her were ideas antithetic to liberalism: patriarchal and even colonial views of the superiority of the west and market economies. imre’s political idol was margaret thatcher, and he firmly believed in the superiority of what he called western european civilization. he proudly stated to his children and to annastiina that he was “not interested in traveling to india as long as there was a french village he had not yet visited.” johanna perceived these views as outrageous and even racist. her liberalism was not associated with western superiority. while johanna and imre debated these matters openly and fiercely, their liberalisms also stood as a united front against orbán’s illiberalism. typically for a large segment of the hungarian liberal intelligentsia (liberális értelmiség), the tight-knit community around the school professed high levels of political awareness and cultural capital, even though many families such as those of johanna and julian struggled financially to make ends meet. in this sense, these students differed from high school students in other schools in other hungarian cities, many of whom would come from more financially stable entrepreneurial families and live a far less politically charged life. very few of the örkény students had any connections “in the countryside” (vidék), to the extent that anything in the countryside was regarded as a bit of a joke, even to those few that proudly presented themselves as the exception to this budapest cosmopolitan elite. the meme culture of parodic overidentification was highly visible in school life: stickers on students’ lockers showed fidesz slogans in cyrillic alphabet as a reference to the soviet union, and one classroom had redecorated propaganda leaflets targeting george soros on the wall. in the sociality of örkény, group chats, memes, and gifs were inseparable from face-to-face communication during school hours. to the exasperation of his teachers, julian in particular had a habit of scrolling his smartphone during class, while johanna once remarked that “nothing” was happening in the school without “the virtual stuff.” johanna and julian both keenly followed illiberal memes. although exasperated by the political situation, they found the page a source of consoling hilarity. or, as julian once put it: “the country is shit, but the memes are good.” johanna’s and julian’s political awareness was particularly galvanized by the long summer of migration in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees passed through hungary (kallius, monterescu, and rajaram 2016; kallius 2016). the xenophobic propaganda campaigns that followed shook johanna’s and julian’s conceptions of hungary’s place in the democratic world. julian in particular felt deeply ashamed of hungary’s abysmal reputation in the western press, which paid very little attention to hungarians’ opposition to orbán and often dubbed eastern europe “racist” by mere virtue of being eastern european and having inherited a socialist past (böröcz 2006; dzenovska 2017). in örkény, as on illiberal memes, the present was oftentimes likened to the communist past. particularly during the higher-level history classes that johanna and julian attended, narratives on the past of state socialism and perceptions of present-day illiberalism served as liberalism’s antimodern antagonist. when their teacher, kati, pointed out that officially the soviet union had been called democratic, the students all chuckled and laughed; just like the first elections in hungary after the communist takeover in 1948 had been “democratic.” and wasn’t it ironic that it was viktor orbán who had for the first time demanded aloud in 1989 that the soviet troops should leave hungary—and now he himself had turned authoritarian? much like other everyday situations, history lessons about the communist period at örkény, too, were often seen as source material for the production of new memes. students would regularly create memes on their smartphones and share them as stories or on group chats. at other times, however, the students’ familiarity with meme templates and formulas was enough to make them perceive a situation as an unmaterialized meme. such was the case, for instance, during a class on the personality cult of the 1950s stalinist dictator of hungary, mátyás rákosi. in her usual theatrical and eloquent manner, kati read aloud the birthday speech that ernő gerő, another early communist leader, had given on rákosi’s birthday in 1952: “comrade rákosi’s sixtieth birthday is the heart-warming celebration of our whole nation. but this day is not only the celebration of our nation! our beloved mátyás rákosi . . . is known and respected by millions and millions of people in the whole world!” julian, johanna, and their classmates laughed at the speech, and quickly managed to identify the markers of a personality cult in its wording. these included, first, that rákosi and the party were indistinguishable; second, typical of dictatorial propaganda, rákosi was claimed to represent “normal” hungarians; and third, the assertion that rákosi was internationally known and celebrated. kati congratulated her laughing students. there was one task left: to analyze a famous propaganda photo from the early 1950s that kati showed on the powerpoint, in which rákosi, dressed in a suit, was gently caressing wheat crops in a soft breeze. amid smiles, facepalm expressions, and chuckles, annastiina already sensed that as they listed elements of propaganda, students were not seeing rákosi, but orbán. soon enough, johanna whispered: “this is just like today.” the task brought to mind the video that orbán had just posted on his facebook page, in which he cooked an easter ham meal for his family, pretending to be just like any hungarian man, wearing an apron and sweeping his porch before cooking.7 in all of these cases, the meme template of orbán-as-communist leader served as the frame through which students perceived and made sense of state propaganda forms. how did these students come to see propaganda through the lens of internet memes? the similarity the students see does not inhere in the images themselves. rather, the perceived repetition emerges from a series of past encounters in which these forms are “framed, reflexively, as being the ‘same thing, again’” (gal 2018, 2). the continual creation of memes became a breeding ground for seeing memes as propaganda, and propaganda as memes. as johanna confirmed, it was enough to merely see the original stalinist propaganda photo: in the students’ minds, orbán was there, caressing crops. the students’ memetic sensibilities ensured that no digital devices were needed to perceive the situation as a meme. in the next section, we explore how memes have become increasingly autonomous from technological devices and part of embodied sensibilities to navigate social positions. the meme radar: navigating illiberal propaganda for johanna, julian, and their classmates, the incentive to capture, edit, and share lived moments in the format of memes and social media stories has become second nature (belting 2012; miller et al. 2016; borenstein 2022). although we are both millennials ourselves, our self-identified generation z interlocutors often found it humorous to see how lagging our embodied skills were in terms of the speed of chatting, taking selfies, crafting a smooth series of interconnected instagram stories, or grasping the full range of intertextual references required to understand the latest memes. for these youth, technological affordances of digital platforms such as scalability, replicability, and shareability have become intimately linked to the sensorium (papacharissi and easton 2013). everyday situations are instantly evaluated as worthy of reaching for one’s phone to be captured and circulated for likes and comments or not; whatever is sensed already has the quality of a potential meme or social media story. for our interlocutors in budapest, memes are thus only partially content “on the internet,” as they do not emphasize the online platforms through which they circulate as a realm separate from the real (cf. boellstorff 2016). rather, they perceive the world through what we might call “meme-tinted glasses.” the students were incessantly detecting fragments of propaganda and interpreting them as memes. their identification of aspects of the world as meme-like made for a key way of orienting themselves in moral and political space and constituted a means of navigating between truth and untruth. as scholars reflecting on relations between mobile technologies and affect, habit, and gesture have noted, the instant access to databases and image repositories has for young generations become a form of intuitive engagement that allows them to instantly reframe, remix, and recirculate events as they unfold (serres 2014; pedwell 2019). in the context of our field site, we refer to this mediated disposition as a “meme radar,” as liberal youth orient themselves in the world by working through perceived similarities between lived realities and memes. anthropologists have long noted that media serve as “reservoirs and reference points” for everyday conversation (spitulnik 1996, 162), for instance, showing how discursive forms such as radio phrases escape their original contexts and enter vernacular speech. in this sense, the blurring of boundaries between media culture and the everyday is not new. what is different here from the imitation of phrases from the radio or the copying of hashtags onto a placard (see postill 2014), is how everyday situations such as a prom dance or a history class come to be seen through the lens of memes and are consequently, using digital devices, turned into new memes. the fact that memes have an object-like materiality also makes them distinctive from other parodic cultural forms such as jokes (see lampland and nadkarni 2016). jokes, like memes, are networked in the sense that they can index their path of transmission along networks of social relations as one encounters the same joke multiple times. unlike jokes, however, memes can be collected, exhibited, and faithfully reproduced (hogan 2010; shifman 2014), as well as purposefully transformed into new digital objects to impact the direction of the new instantiations that proliferate (fisher 2019; strassler 2020). to understand why memes have become so central to navigating the tensions between reality and unreality for young hungarian urbanites, we need to understand better what they are and how they operate. the media scholar limor shifman (2014, 41) defines an internet meme as a “group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form and/or stance . . . created with awareness of each other,” a group widely “circulated, imitated and/or transformed.” while this provides a useful general definition, an anthropology of memes should acknowledge that what a meme is in part has cultural variation and context-dependency (cf. miller 2011). in a recent study of political memes in singapore, wee yang soh (2020) draws on linguistic anthropology to argue that, indeed, context determines what memes are, and their social implications. crucial here are people’s media ideologies, which refers to people’s beliefs about media, including what media are experienced by social actors as appropriate for particular purposes in a given context (gershon 2010). by taking this into account, we can ground the ethnographic analysis of media forms in people’s perceptions of communicative possibilities and limitations of particular media channels (gershon 2010, 283). in singapore, soh (2020) shows, media ideologies surrounding memes render their political effect ambiguous: on the one hand, the fact that memes are seen as inconsequential youth chatter allows people to share them freely in a context of censorship; on the other hand, this “meme ideology” also limits their potential for political mobilization. soh’s characterization of the potential of political memes seems apt in many contexts, as indeed the media ideology of memes as a trivial visual language of youth is present in hungary too. what is distinct and perhaps unique about the hungarian phenomenon of illiberal memes, however, is the local memetic chain of references. for our interlocutors, the polarizing binary tropes and crude visual aesthetics of the government’s propaganda billboards resemble global internet meme culture. combined with the practices of incessantly producing meme variations on propaganda, this establishes a memetic chain in which, for these youth, government propaganda campaigns and parodic memes appear to be always already indexing each other. the ubiquity of these memetic practices is what ensures that in the context of youth who identify as liberal, the world appears as already generating memes that need only slight tweaking to communicate one’s position on hungarian politics. potatoes at the end of history as we have seen, the illiberal present and the communist past are commonly framed in memes as the evil twins that hinder the successful realization of liberal democracy in hungary. yet the structuring opposition between the liberal and the illiberal central to both meme culture and political discourse in today’s hungary collapses when approached from the vantage point of the political economy of the european union. after all, hungary’s present-day economic policy is built on the thoroughly neoliberal foundations of the european union’s common market (böröcz and sarkar 2017; bohle and greskovits 2019; fabry 2019; scheiring and szombati 2020). orbán plays a double game: his anti-eu rhetoric rests on an economic policy of low taxation for multinational companies and a supply of cheap labor that is highly attractive for foreign investors.8 although often aware of this complex entanglement, the budapest liberal milieu, ourselves included, tends to anchor itself in a liberalism that expresses its opposition to orbán in a language of european values. this eclipsing of the entanglement of hungarian illiberalism and the european union’s neoliberalism becomes especially prominent in memes that depict the country’s economic situation as deriving from the moral flaws of the masses. such memes ridicule a politics based on material interest and need. like students at örkény, illiberal memes often refers to people in rural areas—commonly old people, and especially grandmothers—as those to blame for hungary’s failure to fulfill its democratic promise. rural elderly are routinely portrayed as preferring grocery vouchers, or most poignantly, a sack of potatoes, to democracy—a trope common across the former soviet union and postsocialist europe (adriaans 2017). they are depicted rushing to like orbán’s facebook statuses or queuing for free foodstuffs provided by fidesz. thus while critical of the regime, illiberal memes and similar meme pages reinforce the coupling of neoliberalism and democracy, central to the “end of history” narrative of the early 1990s (fukuyama 1992), with echoes of the undelivered “catching up” with the west that postsocialist states were supposed to achieve when history ended. a post by illiberal memes neatly exemplifies how the budapest liberal milieu imagines the lifeworlds of low-income fidesz voters. the meme portrays the increasing levels of excitement of a shiba inu dog who is simply called a “fidesz pensioner” (figure 6). in a sequence of four images, the dog is offered first one liter of milk, then four kilograms of potatoes, followed by firewood,9 and culminating in a grocery voucher. by the time the grocery voucher is on offer, the dog shakes in such excitement that its blurred head is hardly recognizable as that of a dog. figure 6. the fidesz voting pensioner as a dog offered a series of bribes: one liter of milk, four kilos of potatoes, firewood, and an erzsébet grocery voucher. potatoes, as nancy ries (2009) has shown in the context of postsocialist russia, symbolize social stratification. in hungary, the skyrocketing number of memes featuring potatoes caricature the intersection of class, age, and economic status, while also targeting the very real practice of the orbán regime to give out extra grocery vouchers named after a famous austro-hungarian empress (sisi), known as erzsébet vouchers (erzsébet utalvány). the government distributes these vouchers widely before elections or holidays such as christmas and easter. although the sums, averaging between 20 and 40 euros, might seem small, for many living in poverty they offer a sorely needed financial boost. in reality, the profile of fidesz voters is complex and difficult to generalize. there are indeed many voters who fit the stereotype held by urban liberals of rural pensioners. but the voters also include stable upper middle-class voters and entrepreneurs who fare relatively well under the regime (greskovits 2020). in addition, the regime relies on many ethnic hungarians from romania and serbia to whom fidesz granted citizenship and voting rights without a requirement of residency in hungary in 2010 (melegh 2016). finally and perhaps most important, fidesz draws support from conservative voters who perceive the socialist opposition as tainted by its actually existing historical ties to the communist party. in spite of this diverse base, meme culture designates the rural grandmas as urban liberalism’s other, not quite temporally co-present with the youth who identify as liberal and view hungary with ironic meme glasses. yet these grandmothers are not merely imagined ones. as many of our interlocutors can painfully testify, when liberal urbanites’ own grandparents vote for fidesz, relations become realigned and families tear apart. the fact that many followers of illiberal memes know this well does not contradict their reproduction of one-dimensional stereotypes. after all, the memetic sensibilities around illiberal memes are not about unambiguously claiming poignant satire and comparisons as real. rather, the caricatures of fidesz voters constitute liberal distanciations that turn felt tragedy into tragicomedy, consoling those who feel they have no other way to exert influence. in the next section, we turn to the implications for everyday lifeworlds when no other means of confronting or critiquing authoritarian politics appear possible outside of using memetic irony. memeification and the limits of liberal parody in the highly charged elections of april 2018, fidesz secured a third consecutive supermajority after an election period characterized by debates revolving around soros and migration, as well as extensive propaganda campaigns that portrayed opposition politicians as working for soros.10 numerous opposition parties attempted to coordinate candidates that would prevent a fidesz supermajority, but to the disappointment of many, they failed to cooperate in time. in this context, the victory of fidesz by no means surprised liberal circles. nevertheless, it was felt as an excruciating blow, as yet another entrenchment of a non-democratic regime. julian and johanna had both proudly voted for the first time in their lives. debates over whom to vote for had been constant: johanna had simply followed the popular strategy of tactical voting of whichever candidate in her district had the best chance of defeating the fidesz candidate. julian had voted for, and even joined, a new youthful and tech-savvy party named momentum. seeing the electoral map painted nearly completely in fidesz’s orange color only a few hours later came as a crushing experience. with her friends, johanna sat on the bank of the danube in the middle of the night, crying over the catastrophic results, and discussing with their group the prospects of emigration, as she had been admitted to study gender studies and hebrew at a reputable university in the united kingdom. julian watched the election at home with a friend, and recounted later how they had become paralyzed, unable to do anything but stare at the laptop screen in disbelief. the shock of the election result was visceral: at this stage, there was literally nothing funny about orbán, fidesz, or the propaganda. the day after the elections, the mood in örkény was bleak. as the afternoon sun shone directly into the classroom from the high windows, johanna and julian descended into a vocal argument over what should be the next course of action. julian was devastated by momentum’s poor performance: nearly everyone he knew had voted for them, and yet the party did not even gather enough votes for a seat in parliament. julian was adamant that now was the time to mobilize, go to the countryside, talk to non-voters and fidesz voters. johanna blamed him for simplifying the matter. “but it’s not possible for us not to do something!” julian exclaimed. johanna snapped back: “but we are in budapest, this country is bigger than our small intelligentsia [értelmiségi] circles!” julian demanded more: “exactly—and now is the time to go to the countryside, and tell the people of the reality [valóság]—because the country is lost!” he questioned whether this really was the right moment to leave hungary, as he had planned to. johanna waved her hands in the air and yelled in disagreement: “it isn’t that simple! you make it sound like youth would have to choose between emigration and revolution!” if she left the country, it did not mean she was not connected, did not care, or unable to do something. julian remarked grimly: “if there will be a revolution in hungary, it will be a civil war between budapest and the countryside [vidék]. . . .” julian was cut short when the history teacher, kati, walked in. she immediately reflected on the awkward atmosphere in the class and exclaimed that she understood today was a special day. nevertheless, in accordance with the policy of the entire school, they would not talk about the elections. the entire class immediately erupted in protest, but kati shook her head. “but don’t worry, we will study something that might help you make sense of some things, and we will do small group work to allow for debate,” she told them. kati continued to introduce the topics of the day: two influential theories that had shaped politics after 1989: samuel huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations and francis fukuyama’s thesis on the fall of soviet union, marking the end of history and the global victory of liberal democracy.11 the class was supposed to read excerpts of both texts and debate in small groups: who was right, and who was wrong? everyone proceeded with the task, half concentrating, except for julian: not even looking at his phone, he simply sat behind his desk, did not move, and stared at the ground in front of him. at this point, the ironic sensibilities of meme culture appeared unable to account for the situation. the youth disagreed on whether people could be reasoned out of their voting behaviors by simply telling them the truth about the orbán regime. the inefficacy of memes as a strategy of resistance may not surprise anthropologists, who increasingly note that the socialities of political parody cannot be reduced to the binary of domination and resistance (petrović 2018). it also calls to mind an attempt by the european commission to challenge hungarian illiberalism through its social media outreach activities. in february 2019, after reinvigorated discussion in the european union about what many perceived as the hungarian government’s undermining of an eu-wide migration policy, fidesz had launched a series of billboards depicting a laughing george soros and the president of the european commission, jean-claude juncker. insinuating that the european union’s critique of fidesz was actually engineered by soros, the slogan read “you, too, deserve to know what brussels is up to!” (figure 7). in response, the european commission used its social media accounts to circulate its own meme (figure 8), in english and hungarian. the facebook post reproduced the propaganda billboard almost identically, but it replaced the image of soros with a picture of orbán and juncker together, imposed on a blue background. in a font nearly the same as that on the original fidesz billboard, the european commission’s meme read, “you, too, deserve fact not fiction.” the image was accompanied by a caption emphasizing that it was the hungarian government, not soros, who was responsible for eu policies: “the hungarian government campaign beggars belief. it is shocking that such a ludicrous conspiracy theory has reached the mainstream to the extent it has.” figure 7. billboard sponsored by the hungarian government depicting juncker conspiring with soros: “you, too, have the right to know what brussels is up to!” photo by valerie hopkins. figure 8. the european commission’s meme response to the above billboard. in reality, apart from sharp rhetorical comments and a number of legal proceedings with little or no effect, the european union has been able to do very little about democratic backsliding and the erosion of the rule of law in hungary. in this sense, neither johanna and julian nor the eu could do much more than respond with memes. they are both captive to the memetic logic of parodic imitation, while the frame is set by the hungarian government’s propaganda. this highlights once more how memetic practices establish a continual web of relations between the visual discourse of fidesz propaganda campaigns and the creation of memes that parody that very propaganda. each takes up almost any visual element to reduce complex questions into matters of a simple juxtaposition of two polarized sides, and depends on using captioning and stock photos to turn memorable slogans into recognizable variations. michael taussig has famously drawn on walter benjamin’s writings on mimesis to think through what he calls the mimetic faculty: the human capacity for imitation and copying. for taussig (1993, xiii), “the wonder of mimesis lies in the copy drawing on the character and power of the original, to the point whereby the representation may even assume that character and that power.” in this case, it is remarkable that the border and security discourse of fidesz is presented by the eu here as in fact an accurate portrayal of its own position (kallius 2016). rather than subverting fidesz propaganda, one could argue that this memeification of international politics furthers the interests of the hungarian government by parroting its tropes and normalizing its polarizing communication style. the similarity between propaganda and critical memes also highlights the enduring ambiguity of montage as a political technique that can be both subversive and suppressive. radical theorists of montage such as benjamin and sergei eisenstein have pointed to the capacity for it to generate sudden shocks of insight that shake people out of their somnambulant state. others, such as leni riefenstahl, used it for spectacular displays to cover up fissures in the social fabric (suhr and willerslev 2013, 11). whereas these early theorists wrote in an era in which montage was a specialized activity of filmand image-makers, the current era has made montage integral to the dispositions of any smartphone-savvy person. as teenagers turn their prom night into a series of fifty memes, it would be hard to claim an inherent emancipatory power to montage. in the students’ context, however, what memetic practices of montage effectuate is the locating of liberal positions in a field of illiberalism. conclusion in this article we have explored the entanglements of liberalism, propaganda, and social media in contemporary hungary through our concept of the meme radar, which we theorize as an embodied disposition that perceives everyday situations as memes. in the hungarian context, memetic sensibilities can be seen in a wide variety of everyday contexts in relation to the ubiquity of illiberal state propaganda, as youth seek to neutralize it through ironic capturing, framing, and captioning. the centrality of memes and montage in online and offline contexts, from the classrooms of a liberal high school in budapest to the european commission’s social media feeds, reveals a memeified liberalism that continually reworks the similarities between the propaganda of an illiberal state and the practices of distanciation through which people seek to negate it. as youth perceive, edit, and recirculate parodic takes on the national irreality, the everyday becomes imbued with brief moments of effervescence, simultaneously constituting a sense of reality and shared liberal notions of the good. such moments reinforce the notion that truth in today’s hungary is the privilege of a shrinking minority. although this article focuses on 2017 and 2018, we do not want to suggest that these years mark the illiberal end of history in hungary. in 2015 fukuyama himself gave a speech at central european university, today forced to relocate to vienna and mostly referred to as soros university by hungarian officials and the international media, with the optimistic message that, “in a decade, illiberal democracies will be over for good.”12 far from being over for good, the fidesz illiberal agenda remains internationally proactive: it is not coincidental that influential members of the government fraternize with figures such as the american alt-right cult figure steve bannon. as the regime presents itself as a subversive but righteous underdog in the global fight against liberal elites, its political communications strategies increasingly focus on international legitimacy. for instance, orbán’s and other high-profile fidesz politicians’ facebook and instagram pages are bilingual in english and hungarian, and the state tv broadcasts online daily news in english, chinese, german, and russian.13 the prime minister’s cabinet office runs a popular english-language portal (abouthungary.hu), where one may find, for instance, the international spokesperson zoltán kovács’s emphatic rebuttal of many of the claims we have made in this article.14 after the parliamentary elections in april 2018, both julian and johanna did well in their high school final exams. johanna moved to london to attend university, while julian chose to study in a smaller english town. an aspiring journalist, julian had seriously considered a bachelor’s degree in digital culture at a top university in london. after attending a sample lecture in person, however, he decided against it. with some frustration, he exclaimed: “it’s just not worth an annual £10,000 tuition fee to sit in a classroom and study what is a meme.” abstract this article examines the social media practices through which young hungarians deliberate the workings of truth and the meanings of liberalism under viktor orbán’s authoritarian regime. noting similarities between ubiquitous government propaganda billboards and the aesthetics of parodic social media content, these youth increasingly perceive everyday situations as internet memes. navigating generational differences, class antagonisms, and rural-urban divisions, for them, seeing the world as a meme anchors the youth’s sense of truth and untruth and liberal identity in a polarized political field. we trace the everyday practices of montage through which conspiratorial billboard campaigns and the parodic forms of internet memes become linked, and observe how the visual, visceral, and networked sensibilities of meme culture help neutralize illiberal propaganda by turning it into a source of the self. [hungary; liberalism; memes; political parody; authoritarianism; propaganda; social media] kivonat írásunkban azokat a közösségi média gyakorlatokat vizsgáljuk, amelyeken keresztül a magyar fiatalok értelmezik és reflektálnak arra, hogy mi az igazság és mit jelent a liberalizmus orbán viktor autoriter rezsimében. a mindent átható kormánypropaganda óriásplakátjai és a parodisztikus közösségi médiatartalmak esztétikája közötti hasonlóságot felismerve, ezek a fiatalok egyre inkább internet mémekben ragadják meg a hétköznapok történéseit. a generációs különbségek, a társadalmi osztályok közti antagonizmusok és a vidék-város megosztottság gondolati terében egyensúlyozva, a világot mémeken keresztül látva, ezek segítenek a fiataloknak eligazodni igazságés valótlanság között, és irányt mutatnak liberális identitásuk megéléséhez egy kiélezett politikai erőtérben. azokat a mindennapi mém-gyártó gyakorlatokat követjük nyomon, amelyeken keresztül a konspiratív plakátkampányok és a parodisztikus internet mémek összekapcsolódnak, megfigyelve, hogy a mémkultúra vizuális, zsigeri és hálózatba rendeződő érzékenysége hogyan semlegesíti az illiberális propagandát azáltal, hogy az önkifejezés és öndefiníció forrásává teszi. [magyarország, liberalizmus, mémek, politikai paródia, autoritarizmus, propaganda, közösségi média] notes acknowledgments we are indebted to taras fedirko, sarah green, vlad naumescu, julia perczel, michal murawski, daniel miller, and dóra szegő for their many contributions to this manuscript. we also thank the four anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology for their insightful comments. 1. the notion of the soros plan is akin to the great replacement theory, a far-right idea developed by the french author renaud camus that has also gained prominence in the united states in recent years. in hungary it was propagated via government questionnaires, such as the “national consultation on the soros plan,” and in dramatic television ads during commercial breaks. 2. the expulsion of the central european university made it the second exile university in europe since world war ii, after the exile of the european humanities university, forced to relocate from belarus to lithuania in 2004. 3. in dominic boyer and alexei yurchak’s (2010) work on u.s. late night shows and other forms of late-liberal popular culture, the russian notion of stiob is used more loosely to refer also to overt parody with no indeterminacy about the authenticity of the content. 4. the illiberal memes facebook page was taken down on may 28th, 2021 after a violation of facebook’s user policy. at the time it had 71,000 followers on facebook. their memes from 2019 onwards can still be accessed on instagram at http://www.instagram.com/illiberal.memes. 5. the fidesz government usually responds to accusations of anti-semitism by claiming that it is, in fact, protecting europe’s jewish population by limiting immigration from muslim countries. see “hungary tells uk jewish group to ‘mind its own business’ over antisemitism,” guardian, february 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/13/hungary-tells-uk-jewish-group-to-mind-its-own-business-over-antisemitism. accessed july 5, 2022. 6. quote translated by the authors from dávid klág, “a magyar politika szereplői önmagukban nevetségesek,” january 9, 2019, https://index.hu/kultur/2019/01/09/illiberal_memes_facebook_interju_mem_humor/. accessed august 24, 2019. 7. video posted on viktor orbán’s facebook page, “the easter ham,” a húsvéti sonka, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156087060756093. accessed august 24, 2019. 8. according to the financial times in 2019, about 30 percent of the hungarian industry’s output depends on the foreign car industry. see valerie hopkins, “hungarians’ 18 percent pay rise stirs german car industry,” financial times, february 1, 2019, https://www.ft.com/content/63d132ea-2561-11e9-8ce6-5db4543da632. accessed august 15, 2019. 9. utility and gas bills in particular are notoriously high in hungary. especially outside budapest, many cannot afford gas heating and resort to wood heating instead. 10. the oecd characterized these elections as only partly free. not long after, freedom house downgraded the status of hungary from a “free society” to a “partly free society” in its rankings. 11. these were not the teacher’s choices, as fukuyama and huntington both feature in the centrally planned high school history curriculum. 12. “fukuyama speaks at ceu about the future of liberal democracy | central european university,” central european university website, https://www.ceu.edu/article/2015-10-14/fukuyama-speaks-ceu-about-future-liberal-democracy. accessed july 5, 2022. 13. the main english-language news portal of the fidesz government is https://abouthungary.hu, and the daily english-language broadcast hungary reports can be found on médiaklikk, https://mediaklikk.hu/musor/angol-nyelvu-hirek-m1/. accessed 5 july 2022. 14. see, for instance, kovacs’s response to coverage on hungary by the new york times and the guardian: “brace yourselves! the progressive elite of the new york times editorial board is so woke about hungary,” about hungary blog, 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reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.04 the weightless state: powerpoint and the everyday work of making senegal matter cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 274-302, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.05 the weightless state: powerpoint and the everyday work of making senegal matter caroline melly smith college https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1404-7585 with a deep sigh, i looked up from my laptop and surveyed my surroundings. scattered across my desk were disheveled piles of brochures, world bank reports, a battered notebook, and xeroxed masters theses. my laptop screen, too, was littered with dozens of open files and websites, including an online repository, accessed via intranet, that contained hundreds of archived powerpoint files and other institutional documents. in this sea of materials, it was hard to keep my own file—and my broader mission—straight. just a few weeks earlier, in march of 2006, i had begun a stage (internship) at apix, senegal’s national investment-promotion agency.1 housed in an elegantly appointed building just a few blocks from the president’s residence, apix fashioned itself as the vanguard of state governance and innovative policymaking in contemporary senegal. it thus seemed an ideal ethnographic site from which to consider the re-making of the state after structural adjustment, a state that was paradoxically configured as both a hindrance to and a medium for neoliberal economic reform in africa. i had been particularly interested in probing the substance of the state: in making ethnographic sense of how state officials made their institution, their mission, and their own daily work tangible and present in an era of largely eroded state power and legitimacy. with this ambition in mind, i had spent the first several weeks of my stage shadowing staff members, studying reports and promotional materials, and familiarizing myself with office routines and investment regulations. after i settled into my makeshift desk, elhadji, my supervisor and new office mate, gave me my first official assignment: to assemble a powerpoint presentation for his upcoming presentation to potential investors in south africa. to produce the presentation, i had to log onto the agency’s password-protected intranet archive. this heavily trafficked online repository was filled with hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of powerpoint files, composed in almost a dozen languages, including french, arabic, english, spanish, and italian. the slides described apix’s founding and mission, the agency’s structure and investment procedures, and its grand projections for economic growth. many of the slides proved remarkably uniform in content and design, echoing the same tale of a streamlined state and an economy ripe for investment. yet they also contained fascinating discrepancies and inaccuracies: national and household economic statistics and general population estimates varied widely, for instance, as did anticipated dates for senegal’s economic “emergence,” information about the dependability of electricity and other infrastructures, and details about investment sectors. it was not just the repository that was overwhelming; though i never admitted it to elhadji at the time, in truth i had never even used powerpoint before arriving at apix. and so i found myself scrambling that afternoon not only to piece together incompatible economic data and find ethnographic footing in the hectic office but also to grasp the basics of this unfamiliar presentation program. sensing my mounting frustration, elhadji came to stand beside me. a charismatic man in his mid-forties, elhadji had a quick wit and spoke english with an accent that might easily be mistaken as american. his parents had worked for the united nations when he was a child, so he had moved around the african continent frequently. after finishing lycée (french-style high school) in dakar, his family had assumed that he would follow in his father’s footsteps and head to france to study, just as many of his peers were doing at the time. but elhadji saw himself as an intellectual trendsetter and instead persuaded his parents to send him to university in canada. after completing his degree, he worked in the private sector in canada and then briefly in california, where he honed his skills as a captivating presenter and savvy businessman. by the time he arrived at the embryonic apix in the early years of the new millennium, he had built a reputation as an innovator and a powerpoint guru of sorts. and so, with the air of a seasoned guide, elhadji put a firm hand on my shoulder and offered some advice. by this point, he had spent several days patiently fielding my questions, guiding my searches, putting me in touch with colleagues, and directing me back to the online repository. but as his eyes scanned the physical and virtual clutter that surrounded me, he could tell i was still adrift. “it’s simple, caroline,” he coached me. “above all, our job is just to guide the investor. no one will want to invest if the structure appears heavy [lourd]. so keep things lightweight [léger].” though i did not realize it at the time, this mentoring exchange would come to shape my thinking about state-making and technological development in contemporary senegal. apix is a relatively small but influential state agency charged with mediating between (mostly foreign) investors and the senegalese ministry system, frequently cast by foreigners and senegalese alike as cumbersome and opaque. it is a quintessential information-age bureaucracy (see dean 2002): staff members’ routines revolve around the collection, consolidation, packaging, and distribution of information, framed as an unequivocal social good that can pave the way for economic investment and, by extension, a deepening of democratic governance. during my time there, employees spent their days meeting with potential investors and assisting them with paperwork, perfecting presentations for trips abroad, sketching investment “roadmaps,” and collaborating with offices and agencies across the city and beyond. by keeping things “lightweight,” as elhadji had admonished me to do, my colleagues managed to extract, bundle, and circulate information more quickly, widely, and effectively and, in turn, to project a particular vision of the senegalese state. administrators and staff thus worked relentlessly to rid their office spaces, investment pitches, and organizational structures of bulk and clutter. powerpoint, i quickly realized, proved critical to this effort. the program’s design demanded that staff members condense complex truths about senegal’s economy and state into crisp bullet points. and it allowed for a performance and circulation of that information that broke with colonial-era bureaucratic conventions, rendering information transportable and ephemeral. taking elhadji’s advice seriously, this article traces the ascendancy of weightlessness as an aspirational material property in this information-driven bureaucracy. during the past two decades, anthropologists have written extensively about the “tyranny of transparency” (strathern 2000) that has come to shape bureaucratic cultures and social life more broadly. they have documented how various instruments and techniques used to generate transparency—from digital mapping projects in nairobi’s slums (poggiali 2016) to e-governance strategies in india (mazzarella 2006)—in fact produce uneven and often paradoxical effects (see also ballestero 2012; hetherington 2011; hull 2012b; sharma 2013; thomson 2012; west and sanders 2003). by highlighting the instability of transparency as an institutional goal and cultural concept, this body of scholarship also illuminates the ways in which contemporary governance is inextricable from both the ideological and material realities of media and technology. in senegal, the tension between what is seen or disclosed (zahir) and what is hidden or not visible (batin)—both concepts borrowed from arabic—has long animated religious and social life (buggenhagen 2010, 2014; roberts and roberts 2003). concerns with transparency and opacity certainly stood at the forefront of apix’s agenda and routines. but it was my colleagues’ keen attention to weightlessness, transparency’s twin property, one might say, that caught my attention. if we define transparency as the “visual quality that an object is said to have if one can see beyond it to something of greater interest—in this case, information” (hetherington 2011, 153), we might think of weightlessness as the material quality that makes this information transportable, transferrable, and consumable. my conceptualization of weightlessness builds on the work of tim ingold (2007), who writes against scholarly tendencies to theorize materiality without attending carefully to materials and their properties. for ingold, properties are not innate and objective attributes of things, but rather emerge relationally in the flux of everyday life and over time. “in that sense,” he explains, “every quality is a condensed story. to describe the properties of materials is to tell the stories of what happens to them as they flow, mix, and mutate” (ingold 2007, 14). in this essay, then, i approach weightlessness as a history of relations and transformations that have deep and consequential effects. that history, i argue, has something important to tell us about how technological development, postcolonial statecraft, and business cultures enmesh over time in unexpected ways. i begin by situating both powerpoint and the apix state form within the same geohistorical current. i consider how weightlessness emerged within this current as a persuasive and desirable property, and i then trace how efforts to coax forth weightlessness shape everyday state practice and media forms. throughout the essay, i pay careful attention to the relentless fluctuations in material substance and heft that characterized powerpoint practice. two important insights emerge. first, it becomes clear that powerpoint is not simply a technology of the state, a means of communicating about the state, deployed by the state. instead, i argue here that this ascendant state form and this banal office software are in fact inextricable from each other. to tell the story of powerpoint’s emergence in senegal, then, also means to tell the story of state restructuring, global migration, bureaucratic documentation regimes, and the resilience of oral performance. it also means to take seriously brenda chalfin’s (2010) admonition that we carefully consider the ways in which state authority and presence have been dramatically transformed by decades of austerity and open market reforms, rather than assume a temporality of decay and decline (see also boone 1990; clark 2005; elyachar 2005; hibou 2004; roitman 2005). my vantage point within apix offered particular insights into the emergent role of states as “entrepreneurial subjects” responsible for branding the nation to attract global capital (graan 2013), an increasingly pervasive phenomenon throughout the global north and south (badaró 2020; jansen 2008; kaneva 2011; manning 2010). as institutions like apix crop up in africa and around the world—there are in fact hundreds of affiliated investment agencies of this sort—we require careful ethnographic work to understand how local and global imperatives, histories, and vocabularies are melded and fused to produce new state forms, and how these emergent governing bodies come to shape policy and engage internationally. second, we come to see that these technologies and governing structures are not merely imported from the global north, reinterpreted and adapted for use in the global south. instead, by placing their work squarely in the flux and flow of these material exchanges, apix staff members cast themselves as legitimate experts, subverting narratives that presume africa’s peripherality to the grand narrative of technological and political innovation. in this way, elhadji’s instructive words and guiding hand subtly reiterated my status as an apprentice within this global workspace and recentered apix as a hub of knowledge production and instruction. proceeding from this perspective, this essay considers what we might learn about state-making, technological development, and african innovation by training our ethnographic gaze on everyday efforts to “keep things lightweight.” origin stories first unveiled by microsoft in 1990, powerpoint is now reportedly installed on more than 1 billion computers around the world (parks 2012, np). it began to take shape in the 1980s, when self-proclaimed creator robert gaskins and his colleagues fused the logics and aesthetics of 35mm slide presentations, flip charts, and overhead transparencies with the emergent capacity of windows and macintosh computing systems to build a program that designed transparencies for laser printing (gaskins 2012, 120–22). by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a rudimentary graphics program that prepared identically formatted slides for projection using a computer. powerpoint’s swift advance marked the culmination of rapid advancements in personal computing, growing sets of complex data, and institutional imperatives to synthesize and repackage information for an interdisciplinary audience. not only were users able to streamline complexity to communicate across departmental or institutional boundaries using powerpoint, but the files were easily portable and thus facilitated local and even global collaboration, exchange, and movement. one of its most notable innovations, according to gaskins (2012, 85), was that it empowered the presenter to take individual control over the presentation. no longer was there a need to rely on assistants or other intermediaries to tediously produce 35mm slides or transparencies by hand. instead, individual users could themselves tinker with ready-made templates, trim unruly data into tidy bullet points, and import clip art for visual effect. what resulted was a novel way of bundling information into “presentations,” the cornerstone of business culture beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, according to gaskins. and so, by the 1990s, powerpoint had cemented itself as “a cog in the great machine,” becoming a global powerhouse with 95 percent market control (parker 2001). what once was an underdog startup venture with dubious economic potential had quickly solidified into a standard mode of communication adopted by national governments, international and nongovernmental organizations, educators, and private-sector firms around the world. yet while powerpoint is an indisputably pervasive feature of many anthropologists’ field and worksites, there has been scant ethnographic research on this program, its artifacts and performances, and its powerful effects on institutional life and the production of knowledge.2 if we do not entirely “see right through” powerpoint slides and practices as users and researchers, counting on them to quickly and transparently convey information, we typically dismiss them as hopelessly reductive and uncreative, or as a troubling sign of the increasing corporatization of our work environments and routines.3 during my early days at apix, i likewise gave very little thought to powerpoint’s material and ideological ascendancy at the agency. i suppose i had imagined the program as a straightforward western import that had arrived there belatedly, carried to dakar along a current of refurbished keyboards, modems, and floppy disks, or tucked into the briefcase of an expatriate employed at an international organization in the city. much of the scholarly and popular literature on the rise of information communication technologies (icts) in africa has described precisely this kind of north-south diffusion.4 in such accounts, africa frequently figures as a vibrant secondhand market for electronic goods or as a site of technological reconfiguration, but not necessarily of primary invention or production, a point clapperton chakanetsa mavhunga (2017) makes clear in the introduction to his edited volume on africa and technology. driven by material lack, infrastructural instability, and cultural ingenuity, enterprising africans adapt western devices, platforms, and practices to local contexts, indigenizing their meanings and functions, elaborating unexpected possibilities, and repositioning africa as a continent on the brink of economic, political, and technological transformation (archambault 2017; burrell 2012; de bruijn 2009; donner 2007). julie soleil archambault (2017), for instance, has demonstrated the complexities of technological uptake in urban mozambique, exploring young people’s ambivalent but ingenious incorporation of cell phones into their everyday lives and relationships. in the hands of these youth, technology designed elsewhere takes on very specific local meanings and purposes, and both technology and intimacy are altered in the process. likewise, jonathan donner’s (2007) work explores the strategic use of cell phone “missed calls” to communicate predetermined messages, pointing at the capacity of rwandans’ technological practice to shake up cell-phone design and marketing practices more broadly.5 these frameworks offer an essential theoretical and political intervention, restoring agency to african users, but they did not prove particularly helpful for making sense of my apix colleagues’ engagements with powerpoint. for those with whom i worked, powerpoint had not made its way belatedly to the african continent, and apix staff were not simply putting a senegalese touch on an imported western invention. quite to the contrary, apix executives described themselves and their agency as intimately implicated in powerpoint’s emergence. just as powerpoint was gathering form and taking off in the 1980s and 1990s, so, too, were structural adjustment reforms in senegal. these reforms would help spur the creation of apix in later decades, but they first dismantled legacies of dependable public-sector employment, spurred rapid urbanization, and sharply devalued the regional currency, sparking economic and social upheaval (melly 2017). as a direct result, migration abroad intensified, especially to the united states (diop 2008; riccio 2005). this was particularly the case for cosmopolitan elites like elhadji, who used their economic advantage to (temporarily) escape conditions at home, fueling la fuite des cerveaux (brain drain) from the continent. with few exceptions, apix’s top-level administrators had attended university in the united states, canada, or france during this time, where they studied business, finance, international development, english, or marketing.6 after completing their degrees, most of them accepted positions in various private-sector offices and worked for several years before returning to senegal. it was within these companies that apix employees first encountered and contributed to an embryonic powerpoint culture, honing skills, developing vocabularies, and accumulating experiences that they would come to draw on later. and it was there—in the senegalese diaspora—where they began to reconsider what both the senegalese state and bureaucratic work could look like.7 many of my apix colleagues felt impelled to return to senegal after the landmark election of president abdoulaye wade in 2000. wade’s political ascendancy marked the end of forty years of single-party rule, and it ushered in a new era of national optimism built on intensified neoliberal reform (see diouf 2013). launched just months after wade’s election, apix was one of the most visible instantiations of these aspirations. it was a hybrid institution of sorts: it was assembled by the world bank using an existing template, built on the remnants of an earlier state program, and situated outside senegal’s conventional ministry system, with the agency’s director general and her staff reporting directly to the president rather than a minister.8 the agency is currently a member of the world bank group’s multinational investment guarantee agency (miga). miga member organizations throughout the world, currently totaling more than four hundred (not all of which are affiliated with nation-states), are given access to expertise and resources aimed at creating, maintaining, and promoting a business-friendly environment in any context. a quick glance at a handful of websites managed by other miga members reveals the profound similarity in approach and form shared by member organizations—from the “one-stop-shop” concept to the designation and promotion of “priority sectors.” thus, apix is at once culturally distinct, tethered tightly to senegalese democratic traditions and structures, and yet astonishingly similar in form to many other contemporary offices like it. in their presentations, apix executives spoke little of the world bank’s role, preferring to celebrate the agency as an achievement of the senegalese state, even as they adopted global priorities and vocabularies to deliver these presentations. luring investment to senegal—a country with scant natural resources, a largely “unskilled” labor force, and relatively few proficient english speakers—was no easy task. with so many developing countries “opened up” by pro-market reforms during the past two decades, it was challenging to convince foreign investors to build an enterprise in senegal when they could invest in more developed and promising markets. during the time of my stage and in the years that followed, foreign direct-investment (fdi) rates thus remained relatively flat and accounted for a tiny proportion of the country’s gross domestic product (see figure 1), as was the case even in african countries with more established foreign-investment circuits. what did set senegal apart, my colleagues believed, were its strong democratic traditions and its long-standing commitment to regulatory reforms. and so apix executives focused their efforts on simplifying legal codes, streamlining processes, and devising ways to “accompany the investor” through an unfamiliar and assumedly precarious economic terrain. figure 1. foreign direct investment (2000–2010), net inflows (percentage of gdp), comparing senegal with kenya, south africa, ethiopia, and ghana. data courtesy of world bank indicator. figure courtesy of doug wright. my apix interlocutors quickly identified powerpoint as central to this work. “we have always used powerpoint here,” elhadji boasted during my initial tour of the headquarters. powerpoint, he explained, offered an ideal means of organizing and relaying information for potential investors, who themselves were presumed adept users. so convinced was he of the transformative potential of the software that elhadji had even brought in a powerpoint “expert” to hold a workshop for staff members during the agency’s infancy. the consultant introduced them to particular aesthetic conventions, suggesting things like the standardized use of a singular, clear font that would make slides legible to the audience. “this also allows us to share the slides within the office more easily,” he added. apix staff members adopted these suggestions with zeal, elhadji recounted, certain that this routinized and standardized aesthetic would streamline office practice and extend the agency’s reach. at the same time, employees saw powerpoint as a platform for experimentation, one that enabled them to assert their personal styles and business acumen in globally legible ways. powerpoint file making was nothing like the more mundane bureaucratic tasks of filling in forms or writing formal letters, elhadji insisted to me. as another colleague, moussa, explained, “powerpoint allows me to apply my skills. i couldn’t do this kind of creative work in a ministry office.” powerpoint, in other words, signaled a new kind of aspirational state practice, one centered (at least ostensibly) on creativity, innovation, and extrovertedness, rather than on rote form-following and provincialized state politics. it enabled staff members to link postcolonial governance with technology and business culture in visible and tangible ways. writing about various ruined architectural landmarks of postwar monrovia, liberia, danny hoffman (2017, 87) has argued that modernist architecture “belongs in and to african cities no less than to cities anywhere on the planet.” monrovia’s monumental spaces—and their excesses, aspirations, and inaccessibilities—are not peripheral to the modernist project, but rather integral to and constitutive of it. similarly, my apix colleagues did not see powerpoint as an imported tool that they belatedly adopted and vernacularized to suit their african environs. instead, they imagined themselves as contributing in early and important ways to the program’s global ascendancy. as they tinkered with a fledgling powerpoint program in offices and institutions throughout the diaspora, future apix executives were in fact experimenting with modes of working, collaborating, and presenting ideas that they would soon use to reimagine the senegalese state. “i always knew i would return to senegal,” said sidi, whom everyone called “the american” for his tall stature and years spent living in the united states. “and so i learned as much as i could [in the united states] so i could build things here.” this perspective forces a crucial shift: “instead of being a mere user,” mavhunga (2014, 16) has persuasively argued in his work on african technological development, “the african becomes a designer who makes technology, not just someone who appropriates or (mis)uses incoming technology.” diasporic networks become critical “transient workspaces,” borrowing from mavhunga, in which innovators work out global technological futures. it was amid these frenetic encounters and transfers that weight began to emerge as a distinctly consequential property, one that could determine how effectively and expansively information could move across institutional and nation-state boundaries, and how, in turn, the senegalese state was perceived as a global actor. these preoccupations with weight were informed by international discourse about economic development and good governance, by everyday engagement with technologies like powerpoint, and by national anxieties and aspirations. they were also implicitly shaped, perhaps, by cultural conceptions that linked heaviness (diis) with difficulty and burden, and lightness (woyof) with openness and friendliness, though my colleagues never articulated these connections in any precise way.9 in what follows, i examine how apix staff members coax forth weightlessness and to what effect. coaxing weightlessness situated on a quiet, tree-lined street a short walk from the presidential palace, apix’s stately headquarters stands as a testament to a new kind of african state. many senegalese ministries are housed in aging independence-era structures that are dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and sparsely furnished. people from various economic and social backgrounds shuffle through these spaces each day, as they file petitions, pay fees, seek official stamps, or request documents. in stark contrast, apix’s headquarters is not open to the general public; visitors must have a prearranged appointment to proceed past the uniformed guards at the agency’s entrance (see figure 2). by signaling out and catering to a global elite, these spaces make a bold statement about the level of attention and care an investor—not the country’s citizenry as a whole—can expect from the senegalese government. once inside, guests sip nescafé and browse glossy brochures in the reception area, where contemporary paintings by renowned local artists share wall space with brightly colored posters promoting senegal as an ideal investment destination. heavy doors lead into the main services area, called the “one-stop shop” (le guichet unique), where a young and predominantly female staff interfaces directly with potential and current investors (see figure 2). here, blank forms and promotional materials are kept in short, neat stacks on meticulously ordered shelves. investor dossiers are filed away out of sight; a few are discreetly pulled out at a time and kept in small tidy stacks on desks or photocopied, reviewed, and replaced. in adjoining offices, representatives from various government bodies—including the ministry of justice, the ministry of finances and budget (mefp), the ministry of labor, and the african organization for intellectual property (oapi), and customs—circulate in and out throughout the day, dispensing expertise, collecting documents, and issuing approval at various points in the investment process. a short hallway leads to the agency’s “documentation center,” a small but welcoming space that boasts elegant shelves filled with world bank documents, brightly colored promotional materials, master’s theses, and quarterly reports, all tidily ordered and perpetually weeded out. to the left, a sweeping staircase leads to spacious upstairs conference rooms and amply appointed administrators’ offices. here, too, paperwork is largely contained from view, filed away in cabinets or stored in digital form. figure 2. entrance to the agence pour la promotion des investissements et des grands travaux (agency for the promotion of investments and major works, or apix) headquarters. these open layouts are intended to appeal to an international clientele, promote teamwork among senior staff members, and enable collaboration with representatives from other public and private-sector offices throughout the city. “team members” are expected to work together on projects, to troubleshoot when problems arise, and to “do a little bit of everything,” in the words of one staff member, rather than focus solely on their own workload and duties. in our conversations, apix staff took pride in the fact that meetings at the agency began on time, deadlines were firm, and standards of performance were exacting, “just like in american corporations.” one employee described to me the great satisfaction he gained from working for an organization where results were “immediate and visible” in ways they would not be within a ministry office. i spent much of my time among the agency’s airy and fluid second-floor offices. i shared an office with elhadji, powerpoint facilitator extraordinaire, and moussa, a young, tech-savvy associate who worked on the communications team. moussa was excited to be able to translate his skills in marketing and design into state work—tinkering with layouts for promotional materials, helping produce radio advertisements, collaborating on translations, and, of course, assembling powerpoint presentations. “apix is constantly working to anticipate the future and to figure out what tools we need to communicate effectively with the public,” moussa explained early in my tenure at the agency. this stood in stark contrast to typical state offices, which he and his colleagues perpetually cast as slow to innovate. on one particular afternoon, moussa was busily preparing to launch a new initiative that would use text messages (sms) to alert investors, media, and other relevant parties about apix developments or upcoming events. this strategy, he proclaimed, would enable the agency to “occupy space” (occuper l’espace) in entirely new ways. in contrast to posters or newspaper advertisements of yore, text messages transmitted information in targeted, sophisticated, and relevant ways. they permeated networks effectively and dissipated quickly, leaving behind no material trace. apix’s streamlined spaces and moussa’s text-messaging campaign, i argue, form part of a broader effort to transform the materiality of bureaucracy at the agency. paperwork is, perhaps, the most salient sign of bureaucratic life (gupta 2012, 143; see also hull 2012a; weber 2009), and it was a sign that deeply troubled apix staff members. as a spate of rich ethnographic work has explored, documentary practices are a crucial technique for imposing rational order and cultivating modern habits and institutions, particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts (das and poole 2004; gitelman 2014; göpfert 2013; gordillo 2006; hull 2012a, 2012b; navaro-yashin 2007; tarlo 2003; weber 2009). for bruno latour (1986), documents achieve these feats by “deflating” vast troves of information, much of it contradictory or complexly nuanced, into tight paragraphs, tidy charts, and clean graphs. it is through the process of inscription, as latour calls it, that the document itself—and not the complex practices, technologies, relationships, and negotiations it distills and encodes—comes to have social worth, agency, and mobility. inscription thus involves a distillation and physical compression of the material record, which enables, in turn, a more effective circulation of information. powerpoint, i argue, plays a key role at apix in continued processes of the inscription of information. despite its quite modern surfaces, apix has inherited this institutional emphasis on bureaucratic documentary practice. indeed, during my research years, formal processes of investment in senegal involved a good deal of paper. just as the file is regarded as the “workhorse” of pakistani postcolonial bureaucracy (hull 2012b, 113) and “the critical unit that organizes bureaucratic life” in contemporary india (gupta 2012), so, too, did the dossier form the cornerstone of apix office practice. investors were required to assemble a physical dossier—which included criminal records, tax forms, declaration forms, information about assets, and proof of capital—and to deposit this collection of physical paperwork in person or (in the case of some foreign or diasporic investors) by proxy.10 these dossiers circulated through and beyond apix’s walls, linking various state offices. apix is also a key node in the mobilization of various other kinds of documents, including brochures, posters, standardized forms, official letters, memos and other interoffice communications, and reports. staff members of all ranks spent a significant part of their days filtering, filing, hauling, studying, retrieving, approving, signing, stamping, rejecting, destroying, and photocopying paperwork. all this paper provoked a great deal of anxiety. apix staff members frequently spoke of their fears that paper would pile up and clutter the agency’s modern and appealing offices, that dossiers would be misplaced or that document practices would stall, slowing down the office. potential or current investors, in turn, would be turned off by what they would see as a bumbling and outmoded bureaucracy. one afternoon, for instance, i was shadowing bintou, a staff member in the one-stop shop, as she worked directly with clients depositing dossiers. when one potential investor came in to add a missing document to his file, bintou quietly excused herself and a hushed but frantic search ensued, as the dossier was nowhere to be found. though bintou eventually managed to track down the file—it had gotten wedged inside another dossier and traveled upstairs with a stack of paper—the incident spurred bintou’s manager to begin the afternoon’s staff meeting with a discussion of changes they might make to avoid similar mishaps in the future. as i have written about in greater detail elsewhere (melly 2017), keeping papers moving and avoiding bureaucratic embouteillages (bottlenecks) was a critical daily preoccupation during the time of my research. to help facilitate paper flow and avoid tie-ups, various ministry offices, such as the senegalese customs office, have installed representatives in satellite offices that cluster around the one-stop shop, as i gestured to above. in this way, both the institutional layout and daily routines have been profoundly structured by the necessary presence of paper and by the looming threat of unruly piles. these institutional bottlenecks, moussa explained one day, were a legacy of french colonialism: though colonial paperwork practices helped to organize and legitimize the postcolonial state, he said, they also made the institution “heavy” (lourd) and slow. in this sense, documents and dossiers were for my apix colleagues as much a sign of modernity’s arrival (riles 2006) as they portended its imminent unraveling. paper thus remained comparatively absent from apix’s physical spaces and future-focused imaginaries, even if it was always there. my colleagues made explicit that these containment policies formed part of a concerted effort to distinguish the agency from conventional ministry offices, where disorganized piles of paper are perhaps the most striking feature of the workspace, and where tedious and all-consuming concerns about paper itself are thought to distract state workers from effecting “real” change. on several occasions, i overheard apix staff workers chide their colleagues for their lax attention to the documents spread or stacked on their desks. “this is not a ministry office!” some would quip, seemingly in jest. similarly, when i would return from meetings or interviews at other government offices in the city, my colleagues would sometimes jokingly inquire about how much paper i encountered while there or how long i’d spent just waiting around. staff members imagined their work as an antidote to the kind of bureaucratic “red tape” that gupta (2012) describes. for gupta, the work of bureaucratic writing—and the unevenness and arbitrariness of inclusion, redistribution, and care that writing processes necessarily entail—inflicts a kind of structural violence on the lives of the poor. my apix colleagues, by contrast, worried more about the materiality of paper—its physical and visual weight, its uneven and strained movements—and its impacts on investors and state workers themselves. figure 3. le guichet unique [the “one stop shop”]. promotional photo of le bureau d’appui à la création d’entreprise (the business creation support bureau, or bce). note the relatively contained presence of paper. in a sense, powerpoint offered a technique to further compress the state’s material record—for turning paper into less paper—and for loosening the agency from the grip of postcolonial bureaucracy. but distilling decades of often vague and incompatible information into clean charts and simple bullet points required a lot of work and a bit of creative decision-making.11 while working to proofread and edit a colleague’s english powerpoint presentation one afternoon, i encountered a slide that estimated senegal’s gross domestic product (gdp) per capita to be about $500 us dollars. this seemed out of sync with another presentation i had completed just the week before, and so i began to dig more deeply, pulling up previous presentations and doing online database searches. i quickly uncovered dozens of different estimates that ranged anywhere from a few hundred dollars to nearly two thousand dollars. when i asked elhadji for advice on how to proceed, he obligingly picked up his phone and called the director of the agency’s documentation center downstairs. after the two men had chatted amicably about their families, traffic jams, and a recent soccer game, elhadji asked the director if he had an updated gdp figure. the call ended quickly thereafter, and elhadji reported that there was no consensus. after all, he explained, statistics like these varied widely in a country where it was difficult to draw the boundaries around the formal economy. peering at my laptop screen, elhadji pointed to the figure $1,700—which i had drawn from the cia world factbook—and suggested i simply delete the “1” and leave it at $700. that figure seemed more credible (fiable), he said, especially since the dollar had recently fallen. it fell in line with many of the other recent presentations in the online repository. $1,700, he worried, might seem too ambitious a figure and leave investors skeptical of apix’s pitch, while anything lower might deter investors who did not have experience working in low-income countries. a “credible” figure in this instance simply meant an inconspicuous one, one that faded into the background without attracting sustained scrutiny. staff members also exploited powerpoint’s crisp bullet-point form and eye-catching graphics to produce an unambiguous portrait of economic possibility and political reform in senegal. in anticipation of an upcoming investment pitch in spain, for instance, elhadji prepared a slide that he titled “key dates.” in crisp yellow text set against a dark blue background, he assembled half a dozen important historical events. he had made some of the entries larger than others, he told me, to reflect their relative importance in senegal’s history. interestingly, the largest entry—larger even than senegal’s independence—was “1994: devaluation of currency—turning point.” when i pressed, elhadji explained that he intended to focus on this point in his presentation, as it would hold the most interest for the potential investors in attendance. devaluation, he continued, had been un épreuve (a hardship, a trial) that had tested senegal’s fortitude, but it had also paved the way for apix’s interventions (see also melly 2013). this explanation did not surprise me, as elhadji often spoke of currency devaluation as transformative. thanks to the stylistic affordances of powerpoint, he was able to frame a particular historical narrative that placed economic liberalization and apix itself at the center of the story. economic austerity and neoliberal restructuring have met with plenty of skepticism and resistance in senegal (see melly 2013), both in the general public and among political factions and more conventional ministry offices. but powerpoint helped transform the variation, ambiguity, and uncertainty at the heart of these controversial projects into clear and confident bullet points. apix staff members also used powerpoint to provide potential investors with an overview of the investment process in senegal. they crafted flowchart-style slides that described the evolution and movement of the investor dossier, presenting the process as seamless, predictable, and without bureaucratic bottlenecks. they then uploaded these presentations onto the agency’s website or projected them during investment pitches. in these instances, powerpoint files rendered visible and transparent apix’s everyday activities, expectations, and structure, thus fulfilling the agency’s mission of relaying information, guiding and “accompanying” the investor, and keeping the state out of the way of the “real” work of economic transformation. they channeled the audience members’ attention, guiding them through presentations, but also offering potential investors an institutional map for navigating the investment process. indeed, the sparse and graphic form of powerpoint itself helped produce a vision of the streamlined state and its partners for potential investors and apix staff members alike. moreover, stashed from view on the agency’s intranet, powerpoint files did not clutter offices in the ways that official reports, investment forms, and brochures threatened to do. executives downloaded and stored powerpoint files on usb drives, which could easily be stowed in a briefcase or suit pocket and carried along on an investment pitch abroad, accompanied by just one or two apix staff members. in this way, powerpoint had enabled a vision of the state that was compact and spectacularly portable, tailored precisely to an international clientele. one afternoon, however, as the lights flickered in our downtown office, i was reminded of just how tenuous these aspirations of compressed state presence and global portability really were. electricity outages, which staff members typically cast as an effect of the “incomplete” privatization of public assets, occurred quite often during the time of my research.12 bracing themselves for another disruption, my office mates rushed to produce backup copies of the powerpoint presentations and other projects on which they had been working. in an instant, the large communal printer in the hallway outside my office whirred to life, sputtering piles of paper. as i watched my colleagues return to their desks with arms full of printed presentations and documents, i marveled at the amount of paper this supposedly weightless state required after all. in an era of unrelenting economic austerity, infrastructural overload, and meager economic growth, apix’s ambitions for an unfettered state existed in uneasy tension with bureaucracy-as-usual. what resulted was a very complex and incomplete transformation of the state’s material and ideological form, one that undermined any facile notions of the african state’s seeming progress or decay. indeed, by probing weightlessness ethnographically, we begin to perceive both the senegalese state and powerpoint as complexly relational forms, as caught up in “the processes of the world’s ongoing generation and regeneration” (ingold 2007, 9). projecting the state underwhelmed by the bland and predictable presentations i had found in apix’s intranet repository, i set my sights on becoming a powerpoint innovator in the early days of my internship. i’d spend hours searching for compelling clip art and experimenting with font and color choices, eager to put my college art degree to good use—and perhaps to earn some credibility in my new office. but when i unveiled my first presentation draft to elhadji, he promptly suggested a series of changes to bring my slides into alignment with the others in the repository. apix had adopted arial as its standard typeface, he explained, because studies had shown that it was easier for audiences to read and thus would make the state’s message clearer to readers. bold color choices and unnecessary graphics might likewise distract the audience. indeed, it quickly became clear that my apix colleagues assembled powerpoint files with a high degree of restraint rather than with a sense of brash creativity. they carefully worded every bullet point, cautiously selected each icon. they built their slide presentations on previous files, in terms of both form and content, and they saved them anonymously in the intranet database, stripping the files of any sense of clear authorship or singularity. mirco göpfert (2013) describes the aesthetic pleasures of report writing among nigerien gendarmes, attending in particular to the ways in which they open up space for creativity and individual expression amid the confines of bureaucratic form. at apix, particularly well-crafted powerpoint slides likewise garnered praise and attention from executive staff members; notably effective slides were copied and pasted into future slide decks. but in contrast to the reports göpfert describes, an ideal powerpoint file was one that called little attention to itself or its creator or creators. instead, a successful powerpoint slide receded into the background, allowing the presentation—and the presenter—to instead take center stage. apix’s most charismatic presenters were skilled at using spare bullet points to keep their performances on track, while also embellishing these points to engage audience members. they spoke fluently, confidently, and convincingly in the language of the audience. through embodied performance and oratory strategy, apix executives temporarily and spectacularly expanded the state’s material record and presence once again, giving the state a new weight and substance. though most presentations took place abroad, i did have the opportunity to attend a few powerpoint presentations within apix’s headquarters and elsewhere in the city. at all these presentations, storytelling took center stage. during a presentation to a visiting contingent of high-ranking nigerian military officials, for instance, elhadji recited lively tales of senegal’s first president, the preeminent léopold sédar senghor. taking his cue from a singular, succinct bullet point—“senghor: forefather of independence”—elhadji unraveled an elaborate story of senghor’s commitment to publicly funded education, global democratic engagement, and religious and ethnic tolerance. his narrative seemed to blur the mythical and the historical. as he spoke, he drew a clear contrast between the sociopolitical histories of senegal and nigeria, playfully teasing his military guests about their country’s history of coups, ethnic and religious tensions, and corruption. i shifted somewhat uncomfortably in my seat at his comparisons, worried that he might offend his audience, but his guests responded with hearty laughter and applause, just as he had anticipated they would. elhadji was in fact retooling a repertoire of joking practices imagined to bridge frictious ethnic and kinship divides (radcliffe-brown 1940). similarly, at an investment fair held at what was then the premier hotel in dakar, nafissatou used her schooling and professional experiences in senegal and abroad as a means to describe the educational possibilities and challenges facing the country’s youth. “it’s often thought that girls should stay at home, find a husband,” she said wryly, coaxing laughter from her all-male, largely south asian and arab audience. like elhadji, nafissatou used humor to work across cultural and gender divides. dressed in a perfectly starched white boubou and standing in front of a brilliantly illuminated screen, the lights dimmed, her physical presence was captivating and her stories commanded attention. she contrasted her own transnational educational and professional itinerary with the life of her mother, working to tease out larger trends in post-independence education, gender relations, and professional development. as she spoke, she painted a compelling picture of an african state deeply invested in public education and democratic empowerment, enriched by an appreciation of tradition. though strikingly modern in many ways, powerpoint presentations were also an accumulation of centuries of performative culture and oral documentary practice. to be sure, elhadji, nafissatou, and other apix executives spoke frequently of the presentation skills and approaches they acquired while studying or working abroad. but they were also explicit about the fact that oratory artistry and display have long animated religious, political, and social life in senegal. “we [senegalese] tell stories,” elhadji told me plainly during one of our afternoon chats. senghor once theorized oral culture as “a fundamental aspect of blackness” (cited in mbaye 1990), and such descriptions of nation and orality persist in contemporary senegal. elhadji’s lauding of senghor was reminiscent of senegal’s griot (géwél, in wolof) performers—musicians, poets, and storytellers noted for their facility with language and charged with preserving cultural history (cosaan) and genealogies (tang 2007; see also b. hoffman 2001). nafissatou’s recitation of her own life story was likewise vaguely reminiscent of female griots’ praise poetry (taasu), which often takes on an autobiographical bent (mcnee 2000). griots are caught up in a web of patron-client relations: they perform a highly specialized kind of labor in exchange for remuneration from families of higher social standing. their performances continue to mark major life transitions like weddings and births, but they also infuse political rallies and other public events, keeping ancestors alive, celebrating the continuity of lineages, and carrying treasured collective values into the present and future. interestingly, judith irvine (1995, 253–54) points out that griots are traditionally imagined to be “lightweight,” excitable, and theatrical, character traits thought to complement the “heavy,” measured, and stolid character of noble socio-occupational groups and to rouse them to action. apix’s executives are not modern griots, but the ways they approach their work have most certainly been shaped by centuries of praise-singing, storytelling, oral documentation, and patron-client relations.13 their powerpoint presentations bear the traces, too, of wolof-language theatrical dramas that grapple with social change or historical events (coulibaly 2019); of long-standing performative joking practices that both illuminate and maintain social hierarchies between ethnic groups, generational cohorts, or family clans (de jong 2005; gueye 2011); and of the marked emphasis placed on “sartorial mastery” as a mode of communication (mustafa 2001; see also grabski 2009; heath 1992) among both women and men. in ways both implicit and explicit, elhadji and nafissatou drew on established performative conventions to breathe new substance and weight into the otherwise thinly developed slides. these elaborations were as much enabled by the powerpoint form as by the preconditions for the form’s flourishing at apix. at once heavily embellished and spectacularly immaterial, apix’s staff members’ presentations both responded to and defied calls for weightlessness. a successful presentation entailed more than personal charisma and oratory prowess; it also required a dependable physical and technological infrastructure (see also larkin 2008; von schnitzler 2013). an essential part of the powerpoint performance involved properly connecting necessary cables, turning on the projector, accessing the usb drive, locating and opening the appropriate file, and projecting the slides onto the wall. the successfully illuminated slides frequently elicited quiet awe and relief among apix staff members, if not among members of their audience, who typically took powerpoint for granted. this was, in part, because the technology made spectacularly visible apix’s privileged connections to the nation’s electricity supply, to the internet, and to global circuits of expertise and business practice. it was also because these slides made the senegalese state materially present in specific and important ways: although the slides commanded attention during a presentation, they would disappear as soon as the presentation was concluded, when they would promptly become just another file in the virtual archive until they were resurrected, edited, reformatted, printed, projected, or translated for reuse elsewhere. the files moved with ease—from computer screens at apix to meeting rooms elsewhere in the city to forums in spain or presentations in china—making senegal substantively present, without leaving a trace of the state behind. in this way, powerpoint files fulfilled the agency’s objectives of guiding investors, streamlining procedures, and illuminating senegal’s future—work that people themselves could not do alone. the files both resembled and engendered the good structurally adjusted state—a state that was properly contained and restrained and that worked in the service of neoliberal expansion and global integration. at the same time, it was a state enriched by precolonial traditions of engaging audiences, chronicling and performing histories, and highlighting obligations. it was a state form that eschewed the heavy residues of french bureaucratic culture even as it produced new “weight” of its own. indeed, the apix state form relied on a much heftier infrastructural apparatus—of computers, projectors, drives, electrical networks, cables, international aircraft—than its paper-driven predecessor. this insight recalls observations offered by scholars studying transparency, who have demonstrated that “the will to transparency has a tendency to reproduce opacity,” as william mazzarella (2006, 500) has put it. “one of the great structuring ironies of our age,” he continues, “is the tendency for increasingly elaborate systems of mediation to be deployed in the pursuit of immediation.” the weightless state, emptied of its postcolonial bloat, seemed only to take on new substance, new complexity, new weight as it became entangled with powerpoint. making senegal matter “the properties of materials,” ingold (2007, 15) reminds his readers, “are not attributes but histories” that emerge over time, relationally and processually. in this essay, i have likewise approached weightlessness as a history of movements and encounters spanning many decades and several continents. focusing on these material fluctuations has enabled me to shift my gaze away from powerpoint or apix as an accomplished entity or a determinative force and instead toward the ways in which “the state” and “technological media” rub up against, unravel, reshape, and become entangled with each other. what emerges, in many ways, is a history not only of “weightlessness” as an institutional goal but also perhaps of african state-making and technological innovation more generally. it is a story that unsettles standard narratives about technological uptake and global flow, which tend to position africans as passively, reluctantly, or belatedly involved in technological and political developments alike. as they stashed piles of papers from view, downloaded and circulated powerpoint files, selected subdued colors and standard fonts, connected cords, entered passwords, tightly framed bullet points, and finessed their oral presentations, apix staff members made senegal matter in specific and consequential ways—they gave the small african state substantive form, and they made that form worthy of attention. while most of apix’s foreign investment-promotion work took place abroad, at a distant remove from the agency’s dakar headquarters, i did have the chance to engage with potential investors on occasion, when they passed by the office to deposit paperwork or when they attended investment fairs or other events in the city. many foreign investors seemed rather unconvinced by the agency’s investment pitches and powerpoint slides. after nafissatou’s presentation at the seaside hotel, for instance, a cadre of investors from dubai approached me during the coffee break with deep reservations about investing in senegal. nafissatou’s presentation had been well polished and engaging, they acknowledged, but senegal itself did not make for a particularly distinct or compelling investment destination. nothing shared during the presentation had convinced them otherwise. one told me, “it would make more sense to take our money to ghana, perhaps. senegal’s port is still sleeping. and at least in ghana they speak english.” apix executives took investor feedback and lagging fdi rates quite seriously. they used this information to continuously redirect their approach and pitch, to rally for changes to regulatory codes, or to find ways to streamline bureaucratic processes. but to see the work of apix, or indeed of powerpoint presentations, as merely aimed at generating investment would misapprehend the nature and complexity of this kind of work altogether. indeed, elhadji, nafissatou, moussa, bintou, and their colleagues saw themselves instead as shaping and circulating new modes of governance and communication. “apix is a trendsetter,” elhadji loved to proclaim. the agency had won a few international awards during my time there for its innovations in investment promotion and communication. but for elhadji, the systematic and innovative use of powerpoint constituted one of their greatest accomplishments. he had been invited to host workshops at state ministry offices to introduce them to the software program and its affordances. and the nigerian military officials we had met with had likewise tried to cajole him into helping teach state ministry workers in abuja. apix executives and staff were just as intent on transforming the material substance and public presence of the state and shaping african media, then, as they were on luring foreign capital. “senegal” comes to matter for these state workers not just as an investment destination, as a recipient of foreign capital or imported technology, but as both global node and consequential substance in the information era. abstract executives at apix, senegal’s state investment-promotion agency, cast their office as the vanguard of a new kind of state formation, one remade through decades of austerity and resolutely focused on the nation’s future. they imagined powerpoint as especially critical to this mission, as it had the potential to move the state beyond the confines of paper form and parochial bureaucratic routine and into the wider world. in this article, i explore the complex relationship between this state agency and this presentation software package. more specifically, i examine how preoccupations with weight shape state work and technological practice. by attending to everyday aspirations for weightlessness and resultant shifts in material forms, i argue, we might better understand the complex and consequential relationship between state and media in senegal and elsewhere. [state; technology; africa; materiality; powerpoint; structural adjustment; media] notes acknowledgments this essay has taken shape over many years through conversations with many generous scholars. in the earliest stages of writing, i benefited from perceptive and encouraging feedback from neha vora, inderpal grewal, and jon anjaria, as well as an american anthropological association panel discussion. pinky hota offered extensive comments and helped me refocus and rework the essay at a crucial moment. two remarkable sets of reviewers helped me sharpen my thinking and improved the essay enormously. my greatest debts, however, are owed to elhadji and moussa, as i call them here, for our powerpoint work sessions and probing conversations. i am fortunate to have been their apprentice. 1. apix stands for l’agence nationale pour la promotion des investissements et des grands travaux. 2. notable exceptions to this include stark and paravel 2008, wakeford 2006, and prentice 2019. 3. the vast majority of scholarly and public writing about powerpoint is focused on evaluating it as “good” or “bad.” for examples, see kaplan 2011, tufte 2003, bumiller 2010, thompson 2003, and cyphert 2004. 4. for an excellent critique of this sort, see mavhunga 2014. 5. this theoretical stance extends to sociopolitical formulations like capitalism and democracy. frederic schaffer (2000) offers an excellent analysis of local understandings of demokaraasi in senegal, demonstrating that democracy is not simply an “import” but rather complexly imbricated with indigenous modes of governance and collective action. 6. transnational migration has long played a critical role in keeping national and household budgets afloat in senegal, particularly in the decades following structural adjustment (melly 2017; see also diop 2008). moreover, top positions in government and the private sector are frequently awarded to candidates educated abroad, as was the case at apix. all four of senegal’s presidents have received some of their education in france. 7. critical to my thinking here is victoria bernal’s (2014) pathbreaking work on nation-making, new media, and transnational migration in the eritrean diaspora. 8. senegal’s system of governance is modeled on that of france, with a popularly elected president who chooses a prime minister to serve as head of government. in consultation with the president, the prime minister appoints a council of ministers to lead more specialized posts. the number of ministries in operation varies, as new ministries are instituted and others are folded together or dissolved. 9. importantly, my apix colleagues discussed the weight of things—and indeed most matters—in french rather than the more widely and frequently spoken wolof, as french has long been the language of institutional governance in senegal. wolof was sometimes spoken with senegalese investors in the one-stop shop, but never (aside from a phrase here and there) in the executive offices. 10. there was no internet-based mechanism for submission, though staff members expressed hopes of eventually creating one. 11. morten jerven’s poor numbers (2013) does an excellent job elaborating the sociohistorical context in which this statistical uncertainty arises and describing the impacts of such wildly divergent and often inaccurate economic data. 12. in 1999, senelec (société national de l’electricité de senegal), senegal’s national electricity company, was privatized and became part of an energy consortium with a canadian company. this partnership was broken just a year later, in 2000, and senelec returned to state control. many of my colleagues at apix interpreted the relentless electricity outages as a sign of the dangers of incomplete privatization. while the office did have a generator, it only ran equipment deemed “essential,” and this did not include computers and printers at the time. 13. there is a fascinating literature on the figure of the “modern griot” in contemporary 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transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.05 remembering place: the temporality of trauma in rudraprayag after the 2013 flash floods cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 592-615, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.05 remembering place: the temporality of trauma in rudraprayag after the 2013 flash floods gideon thomas mathson christ university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2810-1909 yeh ukhitmath nahin, yeh abh dukhimath hai (this is no longer ukhimath, this is now dukhimath; dukh meaning sadness), jagat singh, the owner of a chai stall at the ukhimath market said after a long discussion in the shop on the matter of the compensation issue in the area. following the initial aftermath and recovery operations of the disaster of june 2013, around six months after the floods and landslides had changed the morphology of the mandakini valley, the process of compensation began. it would not end until the time i finished my fieldwork in 2017, four years after the flood, which involved $3.8 billion usd of damage to resources and property. what ensued from the initial verifications of compensation was a series of lists meant to enumerate the damage to property, both land and built structures. however, these lists, disbursed by the local revenue offices rather than the disaster-management framework in the valley, ended up being caste-based, primarily because the demographic and territorial constitution of the valley was also caste-based. what caused further chaos was that the lists were dispensed through kedarnath,1 so the “pandit lists”2 emerged first, and by the time i finished my fieldwork, these were the only completed compensatory amounts distributed. the delay with disbursement had two effects: first, it rendered a large part of the population of at least the ukhimath area bankrupt and financially vulnerable.3 the longer the delay with the lists, the more the temporality of debt expanded. second, it also created income gaps in villages that traditionally saw considerable income parity, particularly those constituted by pandits and rajputs collectively.4 thus in this case the very mechanisms meant to guarantee financial stability ended up as secondary perils (dabral and ewing 2009; gill 2007).5 they also ended up producing “secondary trauma” (erikson 1976; gill 2007): a subversion of community, deracinating what kim fortun (2001) describes as the proclivity of disaster to create “enunciatory community” around the double binds produced by post-disaster governance. compensation in the mandakini valley during this liminal phase produced a period marked by a fragility in economic and societal relations. there is a period of compounding, “cumulative” (bonilla and lebrón 2019, 15) vulnerability, marked by insecurity over the future, which remained highly uncertain for many residents of ukhimath. the sheer devastation produced in just three days rendered the valley morphologically changed, particularly closer to kedarnath. in the wake of the flood, landslides emerged as one of the major consequences, with nearly 450 cases reported between june 19 and 23 alone (joshi 2015). the floods themselves were produced by a complex network of environmental factors that came together to meet particular conditions of historical land use to create these devastating conditions of soil stability. a few days before the june 16, 2013, the indian meteorological department noticed an aberration with the oncoming monsoon that year: the meeting of two areas of low pressure, that of the north-easterly monsoon and the western disturbances over rajasthan to produce a rapid acceleration of the monsoon. it was predicted that the monsoon would reach uttarakhand in a week, around a month earlier than its usual onset. red alerts were issued for the state of uttarakhand. however, the monsoon arrived even earlier than predicted and caused an unprecedented amount of rain. six months’ worth of rainfall occurred within a day. at the hindu pilgrimage site of kedarnath, it had been raining for three days and many pilgrims had been isolated at the site due to the rain. the flash floods themselves unfurled in two major bursts: the first was, as previously mentioned, caused by the sheer severity of rainfall on the june 16, and the second on june 17 was caused by the breaching of a glacial lake (an increasingly common phenomenon in the himalayas) upstream of kedarnath. in a district with barely 3 percent of total land cover inhabitable, the increased numbers of landslides across the valley meant the loss of precious lived space.6 the so-called undercutting of slopes by mountainous rivers catalyzed the tragic degradation of the landscape of the mandakini valley (rautela 2014), creating a semi-regular phenomenon that some describe as “landslide swarming’’ (haigh and rawat 2011), with the landscape passing into a highly fragile state. many found the devastation difficult to reconcile; there was a traumatic kernel, a “not known” (amy 2010, 46) for many of my respondents in the enormous change that had occurred. accompanied with increased economic precariousness, this rendered the everyday into something caught in repeated cycles of hope and despair about the future. for many, the flood wiped out an irreplaceable fragmented whole (benjamin 1968) of environmental memory and culture. this article considers the work of mourning (freud 1917; comay 2011), as well as the temporal contours of being confronted intersubjectively (laplanche 2017) with traumatic circumstances. the intersubjectivity of trauma was a modification made by jean laplanche (2017) to the freudian model of trauma articulated in “beyond the pleasure principle” (freud 1920). the retroactivity of trauma induced by a cut to environmental-temporal perception forms part of the picture, but it is accompanied by an explicit connection to the intersubjective conditions of present circumstances. this cut of disaster is produced as a “temporal disjuncture” (pelling and norbert 2017), which forms a barricade to passing everyday time and forms a traumatic kernel (amy 2010), which lasts as durational moment that disjoins itself from the flow of linear time to form a block of memory that perpetually threatens the present with the eruption of its own past-presentness. i argue in this article, however, that precisely this traumatic kernel generates the position of an environmental witness (vaughn and fisher 2021). the compensation lists had created for many a circumstance of compounding economic fragility, and in these cases, i spoke to people across seven villages in the ukhimath area, including premnagar and sirkanda,7 where i stayed between september 2015 and june 2016. i interned during this period as an administrative assistant to a patwari, the ground-level official in charge of a revenue circle (patti).8 many times i would step out of the tehsil, a local unit of administrative division, with a patwari on matters related to the compensation lists, and the majority of daily cases dealt with in the tehsil concerned the compensation lists. many of the interlocutors whose confrontations with the post-disaster governance period i describe here are men, since the majority of applicants turning to the tehsil office were male. it was the same at the district disaster management authority (ddma) office, as well as the various offices we passed through when we made trips through the valley to kedarnath on various administrative assignments. in the villages i visited or stayed in, however, i interacted equally with men and women. most of the interlocutors who expressed concerns regarding the drastic environmental change around the ukhimath area and the psycho-social consequences thereof were men, who could more freely express psychological concerns with me. thus while the period of compounding financial instability i describe constituted a large scale comprehensive event that affected the lives of many, both men and women, the cases of recollection or of environmental witnessing i describe here are individualized and specific. non-linear processes in the “linear” time of disaster traditionally disaster recovery operations tend to produce a linear picture of time, with the disaster seen as having past, present and future dimensions, via being imbricated in processes of ‘preparation-disaster-recovery’ (michael 2014, 241). in the case of the compensation cases that followed the floods, this framework did not come to bear. instead of recovery marking an end to the disaster, it ended up being a prolongation of the half-life of the disaster itself: the disaster seemed to stretch on into infinity (bonilla and lebrón 2019). as sarah vaughn (2022) describes it, disasters are imbricated in and imbricate social inequalities and hierarchies, such as race, or in the case of the compensation process in the mandakini valley, caste. the compensation for the floods of 2013 was broadly divided into two classes, compensation for lodge-owners at the actual site of kedarnath, and compensation of land and built property downstream from kedarnath. the former cases received much higher compensation, amounting to between rs. 700,000–1,500,000 (approximately $8,300–17,800 usd), while owners of businesses further away, at sites like rambara, received between rs. 50,000 ($590 usd) to rs. 500,000 ($5,900 usd). they also received paltry sums for the actual land lost, which often amounted to as little as rs. 5,000 ($60 usd). owners at kedarnath are exclusively pandit, since only brahman castes are allowed to trade there. this fact created huge income disparities within villages, since often pandit castes often cohabit with rajput castes in the same village. a further problematic that emerged was that the local authorities (the tehsil revenue offices) decided to distribute compensatory amounts based on lists founded on places of residence, and since villages are divided by caste, the lists themselves ended up likewise divided and were, called colloquially “pandits’ list” and “rajputs’ list.” finally, whereas residents of kedarnath received their compensation within three months of the flood, other castes had not received compensation up to even three years after the flood, when i completed my fieldwork in the valley. this created situations of debt and rapid economic deterioration for a number of residents, many of whom moved from owning businesses to relying on government schemes such as those guaranteed under the national rural employment guarantee act (nrega) for their livelihoods. mahesh bisht, who lives in prem nagar village in the ukhimath tehsil was affected both in 2012 and 2013 by landslides. in the latter case the landslides were triggered by the floods in the valley below. on both occasions the house he and his family were living in was swept away. on the first occasion the uttarakhand government, through the aegis of the disaster mitigation and management centre (dmmc), provided a tin shed house. as the tin shed house proved inadequate for a household of six, the family spent the time they could rebuilding a reinforced cement concrete (rcc) house.9 this was swept away in a landslide during the 2013 floods. this time the family was placed on the world bank’s owner-driven construction housing (odch) list.10 the process of the distribution of funds and the construction of houses was overseen by an ngo called sudha (society of uttaranchal development and himalayan action), based out of the rudraprayag district offices. however, they had to wait for a long time before the beginning of construction, as the various plots of land suggested for building were found vulnerable to sinking. bisht, a pandit, who owned a ritual goods shop just outside the omkareshwar temple at ukhimath, was trying to pull together a sum of money to reopen his shop, which he had been forced to close down since he could not afford fresh supplies while still reconstructing his house. regarding the money he had loaned for the reconstruction of his house, he said: “yeh toh hamari biradari hai, aur phir ham paise bhi saal, do saal baad lauta sakte hain”11 (the money taken from a kindred group is entirely different, we can return it in one or two years’ time). however, as the amount invested in the house ended being much more than the rs. 500,000 ($5,900 usd) allocated by sudha, bisht found it increasingly difficult to maintain his financial stability. although the family was grateful to not be living in a tin shed house anymore, the bills from living in a guesthouse awaiting their own house’s construction were piling up. the disaster risk reduction (drr) features also meant that certain parts of the house had to be reconstructed in a particular way, further delaying the procedure.12 this is a critical point about a period of financial instability following disasters. temporality takes on a crucial form often missed by representations of the event. a slight disturbance in a period of financial disequilibrium can be considerably exacerbated by small delays in bureaucratic procedures. in bisht’s case, this meant an inability to fund the re-opening of his shop, barring him from a stable income. with the burden of financial debt accumulating, bisht had been forced to take loans from traders located at the ukhimath market to stabilize his financial situation. he described how this burden had begun to distract him from his daily activities and that the pressure of living without a stable income made him feel vulnerable. psychological studies (srivastava et al. 2015; aneelraj et al. 2015) conducted in the aftermath of the floods have noted a strong correlation between cases of ptsd (post-traumatic stress disorder) and the lack of reconstruction of habitual zones of inhabitation. in the case of children, the loss of a play space was noted as a stressor, causing the increased prevalence of both depression and ptsd. malini srivastava, a psychologist at the himalayan institute for medical sciences, based in a private university, notes a similar relation to lost land that previously served as a place of residence. this was further emphasized when i spoke to dr. ­dhanya chandran and dr. naveen kumar, both of whom conducted fieldwork in the aftermath of the floods in 2013, at the centre for psycho-social support in disaster management at national institute of mental health and neurosciences in bangalore (nimhans). kumar argued that one might think of cases of ptsd as dispersed across a spectrum, with particularly onerous symptoms in certain cases, and that tracing this dispersion constitutes a key element to understanding the specificities of the hardships faced in these communities. kumar suggested these considerations might also feed into how we define memory in relation to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-5), thus helping us trace emergence in relation to these scales. trauma and depression were thus seen as tied to processes of rehabilitation during the flood, and in interviews or chance conversations i had with many interlocutors it became apparent that the delayed compensation had caused much psychic distress to residents of towns around the tehsil of ukhimath. as mentioned, for those living in hamlets on the way to kedarnath, compensation amounts proved even lower. speaking to aakash rana at kedarnath, i learned that he had received just around rs. 250,000 ($2,970 usd) for the damage of his major shop, a sum that proved insufficient for any reinvestment into the valley’s economy. rana worked for the garhwal mandal vikas nigam because of his inability to return to his shop.13 as he described it, he was averse to returning to kedarnath under such circumstances and particularly so close to the flood. he described his aversion to working at kedarnath despite the overwhelming support authorities had given to the resurrection of kedarnath. following the floods, rana had helped in recovery efforts for those stranded. he said, “uhne nahin pata na, hamne toh dekha hai, dar lagta hai, mandir ke paas bhi jaane ka ji nahin karta, kyunki vahan se lashein bhi nikal sakte hain” (they [referring to the authorities at kedarnath] don’t know what we have seen; we feel scared of even going close to the temple. there could still be bodies buried in the rubble around). as ramesh lal, a resident of dungur semla, remarked to me on one occasion, “hamare liye yeh dukan khareedna hi namumkin tha, aur kharidke hum bech bhi nahin sakte” (for me to be able to even get a shop is difficult, then once we have it, we can’t even really sell it). he is making reference to the amendment to the uttarakhand zamindari abolishment act, which prevents the sale of property owned by members of scheduled castes to members of upper castes. he continued, “aur jab chale jaye humme apne zameen ko apna batane ke liye bheek mangna padta hai” (and then when it’s lost, we have to go around begging people to make them believe our land is ours). i met lal while walking between villages with the patwari. he described how he had begun working in kedarnath as a mule-driver for the owner of a stable closer to gaurikund, and then through sheer thrift had managed to build a small shop a little further downstream. the shop was destroyed in the floods of 2013. “pure makan ke liye mujhe bas ek lakh diya hai, aur iske liye bhi bheek mangni padti hai” (they are offering me merely 100,000 for this, and even for that i have to keep begging). in the cases described above, the temporality of the compensation’s delay, an administrative device, feeds into and extends the psychic time of trauma. temporality thus, far from being a mute spectator to human action, can be seen here as a dense intertwining object. the delay of the compensation and the diminishing of familial monetary networks greatly diminished people’s social and psychic capacity to withstand such shocks. as a result, disaster, rather than becoming framed as a linear progression of time, turned into a “chronic disaster syndrome” (adams, van hattum, and english 2009). “environmentality” (agarwal 1995) in this sense is deeply imbricated into the psychic lives of individuals and communities. chronic disaster syndrome implies exacerbated and ongoing trauma accompanied by an accelerating depletion of economic circumstances. these circumstances become a way of life (adams, van hattum, and english 2009). the disaster is drawn out indefinitely through a series of financial circumstances, through the very bureaucratic mechanisms designed to counter it. the temporality of trauma occupies the place of a “temporal disjuncture” (pelling and norbert 2017, 123), which forms a traumatic kernel (amy 2010), thus intersecting the temporality of the delay with the compensation lists, which themselves end up being an occupation of everyday temporal duration, creating a fissure in time. lost ecologies and the future anterior one day, walking with a patwari, i reached the village of nohra, where certain disputes over the compensation lists were to be mediated. as we were sitting in front of one of the applicant’s houses, sipping chai on a spring evening, the applicant, ganesh sharma, turned his eyes toward the village forest. it was an oak forest, and as often happens with such forests, which absorb and retain a lot of moisture, a cloud of mist hovered above it. sharma pointed to the mist and said, “dekho, prakriti ka chamatkar” (look, a miracle of nature).14 we all turned to look at the cloud and marveled at the sight. however, after a while he turned to the patwari, mr. r, and said, “par inhi badalon ne itna vinash phailaya hai” (and yet this is the very thing that has caused all this destruction). sharma was arguing that the presence of such moisture-laden forests often precipitated rainfall, and alleging they caused cloudbursts just above villages. in the description of temporal perception after a disaster, in many accounts i heard, it seemed that while the disaster might have changed the way people anticipated the future, it also was re-writing the past: the very presence of the surrounding environment became recoded into the presence of disaster. another case was described to me while i was discussing issues related to the flood with dipesh benjwal who owned a stationery shop in the town of agastyamuni and also edited a regional literary and cultural journal, dhaad. benjwal described migration and disasters as intricately linked. he described his own family history as evidence of this, saying, “hum pehle benji se aaye, bhuskalan ke karan. ab who gaon janshoonya hai. jab badh ayi, hum bach gaye, par humare neeche ghar sabh beh gaye. nadi ka pani itna badh gaya ki kheton tak machali aa gaye the …abh agar phirse apada aayi hum kahan jayenge?” (we first migrated from the village of benji, a little uphill from here, because of a landslide. that village now is janshoonya [uninhabited]. now when the flood came, we were just saved, seven houses below ours were washed way, the river waters rose so high that fish were thrown into the fields. … now if another disaster comes, where will we go?). as mike hulme (2017a; 2017b) describes it, climate forms a stable pattern of action in which human culture can place its trust and from which it can derive a foundation for psychic attitudes and moods. the disruption of climate reliability thus also severely affects human perception itself. here we see that everyday talk about weather that implicates the human imagination (boia 2005; strauss and orlove 2003) is tied to our ability as humans to store copious amounts of information regarding the seasons over a period. large, devastating changes in the environment thus pose a challenge to how we conceive the weather—but also to how we conceive ourselves. one of the most drastic changes in perception that took place following the flood concerned the future perfect or future anterior, the capacity of the past to be rewritten by the future.15 the future anterior connects the environment to human perception, opening people to forms of communication beyond just the human, implying that language is more than just human language (kohn 2013; helmreich 2023). the psychical is never purely mental in this sense, and the nonhuman is not unthinking substance, but rather, like eduardo kohn’s (2013) “thinking” forest, the climate and weather around a place also think, also are drawn into a structure of signs used to communicate complex codes. humans thus never think alone but are always thinking with the environment. in the words of many, the transformation of the morphology of the valley and the irreconcilability of present circumstances with the past created an environmental-personological kernel that remained recalcitrant to the apparatus of future-facing temporal perception within the everyday.16 the environmental subject (luis de la mora 2021) is split from itself by the presence of language, or, in this case, by communication at large.17 this traumatic kernel produces a thought of its own, a retroactive thought, that folds the environment back into the past, changing its very contours.18 two years after the flood when i was conducting my pilot survey, i met rajesh trivedi, a field worker associated with sudha, the ngo responsible for rebuilding houses for flood victims. trivedi eventually introduced me to the village of sirkanda, where i stayed for the largest part of my field study. sirkanda had been severely affected by the floods, since most of its inhabitants worked at kedarnath and rambara as lodge-owners, shop owners, and mule-drivers. when we first met, trivedi began telling me about everything that had happened in the immediate aftermath of the flood. it was a harrowing period for all those who were stranded in areas around the valley waiting to be rescued. the national press coverage of the event had focused largely on the effects of the flood on the site of kedarnath and the regions immediately downstream from it. however, the flood had deleterious effects throughout the valley. trivedi noted that during the time of the flood, people had rushed up the slopes of mountains on either side, to find stable land at the top of the mountain. an acquaintance he knew had done the same with his brother’s child. there was no food, and when he began to come down, after some time, the child was almost dead from hypothermia. when they arrived at the bottom, he entered a room of a house and saw a group of people who were lying dead there. then he went to a shed next to that and saw a lot of atta (flour) on the ground. he made a roti of atta (wheat flour) and fed the child, then slept, and when he woke up, the child was fine. but on the hilltops many people died in their sleep. he said most of the helicopters came late; the government had failed the people. if they had come in time, if there had been more helicopters for ukhimath and not just for kedarnath, they might have been saved. “joh bhi soh gaye who subah tak mar gaye” (if you went off to sleep in that state you were going to die in your sleep). in trivedi’s accounts, the past is interwoven into the gestures of the present, but it is not the simple past, but rather the past as such, memory-in-itself, which returns. disaster, trauma, and temporality trauma, when exposed to the secondary peril of an unstable financial period, grows into a deeper ontological insecurity, a sense of precarity.19 what many residents faced was a compounding period of loss. while agreeing with the psychoanalytic position (amy 2010; freud 1920) that maintains that traumatic loss remains recalcitrant, i argue also that that very recalcitrance is what creates the position of an environmental witness (vaughn and fisher 2021), a witness to the sheer change in the environment over a very short period of time. these two durations, that of a compounding unstable financial situation and the recalcitrant, retroactive core of an environmental-personological mutation, almost compel the witness toward the work of mourning.20 trauma in the lacanian schema can be read as the sense produced by an event, one that impels a self-referential cycle where the presentness of a past (p1) relates to the present (p2), in relation to which the past is past through a synchronic fragment of sense that is produced at p2, from the point of view of a future, which in the instance of trauma is foreclosed (gell 1992; husserl [1905] 1964). the ontology of trauma described in this essay is thus precisely of such a recursive point of experience, which is fundamentally incomplete, in the sense of a broken vessel whose shards must now reconstitute a meaning that is not that of the original (benjamin 1968). i argue in this article that trauma describes such a fragmented ontology. however, this does not underlie an attempt to define trauma within a restricted discursive space as a thing-in-itself. several investigations of trauma move away from the tendency to consider it psychologically as an imperative in itself (fassin and rechtman 2009; young 1995; gupta, bhattachraya, and priya 2019; das 2007). the problem they argue is that psychological characterizations like ptsd tend to individualize trauma, locating it in a truth procedure based on an intra-individual reality, rather than locating the conditions of trauma in social realities that condition these individual perspectives. here i retain this crucial intervention into trauma studies, looking to move past the specifically psychological characterization of trauma, while at the same time retaining the suture with the cause of actual suffering (lester 2013). while certain psychological characterizations like ptsd do box trauma into a particular discursive grid, what i describe here pays attention to specifically how trauma becomes a lived experience beyond the moment of injury (adams, van hattum, and english 2009; lester 2013). in the accounts of trauma shared here it is the lived space around that becomes radically other in the face of an economically uncertain future. the return of trauma as i describe it here is not merely the return of a specific moment of injury that repeats itself, but, rather, the repetition itself as conditioned retroactively, the past drawn into existence by the future, which by a certain point in the present will have taken place—or conditioned as in trauma by a will not have, the sign of an absent future (lacan 1966a). afterwardsness and the temporal space of trauma in the hills, as anywhere, we are tied to the specificities of an ecology, and these retain their ability to draw certain dispositions toward them even in absentia. the subecology of a house, for example, contains a series of regular paths in space and time, tied together by a sensorium, sounds, smells, and sights that are all retained both as part of the sensorium but also contain within themselves subecologies, where often the specific traces of orographic retention can be distinguished. the disaster of the flash floods was enfolded into the everyday, into gestures and sounds. on different occasions i talked to pratap singh, an interlocutor who had survived the 2013 floods. singh and his family lived at a slight remove from the village of sirkanda, where i was staying close to a temple dedicated to the village goddess. singh’s father had worked for the kedarnath mandir samiti.21 on june 16, in the early hours of the morning, singh heard a loud explosion from the forest above. he is still unsure whether this was the sound of a cloudburst or boulders tumbling. immediately after this, the house he was living in slipped away, with his father and brother inside and unable to escape. but singh, whose room was right next to the balcony, had a few seconds to jump out. the river cutting the base of the mountain from underneath had loosened the structure of the topsoil and had caused the entire structure to collapse into the river. over the time i spent around the village, singh got married and also reconstructed his house. he was given a job at the kedarnath mandir samiti as well. however, on several occasions he described how he could still feel the land slipping away. he said he could feel the weight, bhar, of the land still tugging (kheenchav) at his soles. here the present of the past is vividly alive in the body, embedded in a gesture that continues to haunt, to continue to draw the present of the person toward the gripping past of the disaster. in conversations with singh, he also described how certain habitual dispositions from his earlier place of living would allow him a descent to the ordinary, the sensorium of the house itself remaining as a lost fragment still contained in the lived present of singh’s memory. the highly traumatic kernel that repeats the presentness of the past also produces the subject as witness of the environment (vaughn and fisher 2021), as a monument to place. the interface of the past and the present is laden with accumulations from the cultural past, from bodily dispositions relating to this past, that make the work of everyday perception within a particular milieu, such as an environment scarred by flash floods, possible. i would sense this often in conversations as the sheer weight of the absence of a space, the dense network of bodily connections associated with it, became suddenly absented. the shock of the environmental loss would suddenly possess language, contouring and fragmenting a statement. kedarnath, apart from being a meshwork of intraand inter-caste relations, also constitutes a rare ecosystem, until the floods preserving a dense and rich alpine meadow (bhugyal) ecology. prior to the floods, the route to the site snaked along the left bank of the river, and the vicinity of the temple as well as certain sites along this route were dotted with subecological zones, seen as mythological markers (or referents working across time) for the sacred space of kedarnath. harish rawat, my landlord in sirkanda, worked for many years at kedarnath as a mule-driver, along with co-owning a stall at rambara with his uncle, before taking up a semiformal job as an architect in delhi for a few years and then returning to his village to take over his father’s shop. as we were discussing kedarnath one day, rawat and his wife pulled out a photo album. the album constituted a string of memories that harishji reflected on as he passed through them. he described the contexts of the various photographs to me as he looked through the album. we happened on a photo of kedarnath before the 2013 floods. the landscape was unrecognizable: the photographs showed a lush green meadow covered in flowers, with two streams running gently through a far cry from the stony outcrop that currently marks the environment of kedarnath. harishji described how he had worked at kedarnath for his uncle, who owned a set of mules at a way station in rambara. he would take the mules out and guide them as they carried pilgrims all the way to the temple. it was hard work, particularly for a boy of around fifteen. he began describing how crowded kedarnath would be while he was working there, in the late 1980s. he said the old trekking route to the temple would be crowded and the stalls near the temple charged for seating space. “wahan pe aise baithne ke liye alag paise lete the” (at that time, we used to have to pay a different amount of money to sit like this) he said, demonstrating with his knees hunched up to his chest, “aur aise baithne ke liye alag” (and a different amount to sit like this), with his legs resting straight, parallel to the ground. “us time pe yatri bhi alag the” (at that time the pilgrim was also of a different mettle), he insisted. in his description rawat emphasized two major notions: on the one hand, he was pointing to bodily discipline, a theme he often touched on in our conversations. in his estimation, in earlier times the devotees held a greater sense of control and veneration in their bodies toward the deity at kedarnath. on the other hand, he was also pointing to the sheer volume of pilgrimage traffic at the shrine in the past. on another occasion rawat described how kedarnath was not really a place meant for people to reside. as he described it, the water that flows from the glaciers is hard and impossible to drink. he added that trekking upward from vasuki tal, an eco-mythical spot on the temple’s west side, pilgrims got drugged into sleep by the miasma of the brahma kamal flower found at these altitudes. rawat also spoke often about how he enjoyed working, despite the physically challenging nature of his labor. he emphasized the pride in relation to working at kedarnath. however, since the flood he felt an aversion to the idea of returning there, despite it being a viable economic option at a time when his family and he desperately needed it; a series of economic shocks following the floods had left them in dire financial need. rawat claimed he could no longer go there because the place was not the one he remembered from his childhood: an open meadow, without the scars of the flood. rawat, too, had been on the receiving end of the delay in the compensation process: as a member of the rajput caste, he had not received any compensation well after two years, which meant he could not restart either of his previous two businesses. in the case of rawat’s recollections, the environment had become radically other, and his life in the wake of economic collapse had become one of confronting this otherness daily. what returned in his account was not a reproduction (gell 1992; husserl [1905] 1964) of kedarnath, not the recollection of a space, but a series of rhythms and refrains that were the place itself, the place as an excess, as a traumatic core that eclipsed the present. it is in this sense precisely the environment itself that thinks, that returns in itself, producing a language within language that falls outside the bounds of the purely symbolic (kohn 2013). khud and the interstices of the environment the presence of various lacunae and disjunctures related to temporal cognition taking on the form of an active presence were also tangible in other signs in sirkanda. after a few months spent in the house recommended to me by madan rawat, i had to move out of the place because my landlords, who had been living in the family home, had to move out as rawat’s brother was to return to that house. i thus moved into a new house a little further away from the road, to live with harish and meenakshi rawat. i lived nearly six months with them and thus got to know the family well. it was when i was about to leave for the city of dehradun, where i was planning to attempt some archival work relating to a history of disasters in garhwal, that my landlady turned to me and said, “tu hamse mil chuka hai, teri khud lag gayi” (you have become one with us, your khud is attached to us). i had heard the word khud before as a term of endearment, implying an particular connection to another person who is missing at that point and who one happens to think about or wish to meet. however, my landlady used the term for me while i was still present, implying that the connection between us was already forged even in my presence: i was now someone who would be remembered by her. the term implies a virtual and provisional exchange of substance. in the past, i had usually heard the term used because a particular object reminded a person of another’s presence in their absence. the term khuded is also used prominently in garhwali folk music and poetry to indicate a composition of songs of loss sung on being separated from a relative or a spouse. however, in prevalent usage the term often occurs more as a marker of both joy at being united (in memory) with someone and a sorrow at their absence. crucially, khud is a deeply environmental concept, since it is not just the person that is remembered, but the person at a particular moment in time, shrouded by the ecology that surrounding them. in this way the concept clearly points to a sense of a thinking environment (kohn 2013; deleuze 1968), an environment recursively involved with the person. on one occasion speaking to aakash rana, an attendant working at the garhwal mandal vikas nigam in kedarnath, he described how a few years back he had lost his fiancée to a tragic accident and how he would listen to popular khuded songs, particularly by the grand poet of garhwali music, narendra singh negi, and would remember in the lyrics of the song particular moments of togetherness with her. in his description, something about the structure of the music and the lyrics themselves caused a return to the past. he said that he listened to the music not to open up the old wound (ghav), but because he had to live with the wound for the rest of his life. here we see that the wound is a thinking substance (a self-referential cycle) with its own temporal dynamics, its own fragmentary ontology (benjamin 1968). the collective witnessing of the pure past it was june of 2015 and rains had been causing landslides along major pilgrimage routes in the state. throughout the day in the ddma control room at the town of rudraprayag, messages would come in about the happenings at kedarnath. the whole room was festooned with documents relating to the pilgrimage. one of the walls of the small room, which could barely fit four people, featured a bulletin board with pictures from the rescue operations during the floods. a day or two after i first entered the office, the same bulletin board created a return to the flood. it was in the afternoon, and a truck arrived at the ddma office to take equipment to sonprayag and gaurikund (on the route to kedarnath). it was driven there by rakesh singh. singh hailed from delhi, making him the only person present who did not come from uttarakhand. amit and piyoosh, two wireless radio operators, were both sitting in the control room, the first room in the ddma office, which is three rooms arranged horizontally as in a bungalow. singh was accompanied by a teenage boy, puran, who assisted him with carrying the items and a number of other small chores. after an initial round of greetings, singh turned his attention to me, seeming to pause at my strange and apparently unfitting presence in the office. but his attention was quickly drawn to the clipboard in front of me. his eyes seemed fixed on an image of a member of the armed forces rescuing a group of pilgrims a little downstream from kedarnath. glancing occasionally at the picture, singh discussed the it with amit, trying to guess the exact location of the rescue. he then turned to me, glancing over the table i was sitting at, which had a small pile of files on it, and asked: “ukhimath ke as-pass dikat ki sanbhavna hai kya?” (are there chances of trouble in ukhimath?) i attempted to respond, but without any recent information on the place, i could only murmur a halfhearted reassurance. he then turned to amit, who did reassure him. it later turned out that singh had heard about the landslide that had hit the road a little ahead of badrinath a few days earlier, and was worried about driving to a dangerous place (he was headed to ukhimath that day). he had been driving in uttarakhand for only around six months, and felt unsure about the general safety of this. the conversation then drifted to the flood, and to the degree of destruction caused. somewhere in the middle of this, piyoosh turned to the boy and asked him “bula, tumhara gaon kahan hai?” (bula [younger brother], where is your house?) the young boy answered, “uttarkhashi mein” (in uttarkashi). “uttarkashi mein kahan?” (where in uttarkashi?) “harsil.” after some discussion involving the town and the ddma there, piyoosh inquired, “apada ke time kahan pe the?” (were you there during the floods?) puran, who seemed unfazed by the question, replied “haan, main pitaji ke saath gadi mein ghar jar aha tha” (yes, i was driving back home with my father on the evening of the 16th). to which piyoosh responded equally unfazed “toh tum bache kaise?” (so how did you escape?) puran then narrated briefly what had happened that night: it had been raining heavily through the morning and afternoon, and they had heard reports of possible problems along the river. they decided to go back home because of this, rather than in spite this. on the way, close to uttarkashi town, they heard a surge in the distance. they were on a portion of the road that was rather high. but as a barrage of water passed by underneath, portions of the road ahead began to slip away. they decided to foot it, abandoning the car and climbing to a higher point on the mountain. they stayed on top for the night, not daring to go down. that night, (puran had guessed june 16), the skies were completely clouded, making it extremely dark. later that night, another wall of water burst through the river and puran remembered seeing through the small gaps in the forest sparks ignited in the river water, probably from heavy boulders colliding. in the morning, when the light of day finally shone weakly through the clouds, they went down to uttarkashi, to find their house destroyed. a few hours later they managed to locate all the members of the family living in the house, all of which had escaped in time. piyoosh stayed silent through the description, staring at the radio in front of him, pausing in his listening only once to receive a message. then he asked puran if they had rebuilt their house. puran said they had just bought back land that year, and were living with their relatives while their house was being reconstructed under the aegis of an ngo in uttarkashi. having finished his story, puran was prodded by amit and piyoosh to tell them how much he earned. when he told them he earned rs 3000, they teased him and asked him what he was going to do with it. business-like, puran answered, “it goes into paying for rent and food.” here an act of collective witnessing again produced the fissure, or cut, of environmental perception, when what is in excess of the everyday environmental-temporal paradigms overflows into speech. the traumatic kernel of the excess of the disaster produces a fragment of memory, but more than memory, a sense of the presentness of the past, within community. conclusion: secondary trauma and collective witnessing within the lacanian scheme it is not so much that trauma fragments reality, but rather that trauma reveals reality as inherently fragmented. the very basis of temporal perception which is supposed to run teleologically ends up producing a chairos, or a counter-current to the passage of time (wright 2021). the notion of kant’s ([1781] 1998) causality implied by the kantian transcendental aesthetic is reversed. this seems to be a crucial point of borrowing for the anthropology of disaster. the task of remembering or re-witnessing the event thus becomes crucial. in the case of the flood in the mandakini valley, it wasn’t just the sheer scale of destruction but the narrow period of time in which it occurred, just three days, that produced a disaffection from the environment, a temporal dis-jointedness (pelling and norbert 2017) permeating temporal perception, which renders it linked to the past and the constant rearranging of the relevance of the past. in his theory on trauma, laplanche (2017) suggests that the function of retroactivity in trauma is inter-subjective rather than intra-subjective. this constituted a major advancement in the theory of trauma. trauma thus becomes the collective articulation of a social assemblage, a particular configuration of society in space and time, rather than a purely subjective experience. it thereby also becomes temporal, something exchanged within the community, which emphasizes the forward movement of retroactivity along with the actual return to the past, that is, the relevant past is regularly reconfigured in relation to the emotional reality of the present. in the account i have presented above, the past also becomes a subject of exchange, a means of collective witnessing. this is not to suggest that collective witnessing alleviates or helps master secondary trauma, the dissolution of the community that exacerbates trauma. rather, it suggests the assumption of a position that is precisely contrary to mastery: the position of the witness. witnessing the transformation of the environmental-personological interface becomes crucial also in drawing attention to the sheer damage unfurled by what is inscribed in the disaster-management literature under the term “secondary peril.” trauma itself compounds in the face of this secondary economic peril and ends up becoming deeply tied to the life of the community itself, turning into a way of life for many individuals. abstract the 2013 flash floods reproduced an everyday that was textural, the returning past of the event combined with gestures from within the everyday, to disorient survivors of the event. i attempt in this essay to analyze the return of the event as producing psycho-spatial affects, drawn from the psyche’s own propensity to return while repressing the event that causes the return, described within psycho-analytic literature as “afterwardsness.” such afterwardsness is conditioned by the sheer incomprehensibility of environmental change that took place in just three days in the mandakini valley between june 15 and june 17, 2013. following the flood, delays with the recovery process, and particularly with the process of compensation, exacerbate this trauma, leading to an extension of the temporality of trauma infinitely forward. [disaster; trauma; temporality; afterwardsness; compensation] notes acknowledgments this fieldwork for this paper was conducted as part of my doctoral research work and was funded by shiv nadar university, greater noida, india, where i took up my doctoral studies. 1. kedarnath is a node in two different pilgrimage routes, the panch kedar and the char dham pilgrimage; the latter including the sites of badrinath, kedarnath, gangotri, and yamunotri, each again representing the larger confluence of river valleys that extends into the gangetic plains with each of these sites being divided between saivite and vaisnavite allegiances. the site of badrinath, moreover, is also directly related to the former throne of the kingdom of tehri garhwal, which remained a princely state until two years after independence, with the king considered to be a living embodiment of the vaisnavite deity in badrinath. these feudal relations, however, do not affect caste directly in the other river valleys since it is each of the valley’s central (vedic) deities that determine ritual closeness, rather than the administrative structure of kingship. at the same time both kingship and divinity did play a part in the initial construction of bureaucratic revenue extraction structures that were later modified during the period of colonial rule and formed the basis for the current caste structure. the division of these sites is also recursively segmentary, in that in each valley collections of villages (divine pattis/revenue circles) also worship deities that are then related hierarchically to the central deity in each valley. caste identities in these valleys are thus primarily divided on the basis of ritual closeness of the village to the deity at kedarnath and of the resident in the village to each deity; although as i attempt to show in my work, caste is also simultaneously shaped via bureaucratic artifacts like the compensation list (mathson 2024). 2. pandits refer to a local caste group derived from the brahmin caste within the four-fold varna (caste) system described both in certain hindu scripture and colonial law, as well as modern anthropological and legal discourse, all of which draw on a small set of scriptural sources (dirks 1989, cohn 1987). although the history of the development of a modern caste system in uttarakhand has been particular in many ways (pant 2011, pathak 1981). since the lists were designed for each village and since villages are segregated on the basis of caste, the administration of rudraprayag saw it fit to distribute money on the basis of “caste lists” like the “pandit list.” 3. the omkareshvar temple located at the center of the actual ukhimath township was the winter seat of the deity at kedarnath, and housed the idol after its peregrination from the kedarnath temple, located twenty-five kilometers upstream from the ukhimath block area. 4. pandits and rajputs correspond broadly to the positions of brahmin and kshatriya the four-fold varna system, within which castes are divided on the basis of purity and pollution in a hierarchy. however, it should be noted that arguments regarding the timelessness of this tradition have been historically rebutted, showing that the interpretation of the four-fold varna system from a very small selection of hindu scripture were mostly made by colonial courts in reference to specific caste group that they designated as being worthy of knowledge of the country and interpreted into civil law across the country (dirks 1989, cohn 1987). 5. a paradigmatic case of a secondary peril is the flooding that followed the breeching of the levees after hurricane katrina. close to 1,800 people died, with nearly $186 billion usd worth of property damage. the breaching of the levees led to major civil litigation. the first concerned whether insurance companies were liable for the breach of the levees to compensate for the resultant damage. this suit was settled in august 2007 in favor of the insurance companies by a u.s. appeals court arguing that the insurers were not liable for payment even in the case of negligence found in the construction of the levee. in the other case, a u.s. federal judge in november 2009 found the army corps of engineers responsible for negligence in the construction of the levees and ruled for major compensations for a large section of the affected populace, going into billions of dollars. 6. the 2022 rudraprayag agricultural contingency plan (acp) is available at https://agriwelfare.gov.in/sites/default/files/ukd10-rudraprayag-10.07.14_0.pdf (last accessed september 2024). 7. throughout this essay, the names of places have been altered, the name of the village where i resided a large part of fieldwork changed, and sobriquets used for interlocutors to protect their privacy, since many of the matters discussed were of a sensitive nature. 8. a revenue circle is a government administrative unit consisting of a number of villages historically created within colonial rule to be administered by a circle officer (called a patwari in most parts of northern india). the historical purpose of the revenue officer during colonial times was the collection of agricultural tax, which has been excluded from the ambit of tax collection in modern india. the other function of the patwari, particularly in a colonial non-regulated province (divested of a governor and a localized judiciary) like the former garhwal division of which rudraprayag was a part, was actually administering and discursively producing the disciplinary conditions for land-ownership in these parts (for more on this see mathson 2024). 9. rcc houses are quite simply concrete houses. they are usually called “rcc houses” locally referring to the technical term. rcc is distinguished from plain cement concrete (pcc) and tends to be more durable. 10. the odch lists were created by an ngo based out of the ddma offices in rudraprayag and funded by the world bank’s uttarakhand disaster recovery project. the odch project looked to rebuild houses in consultation with owners also keeping in mind the necessity of proofing these houses against earthquakes and locating them in areas apparently secure from landslides. the lists contained the names of owners who had been seen as being most in need of houses, in some cases those who had been affected by landslides form the previous year as well. 11. it is critical to note here that the depletion of such kindred networks (which i have analyzed elsewhere, mathson 2024) contributes considerably to escalating “relative depravation” in relation to each individual’s ownership bundle (sen 1981). 12. the disaster risk reduction features included earthquake proofing the houses and geological survey of india land surveys that isolated portions of land that were seen as being fit to inhabit. 13. a state government run organization that promotes tourism in uttarakhand. the organization was considerably involved with running temporary facilities for the inhabitation of pilgrims in the years immediately after the floods. 14. such articulations were quite common among the residents of the mandakini valley and formed part of a rich glossary of garhwali terms that would often pepper conversations in hindi. terms like rumuk (the fading yellow light of dusk) and swisahat (the sound of a brook) describe immanent particularities in nature. garhwali also has a vast glossary of terms describing particular smells and sounds. terms like swisahat carry eduardo kohn’s (2013) sense of iconicity, where the sound of the word replicates the real, a thing out there in the world. here we have an example of what jacques lacan (1959) describes as the “thingness” of the world as a never-ending, self-referential loop around the drive. iconicity in this case also describes such a self-referential loop, tying two presents via an emerging sense. 15. the future anterior is defined by lacan (1966a) as “a past which manifests itself in an inverted form of repetition,” that is, it is precisely the original traumatic cause that manifests itself as a repetition of a later event. the traumatic recurrence is thus defined not just by an anticipation but by an inverted form of repetition. in this article, however, i move away from the notion of “trauma as moment of injury” to the notion of “trauma as ongoing lived experience” (lester 2013, 755). this form of retroactivity has a lineage in lacan that goes back to his training as a student of hegel via kojeve. in g. w. f. hegel ([1820] 1979), too, historical events are shaped and re-shaped by the future perfect, encapsulated in his aphorism, “the owl of minerva flies only at dusk.” this sense of the future anterior is captured vividly in the workings of afterwardsness, described later in this essay. 16. here i am considerably influenced by mauss’s (1985) suggestion that personhood rather than being defined/definable (being a question of applying the correct definition to empirical reality) is perpetually changing. within the bounds of the social anthropology of india there has been a tendency to explain “indian personhood” in terms of the dividual (a relational person rather than a self-sufficient person which would be the individual) which often exacerbates the idea of an insurmountable east-west division. over time there have been global shifts through theories that describe personhood recursively rather than either singular or plural (wagner 1991, strathern 1991). here i suggest that we might also think of personhood psychoanalytically (which does not mean mentally) but rather through the notion that the person is split within it-self. this is expressed well by lacan’s (1966b, 430) reconstruction of the well-known cartesian formulation as “i am thinking where i am not, therefore i am where i am not thinking.” i understand this split self as not being just relational with the environment, but entirely immanent with it. 17. while most postmodern critiques of the kantian/cartesian subject position insist on the subject being absent entirely, a more detailed reading of such critiques often returns to the lacanian conception of split subjectivity. for example, see gilles deleuze (1968) on the third synthesis of time, and michel foucault (1971) on the birth of modern subjectivity as “man.” 18. here i explicitly steer clear of the relation of trauma to childhood neurosis, a staple in freudian and lacanian psychology, and instead move to an interpretation of the drive (copjec 2002) that centers more on freud’s (1920) reading of war neurosis following world war i, where he places the focus on the fact of the contemporaneousness or the presentness of the past. the dreams of soldiers that repeat the war, as freud points out, constitute not fragments of memory but actual repetitions of the traumatic event. for a deeper investigation of the concept of trauma as in fact related to the moment of injury, rather than to a biographical past, see malabou 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n.j.: princeton university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 592-615, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.05 deciphering a non-meal: pantawid-gutom and the everyday negotiation of hunger in the philippines cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 194-215, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.02 deciphering a non-meal: pantawid-gutom and the everyday negotiation of hunger in the philippines gideon lasco university of the philippines diliman ateneo de manila university http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6402-682x jhaki mendoza university of the philippines manila https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8063-290x “it’s also pantawid-gutom,” jarod,1 an eighteen-year-old street vendor, told gideon lasco as he was hanging out with jarod’s barkada (peer group) in a port community in luzon. jarod was referring to shabu (crystal methamphetamine)—an illicit stimulant—in the middle of a conversation about its effects, particularly in relation to work. loss of appetite came up—which gideon considered a bad thing. but jarod, who on the side also works as a porter, construction worker, and occasionally engages in sex work, claimed otherwise: “that’s another advantage with shabu. when you use it, you don’t have to eat.” this conversation marked the first time we encountered non-food (in this case, an illicit stimulant that has emerged as the main target of the philippines’ punitive antidrug campaigns), referred to as pantawid-gutom, but the claim quickly found validation among jarod’s peers. a portmanteau from the tagalog (filipino) words pantawid (something to help bridge or tide over) and gutom (hunger), pantawid-gutom had not previously struck us as anything other than food people consumed between meals. sometimes, we ourselves—as local medical anthropologists living and working in metropolitan manila—would refer to pantawid-gutom in our everyday lives, for example, when we, caught in the capital city’s notorious traffic jams, would buy a snack from vendors boarding the buses to prevent ourselves from getting hungry until we could have a proper meal at home. throughout fieldwork that spanned six years (2012–2019)—as part of ethnographic work on drug issues and, later, president rodrigo duterte’s “drug war” (lasco 2014, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c)—drugs as pantawid-gutom would surface as a recurrent theme, inspiring us to explore the term further and more deliberately. for gideon lasco, this exploration involved pakikitambay (lasco 2014), or “hanging out with” mostly young men in urban poor communities in luzon, beginning with the port community where he initially met jarod and his friends. the long-term relationship allowed him not just to talk to them but also to observe their daily routines, including their consumption of food and other substances. for jhaki mendoza, this inquiry entailed pagmamasid (bennagen 1985), or “observation” in a low-income community in quezon city, where she also approached and interviewed various individuals passing by one of the city’s major thoroughfares. these conversations, initially facilitated by the fact that jhaki lived in the same city and spoke the same language, were preceded by a disclosure that we, as local researchers from the university of the philippines, were studying pantawid-gutom. in keeping with local research conventions, these interviews—sixteen in total—were followed by giving a token of 300 pesos (around $6 usd). food insecurity, we soon found, proved a sensitive topic for people. they regarded questions about whether they experienced hunger a matter of personal dignity, reminding us of hanna garth’s notion of alimentary dignity, or “the ways in which individuals or groups of people define their cuisine as meeting locally determined standards for a civilized, well rounded, calorically sufficient cuisine that also meets local standards of symbolic value” (garth 2019, 5). which makes us wonder if surveys—like a recent one that estimates that 2.3 million families experienced “involuntary hunger,” representing 9.5 percent of the entire population (fao 2021)—are missing out on a larger picture of hunger. as joan gross and nancy rosenberger (2005, 2010) have illustrated, survey questionnaires assessing food insecurity fail to capture the larger context in which hunger operates and how individuals continually strive to employ different strategies to make ends meet, such as utilizing different forms of capital. such sensitivities underscore what is at stake in our topic, given how, as garth (2019) observes, “alimentary dignity is central to debates on food security and food sovereignty.” from various interactions with our interlocutors, as well as from archival research on the figurations of pantawid-gutom in the scholarly literature and popular culture, it was clear that pantawid-gutom was consumed in contexts of difficulty or deprivation. dabet castañeda (2007, para. 17), in a report on sex workers, has a passage that well describes the predicament of the people we met: “days when there are no customers, sandy said, her mother would scavenge scrap materials at the nearby dump and sell these to the nearest junkshop. the small earnings from junk could at least provide them a meal, sandy said. ‘pwede na rin pantawid-gutom’ (just to tide over the hunger), she said as she shrugs her shoulders.” in addition, we identified various practices and substances—both food and non-food—that people referred to as pantawid-gutom, making it clear that while a food category, it also unsettles the very idea of what constitutes “food,” particularly in relation to hunger. how does deprivation change people’s categories and standards of what is good to eat? what is the encoded message in the very existence of pantawid-gutom? these are some of the questions informing our ethnographic engagement, and the answers—as we discuss—lie in the in-betweenness of pantawid-gutom, its being a liminal category between food and non-food. revisiting food anthropologists have long documented the various classifications of food in different cultures: from the cultural materialism exemplified by the works of marvin harris (2001) and julian steward (2006), which views food systems as adaptations to the physical surroundings, to the writings of claude lévi-strauss (1983) and mary douglas (1972), which give more prominence to the symbolic meanings embedded in food, meanings revelatory of patterns in human social relations. some of these perspectives are implicit in the inevitable discussion of food and beverage in full-length ethnographic monographs that focus on a particular locality (for examples in the philippines, see jenks 1905; cole 1913; ewing 1963; scott 1990). eventually, over the course of the twentieth century, food and food categories would receive greater attention as an explicit object of study in relation to growing public health concerns over nutrition and food insecurity, as well as emergent theoretical directions in the social sciences (see mintz and du bois 2002; messer 1984; pottier 1999). lévi-strauss (1983) posited the existence of a “cultural triangle” with three kinds of food—raw, cooked, and rotten—the latter two corresponding to culture and nature, respectively, and all three are distinct based on the degree of human intervention. building on lévi-strauss’s attention to categories but also departing from his dependence on a universal culinary language, mary douglas asserted that “food categories encode social events” (douglas 1972, 61). in her categories, she moved away from food preparation to the unwritten rules governing combinations of food and beverage, their sequence, the time of the day, and the particular social groupings and contexts of meal consumption: “drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen, and family. meals are for family, close friends, honored guests. the grand operator of the system is the line between intimacy and distance” (douglas 1972, 66). for douglas, food categories are reflective—and constitutive—of a broader social world. pierre bourdieu (1979) would add the element of “taste” and class distinction: food categories do not merely encode intimacy or belonging but also social class—tastes of luxury and tastes of necessity. expanding on the element of taste, deborah lupton (1994) and david e. sutton (2010) highlight the multisensorial dimensions of food and its value in memory construction and place-making (i.e., private vs. public and local vs. global) shaping our food categories. anthropologists have also extrapolated on gender distinctions and bodily dimensions embedded in food categories, foodways, and consumption (lupton 1996; counihan 2018). other anthropologists link food categories and taxonomies with ethnomedical concepts (manderson 1981; nichter 1986) and ethnoecological precepts (wallace 1983; wassmann 1993). tanis furst and colleagues (2000, 349) argued, “the fundamental imprecision of ordinary language does not nullify our understanding of spontaneous food classifications, yet its effect must be acknowledged in any attempt to make sense of the ways people classify foods.” following the social life of food amid politicized food insecurity problems, kristin phillips (2018, 85), for instance, posits that as people produce, consume, and ritually engage with food, “they affirm, negotiate, reconstitute and contest their place in the world and the social categories that mark them and others.” some of the food categories identified by douglas will have analogues in the philippines, in part owing to the country’s long colonial history under spain (1565–1898) and the united states (1899–1946). as in middle-class london, an invitation to a full meal in middle-class manila (i.e., dinner or lunch rather than snacks or coffee) signifies greater intimacy; the same can be said of inviting someone to one’s home rather than to a restaurant. nonetheless, key material and structural differences also render local food categories distinct. rice, for instance, is central to food in the philippines, and its presence or absence distinguishes full-blown meals from snacks (negrillo 2019; aguilar 2005; fernandez 2001). the anthropologist propsero covar affirms rice as a sine qua non of a filipino meal, alongside ulam (any dish or food item that is paired with rice, usually translated in the philippines as “viand”)—which he defines as either karne (meat), gulay (vegetables),2 or preferably both. of the filipino, he writes: “if you do not eat rice, you will look for rice because it is obligatory” (covar 1998). doreen g. fernandez (2019) adds that the temporal, rather than the spatial, dimension figures prominently in defining and distinguishing between different meals: umagahan (breakfast), tanghalian (lunch), hapunan (dinner). meals serve as stopping points and landmarks of the day. all of the above categories and conventions, however, assume that people have something to eat, that they have the time and money to choose what to eat, and that, in any case, these categories remain somehow independent of the people or the environment. however, as garth (2019, 4) observes, “the categories of ‘real food’ and the decent meal often index larger historical, social, political, and economic processes.” indeed, as the very existence of pantawid-gutom implies, food rules are suspended in exceptional times—particularly in situations of food scarcity and insecurity—making these instances important to explore beyond just acknowledging the existence of substances like coffee, tea, and sugar as “proletarian hunger killers” (mintz 1979, 59). in the following sections, we highlight the embodied realities and situated practices surrounding pantawid-gutom to illustrate that beyond the structuralist and rigid classifications attached to food categories, the corporeality of hunger leads people to reconstruct these categories in their everyday lives. in doing so, we also hope to offer some insights into people’s notions of dignity and pleasure in contexts that seemingly deprive them of both. deciphering a non-meal to talk about pantawid-gutom means to elide the sensitivities of hunger while eliciting a variety of responses. some associate it with the government’s pantawid pamilyang pilipino program—a conditional cash-transfer program started in 2008 that provides financial assistance to the poorest households as long as they meet certain conditions, like ensuring their children’s school attendance and regular health checkups (reyes et al. 2013). many, however, speak of pantawid-gutom as a set of products and practices people use to stave off hunger—due either to lack of funds, long, uninterrupted working hours, or both. jarod and his friends, for instance, work long and irregular hours in the port—waiting for passengers and various income opportunities—which makes the hunger-suppressive effects of shabu, though not the sole reason for using the drug, especially useful despite its cost (100-200 pesos or $2-4 usd per shot, though it is usually shared with one or two companions). as the twenty-two-year-old tupe told gideon lasco: “you cannot leave your work, so you just endure the pain, because you think that you need to finish your job. even if you feel that your stomach hurts. but with shabu, you don’t feel that. you can last the whole night without feeling hungry, sleepy, or tired.” jerome, who is twenty-five, who works as a tricycle (i.e., motorized pedicab) driver, notes shabu’s ease of consumption. “it’s even faster than eating in jollibee,” he says, referring to the country’s most popular fast-food chain. “one or two hits, and you’re feeling better. you have gana [appetite or desire] to work, but you don’t have gana for food anymore.” by “hits,” he is referring to sniffing or insufflating the powdered, crystalline methamphetamine that he and his friends heat using a lighter and some aluminum foil. odorless and colorless, the smoke leaves no trace, and they can easily take those hits in nondescript wooden houses—euphemistically called puwesto (simply meaning “place”)—near their workplace. when a shabu sachet is shared with up to three friends, its cost basically equals that of a meal in a fast-food chain or is just a bit higher than one in the many carinderia (eateries) in the port. our interlocutors think of shabu as a potent hunger suppressant, but it is not the only substance they consider a pantawid-gutom. yosi (cigarettes) are also seen as having a hunger-suppressing effect, on top of their ability to kill boredom. a few of our informants also recalled sniffing rugby (volatile solvents or industrial adhesives with toluene as an active ingredient), like tupe who claims it has no euphoric effect, “but you won’t feel hungry.” twenty-nine-year-old dante finds it makes him “feel happy and entertained,” alongside serving as a pantawid-gutom. readily available bottled in hardware stores at a cost of 50-100 pesos ($1-2 usd), rugby has long been recognized as a hunger suppressant in urban poor communities from india (seth, kotwal, and ganguly 2005) to mexico (gigengack 2014); one study among children in metro manila found that 40 percent used such substances (porio and crisol 2021). other strategies such as sleep or distraction through the use of mobile phones or other activities also help to endure hunger, and our interlocutors occasionally referred to these practices as pantawid-gutom. as dante, a thirty-seven-year-old street dweller, says: “pantawid-gutom? yung didiskarte ka [you find ways to make ends meet]. you beg. you ask for money or food. you can also scavenge for scrap metals and sell that, so you can buy something to eat. if there’s really no option left, i just sleep.” ambet, a port vendor aged twenty-four, agrees: “even illegal activities, you will be tempted to [engage in]. it’s pantawid-gutom, so you can have money and you can buy food.” in these encounters, at least for some of our interlocutors, pantawid-gutom encompasses both non-food coping strategies, intended to detach oneself from the sensation of hunger, and non-food food, meant to suppress hunger altogether (hadley and crooks 2012; black 2009). but a majority of pantawid-gutom remains what most would classify as food, something ingested. the materiality of pantawid-gutom must fill one’s stomach, must be corporeally felt. candies, crackers, and instant noodles, for example, are identified as pantawid-gutom food items, although others consider the latter a meal. jarod explains the rationale for staving off hunger in terms of the health consequences of an empty stomach: anything to fill your stomach is pantawid-gutom. just so that the stomach has something. because if the stomach is left empty, and if you’ve gone past your hunger [malipasan ng gutom], it will be acidic, you will get sick with ulcer. that’s why many passengers are really waiting for us to sell them something—candies, bananas, donuts. they’ve come from other cities, and it will take another three hours to reach manila, so their stomachs will not be empty. beverages like water, coffee, and milk—in order of popularity—are also seen as pantawid-gutom, underscoring the fluidity of food and water given that, in other settings, food items are seen to counter dehydration (wutich and brewis 2014). as rody, a fifty-seven-year-old tricycle driver in quezon city shares, he always brings water because it “alleviates hunger and at the same time quenches thirst,” making it an important pantawid-gutom. coffee is also seen as having a satiating effect (“the feeling really is like my stomach is filled up,” says rody of kopiko, a powdered coffee brand high in sugar), mirroring observations elsewhere on how high-calorie liquid stimulants such as sweetened coffee and tea “hit the spot” (mintz 1986, 118) for overworked and undernourished individuals. the same satiating effect informs the view that soft drinks and energy drinks are pantawid-gutom. “they’re heavy in the stomach, and they will make you dighay [burp],” joseph, a twenty-eight-year-old construction worker, told gideon lasco, referring to coca-cola and cobra, a popular energy drink. anthropologists have written about cobra and other energy drinks in terms of their ability to make people stay awake and alert longer amid the demands of a 24/7 economy (see hardon 2021), but accounts like joseph’s make us wonder whether hunger suppression also forms part of these products’ appeal. ultimately, however, the goal of pantawid-gutom is not just to suppress hunger but also to avoid nalipasan ng gutom (literally, “to go past one’s hunger”), given that, beyond its sensations of pain and discomfort, prolonged hunger is perceived as a dangerous condition that can lead to stomach problems like ulcers, in turn associated with fatal complications. our interlocutors’ accounts remind us of the popular expression malayo sa bituka (far from the digestive tract), which refers to indifference toward illnesses and injuries physically far from the digestive tract (e.g., joint pains). such an expression, however, implies that the converse also holds true: something perceived as close to the bituka (digestive tract) is seen as especially problematic. ippolytos kalofonos (2021), in an ethnographic account on hiv and hunger in mozambique, speaks about the danger of medicalized hunger as a result of social and economic problems like food scarcity exacerbated by health interventions. in his work, people described hunger as the most disturbing side effect of anti-retroviral (arv) therapy, making the struggle to find work and food sources even more difficult in central mozambique. while people living with hiv managed to live longer, the experience of intense hunger from arvs resulted in “social death” because of weakened social solidarity and the individual dignity of already disenfranchised people (kalofonos 2021). given its corporeal consequences and at times dehumanizing effects, hunger evokes a primal fear, and accounts of pantawid-gutom show how it also constitutes an attempt to prevent and even treat a more dangerous and serious state of hunger. this resonates with the words of nena, a fifty-two-year-old single parent living with five children and four grandchildren in quezon city: “biscuits like skyflakes [a common local brand of crackers] and milk are important pantawid-gutom, because they are medicine for ulcer. although not totally filling, they can help reduce the acid in the stomach, which is mahapdi [painful].” pantawid-gutom versus a regular meal if pantawid-gutom is a substitute for a regular or proper meal, what, then, constitutes the latter? what counts as, in the language of fernandez (2019), a “serious meal”? there is no exact equivalent to the word meal in filipino; there are only names of specific meals according to the time of the day (e.g., umagahan for “morning meal,” tanghalian for “noontime meal,” and hapunan for “afternoon meal”). in terms of content, most of our interlocutors consider a meal as something with kanin (rice) and ulam (viand), or kanin, ulam, at gulay (rice, viand, and vegetables), mirroring the anthropological accounts we referenced earlier. yet when disaster strikes—as in the case of the more than twenty-four typhoons that batter the country annually, people switch to root crops (bertuso 2019, 82), just as people elsewhere turn to “hunger foods” or “famine foods” in times of crisis (matalas and grivetti 2007; lasco et al. 2023). typhoons may be less of a concern for our interlocutors, most of whom live in urban communities insulated from the effects of natural disasters on food supplies. but in a way, they consider their personal circumstances a state of exception—given that they would consume their own pantawid-gutom, while also agreeing that, ideally, rice is consumed thrice a day. as twenty-four-year-old leoben, a construction worker who lives with his wife and two children, says: “of course, there are times when you have to make do with whatever is available, like tuyo [dried fish]. but i will do everything because i need to be able to provide three meals a day [to my family].” although our interlocutors did not unanimously find rice essential to every meal (for instance, some consider instant noodles a meal), everyone found a rice meal to be ideal. “i don’t feel busog [full] if i don’t eat rice,” we often heard not only from our informants but also from our friends and colleagues. they also affirm the idealness of three meals a day for a typical filipino household. in other words, their responses show striking consistency with dietary patterns identified by nutrition scholars (angeles-agdeppa, sun, and tanda 2020) and anthropologists. following these food patterns, the components and the timing constitute the first point of comparison between a pantawid-gutom and a meal. while pantawid-gutom can be anything that staves off hunger and therefore can be consumed at any time, a regular meal is temporally delineated and must have rice, alongside ulam, which is ideally meat or fish but can be anything savory that complements rice (see table 1). while the value (or efficacy) of pantawid-gutom lies in its ability to stave off hunger, a meal must have sustansiya—a word derived from the spanish for “substance,” but which loosely signifies food with good nutrition and quality. “human bodies require sustansiya,” jerome, the tricycle driver, tells gideon lasco. “that’s why you need vegetables, fruits … pantawid-gutom lacks sustanisya, you just eat it so that the stomach has something.” table 1. comparison of local food categories in the philippines based on certain domains and qualities domains meal (umagahan, tanghalian, or hapunan) snacks (merienda) pantawid-gutom in the context of poverty qualities access difficult easy easy time morning, noon, evening between meals in place of meals nutrition with rice and viand (combination of vegetable and meat), high nutritional value without rice, high to low nutritional value without rice, low or no nutritional value desirable characteristics for perceived nutritional value (suntansiya), energy (sigla) and satisfaction/pleasure (sarap) may be for satisfaction/pleasure (sarap) and/or to bridge hunger. to bridge hunger in a fast, affordable, accessible, and effective way cost high high to low low a regular meal that has rice and viand is also perceived as providing the needed energy for the body, especially for people engaged in physical labor, bearing striking resemblance to anson rabinbach’s (1992) “human motor” concept, a metaphor that succinctly characterizes how the imperative of productivity in industrial and modern times has transformed the depiction of and discussion about the human body. a related ethnography of food riots in chile also emphasized the interconnectedness of concepts about food, strength, and work: the scarcity and unaffordability of meat left people hungry and drove them, especially the working-class poor, to initiate food riots. much like rice, meat in chile makes a meal complete and nutritious, as it provides the much needed fuerza (strength, power) for work (orlove 1997). eddie, a fifty-eight-year-old tricycle driver in quezon city, pointed to a similar notion relating to food and strength when he used fuel or batteries as a metaphor for the body to explain how a regular meal “recharges” it: because they provide energy for the body. nakakargahan ka [you are being recharged]. even though you eat rice thrice a day, your body will not get used to it, because it gives your body life. … but with bread, no matter how much bread you eat, it will easily get dissolved in your body, right? because imagine, when you dip a bread in coffee, it gets dissolved easily, right? so, the same thing happens once you digest it. but not with rice. it stays inside the body much longer, so i get to work much longer. as the following conservation with narciso, a forty-three-year-old construction worker in quezon city, illustrates, food provenance and preparation also inform the distinction between the two categories: “for me, pantawid-gutom can be stuff that you don’t even know where it came from, like fish balls and kikiam [street food].” jhaki mendoza further explored pantawid-gutom’s difference from other foodstuffs like kanin and ulam, and narciso responded: “ah, that’s better, because you really know how they were prepared and they were cooked well.” other points of distinction arise from the context in which the two categories are consumed. pantawid-gutom are readily available at our informants’ workplace or sites of income, from candies and crackers sold by ambulant vendors, to lugaw (rice gruel) and other street food at corner stands, and shabu consumed in unmarked houses. they can also be consumed—gulped, inhaled, eaten—in a matter of minutes, and prove much more affordable than a meal with rice and viand. all these attributes prove valuable in an informal, precarious economy that demands constant presence if one wishes to earn money and where there is no place to eat (cf. lasco 2014). in contrast, a regular meal takes time to prepare: rice and viand have to be separately cooked and are not amenable to instant consumption, typically requiring a spoon, fork, and a plate. it is also relatively more expensive. given that most of our interlocutors lacked access to a refrigerator, they also had no means to preserve either the meal itself or its constituent ingredients, underscoring not just the desirability but the necessity and suitability of so-called instant food in their life settings. in some cases, however, pantawid-gutom like canned goods and other prepackaged foods can be transformed to approximate a regular and well-cooked meal by preparing them in certain ways to make them decent and “categorically complete” according to our interlocutors’ own standard of a good food (garth 2019; wheeler 2018). a conversation with abby, a twenty-five-year-old masseuse living in a quezon city slum, illustrates as much: sardines and noodles are pantawid-gutom. i don’t think they have enough nutrition. but it’s up to you paano mo reremedyuhan [how you will augment them]. they can be nutritious. for instance, i cook the sardines with lots of vegetables, then now it’s nutritious. with noodles you can put egg and other vegetables as well. but i don’t really think noodles are inherently nutritious, because aside from the fact that it’s readymade, it doesn’t get dissolved easily [in the stomach]. pagpag, terter, or tira-tira (i.e., leftover food, usually meat, that are picked from garbage bins and dump sites either to sell or for personal consumption) can also be modified to become a regular meal, as described by nena: “sometimes we also eat pagpag. we experience that. we re-cook the tira-tira [leftover] chicken we scavenged from jollibee. first, we wash the chicken to clean it, then cook it right away. we turn it into adobo. it’s enough to get us by for a day.” one final distinction worth mentioning is the positive state of pagkabusog that accompanies a regular meal—as compared to the negative state of hindi gutom (not hungry) that is the goal of pantawid-gutom. to be busog means to “feel energetic and lively,” as emily, a woman of fifty-three living on the streets, explains, “rice and fish … they’re nakakabusog [filling]. biscuits and bread, they just remove the hunger.” bernie, a forty-year-old construction worker, agrees: “a full stomach and you burp a lot.” julian, a street vendor of sixty-one, shares a similar view: “you are energetic in your work when you are busog. that’s why kanin and ulam are important, because they are pampatatag [for endurance].” these descriptions of pagkabusog are mirrored by the account of rachel winter (2017) who finds the same affective reality accorded to rice among her filipino interlocutors. similar to our findings, she argues that people view rice as a “heavy food” and a more “serious” energy source, while they consider bread a “light food” that lacks energy for the body. the duration of satiety also differs between regular meals and pantawid-gutom. the latter is often described as saglit lang yun sa katawan (lasts just for a short time in the body) or hindi pangmatagalan (not for long). on the other hand, a regular meal is often perceived to have a more lasting effect, as described by vivian: “pantawid-gutom only lasts for a short period of time. if you eat kanin and ulam, that will take you longer. you can go for four hours without eating anything after a meal.” the duration of satiety comes into play in the context of feeling hungry just in time for the next meal. estrella, a forty-seven-year-old homemaker, shared: “with rice, you can really last longer. when you eat that in the morning, it can last until 12 noon. but if you eat bread, that will only last until 10 in the morning, and then you are hungry again. so, you see, it’s [bread] not meant to keep you satiated for a long time.” dante expressed a similar idea: “kanin and ulam really make me busog. but if you eat biscuit, you will only feel busog for a short time and eventually make you gutom ng wala sa oras [suddenly feeling hungry, or much earlier before the next meal time].” like food categories, definitions of busog, hindi gutom, and gutom are deeply embodied, their sensory attributes (sutton 2010) subject to everyday negotiation. the example of vivian and her husband makes this clear: both only consume bread, biscuits, and coffee during the day, saving the resources for their children who need the proper meal: “for hapunan, that’s when we eat kanin and ulam. so that we don’t get hungry, because it’s very hard to sleep with an empty stomach.” pantawid-gutom and the urban food landscape in our exploration of pantawid-gutom, we inevitably reference the urban food environment, with frequent mentions of prepackaged, ready-to-consume food and drinks such as instant noodles, instant coffee, energy drinks, soft drinks, candies, and other cheap and sugar-rich commodities that have also characterized the food landscape in other contemporary urban contexts (mintz 1986; errington, fujikura, and gewertz 2012; baviskar 2018). on the one hand, gross economic and nutritional inequities characterize this landscape; it is one where food exists in excess but out of reach (scheper-hughes 1992; macclancy, henry, and macbeth 2007; wentworth 2017). even amid widespread hunger, an estimated 2,000 tons of food are wasted in metro manila daily (cos 2022), and our interlocutors could only get hold of the literal leftovers of this food through their own efforts (diamante 2015) and “informal food systems” (tefft el al. 2017). our interlocutors resorting to pagpag or terter resembles what rachel black (2009) identified as “urban foraging” in some european countries, where people from marginalized communities sift through refuse (usually market waste) to look for their next meal. black (2009, 272) refers to the phenomenon as an “expression of both hunger and of human resourcefulness” in a consumer-oriented urban foodscape. as pointed out by cora alice du bois (1987) in her ethnography among the alor in indonesia, the experience of hunger propels people to specific practices, including learning new skills. to some extent, this corresponds to the notion of diskarte in the form of scavenging and begging as identified by one of our informants as his idea of pantawid-gutom. on the other hand, such a landscape is also filled with so-called hunger killers directly marketed to people like our interlocutors, catering to their need for pantawid-gutom. like poor, low-caste consumers in india (baviskar 2018) and those at the “bottom of the pyramid” in papua new guinea who turn to instant noodles (errington, fujikura, and gewertz 2012), our interlocutors may feel “pleased with their access to a world-pervading, competitively priced, convenient, satisfying, daily belly filler—pleased with their access to this particular kind of contemporary hunger killer” (errington, fujikura, and gewertz 2012, 28). coffee, soft drinks, and energy drinks fall into a similar category, allowing our interlocutors to meet the demands for various kinds of labor amid contexts of “capitalist transformations” and “performance consumptions” of labor (mintz 1986; roseberry 1996; rodrigues, lopes, and hardon 2019). pantawid-gutom illustrates the overlapping meanings attached to these resources and unsettles rigid ideas assigned to food items and other sources of sustenance. one wonders if pantawid-gutom are necessarily low quality and lack nutrition, or whether such definitions are specific to our interlocutors’ urban food and economic environment. in rural figurations, pantawid-gutom may take a different form. for instance, in coastal communities in central visayas, root crops and maize might complement rice in times of food scarcity (balatibat 2004). notably, in the same area, seasonality drives the locals to gather certain “hunger foods” such as sea urchins, seaweed, mollusks, snails, and other organisms thriving in shallow waters (sobritchea 1994; balatibat 2004). yet in another fishing settlement in southern luzon, where fish is a staple item, francisco datar (2002, 61) mentions further unnourishing pantawid-gutom items whenever seasonality hits: “this [meager catch] is evidenced by the long list of loans made to every household for every purchase. the usual items purchased on credit are rice, sugar, kerosene, bread, and the rest are salt, cigarettes, and coffee.” in other urban food environments, meanwhile, the food items we discussed are categorized differently, further reminding us of emily yates-doerr’s (2015, 319) observation that categories “emerge through specific, situated practices.” for instance, in another ethnography exploring food consumption in urban areas of vanuatu, white rice occupies an ambivalent category in the locality’s diet, as it is considered “imported” and therefore less nutritious than the area’s more traditional root crops (wentworth 2017). however, given the more cost-effective and satisfying qualities of white rice, it has become a diet staple and a key ingredient of a “complete meal,” especially in households struggling to secure food on a daily basis. far from being determined by the urban food environment, then, our study shows how the corporeality of deprivation and the cultural meanings assigned to hunger (chao 2021; kalofonos 2021) constantly produce and reconstruct people’s notions about food and food rules, nutrition and sustenance. in refusing to acknowledge pantawid-gutom as a real food, are they also evincing some kind of “discursive resistance” (garth 2014), or perhaps articulating an idiom of hope? while our interlocutors speak of the inability to provide food for their children as a moral failing, their accounts of consuming pantawid-gutom so that their children can eat “real meals” speak of an attempt not only to negotiate hunger but also to meet a moral imperative amid difficult circumstance—to achieve some semblance of well-being and the good life for their children and, by extension, their own future (fischer 2014). such a narrative illustrates the symbolic efficacy of pantawid-gutom in mending the morally painful and “socially disruptive” effects of hunger (kalofonos 2021, 31). conclusion: the multiple efficacies of pantawid-gutom sidney mintz (1986) suggests that by revisiting long-standing topics of anthropological interest such as food by paying attention to their meanings, anthropologists manage to see patterned relationships between substances and human groups as forms of communication. in a departure from rigid definitions and assumptions of what counts as hunger, nutrition, and good satiety (kristensen et al. 2002) in nationwide surveys, or from how people categorize food (cf. hardin 2021; gross and rosenberger 2005), our examination of pantawid-gutom reveals hunger as not just a discrete state characterized by the absence of food but also as a nebulous spectrum that involves active intervention through various substances and practices (gross and rosenberger 2005, 2010). moreover, in exploring how people define pantawid-gutom as opposed to regular meals, we see the suspension of the standards of what is good to eat amid the resort to substances or practices that instantly alleviate hunger. clear material differences exist between pantawid-gutom and the regular meals people strive to approximate or substitute. to recapitulate our interlocutors’ accounts, meals cost money, take time to prepare and consume, offer a full sense of satiety, and have nutrients that people need (especially rice). conversely, the efficacy of pantawid-gutom lies in its accessibility, affordability, and its ability to stave off the sensation of hunger regardless of its nutritional quality (in some cases, none). finally, meals follow a temporal pattern no longer sustainable amid the 24/7 demands of the global economy (rabinbach 1992). might the merienda, or snack, serve as a healthier alternative to pantawid-gutom to fit this temporal context? in other words, can there be more nutritious pantawid-gutom? feeding programs, nutritional innovations, and even information campaigns in the philippines have been largely meal-based, that is, their goals have been to either provide meals or educate the public on what makes for a good meal. by nutritionally surveying the different kinds of pantawid-gutom in urban and rural food environments; by addressing the unavailability of healthy snacks; and by creating enabling environments for people to prepare, afford, and access healthy foods, nutrition policy can attune itself better to the context-specific realities of food insecurity. such ethnographic insights on food scarcity, as well as how such insights can contribute to public health and nutrition, have been previously laid out in the literature (hadley and crooks 2012; gross and rosenberger 2005, 2010); they can serve as inspiration for similar studies in the philippines and elsewhere. these material considerations aside, the efficacy of pantawid-gutom also operates on a symbolic level, that is, in its categorization as a non-meal, its occupying a different conceptual domain. a meal is meant to be nakakabusog (filling) and masustansiya (nutritious)—and neither deprivation nor our interlocutors’ coping strategies change these standards. drawing on fieldwork in cuba, garth (2019, 5) observed that amid “(nonextreme) food scarcity, where certain ingredients are nearly impossible to acquire … alimentary dignity is negotiated through this discursive practice of only categorizing particular foods as ‘real.’” aside from emphasizing the temporal dimension, that is, the need to eat three times a day, what our study adds to this notion of dignity is that even in extreme cases of hunger, such definitional practices endure and include not just defining what counts as real or ideal food according to locally desirable standards but also (re)defining which other foods (or non-food substances) count as something else. indeed, by placing pantawid-gutom on a different register, individuals who occupy marginalized positions in the urban, informal economy maintain their “alimentary dignity” (garth 2019), their expectations of what constitutes a “good food” (hardin 2021; trapp 2016; wentworth 2017; wheeler 2018), and ultimately, their aspirations for a good and dignified life (fischer 2014), all while satisfying the more pressing demands of hunger as they continue working or looking for work (orlove 1997). by framing their food insecurity in ephemeral terms, by using the metaphor of crossing or tiding over, the notion of pantawid-gutom carries the hope that they can bridge their socioeconomic and moral predicaments. abstract pantawid-gutom literally means “to bridge hunger” and refers to a range of food and non-food products and practices in the philippines that allow people to survive in between “serious meals.” what does its existence as a liminal category between food/non-food or serious/non-serious meal signify, particularly for millions of filipino families who regularly experience hunger? drawing on fieldwork in low-income urban communities on luzon island, and from a review of the scholarly and popular literature, we use local conceptions of pantawid-gutom—hitherto overlooked in the scholarship—as a starting point for exploring the lived reality of food insecurity in the country. the efficacy of pantawid-gutom, we argue, is both material and symbolic, providing temporary relief from the feeling of hunger and allowing people to suspend their ideas of what is good to eat while maintaining the hope that their socioeconomic predicament is something bridgeable. [pantawid-gutom; hunger; food insecurity; food categories; nutritional anthropology; philippines] buod sa pilipinas, ang tambalang salitang “pantawid-gutom” ay tumutukoy sa mga pagkain at iba pang bagay o gawain na ginagamit o ginagawa ng mga tao upang “maitawid” ang kanilang gutom sa gitna ng kahirapan o mahirap na sitwasyon. ano ang maaari nating matutunan sa pagsasabuhay ng mga tao sa konseptong ito, at sa relasyon nito sa pagkain, lalo na sa milyon-milyong pamilyang pilipino na araw-araw nakararanas ng gutom? hango sa˛ isang etnographiya (pakikiag-usap, pakikipagkwentuhan, at pagmamasid) sa˛ iba’t ibang mga komunidad sa timog luzon, at sa pagsasaliksik ng mga nauna nang naisulat tungkol sa naturang paksa, ginamit namin ang mga lokal na pag-unawa sa “pantawid-gutom” (isang paksang sa pagkakaalam namin ay hindi pa napagtutuunang-pansin sa antropolohiya) upang simulan ang isang malalim na pagtanaw sa karanasan ng pagkagutom at kakulangan ng pagkain sa bansa. mula sa aming pagsusuri, ang bisa ng pantawid-gutom ay nakaugat sa silbi nito bilang isang bagay na sadyang nakakapawid ng gutom at sa pagiging simbolo nito ng pag-asa: pag-asa na may mas ‘tunay’ na pagkain na nakaabang sa kanila, at, gaya ng gutom, maging ang kanilang mga suliranin sa buhay ay maaari ring ‘maitawid’. 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4: 444–68. https://doi.org/10.1086/677311 yates-doerr, emily 2015 “does meat come from animals? a multispecies approach to classification and belonging in highland guatemala.” american ethnologist 42, no. 2: 309–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12132 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 194-215, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.02 grinding the souls: politics of interspecies pity and the labor of care in a south korean animal shelter cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 298-321, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.06 grinding the souls: politics of interspecies pity and the labor of care in a south korean animal shelter euyryung jun jeonbuk national university https://orcid.org/0009-0005-5654-0924 when i first requested an interview with yujin, a managing staff member of animal rescue in action (ara),1 an animal shelter that rescues and provides care to homeless dogs in danger of euthanasia in yangju and facilitates their adoption into homes in south korea and overseas,2 she said that she would prefer to do it over the phone. her preference was not so much rooted in concern about the pandemic but in the fact that she felt she had no time to spare, as she needed to be online all day to talk with people interested in adopting dogs. during the interview, she told me how ara had been run by “grinding the souls of a few [myeonmyeochui yeonghoneul garaneoeo].” pointing to the routine burnout and high turnover among the staff, she said, “most people quit within a year. those who become engaged too enthusiastically see their lives collapse, ruin their health, and then quit before a year goes by. but those who are only partially engaged generally stay longer.” her words stuck with me throughout my fieldwork at ara (2019–2022), an organization run predominantly by middle-aged women from lowerto middle-income backgrounds, while i sought to fathom the meaning of the intense and precarious labor of interspecies care these women embodied. in this essay, i first try to situate ara’s activities against the backdrop of the emergent politics of what i call “interspecies pity,”3 predominantly mobilized by the increased visibility of animal suffering and human pity aroused by the spectacle of such suffering (cf. arendt 1969; boltanski 1999; ticktin 2015). the attention to the suffering of animals as a population has seen rapid growth in south korea in the past two decades, leading to the emergence of various kinds of groups working on animal rights, initiating related legislative changes, and redirecting social giving toward animal issues. i specifically look at how ara’s activities could not only flourish in but also be significantly constrained by the moralist politics of interspecies pity that makes running and working at ara extraordinarily intense, as yujin’s above expression of “grinding the souls” indicates. this politics translates the labor of interspecies care into selfless affection and love and asks caregivers to prove their “grace” by refusing any reciprocity for the act of giving (pitt-rivers 2011). the pressure for grace then turns ara shelters into places that actively reproduce feminized labor of the cheap and the flexible (weeks 2011). how can one reconcile the apparent irony of the explosion of pity for non-human suffering and the demand for the cheap yet devoted labor of women to provide this care? the rise of the view of animals as “socially most vulnerable” and the politics of interspecies pity that thrive on that image tend to downplay the issue of human difference and social inequality by highlighting a universal humanness (cf. song 2010; weiss 2016). yet the naturalization of care that prevails in this politics demands the kind of care that cannot be possible without the gendered exploitation of less educated, lower income women. this situation might make us ask how the search for pure and innocent suffering may not only render invisible structural inequality (ticktin 2017) but in fact operate precisely by exploiting and reproducing existing social inequality. this reality also highlights the importance of addressing asymmetries and differences within “the human” that cannot be ignored in understanding the concrete nature of interspecies relationships, but that in anthropology’s multispecies turn have received relatively less examination (kirksey and helmreich 2010; kohn 2013; cf. lemke 2017).4 the politics of interspecies pity, as seen in the case of south korea today, seems to extend the need for women’s shadow labor, which, as feminist scholars of political economy have often noted, constitutes the capitalist system’s “invisible heart” (folbre 2002). however, although women’s gendered labor of care became readily available for exploitation in the maintenance of pity’s moralization at ara, their everyday entanglements at the shelters still resisted a complete subsumption to patriarchal capitalism, thus offering a rupture for my second intervention. in other words, women’s conscious negation of what they do at ara as “labor” or “wage work,” and their unwitting yet persistent rejection of the rationale of productivity by following their own enchantments with more-than-human sociality, reveal their labor to have what sylvia federici (2012, location 197) called “the ‘double character’ of reproductive work,” with power to both integrate workers into the labor market—but also to disintegrate them from it. ara’s activity of helping the system’s unwanted dogs survive and flourish in more-than-human adoptive kinship constitutes reproductive labor in its own right, but one that does not conform to economic rationality or capitalist world-making (cf. moore 2023). in this light, the expression “grinding the souls” gains another, rather more affirmative meaning: in women’s own world-making, these words capture affective excesses not subsumed by the intensity of labor or the logic of productivity. below, i discuss how the labor of interspecies care at ara emerges as a “curious double” (muehlebach 2011, 76). on the one hand, this labor embodies feminized exploitation by being constantly vulnerable to the co-optation of the moralizing and naturalizing politics of interspecies pity. on the other hand, it becomes the site for intraand inter-species entanglements irreducible to the logic of exploitation, thus creating new forms of care and sociality. i will first situate the ara’s activities in the emergent politics of interspecies pity and discuss the politics’ tendency to (re)establish a moralist and dehistoricizing vision of human-animal relations and to erase human difference and inequality. i then examine a paradox ensuing from this politics—and the possibility that nonetheless emerges. that is, although interspecies pity’s blindness to human difference appropriates it to realize its own promise, everyday entanglements such as the ones occurring in ara shelters are not entirely overshadowed by that coupling of moralization and exploitation. in so doing, i continue critical and feminist endeavors to intervene in and reconstruct the notion of care when an idealized, totalizing, and often depoliticizing discourse of care has increasingly gained new purchase with the rise of the global talk in the anthropocene (govindrajan 2021; parreñas 2018; ticktin 2021). the discourse of interspecies pity and women’s practices at ara both imagine “care,” but they do so differently. if pity mandates “graceful care” then translated into feminized exploitation, the ara women establish an “interspecies kinship of care” that operates based on mutual enchantments, rather than exclusive entitlements. it appears that both the discourse of pity and the women themselves refuse the idea of labor per se, but the refusals head in different directions. pity’s negation of animal care as labor aligns with the moralizing vision of care as selfless giving, which not only denies any material returns for women but also then serves as a pretext for stigmatization about doing unworthy things. the women’s own refusal to describe what they do as labor may make them complicit in the devaluation of care work, but we can read into it a critique of the capitalist validation of what is worthy and what is not, thus revealing the very system of (de-)valuation responsible for their own exploitation/stigmatization. when coming to the shelter meant mourning the dead and not leaving the shelter meant responding to another’s call, the ensuing care in fact meant nothing but coming to terms with mutual vulnerabilities. in what follows, i will show how ara’s activities, while always caught between the pressure for grace and the stigmatization for uselessness, may hint at a possibility of commoning care characterized by mutual enchantments, disowning and relational rearrangements. interspecies pity and animals as the socially most vulnerable when i met kim cheon soo, the then representative of the veterinary medical association of yangju, in the winter of 2019, he emphasized that only a few of the town’s rescue dogs were put to death, something for which he credited the work of ara, as they took in all dogs before they could be euthanized. south korea’s animal protection act allows rescue dogs and cats to be exhibited online for up to ten days in hopes of either finding their original or new homes.5 if they cannot be returned or rehomed, the animals are to be “humanely handled” (indojeok cheori)—a euphemistic phrase for euthanasia. commissioned by the city government of yangju, the role of local vets like kim was to take care of the rescued animals, treat the injured, find their homes, and put un-homed ones to death. the presence of a group like ara, which kim described as “practically focused on saving lives,” compared to the larger and nationally renowned animal rights groups he thought of as more “event focused,” spared him and other commissioned vets in yangju the grim task of legalized killing, which was more unavoidable and widespread in other parts of the country. ten days after my meeting with kim, i visited one of the shelters ara ran in yangju. it was a freezing february morning, with the temperature plummeting to negative 15 degrees celsius. the shelter was located amid paddy fields, with no one in sight since it was off-season. yet as i approached the shelter made up of five to six vinyl greenhouses, i was struck by the sound of hundreds of dogs barking. when i went into one of the greenhouses, i saw about a hundred dogs, each caged in a separate kennel with their name, estimated age, sex, and characteristics written on the front. this time, i was surrounded not only by the sound of barking but also the odor of dog feces. when a dog out to exercise ran fast toward me and soiled my padded jacket with its paws, i saw mihee, a staff member that i was supposed to meet that morning, doing her morning chores: changing food and water for the dogs and clearing away their feces from the night before. figure 1. staff doing her morning chores in one of the ara shelters. photo by euyryung jun. figure 2. the tags on the front of kennels show dogs’ name, age, sex, and characteristics. photo by euyryung jun. when mihee was still a high school student in 2012, she found a stray maltese dog on the street and took it to a police station. soon the dog was moved to a local shelter commissioned by the city government, where its condition deteriorated. “you could see that the dog had obviously been neglected there. many people like me simply report any stray dogs to the authorities without knowing they may be killed unless they find a home to go to,” mihee said. her experience with the stray maltese led her to ara, which had just started operating in town and was saving dogs from euthanasia. the group started with fewer than one hundred dogs and now cares for about five hundred animals in three shelters located in yangju and seoul. another staff member, yujin, explained the motivation behind the creation of ara: “[we thought] that although we might not be able to do something big, we can still save the kids [dogs] in yangju. these are the kids who will die. they will be killed if they are put there [in these shelters].” both mihee and yujin reveal that, ironically, ara emerged in response to a new sense of biopolitical responsibility, according to which the state’s animal control places animals under the legal injunction of “live well or die,” as a consequence of which they define killing as an “act of caring and responsibility” (srinivasan 2013, 106–12; cf. bocci 2017). in intervening in the utilitarian sacrifice perpetrated by the state, ara’s position rather resembled what didier fassin (2007) termed the “politics of life” in his discussion of humanitarian organizations. its efforts to bringing to their shelter as many dogs as possible, left after the tenth day, focused on saving individual animal lives, representing them as victims in need of defense. in contrast to the state’s premeditated responsibility, ara’s intervention embodied a form of “response-ability” as the “capacity to respond” (haraway 2016, 78). while deep uncertainty constantly threatened the group’s future, with the constant appearance of dogs with nowhere to go and limited space and capabilities in the shelter, ara nonetheless acted in the face of the pervasive vulnerability obvious once it was known what would happen if nothing was done (dave 2014; jun 2019). the group could not simply not act. however, it is not enough to merely address questions of interspecies compassion and vulnerability between the staff and dogs to fully understand the larger contexts in which ara acted and became sustainable (jun 2023). that is, what made it possible for ara, which began with fewer than 100 homeless dogs, to become a group that rescues and offers shelter to 500–550 dogs annually within less than ten years, even without the nationwide visibility proffered by celebrities supporting larger animal rights and animal welfare groups? what can explain a seemingly endless stream of volunteers and donations, which even saw a rapid rise to more than 13 billion won in 2020, at a time when the entire national economy staggered under the fallout of covid-19? to situate the work of animal care embodied by ara beyond the staff-dog relationship and thus understand what largely sustains its activities in today’s south korea, it is important to consider the changing moral status of animals and their rapid entry into the realm of social assistance, within which animals have been increasingly defined as “the weakest of sahoejeok yakja [the socially weak]” (lee 2017, 28). this recognition of animals as the most vulnerable social group and their inclusion in law (cherkaev 2021), such as the animal protection act, have been fueled by the increased visibility of the suffering of animals and by an interspecies version of what luc boltanski (1999) called “a politics of pity,” following hannah arendt’s (1969) distinction between compassion and pity. unlike compassion, a co-suffering affect, pity can be aroused “without being touched in the flesh,” can travel easily, and “reach out to the multitude” (arendt 1969, 80–84). an interspecies politics of pity, which operates by mobilizing the suffering of animals in general—that is, not “this animal, at this moment” (dave 2014, 434)—as well as human pity toward the spectacle of animal suffering, discursively shapes the conceptualization of animals as the most vulnerable group within the world of more-than-human, social suffering. in so doing, this politics extends a humanitarian framework and its universalist and moralist tendencies to the matter of animal suffering (ticktin 2015). it mobilizes the innocence and helplessness of the animal victim and a totalizing and dehistoricizing vision of the timeless human oppression of animals (song 2010; ticktin 2017; weiss 2016). recent examples involved the killing of an eight-year-old female puma found roaming outside her enclosure in a daejeon zoo in 2018 and the death of a cloned beagle abused for lab experiments at the veterinary school of seoul national university in 2019. these events received nationwide attention that led to vociferous petitions on the online board run by cheong wa dae, the then presidential office. the images of porong-i, the puma, shot dead and lying still on a truck, and of may, the beagle, famished and rawboned, his genitals grotesquely swollen for the alleged semen collection, went viral on the internet, arousing public sympathy and grief. these incidents were portrayed as tragedies caused by the endless human exploitation of animals and as serious violations against the animals’ right to life. when denouncing cruelty against animals and highlighting the need for rescue, protection, and care, the politics of interspecies pity tends to progressively erase difference and inequality among humans (moore 2023; song 2010). it defines the human singularly as “an accomplice and a beneficiary in a society of egalitarian power sharing” (song 2010, 54), thereby rendering human inequality invisible vis-à-vis the insurmountable profundity of animal suffering (weiss 2016).6 a video titled “pigs murdered by hammer” (“dwaeji mangchi salhae sageon”), posted online in 2018 by the korean animal welfare association (dongmul jayu yeondae/kawa) and korea animal rights advocates (kara), the two largest animal advocacy groups in south korea, exemplifies how the erasure of human inequality and difference works in such contexts. taken by a secret informant to denounce a local factory farm for animal abuse, the video shows a man, supposedly a farm worker, bludgeoning tens of piglets with a hammer, leaving those still alive struggling in pain. in this gory scene, the man and his acts emerge as the epitome of human violence and cruelty toward animals, as the situation that requires moral rectification. what slips from attention here is who the humans are that tend to work on factory farms: people in the most precarious social positions, often migrant workers. arousing interspecies pity here deeply depends on ignorance of human difference and inequality, rather reintroducing a moral hierarchy among humans according only to their relationship with animals. one of the youtube comments on the video, “i am not going to do that kind of work even if they give me one billion won,” is symptomatic of the stigmatization thus generated.7 when translated into the mundane world of care, interspecies pity’s blindness to human difference reveals its biggest paradox, in which it ends up exploiting difference while refusing to acknowledge it. the rise of animals as the most vulnerable social group and the interspecies pity thriving on that imagery have allowed animal-rights groups such as ara, to appear and flourish. this milieu also ensured that the larger of these groups, such as kawa and kara, managed to solicit more donations than traditional civic groups.8 however, i show below that while ara survived on interspecies pity’s humanitarian urge to rescue and care for animals at risk, the moralist tendencies of this politics bound it to the demand for pure, disinterested care that cannot be done without the exploitation of the cheap yet devoted labor of women. while pity does not acknowledge gendered difference, the type of care it mobilizes has a gendering effect. below, i discuss how the ara staff routinely face the pressure for pure care and what julian pitt-rivers (2011) has called “grace,” which refuses and indeed stigmatizes any compensation or returns for the act of (care)giving and inherently leads to a gendered exploitation that runs on the naturalization of animal care as “womanly.” pressure for grace and gendered exploitation “when the care [coexistence of animal rights on earth] thing happened, we had such a hard time for months. all the donations stopped coming in. [people thought] every shelter was the same [as care]. that is why we fear such issues,” said yujin. she was commenting on a scandal involving one of south korea’s three largest animal rights groups, care, which shocked not only local animal-care circles but the entire country. in january 2019, a group of care staff members disclosed that its president, park so yeon, had secretly euthanized more than two hundred dogs that the organization had rescued from dog meat farms and other “abusive sites” for the past four years (choi 2019).9 news story after news story followed, denouncing the moral depravity of park, a well-known activist whose frequent appearances on animal-themed television shows had left the public impressed with her deep (com)passion for suffering animals. when the follow-up revelations included her misappropriation of donations, public anger and surprise exploded, with the media labeling park as “janus-faced.” what happened at care inevitably tainted the public image of local animal groups. the news shocked animal lovers, making them question the legitimacy not only of care but also of other organizations, including ara. recalling one of the biggest crises ara had ever encountered, yujin continued, “these kids [dogs] live on that money [from donors] month by month. but [when it happened] running shelters became too difficult. it took so long to recover, and now the corona virus pandemic has come. at that time, there were lots of people who told us they wanted to switch from money to goods. and there were those who would call me out of nowhere and ask for an explanation. these people would say, ‘what kind of group is yours? how do you people use the money [from donations]?’” yujin’s words implied how much dogs’ everyday survival and well-being directly depended on how well ara managed to maintain its reputation with outsiders, including donors and volunteers. even the slightest damage to public appearance could become toxic, especially for a group such as ara, which took care of a large number of dogs (perhaps the largest in the country as yujin assumed) and relied heavily on monthly donations. yujn told me a story from a few years ago, when local animal groups gathered to attack dog meat farms. ara decided to step outside of the collective, after all, in fear of attracting public attention, which was well-received by other groups. public action and risk-taking could potentially put their dogs in danger. too much fame was risky as well, as it could trigger unwanted attention. “this is why we don’t want to become as famous as kawa or kara,” stressed yujin. this situation shows the kind of moral boundedness in which ara inevitably found itself embedded, and the precarious conditions of its operations. although interspecies pity, mobilized by the suffering of innocent animals, has generated the ground on which animal groups such as ara could appear and flourish, its moral tendencies not only to establish a strict human-animal divide but also to define humans either as victimizers or saviors have strongly regulated the parameters of the group’s possible actions. gifts rooted in interspecies pity were accompanied not only by suspicious regard for the recipients but also by pressure for them to provide pure, unconditional care, that is, possess grace. to be a gratifier, however, means to be a giver of a free gift; the opposite of the kind of gift marcel mauss (1966) elaborated on, one that calls for return. grace refuses any reciprocity for the act of giving, instead lavishing unaccountable love. the staff of ara, for example, was expected to work for free or for a minimal reward to show their selflessness and disinterestedness, attributes that would make them deserving donation recipients and morally legitimate caregivers of dogs. in tired voice, yujin said, “you know, we are so fed up with the situation” of constantly fearing any possible moral scratch. she knew that it would be better to run shelters more systematically by formally employing full-time, paid staff and having those who are competitive (il jal haneun) stay on longer. yet this seemed impossible in face of the constant fear of being misread as profiteering from dogs. they had to prove that they differed from “dog traders” (gae jangsu)—the biggest insult, yet not unheard of when dealing with faultfinding outsiders. as pitt-rivers (2011, 426) noted, the matter of maintaining “the purity of the motives of the gratifier” is intimately linked with that of maintaining one’s “moral supremacy.” yet when any evidence of material reciprocity suggested the contamination of the purity of own’s actions and love for the animals, what, one might ask, is muted and rendered invisible at the same time? was it not precisely the fact that love takes labor (govindrajan 2021), that taking care of hundreds of homeless dogs requires massive human effort and money, something effectively disappeared in face of the need to make ara appear the morally legitimate caretakers of dogs? i did not ask yujin this question, but she certainly would have agreed, especially considering the details she has often given me when talking about the intensity of the everyday work at the shelter. in her discussion of the bovine politics in himalayan india, radhika govindrajan (2021) notes the stark contrast between a discourse of idealized, purity-seeking yet bodily distant love for gau-mata (cow-mother) among male hindu nationalists and the practice of embodied love by the rural women responsible for the grueling care labor of livestock. in ara’s situation, the call for grace and pure care and the everyday care done on the ground were conjoined in a direct relationship of exploitation. as “opposed to calculation,” the search for grace in the moralizing politics of interspecies pity negates the worldliness of money and labor (pitt-rivers 2011, 437). yet when that pity needed someone else’s devoted and often backbreaking labor to achieve its own promise, the negation became the ground of exploitation against (female) labor. indeed, the mechanism of negation and exploitation in this relationship resembles that of naturalizing women’s reproductive labor in patriarchal capitalism (dalla costa 1983; federici 2012). women’s reproductive activity is labeled natural, feminine love, rather than labor in need of compensation; at ara, the labor of interspecies care, predominantly provided by women in their thirties and forties, took the name of “women’s innate affection for dogs.” the face of the innocent gratifier sought by interspecies pity thus became dominantly feminized. when i pointed out to her that the majority of the shelter staff were women, yujin said, “yes, yes, it is somewhat like that. like moseongae [mother love] [that explains why women work at ara despite many troubles]. [i think it is] something like mother love toward dogs.” the idea that women’s care for dogs in danger of euthanasia emerged from some innate female urge offered an appealing answer to why ara persisted despite all the hardships. yet this naturalization disguised the fact that the reduction of female labor into “non-labor” legitimized the exploitation of cheap, if devoted, labor of women working at the shelter. the staff at ara were divided into two groups: the unpaid, managing staff (like yujin) called seutaep practically ran the organization. their tasks included counseling for adoption, managing the sns (social networking service) accounts, accounting for donations, maintaining contact with overseas sister organizations, and attending to various ad hoc tasks. the minimum-wage shelter staff, called jikwon, fed the dogs, took care of their feces and dirty urine pads, walked and exercised the animals, closely watched individuals, reporting any problems to managing staff, kept the whole shelter clean, and dealt with many other tasks arising from the care of about thirty to seventy dogs at a time. the division of labor between the managing and the shelter staff inherently led to the hierarchy among them, which became important in running ara shelters efficiently (jun 2023). a slight class difference also seemed to obtain between the managing staff, who were relatively better off, often running small businesses such as nurseries or private institutes (hakwon), and the shelter staff, who tended to be of lower-income, less educated backgrounds and used to work in the service sector or small factories before joining ara. nonetheless, it was somewhat fuzzy to say who was exploiting whom when almost everyone i met was intensely immersed in the work at ara, receiving either nothing or minimum remuneration. the naturalization of dog care as a woman’s task emerged as a notable tendency not only among the managing staff like yujin but also among some of the shelter staff, and it often cropped up in conversations about the few men working in shelters. for example, bora, a passionate part-timer emotionally so attached to the everyday well-being of the dogs that she worked in ara shelters almost to the same degree as the full-time staff, called some of the young men who had worked there “a little unique in many ways.” they would not consider coming to work in animal shelters where “the work is hard and the pay is small” without being “unique”—suggesting their lack of competitiveness as young men in finding more desirable jobs. “they come thinking that they will do rescue operations but become disappointed when they find out that what they have to do is feed dogs and muck out kennels. … you know, we are housewives and ajumma [a demeaning word for middle-aged, married women],” she slurred. her words expressed her deep dissatisfaction toward those men who performed “only about twenty percent,” when she performed “one hundred percent.” at the same time, she appeared to repeat the social devaluation of care work and the naturalization of it as women’s work. if bora appeared still relatively indirect in gendering the shelter work, jeong youn, another shelter staff member who, i found, had the tendency of having normative conversations on things like what animal care should look like and what responsibilities pet owners should have, did not hesitate to define animal love and care as a “woman thing,” with men’s presence in that context reduced to a largely technical matter. she told me how often she had to control herself from being too involved in the work at the shelter and how she saw it as resulting from “women’s natural tendency for being reckless,” compared to “men who are basically more rational.” this is why dongpan (the animal scene) was inherently yeocho (predominated by women), she claimed. the two women feminized dog care differently. if bora highlighted the fitness of women (especially older women) for socially devalued care work, jeong youn saw women’s “inherent nature of being emotional” as the key factor that made them keen to love and care for animals. either way, the “attributes of femininity” served as “work functions” (federici 2012, 4; emphasis original). as gender difference became a source for them to make sense of their own engagement, they unwittingly legitimized their own exploitation. in other words, their exploitation was also self-exploitation, as they willingly participated in the process of naturalizing the so-called feminine attributes and of negating what they did as labor. yet because their exploitation also constituted a form of self-exploitation, i hesitate to say they were simply reproducing the alienated labor of women. although they were perfectly filling the need for cheap, feminized labor created by the moral politics of interspecies pity, they were far from alienated. rather, the deeply affective relationships they built with both humans and non-humans at ara shelters—even though they were the condition of their own (self-)exploitation—very much satisfied their own desires. solely identifying these women as “exploited” therefore does not fully explain the nature of their relationship with and engagement at ara. below, i discuss that women’s conscious negation of labor (and even work) requires a reading that does not confine them merely to the familiar trope of exploitation and alienation. crazy women, obvlivious dogs, and irreducible entanglements my first volunteering day at ara’s main shelter in soorieup, yangju, proved a hot, steamy day in july 2020. i was paired with soo jeong, a middle-aged woman with long, orange hair, to help clean the house where five to six small dogs lived. when i went inside, i noticed that she was already finishing wiping the floor of the main room with a strong substance to prevent the odor of the dogs’ urine from soaking through. the dogs were playing in the small front yard. she kindly showed me what to do in the other rooms and then left. about two hours later, when i was about to rest, sweating heavily from the intense labor, she came back and said with a smile, “are you done? once the dogs come back in, they will mess up the room again, and i will have to do this all over again. i repeat these chores every day.” it had been four months since soo jeong had begun working as a full-time shelter staff member at ara. she said that she “used to do service work before, but had to quit because of corona.” like her, most of the shelter staff i met during my fieldwork at ara were women who used to work in the service sector or small factories before joining the shelter. in particular, those who started working at ara during the covid-19 outbreak came to work because they could not stay in their original workplaces any longer. the urgent need for social distancing eradicated jobs, especially in the person-to-person service sector (daemyun seobisue oup) in areas such as “education; food and accommodation; public health; social welfare; and arts, sports, and leisure” which usually have a high demand for women (shin 2021, 15). the fact that in 2020 this sector had the largest reduction in the rate of employment reveals the kind of existential crisis women of lower educational and income backgrounds in south korea have faced, especially during the early phase of the pandemic. in the same year, three times more women (283,000) than men (109,000) became jobless compared to the previous year (chang 2020), a situation caused by the sudden decline in the demand for service and relational labor in the market and the rising demand for women’s care and reproductive labor at home. however, for most of the shelter staff i met at ara, including those who had lost their jobs during the pandemic, money was not their sole motivation for working there. instead, as jeong youn, who lost her job at a duty-free shop, once told me, it was something “you cannot do if you think just about money.” many of them considered their work a special thing to do while off from “real work.” this held especially true for those who used to serve as volunteers before becoming full-time shelter staff. it was what they did to “offer a hand to ara that is always in need” as jeong youn would describe her motivation; or “for the kids [dogs]” as taeri, another shelter staff in her mid-forties who used to work in a garment factory, once told me. that women do not come to work in a place such as ara thinking of it as work for a wage was confirmed by yujin’s groan when she addressed the difficulty of finding shelter staff despite rising unemployment during the pandemic: “you know, we thought it would be easier to find people, because everyone said they were fired. [laughs] ah, [but] it was really hard to find someone. so, [we thought] it doesn’t matter [that they have a job or not]. people just don’t want to do such hard labor!” perhaps we could re-read bora’s devaluation of shelter work and her dissatisfaction with the male staff’s half-heartedness in doing their job against the backdrop of the above situation. it was work that comes with neither great monetary compensation nor any social honor. in that sense, it stood far from the stereotypical masculine pursuit—and rather what women were used to, willingly or not. if women like bora and others worked wholeheartedly despite the trivial nature of the work, it was precisely its triviality that made men half-hearted in their tasks. thus, when she slurred when saying “we are housewives and ajumma” to express her discontent with the young men disappointed that they do not do rescue operations, her slurring may indeed have hidden her contempt for men’s educated inability to give themselves to socially unrecognized work, as much as it may have been the recitation of the devaluation of care labor and its naturalization as a women’s job. “so, there are times when i wonder why they would even work in this kind of place,” said bora, unable to refrain from simmering doubts by questioning those, especially men, who did not possess the same degree of devotion and passion, as being out of place. however, it was not only to men in shelters that providing care for rescue dogs could be potentially meaningless. women constantly faced their own families, who saw them as being too much into the dog business of ara, which they considered rather useless. from the outset of my fieldwork at ara, i was struck by the managing staff who would talk about their own disapproving families (especially their husbands), to whom they would even lie that they had stopped working for ara or keep it secret if they had not. the fact that women’s involvement with ara could be at odds with the interests of their own family was detectable, too, among the shelter staff, but there it manifested differently. when i asked what made them work for ara, some of the shelter staff mentioned, besides other reasons, the relative freedom they had gained from their maternal duties at home (e.g., “my daughter is now living away in her college dormitory” or “my kids have started going to school”). thus, if the managing staff were with ara despite their families, the shelter staff worked there thanks to their absence. either way, their time at ara significantly counted against their role as mothers and wives, thus adding another layer of meaning to women’s involvement at ara. on the surface, this situation may mirror the double burden placed on women from lowerto middle-income backgrounds in south korea who have to attend to the unshrinking demand for their domestic labor amid an ever-escalating pressure to be productive in the labor market. on closer look, by engaging with supposedly useless activities in potential conflict with their own family, the women at ara satisfied neither the household economy in its broad sense nor the larger patriarchal structure in which it is embedded. as long as the question of what they gave to capital and what they gave to themselves was a concern in women’s engagement at ara (federici 2012, location 196), its contribution to the system was ambivalent at best, while much of it pertained to following their own enchantments and desires. although their passionate engagements simultaneously meant their potential exploitation under the politics of interspecies pity, their own entanglements at and with ara were not easily reducible into the cheap labor of the “femitariat” (moore 2023). instead, to use yujin’s expression, which mirrored her perception of others’ view on them, they were the “crazy women” lavishing their energy and time on a superfluous and expensive activity in the economic rationality. their everyday work of helping dogs survive and (re-)flourish in more-than-human adoptive kinship constituted a re-productive activity too—yet counterproductive in the market sense. how do we make sense of the irony of women’s interand intra-species entanglements vulnerable to the co-optation of the moralizing discourse of interspecies pity, on the one hand, yet resisting their complete translatability into feminine productivity, on the other? when shadowed by the politics of interspecies pity, women’s care for dogs at ara is inevitably “haunted by labor” (tsing 2015, 78)—as one that is feminized and exploited. the idea of labor clearly helps one recognize a form of gendered injustice and exploitation perpetuated under pity’s moralization and naturalization. even if women themselves do not define their activities as labor or wage work, they still remain haunted by labor, as they are not fully shielded from the broader politics of interspecies pity that brings a group like ara into existence in the first place, and then translate women’s desires and enchantments into “grace” and selfless devotion. however, if we do not shrink the heterogeneous elements arising from women’s experiences into the project of interspecies pity and instead recognize the possibility of another form of world-making, how do their activities look from that perspective and what other meanings may be given to them? here, i show that women’s engagement with ara may contain “uncaptured excesses” (ticktin 2021, 918) that cannot be consumed by the logic of labor. many at ara arrived at the shelter in mourning about the unanticipated death of animals they had lived with before, thus attending to the unfulfilled love and care for them. jeong youn, who lived with her husband and three dogs, had lost her first dog to measles within less than two weeks after her husband bought it from a pet shop. this incident led her to adopt two dogs from animal shelters, including ara. that she had such a short time with her first dog left her wanting another dog that she could properly care for. the manager of the duty-free shop she used to work for recommended she adopt a dog from a shelter. she did as advised and adopted another dog from ara, for which she started volunteering while working at the shop. likewise, bora told me about her experience with a baby sparrow she accidently came across at the factory she used to work at. she brought it to her house and took care of it like a pet. she said, “we would go to work together. it would not fly away and would stay inside my hood all day. i guess it thought of me like its mom.” but, one day she found it crushed to death on her pillow. “when it left like that within a month, the whole house felt like someone’s funeral. even with a bird, even a wild one, [i couldn’t believe] we could commune.” after this incident, she adopted a stray dog she found near her factory and began volunteering at ara. figure 3. staff holding a dog in the gisan-myun shelter. photo by euyryung jun. figure 4. dogs having their exercise time. photo by euyryung jun. if the stories of jeong youn and bora show the power of loss as “generative” of new relationships in that “absence is always potential presence” (parreñas 2018, 109), the new spaces of connectivity are not only cohabited but also significantly co-molded by the nonhuman other. while yujin used the word mother love to describe the inborn nature of women inscribed in their bodies, it was often the dogs that made the women their “mommy.” for example, when i asked her whether it was not very physically demanding to work at ara, joomi, a part-timer in her thirties said, “yes, it definitely is. but i cannot bear to stop working here leaving these kids [dogs] behind” (emphasis mine). when she said this, i almost had a vision of dogs biting her clothes when she was about to leave them behind. i asked this question as she, who had spent the past ten years as a full-time housewife taking care of two young children before coming to ara, stressed that she did not necessarily have to work as she did not face financial difficulties. with her children going to school now, she could finally secure some free time and was able to complete a certificate in pet beauty with the help of government assistance for the unemployed. when she searched for a place to do related work, part-time work at ara came her way. even though she could leave if she wanted, what bound her was nothing but those dogs. there inevitably developed between dogs and shelter staff as their daily caretakers a quasi mother-child relationship. in ara shelters, which always had difficulty finding new staff members to replace departing ones, dogs made “surprisingly powerful demands” by appearing to want them, and only them, as their mommy (ngai 2012, 64). here, the specificity of the situation helped strengthen the mutual kinship between dogs and staff (govindrajan 2015). however, while staff members found it difficult to leave shelters, dogs had always to be ready to leave for adoptive homes. indeed, ara was run like a dog orphanage, where keeping the constant flow of dog bodies proved most important for securing spaces for new rescues. thus, farewells proved frequent at the shelters. one morning, i witnessed a moment of separation when jeong youn greeted me by saying that there was an emergency. heungmi, a lovely, mid-sized black-and-white dog, was going to the airport to leave for her new home in a u.s. town. however, she had not been bathed yet, so hee jin, one of the managing staff, had urgently been summoned to the shelter to bathe and take heungmi to the airport. usually, when a dog is adopted, it must be bathed one day before departure. jeong youn was worried that heungmi might catch a cold on her long journey to the united states. the dog also needed to fast before getting on the plane, which meant that sanggu, a big eater who shared the same kennel, needed to fast too. i said, “sanggu will be lonely after his roommate heungmi leaves.” responding to my naïveté with a little laughter, jeong youn said, “still, he will forget about her in a few days. these kids forget easily. even mothers and babies forget about each other within a few months.” separation and forgetting form a normal part of everyday life at shelters. thus, jeong youn’s reply seemed to clarify how well not only staff members but also dogs dealt with the situation. yet separation did not mean alienation and loss but the continuity and even consummation of kinship. for all their motherly care for dogs, staff members reserved terms such as “mommy and daddy” for their future adoptive human parents by calling themselves emo (auntie) or samchon (uncle).10 shelters functioned like prep schools for interspecies kinship, where dogs’ human aunties or (to a much lesser degree) uncles make them into lovable and thus adoptable kids. joomi said she seldom used sns but opened an instagram account to follow adoptive families: “i get so proud [ppudeut haeyo] and teary when i see them go and have fun. (laughs) really. truly. and, when i see those kids that are still stuck here, i try hard to take photos of them [to go online for adoption], wishing them to find good homes, you know? i wish they could all go somewhere and this place would disappear. we talk about it every day.” while dogs leaving for their own good made joomi and others proud aunties, the presence of those still in shelters inevitably saddened them. at ara, staff referred to the dogs that had stayed at the shelter for years and did not seem to have a good chance for adoption due to either age or illness as mugeunji. in its ordinary usage, mugeunji refers to mature kimchi, loved for its deeply fermented flavor. however, at ara, the term highlighted the misfortune of some dogs and their state of being forgotten in the adoption scene. overall, this situation shows that dogs at ara should be the forgetting ones, not the other way around, and that the interspecies kinship thus arising preaches disowning over owning.11 the kind of relationality embedded in joomi’s pride in seeing dogs go and have fun not only refuses but also exceeds the familiar doubling of separation and alienation, let alone that of labor and exploitation. indeed, ara embodies a form of care that focuses on reworking “relational arrangements” (ticktin 2021, 918) and on commoning kinship, whereas the care that the politics of interspecies pity demands focuses on policing the moral purity of the caregiver, thus reproducing exclusion and inequality. in so doing, interspecies entanglements at ara are not only not exhausted by the moralizing discourse of interspecies pity but also generate a possibility—however fleeting and seemingly trivial—to reimagine a kinship of care that operates based on mutual needs rather than “moral deservingness” (ticktin 2021, 919). in other words, although the structural hierarchy within which the two forms of care are embedded may seize women as shadow workers, from within the very shadow emerge new possibilities of care and sociality with the other-than-human. backbreaking yet enchanted labor in the late summer of 2022, i returned to an ara shelter located in gisan-myun, yangju. however, taeri and jeong youn, the two shelter staff members who played an enormous role in helping set it up in 2020, no longer worked there. taeri, who left me with the impression of a “quiet but avid worker,” suffered arthritis pain in her fingers and legs after a year of working at ara and had waited for someone to replace her for long. jeong youn, who told me she would leave as soon as the work of setup was done when i first met her two years earlier, had extended her stay, and finally quit when summer 2022 came. she could not leave sooner because the entire duty-free industry she wished to go back to had collapsed under the ongoing pandemic and then again because it took long for ara to find someone to replace her. as yujin told me, working at ara for a longer period was rare. sooner or later, whether for women’s own physical or mental conditions or other factors, their full-time engagements eventually ended. in this essay, i sought to understand the meaning of women’s backbreaking yet enchanted labor: first, in the context of broader politics of interspecies pity that appropriate it for its moralist search and, then, in women’s own affective entanglements with both humans and non-humans in shelters. interspecies relation was important in both but featured very differently.12 politics of interspecies pity did not allow any reciprocity between humans and animals, and instead re-introduced a strict species hierarchy by fixing their roles into the savior and the saved. in the end, the politics of pity is drawn by the divide between the fortunate and the unfortunate than by matters of equality and justice (boltanski 1999). in the latter, however, interspecies reciprocity played a major role in gluing women to shelters and made them grind their souls amidst their own sweat, reeking dog dung, occasional bites and injuries, and slowly surfacing pains. it was in women’s labor that two forms of relations and more than human world-making intersected with one another, making it once gendered exploitation and another irreducible entanglement. on a broader level, this situation suggests the importance of not only considering the co-constitutiveness between social inequalities and interspecies relations but also seeing the possibility of new terrains that are simultaneously open (davis 2016; kim 2015; kosek 2006). it is also in this context of “deep entanglements” that the notion of work and (re-)productivity should be rethought beyond the money economy of capitalism that operates on the exclusion and exploitation of what is called nature, whether it be human or non-human (besky and blanchette 2018; moore 2023). the labor of interspecies care that ara embodies hints a possibility of being (re-)productive otherwise by enabling “those ‘who were never meant to survive’ to” not only “do just that” (hartman 2016, 171), but also weave and be woven into new relations. abstract this essay shows how the labor of interspecies care at animal rescue in action (ara), an animal shelter in south korea, invites two divergent interpretations. on the one hand, this labor embodies gendered exploitation by being vulnerable to the co-optation of the moralizing politics of “interspecies pity.” on the other hand, it becomes a site for intraand inter-species entanglements, that are irreducible to the logic of exploitation. the activities of ara become not only sustainable but also bound by the politics of interspecies pity, which translates the labor of care into selfless affection and grace, thus reproducing gendered exploitation. at the same time, however, everyday entanglements in ara shelters still create affective excesses that are not entirely subsumed by the politics of pity and generate new forms of care and sociality. overall, i suggest seeing not only the co-constitutiveness of social inequalities and interspecies relations but also the possibility of new, simultaneously open terrains. [interspecies pity; care; grace; gendered exploitation; reproductive labor; south korea] 초록 이 글은 한국의 동물 단체 ara에서 수행되는 종간 돌봄 노동이 두 개의 상이한 해석을 요청하는 상황에 주목한다. 이 노동은 한편으로는 “종간 연민”의 정치에 취약해질 수 밖에 없는 상황에서 젠더화된 착취를 체현하나, 다른 한편으로는 착취의 논리로만 환원될 수 없는 얽힘의 장소가 된다. ara의 활동은 종간 연민의 정치에 의해 지속가능해질 뿐 아니라 동시에 구속되며, 그 속에서 그들의 돌봄 노동은 이타적 애정과 ‘순수 선물’로 번역되고 그 결과 젠더화된 착취가 재생산된다. 하지만, ara 쉼터에서 이루어지는 일상의 얽힘들은 연민의 정치 안에 완전히 포섭되지 않을 뿐 아니라 새로운 유형의 돌봄과 사회성을 구성하는 정동적 과잉을 창출한다. 이 글에서 나는 사회적 불평등과 종간 관계의 상호구성됨, 더 나아가 그 속에서 새롭게 열리는 가능성의 지형들에 주목할 것을 제안한다. [종간 연민; 돌봄; 순수 선물; 젠더화된 착취; 재생산 노동; 한국] notes acknowledgments i thank my interlocutors at ara who kindly opened their space to me and allowed me into their world-making. i am deeply indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and generous comments that greatly helped improving this essay. i would also like to thank the editorial collective, particularly alberto corsín jiménez, for their editorial guidance, and petra dreiser and kate herman for their editorial assistance. euy min lee provided me with valuable help in transcribing interviews. preliminary versions of this essay were presented in venues organized in 2022–2023 by the research network for human-animal studies, the department of women’s studies at ewha womans university, the green party gwangju, your step & center for gender studies at chonnam national university, and anthropological research association of seoul national university (aras). i thank those who invited me to share my thoughts with them. finally, this work was supported by the ministry of education of the republic of korea and the national research foundation of korea (nrf-2022s1a5c2a02093459). 1. the names animal rescue in action, yangju, and of people in this essay are pseudonyms. 2. the relative unpopularity as companion dogs for adoption in south korea of mixed-breed, large-sized dogs locally called “jindo mixes” makes it necessary for them to find adoptive homes overseas, mainly in canada and the united states. 3. i use the phrase “politics of interspecies pity” to highlight similarities to the politics of pity (boltanski 1999). “interspecies pity” does not mean to suggest bi-directional pity between humans and animals, but pity involving another species as the pitied object. 4. for some exceptions to this tendency, see chua et al. 2021; govindrajan 2021; and parreñas 2012, 2016, 2018. 5. in a growing number of places in south korea, cats (especially feral ones) fall under the trap-neuter-return (tnr) program and thus find themselves in a different situation than dogs. 6. this erasure of human difference may inevitably be in tune with the hegemonic stress on individual (human) agency and empowerment and the downplay of structural inequality in neoliberal sociality. the rise of the animal as socially most vulnerable has interestingly coincided with the emergence of the neoliberal political economy in south korea. 7. accessed august 23, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ssuw0h3qs 8. for example, in 2022, kawa and kara together drew almost six times the donations given to people’s solidarity for participatory democracy (chamyeo yeondae), one of the largest civil society organizations. 9. since eating dog meat remains legal in south korea, as of 2021, the country has about eight hundred small-to-large dog meat farms—a number quickly halved since 2017 (han 2021). the passing of a bill in january 2024, however, means that dog meat consumption will become illegal beginning in 2027. 10. in the everyday social life of south korea, extending kinship terms to even a complete stranger is not unusual. given the cultural context, referring to the caretakers of dogs aunties and uncles appears not only apt but also a way of anthropomorphizing dogs. 11. the idea of disowning, however, should not be confused with that of “unmaking animal property” (abrell 2016, 28): ara rescues dogs to prevent them from being killed, not to free them from human ownership. disowning here has more to do with removing dogs from the kinship relations they had developed with staff and making them ready for new kinship adventures. 12. here, interspecies relation refers not only to affective, social, and material dimensions but also symbolic, cultural, and discursive ones. in that sense, the politics of interspecies pity may be said both to define and promote a form of interspecies relation. references abrell, elan 2016 “saving animals: everyday practices of care and rescue in the us animal sanctuary movement.” phd 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the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in israel.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 22, no. 3: 688–706. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12453 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 298-321, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.06 the immune home: domestic enclaves, diffuse protections cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 563-572, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.04 the immune home: domestic enclaves, diffuse protections ann h. kelly king’s college london http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4658-2133 javier lezaun university of oxford http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5483-3628 a delegation of senior officials from several tanzanian ministries and research agencies disembarks the plane taking them from dar es salaam to ifakara. from the airport it is a short, if bumpy, ride to the ifakara health institute (ihi)—a former swiss tropical field laboratory that has become in recent decades a tanzanian center for global health research and a world leader in the study of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. on arrival, the group is ushered into the vectorsphere, a combination of insectary, open-plan office, and “semi-field system”—an outdoor enclosure where mosquitoes are studied under quasi-natural conditions (kelly and lezaun 2017). as the delegates progress from lab bench to rearing cage, a series of demonstrations follow—a phd student developing a machine-learning algorithm for mosquito dissection explains the relationship between wing size and flight tone; an undergraduate intern illustrates the attractiveness of human sweat by releasing mosquitoes into tubes wafting synthetic odours on plumes of co2. it is arnold mmbando’s investigations in the semi-field, however, that garner the most enthusiastic response. arnold is working on a new method to protect local residents from malaria: eave ribbons impregnated with the chemical transfluthrin. made of ten-centimeter-wide bands of hessian fabric, the ribbons are light and can be easily affixed to the house’s exterior, covering the gaps between walls and roof common in many rural dwellings. thanks to transfluthrin’s spatial-repellent properties, the eave ribbons produce emanations that divert female mosquitoes away when they approach inhabited spaces in search of blood. portable, cheaply made, and aesthetically pleasing, the combination of ribbon and chemical could, arnold believes, transform the landscape of malaria prevention. figure 1. arnold mmbando, describing the operation of eave ribbons attached to an experimental hut, january 2020. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. for the past two decades, the battle against malaria-carrying mosquitoes in sub-saharan africa has relied on two domestic interventions: the spraying of residual chemicals on interior surfaces (indoor residual spraying, or irs) and the distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets (llins). integrated with antimalarial drugs and rapid diagnostic tests, these measures have significantly reduced the global malaria burden. in recent years, however, case numbers have plateaued and in some hyperendemic regions have started to rise again. increasing mosquito resistance to insecticides presents the most obvious challenge, but it has long been clear that the limitations of irs and llins are inherent in their design. in rural areas like the kilombero valley around ifakara, the house does not always correspond to a singular, bounded material structure, and nighttime domestic activities rarely remain contained within the walls of a single familial dwelling. residential space tends to spill out across a number of thresholds, open spaces, and partial enclosures, often encompassing multiple buildings in various states of construction and collapse. here, as elsewhere, the house is a drawn-out vital project, propelled by the aspirations of its inhabitants, punctuated by material constraints, and distributed across a range of structures (see motta 2021, this issue; neiburg 2021, this issue). the vectorsphere’s semi-field system attempts to replicate this fractal domestic topography, an effort not lost on its visitors. as arnold finishes his presentation, paul erasto, the chief research scientist at tanzania’s national institute of medical research, points to the chair just in front of the experimental hut. “my father will be sitting here speaking with friends throughout the evening. my mother will be cooking in the firepit just ahead. how will bed nets protect them? nets protect the inside—a place where no one is!” arnold’s impregnated ribbons are designed to create what he calls “bubbles of protection.” they work through passive dispersion, emitting vapors into the ambient air over a period of several months. compared with other steps usually taken to prevent mosquito bites outdoors—burning coils and herbs, applying topical chemical formulations to skin and clothes—these emanators require minimal investment or compliance from the user, and they pose fewer health risks. the ribbons can also travel light: researchers at ihi have recently tested them with local farmers who, during the rainy season, tend their crops from makeshift structures erected near the rice fields. arnold is also exploring smaller repellent-dipped strips that could be distributed under verandas, partial walls, and outdoor kitchen pergolas. spatial repellents represent a novel form of house-ing, oriented toward the flow of domestic routines that unfold across and beyond the house’s walls; arnold and his colleagues at ihi are effectively engaged in an effort to extend the oikos by chemical means, so that it can encompass those peri-domestic locations and inter-domiciliary events where the risk of infection is highest. a discreet intervention, such reformulation of chemical protection carries nevertheless huge implications. seen within the long history of tools used against malaria, spatial repellents focalize different forms of relationality and propinquity, directing attention to the interstices of everyday life. they also create a powerful sense of moral ambivalence. unmoored from the physically enclosed dwelling, the global fight against malaria appears to cast off its traditional material referent, and with it a crucial means of imagining the public good. * * * the relationship between malaria control and the conceptualization of domestic space goes back to the very moment the disease was apprehended as a mosquito-borne infection. ronald ross’s famous dissections of mosquitoes’ plasmodium-filled gut tissue in secunderabad proved the existence of a microbial pathogen, but it was patrick manson’s “model home” that ultimately settled the fundamental question of malaria epidemiology. manson conducted his famous experiment along the edge of a half-drained swamp in the roman campagna, an area known for being poor and intensely malarious. constructed in london, disassembled, and shipped on to ostia via rome, manson’s house consisted of four rooms adjoined by a single corridor. the windows were fitted with clear glass encasements and covered with cotton netting; the eaves, left open for ventilation, were secured with wire mesh. the doors leading out of the house were lined with netting and further enclosed by a screened porch. four men took up residence in the hut and lived there for three months, moving freely around the swampy grounds during the day, returning to the experimental hut during the evening to be cocooned within its mosquito-proof walls. for the duration of their stay they remained malaria-free, while the surrounding population suffered repeated attacks of the disease. manson’s experiment established malaria as an intra-domiciliary disease, an infection acquired predominantly indoors, from female mosquitoes that entered the house during the night in pursuit of their blood meal. this understanding of transmission would shape disease-control efforts for more than a century: in contrast to the seemingly never-ending task of eliminating mosquito breeding habitats outdoors, one could suppress the disease by limiting exposure to the vector within private dwellings. figure 2. patrick manson’s experimental hut and its occupants from june to october 1900. colored photograph of a pen drawing by a. terzi, ca. 1900. wellcome library, london, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/pz5qmgv2/images?id=dpztts8h. yet how best to limit exposure remained unclear. in italy, the strategy of bonification conceived malaria elimination as a by-product of “the improvement of the countryside in all its aspects” (longobardi 1936, 8). protection against malaria would emerge naturally from a generalized upgrading of the population’s living conditions, particularly a betterment of the housing stock that would render the interior increasingly impermeable to mosquitoes. the discovery of ddt in the 1940s offered an alternative paradigm of domestic safeguarding: the chemical’s extraordinary residual toxicity allowed it to kill female mosquitoes resting on interior walls and ceilings months after application, dramatically affecting the rate of transmission. ddt’s low-cost efficiency disentangled malaria prevention from house improvements or rural development, while the possibility of concentrating efforts on indoor surfaces made control programs modular and scalable. this form of chemical action underpinned the who’s global malaria eradication program (gmep, 1955–1969). “houses, unlike potential breeding places, are easy to locate. their area of wall surface can be closely estimated, and it is possible to forecast accurately requirements in materials, equipment, personnel and finance” (alvarado and bruce-chwatt 1962, 90). the gmep implied a very specific form of house-ing, and had its share of successes where homes conformed to the domestic topography of industrialised modernity. it struggled, however, in regions where residence was neither architecturally bound nor geographically fixed. the most intractable obstacle was, according to a who report, those “habits of the population” that unsettled the assumption of the house as a stable material entity corresponding to an equally stable social unit. “outside sleeping during the hot season and frequent rebuilding, re-thatching and re-plastering of houses, related to special events, e.g. festivals, but carried out in an entirely irregular fashion” were some of the activities that undermined the who’s eradicationist ambitions (bernard 1963). * * * this colloquy reminds us that the home comes about through intensive boundary work, a product of social coordinations enacted through domestic space but independent of any permanent demarcation between the interior and the out-of-doors (douglas 1991). our understanding of the home has a direct bearing on how we imagine the scope for solidarity within the immunitary configurations that constitute human existence. peter sloterdijk (2016) likens modern domestic architecture to “a spatial immune system,” whereby individuals can live adjacent to, yet insulated from, neighbors defined by a situation of co-isolation. “residence is, immunologically speaking, a defensive measure designed to demarcate a sphere of well-being from invaders and other agents of unwellness” (sloterdijk 2016, 535). yet while they might appear inoculated from the kind of intricate social coordinations that characterize the home, these “co-isolated associations” generate new connections, dependencies, and communal exposures by feature of sheer physical proximity and their reliance on shared infrastructures. as we learn time and again when the private dwelling becomes our last line of defence against a common threat, the immunitary paradigm at the core of the high-modern security regime is inequitable, fragile, and ultimately dangerous. when seclusion is the price of safety, the most immediate danger may be refracted, but new threats are quick to emerge. lasting immunity cannot emerge from compartmentalization and exclusion, but from “something more complex that implicates and stimulates the common” (esposito 2011, 18). * * * in ifakara, arnold’s eave ribbons are just one of several new spatial-repellent products currently undergoing testing. the team is trialing a range of tranfluthrin-treated bags, sandals, football socks, prayer mats, and chairs, all of which could be used to create transitory, mosquito-free envelopes that would accompany the user in her daily outdoor routines and interactions. figure 3. paulina mshingo, ifakara health institute’s in-house seamstress, stitching together a repellent shoulder bag, january 2019. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. while these products partake in the long genealogy of chemical tools against malaria, they represent a different paradigm of protection. they reorient disease prevention away from the insecticidal approach and toward the design, through repellency, of protective atmospheres. the site of operation is not the bounded, enclosed space of the home, but the more fluid topography of the peri-domestic, those spatiotemporal in-betweens that play a critical role in the transmission of malaria. key house-ing practices that typically occur outside the walls of the house—washing, cooking, sleeping (during the hot season), funerals, and parties—move from the fringes of public health attention to become the very point of intervention. kinship ties and social groupings external to the nuclear family begin to feature more prominently in the malariological literature: the fluid collective that gathers to watch a football game, or to pay respects outside the house of the village leader, can now do so under the invisible but deliberate protection of chemical emanations. arnold’s eave ribbons have attracted the attention of several foreign donors, and a group of international collaborators has arrived for a week-long visit to prepare a randomized controlled trial. they have spent the day driving around rural villages in the district, identifying areas with sufficiently high rates of malaria transmission to demonstrate the ribbons’ protective effectiveness. around the dinner table at the institute’s main house, arnold looks visibly shaken. lina finda, a social scientist at ihi, asks how he feels about the coming project. arnold describes his day as “heartbreaking”—a tour of houses with backs open to the elements, mud walls crumbling around sticks, children lying sick. lina nods. “we are just going to go around putting ribbons on these homes? it is shameful.” even if they are effective in diverting mosquitoes, she implies, the eave ribbons will fail to bring durable improvements to the material living conditions of those most exposed to the risk of malaria; by virtue of their very cheapness and ease of application, they might in fact help perpetuate chronic forms of destitution. this exchange clarified for us some of the moral ambivalences that emerge when global health interventions are detached from the seemingly self-evident referent of the enclosed dwelling. it also cast the history of malaria control in a new light—the issue with the gmep’s approach, we now realized, was not its focus on domestic spaces, but the reduction of the oikos to a set of intersectional planes within which a family spends the night. ddt had provided a chemical formulation for precisely this understanding of the home—its uncommon residual toxicity foregrounded surfaces at the expense of other factors affecting the distribution of health and disease. the question we were left grappling with is whether spatial repellents could conjugate a different vision of the home, one attuned to forms of mutual dependency and obligation that cut across physically bounded domestic enclaves. arnold’s unease at his own invention illuminates the stakes: how to ensure that portability does not provide a justification for the individualization of security, and that the atmospheric quality of protection is not used as an excuse to neglect material improvements. still, implicit in the diffuse power of these chemicals lies the possibility—if only that—of treating the in-betweens of social life as a space of communitas, a zone of collective experimentation, rather than simply a gap where danger lurks. figure 4. rural house near mafinigi, south of ifakara, january 2020. photo by ann h. kelly and javier lezaun. abstract this essay tracks a paradigm shift in the use of chemicals to control malaria: away from insecticidal approaches, focused on killing mosquitoes within private domestic dwellings, and toward the creation of protective communal atmospheres. an ongoing study of the efficacy of spatial repellents to reduce malaria transmission in rural tanzania provides an opportunity to rethink the oikographic assumptions of malaria control—and of many global health interventions—and to foreground the specific relationalities of peri-domestic spaces. yet a sense of moral ambivalence permeates this inquiry, as malaria prevention becomes untethered from any long-lasting material improvement in the house. we reflect on the power of chemicals to reveal chronic forms of neglect and, just possibly, conjugate new, if diffuse, forms of communitas. [malaria; peri-domestic space; chemicals; immune home; critical global health; tanzania] notes acknowledgments these reflections are indebted to our collaboration and friendship with many researchers at the ifakara health institute, who have generously brought us into their mosquito work and made us feel at home at the institute. in particular, we thank prosper chaki, lina finda, najat kahamba, emmanuel kaindoa, salum mapua, arnold sadikiel mmbando, rukiyah mohammad, fredros okumu, and doreen josen siria. the piece draws directly from the oikography seminar, and we gratefully acknowledge the support of joão biehl and federico neiburg in helping develop our thinking on the house as a unit of global health intervention. we would also like to express our thanks to aaron su, who provided keen editorial advice in advance of the submission. this work has received support from the british academy, as part of their knowledge frontier’s program, “entomological happenings: exploring collaborative design solutions for sustainable mosquito control” (grant no. kf3/ 100047). the degree to which this piece resonates with spatial analysis results from our engagement with project partners nerea calvillo, jonathon fogelson, mark fretz, brook muller, and michael singer. references alvarado, carlos a., and l. j. bruce-chwatt 1962 “malaria.” scientific american 206, no. 5: 86–101. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/malaria-1962-05/. bernard, pierre 1963 “remarks on the eradication of malaria in inter-tropical africa.” document no. who/mal/403. geneva: world health organization. douglas, mary 1991 “the idea of a home: a kind of space.” social research 58, no. 1: 287–307. www.jstor.org/stable/40970644. esposito, roberto 2011 immunitas: the protection and negation of life. translated by zakiya hanafi. new york: polity. originally published in 2002. kelly, ann h., and javier lezaun 2017 “the wild indoors: room-spaces of scientific inquiry.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 3: 367–98. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.3.06. longobardi, cesare 1936 land-reclamation in italy: rural revival in the building of a nation. london: p. s. king. motta, eugênia 2021 “the dying home: ‘bad deaths’ and spatial inscriptions of mourning in a favela.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 556–62. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.03. neiburg, federico 2021 “multiscale home: shifting landscapes and living-in-movement in haiti.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 548–55. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.02. sloterdijk, peter 2016 foams: spheres volume iii. translated by wieland hoban. los angeles: semiotext(e). cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 563-572, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.04 structures of resentment: on feeling—and being—left behind by health care reform cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 317-343, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.10 structures of resentment: on feeling—and being—left behind by health care reform jessica m. mulligan providence college https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8165-7722 emily k. brunson texas state university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6321-1882 after her shift at the dollar general store, allison visited a social service agency. she was six months pregnant and excited about the baby, but nervous about making ends meet. though she worked two retail jobs, allison depended on food aid and could not save enough for a security deposit and first month’s rent so that she and her boyfriend could move out of her mother’s house. after loading the cereal, bread, and vegetables from the foodbank into her compact car, she sat down for an interview at a picnic table shaded by pines. “every little bit helps,” she said, referring sheepishly to both the groceries and the $25 interview incentive. in her interview, allison—who like most of the clients at this church-affiliated agency in rural florida was white and poor—reported she had been uninsured for most of her life. she was well into the second trimester of her pregnancy before she received prenatal care by qualifying for medicaid.1 though she was only twenty-two, she suffered from multiple, untreated health problems including nerve issues, recurrent sinus infections, and chronic pain. allison had tried to sign up for obamacare a half dozen times, but was unsuccessful. the online calculator estimated she was eligible for coverage at $20 per month. yet when she completed the application and input her personal information, the cost jumped to $300. “i don’t know anyone who can afford that,” she said, “even my better-off friends.” she did not seem to know that if florida had expanded medicaid she would have been eligible for that program, whether or not she was pregnant. instead, allison said she did not think too much about insurance now: “it’s something for rich people, who are fortunate enough to be able to pay for it.” figure 1. photo by kyle kusz. in this statement, and at other points in the conversation, allison expressed resentment that she, as a non-“rich” person, did not benefit from health care reform. allison worked, but her jobs were insecure, paid little, and did not provide benefits like health insurance. compounding this situation, the social service and relief programs she could access were temporary, means-tested, and insufficient. like many other poor individuals, allison felt disenfranchised and distanced from the possibility of turning the american dream into a reality. the affordable care act (aca)—the first major health care reform enacted in the united states in almost fifty years—was meant to address the health and financial well-being of people like allison. the law, as passed in 2010, contained mandates that required individuals and businesses to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty; the expansion of state medicaid programs to include adults with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level ($14,404 for an individual, or $29,327 for a family of four in 2010); subsidies to those with incomes above the federal poverty level to purchase health insurance through online marketplaces; and insurance regulations including preexisting conditions protections and a requirement to fully cover the costs of certain preventative care services. the law succeeded in lowering the number of uninsured people in the united states by twenty million (garfield, orgera, and damico 2019), but its scope remained limited. framers of the law had favored incrementalism over more radical system change when they dropped the public insurance option and excluded many immigrants from eligibility, thereby ensuring that only private plans could be sold on the exchanges and that universal coverage would remain out of reach (halpin and harbage 2010). these moves, designed to make the law more palatable to those on the right, gained little political goodwill from conservatives. from the day the aca was passed with no republican support, it has been endlessly attacked, dismantled, and only ever partially implemented (starr 2011). this lack of support for the aca, and for health care reform more generally, has its roots in resentment: racial resentment that coalesced in attacks on the first black president (coates 2017), as well as resentment based on class, gender, sexuality, and immigration status. the law’s opponents purposefully employed racially coded language directed at the president and immigrants to fan animus (tesler 2012; maxwell and shields 2014). yet resentment was also baked into the law itself through its exclusionary and equalizing provisions. means testing—where projected future income determines the cost of coverage in the marketplace—for example, made the law particularly problematic for the working poor, whose income and employment status is subject to frequent changes. coverage of individuals with preexisting conditions and women’s reproductive health services, meanwhile, were cast as a loss for others (i.e., the healthy and men). during implementation, even more exclusionary features were added, such as state decisions not to expand medicaid and to limit enrollment assistance. the exclusion from coverage that emerged, combined with the difficulties produced by means testing, fueled resentment among those the law was designed to help. allison expressed this resentment in the idea that insurance was “something for rich people.” allison lived in florida, the state that initially brought forward a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the aca on the grounds that it coerced states to participate. this lawsuit resulted in a 2012 supreme court decision that made medicaid expansion optional. in states that opted out of medicaid expansion, including florida, most poor adults earning incomes below poverty had no affordable options for health coverage. thus allison could not afford insurance on the exchange before her pregnancy: she was too poor to qualify for subsidized insurance and ineligible for medicaid. the aca’s fragmented and much contested approach to health reform forced allison to navigate what we call “resentment structures”—social service programs and public policies constructed on the basis of distrust and suspicion that reinforced and reproduced racial and class hierarchies. for white people like allison, who are already hailed by resentment politics in the media and political discourse, embodied brushes with resentment structures further habituated them to feel resentful of others (be they rich or otherwise). borrowing from raymond williams (1977, 132), we interpret resentment as an important “structure of feeling,” the “characteristic tone” and relational affect that distinguishes this moment from others. structures of feeling organize dominant discourses from the media and popular culture; they “shape our bodily felt and evaluative response to events and outlooks on the world” (banning 2013, 95). but we also contend that resentment is a feeling that structures. as resentment spills over from the representational circuits of media pundits, political activists, and policy makers, this red-hot emotion, like molten iron, eventually cools and hardens to produce social policies and structures. the experience of moving through the resulting structures often proves so difficult and off-putting that the structures themselves succeed in creating even more feelings of resentment and frustration. viewing policies in this way, as social forces “that have agency and that change as they enter into relations with actors, objects, and institutions” (shore and wright 2011, 20), allows us to see how the aca, a policy designed to reduce inequality by expanding access to health coverage, has also activated and fanned resentment, particularly among poor, white individuals. as such, this article analyzes the dialectical interplay between resentment as a structure of feeling and a feeling that structures in the contested domains where the aca was formulated, implemented, and manifested in uninsured people’s lives. resentment: at the intersections of race and class resentment has been an important concept in western moral and political philosophy at least since friedrich nietzsche (2018 [1887]) explored it in a genealogy of morals. a basic definition of resentment is indignation at having been treated unfairly, or as marlia e. banning (2006, 70) describes it, “feelings of ill will or anger.” as resentment is directed at “others,” it also entails an “us-versus-them” view of the world: “when people perceive that they are not getting their fair share and that others are but do not deserve to, the emotion of resentment is a likely result” (cramer 2016, 9). taking the concept further, didier fassin (2013) describes resentment as an emotional reaction to a relational situation, for example, workers who are laid off and then unable to find employment, that results in diffuse animosity toward others in lateral or subordinate positions. political elites once feared this type of resentment, worrying that this “dangerous” emotion would lead to rebellion (engels 2015; nietzsche 2018). but since the 1960s, jeremy engels (2015, 20) argues, resentment has been tamed and transformed into a tool for dividing the populace and diffusing resistance. each of these definitions, as well as the many others that exist, fundamentally portray resentment as an emotion, albeit one based in a particular social context (in the sense that resentment is not primarily the product of one’s interior state or brain chemistry). as we argue in this article, however, this narrow definition of resentment as an emotion is incomplete.2 in the past decade, resentment has increasingly been recognized as playing a key role in national debates in the united states, including those concerning race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social welfare (banning 2006; engels 2015; c. anderson 2016, 2017). in arlie russell hochschild’s (2016) strangers in their own land, for example, white southerners felt resentful because, after lifetimes of living “good” lives and doing what was expected of them, “others”—particularly racial minorities, women, and immigrants—were able to cut in front of the proverbial line due to government policies and programs like affirmative action and welfare. likewise, theda skocpol and vanessa williamson’s (2012) study of the tea party found that its predominantly white, older, and economically well-off members felt passionately about revering the constitution, while also fearing the decline of america, hating obama, and detesting “moochers.” similarly, according to katherine j. cramer (2016), economic insecurity, us-versus-them interpretations of the world, and strong rural identities explain why wisconsinites who might benefit from government help adamantly opposed it. thus these works portray resentment as an understandable, even natural emotional response to decreasing racial or cultural supremacy and the falling economic power of poor and working-class whites. in most cases, resentment is portrayed as stemming from those on the political right, including conservatives, men, and whites, and particularly poor members of these groups. in 2016 and 2017, for instance, the new york times, the new yorker, the economist, and the atlantic all ran major stories on resentment among whites. these pieces depicted poor whites as either unrepentant racists and duped partisans who voted against their class interests, or as sages whose knowledge of economic dislocation and elite snobbery could reinvigorate the democratic party (see rothman 2016). the problem with this framing, as others have pointed out (c. anderson 2017; coates 2017), is that focusing the analysis of resentment on poor, white, and male conservatives implies that middleand upper-class individuals, nonwhites, women, and liberals are not resentful.3 but many are. in fact, far from being non-resentful, middleand upper-class individuals are the politicians and cultural producers who play key roles in making resentment an integral part of recent politics (banning 2013). by so doing, they imbue policy programs and social structures with resentment features like strict means testing, more exclusionary and punitive immigration rules, and work requirements for public aid. resentments do not just appear—they are stoked, amplified, and then institutionalized by a wide spectrum of political actors. the recent resurgence of resentment, catalyzed by the election of barack obama and enflamed by the subsequent election of donald trump, has a much longer history. white rage and overt violence like lynching and massacres have long served as tools to enforce white supremacy and racial apartheid in the united states (feimster 2011; k. williams 2012; phillips 2016). carol anderson (2016, 3), for example, argues that white rage flares in response to black advancement, which is why it flourished during reconstruction, after brown v. board of education, and during the civil rights movement. importantly, overt and extra-legal violence was often accompanied by policies like share cropping, red-lining, and anti-miscegenation laws that legitimated and maintained the racial order. in the jim crow era and before, white rage and policy agendas were closely and explicitly linked. rage has often done political and policy work. as white racial politics shifted in the post–civil rights era and overt shows of racism became less politically palatable, new crops of policies emerged that were racist in their effects, even if segregation and maintaining inequality were not their explicit justification. during the 1970s, with the ascendance of richard nixon, dog whistling became the norm and terms like welfare queens, law and order, and makers versus takers largely supplanted more overtly racist language (haney lópez 2014a). in the long backlash to civil rights gains, policies based on resentment politics have proliferated. they include tying food-stamp eligibility to work (dickinson 2016); welfare reform with an emphasis on child support, work requirements, and term limits (morgen, acker, and weigt 2010); and, most recently, the push to add work requirements to medicaid (chokshi and katz 2018). while affecting poor, racialized communities directly, these and other resentment policies impact poor whites as well. however, because the policies are situated, at least indirectly, as only biased against nonwhites or non-citizens—as us versus them—observers do not generally appreciate the policies’ class-based nature. hence some scholars argue that the aim of racially based politics is to prevent class-based cohesion and challenges to the status quo that could undermine the hegemony of the wealthy elite (kawachi, daniels, and robinson 2005). fassin (2013) takes this idea further by positing a difference between two forms of resentment represented in the examples above: the ideological rancor of the non-oppressed (resentment) and the authentic alienation of the dominated (ressentiment). though fassin (2013, 260) acknowledges that these can overlap, the contrasting case studies he presents—white police officers in france and black south africans under apartheid—paint a stark opposition between the two: the resentful man is not directly or indirectly exposed to oppression and domination, but he expresses discontent about a state of affairs that does not satisfy him. ressentiment results from a historical alienation: something did happen, which had tragic consequences in the past and often causes continuing hardship in the present. resentment amounts to an ideological alienation: the reality is blurred, leading to frequently misdirected rancor. according to fassin’s definitions, the resentment described by hochschild (2016), skocpol and williamson (2012), cramer (2016), and others does not reflect an actual historical loss, but an essentially misguided emotional stance. fassin’s distinction between ideological rancor and anger at genuine oppression becomes problematic when we try to understand the predicaments and political sentiments of poor whites in the united states. an intersectional approach that acknowledges that many poor whites are both subjugated by global capital dislocations, the temporalization of work, low wages, lack of health care, the defunding of social services, and eroded public schools while also being proponents of white supremacy, islamophobia, anti-immigrant policies, anti-lgbtq legislation, and the like is messier—but ultimately more informative. this article adds to contemporary analyses of resentment by considering how resentment coheres into policies and thereby produces new experiences of disenfranchisement, frustration, and resentful feelings. we do this by examining the experiences of poor white persons who oppose the aca, legislation ostensibly meant to help them. in our interviews with uninsured individuals, a diffuse and hybrid version of resentment emerged where poor whites were resentful because they were excluded from meaningful health reform and they blamed others for consuming public resources. respondents talked about and experienced resentment through contradictory tropes about us versus them, deservingness, and personal responsibility. but what was also clear in their stories was how policies based in resentment structured their experiences and political realities. collecting resentment narratives the narratives presented in this article derive from two independent projects, one conducted in florida and rhode island by jessica m. mulligan and the other conducted in texas by emily k. brunson.4 mulligan’s research in florida and rhode island centered on the experiences of state residents who sought access to insurance coverage. from 2014 to 2017, 188 health insurance enrollment interactions were observed at the state health insurance exchange and community enrollment events in rhode island. in florida, participants were recruited in 2014 and 2017 from health enrollment sites, social service agencies, and work sites to participate in interviews about insurance coverage. a total of eighty-five participants (fifty from florida and thirty-five from rhode island) were recruited for interviews. interviews generally took place several months after participants’ initial attempts to enroll in coverage and considered their health needs, work histories, and experiences with health insurance. contextually, florida proved hostile to aca implementation, with no medicaid expansion and many obstructionist efforts by local politicians to block enrollments. the particular county included in this project was far whiter and older than florida as a whole, and the county boasted several active tea party chapters. rhode island in many ways was the opposite. in this reliably democratic state, leaders embraced the aca and enthusiastically implemented it. nonetheless, issues with implementation led to frustration and disenfranchisement (brugnoli-ensin and mulligan 2018; mulligan, arriaga, and torres 2018). brunson’s research in texas focused on people’s experiences of living without health insurance and how their situations changed over time with aca implementation. data were collected in 2013 through interviews with and surveys of health care providers, a survey of two hundred randomly sampled residents, and from interviews with thirty-one persons who had been uninsured for at least six months in the previous year, all of whom lived and worked in a particular county in central texas where demographic characteristics and insurance coverage mirrored the state averages. in the two subsequent years, 2014 and 2015, a subsample of ten interview participants were re-interviewed. interviews in all three years explored the respondents’ health histories, their past and current experiences with health care, and health care access. like florida, texas was also hostile to aca implementation. despite having the highest percentage of uninsured persons in the united states, the state (unsuccessfully) sued the federal government to prevent the legislation from moving forward. following the failed court case, the state leadership chose to 1) opt out of medicaid expansion; 2) not develop a state-based insurance exchange; and 3) impose strict regulations on navigators, those hired to assist people in signing up for insurance through the federal marketplace, which resulted in only about five hundred navigators left to serve almost seven million uninsured texans (feibel 2014; michels 2014). as both of us came to know uninsured and newly insured people who struggled to enroll in, and in some cases use, health insurance, we began to understand that frustrations with the aca were about more than partisan politics; they were also about a law that did not actually meet the needs of many people it was designed to help. like allison, whose story of trying to enroll opened this article, many respondents were left out of affordable coverage. for those who did obtain access to insurance, their experiences were often problematic. so we looked for similarities and patterns across our different research sites to think together about how resentment structured experiences with the aca and how these played out particularly among poor whites. in doing so, we were cognizant of homogenizing whiteness (hartigan 1997) and generalizing group responses to poverty (c. strauss 2018). the case presented here is not an argument for either of these, but rather a nuanced portrayal of commonalities that exist among vast differences. experiencing resentment for the purposes of this article we have chosen three cases to illustrate how particular resentment structures amplified resentment sentiments among poor whites: difficult-to-navigate means-tested eligibility infrastructures and punishing tax penalties (case 1); the medicaid gap and the perception of safety-net programs being for racialized others (case 2); and a lack of trained navigators to assist with enrollment into programs that themselves divided populations based on characteristics like disability status, age, and pregnancy (case 3). we chose these particular cases because they reveal themes that repeated across our interviews while also representing conditions unique to each field site. tax bills and high deductibles trigger resentment of others for some individuals, resentment manifested as anger at others—often the poor, immigrants, or people of color—perceived as benefiting from the health law and consuming too many resources. the aca is a means-tested social program in which each applicant received a different price and level of coverage based primarily on their age, state of residence, family size, and income. furthermore, instead of providing universal access to comparable insurance, the program provided advanced tax credits to those who income qualified, with the expectation that enrollees would have to pay back any erroneous credits they received after an end-of-year reconciliation with their actual (instead of projected) income. predictably, this policy structure for determining eligibility and payment generated resentment. consider the example of violet. violet was a recently widowed sixty-four-year-old, white, retired emergency department nurse. she lived in a small coastal town in rhode island in an upscale manufactured home. violet had signed up for health insurance through the exchange, but ultimately dropped the coverage she received and opted to remain uninsured until medicare coverage began on her sixty-fifth birthday. violet’s biggest difficulty with the insurance came in the form of an unexpected tax bill. after her first year in the program, violet had to pay back $4,500 to the internal revenue service (irs). she had earned about $47,000 that year from her widow’s social security benefit and from working part-time as a nurse. therefore, the income estimate that she provided during enrollment proved inaccurate (as predictions of the future often are). when her actual income was reconciled with the projection, she learned that she had been receiving too much in tax credits and hence owed the irs money.5 violet had signed up for coverage on her own, though she did talk with someone over the phone when it came to picking out the plan. she said she did not understand it was a tax credit, or what that really meant, and no one explained it to her. “should be called a tax debit, not a credit,” she said. violet was against obamacare before she had it, but this experience “really put the stamp on things.” her accountant and her primary care doctor had also told her that obamacare was terrible. despite this negative experience and negative feedback from those she trusted, violet signed up for a second year of coverage through the rhode island exchange. in the second year, violet struggled to pay the premium for a plan with a large deductible—the only affordable option available to her. violet’s husband had been a fisherman, and she did not become a nurse until her late thirties. she struggled to pay medical bills when her children were young and the family was uninsured, sometimes paying doctors with quahogs (a type of clam). given her struggles to obtain medical care for herself and her family, it was surprising when violet condemned others for their irresponsible use of health resources. she supported adding premiums to medicaid: “all these people on their welfare and free health care should have to pay something, even if it’s just $15 a month, for a family of four. a few dollars at the doctor’s office,” she said. “then people would think twice about wasting it.” often during the interview, violet became upset and shifted the conversation to people on welfare who did not work and expected everything for free (“heat assistance, food stamps, medical care, housing, everything”). when asked if she supported medicare for all, she responded unequivocally: i don’t think so. no. see, i just came from a generation where you worked. my grandparents came over here—my great-grandparents came over from portugal and the other ones came over from ireland. they worked. they never got a handout. they never got anything. and there we got all these people—and i’m not saying any one country—but they’re all coming over here and they’re not working. i was in social security . . . waiting in line, you know, in a seat, and this guy ahead of me—he wasn’t ahead of me—he was in another booth and he was in there trying to get social security because he can’t work ‘cause his disability? can’t speak english. well, guess what? go to night school and learn english. you want to come to this country? put something back. no. in this encounter, we see the familiar resentment narrative of blaming others for receiving benefits that one does not receive oneself. violet even used hochschild’s (2016) image of cutting in line. it is unlikely that violet’s family members received no help: they likely benefited from medicare, veteran’s benefits, strong public schools, and access to low-interest and federally insured home loans. yet these benefits are often seen as middle-class entitlements, rather than welfare, and therefore not stigmatized. violet’s anger also stemmed from feeling as though she did not have enough herself—she was currently uninsured and hoping that nothing bad happened to her, while so many others had coverage. she needed a hernia operation, but was waiting until she turned sixty-five and qualified for medicare. she clung to the notion that people like her—who worked hard—deserved help, but instead of being helped, violet felt she had been punished. the tax bill stung because she accepted government help and then was saddled with a bill. if the aca had not been built with resentment structures in the form of means-tested eligibility, estimated subsidies, and tax penalties, then violet might have had a much better outcome and a different assessment of health care reform. instead, each brush with a resentment structure left her claiming that others were receiving benefits that she rightly deserved. the medicaid gap provokes white resentment while violet expressed resentment of others receiving benefits they did not deserve, some individuals were explicitly resentful based on race. consider the case of sharon, a poor, white fifty-six-year-old living in texas. in addition to producing policies that excluded many individuals from care, political and public figures in the state assailed the aca. a senior administrator in the texas department of state health services, for example, exclaimed, “people in texas are uninsured because they want to be. texans don’t want health insurance” (brunson 2018, 177). these sentiments were, in turn, broadly repeated and reproduced throughout the state through local media and across family dinner tables. when brunson first interviewed sharon in 2013, she was sick with chronic sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease that caused scarring and thickening of her lung tissues, kidney damage, and intense, chronic pain. her lack of health insurance meant sporadic care at best. like allison, sharon fell into the coverage gap. her only option for care was the indigent care program in her county, but the clinic was located nearly forty miles from her house and she did not have money for gas. so sharon made do, filling her prescriptions when she could, and doing without when she could not, using her elderly neighbor’s medicare-paid-for oxygen tanks when she experienced difficulties breathing, and seeking care only when absolutely necessary. (at the time of sharon’s first interview, this had resulted in more than $60,000 in debt to a local hospital, an amount she had no hope of repaying. by the time of our final interview, sharon was nearly $250,000 in debt due to medical expenses.) sharon had not envisioned her life this way. when she was young, sharon attended college and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. she then worked as a respiratory therapist for almost ten years, a job that offered health insurance and other benefits. because she was young and healthy and had never really used this health coverage, sharon did not think twice about a career change that led to a series of jobs without health insurance, and while she accepted the fact that she was “poor,” she never regretted her choice until she developed a chronic health condition. over the course of three interviews totaling almost ten hours, sharon’s focus alternated between her desperation for care and embarrassment over her situation. on a few occasions, sharon also lashed out at others. the first instance took place during our first interview, when sharon complained that her whiteness caused her to receive a lower quality of care the few times she was able to use the county’s indigent program. sharon felt that because the clinic was run by “mexicans,” and because most of the people who went to the clinic were also “mexican,” the clinic staff were less sympathetic toward her as a white woman. a second instance occurred at the end of our second interview. as we were leaving, sharon stopped to explain her shock at the state of her life. while poverty was not entirely unexpected, her diagnosis with sarcoidosis and her inability to obtain care were. “as a white woman,” sharon said, “my life just shouldn’t be like this.” the following year, before we could even say hello, sharon apologized for this comment made a year earlier. she wanted to clarify that she was not racist and felt bad for implying that she somehow deserved better because of her skin color. she then went on to explain that she was going to try applying for disability, something she had put off because she had long felt that disability was only for “lazy” people. in the midst of her own mental gymnastics of being resentful about barriers to her care, not knowing what to do, fearing that she could be classified as undeserving herself, and struggling to maintain some semblance of health, sharon had come to terms with the fact that she was disabled and was finally willing to seek out disability insurance. sharon’s case illustrates the interplay between resentment structures and the production of resentment feelings in individuals left out of aca coverage expansions. her sense of frustrated white privilege manifested only after she attempted to access care through the aca and found no options open to her. boundary expansions that included some groups in health reform (citizens and permanent residents), even as it excluded others (unauthorized immigrants and the poor in non-medicaid-expanding states), increased the “brightness”—or visibility—of sharon’s exclusion (marrow and joseph 2015). as someone who considered herself liberal and a supporter of the aca generally, sharon later expressed shame at her reaction to her own exclusion. sara ahmed (2004b, 51) argues that one’s sense of self often emerges in relation to a hated other: “this other, who may stand for or stand by other others, presses against me, threatening my existence.” in this vein, sharon’s sense of self as a white woman emerged in relation to excluded others; she distinguished herself from these others and felt unlike herself when forced to get care at the indigent clinic. her embodied brush with the resentment policy of the medicaid gap heightened her sense of whiteness and gave rise to feelings of resentment. excluding men fuels familial and gender resentments expressions of resentment in our research also often involved assessments of deservingness. sarah s. willen and jennifer cook (2016, 100) argue that “deservingness debates involve conversations, either in public or behind closed doors, in which divergent stakeholders express or enact competing views about whether a particular person or social group deserves a certain kind of attention, investment, or care.” in a country without a strong commitment to universal health care access or a belief in health as a human right, other criteria emerge to explain who did or did not merit health care. in the earlier examples, working, paying premiums, and whiteness all featured in how respondents understood who deserved care. in other words, deservingness was reckoned through ideas about class and race as well as beliefs about personal responsibility. in other cases, gendered and sexual respectability and familial obligations also played important roles in calculations of who deserved care. in florida, a divorced, fifty-year-old white woman named lorie sought coverage for her nineteen-year-old, uninsured son. lorie was on medicare for disability since a car accident a few years earlier. she was not aware that the aca allowed her son coverage on his parent’s insurance until age twenty-six. when we told her this, she planned to contact his father, since he worked for the school department and had “good insurance.” lorie’s son had been on medicaid previously, but lost coverage when he aged out of the program at nineteen. he had multiple medical needs including weight loss, asthma, and a potential heart issue. he sought care, but was unable to pay the associated bills. lorie had taken her son to the florida blue office to get him coverage, but found it was too expensive. the son had no income and therefore fell into the coverage gap, which meant that he had to pay full price for an insurance plan. his mother was not aware that florida had opted not to expand medicaid, or that if they lived in an expansion state, her son would have had full coverage. in considering care for her children, lorie contrasted the experience of her son, whom she considered deserving of health coverage, with her daughter, whom she derided as dependent and lazy. lorie criticized her daughter, who had four children and had given two of them up for adoption. according to lorie, the daughter lived with her, “sits on her butt all day,” and received $500 a month in food stamps. lorie frequently babysat the kids. her son, on the other hand, was smart and studied. he wanted to be a preacher. he was starting his own lawn-care business—he already had the license. he was not earning any income at the time of our interview, but lorie insisted that he was a hard worker and was going to make something of himself. he did not want to get married or have kids until he was thirty. according to lorie, he did not want to be like his sister and definitely did not want to rely on welfare. in lorie’s case, gender dynamics (the favored son), condemnation of sexual promiscuity, and ideologies of hard work informed resentment, but it was also expressed in the intimate circuits that run through families where deservingness is reckoned in family stories of who is and is not responsible for their circumstances (and these stories do not always adhere to a racialized or classed us-versus-them narrative). the son was not working yet, but was understood by his mother to have the potential to work hard and create a legitimate family. he, therefore, deserved health insurance, and lorie was willing to try multiple pathways (her ex-husband, medicaid, florida blue) to help him obtain coverage and care. her daughter, on the other hand, had a “spoiled identity” in her mother’s recounting, and was not deemed deserving. the mother expressed indignation that her daughter received income supports and health coverage by virtue of being an unwed mother, while her son went without. without recourse to a notion of health as a human right or a sense that everyone should have access to care, this family matriarch weighed which of her children was more or less deserving. this example once again shows us how social programs available to some through categorical eligibility rules meant to ration access to coverage and to provide it only to the most deserving (children, the disabled, and parents of young children) generated resentment when they did not align with other conceptions of deservingness (wedded childbearing, hard work). lorie was not incensed that some people got health care while others did not; she was upset that coverage was going to the wrong people. as with violet, the er nurse from rhode island, work was seen as the key to deserving insurance, not parenthood or poverty. structured resentment as anthropologists of policy have convincingly argued, policies both reflect and create social worlds (shore and wright 2011). the resentment narratives introduced in this essay illustrate the creation side of this dialectic. moving through resentment structures created feelings of resentment for allison, violet, sharon, and lorie as they reacted to their own exclusion from health care coverage. but how did these policies reflect existing social resentments? using the heterodox tools that are the hallmark of the anthropology of policy and “studying up” (gusterson 1997), we now trace how resentment sentiments informed policy making. our purpose is to clarify the reflection side of the dialectic, in other words, the ways in which resentment sentiments became incorporated into policy platforms and program structures.6 first we examine the media landscape and identify common tropes that major cultural producers and pundits used to articulate resentment narratives. then we show how these resentment narratives became institutionalized through the creation of policies that contained resentment features such as excluding immigrants, requiring frequent eligibility recertifications, and blocking beneficiary access to information and assistance. the media landscape, both nationally and locally in areas like florida and texas, was populated by attacks against the aca that targeted coverage expansions and insurance rule changes favoring women, low-income earners, and people of color—all of whom were disproportionately uninsured and/or paid higher insurance rates before the enactment of the aca. as one example, media coverage widely acknowledged that women were most impacted by coverage limits and insurance underwriting that excluded those with preexisting conditions. in response, fox news ran segments questioning why young men should have to pay for maternity care, a service they would presumably never need (franke-ruta 2013). the koch foundation likewise ran outreach and advertisement efforts encouraging college students not to enroll in coverage and instead to “opt out” (v. strauss 2013), emphasizing that healthy, young adults should not have to enroll in a program that would primarily benefit others. us-versus-them rhetoric was pervasive and used by media pundits and other ideologues, including political leaders, in their efforts to block and undermine the implementation of the aca. race similarly played a key role in objections to the aca (tesler 2012). much of the media coverage of the legislation directly attacked obama himself, thereby racializing the law (for examples, consider the much circulated caricature of obama as a “witch doctor” and the use of the term obamacare itself as a racial provocation [haney lópez 2014b]). while many on the right referred to obama as a socialist, asserting the aca as a form of socialism, others referred to him as a terrorist (citing both his blackness and his purported ties to islam), and yet others suggested that obama’s primary goal with the aca was to obtain retribution for slavery. among far-right political pundits, explicit race baiting was common: rush limbaugh: obama has a plan. obama’s plan is based on his inherent belief that this country was immorally and illegitimately founded by a very small minority of white europeans who screwed everybody else . . . and it’s about time the scales were made even. and that’s why this president is lawless, and that’s why there’s no prosecution of the black panthers for voter intimidation, because it’s not possible for a minority to intimidate the white majority. it’s always been the other way around. this is just payback. this is “how does it feel” time. (quoted in waldman 2014) glenn beck: everything that is getting pushed through congress, including this health care bill are transforming america. and they are all driven by president obama’s thinking on one idea: reparations. (quoted in waldman 2014) in a move characteristic of white supremacist rhetoric in the united states, limbaugh and beck projected hate and divisiveness onto obama, thereby casting themselves and their audiences as victims and true patriots (ahmed 2004a, 117–18). the quotes above, along with tropes such as the welfare queen (jordan-zachery 2009), the notion that undocumented immigrants come to the united states for free health care (chavez 2013), or the convoluted math that expanding medicaid would lead to fiscal disaster for state budgets (hayes et al. 2019), all rely on the notion that underserving, nonwhite people are syphoning resources from whites and thereby threatening their way of life. while some of the racial resentment talk was explicit, other commentators (especially politicians on the national stage) relied on more implicit, coded language. dog-whistle politics, or coded racial appeals, have the appearance of race neutrality but in fact activate and carefully manipulate hostility toward nonwhites (haney lópez 2014a, ix). when the speaker of the house at the time, paul ryan, characterized the aca as a program for “takers” (craw and carter 2012), or when florida governor rick scott (2012) invoked states’ rights as a reason to reject medicaid expansion, they dog-whistled. national and local news media repeated this rhetoric. in texas, state politicians from then governor rick perry to city council members at town hall meetings likewise continued with the dog-whistling refrains. sharon had heard these arguments, repeatedly. in 2010 and 2011, it was nearly impossible in texas to watch the local news, read a local newspaper, or listen to conversations about health-care reform without exposure to dog-whistling. this environment may well have contributed to sharon, in her own desperate circumstances, exclaiming in a singular moment that, as a white person, she deserved better. more generally, it also led to broad political and public support for the state government’s choice to not expand medicaid—the policy that led sharon, who initially supported the aca, to become resentful. but how does the emotion of resentment that politicians and pundits mobilize to induce feelings in their constituents and audiences translate into policy and social structures? carol anderson (2016, 3) argues that “white rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. it wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly.” it is these less visible and less spectacular machinations of white rage that we call resentment policies. resentment emotions solidify into resentment policies (which in turn fuel more resentment emotions) when elected officials and private actors (like corporations) promulgate rules, programs, and eligibility criteria that limit access to social services and public goods to only those deemed “deserving”; impose burdens and costs on eligible beneficiaries that discourage the uptake of services; naturalize inequalities and make them seem inevitable; and shame or vilify those in need of services, thereby transforming our interdependencies into “burdens.” as an example, consider the american legislative exchange council’s (alec) (2011) “the state legislators guide to repealing obamacare.” this widely circulated and much utilized playbook argued that the health law represented a “federal takeover” of insurance regulation, would lead to higher taxes, and would create “overburdened” medicaid programs. using language like “americans will be subjected to many other obamacare related taxes,” the guide dog-whistled racism, that is, americans (read whites) would be subjected to obama (a black man). in addition to its guidebook, alec held conferences, trained policy makers, and drafted model legislation with the input of major health care interest groups like big pharma and tobacco firms, all to further obstruct the aca (pilkington 2013). through their efforts, alec and other ideologically similar organizations spearheaded efforts to derail the implementation of the aca through the courts and through state governments, where much of the work to obstruct implementation of the law occurred (jones, bradley, and oberlander 2014). these and similar efforts eventually led florida and thirteen other states, including texas, to sue the federal government to block implementation of the aca in 2010. the supreme court decision that resulted from this legal process ultimately allowed twenty-one states to not expand medicaid coverage, leaving no health-care options for individuals who lived below 100 percent of the federal poverty level. this situation left sharon and others like her first confused (wasn’t the law supposed to help?) and then resentful (why am i being left out?). the medicaid coverage gap is a prime example of a resentment structure. state decisions not to expand medicaid to poor adults obstructed movements toward greater racial equality. while this policy decision seemingly affected all people living below the poverty line in the same way, blacks are more likely than whites to live in one of the fourteen states that continue to opt out of medicaid expansion. in 2019, the majority of medicaid non-expanding states are located in the south and have large black populations (artiga, orgera, and damico 2019). in this way the medicaid gap serves the same function as other racially motivated policies like segregation and jim crow laws: it widens racial inequality and limits access to social services. in a similar vein, the decision to exclude some immigrants from aca eligibility is another example of a resentment structure. by excluding unauthorized and some lawfully present immigrants from marketplace and medicaid coverage, the law’s framers ensured that applying for health coverage would entail a lengthy verification process during which applicants would be sorted and categorized by submitting immigration status information. in addition to increasing the “brightness” of immigrants’ symbolic exclusion from the body politic (marrow and joseph 2015), this procedure also created opportunities for exclusion through technical errors and eligibility delays. and even when immigrants were eligible, these policies led some to shy away from coverage, including mixed-status families, where the benefits of coverage were sometimes felt to pale in comparison to the risks involved in obtaining it (castañeda 2018). this exclusion did not arise in the law’s contested implementation. drawing xenophobic lines of belonging that issue from an us-versus-them or citizen-versus-non-citizen conception of health care deservingness formed part of the initial framing of the law and demonstrates that republicans do not have a monopoly on resentment policies. as feelings of disregard for immigrants became concretized in health policy, this created eligibility structures that excluded immigrants, but that also made it more difficult for everyone to access coverage. in each of the states where we conducted research, we saw resentment policies arise from resentment sentiments, even as the particulars of each state and local context mattered in their expression. in addition to sharon’s example in texas, another instance of an obstructionist resentment policy occurred in florida, when rick scott, then governor, issued an executive order prohibiting aca enrollments on state property. this meant that where allison lived, enrollment assistance was only available for a half-day a week in a county-owned building (rather than the state-operated health department) that did not have wireless internet, even though the application for coverage was completely online. the governor claimed the rule protected the privacy of enrollees, but the impact was that it was even harder for floridians to access coverage. this resentment policy directly influenced the experiences and attitudes of allison and others like her who were left to navigate a complex and confusing process with inadequate access to trained assistance. even in rhode island, a reliably democratic-voting state, resentment structures have found fertile ground. while state policy makers supported the aca and expanded medicaid, they also put in place restrictive eligibility processes and even closed the walk-in customer service center in 2015 due to cost overruns and the lack of a budget (p. anderson 2015). fiscal conservatism and concerns about fraud led rhode island to require multiple, redundant forms of identity verification that left the state exchange malfunctioning and unable to process the enrollments of many eligible individuals and families (mulligan, arriaga, and torres 2018). applicants’ identities were verified through the rhode island department of human services, the irs, experian (a consumer credit–reporting company), and homeland security. when identity did not align among these databases or if the individual did not have a credit history (common for both the young and working poor), their applications often faced delays. not surprisingly, such policies stoked attitudes of resentment among many of the people we worked with, including violet, who resented the financial upheaval caused by means testing and her impression that others were able to get care that she had not received earlier in her life. in all of these ways, resentment has acted as an organizing narrative that directly created policies and social structures that are both based in resentment principles and that perpetuate the idea that the aca is unfair and benefiting “others.” the notions that aca enrollees should be thoroughly surveilled, are likely to be committing fraud, are not already working, or are simply undeserving of health coverage have come to structure how social policy more broadly is imagined and implemented. in turn, these resentment structures also facilitated the circumstances that led the people we interviewed to become resentful themselves. earlier we discussed multiple examples of resentment policies, including the medicaid gap; barring some immigrants from coverage; limiting access to trained enrollment assisters; blocking enrollment activities on state property; and requiring multiple, redundant identity verifications to avoid fraud. other resentment policies that emerged in the politically contested implementation of the aca include excessive regulations for the certification of in-person assisters; limiting exchange hours during open enrollment; requiring frequent recertification for aca enrollees; cutting funding for cost-sharing reductions; imposing co-pays and premiums on medicaid-eligible populations; and, most recently, imposing work requirements on medicaid eligibility. all of these policies produce structures that in turn fuel resentment among those who must navigate through them. conclusion while firmly rooted in their own circumstances and responses to their particular situations, the feelings of resentment expressed by allison, violet, sharon, and lorie were not unique. we heard similar responses from many people we interviewed. all the middle-class individuals interviewed by brunson expressed, like violet, concern about “fairness” and resentment about “undeserving” people receiving access to care when their own access was limited. we also persistently heard poor white respondents repeat the dog-whistle refrains against the aca that were so common in local and national media. finally, while willingness to work, responsibility, and family duty emerged as common themes, every conception of deservingness was particularly intersectional to the person describing it. less individualized was how our interlocutors arrived at their resentment. the experience of moving through the resentment structures of the aca often proved so difficult and off-putting that the structures themselves created and exacerbated feelings of resentment for individuals seeking health coverage. in the everyday contexts where people tried to access coverage and care, resentment sentiments were common. some blamed racial and class others. some blamed politicians. some felt that work or respectability should equate with health insurance deservingness. others were apathetic and felt that the system only worked for rich people. nonetheless, all the interviewees featured in this article have one thing in common: they moved through resentment structures. they were cut off from medicaid, blocked from access to trained assisters, and faced a malfunctioning bureaucracy designed for people with stable incomes and predictable lives. each of the individuals presented here also experienced unmet health needs because of their exclusion from coverage. resentment structures thus produced embodied vulnerabilities: allison’s late entry into prenatal care; violet’s unrepaired hernia; sharon’s mounting bills and borrowed oxygen; and lorie’s uncovered son with a heart condition. these are real historical exclusions, not just misdirected ideological rancor. in this way, resentment sticks to the aca, not just because conservative commentators say it is an unfair law but because people know this to be true through their embodied brushes with resentment structures. resentment creates and hardens divisions between groups—whites and blacks, the poor and the middle class, women and men. the dialectic interplay between resentment as a structure of feeling and a feeling that structures also ensures that resentment succeeds in reproducing itself. of course, none of this is inevitable. just as policies created on the basis of resentment can foster even more resentment and inequality, policies based in solidarity can create a shared sense that we are all in this together. medicare is a good example of a policy that emerged from the civil rights movement and fostered greater racial, ethnic, and economic equity through expanding health coverage to the elderly and disabled, as well as desegregating the nation’s hospitals (smith 2016). the aca could have done this too; it had begun to reduce coverage disparities, before its major provisions were rolled back and sabotaged (artiga, orgera, and damico 2019). to disrupt the incessant manufacturing of resentment feelings, we need more than concepts of false consciousness and duped racists. we need to consider how policies, like the aca, themselves result from classand race-based forces that structure policies and their implementation and thereby create the political, economic, and social realities that individuals experience and come to resent. turning our analytic attention to how social policies create experiences of resentment helps us understand the continuity of this structure of feeling across time and space, as well as how it has been so effective in blocking greater racial and economic equality (c. anderson 2016). abstract described by many as an emotional state rooted in having been treated unfairly, resentment has surged over the past decade. resentment politics troubled the passage and implementation of the affordable care act (aca, 2010) in the united states. while some people gained access to health insurance through the aca, others experienced continued exclusion from affordable coverage. drawing on ethnographic interviews with poor whites from florida, rhode island, and texas, we show how uninsured individuals talked about and experienced resentment through contradictory tropes of “us versus them,” deservingness, and personal responsibility. we argue that policies based in resentment, occurring on both national and state levels, structured these individuals’ experiences and amplified their resentment sentiments. through this case study we argue that resentment is more than an emotion: it is also a force that structures policies and their implementation. resentment policies in turn create the social, political, and economic circumstances that generate resentment feelings. [resentment; ressentiment; affordable care act; obamacare; health care reform; policy] notes acknowledgments for their thoughtful comments, we would like to thank the cultural anthropology editors, the reviewers of this article, and kyle kusz. stephanie arriaga, jeannette torres, and ingrid brugnoli-ensin served as research assistants on the florida and rhode island research. the committee on aid to faculty research and the school of professional studies at providence college funded the research conducted by mulligan, while the research enhancement program at texas state university funded the research conducted by brunson. we especially thank allison, violet, sharon, lorie, and all the other individuals we spoke and worked with, without whom this article would not have been possible. 1. pregnant women with income below 185 percent of the federal poverty level (fpl) are temporarily eligible for medicaid in florida until two months after giving birth. 2. a considerable anthropological literature exists on affect and its relationship to emotion. the androcentric strains of this literature, which draw heavily on western philosophical traditions (i.e., massumi 2002, mazzarella 2012), make a hard distinction between affect (defined as corporeal expressions of sensation that are prediscursive) and emotion (located within culture and discourse). in this article, we treat resentment as an emotion, rather than an affect, to the extent that a distinction is useful. by defining affect as prediscursive, scholars place it largely outside of analysis (i.e., massumi 2002) and romanticize a prediscursive affective experience as a sign of resistance to modernity (mazzarella 2012). this move (and the ontological turn more broadly) strikes us as a way to smuggle ethnographic authority back into treatments of emotion and also tends to ignore the large body of research produced by feminist scholars, such as the anthropology of emotions (pedwell and whitehead 2012, 117–18). 3. further evidence that the poor have been unfairly singled out as the progenitors of resentment politics can be seen in the 2016 u.s. presidential election results. though poor whites and their racial resentments were often blamed for electing trump, data do not bear this out. the coalition that voted trump into office was not disproportionately working class—two-thirds of his support came from people making more than $50,000 a year (carnes and lupu 2017). 4. both projects were approved by our universities’ institutional review boards; accordingly, confidentiality and privacy were appropriately protected. we have used pseudonyms to protect respondents’ identities. 5. since insurance premiums increase with a person’s age (due to the actuarial categories used in insurance rating), older people pay the highest premiums, but they also receive the most in tax credits to bring their premiums down. therefore, older people will be hit with the largest tax bills if their income is significantly higher than expected. see mulligan (2018) for a discussion of actuarial rating and means testing in the aca. 6. in this section we are indebted to the secondary scholarship that documents how organized pressure from republicans and industry interest groups fomented resentment so as to wrest important concessions from policy makers (starr 2011; light and terrasse 2017) and later to block implementation and add additional resentment features to the law (jones, bradley, and oberlander 2014). references ahmed, sara 2004a “affective economies.” social text 22, no. 2: 117–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-22-2_79-117. 2004b the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. american legislative exchange council (alec) 2011 “state legislators guide to repealing obamacare.” washington, d.c.: alec. https://www.alec.org/publication/the-state-legislators-guide-to-repealing-obamacare/. anderson, carol 2016 white rage: the unspoken truth of our racial divide. new york: bloomsbury. 2017 “the 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oxford university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 35, issue 2, pp. 317-343, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2019. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca35.2.10 through the body of the midwife: ethos, labor, and the cultivation of trust in health care in yogyakarta, indonesia cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 492-516, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.03 through the body of the midwife: ethos, labor, and the cultivation of trust in health care in yogyakarta, indonesia catherine smith macquarie university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1116-9584 yanti shuffled out from the back room and placed the small aluminium toolkit on the table between us.1 “it’s small, isn’t it?” she said with some concern in her voice. we both looked down at the unicef-branded toolkit. she continued: “back then we thought that this was everything we needed. now we think we need all of this.” yanti chuckled and gracefully swept her arm in a wide circle, gesturing around her house and independent midwife practice in a village about a two-hour drive from the city of yogyakarta in indonesia. the rooms around us were filled with overflowing filing cabinets tucked under tables and stacked on top of each other; folders full of paperwork filled shelves to the ceiling. the birthing room, emergency room, and pharmacy counter faced onto the courtyard just outside, as did several bedrooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen for women waiting to give birth. yanti’s self-funded ambulance was parked in the driveway in the front yard, where she had removed a large section of the fence so that people could more easily access her house and midwife practice. we were sitting at her dining room table, drinking tea, eating steamed bananas, and talking about her days as part of indonesia’s village midwife program, when she was expected to meet all the health needs of her village with the rudimentary equipment included in the toolkit in front of us, supplemented with a good dose of her own tenacity. now the kit was empty and redundant, but yanti had kept it as a souvenir to remind herself of her time as a brave young village midwife. in this article i take up the life histories of midwives like yanti to examine the critical problem of how interpersonal trust between a practitioner and their patient might translate or fail to translate into a deeper, more generalized trust in health care. in interviews with thirty midwives in the special district of yogyakarta in 2019 and early 2020, midwives like yanti frequently gave evocative accounts of their experiences during the village midwife program to illustrate how midwives, over about thirty years, came to be seen as a group of highly trusted health-care workers who play expanded and atypical roles in the health system and in their communities. interviews with thirty-five women confirmed that midwives are widely perceived as trusted and trustworthy health-care workers. but village midwives like yanti did much more than passively supply health services or even fill gaps in the health system. by being highly responsive to community needs and improvising diverse forms of health and social care in a resource-poor environment, they over time came to embody a distinctive ethos that continues to characterize the professional identities of midwives in yogyakarta today. this ethos acts as an affective and ethical orientation binding midwives together, guiding their relationships to communities and the health system, and characterizing the culture of their practice. this ethos sees midwives take on high levels of personal risk and responsibility to remain alert and responsive to the evolving needs of their communities and continually improvise and expand their skills to compensate for shortcomings in the health system. as such they provide forms of health and social care that go well beyond their official role as maternal and reproductive health providers. at times this ethos takes the form of subtle gestures of reassurance and attuned forms of care, but it often involves high levels of risk-taking, physical exertion, and an ongoing vigilance concerning the social environment. in addition to illustrating the prominent and atypical roles midwives play in the health system, this article examines how this ethos acts as the object of a substantive generalized trust in the culture of midwifery. cultivating trust in health care marks no small feat, and the problem of trust and distrust is one faced by health-care workers around the world. while it is broadly acknowledged that trust constitutes an important component of just and effective health systems, much remains unknown about how interpersonal trust in a particular health-care worker does or does not translate into a generalized trust in cultures of medicine or health systems. while trust operates on interpersonal, epistemic, and sociopolitical levels (marková, linell, and gillespie 2007), it is also a deeply corporeal experience, “an embodiment of expectations that vulnerabilities will be protected rather than exploited” (abelson, miller, and giacomini 2009, 64). given the corporeal vulnerability and power imbalances often present in clinical encounters (grimen 2009; hamdy 2008; høybye and tjørnhøj-thomsen 2014; smith-oka 2012), this focus on embodied vulnerabilities and the anticipation of either protection or neglect seems particularly pertinent for understanding (dis)trust in health care. indeed, many anthropologists have illustrated distrust in health care as a destabilizing and traumatic dynamic that amplifies suffering, reproduces health inequities, and undermines the efficacy of health care. distrust in medicine may result from abuses of power by practitioners, especially if there is a lack of accountability (dixon 2015; sadler et al. 2016; smith-oka 2012). it can also result from the complicity of medical institutions in structures of racism, gender-based violence, political violence, and other dynamics of social oppression (briggs and mantini-briggs 2003; davis 2019; varley 2010). however, distrust in medicine also develops indirectly, as a result of histories of colonization or social oppression that generate widespread distrust in the state, intensify embodied suffering, deepen health inequalities, and inform social imaginaries of medicine (blair, more, and tsai 2017; briggs and mantini-briggs 2003; hamdy 2008; smith 2015). this raises the question of the extent to which health-care workers are able to counter these powerful social forces to create a more stable, generalized trust in health care. although trust in medicine is strongly mediated by perceptions of the state and the same sociopolitical histories that structure health inequities (briggs and mantini-briggs 2003; hamdy 2008; smith 2015), in seeking to promote trust in health systems, the tendency has been to rely heavily on the goodwill of health-care workers, encouraging them to embody forms of speech and behavior that signal integrity and competency (gilson 2003; mechanic 1998). in addition to being an important site of interpersonal trust, clinical encounters often carry sociopolitical ramifications that shape perceptions of medical knowledges, cultures of medicine, health systems, or the state itself (andaya 2010; briggs and mantini-briggs 2003; hamdy 2008), including processes mediated through the bodies of health-care workers (cooper 2015). to understand how to deepen generalized trust, we need to examine how trust or distrust becomes directed toward a particular object—which might be limited to the individual health-care worker, but when more stable extends to medical knowledges or technologies, cultures of medicine, the health system, or a sociopolitical order anticipated to provide (or deny) care (calnan and rowe 2006; gilson 2003; mechanic 1998). the question then becomes: what kind of sociopolitical order is signified through a clinical encounter? and to what extent can we expect health-care workers to resignify the place of health care within that sociopolitical order, to promote the embodied anticipation of protection that characterizes generalized trust in health care? this article investigates these questions through ethnography that illuminates trust’s tendency to morph between an affective, interpersonal dynamic and an embodied anticipation of protection within the broader sociopolitical realm of healthcare. i bring ethnographic perspectives to debates around trust in health care by showing how a group of health-care workers came to embody an ethos that over time became the object of a substantive generalized trust in a culture of medicine. this ethos was enacted by midwives gradually over several decades as they improvised, adapted, and responded to the demands of the broader institutional and social landscape, demonstrated their trustworthiness through strenuous labor, personal dedication and risk-taking, and slowly expanded the scope of their practice. their life histories show trust’s historical progression from distrust, to a transactional form of trust, to interpersonal trust, and then to a generalized trust in the ethos shared and continually enacted by midwives. they also show the fragility of trust, where trust remains contingent not only on the conduct of health-care workers but also on the ways that their actions are perceived to reflect particular sociopolitical orders that may or may not produce feelings of corporeal protection (cooper 2015; hamdy 2008; smith 2015). i focus on this positive case study of trust not to downplay ongoing problems in the health system but with the aim of contributing to efforts to build trusted and trustworthy health systems (gilson 2003). my own motivation to research trust in health care comes from having previously carried out ethnographic research in the indonesian province of aceh, where health systems faced deep distrust as a result of protracted structural and political violence and widespread distrust of the state, and where i observed the highly distressing consequences of entrenched distrust in health care (smith 2015). i have placed midwives at the center of this research to show how health systems are shaped by the health-care workers within them, who navigate an ever-shifting social field to respond to emerging challenges and care for communities. this becomes particularly apparent in resource-poor settings, where health-care workers need to be highly adaptive and innovative (langwick 2008; livingston 2012; street 2011). although health systems rely heavily on the resilience of health-care workers, the complex forms of labor they carry out remain problematically underrecognized, as does the highly feminized nature of the global health workforce (birn 1999; who 2019a). in addition to offering recognition to midwives, this article shows the labor of health-care workers as a generative force that shapes cultures of medicine and animates the social realm of health care. after illustrating how the midwives of yogyakarta came to embody an ethos and to cultivate trust in their culture of medicine, the article concludes by observing that although the depth of trust in midwives is quite remarkable, it is also contingent on midwives’ continual efforts to sustain this ethos through extraordinary levels of vigilance, responsiveness, and improvised forms of care. this has both positive and negative effects for midwives and for the stability and depth of trust in health care. taking up lucy gilson’s (2003) observation that building trust-based health systems ought to be a high priority given that trusted health systems generate wide-reaching social benefits and can even work to deepen trust in the state itself, i conclude by arguing that the responsibility for generating trust in health-care ought to be more equitably shared between health-care workers and other health researchers and professionals, both to deepen institutional trust and to alleviate the burden currently placed on our health workforces. midwives: the backbone of the indonesian health system one of the distinctive features of the indonesian health system is the prominent and atypical role played by medically trained midwives. although home births are discouraged, indonesia has always had a policy of midwife-led care. partly a consequence of indonesia’s shortage of doctors (world bank 2009), midwives significantly outnumber doctors and are a visible presence within hospitals and community health centers (puskesmas), where they lead maternal, sexual, and reproductive health care, while also supporting other medical staff to triage patients and perform many other duties. like yanti, many midwives operate independent midwife practices (bidan praktek mandiri), where they perform even more diverse roles. usually attached to the homes of midwives, independent midwife practices are physically and socially embedded in neighborhoods and villages, forming important nodes in the health system. midwife practices serve as birthing centers and major providers of maternal, sexual, and reproductive health care (anindya et al. 2020, 14). midwife practices are also important points of primary health care through which midwives respond to accidents and emergencies, attempt to offer mental health care, stay vigilant to signs of domestic violence and abuse, promote vaccination and nutrition, and offer highly diverse forms of health care that go well beyond the typical role of midwives. while perceptions of the health system and maternal health experiences vary radically across indonesia (alesich 2008; anindya et al. 2020; bennett 2017; hildebrand 2009; fitzpatrick 2022; munro, katmo, and wetipo 2022; newland 2002), and while the health system is continually expanding (witoelar and utomo 2022), even in the relatively well-serviced area of yogyakarta midwives carry out diverse and expanded forms of health care. the expanded and atypical role that midwives play has its historical roots in the village midwife program, a major public health program that saw tens of thousands of young women trained and posted to work in remote communities, usually as the only trained health practitioner. the indonesian government established the village midwife program in 1989 in response to persistently high levels of maternal mortality, which at the time stood at 400 deaths per 100,000 live births (shankar et al. 2008, 1226). the program emerged as one of indonesia’s primary responses to the world health organization’s safe motherhood initiative, which saw an increased emphasis on the medical management of birth (abouzahr 2003; langwick 2012; pigg 1997). in many countries, traditional birth attendants were prohibited from attending births, and norms around birthing changed rapidly in this global policy environment (berry 2006; jenkins 2003; whittaker 2002). while indonesia also suppressed traditional birth attendants during this era (hildebrand 2009; newland 2002), the indonesian government departed from the global trend by building a large workforce of trained midwives, known as bidan. the village midwife program aimed to place a skilled birth attendant in every village in the archipelago. village midwives were to oversee maternal and child health, and sexual and reproductive health care, and they made major contributions to indonesia’s highly regarded family-planning program (hildebrand 2009; hull 2003). the government hoped that midwives would stay long term in their villages, become financially self-sufficient after their initial three-year contract and acting as a first point of care in a decentralized system of village-based health care (hull et al. 1999). over the first seven years, some 54,000 women were trained and posted to remote villages, providing coverage to more than 96 percent of indonesia’s large and geographically dispersed population (shankar et al. 2008, 1227). the minimum training required to be a licensed midwife has changed many times over the years, but in the original program village midwives were nurses with an additional year of midwifery training.2 in principle, all village midwives were associated with a community health center (puskesmas). however, they were posted to remote villages some distance away from their affiliated health centers, so in practice village midwives frequently operated as the only trained health-care worker in their assigned villages. although the village midwife program continues today, references to the program usually point to the 1990s, when the program was most active and formed an important element of the indonesian government’s efforts to expand primary health care. although the program led to improvements in women’s health, the reductions in maternal mortality were not as significant as anticipated (hatt et al. 2007; frankenberg and thomas 2001; shrestha 2010; trisnantoro et al. 2010). while maternal mortality has steadily decreased over time, it remains elevated at 177 deaths per 100,000, and a range of complex social and health system factors continue to contribute to maternal deaths, which are inequitably distributed across provinces and social class (hay 2015; saraswati 2022; who 2019b, 101). while access to health care continues to improve, marked inequities and systemic complexities persist, affecting both midwives and those in their care (anindya et al. 2020; hay 2015; wilopo et al. 2020). earlier accounts show that many village midwives struggled to adapt to life in their new villages. terence hull and colleagues describe that in the mid-1990s, midwives were “neither respected enough by the people to replace the dukun [traditional birth attendant], nor skilled enough to provide a level of primary health care comparable to that given by general practitioners” (hull et al. 1999, 48). ethnography from diverse parts of indonesia during the 1990s suggest that midwives struggled to meet the conflicting expectations of communities and the government, while also often failing to meet their own desire to support the health of their communities (alesich 2008; hildebrand 2009, 190–93). this observation resonates with the recollections of midwives i interviewed in yogyakarta in 2019. however, sometimes the social implications of development interventions unfold over a much longer period of time. the life histories below show how midwives in yogyakarta eventually overcame these obstacles and over a period of decades went on to establish themselves as a group of highly respected health-care workers with significant social influence who create a sense of safety in health care (bennett 2017). this trust was cultivated gradually, as midwives responded to their challenges and came to embody a distinctive ethos that continues to characterize their practice today. the making of a midwife: a case study siti, now in her early forties, runs an independent midwife practice in a tobacco-farming village about forty-five minutes outside yogyakarta. like most independent midwife practices, siti’s practice is a hybrid clinical-domestic space inside her family home. siti and her family live upstairs, while the ground floor serves as her practice. in addition to the consulting and birthing rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens for guests, siti runs a small shop from her garage, stocked with basic pharmaceuticals. siti is known as a friendly and skilled midwife, so that about twenty women from surrounding villages give birth in her practice every month. siti lives with her three children and her husband arief, who serves as the principal of the local primary school and doubles as the unofficial village ambulance driver. siti adopted one of her children after the girl was left abandoned by an unmarried woman who fled late at night after giving birth. siti was born in central java in “a tiny village far in the mountains.” she said that when she was a child, her mother was often called to support the traditional birth attendant. although siti sometimes joined her mother at these births, she said that her mother didn’t encourage her to become a midwife, but that “the path of her life” drew her to midwifery: actually, i didn’t intend to become a midwife. when i was a girl, i wanted to be a dancer, i liked javanese dance. i used to perform when i was in school, but the nursing college was run by muhammadiyah. i had to wear a headscarf, i had to live in a dormitory, the rules were very strict, so i couldn’t practice. later they thought it was pretentious for a nurse to dance. so, i thought, “well, ok, i’ll follow the path of my life with a happy heart.” so, i became a midwife, which is humanitarian, right? let alone in [the rural district i was posted to]. it was remote. it was poor. as a young woman she moved alone to yogyakarta to study nursing and midwifery. soon after graduating, siti was posted to a village about two hours outside of the city. she recalled her formative experiences as a midwife as follows: “after i had been working for just a year, the monetary crisis hit [1998]. [the district i was posted to] was always dry, always poor, the farmers had always struggled there because there is no water. so even in the community health center the patients were bathed with a washcloth, just one dip of water. we had to order the water to be sent up from yogyakarta in jerry cans, and it was slow to arrive.” i asked her: “and who paid for the water, the government or the midwife herself?” she replied, surprised, “oh, the midwife herself must pay, that’s clear. and the electricity too.” she continued: so that’s what i encountered when i arrived in [this rural district] as a young girl. it was dry, the farmers were poor, there was the monetary crisis, and there was a lot of suicide, lots of suicide. people would commit suicide if for instance they had a sickness that didn’t heal. they felt despair to the point that they would hang themselves. so that’s what i encountered as a young girl in the village. before i arrived in the village, i was thinking about hygiene, what to do if there is a complicated birth. but when i arrived in the village and i saw the despair, the suicide, i realized that the responsibilities of midwives included all the needs of the people. observing suicide, poverty, and general suffering deepened siti’s sense of compassion and social responsibility. as a young woman and an outsider to the community, siti realized she would need to gain the trust of the people. her key strategy was to participate in the everyday events of village life. although part of her role meant convincing people to take up “modern” and hygienic health practices, siti did not try to assert her authority, but rather carried herself as an ordinary woman “at the same level” as the people. siti explained: “the main thing is that we give back to the people. we can’t be indifferent, we have to be friendly, join in gatherings, the [quranic] recitation gatherings that are organized by the village head, games and competitions… . yes, [i felt] happy, so if anything happens, i always joined in the gatherings. [this meant that] asking for help [from villagers] was also easy. so, if something happened people would come to me, listen to me, help me.” in the beginning, her attempts to build trust proved essential to gain acceptance: from when i was a girl, whenever i was in the village, i felt close [akrab] with the people. i only owned a television. i didn’t have any wealth. i could go out and leave my door open, leave the key, go to the neighbors whenever i wanted. in the next village there was another village midwife from jakarta, and she was egotistical. she went into yogyakarta and left her house unlocked. all her appliances were stolen. even her iron, her fan, her television, all of it. everybody knew who stole it, but they wouldn’t tell the police. that was because she wasn’t close to the people. so even though i was in a poor, remote village, i adapted quickly, so that i would get used to it and i would be close to the people. siti observed the social environment, approached people with humility, and prioritized building trust with the community. she agreed to all requests if at all possible. she often worked in exchange for rice or bananas, or for nothing at all. she befriended the traditional birth attendant and never scolded anybody if they didn’t follow the health practices she promoted. instead, she waited for opportunities to gently demonstrate her skills without criticizing others or drawing attention to herself. over time, siti built confidence in her own ability and strengthened relationships with the community. siti moved back to the city after her three-year placement as a village midwife and became a hospital midwife. after yogyakarta was struck by a major earthquake in 2006, she moved to her husband’s village and opened her practice. but she still has strong connections with the village in which she worked as a village midwife: “even now if there is a wedding or celebration i’m still invited to join. more than fifteen years later i’m still invited. they know my children, and my husband too. i still feel like i’m family with that village.” siti still now often offers services for free, or finds ways to offer generosity, such as having her husband drive people into the city. her practice is open from around 7 am to 10 pm, or twenty-four hours if there is a birth or if somebody knocks on the door seeking urgent care. in the evenings, after her practice closes, siti lies in bed and scans through the messages in the whatsapp message group she organizes among women in her area, answering questions and offering health advice. she also reads the tone of the messages, to see if anybody seems at risk of post-natal depression, or to detect if any are having marriage problems, which could lead to domestic violence or emotional distress. i asked her about the long hours she works. the point is that midwives have to work with sincerity. we have to struggle. it’s good for us to struggle. the struggle is the way that we care for women. for instance, we can’t focus on own our families. sometimes our families feel neglected. we can’t promise to spend time with our own children, this means our families also need to have sincerity. it’s different from a doctor who practices from this time to this time. midwives need to be ready twenty-four hours. we can’t plan the time of a birth. we can’t plan the time of an emergency. that means that midwives and their families must be sincere and enthusiastic. we need to stay healthy. sometimes even if we are sick or in pain, we need to help others. the dedication and responsiveness of midwives like siti is not only admirable but has become productive of an ethos guiding the culture of midwifery and shaping the dynamics of trust in health care. embodied labor and the improvisation of health care the midwives of yogyakarta have been remarkably successful in creating a trusted sociopolitical realm in which health encounters can occur, cultivating substantive levels of trust in the culture of midwifery. while they were originally mistrusted, midwives like siti cultivated progressively deeper levels of trust by carrying out both subtle and strenuous forms of labor and by staying highly responsive to the shifting social and institutional landscape. these efforts gradually took the form of a recognizable ethos that shaped the culture of midwifery, became the object of trust, and promoted the embodied anticipation of protection that characterizes generalized trust in health care. like siti, many of the midwives i interviewed looked back on their capabilities as young women with some surprise, but most notably with pride. since village midwives were sent alone into remote villages, they needed to improvise and dig deep into their own resilience, including by responding to accidents and attempting to prevent suicide. building trust in the early days was strategic and necessary. this was a transactional form of trust sometimes described as “thin trust” (nooteboom 2006), and yet it was this transactional trust that allowed midwives to adapt to life in an unfamiliar setting, develop their skills, persuade people to accept their support, and establish the foundations for deeper forms of trust to emerge over time. for some, the hardship they faced as freshly trained midwives felt challenging. one recalled the first birth she attended: “when i arrived, i could see there was fluid on the dirt floor. i thought: ‘is this amniotic fluid, is this blood? it’s so hard to tell in the dark.’ there was no electricity back then, we only had a lantern. every time the wind blew, the flame would flicker, and i prayed to god, ‘please don’t leave me alone in the dark with this woman’s life.’” no doubt, many midwives did not manage to adapt or feel a sense of satisfaction in their work, as captured by vanessa hildebrand (2009). but others recalled this period of their lives with exhilaration and pride. rini, for instance, now runs a clinic in a village about an hour outside of yogyakarta. when i explained that i was researching trust in health care, she smiled and began talking enthusiastically about her experiences as a village midwife: [the village i worked in] was in a mountainous area. it could only be accessed using a motorcycle or a bicycle at the time. and there was no midwife in the village where i lived. when i arrived, i was regarded as an angel. i mean people thought ‘oh, there are capable midwives who can help! there is a midwife who can solve all our problems.’ what happened is, —you know i still remember until now, —the village where i worked was on the edge of a river. the river had no bridge. well, the first thing i experienced when i arrived in the village was to be called to a birth in the village on the other side of the river. the village was in a different district but they had no midwife, so i had to help, right? she sat forward on the edge of her seat, grabbing my knee: “the river had no bridge. so, what happened? i needed to walk across the river in the middle of the night. i grabbed my equipment, my village midwife kit, and a change of clothes, and carried it all on my head.” she elongated her back and gestured elegantly, as if picking up her midwife kit and placing it on the top of her head: “the people were shouting out ‘quickly, quickly she’s already in pain.’ i walked across the river in the middle of the night with everything in a bundle on my head. the water was up to my shoulders.” rini reached her chin upwards, as if she were struggling to keep her face out of the water: “the current was strong, it was cold. woah! i still remember it very clearly.” rini narrated her experience enthusiastically, smiling and shaking her head as she remembered how capable she was as a young woman. i asked about her responsibilities as a village midwife: “it wasn’t our [official] responsibility, because it’s not within our competency. but when i was there, the community assumed that ‘you have to be able to do anything, you have to be able to solve all of the problems that exist in this village.’ there is an injury. yes, i’m there. somebody fainted, i must be able to help. anyway, if anything happened in the village, people ran straight to me.” i replied: “you must have learned a lot about health, right?” yes, from three years living in the village, i feel like i gained about ten years’ worth of education. yes, it felt like ten years, because i was working twenty-four hours. it was also difficult because there were cultural particularities that were different from my [upbringing]. the problem was i was still very young, very young, but i was positioned as the person who was responsible for everything. that’s what was extraordinary in my opinion. i continued: “and how did you feel back then, proud or scared, or … ?” “proud, very proud,” she exclaimed, “because thanks to god, i was given my abilities by god, and i was given the opportunity to make the most of them, and thanks to god i was able to help people and i didn’t have many problems, so i think this was a big achievement. even though other people don’t consider this an achievement, i think it’s an achievement, so i’m proud.” most of the midwives i interviewed in their forties and older had similar stories. many counted on their fingers the multiple roles they carried out. ratna recalled: “somebody fell off the roof, lots of people fell off the roof. there was somebody who was electrocuted, somebody who drowned, people coming with fevers, with all kinds of illnesses, elderly people who were lonely and felt sick but really, they just needed somebody to talk to.” similarly, dewi described: “yes, people had accidents, lots of accidents, motorcycle accidents, people cut themselves, once somebody fell out of a tree.” siti explained: “yes, of course, we had to do everything. if people had a fever, if people fell off the roof, once there was a guy who cut his leg from here, [she pointed to her foot] all the way up to here [pointing to her inner thigh]. there was blood everywhere and everybody was screaming … . yes, the point is we needed to accept everybody, whether it was in our competency or not.” although all affirmed that it was their proud duty to respond to the needs of those around them, some also expressed how difficult this was as a young midwife with little or no support. many used the phrase: “i was still a little girl [gadis kecil]!” while describing their experiences. one said: “it’s like the government said to us, oh, you can ride a motorcycle, why don’t you fly this aeroplane.” while the decision to send young, freshly trained midwives into unfamiliar and remote areas seems to depart from gender norms since midwives were usually alone, unmarried, and with limited institutional support, this policy reflects an enduring tendency within indonesian state-building to naturalize the unpaid labor of women and to then instrumentalize that labor within processes of state-sponsored development (marcoes 2002; newberry 2006; suryakusuma 1988). during the suharto era, such efforts focused on mobilizing “housewives” into large, women-based volunteer movements that implemented development agendas, including many health activities, and that played a major role in animating state-building (newberry 2006). although midwives are trained health care workers—and not volunteers—similar sensibilities also likely rationalized the high expectations placed on village midwives to carry out extensive forms of labor beyond their assigned roles. however, the mobilization of women’s labor is a common feature of health systems globally. the highly feminized nature of health workforces is rarely made visible in academic or policy literature, and the unpaid labor of women within global health remains largely taken for granted and unrecognized (birn 1999; who 2019a). nevertheless, my midwife interlocutors emphasized their pride in the contributions they made and continue to make to their communities. while there is a certainly an extraction of women’s unpaid labor at work, it is analytically useful, and aligned with the sensibilities of my midwife interlocutors, to focus on how this labor gradually generated an ethos that orients midwives to their practice and stands as the object of trust in the culture of midwifery (gilson 2003; mechanic 1998). former village midwives, many of whom later moved to the city, and the younger generation of midwives who work under their guidance, continue to share and recreate this ethos, even as the health system continues to grow and expand. sustaining the ethos of midwifery today yogyakarta is no longer a sleepy town and has grown into a small but bustling city with traffic jams, air pollution, and shopping malls. yogyakarta is a university town with a vibrant youth culture, set within an old javanese city proud of its traditional arts, its sultanate, its pluralistic healing traditions, and its cultural codes of speech and conduct (ferzacca 2001). yogyakarta city has some of the best health infrastructure outside of jakarta, with nine major hospitals, smaller specialized hospitals, decentralized emergency services, and, according to my interviews, “more than one thousand” independent midwife practices. while yogyakarta has a growing middle class, high levels of socio-economic inequality persists. just beyond the ring road that forms the perimeter of the city, the urban atmosphere is quickly replaced by rice fields and mountains. the farming communities that siti worked in still struggle to make ends meet. many villages have distinctive identities as micro-communities. these days, most youth will leave to live in the city. others stay and seek work on the tobacco farms, cigarette factories, or other factories that dot the rural landscape. although there are established health services, midwives in both rural and urban areas of yogyakarta still hold strongly to their ethos. for instance, one of the district’s senior midwives, ida, was deeply moved when she heard a story of a young, unmarried university student who took her own life when she realized she was pregnant. ida now goes door to door to the boarding houses of yogyakarta: “i tell them—if a young woman becomes pregnant, don’t shame her, don’t scold her. make sure you call me and i can talk to her. i can make sure she has the care she needs. don’t shame her to the point that she kills herself.” although this departs somewhat from social norms, ida makes it known that she welcomes unmarried pregnant women, fearing that they might hide their pregnancies and give birth alone, or worse yet die by suicide. like siti, ida also adopted a child that was left abandoned at her practice. despite her age and her own health problems, ida dedicates herself to protecting the health of women in yogyakarta, including by seeking to influence sensitive social issues such as suicide and the sexual health of young and unmarried people. like ida, many described the vigilance they feel observing the lives of those around them, scanning for hidden health needs. for instance, ayu explained: “when i’m out in the streets, wherever i am, i’m always looking around to see: ‘is this woman happy, does she have enough money for food, does her husband come home late at night?’ i’m always looking to see if there is a problem that later might turn into a health problem.” midwives still attend neighbourhood events “like ordinary women,” even as they take on extraordinary responsibilities. like siti, many midwives run whatsapp message groups, allowing them to be on the lookout for potential problems. government agencies also call on midwives to carry out a broad range of activities. a senior midwife told me: when there is a government program, there are always midwives involved, whatever it is. for example, it’s clear that [midwives will be involved in] any maternal and child health programs, health promotion, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases [programs]. then there is nutrition, family planning, and programs for schoolchildren. but actually, midwives can be involved in anything. for example, when they build a new housing project for the poor, they invite the midwives to open the building … and i agree. because it’s always an opportunity to enter the community. we can enter people’s homes, and say, ‘stop smoking,’ ‘that toilet needs to be cleaned,’ ‘don’t warm up your motorcycle inside your house if your wife is pregnant.’ … we can look for signs of domestic violence, violence against children. these are opportunities to promote health and to become closer to the people. i asked her whether she agreed that midwives should take on this broad range of responsibilities: yes, well it is our responsibility, because we are sworn-in healthcare workers. even though legally it’s not our responsibility. but if we don’t help the people, who will? … once there was a situation where somebody was electrocuted. people called the midwife to come to help. and the midwife said: ‘well, i can’t, that’s not my job, that’s the doctor’s job, it’s not my job call the doctor.’ and then the person died. the villagers wanted to burn down the midwife’s house, chase her out of the village. people came to her house with flaming torches, some carried machetes, other weapons. we are community officials, like it or not, we have to help, we have to do it. we can’t say: ‘oh, it’s not my job, oh, it’s your job, oh, i can’t.’ we have to be ready to embrace all levels of society. while this ethos is primarily generated through their ongoing expanded labor, senior midwives also socialize their junior colleagues into this ethos. for example, siti told me: “sometimes young women come to me, and they say they want to be a midwife because babies are cute, because it’s nice to help women. but they don’t want to work, they’re afraid of work. they say they’re tired, they want to go to meet their friends. i won’t accept it. you cannot become a midwife because babies are cute. you must only become a midwife because you’re ready to serve your community.” the indonesian midwives’ association regularly holds gatherings at which senior midwives give speeches to their younger colleagues, emphasizing that midwives should be ready to work 24/7, stay alert to the needs of their communities, and look out for signs of domestic violence, hidden pregnancies, or women at risk of post-natal depression. midwifery is demanding work for little pay, with junior midwives in private practices starting at the minimum wage of 2 million rupiah (usd 140) a month. “the same as a factory worker,” one junior midwife said to me with tears in her eyes. “but i’m proud,” she quickly added, “i’m proud to be a midwife.” young midwives who do not share these values are directed to seek other paths in life. recognizing the foundations of trust while my research centered on the experiences of midwives themselves, i interviewed thirty-five women about their experiences interacting with health services, and found that many described midwives’ friendliness and sincerity, their integration into local communities as equals rather than elites, and their willingness to carry out extensive forms of labor around the clock as signs of their trustworthiness. as we saw in siti’s account, the imperative to be friendly and calm, to accept and treat everybody, and to agree to requests whenever possible, was recognized as the foundation of trust. as indah emphasized: “anything that we need, the midwife will give. if i want advice, if i’m feeling uncertain, i just talk to the midwife, and straight away, i feel calm again. midwives are ready to help us, enthusiastic to help us, twenty-four hours.” many interpreted midwives’ strategy to situate themselves as ordinary women and part of the community as a sign of humility and integrity. this was particularly prevalent in villages, and among low-income women in the city, where the hierarchical nature of the health system felt pronounced. fitri, described this as follows: “they live in our villages, they are our neighbors. i’m scared to ask a question if i’m at the community health center. the staff there are elites, i’m embarrassed to talk openly with them. if i’m with the midwife, i can be more comfortable, chat for a while, we know each other, i don’t need to worry about being scared.” many recognized midwives’ willingness to work well beyond their official duties to respond to community needs. although this behaviour was expected and often taken for granted, participants frequently admired this dedication and generosity. as atikah described: midwives are very friendly, very friendly, especially to poor people like me. we don’t have to worry about paying. if we can give just a little bit [of money], yes, just a little bit [is enough]. if we can’t give a little bit [of money] we can just give rice. midwives are very friendly. even my husband goes to the midwife to have his blood pressure checked because he’s too lazy to wait at the community health center, and she is always happy to help. in the instances where participants expressed a dislike for a particular midwife, it was because they did not adhere to the expected ethos. this is expressed through a narrative that holds that midwives in independent practice are friendly, while hospital or community health center midwives are fierce (galak). since it is financially difficult for midwives to run their practices, a midwife might go out of business if they are seen to be fierce. some midwives burn out or wish to spend more time with their own families, which might lead them to work in a hospital or community health center, which is also demanding but with better working conditions. in these institutional settings, however, it is more difficult for midwives to demonstrate their ethos. many hospital midwives operate practices from their homes in the evenings, sometimes limited to contraception and reproductive health advice, to stay connected with their communities. however, the high expectations are also a reason why some midwives close their practices to work in hospitals, where they have a “shared responsibility” for the lives of the people in their care. hospital midwives enjoy better working conditions but enjoy a lower social status and sometimes experience less satisfaction, since midwives themselves are deeply invested in their ethos. while midwives have been remarkably successful in generating trust, they must remain vigilant and responsive to community needs to sustain this ethos, retain this trust, and to satisfy their own sense of duty. this means taking on high levels of risk and responsibility for little pay and only partial recognition, in return for good social standing and a rewarding career that many approach with deep dedication. conclusion health systems are one of the most intimate and vital manifestations of the state, and the task of understanding institutional trust in health care has important implications for improving health systems and for building trust in the state. although trust in health care is mediated by a range of sociopolitical processes that shape the anticipation of either protection or neglect in a clinical encounter, the responsibility for building trust is frequently carried by health-care workers themselves. while this perception of trust as an interpersonal, affective dynamic no doubt promotes important forms of care, and while the midwives in my research certainly embraced this responsibility, in many cases the efforts of health-care workers do not suffice against the backdrop of long histories of sociopolitical oppression (briggs and mantini-briggs 2003; hamdy 2008; smith 2015). in other cases, trust may remain limited to the interpersonal realm and fail to generate a more stable generalized trust in health care (calnan and sanford 2004). while trust is an affective and interpersonal experience involving the anticipation of corporeal safety and protection, to become more stable it needs to shift beyond the interpersonal realm, to situate health care in what is perceived as a legitimate sociopolitical realm that generates an anticipation of corporeal protection. this article has offered ethnography to show what the cultivation of trust looks like in practice, in a resource-poor situation where health-care workers take on the responsibility for building trust in health care. in the present case, midwives successfully built not only interpersonal trust but also trust in the culture of medicine, since they gradually embodied a distinctive ethos that acted as the object of trust and successfully established midwifery practices as important and trusted nodes of the health system. the ethos enacted by midwives came to define their culture of medicine, stand as the object of trust, and create a trusted sociopolitical realm in which health encounters could occur. the cultivation of trust involved extensive and demanding forms of labor, high levels of risk-taking, and the improvisation of forms of health care well beyond their field of training, in addition to gentle acts of kindness and empathy. generalized trust requires an object. in this case, the object of trust is the ethos, continually generated and mediated through the bodily labor of midwives, whether they are smiling gently, swimming across flooded rivers, running to respond to accidents, or answering their door 24/7 to those in need. however, even this relatively successful case study shows the precarious nature of trust in health care. while the efforts midwives have made to build trust are admirable and a source of pride for the midwives themselves, this cultivation of trust through strenuous and complex labor comes at a high cost to midwives, who work under demanding and poorly paid conditions with only partial recognition. it may also come at a cost to the health system, since health systems that rely heavily on the goodwill of health-care workers are also more vulnerable to the failings of health-care workers, and to fluctuations in levels of trust as its conditions change over time. trust might be lost if a health-care worker cannot meet the high expectations placed on them, or if they do not manage to compensate for either institutional or broader sociopolitical shortcomings. if health-care workers abuse their power or act in ways that reproduce social oppression (davis 2019; smith-oka 2012; varley 2010), this can extend to a distrust of medicine more broadly. trust can easily revert to an interpersonal dynamic of care confined only to an individual health-care worker, or even fail and lead to an active distrust of medicine more broadly. to recognize the multidimensional labor of health-care workers means not only to support better labor rights, but also to see health systems as social institutions that rely heavily on health-care workers to establish institutional legitimacy and trust. while i completed my fieldwork in january 2020 in the early weeks of the covid-19 pandemic, the demands placed on midwives intensified greatly during peak periods of the pandemic, to the point that even the deeply dedicated midwives i worked with were pushed to their limits (hazfiarini et al. 2022; smith 2020). as gilson (2003) argues, the creation of a trust-based health system has wide-reaching social benefits not only because trust is essential for quality health care but also because health systems constitute important institutions for the establishment of political legitimacy and trust in the state itself, as well as for the creation of the broader values of mutual care and social responsibility. if our goal is to develop trust-based health systems, then should move beyond the tendency to rely heavily on health-care workers to build trust through their labor and willingness to take high levels of risk. instead, we should recognize that the development of trusted health systems requires an ongoing social and political process and share responsibility for the creation of trust in medicine more equitably across health-care workers, public health professionals, and health social scientists. abstract the question of how to build trust in health care is one that faces health-care workers and public health actors around the world. this article illustrates how midwives in yogyakarta, indonesia, have over time generated a distinctive ethos that characterizes the culture of their practice, and that stands as the object of a substantive generalized trust in midwives. in bringing attention to the multidimensional forms of labor carried out by health-care workers in a resource-poor setting, this article shows how cultures of medicine are generated and embodied by health-care workers in ways that mediate the dynamics of trust in health care. it offers a case study of the successful cultivation of trust in health care, while also reflecting on the problematic implications of the tendency to rely heavily on the labor of health-care workers for the development of trust-based health systems. [trust; health care; ethos; culture of medicine; midwives; indonesia] abstrak bagaimana cara membangun kepercayaan terhadap layanan kesehatan merupakan masalah yang dihadapi petugas kesehatan dan profesional kesehatan masyarakat di seluruh dunia. artikel ini menggambarkan bagaimana para bidan di yogyakarta, indonesia, telah membangun etos khas yang mencirikan budaya kebidanan, sehingga yang menjadi objek kepercayaan masyarakat terhadap bidan secara umum. selain membahas pekerjaan multi-dimensi yang dilakukan oleh petugas layanan kesehatan di lingkungan dengan sumber daya yang terbatas, artikel ini menunjukkan bagaimana kebudayaan kedokteran dihasilkan dan diwujudkan oleh petugas layanan kesehatan dengan cara yang membentuk dinamika kepercayaan dalam layanan kesehatan. artikel ini menawarkan studi kasus atas kesuksesan terwujudnya kepercayaan dalam layanan kesehatan, secara bersamaan juga memberikan refleksi terhadap implikasi bermasalah dari kecenderungan untuk sangat bergantung kepada tenaga kesehatan dalam pengembangan sistem kesehatan berbasis kepercayaan. [kepercayaan, layanan kesehatan, etos, budaya kedokteran, bidan, indonesia] notes acknowledgments this research was funded by a discovery early career researcher award (decra) from the australian research council (de180101214), with additional support from macquarie university. i am deeply grateful to the indonesian midwives association, especially nunik endang sunarsih, sutarti, christina pernatun kismoyo, and all the midwives who participated in interviews and showed me kindness and hospitality. sincere appreciation to siswanto wilopo and amirah wadhi at the center for reproductive health at gadjah mada university for their collegial guidance, and to atik triratnawati, gama trioni, dian lestarinigsih, nefiani puji astuti, rizka rachmawati, and linda bennett for their generous assistance. rebekah plueckhahn, jane palmer, and annemarie samuels offered insightful feedback on earlier drafts, and vida asrina dhulst kindly edited the indonesian abstract. sincere thanks also to the three 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pakistan.” social science and medicine. 70, no. 1: 61–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.09.028 whittaker, andrea 2002 “the demise of birth attendants in northeast thailand: embodying tradition in modern times.” in the daughters of hariti: childbirth and female healers of south and southeast asia, edited by santi rozario and geoffrey samuel, 211–33. london: routledge. wilopo, siswanto, amirah wahdi, hasbullah thabrany, and anooj pattnaik 2020 bringing private midwives into indonesia’s national health insurance scheme: a landscape analysis. washington, d.c.: universitas gadjah mada and thinkwell. witoelar, firman, and ariane utomo 2022 “introduction: diagnosing indonesia.” in sickness and in health: diagnosing indonesia, edited by firman witoelar and ariane utomo, 1–14. singapore: iseas – yusof ishak institute. world bank 2009 indonesia’s doctors, midwives, and nurses: current stock, increasing needs, future challenges and options. washington, d.c.: world bank. world health organization (who) 2019a “delivered by women, led by men: a gender analysis of the global health and social workforce.” human resources for health observer series 24. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/311322 2019b “trends in maternal mortality 2000 to 2017: estimates by who, unicef, unfpa, world bank group, and the united nations population division.” executive summary. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 492-516, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.03 desnacionalización, regímenes visuales y resistencia: gitanos americanos en ciudad de méxico cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 171-193, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.01 desnacionalización, regímenes visuales y resistencia: gitanos americanos en ciudad de méxico david lagunas universidad de sevilla https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9619-0149 en la historia de méxico, los roma1 constituyen un caso singular: se trata de una minoría étnica cuya antigüedad histórica no es contestada, sino atestiguada desde su llegada en el siglo xv a américa, sin que ello les convierta automáticamente en autóctonos, al igual que pasó con los roma en europa. los primeros gitanos ibéricos que llegaron al continente americano en los viajes de colón no fueron nativos, como ocurrió con otros grupos romaníes que migraron desde europa a méxico desde finales del siglo xix y principios del xx. no obstante, no deja de ser un suceso que hace parte de la trascendencia nacional, aunque constituye una historia no reconocida y olvidada. micaela di leonardo (2004, 2), siguiendo a eric wolf y a las sociedades sin historia, señala que con el declive del pensamiento evolucionista que contraponía la alta cultura occidental con las culturas salvajes a mediados del siglo xx se estableció una nueva comparación entre el occidente rico, con sus historias específicas y los campesinos, primitivos y pobres no blancos, con una historia simple, no relevante. en relación con los romani studies (trumpener 1992) se centra en la mitología y las ansiedades presentes en la construcción cultural de los roma en occidente al analizar el racismo y el orientalismo de las narrativas literarias bajo la idea de una no-sincronicidad de esta población, como situada en otro tiempo y sin historia, un pueblo nómada más cercano a la naturaleza, metaforizado y deshumanizado como arcaico y amnésico hacia el pasado. ken lee (2000) subraya la semejanza entre el orientalismo de said y la idea del “otro fuera del tiempo” de fabian y cómo se construye al gypsy como un otro exótico, una manifestación oriental dentro de europa. por otro lado, josé mapril y micol brazzabenni (2008) señalan que persisten imaginarios sobre la migración y la movilidad que subyacen en la construcción nacional de las identidades, en específico sobre los roma como no-nativos e itinerantes, lo cual justifica su falta de integración. su dinámica se presenta como la clave que proporciona una definición colectiva a partir de un comportamiento social percibido por el resto de la sociedad como esencialmente nómada, una categoría colonial y esencialista (noyes 2000, 2004). la cuestión es que la falta de compromiso político para dignificar la historia y la antropología de los roma ha reforzado imperceptiblemente los riesgos de la racialización y la discriminación, así como la ilusión de pensar que ellos son siempre los mismos, como si existiera una cultura romaní ideal de la que surgen las distintas comunidades; por lo tanto, la coherencia interna de cada grupo romaní está siempre en riesgo (fraser 2005; piasere 2011a). el carácter de los roma se concibe de ese modo como exterior al flujo y a la dinámica de los procesos históricos. frente a esto, la américa romaní se manifiesta en el proceso histórico de la diáspora de esta población, a través de la cual su cultura se reproduce de manera creativa y en una permanente reformulación de tiempo-espacio. en ese sentido, es interesante la idea de la cultura transatlántica de paul gilroy (1993): una cultura atlántica negra diaspórica, ni africana, ni británica, ni americana, ni caribeña, sino una mezcla de todas ellas que trasciende la etnia y la nacionalidad (véase kóczé y van baar 2020, 28). en la actualidad, méxico registra la presencia de rom kalderash, ludar y una comunidad gitana implantada en ciudad de méxico (cdmx). sus miembros se identifican como gitanos americanos tras haber circulado por brasil, argentina, venezuela, méxico y otros países del continente desde su llegada a finales de 1950 desde españa a causa de las dificultades económicas, políticas y sociales durante la dictadura franquista. en 1958, un grupo de familias calós españolas arribó a brasil en barco desde canarias, continuando meses después su camino hacia argentina, donde se fundaría la comunidad caló más importante de américa. las personas mayores de la comunidad con las que estuve conviviendo me explicaban que:2 los primeros que llegaron a brasil fueron cuatro hombres solos de madrid. vendían telas, sábanas, colchas, mantelerías. eran vendedores. pero a los tres meses lloraban: “¿qué país es este? hay negros, no hablan español”, preguntaron. ¿y qué país hace frontera? y les dijeron: “hay un país más grande que bolivia donde hay españoles. tienen tiendas. es argentina.” y fueron dos de esos hombres a buenos aires. aquello era como nueva york. una maravilla. nos compraron las telas. íbamos a los cabarés, a los hoteles, a los restaurantes. la fruta era grande. ¡cómo se vivía! por ser españoles nos trataban como señores. “qué bonito acento tienen”. era llegar como colón. poco tiempo después, al correr la voz por teléfono a españa y por el efecto llamada (“¡veniros, veniros, que se ganan fortunas aquí!”), empezaron a llegar las familias españolas atraídas por estas buenas noticias. desde buenos aires se instalaron en mendoza, posteriormente en rosario y empezaron a circular por bolivia, paraguay y perú, “donde había mucho oro y compraban monedas de oro. iban a los países donde hablaban español. el continente nos dio una nueva visión a los que hoy estamos en américa para poder sobrevivir más cómodamente”. otro núcleo se implantó en caracas en 1960: “en venezuela no te importaba el precio de los hoteles, íbamos a comer a los restaurantes, comprábamos coches americanos, salíamos a trabajar y ganábamos mucho dinero”. y a mediados de la década empezó a implantarse una comunidad caló en são paulo. para 1978, se produjo la migración de alrededor de veinte familias desde são paulo a cdmx, quienes fundaron la comunidad caló actual, “aunque ya había gente en méxico de la familia de la karime amaya, unas gitanas primas hermanas de carmen amaya, quienes llegaron en una compañía de flamenco y se quedaron allí en los años sesenta y setenta. y se casaron con payos”. las primeras mercancías que los calós vendían a domicilio en méxico consistían en colchas, mantelerías y cortes de tela para hacer trajes. los vendedores vivían en hoteles o de alquiler en departamentos: “llegábamos a los hoteles y nos recibían con un ‘mande usted’. no nos molestaban. íbamos a los pueblos y vendíamos mucho”. y el negocio se expandió rápidamente cuando empezaron a comprar colchas a fabricantes españoles de cdmx y de puebla. a finales de la década de los ochenta, un grupo de familias innovaron fabricando chaquetas, invirtieron sus ganancias, compraron viviendas en cdmx y alcanzaron un nivel de vida superior. la red familiar de fabricantes textiles fue la parte principal del bloque o familia-núcleo de la comunidad local (piasere 2015), pues la mejor posición socioeconómica de este grupo consiguió estabilizar a la parentela en el mismo lugar de residencia. la comunidad fue creciendo y atrajo a más familias de españa y también de argentina hacia este núcleo fundacional en la colonia (barrio) dolores, al oeste del centro histórico, una colonia de clase media ubicada en la delegación santa marta3. por otro lado, un pequeño sector se dedicó a la música y al arte flamenco, participando en el circuito de tablaos y clubes de la ciudad. una de las premisas de este texto es que en el intercambio económico, cultural y físico se constituye la singularidad cultural de los roma sobre la base de una dialéctica entre 1) un adentro, un sistema romaní, sin hacer referencia a un esencialismo, anticipado por patrick williams (1984) y leonardo piasere (1985, 2011a), sobre la base de que la reproducción cultural que es social, elástica, fluida y remite a las condiciones históricas; 2) y, un afuera, una construcción política, antropológica e histórica que existe a través de la puesta en escena y representación de los roma por medio de dispositivos simbólicos. este afuera es objeto de atención destacada en el texto, pues precisamente mi tentativa consiste en aportar conocimiento sobre cómo los gitanos de cdmx responden y resisten el racismo de la sociedad mayoritaria. previamente, aporto una breve introducción sobre la presencia romaní en américa y, a continuación, ofrezco una contextualización del régimen visual y la imagen estereotipada que los roma tienen en el imaginario popular. la parte sustancial del argumento se desarrolla en el análisis de un habitus (bourdieu 1998): cómo los gitanos de cdmx gestionan la forma de presentarse al exterior y resisten las tentativas de racialización con relación a dos prácticas socioculturales significativas. por un lado, los intercambios económicos de las actividades propias de la venta itinerante en el país; por otro, la integración en la industria cultural del ocio y el entretenimiento a través del arte flamenco. metodológicamente, la investigación etnográfica desarrollada desde 2009 hasta 2020 me ha posibilitado el poner en perspectiva lo que otras obras aportan al no centrarse en otros grupos gitanos que viven vidas muy duras, en situaciones de pobreza o discriminación, sino desde una etnografía de los calós americanos que amplía la lente hacia la clase media con posibilidades de salir de españa a américa durante la dictadura franquista. cabe aclarar que previamente realicé un trabajo de campo con gitanos catalanes y andaluces en barcelona, así como gitanos rumanos en españa (lagunas 2005, 2010; bergeon, lagunas y torres 2021). y en relación con la etnografía actual en el continente americano, he desarrollado un enfoque multilocal para entender la política de circulación de estas poblaciones en américa y europa. asimismo, empleo la técnica de investigación por inmersión (piasere 1999, 77), la cual consiste en una relación cognitiva-emocional intensa con los interlocutores, así como el descarte de la tecnología y el rechazo del método de pregunta-respuesta; quiero aclarar que esta fue una decisión metodológica clave y que marcó mi análisis en casi todas las fases de la etnografía. y no basta con mencionar la observación participante, sino también el conocimiento por impregnación, adquirido por resonancia y sondeo cognitivo a través de encuentros frecuentes e intensivos con mis interlocutores (piasere 2002) y encarnado en la experiencia participativa (okely 1992). por último, en cuanto a las posibilidades prácticas, el lugar de mis observaciones se dirigió a cdmx, así como al área metropolitana y al resto del país, acompañando a mis interlocutores en sus actividades económicas. américa romaní la literatura antropológica e histórica revela la pluralidad de estilos de las comunidades romaníes, así como la presencia en la historia a través de la cultura (de martino 1977). existe una literatura creciente acerca de esta presencia romaní en américa (boyd bowman 1985; prorrom 1999; gamboa y paternina 2000; torbágyi 2003; martínez 2004, 2010; lignier 2012; sutre 2013, 2014a, 2014b; ostendorf 2017, 2018), especialmente en brasil (ferrari 2010; vilar 2011; fotta 2019, 2012), colombia (gómez baos 2010; paternina 2013), ecuador (peeters 2004), argentina (bernal 2002, 2009; carrizo 2009; pudliszak 2010; calcagno 2013; galletti 2019a, 2019b, 2021a, 2021b; lagunas 2023) y méxico (pickett 1962, 1970; salo 1992; imegi 1995; armendáriz 1998, 2001, 2006; pérez romero 2001; alvarado 2012, 2013, 2020; baroco y lagunas 2014; lagunas 2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b, 2019; lagunas y santiago 2021). anne-isabelle lignier (2012) plantea una tentativa de periodización de las migraciones romaníes a américa. la primera migración desde españa y portugal comenzó en el siglo xv (en 1498 cristóbal colón navegó con un grupo de gitanos en su tercer viaje a las indias occidentales) y se extendió hasta el siglo xviii a causa de las políticas de expulsión de la población (ver asséo 2008). los españoles enviaron a los gitanos a sus colonias americanas (incluida la luisiana española) como parte de su solución americana (hancock 2010), aunque durante el periodo de felipe ii se prohibió el acceso de los gitanos a las indias debido al miedo de trasladar el problema gitano a estas colonias (ver mira ceballos 1995; martínez 2004; galletti 2021c). fernanda baroco y david lagunas (2014), por ejemplo, indagan en casos inquisitoriales contra gitanas en nueva españa: la mayor parte tratan de acusaciones de estafas al leer la suerte y practicar adivinaciones; prácticamente ninguno de ellos llegó a juicio o a un interrogatorio. a lo largo del virreinato y durante el siglo xix, la población romaní, comparada con la población nativa, era tan insignificante que no representaba una amenaza. no obstante, la estrategia cultural de la corona española en nueva españa era más compleja, ya que la asimilación nunca se planteó en las indias, y la mezcla racial era tan abundante que la homogeneización era una tarea imposible. de esta manera, sería posible afirmar que la otredad romaní se vio subsumida y opacada en el complejo mosaico de otredades de la nueva españa. la segunda migración masiva ocurrió en el siglo xix y coincidió con el fin de la esclavitud en moldavia y valaquia (asséo 2008, 71), así como al final de la primera guerra mundial con el movimiento de grupos rom y vlach. adèle sutre (2014b, 480–484) analiza el movimiento transnacional a principios del siglo xx de una parentela romaní de caldereros tshoron en estados unidos y canadá, y muestra cómo atraviesan las fronteras con facilidad. el estudio de sheila salo (1992) también indaga en la fluidez de los movimientos de circulación entre estados unidos y méxico durante la primera guerra mundial de varios grupos kalderash y macwaya. la tercera migración involucró a grupos romaníes de europa central y del este, principales víctimas del genocidio nazi. en el caso de los gitanos de origen español, a finales de los años cincuenta, llegaron los primeros contingentes a brasil y se desplazaron hacia argentina, uruguay, venezuela, perú, méxico y bolivia, principalmente. la cuarta y última migración tuvo lugar con la caída del muro de berlín y la guerra en la ex yugoslavia (hancock 2010). no obstante, cabe relativizar esta periodización. esteban acuña (2019, 54) subraya la complejidad y el dinamismo de los procesos migratorios, la amalgama de diversos y continuos movimientos, conexiones, llegadas y anclajes. para martin fotta y mariana sabino-salazar (2023), la movilidad a través del atlántico ha tenido un impacto en muchas comunidades romaníes, en su carácter, etnogénesis e identidad, y es un componente constitutivo de la diáspora romaní moderna. es importante señalar que los marcos académicos utilizados tienen historias específicas a menudo enredadas en las estructuras de poder coloniales e imperiales de los países de origen. por ejemplo, aniko imre (2005) muestra cómo el nacionalismo y el racismo de europa occidental se adoptan en europa oriental tras la caída del muro de berlín, y cómo la supremacía blanca se reproduce en la construcción de las identidades nacionales postsocialistas de forma que las comunidades romaníes son consideradas ajenas a la identidad nacional, potencialmente destructivas, estigmatizadas por su carácter transnacional y, por tanto, objeto de persecución racista. giovanni picker (2017) describe los proyectos de segregación urbana de los roma en europa después de la segunda guerra mundial desde la perspectiva de la interseccionalidad, y cómo la raza, el estatus socioeconómico y los estereotipos reproducen las jerarquías de una política colonial. por su parte, helio garcés (2016) analiza desde una perspectiva decolonial la emergencia del racismo anti-gitano/roma a través del esquema de genocidio-epistemicidio sobre el que se construye la modernidad. la racialización del pueblo gitano se remonta a la expulsión de judíos y moriscos durante la monarquía hispánica, a la explotación material e inferiorización epistémica como procesos interconectados de opresión-persecución y a la diferencia de forma de “lo gitano”, que juega un papel fundamental en la conformación de las naciones europeas modernas: una identidad antagónica y deshumanizada para ser disciplinada, explotada y aniquilada. en cambio, patricia galletti (2019b, 2021a, 2021b) aborda el racismo desde el enfoque de la colonialidad del poder de aníbal quijano y la racialización de la cultura de frantz fanon: la deshumanización, la desigualdad y la marginalidad de base racista que a menudo experimentan los racializados, como los gitanos, indígenas y negros. estos y otros trabajos muestran ciertas lentes críticas como la teoría crítica de la raza (ver ryder 2019), las teorías feministas y queer, los estudios y metodologías indígenas y los estudios postcoloniales o el pensamiento decolonial que nos ayudan a plantear la situación de los roma en el continente que llevó al colonialismo y al imperialismo a un escenario global y, sobre todo, exponen que es necesario considerar y explorar el lugar de los roma en este escenario geopolítico. la relevancia de esta variedad de enfoques conceptuales tiene sentido si se toma en cuenta que méxico fue una colonia y aún sigue luchando con las consecuencias geopolíticas, materiales y sociales del colonialismo y el imperialismo. david pickett (1962, 1970) aportó estudios etnográficos sobre la presencia romaní en méxico en los años sesenta, acompañando a grupos roma dedicados al cine ambulante. una breve mención sobre el tema también la encontramos en una compilación de guillermo bonfil batalla, la cual hace referencia a los gitanos que ingresaron al país en 1922, conocidos como húngaros, categoría que se asociaba con el robo (martínez montiel et al. 1993, 274). estos grupos se dedicaban al trabajo en cobre, a la elaboración de marmitas y charolas, a la adivinación de la suerte, a la compra y venta de ropa y utensilios viejos, así como a espectáculos circenses. entre los trabajos más recientes destaca la lumea de noi (pérez romero 2001), con fragmentos de historia biográfica de los ludar, quienes en la actualidad se dedican a los espectáculos de carpa-teatro, circo, ventriloquía, ilusionismo e hipnosis colectiva (armendáriz 1998). a pesar de la creciente literatura sobre el mundo romaní, la opinión pública de los roma en méxico es lábil, e incluso es un grupo que apenas se ha manifestado políticamente. constituye así un proceso emergente que a futuro generará previsiblemente una lucha por la emancipación, pero no la misma emancipación cultural y política que los proletarios, sino la de los roma dispersos y diversificados. esta relativa invisibilidad se ha convertido en una estrategia que parte de la premisa siguiente: cuando una diferencia rompe el panorama de la diferencia aceptada —visibilidad—, la invisibilidad resulta ser una estrategia más prudente y exitosa. en esta última década se han acelerado los procesos de visibilización de determinados grupos como los rom y los ludar, quienes buscan hacerse reconocer a través de publicaciones y relatos autobiográficos, y otros grupos que se han acercado a las universidades, a los espacios artísticos y a los medios de comunicación. en este sentido, cabe mencionar a la biblioteca juan de córdoba y al patrocinio de la fundación arturo harp helú de oaxaca, lugar en que se han realizado talleres y cursos de lengua romaní desde 2014; también, hay que reconocer que el gobierno de cdmx ha desarrollado en los últimos años eventos sobre la presencia romaní como parte del patrimonio cultural del país. la falta de compromiso cultural y político para hacer a los roma identificables en méxico refuerza imperceptiblemente los riesgos y las razones de los propios roma para haber cultivado la invisibilidad en un conjunto político y nacional poco o nada propicio para la visibilidad, pues no existe una política social, educativa, cultural y menos aún el reconocimiento de sus derechos históricos. el escaso apoyo del estado mexicano deviene no de una política integral sobre las comunidades romaníes, sino de las áreas, programas y departamentos menores que fomentan la cultura, el arte y las tradiciones, como son los programas pacmyc y fonca4. se evidencia un proceso emergente entre los roma en américa para que se reconozcan desde los estados sus derechos históricos como pueblo y sus aportes en la historia, la cultura, la economía, el arte y dejar de ser concebidos como minorías étnicas o comunidades locales (ver armendáriz 2006). regímenes visuales los procesos de reconocimiento etno-racial de los roma en américa latina y el caribe reflejan formas diferentes a los modelos europeos y estadounidenses (fotta y sabino-salazar 2023). históricamente, y tomando como punto de partida las relaciones raciales dirigidas a la discriminación social, las autoridades gubernamentales de estados unidos, méxico, colombia y argentina tienen sus propios conceptos racializados sobre quién puede o no entrar al país y vivir en sus territorios. ello incluye el genocidio y la expulsión a los márgenes de los pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes. hay que subrayar el hecho de que méxico se construye como nación a partir de la reivindicación del pasado prehispánico en el siglo xix por parte de los criollos, por oposición y para diferenciarse de españa. en ese proceso de construcción nacional no caben los roma, quienes no forman parte de la genealogía de la nación, y la percepción de su elasticidad territorial, falta de autoctonía y profundidad histórica los tipifica, a diferencia de los pueblos originarios. los estereotipos culturales y raciales proyectados sobre los gitanos desde la sociedad mexicana son excluyentes (ver piasere 2012, y el antigitanismo): en el contexto de la racialización, algunos grupos étnicos reciben un trato favorable o discriminatorio en función de la categoría racial que se les atribuye socialmente. los indígenas, los güeros —persona rubia o de piel blanca en méxico—, los europeos, los estadounidenses, los centroamericanos, los gitanos y los afrodescendientes están igualmente racializados, pero las consecuencias sociales no son las mismas para unos y otros, ya que no solo influye el color de la piel, sino también factores como el país de origen, la forma de hablar y los rasgos físicos. en el caso particular de los gitanos, la blancura es un componente clave de la colonialidad, que se construye en relación con diferentes historias y patrones de inmigración en cada contexto nacional. méxico tiene un sistema pigmentocrático desigual que discrimina a los individuos y grupos de piel morena, indígenas y asiáticos, y privilegia a los euroamericanos, así como a blancos y mestizos que se benefician de este racismo estructural. la blanquitud —el ethos de la cultura europea occidental y sinónimo de ciudadanía moderna— y la blancura —la idealización del fenotipo blanco o europeo como ideal de belleza, prestigio y superioridad social— son parte de los mecanismos de racialización y la culminación del racismo del país (navarrete 2020). es más, uno de los fundamentos de la construcción de la nación mexicana liberal en el siglo xix es racista en su origen, ya que la identidad nacional se fomentó a partir de una sola cultura y lengua identificadas con las clases dominantes, con la blanquitud. los calós fenotípicamente suelen pasar desapercibidos porque, como ellos mismos señalan, son parecidos a los mexicanos en la fisonomía, la piel y los ojos oscuros, lo que les permite confundirse con la variedad de tonos de piel y fisonomías: “yo paso desapercibido, yo soy uno más. y los rasgos y la fisonomía de los payos mexicanos son igual. son como yo. yo soy mexicano, igual que ellos”. los calós señalan así que los rasgos del mexicano se parecen mucho a los de ellos: “son como los calós, morenos de piel; las mujeres con moño. somos iguales”. en realidad, existe una variabilidad fenotípica que permite un manejo flexible de la estética y la apariencia externa que los aproxima también a la categoría de blancos y que conforma un sistema de representación articulado por distintos factores de reconocimiento racial: país de origen, forma de hablar y rasgos físicos. en particular, la blancura puede potenciarse entre las jóvenes calís, quienes se tiñen el pelo de rubio, acentuado con un maquillaje muy marcado, un vestido elegante en tonos oscuros o una combinación de colores; así determinan su belleza, un estatus elevado y su europeidad (sobre la mujer gitana en el imaginario europeo, ver berná 2019). de ese modo, los calós han sabido manejar a su favor la jerarquía de las clasificaciones raciales para resistir al racismo. por otro lado, el arte, la literatura y los medios de comunicación masivos han alimentado un imaginario popular que remite a las políticas de representación de los gitanos, lo cual genera una distorsión ontológica. por ejemplo, sabino-salazar (2020) expone que la imagen de carmen ha tenido una enorme repercusión en la cultura popular latinoamericana (cine, cómics y telenovelas); hace mención a la gitanilla de 1991, un cómic para adultos basado en carmen, con contenido erótico y violento. asimismo, un argumento recurrente en el cine mexicano entre 1945–1970 fue el de la gitana que seduce al “macho”, dinámica expresada en las películas gitana tenías que ser (1953), la gitana blanca (1954) y la gitana y el charro (1964), todas de la época de oro del cine mexicano (véase gallardo 2017). sabino-salazar (2020) señala que también hay un personaje en un cuento de la escritora mexicana elena poniatowska, en el cual la protagonista, esmeralda, se presenta como la heroína de víctor hugo, aunque no es gitana, sino polígama y se casa cinco veces. sabino-salazar (2020) aporta más datos acerca de cómo se han proyectado los estereotipos de carmen y esmeralda como mujeres fatales de la mano de directores, compositores y autores de estados unidos, europa y américa latina. en esta última área destaca mercedes vigil (gitana, 2014), paulo coelho (la bruja de portobello, 2006) y assis brasil (o caboclo e a cigana, 1985). además, entre 1941 y 1943 gilda de abreu escribió una radionovela, aleluia a cigana, y pueden mencionarse muchas otras novelas para televisión en brasil, méxico, venezuela, argentina y chile. a medida que avanza la guerra fría, la imagen de las gitanas pasa de ser un prototipo del flamenco andaluz, sensual y ambivalente, a otro gótico, de los cárpatos, más amenazante (fotta y sabino-salazar 2023). en méxico, estos productos muestran temas comunes como el romance entre una gitana de aire flamenco y un hombre de honor mexicano (el mariachi, el charro). y existe una continuidad, como la exitosa telenovela yesenia de 1970, adaptación de una historieta creada por la escritora yolanda vargas dulché de la parra, y más recientemente la telenovela gitanas de 2004, de la productora estadounidense telemundo. imagen 1. yesenia, film (dir. alfredo b. crevenna, 1971). imagen 2. gitanas, telenovela (2004-2005). estas representaciones normalizan a los gitanos (butler 2002), quienes aparecen estereotipados como sujetos puros, de nobles sentimientos, que forman una comunidad con costumbres atávicas, patriarcales y fuertemente solidarios entre ellos. en yesenia se muestra al espectador los rasgos prototípicos: la estética oriental, el colorido vestimentario, las artes de la astrología y la adivinación, el gusto por la libertad y su antimaterialismo, las cualidades como mercaderes y músicos que remiten a los saberes arcanos egipcios, indios y orientales. este proceso de abstracción se transforma en una mitología positiva y romántica. katie trumpener (1992), en su análisis literario, político-cultural del racismo y del orientalismo, que ha determinado históricamente la construcción de la gypsy question, plantea que este régimen de observación es un elemento de fascinación y perturbación en el imaginario occidental, ya que los gypsies representan una alegoría de la alteridad y de lo arcaico: anacronismo, vida fuera de la historia, nomadismo, libertad, felicidad, magia y criminalidad. esta representación práctica de los gitanos en los medios les otorga una identificación flotante (lévi-strauss 1971), detrás de la cual existe un sustrato de un sistema antropológico e histórico gitano que debe hacer frente a una estrategia continua para resistir a un estado y a una sociedad racista. el régimen visual ayuda a entender cómo se percibe e imagina a los gitanos de una manera determinada, una identificación estética arraigada en el imaginario popular como resultado de una coyuntura, pero aun así anclado en la historia de las mentalidades, al estilo de la escuela de los annales. frente a este régimen visual, la forma de los gitanos de presentarse al exterior —el afuera— constituye un juego particular de distancia y atracción respecto a los gadjés que los grupos gitanos manejan con maestría. identidad estratégica la venta ambulante y a domicilio, y la performance artística del flamenco son dos prácticas socioculturales de esta dimensión del afuera. en ambos casos, los calós gestionan las relaciones sociales interculturales por medio de la identidad estratégica y la negociación de la gitaneidad (ver silverman 1988). piasere (1999, 15–19) señala que a mayor discriminación del estado mayor es el funcionamiento de la estructura romaní y la conflictualidad anti-gadjés; en cambio, la cismogénesis se atenúa cuanto mayor es la democratización de un país y la visibilidad de los roma. recordemos que cuando una diferencia rompe el panorama de la diferencia aceptada —visibilidad—, la invisibilidad resulta ser una estrategia más prudente y exitosa. en relación con las actividades económicas comerciales de los calós, la premisa es que la práctica de la vida material de los grupos romaníes, desde sus ocupaciones hasta la modalidad de su presencia en el territorio, es el resultado de elecciones y valoraciones articuladas con el contexto y que se despliegan de forma creativa (piasere 1999, 21–35). esta cuestión recapitula el problema del mantenimiento de la autonomía aprovechando las oportunidades e insuficiencias de los sistemas económicos dominantes (piasere 2011a). en otros trabajos (lagunas 2017b) he analizado la interrelación con la economía y su dinamismo en su intercambio con la sociedad mayoritaria y en el contexto de lo que los economistas llaman economía informal, un tipo de mercado-bazar no capitalista, así como su articulación con el espacio y la movilidad en el territorio como aspectos fundamentales de las prácticas económicas (brazzabeni, cunha y fotta 2016, 9). los calós son excelentes vendedores y movilizan sus competencias (giddens 2011) durante la performance del intercambio comercial con los payos. manejan el sistema de aceptabilidad social cuando se presentan ante sus clientes como españoles, ocultando su identidad como gitanos, una estrategia defensiva en respuesta a la estigmatización externa (lagunas 2017a). y ante la expectativa de ser discriminados en una transacción comercial, tratan de neutralizar los prejuicios a su favor. en situaciones más difíciles como, por ejemplo, al descubrir que un cliente puede intentar robarles o para hacer frente al hostigamiento de la policía, “enseño mi pasaporte español cuando he entrado a una empresa grande a venderles y pregunto por el gerente. ‘ah, español. ok’. y puedo pasar. o cuando la policía me persigue”. al presentarse como españoles ante sus clientes (identificación positiva) ocultan su identidad de gitanos (identificación negativa) y gestionan así los códigos simbólicos de los regímenes visuales. los mexicanos tienen expectativas ante esta performance y tratan a los calós con base en cómo deberían tratar a una persona por ser española y no guatemalteca, colombiana o norteamericana. para los vendedores calós es crucial crear una situación de confianza en la conversación durante el intercambio comercial, pero antes debe establecerse un primer contacto a través de situaciones cotidianas como andar por la calle, llamar al timbre de las casas, entrar en un comercio, una oficina, una clínica o una escuela: dices “buenos días, señor, disculpe la intromisión, estoy un poco desorientado. es que no soy de aquí”. y al utilizar estas palabras, esta fraseología y esta vocalización, a ellos les llama la atención. “¿de dónde viene?” y estableces la conversación. rompes la distancia: “perdone que me presente. encantado de conocerle. venimos de españa. nos dedicamos al comercio”. y le ofreces la mercancía. en esta interacción cara a cara, el cliente puede no ser consciente de que es objeto de una relación de poder, en la cual se emplea la comunicación simbólica. las palabras forman parte de un complejo ritual que puede verse como un lenguaje que comunica y tiene eficacia; en la línea con john austin (1990), el cómo hacer cosas con palabras. la persuasión y la manipulación son dos formas de poder que los calós ejercen con inteligencia. la manipulación simbólica se refiere a un tipo de intención oculta con consecuencias claras: inducir a que alguien haga algo. para ello se ofrece una falsa impresión de la intención del actor, tal como narra una joven mujer calí: “entré en una tienda en una calle de un barrio de cdmx y le dije a la dueña: 'me he desorientado. voy buscando avon. tengo que marcharme a españa. he venido de una exposición de cosméticos'”. la maestría de los calós es generar en las personas expectativas ante una performance convincente y creíble. la persuasión, en cambio, remite al argumento y a la lógica. depende de las competencias de cada quién, de la personalidad y de la habilidad en la presentación del argumento, en cómo contar una historia y convencer. el hecho de presentarse como españoles contribuye a ello: “como nos ven con el don de la palabra y la locuacidad propia de un país del primer mundo nos ayuda a que nos presten atención. y les decimos que aprovechen esta oportunidad única de comprar un buen producto a bajo precio, como si fuera regalado”. otra dimensión de la visibilidad se revela entre un pequeño grupo de varones calós dedicados a la música y que participan en las performances flamencas en los clubes y tablaos de cdmx y del país en general. en méxico, el flamenco es bien recibido como un patrimonio de la cultura española. su presencia en cdmx se encuentra conectada con la diáspora5 y tiene un origen mestizo. se remonta a los años cincuenta y sesenta cuando “las bailaoras hermanas de carmen amaya, quien actuaba periódicamente en méxico con su compañía flamenca, se quedaron en el país y se casaron con payos mexicanos. y de ahí surge una rama del flamenco”, según me explicaba un cantaor caló de la comunidad de buenos aires, cuya madre estuvo trabajando en méxico en los 70 y 80. el impulso de estas mujeres, quienes crearon escuelas de flamenco, fue clave. sus hijas fueron continuadoras de esta escuela que a su vez generaron otras nuevas fundadas por payos. este embrión matriarcal del flamenco tomó impulso cuando "cristóbal reyes, tío del hoy célebre bailaor joaquín cortés, llega a méxico a finales de los setenta y organiza clases en las que participan muchas mujeres payas que se convertirían poco tiempo después en instructoras de flamenco en varias escuelas del país”, según señala mi amigo cantaor de buenos aires. desde mediados de los ochenta, los calós de cdmx participaron en los shows flamencos en los tablaos de la ciudad como cantaores, bailaores y guitarristas, especialmente los provenientes de un sector de familias que habían venido de sevilla a méxico a principios de la década. a las mujeres no se les permitía cantar, pero en los últimos años una joven calí que había cantado en el coro de la iglesia evangélica de la cdmx, empezó a actuar por todo el país con un espectáculo flamenco, acompañada por jóvenes de la comunidad. en los shows en los que participan los calós se comparte el escenario con otros cantaores, guitarristas y bailaoras payas. carol silverman (2012) hace referencia a la diáspora romaní en relación con dos comunidades macedonias romaníes diaspóricas en el bronx y en skopje. estos grupos migran al bronx desde la década de los sesenta y “se refieren a macedonia como su hogar” (silverman 2012, 39). silverman considera que la diáspora, la transnacionalidad, el hibridismo y el cosmopolitismo son elementos que definen a los roma, quienes responden creativamente a las políticas culturales por medio de la música romaní en un contexto histórico de desigualdad, discriminación y explotación del mercado que se deleita con la representación esencializada y orientalista de los exóticos gypsies. los calós se encuentran con dilemas similares. a través del arte y la música responden a la marginación y a la desigualdad con las que negocian tanto las representaciones estereotipadas de sí mismos como aquellas que muestran una vía de inserción mejorada en la modernidad a través de la expresión artística (lagunas 2010). “en el cante flamenco mandamos los gitanos”, señala un joven artista caló. los calós definen el flamenco como un hecho indiscutible y genuino, recrean una herencia que da sentido a la construcción de sus raíces en una situación diaspórica al autogestionar su identidad como gitanos en el entorno cosmopolita de cdmx. y simultáneamente genera una invención autoconsciente de la historia y la cultura de los propios gitanos. puede entenderse mejor como una expresión de un tipo de nostalgia hegemónica y resistente, la cual ha ido reproduciendo una identidad distintiva como gitanos y americanos, inscrita en la expresión artística. la performance flamenca en el sistema de tablaos de cdmx ha vinculado a la ciudad con las redes artísticas estatales y globales. ello también ofrece un sello de atractivo cultural a cada colonia en donde los calós realizan sus actuaciones, representando la diversidad de la ciudad. estos tablaos y clubes han sido muy atractivos para el consumo de la clase media urbana como parte de un proyecto que conecta la geografía, la cultura y las artes. no obstante, el protagonismo de los artistas payos y el dominio económico de los empresarios han opacado la participación de los calós, quienes expresan que “nosotros les enseñamos a los payos primero y después ellos crearon escuelas. se apropiaron de los shows y han ganado mucho dinero. los mexicanos que van a los shows creen que eso es puro flamenco gitano, cuando muchas veces actúan los payos que aprendieron de nosotros”. hay una tensión subyacente respecto a la desgitanización del arte flamenco en la industria del ocio y los calós marcan su distinción apelando a sus orígenes respecto a los payos, a quienes en ocasiones perciben como usurpadores: “hay cantaores payos que son buenos. pueden impresionarte en un momento. pero les sale lo payo en el cante al final. no transmiten el flamenco puro, no llegan a nuestro nivel”. en definitiva, tanto en las transacciones interculturales de la venta itinerante como en la performance flamenca, la etnicidad, como artefacto y construcción ideológica, detenta una eficacia social (rivera 2000). en el intercambio comercial, la gestión de la etnicidad (gitano-español) es estratégica para resistir la racialización, identidad étnica que también posee un valor performativo que orienta el comportamiento de los actores sociales y les ofrece un horizonte de sentido y una posibilidad de autoidentificación y movilización, como en el caso del flamenco. todo ello evidencia las capacidades de los calós como sujetos minorizados para emanciparse de las estructuras de dominación. conclusiones en méxico y en américa, los roma han sido históricamente devaluados con respecto a la construcción nacional. los procesos de des-nacionalización y des-ciudadanización de las comunidades romaníes, consideradas como apátridas, se basan en estereotipos que esencializan y sitúan fuera de la contemporaneidad a las poblaciones romaníes. uno de los puntos fuertes de mi argumento es que los calós resisten a la racialización de la sociedad mexicana al emplear a su favor la categoría de españoles, ubicada en la jerarquía superior del sistema de categorías racializadas, cuando se presentan ante el payo en las transacciones comerciales o como mecanismo defensivo en respuesta a la agresión o violencia policial. ello les permite posicionarse en el polo opuesto respecto a otras categorías racializadas e inferiorizadas, como la indígena. en otros países como colombia, en cambio, la activación política de las identidades gitanas opera con configuraciones nacionales invocando el marco jurídico de reconocimiento de convenios como el 169 de la oit sobre pueblos indígenas y tribales (paternina 2013; piasere 2011b). en el caso del arte flamenco se configura como un contradiscurso de resistencia y un espacio híbrido y transnacional en el que ocurre la inclusión en el estado mexicano. la etnogénesis (roosens 1989) también se construyó a través de la performance flamenca en el ámbito de la industria del ocio y el entretenimiento, simbolizando el compromiso de los calós con la historia, la modernidad y la globalización. el flamenco se construyó como un ámbito alternativo de resistencia, un producto cultural que representaba su carácter distintivo como gitanos, y como una política de identidad basada en la herencia de la tradición flamenca que expresaba el cosmopolitismo y una cultura híbrida y transnacional. en conjunto constituye un tipo de agencia subalterna que remite a la configuración situacional del poder y la resistencia de minorías y otros sectores sociales (scott 1992). quiero subrayar que los calós han jugado inteligentemente con la aceptabilidad moral de la sociedad mexicana y han gestionado el juego de la distancia respecto a los payos. esto es así porque consiguieron establecer una complementariedad con la sociedad mexicana al manejar estratégicamente el régimen de observación que los infravalora como gitanos, a través de la presentación de sí mismos (goffman 1981) bajo una manipulación consciente sobre la imagen que desean proyectar. los calós tratan de manipular los símbolos a nivel lingüístico y corporal, como la forma impecable de vestir, elementos que tienen un significado de trasfondo. definen así un habitus de clase, demostración fehaciente de la gran inteligencia para manipular los símbolos de la apariencia externa con el fin de acercarse a grupos superiores o inferiores en términos de estatus. por último, la pregunta es si el caso de los gitanos en américa es la prueba definitiva del racismo existente, a pesar de que su posición de clase media al interior de la sociedad mayoritaria favorezca una mejor complementariedad económica, social y política. los datos no demuestran lo contrario, y sí en cambio la persistencia del racismo. gran parte de este texto describe las formas en que los calós gestionan su adscripción como españoles para tener una vida mejor en méxico, la cual, en efecto, tienen, pues utilizan esta identidad de forma estratégica porque su condición de gitanos podría exponerlos a un mayor rechazo. resumen la idea de que el carácter de los roma es exterior al flujo de la dinámica de los procesos históricos es un organicismo alienante en méxico y américa latina, pues los regímenes visuales han reproducido estereotipos culturales y raciales excluyentes sobre ellos. en este texto se analiza cómo los gitanos de la ciudad de méxico resisten a las imposiciones racializadoras del estado y la sociedad dominante, contradiciendo los estereotipos y prejuicios hegemónicos a través de la autogestión estratégica de la identidad al presentarse al exterior. se aportan así datos empíricos sobre dos ámbitos clave de esta autogestión conectada con la dialéctica visibilidad-invisibilidad: las actividades comerciales y la performance flamenca. [gitanos; historia; régimen visual; resistencia; méxico] abstract the idea that the character of the roma is external to the flow of the dynamics of historical processes is an alienating organicism in mexico and latin america. visual regimes have reproduced exclusionary cultural and racial stereotypes of the roma. this text analyzes how the gitanos of mexico city resist the racializing impositions of the state and of dominant society, contradicting hegemonic stereotypes and prejudices through the strategic self-management of identity by presenting themselves to the outside. empirical data are provided on two key areas of this self-management connected to the visibility/invisibility dialectic: commercial activities and flamenco performance. [gitanos; history; visual regime; resistance; mexico] notas 1. utilizaré alternativamente en función de los puntos de vista el término políticamente correcto, roma, que engloba la diversidad de grupos existentes en méxico como los rom, ludar y calós, así como las personas que se identifican a sí mismas como tales. y gitanos, como popularmente se conocen en méxico. también empleo gitanos y calós cuando me refiero propiamente a los grupos de origen español. 2. he dedicado una parte importante de la etnografía a convivir y conversar, de manera intensiva y dialógica, con mis interlocutores siguiendo sus ritmos sociales: comer y beber con ellos, trabajar en la venta ambulante, acompañarles al bar o la cafetería, en las celebraciones. 3. por cuestiones éticas y preservar el anonimato, los nombres de colonias y delegaciones son ficticios. tampoco menciono los nombres de mis interlocutores. 4. el programa de apoyo a las culturas municipales y comunitarias (pacmyc), dependiente del consejo nacional para la cultura y las artes (conaculta) del gobierno federal, constituye una estrategia orientada a apoyar la recuperación y el desarrollo de la cultura popular a través del financiamiento a proyectos que permitan estimular las iniciativas culturales de la sociedad. el fondo nacional para la cultura y las artes (fonca), también dependiente de conaculta, persigue el fomento de la actividad artística en cualquiera de sus manifestaciones. 5. una dimensión de la diáspora transnacional es cuando los gitanos americanos con mayor fluidez y menor arraigo en el país tratan de enterrar a sus difuntos en españa, lo cual tiene consecuencias literales para las necro-movilidades humanas (ver jassal 2014). referencias acuña, esteban 2019 “a transatlantic perspective on romani thoughts, movements, and presence beyond europe”. critical romani studies 2, no. 1: 42–60. https://doi.org/10.29098/crs.v2i1.31 alvarado, neyra 2012 “le spectacle des tsiganes ludar au mexique. transformation, 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criminalization, and black womanhood in trinidad leniqueca a. welcome george washington university https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1448-7859 as tanya opens the door to the shop, the sound of music and hearty laughter overflow from the space filled with the kinetic energy generated by the women who labor and lime here every day—an energy four walls cannot contain.1 catching their merriment, i understand why, as tanya has informed me, deja frequents the shop after her work shift. since i moved in with tanya in a neighborhood in laventille, trinidad, she has insisted i record the story of deja, whom she met several years ago in this very shop.2 i have come to speak to deja and fulfill my promise to tanya. the women present in the space pause their conversation only to introduce themselves and inform me that deja is coming now, which translates to more than an hour later in trinidadian time. they are discussing recent shootings and robberies in port of spain. however, they retell the events with a honeyed bitterness, in which they overemphasize comedic details, making the danger of the events the backdrop rather than the main attraction. they make the stories of crime in the capital city they must venture into daily avenues for cathartic laughter, rather than reasons for despair and fear. as one woman, ava, ends a story of how she narrowly escaped being robbed in a maxi taxi, another, sandra, quickly chimes in with her own story of a robbery she witnessed just outside the shop in which we sit. “i see a man rob a woman in town one time. if you see how he rob that woman, you woulda swear the two of them is lovers. if you see. he lean up on the lamp post, smoking he cigarette cool, cool [she demonstrates his stance]. when the woman come on up, like he done mark her higher up, yuh understand. he was waiting on her—the gold band on she hand. eh heh. man, if you see how he push that woman on a car and grab the woman bracelet. yuh woulda swear is she man.” sandra’s hyperbolic gestures and comedic tone animate the scene, causing the shop to erupt in laughter once again. however, when the laughter subsides, i am confronted with the gravity of sandra’s analogy: the man assaulted the woman in the street as if “two of them is lovers.” then, i remember why i am in the shop: to record the story of a mother living with grief. two and a half hours later i am sitting with deja deep into our interview. we have gotten past her explanation for her tardiness, her apologies for the women jovially carrying on their conversation in the background, and her vetting of me. she begins to reveal more about herself: you have this emptiness in your belly [emphasis added]. you know you are missing something. you don’t even know how you feel. sometimes you take out a plate of food to eat and you can’t even eat it because you studying if your child eat? if he eating clean? you studying you know, if he was alive what condition would he be in? how would he be? you also studying each day pass if they would have come to burn down your house—if they would come and shoot down your house to get to him? … [hushed voice] it ain’t have a day, it ain’t have a minute, that you don’t think— she trails off and sits quietly for a moment before resuming: i feel—i feel—i need to open up. that the grief is what have me so. girl, if i talk about him long, sometimes my voice go for hours and i can’t talk again. so i feel that i need to open up to get relief. because it come like i have that lock in a cage inside of here [her voice breaks]. cause i never—no, i go counseling, but it was a set of dead mother. when i say ‘dead mother,’ i mean mothers who loss their children [she pauses again]. it take long to catch back myself like how i is. reall longgg. and i still ain’t reach. … ‘cause, although he was that, he was never a rude child, he was loving, caring [short pause]. but what he was doing was wrong [she says with a hint of anger in her voice]! going to that group or liming with that group or getting yourself in that—you should have be here today to make me feel proud. i register the multiple tenses and moods that feature in deja’s discussion of her son killed twelve years ago by an unknown assailant deja assumes was his associate. she speaks about his life simultaneously as what was, what is, and what could have been. this gives me a glimpse of the way her child is housed inside her as layers of time collapsed into one another. “my son. he was involved in it. but i never encourage it. like when he got involved in thing, i put him out.” deja’s tone is calm and deliberate as she delivers these words. she looks at me as if to be sure i record that she was a good citizen—proven by her willingness to expel her “criminal” son—even if he never actually left her. she did not condone her son’s illicit activity. she did what she was supposed to. “was that really difficult for you when you had to tell him to leave?” i hesitate, understanding the danger of posing this question while suspecting she is less resolved than she performs about her past choice to evict her son. “yea,” she pauses, taking a deep breath that seems to source energy from the shop filled with women who have sustained her through more than anyone should have to bear. “it come like, yuh know, somebody die for you. yuh know is real difficult telling your child they have to leave just to please—uhh—to save your life. it go hurt you. but like anything he need, i go send for him. his food, if he come for money, any little thing i would give him.” we sit with a tense silence between us until deja breaks it with a whisper, “one shot he get.” in her voice, i hear the ripping apart of stitches that were always already insufficient to seal the wounds that have not healed, but i do not hear her exact words. she repeats her utterance for the record: “one shot he get. i always remember him. not a day pass i don’t remember him. up to this morning.” *** two seemingly disparate stories of theft and assault against the bodies of black women were brought together that afternoon in the space of this shop. one woman attacked on the body for the acquisition of her material possessions, an act indexical of intimacy to sandra. another woman attacked in her body through the murder of her son. one anecdote a gesture to the normalcy of partner violence, the other an illustration of the underrecognized fractal victims of gun violence and the state violence used to manage it. i retell these two stories here as they came to me, uncomfortably juxtaposed, because since receiving them alongside each other, i have been moved to think about them relationally. gender-based violence, inter/intra-community gun violence, and state violence are often treated distinctly in analysis. yet as the women convened in the shop and shared their experience of black poor womanhood in trinidad, they revealed how these different forms of violence are felt and carried together, thereby inviting us to think more about their entanglements than their divergences. since the rise of the homicide rate in trinidad at the turn of the twenty-first century, gun-related murders of largely young black men by young black men remain the predominant concern of the trinidadian state, media, civil society, and supra-state organizations. they treat this form of violence as exceptional and public—a threat to the physical safety of all citizens and the economic and moral stability of the nation—distinct from gender-based violence, understood to arise from intimate relations and thus private, outside the purview of the state. while highly vulnerable to physical violence, black women in low-income communities face the erasure of their vulnerability as they are often chastised for their intimate and familial relationships with so-called violent men and scapegoated for high national murder rates as state officials, ngos, and even their own community members regurgitate theories that interweave blackness, deviant sexuality, matriarchal family structures, and criminality. this chastising and scapegoating occur even as black women in poor urban communities lose kin to murder at high rates—murder conducted both by the police and young men from the same social position. gun violence, the discourse around it, and the securitization efforts produced to manage it fiercely disrupt the quotidian lives of black women of urban communities in multiple ways even less accounted for than physical harm against women. yet, embedded in a matrix of violence, black women devise ways to care for others, often at the expense of their physical, mental, and emotional health. in this article, i place in conversation multiple forms of violence against those who occupy the category of poor black woman in trinidad: the abuse and premature death of these women at the hands of their partners or strangers; the physical and discursive violence against black women by the state; the theft of their children due to inter/intra-community and police violence; and the grief black women are often forced to carry. i show how these different forms of violence converge on and in black women’s bodies and, rather than being distinct in causation and effect, make for multiple iterations of the ongoing colonialist extraction of black women’s lives for the constitution of different forms of masculinist state and economic power. in this way, i join the labor of scholars working throughout the black diaspora that refuse the binary of state and interpersonal violence, as well as the colonial/postcolonial divide in excavations of gender-based violence. scholars who fall into that category are shanya cordis (2019), christen smith (2016), andaiye (2020), yomaira figueroa-vásquez and jessica marie johnson (2021), alysia mann carey (2014), savannah shange (2022), and brendane tynes (2022), among others. though i center here the pervasive violence against black women in trinidad, i do not seek to lock them into a permanent victim-hero status or to essentialize black womanhood. rather, i aim to show how masculine and feminine subjectivities, in tandem with racialized positionings, are produced through violence, more comprehensively documenting the nature of gendered violence and its embodiment. while this article illuminates and brings into conversation the multiple modes of violence against black cishet (cisgender heterosexual) women that go unaccounted for, i also do not seek to exceptionalize this violence. i remain attentive to the ways colonial logics and derivative notions of normative racialized humanity and respectable performances of gender and sexuality manifest gendered violence in related yet particular ways for cishet women and trans-people across racialized groups, gender and sexually transgressive people more broadly, and cishet men in the caribbean (for discussions on this, see, for example, trotz 2004; haynes and deshong 2017; cordis 2019; grey and attai 2019). the present work has resulted from twenty-four cumulative months of fieldwork between 2016 and 2020 in trinidad, dedicated to understanding processes of statecraft, criminalization, racialization, and gendering, though as a black woman born and raised in trinidad, i have been grappling with this political terrain beyond this formal time period. during fieldwork, i conducted participant observation and interviews with state actors working on national security and development, police officers, news editors, journalists, crime photographers, ngo workers, and community members of state-categorized “crime hotspots.” in addition to ethnographic fieldwork, news media archives, particularly from the past two decades, as well as historical legal archives have proven critical to the development of this work as i write against the impetus to read acts of violence, particularly inter/intra-community violence, as contained performances—singular events originating from individuals that carry a natural and social propensity for criminality determined by racialized (including class, religion, geography, etc.) and gendered markers. this approach rationalizes carceral and supposedly extrajudicial responses as the prime means to redress “crises of crime” and inhibits necessary transformative social intervention and the reimagination of systems of accountability and repair (gilmore 2017; kaba 2021; vergès 2022). rather, by thinking with the lives and deaths of women across space and time in trinidad, women i met through ethnographic fieldwork and in primary and secondary archives, i work to develop a more capacious, relational, and historically layered understanding of gendered violence. finally, i plumb stories of pain not simply to regurgitate black death but to chart the ground on which unequivocally precious life is made.3 in this vein, i also consider the ways black women make joy with and despite this terror as they contribute to re-crafting a world in which women no longer have to steal space for themselves in landscapes of death—where they no longer have to be women fitting the category of womanhood as defined by western humanism. figure 1. the cover of the trinidad and tobago guardian newspaper, february 7, 2017. familiar wounds she rarely spoke of her personal life to those around her, so we cannot know what jamilia dereveneaux endured at his hands before the night of february 5, 2017. what we do know from newspaper reports is that jamilia confided in a friend earlier that day that she was going to make some relationship changes (dolwat 2017). one of those changes involved asking her lover to return the keys to her car, which he used to work as a “ph” (informal) taxi.4 he called her while she was at work at her second job at a restaurant in movietowne (a local entertainment complex) and asked her to come to the basement parking lot. she went to the deserted basement around 8 pm to collect her keys. they met. they talked. he gave her the keys. then, as jamilia turned to leave him, he slashed her throat. he would instead leave her. the tragically unsurprising final scene of their relationship: jamilia, a twenty-seven-year-old black woman bleeding and gasping for air on the cold concrete floor of the parking structure, her once trusted lover escaping into the night with her freedom. in my studio apartment in philadelphia, i found out about jamilia’s murder as many within trinidad did. shortly after movietowne patrons discovered jamilia in the basement, pictures of her wounded body began to circulate on social media platforms as proof of the crime crisis in trinidad. in an attempt to calm the fearful citizenry, prime minister keith rowley addressed jamilia’s killing the following night in a public meeting with residents of maloney, trinidad—a state-categorized hotspot. “you called on the prime minister to do something about crime. i am not in your bedroom, i am not in your choice of men,” he said. (hassanali 2017). with these words, the prime minister refused state responsibility for the prevalence of intimate partner violence.5 he framed this violence as a personal choice, private and ahistorical. yet the means of jamilia’s killing, a cut to the throat, belies this framing. that wound is a citation. its referent: enslavement. as jennifer morgan (2018, 1) states, “atlantic slavery rested upon a notion of heritability”; racial capitalist production and white heteropatriarchal plantocratic power were constituted through black women’s wombs (hartman 1997; beckles 2004). in 1662, virginia became the first colony in the americas to enact a law that saw the state of freedom or bondage on birth determined by the status of the mother, or partus sequitur ventrem (the latin later added to the laws of virginia, 1662 act xii)—“offspring follows belly” (morgan 2018, 4). as morgan shows, although this was the earliest law of its kind, it simply codified practices of racial inheritance already followed in other english colonies in the caribbean. the driving force behind this legislation was not the natural reproduction of a labor supply, but rather the need to establish distinct racial categories and tether blackness to enslavement. the law also enabled white men to commit sexual violence without the risk of the inheritance of white property or whiteness itself. furthermore, the legal code, which reverberated throughout the atlantic world to legitimize black subjugation, placed black women and, by extension, black people closer to animals or objects of possession than humans as colonizers circumvented normative european laws of patrilineal descent and instead looked to husbandry and property law to regulate black reproduction. “the law [1662 act and the slave codes that emerged from it] locked enslaved women into a productive relationship whereby everything that a body could do was harnessed to the capital accumulation of another” (morgan 2018, 17). in law and practice the black woman’s body was captured and made valuable only for constituting others’ personhood, property, and protections (hartman 1997, 80). the siete partidas (a thirteenth-century castilian legal code influential in the legal rule of spain’s overseas possessions) explicitly equated a person to a domesticated animal with the words, “so the mother’s owner also owns her child, just as the sheep’s owner also owns her lamb,” and morgan sees them echoed in the 1662 virginia act. it is the logic of racial slavery that considers a black woman a sheep that can be owned—a lamb that can be slaughtered—that i saw cited on jamilia’s neck as her photo came across my phone screen. yet the plantation history of black women’s violability was not only legible on jamilia’s body. it also resonated in the prime minister’s response to her death and the in high rates of gender-based violence in trinidad more broadly as he criticized women’s choice of violent men. within the social order of the plantation, black women’s and girls’ bodies were not just constructed as sites of conquest for constituting masculinist power but were also seen as the “locus of culpability” (hartman 1997, 82). legal cases during the formal period of enslavement document this formulation of black womanhood as always guilty for that which is done to her. one such exemplary case occurred against the british governor to trinidad, thomas picton, for the 1801 torture of louisa calderon, a girl aged ten or eleven (epstein 2012). picton claimed that louisa, a “free mulatto woman” and the “mistress” of pedro ruiz, had orchestrated the robbery of ruiz’s home alongside one pedro gonzalez. when louisa claimed innocence for both herself and her alleged accomplice, picton had her tortured to elicit a confession. she was just one victim in a regime of brutality implemented by picton to establish and enforce a clear color line in trinidad in the early days of british rule. when britain took over trinidad from spain, it inherited an embryonic slave economy with just over 50 percent of the total population enslaved and unusually large free colored and free black populations (brereton 1981, 16).6 picton, himself a landowner with enslaved labor, sought to regulate this “frontier society” by instituting new forms of racial policing. charges were brought against picton by a commission headed by colonel william fullerton because his despotic practices risked endangering the image of british white civility that the crown government was trying to establish, particularly as the british era of abolition had already begun when britain acquired trinidad (matthews 2007, 92). critically, during the case, the prosecution aimed at picton, effaced pedro ruiz’s sexual violence against louisa as the barrister normalized their relationship through a racial science theory purporting that climate accelerated puberty and womanhood in nonwhite females in the colonies. on the other side, picton painted louisa as a morally lacking “mulatto prostitute” who made “a criminal connection with a sambo or negro” to rob her “industrious” partner, and his defense cited the ungovernability and social chaos of the island to justify his use of torture (epstein 2007, 725). louisa’s mixed-race skin and gender emerged as the core evidence of her criminality and responsibility for any abuse she endured. it would take the whitening of louisa and the darkening of her torturer in circulating illustrations of the case to make the british public recognize lousia as a victim of state violence (epstein 2012). the case dragged on from 1803 to 1807. in the end, however, picton was cleared of all charges and went on to be remembered as a british military hero. the permissible denigration of the black/blackened female body and the transfer of responsibility from the violator to the violated feature in both the case of louisa and that of jamilia. in prime minister rowley’s critique of jamilia’s “choice” of partner we hear resonances of picton’s castigation of louisa for her criminal connection with a degenerate “negro” man. both men show “a refusal to bear witness” (figueroa-vásquez and johnson 2021, 88) to these women’s lives, and both try to efface the state’s (in)direct hands in the violence the women endured. how does this through line occur despite the process of formal emancipation from slavery, formal decolonization, and the rise of the postcolonial state? the engendering of black womanhood as both fungible and criminally culpable meant a fundamentally divergent positioning of black and white women pre-emancipation, and utterly different experience of domination. while the heteropatriarchal policing of white women’s sexuality aimed at the protection of respectable motherhood—the production of legitimate kin—the control of black women’s sexuality was rooted in abjection (sharpe 2016; hartman 1997; spillers 1987). thus, while white women rendered as pure maternal figures were the measure of ideal femininity, on the de jure abolition of slavery, black women would have to be re-invented as chaste mothers instructed in the rearing of civilized children if they were to become proper colonial subjects and, eventually, proper citizens of an independent nation-state. to use saidiya hartman’s words, “marriage and protection rather than sexual freedom and reproductive justice were the only ways conceived to redress her wrongs or remedy the wound dealt to [her] reputation as a human being” (2016, 167). this was exactly the agenda laid out by the now infamous moyne commission report of 1945, which analyzed the sociopolitical and economic fabric of the anglophone caribbean to determine the cause of the mass uprisings throughout the region in the 1930s. the moyne commission claimed that the lack of stable family structures produced high levels of poverty, leading to the protests of the colonized masses. in fact, the protests were responding to economic exploitation, rampant inflation, and the continued social neglect of the masses by the colonial administration, as well as by local and foreign capitalists (milette 1999). yet similar to the moynihan report studying black families in the united states almost twenty-five years later, the moyne commission report placed the black matriarchal family at the source of urban socioeconomic problems. destitution and criminality among black people could thus only be solved through the normalization of “proper” male-centered families and legally recognized marriage (french 1988). this proclamation formed the basis for respectability campaigns against so-called promiscuity, common-law marriages, and female-headed households. it also generated educational programming on civics, child-rearing, and hygiene particularly targeted at poor black women in the anglophone caribbean—educational training that continues to the present. figure 2. page from a 1958 issue of the community development bulletins published and circulated by the community development department of the colonial government of trinidad and tobago in the 1950s. this page illustrates the discourse around self-discipline and social reproduction toward nation building characteristic of the time leading up to formal independence. sourced from the 1950s community development newspaper collection, the west indiana and special collections at the university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad. figure 3. page from a 1959 issue of the community development bulletins published and circulated by the community development department of the colonial government of trinidad and tobago in the 1950s. this page gives a glimpse into the work of the women’s institutes and women’s groups founded during that era. sourced from the 1950s community development newspaper collection, the west indiana and special collections at the university of the west indies, st. augustine, trinidad. as the modern trinidad and tobago nation-state emerged in the 1960s, the creole elite upheld the colonial idea that to be both an ideal woman and citizen meant to be heterosexual, monogamous, fertile, and a producer of economically productive and law-abiding offspring (alexander 1994). thus, the postcolonial state structured itself on the imaginary of the respectable, maternal black woman (rowley 2010) and continued to treat black women’s bodies as primarily sites for social reproduction and capital accumulation. no longer the producers of enslaved property, they now emerged as the progenitors of the new nation responsible for choosing, raising, and supporting “good” men (even as they remained men’s possession)—men who could spur development, counter established notions of black inferiority, and prove the ability of formerly colonized people to self-rule. however, as the postcolonial economy, based on hydrocarbon energy and associated petrochemical exports (heavily reliant on foreign investment, highly sensitive to global economic shifts, and plagued by a racial hierarchal organization of labor) now constricts, working-class labor power weakens, and social investment declines with neoliberal reform, levels of unemployment, underemployment, and informal labor rise in trinidad (perry 2022).7 this increasing economic precarity, fueled by both local and global colonial economic relations, continues to hinder the performance of the productive masculinity and femininity the nation-state dictates. poverty fuels antagonistic social relations in urban communities with limited resources—both gun violence and gender-based violence—as men positioned as inadequate providers face a crisis of masculinity. this friction intensifies as men more frequently construe women’s educational and economic advancement as a rejection of normative femininity contributing to male marginalization (hosein 2019). recall, jamilia had requested the return of her car, which her partner had been using for work, leading to her murder. economic conditions also limit the channels through which women can provide for themselves, the ways they can construct and manage kin networks, and the pathways by which they can escape harm (hosein 2019; andaiye 2020). yet these political economic and socio-historic factors that produce and structure women’s relationship to violence are often publicly silenced. instead, the continued co-optation of black women’s bodies for gendered labor and the modern positioning of women as the nation’s moral center not only restricts the grounds on which they can be valued but also maintains low-income black women as culpable for violence—whether performed on their bodies or enacted in the national body. in the afterlife of enslavement, black women remain required to perform in confined ways— “strong black woman/m/other”—to retain their conditional freedom (rowley 2010, 11). and if the state finds that black women do not cultivate a socially proper self and a socially proper child according to the strict colonial script of respectable personhood, they will not only be shamed for their presumed gendered failure but will also often see life taken from them with no free space to mourn their loss —a continuation of a plantation horror story. figure 4. the cover of the trinidad and tobago daily express newspaper, december 20, 2018. the headline references then commissioner of police garry griffith’s statement that if directly attacked, police officers should not hesitate or shoot to disarm but instead shoot to kill. accompanying the headline is a picture of griffith shaking hands with rudy giuliani. stolen bellies at about 9:30 pm on october 25, 2018, members of the inter-agency task force (a special operations police unit) entered a communal yard in trou macaque, laventille, where eight young men were playing cards. the police were looking for mechack douglas and shaundell st. clair. later, the officers claimed gunfire met their arrival, leading them to kill—in supposed self-defense—five of the young men and boys present. relatives of the deceased—mechack douglas, shaundell st. clair, nicolas barker, shekeem francois, and kudiem phillip—disputed the officers’ claims and described the event as a mass execution (ramdass 2018). a week after the shooting, i call a senior police officer with whom i have been conducting fieldwork, officer james, to discuss the occurrence. after four rings, james answers the phone. i begin, “i saw on the news all the reports and concerns about trou macaque. how does the shooting affect the relationship between residents and the police?” without missing a beat, he retorts, “everyone talking about the two teenage boys who were killed, but no one talking about shaundell, mechack, and the other one. a lot of people are very happy that they are no longer terrorizing the community. … i am glad you went on the ride-about with us, because you got to see the kind of terrain we dealing with. … people imagine the terrain is like where they live, and people compare the children with their children. but it is a different environment there” (emphasis added). he ends the conversation, leaving me to ruminate over his words. james’s statements feel like an admission of guilt. without the slightest hesitation, an officer of the law reveals that he believes in upholding a social order that sees some as born differently human, and those deemed violent or potentially violent as that which can and should be killed. following common practice, members of the media went to the forensic science center to capture the reactions of the families of the deceased as they awaited autopsy results they hoped would corroborate their telling of the events. local newspapers printed the words of teresa, the mother of twenty-three-year-old nicolas baker. i reproduce them as reported: they kill my child just so! he was going to check his partner and allyuh shoot him like a dog! my child don’t be on nothing. he doesn’t have a criminal record or anything. you just shooting black people children for nothing. they have children too. you will feel my pain. that is my belly you gone with just so, innocently! what you feel it is? why did they kill my son? is it because he is from the ghetto? … i worked and struggled to make sure my children reached somewhere. i work like a dog to make sure they get what they want. (hamilton-davis 2018; emphasis added) teresa’s statements sit with me. she narrates the loss of her son as the theft of her belly, just as deja inferred. it is theft because, although teresa worked to enable her children’s social mobility, that is, performed the labor of social reproduction to benefit the nation-state, that state did not return on its debt. instead, the state’s security force took her child. what teresa clearly articulates in her statement referencing the stolen labor of her belly, work she analogizes to that of an animal, is the endurance of her gendered and racialized positioning born of the plantation. teresa shows that the reproduction of the postcolonial state remains predicated on the bellies of black women. not just in the way the nation-state relies on black women to produce appropriate productive citizens but also in the way the state constitutes its power (is produced as a legitimate source of security) through the murder of poor black women’s children who state actors categorize as dangerous criminals (through stolen bellies). teresa is fully aware that her son’s blackness and geographical identity positioned him in the crosshairs of the police. nonetheless, she demands someone address why and how her son could be taken from her. teresa demands accountability and that we bear witness to the pain that she and other mothers like her carry in their bodies. following the anthropologists veena das (1996) and deborah a. thomas (2019), i understand the public voicing of pain not simply as an expression of a private state but as an attempt to construct a channel between bodies, along which the burden of pain can be distributed and carried together. it is a call for affective recognition—what thomas (2019) theorizes as a deep embodied intersubjective recognition rooted in love, rather than modernist juridical codes.8 however, what happens when one cries out from the depths of their body for others to carry their pain but that call goes unanswered? as pictures started circulating of two of the deceased from trou macaque holding guns—supposed proof of all five young men’s violent natures—people began to ask: if the young men were lawless, did it matter if the police killings were premeditated? could the ends justify the means given the crisis of crime? almost 3,500 citizens responded with a resounding, yes to the second question in a local newspaper poll hosted on facebook. participants expressed no remorse for the families of the deceased. the poll revealed a controversial but widely held belief: not every death appears worthy of grief, and, by extension, not every individual appears worthy of life (butler 2009). with this, teresa was left to individually carry her pain alongside other mothers whose bellies had been stolen, or, as deja calls them, “dead mothers” (mothers who carry their dead children as life within them). on saturday, june 27, 2020, almost two years after the trou macaque shooting, the police killed three men—joel jacob, noel diamond, and israel clinton—in morvant, trinidad. though the officers initially claimed the deaths had resulted from a shootout, cctv footage from a nearby home revealed that the officers had fired at the men unprovoked (ramdass 2020). following the release of the footage, citizens of areas around the capital city initiated protests against the banality of police violence in their communities. ornella greaves, a young black woman four months pregnant, attended one such protest in beetham gardens, intending to record residents’ interactions with the police. during the protests, officers fired into the crowd and fatally shot ornella. though eyewitness reports, ornella’s own statement before succumbing to her injuries, and protestors’ video footage attested to the police killing ornella, the police commissioner, gary griffith, asserted that he had footage, which he never produced to the public, disapproving these claims (christopher 2020; loop t&t news 2020). griffith sought to cultivate doubt by insinuating that ornella had died at the hands of one of her community members. as a strategy, this could only be conceived as effective because of the racialized criminalization of beetham and its residents. up to the time of writing this article, the police complaints authority’s investigation into ornella greaves’s murder remains open, with feminist activist groups such as womantra and caiso continuing to call for justice in trinidad. at her daughter’s funeral, anette greaves recounted her last moments with ornella: “i saw ornella passing. i asked her where she was going. she had her phone out recording and she said she was going right there. i told her, when you hear the police start to shoot, you might get a bullet, and i don’t know what i will do” (superville 2020). anette greaves let the crowd know that while she was still grieving her daughter’s death, she had come to terms with her passing, and encouraged mourners to take time to teach their children “the right values and lessons” (superville 2020). she felt it necessary to deliver this warning because, despite her teachings, her daughter enjoyed parties more than god, and “parties can’t save you,” (superville 2020). on the surface, anette greaves’s last words to her daughter may appear to be prophetic—a mother’s intuition—but in fact her words reflect the constancy of masculinist sovereign violence, producing a set of familiar expectations (thomas 2019). the elder greaves understood that protests in a criminalized community like beetham are never read as legitimate civil disobedience but rather as unruliness and a threat to the social order. greaves understood, given historical precedent, that the police could and would kill with impunity in areas and neighborhoods categorized as black, low-income, and criminal—all in the name of security. she also understood that her daughter did not conform to the colonial script of respectability that she needed to perform to access her rights of citizenship and protection. she was a low-income black woman involved in a common-law marriage who had four children and was pregnant with a fifth, a woman who did not attend church.9 thus, in anette greaves’s calculation, the probability of her daughter leaving for a protest and not returning home was high. her refusal to perform responsible gendered citizenship, her “femininity-as-failure” (barratt 2018), constituted an offense punishable by death. the fact that anette greaves sought to warn parents to raise “proper” children at her daughter’s funeral reveals the ways in which black women, through decades of social programming, have been conscripted into the work of reconfiguring sovereign violence as personal failures in mothering and womanhood. they have been made to invest in a project of respectability that states that no matter how well they perform, their bodies can be treated as open terrain on which various groups can constitute heteropatriarchal power: the bearers of hegemonic white and mimetic white masculinities, as well as men marginalized by their racialization seeking the power of normative white masculinity (beckles 2004). the continuous, multiscalar struggle for political and economic power, social control, and humanist recognition in the caribbean in the wake of the plantation creates a normalcy of violence in impoverished landscapes like laventille and beetham. this produces the repetition of loss that poor black women are frequently forced to individually carry within their bodies (while sometimes denying the burden, as in the case of anette greaves). meanwhile, the criminalization and subjection of black life erode a public capacity to recognize, legitimize, share in, or, more critically, prevent these black women’s grief. at the same time that lower-income black women remain highly vulnerable to the performance of physical violence on their bodies they also experience the effects of masculinist violence in their bodies. as state violence and intra-communal violence kills black women and their children, the historical construction of black womanhood produces these women as the genesis of such violence, speaking of “failed femininities” and “bad mothers.” this not only disavows the quotidian dangers of existing as a low-income black woman but also delegitimizes her grief in the face of death, locking that grief as a presence in her body. that presence slowly extracts life from her. the anthropologist laurence ralph (2017), drawing on the work of judith butler (2009), orients our attention to the potential of grief for valuing black life when black people, particularly black women who often take on this gendered labor, grieve for black victims marked as ungrievable by the logics of the state. henry washington jr. (2020) makes a similar argument as he unpacks the ways margaret garner, mamie till-mobley, karla f. c. holloway, and lezley mcspadden challenge (though do not dislodge) liberal humanism (which devalues black life) through their performances of public memory of their children. following ralph and washington, i acknowledge the political work black women enact through their grief for their kin and communities, but i also take stock of this grief’s violence—the ways it takes life from black women as it gives life to the dead. i do this to take account of the true depth of the state’s theft from these women. first, the state reduces black women and their sexuality to reproductive factories, then it steals black women’s bellies because they purportedly produced violent criminals, and finally, the state steals their mental, physical, and emotional health as it forces them to labor to confer humanity onto their offspring through grief on their death. yet the nation-state perpetuates the conditions in which that grief can never fully be publicly recognized and cared for. and even black women who do everything to prove that they are “good” mothers and who reject their status as laboratories of violence by investing in the production of “good” citizens must still contend with the presence of delegitimized grief that lingers and takes from them. i return to deja’s story to elaborate on this point. figure 5. roadblock, 2021. digital collage produced by leniqueca welcome using fieldwork photos taken between 2018 and 2019. carrying grief sitting with deja, i ask her opinion on police killings and the representation of grieving mothers in the media. she uses this moment to again distinguish her treatment of her son’s life and death from the normative response to supposed criminality performed by other mothers. “not everybody will come out and talk like me. they will say he was a good boy and, oh, they just kill him. they won’t say their son was a bandit like how i say it. they will say mistaken identity. that is what they will say.” deja moves from reassuring me that she is always honest in her portrayal of her son to reflecting on the meaning of his death. “yes, i am still in the pain of losing my son, but it did bring a little relief from always having to look over my shoulder. one child could put your whole life in danger, your whole family. so that [when he died] was a relief for me that i didn’t have to lose anybody else. i would say, ‘thank you, jesus, the whole thing done.’ otherwise you studying when you go out if you go get a phone call [that your child is dead].” her voice and posture as she delivers these words betray her; nothing about her son is done for her. however, before her sadness has a chance to consume her, she reverts to a disciplinary tone. “they [your children] not listening [being disobedient] put them out. so, when push come now, hear what the people will say, ‘she did put he out.’ they won’t have anything over yuh. they go say, ‘you don’t take nonsense.’” throughout our conversation, deja oscillates between a state of loss rooted in the love of her child, and her compulsion to be seen as having done the right thing about him as a good citizen and a strict mother. she battles with the reality that her survival and the protection of her other children meant distancing herself from her son. she struggles with the knowledge that she has carried with her since her son got involved “in things,” that the termination of her anxiety lay in the death of her son, whether it be at the hands of the police or his comrades. yet she still feels unsafe. her disclosure of the small sense of relief that marked his death evinces her deep longing for stability, safety, and freedom—for life outside the shadow of death, things denied to her as a poor black woman in the wake of the plantation. she grieves her son, she grieves the loss of her full personhood, and despite her efforts to distinguish herself from mothers like teresa, who are criticized for protecting their sons and claiming their innocence, deja’s grief, just like theirs, remains a presence locked in a cage inside her, with nowhere to go. it strangles her voice. recall deja’s words: “girl, if i talk about him long, sometimes my voice go for hours i can’t talk again.” the anthropologist christen smith, drawing on her research in bahia, brazil, and austin, texas, applies the medical term sequelae to capture the lingering effects of violence on black mothers. the word refers to conditions resulting from previous diseases or injuries, “that is, the gendered punishment of living death handed down to those who affectively surround the dead” (smith 2016, 31). here i build on smith’s concept of sequelae and expand my focus beyond the lingering effects of state violence manifested in police killings to elucidate the lingering effects of broad masculinist violence on black women. i do this in acknowledgement that the grief over a child killed by the police and a child killed by someone of a similar racialized and socio-economic positionality can feel indistinguishable in the ways they affect the body. this is despite the fact that a police officer and a young poor black man from a marginalized community are distinct types of offenders in terms of the material conditions that spur their actions, their relationship to the nation-state project, and the ways their acts of harm are read and held accountable. killings by people from black low-income communities are criminalized while the killings by the police are state-sanctioned, that is, normalized as part of the everyday violence work police do in service of the state and market (seigel 2018, 10). deja’s son was not killed by the police. deja suspects he was killed by someone like him, someone he knew, someone involved in illicit activities to both sustain life in a resource-poor community and to access a sovereign power they are otherwise denied by virtue of their ongoing marginalization and criminalization (thame 2016; welcome 2022). the person who took deja’s son performed one form of masculinist violence that affects her: extractive intra-community violence enacted among those on the margins of manhood, a violence derivative of the colonial violence enacted by those at the center of normative white masculinity (and those later incorporated into the project of whiteness as its postcolonial agents). however, as the colonial framing of black womanhood, black kinship, and criminality invoked by the postcolonial state structures the relationship she has with her son in both life and death, another form of masculinist violence occurs within deja. as she lived with the constant fear that her son could die at the hands of the police or fellow “criminals”; as she felt forced to practice her citizenship and appropriate motherhood through the eviction of her son; and as she battles with the grief of a stolen child and guilt around her mothering, she feels the violence of the nation-state project. caught in an assemblage of masculinist violence—with some actors regarded as the problem and others as the solution—deja attempts to negotiate her position. toward the end of the interview, deja discloses another death that has affected her—the murder of the television talk-show host marcia henville by henville’s husband. henville’s show highlighted the lives of people in marginalized communities. deja tells me that henville often interviewed mothers who had lost children, and she would always know the right question to ask: how do you feel? deja saw henville as providing a channel for women’s pain, something she desperately needs to exorcise the grief within her, something lost with henville’s tragic death. here, intimate gendered violence moves from being a shadowy prelude to our conversation to a central feature of deja’s story. it marks the foundation of consent for this interview: to deja i am a surrogate for henville to whom she no longer has the chance to speak. a black woman whose husband, before burning her body, stabbed her repeatedly and cut her throat. the reappearance of a familiar wound. feeling together in this article, i have worked to show how the various forms of masculinist violence that extract from poor black women’s bodies—including gender-based violence by partners and non-partners, state violence, inter/intra-community gun violence, and the lingering violence of grief over murdered kin—are entangled in their foundational gendered and racial logics rooted in the plantation, by the political economy that fuels urban precarity and insecurity, and in the ways they are enacted on and felt in black women’s bodies. jamilia and henville: forever silenced by a cut to the throat. deja: choked by the afterlife of one shot. teresa, deja, and annette: left to soothe empty bellies. lousia and ornella: tortured and killed for the constitution of state power. jamilia, louisa, and ornella: written into the archive as victims of their choices, masking the true terms of their stolen lives. these women together: “strangers made sisters through an unthinkable kinship” (figueroa-vásquez and johnson 2021, 91).10 poor black women in the wake of the plantation remain the terrain on and within which battles for the power of hegemonic masculinity are fought. moreover, the personhood of these women is primarily recognized by the nation-state for the maternal labor they perform in its service and at the moment the state transposes its responsibility for perpetuating the conditions that enable violence to the bodies of these black women. however, even as black women are treated as terrains of extraction for the constitution of masculinist power, made to carry the dead, and have their pain disavowed, they carve out space to be alive. they build social worlds through and beyond death (carter 2018): “for what is more woman than holding death and life, sky and earth in your body same time, to fly while earthbound” (banwo 2022, 192; emphasis original). while illuminating the violence black women in trinidad endure against their being, it is critical to also acknowledge how they configure their lives as precious. thus, i end this article where i began—amid the sounds of laughter from the women in the shop deja frequents. though deja often uses the space to discuss her son and to temporarily alleviate some of the pressures of his presence inside her, she uses the shop for so much more. while waiting for deja to arrive the day she told me the words recorded here, the deja the women in the shop described to me was not a mother who often cried among them. instead, she emerged as a gregarious comedian who always unabashedly perks up her breasts before venturing off to flirt with those she desires. the shop is a sacred, life-giving space for deja. here her body is more than an archive of coloniality. in this shop, these women’s laughs fill the cavernous spaces in their bellies, expand up and out of their throats, and flow among them, weaving them together beyond the violence they endure. the laughter and gesticulations that animate their shared storytelling become an improvisational dance that allows them to feel free in their bodies (if only for a moment)—similar to the way sarah bruno (2022) describes the space of the batey, where puerto rican women through the practice of bomba release the wreckage of ongoing colonial violence. when i met deja, she insisted i omit any information about the venue of our meeting, hence the simple reference, “shop.” she was adamant about this to protect the identity of the space she crafted for herself with other black women to reclaim what is rightfully their own. i mark and hold this space of black women communing, caring for each other, celebrating their full being, and cultivating joy as the grounds for living free. if we understand the space of the body as the critical terrain on and in which unfreedoms are made, then everyday claims to one’s own body, a body always in relation with others, as a site of pleasure and joy remain critical liberatory work. this work is often obscured, but it exists immersed in the thick of it all. thus, i continue to mark the ways black people—criminalized (even by people who may share a black identity), violated, and placed definitively outside the limits of whom this world should care for—continue daily to move through the world as if their lives are unequivocally precious, thereby actively enacting a world in which this constitutes a reality. may we take a breath on this ground on which moments of precious life are lived now, and let it help us find an opening. abstract in this article, i place in conversation multiple forms of violence against those who occupy the category of poor black woman in trinidad: the abuse and premature death of these women at the hands of their partners or strangers, the physical and discursive violence against black women by the state, the theft of their children due to inter/intra-community and police violence, and the grief black women are often forced to carry. i show how these different forms of violence converge on and in black women’s bodies and, rather than being distinct in causation and effect, constitute multiple iterations of the ongoing colonialist extraction of black women’s lives for the creation of different forms of masculinist state and economic power. ultimately, i show how masculine and feminine subjectivities are produced in tandem with racialized positionings through violence and comprehensively document what is gendered violence and how it is embodied. [gender-based violence; coloniality; state violence; postcolonialism; blackness; caribbean studies; black studies] notes acknowledgments first, i want to express my gratitude to you, deja, for taking the time to sit with me and trusting me to care for your story. your words not only shaped this article but reconfigured aspects of my larger project. i also extend thanks to tanya, the other women of the shop, and all others who have glimpses of their lives featured here. i am grateful to deborah a. thomas, sara rendell, chrystel oloukoi, ashley agbasoga, ampson hagan, and victoria massie for their valuable comments on early versions of this piece, and to diana pardo pedraza and sarah bruno for their generative input on later drafts. additionally, i greatly appreciate the feedback from the anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, which significantly enhanced the article. finally, this research was made possible by support from the social science research council’s international dissertation research fellowship and the wenner-gren dissertation fieldwork grant. 1. lime is a colloquial trinbagonian term that when used as a verb means, “to hang out.” 2. the names used in the ethnographic vignettes throughout this article are pseudonyms. however, names of individuals from news media stories appear as reported, and the names of public officials remain unchanged. 3. the use of “precious life” here references ruth wilson gilmore’s words “where life is precious, life is precious” (kushner 2019), an abolitionist orientation to move beyond criminalization that legitimizes premature death and to consider all life as unconditionally precious. this is the political commitment that informs my larger project. 4. “ph” is a colloquial term for an informal taxi in trinidad. it means that the car being used to run the service is private and thus has a license plate starting with the letter “p” rather than a license plate starting with “h” used to indicate that a car has the hired status and thus is legally allowed to run as a taxi. 5. a 2022 government report stated that in its 2017 survey, about 30 percent of women experienced partner violence and 20 percent of women experienced sexual violence from non-partners (ministry of health of trinidad and tobago and pan american health organization, and world health organization 2022). these statistics, however, are partial, as sexual violence is notoriously underreported. 6. the royal cedula of 1783 issued by the spanish governor in trinidad, don josé maria chacón, offered land grants to french catholic planters including “free negroes and mulattoes” in an attempt to develop the trinidadian plantation economy and increase the enslaved labor population. 7. as keston perry (2022) states, in the late nineteenth century, trinidad and tobago’s large petroleum reserves were discovered, and in the early twentieth century, the british colonial government started extracting them in service of its empire. given hydrocarbon resources, following independence, the trinidadian government sought to develop industrial production and managed to rely less on tourism than other caribbean islands. however, industrialization did not lead to major social transformations as predicted, as the finance, manufacturing, and hydrocarbon sectors post-independence maintained a colonial structure. they remained dominated by foreign enterprises, with limited local capital gains concentrated along class and color lines. while, as perry notes, the trinidad and tobago state did attempt, following the social uprising of the 1970s, to implement a more nationalist approach to industrialization, over time this strategy became undermined by international policies (u.s. and european protectionist measures concerning their industries and exports), predatory international loan agreements, and the government’s continued reliance on foreign expatriates for managerial and executive labor, among other factors. 8. 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recalls last warning to daughter.” trinidad and tobago newsday, july 8. thame, maziki 2016 “democracy and the end of revolution in the contemporary caribbean.” small axe 20, no. 2: 164–74. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-3626680 thomas, deborah a. 2019 political life in the wake of the plantation: sovereignty, witnessing, repair. durham, n.c.: duke university press. trotz, d. alissa 2004 “between despair and hope: women and violence in contemporary guyana.” small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism 8, no. 1: 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/-8-1-1 tynes, brendane 2022 “‘sometimes there just ain’t no magic in this’: black women at the nexus of gendered violence and erasure.” in researching gender-based violence: embodied and intersectional approaches, edited by april d. j. petillo and heather r. hlavka, 27–42. new york: new york university press. vergès, françoise 2022 a feminist theory of violence: a decolonial perspective. translated by melissa thackway. london: pluto press. washington, henry, jr. 2020 “making a scene: performance and black maternal remembrances.” women and performance: a journal of feminist theory 30, no. 2: 140–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770x.2020.1869410 welcome, leniqueca a. 2022 “to be black is to …: the production of blackness in and beyond trinidad.” small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism 26, no. 2: 108–18. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901682 conjugated universalism: from rural pakistan to “worker-peasant rule” cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 334-360, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.02 conjugated universalism: from rural pakistan to “worker-peasant rule” shozab raza university of toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5747-0837 one afternoon as i sat in my apartment in jampur, a rural town in pakistan’s peripheral south punjab region, i got a call from allah baksh baloch. during my field research on the region’s communist history, allah baksh mediated my access to various leftist political actors. he was well-positioned to do so, not just because of his youthful energy despite his elderly age but also because of his long-standing association with the mao-inspired mazdoor kisan party (mkp), historically one of pakistan’s largest communist parties. through his party work, allah baksh had acquired many contacts across the region’s small towns and countryside. this time, he invited me to the rooftop of a commercial complex, located across the street from my apartment. on arriving, i saw allah baksh basking in the winter sun, his gray hair glistening. he was sitting next to a younger, well-built man who, when seeing me, stood up and introduced himself as “comrade sarwar.” sarwar, i soon learnt, was an independent journalist (we were sitting outside his office), as well as a member of the trotskyist wing of the pakistan people’s party (ppp), one of the country’s flagship political parties. at one point, our discussion turned to leon trotsky’s death, which sarwar (naturally) blamed on joseph stalin. allah baksh, however, had a different take: “trotsky was in exile, in america, and he had illicit sexual relations with frida kahlo, the wife of the person he was staying with. her husband then killed trotsky.” i told allah baksh it was now widely accepted that trotsky was murdered at the behest of stalin, who wanted to put an end to trotsky’s mobilization against him. further, kahlo’s sexual liaisons with trotsky did not trouble her husband, as they had an open relationship. allah baksh was unconvinced: “didn’t america give freedom to women only recently? wasn’t america like us only fifty to sixty years ago?” i somewhat agreed, but i didn’t understand his point. “so, if america was like our society when trotsky slept with frida kahlo—if there wasn’t any freedom for women—how could he have gotten away with having sex with someone’s wife?” allah baksh, who belonged to a baloch tribe called lashari, assumed that baloch customs in this part of south punjab, which bordered balochistan province, resembled those in the united states when trotsky was murdered (trotsky was actually in mexico city when he was murdered). the practice of respecting these customs is known as “doing balochki” (balochki karna) and constitutes part of a wider notion of balochness or balochiyat. and just as a man would be customarily killed in south punjab for having illicit relations with another’s wife and thus violating balochiyat, so too, allah baksh reckoned, it must have been the case in north america before women’s freedom. by exonerating stalin, allah baksh was implicitly defending the mkp’s political ideology, as the party aligned itself with a global maoism that viewed stalin favorably. against a trotskyist position that saw contemporary pakistan as a sarmayadari nizam (capitalist system), making the proletariat the chief revolutionary subject, this maoism also maintained that the country was “semi-feudal” (nim-jagirdari), thus rendering the peasantry a decisive revolutionary subject. this implied that the mkp’s historic political program of mazdur kisan raj (worker-peasant rule), a global sovereignty for both workers and peasants, also remained germane. ultimately, allah baksh was defending this universalist politics when he exonerated stalin—an exoneration made possible by widening the subjects of balochiyat to include figures like trotsky. that is, allah baksh both connected balochiyat and marxism and transformed the former’s parameters to defend the mkp and its goal of mazdur kisan raj: a conjugated universalism. by conjugated universalism, i refer to how peasant revolutionaries like allah baksh connected and transformed ideational elements in the pursuit of a politics of universalism,1 defined here as “structures of aspiration that direct a particular message to all of humanity” (li 2021, 4). my use of conjugation flags both connection and transformation, drawing on the term’s resonance with vocabularies of kinship (as in conjugality) and grammar (whereby verbs transform in particular relational contexts).2 conjugated universalisms stand in contrast to unconjugated ones, whose advocates do not engage in this connective and transformative ideational work. rather, unconjugated universalisms—what others have variably described as “flat universalism[s]” (campbell 2021, 360), “strong universalism[s]” (kaviraj 2009, 182), or “north atlantic universals” (trouillot 2003, 35)—project and impose as universals what are actually particular (often european) experiences, all the while effacing their specific origins. from elevating the proletariat as the central revolutionary subject to imposing the free market and liberal democracy as aspirational standards for the world, various tendencies across the left and right have promoted an unconjugated universalist politics. as i elaborate later, the eurocentrism of unconjugated universalisms led to the emergence of certain “southern” theories—from latin america’s decoloniality school to south asia’s subaltern studies—that challenged universalisms entirely. however, recent debates across anthropology, political theory, and history have, for reasons that will become clearer, recentered the role of universalisms in the political struggles of the global south. whereas some argue that various movements, from the haitian revolution to third world socialism, were actually the true harbingers of universal enlightenment ideals like freedom and liberty, others maintain that they promoted alternative universalisms exterior to the european fold. drawing on an “anthropology of universalism” focused on the practice of universalism (li 2020; tsing 2005), i build on these recent debates by showing how political actors craft universalist projects through a dialogical mode involving combination and transformation—in short, conjugation—across various traditions. much like “conjugated oppression,” which flags how class and other hierarchies combine in ways that transform the experience of oppression, the resultant conjugated universalism is “more than merely the sum of its constituent parts” (bourgois 1988, 330). i specifically explore how peasant revolutionaries conjugated across three traditions—marxism, balochiyat, and siraiki nationalism—to add legitimating force and substance to the otherwise abstract universalism of mazdur kisan raj. the article draws on more than twenty months of field and archival research in the south punjabi districts of dera ghazi khan and rajanpur, research facilitated by my ambivalent positionality. on the one hand, allah baksh felt comfortable introducing me to his circle of revolutionaries because he knew that i broadly shared his political ideals, even if we often debated the specifics of revolutionary theory and strategy. in fact, it was precisely these debates, which meant sharing my political positions rather than assuming an elusive neutrality, that strengthened his confidence in me as a comrade and thus someone who could be trusted (see also plys 2020, 317–18). allah baksh and his comrades also understood intuitively my purpose there. in line with mao tse-tung’s (1990) stress on “social and economic investigation,” the mkp believed that conducting empirical research, or tabqati jaghrafiya (class geographies) (alam 1975, 7), was necessary for revolutionary theory and strategy, and often published investigative (tahqiqati) reports. on the other hand, my urban, western background enabled me, much like other researchers of pakistan (armytage 2018), to “study up” (nader 1972), including by accessing police surveillance files.3 thus, my positionality, a simultaneous “sameness and otherness” that especially afflicts left intellectuals studying progressive movements (portelli 1991, 39), shaped the sort of empirical materials i was able to collect for this essay. in the article’s first section, i trace the emergence of the mkp, focusing specifically on how the party initiated its politics of mazdur kisan raj by conjugating an otherwise eurocentric marxism. influenced by mao, the party sought to transcend marxism’s possible parochialism and connect it to pakistan’s specific relational context by transforming its parameters. the party also energized several of its peasant revolutionaries to conjugate—that is, to further the universalist project of mazdur kisan raj by both connecting and transforming ideational elements within their own even more specific contexts. in the essay’s second and third sections, i focus on two such contexts: tribe and nation. peasant revolutionaries specifically engaged with balochiyat and siraiki nationalism, not only connecting both with marxism but also transforming their respective parameters to transcend any particularism that, like eurocentric marxism, might threaten the universalism of mazdur kisan raj. indeed, attention to conjugation centers peasants as worldly actors whose practical and ideational labor destabilizes the universal/particular distinction, one that has often framed the study of universalism. conjugating marxism the founders of the mkp themselves sought to further mazdur kisan raj by conjugating marxism—that is, by connecting it to, and transforming it for, pakistani conditions. the party emerged as a critique of earlier eurocentric communisms, in pakistan and elsewhere, and, inspired by mao’s reinvention of marxism for chinese conditions (dirlik 1983), sought to elaborate a communism for pakistan. in the process of making this connection, party founders also transformed marxism: first, by claiming that various laboring classes, not just the proletariat, could be revolutionary subjects; second, by making what they called semi-feudalism and imperialism, not just capitalism, the object of critique and combat; and third, by recognizing the insurgent elements in local traditions and epistemologies. owing to its maoist inheritance, the party also encouraged the peasants it recruited to engage with their local traditions anew. as i detail later, several peasants conjugated balochiyat and siraiki nationalism to marxism so as to legitimize and enrich the party’s universalist project of mazdur kisan raj, one that sought to uplift humanity across differences. the mkp emerged amid a popular movement that deposed the military ruler ayub khan in 1969 and a sharpening of strategic splits between the chineseand soviet-aligned communist parties across the globe. mkp founders oriented to the “chinese line” and believed that the soviet union was compromising with third world capitalists in struggling against western imperialism. instead, they agreed with the chinese communist party to argue that the “revolution must be led by the working class, supported by the great power of the peasantry, to travel the path of people’s democratic revolution and then establish a socialist system” (muhammad 1973, 6). yet mkp founders also insisted that their revolution would be specific to pakistani conditions. as the mkp founder and lawyer afzal bangash once told a public meeting in lahore in 1976, “the revolution for which they were striving would be neither like peking nor like moscow, but purely pakistani” (special branch, punjab 1976). here too, the party took inspiration from mao (1965b, 199), who emphasized the necessity of constructing a locally legible communism. for instance, in his “mass line” politics, part of his (mao 1965a) broader philosophy of practice, mao called for revolutionary parties to both reflect the vernacular concerns of the masses in their theory and practice and to push the masses toward a communist internationalism. indeed, it was maoism’s commitment to a vernacular-driven universalism—an implicit opposition, that is, to the unconjugated universalism the comintern has been criticized for promoting during the interwar period (e.g., chatterjee 2016)—that facilitated its global travels (lovell 2019). maoism, in other words, was a “worldly marxism” (ali and raza 2022). for their part, mkp founders conjugated marxism to pakistani conditions in three respects, and in doing so, they departed from prevailing leftist parties in the country like the communist party of pakistan (cpp), which operated officially from 1948 to 1954,4 and the socialist national awami party (nap). figure 1. the cover for an issue of the mkp’s internal circular signals the party’s vernaculardriven universalism. the sketch is of ho chi minh and the text reads “connect the shining paths of landhi to hashtnagar—remind us of ho chi minh.” landhi is an industrial area in karachi, where an explosive workers’ struggle occurred in the 1970s. hashtnagar is a rural area in the former north-west frontier province and was the site of a major mkp-led peasant movement in the 1970s. clipping from the mkp’s circular, no. 62 (june 1975). scanned by noaman ali. first, the mkp leader eric cyprian, once a member of the cpp, argued that communists should expand their organizing efforts beyond the urban proletariat to include peasant classes, where “the most decisive blows can be struck at the ruling class” (m. a. ali 1952, 239). we see the party broadening communism’s revolutionary subject in its translation of karl marx’s internationalist slogan (“workers of the world—unite”): dunya bhar ke mehnat-kash, ek ho jao. drawing on a historical communist lexicon,5 the party translated “worker” as mehnat-kash (toilers), not mazdur (its typical translation), likely to make the slogan resonate in their agrarian context. unlike mazdur, mehnat-kash offers a more expansive category that can encompass the countryside’s diverse laboring classes, from smallholders to tenants and landless agricultural workers. frantz fanon engaged in a similar translation exercise (gordon 2010, 13). les damnés de la terre, the french title for the wretched of the earth, is the first line in the french version of the internationale, where “les damnés” refers to the proletariat. in using this line as the title for a book centered on the colonized world, with “les damnés” referring to its peasantry and lumpenproletariat, fanon challenged the eurocentric marxist assumption that the continent’s proletariat constituted the vanguard revolutionary class. yet by using the language of the internationale to launch this provocation, he still affirmed his fidelity to an internationalist politics. likewise, the mkp sought to advance marxism’s universal promise through translations that inaugurated a revolutionary subject more aligned with a non-european context like pakistan. the mao-inclined mkp thus did not have the same “translation problem” (kaviraj 2009, 179) that afflicted an earlier generation of communists in colonial india, who were often accused of having their “head in russia and body in india” (shaikh 2021, 82), such that they organized according to categories ill-fitted for their milieu. figure 2. “singing the internationale.” mkp members sing the internationale at a party congress in karachi in 1977. the mkp president major ishaq muhammad can be seen standing at the far left. clipping from the mkp’s circular, no. 86 (november 1977). scanned by noaman ali. second, by organizing “all the exploited sections of the people” under communist leadership (m. a. ali 1952, 247–48), the mkp transformed marxism’s object of critique and combat to include not just capitalists but also landlords and their imperialist patrons. for in places like south punjab, the party mostly encountered jagirdars (landlords), not capitalists, many of whom were baloch tribal chiefs (tumandars and sardars) whose ancestors had consolidated their authority by allying with the british raj (s. raza 2023).6 in exchange for their loyalty, the raj gave chiefs legal jurisdiction over their tribespeople, authorized their paramilitary apparatus, and granted them immense landed estates (jagirs) from which they collected both rents and the entire land revenue. inspired by the populist pro-peasant rhetoric of zulfikar ali bhutto and his ppp, peasants in south punjab confronted these jagirdars in the early 1970s, demanding fairer sharecropping arrangements and an end to forced labor (begar). mkp founders soon lent support to these insurrections, as they believed the endurance of these colonially fortified estates in postcolonial pakistan evidenced “semi-feudalism” and “semi-colonialism” (muhammad 1972), both of which communists needed to confront. the party’s involvement also led to the peasants’ radicalization, as they began calling for the abolition, not reform, of jagirdari (feudalism), their ultimate aim being to establish a global subaltern sovereignty, a mazdur kisan raj. third, mkp founders sought to build a party oriented to the cultures, languages, and epistemologies of the masses. the party criticized the earlier cpp leadership’s infatuation with elite urdu literary culture, which they saw as “feudal and imperialistic,” and which left the cpp “culturally alienated from the people of the soil” (leghari 1979, 73–74). party leaders sought to end this alienation in several ways, including through party mentorship programs and schools. leaders often mentored the peasants they recruited, teaching them to read and write, which is in fact how allah baksh became literate. they also invited locals to party schools, where they exchanged ideas and collectively read and debated marx, lenin, and mao. indeed, the party inspired peasants to see “theory,” now an emic category, as a necessary part of a global liberatory struggle, even energizing some to “stretch” (fanon 2004, 5) revolutionary theory to make it speak to the specificities of their own conditions. even after the mkp effectively collapsed in 1977,7 formerly affiliated peasants like allah baksh continued to renew marxism. they sought to show that marxism was not a foreign, western import—not particular to europe—but embraced logics that inhered in local traditions. more broadly, peasant revolutionaries aimed to add culturally attuned substance and legitimizing force to the otherwise abstract universal goal of mazdur kisan raj. this subaltern aspiration for universality challenges scholars who view universalism as principally an elite, european, and even authoritarian enterprise. writing from the vantage point of south asia, subaltern studies, for instance, contested both liberal and marxist universalism on these grounds. whereas the former presumed a universal human endowed with rights, the latter, in their reckoning, assumed a universal stageist history (kaviraj 2009) that would teleologically culminate in a universal capital-labor conflict and proletarian emancipation (chakrabarty 1989), often under the auspices of a universalized bolshevik model of the party (chatterjee 2016). subalternists argued that subaltern politics should be understood not in these universalist registers of human rights, enlightenment ideals, or class politics, but through vernacular vocabularies and concerns. latin american decoloniality scholars went further in this emphasis on difference and particularity, arguing that subaltern lives, undergirded by their own epistemologies, inaugurate distinct worlds: a pluriverse (mignolo and walsh 2018). implicit in these latin american and south asian critiques are shared assumptions about universalism, viewing it as a western imperialist imposition that, at best, effaces subaltern subversions or, at worst, legitimates their suppression. as neil lazarus (1999, 9) writes, these scholars “have written at length to condemn as naive or, worse, tacitly authoritarian, any commitment to universalism.” yet this post/decolonial stress on difference, a “triumph of provincialism,” as samir amin (2009, 198) once called it, now appears to uncomfortably tally with resurgent authoritarian nationalisms.8 perhaps this partly explains the renewed interest in universalism as a political project within political anthropology, political theory, and history, among other fields. except now, recognizing the violence and silences of elite-peddled unconjugated universalisms, scholars are “decolonizing universalism” (khader 2019) in various ways, from theorizing a “left universalism” (sekyi-otu 2019) to unearthing a “universalism from below” (buck-morss 2009, 106). some political theorists even argue that subaltern anticolonial actors in the global south were actually the true harbingers of universal enlightenment ideals like freedom and liberty (buck-morss 2009; nesbitt 2008). other political theorists and historians, however, maintain that anticolonial actors actually promoted “alternative universalisms” (getachew 2016, 837) beyond enlightenment ideals (a. raza 2020b; goswami 2012). from jihadism (li 2020) to a progressive “muslim international” (daulatzai and rana 2018) and arab communism (bardawil 2020),9 political anthropologists have recently explored a range of such alternative universalist projects as they interact with ethnographic conjunctures—what anna l. tsing (2005, 8) called “engaged universals.” drawing on these debates, a recent literature, often inspired by mikhail bakhtin (1981), centers the role of dialogical interaction across traditions in the formation of universalist politics (campbell 2021; gopal 2019; graeber and wengrow 2021). building on this perspective, i explore ethnographically a mode of dialogical practice oriented toward connection and transformation—that is, conjugation. inspired by the mkp leadership’s own remaking of marxism—an effort to smoothen the “friction” (tsing 2005) involved in translating this ideology of european origin for pakistani conditions—peasant revolutionaries conjugated across marxism, balochiyat, and siraiki nationalism to deepen and further a universal project of mazdur kisan raj. in crafting this conjugated universalism, peasants implied the existence of a shared (albeit uneven) world of elite domination and exploitation. they also implied that the insurgent ideas needed to radically alter this global order could be found even in traditions that appeared vernacular or particular from various vantage points. this included marxism, which, because of long-standing anticommunist propaganda by pakistan’s elitist and islamist parties (iqtidar 2010), often looked irrelevant to the transformation of pakistan to fellow villagers—that is, it looked particular to europe. it also included balochiyat and siraiki nationalism, those seemingly “particularistic ties” often viewed as dividing subaltern politics in the subcontinent (chakrabarty 1989, 3; k. a. ali 2005), not generative of a universal politics to remake the world. as peasant revolutionaries conjugated marxism, balochiyat, and siraiki nationalism, they transformed their particularities into a universal, such that they put under strain, even transcended, the analytical distinction between the universal and particular. conjugating balochiyat another winter morning, allah baksh took me to jampur’s local courts (kachahri), a bustling place in the town center, where we went to the office of a lawyer named rashid. together with allah baksh, rashid led the kisan ikath (peasant collective). allah baksh had created the group in 1985 as a “front” for the mkp, with the original aim of gradually recruiting peasants, irrespective of their preexisting ideological or party affiliation, into the party by assisting them with their day-to-day problems. even as the mkp fractured and effectively collapsed, the kisan ikath endured well into the 2000s and, unlike other peasant organizations that emerged in punjab (rizvi 2019; aftab and ali 2023), it still sought to enroll the peasantry into a universal politics of mazdur kisan raj. the group defended peasants in several ways over the years, from organizing protests against local dealers selling tampered (do-number) fertilizers and pesticides to campaigning against the jagirdar-led dispossession of smallholders. the organization also assisted peasants in their legal troubles, which often centered on police harassment, property disputes, and illicit sexual relations. peasants otherwise intimidated by the courts approached the kisan ikath, and often specifically allah baksh, who, despite his peasant background, had acquired a reputation for his adeptness at navigating the courts, and for his connections to various lawyers. one of them, of course, was rashid. in his fifties with a large, twirling mustache, rashid, as i quickly learned that winter morning of our first meeting, inhabited multiple, seemingly contradictory identities. though he served as the kisan ikath’s general secretary, rashid was not ideologically aligned to the party behind the front, the mkp, but belonged instead to the same trotskyist outfit as the journalist sarwar. he was also a sharp and quick-witted intellectual, as well as the sardar (petty-chief) for a major baloch tribe. he was as adept at navigating and popularizing french philosophy (he often quoted jean-paul sartre in his speeches) as he was at detailing the intricacies of tribal genealogies and contestations. in fact, in his office that morning, our conversation eventually turned to the qaba’ili nizam (tribal system). i asked rashid about it: “people have told me that they’re reluctant to go to the courts, that they’d rather resolve disputes within their jirgas or panchayats [tribal authority structures]. as a lawyer, what do you think of this?” rashid answered: “you know the courts always favor the powerful over the weak. the rich over the poor. … sometimes people can get more justice in tribal law [qaba’ili qanun] than in court law [adalat qanun].” during my time with allah baksh, who belonged to the lashari tribe, i realized he not only agreed with rashid’s position on baloch tribal authority but went further. “marx wasn’t bringing anything new with communism,” he once told me. “he was simply bringing back tribal culture.” allah baksh was directly connecting the project of marx and marxism to baloch tribal ideals and practices (that is, balochiyat). however, he wasn’t simply instrumentalizing communal forces for class struggles, as communists had done elsewhere (bardawil 2020, 113–37); he was also transforming those very ideals and practices. the “tribal culture” allah baksh believed marx simply brought back was, in actuality, his own reimagination of that culture. in connecting balochiyat to marxism, he thus also transformed the former—a conjugation whose purpose substantiated the abstract universalism of mazdur kisan raj. as i explore in the following, allah baksh often pointed to elements within balochiyat—specifically its relationality, adjudicatory institutions, and nomenclature—that could be connected with and incorporated into marxism. at the same time, he also sought to transform balochiyat, as he was alert to some of its elements, certain “frictions,” that threatened to undermine the universal promise of mazdur kisan raj. one way allah baksh connected marxism and balochiyat was by incorporating the latter’s relational logics into the former. the activist-scholar jodi dean (2019, 10) has theorized the sort of relations communists aspire to build in terms of comradeship: a mode of political belonging based, she argues, on a shared critique of the present and a commitment to building a better future, a mode that involves both “discipline and joy.” in fact, allah baksh sought to construct relations along similar lines—except he disliked the word comrade, preferring sathi (fellow traveler), as it didn’t have a foreign, atheistic, and thus alienating quality to it. and to give substance to sathi, he found inspiration in his own milieu, specifically baloch tribes and their elementary unit, the family. he often spoke of these tribal and familial relations as both “relationships of love” and “burden” (bojh). that is, they constituted relations in which agency was experienced not in opposition to obligation but in its fulfillment (cody 2016), where love became manifest in the exercise of duty. for his part at least, allah baksh had come to see the kisan ikath as his tribe and family, consisting, as he once put it, “not only of [his] own blood but the blood of [his] children and family.” and he wanted other workers and peasants—be they a kisan ikath member or not, a baloch or not—to also relate to one another in similar terms. he wanted to build a mode of communist political belonging that incorporated the relational logics of balochiyat. to concretely promote these logics within the kisan ikath, allah baksh turned to jirgas or panchayats, those tribal adjudicatory bodies rashid defended that morning. allah baksh believed marxism could be transformed for the better if it incorporated these institutions. “when marx spoke about socialism,” he once told me, “all he was really trying to do was extend our panchayat system.” allah baksh meant several things by this. he believed that tribal panchayats implied a critique of courtly and state authority, one shared by marxism. through panchayats, ordinary people could potentially organize their own affairs, outside the mediation of political and economic elites. and through its processes, panchayats, allah baksh believed, could consolidate forms of solidarity between cadres, which other institutions like the court system never could. by incorporating the panchayat into the kisan ikath, he wanted to build among members these critiques, this confidence in self-governance and, most importantly, this solidarity. and from the kisan ikath, allah baksh sought to “extend this tribal solidarity to the communist party and world at large.” not only did relations of balochiyat cultivate the sort of group solidarity needed to achieve mazdur kisan raj, they also, allah baksh implied, gave substance to the relational world this universalism would bring into existence. yet allah baksh also acknowledged certain limits or “frictions” to balochiyat that could undermine this universalism. i became more aware of this during a debate that erupted between allah baksh and rashid after the kisan ikath’s annual may day (or international workers’ day) rally, a long-standing tradition here (buhar 1976). in an internationalist spirit, leaders that day gave speeches connecting the plight of workers and peasants in south punjab to the struggles of chicago workers in the late nineteenth century during the haymarket affair, an event that marks the origins of may day. but not a single woman was present at the rally, even though kisan ikath leaders insisted, echoing arguments in marxist feminism (federici 2004; bhattacharya 2017), that women also needed “liberation” (azadi), as they “are oppressed two-times over,” in the field and at home. when i asked them about this absence later, rashid got defensive. he suggested that women’s organizing was what american-funded ngos did, and then later added that the soviet union’s first central committee had only one woman (implying women weren’t necessary for revolution). allah baksh disagreed: “the truth is that our sathis don’t want to stop doing balochki.” “doing balochki” partly involved controlling women’s movements and maintaining strict gender segregation (purdah)—a patriarchal control often enforced through conventional panchayats, led by tribal elites who also used this institution to distribute patronage and bolster their sovereignty.10 including women in the kisan ikath and its rallies and panchayats would thus violate normative baloch ideals and practices (or balochiyat). leaders, allah baksh implied, feared doing this as it could undermine not just their reputation but their very personhood as a baloch.11 but if “doing balochki” meant excluding half of humanity, how could it form part of any universalist politics? recognizing these frictions, allah baksh ultimately sought to transform balochiyat to produce an entirely new revolutionary relationality. “put aside your political affiliations, your social status, your familial or tribal disputes,” allah baksh (baloch n.d.) once wrote in a leaflet, “and join the kisan ikath.” while this relationality, what he sometimes called “political friendships” (siyasi dosti), would contain elements of tribal relations—that combination of love and duty—it would also form a new tribe. at one kisan ikath meeting i attended in the rural town of dajal, a peasant leader began by thanking the tribally diverse attendees, adding that “our tribe is all of us assembled here.” in his own remarks, allah baksh made the point explicit: “we need to end our previous ties to tribe and caste and produce a new tribe—a mazdur kisan tribe.” allah baksh believed this possible because he understood the social constructedness of tribes. “tribes are created over time,” he later added at the meeting, “and new tribes emerge.”12 the new tribe, in his view, would be consolidated through panchayats mediated by the kisan ikath, not tribal elites, a point alluded to in the organization’s very name (ikath is another term for panchayats here). the tribe would ideally include women as equals as well. ultimately, the new tribe he aspired to build would draw on but also transcend balochiyat’s relational logics: it would incorporate all exploited classes, irrespective of tribal, ethnic, or gender differences, and be directed toward and reflect the substance of mazdur kisan raj. allah baksh’s transformation of balochiyat is further illustrated in his understanding of the term sardar. he and his comrades used the term in reference not just to chiefly figures like rashid but also even to each other. to me, this showed how deeply entrenched jagirdari was, such that even communists deployed its vernaculars, but allah baksh disagreed. “we want to bring the word to the bottom—to show that ordinary people are the true sardars, not the jagirdars.” he also offered a unique etymology of sardar. whereas others understood sardar to come from sar (head) and dar (holder of), such that sardar literally meant “holder of the head,” allah baksh mobilized another meaning of dar, as the gallows or impaling stake, meaning that a sardar, in his rendering, was someone at the head of death, even sacrifice. to him, the etymology of sardar thus connoted someone sacrificing themselves for the collective. his usage implied that ordinary peasants and workers, in their various toils that kept communities alive, were the ones sacrificing for the collective. they were the true sardars. while communists across the global south often translated and transliterated terms to further their politics (crawford 2021; shaikh 2021, 46–84), allah baksh also etymologized. by transforming the meaning of baloch tribal nomenclature to elevate the toiling classes and their sacrificial, socially reproductive labor, he connected balochiyat to marxism, a politics for the toilers (and whose labor theory of value also uncovers the centrality of labor to society). he sought to demonstrate that communist politics could (literally) inhere in the terms of balochiyat. in the end, allah baksh’s various conjugations of balochiyat, from expanding its tribal relations to re-etymologizing its nomenclature, aimed to locally legitimize and substantialize the universalism of mazdur kisan raj—that is, to transform a possibly “abstract universal” into a concrete one (sekyi-otu 2019, 166–67; mallick 2020). however, it remained uncertain whether this engagement with balochiyat would serve this particular political purpose, especially in this part of south punjab. many local baloch’s ties to baloch culture and language had weakened over the centuries since their ancestors first migrated here from the bordering balochistan province. many had also intermarried with other ethnicities in this diverse part of punjab, which also bordered the sindh province. most, including allah baksh and rashid, spoke siraiki over balochi. many also identified ethnically as siraiki, owing to the siraiki nationalist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. as it turns out, some left-wing adherents of this movement believed that the nation, more than the tribe, was what needed to be conjugated with marxism to legitimize and substantialize mazdur kisan raj. conjugating the siraiki nation the term sardar came up on another occasion, this time by its absence. shortly after i moved to jampur, one of the kisan ikath’s members, sharif pitafi, tragically died only in his fifties. in his honor, the kisan ikath held a musha’ara, a poetry symposium popular across the subcontinent. in south punjab, musha’aras, alongside melas (festivals), have also been spaces to promote the siraiki language and siraiki nationalism, an ethnolinguistic movement that emerged in the 1960s calling for a “siraiki homeland” (wasaib). among the hundreds that attended sharif pitafi’s musha’ara were a few staunch siraiki nationalists, who were also socialists. alongside allah baksh and rashid, these siraiki nationalists gave rousing speeches. as i sat on the ground listening, protected from the midday sun by a wide tent, i noticed that several siraiki nationalists referred to jagirdars not as sardars (as most did), but as chaudharis. whereas in upper punjab, as elsewhere in the subcontinent, chaudhari is an honorific title of respect for landlords or other rural elites, in south punjab, it commonly functions as a derogatory term for punjabis. by using the term to refer to siraiki jagirdars, these siraiki nationalists were excluding the region’s landed elites from their imagined boundaries of the siraiki homeland. they were channeling (or connecting) popular grievances against upper punjab toward a marxist critique of class exploitation and, in so doing, transforming the terms of siraiki nationalism. by conjugating siraiki nationalism in this way, they sought to give the universalism of mazdur kisan raj a legitimizing force and substance. but much like tribe, this engagement with siraiki nationalism, however radical, was also undermined by certain frictions, one that antinationalist communists sought to highlight. figure 3. a kisan ikath poster displayed on the stage at sharif pitafi’s musha’ara. pitafi is pictured on the left. the slogan dunya bhar ke mehnat-kash, ek ho jao (workers of the world—unite) is on the top. the rest of the poster lists the organization’s main demands. photograph by shozab raza. first, some context. the siraiki movement began as a literary and linguistic movement, only later becoming nationalist and socialist (shackle 1977; langah 2012). emerging in the early 1960s, the movement promoted siraiki as a distinct language from punjabi, not a dialect, with its autonomous literary tradition. centered in the major south punjabi cities of multan and bahawalpur, the movement was also largely middle-class, consisting of poets, writers, and academics who gathered under the umbrella of organizations like the siraiki adabi majalis (siraiki literary assembly). through various conferences and seminars, these organizations established a distinct script for the language and elevated mystic poets like khwaja ghulam farid (d. 1901) as representatives of a unique siraiki literary tradition. yet even though not explicitly political, the siraiki literary movement of this period incubated such a possibility. as the siraiki scholar and activist nukhbah langah (2012, xviii) argues, poets and folk artists created an “imaginative space … for the representation of siraiki identity,” one that would become politicized by events in the 1970s. in 1970, the government ended the one unit scheme, which had amalgamated all provinces in west pakistan into one administrative-political unit to counteract east pakistan’s influence as the province with a demographic majority. it angered some siraiki-speakers that their areas were re-incorporated into the new punjab province (jaffrelot 2015, 187–88). further, the independence of bangladesh in 1971, partly driven by grievances over language, and, a year later, the sindh government’s recognition of sindhi as the province’s official language also inspired siraiki activists (shackle 1977). soon, socialists and communists joined the burgeoning movement. they did so in part because of the political climate following bhutto’s toppling in 1977 and the launch of general muhammad zia-ul-haq’s military dictatorship. while implementing a far-reaching islamization program, zia-ul-haq also furthered the repression of the left begun by bhutto (toor 2011, 117–56). he banned political parties and open political activity, and arrested many oppositional party leaders, including several mkp leaders. yet zia-ul-haq’s regime, like any military regime, could not completely eradicate all progressive activity. those who circumvented persecution for one reason or another continued to agitate, and did so through various fronts (a context that partly explains why allah baksh formed the kisan ikath). these included the siraiki suba mahaz (front for siraiki province) and the siraiki lok sanjh, a cultural group. through these fronts, the siraiki literati and various socialists came together on one platform, with the latter using them as vehicles for socialist agitation.13 eventually, some socialists came to relate to these groups beyond strategic terms and to see in siraiki nationalism elements that could be combined with marxism to further a universal politics of mazdur kisan raj. one of them was manzoor buhar, a (now deceased) peasant leader of the mkp at the time allah baksh first joined. with the support of the party, buhar led a large anti-police movement in his village in the mid-1970s, but after the mkp fractured in 1977, he began promoting siraiki nationalism. siraiki socialists like buhar became convinced that their universalist aspirations, previously promoted by the mkp, could only be actualized in a “siraiki homeland,” envisioned as a separate province called siraikistan. influenced by leading figures like taj muhammad langah, siraiki socialism fashioned itself as a movement for economic redistribution, not just political recognition (see also fraser 2000). it condemned the agricultural colonization of south punjab during the postcolonial period, as the government allotted land to various outsiders, including military officials and settlers from india (both punjabis and muhajirs). it also criticized the uneven development of south punjab vis-à-vis upper punjab, as the government extracted natural resources from the former while investing disproportionately in the latter.14 the movement positioned itself against what activists called the “punjabi-muhajir alliance” (langah 2012, 25) or takht-e-lahore (throne-of-lahore), a state of affairs whereby punjabis and muhajirs ultimately colluded to dominate and exploit the entire country, not just south punjab. siraiki socialists essentially connected nationalism with marxist theories of uneven development, arguing that only in confronting this alliance and establishing a siraiki homeland could they further the universal politics of mazdur kisan raj. but some communists in south punjab argued that siraiki nationalism contradicted these universalist aspirations—they flagged frictions—as it would reproduce existing landed inequalities. one of them was ghulam akbar baloch, allah baksh’s senior comrade and president of the mkp unit in dera ghazi khan in the 1970s. now an elderly man in his eighties, blind in one eye and boasting a thick, wavy mustache, akbar believed the siraiki movement would only benefit local landlords. “who do you think will be siraikistan’s chief minister?” he once asked me. “it’ll be a leghari or another jagirdar. they’re the ones who’ll get more power and wealth.” even though he acknowledged that south punjab was underdeveloped in comparison to upper punjab, akbar did not think a siraiki homeland would solve the problem. interestingly, what also stimulated his opposition to siraiki nationalism, his inability to see it as constitutive of a universalist politics, was what may have encouraged communists like allah baksh and rashid to engage with balochiyat. namely, he did not identify as siraiki, nor did he believe many in this part of south punjab were siraiki, even if they (like him) primarily spoke siraiki. “we’re baloch,” he told me. “it makes more sense for us to join the balochistan province than join any future siraiki province.”15 ultimately, he felt many siraiki leftists, including former comrades like buhar, had directed their universalist emancipatory ideals toward a project that would only betray them. akbar’s opposition to ethnonationalism drew on earlier debates within the mkp over “the national question” (qaumi sawal), debates that partially led to the party’s split in 1977. whereas non-punjabi mkp leaders, like the pashtun afzal bangash or the sindhi feroz ahmed, were more sympathetic to nationalist movements in the country, upper punjabi leaders, notably mkp president major ishaq muhammad, were far more critical. at meetings and public talks, major ishaq, as he was generally known, would insist that “old politicians would again come into power in different shapes” and that “slogans of provincialism and parochialism were being raised in the punjab only to safeguard the decadent feudalist-capitalist system” (special branch, punjab 1975). he also once debated the notable siraiki socialist and scholar aslam rasoolpuri.16 when the latter referred to people in the siraiki belt as “his people,” major ishaq took issue, responding “what do you mean your people?” some siraiki socialists, as well as certain pashtun and sindhi socialists, interpreted major ishaq’s lack of sympathy for ethnically based grievances as evincing his own punjabi chauvinism (leghari 1979, 221). but akbar remained unconvinced by these charges against major ishaq. he pointed to the recent ascendence of jagirdars in the siraiki movement as evidence that major ishaq was ultimately correct in his diagnosis of ethnonationalisms. akbar was implicitly referring to groups like the janubi punjab suba mahaz (jpsm, front for south punjab province), which, formed around 2018, was led by several elite politicians from south punjab, including many jagirdars. however, several siraiki socialists were themselves critical of this ascendance, and thus sought not just to connect siraiki nationalism to marxism but also to transform the former by redrawing the boundaries of the siraiki nation to exclude jagirdars. they believed that jagirdars merely exploited the popularity of siraikistan for their own electoral gain, having otherwise remained opposed or indifferent to the movement. commenting on the jagirdar-led jpsm, nukhbah langah claimed that it “was created without considering the aspirations of the indigenous population of siraiki wasaib and siraiki nationalists who understand the ground realities of the region” (birmani 2018). siraiki socialists also went further to suggest that south punjab’s jagirdars were as implicated as upper punjab’s elites in the uneven development of punjab, with both classes also maintaining comprador alliances with western elites. most jagirdars lived in upper punjab, in cities like lahore, or even abroad, in cities like vancouver or london, where they reinvested surplus accrued from south punjab. many siraiki socialists thus viewed the siraiki movement as a class struggle to abolish jagirdari, one conducted through the idiom of the nation. to them, their siraiki nationalism aimed to “emancipate the local peasants from absentee landlords who had kept the area backward” (jaffrelot 2015, 187). at sharif pitafi’s musha’ara, rashid introduced me to one such siraiki socialist, a member of the siraiki democratic party, who told me: “the nationalist struggle is also a class struggle, not only against the upper punjab exploiters but also against south punjab’s jagirdars.” by waging a universalist struggle against class hierarchies through the mediation of the nation, siraiki socialism mirrored other nationalisms. scholars of pakistan have recently argued that political actors in other nationalist movements in the country—from the recent pashtun tahafuz movement (ptm) in the khyber pakhtunkhwa province (mallick 2020) to the creation of pakistan itself (tirmizey 2022)—saw nationalism as a vehicle for a more universal emancipation. nationalists elsewhere in the global south similarly tied nation-building to “worldmaking” (getachew 2019). fanon (2004, 178), for instance, understood anticolonial nationhood as the first stage—one that subsumed the contradictions between subaltern classes to combat the larger contradiction between the colonizer-comprador and the colonized—in a multistep process directed ultimately toward a universalism he called a “new humanism.” fanon arrived at the universal through the mediation of the national—an “intricate dialectic-within-a-dialectic” (ciccariello-maher 2016, 78). building from fanon, amin argued that postcolonial countries needed to prioritize the nation by “delinking” from the global capitalist-imperialist economy: a “three-phase dialectical movement from the false universalism of capitalist eurocentrism to the affirmation of popular national development to the recomposition of a superior socialist universalism” (amin 2009, 212; see also amin 1990). much like these anticolonial activists, siraiki socialists believed nationalism could contribute to this movement toward the universal, especially if conjugated. by both connecting the siraiki nation to marxism and transforming its boundaries to exclude jagirdars, this conjugated siraiki nationalism, they believed, substantialized an otherwise abstract notion of mazdur kisan raj. it gave to this universalism a local, cultural resonance and thus a legitimatizing force. conclusion the political theorists adom getachew and karuna mantena (2021, 361) recently noted that scholarly discussions around decolonization often center on critique or deconstruction, rather than on “what arguably was the primary context and aspiration of anticolonial argument: an attempt to reconstruct viable political futures in the aftermath of european domination.” in this essay, i ethnographically explored one such reconstructive project, led by communist revolutionaries and directed toward the achievement of a universal subaltern sovereignty: a mazdur kisan raj. revolutionaries pursued this goal by ideationally and practically connecting and transforming (or conjugating) traditions variably viewed as particular—specifically marxism, balochiyat, and siraiki nationalism—toward what i termed a conjugated universalism. by both enrolling and transforming the particular into the universal, peasant revolutionaries not only enriched the universal with the particular, to paraphrase aimé césaire (2010, 152), but effectively put a strain on, even transcended, this conceptual distinction, one that has conventionally framed the study of universalism. while the mkp did not achieve its universal goal of mazdur kisan raj, it seems even more urgent and necessary today to insist on a universalist politics as an emancipatory horizon. writing in 1988, amin (2009, 177) argued that capitalism, in imposing itself (albeit unevenly) on the world through imperialism, created a “demand for universalism,” not only as an analytical endeavor but also as a political project. only in thinking and organizing on the very universalist registers that capitalism itself operates could the system be overturned. indeed, as the african political theorist ato sekyi-otu (2019, 14) has suggested, to reject universalism on the grounds that it is imperialist/capitalist/western is itself a concession to these forces, as it means participating in their own conceit that only they can be the universal’s purveyors. he goes on to show how various african traditions have also claimed the universal. today, additional dynamics—from superpower conflicts in our multi-polar world to the climate crisis and escalating jingoistic nationalisms—arguably add to the demand for universalism. even a subaltern scholar like dipesh chakrabarty (2009a), once a chief critic of universalism, has conceded that the climate crisis, with the shared sense of catastrophe it has elicited, now demands a universal thinking and practice (but without, he qualifies, hegelian teleology or the subsumption of particularities). perhaps today, then, more than needing “universalism for africa’s sake,” as sekyi-otu (2019, 12) put it, we need a universalism for the planet’s sake. while the mkp’s peasant revolutionaries show us how to reclaim the universal for an emancipatory politics, they also alert us to the historical limits of left universalisms, whose horizons did not – but now certainly should – extend beyond the human.17 abstract across anthropology, political theory, and history, scholars are recentering the role of universalisms in the radical political struggles of the global south. whereas some argue that these movements realized and even shaped enlightenment universalisms, other scholars maintain that they promoted alternative universalisms. in this essay, i explore how political actors craft universalist projects by combining and transforming—in short, conjugating—ideational elements across various traditions, european and otherwise, with the resultant “conjugated universalism” more than the sum of its constituent parts. i focus on peasant revolutionaries belonging to pakistan’s mazdoor kisan party (mkp), the country’s historically largest communist party, who conjugated across various traditions—including marxism, baloch tribal ethics, and siraiki nationalism—to substantialize and legitimize the otherwise abstract universalism of “worker-peasant rule” (mazdur kisan raj). this attention to conjugation centers peasants as worldly actors and destabilizes the universal/particular distinction, one that has conventionally framed the study of universalism. [universalism; internationalism; marxism; tribes; nationalism; peasants; pakistan] notes acknowledgments for facilitating research in south punjab, i want to give special thanks to rana asad, muhammad azeem, allah baksh baloch and his family, sibtain jafri, ahsan raza, zain ul abideen, and comrades in the kisan ikath. for their input into the arguments developed here, i thank kamran asdar ali, noaman ali, allah baksh baloch, stephen campbell, frank cody, chris krupa, tania li, darryl li, hadia akhtar khan, sarah khan, kristin plys, and the journal’s editors and reviewers. i also want to thank the attendees of various seminars in which i first presented this material, including at yale university, the university of michigan–ann arbor, nanyang technological university, and the university of wisconsin–madison. for other support, i thank the macmillan center and the program in agrarian studies at yale university (especially k. sivaramakrishnan, joy wang, and elizabeth wood), the wenner-gren foundation, and the international development research centre. 1. a related way to think about universalism is in terms of the global applicability of analytical concepts—a dimension i do not focus on here, though others have so (chibber 2012; chakrabarty 2009b). 2. because of this emphasis on both connection and transformation within certain relational contexts, conjugation departs from adjacent concepts like syncretism or articulation (hall 1980). the transformative inflection to conjugation is perhaps why philippe bourgois (1988) uses the term in his concept of conjugated oppression. see also lerche and shah 2018. 3. i specifically accessed the punjab police’s library of the special branch in lahore, which houses surveillance files from the 1800s to the present. part of the reason i was given access, i suspect, is that communist activity is, given the decline of the left, no longer a priority of state surveillance, as it once was in the 1960s and 1970s, a period of heightened communist activity and from which most of my archival material comes. 4. for scholarship on the cpp, see k. a. ali 2015, malik 2013, and toor 2011. 5. in the 1930s, for instance, a punjab-based communist party called the kirti kisan party launched an urdu weekly from lahore called mehnat kash (harshvardhan 2022; on communist periodicals during this period, see also a. raza 2020a). toilers, the translation of mehnat-kash, was itself a category used in the international communist movement, as exemplified in the name for the soviet union’s training school for international communist leaders: the communist university of the toilers of the east. 6. each tribe usually has only one recognized head chief, the tumandar, but there are many petty-chiefs, called sardars. usually, any male members of the chiefly clans, and even heads of non-chiefly clans, give themselves the title of sardar. 7. there were several reasons for this, including disagreements among the mkp leadership over the party’s relationship to ethnonationalism and over which rural class to prioritize organizing, the landless agricultural laborers or tenant farmers (n. g. ali 2019, 252–56). 8. indeed, as others argue (nassen smith 2022), certain postcolonial critiques of universality resembled martin heidegger’s critique of enlightenment universalism, one that arguably shaped his own fascist sympathies. 9. elsewhere, i explore how mkp figures engaged with islam in their universalist project (s. raza 2022). 10. women accused of illicit sexual relations, for instance, are labelled kali (dishonored) and then punished according to the kali qanun (honor codes). panchayats variably ruled that the women in question be sold into slavery, exchanged in marriage (wata-sata), and even murdered. 11. male mkp members in the 1970s similarly worried about the reputational costs of confronting patriarchy, a position that women activists in the party criticized strongly (ali and raza 2022). 12. in fact, allah baksh’s mother belonged to a punjabi jat caste (hanbi) that, after centuries of intermixing and intermarrying with local baloch tribes, now identified as baloch. see also fryer 1876, 18. 13. this per my interview with aslam javed, a progressive siraiki journalist who tragically died in 2018. 14. on south punjab’s underdevelopment, see ahmad 2022. 15. in this, he echoed movements like the baloch muta’ahida mahaz (baloch united front) that, in the 1970s, distributed pamphlets “demanding that d.g. khan district be included in the balochistan province at once” (special branch, punjab 1972). notable scholarship on siraiki nationalism (e.g., langah 2012) has not considered these contestations over the boundaries of the “siraiki nation,” especially in baloch-dominated south punjabi districts like dera ghazi khan. 16. allah baksh provided me with details of this encounter. 17. on how “left internationalism” has not sufficiently engaged with the nonhuman, see çubukçu forthcoming. references aftab, 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kasim ali 2022 “labour geography of the national question in times of decolonisation: sharecropper politics in western punjab, c. 1945–1953.” antipode 55, no. 1: 286–306. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12884 toor, saadia 2011 the state of islam: culture and cold war politics in pakistan. london: pluto press. trouillot, michel-rolph 2003 “north atlantic fictions: global transformations, 1492–1945.” in global transformations: anthropology and the modern world, 29–46. new york: palgrave macmillan. tsing, anna lowenhaupt 2005 friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 3, pp. 334-360, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.3.02 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 1–26, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.01 andrew j. green king’s college london https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0643-6182 it’s august 2022; i’m speaking to antonio,1 a musician in his sixties from mexico city, who now lives on the outskirts of the town of ajusco. we’re sitting outside his house, self-built, surrounded by trees that he planted and maintains. there’s a songbird—a zorzal, or thrush—sitting on the wooden roof, singing; antonio calls it woodstock. partway through our interview, we hear one neighbor walk outside and begin to rev up a chainsaw—likely preparing to cut down trees nearby. occasionally residents fell trees for personal use; logging is also carried out at a larger scale by organized commercial groups. at any rate, deforestation is a major problem locally: recent reports state that two hundred trees per day are being felled by illegal loggers (talamontes) in the ajusco zone (sánchez 2023). emergent auralities coalesce around deforestation in the town of ajusco, where people learn to live alongside illegal logging. during ethnographic research in the surrounding area of ajusco-chichinautzin, situated between the expanding metropolis of mexico city and the threatened forest around it, i have sought to understand the complex entanglements of sound, music, and deforestation. i argue that it is intuitive and useful both to listen to contexts of deforestation and to engage with the different ontologies of sound that deforestation, and on chainsaws and acoustic violence: sound and deforestation in ajusco-chichinautzin, mexico cultural anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9069-1452 cultural anthropology 40:1 2 attempts to stop it, may entail. adequately attending to such a context requires a social and multisensory listening practice that recognizes deforestation as simultaneously a social, economic, and sensory problem (cf. peterson 2021, 9–10; chao 2022). here, scholarship on sound as a “thick” event (eidsheim 2015), on adaptive forms of audition (daughtry 2015), and on the connections between music, sound, and violence (cusick 2014) helps us identify and support the strategies that people adopt in response to deforestation. there are three main reasons i wish to explore this specific entanglement. first, deforestation has a significant aural component. the sound of chainsaws is typically the first indicator of deforestation taking place, and if nearby, it is an unmissable one; resonating at 110db, chainsaws create “a visceral sound that seems to drive deeply into our bones” (gieser 2019, 50). since cutting down trees is highly restricted in ajusco-chichinautzin, especially following a 1947 prohibition on logging, the sound of chainsaws is experienced as illicit. loggers use mufflers and other technological means to dampen the sound of chainsaws, but these strategies tend not to work, and the workers’ inability to suppress this sound entirely has implications for their mode of organization: they work in remote locations, after dark, and deploy lookouts around the area being deforested (gonzález alvarado 2023). among residents of local towns such as santo tomás ajusco, the sound of chainsaws is associated with a complex set of affects— ruefulness, shame, anger, powerlessness, and threat—reflecting both opposition to clandestine logging and a reluctance to publicly criticize it. the presence of this sound also affords the possibility that deforestation might be stopped; and it is, further, vital for residents’ survival. residents of ajusco-chichinautzin develop “aesthetic knowing as skilled listening” in seeking to discern the aural complexities of chainsaws (gieser 2019, 51), learning to listen out “virtuosically” (daughtry 2015, 150–51) for chainsaws to avoid dangerous run-ins with clandestine loggers. second, sound and music feature prominently in the mediatization of deforestation in mexico. media coverage often uses the sound of chainsaws as a synecdoche for the problem of deforestation in general. one feature in the magazine proceso on deforestation in the state of veracruz, for instance, describes the “orchestra” of chainsaws that presages environmental devastation (zavaleta 2021). an accompanying video presents images of tree stumps and bare, recently deforested terrain alongside interviews with local residents and information about the government’s failure to control illegal logging; it is set to eerie, atonal music by the electroacoustic artist volcano radar, interspersed with prominent sound recordings of on chainsaws and acoustic violence 3 chainsaws.2 in ajusco-chichinautzin, sensationalist media coverage follows police raids on groups of talamontes. one such video, created by a journalist embedded in police raids against talamontes carried out in santo tomás ajusco, tells us about both the increasingly militarized police response to deforestation and the authorities’ eagerness to publicize this “crackdown on talamontes.” it opens with footage from the top of a police car, blue-and-red lights flashing (but sirens not wailing), accompanied by dramatic electronic music indicating danger and movement.3 another recent video opens, similarly, with a car journey to deforested areas in ajusco-chichinautzin, accompanied by foreboding cello music, and it concludes with footage of community forest guards approaching a group of talamontes after dark; the voiceover instructs us to “listen attentively” before we are played a recording of talamontes firing at the forest guards, “still with chainsaws active.”4 the third reason it appears worth engaging with deforestation as an aural phenomenon is that sound and listening are implicated in technological responses to deforestation, which detect and locate the sound of chainsaws. acoustic monitoring is already being used across the americas in response to other kinds of crimes. for instance, leonardo cardoso (2019) critically explores shotspotter, an acoustic monitoring system created to detect and facilitate rapid police response to gunshots, in two urban areas in brazil. in practice, the deployment of shotspotter depends on an intricate series of translations between technological and human actors, producing what cardoso (2019, 65) terms “translation gaps”: “the range of human and non-human ‘betrayals’ (or dissidences) that ended up destabilizing shotspotter’s performance in brazil and eventually undermining sst’s claim as a macro-translator of violent crime.” these are caused by factors including electricity blackouts; high levels of environmental noise, including sounds similar to gunshots such as firecrackers; and budget constraints. in a similar vein to shotspotter, claimed technological solutions to deforestation aim to audiolocate the sound of chainsaws, thus extending the practices of surveillance capitalism into forest space. the most high-profile of these solutions has been developed by the non-governmental organization rainforest connection, in conjunction with the company huawei. founded by silicon valley entrepreneur topher white, rainforest connection installs systems in forests, built from small solar panels and recycled, repurposed smartphones. placed in the canopies of trees and geolocated, the smartphones continuously record sound, and their recordings are processed in real time through an app also designed by the organization. by processing these sounds using artificial intelligence, the app cultural anthropology 40:1 4 is designed to identify and locate the sounds of chainsaws in real time and send alerts to local forest rangers, who may then rush to catch clandestine loggers in flagrante. rainforest connection claims that it has helped to “stop illegal logging and poaching operations in sumatra,”5 although the project appears financially costly and positive outcomes remain to be robustly demonstrated. a critical response to this project may center both on “translation gaps” in its implementation and the account of sound that it produces.6 as thorsten gieser (2019, 55–56) points out, when heard up close, the chainsaw’s sounds are varied and vital to its maintenance (for instance, a metallic rattling sound can indicate that the chain is too loose); since the chainsaw’s volume is damaging to the human ear, users must learn to hear these different indications of the machine’s health while also wearing ear protection. at a distance, it can be difficult to distinguish the sound of a chainsaw from that produced by other motors, such as those of automobiles, light aircraft, motorcycles, or grass trimmers. these sounds can be differentiated on the basis of pitch—although this requires the ability to judge distance, which is difficult for a mono-sensory app to learn—or by rhythm, since a chainsaw tends to operate for only a few seconds at once, but this again presents technical challenges. use of the rainforest connection app likely requires that forest guards spend more time in an office, performing the requisite “delicate translations . . . between human and non-human actors” (cardoso 2019, 53). yet since chainsaws are also used in legitimate forest management, forest guards must make contextually informed judgments about whether chainsaw sounds are illicit or permitted, which depend on their emplaced and embodied sensory knowledge of specific forests. by contrast, the technological production of sound as “instrumentalizable, containable, or objectifiable” (peterson 2021, 7), by isolating sound from other senses, is likely to remove from forest guards vital sources of sensory information (sight, smell, vibration, sense of time, sense of distance) that prove vital for effective listening, and which must in any case be re-inserted into the process of perception afterward (cf. rice 2015; helmreich 2016). antonio, above, also possessed and used a chainsaw; his intuition about his neighbor’s intention resulted from social knowledge and the observation of habit. all of this points toward my overall argument: that auralities are reconfigured in contexts of deforestation; and that this has implications for voice—who is able to speak and how (e.g., couldry 2010). acoustic monitoring for deforestation presumes a simplified social context, in which rangers are not corrupt; those carrying out illegal logging are not armed, and are able to subsist by other means; on chainsaws and acoustic violence 5 rangers have the resources and inclination to stop illegal logging; and the forest already has mobile phone signal. it also implicates sound within a restricted disciplinary logic in which “we” (the authorities and forest guards) must use information (sound) to stop crime (deforestation) (see hsieh 2021, 53–55). the limitations of this disciplinary logic have been evident since its application to the region in the early 2000s, which, as part of a wider turn toward “punitive politics” in mexico city (müller 2016), had the unintended consequence of encouraging more loggers to carry firearms. on the other hand, effective responses to deforestation tend to entail open-ended, socially oriented, and embodied practices of listening and audition. i seek, here, to attend to deforestation as a complex problem irreducible to moralistic narratives about “bad people destroying the forest”; to hear the embodied listening strategies developed by loggers, forest guards, and those living and surviving amid environmental loss; and listen to the complex legacies of dispossession that mark places such as ajusco-chichinautzin. acoustic violence and the environment “it’s horrible when you hear it,” gisela, a resident of san miguel ajusco in her thirties, told me as she described an encounter with clandestine loggers while on a nighttime walk through the forest. on this occasion, the acoustic preceded the haptic: first it was “all quiet, and then suddenly, you hear the noise”— here she made a trtrtrtr sound, to imitate a chainsaw. then, “you start to feel that the ground is vibrating. and after a while paaaakhh!!” she said, making the sound of a tree falling to the forest floor. gisela used an analogy with the explosion of a firework to capture the sense of tension, expectation, and destruction of these sounds and sensations: it’s not like [the tree] falls immediately, right? but it’s a sound you expect—it’s like the rocket when there’s a tssssss sound. because you wait just—it’s like the rocket that passes by, tsssss, and you know that at a certain moment it’s going to explode. and [with the tree] you wait for the paaakhh to fall. (interview, gisela, resident of san miguel ajusco, thirties, september 2023) what iterations of “acoustic violence” emerge through engagement with deforestation in ajusco-chichinautzin? music scholars have paid increasing attention to the entanglement of music and sound with war, torture, and trauma (cusick 2014; daughtry 2014, 2015), amid a wider questioning of the notion of music as cultural anthropology 40:1 6 a panacea for conflict, violence, and social division (e.g., johnson and cloonan 2009). equally, contexts of environmental loss and damage may also suggest longer-run, less immediate, and less dramatic accounts of acoustic violence, such as marina peterson’s (2021) exploration of unwanted sound as both “annoyance” and “noise pollution.” j. martin daughtry (2020) aims to connect the scholarship on acoustic violence to contexts of environmental violence, an endeavor this article looks to extend. following rob nixon (2011), daughtry suggests that environmental violence ought to be understood as a temporally destabilized “slow violence” detached from specific, dramatic acts. this presents problems for music and sound scholarship, daughtry (2020, 6, 20) ultimately suggests, given the “human-sized” nature of most music, and the inadequacy of music as an agent of ideological change during an environmental crisis in which “there isn’t enough time for slow violence to be undone by slow enlightenment.” gisela’s account above suggests two things about environmental acoustic violence. first, it “[plays] out across a range of temporal scales” (nixon 2011, 2): the slow, insistent sonorities of environmental damage, which are often both hidden and deliberately avoided; the anticipation of consequences; the sudden, recognizable violence of arboreal, or ecosystem, collapse; the haunting silences of absent ecosystems. deforestation encounters crisis on multiple scales, reaching from incremental planetary climate change to killings of land defenders. second, the acoustic component of slow environmental violence is not necessarily subtle, imperceptible, or immaterial. it, too, shakes the ground and makes bodies vibrate. the relative subtlety of the sonorities of environmental devastation depends (literally) on our positionality, and here our choices as researchers—especially whether, how, and where to engage with land defenders and communities bearing the brunt of environmental damage—matter for the ways that climate change comes to sound to us. ecomusicologists’ concern with the ideational, discursive, and critical is often staged at a remove from the experiences and priorities of the people actually living through environmental devastation, who may care less about how we talk about “nature” and “culture” than their ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, not die in forest fires, and avoid being shot by clandestine loggers. two iterations of acoustic violence overlap throughout this article’s case studies. first, acoustic violence is exerted against people in ajusco who live surrounded by the activities of clandestine loggers. this is expressed through affects of danger, fear, and helplessness that accumulate around the sound of chainsaws. second, deforestation and responses to it have provoked a less explicit form of on chainsaws and acoustic violence 7 acoustic violence in which the inherited cultural richness of forms of acoustically beingand becoming-with forest contexts becomes marginalized, diminished, or lost. this occurs as a result of the loss of habitat itself, lost habitats—and the attendant loss of sonorities; the auralities of disciplinary policing, which can encroach on a diversity of listening practices in what is referred to here as the ajusco “forestscape”; and the ongoing privatization of land in the zone, which makes it harder for people from the town to physically access forest space. these forms of environmental acoustic violence are linked: for instance, as already indicated, the fact that clandestine loggers now carry firearms at least in part constitutes an unintended consequence of a disciplinary approach to policing. of the 55 participants in this study, most are residents of or frequent visitors to the ajusco-chichinautzin region. given that this article is an outcome of a study relating to music, sound, and deforestation, roughly half are either musicians or engaged in some kind of musical activity; a smaller number work or volunteer as forest guards. for reasons of safety, i chose to avoid conducting research directly with talamontes. research took place in two towns: ajusco (a “town made of two towns,” the conjoined santo tomás ajusco and san miguel ajusco); and san nicolás totolapan, another “originary town” that has chosen to convert its historic territory into a site for ecotourism. notably, both towns experience a pervasive social division between so-called originarios, “originary” people connected to the local area by family and/or birth, and avecindados, generally denoting those who have settled there later in life.7 i also conducted research in the forests around these towns, through hikes and reforestation days. both during these activities and in a series of semi-structured interviews, i inquired about how my participants had learned to interact with the soundscapes around them. for many respondents, deforestation proved a sensitive topic, which could only be broached after establishing a high degree of rapport and trust. this reflects a dangerous situation for land and forest defenders across mexico, who are subject to both state repression (amnesty international 2023) and a pattern of assassinations that has led the country to be dubbed the world’s “deadliest place for land defenders” (associated press 2022). equally, within towns such as ajusco in which a small number of originarios make their living from illegal logging, there exists a more banal sense of silence around the practice, rooted in the likelihood that respondents were personally related to at least some talamontes. as i will explore in more detail below, respondents also reacted to questions about the aural worlds of deforestation with despondence and helplessness. here we may reformulate the anthropocentric thought experiment “does a tree cultural anthropology 40:1 8 fall in the forest if nobody is around to hear it?” at varying removes from its original intent. where nina sun eidsheim (2015, 1) reworks this thought experiment to draw attention to the thick multisensory experience in which sound is embedded—storm clouds drawing over the falling tree; birds flying away; the vibrations and the dust thrown up from the impact of the tree on the ground— the conflictive contexts of environmental breakdown suggest other questions. how can we talk about the sound of a tree being felled, if those who can hear it have no power to stop it? what are the social processes through which this sound becomes unsayable, through which it becomes impossible to name the— human—originators of this sound? i explore these questions in what follows. identities, places, and illicit economies the research carried out for this article centers on two sites in the zone located roughly six kilometers apart: parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan and the town of ajusco. central to both sites are historic originario (originary) towns that have existed since just before to the colonial period. in both cases, these towns’ long history is central to their claims on the stretches of land surrounding them. the town of ajusco, for instance, has preserved a canvas containing a map of the town and the surrounding area, which is dated to 1609 (reyes 1981, 137; brito guadarrama 2006). there are also titles signed by family members whose descendants still live in the town, which claim rights over an expanse of land extending around the town. the population of originarios of ajusco claim ownership of this land. the town of ajusco comprises santo tomás ajusco and the neighboring town of san miguel ajusco, distinguished by adherence to two different catholic churches and by two areas of communal land governed by a unified comisaria (commissariat). some jokingly narrate this difference through a purported contrast in ethnicity—the originario inhabitants of santo tomás ajusco are said to be the descendants of tepanecs, and those from san miguel are said to be descendants of mexicas. the documents concerning the settlement from the colonial era describe simply a settlement titled “axochco” or “axusco,” which had been founded by tepanecs in the fourteenth century (percheron 2008). in this article, i use the phrase “the town of ajusco” to refer to this urban settlement; “the ajusco zone” to denote the broader territory to which the originarios of this town lay claim; and “ajusco-chichinautzin” to refer to a broader geographical region including the ajusco mountain range. on chainsaws and acoustic violence 9 in contexts across mexico, such as the celebrated case of cherán, michoacán, autonomous indigenous governance has been noted to support effective forest management (wolfesberger 2019); and across mexico, originario and indigenous identities are strongly associated with the preservation of natural habitats (calvillo 2023). yet since the land claimed by the originario population of ajusco is unproductive for agriculture, logging has long been a primary source of economic survival. notably, ajusco’s colonial-era titles claim for its originario population the right to “conduct logging in the mountains which are [its] exclusive property” (brito guadarrama 2006, 23). the local cultural affinity with the forest and its resources is reflected in a series of listening practices and capabilities. there was agreement among my respondents that elder originarios tended to have a highly attuned ear for the intricate details of the forest soundscape, often to the astonishment of comparative newcomers. one avecindado from ajusco described to me how, during one mountain walk with an originario friend, he tells me, “there are some people coming,” and he thinks, and says, “there must be like two or three of them.” you couldn’t see anyone! i said to myself, who knows, this guy. [laughs] a few minutes down the same path we met three people walking the other way. i mean—such a capacity for listening . . . he saw and heard things that i didn’t see or hear. several related listening traditions in the zone held the song of various (currently or formerly) endemic birds to indicate that it was about to rain. some listened for the song of the gallina de monte (dendrortyx macroura); others, for that of the golondrina pechigrís (progne chalybea); some listened for indications that it would rain in the overall vocal activity of birds. one respondent described the belief that the song of the orange-chested picogordo tigrillo (pheucticus melanocephalus) summons precipitation during the rainy season: “they call the rain . . . . that’s what the ancestors always said, ‘it’s going to rain, they’re calling the rain.’ they always knew” (interview, valentina, originaria from san nicolás totolapan, sixties, october 2023). finally, many originarios believed that unexplained sights and noises at night were caused by spiritual entities, such as duendes (elves) and brujas (witches). the activities of these entities disaggregated forest space by leaving what one respondent felt as malas vibras—bad vibrations—in certain areas (interview, arturo, originario from san nicolás totolapan, fifties, october cultural anthropology 40:1 10 2023). at the same time, due to factors such as habitat loss, rare birds avoiding the flow of tourists to the region, and urban expansion, many believed that these listening traditions were being lost. equally, some folk beliefs are directly related to the tradition of logging, as in the case of a folk tale called la leyenda del duende hachero (the legend of the axe-wielding elf), told among older generations of loggers across the zone: when loggers are in the mountains, they often spend the night in the forest, they sleep there. and at night they make their bonfires. and they fall asleep. and they have to keep a certain awareness, because they say that the duende hachero is going to go out into the forest, and then he goes, they are going to hear an axe striking a tree. if they manage to identify where the sounds came from, which the duende hachero gave them, the next day they can locate the trees that are easier to work with. and they see it as a gift from this elf to the loggers. (interview, oriol, avecindado from santo tomás ajusco, fifties, october 2023) this legend speaks, then, about the importance of perceptive listening for those seeking to negotiate and benefit from the forestscapes around them. the legend of the axe-wielding elf reflects a bygone era, in which logging was considered both less morally outrageous and less dangerous than today. by contrast, in the present, the population of ajusco is often singled out for criticism for carrying out and facilitating illegal logging. yet the contemporary problem with deforestation has its roots in changing local livelihoods. for most of the twentieth century, livelihoods in the town were dependent on a nearby paper mill called loreto y peña pobre; when this paper mill closed in 1992, some took to clandestine logging to make ends meet. deforestation ought also to be understood in the context of a long history of dispossession of the town of ajusco’s communal lands under both colonial and post-independence governments. starting in the twentieth century, acts of dispossession—including the 1936 establishment of a natural reserve, which in effect expropriated the majority of the land belonging to the town—were carried out on ecological grounds, informed by the belief that originario communities were “a constant threat to [natural] equilibrium, [and] practiced excessive and uncontrolled logging” (percheron 2008, 222–23). the creation of this natural reserve on the town’s land also meant to encourage the development of ajusco-chichinautzin as a site for tourism and hiking. on chainsaws and acoustic violence 11 deforestation also stokes tensions within and between communities. avecindados often blame originarios for deforestation, and this idea dovetails with broader resentment about both their exclusion from local politics and decision-making. in turn, originarios allege that avecindados—a group jokingly labeled by one avecindado respondent as caras pálidas (palefaces) in recognition of the sublimated racial politics of the zone—harbor discriminatory attitudes toward them. furthermore, neighboring communities such as san nicolás totolapan, to the south of ajusco, occasionally blame residents of ajusco for deforestation on their territory. the natural park studied here, parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan, was formed from the ejido territory belonging to the originary population of the town in 1998,8 following the constitutional reforms of 1992, which liberalized the laws around the use and sale of communal ejido territory. san nicolás totolapan has taken a different economic path to that of ajusco, successfully converting converted ejido land into a sustainable business dependent on tourism and the experience of the park as a site for biodiversity and rich forest. this involved a mass program of tree-planting on this site in the 1990s, and continuous tree-planting until the present day. it has also implied the creation of infrastructure to facilitate tourism, and the implementation of a series of practices to facilitate a particular kind of tourist experience. in recent years, amid crackdowns, those carrying out illegal logging have consolidated into organized criminal groups, establishing a black-market economy for timber (ortiz 2022).9 loggers can expect, according to one estimate, six to seven thousand pesos (about $380 usd) for a truck haul of three and a half tons of timber (miranda 2023b). logging without a permit can lead to significant prison time;10 long punishable by up to ten years in prison, in 2023 legislation was introduced to raise the maximum sentence for illegal logging in mexico city to twenty years (cuenca 2023).11 then city mayor claudia sheinbaum, now the president of mexico, claimed in 2022 that due to an increased number of police patrols and raids, deforestation in ajusco-chichinautzin had decreased (escalona 2022). if this claim is correct, it may also reflect changes in strategy: since local police are suspected of corruption, police raids are now carried out by the militarized national guard and the federal police; and police now focus less on catching loggers in the act, and more on raiding the workshops, generally located in towns, where loggers process the timber. in places where there is an especially entrenched pattern of violence by talamontes against community forest defenders, such as san miguel topilejo, some local residents have also started to call for the intervention of the army. the progressive intensification of cultural anthropology 40:1 12 anti-deforestation policing has accompanied an increasing professionalization of illegal logging on the part of local residents. a police raid on a logging operation in 2022 captured, as well as timber, escuadría [that is, material to form structures] made of pine (joists, falsework platforms and crossbeams), 3 sawing towers, 3 push carts, 5 electric motors, 20 band saws, 3 circular bench saws, 2 pickup trucks with a 4.473m³ roll of fir and escuadría of the same wood.12 it is an important detail that electric motors—costlier but quieter—appear in this inventory. in what follows, i explore two case studies, one focused on the town of ajusco, the other on san nicolás totolapan. each, i argue, points toward transformations in how those inhabiting the region come to engage with sound. sound and raids: the town of ajusco in recent years ajusco-chichinautzin has witnessed repeated clashes between community forest guards and organized criminal groups, which have left several killed and wounded. as in the accounts below, both from journalists embedded with community forest guards in san miguel topilejo, a few miles east of the town of ajusco, press coverage of these clashes often prominently feature the sound of chainsaws: we stopped for a moment in the middle of the forest. the silence is overwhelming. an engine [i.e., a chainsaw] is heard among the trill of birds. “they are loggers, they are here,” says the youngest of the brigade. the brigade’s members all become alert. they clasp their machetes, and look at each other. “we have to move, it’s dangerous, because they’re armed,” replies the head of the brigade. we get out of the trucks. we move forward, stealthily. the chainsaws can still be heard. the risk of finding them is ever-present: nobody is prepared for a confrontation. (ruiz 2022) it was noon, they heard the sound of a chainsaw, so the workers noticed the presence of loggers; at that point they started firing at us, fortunately no one was injured, but we had to run away from there; we asked for the support of the national guard to be able to leave the area. (bravo 2023) evident from both these accounts is how the balance of power affects the signification of the sound of chainsaws; and more broadly, how each “configuration of on chainsaws and acoustic violence 13 hearing and sounding implies people, power, and placement” (sterne 2015, 72). where in other contexts (see below) the sound of chainsaws may prompt meaningful action to stop logging, in a situation such as this one, where forest guards’ sole option is to flee, the sound is likely to provoke only fear, helplessness, and possibly trauma. as seen above, the increasingly proactive response on the part of the authorities has accompanied a disposition to publicize police raids, especially on the town of ajusco; footage from these raids occasionally tells stories about sound. one image, from a video of a police raid on illegal loggers in the town of ajusco, shows a large speaker on top of a pile of timber. while it might stand to reason that loud music might be played to drown out the sound of cutting wood—similar to the way that loggers hide timber and equipment under piles of sawdust (miranda 2023a)—conversations with respondents suggest, instead, that loggers play music to create an enjoyable atmosphere for work. this use of music carries the accompanying message that the work of clandestine logging is no different than any other kind of manual labor. in this case, then, music “renders [environmental] violence public and diffuse” (daughtry 2014, 44), communicating a sense of impunity to potential informants nearby, on whose information police raids often depend. raids also involve new surveillance technologies. just as loggers are frequently noted to use drones, so too the police have started to use drones to locate loggers’ workshops prior to raids. as one feature states, they do this “carefully in the early morning” before loggers can “shoot at them and knock them down” (cosme 2022). finally, raids rely on silence as police quietly approach their target to maintain a sense of surprise. deployed within a wider set of tactics to catch talamontes, this silence contrasts with the fearful silence kept by the community forest guards mentioned earlier to evade loggers. media coverage of police raids also presents a simplified account of social cohesion around talamontes—thus invoking wider links between efforts to regulate sound and the formation of publics (peterson 2021, 65–68; hsieh 2021). one video includes an interview with a police officer just after a raid in the town of ajusco: let’s say that the town unites, among them they know that many of these activities are illicit, and when the arrest or arrest of a probable perpetrator is achieved, they usually ring town bells or make calls for people to unite and they can release the detainee.13 cultural anthropology 40:1 14 it is true that arrests against talamontes are usually resisted by some people, although in the present these number very few—this video shows a group of four or five—in comparison to larger-scale protests and roadblocks carried out by residents of the town in the early 2000s. the fear that loggers would ring town bells to gather “the townspeople” to resist a police raid is not unfounded: among other sound signals (cf. carbajal lópez 2013), church bells are traditionally used to assemble the people of the town in response to emergencies. indeed, during a 2023 police operation to destroy a construction allegedly built by originarios on natural reserve land, some reportedly “threatened to sound the town bells to attract more people and burn the [police] vehicles” (bolaños sánchez 2023). yet as a number of conversations have indicated, the above police officer misreads the status of this call. one originario clarified that church bells would be inappropriate to stop police anti-logging raids, since the people of the town are against cutting down the trees, the forest. they wouldn’t call [with church bells] for that. they only call to defend the common territory. limits, boundaries. “the government is coming to expropriate some land,” “the government is coming to steal water.” (interview, moisés, originario from san miguel ajusco, fifties, october 2023) at stake here is the nature of the local, sonically interpellated “public.” in portraying an entire community as complicit in environmental crimes, the police officer above hears the ringing of church bells as constitutive of an imagined anti-environmental counterpublic, in turn suggesting ideas about the sonic as subversive of modernist, logocentric orders of governance (e.g., novak 2015, 129–31). yet the notion that the entire town is united in favor of logging (especially to the extent that a police raid on a clandestine workshop would be considered a “town emergency”) is not accurate. this viewpoint—common in the online discussion about clandestine logging, in which the residents of the town of ajusco are often scapegoated—jars with the ways that these residents themselves experience the sounds of environmental loss. many conversations with both avecindado and originario residents of the town indicated that the auditory discomfort chainsaws provoke is heightened by the apparent impossibility of stopping their sound. many studies show that even ambient sounds considered innocuous do psychological harm if we are denied control over whether we hear them (see daughtry 2015; windsor 2019). conversations also indicated that local residents frequently “tuned out” the sound on chainsaws and acoustic violence 15 of chainsaws (daughtry 2015, 33)—a common response to aural stimuli over which people have little control. ecologically aware residents tend to describe their reactions to this sound as coraje (anger), but also impotencia (helplessness). take this exchange with two originary residents of ajusco: alicia: in some places where there are clandestine workshops, you can hear how they work the wood. if you listen. and on the hill, then sometimes on some routes, you can hear the chainsaws, and when the trees fall, the trucks, you can hear them. i: how would you react when you hear that? celia: it’s horrible. ugly. alicia: helplessness. yes. helplessness . . . they are very organized groups and they are very well protected, they have weapons. it is impossible to get close. chainsaws primed my respondents for “survival mode”; most avoid the sound of chainsaws, even to the extent of—while on forest walks—turning around and walking back in the direction from which they came. one originario member of ajusco simplified their reaction to the sound of chainsaws to the word “run,” while expressing concern that the sound itself would damage plant and animal life: “i don’t know what impact hearing the noise of the chainsaw will have on a bird. and in a plant. . . . the noise of a chainsaw, it’s an attack on the environment” (interview, moisés, originario from san miguel ajusco, fifties, june 2022). another respondent described frequent encounters with talamontes on forest walks: i: what does the sound of chainsaws provoke in you? omar: chainsaws . . . well, frustration and anger. . . . it is a feeling of insecurity that you feel when you see that. . . . all we do is just [say] “good afternoon,” “good afternoon.” and then we carry on walking. a complex kind of public thus emerges in this landscape in response to an unwanted sound. michael birenbaum quintero’s (2019) argument that global south cultural anthropology 40:1 16 soundings eschew habermasian, liberal conceptions of the public sphere is of clear relevance in this setting. what peterson (2021, 65) refers to as a “public ear”—“an average, general mode of hearing and experiencing noise”—can be reiterated here as an “auditory infra-public” in which a shared listening practice is experienced as intimate and secretive. presumptions of community support for talamontes, then, fail to recognize how the acoustic violence of deforestation is exerted against residents of ajusco, and misreads the complex publics that emerge in response. in the next section, however, i turn to a nearby context in which the sound of chainsaws provokes meaningful action. forest protection and ecotourism: parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan there’s a user-generated video on the facebook page of parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan, uploaded by a visitor. it is filmed from a park lookout, from which mexico city can be seen. showing us the capital, bathed in smog, the visitor emphasizes the value of visiting the park so as to “clean out our lungs.” then, suddenly interrupted by shouts from below, the visitor tells us not to worry: these are boy scouts. “i don’t think they’re killing anybody,” she tells us. it’s a throwaway comment, but it nonetheless indicates how this site for ecotourism depends on a perception of safety that intertwines in complex ways with experiences of this parque ejidal as “tranquil,” free of sonic disturbances. indeed, groups of scouts from mexico city have long visited ajusco-chichinautzin, but amid rising insecurity, their visits to this zone have been increasingly limited to comparatively enclosed and surveilled spaces such as this park. isolating the green space of parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan from the conflictive realities surrounding it constitutes a challenge. most of the park’s visitors come from urban mexico city; the value of the park, for these visitors, often mirrors the defects of (noisy, polluted, busy, unsafe) urban life.14 the park advertises itself to various audiences on social media, implicating music in various ways: video footage of people mountain biking in the park, for instance, is set to upbeat motivational rap and metal; while footage of the landscape is accompanied by a more relaxed pastoral acoustic pop piece featuring a wooden flute, presenting a material resonance between this forestscape and the music used to represent it. perhaps most important, the park advertises itself as a “site 100 percent free from stress”; and to campers, it foregrounds the fact that the camping zone within the park enjoys twenty-four-hour security. on chainsaws and acoustic violence 17 originarios from san nicolás totolapan who work in the park commonly believe that the forestscape is populated by mystical creatures such as brujas and duendes. these creatures often make strange or inexplicable noises during the night, and can imitate the calls of birds and other animals. territory creation within the forest often reflects this modality of listening: some full-time workers in the park described to me how they repelled mystical creatures from their sleeping area by placing crosses at points around it,15 and some mentioned the possibility that these creatures might be “pacified” by playing calming classical music.16 the park’s self-presentation, however, emphasizes a contrasting modality of listening. we are invited to listen for well-being; for the “plenitude most commonly associated with contemplative techniques of quietness as a means to bring about a transformation of the self ” (ochoa gautier 2015, 183). this modality is shared by many who work and live in the parque ejidal, who typically associate low levels of noise with safety and psychological health. while most park workers live nearby, a minority stay in the forest 24/7, only leaving to go shopping or visit the doctor. many come from originario families, but another subset of workers, who moved from urban mexico city to work in the parque ejidal, have experienced marked sensory change. one, roberto, grew up in northeast mexico city but married an originaria from san nicolás totolapan and accepted work taking care of the onsite camping and cabins areas. he gave me a rich description of the kinds of sounds he had learned to listen out for: the hisses of pythons and the mews of mountain cats, which sounded “as if they were children.” roberto found spiritual peace in the park, escaping the constant noise of the capital: you go to the city, you go on public transport or drive or walk, and you look to your right and you see someone in a bad mood. you look to your left and see a couple fighting. you look in front of you and you see someone on public transport with his sad “going-to-work” face. so all that is filled with stress and tension, because it contaminates you. (interview, roberto, park worker from mexico city, thirties, july 2022) working and living in the park facilitated healing from such “contamination,” since “here in the forest you practically do not hear anything at all, neither the smog nor the cars . . . you’re at peace with yourself ” (interview, roberto, july 2022). cultural anthropology 40:1 18 listening for well-being, however, is encroached on by the sound of clandestine loggers, entering the park from neighboring communities. park workers hear chainsaws in the early hours of the morning and during nighttime, generally at the edges of the park, bordering terrain belonging to other towns. removing the characteristic whine of chainsaws from the soundscape simultaneously protects the forest and the tourist experience. scholars have often highlighted the relationality of hearing (e.g., eidsheim 2015, 179–81); park workers’ hearing of chainsaws is dependent on their being embedded in the park and already aware of the significance of this sound. this sound assumes presence within the intellectual architecture through which illegal logging is identified as an environmental concern and a source of danger. equally, visitors from elsewhere in mexico or abroad may not hear the sound of chainsaws at all. for example, one visitor from the united states told me not only that they did not register this sound but also that they would not have noticed it if it had been present. the non-presence of the sound of chainsaws for this visitor was related to a lack of awareness of the association between logging and violence. in turn, sound is implicated in the emergent practices developed by guardabosques (forest guards) to stop deforestation. forest guards are sent around the park’s borders to listen out for chainsaws. the more detailed knowledge a forest guard has of the park, the easier it will be for them to locate this sound; but since there are many legitimate uses for chainsaws, prior spatial knowledge about the areas of the park that talamontes tend to visit is also indispensable for judging whether a specific chainsaw sound is illicit or legitimate. this form of audition is both embodied and requires the auditor to be invested in a particular set of values and goals (cf. chao 2022, 61–62). forest guards then approach this sound— preferably on foot— to verify its source without alerting the loggers. one forest guard and ejidatario in the park experienced this as a moment of acute anxiety: “you must go with every caution. and so, yes, the moment feels very tense. . . . the sound of the chainsaw is unmistakable. it makes a whole lot of noise. . . . you sense that sound from a distance” (interview, arturo, originario from san nicolás totolapan, fifties, september 2023). on hearing chainsaws and identifying this sound’s source as illegal logging, forest guards relay information about the sound’s location to the director of the park, so that they can call the national guard and the police. communicating with the park director nonetheless proves complex. if there is mobile phone signal or wireless internet coverage, forest guards inform the director via mobile phone or an encrypted messaging app; if not, they use the walkie-talkie handheld on chainsaws and acoustic violence 19 radio system accessible to all park workers. since loggers have often managed to access this system, park workers may use a series of periodically changing cryptic messages to indicate that talamontes have been detected. this is still far from ideal, given the likelihood that a small number of park workers receive bribes from talamontes to inform them of police raids in advance. the director then contacts the police and national guard, who enter the park quietly to surprise the loggers. on those occasions when the police have successfully caught loggers in flagrante, it is because both forest guards and the police have approached loggers on foot, stealthily (interview, arturo, originario from san nicolás totolapan, fifties, september 2023). two things may be said about these tactics against illegal logging: first, that while sound gives the most immediate indication of deforestation, detecting and stopping talamontes requires park workers to employ diverse “arts of noticing” (tsing 2015, 17–25); and second, that these tactics are predicated on the expansion of communications infrastructure into the park. park workers informed me that in the first few years that the park had opened to the public, forest guards had to travel on foot or horseback to report on the activities of talamontes (interview, arturo, september 2023). as well as helping to stop loggers, however, internet connections provide these workers with a greater ability to break up the sonic monotony of day-to-day life in the park, heard at non-peak hours in the form of popular music streamed from online platforms—cumbia, salsa, banda. park workers often listen to music during the day, both through headphones and portable speakers. they also hold parties on this site, one of which i was invited to attend; it ended suddenly at 10 pm to comply with the park’s rules. this abrupt ending brought attention to the interventions which, intentionally and indirectly, circumscribe visitors’ experience of the soundscape. the camping and cabins areas are surrounded by eight-foot-high fencing, and the park maintains a set of rules around noise pollution. its general rules ask visitors to “allow the sounds of nature to thrive—keep noise levels to a minimum.” in the cabins area, specifically, visitors are not permitted after 10 pm to use “music speakers at high volume, or any equipment generating noise that might disturb other visitors.” the camping area operates according to similar rules, although here park workers are more likely to show flexibility, since groups that visit to camp often want to drink, party, and make noise. the park’s noise regulations are justified as a common sense means to ensure people get along, and as a way to protect wildlife. another set of rules, in turn, indirectly intervenes in visitors’ acoustic experience: visitors are subject to a curfew, in from about 7 pm or cultural anthropology 40:1 20 8 pm, justified on safety grounds. this curfew mirrors the times of deforestation: visitors are allowed to wander freely in the park during the day, but later on—at the time that when loggers tend to operate—they are kept in an enclosed space far from the sites in which this tends to occur. visitors’ experience of parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan as an island of tranquillity and security, then, is achieved in part through spatial labor.17 forest guards’ attempts to stop deforestation at the source involve an emergent set of adaptive sound practices; but park workers also engage in acts that circumscribe the tourist experience spatially and acoustically. these practices implicate sound as complex social event, involving sociality among park workers; the image and experience of the park, which form the effective commodity that visitors purchase; the expansion of communication infrastructure within the park; and the ways that this variously complicates and complements workers’ experience of this soundscape. conclusion starting with the notion of deforestation as a thick aural event, in this article i have sought to show how contexts of chronic deforestation and activities to stop it can lead to the refiguring of auralities and listening practices. in doing so, i apply the concept of acoustic violence to the slow—and multi-temporal—violence of environmental loss. central to this argument is the whine of chainsaws, experienced by many in the area of study as synonymous with danger; a sign of helplessness. yet since the sound of chainsaws simultaneously signals the power of loggers and undermines it—especially in relation to the authorities—we may conclude that this sound is radically contingent: the article’s case studies show how the “violent” effects of “acoustic violence” depend on broader patterns of violence and domination. a slower and less perceptible sense of acoustic violence is also at play here, which relates to the modalities through which people hear. walking with marind people in south papua, sophie chao (2022, 44, 61) assembles the “sounds of death” associated with deforestation—“gnawing chainsaws, the crackle of illegal burning, [the] rumble of overloaded trucks,” and the “most deafening sound of all,” silence—together with the relational, interspecies “sounds of life” that “together produced the landscape as a dynamic, multisensory realm.” hearing deforestation in ajusco-chichinautzin does require attention to the listening practices of police and forest guards, which form part of wider tactics to combat on chainsaws and acoustic violence 21 deforestation; but it also demands attending to how people in this zone hear the sounds of life, through culturally transmitted listening practices: listening for birdsong to predict the weather, or listening for people approaching from great distances, or listening out for nocturnal spiritual entities. where gieser (2019, 56) describes how the use of a chainsaw to fell trees renders the surrounding soundscape “more or less inaudible and irrelevant to the task at hand,” i want to suggest that in ajusco-chichinautzin this “rendering inaudible” occurs not only in a direct phenomenological sense but also in a wider cultural sense, which is decentered form the act of tree felling, and which implicates not only talamontes but a diverse group of local actors. both deforestation, and disciplinary responses seeking to eradicate it are involved in a wider process through which, in focusing on the violent sound of chainsaws, local acoustemologies and listening practices become simplified, instrumentalized, and marginalized. scholarly attention to sound and listening in such a context can reproduce this process, as well as challenge it. in listening to deforestation, environmentally engaged scholars of sound and music must also find ways of hearing for the histories of dispossession, enclosure, and encroachment concealed and justified by deforestation. this involves listening for the processes through which people’s experiences become unsayable; attending to the systemic exclusion, from media coverage of logging, of the division of forest ecosystems in ajusco-chichinautzin into playgrounds and estates for the wealthier classes. in the end, this requires hearing how environmental acoustic violence exceeds sound; how its resonances and affects spill over into wider crises of voice. abstract this article explores distinct practices of sounding and listening that have emerged in a context of severe deforestation in ajusco-chichinautzin, a region south of mexico city. it applies the concept of acoustic violence to this setting, as part of wider attempts to build constructive responses to climate breakdown through sound and music scholarship. as the first indication of occurring logging, the sound of chainsaws proves vital in attempts by forest guards and police to detect and halt deforestation. equally, attentiveness to acoustic violence allows us to cut through sensationalist media presentations of the problem of deforestation, to perceive how local populations— often blamed for complicity with loggers—are in fact direct victims of environmental loss. the concept of acoustic violence can also illuminate how, in a context not just of environmental loss but of dispossession, modalities of listening may become simplified, instrumentalized, or lost. [acoustic violence; sound; ecomusicology; mexico; deforestation] cultural anthropology 40:1 22 resumen este artículo explora distintas prácticas de sonar y escuchar que han surgido en un contexto de severa deforestación en ajusco-chichinautzin, una región al sur de la ciudad de méxico. aplica el concepto de violencia acústica a este contexto, como parte de intentos más amplios de construir respuestas constructivas al colapso climático a través de la investigación sonora y musical. como primer indicio de la tala en curso, el sonido de las motosierras resulta vital en los intentos de los guardabosques y la policía por detectar y detener la deforestación. de igual modo, prestar atención a la violencia acústica nos permite trascender las presentaciones sensacionalistas de los medios de comunicación sobre el problema de la deforestación y percibir cómo las poblaciones locales, a menudo culpadas de complicidad con los taladores, son de hecho víctimas directas de la pérdida ambiental. el concepto de violencia acústica también puede iluminar cómo, en un contexto no sólo de pérdida ambiental sino de despojo, las modalidades de escucha pueden simplificarse, instrumentalizarse o perderse. [violencia acústica; sonido; ecomusicología; méxico; deforestación] notes acknowledgments the author wishes to thank all of the participants in this study, as well as the editorial team and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments. the research leading to these results has received funding from the norwegian financial mechanism 2014–2021, supported through narodowe centrum nauki’s pols program, no. 2020/37/k/hs2/03647. 1. some names and details in this article have been changed. 2. see the video feature “veracruz: concierto de motosierras” [veracruz: chainsaw concert], uploaded by proceso on october 25, 2021 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wfdefxrqia), last accessed december 7, 2024. 3. see an unotv video, “detienen a líder de talamontes en ajusco” [leader of loggers arrested in ajusco], uploaded on june 30, 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzqrgf6op9s), last accessed december 7, 2024. 4. see an unotv video, “tala clandestina, san miguel topilejo, tlalpan: uno tv ingresó a zona controlada por talamontes cdmx” [illegal logging, san miguel topilejo, tlalpan: uno tv entered an area controlled by loggers cdmx], uploaded on june 30, 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozyhrnoywwe), last accessed december 7, 2024. 5. see a ted talk given by topher white in 2015, entitled “what can save the rainforest? your used cell phone,” available online (https://www.ted.com/speakers/topher_white), last accessed august 4, 2023. 6. also see hsieh 2021 for an account of noise detection, listening, and people’s relationships with the state in taiwan. 7. pueblo originario, or “originary town,” is a term used across mexico city to describe settlements that predate colonialism or date back to the early colonial period, and which were inhabited by indigenous people; originary identity may therefore be understood as a kind of para-indigenous identity. the term avecindado began to be used locally in the 1980s to describe the wave of newcomers to the zone. equally, some of my research participants, who had grown up in the town of ajusco but had been born elsewhere, were excluded from recognition as originario. 8. ejidos are communal landholdings in mexico, generally ceded to indigenous communities for farming. most ejidos were created by the postrevolutionary government during 1930s land reform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wfdefxrqia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wfdefxrqia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzqrgf6op9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzqrgf6op9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozyhrnoywwe https://www.ted.com/speakers/topher_white on chainsaws and acoustic violence 23 9. talamontes in ajusco are not necessarily connected to drug cartels, as is the case in other states, such as michoacán. santo tomás ajusco has a negative reputation for violence partly related to cartels using the picacho-ajusco road, which runs by the town, and the forests outside it as dumping grounds for corpses. 10. in more urbanized areas of the ajusco zone, residents often need to fell or prune trees on their property, but applying for the necessary permissions makes for an administratively burdensome process. due to greater visibility, a larger concentration of people, higher police numbers and—potentially—vengeful neighbors, one is more likely to be caught in these more urbanized areas. deforestation here is therefore quieter, carried out under cover of dark with a hand axe (interview, abel, resident of ajusco medio, fifties, may 2022). 11. also see the following anonymously authored report in el sol de méxico from august 2022: “talamontes podrían pasar hasta 15 años de carcel si aprueban ley” [loggers could spend up to 15 years in prison if law approved], (https://www.elsoldemexico.com.mx/mexico/ sociedad/talamontes-podrian-pasar-hasta-15-anos-de-carcel-si-aprueban-ley-8699439. html), last accessed december 7, 2024. 12. see an anonymously authored report from june 2022: https://www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2022/06/28/segob-aseguro-cuatro-aserraderos-clandestinos-en-el-ajusco-hubo-7-detenidos/, last accessed december 5, 2024. 13. see an unotv video, “detienen a líder de talamontes en ajusco” [leader of loggers arrested in ajusco], uploaded on june 30, 2023 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzqrgf6op9s), last accessed december 7, 2024. 14. “people’s objective coming here to the park to camp or stay in a cabin, many times it’s to rest, to get away from the noise, the monotony of the music that is always heard every day in the city” (interview, roberto, july 2022). 15. “the brujas would come down very close to the camping area and what they used to scare them away were little crosses made of ocote pine. they put them on the windows and doors and, well, images of the saints” (interview, rosa, originaria from san nicolás totolapan, thirties, september 2022). 16. “it’s something i heard once, that listening to music like that keeps all mystical beings like that, calms them down . . . . classical music. like, beethoven, chopin” (interview, ignacio, originario from san nicolás totolapan, thirties, september 2022). 17. my use of this term draws on classic theoretical literature relating to the production of space, especially neil smith’s (2008) marxian approach to the production of nature and natural space. references amnesty international 2023 “mexico: tierra y ¿libertad? criminalización de personas defensoras de tierra, territorio y medio ambiente” [mexico: land and liberty? the criminalization of defenders of land, territory, and environment.] associated press 2022 “mexico, the deadliest place for land defenders.” youtube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=rvpndqza7au birenbaum quintero, michael 2019 “loudness, excess, power: a political liminology of a global city in the south.” in remapping sound studies, edited by gavin steingo and jim sykes, 135–55. durham, n.c.: duke university press. bolaños sánchez, ángel 2023 “comuneros en tlalpan 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agrarian communities on the periphery of mexico city (sixteenth–twentieth centuries)]. mexico city: centro de estudios mexicanos y centroamericanos. peterson, marina 2021 atmospheric noise: the indefinite urbanism of los angeles. durham, n.c.: duke university press. reyes, alfonso 1981 ajusco: mirador de méxico. mexico city: comisión coordinadora para el desarrollo agropecuario del distrito federal. rice, tom 2015 “listening.” in keywords in sound, edited by david novak and matt sakakeeny, 99–111. durham, n.c.: duke university press. ruiz, alejandro 2022 “los guardianes del bosque de topilejo” [the guardians of the topilejo forest]. zonadocs: periodismo en resistencia, december 4. sánchez, f. 2023 “talan hasta 400 árboles al día en tlalpan” [up to 400 trees are cut down every day in tlalpan]. el universal, august 5. smith, neil 2008 uneven development: nature, capital, and the production of space. 3rd edition. athens: university of georgia press. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13003 cultural anthropology 40:1 26 sterne, jonathan 2015 “hearing.” in keywords in sound, edited by david novak and matt sakakeeny, 65–77. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tsing, anna l. 2015 the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. windsor, w. l. 2019 “music in detention and interrogation: the musical ecology of fear.” in the oxford handbook of sound and imagination, edited by mark grimshaw, mads hansen, and martin knakkergaard, 2: 281–300. new york: oxford university press. wolfesberger, philipp 2019 “processes of territorialization in mexico: indigenous government, violence, and comunalidad.” conflict and society 5, no. 1: 41–54. https://doi.org/10.3167/ arcs.2019.050103 zavaleta, noé 2021 “veracruz: concierto de motosierras” [veracruz: concert of chainsaws]. proceso, october 25. https://doi.org/10.3167/arcs.2019.050103 https://doi.org/10.3167/arcs.2019.050103 on chainsaws and acoustic violence: sound and deforestation in ajusco-chichinautzin, mexico acoustic violence and the environment identities, places, and illicit economies sound and raids: the town of ajusco forest protection and ecotourism: parque ejidal san nicolás totolapan conclusion abstract resumen notes references flowers of deception: the expert’s nostalgia for a future’s past and its occlusion of agrarian labor cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 455-484, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.06 flowers of deception: the expert’s nostalgia for a future’s past and its occlusion of agrarian labor amrita kurian university of pennsylvania https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0508-5176 sighting a parasite: a story of experts’ affects on a cloudy day in january 2016, a fortnight into harvest season, i accompanied a group of government officials—officers of the tobacco board, the regulatory authority that oversees the production and marketing of cigarette tobacco in india—to a flue-cured virginia (fcv) tobacco-growing village in prakasam district, andhra pradesh.1 the party spent the day liaising with farmers, inspecting the standing crop for pests and blights, and confirming that the post-harvest curing of leaves was proceeding as planned. we were midway through our journey back to town when the auction superintendent, the most senior official present, abruptly asked the driver to pull the government vehicle over to the side of the road, breaking with the itinerary. the officials then stepped out of the jeep onto a dirt track, flanked on either side by tobacco farms, and began a heated discussion. i couldn’t immediately decipher the cause of their alarm, but neither cloudy skies nor bright red soil could hide the purple flowers on yellow stalks blossoming beneath the tobacco plants that had set them off. the farm was rife with these flowers, and above them, the tobacco was wilting. orobanche cernua, also known as broomrape and, colloquially, as malle (after jasminum flowers) is a holoparasite—a total root parasite that depends entirely on its host for food and water. the plant draws nourishment by inserting suckers, called haustoria, into a host plant’s roots under the surface of the soil, and feeds on solanaceae (nightshades) like tobacco and chilies, dominant cash crops in the region (baghyalakshmi et al. 2019, 96).2 an unfettered orobanche infestation can cause anywhere from a 20 to 100 percent reduction in crop yields. worse still, orobanche’s tenacious pollination—via humans and farm machinery—not only has immediate adverse consequences for neighboring farms but can also produce a hostile environment for cultivation far into the future. figure 1. orobanche cernua on the parched soil in the flue-cured virginia tobacco farms in prakasam district, andhra pradesh. photo by amrita kurian, andhra pradesh, 2016. justifiably concerned at the sight of the parasite on a field ready to be harvested, the junior field officer in charge of the village sought to get hold of the owner of the affected farm over the phone. with great vigor, he attempted to impress on the farmer the urgency of dealing with the infestation at the earliest. yet he did not manage to elicit an adequate response. after he’d hung up, he recounted his exchange to the auction superintendent. the latter then spoke to the farmer directly, hoping to elicit a more favorable response. but he too ended his conversation in exasperation. surprised to learn that the farmer had refused to cooperate with the request of a senior bureaucrat, i enquired about the nature of their conversation. “what can he do?” the auction superintendent said, resentment and despair contorting his voice. “there are no laborers for hire!” this article investigates the affective responses that accompany experts’ day-to-day technoscientific management of environmental sustainability initiatives. it argues that experts’ affects, which derive from a particularly postcolonial experience of market relations, play a determining role in deciding who gets to be the expert’s public and, thus, who gets to benefit from state support and expert environmental sustainability initiatives. following the environmental sustainability initiatives of the tobacco board in the wake of the orobanche infestation, the article finds that landowning farmers are defined as the experts’ primary audience and “public.” experts in the indian fcv tobacco sector share an affective attachment to farmers, which i show to be part of a uniquely postcolonial emotional regime based on a shared cultural milieu of caste-based landownership, a history of state protectionism—which officially mandates experts to protect farmers’ interests—and a common experience of their unequal status in markets (cf. clarke 2019a, 2019b). this affective attachment to farmers contrasts sharply with experts’ passive neglect of and active resentment toward laborers, which i claim highlight the experts’ investment in maintaining the rural hegemony of landowning farmers, on which agrarian relations in india are largely based. like untimely cyclones and parasitic infestation, my opening vignette suggests, the laborer becomes visible only when she disrupts the smooth flow of cash crops to the market. experts’ definitions of publics have important implications for who benefits from the state’s actions and investments—and who suffers on account of its neglect. the experts’ contrasting treatment of landowning farmers and landless laborers suggests that sustainability measures to ensure agrarian futures are not necessarily directed at all the people affected by anthropogenic climate change (paprocki 2022). for instance, fcv tobacco farmers receive inordinate attention from the state and state experts even by the standards of indian agriculture. the tobacco sector in india has historically received significant state investments in physical infrastructure, as well as subsidies and financial relief or support. this is because, although a relatively minor crop by both acreage and number of livelihoods sustained, fcv tobacco remains highly lucrative and contributes significant revenues to tobacco farmers, traders, manufacturers, and the government of india.3 thus, despite the stagnation of the global tobacco market in recent decades, india is one of the top three producers of the crop, alongside countries like china and brazil. formed in 1975, in the heyday of india’s protectionist planned economy era, the tobacco board brings under one umbrella all those it considers stakeholders in the indian fcv tobacco economy. the board maintains a registry of every indian tobacco farmer, trader, and manufacturer, and charges them for state services. within these groups, farmers hold special importance for board officials. the board was originally constituted in response to farmers’ protests against exploitation at the hands of buyers, who possess inordinate price-setting powers in the historically oligopsonistic cigarette tobacco market (duvvury 1986). moreover, the interests of domestic traders and manufacturers are covered by the protectionist policies of the central government. thus, tobacco farmers make for the main recipients of the board’s knowledge and extension services, which aim to produce a high-quality, standardized fcv tobacco crop for the market and, in doing so, to lift farm incomes. for the same reason, inadequate returns in the market drive populist pressures against experts and become a source of shame for the senior experts of the tobacco board, who have been molded by the ethos of protectionism. affects like nostalgia, which accompany experts’ sustainability initiatives, mark a turn from their historically protectionist stance. they work as disciplining forces to tailor farmers’ subjectivities to neoliberal markets. the exclusion of laborers from the experts’ purview seems curious considering that laborers are indispensable to the cultivation of the fcv tobacco crop and vital to the indian tobacco economy’s ability to produce cheap tobacco. as the early literature on orobanche eradication in south asia stresses, laborers are not only vectors in the pollination of orobanche but also essential in framing solutions to handpick the parasite for effective eradication (dhanapal 1996). furthermore, in the face of mounting attacks from public health activists, laborers have long been used to discursively legitimize the fcv tobacco sector as a source of employment generation. the central government, the tobacco board, and private tobacco companies all recognize the crucial role labor statistics play in legitimizing the continued production of fcv tobacco and regularly publish information regarding the number of skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled laborers—which hovers around the 20 million mark—employed in the tobacco sector.4 the experts’ passive neglect of laborers is only offset by an active resentment that they justify using a perverse riff on marx’s notion of primitive accumulation. here, landless laborers, predominantly women and dalits (oppressed castes), are seen as “free” to sell their labor or to collect welfare benefits beyond the tobacco economy.5 their situation is contrasted to the plight of tobacco farmers, who remain tethered to degrading lands. the visceral and unconscious affects revealed in encounters such as the one described in my opening vignette capture underlying modes of engagement that go well beyond the official imperatives laid out in the technoscientific mandates and training of state experts (massumi 2002). they provide windows into the ideologies that lie behind experts’ loyalties to their publics and to the boundaries they draw and maintain around their technoscientific interventions (cf. gieryn 1995; mahony 2013). the expert’s affective attachment to farmers in the fcv tobacco sector derives from a postcolonial empathy with the figure of the farmer sustained by the racialized hierarchies of liberal markets, where indian fcv tobacco has a long-standing reputation for low quality. as the chief scientist of the largest domestic cigarette manufacturer, indian tobacco company limited (itc ltd), pointed out in a 1995 report, “india produces neutral filler like china … and its cost of production is low as in china [sic]” (subramaniam 1995, 19). the constitutive “lack” (of quality) of indian tobacco, defined by buyers to maintain the low cost of its fcv tobacco, encapsulates india’s tobacco markets, state experts, farmers, and the terrain. this sense of lack produces an emotional regime made up of “a unique set of official rituals, practices, and emotions” that structures the subjectivities of the experts and their publics (reddy 2001, 129; quoted in clarke 2019b, 251; cf. clarke 2019a). figure 2. laborers harvesting flue-cured virginia (fcv) tobacco leaves on a farm in prakasam district, andhra pradesh. photo by amrita kurian, andhra pradesh, 2016. such an emotional regime is decisively postcolonial in that it is renewed by postwar economic development discourses that characterize postcolonial nations like india as developing nations, perpetually plagued by state corruption and miseducated farmers, which distort the transparent functioning of liberal markets (wedel 2015). in seeking advancement in the global economy through self-improvement, this emotional regime combines a sensibility of victimhood with cultures of blame based on a shared sense of “plighted citizenship” (berlant 2011, 13; benson 2011, 21). “the [fcv tobacco] product offered is unclean due to farmers not properly understanding the importance of cleanliness,” the itc scientist referred to earlier suggested in the same report, a testament to the internalized racialization of farmers’ cultivation practices that characterizes liberal markets for fcv tobacco (subramaniam 1995, 20). the blighted modernity that sticks to postcolonial nations does not stop at racializing farmers and laborers along graded hierarchies; it also fuels a sisyphean endeavor among state experts to scientifically improve the quality of indian fcv tobacco toward facilitating greater market integration. in defining the boundaries of experts’ publics, affects work as forces of production, mediating gender, caste, and national roles, and reproducing not just capital but also bourgeois subjectivity (yanagisako 2002; cf. rofel and yanagisako 2018). as culturally mediated expressions of deep-seated ideologies, affects reveal “the interfolding of the impersonal and the intimate” that binds experts to specific publics (mazzarella 2017, 201). in the fcv tobacco economy, the neutrality of the tobacco board expert’s scientific mandate is shown to mask the common cultural milieu the expert shares with the indian tobacco farmer, rooted in landownership and landownership-based rural hegemony. the expert’s fealty to the landowning farmer sustains the economic agency of upper-caste farmers amid rapidly changing dynamics of village life and reproduces farmers’ subjectivities in accordance with the requirements of neoliberal markets (cf. richard and rudnyckyj 2009). as historically cultivated, intersubjective dispositions, affective sensibilities sustain in-group caste loyalties in india, while maintaining difference through blame, resentment, touch avoidance, and a refusal of commensality (mitchell 2021; lee 2021).6 not seen as active participants in the region’s agrarian economy, laborers do not pay for rent and services to the state. they do not obtain subsidies from the board or corporations, nor do they receive disaster relief in the face of erratic weather patterns and parasitic infestations. at the same time, laborers become hypervisible in the expert’s affective registers as objects of blame and resentment when seen as disruptions to the smooth flow of tobacco to markets, even, as in the case of the opening vignette, in absentia (see spillers 1987 on “hypervisibility”;7 davis 1981;8 cf. benson 2008;9 cheng 2015). despite the relatively privileged position of indian tobacco farmers, the auction superintendent’s despairing utterance—“what can he do?”—suggests that indian tobacco experts consider farmers helpless when faced with the willful absence of laborers. the experts’ neglect of and resentment toward laborers perpetuates the caste-based division of labor that facilitates the production of cheap commodities for the market. in what follows, i draw on parallels between experts’ environmental sustainability pedagogies developed in the wake of the parasitic infestation in the fields of prakasam and orobanche’s concealed entanglement with the tobacco plant to structure my arguments. the section following the introduction uses the complex (and invisible) entanglement of the tobacco plant and the parasite beneath the soil’s surface to trace the historical production of actors and their affective and symbolic orders in prakasam’s fcv tobacco economy (cf. carr 2015; besky and padwe 2016). the section called “deceptive bloom,” a play on orobanche’s purple flowers, shows that, despite their benign appearance, experts’ pedagogies in teaching farmers sustainable farming conceal as much as they reveal. “invisible haustorium” explores the nostalgia that marks experts’ pedagogies—collapsing traditional boundaries between science, authority, politics, and society—and produces a geographically situated epistemic community between state and market actors geared toward shared agrarian futures. it also reveals experts as culturally embedded actors who share the landed farmers’ anxieties and resentments, not only vis-a-vis accumulating capital but also in maintaining the status quo of the agrarian relations that enable it. a brief epilogue, “tobacco wilting,” tells the story of ravannamma garu to show how the body of the laborer—like the tobacco crop under siege by orobanche—wilts, capitalized for exchange by parasitic agrarian relations. considered free agents, laborers like ravannamma are abandoned by experts and exposed to new forms of climate precarity. as an ethnographer in the field, my privileged position as apprentice expert gave me access to otherwise exclusively masculine spaces, structured along caste-based socialities. like the handful of female tobacco board officials and scientists, i was usually referred to as “madam garu,” a signal of perceived status.10 as a result, despite my gender and ambiguous caste affiliations in the eyes of prakasam’s village residents, i was able to seamlessly navigate across socially segregated production zones, allowing me to work with farmers and laborers on tobacco farms and grading halls, as well as alongside tobacco board experts on auction floors and in the course of field visits like the one with which i opened this essay. it is in this capacity that i first met the labor contractor singaiah garu and befriended his wife, ravannamma garu, their daughter-in-law, parvati, as well as the women who worked in his muttah (the labor gang). my position allows me to note the physical, material, and figurative absenting of laborers from experts’ narratives and spaces and to spell out the consequences for laborers and the tobacco economy. it is important to acknowledge here that the experts’ absenting of laborers does not determine laborers’ ontological projects of dignity and survival. in the face of the mundane slights that characterize rural and agrarian lives, laborers were very present in prakasam’s village economy, living lives of their own. one day, on our way back from harvest, we were all invited by a tobacco farmer’s wife to celebrate the death anniversary of a close relative at her residence. already fond of andhra food, i was excited at the prospect of attending the midday meal and asked parvati, whom i’d befriended by then, about the food we would be served. she smirked, shook her hands in the air, and told me that “we” (“memu” is exclusive in telugu and does not include the listener) don’t attend such events. taking her curt response to indicate her own mood, i went ahead and attended the meal the next day. then, as i sat among the older farmers enjoying spicy mutton curry, i realized that the few women i knew from the farms were seated at a different table, far from mine. through her words and actions, parvati had made her stance against caste-based commensality crystal clear. complex entanglements beneath the soil: the origins of the indian fcv tobacco sector orobanche germinates under the soil, inserts its haustoria into the tobacco host plant, and only emerges into visibility above the soil surface once both plants have set down deep roots. for experts from the tobacco board, this complex entanglement, hidden beneath the soil, makes developing targeted solutions for eradicating orobanche particularly challenging. relations between experts, farmers, and laborers in the indian fcv tobacco sector, i argue, mirror these concealed entanglements. the origins of all three can be traced to colonial projects of agricultural improvement which led to the formation of indian tobacco markets in the late nineteenth century, and the later postcolonial responses to these infrastructures (arnold 2018). state experts in the indian tobacco sector draw their lineage to the “men of science” imported from britain into the indian civil service for their “superior technical and scientific knowledge of practical agriculture” in the late nineteenth century (sinha-kerkhoff 2014, 331–32). beginning in bihar, these early tobacco scientists worked primarily with local european planters and native landlords (zamindars) who were seen as possessing the resources necessary for growing the capital-intensive tobacco crop and the suitably “progressive” attitudes required for driving farm innovation. these enduring relations continue to structure state experts’ affective attachments to landowning farmers to the present day. later, in the early twentieth century, indian tobacco agriculture was molded by the interests of large global tobacco companies looking to source raw materials from beyond the americas and expand into newer consumer markets, as well as by the colonial government of india, which sought to earn taxes on international trade and boost revenues locally. the local manufacture of cigarettes also got a boost from nationalist movements in bengal that campaigned against the consumption of foreign goods (e.g., the swadeshi movement) (biswas 1995). the most prominent of the large international tobacco companies to set down roots in india was the transnational conglomerate british american tobacco co. (bat co.). the company established an indian offshoot, the imperial tobacco company (itc), and a leaf-development and procurement wing, indian leaf tobacco development co. (iltdc) (cox 2000). the imperial tobacco company (itc) was renamed the indian tobacco company ltd. in 1974, and iltd became its leaf-procuring wing. it continues to remain the largest domestic buyer and exporter of fcv tobacco, purchasing up to 80 percent of the fcv tobacco sold in certain regions. today, itc’s dominance continues to give it outsized influence with tobacco farmers and the tobacco board. dominant market players have reinforced the capital intensity of fcv tobacco cultivation over the years. by the 1930s, virginian varieties of tobacco were indigenized by crossing them with darker deshi or native strains. the resulting hybrids needed to be rendered bright to fit demand in global cigarette markets for “golden leaf” tobacco, which was achieved by flue-curing harvested tobacco leaves in brick barns using heat from wood fires distributed through flue pipes (sinha-kerkhoff 2014; cf. hahn 2011). flue-curing proved complicated and expensive compared to the traditional air-and sun-curing methods that it replaced in india. in the early colonial era, farmers were incentivized to produce tobacco through the provision of agri-extension services by the state and private experts. curing, grading, and storage were the responsibility of tobacco buyers, and the cost of farm inputs, such as seeds and fertilizers, was deducted against the purchase of green leaves at harvest (duvvury 1986). likewise, barns were initially owned and maintained by tobacco dealers and companies. however, gradually, the burden of producing a quality crop was shifted onto the shoulders of the region’s tobacco farmers. today, all tobacco farmers need to own or lease barns to cure their harvested tobacco, and must find separate spaces to grade and store cured tobacco leaves. such infrastructures prove critical to producing standards of tobacco accepted at the tobacco board’s auction platforms. these factors, along with stipulations of the minimum acreage required per barn, exclude many marginal and small farmers from participating in the lucrative tobacco economy.11 thus, except in a handful of districts, fcv tobacco is a market cornered by large landowning farmers. the production of fcv tobacco also proves incredibly labor intensive. it requires a dedicated workforce of skilled seasonal laborers through all stages of cultivation, harvest, and curing. daily wage laborers are essential for transplanting saplings, planting, furrowing, and eliminating weeds. skilled laborers are contracted as a gang (muttah) for the entirety of the harvest period to pluck and prepare harvested leaves for curing, to cure harvested leaves, and to bulk, condition, grade, bale, and load and unload cured tobacco leaves. in the early decades of the twentieth century—when fcv tobacco cultivation moved from bihar to the plains of coastal andhra pradesh—the region was lauded not just for its fertile soil, irrigated by dams on the krishna and godavari rivers, but also for its amenable labor, shielded from the fervor of nationalist and peasant uprisings in bihar and bengal (sinha-kerkhoff 2014). at the time, local missionaries sourced tobacco labor from yerukula adivasi (tribes) women (radhakrishna 1989). today, the skilled tobacco labor force that harvests and grades fcv tobacco consists predominantly of women and exclusively draws from dalit communities. colonial modes of production have not only produced categories like experts, farmers, and laborers in the tobacco economy but they also inform relations of production in the sector. the extraction of cheap raw materials from the colonies has led to a partial breakdown of erstwhile feudal relations of production in indian agriculture (banaji 1977; patnaik 1983). however, capitalist expansion has also relied on feudal relations of production, specifically, the exploitation of caste-based labor enforced through land alienation and caste endogamy (mohanty 2016). thus, whereas primitive accumulation has elsewhere been associated with social solvency, caste-based land alienation means that laborers in prakasam remain predominantly landless and have little access to capital and other resources. exploitative colonial taxation, on the other hand, proletarianized poorer tenants and encouraged absentee landlordism, leading to poor technological development in smallholder lands (patnaik 1986). these historical conditions, by default, exclude laborers from stakeholdership in the tobacco economy on the basis of landownership. colonial modes of production have persisted in postcolonial india through inherited infrastructures and attendant “structures of feeling” that mediate productive relations. in agriculture, failed attempts at modernization, most notably, the abandonment of post-independence efforts to redistribute land through land reform, have selectively benefited specific middle-tenant and peasant-caste farmers (siegel 2018; cf. gidwani 2008; sud 2007). in areas like prakasam, dam projects and cash-crop agriculture have distributed prosperity more widely among specific caste groups who were formerly tenant farmers, such as kammas, kapus, and reddys (a. v. r. rao 1958). kamma farmers dominate in prakasam, constituting not just a distinct culture but also the dominant political voice of andhra state politics (cf. upadhya 1988; benbabaali 2018). it is these dominant peasant castes that have mainly benefited from the tobacco board’s agri-extension services, green revolution technologies, and government aid. to better understand the structures of feeling inherited by the various actors in the tobacco economy today, we must also understand the history of the constitution of the tobacco board. this history explains the strong bonds between experts and farmers today. as larger numbers of international buyers and intermediaries emerged in the postcolonial era, indian tobacco farmers found themselves increasingly exploited by more powerful market participants. on several occasions, local traders were guilty of pilferage and reneged payment (duvvury 1986). a significant political bloc by then, farmers organized to demand government intervention in the sector, leading to the establishment of the tobacco board under the tobacco board act of 1975. the act mandated that board experts assist indian tobacco farmers in becoming competitive in markets. to this end, the board would work to improve the quality of indian fcv tobacco crops and better integrate indian tobacco farmers into global supply chains. they would also regulate indian tobacco markets by monitoring the grading and pricing of crops through board-run auctions. in doing so, the board was to safeguard the indian tobacco farmer’s livelihood, while effectively increasing state revenues. both experts and farmers share an understanding of the perceived low status of indian tobacco in the global market. lack of quality constitutes baggage that indian tobacco has carried for more than a century. the colonial improvement projects that indigenized flue-cured virginia tobacco varieties occurred in parallel with a discourse on the inherent lack that supposedly characterized indian nature, native populations, and their culture. as early as 1907, albert and gabrielle howard—a scientist couple appointed by the imperial government of india to a research institute at pusa, bihar—wrote that “despite the importance of the crop and its money value, some rather surprising weaknesses in cultivation methods were prevalent. … above all, there was no attempt whatever to aim at quality” (howard 1953, 83). while albert howard later conceded that the burdens of the peasantry—suffering from taxes and debts—were factors behind the lack of quality in indian tobacco, most european merchants of the time continued to see low-quality tobacco as representative of the “‘slovenliness and ignorance of a semi-barbarous people”’ (sinha-kerkhoff 2014, 45). this sensibility of lack extends beyond tobacco and agriculture and attaches itself to the postcolonial nation’s imaginings of itself. while a notable aspect of postcolonial india’s counter-hegemonic reaction to being relegated to the “waiting room” of modernity has been to constitutionally grant universal franchise to every indian, such political modernity remains fraught with contradictions (chakrabarty 2008, 9). both colonial and postcolonial development projects have viewed peasants and villages as seats of superstition that education alone can change. these ideas prove central to the post-independence state’s efforts toward rural development and its alliance with landowning farmers to achieve these ends. yet even as affluent landowning farmers embraced the virtues of self-reliance and market integration, they have vigorously opposed egalitarian land redistribution, sequestering the largest share of the benefits of state infrastructural and welfare projects (siegel 2017). thus, despite the counter-hegemonic valence of gandhian ideals aimed at uplifting villages, the chosen path to a distinct indian modernity has been reduced to technological improvements aimed at increasing agricultural productivity. this history explains regulatory experts’ and agri-scientists’ enduring focus on researching and developing seeds and improving cultivation, grading, and curing technologies, at the cost of, say, measures aimed at protecting the interests of agricultural laborers. state experts’ affective attachments to farmers, as with their experience of modernity vis-à-vis markets, are built around a contradiction. like european scientists and early indian modernizers, experts at the tobacco board have naturalized the lack-of-quality discourse, incorporating it into their technical interventions and extending it to descriptions of indian farmers and tobacco-growing geographies. however, unlike their british counterparts, and like indian tobacco farmers, board experts also experience racialized hierarchies in markets that view their work, as bureaucrats of the indian state, as inefficient. the conceit of economic developmentalism of the post–world war ii era is that while europe and the united states provide ample subsidies to their tobacco farmers, state mediation of indian markets is widely seen by buyers as a corruption of liberal free markets—a lack of a different kind (cf. wedel 2015). like tobacco farmers, indian state experts experience markets as the perpetual other, inflecting affective attachments with postcolonial emotions of nationalist solidarity, counter-hegemonic to the west. a final factor that cements the solidarity between state experts and tobacco farmers is their shared cultural backgrounds. most of the experts i interacted with in prakasam were central government bureaucrats—but also natives of the region. they had been recruited, among other things, for their telugu-speaking abilities, key to facilitating smoother expert-farmer relationships. this assignment of bureaucrats lines up with the indian civil service’s agenda of territorially and socially integrating a nation with high linguistic and cultural diversity by using state bureaucracy to distribute welfare and enact planned development (benbabaali 2008). these bureaucrat-experts (as well as the state scientists and domestic tobacco company executives they worked closely with) also most often hailed from the same dominant caste groups that made up the bulk of fcv tobacco farmers in the region, and many of the experts i quote in this article personally traced their lineages to current or erstwhile landowning agricultural households. the experts’ cultural, linguistic, and affective attachment to farmers were not accidental but essential to effectively performing their roles as bureaucrats. experts were emplaced in farmers’ cultural and political milieus and shared their cultural bias against labor mobilization in favor of maintaining the status quo in rural social relations rooted in landownership and market integration. unsurprisingly, then, most of the tobacco board’s subsidies for sustainable practices and their reparations in the event of environmental catastrophes largely benefit landowning farmers. the positioning of farmers as the experts’ public is crucial to this outcome. the deceptive bloom: pedagogies of sustainability as a diversionary tactic orobanche’s colloquial telugu nomenclature—malle, synonymous with flowers of the jasminium species in the language—offers testimony of its alluring appearance. but the purple blooms that crown the parasite’s stark yellow stalks also hint at a more obvious trait of the plant—an absence of chlorophyll. just as the orobanche’s bloom conceals complex entanglements with the tobacco plant beneath the soil surface, the neutral stance that state expertise uses to bolster its authority also hides a unique set of dependencies and constraints. in their public engagements, pedagogies, and the interactional skills that experts harness to perform these duties, the expert’s neutrality masks the indian tobacco economy’s collective subservience to markets and its indispensable dependence on low-cost agricultural labor. in meeting their mandate, which requires them to protect tobacco farmers’ livelihoods by improving the quality of fcv tobacco in line with market preferences, tobacco board experts have created a discursive register to package and present information to farmers and have fostered specific sites from which to disseminate this information. events such as field visits and other one-on-one meetings with farmers are not just occasions for experts to share information; they also allow experts to express solidarity with tobacco farmers. such “spatialities of technoscientific knowledge” create epistemic geographies, communities with farmers built around shared in-depth knowledge of the tobacco-growing geographies (mahony and hulme 2018, 396). as part of its efforts in public engagement, the tobacco board funds and organizes agrarian seminars every year. big-tent events, the board’s agrarian seminars bring together a diverse group of stakeholders—including farmers, traders, and scientific experts—under one roof. they are sites where stakeholders renew their commitment to each other and, if the 2016 iteration offers any indication, a stage for tobacco board experts to showcase their formidable ability “to finesse reality and animate evidence through mastery of verbal performance” (matoesian 1999, 518). both state and tobacco company experts who participated in the event visibly enjoyed delivering customized and highly animated pedagogic stories, taught using both english and telugu and tailored to their local audience. a local scientist compared the combination of nutrients essential to growing fcv tobacco, naitrōjan-potash-bhāsvara? (nitrogen-potassium-phosphorous), or npk, to a typical andhra meal of annamu (cooked rice), kūra (curry), and perugu (yogurt), demonstrating that experts used civic epistemologies or culturally specific and historically grounded ways of knowing in their public engagements (jasanoff 2012). for the experts at the seminar in 2016, the emergence of orobanche also indexed a longer-term pattern of erratic weather and rising environmental degradation in the region. the untimely precipitation that year resulted from stark differences in dayand nighttime temperatures in the region in previous years. together with degraded soil conditions resulting from prolonged monoculture, this had created conditions rife for the parasite’s germination and spread. mahesh rao, the tobacco board’s administrative head for prakasam district, explicitly made the connection between current and long-term challenges, opening the seminar with the bold claim that “climate change” had been the leading cause for decreasing profits from fcv tobacco in the region in recent years—despite widespread acknowledgment that demand for indian fcv tobacco was depleting annually in any case. inevitably, the 2016 agrarian seminar focused primarily on sustainability measures developed to counter the parasitic infestation and the climate change it portended.12 to steer farmers away from chemical pesticides in dealing with the infestation, dr. reddy, a senior itc scientist, employed anthropomorphic metaphors. orobanche was mondipattuthala (stubborn) and intelligent, he suggested. he cautioned farmers against impulsive, heavy-handed actions, such as using kerosene to kill the orobanche. drawing on international relations metaphors, he explained that the parasite demanded a “diplomatic” approach, one involving tact and attentiveness. dr. reddy claimed that, in the long run, traditional “cultural methods” of cultivation would prove more effective in combatting orobanche infestation. to counter problems of soil degradation and groundwater salinity, he prescribed deep plowing, crop rotation, and using cattle and green manure (eruvu) as fertilizers in place of artificial chemicals. chemical fertilizers killed the life of the land, or the sookshma jeevigal (microorganisms) who live on the land, he declared, marking a shift toward sustainability in tobacco monoculture in recent years. accompanying this new sustainability ethos were several references to “our forefathers” (mana poorvikulu), marking them as worthy of imitation. these accounts rhymed well with the turn to cultural methods in renewing farm health. repeatedly, in private interviews and at seminars, i came across experts commenting on the poor work ethic of farmers today, criticizing them for leaving the fate of their farms in the hands of labor contractors. dr. reddy, for instance, suggested that the ancestors of today’s tobacco farmers had been less distracted by non-farm endeavors, allowing them to be more attentive to their crops. echoing dr. reddy’s nostalgia, mahesh rao told me that his grandfather’s generation had been known for their superior work ethic. wives then diligently raised cattle and physically collected manure for fertilizer on their farms. today, by comparison, even when they owned buffaloes, women were too proud to do menial work, he complained. as salaried bureaucrats with scientific mandates, the experts’ distance from the land allows them to reproduce differences between experts and farmers and critique the latter along the same rubric of “lack” previously employed by european experts. by referencing their common ancestors, experts reinforce epistemic community through their shared cultural milieu and experience. in sharp contrast to mahesh rao’s claim that climate change principally lurked behind decreasing profits, indian exporters have come under increasing pressure from international buyers to reduce the presence of excessive crop protection agents (cpas) in exported tobacco. these allegations have reduced prices of individual fcv tobacco bales in the market and even led to the outright rejection of export consignments. seen from this perspective, the direction of experts’ advice advocating “diplomacy” and attendant nostalgia are motivated not only by the desire to secure farm futures but also by the need to assuage international buyers’ concerns. ultimately, however, despite experts’ claims, the revival of cultural methods of farming, with all their attendant cultural and nationalist affects, without any change in the terms of trade, only serves the market. the constrained motivations of tobacco experts were highlighted for me by my farmer friend, krishna garu, a local fcv tobacco farmer, who raised several objections in response to my summarization of dr. reddy’s recommendations. from krishna garu’s perspective, to implement measures like crop rotation and deep plowing in the absence of adequate rainfall, farmers would have to buy non-saline irrigation water throughout prakasam’s prolonged summer droughts, when even drinking water was a scarce resource. in asking farmers to implement sustainability practices in line with their forefathers’ practices, neither dr. reddy nor mahesh rao had spelled out the quantity of livestock required to produce sufficient manure, the labor required for this task, or the water needed to raise cattle and irrigate land fertilized by natural manure. these facts were not unknown to board experts. they were often sympathetic to the fact that most farmers engaged in other businesses, such as real estate, to buffer against recurrent losses on their farms. they were aware that the market price for fcv tobacco was driven more by the fluctuations of demand and supply in an opportunistic market than by ethical sourcing concerns or the environmental impact of tobacco production (cf. benson 2008). even so, the institutional and discursive force of expert pedagogy, and the affective and scientific labor of the experts, worked to discipline farmers. the state expert’s encouragement of market-friendly sustainability measures is of a piece with larger patterns of self-reform that neoliberalizing governance promotes (alaimo 2012; richard and rudnyckyj 2009). their attempts to secure agrarian futures and mitigate the environmental effects of tobacco monoculture can be characterized as an effort by the government to mitigate problems created by the government (and market) (hetherington 2020, 4). seen in this light, experts’ actions serve to divert farmers’ attentions away from concerns over the unequal terms of trade set by tobacco companies—where buyers increasingly have inordinate price-setting powers—and towards self-correcting behavior such as attending to the health of the soil and their crops. the invisible haustorium: nostalgia for a future’s past changing patterns of rural lifestyles in india have in recent decades created a yearning for a less complicated time and melancholy over a home lost to rapid urbanization and state neglect (cf. mathur 2014). in the fcv tobacco sector, experts and landowning farmers share such nostalgic feelings. in mediating expert-public engagement, such nostalgia speaks to lost rurality, ties farmers’ subjectivities to the imagination of the postcolonial nation, and binds experts and farmers together based on their collective failure in markets. the gradual withdrawal of state support for tobacco markets, a stabilizing force in high-risk/low-return markets, has only increased the uncertainty over the future viability of the sector, further stoking these sentiments today (cf. yarrow 2017; piot 2019). the nostalgia of experts suggests multiple ethical and political possibilities. in the wake of the orobanche infestation in the fields of prakasam, many experts told stories of a nobler past, demonstrating a discomfort with the present, itself a receding moment containing “expectations about a hoped-for future” and “experiences of the past” (scott 2004, 39). like other affective attachments, nostalgia has the potential to work its way into experts’ spatio-temporal projects of revival, including attempts to restore more-than-human lifeworlds, such as microorganisms living in the soil (angé and berliner 2020; angé 2020). it can produce labors of love that translate into care and solidarity projects in particular places (tsing 2015). more immediately, the expert’s nostalgia has succeeded in producing a geographically situated epistemic community geared toward shared agrarian futures. yet the nostalgia of experts also raises several important questions. to begin with, there is the question of why it arises. what questions do nostalgic his-­stories answer in the context of the expert’s work? and what does this say about the political and cognitive problem space from which experts tell stories of the past (scott 2004)? agriculture’s contribution to indian gdp has been on a downward trend since the liberalization of the indian economy in 1991. tracking this trend, indian farmers find themselves receding in importance in the nation’s populist discourse. today, despite policymakers’ widespread acknowledgment of the harsh lived realities of farming, including inadequate compensation, highly speculative markets, and crushing debt, the ability of indian farmers to operate within political society and arrest the working of government exists only as a form of vicarious desire for the democratic process among liberal intellectuals (cf. chatterjee 2004). most recently, this growing government apathy toward farmers was on ample display in the indian government’s stubborn indifference to farmers’ protests in response to attempts at deregulating agricultural markets (cf. sethi 2021; amnesty international 2024). thus, despite being india’s largest employer, the country’s farm sector feels displaced in the national imagination by rapid urbanization and a burgeoning tech industry. but—as with sentiments like love, concern, and work ethics—a sensibility of abandonment and lack can become unjust and selfish. in rural india today, it increasingly ties the loss of a future to exclusionary logics based on blame and resentment of proscribed others—features it shares with the rising tide of right-wing sentiment worldwide (cf. govindrajan 2019; franklin 2019). here, the expert’s nostalgia, a form of cruel optimism assuaging anxieties of loss, becomes aligned with the mania of exclusionary nationalism, barely concealing a yearning for a past when labor was more “amenable” to facilitating the capitalist expansion of tobacco markets (boyer 2006). experts’ and farmers’ nostalgia for an ideal past also closely connects to their resentment of laborers today. despite the failure of egalitarian and land-distribution projects, some of the benefits of welfare programs, affirmative action, communist and dalit political mobilization, and fcv tobacco wealth have trickled down to the poorest and most oppressed caste groups. in the fcv tobacco sector, the wealth that fcv tobacco brought to villages has become a “money multiplier” for laborers (chikkala 2015). as a result, several dalit landless laborers have today turned into small landholders, rearticulating historical conditions of land alienation, albeit on highly precarious terms (cf. ramamurthy 2011). and, even among those still landless, opportunities for selling their labor have improved. moreover, the laborers’ indispensability to farming fcv tobacco has empowered muttahs to negotiate better contracts. thus, labor costs increase after every bumper harvest and do not recede in subsequent years, regardless of the hit to farmers’ profits, making rising prices for labor a leading cause of farmers’ and experts’ resentment of laborers. reading the biography of “a born virginia tobacco grower,” an erstwhile member of parliament and the tobacco board, recommended to me as a must-read for the accuracy of its observations by several tobacco board experts, i came across a similar story of nostalgia and resentment that resonated with stories i’d heard from farmers and experts, suggesting that neither nostalgia nor resentment were novel or inchoate affects. written in english in 1985 by b. v. sivaiah, the book criticizes young farmers, who the author claims are lured into neglecting the health of their farms by city lights and television shows, signaling a village ethos lost to rapid urbanization. sivaiah reserves his harshest judgments for laborers. according to his narrative, the laborer is someone who would rather go hungry than miss the latest showing of their favorite movie. the men squander their money on alcohol while their families face perpetual penury. the new generation of laborers, unlike that of their parents, come late to the fields and—like “government officials”—leave early. even when on farms, sivaiah (1985, 194–95) complains, laborers “dragged their feet.” he illustrates the suboptimal work ethic of laborers in a joke about a teacher quizzing his student on a math problem. the joke goes something like this: if a single laborer takes a day to complete a task, how long do two take? the naive student responds that the work takes two days. in sivaiah’s (1985, 137) text, such lousy math exemplifies the laborers’ lethargy and lack of cooperation. sivaiah’s characterization of laborers and state experts’ nostalgia for a nobler past are symptomatic of the “alternative hegemonies” crafted by postcolonial elites to counter colonial and market hierarchies (shah 2008, 673). but their rhetoric of national pride also masks the postcolonial dependence on colonial legacies of “extractive statecraft” and “expropriation of surplus by elites” that has enforced penury and indignity on oppressed castes (shah 2008, 673). sivaiah’s expectation of dedication from farmworkers echoes in experts’ stories today. laborers were once dedicated to the farmers they served, mahesh rao ruefully told me. they would report for work at their master’s house at the crack of dawn. masked in these nostalgic narratives is a historical relationality that actively dissuaded dalit laborers from owning land, rendering them not just amenable but indentured to the farmers they served (banaji 2003; omvedt 1982). these blind spots allow postcolonial modernizers to continue to absent laborers from the scientific repertoire of expertise and exclude them from availing of the benefits of state patronage—most crucially, state-organized subsidies and credits and personal-injury and climate-disaster relief packages. the latter, in recent years, have helped farmers re-purchase and transplant tobacco saplings destroyed during erratic cyclonic rainfall and the root rot that ensues. whereas laborers are largely excluded from the experts’ discourse, both sivaiah’s biography and the vignette that opens this article offer instances of special circumstances that render laborers hypervisible. the persistence of the status quo of agrarian relations has meant that even as rich peasant farmers become self-reliant and market-integrated, these same farmers expect laborers to remain welfare subjects (cf. viswanath 2014). but where the laborers’ indispensability to the farmers’ and state’s profits and their ability to negotiate better contracts comes into visibility, laborers become hypervisible. they are seen as unruly political subjects, sources of exasperation, and subjects of disparagement. they are then demonized as disruptions to the smooth flow of crops to markets. in the worst cases, the laborers’ hypervisibility as empowered agents subjects them to extralegal violence (cf. a. rao 2009). the karamchedu and chunduru massacres of dalits and agrarian laborers and the destruction of their property in prakasam in the 1980s resulted from such contradictions of invisibility and hypervisibility (berg 2014; ilaiah 2004). these incidents also led to the largest dalit mobilization against casteism in recent andhra pradesh history (satyanarayana 2014). conclusion experts around the world are experiencing a crisis of legitimacy today. the gulf between the cultures of those who govern and those governed has become unmanageable (riles 2018). as a result, there is a call from within the ranks of experts, as well as from beyond them, to expand and intensify public engagement to restore lost trust in the age of participation (cf. lave 2015; chilvers and kearnes 2020; jasanoff 2015). in this context, it is worth noting the major obstacles to improving relations between experts and the audiences they ostensibly serve. in indian fcv tobacco agriculture, the gulf between experts and landowning farmers is perpetuated by the “market world” we live in and governed by vestigial colonial hierarchies, where regulated commons have been replaced by neoliberal self-governance; dialogic engagement, although still formally conducted, is no longer central to regulating technoscience (pestre 2008). in this article, i have further complicated the emphasis on participation by highlighting the complex histories that produce experts and their publics, and, more specifically, “the making and formatting” of publics through the analytics of affect (pestre 2008, 104). i have shown how the performance of affects—like nostalgia, concern, and resentment—do important boundary-making work for experts. indian state experts’ affect toward tobacco farmers and their use of nostalgic stories of “our forefathers” in fostering environmental sustainability reveal the potential of creating shared epistemic geographies that enable experts to stake claims about representing farmers. yet the goals of expert-public engagement continue to be geared toward market integration through increased productivity. despite state experts’ concern for farmers in the fcv tobacco sector, their moves to revive cultural methods are not simply motivated by visions of viable agrarian futures. rather, they are inflected by neoliberal ideologies underpinning markets that push mounting burdens of costs and risks onto farmers’ shoulders. in a reversal of destiny, laborers proletarianized by enforced caste-based land alienation are now considered free to escape the drudgery of agrarian labor and caste discrimination by working in rapidly expanding small towns and cities. however, ignoring labor when designing solutions to meet the challenges of environmental crises overlooks the causes of labor shortages in agriculture, which has feminized the labor force and produced a growing number of translocal householdings (gidwani and ramamurthy 2018). climate change and other environmental factors play a crucial role in producing labor shortages in regions like prakasam. in the past decade, prakasam district has seen a drastic increase in heat-related deaths concentrated among those who work outdoors (sumadhura 2019; kumar 2015). the unavailability of labor constitutes a cumulative result of migration cycles away from the backbreaking work, pesticide poisoning, and heat-related deaths so integral to monoculture. while experts’ absenting of their lives and livelihoods further accelerates the exit of laborers from agriculture, the lack of state recognition and economic agency exposes those left out of experts’ calculations to the contingencies of environmental crises, socially and psychoculturally impinging on their ability to thrive (whyte 2017, 155; cf. besky 2019). the women who grow and process fcv tobacco may be indispensable to the tobacco economy, but like the tobacco plants exposed to parasitic infestation, they are left to wilt under the sun. epilogue: the wilting tobacco i will conclude this article with another vignette to highlight some of the consequences of experts overlooking laborers. the story of ravannamma garu, the labor contractor’s wife, hints at how the neglect of state experts routinely plays out for laborers. over the first couple of months that i worked on the tobacco farms alongside women laborers, ravannamma garu had reluctantly included me in farmwork—despite my strange appearance, awkward telugu, and limited skills. as we transplanted saplings and removed weeds, it often seemed as if the women were conducting extensive research into my person, rather than the other way round. generally wary of authority and village gossip, the women of the labor gang shied away from interviews. but as i spent months with them, discussing fashion, family, and films, they passed on the expertise they had gathered from their mothers. i learned how to transplant saplings, harvest leaves, sew them onto curing racks, and grade cured tobacco, as well as to remove orobanche. despite their knowledge and insights, neither maistree garu nor ravannamma garu were ever invited to interact with experts. the experts didn’t seek out their views, even though it was maistree garu who decided when laborers would pluck orobanche from the farms he monitored. despite the experts’ absenting of laborers, the workers strove to make a living, challenging normative structures and creating alternative modalities of expertise. as maistree garu, the labor contractor and ­ravannamma garu’s husband, proudly declared, the “laborers did all the work, while farmers collected the money.” figure 3. maistree garu monitoring the work of the muttah (labor gang) on the tobacco farm. photo by amrita kurian, andhra pradesh, 2016. as time passed, ravannamma garu’s attitude toward me softened, moving from suspicion to nonchalance to warmth. she made sure i was not working too hard by making me sit beside her while she worked. but as the tobacco plants grew tall and ripe, it was she who looked increasingly worn out. over the course of the season, she had been struck by the loss of her brother and father, and i chalked her fatigue down to grief and sleepless nights spent unloading cured tobacco from the barns, tasks that formed part of the laborers’ chores during harvest. then, after several days’ absence from farmwork, she visited the barn one day to tell us she was on her way to see the doctor. she complained that she had been tormented by nausea and persistent stomach pain (kaduppunoppi) for some time and explained that this was why she had missed work. in a later conversation at their home, remarking on her deteriorating health, ravannamma garu stressed that pain and nausea were integral to agricultural work. nausea and dizziness resulted from the lack of safety gear, which meant that laborers were always breathing in pesticides and fertilizers, critical features of cash-crop monoculture. they were also prone to green tobacco sickness from physical contact with tobacco gum that rendered their hands purple-black and the food they consumed by hand bitter. ravannamma garu considered her condition part of the seasonal dues that cost the agricultural laborer in lost wages, medical bills, and ultimately health, a price she paid for her livelihood. a few weeks later, when i returned to the field after a short easter break, my farmer friend, krishna garu, told me that no work would happen on the fields that day. in an occupation where even sundays are workdays for all but churchgoers, this was atypical. ravannamma garu had succumbed to her abdominal pain and passed away. work on the farm was suspended for the next two days while maistree garu and his family mourned their loss. after a day or two of mourning, the laborers and i went back to the farms. the tobacco plants did not stop for death or mourners; they followed seasonal and market rhythms, and the potential for losses made farmers less empathetic. though maistree garu’s family took a couple of additional days off, the seasonal work meant that neither he nor they could take too long to mourn ravannamma garu. there were mouths to feed and work to be done caring for the crop. regardless of whether ravannamma garu was killed by pesticide use or the backbreaking work and unhealthy working conditions of agricultural labor, her status as a free actor placed her death outside the agrarian experts’ purview and their schemes compensating for loss. abstract using the lens of affect, this article argues that understanding the sensibilities and allegiances of postcolonial experts is vital to determining who constitutes the expert’s “public” and, thus, who benefits from state interventions and who doesn’t. following environmental sustainability initiatives in the wake of a parasitic infestation of tobacco in andhra pradesh, i analyze experts’ concern for landowning farmers in contrast to their passive neglect and active resentment of landless laborers. the article draws parallels between the experts’ pedagogies and the parasite’s deceptively attractive bloom, which hides complex entanglements between parasite and plant beneath the soil surface. i show that a postcolonial emotional regime idealizes landowning farmers and renders invisible the experts’ and farmers’ common cultural milieu of landownership and collective dependence on caste-based labor. invoking nostalgia for a lost past, experts’ pedagogies are productive, subsidizing monoculture while neoliberalizing farmers’ subjectivities. by their absenting, laborers face climate precarity and the reproduction of resentment against them. [experts; expertise; affect; nostalgia; caste; environmental sustainability; india] notes acknowledgments this article is based on my extended trips and conversations with several experts, laborers, and farmers in andhra pradesh. i am eternally grateful for their time, patience, and generosity. i am thankful to the anonymous reviewers whose incisive comments have improved this essay immeasurably. i would also like to thank the editors, especially ather zia, for their thoughtful and generous engagement with my work. various drafts of this essay have benefited from the generous comments and insights of dana burton, waqas butt, joseph d. hankins, louise hickman, lilly irani, amy kennemore, martha lampland, nancy postero, rachel varghese, kalindi vora, and the graduate students at the penn envirolab, especially indivar jonnalagadda. michael berman and grant leuning have read at least five versions of this essay. i am grateful i have you in my life. research and writing for this piece were made possible through generous support from a wenner-gren dissertation fieldwork grant, the david k. jordan fellowship, and the f. g. bailey dissertation research funding from the university of california san diego. the center for the advanced study of india at the university of pennsylvania provided me the space to complete this article. i cannot thank thomas george and sarah richardson enough for their helpful editorial assistance. 1. flue-cured virginia (fcv) tobacco is the primary variety of tobacco used in most popular cigarette blends worldwide. 2. the parasite attack leads to carbohydrate and inorganic ion loss and reduced water uptake by the host plant, skewing key chemical ratios of nicotine, sugars, and nitrogen in the cured leaf, and affects tobacco prices at auction. its spores adhere to farm machinery and the extremities of humans, enabling their rapid spread from farm to farm (puzzili 1983). 3. india produces various types of tobacco, including fcv, bidi, hookah, chewing, cigar-wrapper, cheroot, burley, oriental, hdbrg, lanka, pikka, natu, motihari, jati etc. (https://ctri.icar.gov.in). among these, fcv tobacco is a minor crop, grown on just 140,000 hectares, by only 100,000 farmers, and exclusively in the southern states of karnataka and andhra pradesh (tobacco board 2022), yet fcv tobacco comprises 80-85 percent of india’s tobacco exports. the indian government earned about 876 million dollars from fcv tobacco in 2022 in foreign exchange alone, apart from taxes and excise revenues (tobacco board 2022). tobacco accounts for 4 percent of india’s agri-exports by volume and earns 10 percent (14,000 crores) of agri-export incomes. 4. this labor statistic encapsulates farm labor employed for all varieties of tobacco agriculture in india. the statistic is corroborated by the indian council of agricultural research and online resources such as statista. however, since it draws on the national sample survey 2011, the figure is dated. 5. the term dalit means “broken” or “downtrodden” in marathi and is a chosen name of self-empowerment by members of the most oppressed castes in india. 6. lee’s work exemplifies how unconscious and visceral affects, like the disgust that characterizes human responses to bodily effluence, or matter out of place, are culturally cultivated. caste in india is perpetuated by extending these culturally mediated affects to categories of humans based on their enforced proximity to matters out of place. 7. the black feminist scholar hortense spillers points to this paradoxical hypervisibility of the figure of the black woman in liberal humanist discourse, subsumed as a derivative of objectified masculine labor in the atlantic slave trade archives and doubly oppressed as black and woman on slave plantations (spillers 1987; see also davis 1981). yet when she finally becomes visible to normative history, she becomes hypervisible as disrupting normative heteropatriarchy, as evidenced in the infamous moynihan report of 1965. 8. peter benson (2008; 2011) writes about how tobacco corporations have mobilized global health advocacy to demand “clean” tobacco from producers in the united states. these corporate mechanisms discipline farmers by informing cultivating ethics and shaping their relationships with racialized immigrant workers, who are seen as the source and point of contamination. 9. cheng’s archival study of tobacco shows how, as early as the nineteenth century, refracted ideals of proper race and sexual reproduction tied to scientific eugenics and national security were used in plantation agriculture. the characterization of tobacco infected by the tobacco mosaic virus as “el tabaco se ha mulato” (“tobacco has become mulatto”), implying the ruin of once “exquisite” tobacco, provides a testimony to the fears of contamination via miscegenation (cheng 2015, 1, 3, 4). 10. garu is a gender-neutral term of respect in telugu indexing age and/or social status. 11. the minimum acreage in the fcv 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sumadhura 2019 “high temperatures, heat wave haunt people in prakasam.” the hans india, may 8. tobacco board 2022 “tobacco board annual report.” guntur, andhra pradesh: tobacco board india. tsing, anna 2015 the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton, n.j.: princeton university. upadhya, carol boyack 1988 “the farmer-capitalists of coastal andhra pradesh.” economic and political weekly 23, no. 28: 1433–42. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4378736 viswanath, rupa 2014 the pariah problem: caste, religion, and the social in modern india. new york: columbia university press. wedel, janine r. 2015 “high priests and the gospel of anti-corruption.” challenge 58, no. 1: 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/01603477.2015.990831 whyte, kyle 2017 “indigenous climate change studies: indigenizing futures, decolonizing the anthropocene.” english language notes 55, no. 1-2: 153–62. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-55.1-2.153 yanagisako, sylvia 2002 producing culture and capital: family firms in italy. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. yarrow, thomas 2017 “remains of the future: rethinking the space and time of ruination through the volta resettlement project, ghana.” cultural anthropology 32, no. 4: 566–91. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.06 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 455-484, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.06 the fish is in the water and the water is in the fish: symbiosis in a nuclear whale fall cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 349-378, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.11 the fish is in the water and the water is in the fish: symbiosis in a nuclear whale fall petra tjitske kalshoven the university of manchester https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6011-9236 in february 2020, i attended a public meeting of the west cumbria sites stakeholder group (wcssg) taking place, as usual, in the rustic civic hall of the former mining town of cleator moor in north west england. the sellafield nuclear site, whose operations during its eventful history had included plutonium production, power generation, and the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, was preparing to move into full decommissioning. this was expected to give rise to a transformation in sellafield’s business, its working arrangements, and its relationship with the west cumbrian context in which the nuclear industry operated—a matter that required serious discussion with the wcssg. according to its website, “the wcssg is an independent body whose role is to provide public scrutiny of the nuclear industry in west cumbria.”1 the wcssg was set up in 2005 by the nuclear decommissioning authority (nda) as one of a number of similar groups in the united kingdom in areas where nuclear decommissioning occurs. the nda is a u.k. government body that owns and oversees seventeen nuclear decommissioning sites in the country, one of which, a subsidiary since 2016, is sellafield limited (sl). the sellafield site was previously managed by a private american-led consortium, nuclear management partners, under a contract with the nda. government dissatisfaction with progress in waste retrievals and remediation at sellafield led to the decision to bring the company back under direct governmental control, considered a suitable move given the site’s complex technological challenges and the hazards and uncertainties associated with its nuclear inventory. the wcssg, then, is tasked with scrutinizing a state-owned company whose business is the cleanup of the sellafield site. the stakeholder group’s expert knowledge in matters nuclear is acknowledged by the nuclear industry. it is generally highly supportive of sl, with many members (formerly) active as nuclear professionals themselves. during meetings, any critical note uttered tends to be preceded by an outpouring of appreciation for the industry. meetings are attended by a membership including primarily elected local councillors, representatives of community groups, and regulators (representatives of the u.k.’s environment agency and office for nuclear regulation), mostly middle-aged men and a handful of women. an nda representative responsible for socioeconomics presented the nda’s new local economic and social impact strategy to the stakeholder group. he mentioned “dependency” on the nuclear industry as a problematic issue in west cumbria, yet was pleased to announce an increase in nda allocations to areas of decommissioning for socioeconomic projects, including £11.5m to west cumbria. of this amount, £10m would be sent to sl and £1.5m to the local community fund.2 during the q & a session, i asked whether the issue of dependency he had noted would not be exacerbated by the channeling of public moneys through sl. “a smashing question,” he reacted, “you have a point”—and he went on to clarify that, in sl’s care, the allocation would allow the company to tap into community needs such as moving people off site to alleviate traffic in the area. it was not a smashing question—it was an obvious one, suggested to me earlier in conversation with a friend who worked for the national nuclear laboratory, also located in west cumbria. it also seemed rather obvious that channeling moneys through sl would perpetuate a certain local ethos exemplified by a combination of the company’s benign patronage and the region’s welcoming of it, a phenomenon that had struck me during fieldwork.3 in this article, i discuss west cumbria’s close relationship with the nuclear industry and ask to what extent dependency makes for a useful concept in discussing its regional dynamics.4 i will make use of a metaphor, the whale fall, in thinking through the concept of dependency, which resonates with the “organic metaphor” that has a long tradition in anthropology. the whale fall means to stimulate grappling with the phenomenon of alleged dependency in the particular setting of west cumbria and to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of what the term dependency may afford or obscure. as the nuclear industry’s main discussion partner in this period of transformation, the wcssg, which convenes a plenary meeting twice a year and has separate working groups, will play an important role in my ethnographic evidence. the nuclear industry in west cumbria since september 2017 i have lived in the coastal “georgian gem town” of whitehaven,5 home to many sl workers, to conduct ethnographic fieldwork at and around the nuclear facilities at sellafield ten miles further south, located between the irish sea and the lake district, a world heritage site, in north west england. these facilities, run by sl, the so-called site licence company, are entering a stage of full decommissioning after having played a pivotal role in british nuclear history. the nuclear has been a presence in west cumbria for decades, replacing earlier industries ranging from transatlantic trade and fisheries to mining and steel.6 it was here, when the site was called windscale, that scientists produced weapons-grade plutonium in a bid to keep up with the united states during the cold war. it was here that the first commercial nuclear power plant operated, calder hall, which opened in 1956 to produce plutonium, with nuclear energy as a by-product, and stopped generating power in 2003. it was here that in 1957 an incident happened, the windscale fire, that could have become a major nuclear disaster but got nipped in the bud—involving “a certain amount of luck and uncertainty,” in the words of jonathan hogg (2016, 91; for an extensive analysis, see arnold 1992). yet the sellafield site is perhaps best known for its commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, which is planned to come to an end in 2022, and for its copious amounts of plutonium and high-hazard so-called legacy wastes from historical operations, whose storage in old ponds and silos officially harbors “intolerable risks.”7 as it stands, sl is the major employer in west cumbria, and a handsomely paying one, with about 11,000 employees on the payroll and a similar number of people working in its local supply chain (oxford economics 2017).8 several other nuclear-affiliated facilities dot the west cumbrian landscape, including britain’s low level waste repository some seven miles south of sellafield, another nda subsidiary included in wcssg’s scrutiny. as of 2022, sl will be fully focused on nuclear waste management and environmental remediation, or as sl’s former ceo paul foster put it at the wcssg meeting of may 7, 2019: the company is focused on keeping the genie in the bottle—“and there’s a lot of genies”—and ultimately on getting rid of the genie. taking care of nuclear waste (retrieving contaminated objects and radioactive materials from legacy buildings and making and storing waste packages) has become sl’s core business. figure 1. sellafield site seen from the north across the bay at the village of st bees, four miles south of whitehaven, 2018. photo by petra tjitske kalshoven. my ethnography in west cumbria follows the transformation taking place both at sl and in west cumbria, as the region begins to prepare for a future in which sl will probably no longer play its current role as a major employer. the decommissioning of the sellafield site, however, will make for a long process of slow change, currently expected to stretch to 2125. once completed, the area’s connection with the nuclear industry may disappear altogether, although part of the transformation (a term used by sl) includes initiatives aimed at capitalizing on west cumbria’s nuclear expertise by presenting the area as the place par excellence for new nuclear ventures to flourish. in the four years i have spent in the area, i have been struck by the intricate ways in which west cumbria is entangled with the nuclear industry, not only socioeconomically but also culturally and affectively.9 the industry’s broad range of in-house skills and expertise constitutes a considerable resource for surrounding communities. for example, a local business owner in whitehaven told me about a major power outage she had had to deal with—within 1.5 hours, sl’s main electricity man had come to the rescue. in another example, the founder of a homeless shelter told me the facility could not have existed without sl, as she would not have been able to set it up without the advice on legal and safety issues sl had offered her. more generally, sl employees are visible and influential in prominent positions as school governors, councillors, or on charity boards, and they maintain a strong social presence in retirement.10 in conversation, such entanglements are often couched in terms of a parent-child relationship, with the region cast in the role of a child looking to its parent, sl, for nourishment and guidance. with employee numbers at sl expected to diminish as decommissioning progresses, the company has launched a social impact strategy (sellafield ltd 2018) aimed at empowering west cumbrians and diversifying the supply chain, which means weaning off “the child” while complying with corporate responsibilities toward host communities that, for many years, have been generally supportive of the nuclear industry. in fact, the nuclear industry depends on its child’s goodwill and skills, and as we will see, the child is quite aware of and savvy about this situation. complicating the company’s efforts to empower the region beyond its own existence is the inverted longue durée of decommissioning as it stretches out into a relatively deep future—not only because of the uncertainties associated with the decommissioning timeframe but also because local people (including sl employees and aspiring employees) do not seem quite convinced that preparatory action is really called for, now, with sl still having plenty of work and career opportunities on offer. sellafield site as a whale carcass—west cumbria as a whale fall the nda presentation at the 2020 wcssg meeting highlighting dependency reminded me of a metaphor that a university of manchester phd researcher invoked to refer to sellafield as we trialed a board game about the nuclear industry.11 the sellafield site resembled a “whale carcass,” he said, a concept he was familiar with through scuba diving (aaron daubney, personal communication at the university of manchester’s dalton cumbrian facility near whitehaven, 2019). when a dead whale sinks to the bottom of the ocean, he explained, a habitat forms in which an onlooker can find all kinds of different things in different states. species feeding on the whale carcass give rise to new habitats and ecologies—an exciting environment for scuba diving. highlighting sellafield’s economic and cultural impact on west cumbria, the researcher used the whale carcass analogy to refer to the sellafield site proper, which is often compared to a small town, with its own local dynamics and services. intrigued by his idea of a whale carcass, i found that, in marine ecology literature, whale carcasses sinking to the sea bottom give rise to a so-called whale fall that remains a “food bonanza” for a considerable time, attracting different communities of species. a whale fall extends outward beyond the carcass to include these foraging creatures. as the carcass degrades, the whale fall becomes “a unique habitat with some of the highest local species richness known from deep-sea hard substrates” (treude et al. 2009, 2). the phenomenon of the whale fall offers an inspiring metaphor to explore social dynamics in the habitat of west cumbria, where the sellafield site has provided sustenance for many years, at several times in its history drawing in considerable numbers of workers benefiting temporarily from its succor, and throughout providing local jobs both on the sellafield payroll and in its supply chain.12 when i tested it out on a key discussion partner, retired from sellafield, he reacted enthusiastically and reminded me that not only he himself but his friends and extended family benefited from nuclear ties, pensions, and job opportunities. “and so do you,” he teased me—my five-year research project being funded by an endowment from british nuclear fuels limited, the defunct company that preceded sl.13 the organic metaphor in anthropological theorizing analogies between society and living organisms have proven a fertile ground for pattern finding in social theorizing, with roots going back to antiquity (westra and robinson 1997). the “organic metaphor” has emerged as a problematic trope because of its associations with nineteenth-century evolutionary thinking tainted by hierarchical and racialist politics. prominent in the evolutionary approach was the english philosopher, social scientist, and polymath herbert spencer (1820–1903), who situated the objective for social science in identifying, as it were, social organs and tracing their growth. drawing on ideas expressed by plato and thomas hobbes about the human body as an analogy for society, spencer outlined parallels between biological organisms and societies, suggesting that increasing complexity in living bodies whose different parts depended on one another paralleled societal development. he applied this analogy to his analysis of social dynamics driving the industrial revolution in northern england (spencer 2000, 11–13). a less deterministic and more sustainable model for the use of the organic metaphor with which i feel affinity can be found in anthropologist and biologist gregory bateson’s interest in cybernetics: drawing analogies between complex regulatory systems and finding inspiration in patterning recognizable in a variety of life forms and morphologies (cf. kalshoven 2018, 2019), bateson (1972) used organic metaphors to inquire more broadly into what it means to be alive. far from aspiring to a grandiose and universal theory, and strongly rejecting essentialist and evolutionary assumptions in nineteenth-century thinking, i here consider the organic analogy with a whale fall not as a tale of increasing complexity (which would fall flat in the case of a whale fall) but for its dynamics of symbiosis and resilience, as well as for the critique it affords of the notion of dependency. use of an organic metaphor also allows us to consider the sellafield site, with its legacy of radioactive waste stretching far into the future, from a longer-term ecosystem perspective. vincent ialenti’s (2020) ethnography of finnish scientists working on a geological disposal facility for nuclear waste provides a stimulating clue: the scientists use a forest analogy as a method to train their own long-term thinking by focusing holistically on the entire ecosystem (the forest) rather than on details only (the trees), while adopting multiscale perspectives. ialenti suggests everyone should learn from this approach to counter the vicissitudes of the anthropocene.14 the scientists worked to “forecast the interacting geological, hydrological, and ecological conditions that might surround the repository over the coming tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years” (ialenti 2020, 4), emphasizing ecosystemic change. with the whale fall, i wish to make an analogy with an ecosystemic entity to think through a societal web of relations over time. unlike the whale in the whale fall, sl is not dead yet. my analogy does not hinge, however, on a comparison between entities that are either alive or dead. as i have argued elsewhere (kalshoven 2019), the boundaries between life and death are permeable, with dead and living organisms closely associated precisely because they both function in the realm of the organic. the similarity highlighted in the whale fall analogy resides rather in the slow disappearance of an organic, nurturing presence. like a whale carcass that lands on the ocean bed, sl happened on an unsuspecting habitat (see arnold 1992, chapter 2, on the siting of the first windscale reactors) and changed it through its nurturing presence. like the whale carcass, sl is expected to share out and thus diminish over a long period of time. before returning to the analogy of the whale fall toward the end of my account, where i draw out how the organic metaphor can be put to work, i will elaborate on sl and its west cumbrian habitat, teeming with feeding organisms. between radioactive risk and nuclear well-being an organic metaphor makes an appearance in the anthropologist joseph masco’s analysis of the changing nature of u.s. weapons scientists’ work. he draws a compelling analogy between aging nuclear weapons, which require careful maintenance, and fragile old bodies, describing how the united states clings doggedly to its post–cold war nuclear arsenal (masco 2004). in nuclear borderlands (masco 2020), he broadens the scope by exploring the ambivalent relationship between, on the one hand, the u.s. military’s los alamos national laboratory (lanl) and, on the other, pueblo and nuevomexicano communities caught up since the 1940s in the “plutonium economy” of nuclear weapons production. in northern new mexico, local concerns over the environment and sacred landscapes have gone hand in hand with views of lanl as a key socioeconomic asset and even a source of survival for pueblo and nuevomexicano cultures. masco describes how an emphasis on distinct identities and critical perspectives within northern new mexico extends into the lanl workforce. in west cumbria, by contrast, local outlooks appear much less diversified and more united in their loyalty to and identification with the nuclear industry. this stance transpires also from the general lack of a local discourse on radioactive hazards. the latter appears all the more remarkable as most social science research in the united kingdom has approached the nuclear from a perspective of “risk” (e.g., parkhill et al. 2009, 2010, 2011; henwood 2019; for an overview, see solomon, andrén, and strandberg 2010). “risk researchers” derive their evidence primarily from “risk subjects” in focus groups, which means that the ethnographic evidence remains rather limited. despite risk researchers’ insistence on a holistic approach, the focus on risk skews their materials toward an emphasis on risk subjects’ perceived anxieties, which at times smacks of patronizing and fails to do justice to the complexities on the ground. instead, the anthropologist malcolm chapman (1997), writing on the tension between west cumbria and the lake district, argued that locals considered risk an outsiders’ view, which resonates with my findings more than twenty-five years later. similar dynamics are apparent in an article focusing on mono-industrial towns in scandinavia and former soviet states between the 1930s and 1980s, in which anna storm and tatiana kasperski (2017) sketch a taxonomy of different social contracts. associating the nuclear industry with what they call the “accountability social contract,” often including state involvement, they characterize nuclear power plants as “much appreciated workplaces” with a high level of trust, where “the plant and the town [unite] against the nuclear critics” (storm and kasperski, 39–40). “what might be at stake is actually not only income or an appreciated lifestyle, but a whole worldview of what is meaningful and true” (storm and kasperski, 44). this does not mean that everyone feels at ease with the nuclear presence: real misgivings about nuclear impacts on humans and the environment exist among small groups of anti-nuclear activists who are, however, primarily located elsewhere in cumbria.15 misgivings about nuclear impacts do get voiced in west cumbria, but, i suggest, for rather different, strategic reasons. in a 2020 phd thesis on the siting of a geological disposal facility in eurajoki, finland, mika kari contrasts two useful explanatory frames to discuss dynamics of acceptance among the local, generally nuclear-friendly community.16 the “nuclear oasis” frame (blowers, lowry, and solomon 1991) is associated with a power imbalance between the industry and local residents. it foregrounds marginality, peripherality, and acceptance of things nuclear, including the burden of risk, through economic dependency.17 the contrasting frame is that of “industry awareness,” a term coined by the nuclear energy agency in 2007 (kari 2020, 32). this frame emphasizes local agency, conceiving of nuclear communities as well-informed, with the nuclear a recognized part of their cultural identity, pride, and well-being. kari finds that both frames apply to a certain extent, but neither suffices to fully explain eurajoki dynamics. rather, the frames work in tandem: well-being, associated with the nuclear presence, emerges from kari’s questionnaires as a primary consideration, but it tends to go hand in hand with an appreciation of economic benefits. in west cumbria, i found that elements from both frames come into play as the wcssg spars with the industry over its role in the region’s prosperity: councillors strategically instrumentalize the sacrifices involved in bearing the burdens of waste and risk, invoking the nuclear-oasis frame—while holding high hopes for the area’s continuation as a center of nuclear activity and expertise, sentiments that chime more closely with industry awareness.18 west cumbria’s close relationship with sl: sl’s social impact strategy mindful of a future in which the company’s presence will diminish, sl actively seeks to reduce the region’s socioeconomic reliance on its assets. in 2018, the company launched a social impact strategy (sellafield ltd 2018), grounded in a report by oxford economics (2017) that showed the extent of west cumbria’s boroughs copeland and allerdale’s reliance on sl jobs. in this strategy, sl promised to “improve access to sustainable incomes, beyond sellafield ltd, by increasing skills, knowledge, aspirations and access to opportunities” (sellafield ltd 2018, 9; emphasis added). the company wrote that it supported “sustainable activities that create self-reliance and independence” (sellafield ltd 2018, 7). in the latter statement, an implicit reference may be read to sl’s sponsoring of local charities, festivals, or the rugby league that i was told would always run into financial trouble. according to sl discussion partners, sl sought to move toward a more “sustainable” model of sponsorship that enabled beneficiaries to build on investments rather than receive “handouts.”19 figure 2. dog show at the egremont crab fair, september 2018. the nuclear facilities operated by sponsor sellafield limited are visible on the horizon. photo by petra tjitske kalshoven. in the oxford economics report, the active verbs sustain, support, and generate associated with sl contrasted with west cumbria’s “reliance” and “dependence” on the former, as in: “sellafield ltd is extremely important to employment in copeland sustaining an estimated 58.7 percent of local jobs in that district alone. allerdale has the next largest reliance on sellafield ltd with 4.4 percent of total economy jobs dependent on sellafield ltd activity” (oxford economics 2017, 21; emphasis added). and: “overall, sellafield ltd supported 43,800 fte jobs in 2016/17. we estimate 22,800 were generated from the activity that sellafield ltd supported in its u.k. supply chain. finally, as its staff and employees within its supply chain spend their wages, a further 10,000 jobs were generated in the wider economy” (oxford economics 2017, 18; emphasis added). in november 2017, sl’s social impact strategy, then still a draft, was introduced at a plenary wcssg meeting by sl’s head of corporate affairs, jamie reed, a proud west cumbrian and former labour member of parliament for copeland.20 the strategy, he explained, aimed at strengthening the supply chain, thus promoting entrepreneurialism and diversification. importantly, the supply chain needed to be encouraged to find clients outside of the nuclear industry. the goal was to arrive at a smaller sl and a larger supply chain that would prove less dependent on the nuclear industry. reed challenged wcssg members to help sl put flesh on the bones of his proposals. the next fifty years, reed added, were all about eliminating reliance on sl. “so what does the community intend to do?” he urged. wcssg leaders retorted: “the difficulty is precisely how to energize the supply chain. because it is you paying them at the moment. diversifying is a challenge, also given the high wages paid at sl; it is not attractive to workers to go work in the supply chain.” while sl sought to disentangle the ties, wcssg members highlighted the parties’ interrelatedness. the statement about high wages resonated with my interview data: several sl discussion partners had told me that money was their prime motivation for joining and staying with sl, even if they did not enjoy their jobs, citing “golden hand cuffs.” health, educational, and tourism services were said to struggle with intake and retention because of the draw of the nuclear industry. the manager at muncaster castle (a tourist attraction ten miles south of sellafield) told me that their chef had traded his quirky job in lovely surroundings for a place in the mail room at sellafield. players in the nuclear consultancy supply chain, on the other hand, told me they were quite able to offer competitive salaries—as long as these could be covered by consultancy work for sl. those who did not benefit from nuclear wealth sometimes expressed resentment with what they deemed disproportional remuneration. in september 2017, i was welcomed into whitehaven’s antiquarian bookstore with a torrent of complaints by the owner as he held forth that the region depended completely on one industry. sellafield, he claimed, was “like a cuckoo,” having displaced other ventures. moreover, it was shameful how sl people earned a lot for “doing nothing.” he did not believe any nuclear waste got cleaned up at all. remarks like these were not unusual among outsiders to the nuclear industry, and in a mitigated version i heard them uttered by some players in the nuclear supply chain as well. and yet most people i met in west cumbria referred to the industry as an asset to the region, providing livelihoods to many. discussion partners within the industry, however, mentioned inequalities, in particular the income gaps between those working for the industry and those in less well-paid jobs, as a root cause for west cumbria’s failure to become independent. this was what sl sought to tackle with a refresher to its social impact strategy. in 2020, the company relaunched the strategy under the heading six: social impact, multiplied (sellafield ltd. 2020). the refreshed version conveyed the same key points as the 2018 original, aiming for “thriving communities,” but included concrete plans and budgets to overcome inequalities, in particular through skills development. according to gary mckeating, sl’s head of community and development, “it’s not about telling people what’s best for them. it’s about giving communities the tools to be independent, self-reliant, and successful in the long-term.”21 figure 3. repairs begin at whitehaven’s west pier lighthouse, a harbour commissioners project funded primarily through sellafield limited’s six (social impact, multiplied) program, august 2021. photo by petra tjitske kalshoven. dependency the notion of dependency as a negative trait goes largely unquestioned in corporate, political, and casual discourse about west cumbria. dependency is framed not only in terms of jobs and livelihoods, partly laced with expressions of irritation over the dependent’s expectation of being bailed out through supposed handouts, but also in terms of emotional attachment through invoking the parent-child relationship, considered inappropriate between adults.22 this taken-for-grantedness of dependency as intrinsically problematic merits some scrutiny in light of recent anthropological work in political economy that takes issue with a straightforward relationship between care and dependency and questions the rhetoric of “jobs for all.” in give a man a fish, james ferguson (2015) draws on southern african case studies to question negativity associated with dependency. he discusses the emergence of social welfare programs that go against the accepted “development cliché”: “give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime” (ferguson 2015, 35). “the slogan encapsulates a certain development ethos, economically expressing a core belief that the object of development work is transformation, not charity, and that recipients of aid should get productive skills and the opportunity to work, not handouts and dependency” (ferguson 2015, 35). ferguson questions this tenet—perhaps there is no need for more fish, and most certainly people contribute to society in other ways than through wage labor. instead, he makes a case for a politics of redistribution, arguing that increased production through wage labor may not always be warranted, or even economically useful. the sharing of assets may not only mitigate inequalities—it might prove productive. in the southern african cases ferguson discusses, particular kinds of dependency involving a share of money, goods, or prestige may even be seen as desirable. in contexts with a long history of inequalities, where specific kinds of dependency are associated with being embedded in mutually beneficial relationships and with being someone, that is, with personhood, the parent-child metaphor may connote care and obligation rather than stigmatized dependency (ferguson 2015, 162). this kind of rethinking of taken-for-granted socioeconomic relations remains absent from west cumbria. in local business and stakeholder meetings,23 conceptions of the circular or stationary economy, or a move from production toward redistributive politics, are never seriously on the table. the emphasis remains invariably on economic growth. dependency, associated with a lack of entrepreneurship, is considered to stand in the way of growth, the unquestioned key to preparing for the future.24 ferguson’s argument for a new perspective on dependency nonetheless holds interest here, for two reasons: first, ethnographically, i found that dependency in west cumbria is not a deplorable state; rather, it is wielded as a tool in asserting one’s rights vis-à-vis the nuclear industry. it also constitutes an assumption on the part of the industry that makes it act, as an obligation toward its “dependents” (workers, supply chain, and west cumbria as the host region)—in ways similar to the obligations playing out in the southern african case studies. dependency, then, can be considered a strategic tool rather than a burden. second, because of the time scales involved in nuclear decommissioning, radical societal and economic change is likely to occur anyway, including potentially different framings of dependencies between human animals, non-human animals, and local and planetary ecosystems.25 figure 4. sellafield site in its agricultural west cumbrian habitat, with a farm in the foreground and lake district fells in the background, just after the rain, 2019. photo by petra tjitske kalshoven. the fish is in the water and the water is in the fish despite wcssg’s initial resistance, a wcssg working group called the enablers took up sl’s challenge, and in february 2019 the wcssg convened in cleator moor to revisit the matter. when i arrived at the meeting, tables had been rearranged to accommodate a workshop format. the enablers chair kicked it off, asking: “how do we maximize community benefits from sl?”—nicely bringing out, and taking for granted, how the company was viewed in west cumbria, namely, as a local resource meant to benefit the community. he went on to explain that this was “our meeting,” “we have designed it,” but he extended his thanks to sl for facilitating it. the company’s jamie reed attended just to “clarify points,” telling the now familiar story of sl’s expected demise and urging community representatives to take action now that there was still time. as a student of american literature, reed offered a quotation he attributed to arthur miller: “‘the fish is in the water and the water is in the fish’; sl and west cumbria are closely intertwined”—a reality he both acknowledged and problematized.26 reed pointed out that the end of reprocessing would mean the end of twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock operations (implying the end of particularly lucrative shift work), a 25 percent reduction in activity, and 2,000 surplus roles “if we do not act.” at the workshop that followed, the facilitators (sl and nda staff) gathered answers to a question formulated by the enablers, which put kinship firmly center stage: “what would you wish west cumbria to look like for your grandchildren?” i was struck by how difficult it proved to imagine a future world with markedly different work arrangements and social relations. changing societal contexts did not find mention, apart from technological advances such as better connectivity. instead, the discussion kept coming back to new nuclear possibilities, well-paid jobs for coming generations, and economic growth. when we were asked to list barriers to opportunities, a councillor at my table reacted immediately: “fear of radioactivity!” properties in his village should fetch more than they do, he explained—outsiders (that is, potential property buyers looking to cumbria for retirement) associated the nuclear presence incorrectly, in his view, with risk. was this a case of what chloe ahmann (2019) has called “subjunctive politics”? ahmann asks why residents of baltimore recently showed enthusiasm for a highly polluting trash incinerator in an already contaminated neighborhood. she suggests “subjunctive politics” at work, a process of decision-making with roots in an attitude that things could be even worse, leading to suboptimal decisions by effectively limiting the choices that people envisage for themselves. baltimore residents, ahmann writes, opt for jobs in the short term, knowing full well that the incinerator might bring health problems in the longer run. in west cumbria, future possibilities seem to be kept within boundaries as well, but not because of a sentiment that things could be even worse. rather than feeling they have to settle for what they know is far from ideal, as in the baltimore case, west cumbrians are quite comfortable in their present circumstances and strive for more of the same: a continuation of lucrative jobs and benefits. such a welcoming stance toward the nuclear comes across from a different angle in başak saraç-lesavre’s (2019, 2020) writings on carlsbad, new mexico. her work on positive local perceptions of the waste isolation pilot plant (wipp), a geological repository for nuclear waste, complicates straightforward social science conceptions of risk. seeking to extend the life of wipp, entrepreneurial local actors who wish to keep nuclear involvement going associate risk not with nuclear waste buried underground, but with a decline of nuclear activity (saraç-lesavre 2020, par. 11). pride in expertise and tradition takes center stage in these local actors’ perspective on nuclear enterprise as a valuable source of local power. what works differently in west cumbria, however, is that local actors seem content with the nuclear industry driving business initiatives. the industry sees this as a source of frustration, since it expects the region to be proactive and demonstrate less dependency. sl facilitating its own demise the wcssg was not alone in its somewhat reluctant attempts at future-making. i attended a flurry of workshops in 2018–2019 organized by different fora in west cumbria (including the local enterprise partnership, the cumbria innovation partnership, copeland’s mayor, wcssg, and sl), all meant to come up with ideas for future prosperity. what was most striking to me was the active role that the nuclear industry took in driving these initiatives—a role that went well beyond the call of corporate duty. even though sl insisted that the community needed to drive transformation, sl took the lead in the processes meant to lead to change. to a remarkable extent, sl employees took charge of events and workshops. more often than not, facilitators at initiatives turned out to be employees on the sl payroll seconded to a local community or trade organization. when i drew sl discussion partners’ attention to such entanglements, i was told that sl saw itself indeed as an enabler, “an anchor institution,” full of knowledgeable and capable people “supporting” the area. sl, then, while professing to wean off its child, seemed to tighten the bonds even further in facilitating all local efforts to sever the ties of kinship. added to this was the company’s insistence on being careful with “taxpayers’ money,” on making savings and investing in communities to make sl’s mission worthwhile to taxpayers, which only served to strengthen the alleged dependency. i wondered whether this continued reliance on sl “capability” would prove conducive to promoting the new élan that was part of sl’s discourse on transformation.27 in many conversations with me, sl professionals criticized their company for its focus on process rather than delivery. yet my impression was that the workshops the company facilitated were precisely adding process, not delivery.28 in this presence-absence quandary, sl seemed to be facilitating its own withdrawal while perpetuating an ethos from which it wished the region to move away. it dawned on me that all was indeed sellafield. the fish was in the water and the water in the fish—they were as one, sharing kinship and kinship terminology and birthing forth bodies that went about their key business of process. even the wcssg (formally considered independent) was conjoined with the nuclear industry it was supposed to scrutinize—quite apart from the nuclear roles many wcssg members had enjoyed in their working careers, both the wcssg plenary group and each working group were facilitated by a secretary on the sl payroll.29 from supply-chain companies to schools to rugby clubs to facilitators, the bonds between sl and non-sl organisms seemed difficult to disentangle. tasked with negotiating this symbiosis formally were wcssg leaders and sl communications and stakeholder relations officers, caught up in an intricate pas de deux. these dynamics concerned not so much dependency than hedging one’s bets and moving carefully through familiar choreographies. far from being helplessly dependent on the nuclear industry, local leaders, themselves often experts in the nuclear, showed strategic positioning, fondly invoking “the community”—as would the nuclear industry from its carefully fostered perspective of care.30 in the sparring that occurs between the industry and the wcssg, nuclear expertise is a shared asset rather than the industry’s primacy. an inverse resonance becomes apparent with hugh gusterson’s (2000) well-known story of local opposition that occurred in 1988–90 against a nuclear waste incinerator planned in california, in which he highlights rhetorical strategies adopted by lawrence livermore national laboratory, on the one hand, and the anti-incinerator movement, on the other. in both camps, expertise proved key to scoring points, with the anti-incinerator activists engaging experts to do so on their behalf. in the west cumbrian case, community representatives embody expertise in matters nuclear themselves—yet in the wcssg’s rhetorical practice when in their “child” role, it tactically takes a backseat. analogy of the whale fall through time and one may well protest, why shouldn’t west cumbria put its energies into drawing profit from the nuclear industry as long as it sticks around—in particular if this could well be for a considerable time to come? for in the course of 2019, a problem in sl’s call to action turned out to be the slowness of its own expected demise. my discussion partners increasingly felt a lack of urgency, fed not only by many west cumbrians’ desire for intergenerational careers in the nuclear industry but also by sl’s continuing recruitment to cope with what looked like burgeoning amounts of decommissioning activity.31 the new ceo martin chown, who took over from foster in february 2020, moved away from the emphasis on decline. in an online meeting of the british energy coast business cluster during the covid-19 crisis, he declared that sellafield had a changing rather than a declining mission. any decline was expected to be shallow in terms of money, jobs, and people. “we are stopping reprocessing,” he said on june 17, 2020, which was “significant, but not the most significant.” where foster had warned of the potential withdrawal of government funds with too little entrepreneurialism evident, chown celebrated sellafield as a huge construction site leading the way in innovative decommissioning. a 2018 conversation with a technical manager preparing retrievals from the magnox swarf storage silo (msss), considered one of the u.k.’s most hazardous legacy buildings, provided enlightening insights into decommissioning time scales. huge silo-emptying tanks running on rails had to be brought in, first requiring the clearing of space for a rail system.32 operators had to be trained and hired to manipulate joysticks and work from screens. electrical systems had to be kept running at all times to ensure the monitoring of potentially dangerous buildup in temperature and hydrogen levels. notoriously slow procurement processes for purchasing or commissioning innovative tools required streamlining. besides, the manager said, “we don’t know how the tooling will work with the real waste—they are tested with simulants [that is, non-radioactive materials].” if there was one thing that would make his work easier, it would be simulants acting like the real thing. because of these unknowns encountered in retrieval endeavors, which turned deceptively simple activities into projects of many years, he said, complying with governmental short-term budgetary cycles proved problematic. other discussion partners claimed tasks had been carried out more efficiently before nda government bureaucracy kicked in. and yet, perhaps ironically given the emphasis on entrepreneurialism, operating under the government’s aegis enables the longevity of this not-for-profit mission and its associated socioeconomic benefits. even more fundamentally, the sheer materiality of the site’s inventory (that is, its radioactive waste, nuclear materials, and contaminated structures) requires the passing of time for radionuclides’ radioactivity to diminish, so that they can be acted on and made safe more securely. walking away from the site is simply not an option, as it would leave entire ecosystems exposed to ill effects from leaks or unmonitored emissions.33 decommissioning, the decomposing of the sellafield site, then, is expected to provide jobs for a long time to come. this brings us back to the whale fall, the habitat that springs up around a whale carcass. a carcass goes through different stages of use by deep-sea creatures as the whale, as a result of the surrounding conditions, slowly decomposes: (1) a mobile scavenger stage, wherein scavengers such as hagfishes, sleeper sharks and amphipods feed on whale soft tissue; (2) an enrichment-opportunistic stage, where remains of the whale dispersed over the surrounding sediment are utilized by an opportunistic community with high population densities but low species richness; (3) a sulfophilic stage, where microbial consumption of organic compounds in the lipid-rich bones as well as in the organically enriched sediment sustains the production of hydrogen sulfide, which is then utilized by a chemo-synthetic community; and (4) a reef stage, where the whale bones serve as hard substrate outcropping from the seafloor and as a refuge for a variety of deep-sea animals. (treude et al. 2009, 2) as organic metaphors are wont to do, the whale fall standing for the west cumbrian nuclear habitat tempts the imagination, provoking analogies of which the merit lies in sparking potential insights into social dynamics. stage 1 above could be compared to the beginnings of the sellafield nuclear site when it was called windscale, charged with the production of plutonium. scientists, construction workers, and engineers flocked to west cumbria, where they stayed in the greengarth staff hostel (davies 2012, 44–47) and in company houses in seascale that aligned with a worker’s rank (garratt 2016). mobility was a major factor in these years, with some “incomers” putting down roots. the coastal resort of seascale, just south of sellafield, where a private educational facility proved a draw for highly educated parents, was a party town in those early years. stage 2 may be compared to the boom period, when a new reprocessing facility, thorp (thermal oxide reprocessing plant), was built in the 1980s. construction workers congregated in the town of egremont, just north of sellafield, which became notorious for pub crawls and brawls, turning it into “something from the wild west” (davies 2012, 102).34 sellafield required supply-chain involvement benefiting a wide area, while species richness remained low as the supply chain’s efforts centered exclusively on the nuclear. stage 3 represents perhaps where west cumbria was during my fieldwork, with sl’s call for diversification of the supply chain and with engineering and (de)construction firms feeding on its bones, standing in for the chemo-synthetic creatures. this stage of active decommissioning might be sustained for an extended period of time with the new ceo putting much less emphasis on decline,35 the u.k. government continuing its funding of the sl cleanup mission, and sl stepping up its investment in skills and young people, spreading rich layers of sustained sustenance throughout west cumbrian communities. nutrients here sit both in the decaying carcass (“lipid-rich bones”) and in its west cumbrian substrate (“organically enriched sediment”), highlighting the organic relations between sl and its social environment, notwithstanding sl’s efforts at loosening ties. figure 5. legacy facilities on sellafield site in the process of being decommissioned, close to the main gate where trucks are inspected before they are allowed to enter the site, 2019. on the left (with the crane perched above it) is the pile one chimney where the 1957 windscale fire occurred. photo by petra tjitske kalshoven. in stage 4, the carcass has become a “hard substrate outcropping” where organisms can take refuge. amy r. baco and craig r. smith (2003) notice a surprisingly high biodiversity at this stage (including “whale-bone specialists”), when all that remains of the whale is bone. could this represent the grounding for a diversified supply chain? but what might happen to this vibrant community if a fresh carcass fails to materialize, and dematerialize? the fish might be in the water and the water in the fish, but would the water flow away with the fish if it could be found elsewhere, as some discussion partners suggested: “people will go where job opportunities take them.”36 of great interest here is the high-level nuclear waste that will remain active for thousands of years beyond the generations of organisms feeding on the boney carcass. for now and into the more immediate future, this waste proffers the primary nourishment in the whale fall, as it is sl’s mission to take care of it through retrieving and packaging. but the waste may provide yet additional sustenance. in 2018, the u.k. government launched a siting process for a deep geological disposal facility on the basis of current scientific consensus suggesting that the burial of high-activity waste deep underground proves the safest way to dispose of it. this siting process is grounded in volunteerism. attracted by the prospect of new (nuclear) jobs and investment, parties in both copeland and allerdale have come forward as potential hosts, citing their nuclear expertise and the fact that the lion’s share of britain’s high-activity nuclear waste is already in the region as it is—at sellafield. moreover, in response to the united kingdom’s ambition to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, research is exploring the use of heat radiated from high-activity waste as a source of energy.37 there have also been calls for further research into using spent fuel to feed into new forms of nuclear power generation in a so-called closed fuel cycle (bodel, butler, and matthews 2021). rather ironically, then, given the toxic longevity of nuclear waste, it is precisely this major societal problem of high-level waste that possibly extends the nourishing life of the whale carcass in, and even beyond, its west cumbrian fall. the social contract of the west cumbrian whale fall biological descriptions of a whale fall and the stages it passes through foreground the organisms feeding on the remains of the whale. the whale itself is interesting for what it has on offer during its decomposition—in fact the whale carcass is the key reason for the organisms to be there at all, and yet its role remains largely passive. this image resonates with my findings about socioeconomic and affective dynamics in west cumbria. while the nuclear industry was seemingly in charge and calling the shots (and still quite alive despite its decommissioning), it was the lively mass around it that, by pouncing on it and benefiting from its presence, kept it relevant. this surrounding mass had become one with the industry in feeding on it—just like the organisms in the whale fall that ingest the remains of the whale, sharing flesh and kinship. any insistence on one-way dependency fails to account for such dynamics of reciprocity—which resonates with ferguson’s (2015) plea for a redistributive politics that replaces the notion of dependency with that of a “rightful share.” the symbiosis that characterizes the whale fall dynamics of west cumbria was inadvertently brought out in ceo martin chown’s comments in sl’s company bulletin in august 2020, at the launch of six, following the first wave of covid-19: perhaps the most visible sign that we [sl] are back [from covid-19], not just in our workplaces, but as a fundamental part of our communities, is that we are finally able to launch our new approach to social impact—six.… to me, not only does this signify our continued wish to help our communities, but it clarifies why it is so important. we’ve got 100 years’ worth of work at sellafield and to do it we need a skilled, resilient, and resourceful community that can host a range of businesses in support of that work. in turn, that requires a healthy and motivated population, high levels of educational attainment, self-reliance, and entrepreneurialism. (chown 2020; emphasis added) while seeking to distance the child with his call for self-reliance and entrepreneurialism and maintaining the perspective of sl as a “helper,” chown sketched a picture of mutual benefits—a social contract. later in august 2020, an sl-driven “nuclear prospectus” for west cumbria painted a bright nuclear future, one in which rebecca weston, the chair of the clean energy sector panel (and, typically, also sl’s chief operating officer), declared, “we must move from dependence on sellafield to a more diverse economic future”—while the prospectus advertised a relentless focus on nuclear opportunities (clean energy sector panel 2020, 3). i realized i should have posed another question to the nda’s presenter, six months earlier, about west cumbrian dependency, namely, to what extent it mattered. neither sl nor the whale were dead in the water, precisely because of the social contract of their ecosystemic relations. thinking through the metaphor of the whale fall enables a critique of the notion of dependency: it becomes a term wielded by both the industry (as a reproach) and the region (as a burden) in their familiar, and familial, sparring over the joys and frictions of symbiosis. kari suggests that the industry itself invented and strategically invoked the industry-awareness frame to put a more positive spin on its relationship with communities (kari 2020, 36). this may well be so, but west cumbrians show themselves to be so industry-aware as to strategically invoke the nuclear-oasis frame and include it in their negotiating and renegotiating of the social contract. this is a social contract of symbiosis rather than of dependency, and its power dynamics play out more evenly than either of the parties might like to acknowledge. as west cumbrian pundits show—taking care not to make this explicit—playing the card of dependency, which transpires as a discursive tool rather than an analytic category, may prove quite entrepreneurial indeed, for years to come. abstract the nuclear site of sellafield in west cumbria, north west england, embarks on a long period of decommissioning. sellafield limited (sl), the government-owned company running the site, is intent on disentangling the strong socioeconomic and affective relations with its host area with a view to making west cumbria less dependent on sl, the area’s major employer, as the company prepares for a slow withdrawal. comparing west cumbria to a whale fall, the habitat that comes into being around the nourishing presence of a decomposing whale carcass, i suggest that west cumbria has feasted on sellafield through different stages of nuclear activity, from its production of plutonium down to the long-life materiality of its nuclear legacy wastes. from this perspective on a symbiotic relationship, dependency is shown to be not a one-sided reality but a discursive tool wielded by both the industry and west cumbrians for different strategic purposes. [nuclear decommissioning; sellafield; dependency; organic metaphor; symbiosis; whale fall] notes acknowledgments my writing about west cumbrian socio-nuclear dynamics has greatly benefited from many a stimulating discussion with colleagues of the university of manchester’s beam nuclear and social research network. i am grateful, too, to a wide array of sparring partners in west cumbria, and particularly so to sl, the nda, and to the wcssg, for having me participate in meetings and conversations and generally putting up with a sometimes provocative outsider’s curiosity. many thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers for their highly apt comments, suggestions, and probes, and to the editorial team at cultural anthropology, christopher nelson in particular, for their amazing dedication to getting this piece licked into shape. my five-year ethnographic involvement in west cumbria has been made possible by generous funding from a british nuclear fuels limited endowment, and by practical, tactical, and intellectual support from the university of manchester’s dalton nuclear institute. a very special thank-you goes out to aaron daubney for imagining a whale carcass, bringing it up to the surface, and inspiring me to make it morph with my ethnography into this tale of symbiosis in west cumbria. 1. see the website at https://wcssg.co.uk/about-us/ (accessed march 25, 2021). on the same page, sellafield limited’s praises are sung, immediately revealing the entanglements between the wcssg and the nuclear industry it is supposed to scrutinize. 2. see the nda’s socioeconomic report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/socio-economic-report-2018-to-2019/socio-economic-report-2018-to-2019 (accessed march 25, 2021) and nda 2020. to put these amounts into perspective: sl receives about £2 billion annually in government funding (that is, taxpayers’ money) to carry out its operations. 3. care for communities is also a duty in accordance with the u.k. energy act 2004, which lists among the nda’s functions “giving encouragement and other support to activities that benefit the social or economic life of communities living near designated installations, designated sites or designated facilities” (part 1, chapter 1, section 7e; see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2004/20/section/7, accessed july 27, 2020). 4. my interest in the notion of dependency stems from my familiarity with the ethnohistorical work of toby morantz, who taught and supported me during and after my phd work at mcgill university. morantz’s work on the fur trade, and on whaling, highlights intricate patterns of interdependency between eurocanadian hudson’s bay traders, cree, and inuit (e.g., morantz 2002, 2010.). 5. the designation “gem town” was awarded by the council for british archaeology (http://isgap.org.uk/gem-towns). having prospered as a result of transatlantic trade and coal mining in previous centuries, whitehaven makes a rather unloved impression in spite of various attempts at regeneration over the past decades. in 2014, an imposing office complex for sl employees, albion square, was built in whitehaven, meant to make the town more vibrant and alleviate staff traffic to site (https://www.visit-whitehaven.co.uk/albion-square, accessed august 24, 2021). during my fieldwork period, sl was realizing investments aimed at enlivening the town, including turning a decrepit bus station into a restaurant cum meeting hub for small businesses and painting the lighthouses in the lovely harbor that previously benefited from european financial support. 6. for brief u.k. nuclear histories, see hogg 2016 and blowers 2017. for narratives of living with the nuclear in west cumbria, see davies 2012. 7. for a 2018 parliamentary report on decommissioning progress at sellafield, focusing on legacy ponds and silos, see https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmpubacc/1375/137506.htm, accessed august 25, 2021. the term legacy is used for nuclear infrastructures and wastes resulting from operations carried out by previous generations, with which the current generation of operators, scientists, and engineers has to deal. 8. according to the nda (2020, 17), “sellafield … directly employs around 10,000 people, with a further 17,000 jobs supported in cumbria indirectly.” the boroughs of copeland and allerdale, which together make up west cumbria, have populations of about 68,500 and 97,500. plans are underway for a reorganization of cumbria’s administrative layers (currently parish, borough, and county), which would put an end to the boroughs and result in two unitary councils, west cumbria (including allerdale, copeland, and the city of carlisle) and east cumbria. 9. a relationship that has evolved over a long period of time; compare lorna arnold (1992, 58–59) discussing the years preceding the 1957 windscale fire: “in its brief history of tribulations and achievements windscale—a unique and isolated site—had developed a powerful corporate loyalty and pride reminiscent of the local patriotism that italians call campanilismo. perhaps it is fanciful to think that windscale staff looked at the tall pile stacks almost as an italian looks at the bell tower of his parish church, but certainly the establishment’s sense of identity and self-reliance was very strong, and it had a tradition of solving its own problems.” for the fascinating role played by company housing in attracting staff and strengthening nuclear bonds in the early period of plutonium production in west cumbria, see garratt 2016. 10. during covid-19, sl encouraged those employees not considered “key workers” to engage in volunteering, reinforcing its local ties and its community-orientated reputation (kalshoven 2021). in august 2020, sl asked employees volunteering as school governors to make themselves known, so that info on sl careers could be distributed effectively. in a podcast, ceo martin chown praised a supply-chain company for creating a partnership with a primary school, strengthening ties between industry and children at the “key age where they consider their future options.” sl employees on the corporate graduate scheme visit schools routinely as ambassadors for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) subjects. the company sponsors educational ventures and campuses, further reinforcing the region’s focus on nuclear skills and careers. 11. this trial was part of the sellafield site futures project, https://www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/thebeam/2019/10/11/exploring-sellafields-limitless-future (accessed august 21, 2020). 12. in an interview in 2017, an sl manager annoyed by sl-bashing on social media spoke to me rather less positively of “piranhas around a rotting horse.” 13. discussion partners were often keen to know whether sl sponsored my research. on learning that this was not the case, even though senior sl people were supportive of it and the bnfl funding did offer me nuclear “patronage,” they seemed slightly disappointed and in a few cases less interested in participating in the research, for example, in workshops to which i invited them—it was as if i did not depend enough on the nuclear! the company itself seemed quite reassured by the institutional affiliation with nuclear research that i had through the university of manchester’s dalton nuclear institute and dalton cumbrian facility, and it generously offered me site access. 14. the usefulness of metaphors in future making is also highlighted in foresight studies, for example, inayatullah et al. 2016. 15. most notably radiation free lakeland, https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com, and core, cumbrians opposed to a radioactive environment, http://corecumbria.co.uk. compare baxter and lee 2004 for an interview-based study of perceptions of risk (conceived of as socially constructed in a context of everyday life experience) concerning a waste-treatment facility in alberta, canada, in which the authors note amplification of risk at regional and national levels as opposed to attenuation of risk at the local level. 16. in recent work addressing ethics in the nuclear realm, the term acceptance is problematized as it implies “the public” passively enduring corporate or governmental decisions. see taebi 2016, which argues for the criterium of acceptability instead. 17. compare andrew blowers (2017, 116) on “semi-feudal overtones” between sellafield and west cumbrians. françoise zonabend’s (1993, 61) fascinating ethnography of the nuclear facilities at la hague, normandy, similarly paints a social history foregrounding local anxieties in “a land that has been robbed of its identity by a high-risk industrial establishment.” 18. contrast brian wynne, claire waterton, and robin grove white (2007, 32), drawing on 1992–93 focus groups in west cumbria, who suggest that any pride is not located in west cumbria’s considering itself a center of excellence in nuclear science and technology, but rather in its carrying a burden for the rest of the country. 19. in other words, to “move away from the low-barrier, sort of feel-good mini investments,” as sl head of community and development gary mckeating put it in a social impact multiplied podcast, august 19, 2020. community expectations here chime with the “family social contract” that anna storm and tatiana kasperski (2017, 41–42), in their relational taxonomy of mono-industrial towns, associate with the steel and iron industry, involving ample company investment in town planning and festivals, marked by “care between workers and company management.” when industrial activities wind down, they note, those operating according to the “family social contract” expect continuing care. 20. for his work on the topic as an mp, see reed and cunningham 2005. in november 2021, it was announced at a wcssg meeting that reed was set to leave sl and join the nda. 21. see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/introducing-six-sellafield-ltds-new-social-impact-programme (accessed august 5, 2020). in an interview i had with anti-nuclear activist martin forwood in april 2018, he noted a tension between dependency and deprivation: “the area has become dependent on the industry,” he said, “but where is all the largesse that sl is supposedly distributing? there is deprivation locally, how is this possible? where do all these alleged millions go?” with six 2020, sl professed to address such inequalities. 22. compare brian wynne (1992, 299) with an additional perspective on the role of “social dependency” in an article on cumbrian sheep farmers and the 1986 chernobyl fallout, which highlights local qualms with a lack of transparency following the windscale accident: “the farmers identified socially with family, friends and neighbors who were part of the sellafield industrial workforce. they recognized their own indirect and sometimes direct social dependency upon the plant—not only neighbors but also close relatives of the hill-farmers work there. thus, underlying and hounding their expressed mistrust of the authorities and experts, there was a countervailing deep sense of social solidarity and dependency.” 23. the term stakeholder, referring to anyone interested in or affected by an issue, is widely used by discussion partners in all kinds of roles and very much normalized in west cumbria in the fora i have engaged with. its use is certainly not limited to industry players. 24. the local emphasis on wage labor and jobs is also strikingly evident in the controversial local support for a coking coal mine planned to be dug just south of whitehaven. the project proposed by west cumbria mining was put on hold in 2021 after a national and international outrage over climate concerns, widely covered in the press. see, for example, reed 2021—surprisingly, this new york times article makes no mention of the continuing importance of the nuclear industry in west cumbria. 25. this turns nuclear decommissioning into a fertile ground for exploring future-making scenarios that a university of manchester interdisciplinary team has tentatively begun studying (https://www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/thebeam/2019/10/11/exploring-sellafields-limitless-future, accessed august 21, 2020). i will elaborate on this in a new multisited ethnographic project funded by the u.k.’s economic and social research council, entitled “mimesis in action: nuclear decommissioning as conceptual playground for societal and ecological future making,” beginning may 2022. 26. i take the heading for this section from reed’s reference to arthur miller’s the shadow of the gods (1958). i am aware that, unfortunately for my key metaphor, a whale is not a fish. 27. capability is a favorite sl term. 28. an sl discussion partner confessed to me that he heartily disliked the ubiquitous post-its at workshops—to him they signaled the meeting would be all about process, without any tangible results. another sl employee shuddered at the mere mention of a “workshop” without proper tools to make something. 29. entanglements between wcssg and the nuclear industry in west cumbria came strikingly to the fore following the death of core’s martin forwood, a longtime campaigner against nuclear reprocessing, in october 2019. a minute of silence was observed at wcssg meetings, with appreciation being expressed of his professionalism and informed critique. to my surprise and confusion, members remarked, however, that it felt rather odd to celebrate forwood’s anti-nuclear reputation at the wcssg. for forwood’s obituary, see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/16/martin-forwood-obituary. 30. this dynamic is evident also in west cumbria’s having come forward as a potential host community in the u.k. government’s siting process for a deep geological disposal facility, which was launched in 2018 (kalshoven 2020; cf. hecht 2018). preceding this move, the wcssg chose to emphasize west cumbria’s uniqueness in its familiarity with all things nuclear and its longtime stewardship of the country’s nuclear waste: “we are the host community now, a unique community in its understanding, history, and impact. … our community has supported the industry for a long time” (wcssg enablers meeting, egremont, april 12, 2018). 31. further complicating the narrative of the threat of fewer job opportunities at sl is an expected shortage of working-age people in cumbria (oxford economics 2017). 32. on msss emptying tanks, see: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sep2-moves-into-position-for-retrievals (accessed october 19, 2021). note the head of legacy silos at sl remarking, “this is a marathon, not a sprint.” for retrieval operations from legacy buildings becoming sl success stories, see also kalshoven 2020 on the decommissioning of a legacy pond. 33. wcssg meetings in 2019–2021 included extensive updates on a newly discovered leak at msss, with an elusive source and underground pathway. see https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/sellafield-ltd-incident-reports-and-notices (accessed october 19, 2021). 34. and allegedly, according to some discussion partners, involving a surge in cases of venereal disease. 35. when i expressed my bemusement in a conversation with an nda representative over this change in tone compared to chown’s predecessor foster’s, the nda discussion partner suggested that foster might have been irked by what he viewed as the region’s entitlement, on top of its supposed dependency. 36. when i asked an sl team leader in 2019 for his hopes for west cumbria, he said he hoped the region would not to be “mothballed” as had happened in areas where industries had closed overnight. but who knows, he said, what the future might hold: “perhaps capitalism will come to an end!” a year later, the covid-19 measures aimed at keeping economies afloat taken by many governments, including britain’s conservative one, intriguingly saw an unprecedented sharing of 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reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.11 evoking eternity: orthodox co-presence in post-yugoslav central serbia cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 272-297, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.05 evoking eternity: orthodox co-presence in post-yugoslav central serbia nicholas lackenby university college london https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3692-2536 in the eternal … nothing passes away, but the whole is simultaneously present augustine, confessions nek’ se peva, nek’ se vino pije / u ovom životu ništa večno nije let us sing, let us drink / in this life nothing is eternal serbian folk song on a damp morning in october 2017, a small crowd gathered outside an orthodox church in the central serbian town of kraljevo. eventually, the blue flashing lights of a police car fractured the gray autumnal drizzle, prompting the crowd—clustering patiently beneath umbrellas—to turn with quickening interest. behind a slow-moving police escort purred a silver van with tinted windows. inside—lying in an ornate, velvet-lined casket—were the relics of saint simon the monk. or, to give him the name he bore before taking monastic vows, king stefan nemanjić, the first crowned (c. 1165–1228). the year 2017 marked 800 years since stefan had been coronated king of the serbs. in honor of this anniversary, his relics were ceremonially brought to the town from studenica, a medieval monastery about an hour’s drive to the south. stefan/simon rarely travels, making his visit, in church circles at least, an event of great significance. for churchgoers, it was not that some holy relics had been brought to town, but that stefan/simon himself had come—a royal visitor who deserved to be received as such. at the end of a divine liturgy served in his honor, marija,1 a schoolteacher in her late forties, caught my arm, smiling. “i feel such joy, i’m so happy that he’s here! you can see what great love he has, he came!” saints are alive, marija enthused, comparing them to “lightbulbs” connected to god; “they have already arrived in eternity [večnost].” orthodox relics are well known to afford temporal gymnastics. in her classic work on postsocialist dead bodies, katherine verdery (1999) argues that relics bring about a “compression” of time; parading them around makes it feel as if historical events happened only a few days before. but the analogy of time compression, of the past coming close to the present, does not capture the events in kraljevo on that rainy morning. the people who awaited stefan/simon did not suppose that he had died a few days earlier. nor did they imagine themselves re-enacting a historical event. as a saint, marija said, simon had entered eternity. orthodox christians see eternity as coterminous with the presence of god and the heavenly kingdom: a potentially attainable and habitable dimension that is timeless, infinite, mysterious, and good, and one that encompasses the temporal, worldly order. given his place in eternity, the crowd responded to the monarch-saint as a real, living, and emotional presence, more as a contemporary than a historical figure. eternity, the historian carlos eire (2011, xiii) pithily observed, “can make a hell of a difference.” this article explores the difference that evoking eternity makes. conceptually, eternity proves problematic, challenging, and contentious (melamed 2016, 11), a notion conjuring up dimensions beyond the reach of the human imagination. but, for all the connotations of boundlessness and ineffability, visions of eternity are inextricably connected to the social, political, and intellectual conditions producing them—and on which they recursively impact (eire 2011). interrogating eternity anthropologically means thinking about how people—from their embodied position in the present—imagine dimensions beyond time to affect their spatial, temporal worlds. this article explores one iteration of eternity, one that emerges in a nominally orthodox, postsocialist society in contemporary southeastern europe. specifically, i consider self-identifying orthodox christian believers in central serbia—a diverse network of women and men fluent at evoking the eternal. in the orthodox theological view, eternity encompasses human history, history here imagined as a linear, irreversible movement from creation to final judgment. within history, christians work toward the eschaton (djakovac 2015, 229). while eternity can only be experienced in its fullness at the end of time, it is not relegated to the climax of a chronological timeline, as it is in some protestant understandings (cf. webster 2022). this world and the divine are “not separated in a temporal sense … but are coexistent” (hirschon 1989, 245). i capture how such abstract theological ideas function in everyday social life by speaking about the alongsidedness of eternity. what i mean is that my interlocutors perceive eternity as a mystical dimension outside of sequential time and bounded space, one that sits alongside social life in the present. in this dimension, forebears (like saint simon) and beloved kin are seen as alive, co-present, and able to engage with the living. being alongside, eternity is always at hand, a resource to be called on when needed. james bielo (2017, 134) writes that a central capacity of religious life is the management of people’s relationship to time—religious practices are, in effect, “responses to the problem of temporality.” evoking eternity constitutes a response to temporality par excellence, one that does so by reaching beyond time altogether, to a dimension alongside it, allowing people to momentarily re-imagine and re-orient the everyday. by evoking eternity, my orthodox interlocutors—limited, like all humans, by their bodies, frailty, and socioeconomic conditions—imbue life with increased imaginative possibility. we can get a better grasp on how eternity renders chronology irrelevant by thinking through ethnography from a wholly different context. studies of the dreaming in australian aboriginal cosmology intersect in revealing ways with the orthodox material. rather like eternity, the dreaming offers “a different order of reality” (myers 1986, 51), the precondition of existence, which encompasses—and can be revealed in—the world (elkin 1969, 88). the dreaming is “not limited by considerations of space and time” because “all space is here and all time is now” (elkin 1969; emphasis mine). as with eternity, we should not imagine the dreaming as a “horizontal” line, “extending back chronologically through a series of ‘pasts’” (elkin 1969, 93). instead, the line is vertical, where the past “underlies and is within the present” (elkin 1969; emphasis mine). scholars have consequently described the dreaming as “compenetrative” (hume 2002, 38; stanner 1998, 18), with the past, present, and future mutually infused rather than sequentially ordered, the living and dead interconnected. in kraljevo, king stefan thus did not “return” from a distant past—the eternal realm alongside simply allowed him to be there, co-present. the ethnographic record also suggests that the dreaming established the “fundamental ontology of all things ordained once-and-for-all” (myers 1986, 54): it is set down, fixed. however, my argument about the evocations of eternity that i documented in serbia is not about fixity. on the contrary, i suggest that eternity is dynamic. stefan/simon had not always been in eternity—he arrived in it, as marija reminded me. what makes eternity socially generative is its accumulative nature; it can be populated. as a habitable dimension alongside the everyday, eternity facilitates intimate bonds of co-presence (williamson fa 2022), allowing a range of physically departed people to remain at hand, ready to engage in social life. despite such socially constitutive potential, eternity has rarely emerged as an explicit object of anthropological interest. the idea sometimes becomes tantalizingly employed to scaffold arguments (e.g., tomlinson 2012; teitelbaum 2020), but, beyond studies of monasticism (lester 2005, 210–28; scherz 2013) and ritual (rappaport 1992), eternity remains infrequently interrogated in and for itself. this seems strange, especially given a proliferation of work considering non-western forms of historical consciousness (hirsch and stewart 2005; palmié and stewart 2016; stewart 2016) and the unpredictable and affective ways in which past/present/future fold into each other (e.g., bryant and knight 2019; ringel 2016). one could, of course, object to the irony of considering eternity in relation to the temporality literature, since eternity does not concern time at all, but timelessness. however, as a dimension outside, and yet alongside, time, eternity is intrinsic to people’s “temporalizations” (munn 1992), helping them speak about and situate themselves within time. to study eternity, then, means to think about how people situate complex pasts in relation to their present. it means to ask how humans strive to profit from the insights, empathy, and agency of deceased people they did not necessarily meet in person. and it means to inquire how people locate human transience, frailty, and finitude within a vast cosmological picture. the first half of this article explores the ways in which serbian churchgoers evoke eternity and its relation to time, as well as how they speak about having to “earn” it. in particular, i describe how eternity is entangled with the existential problem of death. scaling upward, i then consider how extended serbian kin are remembered unto eternity, and the ways in which ancestors and saints are experienced as remaining alongside the present. ultimately, i speculate about the social possibilities afforded by eternity. orthodox life after yugoslavia under the leadership of marshal josip broz tito, the socialist federal republic of yugoslavia (1945–1992) held together bosnia-herzegovina, croatia, macedonia, montenegro, serbia, and slovenia. after tito’s death in 1980, the multinational state weakened, eventually splintering in a much-studied series of wars (see, for instance, glenny 1992; jović 2009; cohen and dragović-soso 2008). in serbia, the population lived through spiraling inflation, economic sanctions brought against the authoritarian regime of slobodan milošević, and the nato aerial bombing of yugoslavia in 1999—an intervention in response to the actions of serbian forces against ethnic albanians in kosovo. after milošević was toppled in 2000, resentment and disappointment swiftly replaced hope for a brighter future (greenberg 2014). unsurprisingly, such shattering experiences of ethnic violence, societal disintegration, and economic turmoil deeply impacted local perceptions of time. across the former yugoslav states people were pushed to simultaneously inhabit multiple temporalities—of transition and european integration, of capitalist striving and ethno-national teleology (gilbert et al. 2008, 11; živković 2011, 252). religious temporalities re-emerged, too. under socialism, yugoslavia’s constitution had officially guaranteed freedom of conscience, but the regime was underpinned by ideological atheism—a secular, unifying creed of “brotherhood and unity”—discouraging overt expressions of religiosity. as the system crumbled, religious institutions became increasingly vocal (see perica 2002), proffering new temporalities with which to navigate the transition. in serbia, the serbian orthodox church reasserted its authority in the public sphere, positioning itself as the traditional protector of the serbian people and fanning the nationalism of milošević’s regime (radić 2000). beyond the machinations of institutional politics, orthodox christianity offered a reaffirmed sense of identity and moral direction to the population at large. no longer the preserve of rural, elderly women, the church and religious practice began to attract and affect an increasingly diverse range of people (radulović 2012). today, as in other majority orthodox countries, ethnic and confessional identities blend into one. a majority of serbs (about 80 percent, according to the 2022 census) identify nominally as orthodox. this article is based on fieldwork primarily conducted in and around the town of kraljevo. sitting on the river ibar, kraljevo is a sprawling urban settlement, with a population of about 125,000 in its overall administrative area. during the yugoslav period, kraljevo was a booming industrial center, with many of the town’s residents employed in its factories. the economic infrastructure crumbled during the 1990s, leading to mass unemployment. despite tentative signs of economic regeneration and foreign investment, people often point to kraljevo’s decay, either by recalling better times during socialism or noting that “everything has gone under [sve je propalo].” demographically, kraljevo follows the national trend: around 95 percent of the population identify as both serb and orthodox.2 it is well known that only a relative minority of the serbian population engage regularly with religious practice.3 this article largely draws on conversations, observations, and interviews with the extended networks of women and men who inhabit kraljevo’s liturgical world, people who often self-identify as “believers” (vernici). what distinguishes these people (who vary considerably in age, education, and employment) is that they seek to live “in the faith” and claim to be “working on” their salvation. they do not constitute a homogenous, isolated community set apart from mainstream society. some have spouses—or parents—uninterested in and sometimes skeptical of what they see as excessive piety. many of my interlocutors only come into interaction with each other at church events. but believers are connected insofar as they try to follow the church’s calendar of fasts and feasts, attending the divine liturgy on sunday and receiving holy communion regularly. it is worth noting, then, that while the eternity orthodox imagine is not cyclical (a point to which i return in the final section), the calendar which draws them closer to it is. as a rather large town, kraljevo offers a vibrant liturgical life, perhaps best imagined as an extended spiritual landscape through which people circulate. there are three parish churches and a chapel in the local hospital. groups meet to learn about orthodox tradition, and, in the summer months, priests and friendship groups organize numerous coach-trip pilgrimages to monasteries in the region. unique to kraljevo is the so-called spiritual centre, housed in the townhouse of nikolaj velimirović (1880–1956). a former bishop of žička eparchy, prolific writer, and theologian, velimirović was canonized in 2003. while critics have described his writings as antisemitic and deeply problematic (see byford 2008), in church circles he is read uncritically and with broad appreciation. in sum, my interlocutors are open to seeking “eschatological solutions” to the present predicaments of serbian life (raković 2013, 108)— which makes them good collaborators for thinking about what eternity can do. it will pass! in church circles, the ideas of eternity and eternal life (večni život) recur with frequency. homilies dwell on the fleeting, transient nature of this earthly existence and its eternal counterweight: god came to this world “to give us life, not only for today and not only for tomorrow, but for all eternity!” (episkop jovan [purić] 2008, 19). lay evocations of eternity do not prove intellectually consistent in a theological or doctrinal sense. everything depends on the speaker’s positionality: references to the eternal are partial, contextual, and hopeful, sometimes laced with uncertainty and ambivalence. what matters is that when people face untimely bereavements, divorce proceedings, or unemployment, as an utterance, eternity returns people’s focus (however briefly) to the heavenly kingdom, to the impermanence of this world, and to the nearness of the celestial realm. the serbian theological tradition offers a rich conceptual apparatus for eternity-thinking, the idea finding particularly strong voice in the work of justin popović (1894–1979). contrasting the “spirit of eternity” with the “spirit of time,” popović (2005, 147) characterizes time as but a “fragment” of the eternal realm, a fragment that becomes meaningless when disconnected from eternity. in vice-ridden modernity, the enfeebled human condition needs eternity, described not as a mere “transcendental possibility” but as “real,” “living,” and “tangible” (popović 2005, 147). as the theologian bogoljub šijaković (2013, 207) has noted, reading history through the perspective of eternity reveals the eschaton as “potentially present” at every single moment. the perception of eternity’s alongsidedness percolates into conversations. between sips of herbal tea in a monastery refectory, sister anastasija insisted that eternity and the temporal world were not “parallel universes.” she gently placed her palms on the table to illustrate two separate, untouching spheres. rather, she clarified, the temporal and eternal “are unified”; there should be “no obstacle [prepreka] between god and us.” miloš, a translator in his early sixties, expressed a similar view. we sat in his book-filled living room while he mused that “this earthly life is a sort of entrance [ulazak] into eternal life. it means that here [in this world] one can taste some sweetness [slast].” following this logic, a person living a “liturgical life” can glimpse the eternal realm. people claim that the divine liturgy—that intensely sensorial ritual during which the congregation experiences shared movement, incense, and chant—is the moment at which eternity breaks into the present, at which a believer glimpses god’s kingdom, the not-yet-in-the-now (vasiljević 2014; carroll 2017, 2018). monastic accounts describe experiencing the “uncreated light” of god as being like “the touch of divine eternity” (ladouceur 2019, 166). despite their awareness of such theological explanations, churchgoers do not easily proffer experiential reports of what eternity itself looks or feels like (cf. lester 2005). eternity is a discursive framing, an idea that allows for imagining new possibilities. david henig (2020, 93) observes that much of the anthropological scholarship on temporality in post-yugoslav spaces focuses on secular, future-oriented projects. he makes a fair point: to challenge the image of post-yugoslav citizens as inescapably defined by historic violence, anthropologists have (rightly) insisted on people’s capacity for visionary, future-oriented thinking (petrović-šteger 2020a, 2020b), their yearnings for normality (jansen 2015), and how, through hope, they reach toward better futures (jansen 2016; jovanović 2018). henig (2020, 93) offers the crucial insight that we must consider such secular temporal reasoning together with conceptions of time deriving from religious thought, since both intersect “in a given historical-political nexus” (see also gilbert et al. 2008, 11). evocations of eternity make sense in—and cannot be extracted from—the context of daily life in twenty-first century serbia, a place whose mood has been described as one of sheer psychological, economic, and political exhaustion (petrović-šteger 2020a). it is important to underline, then, that despite their eloquent eternity-thinking, my interlocutors do not lead lives devoid of future-oriented aspiration, oblivious to temporal constraints. i stress this in the face of tendencies in popular journalistic accounts to essentialize supposedly balkan (and especially orthodox) time as characterized by deterministic, inescapable spirals of violence (for instance, kaplan 1994, 58). the journalist victoria clark’s (2000, 75) travel writing about serbia provides a vivid example: orthodox time has its own dynamic. its motion is spiral, not linear, which means that orthodox history moves in divinely ordained circles, as pleasingly repetitive as the patterns on church vestments. empires and lands are lost and regained … until the end of the world. the past is never forgotten because it comes around again, and the future is never new. living and working in contemporary kraljevo, believers are not driven by time cycles that somehow sit counterfactually to “reality,” nor do they exist in a timeless vacuum oblivious to sociohistorical transformation and future-oriented aspiration. older couples carefully make retirement plans. unemployed male laborers search for paid work to support their families, sometimes desperately. some learn german and english to apply for visas in the hope of finding better employment outside serbia. people consider what to study at college, envision where to raise a young family, and undertake extensive home improvements. their evocations of the eternal do not equal a denial of historical change, but identify historical change as historical, as something happening in time. as petar, an insurance salesman, expressed it: “‘time exists with us [i.e., in this world]. … with god, time does not exist.” serbian orthodox express eternity relationally, by counterposing it to the here and now. ana is a nurse in her fifties, a willing conversationalist. one morning, over coffee in her kitchen, she said, wistfully: “with god, i think that the dimension of time doesn’t have any influence. god has his own perspective on that dimension. in relation to eternity, what is a year?!” let’s visit a different kitchen, that of miodrag and jelena—a retired couple who live in an apartment filled with icons and spiritual readings. jelena explained that “we’re not created for a sojourn [boravak] on earth, we’re created for eternity. here [in this world] it is temporary.” expanding on his wife’s thoughts, miodrag recalled a citation he attributed to velimirović: “we’ve come here to serve our term [rok] … and then we return home.” life in linear time becomes but a passing segment of an all-encompassing dimension (see also cannell 2013, 232). i mentioned eternity to bojan, a taxi driver, as we careened down the highway back into town. flicking through his phone, he directed me to a video by father gojko perović—a priest who has found considerable success on youtube with his witty yet sage anecdotes and homilies. in the clip, father gojko recounts the tale of an unhappy man who confides in a priest that his personal, financial, and family life is falling apart. the priest instructs him to put up a sign with the words pro ´ci  ´ce!—“it will pass!” sure enough, after a year the man returns with the good news that everything is indeed going better. at this, the priest promptly tells him not to remove the sign—it will pass! in this life, both economic woes and good fortune are transient. much as buddhist thought emphasizes impermanence (cassaniti 2022), eternity reminds people that worldly existence—with its suffering, uncertainty, elation, and joy—is, after all, only temporary. in short, evoking eternity allows people to throw their future-oriented activities—if only momentarily—into high relief (see also stewart 2012, 214). one of maja petrović-šteger’s (2020a, 174) belgrade informants recalled the wisdom of patriarch pavle (1914–2009): “time is only a duration” that ultimately becomes tiring, the woman paraphrased, “so the right thing to do is to step out of it once in a while. to be able to look forward and backward.” alongside the everyday, eternity puts things in perspective. earning eternity the challenge, in a fleeting world filled with distracting pleasures, is keeping the eternal in mind. a belgrade priest made this point starkly in a homily about the parable of the rich fool (luke 12: 16–21). the homily—drawing on material previously published in a book—assessed a greedy, insatiable person as a “thief,” stealing not only from god and those around him but also “from himself, from his eternal life” (radojević 2018, 310). the rapacious quest for “this-worldly treasures” leads away from the eternal, not toward it (radojević 2018, 313). one friend criticized her neighbors for slaughtering a pig in december, during the nativity fast, a time when eating meat is prohibited (see lackenby 2023a, 875). such indulgent, festive behavior, she muttered darkly, clouded a view of eternity. my interlocutors speak often about having to “earn” (zaslužiti) eternity by trying to live well, according to the gospels. a woman at an icon procession in belgrade expressed it like this: “our time here is short, but it’s important, because with it we determine our eternity [odred¯ujemo našu večnost].” zdravko, a retired military man and believer, shared a similar view. he suggested that eternity “is what we are fighting for in this world, through the way we live and with our virtues so as to earn eternal life in the kingdom of heaven!” zdravko was certainly committed to his churchgoing, on one occasion canceling our planned coffee meeting to attend vespers because he had overslept and missed the morning service. eternal life depends, in other words, on a person’s conduct in the worldly one. and this worldly life is not meant to be easy. draško, a civil engineer in his late twenties, expounded on this idea as we meandered home after a few beers. crossing the deserted town square, he characterized orthodoxy as a constant struggle, of which the overall purpose is to reach “‘salvation.” people should not focus, he proclaimed, on anticipating miraculous transformations in this life: “the point isn’t that a disabled person gets up and walks, but that he gets to heaven.” warming to his theme, draško proffered another, more poetic example: “the point isn’t that the blind can start to see [in this life], but that they can see in eternity.” one could reasonably argue that it is rather easy for draško to lucidly deliver such reflections, since he is neither disabled nor blind. but his logic is instructive. reaching god’s eternal realm is the goal of this earthly existence, but such striving does not transform this life in the concrete ways we might anticipate from a fallen human viewpoint. evoking eternity, then, does not alleviate worldly suffering, though it does momentarily reframe it. a powerful example came on a spring day when milanka invited me for lunch at kraljevo’s glistening new retail complex on the outskirts of town. milanka, a widow in her mid-sixties, used to run a small business. as we paused outside a fishmonger’s, ivana, our mutual acquaintance, emerged. the previous year ivana had tragically lost both her mother and father. the two women spontaneously engaged in conversation about coping with grief and loss. eventually, the time came to take our leave of ivana. wishing her well, milanka seemed to throw the whole conversation about death into relief, a detectable buoyancy in her voice: “we’ll all go there soon … time goes by like this! [she snapped her fingers]. it’s already sixteen years since my husband died!” milanka was not seeking to trick time, to bend it to her own ends (cf. ringel 2016). rather, she was urging an acceptance of it, of its forward-moving, unstoppable progression. and with that snap of her fingers, milanka got to the crux of the matter: evoking eternity is deeply entwined with an ongoing contemplation on death. there are no dead people one evening, drinking wine in a dense haze of cigarette smoke, miodrag wanted to elucidate for me the process by which the soul leaves the body at death. as he spoke, jelena shuffled off to the bedroom. she returned holding a small pamphlet printed on off-white paper with an icon of christ descending into hell on the front cover. it was a copy of the akathist hymn for the departed, a prayer intoned at the graveside. “eternity is what christ promised,” jelena repeated, several times. the television flickering in the background, she read aloud the passage that implores god to keep the departed in his flock. the living, jelena reminded me in fetching the akathist, have a role to play in securing the deceased a place in the eternal realm. in orthodoxy, death is not seen as “a final end to the relationship which proceeded it” (hirschon 1989, 207). on dying, a person can no longer repent for themselves, so it becomes incumbent on the living to pray on their behalf. at memorial services, those assembled hold flickering beeswax candles and chant the refrain “memory eternal!” (vječnaja pamjat!). this is not a supplication for the departed to be eternally remembered on earth, in this life. it is an entreaty that god remember them, and keep them with him. to that end, people commonly fill in the names of their deceased kin on church-issued paper slips—headed with a cross and the words “for the departed.” at church entrances, one finds small baskets of these slips of scribbled cyrillic, left along with crumpled dinar bills, so that the priest will intone and thus “remember” the names before the liturgy. miloš once directed me to the words of velimirović: “we want the name of the deceased to be mentioned forever in eternity, in the eternal life and the kingdom of god.”4 as part of the social process of death, evoking eternity incurs intellectual work and mental effort (astuti 2007). an article published in pravoslavlje—the official magazine of the serbian patriarchate—proposed that orthodox should not think of death as an “inevitability” but as an “existential problem” holistically “resolved” by god through his loving promise of eternal life (bošković 2015, 25). similarly, my interlocutors vocally problematize death, minimizing the profundity commonly attached to it, couching it as but a mere transition into the eternal. bojana, a lawyer and widow in her forties whose husband died shortly after the birth of their son, once murmured—with quiet certainty—that “death is only a stage through which we go into eternity.” jelena insisted on death’s unnaturalness: “death is not a normal thing—it is only a crossing [prelaz].” in orthodox publications, one encounters euphemistic references to people “falling asleep in the lord” or “presenting themselves” unto him. the final paragraph of an obituary in pravoslavlje noted that “stevan will await the resurrection of the dead and eternal life in jagodina town cemetery.” there is, then, an emphasis on waiting, an implicit suggestion that burial marks nothing more than a temporary measure. as well as disdainfully downplaying the finality of death, people make positive, hopeful claims about the status of those no longer physically present. i am thinking of miroljub, a charismatic odd-jobs man in his mid-fifties. one afternoon, as he was delicately pouring oil into the lamp hanging before the icons in his living room, he mused: “there are no dead … we light candles for the living in this world and for the living in the other world.” the premise of this claim (widely repeated by laity and clergy) is that, from god’s eternal perspective, all are living. a priest corrected me when i referred to the “dead” (mrtvih), suggesting “departed” (upokojenih) as more appropriate. miroljub—ever ready with an apposite maxim—pushed his point further by claiming that there is “no up nor down,” no distinction between the living above and the dead below. he recalled the place where visitors light candles at the studenica monastery church. on either side of the narthex are two raised marble plinths. unlike at many churches, where the candles are placed on separate levels, here the thin wax tapers lit for the health of the living or the solace of the departed are indistinguishable, symbolically burning alongside each other on a single plane. the plinths thus symbolically materialize the idea of eternity keeping the departed co-present. milanka speaks in similar terms to miroljub. she lives in one of the apartment blocks overlooking the cemetery where her husband is buried. when she steps onto her balcony to hang the laundry to dry, she looks at the gravestones and says, “sleep! you’re sleeping in the best bedsheets. … i’ll come soon!” milanka reported her ritual as we were eating lunch, a smile on her face, joking about what her neighbors must think. she leaned across the remnants of the grilled chicken: “i don’t see him as dead. he fell asleep.” and then she repeated that hopeful, recurring statement of belief: “with god, there are no dead people.” in their exchange outside the fishmonger’s, milanka and ivana agreed that departed kin “can hear and see us.” milanka waved her arm around, adding that she thought her husband could perceive “everything.” this omniscience carries consequences: precisely because the departed remain around us, milanka cautioned, the bereaved had to take care with how they spoke, avoiding criticism, since their loved ones could not defend themselves. elsewhere, stefan williamson fa (2022) shows how shi’i muslim devotional vocal recitation facilitates relations of co-presence with the family of the prophet—beings who are unseen and immaterial and yet felt as proximate. eternity-thinking does similar work, allowing the departed to be ever present. if the claim that there are no dead is cathartic, then graves actually provide a location for the enactment of co-presence. i have heard the gravestone described as a sort of “reception area” (prijemnik) where the bereaved can speak with departed kin. a vivid illustration comes from a trip i made with miodrag and jelena at the beginning of lent, to visit the graves of miodrag’s relatives. it was sleeting and cold, the mist only just beginning to rise from the surrounding hills. we walked to the tomb of miodrag’s parents—a wide, raised plot of earth, encased in marble slabs. after miodrag had read the akathist, he and jelena served the graves with koliva (the boiled wheat used in orthodox commemorations) scooped out into paper cake cups. miodrag poured red wine onto the graves in the shape of a cross. (at a different cemetery that we visited afterward, miodrag spoke encouragingly to the occupant of the grave: “come on, mila, have some wine!”) from small plastic cups, we sipped wine, too. miodrag walked around the graves smoking, tears in his eyes. “i want to smoke a cigarette with grandad,” he said, lighting one and placing it into the muddy mound. he recalled, slightly choked, that he had started smoking with his grandfather when he was little. “look how he’s smoking,” he pointed out, watching the smoke swirl upward. later, seeing how the cigarette was reduced to a stalk of gray ash right up to the filter, he observed contentedly: “look, he’s smoked the whole thing.” miodrag, visibly moved, experienced his grandfather as intimately and emotionally co-present (see also williamson fa 2022). yet however reassuring the feeling of alongsidedness, however contenting to smoke and drink with the departed, eternity is laced with uncertainty. unlike in some forms of protestantism, orthodoxy gives no assurance that one is automatically saved through baptism, or that good souls go straight to heaven. only god knows who will be saved. through their praying, fasting, and participation in liturgy, churchgoers demonstrably seek to earn eternity—but they never claim to be guaranteed a place. solely the saints—as marija so animatedly stated with regard to simon the monk, and as priests periodically remind their congregations—have unambiguously “entered eternity.” beyond saints, things remain uncertain. there is ambivalence about the status of departed souls, with different claims emerging depending on the worldly biography of the departed, their perceived saintliness, or the degree of affection the speaker has toward them. patriarch pavle, whose passing in 2009 provoked a mass outpouring of grief, is not (yet) officially canonized, though the laity practically reveres him as a saint in eternity. by contrast, when i asked milanka directly where she thought her husband was, she paused, smiled slightly, and said that she hoped that he “is on the side of god,” reminding me that we have to earn the kingdom of heaven: “i don’t know if he is there. i don’t know whether we will meet. but i try.” however, pressing people on the specifics of whose soul is where obviously misses what makes evoking eternity compelling. in the sudden throes of loss, profound grief, or in affectionate recollections of a missed family member, my interlocutors derive comfort from situating the departed in god’s eternal realm. draško lost his father to cancer when he was in his twenties. he admitted that he sometimes feels lonely, though not sad: “i know he is in heaven.” a couple whose son had died posted a tribute on social media on what would have been his birthday. one of the supportive comments written by friends read, “don’t worry, now he’s in a place where there are no years.” evoking the eternal “contextualises the individual death within a transcendental order” (seremetakis 1991, 225), however fleetingly. interestingly, the ethnography on mormonism also reveals deep concern about the connection between eternity and one’s family members. fenella cannell’s (2013, 2017) informants hope to be “forever families,” eternally bound to each other in heaven. cannell’s work places the focus of attention on the nuclear family unit. in serbia, the concern for situating kin in eternity also stretches beyond immediate family to more distant ancestors, to the extended kinship ties of the serbian people as a whole. alongside our ancestors central serbia was not directly affected by the land wars that devasted croatia, bosnia, and kosovo in the 1990s. men from the area were drafted, though, and the general trauma of that period lingers. my interlocutors have a self-reflexive awareness that the autocratic milošević regime was widely held responsible for instigating yugoslavia’s collapse and the horrific ethnic violence that followed—leaving the serbian nationalism of the 1990s an utterly tarnished brand. the inhabitants of kraljevo thus hold a defensive attitude to remembering serbian suffering. particularly pronounced are local memories of the nato aerial bombing of yugoslavia in 1999—an intervention in response to the ethnic cleansing of kosovar albanians by serbian forces. like other nationalist discourses, the serbian version is shot through with references to the eternal. in 1389, at the much-mythicized battle of kosovo, the serbian prince lazar led his troops against the oncoming ottoman invasion. according to the legend—imbued with christian symbolism of martyrdom and resurrection—lazar chose the “eternal, heavenly kingdom” over the earthly one, losing the battle (and his head) and assuring his place, and that of the serbian people, with god (bieber 2002; bandić 2008, 227–38). velimirović wrote about “heavenly serbia” (nebeska srbija), urging serbs to reconnect with heaven through their devotion to church. in such narratives, serbs become a people who, like christ, lose in this world but win in eternity. in the 1990s, the idea of serbia being “celestial” or “heavenly” re-emerged into public discourse (radić 2000, 254). scholarly studies of serbian nationalism pick up on the eternal trope. christos mylonas’s (2003) book, serbian orthodox fundamentals: the quest for an eternal identity, is perhaps the most obvious (but see also čolović 2002, 18; bandić 2008, 237–38). here, like in other discussions of nationalism, eternity is taken to mean perdurance. for michael herzfeld (1991, 3–54), the nation-state seeks to “eternalize” its values and historical status, presenting itself as permanent, “fixed for all eternity” (herzfeld 2016, 25). deployed thus, “eternity” captures the nation imagined as organic and everlasting. yet if we engage seriously with orthodox cosmology, we see how the national community is not emboldened by the image of itself stretching endlessly into the future, but by the affective alongsidedness of a populated eternal realm. to make the point, it is illuminating to place the serbian materials in dialogue with one of the classic discussions of national temporality. benedict anderson’s (1991, 24) account of nationalism famously charts the transition away from the medieval idea of simultaneity-along-time, where past and future are compounded in the present. borrowing from walter benjamin, anderson (1991, 24) contended that the nation came to be imagined as moving through “homogenous, empty time”; it is a “secular, historically-clocked, imagined community” (anderson 1991, 35). but to appreciate eternity-thinking in kraljevo means returning to that earlier view of simultaneity. the heavenly dimension is “synchronous” (forbess and michelutti 2013, 11). as i have shown elsewhere (see lackenby 2023b), my interlocutors do not imagine the serbian people—just as they do not imagine themselves—as traveling through homogenous, empty time. since god created the world and the peoples in it, they see the serbian people as existing in the face of eternity, a dimension that, anything but empty, is imbued with potential and hope. when churchgoers evoke “heavenly serbia” they are not, in fact, longing for a sacralized nation-state that will perdure forever in this world (cf. dawson 2009). they believe that the world—and the political constellations within it—are transient. instead, they are conjuring the host of serbian forebears who inhabit the eternal realm alongside the worldly one—the serbia of heaven, as opposed to the one of earth. this view is not bereft of political affect. i discussed the issue with father stefan, an affable priest in his late thirties, during a conversation in his office. he proposed that the mentioning or remembering of victims and ancestors should be understood in terms of “living alongside” (saživeti): it’s not just remembering and commemoration. it’s not just some custom. but it has essential ontological importance that we, through that remembering, simply live alongside them [saživimo sa njima]. for father stefan, remembering does not constitute a committed relationship to a historical past. it constitutes a form of ongoing coexistence. in orthodox commemorative practices, “the past and the present are brought together and the divisive aspect of time is abolished” (hirschon 1989, 16). to remember, then, is not to recall things that happened before now. it is to recall people against the limitless relief of god’s eternity (see also du boulay 2009, 398). memorial services reveal the enactment of such remembering in practice. in kraljevo, there are multiple dates throughout the year at which clergy, civic dignitaries, and the public assemble to commemorate serbs killed in the wars of the twentieth century. in a different context, that of post-soviet ukraine, catherine wanner (1998, 168) shows how re-emerging church rituals challenged “the exclusive dominance of a secular sense of temporality.” the cyclicity of the religious calendar clashed with a progressive, secular timeline. in serbia, too, looping liturgical time can baffle the linearity of the public sphere. but my point here is not just that church rituals challenge secular time, rather that they evoke a dimension outside of time all together, one in which the departed are co-present. to take one example: on june 4, 2017, kraljevo celebrated its town feast day, the feast of the holy trinity. following prayers at church, priests, town officials, and the congregation processed in a straggling line around the town, bearing icons and banners. the procession arrived at the imposing, gray monument in the main square, atop which stands a uniformed serbian soldier, rifle clutched in one hand, a flag in the other. this is the monument to the serbian warriors, which commemorates the soldiers who fell in the balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 and the first world war. the clergy formed a horseshoe at the foot of the memorial and chanted commemorative prayers. the ritual complete, the crowd slowly walked off, singing “eternal memory.” the procession proceeded toward the monument to those killed in the yugoslav wars between 1991 and 1999. again, the clergy gathered around the altar-like stone plinth and remembered the departed unto god. a similar annual ceremony takes place at the 1991–1999 monument annually on march 24 to mark what locals refer to as the “nato aggression.” the clergy wear red and golden vestments—the liturgical color-scheme for feasts commemorating martyrs—and a deacon quietly reads out the names of those killed, thus “remembering” them. members of the public hold candles, and some women grip large, printed photographs of their sons who were killed fighting in the kosovo war. the priests chant “unto the ages of ages,” into eternity. in anderson’s (1999, 202) account, the dead have “responsibility” insofar as they quietly speak of the nation’s “goodness” and “innocence,” but they mark an awkward presence: “heaven harbors no nations, and the dead are no use to nationalism in so remote a sequestration.” in orthodoxy, however, the dead are not left to tacitly bolster a temporally oriented nationalist project. the dead are understood as “living before god,” and so relationships with the departed continue through prayerful remembrance; they are actively retained as part of a collectivity that transcends this world. orthodoxy’s retentive dynamic allows saints and past events to inhabit “the local time horizons of orthodox presence” (carroll 2015, 187; see also williamson fa 2022). miloš once observed that saints are “so alive, so alive in spirit that it is as if they lived yesterday, as if they live today. in fact, they are always present with us.”5 on one occasion, i joined a pilgrimage to the monastery of mileševa in southwestern serbia, a monastery renowned not only for its frescoes but also for housing the relic of saint sava’s left hand. sava is serbia’s patron saint, a figure of towering importance, who secured autocephaly for the serbian church in 1219. the abbot addressed the small group patiently waiting to venerate the relics. “saint sava is here with us now,” he said, dreamily, with a flourish of his arm. more than a brownish hand lying in a silver casket, saint sava is seen as alive and co-present. when, on sunday mornings at the close of the liturgy, the priest stands before the iconostasis, faces the congregation, and intones the names of saints, those saints are understood to be there. now, the ethnologist dušan bandić (2008, 234) wryly noted that while the kingdom of heaven into which prince lazar entered through his martyrdom “exists,” it is not “in heaven”—it exists in the “memory of the people,” in their legends. my interlocutors, by contrast, do not understand their saintly forebears as living presences thanks to their fixity in folklore. they see them as “alive and active” (forbess and michelutti 2013, 11) given their co-presence in eternity. to an extent, the alongsidedness of the eternal realm recalls what naomi haynes (2020, 61) terms the “expansive present,” a “shared timespace common to both biblical heroes and contemporary believers.” haynes argues more broadly that in inhabiting this expanded version of the present which broaches past and future, pentecostals avoid submitting to capitalist time. similarly, as a dimension alongside the everyday, eternity proffers increased agential and imaginative possibilities to the present. eternal possibilities a few days before saint simon/king stefan visited kraljevo, i attended a public lecture about the history of the medieval nemanjić dynasty at the town hall. referring to stefan/simon, the lecturing scholar asked the audience: “what will he think of us now? how will he see his people?” accepting stefan/simon as a living saint in eternity, the scholar implied that this revered figure had the capacity to pass judgment on the moral state of contemporary serbs. recalling the saint’s judgmental gaze, the scholar effectively invited his audience to partake in collective introspection. in evoking eternity, people can ascribe agency to those no longer physically present. the covid-19 pandemic—which decimated the elderly hierarchy of the serbian orthodox church—provides a further example. on october 30, 2020, the metropolitan bishop of montenegro, amfilohije radović, died following complications from the virus. amfilohije had been an outspoken cleric and theologian, a sometimes controversial yet much loved figure in serbian public life. people resisted the idea that he was truly gone. reflecting on the eternal quality of god’s memory, one priest insisted that “remembering amfilohije makes our relationship with him living and uninterrupted” (lukić 2021, 37). among the numerous lamentations that appeared on social media was a text titled “happy eternity to you, our good metropolitan,” by a young writer, milan ružić (2020). ružić sought to counter the widespread sadness by reminding readers of the joyful fact that the beloved bishop had now entered eternity. from his new place there, amfilohije would be able to watch “us” and do far more for his people than on earth. far from losing his capacity to lobby for the well-being of serbs, amfilohije’s capacity, ružić noted, had increased. eternity allows the physically departed to remain as actors in the political community (cf. anderson 1999). when the historian timothy snyder (2018, 166) introduces the “politics of eternity” as an analytic, he means political projects bereft of forward momentum and innovative content: “eternity takes certain points from the past and portrays them as moments of righteousness, discarding the time in between.” the nation falls victim to an endless onslaught of fictional problems where “time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns to the same threats from the past” (snyder 2018, 8). snyder’s analytical frame draws a direct contrast between eternity and novelty. but such a hegemonic, static reading of the eternal obscures the real socio-political consequences of eternity-thinking, what eternity does. how, we might ask, do religious practitioners and politicians reach beyond the flux of time to reconfigure socio-political life in the present? how might we better understand other issues characterized by human finitude and linear time—climate change being an obvious example—by grappling with local iterations of eternity-thinking? as socialist regimes crumbled, verdery (1999, 122–24) argues, nationalist politicians discovered different “temporal options” available to them. on the one hand, cyclical timelines of renewal and decay, where the threat of national death had to be overcome. on the other, linear timelines concerned with future economic prospects. she observes that different perceptions of time produce different senses of urgency and ensuing policy priorities. clearly, evoking eternity also provides options to both persons and polities. eternity is a dimension that subverts tripartite temporality, a dimension that lets historical figures, events, and glimpses of the future (vasiljević 2014) sit alongside the everyday. eternity affords a more capacious version of life, allowing an entire corpus of ideas and actors to be retained alongside the present, ready to be engaged—for peaceful, violent, and political ends—as and when necessary. when the eternal appears in the anthropological imagination, it generally does not evoke transformational potential, tending to suggest the opposite: stasis, inaction, stagnation, inertia, a striving for hegemony. in his thinking about nation-states, orthodox christianity, and cities, herzfeld (1990; 1991, 3–54; 2009) uses the trope of eternity to indicate perdurance and everlastingness. the eternal also connotes an endless return, a view influenced by mircea eliade’s ([1954] 2005) description of perennial loops of creation and destruction, constantly reverting to the same state. for eliade ([1954] 2005, 189), the “eternal return reveals an ontology uncontaminated by time and becoming.” a recent anthropological move has been to engage with the theological categories of our interlocutors to enhance the concepts that we, in turn, use to illuminate their worlds (robbins 2020). ethnographically tracking local expressions of eternity-thinking reveals večnost as a category that does something to the social world (eire 2011). in serbia, eternity offers a means through which to think about time, a way to perceive and frame it. feelings of solace and communion with the departed, and the judgment and support of those no longer present, hinge on the perception of a timeless dimension alongside. the eternity evoked by serbian orthodox is not the change-erasing return popular in essentializing accounts of balkan time. their eternity is not devoid of “becoming” (cf. eliade [1954] 2005, 189)—if anything, it enables it. some religious traditions, of course, clearly do think about the eternal in cyclical terms. and the cyclical metaphor undoubtedly illuminates the intersection of landscape, waiting, ritual calendars (hadžimuhamedović 2018, 9), and atemporal forms of selfhood (argenti 2019, 14). but my point is that in reaching beyond time—in striving for a mystical, atemporal, constant, and perfect dimension—people recursively affect their temporal lives. eternity-thinking dynamizes the temporal world. it is ethnographically revealing to think about eternity—not as the opposite of novelty, but as a dimension that can, in fact, produce it. abstract this article approaches the idea of eternity ethnographically. specifically, it turns to post-yugoslav central serbia and the version of eternity (večnost) evoked by practicing orthodox christians in their daily lives. in this context, the eternal does not imply the everlastingness of persons and things in this life, or an inevitable cyclical “return.” rather, eternity constitutes a dimension outside of time that sits alongside the present, a dimension that can be inhabited by ancestors and departed kin. in evoking eternity, people throw temporal life into relief, find solace in the face of death, and engage in the national community those no longer physically present. against an essentializing view of the eternal as repetition or stasis, the article speculates about how evoking eternity is socially and politically generative, imbuing life with increased imaginative possibilities. [eternity, serbia, former yugoslavia, orthodox christianity, postsocialism, temporality] апстракт овај чланак приступа идеји вечности са етнографске тачке гледишта. to се осврће на верзију вечности (eternity) евоцирану од стране православних хришћанских верника у свакодневном животу, а на територији централне србије, у пост-југословенском периоду. у овом контексту, вечност се не односи на трајанје особа и ствари у овом животу, или на неизбежни циклични повратак. вечност је пре димензија ван времена која постоји поред садашњости, димензија која може бити настањена прецима или почившим ближњима. евоцирајући вечност, људи истичу привремени овоземаљски живот, налазећи утеху у суочавању са смрћу и тако повезују са заједницом оне који више нису физички присутни. противно виђењу вечности – као нечему што је понављање или застој – овај чланак посматра социјални и политички потенцијал евоцирања вечности, као прожимање живота појачаним маштовитим могућностима. [вечност, србија, бивша југославија, православно хришћанство, пост-сoцијализам, пролазност] apstrakt ovaj članak pristupa ideji večnosti sa etnografske tačke gledišta. to se osvrće na verziju večnosti (eternity) evociranu od strane pravoslavnih hrišćanskih vernika u svakodnevnom životu, a na teritoriji centralne srbije, u post-jugoslovenskom periodu. u ovom kontekstu, večnost se ne odnosi na trajanje osoba i stvari u ovom životu, ili na neizbežni ciklični povratak. večnost je pre dimenzija van vremena koja postoji pored sadašnjosti, dimenzija koja može biti nastanjena precima ili počivšim bližnjima. evocirajući večnost, ljudi ističu privremeni ovozemaljski život, nalazeći utehu u suočavanju sa smrću i tako povezuju sa zajednicom one koji više nisu fizički prisutni. protivno viđenju večnosti kao nečemu što je ponavljanje ili zastoj ovaj članak posmatra socijalni i politički potencijal evociranja večnosti, kao prožimanje života pojačanim maštovitim mogučnostima. [večnost, srbija, bivša jugoslavija, pravoslavno hrišćanstvo, post-socijalizam, prolaznost] notes acknowledgments i profoundly thank my friends and interlocutors in kraljevo and belgrade for their help and kindness. without them, this research would not have been possible. conversations with susan bayly, julia buyskyh, danny cardoza, jo cook, david henig, rastko jović, aleksandra pavićević, joel robbins, and leanne williams-green were extremely formative, as were comments from online audiences at the universities of cambridge and bratislava. i am grateful to bojan aleksov, timothy carroll, lászló fosztó, and ori mautner for stimulating feedback, as well as for the constructive comments from three anonymous reviewers and manuel tironi at cultural anthropology. many thanks to anča dimovska for translating the abstract. in particular, i thank charles stewart for numerous exchanges and readings that massively improved the text. all shortcomings are my own. i recognize the support of both the leverhulme trust and the ukri (uk research and innovation) (grant ref: mr/s031669/1). i dedicate this article to my dear friends dragana radojičić and slobodan jandrić. memory eternal! 1. to preserve the anonymity of my interlocutors, all names are pseudonyms and some biographical details have been changed. 2. see the site of the statistical office of the republic of serbia in the documents “population by ethnicity and sex, by municipalities and cities” and “population by religion, by municipalities and cities”: http://www.stat.gov.rs/en-us/oblasti/popis/popis-2011/popisni-podaci-eksel-tabele (accessed may 2023). 3. see the pew research center report titled “religious belief and national belonging in central and eastern europe,” https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/05/10/religious-belief-and-national-belonging-in-central-and-eastern-europe/ (accessed may 2023). 4. see https://svetosavlje.org/misionarska-pisma/62/ (accessed may 2023). letter 61 of velimirović’s missionary 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knowledge as decolonial pedagogy cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 395-403, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.03 the margin speaks: on the radical possibilities of embodied knowledge as decolonial pedagogy kimberley d. mckinson vanderbilt university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5720-8441 as a space in which the situated practices of teaching and learning are performed, the classroom must be where the work of decolonizing anthropology (harrison 1991) begins. such a contention takes the classroom as an important site of anthropological knowledge production where scholars must perform the pedagogical work necessary to reimagine anthropology as a more just discipline. often inherent in the call to radically reimagine anthropology is the assumption that the scholarship and pedagogy to radically reframe the discipline will emerge from anthropology departments at predominantly white institutions (pwis)—and in particular, from the discipline’s select highly regarded graduate programs. in this regard, pwis have been taken to be the authority, the voice of the discipline, and the gatekeepers at home—the site to which anthropologists retreat from the supposed margin to produce knowledge. in a similar vein, the predominantly white students who attend pwis have traditionally been taken to be the standard, and moreover, the future of the discipline. john jay college is not in the mold of a pwi. as a public, urban, and senior college within the city university of new york (cuny), john jay college predominantly serves minority students—47 percent hispanic, 18 percent white, 17 percent black, 15 percent asian, and 3 percent other, as well as a significant number of veterans (450 enrolled) and first-generation students (45 percent of students enrolled). the college is a federally recognized minority serving institution (msi) and hispanic-serving institution (hsi). while these demographic figures are helpful in statistically describing the composition of john jay college’s student population, they do not fully capture the realities of my lower-income students, who come from families with a median household earning of $41,900 (aisch et al. 2017). many of these students live at the intersection of racism and poverty and work each day to juggle school, long commutes, parenthood, and jobs that are necessary for them to contribute significantly to the economic survival of their households. john jay college is attended by students who have learned how to survive at the margins of society, as well as at the academic margins. still, though my students are multiply peripheralized, they belong to a radical tradition of higher education in the united states: cuny has long been a pioneer in the development of democratic and open pedagogy (fabricant and brier 2016). the pedagogical strategies of past cuny teacher-activists—notably, black feminist poets and writers such as audre lorde, toni cade bambara, and june jordan who taught at the university in the 1960s and 1970s—offer an example of radical teaching and learning. in this black feminist model, teaching and learning was always positioned as a situated intellectual project, that is, as embodied, interactive, and practice-based (lave and wenger 1991). furthermore, theirs was an example of teaching committed to “disrupting disciplinary boundaries, identifying knowledge bases outside of the university that flourished inside poor multi-ethnic neighborhoods, and creating a partisan liberatory relationship to collective studies” (lavan and tomás reed 2017, 8). in this spirit, these teacher-scholar-activists unapologetically centered minority students and their everyday embodied experiences and forcefully positioned the msi classroom as a place of radical intellectual possibilities. in this essay, i argue for an active looking to the msi classroom and the minority scholars intellectually forged in this critical geography. i center auto-ethnography and photovoice as emancipatory embodied teaching and learning strategies that ask minority students to think about their own lived experiences as knowledge and their own communities as sites of theory-making. in this way, this essay offers a model to disturb scientific imperialism and decolonize the classroom. who d’ya think you are? in my upper-division course titled “class, race, ethnicity, and gender in anthropological perspective,” students use auto-ethnographic writing assignments to distill the performance of these categories in their own personal lives. auto-ethnography is a methodological approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) to understand cultural experience (ethno) (chang 2008). this experiential and reflexive practice, as tami spry (2009) notes, has the power to reveal the understory of hegemonic systems. the process of working on auto-ethnographic essays challenges my students to take on the dual role of subject/ethnographer and embrace an intentionally embodied methodological praxis. quite importantly, auto-ethnography provides my students with the opportunity to take their own bodies as constitutive of evidence, analysis, and knowledge. in an auto-ethnographic essay on race (mamudoska 2020),1 one of my students, a young romani woman, describes her racial negotiations in the wake of immigrating from macedonia to the united states. she writes, “my racial identity has always been a confusing topic not only for me but for those around me as well.” she brings the reader into her family’s complex racial and ethnic history, explaining that in macedonia, her family’s tan skin and low economic status had marked their bodies as romani—that european minority ethnic group stereotyped as “gypsies” and pathologized (in both macedonia and hollywood popular culture) as biologically predisposed to stealing, poverty, and fortune-telling. yet if in macedonia her family stood out as distinctively ethnic and “other,” in the united states, their phenotypic trait of olive skin enabled them to “blend into the major white population as well as the hispanic population” (mamudoska 2020). the student’s writing brims with the frustration of trying to claim her romani identity while often having to succumb to others’ limited interpretations of her racialized and ethnic body. she describes one such interaction. once, when she informed a customer at her place of work that she was macedonian, he responded, “but you’re … .” his sentence ended with a pregnant pause. he proceeded to rub his cheek signifying the color of the student’s skin. the student put the man’s silence into words. “in his mind, i couldn’t be macedonian.” indeed, in this customer’s mind, to be macedonian was to be light-skinned, and the student’s skin color betrayed any claim to a macedonian national identity. even though she was now resident in the united states, the racial and ethnic politics of macedonia would not be left behind. one hears the irritation and unease in the student’s voice when she writes, “i laughed obnoxiously and proceeded to explain to him that i was roma.” for her, her olive-skinned romani body had a legitimate claim to the macedonian imagined community. for the customer, these two things were not congruent. in what follows, the student describes capitulating to her own exasperation, as well as to the stereotypes that she guessed were comfortably lodged in the customer’s mind. she writes, “i then degraded myself to explain that i was gypsy.” the reader is forced to bear witness to the student’s self-imposed shame and to the tragedy of the moment in which she identifies with a word she finds offensive. auto-ethnographic praxis provided this student with both the permission to and means by which to sit with problematic stereotypes of race and ethnicity that had been effectively mapped onto her body. in addition, it was through her auto-ethnography that this student managed to come to and articulate her most honest of truths. in this regard, one only need look to the explicit and unvarnished title of her auto-ethnography: “mi sijum romani (i am romani).” in the outline for her undated course, “race and the urban situation,” taught at john jay college, lorde dedicates one module of the discussion on the effects of racism on black americans to “the internalized stereotype.” on the outline she asks her students, “who d’ya think you are?” this simple question emphasizes the importance of “i” and asks students to understand their learning as “a process of individuation which can build deep self-knowledge” (lorde 2017, 3). it is a question i have seen many of my students struggle with. many have been hesitant to embrace the ways in which their own working-class and ethnic experiences can allow for a remapping of anthropological knowledge in the classroom. still, i ask this question of my students, not in the name of mere individualism, but, as lorde did, in the name of liberation. it is this same question that my romani student wrestled with in her essay. in exploring the shifting landscape of her racial and ethnic identity, the student’s racial experiences illuminate anthropological theorizations about the myth of race. yet she also forces the reader to consider the ways in which race, in its lived implications, is very much real. her words stand as a reminder that the united states’ black/white racial paradigm is neither complex nor sophisticated enough to convincingly grapple with the question “who d’ya think you are?” auto-ethnography allowed this student to do precisely what lorde (2017, 16) asked of her own john jay students decades earlier—to “define themselves in ways that will be of use in the world [and] … to identify with their own multiple selves, and in doing so, establish an activist practice deeply seated in self-knowledge.” the declaration “mi sijum romani (i am romani)” must thus be read as an act of self-affirmation, an embrace of a u.s.-specific notion of ethnic identification and pride, and ultimately, as a defiant rejection of romani misrecognition in favor of recognition of the “i.” countervisual lenses my course “urban anthropology” has also provided a space for my students and me to productively explore embodied and decolonial pedagogy in the msi classroom. in this course, students are expected to conscientiously move through new york city as urban ethnographers and use their camera phones to capture images that bear witness to their own unique readings of the urban landscape. taken as a tool of ethnographic fieldwork, the camera phone has expanded what it means to do contemporary ethnography. sarah pink and larissa hjorth (2012) have argued that it is the banality of the camera phone that allows for new types of co-present visuality and sociality. however, as they note, the camera phone’s banality should not only be understood as related to the images that it produces, but also in terms of its use. that is, the camera phone itself must be read as “an embedded part of the ordinary—the routine, habitual and often-tacit practices in which we engage as we move through, sense and perceive environments” (pink and hjorth 2012, 147). undergirding my impulse to structure this course around urban photography is a commitment to having my urban ethnographer students practice the embodied multi-modal methodology of photovoice (wang and burris 1997). as a methodology that centers community, photovoice places the camera in the hands of those historically excluded from and harmed by audiovisual modalities (shankar 2016). in calling for a critical re-engagement with photovoice, arjun shankar has argued for a consideration of the ways in which this methodology can produce countervisual and counter-hegemonic knowledge. he suggests that scholars must not simply take student visuals as documentation, but rather as evidence of students’ abilities to agentively construct their own embodied realities. in my classroom, the experiential exercise of using photovoice has forced my working-class students to pay attention to, represent, and agentively confront the everyday bodies, practices, infrastructures, and aesthetics of life in new york city as they track back and forth between john jay’s campus in midtown manhattan and their homes located in less affluent parts of the city. one particularly compelling photograph from my “urban anthropology” cohort of students is titled the city as utopia: poverty through the lens of a secret admirer (figure 1).2 the image, captured by a young afro-dominicana, draws the viewer in with the striking clouds that populate the top third of the frame and comfortably rest above a set of brown new york city apartment buildings. in her meditation on the photo, the student writes, “on first glance, one may notice the mesmerizing sky with clouds only seen in picturesque paintings or the aged six-floor buildings.” the buildings are, in fact, not distinguishable nor are they distinguished. the worn newspaper stands in the immediate foreground of the image advertising the metro, am, and impacto latino publications more immediately draw one’s eye. one imagines passersby grabbing them during brisk morning commutes and ignoring the buildings in the background. still, the student brings the viewer back to those buildings. they are “compacted with individuals accompanied by unknown stories,” she writes. yet the student knows these people and their stories. their home is her home—new york city’s fifteenth congressional district, located in the bronx. the student informs the viewer that according to the 2010 census, this is the poorest district in the united states. the student further contextualizes her embodied relationship with this geography, writing, “i have walked these sidewalks and borne witness to the impact of poverty on those i call my neighbors, local business owners, and friends.” she goes on, “they say nyc is the best.” and then, this fifteenth-district resident leaves the viewer with a final word, a question to meditate on as they rest uneasily with the implications of what the student has captured with her lens—“yet, how can it be that the best city in the world disregards its poor?” figure 1. the city as utopia: poverty through the lens of a secret admirer. photo courtesy of amber gonzalez. in her 1969 essay, “realizing the dream of a black university,” toni cade bambara asks: “what happens to the student who cannot or will not operate in the schizophrenic way a ‘good’ student has been trained to, with real life on one hand and academic life on the other?” (bambara 2017 [1969], 17). in taking her question as a charge, i ask my students to resist the schizophrenia of the utilitarian university. rather, i ask them to acknowledge the experiences forged in their communities as central to their learning in the formal classroom and to regard their communities as authentic intellectual spaces. when they use their cameras to embrace such a philosophy, my students manage to tap into the counter-hegemonic possibilities of photovoice to construct new realities. it was by embodying such a praxis that my student from the fifteenth congressional district could acknowledge the realities of life in this community. however, her lens does not settle on pathologizing this place and its inhabitants. rather, her photo and writing command the viewer to destabilize and reframe their foreign gaze. she reminds the viewer that even in the face of poverty, this place and these residents are to be admired. there is utopia to be found here, as her title reminds us. her final question to her viewer subtly criticizes those who control new york city’s resources, those who market the city as “the best,” and those who are more likely to focus their economic gaze on brilliant skyscrapers in manhattan than on faded housing in the bronx. in so doing, the student reveals to the viewer the true counter-hegemonic power of her lens, deftly turning it around to rest on those with whom the burden of change rests. alive at the margins each time they practice auto-ethnography and photovoice, my students actively (re)write anthropology from the msi classroom. this work is not predicated on displacing the margins nor on trying to remake my students in the image and likeness of the privileged few who exist at the center, with the hope that through some form of scholarly transubstantiation they will be made whole. instead, this pedagogical work is grounded in a recognition of the wholeness of the students who thrive intellectually at the margins. it is steeped in a celebration of the inherent emancipatory and decolonial possibilities that come alive at the margins. it subscribes to the unquestionable truth that the margin can and must be allowed to speak. abstract in this essay, i argue for an engagement with students’ embodied knowledge as a means by which to rethink what it means to “do anthropology” as well as produce knowledge. i center auto-ethnography and photovoice as emancipatory teaching strategies that ask students to think about their own lived experiences as knowledge, their own communities as sites of theory making, and their own voices as the authority. this essay takes seriously the classroom at the academic margins as integral to the renewed calls to decolonize anthropology. [embodied knowledge; auto-ethnography; photovoice; decolonial pedagogy] notes 1. this student’s essay was published in the spring 2020 newsletter (news from the ninth floor) of john jay college’s department of anthropology. 2. this student’s photography and reflection were published in the fall 2020 newsletter (news from the ninth floor) of john jay college’s department of anthropology. references aisch, gregor, larry buchanan, amanda cox, and kevin quealy 2017 “some colleges have more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.” the upshot by the new york times, january 18. bambara, toni cade 2017 [1969] “realizing the dream of a black university.” in toni cade bambara: “realizing the dream of a black university” and other writings, part ii, edited by makeba lavan and conor tomás reed, 13–28. new york: lost and found. chang, heewon 2008 autoethnography a method. walnut creek, calif.: left coast press. fabricant, michael, and stephen brier 2016 austerity blues: fighting for the soul of public higher education. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. gonzalez, amber 2020 “the city as utopia: poverty through the lens of a secret admirer.” news from the ninth floor 3, no. 2: 19. harrison, faye v. 1991 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. washington, d.c.: american anthropological association. lavan, makeba, and conor tomás reed, eds. 2017 toni cade bambara:“realizing the dream of a black university” and other writings, part i. new york: lost and found. lave, jean, and etienne wenger 1991 situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. cambridge: cambridge university press. lorde, audre 2017 “i teach myself in outline”: notes, journals, syllabi, and an excerpt from “deotha.” edited by miriam atkin and iemanjá brown. new york: lost and found. mamudoska, edaet 2020 “mi sijum romani (i am romani).” news from the ninth floor 3, no. 1: 1–3. pink, sarah, and larissa hjorth 2012 “emplaced cartographies: reconceptualising camera phone practices in an age of locative media.” media international australia 145, no. 1: 145–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878x1214500116 shankar, arjun 2016 “auteurship and image-making: a (gentle) critique of the photovoice method.” visual anthropology review 32, no. 2: 157–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/var.12107 spry, tami 2009 “bodies of/as evidence in autoethnography.” international review of qualitative research 1, no. 4: 603–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2009.1.4.603 wang, caroline, and mary ann burris 1997 “photovoice: concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment.” health education & behavior 24, no. 3: 369–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 395-403, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.03 cultural anthropology: getting your ducks in a row: marriage, protection, and love without regret in virginia 301 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 301-27, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.05 getting your ducks in a row: marriage, protection, and love without regret in virginia siobhan magee university of edinburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8366-3154 like their heterosexual counterparts, most lesbians and gay men in the united states during the 1980s and 1990s were looking to the future when they constructed kinship ties and argued for their authenticity. they spoke of their gay families as a source of “security,” expecting chosen kin to “be there” for them at some unspecified time of need in days to come. — kath weston, “forever is a long time,” 1995 what does it mean to be safe? who gets to be safe? —jatin dua, captured at sea, 2019 “you . . . we . . . you want your ducks in a row. it’s for tax purposes,” said brinn. “and to remove any uncertainty, potential trials and tribulations, should anything happen . . . medical . . . ,” said andrew, brinn’s husband of fifteen years. “medical . . . legal . . . financial, inheritance . . . there’s power of attorney, isn’t there . . . ,” brinn echoed and added. 302like most of the liberal-on-some-issues-progressive couples i met in 2017–2018 in charlottesville, virginia, for brinn and andrew, a social worker and an academic, both white and approaching fifty, parents to a tween, also sharing their home with two cats and discussing welcoming some chickens, talk of what legal marriage could bring in terms of financial and medical benefits and matters of property was its own kind of love language. the people i met highlighted how, when you engaged with these marriage bureaucracies, what you really got was a sense of the inevitability of death—even though, for most couples, the when, the where, the how, and the “who first out of we two?” remained unknown. that legal marriage was a way of, as brinn put it, “getting one’s ducks in a row” was not, it was understood, unromantic. it did not jar with marriage’s social, ritualistic, and often, religious or spiritual, meanings—the idea that when you found someone you loved enough to want to marry, this was against the odds. brinn and andrew wore rings and referred to each other as spouses, “husband and wife.” some of their home décor was wedding paraphernalia: a framed, a3-sized picture of a tree for which wedding guests’ bottle green inked thumbprints made up leaves; the lyrics to their first dance song calligraphed and framed by a bridesmaid. “how big was your wedding?” i asked. “in the end, about 150!” seeing as i was in charlottesville in the early years of marriage equality (introduced to virginia in 2014 and across the united states in 2015), john borneman’s (1997, 582) pithy phrase to criticize what he saw in the 1990s as anthropologists’ preoccupation when studying kinship with “the normative trinity of birth, marriage, and death” most obviously resonates with the question of how marriage pertains to themes of exclusion, recognition, and “rights.” indeed, in charlottesville, the politics of (homo)normativity (duggan 2002) was a hot topic. while most openly queer people and allies whom i met praised marriage equality and took it as evidence of legal marriage’s status as, as one lawyer put it, “a working document,” some wondered aloud about how legal marriage’s historical exclusion of “people like them” colored marriage (and queerness) now. did a couple that did not include a man and a woman hold the possibility for a nonhierarchical marriage in which both people gained as much as they gave? or were marriages inherently normative relationships, whichever genders were involved (brandzel 2005)? for queer people, was normativity ever a possibility, married or unmarried? on top of that, wasn’t normativity a right? i met several conservative-leaning queer people who bemoaned the assumption that they voted democrat. 303one wondered out loud, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, “haven’t we [queer people] earned the right to be boring?” but borneman’s words have an additional resonance for me when i think about marriage in charlottesville, because one part of borneman’s “normative trinity”—marriage—frequently referenced another: death (see also borneman 1996). at brinn and andrew’s wedding, they promised each other for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health . . . ‘til death do we part. material memento mori honored deceased loved ones and intensified the day’s affective redolence. brinn wore a turquoise bracelet that had belonged to a college friend who had died in her twenties (the friend’s mother loaned it to her—the mother was herself a wedding guest and more than this, someone who was honored in brinn’s speech). a dresser at the reception held silverand gold-framed photographs of both sides’ deceased “blood relatives,” from “good death” great-grandparents to a “gone-too-soon” (in his thirties) cousin of andrew’s. practices of mourning-cum-recognitions of mortality varied between weddings: there was talk of how “it was his mother’s ring”; when wind chimes in trees pealed, it was the beloved dead making their presence heard; there was a “scotch-based signature cocktail” for a deceased father of a groom; a bride wore the perfume of her deceased mother; swatches of the deceased’s handkerchiefs were sewn into suit jackets and lockets holding photographs were tied around bouquets; a pastor, in a ceremony, noted that, earlier that day, the couple had left flowers on the grave of the bride’s first husband. “let us not forget that wedding days are days when we make promises to many different people—and some of those people are no longer with us in an earthly way,” the pastor said. getting your ducks in a row in this article, i think about protection as a key motivating ideology and practice (dua 2019) for people i met talking of marriage and kinship in charlottesville in 2017 and 2018. forget about “fairy-tale” weddings (or at least, forget about them being the main part of the story) or pretending to be perfect; marriage was an idiom for talking about uncertainty, “what really matters,” political upheaval, “scars,” mortality—as brinn and andrew said, it was at least in part about when something bad happens. i’m not writing about marriage within a certain group, a community in an “ethnic,” “racial,” sexuality-based, or religious sense, despite my admiration of many of these studies (e.g., barnes 2016; bjork-james 2021; lewin 2001). my sample were people living in charlottesville and willing and able to talk about 304one aspect or another of marriage. one of the things that struck me was how people from a range of situations in terms of race, class, gender and sexuality, and political-cum-religious affiliations talked of protection when they spoke of marriage. and so i was curious about how protection had become a kind of kinship-political baseline. i’m not using my observations about protection (or about marriage) to claim “so, we’re actually all in the same position! facing the same challenges!” rather, what seems pertinent here is how whether or not a cross-section of society talk of threat and protection when they talk of marriage, some people are more likely than others to face certain kinds of danger and, in particular, to be treated as if they were dangerous.1 histories such as christina hanhardt’s (2013) safe space: gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence (see also thomsen 2021) show us that ideas about protection’s related discourses of safety, danger, and threat have been used to segment (and hierarchize) society along lines such as race, gender, sexuality, class, faith, and nationality (ralph 2019; as have marriage laws, see cott 2000 and hunter 2017). (i should also say that i’m white—and so is my husband, who was with me in virginia—and this will have shaped how and what it was for us to be in virginia, as is always also the case in the united kingdom, where i grew up and live now.) in focusing on protection as a politically complex and, i argue, rather naturalized sentiment in local understandings of what legal marriage is, i am highlighting how central protection is to intimacy when it’s already been acknowledged how central it is to, for example, justifications of u.s. foreign policy and national security—wars, walls, guns, surveillance, policing, safety laws (e.g., anderson 2024; briggs 2017; masco 2014; stone 2022; jain 2006; ralph 2019; burton 2015) and to discussions of who young people are and what society’s responsibilities are toward them (think “child protection”; see mariner 2019). the history of protection via marriage tells a story about the u.s. nation (cott 2000; coontz 2006; mckinnon 2019). themes of property and supposed liberty apply to sentiments around protecting loved ones just as they apply to protecting the nation (reddy 2011). people of color and then those in same-sex relationships having access to legal marriage signifies (at least in theory) a transition from their being othered as people whom society should be protected from to full persons whose rights and relationships must be protected—regardless of whether or not they, as individuals, “believe” in marriage, or want to marry, or ever “meet the right person” (hanhardt 2013; holloway 2006; cashin 2017; cleves 2014). for sure, legal marriage in the united states has always been deadly serious. at many points in history, marriage has not only reflected but formed and 305reinforced racial, gendered, nationality, and class-based hierarchies. as a way of making personal attachments public (cott 2000), marriage tells a story of u.s. civil rights—and lacks thereof. there were the laws of the colonies and the use of marriage to dispossess indigenous people; how marriage was (is?) the linchpin of “settler sex and family,” bringing together property with a certain kind of morality (tallbear 2018). there were the battles free and enslaved black people fought to stay with the people they loved (gordon-reed 1998, 2008; hunter 2017). there were the plights of immigrants and religious minorities (cannell 2013; mckinnon 2019). there was the oppression and ingenuity of interracial couples before the 1967 u.s. supreme court case loving v. virginia (cashin 2017—and note that this came about because anti-miscegenation laws contravened the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment written after the civil war and that was meant to establish formerly enslaved people’s enfranchisement). there was the stuckness and stigma those who needed to leave marriages faced in the years before the “no-fault” divorce (celello 2009). what was going to be the next big politics marriage story? my fieldwork took place in the early years of marriage equality, but also in the first year of the first trump presidency, and people told me they didn’t know what was going to happen next, if there was going to be a backslide, if the right to legal marriage could be taken away. with this context in mind, as both an analytic and an ideology (dua 2019) protection does the necessary work of recognizing the acute scale and intensity of kinship and relatedness—of what’s at stake for those involved. kin may well “live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths” (sahlins 2011, 14), but even this arresting phrase does not reflect how, looking back on my time in virginia, people strived to keep intimates safe (sometimes in vain) from threats that were sometimes clear, sometimes ill-defined. protection resembles “care” (borneman 1997) because, as a way of discussing how people are entangled, it foregrounds what they do for one another—or what they might do for one another if they had to. particularly pre–marriage equality, protecting kin via marriage and protecting an exclusionary status quo (e.g., through homophobic laws or inheritance laws that privilege the wealthy and often the white) seemed particularly co-constitutive (cf. brandzel 2005). although borneman (1997, 574; emphasis mine) did not explicitly analyze the use of protection, he observed how “marriage and the ‘protection of families’ is often claimed as a universal human right, more basic to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ than meeting other human needs, such as, for example, the need to 306eat, to work, or to love.” “care,” for borneman, was an alternative analytic that avoided centring formal legal systems and “the family” (narrowly defined). but isn’t it also the case that protection is also something that people do for those who matter to them outside of formal, hegemonic, and normative relationships? hasn’t it often been the only option? borneman (1997) described how, in the mid-1990s, harald, a terminally ill german man adopted his partner, an arrangement that was possible because this man was twenty years his junior and necessary because legally recognized same-sex marriage had not yet been introduced. harald was (perilously) lying in court when he said that they had never had sex. but he was telling the truth when he said that he wanted this younger man to become his legal kin so that he could leave him “his house and wealth” (borneman 1997, 577). to me, this seems like protection rather than care alone. protection captures the dramatic nature of harald’s actions and the gravity of the stakes. protection shows how relationships can involve calling on the state for help, but how this can involve both protecting loved ones from the state and using state support in non-normative ways. protection reflects how affect is usually wrapped up with thoughts of material survival and of the mortality of oneself and one’s loved ones. if marriage and protection are linked culturally, politically, and perhaps unconsciously, it is not because marriage is unique, but because it signifies a formalization of what many people feel is an important part of relationships—whether they would like this to be the case or not. there are debates about whether or not the introduction of legally recognized same-sex marriage creates new exclusions (butler 2002; brandzel 2005; briggs 2017). but then there is the more general question of what it means psychically and societally for threat to be a persistent presence in conceptualizations of love and attachment. protection and kinship the ties between legal marriage, protection, and the intense politicization of safety, danger, and mortality in the united states are apparent in an overlap between how david schneider (1968) wrote about american kinship and how laurence ralph (2019) has, much more recently, analyzed policing in the country. while ralph seeks to denaturalize safety, schneider aimed to denaturalize the family. when looked at as a set, one gets a sense of how the institution of marriage’s potency might in part result from its associations (earned or otherwise) with protection and safety in a place where these are hegemonic cultural values. schneider (1968, 34–35) writes: 307informants describe the family as consisting of husband, wife, and their children who live together as a natural unit. the family is formed according to the laws of nature and it lives by rules which are regarded by americans as self-evidently natural. so americans are not really surprised when they hear this same sort of arrangement is found among some animals and birds and even fish. it seems quite natural for a pair to live together, to mate, to have a place of their own with their offspring, to protect that place and their offspring . . . . to protect that place and their offspring: here, home merges one’s closest people with one’s precious property, alongside the understanding too, of course, that the property will at some point belong to the offspring. schneider does not suggest that this way of thinking is wrong. rather, he shows that this is curious, worthy of ethnographic description. schneider denaturalizes the normative u.s. family of the time: not even a man and a woman living together (denaturalizing heterosexuality), but a “husband [and] wife” (denaturalizing marriage). he continues, “americans see a family when animals mate and rear their young in a place which they occupy and protect—their nest, their cave, their home” (schneider 1968, 35). what is notable here is that, “like animals,” families live with threat, and therefore live with protection—or are constituted by protection—even when things are going right or, at least, going normative. agreeing with schneider (1968, 35) that kinship and relatedness, understood as the need to “occupy and protect,” are local ideas rather than “natural” facts, “universals,” i was surprised to read the following lines in ralph’s (2019, 13; emphasis mine) book on police torture in chicago: for all of our achievements as humans, we are still a species that is ruled by very basic instincts, instincts developed millions of years ago and ones shared by most animals. the most basic of instincts is the desire to keep ourselves alive; thus, we are incredibly attuned to danger, and fear shapes much of our emotional life. because we are fearful of threats, what we crave—perhaps even more than food or companionship—is a sense of safety. what kind of safety politics, i wondered, are at play when being “fearful of threats” is rendered as a human quality rather than a product of historical, cultural, or political shaping? however, as ralph proceeds, he focuses precisely on 308how safety (and, i argue, protection) is not primordial but rather a national and institutional project, so he focuses on history: the very idea of safety in the united states is rooted in the frontier logic that justified the settlement of this country in the 1700s. for the white settlers, safety was premised on viewing native americans as threats and so transforming them into “savages.” (ralph 2019, 3) as a project, the united states can be viewed accordingly as comprising offensive moves dressed up as preemptive defences. protection always creates an other, and violence is perpetrated in the name of protecting oneself and one’s people, and getting married has been one of the ways in which people in the united states have marked out who their people are (and therefore also who they are not). ralph demonstrates the danger of “our people” being understood along racial lines. orisanmi burton (2015), also writing on policing in the united states, takes the u.s. police motto, “to serve and protect,” and argues that we need to be explicit about who or what is being protected—his article is entitled, “to protect and serve whiteness.” how to protect is a political issue that carves out differences: policing and formal legal systems? guns? prisons? taxes? insurance? cars? community support? god? democracy? marriage? indivisible from processes of racialization are the slippages between family and nation that occur in the name of protection. as sophie bjork-james (2020) points out, “heterosexuality provides an ideological framework for rightist movements. gender does the dual work of articulating a set of valorized identities for participants while also creating a system of moral justification for prejudice. for instance, they portray women and children as requiring protection from foreign, racialized, or queer others.” at a 2020 pro-gun rally in richmond, virginia, the virginia republican john mcguire said, “our country was founded on common sense. . . . our founding fathers believed it was a god-given right to protect yourself, your family and your children. that’s why these people are here today and i support them” (bbc news 2020). it’s far from the case that protection is solely a conservative concept. for the past decade, “protect trans kids” has been a notable u.s. trans rights slogan. megan thee stallion when, in october 2020, performing her song “savage” on saturday night live had projected on to the stage behind her it the words “protect black women.” she paused to play a clip of black lives matter and gun-control activist tamika mallory’s words, “daniel cameron is no different 309than the sell-out negroes who sold our people into slavery.” the previous month, daniel cameron, kentucky’s first black attorney, had announced that only one of the officers involved in breonna taylor’s murder would face charges (and not for murder) (aswad and jackson 2020; see also thee stallion 2020). whom to protect is arguably the question at the heart of civil rights. in this article, showing how discussions of whom and how to protect take shape surrounding so-called private relationships and intensely public “big politics” and media debates alike, i’ll go ahead in five sections. the first describes researching marriage in 2017 and 2018 charlottesville, drawing on conversations about kinship, racialization, and notions of threat that came to the fore in the wake of the unite the right rally, but which were, of course, also “in the wake” (sharpe 2016) of much deeper virginia, national, and global histories. the second section describes the frequency and forms of threat and danger as local kinship idioms. this provides necessary groundwork for making it understood that one of the reasons that marriage is the focus of so much cultural discussion in the united states may be because marriage seems to in no small part concern “what happens if something bad occurs.” the penultimate section, the third, relays how a queer couple discuss marriage following marriage equality. the final substantive section interprets interlocutors’ reflection about how marriage is something they “don’t want to regret not doing”—and how narrations of these thought processes, and pathways to getting engaged or married, sometimes include references to bereavement. researching marriage in 2017 and 2018 charlottesville “we’re rooting for that couple,” a young play center practitioner told me in charlottesville in the summer of 2018, shaking her head as she fished choke-hazard-small crayon butts out of a plastic tub at a community event. who were “that couple”? in may 2018, the new york times’ iconic “vows” section led with an article titled “months after a brutal day in charlottesville, a tender wedding” (la gorce 2018). the article described the wedding of twenty-seven-year-old marcus martin and twenty-eight-year-old marissa blair, who had been counter-protestors at the unite the right rally on august 17, 2017. on august 11 and 12, white nationalists seeking to “unite the right” attacked the bucolic and increasingly expensive college town, symbolic to some of an “upper south liberal elite,” a “hillary hotspot,” and a “blue bubble in a sea of red.” the apparent 310provocation was the city council’s proposed removal from a public park of a jim crow–era statue of confederate leader robert e. lee.2 attacks were staged at the university of virginia campus and the city center. james alex fields jr., a twenty-year-old neo-nazi from ohio, drove his dodge challenger into a group of counter-protestors walking along the downtown mall and murdered the thirty-two-year-old paralegal heather heyer (see bellamy 2018; spencer 2018; bodroghkozy 2022). in the same story as the wedding photographs, the times printed a different sort of photograph—one that won a pulitzer for the charlottesville daily progress’s ryan kelly. under the glare of the august virginian sun, a young black man is suspended mid-air. the red-and-white sole of his shoe point at the viewer. without context, the photograph might depict the man performing a virtuoso high kick. in truth, the man—marcus martin—had been shunted into the air. the back of fields’s dodge challenger is at the back of the photograph, framed by sharpied placards: “love,” “solidarity,” “black lives matter.” martin was one of the people rammed into by james alex fields jr. seconds before, martin had pushed blair, then his fiancée, out of the car’s path, giving her, as the times put it, a “protective shove” (la gorce 2018). heyer, the woman whom fields murdered, was blair and martin’s friend. in 2018, blair and martin chose purple, heyer’s favorite color, as their wedding hue. “you don’t have to do this,” said wedding guest susan bro (leach 2018), heyer’s mother and a community activist. but, as blair told a second publication, glamour, i’m a big believer in that everything happens for a reason, and while i hate that heather had to die that day, if she had went any other way the message wouldn’t be this loud. it wouldn’t have reached so many people and showed them that there is so much hate in this world, but if we love each other it will be ok. my bridesmaids said it perfectly. “august 12th is what hate looks like. may 12th is what love looks like.” (qtd. in leach 2018; emphasis mine) i arrived (along with my husband and our one-year-old) in charlottesville in early july 2017. i was going to interview religious leaders, those who made and enforced laws surrounding marriage, wedding professionals, activists and advocates, and just about anyone else who had something to say about marriage. talk of protection and kinship were foregrounded because of august 2017’s violence. some of the business owners i was interviewing in their capacity as 311wedding vendors were based in the center of town and wondered how they would be able to pay their steep-and-rising rents if engaged couples (charlottesville was, especially in the fall, a “wedding mecca”) and prospective university of virginia students’ families “were too scared to come to cville.” some of the religious leaders i interviewed in their capacity as wedding officiants and premarital counselors said they were thinking about how to protect their congregations. salient to protection as it relates to family and community, the kind of terrorism enacted on charlottesville was threatening in part because of the importance people placed on being in public and semi-public spaces with strangers or acquaintances—free concerts, shops and markets, religious services, community events like pancake breakfasts, sporting events and tailgating, chatting at the playground. you never could tell how justified worries about safety were. but pushing fears aside, and being seen to do so, was both kinship and politics and was, as some described it, a way of “protecting our way of life . . . what we stand for.” sometimes “being in community” meant a degree of uncertainty about who else was there or what their motivations were. there was some speculation about whether or not cville pride 2017 (tagline “y’all means all”) would go ahead, given that it was scheduled for a month after the august tragedy (henceforth, “a12”), and on the downtown mall where heyer was murdered—but it did. carrying on with “normal everyday life” did, however, create some edginess. “i’m not usually one to keep my cell out during meetups,” said a lawyer-turned-wedding-officiant apologetically as i interviewed him in a coffee shop. “but my kid’s going through something at the moment . . . plus there’s been the unpleasantness.” a common narrative framing device for talking about where you were on a12 was “who i called first,” or “who did i try to check up on?” sylvette, a wedding planner who was white and of mixed french and irish-american descent, had been extremely worried about her adult daughter when she failed to pick up “about fifty” calls from her and her wife, because her daughter was out for coffee with a friend and had her phone on silent. however, i also heard lots of accounts of people checking in on people to whom they had “weaker” ties than family or friends—neighbors who were vulnerable older people, for example—but also those who owned local businesses that might be impacted by the white supremacists’ violence. in the year following a12, some people discussed in public and private fora what the catastrophe said about charlottesville’s politics and history (see douglas 2024). i got the sense that white people, from a range of different political affiliations, expressed more surprise about a12 than people of color did. there was 312dismay at the white nationalists’ violence, but also at how the city government, the university leadership (see bashkow 2017), and the police had handled the event. in summer 2018—a12’s anniversary—helicopters circled the city. i carried out fieldwork at a time when many people in charlottesville were particularly concerned about protection, but it was my impression that allusions to threats and death were also a feature of kinship talk in purportedly normal times. that to love someone meant possessing a peripheral vision attuned to potential threats came out in strikingly everyday conversations. when i chatted with other parents—or with parenting grandparents, aunts, and uncles—about topics such as sleep, eating, and, as it was sometimes put locally, “acting out,” they often referenced rhetorically unthinkable disasters without batting an eyelid: “don’t get me wrong, i would take a bullet for him, but the threes and the fours have been real tough,” “i would run through fire for her; i always say ‘she’s my heart walking around outside my body,’ but the other day i gave her my cell phone and lay down on the floor for an hour.” calls for women to practice self-care, admonishments that you couldn’t look after kin or community (see also barnes 2016) “if your cup wasn’t full,” were transmitted through the simile, “it’s like what they say when you’re on an airplane: if there’s an emergency you have to put on your own oxygen mask before putting on anyone else’s!” when love, kinship, and attachment, are “ineffable” (cannell 2013), disaster, and specifically what you would do for a loved one if you needed to, offered some kind of vocabulary; hence, i suppose, the wedding vows i mentioned earlier. mortality and morality were intertwined in how people prioritized the protection of some people over others, but the some people over others applied both to some people over others in a person’s family and community and some people over others on a societal level—what we might call “protectable lives” (cf. butler 2009). protection brought together family, place, property, and sentiments that drew on the multiple meanings of home, and the multiple meanings of mine arose often during my fieldwork. histories of an earlier, more rural virginia constituted sources of meaning. lynn, a white sixty-year-old who worked in the wedding business, and i were talking about engagement rings when she told me, in the american tradition, a woman was given a pearl in an engagement ring and then the band was given at the time of matrimony. and the ring was symbolic of you know, “we’re betrothed,” because you had the preacher who went on the circuit and you could be betrothed and have 313children before the preacher came round to marry you. especially here in the rural areas. i asked lynn if it was scandalous to have children when you weren’t married, to which she replied, no, because the couple are together. and if you go back into the history of the hollows of virginia just here, the preacher was on his circuit, and if he didn’t get around to you within a year then you didn’t wait. you had to have children. you had subsistence farming. those children had to be coming out so you could have little workers. right?! some details here are cast as outmoded: subsistence farming, children contributing materially to their households, the image of a virginia so sparsely populated that christians did not have enough neighbors to warrant a congregation with their minister. however, this picture of “together”—as lynn put it—evokes an atmospherics (what stewart [2011] calls “the charged atmospheres of everyday life”) of kinship and politics that, for some, continues today. marriage can be a circle that some families draw around them—not necessarily of farmland, not necessarily much of a physical space at all, but a conceptual, material and possibly legal space. both because of and despite the idea that your kin are the people you protect, many people reflected on the extent to which kinship is inherently exclusionary (wagner 1977; see also cooper 2019). the same people who said that your spouse should be your “best friend” lamented that best friend–talk was a notable cause of upset in their children’s elementary schools. people wondered aloud if it was inevitable to contribute to the flourishing of some over others. formal legal systems, economies of time and money, and laws of physics that said you couldn’t be in more than one place at a time dictated that, even to startlingly altruistic, community-minded people practicing a “priority kinship”—protection was not a zero-sum game: everyone mattered, but some came first, and you would endanger yourself in a beat for your kin. many interlocutors were deeply moved by what they saw as the central pillar of their faith: god sacrificed his only son, put believers before his son, and this was divine because it inverted what could and should happen in earthly kinship. religious leaders and activists were admonished (and admonished themselves) if giving time to politics and community meant they didn’t see enough of their families and friends. “it’s like jackie 314o said,” a retailer and lgbtq+ rights activist told me, “if you mess up raising your kids, then nothing else you’ve done matters one jot.” “pastors get divorced a lot,” said an evangelical pastor. none of this was easy—i had never been somewhere before where there was so much talk (and action) of community. threat and danger in virginian kinship-political atmospherics to understand why and how marriage—an institution associated with protection—has such deep cultural purchase in the united states, we need to comprehend the pervasiveness of talk of threat and danger in in everyday kinship-political atmospherics. “political affiliations in virginia run the gamut,” a lawyer told me. in 2017 and 2018, virginia was held by the democrats, but it has historically been a “purple,” or swing state and a bellwether for u.s. politics, a “battleground.” charlottesville and lynchburg (where i was also doing research) weren’t only places but ideas, and many people used them as shorthand for how virginia was a place of polarized politics. on the one hand, as it was put, was lynchburg, jerry falwell’s (sr. and jr.) christian-conservative town, a southern place. on the other hand, so it went, there was the college town where thomas jefferson had separated church and state, an internationally minded home to the university of virginia, a prestigious “state ivy.” “charlottesville has been voted the happiest place in america and there was only one homicide here last year!,” i was told on our way from the airport. political talk sometimes took the idiom of “how southern is virginia?.” after a12 and its subsequent reckonings with race, people petitioned, “can we now agree that charlottesville is undeniably southern?” a teacher and charlottesville democrat activist told me, “cville people want a pride event but not a parade; lgbtq+ people don’t want folks to think they’re displaying themselves, thinking they’re special—that’s a southern thing.” young women in a charlottesville shop corrected me when i surmised that many people married quite young in virginia because of christian belief. “it’s also because this is a military state,” one of them said. “folks go to military school and then they marry young in case they’re deployed.” people with many different religious and political affiliations married. however, marriage, the military, and more conservative denominations of christianity shared associations (“tradition,” structure, nominally clear ideas about gender) that made it seem, according to local social logics, that if you liked one, you’d also like one or two of the other. 315charlottesville’s residential streets were lined with primary-color chalked kids’ etchings, sedan car–squashed squirrels (plus the odd roadkill snake), and lovingly constructed front-porch halloween vignettes. salient to the public politics of marriage (cott 2000), beliefs were not confined to inside the home, let alone to inside the head or the ballot box. people staked in their front yards the mennonite sign no matter where you’re from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor in spanish, english, and arabic, along with signs declaring who they planned to vote for. caps and t-shirts read “maga,” “bernie sanders,” “sojourners,” and, on rare occasions, “the first rule of gun safety is own a gun,” while preppy couples wearing pearls and boat shoes took their children to the cville pride event i mentioned earlier. there were whispers and eye rolls and bumper stickers, and yet this difference of opinion was expected: “democratic”; “what i grew up with myself”; “my uncle holds those views”; “american”; “one thing about the south is, it’s important to be polite—at least to people’s faces!” but, especially since the 2016 election, i was told, things could be tense, conflictual, exhausting, “a dumpster fire.” some academics might be cynical about the idea of polarization (e.g., grossberg 2019) but it was one of the registers through which people i met said that all this was not so new. many discussed how white supremacy, and the uncertain rights of women, gender-nonconforming, and queer people, had been present since the beginning of the united states. kiki petrosino (2020), a poet and university of virginia professor, published white blood: a lyric of virginia. petrosino writes in her poem “the shop at monticello,” “i’m a black body in this commonwealth [of virginia], which turned black bodies/ into money. now, i have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me of this fact.” several times i heard debates about whether what tied together thomas jefferson and sally hemings was a “relationship” or rape (see gordon-reed 1998). jocelyn nicole johnson’s 2021 novella my monticello is about a descendent of jefferson and hemings seeking refuge in monticello when white militia attack charlottesville. things were “especially bad” while i was in charlottesville, but what’s the grammatically correct way of saying they had been especially bad forever? people across the political spectrum discussed if “things were getting better or getting worse.” some of the people i knew who were liberal or progressive and in their sixties and up said that they had seen great progress in their lifetimes. the rights of lgbtq+ people came up as a key example here, and advocates said that this level of progress, epitomized by marriage equality, would 316have been unimaginable only a couple of decades ago—“shoot, one decade ago.” but then they said that what they saw now in elections, and online, and on the streets of charlottesville did make them wonder. but then they said that there were good people here and that “this city has woken up and we won’t let hate win.” but then, but then. chelsea and louise chelsea and louise’s wedding took place twenty-six years after they’d met and twenty-four years after they’d become a couple after meeting while university students in north carolina. they had been friends and roommates and then got together when chelsea returned from studying abroad. “we’re both wanderers to some extent,” said chelsea. “we’ve had a number of lines of work. we’ve moved about a bit: cities in the south mostly—after college it was charleston, charlotte, roanoke, richmond. charlottesville isn’t perfect—obviously—but it’s been home for eighteen, nineteen years.” chelsea worked as an administrator and louise managed a bookshop. they identified as respectively of “mixed english, irish, and german descent” and “mostly scottish, so i’m told, but with a black ancestor, apparently, a few generations back.” “we called it our retrospective” chelsea said dryly of their wedding. they had a courthouse wedding and then a reception at their home. “it’s not like we were chomping at the bit to marry all these years,” louise said. “when we got together there was a movement for it, but it wasn’t the center of much.” chelsea and louise married in 2017, three years after marriage equality in virginia and two years after marriage equality across the country as a whole. when discussing how they decided to marry, chelsea and louise situated their marriage against the backdrop of marriage equality but also against events and relationships in their life together. chelsea and louise had decided to marry after louise’s father’s ninetieth birthday celebration in south carolina in the summer of 2016. about twenty family members from four generations had gathered. they had enjoyed water sports and lobster dinners. louise’s sister, her partner, and their teenage daughter had flown over from japan—a rare treat. louise said, there was a strange moment at the end of the weekend when we had that sort of light depression that comes with saying goodbye—we were packing up and having some refreshments—when my mother said “so when’s the 317next time we’ll all get together?” and chelsea and i just sort of looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes. it was just kind of “shall we?!” chelsea added, “on the drive back, we said ‘bah! let’s do it!’” louise reflected on how part of the appeal of legal marriage was that it can hopefully protect the rights—and even safety—of same-sex couples if strangers appear hostile or disrespectful. louise said we haven’t faced any real bad problems, prejudices. but then sometimes we’ve been on vacation . . . traveling, and we’ve had that experience of a bartender or a taxi driver saying, calling us, “friends” and you just sort of have this understanding that sometimes you say “well, actually . . . ,” and other times you let them think that . . . . just because of the atmosphere, the sense you’re getting. and these places haven’t been in the south necessarily, or in countries you think of as conservative or difficult for women. we’re talking maine! we’re even talking scandinavia! i suppose if you’re married, you’ve got this extra power in your back pocket, like “hang on there,” if someone disrespects you. whether someone likes it that we’re married on a personal level, it’s the law of the land. chelsea added, “i don’t want her hurt by someone’s disrespect.” chelsea and louise’s words express uncertainty about which person in a couple will need help, and there is the uncertainty of what—or who—threatens a couple. but the examples of bartenders and taxi drivers they use prove instructive. this was not the coming out that some lgbtq+ people in charlottesville may have done to their family of origin, classmates, or coworkers (see clare 2017 on some of the politics of coming out). rather, it was about being read as being lgbtq+ in transient encounters such as buying something. a frequent topic of discussion in the early years of marriage equality were homophobic consumer situations, for example, the religious-freedom-centered supreme court case masterpiece cakeshop v. colorado civil rights commission (2018). raheem, a beverage industry entrepreneur in charlottesville, put it succinctly, “in the run-up to marriage equality, we said it wasn’t about the big wedding cake, it was about health insurance, the hospital; but now it is also about the big wedding cake.” these encounters show that kinship is here conceived as being in part about 318feelings for intimates, but also in part about feelings for those who are known to—or might—form part of more public surroundings. whether someone likes it that we’re married on a personal level, it’s the law of the land. a friend and colleague who read this asked what i thought louise thought being married would do to stop these kinds of encounters. this was not clear—at a time when, for example, it was still legal for a person to be fired on the grounds of their sexuality and when many doubted whether or not the police could be relied on to protect who needs to be protected. on one level this speaks to what we might call the “legal atmospherics” of marriage, the ways in which marriage offers both a lens onto public opinion and consensus, and something that drives change (people often said, “now that marriage equality is here, it’s really time to get conversion therapy made illegal”). i think this says something not only about the institution of marriage but also about institutions more generally. they are associated with being old and powerful, or they are associated with being powerful because they are associated with being old (mayblin 2019). but the nuts and bolts of what they do might remain murky. on another level, this speaks to the ways in which threat is by definition vague and that people do not marry to remove threat from their lives; rather, it formed part of the feeling and language of what made an ineffable topic—love—describable. marriage, protection, and clarification interactions with the gravely ill and with bereavement were a common motif in people’s narrations of how they came to be married. death—living through other people’s or imagining one’s own—was taken to clarify relationships. rather than solving the problem of mortality, death motivated feelings about protection and gave marriage much of its affective redolence. some people in long-term relationships had told their partner’s dying parent or particularly beloved grandparent that they intended to marry their child or grandchild. a woman called leighton, a teacher in her forties, who was “scots-irish and filipino” and had grown up in nearby lynchburg, told me: my now husband went in to see my father when he was in hospital and they had a conversation, and he came out and he said, “will you marry me? your father just gave me his blessing.” and ordinarily i would say, “that’s hogwash; i’m not my father’s, just as i’m not yours” but in this situation, at a hospital, it was like, “this is tying things together, this is how things should be.” 319i spoke with her husband, rhodri, a white musician in his fifties who described himself as “welsh via new jersey,” he said, these are the moments of our lives, and they are never what you imagine them being, but they’re more than what you’d imagine. you’re in a hospital, like, things are stripped away with the furniture, you know, for hygiene. but they’re also stripped away because you see the life cycle and you see time slipping away. there’s clarity. and marriage is about clarity. in my faith and just in life, i want to learn, and the lesson of being with a dying person is: better to regret doing something than not doing something. but i knew i’d never regret marrying her! that’s commitment. leighton and rhodri’s words proffer noticeable themes: the connection between death and “clarity,” and the compatibility of thinking about marriage and death with thinking about faith. but rhodri’s words, in relation to marriage, “better to regret doing something than not doing something,” resonated with the theme of marriage as action. marriage did not protect from death, but it could protect from a lack of clarity. and while some of this clarity was bureaucratic and legal, some of it was affective. people marry for many different reasons (combinations of securing custody rights, money, health insurance, visa opportunities, expectations from families of origin or from religious groups).3 however, the dominant discourses centered, quite predictably, on “love” and “commitment,” and central to both was the notion of regretting not having gotten married (and to a particular person). this sentiment seemed to hold for both imaginations of death by natural causes and nightmares regarding death by accident or even hate and homicide. while regret can be experienced at any point in the life course (see landman 1993), as i saw it in virginia, death (or when one is close to it) was cast as the ultimate moment when a person would assess the path they had taken in life. young teenagers spoke urbanely about having “bucket lists” (as in “kicking the bucket”): experiences they wanted to have, places they wanted to visit before they died. adults said the question of what they wanted to do in life, how they should live, was clearer when they asked themselves “what do i want to be said about me at my funeral?” women in particular referenced the mary oliver line “is this how i want to be living my one wild and precious life?”—tongue-in-cheek when doing tedious things like work emails, worrying about having offended an acquaintance, or scrubbing food off car seats. mortality provided a 320picture of finite time, and finite time was clarifying—a meaning-maker compatible with a range of religious and political views, even as it often indexed individuals taking responsibility for structural pressures. other people’s deaths gave people the chance to see their own situations with more clarity. nick, a black real estate agent in his early thirties, told me how he’d proposed to his partner, dominique, of similar age and of mixed african american and jamaican descent, after an uncle with whom she’d been very close, vincent, had died of complications from a heart attack, leaving dominique distraught. “i just thought, ‘fuck it, let’s go all in,’” nick said. he proposed while they were getting dinner after helping clear out the deceased uncle’s place. nick wasn’t filling a role inhabited previously by vincent. marriage wasn’t a comforting distraction during a difficult time. “marriage ain’t a band-aid,” i was often told —particularly by religious leaders. to boot, dominique’s bereavement formed part of the story of nick and dominique’s engagement, but, importantly, the headline was the couple’s “success” and “compatibility.” that nick had supported dominique through a difficult time, and expressed “diffuse enduring solidarity” (schneider 1968), evidenced this. i am arguing that one of the ways the institution of marriage reproduces itself is by having people witness other people’s deaths and not only mourn them but rather, for a moment, inhabit them, fast-forwarding to their own moment of death. people didn’t only think about marriage, protection, mortality, and regret by indexing what happened to friends or relatives, but by thinking about stories and situations from the media. elizabeth, a single and dating grocery store manager in her thirties, a woman who was white and had grown up in charlottesville, lamenting how expensive it had become, how “the scene has changed so much,” said to me, “when i think about what is really a marriage, i think about that poor man who called his wife on 9/11. he was in one of the buildings. he perished. it’s a beautiful message. that’s love, that’s marriage. you can listen online.” (i also met two couples who had gotten engaged in the weeks that followed 9/11). when people brought up obergefell v. hodges, the 2015 u.s. supreme court case that made all u.s. states perform and recognize same-sex marriages, they cast it as a civil rights biography of a couple. and that this was a story of commitment between two men (james obergefell and john arthur) was evidenced by obergefell caring for arthur when the latter fell gravely ill. my interlocutors’ memories of the particulars were often fuzzy (e.g., regarding arthur’s name, and that he suffered from als). but being together through serious illness 321symbolized locally “sticking around during the tough times”—and therefore “real commitment.” real commitment might sound tautological but, of course, everyone knew of (or had experienced) marriages that were not committed, rather turning into sites of hurt. marriage equality and the plaintiffs at the center of it highlighted the connections between rights, affection, and mortality in marriage. and at a certain point in my fieldwork i was struck by how some heterosexual couples drew on images of discrimination and indignity—and of illness, accident, and death—that were most clearly associated with same-sex couples before marriage equality as problems that could befall any unmarried couple. they featured in lists of reasons to get married. these visions—nightmares—formed part of what made marriage a matter of protection: “what if you’re not married and the hospital employees only let spouses by your bedside?” “what if you’re not married and your significant other dies and then people, the authorities, can’t tell that your kids are your kids and not only your significant other’s kids?” (see also briggs 2017) “what if your spouse loved you and hated their blood relatives, but then a random cousin ends up inheriting their money and you’re not even invited to the funeral?” (see also reimers 2011) it might appear jarring to those who have experienced these kinds of tragedies to have them called on discursively in this matter. but i suggest we see these reflections as evidence of how central stories of “actual couples” are to how legal marriage has been shaped over time, of how marriage has been shaped, in part, by tragedy and exclusion. conclusion marriage, a history: how love conquered marriage—so goes the title of stephanie coontz’s 2006 best-seller. but this article offers an account of how marriage has conquered threat and death and how this proves consequential not only for how we think about kinship and relatedness but also for how we think of politics, the state, and power (mbembe 2019). following my interlocutors, i haven’t presented marriage as a path to immortality, nor as a lucky amulet. rather, i’ve 322observed the pervasiveness of danger and threat in talk of kinship and love. the idea of protection and the institution of marriage were, at the time of my fieldwork, often presented not as a way of eradicating threat (and, ultimately, inevitably, death) but as a way of, ideally (given that marriages, like other personal relationships, can also be sites of abuse,4 including intimate partner violence), lessening uncertainties around legal and financial rights, and of making sure that a spouse and society know the depth of commitment (again, ideally!) one felt for one’s significant other. mainstream media, and sometimes religious or academic discourses in favor of marriage, or at least the fantasy of marriage, focus on how getting married can ameliorate uncertainty (uncertainty over whether a lover truly cares about you, uncertainty about whether or not your life is actually “on track” or not, meeting “goals”) and stability (the psychic-social and indeed financial state that is especially mobilized in tracts about the “correct” circumstances under which to have a child). my suggestion is that one of the compelling things about marriage (to those who enter into it and perhaps to those who study it) is that it is never just about how a loved one feels about you but also always about the imagined and actualized threats and protections a relationship, a society, and a world produce, coupled with mortality. it seems as if, in certain contexts, uncertainty and stability—the at first sight mundane pair—become “activated” to make them threat and protection. but the point is that, in legal understandings of marriage, and in at least some of the cultural imaginaries in which these are nested, threat and protection were there, in talk of uncertainty and stability, all along. and this uncertainty, in relationships, but also in knowing how and when we will die, is surely one of the reasons why protection has flourished in kinship and politics in many parts of the world (e.g., babül 2015)—and yet it seems somehow heightened in the united states. in focusing on marriage, protection, and threat, this article might be seen, in part, as a story of how, as michael taussig (1984) identified (and see also sluka 1995), “cultures of terror” are particularly palpable in settler societies. consider kathleen stewart’s description of 1980s west virginia and its salience to the love-fear connection-exclusion that evokes both marriage and the nation: here, too, it seemed as if family and place were all-important, and i imagined that the porch lights left on all night here, too, signalled both a welcome to visitors and a warning to intruders. here, too, a swath of open 323space around a house seemed to leave it both unprotected and in a position to see what approaches (stewart 1996, 41) welcoming and warning; protecting and being protected from. if kinship, and particularly marriage, is not only political but is politics (mckinnon and cannell 2013; carsten et al. 2021), and the political is expressed in the language of threat and protection, then anthropologists should consider how people experience loving against, caring against, doing kinship against the dangers presented by the times and places their interlocutors inhabit, while also looking at notions of protection and threat as historically contingent (ralph 2020). in virginia, in 2017 and 2018, protection was indeed diffuse and marriage in no small part concerned flexibility. you signed up for a person, an institution, the commonwealth of virginia, but much of what followed remained unclear. protection emerged as a core value amid this uncertainty. abstract marriage, as a topic of ethnographic and historical exploration, ties together kinship, politics, economics, and faith in complex and significant ways. in the united states, federal and state governments have used legal marriage to create insiders and outsiders along lines of “race,” sexuality, and religion. those who have not been allowed to marry a consenting partner of their choice have been cast as dangerous, and as threats to the nation. drawing on fieldwork in the virginia city of charlottesville, i argue that protection is a key idiom through which to understand marriage and kinship in the united states. the research took place at the time of the 2017 white nationalist attack on charlottesville, and discussions of marriage and kinship resonated with wider political questions about what it means to be safe, and how kinship often means loving against and caring against—protecting against—dangers that threaten those closest to us. [usa; kinship; marriage; virginia; protection] notes acknowledgments  most thanks are due to the people in virginia who helped me with my research and who helped me and my family while we lived in charlottesville and lynchburgparticularly susan mckinnon. i would like to thank cultural anthropology’s editors, production team, and anonymous reviewers for their patience and their tactful and perceptive feedback. in addition, i owe lots to the following people for commenting on one iteration or another of this article: janet carsten, hsiao-chiao chiu, jess cooper, alexander edmonds, corey gibson, sophie haines, luke heslop, delwar hussain, lucy lowe, eirini papadaki, koreen reece. i have presented drafts of this long-to-finish article at brunel university (with special thanks to anna tuckett for organizing) and at the university of edinburgh, and i thank attendees for their feedback. my project was funded by a european research council (erc) advanced grant (pi professor janet carsten) under the european 324union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 695285 agatm erc-2015-adg, held at the university of edinburgh. names and some identifying features have been changed. 1. in charlottesville at the time of my research, the ways in which people have been wrongly labeled as dangerous to justify violence was being felt in the starkest ways by community members who were commemorating john henry james, who had been lynched near charlottesville in 1898. a white woman had falsely accused him of rape. in 2018, people from charlottesville and albermarle participated in the equal justice initiative’s community remembrance project, a pilgrimage from charlottesville to alabama and back, recognizing john henry james. the pilgrimage took place in conjunction with community discussions and history programs. see douglas 2024. 2. this was realized in 2021. 3. i’m grateful to the reviewer who urged me to make this point explicit. 4. thank you to the 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daribi example.” american ethnologist 4, no. 4: 623–42. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1977.4.4.02a00030 weston, kath 1995 “forever is a long time: romancing the real in gay kinship ideologies.” in naturalizing power: essays in feminist cultural analysis, edited by sylvia yanagisako and carol delaney, 87–110. london: routledge. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 301–27, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.05 the massacre and martyr(dom)s of oak creek: on the problem of diaspora, the economy of agonism, and the extimacy of relation-making cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 246-271, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.04 the massacre and martyr(dom)s of oak creek: on the problem of diaspora, the economy of agonism, and the extimacy of relation-making randeep singh hothi university of california, los angeles https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4703-094x on august 5, 2012, a white supremacist descended upon a gurdwara in oak creek, wisconsin, leaving seven killed and several injured in what was then purported to be the bloodiest massacre targeting a religious community in the united states since the birmingham church bombing of 1963. over the subsequent national news cycle, reporting condemned the racism thought to motivate this latest “hate crime,” meanwhile only incrementally arriving at a sense of its victims: that they were sikhs; they follow sikhism; their houses of worship are called gurdwaras; their scripture is the guru granth sahib. however, while public discourse underwrote the tragedy of a little-known community targeted for its conspicuous turbans and beards, sikhs themselves had learned to become far more ambivalent about their purported victimhood. in the hours following the shooting, at a major gurdwara in california, i noticed a familiarity with violence extended well beyond the immediacy of any then here and now. gurdwara complexes minimally consist of two built environments—the royal sanctum (darbār), in which collective ritual life is centered around the guru granth sahib, and the open kitchen (langar), in which it is around the free preparation, distribution, and partaking of meal. i first proceeded to the sanctum, where the officiant (bhāī, literally, “brother”) initiated a performance of the collective supplication (ardās) among the few hundred congregants. each stanza of its standardized rhythmic blank verse calls the assembly to collective remembrance by uttering, in choral synchrony, wāhegurū (the supreme being). on this day, the poignance of the third stanza seemed especially unmistakable. its text memorializes exemplary men and women of past centuries whose resolute devotion could not be deterred, those who had “sacrificed their heads but did not surrender the path, became cut to pieces joint by joint, became de-scalped, mounted breaking wheels, became hewn alive by saws, sacrificed themselves in service of gurdwaras, refused to surrender the path, who upheld their sikhi with each breath and hair.” yet whereas the body of the supplicatory text is seldom altered, its conclusion is by convention supplementable. on this day, in the hours following the shooting, the supplication invoked also those just slain—however, not as victims, but as martyrs. this article concerns the cofiguration, or mutual foregrounding, of seemingly distinct orders of violence. modern sikh memorial practices reveal a remarkable sensitivity to martyrs (shahīd) and martyrdom (shahādat), ethical beings and events, respectively, in which the self elicits its death in devotion to the supreme being. as elaborated in exegesis (e.g., see murphy 2004, 343–44), martyrdom emerges from a perpetual remembrance of the interconnectedness of all things (nām simarān), which emancipates the self from its self-individuation (mandair 2009, 215), or ego (haumai), in a new becoming (the gurmukh) given to universal compassion, spontaneous love, and relentless sovereignty (bhogal 2012a, 861; mandair 2009, 373, 377). moreover, martyr(dom)s also contour collective memory, disclosing a “history of the sikh people [that] has been one of marginalization and struggle at the periphery of three imperial hegemons: mughal, british and indian/hindu.” (bhogal 2011, 64). in an intertextuality (silverstein 2005, 7) or “becoming-comparable” characteristic of martyr(dom)s (bernal 2017; thiranagama 2014), dis/similarities between instances thereof can index (silverstein 2013), or “point to,” dis/similarities between the respective contexts of their occurrence, in this case, regimes imperial, colonial, postcolonial, and liberal multicultural. at stake in the in/comparability of the event is a global economy of agonism, which mobilizes in this case at least two forms distinctive of late twentieth century socio-political struggles, the politics of recognition and ethno-nationalism. for a growing number of sikhs, their tradition calls for an avowed agonism against white supremacy and a concomitant refusal of liberal political forms. young activists relate their struggles against racial supremacy to seventeenthand eighteenth-century struggles against state power, grounding their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. yet for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror firsthand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won recognition, respectability, and legibility. established community leaders focally concerned with mobilizing a politics against the nation-state for a homeland insist that other kinds of agonism in the diaspora might distract from ongoing struggles against india, whose violence is intuited as more profound in cruelty, brutality, and scope. in this generationally delineated disagreement articulated around the figuration of martyr(dom)s, the scalar complexity of the ethico-political is premised on the translation of time and place. i probe the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the problem of diaspora, the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. in the nation’s tortured body, brian keith axel (2001; see also 2004) argues that martyrs slain by the indian state motivate psycho-social investments in homeland constitutive of diasporic subjectivity by inspiring an imagination of, stake in, and demand for territorial sovereignty over and around panjab. however, i find that martyrs slain by white supremacist violence instigate translations between struggles concerned with homeland and sites of dispersion, respectively, including, inter alia, the territories now claimed by the united states, canada, australia, and the united kingdom. the respective relation, mutual implication, and strategic negotiation of diasporic and para-diasporic investments indexing homeland and the sites of dispersion, respectively, inform the competing worlds at stake in disputes about political form. that is, the problematization of diaspora reveals how political imagination is figured by tacit presuppositions about the proper loci of agonism, or when/where the action is. for sikhs, is it a homeland in panjab, the apparent site of the tradition’s founding, demographic growth, and given memorial canon, or is it unbound, inclusive of the sites of its dissemination, as implied by the tradition’s universality? an ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the extimacy of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, collective relation-making, that is, making solidarity, alliance, or coalition. the urgency of relation-making bespeaks an assembling that might refuse the mutually imbricated workings of global empire, raciality, patriarchy, class, and capital (smith 2015, 385). yet its political (contra social, e.g., durkheim 2013; goffman 2021) achievement also proves elusive, as sikh ethno-nationalism and human rights campaigns have, over the decades, evinced all too well. in focusing on the extimacy of relation-making, i pursue a study capable of thinking together the disjunctures within collectives and the disjunctures between collectives. roseann liu and savannah shange (2018), for instance, problematize solidarity-building grounded in the putative parity between asian american and black experiences by scrutinizing generationally delineated disjunctures among the prior. disagreements about political form reveal the stakes motivating the dynamic relation between relations-with-others and relations-with-self, in this case implicating disparate inheritances of violence, investments in time and place, and the in/comparability of ethico-political events. to bring into ethnographic focus the problematization of diaspora, economy of agonism, and extimacy of relation-making, i turn to the semiotic sciences for a vantage unto their mutual imbrication in situated sense-making practices. in the debate at the center of this study, contested investments in the locus of the real motivate arguments around violence in its scale and structuration. for diasporas inheriting multiple orders of ethno-racial violence, the scale of structural violence proves important precisely because majoritarian violence so obviously operates otherwise than punctuated events. scalar analytics are central to the anthropology of diaspora (bakker kellogg 2021; bernal 2020; lukasik 2021), both in its concern with agency (e.g., competing construals of homeland through which social actors negotiate the terms of political recognition; see bakker kellogg 2019, 476, 481), and with discursive structuration (e.g., the remapping of homeland violence, following the war on terror; see lukasik 2021, 566). as studies of raciality have demonstrated, fixation on evental spectacle can obscure its more entrenched, perduring, and patterned workings (beliso-de jesús and pierre 2020, 72; rosa and díaz 2020). an analysis of scale, or arrangement of world (carr and lempert 2016; pritzker and perrino 2021, 366–70), therefore brings into view the competing senses of time and place at stake in disagreements in and about diaspora. the ethnographic moment at the center of this study draws on analytic sensibilities garnered through more than two years of field research investigating multisited mediations of the sikh tradition, including among gurdwara communities in the united states, the united kingdom, canada, and india. at the above gurdwara in california, management committee members called me to join deliberations in the langar hall, having noticed my discoursing outside and otherwise from years of irregular attendance in protests, informal discussions, and community organizing. this participation did not anticipate the sober moment as fieldwork at the time, though subsequent notes and the composition of this essay have perhaps made it so, if only by retroaction. in this case, the ethnographic field consists in the dialogic pursuit (gupta and ferguson 1997, 38–39) of the problematization of diaspora, extimacy of relation-making, and economy of agonism in both their face-to-face and imagal modalities. the langar hall instantiates an “offstage” (shryock 2004), a site wherein collective interventions in public life are devised and, in this case, calibrations to and between homeland and sites of dispersion are made un/tenable, relations internal and external to a collectivity are negotiated, and the horizon of a politics is perpetually re-imagined. the format of this ethnography tacks between analyses of images and face-to-face interaction, interactional modalities wherein martyr(dom)s make a problem of diaspora. it first examines the built environment of the langar hall for everyday sensitivities to martyr(dom)s. images thereof installed on its walls enact a diasporic imaginary, which scales an evolving tradition of struggle in memorial canon. the ethnographic focus then shifts to a heated half-hour dispute between young activists who blame refusals to politicize white supremacy for moral failure and elder gurdwara management committee members who rebuff such interventions for indulging in a performative radicalism. the cross-legged assembly wrangling on the floor of the langar hall reveals competing investments in when/where the action is, relaying between generationally delineated turns-at-talk that each ground their respective models of agonism in reference to those slain just hours earlier. in so proceeding, this study seeks possibility in the service of a more decisive articulation of otherwise distinct agonisms and, in doing so, offers itself in the meditation of a yet-to-come. diasporic imaginaries: the scaling of struggle in memorial canon bibi (honorific, “sister”) amandeep kaur commands the foreground of the photograph, peering directly at the viewer against the blurred bodies behind her (figure 1). she informed human rights organizations of the abductions, tortures, and executions perpetrated by police in panjab, and was executed by them for it. bhai (honorific, “brother”) mani singh faces his executioner, instructing him to cleave not at the wrist but rather the digit of his finger for a truer implementation of the joint-by-joint dismemberment decreed by the then governor of mughal lahore (figure 2). he was arrested for thwarting attempts to ambush arriving pilgrims and executed for refusing to disavow gurmat, the teachings of guru nanak and his successors. figure 1. bibi amandeep kaur. figure 2. bhai mani singh. about forty such images of martyr(dom)s line the four walls of the langar hall, hanging on high, evenly spaced, halfway between floor and ceiling. painting reproductions, mid-twentieth century experiments in modern visual forms mostly in the medium of oil, depict martyrdoms-in-becoming, bodies being hewn in half, tied and burned alive, and cut joint by joint by successive powers of and since the seventeenth century. photographic reproductions, circulated before death or collected afterward, focus on martyrs yet-to-be, bodies that become slain by the indian state in the 1980s and 1990s. congregants in the langar hall ordinarily notice this series of images while partaking in the dispensed bread, sitting cross-legged, back to back, and in linear array (pa ṅgat), though passersby can sometimes be noticed contemplating them while standing in suspended gaze. in 1997 and 1998, bal installed these “photos of the martyrs” (shahīdā ṅ dīā ṅ phōtōā ṅ) to honor militants and non-combatants abducted, tortured, and killed by the indian state in the 1980s and 1990s; inspire the gurdwara community to reflect on them as ethical and political exemplars; and motivate the movement for an independent sikh homeland in and around panjab (“khalistan”). bal is a working-class gurdwara organizer in his fifties who migrated to the united states after men in his family were disappeared and killed by state police in the 1990s. he reports installing these images so that congregants might recognize the sacrifice of martyrs (“sa ṅgatā ṅ ihanā ṅ dī kurabānnī recognize karaṇ”), find inspiration in them, (“sa ṅgatā ṅ nē ihanā ṅ tō ṅ parēranā laiṇī”), and cultivate an unshrinking exuberance (“sa ṅgatā ṅ ihathē laggū cha radī kalā”) in the service of a vociferous struggle. he explains that “these men/people are never ordinary [ih ba ṅdē āmm ba ṅdē nahī ṅ hu ṅdē],” precisely because they “sacrificed the most valuable thing, their lives, for their tradition and their community’s heritage [ihanā ṅ nē āpaṇē dharam tē āpaṇī kaum dī heritage vāsatē sabh tō ṅ jiādā kīmatī chīz āpaṇī jān kurabāṇ kītī].” for bal, martyrs instantiate a resistance against state violence that makes possible and conduces the practice of tradition. the exalted rank of the martyr is meant to compel political investment in homeland. according to axel’s (2001) study of indian state violence against sikhs, the mutilated body of the martyr motivates a longing for prior wholeness, instituting a properly diasporic subjectivity in the desire for territorial sovereignty over a homeland anterior to its colonial and then postcolonial disfigurement. however, images in the langar hall, unlike online archives of the already mutilated (as in axel 2001), depict martyrs from the 1980s and 1990s yet to be mutilated (e.g., bibi amandeep kaur) and martyrs from past centuries becoming-mutilated (e.g., bhai mani singh). the martyrs depicted in these images do not exhibit any conventional signs of dejection, because realized beings are emancipated from pain and sometimes even pleasure (though, in one exceptional photograph, a young harjinder singh jinda smiles while offering confections to his collaborator, sukhdev singh sukha, in celebration of their upcoming execution, having assassinated the former chief of the army staff responsible for commanding the attack on darbar sahib in 1984). depressed upper eyelids, even countenance, and steady posture instantiate signs of existential equipoise characteristic of modern sikh martyrological iconography, even if transgressing gendered expectations of the austere body (e.g., in the piercings, makeup, bindi, and vivid suit worn by bibi amandeep kaur), and even if defanging the wholeness of the complete body (e.g., in the turban/dastār, sword/kirpān, and possibly bracelet/kaṛā removed from bhai mani singh). bal initially collected photographs of contemporary martyrs with collaborators in the united states, united kingdom, canada, germany, and india. bal began by circulating these images in panjabi-medium diasporic newspapers, amid protest demonstrations, and at gurdwara programs commemorating martyrdom (shahīdī samāgam). (on the public display of sikh martyrs, see also chopra 2018.) these images instantiate a diasporic imaginary, or a “globalized domain of images” (axel 2004, 35), a field of visual artifacts that constitutes diaspora by inspiring the shared imagination of an originary homeland. this martyrological diasporic imaginary is organized around the figure of the khalsa, the order of “saint-soldiers” (sa ṅt sipāhī) instituted by guru gobind singh (1666–1708) in 1699, that is also the authorial voice and beneficiary of the supplication voiced in the sanctum (“this supplication is of the supreme and collective khalsa, let the collective khalsa call to mind, wāhegurū, wāhegurū, wāhegurū”). the event that organizes this imaginary occurred in june 1984, when the indian military attacked the sacred premises of darbar sahib (the so-called golden temple) on the celebrated martyrdom anniversary of the fifth master, guru arjan (1563–1606), raided other gurdwaras across the country, set fires to and confiscated libraries of priceless, handwritten manuscripts, and destroyed rare artifacts. the campaign marshaled thousands of soldiers and months of training (tatla 2015), targeting, according to joyce pettigrew, the existential “heart” (1995, 8–9) of sikhism, not simply a struggle for regional autonomy. yet the events of 1984, counterinsurgency, and militancy remain obscure and little understood. the indian state has yet to admit the true extent of its systematic terror nor its cover-up thereof (kaur 2019). langar halls in the diaspora instantiate one crucial site wherein state violence has been memorialized for more than three decades, contrary to indifference from academics, media, and international actors (see mahmood 1996, 244), and whereas the public installation of recent martyrological iconography had until recently been prohibited in india (singh and purewal 2013, 144). the diasporic imaginary installed in the langar hall situates the conflict in and against the state in an evolving tradition of struggle by making serially contiguous the paintings of renowned martyrs slain since the seventeenth century and photographs of recent martyrs murdered by india. as bal explained, a likeness couples ancient (purātan) and recent martyrs, “their [contemporary martyrs] rank and status resembles that of past martyrdoms [ihanā ṅ dā darajā rutabā purāṇē shahīdā ṅ nāl miladā juladā hai].” by placing images of martyr(dom)s across otherwise distinct eras in a single serial array, temporal continuity is projected from spatial contiguity. the semiotic transposition offers one of the longest-standing arguments for periodizing indian state violence of the 1980s and 1990s as the third and most recent massacre (ghallūghārā) (see also tatla 2015) since the “greater massacre” (vaḍḍhā ghallūghārā) of sikhs in 1762 by the durrani empire and the “lesser massacre” (chōṭā ghallūghārā) in 1746 by the moghul empire. yet the diasporic imaginary also motivates differences between kinds of martyr(dom). the langar hall models, extends, and evolves a tradition of the warrior-saint (sa ṅt sipāhī) modeled on the exemplary lives and teachings of gurus arjan (1563–1606) and teg bahadur (1621–1675), whose teachings courted mortality at the hands of moghul imperial authority. the array of images periodizes, by grouping together images of the lives of the gurus in distinction from images depicting subsequent campaigns against the moghul empire, skirmishes against tribal potentates, and anticolonial resistance against the british raj, as well as both the militancy movement against and extrajudicial killings by india. as instantiating its two exemplary instances, the gurus might even seem to exceed martyrdom itself. the ambivalence is enregistered in the supplication, for instance, in which their companions are recalled in the ways that they were slain, but they themselves are not. precisely because bal and others group different “kinds” of martyr(dom)s together, some kinds can be conspicuous in their absence. this langar hall, for instance, like most, does not install depictions of those slain by racial violence in the united states (though, see kaur 2023). the dis/similarity of martyr(dom)s across instances is precisely what furthers the ongoing evolution of a tradition of agonism, including its appropriation. images installed in the langar hall both authorize ethico-political stances in the here and now and memorialize past struggles, bringing different kinds of martyr(dom)s across time and place into emergent dis/similarity. however, postcolonial anxieties occlude the creativity of its repetition (on the creativity of martyrological iconography, see mittermaier 2015, 586 and varzi 2006), reducing the memorialization of martyr(dom)s in the sikh tradition to “optical illusion” (e.g., das 1992, 247) and “the obsession to mechanically analogize new events to a limited stock of past events” (das 1992, 253). post/colonial states have relatedly sought to appropriate the tradition, prizing sikh men of caste as a loyal race of “special warrior-martyr[s]” (fox 1985, 8; see also fenech 1997; imy 2019) for their putative, if properly subdued, bravado and valor. however, this “iconolatry of manliness” (mandair 2005), which genders the capacity for self-sacrifice, makes men paradigmatic of sikh subjectivity, eliding the multiplicities constitutive of sikhs (see singh 2005), including women martyrs who span from the period of the living gurus into the future. nikky-guninder kaur singh (1993, 4) argues that “ironically, sikh literary heritage abounds in precisely the kinds of images for which western feminist critics yearn so painfully.” in the langar hall, martyred women are quite literally depicted in images. bibi amandeep kaur and other women refute the gendered stereotypy of martyrdom, as does the supplicatory text that makes exemplary the martyrdom of both “men and women” (si ṅghā ṅ si ṅghaṇīā ṅ). the institution of memory is therefore also its creative evolution in a tradition of struggle. the mutually co-implicated evolution of the martyrological tradition and an ever-changing field of politics becomes a key site for thinking the ethics of ego-loss informed by the brutal violence of nations and states, whereas functionalist analyses focus primarily on instrumental utility. for instance, a characteristically secularist necropolitical analysis models martyrdom after suicide bombings as its paradigmatic case, reading martyrdom for ideological duplicity, ressentiment, and religious fervor, as a world-hating vow to destroy “impure corporeal life” (mbembe 2019, 50), an act of “subjugating life to the power of death” (mbembe 2019, 89), a vengeful calculation “to take the enemy down with you” (mbembe 2019, 89), and a self-suicide wrought by a “desire for eternity” (mbembe 2019, 92). ethnography shows that martyrdom indeed often does “manipulat[e] [death] toward nation building” (mbembe 2019, 65; see also bernal 2017, 27), for instance in “an economy of heavenly reward” (varzi 2006, 37) or a vengeful desire to transcend the material world (e.g., hacking 2008, 23–25). however, the functional figuration of death makes possible its thinking otherwise, not only its manipulation. sikh discursive practices seldom ground martyrdom in the promise of a hereafter. rather, the living are called to contemplate death in the unrelenting project of foregoing an ego now, the study of which might awaken a truer sense of what it mean to live. the 9/11 generation: intervention in the release of agonism in the langar hall where images of martyr(dom)s are installed on high, the assembly sits cross-legged in concentric circles, a symmetry reflecting the egalitarian ethos at stake in gurdwara settings. vir addresses the assembly as a form of the divine itself (“gurū rūp sādh sa ṅgat jī”), a routine conversational opening that acknowledges the authority of the assembly and frames the discussion as one of collective contemplation (vicār), which, much like martyrdom, is premised on foregoing ego (haumai). in practice, the forbearance involves treating disagreement delicately, to not indulge in the narcissistic trappings of facework, and to not offend any in the vaunted assembly of seekers. vir is an elected gurdwara management committee member in his fifties, one of many such predominantly men responsible for overseeing the everyday operations of the gurdwara, including informal decision-making initiatives such as this one, which calls the assembly to authorize the gurdwara community’s official response to the shooting. i admired this assembly of two dozen men and women for their sēvā (selfless service) in operating the langar hall, teaching sikh history and panjabi at the khalsa school, programming community health campaigns, and undertaking various ad hoc initiatives. the lives of most are anchored in the sociality of the gurdwara, including asylees who had migrated during the 1980s and 1990s, as well as more educated classes who had arrived as early as the mid-1960s. in the innermost circle sat young, college-age activists familiar to me from various protests, youth camps, and social media, rather than from the day-to-day operation of the gurdwara. they sit quietly—at first. the deliberation soon arrived at sponsoring a candlelight vigil, convening an interfaith dialogue with local religious community organizations, and issuing a public statement thanking law enforcement for their service, though one suggestion to call for gun control was dismissed for treading in matters of political controversy. for many, including the consensus at this langar hall, a recognition that sikhs are conducive to, rather than threaten, national aspiration is so sought after precisely for its prophylactic promise that it might correct misconstruals thought to motivate abuse and violence against them. sikh men have become renowned as particularly ironic victims of racial violence according to a “hypothesis of mistaken identity” (puar 2007, 178), which proposes that anti-sikh violence stems from a conflation between the “monstrous” (puar 2007) turbans and beards of the sikh body and the overdetermined figure of the islamic terrorist (on “racialized religious markers” of sikhs, see singh 2013, 123). in the “racial panic” (rana 2011) following 9/11, sikhs have become actionable targets of fatal violence under what might be called the racial sovereignty of transnational white patriarchy (grewal 2013), emblematized in the murder of balbir singh sodhi, who was slain in the days after 9/11 by a gunman who wanted to “shoot some towel-heads,” and who warned that “i’m an american. arrest me and let those terrorists run wild.” the consensus underwrites now standardized forms of public participation, which are thought to help garner sympathy, accrue goodwill, and ward off further violence. against this consensus, the cadre of young activists sitting in the cross-legged assembly call instead for a press statement addressing white racism by name, a rally rather than a vigil, and solidarity with seemingly similarly aligned black, indigenous, and muslim communities, and under no circumstance any thanks to police. jot, gem, and their peers instantiate a “9/11 generation” (maira 2016; see also nijhawan and arora 2013) whose fluency in the idioms of social justice emerges in response to domestic forms of racialization under the global war on terror. theirs is part of a larger generational movement to make compatible tradition and movements of social justice (nijhawan 2016, 12). practically, this involves building culturally sustaining institutions adjacent to and within gurdwara settings (luthra 2021) that seek to meet urgent community needs, for example, addressing substance abuse, domestic violence, and homelessness, as well as broader agendas such as environmental justice, civil rights, anti-imperialism, and labor organizing. their frustration lies with the seeming servility of their community’s attempts to garner recognition through education campaigns, interfaith forums, policy interventions, and liberal rituals of public mourning, which they believe forfeit the agency of the warrior-saint so unmistakable and visible in the langar hall. jot scans the circumference of the circle and finally erupts, piercing the harmony of the consensus by forcefully asking what appealing to gōrē (whites) had ever achieved for “us.” the intervention comes as a three-pronged criticism. first, the inclusive first-person plural implies that the consensus wrongly assumes that others like him and his peers are included in their constituency, pressing the assembly to acknowledge the servility of its consensus in contrast to their refusal. second, the intervention implies that perpetual efforts to garner sympathy have not yielded at least proportionate reward, given that anti-sikh racial violence persists seemingly unabated. third, and perhaps most unsettling, the assembly is charged with folding the universal teachings of guru nanak into the mandates of whiteness/liberalism. in doing so, jot makes palpable “the fact of whiteness” (hartigan 1997), rendering explicit the race of the otherwise unmarked addressee of liberal recognition, or what might be called a “white listening subject” (flores and rosa 2015). in punjabi, gōrē has come to stand for white and liberal cultural forms against which diaspora can be positioned. the insistence on making explicit the fact of whiteness becomes especially jarring in this case, precisely because race, caste, and ethnicity are not sanctioned social categories for gurdwara settings, in keeping with the universality of gurmat. though, matters prove far more vexed and vexing in practice, as this dispute makes apparent. jot’s indelicate entry perks up his peers. proceeding in tight succession to retain the conversational floor, one of jot’s peers voiced an idiomatic expression problematizing the servility of the consensus as an instrument of whiteness/liberalism: “whites have made us into spoons [camacē].” another situated the stance of the assembly as one of beggars (ma ṅgatē), in contrast to the background knowledge that one only begs of the supreme being, not any human. the series of arguments stakes a will to defy proper to the tradition, registering the contradiction between performances of docility designed for white liberal listening/viewing publics and a proud tradition of defiance, struggle, and sovereignty. at stake is the forfeiture of a sovereignty, ceded to the colonial “christian-secular continuum” (mandair 2013; see also bhogal 2012b) and in complicity with imperial hegemony, anti-blackness (judge and brar 2017), and white supremacy (see kaur 2020). gem latches on, voicing a parallel between moghul and american empires: “would it ever make sense to ask the mughals to appreciate that we’re nice and peaceful people?” gem makes comparable liberalism/whiteness and past regimes like the mughal empire, framing the prior beyond any biographic adversary. under the moral-juridical rubric of so-called hate crimes, liberal discourses characteristically understand such violence as matters of criminal trespass, an individuated transgression against and contrary to law, rather than political violence, the structural trespass of the juridico-political regime itself (see mamdani 2015, 63). however, martyrdom partly consists in asymmetry, a mortal encounter with an existent power of greater magnitude. for gem, this asymmetric power is structural in race and empire. he proclaims this explicitly: “this is structural racism,” enumerating a history of racial injustice in slavery, native american genocide, japanese internment, and killings targeting sikhs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. in making commensurate anti-sikh violence and a history of american violence against other conspicuous minorities “of color” (cf. sexton 2010, 47–48), oak creek becomes situated in both the tradition of martyrdom and the history of the united states. as becomes apparent, however, the conspicuous academic register of concepts such as structural violence draws charges of theoretical abstraction inadequate to the concrete moment. sunaina maira (2016, 259) suggests that the grounds for a complex, creative, and evolving politics of solidarity requires an understanding of mutual histories and struggles (on reciprocation, see atshan and moore 2014), not of shared subjection alone. liu and shange (2018) further emphasize the role of empathy in solidarity (cf. cox 2022, 104). in this case, their existential entanglement with others is left unsaid in the translation between political organizing elsewhere and an abbreviated face-to-face discussion in the gurdwara. in triangulating between the diaspora, seemingly similarly situated others, and the brutality of a nation-state exacting historically comparable kinds of racial violence, the deterritorialized political horizon scales, by making coeval, sites of agonism, that is, of settlement and homeland. gem, jot, and their crew referred to those slain in oak creek as shahīd (martyrs), the most recent of vaunted martyrs, but their inspiration by martyrs like bhai mani singh, whose poetic excess calls for more violence in the moment of death, is implied, for example, in gem’s reference to the mughal empire. in doing so, these activists urge others to forego a merely nominal acknowledgment of martyrdom, calling instead for collective action in alignment with the fearlessness characteristic of realized beings (the gurmukh), though not necessarily a brush with mortality. here, white supremacy is the most recent order of violence amid the evolving historicity of a tradition. the refusal of given habituated political forms anticipates a yet-to-come that would acknowledge an incommensurability between the ritual servility of liberal mourning and a tradition of defiance concerned with releasing ego from its own habituated impulses for self-preservation. in the parking lot after the meeting, gem, jot, and their crew admitted that they expected the assembly to dismiss their intervention precisely because their call to conflict stood so at odds with entrenched consensus. they see hypocrisy in gurdwara leadership and organizers who place images of martyrdom in the langar hall yet organize public performances of docility before the nation. they imply that, though political mobilization against racial violence in the diaspora can be as vociferous as struggles against hindu nationalism in india or moghul imperial power in the past, a collective mobilization against white supremacy would have to risk social dissonance, misrecognition, and illiberalism. perhaps the expectation of failure made the tenor of their polemics all the more strident, owing to a general melancholia born of the ever-present possibility of abuse and violence (hundle 2012, 289) that also interdicts its very mourning (grewal 2013). activists had noticed that the gurdwara management committee members had adjourned the meeting within minutes of their intervention, confirming their suspicion that the gurdwara’s response was already devised well before the call for participation. in surmising a second or recursive offstage behind the veil of collective deliberation, they wondered whether their participation mattered at all. the implication here is that mobilizing against a broader racist society threatens to unravel and re-constitute the character of gurdwara politics and for that matter of community itself. the 1984 generation: conservation in an economy of agonism “we lived through desert storm, our brothers and sisters were slaughtered in delhi,” interjected the now agitated vir. the gruff rebuke silences the cadre of activists into ceding the floor, startling any listeners entranced by their unexpected series of arguments. vir explains that he and others in the assembly had both witnessed state-sponsored pogroms targeting them in the streets of delhi in 1984 and dealt with abuse targeting them during the first iraq war. after the assassination of the indian prime minister in response to india’s attack on darbar sahib in 1984, hindu mobs sponsored by the state had burned alive, shot, and publicly executed sikh men and women in delhi and across the country. and in the wake of desert storm, also well before 9/11, anti-sikh violence had targeted sikhs in the united states then as well. vir’s intervention ironizes the rhetorical form of the arguments issued by activists sitting directly across from him. his use of the exclusive plural “we,” which refers only to those with firsthand experiences of this violence, makes conspicuous the young activists for their remove from these events, in contrast to others among them. in so dividing the assembly, vir plays on jot’s initial use of the inclusive first-person plural, which charged the assembly with servility. here, vir charges jot and his crew with lacking the experiential authority to warrant such stridence. second, the citation of delhi and desert storm parallels, and reverses, their citation of slavery, genocide, and internment. the counter-citation undermines the purported novelty of their contextualization by scaling memory otherwise, anchoring the relevant kind of violence in that of the indian state, the exceptional gravity of which is acknowledged across the generational divide, but which only some gurdwara organizers and decision-makers can claim to have experienced firsthand. the epistemic authority of firsthand experience grounds the kind of violence that becomes paradigmatic. according to vir, the young activists have no standing to impugn the community’s strategic approaches to racial violence in the united states, because they had not earned the scars to claim any authority on matters of life and death. vir then recalls having petitioned school districts to counter bullying when these students were still in elementary school, an especially caustic diminution of their standing. the quip charges the activists with arrogance, or at least thoughtless disregard, in their attempt to sensitize an assembly that needs no reminder about what it means to deal with routinized abuse, harassment, and assault. the retort itself preempts further counterargument, in that activists themselves acknowledge that indian state violence of the 1980s and 1990s is more profound, grave, and serious than anti-sikh violence in the united states. vir’s abrupt rebuke makes stark an unmistakable rift between activists and the rest of the assembly. sitting opposite vir, tej and pal are his allies in the factionalized terrain of local gurdwara politics. both were college students in panjab during the 1980s and 1990s, a formative site of organizing around sikh ethnonationalism. tej is a familiar face in the gurdwara setting, a community organizer who discourses online and offline to draw attention to the human rights record of india, the injustices of its current and past governments, and the need to consolidate collective political will against it. tej, like many ethno-nationalists, has sought solidarity from others with little success, and remains frustrated by indifference to the plight of sikhs among international media, the human rights community, and governments. pal stands by the doorway at the circle’s periphery, perhaps as a form of ethical self-effacement or perhaps to monitor the discussion from without. pal, unlike tej, hesitates to embroil himself in such corrosive discourse, whether online or in this langar hall. he is rumored to really “pull the strings” behind the gurdwara management committee decisions, a stature owing partly to his modest wealth from business and partly from his related pull with ngos, government officials, and politicians in the united states and india. nevertheless, tej and pal each offer concessions that might repair the now factionalized assembly. tej explains that “this isn’t a time to make things political,” having noticed the uneasy tension in the room. for tej, as with his peers who support an independent sikh state, protesting white racism distracts from efforts that could be expended toward more pressing problems in india. tej was also perhaps obligated to repair the rift because he was the one who recruited the “youngsters” to join the deliberation, having canvassed the gurdwara premises for familiar faces from rallies, protests, and social media. however, perhaps to placate any impetus to further quarrel, tej had conceded that “the youths’ sincerity should be respected,” explaining that he admired the “youngsters” for their passion. pal builds on the concession, agreeing that candlelight vigils are “not really a sikh thing.” pal instead proposes a public memorial culminating in a collective supplication (ardās), resolving to solicit a college-aged woman adept in public speaking who could represent the local sikh community in the performance of a memorial at the municipal public park in collaboration with elected city officials. the concession is offered as compromise, an agreement with jot about the incongruity between the forms of public participation authorized by the consensus and otherwise by tradition. vir, tej, pal, and other organizers have developed a strategic but ambivalent approach to the rituals of liberal self-representation criticized by the activists. especially since 9/11, gurdwara management communities have learned to collaborate with city government and schools, police departments, and interfaith forums, in doing so making sikhism legible to centers of power and drawing praise from other sikhs. in garnering sympathy in the united states and fueling an ethno-nationalist movement in and against india, they claim to instrumentalize, but not internalize, liberal forms, a strategic presentation of self designed to contest one state by recruiting another. in this gurdwara, committees are elected, among other things, for their alignment with a struggle in panjab. relatedly, in this case, the strategic presentation of english-speaking sikh women fluent in the language of liberalism instantiates another strategy by which the well-formedness of sikhism is strategically performed for public valorization. women’s involvement in gurdwara decision-making proves complex, including in efforts to contest the patriarchal administration of institutional space, the tokenization of women for the purposes of facework in gurdwara party politics, and, of course, attempts to heed an egalitarianism communicated by the tradition. in this case, the problem of diaspora is settled by fiat, conserving the primacy of homeland against competing scalar intuitions grounded in disparate experiences of violence. activists motivated an urgent political conversation about white supremacy by attempting to secure a footing in the interactional styles operative in the gurdwara setting. the cadre practiced indirection, careful not to risk embarrassing any specific person, which would have transgressed the ethics of the gurdwara setting; referred to themselves in the third person as dās (“slave” of the supreme being), rather than risk an egoic self-indulgence through first-person indexicals like “i” or “me”; but, ultimately, succumbed to indulging in harsh moral censure that re-entrenched egoic factionalism. activists could not hold the floor, because, inter alia, ethnic panjabi interactional customs afforded turn-allocation privileges based on seniority in age. in yielding to ethnic interactional norms, the dispute resolves an agonism anchored to the time-space of homeland. the conservation of a liberal consensus is meant to further a more vociferous struggle for homeland, a yet-to-come premised on foregoing agonism otherwise. when i spoke to members of the assembly after the meeting, they explained that the young activists did not realize that little could be gained in agitating against whiteness/liberalism (gōrē) in the united states. to them, college students back for summer break threatened to embroil the community in unnecessary conflict, disrupted the otherwise constructive tenor of the discussion, and offered solutions that seemed far more “academic” rather than practical. when i asked members of the assembly about the demands placed on them by the martyrdoms of oak creek, some insisted on differences within martyrdom. they did not dispute the martyrdom of those slain in oak creek, which defensibly consists in attending a gurdwara in the face of mortal violence, and all agreed that a sikh must be capable of conflict should the need arise. however, the tradition, i was told, does not always demand further conflict in response to martyrdom, pointing to more quietistic acts of death depicted in the langar hall. perhaps surprisingly, the problem of diaspora also aligns generational struggles, as in their respective experiments in political imagination. after all, such intergenerational divisions are also permeable (nijhawan 2016, 12) and evolving (murphy 2004). although the activists failed to topple a thinly veiled monopoly over collective decision-making, they claimed success for having forced a conversation about a more serious and risky politics. in this respect, they seem very much like a previous generation of organizers like bal, who, in installing the images of martyr(dom)s in the langar hall also called his community to contemplation. for disputants themselves, activist and management are mutually designated social roles signifying, among other things, the sharp distinction between the idiom of social justice and the administration of the gurdwara, respectively. yet insofar as both factions seek to politicize collective action in ways that guide collective decision-making, the distinction between activism and institutional management may itself prove unviable. the localizability of agonism is precisely what that the problem of diaspora both conserves and threatens to unravel. indeterminacies: the extimacy of relation-making ten years after the massacre of oak creek, a more expansive class of predicates (e.g., those who “were killed/shot”) supersedes shahīd/shahādat (martyrs/martyrdom) in everyday references to the slain. the semantic shift indexes the evolving circumstances in which the slain are now recalled—to underline the racial valence of such violence, less so a long-standing tradition of ethical becoming. as the problem of diaspora would have it, competing investments in time and place anchor the kinds of memorializations that become socially enregistered in the here and now. likewise, apropos of the generationally delineated dispute in the langar hall, quite different experiences of violence motivate the scalar dimensions of political imagination. young activists and elder institutional decision-makers are both concerned with supremacies white and hindu, which precede 9/11 and 1984, trump and modi, and the war on terror and hindutva, respectively. however, vying investments in the proper locus of agonism, or when/where the action is, differentially motivate the kinds of politics that seem viable, that is, conciliatory performances of liberal mourning in the service of repairing the seeming social rupture wrought by racial violence versus mobilizations that would politicize community in the furtherance of a struggle against white supremacy alongside seemingly similarly situated agonists. the figuration of the martyr(dom)s throws this deliberative calculus into relief, calling for collective contemplation into the scalar complexity of the here and now. the ephemerality of diasporic martyr(dom)s owes, at least partially, to spatio-temporal remove from home(land), to dislocation from the paradigmaticity of ethico-political event. what, then, might the problem of diaspora, and impasses consequent thereto, teach us amid the calls for broad-based relation-making so sought after in shared struggles, that is, against global forms of capital, empire, raciality, and patriarchy? an economy that would restrict the viability of waging multiple seemingly incommensurate struggles simultaneously may need to be reconsidered. in this case, decision-makers of rank existentially proximate to the violence of the postcolonial state resort to conciliatory performances of public mourning in diaspora, refusing to risk decades of partial but hard-won liberal sympathies that might be leveraged in the service of a more effective agonism for homeland. ethno-nationalist politics so often conserve a liberal “anti-politics” (ferguson 1994; ticktin 2011; see also lukasik 2021) otherwise, restricted to vying for seemingly scarce symbolic capital apportioned by a liberal order that is both enigmatic as it is global. however, if violence in the diaspora and violence in the homeland are in fact not of different “kinds,” the scalar dimensions of political imagination, including the loci of agonism, may no longer be appropriable to any one time/place. indeed, the pursuit of a more general agonism capable of contesting global supremacies together may already be under way. diasporic sikhs are increasingly alive to the convergence of white supremacy and hindu fascism not only in electoral politics (thobani 2021) but also among international security regimes, as in the indian state’s recent actual and attempted assassinations of sikhs in canada (singh 2023, 7–8) and revelations confirming the collusion of the british army, intelligence, and government in the perpetration of india’s brutal violence in 1984 (see singh 2014). the labor of configuring political juncture, however, is to be achieved. that is, the failure to arrive at a new political synthesis also instantiates the partial, ongoing, and open-ended project of “articulation” (laclau and mouffe 2014), or the recomposition of otherwise distinct agonisms. at stake in the articulation of such otherwise distinct agonisms is a yet-to-come, one that cannot be guaranteed, assured, or legislated in advance, nor delimited to any model of revolutionary subjectivity already known. that is, refusal itself constitutes a crucial moment in the ethics of relation-making. the politics of solidarity are so often premised on achieving a togetherness of otherwise distinct projects, whether in instituting “mechanical” (cf. durkheim 2013, 57–87) similarity (e.g., enacting the shared social standing of migrants against the xenophobia of nationalism; see rozakou 2016), or “organic” (cf. durkheim 2013, 88–104) functional differentiation (e.g., between military and charity in global struggle; see li 2019). yet solidarity is also to be refused. for instance, third world (mohanty 2003) and transnational (grewal and kaplan 1994) feminisms have long problematized the imperial universalism of white feminism that denies women their historically differentiated agencies. at stake in refusal is a sensitivity to difference requisite to the ethical demands of relation-making. for instance, liu and shange (2018) call for “thick solidarity” (see also abad 2021), which would refuse the benefits of being not-black, of being among blackness, and of gaining from anti-blackness. here, actual solidarity would cede power (shange 2019, 156), defer to those impacted (liu and shange 2018, 196), acknowledge debt (shange and liu 2019), and refuse profiting from non-black privilege—contra progressive pedagogies that level difference in the service of “multi-racial” solidarity (shange 2019). eve tuck and k. wayne yang (2012, 35) call for “contingent collaboration,” which would recognize incommensurability, refuse the appropriation of decolonization even by projects of social justice, and unsettle the self-arrogated innocence of allies even if it requires the un-coalescing of coalitional politics. that is, the workability of coming together can turn on the ethical demands posed by incommensurable difference, which, as implied by its extimacy, is also at stake in disjunctures within collectives. in the langar hall, incommensurate intuitions about political workability, that is, whether agonism obeys an economy or otherwise might be conjugated, are resolved by fiat. each faction espouses a politics pursuant, and hews, to its formative experience of violence, however experience did not thwart intergenerational concert alone. ethical (in)sensitivities breaching the interactional protocols of the gurdwara setting also foreclosed the possibility of intergenerational coalition. the articulation yet-to-come hails a meditation on the protocols of relation-making, that it might “[renew our] habits of assembly” (harney and moten 2021; see also callahan 2020). perhaps paradoxically, the ambivalence, difficulty, and (im)possibility of extending/withholding relation-making, that is, of solidarity, alliance, and coalition, furthers the need for a politics thereof. the incipience, false starts, and internal discord of collective decision-making make for crucial, sometimes inevitable, moments in the arc of a collective becoming that risks mutual affection between self and other, in what might be called a “poetics of solidarity” (maira 2016, 258–63), a processual production/rupture generative of emergent political subjectivities and cleavages that may be neither nameable nor intelligible. the risk-laden practice of relation-making is therefore simultaneously memorial practice and the anticipation of a new world, a condensation of time and place with others (wilder 2022, 109–12). in excess of and otherwise to discrete self and other, the indeterminacy of gathering may then itself be the crucial site of the action (hothi 2023). the shared footing before an indeterminate future also subverts an untenable divide between analyst and ethnographic subject, one lesson that compels this study. an acknowledgement of this shared footing helps resist indulging in all-too-ready moral polemics that disqualify either side of a generational divide, as if narrow-minded traditions are unenlightened to the plight of others, or as if arrogant radicalisms are more vested in self-styled vanguardism than risking anything of themselves. more to the point, as implied by its extimacy, majoritarian violence from “without” and intra-collective violence from “within” may themselves be mutually co-implicated, as would be their wounds. a futurity in excess of and otherwise to the numinous blossoming of the wound is yet to come, but may also already be among us. abstract this article concerns how competing investments in the real motivate political disagreement. the ethnography focuses on face-to-face debate in the wake of spectacular white supremacist violence against sikhs in the united states. young activists relate their struggle against racial supremacy to martyrs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, motivating their call for a politics that would defy empire, cultivate coalitional alliances, and refuse well-worn performances of multicultural docility. however, for institutional decision-makers of rank, who ground their authority in having witnessed majoritarian state terror first-hand, such agonism risks decades of partial but hard-won respectability, legibility, and safety. this article argues that the in/comparability of evental violence is staked by a global “economy of agonism,” which mobilizes in this case at least two political forms distinctive of the late-twentieth century in each the politics of recognition and ethnonationalism. the article probes the competing investments motivating political disjuncture by tracking what is here called the “problem of diaspora,” the seeming untenability of calibrations to and between home(land) and sites of dispersion. an ethnographic pursuit of psycho-social cleavages consequently reveals the “extimacy” of, or mutual co-implication of internal and external in, “collective relation-making,” i.e., in making solidarity, alliance, or coalition amongst seemingly similarly situated others. [race; religion; diaspora; semiotics; solidarity; white supremacy; sikh; panjab; punjab; india; hindutva] acknowledgments findings have benefited from detailed comments by andrew foster, nathaniel gallant, rajbir singh judge, webb keane, james meador, kamala russell, kabir tambar, and elizabeth wingrove, as well as important input from angie baeker, steve lett, cameron sayadi, warren thompson, and saint ignatius university centre, antwerp summer school workshop participants, including specifically david henig and angie heo. this essay is informed by research supported by the social sciences research council, the national science foundation, the wenner-gren foundation, and the american institute of indian studies. writing has been supported by the institute for citizens & scholars (formerly the woodrow wilson national fellowship foundation). references abad, miguel n. 2021 “‘i’m picking a side’: thick solidarity, antiblackness, and the grammar of the model minority.” race ethnicity and 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indigeneity, education & society 1, no. 1. varzi, roxanne 2006 warring souls: youth, media, and martyrdom in post-revolution iran. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wilder, gary 2022 concrete utopianism: the politics of temporality and solidarity. new york: fordham university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 2, pp. 246-271, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.2.04 cultural anthropology: the financial activist: shareholding and the inconvenience of collective ownership 672 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 672-696, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.05 the financial activist: shareholding and the inconvenience of collective ownership sohini kar the london school of economics and political science https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9029-5214 on may 24, 2020, the anglo-australian mining giant rio tinto blasted the juukan gorge—an aboriginal sacred site—in the pilbara region of western australia to expand an iron ore mine. the puutu kunti kurrama and pinikura people are the traditional owners of the land, which has shown continual human occupation of 46,000 years (wahlquist 2020). rio tinto, however, had ministerial consent for the destruction of the site under western australia’s 1972 aboriginal heritage laws favoring mining companies (wahlquist 2020). in effect, it had operated legally—in a settler-colonial context—in its expansion. while the consequence of this destruction is immeasurable for the traditional owners (see dotson and whyte 2013), it had unexpected corporate effects. this included removal from office of the executive leadership of rio tinto due to significant pushback from institutional investors, despite having delivered record returns to its shareholders. while in this first instance shareholders responded to the specific event of the destruction of the rock shelters, rio tinto’s shareholders have, in recent years, also been pushing the company to act in response to climate change and environmental harm. these shareholder actions are often instigated, informed, and negotiated in response to pressure from non-financial actors or activists. in a second instance of shareholder action, the activist group market forces 673spearheaded a resolution on the paris climate agreement, winning support from shareholders on rio tinto’s emissions targets. in a third instance, activists working to support local communities affected by rio tinto’s operations in madagascar gained a strategic platform at the annual general meetings (agm) to persuade other shareholders about what they see as the corporation’s inadequate response to the failures of a tailings dam. drawing on these three instances, this article concerns the ways in which shareholders are increasingly asked and lobbied to further non-financial ends and how a global network of activists work to sway these investors. i distinguish here between shareholder activists and what i call financial activists. while shareholder activists must—as the term suggests—own shares in the company to enact change through the model of shareholder governance, financial activists capture a broader coalition of actors who work to shift financial activities. while some work entirely outside of the financial system, seeking to influence financial actors such as shareholders, others are shareholders, holding token shares in companies they seek to influence through shareholder voting rights. financial activists view shareholding not primarily for investment, but for enacting change through the governance structure of shareholder democracy. similarly, while activists and social movements like extinction rebellion raise public awareness around climate issues (harms 2022), including around corporate actions and financial transactions, they are not necessarily financial activists. rather, financial activists will often work using the financial system to change corporate behavior, using the terrain of finance as a site of contestation. drawing on the work of lauren berlant (2022), i argue that such interactions between activists, shareholders, and corporations are those of inconvenience. this article speaks about the ways in which activists engage and, in a sense, learn to live with the inconvenience of financial systems, while simultaneously working to “loosen” the bonds of a structure of power—namely financial capitalism—and working with the contradictions it poses (berlant 2022, 28). this article deals not so much with rio tinto as with the inconvenient relationship between activists, investors, and publicly listed corporations. it concerns a form of activism that has grown in the context of financialization. activists establish strategic relationships with and as financial actors, ultimately inconveniencing business as usual. yet to do so means being “acknowledged and taken in” (berlant 2022, 7) by the very financial system that sustains global inequalities. in other words, it relies on a process of financializing activism. ultimately, however, collective ownership as a kind of financial commons 674proffers an uneven space in which capitalist hegemony dominates, even as it is contested. or, as stuart kirsch (2019, 3) notes, with corporations adapting to and co-opting the discourses of their critics, “the dialectical relationship between corporations and their critics has become a permanent structural feature of neoliberal capitalism” (see also boltanski and chiapello 2005). rio tinto is not alone in facing financial activism in the extractive industry. in recent years, british petroleum (bp) has faced shareholder rebellion, while shell has experienced shareholder litigation, both in response to the climate catastrophe.1 shareholders, particularly institutional investors like pension funds, are increasingly called on to address the impact of publicly listed corporations on climate change and the environment. i focus on rio tinto as a way to unpack these differing strategies of calling on shareholders to act in a context of financialization. indeed, the very expansion of finance has created points of contestation. while the popular perception of finance is often of a technical, even depoliticized space—a black box (mackenzie 2005)—these activists have found ways to use financial practices to limit or change actions of companies that are themselves increasingly beholden to shareholders. the consequence of such activism is the implicit sustaining of a system of capital accumulation. that is, it cannot so much challenge who benefits from finance, as how finance funds a capitalist economy, loosening, to some extent, the bonds of uneven power (see also bear et al. 2015). finance as collective ownership on a warm july evening in 2019, a group of people gathered at london’s postman’s park. located close to st paul’s cathedral in the city of london, it was the meeting point for an unusual walking tour of the city. organized by an activist group and led by two of their members, the tour was designed to show london’s role in climate change. focused on the financial heart of the city, the group—dedicated to divestment of fossil fuels—sought to show what they called in a pamphlet handed out at the tour, “the dirty secrets of fossil fuel finance and the actions that londoners are taking to build a fairer world.” symbolically starting at the park, which holds the memorial to heroic self-sacrifice, a tribute to everyday heroes who lost their lives in the service of others, the tour guided the dozen or so of us through the bustling heart of the city and the entangled histories of finance and fossil fuel. from the offices of the koch brothers to the bank of england and the erstwhile site of the east india company headquarters (now the headquarters of the insurance giant lloyd’s of 675london), the tour guides explained the ways in which capitalism and colonialism wove through the city of london, undergirding the financial district’s relationship to fossil fuels and ultimately its current impact on climate change. the fifth stop of the tour was the royal exchange—the former site of london’s stock exchange. here, the tour map noted that “the financial system lies at the heart of climate breakdown.” standing in the foyer of the victorian exchange, one of the tour guides—a civil servant by day—noted the history of the place. they stated that investment, unlike private ownership, constituted a kind of collective ownership. in fact, because publicly traded companies could be owned by multiple shareholders, they could hold these companies accountable. if financialization has marked the growing reach of finance into all aspects of life, in so doing, it has also created ways for people to enact change through finance when conceptualized as collective ownership of firms. when publicly listed, corporations have a more complicated relationship to shareholders, including institutional investors that manage the savings and pensions of millions of ordinary people. the model of shareholder democracy—that shareholders have a say in corporate governance—constitutes a space of constrained political engagement. while bringing capital to firms, and sustaining its value on the market, shareholders can become inconvenient to corporations if and when they challenge management. while financialization has a long global history (arrighi 2010), its most recent iteration marks the growing importance of finance as a source of profit (krippner 2011) and of shareholder value (ho 2009), as well as the rising power of the rentier class (christophers 2021). financialization has meant the increasing integration of financial markets into daily life through things like household debt, personal investment accounts, equity-linked insurance, pensions, mortgages, and student debt (langley 2008; lapavitsas 2013; martin 2002; knorr cetina and preda 2005; stout 2019; weiss 2015; zaloom 2019; lin and neely 2020; zaloom and james 2023; fields 2017; christophers 2023). while financialization has often been conceptualized in terms of growing inequality and dispossession (kar 2018; schuster and kar 2021), this article looks at activists and social movements that have come to understand finance as a site that can be contested. that is, rather than turning to activists who contest the very premise of finance—such as the occupy movement (appel 2014; ho 2013; haugerud 2013), anti-privatization activists (muehlebach 2023), and those pointing to capitalism-driven climate catastrophe (harms 2022; malm 2021), i look at activists who work through finance and with financial actors, such as shareholders. 676this analysis is situated at the intersection of democratizing finance and the financialization of democracy. the project of democratizing finance is twofold: first, it reflects the expansion of ownership of finance capital, or what julia ott (2011, 5) calls “shareholder democracy,” which has enlarged the shareholder class and “elevated stockowners in matters of corporate governance and economic policy.” the second dimension is the project of “increasing democratic input into the critical investment decisions that shape the future of the economy” (block and hockett 2022, 16–17). financial activists consider both dimensions of democratizing finance: first, by recognizing the enlarged shareholder class globally; and second, by pressing for a more active form of collective ownership through which investment can become a more democratic practice. nevertheless, the move to utilize financial actors and markets as the basis of enacting social change also necessarily takes as given that contemporary democracy is financialized: that our votes as shareholder might have influence similar to a political one. with the intertwining of democratic politics with extractive industries (mitchell 2011) and finance capital (fraser 2015), it is worth considering the ways in which financial activists attempt to sustain new forms of politics from within the framework of financialization, particularly through the framing of shareholder democracy. since 2019, i have been following the work of various social movements and forms of activism that rely on or work to influence financial actors. this includes groups that promote shareholder action as well as groups that engage and negotiate with pension funds. many, but not all, of these activists focus on climate change. other groups have also targeted financial actors to divest from socially and environmentally harmful activities. at the early stage of research, i attended protests and meetups in london, such as the walking tour i mentioned earlier. however, with the start of the global covid-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdowns, my research methods changed, and i began attending webinars, for instance, instead of in-person events. on the one hand, this development reflected the realities of research in the conditions of lockdown. on the other, it also captured the global network of actors working on and coordinating action. for instance, in the case of rio tinto, shareholder action and questions at agms in london were in response to mining operations in australia and madagascar. along with analysis of publicly available documents, both from rio tinto and activist organizations, i conducted interviews by email and on zoom with actors who were spread globally, reflecting the reach of a multinational corporation (see kirsch 2019). while i have not anonymized groups that have public and well-documented platforms, i have fully anonymized individuals and 677organizations that i have spoken to or communicated with in relation to their activist work. rio tinto offers a particularly salient case to analyze in terms of shareholder action and activism. the anglo-australian mining giant was created 150 years ago when the scottish banker hugh matheson established a syndicate along with deutsche bank and the railway contractors clark, punchard, and company to buy the rio tinto mines in spain. while their history is forged through finance, rio tinto, like many mining companies, have faced pressures on their global operations from various activist organizations. as noted by marina welker (2014, 5), mining corporations engage in a range of transactional activities that “are latently available for identifying, evaluating, and transforming the corporation.” activists have often been seen as stakeholders who pressure extractive industries to consider the effects of their actions on the local environment and communities (kirsch 2019; jacka 2018; roy chowdhury and lahiri-dutt 2021; weszkalnys 2014). the response to such pressures often arrives through forms of corporate social responsibility (csr) (rajak 2011), which tend to paper over failures, rather than through more direct operational changes that benefit communities and reduce harm. finance as collective ownership, however, means that more actors—both direct and indirect investors—have a stake in the activities of corporations and a say over its governance. berlant (2022) argues that existing in relations means necessary inconvenience. this holds true for shareholders and activists, who are in relationships with corporate actors, including ceos, senior managers, and board members. here, i purposefully do not frame this phenomenon as an abstract corporate personhood in the legal sense (kirsch 2014). rather, i want to show how activists, shareholders, and corporate actors—as individuals—engage in relationships of inconvenience. in the three instances that i discuss in this essay, shareholders—often mediated by activists—come to inconvenience business as usual for corporate actors—whether in response to an event or due to organization by or in dialogue with activists. in each of these instances, the very structure of financialized ownership becomes the grounds for pressuring the corporation to act in ways they otherwise would not. from shareholder value to shareholder activism in her ethnography of wall street, karen ho (2009) documents the shift in corporate practices from serving the interests of employees to serving the interest of shareholders, that is, shareholder value. the primary mission of 678corporations is now “understood to be the increase of their stock prices for the benefit of their ‘true owners,’ the shareholders” (ho 2009, 4). power has shifted from those working at corporations to those who own shares in it. however, as shareholder value increases in influence, so does the clout that shareholders wield over corporate decision-making. while individuals increasingly invest in markets, they are often not actively managing their portfolio; rather, “institutional investors like pensions and mutual funds emerged as the driving force in the global financial markets” (ott 2011, 222). globally, pension assets are now worth around $60 trillion and amount to 105 percent of the gross domestic product (gdp) of the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd) countries. of this, $38 trillion is managed by pension funds.2 we have, in other words, an unprecedented number of people who are passive investors, leaving the technicalities of investment to fund managers. writing of the growth of this form of shareholding, marina welker and david wood (2011, s58) note how “if consumers are alienated from the conditions of commodity production . . . the majority of shareholders today are, analogously, alienated from the firms they invest in.” that is, shareholders are largely not involved in the day-to-day operations of the corporations and firms they invest in and are often understood to care mostly about the rate of returns these investments provide. movements such as socially responsible investment (sri) and environmental, social, and governance (esg) investing, however, work to relieve “the moral alienation of the investor” (welker and wood 2011, s60). these movements seek to make passive or indirect investors aware of the power they can exert over their capital. socially responsible investment emerges from a longer history in which activists have pushed corporations and financial institutions to invest responsibly; or, more frequently, to divest from morally contentious conditions, such as apartheid south africa (kaempfer, lehman, and lowenberg 1987; seidman 2015; hunt, weber, and dordi 2017; teoh, welch, and wazzan 1999) and south sudan (soederberg 2009). more recently, the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (bds) movement has focused on the israeli occupation of palestine (harris 2019; bakan and abu-laban 2009; feldman 2019), and fossil fuel divestment has become a centerpiece of climate change activism (trinks et al. 2018; ayling and gunningham 2017; mckibben 2013). though civil society organizations have increasingly been involved in the question of governing global finance, they often remain outsiders who raise awareness about or protest global finance 679(scholte 2002). alongside sri, we have also seen the rise of esg investing. investors linked to esg assess not only the financial bottom line of corporations but also the non-financial dimensions of environmental, social, and governance impact (see leins 2020; welker and wood 2011). like sri, esg has opened up another avenue for activists to pressure investors to act in ways that sustain not just financial profits but also social and environmental well-being. activists have increasingly seized the growth in pension funds as a site of contention rather than passive, technical, and apolitical investment. for instance, make my money matter—based in the united kingdom and co-founded by the film director richard curtis—claims that with £3 trillion in u.k. pensions, pensions offer a powerful source of climate action.3 changing pension investments to sustainable or green investments, the organization argues, is “21x more powerful at cutting your carbon than giving up flying, going veggie, and switching energy provider.” taking greater control over individual pension funds has become a way for individuals to enact collective ownership and overcome their alienation. individuals can pressure pension funds, as institutional investors, to consider the social and environmental impact of their investment portfolios. similarly, as more people hold bank accounts, they can also hold banks’ investment practices to account by moving their accounts elsewhere, putting pressure on banks to align practices to account holders’ values. groups such as banktrack work to raise awareness of banks’ financing of fossil fuels and investments that involve human rights abuses, and they encourage people to move their money to banks with more sustainable practices. it is worth noting that while much financial activism has centered in the global north, the goals for such movements (e.g., addressing climate change, indigenous dispossession, human rights abuses, environmental damage) are global in nature. this fact can be attributed to lower levels of financial inclusion in the global south, meaning that fewer people have the tools—such as pensions—necessary to pressure financial actors. however, we can see how financial instruments, as julia elyachar (2023, 333) notes, remain the “glue weaving these worlds together.” thus, even as finance becomes the mechanism of intervention and financialized dispossession in the global south, it simultaneously provides the grounds for protest from afar. typically, shareholder activism refers broadly to a “range of activities by one or more of a publicly traded corporation’s shareholders that are intended to result in some change in the corporation” (cloyd 2015). shareholder activism can range from hedge fund activism to shareholder proposals.4 shareholders, moreover, can act to change corporate actions not only toward financial ends 680but also toward more social, political, or environmental ends. activist investors in the traditional market sense work to increase returns through their interventions in a firm’s management. i focus on the intersection of shareholder activism in the financial sense with the more conventional forms of activism as social movements. i define this network of actors as “financial activists” because not all actors are shareholders. however, all the actors attempt to engage financial markets and actors as a strategy for social and environmental change. following berlant, i show how these challenges often take the form of inconveniencing the proceedings of the corporation through shareholding until it changes its course of action. the challenge of social movements rooted in sri is the dispersed and atomized nature of finance (appel, ferrer, and graziani 2024). there is a history of transnational social movements—often opposed to the effects of globalization, unfettered free trade, and, increasingly, the climate crisis—that have emerged since the end of the twentieth century (edelman 2001; bjork-james, checker, and edelman 2022). transnational movements have necessarily faced the challenge of coordinating action across geography and scale (escobar 2001). with the spread of global finance, portfolios often cover investments that span the world. moreover, many are invested in corporations like rio tinto that are themselves multinational companies (mncs) and have a global footprint. unlike social movements with recognizable coalitions, shareholder activism requires coordination of quite disparate groups: globally spread individuals who have pension funds or bank accounts, similarly disparate institutional investors that are willing to respond to their fundholders as well as fiduciary duty, and activists who have knowledge and expertise in the issues brought to the table. the three instances i examine exemplify the way in which shareholders exert pressure on corporations (case 1), and how globally situated activists negotiate with shareholders and hold corporations to account in ways that extend beyond their fiduciary duties or to translate social and environmental matters into fiduciary duty (case 2 and 3). they highlight the degree to which ethical obligations as put forth by activists can outweigh the financial dimensions of corporate activities, and how ethical concerns translate into fiduciary ones. investors and the event as news of rio tinto’s destruction of the juukan gorge cave became known, the company faced widespread condemnation from around the world. rio tinto’s engagement with indigenous communities has a much longer history, 681shaped by the australian legal framework, and established work by indigenous activists (e.g., norman 2016; trebeck 2007). the destruction of the juukan gorge emerged as a “critical event,” or an event that “shaped large historical questions and everyday life” (das 1995, 2). it both heightened the long-standing and historical concerns of indigenous activists, while bringing to the fore a new set of actors: investors. the event is now written into rio tinto’s timeline marking its 150-year corporate history with a quote from its chairman, simon thompson: “our strong performance in many areas during 2020 was overshadowed by the destruction of two ancient rock shelters in the juukan gorge.”5 thus, the singular event comes to inform the everyday operations of the corporation. in the aftermath of the destruction and ensuing outrage, thompson arranged meetings with critical u.k. investors to allay concerns, including legal & general, the largest asset manager in the united kingdom and one of rio tinto’s ten biggest shareholders (hume 2020b). in august, the board investigation found “no single individual or error was responsible for the blowing up of the caves . . . but rio had missed numerous chances to prevent the demolition of the site” (hume 2020a). as a result of the investigation, the ceo, jean-sébastien jacques, and two other executives faced financial penalties for their actions and had bonuses worth £4 million cut. by september, the board faced a “shareholder revolt” (hume and smyth 2020) for what was seen as an insufficient response. with the company listed on both the british and australian stock exchanges, institutional shareholders in both countries, including future fund, australia’s sovereign wealth fund, and the pensions board of the church of england, demanded further action. hesta, a “superannuation fund that manages $52bn on behalf of more than 870,000 australians, wanted an independent review of all current agreements between the company and traditional owners” (allam, butler, and wahlquist 2020). the pushback from investors ultimately led to the sacking of the ceo and two senior executives. while there was a justifiably strong and critical response from the affected communities and civil society organizations more broadly, other commentators sensed that rio tinto only acted because of the response from its shareholders. speaking to the guardian, james fitzgerald of the australian centre for corporate responsibility suggested that “rio tinto’s behaviour and culture may have remained largely without sanction but for the admirable and unprecedented intervention of the company’s own shareholders, who demanded more than the 682token consequences first proposed by rio tinto’s board” (allam and wahlquist 2020). that jacques was ousted as ceo is perhaps more surprising, given that in his four-year tenure as ceo, the financial times reported that rio tinto “handed almost $40bn of cash to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, helping the dual-listed company outperform arch-rival bhp and deliver total returns of 183 per cent and 229 per cent to london and sydney shareholders, respectively” (hume and smyth 2020). this means that delivering and maximizing on shareholder value, narrowly defined as financial returns, did not prove sufficient for investors. underlying shareholder activism in response to the event was a sense that companies should follow—or at least abide by—certain ethical principles; in this case, it was the duty to consult with the traditional owners of the land. significant in the ousting of the management was the size of the funds that threatened to withdraw money if there was no change, and the clout they held. like hedge funds that can demand significant changes through shareholder activism, large institutional investors like hesta and the future fund could enact significant change. the event seemingly marked an overhaul in rio tinto’s relationship with the traditional owners and the state following a formal parliamentary inquiry, including the funding and establishment of the juukan gorge legacy foundation and an agreement for co-managing the mining activities with the puutu kunti kurrama and pinikura aboriginal corporation. in addition to these measures, the event continued to shape rio tinto’s relationship with its investors. one year after the destruction, rio tinto streamed a video of its employees’ reflections on the events at its agm, capturing a diverse group of employees, including other first nations individuals.6 while the first part of the three-minute video captures a sense of disbelief that the destruction had happened, the second emphasizes how rio tinto has listened and changed. that the video was made for and distributed at the agm suggests it as a response primarily to shareholders. the company’s 2021 annual report also discussed the destruction of the gorge throughout. the conversation about the juukan gorge also extended to the investor seminar held by rio tinto in london in november 2022.7 based on the question-and-answer session transcripts, attendees included representatives from major investment banks and financial institutions. as reflected in the publicly available slides and script for the seminar, the first presentation came from angela bigg, the president of the diavik diamond mine in canada—a site with its own problematic history with first nations people (see hall 2022)—and concerned 683“culture share.” in the presentation, which covers “safety in all its forms – physical, mental and cultural,” the script notes: 2020 was a tough year for many, not only did the pandemic kick off, with all of the uncertainty and worry that came with it, we also had juukan gorge, and the aftermath . . . . on a personal note, i questioned whether this was a company and culture i wanted to continue on with, as i was no longer proud to be associated with rio tinto. eventually, however, the text concludes that “there is a collective action towards improving things, fully supported by exco [executive committee]. we are tackling these issues and becoming a kinder and a culturally safer organisation. this is the rio tinto that i am certainly proud to be a part of.” from the outset, the presentation seeks, first, to highlight and acknowledge the destruction of the rock shelters to investors, and second, to reassure them that things have changed and that rio tinto marks a “culturally safe” institution to invest in. despite the affective signposting about culture and values in the presentations, the q&a session notably reflects limited interest from these investors regarding the destruction of the caves, with significantly more interest placed on rio tinto’s climate strategy and decarbonization. investors in australia, the united kingdom, and europe—led by hesta—collaborated to reach an agreement with rio tinto on “improved disclosure and governance arrangements.”8 in a 2021 press release on the agreement and the requests put forward by investors, hesta’s ceo, debby blakey, noted: it’s pleasing that we’ve had constructive discussions with rio tinto that can support progress towards managing this clear financial risk for investors. the steps the company has agreed to will support broader improvements in practices, disclosure and oversight urgently needed across the mining sector. here, the investor response to the destruction of the juukan gorge caves is reframed in terms of fiduciary duty: poor disclosure and governance are identified as financial risks for investors. blakely’s statement also implicates the mining sector more broadly, suggesting the need for this investor engagement to apply more widely to the industry. for rio tinto, blakely adds that the company requires “long-term commitment to deep-seated cultural change and strong 684frameworks and processes in place to support genuine, open and ongoing partnership with indigenous communities, no matter who is in management or board roles.” in other words, the investor action should be institutionalized. in may 2021, 61 percent of votes cast at the agm opposed the firm’s exit remuneration package for jacques and the other executives in response to the company’s handling of the juukan gorge. while the vote was only advisory, meaning it did not require enforcement, it did have larger effects, including on the board itself. in australia, if a company has more than 25 percent opposition to a remuneration report, the board must put itself up for re-election (hume 2021). thus the destruction of the juukan gorge caves revealed a particular kind of activist shareholder and their relationship with the corporation. the institutional investors that forced the resignation of jacques and put pressure on rio tinto to establish new accountability measures represented the more classic form of activist investors. that is, they managed to exert pressure on the corporation to enact change or risk losing their investments. investors, in other words, acted as activists to change corporate action. making passive investors active in 2020, prior to the events of jukaan gorge, market forces, an activist organization that aims to shift investments away from fossil fuels, brought forth a resolution to rio tinto’s agm. acting as an “agent for 109 shareholders representing approximately 0.02% of the shares on issue in rio tinto limited,”9 market forces pressed rio tinto to set binding emissions targets. while the numbers represented in this group would be too small to effect change, if it succeeded, it could “gain support from other shareholders, including members of the climate action 100+ initiative, a coalition of environmentally concerned investors managing $40tn in assets” (hume 2020c). although rio tinto’s board advised its shareholders to vote against this resolution, 37 percent voted for it. while the resolution ultimately did not pass, the actions reflected how a relatively small group of shareholders (0.02 percent), sustained by an activist network, could mobilize a third of shareholders to call on the company to act. in 2021, market forces again coordinated a resolution at its agm, calling for rio tinto to meet paris-aligned emission reduction targets.10 in this instance, shareholders voted almost unanimously (99 percent) in favor of the resolution. and in 2022, market forces withdrew its resolution on scope 3 emissions (i.e., client and customer emissions) after coming to an agreement with rio tinto that the company would improve its transparency on reporting scope 3 emissions.11 685market forces was not only able to shift shareholder opinion but also used this success to directly influence the corporation. with the coordinated action of groups like market forces, finance—through the mechanism of shareholding—becomes the tool of enabling corporate change. “we’re consistently disappointed by investors’ unwillingness to hold companies to account,” writes leigh in an email exchange. leigh works at an activist organization that develops shareholder proposals. they note the failure of institutional investors to publicly set expectations for engagement with companies, vote for shareholder proposals, and vote against reinstating directors when those expectations are grounds for disappointment. the ideal of shareholder democracy sees shareholders taking an active role in corporate governance. yet the growth of “mass investment” (ott 2011, 4) has seen a fall in active fund management, and a rise in passive investment (e.g., through index funds). institutional investors with large portfolios have quite limited interest in the active governance of companies in their portfolio (lund 2018). despite bold claims to invest responsibly or sustainably, there is limited meaningful action enacted through shareholding. disappointment, as noted by jessica greenberg and sarah muir (2022, 308), “is a space of disquiet in which moral certitude and political righteousness are troubled, if not upended, by a world that is not what it should be.” between the rhetoric of climate-friendly pledges and the growth of passive investment, then, lies the space of disappointment—but also of potential action. by engaging investors to follow through on their publicly stated social and environmental promises, while simultaneously recognizing the financial risks of the climate crisis, activists not only become inconvenient to the everyday practices of institutional investors but also work to remake shareholder action in ways that make productive use of this disappointment: nudging passive investors to become active. institutional investors, such as pension funds, have publicly stated goals of addressing social and environmental issues, such as the sustainable development goals (sdgs). however, a study on australian superannuation funds finds that levels of disclosure on sdgs by funds suggest a greater emphasis on rhetoric than on meaningful action (moore and sciulli 2022). in this context, leigh’s organization pushes investors on these gaps between rhetoric and meaningful action. as leigh explained: 686big investors (asset owners and managers) regularly claim to be driving climate action through active ownership of companies. we prepare shareholder interventions, including shareholder proposals, to mobilise investors to live up to those claims and use the power they have to influence positive change on climate action at the companies they own. while institutional investors take on a generally passive ownership of corporations through shareholding, activist groups preparing shareholder action do the active work of researching and preparing interventions. they conduct the “phatic labor” (elyachar 2010) or the infrastructures of communicative channels needed to bridge the gaps in knowledge about climate change and investment. part of this work is finding and working with interested shareholders to enable them to introduce the proposals at agms. leigh explained that mining companies were identified not only because of their high footprint in australia’s national emissions but also for having an investor base “dominated by the world’s major asset managers and australian pension (superannuation) funds.” these investors, they further noted, “can and must live up to their claims of active ownership, so shareholder interventions give them an opportunity to do that, as well as an opportunity for their customers/members to call out any failures to vote or act in line with their active ownership claims.” the role of activist groups promoting shareholder action is to convince, organize, and mobilize shareholders—particularly institutional investors—to follow through on their stated promises of sustainability. it is insufficient, however, to simply make a moral claim of doing good or, as a 2017 report from market forces states, “climate risk is not just an ethical problem.”12 in its 2017 report, market forces noted guidance from the australian prudential regulatory authority that climate risks are “distinctly financial in nature.” the report further argued that “superannuation fund trustees who fail to consider and disclose climate risks are thereby putting themselves at risk of breaching their duties to members.” a 2024 report from market forces identifies how “greenwashing and inadequate information from companies on their climate management plans are the main barriers to investors incorporating climate risk more effectively.”13 as donald mackenzie (2009, 441) has argued with the emergence of carbon trading, there is a process involved in making things commensurable. where the characteristics of capitalism “are not inherent,” there are continuous attempts to “change the calculative mechanisms that constitute it.” just as carbon markets need to become part of the calculation of the 687bottom line, environmental concerns must be made legible as financial risks, and fit the fiduciary duties of institutional investors. in effect, activist organisations can push for investors to recognize the commensurability of environmental risks as financial risks, thus turning them into critical questions of long-term profitability, and matters crucial to investors. making official company business “and this is the important bit about shareholders and where shareholders link to outcomes, which is that we are not afraid as an ngo of doing dialogue with the company. lots of activists will not; they won’t dialogue with the company because they fear it makes them look like they’re in cahoots and/or they don’t agree in principle and they think that it should be the community speaking to them and so and so forth. there’s a whole range of reasons why they don’t like it, but we’ve always done it when we’ve needed to.” i’m speaking to kim on zoom about their experiences in negotiating with rio tinto and its mine’s impact on the surrounding community and environment in madagascar. their comments about non-governmental organizations (ngos) that speak or work with corporations and their shareholders reflects the tensions in activist fields between engaging the primary actor and the appearance of collaboration. yet as my conversation with kim reveals, their engagement with rio tinto can be read as one of agonism or of recognizing the corporation as an “adversary or legitimate enemy,” rather than “an enemy to be destroyed” (mouffe 1999, 755). unlike activists that refuse to engage corporations, kim’s organization does so both directly and through shareholders. in his report on the fifty most polluted places on earth, the un rapporteur on human rights and environment, david boyd (2022) names the anosy region in madagascar as a “sacrifice zone”—a term that originates from the areas designated as uninhabitable following nuclear testing (see juskus 2023). it now refers to places increasingly uninhabitable due to toxic pollution. since 2006, rio tinto has partnered with the government of madagascar to establish the qmm mine, an ilmenite mine in the region. activists have argued that failures of the tailings dam at the mine have led to the pollution of lagoons that local communities rely on for drinking water and subsistence fishing (morrill 2022). local and global activist networks have been raising concerns about the mine’s impact on local communities. 688as one part of their strategies, kim’s organization has conducted agm action—raising questions at agms, often with the participation of strategic shareholders (i.e., shareholders sympathetic to the cause). kim explains how the “agm is a tiny blink in the process that we are really in, and it’s just a small, small opportunity to try and get interest from investors.” yet it remains important because “you know—money speaks to money. they are people who can lever the company to do better.” engaging shareholders becomes a key strategy to make the corporation respond. this has meant taking their findings to shareholders and investors by raising questions at agms. these interactions have enabled, first, the ability to amplify the issues of pollution in the public domain. kim further explained the impact of amplifying these findings with shareholders and investors at agms: i think the main thing is that it increases the pressure on the company to answer to things. . . . my take on that is that because we raised those issues within the sphere of the agm, we made them official company business. while critics of corporations engage them in various spaces (kirsch 2019), i consider here what the specific space of the agm does for activists and the corporation. in the context of shareholder democracy, the agm is considered a space of deliberation rather than assumed corporate authority: agms come to serve as a space of contestation where activists like kim can make their findings “official company business.” that is, there is a performative (austin 1975) element of speaking to specific issues in the space of the agm. it reflects how investors’ ownership can be exerted through “the communicative field and discursive dynamics” (myhre and holmes 2022, 176). by posing questions in the space of the agms, the activists make the matters company business. as kim further explained, “now, as a company under uk law, if there was anything to worry about . . . they couldn’t just leave it sat there . . . they had do something by law, they had to make some kind of reference to it in their report . . . because at least it’s something they have to look into because they have to tell their shareholders they are dealing with the issues that affect the company’s business.” kim suggests that after the agm, a committee was set up to investigate the issues raised, but that they were never informed of this action. however, to kim, this signified that the company had taken on board some of their findings, if only to respond to shareholders and to follow through on its legal obligations. 689 financializing activism “dialogue is an incredibly difficult thing with the company; it’s very, very difficult and you have to be incredibly persistent,” explained kim. for activists, it is this repeated and continued engagement that leads to change. this persistence becomes an inconvenience to the corporation. berlant (2022, 7) writes that “we cannot be in any relation without being inconvenient to each other. that is to say: to know and be known requires experiencing and exerting pressure to be acknowledged and taken in.” for financial activists, it can feel uncomfortable to be taken in and known by the corporations in ways that other activists eschew. to be taken in, then, marks a necessary, often tactical, acceptance of, and proximity to an economic system that perpetuates structural forms of inequality. yet the corporation is also aware of the dangers of being taken in. in response to successful mobilizations from shareholder (and financial) activists, there is a shift from active investment (i.e., shareholder capitalism) to that of index investment through firms like blackrock and vanguard, reducing the power and influence of shareholders (fichtner and heemskerk 2020). facing increasing scrutiny, especially in terms of climate targets, many companies have started a process of “green hushing” or not publicizing “details of their climate targets in an attempt to avoid scrutiny and allegations of greenwashing” (speed 2022), closing the gaps that groups like market forces rely on. moreover, shareholder democracy does not make for a constant form of governance. rather, it is one that can come to life with a critical event, but return to business as usual as investors once again become passive. thus, with investors seemingly satisfied with rio tinto’s “never again” rhetoric in the aftermath of juukan gorge, there was little sustained engagement with the degree to which the company manages its relationship with first nations peoples. before the 2023 agm, pirc, an independent corporate governance and shareholder advisory consultancy, advised institutional shareholders to vote against rio tinto’s proposed pay scheme, which included a 70 percent pay increase for its ceo. further, it advised shareholders to pull support from its chair of the sustainability committee, who had been embroiled in rio tinto’s venture with bhp to build a copper mine on sacred native american land in oak flat, arizona (eastwood 2023). instead, shareholders approved the renumeration report by 96 percent and the re-election of the chair by 94 percent.14 while the fate of oak flat now, at the time of writing, rests with the ninth circuit court of appeals, which will decide whether the destruction of the site considered sacred to the san carlos apache constitutes a violation of the religious rights of indigenous 690communities (aquino 2023), shareholders seem to have given tacit support to the corporation in relation to its dispossession of indigenous lands. on the one hand, shareholder and financial activists can work to reshape corporate activity by inconveniencing them, but this activity does not fundamentally question finance as a mode of accumulation. as wealth inequalities expand on the grounds of financial accumulation, financial investments are being challenged, but perhaps the bigger question is, what happens when we rely on the very infrastructure of capitalist accumulation as the basis of these new forms of activism? on the other hand, the inconvenience of shareholder activism enables what berlant (2022, 28) calls “loosening the object,” or using the “contradictions the object prompts to loosen and reconfigure it, exploiting the elasticity of its contradictions, the incoherence of the forces that overdetermine it.” as donald mackenzie (2009, 453) has argued in the context of finance and climate change, “the existing and planned experiments in changing capitalism’s bottom line are heterogeneous, widely diffused worldwide, and involve many aspects—scientific, technological, political, accounting, sociological, anthropological, geographical—beyond economics as narrowly conceived.” in addition to being witnesses to such experiments, financial activists work to enact change on these shifting grounds. in an era of financialization, activists take up the often-elusive promise of democratic politics through finance to engage in active corporate governance. financial activists are not unaware of the limits and constraints within which they work (i.e., financial systems). rather than challenging the structure of capitalist accumulation, they engage with the opportunities offered by collective ownership and democratized finance; they envision ways of dialoguing with investors and corporations, which might make the conditions of financial capitalism less harmful and less violent to the land and to communities affected by corporate activities. financial activists call our attention to the ways in which we might actively engage—and inconvenience—financial systems, rather than passively allowing for an overdetermination of their power. abstract with the increasing financialization of the global economy, social movements and activists increasingly target financial actors to enact social change through the framework of shareholder-led corporate governance. where finance penetrates individual households, activists harness the widespread “collective ownership” of corporations through shareholding to push for social change. drawing on three instances of shareholder mobilization in relation to a mining corporation, this essay examines how activists engage financial actors, particularly in relation to extractive industries. based 691on ethnographic fieldwork in london, interviews with global activists, and analysis of corporate materials, the article draws on lauren berlant’s theory of inconvenience to show how activists learn to live with and inconvenience financial systems, while simultaneously working to undo or lessen some of the harms caused by extractive industries. while in the first instance, institutional investors respond to an event and act as traditional activist shareholders, in the second and third, activists work to mediate and inform investors to hold the corporation to account. the article concludes on the financialization of activism, and the limits to undoing inequalities embedded in finance as a terrain of political contestation. [financialization; activism; social movements; divestment; environmental and social governance; corporations] notes acknowledgments  i am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who engaged so thoughtfully with this article, and to the editors of cultural anthropology, especially julia elyachar, for seeing it through. i have had the benefit of receiving comments on this essay through presentations at the rai/rgs conference 2020, easa 2022 (with thanks especially to gisa weszkalnys for discussant comments), the impact hau conference 2024, the department of anthropology at the university of lucerne, and the department of international development at lse. thank you also to jeremy schmidt for reading numerous iterations of the article. 1. bp faced shareholder rebellion at its 2023 agm, where national employment savings trust (nest) planned to back a motion set forth by an activist group, follow this, to align its emissions to the paris climate agreement (ambrose 2023). other environmental groups such as clientearth have sued shell’s board of directors over its mismanagement of risks in relation to the energy transition. through shareholder litigation, clientearth sought—ultimately unsuccessfully—to hold the board accountable to its duties. (see key documents from clientearth’s lawsuit at redirecting shell, https://www.clientearth.org/redirecting-shell/ [accessed 24 april 2023]) 2. see the oecd report, pension markets in focus 2022, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pensions-market-in-focus-2022_b8fd9171-en.html [accessed 20 march 2023] 3. see make my money matter’s website. the organization closed in 2025. https://makemymoneymatter.co.uk/pensions/ [accessed 26 april 2023] 4. actions of hedge funds—which might own significant portions of a company’s assets—are often more assertive, and aimed at profit (cloyd 2015). meanwhile, shareholder proposals aim to encourage forms of change. some of these might relate to executive compensation or certain forms of oversight, but also “a change to the company’s behaviour as a corporate citizen” (cloyd 2015). 5. see the timeline on rio tinto’s website, https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/we-are-150#rt-rio150-2020 [accessed 10 may 2023] 6. the video of this can be found here: https://www.riotinto.com/en/news/inquiry-into-juukan-gorge 7. see the 2022 slides and transcripts from the investor seminars documented here: https://www.riotinto.com/en/invest/investor-seminars 8. see the march 23, 2021, media release from hesta, “investor collaboration following heritage destruction at juukan gorge achieves agreement with rio tinto on improved disclosure and governance arrangements.” accessible at https://www.hesta.com.au/about-us/media-centre/investor-collaboration-achieves-agreement-with-rio-tinto [accessed 11 may 2023] 692 9. see the addendum to rio tinto’s 2020 notice of annual general meeting, accessible at https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20200325/pdf/44gd90bznxp0g3.pdf 10. see the 2021 resolution presented by market forces, accessible at https://www.marketforces.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/rio-tinto-2021-resolution.pdf 11. see the february 28, 2022, “notice to the australian securities exchange/london stock exchange” from rio tinto noting the withdrawl of two resolutions by market forces, accessible at https://announcements.asx.com.au/asxpdf/20220228/pdf/456jh0cpy658b8.pdf 12. see the august 2017 report from market forces, risky business: the majority of australia’s largest super funds disclose no consideration of climate risk, accessible at https://www.marketforces.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/market-forces-risky-business-final-1.pdf 13. see the february 2024 report from market forces, investor disconnect on climate risk, accessible at https://www.marketforces.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-02-final-report.pdf 14. see the may 4, 2023, post “results of rio tinto annual general meetings,” accessible at https://www.riotinto.com/invest/shareholder-information/annual-general-meetings [accessed 15 august 2023] references allam, lorena, ben butler, and calla wahlquist 2020 “rio tinto: why the sacking of three executives isn’t enough for mining investors.” guardian, september 11. allam, lorena, and calla wahlquist 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of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.05 labors of love: on the political economies and ethics of bovine politics in himalayan india cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 2, pp. 193-221, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.02 labors of love: on the political economies and ethics of bovine politics in himalayan india radhika govindrajan university of washington https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4972-8663 “maaaaaaaaaaa,” the audience, composed largely of women, repeats obediently after kanha, the silver-haired guru (religious guide or instructor). mother: what a cow is actually saying when uncomprehending humans think she is only mooing, he declares. indu joshi,1 a young woman with whom i am watching the gau-katha (a hindu ritual event involving the performance of religious narratives about the cow) on sanskar channel in summer 2017, chants under her breath in unison with the ladies on the television screen.2 her knees are tucked under her chin as she watches the screen intently during a short break from the laborious task of cleaning gobar (cow dung) out of the tin shed that houses the family’s four cows who, at that moment, are at the grazing grounds with indu’s mother-in-law. the gau-katha is taking place in the city of haridwar, about two hundred miles from the village where we are, in india’s central himalayan state of uttarakhand. indu’s tai (aunt, or more specifically, her husband’s father’s older brother’s wife), who had once hosted the guru at her home in the nearby town of almora, had called indu a few minutes earlier and instructed her to watch the katha. kanha, she said, was a fount of wisdom, and, more importantly, a true lover of cows. i knew him better as the head of a prominent right-wing cow-protection organization that wanted the indian state to recognize the cow as rashtra-mata (mother of the nation) and institute the death penalty for anyone found guilty of slaughtering cows, thought of by cow-protectionists as an embodiment of the goddess gau-mata, or cow mother. kanha was one of the most charismatic faces of a contemporary gau-raksha (cow-protection) movement, rooted in hindu supremacist ideology, that has, over the past decade, authorized and enacted unremitting, sometimes fatal violence against dalits (formerly known as “untouchables”), muslims, and other religious minorities identified as threats to the cow and a supposedly beleaguered hindu nation that can only be united and secure under the maternal leadership of gau-mata (gundimeda 2009; contractor 2018; govindrajan 2018; imran 2018; adcock and govindrajan 2019). “listen,” kanha continues, his tone intimate and relaxed, “let me tell you mothers and sisters a story.” he proceeds to describe how once—when the god shiva was reciting a rama katha (a religious narrative about the life of the god rama) to his wife, parvati—a parrot, eager to listen to the parable, arrived on the scene. shiva felt enraged by the parrot’s presence at the katha, the guru tells the crowd. “now why would that be?” he muses. “let the mothers assembled here ask shankar (shiva) what harm the parrot did by listening to this katha?” the camera turns on the audience, and i see women whispering to one another, wondering if anyone knows the answer. “now that mother knows the answer,” the guru says jubilantly, pointing at someone in the crowd. “a parrot can only speak, but it does not work.” suddenly, kanha’s joyful smile disappears. he shouts into the microphone, his hands chopping through the air for emphasis. “the problem with india,” he screams, “is that too many parrots are born here today. they can only talk, they say rama rama, but they do not do the work of rama.” after leading the crowd in another forceful chant of “maaaaaa,” he takes a deep breath before coming to the denouement. “take a vow to do rama’s work: protect and serve gau-mata (cow-mother). don’t just say you love [prem] her, do the work [kaam] of loving her.” the benevolent smile has returned to his face. “what he’s saying is true,” indu says, as she stands up to pull the television plug out of the electric panel. “most people only talk of love. just look at my father-in-law. he’s always telling me that if i do this work [gesturing to the cow dung crusting on the edges of her saree and the tips of her fingers] with love, then i won’t even know when the work is done. but when has he ever done the work of caring for animals? talk of love [moh-maya] has force only when you break your back for it.” at the time i thought indu’s comments were indicative of the anger she felt at her father-in-law’s routine caustic commentary on how women of her generation tried to shirk work. it was only later that i realized her mediated “conversation” with the guru might illuminate something about a question that has long occupied anthropologists, political theorists, and philosophers: what constitutes the stuff of love? much like anthropologists of love, neither indu nor kanha believed that love is a spontaneous eruption of intimate attachment between autonomous individuals (cf. stout 2014; kikon 2019). true love does not “just happen,” but entails work; its affective attachments have to be made flesh and blood through acts of labor. declarations of love not substantiated through action are effete, merely parroted, as kanha so contemptuously put it. only a laboring subject could, they asserted, lay genuine claim to the status of a loving subject. beginning from this recognition of love as work, this essay asks how the specificity of the labors that organize and materialize affective attachments critically shape the nature and politics of love. more specifically, i explore how different kinds of situated labor produce varied kinds of love in the conjoined social worlds of right-wing gau-rakshaks and rural women dairy farmers in uttarakhand. my interest in this question grew out of the realization that despite their agreement that love took work, the guru and indu used different terms for attachments that one might gloss as love: prem and moh-maya. these terms, i argue, are not synonymous, but index distinct affective relationships imbricated in and emerging from distinct embodied regimes of labor. in what follows, i trace how prem, an idealized and desensualized love, emerged out of two highly visible forms of labor: first, the spectacular and well-publicized vigilante violence that young, male gau-rakshaks have unleashed on muslims, dalits, and adivasis in the name of raksha (protection); and, second, the mediatized seva (service) performed by older gau-rakshaks, as well as ordinary urban women, an important part of which is producing audio and visual media for a hindu audience united by their love for gau-mata. these highly visible forms of gau-rakshak labor and the prem that ensued from them stood in sharp contrast to the invisibilized labor and moh-maya of rural women. moh-maya, a term that signals an illusory, even “deluded,” form of loving attachment, was, i will demonstrate, attuned to a gendered arrangement of agrarian labor in which women were almost entirely responsible for the grueling and devalued care-labor involved in caring for livestock animals (gold 2006). paying attention to the situated specificity of these relationships between love and labor, i argue, enables a renewed engagement with a larger question about the work that love, as a “political concept,” does in the world (hardt 2011; cf. berlant 2011).3 the relationship between love and politics has long occupied scholars. while theorists like michael hardt (2011, 677) hold out hope that “a good love” might “create bonds that are at once” and multiply “intimate and social,” others suggest that love is, at best, a politically ambiguous force. love, the anthropologist naisargi n. dave (2016) thus asserts, is an “unjust ethic,” because “when we love it is the one or ones who are special to us that we save.” elizabeth a. povinelli (2005, 174) is similarly critical of love’s politics, warning of the erasures of “enfleshed” bodies and worlds that “modern love” produces in its fetishization of the sovereign “subject-in-love.” these are important concerns that grow only more urgent in the face of the seemingly inexorable global rise of majoritarian political and religious movements thriving on what nitzan shoshan (2016) calls “the governance of affect” through discourses and practices that manage and mediate love and hate (cf. johnson 2018). indeed, “fascism as a politics of hate,” as sara ahmed (2016) so astutely observes, “is written in a language of love.” the centrality of love to fascist politics in the united states and the united kingdom, she suggests, is revealed in how common it has become “for ‘hate groups’ to re-name themselves as organisations of love” (ahmed 2003; cf. ahmed 2004). “it is out of love,” she writes (ahmed 2003), “that the group seeks to defend the nation against others, whose presence then becomes defined as the origin of hate.” in this essay, i elaborate on ahmed’s crucial insights on love and fascism to argue that it is not just the language of love but also the labor involved in loving that enlivens the politics of fascism. it is loving labor that endows fascism with meaning. the politics of the hindu right-wing, i reveal, acquired force through the everyday work of protection and service performed by gau-rakshaks who sought to expunge “hateful others” not out of hate, but from irrepressible love (ahmed 2003). however, recognizing that love can involve varied labors reminds us that its political and ethical possibilities are multiple, and not necessarily exhausted by fascist authoritarianism. the penultimate part of this essay substantiates this claim by attending to how the quotidian care-labor performed by rural women who raise dairy cows engenders a love that thwarts the fascist purity of the prem that fueled gau-rakshaks. these women recognized that the moh-maya they felt for their cows was insufficient and impure because it was grounded in unequal distributions of power and value. importantly, their ethical dilemmas and commitments were not shaped by an ethics of what dave (2016) calls an “indifference to difference itself.” they could not pretend indifference to their undeniable “complicity” (thomas 2019a) in the violent extraction of animal labor. indeed, they were often “haunted” (govindrajan, forthcoming) by their willful participation in a system that drew its legitimacy from ideologies of intractable difference and hierarchy. their acknowledgment of the violent limits of love, i argue, was shaped by an affective recognition of and reckoning with the capitalist, patriarchal regime within which feminized labor (both human and bovine) was devalued and naturalized. in the conclusion i suggest that it was precisely its lack of moral purity that imbued rural women’s love for the cow with an ethical and political potential absent in gau-rakshaks’ “pure” and irreproachable love for gau-mata. “just once work for gau-mata with love”: cow-protection, religious nationalism, and sacred geography cow-protection constituted a critical node of a late nineteenth-century strain of hindu nationalism that, as the anthropologist peter van der veer (1994, 2) argues, “fed upon religious identifications” and was “directly dependent on religious antagonism, between hindus and muslims.” in 1881, dayanand saraswati, the founder of the popular hindu reform organization arya samaj, published a text called the gaukarunanidhi, which made a strong case for protecting cows from slaughter (adcock 2010). in the same year, his organization founded one of the first gaurakshinisabhas, or cow-protection assemblies, many more of which soon mushroomed across north india with the aim of preventing “cattle from ‘passing under any circumstance into the hands of those who will either sacrifice them or slaughter them for food’” (de 2019, 244). members of these assemblies were often involved in coercion and violence against muslims and dalits, whom they suspected of slaughtering and skinning cows (freitag 1980; pandey 1986; de 2019). as historians have noted, this project of cow-protection, with its emphasis on the sacred inviolability of the cow’s life, stood at odds with everyday rural economies in which cattle rearing, trade, slaughter, and consumption were inextricably intertwined (chowdhury 1996; adcock 2010; kothiyal 2017).4 the association between cows, hindus, and nationalism was strengthened by the emergence, in the same period, of the mother-goddess gau-mata (cow-mother). gau-mata’s iconic image—a white bejeweled cow, rounded body studded with hindu deities—graced pamphlets and calendars distributed widely across northern india in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (gupta 2001; pinney 2004). gau-mata came to stand as a symbol of hindu (often collapsed with “indian”) community and nationhood alongside other maternal embodiments of “national territory,” especially the goddess bharat mata, or india mother (ramaswamy 2010; cf. gupta 2001; pinney 2004). the guru’s movement to have gau-mata constitutionally enshrined as rashtra-mata (mother of the nation) draws on precisely this century-old connection between the cow and the nation, even as it represents it as primordial. in the years following 1947, the fact that “cows were not granted complete constitutional protection through a total, national ban on cow slaughter” even in an “independent hindu dominant india” came to be framed by hindu supremacist groups as a “historical injury” to hindu sentiment and a sign of hindu “impotency” (chigateri 2011, 140). “outrage” at this ongoing putative violence against hindus continues to animate contemporary cow-protection politics (jaffrelot 2008). the guru kanha, for instance, frequently told his followers that they would remain “colonized” as long as their mother (the cow) continued to be treated as an animal and slaughtered. the very fact that even hindus still called the cow an animal instead of mother, he thundered at gau-kathas and rallies, was a sign of how the hindu spirit had been broken. importantly, right-wing religious figures like kanha connect what they see as a broader history of injustice and violence against hindus to more locally meaningful anxieties about identity and belonging, thus fueling the rise of what joshi (2018) calls a “regional hindutva.” the project of cow-protection has put down deep roots in uttarakhand, which now hosts hundreds of cow-protection organizations, precisely because it has been carefully interwoven into pahari (literally, of the mountain) politics.5 fears about the erosion of a distinctive pahari cultural identity due to a lack of development in the mountains played an important part in fueling the mass mobilization for statehood that ultimately led to the creation of uttarakhand as a separate himalayan state in the indian union in 2000, after it was carved out from its parent state of uttar pradesh. this invocation of a pahari culture at risk was linked to the distinct caste demography of the hills, which are majority upper-caste hindu (mawdsley 1999; cf. mathur 2016; koskimaki 2017). in 1994, the passing of state legislation reserving 27 percent of education and employment opportunities for other backward classes (obcs) in uttar pradesh, in addition to the existing 22.5 percent reservation for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, led to widespread anxiety about further marginalization among upper-caste paharis if “half of all government jobs” in the hills went to a minority “lower-caste” population (mawdsley, 1999, 104). as emma mawdsley (1999) observes, the widespread protests that erupted across the hills in response to this legislation breathed new life into what was then a waning popular movement for a separate state. however, as numerous scholars of the region have noted, the creation of a separate state has done little to assuage pahari anxieties in the face of a perceived lack of “development” diagnosed by widespread unemployment, industrial land grabs, agrarian crisis, and record rates of migration from the hills to the plains (mathur 2016; koskimaki 2017; govindrajan 2018). it is these affective anxieties about access and belonging that the hindu right-wing has managed to powerfully harness to the cause of cow-protection by repeatedly suggesting that the welfare of uttarakhand’s hindus is intimately linked to that of gau-mata. this seemingly tenuous association is shored up through appeals to the widely shared belief that the himalayan region constitutes a distinctly hindu sacred geography, or a “living landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests . . . are elaborately linked” to the presence “and stories of the gods,” and are gods themselves (eck 2012, 4–5). local pride in this sacred geography is reflected in the tag devbhumi (land of gods) often used in popular and official discourse to describe uttarakhand’s status as home to several major hindu pilgrimage sites. in recent years, the marketing of devbhumi by the state and business investors has fueled the explosive rise of a dharmic (religious) industry—a network of gurus, ashrams, yoga and wellness retreats, and temples—that claims to draw its own potency from the shakti (creative power) of the devbhumi (cf. joshi 2018). gurus who advocate the politics of cow-protection have flourished as part of this broader dharmic industry, adding their own ashrams and gau-shalas (cow-shelters) to the thousands of religious institutions mushrooming across the region. the connections between the supremacist politics of gau-raksha and broader hindu religiosity were brought home to me when i attended a nine-day bhagwat katha (a recitation of narratives from the bhagwat purana that has, increasingly, become an important ritual event across uttarakhand) at a small village temple in the mountains. gau-mata featured prominently in the katha even though it was not a gau-katha. in one recitation, the vyas (the guru who recites the katha) attributed the emergence of the krishna avatara to the gods’ desire to protect gau-mata from rakshasas (demons) who sought to threaten her bodily integrity. after reminding attendees that the gods expected a good hindu to do gau-seva (service for cows), gau-daan (gift cows), and gau-raksha, the vyas urged the crowd of mostly rural women to chant “jai gau-mata” (victory to gau-mata). religious figures like the guru kanha often argued that paharis who were nourished by the devbhumi were especially obligated to do gau-seva and gau-raksha. “even the ganga originates in gaumukh (literally, cow face; the name of the himalayan glacier from which the river ganga originates),” kanha told the audience forcefully during a gau-katha hosted by a locally significant temple in the mountains a few years ago. “there would be no ganga without the cow, no himalaya without the cow. there would be no devbhumi without the cow. . . . you might have fought for this state, but take it in writing from me: you will not feel its benefits until you fight for gau-mata who is being cut mercilessly in the streets.” abruptly, he flashed an amused, lopsided smile at the audience. “don’t sit at home and cry thinking about what will happen to your children and grandchildren,” he chided, now gently. “just once work for gau-mata with true love. then see how quickly your children will succeed.” kanha’s diagnosis that the lack of development in uttarakhand resulted from a lack of love for the maternal figure on whom the very existence of the devbhumi depended seamlessly connected cow-protection, sacred geography, and development anxieties. as the next two sections detail, many gau-rakshaks echoed his emphasis on genuine love as an agent of political and social transformation, although the question of how to establish the authenticity and, thereby, the potency of this love remained open for debate. bete ka prem: filial love, sacrifice, and violence in 2017, i met two young gau-rakshaks, monu tamta and vikas nayal, at a coffee shop in the town of haldwani. they had been introduced to me by an older gau-rakshak whom i had met at a protest called by the guru’s organization in haldwani a year earlier. after showing me several facebook photos of themselves holding sticks and posing while patrolling state highways across uttarakhand in search of cattle smugglers, they started to talk about prem, or love. monu told me that he saw the work of raksha, or protection, as fueled by “filial love” (bete ka prem) for the cow. vikas, who went to college with monu, nodded his agreement and added that this was rashtriya-karya (work for the nation). when i pressed him to explain what he meant, he said, “the cow is the mother of the hindu dharma. and this is a hindu nation. . . . any hindu who loves (prem) this country should be willing to lay down his life for gau-mata because she is not only our mother, but also the mother of this nation.” i was struck by the repeated use of the term prem, more formal than the colloquial pyar that young men like monu and vikas would usually use to describe their everyday affective attachments. scholars have observed that while the original sanskrit prema, love (from which the hindi prem is derived), had a “wide and indeterminate connotation” in its numerous literary invocations, modern usages of prem in hindi and other indian languages often evoke an idealized and selfless love, shorn of sexual inference and imbued instead with a sense of ethical obligation (kaviraj 2006, 164; cf. ahearn 2001; gold 2006). some historians argue that this narrowing of prem’s meaning dates to the late nineteenth century, when (hindu) nationalist figures began to use it to index not just the idealized conjugal bond of the archetypal “hindu-aryan” nationalist couple but also a putatively pure and self-sacrificing love for the nation (chakravarti 1990; kaviraj 2006). it was precisely this modern history of narrowing in the “aesthetic,” “conceptual,” and sociopolitical meanings of prem that was reflected in monu and vikas’s use of the term to signal the exalted nature of their love (kaviraj 2006). the affective force of this prem, monu and vikas told me, had forced them to “sacrifice” a launde ki normal life (the normal life of a carefree young man) in service of gau-mata and the nation. later in the conversation, monu fervently declared that it was because of the intensity of his prem that he was willing to “die and kill” for gau-mata and the country. when i asked what he meant, it was vikas who responded, pushing his white, coffee-stained ceramic cup out of the way as he leaned across the table: see, we do not justify the murders that have taken place. but there are some people who play with our emotions. that is what makes some hindus react. that shows that their love is true [sacha]. this is why we are saying to the state, “respect our love, give our gau-mata her rightful place in this country.” if the state doesn’t act, then such attacks will continue. the murders that vikas was referring to were the recent mob lynchings of muslim, dalit, and adivasi men, mostly in northern india, by vigilante gau-rakshaks, who, as christophe jaffrelot astutely observes, have formed a “parallel state structure” through which “the hindu rashtra (nation) is materializing” (anderson and jaffrelot 2018). while vikas carefully expressed condemnation of the lynchings, he was convinced that it was the failure of the state to enshrine hindu emotion in law that compelled otherwise apolitical hindus to violence (jaffrelot 2008; cf. adcock and govindrajan 2019). moved by love, they retaliated against those who, as sara ahmed (2004, 118) puts it, “caused injury” to the ordinary hindu’s “good feeling” of love.6 as far as monu and vikas were concerned, then, love committed them to the violent, masculine labor of purging those who hated the object of love. “it’s not easy, this work,” monu confided when i met him again a few days later, this time without vikas. “the nights we spend on patrol are exhausting. there’s a real risk of death at the hands of cattle smugglers. . . . but this is the nature of this work. you have to be ready to put in effort [mehnat].” my conversation with monu left me wondering what was at stake for him and other gau-rakshaks in claiming that the violence they unleash on religious and caste minorities constituted risky labor. it is worth noting here that the understanding of violence as sensuous, embodied, difficult labor resonates across multiple contexts (hoffman 2011). yet i would argue that there is something specific about the ways in which violence, love, and labor intertwined in the imaginary and praxis of gau-rakshaks. the labor of violence was what imbued their love for the cow with affective force and meaning. rakesh tewari, a recent college graduate and member of a haldwani-based cow-protection organization, expressed this sentiment when he told me that his prem for gau-mata had “real josh” [fervor, force] because he was “fearless” and “willing to do whatever was needed” to protect her. what young men like rakesh, monu, and vikas were suggesting, then, was not simply that love moved them to action. instead, they insisted, it was precisely their willingness to engage in risky, violent labor that revealed the depth of their love for the cow, that made their love sincere and authentic. establishing the authenticity of their prem was a remarkably important concern for all the gau-rakshaks i knew. however, what made love for gau-mata genuine was a matter of some debate. younger men like vikas, rakesh, and monu claimed that the purity and sincerity of their love manifested through their participation in acts of violence. as a result, they often criticized those male gau-rakshaks who refused to go out on patrols and preferred to run gau-shalas (cow-shelters) instead. “anyone can run a gau-shala,” dikesh pandey, a gau-rakshak i spoke with in 2016, said to me disparagingly when i asked if his involvement with local gau-shalas extended beyond dropping off the cows he rescued. “but what we do—raksha—is the real work. it’s risky.” if younger gau-rakshaks privileged a risk-taking, violent, masculine subject as the authentic lover, older men involved in gau-raksha tended to emphasize seva (organized service) as the basis of genuine love for the cow and the nation. the selfless work of seva, they argued, engendered an entirely different relationship between love and labor than the work of masculine violence, which they construed as glamorous and self-serving. as i demonstrate below, the ideal of seva allowed older gau-rakshaks to both counter the critical narratives of younger gau-rakshaks and legitimize and conceal the communal violence of gau-raksha. the cow who went to a katha: altruism, mediation, and gender in gau-seva the afternoon sun was beating down without mercy by the time i arrived at the modest gau-shala located in a peri-urban area near haldwani a few years ago. i had been directed there by uma mausi (mother’s sister), the sister of a woman with whom i had lived briefly during dissertation fieldwork in 2010. uma mausi had waxed eloquent about mohan chand pandey, the man who ran the gau-shala. “he’s donated his own land to the gau-shala,” she gushed. “such an unselfish man.” pandey greeted me with a rousing “jai gau-mata ki!” (victory to gau-mata). when we sat down on a stone platform in his courtyard, he started recounting his life history. gau-mata had visited him in a dream six years ago, he recalled, and had told him that his life would be fulfilled if he opened a gau-shala and did seva for sick and elderly cows and abandoned bulls. when i inquired as to what the quotidian doings of gau-seva (cow-service) involved, pandey enthusiastically began to describe an ordinary day at the gau-shala. when i wake up, i first pray to a cow, here in the gau-shala. after bathing, i start sending people good morning messages. thousands of people receive my messages daily. people nowadays send roses and other random [unt-shunt] things like that. i send only pictures of gau-mata. sometimes i share video clips from gau-kathas. sometimes i make videos of the gau-shala and send those. i send things that touch the heart, that awaken [jagruk] the spirit. like this morning, i sent a picture of a cow who goes to a temple daily to listen to a katha. bhai [brother], a cow is going to a katha, and you’re sitting at home watching serials on tv? think about that for a minute. as pandey described other images he had shared recently, i was struck by how little time he actually spent with the cows at the shelter. in addition to his early morning visit, he usually went to the gau-shala (attached to his house) a few times a day. his visits were motivated by a desire to “supervise” the workers responsible for feeding the cows (with grass bought locally from women farmers and commercial livestock feed) and collecting their urine and dung (both of which were sold to local and national distributors). many of the workers, particularly those who collected urine and dung, were local women who kept animals of their own. the bulk of pandey’s own seva, then, entailed hours of painstaking labor to produce and disseminate what shakuntala banaji (2018, 3, 7) calls “hindutva media productions”: digital media, especially audio, images, and video, that have played a vitally important role in producing a “new hindu majoritarian ‘national subject’” from the 1980s onward. as sahana udupa (2018, 453) notes, this “mediatized form of hindu nationalism” increasingly thrives on the “entrepreneurial” work of a wide range of social actors like pandey (cf. mukherjee 2020). like other “online volunteers of hindutva,” pandey understood this mediated seva as intrinsically driven by an altruistic desire to awaken hindu sentiment and cultivate an affective community of hindus united by the force of their emotion for gau-mata (udupa 2018, 456). figure 1. an example of the images extolling gau-seva that circulate over social media. photo credit: gau mata gau seva trust. https://www.facebook.com/savecowsaveindia/photos/a.1601791173430734/2577371205872721/?type=3. pandey insisted that it was only through such spontaneous and public-spirited seva that one could experience genuine love and devotion for gau-mata and the hindu nation. as such, he pointedly distinguished his work from that of vigilante gau-rakshaks who, as he contemptuously, and even a little defensively, put it, “went around believing that nobody was as good as them just because they had beaten up some cattle smugglers.” “anybody can beat up people in the name of the cow,” he said disapprovingly. “but just mention gau-seva and watch how fast they run.” their violence, he concluded, resulted from a desire to publicly display (dikhava) their masculinity (mardangi). it had nothing to do with the feeling (bhava) of true love or devotion for gau-mata. ultimately, for pandey, the work of young vigilantes proved insincere because it was imbricated in “dirty politics” and, therefore, hypervisible in national political discourse. “no newspaper or television channel will tell you about the seva that gau-sevaks like us do. but let there be a hint of a scuffle on the highway, all these media people will immediately arrive with their cameras. these boys [referring to gau-rakshaks] know what the public, the media is hungry for. it’s all politics.” seva, on the other hand, aroused and was fueled by authentic feeling because it had nothing to do with politics. “seva means working without any selfish intent, without any politics, without any desire for fame. you do seva because of the feeling in your heart,” he declared. he warned me not to take seva lightly. it was, he said, the only thing that stood between hindus and their destruction as a people. “do gau-seva and you will have saved the hindu family, hindu society, and hindu nation. otherwise, there will be nothing left.” while the political ideal and practice of seva, which lays “emphasis on principles of selflessness and sacrifice,” has been central to a range of nationalist projects for well over a century, it has played a particularly important role in buttressing right-wing hindu constructions of the self, community, and nation (ciotti 2012; cf. kaur 2005; patel 2010; thachil 2014). indeed, the connection that pandey sketched between gau-seva and the reinvigoration of the hindu family, society, and nation is emblematic of the ways in which hindu supremacists mobilize the seemingly apolitical discourse of seva as part of their violent nation-building projects. the stress on the selfless and sacrificial aspects of seva was important, however, because it allowed pandey to distance himself from the politics of street confrontation practiced by vigilante gau-rakshaks. by emphasizing seva as the basis of love for the nation, materialized in the body of the cow, gau-sevaks like pandey and gurus like kanha managed to attract broader audiences, particularly women who have historically been drawn into hindu nationalist mobilization through the ideology that altruistic seva for the nation should cut across caste, class, and gender (dyahadroy 2009; ciotti 2012). while the ethos of seva, with its emphasis on self-renunciation and discipline as a path to resurrecting the “essential hindu nationalist self . . . and ideal hindu nation,” is fundamentally masculinist, it still offers women an opportunity to cultivate an independent “feminine self” through daily service for ideals and entities beyond the husband and family (bacchetta 1993, 40). certainly, over the past decade, older pahari women from across castes and unaffiliated with any hindu supremacist organization have become regular attendees at gau-kathas because they provide a space from which to participate in nation-making through bhakti (devotion) and seva. the preponderance of women in the audience at any gau-katha reveals how the understanding of cow-protection as a masculinist enterprise rooted solely in vigilante violence (cf. mukherjee 2020) fails to capture the ways in which cow-protectionists appeal to broader social worlds by casting the work of cow-protection as mediated, apolitical seva, open to anyone willing to sacrifice self-interest for a larger cause. in fact, uma mausi had insisted that i meet with pandey precisely because he was a sevak, not a gunda (goon), a term she used for some of the younger gau-rakshaks with whom she knew i had been meeting. “there’s not a trace of violence in that man,” she announced when i met her at her house in nainital a few days after my conversation with pandey. “he sends such wonderful whatsapp [messages], only pictures of devis [goddesses], devtas [gods], and cows.” she beckoned me to sit beside her on the chintz-covered sofa, so that i could look at the images closely on her phone. “he has inspired me to do some seva myself.” when i asked about her seva, she told me that she not only spent hours every day forwarding whatsapp messages about the cow to friends and family members but had also convinced several of them to donate money for food and medicine to gau-shalas. “initially i had told pandey ji that i couldn’t help him because i don’t like traveling,” she said. “but he told me that all the gurus agree that any work done with love [prem] and devotion [bhakti] is seva. ‘you can sit at home and send whatsapp,’ he told me, ‘don’t think of that as lesser work.’” uma mausi’s account of how she became involved in gau-seva reveals that it is not just the ideology of seva, but a capacious sense of what seva could entail that draws many women into the cow-protection movement. for instance, chetna ram, a young woman who attended college in the town of almora, shared with me that she would drop a few coins in the plastic donation jar, shaped like a cow with full udders, that lived on the counter of her favorite clothing store every time she shopped for new jeans or blouses. “bhaiyya [the shopkeeper] once told me that several gau-shalas are able to buy grass for cows only because of donations from almora bazaar,” she recalled. figure 2 and figure 3. “cow banks” requesting donations to buy food for cows. photos by radhika govindrajan. the idea that one could work toward cow-protection through acts as quotidian as pressing forward on a devotional whatsapp message or dropping spare change in a donation jar clearly allowed individuals like uma mausi and chetna, who were loosely (if at all) connected to formal cow-protection organizations, to feel as if they were playing their own small part in constructing the hindu nation. and yet this understanding of seva was also the source of deep misgivings for many rural women who felt that such a broad conception of service as labor devalued their own grueling and invisibilized agrarian labor. rekha kandpal, uma mausi’s sister, was a passionate exponent of this view, as i was to find out when i visited her a few days after my trip to nainital. having pressed me for the fine details of my conversation with pandey and her sister, rekha chachi [aunt, more specifically, father’s brother’s wife] appeared indignant when i told her how uma mausi had become a gau-sevak. “what are you saying re?” she sputtered. her daughter-in-law, who had just come into the room, asked what the fuss was about. “uma mausi thinks sending whatsapp is doing work for a cow,” rekha chachi said, her voice dripping with scorn. “and look at us fools, spending all our days cleaning cow-dung and taking our cows out to graze.” though somewhat mean-spirited, rekha’s refusal to accept uma mausi’s seva as a legitimate form of labor illuminates the limits of the politics of cow-protection, particularly among rural women. over the course of my fieldwork, i found women farmers were often deeply critical of the ways in which gau-rakshaks understood the meaning of labor and love. ironically, they usually articulated these critiques during the course of the gau-katha itself, whether they were attending in person or watching on television. these critiques did not mean that these women rejected gau-kathas in their entirety. on the contrary, gau-kathas were becoming increasingly popular among rural women for a variety of reasons including the fact that attendance at kathas of all kinds was increasingly a source of social prestige. many women who attended gau-kathas felt genuinely conflicted about what it meant to live ethically in relation to the cows they raised and hoped that gurus might offer some answers. and yet, they often found the gau-rakshak ethical imaginary wanting on the grounds that it failed to understand the ethically fraught nature of their everyday relationships with cows. as we shall see in the next section, these ethical dilemmas, and the conflicts they engendered, were at their most acute in debates about cow milk and about how to understand the feminized labor of cows. a holiday for gopuli: milk, feminized labor, and unequal solidarities while male gau-rakshaks, young and old, regarded their love for gau-mata as genuine because they labored for her (whether through violence or seva), they believed that gau-mata’s mamta (maternal affect) for her children expressed the spontaneous and innocent love of a primordial mother. the naturalization of the cow’s maternal role was most forcefully expressed in gau-rakshak claims that the cow’s maternal “gift” (ma ki bhent) of milk formed the substance of the kinship between gau-mata and her children. as the historian charu gupta (2001, 4296) notes, the idea that the cow was a “universal mother . . . reached deeply into the hindu psyche” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. the widespread circulation of images and texts that depicted the cow nourishing bovine and human (hindu) children with her milk lent affective weight to claims that the “well-being of the hindu nation” depended on the consumption of cow milk and ghee (gupta 2001; gould 2004). contemporary gau-rakshaks continue to emphasize the importance of cow milk in substantiating kinship with gau-mata, often referring to their labors as motivated by the desire to pay off the “debt” of the cow’s “gift” of milk (cf. narayanan 2019). such claims about the cow’s innocence and generosity, and the reciprocal obligations they imposed on her children, were repeated by multiple actors at a rally organized by the guru kanha’s organization in delhi a few years ago. in the middle of the day, one of the volunteers for the organization, a woman from the city of haldwani, stopped by to talk to the contingent of rural women from the mountains with whom i was sitting. she commanded us to commit ourselves to gau-raksha as she handed out small yellow paper flags bearing the iconic image of a cow with several hindu deities embedded in her body. our commitment was necessary, she said, because gau-mata was too innocent (masoom) to protect herself. all gau-mata cared about, she said before walking away, was caring for her children, which was why she “always had milk in her udders” to feed them. figure 4 and figure 5. the crowd at a cow-protection rally called by the guru kanha’s organization. photos by radhika govindrajan. figure 6. a yellow paper flag with an image of a cow with hindu deities in her body and text that reads “gau-mata rashtra-mata.” photo by radhika govindrajan. another gau-rakshak, a young man from dehradun who started a conversation with me as we stood in the long line for tea during a break between speeches, described how he had come to gau-raksha because of his gratitude for the cow’s mamta (maternal affect). as we parted ways, he told me that he did not care about politics and was not affiliated with any political party. he did this work, he said, because he “loved gau-mata from the heart,” and because her “innocent face” haunted him. he was here, he continued, because gau-mata needed her sons; she was too “innocent” to fight the “cunning butchers” (we both knew without him needing to clarify that he was referring to muslims) who thirsted for her blood. i was struck by these claims that gau-raksha was driven purely by the imperative to protect the cow’s maternal innocence. miriam ticktin’s (2017) work on the politics of innocence is useful in understanding how innocence comes to be such a powerful force in driving political action. ticktin (2017, 578) notes that the “ethico-moral” concept of innocence “promises a space of moral and epistemic purity” in which the deserving are easily separated from the undeserving. in the narrative discourses of gau-raksha, the innocence of gau-mata holds out the promise of a purified hindu nation in which only the cow and her hindu children are “worthy victims” (ticktin 2017, 577). it is the cow’s innocence and purity that enables the identification of the “cunning butcher” as unworthy of membership in the nation. it is the innocent face of gau-mata that allows the young gau-rakshak from dehradun to distance himself from politics and absolve himself of responsibility for the (often fatal) violence that young men like him visit on the “uninnocent” in the name of love. apart from serving to displace religious and caste minorities to the limits of humanity, gau-rakshaks’ narratives of innocence also naturalize the cow’s milk-producing labor by casting the cow as an idealized maternal figure whose natural instinct to nurture any child (whether human or nonhuman) is so strong that she is incapable of withholding milk from them. as yamini narayanan (2019, 201) argues, “the celebration . . . of the lactating cow as a freely giving, sacrificing mother . . . illuminates the instrumentalization of bovine motherhood and breastmilk to serve hindu patriarchy.” the image of the cow as a natural mother, whose udders are always overflowing with milk for her children, erases the fundamental violence of dairy production, whereby cows are routinely (and forcibly) impregnated for milk that is then “diverted” from their calves (gillespie 2018; narayanan 2019). indeed, it was precisely at such patriarchal representation of feminized labor as “natural” and “spontaneous” that rural women across castes directed their sharpest critiques. almost all the pahari women farmers i spoke with at gau-kathas and rallies expressed a deep dissatisfaction with how the discourses of purity and innocence naturalized, and thereby erased, feminized labor, both their own and that of their cows. for them, such discourses evoked and reinforced a broader patriarchal devaluation of the “back-breaking” farm labor that women performed to keep mountain agrarian economies afloat (gururani 2010; govindrajan 2018). in the rural mountain region where i have conducted fieldwork for more than a decade now, women were primarily responsible for and spent their entire day doing the arduous work associated with cultivation, fodder and fuel collection, and care of livestock animals, in addition to their quotidian (and also burdensome) household labor. men often dismissed this labor as “women’s work” (sainikaam), with many commenting that women “chose” to overwork themselves as part of their innate feminine nature or because they were maddened by the “petty” desire to show off how hard they could work to their peers. figure 7 and figure 8. the grueling labor involved in raising livestock falls entirely upon women. photos by radhika govindrajan. women countered this devaluation of their work by pointing to the ways in which it was crucial to keeping mountain social worlds afloat in times of distress. in particular, they stressed how the grueling labor they performed in caring for dairy cows created a precious, albeit small and precarious, stream of income from the sale of milk to the many stateand privately owned dairies that have mushroomed across the mountains as part of rural development schemes during the past two decades (govindrajan 2018). importantly, they recognized that the labor involved in this economy was not just human but also nonhuman, specifically bovine. in other words, they recognized that the devaluation of gendered labor cut across species. thus, for example, the women with whom i had attended the cow-protection rally were skeptical, to put it mildly, of the volunteer’s claim that a cow naturally had milk in her udders for her children. after the volunteer had walked on to greet another group, a woman from the mountains sitting behind me snorted derisively and asked the others if they thought this woman had ever milked a cow in her life. “which cow gives milk just like that?” she asked, a tone of disbelief in her voice. one of the other women in our group responded that the volunteer was clearly a woman from the city who didn’t understand the nature of farm labor; she didn’t even know that there would be no milk without the labor of women and cows. i heard a similar sentiment from hema joshi, a woman from a mountain village who was locally renowned for being “mad” about her five jersey cows. “yeh saara karobar inhi gayon ka to hai” (this whole business belongs to these cows), she said to me when i met her at the grazing grounds in her village in the winter of 2019. the business she spoke of was the ten thousand rupees she earned every month after selling milk to a private dairy that belonged to a local artisanal cheesemaker. “without their mehnat [effort, labor], i wouldn’t have anything to send to the dairy. their mehnat is what keeps me afloat.” her use of the words karobar and mehnat was significant, highlighting the imbrication of bovine labor and milk in commodity exchange and thereby calling into question the claim that cow’s milk was the freely given gift of a loving mother. while such assertions certainly challenged the gau-rakshaks’ imaginary of cows as natural mothers, one might argue that they ran the risk of representing cows as natural workers, voluntarily integrated into capitalist systems of dairy production (besky and blanchette 2018; paxson 2018). maan barua’s (2018) important caution that “animals . . . are not self-directed creatures exchanging alienable labor in the marketplace of their own volition” is pertinent to recall here. yet rural women resisted the urge to “naturalize work” in two important ways: first, by actively criticizing the ways in which feminized labor, both human and nonhuman, was naturalized and, thereby, invisibilized; and second, by acknowledging (and being unsettled by) the violence that they themselves inflicted on cows’ bodies. below, i offer two ethnographic moments to illuminate how such critiques emerged in the course of everyday life. the conversation as we huddled around the hearth on a winter evening in 2017 had turned from completing preparations for that night’s puja to cows. bhaga arya, who had only just returned from the shed after milking the cows for the evening, was telling her mother-in-law that gopuli, one of the cows, had refused to give milk for the fourth day running. “there’s a new pashu ahaar [livestock feed] in the market. perhaps we should buy that for her.” her mother-in-law agreed that this was a good idea, and told her son, who was sitting in the next room, to buy the pashu ahaar when he went to work the next day. “there’s another thing we can do,” bhaga said, extending her toes towards the hearth. “in my mait [natal home], we would let the cows rest for at least a year and a half or two after giving birth before we took them to the bull again. let gopuli rest and build her strength. she is still young.” her mother-in-law, nodding off from the heat of the fire, opened her eyes momentarily to acknowledge that this was worth thinking about. it was at that moment that bhaga’s father-in-law, who was sitting in the next room with her husband and listening to our conversation, decided to intervene. “what nonsense,” he sneered. “cows don’t need to rest. they are meant to have children. why else do we call the cow gau-mata? lazy women will tell any lie to get out of work.” bhaga’s face was etched with hurt and anger. a few minutes later, she stood up and asked if i wanted to accompany her to the bathroom. she exploded the moment we stepped out into the courtyard, declaring that men in the mountains expected women and cows to spend their whole lives giving birth to children and laboring, as if that is all they were born to do. “forget me, he [referring to her father-in-law] won’t even let the cows live their lives in peace,” she said, finally, before turning to head back into the house. i was struck by bhaga’s assertion that patriarchy affected the possibilities of life for both humans and nonhumans. her words illuminated how women and cows were subject to (re)productive control within a capitalist, patriarchal system that represented their labor as an expression of natural feminine desire or, as sylvia federici (1975) so powerfully put it, an act of “love” (cf. bear et al. 2015; jegathesan 2019). the connection she felt with gopuli was thus rooted in this shared experience of the erasure of their unnatural and unpaid labors. however, even as women like bhaga claimed a certain kinship with cows on these grounds, they were also painfully aware of the coercive power they wielded over their bovine companions. one day in 2018, when i was at the grazing grounds in the village of pokhri, mohini nayal, a neighbor of the family i was living with at the time and a devoted viewer of televised gau-kathas, started to tell me how she had recently lined the walls of her cowshed with old shawls so that the cows wouldn’t catch a chill. one of the women who had joined our little circle commented on how much mohini chachi loved her cows. the word she used was moh-maya (literally, the illusion of love), which pahari women often used to index the affective bonds of love (cf. govindrajan 2018). mohini chachi’s response was remarkable for the ways in which it recognized both the love she felt for her cows and the limitations of that love: what a thing god has made, this love. after a lifetime of doing work for animals [jaanwaron ka kaam] you come to feel such moh-maya for them that you can’t sleep at night thinking of them trembling in the cold. but in the end, we sell or let them loose after they stop giving milk. . . . this greed for milk is a terrible thing. i don’t know if god will forgive us for thieving milk from their calves. . . . maybe that’s why we call it moh-maya. mohini chachi’s use of the terms moh-maya and maya-mamta instead of prem, or even the more colloquial pyar, proves significant because maya evokes both a sense of illusion and of “attachment, affection, compassion, and love” (lamb 2000). indeed, moh-maya, as ann grodzins gold (2006, 306) notes, often carries implications of delusion. this semantic openness was precisely what mohini chachi was wrestling with as she reflected on the intensity of the affective bond she shared with her cows as well as its ethical limits. it was the embodied, intersubjective labor involved in raising cows that created her “thickly enfleshed” attachments to them, attachments she understood as moh or love (povinelli 2005; cf. jalais 2009; govindrajan 2018). figure 9. embodied, intersubjective labor is the basis of moh-maya. photo by radhika govindrajan. what made this moh often seem like maya was precisely the fact that it was subject to the impure and power-laden transactions of everyday life in capitalist rural economies. for it was because they themselves were subject (though unequally) to patriarchal regimes of feminized labor that mohini chachi and others like her were keenly aware that a pure and innocent love for the cows they engaged in unnatural labor could only remain illusory if not delusional. conclusion what might these varying conceptions of love and the labor it entails illuminate about the political regimes that love (and its affine, hate) makes possible? is love doomed to what michael hardt (2011) describes as narcissism, or can it seed the ground for an ethics of an incomplete but ongoing accountability to those other than the self? the question of love’s politics is particularly crucial in this moment when violent love has become the dominant affective register for authoritarian and fascist politics worldwide. thinking about love as work, i have argued, allows us to apprehend how it can, depending on the specificity of the labor involved in its realization, both fuel and exceed fascist politics. to put it differently, attending to the varied labors of love in situated social worlds reveals how love can condition a variety of often conflicting political and ethical possibilities, working simultaneously as a force of “transcendence” (dave 2016), “self-sovereignty” (povinelli 2005), violence, and “repair” (thomas 2019a). a reparative love, i propose, refuses purity and coherence, and instead works through complicity and ambiguity. it demands ongoing embodied labor that is relational, “response-able,” and aspires to transformation even as it remains mired in violence (thomas 2019a). following deborah a. thomas (2019b), i understand loving repair as “a dailypractice of recognition and love” that “destabilizes the boundaries between self and other, knowing and feeling, complicity and accountability” (emphasis mine). reparative love is thus work-in-progress. let me illustrate what i mean by returning briefly to the loving labors performed by gau-rakshaks and rural women. vigilante gau-rakshaks believed that the sincerity of their love for the cow was reflected in the violent labor they undertook to expel those who hated gau-mata from an otherwise love-filled hindu nation. while older gau-rakshaks preferred the labor of mediated seva to vigilante violence, they, too, understood their work as a form of inherently masculine labor directed toward securing the nation (inseparable from gau-mata) from those incapable of truly loving it. true prem, in both these cases, was understood as transcendental, unmoored from the constraints of an “enfleshed” world and directed toward an abstract object of devotion (povinelli 2005). it was also beyond doubt or reproach in a way that did not allow for any reflection on the extreme inequality, exclusion, and violence that buttressed it. this prem was not, as i have demonstrated, the love to which most rural women were attuned. indeed, the women who labored on and for cows recognized that a pure and transcendental love was fundamentally delusional given their incontrovertible collusion in the violent extraction of bovine labor characteristic of capitalist dairy economies. yet this did not stop them from laboring, in largely unseen and invisibilized ways, toward a more ethical and just love within the “contaminated” reality they inhabited (ticktin 2017, 588). their tentative ethical strivings, shorn of the assurance with which gau-rakshaks pursue their love, bring to mind ticktin’s (2017, 588) powerful assertion that a “world without purity . . . [where there is] no place of moral transcendence” might well be “the site of new political emergence.” indeed, my final conversation with bhaga provided a powerful reminder of the possibilities for solidarity and reparative justice that an undeniably impure and yet ever-striving love might hold. in september 2019, while on a visit to her home, i asked what had come of her attempts to convince her mother-in-law that gopuli could do with a “rest” between visits to the village bull. she told me that while her efforts had failed the first time, she had since taken a different direction and worked on her husband to join her campaign. when i asked about the outcome, she laughed and said that gopuli was finally enjoying a much-deserved chhutti (holiday). abstract this essay asks how conceptualizing love as work might provide a fresh perspective on love’s politics. in offering an ethnographic account of how love for gau-mata, the cow-mother of the idealized hindu nation, fuels a right-wing hindu nationalist politics of cow-protection in india’s central himalayan state of uttarakhand, i suggest that the specific arrangements of labor through which affective attachments are organized critically shape the ethics and politics of love. more specifically, i depict how different kinds of situated labor produced varied kinds of love in the conjoined social worlds of right-wing gau-rakshaks (cow-protectionists) and rural women dairy farmers in uttarakhand. for these social actors, genuine love for the cow manifested in a willingness to labor for her. yet their understandings of what this loving labor entailed differed starkly. this article examines three distinct kinds of work—protection, service, and care-labor—that these actors variously undertook out of love for the cow. it traces how these different labors produced a varied set of relationships, affiliations, and obligations that crucially shaped the ethics and politics of love. ultimately, i show, attending to the varied labors of love in situated social worlds reveals how love can condition a variety of often conflicting political and ethical possibilities, working simultaneously as a force of transcendence, fascist violence, and repair. [love; fascism; gender; affect; labor; cow protection; hindu nationalism; south asia; himalaya] notes acknowledgments this article is based on conversations and encounters with numerous people in uttarakhand to whom i am grateful for their time. i owe a particular debt of gratitude to the many rural women who have drawn me into their lives with unmatched warmth and generosity over the past decade. i am thankful to the four anonymous reviewers whose incisive and perceptive comments have improved this essay immeasurably. i would also like to thank the editors, especially brad weiss, for their thoughtful and generous suggestions for revision. various drafts of this essay have benefited from the insights of kemi adayemi, mona bhan, maneesha deckha, jean dennison, ishita banerjee dube, maría elena garcía, jenna grant, sunila kale, christian novetzke, juno parreñas, priti ramamurthy, gabriel rosenberg, harris solomon, sher ali tareen, anand vaidya, and many others. versions of this essay were presented in talks at several institutions. i am grateful to those in the audience for their questions and comments, all of which have shaped this essay in critical ways. research and writing for this piece were made possible through generous support from a simpson center society of scholars fellowship, a royalty research fund fellowship, and an american council of learned societies fellowship. finally, thanks to jessica lockrem and petra dreiser for their helpful editorial assistance. 1. to protect people’s identities, all names used in this essay are pseudonyms. 2. kathas are “religious stories, whose performances constitute a demarcated ritual event” (narayan 1992, 46). as kirin narayan (1992, 46) notes, “the narratives told are from the epics, the puranas, and regional religious traditions.” gau-kathas follow the generic katha format but focus on stories that emphasize the central place of the cow in hindu dharma (religion). gau-kathas have become increasingly popular during the past decade. in addition to drawing in-person audiences in the thousands, they also occupy prime-time slots on hindu devotional television channels like aastha and sanskar. 3. i am grateful to naisargi dave for having encouraged me to think through this question in the context of my ethnographic work. 4. cassie adcock and i (adcock and govindrajan 2019) argue that the oft-repeated claim that cow-protection is fueled by a politics of religious difference between hindus, muslims, and christians simplifies a nuanced social and political landscape in which cow-protection is inseparable from rural livelihoods, caste-based labor, dietary practices, and situated human-animal relationships (see also govindrajan 2018; sur 2020). 5. two recent legal decisions reveal how successful cow-protection organizations have been in pursuing and legitimizing their political aims in uttarakhand. in august 2018, the uttarakhand high court passed an order announcing that it would take on the role of parens patriae, or legal guardian, for cows across the state. right on the heels of this decision, in september 2018, the legislative assembly of uttarakhand passed a resolution declaring the cow rashtra-mata (national matriarch), one of the guru’s key demands, and immediately forwarded it to the central government for further consideration. 6. interestingly, even the indian state identifies uncontrolled emotion as a primary cause of violence in the name of the cow. in 2018, the supreme court of india called on the central government to issue new laws aimed at preventing incidents of mob lynching. the court noted that gau-rakshaks had to “remember that they are subservient to the law and cannot be guided by . . . emotions or sentiments” (human rights watch 2019). references adcock, c. s. 2010 “sacred cows and secular history: cow protection debates in colonial north india.” comparative studies of south asia, africa and the middle east 30, no. 2: 297–311. 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requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.2.02 ontological collateral cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 99-124, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.09 ontological collateral: the entanglement of “cancer pain” and “chronic non-cancer pain” in thailand scott stonington university of michigan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0472-3885 we don’t have chronic pain in thailand. it is a western invention. but we might have it soon. — dr. paiboon, director of a community hospital in northern thailand “it was the best day of my life,” said suchart, describing the day he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. it was the summer of 2015, and we were sitting on a roadside bench facing his one-room concrete house outside of chiang mai, the urban center of northern thailand where i was conducting ethnographic fieldwork on pain. suchart was in his sixties, wearing an old t-shirt and torn dress slacks meant for working the longan fruit orchard stretching out from his house. but despite his outfit, suchart had been unable to work his orchard for a long time. four years earlier, he had begun feeling a gnawing pain in his upper abdomen. he went to his local hospital, a few miles from home. there, he received an ultrasound and was told that his pancreas was inflamed, and that the pain would resolve on its own. instead, it worsened. every day, he lay incapacitated in his bed, unable to work, enjoy meals, or receive friends who came to visit from his social club. at times, the pain erupted in flares that he explained “i thought might kill me.” when such episodes came, his son took him to the hospital for “medicine injections” (chīt yā), intravenous morphine. once they had controlled his pain, doctors would send suchart home with paracetamol (acetaminophen). before the mid-2000s, no opioids had been allowed out of hospitals in thailand, but a new movement had emerged, arguing that those with cancer pain required special, aggressive out-of-hospital pain management. since suchart did not have cancer, he did not qualify for this new exception. besides, his doctors explained to him that his pain resulted from “acute episodes” of pancreatitis, which required in-hospital treatment. thailand’s low-cost universal healthcare system made periodic hospital care accessible and affordable enough to become a routine part of suchart’s life. each time he returned home from the hospital and the morphine wore off, suchart found himself debilitated again. “the pain ruined my life,” he explained. “i couldn’t do anything.” and it continued to flare, on and off for more than a year. eventually, he was sent to the regional university hospital to have his gallbladder removed and a stent placed endoscopically into his pancreatic duct to prevent further episodes of pancreatitis. but the pain did not subside after the surgery, and suchart returned to his cycle of pain, this time for six months of what he described as “life worse than death.” finally, another round of scans showed a cancerous mass in the head of his pancreas. doctors told him that it was inoperable (wrapped around important blood vessels) and not amenable to radiation (too deep in the abdomen) or chemotherapy (no effective regimen for his type of tumor). instead, they referred him to chiang mai university pain clinic, one of a few specialty pain clinics in thailand, staffed by three physicians who had trained abroad in pain management. they prescribed him a fentanyl patch and oral morphine to take home to treat his cancer pain for the expectedly short remainder of his life. it was one year after that when suchart and i sat on the bench outside his house and he declared the day of his fatal cancer diagnosis as the best day of his life. “after that, i started doing everything again. now, i take care of my granddaughter; i enjoy the company of my friends; i’m thinking of trying to work the orchard, though my son yells at me not to. maybe the tumor will take me, but i don’t care, because i have my life.” later, i had a chance to interview several of suchart’s physicians about his case. one reflected: we only give take-home opioids for cancer, but suchart’s case makes me wonder: should we have been giving him morphine at home before, too? what about patients with chronic pancreatitis from another cause? i don’t know. that is a question we were able to avoid before this new policy [allowing take-home opioids for cancer patients]. another physician at the table added: i worry that this new field of “palliative care” [english], of treating “cancer pain,” [english] will force thailand to accept the west’s category of “chronic pain” [english], too. but “chronic pain” isn’t really a thing, it’s an invention of the west. we don’t want to be like the u.s.—everyone using morphine to escape the discomforts of life. that is a dangerous path. he then began discussing the deterioration of thai society, its young generation obsessed with instant gratification, iphones, and video games, looking for solutions outside themselves for the ordinary discomforts of life. because of this, thais might begin to “experience more pain, and ‘chronic pain’ could become a real thing.” in their narrative, suchart’s physicians slipped between disease categories, bodily process, and experiences of those processes. the areas often demarcated in western philosophy—epistemology (truth claims about reality), ontology (actual reality), and phenomenology (experience of reality)—seemed to blur. when the physicians opined about the emergence of chronic pain in young people, did they mean that thais would continue to have the same bodies, but just be worse at tolerating them? or might they actually have different physiological processes happening in their bodies due to how their bodies were trained? and why was it so dangerous to name something a disease unto itself (rōk) rather than simply a symptom of some other process (‘ākān)? was this naming capable of changing bodies, the experience of those bodies, or both? or was it simply about the politics of treatment with a controversial substance, opioids? collateral object, anti-ontology in this article, i use ethnographic data from thailand to describe a particular landscape of pain and the possibility of treatment. these data are drawn from a year of fieldwork in northern thailand in 2015, during which i followed thirty individuals with painful bodies to their homes, clinics, monasteries, and workplaces, and conducted semistructured interviews with them, their families, friends, clinicians, and spiritual advisors. these interviews built on a decade of fieldwork on end-of-life care in thailand (stonington 2020b). i present these data in an attempt to explain two interrelated inflection points that occurred in suchart’s story. the first happened on the day of his terminal cancer diagnosis, amazingly the “best day” of his life. before then, his pain could only be labeled an “acute symptom,” possible to treat with morphine in the hospital but not at home. and then, suddenly, doctors applied a new label to the process occurring within him, “cancer pain.” this label implied a more solid and permanent reality, and with it came the possibility of ameliorating his discomfort with morphine. the second inflection point was named by his physicians. suchart’s case had “made them wonder”: should they have “been giving him morphine at home before?” with the possibility of this action, they also wondered about classification. should there have been a category of pain that was neither the new solidly real category of “cancer pain” nor the prior way of addressing “acute pain” as a temporary symptom? did the creation of “cancer pain” make inevitable the creation of a corollary object, “chronic non-cancer pain?” it is this collateral effect that i hope to understand in this article. social scientists of medicine have long shown that diseases, and even human bodies themselves, emerge historically. bruno latour (1984) famously described how the microbial theory of infectious disease reassembled preexisting scientific theories, bodies, and institutions into novel configurations. margaret lock (1993) mapped the confluence of conceptual models, bodily processes, and lived experiences that differentially constituted menopause in japan and in the united states as indications of “local biologies.” ian hacking (2002) described a historical moment in nineteenth-century france that precipitated the emergence and subsequent disappearance of states of dissociation and amnesia known as “fugues.” these classics drew on a long tradition of thinking in the social sciences about how categories are made, transformed, and destroyed in relationship to one another (bowker and star 2000; jasanoff 2004), as well as on a long-standing attempt to understand what sheila jasanoff (2004, 21) describes as “co-production,” the processes that “continually reinscribe the boundary between the social and the natural, the world created by us and the world we imagine to exist beyond our control.” i use suchart’s and others’ stories to extend thinking about local biologies and coproduction to two related phenomena. first, i trace how the emergence of one medical object, in this case “cancer pain,” begged the question of another object, “non-cancer pain.” i use the term ontological collateral to point to situations in which one object pulls another into existence. second, i hope to understand how a potential medical object might be prevented from emerging, or whose emergence might at least be resisted. suchart’s physicians put effort into keeping “cancer pain” from pulling “chronic non-cancer pain” into existence. to them, if “chronic non-cancer pain” were to become a “thing,” it would disrupt the (newly stable) order of things, including the division of the world into opioid-treatable and not-opioid-treatable pain. it might also create more painful thai bodies and/or weaker thai constitutions, its effects spilling far beyond the boundaries of medical practice. this constitutes difficult conceptual terrain. how can one ethnographically address something that is claimed not to exist, but that has a name and definition and is discussed constantly (cohen 1998; mcgovern 2017)? one might say that all objects or events come into existence in relation to other objects or events, and so all moments of emergence and creation are also necessarily moments of disappearance or destruction. to use the examples listed above: in latour’s account (1984), microbial theory needed to shut down competing theories of disease etiology as much as it needed to argue the existence of microbes themselves; in hacking’s (2002) account, “fugue states” needed to incorporate, reformulate, or discard prior categories (such as “hysteria” and “epilepsy”) to come into being. but how, moreover, can one make sense of something that is claimed not to exist but is assumed to be at risk of existing? contemporary science and medicine are fraught with controversy over the reality, or “epistemo-legitimacy” (dumes 2020) of various disease categories (barker 2005; murphy 2006; dumit 2006). but in suchart’s case, the category of “chronic non-cancer pain” was not exactly contested; doctors did not consider it “unexplainable and as a result, unmedicalizable” (dumes 2020, 9). instead, they deemed its very existence a risk, a potentiality that most everyone was trying to avoid, even as it emerged as a reluctantly inevitable collateral object to the more accepted “cancer pain.” charis thompson (2007) has described the process of “ontological choreography” as complex, rhythmically nested actions designed to bring particular social (including medical) realities into existence. suchart’s world seemed characterized by similar actions, but in his case, they were designed to prevent “chronic non-cancer pain” from becoming a reality. i use the term anti-ontological choreography to describe this—not to contest the existence of ontological activity, but to point out that it was oriented toward nonbeing—a dance with reluctant players, resisting and watching as “chronic non-cancer pain” emerged, unbidden, before their eyes. let’s take a moment here to address a complication: what if there is actually less pain in thailand? there is good reason to think that pain is partly determined by one’s understanding of and approach to it (throop 2010; buchbinder 2015; garcia 2015; banerjee 2020). there is also no doubt that bodies are products of time and place, through individual life course histories, environmental exposures, differential social forces, and more (lock 1993; roberts 2017). in any inquiry about pain lurks what hacking (1996) called “looping effects of human kinds”—in this case, the possibility that how one categorizes and conceptualizes the body may affect the body itself, and vice versa. i approach possible looping effects ethnographically, examining suchart’s physicians’ own claims about the dangers of allowing thais to loop toward more pain. part of how they hoped to prevent this was by keeping certain kinds of pain from becoming legitimized categories and, thus, actionable and, hence, real. to protect thai bodies and constitutions from becoming more like their western counterparts, physicians and patients in thailand worked to avoid the labels “chronic” and “pain” from becoming applied to problems. i map this work in the ethnographic sections that follow. much of the literature about pain concerns the entanglement of pain’s categories with its treatability, both in western (good et al. 1994; jackson 1999; buchbinder 2011; crowley-matoka and true 2012; hansen and skinner 2012; knight et al. 2017) and in global (krakauer 2008; livingston 2012; banerjee 2020) contexts. in the contemporary global politics of pain, opioids always already seem problematic, due either to their ubiquity in rich countries or to their scarcity in poor ones, driving a fierce and confusing ethical debate about global opioid accessibility (wailoo 2015; knight et al. 2017). when suchart’s pain moved from “acute intermittent” to “cancer pain,” his pain became treatable. if opioids had not been limited only to the latter, his physicians might not have been so concerned with the nature of his pain (stonington and coffa 2019; stonington 2020b). and of course, nothing in opioids inherently ties them physiologically only to cancer, nor does a clean physiological basis exist on which to reify all “cancer” as a single kind of disease process—or for that matter, “cancer pain” as a unitary object (livingston 2012; banerjee 2020). thus, the basis on which opioids became legitimate for use outside of hospitals in thailand proved conceptually tenuous. opioids, then, formed a major part of how pain threatened to overflow the disease category of cancer, precipitating “chronic non-cancer pain.” in what follows, i aim to show some features of the anti-ontological choreography around pain in thailand. first, i provide the historical context of thai buddhism’s relationship to pain, as well as the movements leading to the new category of “cancer pain” in thailand. i then describe the process of how supposed “chronic non-cancer pain” has begun emerging as cancer’s ontological collateral through an ethnographic analysis drawn from two locations: a community hospital, where “chronic non-cancer pain” was prevented from existing; and a pain clinic, a site of collateralization or slippage toward “chronic non-cancer pain.” the intent of presenting these two locations is to interrogate the dance of becoming and non-becoming, of advocacy and resistance playing out in the negotiation of categories, experiences, and bodily processes of pain. buddhism and pain an important historical backdrop for understanding recent transformations around pain in thailand is the strong focus on pain in buddhism, both in doctrine and in contemporary lived practice. the pāli canon, the original buddhist discourse written shortly after the historical buddha’s life, consists of nested lists built from core tenets known as the “four noble truths” (pāli: cattāri ariyasaccāni), which hold that “suffering” (pāli: dukkha) arises from “attachment” (pāli: taṇhā)—clinging to pleasant things and rejecting unpleasant ones. this attachment makes beings suffer by putting them at odds with the inherently transient and unsatisfactory nature of existence. in thailand, pain has emerged as the core point to prove this teaching: it is wanting pain to go away, rather than the pain itself, that makes people suffer (stonington 2015; aulino 2019). early in my fieldwork in 2015, i had an informational meeting with dr. paiboon, the director of a small community hospital outside the city. when i explained my study, he exclaimed: “ah, ‘chronic pain,’” speaking the words in english. then he took a beat, and echoed the refrain i had heard from others: “we don’t have that in thailand. ‘chronic pain’ is a western invention. we can say that something hurts, but pain itself is not a thing, it is a judgment.” when i looked confused, he pulled out a piece of paper and drew me a diagram of the human mind, in which the senses pick up sensations from the inner and outer world. there is then a reaction (positive, neutral, or negative) to each sensation, followed by judgment (desired or undesired). in a mix of english and thai, he explained: judgment is the interpretation of the sensation. it is affected by experience and meaning, crafted by karma, social relationships, childhood development, education, personality, behavior, so many things. “chronic low back pain,” [english] which they talk about in medical journals, is not a thing. if there is a disease, we treat it. but we’re not treating the pain, we’re treating the disease. sometimes the pain is still there despite treatment. then is it a disease, or just life? it doesn’t really matter. one must deal with the person’s judgment. this monologue offered a lay version of the concept of dependent origination found in the foundational theravada buddhist pāli canon, a description of the chain of events leading from sensory input from the world, filtered through the judging mind, eventually leading to suffering and the cycle of rebirth, either of the whole person in future lifetimes, or of the self in the present moment (payutto 1995). dr. paiboon’s use of the term “judgment” meant to encapsulate the agentive role that the human mind plays in generating suffering from pure sensory input. “the sensation is there,” he explained, “but it is only if i identify with it that it will make me suffer. if i don’t grab onto it, if i don’t perceive it as ‘i hurt,’ my mind just notices that sensation is there, nothing more. ‘i hurt,’ is an error, a misjudgment.” not surprisingly, then, there is often a complex relationship between religion and medicine as the relevant frames for approaching pain in thailand. this fact was made clear to me by a charismatic monk i came to know during my fieldwork, named pho khao. he had been diagnosed with a tumor of the muscles of his lower leg, and had initially sought treatment. his physicians recommended an amputation; he agreed and was scheduled for an operation, but on the day of surgery, a large car accident in the city made the surgeons cancel his surgery. pho khao took this as a karmic sign and decided not to pursue any further treatment and instead to meditate his way through the pain until death. the cancer slowly ate through his leg, turning necrotic and infected, ascending into his abdomen and then through his lymph system into his entire body. “rather quickly after starting my practice,” he explained during a sermon to his disciples, sitting with his rotting leg perched in front of him to drive home the undeniable reality of his pain, “i achieved a separation of mind and body. now, my leg hurts.” he prodded the necrotic and infected tissue, expressing pus for all to see. “but i don’t hurt. there is pain, but i do not suffer from it.” as he spoke, he beamed a joyful smile and laughed freely and easily. in the middle of his teaching, he stood to walk around, bearing weight on the affected leg to show that he could experience the pain without suffering from it. later in an interview he explained: “the key to transcending pain for me was to forego any treatment. if i decided to take even a paracetamol [acetaminophen], then it meant that part of me wanted the pain to go away, and blam, i would suddenly have it rush in upon my heart-mind [čhai] and i would suffer from it.” the concepts of karma and reincarnation add narrative trajectories to this pain/suffering distinction. one’s pain, in a thai buddhist karmic logic, may result from one’s past misdeeds, evidence of punishment by a being that one wronged in the past, including in a past life (stonington 2020c). because of this, many people in thailand contrast the ordinary pain of life—flagged by the common phrase “life is birth, old age, pain, and death”—with severe pain that seems out of proportion, and thus may represent a particular karmic consequence. this marks one point where medicine and pho khao’s ascetic extremism diverged. this became clear to me when shadowing a group of surgeons seeing a series of patients who had recently undergone surgery, mostly for tumor removal. after we passed each patient, i asked: “is their pain control adequate?” eventually the attending physician turned to me and asked: “do americans think that everything should be comfortable? these people are dying!” we all laughed at this poke at americans, but then, seeing that i was genuinely interested, he continued: the global medical trend is to rate pain on a scale, and treat until it is gone. recently, we do this more here, but i don’t think it fits. if a patient has 0/10 or 3/10 as a goal, it is already a problem, already addiction. pain is part of all things. wanting 0/10 means looking outside oneself to escape reality. the mind is already addicted, before ever taking [medication]. but one shouldn’t have 10/10 pain, either—that is too much for the mind! maybe the goal should be 5/10! as in many other world areas (krakauer 2008; livingston 2012; banerjee 2020), the physician insisted that pain management needed to be moderate rather than totalizing. this was supported by a classification of pain in which some pain was “just ordinary life,” and attempting to escape it would result in further suffering. other pain was so severe that one could not face it directly; beyond a certain threshold, capacity for insightful judgment declines. many health professionals who echoed support of this understanding to me cited the buddhist doctrine of “the middle way” (matchimāpatippathā)—the buddha’s observation that extremes lead either to clinging or to aversion and thus to suffering, and that therefore the path to enlightenment lies in moderation (stonington 2011). they saw the goal of pain management as reducing extreme pain back to the middle, to the kind of pain meant to be faced by all of us. when asked about pho khao’s approach, many health providers and patients nodded in acknowledgment and then described it as too advanced, too difficult, or too extreme to have relevance for most “ordinary people.” it seemed that in tension with asceticism, doctors saw their role as proffering a more universally achievable relief of suffering. the emergence of cancer pain in an ethnography of cancer in delhi, dwaipayan banerjee (2020) has traced the inextricable link between cancer and the emerging fields of pain management and palliative care in india. in that context, where curing cancer was largely a pipe dream but pain could be treated, pain became as or more real than cancer itself. this led to the structural substantiation of cancer pain as an entity, from funding to research to treatment centers. it also drew indian scholars and practitioners to differentiate their own understanding of pain from that found in wealthy countries, claiming that it needed to be more holistically bio-psycho-social than purely physiological, and should thus be managed in more complex ways than with simple pharmacologic interventions. a related history explains the emergence of cancer pain in thailand, albeit with a thai buddhist inflection. in the 1990s, a series of events, especially the controversial death of a famous monk named buddhadasa, brought national scrutiny to the use of aggressive hospital medicine at the end of life in thailand (stonington 2011, 2020b). a coalition of monks, lay activists, and prominent public-intellectual physicians began to advocate for allowing people to die at home, especially those with end-stage cancer whose outcomes were unlikely to improve with hospital care (wright et al. 2010). but pain management emerged as a major barrier to home death, given that dying from cancer is often very painful and a painful death has disadvantageous consequences for one’s rebirth. at the time, opioids were restricted to hospitals, and so the question arose whether there should be an exception to this rule for patients traveling home to die (stonington 2020b). the prohibition of opioids outside hospitals pulled a host of other elements and actors into the choreography of pain at the deathbed, including imagined legal risks and fear of violent interference by police and military. activists, speaking to those concerns, began to argue that part of what made taking opioids home a safe exception to opioid restrictions was the unique nature of cancer as a disease: both extremely painful and having a natural endpoint, it made long-term abuse and addiction unlikely. this argument required lumping all forms of cancer into a single category, drawing on a commonsense understanding among many thais that cancer represents a specific moral-physiologic entity different from other diseases, almost being-like in its autonomous and discreet physical nature, and possessing its own karmic history (stonington 2012, 2020a, 2020c). the surgeon who taught me about “the middle path” later explained the medicalized valence of this reification of cancer in an interview after rounds: “when cancer advances, it causes severe pain, the most severe of all. the goal is to relieve the pain enough for patients to be able to die peacefully and aware, to be able to practice meditation and study and understand the nature of things.” pain was considered epiphenomenal to a physiologic cause, and in this case, that cause was a single exceptional reified category of cancer, an entity so equated with severe pain that it stood in as a metaphor for the pain itself (sontag 1979; banerjee 2020). restrictive opioid policies are ubiquitous throughout asia (krakauer 2008; wright et al. 2010; banerjee 2020). in thailand, they have been supported by broad public association of opioid pain medications with the history of opium cultivation and trade in the golden triangle, and the subsequent popularly supported war on drugs, including excessive police violence and extrajudicial executions (kim 2020; stonington 2020b). combined with the buddhist imperative to face the painful nature of human life without trying to alter it, this atmosphere drove a severe “opiophobia” in thailand (nagaviroj and jaturapatporn 2009). the practice of not allowing opioids outside of hospitals proved much more complex than a matter of “illegality.” historically, no medical legislation has existed in thailand to guide law enforcement, so that litigation has determined the boundaries between “legal” and “illegal.” in truth, fear of litigation much more than accumulated case records have driven the establishment of such boundaries (engel and engel 2010). not allowing opioids outside of hospitals was a matter simultaneously of social norms, recommendations of professional bodies, and fear of as-yet-undefined lawsuits. partly due to this ambiguity, a coalition of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists began advocating for patients’ right to die at home by sending patients home with oral morphine, to some degree taking the moral and legal risk on themselves. these activists then began to present their actions to academic conferences and news outlets, explicitly challenging the status quo approach to opioids. a cadre of palliative care–oriented clinicians managed to push a policy through the hospital-accreditation bureau that allowed home opioids for so-called cancer pain. at the center of this movement was a small group of physicians trained abroad in pain management, including the doctors at the clinic where suchart was prescribed opioids after his cancer diagnosis. as soon as cancer pain became a viable policy category in thailand, things began to shift again into a zone of questioning and debate, into what michel foucault (1998) might have called a “problematization.” stories like suchart’s and others illustrate this problematization, an anti-ontological push-and-pull about what kinds of pain should and should not be “things.” the hospital clinic: erasing “chronic” and “pain” from nongyao early in my fieldwork in 2015, i met a woman named nongyao who navigated familial and bureaucratic structures in search of amelioration of symptoms in her legs. nongyao’s story brings into view the categorical, material, and clinical ways in which “chronic non-cancer pain” was resisted, sometimes actively, sometimes passively, from coming into being, the process i am calling anti-ontological choreography. nongyao was seventy-seven years old when i met her. her lower back had hurt for much of her adult life. she had worked selling food at market, walking every day despite her pain. around her seventy-sixth birthday, her walking slowly worsened without an inciting event. eventually she could move only with extreme difficulty. to describe her pain, she used the word rāo, which translates as “the cracks that form in glass after it breaks but before it ruptures,” and occasionally plǣp plǣp, which translates as “flashing, glittering, sparkling.” she also said that her legs were “slow” (chā), which usually translates into western medical terms as either “numbness” or “weakness.” for a while, she confined herself to home. eventually, her daughter and son-in-law forced her to go to the nearby district hospital, the same hospital where suchart received his care and where i was conducting fieldwork. at the hospital, she waited for several hours and was then called up to one of three “history-taking stations,” small desks staffed by a triage nurse. on that day, the hospital processed about 400 outpatient visitors. with three history-taking stations, this meant the nurse had 1.3 minutes to take a history. she asked nongyao, “what do you have, grandmother?” she notably left off the common particle bāng, a word used to invite someone to expand or list multiple answers. nongyao’s eyes were averted, saturating the scene with the emotion known as krēng čhai, a feeling of hierarchical inferiority. “my legs hurt [čhep],” nongyao responded quietly. “hurt in what way?” asked the nurse. “rāo,” said nongyao, “plǣp plǣp.” “for how long?” asked the nurse. “many years; worse in the last few weeks,” nongyao answered. the nurse condensed this into a 2x2cm box at the top of a form as: “acute neuropathic leg pain, bilateral,” in english. it is worth pausing at this moment. the interaction with nongyao, although foreshortened by the time pressure and the atmosphere of krēng čhai, nonetheless contained a great deal more information than was written on the nurse’s triage form. nongyao’s pain had lasted years and recently worsened. this was cast as “acute.” while nongyao was waiting to see the physician, i introduced myself, my research, and my consent process to her, and she agreed to let me join her for the rest of her visit. eventually, she saw dr. tan, a young internal medicine physician. dr. tan had about four minutes for physical exam, data analysis, and orders. he now held nongyao’s one-page form in hand. he looked up at her as she hobbled into the room. “your legs hurt, no?” he asked. she nodded. he came around the table and did a brief strength exam (pushing against the ball of her foot), then wrote “lumbar spondylosis” in english in another box labeled “diagnosis.” he then wrote an order for paracetamol and a topical analgesic cream. nongyao was guided out to wait for her medications. this process, honing nongyao’s story into a few pieces of data, seemed routine and unproblematic to me at the time, something one might see at any hospital in an underresourced setting (livingston 2012; street 2014; banerjee 2020). it was only later that i began to see how its nuances began to craft the available categories for nongyao’s suffering. i saw her again several months later when she returned to the hospital. she approached the history-taking station and repeated her identical story, except that now the worsened phase of pain had lasted several months, rather than weeks. the nurse wrote “recurrent acute neuropathic pain” into the box. again, the word “chronic” did not appear, the episode modified from nongyao’s explanation to instead be represented as a second discrete event. this time she was seen by a different physician, who did not repeat the history or exam, but merely said: “we’re already treating you for pain. if it doesn’t improve, then it is likely just part of getting older.” when nongyao arrived home, her daughter and son-in-law were waiting for her. when they learned that she had not been prescribed anything, they were upset and asked her what she had told the doctor. she told them that she had said that her pain had not improved. her son-in-law, clearly angry, said: “that was a mistake! pain is not a disease [rōk]. you wasted their time, they are too busy for that. you have to go back and say something different. tell them that your legs are slow [chā]!” nongyao returned to the hospital again the following week. this time, she told the history-taking nurse that her legs were “slow,” and the nurse wrote in the box, “chronic lower extremity weakness,” in english. this time the physician ordered an x-ray of the lumbar spine and a steroid injection into the area. sitting in the waiting area, nongyao said of this interaction: “my daughter and son-in-law will be pleased. the doctor took an x-ray this time—it must be a disease!” this latter exclamation described more than the comfort and reification that come from engaging suffering with technology, what mary-jo good (2001) has called the “biotechnical embrace.” it was the product of a transformation of nongyao’s problem. she went to the hospital to seek help with her walking, saying that she suffered from a combination of pain and numbness/weakness that had been plaguing her for years. the hospital put this story through a series of transformations, determined by many things: documentation (a 2x2cm box!), temporal constraints (1.3 minutes!), as well as predetermined categories into which her story was allowed to fit (“acute,” “neuropathic,” “recurrent”). by her second visit, when her presentation no longer fit those categories, she was turned away, and told that her pain was “just part of getting old.” she was then disciplined by her family, who said she had made the mistake of thinking that pain was a disease. and so nongyao reformulated both her strategy and, to some degree, her own perception of the problem. when she returned, it was no longer for pain, but for “slowness,” which was allowed to be “chronic.” this was rewarded by the physicians with the more affirmational response of taking an x-ray and giving an injection. by the time she left, her problem no longer had the name “pain.” this process constituted a rhythmically coordinated dance, some of it active, some passive, with the ultimate effect of preventing the words “chronic” and “pain” from attaching together to her problem. i asked dr. tan to explain his decision-making for nongyao. he grabbed a piece of paper to sketch a table (table 1; original in english) while he spoke (in thai sprinkled with english medical terms): chronic mild pain is just human life. and there really isn’t such a thing as “severe chronic pain” [english]. “severe pain” [english] is from something, something real and “physiologic” [english], like trauma, or cancer, or infection. so if someone is in “severe pain” [english], i admit them to the hospital, give iv morphine, and diagnose and treat the problem until it goes away. an exception is “neuropathic pain” [english], but that comes with other things . . . weakness, numbness, from some injury or physical process. i try treating those things. of course, sometimes we’re unsuccessful. then people need to cope with those, too . . . and of course, if people start thinking of their “chronic moderate pain” [english] as severe, we’ll have a problem. table 1. dr. tan’s pain treatment paradigm type of pain mild/moderate severe acute diagnose/fix problem; treat pain with paracetamol admit to diagnose/fix problem; treat pain with iv morphine chronic life does not exist even his example of one kind of “severe chronic pain”—neuropathic pain—was only able to exist by virtue of other elements, numbness and weakness. in nongyao’s case, the choreography performed by health workers served to bring one medical category into existence (neuropathic weakness), but seemed equally designed to prevent another medical category—to prevent “pain” and “chronic” from adhering to nongyao. as with suchart, it was not simply that nongyao’s pain was not “medicalized.” in fact, the medicalization of her problem lurked as a potentiality everywhere, even given a blank space in a treatment paradigm table. instead, processes were deployed to prevent the application of a particular category (“chronic” plus “severe”). dr. tan saw the difference between “moderate” and “severe” as one of interpretation, meaning that it was subject to erosion, and the distinction thus needed to be protected—or else “we’ll have a problem,” leaving open whether he meant a social, political, or practice problem, and thereby seeming to imply all of these. nongyao did not put up a fight in the face of chronic pain being erased from her, and in fact, she emerged as one of the choreographers of this process. in a later interview, she explained: “i’ve realized that my pain is a matter of the heart-mind [čhai], not of the body. for my weakness, the doctors have prescribed exercise. for the pain, i’ve realized that instead i need heart-mind exercises.” the thai phrase for “exercise” translates as “expending body energy” (‘ǭk kamlang kāi), and in a clever wordplay, she had invented a new term, “expending heart-mind energy [‘ǭk kamlang čhai].” one might gloss this response as a form of acceptance forced by lack of a solution to her problem, something one might see in many poor countries that produce painful bodies with few resources for medicalizing them (livingston 2012; banerjee 2020). but nongyao’s acceptance proved particularly buddhist in its inflection: her unresolved pain did not become “world-destroying,” as elaine scarry (1987) has charted in european history; nor did it require a purpose to obtain meaning, to become “suffering-for” instead of “mere suffering,” as jason throop (2010) has charted for chronic pain in yap. instead, the universal and undifferentiated nature of the pain required her to train herself in a kind of repetitive action on her own mind, similar to that charted in other chronic care contexts in thailand (cassaniti 2015; stonington 2015; aulino 2019). this same anti-ontological choreography occurred in many cases that i encountered. lalida, a nurse with whom i spent a lot of time during my fieldwork, had developed over a period of several years what she identified as “severe chronic abdominal pain with acute flares,” sometimes with diarrhea and constipation, but mostly just with debilitating aching. she explained: at work, people are unkind about it. they don’t believe me. at first, they were sympathetic, and i got time off work when the pain came. but after a while, they started saying: “this can’t be real! is there something wrong with your intestines, or not? why isn’t it getting better? you just don’t want to work. you can’t deal with ordinary life.” for lalida, it was not the pain that disturbed her coworkers, it was the combination of pain and chronicity. she elaborated: “if i could just say that it was severe chronic diarrhea, that would help, since people believe in chronic diarrhea. but it would be a lie. when it comes on badly, i usually don’t have diarrhea. it just hurts.” here pain, as in many other world areas, was caught up in a kind of personhood diagnosis (buchbinder 2011). but lalida’s coworkers, like nongyao’s hospital, were not just concerned with characterizing what kind of person lalida was; they were also enforcing the boundaries of what kind of pain was allowed to exist. of the several dozen patients i followed during my fieldwork, all gave examples of this. at some point in the process of negotiating the possible medicalization of their pain, they were all told a version of “pain is not a disease, it is life.” and beneath the statement lurked something beyond a matter-of-fact description of the nature of pain, something reaching into moral judgment and danger. suchart’s physician named this when he said that it would be “a dangerous path” to allow “chronic pain” to become a “thing.” lalida’s coworkers did not just disbelieve her pain, they were afraid of it occupying a legitimate category, as though the category itself represented a moral contagion (keane 2017) that might spread, and might even result in more pain for everyone. at the end of her monologue about the nonacceptance of her pain, lalida added: “if only i had cancer, it would make this so much easier. i might die, but in the meantime, i could live an accepted life and be free of pain.” by this she meant that she could treat her pain at home with chronic opioids. this statement felt striking, especially in the face of the usually assumed stigma of cancer (sontag 1979; banerjee 2020; stonington 2020a). a glossed unified category of cancer had become a stand-in not only for severe pain but also for pain’s treatability. for lalida, like for suchart, cancer seemed to provide a welcome exception from the otherwise rigid order of things. but there was something destabilizing in lalida’s suggestion, beyond just wishing for cancer. just as suchart’s doctor had wondered if she should have given him morphine at home for his chronic (then non-cancer) pain, one might have wondered the same about lalida: if her pain was so severe that it was blocking her ability to make spiritual progress, might not someone want to prescribe her some oral morphine, to make enough space in her heart-mind for the spiritual work needed to attain a higher “level of mind?” wouldn’t the optimal amount of pain have been 5/10 for her, even though she was not a cancer patient? as suchart’s doctors explained, the category of “chronic non-cancer pain” had never arisen before the creation of “cancer pain” as a category, partly because opioids had not legally been allowed outside of hospitals. this previously made moot any discussion of the severity of suchart’s pain—any distinction between chronic severe pain and chronic low-level or moderate pain. but now that cancer patients could take opioids home, a new doubt hovered in the air, a companion to the creation of “cancer pain.” one might say that the concept of “cancer pain” had a shadow or reflection, another object entangled with it: “non-cancer pain,” kept at bay but waiting for a chance to rush in and occupy a place in the constellation of acknowledged medical categories. and of course, both this potential and resistance to it were driven by the promise and stigma of opioids. the pain clinic: mechanisms of collateralization the epicenters of this burgeoning ontology (or more accurately, eroding anti-ontology) were a handful of specialty pain clinics in thailand, including the one at chiang mai university where suchart had finally received his fentanyl patch and oral morphine following his cancer diagnosis. it was very small, open only four mornings per week, and staffed at a given moment by one of three anesthesiologists. all three had trained abroad—in australia, canada, and the united states—where they had learned, as one doctor put it, “both about the dangers of opioid epidemics and the problem of undertreating pain in developing countries.” the clinic was originally founded to provide pain-management consultations for hospitalized cancer patients, who would be wheeled down from the inpatient wards to be seen briefly and have their medications reviewed. but the pain clinic physicians had subsequently become part of the movement in the late 2000s to create the category of “cancer pain” that would allow sending opioids home with patients on discharge (stonington 2011, 2020b). since then, the clinic had developed a largely outpatient population, most of them patients with terminal cancers who needed short-term palliation until death. but since beginning to address outpatient pain management, the patient population had slowly begun to shift to include patients without cancer. a patient case can illustrate the forces involved in this change. dao was a fifty-year-old woman who had had cervical cancer eight years before, with significant local invasion into her abdomen. she had arrived at the pain clinic in the early years of its activism around cancer pain, and was started on home oral morphine. unexpectedly, her cervical cancer responded dramatically to chemotherapy and radiation, and she went into full remission. but despite this cure, her pain did not subside. “we’re not sure why her pain continued,” explained one of the anesthesiologists. “maybe damage to abdominal pain fibers from radiation? regardless, her pain didn’t change, so we’ve just kept treating it in the same way.” interestingly, although his physiologic reasoning was tied to the specific anatomy of dao’s tumor and its treatment, it did not prevent him from placing her original disease in the homogenizing category of “cancer.” like at nongyao’s hospital, on each of dao’s visits, her medical history was taken down onto a history form, but unlike at nongyao’s hospital, the pain clinic’s history-taking form had two pages devoted to the description of pain, including a diagram of the human body to locate the pain; a box to free-text the words that the patient used to describe it (dao described hers as “dull aching,” tư̄ tư̄); a set of english words for the physician to circle to identify components of the pain (nociceptive vs. neuropathic); its duration (including acute, subacute, and chronic); and to free-text its cause. and thus dao, who had arrived at the clinic for “severe subacute cancer pain” was now categorized on each visit as having “severe chronic pain.” with cancer as a sort of gateway, she found herself carried over into a category of pain that had previously not been supposed to exist. and thus within the pain clinic, the boundaries between cancer pain and non-cancer pain began to erode. what had initially begun as a form of activism, muscling a category of “cancer pain” into the policy landscape of thailand, now began to slip more passively into another kind of change. some of this resulted from the ambiguous legal landscape in thailand: just as there had been no hard law against sending cancer patients home with opioids, pressure was able to mount in the clinician-patient interaction. this seemed for many to combine with religious ambiguity about what constituted the “middle path” and the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary pain. the ascetic meditator pho khao, who might have been taken as an example that pain should not be medicalized, regardless of severity, was used instead by many as an example of the opposite, largely because his approach required such extremity. he had renounced his family, including his children to whom he had never again spoken, so that they would not make him wish for cure. and he had gone into isolation deep in the forest to devote himself to twenty-four-hour continuous meditation practice. how many people (whether or not with severe pain) could or would choose to pursue that kind of practice? one of pho khao’s disciples, named phra sangthong, another monk in his forties, had suffered for ten years with debilitating neck and arm pain. though he maintained hope of ultimate liberation and continued to practice meditation, he had not achieved the separation between mind and body that pho khao proffered. he explained, pho khao is an inspiration, but how many of us can do that successfully? it likely takes many lifetimes of practice to attain the level necessary to separate mind and body. and also, pho khao has cancer, so there is an endpoint to his pain. for me, the rest of my life will have the same pain, every day, and probably onward into the next life, forever. it is relentless, and it fills up everything. the more i meditate, the more i suffer. phra sangthong eventually found his way to the pain clinic, where doctors prescribed him a fentanyl patch and gabapentin (a pain modulator for neuropathic pain). when i interviewed his physician about her decision to treat his pain with strong medications, she said, “he has been working so hard on mastering the mind-body connection; it doesn’t seem to be working for him. it’s time to try another approach.” a category that seemed impossible elsewhere had become available enough to be casually chosen as another thing to try, driven partly by phra sangthong’s clout as an avid meditator, taking the ascetic claim that his pain was “just part of life” off the table. the pain clinic’s power as a center of ontological potential, a location where categories and practices were made and disseminated, also constituted a kind of vulnerability. the clinicians at the pain clinic found this change stressful. one physician said, “this all used to be straightforward. people were dying of cancer, and we were helping them not suffer. now every day i think, ‘is this an exception or not?’ and there doesn’t seem to be a clear way to distinguish.” the new porousness and ambiguity of what qualified as treatable pain had turned a morally clear advocacy into a murky and fraught communicative landscape (buchbinder 2011; crowley-matoka and true 2012; stonington 2020a). there was also clearly a social landscape that determined who had access to “chronic non-cancer pain” and who did not. although thailand’s universal health-care system guaranteed that cost was not a barrier, discourses of class ran through narratives about pain. suchart’s physician, in his monologue about the nonexistence of chronic pain, described it as a social suffering born of modernization, afflicting an iphone-pampered generation of thai youth. this glorification of renunciation may appear unsurprising in country where buddhist asceticism like pho khao’s carries so much weight on the proper relationship between self, experience, and the material world. but the trope ran through many others’ stories, including the coping strategies of patients with pain. one wealthy patient with lower back pain, who had been receiving opioids from the pain clinic, said: “if i had been poor my whole life, i think that my pain would be much easier to handle. strengthening the heart-mind takes practice, and a life of poverty is a life of pain. if i had been poor, i could have built up endurance.” unsurprisingly, the poor and working-class people i interviewed did not glorify poverty in the same way. one woman i interviewed from the community hospital described how pain came from poverty itself—how food insecurity had driven her to a level of worry about her body that compounded the pain and “made her suffer from it,” implying that without the fear of starvation, she might not have hurt as much in her physical body. but she nonetheless claimed that both pain and poverty had trained her mind to be a “superhero,” able to handle the pains of daily life. when i asked her if she had ever heard of the pain clinic, she said, “it doesn’t quite sound like a place for people like me.” this seemed particularly meaningful given that cost did not stand in the way of becoming a patient at the pain clinic. although the clinic treated patients from across the class spectrum, a discourse of class clearly proved central to its functioning: the nidus of creation for “chronic non-cancer pain” in thailand had a middle-class inflection to it, regardless of cost. conclusion the choreography in the pain clinic illustrates the relationship between two objects, “cancer pain” and “chronic non-cancer pain.” the emergence of “chronic non-cancer pain” was framed as a side effect of the more active creation of “cancer pain.” dao’s physicians did not say, “we think it is important to advocate for patients whose non-cancer pain is elsewhere unrecognized.” instead, they said, “her pain didn’t change after cure, so we’ve just kept treating it in the same way.” in other words, “chronic non-cancer pain” had begun to emerge as a kind of ontological collateral, a spillover from a more recognized entity. this was possible because of the pain clinic’s role as a center of ontological possibility: its self-assigned role in creating “cancer pain” had tumbled into creating another category, the result of a passive absence of resistance rather than a resounding endorsement of the reality of “chronic non-cancer pain.” unlike contested illnesses in developed countries, such as chronic lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, or multiple chemical sensitivity, which are largely characterized by embattled camps of believers and skeptics (dumes 2020), clinicians in the pain clinic simultaneously argued for both the nonexistence and the inevitability of “chronic non-cancer pain,” as though it represented a potentiality (taussig, hoeyer, and helmreich 2013; morgan 2013), a collateral object yoked to the necessary acceptance of “cancer pain.” it seemed to lurk in the human mind-body as something that must be resisted but would likely eventually erode through any barriers erected to keep it at bay. nongyao’s and suchart’s community hospital was engaged in a more active resistance of the category of “chronic non-cancer pain.” not wanting to medicalize ordinary life, or somehow make bodies more painful by categorizing them in the wrong way, physicians and nurses deployed a series of operations, some active and some passive, to ensure that chronic pain could not become a patient’s problem. the understanding of “cancer pain” and “chronic non-cancer pain” was linked to a buddhist understanding of the human mind as having inherent weaknesses that could manifest given the right conditions. and everyone—from nongyao to the pain clinic’s clinicians—felt it was their responsibility to protect thais from that fate, though they simultaneously felt impotent at their ability to prevent it, to stop the slow erosion of thai heart-minds. connected to the individual psychology of pain was thus a social theory, an imagined deterioration of thai society, of more and more people wanting treatment for subjective ills, or inhabiting increasingly painful bodies. this provides a snapshot of a moment within a much larger global transformation of the politics of pain and its treatment, of rivulets within a river of medical globalization (tsing 2000). in thailand, the initial move to treat pain as epiphenomenal to a physiologic process—yoking it to cancer as a singular, unified, undisputed “real” thing, a “disease”—could not be protected, and had begun to overflow its bounds, to confer on pain its own thinginess precisely because of, rather than in contrast to, its irresolution and ambiguity (scarry 1987; good et al. 1994; crowley-matoka and true 2012; wailoo 2015). from a birds-eye view, this process looked like medicalization, a steady march toward the expansion of pain categories and increasing use of opioids. but close ethnographic examination reveals a more nuanced process, in which those who one might assume to do the medicalizing were engaged in anti-ontological choreography, resisting the emerging inevitability. scholarship on the historically contingent emergence of disease categories, experiences, and bodily processes often focuses on processes of creation, coordination, and normalization, even when those processes are fraught with conflict or inconsistencies (latour 1984; hacking 1996, 2002; mol 2002; dumit 2006; thompson 2007; dumes 2020). the emergence of “chronic non-cancer pain” as a collateral object expands such constructionist approaches by demonstrating that construction can take place through refusal as much as through creation. it reveals how emergence can occur through porous boundaries, or how objects can be so entangled that they become yoked to a common force, to a churn pulling both intentionally created medical objects and their unintentional collateral objects along in a single wake. abstract social scientists have long argued that medical objects (categories, bodily processes, and experiences) emerge in historically contingent ways. based on ethnographic fieldwork in thailand, i describe a special case of this: ontological collateral, the emergence of one medical object due to its entanglement with another. “cancer pain” recently became a widely accepted category in thailand to permit the administration of opioid pain medications for cancer patients dying at home. but the category has proven porous, leading many to claim that they now must treat “chronic non-cancer pain” with opioids as well. others characterize chronic pain as a western invention, claiming that recognizing it will harm thai bodies and minds. the result has been an anti-ontological choreography, a dance of becoming and resistance based on a collective understanding that categories, bodies, and experiences are so intertwined that they risk cascading into one another. [ontology; pain; medicine; thailand; opioids] notes acknowledgments i thank the blakemore foundation for financial support for fieldwork that fed into this article. i also thank krisztina fehérváry, raphael frankfurter, webb keane, bruce mannheim, megh marathe, elizabeth roberts, camilo sanz, and erick white for comments on this manuscript, as well as input from the university of michigan’s sociocultural workshop, the sts speaker series, and the institute for the humanities workshop. i am also grateful for the productive comments from the anonymous reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology. references aulino, felicity 2019 rituals of care: karmic politics in an aging thailand. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. banerjee, dwaipayan 2020 enduring cancer: life, death, and diagnosis in delhi. durham, n.c.: duke university press books. barker, kristin k. 2005 the fibromyalgia story: medical authority and women’s worlds of pain. philadelphia: temple university press. bowker, 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s3–14. https://doi.org/10.1086/671401 thompson, charis 2007 making parents: the ontological choreography of reproductive technologies. cambridge, mass: mit press. throop, c. jason 2010 suffering and sentiment: exploring the vicissitudes of experience and pain in yap. berkeley: university of california press. tsing, anna 2000 “the global situation.” cultural anthropology 15, no. 3: 327–60. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.2000.15.3.327 wailoo, keith 2015 pain: a political history. baltimore, md.: johns hopkins university press. wright, michael, hamzah ednin, phungrassami temsak, and agnes bausa-claudio 2010 hospice and palliative care in southeast asia: a review of developments and challenges in malaysia, thailand, and the philippines. oxford: oxford university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 99-124, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.09 cultural anthropology: touched by deep time: earthquake sickness in mexico city 463 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 463-492, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.04 touched by deep time: earthquake sickness in mexico city lachlan summers max planck institute for the history of science https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0737-3868 in the middle of 2018, nine months after mexico city had last been shaken by a major earthquake, elena lay in the bed of her apartment in doctores, wide awake for perhaps the fourth night in a row. “it was as if i could hear the walls,” she would later tell me, noting that such sleepless nights had become routine since the earthquake of september 19, 2017. while the 7.1m earthquake had frightened her, she emerged fine, as did her friends and family. her building, too, had ostensibly remained unharmed. and yet, as time passed, cracks appeared in the walls of her apartment—deep, alarming fissures that wrapped around the room. still more troubling was that these cracks were mirrored in the apartments above and below hers, suggesting not isolated, superficial damage, but some hidden thing gone wrong in the building itself. as if its slow disintegration were too loud, elena leaves her apartment, drives to the office where she works, puts her head on her desk, and falls asleep until her colleagues arrive. elena, by her admission, is tocada. tocado/tocada translates as “touched,”1 but is generally used to mean “crazy” or “affected,” similar to the english phrase touched in the head. a woman in her fifties, elena has lived in mexico city all her life and has experienced many of the city’s tremors. but during the minute that she laid on the floor on september 19, 2017, arms wrapped tightly around her 464head, something changed in her. since then, she has been affected by a peculiar range of health issues: she has lost weight (15kg), has dizzy spells, and suffers long bouts of insomnia. though years have now passed, she tells me that the earthquake never really ended for her. over the past six years in mexico city, i have met dozens like elena: people who present a broad range of post-earthquake symptoms and sometimes refer to their condition as tocado. alongside physiological issues—such as migraines, insomnia, loss of appetite, weakness, dizziness, diarrhea, and diabetes—their symptoms often include psychological states: a persistent sense of dread, generalized listlessness, pronounced claustrophobia, and panic attacks. with embarrassment, some hang cutlery from their ceilings to notice light tremors, pay close attention to their pet’s behavior, sleep with their shoes on, refuse to shower if they are alone in the apartment, and leave their front doors unlocked whenever they are home. across these diverse symptoms, there is one constant: the 2017 earthquake made them sick. un bolillo pa’l susto when a tremor strikes mexico, people make the same joke: un bolillo para el susto (a bolillo for the fright). a bolillo is a small, crusty bun, an accompaniment for chilaquiles, the foundation of a small torta (sandwich), or (my favorite) a guajolota—a tamal stuffed inside a bolillo. when chilangos explain why you eat a bolillo after an earthquake,2 they say that a fright (susto) can make you weak and, if unmanaged, give you diabetes. often, they refer to their grandparents, who either explicitly taught them that they must eat a bolillo to avoid fright-induced diabetes or who attributed their own diabetes to an experience of acute stress (cf. elizondo et al. 2003; mendenhall 2012; poss and jezewski 2002). in mexico, to experience a susto, like the shock of an earthquake, is to risk becoming like elena: a person overtaken by the fright (alguien que se queda tocado por el susto). susto, in medical anthropology, is a “culture-bound syndrome” throughout latin america, particularly mexico and central america, which describes a person who experiences a fright that induces a range of negative health effects like anxiety, depression, weakness, insomnia, wasting, bodily aches, diarrhea, and diabetes (castaldo 2004; gobeil 1973; poss and jezewski 2002; rubel 1960). susto’s connection of acute moments of stress to negative health outcomes, alongside its broad symptomology, has produced a range of interpretations.3 early medical anthropology interpreted susto as a “folk illness” (rubel 1960; rubel, o’nell, and colado-ardon 1984). such works often identify susto as a locally 465specific variation of post-traumatic stress disorder (bourbonnais-spear et al. 2007; weller et al. 2008). in response, critical medical anthropologists foreground how structural conditions of deprivation produce illness, highlighting the role of socioeconomic factors in physiological causes like hypoglycemia (bolton 1981), malnutrition (mysyk 1998), or internal parasites (signorini 1982). such works often frame susto as an idiom of distress rather than an illness, a means of reinforcing social norms (greenway 1998), contesting sexist social expectations (o’nell and selby 1968), or protesting economic insecurity (mysyk 1998). while divergent, these interpretations share an understanding of susto as a physiological expression of an individual’s maladaptation to societal expectations (green 1994, 121). this view transcends medical anthropology, with susto included as one of nine “cultural concepts of distress” in the american psychiatric association’s dsm (apa 2013). beyond english, the literature on susto offers more sustained attention to local interpretations and context. jaime echeverría garcía (2014) shows that sixteenth-century nahua speakers in new spain said that frights cause their tonalli, or animating essence, to leave their body. historically, a susto was understood as a fright that permanently disrupted someone’s thermal equilibrium—and susto’s association with cold things, particularly winds, persists (barba de piña chan 1995; muñoz morán 2011). while some note that the devil and spirits are associated with susto (barba de piña chan 1995; muñoz morán 2011), others argue that susto is a syncretism of pre-conquest and catholic ideas (remorini et al. 2012). miriam castaldo (2004) suggests that susto’s plurality has seen anthropologists homogenize the affliction in pursuit of generalizable definitions, warning that synthetic accounts assume culture to be static and its members isomorphic, which elides how cultural and natural factors shape the illness, and it inhibits studying how susto emerges and changes over time in a community (castaldo 2004, 63–64). as eduardo menéndez (1994) argues, illnesses “structure knowledge to face, coexist, solve, and, if possible, eradicate” the conditions that produce it, so the details of an illness’s social context prove vital for understanding it (cf. remorini et al. 2012; urióstegui-flores 2015). instead of unmasking the purportedly real cause underlying susto, explaining the affliction away by appealing to the universal body of biomedicine, an overarching social structure, or euro-american metrics of human psychology, scholars should focus their attention on the historical, political, and social contexts in which susto emerges as an illness (jacobo herrera and orr 2020). i would add to this merrill singer’s (2010) 466recommendation that anthropologists consider how environmental conditions mediate such an illness. frida jacobo herrera and david orr (2020) note something surprising in the english-language literature: although all forms of susto share a constant—an intense moment of fear—the role of fear as a contributing factor is rarely explored. but when “fear [is] a way of life,” as linda green (1994) describes the village of xe’caj, southwestern guatemala, during the guatemalan civil war, individualized pathologizations miss the political conditions that generate fear, how that fear is socialized, and what embodying that fear does to a person. in situations where social, political, and environmental factors render fear chronic, understanding fear might be central to understanding the illness. in mexico city, this fear is induced by earthquakes and associated geophysical processes. building on a longer history of considering geology (cf. ingold 1993; nash 1979), social scientists have sought to examine how “political and social worlds are constituted, limited, and unsettled by the earth” (oguz 2023, 417; see also bobbette and donavan 2019; braun 2000; elden 2013; melo zurita et al. 2018; povinelli 2016; weizman 2007). broadly speaking, the pursuit of “analytical tools capable of lifting the veil of the earth itself” (marston and himley 2021, xx) has produced two trends: works that spotlight the interface between geology and humanity and those that foreground the excess of that relationship. the first trend might be framed as a geological extension of the more-than-human approach to anthropology (tsing 2013), in which geology figures as an unstable participant in human projects (limbert 2020; oguz 2021, 2023; weszkalnys 2014); the second trend foregrounds what exceeds the human, arguing that geology demands analytic tools that moderate the significance of humans (chakrabarty 2009, 2014; harmon 2018; ialenti 2020; morton 2013). jerry zee’s (2017; 2020; 2022) work on dust management in china offers a rich example of the first of these trends, framing the meeting point between political and geo-atmospheric processes as a symmetrical “experiment” by which the two co-produce one another. for zee, these technopolitical works are not projects of control in which sand emerges as a passive object of management; rather, sand enters state strategies as an unruly participant, such that the state itself becomes sand-like. however, dipesh chakrabarty (2014, 3), a key protagonist of the second trend, argues that the “vastness” of the geological conflicts with the “familiar[ity]” of the human, because the two are “vastly different and incommensurable scales of time.” for this reason, nigel clark (2011, xvii) rejects the symmetry of actor-network theory–inspired approaches to geology, imploring the social sciences to study those “regions where we are absent” and 467the “worlds beyond us.” temporality, though not necessarily a central focus, is seldom far from these geological discussions, and the form time takes follows the contours of each analytic. on the one hand, zee (2017, 217) examines how “sand-control programs in practice make governmental control of and intervention into time a site of chronopolitical experiment, where the soaring futures of the state are reshaped through sand as a material.” working with finnish nuclear waste disposal engineers, vincent ialenti (2020, 2), on the other hand, argues that “gazing into deep time . . . is our collective responsibility” to overcome the short-term thinking that produced the anthropocene. while there are differences within and exceptions to these trends, geology in the social sciences is typically understood either at the interface or in the excess. the former foregrounds continuities between geology and humanity and the stakes, conditions, and outcomes of their embroilments; the latter turns to that with which humanity cannot be mutually engaged, questioning the possibility of ever understanding geological things. more critically: the former, to a certain extent, elides the question of scalar difference, while the latter surrenders to it. in this essay, i draw from both trends while making space for a third line of inquiry. following kathryn yusoff (2017), i understand mexico city as a “geosocial stratum,” rather than only an assortment of human things superimposed on a geological foundation: i agree that there is a connection between the endless creep of tectonic plates below and the muted unraveling of buildings above. however, mutuality and continuity are not the only ways in which we can understand human-geology relationships, and attention to peoples’ debilitating fear also requires that i keep geological excess in the frame. to properly describe being tocado, the fear that emerges in this geosocial stratum, i try to write about how it feels to live alongside what exceeds mutuality. to understand living with the latent presence of the earth, i have learned from work on environmental uncertainty, particularly on toxicity. toxicity is an epistemological problem that emerges from material processes (murphy 2006) and shifts bodily orientations to the world. writing about formaldehyde exposure, nicholas shapiro (2015, 369) describes a “chemical sublime,” an “experience and a practice” whereby “minute aberrations in the body” become a means of tracing how toxic atmospheres accumulate. processes so diffuse and unstable demand a “somatic mode of attention” (csordas 1993)—and its recognition as a real illness demands new evidentiary modes, generating new social forms, becoming what joseph dumit (2006) calls “illnesses you have to fight to get.” exposure occurs at the interface between the human and the environmental without 468a normative sense of relationality. writing of pollution in mexico city, elizabeth roberts (2017) reminds us (and i’m paraphrasing) that “becoming-with” (cf. haraway 2008) is sometimes “becoming-with shit.” like geological motion, toxicity registers on the body without being unequivocally known, and this indeterminacy both induces fear and demands new forms of embodied knowledge. indeterminacy constitutes a problem anywhere, but it is compounded by situations in which knowledge remains unreliable. this partly results from the unpredictability of seismicity (reddy 2020)—but also from that of the mexican state. in mexico, political processes and state bureaucracy routinely overlap. caciques, or powerbrokers, use clientelist networks to exercise covert influence well beyond their formal stations (castro 1984). insofar as administrative standards for bureaucratic function exist, there is room for negotiation for political benefit (de vries 2002; cf. gupta 1995). mexicans know this all too well: the politics of resolving a problem are generally understood as coterminous with the appropriation of resources and institutional power (lomnitz 1996). in this process, the mexican state, in megan crowley-matoka’s (2016) apt term, becomes “slippery”: it is inconsistent, prone to chance—one might get a good doctor in a public hospital, one might not (wentzell 2015); a flood might be an accident or an intentional calibration of the city’s overstretched drainage (chahim 2022); or, as i show, a building might have been built according to standards, but then again, it might not. the point is not that the mexican state doesn’t work, but, rather, that few can be certain it will. the state of being tocado emerges at the confluence of these geological and political uncertainties, at the edge between an excessively lively earth and the slippery architecture built atop it. these dual indeterminacies were an ongoing topic of conversation in mexico city after the earthquake of 2017. when i first met the residents who would become my interlocutors in this research, we talked about the buildings that had fallen in the earthquake. in the years that followed, we continued talking about the buildings that seemed to keep falling—those damaged in the earthquake and those ostensibly unharmed. beginning in late 2017, the informal civil society group verificado19s introduced me to members of the neighborhood assembly of earthquake victims los damnificados unidos de tlalpan (the united casualties of tlalpan). alongside them i attended weekly assemblies, protest marches, and meetings with state officials during the summers of 2018 and 2019, and again from 2020 to 2023, when i lived permanently in mexico city. we kept in touch via whatsapp, especially during the quarantine period of the covid-19 pandemic, when interlocutors would forward me photos of fractured columns and 469cracks in their apartment walls or recordings of the sounds their buildings made at night. after meeting people who described themselves as tocado, i conducted transect walks. in these walks, people would take me to their buildings or show me the architecture that made them most afraid. i grew up in australia, which has little familiarity with earthquakes, so i listened to residents’ stories with heed—including long after the friends and family of tocados had become fed up with listening to their concerns. to be tocado is, as those affected say, to be trapped in the moment of fright, in earthquake time; by being willing to listen to the stories others had tired of, i managed to inquire into the experiences generated by the 2017 earthquake. this article examines the uncertain geological knowledge that fear assembles in the form of being tocado. central to my argument is that, for buildings in mexico city, destruction is only a relative condition. they might be okay. but if they’re on the right side of livable now, no one can be sure for how long. soft soils, earthly motions, lax legislation, and corrupt developers conspire a city full of buildings that might be slowly falling, perceptible only if you know how to notice. after an acute earthquake experience, people who are tocado attune themselves to the signs that populate the spectrum between absolute and relative destruction. in this article, i follow these signs. outlining what might be considered a geological sensorium, i show how people who are tocado develop sensitivity to the barely perceptible kinesthetics of the city’s materiality. their sensitivity to ongoing geological processes induces an embodied apprehension of human vulnerability to the earth, manifesting in a sense that the 2017 earthquake has not ended. rather than being an individual pathology, an idiom of distress, or a cultural expression of a human universal, i suggest that being tocado makes for an earthly seasickness in which people are overwhelmed by the earth’s constant motion and exhausted by the demand to bridge abyssal scalar difference with their bodies. neither mutuality nor excess, a falling building constitutes an interface between the human and the geological only insofar as a precipitous cliff would mark an interface between the sky above and the abyss below. ungrounding earths as i fall onto the pavement, my eyes are fixed on the skyline. i had been looking where fernanda was pointing—where, a few blocks away, a building was hanging over the street—when my foot caught a crack that had kept itself hidden. the first time i fell over on a transect walk with an interlocutor, i felt embarrassed; by now i am used to it. at the time, i was walking with fernanda 470in doctores, visiting the buildings she expected to fall. i could have been anywhere. i could have been careening groundward during one of the dozens of memory walks (bonilla 2011) i undertook with residents across central and eastern mexico city. i could have been slotting the tire of my bike into a new crack on the road’s surface as i rode to a meeting of earthquake victims. i could have been sprawling while accompanying los damnificados unidos on their regular protest walks from tlalpan to zócalo, as they reminded the city that, for them, the 2017 earthquake was still ongoing. the gravity of the situation mattered little; if i was walking, i would at some point end up on my face, the permutations of the city’s surface catching me off guard. this is unsurprising. although the basin in which mexico city sits is (currently) 2,240m above sea level, it has spent most of its past underwater. completely submerged until the end of the tertiary period, from the late cretaceous through the middle eocene (100–38mya), a marine regression takes place, and the subduction of the cocos tectonic plate causes the north american plate to rise. what we call mexico begins thrusting its head above water about 30mya (guzmán and de cserna 1963). the friction of this movement produces vertical fractures through the continental crust of the north american plate, and magma pours upward through these discontinuities to form the trans-mexican volcanic belt, a 998km-long east-west arc of around 8,000 volcanic structures that cuts across mexico from nayarit to veracruz (pardo and suárez 1995). the valley of mexico, in the center of this belt, is at this point still a valley, hemmed by mountains to the west (sierra de las cruces), east (sierra nevada) and north (sierra pachuca), with the river rio balsas flowing south to the pacific ocean. at some point in the late pliocene, these volcanos begin erupting, sealing the southern reaches of the valley and forming a basin 5,960km2 in size (allan 1986; cantagrel and robin 1979; mooser, nairn, and negendank 1974; pasquaré et al. 1991). melting snow on nearby peaks and summer rainfall pour down the mountains; when the first human inhabitants of the region arrived around 11,000 years ago, these lakes were saltwater in the north, freshwater in the south, with rich, productive wetlands all around (bribiesca-castrejón 1960). the mexica arrived in the fourteenth century, constructed a vast system of dams to keep these waters separated, founded the city-state tenochtitlan, and forged the triple alliance between tenochtitlan, tlacopan, and texcoco in 1428. about a hundred years later, the castilian conquistador hernán cortés arrives and describes with wonder an immense city “built on a salt lake” that “rises and falls with its tides as does the sea” (mundy 2015, 11). the colonists found the city’s environment 471unfamiliar (cf. melville 1994), so they demolished the infrastructure that managed the lakes, drained the basin (candiani 2014), established one of the largest cities in the world on the soft soil of a lakebed, and set into motion a now half-millennium-long struggle to manage the surface of mexico city (chahim 2022; de coss-corzo 2021; hoberman 1974; del valle 2022; vitz 2018). the mexican soil scientist ma del carmen gutiérrez-castorena and colleagues (2005) demonstrate the impossibility of the megacity of mexico city with a thought experiment: imagine a rectangular prism of soil, they tell us, whose face is one meter by one meter, and is 70 meters long, the length of the deepest point of the clay layer beneath mexico city. seventy cubic meters of ground, cubic meter by cubic meter. were this imaginary column put into an oven at 105 degrees celsius for four days, its water would evaporate, and we’d have less than seven cubic meters of soil. then, once the air pockets that held the water had collapsed, there would be just over half a cubic meter of solid material remaining. although the lakes are gone, mexico city still floats. sort of. as the city grew, it burrowed into the soft soil beneath it (zeevaert 1953). sinking at an average of twenty to thirty centimeters per year, the city shows surface fissures, particularly in the eastern regions of iztapalapa and tláhuac (osmanoğlu et al. 2011). fifteen of the city’s sixteen delegations are considered subject to earthly disturbance, with benito juárez, iztapalapa, cuauhtémoc, and tláhuac especially prone (avilés and pérez-rocha 2010; see figure 1). throughout cuauhtémoc and tláhuac, where i researched, grietas, or fractures, emerge at the intersection of soils with different rates of subsidence, appearing as writhing concrete and slumping roads. the city’s empty underground generates an active surface. so, while i wouldn’t recommend tripping as a method, it did prompt conversation about what was happening under us. as i dust myself off, people say, es un desmadre (this path is a mess), or words to that effect, with sympathy and a stifled smile. then they reflect on the motion beneath us, branching easily from ¡aguas! (watch out!) to a meditation on the crack that made me trip. we were never short of material. concrete cracks; gutters that might once have stood a foot above the street level sink, dragging the road with them; the camber of the streets swing from side to side along their length; holes emerge along these streets that gradually swallow the road itself. as i fall with fernanda in doctores, she says, “you can’t trust it, pinche ground.”4 with two fingers, she follows as the crack splinters into discrete but connected fissures: one that passes from the footpath to the road adjacent—a patch of subsidence undermining the street, perhaps—and another that digs its way underneath a nearby building to 472do unseen work to its foundations. “it’s not only the cracks,” she tells me, “it’s whatever else is happening down there.” figure 1. digital map of the distribution of fractures and subsidence across mexico city. from dora carreón freyre et al. (2017). whatever’s happening down there is an ongoing concern for people who describe themselves as tocado. fearfulness of seismicity makes them hypersensitive to these cues of earthly motion. many things bring a building down in mexico city, but the hollow earth is central, slowly giving way for years, such that a standing building might just be hovering. alongside cracks and subsidence in the earth’s surface, residents track where water pools after summer rains to see if they might follow the ancient waterways to future seismic risk. but more often, they use buildings to understand the action of the unseen earth beneath them, as if buildings were antennae that caught signals of hidden geophysical motion. 473 angles of uncertainty when i tell josé enrique that i can’t see what he is seeing, he clicks his tongue. “i think it gets a little wider at the top,” i say, “but i couldn’t tell you for sure.” as i look across the two-meter atrium outside his bedroom window to the apartment opposite, he tells me, impatiently, “it’s getting bigger. you think i’m crazy, but i see it every day. i know it’s getting bigger.” i squint out the window again (figure 2). it seems to get smaller toward the building’s base, but i can’t tell if my eyes are tricking me, my perspective distorting the angle. ever since he noticed the gap, a year or so after the earthquake, josé enrique struggles to sleep, has higher blood pressure, and finds himself occasionally “seized by terror.” though he experienced several of the city’s major earthquakes, he tells me that he feels different after 2017. his family is worried, as much for him as for the building; like others across the city, he told me with some resentment: “they just think i’m crazy.” but in apartments like josé enrique’s, on the fourth level of a mid-century building in central colonias like guerrero, where numerous buildings have fallen, these gaps take on great importance. figure 2. gap widening in the wall across josé enrique’s atrium. photo by lachlan summers. 474people know the stories of buildings that suddenly collapse in mexico city. they know stories of people like the architect max tenenbaum, who designed numerous buildings throughout the capital, one of which fell in 1985 (the city’s largest earthquake) and two of which fell in 2017 (yañez 2018). they know how figures like him became obscured in the institutional flurry to reform architectural codes post-1985 (alcocer and castaño 2008), and that despite his fallen building, and despite his flight from the country in 1986 (stockton 1986), he could become a corresponsable en seguridad estructural (steward of structural safety, or cse) in new institutional bodies charged with verifying the structural security of buildings throughout the city. people in mexico city know that while the government might describe directores responsables de obra (liable director of construction, or dro) and cses as separate “assistants of public authority” (gobierno de la ciudad de méxico 2019), architects like tenenbaum can be the dro who designs and oversees a building’s construction and the cse who reviews its adherence to architectural codes. because developers will fire cses and dros that require them to use more durable, and so more costly, construction materials, a market has developed in mexico city for what is known colloquially as firmones (signers): dros and cses who can be paid to sign blueprints without verifying them. residents know that, despite the increased attention that dros and cses received after the 2017 earthquake, and despite the notoriety of his three fallen buildings, tenenbaum renewed his dro license in november 2017. *   *   * but this story is not about max tenenbaum. rather, it concerns the widespread fear that residents have of the impossibility of knowing whether the slippery hands of someone like him pocketed the money and drew the designs for the building unraveling around them. while, in june 2016, then jefe del gobierno miguel ángel mancera promulgated a decree that would curtail loopholes that let people like tenenbaum design and verify buildings,5 residents knew that even if it were to result in legislation, it would never result in a meaningful procedure of enforcement. (either way, it didn’t; mancera suspended the decree in november 2016.) for instance, people fearful of seismicity point out billboards that sit atop residential housing. in 2004, the mexico city government decreed that, because of the risk they posed in strong winds and earthquakes, all billboards needed to be removed from residential buildings. eventually, the mexico city government promulgated a law that prohibited billboards on residential housing and set into motion a plan for their removal (gobierno de la ciudad de méxico 2010). 475and yet, during the 2017 earthquake, viaducto miguel aleman 106 collapsed under the extra weight and resonance of a billboard, scheduled for removal since 2014, killing eleven people (instituto de verificación administrativa del distrito federal 2015).6 to today, billboards sit atop residential buildings throughout the city, prominent markers of the state’s inability to enforce the laws it promulgates. it is for these suspicions that seemingly innocuous angles, like that which might be widening outside josé enrique’s bedroom, feel so unsettling. cracks, gaps, and angles make for uncertain markers of a process, signs that invite skepticism toward a building’s permanence. attention to these signs can make people sick. i accompany ana on her route to the pesero (minibus) that takes her to the salon where she works, so we can pass a building she scrambles under each morning. when we’re a few blocks away from it, she grabs my arm and says, “ay, it gives me vertigo, even from here.” ana has told me that she suffers from two types of vertigo. one is a lightheaded feeling, induced by being in high buildings—which only began affecting her after the 2017 earthquake. the other describes what she feels when she passes buildings like this one: “it makes me dizzy when i’m underneath it. it’s as if i feel it pressing onto me.” i don’t understand what she’s talking about until we reach the base of the building, at which point i feel it too. it is as if the top of the building is rushing down on top of us. at the base of the two buildings, there’s a gap of a few millimeters; five levels above, it spreads to about half a meter (figure 3). the structures are not condemned, and they seem occupied, but the buildings have splayed away from one another, upright only for the support of the buildings on their opposing sides. ana begins breathing heavily, and we walk away to watch the structures from a safe distance. after catching her breath, ana says angrily, “every day i pass by it, and it looks bigger. like it has suddenly grown. i don’t know if there was a little tremor, if something underneath has given way, but they’re moving. how long until they come down?” i feel dizzy too, like a reverse vertigo, induced by the proximity of a tall thing so unsteady. “when they come down, those buildings come down with them,” she continues, waving her arm laterally, “why the fuck are they still allowed to be up?” as i walk home, i trip again, but this time because i’m trying to calculate what an admissible incline for these buildings might be. the mexico city government’s normas técnicas complementarias para diseño y construcción de estructuras de concreto (supplementary technical standards for the design and construction of concrete structures) denotes the “coefficients of 476seismic design” required by article 181 of mexico city’s reglamento de construcciones para el distrito federal (building regulations for the federal district), specifying that a building may only lean 0.43 percent of its height. if they are twenty meters tall, which is my impression, it should only lean 8.6cm. this doesn’t help. how would 8.6cm appear from twenty meters below? would it be safe if it were only eight centimeters? seven centimeters? if it isn’t yet 8.6cm, how long until it would be? figure 3. two splaying buildings, tlalpan. photo by lachlan summers. internalizing inhuman times there’s no electricity, unsurprisingly, so julio and i begin climbing the stairs to his former apartment on the fifth story. though we’re technically indoors, a disquieting breeze howls down the central stairwell of the building. thick dirt and rubbish from the street mingle with the lighter dust generated by the building itself. with several load-bearing columns buckling during the 2017 earthquake, julio’s building was condemned, and he and other residents moved in with family or friends. a year after the earthquake, the building owner still permitted residents to leave their belongings there. almost as soon as julio 477unlocks the door to his apartment, it flings heavily against the wall of his former living room, as if the building were leaning at such an angle that the door would open itself if it weren’t locked shut. i look through the living room to his bedroom, see the city beyond, and struggle for a moment to understand my senses. half of his bedroom wall has fallen from the building; light and dust pour into his apartment. there is no real division between the outside world and inside the building (figure 4). “fucking hell, julio, why do you lock the door?” i ask in english, and he laughs. figure 4. julio’s bedroom wall. photo by lachlan summers. he points toward the crack running behind the interstate 5 poster on his wall. “that’s from september 7,” he tells me, the 8.1m earthquake that preceded september 19, 2017, though that earthquake is generally described as not having caused damage in mexico city. the september 7 earthquake was massive—the largest in mexico’s modern history—but julio describes it in mexico city as “just a jolt”; it struck near midnight, he got out of bed and went downstairs for a few minutes, but didn’t think too much of it. in the light of the following morning, he saw the crack across his wall. “i was like, ‘shit,’ but it didn’t seem too bad. every building has cracks, so i didn’t think about it.” once again, i look through his apartment to the city beyond. the crack that had commenced at midnight on september 7 gave way twelve days later, and it’s hard for julio to know how his building would have responded on the 19th had it not sustained that damage. “i didn’t realize it at the time, but that crack should have been a red flag,” julio tells me. “if i saw that now, i would run.” 478after september 19, 2017, people in still-standing buildings throughout mexico city wondered if they, too, had cracks that were waiting to give way. los damnificados unidos and their supporters told me that officials from the sistema nacional de protección civil (national system for civil protection, or sinaproc) and centro nacional de prevención de desastres (national center for disaster prevention, or cenapred) had responded to calls from people worried about the new cracks. however, the scale of the disaster meant that they were overstretched, so state resources became harder to access. chilangos turned to other methods. they used the hashtag #revisamigrieta (unfortunately only translatable as #checkmycrack) on social media, as residents posted photos of fissures and people who claimed to be engineers or architects verified them. small groups of civil responders, particularly the group ciudadanía19s, organized architects and engineers to respond to calls for building checks, but gradually focused on pressuring the government to create a city-wide risk atlas. mexico city remains littered with markers of its seismic history, angry gaps in the skyline that mark the buildings that once were. carparks in central parts of the city—particularly roma sur and doctores, working-class districts that hem tourist zones—correspond with the registry of buildings damaged in 1985, making these gaps perhaps the most prominent markers of seismicity throughout the city. they commonly appear on street corners, where buildings are exposed to two shearing forces, rather than only one. while a few parking lots emerged after the 2017 earthquake, most sites of fallen buildings remain boarded up. i pass these sites and often see someone standing silently, looking into the void left in the skyline (figure 5). sometimes, part of the building remains, a normal structure at eye level that is busily collapsing overhead, as if the city were a surrealist landscape intended to confuse the senses. but these markers of seismic history are always in motion, often in modes that trouble standard perceptions of time. calzada tlalpan 1171 is one such building. i couldn’t understand why it was condemned until i met gloria, a former resident with whom i visited the building, who showed me photos of the fractures spiraling up its internal atrium. calzada tlalpan 1171 was finished in 1979, and by all accounts sustained severe damage during the 1985 earthquake. gloria herself moved into the building in 2003, when a large fissure hung over the stairwell and cracks began appearing inside apartments. even then, she said, the cracks seemed to spread. gloria joined her neighbors in paying for occasional repairs, becoming accustomed to chunks of wall suddenly crashing to the ground and debris piling up in common areas until someone removed it. “i can’t 479believe it now,” she told me. “but we thought we had done what we needed to make it safe. the walls and roof falling somehow didn’t bother us.” figure 5. an empty space where a building once stood, roma norte. photo by lachlan summers. after the 2017 earthquake, these cracks spread with ferocity. “they appeared in new places, bien cabrón,”7 she tells me, and she and her neighbors felt these new cracks were different. they asked the dro to check the building, and his assessment, finalized in may 2018, confirmed their fears: the building was at a “medium risk of collapse” because a reinforcement beam the residents had installed in the mid-1990s had damaged the first floor of the building. the earthquakes had compounded one another through residents’ attempts to manage the city’s seismicity. while the shearing effects of that beam in the 2017 earthquake did significant damage to the building, the assessment showed that the building had long been unsafe (figures 6–8). residents were forced out. gloria moved in with her cousin. she hasn’t been the same since: “when we received that notice, the ‘medium risk of collapse’—what the fuck is that, a medium risk of collapse?—it all changed for me. it wasn’t just the earthquake. it’s that we were so lucky . . . . it was falling the whole time . . . . the earthquake just aggravated what was always happening there. it was happening all the time, all the time, all the time.” we stand in front of gloria’s former home, its peeling gray facade flashing occasionally through the black veil that billows around it. “it’s still falling, but 480it’s still here,” gloria says, motioning to the debris on the footpath. the rubble around us, which she had once casually swept into piles, now marked something that had long gone wrong in the building. “now when i see rubble like this, or cracks, i panic. i can’t do it. i see it and my heart goes pum pum and i can’t breathe. i know that i was living in a building that was waiting to come down, and it could have done that at any point in those fourteen years . . . . i mean, yes, it didn’t fall on me. but i don’t feel like i escaped it.” i look from her building to the computer repair store next door, where two young men are bullying each other. gloria meets my gaze and shakes her head, eyes wide. figure 6. calzada tlalpan 1178, december 2008. photos from google maps. figure 7. calzada tlalpan 1178, september 2017. photos from google maps. figure 8. calzada tlalpan 1178, november 2021. photos from google maps. across the city, people worry whether the cracks in their walls indicate unseen forces in their buildings. when elena, with whom i began this essay, opens the door to her apartment, the crack is the first thing i see. it snakes its way from the kitchen through the wall that separates the bedroom from the kitchen and around the bedroom. she knows diagonal cracks are more worrisome than horizontal ones, so we pay attention to where the crack seems to pivot at an angle, and where it intersects with support beams (figure 9). this particular crack appeared a few weeks after the earthquake, deeper than those already in the apartment. a few months pass, the cracks spread, and elena’s neighbors report similar cracks, as if a connecting column was damaged, so they contact the building’s dro. he tells them the cracks are superficial, and can be repaired by resurfacing the walls. elena, gesturing around her, says, “but i had doubts.” by the time the dro had been contacted elena was finding it impossible to hold food down. it’s a problem that returns periodically, so she estimates that she has lost fifteen kilograms since the 2017 earthquake. “i’m nauseous all the time, but there’s nothing wrong with me,” she tells me. “i’ve been to checkups; 481the doctors don’t know what’s happening.” the earthquake struck while she was alone in her third-floor apartment, shaking so violently that she fell to the ground. she lay on her side, arms wrapped around her head, praying. “the headaches began immediately,” she says, “and i haven’t felt right since.” after a few sleepless weeks, she left for her brother’s house in texas. “but when i got back, it was so awful. the crack was feísima [extremely ugly], like angry; it had jumped across the wall in two weeks . . . . it wasn’t my home when i returned.” neighbors leasing their apartments left the building, but elena, who had bought the apartment with her now-deceased husband, was stuck. “where would i go?” she asks me. “and who would want to buy this place from me? i’m trapped.” figure 9. the beam where elena thinks her apartment’s crack emerged. photo by lachlan summers. a few months after contacting the dro, elena takes a pencil and, “as if it were a growing child,” draws a line across the crack and writes the date (figure 10). a few weeks later, she noticed that the crack had splintered beyond where she had initially drawn the line. she begins marking the various cracks around her apartment at several-week intervals, confirming that all continue to expand. she tells her neighbors, who do the same thing or who take photos of the cracks for provenance, corroborating that their building is indeed in motion. when i visit elena’s apartment, the various cracks are all dated several times, and patches of the wall’s surface are ripped out between dates that are close together, to check whether a crack on the surface indicated a fissure underneath. “when do you decide to date them?” i ask her, and she tells me, “sometimes i see it, and it tells me that it is worse.” figure 10. elena’s dated fissure. photo by lachlan summers. 482government guidance recommends verifying individual cracks, but not measuring their movement. yet elena’s attention to the cracks’ speed suggests that the problem is not just the damage but also the fact that an indeterminate process might have taken root in her apartment. a one-off check proves insufficient. elena dates the crack when it seems to have sped up; similarly, she leaves the apartment when she “gets the feeling” or when her cat behaves strangely, rather than on a schedule in human time, like daily, or every sunday, or on the first of the month. while not everyone dates their apartment’s cracks, residents have a sense for their movements, knowing when particular splinters occurred, and whether another tremor caused it. this attunement transforms their homes into indifferent geological entities; elena tells me, “we’re all marking these cracks, but really it’s just one crack. they all connect, i’m nearly certain; just somewhere we can’t see anything. it is one crack, wrapping itself around all of us.” as the surface of the city writhes, as the gap in josé enrique’s neighboring building widens, as the buildings near ana continue splaying, as cracks twist their way through elena’s apartment, julia stares absently out the window toward the abandoned building adjacent to hers and says to me, “se acerca el día en el que se cae encima de mi [the day that it falls on top of me is closing in].” julia had by then described to me a few times her ongoing, post-earthquake symptoms—insomnia, dizziness, claustrophobia, and sensitivity to noise. however, what interests me here is her language itself. her phrasing uses the reflexive verbs acercarse (to approach) and caerse (to fall), articulating her worry in a passive voice. such a grammatical formulation is not uncommon and perhaps meant to convey her sense of the neighboring building as an agentic subject, 483while she remains its passive object. but in the phrasing se acerca el día (the day approaches), julia herself is not approaching the day in which the building falls. the day in which the building falls is approaching her. time, in her rendering, is not organized around her position in the world, in what might be understood as a temporality that orients itself around the experience of a central individual; rather, time is happening to her, something apparent through the presence of the slowly falling building next door. it—and so she—remain within the time of the earthquake. touched by deep time it is common to hear that someone se queda tocado por el susto (stays with the fright). they are, in a very material sense, stuck in that ongoing moment. while this might seem like a local interpretation of post-traumatic stress disorder, if anthropologists are to take their interlocutors as theorists—as i am trying to do—rather than data points (bonilla 2015, xvii), we would have to accept that the term post-traumatic stress disorder is inappropriate, because some people in mexico city remain in the time of the earthquake. they are not only in human time anymore; the post of post-traumatic is plotted on the wrong calendar. rather than their affliction being induced by a traumatic experience and a fear of future earthquake events, people who are tocado fear the processes initiated during the earthquake and carried forward by sinking soils and slippery states, a form of seismic time that requires a seismic event—but is not reducible to it. neither “slow violence” (nixon 2011), nor a spectacular sublime (masco 2004), neither interface nor excess, to be tocado is to be inundated by barely perceptible processes that point to a single force, closing its grip around the person noticing them, while the city beyond continues as normal. i have described tocado as an earthly seasickness. this is not a metaphor. seasickness is induced by the sea’s motion, a perceptual incongruity that stresses the brain, inducing nausea and heightening other senses, especially smell. the form of “somatic knowing” (shapiro 2015) demanded by being tocado constitutes a state of being similarly overwhelmed with motion—though that of the earth: undulating surfaces, cracking walls, widening gaps, and sinking foundations. those who feel compelled to notice these signs become fearful of the processes they index: they feel themselves enveloped in something that happens all the time, all the time, all the time. the inevitability of the end toward which this motion points inflects these indeterminate markers of change with an uncertain urgency, impelling temporal questions like “is this new?” and “how long has it 484been like that?” but there are also questions like “how long do we have left?” and “when could we be certain?” these processes and questions contain someone who is tocado in a geological present, and they find themselves irretrievable from the moment of the earthquake, which continues all around them. the “real” cause of being tocado in mexico city is an earthquake in mexico city. this is not to say that it is a culture-bound syndrome, but rather an environmental illness produced by the valley of mexico: its social history, its geological past, and the form of statecraft that has emerged there over the past few centuries. and while recognized in mexico, being tocado por el susto is not medical; it is familiar, but humiliating, and largely elicits only pity. akin to other afflictions that blur mind, body, and environment, being tocado is an issue as much epistemological and social as it is physiological, demanding new ways of knowing and new forms of proof that sit “at the very limit of the phenomenal” (massumi 2005, 43). borne at a specific interface of lively earths and slippery architecture, it is to somatically register a destructive geosocial history, like the formaldehyde exposure of shapiro’s (2015, 387) “chemical sublime” is to “apprehend the costs of late industrial infrastructures.” but while diffuse causes like formaldehyde poisoning are too minute to constitute anything recognizably medical, the cause of being tocado is too vast and distributed for recognition. those affected are trapped in the time of the earthquake, embodying a geological scale distinct to mexico city. what is the cure for being tocado? can someone cure their earthly sickness, much like a person will get their “sea legs” to overcome seasickness? many people in mexico city perceive an earthquake as a shock, but they don’t stay with it. yet for those who se quedan tocados por el susto, few remedies appear to exist beyond embarrassed, wearying management. the political and geological forces that cause, exacerbate, and prolong earthquakes endure, so what might have been a sudden shock has become both their permanent condition (cf. choy and zee 2015) and, perhaps, that of the city. people who are tocado can only hope that the building holds, that the next earthquake is not strong, or that it strikes while they are outside. until then, there is not much more than un bolillo p’al susto. abstract in mexico city, earthquakes are so frightening that they make residents sick. sometimes referred to as being tocado (touched), the illness might be considered part of the “culture-bound syndrome” known as susto throughout the spanish-speaking americas, where acute experiences of shock—such as being trapped in a shaking 485building—induce chronic physiological outcomes. instead of explaining the illness as an idiom of social distress or a cultural interpretation of a biomedical affliction, i suggest we might better understand tocado’s symptomology by following the fright itself. people who are tocado fearfully attune their senses to the signs of seismic risk—puckering potholes, sidewalk fissures, building subsidence, cracks in apartment walls—and develop an embodied apprehension of the ongoing geophysicality of their worlds. we might thus understand being tocado as being sick with the everyday presence of deep time. [susto; earthquake; architecture; time; indeterminacy; corruption] resumen en la ciudad de méxico, los terremotos son tan aterradores que enferman a los residentes. a veces se le conoce como “tocado/a/e”, la enfermedad podría considerarse parte del “síndrome de cultura” conocido como “susto” en hispanoamérica, donde las experiencias agudas de shock, como estar atrapadas en un edificio tembloroso, induce resultados fisiológicos crónicos. en lugar de explicar la enfermedad como un idioma de angustia social o una interpretación cultural de una aflicción biomédica, sugiero que podríamos entender mejor la sintomología de estar tocado siguiendo el miedo en sí. las personas que están tocados sintonizan con miedo sus sentidos con los signos de riesgo sísmico (baches en crecimiento, fisuras en la acera, edificios de hundimiento, grietas en paredes de concreto) y desarrollan una aprensión encarnada de la geofísica de sus mundos. podríamos entender que el tocado está enfermo con la presencia cotidiana del tiempo profundo. [susto; terremotos; arquitectura; tiempo; incertidumbre; corrupción] zusammenfassung in mexiko-stadt sind erdbeben so beängstigend, dass sie die bewohner*innen krank machen. die krankheit, welche manchmal als estar tocado (berührt sein) bezeichnet wird, kann als teil des in den spanischsprachigen amerika als susto bekannten “kulturgebundenen syndroms” bezeichnet werden, wo akute schockerfahrungen chronische physiologische folgen auslösen. anstatt die krankheit als kulturspezifischen ausdruck für soziale belastung oder als kulturelle interpretation eines biomedizinischen leidens zu erklären, schlage ich vor, dass wir die symptomatologie von estar tocado besser verstehen, wenn wir dem schock selbst folgen. menschen, die tocado sind, richten ihre sinne ängstlich auf die anzeichen eines seismischen risikos aus—schlaglöcher, risse in bürgersteigen, gebäudeabsenkungen, risse in wänden—und entwickeln eine körperliche wahrnehmung der anhaltenden geophysikalität ihrer umwelt. auf diese weise erkennen wir, dass estar tocado eine art leiden an der alltäglichen präsenz von tiefenzeit ist. [susto; erdbeben; architektur; zeit; unbestimmtheit; korruption] 486 notes acknowledgments  i am indebted to los damnificados and everyone in mexico city who trusted me enough to tell me stories. this article has benefited from the keen eyes of many brilliant people: nancy chen, andrew mathews, and jerry zee provided lucid guidance when this research was becoming a dissertation chapter, while conversations with sophia roosth, leander diener, and gloria maritza gómez revuelta helped me turn that chapter into this article. i presented versions of this work at the 2022 aaa conference in seattle, where marcos mendoza and angela storey gave me helpful commentary; the 2022 ucsc graduate student conference, where i had the good fortune of brian walter as my discussant; and, most crucially, in late 2023, when sandra rozental invited me to present a draft of this article at the universidad autónoma metropolitana cuajimalpa’s taller etnografía, and she, miruna achim, and all the other brilliant people in the workshop gave me incisive comments that helped strengthen this essay’s argument and, in particular, ground it better in spanish-language literature. three anonymous reviewers gave me sharp readings and generative feedback, and the cultural anthropology editorial team proved super generous with their time and expertise—a special thanks to matilde córdoba azcárate, who helped get this piece over the line. ca’s managing editor kate herman and copy editor petra dreiser gave the ultimate version of this essay an exceedingly close and thoughtful final edit. i have not received funding for this or any other research. 1. spanish is a gendered language, so tocado is the masculine form of the word, while the feminine form is tocada, and a non-gendered form would be tocade. for simplicity’s sake, i am using tocado as the generic plural, as my interlocutors do, but whenever i do so, it should be read as tocado/a/e. 2. i use the slang chilangos to refer to residents of mexico city. 3. nervios is another illness that anthropologists have subjected to interpretation; see low 1981. 4. pinche is a difficult slang word to translate; it literally means “trickster,” but it’s used like the adjectival “fucking.” 5. i haven’t translated jefe de gobierno because i don’t really know how: it’s more than a mayor, but not quite a governor, reflecting mexico city’s status as a federal district, rather than a city or a state. 6. according to the instituto de verificación administrativa record no. inveadf/ov/a/440/2015. last accessed april 11, 2025, available at https://miedificio.contralacorrupcion.mx/assets/docs/viaducto_doc2.pdf 7. in this context, this slang expression means “with great intensity.” references alcocer, sergio m., and víctor m. castaño 2008 “evolution of codes for structural design in mexico.” structural survey 26, no. 1: 17–28. https://doi.org/10.1108/02630800810857417 allan, james f. 1986 “geology of the northern colima and zacoalco grabens, southwest mexico: 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press. zeevaert, i. 1953 “pore pressure measurements to investigate the main source of surface subsidence in mexico city.” in proceedings of the third international conference of soil mechanics and foundation engineering, 2: 299–304. zurich, switzerland: icosomef. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 463–492, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.04 economy of favors: tiered labor systems on mexico’s car assembly lines cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 400-427, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.04 economy of favors: tiered labor systems on mexico’s car assembly lines alejandra gonzález jiménez university of toronto https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1901-5725 every forty minutes, lupita receives a new batch of auto parts. she is one of hundreds of logistics workers who, across three daily shifts, distribute auto parts inside volkswagen mexico (vwm), the german transnational car corporation headquartered in puebla, 106 kilometers south of mexico city.1 lupita is employed by servimsa, one of the three companies subcontracted to handle the distribution of auto parts inside the car factory.2 with a handheld scanner, lupita first registers the auto parts’ arrival at her line, scanning barcode after barcode printed on stickers on styrofoam boxes, metal containers, and plastic crates. next she opens the packages and quickly removes the bubble wrap covering the pieces that make up fuel tanks. then she ensures the auto parts are neither damaged nor defective and verifies that they are arranged in the sequence corresponding to cars already moving on the line, a task known in logistics parlance as elsecuenciado (sequencing). for the final step, lupita delivers the auto parts in an organizational cart to a team of autoworkers.3 to unpack the hundreds of auto parts that pass through her hands daily, lupita needs gloves. gloves protect her hands from wear and tear caused by the repetitive task of unwrapping and also shield auto parts from her fingerprints. gloves, however, are a scarce item for logistics workers. whenever they ask supervisors for gloves, the usual response is “sí, ahorita te los traigo [yes, i’ll bring them in a bit].” yet gloves never arrive. lupita instead frequently obtains gloves from adrian, a male autoworker directly employed by the car factory. the shortage or abundance of gloves is a subtle manifestation of how autoworkers and logistics workers experience a tiered labor system in their day-to-day. uneven working conditions have opened a sphere in which items such as gloves are exchanged. focusing on these exchanges reveals how the hierarchies and inequalities intrinsic to and constituting global car production become reconfigured on the assembly lines by means of an economy of favors. through an ethnographic analysis of the economy of favors, this article attends to the sociality among workers situated in a tiered labor system. inequalities in segmented labor markets inside factories are nothing new (cross 2015; de genova 2010; de neve 2016; lugo 2008; mollona 2009; rothstein and blim 1992; safa 1995; strümpell 2008; yelvington 1995). yet, as anthropologists have shown, supply-chain production—organized through subcontracting, outsourcing, and knitting together varying forms of social difference (tsing 2009)—has created conditions under which workers situated in uneven labor regimes toil side by side (gonzález-polledo and sabaté muriel 2019; kasmir 2014; parry 2013). in mexico’s car factories, supply-chain car production has brought together senior autoworkers who are almost always male and unionized with subcontracted logistics workers who are almost always young and female. to explore the interplay between proximity and unevenness on mexico’s car assembly lines, i analyze the economy of favors at vwm.4 favors (favores) constitute asymmetrical exchanges of material and nonmaterial assistance between autoworkers and logistics workers. the circulation of favors illuminates a distributive field of complex relationships among unevenly situated workers. similar to marcel mauss’s (2016) gift, a favor has the potential to foster, sustain, and disrupt social relations—or to create unwanted relationalities. on mexico’s car assembly lines, favors exchanged between logistics workers and autoworkers also make for instrumental exchanges: they serve to help people obtain something needed immediately. the objects of exchange range from essential, job-related items (such as protective gear) to acts of assistance that help workforces cope with the exhaustion and stress of their fast-paced workdays. autoworkers and logistics workers do not actively seek out favors. rather, the economy of favors arises as an unintended—yet unavoidable—consequence of a tiered labor system that intersects with accelerated automobile production. just-in-time production (jit), which revolutionized fordist production, is characterized by structuring production with no temporal buffers between processes and a fast-paced line.5 here, i show how jit has engendered interdependences between unevenly situated workforces on the assembly lines. supply-chain production, jit, and labor flexibilization all interrelate in constituting the structure of global production. close ethnographic attention illuminates their nuances, revealing the conjuncture and the ways in which each impinges on the sociality among tenured and subcontracted workers. while ample research has shown how gender, age, and status interplay to form a segmented labor market (benería and roldán 1987; fernández-kelly 1983; mills 1999; ngai 2005; ong 1987; safa 1981, 1995), this article sheds light on how gender and age reconfigure a tiered labor system. although in mexico gendered, uneven labor regimes have long coexisted within the same household (benería and roldán 1987; rothstein 2007), the division of labor inside car factories created by supply-chain car production has blurred this spatial separation. the economy of favors provides a lens through which to examine how social differences and sexual discourses intersect with the structure of global production. favors reveal the ways in which a constellation of power relations among unevenly located workforces are engendered on the lines. i show how the inequalities and hierarchies inherent in a tiered labor system are naturalized by how gender and age intersect with factory hierarchies. in what follows, i lay out social differences between workforces by historically situating logistics workers and autoworkers. i then ethnographically center the analysis on the economy of favors to illuminate how workforces enact, reinforce, and interrupt a tiered labor system. in any of their renditions, i argue, favors ultimately reproduce and further entrench modes of subjection that characterize but also transcend uneven labor regimes. an ethnographic analysis of the economy of favors provides insights into the ways in which workforces experience the precariousness of flexibility and how inequalities and hierarchies become recast in the service of capital. knitting inequalities the reorganization of automobile production into supply chains segmented the fordist production model into three clearly defined processes: the manufacture of auto parts, the distribution of those parts, and car assembly (cowen 2014). inside car factories, supply-chain production created a new division of labor in which autoworkers assemble cars from the auto parts that logistics workers prepare for them. although neither autoworkers nor logistics workers own the means of production (marx 1993), the restructuring of global production over the past five decades has situated mexican workforces differently in relation to capitalism, the nation-state project, factory structures, and each other. both workforces enter the shop floor as historical subjects that represent, embody, and are made to embody the histories and processes that have reconstituted them as industrial workforces, as instruments of labor, and as gendered subjects. autoworkers are a residual, predominantly male, industrial workforce whose labor regime was initially shaped by the social contract among organized labor, companies, and the state under state-led industrialization, which promised stable employment and social mobility (bachelor 2001; bennett and sharpe 1985; lenti 2017). although in the 1990s the full-force labor flexibilization (harvey 1989) via the north american free trade agreement (nafta) (healy 2008; juárez nuñez and babson 1998) shattered this promise, certain elements of the triadic social contract remain observable in the working conditions experienced by autoworkers today (babson 2000; middlebrook 1995). in mexico’s social imaginaries, autoworkers are still considered among the crème de la crème of the working classes. vwm continues to directly employ its autoworkers, whose union, sindicato independiente de trabajadores volkswagen de méxico (sitiavw), is fifty years old and one of three independent unions among the twenty-seven car factories in mexico.6 on the lines, autoworkers hold a high status within the factory’s hierarchy and are endowed with the prestige of belonging to a labor union with a record of successful labor struggles.7 they command power based on seniority (they are generally older than logistics workers) and knowledge: the know-how of car production, knowledge about how the vwm factory works and how unions should work, and life experience. autoworkers continue to signify and embody the promise of social mobility that has infused projects of industrial development. logistics workers, on the other hand, constitute a casual flexible workforce (cowen 2014; bonacich 2005; de lara 2018; graham 1995; sowers 2017). as a workforce inside mexico’s car factories, logistics workers emerged during the 1990s as part of the entangled transformations to implement supply-chain production to align mexico with nafta (bueno 1998; carrillo 1990; juárez nuñez 1998). media and government often highlight logistics jobs as an example of the employment opportunities generated by free trade. although logistics work in the automotive sector has indeed contributed to the younger generation’s labor participation in the formal economy, it has also given rise to one of the most precarious workforces among those formally employed in mexico’s export economy. at vwm, three different companies handle the distribution process. the logistics workers they employ are notably younger, and though they are unionized, their unions are company unions.8 to convey the hierarchal distinctions and privileges between directly employed and subcontracted workforces, logistics workers refer to autoworkers, tongue-in-cheek, as “los intocables [the untouchables].” this moniker reveals how class and status hierarchies inherent to supply-chain production are experienced daily on the assembly lines. but the name also conceals the ways in which gender and age intersect in reinscribing class and status hierarchies and inequalities beyond the factory shopfloor. figure 1. almost-finished cars moving on the assembly line. photo by alejandra gonzález jiménez. unevenness on the shop floor in logistics work inside car factories, female labor continues to drive the circuits of commodity production (fernández-kelly 1983; iglesias prieto 1985; mills 1999; ngai 2005; ong 1987; safa 1981; salzinger 2003). although no explicit gender and age policy exists, both logistics workers and autoworkers concur that the three logistics companies operating inside vwm predominantly hire young women for the role of general helpers to deliver auto parts to autoworkers. the mexican economist huberto juárez nuñez (2006, 15) suggests that supplier companies prefer hiring “young women and single mothers … without any union background or any connection to vwm assembly workers.” during my fieldwork at the factory, i observed this myself: predominantly female workers (in red, green, or yellow polo shirts) unpacked auto parts on tables located a few meters from the lines, whereas mostly male workers (in white overalls embroidered with the blue vw logo) assembled cars. the car corporation’s publicly available data also shows an uneven gender distribution: in 2021 the factory directly employed 4,775 women, a number that includes nonunionized positions (empleados de confianza), autoworkers (trabajadores/obreros del automóvil), and administrative and marketing staff.9 women constituted 20 percent of the approximately 7,000 unionized autoworkers. unevenness is also discernible in the age composition of these groups. the majority of logistics workers belong to a younger cohort, ranging in age from sixteen to forty-five; autoworkers range from twenty to sixty-five. dispararities are also evident in educational levels: logistics workers typically have completed junior high school, whereas autoworkers have completed high school, technical vocational schooling, and (in some cases) college. young single mothers and older men implicitly constitute the preferred labor forces for logistics companies and car factories respectively. my interlocutors explain this preference by assuming that single mothers are less likely to quit their jobs—a significant factor, because logistics work is characterized by high turnover. young people graduating from high school are imagined as not having any dependents and thus likely to continue looking for less precarious jobs. the preference for young single mothers as the labor force suggests a shift in the gendered and age-based ideologies guiding global commodity production. in the early years of export production young women were the preferred labor force because they were imagined as daughters, wives, or sisters with no dependents and therefore no need for higher wages (fernández-kelly 1983; iglesias prieto 1985; mills 1999; ngai 2005; ong 1987; safa 1981). in the era where export production is one of the main gateways to employment, young women are interpellated as mothers and breadwinners who would work regardless of low wages (see also zuñiga 2013). single-mother logistics workers are constructed as “having an economic need” (tienen una necesidad económica) that assumes that any single-mother logistics worker—unlike single-father logistics workers or any other logistics worker—will look to male autoworkers for economic protection even if they are married. autoworkers, factory managers, and other logistics workers imagine single-mother logistics workers as ofrecidas, a word that derives from the verb “to offer” yet has a double meaning in mexico. ofrecida refers to 1) a person who offers to do a favor in a subservient manner, and 2) a person who easily agrees to have sexual relations. adding an extra layer to this sexualized construction and assumption of “loose morals,” female logistics workers are often described as “fresh meat” (carne fresca) when they first arrive at the assembly lines. male autoworkers, on the other hand, are constructed as womanizers who, when given the opportunity, will prey on young female logistics workers. this hypersexualized construction is in tandem with, and reinforced by, autoworkers’ status within the factory hierarchy. on the factory shop floors, young female logistics workers (whether single mothers or not) are cheap and devalued labor yet also hypersexualized subjects because of their assumed needs and loose morals.10 discursive practices show the ways in which factory workers are simultaneously constituted as instruments of labor and sexualized subjects (ong 1987; salzinger 2003; yelvington 1995).11 variegated and polyvalent power relations emerge from the intersection of gendered and aged relationships with levels of education and work experience. in spite of how workforces are interpellated, the sociality between autoworkers and logistics workers on the lines is multivalent and complex. some autoworkers are indeed harassers and womanizers who try to take advantage of young female logistics workers. as the economy of favors illuminates, however, the relationships between logistics workers and autoworkers cannot be reduced to those of male predator and female victim. on the lines, workforces disrupt such discursive constructions, thus illuminating the constitution of masculine and feminine subjectivities within and outside of production relations (salzinger 2003). the polyvalent relationships between logistics workers and autoworkers are crisscrossed by other existing social differences and by the tiered labor system that brought these workforces shoulder to shoulder in the first place. thus, even when the constructions of “male predator autoworker” and “female ofrecida logistics worker” become disrupted, other forms of gendered dynamics are reproduced. i suggest that tiered labor systems build in and legitimate labor consent through gendered and age relationships. working under a tiered labor system inequalities between autoworkers and logistics workers are evident from the moment workforces are recruited to the daily working conditions. in contrast to autoworkers, aspiring logistics workers must present proof of no criminal record to be considered for hire. for unemployed individuals, the process of acquiring a carta de antecedentes no penales (letter of no criminal record) is both cumbersome and costly, as it entails a fee of 260 pesos (us$12.46) and requires a visit to a government office. aspiring workers must submit original and copied documents of identification, proof of address, and a birth certificate, and the process can consume an entire morning. most aspiring workers accept the logistics companies’ offer to cover the cost of the criminal record check, and once someone is hired the company deducts that cost from their weekly wages over four weeks. precarity has created a dual entangled transformation: people are recruited as workers-debtors, and companies serve as employers-financiers.12 on the lines, the tiered labor system manifests in subtle ways. autoworkers regularly receive gloves, boots, protective eyewear, earplugs, back-support belts, a bag with tools necessary for assembling auto parts, and several uniforms (which a laundry service washes at the end of the work day), as well as subsidized meals in the factory’s cafeterias. by contrast, logistics workers receive only one pair of gloves, two polo shirts, a pair of boots, and a pair of arm-socks to protect their upper limbs from cardboard and metal scratches; after one year, they receive an apron and a third polo shirt (and another shirt after each additional year). they pay three times more than autoworkers do for meals in vwm cafeterias. mistakes that could interrupt production and their handling further signal the experience of tiered labor systems in the day-to-day. an autoworker who finds a damaged, defective, or wrongly sequenced auto part takes that piece to a facilitator (another autoworker who is responsible for assisting autoworkers’ teams on the line). the facilitator removes the auto part from the production process (dar de baja el material) by placing it on a table (located on the lines) whose sole purpose is to hold damaged, defective, or wrongly sequenced auto parts. finally, the facilitator delegates the task of finding the right piece and alerts autoworker teams further along the line that a specific car is missing a part. meanwhile, the autoworker who identified the problem promptly resumes their work. for logistics workers, by contrast, encountering a damaged, defective, or wrongly sequenced auto part initiates a lengthy and burdensome bureaucratic process. the worker who identifies the issue must first locate the direct logistics supervisor—not an easy task given that supervisors are always on the move within large areas of operation. the easiest way to reach a supervisor is via a phone call, but because there are no phones on the assembly lines, both logistics workers and logistics floor supervisors must use their personal cellphones at their own expense (and most logistics employees rely on prepaid cards).13 the use of personal cellphones for work-related matters is one example of how companies subtly shift the associated daily expenses of business operations onto workers.14 both logistics supervisors and logistics workers collaborate on completing several forms to be submitted to the production coordinator, a non-unionized worker who is directly employed by the car factory. reporting and recording problems with auto parts serves multiple purposes. it is the initial step toward rapidly finding a replacement. in cases of damaged auto parts, it also creates a way for logistics companies handling the final phase of the distribution process to deflect responsibility for the damage—an important step, because a stopped line incurs fines. logistics floor supervisors and logistics workers also collaborate on retracing the damaged part’s trajectory in the supply chain to try to locate the origin of the problem. this is not an easy task: before reaching their final destination, auto parts undergo an extensive journey, during which they are handled, loaded, and unloaded multiple times by workers employed by various logistics companies. mishaps can occur at the manufacturing site before the parts are packed for delivery; during handling by forklift operators responsible for the boxes or containers in which they are packed; or after arriving at warehouse 29a—vwm’s distribution center. througout the auto-parts’ journey, logistics workers can accidentally drop the packages. supply-chain production did not create production delays; these are historically intrinsic to industrial capitalism. yet the reorganization of production reconfigured how interrupted production is managed. during fordist production, car manufacturing was managed as a unitary production process handled by a single workforce employed by a car corporation. the car factory itself absorbed costs associated with interrupted production. heavy workloads created by backlogs, along with their accompanying tensions and animosities, were dealt with by a single (though internally divided) workforce that was unionized and mostly male. although temporary autoworkers were often blamed for any problems on the assembly lines, they and tenured autoworkers were ultimately employed by the same corporation and belonged to the same union.15 under supply-chain jit production, production delays are handled differently among workers and corporations. companies responsible for disruptions face heavy fines. in the early days of jit production at vwm, the fine was us$500 per each minute the line remained inactive (juárez nuñez 1998). in 2008 fines ranged from us$600 to us$1,000 per minute (martínez muñoz 2008). in 2019 an autoworker and a close interlocutor of mine told me that the fine had been raised to us$5,000 per minute. in addition to the monetary penalty, the error also affects the company’s standing in vw’s supplier ranking system, which can hinder the supplier’s prospects in future bids. animosities arising from bottleneck production now manifest between tenured and subcontracted workforces. supply-chain jit production has increased the possibility of tensions, because no matter how fast workers labor, they are “always on the verge of falling behind” (graham 1995, 78). along with speed, tight schedules, and the lack of temporal buffers, heavy fines exert an extra pressure on logistics workers. pressure comes from supervisors and managers employed by either the car factory or the logistics companies, who in turn face pressure from their own superiors, both german and mexican. the tense ambiance is evident in their urgent movements, loud commands, and frequent glances at their watches while writing on whiteboards that juxtapose jit’s ideal production time with real production time. in logistics work inside car factories, the most important rule is to avoid any delay or, worse, to halt production. this rule is reiterated during training sessions and at the beginning of each workday. logistics workers must proactively anticipate and address any potential issues that could affect production. a logistics worker deemed responsible for interrupted production may face suspension from work for a few days, leading to a loss of wages that in turn leads to a loss of the monthly bonus, which is based on attendance, responsibility, and punctuality. suspension can result in a loss of us$40 per month in wages. if the problem creates a chain of disruptions, causing the line to stand still for an extended period, the logistics worker(s) held responsible face(s) the car factory’s security guard instead of the logistics company supervisor. the penalty for a major disruption, aside from suspension from work, involves the perforation of the swipe card, known as caet, used by workers to enter the factory. a hole punched in the card indicates a worker’s probation; with the third hole, a worker is fired from their position without any input from logistics companies. fired workers also find themselves blacklisted, preventing them from entering the car factory through a different supplier in a period of five years. a severe punitive action, suspension from work is now part of the repertoire of harsh disciplinary techniques constituting the histories of global commodity production. such techniques include limiting access to the factory clinic and bathrooms, meticulously monitoring prayer rooms, and prohibiting talking among workers (fernández-kelly 1983; graham 1995; ngai 2005; ong 1987; wright 2006; yelvington 1995). to drive them to keep up with the demanding jit schedules, logistics workers are subjected to similarly strict regulations imagined to achieve 100 percent worker efficiency. yet suspension from work, which heavily impacts logistics workers’ household economies, obscures the fact that their lack of control over the production process has itself resulted from the extreme fragmentation of work on the assembly lines. ironically, removing control of the labor process from workers is the stated aim of taylorist fragmentation (braverman 1974). figure 2. warehouse in which one of the logistics companies operates. photo by alejandra gonzález jiménez. accommodating hierarchies the tiered labor system has opened a sphere of exchange between autoworkers and logistics workers. in this sphere, material and nonmaterial assistance circulate in the form of favors. in exchange of a favor, reciprocity is often expected. take the case of lina, a twenty-five-year-old logistics worker who needs a back-support belt to move containers. when she requested one, her supervisor told her to ask an autoworker, because the logistics company had not provided them in a while. after receiving a belt from an autoworker, lina knew that she eventually would have to repay the favor: “once you start asking for favors, you know that, when they [autoworkers] send you to get a coke, you have to do it.” getting protective gear and fetching drinks or snacks make for the most common favors, yet these two types of favors differ significantly. fetching drinks for autoworkers doesn’t replicate the transactional logic expected when logistics workers ask for protective gear. even in the cases where a logistics worker repays a favor to an autoworker, the autoworker still pays for the drinks. in such an exchange, the logistics worker repays with the action, time, and labor it takes to fetch something. neither workforce is allowed to leave production lines, but logistics workers enjoy a bit more flexibility. logistics workers return the favor to autoworkers by walking for ten to twenty minutes round-trip, often under a scorching sun, to the convenience stores or food stands located within the sprawling three hundred–hectare factory (equivalent to about 741 american football fields). autoworkers are not obligated to reciprocate logistics workers’ favors, as they remain in the position of giver by paying for their own drinks and snacks as well as for those for the logistics workers who fetch them. in such an exchange, the gifts of time and labor reinforce logistics workers’ subservient position. figure 3. the factory grounds are 300 hectares. photo by alejandra gonzález jiménez. favors extend beyond merely differentiating the haves from the have-nots. much like gifts, favors act as vehicles for engendering, maintaining, and reproducing the tiered labor system. favors play a crucial role in shaping and reinforcing the complex web of social interactions and power dynamics within the factory. a closer look at the grammar of favors reveals how hierarchies implicitly play out within exchanges between workforces. when logistics workers ask for industrial protective gear, they present their query as an open-ended question. the expressions “¿oye, podrías hacerme un favor? ¿puedes conseguirme un cinturón? [hey, could you do me a favor? can you get me a belt?]” or “¿un favor, podrías darme unos guantes? [a favor, could you get me some gloves?]” are properly formulated questions that do not assume that the favor will be granted. podrías is a conditional form (pospretérito) of the verb poder (can) and indicates the possibility of something happening under the condition that something else happens prior to it. to acquire gloves or belts, logistics workers must first seek the agreement of an autoworker to perform the favor. the way the request is formulated implicitly reflects deference toward autoworkers. in this way, the act of requesting favors becomes a means through which logistics workers reaffirm and reinforce their position of subordination in the factory hierarchy. autoworkers asking logistics workers to fetch drinks or snacks don’t give an explicit order, but neither do they present their query as a choice. autoworkers might say, “oye, por favor hazme el favor de ir por las cocas [hey, please do me the favor of getting the cokes].” they are rhetorically asking for a favor and simultaneously issuing a command. “hey, please do me the favor of getting the cokes,” is an illocutionary act that, even before the action is done, already performs the action in speech (austin 1975). the phrasing assumes the action will indeed get done. repaying a favor doesn’t seek to nullify the first favor, nor does it aim to cultivate a relationship. instead, repaying a favor to autoworkers serves to prevent souring relationships among coworkers. desire, a twenty-five-year-old woman responsible for unwrapping side-view mirrors, explains the position that logistics workers often find themselves in when confronted with requests from autoworkers: “you can’t say no because then you are going to have a bad relationship with autoworkers; i see them every day!” autoworkers’ requests for favors elicit diverse personal responses and reactions from logistics workers. mariana and pedro, both in their early twenties, have no objections to this arrangement. “it is ok to get las cocas [coke],” pedro points out, “because it is very hot on the assembly lines; we get las cocas, and they [autoworkers] pay for them.” in contrast, desire resents being sent to run an errand: “they think that because you are young and working in logistics services, you have to serve them.” reactions to autoworkers’ requests depend on various factors such as mood, level of fatigue on a particular day, rapport, whether production is moving seamlessly, and other contextual elements. consequently, the logistics workers’ responses vary daily. despite the individual perceptions of fairness or resentment, the act of asking through an implicit command or through an open-ended question renders visible, reiterates, reinforces, and reproduces the hierarchical positions in which logistics workers and autoworkers are located. the ways both workforces ask for, respond to, and enact favors illuminate the process of subjectification induced by their positionality within the tiered labor system. it also reveals the cultural construction associated with types of work. assembling cars requires know-how, schooling, and experience; logistics work is unskilled labor that requires only a high school degree. assembling produces the ultimate commodity, a car. logistics work, on the other hand, lies between and connects two processes that produce material commodities. although it is a site of accumulation, and the labor involved in the distribution process is essential to keep the supply chain of car production moving, logistics work is described as a service, because it doesn’t produce a tangible commodity. in mexico, where manufacturing has been historically heralded as the path of social mobility, service constitutes devalued work in the eyes of autoworkers and logistics workers alike. ironically, reciprocating favors produces more service on the part of logistics workers, thus reinforcing the assumption that logistics workers are at the service of autoworkers. greasing the wheels of production favors are a by-product of the conjuncture of sociohistorical processes playing out on the assembly lines. a tiered labor system that exists within the same workplace and structures labor relations and working conditions also shapes the field in which both groups find themselves working next to each other. favors also illuminate the ways in which corporations reduce the costs of production by not providing equipment. but requests for drinks or snacks also result from how a tiered labor system coalesces with the fast-paced assembly line, tightly scheduled production, and restrictions on workers’ movements within the factory grounds.16 among unevenly located workforces, this conjuncture has engendered interdependences revealed through favors. although incidental rather than intentionally constructed, the economy of favors mutually benefits autoworkers and logistics workers. favors also benefit car production and, by extension, corporations. since the onset of industrial capitalism, the assembly line has been designed to remain in constant movement. jit is the latest version of how such movement is put into effect via the acceleration of production. at vwm the line is designed to have cars roll out every minute and twelve seconds (equivalent to 1,500 cars in twenty-four hours). to meet production quotas, autoworkers assemble pieces on moving cars within minutes or seconds—a manifestation of how jit is a “new, faster-paced, more intensive labor process [that basically] pumps work out of workers” (kenney and florida 1993, 264; cited in smith 1997, 321). double shifts and increasing the line’s speed are mechanisms pumping work out of workers. but how do workers pump work out of themselves? earning double for extending their shifts may motivate them, but doubling the work shift is not done by choice.17 i suggest that the economy of favors enables workers to fuel their bodies so they can pump work out of themselves and meet grueling production demands. workers sustain their bodies and minds with drinks such as coke, sprite, fanta, coffee, energy drinks, and atole (a corn-based drink); snacks such as lay’s potato chips, gansitos, galletas principes, conchas mantecadas, and bimbuñuelos bimbo; or meals such as tamales (salsas, cheese, or meat surrounded by corn dough and wrapped in a banana leaf or corn husk), tortas (sandwiches), memelas (fried or toasted cakes made of corn dough topped with salsas), and maruchan instant lunch soups. sugary drinks and foods with high caloric content—cheaply available since the advent of nafta and contributing to the rise of diabetes in mexico (gálvez 2018)—help workers deal with the exhaustion, hunger, and stress caused by the demands of high speed, pressure from supervisors and management, and time constraints. for workers in the first shift (6:30 am to 3:30 pm), such drinks, snacks, and meals might be their first bite of the day, because factory shuttles pick them up from their homes between 4:30 am and 5:30 am. in this light, the economy of favors is akin to the gift-like sociality that the anthropologist jamie cross (2015) traces on the shopfloors of a belgian diamond-processing factory in india, where the exchange of gifts (homemade food, sweets, and handcrafts) among workers proves crucial for achieving high rates of productivity by helping workers cope both with intense labor control to prevent slowdowns and with the enormous pressure that they experience when working with diamonds. even when a shop floor worker gives a gift to a manager in hopes of obtaining promotions or accessing the best stones to work with, this gift-like sociality, cross argues, shows the centrality of mutual interdependence for the operation of global commodity production. interdependence among workers also plays a significant role in a more basic sense: gift exchange lightens moods and pressures, thus minimizing labor turnover despite the working conditions. similarly, favors among autoworkers and logistics workers support and sustain workers’ bodies under the extenuating conditions of global car production. like gifts in the diamond factory, favors on the car assembly lines help workers navigate their exhausting work day and the accelerated tempo of global commodity production. indirectly, both gift-like economies benefit corporations. yet the two economies of exchange also differ. whereas workers in the diamond factory actively foster a gift economy, autoworkers and logistics workers don’t seek the economy of favors. favors are not exchanged to cultivate and enhance relationships but instead serve as instrumental exchanges to meet immediate needs: protective industrial gear or sustenance for tired bodies. reinforcing a friendly relationship between autoworker and logistics worker constitutes a possible outcome of favors, rather than their logic. regardless of the outcome, asking for and doing favors shows the ways in which logistics workers and autoworkers actively seek to maneuver and navigate their day-to-day labor and working conditions. figure 4. view of a car body during the day of the virgin of guadalupe when the factory opens its doors to workers’ families. the celebration of the virgin is a few days before christmas, which is why there are piñatas in the background. photo by alejandra gonzález jiménez. tiered labor system interrupted adrian frequently gave lupita one of the eight pairs of the gloves he (like all autoworkers) received at the beginning of his shift and offered her the convenience of using his personal locker to store her handbag and jacket, sparing her from using the collective locker designated for all logistics workers on her line. from time to time, he also invited her to join him for meals in the factory’s cafeteria—a gesture that helped her save both time and money. if she had brought a lunch to work that day, she could save it for the following day, thus eliminating the need to allocate time that night or at 4 am to prepare a meal. if she had not brought a lunch, she saved money by not having to spend 30 pesos (us$1.50 us)—a third of her daily wage—for a meal in the cafeteria. for lupita, who shares her wages with her brother to support their household, such savings are significant. for adrian, however, the cost of covering his meal and lupita’s was relatively inconsequential. thanks to the subsidy for autoworkers, adrian pays only 8 pesos (us$0.40) for his meal. the combined expense of his meal and the 30 pesos for lupita’s made up about one percent of his wages.18 over months of working together, lupita (who was twenty-eight) and adrian (who was sixty) developed an amistad, defined among workforces as an ambiguous relationship between an older man and a younger woman. amistad can imply friendly relations, relations of solidarity, or romantic relations and is thus suggestive of more intimate relationships beyond the factory shop floor. occasionally, adrian also shielded lupita from experiencing one of the harshest aspects of being a subcontracted worker: the exhausting, stressful, and occasionally punitive process that logistics workers undergo when seamless production comes to a halt: whenever lupita found a damaged, defective, or wrongly sequenced auto part, adrian reported the problem to the facilitator in her stead, which spared lupita from getting embroiled in the frantic, lengthy, onerous, and weary bureaucratic process that logistics workers endure in the case of problems with auto parts. remarkably, adrian wasn’t questioned a single time. his action also protected her from autoworkers’ animosities caused by disruptions in the production process, because a missing piece can lead to production delays or even a complete halt in production, forcing the extension of work shifts to address contingencies and thus increasing the pressure and stress on autoworkers. to the degree that favors can be measured, this kind of favor is enormous. therefore, it cannot simply be repaid by sending someone to fetch sodas or food. a favor of this magnitude, lupita explained to me, makes a male autoworker feel entitled to demand that female logistics workers “go out for drinks with him or let him hug you [salir a tomar o dejar que te abrace]” or “he can turn you into his mandadera [errand person].” adrian, however, never asked lupita—or any other logistics worker for whom he has done favors—for anything in return for the numerous gloves, meals, and avoided disruptions. to an extent, their special friendship explains adrian’s protection of lupita. yet understanding adrian’s favors as only the result of their close relationship misses the fact that some of the 7,000 autoworkers work toward creating solidarity with subcontracted workers. such relationships are articulated through amistad and, paradoxically, often include favors—the medium through which the intrinsic hierarchies of a tiered labor system are enacted and accommodated on the assembly lines. shielding a logistics worker from the harsh consequences of a tiered labor system is possible only because of the hierarchies that exist between the two types of workers in the first place. simultaneously, this kind of favor interrupts the tiered labor system as its outcome alleviates a harsh aspect of labor flexibility: being the scapegoat for delays in production. the favor that shields a logistics worker signals an amistad with an autoworker. for those outside such relationships, that favor reinforces the sexualized construction of female logistics workers as ofrecidas, as amistad is often cultivated with married autoworkers. workforces consider amistad an advantageous relationship only for female logistics workers. according to amelia, a forty-five-year-old logistics worker living with antonio, a sixty-year-old autoworker, amistad gives logistics workers “certain privileges” in the form of protective gear, meal invitations, and protection from conflicts with autoworkers. her comment rings true with how favors impact logistics workers: what is given directly affects the logistics workers’ ability to work without causing too much strain on their bodies or enables them to save money. yet this description obscures how favors also impact the autoworkers’ ability to keep up with the speed of the line. the perception that favors help only subcontracted workers conceals how these exchanges mutually benefit autoworkers and logistics workers alike. amistad suggests polyvalent relationships. it exceeds the strategic and instrumental. autoworkers’ generosity cannot be explained only as the result of romantic, intimate relations (or the desire for them). such explanations would not capture the complexities and nuances of the relationships between autoworkers and logistics workers. they would conceal how their relationships—created, cultivated, forged, and sustained through heavy workloads, stressful moments, and a work system that inherently antagonizes both workforces while creating almost immeasurable pressure to not fall behind—can also constitute relations of trust and support between unevenly located workforces. favors can be acts that, for a fleeting moment, interrupt a tiered labor system. during brief occasions, favors shield logistics workers from a labor system that penalizes those at the lowest echelons of the supply chain of car production. these transient moments reveal a “moral economy” (scott 1976) forged under extenuating work conditions. paradoxically, a favor that interrupts the tiered labor system simultaneously reproduces its hierarchies, stressing autoworkers’ status as “the untouchables.” this affirmation of autoworkers’ position serves as a reminder that the economy of favors is inherently the product of, and shaped by, uneven labor regimes. undesirable relations lupita experienced a significant shift in her work routine when she was transferred to warehouse 4. relocations are common in logistics work because they offer a quick fix to high turnover rates caused by the mechanisms implementing flexibility and productivity. for logistics workers, sudden transfers entail adapting rapidly to new work areas, tasks, and auto parts. transfers also create wage delays: despite the use of facial and index fingerprint recognition for clocking in and out of shifts, the payroll office still relies on manual attendance records provided by supervisors. even though she had worked at warehouse 4 for two weeks, lupita’s name didn’t appear on the attendance list of this warehouse while in warehouse 27, she appeared as an absent worker. as she had done in the past, lupita endured the implications and hassles of yet another transfer. she had already begun the exhausting process of reclaiming her delayed wages by talking repeatedly with her supervisor and her supervisor’s supervisor. a couple of times, right after the end of her shift, she walked to the logistics company’s office, situated in an industrial park about a kilometer from her warehouse. to reach this office, lupita had to navigate a heavily trafficked road whose only designated crossing point, a narrow tunnel, was used as a dumpster and restroom—and had nearly zero visibility. lupita chose instead to cross the road by skillfully dodging fast-moving (and honking) shipping trucks, passenger buses, and cars, pausing in the middle while enveloped in a swirl of dust and exhaust fumes. because visiting the hr office meant that lupita missed the company shuttle bus, she had a prolonged commute home, riding on overcrowded buses and covering her fare while figuring out how to make ends meet until the company paid her meager wages. perhaps the only good thing about going to the company’s office was that she was spared from working until 11:30 pm; a double shift would have left her just a few hours to sleep before catching the company shuttle bus at 5:15 am for the next work day. thankfully, lupita’s supervisor ranked among the few who empathized with the plight of logistics workers and understood that as supervisors they, too, grapple with the harsh conditions imposed by a system built on and perpetuating a chain of hyperexploitative labor relations. lupita endured numerous travails involved in the transfer to a new work area. however, there was one aspect of this transfer that she refused to put up with yet again: the hassle of establishing new work relationships with a different set of male autoworkers. as she told me, “you don’t know what cunning tricks some of these workers have [no sabes que mañas algunos de estos trabajadores tienen].” after finding herself indebted to a male autoworker in warehouse 4 for the favor of reporting a damaged auto-part, lupita faced pressure to return the favor. the situation quickly turned uncomfortable when the autoworker pestered her to go out for drinks; made unwanted comments about her hair, eyes, and appearance; and kept bringing his body close to hers during the work day. fed up with the situation—and with enduring this kind of unwanted relationality across various assembly lines for more than five years—lupita quit her job. favors can be a double-edged sword. a favor granted to a young female logistics worker that directly intersects with production has the potential to create a significant debt. such a favor may generate a form of negative reciprocity in which something is obtained in exchange for nothing—or a favor of greater value is expected in return (lomnitz 2005; sahlins 1972).19 while negative reciprocity accounts for all the asymmetrical exchanges between logistics workers and autoworkers, the exchanges involving material and nonmaterial assistance frequently create a debt repaid along the same lines. however, favors directly intersecting with production are of a different caliber. they can potentially lead to asking for exchanges that go beyond immediate job-related actions. although the logic of exchanges doesn’t revolve around creating and cultivating relationships, favors can inadvertently create undesirable relations. the harassment and subjection of young female logistics workers in the mexican car factory is not as extreme as in an indian steel factory (parry 2013) or in maquiladoras located along the united states–mexico border (wright 2006): in both of those locations, female workers are regularly sexually assaulted or murdered. the female logistics workers i interacted with, on the other hand, are “only” subjected to unwelcome comments about their appearance, unwanted hugs, invitations to go out for drinks, and conversations about imaginary intimate encounters. together, the experience of young female workers in all of these settings show the multiplicity of ways in which gender and age intersect with precarious labor regimes on factory shop floors to rekindle gendered hierarchies in tandem with how modes of subjection act upon female workforces. not all female logistics workers who experience such forms of harassment have the option of quitting, though. even lupita didn’t leave her job when she first found herself cornered by male autoworkers. she escaped unwanted relationalities by being transferred to different lines. this feature of flexible labor regimes can remove female logistics workers from undesirable relationships but can also, ironically, place them in new undesirable ones. her decision to quit her job, on the other hand, removed lupita from an undersirable relationship—and also liberated her from being the target of malicious gossip (from logistics workers and autoworkers alike) because of her relationship with adrian. by engaging in amistad with a significantly older male autoworker, lupita enacted the discursive constructions that constitute female logistics workers as devalued hypersexualized instruments of labor—namely, female logistics workers as ofrecidas and with necesidad económica. in this light, quitting as a tactic counters and refutes such discourses. paradoxically, it also reproduces the cycle of disposability that characterizes female low-wage employment in the era of precarious labor regimes. after resigning from her job, lupita embarked once again on her own circulation on the supply chain of car production. she felt confident about finding another job, whether at fujikura (a supplier of wire harnesses, sensors, and electronic products) or any other supplier. while she enthusiastically shared her plans with me, i felt a pang of curiosity and couldn’t resist asking her a question, even though i knew it might sound silly. i asked lupita if she had ever complained about being harassed by an autoworker. “¿y con quién? [and to whom?]” she replied. “i told adrian and other compañeros, but … to servimsa? what is this company going to do? autoworkers are untouchable!” conclusion this article has shown how the inequalities and hierarchies constituting a tiered labor system on mexico’s car assembly lines are enacted and reconfigured through favors. by engaging with the sphere of exchange of favors, autoworkers and logistics workers reproduce their status in relation to each other, while simultaneously accommodating the hierarchies inherent to global car production. unpacking the nuances of labor flexibility illuminates the ways in which gender and age intersect with tiered labor systems along with the complex and multifaceted relationships between tenured and subcontracted workers. by shedding light on the polyvalent relationships among unevenly situated workers, i expand on jonathan parry’s (2013) insight into the dynamics of worforces within factory structures. servitude is inherent in asymmetrical exchanges, because favors enable autoworkers to assert their status within tiered labor systems. the possibility of gender-based subjection and coercion is also latent. nevertheless, favors also illustrate the diverse forms and meanings the sociality between unevenly situated workforces can take. in extenuating working days, favors serve as a support system for all workforces regardless of their status. significantly, favors reveal the ways in which workforces assert their agency to navigate and alleviate the working day. autoworkers’ agency also becomes visible in their manipulation of a tiered labor system without directly challenging it. the asymmetrical exchanges constituting the economy of favors benefit workforces, corporations, and, by extension, accumulation. focusing on the interactions between workforces within a labor system that inherently antagonizes workers inevitably raises the question of labor politics. in an era of labor precarity, class fragmentation, and the systematic dismantling of unions, labor politics remains a central question in recent labor studies (kasmir and carbonella 2014; lazar 2017). autoworkers’ momentary interruption of a tiered labor system hints at the possibility of solidarity between unevenly located workforces. although efforts are underway to overcome class fragmentation between autoworkers and logistics workers, the form of such labor politics and its potential remain open questions. structurally, mexico’s labor code and company policies prevent logistics workers from joining autoworkers’ unions and vice versa. although autoworkers’ unions have at times supported the auto-parts manufacturing workers’ efforts to form independent unions, this support is heavily influenced by the politics of the union committee, rather than constituting a collective push from autoworkers to stand in solidarity with their fellow workers along the supply chain of car production. in most cases, solidarity with workers in the supply chain remains nonexistent. autoworkers’ union committees and individual autoworkers are more concerned about protecting their hard-won gains than about revamping union politics. as a result, the defense of gains often takes the form of attacking other workforces employed in the supply chain, even resorting to false accusations such as “subcontracted workers earn more than us.” finally, interrupting logistics workers’ harsh working conditions reinforces the status of autoworkers as the “untouchables.” this may serve as a reminder that even when a favor intends to protect subcontracted workers, the economy of favors is constituted by, and unfolds within, a field of power relations. exchanges enact, reinforce, and further entrench hierarchies and inequalities among workforces. much like gifts, favors act as vehicles for engendering, maintaining, and reproducing a tiered labor system. in any of their renditions, favors reify inequalities inherent to global car production while concealing how gender and age intersect in constituting labor consent within uneven labor regimes. abstract inequalities are inherent to capitalism. however, supply-chain production has introduced new dynamics in which workers situated in uneven labor regimes increasingly find themselves working alongside one another. on mexico’s car assembly lines, autoworkers work next to logistics workers. the former belong to a residual workforce shaped by the historical triadic social contract between organized labor, the state, and companies; the latter are among the most precarious workers in the post-nafta era. this ethnographic study focuses on how a tiered labor system shapes the sociality between workforces and draws attention to the circulation of favors—asymmetrical exchanges of material and nonmaterial assistance that unintentionally arise from uneven working conditions. by delving into these exchanges, this article illuminates the ways in which gender and age intersect in reconfiguring a tiered labor system. it offers insights into the precariousness of labor flexibility by providing a glimpse into the dynamics on a factory shop floor. [supply-chain capitalism; uneven labor regimes; gender and age; gift-like economies; nafta; mexico] resumen las desigualdades son integrales al capitalismo. sin embargo, la producción organizada en cadena de suministros ha introducido dinámicas en donde trabajadores situados en regímenes laborales desiguales se encuentran cada vez más trabajando juntos. en las cadenas de montaje de automóviles de méxico, los trabajadores del automóvil trabajan codo con codo con los trabajadores de logística. los primeros pertenecen a una mano de obra conformada por el histórico contrato social entre sindicatos, el estado y las empresas; los segundos se encuentran entre los trabajadores eventuales más precarios empleados en la economía de exportación. este estudio etnográfico examina como un sistema laboral estratificado le da forma a la socialidad entre los trabajadores. el artículo se centra en los favores—intercambios asimétricos de ayuda material e inmaterial que surgen involuntariamente de las condiciones de trabajo. al enfocarse en estos intercambios, el artículo ilumina las formas en que el género y la edad se entrecruzan en la reconfiguración de un sistema laboral estratificado. al ofrecer una examinación de la dinámica laboral en una fábrica, el artículo proporciona una perspectiva de como se vive la precariedad de la flexibilidad laboral. [capitalismo; producción en cadena; regímenes laborales desiguales; género y edad; economía del don; tlcan; méxico] notes acknowledgments first, let me thank the workers who shared their work experiences, frustrations, and joys with me. i am deeply grateful for their patience with all my questions. for critical feedback along the way, i’m grateful to amira mittermaier, seçil dağtaş, and kristen drybread. for feedback on earlier drafts, i’m thankful to chantelle falconer, vivian solana, gloria clemencia pérez-rivera, columba gonzalez-duarte, and timothy makori. special thanks to julia elyachar and the cultural anthropology editorial team, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. finally, thanks to the ca production team. this article is based on field research that was supported by the wenner-gren foundation and the social sciences and humanities research council. 1. this article draws on interviews with logistics workers and autoworkers, as well as on intermittent fieldwork in puebla, mexico (2011–2019), including a brief period of working as a logistics worker inside vwm. it is part of a larger project exploring car production in post-nafta mexico. 2. logistics workers inside car factories are often called “material handlers” (graham 1995). the other two companies handling auto-part distribution inside vwm are dhl and schnellecke logistics. 3. logistics workers also pick up auto parts from manufacturing sites, distribute them on the assembly lines, and transport finished cars on car carriers to concessionaries, freight trains, and shipping ports. on the lines, they unpack, unwrap, unload, and load materials on dollies, hand trucks, and moving carts. they operate trucks, liftgates, forklifts, and railcars; they also retrieve waste from the lines and sort it with their hands to separate recycling from landfill waste, as well as fold and break cardboard with their bodies. 4. i borrow alena v. ledeneva’s (1998) term economy of favors. in the context of post-socialist economies, the economy of favors discusses ambiguous exchanges that lie between apparent acts of kindness and practices involving bribes, patronage, clientelism, and illicit exchanges (heanig and makovicky 2017). 5. also known as the toyota production system. it is celebrated as increasing production and productivity while simultaneously minimizing waste, production costs, and downtime. it was first implemented in japan (1970s), the united states (1980s), and then mexico (1990s). 6. see industriall global union, “labour reform: mexico’s independent unions highlight progress,” may 16, 2019 (accessed december 31, 2021). 7. for sitiavw labor struggles, see bensusán and tilly 2010; juárez nuñez 2006; vanderbush 1998. 8. to be a supplier, a subcontractor must meet vwm’s requirement that workforces be unionized. however, unionization doesn’t mean compliance with mexico’s labor code. 9. volkswagen mexico, “la importante participación de las mujeres volkswagen,” march 8, 2021 (accessed june 6, 2021). 10. ideas and meanings about female logistics workers’ respectability on the lines lie beyond the scope of this paper. 11. “desire” is also intrinsic to global production (salzinger 2000). 12. requesting a criminal record check is not particular to vwm. rather, it forms part of the securitization of supply chains (cowen 2014). 13. logistics workers often ration their calls. in cases where their weekly wages are not paid and they lack credit to call their union represenatives, they borrow their coworkers’ phones. 14. these are so-called operating costs. see chris b. murphy, “operating costs definition: formula, types, and real-world examples,” investopedia (accessed march 10, 2022). 15. in 2015 vwm downsized its temporary workforce because of the vw diesel scandal. 16. before jit, vwm autoworkers’ movements were less restricted (juárez nuñez 1998). 17. unlike logistics workers, autoworkers receive doubled wages for extending a shift. 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maquiladoras: new actors in new contexts], edited by maría eugenia de la o, 263–288. mexico: centro de investigaciones y estudios superiores en antropología social (publicaciones de la casa chata). cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 3, pp. 400-427, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.3.04 refusing the god trick: engaging black women’s knowledge cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 182-190, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.02 refusing the god trick: engaging black women’s knowledge faye v. harrison university of illinois at urbana-champaign https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2877-6164 during my graduate school experience, i learned a great deal that was not a part of the formal curriculum. the courses i took with amazing professors played an important part in preparing me for the career trajectory i have followed. yet lessons from the informal curriculum also had a profound impact, especially on the way i think about the ideologies, social relations, power dynamics, and practices shaping the production, validation, reception, and circulation of anthropological knowledge. during those years at stanford, st. clair drake was a major source of knowledge and inspiration. he retired after my first year, but i continued to work with him and learned a great deal from the many conversations we had. drake’s style of teaching resembled storytelling and counter-storytelling. a pan-africanist trained in social anthropology but not at all confined to the discipline’s boundaries, he was a griot with awe-inspiring erudition, a walking encyclopedia on africa and the african diaspora, along with many other subjects. combining perspectives from studies of the sociology of knowledge, intellectual history, race relations, and antiand postcolonial politics, he proffered observations of anthropology’s intellectual substance and its workings within departments, academic job markets, professional associations, funding agencies, publication outlets, and contexts of practical application, problem-solving, and advocacy that gave his students much to digest. it has taken decades for me to appreciate much of what he taught about the politics of knowledge, contestations over theory, what and whose work is deemed to be of significance, and the fraught relationship africans on the continent and throughout the diaspora have had to anthropology as objects of study, interlocutors, and producers of knowledge. his stories and seminal essays (e.g., drake 1974, 1978, 1990) on the history of black scholars in anthropology inspired me to work with colleagues to rescue black anthropologists, including drake himself, from oblivion and erasure from collective memory, syllabi, and citations (harrison 2013, harrison and harrison 1999). over the years, i have built on what i learned from drake. one inadvertent lesson concerns the gendered gaps in his stories and writings. although he was always a source of support for me and spoke highly of the contributions that vera green, sheila walker, and other black women colleagues have made to anthropology and black studies, he remained silent about the african independence advocate eslanda goode robeson (wife of the internationally renowned performing artist and leftist activist paul robeson). “essie” studied social anthropology at the london school of economics (lse) and later at hartford seminary foundation during the 1930s and 1940s (ransby 2013). contrary to what is often published about her, she never completed her phd. yet she became famous as an independent thinker because of african journey (robeson 1945) with its decolonized representations of sub-saharan africans, her extensive journalistic writings on domestic and world affairs, and her courageous 1953 testimony before senator joseph mccarthy’s infamous investigating committee during the cold war witch hunts. the silence that really provokes me to think more deeply about gender biases and racialized gendered effects in academia and in black scholarship itself concerns elizabeth stubbs davis, w. allison davis’s wife. like robeson, she was not included in drake’s stories, essays, and lists of african american pioneers in anthropology, although zora neale hurston and katherine dunham were. he acknowledged davis’s participation in the 1930s deep south biracial research team, of which he, too, was a part (davis, gardner, and gardner 2009). the book’s preface describes her as a skillful ethnographer responsible for collecting all the data on black women and for gathering and interpreting the evidence on the black class system and miscegenation. she made a substantial contribution to that classic book on class and race (conceptualized in terms of caste) among african americans and whites in jim crow–era mississippi, but she was not listed as one of the co-authors. when i read david varel’s (2018) the lost black scholar: resurrecting allison davis in american social thought, i was shocked to find out how serious drake’s silence had been. varel’s research reveals that elizabeth davis had studied anthropology at mount holyoke, radcliffe, and lse, and had been a phd candidate before settling into a middle-class life as a housewife and mother. according to varel, she provided much more than emotional and domestic support to her husband. she formed a vital part of an intellectual partnership that made allison davis’s career possible. her thinking was submerged under her husband’s scholarship. drake contributed to her invisibility as an anthropologist despite his having played an important role breaking the ground for reclaiming african american and global african scholars. this erasure occurred even though he often illuminated the role of non-university-based “para-intellectuals” whose discursive practices—whether reflected in publications, archival documents, or orally transmitted narratives—can influence the work of formally credentialed or recognized scholars. silencing of this sort has skewed representations of the black radical tradition. w. e. b. du bois’s contradictory pro-feminism resulted in his obscuring of anna julia cooper and ida wells-barnett—now reclaimed as foremothers of sociology—in his writings, despite their considerable achievements as scholar-activists (james 1997). a masculinist bias also appears in cedric robinson’s perspective on racial capitalism and the radical black intellectuals who interrogated it (robinson 2000). there is a conspicuous neglect of women like claudia jones, whose contributions deserve diligent attention (davies 2016). responses to the pervasive gender, racial, and national biases that have limited the mapping and navigation of “glocal” epistemological landscapes have led to research, publication, and social media projects that attempt to revitalize anthropology and the wider interdisciplinary terrain of which it forms a part. among these interventions range initiatives that resurrect past and present-day scholars whose (former) invisibility and inaccessibility have made recognizing and seriously engaging them much less likely in teaching and scholarship (e.g., anderson 2019; baker 1998; bay et al. 2015; guy-sheftall 1995; harrison 2008; harrison and harrison 1999; harrison, johnson-simon, and williams 2018; marable and mullings 2009; morris 2015; mcclaurin 2001; varel 2018).1 parallel concerns have also emerged in other parts of the african diaspora. in brazil and cuba, the recent upsurge in publications and cyber-writing on/by black women has expanded interest in the varieties and commonalities of feminist consciousness and collective action that exist throughout the americas. recently published compilations of the writings of the late social anthropologist and black movement activist lélia gonzalez (2018) and the activist philosopher sueli carneiro (2019) have made the social and political thought of these black brazilian feminists more readily available to brazilian and other lusophone audiences. overcoming the language barriers that restrict the circulation of knowledge, a growing number of translations has accelerated the mobility of black women’s texts. books from a number of leading u.s. black feminists are now available in portuguese and other languages, and collections of essays by and on afro-latin american feminists have been translated into english (alvarez and caldwell 2016; alvarez, caldwell, and laó-montes 2016; rubiera castillo and martiatu terry 2020). black feminist anthropologists are playing a leading role in some of these important collaborations and in interpreting the conceptual, theoretical, and political contributions of afro-latin american feminists (caldwell 2019; smith 2016; machado and perry 2021; perry and sotero 2019). these endeavors are occurring across a wide array of fields, and they are making it easier for more of us to bring non-canonical ideas and authors into the conversations, reading practices, and writing regimens of larger numbers of scholars and scholars in training. the burgeoning availability of print and electronic publications and of video-recorded lectures that fill long-standing gaps and work against the grain of peripheralization make inexcusable the continuation of learned ignorance and the failure to recognize and respect black women’s intellectual agency as documentarians, social analysts, and theorists. some of these recent trends are aligned with more far-reaching paradigm shifts. these ventures seek to move the (inter)disciplines toward remaking knowledge and its relations of production, exchange, reception, and dissemination under conditions that depart from the logics and values of the “cognitive empire” (santos 2018). leading proponents within world anthropologies discourse call attention to anthropology’s (or anthropologies’) place within this context (ribeiro and escobar 2006). eurocentrism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy are implicated in the precepts, practices, and institutions of this imperial regime, whose overlapping hierarchies and intermeshed axes of inequality have disproportionate effects on racially subjected men, women, and non-binary/transgendered persons within spheres of social science. for most of its history, the cognitive empire’s authority has relied on “western cultural narratives” about objectivity and universality, purportedly achieved through infinite vision from an unmarked, unlocatable, and disembodied position, conventionally the pedestal of privileged western masculinity (haraway 1988, 583). working against this myth, donna haraway argues in favor of situated knowledges grounded in embodied, locatable partial perspectives. partiality is not the same as “relativism … a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally” (haraway 1988, 384). instead, partial perspectives are located in webs of shared conversations and political solidarities (haraway 1988, 384). haraway’s argument resonates with boaventura de sousa santos’s (2018) thinking on ecologies of knowledges and intercultural translation as closely related procedures advancing the most promising features of the epistemologies of the south—and ultimately those of a decolonial pluriversality extending across the north/south divide. to work toward these goals, we must refuse to accept the optical illusions and myths of the “god trick” (haraway 1988, 582, 587). the god trick’s epistemological violence inflicts disproportionate injuries on racially subjected women. at a moment when anti-blackness and white supremacy lie at the center of public debate, and when we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in racial capitalism (robinson 2000), it is imperative that—with our increasing awareness of the gendered aspects of these sites of interrelated racialization—we unapologetically take black women’s intellectual realities and experiences into account. by so doing, we will achieve a better understanding of our vulnerabilities and our refusals in the face of pervasive forms and intensities of “misogynoir” (bailey 2010). despite the inhibiting aspects of the social sciences’ status quo, this proves an exciting moment with new possibilities for reckoning with the state and status of black women’s scholarship within national and global hierarchies of knowledge and divisions of intellectual labor. it is to our collective advantage as a discipline that black women move out of the shadows into the light. black women should not be confined to compartments or boxes that fail to do justice to who we are as complex thinkers contributing, for instance, to vital craftings of theory that potentially shift paradigms toward “ex-centric,” non-hegemonic modes of knowing the world, its imperatives, and possibilities (harrison 2016). black women’s contributions may also have implications and applications for re-envisioning policy as a tool for solving urgent problems and enhancing planetary well-being. given the abundant corpus of black women’s scholarship, there is no excuse for its gross underengagement. such underengagement manifests not only in the absence of citations. it is also exhibited in perfunctory rituals of citation that implicitly assign authors to a peripheral status. we all know of instances when authors are cited, included in indexes, and even mentioned in texts without being seriously engaged or accurately represented. having measurable quantities of data points in the social science citation index may indicate some level of name recognition, but that alone proves insufficient if citational recognition does not have the meanings and effects that the #citeblackwomen movement and kindred initiatives aim to accomplish—the valorization of our scholarship. cursory glances, careless misreadings, insensitive misrecognitions, and perfunctory gestures toward inclusiveness are not uncommon. these problematic practices indicate that the cited work is not being taken seriously, nor given a close reading attentive to the nuances, complexities, underpinnings, and implications of the argument. when citations are earnestly constructive and fair, they may call our attention to a variety of different things. authors may cite a publication because of its geographical focus, topical or thematic emphasis, methodological framework, or theoretical significance—or limitations—which are not necessarily problematic. when the overall effects of cumulative citations restrict readers’ attention to basic descriptive features and rarely reflect more nuanced, multifocal interpretations of the texts, readers might infer that the cited authors perform fieldwork but not “theory-work” (a concept from comaroff and comaroff 2016). this is a concern that black women sometimes share about how their work is read and referenced. related to this is the perception that black women are not expected to do more than consume and apply other scholars’ theory. when they theorize in ways that depart from or contest the thinking of scholars assumed to be authorities on the subject matter, black women risk being subjected to “whitesplaining,” with its “enduring tragedies for contemporary black thought” (asubiaro-dada 2020). contestation over knowledge, particularly theoretical claims and the evidence informing them, is genderaced, shaped by the inextricable entanglement of these axes of difference and power (carles and jubany-baucells 2010; lavie 2018, 24). patterns of underengagement and contestation, misrecognized as intellectual collegiality, need to be redressed lest they sustain conditions that insidiously assign black women to zones of epistemological death. on a more optimistic note, a more convivial (nyamnjoh 2020) synergy can be built. to move toward that outcome, a great deal must be unlearned, so that a genuine ethic of care, respect, and accountability might be embodied and practiced. abstract drawing on african diasporic, feminist, and decolonial streams of thought, this essay addresses gendered and racialized biases, gaps, and silences that depreciate black women’s epistemological agency. the essay examines the significance of a proliferation of recent publications, including translations, that are bringing the intellectual contributions of black women in the americas to new audiences. this growing trend, which resonates with the objectives of #citeblackwomen, forms an integral part of a more comprehensive project seeking to reconstitute knowledge under conditions that break away from the prevailing cognitive empire. the western cultural narratives, myths, and sleights of hand buttressing this regime inflict an epistemological violence that harms black women. [black feminisms; african diaspora; race and gender; intellectual history; translations; epistemic decolonization] notes acknowledgments i am deeply thankful for the generative stimulation and inspiration i have enjoyed from everyone in this colloquy, but especially from anne-maria b. makhulu and christen a. smith, whose initiative made this collection possible. i appreciate anne-maria’s diligent, fine-grained reading of the earlier drafts that resulted in this essay. over the past several years, christen’s leadership in building overlapping black diasporic feminist networks to address citational politics as an important facet of epistemological struggle has taken a long-standing problem to a higher level of constructive engagement. 1. see also the cite black women collective at https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/. references alvarez, sonia e., and kia lilly caldwell, eds. 2016 “african descendant feminisms in latin america. part i: brazil.” special issue, meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 14, no. 1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/meridians.14.issue-1 alvarez, sonia e., kia lilly caldwell, and agustín laó-montes 2016 “translations across black feminist diasporas.” meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 14, no. 2: v–ix. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.14.2.01 anderson, mark 2019 from boas to black power: racism, liberalism, and american anthropology. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. asubiaro-dada, wumi 2020 “#theorizingwhileblack: whitesplaining and its enduring tragedies for contemporary black thought.” medium, june 3, 2020. https://medium.com/@wumishubby/theorizingwhileblack-5c8dc1dfbe57 bailey, moya 2010 “they aren’t talking about me…” crunk feminist collective, march 14, 2020. https://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me/ baker, lee d. 1998 from savage to negro: anthropology and the construction of race, 1896–1954. berkeley: university of california press. bay, mia, farah j. griffin, martha s. jones, and barbara d. savage, eds. 2015 toward an intellectual history of black women. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. caldwell, kia lilly 2019 “the contours and contexts of afro-latin american women’s activism.” in comparative racial politics in latin america, edited by kwame dixon and ollie a. johnson iii, 249–70. new york: routledge. carles, isabelle, and olga jubany-baucells, eds. 2010 “genderace: the use of anti-discrimination laws; gender and citizenship in a multicultural context.” final report. brussels, belgium: european union seventh framework program grant report. https://www.tu-berlin.de/fileadmin/f27/pdfs/forschung/genderace_final_report.pdf carneiro, sueli 2019 escritos de uma vida. são paulo: pólen livros. comaroff, jean, and john l. comaroff 2016 theory from the south; or, how euro-america is evolving toward africa. new york: routledge. davies, carole boyce 2016 “a black left feminist view on cedric robinson’s black marxism.” black perspectives, november 10, 2016. https://www.aaihs.org/a-black-left-feminist-view-on-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism/ davis, allison, burleigh b. gardner, and mary r. gardner 2009 [1941] deep south: a social anthropological study of caste and class. columbia: university of south carolina press. drake, st. clair 1974 “in the mirror of black scholarship: w. allison davis and deep south.” in education and black struggle: notes from the colonized world, edited by the institute of the black world, 42–54. cambridge, mass.: harvard educational review. 1978 “reflections on anthropology and the black experience.” anthropology and education quarterly 9, no. 2: 85–109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3216192 1990 “further reflections on anthropology and the black experience.” edited by willie l. baber. transforming anthropology 1, no. 2: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1525/tran.1990.1.2.1 gonzalez, lélia 2018 primavera para as rosas negras. são paulo: ucpa editora. guy-sheftall, beverly, ed. 1995 words of fire: an anthology of african-american feminist thought. new york: new press. haraway, donna 1988 “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14, no. 3: 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 harrison, faye v. 2008 outsider within: reworking anthropology in the global age. urbana: university of illinois press. 2013 “learning from st. clair drake: (re)mapping diasporic connections.” journal of african american history 98, no. 3: 446–54. https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.98.3.0446 2016 “theorizing in ex-centric sites.” anthropological theory 16, no. 2–3: 160–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499616652516 harrison, ira e., and faye v. harrison, eds. 1999 african-american pioneers in anthropology. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, ira e., deborah johnson-simon, and erica lorraine williams, eds. 2018 the second generation of african american pioneers in anthropology. urbana: university of illinois press. james, joy 1997 “profeminism and gender elites: w. e. b. du bois, anna julia cooper, and ida b. wells-barnett.” in transcending the talented tenth: black leaders and american intellectuals, 35–60. new york: routledge. lavie, smadar 2018 wrapped in the flag of israel: mizrahi single mothers and bureaucratic torture. lincoln: university of nebraska press. machado, taís de sant’anna, and keisha-khan y. perry 2021 “translation of ‘the black woman: a portrait.’” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12031 marable, manning, and leith mullings, eds. 2009 let nobody turn us around: an african american anthology. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield. mcclaurin, irma, ed. 2001 black feminist anthropology: theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. morris, aldon d. 2015 the scholar denied: w. e. b. du bois and the birth of modern sociology. berkeley: university of california press. nyamnjoh, francis b. 2020 decolonising the academy: a case for convivial scholarship. basel, switzerland: basler afrika bibliographien. perry, keisha-khan y., and edilsa sotero 2019 “amefricanidade: the black diaspora feminism of lélia gonzalez.” lasa forum 50, no. 3: 59–64. https://forum.lasaweb.org/files/vol50-issue3/dossier-lelia-gonzalez-5.pdf ransby, barbara 2013 eslanda: the large and unconventional life of mrs. paul robeson. new haven, conn.: yale university press. ribeiro, gustavo lins, and arturo escobar, eds. 2006 world anthropologies: disciplinary transformations within systems of power. london: routledge. robeson, eslanda goode 1945 african journey. new york: john day. robinson, cedric 2000 black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. rubiera castillo, daisy, and inés maría martiatu terry, eds. 2020 afrocubanas: history, thought, and cultural practices. edited by devyn spence benson, translated by karina alma. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield. santos, boaventura de sousa 2018 the end of the cognitive empire: the coming of age of epistemologies of the south. durham, n.c.: duke university press. smith, christen anne 2016 “towards a black feminist model of black atlantic liberation: remembering beatriz nascimento.” meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 14, no. 2: 71–87. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.14.2.06 varel, david a. 2018 the lost black scholar: resurrecting allison davis in american social thought. chicago: university of chicago press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 182-190, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.02 gaining voice through injury: voice and corporeality in animal rights activism in ciudad juárez, mexico cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 541-566, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.05 gaining voice through injury: voice and corporeality in animal rights activism in ciudad juárez, mexico iván sandoval-cervantes university of nevada, las vegas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9206-9077 in may 2017, during a preliminary hearing held in ciudad juárez, a border city in the northern mexican state of chihuahua, a former member of the state police was being prosecuted for animal abuse. eco-canis de asis, a local ngo, had filed a lawsuit a few months earlier accusing the police officer of shooting and killing two puppies and injuring their mother—a brown and white pit bull originally named tsunami but renamed justicia (justice) by eco-canis on being rescued after the incident. the accused officer claimed that justicia had injured his child. outside the prosecutor’s office, justicia and a group of people, wearing t-shirts with the ngo’s logo, waited for the judge’s decision. they had hung two acrylic banners on display behind them: one showed a photo of the perpetrator next to a picture of justicia taken just hours after she was attacked, explicitly showing the damage done by the shotgun. among other things, this banner read: “animal abuse is a crime, denounce it!” and “this state police officer massacred six puppies and only little justicia survived. every crime deserves a punishment.” the other banner addressed the state governor: “mr. governor [javier] corral, we voted for you, for those who have no voice” (“señor gobernador corral, votamos por usted, por los que no tienen voz”). figure 1. members of eco-canis before justicia’s oral hearing. photo by iván sandoval-cervantes. there were no other dogs, banners, or groups of people around. people moved through the wide concrete entrance quickly. the interspecies contingent disrupted the flow, with the curiosity of passersby piqued by the presence of a dog surrounded by six humans (including me). some of them watched from a distance, while others took photos. the more daring approached eco-canis asking about the case while petting justicia, who looked happy but breathed with some difficulty. justicia, however, could not enter the courtroom; she remained outside during the entire procedure, wearing a pink dog vest with pouches that had been originally designed for another dog, a german shepherd. a few minutes later, and inside the courtroom, a public prosecutor and alicia, the founder of eco-canis, attempted to speak for her, demanding justice or, at least, some form of punishment for the perpetrator. after the hearing ended, members of eco-canis, standing next to justicia, recorded and live-streamed videos narrating what had happened inside the courtroom, videos they later posted on their social media. at first, ciudad juárez would appear an unlikely place for the defense of non-human animals. located in northern mexico, right across the border from el paso, texas, ciudad juárez is home to about 1.5 million people, ranking it among mexico’s ten most populated cities. despite its size and place in mexican history, most outsiders recognize the city for recent phenomena associated with its border location: the maquiladoras (or transnational sweatshops), the unsolved cases of hundreds of disappeared women (portrayed in national and international media), and the rampant violence that stormed the city in the late 2000s and early 2010s. not too long ago, from 2008 to 2012, ciudad juárez was considered “the most dangerous city in the world,” and although it no longer holds that title, violence persists, with the city still ranking among the most dangerous in the world. yet animal rescue and animal activist organizations are on the rise and making their presence felt in the city’s landscape, its politics, and in the world of social media. figure 2. justicia being photographed outside the courtroom. photo by iván sandoval-cervantes. figure 3. oswaldo getting justicia ready after the oral hearing. photo by iván sandoval-cervantes. i begin this essay with the case of justicia because it shows how animal rights and welfare activists, who self-identify as animalistas, use the concept of voice to mediate the relationship between human and non-human bodies in a context of violence and impunity. animalistas are centrally concerned with their ability to represent abused non-human animals, legally and socially, through the concept of voice as a way to reframe the place of animals within the mexican legal system. as claudio lomnitz (2022, 171–72) points out, voice emerged as a significant element in mexico’s neoliberal transition, becoming a significant resource in the democratization process, even if it seldom receives a response from the government. the centrality of voice also becomes evident, quite literally, in the promulgation of oral trials. the idea of speaking for voiceless animals is widespread among animal rights/welfare organizations throughout the world, particularly in europe and the united states. in this article, i highlight the relationship among the construction of voice, animal bodies, and the mexican justice system. animalistas require violently injured animal bodies for their own performance of activism; anthropogenic violence transforms dogs’ bodies into “promising animals” (see dave 2017). the injured animal bodies and their images create the assumption of an individual story and, thus, an individual voice that animalistas seek to channel. in other words, an injured body can make a dog “legible” to forms of state recognition, like the justice system (bocci 2017), by making them specific and individual, resulting in the potential conferral of voice. in thinking about the relationship between non-human injured bodies and voice or, at least, the promise of voice, the role of violence in mexico becomes salient. numerous social struggles position the concept of voice as central in the fight against injustices, particularly forced disappearances and feminicides. voice, voicing, and giving a voice are seen as a first step to combat the purportive silence that often surrounds criminal acts and the accompanying climate of impunity. in contrast to other strategies analyzed by lomnitz (2022), inspired by albert hirschman (1970), like exit and hedging, voice produces a direct confrontation between the institutions and those who seek to change them by making heard their concerns. yet in other instances, voice does not necessarily refer to a rational or articulated call; rather, it describes a desperate call for help, so that its impact resides more in capturing attention than in articulating a message. for example, one collective formed in ciudad juárez in the early 2000s in response to the growing number of disappeared women took the name voces sin ecos (voices without echoes). the founder and mother of one of these missing women stated that the name referred to the kidnapped women’s last moments of freedom, when their last screams for help would not be replicated by others. in the same way, looking at justicia, her images on the acrylic banner, and hearing her story, one could imagine justicia’s response during and after the violent act of the perpetrator, a scream, a cry, something, anything that could be echoed by alicia. thus, the concept of voice can refer both to verbal articulation of discontent and/or to the inarticulate cries that occur in violent encounters. animalistas seek to employ both simultaneously as they move through the legal system and require precise verbal articulation, attempting to channel the experiences of individual dogs and speaking for them. animalistas enter into relationships with individual animals through the act of the rescue, a singular event of witnessing (see dave 2014, 434; 2021, 144), and through engaging in “transspecies semiosis” (kohn 2007, 6–7). the rescue connects the non-human rescuee and the human rescuer; it crystalizes a particular story of past abuse and allows the animalista a concrete relationship with a non-human other. the act of the rescue marks the beginning of this concrete relationship between a human animalista and a non-human animal. however, the animalista must rely on a triad consisting of animal (the physical existence and representation of an individual injured animal), activist (the rescuer or someone involved in the animal’s rehabilitation), and the abuser (the human that injured the animal) to consolidate such an intimate relationship. in this essay, i analyze how violence, through injury, can potentially activate the voice of non-human animals. voice, through animalistas, appears as a necessary condition for non-human animals to be recognized as deserving some form of justice. animalistas seek to become valid spokespersons for non-human animals through various means, starting from the act of the rescue. yet within the mexican criminal justice system, voice does not suffice to attain justice, and legal processes are often reframed to highlight human conflict. ciudad juárez and the animalista movement in the past three decades, writers, social scientists, and policymakers have looked closely at ciudad juárez. in their efforts to understand the relationship between the city, its border location, and the increase in violence, scholars have studied gender violence and femicide (or feminicide, in its latin american acception), maquiladoras and transnational work, and organized crime and violence. researchers have emphasized that ciudad juárez’s border location constitutes the city’s “most important contextual variable” (payan 2014, 435–36), one that has created what howard campbell (2009, 7) calls the drug war zone (dwz): “a world where insecurity prevails and powerful forces, whose essence can never be fully known, impinge on the lives of individuals and communities.”1 this increase in insecurity and violence, campbell continues (2009, 7), has contributed to the formation of “a social space in which the truth is elusive and relative and in which paranoia, fear, and mystery are the orders of the day.” in this context of “political crisis,” there are ongoing disputes over the meaning of violence in relation to the state and the justice system, where dead bodies can become symbols of both the state success and failure in controlling violence (wright 2011). the long tradition of antiviolence activism, particularly in the fight against gender violence, in ciudad juárez has long been connected to these disputes over the meaning of violence and of dead bodies (e.g., ravelo blancas 2004; staudt 2008; wright 2011). kathleen staudt and irasema coronado (2010) argue that antiviolence activism decreased (at least in visibility) during the height of the violence (2008–2012), mostly as a result of fear of reprisal from both authorities and organized crime. all this occurred while government officials at different levels tightened the discourse that the people killed were “bad people.” it is in the aftermath of this violent period that organizations defending animal rights and well-being began surfacing and becoming more visible. several factors influenced the emergence of animalistas in the city, including changes in the ley de bienestar animal (animal well-being law) in 2010 and the 2013 changes in the penal code criminalizing animal abuse.2 for this article, it is worth mentioning two of such factors: first, efforts directed toward non-human animals do not often lead to confrontations between citizens and the government (or criminal organizations). second, non-human animals are commonly seen as naturally innocent (see ticktin 2017), leaving little room for disputing this innocence. in ciudad juárez, the term animalista is used in contradicting ways. the term often indicates a person’s empathy or special connection with non-human animals. the common usage of the term does not follow a narrow normative definition but can accommodate a wide range of human attitudes to non-human animals.3 this means that animalistas in the city are diverse, ranging from peta-inspired vegans to meat-eaters who rescue animals even while violating private property laws—similar, in many ways, to global trends.4 the demographics of the animalista community in ciudad juárez reveal two main subgroups of activists. one group consists of middle-class, university-educated (or at least enrolled in college, either in ciudad juárez or in el paso) men and women in their twenties or early thirties. members of this group do not generally run or operate shelters; instead, they organize events related to veganism and collect dog food for shelters. the second group consists of working-class women from various age groups who are directly involved in the operation of shelters and in dog rescues. this second group also includes professional, middle-class women who provide support with logistics and finances, though most financial resources come through crowdfunding. there are numerous interactions between the two groups even if they do not necessarily overlap. despite this diversity, animalistas share certain elements: (1) all animalistas are concerned with reducing the number of street dogs (which also peaked during the “violent period” of 2008–2012) (garcía and alvarado álvarez 2013) and, therefore, (2) are in favor of sterilization campaigns. (3) all animalistas strongly oppose animal abuse and demand, to different degrees, governmental action against it; and (4) animalistas also claim, in various ways, to represent the animals’ best interest and sometimes even to “speak for them.” these two last points prove central to my analysis here and have been salient during my research. speaking for injured bodies: on the appearance of dogs’ voice justicia’s oral trial the day of justicia’s trial, i accompanied a small human delegation who had gathered at eco-canis, a residence-cum-dog shelter located in the modest neighborhood of san antonio, in downtown juárez, just three miles south of el paso, texas. two members of eco-canis formed part of the human contingent: alicia and oswaldo. they sported the eco-canis uniform: black cargo pants tucked inside black patrol boots, long-sleeved black shirts embroidered with their names, and baseball caps with the eco-canis logo. “we’ve been told that we shouldn’t dress like soldiers,” commented alicia, who, at the time, aspired to obtain government support to form a detective unit to investigate crimes against non-human animals. along with alicia and oswaldo, a family of three joined us, as well as justicia, riding in the back of the truck. this was my first time watching an oral hearing, introduced as part of mexico’s criminal justice reform to incorporate oral trials, passed in 2008. oral trials were seen as a response to the opaque system of closed trials based on written testimony that had allowed for numerous wrongful convictions and forced confessions. chihuahua was a pioneer in the implementation of oral trials, partially funded by usaid (aranda 2007). oral trials were seen as providing greater transparency. before the first oral trial for feminicide took place, the journalist lydia cacho (2008) claimed that oral trials allowed for the possibility for people to be heard and for the judges to listen directly to the victims, as opposed to “being interpreted through hundreds of pages written in anachronical language filled with incomprehensible legal terms.” oral trials provide the opportunity of being listened to—but also of being seen. voice in this context is not separated from a body but, rather, constitutes a link between multiple bodies (the victim, the judge, the public, etc.). this bodily presence also makes people vulnerable, and authorities use this vulnerability to discourage oral trials in favor of “faster solutions” (see rodriguez 2021). after passing through security, alicia, oswaldo, and i entered an empty courtroom equipped with numerous cameras. minutes later we were joined by the “social representation” (the prosecutors). alicia had filed the lawsuit, so she sat with the prosecutors. oswaldo and i remained in the audience. the trial started after the arrival of the defendant, his legal team, and the judge. the judge proceeded to read the file, which included reports from eyewitnesses and character witnesses, and low-quality photocopies of justicia’s x-rays. justicia was blamed for attacking the defendant’s child, but the judge dismissed the allegations, deeming the use of a shotgun, point blank, as disproportionate. proportionality here is understood as part of the principle of self-defense that stipulates that the relationship between the attack and the reaction should be “proportional.” since the alleged attack had already happened and justicia was tied to the ground when the defendant shot her, the use of a gun was seen as purely an act of violence, rather than an attempt to contain the attack. during the trial, the judge mentioned the defendant’s threats to alicia and her family, which included sexist remarks and the accusation that she was using dogs for her personal gain. there was also talk of other instances in which the defendant had been accused of killing other dogs—to which the defense responded by suggesting there was a “dog problem” in his neighborhood. things, however, took an unexpected turn when the judge called for a “five-minute coffee break” that turned into a thirty-minute backstage discussion between the judge, the defendant’s lawyer, alicia, and the state-appointed prosecutor. a settlement was soon reached after the hearing’s resumption, and it would be safe to say that the “coffee break” offered the participants a chance to speak off the record and away from the cameras. based on the death threats that the director of eco-canis and her family had received, the defendant was to stay away from their places of business and their residence/shelter. he also had to send, through his lawyer, two bags of dog food twice a month for a period of six months to eco-canis. as the trial wound down, alicia started being labeled as the “victim,” and even the “plaintiff.” justicia had been displaced. before heading out, alicia, who had mixed feelings about the turn of events, said that “it had been a historic case, and we shouldn’t forget that.” oswaldo, on other hand, wasn’t entirely convinced. there is no voice without a body a few weeks prior to justicia’s trial, we had attended a health festival in a colonia (roughly equivalent to a neighborhood) located right across the rio bravo/rio grande. juárez’s municipal president was going to be there and alicia wanted to remind him of his campaign promise to help animalistas. after the festival inauguration ended, alicia and oswaldo managed to get some words in with the municipal president, but it didn’t amount to much of a dialogue. it would seem that the problem with these attempts did not so much concern their ability to speak for non-human animals but the political conditions that allowed someone to listen to what was said. politicians often address animalistas’ demands with general and overarching solutions, such as the creation of new government departments, which tend to be insufficient and inefficient—if they ever materialize. thus, one way in which animalistas respond to these generalizations is through the telling of stories of injured non-human bodies, allowing them to speak for an individual animal. on our way back from the festival, alicia talked about another report she had filed with the state authorities. this case involved an off-duty county police officer who had used metallic wire to strangle a dog that, he alleged, was bothering his daughter. just as in the case of justicia, no evidence supported the allegation. instead there were superficial counterallegations that sought to position two living beings deemed inherently innocent against each other (see ticktin 2017). the officer had strangled the dog in a park, in front of children and adults. alicia emphasized how little progress the fiscalía, the state prosecutors, were making in this case. she had personally driven several witnesses to the fiscalía, but they had not managed to testify. without a body, alicia’s ability to speak for animals was limited, and while there were other humans who could speak for the dog, they were not allowed to do so. as in the case of justicia, the involvement of a police officer complicated matters. alicia told me: “after he strangled the dog, witnesses say he put the dog in the trunk of his car and drove away. they saw a police patrol stopping him for a few minutes but then letting him go. now they’re telling me they found the dog, but it’s a beagle-looking dog, there are many street dogs that fit that description. they’re trying to cover it up.” legally speaking, this case was more complicated than justicia’s because the dog involved was a street dog, en situación de calle, and existing animal-protection laws only protect “companion animals,” as in pets.5 justicia had a name, a body marked by injuries, and a prior relationship with humans (she had been a pet dog), so she seemed to possess a degree of subjectivity that would imply a voice. justicia’s bodily presence also meant that she continued to be vulnerable, and to make alicia vulnerable as her self-appointed spokesperson. on the other hand, the beagle-looking dog was just that, a generic dog, without a name, and with a body difficult to identify since “many dogs” fit that description. the beagle-looking dog lacked justicia’s visual potential, as well as the individuality needed to have a voice. social and legal processes that did not allow alicia to establish a clear link with an injured non-human body thus suffocated the attempt for specificity. in both cases, though, the injured bodies of the dogs proved central in the efforts by eco-canis to file successful lawsuits and to deploy non-human bodies to provoke compassion and popular support. injured bodies: or how wounds carve a space for a voice when animalistas claim to speak for animals, they seek to include all animals. in many cases, animalistas use stock images of animals in distress or discuss some of the more or less well-known facts about industrial farming (see fernández 2021). yet the success of this exercise is at best ambiguous and, in many cases, futile because no visible link exists between specific human and animal bodies. however, the presence of individual injured animals transforms how the relationship between human and animal bodies is established. violence itself does not generate sympathy. what generates sympathy is how violent acts create a link between activists and victims within a specific context. i will return to the creation of this link later in the article. in this section, i analyze why injured animal bodies become central in the animalistas’ pursuit of representing animal interests. several scholars have demonstrated that bodies have always been a place of “imprinted” power (fassin and d’halluin 2005). theorizing about injuries and bodies shows how violence and its effects are experienced and lasting. for example, as a way to understand the violent effects of the state in causing injuries at the mexico-u.s. border (jusionyte 2018), or as an invitation to rethink biosocial precarity emerging from the violence of war (wool 2017). in his analysis of disability and gang violence in chicago, laurence ralph (2014) argues that portrayals of violence and gangs tends to emphasize death and incarceration, while rendering injured bodies invisible. ralph notes that former gang members’ injured bodies make their messages more effective: men in wheelchairswho have difficulty moving and using catheters cease to be exclusively messengers, instead becoming both the messengers and the message. thus, injured gang members who become anti-violence activists are also “enabled” by their wounds (ralph 2012). for animalistas in ciudad juárez, the wounded animals become a precondition that enables potential social awareness (see ralph 2012). the injured bodies of animals are potentially the messenger and the message but, without an animalista telling their story and invoking their voice, their injuries remain signs to be interpreted. if, following rita segato (2013), every act of violence is a “discursive gesture” that presents a problem of intelligibility, injured animal bodies (and their representations) allow for multiple readings in ways that healthy looking animal bodies do not (see garcía 2023 for the case of peru). for alicia, the injured bodies of justicia and the beagle-type dog became central in the pursuit of an interpretation that could direct animal-protection actions. animal injured bodies constitute visual signs that demand an interpretation, and while they do not necessarily add anything new to the narratives of the city’s violence, they highlight its scope in a way that healthy-looking street dogs cannot. street dogs are often ignored and seen as part of the city’s landscape. even organizations that rescue stray dogs and put them up for adoption portray street dogs as a natural result of urban living, rendering them generic dogs that do not require an individual voice or interpretation. as animalistas seek to make connections between themselves and rescued dogs visible, seeking to make individual dogs specific through their stories, they engage in what tim choy (2011, 6) calls “acts of relation-drawing” that oscillate between the specific and the generic. this representation of street dogs as natural and generic, and of injured dogs as humanmade and specific, highlights how all representations of animals “are ultimately linked to power” (see jalais 2010, 8–9). violence disrupts such ideas about nature and grants some form of subjective individuality and specificity to canine bodies, making the bodies of injured dogs into signs worthy of an interpretation. like other animalistas, alicia seeks to speak for animals in general, but the body of a survivor of animal abuse allows for a specific interpretation. such an interpretative act requires a voice: the voice of the individual non-human victim demanding justice and reparations. this individuality has to emerge from a non-human body that can be seen—to remain a sign to be interpreted, it has to remain visible. the visibility of a concrete animal injured body pushes back against the construction of animals as “absent referents” that makes animal suffering invisible (adams 2015, 20–22), while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of a voice that accompanies that individual body. the presence of injured animal bodies highlights how materiality (both through fleshiness and visuality) and voice can become intertwined in attempts to produce individual voices, and in how they are heard (weidman 2014). i attend to this relationship between the materiality of injured bodies and voice in the next section of this article. voice and the injured body news and social media reports of abused animals, such as justicia and others, allow animalistas throughout mexico to voice their opinions on the relationship between violence, animal abuse, and justice. one extreme example of this appeared in may 2019, when more than forty dogs were intentionally poisoned in the southeastern state of campeche—one of the hypotheses blamed the government. this act of violence created an immediate reaction from animalistas throughout the country: they demanded an investigation and quickly pointed out the harsh conditions under which animal advocates in campeche operated.6 although not all cases of animal abuse become as publicized as the campeche dog poisoning, they appear constantly on the news and circulate on social media, allowing animalistas to point to larger issues that link corruption and impunity to animal abuse. in ciudad juárez, reports of animal abuse and abandonment strengthen the common idea that the city’s violence has, in some ways, obliterated the city’s “social fabric” (see payan 2014: 437; also lomnitz 2022), as non-human animals—especially dogs—are perceived as bearing no responsibility for the state of affairs and are considered inherently innocent (see ticktin 2017). thus, when violence reaches these “innocent creatures,” it is seen as overflowing its designed human space, corrupting the moral qualities of the city’s inhabitants to the point of harming innocent creatures. mexico’s violence thus becomes framed as a moral crisis rather than as the result of government decisions (lomnitz 2022, 172). although the importance or the urgency of violence against animals is not necessarily a daily topic of conversation, it emerges locally and nationally when particularly heinous acts of violence against animals are committed and is commonly interpreted as (or used to reinforce the idea of) a crisis of values in the country. the relationship between violence against humans and animal abuse is not lost on animal advocates in the city.7 when reports stated that during the peak of the “violent era” the number of abandoned dogs went from 20,000 to 200,000, animal advocates argued that such violence was directly linked to the appearance of “cases of [animal] abuse and mutilation” (see garcía and alvarado álvarez 2013).8 yet despite the best efforts of animalistas, these dogs remained unknown, voiceless and, in many ways, bodiless—their bodies disappeared after being picked up by the city’s cleaning services and the traces of their lives became unnoticeable, not directly linked to visual representations that would allow the telling of their individual stories.9 in this context of violence toward both humans and non-human animals, the injured bodies of animals who survive some form of abuse become important vehicles for animalistas as a more easily interpreted sign. the body proves central in the animalistas efforts to give a voice because it provides the necessary materiality both to attempt “transspecies semiosis” (kohn 2007) and to present an individual narrative based on the evidence of injustice—the injuries themselves—to the general public. the concept of voice in anthropology is “central but relatively unexplored aspect” of how “we theorize power, subjectification, and the efficacy of vocal utterances as social action” (weidman 2014, 46). in addition, voice as a concept is often seen as relatively unproblematic (revill 2021, 122). this means that there is often a conflation, rooted in western metaphysical and linguistic tradition, of voice, identity, rationality, and agency (revill 2021, 122; weidman 2014, 39) that tends to ignore how these connections are produced in specific political contexts and with specific human and non-human bodies. in the case of the animalistas of ciudad juárez, who are attempting to speak for and from injured animal bodies, voice emerges as a goal of their involvement in animal rescue. animalistas attempt to become animators, potential ventriloquists (see keane 1999; cooren and sandler 2014; weidman 2014), or invocators of the sensorial experience of listening through images and gazes (see dave 2021; kohn 2007; vargas gonzález 2020). during the trial, justicia remained outside, while i accompanied alicia and oswaldo into the courtroom. although alicia claimed to be the voice of the voiceless, specifically of the dogs she had under her care, the voice of justicia remained largely absent, though the possibility of retelling her story lingered in the air. justicia—or, rather, images of justicia—briefly resurfaced as the state-appointed prosecutor showed photocopies of x-rays of justicia’s body. the low-quality, black-and-white prints showed justicia’s body and the gun wounds as white, overlapping shadows in need of interpretation. no one paid much attention to these images as they circulated in the courtroom and were then quickly put away. the judge viewed the oral reports of the injuries as sufficient proof, given that they seemed to better invoke justicia’s voice and the pain she suffered—something that low-quality photocopies of x-rays could not really do. another reason for the absence of justicia’s voice in the courtroom was alicia’s attempted participation in a complex act of ventriloquism. not only did she want to speak for justicia through the state-appointed prosecutor and the witnesses’ reports but she also spoke on her own behalf, as the defendant had threatened her via text messages and phone calls. thus, as alicia juggled between embodying different voices, justicia’s voice dwindled, almost disappearing but always remaining as a central element, even if just as a possibility. this time, however, the act of ventriloquism did not problematize who was speaking for whom, or for what. rather, it problematized the entire point of the trial: justice for justicia was no longer the objective, as the trial became more about humans engrossed in a potentially violent dispute. rather than seeking to address directly the injustice of violently attacking a dog, the trial reframed the event, highlighting the post-rescue conflict between humans, not the origin story of justicia, whose name evoked an act of injustice. reflecting on the relationship between voice and human/non-human bodies, another thing becomes clear: the “discursive gestures” of violence directed against animals are sites of competing interpretations between ngos who struggle to obtain donations to fund their rescue and shelter operations. these struggles can have serious consequences in an increasingly saturated field where organizations and potential donors are constantly questioning who can be the voice of animals by judging how organizations and individuals become voices of specific animals. eco-canis has been involved in two controversial cases: the case of juanito and the case of perro pinto. the case of juanito, which, according to alicia, involved a pet dog that had been raped, castrated, and then killed by a man, was highly publicized in 2015. labeled by the tabloid la polaka as the perro capado, the castrated dog, it marked one of the first cases that eco-canis tried to take to court. this is an important point, since alicia often expressed her concern for cases of zoophilia. they failed because alicia purchased an autopsy not considered “impartial,” thus rendering it unusable as evidence. alicia learned from this case that the “chain of custody” is important, as any minor bureaucratic error might lead to the dismissal of a case. alicia never managed to find the perpetrator or to prove that, in fact, juanito had been raped, which led some people to question whether this dog “really existed.” alicia’s failure to file a lawsuit was followed by repeated allegations from other organizations that eco-canis was using this case to profit from animal suffering. the case of perro pinto involved accusations that eco-canis had stolen a dog just a few weeks after justicia’s trial, in the summer of 2017. the accusation came from a woman who, according to eco-canis, worked for the office of the state prosecutor. the woman claimed that eco-canis had taken her dog illegally and that the dog had died inside their shelter. the woman, along with a group of people composed of members of other ngos and alicia’s neighbors, protested outside the shelter, demanding that the perro pinto be returned. alicia told me what she had told a handful of reporters: “there was no dog to be returned,” making it impossible for alicia to prove her innocence. the connections of the woman raising the allegation with the state prosecutor seemed a potential red flag for alicia, who told me that she had filed a very similar complaint and was wondering about favoritism in which cases they accepted. these two cases highlight the tensions that exist within the animalista community and how dog bodies (or their absence) become sites of contention as different organizations seek to make arguments on their behalf as the voice of the dogs’ best interests. the case of juanito exemplifies how injured animal bodies become a more lasting vehicle through which animalistas can speak. dead animal bodies quickly lose their potency, while living injured animals allow ongoing interpretations and acts of ventriloquism. the publicity this case received thwarted a direct visual representation of juanito, as different human agents sought to invoke his story, going so far as to claim that this dog did not “really exist.” the case of perro pinto shows, too, how a body contributes to the materiality of voice, because in the absence of an individual body, it becomes almost impossible to know which humans had established a direct relationship with the animal. conflicting claims about speaking for a dog that seems to lack individuality and subjectivity are likely to go unresolved, just like the case of perro pinto did. without that dog, dead or alive, multiple human voices narrated different stories, but none of them had material evidence that could support them. these three cases demonstrate the centrality of the body for animalistas who seek to defend specific animals in the midst of a political context that renders any kind of crowdfunded activism complicated. in this setting, the claim that one’s voice represents the imagined voice of a non-human animal can garner support from the general public. at the same time, it can place animalistas in direct confrontation with each other, as well as with government agencies (such as the state prosecutor, police departments, and others). the ability of a specific human or organization to speak for a dog is evaluated on the strength of a specific, concrete relationship between humans and animals. in the case of justicia, alicia was not challenged as an interlocutor since she had renamed, rescued, and cared for justicia. the relationship between alicia and justicia was put to the test later, when the trial shifted gears, almost ignoring what was owed to justicia. in the other two cases described above, it was difficult to establish a clear connection between the dogs and specific humans, leaving their cases dismissed and buried beneath multiple simultaneous failed attempts to speak for them. without a body, speaking for an injured dog—that materially links humans and animals, voices and bodies—could not succeed. true animalistas: the bonds that allow a voice to emerge (and to be heard) if the relationship that grants humans the ability to speak for non-human animals is based on the association between human and non-human bodies, how is it that animalistas think about this relationship? in the animalista community in ciudad juárez, an ongoing debate swirls about what constitutes a “real animalista”—that is, someone who can truly speak for animals. in this section, i argue that for some animalistas it is the relationship between vulnerable human and injured non-human bodies, with the act of the rescue as the point of inception—the rescue itself—that irrevocably grants a human the ability to speak for a non-human animal. however, this presents two problems. first, there are other competing and complementary views that emphasize personal histories of human-animal contact and underlying motivations when interacting with animals—particularly the idea that saving animals should be completely disconnected from human politics. second, as animalistas seek to become spokespersons for non-human animals, they face “the entire gamut from complete doubt (i may be a spokesperson, but i am speaking in my own name and not in the name of those i represent) to total confidence” (emphasis on the original, latour 2004, 64). animalistas use the act of the rescue, and the relationship they develop with individual dogs, to validate their position as interlocutors. in addition, in the context of real and perceived violence, it has become increasingly significant for animalistas to establish a connection between a human perpetrator and a non-human victim. for most self-identified animalistas, their ability to speak for animals comes from their own sense of empathy toward non-human animals that develops from personal experiences. the experiences that provoke empathy often involved direct interaction with dogs. for example, some realized that they needed to advocate for animals after they started having pets, while others came to this realization after watching street and abandoned dogs suffer. as naisargi dave (2014, 434) argues, “the locking of eyes between humans and nonhumans” can be a critical and intimate moment that “inaugurates a bond,” causing the animalista to distinguish between a singular animal and “all animals in general.” these experiences, and their interpretation, are highly variable both in their depth and in the response they provoke, which results in the broad and generalist way in which the term animalista is used. the breadth of the term, however, causes some discussion among different groups. the question of who is a real animalista is not merely rhetorical; it has implications on who gets to claim the label of being a “real” animal advocate and thus can ask for more funding. this is important, because even if most animalistas in ciudad juárez have no intention of criminalizing animal abuse, shelters and rescue organizations always need resources. for eco-canis, the distinction between the “real” and the superficial animalista is rooted in the act of the rescue. the act of the rescue constitutes a potentially transformative event because it can create a relationship between specific human and non-human bodies. it is a shared moment of physical contact between two subjects, the human rescuer and the dog rescuee, producing a form “of intimacy that cross[es] distance between species” (salazar parreñas 2016, 98–99). these bonds of intimacy are forged between “a particular set of individuals” “who encounter one another … as ‘transcorporeal subjects,’” and “not just as part of a collective” (govindrajan 2018, 20–21). even before the act of the rescue itself, the human rescuer has to be able to identify the rescuee as a victim of human neglect, which means understanding their suffering. this first moment of contact also shows how human rescuers seek to engage in “transspecies semiosis” between dogs and humans, interpreting iconic and indexical signs (see kohn 2007, 6–7) through their own bodily reactions. the rescuer, however, seeks to make such semiosis intelligible for other humans, thus trying to frame the dog’s suffering symbolically, through language: “the dog was cold”; or, “the dog was sad.” although this form of voicing mostly seeks to describe an injustice, at this stage, the relationship between rescuer and rescuee is not yet fully formed. the rescue itself transforms this relationship and the potential transspecies understanding by highlighting the interaction of human and non-human bodies. when dogs are rescued they might be under a great amount of stress, they might be injured, and they might be aggressive as a result. humans who engage in rescues are well aware that their own bodies now become vulnerable, exposed to possible bites and other physical injuries. in addition, rescuers face harsh repercussions, as people in the dog’s immediate social environment might get angry and use the threat of violence to try to stop them. for the rescued dogs, this situation marks the road to recovery, but also the moment when someone first listened to them. for the human rescuers, the specific rescue, as a discrete event, becomes part of a conglomerate of rescue experiences that allows them to better notice injustices, consolidating them as animalistas. the effectiveness of the rescue as an act that creates a bond is based on an understanding of human and non-human bodies as porous. the contact that takes place during the rescue allows for the development of an interspecies relationship that goes beyond a particular, discrete rescue event and grants the rescuer the possibility of speaking for dogs, thus making her or him a “real” animalista. this relationship ought to be maintained through ongoing interactions with dogs and other animals by creating a proximity among human and non-human bodies that makes rescuers vulnerable to dangerous diseases, as rescuers interact with dogs with terminal illnesses, open wounds, and sometimes tick infestations.10 if the act of the rescue grants the rescuer the possibility of speaking for or becoming a voice for non-human animals, the question remains which non-human bodies may acquire a voice. as i explained before, non-human bodies are only able to acquire a voice when they survive a vicious attack that results in injury. however, there is also the element of human agency. the attack has to be intentionally (that is, not accidentally) caused by specific humans. this became evident in my rescue trips with eco-canis. on numerous occasions, we drove by a street dog or past the lifeless body of a dog on the road—but how could one speak for a dead dog? and, how could one “voice” a claim for justice when the human responsible for such abuse was nowhere to be found? in her research on animal-rights activism in india, dave (2017, 51) argues that some local activists differentiate between “promising” and “unpromising” animals, because “promising” animals are “capable of having names and faces.” this generally holds true in ciudad juárez when organizations are not interested in pressing charges or in directly addressing issues of violence directed toward animals. some organizations in ciudad juárez are mostly interested in providing temporary or permanent homes for rescued street dogs. these organizations, sometimes operated by u.s. citizens and residents, rely on the violent history of the city as the background for their production processes that transform “unpromising” street dogs into dogs with familiar names and photogenic faces, but in a way, their stories are not specific enough for an individual voice to emerge. what is different for organizations like eco-canis, which want to address issues of animal cruelty, is that in addition to a name and a face, for an animal to be promising, it also requires a voice—a voice that emerges through an specific act of human violence. this points to another relationship required for animals to get a voice: the relationship between the human victimizer and the non-human victim. the spillage of human violence into non-human residents produces relationships built on a physical relationship between the attacker and the target—becoming linked through the attack itself. this relationship, and the recognition of human agency it entails, makes dogs “promising animals” (dave 2017). the role of the human perpetrator completes the triad consisting of animal, activist, and abuser that allows the animalista to speak directly about an individual animal and an individual attacker. here, the motive of the attack remains unimportant; what proves central in the construction of a voice is the ruthless nature of the attack on a dog perceived as naturally innocent. the attack, which produces an injured body, transforms animals from “something” into a kind of “somebody”—if the dog had been killed, it would have remained “something,” only legible to the state as a form of property, and only accessible to animalistas as a generic animal prey of the ongoing violence (see haraway 2008, 78–79). dogs can only acquire a voice if they have been injured through the forces of human agency—that is, if they have a story to tell about their abuse that involves specific abusers. thus, even when an animal has a name, a face, and a voice, for their stories to be convincing when told, they also need their abusers to have names and faces. this proves significant within the mexican criminal justice system. not only is there a cifra negra, a “black number” of crimes committed but never denounced; there also has to be a body, otherwise it is difficult to argue that a crime was committed; and there has to be a potential perpetrator. the story of abuse, the injured animal, and the human abuser are all needed for dogs to receive potential recognition as victims and to have access to justice. the importance of the human perpetrator was one of the elements that blocked alicia’s efforts when trying to take the case of juanito to court, but perhaps it is more clearly exemplified in a remark made by alicia after the end of justicia’s trial. justicia was riding in the back, in her crate, docile as always. alicia, oswaldo, and i rode in the front. as we exited the parking lot, alicia said, with a bittersweet intonation: “the important thing is that he was found guilty. i must repeat this to myself, so that i don’t forget.” a reminder that without the perpetrator there would not have been anything to salvage. conclusion figure 4. around the corner from eco-canis: “there is no crime without a victim.” photo by iván sandoval-cervantes. around the corner from the eco-canis shelter, a painted wall said: “there is no crime without a victim” (“no existe delito sin víctima”). without the dog, without the dog’s living injured body, it is difficult to show authorities and the public in general that a crime has been committed. ciudad juárez’s animalistas work hard, then, to stay close to the bodies of rescued injured animals. more broadly speaking, it shows the centrality of the victim in the mexican criminal justice system. the victim has to be “someone,” with a body or a voice, or both. the case of violence against animals demonstrates that the relationship between body and voice can prove messy sometimes, and that certain bodies acquire a voice more easily than others do. in this article, i have explored how non-human bodies become part of complex histories that seek some form of response, if not justice in itself, in violent contexts, analyzing the relationship between bodies and voices. violence can activate the potentiality of voice in some bodies, while silencing others. i argue that for animalistas in ciudad juárez there is potency in the ways in which anthropogenic violence transforms dogs’ bodies into “promising” animals. injured canine bodies become visual signs and evidence of injustices, and they create the assumption of an individual story and an individual voice. even if mostly looking for patchy or small justices (see chao and kirksey 2022), animalistas speak for and from those bodies to demand recognition, or some form of punishment. injured animal bodies, thus, gain a voice that seems unreachable for non-injured animal bodies: their injuries allow their particular stories of abuse to be told. in other words, injuries highlight the specific materiality of some bodies, separating them from generic street dogs. street dogs are also abused and mistreated, but in a different way, a way that does not involve a specific identifiable act of human aggression. the role of the injured body proves central in the animalistas’ efforts to look for an official and/or public response to specific cases of violence against animals. the injured body is not only evidence of injustice but the site from which animalistas seek to speak. in the particular case of mexico, the circulation of images of disappeared people who are no longer able to speak for themselves implies the silence that surrounds impunity and highlights the lack of a voice that was once there but no longer exists (see vargas gonzález 2020). as other forms of activism in mexico have shown, trying to separate the voice from the material bodies (frequently absent and disappeared) without losing part of the message (the potency of the message) makes for a complicated task that often results in generic demands for justice easily pushed aside and ignored.11 injured non-human animals through their bodies and their gaze (su mirada) invoke individual stories of suffering that allow for the possibility of a human activist to become their voice, as long as there is also a human perpetrator responsible for such suffering. animalistas in ciudad juárez often face financial difficulties, time constraints, and a general climate that does not always see their labor as valid or worthwhile—as they are often asked why they are not saving children or the elderly. in this sense, both abused dogs and animalistas in precarious positions inhabit what zoë h. wool (2017, 83) calls “in-durable sociality”: “a way of being with others based in part on a common need for endurance … conditioned by the temporal limits of togetherness: the awareness of many, finite durations, rather than the possibility of a single shared one (the duration).” yet perhaps the sociality established between humans and dogs becomes more indurable for the dogs than for the humans, since the humans can “become”—at least potentially—something for themselves. animalistas gain a sense of direction and purpose by rescuing animals, while many rescued dogs are suspended in “the daily experience of a difficult and deeply uncertain life that is circumscribed within a present that seems to go nowhere” (wool 2017, 81). the individualization of the animal-abuse cases and the precarious situations shared by both dogs and animalistas continues to push for a depoliticization of animal abuse and toward the pathologization of violence—it is individual attackers who are to blame, not the inefficiency of legal processes, the infrastructure, the disregard for abused dogs, or the undervaluation of life. this obscures the larger picture that shows connections between different types of violence and indicates how the legal system can bury voices beneath other voices, producing bittersweet outcomes like the one experienced by alicia and justicia. abstract activism in favor of non-human animals is on the rise throughout mexico despite ongoing and episodic violence. activists, also known as animalistas, represent themselves as the “voice” of non-human animals as they seek rights and well-being for animals. in ciudad juárez, a border city once considered the most dangerous city in the world (2008–2012), animalistas engage in complex ways with non-human bodies as they seek to “speak” for them. this article analyzes the relationship between injured bodies and voice in ciudad juárez’s animalista movement, with the act of the rescue as the point of inception. injured animal bodies prove central for activists because anthropogenic violence transforms dogs’ bodies. non-human injured bodies, and their visual representations, allow animalistas to position themselves as the voice of an animal that survived an abuse while also individualizing and depolitizicing—through the discourse of pathology—violence against dogs. [non-human animals; injuries; voice; activism; ciudad juárez; mexico] resumen a pesar de la violencia continua y esporádica en méxico, el activismo a favor de los animales no humanos ha incrementado. en la búsqueda de derechos y el bienestar de animales no-humanos, las personas activistas, o animalistas, se presentan a sí mismas como la “voz” de los animales. en la ciudad fronteriza de ciudad juárez, que alguna vez fue consideraba la más violenta del mundo (2008–2012), las animalistas se relacionan de manera compleja con los cuerpos no-humanos para poder “hablar” por ellos. este artículo analiza la relación entre cuerpos lesionados y voz en el movimiento animalista de ciudad juárez, enfatizando el acto del rescate como un momento clave. los cuerpos lesionados de perros son fundamentales para las activistas porque la violencia antropogénica los transforma. así los cuerpos animales lesionados, y sus representaciones visuales, les permiten posicionarse como la voz de animales sobrevivientes al abuso, mientras que individualiza y despolitiza—a través de un discurso patologizante—la violencia contra perros. [animales no-humanos, lesions, voz, activism, ciudad juárez, méxico] notes acknowledgments i thank my interlocutors, especially alicia and oswaldo from ecocanis, who allowed me to ride with them as they embarked on the never-ending task of protecting animals in ciudad juárez. i have presented different versions of this article at multiple venues, and i am thankful i got to share my work. i’m indebted to rihan yeh for inviting me to give the first presentation at the colmich. naisargi dave provided thought-provoking comments on a previous version of this essay. i would also like to thank amy reed-sandoval, maría elena garcía, and paola velasco santos. many thanks to the anonymous reviewers who gave generous and constructive feedback, and to the editorial collective at cultural anthropology who guided the review process. this research was partly funded by the ucla school of law through the animal law and policy small grant program. 1. see josiah heyman (2012) for an analysis of the relationship between capitalism, immigration, and violence. 2. the ley de bienestar animal para el estado de chihuahua [animal welfare law for the state of chihuahua] replaced a previous version, written in 1994, that did not include a clear definition of animal abuse. the 1994 version only included 35 articles, while the 2010 version had 95. the penal code reformed in 2013 included an entire new apartado, section 28, with three articles (364, 365, and 366) that addressed crimes against domestic animals. 3. i recognize the influence that philosophical and normative debates have on the animalista movement in ciudad juárez. in this article i am focusing on the descriptive, daily use of the term. 4. peta stands for people for the ethical treatment of animals. peta was founded in 1980. according to the organization’s webpage, it is “dedicated to establishing and defending the rights of all animals … under the simple principle that animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.” peta is probably the most influential animal rights organization in the world, but it has been criticized by several groups, including feminist vegan activists such as carol j. adams (see bindel 2010). for additional references to animal rights/well-being activism in mexico, see ana cristina ramirez barreto (2018) and azucena granados moctezuma (2020). 5. see ley de bienestar animal para el estado de chihuahua [animal welfare law for the state of chihuahua], published in november 2010. 6. this was a highly visible report that circulated in the news and on social media (see pacheco 2019). 7. see also kate mcclellan (2022) on the politics of equivalence in jordan. 8. a more recent news article states that during 2019, almost 2,000 dead animals were “collected” from the streets of ciudad juárez (castro 2019). 9. policies that removed canine bodies from the streets like trash can be related to yamini narayanan’s (2017) criticism of urban planning 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and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.05 “life is a gamble”: labors of mobility, risk, and return between sudan and lebanon cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 113-141, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.06 “life is a gamble”: labors of mobility, risk, and return between sudan and lebanon anna simone reumert columbia university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8299-3186 “life is mughamara,” bashir told me. “you have to take risks in life to get somewhere. like now, i’m investing in this harvest, i’m trying it out, but if it fails, i’ll have to migrate again.” mughamara translates from arabic as “adventure,” “gamble,” and “risk,” and implies in its root form the act of immersion; throwing oneself into something without knowing the outcome.1 this article is based on fieldwork with young migrant returnees who, like bashir, are sons of subsistence farmers in western sudan and worked low-skilled service jobs in lebanon before an economic and political collapse in 2020 forced them to leave. they returned to sudan in the midst of its own economic and political crisis after a popular civil revolution in 2019. like other sudanese male migrants whom i met in beirut and khartoum, bashir described migration itself as mughamara. following in the footsteps of younger male migrants from khartoum to beirut and back again, i show how this term articulates the risk and potential benefits of migration, the value of which is both material and affective for migrants, who validate themselves through their risk-taking.2 building on these migrants’ terminology, i propose mughamara as a concept of mobility, in a context where the striving for labor opportunity also means a striving for life. when i first met bashir in beirut in the fall of 2019, lebanon was gripped by economic crisis and mass uprising (majed and salman 2019). bashir had lost his job as a concierge at a hotel and was looking for a way to go home. he had seemed detached from his migrant friends in beirut, always reminiscing about life back in sudan. he left lebanon in winter 2020 and went back to his village in kadugli, south kordofan, a subsistence farming and politically marginalized region in western sudan, where he helped his mother tend their land. he did not stay there long before making new plans. he tried his luck at smuggling weapons across the border from south sudan, as well as at working at a construction site in egypt, where he got injured. in august 2021, we met in khartoum to say goodbye again. migration was on his mind and he was planning to go back to lebanon. rain flooded khartoum’s streets, signaling the arrival of the harvest season, and we sought shelter at a popular downtown café. young people around us were playing cards and discussing the rising prices of food and fuel in sudan, but bashir had not come to khartoum to join their protests. barely touching his coffee, he began to tell me about his gamble, as he called it, mughamara. to migrate to lebanon, bashir had to pay a thousand dollars in advance to a broker agency in khartoum. to pay this cash, he had mortgaged his mother’s crops to a local trader. a customary agrarian loan known colloquially as shayl. through this bargain, bashir risked his family’s subsistence, their livelihood, in hopes of making more money abroad that would, perhaps, change their circumstances. this is a speculative bargain. if the harvest fails, he becomes indebted to the trader, but by selling at the market, he becomes “relevant” in market terms. just as bashir bets on the harvest, he also bets on his potential for getting a job when he pays a broker to help him migrate. this constitutes a labor mortgage, insofar as the exchange-value of his labor power is held in suspense; he invests in his own potential for hire, without knowing whether he will get a job. risk-taking in this economy constitutes a labor that is necessitated by, and yet distinct from, the waged work that migrants may or may not get when they go abroad. the goal of bashir’s speculation is not sky-high; he does not aspire to become rich, but simply to live better. yet in a transregional economy where cross-border mobility yields profit, the desire for a good life comes at a risk for those who move. crossing borders, bashir (and others like him) becomes valuable to state and non-state actors who extract fees from him. his very search for work through mobility becomes a point of value extraction. bashir’s gamble is relational, insofar as it is necessitated by, and begins, in the family, and it is to the family that the migrant and their labor return. the family invests in, and puts pressure on, the family member to earn money abroad, but the family’s labor also proves vital in reproducing the migrant’s capacity for labor. in a generational economy, bashir had returned “too soon.” he had returned to sudan with less than when he had left, and he returned to a material obligation as a son of subsistence farmers. in subsistence farming communities in sudan, women have become the main household providers in the absence of migrating men and their remittances. bashir’s compromised return spirals from a history of agrarian dispossession and the privatization of land in sudan. for him, as for others in his position, labor migration constitutes both an inherited burden and a necessary risk in their continuous striving for a good life. bashir’s itinerant gamble captures the experience of laboring in the midst of uncertainty produced by the multiple, overlapping crises that condition the lives of citizens in both sudan and lebanon today—a time when risking your life on the move, or mortgaging your harvest, becomes a survival strategy against the bigger risk of becoming stuck in unemployment, or losing your land altogether. following in the footsteps of migrants looking for work amid the accumulating crises in lebanon and sudan, the article moves through different economies of speculative value extraction—from agrarian speculation to the labor required to move between this work. through their quest for labor, we also meet awadalla, a former migrant worker in lebanon who now operates a clandestine trading network of migrant labor and agrarian produce that links bashir’s labor itineraries to a domestic service economy in beirut and other cities of the middle east. the article ends by following bashir on his way out of sudan again, striving for a second chance abroad, and, eventually, a better return. note on fieldwork and methodology this article forms part of a six-year, multi-sited ethnographic and archival research project that i conducted with sudanese migrant workers in lebanon, as well as with migrant returnees in sudan, between 2017 and 2022. the material for this article is mainly based on participant observation i conducted with sudanese migrant returnees in khartoum in august 2021, but it also draws on and refers to fieldwork i undertook in lebanon between 2019 and 2020, as well as in june 2022, when i conducted follow-up interviews with migrants in beirut. i also include conversations i had with the khartoum-based non-profit cooperative for peace and security (cfps), which works with women farmers and migrant returnees in kordofan and jazeera. my conversations with the migrant returnees in khartoum were informal and took place in public and semi-private spaces, including a café, a car, and a migrant broker’s office. the field sites include a car and a motorbike, which transported us to a clandestine migrant broker’s office. the coffeehouse mentioned above presented a rare resting hour in this constant itinerant movement for labor. due to the nature of the fieldwork, i did not record our conversations. instead, i took notes, which i stored safely and coded anonymously. all conversations were conducted in colloquial arabic and translated by me. for their safety, i have changed the names of all research participants. the unstable political situation in sudan at the time of my fieldwork, two months before the military coup in october 2021, made it impossible for me to get a permit to conduct research in kordofan. my ethnographic data on agrarian life is therefore based on my interlocutors’ description, which they shared in person, as well as over the phone.3 debt and risk in mobility: theoretical interventions in political economic analyses, speculation means to bet on the market with the interest of profiting from the outcome (bear 2020; davis 2018). i conceptualize risk and speculation on a different scale, by examining how migrants and farmers bet on their chances to survive the fluctuating demands of a transregional market economy. in many agrarian and urbanized societies of the global south, risk has become both a “disciplinary discourse” (bize 2018), imposed by the state, and a practice in response to it (martin 2007). speculation is not a metaphor in this process; it indexes the material and affective practices of scavenging and maneuvering for life via labor (bize 2018; james 2021; morris 2008; simone 2020; tadiar 2022). as neferti tadiar (2012, 785) argues, the distinction between labor-time and “life-time” has become dissolved for those who have to put their bodies available for hire at all times, making their life-time valorizable as potential surplus labor. of course, mobility has always produced debts for those who go, and profits for those who facilitate their movement (mathew 2016; schouten 2022). it is not necessarily that people migrate more than they used to, or that farmers take on more debts than they used to (agarwal 2021; federici 2012; gerber 2014; graeber 2011; shah and lerche 2020). anthropologists have conceptualized how debt fuels migration (achtnich 2022; kleinman 2019; piot with batema 2019; roitman 2005; scheele 2012), and the gendered implications of mobility debt for families (ferguson 1999; gaibazzi 2013; ghosh 2015; grabska and fanjoy 2015; melly 2011; parreñas 2005). yet studies suggest that mobility has become more formalized as a point of value extraction and exploitation by both state and non-state actors (achtnich 2022; belloni 2019; schouten 2022; reeves 2016; vogt 2018; wright 2021). the persisting desire for a wage, both in africa and on a global scale (barchiesi 2011; comaroff and comaroff 2020; denning 2010; ferguson and li 2018), and the increased necessity of having to move in search of it, is what renders migrants into a category of control, extraction, and investment by states, humanitarian organizations, as well as non-state fiscal agents (de genova 2002; fassin 2011; mezzadra and neilson 2013; silvey and parreñas 2020; ticktin 2011; willen 2019). at detention centers at the frontiers of europe, for example, the increased control of cross-border migration has “arrested mobility” and, some argue, made the migrant’s immobilized body, rather than their labor power, a distinct point of value extraction (achtnich 2022; andersson 2018). but as europe has become harder to reach, people still move elsewhere for labor. sudan is today both a destination and a transit zone for transregional migration to and from the middle east (lumley-sapanski, schwarz, and valverde-cano 2021; oette and babiker 2017; thiollet and thibaut 2022). in sudan, eu-funded reintegration programs now invest in migrant returnees as “human capital” through vocational training (ziai 2022, 2020). regional scholarship that foregrounds social capital and informalized labor (elyachar 2010; hanieh 2022; medani 2021) is instructive to keep in mind the itinerant and non-waged labor of migration. going to market, looking for opportunity, making oneself available for hire—all of these activities constitute labors of mobility that respond to market demands of social capital and entrepreneurial self-fashioning (de abreu 2018; elyachar 2010), where “making it” demands stretching oneself across time and place, with the risk of stretching one’s family thin. the labor exchange becomes for aspirational migrant workers a mortgage in this process.4 not unlike bashir’s harvest bargain, they pay brokers to go abroad, without any guarantee of becoming employed. the migrants i follow call this practice a gamble, mughamara. labors of mobility working night shifts, moonlighting, digging under the earth, crossing borders illegally, carrying unregistered goods, shadowing someone who doesn’t want to do the job themselves, are necessary tactics for those who, like bashir, return to a sudan, where half of the active labor force is “precariously employed” (undp 2021), if employed at all, and many work in the shadows of the state economy (bakhit 2020; medani 2021). shadow labor is coded by racialized and gendered terms of movement and access both within sudan and in a transregional economy, where some bodies pass easily while others are systematically marked out as suspicious, and/or hypersexualized, and targeted accordingly through extractive and disciplinary measures by state and non-state actors alike. this racial-gendered coding takes place as well on the route to lebanon from sudan, which involves crossing borders in the shadow of state control. migrants fly to syria and from there continue on a smuggling route across the border into lebanon. this route was in use before the syrian war (2011-), but it has grown as a business since then. many of the migrants who took the journey across the mountain range bordering syria and lebanon alongside other migrants, primarily sudanese and syrian, recounted in harrowing detail how they were kept underground for days. but the journey allows for legal flexibility: when lebanese border guards caught someone crossing, they let them through in return for fees. once the migrants make it to beirut, they can become documented through an informal transaction with lebanon’s general security, a process colloquially known as “fixing the situation,” through which they obtain work permits. most sudanese migrants in lebanon become documented under the category of “domestic laborers,” although few today work domestically. rather, these jobs have been outsourced to the restaurant and hospitality sector, which relies on the steady availability of cheap foreign labor to run its engine. being employed in this way offers migrants more flexibility than live-in domestic servants have, but little security. as “domestics,” they are not protected by lebanese labor law (kassamali 2021; mikdashi 2022). the lebanese state uses migrants’ legal precarity to discipline and regulate them through regular detentions without trials, as well as threats of deportation. mohammed, one of bashir’s flatmates in beirut, recounted over dinner at their house one night in 2019 his experience in lebanese detention. after being detained for months without trial because his work permit had expired, he went back to sudan, then tried his luck again, crossing through syria once more to get to lebanon. “were you not afraid to be detained again?” i asked mohammed. “afraid, no. it’s part of the adventure [mughamara]—there’s a 50/50 chance of succeeding,” he responded. migration generates debts, as people pay to go and go again, but the sudanese migrants i spoke with did not describe this as a debt exactly. rather, like mohammed and bashir, many spoke of their migration as an adventure and a gamble, mughamara, through which they both valued and validated their migration. “you are the producer of your life” and “migration is a gamble” circulated as mantras between the sudanese male migrants i met in beirut, many of whom had been regularly detained. for them, taking a risk on life, mughamara, also means a way to retake control of life. perhaps this emphasis on the activity of risk-taking, rather than its material consequences, allows space for hope; as long as one is still gambling, things can change for the better. as lebanon’s economy went bankrupt, migrants could still get work, but it was harder to hold on to, and much less paid, than before the crisis. with businesses regularly closing and reopening under covid lockdowns and the inflation of the lebanese lira, migrants changed jobs several times a year, often moving between beirut and other regions of lebanon as demand required. to survive the inflating cost of living in beirut, many have had to work double shifts, washing dishes at restaurants and cleaning factories at night, creating eighteen-hour workdays, which might, if lucky, earn them up to us $500 a month. at this rate, few are able to send any money home. in fact, many have had to borrow money from their families to survive living in beirut. this has reversed the intended flow of migration, as migrants’ families send rather than receive money, investing in migration without seeing a horizon for its anticipated return. many of bashir’s migrant friends in beirut hesitated to return, feeling that they had “nothing to bring back,” as one of his former flatmates told me. they seemed to experience their present predicament as a crisis that “presupposes its future resolution” (larkin 2017, 49); the future is in sight, but it does not guarantee a change from the present (guyer 2007; morris 2008).5 bashir, meanwhile, couldn’t wait to go home. returning to revolution migrants who returned from lebanon to sudan in 2020, as bashir did, returned from one country gripped by crisis to a country entering one. sudan’s civilian revolution of 2018–19 was an intergenerational civil uprising, but its main actors—and martyrs—belonged to the generation of twenty-somethings that many of the returning migrants, like bashir, were born into. revolution was everywhere in sudan, yet the migrant returnees i spoke to in khartoum did not discuss it much. while sudanese migrants in beirut had organized solidarity marches in support of the revolution at home in 2019, those who returned spoke about it without a sense of belonging to it. the revolution entered their discourse in the mode of foreclosure, opportunities of a better life that had not materialized. they had returned to a place where things seemed to not have changed or to have even worsened, as it did further in the year after they returned. as things deteriorated in 2020, migrants were not the only ones who experienced the revolution as an event that did not transform the structure of living in sudan. the former islamic regime, which had taken power when bashir came of age in the 1990s, had largely dismantled the social welfare contract (de waal 2013; kaldor and de waal 2020; medani 2021; salomon 2016). the past regime never fixed the roads or upgraded the electricity supply, and shortages of fuel, gas, food, and medicine worsened during the transition period. in opposition to the transition in 2019, military supporters took gas pipelines and bakeries hostage and blocked access to public infrastructure in an effort to (re)assert their control over the country’s political and material assets (el gizouli and thomas 2021). as a result, khartoumites can now eat kfc for lunch—if they can afford the inflated prices. when i visited in winter 2020, a large part of the urban population stood in bread lines. new platforms for political organizing and entrepreneurial economies have blossomed in khartoum since 2019, but many young sudanese people feel marginalized from taking part in these. the revolution had propelled a new promise of “opening” sudan to global capitalism, of attracting international investment. sudan’s national debt had spiraled in the 1980s, when structural adjustment loans had changed the relations of production and ownership in sudanese society (barnett and abdelkarim 2016). taxes did not materialize into public services and welfare, but were instead spent on paying the state’s foreign debts, making sudan one of the most indebted countries in the world (brown 1992). in 2020, the united states briefly lifted the sanctions with which it had been disciplining sudan for thirty years, in return for certain political compromises, such as formalizing peace with israel. but the united states and other foreign donors mandated new austerity measures that have made basic living goods inaccessible for many (bakhit 2020; el gizouli and thomas 2021). and when the sudanese army overthrew the civilian-led transitional government on october 25, 2021, the united states quickly suspended its debt pledge of us $700 million. the revolution opened a horizon of material and political possibilities that have yet to materialize for most people (bakhit 2020). although the protests first erupted among frustrated workers in atbara in december 2018, the revolution became centered in khartoum and associated with young middle-class urban professionals (tubiana 2022). many of the urban poor in khartoum are pastoralists or sedentary farmers indigenous to western sudan, including bashir’s home of south kordofan, who have been displaced or lured away from their land through a history of colonial and postcolonial state-induced economic warfare (babiker 2009; franck, casciarri, and el-hassan 2021). the sudanese anthropologist mohamed bakhit (2020, 919) has argued that the economic hardships hit the middle class the hardest, since “the population of peripheral areas and shantytowns has faced economic hardships for a long time, and most of them work in the informal economy with the ability to get cash money and negotiate their income on a daily basis.” the past regime had expanded young people’s access to higher education by launching new universities in the provinces and suburbs of khartoum, but the creation of jobs remained slow (mann 2014). the increased access to higher education in sudan today has resulted mainly in a growing class of educated unemployed, many of who migrate into low-paid jobs across the middle east. present-day sudanese migrant workers are often much better educated than the generations who migrated before them, including their fathers and uncles, as i describe below. in the revolution, the political production of social inequality backfired. when the military took power in october 2021, unemployed college graduates took to the streets again, calling for the transitional civilian government to represent their demands. gendered routes sudanese migrants who i spoke to in beirut often described migration as a male endeavor, insisting that border-crossing was “not safe for women.” the twin association of men’s mobility as a masculine privilege—a ticket to ride—and a simultaneous obligation toward home, is a recurring phenomenon in migrant-sending societies across africa (bolt 2015; ferguson 1999; mains 2017; menin 2016; palillo 2022; vigh 2017). in sudan, the male-gendering of migration is mandated by law, which since 1994 has forbidden women from traveling without the company of a male guardian (tønnessen 2010). but women in sudan do migrate, and they are just as much displaced by ecological and economic warfare. their different trajectories reveal how mobility is gendered such that while men and women both migrate, they become channeled into different labor (abusharaf 2009; grabska and fanjoy 2015; leontsini and lyberaki 2015). bashir’s sister offers a case in point. in between his itinerant travels, bashir stayed with his older sister amani. she lives in khartoum with her three daughters in a squatter house and sells tea on the street corner in souq al-arabi, a large open-air market in the city. at any time of day, on any day of the week, souq al-arabi in khartoum is alive with commerce. at this busy square in the old colonial center of the city, people of different social classes meet in between work to shop, drink sugary coffee boiled with ginger root, and eat the hot lentil stews prepared by sitt el chai (tea ladies). amani sells her tea to office workers, students, and people in transit who all stop for a break and a chat on the roadside. as a “tea lady,” amani forms part of a labor group of internal migrant women displaced from western and southern sudan because of structural and economic warfare (abusharaf 2009). in khartoum, women displaced through these routes are often hypersexualized and discriminated against, and their labor options are limited to forms of “street work” that are considered indecent, even as women they sustain and feed the city’s working masses, and as such are vital to the urban infrastructure and social economy. the gendered and racial discrimination against urban “squatters” has carried over from british colonial anxieties and their disciplining of the urban unemployed (sikainga 1996); the disciplining of urban labor targeted working-class and migrant women in particular (boddy 2007; hale 2001). in colonial khartoum, “it was not the city that posed an inherent danger, but rather unregulated (and unidentified) women’s bodies that threatened existing social order” (brown 2017, 143). women’s bodies have also been a target of state policing in postcolonial sudan, in particular under bashir’s regime which disciplined for their labor and movement, while idealizing them for their propriety and reproduction (fadlalla 2011; hale 2001). “under bashir, tea ladies were relentlessly fined, arrested, blackmailed, and sexually assaulted by public-order police.” (provan and rowsome 2020, 70). the presence of women working on the street in khartoum, even as tea-sellers, is still subject to police harassment and public judgment, but their labor also connects the city in vital ways. “you migrate because you want to improve your life,” bashir said when i visited him at his sister’s for breakfast one morning. he wasn’t fleeing from his responsibilities, he said, he was going for his family’s sake. amani, who had joined our conversation, disagreed with this. “men migrate primarily for their own needs, not because their family tells them to. if they can’t make money abroad, better to stay here and care for their families,” she asserted. for her, men’s migration seemed like an “escape” from their obligations rather than a fulfillment of that role. bashir protested that he had migrated for his family. in the corner of amani’s one-bedroom sat the flat-screen tv he had brought home with him as a gift from lebanon, as if to illustrate his point. yet the tv remained wrapped in plastic, and bashir had borrowed money from his sister to cover the bus fare back to his village. bashir was spared the sexual discrimination that his sister faced on the journey for labor, but he encountered other pressures and temptations as a single male traveler (see also palillo 2022). after returning from lebanon in 2020, bashir first went to egypt and worked at a construction site for a few months. he injured his arm one day in an accident on the site, and was hospitalized for a month. this used up the few earnings he had made, and he returned to his village again. later that year, bashir began working for a petty trader, for whom he sold agrarian produce across the border to south sudan. on one such trip, he was approached by a trader across the border who offered him two kalashnikovs “at a good price.” bashir had never held a gun in his life before he smuggled weapons back to sudan, where he sold them to a local militia fighter in kadugli, whom he associated with the sudan people’s liberation movement-north (splm-n). while looking for a buyer, he had stored the weapons under his bed in his mother’s village. he called me one day, showcasing the machine guns as if they were toys. bashir’s family belongs to the baggara-messiriya tribal group. they are pastoralists whose cattle grazed in south kordofan, where they later settled more permanently as subsistence farmers, or “agro-pastoralists” (casciarri and ahmed 2009). they have been in a long and politically exploited land dispute with the nuba tribe, who are indigenous to south kordofan. although the splm-n technically organized for the nuba, and in opposition to the interests of the baggara and other pastoral groups claiming rights to the area (ahmed 2013), bashir considered them to represent him and “his people” too. his sense of alliance underscores the shared livelihood patterns between these groups, as well as their common grievances in relation to the islamic regime in khartoum and the regional conflict, to which both pastoral and sedentary groups have lost land, limbs, and livelihood (assal 2009). yet the legacy of british colonial land policy in sudan has racialized terms of land tenure and tribal identification, and antagonized intertribal relations of trade and co-dependence in south kordofan, as elsewhere in sudan (see franck, casciarri, and el-hassan 2021; elamin 2018; ille 2011; mamdani 2020). the british colonial administration reformed customary land law by interpreting land rights differently according to tribal designation and area, in a strategy to cultivate cheap crops on mechanized farming in eastern sudan, while maintaining rain-fed farming in the west (babiker 2009). for example, they assigned the baggara tribe land tenure in an effort to buy their loyalty and, later, their labor as a militia, “even though the baggara wanted only passage rights for their animals rather than land rights” (komey 2008, 1001). meanwhile, the british colonial administration designated the nuba mountains as their tribal homeland (dar) “without nuba consent” (komey 2008, 1000). the state’s claim to usufruct rights over land categorized as “uncultivated” included the area where the nuba lived. the british then introduced mechanized farming and cotton production in the area, which had, as guma kunda komey (2008, 1002) observes, “a disastrous effect on the nuba” who “were squeezed and had to choose between two options: either leave the area to work for the government as soldiers or become workers in a mechanized farming scheme.” the political privileging of usufruct rights over statutory rights has haunted sudanese land politics till today.6 the former islamic regime exploited and militarized intertribal land disputes in western sudan for political purchase, including by distributing weapons among the tribes (ahmed 2013; marchal and ahmed 2010; el gizouli and thomas 2021; komey 2008). in sudan today, militarized labor has become an “intimate part of rural life” through the interregional trade of agrarian produce, livestock, human labor, as well as weapons and other clandestine goods (el gizouli and thomas 2021), all of which cross roadblocks and checkpoints that extract considerable value on their way south and west out of sudan (schouten 2022). bashir’s journey across the border to south sudan became militarized through this chain; he carried grains across the border and returned carrying arms. but bashir knew what he was doing, he assured me, when he called one day in the winter of 2020 and displayed the kalashnikovs he had purchased and stored under his mother’s bed. he was taking a chance to make things better for her, and for himself. in agrarian migrant-sending communities such as south kordofan, people and their distributive labor do not return so much as circulate.7 bashir’s story makes visible the relational and reproductive structure of this migration. as the only male bachelor in a family, bashir has inherited an obligation to provide. his family invested in him going, and it is to the family that he returned when his funds dried up. with the help of the family’s resources, and his sister’s care, he (re)gained his capacity for work and travel. this reproductive labor illustrates how migration takes a “life-time” (tadiar 2022), but also (re)produces life (bhattacharya 2017; federici 2012). taking charge of the family’s economy, as would have been expected of them at their age, might be a way for migrants to (re)assert a gendered authority that has been lost. but returning with ambition poses challenges to the family. abdelrahman from the khartoum-based non-profit cooperative for peace and security (cfps), which facilitates micro-credit and vocational training for women farmers in western kordofan, told me that the return of male migrants often generates a crisis in gender roles of provision and authority. “the men return expecting everything to be as it was, as if nothing has changed,” he said. the returning sons and husbands have not been actively involved in maintaining and planning the household and farming economy, and yet “they take charge of the household funds, and use up their wives’ funds to remarry,” he continued. bashir’s bargain when we met again in khartoum in the summer of 2021, bashir had a lot to tell me. it had taken him two days to travel from his village in south kordofan to see me. i had wired him money through a friend in kadugli to cover the bus ticket. he was only in khartoum for one day before going back to work on the farm. every day away from the farm was a day wasted, and he could not afford to be away any longer. bashir then confessed the extent of his investment in the harvest. he had sold his mother’s crops in advance to a trader to yield a bigger harvest for the coming season. bashir’s mother had inherited about fifty acres (fidaan) of land from her husband, who had passed away when bashir was still in lebanon, but she only cultivated a small part of her land. since her other children were already married or working far from their village, she took on the farming labor by herself, growing groundnuts (fuul sudani). she farms by hand, without a tractor, as do most subsistence farmers in kordofan. “we are poor [maskiin],” bashir said. but this year, bashir had come up with a plan to change their fate. with the cash he received from selling the harvest in advance to a local trader, he purchased sesame and sorghum, the two other main crops grown in his region. he expanded the harvest to five rows of sorghum, four rows of sesame, and three rows of groundnuts. i drew a chart while he listed off the prices in rapid speech. based on the market rate, he calculated that he would make double of what he had sold the crops for. “but this is mughamara; i’m gambling,” bashir emphasized, pointing to the chart i had drawn of his bet. by mortgaging his crops as collateral to the trader, bashir becomes indebted if the harvest does not yield the expected result. bashir thus enters a relationship of informal crop mortgaging known as shayl, which has a long history in sudan, where it emerged as a way to avoid direct interest loans, prohibited in islamic law (abdelkarim 1992; bernal 1991). some consider shayl exploitative, because the farmer sells below market price to the merchant, who stores the crops until he can sell at the highest bidding market price (kevane 1993). if the harvest does not turn out well, the farmer owes the merchant more than he can deliver and will have to pay back through future harvests. bashir understood the risks of his bargain. he knew people from his village who had ended up in prison after a series of bad harvests because they could not pay off their debts. to bashir, these loans presented a danger. “people live like thieves, spending money they don’t have,” he told me. in recent years, micro-credit has become the main loan practice, especially among women farmers who are considered more trustworthy and “always pay back on time,” as the director of the non-profit cfps told me in khartoum. but whereas micro-credit requires monetary payment, shayl is paid in crops, and many subsistence farmers still prefer this form of loan. “how did your mother agree to this plan?” i asked bashir. “it’s for her sake,” he responded, “so that i stay with her and marry and don’t migrate again.” bashir said that he would stay in sudan if he could; the harvest determines where he goes. in sudan, where the wind is hot and dry, the harvest often does fail, despite speculations to the contrary. through the “neoliberal urbanization” and expansion of khartoum, pastoralists now produce “for the city” (franck, casciarri, and el-hassan 2021). the sudanese state has promoted this “pastoral entrepreneurialism” as a form of self-investment (casciarri 2009). yet the discourse of entrepreneurialism disguises a reality of dispossession and the privatization of debt (mbembe 2001). today, many cannot survive from their harvest and rent out their labor by migrating regionally and internationally to subsidize their livelihood. according to the director of the cfps, many subsistence farmers today also sell their land, or mortgage their crops to expand their yield on the market. while a clear division between the land-owning and landless classes in sudan (bernal 1991) never existed, the transformation of communal into elite private land ownership took place in some regions already before the british colonial demarcation of tribal land (komey 2008). in late nineteenth-century ottoman egypt and sudan, land registration had the double effect of privatizing debt and increasing pressure on individual household production. pastoralists who cultivated on shared land experienced the emergence of private property law as a “penalty” and a burden to their livelihood, as it privatized a heretofore collective debt (bernal 1991; hutchinson 1996; mitchell 2002, 67). pastoralists in sudan have long since realized the risk of commodifying their subsistence when increasing cash-crop production for export. transregional labor migration has proven obligatory to subsistence farmers’ survival since the 1970s, necessitated by economic transformations that put pressure on pastoralists (bakhit 1991; bernal 1991; salih 1990). after leaving khartoum, bashir often called to update me on the harvest, and to complain about life in the village. in december 2021, he told me that the harvest had failed, and that he wanted to migrate again, “this time far away,” to europe by boat. i warned him against it, but bashir countered, all my life, all i wanted is to work and live. maybe i’ll die on the way, but it’s worth the risk: that’s life’s struggle. you never know where death will find you; i might die right here today. … life in sudan is not life for me. for some it’s fine, but i want a future. you see, the sudanese in beirut work simple jobs and only think about money, but i think about how i can make a life and a future. my children, how will they live, how will they study? to make a life, you have to struggle. bashir migrates in order to live, but he risks his life as collateral for the journey. like his mother’s crops, sold in advance of being harvested, then stored away for future consumption, he is harvesting for future life. the present is not available to him as a time to consume. and yet, life is not only foreclosed or postponed in migration. migrants in beirut marry, reproduce, they party, and they gamble. sudanese migrants in beirut make kin, organize politically, and live in ways that cannot be quantified as self-investment, but that satisfy their desires for intimacy, friendship, and political identification. these activities of kin-making and leisure count as social reproduction, reproducing migrants not only for more work but also for life outside of, and beyond, labor. the world that migrants build when they go “in search” does not disappear or go to waste when they leave; it stays, grows, and circulates via daily phone calls between khartoum and beirut, and the memories and lessons they bring back. it also reproduces itself through the histories migrants leave behind. in 1960s beirut, sudanese migrant workers established a political and communal life, for example, the sudanese cultural club in 1967, which remains active today.8 several sudanese migrants also joined anticolonial groups that organized out of beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, including the eritrean popular liberation front and the popular front for the liberation of palestine. generational routes “i was not a muhajir; i migrated in order to return,” osman, an elderly returnee who had labored as a butler in beirut in the 1970s and 1980s, recounted when i interviewed him in khartoum in 2020. deploying a distinction between muhajir and mughtarib, which in this context translate best as “clandestine migrant” and “expatriate,” osman elaborated that the muhajireen are those who migrate to “flee their conditions,” whereas he, as a mughtarib, migrated “with the intention to return.” the distinction held true even if, as in his case, these “expatriates” stayed abroad for decades, and even as bashir and his friends also articulate an intention to return. sons of subsistence farmers in kordofan today still migrate with the aim of returning with enough funds to invest in a future at home, expand their land, buy property, marry, and settle. yet they cross borders under much more precarious circumstances than did their fathers and uncles. in my fieldwork with different generations of sudanese migrant workers in beirut, i have noticed a marked change in labor identification between the older migrants, who described to me in detail the service work they did, and younger migrants like bashir, who prefer not to speak about their work at all. the emphasis today on mobility as a gamble—mughamara—articulates perhaps a generational response to a sense of increased labor precarity and foreclosed opportunities abroad. the generational shift in migration also marks a geographical shift from the northern region, which benefited from the returns of labor migration in the 1970s and 1980s, to the western region of kordofan, from where migrants mainly fled conflict and did not return with as much cash (abdelkarim 1992; bakhit 2020; bernal 1991). in the 1970s and 1980s, men from northern and western rural sudan worked during the oil boom in the gulf, iraq, and libya, returning with enough money to change not only their household economies but also the national economy. the generation who labored abroad back then retired with sufficient savings to secure their retirement and land tenure. in addition to buying property for their families, many returnees became real estate speculators in khartoum’s urban expansion. migrants’ remittances fueled a new informal islamic banking system in the 1980s, which offered loans and money transfers to small-scale farmers and seasonal agrarian workers (osman 1999). this introduced finance capitalism into sudanese rural life (medani 2021; young 2021). today, islamic banking has made mobile banking accessible across rural sudan; several of my interlocutors send and receive money in kordofan with a click on their phones. the impact of the gulf oil boom on the regional economy makes for a well-known story in sudan (medani 2021). what has been less documented is that sudanese migration to lebanon preceded this migration by a few decades. during british colonial rule, sudanese men mainly migrated to egypt for work. there, rumor had it, “you could make good money in beirut,” as elderly sudanese migrants who labored in egypt before coming to beirut have recounted to me. from alexandria’s port, they continued by ferry to lebanon. beirut’s economy was booming in the 1950s and 1960s, before the civil war broke out in 1975, and sudanese migrants found work in the city as butlers, drivers, and cooks for elite families, with whom they often stayed for decades. being arabic-speaking workers in an arab country, however, did not grant them privilege in beirut, where racialized notions of blackness seemed to override both class and nationality as identifying markers (see also jureidini 2009). sudanese migrant workers, as well as sudanese intellectuals who studied at the american university of beirut in the 1960s, such as the late scholar malek badri, recounted to me the racial discrimination they faced on the streets and in the workplace, where derogatory slurs such as ab’d (arabic for “slave”) circulated.9 arguably, the racialization of african service labor in lebanon has only worsened since then with the expansion and regulation of migrant labor (kassamali 2021). by the time lebanon’s civil war officially ended in 1990, labor migration had become an established enterprise, run by migrant agencies and governed by the lebanese state, both of which facilitated kafala sponsorship visas to foreign workers. this situation resulted partly from a growing demand from emigrating lebanese families who had returned during and after the war and who now employed a new group of migrant labor from south asia to help them with their daily chores. as labor migration became more governed under the syrian military occupation of lebanon in the 1990s, migrants began to find alternative routes, escaping the lebanese and syrian border police by crossing the border via syria with the help of smugglers. khartoum is today a hub for different migrant groups and refugees displaced from south sudan, darfur, and kordofan, as well as from ethiopia and eritrea (abusharaf 2009; grabska 2021). whether coming from khartoum or passing through, many try the route to lebanon (fernandez 2013; mengiste 2022). the economy of return in khartoum, migration is so common that migrant broker agencies have an entire area of the city named after them—mughtaribiin—the same term that osman used to identify himself as someone who migrated “with intention.” the increased risk of migration is no secret in this trade. on the contrary, migrant brokers often provide risk analysis as part of their sales strategy. “the sudanese love mughamara; they go the illegal way, even though they can buy tourist visas to libya, the gulf, or lebanon, and it would be cheaper,” awadalla, a former migrant worker turned migrant broker in khartoum, told me, using the same term, mughamara, that bashir and his friends did. awadalla is a former migrant worker in lebanon who, as a broker in khartoum, has made a business out of his own and others’ mobility. but, he insisted, “i am not a “human trafficker” (muharib); i help people.” he runs a migrant agency network between beirut and khartoum. for a fee of around us $1,000-1,500, including all travel costs, he offers both formal work visas to the gulf and clandestine migration routes to libya and lebanon. through the same connections and trade routes, he buys produce from farmers in kordofan to export to the gulf.10 his labor connects the transregional trade in human and non-human production from sudan to cities in the middle east. awadalla’s labor illustrates how migrants and the brokers of migration overlap in the economy of mobility. all the migrant brokers i met in khartoum were themselves migrant returnees, who on return had found the business of migration their only viable avenue for making a living. being former migrants themselves makes them trusted salesmen; they know the migrants’ needs because they have been in their shoes (see also alpes 2017; wright 2021). the migrant broker agencies in khartoum operate as family businesses that often employ younger relatives, many of whom later migrate. the agencies also reintegrate migrant returnees by employing them. for awadalla, as for other returnees, migration is a labor that never ends. it continues on return, not only because the migrant worker who performs reproductive labor for their employer is never off but also because the economy of migration circulates through returnees. the work is easy to get but risky, awadalla told me, and demands moving about a lot. because of the constant demands on his labor, awadalla preferred to meet me en route. “my car is my office,” he explained, laughing. his itinerant office allowed me to follow his workday, which stretched into the night as we drove through khartoum, maneuvering his black station wagon through the capital’s bumpy roads, recently flooded from the august rains. one night, awadalla and i were going to go to a nargileh café that he owns on the notorious airport road, a coffeehouse that doubles as a migrant travel agency where deals are sealed and money exchanged. yet our drive through the city ended up taking most of the evening, so we never made it to the café. we made a detour to bahri, one of khartoum’s boroughs, where awadalla had to “deliver something” to a friend at a roadside. while driving, awadalla poured us imported american whiskey that he had acquired from a friend at the ethiopian embassy. drinking imported alcohol signifies an expat class position in sudan, where alcohol is banned, and most of those who drink prefer araki, a locally brewed alcohol. awadalla inherited his trade from his father, who imported shirts from the gulf to sell in sudan. awadalla first traveled to syria for business for the same purpose, and from there he went to lebanon. “you know, i never worked for anyone in lebanon, i was always doing business there,” awadalla asserted. drawing a distinction between working for others and doing business for himself, awadalla fashioned himself here in the idiom of the entrepreneurial, self-owning subject (ziai 2022), or the investor-subject (martin 2007). yet his independence is a solitude produced by his position in a transregional economy, where he is separated from his family and has no “life-time” outside his labor-time (tadiar 2022). his work stretches into all spheres of life; he is never off. his car is both his office and his living room. he exemplifies in this way the fungible subject who is both at risk and a risk taker. “in migration, there is no mother; you’re on your own,” awadalla told me. “you don’t feel time, you are always rushing, working,” he elaborated. as a migrant worker in lebanon, he was detained several times. as a broker, awadalla also feels the same constraints of the international hierarchy of cross-border travel as his migrant clients. he is separated from his ethiopian wife who lives in the united states with their daughter, whom he has never met because, as a sudanese citizen under u.s. sanctions, he can’t travel there. brokers like awadalla speculate on the value of mobility by selling migration. but, as brokers of labor, they also provide the infrastructure to realize migrants’ desires, desires they are themselves shaped and captured by, as former and “retired” migrants, who have few alternative paths for employment. awadalla brags that he “call(s) no one ‘boss’” (comaroff and comaroff 1987, 192), yet his work relies on social capital, while it also makes a profit from others. for example, his transactions are mediated through social “chatter”—at the café, in his car—but the “relational value” generated from this labor is not “outside” market relations (cf. elyachar 2010). his labor thus complicates the distinction implied between alienated labor as working for others and non-alienated labor as working for oneself (see, for example, comaroff and comaroff 1987; hutchinson 1996). bashir and awadalla represent two sides of the same coin of the migration economy. awadalla was migrating “for business” while bashir was working for someone else, yet they both inherited the obligation and the incentive to carry on their families’ livelihood by traveling for work. their different trajectories also reveal how this economy operates on multiple scales in which each person has more than one position—farmer, migrant, broker. bashir mortgages his crops and buys his ticket out of sudan, possibly from the same broker, since the two economies overlap in the same hands. this person could be awadalla, a broker of multiple mobilities and cross-border transactions. awadalla is “working for himself,” but he has no social life outside of his labor-time. having been detained multiple times for this work, he may never get to visit his wife and daughter in the united states. bashir was migrating “for his mother’s sake,” he said, but he also expressed a desire to get away from her village, the farm, and the life that encircled them. the distinction between working for themselves and working for others collapses in both cases. like most of us, they are driven by a desire to be more than one thing, for more than one person, in more than one place, all at the same time. conclusion labor remains the parameter by which people validate themselves, and labor dependency continues even in the absence of a wage. if, as aimee bahng (2017, 3) has argued, “our stories of the future chart the ways we invest—financially, politically, ideologically, and intellectually—in the present,” what happens to the present, the time of living, when the future becomes speculative? how do people imagine and materially plan for uncertain futures? i have sketched some of the consequences for families, and for labor, when risk becomes gendered and necessitated for young male household members. in a socioeconomic context in which people may feel devalued by the work they perform, and at the same time feel redundant without it, the search for labor can lend them a sense of purpose. i have shown how this articulates in the economy of cross-border migration linking subsistence farmers in east africa to service economies in the middle east. there, the search for work through mobility has become a point of value extraction by brokers and border guards and, at the same time, a gendered self-validation for migrants, who call it a gamble, mughamara, that demands courage. the circumstances through which mughamara becomes a mode of practice and an existence of living through risk exceed its specific articulation. in africa, and globally, people are forced to pay for future labor opportunities to stay alive, or to keep on going. this constitutes a visible consequence of the neoliberalization of work. scholars have examined how the economic logic of risk transforms livelihoods and appropriates people’s capacities and resilience, rendering social reproduction itself a zone of value extraction and exploitation (bize 2018; federici 2012; simone 2020; tadiar 2022). navigating an economy in which the future is branded as a commodity demands a fungible political subject who, like an investor, can market their labor-power potential, jump from one opportunity to the next while handling the potential fall, and not be weighed down by particular moral or ideological agendas. yet no such subject exists fully unburdened by social and ethical demands. as migrants like bashir and awadalla experience, and as anthropologists have shown before, the future is not a commodity but a collective economy that changes, as do people’s circumstances and desires. the itinerant lives i describe are not motivated by individual needs only. futures go in one direction, and then they go in another, but they do not move on their own. abstract this article foregrounds the returns of migration by following young migrant workers to lebanon and back to subsistence farming communities in western sudan during a time of revolution and economic crisis in both countries. their labor and the returns of it connect these two seemingly distinct zones of labor and production in a transregional economy, linking east africa to the middle east. in this cross-border economy, the search for work through mobility has become a point of value extraction by brokers and border guards, and at the same time a practice of gendered self-validation for male migrants. in sudan, migrants and brokers both refer to this practice as a gamble, mughamara. proposing mughamara as an ethnographic concept of mobility, i show how young migrants use this term to validate themselves through migration. comparing their experiences to sudanese migrants who worked in lebanon decades before them, i show how the youth’s presentation of mobility as a necessary gamble with life reveals an underlying generational experience of crisis and the foreclosure of class mobility. in a political and socioeconomic context where migrant workers often feel devalued in and by labor, mobility is presented as their only way forward—as well as their ticket home. [migration; labor; masculinity; risk; debt; sudan; lebanon] notes acknowledgments i would like to thank first the editorial collective and anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology. thank you to bashir, awadalla, and everyone else who invited me into their lives and shared their stories with me, and to rasha and abdulrahman at cooperative for peace and security for the helpful conversations. cedej (centre d’études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales au soudan) under the direction of luisa arango, hosted me in khartoum during this research, which was enabled by funding from the department of anthropology at columbia university. of the many who have generously read and commented on early and longer drafts of this article, i am particularly grateful to caroline parker for editorial care; to rima majed, john chalcraft, wael gamal, anne alexander, and participants in the critical development workshop on “labor in the mena” at the american university of beirut (january and june 2022); to brian larkin and colleagues in the anthropology dissertation writing workshop at columbia university (december 2021); to noah salomon, china sajadian, and fellow panelists at the american anthropological association meeting in 2021 where i presented an early draft of this research; to kirsten scheid, elizabeth saleh and members of the anthropology society in lebanon; and not least to rosalind morris and neferti tadiar. 1. the only mention i have found of this term in research on migration is by laura menin, who translates the term as “adventure,” but also recognizes its association with risk and masculinity. menin (2016, 272) writes: “the trope of migration as a risky and an exciting adventure (mughamara), by which abdelkarim at times motivated his departure, is one important dimension of moroccan youths’ narratives about the ‘outside world’ (l-brra, l-kharij) in the tadla. despite the uncertainties surrounding migration, the idea of ‘adventure’ implies that the risk is worth taking.” 2. i follow scholars who define value as a historically determined variable that mediates between relations of production and changes according to those relations. see postone (1993, 127); harvey (2018, 127). perceived in this way, value combines the sociological and economic definitions deduced by david graeber (2001). 3. during the 2020 covid pandemic lockdown, when i could not travel to sudan, my interlocutors called me often, sometimes daily, from their villages and sent me photos of them farming. in some ways, the distance forced on us by the pandemic lockdown enabled a closer relationship. through our phone calls, my interlocutors were able to leave their everyday and reflect on their situation in a way they might not have been had i been there as a guest in their house, in which case the dynamic would have differed markedly. 4. as neferti tadiar (2012, 794) observes, “today many low-wage migrant workers enter the workplace having to pay backward with work for life-times already spent … their time has been mortgaged. they ‘pay with work for life advanced to them (life they owe rather than own).’” 5. jane guyer (2007) has argued that capitalism teaches “fantasy futurism,” while the near future is out of reach, and the present is evacuated. 6. the comprehensive peace agreement of 2005 did not sufficiently solve the land rights dispute, but rather exacerbated it. some observers see the failure to address the issue of statutory land rights as a missed opportunity, without which the agreement ultimately failed to end the war between militias in southern sudan and the sudanese government, preceding the secession of south sudan a decade later (babiker 2009; komey 2008). 7. i am grateful to the reviewer for pointing this out. 8. see reumert 2020. 9. interview with malek badri, khartoum, august 2018. 10. on the history of import and export between the gulf and sudan, see also bertoncin, pase, turrini 2022. references abdelkarim, abbas 1992 primitive 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https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1724183 2022 remaindered life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. thiollet, hélène, and thibaut jaulin 2022 “migration, asylum, and international interventions in the horn of africa.” in routledge handbook of the horn of africa, edited by jean-nicolas bach, 555–564. london: routledge. ticktin, miriam 2011 casualties of care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in france. berkeley: university of california press. tønnessen, liv 2010 “is islam a threshold for escape or an insurmountable barrier? women bargaining with patriarchy in post-islamist sudan.” comparative studies of south asia, africa, and the middle east 30, no. 3: 583–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-2010-036 tubiana, jérôme 2022 “the sudanese ‘transition’ seen from its peripheries, 2018–2021.” in routledge handbook of the horn of africa, edited by jean-nicolas bach, 390–404. london: routledge. united nations development programme (undp) 2021 “country profile: sudan.” human development reports. http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/sdn vigh, henrik 2017 “caring through crime: ethical ambivalence and the cocaine trade in bissau.” africa 87, no. 3: 479–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0001972017000079 vogt, wendy a. 2018 lives in transit: violence and intimacy on the migrant journey. oakland: university of california press. willen, sarah s. 2019 fighting for dignity: migrant lives at israel’s margins. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press. wright, andrea 2021 between dreams and ghosts: indian migration and middle eastern oil. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. young, alden 2021 “the intellectual origins of sudan’s ‘decades of solitude,’ 1989–2019.” capitalism: a journal of history and economics 2, no. 1: 196–226. https://doi.org/10.1353/cap.2021.0007 ziai, hengameh 2020 “on the migrant subject.” review of middle east studies 54, no. 2: 196–214. https://doi.org/10.1017/rms.2021.27 2022 “the migrant as entrepreneur.” in routledge handbook of the horn of africa, edited by jean-nicolas bach, 525–532. london: routledge. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 113-141, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.06 home otherwise: living archives and half-life politics in post-fallout coastal fukushima cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 573-579, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.05 home otherwise: living archives and half-life politics in post-fallout coastal fukushima ryo morimoto princeton university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7986-8109 during my fieldwork in the coastal region of fukushima prefecture, i often accompanied naoko, a woman in her eighties, into the evacuation zone of minamisōma, where she grew up, to tend to her abandoned, contaminated residence. naoko was one of the twenty thousand minamisōma residents displaced in the wake of the 2011 nuclear disaster. each visit, she would enter her former bedroom, open the drawers of the dresser, and quietly contemplate the items within. she would remove a few things from the drawer and lay them on the floor, as if to indicate her willingness to transfer them somewhere else. then, she would clean up the area around the family’s buddhist altar in the adjacent room. as she offered incense, the smoke rose to the wall where photographs of her deceased family members hung. their cremated remains rest in the family grave on their property, a few hundred feet away from the house. the altar, memorial portraits, and the grave together articulate naoko and her family’s multiple relationalities and temporalities, archived in the place they called home. right before our departure, naoko would once again return her belongings to the drawer. this contaminated home, not her temporary residence nine miles north of the evacuation zone, is where she wishes to rest in peace when the time comes. unlike in other post-fallout regions like chernobyl, the japanese government has been gradually reopening areas it originally deemed unhabitable following the failure of the tokyo electric fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant. in august 2011, the government’s decontamination policy sketched a hopeful image for minamisōma’s displaced residents who wished to reclaim their land and livelihoods. naoko was one of many in the odaka district who clung to the government’s promise to reopen the evacuation zone.1 despite the higher risk of radiological exposure, for the evacuees, the idea of home—as both an enduring, contaminated physical structure, and a remote and nostalgic place—has become inseparable from their idea of dying well (ii shinikata). how can people die well in post-fallout coastal fukushima? alternatively, how do people maintain their home and the idea of home, despite and because of the fallout? in greek and japanese conceptualizations, the home (oikos and ie, respectively) constitutes a historical collection of relations and affects that extends across the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born. home is not only a material structure in which one lives, sheltered from the outside world and de/contaminated. it is also a semiotic terrain where concepts such as lineage, genealogy, kinship, memory, and belonging are performed and (re)produced through processes of house-ing: individual, social, economic, material, religious, cultural, and repair work (as also discussed by federico neiburg [2021, this issue] and by thiago da costa oliveira and carlos fausto [2021, this issue]). as a living, processually unfolding archive of multiple relationalities, the home remains a vital resource through which evacuees make sense of the protracted afterlife of the triple disaster—earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear fallout (morimoto 2012). in his analysis on the expansive parameters of u.s. national security in “the age of fallout,” joseph masco (2015) argues that the planetary consequences transcend ecological, geographical, political, and sociocultural boundaries. yet the experiences of the fukushima residents i met challenge this framing of the fallout as a universalizing equalizer. instead, in the aftermath of the accident and throughout the recovery process, radiological contamination has unequally threatened certain bodies and materials. in the event of planetary injuries, settling our attention at the scale of the home can reveal that contamination is not a fixed state. it is, first, a process negotiated through the act of making, unmaking, and remaking home. in late 2013, more than two years after the initial evacuation, the government began decontaminating the region surrounding naoko’s home. eventually, governmental officials proposed to demolish naoko’s home at no cost, and her family consented, as the earthquake that catalyzed the nuclear meltdown had partially damaged their house. thus, a year later, i returned with naoko to visit her residence. this time, her task was to identify which items would be preserved from the demolition and which would be disposed of as contaminated “waste.” she planned to transfer the valuables to a warehouse next to the family’s house, where they kept farming tools and machinery. in this selection process, naoko became more vocal about the items i had seen her unpack and repack many times before. contemplating a kimono she had not worn in ages, she asked me: “what do i do with this? even if i keep this kimono, no one is gonna wear it, including myself.” she touched the faded gray fabric. “to tell you the truth,” naoko confessed, “i might have worn this only a few times. it was from sixty years ago when i married in this house.” when i asked her if she would throw away her kimono, she replied, “the demolition date has not been set yet. i could keep it for the time being. i mean, isn’t it a nice kimono?” she stroked the kimono before folding it with care and returning it to the dresser, closing the drawer with deliberate force. it sounded heavy, as if the dresser carried all the sedimented memories of her life in the house. on the way back to her temporary residence where her son and his family waited, naoko spoke about the difficulty of letting things go: “my family said to throw away any unnecessary things in my life. but the more i thought about each item, the more i felt that my life was being taken away by the disaster and reconstruction.” preserving her things was naoko’s way of resisting the inertia of the government’s reconstruction-through-decontamination initiative. even though she desired to return to her home—and, by extension, for it to be decontaminated—naoko was not ready for her personal belongings to be “cleaned up” and transformed into waste, along with the physical existence of her home and the land she cultivated. although decontamination purports to clean up contaminants, it also entails the large-scale destruction of people’s familiar environments. the government’s initiative engages what i call a half-life politics: policies and practices that foreground the presence and absence of radiation in the environment and their potential harm to humans above all other things, such as the residents’ quality of life, cultural continuity, memories, the sustainability of their livelihoods, and biodiversity. moreover, by pursuing the removal of contaminants above all else, government policies paradoxically foreclose evacuees from accessing state-sanctioned resources by proving their damaged biology, or what adriana petryna (2013) calls “biological citizenship.” in this context, my oikography instead centers on the relational assemblage of the home as the grounds for making meaning and value in the protracted shadow of nuclear fallout. in june 2019, over eight years after her initial evacuation, naoko finally reunited with her inalienable belongings. in place of her old one-story farmhouse stood a modern two-story house, with a shinier and more elaborate altar. although they certainly desired a home with less measurable contamination, evacuees like naoko found their decontaminated and renovated homes rather unhomely. contaminants—radioactive isotopes—sit on the surface of memories and meanings built up and through the home. decontamination, by way of demolition, necessitated the removal of the entire structure. purity, in this instance, endangers historicity. during the building of the new house, naoko had transferred the altar to the warehouse. as part of the ritual that marks moving into a new home, she had acquired a new altar. this, however, required naoko to securely transfer the ancestral spirits from the old altar to the new one. “it was challenging to move the spirits,” she told me. while cleaning the former altar in the warehouse, “a buddhist monk came and chanted to transfer the spirits from one altar to the other. it is funny how the deceased get better treatment than the living ones. no one prayed for me!” naoko’s sarcasm provided a not-so-veiled critique of the government’s decontamination policy, which lacked any consideration for disaster-related damages beyond biomedically significant radiation exposure. for officials, her return to the now supposedly decontaminated region signaled the success of their remediation efforts—naoko was yet another statistic proving the safety of the area. as the altar movers arrived to dispose of the now spiritless old altar, naoko proudly told them how thoroughly she had cleaned it to signal her care and respect for the house her ancestral spirits had previously occupied. yet one of the workers voiced his concern that the altar actually looked too clean: it did not look like a deserted altar in an evacuated home. after chatting among themselves, a younger staff member asked naoko if it was alright for them to make the altar “look dirtier”—it was their routine way for documenting that an altar belonged to a displaced family. the procedure would allow naoko’s family to receive a higher compensation for the altar’s disposal, he said. without securing naoko’s consent, the worker grabbed the incense ash holder and spread ashes over the old altar. photographing the spoiled altar from multiple angles, he exclaimed, “it looks much better!” he then assured naoko that the photos of the adequately “ruined” altar would garner her family one hundred thousand yen (around ten thousand dollars), which they deserved for the lost time. watching the departing truck with the old altar, naoko lamented that “the ruined altar is worth something, but what about my last eight years of waiting and more wrinkles on my face?” now there remains one less item in the warehouse full of misplaced things from the past with no economic value, including naoko’s kimono. she was unable to find a place for it in her modernized residence. in the absence of the old altar, the other items she had kept looked out of place. naoko told her family to throw all her belongings away once she dies. for the time being, she insists that “so long as i live, i need them as proof that i lived in odaka.” the tangible proof is what naoko desired to live as fully as she could despite the fallout and its enduring aftermath. in the context of a crisis and its protracted aftermath, ie becomes an illuminating ethnographic subject and scale of analysis. echoing neiburg’s (2021) poignant observation, people use objects in their homes to order the world around them. in turn, these objects—their presence, absence, historicity, and biography—come to order people (hastrup 2011; manning 2012). through this mutual house-ing, planetary injuries from the fallout crystalize in the mundane and once familiar homes (former, temporary, and current) of evacuees like naoko. sometimes, it takes an impractical piece of memorabilia to sustain one’s sense of belonging. other times, it takes intentional ruination to accept the irreversible flow of time. as an archive of multiple material-semiotic relationalities of people, things, and the environment, the home offers insight into the process through which people attempt to make themselves whole again on an already injured planet. abstract while the 2011 nuclear disaster in japan forced residents out of their coastal fukushima homes, transforming familiar ecologies into sites of estrangement, naoko and neighbors remain invested in the material objects and spiritual relations of their houses, within and despite the logics of contamination. these desires to repair domestic livelihoods to nurture a sense of home (ie) and the idea of dying well (ii shinikata) challenge critical theories of nuclear fallout, which frame contamination’s impacts in terms of biopolitical logics and planetary scales. thus, although contamination regiments the lives of residents through what i call a half-life politics, their practices of house-ing defy these strictures, as planetary contamination becomes experiential, ethnographic, and interscalar, and as people attempt to remake lives in an already injured and irradiated world. [nuclear fallout; contaminated home; biopolitics and half-life politics; semiotics; archives and belonging; japan] 要旨 2011 年東日本大震災に起因する東京電力福島第一発電所事故は近隣の森や生態系を汚染し、多くの福島県浜通り地区の住民達を長期避難に追いやった。しかしながら住民の多くは汚染されなくなく避難した『家』との縁を切るのではなく、個々の考える『いい死に方』を求め汚染された家との物質的、精神的つながり求め続けた。このような避難民の原子力事故後の行動は、人間と放射性物質の関係性を生物的ダメージに特化して語るフォールアウト関連の学術的思考や、事故後の政策に見られる汚染中心の『半減期的政治』とは異なる考え方の必要性を示している。この論文は文化人類学的アプローチを使い、人はどのようにして『家』を保持しようとする行動の中で自分以外のモノとのつながりを認知し、放射能汚染の様々な規模 -その地域性や普遍性を理解し、それと共存して行こうとするのかという問いへの回答を探る. [原子力災害; 汚染された家; 生政治と半減期政治; 記号学; アーカイブと縁] resumo enquanto o desastre nuclear de 2011 no japão forçou os residentes de fukushima a abandonar suas casas, transformando ecologias familiares em locais de estranhamento, naoko e seus vizinhos continuam a investir em objetos e em relações espirituais com as suas casas agora emolduradas pela lógica da contaminação. o desejo de recuperar o sentido de lar (ie) e a ideia de morrer bem (ii shinikata) desafia as teorias críticas da contaminação radioativa que maiormente enfatizam o seu impacto em termos biopolíticos e em escala planetária. assim, embora a contaminação regule o dia a dia dos moradores através do que eu chamo de half-life politics, suas práticas de house-ing desafiam essas restrições. a etnografia revela a contaminação planetária como sendo experiencial e interescalar, e mostra as pessoas refazendo as suas vidas em um mundo já irradiado e ferido. [acidente nuclear; casa contaminada; biopolítica e half-life politics; arquivos e pertencimento; japão] resumen mientras el desastre nuclear de 2011 en japón obligó a los residentes de fukushima a abandonar sus hogares, transformando ecologías familiares en lugares de extrañamiento, naoko y sus vecinos siguen invirtiendo en objetos y en relaciones espirituales con sus casas ahora envueltas en la lógica de la contaminación. los deseos de recuperar el sentido de hogar (ie) y la idea de morir bien (ii shinikata) desafían las teorías críticas sobre la contaminación radioactiva que en su mayoría enfatizan los impactos biopolíticos y la escala planetaria. así, aunque la contaminación regula el cotidiano a través de lo que llamo half-life politics, las prácticas de house-ing desafían estas restricciones. la etnografía revela a la contaminación planetaria como experiencial e interescalar y muestra a las personas rehaciendo sus vidas en un mundo ya herido e irradiado. [accidente nuclear; casa contaminada; biopolítica y half-life politics; archivos y pertenencia; japón] notes acknowledgments my deep gratitude goes to numerous residents of minamisōma for allowing an outsider like myself to be part of their postfallout lives. i want to thank federico neiburg and joão biehl for including my piece in their exciting series. also, i thank hollianna bryan and beth semel for their editorial assistance. all errors are my own. 1. about 13,000 residents evacuated odaka in march 2011. it was reopened in july 2016. as of september 2021, about 4,340 residents are living in odaka. references costa oliveira, thiago da, and carlos fausto 2021 “amazonian house-ing: a visual anthropology essay.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 580–88. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.06. hastrup, frida 2011 weathering the world: recovery in the wake of the tsunami in a tamil fishing village. new york: berghahn books. manning paul 2012 semiotics of drink and drinking. london: continuum international. masco, joseph 2015 “the age of fallout.” history of the present: a journal of critical history 5, no. 2: 137–68. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.5.2.0137. morimoto, ryo 2012 “shaking grounds, unearthing palimpsests: semiotic anthropology of disaster.” semiotica 192: 263–74. https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2012-0088. neiburg, federico 2021 “multiscale home: shifting landscapes and living-in-movement in haiti.” cultural anthropology 36, no. 4: 548–55. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca36.4.02. petryna, adriana 2013 life exposed: biological citizens after chernobyl. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 36, issue 4, pp. 573-579, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2021. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca36.4.05 the wrestler and his world: precarious workers, post-truth politics, and inauthentic activism cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 485-506, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.01 the wrestler and his world: precarious workers, post-truth politics, and inauthentic activism gregory hollin university of sheffield https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4348-8272 warfare, according to loïc wacquant (1998, 331), is one of the guiding metaphors of boxing: “the boxing vernacular is peppered with military terms such as ‘ring generalship,’ ‘firing punches,’ ‘landing bombs,’ and ‘to outgun’ one’s opponent with ‘heavy artillery.’ this militaristic idiom is also prominently featured in the noms de guerre that fighters adopt … ‘rifleman,’ ‘machine gun,’ and ‘minicannon.’” in professional wrestling the equivalent role is played by labor. to be a good performer is to be a good “worker”; to wince in pretend pain is to “sell” the move; that move, if performed in such a way as to not actually hurt, is a “worked” move; the script that the wrestlers follow is also “a work”; to be a valued but second-string performer is to be a “jobber”; the most famed “foreign objects” used to nefarious ends during matches—tables, ladders, chairs—have clear resonances with blue-collar occupations (jansen 2019, 19). even the name “professional” wrestling, while defining a “style rather than the fact that its participants are paid for their performances” (mazer 1998, 4), makes clear allusions to economic activity. in the same way that boxing may tell us something about warfare, pro wrestling can, i suggest, bring into relief some aspects of labor. in particular, and through consideration of a nascent, bottom-up unionization drive in british pro wrestling, i here explore how wrestling speaks to labor at the intersection of the precarious gig economy and post-truth politics. part of a “maligned step-child of sport” (beekman 2006, vii) that exists somewhere between sport and theater, wrestlers give the appearance of competing in a sporting contest while, in actuality, working with one another to tell a story and keep each other safe. the results are predetermined, the match course scripted and, in this sense at least, wrestling constitutes a sporting contest that has always-already been post-truth. commentators in recent years have argued that these peculiar post-truth qualities bring wrestling into alignment with wider cultural discourse. a 2016 piece in the new york times, for example, asked “is everything wrestling?” (gordon 2016) and, as of 2020, more than thirty articles had been published examining the relationship between post-truth’s figurehead donald trump and pro wrestling (levi 2020, 15). these analyses often take as their starting point the fact that, as the academic and ex-professional wrestler larry degaris (2020, 208) notes, “wrestling and modern-day politics share a defining characteristic: they’re both bullshit and pretty much everyone knows it.” given these shared post-truth qualities, many commentators take for granted that pro wrestling’s esoteric yet extensive vocabulary, fine-tuned as it is toward discussions of bullshittery, has the capacity to facilitate insight into contemporary political crises (see castleberry et al. 2018, 77; day and wedderburn 2022; litherland, phillips, and warden 2021, 219–20). others, however, note that trump in particular has a long and storied association with professional wrestling (levi 2020; moon 2022), and many of these scholars argue that trump explicitly draws on the tropes of professional wrestling when constructing his political persona (hall, goldstein, and ingram 2016). thus, just as muhammad ali recognized that money was to be made by taking the pro wrestling playbook and applying it to boxing (beekman 2006, 87), trump and others are assumed to have reached a similar conclusion with regard to politics. yet it is not simply this relationship to post-truth politics that makes professional wrestling particularly pertinent to our current moment. professional wrestlers are in many ways archetypal members of the “precariat” (standing 2011) for whom work is uncertain and unpredictable and who are widely argued to be a core labor force in the contemporary, globalized work environment (kalleberg 2009). these “uberized,” precarious workers still represent a relatively small portion of the total workforce across oecd countries (feher 2018, 174), but they have been widely argued to be both “dangerous”—in that they may be “prone to listen to ugly voices, and to use their votes and money to give those voices a political platform of increasing influence” (standing 2011, 1)—and, through both their labor and labor organizing activities, as offering potential insight into the trajectories of capitalism in the coming decades (feher 2018, 207). thus, and while the experience of precarious labor “shifts dramatically for workers in different class, cultural and geopolitical contexts” (millar 2014, 48), a self-conscious “post-truth era” (sismondo 2017) that is dependent on “specific forms of knowledge, skills, values, reflection and effort” (mair 2017, 3) constitutes an important context for precarious work, and it is one ideally represented by pro wrestling. in the following section, i show that professional wrestlers perform for low, insecure wages; short of regulation; and in a workspace marked by the absence of both the state and traditional trade unions. i subsequently detail an attempt at unionization by a group called unite the outsiders that proposes something akin to a “freeworkers’ union” (sandoval 2016) specifically oriented toward a precarious workforce living under neoliberalism. i show that while many professional wrestlers agree with outsiders’ diagnoses concerning their poor working conditions, there is a widespread skepticism regarding the motivations of a major figure in the movement who, these wrestlers argue, may simply be furthering his own career. i understand these wrestlers’ skepticism as emerging at the intersection of the neoliberal “entrepreneurial self” (foucault 2008) and the post-truth “zany” situation (degani 2018) and conclude by suggesting, first, that the entanglement of post-truth performance and precarious employment typified in wrestling will likely become an increasingly common feature of the contemporary neoliberal workplace and, second, that wrestling affords particular insight for our understandings of labor organization under such conditions. wrestling’s precariat in a sports hall at the back of a community co-operative is three count.1 situated in the north of england, three count runs occasional wrestling shows but, primarily, exists as a training school for wannabe pro wrestlers. the close links between three count and two large, regional promoters—both of whom have working relationships with world wrestling entertainment, or the wwe, the largest wrestling company in the world—makes it a popular destination: over the course of 2019 something in the region of 120 pro wrestlers trained here, although the number in any given session usually ranges between 10 and 15. young men are overrepresented among the trainees, but the cohort is far from monolithic. there are usually women present, and some trainees are well into their forties. many of these individuals are wrestling for the first time, but others have been performing on shows for decades. almost everyone tells me that they aspire to make a career in wrestling, with the imagined end point being a contract with the wwe.2 the path to realizing that aspiration, however, is incredibly difficult. one of the most successful wrestlers to frequent three count, a twenty-four-year-old named darren, offers a case in point. darren consistently performs on four or five shows a week and, at one point in the spring of 2019, tells me that he has wrestled forty-eight matches in the previous twenty-six days—a schedule that involves repeatedly traversing the length and breadth of the british isles. darren is paid between £20 and £40 for each of these matches, a wage usually assumed to also cover “volunteering” for several hours setting up the venue. when, in the autumn, darren starts coaching at three count on sunday mornings, he often begins a session at 10 am, having arrived back in the city just four or five hours earlier following a show on saturday evening in some far-flung location. similarly, darren frequently ends training early (at noon, say, rather than 1 pm), and with a promise to make up the time later, because he needs to depart for a similarly distant show that night. unsurprisingly, darren is almost always sporting an injury of some sort: a twisted ankle, a sore back. still, he tells me that he is happy for the work and the money: he is “living the dream,” while most of the other wrestlers to whom i speak are paid less, work one or two shows a week at best, and consistently fear missing out altogether to young up-and-comers prepared to work for free. on nights when he is not wrestling in front of a crowd, darren attends wrestling training schools while keeping up a relentless gym schedule. he also tells me that he frequently turns up unannounced at events where he is not booked to perform with the goal of helping out, showing his face, and maybe even standing in when another wrestler is unexpectedly injured or absent. a university graduate in theater and performance practice, darren combines all of this with occasional bar work and a day a week caring for an elderly grandparent. i begin my fieldwork assuming that the ubiquitous look of the jobbing wrestler embodied in darren—clutching a can of monster energy drink in one hand and a travel-on wheelie suitcase in the other—is an affectation. i increasingly come to see it as denoting an attempt to navigate utter exhaustion. it is widely argued that professional wrestling is by, for, and about working-class men (e.g., jenkins 2005; mazer 1998, 100; smith 2014). but the imagined figure at the center of pro wrestling is usually understood as a member of the “old” working class (standing 2011, 12–13): the manual laborer with a desire to see their ungrateful boss receive their comeuppance (sammond 2005; cf. jansen 2019). such a rendering, however, resolutely does not capture the experience of darren—a young graduate who wrestles while also working across the care and service sectors and who has nothing like a singular boss. instead, darren, both in and out of wrestling, is a member of the precariat. indeed, cultural workers like pro wrestlers make up a significant proportion of the precarious workforce in the uk. the mantra of the cultural sector—“do what you love”—makes these workers’ lives “complex and contradictory, combining work satisfaction and relatively high levels of autonomy with job insecurity, low pay, anxiety and inequality” (sandoval 2016, 51). the fact that darren and his fellow wrestlers do what they love, however, does not mean that they are naïve to wrestling’s problems, or the efforts being made to address them. the leftist, wannabe union man darren’s experiences capture at least two of the recurring grumbles at three count. first, participants often describe the working conditions at wrestling shows as unacceptable. wrestlers frequently report an absence of basic health-care provision, meaning they are essentially on their own in the event of a medical emergency. some promoters reportedly also fail to make food and water available. given that many wrestlers are at a venue for six or seven hours (and engaging in intense physical exercise) this is viewed as a problem. second, wrestlers tend to agree that rates of pay are very low given the time and personal expense required to perform. the majority of wrestlers tell me that they receive about £20 a performance, although significantly lower “mates’ rates” are often expected locally. (and most wrestlers only work locally—in part because promoters are reluctant to pay significant travel costs—rendering their “full price” fee more or less moot.) even if wrestlers see £20 as fair within the economy of professional wrestling, they also recognize that, in “the real world,” such a wage would be a disgrace. into this context stepped a wrestler and activist named luke night, the figurehead of a nascent union effort called unite the outsiders. night, an american wrestler in his late twenties, railed against the wwe and its presence in europe, simultaneously blasting employment conditions and chastizing wrestlers who signed contracts with the organization, accusing them of taking “blood money,” particularly with regard to performances in saudi arabia. focusing his attention on poorly paid independent promoters and wrestlers, night combined an emergent, bottom-up approach to unionization with strategic alliances with long-time stakeholders such as equity, an established trade union for performers and creative practitioners, and the industrial workers of the world, a century-old labor union. just as interesting, to me at least, was the fact that night’s aforementioned pronouncements on labor and labor organization were not confined to the backstage world of wrestling, like three count. instead, when night performed, he foregrounded labor relations in the ring and as part of the show. understanding why night’s performance is interesting requires a three-paragraph detour into the vocabulary of pro wrestling. first, the binary distinction between a work and a shoot. a work is an activity (a match, a rivalry, a persona) that is scripted, performed, and exists exclusively within the world of wrestling. a shoot, by contrast, describes an activity that exists “for real” and outside of the performance. thus, a wrestler may have a shoot name (mark calaway) and a worked name (the undertaker). an interview might be a worked interview (told in character) or a shoot interview (like a “making-of” dvd extra that explains what’s really going on). a wrestling move may be a work (where both wrestlers act as though the move hurts, although it doesn’t) or it may be a shoot (someone really gets punched in the head). second, and stemming from this work/shoot distinction, is the concept of kayfabe. kayfabe, simply put, is the wrestling community pretending that works are shoots: kayfabe is wrestling’s denial that wrestling is fake. kayfabe is the undertaker acting as though no one called mark calaway exists. kayfabe is scowling at your opponent from across the merch stand long after the end of a match. kayfabe is limping out of the arena on crutches and taking two weeks to recover after being on the receiving end of a particularly brutal (if entirely fictitious) attack. (for more on kayfabe see laine 2020; moon 2022.) finally, there is the distinction between a mark and a smart. a fan is a mark if they mistake a work for a shoot, if they are duped into believing that kayfabe is for real. a smart, by contrast, understands a performance for what it is. of course, very few people believe that a dead person known only as the undertaker is one of the best wrestlers on the planet but, as sharon mazer (1998, 167) has noted, the “phantom of the real is at the heart of professional wrestling’s appeal.” even for the overwhelming majority who know that wrestling is scripted, there is always the possibility that this particular wrestler really is injured, or that these two particular wrestlers really do hate each other. returning to the organizing efforts of outsiders, while there have certainly been attempts to unionize professional wrestling in the past,3 these efforts have rarely intruded on the work, the kayfabe product presented to audiences. what makes night notable, therefore, is that his efforts at unionization are central to his wrestling performance. his worked, kayfabe character is also a leftist union man, and he spends considerable time in the ring vocally speaking out against the wwe and employment conditions more generally. these critiques are then folded into longer, multipart story lines, with in-ring enemies mocking night and his organizing efforts. as an example, i was present for one in-ring promo in which a previous opponent of night’s joked about taking a contract with the wwe before declaring that he could never be beaten by “some social-justice warrior, or some leftist, pseudo-intellectual, wannabe union man.” these story lines speak to the fact that wrestling’s front stage (work) / backstage (shoot) dichotomy has exploded over the past decade, and we now have a new term to contend with: the “worked shoot.” worked shoots introduce elements that have historically been off limits for wrestling performance: the existence of other promotions, backstage politics, a recognition of the artifice of pro wrestling. worked shoots have proven both revolutionary and so overwhelmingly popular that they have ushered in a new age of wrestling, known as the “reality era” for its blending of fiction (works) and reality (shoots) (jeffries 2019, 7). worked shoots are also argued to have put the final nail in the coffin of kayfabe—now widely declared dead (herzog 2017)—for there is no longer any denying that the work of wrestling is fake. night’s worked shoot—the railing against the wwe as an unaccountable corporate behemoth, newly arrived in europe, crushing community and difference; the need for an emergent, bottom-up solidarity movement that foregrounds the rights of precariously employed workers abandoned by traditional labor organizations and exploited in the corporate sphere; a desire to connect exploitation in the workplace with the wider inequities of late-capitalism—clearly resonated with fans, seemingly perfectly calibrated for a post-occupy generation, the bernie bros, and the corbynistas who could likely be identified as members of the precariat and as progressive in a slightly diffuse way. night was nominated for numerous end-of-year awards by the trade magazine the wrestling observer, despite working almost exclusively outside of north america and away from legacy television networks. a t-shirt supporting unionization, with outsiders stamped proudly across the front, was everywhere—surely among the year’s best-sellers. night constituted a more or less constant topic of conversation, both within three count and the wrestling community more generally. as i spent time in and around pro wrestling, i was convinced by night’s diagnosis of the industry: salaries were unacceptably low and the lack of even the most basic health and safety procedures in the workplace felt genuinely staggering. furthermore, his attempt at founding a “freeworkers’ union” or “freelancer collective” chimed with marisol sandoval’s (2016, 55) calls for the formation of a solidarity movement able to “create an alternative that rejects both hierarchical control and alienated labor as well as (self-)exploitation and precarity”; a path described as “more promising—more realistic, as well as more desirable—than petitioning public or private institutions for more permanent employment contracts” (feher 2018, 204). and yet, by discussing unionization on stage, in a space normally associated with performance and falsity, night’s act did inevitably beg the question “is this union man really a union man or is this just a character?” given the allegedly non-trivial links between pro wrestling, donald trump, and contemporary politics tout court, this seemed like a non-trivial question: if much precarious labor will be undertaken in contexts marked by conditions popularly understood as being post-truth, how do those conditions shape efforts at labor organization? i decided i needed to know: first, how did precariously employed pro wrestlers understand attempts at unionization within a post-truth landscape? second, when you really got down to it, was the unionization effort a work or a shoot? it’s probably a scam to sell t-shirts perhaps surprisingly given wrestling’s reactionary reputation, the community at three count professed a largely progressive politics. both theresa may and boris johnson, the two british prime ministers in position during 2019, and the ruling conservative party, made for a relatively frequent focus of ire; there was a running joke that one wrestler—whose day job was a trade union organizer—was really a member of the tory party; and it was universally agreed that any wrestler whose character voted for brexit would need to be a heel, someone to be booed. one might imagine, then, that these wrestlers would be receptive to night’s efforts at unionization. and yet, over and over again, a substantial proportion of the wrestlers at three count made it clear to me that they understood night’s attempt at labor organization as a story about work rather than a form of work. the actual work that night was undertaking, i was told, was running a merchandising company. “so, i think right now,” one wrestler told me, “it’s doing nothing but selling t-shirts for luke night. like yeah, you see him all around and he’s obviously a great wrestler, he’s done a lot in wrestling, he’s doing really well. … and to be fair, if it all comes out with it being mostly a publicity stunt, then it’s making a lot of money.” another said that “my personal opinion is that it is probably a scam to sell t-shirts. there is literally nothing that unite the outsiders can do for someone … and i think the people that are talking about this union are very, very much aware of that. … at the end of the day, it’s showbiz.” a third wrestler made it clear to me that unite the outsiders should be understood as a savvy bit of marketing: “he’s just using his position at the moment to kind of play to that crowd. he’s kind of going ‘ah, you know, this is a niche that i can tap into,’ and that’s what he’s gonna do. i think he’s just playing up to that, and i think anyone will play up to that given his position. i guarantee that he will probably get signed by somewhere in a few years and then that will just be a t-shirt that he’s sitting on the shelf.” to be clear, this was not an unanimously held view. some wrestlers were entirely supportive of unite the outsiders and did not question it at all; others were in broad agreement with the need for a union, but questioned the strategies and feasibility of the union drive; others professed no opinion at all.4 nonetheless, the view that outsiders should be understood in the world of kayfabe, as a work, was widespread among pro wrestlers at three count. i just want to take stock here. the three individuals quoted above are all precariously employed members of the wrestling community—two are actively earning money, albeit not much, the third is aspiring to—who want to make a career out of their practice. all also agree that workplace conditions for precariously employed wrestlers like themselves are in serious need of improvement. when an organization like unite the outsiders claims that it wants to improve working conditions—and is specifically interested in wrestlers like them who work for small organizations, in unsafe conditions and make a pittance—they conclude that what we are seeing is a work. furthermore, these wrestlers don’t begrudge night this performance. one could easily imagine how theses wrestlers might be angry about unite the outsiders if it is imagined as a performance—is this not an attempt to capitalize on their own precarity? is it not distracting from the possibility of other, genuine, attempts to instigate change? yet instead, the general view is that it’s making a lot of money, anyone would do it, it’s showbiz. *** in wage-labor and capital, marx (1885, 7) writes that: “the laborer who for twelve hours, weaves, spins, bores, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stone, carries loads, and so on — … [does] this represent the active expression of his life? on the contrary. life begins for him exactly where this activity of his ceases—at his meals, on the pub-house bench, in his bed.” for michel feher (2009, 23), this distinction between the subject-at-work and the subject-at-leisure maps onto the binary between the “negotiating subject and the negotiated commodity”: the worker can negotiate over if and how work is undertaken, but there can be no negotiation over the inalienable rights of the “free labourer.” under this model, according to feher (2009, 29), the worker is a “split being.” in pro wrestling, this feature of capitalism reaches its logical end point: the wrestler’s work name often literally differs from the one used away from the ring. under neoliberalism, however, a new subject position has emerged, primarily through the concept of human capital: “human capital is me, as a set of skills and capabilities that is modified by all that affects me and all that i effect” (feher 2009, 26). human capital, as a key aspect of the transition from liberalism to neoliberalism, does away with the subject/commodity distinction integral to liberalism by constituting the subject as the commodity expected to sell themselves. within the precarious world of pro wrestling, the need for the wrestler to be such a “self-appreciating subject” (feher 2009), an “entrepreneur of himself [sic]” (foucault 2008, 226),5 renders explicable the wrestlers’ lack of upset toward luke night: he is assumed to be, like themselves, an entrepreneurial subject who takes his social milieu and uses it to increase his own human capital. (and seems to be good at doing it, apparently capturing something of a zeitgeist discontent among both wrestlers and fans about contemporary working conditions.) that night has found this niche is simply to his credit. but, of course, things are not so simple. the collapse in the distinction between work and worker has led not only to the formation of novel modes of subjectivity but also to a significant reformulation of “the real.” it was previously understood that the work was kayfabe and could be safely bracketed off from reality; the worker, meanwhile, was shoot and part of life who, like marx’s free laborer, could step away. for these wrestlers, though, anything that happens to a worker is fair game for a work, but, as a consequence, there is the lingering suspicion that the worker themselves may be a work. neither work nor worker are ever able to entirely escape the post-truth world of professional wrestling and, within this landscape, alleged attempts to alleviate precarity are fundamentally undermined by the impossibility of legitimacy. there is always the possibility that you might be a mark. it’s a carnie business if professional wrestling exists on the periphery, then three count sits on the periphery of the periphery: a second-tier promotion locally, it is a long way from london, and even further from the global hubs of wrestling in new york, tokyo, and mexico city. a few of the wrestlers at three count know night personally, and another individual associated with unite the outsiders is a sometime attendee at the training school, but there is no particular reason to suppose access to the machinations of the nascent union movement here. it felt important to understand what wrestlers thought about night, but i continued to have a lingering hope that i would find out what was actually going on. around three count were a number of invariably well-connected promoters and coaches who, i thought, might provide more insight. two of the promoters to whom i spoke—both self-styled as old school and no-nonsense—proved dismissive: “you’ve got all these people talking about unionizing, all this, that, and the other … and it’s absolutely ridiculous,” said one; “i don’t have a strong opinion on it. if anything, i just find it a little bit silly, but i don’t really care for it either way,” said another. others, though, were more forthcoming. younger, new school, and invested in the national scene, a coach named isaac expressed strong support for the idea of unionization while also detailing some fairly significant reservations about the approach taken by outsiders. when i mentioned that some wrestlers to whom i’d spoken believed the movement to be a work, isaac replied: “yeah, it probably is. because, when i keep saying, it’s a carnie business, yeah, of course it’s a carnie business. why wouldn’t you try and profit of this?… and again, the point is genuinely true, and i believe in it wholeheartedly, but there’s always going to be those people who are going to see, like, ‘oh, we can make some money out of this too.’ so, i don’t think it’s a work, because i still think that the idea is right. like, a lot of the guys who are doing it, they are personally doing it for the wrong reasons, even if the greater reason is right. … they’re doing it for their own reasons, because i know luke night, his bookings have doubled.” a second coach, dean, offered further elaboration, but no more certainty. a sometime attendee and guest coach at three count, dean was involved in the running of a promotion that worked extensively with night. as part of his role, dean had some insight into the scriptwriting process, including scripts that involved discussions of unionization. remarkably, he seemed every bit as uncertain about the status of unite the outsiders: “i have doubts about its legitimacy. … in ring, out ring, always question it. it’s always been the way, because that is the industry. the industry has always had a level of mystery around certain things, whether that be what you see on screen or what you see behind the curtain. … if tomorrow it turns out that it was legitimate and we have an improvement in terms of structure and professionalism, i’ll be happy. i won’t be shocked. but,” he adds with a laugh, “if tomorrow turns round and it was all a big work, and it was just a money-making thing, i’d also not be shocked.” when i asked specifically about kayfabe story lines that have drawn on the unionization effort—story lines that, remember, dean helped put together—he simply said: “from a story point of view, it’s phenomenal. one of the greatest stories told in modern wrestling, especially european wrestling. engaged the way through. but it blurs the lines, for legitimacy, i think that’s the problem. … and again, this is the thing, from a story point of view, that is fucking brilliant. ‘cause that is so engaging and, like you said, kayfabe. is it dead? no, it’s alive and well.” *** when isaac says that wrestling is a “carnie business,” it strikes me that he is simultaneously making a socio-historic and a conceptual point. socio-historically, pro wrestling emerged from, and continues to be associated with, fairgrounds, carnivals, and sleights of hand (litherland 2018, 27–28). conceptually, isaac seems to echo mikhail bakhtin (1984, 10–11) when he writes that the carnival was as a “second life,” a “world inside out” that “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.” when bakhtin (1984, 24) describes carnivals as spaces organized around laughter, degradation, and the body, it is hard not to understand professional wrestling as a vestige of these “half-dead forms,” an “enduring possibility” of sport organized around the stage rather than the field (litherland 2018, 5, 22). however, in the context of, first, neoliberal modes of subjectivity that diminish the possibility of a “split being” (feher 2009) and, second, a parallel shift that requires performance to be marked by the self-conscious evocation of entrepreneurship and “reality,” it is worth asking if wrestling can indeed still claim to be carnivalesque, to be celebrating a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and established order.” in temporal contrast, michael degani (2018, 474; emphasis added) writes that “zany situations,” which—like wrestling, often incorporate both violence and laughter—are about the “permanent entanglement of work and play wrought by capitalism’s constant revolutionizing.” degani (2018, 481; emphasis original) argues that, while similarities with the carnival are clear, decisive differences exist as well: “where the metacommunicative frame of the carnivalesque is ‘this is play,’ the zany situation seems to ask, ‘is this play?’” in his refusal to consider the carnival as a space of work bakhtin oversimplifies, for the phrase “carnie business” reveals that, in wrestling at least, work and the carnival most be thought together (stallybrass and white 1986, 30). further, the wrestlers’ apparent uncertainty over the status of labor organizing (is this play?) radically changes their response to it: even with agreement over the diagnosis offered by unite the outsiders there continues to be some skepticism, a belief that this might be carnie business, and an ever present worry that one may be a mark. importantly, the coaches and promoters with greater insight into the workings of pro wrestling are no more certain as to whether unite the outsiders is a work, and they remind me to “always question it.” there is no doubt that the permanent carnival can be thrilling, but the possibility of community organizing is offset by the need to continually ask “is this real?” the toothpaste can’t go back in the tube it was clear that i needed to speak to luke night. after several attempts to meet in person, we’re eventually able to organize a zoom call in mid-december 2019. night’s shoot name is elliott barrett. when we speak, he is wearing a bernie sanders t-shirt, and we chat about the senator’s prospects for procuring the democratic nomination for u.s. president. during our conversation, barrett traces the formation of unite the outsiders back to 2017, when he started performing in the uk more regularly. he describes outsiders as a “merchandising company that uses a portion of its proceeds to sponsor wrestlers into equity, which is an entertainment trade union.” alongside offering a pathway to equity, barrett tells me that outsiders wishes to introduce some standards of practice in the uk: the guaranteed provision of food and water, the presence of a qualified and competent medic, basic first aid training for attendees at training schools, the introduction of policies around both concussion and hard-core wrestling. finally, and perhaps less tangibly, a goal is to ferment a sense of solidarity within the uk wrestling community. as noted above, this constitutes post–wage labor activism, aiming to “create moments of solidarity and collectivity that … challenge individualised work cultures” (sandoval 2016, 56), and with demands that are less about “social protections attached to wage-earning jobs, which became the norm under the fordist social compact,” than “universal and unconditional guarantees” that “adapt risk-coverage mechanisms to their specific needs” (feher 2018, 205). just over half an hour into the interview i muster the courage to tell barrett that a decent number of people to whom i’ve spoken think that outsiders is a work and that this is an attempt to earn himself more money rather than help or build the community. “what would you say to that?” i ask. the question seems to take him by surprise, and he pauses often during his answer: “i would assume that they just don’t know me personally whatsoever. they haven’t been listening to what i’ve been saying, or they don’t understand.” finishing with a laugh, he adds, “that’s antithetical to what we’re doing.” in fact, says barrett, outsiders is probably costing him money, because “i give away most of my merch money that i didn’t used have to give away. that was all mine.” apparently thinking on the matter further, barrett adds: “i think a lot of the skepticism might come from the fact that it’s pro wrestling, and everyone’s skeptical of everything in pro wrestling. and no one knows what’s real and what’s fake. and there’s all these blurred lines all the time, so i’d assume that has something to do with it. erm, but overall, i mean,” he finishes with a further laugh, “i can just say that it’s not.” “but you would say that if it was a work, though, wouldn’t you?” i reply. “yeah. this is a real thing.” i mention to barrett the event i attended where i heard him derided as a “leftist, pseudo-intellectual, wannabe union man.” “it kind of bends my mind, a little bit,” i say. “i mean, again, because i’m so outspoken about it, it’s impossible for someone not to want to bring it up in a promo, or as part of a story line. but it doesn’t necessarily mean that that is entirely not true.” attempting to express my confusion about all this, about how conversations with pro wrestlers, promoters, and community insiders of all stripes—all individuals meant to understand the game and its workings—have left me none the wiser about outsiders, i say, “you know, i read and read and read about how kayfabe is dead … and then this is like, where, the interesting thing is these people, they don’t know.” “i think at this point,” replies barrett, “it’s just like manufacturing doubt. right? and that is what it’s all about, because, you know, the toothpaste can’t go back in the tube. … and if you’re questioning it, then that’s kind of the best we can do at this point.” *** while i’m confident that night/barrett would contest this positioning, his actions continue to be entangled with neoliberal modes of subjectivity and labor organization. while he overtly rejects the view that he is an entrepreneurial subject, actualizing human capital for his own ends, he can still be understood as enacting what lilly irani (2019) has called “entrepreneurial citizenship.” according to irani (2019, 7; emphasis original), the promise of entrepreneurial citizenship is “not only that one make’s one own future but that one can generate progressive futures for others through organization, know-how, and resourcefulness.” in his own telling, night/barrett’s entrepreneurship—his character development, wrestling skills, merchandise design, commitment to unite the outsiders—is not only aimed at securing his own future but also that of his fellow workers, and, i would add, it is specifically oriented at doing such within a neoliberal environment marked by the absence of state intervention and a relative lack of interest from traditional labor unions in low-paid, precarious workers. regardless of our degree of optimism regarding the capacity of efforts like unite the outsiders to challenge neoliberalism from within, the problem, as elucidated by irani, is that this positionality depends absolutely on authenticity (irani 2019, chap. 7). but in an environment shot through and through with questions about what is real, many wrestlers simply do not believe night/barrett or view him as authentic—even when his diagnosis of contemporary working conditions aligns neatly with their own. indeed, what makes night/barrett so successful at accruing “self-appreciating capital” (feher 2009) does not straightforwardly align with how supposedly real his performance is. a number of other wrestlers, including the trade union organizer who trained at three count, had strong shoot union backgrounds and much clearer real-world bona fides when it came to labor organization. yet these wrestlers did not see their stock appreciate to any degree like night/barrett’s. instead, what singled out night/barrett was his ability to consistently blur the lines between work and worker, to turn himself into “one of the greatest stories told in modern wrestling,” as dean, the coach at three count, has it. the problem here, as degani (2018, 475) says of others in zany situations, is that night/barrett’s “freedom to play around was a role they were consigned to perform.” and this suggestion that night/barrett can only ever be understood as a great story, a performed role, brings with it a host of unwelcome questions: is this a work? am i a mark? thus, a perhaps unfortunate consequence of night/barrett’s entrepreneurial, self-appreciating, zany, and fully post-truth performance is that, in the eyes of his peers, it delegitimizes claims about his capacity to organize and change labor practices within the wrestling industry. night/barrett’s story speaks to fans and wrestlers alike because it is so real and maps on to their experience of precarious work, but it is not quite real enough for them to act—unless that action means buying a t-shirt. conclusion didier debaise and isabelle stengers, following william james, write that a primary motive in modernity is “the horror of being a dupe,” “the awful risk of believing lies.” this motive prompts a “real ontological question: what universe is being created through and with our mistrust” (debaise and stengers 2022, 4). in trying to understand the pervasive mistrust of the contemporary moment, many scholars and commentators have turned to pro wrestling, a space that has always-already been post-truth and where “nobody wants to be a mark, nobody wants to be not in on the joke” (litherland, phillips, and warden 2021, 223; emphasis original). one suggestion within the existing literature is that it is the vocabulary of pro wrestling that is most useful: this metaphoric connection suggests that terminology from within wrestling (work/shoot, mark/smart, kayfabe) can be mapped onto apparently more important matters, such as mainstream politics. a second suggestion focuses not on metaphor, but emergence, suggesting that the kernel of trump’s character, for example, can be traced back to his involvement in pro wrestling. here, i have taken a different tack, suggesting that wrestling may have a synecdochical relationship with post-truth politics and may give some insight into conditions of precarity in a post-truth ecology. it is, of course, crucial to disentangle diverse “forms of precarious labor that hold very different relationships to a worker’s experience of the everyday” (millar 2014, 40) and to recognize that the situation wrestlers find themselves in is quite different to that experienced by the overwhelming majority of workers: the precariat continues to be a distinct minority; there can be few workplaces quite as zany as a wrestling ring. the importance of wrestling to analyses of labor organization, therefore, arises not so much from the site’s typicality or obvious generalizability as it does from the fact that centering “relatively marginal and disempowered groups is not necessarily wrongheaded—especially when these groups seem to indicate where capitalism is heading” (feher 2018, 207). if it is plausible to ask the question “is everything wrestling?” (gordon 2016), then it also seems plausible to ask if the questions that wrestlers face, questions of precarity and performance, also have a wider valence. this is the context that frames my argument that three count is a space where the risk of being a dupe—of being a mark—is ever present, where folks must continuously ask “is this real?” or “is this play?” the wrestlers are, as degani has it, “stuck,” rarely able to settle on an answer as to what is a work and what is a shoot, whether they’re being smart or, in fact, whether they’re a mark. this situation is not so much carnivalesque as “a kind of parody of the utopian fair … it does not so much relieve or liberate a stuffy situation as whirl everything into a frenzied mixture of exuberance and exhaustion, pleasure and punishment” (degani 2018, 481). this state of permanent questioning seems highly detrimental in the context of organizing precarious labor, for even when there is agreement over the diagnosis, the fear of being a dupe forestalls the possibility of change. dean, the coach and promoter at three count, did ultimately see a way out of this bind. first, there needed to be a separation between luke night the character and elliott barrett the person. unblur the lines. second, night/barrett could not run the show. night/barrett could wave the flag, bear the standard, but he could not ultimately head the union. in advocating for a return to the liberal division of the subject, and a hard split between work and worker, dean here makes the eminently sensible suggestion to return to a way of being under which labor movements saw considerable success. the problem is that, by dean’s own admission, this separation of work and worker would come at a cost to the product: it was precisely the blurring of the lines that, “from a story point of view,” made it so “fucking brilliant.” it does indeed seem unlikely that you will be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. coda 1 after finishing the interview, and musing on what it all might mean, i spend ten minutes organizing the academic detritus that accompanies such work: organizing some notes, transferring mp3s behind a firewall, filing away the participant consent forms. it is only when undertaking the final task that i realize that elliott barrett has signed the consent forms “luke night.” coda 2 i concluded my fieldwork at three count at the end of 2019 and, within months, a radical change occurred. in june of 2020, #speakingout began to trend on twitter. reproducing 2017’s #metoo in microcosm, the movement detailed the emotional, physical, and sexual abuse suffered by (overwhelmingly, if not exclusively) women in the wrestling community. in response, an all-party parliamentary group (appg) on professional wrestling was formed, bringing professional wrestling in the uk under the surveillance of the state. elliott barrett stood at the center of #speakingout, with several women alleging sexual assault. unite the outsiders released a statement saying that the organization was no longer working with barrett, but that statement was its final act. neither outsiders nor barrett is even mentioned in the appg’s report,6 their proposed freeworkers’ union not so much rejected as forcibly forgotten. barrett himself has been blackballed and has not wrestled since. this is, of course, a depressingly familiar story about powerful men: in sport, in unions, in politics. it is a story so familiar that it should, and does, prompt significant reflection about my own ignorance of what was happening (o’neill 2022). why, though, did barrett fall when others—including donald trump and wwe owner vince mcmahon—have, thus far, largely been able to ride out similar accusations?7 trump’s positioning as a unitary post-truth subject was not undermined by allegations of sexual assault. for some, it is even conceivable that sexual assault increased his human capital: indeed, this constitutes the explicit argument of feher (2018, 227) who argues that trump “persuasively conveyed that under his administration, being or standing by a nationalist, gun-carrying white male would become a truly valuable asset.” this was not so for barrett, whose brand was incompatible with his behavior and whose capital was sufficiently devalued that he was rightly abandoned. among all the wreckage, then, there is both something incredibly depressing about the fact that a crushing inability to act intersectionally killed any chance of improved working conditions and a shimmer of hope that under at least some circumstances it remains possible to hold some of those responsible to account. abstract in this article, i explore attempts to organize a precarious workforce in a setting that is always-already post-truth: professional wrestling. i focus in particular on a nascent, bottom-up unionization effort in the uk that foregrounds the rights of wrestlers who perform for low wages, in unsafe environments, and in the absence of both the state and traditional trade unions. i show that while many wrestlers agree with this movement’s diagnosis of problematic working conditions, there is also widespread skepticism about activists’ motivations, with many wrestlers suggesting that the organization may be telling a self-interested story about work, rather than engaging in a form of work. i argue that wrestlers’ permanent questioning emerges at the intersection of the self-appreciating, entrepreneurial subject and the post-truth, zany situation and conclude that wrestling affords insight into labor organization under employment conditions emblematic of a contemporary post-truth neoliberalism. [activism; carnivalesque; neoliberalism; post-truth; precarity; professional wrestling; trade unions; united kingdom] notes acknowledgments i thank both the anonymous peer reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, particularly matilde córdoba azcárate, for their incisive and engaging feedback—it has improved this piece immeasurably. i also thank josh bowsher, eva haifa giraud, and jamie coates for their generosity in providing invaluable and critical comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. 1. pseudonymizing the names of all participants and organizations directly involved in this research was a condition for the ethical approval of this project. it was made clear to all participants that pseudonyms would not guarantee anonymity and all participants agreed to these terms. 2. in 2016, the united states–based wwe began to put on regular shows in the uk and, around the same time that i begin my fieldwork in january 2019, launched a uk-based brand called nxt-uk (meltzer 2018) which resulted in the wwe signing around forty european (overwhelmingly british) wrestlers to three-year contracts, reportedly worth $50,000 a year (meltzer 2017). procuring such a contract was the stated goal of almost all attendees at three count and represented a clear and (fairly) realistic path to a reasonably well-remunerated career in professional wrestling. these links to the wwe provide the most overt link to a distinctly trumpian post-truth politics, for trump and three count are institutionally and discursively united by foundations provided by this institution: trump has hosted two iterations of the wwe’s wrestlemania (pro wrestling’s answer to the super bowl), appeared on the wwe more than a dozen times (moon 2022, 47–48), and would ultimately be inducted into the wwe hall of fame in 2013 (levi 2020, 16). linda mcmahon, the wife of wwe owner vince mcmahon, was appointed to donald trump’s cabinet, and the mcmahons emerged as the third-largest financial backers of trump’s 2016 presidential run (moon 2022, 12). 3. in the uk, for example, there were attempts at unionization in the mid-twentieth century (litherland 2018, 73–74) and, more recently, individual promotions have come to agreements with equity, the performing arts union (hemley 2019). in the united states, it has been widely reported (jansen 2019, 13; shoemaker 2014, 345–48) that hulk hogan tipped off his employers about a nascent unionization drive being led by jesse “the body” ventura—a wrestler perhaps best known as a star in the arnold schwarzenegger vehicle predator and as the governor of minnesota. another totally normal day in pro wrestling. 4. t-shirts, again, played an outsized role in the expression of these views: “i paid for a t-shirt.”; “i’d feel uneasy wearing one, because who am i to say i’m an outsider when i’ve not got an offer not to be?”; “i have no idea what that movement was, i just saw the t-shirt.” 5. for an analysis of the gendered nature of entrepreneurial discourses, see murphy 2017. 6. the report was initially made available via the personal website of the appg co-chair. at the time of writing, however, it is no longer available through that source. an archived version can be accessed at: https://web.archive.org/web/20210422162701/https://www.alexdaviesjones.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/833/2021/04/new-appg-wres_compressed.pdf 7. since writing this article, a former wwe employee has accused vince mcmahon of sexual assault and sex trafficking and, as of writing, mcmahon no longer sits on the board of the company (draper 2024). such events have not severed the links between donald trump and the wwe, however: in july 2024, hulk hogan was invited to speak at the republican national convention where he was described by new york times columnist ezra klein as giving “undoubtedly, the night’s best speech. it was campy, and it was strange, and it was entertaining. but it understood that the root of donald trump’s politics are as 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https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717692076 smith, r. tyson 2014 fighting for recognition: identity, masculinity, and the act of violence in professional wrestling. durham, n.c.: duke university press. stallybrass, peter, and allon white 1986 the politics and poetics of transgression. ithaca, n.y.: cornell university press. standing, guy 2011 the precariat: the new dangerous class. london: bloomsbury. wacquant, loïc 1998 “the prizefighter’s three bodies.” ethnos 63, no. 3–4: 325–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.1998.9981579 cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 485-506, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.01 cultural anthropology: “do they do our thozhil?”: toxic industrialization, uncertainty, and refusal in north chennai 543 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 543-569, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.07 “do they do our thozhil?”: toxic industrialization, uncertainty, and refusal in north chennai rishabh raghavan max planck institute for social anthropology https://orcid.org/0009-0005-2332-9145 when pandian,1 the headman of a fishing village from the estuarine peninsular neighborhood of ennore, in the northern periphery of chennai (india), told me that the prawns and fish he caught were safe to eat, he sensed my disbelief straight away. having gotten frustrated with a report i had brought up, which presented the results of a toxicological study that showed how ennore’s fish were laced with a concoction of industrial chemicals, pandian patted his stomach heartily and told me that those prawns and fish made up a part of his meal nearly every day of the week. eating them, thus far, had caused him no perceivable harm. “yet they are saying that there is mercury in the fish,” he snapped.2 “do they do our thozhil?”3 he added the latter angrily, referring to his profession of estuarine fishing that up until a decade ago had been the dominant source of income among the men in his village. feeling wary because of how tense the situation had grown, i responded with a guarded nod and pandian eased up, though only slightly. he sighed and briskly explained that the coal dust that the power plants exuded routinely irritated his skin and that it even made its way to the insides of his body, showing up in the bouts of black phlegm he coughed up on occasion. his nets, he went on, had turned black because of the fly ash that settled in the water, and every time he fished, he felt the ash layer his body. but 544these were experiences “only the fishermen could know,” he commented, appearing to find some solace in his own reasoning.4 “people should be saying that the power plants are ruining our lives and not speak about the fish, because i’m telling you,” he concluded, stroking the top of his stomach ever so gently, “the fish is fine . . . it does nothing to my body.” during my many interactions with pandian, not once did he suggest to me that he believed ennore was free from industrial pollution. however, the day i brought up the toxicological report, it seemed as if there was something else he wanted me to understand. that day, he expressed how he considered his own bodily encounters with ennore’s pollution as at odds with some of the results stated in the report. in insisting that his catch was completely harmless because it had not, up until then, caused him any bodily afflictions, pandian pitted his own epistemic practices against the scientific protocols summed up in the report. the authors of the report had stated that the fish and prawns from the ennore estuary showed high rates of heavy metal retention; but pandian, as a fisherman, insisted he knew better. he established his own embodied measurements of the effects of the toxic chemicals that suffused the estuary and, on his own terms, chose to understand this pollution as emanating from the power plants that surrounded his home. in refusing to endorse the report’s claims, pandian was insisting that there in fact existed other ways of knowing ennore’s pollution. importantly, in pointing to how his ways of knowing this pollution both emerged from and sustained his relationship to his home—primarily, through shoring up his identity as a fisherman from the neighborhood—pandian reminded me that there were also other ways of knowing ennore. in this article, i critically examine these facets of pandian’s refusal to uncover how it indexed what it means to live in urban peripheries like ennore, places experiencing unprecedented levels of industrial expansion and petrochemical pollution. in building on a body of work that has analyzed peoples’ capacity to live with uncertainty and ambiguity when experiences of chemical toxicity and urban marginality intersect (lora-wainwright 2013; auyero and swistun 2009; ahmann 2024), this essay posits acts of refusal as a means of mediating some of those experiences. for ennore’s fishermen, in particular, acts of refusal were often partial, processual, and sometimes even contradictory, offering them the ability to criticize the forms of caste-based urban segregation that sequestered ennore as a site fit to house the state’s fossil-fuel industries, as well as the petrochemical pollution it was doused with thereafter, and, subsequently, the epistemic practices that (mis)labeled its ecology as polluted. yet the fishermen’s 545refusal did not solely operate as a form of critique. instead, in following various fishermen from ennore, the article finds that their stances of refusal could sometimes prove influential in their attempts to forge lives and make claims in a place that they sought to continue calling home, even as it was becoming increasingly industrial and seeped with more pollution. the toxic industrialization of ennore indeed, ennore was witnessing alarming levels of petrochemical pollution. at the time of my fieldwork in 2018, the stretch of coast unfolding in chennai’s northern periphery found itself in the middle of many different industrial paradigms that all contributed to the pollution in the region: from defunct asbestos-ridden power plants waiting to be razed to smokestacks puffing away the tons of coal burned every day, standing across the naked cooling towers of newer power plants waiting to become fully operational. in other words, what was happening in ennore is most aptly described as a process of “toxic industrialization.”5 many of the fishers i met from pandian’s village, much like pandian himself, were consistent in tracing the onset of ennore’s toxic industrialization back to the early 1990s when their elders (including pandian) had consented to the government’s resettlement of their village from one side of the estuary to the other for the construction of the north chennai thermal power station (nctps). convinced that the promise of government jobs at the coal-fired power plant (even if those jobs were allocated only to two male members within each relocated family) and land titles at the new settlement would sufficiently reorient their futures, the elders had not foreseen the wave of industrial activity earmarked to follow. after the nctps commenced operations in 1994, the following three decades saw successive local governments rapidly expand ennore’s fossil-fuel infrastructures with the onset of neoliberalism in india (kumar 2022). this resulted in the sanctioning of 5,420 megawatts’ worth of coal-burning power plants, two large-scale commercial ports, and a host of other infrastructural and industrial additions on the peninsula.6 moreover, as many of the fishers still waited on the land titles promised to them, or, like pandian, found that the “company”—a term the fishers used to refer to both private and state-owned industries—would arbitrarily transfer job holders to distant postings when they protested its unrelenting expansions, they were left ruing the fact that their home—once considered a bountiful brackish water ecosystem—had expeditiously become the city’s petrochemical outpost. figure 1. an aerial photograph of the nctps releasing its thermal discharge back in to the ennore estuary, besides the docked boats that were of the fishermen from pandian’s village. photo by l. lakshmi narayanan, 2024. 546interestingly, the report that suggested that the fish from the estuary retained toxic heavy metals had been commissioned by a bench of the national green tribunal (ngt), a special court that dealt solely with cases of environmental concern, and which had been hearing a petition filed by a fisherman from another village in ennore. receiving legal assistance through a chennai-based non-governmental organization (ngo), the fisherman had complained that the tamil nadu generation and distribution company (tangedco)—the main actor in what the fishermen called the “company,” as it owned and operated the power plants in ennore—was illegally dumping toxic fly ash in the estuary and the surrounding wetlands. as a result, the court commissioned a team of scientific experts to study the level of fly ash pollution in the region. in the final report, the experts stated that the contamination in ennore was indeed high enough to constitute significant pollution and, along with the fact that all of the samples of fish and clams they tested showed retention of toxic heavy metals, also stated that the consumers of the fish, and the fishermen who were exposed to contaminated water for long periods of time, were vulnerable to severe health risks. while the report mentioned that a “separate survey would be required to quantify the 547historical and ongoing losses suffered by the fishers” (ismail, narasimhan, and narasimhan 2017, 20), pointing to the fact that it was the power plants’ unmonitored discharge of fly ash waste that was the prime source of ennore’s pollution, certain biomedical findings were quick to make it across a range of media outlets. “loaded with poison, ennore creek fish not safe for consumption” (chaitanya 2017) and “how your fish curry might contain mercury, lead, and nickel” (chitra 2017) read the headlines in two popular english-language newspapers in the city. pandian’s burst of frustration at my bringing up the report has to be examined against this backdrop of sensational newspaper headlines. he was not alone in feeling that way about the report’s claims. other fishermen i knew also felt adamant that the fish they caught was perfectly safe to eat. one fisherman conceded that on rare occasions his catch smelled like “kerosene,”7 but most of the time his catch looked and smelled just fine. “the size of my catch has depleted after the company came, that’s for sure,” he told me, adding that it was in fact his “troubles” that needed to be reported in the papers. but why were people talking about the fish? “whoever said that,” the fisherman concluded, “they are not from this area”; it was a charge pandian also leveled at the authors of the report. pandian and the other fisherman were most likely wrong in claiming that their catch was safe to consume. given the various of phases of industrialization ennore had undergone, chemical contamination simply could not be mapped onto one particular timeline. instead, akin to what rob nixon (2011, 3) describes as “slow violence,” the petrochemical pollution that enveloped ennore was “incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing across a range of temporal scales,” such that its effects could remain dormant even for those who closely experienced it. while pandian, and many other fishermen too, could not deny the evidence of fly ash irritating their skin and lungs, the threat of mercury-laden fish remained imperceptible to them, and the impact on their health might only manifest itself more acutely in the long term. nevertheless, i believe that the fishermen’s declarations have to be read beyond the assessment of an imperceptible slow violence. as thom davies (2022, 419) reminds us, “there is a danger of over-determining toxic landscapes as invisible to the people who inhabit them.” doing so risks positioning communities at the front lines of toxic industrialization as quiescent and passive to both the inevitability and imperceptibility of chemical pollution. instead, in taking “the perspectives of people who co-exist with pollution at the centre of accounts of slow violence” (davies 2022, 420), even if their accounts at evidencing toxic 548exposure are disparate and only contribute to a generalized sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, and precarity (lora-wainwright 2013; auyero and swistun 2009), this essay persists with asking what the fishermen’s assertions about the lack of toxic compounds in the fish might still reveal about the people and places facing the brunt of toxic industrialization. my contention is that, set against the hard evidence suggesting that the human consumption of fish caught in ennore posed significant health threats, the fishermen’s discounting of the report’s findings proves most revealing when examined as an act of refusal. i draw the term refusal from audra simpson’s (2014) research with the kahnawà:ke mohawks in north america. in refusing both american and canadian citizenship, along with the territorial boundaries that mark both settler states, the people of kahnawà:ke responded to histories of having been stripped of their land and livelihoods by the very powers who later offered to (differentially) incorporate them into the citizen/state relationship. they did not resist or disobey the citizenship and settlement offers (packaged together with borders, passports, and legal rights) made to them by the american and canadian governments in the hope of a better deal. refusal, in other words, is not synonymous with resistance where conventional social, spatial, and political hierarchies inform acts of disobedience and defiance. instead, the refusal of the people of kahnawà:ke must be thought of as a form of critique where the very terms and conditions of hierarchical negotiations are rejected and the premise that one should consent to having their stories told for them is denied outright (see also mcgranahan 2016). when pandian claimed that he, of all people, was perfectly able to tell if his catch was safe to eat, i suggest he was refusing to accept the current material and social order in which fish—the product of his lifelong, hereditary labor of estuarine fishing—had been stripped of its value; in which food had become poison; and where he could no longer trust what he felt in his own body. read in this light, pandian’s insistence that the fish was edible acts as a critique of how “meanings of contamination are [often] the outcome of power relations” that not only tend to reproduce unequal relationships between residents experiencing contamination and those in positions of authority (auyero and swistun 2009, 5) but also inform what is made to count as exposure to chemical toxins (murphy 2006). in particular, pandian’s was a refusal of the kinds of environmental justice and biomedical research practices that, even with good intentions, “focus on chemical violence by virtue of rendering lives and landscapes as pathological” (murphy 2017, 496). indeed, for many of the other fishermen i spoke to, who stood firm on their refusal to endorse the report’s findings about the fish—while 549at no point denying the levels of toxic industrialization they habitually endured—we have to understand their refusal as presenting “partial and situated critiques of the framing of their community as damaged,” and of their landscapes as toxic (bickerstaff 2022, 13). what do such partial stances of refusal reveal about life and livelihoods in ennore? how do they interact with the uncertainty and ambiguity that stem from the uneven modalities of knowing pollution? what do they offer the fishermen who continue to see their home take on unrelenting levels of toxic industrialization? guiding itself through these questions, this essay shows how the fishermen’s refusal mediated different experiences of uncertainty that stemmed from living and working in a polluted landscape. in uncovering how some of these uncertainties were experienced as a result of histories of urban segregation that rendered peripheral locations like ennore appropriate to house polluting industries, and how they were thereafter sustained through the bodily demands of fishing work in a contaminated river, it posits acts of partial, processual, and contradictory forms of refusal as ways in which different fishermen reconciled some of their experiences of living with ennore’s pollution. in critically engaging emic terms like area and thozhil, and also showing how collective assemblies became instrumental in challenging ennore’s toxic industrialization, each of the three sections in this article reiterates the argument that refusal not only helped the fishermen forge lives and make claims in places becoming more industrial and toxic but also mediated their sustained relationship to a place they knew as home. different areas, different smells the tamil film pudhupettai (“new neighborhood”) breaks into its first song a few minutes into the opening. the film’s protagonist, kokki kumar—who runs away from his home at the start of the film, and ends up becoming one of north chennai’s most dreaded gangsters by the end—on meeting his friends in a bustling marketplace, begins singing: hē paṭicca nāyē kiṭṭa varāta / hey educated dog, don’t come close eṅka ēriyā uḷḷa varāta / don’t come into our area eṅka ēriyā uḷḷa varāta / don’t come into our area eṅka ēriyā uḷḷa varāta / don’t come into our area to make matters clear, in the next verse, one of kumar’s friends names a few neighborhoods in north chennai: 550putuppēṭṭai kācimēṭu eṇṇūru /pudhupettai, kasimedu, ennore, viyācarpāṭi eṅka ēriyā / vysasarpadi, our area with kumar following right after, listing a few centeral and south chennai localities in contrast: hē aṇṇā nakar kē kē nakar / hey, anna nagar, k. k. nagar, ṭi nakar pōṭ kiḷap uṅka ēriyā / t. nagar, boat club, your area kumar and his friends sing of a segregated city. the parts of chennai they claim as their ēriyā (“area”) are predominantly working-class and lower-caste neighborhoods in north chennai. in juxtaposition, they label the central and southern portions of the city as the area of the paṭicca nāyē (“educated dog”). in their area, they sing that they face daily squabbles over government-rationed water supply, that they find the smell of fish even on jasmine flowers, and that they have gotten used to mourning the death of fishermen who risk their lives at sea every day. the “curd rice” eaters (a colloquial gastronomic reference used to denote upper-caste tamil brahmins) from other parts of the city, they insist, are just incapable of grasping what life in their area is like. “don’t come close,” kumar and his friends sternly warn the “educated dogs.” “don’t come into our area,” they repeat, as they dance and frolic to the remainder of their tune.8 the coordinates of the segregated city that kokki kumar and his friends sing about in the song titled “eṅka ēriyā” (“our area”) apply to ennore’s fishers and me as well. this spatial distinction has its roots in the british colonial administration, when parts of what is now north chennai (including ennore) fell under the administrative limits of the city’s “black town” that mostly homed native weavers and merchants who serviced the east india company’s trading post in neighboring “white town” (hancock 2008). though black town was renamed georgetown in 1906, the area it was composed of continuously expanded with smalland medium-scale industries, attracting lower-caste rural migrants who sought employment opportunities as a result of having experienced repeated famines and market instability under the colonial government (hancock 2008). after indian independence in 1947, the state government’s land-use patterns in chennai (what was madras until 1996) still continued to “follow colonial precedents, with industrial sites in the north and northwest, and residential and commercial uses predominating in the districts to the west and south” (hancock 2008, 45). to put it simply, by the late twentieth century, north chennai had 551been affected by decades of spatial and ecological ramifications that came with industrialization. with the onset of neoliberalism in the late 1980s, however, spatial configurations of many indian cities were affected by the state’s new role as “a land broker for private capital” (levien 2018, 61). as a result, and with the introduction of new zoning regulations and land-acquisition laws, peripheral lands became new frontiers for capital accumulation—from private industries and real estate companies to large-scale infrastructure projects—aggressively dispossessing vulnerable caste groups from the urban fringes and resettling them on legally insecure lands still only open to further market speculation (ranganathan 2022; coelho and raman 2013; gidwani and reddy 2011). by no means were peripheral wetlands and the urban sea excluded from such processes of urbanization. instead, as nikhil anand and lalitha kamath (2024, 131) write about mumbai, the urbanization of the sea was also “performed across colonial and post-colonial timescales.” furthermore, they make the point that the colonial and postcolonial state systematically “eviscerated”9 coastal inhabitants in a bid to transform the sea with a host of different capitalist infrastructure projects, in the process devaluing the lives and livelihoods of fishers and the coastal ecologies they historically called home. as an estuarine peninsula on the northern periphery of chennai, and in a part of the city that has continued to expand industrially throughout and beyond the twentieth century, ennore was violently turned into a coastal frontier wherein the neoliberal state spatialized its fossil fuel–based industrial and infrastructural ambitions (kumar 2022). moreover, given that the fishers of ennore largely belonged to the pattinavar caste10—falling under the state’s administrative classification of other backward classes (obc)—their lands, rivers, and sea were seen as more disposable for the state to realize its fossil-fuel aspirations. this view aligned neatly with other infrastructural projects in india that have systematically eviscerated lower-caste and working-class residents from their homes (and the city more broadly) in ways that preserved upper-caste and class interests (baviskar 2020; coelho 2020). however, it was not just this evisceration that ennore’s fishers endured. it was also the ceaseless amounts of petrochemical pollution that came with it. “can you smell that?” a fisherman called velu asked me one summer afternoon in 2019, as he sniffed the air in disgust. “after the power plants came, we smell stinky things like this a lot,” he went on, continuing to stitch the ends of the nylon nets that lay in his lap, as we sat on the bank opposite the nctps, in 552the net-mending cement shack of the village. “but i know it doesn’t smell like this where you live,” he went on. on a few different occasions, velu later told me that he had taken his family to the beach next to where i lived in the south of the city. he spoke of how the roads there were cleaner, the houses bigger, and the smells altogether different. “they built all the power plants in our area and left it all nice for you in your area,” he concluded plainly. velu’s comments about the differing smells where we each lived reflected the forms of urban segregation that affected our lives. he knew i was an upper-caste man living in the south of the city, which he categorized as distinct from ennore. but it was not just the power plants or our different caste affiliations that made up the difference for him. it was also the noxious smells that he encountered every day in ennore, which he escaped when he occasionally picnicked with his family on the southern beach. his use of the term area indexed this experience of segregation, revealing that it was not just spatial, casteist, and sensorial, but also, in some way, chemical. on a different occasion, a younger fisherman called simbu expressed to me how visits by researchers—be it members of court-appointed committees, research collaborators with city activists, or anthropologists like myself—thickened the experience of chemical segregation. on meeting simbu under the ennore bridge one afternoon, i learned that he had only recently ferried a group of scientists on his boat to collect water samples of the estuary. “people like you had come,”11 he told me, adding that the researchers had barely spoken to him—they had only asked him once if he had observed any notable changes to the estuary before proceeding to bottle samples of the water and thereafter simply leaving. “if they are writing about ennore, shouldn’t i also have a say?” he went on to ask me, telling me he “wasn’t sure what to think anymore.” activists from the city center had told him that the air was unfit to breathe, that the water was contaminated, and later even that the fish was unsafe to eat. “but what i think, that is what no one really cares about,” he went on, asserting that he wished no one would come to ennore anymore. “this is my area,” simbu vented. “and you don’t forget,” he continued, “after you leave, all of us are still here.” simbu took a while to get over what he felt that afternoon. he sat down by the bridge, initially appearing contemplative and then telling me he needed to leave, giving me a quick wave as he rode away on his bike. on many different occasions he’d asked me why i chose to study ennore. what was it that i wanted to know about the fishers? at no point did i have an answer for him that i was entirely sure of. he gauged that instantly and often made it clear that he, too, wasn’t entirely convinced as to what i was doing in his area. 553in laying out the unease he had with me and other researchers visiting ennore, simbu revealed that the fishers not only had to contend with the polluting infrastructures that spatially and chemically segregated them from other parts of the city, but also with a flow of activity that attempted to study, identify, and label ennore’s pollution. both simbu and velu, i suggest, flag what chloe ahmann (2024, 10) calls a process of being “zoned out.” writing about the heavily industrialized curtis bay peninsula in south baltimore, ahmann traces how curtis bay was zoned out historically—as a quarantine site for new immigrants entering the united states in the nineteenth century, as a militarized industrial zone during the second world war, and thereafter as a place to house a conglomeration of heavy industries far away from the city. while the process of zoning out curtis bay spatially distanced the peninsular residents from the rest of baltimore, it was amplified by an experiential difference that left many confronting waves of industrial pollution and the mechanisms of government and industry that managed and labeled what counted as pollution or not. the spatial distance, in other words, facilitated conceptual uncertainties as to how toxic places like curtis bay were meant to be known and experienced by differently positioned people, fueling contestations among residents and others as to what was best for the peninsula’s future. while velu’s use of the term area pinned what an experience of being zoned out was, simbu’s stance that ennore was his area acted more as a refusal toward some of those experiences. he stated how different narratives of ennore’s pollution unearthed in him a confusion about what he felt and knew about his home, and then went on to refuse being caught up in that uncertainty by questioning why it was that his own experiences fell out of those narratives. as a result, much like kokki kumar and his friends asserting that north chennai was their area, and that it was best that the “educated dog” stay away, simbu assertively emphasized that ennore was his area and that he wished no one else set foot on the peninsula if they professed to tell a story about ennore’s pollution that was his to bear and, undeniably, his to tell. “refusal,” as simpson (2014, 11; emphasis original) writes from kahnawà:ke, “comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld.” simbu, velu, pandian and many other fishermen i knew, be it in their claiming ennore as their area or accusing scientists, researchers, and myself of hailing from other areas, desired their political sovereignty be acknowledged and upheld. a denial of their desires unearthed in them the hurtful and confusing experience of being zoned out. yet it would be misguided 554to assume that the fishermen’s refusal marked a denial of all accounts of ennore’s pollution and its causes. after all, pandian did pinpoint the pollution he faced as emanating from the power plants. velu, too, was convinced that the smells he habitually encountered in ennore needed to be avoided, and simbu, perhaps grudgingly, did take the researchers out to the estuary because he knew there was a story to be told about the place’s pollution. in other words, their refusal was processual and partial, aimed mostly at mediating the uncertainties that clouded them when others labeled ennore a polluted landscape, while they were left asking why their own accounts were willfully omitted. what authority did those studying ennore have, the fishermen asked at those moments. which area did they come from? “do they do our thozhil?” pandian asked me, speaking about the experts who wrote the toxicological report about ennore’s fish. “then how can they speak about the fish?” it was not just the unfairness of externalized accounts summing up ennore’s pollution that mattered to pandian. crucially, it was also that the fishermen themselves perpetually produced a wealth of relevant knowledge on ennore’s chemical and toxic contamination. their thozhil was key in this regard. do they do our thozhil? sitting on a boat one cool december evening, i watched as velu practiced his thozhil until the early hours of the following morning. with the water coming up to his waist, he began by drilling the wooden poles he’d brought along with him into the bed of the river, in the place he was assigned to fish that day as a part of a traditional river-sharing system applicable to all the practicing fishermen in the village.12 each pole was drilled into the riverbed, distanced adequately from the other poles to form a rectangle-like structure. after setting up six sets of such rectangles, velu swam back to the boat and hauled a large net for each set. tying the net to the poles, the whole setup came to look like a box, with the side facing the direction of the current left open, such that fish, crabs, and prawns swam into the nets. the entire process of setting up his nets took velu almost three hours. thereafter, he took a break, checking frequently if the direction of the current had changed—which would mean he would have to rearrange the way his nets were set up—before undoing his nets to draw his catch onto the boat, and redoing them again. velu did not own the boat we were on; it was his cousin’s. as we were in the high season for fishing, his cousin leased out the boat when he didn’t use it, 555knowing there was always a chance of a good catch. after the costs for diesel and ice to store the catch were taken away, velu explained, whatever amount the fish sold for at market would be split in equal shares between the boat owner and whoever did their thozhil. if his cousin had been on the boat with velu that evening, he would have gotten two shares of the sale: as owner and as a fisherman. but his cousin hadn’t joined, as he planned instead to take the boat out to sea after we returned in the morning. in that way, he maximized the earnings he could get during the fishing season: from his own labor and from that of those to whom he loaned the boat. “he’s a smart man,” velu told me, explaining that his cousin expected him to get good catch. “he knows i’ll do our thozhil well; that’s why i always go to the river during the season.” your browser does not support the video element. film clip 1. velu sitting up his nets beneath the northern bridge, with nctps in the backdrop. video by rishabh raghavan. https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/6682z343z most of that evening, however, velu appeared in a more pensive mood. there were many moments in between him setting up his nets, with his body still waist-deep in the river, where he paused to take a break. at those times, it appeared as if he took in the sights, sounds, and smells of ennore’s industrial activities a lot more intensely. often, he’d call out to me from the water during those brief pauses, either pointing to the nctps or ominously pointing in the air, reiterating in one way or another that every inch of his home had fallen into the hands of the company. when he hoisted himself back onto the boat after he had completed setting up the nets the first time, he was more forthcoming with what seemed to trouble him. every time he dug a pole into the riverbed, he explained, he felt different kinds of industrial sediments. sometimes it was coal ash, sometimes it was construction debris. sometimes those sharp perceptions were coupled with the nagging sensation that the water was greasy or oily. velu 556ran his fingers along his arms as he spoke. along with the immediate sensations gathered in the water, there was always something that troubled him during the practice of his thozhil since the power plants had been built. he wasn’t the only fisherman i knew who tied their bodily sensations to the power plants. simbu, for example, explained that he knew that the river was laced with “chemicals” from the plants because he regularly broke into skin infections and spent more money on skin ointments than anything else. he also recounted moments when he could not practice his thozhil altogether because of the thermal discharge that was released into the river; the water was so hot that dead fish floated on the surface, he told me. other fishermen also spoke of changes to the depth of the river, the narrowing of its course, and importantly, the reduction to the sizes of their catch. that evening, after velu had eventually dragged his nets onto the boat after his break, dropping the prawns, fish, and crabs onto the floor, he appeared satisfied at first. if the second catch of the night turned out just as good, he would go home feeling content he told me, as he began washing the dirt off the prawns and crabs, proceeding to inspect and later sort his catch into different buckets. yet just as his satisfaction seemed to have peaked, he added: “you should have seen the size of our catch before the company came. with one round of nets, we’d catch twice as many prawns, and that was enough for us. now, we have to go at least two or three times to set the nets, even in season. and in the summer,” he carried on, “when the catch is very low, i have to find labor work in the company because there is not much fishing work anymore. nowadays, even boat owners have to find other work around here.” he marked a heavy pause, sounding somewhat remorseful, before asking: “without our thozhil, who are we?” velu and others drew on a lifetime of bodily experiences accumulated during thozhil to produce knowledge about ennore’s toxic industrialization, forming the basis for what nicholas shapiro (2015, 370) calls “sustained bodily reasoning.” writing from across the united states, shapiro considers people’s domestic encounters with formaldehyde, a chemical compound that leaked from the building materials of their houses. he shows how the habitual and repeated experience of formaldehyde and its minute “effects and affects” aggregated into bodily reasonings about chemically saturated worlds, and about people’s relationships to those. at times, shapiro suggests, the sheer sum of those knowledge-making accretions expanded into a form of knowing that exceeded reasoning, whether bodily or of the mind. it is this excess of knowledge, this comprehension that touches onto something vaster than one’s life, that shapiro likens to the philosopher immanuel 557kant’s notion of the “sublime.” but where kant saw in the sublime a confirmation of mankind’s cognitive abilities to grasp the incomprehensible, shapiro shifts the intent, and affixes to the sublime the non-human potency of the chemical world. the “chemical sublime,” shapiro (2015, 369) writes, is an “embodied apprehension of human vulnerability to and entanglements with ordinary toxicity, provoking reflection, disquiet, and contestation.” as much as it constituted their work and the source of their income, thozhil was also a home-making practice for the fishermen: an activity by which they could keep calling ennore home and persist in identifying as fishermen. and yet, similarly to the intimacy of the formaldehyde-saturated domestic spaces studied by shapiro, thozhil—their most habitual of practices—staged for the fishermen the sustained repetition of embodied encounters with the chemicals released by the power plants, burdening them with ongoing bodily reasoning. through thozhil, the fishermen were compelled into linking skin infections to their routine of diving into the contaminated river, or into observing how black their once-blue nets had turned because of the ash-laden air, the same air that got them to cough at night as the ash tickled their lungs when they were out fishing. at times, the sum of habitual experiences that some fishermen gathered from their thozhil, and the reasonings they crafted from those, were “sublimated” into a vaster kind of comprehension, enabling them to grasp the extent and depth of their home’s toxic industrialization—the repeated sight of dead fish, the experience of foul smells in the air, the itchiness of skin infections, their reduced catch. for velu, there were moments when the accretion of those experiences flooded him with fearsome questions without answers, giving way to an uncertainty with no end: what future did the fishermen have in ennore? would they all have to become manual laborers at the company, building up the power plants they knew only harmed their lives and livelihoods? who were they, if not fishermen from ennore? for velu and others, their bodily reasoning routinely gave way to a chemical sublime that made it impossible for them to ignore the uncertainty of their chemical-infused lives. and yet, more than one fisherman, including velu, nevertheless chose to persist in a very straightforward act: they quite simply refused to quit fishing. on that evening spent on the loaned-out boat with velu, i met surya, a young fisherman. when velu took a break after he finished setting up his nets the first time, his phone rang. “surya is at the riverbank,” he told me, and sure enough, a slim figure was waiting in the dark, and soon hopped onto the boat to help with their thozhil that night. it was the first time i met surya, 558and i wondered why he had not joined us from the start. “i have a contract job at the private shipbuilding yard,” surya admitted a little while after he had gotten on the boat, as velu and he inspected each net for gashes or holes after having sorted out the first catch of the night, and before relaying their nets again. surya was late because his supervisor had not let him leave on time. but that wasn’t going to be the case for much longer, he added with assurance. he told me that he was only at the job to save money to buy his own boat, because he was planning on becoming a “full-time fisherman.” figure 2. surya and velu inspecting their catch after having drawn their nets back on to the boat. photo by rishabh raghavan. over many of our later encounters, surya explained his reasons to me. it was not only difficult to find permanent employment in the company, but, in addition, those who received government jobs with the resettlement package generally disliked the life that it came with. surya’s father (then deceased) and brother were the two male members given permanent jobs, but they continued to practice their thozhil at every opportunity they got. as company employees, they were mistreated by their superiors, given the lowest-paying positions because they had not completed their school education, and were often posted in parts of the city far away from ennore. surya saw the dissatisfaction they felt for the lives they took on. he, too, felt the same way a few times, having taken up a host of small jobs in ennore. they always involved paying a subcontractor, putting up with supervisors who gave him a “headache,” working overtime without dues, and, eventually, him quitting in anger and exhaustion. “but every chance i got to do our thozhil, i always went,” surya added brashly, because that was the 559only way he could “feel free.” at those moments, he told me, he knew he was his “own owner.” figure 3. surya and velu running their fingers through their nets to gauge if there were any large gashes or holes that needed immediate repair. photo by rishabh raghavan. surya’s declarations by no means marked an anomaly among the fishermen i met in ennore. neither did they imply that surya denied experiencing the harms of pollution when he practiced thozhil. he was just as quick as his fellow fishermen to show me the skin aberrations on his arms and legs, or to voice his concerns about the long-term viability of thozhil. he also admitted that he feared he would have to dip into the contract market during the lean season, even after he had bought his own boat. and yet, he was persistent in refusing to give up his plans of being a full-time fisherman in ennore. his refusal amounted, in his terms, to an act of freedom. such stances of refusal were commonplace among the fishermen. velu, for example, openly stated his dislike for the fact that he had to engage in contract work during the lean season. and while he did not aspire to buy a boat because it was too much of an investment for him, every chance he got to partake in thozhil, he took it up without hesitation. his explanation was unambiguous: he preferred to be a fisherman in ennore to being, as he put it, “a coolie.”13 i also met a boat owner who grudgingly exchanged prawns for a labor contract in the summer months, telling me it upset him because he was a “fisherman first.” he was forced to make the deal because it was necessary for him to sustain an income in the summer, but he insisted that there was something inside him that he had “lost.” pandian, while he earned a pension from the company, returned 560regularly to practicing thozhil. the pride and matter-of-factness with which he claimed thozhil as his labor was also tied to the need of sustaining his identity. as we stood on the terrace of his house one evening, pandian went one step further in vocalizing his refusal to let the toxic industrialization of ennore erode who the fishermen were. he expressed his desire, as village head, to go back in time and refuse the government’s resettlement offer. as we walked back down from his house toward the riverbank, pandian asked me to take a look at the bottoms of my feet. “it’ll be black”—and it most certainly was—he stated ominously, before adding: “if you see that much coal dust every day, then you can’t help but feel angry.” refusal was wedged between the ways the fishermen’s thozhil reinforced the capacity for many to be fishermen in ennore, and the feeling that one was withering away in a contaminated river. the practice of thozhil sublimated the chemical into the vast and fearsome comprehension of the uncertainty that patterned the fishermen’s lives. and yet, simultaneously, it also offered them the capacity to refuse the debilitating feeling that arose from experiencing the toxic industrialization of their home. some, like pandian, used refusal as a fuel that turned fear into anger. others, like surya, refused so as to feel free. nevertheless, here too, refusal proved differential and partial—changing with the fishing season, shifting according to who owned boats and who only offered labor. it was sometimes contradictory too—given that the catch from their thozhil sometimes fed into gaining temporary work at the company that caused ennore’s toxic industrialization, or, in requiring that the fishermen sustain temporary work at the company so that they could invest in equipment used for fishing. akin to the hereditary taxi drivers in mumbai, who, as tarini bedi (2023) suggests, take on the city’s pollution during driving work to persist with a profession that they find both dignifying and ethical, the fishermen refused to renounce their thozhil in a bid to sustain lives and livelihoods they found meaningful. they did so despite the effects and affects of repeated chemical encounters they knew acutely —at times, through a sublime form of comprehension. and they did so to sustain their long-standing relations with toxic ecologies in ennore, a zoned-out periphery that, crucially, also happened to be their home. ennore for us the fishermen were not alone in having to engage with the uncertainties that arose from their bodily reasonings on chemical pollution or those that resulted from ennore being zoned out. many of ennore’s other residents also 561questioned why it was that their narratives were excluded from reports about their home. they did so publicly at times, organizing press meets, conferences, and protest marches to broadcast their demands for a place they knew was saturated with petrochemical pollution. in fact, the first time i ever heard pandian speak was when he was invited onto the stage of a public conference put together by a small, ennore-based non-profit organization. representatives from each of ennore’s fishing villages, its working-class residents, labor union members, and city-based politicians and environmental activists took turns that evening speaking under a banner that read nammaikkana ennore (ennore for us). i had received a flyer from one of the organizers at the ennore bus stop a week before the event, and he insisted i come, as the event was an opportunity for ennore’s residents to broadcast what they themselves wanted for their neighborhood. the flyer listed some of those demands: asking for the land on which the local government school operated in ennore to be made public property; for that land to then house a college and a full-time hospital for ennore’s residents; for the illegal dumping of toxic waste into the river to be stopped; and that appropriate, permanent jobs be given to all residents of ennore. as the organizer himself insisted, “now it is time we say what we want.” on the day of the conference, i listened to an array of speakers from ennore and elsewhere discuss what they deemed the urgent needs of ennore’s residents. many of the speakers prefaced their talks by alluding to how ennore was 562relegated to the margins of a segregated city. frustrations were raised about the lack of “city-like investments” that patterned life in other parts of chennai, with examples of how there were still no emergency medical facilities in ennore, or how public transport services simply did not match the requirements of ennore’s residents. one speaker demanded that the state government write ennore into its wider urban planning frameworks, even petitioning for the chennai metro rail project to extend to their neighborhood.14 the most common theme among many speakers was that despite the many companies that had set up base in ennore, its residents were constantly overlooked when it came to accessing jobs. “even small contract jobs they are not willing to give us,” one speaker said in a humorous tone, drawing a few tepid chuckles from the audience. but he swiftly recalibrated the mood among the audience. “without this meeting ending today, even tomorrow and the days after that i wish to see our people carry on making themselves heard,” the speaker went on, insisting that if the objective of receiving “proper jobs” was to be achieved, ennore’s residents had to sustain their efforts at speaking out for themselves.15 figure 4. a group of residents stand in front of the “nammaikkana ennore” hoarding outside the meeting venue in ennore. photo by rishabh raghavan. pandian stood apart in this regard when he came onto stage. he began by going into detail about the relationship between the river and sea and how the flows between them sustained the mangrove forests that protected the ennore estuary. the mangroves, he proceeded, in turn nurtured the fish, prawns, and crabs that the fishermen had caught for many years. “but all of this changed after i signed the papers for the state to build its power plant,” he said, then offering an example of how the construction of the bridge in ennore left a lot of industrial debris in the river that had still not been cleared up. “you can all come and see it,” he added, speaking about the mount of debris, “because even now it is still there.” for most of his talk, pandian mentioned many points i would later go on to hear: “coal dust” was everywhere, the river mouth was choked with industrial sediment, the government had “cheated” the fishers with their relocation offer. at one point, however, pandian expressed deep regret for having personally consented to the government’s plan to construct the first power plant on “his land,” thereby granting the government the ability to pollute ennore’s river. however, he soon stepped away from the weight of that regret. “whose river do you think it is?” he asked the audience. “it is our river,” pandian insisted, expressing his refusal to be weighed down by the unfair conditions of his consent many years ago. “it is the river of the people of ennore even now,” he added, showing how both his regret and his refusal dragged on through different stretches of his life, well into the present. 563refusal, simpson (2016, 330) writes, “holds on to a truth, structures this truth as a stance through time” and “operates as the revenge of consent—the consent to these conditions, to the interpretation that this was fair, and the ongoing sense that this is all over with.” pandian repeatedly expressed his regret for having consented to the government’s offer by forfeiting his land for the construction of a power plant. this regret offered him the basis from which he later began to refuse the power plant’s presence in his home, thereby “avenging a prior injustice and pointing to its ongoing life in the present” (2016, 330). moreover, while i had assumed that pandian’s refusal stood in conflict with the demands made by other residents—given that many petitioned for stable jobs in the companies that unequivocally contributed to ennore’s toxic industrialization—i was proven wrong when i spoke to him later. “if young people from our village all got permanent work,” he said, “then i can say something good has happened to us.” i came across similar desires from other fishermen too. velu, and even his cousin who owned the boat, had both told me that they would be willing to accept permanent employment at the company. “but you think they’d offer us permanent work?” velu’s relative had scoffed, changing the subject of our conversation. a young fisherman i met had told me how he was in the process of getting his driver’s license to increase his chances of permanent employment at the company. driver positions proved difficult to secure, he insisted, but if you had the right contacts, which he claimed he did, the job was accessible. but most important was his explanation as to why he planned to become a driver: “every corner of ennore the company has come, and they are saying more is only going to arrive.” the young fisherman, as did the others, revealed how, when the spatiotemporal rhythms of industry and toxicity collide in zoned-out peripheries like ennore, futures are often cast both in hope and doubt, even as they steadfastly remained uncertain (ahmann 2024). pandian, simbu, surya, velu, and the young fisherman all refused the imposition of this uncertain future onto themselves and their homes. some, like pandian, voiced desires for a past when ennore was theirs and they were solely fishermen. at other points, they refused to endorse the labeling of the ecologies of their home as polluted, wanting their own experiences of toxicity to reveal the truth about their area. frequently, they refused to be subsumed by the uncertainties that their thozhil awoke in them as they fished in a highly industrial landscape. they chose instead to engage with ennore on their own terms: as fishermen. and sometimes, their refusal was aimed 564toward a future yet to come—one they saw as only becoming more industrial and toxic—and of which they wanted nothing if it meant they could no longer live and work in their own home. pandian’s speech at the public meeting, then, despite being out of step with the rest of the speakers, was by no means antithetical to the demands put forward for permanent work in the company. the fishermen, as did ennore’s other residents, contended with “the contradictions of existing in worlds that demand chemical exposures as the conditions for eating, drinking, breathing” (murphy 2017, 497), even when they knew that the sustained exposure to chemical pollution only caused them considerable uncertainty and harm. as a result, their acts and stances of refusal themselves took on partial and contradictory positions, foregrounding a variety of desires. crucially, public assemblies like nammaikkana ennore offered residents the opportunity to voice and broadcast such stances of refusal. simultaneously, it also gave many the stage to voice their desires to be heard, to be recognized—even if that meant that they were to take part in the processes contributing to the toxic industrialization of their home—all in the “hope that things will be different” (mcgranahan 2016, 338), even if how they were to be different was anything but clear. conclusion: beyond uncertainty in places like ennore, zoned out as peripheries for the growth of toxic industries and infrastructures, uncertainty cuts through human lives and livelihoods. in the argentinian shantytown of flammable, javier auyero and débora swistun (2009) show how residents, state representatives, epidemiologists, and industry officials all diverge in their narratives on petrochemical contamination: those divergences escalate into a “toxic uncertainty” that leaves residents’ relationships with surrounding chemicals and industries perennially ambiguous. writing from polluted rural china, anna lora-wainwright (2013) concludes ominously that the gap between residents’ experiences and knowledge of toxicity and the quantification of pollution by law, state, or industry impede any potential for collective action. because, as m. murphy (2006) reminds us, imperceptibility is key to the workings of chemical exposure, the epistemic practices put in place to materialize chemicals’ presence, and their affects and effects, cannot avoid dealing with a politics of uncertainty that sometimes preserves, and sometimes furthers, uneven power relations (see also liboiron 2021). 565in this essay, i cast the fishermen’s refusal as an active engagement with ennore’s politics of uncertainty. when velu, simbu, or pandian refused to leave their land, river, and senses of self and enacted forms of refusal by persisting with their thozhil, they did not only do so despite toxic uncertainty—but also as a bid to engage knowingly with this uncertainty. in uncovering how their refusal was partial, processual, and sometimes even contradictory, i argue that the fishermen’s lifetime of chemically informed reasoning had sublimated ennore’s toxic uncertainty into something they were able to, at times, grasp. in that sense, they knew the full extent of how precarious their lives and livelihoods were and gauged how their encounters with pollution also constituted encounters with historic forms of spatial and sociopolitical unevenness. nevertheless, they persisted through unevenness and uncertainty, knowing that certain pasts may not necessarily lead to any futures. perhaps one thing only was certain: the fishermen would not accept that their desires to build meaningful lives and livelihoods, and to sustain long-standing histories of calling ennore home, be written out. any impediment to their presence in ennore was met with their refusal. abstract this article shows how acts of refusal mediated different experiences of uncertainty among the artisanal fishermen who lived and worked in ennore’s (chennai, india) polluted landscape. in uncovering how some of these uncertainties were experienced as a result of histories of urban segregation that rendered peripheral locations like ennore seemingly appropriate to house polluting industries, and thereafter sustained through the bodily demands of thozhil (the profession of artisanal fishing) in a contaminated river, the article posits acts of partial, processual, and contradictory forms of refusal as ways in which different fishermen reconciled some of their experiences of living with ennore’s petrochemical pollution. in critically engaging emic terms like area and thozhil that the fishermen used to flag their stances of refusal, and also showing how collective assemblies became instrumental in challenging ennore’s polluting industries, the article argues that refusal not only helped the fishermen forge lives and make claims in places that were becoming more industrial and toxic but also mediated their relationship to a place they knew as, and desired to continue calling, their home. [refusal; toxicity; pollution; uncertainty; fishermen; south india; urban segregation] அருப்பொருள் இந்த கட்டுரை, எண்ணூர் மாசடைந்த நீர்நிலைகளில், பாரம்பரிய முறையில் மீன்பிடிக்கும் மீனவர்களின், வாழ்வாதார ஐயப்பாடுகளை விளக்குகிறது. பல இரசாயன ஆலைகளை சுமக்கும், நகரத்தின் 566விளிம்பில் தள்ளப்பட்ட எண்ணூரின்,‘நகர்புற-பிரிவினை’ வரலாற்றை ஆராய்ந்து , சுகாதாரமற்ற நீரில் இறங்கி மீன்பிடி தொழில் செய்யும் மீனவர்களின் தேவைகளை கண்டறிந்து, எண்ணூர் மீனவர்கள் எவ்வாறு தங்களின் வேறுபட்ட அனுபவங்களை வைத்து ‘எண்ணெய் கசிவு’ போன்ற மாசுப்பாட்டை எதிர்த்தனர் என்பதை, நடைமுறை கூறுகள், செயல்முறை வழக்கம் மற்றும் முரண்பாடுகளின் மூலமாக இக்கட்டுரை நிறுவுகிறது. ‘ஏரியா’ மற்றும் ‘தொழில்’ போன்ற வட்டார வழக்குகளை பயன்படுத்துவதன் மூலமாக, எண்ணூரை மட்டுமே தங்கள் வீடாக கொண்ட மீனவ மக்களின் மனநிலையையும், மாசுபாட்டை எதிர்க்கும் சமூக கூட்டுறவையும் புரிந்துகொள்ளமுடிகிறது. தங்களுக்கே சொந்தமான மொழிநடையிலும், பெரும் இரசாயன ஆலைகளை எதிர்க்கும் தங்களின் நிலைப்பாட்டின் வாயிலாக எண்ணூர் மீனவர்கள் எப்படி தங்கள் வாழ்வாதாரம் மட்டுமின்றி, தாம் வாழ்ந்து மணலுக்கும் தம்மை வளர்த்த கடலுக்கும் இடையேயான உறவினை வலுவூட்டுகிறார்கள் என்பதை இந்த கட்டுரை ஆறிந்தாய்கிறது. [மறுப்பு; விஷத்தன்மை; மாசுபாடு; தெளிவின்மை; மீனவர்; தென் இந்தியா; பெரு நகர பிரிவினை] notes acknowledgments  capucine tournilhac has seen this article through its many renditions, ever since its earliest conception as a chapter in my doctoral thesis, and it is to her that i owe my first thanks and gratitude. jason cons has been a tremendous mentor and friend, and i am deeply grateful for his support through the writing of this article. ursula rao, duncan mcduie-ra, andrew mcdowell, ghassan hage, kavita dasgupta, siddharth chadha, lotte hoek, jamie cross, and my departmental colleagues at the max planck institute of social anthropology have all been influential at various stages of the production of this article, and i extend my gratitude to them all. the three anonymous reviewers, whose insights have made this article in many ways, were generous with their critical feedback and support—i thank them dearly. the bulk of the fieldwork that preceded the writing of this article stemmed from my doctoral studies, which were generously funded by the leverhulme trust. 1. all the names of my interlocutors have been changed. 2. all the quotes in this essay have been translated from tamil to english by the author. however, all italicized terms within quoted sentence emphasis the direct use of the term or phrase in the sentence. for example, with “mercury” and “thozhil,” i mean to indicate that pandian used the english word mercury and tamil word thozhil in direct speech. 3. pronounced “tho-lil,” the tamil term could be used to mean “profession,” “work” and/or “labor” depending on the speaker. here, pandian was referring to the labor put in during fishing work. yet the phrase “our thozhil” could also, in other contexts, mean “our profession” or “our work.” it is the dynamism of the term, and the ways in which it meant different things for the fishermen, that i extend through my use of the term. 4. i use the terms fishermen and fisherman to both highlight the gendered connotations of my fieldwork and augment the gendered boundaries of thozhil. while the labor of fishing in the estuary was predominantly carried out by male fishers, the labor of selling fish in the local market, childcare, cooking and caring was largely taken on by fisherwomen. elsewhere, my use of the term fishers denotes the wider fishing community in 567ennore, thereby bringing the fishermen, fisherwomen, and fisher children within its fold. 5. see jayaraman (2020) for their use of the term when writing about ennore and that from which i borrow for this article. 6. the bulk of the ethnography stems from my doctoral fieldwork (2018–2019). 7. the fisherman used the colloquial term for kerosene, which was krishna oil. 8. a clip of this song is accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7d6jz-aegy 9. anand and kamath extend vinay gidwani and rajyashree reddy’s (2011) conception of “eviscerating urbanisms” that describes a set of interlinked forces that patterns urban transformation in metropolitan india suggesting that it it doubles up as a crucial diagnostic tool when it comes to studying the urbanization of india’s coast and seas. 10. the fishers i speak of belong to the chinna pattinavar (small pattinavar) subgroup who mostly fish in the estuary, as opposed to the periya pattinavar (big pattinavar) subgroup who fish at sea. 11. my relationship with ennore’s fishermen took a slightly different turn, as i was not explicitly associated with any of the activists or research groups that worked there. 12. i refer here to the padu system as the way ennore’s fisherman governed fishing practices in the river, discussed by panini (2001) and mathew (1991). 13. velu’s use of the word coolie emerged from the same term that was used to refer to certain forms of indentured asiatic labor in the nineteenth century (see varma 2016; also valentine 2008). 14. the chennai metro rail is a government rapid rail infrastructure project for the chennai metropolitan area. 15. see mitchell 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formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 3: 368–93. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.3.02 simpson, audra 2014 mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2016 “consent’s revenge.” cultural anthropology 31, no. 3: 326–33. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca31.3.02 valentine, daniel 2008 “the coolie.” cultural anthropology 23, no. 2: 254–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00009.x varma, nitin 2016 coolies of capitalism: assam tea and the making of coolie labour. berlin: de gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110463170 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 543–569, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.07 #citeblackwomen cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 177-181, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.01 #citeblackwomen anne-maria b. makhulu duke university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0289-6950 christen a. smith university of texas, austin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0670-7907 although the numbers of black women in anthropology are growing, and our contributions too (e.g., fields 1995; mcclaurin 2001; harrison 2008; bolles 2013; williams 2018), black women’s scholarship remains relatively invisible in the field as a whole. this holds true despite efforts at recasting the discipline to acknowledge not only its origins in the colonial encounter but also to move beyond such acknowledgments to embrace the possibility of a decolonial discipline. and yet, the dominant voices remain relatively unchanged whether at the highest levels of the american anthropological association, on the editorial boards of the discipline’s flagship journals, in university and college departments, or among those invited to deliver distinguished talks and conference keynotes (though this past year may have signaled a change).1 this tension between the diversity of the membership and the prominence of some and not others drills down as deep as who is cited and who is not; who is included in an ever-emergent anthropological canon and who is not; and ultimately who and what is regarded as pathbreaking, ingenious, and dare one say, theoretical (i.e., a source of knowledge and abstraction rather than raw data) (smith and garrett-scott 2021).2 nowhere is this more evident than in the relative absence of black women’s names from the bibliographies and citational rituals of mainstream anthropology. this holds despite the transnational reach and scope of many working across black atlantic and diasporic geographies, as well as across extensive historical timelines that in other milieus would be understood as longue durée and hence intellectually robust. christen a. smith’s november 2017 founding of the #citeblackwomen movement, and its subsequent expansion through the cite black women collective, inaugurated a very public conversation about black women’s intellectual contributions.3 in this present moment of global protests against anti-black racism, the race-gender project that is #citeblackwomen has been joined by #blackintheivory. but as with the movement for black lives, which has severally responded to the call for accountability in the killings of black men by police or vigilantes—ahmaud arbery, michael brown, philando castile, george floyd, freddie gray, trayvon martin, and tamir rice among them—black women’s experiences of police brutality and death have not generally inspired an immediate call to action, with the notable exception of #sayhername (african american policy forum 2015). #blackintheivory has rightfully drawn attention to the experiences of black colleagues and students in the yet-to-be-fully-decolonized university: a university in which black scholars confront stolen ideas and work products; reluctant acknowledgment of their insights, intelligence, and legitimacy; as well as the systematic diminution of black labor and effort. the #citeblackwomen colloquy by contrast explicitly engages not only a general set of racial exclusions but also those converging at the intersection of race and gender to bring a renewed balance to conversations about righting historical wrongs that often reproduce gender inequities, even while attempting to correct racial ones (smith et al. 2021). our colloquy takes up the paradox of black women scholars’ limited visibility in anthropology, moving away from directly addressing the methods and means of citation and toward laying out the logics of silencing and invisibilization that result as a consequence of black women’s disappearance from the text, parenthesis, footnote, endnote, and bibliography. at the same time, we acknowledge the overlap between the means and methods of citational erasure, and the means and methods of overcoming silencing and invisibilization. bell hooks (1991, 153) tells us that black women have been perceived as “all body, no mind,” as “service workers” and never thinkers. for those black women committed to the intellectual project, the “work is a necessary part of liberation struggle, central to the efforts of all oppressed and/or exploited people who would move from object to subject, who would decolonize and liberate their minds” (hooks 1991, 150). but, as sara ahmed has recently noted, “to pose a problem is to pose a problem.” and pushing conceptual and political boundaries runs the risk of undoing institutional knowledge-power, even as a kind of intellectual “vandalism” or “sabotage” may prove essential to getting a story out “into a wider world.”4 this colloquy tries to get those stories out in a double sense: one, because there are stories to tell; and two, because those stories rarely circulate as they should. our sistren in this endeavor represent severally and distinctly the challenges of being black women intellectuals. we span the generations. faye v. harrison’s pioneering work as a leading black anthropologist, prolific author, and advocate opens our colloquy. as editor of the 1997 volume on decolonial thinking in anthropology she anticipated so many others. savannah shange represents our greatest hope for a renewed and revitalized discipline attentive to a radical black feminist methodology, to poesis and poiesis—that praxis of bringing something into being—even as she makes libations to our ancestors. bianca c. williams works on the movement for black lives as well as in more recent scholarship campus social movements. her institutional understandings force us to interrogate black women scholars’ locations—their multiple positionings and corollary burdens, their split tenure lines and numerous loyalties. christen a. smith, alongside the cite black women collective, is the name behind the #citeblackwomen movement from which the colloquy takes its title. able to think afro-descended life in the americas both north and south and always reflecting on the sequelae of structural and physical violence, her contribution to this project is immeasurable, focusing on the relays of injury that begin in intellectual theft and conclude in wider citational refusal. anne-maria makhulu is, in many respects, a fervent convert—later to the conversation yet generationally proximate to a time when the politics of recognition could not, as yet, fully encompass “the unthought” (hartman and wilderson 2003). abstract anthropology continues to grapple with pervasive racism and sexism. although we have made strides to distance ourselves from our colonial roots, our field remains dominated by white men. more pointedly, despite the diversity of our discipline, people of color generally, and black women particularly, continue to be excluded from the anthropological canon. nowhere is this more evident than in the relative absence of black women from the bibliographies and citational rituals of mainstream anthropology. although black women have been practicing, theorizing, and revolutionizing north american anthropology since zora neale hurston’s groundbreaking work in the early twentieth century, they have remained largely excluded from our disciplinary conceptualizations of what constitutes serious anthropological theory. inspired by the work of cite black women, this colloquy critically examines the race and gender politics of citation in anthropology and the urgent need for anthropologists to reimagine “conceptual collaboration” to move our discipline toward justice. the anthropologist lynn bolles (2013) notes, “if the citation wars have meaning in the modern academy … then in both short and long runs african american scholars are/will be faceless and voiceless.” with the advent of the #metoo movement and with increasing attention paid to the politics of authorship and representation inside and outside of the academy, this colloquy critically reflects on how anthropologists might re-think approaches to theory, methodology, conceptual framing, and pedagogy to bring black women to the center of anthropological debates. [anthropology; black women; citation; racism; sexism] notes 1. in 2021, faye v. harrison delivered the opening distinguished lecture to the american anthropological association, while akhil gupta as president of the association delivered the presidential address. 2. christen a. smith and dominique garrett-scott (2021) recently published a pilot study analyzing the citational rates for black women in anthropology. this article also explores the very tensions within the discipline that we discuss here. 3. for more information on the cite black women collective, see smith et al. 2021 and their website www.citeblackwomencollective.org. 4. maya binyam, “you pose a problem: a conversation with sara ahmed,” the paris review, january 14, 2022, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2022/01/14/you-pose-a-problem-a-conversation-with-sara-ahmed/ (accessed january 24, 2022). references african american policy forum | center for intersectionality and social policy studies 2015 say her name: resisting police brutality against black women. new york: african american policy forum | center for intersectionality and social policy studies. bolles, lynn 2013 “telling the story straight: black feminist intellectual thought in anthropology.” transforming anthropology 21, no. 1: 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12000 fields, karen e., trans. 1995 the elementary forms of religious life, by émile durkheim. new york: free press. harrison, faye v. 2008 outsider within: reworking anthropology in the global age. urbana: university of illinois press. harrison, faye v., ed. 1997 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. 3rd edition. arlington, va.: american anthropological association. hartman, saidiya v., and frank b. wilderson iii 2003 “the position of the unthought.” qui parle 13, no. 2: 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183 hooks, bell 1991 “black women intellectuals.” in breaking bread: insurgent black intellectual life, edited by bell hooks and cornel west, 147–64. boston, mass.: south end press. mcclaurin, irma, ed. 2001 black feminist anthropology: theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. new brunswick, n.j.: rutgers university press. smith, christen a., and dominique garrett-scott 2021 “‘we are not named’: black women and the politics of citation in anthropology.” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 18–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12038 smith, christen a., erica l. williams, imani a. wadud, and whitney n. l pirtle 2021 “cite black women: a critical praxis (a statement).” feminist anthropology 2, no. 1: 10–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040 williams, bianca c. 2018 the pursuit of happiness: black women, diasporic dreams, and the politics of emotional transnationalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 177-181, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.01 cultural anthropology: my neighbor the gringo: commercialized intimacies and newcomer hospitality in a rio de janeiro favela 726 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 726-752, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.07 my neighbor the gringo: commercialized intimacies and newcomer hospitality in a rio de janeiro favela alessandro m. angelini johns hopkins university http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3504-2457 gareth a. jones london school of economics and political science http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9844-4547 márcia stood in the middle of the main road leading up the hillside favela, or self-built neighborhood, that she has called home for nearly her whole life. a photographer snapped a picture of her that would appear on the front page of rio de janeiro’s most widely read newspaper the following day, along with a brief interview of the schoolteacher turned activist. her arms outstretched like the city’s iconic christ the redeemer statue, márcia’s pose could be read as either an all-embracing welcome or as barring the path against invaders (see figure 1). standing in the street with the lights of the favela glimmering in the night, and with a wry smile across her face, was she playing host or guardian? márcia’s community, known as morro do vidigal (vidigal hill), a settlement of around 10,000 inhabitants that overlooks the atlantic ocean and high-end beachfront districts of leblon and ipanema, had been experiencing a growing influx of outsiders from the early 2000s. this change had felt like a reversal of sorts. middleand upper-class foreigners as well as cariocas, as rio inhabitants 727are called, had long considered vidigal a no-go zone associated with poverty and criminality. however, in the space of a few years, vidigal had undergone a dramatic change of use and image. it had begun to attract not only visitors but also capital in the form of outsider interest in building new or refurbishing existing properties.1 figure 1. márcia poses for a newspaper profile piece as an anti-gentrification activist in vidigal. photo by domingos peixoto (agency o globo). by 2015, eighteen hostels had been established, and numerous other properties started to advertise rooms on platforms such as airbnb. in an area near the top of the hill known as alto vidigal, a cluster of bars, two art schools,2 a culinary academy, a boutique hotel, and an architect-designed condominium were newly built. a series of large mural interventions by star graffiti artists had also transformed the physical landscape and the imagery of the neighborhood. in this essay, by examining how hospitality outposts developed in vidigal, we outline how anxieties over belonging to place become manifest. one threat is what anthropologist angela torresan (2020) describes as the reciprocity embedded in vidigal residents’ struggles to improve their own conditions—melhorar a condição de vida—that lies in tension with a local moral economy, the tacit expectation that one person’s gain will bring wider community benefits. gentrificação, a word adopted directly from the english gentrification, had started to take on currency in rio de janeiro in the economic boom of the late 2000s and early 2010s. this unprecedented real estate speculation, it was thought, could bring new opportunities for people to improve their lives. certain residents 728with financial means and locational advantages invested in building new floors or rooms to rent, or in converting residential spaces into hostels or bars. but conversely, such efforts to “cash in” on the perceived bonanza might undo the sense of neighborliness that frames social arrangements as between more or less equals or people from similar backgrounds; in short, a communitarian idea of favela sociability would be undermined. by 2015, as brazil’s economy entered a downturn and as construction projects stalled, skeptical residents emphasized the markedly racial character of displacement via real estate speculation, popularizing the term remoção branca, or “removal by whites.”3 it is by focusing on host-guest relations that we explore the contours of anxiety, expectation, hype, and skepticism in what was broadly felt like an inflection point in the history of the neighborhood and city more broadly. with many newcomers setting up hostels and bed-and-breakfast accommodations as a way to promote and capitalize on a cultural imaginary of the favela, claims to assume the role of host turn on diverse practices of conjuring community, and more saliently, a notion of convivência, which in brazil refers broadly to the conditions under which living together or coexistence is made possible and sustained. to put it another way, we trace how the paradox of newcomers becoming hosts reflects how anti-gentrification struggles are not commensurate with calls for a return to a restoration of convivência. the emergence of foreign-owned and -run hospitality reveals a confluence of global favela imaginaries and real estate interests, as well as their attendant contradictions. with gentrification seemingly unrestrained at the time of our research, convivência is invoked not as a nostalgic desire to reclaim a mythic sense of community but as an aspiration to rework urban change on one’s own terms. these discursive and affective attachments constitute a structure of feeling that, in vidigal and other favelas, has to do not only with qualities of the urban fabric but is also ethnicized or racialized as distinctly “favela.” this essay examines the material process of building new spaces to accommodate an economic orientation toward receiving outsiders; the symbolic process of reimagining the favela’s place in the world, consolidating its historical and cultural value; and the affective process of transforming the favela as space of danger, violence, and poverty to one of communal togetherness, cultural vibrancy, and chic lifestyles. the racial politics of the gentrifying favela shift amid the production of new entrepreneurial spaces of leisure and hospitality. as these fault lines emerge, and as the idea of the favela’s symbolic place in the urban imaginary shifts, we show how struggles to mobilize collective memory and 729collective action derive from the ambiguity of defining who and what constitutes being a resident. we explore scholarly debates over gentrification and hospitality to inform how the notion of convivência became a keyword in conversations over property speculation, rising rent and utility prices, and the arrival of middleand upper-class visitors to vidigal. in the sections that follow, this article thus responds to an overdetermined story of both gentrification and resistance to displacement. vidigal was not only made into the emblem of favela chic by the rapid emergence of accommodations and leisure industry locales but was also experienced as a kind of sign of a spatial reordering of the city, an inversion of the urban order of things rife with opportunities and contradictions. this article then tracks how these processes led to a consciousness-building campaign to consolidate public memory. in the conclusion, we discuss how the end of this period of investment and hype was experienced as both reverting to a familiar status quo of state and capital neglect as well as renewed questions of place-belonging and identity. we had initially identified vidigal in 2014 as a key site in which to study the dynamics of urban social inequality and tourist imaginaries. the fieldwork, conducted primarily by alessandro angelini and supported by gareth jones as principal investigator, involved conversations and interviews with local activists, residents, tour guides, builders, and managers of housing accommodations, as well as attending community debates. our positionality as white male foreigners at times shaped unprompted conversations about the real estate boom in vidigal, the purported sightings of global north celebrities, and even invitations to view newly constructed housing with the assumption that we might be interested buyers. this research formed part of a team comparative ethnography project bringing together anthropologists from three european universities to work in four cities across the americas—kingston, mexico city, new orleans, and rio de janeiro. elsewhere our team explored the embodied experiences of tourists, guides, and residents in sensing and assigning meanings to spaces of urban poverty (jaffe et al. 2020). we aimed to investigate the commodification and aestheticization of violent, impoverished urban spaces and their residents as an emergent phenomenon affecting urban imaginaries, the built environment, local economies, and social relations. the project analyzed the shift from stigma to brand by tracing different dimensions of this transformation: long-term processes of place-making, the circulation of narratives and images, the role of brokers including tour guides and ngos, and the transformation of urban value as a sensory, aesthetic, political, and economic remaking of spaces long associated 730with poverty and violence (dürr, jaffe, and jones 2020). among the cities in our study, what our group had come to call inequality tourism has had a longer history and in certain favelas figured as a precursor to “downward raiding” real estate dynamics (garmany and burdick 2020). these socioeconomic processes led us to the blurred spaces of hospitality, a facet of the tourist encounter beyond the ephemerality of the tour that introduces questions of residential belonging and displacement. beyond the just-so story of gentrification vidigal’s social and territorial history does not conform to the pattern of segregation by which observers have defined rio’s urban landscape (mccann 2014; ventura 1994). by 2015, residents estimated in conversations that one in every ten residents was a gringo, a brazilian colloquialism for a tacitly white foreigner, usually from north america or europe (blanchette 2005). a survey organized by local activists that year put the number of resident gringos—excluding sojourner backpackers, attendees on courses or education programs, and visitors—at significantly less, around 2 percent. the gap between the perception of international outsiders moving into the community and attempts to quantify their presence could be attributed to their outsized salience in everyday life. a demographic study based on a household sample bears out these local perceptions of the shifting race and class composition of new residents: “while the migrants who moved to this place in the period 2012–2016 are 75% white and 23% black or brown, the migrants heading to vidigal in the period 2016–2018 are 55% white and 45% black or brown, a profile closer to the residents who had been living since before the pacification (48% white and 51% black or brown)” (bonamichi 2022, 396). favela residents generally identify gringos not only by their physical characteristics but also by their accents, clothing, consumption habits, as well as their manner of walking the many steep stairways of vidigal (freire-medeiros 2009). in other words, gringo-ness came to be defined in rio’s favelas as an assemblage of embodied habitus. it was not unusual to overhear english, french, italian, spanish, or german on the main streets, when buying food or drinks at a bar, or when attending events. this heightened presence, real or imagined, of gringos marked a more complicated geography of the historical divide between favela and asfalto, or formal city. it became a cause for both celebration and anxiety, particularly on the part of long-term residents who saw neighbors selling their homes for what were rumored to be hitherto unimaginable sums, new businesses opening up to meet 731the needs of tourists and new residents, and “strangers” occupying seats on the kombi transport vans winding up the hill. this visualization of peoples’ identities with their race or ethnicity, even if their presence was short-term, is resonant with more materialist concerns and longer-term presence linked to gentrification, a process that in vidigal and other urban areas became referred to as the aforementioned remoção branca or as “whitening” (garmany and richmond 2020; mattos 2013). the geographer david harvey (2012, 20) anticipated the gentrification of rio’s favelas as an inevitable outcome stemming from land titling and the formalization of private property widely promoted by international development organizations and think tanks: “my bet is that, if present trends continue, within fifteen years all those hillsides now occupied by favelas will be covered by high-rise condominiums with fabulous views over rio’s bay, while the erstwhile favela-dwellers will have been filtered off to live in some remote periphery.” this projection was shared and given nuance by life-long resident dona graça when she confessed in a documentary film about vidigal, “i think residents need to value this place, but i think soon vidigal will become a gringo neighborhood [bairro de gringos]. nothing against them. it’s great, that convivência, but not in an exaggerated way.”4 her assessment of local changes, echoed by other residents we encountered in this research, evinced a certain ambivalence that complicated the tidy conflictual binarism of prevailing academic writing on gentrification. whether offered as prediction or polemic, harvey’s speculation rests on the logic of rent-gap theory, or that is, how the dynamics of capitalist urban development seek to bridge the differential between actual and potential land rents under an increasingly globalized real estate competition (smith 2002). while there has been a vigorous debate over the rent gap as a driver of gentrification, and indeed its very definition (slater 2017; ghertner 2015), matthew richmond and jeff garmany (2023), in a direct rebuttal to harvey’s claim, point to the “inertia” of local territorialized processes (cf. santos 1979) to explain how a wholesale displacement of favela dwellers did not happen. the question of whether and where gentrification succeeds or fails obscures the zones of contact where in fact something otherwise may be afoot. thus we are concerned in particular with how the dynamic between actual and potential value maps onto identities of resident and newcomer, which in turn are expressed in uneasy ways in claims to belonging and to hosting. claims of incipient gentrification in vidigal extend back decades before the intensification of the mid-2010s. the first houses, in the form of wooden shacks, 732appeared on the hillside in 1941. in robert gay’s (1994, 70) historical account, “for much of its early history, the favela of vidigal was both isolated and unorganized. in fact, it was only when it was threatened with removal that the community was spurred into any form of collective action.” the owner of the territory, an industrial company, attempted to expel the nearly 200 families residing there twice, in 1958 and 1967. the latter standoff led to the founding of the favela’s neighborhood association. in 1977, mayor marcos tamoyo attempted to remove vidigal, as he did several other favelas in rio, alleging that houses were in imminent danger of landslides. however, when residents discovered that the purportedly high-risk areas would be redeveloped into twelve luxury apartment buildings, they mobilized once more, with the help of the pastoral das favelas (a catholic church organization to promote the rights of favela residents), the brazilian institute of architects, lawyers, and parliamentarians, to force the project’s abandonment (mccann 2014; lima 2010). and then again, in the early 2000s, rolf glaser, a german entrepreneur who had amassed a substantial fortune in currency trading, eyed vidigal as a future tourist attraction. he proceeded to buy thirty-seven houses with the idea of constructing luxury hotels and restaurants to be staffed by residents of vidigal, as well as a museum to showcase the favela as it once had been before its transformation. in 2012, glaser entered into a legal battle over a property he had allegedly sold to an austrian business partner who had refurbished it into a backpacker hostel.5 glaser denied selling the property, but the dispute was interceded by the local gang boss, who expelled and prohibited him from returning to vidigal. a more recent analytical framework for gentrification, apropos harvey, points to the securitization of real estate values through community policing. the police pacification unit (unidade de polícia pacificadora, or upp) program aimed not so much at liberating favela dwellers from the threat of everyday violence as liberating property values in neighborhoods suppressed by the presence of violent actors entrenched in nearby favelas (frischtak and mandel 2012). this strategy was enhanced by significant public and private investment associated with the 2014 fifa world cup and 2016 summer olympic games. officials heralded these sporting mega-events within a discourse of urban integration and amplification of the so-called marvelous city brand (landesman 2016). the sudden enthusiastic application of urban planning regulations and environmental protection assessments also did work to displace communities from what were claimed to be flood or landslide-prone areas, thinning the high-density favela (freeman and burgos 2016) and signaling a preparedness for investment qua 733gentrification (rocha and carvalho 2018). property prices, in real terms and compared with incomes, grew by as much as 266 percent between 2008 and 2015, before crashing in 2016 in the wake of an economic recession (cummings 2015). the upp and partial redress of infrastructure deficits made daily life feel more secure, including an indicative sense of citizenship, while paradoxically stirring feelings of uncertainty in other ways, including anxiety of covering utility bills and compliance with building codes (pilo’ 2020), potential dispossession through gentrification, and the existential loss of neighborhood identity. with the optimism associated with the hosting of successive mega-events and, more tangibly, the installation of a upp outpost in the neighborhood, a tourist gaze took hold of vidigal. outsider curiosity became taken up as a real estate interest. at the peak of the speculative boom around 2015–2016, vidigal was rife with stories and signs of celebrities being sighted in the favela (see figure 2). the tabloid press showed photos of former soccer player–turned-model david beckham, as well as u.s. cultural icons kim kardashian, kanye west, will smith, spike lee, and madonna walking through vidigal, alleging that they were scouting properties to construct mansions or studios.6 the presence of sports figures, actors, and artists enhanced the role of the favela as a contemporary symbol and space for creativity, vibrancy, and resilience, as well as addressed a stigmatizing crisis of representation (angelini 2016; 2020).7 and while this has been an empowering move, it has also provoked a sense of the favela 734as mediatized space, as spectacle or spectacular, appropriating from poverty, blackness, and violence to constitute a particular aesthetic, a supposed favela chic (larkins 2015). figure 2. a cardboard cutout of television show host sabrina sato exclaiming “sabrina was here!” at a resident’s front door, next to building materials. photo by alessandro m.angelini. the way these stories of celebrity buying property filtered through lines of gossip in vidigal and rio more widely, despite their apocryphal basis, spoke to a desire and vested interest on the part of local boosters, ranging from tour companies, media organizations, the rio municipality, and especially property owners to push a rise in prestige and economic value.8 yet the ways everyday rumor and gossip circulate through and even drive gentrification problematize the macro-lens view of urban transformation and the narrative of displacement. while such discourses point to how and where zones of interclass contact are produced from a material, symbolic, and affective standpoint, in extremis, gentrification becomes a just-so story that mutes the agency of local actors who are instead cast as victims or unwitting agents of the inexorable march of predatory capital. the story of the dissolution of community ties and loss of social cohesion amid this change further obscures long-standing tensions and conflicts within neighborhoods (pérez 2002; boyd 2005). the effects of market-led displacement through rising prices and rents became evident in vidigal and elsewhere in rio by the early 2000s, but the teleology of the gentrification narrative as a wholesale takeover through the logic of unfettered capital lacks attention to actors’ ambivalent positions within fields of cross-cutting interests. while statements such as “vidigal is being gentrified” were generally met with nods of recognition, the actors, processes, and relations substantiating these assessments rarely became specified. who are the agents of change, and what does change under the sign of gentrification look like on the ground? in the following section, we explore these questions in the phenomenon of newcomer hospitality and the discourse of convivência as mediating racial and class differences. newcomer hospitality and convivência: shared life, racial consciousness, and place in vidigal, we became attuned to hospitality’s role amid changing regimes of territoriality, place-belonging, and capital. as the literature on hospitality does not readily assume a stable host and a transient guest, in vidigal some newcomers arrived with the aim of becoming hosts. moreover, the question of belonging was tied up in entrepreneurial drive, as well as forms of class and racial friction. put bluntly, the recently welcomed became the new welcomers. but how the right to host is negotiated demands that we revisit hospitality as 735an anthropological analytic. the works of julian pitt-rivers (2012) and jacques derrida (2000) have been touchstones in shaping a theory of hospitality. for pitt-rivers, hospitality encompasses a sociological code, universal yet scaled at the level of encounter between a (native) community and an (individual, culturally unmarked) stranger. for derrida, the aporia of hospitality lies in that, as a right of the foreign other to be received as a friend, the host reinforces his/her own authority in his own home. as tom selwyn (2000) has observed, arrangements of kinship, friendship, and association are negotiated through a dialectics of hospitality and hostility, which determines how and on what terms strangers become insiders. hospitality entails a mediation of norms and manners and conditions the contours of intimacy. matei candea’s (2012) ethnographic case proves particularly instructive here. he describes a corsican form of hospitality, framed in ancestral culturalist terms, directly confronting french national law over the question of harboring a presumed criminal, and thus refutes derrida’s assertion of hospitality seamlessly shifting scales. in other words, it is not enough to claim that hospitality works the same in the family as it does in the street or the nation (wessendorf 2014). ambiguity, irony, and humor are interwoven into hospitality’s fluid web of relations, particularly to commercialization, as magnus marsden’s (2012) study of afghan traders highlights. arguing that hospitality has long been a matter of reconciling utility and morality, marsden suggests that its power derives from a capacity to co-produce a sense of dynamic, even playful interrelationality. the relation can assume a more self-conscious mode, as in, for example, erika andersson cederholm and johan hultman’s (2010) analysis of “lifestyle entrepreneurs” who attempt to construct an association between their lifestyle and those of their guests. the emphasis lies on breaking down the explicit commercial nature of the transaction, making the stay or experience a social one, in which engagement with the hosts, the surroundings, and other guests is encouraged, a process that promises emotional bonds, and deliberately or otherwise, a claimed intimacy that holds a commercial value (smith 1977). in vidigal, these kinds of improvised self-fashioning were evident among the intermediary class of actors, some of whom we will meet later in this essay, trying to open up the favela to tourism and lodging accommodations. hospitality, as a mode to bridge otherness, functions in this context to flatten class inequality as cultural difference. convivência emerged within the discourse through which favela residents expressed anxieties about this confluence of economic power and social encounter, a threat to a particular notion of 736harmony, an affective condition of being in place. but convivência also cropped up as an aspired-to yet not idealized state of affairs for so-called lifestyle entrepreneurs to cultivate among longtime residents. as such, convivência proved ambiguous and polyvalent rather than an ordered set of conditions; it had no checklist and could not be engineered. as a social relation, it was experienced as moored to people and place and already assumed difference as a precondition for the hospitality relation. convivência shares meanings with its anglophone cognate, conviviality, but they are not isomorphic. as noted by amanda wise and greg noble (2016), conviviality as a concept has enjoyed a moment of notoriety and “become one of the latest groovy things,” a kind of ethical keyword for intercultural agonism and living with difference. the sociologist paul gilroy (2004) identified conviviality as a response to the reification of identity, particularly in postcolonial britain. and in anthropology, andrew brandel (2016) has made a case for conviviality as an alternative paradigm for the discipline to hold the erasure of difference in abeyance and to embrace the unresolvable. this claim proved especially pertinent to exploring the possibilities of “shared life” under globalization, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, as well as to concerns with misanthropy and hate crime (hinchliffe and whatmore 2006; wessendorf 2014). in brazil, convivência, similarly, constitutes an attractive concept for its versatility as an analytic tool and optimism of the intellect that the term seems to carry. civil society organizations have adopted the term as an ideal or to-be-worked-toward state of living. nevertheless, as alexandre emboaba da costa (2016) has pointed out, convivência needs to be seen against national ideologies that celebrate hybridity and racial democracy as forms of shared belonging and that have failed to overturn histories of racism. adopting sara ahmed’s (2010) idea of “happy objects,” he points out that convivência can both mask discrimination and racism, alluding to a sense of being together, as well as serve to project a politics of identity and resistance against larger-scale claims to equal citizenship. the term holds an emic quality in brazil, where the intellectual work it does mirrors its salience in everyday life. in this context, references to convivência generally refer to and affirm how people can live with difference in mobile and multicultural worlds. the term can be deployed as resistance to intrusion and evokes a sense of living together, a tacit set of endogenous social arrangements, under unspecified threat. “are you against convivência?” the newspaper journalist asked márcia in the profile piece. “in some way,” márcia responded. “i’m against appropriation. 737to be out strolling with my son and be photographed. i’m not a monkey.” her pointed retort marked out the racial inequalities embedded within the convivência relation. fleeting encounters with strangers wielding cameras only further perpetuated the social distance and hierarchy, in márcia’s reckoning. however, the strangers were not only in vidigal for brief visits; some had come to stay, and this provoked a deeper concern for márcia. “and i am against the rising real estate prices,” she continued. “how does that make it for those who rent? . . . the favela is for favelados.” notably, throughout this discussion, márcia expressed preference for the term favela over the more neutral alternative comunidade. favela generally carries pejorative connotations, with associations to blackness, poverty, and violence, but it is precisely that stigma that márcia was invoking as a badge of shared history and identity. márcia insisted on the specificity of favela: “any group can be a community. it has no face. favela means something. a kind of place. history. it is a pretty word. it’s in songs. and community? what’s that? it sounds like the euphemism of saying moreno instead of black.” márcia further emphasized a racial identification that aligned the favela with afro-brazilian historicity. this claim was not only about blackness and history but more centrally about blackness as history. as john f. collins (2015) argues in his study of racial consciousness in the pelourinho neighborhood of salvador, brazil’s putatively prime site of patrimonialized black identity, the ways architecture, history, and bodily dispositions are reified as markers of afro-brazilianess bears the double edge of objectification. while these claims to difference condition the image of the favela as a consumable good (linke 2014) and its heterotopic accommodation of difference (lino e silva 2022), márcia sought to preserve the favela semantically as a preeminently black geography of struggle, at once deeply material, deeply metaphorical, and deeply experiential (mckittrick 2006). and this conviction informed her political activism as an oral historian and anti-gentrification advocate. a case in point, márcia further explained the police had banned baile funk dance parties in vidigal because, according to police, the music celebrates criminality and sex.9 the soundscape of the favela does work to construct social and cultural differentiations as “an assertive identity politics” in which funk musicians are variously considered immoral or criminal subjects (lippman 2021; oosterbaan 2009). nevertheless, funk carioca music frequently featured in the private parties of the rich and gringos. márcia recounted: there are people buying properties and coming to exclusive parties in vidigal. i once went to one of these parties because a friend from the “asphalt” 738insisted on going. i could stand it for barely one hour. the people there were insufferable. i didn’t know anyone there, even though it was happening where i have lived almost all my life. when asked why she thought visitors were coming to vidigal, márcia reflected, there is the thrill, i suppose, of being in the favela. but there is no mixing. the parties charge over 100 reais [$30 usd] at the door, so no one from here can afford to go. and it was funny that one time i went to the party because they had a big projection screen and everyone was looking at that, rather than the view. when the parties are happening, the traffic jams [engarrafamentos] up and down the hill become impossible.10 márcia’s experiences in vidigal’s new enclaves of leisure evoked the contradictions of a spatial recoding that appropriates illicit sociality for chic exclusivity. to these ends, residents have deployed what jennifer roth-gordon (2017) calls “linguistic differentiation” that demarcates the social space of the favela through uses of slang, word play, and grammatical constructions, as distinct from other parts of the city and its “citizens.” iterations of local slang (gíria) mark out the subject position of being of the favela, and as she also notes, “for the elite and middle class, brazilian portuguese gíria has long symbolized disorder, where the unauthorized breaking of linguistic convention indexes the breaking of laws” (roth-gordon 2017, 85). in márcia’s assertion, the favela is an autonomous and racialized space negotiating cultural sanitization and appropriation, its history flattened by public security policy and market forces. drawing heavily on her affective sense of belonging to the favela, and adopting ahmed’s term (cited in da costa 2016), márcia suggested she had become an “unhappy object.” she was in effect issuing a public warning about the community’s endangered territorial distinction. in the next section we offer perspectives from other actors, differently situated in what they perceive as an exceptional moment of entrepreneurial opportunity and a reworking of social relations. we describe the coaching and disciplining of local everyday practices and sensibilities to cater to an anticipated outsider demand for the favela as a consumable experience. new hosts and the “inversion” of vidigal “all this has turned inside-out. this is the most sought-after place in the city right now,” ricardo, a building contractor, commented while gazing out 739over the favela sprawled below us. we stood on the veranda of a bar near the site of his current project, an arts school. the building site stood out from the surrounding architecture by its outsized scale and expensive construction materials: the skeletal frame of steel i-beams jarred with the reinforced concrete and brick structures that composed the vast majority of the favela. ricardo was smiling with optimism. “i’ve already had five projects in vidigal in just the past year and a half.” he pointed at his most recently completed venture, a private apartment rental complex, painted bright orange. when asked if his clients were investors from outside vidigal, he cracked a smirk. “all from outside. it’s incredible.” ricardo had never previously taken on projects inside a favela; beyond certain state-run institutions like crèches and health centers, favelas are built primarily by those who live in them. it is perhaps a defining characteristic of favelas, the manifestation of self-built rather than professionalized construction. but in vidigal, that distinction now no longer held true. notably, ricardo’s language of inversion also played on a semantic slippage. in portuguese, inversão generally means a change in the order of things, especially a turning inside-out, upside-down, or backward from a normal state of affairs. but it is also an economic term referring to potential real estate speculation strategies pursued amid conditions of market valorization. this image of inversion can also be found in the english-language expression flipping a property. ricardo’s bemused exuberance about the projects he was undertaking in vidigal, whom he found himself working for, and the capital flowing into the neighborhood spoke to a scrambling of rio’s spatio-economic order that had long consigned favelas to systemic disinvestment and deprivation. an exceptionalist discourse of the favela as distinct social space can be found in tourism branding, street art iconography, videogames, films, and journalistic accounts that regularly traffic in exoticist tropes where the “reality” of brazilian society is frequently invoked, as the gritty yet noble “other side” of the glitzy veneer of the formal city, or as an untamed “jungle” to be explored by intrepid adventurers (jaguaribe 2004). márcia’s sour experiences at private upscale parties testify to this trope in action. however, representations of hospitality diverge from this kind of othering. in descriptions of accommodation options in vidigal and other such neighborhoods, the presence of the favela is just as likely to be obscured or euphemized, while the majestic views and access to beaches or the atlantic forest are instead played up. the home rentals website airbnb became a popular tool for residents, including márcia herself, to capitalize on high demand around the world cup and the olympics. at that time, airbnb’s 740mapping tool did not distinguish favela territories from the rest of rio’s urban fabric.11 in effect, a listing consists of a location and an owner’s description with photos and rates: “ocean views at an affordable price” was a common marketing line. the cumulative effect of these listings is to render the favela, at least for short-term rentals in private homes, unexceptional vis-à-vis the formal city. the bar where ricardo spoke effusively about vidigal’s transformation was located inside a boutique hotel at the top of the hill, well known for hosting the kinds of loud and exclusive weekend parties about which márcia and others had complained. this hotel, designed by a prominent architect with reclaimed, “sustainable” materials and minimalist aesthetics, had become a popular short-stay destination. in an interview, the manager, renata, explained that the hotel aimed to cater to international visitors, but 40 percent of the guests were carioca and another 30 percent hailed from other parts of brazil. with room rates on par with rio’s grand beach hotels, nearly all guests were conspicuously upper class. this juxtaposition with the social and racial profile of favela residents was the source of simmering tensions. renata had been hired in january 2015 to ameliorate relations with the surrounding community, based on her previous experience at a corporate hotel built near indigenous peoples’ territories in the northern state of pará. she drew parallels from that experience, where she mediated local anxieties and business interests, to her current position in vidigal. organizing open-door activities for residents while maintaining the lucrative, albeit loud and all-night, weekend program of live music and themed events, renata eventually found herself in a bind: the parties were subsidizing the cost of maintaining the hotel, whose occupancy rate was not high enough to financially sustain itself. djs blasting electronic music clashed with the tastes and work schedules of nearby households. the situation posed the hotel and renata as a “bad neighbor” whose interests were guided by profit rather than convivência. indeed, shortly after the conversation with renata, graffiti appeared on a wall near the hotel, proclaiming, gentrificação não é convivência. the anonymous message marked out the hotel as an emblem of community anxieties, not only to longtime residents but to newcomer foreigner owners who saw the hotel as a foil for their own ostensibly more noble pursuits within the favela. one such newcomer was josh, a business student from the united states, who arrived in vidigal and, with two argentine partners, founded a bed-and-breakfast and ngo called favela feeling. “we seek a social impact, for social development, rather than a non-profit approach,” he explained in the vernacular of social entrepreneurialism. they had acquired a five-story building from a community 741organization to establish their business, and they claimed to give 45 percent of revenues back to the organization. whereas travelers once stayed at the guesthouse as volunteers, they now checked in at the favela feeling hostel, with volunteer work as an option. josh pointed to an outdoor space for a community garden and rooms where english classes would be held. during the world cup and olympics, favela feeling brokered homestays for tourists in local residents’ houses. josh had noticed that families were posting their homes on airbnb, an official olympic sponsor. the broad embrace of the platform contrasted with that in other major cities such as new york, paris, and barcelona, which had severely restricted the practice of short-term property rentals. but, josh observed, “we have residents here in vidigal advertising on airbnb, and they’re not getting a lot of visitors. they’re taking a photo of the corner of the bed, or of the toilet that wasn’t cleaned. since we have the sales channel—where we get between 3,000 and 5,000 visitors to our site every month—that is just going to increase their profile.” josh here was underlining how he guided residents as hosts to meet tourist expectations of hospitality. home improvements were to be recast as capital investments, but the core of the accommodation enterprise would remain centered on an entrepreneurial pedagogy. “airbnb is just not involved in specifics. they’re not going to visit families, asking what their dreams are, or figuring out who they are as people. we do that. it’s a much more personal approach. we make sure that when people make a lot of money, they know how to use that money.” in other words, josh’s model of “responsible tourism” was premised on a kind of intimate managerialism with his hosting clients. this one lady made 5,000 reais [$1,500 usd] in one month during the world cup. we helped her a lot with thinking through improvements. but she went out and bought a 50-inch screen television. i said, “really? is this really what you need?” and she said, “no, no, it’s for the tourists. they love television.” they don’t need that, trust me. so we still need some improvement. for josh, developing the hosting capacity of vidigal was a cottage consultancy service he saw himself as providing, driven by a notion of moral impact on the community. we note here how josh, who wielded social power as a gringo entrepreneur, spoke of “improvement” in two distinct yet intersecting senses: alongside the question of which material investments households ought to prioritize with their earnings as hosts, josh was also concerned with disciplining 742residents themselves around an ethos of hospitality, and making their practices of consumption in effect productive. josh and a young woman named jessica attended a workshop series in 2015 over the legal formalization of favela tourism with the deputy secretary of the municipal tourism authority, phillipe campello. jessica was a born-and-raised resident, or cria, of vidigal who had converted one story of her house into a small hostel and was thus a fellow hostel owner. she lamented, “residents are timid; they need to learn convivência.” campello suggested a model called go houses, in which optional add-on services are bundled into airbnb stays. “it represents a way that hospitality can create networks of sales commissions. so, for example, if a boarder in an airbnb home wants breakfast, or laundry service, or a tour of the community, these can all be contracted out.” nodding, josh openly mused, “we must penetrate the mentality of residents.” their frustration with the residents’ reluctance, or lack of imagination, to commodify domestic labor was articulated under the guise of a need to “learn convivência.” this interaction belied the notion of convivência as an agentless brand of a local moral economy and underscored how it was a normalizing project of a favela tourism industry in the making. debate, signage, resistance when pitt-rivers (2012, 514) noted, “a host is host only on the territory over which on a particular occasion he claims authority,” he was ascribing a particular spatial politics to hospitality. to be a host, in other words, one must exert dominion over a place. whereas in the traditional society model that undergirds pitt-rivers’s argument, territorial power is conferred by status, in capitalist rio de janeiro, this is expressed most evidently through private property. in vidigal and other favelas, we observed a hardening of the boundary between private and public spaces. informal spaces of sociability were giving way to commercialized, often physically demarcated, and fortified micro-enclaves. fala vidigal (speak up, vidigal) was a 2014 series of public debates to educate and “awaken” favela residents to the phenomenon of gentrification and other pressing social issues. organized by the vidigal residents’ association, a local accommodations agency, and the favela advocacy and communications ngo justice action, the events took place on workday evenings in the open-air amphitheater at the entrance to vidigal. the topic of the first debate was “real estate speculation and price increases.” a didactic presentation from the justice action director, an urban planner by training, explained gentrificação to the estimated 743250 people in attendance from vidigal and other favelas. images from u.s. cities illustrated the changes gentrification portends and related forms of street protest. the presentation emphasized how rio’s favelas serve a structural need for affordable housing in direct contestation to their prevailing image as a social problem. the speaker then advocated for financial education, local economic development, and establishing a community land trust to keep the capitalist real estate market at bay. at a second event, longtime residents and new arrivals expressed the values of community under threat by rising utility rates and rental prices, militarized security under the upp program, and neglect of public services and spaces. there, márcia and her friend vinícius, a trained actor with the local nós do morro collective and capoeirista, presented a film they co-produced with the visual anthropologist angela torresan, in which dona graça, cited earlier, appeared. their project to rescue local oral histories sought to raise consciousness about identity loss and evictions due to skyrocketing rents in vidigal. the effort to document residents’ memories appeared to be a salvage-culture project to brace a sense of community against the threat of erasure. the ensuing discussion compared the current struggle with the anti-removal movement in vidigal in the 1970s, summarized above. the draconian anti-poor policies of the military dictatorship constituted a clear threat and prompted intense struggle that still shaped people’s attachments; a renewed sense of community belonging was mobilized to confront a more ambiguous menace. leandro, a vidigal native of fifty-two years and a co-director of the residents’ association, warned his neighbors against selling their homes to newcomers, even for figures they had never previously imagined. “you have to be aware that your house has a high human value. you have to think about whether it’s really worth leaving here for r$200,000 [$50,000 usd]. you don’t just change your address. you need to change your habits, the time it takes to do things . . . . all of this must be weighed.” leandro appealed to residents to incorporate the value of communitarian sociability and identity in considering offers to sell. while his plea called for a reasoning beyond cold economic logic by valorizing social relations inherent to vidigal, it nonetheless remained couched in individual choice. márcia later explained in a private conversation, “we’re not worried about relations between favela and asfalto. we are concerned with the occupation of the favela by the asfalto. i don’t know anymore if someone is a resident or not, so it is hard to relate to people.” here she echoed the pitt-rivers imperative to resolve the ambiguous status of the stranger. in turn, this uncertainty disturbed a stable idea of convivência. márcia extrapolated the end effect of such shifts: “you 744know that famous book about rio, cidade partida [divided city]? well, now what we have is the favela partida.” riffing off zuenir ventura’s (1994) well-known work of reportage that came to define her city as spatially divided along class lines, márcia was identifying an increasingly more granular geography of urban inequality. the divided favela is a seemingly confounding notion, for it belies the image of the favela as an excluded yet consolidated space on the urban periphery. john burdick brings analytical clarity to this dynamic by calling for a focus on intra-class differentiation. in a recent ethnographic study of gentrification in a rio housing project, he paints a picture of “the working class, more realistically, as differently positioned clusters of agents engaged with gentrifying forces in a variety of intricately patterned ways, each shaped by the capacities that each differentiated cluster brings to the encounter.” (burdick 2020, 449). this means seeing actors “sometimes, yes, as distressed absorbers of forces beyond their control, pushed involuntarily toward displacement, but sometimes as people endowed with sufficient resources to push back against displacement; and sometimes as savvy collaborators, taking advantage of the forces of gentrification to better realize their own life projects.” (burdick 2020, 449). while burdick embraces a more textured range of behaviors than the blanket term gentrification may suggest, his framework is still attuned to residents fundamentally as economic actors. while márcia and other long-term residents of vidigal embodied these differently situated positions vis-à-vis market and state forces, they also struggled to cultivate a political subjectivity commensurate with the nuances and contradictions of their changing neighborhood milieu. the provocation that vidigal was becoming a divided favela raised a relevant question in conversation with márcia at her home, where she rented a room to a university student. we asked, “you said that the favela is for favelados. but how can one qualify as favelado? what distinguishes a favela resident from an interloper?” her reply proved insightful. “look, the real residents of vidigal never had a choice of living elsewhere in the city. these newcomers, at the end of the day, have the means and the freedom to leave. that is the difference.” márcia recast the picture of belonging as a question of a differential in economic mobility, displacing the common nativist claim of being cria. yet even her activism to confront this state of affairs underscored certain enduring complexities. “vidigal is full. i want to put up a sign saying so,” márcia had proclaimed in the newspaper profile interview. she would later proceed to put up signs in the favela, but of a different kind: in a project they named signing memory (projeto emplacando a memória), márcia, vinícius, and fellow organizers 745installed plaques for streets, alleys, and plazas throughout vidigal to commemorate local histories. these acts of marking territory defy official attempts of doing the same. in an urban infrastructure-upgrading program in the 1990s, the municipal government had mapped the favela and tried to name its streets after fruit. “there was already this issue of prejudice toward residents, and you want to name it banana street?” márcia fumed. nevertheless, the signing memory project is itself symbolic of the blurred distinctions literally being overwritten on vidigal. the project was carried out in partnership with an austrian graphic designer named theo who produced a foldout paper map titled “vidigal: 100 secrets,” which pinpointed not only important community landmarks but also shops, bars, hostels, and other businesses. theo, himself a new arrival in vidigal of several years, had reached out to márcia in 2012 as a research partner to make histories of vidigal part of its physical landscape. acting in the name of his adopted community, theo operated within the moral economy of a vidigal seeking to bulwark itself from a perceived threat of losing identity. at the same time, the map rendered the favela as a space of consumption for outsiders, and the signing memory project conferred added value to the favela that could be reappropriated by future newcomers. this possibility underscored the difficulty of implementing a patrimonialization strategy, even one sensitive to histories of struggle and difference. conclusion the emergence of hostels, homestays, and bed-and-breakfast accommodations, bars, restaurants, art and culinary schools, owned and managed by those who originate from outside the favela, and in some cases from outside brazil, represents a new and unique phenomenon of newcomer hospitality. we have centered on actors operating in the contact zones of gentrification to highlight the inner contradictions and struggles of urban transformation and community identity. the concept of convivência emerges in this context to address the micro-level negotiations that make up a thriving community without losing sight of the class and racial inequalities embedded within a range of new encounters and social spaces. márcia’s insight about the favela partida—the splintered geography of chic leisure alongside precarity—is rooted in the everyday sense of living among travelers and partygoers who come to fulfill a consumerist desire to experience vidigal as exotic spectacle, as well as other actors who perceive convivência as a normative project to introduce a range of entrepreneurial, artistic, and managerial outlooks and interests. 746in tracking the uses of convivência in this social context, we struggled to find consistency in its deployments. convivência in this moment of speculative economic activity and ambivalence about the arrival of newcomers variously emerged as a state of affairs to be restored, a (non-commodified) valuing of place, an aspirational sense of inclusivity, a set of values and practices to pedagogically transmit to others toward generating the preconditions for hospitality, an expression of a quintessentially brazilian celebration of mixture and the ideology of racial democracy, and a relation of good neighborliness counterposed to profit-seeking interests. all of these signal the semantic capaciousness and inner contradictions of convivência. as such, we found not so much a concept that can seamlessly travel or translate into other anthropological analyses. rather, we offer this account as a methodological lesson in how the social dynamics and countervailing forces in a complex field of relations can be perceived through the situated expressions of a salient term. rumor and memory practices also became discursive fields where residents expressed and contested anxieties presented by real estate speculation and shifts in the cultural imaginary. not by coincidence, márcia completed a master’s degree in social memory in 2019, with a thesis on the politics of memory, and has continued working as an educator and activist. some of the everyday encounters during field research proved portentous: in 2015, while exiting a kombi van at the top of the hill that had been stuffed with a group of young white backpackers, an old woman, her arms loaded with grocery bags, muttered exasperatedly, “ah, these tourists! sometimes i wish the traffickers would come back so they’d leave.” within less than a decade, the woman’s wish seemed more like a prediction. with brazil’s economy contracting, inequality rising once more, and successive political crises embroiling all levels of government, rio’s security infrastructure collapsed. the upp program was scaled back, officers went unpaid, and a series of new governors reinstated iron-fisted policing tactics. consequently, in vidigal and many other favelas, confrontations between traffickers and police rose, along with armed assaults and homicide. some hospitality enterprises have shut their doors or limited business, and the traffic taking guests uphill to parties diminished. josh, for his part, has remained in vidigal. he and his partners rebranded their hostel as a co-living and co-working space, but it ceased operation in 2018. his favela feeling enterprise morphed into a “social incubator” and “innovation hub” offering english classes and entrepreneurship training for locals, and favela tours for visitors. jessica, meanwhile, sold her house, which she had run as a hostel, and opened a spa in the southern state of paraná. listing her home sale 747on social media elicited several posts tagging friends to facetiously nudge them: “let’s bring the gringos to vidigal!!!!” and “check out our new business. should we open a hostel?” these turns toward uncertainty and ironic detachment may recast vidigal’s inversion from emblem of favela chic and entrepreneurialism to fleeting chimera. but the favela chic moment nonetheless revealed the work of convivência in shifting the conditions for outsiders to visit, for some of them to stay, and for longer-term residents to define themselves in relation to the new hosts. abstract during the past two decades, foreigners have acquired housing stock in many of rio de janeiro’s oldest and most iconic favelas, or self-built neighborhoods, and invested in capital improvements, with an eye toward turning private residences into lodging accommodations. these new arrivals, mainly from the global north, have altered social milieus and property values. the proliferation of favela hostels has signaled a market-led displacement of residents and a reproduction of the urban periphery. the present essay asks what an anthropology of hospitality looks like amid these emergent spaces of commodified culture and transnational mobilities. this curious social arrangement wherein newcomers play the role of hosts inflects debates over favelas’ economic trajectories and shifting status in the cultural imaginary. newcomer hosts both aestheticize and monetize a presumed generosity, vitality, and promiscuity of working-class residents. hospitality as cultural rule meets the favela as unruly culture. the essay explores ethnographically how the concept of convivência, or living together, comes to describe an aspiration to rework urban change amid class and racial anxieties about place-belonging and identity. the emergence of foreigner-owned accommodations in rio’s favelas reveals a confluence of global slum imaginaries and global real estate interests, and how resident hosts and traveler guests experience the attendant contradictions in the everyday. [convivência; favela; gentrification; hospitality; rio de janeiro] resumo nas últimas duas décadas, estrangeiros têm adquirido imóveis em muitas das favelas mais antigas e emblemáticas do rio de janeiro, e investiram em melhorias de capital, visando transformar residências particulares em hospedagens. esses recém-chegados, principalmente do norte global, têm alterado os meios sociais e os valores imobiliários. a proliferação de albergues em favelas tem sinalizado um deslocamento de moradores impulsionado pelo mercado e uma reprodução da periferia urbana. o presente artigo investiga como se configura uma antropologia da hospitalidade em meio a esses espaços emergentes de cultura mercantilizada e mobilidades transnacionais. esse curioso arranjo social, em que os recém-chegados desempenham o papel de anfitriões, influencia os debates sobre as trajetórias econômicas das favelas e sua mudança de 748status no imaginário cultural. os anfitriões recém-chegados tanto estetizam quanto monetizam uma suposta generosidade, vitalidade e promiscuidade dos moradores da classe trabalhadora. a hospitalidade como regra cultural encontra a favela como cultura insubmisso. o artigo explora etnograficamente como o conceito de convivência, ou viver junto, descreve uma aspiração por compreender as transformações urbanas entre ansiedades de classe e raça sobre o pertencimento e a identidade. o surgimento de hospedagens de propriedade de estrangeiros nas periferia urbana do rio revela uma confluência de imaginários globais da favela e interesses imobiliários globais, e como anfitriões residentes e hóspedes viajantes vivenciam as contradições inerentes no cotidiano. [convivência; favela; gentrificação; hospitalidade; rio de janeiro] notes acknowledgments  we are deeply grateful for the close attention and constructive comments offered by the three anonymous reviewers, as well as the editorial team, in guiding draft revisions. this article draws on research funded by a grant from the deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg, germany), the economic and social research council (esrc, uk), and the nederlandse organisatie voor wetenschappelijk onderzoek (nwo, the netherlands), titled “slum tourism in the americas: commodifying urban poverty and violence,” awarded under the open research area plus funding scheme grant es/m001970/1). data availability statement  due to the nature of the research and ethical considerations, supporting data for this article are not available. 1. part of this change can be attributed to the rolling out of a community-oriented policing program focused on favelas, the unidade de polícia pacificadora (police pacification unit, or upp). on the upp as a project of extending state presence and governmentality, see haynes (2023). 2. one of these institutions, the escola vidigal, was founded by the brazilian artist vik muniz, with financial partners including the firm morgan stanley, which contributed us$160,000 from employee donations with company matching funds. see https://www.morganstanley.com/articles/morgan-stanley-brazil-celebrates-vik-muniz-escola-vidigal 3. the earliest usage of remoção branca appears in a 1981 public administration report on projeto rio, a participatory planning project in maré, a large favela in the city’s north zone (poggiese 1981). brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985) ordered the demolition of numerous favelas and the relocation of residents to peripheral public housing (mccann 2014). the question of whether to urbanize or remove favelas represents a long-running current in brazilian urban politics, one that has taken on distinctly new resonances in the latter moment of hosting international sports mega-events (freeman and burgos 2016). 4. angela torresan, “fala vidigal: segundo debate,” youtube, 2014, accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c0qqmnc8h8, last accessed march 17, 2025. 5. the globo newspaper covered the dispute in particularly sensationalist fashion, reporting that glaser had taken over the hostel, expelling staff and guests, while his austrian business partner was abroad, comparing the episode to hitler invading and annexing austria in 1938. glaser argued that the 2010 sale was fraudulent, but the partner was able to produce documents with details of the r$20,000 (us$5,000) deal to back up the claim (rebello 2012). 6. politicians also had a part in this phenomenon, including tours organized for then u.s. vice president joe biden to santa marta, and a visit to the city of god by u.s. president barack obama. it recasts the favela through the presence of outsiders, especially foreigners. these visits often included involvement with social enterprises or cultural installations, contributing to the re-imagination of poverty, exclusion, and insecurity. 7. an ambiguous example is the filming for the 2017 global hit “vai malandra,” performed by anitta, mc zaac, and the u.s. rapper maejor. with lyrics that combine 749portuguese and english, and shot in vidigal, the video references tropes such as laje (rooftop slabs), motobois (motorcycle taxis), and particular clothing styles. 8. the counterpoint is the displacement of vidigal-based artists, notably alexandre wilson, attributed to increased rents (huggins 2016). 9. in brazilian law, the glorification (apologia) of criminality constitutes a crime in itself and is sometimes invoked as a justification for the police repression of bailes (sneed 2019). 10. there is one narrow, winding road to the top of vidigal, and on weekends it gets especially congested with partygoers riding up in kombi vans and on the back of motorcycle taxis. a debate in vidigal at the time of this research was whether drivers should be allowed to charge up to ten times the usual fare—and thus give priority to deep-pocketed visitors, seizing economic opportunity—or recognize fair treatment for residents. 11. andrés luque-ayala and flávia neves maia (2019) examine google’s digital mapping of rio favelas project, including vidigal, to argue that digital mapping makes favelas available as spaces of consumption, especially for tourism, and therefore builds what they call a kind of “digital governmentality.” references ahmed, sara 2010 the promise of happiness. durham, n.c.: duke university press. andersson cederholm, erika, and johan hultman 2010 “the value of intimacy: negotiating commercial relationships in lifestyle entrepreneurship.” scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism 10, no. 1: 16–32. http://doi.org/10.1080/15022250903442096 angelini, alessandro 2016 “favela in replica: iterations and itineraries of a miniature city.” journal of latin american and caribbean anthropology 21, 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closed’: conviviality in a super-diverse london neighbourhood.” european journal of cultural studies 17, no. 4: 392–405. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549413510415 wise, amanda, and greg noble 2016 “convivialities: an orientation.” journal of intercultural studies 37, no. 5: 423–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2016.1213786 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 726–752, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.07 good bureaucrats and god: the ethical labor of the public cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 616-644, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.06 good bureaucrats and god: the ethical labor of the public maira hayat university of notre dame https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0170-5742 it is another saturday morning and the five of us—myself, azfar sahib, and three other irrigation department bureaucrats—are sitting too close to each other in a small suzuki, being driven to janjattey (a village in punjab) as part of proceedings in an irrigation-water dispute. azfar sahib sits at the apex of the revenue wing of the lariyan irrigation division of the irrigation department in punjab, pakistan’s agricultural heartland and most populous province.1 punjab is also where the country’s canal-irrigation infrastructure—the world’s largest contiguous such network—is concentrated. as deputy collector, azfar sahib oversees the work of two subordinate bureaucratic tiers—the zillehdar and patwari (revenue officials); supervised by the collector, these four tiers constitute the department’s revenue wing.2 the revenue wing is responsible for assessing irrigation-water charges, settling water disputes among agriculturalists,3 and prosecuting water theft from state canals under the colonial-era 1873 canal and drainage act, the primary legislation scaffolding irrigation management in pakistan’s punjab.4 we are going to janjattey because a man called zaheer and some others have been throwing trash in a watercourse (khaal) in the village, blocking the flow of irrigation water to other cultivators who use that watercourse. of those affected, some formed a group and visited azfar sahib’s office a few weeks ago, lodging a formal complaint against zaheer. when the issue remained unresolved after three attempts by the patwari, iqbal sahib, and the zillehdar, hamdan sahib, azfar sahib announced the day and time of his visit: “i’m coming then, and will look into it myself,” he had said ominously to iqbal sahib. iqbal sahib’s authority, as well as that of his zillehdar hamdan sahib, had been dealt a blow by this decision, for it was their failure to reach an amicable resolution that had necessitated azfar sahib’s visit; his subordinates had been unsuccessful in resolving the matter, hence the escalation of the dispute to the upper tier involving him (as the deputy collector). attempts at dispute resolution by irrigation department bureaucrats are covered by the 1873 act. specific sections of the act classify obstructing canal water flow and “corrupting or fouling” the water in a canal as offenses; prohibit the discharge of effluent into canal and drainage works; and vest officials with the power to remove a range of obstructions from a watercourse. figure 1. a khaal in rural punjab. on reaching janjattey, we step out of the car, greet the village elders assembled to receive us, and are led to the watercourse. we walk along it noting the usual suspects—discarded juice boxes, plastic bottles, big and tiny plastic shopping bags, and rags of cloth mixed into balls of grayish green-brown slush—clinging to the mud bank. figure 2. irrigation officials and agriculturalists “in the field” in a different case. azfar sahib: “the trash is clearly visible. look, it is right here!” he looks up at zaheer, against whom the complaint is primarily directed: “can’t you see it?” zaheer, who had slowly and reluctantly walked up to us but continued to stand apart, says, “yes, yes,” but doesn’t look azfar sahib in the eye. the june sun is shining shamelessly on our group of ten men, me, and some children skipping around, a little curious, a little bored. azfar sahib’s white shalwar kameez is shining back at the sun, his eyebrows are raised, and his lips drawn apart. suddenly he stops peering into the watercourse, steps away from the embankment, flicks a fly from his ear, and says, looking at iqbal sahib and hamdan sahib, “they don’t have to clean it if they don’t want to. i’ll simply press charges.” then, looking at zaheer, “it’s for you and your government [apki hakoomat] to sort out. and if water supply is cut off, i won’t be able to help you.” zaheer, now meeting azfar sahib’s gaze, says, “you are new, but this is an old problem. the deputy collector before you understood our problem. this waste is from the mosque. what are you suggesting? should we stop doing ablution and praying in the mosque?” after a few seconds of tense silence, some of the men around zaheer say, “yes, one has to pray!” and “one can’t stop praying now!” azfar sahib lets out a short laugh, louder than usual. “we’ve brought god in the middle again, haven’t we! look, this is a water problem [pani ka massla]. there’s no need to bring religion [mazhab] in. i am the new deputy collector, but i’ve been in this department for fifteen years. i know everything. i know what’s going on.” he jerks at his shirt as if, with the creases, questions about his expertise will also fall off. public office: state transcriptions and laboring bureaucrats state transcriptions is it, should it be puzzling that a routine irrigation-water issue—a “section 70 case” under the 1873 act that involves the offence of “corrupting or fouling the water”—generates discussion over “bringing in religion”? after all, pakistan is officially an islamic republic; the preamble to its constitution begins by stating that “sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to almighty allah alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of pakistan within the limits prescribed by him is a sacred trust”; the constitution proclaims islam as the state religion; and a robust body of case law has conceptualized government office as a “sacred trust.”5 given such authoritative state “transcriptions” (khan 2012), why should the invocation of god or religion in everyday state activity prove contentious? the response to these questions must be routed through a conceptualization of law and everyday bureaucratic work as ethical labor—but first, let’s take a deeper look at state transcriptions to better illustrate the stakes of what i am going to argue, and what my bureaucrat interlocutors are navigating. soon after pakistan’s creation, in 1949, the question of the public role of religion became a cause for high-level national dialogue as the country’s first legislature (constituent assembly) debated passing the objectives resolution (or). the or addressed the relationship between the newly founded state, its citizens, and islam, and was meant to articulate the main principles in light of which the new country would draft its first constitution. the constituent assembly was the site of vigorous debate—then prime minister liaqat ali khan, moving the resolution in march 1949, said: “…we, the people of pakistan, have the courage to believe firmly that all authority should be exercised in accordance with the standards laid down by islam so that it may not be misused. all authority is a sacred trust, entrusted to us by god for the purpose of being exercised in the service of man . … islam is not just a matter of private beliefs and conduct. it expects its followers to build up a society for the purpose of good life—as the greeks would have called it, with this difference that islamic ‘good life’ is essentially based upon spiritual values” (2009, 92, 95). specifically on the question of those running the state, maulana shabbir ahmad osmani noted: “it is evident that a state which is founded on some principles, be it theocratic or secular (like the ussr) can be run only by those who believe in those principles. people who do not subscribe to those ideas may have a place in the administrative machinery of the state but they cannot be entrusted with the responsibility of framing the general policy of the state . …” (2009, 113). the or served as a preamble to the 1956, 1962 and 1973 constitutions, and in 1985, through a constitutional amendment, it became a substantive part of the constitution. this incorporation took place during general zia ul haq’s military rule (1977–1988), remembered (and reviled) for its “islamization agenda.” also part of islamization was the setting up of a federal shariat court (fsc) to adjudicate in cases of legislation allegedly violating islamic injunctions. thus, conditions had been created for a case to be brought to the fsc in 1987, alleging that a clause of the civil servants act of 1973 regarding the power of seniors to fire subordinate officers “at pleasure” was “repugnant to the injunctions of islam.” since the or’s incorporation into the constitution as a “substantive” part, the allegation was triable in the fsc. the supreme court upheld the fsc judgment, an excerpt from which reads: a civil servant is required to act as a servant of the state … no opportunity can be provided in an islamic state to any one to curb the urge and instinct of others to disobey his arbitrary, dishonest orders which are contrary to sharia. security of tenure of a civil servant can be an incentive to him for discharging his duties honestly, constitutionally and according to sharia. on the other hand any apprehension in his mind against this security is liable to breed in him what is known as servility to the boss … servility is likely to endanger his independence of action and make his actions subservient to the wishes of the boss, howsoever, unlawful and unislamic they may be. shortly after the judgment, supreme court justice nasim hasan shah (1987, 385), at a college event where he had been invited to speak, praised the judgment, emphasizing that “all government posts and ranks are allah’s trusts and the government officials and rulers are trustees.”6 it is one thing for a member of the superior judiciary to announce that government posts are “allah’s trusts,” and quite another to inhabit such a post and fulfill the role. state transcriptions contour the space for bureaucrats to labor with/in, but they do not predetermine bureaucratic behavior, nor do they settle the differences that inevitably arise as bureaucrats understand their mandates differently. as i will show in subsequent sections, on the reading of a few authoritative legal texts a conception of office as allah’s trust may appear straightforward—and yet examining everyday bureaucratic work shows how fine distinctions between what is and what isn’t to be given a “religious color” (mazhabi rung) are made by bureaucrats in the course of their work. i argue, therefore, that it cannot suffice to locate determinations vis-à-vis the role of religion in law, high-level policy mandates, or case law, because they may very well be undermined in the course of everyday bureaucratic work. this ‘gap’ between law and its application has featured prominently in anthropological writing on law and statecraft, and it has been filled with theorizations of discretion and power (rudolph and rudolph 1979), norms (greenhouse 1982), corruption (kaviraj 1984), irresolution (holston 1991), political society (chatterjee 2006), and of the divide between upperand streel-level bureaucrats (akhtar 2018). anthropological engagements with this space have proved generative: naveeda khan (2012, 14) has suggested that “over time the legal transcripts of the state espouse a forcefulness” that may “surpass … the capacity of the law.” considering the proliferation of blasphemy allegations in pakistan, khan (2012, 17) suggests that texts come to “undergird everyday lives.” this appears less settled in my research setting: while my bureaucrat interlocutors know what the constitution says (some have read it, many others have not), they are not aware of nor conversant in the case law on public office. it became clear to me early in my fieldwork that legal texts—whether the 1873 canal and drainage act undergirding the entire irrigation system in punjab or court judgments conceptualizing public office—are only one among the many things bureaucrats labor with. laboring bureaucrats instead of explaining the failures of law, i argue that ethical labor is key to understanding how bureaucratic work proceeds every day. ethical labor is my conceptualization of the enrollment by my bureaucrat interlocutors of law, god, and vernaculars of work; and, as i will show through ethnographic evidence, the labor takes the form of distinction-making vis-à-vis the public and the private. my conceptualization of ethical labor builds on two emic categories: ethics (ikhlaq) and labor (diharri). diharri, a term my bureaucrat interlocutors use often, has a dual meaning: it can mean a daily wage as well as a day’s work (see hayat 2020 on this semantic space). my use of labor here is meant to emphasize intentionality and deliberation in bureaucratic work instead of exploitation, which is the more common register for examining labor. attending to such vernaculars of work expands the scholarly lexicon of government, demanding that it make space for, for instance, “having to account to god,” ethics, and a specific understanding of “merit” (that i elaborate in subsequent sections) as ways to work, as ways of work, not transgressions of bureaucratic objectivity and law. my claim, that my bureaucrat interlocutors actively produce public-private distinctions in their everyday work as a modality of ethical labor, intervenes in three literatures: the anthropology of islam, bureaucracy, and ethics. recent literature in the anthropology of islam has shown that the public-private distinction constitutes a modality of secular power (agrama 2012; ahmed 2010; lemons 2018). theorizing from the egyptian case, in a compelling ethnography of personal status courts, hussein agrama (2012, 13) examines conceptions and practices of publicity and privacy to show that conflicts between religion and law are rooted in liberal secularism, and that egypt’s religious-political ambiguities are not a national failure or peculiarity, but expressions of deeper indeterminacies at the foundation of secular power (agrama 2012, 74, 181). indeed, a comparison between the pakistani and egyptian constitutions, and the countries’ political histories, reveals many similarities: a realm of personal family law governed by sharia provisions; a contemporary legal framework rooted in colonial rule; islam as state religion (article 2 of the pakistani constitution); entrenched military power. agrama does the important work of showing that states (of the global south), such as egypt and pakistan, are not failing on a “scale of secularity.” thus, to the question of whether egypt constitutes a secular or a religious state, agrama (2010, 499, 501) responds that it is neither a false nor an answerable one, since the tensions such a question demands answers to are not peculiar to egypt, but constitutive of modern secularism as a problem space. i am interested in the ethnographic demand after such a diagnosis: how do agents of the state navigate these indeterminacies with varying degrees of success and failure, hope and indifference, regret and disillusionment? are they able to reconcile them at times, ignore them at others, or further them? while such questions make the anthropology of bureaucracy an important conversational space for me to engage, my approach diverges from the overwhelming bent away from the bureaucrat in the literature. the anthropological literature has shown bureaucracies to be sites of structural violence (ferguson 1994; graeber 2015; gupta 2012; hoag 2014). akhil gupta, in an examination of the indian state’s chronic failure to address poverty, has rooted the arbitrariness of outcomes in the structures and operations of bureaucracy, instead of in, for instance, officers’ attitudes or incompetence. gupta (2012, 23) writes that regardless of the sincerity and noble intentions of officers, “the very procedures of the bureaucracy” subvert the goal of helping the poor. he makes the important and fine distinction between the arbitrariness of bureaucratic outcomes and bureaucratic indifference. in their anthology, aradhana sharma and gupta (2006) advocated examining “official procedures” as “authorless strategies through which power is exercised and inequalities instituted” to disentangle “intentionality” from the “operation of power.” james ferguson (1994, 283), too, in his influential text on development and bureaucracy in lesotho, made a compelling case for “demot[ing] intentionality” and instead focusing on a “machine, an anonymous set of interrelations that only ends up having a retrospective coherence.” furthering this bent away from the bureaucrat, motivated this time by a latourian turn away from the institutional, matthew hull’s (2012, 18) more recent ethnography of a pakistani bureaucracy focuses on “graphic artifacts” and the “associations” they are constituted by and constitutive of. while this scholarship has deepened the understanding of participatory politics (anand 2017; mathur 2015), and more richly populated bureaucratic spaces, the combined effect is reduced attention to bureaucrats themselves—their intentions, critiques, and ethical conundrums. this, as i show below, misses the difference made by bureaucrats’ notions of accountability and their concepts of good and bad. in taking seriously the reasoning articulated by my bureaucrat interlocutors, i find inspiration in the anthropology of ethics for its attention to subjecthood generally, and to emic idioms, categories, and reasoning in particular. the anthropology of ethics might appear a surprising interlocutor, given that bureaucracies typically feature in political and social theory, as well as in popular commentary, as foils to ethical enterprise (kahn 2011; macintyre 1988; mufti 2013; taneja 2017). in particular, saba mahmood’s (2004) ethnography of a piety movement among cairene muslim women has been a powerful stimulus for me to consider as ethical labor my bureaucrat interlocutors’ quotidian work. mahmood’s ethnography is quite explicitly not about the bureaucratic as a modality of ethical inhabiting. but it bears mentioning that mahmood’s interlocutors were clerks in the state bureaucracy by day and participants in the piety movement by night. reading mahmood’s analysis, built on her work with her female interlocutors after their office hours, i was first led to wonder how the yield would differ if the ethnography considered their workdays. my attention to vernaculars of work as a key element of ethical labor readily brings me into conversation with the ordinary ethics literature, given its organizing principle that the “wellsprings of ethical insight are deeply embedded in the categories and functions of language and ways of speaking” (lambek 2010, 2). critiques of this influential approach have noted that if ethics is considered intrinsic to speech and action, then the “communicative labor by which the ethical is made intersubjectively relevant, socially recognizable, and pragmatically consequential” risks being eclipsed (lempert 2015, 134; zigon 2014). in response, scholars have proposed alternatives to immanence, ranging from “entanglements” (lempert 2015; 2013) and “assemblages” (zigon 2011) to “affordances” (keane 2014). collectively, this marks an effort to locate the ethical—whether in the everyday, the ordinary, interaction order, actions, or situations. while i share the attention to ordinary language use, my own approach diverges from ordinary ethics along two axes: (1) its invocation, in line with aristotelian notions of practice and in opposition to durkheimian and kantian notions of obligation, of an overly simplified conception of rule-following as foil, culminating in a statement such as, “ethics is not a matter of smoothly following the rules” (lambek 2010, 12); and (2) the status and role of the vernacular in conceptualizing the ethical. for an approach anchored in ways of speaking, ordinary ethics is remarkably dominated by english-language idioms and, hence, categories—consider, for example, lengthy deliberations over freedom and agency (laidlaw 2014, 10), and practice and performance (lambek 2010, 258). my interlocutors rarely used these words, or their urdu or punjabi equivalents, as i elaborate below. jarrett zigon (2014), concerned about that which exceeds articulation, proposes a “critical hermeneutics” instead of an ordinary language approach. with critical hermeneutics as zigon (2014, 755) views it, however, the anthropological endeavor is to go beyond our interlocutors’ speech. this, in turn, is a function of his location of conscious reflection on appropriate ethical responses in moments of “breakdown” (zigon 2009, 262).7 my analysis diverges on both these fronts: first, in a bureaucracy that, in the words of one of my bureaucrat interlocutors, is devoted to “basically dealing with the public,” “breakdown” is the stuff of the everyday: mediating between disputing parties, negotiating conflict, fielding complaints are all registers of the ordinary. taking their terms seriously, i conceptualize ethical labor with my interlocutors’ speech, not despite it. the ethical has not formed a dominant modality for understanding bureaucratic work (cf. ballestero 2015; bear 2014; von schnitzler 2013), and when it has, it has tended to emerge amid conversations on corruption (jauregui 2014) or when newness enters bureaucracies in the form of neoliberal reform projects (qureshi 2015; tidey 2016). however, this has the effect of portraying bureaucracies as static (working smoothly) until a new (neoliberal) program knocks (qureshi 2015, 37–38). next, i unfold my argument in a sequence of three ethnographic narrations that trace the intricate and often surprising ways in which public-private distinctions are made in quotidian bureaucratic work as a form of ethical labor. first, i complete the opening narration. then i complicate the portrait of the same interlocutor, azfar sahib, who in the opening narration says there is no need to bring in god yet routinely invokes accountability to god as integral to work. the third ethnographic narration introduces some of my other bureaucrat interlouctors and sheds light on a disagreement among them over what being a “good muslim” entails in relation to ikhlaq and merit. the ethnographic evidence in this article draws on a decade of research with the punjab irrigation bureaucracy. during this decade, for many of my interlocutors i have graduated from being “that researcher working on her thesis who keeps coming back” to the “lecturer” who is now asked to deliver presentations on the colonial history of the department as part of trainings for irrigation officials. then, as now, i consider myself a student of this world. then, as now, the distinction between the anthropologist-me and the citizen-me continues to be an unsteady one. in the final section, for instance, you will encounter me more as angry citizen than as anthropologist. as it turns out, we were all busy in distinction-making labor—let me turn now to my interlocutors’. “no need to bring in religion” let us return to the ethnographic narration that opened this article. after the inspection we assemble in the village headman’s quarters for tea as was usual practice. during this time azfar sahib makes a bit of noise having the hosts find him a spot where he can offer asr (afternoon prayers). interspersed between his rounds outside the quarters for ablution and loud confirmations of the direction of prayer (qibla), are the following: “please confirm the direction quickly, i don’t want my prayer to go qazah [delayed prayer to make up for a missed prayer],” and “i never let my prayers become qazah.” but i knew from nearly two years of fieldwork with azfar sahib that he would routinely offer qazah prayers. on our way back from janjattey, azfar sahib noted the excess (ziadtti) of zaheer’s instrumental use of religion. he also commented on the fuss he had made about praying, saying it was to reassure zaheer and the others that he took concerns around prayer seriously. for how else, he suggested with a smile, would his attempt at bracketing the religious and managing the pani ka massla (water problem) prove effective? two related aspects of public-private distinction-making come into view: for this public matter, azfar sahib wants to keep religion out, but for his attempt to be successful, he needs to be seen as a privately religious person. had azfar sahib been seen as someone inattentive to prayer, his attempt to keep religion out of the proceedings would have been less likely to succeed. for him to keep religion out of this case, he must be seen as someone who usually pays attention to the exigencies of prayer—as he noted, how else would his attempt at bracketing the religious succeed? a few years after this incident, the irrigation department held a mandatory training for revenue wing officials and azfar sahib was one of the lecturers. bureaucrats’ promotions require such trainings. during them, senior officials such as azfar sahib are invited to lecture on topics of their expertise—in this training, azfar sahib was in charge of the modules on irrigation legislation. during one such training session, which i was allowed to attend as a special favor given my years of working at the department, conversation between azfar sahib and the participants (seventeen zillehdar and i) turned to how agriculturalists try to obstruct irrigation officials in “section 68 cases.” section 68 of the 1873 canal and drainage act, titled “restoration of demolished or altered watercourses,” gives the department the authority to rebuild dismantled watercourses. dismantling watercourses is a common form of disputation among agriculturalists. in such cases, the person who is no longer able to draw water because the watercourse has been dismantled approaches the department to lodge a complaint and request the watercourse’s restoration. if the investigation finds that the watercourse was indeed wrongly dismantled, the department orders reconstruction. once officials reach the location to begin reconstruction, however, the situation can present further challenges: during the training, one zillehdar narrated his recent experience when agriculturalists had constructed a mosque over the path of a watercourse to stop its restoration. the construction of the mosque had taken place overnight when it had become known that the irrigation officials would begin work on laying the foundations of the watercourse the following day. some of us smiled knowingly, others laughed, and nodding slowly, azfar sahib said: “see. see for yourself. this is a common tendency in our society … to give a religious color [mazhabi rung] to everything.” the discussion continued as officials shared their experiences—some successful, some frustrating—with section 68 cases. as the session drew to a close, azfar sahib said, “look, it is never easy, doing the right thing is never easy.” he used the terms sahi kaam (right act) and durustt faisla (correct decision) for “the right thing.” he then narrated the incident which i recounted in the opening of this essay as a lesson to his juniors in how he had managed this tendency once by drawing boundaries around a “water problem.” the exercise here is not to determine how azfar sahib typically works, or how a case such as this is typically resolved. it is to show that from the site of the bureaucratic everyday, distinguishing the religious from that which should not be given “a religious color” is underdetermined: state transcriptions, whether section 70 of the 1873 act, or a supreme court judgment, or a constitutional provision, tell us only so much. “i have to answer to god” azfar sahib took stock of his division every saturday. at these meetings all the patwari and zillehdar of lariyan division would gather in his office and arrange themselves in two crescent-shaped rows of chairs, the zillehdar in front of the patwari, reflecting departmental hierarchy. azfar sahib, seated behind his desk, his usual picture of calm, would command the room for about an hour. he would call on specific officers and ask to be updated on this or that court case, water dispute, or anti-corruption proceeding. at these meetings, he would routinely narrate his own experiences in government service, beginning and ending with, “the decision will be yours; my duty [farz] was to tell you.” his stories were usually about how he had withstood political pressure, pressure from his superiors, and the allure of bribes to do what was right: “side with the law and the truth, then there’s nothing to fear. many people have put pressure on me, threatened me, blackmailed me. did i ever budge?” then one or another subordinate would say “no, never,” and azfar sahib would complete his story. these meetings would end with cups of tea and saucers clinking together; the twenty or so men and one woman standing up to take their leave, jerking at their shirts to let the biscuit crumbs fall; and azfar sahib’s parting words, always the same: “it is my duty to tell you, for i have to answer to god one day when he asks, ‘so azfar, i gave you this senior post, what did you do with it?’” here is a story he told once when hina, a zillehdar, mentioned to him that the executive engineer (“xen,” her superior) was putting pressure on her to sanction a new watercourse at a politician’s request (sifarish). these are known as “section 20 cases,” and require that the official secure consensus from the agriculturalists whose lands the watercourse will traverse before deciding whether to approve (“sanction”) or disallow the watercourse. in this case, azfar sahib had consulted with multiple agriculturalists and gathered that most opposed the proposed path of the new watercourse. but this did not decide the matter—in azfar sahib’s own words, “the law was clear, but practically there was so much going on” (qanoon ttu wazeh tha magar practically barra kuch horaha tha). he went on to describe how he had been under “extreme pressure”: he said “extreme pressure” thrice, then its urdu version twice, “limitless [be-inteha] pressure.” “my seniors were putting pressure on me. the xen wanted to favor one of the agriculturalists requesting the new watercourse, the chief engineer wanted to favor another who was opposed to the watercourse, and even the collector at the time wanted to favor someone else. i felt so stuck [jakrra hua].” he brought his tightly clenched hands up to his face to show how. “i said to allah, please help me. and then allah created a situation that worked in my favor [allah ne aisee surat paidda kee]. somehow i got out of it, else i would have committed a wrong. only because of his help did i do something right. i won, but only because he helped me. you can’t make everyone happy. i’ve restricted myself to my self [zaat]. i have to answer to him and i have to have a clear conscience. as for the others, that’s their problem. look, makkah and madinah were fixed only after the top was fixed. once the top is ok then the rest becomes ok too.”8 this story offers a rich analysis of government hierarchy, the self, and situations created by god. indeed, on offer here is a theorization of government and self and of the life of law—“practically,” in practice, so much more is always going on even if the law is clear (wazeh). but i want to pursue a particular thread: that ethical labor explains the very implementation of the law—it is what makes the law matter, and it is how the law matters. azfar sahib’s official duties, as scripted in the manual of rules, and the 1873 canal and drainage act, include the supervision of his subordinates. but azfar sahib invoked a duty (farz) owed to an entity other than the department. this was something he owed to god and would have to account for on the day of judgment (often referred to as qayamat ke din or uss din, “that day”)—but insofar as one effect of this requirement was him serving as a diligent superior to subordinates, we could say that his ethical labor makes him a good agent of the state. azfar sahib discharges his official duty because he has to answer to god. he behaves like a good bureaucrat, then, because he is accountable to god. having to account to god also explained his decision not to bring his suzuki to the office, and to take the bus instead. “a suzuki needs fuel. if i start coming to the office in my car from my home all the way in ichra [a neighborhood in lahore], my fuel costs will spiral. my salary will remain the same. what will i do? corruption. one has to answer to god! so to protect myself from corruption, i don’t bring my car to work.” having to account to god made him a good bureaucrat insofar as it prevented him from refueling his car from the public exchequer. let me now expand my ethnographic evidence, and go beyond azfar sahib’s office. consider another department-wide training. in one of the sessions dedicated to an explication of section 39, as azfar sahib was explaining the most common cases in which the section would apply, our conversation turned to the prevalence of disputation among water users. part of section 39 stipulates that for every application for the construction of a new watercourse, applicants will “identify owners or occupiers of lands and other irrigators who are likely to benefit from the proposed watercourse.” the aim is to ensure that general support for the watercourse already exists before involving the department and formally beginning proceedings, since such infrastructure is usually not approved in the absence of consensus. in the training, azfar sahib explained how officials should navigate this requirement, and actively support the creation of consensus, expending effort on mending soured relations among neighboring agriculturalists. he criticized current practice among department members which tended to reject applications for not evidencing consensus. instead, he urged the officials to do the work of “creating consensus.” most of the hour-long session reinforced this point about promoting better social relations among people as a virtue—in terms of bureaucrats earning reward from god for a virtuous act (sawab kamana), following the prophet’s example (sunnah), and fulfilling their duties (faraiz) as muslims. thus far i have shown how the routine conduct of bureaucratic tasks—supervising subordinates, getting to the office, following orders, refusing to follow orders, interpreting and implementing laws, delivering mandatory training—creates spaces for ethical laboring. through an extended focus on azfar sahib, i have aimed to draw a complex portrait of one bureaucrat—thus we have learnt from azfar sahib not only as he is (challenged) in the field but also as he acts in his office leading weekly meetings and lecturing in department trainings. in the final ethnographic narration i examine a different mode of everyday bureaucratic work—inspections as part of a drainage survey—and focus on a disagreement among multiple bureaucrats, paying particular attention to the categories, idioms, and metrics they employ for evaluating each other’s actions, as well as their own. i aim to illustrate not just how bureaucrats navigate these situated tensions but also what favorable or menacing consequences for citizens this navigation produces. at stake in the next case is the reproduction of structural violence—specifically, the quotidian ways in which religious persecution against the severely oppressed ahmadiyya minority occurs. i attend to the language of and reasons for which some of my interlocutors seek to challenge this injustice by invoking categories of merit, the official (daftari), and the legal (qanooni) to distinguish the private from the public. tax and ikhlaq in september 2016, the irrigation department formed a committee to survey sewage drains in lahore and reassess the revenue generated from them. azfar sahib and engineer azeem (an xen) were chosen to head the committee. the survey meant to document the number and location of industrial units discharging waste into lahore’s drains, measure the volume of discharge into drains from each factory outlet, and calculate the charges each industrial unit should be paying. the committee had to report back with updated figures on how much revenue the drains ought to be generating. this entailed assessing the shortfall between the revenue that was due from each industrial unit and what was actually being collected every year, as well as identifying the location and extent of the shortfall. the committee started its work with a list of registered industrial units in lahore, visiting each in turn to verify discharge volumes. i accompanied the team members on their inspections as part of the survey, which took about a month to complete. the third day of inspections the inspection team comprises azfar sahib, engineer azeem, and me. we are joined by two officials from the drains section: maheen, a newly inducted female engineer, and saleem sahib (an xen, and maheen’s superior). after a morning spent visiting paper, bleaching, and dyeing factories and measuring their outlet dimensions and velocity of effluent flow, we arrive at the gates of a textile factory. azfar sahib’s sweaty clothes hang limp from his frame, the belt on engineer azeem’s waist sits askew, my rolled-up sleeves cling with sweat to my elbows, and we all smell the same—tired and somewhat anxious. two uniformed security guards stick their heads out of the tiny shack flanking the locked gate and ask us why we are there. they tell us to wait at the gate while they confer with their superiors inside. half an hour under the blistering sun later we are cleared for entry, but not before azfar sahib threatens to add “refused to cooperate” on the form. figure 3. from the survey we conducted, inside the factory. photo by maira hayat. a security guard escorts us to the drain. a thick, dark purple, stinking liquid flows through the brick-lined outlet. saleem sahib dips his calibrated stem into the drain at three different points to mark the level of the liquid and get a uniform reading. to calculate velocity, he drops a pebble into the drain at “point a” and asks me to stand and mark the point. maheen takes my phone and turns on the stopwatch when the pebble is dropped into the drain. azfar sahib positions himself at point b and shouts “stop” when the pebble passes him. we then note the time it takes for the pebble to cover the distance between points a and b. the distance is measured in feet by engineer azeem and then by using a measuring tape. we repeat the process three times for three different points a and b. azfar sahib measures the circumference of the outlet opening. engineer azeem then multiplies the area of the outlet opening with the velocity and asks azfar sahib to insert our calculations into the “volume of discharge” box on the form. the volume is multiplied by the drainage charge to get the amount to be “recovered” from the factory. figure 4. from the survey we conducted, outside the factory. photo by maira hayat. as we are walking out of the factory gate, saleem sahib suddenly says, “the object we used this time, that pebble, it was heavier than the twig we have been using all along. the pebble sank a little, remember? that has affected our measurements. our calculations say the velocity is 4, but actually it will be closer to 6.” a velocity of 6 would mean a higher volume of discharge and therefore a higher charge. azfar sahib quickly disagrees; he points out that we were careful to choose a pebble that weighed the same as the twig, which had been lost somewhere between inspections. one of the team had likely dropped it as we went from one factory to the next. engineer azeem: “we can go back and measure again until everyone is satisfied.” saleem sahib: “no that’s unnecessary, but it’s closer to 6; 4 is too low.” figure 5. from the survey we conducted, outside the factory. photo by maira hayat. maheen: “6 is too high.” saleem sahib: “you are forgetting we changed to a pebble from the twig.” maheen: “i remember very well. it can’t be 6!” saleem sahib: “you heard the liquid making that loud woosh woosh sound, didn’t you? it was flowing quite fast!” engineer azeem: “let’s settle on 4.5?” maheen: “but we all just measured it and it was 4. why is it suddenly a problem?” azfar sahib: “yes i agree, we just measured … nothing needs to change.” saleem sahib: “believe me, this was faster than any of the drains we’ve seen all morning.” engineer azeem: “let’s stop arguing on the road in front of everyone. we have a long list of factories to go down; let’s just enter 5 and leave.” maheen: “4.5.” saleem sahib: “5.5.” by the end, azfar sahib seems quite spent from all his mediating, and every member of the team glowers. as we begin walking to the next factory, i fall into step with maheen. “what just happened to saleem sahib?” i ask. “you saw, right?” she says. “the pebble was an excuse. sir knows that that factory owner is ahmadiyya, so he was behaving like this.” bad bureaucrat, good muslim i will work through something that struck me when i discussed the incident with other department officials: consistently, they discussed the incident with me not in terms of saleem sahib being a biased, bad bureaucrat, but in terms of his misguided effort to be a “good muslim.” that someone would try to do this to an ahmadiyya factory owner did not surprise me—by now i was familiar with the pervasiveness of anti-ahmadiyya sentiment among many of my bureaucrat interlocutors. today, anti-ahmadiyya sentiment in pakistan is widespread, and every so often incidents of violence against ahmadiyya, and backlash against those who speak on their behalf, spiral to media attention.9 therefore, what surprised me was the challenge saleem sahib’s attempt met, and the reasoning behind the challenge. let me begin with maheen. maheen did not resist saleem sahib’s attempts to charge the factory owner a higher rate in the language of religious discrimination. as she said to me in her office a few days later, “of course i couldn’t call him out in those very terms.” maheen was junior to saleem sahib—he could obstruct her transfers, promotions, and career advancement. but maheen also could not openly support an ahmadiyya factory owner because that “invites people to question your islamic credentials.” this can, literally, become a question of life and death. lawyers in pakistan often refuse to represent ahmadiyya clients in false blasphemy cases (one form of harassment of religious minorities in the country) due to death threats, just as judges refuse to adjudicate in such cases. soon after the factory visit we made a short stop at a mosque to offer zuhr (noon prayers). maheen and i waited inside the car while the men went inside the mosque to pray. maheen complained, “trying to be a good muslim, that’s what he thinks he’s doing!” she decried how saleem sahib had tried charging the ahmadiyya factory owner more than was merited, and then pointed to the contradiction (ttazaad) between that attempt to be a “good muslim” and going inside the mosque to pray comfortably while leaving two women waiting, sweating in the car. the “good muslim” reference came up again some weeks later when i discussed the incident with hina, a zillehdar in the department. hina thought it was wrong of saleem sahib to have tried charging the ahmadiyya factory owner more because it went “against merit.” hina, ever proud of her mastery of islamic historical dates, events, and names, said: merit should have been his guide. in the prophet muhammad’s time there were many non-muslims living in the islamic republic of madina. what did the prophet teach them by example? that non-muslims be treated just like muslims. you can’t be a muslim if you cause hurt with your hands or your tongue. what kind of a muslim does this officer think he is? he misunderstands islam. why do you think people converted to islam? not because the prophet prayed or kept fasts. but because of his ikhlaq. hina’s invocation of merit makes clear that in this case what should matter was the rate of effluent discharge, not the factory owner’s identity. if hina used the language of “merit,” azfar sahib used the language of legal (qanooni) and official (daftri) matters (muamlaat) to explain saleem sahib’s wrongdoing. the “mischief of mirzaiyyat” (fitna-e-mirzaiyyat) had nothing to do with qanooni muamlaat such as this one, according to azfar sahib; mirzaiyyat (from mirza; mirza ghulam ahmed is the founder of ahmadiyya belief) is a derogatory reference to ahmadiyya. azfar sahib explained that ahmadiyya present the greatest danger to muslims because, unlike other minorities that do not claim to be muslims, ahmadiyya do not only claim to be muslim but are also “too similar” to muslims: “hindu and christian places of worship look different and are easily spotted. but their [ahmadiyya] mosques are just like ours, so you can’t tell them apart! they can easily take our younger generations towards deviance [gumrahi] and we won’t even know!” however, all this had nothing to do with the tax assessment for azfar sahib—that is, anti-ahmadiyya beliefs were private, and to be distinguished from what the public matter of this drainage charge demanded. there is something to be said here about the particularity of the bureaucratic—“this case,” “this particular drain’s tax charge”—and what it enables and defers. it defers the ahmadiyya question: we do not need to debate hina and azfar sahib regarding ahmadiyya’s constitutional status as non-muslim in pakistan. but in the deferral also lies an opening—we can ensure that fairer tax computation takes place if we bracket the ahmadiyya question and break it up into “this case” that has to do with taxation. a long, onerous national history can be deferred, as can its reckoning. the merits of this case demand that the ahmadiyya factory owner should be charged the same as everyone else: that is, the factory owner’s religion does not matter to calculations of his tax charge. bureaucratic process here interrupts the violence that being ahmadiyya in pakistan involves. six months later, we were sitting in hina’s office when the nekokara case came up. some days earlier, an assistant commissioner (ac), jannat hussain nekokara, had had to publicly apologize on national television for calling for “due rights” for non-muslim minorities in pakistan at a college event on international human rights day. she had referred to ahmadiyya as part of a list that had included other muslim denominations such as shia, sunni, and wahabi, calling for an end to such differences in the interests of a stronger and united pakistan. as seen in video footage of her public apology that went viral, an extremely agitated student says, “when the constitution is saying [they] are non-muslim, then why are you [talking about] unity?” as nekokara provides clarification, she is forced to state her own belief vis-à-vis ahmadiyya and the finality of muhammad’s prophethood (khatam-e-nabuwwat). toward the end of the video she is asked to call ahmadiyya kafir (non-muslim), and their belief in the non-finality of muhammad’s prophethood a “lie.” iqbal sahib asked if we had seen that video of the angry student demanding an apology from the ac. i mentioned the factory incident to say that ahmadiyya discrimination, as we had all seen with that survey, was pervasive. yusuf sahib, a newly transferred zillehdar, was quick to dismiss saleem sahib’s attempt to charge a higher tax rate as misguided. “in official [daftari] matters it does not matter if the factory owner is ahmadiyya or not.” but after a brief pause he added, “you seem very upset for the ahmadiyya factory owner.” thrown off by the inherent question and the pause preceding it, i said, “i think it is not right what has been happening to …” he interrupted me, “you should know that this story of them being persecuted is wrong … they are such big businessmen, senior officials. they are doing very well in this country. ahmadiyya are basically a pressure group.” my head pounding angrily, i—part-anthropologist, part-citizen—responded by saying that a few well-placed ahmadiyya were not representative, and that even if they held high official positions today, it did not detract from the insecurity they must live in. yusuf sahib added, lifting and smoothing the end of his shirt on his thighs in agitation or impatience, “they are everywhere and doing well. they are everywhere—that’s the thing, you won’t even know. for example, look at you. i don’t know . … for all i know, you may be one of them too.” iqbal sahib cleared his throat and began rustling papers, while hina said, nervously, “enough conversation for today! let’s study this map together and see how good you’ve been as a student. tell me which watercourse provides water to this plot of land.” it must have been about a minute later when yusuf sahib quietly left the room. conclusion it is not surprising that participants in piety movements, for example, grapple with ethical challenges. indeed, work by anthropologists on such movements (khan 2018; mahmood 2004) has inspired me to take their inquiries to an ostensibly ill-suited ethnographic site. an irrigation bureaucracy notorious for inefficiency and corruption might appear a counterintuitive choice for asking questions about ethical labor. but i have shown in this article that bureaucracies are uniquely important sites in which to ask after the ethical: how bureaucrats work, the metrics they use to evaluate their work, and to whom they consider themselves accountable affects the many people to whom they are meant to provide public service, illustrating the distinctive and urgent stakes in expanding the anthropology of ethics and islam beyond what we might consider intuitive sites. examining everyday bureaucratic work as ethical labor provides insight into not only ethical work on the self but also, because these persons are public servants, on how their ethical labor—manifested in decisions such as blocking, reducing, or changing the direction of water flow—affects the public. pakistan’s punjab is home to one of the world’s largest irrigation networks, managed by a vast bureaucracy; its agricultural economy depends on irrigation; and flows, blockages, and rates of water have direct consequences for who grows how much to subsist or sell. with a changing climate, as rainfall patterns become less predictable, systems of irrigation-water distribution come under greater strain, and pressures to administer an increasingly unreliable resource grow, the stakes in decision-making by bureaucrats will become increasingly urgent—not just in pakistan, but everywhere that irrigation enables agriculture. as calls to privatize public goods become louder in the name of efficiency and climate preparedness (hayat 2024), it is all the more important to better understand how public bureaucracies function, so that they can be supported to enhance the provision of the public good of water. anti-ahmadiyya sentiment and violence is widespread in pakistan. and yet, distinctions of daftari, qanooni, zaati, considerations of ikhlaq and merit, and invocations of the prophet as exemplar, have enabled some bureaucrats to challenge one of their own, and to ensure fairer tax assessment for an ahmadiyya factory owner. examining how my bureaucrat interlocutors enroll law, god, and vernaculars of work as an exercise in ethical labor, and how this labor manifests in distinguishing the public from the private, enables an appreciation of how specifics of national history and politics cathect the problem space of bureaucracy toward normative conceptions of duties, metrics, and exemplars (scott 2004). while recent anthropological literature has examined the public-private distinction as one that secular power incessantly throws up, my contribution has sought to go beyond the implied automaticity of public-private distinction-making: what do bureaucrats do with such structural tensions and instabilities? azfar sahib does not invoke god unthinkingly and inevitably as he goes about his work, even though the position he occupies has been recognized by the highest courts as a “sacred trust.” his quotidian work entails distinguishing between when a “water problem” is just that, and when it is to be given a mazhabi rung (religious color). we miss this considered labor at our own peril and impoverish our understanding of public bureaucracies that do the crucial work of ensuring a public good is administered as such. further, without subjecting public administration to greater scrutiny, what hope is there for demanding more from it? the question of the public role of religion is an old one in pakistan, but it is not a tired one—on the contrary, it has immense vitality. the recently ousted prime minister of pakistan, imran khan, came to power with an electoral manifesto that claimed to be based on the prophet muhammad’s madinah charter. his aim, he has announced several times, is to build a madinah kii riasat (republic of madinah), which he has frequently described as “the first welfare state in the history of mankind.” as well, recent years have seen a worrying rise in cases of violence against ahmadiyya. so will ethical labor among bureaucrats re-script, or further strengthen historical scripts such as the second amendment of 1974 that have created an atmosphere for the easy targeting of minorities in pakistan through blasphemy allegations? while we can discern tendencies by tracing historical and political-legal trajectories, the answers are far from predetermined—how bureaucrats dialogue, reason, discriminate, and hold themselves accountable, and to whom, in each case, will tell. the stakes are not insignificant, and they go beyond the bureaucratic self: justice, case by case, or violence, case by case. there is an all-too-human humility to this—in turn enabling going “beyond [the] human horizon” as amira mittermaier (2021, 26) puts it. i recognized this when i was telling hina some weeks ago about my frustrations concerning some group work at my workplace. i sent her a whatsapp audio note, our usual mode of communication, describing feeling torn between securing my own position and not having done more to challenge the group since the ultimate decision made me unhappy. she responded: “we are powerless in front of systems, anywhere, u.s. or pakistan. i have learnt this. our work is to light our share of the lamp. you tried. leave the rest to god. if you have faith in god. today our problem is just this, we say we want to see the fruit of our labors.”10 a part of me finds this reasoning self-serving. but this is a partial interpretation, for hina is someone i have worked with very closely for nearly a decade, someone who has been transferred from here to there and there to here for being “difficult.” a more careful interpretation is: hina is asking that we make the effort even though there are no guarantees. indeed, she begins by stressing that we are powerless in front of systems. labor, without demanding to see the fruit of that labor—leave it to god. allah pe chorr dain. abstract bureaucracies are typically studied for lessons in structural violence, anti-politics, failures of law, and as foils to the ethical. i, however, argue that they constitute uniquely important sites to theorize the ethical. conceptualizing ethical labor as a modality of everyday bureaucratic work, i examine this labor as it enrolls law, god, and vernaculars of work, and takes the form of public-private distinction-making. the article expands the anthropology of bureaucracy, ethics, and islam by going beyond showing that public-private distinctions are immanent to modern secular power, arguing instead that they are actively labored for in everyday bureaucratic work. as a result, who they favor or menace is a function of specific political-legal and historical lineages. [bureaucracy; islam; water; ethics; law; pakistan] خلاصہ بیوروکریسی کے مطالعے کے پس منظر میں عموماً    یہ چند اسباب ہوتے ہیں : تشدد بذریہ ظوابط , قانون کا غیر اطلاق سیاست اور اخلاقیات کی نفی. تاہم اس مضمون کے مطابق سرکاری اداروں    کے تجزیہ میں    اخلاقیات کے نظریہ کی خاص اہمیت ہے. یہ تصور کرتے ہوئے کہ بیوروکریسی کی روزمرہ کارکردگی اخلاقیات    کی ایک شکل ہےیہ مضمون بیوروکریسی، اخلاقیات اور اسلام کی بشریات کو ایک وسیع پیمانے پہ جانچتا ہے: بحث محض یہ نہیں کہ نجی سرکاری تفریق جدید سیکولر اقتدار کا ایک جُز ہے بلکہ یہ بھی کہ اس تفریق کو برقرار رکھنا بیوروکریٹک کام کا خاص مقصد بھی ہے.    نتیجتاً کون اس سے فائدہ حاصل کرتا ہے اور کس کے لیے یہ خطرہ ہیں , اس کا فیصلہ مخصوص سیاسی قانونی اور تاریخی مسب و نسب کے مطابق ہوتا ہے [بیوروکریسی پانی اسلام اخلاقیات قانون پاکستان] notes acknowledgments i am indebted to my interlocutors in the irrigation world who have helped me understand the work of water for a decade now. for helping me navigate legal records, i thank usama khawar ghumman and umaiya zahid. for their generosity with time, and feedback on versions of this article, i thank hussein agrama, hannah chazin, emma shaw crane, colin halverson, thomas blom hansen, saad gulzar, zahra hayat, salman ahmad hayat, shakirah hudani, basit iqbal, steve kolmes, elizabeth f. s. roberts, lana salman, zeba shafi, aradhana sharma, kabir tambar, anna weichselbraun, and the participants in the yale south asia workshop, the kroc institute’s pres seminar at the university of notre dame, and the stanford south asia seminar. for early iterations of some of these arguments, i thank hussein agrama, william mazzarella and kaushik sunder rajan; for later iterations i am thankful to kamran asdar ali, donald s. moore, samera esmeir, radhika govindrajan, and arsalan khan. thank you to akhtar hayat, my constant reader. i am thankful to the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial collective, especially ather zia and kate herman, at cultural anthropology for carefully guiding this article through the review and publication process. this article is based on research supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, and the american institute of pakistan studies. 1. all officer and division names, as well as locations, are pseudonyms. 2. the department comprises two wings: revenue and engineering. the revenue hierarchy travels down from the collector, to the deputy collector, zillehdar and patwari. the engineering hierarchy travels down from the chief engineer to the superintending engineer (commonly “se”), the executive engineer (commonly “xen”), the assistant executive engineer (or subdivisional officer, commonly “sdo”), and the sub engineer. 3. my use of agriculturalist is intended to include both land owners and tenants. distinctions among agriculturalists—such as land ownership or other tenurial arrangements—are not my focus in this article. for literature on the complexities of categories such as farmer and peasant, see gill 2024, dove 1994, hayat 2024, and rizvi 2017. 4. in 2023, new legislation to replace the 1873 act was introduced. rules under the new act have not yet been formulated. the material discussed in this article was governed at the time of my research by the 1873 act, and the section numbers refer to the law in place then. 5. for instance, supreme court cases, pld 1987 supreme court 304, 2020 scp 26, 2020 psc 666, 2020 scmr 568; a sindh high court case, 2006 plc (c.s.) 564; a peshawar high court case, 2021 phc 10. 6. historian rohit de (2018) has conceptualized the government job in india as a property resource. he attributes litigation among bureaucrats to the enactment of the constitution itself, and emphasizes the post-emergency period in indian politics. this is an important comparative conversation to be developed, given shared and diverging trajectories of the politics of religion, employment and welfare in the two countries. 7. unsurprisingly, this literature has occasioned the caution (laidlaw 2014, 125; lempert 2013; zigon 2014) that the ordinary not be collapsed into the social. nadia fadil and mayanthi fernando (2015, 65) have articulated another interesting and important critique. they note that in many studies of ordinary ethics among muslims, “the everyday acts … less as an empirical site of observation than a normative frame that enables the restoration of a conceptualization of agency primarily understood as creative resistance to (religious) norms.” noting the blurring of the ordinary into the everyday at play in much of this literature, they argue that the muslim subjects of study end up being portrayed as basically like the secular humanist anthropologists studying them. 8. by “top” he meant leadership, in the sense of governmental superiors. this would sometimes be a loose reference to the secretary-level leadership of the entire department. at other times it could reference the elected political leadership. azfar sahib was not the only one who invoked the “top” frequently, and of course not everyone was in perfect agreement. for example, javed sahib, a zillehdar, would say in azfar sahib’s absence, “he should talk about his behavior too, as he’s been at the top for a while.” 9. in 1974, ahmadiyya were declared non-muslim. the declaration of their non-muslim status has opened up space for persecution such that, for example, false blasphemy charges are brought against them. in 2018, when the government appointed the prominent ahmadiyya economist at princeton university, atif mian, to its economic advisory committee, outcry from islamist political parties led to the revocation of this appointment. 10. here is what she said in urdu: میں نے    تو یہ سیکھا ہے: ہمارا کام ہے اپنے حصے کا دیا جلانا۔ آپ نے کوشش کی. بس پھر اللہ پہ چھوڑ دیں۔ اگر اللہ پہ یقین نہیں ہے… یہ ہی تو اج کل مسئلہ ہے: ہم کہتے ہیں ہمیں ہماری جدوجہد کا پھل بھی ملے۔ references agrama, hussein ali 2010 “secularism, sovereignty, indeterminacy: is egypt a secular or a religious state?” comparative studies 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616-644, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.06 virtuous indecisiveness: structural moral ambivalence and the tentative implementation of non-invasive prenatal testing in japan cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 171-197, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.01 virtuous indecisiveness: structural moral ambivalence and the tentative implementation of non-invasive prenatal testing in japan tsipy ivry university of haifa https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4576-8446 maki ogawa miyagi children’s hospital https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9757-8658 jun murotsuki tohoku university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7030-5385 professor rin,1 the head of a maternity department in a regional hospital in northern japan, specializes in reproductive genetics. the first author (ivry) met him in the winter of 2014, a year after the japanese society of obstetrics and gynecology (jsog) issued guidelines for a clinical trial of a new non-invasive prenatal test (nipt) that analyzes free-floating fetal dna in maternal blood, indicating the probability that the fetus has one of three chromosomal anomalies (21,18,13). this new maternal blood test, undertaken during the first trimester, does not endanger the pregnancy but might yield indications of chromosomal anomalies, and thus, might lead to further invasive testing and questions regarding termination. rin’s hospital was one of thirty-four institutions authorized by jsog in 2013 to provide nipt.2 reflecting on his encounters with couples coming for the genetic counseling mandatory for those opting for nipt, rin said: “japanese are not good at decision-making.”3 he explained that couples have difficulty deciding whether to undergo nipt and, if they do, how to proceed when receiving the results. ivry was perplexed by rin’s seemingly negative appraisal of the japanese as decision-makers and skeptical about his generalization. the pregnant women and couples she had met did not seem particularly hesitant about undergoing a blood test early in the pregnancy; rather, it was the genetic counselors who repeatedly confessed a “lack of confidence” about how to advise their clients. then, in 2014, she did not yet suspect that she was missing a culturally distinctive nuance in rin’s statement. five stints of fieldwork (2014–2019), a close exploration of the nipt experiences of pregnant women, their partners, and genetic counselors, and much dialogue with her japanese co-authors, an ob-gyn and a genetic counselor, made ivry realize that, despite her literal understanding of rin’s words, she had misunderstood their meaning. explicit and implicit statements by medical professionals about the inappropriateness of quick, unequivocal decisions made her comprehend that rather than complaining about his patients’ ineptness, rin was pleased that reproductive decisions, both preand post-diagnostic, did not come easily to them. ivry had missed the value that rin associated with ethical ambivalence. in rin’s ethical scheme, indecisiveness—as both an indication and a manifestation of ambivalence—carries no negative connotations. indeed, for rin, the genetic counselors, the midwives, and the nurses interviewed, vacillation about undergoing a test that might lead to a termination decision and ambivalence when facing what they called “choices of life” (命の選択, inochi no sentaku), i.e., whether or not to give birth, is virtuous.4 importantly, we do not claim here that japanese couples always experience initial difficulty when deciding whether to undergo a blood test in early pregnancy, nor that they are discouraged from making decisions. rather, our findings suggest that both institutionally and individually structured guidelines are established in the mandatory genetic counseling sessions and beyond to ensure that no decision is taken lightly. this explicit concern with evaluations of the quality of deliberations permeating the arena of nipt genetic counseling speaks to current anthropological efforts to understand how people endeavor to live a moral life within their glocal moral worlds.5 underlying the vibrant anthropological debates and disagreements about how to approach the ethical effectively is an understanding of people not as good or bad per se, but as having notions of good and bad according to which they evaluate themselves and others (laidlaw 2013). yet while practices and mechanisms of evaluation have been germane to these debates, the question of how people evaluate the quality of ethical deliberations in particular social settings remains under-researched. in the japanese arena of nipt counseling, where such evaluations are explicit, it seems that ambivalence—both its absence or presence and its depth—is regarded as a key principle with which to evaluate decision-making. we call this principle “structural ambivalence,” where ambivalence stands for a respected ethical stance, rather than the inability to decide, and structural conveys the sway ambivalence holds throughout macro and micro social scales of meaning-making. in this article we trace its working across scales. maternal blood tests, such as nipt, that do not endanger the pregnancy and give indications of fetal anomalies have become normalized in many parts of the world. in japan, under the auspices of structural ambivalence, such tests prompt ethicalization processes, namely, the rephrasing and reframing of social practices into ethical quandaries that demand ethical deliberations that take place across multiple scales of social practice (ong 2010). the valorization of indecisiveness notwithstanding, japanese medical professionals expect prospective parents, like their counterparts in europe and the united states, to reach decisions about undergoing nipt and other prenatal tests, to sign consent forms, and to decide about how to proceed after receiving the results. thus the valorization of indecisiveness is about promoting the quality of decision-making processes, rather than about discouraging decisions. medical professionals’ concerns, however, go beyond autonomy. the japanese moral world is a “moral assemblage” (ong 2010; ong and collier 2008; zigon 2010) of religious and ethical traditions that includes layers of shintoism, japanese versions of buddhism and confucianism, and western ethical traditions (e.g., sleeboom-faulkner 2014; wargo 1990). the notion of “autonomous decisions” (自己決定, jiko kettei) immigrated to japan during the 1980s as part of a broader effort to translate bioethical literature from english (robertson 2010) and became a formal prerequisite in japanese medical interventions (akabayashi and slingsby 2003). this leads to questions about how decisions are made in a social setting that values indecisiveness as a mark of appropriate ethical consideration and about the long-term personal and social consequences of decision-making processes for the deciders’ moral subjectivities. this article addresses these questions while drawing on an ethnography of nipt genetic counseling in japanese hospitals contextualized within the moral ambivalence toward reproductive technologies traceable across social scales. we analyze ethical deliberation processes surrounding the provision and uptake of nipt, tracing their development within the moral assemblage of japanese maternity care. the japanese configuration of nipt raises questions about the paradoxical role of ethicalization in the implementation of contested technologies in japanese society and beyond. our explorations are informed by and contribute to cross-disciplinary conversations at the intersections between the anthropology of reproduction and the anthropology of ethics and moralities about the meaning and purpose of bioethical praxis and, particularly, of moral ambivalence, as configured within glocal reproductive politics (ginsburg and rapp 1991). reproductive technological challenges to social order at the turn of the twenty-first century, as ethnographers started focusing on the increasing involvement of biotechnologies in conception, pregnancy, and birth, they came to understand the making of kin as a terrain of social transformation. rather than emphasize cultural continuity, as their predecessors had done, contemporary anthropologists identified the range of emerging reproductive technologies—contraceptives, assisted conception and donor technologies, prenatal and preimplantation diagnostic technologies, and the like—as transforming notions of life/death, nature/culture, and relationality, as well as, importantly, challenging the moral order in many societies around the globe (e.g., franklin 2003; lock 1998; strathern 1992). the range of prenatal diagnostic technologies (pnd) to detect fetal anomalies that became available during the second half of the twentieth century has raised many ethical anxieties. alongside the prospect of the post-diagnostic termination of anomalous fetuses, pnd were identified as part of a neo-eugenic apparatus of selective reproduction, leading to ethical public debates in europe and the united states among health-care providers, disability rights activists, bioethicists, philosophers, feminists, and religious scholars (gammeltoft and wahlberg 2014). questions regarding when life begins and what makes a life worth living were among those perceived as key to understanding local sociocultural configurations of pnd (gammeltoft and wahlberg 2014). though in many contexts pnd were introduced as tools enhancing women’s knowledge and choices, critics voiced concerns that these so-called choices would rapidly become a compulsion to choose the socially endorsed alternative (strathern 1992). indeed, these concerns foretold the normalization of pnd in much of the developed world. nevertheless, the ethical negotiations of non-invasive and invasive tests are configured quite differently. the former signifies interventions not known to carry any risk of miscarriage: for example, blood tests analyzing fetal proteins and obstetrical ultrasound measurements, both of which give probabilities indicative of fetal anomalies but yielding considerable false positives. such tests were introduced in the united states as part of an “assurance ritual,” a means of affirming that “everything is ok with the baby” (press and browner 1994, 212–13), or even, in the case of obstetrical ultrasound, as a bonding device (taylor 2008). applicants were rarely invited to reflect on the tests’ ethical implications. invasive tests, on the other hand, such as amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (cvs), analyze fetal cells directly and yield definitive results, but they carry the risk of miscarriage. fetal diagnosis constitutes the explicit purpose of this testing, which invites applicants to weigh diagnosis against the risk of miscarriage. in her seminal exploration of pregnant women’s dilemmas about amniocentesis, rayna rapp (1999, 3) described how american women feel “forced” to make “concrete and embodied decisions about the standards for entry into the human community.” she referred to her informants as “moral pioneers” (rapp 1999, 307) and showed how genetic counselors offered them a “translation” of genetic knowledge but avoided interfering with their ethical decisions as part of a professional commitment to “non-directiveness,” expecting them to use professional knowledge to make decisions on their own. ethnographers of pnd working outside euro-american settings identified local ways to handle moral pioneering—that is, mechanisms to share the burden of autonomous reproductive decisions—while engaging in burgeoning scholarship on ethics and moralities (zigon 2007, 2010). the moment when a pregnant woman is faced with an indication or diagnosis of fetal anomaly was identified, using jarrett zigon’s (2007) idiom, as a “moral breakdown” (gammeltoft 2014; ivry and teman 2019): a “moment of crisis” (gammeltoft 2014, 196) when the existentially comfortable moral world breaks down, forcing the pregnant women to “consciously reflect upon the appropriate ethical response” (zigon 2010, 5). zigon (2009, 269) calls such reflections “ethical work,” seeing them as a response to an “ethical demand” (zigon 2007, 139) and a tactic to recover “nonconsciously acceptable ways of living in the world.” zigon clarifies: “i do not intend the notion of acceptable to be equivalent to obligatory. rather, it is much more about being existentially comfortable in one’s world… . ethics in my terms is the process that is aimed not at the good but rather aimed at cultivating this existential comfort in and between the ranges of influence of … various moralities” (zigon 2010, 5). it should be emphasized that nipt does not endanger the pregnancy. yielding probabilistic but highly accurate results with low false positives (2.5 for down syndrome),6 it blurs the distinction between non-invasive, safe-yet-inaccurate tests and invasive, risky-yet-accurate tests. thus, while in many countries nipt requires no prior counseling, in japan, genetic counseling is mandatory, with a mass of medical information that seems to equal that given in pre-amniocentesis counseling documented in the united states (rapp 1999). moreover, japanese nipt applicants are required to show evidence of serious ethical labor, similarly reminiscent of american amniocentesis applicants (rapp 1999). our analysis of the ethical labor surrounding nipt in japan draws on various concepts emerging from the above ethnographies of moral pioneering and the anthropological theorization of moral breakdowns. however, it departs from them in two ways. first, rather than focusing on the drama following the actual diagnosis of a fetal anomaly, we concentrate on the introduction of tentative ethical dilemmas, namely, the processes of ethicalization concerning nipt’s potential to introduce a future moral breakdown, as insinuated in pre-nipt genetic counseling. second, we question the developmental trajectory of zigon’s (2007) “moral breakdown” alongside the tactical purposes he designates to ethics. the case of pre-nipt counseling in japan invites a reconsideration of the notion of ethical labor as a tactic to recover comfortable moral everydayness; it is discomfort—with technologically assisted selective reproduction—that pre-nipt counseling cultivates in japanese consultees. our findings call, instead, for michael lambek’s (2010, 2015) and michael lempert’s (2014) notion of ethics as a performative action that holds value in and of itself. furthermore, we are inspired by lambek’s (2015, 45) emphasis on ethics as a quality of action and action’s spirit and by lambek’s (2015, 8) and arthur kleinman’s (2007) insights on virtue as an important entry point to understanding what matters to people. our analysis is further informed by notions of bioethics as a symptom of social transitions (rosenberg 1999) and a product of ambivalence toward progress (lock 1998; stevens 2003) and, more specifically, by ethnographic explorations of the emergence of affect in institutional ethics (e.g., addison 2022). we explore what happens when ethical labor is enacted within a local moral assemblage informed by, among others, institutional respect for ethical ambivalence and a recent history of eugenic state policies. renouncing japanese eugenic state policies terminations of pregnancy and infanticide, euphemistically called mabiki (間引き) after the culling of seedlings in rice cultivation, are documented throughout japan’s pre-modern history. they were used as forms of fertility control, particularly in times of crisis (lock 1998; norgren 2001). within the multilayered moral assemblage of shintoism, japanese confucianism, and buddhism, terminations did not make for objects of condemnation before the mid-nineteenth century. indeed, buddhism and shintoism never developed notions of singular divine rules, and it was not in the traditions of shinto priests or buddhist monks and nuns to challenge complicated moral issues (lafleur 1992; wargo 1990); buddhism, in particular, has always been a venue for rituals to console the spirits of aborted fetuses (lafleur 1992; see also hardacre 1997). the criminalization of abortions soon after the promulgation of the constitution in 1889 marked a new nationalist regime bent on population growth to facilitate japan’s military efforts and become a compatible player in western colonialism. during the first half of the twentieth century, eugenics became a state ideology that implemented both “positive” and “negative” eugenic practices. at the height of world war ii, japan issued the national eugenic protection law, legalizing the eugenic sterilization of citizens with a “hereditary … bodily disease or … mental disease” (for the full list of conditions, see kato 2009, 244). after japan’s defeat in 1945, japanese scientists disassociated themselves from scientific policies and practices influenced by ultra-nationalism (robertson 2010, 430). however, despite protests, eugenic sterilizations continued until the abolishment of the national eugenic protection law in 1995 following international pressure by disability rights advocates (kato 2009; matsubara 2002; robertson 2010; tsuge 2021). the maternal body protection law of 1996 declared its purpose as protecting the health of mothers and babies and had no article listing hereditary diseases that qualify termination. public debates, which had started with the introduction of amniocentesis in japan in the 1960s (tsuge 2021) and continued after 1996, questioned the ethicality of new technologies to diagnose fetal disabilities. neither the state nor jsog endorsed pnd, instead signifying them as the revival of the dangerous eugenics ideology. indeed, while local governments subsidize maternity checkups, pnd are not covered.7 at the turn of the twenty-first century, pnd were practiced cautiously, and doctors neither offered or recommended them (ivry 2009). post-diagnostic terminations were performed “backstage” in accordance with the legal article about the fear of serious damage to maternal health caused by pregnancy or delivery (kato 2009, 258). rather than discussing technologies facilitating selective reproduction, ob-gyns highlighted the importance of maternal nutrition, moderate weight gain, and maternal relaxation to fetal health. the japanese “mother and baby health notebook” (母子健康手帳, boshikenkotecho), which monitors gestation, birth, and the baby’s health until the age of five, conceptualizes pregnant women as fully fledged mothers whose babies happen to dwell in utero (ivry 2009). figures 1 and 2: different designs of the medical record of maternity checkups. the drafting of nipt guidelines in 2013 was the first time that jsog took explicit responsibility for pnd amid unrelenting ethical debates. deciphering the repercussions of these debates in maternity clinics and genetic counseling sessions invites aihwa ong’s (2010, 13) anthropology of ethics, which entails “locating ethical practices, that is, tracking ethical configurations where ‘ethicalizing’ processes and decisions take place.” according to ong (2010, 13), “situated ethics happen at the intersection of competing logics… .[namely,] overlaps and tensions between multiple ethical regimes.” in our case, these might be summarized as the tensions between the (american-style) regime of autonomous decision-making, which necessitates the provision of scientific information in an ethically neutral way, and the (japanese-style) regime of structural ambivalence, which (as we shall see) renders ethical labor an intersubjective endeavor requiring support. following ong’s lead, this research was designed to trace the processes of ethicalization surrounding nipt across scales of social practice and their different social agents. methods of tracing ethicalization during ten months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2014 and 2019, ivry documented formal and informal conversations about nipt with ob-gyns, genetic counselors, midwives, pregnant women, and their partners.8 the ob-gyns, genetic counselors, and midwives interviewed came from hospitals throughout honshu. most of the interviews with pregnant women and their partners were conducted in a major metropolitan hospital in tohoku.9 all interviews were conducted in japanese by ivry and transcribed verbatim by a research assistant. ivry then analyzed the interviews and translated selected parts into english. questions aimed to elicit the experiences of either providing or undergoing nipt within the broader context of the interviewees’ lifeworlds. the initial analysis revealed three interconnected phenomena. first, a range of practices emerged that health-care professionals use for marking nipt as a problem. second, evaluation practices set in motion by this problematization were noted. third, a master narrative evoked by both health-care providers and pregnant couples about their change of mind over time was identified. routes of enactment of ethical deliberation as they develop through time, beyond cultural notions of the beginning of life or a life worth living, proved powerful entry points to understanding: first, what it takes to make reproductive decisions within a regime that values ethical ambivalence; and second, what the consequences of ethicalization processes are for individuals, the members of their close network, and society as a whole. we now analyze the findings at the level of pnd policymaking as these deliberations frame the conditions for the provision and consumption of nipt. how nipt is marked as an ethical problem by reproductive health policymakers jsog’s issuing of guidelines for nipt in march 2013 seemed to designate a turning point in the governance of reproductive technologies in japan. prior to 2013, japan did not have a state-authorized system of screening for fetal anomalies. although the technologies were available in japanese medical institutions, jsog avoided formally supporting any form of pnd. the most explicit formal statement about a pnd technology were guidelines issued by the ministry of health, welfare, and labor in 1999, exempting ob-gyns from informing pregnant women about maternal serum screening (mss)—a blood test in the first trimester that had already been used as a screening tool for more than a decade in europe and the united states (tsuge 2021). amid disability rights movements’ statements about mss as a neo-eugenic endeavor, half the jsog members opposed mss, citing issues of doctor-patient trust relations (ivry 2009). ob-gyns in the early 2000s saw it as irresponsible to offer pregnant women a test that yields probabilistic, that is, indefinite, and often false positive results, thus requiring these women to undergo amniocentesis, an invasive test endangering the pregnancy, if they wanted a definite result. jsog guidance prior to 2013 thus institutionalized an ambiguous state of affairs in which technologies to diagnose fetal anomalies were available in medical institutions but a formal unwillingness to use them prevailed (ivry 2009). moreover, under the maternal body protection law, terminations can take place until twenty weeks and six days of gestation, but diagnosis of fetal anomaly is not listed as an acceptable reason for termination (ivry 2009). a decade later, in 2014, when sharing with ivry their thoughts on nipt—a considerably more definitive but still probabilistic test that also requires amniocentesis for a definitive result—the four jsog members interviewed reported that the professional community was, once again, divided almost evenly. as with mss, nipt was, they stated, recognized as a neo-eugenic device and feared for its potential to reinforce discrimination against people with disabilities. however, it was different this time. they referred to the social matrix underlying the politics of reproduction in japan over the past two decades, which showed lingering economic recession, culminating in the march 2011 triple disaster in northeastern japan, shrinking fertility rates,10 and increasing rates of working mothers to have considerably transformed the landscape of reproductive policymaking.11 they also cited the increasing age of japanese mothers at the time of a first birth,12 and its statistical correlation with the occurrence of fetal chromosomal anomalies. they emphasized the high credibility of nipt for tipping the scales slightly in spite of the ongoing reservations of nearly half of jsog’s members.13 the aggregate picture emerging from these four jsog members was a repeated emphasis on jsog’s ambivalence as a professional association. they recounted the serious disagreements around nipt within jsog prior to the issuing of guidelines, the list of requirements—including having a certified genetic counselor employed at the hospital—for enabling medical institutions to provide nipt, and the limitations on patients’ eligibility. their ultimate message was that the jsog decision to permit nipt as a clinical trial had not been taken lightly, that the decision did not resolve the test’s ethical problems, and that nipt had not been nor would be made readily available. in other words, the detailed guidelines regarding nipt’s provision and uptake ensure that it is marked as an ethical problem. the tentativeness and cautiousness regarding the implementation of nipt in japan is distinct when compared to its implementation elsewhere. in italy, brazil, the united kingdom, and china, nipt was offered privately for several years before formal guidelines were issued and even before clinical trials were organized to measure clinical and psychological consequences (qiu 2019; zeng et al. 2016). thus japan’s simultaneous issuing of formal guidelines, the institutionalization of a clinical trial, and the mandatory regimen of genetic counseling preand post-testing stands out. noteworthy is that the explicit objective of the clinical trial in japan was not to evaluate nipt’s accuracy (already established in american labs), but to assess pregnant women’s responses to the test so as to structure suitable counseling and support. yet many medical professionals did not consider it enough that jsog had marked nipt as an ethical problem; some of them embarked on further problematization initiatives of their own. how nipt becomes seen as an ethical problem by health-care providers forty-six-year-old sachiko is a midwife in a children’s hospital. soon after the hospital became an authorized provider of nipt, the head of the maternity ward invited the medical staff to share their thoughts about the new test. in her interview, sachiko expressed her shock on hearing that her institution, a children’s hospital, would now be offering a test that “facilitates the selection of life.” she described having to conceal her antagonism when drawing blood samples from the women who came to undergo nipt. sachiko felt that nipt contradicted her professional commitment to the egalitarian care of unborn babies just as much as to neonates and children: “i thought that a children’s hospital is all about treating children as human beings regardless of their chromosomal disabilities. we don’t exclude children with down syndrome from care, right? so why offer a test that discriminates against them?” for her, nipt epitomizes the paradox of the expansion of medical interventions to support and enhance the lives of people with disability and the simultaneous expansion of genetic tests to diagnose and eliminate disabilities in utero (ginsburg and rapp 2021). she felt particular resentment toward one doctor who pointed out that although free medical care was available to children with disabilities, few medical facilities actually offered them care. she saw his utilitarian ethical reasoning about limited resources as a breach of professional commitment: “what kind of human beings are these doctors?” however, discussions with colleagues made sachiko realize the diversity of perspectives on a test she thought was unequivocally unethical. she gradually started acknowledging the challenges of disability care for parents: “it’s not easy to accept a child with a disability.” when sachiko herself conceived at the age of 42 (ivry first met her toward the end of her pregnancy), she decided not to opt for nipt despite being eligible: “i didn’t reach the point where i agreed to decide on whether i would abort a child with a disability.” sachiko’s determination not to enter a process of decision-making about nipt was not only a full-fledged decision but also signified, to her, a higher level of virtue. significantly, only if sachiko had “agreed” to enter the process of decision-making would she have entered the phase of indecisiveness and vacillation. this did not mean that she was oblivious to the prospect of fetal disabilities; in fact, while undergoing a routine obstetrical ultrasound, she wondered (although without asking) whether the doctor was properly checking fetal nuchal translucency, seen as indicative of down syndrome. sachiko started understanding that “people who undergo nipt don’t do it lightly … the doctor makes them think hard; it’s a weighty decision.” this acknowledgment of the intensity of ethical labor that doctors demand from applicants and their worries indicating ethical strife relieved sachiko’s antagonism, invoking her compassion rather than condemnation. evidence of the performance of hard ethical labor (regardless of the ensuing decision) thus emerges here as a mechanism of legitimization. the most ambivalent about nipt among medical professionals were the genetic counselors who have direct responsibility for facilitating the decision-making process of pregnant couples. these low-paid, usually female, practical mediators of decisions complained in their interviews that they were never sure about “how to speak to clients” or “how best to conduct a genetic counseling session.” they confessed a “lack of confidence” when conducting both the compulsory session before nipt and the subsequent sessions informing couples of the test results or discussing further testing. while some reported their clients’ insufficient scientific literacy, the counselors’ deep concern was for the ethical aspects of their practice, particularly the correlation between prenatal diagnosis and eugenic motivations. of the sixteen interviewed, ten expressed explicit worries about the discriminatory implications of pnd on people with disabilities. all the genetic counselors were adamant that couples must take responsibility and make their decisions “as parents,” thus echoing the formal (aforementioned) conceptualization of pregnancy as in utero childcare. unlike u.s. genetic counselors who, according to rapp (1999), are committed to the idea of non-directive counseling and tend to transfer moral responsibility to the pregnant couple, japanese genetic counselors feel pushed into moral pioneering. one genetic counselor, chie, said: when i speak to clients, i always feel that my humanity is being tested. i feel that many people undergo pnd without being aware of how heavy the choice that might await them is. i’m conflicted about how much i should say about a technological option which leads to such a heavy choice. i’m concerned that i’m infringing on the client’s right not to know. chie feels torn between her professional obligation to make information accessible and her commitment to protect pregnant women’s well-being. her conflict echoes a key question: how can reproductive risk be communicated without exposing pregnant mothers to the risk posed by the information? chie does not see only the provision of full information as the prerequisite of quality counseling; rather, in her ethical scheme, she is equally committed to minimizing the distressing effects of information and respects the right not to know. when first meeting chie, she had just been hired by the hospital, and ivry associated her declared lack of confidence with the novelty of the responsibility entrusted to her. however, this declaration persisted in their encounters over the years. how nipt becomes an ethical problem in encounters between pregnant women and couples and medical counselors the pregnant women interviewed recalled first hearing about nipt in media debates, often long before they conceived. even before their first genetic counseling session, all of the women except koko (discussed later) had already decided, sometimes after discussions with their partners and other family members, to undergo nipt. they found their decisions, however, destabilized by care providers’ queries. kaori, a thirty-seven-year-old accountant with a three-year-old child, was determined, after discussing the matter with her husband, to undergo nipt in her second pregnancy (as she had in her first), despite receiving no indication from routine checkups of any fetal anomaly. in her first pregnancy (soon after the issuing of jsog guidelines) she had planned to undergo amniocentesis if an indication of a chromosomal anomaly had surfaced and explained that she was ready to “give up” (諦める, akirameru), that is, to terminate the pregnancy, had the results been positive. unlike “having an abortion” (中絶する, chuuzetsu suru), a phrase signifying the endpoint action of termination, the frequently used akirameru insinuates a process preceding the decision and even regret for being pushed by the circumstances to end the pregnancy. in her second pregnancy, when ivry met her, kaori held to her decision to undergo nipt; however, she had now changed her mind and was determined she would give birth to her child regardless of any fetal anomaly diagnosis. “my husband respects my wishes,” she reported. this time, she renounced selective reproduction yet opted for nipt, reframing its purpose. with tears in her eyes, she reported answering her ob-gyn’s question about why she would undergo nipt if she had no intention of terminating: “if medical progress offers a way of knowing beforehand, i want to know.” it is worth noting that the ob-gyn framed nipt explicitly as an obvious means of selective reproduction, while conflating the decision about whether to undergo nipt with a tentative decision about whether to terminate upon diagnosis of a trisomy. kaori explained the importance of prior knowledge as a way of “preparing her heart” and organizing her work and family life to accommodate a child with special needs, thus reframing nipt as a tool of care rather than of selective reproduction. her approach, in fact, conforms with the consent signed at the end of pre-nipt genetic counseling sessions: article 8 states that the purpose of prenatal testing is to prepare the optimum environment for the fetus after the birth, while article 9 clarifies that fetal anomaly alone is not a legal reason for termination.14 kaori talked about her change of mind between her first and second pregnancies, both of which were spontaneously conceived and wanted pregnancies. at the time of the first pregnancy, “i couldn’t imagine what it really means to have a child.” however, the experience of nurturing a child had transformed her thinking: “i’m in awe of the life that comes out into the world… . the quality of this amazement has nothing to do with whether that life has a disability or not.” kaori managed to choose nipt while repudiating selective reproduction—a repudiation that reflects japanese discourses of disability justice and their conjunctive maternal commitments.15 “are you really sure you want to undergo nipt?” mako and satoshi yoshida received a fetal anomaly indication shortly after their technologically assisted conception. they had first heard about nipt at the infertility clinic where they had undergone treatment, and then at a pregnancy checkup that revealed an indication of a fetal anomaly. their ob-gyn noted a “slightly” extended nuchal translucency measurement. he tried to mitigate the information by assuring them that all other indicators were normal. he also explicitly reassured them, saying “you don’t need to worry too much,” thus invoking his professional commitment to protect pregnant women from any unwanted effects of risk information on their well-being. “there is a one in 10,000 chance of there being a problem … . 80 percent that everything is ok,” said the ob-gyn. satoshi, reframing the logic of ensuring maternal peace of mind, thought that it would be “better to minimize the 20 percent and achieve peace of mind.” mako, despite her initial opposition, eventually agreed to undergo nipt “as a last resort,” thus reinforcing that their decision was made after serious deliberation—as a last not a first resort, but not as a choice. satoshi said that although they had talked about what they would do if the diagnosis was positive, they had not yet reached a decision. indecisiveness concerning termination persisted amid the choice to undergo nipt. the genetic counselor who met with the yoshidas asked them several times whether they were really sure about undergoing nipt: “you might think that the test will easily relieve you of worries, but it is not really about instant relief from uncertainty. please think hard, as it might lead you to a selection of life … ethical quandaries might arise.” such warnings about looming tentative ethical ordeals and explications of the ethical risks lurking beneath nipt were evident in the accounts of all the pregnant women and all the partners. whether or not the couples received a prior indication of a fetal anomaly, they were often asked by ob-gyns, nurses, or genetic counselors to explain their decision and to think hard. the only woman who did not report such intervention by her care providers was koko, a thirty-seven-year-old who had separated from her fiancé shortly before discovering she was pregnant with their child. she described her pregnancy as deeply disruptive; however, having encountered women her age who were experiencing infertility, she felt lucky to be pregnant and obligated to give birth. having not sought any health-care information due to her ambivalence, it was, she said, her ex-fiancé who first suggested nipt; she, herself, was not at all inclined. recognizing koko’s conflict, the nurse arranged an emergency appointment with a genetic counselor. whereas the health-care providers in all of the other accounts were reported to have questioned and often frowned on the decision to undergo nipt, giving their referrals unwillingly, koko was the only interviewee who received help from a medical professional in making an appointment for nipt. her visible struggle seems to have propelled the nurse to help her; in contrast, pregnant couples who showed determination to undergo the test prompted medical professionals to raise questions and demonstrate opposition. a few reports emerged of medical professionals who went further than just implying tentative ethical dilemmas. shizue, a forty-two-year-old dancer in her second pregnancy, described her shock when the nurse who introduced nipt outlined the heaviness of the tentative ethical dilemma. the nurse explained that if the test yielded a positive result and the woman then receives a positive result from amniocentesis and decides to terminate, the termination will take place at a stage when she can already feel fetal movement. the nurse designated nipt as a road to termination and termination as the killing of a sentient being. reports of such ominous introductions to nipt stand in sharp contrast to anthropologists’ depictions of medical professionals in other countries recommending nipt unequivocally or even prescribing the test without discussion, particularly to pregnant women over thirty-five. in china, women are even expected to provide a compelling reason for refusing (qiu 2019), while in germany, the medical system has been reported to routinely schedule women for testing and encourage little prior ethical deliberation (reinsch, könig, and rehmann-sutter 2021, 208). in japanese hospitals the requirement to think hard about whether to undergo nipt is sometimes strategically institutionalized in the timeline of counseling and testing (even beyond jsog’s guidelines). in one institution the pregnant woman can only undergo the test one week after the mandatory counseling session. the genetic counselor in charge of nipt in that institution explained that this requirement was put in place to ensure “serious thinking.” some japanese doctors seem to believe that even obligating serious thinking proves insufficient. thirty-nine-year-old keiko considered herself lucky to even get a referral, as her friend’s doctor insisted that nipt was unnecessary and refused to provide her with a referral. keiko’s own doctor relented only when she expressed deep maternal anxiety, which can, it seems, inspire doctors’ compassion. nipt as an “ethical turn”: post-diagnostic evaluations and moral breakdowns in the aftermath of negative and positive results the potential impact of the ethicization of nipt can be fully appreciated when examining accounts of receiving a negative result, namely, that the fetus does not appear to carry one of the three trisomies. these accounts were often found to take the form of a post-diagnostic self-evaluation, with pregnant women and couples attempting to justify their decisions and get reassurance of their own moral caliber. the yoshidas, whose doctor reported an extended nuchal translucency measurement, explained that “if not for that discovery … we wouldn’t have thought about nipt.” likewise, akira and momo suzuki, aged forty-two and forty, respectively, explained that if they had been younger, they wouldn’t have considered undergoing nipt; after all, added akira, “the ministry of health has made this possible.” there were those who felt the need to emphasize the (unexpected) merit of undergoing nipt, beyond just “the relief” of not carrying a baby with a disability. “it was good,” said forty-three-year-old akiko, “the test gave me an opportunity to contemplate the meaning of giving birth and made me realize that a baby is a miracle.” shizue used the opportunity of informing her husband about the negative result to enact a moral pedagogy aimed at promoting greater commitment to their unborn child. she told him: “there is no guarantee that our child will be born healthy, and even if it is born healthy, the test only indicates three trisomies. there is no guarantee that our child won’t be stupid or grow up to be a murderer.” so with the three trisomies ruled out, the couple now committed to raising any child born with devotion. shizue, like kaori discussed earlier, came to denounce selective reproduction. in some cases, receiving a negative result led to ethical strife and even a post-diagnostic “moral breakdown.” forty-two-year-old asuka, a nurse and mother of a four-year-old, burst into tears when recounting the guilt she felt toward the unborn baby on hearing the negative result: i experienced many hardships of pregnancy but tried not to think “there is life there.” i went to the hospital to have an ultrasound and was happy to see the little heart beating; it was a relief, i was glad. but afterwards, i tried not to think about it. when i was pregnant with my first child, he moved from the very beginning, and when my stomach hurt, i said, “let’s get through this together.” this time, i waited for the results of the nipt and did not say anything [to the unborn baby]. when the result came back negative, i apologized to the fetus and said, “forgive me … for not thinking about you properly.” asuka experienced a moral breakdown after being informed that her baby did not carry one of the three trisomies. she described undergoing a serious pre-nipt decision-making process with her husband and her doctor, in which they decided to undergo nipt and terminate in the case of a positive result. these decisions might have pushed her to suspend bonding with her unborn baby, making her pregnancy only “tentatively tentative” (compare rothman 1986). this did not, however, prevent her from breaking down in the aftermath. rather than recovering the comfortable moral world, the negative result evoked a moral and emotional breakdown (compare addison 2022) and a spell of further ethical labor, riddling the taken-for-granted moral assumptions about what constitutes appropriate parental demeanor in the face of tentative disability with tension.16 it is against the possibility of post-diagnostic breakdown and the looming disruption of a (supposedly) established maternal–fetal bond that genetic counselors conduct their counseling sessions. rie, an experienced counselor said: when i start the genetic counseling session, i make a point of hearing from the mother about her feelings when she discovered she was pregnant. many women say they were happy. i proceed with the counseling, wanting her to cherish that feeling. [it is important for me to open like that] because even if they choose termination, i think a woman would like to say goodbye [to the fetus], so i want the mother to take the time she spent with her unborn child seriously. rather than condemning abortion, rie’s approach is oriented toward enhancing maternal–fetal relations across the life-death divide, partly as a support strategy for bereaved mothers. she works to prevent the mother’s disconnection from her fetus. in japan, fetal death is acknowledged with a death certificate from as early as twelve weeks of gestation. in the hospital where ivry conducted field work, the death of a fetus was recognized and commemorated with a structured ritual that courtney addison (2022, 268) might identify as an “enchanting turn.” the midwives dress the dead baby in a tiny cotton kimono and arrange it in a special box surrounded with origami flowers. the parents, accompanied by the medical staff, carry the box down a side corridor to a quiet circular room with no religious symbols where they light incense and pray silently. while an analysis of such rituals lies beyond the scope of this article, it should be noted that the ritual acknowledges the parent-fetus relationship as human relations, regardless of whether the fetal death was the result of termination, miscarriage, or stillbirth. this emphasis on human relations helps us understand that the deliberation processes encouraged in genetic counseling sessions sometimes culminate in a change of mind beyond just repenting for the temporary disruption of maternal-fetal relations; indeed, some couples end up regretting their decision to undergo nipt altogether. chie, the genetic counselor mentioned earlier, witnessed such fundamental change of mind in her patients. when discussing in 2019 whether she had gained more confidence in her profession in the two years since ivry first met her, chie shared an experience that had impressed her deeply. usually, when the nipt result was negative, i would say, “what a relief! it’s so good that the result is negative”… and people usually said they were relieved. but then, recently, there was a couple who said nothing like this. they said, “yes, ok, thanks.” i asked them if … they were feeling ok. they said—particularly the man—that after doing the test they came to question the reason for doing it and realized that they are prejudiced against children with down syndrome. they felt guilty for undergoing a test that might lead to the termination of a person with a disability. since then, i have become more careful with my words. i want to be able to give counseling in a way that is sensitive to the couples. figure 3. kimono for a twelve-week-old deceased fetus. figure 4. kimonos for deceased fetuses from twelve to forty weeks. chie, like the pregnant parents, engaged in post-diagnostic self-evaluation. she proceeded to explain the merits of the “lack of confidence” in their professional ability repeatedly referred to by her and other genetic counselors and embarked on a chain of successive tentative scripts of reproductive misfortunes. if they receive a positive result, undergo amniocentesis, have an anomaly diagnosed, decide to terminate, and then feel bad about that decision, i want to be able to tell them that it was not a bad decision. that i was there with them and witnessed how hard they thought in reaching a decision that was suitable for that moment in time. you see, this is where i don’t have confidence. i think it’s not necessarily good to have confidence in such matters. i think it might be better to provide counseling while constantly searching for answers and not having confidence. thus, chie explicitly evaluates lack of confidence as a professional virtue. nonetheless, she told ivry that she makes sure never to show this to her clients, understanding that for clients to feel comfortable, her “lack of confidence” must never surface during counseling sessions. structural ambivalence, virtuous indecisiveness, and the paradoxes of ethicalization in japan and beyond what do positive appraisals of indecisiveness, hesitation, lack of confidence, and other reifications of ethical ambivalence tell us about the meanings, purposes, and consequences of ethicizing biotechnologies in japan? and what can this ethnography contribute to anthropological explorations of ambivalence and ethicalization beyond japanese society at its intersection with reproductive technologies? the case study of a maternal blood test early in the pregnancy reminds us that ethics itself can become an object of evaluation and that a focus on how deliberation processes are evaluated can offer a perspective for understanding what is at stake for the different parties in particular sociocultural settings. the main issues in the decisions surrounding nipt for japanese policymakers, care providers, pregnant women, and their supporters might differ, but their quandaries boil down to similar questions concerning the ethics of relations: doctor-patient, maternal-fetal, and parent-child. all of these questions respond to an ethical demand to consider and reconsider the multiple aspects of future tentative dilemmas of terminating fetuses diagnosed with one of three trisomies that might be revealed through nipt. under the auspices of structural ambivalence, genetic counseling becomes dedicated to creating space for prospective parents’ ethical deliberations no less than providing them with accessible scientific knowledge (compare addison 2022). patients must make up their own minds, but counselors are committed to support their pre-diagnostic deliberations in preparation for possible future strife. counselors are responsible for providing information about nipt’s accuracy and the probability of fetal anomalies according to maternal age. however, they see this information, in and of itself, as a risk factor for maternal well-being and feel obliged to warn their clients about the ethical risks surrounding nipt. facing subsequent invasive tests and a termination decision after a positive diagnosis makes for a risky horizon; however, making a two-fold determinant decision, namely, to undergo nipt and to terminate if a fetal anomaly is diagnosed, proves equally as risky, as asuka’s experience suggests. determination is risky, but indecisiveness might have provided her with an ethical safety net, particularly if witnessed by a counselor who can attest to the enactment of serious ethical labor in the case of a future moral breakdown following a negative or positive result. the duration and depth of the indecisiveness can be regarded as criteria for evaluating both individual moral caliber and the seriousness of the deliberation process. this invites anthropologists to acknowledge that in particular sociocultural settings, indecisiveness signifies a potent ethical stance rather than a failure to decide. indecisiveness can linger under regimes of structural ambivalence; in japan, public debates over brain death (akabayashi and slingsby 2003; lock 1998) and ivf regulations have continued for three decades. in the summer of 2019, the japanese reproductive genetics community was scandalized by media reports about unauthorized clinics providing nipt for cheaper prices. competition with authorized facilities notwithstanding, the nipt consortium members expressed outrage that nipt was being provided with little counseling: “what happens to a couple if, with no prior preparation, they only realize what this test is all about after receiving a result?” at stake for these reprogenetic experts was the blurring of nipt’s eugenic implications through the erasure of the deliberation process encouraged by counseling. it was the loss of ethical ambivalence that they mourned. interestingly, both scholars who insist that ambivalence constitutes an aspect of the japanese self resulting from the particular trajectory of japanese modernization (e.g., ohnuki-tierney 1990) and those who view it as the inevitable flipside of postmodernity more broadly (e.g., bauman 1991) theorize ambivalence as a spontaneous, unintentional, and almost unconscious undercurrent in people’s lives. this ethnography, however, shows mindful efforts to cultivate ambivalence as a virtuous ethical practice. if there is anything particularly japanese about the configuration of ambivalence elucidated here, it is perhaps the license ambivalence receives to openly structure private and public ethical deliberations. rather than muffling “unexamined neo-eugenic assumptions … through organizational routines of signing consent forms,” as faye ginsburg and rayna rapp (2021) described in the united states, nipt genetic counseling sessions in japan may become pedagogic procedures to keep prospective parents alert to the eugenic assumptions underlying reprogenetic technologies. far from being institutional mechanisms to restore a “morally comfortable world of unquestioned action” (zigon 2009, 269), ethicalization processes at both the level of policymaking and the clinical level of nipt genetic counseling become forms of what might be called the “exclusionary inclusion” of contested technologies. they are, in short, about having one’s cake and eating it, too: in other words, using reprogenetic technologies while, at the same time, cultivating and maintaining unrelenting ethical discomfort about them. importantly, the ambivalence cultivated in pre-nipt genetic counseling sessions should not be confused with ambiguity; it is, in fact, its opposite. ambivalence is about the elucidation of correlations between social realms of practice. in clinical encounters in japan it is often made clear that the termination of anomalous fetuses hovers at the horizons of nipt. furthermore, ambivalence flourishes on the acknowledgment of the divergent perspectives of different social agents and the internal complexities within each perspective. in short, ambivalence is the cognitive skill of seeing complexity clearly, and indecisiveness is its enactment. beyond japanese genetic counseling, the prospect of making space for complexities seems precisely what makes ambivalence attractive as a vantage point for some contemporary anthropologists (e.g., jovanović 2016; kierans and bell 2017). rather than the nonjudgmental approach advocated by early cultural relativists, within the current moral economy of anthropology (stoczkowski 2008), the call to cultivate ambivalence represents a countercurrent to the ethicalization of our discipline, testifying to the efforts required to suspend judgment in the face of pressures to take a stand. questions about the quality of ethical deliberations become more pertinent with the ethicalization of the world. anthropologists engage with such evaluative questions when lamenting the “erosion” (lambek et al. 2015, 2) of the language of ethics (which accompanies its spread to countless social activities) or noting that talk about ethics may appear “hypocritical” (lambek et al. 2015, 3) or “hollow” (das 2015, 55). we suggest that beyond such acknowledgments, if we are to understand how people seek to lead a moral life, it is essential to contemplate the question of how people and their ethnographers evaluate the quality of ethical deliberations. abstract anthropological engagement with moralities and ethics assumes that people evaluate themselves and others according to their notions of good and bad; yet little is known about how people evaluate the quality of their deliberations. such evaluations of the seriousness of ethical deliberations prevail in japan’s genetic counseling for pregnant couples considering nipt, a maternal blood test early in pregnancy that does not endanger the pregnancy but might lead to termination dilemmas. these deliberations are based on the idea that the ambivalence over whether to provide or undergo a potentially selective test is virtuous. this article examines how japanese policymakers, medical professionals, genetic counselors, and pregnant couples make decisions within social settings that valorize indecisiveness. ambivalence emerges as the cognitive skill of seeing complexity clearly. how people and their ethnographers evaluate the quality of ethical deliberations is essential to contemplate if we are to understand how people seek to lead a moral life. [ethicalization; ambivalence; virtue; prenatal diagnosis; genetic counseling; reproductive decisions; local moralities and ethics; japan] 摘要 道徳と倫理への人類学的な関与は、人々が善悪の概念に従って自分自身や他人を評価することを前提としている。 しかし、人々がその討議の良し悪しをどのように評価しているかについてはほとんど知られていない。このような倫理討議の深刻な評価は、妊娠を危険にさらすことはないが中絶のジレンマにつながる可能性のある妊娠初期の母体血液検査である nipt を検討している妊娠中のカップルに対する日本の遺伝カウンセリングでは一般的である。これらの討議と躊躇いは、潜在的に選択的なテストを提供したり受けたりすることが道徳にかなっているのかどうかという両価性の考えに基づいている。 この論文では、日本の政策立案者、医療専門家、遺伝カウンセラー、および妊娠中のカップルが、決断をためらうことに評価する社会環境の中でどのように決定を下すのかを調べる。両価性は、複雑さを明確に見る認知スキルとして現れる。 人々とその民族誌学者が倫理的審理の質をどのように評価するのかは、人々がどのように道徳的な生活を送ろうとしているのかを理解し熟考することが不可欠だ。 [倫理化, 両価性, 美徳, 出生前診断, 遺伝カウンセリング, 生殖決定, 地域の道徳と倫理, 日本] notes acknowledgments the first author is grateful to the israel science foundation for generously funding this research (grant no.1854/14). special thanks go to rika takaki-eini for transcribing the interviews and for her invaluable help throughout the research process. most of all, the first author is grateful to the pregnant women and their partners, the genetic counselors, and the ob-gyns who agreed to share their thoughts about the sensitive issues at hand. all three authors are indebted to the three anonymous reviewers and to the cultural anthropology editorial team for their insightful comments and suggestions that helped sharpen our arguments. thanks are owed to nikki littman and petra dreiser for their sensitive english editing of the manuscript. 1. the names and selected details of research participants were changed to protect their privacy. 2. see https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11908000/000754902.pdf. accessed on 12 march 2023. 3. the interviews all occurred in japanese and were translated into english by ivry. 4. virtue here is based on thomas widlok’s (2012) idea of virtue as an observable practice rather than an idealized notion. 5. debates persist about how anthropologists should effectively approach the ethical: as a day-to-day immanence in people’s lives (lambek 2010), an eventual occurrence (lempert 2014; zigon 2007) or as a form of reasoning (sykes 2012), sentiment or sensitivity (throop 2012), or performative action (lambek 2010; see also lempert 2014). how should ethnographers account for individuals’ endeavors to constitute themselves as moral subjects while paying heed to the intersubjective and social dimensions of ethical reflections (jackson 2005)? these questions offer some examples of the vibrant field of inquiries into ethics and moralities in anthropology. for a conclusive review, see mattingly and throop 2018. 6. see https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11908000/000754902.pdf. accessed on 12 march 2023. 7. pregnant women can choose to undergo checkups (using local government payment coupons) in a range of facilities including general hospitals, maternity hospitals (often run privately by an ob-gyn), or birth centers run by midwives. 8. the research was approved by the ethics committees of each of the three authors’ institutions. in addition to the interviews, ivry also conducted participant observations in nipt genetic counseling sessions in a hospital in northeastern honshu (tohoku) in 2019. the authors also collected fifty-two questionnaires about pregnant women’s experiences of nipt, also using them to find pregnant women willing to be interviewed. the second and third authors, who are medical professionals, introduced the research to applicants for pre-nipt genetic counseling. women interested in participating were invited to watch a short introductory video recorded in japanese by ivry (available by request). those who consented filled out a questionnaire about their nipt experience and indicated their readiness to be interviewed by ivry. the authors also gathered media coverage of the public debates on nipt, statement papers, formal instructions for conducting nipt and supplementary explanatory materials, genetic counseling textbooks, and nipt statistics issued by jsog and the japanese ministry of health since issuing the guidelines in may 2013. 9. at the time of the interview, the women ranged in age between thirty-five and forty-six. of the total twenty-seven, thirteen were parents of one or two children, thirteen were working mothers, twenty-six were married, and their partners ranged in age between thirty-four and fifty-two. the women lived in various towns around tohoku, and ten had received an nipt referral from the maternity clinic in their hometown. of the interviewees, eleven couples had undergone fertility treatment to conceive. all the interviewees received negative nipt results; seven were interviewed shortly after receiving the results. 10. fertility rates declined to 1.41 in 2012 (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/geppo/nengai12/dl/gaikyou24.pdf; accessed on 12 march 2023). 11. working mother rates were 52.4 percent in 2018 (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/geppo/nengai12/dl/gaikyou24.pdf; accessed on 12 march 2023). 12. average mean age was 30.3 in 2012 (https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/geppo/nengai12/dl/gaikyou24.pdf; accessed on 12 march 2023). 13. there is a 99.1 percent detection rate for trisomy 21 according to sequenome, the u.s. company that developed the test. 14. indeed, while a doctor cannot legally be sued for failing to diagnose a fetal anomaly, in a legal precedent from 1992, parents won a suit against a doctor who was found guilty of infringing their right to make “mental preparations” (精神的準備, seishintekijunbi) for the birth of a child with special needs (maruyama 2014). 15. elaboration on prospective parents’ negotiations with japanese disability politics lies beyond the scope of this article. 16. eri takeda and colleagues (2018) reported on post-partum maternal distress in women who underwent nipt. references addison, courtney 2022 “an ethics of enchantment: forming affect and information in experimental paediatric medicine.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 28, no. 1: 260–78. 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cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 2, pp. 171-197, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.2.01 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 131–161, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.06 akanksha awal university of oxford https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8684-7795 the most dangerous thing of all is the death of our desires. —pash (1950–88), punjabi poet in ghaziabad, a city of 3.4 million inhabitants on the eastern edge of delhi in the state of uttar pradesh, jyoti and i were sitting under the shade of a tree outside a degree college, where she was studying for a master’s in sociology. we met regularly in 2015 and 2016 when i was conducting ethnographic research on how education changes women’s ideas of love, marriage, and desirable futures. jyoti and i first met in the girls’ common room of her college when i was waiting to meet with the college principal. that day, jyoti was laughing coquettishly into the phone and cajoling the policeman she was speaking to top up her phone. i was sitting beside her completing my notes, trying not to listen to her seemingly private conversation. after only a couple of minutes, jyoti hung up and chided me for my lack of interest in her conversation. she seemed annoyed by my distance. “you have ruined your life [barbaad] by doing this phd!” she said somewhat angrily. “you should at least be interested in speaking to them,” she implored. assuming that she was suggesting love as enjoyment: hopelessness, play, and desirable futures in ghaziabad, india cultural anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-2164 cultural anthropology 40:1 132 a flirtatious engagement with the policeman, i protested and explained that i already had a boyfriend, and that i felt committed to him. “so what,” she rebutted; “he is there [abroad], you are here.” even if i had a boyfriend, she said, i should enjoy like she did (using the english word in a hindi sentence). “one should enjoy with many people,” she repeatedly advised me. over the next few months, jyoti tried to set me up with her cousins and classmates, encouraging me to have fun with her. she repeatedly reminded me that her sister-in-law had told her that going out with one’s husband after marriage can get boring after a while (shaadi ke baad tu ek hi admi ke saath sara time jaan-aana padta hain), so, she advised jyoti, who in turn advised me, to enjoy while in college (i.e., before marriage and still able to). however, i had yet to learn that enjoyment meant cultivating erotic desire in casual encounters without assuming that it would lead to sex, love, or marriage. jyoti was an excellent guide to enjoyment and repeatedly asked me if she could give my number to her cousins. while i repeatedly declined, jyoti grew exasperated, until one day she pulled me close, held my waist tight, and pinched me. as i howled in pain, she laughed adding that i seemed too thin to be married (lagti to nahi ho),1 with a strong suggestion that i should be enjoying with her. i concede that jyoti’s trick sort of worked, because from then on, we went around town together: she as the lead, me as her wing(wo)man. such a play with intimacy allowed jyoti to reconstitute herself after an attempted suicide over a cheating boyfriend. after this failed pursuit of love, jyoti insisted that enjoying with strangers would not lead to love or marriage. enjoyment, i discovered over time, is a version of love that offers short-term pleasures and the possibility of play by cultivating erotic desire in casual encounters. such encounters may seem like dating now common in india’s cities and include going to the cinema, exchanging small gifts, or cracking flirtatious jokes with a partner in the malls and parks (bhandari 2020; derné 2000; lukose 2009). however, instead of leading to a future with marriage, these encounters were defiantly presentist. they were also strategic, as women referred to enjoyment as a version of dimaagwala pyaar, or love (pyaar) conducted with the mind (dimaag). this implied a calculated emotional investment into the pursuit, and withdrawal if challenges emerge. this love stood beside dilwala pyaar, or love (pyaar) conducted by the heart (dil): an uncontrollable and yet sacred feeling that ought to be pursued to marriage. this fragmentation of love (pyaar) into different kinds plays with expectations in present-day ghaziabad that love should lead to a future, that is, marriage.2 as a short-lived kind of love, enjoyment allows middle-class love as enjoyment 133 women to play with a future of compulsory marriages while enrolled in a college education that enables their access to the city.3 it emerges under conditions of pervasive unemployment among educated men and women, something that prevents them from marrying against their family’s wishes. and even as women maintained that enjoyment would not lead to a future, it provided pleasure and hope, helping educated young women like jyoti unexpectedly realize their ideals of desirable futures. * * * in this article, i explore how women engage with and discover forms of love, enjoyment, pleasure, and desire that do not necessarily lead to marriage in the context of urbanization, the rise of women’s education, and pervasive unemployment in ghaziabad. in so doing, women discover that erotic desire need not be restricted to love in a marriage and can be cultivated without assuming that it will lead to either love or marriage. love, in this article, is not simply a “pure” feeling of care and concern for another that helps people work toward a desirable future (giddens 1991). rather, it is a constantly shifting narration in time of how people experience and make sense of their feelings of attraction for another (ahearn 2001; berlant 2011; maqsood 2021; wynn 2018). these feelings can range from spontaneous attraction to a bond that emerges through shared life experiences over time. love can be fun, pleasurable, and caring, but it can also be also jealous, aggressive, and hopeless. yet what is experienced and validated as love is determined by social and cultural strictures over its narration. the experiences of love and their narrations shift over time as changing socioeconomic circumstances, such as urbanization and rising unemployment, bear down on the subject. love, in other words, comes in many varieties, each with its own set of emotional expressions and registers of erotic desire (lindholm 2006; orsini 2006; mian 2019; vanita 2005). these feelings condition people’s temporal expectations for what kind of love can be experienced with whom and for how long. in postcolonial india, monogamy has become a norm, and love (or pyaar) receives social validation through marriage (basu 2015; donner 2002; mody 2008). it was not always like this. historically, marriages were “arranged” by the parents within caste and religious boundaries. there was no expectation that these arrangements will involve love or a romantic bond between couples. instead, such marriages were undertaken primarily for the perpetuation of families while love was found in relationships outside of these arranged marriages. this changed with colonial and postcolonial laws that instituted monogamy in cultural anthropology 40:1 134 marriages, removing the possibilities of second or third relationships, and in the process cemented the idea that pyaar should lead to one marriage possible over a lifetime. this kind of love (pyaar or simply dilwala pyaar) involves pleasure alongside suffering to care for another. it typically emerges through cohabitation and the sharing of life experiences over time. but when this kind of love emerges before marriage, even for people within the same caste or religious backgrounds, it is narrated as “a hapless feeling” that compels people to go against the family’s wishes to marry the persons of their choosing (ahearn 2001; hansen 1991; mody 2008). although self-choosing marriages4 can take place across caste and religious boundaries, parental support for them is contingent on the wealth and influence of the person women seek to marry (abraham 2014; bhandari 2020). going against the parents’ wishes can lead to excommunication from families (grover 2017). enjoyment (or dimaagwala pyaar) as a form of love that thrives on sexual frisson and play in urban spaces seeks to circumvent these casteand class-based restrictions over love, sex, and marriage in ghaziabad. it uncouples desiring practices of flirting and joking from their assumed progression to love (pyaar) or marriage. ethnographically focusing on enjoyment as an alternate form of love challenges the idealization of love in anthropology and philosophy as a “revolutionary force” that is expected to usher in a utopian future where love overcomes social differences of class or caste, and leads to a desirable middle-class future of marriage and monogamy (ahearn 2001; cole and thomas 2009; das 1995; mody 2008; rapport 2018). enjoyment also helps question the disregard of love in cultural studies and queer theory as a cruel space of unreciprocated care and concern that exploits human emotions, and instead of leading to a utopian future, keeps things the same (abraham 2014; berlant 2011; basu 2015; federici 1975; illouz 2007, 17; paik 2022; povinelli 2006). love, in this register, constitutes a cruel repetition of gestures of romance that provides the comfort of being able to hope for middle-class futures—even as those futures never arrive (berlant 2001). as we shall see, my interlocutors’ love for men, often in insecure jobs, nurtured their hopes of joining urban middle-class lives, also depicted in bollywood films, where love leading to marriage5 is the norm (bhandari 2020; donner 2016). this hope, as lauren berlant suggests, turned cruel and became an obstacle to women’s flourishing in the face of the deceptions of their boyfriends who would not marry them and the coercions of their families who wanted to marry them off. in contrast, enjoyment as a temporary kind of love allowed women to work past the cruel optimism of love leading to marriage. women’s time before love as enjoyment 135 marriage was vital to their futures, so while enrolled in college, they used enjoyment to experiment with intimacies. instead of timepass or meaninglessly hanging out in the city while waiting for a desirable future to arrive (jeffrey 2010), my interlocutors creatively thought through love and reconstituted it as a site for self-affirmation, pleasure, and erotic relationships with friends, sisters-in-law, and brothers-in-law. in so doing, women used this short-lived type of love to reshape their futures even in the face of hopelessness and middle-class precarity. the essay is organized as follows: the first part situates companionate practices of enjoying within broader global debates about love, enjoyment, and middle-classness. the next section shows how young women worked out ideas of love, marriage, and pleasure in their lives through banter and play; the final part discusses how such practices allowed women to redefine love and relationships with family and friends. all in all, this research contributes to anthropological discussions about contemporary forms of love that shape and enable orientation towards the future in middle-class women’s lives. love as enjoyment the association of love with the pursuit of a desirable future is a recurring theme in social theory. philosophers from søren kierkegaard to luce irigaray (1980) argue that love is a “pure” feeling of care and concern for another that compels people to overcome self-centered behaviors.6 if channeled correctly, this feeling for another can help overcome class and gendered differences and usher in a utopian future where these inequalities matter less (beck and beck-gernsheim 1995; giddens 1991). for anthropologists, love likewise helps couples create a world separate and often in opposition to social norms (ahearn 2001; das 1995; gell 2011; hardt 2011; mody 2008; rapport 2018; shah 2013). this kind of love is removed both from the pursuit of sexual pleasure (reddy 2012) and from contractual obligations of social and legal marriages that sustain communities (abu-lughod 2016; giddens 1991; lévi-strauss 1969; kaur and palriwala 2014; ramberg 2014; strathern 1990; rubin 1975; roy 2022).7 against this idealization, however, in india, love that entails a separation from the family often leads to precarity (abraham 2014; chowdhry 2011; grover 2017; see also, majumdar 2009; and paik 2022 for a historical overview). this is because, historically, love or a romantic bond between couples was incidental in an arranged marriage, which were primarily organized for the perpetuation of families.8 in contrast, enjoyment was a derogatory way of addressing practices of plural marriages, customary divorces, and cohabitation common among the cultural anthropology 40:1 136 lower castes in precolonial india (basu 2015, 63). these practices were regarded as threats to monogamy and outlawed by the colonial and postcolonial indian state (sen 1999). therefore, in present-day ghaziabad, as throughout northern india, where monogamous marriages have become the norm, families still excommunicate couples who marry for love in violation of an obligation to families (abraham 2014; chowdhry 2011). yet the family’s support proves especially important in urbanizing regions of northern india where education does not lead to secure jobs or timepass (jeffrey 2010), and where a decline in agricultural income has been replaced by rental income from the development of family’s farmlands into flats and shops. these middle-class formations have increased women’s enrollment in education (john 2021), a prerequisite for marrying into a wealthier household, or “hypergamy” (majumdar 2004; thapan 2003), enabling their mobility and also raising the age of marriage, so that they spend longer in their natal homes. at the same time, women’s education has also imposed stricter restrictions on whom they can marry (abraham 2014; chaudhry 2021),9 making love leading to a happy-ever-after marriage an unattainable aspiration (abraham 2014; basu 2015; dyson 2018; kang 2023).10 however, berlant (2011) argues that women pursue love even after realizing that it may not lead to a desirable future because it provides the comfort of being able to hope for a different kind of future. berlant explains that this hope can be cruel in the euro-american context if it traps the subject in the pursuit of unattainable middle-class futures of stable jobs and marriages and impedes her flourishing. as i will show, my interlocutors’ hopes of marrying less well-off men in ghaziabad, in line with bollywood romances where love overcomes all obstacles and leads to marriage, became a cruel obstacle in women’s lives, just as berlant suggests.11 in the ruins of this failed pursuit of love, my respondents kindled erotic desire in casual encounters, “enjoying,” and they did so by drawing on older ideas of erotic cultivation in the region (rege 1995; jassal 2012). such practices are not unique to urban india and seem increasingly common in other geographies, as marriages come under strain due to a lack of secure middle-class jobs (see, for example, archambault 2013; cole 2010; nyamnjoh 2009; wynn 2018; takeyama 2016). in these contexts, temporary relationships outside of marriage provide women self-affirmation, pleasure, and access to some middle-class goods and comforts (alexy 2020; groes-green 2014; illouz 2007; mcdonald 2019; newell 2012). in ghaziabad, however, marriages for women are a non-negotiable certainty; they are regarded a sacrament that needs fulfillment regardless of financial uncertainties or domestic violence (chaudhry 2021). love as enjoyment 137 at the same time, historically common second or third marriages and customary divorces are increasingly unavailable to middle-class women, causing despair about women’s marital futures. in this context, where the future seems bleak, college-attending women creatively improvise enjoyment before entering a monogamous marriage. interestingly, my interlocutors referred to enjoyment as a form of love (dimaagwala pyaar), or love conducted with the mind. instead of the progression to marriage, this new kind of love remained defiantly presentist. by narrating and experiencing enjoyment as a form of love, women pointed to a historical understanding in south asia that love exists in many forms.12 these forms of love shift in response to social histories and political realities, such as colonization and urbanization (hansen 1991; mian 2019). the re-emergence of enjoyment in urban spaces reflects how the liberalization of the indian economy has fused city life with sexual desire, designating the urban as a space for experimenting with intimacies (mazzarella 2003; mani 2014; srivastava 2014). city life then often reproduces heteronormativity and marriage (ramberg 2016). however, the narration of enjoyment as a short-lived kind of love shows how women creatively improvised temporary relationships without expecting it to lead to marriage. they did so by reworking bollywood romances where love leads to marriage (dwyer 2000; see simone 2018 on relationships as urban resources), adapting them to their local setting. enjoyment, then, departs from what love (pyaar) means in a conventional sense in ghaziabad, but it is also more grounded in women’s desires. for example, while love in my field site was described and experienced as an overwhelming feeling expected to lead to marriage (mody 2008; see also maqsood 2021), it was typically conducted with the heart (dilwala pyaar), involved selfless care, and was only possible with one person. in contrast, enjoyment was not expected to lead to an enduring relationship, and therefore one could enjoy with many people, often across caste, religious, and gender boundaries. and while love (pyaar) involved suffering that could over time lead to a lack of sex (then it is narrated as prem), enjoyment raised the possibility of sex, which may or may not happen.13 and even as enjoying was not expected to lead to a future, it was still future-oriented, as it sought longterm stability, but on different terms, by reshaping relationships with sisters-inlaw and friends in erotic registers. in what follows, i illustrate how women use enjoyment to reshape their futures on their terms. i arrived in ghaziabad city to understand how tertiary education changes women’s subjectivities and discovered that although women’s ideals of marriage had changed to include love (dilwala pyaar) and care from their partners cultural anthropology 40:1 138 (jeffery 2014), my interlocutors and their sisters struggled to meet these ideals in practice. the three interlocutors in this article, jyoti, priyanka, and nagma, belonged to established middle-class families. during fieldwork, they were trying to turn love (dilwala pyaar) for their boyfriends, who were in poorly paid, insecure jobs, into marriages even as their parents sought to control when and whom they married and whether they attended college. jyoti, the twenty-fouryear-old dalit respondent with whom i started the essay, for example, insisted that enjoyment with men and women would not lead to love (pyaar). she learned this, she told me, after attempting suicide after her boyfriend, from the same caste (jatav), cheated. in contrast, priyanka enjoyed with friends and me often while waiting to meet her boyfriend, a married man belonging to a caste (jats) higher than hers (jatav). finally, nagma, an upper-caste muslim (khan) respondent estranged from her family, insisted that she was enjoying with her hindu boyfriend while working out ideals of love in her life. her boyfriend belonged to a land-owning caste (gurjar) and depended on his mother’s rental income for expenses. my presence as an educated upper-caste (khatri) punjabi woman in a long-distance relationship allowed differences around relationships, caste, class, and age to emerge and be openly discussed (ciotti 2011), though never fully transcended (shankar 2022).14 the three women served as role models for their friends for how to enjoy in ghaziabad city. and yet, their stories of love “gone wrong” (pinto 2014) were also cautionary tales for them to not pursue love (pyaar) leading to marriage. therefore, many if not most of the one hundred middle-class and lower-middle-class young women and twenty men respondents in ghaziabad, hapur, and meerut districts insisted that they enjoyed without ever having pursued love (pyaar) leading to marriage.15 in moments of quiet reflection, though, they referred to enjoyment as a form of love without a future (see also dave 2018) and entered arranged marriages. in the next sections, i describe and discuss the pursuit of love and enjoyment among middle-class young people in ghaziabad, starting with priyanka’s pursuit of love (pyaar or dilwala) leading to marriage. love’s futures? “rehte rehte pyaar badta hain,” love slowly emerges in a marriage, priyanka’s aunties consoled her after she rejected yet another match arranged by her relatives. her aunties were trying to deflect her negative first impressions of a proposed suitor by evoking a long-standing ideal that love is expected to emerge love as enjoyment 139 in a marriage not from initial attraction, but through cohabitation over a lifetime. in contrast, young women with whom i worked for this research like priyanka narrated love as a feeling of instant attraction. “you can’t just love anyone. love just happens!” they told me. such discussions about when love appears and how long it would last reflect how women sought to work out the different kinds of love that were possible and available in their futures. priyanka, for example, believed that if love was not there at the start, in an initial meeting, then it would not grow in marriage either. it seemed to her that love in a marriage diminished over time. she pointed out that, after years of marriage, her elder sister’s husband publicly humiliated her sister and pointed out the flaws in her speech and gait, taunting her over how much she ate. and while my interlocutors believed that an ideal husband demonstrates love and care by meeting a woman’s desires (woh bahut pyaar karte hain, unki har khawaish poori karte hain) (wadley 1994; zharkevich 2019), priyanka observed that her sister’s husband often denied her requests for washing machines or mobile phones, which her father then provided. to priyanka, such deflection to women’s families for financial and emotional care signaled that husbands did not provide loving care in marriage. it seemed unsurprising to her, therefore, when several marriage proposals for her ended over demands that an suv be included in her dowry. for the young women in this article, middle-class futures of love in a marriage—expressed through expensive gift exchanges at festivals, high demands for dowry from the bride’s parents, and dwelling in a nuclear family—made for an uncertain possibility (cf. donner 2016; ponniah 2017). while their farming families gained wealth through rising land prices around delhi, these developments have not resulted in secure incomes (jeffrey and young 2014), leading to marital disputes and divorces over desires for consumer items. rising dowries that make matchmaking difficult on a family’s finances (basu 2015; jeffery 2014; see majumdar 2009 for a historical overview) and lead to repeated rejections also affected my respondents’ self-esteem. love, and its many forms, in this context of frequent refusals and breakdowns of relationships, offers a kind of reprieve. priyanka, for example, did not expect to fall in love with her boyfriend. when she met him, he looked young and had a good body and sense of humor, she told me. at first, he pursued her, she insisted (woh mere pichche aaya tha). but once the relationship was established, priyanka discovered that he was married and had a wife and two children in a village outside of ghaziabad. moreover, he was not educated and did not have a secure job, even though he belonged to a cultural anthropology 40:1 140 land-owning caste higher up in the caste hierarchy than her own. still, priyanka wanted to marry him, expecting him to leave his wife. priyanka told me that she had not even enjoyed with anyone before him. she narrated this kind of love for her boyfriend as a sacred bond or dilwala pyaar, or a kind of love conducted with the heart. these powerful feelings, women argued, appeared out of the blue, often at first sight, and were experienced as a hapless feeling over which they had no control. for priyanka, this kind of love for a married man constituted madness (pagpalpan) that drove her to contemplate a future of marriage with a man who told her that he would not leave his wife. and yet, she felt compelled to pursue this kind of love leading to marriage—despite opposition from her family—and without regard for caste and social strictures (ahearn 2001; maqsood 2021; mody 2008; cf. govindrajan 2021). in bollywood films, love (pyaar or dilwala pyaar) that drives people to give up their families in pursuit of the lover is often shown to lead to a happy-ever-after future of marriage (dwyer 2000; see also pandian 2015).16 however, priyanka’s reality in ghaziabad differed starkly: on discovering her relationship with a married man, her parents tried to hastily arrange her marriage within the dalit community. she repeatedly declined those matches by pointing out that the proposed men were dark-skinned or too short. responding to her insistence, her parents called her boyfriend, who denied their relationship, saying that he was already married and priyanka was mad (pagal). from then on, everyone in priyanka’s family stopped speaking with her (poochte nahi; chod diya), a form of cruelty historically observed in india and beyond when women do not conform to social rules (paik 2022). priyanka’s desires for this particular boyfriend constitutes dilwala pyaar, a kind of devotion to the beloved (orsini 2006), a historically common way of experiencing love in this region. priyanka explained that love (diwala pyaar) gave her strength to endure the burns on her stomach from when her brother threw tea after she did not agree to marry the man her parents had chosen for her. she narrated love (diwala pyaar) as forgiveness as she waited for her boyfriend even when he was attending to his family, regularly turned off the phone, and did not meet her for weeks at a time (main hafton wait karti hoon aur naraaz nahi hoti). love (pyaar) for priyanka was both a hapless feeling (mody 2008; maqsood 2021) and labor (govindrajan 2021). priyanka undertook this labor because she wanted to turn her love into longer-term, enduring marriage. as priyanka’s family tried to get her to move on, she enrolled in a law program. she regarded this as timepass to signal the futility of studying in securing a middle-class job to love as enjoyment 141 achieve the life of her imagination (jeffrey 2010).17 instead of studying, priyanka tried to start an illicit business with her boyfriend, promising government jobs to aspiring teachers. she did this hoping to draw him closer and have money to buy a flat to live with him (“live-in” relationship). the business, however, led to a physical tussle between priyanka and her boyfriend. her boyfriend further threatened her parents to keep a check on her, leaving priyanka seriously unwell. for days, priyanka’s family restricted her from going to college and took away her phone and money. in cruel optimism, berlant (2010, 94; 2011) explores the pursuit of a middle-class future in “compromised conditions of possibility.” berlant conceptualizes this space between ideals and reality as one of cruelty, where a subject’s investment in the pursuit of love comes at the cost of the exploration of other worlds that would enable a subject’s flourishing (2011). such an emotional investment in love to achieve a semblance of a middle-class life, berlant (2011) explains, exhausts the subject. the urdu poet ghalib likewise cautions against a complete immersion in the pursuit of love that causes a subject to withdraw from world-building activities that could enable her flourishing (pugh 1991). as a subject tries harder and harder to remain close to her object of desire (e.g., a boyfriend), she loses the ability to explore other possibilities that could see her thriving. for young women like priyanka, the pursuit of love with a less well-off man, one who even denied the existence of their relationship, caused an emotional separation from her family, who had at initially tried to support her. priyanka’s unwavering hope for her love (diwala pyaar) left her seriously unwell, and she kept declining to meet the matches that could lead to a different future. this type of love (dilwala pyaar) that is expected to lead to marriage reproduces the dynamics of subordination of women’s desires in relationships. it also does not lead to change in women’s lives or to social change, where people can marry outside of caste or religious boundaries. however, even as priyanka absorbed the pitfalls of pursuing love (dilwala pyaar), she discovered an alternate space to cultivate and experience sexual attraction in the new retail malls and parks in ghaziabad city. in the mall, she used naughty gestures, such as winking, pouting, and sexual innuendo to have fun. my interlocutors narrated erotic practices such as these as enjoyment and insisted that they would not lead to pyaar. interestingly, priyanka explained these practices as a kind of love that involved working with one’s brains (dimaagwala pyaar) in pursuit of one’s desires for middle-class activities, such as dining out, having fun at the mall (brosius 2010; anjaria and anjaria 2020)—and exiting relationships if challenges emerged. cultural anthropology 40:1 142 priyanka pointed out, for example, that her friends who enjoyed with several people did not suffer by waiting for their boyfriends like she did. instead, they often broke up if their boyfriends did not return their phone calls. enjoyment, for her, emerged as a cultivated practice that gave primacy to her desires for a middle-class life. in these erotic encounters, women specifically sought middle-class men, typically from jat, gurjar, yadav,18 or muslim landholding communities in the region,19 but also less well-off “local” men they encountered in college. jyoti, my interlocutor who constantly asked me to enjoy with her, explained that she always sought men who would “look good on the arm” (saath chale to acha lage); who would be “fair and tall” (mujhe lambe aur gore admi ko kiss karna hain), emphasizing her desires for an equal match both in looks and pace of life. they would be brusque on the outside, to fend off unwanted suitors, but pliant when she tried out makeup and bags in the mall. priyanka’s experiences were similar. with these boyfriends, these young women engaged in middle-class activities, such as dinners out or watching films. jyoti, for example, explained to me that she engaged in the typical middle-class activity of “sex-talk” or discussions on sexual practices (uberoi 2011) with middle-class men of her choosing. such sexual innuendo both provided her laughter and excitement, while also allowing her to embody the bollywood portrayal of middle-class women hanging out in the malls and coffee shops in india’s bigger cities (bhandari 2023; anjaria and anjaria 2020), even as dating was not a common premarital practice among the lower middle class in 2015–2016. in practice, women like priyanka and jyoti engaged in enjoying after a failed pursuit of love. however, the maintenance of a distinction between these two forms of love—enjoying and love (pyaar)—shapes women’s expectations of the future. women narrated and experienced enjoyment as a present-oriented activity that would not lead to love with a future (pyaar). while love (dilwala pyaar) in ghaziabad entailed suffering, waiting for a boyfriend, and neglect by families and the men, enjoying allowed them to play with the erotic affordances of the city. it enabled them to have fun and experiment with gender norms, puncturing men’s fantasies of women’s humiliation. it was hopeless to pursue love, priyanka concluded after her boyfriend told her that he would not leave his wife. she argued instead that women who sought enjoyment were better off (jo ladkiyan practical hoti hain woh theek rehti hain jo dil se nahin dimaag se pyaar karti hain). as i will show next, these two types of love are often pursued side by side, one feeding the other. just as enjoyment emerges when love (diwala pyaar) does not work out, love as enjoyment 143 it also helps women redefine what kind of love they could have in their lives, offering them sustenance and hope against hope. playful enjoyment during her relationship with her boyfriend, priyanka was adept at seeking fun in public spaces (“priyanka makes everyone enjoy!” her friends often told me). one afternoon, she and i were waiting for her boyfriend after watching a film in the mall. she was touching up her makeup in the washroom when he texted to say that he would not be able to come. priyanka was upset, but she walked out of the washrooms determined not to let this show. a group of young men were hanging out at the popcorn counter. priyanka made eye contact with them, pursed her lips, and asked me to look their way: “see, how they are checking me out!” (dekh, kaise dekh rahe hain.) the men looked right back at us. they followed us out of the mall and chased us in the autorickshaw, blowing kisses through the window. they tried to give priyanka their numbers, but priyanka declined. she smiled and shouted “no!” emptily waving her hand at them. she explained to me that the men had taken it too seriously (woh kahaan se pichche lag gaya, patanka sa). for her, this was meaningless fun (aise hi)! an exchange of glances, a brief dialogue, or a kiss blown at a passerby all form part of romantic pursuit (philip 2022; osella and osella 1998). however, by referring to this practice as meaningless fun, priyanka was playing down expectations set in bollywood cinema and among societal elders that flirting would lead to a longer-term engagement with the men. for middle-class young women in ghaziabad like priyanka, such temporary encounters with men play up the possibility of sex, which may or may not happen. my interlocutors practice enjoyment as a kind of love conducted with the mind (dimaagwala pyaar), as it privileges women’s aspirations for hanging out in middle-class spaces in the city. this kind of love is available to these women in urbanizing ghaziabad and marks a distinct phase in their lives before marriage. during this time, my interlocutors learn how love shifts forms from one kind (dilwala pyaar) to another (enjoyment) when economic and social structures bear down on them. these practices of enjoyment borrow from older forms of erotic cultivation through, for example, libertine jokes, galis (abusive language), or ribald songs that play up sexual charge inherent in relationships to challenge existing caste and gender relations (jassal 2012). they bring to light ephemeral connections not expected to lead anywhere, for example, with a husband’s elder brother or father-in-law (chowdhry 2011; jassal 2012; raheja and gold 1994)—although cultural anthropology 40:1 144 sometimes they do (sharma 1978).20 the difference is that educated young women in ghaziabad across castes enjoy with committed, unavailable, or taboo sexual partners, often merging the older forms with newer depictions as set by bollywood films, where the middle classes are expected to “enjoy” in disparate consumer settings—from fashion to mobile phones, from restaurants to condoms—outside of the rigid social norms attached to caste and gender (liechty 2005; mazzarella 2003, 70–71). enjoyment provides self-affirmation, pleasure, and care. it creates a new space for women’s autonomy in “out-of-the-way” spaces on the urban edges of delhi in ghaziabad, as well as in noida, meerut, and faridabad (see also brunson 2014; phadke, khan, and ranade 2011; roy 2022). take, for example, nagma’s cross-caste, same-gendered friendship with kriti that, as i will show, plays up the erotic possibilities of relationships before marriage by engaging with the aesthetic culture of the mall. nagma, an upper-caste muslim met kriti, a young woman from a mid-ranking caste of gardeners, at a coaching center when preparing for the civil services examination. together, they spent time in malls further away from ghaziabad, in the neighboring district of noida. they chose these spaces to avoid getting caught by nagma’s family, who were looking at that time for a match for her within the muslim community. after an introduction to a thirty-five-year-old man from her community, whom nagma found “disgusting,” she called her boyfriend at that time to discuss their future, but he did not show up. nagma then invited kriti, two friends from the coaching center, and me to the mall. she was seeking relief and poking fun at every possible opportunity. that day, as we walked past a billboard with a bikini-clad model lying on a beach, kriti pointed to the model’s cleavage and tugged at nagma. nagma laughed at kriti’s suggestion and goaded her, “go on, check her out, kriti!” she informed me that kriti went around malls checking out other women. “you should have been a man,” nagma said, now playing with kriti’s hand. by kindling desire with kriti, nagma worked with the playful, teasing, and aggressive genres of desire (hendriks 2016; jassal 2012; krishnan 2016). kriti’s lower-caste status and her physical shortness made her an unlikely suitor for nagma in the conventional sense that regards tall men from dominant castes as desirable partners. but enjoyment makes it possible to rework these ideals, even if only discursively. faced with a future that seemed bleak, enjoyment allowed nagma to play with gender norms of intimacy, and this itself was a source of women’s hopes. by offering her emotional care, and pleasure, kriti challenged the idea that only men could do so in a marriage. later among friends, kriti love as enjoyment 145 put her arm around nagma’s shoulder, raising alarm among the men who derided their friendship: “these two are always together!” but kriti raised her chin at the men and asserted, “yes, we are lesbians!” holding onto nagma. her gesture portrayed kriti as nagma’s protector, and played down the fantasy that only a boyfriend could provide financial care or protection (philip 2022, 149; cf. basu 2020). in so doing, kriti and nagma escaped the instrumental logic that the cultivation of desire should lead to marriage. instead, through laughter and play, they lived out their imaginations of relationships in the here and now, even against the men’s policing and castigation. the mere existence of hope for finding comfort among same-gender friends makes for a political stance against the hopeless circumstances that suggest otherwise. these quotidian spaces of pleasure and play allow educated young women to rediscover forms of love, such as enjoying, where joy and laughter offered at least some opportunity for experimentation with intimacy. these practices emerge out of women’s frustrations with a lack of love and care in increasingly commercialized arranged marriages, on the one hand, and the unreliability of boyfriends whom they love, on the other. however, time and time again, women discover that enjoyment does not lead to changes either. sometimes, the realization strikes when their friends ask for sexual favors; other times, when men resort to stalking, abusive phone calls, or threats of speaking with their parents and sharing her photos with the woman’s new partner. in despair, women give up chasing the “not yet” of an imagined future (appadurai 2004; miyazaki 2006) of egalitarian friendships with men as templates for future marriages. instead, like nagma that day, they insist on chasing pleasure, regarding it as a locus of a diffuse kind of hope against hope (crapanzano 2003; see also foucault 1997). “enjoy today, who knows about tomorrow,” my respondents often told me when persuading me to join them. this insistent disregard for the future shows that these pleasures are not goal-directed. rather the pursuit of pleasure allows them to hope for the present to turn out otherwise in the face of hopelessness (crapanzano 2003). and even though this presentist kind of love is forever in danger of being subsumed by larger neoliberal transformations that privilege immediacy and heteronormativity (menon 2009; ramberg 2016; kornbluh 2023), love in this part of south asia has historically constituted a site for developing emotional sensibilities (schofield 2021; mian 2019). in my research, the immersion in the pursuit of love allows educated young women to trick time (bear 2016) by lingering in the malls of ghaziabad city,21 especially as their access to these spaces is restricted by their marital status and class position.22 therefore, cultural anthropology 40:1 146 when they are able to do so, such hopes, cultivated together with others, allow middle-class women like nagma, jyoti, priyanka, and kriti to re-imagine and discover new types of love. mocking marriage “there is someone for me somewhere,” nagma told me one day as she left her home after a tussle with her mother and brother who had beaten her and threatened to kill her if she did not marry the man of their choosing. marriage negotiations still loom large in educated women’s lives in ghaziabad, and these negotiations taught them that enjoyment was most likely just a phase in their lives, which they would need to give up to ultimately marry within caste and class boundaries. nagma’s marriage proposal came from her sister’s brother-inlaw. it included a flat in a prestigious locality for nagma’s natal family as bride price, an offer was too good to be missed, her brother told her. but nagma was alarmed to find that her prospective husband wanted nagma to wear a veil, not use whatsapp, or work after marriage. nagma noted these restrictions as signs of a broader incompatibility in their worldviews and pleaded with her family to allow her to finish her law degree while they looked for someone more suitable. yet they dismissed her education as something unimportant in comparison to the possibility of such a good match. the evening after the tussle, she told me, she had vomited all over the place and no one in the family had come to help her. she felt powerless, and defeated (koi taras nahi aaya, meri naak aur lips se khoon nikal raha tha, lekin koi taras nahi aaya). a lack of say over one’s marriage is historically understood as a form of cruelty among educated muslim women (alam 2021, 30), and nagma registered her brother’s and mother’s insistence that she marry the thirty-five-year-old man against her own desires as morally unacceptable. as a response, she left her family the day after the fight. recalling her actions, she shared with me that she did so under the guise of taking an exam. outside at the district magistrate’s office, where i accompanied her, she doubted herself for a few moments. she wondered if after leaving her family, she would ever be able to financially and emotionally sustain herself as a woman living by herself in delhi. her then hindu boyfriend, from the landowning gurjar caste, was adamant that he would not marry her, a muslim woman, as this would be against his mother’s wishes who provided a share of the family’s rental income for his expenses. but nagma tried to remain optimistic. she told me that she hoped that she would not be single for the rest of her life or have to give up islam to marry her boyfriend. she hoped, too, that love as enjoyment 147 she would find a suitable muslim man who would love her, value her education, and not object to her working after marriage—a middle-class ideal common among upper-caste professionals (baas 2009; fuller and narasimhan 2007). in the meanwhile, she insisted on enjoying with her boyfriend. enjoying, in this register, denoted an immersion in sexual pleasure that kept nagma from thinking about her troubles. “two hours with him pass by like two minutes,” she told me as she pointed at the glow on her face one afternoon (barabar ka len-den). and yet, when i asked her whether she would marry her boyfriend, she responded angrily that people in their thirties, like i was, always suggested marriage, and insisted that she was enjoying, and that doing so did not mean she intended to marry her boyfriend. in moments of enjoyment, nagma, priyanka, and jyoti contemplated the (im)possibilities of combining excitement, sexual pleasure, and desires for gendered progress with middle-class comforts available in a marriage. for example, while nagma enjoyed the sex with her boyfriend, she explained that her boyfriend, too, not only expected her not to work after marriage but that he hoped her to raise two boys, despite her wishes to someday have a boy and a girl. to her, this expectation signaled the same kind of subordination of her desires that she had already faced in the family she had just left behind. therefore, despite the challenges of a single life in delhi, nagma insisted that she would not marry her boyfriend. instead, she pointed to a successful marriage of a muslim woman with a jat man in her new neighborhood in noida as an example. in this marriage, the man supported the woman against his own mother. he also had a secure income, unlike nagma’s boyfriend at the time, who depended on his mother. these intimacies transformed nagma’s ideas of love and the possibilities of the relationships herein. for example, she retained her friendships with kriti and the men from the coaching center, who helped pay a deposit toward a room, while continuing to enjoy with her boyfriend and hoping to find a suitable life partner. enjoyment, in this time before marriage, allowed young middle-class women like nagma to learn to disentangle themselves from the cruel pursuit of love (pyaar) to lead to marriage. it created a pause or a suspension to focus on the pleasures of the city by seeking enjoyment with strangers. jyoti, for example, told me that she hoped that enjoyment would cause men to change how they treated women. if not through love, she argued, then through revenge (badla). in town, then, jyoti sought enjoyment with men as a way of teasing men’s desires (chedna). she told me that she made the men wait for her, intentionally turning cultural anthropology 40:1 148 up late for dates and switching off her phone immediately after a really fun date. she told me that she waited for hours before replying to the men’s messages, prompting them to send multiple messages (“did i do anything, jaanu?”), enjoying their anxiety and frustration caused by her lack of response. her practices were examples of an inversion of well-established gendered power dynamics that consider those waiting, normally women, as less powerful (chakrabarty 2000). and yet when i asked jyoti about hurting the men’s feelings even when some discussed marriage and seemed serious, she rhetorically asked me, “well, why is he a man?” (woh ladka kyun bana). jyoti explained to me that she was only doing what men have historically done to women, and argued that after her boyfriend of eight years cheated on her, she had attempted suicide. she had loved (dilwala pyaar) her boyfriend, but struggled to explain her actions to her parents, who worried for her and grounded her for several months (“i woke up to see my brother crying at the edge of the hospital bed and realized who actually cared for me”). jyoti never shared with her family that she had attempted suicide over a boyfriend, thereby avoiding the kinds of treatment that both nagma and priyanka faced. since the suicide attempt, however, she no longer allowed herself to expect or fall in love in these interactions. instead, she simply enjoyed with the men, without regard for their feelings. enjoyment is an edgy form of love that thrives on sexual frisson and tension. its eroticism allows educated young women to play with gender norms by giving primacy to women’s desires, if only temporarily. in so doing, enjoyment provides hope and nourishment to feed the imagination of a version of love—and a world—not latched to marriage. the middle-class young women with whom i interacted for this research, for example, finally concluded that a middle-class life without loyal husbands was not only possible but, in some cases, desirable (see also osella 2012), leading them to cultivate erotic relationships with friends. priyanka joked, “if girls have money, they can enjoy by themselves, like binu and i enjoy. there is no need for men!” laughing and emphasizing her erotic friendship with binu, a single woman in her forties who lived in a house by herself (see also lamb 2022), priyanka learned, too, that she was not interested in pursuing a relationship with men from the dominant castes, for example, jats ( jaton mein nahi ab). instead, she started to regularly meet the matches her parents suggested. in the meantime, she told me that she wanted to enjoy with men before marriage, like her friends did, and began to eye a punjabi boy who manned a mobile phone store for her next episode of enjoyment. even as women like priyanka, nagma, and jyoti insisted that enjoyment was a type of love without a future, enjoyment did lead to a different kind of love as enjoyment 149 future for them. in this future, the erotic allowed women to explore the human need for intimacy outside of the instrumental logic of exchange (joseph 2005; hendriks 2016; cf. groes-green 2014). the erotic also afforded hopes for disruption and play (han 2017) that allowed my respondents to continue hoping in the face of hopelessness. in so doing, young middle-class women in ghaziabad did not reject marriage altogether. rather, they became savvier when approaching marriage. my interlocutors learned from their broken fantasies of love the role of pleasure in reconstituting love in their lives in a less idealized bollywood sense of a happy-ever-after. they entered relationships with men with a more real sense of what could be had, with whom, and how. such enjoyment allowed them to bring the love with their minds (dimaagwala pyaar) in sync with the love with their hearts (dilwala pyaar) (hooks 2003, 207). after enjoying with her boyfriend from 2017 to 2020, nagma married a man from the muslim community in 2020. this match had been suggested by her parents following a reconciliation initiated by nagma’s elder sister. she now has a public-facing role promoting girls’ education in her community and has a young daughter. by 2018, jyoti had patched up with her boyfriend of eight years, but she told him that she would not let herself be hurt this time, even if he broke off or cheated. she told me, though, that “even though i love him, i cannot let on.” instead, she hoped that her as-yet-unknown prospective husband would have an extended family where sisters-in-law would provide emotional care, because she expected her future husband to cheat (see also osella 2012). in 2018, priyanka told me that she had broken up with her married boyfriend and that, in retrospect, she regarded her pursuit of love with him as a waste of time. priyanka’s reflection taught me that enjoyment in ghaziabad allowed young women to overcome the heartbreaks over the pursuit of love (pyaar) leading to marriage. my respondents used enjoyment to play with marital norms, meeting their aspirations for middle-class pleasures before entering an arranged marriage decided by their families. yet they also learned that love comes in many forms, and that they would find it again. love as a practice, a narration, and emotional experience for middle-class young women in ghaziabad is malleable, creative, and often improvised. forms of love shift over time, often from one to another, for example, from love as madness for priyanka, to love as labor, and finally to love as enjoyment. structures of caste, class, and gender bear down on women like her, conditioning the possibilities of these multifaceted forms of love (see also vohra 2022). for middle-class young women in ghaziabad like priyanka, nagma and jyoti, the death cultural anthropology 40:1 150 of the erotic in their lives through divorces, abandonment, or widowhood is one of the most dangerous things because it forecloses the possibility of exploring other enjoyments, and the imagination of possible alternatives (khawaishein mar jaati hain) to loveless marriages, divorces, or widowhood. through enjoyment, my interlocutors tried to preserve their access to worlds in which kindling desire could offer pleasure when marriage did not. these enjoyments were temporary, done in the face of hopelessness. yet as the experiences of nagma, jyoti, and priyanka show here, they might be enablers of a broader reshaping of ideals of love in a prospective marriage. this might happen even when marriages remain restricted within caste and religious communities and arranged by parents. crucially, however, enjoyment as described here also changed the norms of seeking and engaging in pleasurable relationships outside of marriages in urbanizing ghaziabad. in this way, the rules of monogamy might be slowly eroding over time, even as middle-class cultures continue to privilege marrying up. new urban spaces such as the malls provide an opportunity for middle-class consumption and play, but they limit the possibilities of fully reimagining love otherwise. conclusion why do women cultivate hope for love even when they know that their practices will not result in desirable changes in urban ghaziabad? while scholars have broadly argued that love acts as a social force that might defuse hatred (bose 2017, 272) between castes and religions (cf. ahearn 2001; das 1995; mody 2008; maqsood 2021; rapport 2018) in south asia and beyond, young women’s experiences of love discussed here taught them that love (pyaar or dilwala pyaar) did not lead to a desirable happy-ever-after. therefore, they cultivated and nourished desires—for men and women—in urban spaces to enjoy the aesthetic consumption pleasures of the city despite their family’s restrictions on the pursuit of love. my interlocutors narrated enjoyment as a form of love (dimaagwala pyaar). this essay has explored companionate practices that resemble or even draw on love (pyaar) as depicted in mass-media representations as those of bollywood, but do not expect love or marriage at the end. these practices, i have argued, allow people to reconceptualize love and intimacy in their lives. the cases here presented point toward the shaping of new forms of love beyond the structural and epistemic violence of patriarchal heteronormative marriage and moral panics such as “love jihad.” they challenge the injunctions on short-term relationships in contemporary social theory where sexual relationships, which come with love as enjoyment 151 an imperative to “enjoy” (badiou and rouselle 2019, 15), are argued to have commercialized intimacy, damaging stable and enduring intimacies to mark an “end of love” (illouz 2021). enjoyment as a short-lived kind of love acts as a site for transgression, hope, and despair, and ultimately, as we have seen, for direct changes in these particular women’s lives. the discussions and practices of love in this article critically extend contemporary discussions in anthropology in at least three ways. first, the essay engages the multiple kinds of love that allow women to work past the idealization of love (pyaar) as a single thing, a pure feeling of care and concern that would lead to marriage. it shows how women who occupy particular socioeconomic positions in urbanized areas in india discover alternate forms of love to resolve ongoing tension between the pursuit of pleasure, on the one hand, and expected middle-class comfort, on the other. these forms of love (enjoyment) are defiantly presentist and generate possibilities of emancipation, pleasure, and hope for short-term goals, allowing for a reconsideration of berlant’s “cruel optimism” argument by highlighting the creativity, malleability, and playful forms of love that arise precisely to circumvent its cruelties. the essay’s second contribution has been to rethink the cruel optimism of a stagnant kind of love from the perspective of my dalit and muslim interlocutors, who often lack a voice in shaping influential theories from elsewhere (rege 1995; shah 2022). third, the article has shown how embodied gestures of sexual desire in the context of societal and embodied repression can actively bend the rules by creating recognitions and misrecognitions of everyday acts. such a play disconnects women’s acts such as intentionally smiling, waving, or winking from otherwise overdetermined associations with the pursuit of love as marriage or sexual encounter. freud called these playful acts “parapraxis” or “the defective performance of certain purposive acts” (kohn 2013, 172–74). such spontaneous play with associative chains of thought, for example, the unlinking of a naughty wink from its progression to love and to marriage, proliferate and resonate through society in this urbanizing part of india. they also allow my interlocutors to rejoice in the self-affirmation, care, and pleasure that desire can enable, even when it is does not lead to love or marriage. the micro-practices of erotic play explored in this essay shed light on anthropological discussions on the connection between everyday practices and larger moral worlds. while enjoyment focuses on the pleasures of the present, it urged me to look away from the end goals (cf. mahmood 2004 for a different kind of self-actualization). analyzing enjoyment required my attention as cultural anthropology 40:1 152 an ethnographer to the relational possibilities inherent in the present in places where the future or “not yet” seems overdetermined by enduring structures, particularly for women. this ethnographic attention to enjoyment in/of the present by nagma, jyoti, and priyanka revealed how everyday moral contestations about the “near future,” such as what clothes to wear or whether to laugh or pout at men, create conditions of possibility (and acceptability) of new forms of sociality, even as this present keeps threatened by the possibility of subsumption by normalizing ideologies. abstract some young middle-class women in ghaziabad have little hope that love will lead to a desirable future. therefore, they kindle desire in casual encounters that they describe as “enjoyment” and cultivate a sensibility of living in the moment. enjoyment departs from love (pyaar) as depicted in mass media like bollywood that leads to marriage. instead, through enjoyment, college-attending women move through fantasies of love (pyaar) leading to marriage under conditions of urbanization, the rise of women’s education, and pervasive unemployment. in the process, they uncouple flirting and erotic play from its progression to love (pyaar) or marriage. in so doing, women ironically and unintentionally create an alternate form of love (enjoyment). this version of love is playful, creative, and fun. it allows women to access pleasure and to enact a version of love not latched to marriage. by paying attention to these alternate forms of love, this essay shows how women work past the “cruel optimism” of love, reconstituting it as a site for self-affirmation, pleasure, and play. [love; cruel optimism; hopelessness; play; enjoy; class; urban] notes acknowledgments i am immensely grateful to everyone who has helped me with this manuscript. i especially thank michael degani, david gellner, bhawani buswala, gillian rose, and perveez mody for their help in the final stages of the process. i also thank the reviewers, whose careful reading helped nuance my ideas, and to the editors who guided the changes. thanks also to priyanka, nagma, jyoti, and many of my interlocutors for explaining their lives in the most generous way. this research was supported by the uk’s economic and social research council, the leverhulme trust, and st. john’s college, oxford. 1. marriage is often accompanied by bodily transformations for women, where they are encouraged to put on weight ahead of childbearing. 2. in this essay i focus on pyaar in its romantic variety. however, pyaar is also used to describe the feelings of self-less care of mothers toward children, and vice versa. it is also used in letter-writing to friends to denote the english equivalent of “dear” (e.g., pyaare). 3. women discussed in this article are pursuing their first marriage, come from middle-class backgrounds, and are college-educated, which in the urban context of ghaziabad stands for class differences. i intentionally avoid the adjectives of unmarried and single in this essay, because while unmarried constructs women’s lives in relation to marriage, single constitutes a broader category that includes widowed and divorced women. 4. such marriages are referred to as love-marriage (mody 2008). love as enjoyment 153 5. such marriages are sometimes called love-cum-arranged marriages. 6. søren kierkegaard’s philosophy of ascetic love that diminishes the erotic has parallels in early buddhist scriptures (de silva 1970). 7. “marriages” here refers to various forms of living and childcare arrangements (polygynous; with humans and also non-humans) that were present in india during the precolonial, colonial eras. even in present-day india these marriages exist besides legally recognized marriages. 8. often, love (pyaar) was only experienced in second or third “marriages” not registered legally (sen 1999). these living arrangements were common among the lower castes in the precolonial period and were delegitimized by colonial and postcolonial laws in favor of conjugal stability and monogamy (basu 2015; sen, biswas, and dhawan 2011). customary divorces common among the lower castes were referred to as “enjoyments” during the constitutional debates on divorce among hindus in the immediate post-independence period (basu 2015, 63). 9. education during the colonial period constituted a site of reform, undertaken to produce dutiful wives and mothers restricted to the domestic sphere. yet education as a site of reform for women’s agentive capacities also produced new patriarchies (chatterjee 1994; john 2005). in ghaziabad and its surroundings, women’s education is also meant to act as a backup financial option in case women’s marriages end in divorce. 10. marriage is often the only source for women’s property rights in india (basu 2015), prompting many to pursue love to lead to marriage. but men too depend on their parents’ wealth for sustenance, making marriage against the parents’ wishes an unattainable aspiration in this context of unemployment. 11. a materialist account of women’s pursuit of love in postcolonial india suggests that women pursue love leading to marriage because legal marriages allow women to make a claim on the husband’s property, which makes for a powerful motivator in a context in which jobs for educated women are scarce, divorces high, and where people face excommunication for going against the family in inter-caste or inter-religious relationships. however, this reality only provides a partial explanation, because young women like priyanka were prepared to entertain live-in relationships over marriages. these relationships provide limited financial safety. women’s investment, instead, was in relationships outside of the home because these relationships provide affective relief, amelioration, and hope in a context in which dowry and marital negotiations were ever present in their homes, and their domestic lives were saturated with household chores and taunts by siblings. 12. my respondents often evoked this historical understanding by recounting how their parents too had loves outside of marriages, often across religious and caste boundaries (“didi, can you love two people at once?” they often asked me. they highlighted too how these living arrangements were allowed before the colonial government delegitimized them. they pointed out that the wealthy in present-day india, such as the erstwhile chief minister of the state, mulayam singh yadav, live in these arrangements with multiple wives without legally marrying them. young people assumed that these relationships were based on love (see also vanita 2005, a work that claims that people often refer to sexual relationships in idioms of love). 13. the preference for the english word enjoyment over related terms such as ishq indicates urban sophistication and creates an emotional expectation of a controlled emotional intensity over passionate burning registered in these older forms of love (orsini 2006; mian 2019). i am aware of the historicity of the term enjoyment, in that colonial expeditions used enjoyment to describe intimate relationships that did not match the expectations of christian monogamous marriages. 14. my presence served as a mirror for my respondents’ pursuits, and therefore i approached them with care. while hanging out in the city, i served as a responsive audience for their jokes, emotional support, and sexual knowledge, and in the process, i unexpectedly became a sounding board for my interlocutors’ resounding refutations of conservative ideas (especially around marriage). cultural anthropology 40:1 154 15. my interviews drew equally from gurjar or jat (landholding castes), dalit (lower castes), and upper-caste (historically privileged) muslim and hindu women. 16. i frequently watched bollywood films with my interlocutors, such as mastizaade (2016, dir. milap zaveri), pyaar ka punchnama (2011, dir. luv ranjan), and dil dhadakne do (2015, dir. zoya akhtar), among others. 17. jobs in ghaziabad for women tend to be poorly paid, insecure, and often include sexual harassment (awal 2021; cf. islam 2020). 18. jyoti’s boyfriend, for whom she attempted suicide and whom she wanted to marry, belonged to the jatav caste. however, as this was enjoyment, she sought well-off men from dominant caste communities, such as jat and gurjars. 19. men from these backgrounds depended on their families for income, married young, and were often dissatisfied with their own marriages, therefore sought opportunities for enjoying. 20. the ethnographic film no city for women (directed by rangan chakravarty, 2023) depicts a darker side of these relationships where expectations of sex with older kinsmen are forced on younger brides. 21. in latin america and the united states, malls have been researched as hyperregulated spaces in which the marketing and selling of goods takes place through heteronormative scripts of intimacy and desire, offering women the opportunity to enter and be playful with heteronormative codes through flirting and play (dávila 2016). in my research, malls in this part of india played a similar role (see also ghertner 2015). 22. my interlocutors gained mastery over the various moods of love by an experiential immersion in pleasure and play. historically, love is thought to be used to cultivate a wider set of emotional repertories. see schofield 2021, 187, for late mughal era music where ragas of desire are considered to be the most important in evoking a range of emotions, such as a grief, separation. see pollock 2016 for rasas of love in sanskrit literature; moods of love in hansen 1991 for sufi 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enjoyment: hopelessness, play, and desirable futures in ghaziabad, india love as enjoyment love’s futures? playful enjoyment mocking marriage conclusion abstract notes references volumes: the politics of calculation in contemporary peruvian amazonia cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 64-90, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.04 volumes: the politics of calculation in contemporary peruvian amazonia eduardo romero dianderas university of southern california https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1149-4811 on the morning of november 24, 2015, one of the most decisive events in the history of peru’s fight against illegal logging took place in the port of iquitos, the capital of peru’s amazonian region of loreto. that morning, state authorities confiscated an immense contingent of illegal timber lodged in the yacu kallpa, a cargo ship that year by year transported timber processed in iquitos to commercial ports in mexico and the united states. an array of national and international media agencies echoed news about the intervention, celebrating it as a signal of peru’s newfound commitment to securing the legality of tropical timber supply chains. mostly left unmentioned in such celebratory remarks was the extensive labor of measurement and calculation that had preceded this large-scale state intervention. months before state authorities even set foot on the yacu kallpa, they focused their attention on exporting companies previously identified as highly susceptible to trading with illegal timber. in peru, all commercial timber must be backed by a forestry transport permit (ftp) that grants companies the legal right to transport and trade a given volume of timber. the ftp serves as a legal declaration by which loggers state that their timber shipments come from authorized logging sites where they previously listed and georeferenced a given number of harvestable trees. by examining the ftps attached to the timber shipments of suspicious exporting companies, the authorities selected a group of logging operations from which some of the yacu kallpa’s timber cargo had allegedly originated. in the following months, state forest supervisors then embarked on several inspection visits in remote logging concessions throughout loreto. their reports confirmed what they had suspected: the ftps attached to some of the yacu kallpa timber had been used deceitfully. inspectors found no evidence for the existence of hundreds of trees that supposedly were the source of many timber goods on the ship. this meant that, as people commonly say in loreto, such timber had been “laundered” (lavada). officially, the ftp claimed that the timber hailed from an authorized logging site when, in fact, it had been illegally extracted from elsewhere. the meticulous labor conducted by the authorities before the intervention had been aimed at the calculation of a crucial volumetric number: 1,312 cubic meters (m3). after state supervision reports invalidated dozens of deceitful ftps, 1,312m3 became the aggregated volume of timber that, up to that moment, had been determined as illegal within the yacu kallpa. at the time of the intervention, however, not all timber in the huge cargo ship had acquired this status. the number represented only 12.5 percent of the total timber volume inside the vessel. pressured by the crew of the yacu kallpa, who desperately needed to depart for the dominican republic, state authorities decided not to confiscate the 1,312m3 of timber physically, but legally, via a signed agreement by which the crew committed to turn in the illegal timber after their return to iquitos a few months later. and yet, once the yacu kallpa set sail and left peru, the volume of illegal timber within the ship kept growing at a distance. as state forest supervisors visited more logging operations and corroborated the falsity of even more ftp declarations, new state calculations continued to change the overall balance of legal and illegal timber now on its way to enter international tropical timber markets. as the yacu kallpa crossed brazil via the amazon river and turned toward the caribbean basin, three new state supervisions added to the original amount of illegal timber volume. in early january, when the yacu kallpa had reached the dominican republic, peruvian authorities confirmed the amount of illegal timber at 6,891.28m3 (71.4 percent of the sum total,) and by january 26, when the ship arrived at the port of tampico in mexico, this number had grown to 9,268.49m3 (96.03 percent of the total) (see global witness 2017). if in november the yacu kallpa had lodged about 10,000m3 of legalized tropical timber, two months later, peruvian authorities had illegalized well-nigh all the timber inside the ship. after a laborious process of verification and calculation spanning many months, state authorities had thus successfully uncovered the deceitful technical and legal relationship binding dozens of ftps, the inexistent trees they supposedly stood for, and almost all the timber lodged within the yacu kallpa. the yacu kallpa scandal unveiled the astonishing levels of illegality that perfuse every stage of the tropical logging industry in peruvian amazonia, but it also made visible the complex constellation of actors, both human and otherwise, that have emerged over the past two decades to secure the legal origin of tropical timber all the way down to the scale of individual trees. as amazonian rain forests have emerged as critical sites for biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration in the larger context of the global environmental crisis, securing the legality of tropical timber has become a political imperative to which the peruvian state is increasingly bound through international environmental agreements, commercial incentives, and legal pressures. but just as the yacu kallpa intervention shows, large-scale planetary ambitions to guarantee the legality of the international tropical timber trade ultimately depend less on the grand schemes of diplomacy than on securing the precise calculability of a humble mathematical abstraction: volumes. in contemporary peruvian amazonia, volumes serve as calculational abstractions that bind together a vast array of technocratic practices related to the tropical logging industry. they are crucial for timber products to circulate as disentangled commodities representing fixed quantities of commensurable value (see marx 1999; çalışkan and callon 2010). but just as important, volumes are fundamental for state regulatory institutions aiming to organize regimes of technocratic governance on an industry traditionally associated with illegality and deceit. from the measurement of regional forest productivities to the calculation of industrial sustainability, and from the implementation of state inspections to the enforcement of public accountability and transparency, defining volumes in precise and accountable ways proves key to the technocratic governance of tropical logging. and yet, as volumes move and circulate across different scales and media registers, slipping from the humble paper notations performed by logging workers to the yearly annals of peru’s national timber exports, they come to have contentious epistemic and political lives. for how to calculate mathematical abstractions like volumes is a question entangled in disparate political histories and affective dispositions, from long intractable legacies of racialized exploitation to emerging liberal dreams of transparency in the age of climate change and biodiversity loss. in this article, i examine the contentious practices by which tropical timber is regularly transformed into calculational abstractions known as volumes in contemporary loreto. i do this at a time when timber volumetric calculation procedures are becoming increasingly standardized and supervised as part of a series of intense regulatory reforms that aim to secure their precision, auditability, and consistency across scales. drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork in state offices, sawmills, and logging campsites, i examine how volumes contentiously emerge in the everyday activities of indigenous peoples, loggers, timber industrialists, and state technocrats in loreto. my attention to volumes developed as i conducted research on peru’s tropical rain-forest governance and its recent transformations in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss. at first, i understood volumes as artifacts of new technocratic dreams of legibility that could be analytically opposed to the arbitrariness and confusions historically associated with tropical logging in peruvian amazonia. and yet, as i began to consider specific situations where measurements were taken, formulas applied and numbers calculated, it soon became clear to me that volumes could not be understood as entities detached from the memories, aspirations, and desires of those calculating them. far from constituting matters of strict technical concern, volumes repeatedly emerged into discussion as people recalled long histories of racialized exploitation, articulated claims of cultural difference, or expressed aspirations for technocratic transparency and accountability. following volumes, therefore, revealed them as complex and multifarious creatures with long and complicated histories in the tropical rain forests of loreto. by thinking through volumes, i aim to interrogate the politics of calculational abstractions and their importance to understand emerging modes of global environmental governance today. in recent years, anthropologists have pushed against the self-declared disembodied rationality of bureaucratic rule by showing how the material composition, circulation, and manipulation of documents can reveal unexpected processes of political contestation, disruption, and resistance (campbell 2015; göpfert 2013; hull 2012; hetherington 2011; pinker 2015). but as ethnographic objects, volumes do not easily yield to such an analytical focus on materiality. as numerical magnitudes established through the combination of formal mathematical formulas and situated empirical measurements, volumes make for ideal transcendental entities that simultaneously remain intimately imbricated in the bodily entanglements of specific peoples, logs, notebooks, measuring tapes, mud, and water. importantly, such ontological ambivalence demands that we not only address their political lives by locating volumes in specific events of measurement, calculation, and registration, thus leaving the mathematical sets of relations that formally constitute them as if untouched by the vicissitudes of the world. rather, committing to volumes as ethnographic objects requires that we also go beyond materiality and consider how mathematical realms of experience like arithmetic or geometry can become political in their own sake. for as i will show, the very mathematical structures of volumetric formulas become political mediators that mobilize interests, constrain or foster particular practices of exploitation, and, more broadly, resonate with larger political visions about the past and future trajectories of the tropical logging industry in loreto. in this sense, i contend that tracing the politics of calculational abstractions like volumes proves crucial to understanding how emerging modes of global environmental governance ultimately fuel struggles over the conditions by which we are to measure, calculate, and trace different objects of environmental concern at local and planetary scales. by interrogating the politics of calculational abstractions, anthropology can thus consider how even apparently mundane mathematical entities like volumes can be persistently haunted by power, history, and bodily experience. in recent years, a robust body of work has interrogated practices of quantification and calculation by showing that contemporary modes of numerical reasoning do not produce neutral representations of reality, but rather constitute laborious and performative processes within which different political projects, ambitions, and desires find articulation (espeland and stevens 2008; diaz-bone and didier 2016; ballestero 2015; guyer 2014). with this literature in mind, i examine volumes by subscribing to william deringer’s (2018, 38) call to not approach “numerical calculations … as ‘black boxes,’ whose operation in the broader world can be understood separately from their inner workings.” instead, i focus on the “calculation grammars” that inform tropical timber volumes in loreto as a way to unveil the affective and political dimensions of seemingly mechanistic technical practices in a larger context of intense technocratic transformation (see ballestero 2015, 266.) importantly, i show how such calculation grammars are neither universal nor statically constructed. following helen verran’s study of numbering in yorubaland, i suggest that such disparate ways of envisioning volumes emerge from historically contingent sets of ritualized practices that, crucially, are grounded on different mathematical figurations of the physicality of logs (verran 2001). in this sense, i consider the very mathematical structure of volumetric formulas and the technical procedures by which tropical timber is measured as sites of intense political and affective elaboration that merit specific ethnographic scrutiny. from this perspective, calculational abstractions like volumes become fertile ethnographic terrains from which to appreciate how competing forms of political imagination intersect and collide with each other as amazonia enters the age of climate change and biodiversity loss. in what follows, i first discuss the rise of timber volumetrics, the practice of measuring timber volumes, in modern scientific forestry, and examine a particular volumetric formula, the doyle formula, which eventually would come to embroil itself in the economic and political life of loreto’s tropical logging industry during the twentieth century. the doyle formula has traditionally been the privileged means to calculate volumes across loreto’s tropical timber supply chains. and yet, its peculiar mathematical structure has played a fundamental role in fostering the modes of racialized exploitation and technolegal deceit that have thrived in peru’s tropical logging industry for generations. i then show how the peruvian state sought to tackle such legacies of exploitation and deceit by creating new technocratic regimes with the goal of stabilizing timber volumes as creatures susceptible to be calculated, followed, and audited across scales through standardized and accountable procedures. i show how this, in part, was envisioned through the enforcement of an alternative volumetric formula, the smalian formula, a formula considered truer than doyle. i conclude the article by discussing an ethnographic scene in which both the smalian and the doyle formula interact in the context of a timber purchase involving a timber trading company and an indigenous logging squad. by considering the tales told through the contrasting lives of these two formulas, i seek to unsettle the relations between abstract volumes and physical things and reveal the contentious practices that go into producing calculational abstractions in emerging forms of global environmental governance today. doyle: a mathematics of exploitation “thank you for coming, ladies and gentlemen. it is an honor to be with you today,” said teran, loreto’s regional state director of forestry resources, as he glanced on the dozens of loggers that had gathered to meet him. outside the meeting room, the orange light of the afternoon fell onto the port of masusa, the largest timber-processing center in iquitos, a long and crowded stretch of warehouses and sawmills filled with muddy docks, mountains of piled logs, and the never-ending sound of mechanized saw blades (see figure 1). teran had come to masusa to meet a group of loggers concerned about the long-term decay of their businesses in the aftermath of the yacu kallpa intervention a few years earlier. as soon as he had politely introduced himself in the name of loreto’s regional government, dudu, a bulky logger in his sixties, rapidly took the stage. “teran, thank you for coming. we have invited you here today so you can explain to us what you plan to do about the new volumetric guidelines that the government wants to force on us.” figure 1. piles of logs near the port of masusa. photo by eduardo romero dianderas. what dudu referred to were a series of new calculational guidelines recently issued by the peruvian state that standardized the procedures by which loggers and sawmill industrialists were to calculate and report to state authorities the timber they harvested and processed. crucially, such guidelines sanctioned the use of a metric-based volumetric method known as the smalian formula, which was mostly foreign to peru’s tropical logging industry. the state technocrats advancing these new regulations posed smalian as a way to calculate what they insisted was the true volume of timber. thus it was envisioned as a privileged means to guarantee the self-consistency of tropical timber shipments as they moved across peru’s tropical timber supply chains. such claim stood in direct criticism of the doyle formula, the imperial-based method of timber calculation extensively used across loreto for generations. since announced, the policy had come to be seen with a mixture of suspicion, irritation, and fatalism in the sawmills and river ports of masusa. somewhat uncomfortable, teran replied to dudu: “there is unfortunately nothing i can do about that,” he said, when loggers suddenly stood up from their improvised seats and the overall mood of the room started to change. “but please realize that these guidelines are important. we need real calculations, not only as industrialists but as a country. sawmills must produce precise calculations for the government to know how much timber we are producing, how much value we are creating,” continued teran. “for this, we need to start using cubic meters, not board feet. and to report our yields in smalian, not doyle.” quite irritated with teran’s answer, dudu took the stage once again and, in a revealing turn of events, articulated his frustration not in terms of technical discrepancy, but of cultural difference. “teran, how we measure timber is part of our culture. the state should acknowledge the tradition we have here. these guidelines come from lima [peru’s capital]. that is a whole different reality. if you ask people in loreto to calculate in cubic meters and not in board feet, a lot of them are not going to be able do it.” the culture of calculation referenced by dudu, of course, does not only bring together the loggers gathered that day in masusa. as an industry that intractably ramifies throughout loreto, binding international tropical timber supply chains with remote (and quite often illegal) logging operations in the rain forest, such “culture” brings together hundreds of small-scale loggers, indigenous and otherwise, that harvest timber for large timber tradespeople or their intermediaries. but where does loreto’s culture of timber calculation come from? and how can we come to terms with understanding utterly technical practices like timber volumetrics as traditional and cultural things? exploring these questions forces us to dwell on the historical trajectories of volumetric formulas and how their formalized mathematical abstractions have come to resonate with broader political and economic processes in loreto and elsewhere. the practice of measuring timber volumes has been a key component of forestry since forests turned into modern sites of state productivity. in the late eighteenth century, forests became spaces for some of the most ambitious practices of surveying, measurement and calculation in the wake of the enlightenment’s quantifying spirit (warde 2018, 200; viitala 2016, 1040; lowood 1990, 317). rendering trees into volumes via standardized volumetric methods played a key role in such technical processes of forest rationalization (scott 1998, 12; see also warde 2018, 207). early scientific foresters did not, however, primarily aim to measure and calculate current volumes of wood in a given forest; rather, they sought to optimize wood stocks by securing as much wood as possible in the future (warde 2018, 180; viitala 2016, 1044.) foresters thus became increasingly concerned with understanding the intricacies of tree growth rates and with organizing forest management through principles of sustainable optimization and efficiency amenable to their future-oriented goals (lowood 1990, 338.) emerging in the context of the westward expansion of north america’s timber industry in the nineteenth century, the doyle formula offers a perfect example of the abstractive and future-oriented legacies of early scientific forestry (collingwood 1952, 943). as a form of calculation, it is not concerned with measuring the precise volume of a log. rather, it aims to determine what amount of useful timber it will yield once processed as commercial timber. this particular goal informs the structure of the doyle formula itself. as the formula projects the shape of a regular timber block within the tridimensional space of a given log, it only takes into consideration the smallest of its diameters. it also applies a de facto diametrical discount of four inches that factors in the useless width of the bark and the unintended subtractions performed by saw blades. further, the doyle formula is calculated in inches and feet. and since the formula does not authorize inch fractions, calculations round down to the closest whole inch. thus the doyle formula remains far from yielding neutral mathematical descriptions of log tridimensional shapes. in fact, its mathematical structure represents only one among many dozens of different volumetric methods regionally used in north america alone by the early twentieth century (belyea 1953, 200). while each of these methods exhibited its own balance of time efficiency and mathematical accuracy, with some privileging respect for the morphology of logs and others emphasizing practical simplicity and transactional efficiency, the doyle formula had a peculiar feature: it was an abstract construct designed to structurally skew volumetric calculation away from the interests of the feller and toward the future-oriented modes of accounting required by timber-processing centers and their operators. the doyle formula v (in board feet) = [dm – 4]2/16 × l where… dm = smaller diameter l = length although the dissemination of the doyle formula in peru’s tropical logging economy is unclear, it was certainly tied to the late twentieth-century expansion of tropical timber supply chains and how they came to articulate timber industrialists with indigenous and rural labor in amazonia. since its earliest iterations, peru’s tropical logging industry has heavily depended on externalizing timber supply onto racialized labor relations that had thrived in the region since the rubber boom of the early twentieth century. for timber industrialists and tradespeople, venturing for months into the rain forests, exposing themselves to the unpredictable risks of daily work, and becoming economically responsible for the sustenance of workers in remote logging sites did not make for an attractive choice. instead, they came to depend on networks of extractive posts, patron-client bondage relations, and violent forms of exploitation that constituted the economic infrastructures by which forest goods had traditionally flown from all over loreto into the ports of iquitos. paramount among these relations was habilitación, a figure by which patrons disbursed advancements in money and industrial goods to riverine dwellers (both indigenous and otherwise) who would then become responsible to venture into the rain forest and gather an agreed-upon amount of forest goods for the sake of their patron. after a few months, the habilitado would bring the goods to the patron, and together they would calculate the value of what had been delivered minus the value of the original advancement made by the patron. finally, the patron would pay the surplus to the habilitado in either money or industrial goods, thus extinguishing the immediate obligation. habilitación relations flourished as the quintessential way of articulating timber supply chains in loreto throughout the twentieth century. in addition to constituting a model of relationality that distributed responsibility and investment in ways advantageous to timber patrons and their intermediaries, habilitación also made for a profoundly moral relationship: not only to the extent it bound patrons and their riverine clients in relations of obligation, submission, and care that transcended the transactions themselves but also because in all cases, habilitación performed racialized hierarchies between indigenous and rural workers and the urban patrons that provided them with industrial goods and money. habilitación, therefore, became a vehicle of legitimation for social hierarchies, modes of exploitation, and knowledge asymmetries that would mark the social and political landscape of loreto in the twentieth century (see santos-granero and barclay 2000). in time, the particular mathematical properties of the doyle formula came to play a critical role in fostering habilitación relations. to the extent that habilitación requires the calculation of timber volumes to estimate exchange value, volumetric calculation becomes a space fraught with ritualistic and moral undertones that reinforces enduring racialized relations between riverine dwellers (indigenous and otherwise) and their occasional patrons. cubicación is the name still given today to the act of performing formulaic measurements on a log to determine its volume. as timber industrialists and tradespeople cultivated networks of intermediaries to hold habilitados in various towns and basins all over loreto, the figure of the cubicador, the performer of cubicación, became a folkloric trope that indexed racialized relations of trickery and cunningness. various riverine interlocutors i talked to told me about how, in the past, their grandparents would regularly find themselves tricked and paid unfairly by the intermediaries holding them as habilitados. sometimes, trees would not even be volumetric, but remain merely voluminous entities in these transactions, as their grandparents would offer entire trees for a few pennies. as the century progressed and younger generations gained better mathematical foundations through schooling and a more robust involvement with the craft of regional commerce, riverine dwellers acquired a better understanding of the doyle formula and, accordingly, a better stance for negotiating timber volumes in habilitación relations. even today, however, a whole regional vocabulary describes the ways in which habilitación relations enact social injustice by effectively turning the volumetric calculations performed by cubicadores into weapons of racialized exploitation. as many forest engineers told me, for timber buyers in loreto, “the profit resides in the purchase.” terms such as pase (toll) and castigo (punishment) are conventionally deployed to name the discounts enforced by cubicadores by any kind of defect exhibited by a log. to “kill the volume” (matar el volumen) makes reference to the goal of this subtle craft: to detect rotten wood or small holes in the surface of a log and argue about them to shrink the calculated abstract volume of a log and pay less money. “if the true volume of a set of logs is 140,000 board feet,” rolando, a senior forester in loreto, told me, “then a skilled cubicador can easily lower that down to 90,000. it is an armed robbery!” what emerges from this account is a constellation of tropes that place the cubicador as a mediating figure who skews timber volumes by tactically mobilizing costs of opportunity, patronizing forms of manipulation, and inequalities in calculational craftsmanship. such craftsmanship, of course, does not happen in a vacuum. the skill set of the cubicador builds on the doyle formula’s own structural biases, which privilege future-oriented speculation and the execution of various kinds of discounts in the expectation of future yields. the relation of volumetric abstraction with material things that emerges here becomes a function of hierarchical relations of power that accommodate mathematical abstractions to the whims of industrial urban needs. once logs depart from riverine towns toward the processing sawmills, timber industrialists take advantage of the tactical (mis)calculations secured by their cubicadores to increase their yields and profits. a shifting gap thus opens in the slow travel of logs from the riverine towns of habilitados to the industrial sawmills. in this displacement, the sociological and geographical distance that someone might hold from iquitos seems to be in direct correlation with the gradual shrinking of their volumes. as logs move closer and closer to timber-processing centers, volumes grow as if affected by magic, and the relation between the abstract and the concrete becomes more tractable and less polluted by trickery and manipulation. at the turn of the twenty-first century, therefore, volumes were malleable creatures. to the extent that they did not remain identical to themselves as they moved around and changed hands, they did not exhibit self-consistency across time and space. quite to the contrary, their contractions and inflations became artifacts of the hierarchical relations of trickery and exploitation that constituted loreto’s tropical timber supply chains. such malleability made volumes unreliable objects of technolegal inspection. since volumes could easily mutate from one situation to the next, state authorities could not use volumetric calculations to establish with any certainty whether the timber they would encounter in ports, deposits, and campsites was indeed illegal. how, for instance, would a state inspector manage to prove that the volume of this timber shipment was larger than the volume authorized by the ftp of the logging concession where it supposedly came from? how could they, on the basis of such difference, legally infer that, accordingly, a portion of such timber had an illegal origin? answering such questions successfully became key for state technocrats concerned with how to bring transparency and accountability to a badly reputed tropical logging industry in the second decade of the twenty-first century. and yet, despite their self-proclaimed technicality, such questions also confront us with the ways even calculational abstractions like volumes remain entangled in complicated relations between abstraction and materiality that spring from larger configurations of power, history, and bodily experience. smalian: taming volumes by the late 2010s, a wave of international trade agreements, foreign aid commitments, and environmental campaigns had progressively changed the peruvian state’s traditional tolerance for the ubiquitous illegality of the tropical logging industry. the growing pressure brought by this emerging international climate eventually led state institutions to initiate a series of regulatory reforms aimed at securing the legal origin of tropical timber in amazonia. paramount among these reforms was the implementation of standardized guidelines and onsite inspections that aimed to enforce the self-consistency and precision of timber volumes across tropical timber supply chains. at this conjuncture, state authorities introduced a new volumetric formula, the smalian formula, as an alternative to the doyle formula. although the history of the smalian formula is not as well documented as doyle’s, some indications suggest it originated in the work of heinrich ludwig smalian, a nineteenth-century german forester. by the late twentieth century, international institutions like the food and agriculture organization promoted the smalian formula, and the peruvian state timidly adopted it in non-binding guidelines. yet throughout the second decade of the twenty-first century, the peruvian state started to adopt a series of new calculational guidelines by means of which all administrative documentation concerning logging activities was progressively bound to be calculated in smalian and not doyle, a demand imposed not only on state officials but also onto loggers and traders themselves. in 2014, the agency for the supervision of forest resources and wildlife (osinfor), the state institution in charge of conducting the onsite inspections of logging operations, also created a training program to foster the use of smalian in indigenous communities, with the understanding that the traditional doyle formula used by cubicadores worked to the detriment of their economic rights as small-scale loggers. the state enforcement and promotion of smalian, therefore, has become ubiquitous in peru during the past fifteen years. according to proponents of these new technocratic regulations, the standardized application of the smalian formula across all aspects of timber harvesting, transportation, and trade would bring volumetric calculations into a new regime of transparency and accountability, where precise volumes would finally become trustworthy objects of technolegal inspection. for state technocrats advancing these regulatory reforms, smalian constituted a way to homologize practices of measurement for all actors in the logging industry. but perhaps even more importantly, it offered a way to do this by capturing what they understood as the true volume of logs. in such a narrative, doyle emerged as the legacy of a century of exploitation and illegality in the logging industry, where volumes were the protagonists of histories of trickery, inconsistency, and deceit. smalian was showcased as an alternative to such a legacy because of its particular mathematical characteristics. instead of just taking the smaller diameter of a log, smalian took an average of its two extremes to work with a cylindrical representation halfway between the two. further, smalian, unlike doyle, did not include bark discounts in its formulaic structure. and finally, measurements in smalian were conducted in the metric system, making fractions easier to take and making rounding down unnecessary. the combination of all these factors made the logs measured in smalian speculative objects of a much less untamable nature, and provided log sellers—many of them still embroiled in habilitación relations—with a better standing in bargaining for the value of their work. in contrast to doyle, smalian did not approach logs from the future-oriented standpoint of the timber industrialist. rather, it aspired to achieve a fine-grained representation of logs as they were today, without negotiated discounts because of malformations or putrefactions. as a consequence, calculating with smalian typically made volumes larger, subsequently translating into larger payments for timber sellers and lower profits for timber industrialists. the smalian formula v (in m3) = 0.7854 × (dx)2 × l where… dx = average diameter l = length similarly, in contrast to the cunning trickeries performed by cubicadores with the doyle formula, the smalian formula was to be enforced following strict standardized protocols of measurement. such idea became concretized in 2012, when state authorities issued a comprehensive protocol that standardized all measuring practices across peru’s tropical timber supply chains. the resulting document, known as the convergence protocol (protocolo de convergencia), compiles all possible field contingencies to provide standardized guidelines of measurement for any situation. over the years, several iterations of the convergence protocol have followed, each incorporating more and more casuistry—different kinds of trees, different possible disputes—to eliminate the possibility of two acts of measurement ever significantly differing. by subsuming acts of measurement under strict formalized procedures, the goal of this process of convergence was to trivialize two factors seen as conspiring against the ultimate self-consistency of volumes. first, the role of field contingencies and heterogeneous situations—the differences that arose between measuring a log lying on the forest floor versus one floating in water, for instance. and second, the role played by the cubicadores’ tactics of trickery and deceit in skewing volumetric calculations in favor of timber industrialists. yet in recent years, loggers and tradespeople have criticized such attempts to tame volumes through volumetric precision and standardization. interestingly, such critiques do not revolve around technical discrepancies on the best way to standardize and coordinate acts of measurement. rather, they usually point to the limits of standardization itself, that is, to the impossibility of calculational abstractions like volumes to remain fully self-consistent across time and space. testimonies of critical forest engineers and logging workers prove curious in this respect, as they defend the incommensurability of their practices of measurement by insistently dwelling on the microscopic frictions that inevitably shape volumetric calculations. their descriptions abound in the small deviations of measuring tapes when pressured against a tree bark, the arbitrariness of what diameter to take when measuring the irregular flat side of a log, or the unstable movement of a log raft when one stands on it as it flows into the water. importantly, when these microscopic frictions add up to yield disparate volumetric results, they can make a real difference in the world. “sometimes, a state inspector might come, measures logs in your piling yard, and tells you it is all okay,” diego, a forest engineer working for a logging concession, told me; “but then another one comes, measures the same log, and tells you that you have done it all wrong” (see figure 2). figure 2. a measuring tape pressed against the bark of a tree. photo by eduardo romero dianderas. despite rising state demands for volumetric self-consistency, therefore, volumes remain today difficult to follow and stabilize on account of disparate styles of measurement and arbitrary judgments that conspire against their full coordination across time and space. given this lack of self-consistency, a gray space of technical interpretation emerges, where it is not entirely clear in the face of controversy whether the real responsible for a mismatch between two proposed calculations lies with an incompetent state inspector or a ruthless logger. for, as diego concludes, “no two measurements can ever be totally alike.” this phrase points to the incommensurability that lies at the core of every act of measurement. and yet, what is needed for securing the success of today’s state-technocratic reforms is precisely a way to tame such incommensurability through converging modes of coordination that render the frictions of the rain forest and bodily experience into trivial matters. an ambivalent situation emerges from this account. on the one hand, in the previous decade, volumes have indeed become quite self-consistent, at least across the more legal threads of the tropical logging industry. as the case of the yacu kallpa showed us, this has been achieved by mounting a complex infrastructure of standardization and coordination that has effectively disciplined, although never completely, the calculational practices that until the early twenty-first century boundlessly mediated tropical timber supply chains in loreto. on the other hand, however, no measurement protocol or volumetric formula can ever fully extinguish the possibility that timber volumes are affected by violent legacies of racialized exploitation, or the irreducible eventfulness of an act of measurement, or the cunning tactics of deceitful cubicadores. regulating volumetrics cannot magically produce a technocratic space perfectly legible from all sides and fully evacuated from history, power, and bodily experience. what we find, rather, is an ambivalent space in which the mathematical affordances of both formulas and the ritualized practices cultivated around them coexist and overlap with each other. and nowhere does this ambivalence emerge more clearly today than in the mundane act of buying and selling timber. a tale of two formulas the dawn was still dark when in the muddy shores of the sawmill we started to pile up our provisions for the upcoming two weeks. on the horizon, intense mixtures of orange and yellow started to light up the morning. “we need to hurry,” said timao, a forest engineer working for the sawmill; “we do not have a navigation permit, so we need to leave iquitos when it is still dark.” a few days before, timao had introduced me to zhao, a chinese timber industrialist who about a decade ago had arrived in iquitos to take advantage of the rising timber commerce between peru and china. with timao’s intermediation, zhao had granted me authorization to join the crew that would depart today for the pucayacu river. there we were to visit the indigenous community of puca urco, where an indigenous logging brigade funded by zhao had recently announced their log rafts ready for pickup. “water is already going down,” zhao told me, as he smoked a cigar and supervised the trip preparations from a corner; “you all need to hurry up” (see figure 3). figure 3. zhao’s crew prepare for work. photo by eduardo romero dianderas. a day and a half after we had left iquitos, our boat arrived to the mouth of the pucayacu river, where the small port of esperanza is located. here, we were to wait for pancho, a cubicador that zhao had asked to join the crew. “he is the cubicador that zhao trusts the most,” timao told me, because “he really knows how to see the wood.” the next day, very early, pancho arrived in esperanza in a boat coming from the border with brazil. he was a short, bulky man with curly hair and a cunning gaze. pancho did not work exclusively for zhao, for after earning a name as a good cubicador, he now had several clients across loreto. pancho’s valuable calculative skills were not, of course, limited to taking mechanical measurements of cylindrical shapes. sure, pancho knew the subtleties of volumetric formulas and how to use them to his advantage. but as timao said, pancho knew how to see timber. and indeed, he did. for he proved a savvy examiner of the nuances in the logs he would be commanded to buy. he knew how to spot, just by carefully looking at and touching their surfaces, whether logs concealed interior corruptions or diseases. he knew how to infer whether a small fissure could in fact announce the existence of a hidden large fracture. and he could cite with encyclopedic memory the various proclivities and properties of dozens of different species of wood: how to cure a heavyweight ishpingo to make it float in the water; what portions of a tornillo are more prone to rot; why felling trees in full moon negatively affects wood quality. pancho’s was an analytical knowledge not only discursive and explicit but also embodied and sensuous. every time he approached a log, he did so not only with his eyes and words. rather, he smelled it, touched it, and even tasted it. pancho’s skill set as a volume calculator was thus deeply rooted in intimacy with the materiality of timber. but these skills were not restricted to knowing woods. he also knew how to see people. once he would examine a given log raft, he deployed an elaborate set of persuasive techniques addressed at setting prices at his favor when bargaining with timber sellers. “i am not so bad as the other cubicadores, you know,” pancho told me, as we drank and the boat finally started to move upstream into the pucayacu; “these are humble people who live of their work, so i also try to be fair with them.” in this way, even if pancho’s craft depended on an intimate familiarity with the mathematical structure of the doyle formula, it simultaneously depended on a complex balancing of sensuous, speculative, and moral factors always held in tension. and so, calculational abstractions no longer seemed to escape from the vicissitudes of the world, but rather appeared intimately entangled in irreducible sensuous materialities and subtle techniques of negotiation. “when you calculate the volume [cubicas], you have to always keep in mind the yard of the sawmill,” pancho said, while he smoked some black tobacco and set up his tent on the boat’s deck. the calculative act of cubicar, in his view, was about maximizing profits by embracing the future-oriented view of the timber industrialist. and this could not be done just by considering the log as it seemed to be. rather, pancho’s success as a cubicador depended on refiguring the log as a speculative object that concealed a potentiality in need of uncovering or, rather, of being successfully disputed. for this, he could not take refuge in the merely irreflective act of mechanical calculation. quite to the contrary, he needed to bring together the mathematical affordances of the doyle formula and a deep, sensuous engagement with the peoples and things in front of him to become an emotionally savvy negotiator with his counterparts. only then could the true volume, that is, the useful volume, of a log be determined, and less of zhao’s money would go to waste. of course, this was not the only true volume that emerged in the process of buying and selling timber. for at the same time that pancho would calculate the volume of each log with the doyle formula, timao would be next to him conducting the same process with the smalian formula. “the smalian is only for talking to the state,” continued pancho, “just to submit our reports and pay taxes and those kinds of things.” pancho’s take on smalian as just for talking to the state framed it as a mere performative gesture that only stood as the true volume of timber for the eyes of state authorities. and yet, timao could not fail to perform such calculations. the existence of such parallel acts of calculation, both happening simultaneously, side by side, and each claiming to be the true volume in different ways and for different publics, evoked the complex legacies and desires that converged in the humble practical act of buying and selling timber in contemporary loreto. on the one hand, long intractable histories of racialized exploitation, trickery, and deceit. on the other hand, liberal technocratic hopes to make volumes precise and self-consistent. after endless, meandering turns along the pucayacu river, we finally arrived at puca urco. once we landed, ezequiel, the leader of puca urco’s logging brigade, warmly welcomed us and invited us to his house. after a round of catching up and some toasts, timao, pancho, and ezequiel started to plan our activities for the next day. while they talked, i smoked black tobacco with ezequiel’s father-in-law, don julio, an old indigenous bora man in his seventies. “when i was young, the patrons would come and buy our timber for pennies. and we just did not know. we just sold our wood to get whatever we could,” don julio said; “now is different. the engineer timao is a good man, and the state comes and gives us training to learn how to measure our trees.” in don julio’s words, volumes insinuated themselves as creatures that could not be fully detached from the fraught legacies of the past. from the old exploitative offerings of patrons to contemporary hopes that better knowledge and state tutelage could bring redemption for prior harms, don julio’s comment captured the ways in which calculational abstractions like volumes could become an important terrain for redeeming enduring injustices against indigenous peoples today. the next morning, our work began in earnest. ezequiel and his brigade departed in their boats before dawn to collect the log rafts they had left floating in nearby streams and channels. by early morning, they had spurred the log rafts in the river next to the port of puca urco, where they could be lifted by the boat’s huge crane and deposited in its frontal cargo space. some of the crew members joined ezequiel’s brigade in the water, where they spent the day swimming and walking on the log rafts, untying the logs and securing the crane’s hook onto each of them (see figure 4.) once a log was firmly hooked, a crew member would scream “secured!” and the crane would immediately lift the log into the air and carefully pile it alongside the others. as crew members alerted me, this was dangerous work where the rushing rhythms of industrial efficiency would sometimes crash with the imperative of human safety and well-being. (i once witnessed a terrible accident in which a huge log hit a crew worker in the chest. luckily, he survived.) each time the crane released a log in the frontal cargo space of the boat, the whole deck would tremble and everybody would stare until the piles of logs looked stable again. then, timao, pancho, ezequiel, don julio, and i would all rush toward the new sitting log and measure it quickly before the next flying one would come and surprise us from the back. this ritual would take just a minute or two for each log. pancho would first stare at the log and yell its species to us. then, he would quickly measure its length and the diameters at both extremes in both imperial and metric units. timao would then write down the metric measurements reported by pancho in his small notebook to later determine the smalian volume for each log. figure 4. workers walk on log rafts to secure the crane. photo by eduardo romero dianderas. pancho’s calculation with doyle required some extra steps. as a newly arrived moena log was left by the crane and pancho ran to measure it, he turned to ezequiel and said “ok, speak” (ya, habla). the following, quick negotiation between the two men addressed whether any discounts would apply to the overall volume of the log, and why. “three, four months ago, this wood was beautiful,” said ezequiel, trying to justify the rotten state of the wood on account of the crew’s delayed arrival to pick up the logs. “fissure? all this side is already rotten, my friend!” insisted pancho, as he asked timao to cut a small chunk of wood from a side of the moena log. then he smelled it. “you see? this does not smell like a healthy moena. you believe me now? so how much will we discount then? four inches?” “that is too much, let’s go with two” replied ezequiel. “my friend, there is clearly a huge hole within this log,” pancho replied. “let’s do it halfway—shall we say three?” once ezequiel conceded to pancho’s suggestion, the latter wrote down the agreed-on numbers in his little notebook with a subtle smirk. “that is how i like to do business. i do not want to trick you, my friend. they don’t pay me to trick nobody,” he said as he withdrew from the cargo space just before a new log came along (see figure 5). figure 5. ezequiel and pancho measure a log. photo by eduardo romero dianderas. our workday came to an end after more than a hundred of these negotiations between ezequiel and pancho. as we all gathered for a card game in the main deck of the boat, i could not help noticing that the two notebooks pancho and timao had been filling up all day sat on the table next to us (see figure 6). both notebooks looked alike, but the lives they were made to have differed markedly. one was destined to serve as an accounting tool for zhao’s sawmill so that he would know how many logs passed through its sawblades. if pancho had been savvy enough, such numbers would be an underestimation of their final timber yield. and if not, pancho would have failed as a cunning cubicador. in any case, they were made to join a long tradition of volumetric calculation born from speculating on the difference between what was paid to riverine workers and what was finally processed in sawmills. conversely, the numbers in the other notebook, timao’s, would enter a different orbit. they would not feed industrial speculations, but would nurture technocratic aspirations of achieving precision and self-consistency at various scales. and as they were reported back to the state, they would become part of a variety of instruments—from national industrial statistics to technical operational inspections to fiscal payment datasets—that would participate of the hopeful rise a new logging industry committed to environmental transparency and accountability. in the gap that widened between the trajectories of both sets of numbers, the lives of ezequiel, don julio, timao, and pancho emerged as disparate but related depictions of the ways in which, despite the increasing sophistication of contemporary technocratic endeavors, volumes remained deeply entangled in enduring affective landscapes of power, history, and bodily experience. figure 6. pancho’s notebook. photo by eduardo romero dianderas. the politics of calculational abstractions learning how to inspect logs with pancho casts a new light on the yacu kallpa intervention with which this article began. in newspaper articles and specialized reports at the time, the calculational abstractions recruited by state authorities to establish the illegality of the timber cargo appear as nothing more than docile technocratic currencies. the transcendental logic of volumes thus successfully dominates the imagination of commentators and analysts that constitute the privileged publics of rising technocratic interventions in peru’s tropical logging industry. in a way, this could and should not be otherwise. as we have seen, volumes need to emerge as docile and commensurable quantities that allow for sheer procedural efficiency, compelling technolegal inspection, and public accountability. as one imagines the smooth wooden textures of the timber cargo within the yacu kallpa, it does not matter that this timber board over there came from an internationally certified logging concession near iquitos, whereas that other one was bought for pennies from impoverished indigenous workers in the headwaters of a remote basin. at this point, we might never even know. what matters is how such wholes relate to calculated numbers, the way such numbers assign technolegal responsibilities, and the myriad technocratic operations that can now be performed on them to pursue particular kinds of decision making. thus, history is concealed, power suspended, bodily labor evacuated. the immanent frictions of the world are contained to make space for the transcending authority of the technocratic state. but as the present article has shown, this narrative remains incomplete, for calculational abstractions like volumes are also entangled in competing and irreducible forms of political imagination. the future-oriented structure of the doyle formula is embroiled in the legacies of the century-long racialized networks of exploitation that perfused the rain forests of loreto during the twentieth century, whereas the state-enforced smalian formula carries today liberal technocratic hopes to make peru’s topical logging industry subject to global standards of environmental transparency and accountability. importantly, such entanglements are not reducible to specific forms of materiality, since the highly abstract mathematical structure of volumetric formulas constitutes them as fertile terrains for cultivating different projects, relations, and desires. further, measurements taken on logs are also revealed as irreducibly eventful, for no two measurements can ever be identical. and sometimes, such irreducibilities add up to produce incommensurability and disjunction between two calculations of the same thing, thus opening ambiguous spaces of technolegal interpretation. these conditions produce calculational abstractions that depart in significant ways from the docile technolegal currencies seemingly at stake in the yacu kallpa intervention. for once one follows volumes across logging campsites, sawmills, and indigenous villages, they reveal themselves as ontologically ambivalent technolegal entities that are simultaneously transcendental mathematical units and creatures imbricated in long histories of racialized exploitation, deceitful practices of calculation, and the irreducible eventfulness of acts of measurement. the desire for modes of knowledge uncontaminated by politics and subjective judgment is in many ways coterminous with late modernity (see daston 2007). today, climate change and biodiversity loss reinvigorate such desire via sophisticated modes of calculation aiming to make mathematical abstractions increasingly precise, auditable, and self-consistent at planetary scales. as the global environmental crisis demands ever more scalable technical infrastructures for rendering the earth’s materialities and environments into objects of intensive technocratic regulation, how are we to govern the relations that bind calculational abstractions with the materialities that they stand for, not only within particular countries or regions but also at planetary scales? and what sort of awkward place should we acknowledge to history, power, and bodily experience in the organization and circulation of such elusive calculational abstractions? in pursuing such questions, the governance of tropical timber supply chains can be recast as a privileged laboratory in which to consider the effects of rising calculational controversies that lie at the heart of contemporary modes of global environmental governance. for while today vast technocratic interventions are deployed to render volumes as reliable planetary units of environmental transparency and accountability, the exploitative and deceitful legacies of peru’s tropical logging industry enduringly haunt attempts to bring tropical timber firmly into the orbit of global environmental governance. in this context, volumes do not work as technolegal entities that allow us to move seamlessly across calculational scales by transcending the frictions of power, history, and bodily experience. rather, they become engrained in multiple temporalities, political goals, and historical legacies that destabilize the contentious relations between abstraction and materiality. contemporary reforms to timber volumetric calculation procedures thus produce a rather paradoxical effect. for right at the moment when volumes become objects of intensive technocratic regulation, they also reveal themselves as fertile terrains for political and affective dispute. and as such, they become ethnographic prisms where to appreciate long and recalcitrant forms of political imagination and practice in contemporary peruvian amazonia and beyond. abstract recent years have witnessed the advancement of several technocratic interventions in the context of the global environmental crisis that aim to calculate and track different objects of environmental concern at various scales. in this article, i focus on how such technocratic interventions are transforming the processes by which tropical timber is technically rendered into calculational abstractions known as “volumes” in peru’s tropical timber supply chains. drawing on twenty-four months of fieldwork following the activities of loggers, timber industrialists, and state technocrats across peru’s amazonian region of loreto, i show how calculational abstractions can never fully circumvent the frictions of power, history, and bodily experience. rather, technocratic interventions aiming to standardize tropical timber-calculation procedures ultimately transform volumes into fertile ethnographic terrains from which to appreciate how competing forms of political imagination intersect and collide with each other as amazonia enters the age of climate change and biodiversity loss. [peruvian amazonia; global environmental governance; volumes; calculational abstractions; calculation; tropical timber; climate change] resumen durante los últimos años, distintas intervenciones tecnocráticas han sido desplegadas en el contexto de la crisis ambiental global con el fin de calcular y trazar distintos objetos de preocupación ambiental a distintas escalas. en este artículo, me centro en cómo estas intervenciones tecnocráticas están transformando los procesos por los cuales la madera tropical es convertida en abstracciones calculacionales llamadas “volúmenes” dentro de las cadenas de suministro de madera tropical del perú. sobre la base de veinticuatro meses de trabajo de campo siguiendo las actividades de madereros, industriales y tecnócratas del estado en la región amazónica de loreto, muestro cómo las abstracciones calculacionales nunca pueden escapar del todo de las fricciones del poder, la historia y la experiencia corporal. más bien, las intervenciones tecnocráticas que buscan estandarizar los procedimientos de calculo sobre la madera tropical transforman los volúmenes en terrenos etnográficos fértiles desde los cuales es posible apreciar cómo distintas formas de imaginación política se intersectan y colisionan al tiempo que la amazonía ingresa a la era del cambio climático y la perdida de biodiversidad. [amazonia peruana; gobernaza ambiental global; volúmenes; abstracciones calculacionales; cálculo; madera tropical; cambio climático] acknowledgments funding for this research was generously provided by the wenner-gren foundation, the social science research council, the national science foundation, and the explorer’s club. i thank the loggers, timber industrialists, state supervisors, and indigenous leaders who offered me their valuable time and allowed me to walk with them in different parts of loreto. finally, i thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided careful feedback during revisions. references ballestero, andrea 2015 “the ethics of a formula: calculating a financial humanitarian price for water.” american ethnologist 42, no. 2: 262–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12129 belyea, harold 1953 “log rules, with special reference to the scribner and doyle diameter.” southern lumberman 187: 276–86. çalışkan, koray, and michel callon 2010 “economization, part 2: a research 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the emergence of modern forest resource economic thought in germany.” european journal of forest research 135: 1037–54. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-016-0992-5 warde, paul 2018 the invention of sustainability: nature and destiny, c. 1500-1870. new york: cambridge university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 64-90, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.04 dissonance: cartooning in iran, humor, and the study of things that don’t match cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 645-666, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.07 dissonance: cartooning in iran, humor, and the study of things that don’t match mirco göpfert goethe university frankfurt https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0170-5742 i was taking a walk with nasrin varesi, an art teacher and cartoonist, in the beautiful hasht behesht park in central isfahan. it sported plenty of verdant lawns, flowerbeds, and fountains on a calm island in the middle of busy traffic. after going to an underground public toilet, varesi told me that she had seen a tiny, beautiful flower on the floor, probably made of the kind of fabric like often attached to children’s hair pins, with glitter on one of its petals. it was lying there, right beside a “shithole” in the ground, from which emerged a penetrating stench. ever since she began drawing cartoons, she said, she had not been able to pass such a display without picturing a punch line. i could see that a flower from a children’s hair pin and a toilet are somewhat incompatible, “incongruous” perhaps, but i could not see the cartoon, i told her. varesi stopped and looked at me. “it is not about seeing the flower and the shithole,” she said. “it is about seeing the one with the other. the cartoon is not a beautiful flower next to a shithole, but a flower growing out and in spite of it.” she paused to check whether i understood and then added: “it’s like the supreme leader tweeting about the evil of twitter!”1 this essay delves into varesi’s insight, unraveling the cartoonist’s ability to perceive, compose, and amplify dissonance through humor. while many theories of humor orbit the notion of incongruity (morreall 2009, 9), varesi’s perspective hints at a more experiential term: dissonance. beyond cognitive dissonance or acoustic discord,2 this dissonance parallels the uncomfortable tension found in music, where tones clash, challenging norms and demanding resolution without delivering, keeping us on our toes, rejecting our belief in the illusion of harmony (adorno 1973, 18–19; 2003, 52). thinking with dissonances and humor thus holds an uncomfortable potential both as a way of knowing and as a practice of critique. cartooning and other humorous practices have often been studied as a means of popular and artistic resistance (damir-geilsdorf and milich 2020; göpfert 2020a), activism (haugerud 2013; sørensen 2016) or propaganda (bihl 2015), and rightly so, because studying them yields important insights into particular fields of social, economic, and cultural contestation (see kuipers 2011). at the same time, there is far more to humor than politics; bronislaw malinowski ([1937] 2015) even saw it as a starting point for a theory of culture. humor and laughter serve as windows into the nuanced ways in which people experience their lives and navigate moral subjectivities, even amid contexts marked by suffering and violence (see goldstein 2003). in delving into humorous practices such as cartooning, we encounter not only a rich tapestry of social and political commentary but also a distinctive set of skills. these skills provide a unique approach to studying, interpreting, and engaging with the complexities of the world—a peculiar way of knowing. when varesi juxtaposes the flower and the toilet by picturing, for instance, a delicate, daisy-like figure relaxing in a nauseating “shithole”-jacuzzi, she not only evokes powerful forms of resonance in the form of laughter, irritation, or even disgust. she also ventures down a path of engagement with a world that seems full of things that repel, negate, or appear incongruous with each other, not just for cartoonists in iran, and invites us to explore our uncomfortable knowledge of them. this essay explores humor, particularly in cartooning, as a unique mode of engaged knowing. the exploration unfolds in three parts: an overview of the iranian cartooning scene and my research since 2015; an examination of the dissonant image (or mirage) that emerged during the research, one reflecting sharp opposites and contradictions in iranian society; and an investigation of cartooning skills in perception, composition, and amplification that combine the aesthetics and ethics of dissonance. the essay concludes with an invitation to think more about the possibilities (and limits, as the case may be) of how anthropologists can embrace dissonances with humor, humility, and critique. exploring cartooning in iran i first came across cartoons by iranian artists during my persian language classes in mashhad in 2015. i was immediately struck by the surreal darkness that many cartoons conveyed: visual echoes of sadegh hedayat’s writings. i had just read the blind owl, hedayat’s masterpiece, riddled with the narrator’s nightmares and feverish thoughts of suicide, when i came across javad alizadeh’s black-and-white picture of hedayat wearing a hat shaped like an owl from a children’s book. then his picture of a fountain pen penetrating the hand holding it. next i discovered the works of ardeshir mohasses, perhaps iran’s most famous cartoonist, who had fled the country under the shah in the 1970s after criticizing the dictatorship and was unable to return after the revolution of 1978/79 that installed the islamic republic. this discovery was followed by the depressing works of davoud shahidi, an early companion of mohasses, the work of touka and mana neyestani, political cartoonists in exile, and many more. these cartoons hardly gave me anything to laugh about, except for a desperate laughter sometimes in response to the painful truth they so ruthlessly portrayed. i learned of the existence of cartoon houses (khāne-ye karicatūr), cartoon associations, and cartoon museums in all major cities, accompanied by a continuous stream of national and international competitions, festivals and exhibitions, cartoons in every major newspaper and even a variety of satirical magazines on the newsstands. suddenly iran appeared like a country bristling with cartoonists. at the same time and still in 2015, i read and was deeply worried about the imprisonment of the cartoonists hadi heidari and atena farghadani. they were neither the first nor the last cartoonists to face imprisonment in iran. although there had been periods of relative freedom of expression both under the shah and after the revolution, the suppression of satirical expression has entrenched itself as a recurrent feature of the iranian sociopolitical landscape (see farjami 2017, 78). most of the cartoonists i met were born during the iran-iraq war between 1980 and 1988 or shortly before, a decade in the grip of war with little room for satire and humor. in the 1990s, the political atmosphere in iran eased gradually, allowing satirical publications to spring up. among them was a magazine called gol agha, a trailblazer of satire in postrevolutionary iran, even though it was rather toothless and under the close watch of the regime (föllmer 2008, 32–33). president muhammad khatami’s victory and his reform movement in 1997 meant an opening of the public sphere and the emergence of journalistic activism, bringing political satire and caricature into full bloom in iran. at this time, the cartoonists i would later meet were in their late teens and twenties. that period also saw the proliferation of a reformist press (and later social media), which became central to the emergence and wide circulation of cartoons in iran. yet when mahmoud ahmadinejad came to power in 2005, the atmosphere changed radically. his eight-year presidency saw uncompromising restrictions imposed on these newly won liberties, leading to the emigration and exile of many cartoonists, including touka and mana neyestani. many cartoonists associated with the reformist press shifted their primary field of activity to social media. at the same time, an anti-reformist cartoon scene with both financial and institutional support has gained more and more power and international visibility. it materialized, paradigmatically, in so-called holocaust cartoon competitions and similar events organized under the aegis of the “resistance art” or honar moghāvemat association (see göpfert 2020a). this movement and events organized by it form a political project initiated by ahmadinejad and in response to a problematic depiction of islam and muslims, the islamic republic, and to the exceptionality of jewish victimhood in and for the west.3 its protagonists are particularly influential due to the sheer financial and institutional force of their network. yet beyond iran, for instance, when consulting the highly frequented english-language website irancartoon.com, it has not always been easy to see how close they are to the regime. emerging cartoonists depend on their goodwill, for example, when they want to tap into this network’s resources or use their connections to hold their first individual exhibitions in iran, or when they need support letters to travel abroad. at the same time, more and more cartoonists have fled or emigrated to evade restrictions or imprisonment, particularly under ahmadinejad and in the wake of the green movement, a mass protest against ahmadinejad’s contested re-election in 2009. some of iran’s most famous cartoonists left the country at that time. the election of the more moderate president hassan rouhani in 2013 left many hopeful, even optimistic. but their optimism faded quickly in the face of the imprisonment of hadi heidari and atena farghadani. that optimism has not been rekindled. my fieldwork in this context has been patchy. in 2015, i enjoyed the privilege of spending a few months in iran for language training. i also slowly began mapping out the scene of iranian cartoonists, both in iran and abroad. in preparation for a longer stretch of fieldwork the following year, i contacted a professor of anthropology at a university in tehran. he proved immensely helpful as my host when i taught as a guest lecturer in his department in 2016; and he also put me in touch with masoud shojaei tabatabaei, the head of the iranian house of cartoon, where i would have loved to become an intern, participate in drawing classes, help maintain the website, and organize events and exhibitions. shojaei was the first iranian cartoonist i met in person. during our first meeting, facilitated by a phone call from my academic host, shojaei appeared kind and welcoming—but a second meeting never happened. he would not answer my calls or messages or see me in his office. only then did i understand that he was an influential art manager close to the regime, a key figure in the “resistance art” association and an organizer of the holocaust cartoon competitions—and thus particularly unpopular among most of the cartoonists i met later. (it gives testimony to my blatant naïveté as a european anthropologist that i only then realized that my academic host, too, formed part of an influential political network, one that would disagree, to put it mildly, with the positions held by most of my interlocutors.) since 2015, i have spent longer and shorter periods of fieldwork (between three weeks and six months) in iran during which i conducted interviews, but mostly had long and recurring conversations with roughly fifty cartoonists. i also spent a few months following the activities of a cartoon association outside of tehran that had about fifty members (two-thirds of them women), fifteen of them regulars in its weekly activities. the most common activities were workshops during which the artists discussed and sketched initial ideas for cartoons. i also started drawing cartoons myself, under the guidance of a cartoonist. once a week for several hours, we would meet and she would give me exercises to complete, go through the sketches that i brought along, criticize my drawing technique, and help me improve my skills or come up with ideas. the cartoons i produced would, in turn, become the subject of my conversations with other cartoonists. thus my former focus as a rather passive observer of (political) cartooning and satire in contemporary iran gave way to an engaged exploration of the epistemic potential of humor in drawing. exploring ambiguities in iran many of the studies i had read before my first trip to iran rang uncomfortably true when varesi spoke about the tension between the flower and the toilet, the ban on twitter and the supreme leader’s tweets, and about the far broader tensions she noticed in iran. the studies i had consulted depicted iran as a country and society full of sharp contrasts, binary oppositions, contradictions, and paradoxical relations. the overall image seemed like a simplified and somewhat exaggerated version of iran: a depiction i thought had to be unrealistic because it resonated so well with my own internalized orientalist and racist preconceptions—which i knew were false and wanted to reject. to begin with, tehran appeared grotesquely bipolar in many accounts. ramita navai (2014), for instance, in the prologue to her acclaimed book on the capital, the city of lies, follows the course of vali asr street, which runs from north to south: the deep gutters known as joobs carry icy water that gushes out of the mountains in the north. the farther south the water flows [alongside the street], the murkier and darker it becomes… . farther south, the buildings become smaller and more decrepit: houses of raw cement and crumbling brick with broken windows and corrugated iron shacks set up on rooftops. rusting gas flues and air conditioning units hang from walls, like metal guts pushed outside. here the colour is sucked from the streets, into the shadows of conservatism and poverty… . just over eleven miles from top to bottom, it [vali asr street] connects the rich and the poor, the religious and the secular, tradition and modernity. yet the lives of the people at either end seem centuries apart. (navai 2014, prologue, n.p.) this geographical split between the north and the south, shahram khosravi (2008, 60) maintains, supposedly stands for a much more profound cultural and moral dichotomy. ultimately, it echoes what the iranian cultural theorist daryush shayegan (1997) problematically termed “cultural schizophrenia.” this “cultural schizophrenia,” shayegan (1997, vii) maintains, characterizes those societies that are “trapped in a fault-line between incompatible worlds, worlds that mutually repel and deform one another,” worlds in which people experience a “contradictory double fascination” with both tradition and modernity, caught between an “enchanted vision of a world still infused with the aura of collective memory, and the equally compelling allure of the new and unknown” (shayegan 1997, 5). the perceived “delay” between these two worlds, he continues, is “not just a chronological dislocation, but an ontological divide” (shayegan 1997, 6). then i noticed an omnipresent description of the supposedly radical divide between inner and outer spaces, between the private and the public, between the biruni and the andaruni (vahdat 2017, 83). according to khosravi (2008, 123), the “cultural duality between life in private and in public” is still the “most conspicuous aspect of social life in post-revolutionary iran.” the “unveiled” public, khosravi says, is a hegemonic space in the islamic social order; the “veiled” and private, in contrast, offers room for illicit lifestyles in a pre-revolutionary atmosphere.4 this duality of lifestyles has drastic consequences for the people practicing them, khosravi maintains; the way selves are presented depends fundamentally on whether they are being presented outdoors or indoors. most iranians have lived “double lives” since the revolution, khosravi concludes (2008, 123), between two different, largely opposed norms and cultures. roxanne varzi (2006) calls this a “schizophrenic existence,” one caught between modes of self-construction, on the one hand, with a sharp rise in meditation classes and self-help books, and self-annihilation, on the other, with an equally steep increase in drug addiction and suicide, particularly among youths in the mountains north of tehran (varzi 2006, 10–11; see also shirazi et al. 2012 and hassanian-moghaddam and zamani 2017). all these accounts depict simplified versions of complex realities while exaggerating select elements, ignoring many others and carrying implicit normative biases. navai’s account of tehran remains painfully partial and full of clichés. yet she depicts, within a single frame, as it were, many iranians’ agonizing experience of harsh contrasts between economic, social, and environmental privileges and handicaps. shayegan’s notion of “cultural schizophrenia” deserves to be emphatically contested for its psycho-pathologizing reification of orientalist motives (see also khosravi 2008, 21), for oversimplifying the intricacies of life in iran (adelkhah 1999, 3; hashemi 2020), for subscribing to a radically modernist and thus normative conception of the world built on the conceptual split between tradition and modernity (akman 1998; khiabany 2010). yet it corresponds with the images many other iranians (and certainly most cartoonists) i spoke to draw of their lives. khosravi and varzi focus on upper-class tehrani youth at a specific historical moment, while generalizing perhaps too quickly the actions of tehran’s young elite (see hashemi 2015, 281n13), which points to a common bias for ethnographies of iran in the early 2000s (olszewska 2013). however, many of the cartoonists i met shared this bias. most of them were middleand upper-class urbanites who had picked up drawing when khosravi and varzi did their fieldwork in the late 1990s and the early 2000s during khatami’s reform-oriented (yet ineffective) presidency (khosravi 2008, 16), which included the experience of deep frustration when ahmadinejad became president in 2005.5 all these accounts (or my shorthand representation of them) appear problematic or even false because, again, they depict simplified and distorted versions of complex realities while perpetuating implicit normative biases. yet as accounts that echo the experience of ambiguities and things that don’t match for a particular group of people, they are very much true. they align to a surprising degree with the images many of the cartoonists i met would draw of their lives and experiences in contemporary iran, combining falsehood and truth in unsettling ways. perception and dissonance when varesi spoke about her inability to walk past a beautiful flower in a public toilet without picturing a cartoon, she described a particular kind of perceptive sensitivity that, according to her, was cultivated through the artistic practice of cartooning. many anthropologists have, in the past decade, underlined the epistemic potential of artistic practices. drawing inspiration from tim ingold’s (2014, 2016) notion of enskillment, cassis kilian (2021), for instance, focuses on the performing arts, arnd schneider (2017) and christopher wright (with schneider 2010, 2013) on the visual arts, and andrew causey (2017) on drawing. drawing means, causey reminds us, learning to see. the movements of the eye, literally following and moving along the perceived lines, merge with the movements of the hand to draw lines on paper. drawing thus helps us see lines, edges, movement, and the absent by fusing visual perception with engagement, attention with embodied response (see also ingold 2016, 17). rather than a mere means of representation, drawing should be understood as an epistemic practice in its own right, as lochlann jain (2022) beautifully shows. drawing cartoons taps into the epistemic potential of both drawing and humor, which makes for a peculiar way of engaging with the world, perhaps even a particular mode of cognition (hsu 2016). as many approaches inspired by phenomenology have shown, humor enables us to perceive, communicate, and ultimately make sense of the dissonances—the absurdities—of social life (mulkay 1988) and the political present (boyer 2013; göpfert 2022; petrović 2018), perhaps even of the human condition (berger [1997] 2014; see kuipers 2008, 376–378). according to peter l. berger, humor holds great epistemic potential when considering the profoundly dissonant human experience of the world, its uncertainties, the contradictory, ambivalent, fleeting, and fragile elements that constitute it. humor, he says, leads above all to the perception of incongruity (berger [1997] 2014, 193). the “incongruity theory of humor” was also what varesi was referring to when she explained how she saw the flower and the toilet. according to this theory, advocated by immanuel kant ([1790] 1983), arthur schopenhauer ([1819] 1986), and søren kierkegaard ([1846] 1989), humor violates patterns and expectations, exciting laughter. in that sense, humor concerns the perception of incongruous elements—seeing two otherwise incompatible elements as related. yet when thinking about cartooning, varesi slightly shifts the accent of the argument from the perception of things that don’t match toward the experience of discomfort that goes with it. what matters to her is dissonance, rather than incongruity: seeing not the flower and the shithole, but the one with the other. children’s flowers in public toilets are not the only manifestation of “incongruous” elements in contemporary iran. think of the contradictions built into the islamic republic, with the impossibilities of the conflation of religious and political belonging, as described by wael hallaq (2013). think of all the tensions described by navai, shayegan, khosravi, and varzi; the proliferation of meditation classes and the growing number of suicides among youth—for varesi, the list proved endless, experiences of ambiguity and dissonance sprawling.6 not without cynicism she asserted that drawing cartoons becomes easier when so much incongruity is already built into the world in front of you. then there was the official political discourse of the islamic republic, one riddled with binary oppositions that all boil down to the neat distinction between friends and enemies of the revolution. as narges bajoghli (2019) has impressively shown in her ethnography of regime media producers in iran, keeping the revolution alive means maintaining clear, live binaries between insiders and outsiders, between khodi and gheyr-e khodi, otherwise the revolutionary imagery and the revolutionary collective itself would dissolve (bajoghli 2019, 76).7 ali mirsepassi (2011) sees a similar tendency at play in contemporary intellectual debate in iran. influential thinkers, mirsepassi (2011, 67) says, stick with and reproduce such simple binary notions as modern/traditional, inside/outside, and universal/local, which are of little help in understanding extant social, cultural, and political conditions. this tendency is, although at times in reverse, also visible in some of the accounts presented in the previous section. do they all, in one way or another, subscribe to a similar motif? the reproduction of profound binary opposites feeds into what the cartoonist hamed rezaei described in conversation as “keeping the machine of absolutes running,” avoiding nuance and ambiguous in-betweens. this, he said, means keeping the revolution alive. cartoonists, however, develop a sensitivity for seeing and unmasking such “machines of absolutes” by forcing the disparate elements into a single frame, focusing on and exploring the connection between them, embracing ambiguity, perceiving not a picture of two incongruous bits but one of a dissonant whole.8 composition and nuance, certainty and doubt as varesi explained, composing a cartoon often means forcing two incongruous elements into a relationship with each other: good and evil, night and day, rich and poor, north and south, meditation and suicide, the ban on twitter and the supreme leader tweeting. in a follow-up interview on that issue, the cartoonist took out pen and paper to give me an even simpler example, probably the most stereotypical pair of opposing elements: a dove and prison bars. she drew a white dove, a symbol of freedom, and next to it iron bars to symbolize imprisonment. looking at them next to each other, they appear incongruent and somewhat incompatible, but not much more. then she turned the page and skilfully drew not simply a melancholic dove behind prison bars but a dove playing the bars like the strings of a harp.9 this, she told me while pointing to the picture, was what cartooning on the basis of incompatible elements should be about: after perceiving the tension between the two, provoke a reaction between them. this occurs by placing them in a single frame and letting their two separate worlds collide and unfold on each other, dissolving the supposed absoluteness—literally, the disconnectedness—of both. not a beautiful flower next to a shithole, but a flower growing out of and despite it; not a ban on twitter and the supreme leader tweeting, but the supreme leader tweeting about the evil of twitter; not self-help books and meditation classes in one part of town and famous suicide spots in another, but a bus ride from yoga to overdose, or a self-help book about “how to kill yourself en balance.” the perception of dissonance makes a cartoon possible; the composition makes the cartoon. exercises in cartoon composition took place collaboratively during the weekly workshops of a cartoon association whose activities i was following. at the beginning of each session, the cartoonists would choose a topic for the day, for example, the car manufacturer saipa’s announcement of a new model. people jokingly called saipa cars “death traps,” as the faulty vehicles cause many accidents. the cartoonists would then begin their individual studies, or études, look over each other’s shoulder, laugh, and talk about their diverse ideas. as a result of the many cartoon studies on a single topic, the different elements that people chose and combined and their angles of them, as well as the cartoonists’ conversations about these studies—what worked well and what did not, what was funny and what was not, what felt right and what felt wrong, what could and could not be drawn—the issue at hand appeared more nuanced than initially assumed, clearly visible in the final outcomes. one of the cartoons i set out to draw during one of my stays in iran concerned the main organizer of the holocaust cartoon competition, shojaei. like most of my interlocutors, i found this competition revolting on many levels and i came to see its organizer as an opportunistic valet to hard-liners of the iranian regime. the 2016 competition, which was announced through a poster showing a swastika-shaped prison with a palestinian kite flying above it, caused massive outrage and media coverage in the north atlantic. press conferences in tehran were packed with international journalists, with shojaei enjoying the spotlight, making him even more powerful in the iranian cartooning scene. i wanted to draw him bathing in the blazing light of a giant, swastika-shaped theater lamp. but in what posture should i draw him? should he wear sunglasses? should he frown or laugh, appear angry or relaxed? should he point his finger in a gesture of paternalistic warning? should there be others behind him, peeking into the light? and would it be funny? i drew dozens of versions. none was funny, none felt right, but i learned a lot. the necessity of reduction and condensation forced me to analytically dissect the phenomenon at hand and look at it from different perspectives—in direct and barely controllable complicity with the lines unfolding on the paper. in addition, showing my cartoon studies to other cartoonists triggered some of the most intimate and insightful conversations i have ever had during fieldwork. these conversations provided insight because they revealed much about how other cartoonists perceived the phenomenon that i wanted to depict; but they also provided insight because they revealed the certainties and doubts people had about what could and could not be shown in iran and what felt aesthetically and ethically right or wrong. this also means that the reaction caused by the composition of a cartoon, often between two opposing elements, should not be misunderstood as a form of naive dialectics. in a dialectical process, two opposing elements come together, react with each other, and form a synthesis, which represents a form of temporary closure, the provisional resolution of dissonance, if you like. cartoons, in their funny or confusing appearance, however, represent openings. if anything, they proffer temporary stabilizations of unfinished studyings. a cartoon as an object may appear fixed; cartooning as a practice is quite the opposite. in other words, an art form geared toward condensation and simplification (see morris 1993; greenberg 2002, 187) comes to life as a practice of analysis that reveals complexity and nuance. unlike cartoons, comics have been very much appreciated for their openness. in their structural hybridit—bringing together, without synthesizing, narratives of word and image (chute 2008, 459; 2006, 201; theodossopoulos 2022)—they allow for nonlinear and multilinear modes of representation and reflection, as nick sousanis (2015) so impressively shows in his graphic philosophical book unflattening. by their very form, comics resist closure. yet so do cartoons. comics as sequential narratives allow for much more complex lines and intersections of temporality and narrative, rhythm and orientation (hamdy and coleman 2022, 1). yet even a single-frame cartoon may bring together text and image in ambiguous ways, thereby resisting synthesis. the caption might say “festival of free speech,” but the picture shows a graveyard. in addition, the metaphorical and often surreal quality of cartoons, and even more so the irony and satire of humorous drawings, leaves ample room for nonlinear and ambiguous forms of representation. cartoons, in their harsh reduction to a single frame, can prove confusing and even blatantly nonsensical—even to the person drawing them! yet many cartoonists told me that these pictures, even while painfully eluding rationalization, can feel unmistakably “right” (or “wrong,” for that matter). in an uncomfortable way, they combine absolute certainty with profound doubt, embracing both audacity and humility (zarifian 2022, 67) to reveal much more than what they hide. while the final composition should be simple, the process of composing certainly is not. drawing a simple black-and-white cartoon includes playing with simple black-and-white categories, thereby highlighting the complex and often paradoxical relation between them. composing cartoons invites complication and ambiguity instead of absolutes, eventually revealing nuance through black and white. amplification and critique cartoonists exaggerate. they do not depict naturalist facts. an orchid that looks like a half-starved heroin addict vomiting on the floor in a nauseating public restroom does not really exist. a politician does not really play chess with a man held at gunpoint. or, as in ardeshir mohassess’s masterful pre-revolutionary cartoon, the monarch does not really use the gallows and a hanged corpse as decoration at his birthday party. dissonances get amplified, blown out of proportion and turn into something false yet uncomfortably true. telling the truth and telling it loudly served as the cartoonist rezai’s motivation, he stressed during one of our conversations. rezaei lived in tehran and earned a living as an engineer, and he is also a prominent cartoonist in iran. many of the younger cartoonists i spoke to hailed him as ostād, or “master.” the two of us were sitting in a café overlooking a busy street in northern tehran when he remarked: look down at the street with all the cars and people out there. they are walking in the street and taking the metro. they have friends and they are drinking their coffee and they are drinking their whiskey and they are eating well and everything is running very smoothly. but you know that it is not. a passing bus blew its horn after nearly hitting a young woman. oh no, things are not running smoothly. humans are being humiliated. animals are running our lives. he took a sip of his iced coffee. for example, i have a cartoon showing a politician.10 he is sitting at a table with many fine glasses, wine bottles, nice plates, and napkins, and everything is neat, clean, and elegant. but the politician’s head looks like that of a vicious dog drooling over pieces of a dead corpse. another sip of coffee. we can do better than that. but of course, i don’t have the solution. i am paradoxical, too! look at me, i always say i’m a socialist—but i am so bourgeois! we both laughed loudly. i don’t have the solution. but i have a responsibility. i am a messenger. i have to critique. i have to give consciousness to people, make them aware of what is going on. analyze the situation and then express it with art. i said this reminded me of ardeshir mohassess and his motto, “i am only a reporter” (qtd. in neshat and nodjoumi 2008, 37).11 “that is right,” rezaei said, “cartoonists are only reporters—but with a little extra: my pictures should give you a shock, like a needle that goes through the layers of fat and then it touches your nerves.” he told me that cartooning should not be about presenting the audience with a solution to the dissonances on display. it should force you into a relationship with them, provoke resonance, an immediate affective reaction, much like the needle penetrating layers of fat, even against our will. but how? the anthropologist and humor scholar elliot oring has coined the notion of appropriate incongruity in relation to comical things. according to oring (2016, x), we perceive humor when incongruous words, practices, images, or ideas seem—in a joke or a cartoon—appropriately related. yet what many cartoonists wanted to convey was, on a different level, the inappropriateness of the relationship on display; the experience of dissonance, rather than the mere perception of incongruity. rezaei perhaps brought together incongruous bits in a formally appropriate way, but he wanted to shine a harsh light on precisely the ethical inappropriateness of the relationship depicted. “no, everything is not running smoothly!” cartooning as rezaei describes it constitutes a deeply critical enterprise. for him, it means revealing the evil at play in what seems to be good. if theodor w. adorno had been a cartoonist, he would perhaps have said something similar. he was not a cartoonist, of course, perhaps not even particularly humorous,12 but he did explore the notion of dissonance in ways that resonate deeply with rezaei’s words. for adorno (1973, 18), dissonance is an aesthetic expression of suffering; it opposes complacency and rejects our belief in the illusion of existing harmony. consequently, it holds profoundly liberating potential. according to asaf angermann (2015, 271), the notion of dissonance should even be thought of as a key element of adorno’s never explicit and thus painfully elusive moral foundation of critical theory. yet unlike other forms of critique, cartoons and humor can provoke—literally—painfully intense reactions, bodily convulsions. but, again, how? commenting on satire, simon critchley (2002, 36) said: “to have an effect, the warning signals have to be deafening.” dissonance, particularly in its amplified form, resonates or gets under our skin when it taps into and explicates what steve rayner (2012) calls “uncomfortable knowledge.” according to rayner, uncomfortable knowledge is what we know but exclude from the simplified, self-consistent versions of the world that we develop to make sense of the world’s complexity so as to act in it, because it is in tense relationship or in outright contradiction with these versions. in other words, it is that which we know but don’t want to know; the connections we know exist but do not explore. in iran, for instance, the uncomfortable knowledge revealed through cartoons may add nuance within the simplified versions of reality propagated by the revolutionary regime of the islamic republic, or it may raise concerns that should not be raised. cartoonists can get arrested, magazines closed for that kind of impact. the force (and the threat for the regime) of cartoons lies perhaps in their potential to reveal what should remain hidden, but this force expands through cartoons’ capacity to show just how uncomfortable the knowledge they reveal is. in other words, through an affective engagement with things that don’t match or things we shouldn’t know, cartoons show us that what sometimes presents itself as a matter of fact is instead really a matter of concern (see latour 2004). my interlocutors in iran hardly took anything they saw as a matter of fact; they perceived it as a fictive production of a highly contentious and contradictory sociopolitical context. and still, seeing these dissonances amplified and humorously blown out of proportion, being drawn into an affective engagement with them, had powerful effects. perhaps like irony in politics (see samanani et al. 2023, 191), humor can generate surpluses and intensities that go beyond mere understanding, “cultivating embodied tensions that can become animating forces.” cartooning thus combines an aesthetics and an ethics of dissonance, so that even the most surreal images can take on an uncanny appearance of unmistakable truth, substantiated by powerful affects and bodily convulsions from laughter to disgust. anthropology, humor, and humility in this essay, i have tried to reveal cartooning as a form of engaged knowing, intertwining drawing and humor. the practice of cartooning, with its blend of perceptive sensitivity, analytical skills, and moral commitment based on careful engagement with dissonances, presents an intriguing lens for comprehending the political present in iran and beyond. but can this creative practice be of use to anthropology? anthropology, while seldom engaging with humor,13 has considerable experience embracing dissonance, even if it is not aware of doing so. remember, as a worn example, e. e. evans-pritchard (1976) encountering witchcraft among the azande. “witches, as the azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist,” he writes (evans-pritchard 1976, 18); “witchcraft has no real existence” (evans-pritchard 1976, 43). and yet he notes, “i have only once seen witchcraft on its path” (­evans-pritchard 1976, 11)—evans-pritchard experienced something that definitely was witchcraft: a bright light passing through the night and toward the homestead of a man who died a few hours later. doesn’t the tension between rational explanation and embodied experience, the logical incoherence, mirror a certain humility in acknowledging the unknowable? evans-pritchard’s matter-of-fact description of the event opens up a sense of unsettling possibility, david graeber (2015, 36) suggests, and prompts us to wonder: “who knows, maybe there actually is something going on here that we just don’t know about?” this refusal of synthesis, this open-ended exploration of the dissonant, can become as audacious as it can be an invitation to humility. witches cannot exist. witchcraft is not real. i have only seen it once. (said the stone to the anthropologist.) and isn’t it also a bit funny? a cartoonish amplification of dissonance that combines the premise of rationality with the intimacy of experience and, rather than seeking resolution, invites us into an affective relationship with the ambiguity. punch lines, like those in cartoons, do not resolve tensions; they allow dissonance to unfold, fostering inconclusiveness, holistic modes of cognition (rossing 2016, 13), critical engagement, and affective connection. thus ways of knowing through humor can open up new zones of engagement between anthropology and the world(s) it encounters and in which it dwells.14 consider the prospect of sketching cartoons or crafting stand-up bits in the midst of our fieldwork (or while engaging with the literature). what if we then shared these creations with our research partners and colleagues? this practical and affective engagement could open up a new way of collaboratively processing knowledge. by venturing into the realm of discomfort and delving into matters of concern from a place that is as audacious as it is modest, we would, in essence, be exposing ourselves to humility rather than ridicule. in other words, exploring the potential (and limitations) of such an aesthetic and ethical practice of dissonance through humor offers peculiar pathways for collaboration and commitment. that way, perhaps humor can equip us not only with the means but also embolden us with the audacity needed to grapple with the unknowable—all with a spirit of humility and critique. abstract this essay, drawing on research with cartoonists in iran, explores cartooning as a distinctive mode of engaged knowing through drawing and humor. by unraveling the cartoonists’ capacity to perceive, compose, and amplify dissonance, the study reveals a practice that intertwines perceptive sensitivity, analytical skill, and moral commitment. embracing dissonance through cartooning and humor not only provides new perspectives on the political present in iran and beyond but also offers a peculiar mode of knowing the uncomfortable—studying things that don’t match. unlike cartooning, anthropology seldom embraces humor, yet both share a capacity for navigating dissonance. humor as an aesthetic and ethical practice can open unconventional paths for research and commitment, providing a means and audacity to understand the unknowable—all with a spirit of humility and critique. [dissonance; humor; knowledge; cartooning; incongruity; humility; iran] چکیده این مقاله با تکیه بر پژوهش با کاریکاتوریست‌های ایران، کاریکاتور را به‌عنوان شیوه‌ای متمایز از دانستن درگیرانه از طریق طراحی و طنز بررسی می‌کند. این مطالعه با آشکار کردن ظرفیت کاریکاتوریست‌ها برای درک، نوشتن و تقویت ناهماهنگی، عملکردی را نشان می‌دهد که حساسیت ادراکی، مهارت تحلیلی و تعهد اخلاقی را در هم می‌آمیزد. پذیرش ناهماهنگی از طریق کاریکاتور و طنز، نه تنها دیدگاه‌های جدیدی را در مورد وضعیت کنونی سیاسی در ایران و فراتر از آن ارائه می‌کند، بلکه شیوه‌ای عجیب از دانستن چیزهای ناراحت‌کننده-مطالعه چیزهایی که مطابقت ندارندرا نیز ارائه می‌دهد. بر خلاف کاریکاتور، انسان شناسی به ندرت از طنز استقبال می کند، با این حال هر دو ظرفیتی برای هدایت ناهماهنگی دارند. شوخ طبعی به عنوان یک عمل زیبایی شناختی و اخلاقی می تواند راه های غیر متعارفی را برای تحقیق و تعهد بگشاید و ابزار و جسارتی برای درک ناشناخته ها فراهم کند همه با روحیه فروتنی و نقد. [ناهماهنگی طنز دانش کاریکاتور ناهماهنگی فروتنی ایران] notes acknowledgments i have presented early drafts of this essay at the university of konstanz, the university of hamburg, and the university of cologne. i am particularly grateful to thomas g. kirsch, julia pauli, and katajun amirpur for these opportunities, and i thank the participants of these seminars for their critical comments. the conversations at gu frankfurt with friends and colleagues during our ethnographische runde and in the nojoke project proved key in bringing this essay to life. thank you! also, i want to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editorial collective for helpful criticism and encouragement, as well as lukas armbrust, sepide ghorbani, and pauline bugler for their assistance in preparing the manuscript. part of the fieldwork that led to this essay was financed by the center of excellence “cultural foundations of social integration” at the university of konstanz. beyond that, this research is funded by the european union. views and opinions expressed are, however, mine only, and they do not necessarily reflect those of the european union or the european research council executive agency. neither the european union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. this work is supported by erc grant 101040059 (nojoke). 1. all the names used in this article are pseudonyms. places have been changed to keep my interlocutors anonymous. 2. cognitive dissonance as a concept was introduced by the social psychologist leon festinger ([1957] 1962). festinger’s notion refers to a supposed state of mental discomfort in which a person holds two conflicting ideas or desires and then tries to lessen the discomfort. according to the anthropologist richard jenkins (2013, 57), an outspoken critic of festinger’s thesis, “there is nothing that counts as evidence for the mental reality of dissonance, of discomfort, and of the impulse to remove or diminish that discomfort.” in acoustics, dissonance describes the (objectively detectable) conflicting overlap of mathematically incompatible wavelengths (baron 2008, 7–8). 3. first held in 2006, the “holocaust cartoon competition” was presented as a direct response to the publication of caricatures of the prophet mohammad in the danish newspaper jyllands posten. ten years later, in 2016, the second holocaust cartoon competition was held; the preparations for it began shortly after the french magazine charlie hebdo published more caricatures of the prophet in the wake of the terror attack on its offices in paris. the combined prize money amounted to $50,000 usd and was more than twice as high as the awards presented by the internationally renowned aydın doğan international cartoon competition in turkey, which many of my iranian interlocutors called the “cartoon oscars.” for a background analysis, see the white paper by majid mohammadi (2016). 4. however, this trope of a strict moral distinction between public and private spaces is not a result of the islamic revolution, but merely an inversion. as a popular saying goes, before the revolution, people danced in the streets and prayed at home; today they pray in public and dance in private. 5. manata hashemi (2015; 2020), for instance, describes in great nuance lower-class youths’ multifaceted attempts to “save face,” that is, to preserve their dignity while doing labor viewed by their broader society as inherently undignified. this, however, would not be a tension—between undignified labor and the yearning for dignity—that cartoonists experience or could relate to, given their middleand upper-class backgrounds; it also lies beyond khosravi and varzi’s focus. 6. perhaps it is thus not surprising that dressing contradictions, as hamid keshmirshekan (2013) shows, has constituted a key concern for contemporary iranian art more broadly. 7. all of this feeds into an increasingly polarized political discourse with increasing tension between “liberals” and “reformists,” on the one hand and “conservatives” and “hardliners,” on the other, with hardly any room between (föllmer 2008, 37). 8. a similar sensitivity has been cultivated in contemporary iranian art more broadly. ­pamela karimi (2022) impressively describes the intricate and complex, dialectical relationship between iranian art and its sociopolitical context (see also lotfalian 2022). 9. for stunning variations on this simple theme, see the cartoon collection the prisoner of cell no. 8, which hadi heidari (2017) published after being incarcerated in tehran’s infamous evin prison. 10. i have changed the cartoon to protect rezaei’s anonymity. 11. in authoritarian contexts, of course, “mere reporting” is in itself almost synonymous with journalistic activism, itself a reflection of a political context with deeply restricted party politics. 12. adorno’s reputation is not that of a funny guy, but he certainly was interested in humor. he even taught a whole seminar on humor and laughter. 13. of course, there are malinowski’s ([1937] 2015) famous saying that “anthropology is the science of the sense of humour” and contributions like those of horace miner (1956), but by and large anthropology has proved pretty serious business, just like most academic endeavors. 14. such an approach would also allow us to humorously engage with and thus move past the more conventional epistemophilic obsessions we cultivate (göpfert 2020b). references adelkhah, fariba 1999 being modern in iran. london: hurst. adorno, theodor w. 1973 ästhetische theorie [aesthetic theory]. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. 2003 dissonanzen: einleitung in die musiksoziologie [dissonances: introduction to the sociology of music]. vol. 14 of gesammelte schriften: theodor w. adorno [collected works of theodor w. adorno], edited by rolf tiedemann. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp. akman, ayhan 1998 “from cultural schizophrenia to modernist binarism: cartoons and identities in turkey (1930–1975).” in political cartoons in the middle east, edited by fatma m. göçek, 83–131. princeton, n.j.: markus wiener publishers. angermann, asaf 2015 “the ghosts of normativity: temporality and recurrence in adorno’s ethics of dissonance.” the germanic review: literature, culture, theory 90, no. 4: 260–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2015.1096165 bajoghli, narges 2019 iran reframed: anxieties of power in the islamic republic. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. baron, oliver 2008 dissonanz als ästhetische kategorie [dissoance as aesthetic category]. münchen, paderborn: fink. berger, peter l. 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journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.07 resisting alternative images: an ethnography of visual disinformation in brazil resisting alternative images: an ethnography of visual disinformation in brazil mihai andrei leaha university of barcelona https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3684-9693 roger canals university of barcelona https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1529-5943 november 2022, rio de janeiro: in her living-room-turned-office, the journalist natalia leal starts her daily routine. she is the ceo of lupa, brazil’s main independent fact-checking agency.1 the night before, luiz inácio lula da silva had won the presidency in arguably the most disputed election in the history of brazil. natalia opens the lupa website and begins to go through the first fact-checked images and video clips of the day. brazil seems ablaze: video footage depicts armed drug gangs taking over cities (figure 1);2 videos show trucks blocking the highways; posts by “patriots” call for armed military intervention. other images claim to depict the first signs of lula closing the churches. most of these images, natalia tells mihai,3 are photographic or imitate a photorealistic style. they are not necessarily “false,” in the sense that they are not artificially generated or intentionally manipulated to alter their initial composition. nonetheless these images are deceptive when taken out of context or strategically associated with other images or written texts. “true images,” natalia explains, “can end up conveying meaning divergent from the facts they allegedly portray.” figure 1. example of a verification label: false. courtesy of lupa fact-checking agency, brazil. while mihai films her, natalia describes how deceptive images function as disinformation devices. images spread fast and circulate in uncontrolled ways on social media, forming closed informational bubbles. trust plays a key role in this process of viral disinformation: people tend to accept as “true” images coming from their “trust circles.”4 natalia’s words point to an important issue: assessing an image of actuality as true depends on more than what the image shows. it depends, as we argue in this article, also (or mainly) on what we call the relational network in which it is inscribed. natalia next shows mihai a video verified by lupa that depicts the civil police storming the brazilian congress. the video circulated online as an account of a current fact. but the scene it shows corresponds to past events.5 removed from its initial context, this video has become an instance of networked disinformation. it forms part of what natalia calls “the main false narrative of the brazilian elections of 2022: electoral fraud.” these images seek to emotionally mobilize the audience to intervene in the world. as natalia says: “they call for future actions.” they are thus performative, since they contribute to actualizing the reality they allegedly represent. such images are less representations of the world than what we call “anticipatory devices” aimed at sparking political imagination and action. weeks after its publication (on january 8, 2022) the potentiality of this image was actualized in the biggest antidemocratic event in brazil since the military coup of 1964: thousands of people invaded the brazilian congress (figure 3) in a way that mirrored the united states capitol attack on january 6, 2021 (figure 2). “images can be mobilized to anticipate the future by imitating or revising images from quite different social contexts and historical moments,” natalia stated. such images are usually ones people already know. so the general property of images becomes exploited by deceptive anticipatory images: images relate to reality, but they do so by relating also to other images. to quote w. j. t. mitchell (2010, 15), the “war of images” is a war of cloning images. figure 2. the invasion of the u.s. capitol, january 6, 2021. source: anadolu agency via getty images. figure 3. the invasion of brazilian congress, january 8, 2022. source: afp evaristo sa. this article offers an anthropological discussion of what we will call “alternative images.” we define alternative images as images with a deceptive referential value. while presented as accounts or reliable metaphors of reality, alternative images are in fact intentionally misleading. alternative images do not need to be totally false (in the sense of manipulated, altered, or plainly “invented”) to convey a deceptive message. the falsity or deception of an image, we show in this article, is not a property of the image itself. rather, the deception forms part of a relational, multimodal, and contextual network of images and messages. by using the term relational here we do not only point to the relationships that people maintain with images and through them but also, as the previous example shows, to the relationships that images maintain among themselves. these constitute multimodal relations. multimodality here refers to the combination of a variety of communication elements such as texts, videos, audio messages, designs, emoticons, and gifs, thus constituting semiotic wholes. hence, alternative images must be analyzed in their misleading settings, specific media contexts, and channels of distribution (chadwick and stanyer 2022). alternative images make for complex and intentionally distorted visual narratives with a performative potentiality that often plays a crucial role in disinformation and covert influence operations, two key concepts of our article worth defining now. the concept of disinformation points to a set of deliberate untruths or misrepresentations, frequently disseminated as “reliable information,” spread with the aim of furthering political objectives such as undermining adversaries, disrupting policy discussions, swaying voters, exacerbating ongoing social tensions, or generating widespread confusion and information overload (bennett and livingston 2020). disinformation is intentional and premeditated. it can have real and disastrous consequences for what we commonly understand as democratic elections. influence operations, on the other hand, form part of covert networked disinformation wherein the delineation of interests steering media content becomes obscured by instilling skepticism regarding the genuineness of the content and the motives underpinning its dissemination.6 such influence operations do not necessarily make false claims, push propaganda, or launch attacks on adversaries. rather, they present as multimedia content, familiar metanarratives of the kind often seen in disinformation campaigns (gaw et al. 2023). covert influence operations use alternative images to construct a “parallel reality” beyond the false/truth distinction in which a (false) sense of “reality” is enhanced by their dissemination and circulation. in these ways, alternative images acquire the power to influence common opinion. this article has three main sections. in the first, we situate the concept of alternative images in the context of a more general debate on disinformation and “visual trust” (canals 2020).7 the second section explores the online circulation and modulations of alternative images in the context of brazilian electoral disinformation. here we look at several case studies that account for the complex semantic and digital structures of alternative images. we also analyze their modes of circulation and manifestation in the digital landscape. in the third part, we adopt a praxeological approach to disinformation (lelo 2024) so as to ethnographically analyze actions designed and undertaken to face the political influence of alternative images. the specificity of these actions—which vary from carnivalesque embodied manifestations to street interventions and visual verification techniques—lies on the fact that they react to alternative images either by creating and mobilizing new images or by implementing visual technologies aimed at assessing the reliability of images. in other words, they fight images through images. we propose to define these actions as modes of “iconic resistance.” picturing alternative images and disinformation the rise of fact-checking agencies like lupa needs to be framed within a tumultuous present in which natural disasters, wars, and pandemics coexist with a crisis of information described by authors like victoria rubin (2022) as “infodemics.”8 basically, this concept refers to a new post-truth mediascape (barclay 2021) in which distorted facts (and images) can produce severe informational disorder that affects trust in institutions and mass media, threatening democracy, freedoms, and basic human rights (filimowicz 2022; grech 2021). as the infamous case of cambridge analytica illustrates, science and technology can be used to influence behaviors, change minds, and manipulate the audience politically (kaiser 2019). in addition, the advent of generative multimodal artificial intelligence (ai) and the use of algorithms in decision-making processes is redefining politics and visual communication as we know it (bucknall and dori-hacohen 2022; bucher 2018; coeckelbergh 2020). in this context, fact-checking agencies portray themselves as rigorous, objective, and transparent platforms doing a public service of media literacy. they aim to assess the flux of information in different media to clearly distinguish objective facts from distorted and false narratives. among these false narratives we find what we call “alternative images.” the term alternative images as we use it here paraphrases the expression “alternative facts” coined in 2017 by kellyanne conway, an advisor to former u.s. president trump. conway came up with this term when defending attendance figures at trump’s presidential inauguration. the disagreement that led to the term alternative facts related to how the event was photographed. conway accused the journalists who made these images of having taken them from a biased, bird’s-eye view. according to her, the blank spaces in the images of the crowd resulted in a distorted depiction of the large numbers attending the event. despite the facts showing a much larger crowd at obama’s inauguration (fandos 2017), conway defended the assertion that trump boasted the highest number of attendees in history. “and that is an alternative fact,” she stated. according to conway’s logic, no images are more “accountable” or “truer” than others. the veracity of what an image portrays would be more a matter of belief than a matter of facts.9 conway’s “theory” had a big impact in american society. the more it circulated, the more the facts of the presidential inauguration became distorted. as barclay (2021) keenly observed, disinformation spreads in the same manner as folk songs: the oral history–like transmission of disinformation narratives tends to enrich meanings, forget origins, and add new senses to the initial message. much like richard m. dorson’s (1950) concept of fakelore, alternative images and disinformation narratives rely on the “invention” of new meanings rather than on simple repetition or on the principle of “visual traceability” (canals 2020). as selma ottonicar (2020) argues, users actively interact with and get attached to images from known or trusted networks. they often end up paying the images forward, potentially making them go viral. trust thus emerges as a strong principle in these processes of image-intensification (canals 2020). the concept of image-intensification refers to the enhancement of the potential meanings and functions of images. it is through acts of intensification that images acquire new significance and roles, thus recursively affecting the context in which they find themselves. the importance of creative circulation and trust in the study of current images show that images should not be studied from a static and abstract point of view, but, rather, from a dynamic and relational perspective (freedberg 1989), focusing on their “iconic paths” (canals 2020) and analyzing ethnographically the relationships individuals establish with and through them.10 the term alternative as we use it in the concept of alternative images comes from the same root as altered. both concepts point to the idea of changing the status or nature of someone or something. in this sense, we will focus in this article on how alternative images alter reality, thus having a performative nature. yet our objective is not to emphasize (once again) the alleged power of misleading media content on the general population. we feel uncomfortable with the already deconstructed idea of “powerful media and weak audiences” (livingstone 2019). images do not do things only by themselves. for this reason, inspired by a communicative and imaginative approach to disinformation (cabañes 2020; andersen and søe 2020), we highlight the role of human agency not only in the creation and circulation of alternative images but also—and especially—in the strategies carried out to counter them visually. from a methodological point of view, our research is based on a multimodal ethnography carried out by mihai during the 2022 brazilian presidential election, a moment of deep iconic intensification (canals 2020). mihai conducted the ethnography in both online and offline environments, using collaboration, experimentation, intervention, and invention strategies to account for complex media and political ecologies (collins, durington, and gill 2017; dattatreyan and marrero-guillamón 2019). the online/digital research was carried out by observing the circulation of alternative images on social media such as x, instagram, and facebook, but also in several whatsapp and telegram groups. moreover, the network and accounts of politicians as well as of campaign managers and popular political influencers were followed on main brazilian tv channels, youtube, and podcasts. a special focus was given to the right-wing politicians and influencers, as they emerged most frequently as the agents of disinformation during the 2023 campaign.11 we were particularly interested in how these media became distributed, enforced arguments, and instrumentalized images for their political purposes. images that would support or help disinformative arguments were then archived for further analysis. we followed the movement of online images from the perspectives of visual analysis and visual communication (ledin and machin 2018; aiello 2019). to fully understand the context of networked disinformation in brazil, we also tracked images back from the verification divisions of media outlets such as folha, uol, or globo, among others. we surveyed investigative and political analyses on podcasts and journal articles on nexo and piaui. with this approach, we managed to follow the “iconic path” of digital images through fact-checked images debunked by independent agencies such as lupa and aos fatos, or by the fact-checking divisions of media trusts such as estadão verifica and uol confere.12 we used ethnographic cinema to depict some of the above-mentioned movements of iconic resistance. on the streets of são paulo, mihai filmed and collaborated with left-wing artivists engaged in visual street interventions as a response to the disinformation campaign of jair bolsonaro. he also filmed, through both an observational and participatory approach, different actions carried out on the streets by various political supporters (projectionists, supporters, activists, and performers) and gatherings in squares or central areas of rio de janeiro and são paulo. we included campaign images and poster bombs in our ethnographic footage, since we considered them agents of iconic resistance themselves. the footage that resulted served both as primary ethnographic source for writing this article and as the basis for creating a short research film titled verdade e mentiras (truth and lies, 2023) that we will describe and share in the third section. doing research with a camera permitted us to account for the sensory and performative character of political events that goes beyond the textual ethnographic description. this research follows a long tradition in visual anthropology that aims at studying images through images (canals 2023). despite the recent and rich amount of literature on post-truth, fake news, and disinformation, not much has been said about the role of images in disinformation strategies. less has been done in terms of ethnographies of “false images” adopting a bottom-up, relational, and qualitative approach. this is where our work intervenes from the following section onward in relation to the case of brazilian elections. online modulations of alternative images in brazil in brazil, disinformation is a hot topic. as we are writing this article (september 2024), draft law 2630—or the law project (pl) of “fake news”—is still being discussed in brasilia. the project wishes to regulate online disinformation and impose obligations on the big tech platforms that host the dissemination of disinformation. the project aims to tackle, not without controversy, the chaotic context of disinformation that has taken over in brazil in recent years. this context started to take shape in 2017 alongside the rise of the far right and the increased popularity of the charismatic figure of jair bolsonaro (gouvêa and castelo branco 2022; lapper 2021; klem et al. 2020). the journalist patricia de campos mello (2020, 74) ascribes bolsonaro’s rise to power to a larger context of global “techno-populism” (bickerton and accetti 2021; da empoli 2019). campos mello (2020, 10–37) argues that bolsonaro took power in 2018 with the help of a “digital militia”—or a “hate machine,” as the journalist calls it. the movement was articulated mostly online and relied heavily on the propagation of conservative political values. the covert influence operation involved, among other elements, the discreditation of mainstream media and journalism and the use of hate speech. the scheme relied on a massive spread of disinformation through whatsapp messages and social media. according to campos mello, this strategy helped bolsonaro win the election in 2018. figure 4. right-wing digital militia network, according to researchers fernanda sarkis and marcus nogueira and the juridical department of the workers’ party. source: the juridical office of the workers’ party for piauí. in 2022, it became known that bolsonaro’s campaign would be based heavily on networked disinformation and that most of the false and misleading content was to be targeted at his opponent, the former president lula. the investigative journalist breno pires explains how the workers’ party (pt) reacted to the right-wing digital militia led by carlos bolsonaro (pires 2022).13 in the february 2022, the sociologists fernanda sarkis and marcus nogueira formed a team with it specialists, marketing experts, and lawyers hired by the pt to help deconstruct the right-wing disinformation network (figure 4). they based their methodology on the concept of a “cartography of controversy,” inspired by bruno latour’s actor-network theory, according to which, to understand any social actor, you first need to understand their behavior within the network. they discovered that “jair’s show”—as the two researchers called it paraphrasing the film the truman show (weir 1998)—produced a media ecosystem of disinformation managed by eighty-one profiles involving three of bolsonaro’s sons and many other high-profile parliament members, bloggers, youtubers, and influencers. according to the study, the thematic threads of networked disinformation were concentrated around four main axes: criminality and violence; religion and customs; electoral system credibility; and the socioeconomic agenda. the false narratives used images to show associations between criminal groups, lula, and the pt; false depictions of a non-christian, communist lula; images portraying lula as lucifer in an attempt to create moral panic among christian voters; deep-fake videos falsifying electoral research; decontextualized images depicting electoral fraud; and images of political rallies that were either manipulated or out of context, to name just a few. in the following, we are going to analyze how right-wing networked disinformation used alternative images as they appeared in our online research. drawing on the work of françois laplantine (2015), we use the term modulation to refer to a double movement of alternative images: the movement of images “being altered” by actual events (and having an influence on them), as well as the one of images being altered by users in an endless process of copying and differentiation. the former has to do with the principle of referentiality (how images relate to external reality); the second with the one of intensification (how they are transformed when put in circulation). bolsonaro’s presidency was marked by frequent attacks on and the cutting of state funding for brazil’s main media trusts. it constituted a coordinated, long-term attempt to discredit the free press and its institutes (campos mello 2020). for instance, folha de são paulo (brazil’s most prestigious newspaper) was often accused by bolsonaro of misrepresenting him. folha’s poll research institute, datafolha, became one of the victims of bolsonaro’s attacks during the electoral campaign. for the right wing, the “misleading” information from datafolha needed to be replaced with what bolsonaro called data povo (data people). data povo was an expression, a hashtag, and an image used to replace graphic scientific abstractions, such as official election-poll data visualizations. our online research consisted of observing on social networks how the profiles of top right-wing politicians, including bolsonaro’s sons, articulated disinformative narratives and alternative images trough their network of influencers. for instance, during the 2022 electoral campaign, brazil witnessed an unprecedented dispute about the “image of numbers,” as shown in election polls and beyond. one such example was what is known as “the image of the crowd.” on september 7, 2022, bolsonaro invited his supporters in brasilia to celebrate 200 years of brazil’s independence. as a national celebration, the events were not supposed to be politically biased, and bolsonaro was not allowed to make campaign declarations during them. yet the event transformed into a right-wing demonstration of force, and bolsonaro used the occasion for his political propaganda. as a consequence, the images of the september 7 event were banned from online circulation by an order from the electoral supreme court (tse).14 the images were removed from the main social media networks shortly after the event, yet bolsonaro’s propaganda machine found a way to subvert the tse’s decision. in an x post from september 8, carlos bolsonaro posted a photo of a huge crowd wearing the yellow-and-green national football shirts from the event in brasilia (figure 5). the text accompanying the post reads: “according to datafolha this is a sunflower plantation” (@carlosbolsonaro, september 8, 2022).15 it echoed a declaration from jair bolsonaro’s september 7 speech saying, “i have never seen such a huge sea [of people] in yellow and green. here there are no liars from datafolha. here is data povo [data people]. this is the truth, and the will of honest, free, and working people” (delgado 2022). in an interview about the september 7 events in nexo, the political scientist jorge chaloub observes that the events meant to legitimize the discourse of fraud against the research pools and electoral system, proving that they do not represent the real will of the people. it further advances the conspiracy idea that public and private institutions oppose the right-wing movement (cruz 2022). the image of “the sunflower field,” we might add, subverts the image of scientific data with the image of an unquantifiable, “infinite” number of people. this shows that alternative images often constitute subtle ways of “accounting” for alternative facts within the context of complex influence operations. they can be “authentic images,” with a valid, actual referent to a historical moment, that are nevertheless used to deceive and support a disinformative discourse. figure 5. a tweet from carlos bolsonaro (@carlosbolsonaro): “de acordo com o datafolha isso é uma plantação de girassol!” [according to datafolha this is a sunflower plantation.] september 8, 2022. the film director miguel antunes ramos (2023) observes how right-wing propaganda carefully forged the image of the “bolsonarist” crowd. these images often contain an amateurish framing that produces a view of the crowd created by “anonymous authors.” bolsonaro’s propaganda machine produces images for and through his base. the view of the crowd is validated through an aesthetic of authenticity that is recognizable, likeable, and sharable. the perspective of the crowd becomes an alternative perspective turned into a political trophy, ready to be taken home and archived (mckay 2020). it is a bottom-up propagandistic approach in which unknown authorship and “viral sharing” have the power to replace scientific data visualizations with politically effective alternative images. networked disinformation uses alternative images as misleading social decoupages. like the image of the infinite crowd, visually manipulative techniques such as scaling, reframing, or cropping can distort the “bigger picture,” leading to misrepresentations of the social context. for instance, on september 1, 2022, the self-declared conservative newspaper revista oeste published an article titled “indigenous people, supporters of bolsonaro organize an “indio-ciata” (redação oeste 2022).16 the paper used the following image as its cover: figure 6. frame from a video circulating online showing an alleged gathering of indigenous people in support of bolsonaro. in portuguese these kinds of gatherings are named “indiociata.” source: revista oeste. the image is a frame from a video showing what appears to be an indigenous event in support of bolsonaro. the article argues that the event proves support from some indigenous groups for mining in indigenous lands. flavio and carlos bolsonaro posted the video of the event on x, insisting on the images of the indigenous group carrying the flag. on x, flavio bolsonaro shared the image, adding the following text: “our indigenous people are (with) bolsonaro.” a day later, a report by uol disclosed a very different story (audi 2022). the “bigger picture” reveals that the video depicts a sacred xingu ceremony, called kuarup. the group performed this ritual in xingu parque to pay homage to the victims of covid-19. the indigenous local leader and activist watatakalu yawalapiti explained for the report that the two indigenous people carrying the flag were not from their village and that they were given alcoholic beverages to bring the poster to the ritual. she also declared that only a small minority in the xingu territory supported bolsonaro’s re-election. during the dance, watatakalu had banned any political manifestations, considering it disrespectful to the victims of covid and the ritual. she believes that the former government’s delay in giving the community vaccines was partially responsible for the deaths of her kin. in addition, in the following days, the association of xingu indigenous land (associação terra indígena xingu, or atix) launched legal action asking the supreme electoral court, the tse, to remove the misleading tweets. other, more provocative alternative images and messages circulated online and offline during the 2022 campaign, as did memes. memes have gained importance in the digital political sphere, leading ricardo gonzález-garcía (2019) to coin the term memecracy. creating memes is a form of visual creativity that may include parodic imitation and ironic camouflage (shifman 2014; kien 2019). networked disinformation incorporated memes to emphasize the right-wing narratives and make them more effective. our research revealed many right-wing memes circulating online. indeed, as the brazilian philosopher paulo ghiraldelli (2019, 104) noted, “nobody else has produced as many memes as bolsonaro in [brazilian] politics.” like caricatures, memes use exaggerations and add impact phrases to convey a political message. figure 7. a meme circulating online featuring the text: “bolsonaro—make brazil great again.” in this meme circulating among far-right groups, bolsonaro appears like the savior of brazil, portrayed as a rambo figure fighting corruption. it reflects an ideology that supports the wide availability of weapons and military power. the image hints at what joão felipe gonçalves and gideon lasco (2023, 59) call the “nefarious affinities” between economic neoliberalism and political illiberalism by picturing bolsonaro as a “neoliberal populist,” that is, as a avenger supported by the masses. the meme also conveys the aggressive masculine character common in contemporary populist performances (aciksoz and korkman 2017). this alternative memetic image contributes to the construction of a parallel reality of a brazil at war and needing to be rescued by a charismatic, violent, and macho hero. but images can hit back, and anti-memes can react to political leaders’ outrageous statements using humor or even black humor to convey a subversive political message (as we pointed out at the beginning of this text: images relate to things, but they always relate to other images too). figure 8. a screenshot of a twitter account @da_goiabera portraying a meme circulating online. october 6, 2022. this neo-protestant iconography depicting jesus and maria magdalene was posted on social networks and is accompanied by the following text: “i don’t rape you because you are not worth it. signed: messiah, jair (bolsonaro) 2014.” the text quotes a statement bolsonaro made in 2014 to the congresswoman maria do rosário. the meme not only refers to that particular moment but also attempts to subvert the image of bolsonaro as a christian athlete with a contradictory analogy between the image of jesus and the politician’s misogynist statements. in brazil, religion as an electoral theme has seen a rise in popularity since 2018. according to datafolha research from august 2022, 49 percent of brazilians considered the subject of religion very important in the 2022 elections (redação folha de s. paulo 2022). bolsonaro has built strong support among evangelical voters, and research points to a connection between the growing popularity of an evangelical and the conservative movement in brazil (spyer 2020; araújo 2019; alexandre 2020). the war of memes and counter-memes shows that memes can play the role of political radar, which has the power to mobilize the population (especially young generations). they may be designed to rail against an illiberal regime (kallius and adriaans 2022) or to reinforce conservative positions. yet memes materialize beyond the digital sphere (pink, ardèvol piera, and lanzeni 2016). while filming with the artist julio djocsar, we encountered the following poster bomb on the streets of são paulo: figure 9. brazilian artivist julio djocsar pointing at a poster bomb against bolsonaro. photo by mihai andrei leaha). in this poster bomb, quotes from bolsonaro, including the one about the rape, accompany a deformed portrait of the politician wearing a sheep mask. the bible quote reads like this: “beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are raving wolves.” this image blurs the distinction between political and religious images, and shows how intensification, as the creative movement of images from one support to another, can be used to fight false narratives. we will delve deeply into the question of iconic resistance in the following section. reacting to and resisting alternative images alternative images and disinformation may contribute to producing different political effects and emotional reactions. for those who “trust” them, alternative images offer fair accounts of or metaphors for reality. for those who do not trust them, alternative images are simply visual lies that can provoke indignation, rage, and a general feeling of injustice. these feelings may lead to actions of iconic resistance spreading across offline and online environments. in this section, we tackle some of these “iconic paths” by ethnographically depicting how various social agents mobilize, multiply, react to, and resist alternative images on the streets and beyond. one of the specificities of these movements is that they are not iconophobic: they fight “visual falsity” through images, thus creating visual interventions (pink 2007) with the purpose of impacting the public sphere, thereby blurring the offline-online distinction (favero 2018). performing images in the streets the first instance of offline iconic resistance to alternative images that we analyze relates to the use of the body as a public image in demonstrations, especially against bolsonaro. the demonstrations in support of lula and against the spreading of alternative images took place in a general context of emotional intensity. this connects to one of the senses of the term alternative images as we have defined it: these are images that have the power to “alter” people. in brazil, due to the electronic voting system, election results are known just a few hours after voting has finished. in 2022, lula was announced as the winner in a very close presidential race. young, middle-class supporters celebrating his victory in rio’s são salvador square burst into tears. the crowd was euphoric, “altered” or “possessed” by the spirit of national victory. political and communication studies rarely consider the agency of the body as an image in a political dispute. taking into account what laplantine (2015, 65) calls “an anthropology of the sensible,” we consider social facts as sensorially determined and emotionally performed. in this sense, the role of the individual and the agency of the body become politically relevant. during the campaigning period, images of lula and bolsonaro were exhibited, shown, and performed by supporters in a kaleidoscope of embodied and politically symbolic gestures. on the streets, bodies were performing images as much as people were “being performed” by images. for example, at a weekly neighborhood fair in rio de janeiro, a life-sized image of lula “came to life” as passersby hugged, talked, and took photos with the image as if it were real, in a clear instance of what we call “iconic intensification.” we agree with tancons (2015, 136) in the idea that carnivalesque manifestations in political manifestations can be read as “organizational devices for the creation of new subjectivities prefigurative of participatory democracy through transformational processes.” in campinas (são paulo state), left-wing supporters decided to organize a carnival event for lula named carnalula (figure 11). various carnival blocs—mostly white middle class from barão geraldo, campinas, like berra vaca, caxeirosas, união altaneira, cupinzeiro—participated in the event. one of the organizers explained that they wanted to show to the inhabitants of a peripheral and politically undecided neighbourhood in campinas that lula supporters also defended national values and identity, and that they could act peacefully and joyfully. this was a reaction to alternative images depicting lula as an anti-patriotic figure. the group was also fighting one of the most important disinformation narratives of the campaign, which depicts lula as a corrupt thief connected to crime. the carnival blocks were dancing and playing traditional carnival songs, dressed in red and showing lula’s image either on t-shirts, stickers, flags, or drums. lula’s images became modulated though dancing and performing. the bodies of the dancers as well as the voices of the singers turned into agents for performing political images. the agency of the body made the images “come alive,” while the images “modulated” the body and made it a device for political manifestation. the images of the event were then uploaded online with the hashtag “lula love.” the iconic path of these images continued in the online sphere. figure 10. left-wing supporters in a public square interacting with a life-sized image of lula at a local street market in rio de janeiro. photo by mihai andrei leaha. iconic modulations as interventions across brazil, groups of visual artists resist disinformation and alternative images in highly creative ways. during the electoral campaign, we invited the são paulo–based visual arts collective arte em fluxo to participate in a multimodal experimental collaboration. it was an inventive attempt to combine ethnographic filmmaking and artistic interventions. we had previously discussed with them the possibilities of organizing a visual street intervention in which the artists julio djocsar and cauê maia would respond to the avalanche of fake news circulating in brazil. the process would then be filmed and included in a short ethnographic film. the experiment featured two street interventions. the first one responded to bolsonaro’s questioning of a study by the food and agriculture organisation of the united nations, which revealed that brazil had once again entered the world hunger map as of july 2022. bolsonaro had attempted to discredit the finding, saying that he did not see any people begging for bread in front of bakeries. the artists felt compelled to respond to the spread of these false statements. julio, a long-term practitioner of poster bombs, had the idea of creating a large lambe-lambe (the portuguese name for poster bombs) measuring 2.5 meters, featuring the word verdade (truth). the intervention consisted of strategically placing these posters under bridges, in parks, and on walls in the city center, places frequently passed by individuals without stable housing. they were the first ones to be impacted by the intervention, and some of them commented on camera about the importance of establishing the “truth” about brazil’s severe social inequalities. the filmed intervention aimed to re-establish the significance of the word truth by linking it to the immediate and visible reality of são paulo. figure 11. images of lula being performed during the campaign, in the carna-lula political manifestation in campinas, brazil. photo by mihai andrei leaha. in their second intervention, the artists shifted their focus to the antonym of truth: mentiras (lies). cauê maia forms part of the transverso collective,17 and he creatively uses the sprawling urban environment of the south american metropolis as a canvas for his politically and poetically charged artistic interventions. enabled by a portable and adaptable projecting device called “bazooka poetica,” designed by cauê (baptista 2019), his captivating projections occupy the blank walls of são paulo.18 the bazooka consists of a lantern and a magnifying glass. it uses slide-like images printed on transparent plastic paper to negatively project on any surface. the user of the bazooka then passes through a process of adaptation, reframing, and fitting that aims to fix the urban poetry on the chosen surface. through his poetry, cauê subverts political messages and turns them into haiku-like short sentences. during the nighttime intervention, he and his collaborators projected poems and images onto various available surfaces of city buildings and towering skyscrapers in são paulo. their thought-provoking political messages serve as a resilient response to the prevalence of far-right ideologies and often address issues of social injustice, feminism, and indigenous rights. the intervention was carried out on top of the minhocão highway/park in the center of são paulo. one specific image included the old blue bird twitter logo and the following text: “the lie has short legs but knows how to fly high” (figure 12). the intervention was this time a subversive form of denouncing bolsonaro’s networked disinformation. the projections took images closer to city residents’ windows and then uploaded them to social media. the impact of the intervention went beyond the outdoor modulations into the online realm. the images the collaborators made during the intervention potentially impacted the 16,000 followers of their instagram account. the short ethnographic film verdade and mentiras (truth and lies) accompanying this text complements our ethnography as part of the visual depiction of “the sensible” in laplantine’s sense. the multisensorial qualities of film, together with its ability to depict and creatively replicate rhythm, movement, and the corporeal, can account for the modulation of images in the two artistic interventions. modal visual anthropology can be understood as an image-making process that implies both collaborative intervention and anthropological knowledge-making. your browser does not support the audio element. film clip 1. verdade and mentiras (truth and lies), directed by mihai andrei leaha (erc visual trust, 2023). https://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/media/h04d673h0x figure 12. brazilian artivist cauê maia using his “bazooka poetica” to project the poem: “mentira tem perna curta mas voa alto” [the lie has short legs but knows how to fly high]. iconic assessments and alternative images alternative images circulate both online and offline. they spread so quickly that their origin and “iconic path” are hard to identify and almost impossible to trace. the rise of fact-checking and disinformation journalism has led to attempts to demystify the origins and trajectories of digital images through mixed digital forensics techniques (graves 2016; gogolin 2021; sencar, verdoliva, and memon 2022). in brazil, the fact-checking movement is recent and still struggling between economic sustainability and editorial independence (lelo 2022). these agencies form part of international networks that support their “journalistic neutrality.”19 during the last three weeks of the october 2022 campaign, mihai filmed and observed the work of lupa agency. since the pandemic, the team of lupa works from home and connects, organizes, and publishes their articles online. the members of the team accepted our invitation to spend the most intense days of the campaign with them and accompany their coverage of the campaign. we were particularly interested in understanding how fact-checkers assess, verify, and are affected by alternative images. chico mares, one of lupa’s fact-checking specialists, explains how the agency assesses allegedly false images. they use specific digital software for operating reverse internet search tools while trying to determine the online iconic paths of the verified image. he claims that once an image is circulating online, it is almost impossible to identify the original. when performing so-called visual forensics, fact-checkers can feel frustrated before the impossibility of objectively assessing images. nevertheless, looking for past versions of the same image often proves useful. to do so, mares searches for previous publication dates and contexts and then attempts to establish a chronological circulation path for the image. in this way, fact-checkers can determine whether an image was taken out of context and re-mashed, modified, or re-signified to fit disinformative purposes. these techniques prove useful when tackling alternative images created through direct image-editing or montages, because the initial image allows the verifier to assess the changes in the image’s iconic path. mares indicates, however, that images do not allow for as direct a verification process as textual information, mainly because they are harder to label as false/true or manipulated. “images are not facts,” he states. images take time to fact-check, and by the time it is done, the harm of disinformation may already have been done. this causes frustration among fact-checkers, who find themselves in a race against time. the fast-moving circulation of alternative images in closed information bubbles makes the verification process even harder. moreover, the lupa fact-checkers mention that alternative images can exert a kind of violence on journalists—they emotionally alter them. images can contain disturbing graphic content that might expose fact-checkers to shocking depictions. fact-checkers also often receive threats from people who consider their work biased and feel they have a hidden agenda against their favorite candidate. as a countermeasure to this violence, lupa offers its employees psychological support, especially during electoral campaigns. the main political, ethical, and methodological tenets of lupa in understanding and countering the affects and effects of visual disinformation in a fast-moving and unregulated media ecology align with the thesis presented by kimiz dalkir and rebecca katz in their 2020 work navigating fake news, alternative facts, and misinformation in a post-truth world. the first principle consists in fighting technology with technology, mainly by developing innovative software capable of tracking down and revealing online visual disinformation. the second principle concerns the importance of media literacy. in this regard, after the elections, lupa shifted its main focus from fact-checking to disinformation journalism, with the declared intention of educating the public about how disinformation works. lupa produces almost daily videos and photographic materials for a larger audience, as one can see on their website, where each piece of content is designed to fit specific social networks and audiences. in 2023, the agency invested in media literacy programs and helped create the first university master’s program in journalism and fact-checking in brazil. “this is a long-term commitment,” says natalia. “and a hard one,” she adds, “which needs institutional support.” at a conference on digital journalism in huesca, spain, in 2023, the brazilian journalist also advocated for both new laws and state regulations to ensure the accountability of social media platforms that host disinformation. contrary to the studies that see fact-checkers as part of an iconoclastic movement (andersen and søe 2020), we interpret them as non-iconoclastic, since they do not deny the capacity of images to become reliable sources of information. they “just” want to debunk false and misleading ones. actually, fact-checkers are active image-makers, since the act of labeling images (adding to them tags like “false,” “true,” or “deceptive) in itself constitutes an act of visual communication. despite its efforts, lupa felt disappointed with the limited effects of fact-checking on voters. many known political influencers and agents of bolsonaro’s networked disinformation group managed to secure a place in the current parliament. natalia advocates for new solutions to tackle disinformation. according to her, updating legislation and state regulations on social networks should be complemented by pedagogical programs and explicit support of fact-checking agencies and disinformation journalism. the first steps in this direction have already been taken: the brazilian law pl2630 is trying to increase the responsibility of the platforms and update the laws on digital information.20 right-wing critics have deemed this law a new form of censorship that may threaten fundamental human rights such as freedom of expression. as we write this article, bolsonaro has been declared ineligible for office for eight years by the electoral supreme court in brazil (mendes and cury 2023). the main reason is the propagation of fake news. conclusions in this article, we have defined alternative images as intentionally disinformative visual content aimed at creating a parallel reality. we have delved into the context of the brazilian presidential elections by discussing how alternative images contributed to altering the brazilian electoral mediascape. we have focused on two aspects: first, through online research, we analyzed the production and circulation of alternative images within the frame of a broader disinformative media ecology; second, through offline visual ethnography, we discussed different reactions to alternative images: from bodily demonstrations in the streets to fact-checking agencies or artistic interventions.21 we argue that the question of alternative images is intertwined with the notion of “visual (dis)trust.” for images, trust is a relational category (corsín jiménez 2011), a matter of “ordinary ethics” (lambek et al. 2015). in everyday life, the truth stance of images is validated (or refused) within trust circles rather than through factual verification. our online and offline research revealed that alternative images play a crucial role in building trust and consolidating disinformative narratives by creating communities of disinformation. political influencers as agents of covert influence operations play a critical role in building and sustaining these trust networks, which are based more on emotional affinities than on political rational debate. covert networked disinformation often works through micro-targeting, with the help of influencers that can get the messages more precisely to the trust circle. in this sense, the sender, as part of a previous network or community of trust, endows the image with legitimacy through the act of sharing it (this is an instance of what we called “intensification”). once someone trusts an alternative image as we have defined it, the image for this person ceases to be alternative—it becomes “credible” or simply “true.” in a nutshell: disinformation needs trust conditions and specific networks to function. on top of this, trust is a future-oriented concept. the fact of trusting others (or trusting images) prompts us to do things. trust therefore has a performative nature (broch-due and ystanes 2016), as the invasion of congress described at the beginning of this article shows: the people who trusted the image of the invasion of the brazilian parliament ended up invading it. yet this performative nature can be used as an anticipatory device to foresee future events and fight against the effects of disinformation. this is also what fact-checkers do. they know that when an alternative image circulates uncontrollably, it will likely produce effects and turn into reality (as natalia prophetically announced when she commented on the images of the above-mentioned assault before it occurred). more empirical research is needed to fully understand the impact of alternative images within often non-homogenous “trust-circles” and among consumers of disinformative content.22 the aesthetics of alternative images also play an important role in the building of trust as common imaginary. the meme of bolsonaro as rambo, for instance, inscribes itself into a specific conservative aesthetic involving a particular rhetoric of disinformation. judging it strictly from a visual point of view, we might think of the image as an anti-meme, in other words, as a leftist joke working against bolsonaro—but it is the opposite. this proves that images cannot be studied in the abstract, as independent visual signs. their understanding must be rooted in complex and dynamic relationships from which they acquire an original meaning and may trigger specific actions. when analyzing alternative images, we need to focus our attention on what we have called “movements of iconic resistance.” we have analyzed three ways of reacting to alternative images: embodied performances, artistic interventions, and visual verification. they all respond to a general feeling of distrust about images of actuality circulating in the current brazilian mediascape (and elsewhere). visual distrust in fact-checkers is mostly based on a kind of epistemological skepticism (they assume that, a priori, no image is totally reliable before a scientific verification). in this sense, it differs from the initial distrust that fuels the work of artists or carnivalesque public demonstrations, more connected to an action-oriented emotional and political engagement. the three instances of iconic resistance discussed also show differences in the way they operate. artistic interventions or public demonstrations are not interested in proving that alternative images are “false” or “misleading”; instead, they wish to subvert them through public and creative acts of image-making and image-intensification. from a methodological perspective, we acknowledge the necessity of addressing disinformation and alternative images not only from a communicational or semiotic point of view but also through a bottom-up and qualitative approach, combining different modes of doing research. this approach dissolves online/­offline distinctions and focuses on the paths and agency of images in society. we advocate for the importance of setting up ethnographies of disinformation aimed at understanding how alternative images affect and provoke reactions for specific people in concrete historical and sociocultural contexts. we also believe it necessary to study the role of images by using hybrid research and participative methods, including visual and multimodal ones. lastly, we think that this research on alternative images may recursively prompt us to reassess the responsibilities and potentialities of anthropology in post-truth cultures and disinformative environments. do we anthropologists have a responsibility to position ourselves against disinformation? what is the reflexive and ethical stance that we should take before the proliferation of alternative images? as we have seen, within the debate about fake news and disinformation, there is a clear place for journalists, militant artists, and active citizens. yet what would mark anthropology’s place? we have no doubt that networked disinformation constitutes a threat to democracy, knowledge, and equality. we also assume that our work consists of building ethical relationships and collaborations with our interlocutors through which we provide reliable descriptions of reality, which in turn lead us to propose new ways of interpreting and imagining it. like journalists, we anthropologists are committed to trust and truth. and like artists, our practice involves creativity, imagination, and critical thinking. so, how can anthropology help deconstruct disinformation through alternative images? we consider that a first step in this direction is to foster what we have called “ethnographies of disinformation.” this kind of research may contribute to a better understanding of how alternative images work—and therefore how to debunk them. we also have to commit ourselves to the education about and development of visual literacy, along the lines of multimodal and public anthropology. our research must manage to reach different audiences and have a voice in public debates. we must assume the risks of taking our knowledge beyond academia—to collaborate with artists, social movements, and fact-checking agencies. the anthropological study of disinformation cannot be detached from the act of actively counter-fighting it through critical, rigorous, and engaged research. abstract the battle against disinformation played a key role during the brazilian presidential elections of 2022. supporters of jair bolsonaro—and, to a much lesser extent, of luiz inácio lula da silva—generated and disseminated deceptive and false “informative content” to influence public opinion. to counter the spread of fake news, different initiatives emerged. based on a multimodal and hybrid ethnography, this essay discusses different modes of resistance to what we call “alternative images.” this term refers to intentionally misleading images with a deceptive referential value that are presented as accounts or reliable metaphors of reality. we describe three modes of countering these misleading images visually: public demonstrations, artistic interventions, and fact-checking agencies. each one has its own modes of visual assessment and political intervention. the article argues for the importance of carrying out ethnographies of disinformation, capable of contributing to actual efforts against disinformation and alternative facts, along the lines of public and engaged critical anthropology. [disinformation; alternative images; multimodal anthropology; fact-checking; images; fake news; artistic interventions] notes acknowledgments we thank all the individuals and institutions that have contributed to this research, especially the fact-checking agency lupa and natalia leal. we also give a special thanks to transverso collective and cauê maia for his support and cooperation both in brazil and in barcelona. we are also grateful to the editors of cultural anthropology and to the reviewers of this article, whose comments and insights allowed us to improve it substantially. this article is part of the erc project visual trust: reliability, accountability, and forgery in scientific, religious, and social images (pi: roger canals, 2021–2026; www.visualtrust.ub.edu). this project has received funding from the european research council (erc) under the european union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no 101002897). 1. lupa (founded in 2015) is an independent media agency from brazil that defines as a hub fighting disinformation. part of the international fact-checking network (https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/) and trust project (https://thetrustproject.org), the agency uses fact-checking, media education, and disinformation journalism to tackle the avalanche of fake news that has overtaken brazil in the past decade (https://lupa.uol.com.br/institucional). 2. see the image-verification news on lupa’s website, https://lupa.uol.com.br/jornalismo/2022/10/30/comemoracao-bandidos-lula 3. this article is co-authored by mihai andrei leaha and roger canals within the framework of the erc project visual trust: reliability, accountability, and forgery in scientific, religious, and social images (pi: roger canals). the fieldwork was done by mihai andrei leaha, a postdoctoral researcher at the visual trust project since 2022. this fieldwork lasted as long as the presidential campaign period (from june to october 2022), with a follow-up of main political events until january 2023 and beyond. brazil was not a new context to mihai, since he had lived and done research there from 2018 until 2022. he therefore witnessed the rise to power of jair bolsonaro and the avalanche of fake news that submerged brazil before and during his presidency. the writing of this text has been done collaboratively by the two authors. 4. in this regard, we agree with thales lelo (2024) that disinformation must be studied by understanding the trust conditions facilitating disinformation. in addition, we urge for the importance of understanding what makes people “distrust” some images and how they define, assess, and experience the visual fake. 5. the video shows a revolt of the civil police from 2017. see the verification on lupa’s website: https://lupa.uol.com.br/jornalismo/2022/11/01/policiais-civis-invasao-congresso 6. see this internews report about the 2022 philippines elections. internews is an international nonprofit with thirty offices around the world, including headquarters in california, washington, d.c., london, and paris, and regional hubs in bangkok, kiev, and nairobi. their declared aim is to train journalists and digital rights activists, tackle disinformation, and offer business expertise to help media outlets become financially sustainable. see www.internews.org 7. the term visual trust refers to the value accorded to images as reliable mediums for knowing the world and communicating to others. 8. the term picturing disinformation, which appears in the title of this section, paraphrases jay ruby’s (2000) seminal book picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. his collection of essays argues for a reflexive and more ethical stance in the analysis of visual culture. like writing culture (clifford 2010), picturing culture questions the role of the researcher in producing or depicting anthropological knowledge. 9. as we see it, alternative facts can be connected to the orwellian term doublethink from the novel 1984, where conflicting beliefs and images can coexist regardless of the objective reality. 10. according to canals (2021, 202), the concept of iconic path does not describe a linear and individual process of genesis, formation, and (eventually) destruction of images: it rather points to a myriad of interwoven stories connecting heterogeneous images conceptualized differently depending on each “social actor” and historical period. 11. according to lupa, both the lula and bolsonaro campaigns used disinformation to achieve their electoral goals. nevertheless, networked disinformation mostly formed part of the right-wing campaign. we should refrain from creating a false equivalence, although the left also used disinformation during the presidential campaign, at a much lower scale. 12. we wish to clarify that this article presents and discusses only a small number of what we identified as “alternative images.” indeed, it is almost impossible to trace the full extent of online deceptive images due to the high volume of images that circulate online, and to the consubstantial opacity of networked disinformation (chadwick and stanyer 2022). 13. the complete investigation in portuguese can be seen here: https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/materia/o-show-de-jair/ 14. for more information see: https://g1.globo.com/politica/eleicoes/2022/noticia/2022/09/11/ministro-do-tse-impede-bolsonaro-de-usar-imagens-de-atos-oficiais-do-7-de-setembro-na-propaganda-eleitoral.ghtml 15. one can consult the exact tweet on x: https://x.com/carlosbolsonaro/status/1567813993477165062 16. the term indio-ciata refers to a typical right-wing manner for organizing marches in support of bolsonaro. other such marches include motorcycle gatherings, motociatas, or car gatherings called carreatas. 17. the transverso collective was created in 2011 with the purpose of launching poetic interventions in public spaces through urban art methods such as poster bombs, visual projections, and other techniques. see https://www.instagram.com/coletivotransverso/ transverso is not the only collective doing interventions of this kind. projetemos and activist design (a brazilian network of independent designers and projectionists), for instance, are also experimenting with public projections. 18. in may 2024, we replicated this experiment with cauê in the streets of barcelona. this intervention formed part of the second international conference of the visual trust project. see the section “research videos” of the project’s website for a visual account of this event: www.visualtrust.ub.edu 19. for instance, lupa agency forms part of the trust project (https://thetrustproject.org/) and regularly participates in the activities and conferences organized by the poynter institute (https://www.poynter.org/), an organization that maintains the international fact-checking network (ifcn). 20. the fight for regulation of social media platforms took a new turn in in august 2024. the new york times 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of film and anthropology. chicago: university of chicago press. sencar, husrev taha, luisa verdoliva, and nasir memon, eds. 2022 multimedia forensics: advances in computer vision and pattern recognition. singapore: springer singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7621-5 shifman, limor 2014 memes in digital culture. cambridge, mass.: mit press. spyer, juliano 2020 povo de deus: quem são os evangélicos e por que eles importam [people of god: who are the neoprotestants and why do they matter]. first edition. rio de janeiro: geração. tancons, claire 2015 “carnival.” in truth is concrete: a handbook for artistic strategies in real politics, edited by florian malzacher, 136–138. second edition. berlin: sternberg press. weir, peter, dir. 1998 the truman show. paramount pictures. cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 533-563, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.03 “as if i were an illegal”: racial passing in immigrant russia cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 4, pp. 653-678, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.03 “as if i were an illegal”: racial passing in immigrant russia lauren woodard syracuse university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4131-6162 minju and i entered a secluded corner of the far eastern federal university’s library in vladivostok, russia. framed by bookshelves, our table overlooked the sea of japan. when i first met minju, i thought she looked ethnic korean. petite, pale, and with thick, dark brown hair and blunt bangs, minju resembled my korean friends from kazakhstan, whose families soviet officials had deported to central asia under stalin’s orders in 1937. yet her classmates had told me that she was ethnic uzbek from kyrgyzstan. a week earlier i had given a talk about my research on russian compatriots to a class at the university. afterward, a student told me i should connect with her roommate, a member of the russian-speaking diaspora eligible for expedited citizenship as a “compatriot.” “she’s uzbek but from kyrgyzstan,” she told me. another girl interrupted, “no, she’s a foreigner [inostranka], not a compatriot [sootechestvennik].” the roommate corrected her, “no, she is a russian citizen [grazhdanka rossiiskoi federatsii]. her parents live here.” the student gave me a phone number, and i contacted minju on whatsapp. now, another person was questioning minju’s citizenship. i had just asked minju when she had immigrated to russia, when a voice interrupted us. “she is a migrant [migrantka],” an elderly librarian called out, emerging from behind the shelf. just moments earlier, when we had arrived at the library, we had registered with her, minju handing over her student id and i, my american passport. the librarian had scrutinized the documents before logging our information in her notebook and returning them. she had followed us to the corner where we now sat. “no, i am a citizen of the russian federation,” minju answered. i looked at minju, worried. the librarian’s assertion that minju was a migrant was an accusation—it suggested minju was potentially a nelegal (illegal), a term often associated with the homogenizing “central asian” (sredneaziatskie). “then you are from siberia!” the librarian exclaimed. i looked at minju, confused. “what does she mean?” i asked in english, switching from russian, so that the librarian would not understand. “she thinks i am from some ethnic group from siberia,” minju explained, shaking her head. as we continued our conversation in english, the librarian retreated. as the discussion among the students and then between the librarian and minju illustrated, it was hard to place minju. was she a foreigner or a compatriot? migrant or indigenous? she was ethnic uzbek but from kyrgyzstan, her roommate qualified. her name, minju, led to further confusion. minju was not an uzbek, kyrgyz, or russian name but sounded potentially korean—was she ethnic korean from kyrgyzstan or south korea?1 the questions that followed minju demonstrate the complicated act of locating someone within contemporary russian society. the labels—foreigner (inostranets), compatriot (sootechestvennik), citizen (grazhdanin), and migrant (migrant), as well as ethnic russian (russkii) and russian citizen (rossiianin)—all have different connotations, marking expectations of behavior and degrees of belonging. they sort immigrants along a hierarchy, ranging from compatriot, with the strongest claims to citizenship and often imagined as ethnic russian or “of slavic appearance” (slavianskoi vneshnosti, associated with “fair features”), to migrant, with the weakest claims and tied to those of “non-slavic appearance” (neslavianskoi vneshnosti) and designated as “blacks” (chernye), associated with “darker complexions.” the term rossiianin means “russian citizen” and includes all who live in the russian federation, but it, too, can be disparaging, at times deployed as a politically correct sneer in place of a racial slur (graber 2020, 2).2 the indeterminacy of locating minju in russia’s migration hierarchy points to processes of racialization, understood here as “the processes through which any diacritic of social personhood—including class, ethnicity, generation, kinship/affinity, and positions within fields of power—comes to be essentialized, naturalized, and/or biologized” (silverstein 2005, 364). what is at stake for minju is whether she will be recognized as a citizen or illegal. in russia, the world’s fourth-largest migrant-receiving country, illegality functions in ways similar to american and european contexts, in that the terms illegal (nelegal) and guest worker (gastarbaiter) become proxies for blackness. racialized as “black,” immigrants from central asia, as well as internal migrants from the north caucasus, experience discrimination in applying for jobs, renting housing, attending schools, and accessing health care (agadjanian, menjívar, and zotova 2017; reeves 2013; yusupova 2021; abashin 2012; round and kuznetsova 2016; malakhov 2019). what makes russia unique are soviet legacies of belonging that continue to inform migration and citizenship projects today. with the dissolution of the soviet union in 1991, internal migration between the republics of one country was transformed into transnational migration between fifteen post-soviet states, with most immigrants migrating to russia from armenia, kazakhstan, kyrgyzstan, ukraine, uzbekistan, and tajikistan (denisenko, strozza, and light 2020). russian officials have sought to restrict labor migration through various initiatives, including by introducing quotas for work permits and requiring that migrants pass a russian language, history, and culture exam (schenk 2018). at the same time, officials have sought to attract russian-speaking compatriots from abroad to offset population decline by offering expedited citizenship in as little as three months after one’s arrival, as opposed to the standard five-year process. whereas scholars have shown how efforts to restrict citizenship in europe and the united states reinforce the production of illegality “by perpetuating immigrants’ marginality” to ensure the continuation of cheap labor (agadjanian, menjívar, and zotova 2017, 560; de genova 2002), in russia we see a different dynamic as a result of soviet legacies. as i found during ethnographic research on russian citizenship projects, most immigrants, including those classified as labor migrants, qualify for expedited citizenship as russian compatriots because they speak russian (woodard 2019). yet minju was not the only immigrant i met whose citizenship status was called into question based on her perceived ethnicity. as her experience demonstrates, in everyday life, the categories of compatriot and russian citizen remain normatively racialized as white and ethnic russian. many people in russia believe that race and racism do not exist in their country because soviet officials introduced an anti-racism campaign in the 1920s, shortly thereafter declaring the soviet union anti-racist (shnirel’man 2013; zakharov 2015). as was the case for its purportedly color-blind neighbor europe, race for the soviet union (and now russia) was located elsewhere: it primarily constituted an american problem, associated with binaries of black and white (goldberg 2006; lemon 2019). russian people instead identify difference through the term nationality (natsional’nost’). as i explain below, nationality is entangled but not synonymous with ethnicity. i am interested in the relationship between nationality, ethnicity, and race, particularly in the moments in which they overlap and blur (bilaniuk 2016; lemon 2000; rucker-chang and ohueri 2021). ethnographic attention to casual word choice and behavior—referring to someone as a migrant rather than as a compatriot, characterizing one group as uneducated (negramotnyi) and another as highly qualified (vysokokvalifitsirovannyi), and using the informal “you” (ty) instead of the more respectful “you” (vy)—reveals the racialization of citizenship, associated with russianness and whiteness. as a result, immigrant citizens such as minju must continually perform their compatriotism to claim russian belonging. in this article, i examine the racialization of ethnicity and citizenship in the post-soviet context and show how immigrants engage in practices of racial passing to assert belonging. in emphasizing passing, i employ a term used to describe the practice of mobilizing the very points of difference that marginalize someone to suggest an alternative reading (ahmed 1999; tudor 2017; sion 2014). although the term originated in the american context to describe blacks who passed as white to escape slavery and later segregation (hobbs 2014; ehlers 2012), scholars have also examined how individuals—historically excluded owing to their gender, sexuality, religion, and other aspects of their identity—have navigated social hierarchies through other forms of passing (butler 1990; sánchez and schlossberg 2001; rogers 2019; sasson-levy and shoshana 2013; sion 2014). this article joins recent scholarship in demonstrating how passing helps us understand the racialization of migration (krivonos 2020; garcía 2019; gómez cervantes 2021; ullman 2015). in my analysis, i draw on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork i conducted with immigrants and officials in moscow and vladivostok between 2015 and 2017. my research focused on russia’s resettlement of compatriots program, an initiative introduced in 2007 to attract from abroad russian compatriots—defined as ethnic russians, russian-speakers, and those with “spiritual, cultural, and legal ties to the russian federation.” these compatriots were encouraged to immigrate to strategic parts of the country like vladivostok in primorskii krai.3 located in the far east, officials consider primorskii krai strategic because it borders china, north korea, and the sea of japan. as i analyzed how a group of politicians, officials, ngo workers, and academics envisioned the program in moscow and how officials implemented it in the russian far east, i met a variety of immigrants, not just those who obtained citizenship as compatriots. some immigrants i encountered in online forums devoted to helping compatriots return to the homeland, others at universities, grocery stores and markets, in various lines, and in taxis and on public transportation. i conducted thirty-five in-depth interviews with immigrants in primorskii krai, as well as twenty-one interviews with officials, scholars, and others in moscow and primorskii krai. i also analyzed news coverage, policy discussions, and academic discourses about migration in russia. i begin by introducing the concept of passing as a useful lens to analyze processes of racialization in russia. drawing on sara ahmed (1999) and frantz fanon (2008 [1952]), i historicize the space through which bodies move in russia by exploring soviet interventions into race theory and legacies of nation-building. in the remainder of the article, i explore how racialized bodies move through a shared post-soviet space of unmarked russianness through two ethnographic examples. the first examines the case of two ethnic uzbeks who immigrated to russia through the compatriots program because they identified with russian language and culture. although legally recognized as russian compatriots and citizens, they could not pass as white, ethnic russians. to negotiate everyday discrimination, they sought to pass by leaning into, or toward, multiethnic claims of russianness by shedding ethnic markers, including their names and clothing, that racialized them as uzbek, central asian, and thus black. the second case analyzes how ukrainian citizens, prioritized until recently as russians’ “slavic brothers,” seek to pass as ethnic russians by modifying how they speak russian. i suggest that such efforts at passing point to the persistent association of russian citizenship with ethnic russianness and whiteness, despite soviet-era disavowals of racism and contemporary claims of russia’s multiethnic diversity. by paying attention to efforts to pass, we see a fundamental tension in russian society in which belonging is defined as multiethnic and tied to russian language, a legacy of the soviet era, while a popular understanding of russianness remains tied to ethnic russians and whiteness. thus, this article contributes to studies of citizenship as racial projects and whiteness as locally nuanced but informed by transnational structures of white supremacy (beliso-de jesús and pierre 2020). passing in russia the concept of passing helps us understand how racialization works by drawing our attention to how bodies move through space (ahmed 1999, 94). drawing on alyosxa tudor (2017, 21), i conceptualize passing as “making oneself readable as privileged from a discriminated positioning.” to claim such privilege, one must be able to identify the recognized signs and practices that suggest belonging in a particular racial, ethnic, gendered, or citizenship status position (ehlers 2012). it presumes that the boundaries of group membership are clear, and it requires communal knowledge of ideal types such that there is general agreement on what “looks” can reliably identify an individual with reference to binaries of black or white, male or female, citizen or migrant. passing becomes possible when an ambiguous presentation, like minju’s, cuts off immediate identification and opens multiple possibilities. strategies for passing include changing one’s name, accent, dress, and behavior (krivonos 2020; sion 2014; gómez cervantes 2021; ullman 2015). they can also include utilizing material culture and performing one’s knowledge of place to suggest that one belongs and is thus “legal” (de león, gokee, and schubert 2015; reeves 2013; garcía 2019). in what follows, the material i present from russia illuminates yet another dimension of passing, one that takes into account postcolonial theories that move beyond the american context, but nevertheless remain tied to notions of whiteness. my analysis aligns with the work of orna sasson-levy and avi shoshanna (2013) and daria krivonos (2020) to suggest that passing reveals internal hierarchies and illuminates the ways in which whiteness operates. in pointing to how bodies move through space, ahmed’s definition of passing emphasizes how historical contexts shape the spaces in which bodies encounter one another, or what fanon (1952, 91) describes as “the historical-racial schema.” as i detail in the next section, the historical-racial schemas that shape the spaces through which immigrants move in russia today are deeply informed by soviet interventions into race theory and global circulations of anti-migrant rhetoric and productions of illegality. race and space in russia soviet officials disavowed racism because of its ties to capitalism and colonialism while also engaging in their own racial projects that aligned with marxist-leninist historical materialism. in the nineteenth century, russian scholars engaged in debates about race with their european counterparts. they emphasized the role of environmental factors and historical inequities in producing the appearance of races and racial traits (zakharov 2015, 30; tolz 2014). after the 1917 russian revolution, soviet officials adopted social scientists’ view that race was socially produced rather than biologically inherited. communist party leaders sought to stoke proletariat revolutionary consciousness worldwide and saw racial equity as part of this project. internationally, they identified people of color as the “toiling masses of the east,” with whom they should ally to spread the revolution (matusevich 2008, 59–60). domestically, officials sought to incorporate the diversity of peoples of the former russian empire into the new soviet union and to counteract russian imperialism through what the historian terry martin (2001) describes as “affirmative action” policies. early soviet leaders, including lenin and stalin, believed that nationalism was a period and product of capitalism. thus, to accelerate history, officials collaborated with ethnographers to categorize people into ethnic groups, rank them on a hierarchy by levels of national consciousness, and develop ethnic identities. influenced by herderian notions of ethnolinguistic belonging, stalin (quoted in hirsch 2005, 43) viewed a nation as united by “a common language, territory, and economic life”; its members shared a “common mentality.” officials designated the term nationality (natsional’nost’) for the most “developed” cultures, such as russians, ukrainians, tajiks, uzbeks, germans, and others. soviet officials allocated nationalities their own territories with some degree of autonomy and state resources to develop and promote their cultures, primarily through standardizing their languages and organizing ethnographic exhibits and concerts to educate their own people and others about their ethnic identities (hirsch 2005; martin 2001; slezkine 1994). soviet nation-building produced tensions between promoting a universal soviet identity and simultaneously producing ethnic pluralism that included implicit hierarchies of value and belonging. while soviet officials may have promoted the languages, cultures, and rights of all soviet nationalities, this did not mean that officials did so peacefully or that they took into account how people self-identified. similar to other soviet projects, nation-building occurred from the top down. it also proved ambitious, resource intensive, and linked to a specific rendition of decolonization intended to incorporate the former peoples of the russian empire into the soviet union, with the ultimate goal of erasing group identities altogether to make way for international socialist culture. ethnic groups did not disappear, and some historians have argued that soviet nationality policies even reinforced group boundaries, fueling independence movements in the late 1980s (suny 1993; slezkine 1994). furthermore, as nikolay zakharov (2015, 57–58) points out, even the alternative modernities that marxists advanced were still rooted in western european traditions of enlightenment that soviet officials sought to counter. officials categorized many of the people who lived in the soviet union as oppressed and backward and thus subject to socialist projects of civilization. soviet diversity policies left three legacies important for understanding migration, processes of racialization, and belonging in russia today. first, since the soviet union’s collapse in 1991, russia’s migration policies have sought to respond to the question of what obligations the russian government should have to former soviet citizens, specifically ethnic russians and russian-speakers who live outside of russia in other post-soviet republics. while they proved rather fluid in the 1990s, russia’s citizenship and migration policies have become more restrictive in the 2000s. however, it has become easier to obtain citizenship as a russian compatriot—an intentionally ambiguous term that includes ethnic russians, russian-speakers, and those who identify with russian culture (shevel 2011). as a result, most immigrants from other post-soviet countries can apply for expedited pathways to citizenship if they move to areas outside of moscow and st. petersburg. although nearly any immigrant from a former soviet country can claim russian compatriotism, passing as a russian citizen requires a particular performance that remains tied to phenotypical and linguistic features associated with ethnic russians. this leads to the second legacy of soviet nationality policies—namely, the effect of russification on soviet space and how russianness operates as unmarked whiteness. although initially soviet nationality policies sought to promote the development of non-russian nationalities over (white) ethnic russians as a response to lenin’s concern of “great russian chauvinism,” from the 1930s onward, soviet identity became more tied to russian language, culture, and identity (slezkine 1994, 443). ethnic russians became “the first among equals” as soviet officials positioned russian language and culture as something that unified the soviet union’s diversity of peoples (martin 2001, 454–55; sahadeo 2019). as privileged traits, russian language and culture became a way of marking class as urbanites across the soviet union adopted russian as their primary language (kosmarskaya and kosmarski 2019). at the same time, sovietness functioned increasingly as unmarked russianness, so that by the late soviet period, the ideal image of the soviet citizen, regardless of discourses that celebrated the diversity of the soviet people, was that of the white, ethnic russian, male soviet patriot (zakharov 2015, 188–89). since the soviet union’s collapse, russian nationalists have mobilized popular support by arguing that soviet nation-building and diversity policies destroyed authentic russian culture (oushakine 2009). thus, while russian became the common language of the soviet union, ethnic russianness became a form of whiteness, a privilege made invisible and seen as victimized (twine and gallagher 2008, 6). the fact that immigrants, eligible for citizenship as russian compatriots, seek to pass toward russianness points to a third legacy of soviet diversity policies—that racial hierarchies have endured despite soviet campaigns of anti-racism. although soviet officials sought to reject race, as the cold war intensified after world war ii, their efforts to compete with the united states often meant that they called out racism elsewhere but ignored it within the soviet union (lemon 2000, 2019). as a result, although ethnic profiling, racial slurs, discrimination, and racially motivated violence continue in russia today, many russians perceive race and racism as problems that exist only elsewhere (rucker-chang and ohueri 2021). this perception obscures the work that discourses of nationality perform. socialist discourses and policies that promoted ethnic diversity also reproduced notions of ethnic groups as bounded (verdery 1993). the soviet union’s rhetoric of anti-colonialism and anti-racism may have been progressive for the time, but scholars and officials still positioned ethnic groups on a hierarchy that corresponded to marxism’s stages of development, essentializing ethnic groups’ positions in the hierarchy based on ideas of “ethnic mentality” (mentalitet) and locating ethnic russians and other europeans at the top. mentality was seen as heritable; even if one’s ethnicity was initially ambiguous or unknown, it could be revealed because it was “in the blood” (v krovi).4 as soviet authority weakened and marxism-leninism lost credibility in the 1980s, an ideological void opened, with the opportunity for new narratives about national identity in russia to emerge (shnirel’man 2013; djagalov 2021). in the past thirty years, these debates have been shaped by narratives of ethnic russian genocide, the reemergence of the russian orthodox church, and the rise of russian conservatism (oushakine 2009; bassin, glebov, and laruelle 2015; suslov and uzlaner 2019). many conservatives share the stance that russia constitutes the last bastion of white, christian values as postcolonial europe becomes more ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse. american and european discourses of race and migration, including migration as a crisis and migrants as aliens, have also played a role in transforming russian conceptions of race (hutchings and tolz 2015; laruelle 2010). against this backdrop, assumptions about ethnicity and its links to mentality persist, including the supposed ability to guess someone’s ethnicity, and thus, one’s character. i join a growing number of scholars who argue for the need to analyze the racialization of ethnicity in russia and other post-socialist countries (zakharov 2015; weitz et al. 2002; lemon 2000; shnirel’man 2011; baker 2018; rainbow 2019; carew and kiaer 2021; rucker-chang and ohueri 2021; yusupova 2021; sahadeo 2019). when ethnicity means unmasking one’s mentality and identifying someone by a percentage of one’s blood, then discourses concern not only ethnicity but also race as people biologize difference (zakharov 2015, 76; shnirel’man 2011, 2:243; lemon 2000). it is especially this final legacy—how one recognizes another—that i focus on here as i explore how racialized bodies move through a shared post-soviet space of unmarked russianness. as cristina grasseni (2017, 1) writes, racial recognition is “a culturally situated capacity that is learnt, embodied, and socialized in specific ways in thickly layered material and socio-historical contexts.” often, though, those complex histories are reduced to a series of stereotypes—what grasseni (2017, 2) conceptualizes as “mugshot aesthetics”—that rely on the idea that people belong to distinctive, internally homogenous categories, recognizable by sight alone. what happens when it is not immediately clear where someone fits into the hierarchy of belonging, when someone with an ambiguous appearance passes through a post-soviet, russian space? as i demonstrate below, many immigrants in russia cannot pass as white, ethnic russians; rather, they thwart accusations of illegality by choosing ethnic russian names, adapting their accent, and changing their clothing to claim russian citizenship through the multiethnic but still marked category of rossiianin (russian citizen). i argue that, for immigrants from cities in central asia who move to russia because they identify with russian language and culture, passing can be a form of subject-making deployed to distance oneself from the specter of illegality. but for others, it can also mark a rejection of an ascribed identity, including the demand to inhabit only one ethnicity or one language, as i next explore in the case of ukrainian citizens who also seek to pass in russia. “as if i were an illegal” when i met maxim on an online forum for russian compatriots in january 2017, his profile picture was of a gray cat with big green eyes, drinking tea and eating cookies. after seeing several posts by maxim about immigrating to vladivostok, i sent him a message, explaining my research project. we exchanged messages on whatsapp and agreed to meet for lunch. when i arrived at noon, the restaurant was empty, and i chose a table in the center to wait for maxim. soon the waiter returned with a tall, tan man with brown eyes and dark brown hair, cut fashionably with the top longer and the sides buzzed shorter. “maxim?” i asked, and he smiled. he was not what i expected. from his name, i had assumed he was ethnic russian. in our text message exchanges, he had told me about his family. they left tashkent because they saw no future for themselves as russian-speakers. his mother was a sculptor and his sister a ballerina working for a company in greece—class markers that i read as indicators that they formed part of the tashkent intelligentsia. the other background information i had gleaned—his name, affection for cats, russian language, and nostalgia for tashkent, rather than uzbekistan as a whole—all informed my assumption that he was ethnic russian. now, though, at the restaurant, when i saw his darker complexion, i wondered whether he was ethnic uzbek. as we drank tea and ate plov, an uzbek rice dish, we chatted about why maxim and his family had decided to leave tashkent. russian was maxim’s native language. many of his russian-speaking neighbors had immigrated, ethnic russians to russia and ethnic jews to the united states. maxim was a high school teacher at a russian school, but many of the russian schools were closing as the government replaced them with schools taught in uzbek. when his school shuttered its doors, maxim and his parents decided to immigrate to russia through the compatriots program. “i always had problems because i could not speak my native language. and all our neighbors and all the russians moved away. although here i speak russian, they see me as a foreigner [inostranets],” maxim told me. “are you ethnic uzbek?” i asked. “yes, i’m a foreigner,” he replied. “but they aren’t prejudiced [net predubezhdenii]. they can’t be prejudiced because it’s not their land either. historically—if i’m not mistaken—chinese people lived here. and the russians came here two centuries ago, or something like that. that’s why they’re more hospitable here than in the central or western part of russia. in the western part, they’re a bit dangerous.” “is that why you chose primorskii krai? because it’s dangerous in other parts of russia?” i asked. “yes, but also primorskii krai borders some asian countries. and i think the economic situation will improve here.” concerns about danger, even direct references to skinheads in western russia, and appreciation for the far east’s perceived hospitality appeared throughout my interviews and conversations with immigrants from central asia. mindful of what they described as their asian appearance (aziatskaia vneshnost’)—their darker skin color and eye shape—these immigrants chose to move to cities that they perceived as more “hospitable,” in maxim’s words. like maxim, many interpreted eastern russia’s proximity to china, korea, and japan—as well as its history, interchanging between chinese, russian, and japanese imperial powers—as more open toward other ethnicities than central or western russia. indeed, many locals in vladivostok prided themselves on their city’s diversity. i often observed instances, though, that challenged this assumed openness. as elsewhere in russia, everyday forms of prejudice were evident, from cleaning services that promised only “russian personnel and guaranteed quality” to one russian friend telling me that he had bought an apartment in a nice area with “just children and grannies, no central asians.” later during our lunch, maxim’s friend and coworker, oksana, joined us. we continued our conversation, and i asked maxim why he had joined the forum where we had met. “i had questions and i searched for them there. . . . and there i registered and made a nickname [he says “nickname” in english], because if i had written samir then people wouldn’t answer me, as if i were illegal [nelegal],” maxim explained. “wait, is your name samir or maxim?” i asked. “please meet samir,” maxim—or samir—replied in english, opening his arms and smiling. “really! why maxim?” i exclaimed in russian. oksana joined in, laughing, “why maxim? maybe you want to give this name to your son?” again, in english, samir paused, more serious, “well, nickname and people are more friendly if you are native russian. i think so.” maxim’s transformation (back) to samir in our interview was reflective of the discrimination many from the caucasus and central asia face when immigrating to russia. just as minju and i switched from russian to english in the presence of the librarian, in the restaurant, samir, too, switched to english to tell me his uzbek name and why he had chosen a russian one. minju’s and samir’s use of english, rather than russian, to speak about discrimination with me made our conversation more private. it also proffered another strategy of distancing oneself from perceived illegality by indicating to those around us that they spoke english, signaling that they were urban, cosmopolitan, and of a higher class. like other immigrants i interviewed who had selected the far east for its relative openness, samir intentionally selected a russian name on the compatriot forum to mask his ethnicity and, therefore, race. he feared that people would assume from his muslim name that he was “illegal” or a migrant worker. as madeleine reeves (2013, 512) writes, the terms nelegal (illegal) and gastarbaiter (guest worker) evoke those who are nerusskie (non-russian), neslavianskoi vneshnosti (not of slavic appearance), chernye (black), or sredneaziatskie (central asian). assumptions about a lack of russian fluency merge with physical markers of ethnicity to racialize someone as black and illegal. when russians think that nelegaly (the plural of nelegal) are “pervasive” and “visibly recognizable” as “non-slavic,” ethnic profiling through frequent document checks becomes socially acceptable (reeves 2013, 512). however, as alaina lemon (2000) reminds us, racial signs are “slippery.” in post-soviet countries, many non-russians, such as tatars, roma, and uzbeks like samir, are not any darker than ethnic russians. as a result, people look to other signs beyond skin tone to index ethnicity and belonging. often these other characteristics indicative of one’s true ethnicity are seen as “innate” or, in russian, “in the blood” (v krovi); they have to be “detected, unmasked” (lemon 2000, 69). with living memories of stalin’s purges and world war ii, when many non-russians perished in camps, and the threat of skinheads today, racial passing also constitutes a tool for survival. although samir could not control how people interpreted him in person, he sought to conceal his uzbek name online, seeking to pass as russian with the name maxim. when i asked him whether people in vladivostok recognized him as uzbek and if he ever experienced discrimination because of his ethnicity and race, he replied (again in english), “i never tell my nationality to others. sometimes guys ask me, where do you come from? and i tell them i’m local [he laughs]. i lie.” passing could also take the form of asserting one’s identification with russian culture. when i asked minju whether she felt that people often discriminated against her as a migrant, as the librarian had, she responded no: i really know russian language, russian mentality. usually, people think that i’m already russian [russkaia]. i’ve lived with a russian girl for three years already. it’s now easier for me to socialize with other russians than my own compatriots [sootechestvennikami]. many of my girlfriends in kyrgyzstan, we already don’t understand one another. we speak in the same language, but about different things. . . . there are of course many from central asia here [at the university], but i’m already far away [daleko] from them. . . . although we speak the same language, they don’t understand me. i look like i’m korean or chinese—they even approach me and think that i’m one of them! but i’m more comfortable with my russian friends. minju and samir, both ethnic uzbeks, moved to russia from kyrgyzstan and uzbekistan because they identified with russian language and culture. as ethnic minorities within kyrgyzstan, minju’s parents chose for their children to attend russian-language schools because they saw the language as providing greater future mobility. as minju approached her high school graduation, she joined her father in vladivostok, where he had been working for the past decade, so that she could more easily attend a russian university. minju told me that she liked russian language and culture. similarly, as fewer of his neighbors spoke russian and more russian schools closed in uzbekistan, samir decided to immigrate too. while minju thought that she was already russian because she had more in common with her russian friends than with those from central asia and because most people thought she was russian, samir said that he still felt like a foreigner to locals. to pass as russian, samir and minju adopted multiple strategies to lean into their ambiguity—the pause that occurred when they passed through a space and those around could read them in multiple ways. samir’s darker skin suggested he was from central asia and more suspect as “illegal,” whereas minju’s appearance was more ambiguous. as i had observed, people could not immediately place her. she could simultaneously be seen as a korean or a chinese student or as someone indigenous to siberia and, thus, a russian citizen. furthermore, she did not associate with other students from central asia. as she said, although they were from the same country and region and spoke the same languages, she felt “far away from them.” additional details about samir’s and minju’s interests—russian language, culture, and art—paired with their adopted names, maxim and minju, did not align with what people expected from central asian “illegals.” as liora sion (2014) argued in the case of palestinian teachers who taught in jewish schools in israel, samir and minju could not pass as ethnic russians, but they could construct alternative identities that would suggest they were not illegals. by making the features by which people would normally identify them more ambiguous, shedding markers of the illegal other, minju and samir asserted that they were russian, not ethnic russian but potentially members of another ethnic group from within russia. passing proved a strategy of protection, distancing oneself from accusations of illegality, and asserted belonging as a russian-speaker and compatriot. ethnic russian but not russian while immigrants from central asia sought to pass as not illegals, thereby ascending russia’s racial hierarchy, they were not the only immigrants who adopted practices of passing to suggest an alternative identity. ukrainian and even ethnic russian immigrants from other post-soviet countries, invited back to the russian homeland as compatriots, also sought to pass as russians once in russia.5 since the russian war in ukraine began in 2014, more than a million immigrants from ukraine, displaced from the conflict as refugees or economic migrants, have obtained russian citizenship.6 initially, in 2014 and 2015, officials welcomed immigrants from ukraine, describing them as the “most desired immigrants” and “our dearest relatives” who shared a “common language and common culture” with russians (woodard 2019; mukomel 2017; kuznetsova 2020). however, as the conflict has continued, refugees and other immigrants from ukraine have experienced greater difficulties adapting to life in russia, and i found that even those “most desired” felt alienated. one afternoon in early april in 2017, i walked with our cat’s vet, seryozha. it fleetingly felt like spring, sunny and warm. “are you from moscow?” i asked. “no, from ukraine. i moved here two, three years ago. there isn’t any future there [tam net perspektiv],” he said, repeating a phrase i had heard before. in russian, the phrase is literally, “there isn’t any perspective.” as in english, “perspective” can also refer to the art of depicting a three-dimensional space on a plane. i heard this phrase often during fieldwork. immigrants from across the former soviet union used the term to describe their decisions to move to russia, referring often to unemployment, discrimination in their countries of origin as russian-speakers, and low salaries. “there aren’t laws,” seryozha said. “corruption is everywhere. it’s not like that just in the east, where i’m from, but in kyiv too. you have to be careful, though, as ukrainians. when i moved here, i quickly russified [rusifitsiroval].” “why?” i asked. “when i arrived, i had a strong accent,” he said, providing examples in which the “g” in russian became the “kh” in a ukrainian accent. “i spoke [khovoril] with an accent, and many [mnokhie] didn’t like it. locals, muscovites, don’t like ukrainians. when i looked at apartments . . .,” his voice trailed off. “nobody liked it.” “why not?” “because we’re not needed [my ne nuzhny]. why are there so many [this time he said mnogo with the russian “g” that sounds like a “k”] ukrainians in russia now?” seryozha’s assertion that “we’re not needed” echoed an earlier conversation i had had with minju. “it’s enough already. immigrants aren’t needed!” she had said, crossing her forearms to emphasize her point. “look for yourself, all the factories, plants—all of the economy is here in russia. in kyrgyzstan, there is nowhere to work. but in russia, there is good pay—maybe not for russians—but you can do a lot with that money there [in kyrgyzstan]. . . . they don’t need to attract anyone to come here. all the same, people, themselves, arrive! from the [post-soviet] republics there is already enough! have you been to sportivnaya?” she asked me, referring to a popular market in vladivostok. “it’s hard to find ethnic russians [russkikh]! they mean to attract ethnic russians, slavs,” she said, referring to the compatriots program. seryozha was slavic, privileged in russian media as the most desired of immigrants, but he also thought that russians resented him and others from ukraine because there were too many ukrainian citizens in russia, especially after the war had begun in 2014. he and other ukrainians, as well as ethnic russians from other post-soviet republics i met, experienced the disconnect between the promise of russian life and its reality as a feeling of otherness. sveta, a refugee from a village near donetsk in eastern ukraine, fled to russia in 2014. “i’ve always felt at home everywhere, but here i feel different [chuzhaia]. i don’t feel at home,” she told me. sveta’s word choice of chuzhoi, or alien, was one i heard frequently throughout my interviews with ethnic russians and russian-speakers from other post-soviet countries. while in their home countries, they felt alien because they spoke russian and were ethnic russian, in russia, they remained different. as one ethnic russian woman from kazakhstan explained to me, “we were different in kazakhstan because we were ethnic russians [russkie]. but here [in russia] i understood that we’re ethnic russians but not russians [rossiiane].” like samir, most immigrants who were ethnic russian or of european origin simply denied that they were immigrants, choosing not to disclose that they hailed from elsewhere. those with an accent like seryozha sought to russify by changing their speech. this approach suggested that russianness not only concerned phenotype (slavic or european features) but also how one spoke russian. their self-recognition that they may be ethnic russian or ukrainian, with languages and cultures imagined as similar, but not russian, as in from russia, highlights the instability of their privileged positions as slavic compatriots. although, as krivonos (2020) points out, much of the scholarship on passing and the racialization of migration focuses on how those who are racialized as black seek to pass as white (garcía 2019; gómez cervantes 2021; ullman 2015), seryozha, sveta, and other compatriots were white and even ethnic russian. they were exactly the immigrants the compatriots program and other initiatives directed at the russian diaspora sought to attract, but they, too, felt isolated, unneeded, and—in the case of the ukrainians—discriminated against. their precarious position revealed how even those at the top of the immigrant hierarchy, slavic compatriots, found themselves in an unstable position. though privileged and more able to pass than someone of “non-slavic appearance” like minju or samir, they, too, had to russify to assert their belonging. migration scholars have demonstrated how officials have denied ukrainian citizens refugee status in russia and instead recognized them as russian citizens, using citizenship as part of a larger political strategy to maintain influence in the region (kuznetsova 2020; myhre 2018; see also dunn and bobick 2014). the shifting geopolitical mood influences everyday interactions in terms of who is and is not recognized as a russian compatriot. it also builds on other legacies of soviet nation-building, including ideas of nations and cultures as recognizable and distinct, with no room for multiplicity, lending itself well to mugshot aesthetics (grasseni 2017). since russia’s invasion of ukraine in 2014, russian state-sponsored discourses have produced ethnic russians and ukrainians as separate, incompatible identities, denied ukrainian history and statehood, and erased multiple identities within the region (teper 2016; wanner 2014; kuznetsova 2020, 513). shifting geopolitics and soviet legacies of nation-building come together in such a way that ethnic russians and ukrainians, though legally recognized as russian compatriots, find that they, too, must pass to assert belonging. conclusion: the stakes of passing my interlocutors in this article represent russia’s more privileged immigrants, russian compatriots with the agency and status to mobilize their ambiguity to pass as russian. ultimately, even if interlocutors questioned their belonging, they were russian citizens. for those with semilegal status, the stakes of passing prove higher. in the summer of 2015 in moscow, i sat with my host family—a middle-aged woman and her two elementary school–aged children—around the kitchen table, drinking tea, eating cookies, and watching the popular tv show kukhnia (kitchen). broadcast on sts, kukhnia ran weekly for six seasons from 2012 to 2016 and featured the lives of the kitchen staff of the fancy french restaurant called claude monet in moscow. the episode we watched that night illuminated many of the themes around race and passing that were already emerging in the early phases of my fieldwork on russian immigration. in episode 16 of the first season, migration police raid the restaurant, searching for nelegaly. at the sudden appearance of the red-vested federal migration service officers outside the restaurant, management try to rush their immigrant employees out the back. the catch of the episode is that while we, the audience, already expect some immigrants to be working at the restaurant illegally—for example, ainura, the kyrgyz cleaning lady—it turns out that fedya, one of the chefs, has been passing as ethnic russian and a russian citizen. fedya, we learn, is moldovan and working in russia without a work permit. unable to leave the restaurant in time, he and ainura must pass as guests, dining in the restaurant while the police search for nelegaly in the kitchen. the show parodies quentin tarantino’s 2009 film inglorious basterds about an american soldiers’ operation to kill nazi leaders in france. the episode likens the migration police chief to tarantino’s colonel hans landa, known as the “jew hunter.” like landa, the migration police chief tells ainura over an apple strudel, in a direct parallel to the film, that he is the “hunter of guest workers,” and that he always finds them. ainura chokes on her wine, widening her mouth as she gasps, then immediately closes it as she realizes she may reveal her gold tooth, a stereotypical marker of central asian immigrants. while the parody deepens the critique of the russian migration police by likening them to the nazis, it is not necessary for understanding the episode, and the first time i watched it, my host family and i missed the allusion. presentations of language, ethnicity, and race specific to the post-soviet context appear throughout kukhnia, arising in unexpected ways that challenge common assumptions linking race and legality. in this episode, the joke is on us, the audience, and how we read race. ultimately, ainura passes, but the chief catches fedya and deports him to moldova. the “hunter of guest workers” knows how to read the signs of the nelegal, and he identifies fedya by his pickiness and discomfort, eating in the restaurant as a patron rather than in the kitchen. we, however, are not as good at assessing the situation. we learn at the same time as fedya’s colleagues of his moldovan origins. until this episode, my host family and i had assumed that fedya’s white skin, blond hair, blue eyes, and russian fluency designated him as ethnic russian and, thus, a russian citizen. meanwhile, we presumed that ainura was the nelegal and that the chief would deport her. her clothing and physical appearance—her skin color, eye shape, gold tooth, and lined eyebrows—as well as her kyrgyz-accented russian indexed a migrant worker from central asia. in a twist—and a departure from tarantino’s nazi landa—the migration police chief lets ainura go. the show’s depiction of the migration police raid and fedya’s deportation at the end of the episode illustrate the stakes of passing. unlike the immigrants featured in this article who were russian citizens, ainura and fedya experienced the everyday precarity of working in russia as guest workers, subject to ever changing migration policies that depend on the racialization and scarcity of labor (schenk 2018; reeves 2013; round and kuznetsova 2016). as ahmed (1999) and tudor (2017) have written, every identity is ultimately a performance, an act of passing and an approximation to an image of what we imagine someone to be, but the stakes of passing are not the same for everyone. as ahmed (1999, 93) asks, “would one worry, would one fear being caught out, if one did not already perceive oneself to be passing for white? would there be danger, would there be death?” although white fedya from moldova is the one ultimately deported, it takes an expert like the chief to identify him. a hunter of guest workers, he boasts about his skills to evoke the violence of the job, a title made more chilling by the show’s allusion to the nazis. while russian compatriots in this article described similar feelings of alienation and adopted various practices to pass as russian citizens, the stakes for them were not equal. minju and samir, despite seeking to make their identities more ambiguous to distance themselves from specific racial assumptions, could ultimately fall back on their russian citizenship with the cultural capital to pass. yet for immigrants who appeared central asian like samir, fears of racially motivated violence, invoked in interviews with references to skinheads in western russia, influenced families’ decisions to immigrate to the more hospitable russian far east, where immigrants assumed the region’s proximity to china and korea would allow them to pass unnoticed more easily. the felt need for immigrants in russia to pass, even after having obtained russian citizenship, demonstrates how racialized hierarchies in russia persist despite soviet legacies of anti-colonialism and anti-racism and contemporary promises of russian compatriotism. it also points to the indeterminacy of russianness itself. analyzing passing directs us to performances of the negative, the not central asian, the not ukrainian, to inhabit russianness. what is russianness in the absence of these “nots,” or as marina yusupova (2021, 232) asks, “could it be the case that [the] whiteness that ethnic russians [ascribe] to themselves only exists in the presence of racialized migrants?” yusupova’s suggestion about the dependency of russianness on a racialized other recalls zora neale hurston’s (1925, 828) reflection that she felt “most colored” when “thrown against a sharp white background” in universities in new york. it also evokes nicholas de genova’s (2018) argument that the heterogeneity of europeanness can only be constructed through the juxtaposition of what it is not—not migrant, not black, not asylum-seeker, and not muslim. as concerns about migration borrow european discourses of new racism and fears of cultural difference (balibar 1991; laruelle 2010), it becomes easier to define what it means to be russian—and to perform russianness—as what it is not than what it is. analyzing racial passing in russia points us to connections between russia and europe and to how global conceptions of migration and race, including ideas of migration as a crisis (tolz 2017; holmes and castañeda 2016), circulate and transform local and regional conceptions of ethnicity and race (goldberg 2006). although the soviet union may have disavowed race and sought to reject colonial legacies of racism, binaries of white and black, legal and illegal, have entered migration discourses in russia. ethnographic attention to racial passing offers insight into how immigrants navigate hierarchies and assert belonging, even when that belonging is always shifting. it also points us to the need to examine russianness as a political project, one locally situated but also informed by transnational and global circulations of whiteness. abstract this article examines how immigrants from post-soviet countries engage in practices of racial passing to challenge ethnic stereotypes in russia, the world’s fourth-largest migration destination. ethnographic research reveals that immigrants shed signs of illegality to pass not necessarily as white, ethnic russians (russkie) but instead as ethnically heterogeneous russian citizens (rossiiane). the need to pass points to fundamental tensions within russian society about belonging, tensions arising from a particular configuration of race, ethnicity, and language that emerged during the soviet era. i show how ethnic russianness operates akin to whiteness, the invisible ideal against which racialized bodies are marked, despite soviet-era anti-racism campaigns and contemporary claims of russia’s multiethnic diversity. this article contributes to scholarship analyzing migration and citizenship as racial projects by demonstrating how locally nuanced inflections of whiteness interact with global and transnational movements of white supremacy. [passing; whiteness; race; migration; citizenship; russia; europe] резюме в этой статье исследуется то, как иммигранты из постсоветских стран вовлечены в практики расового пассинга, усложняющие этнические стереотипы в россии (занимающей четвертое место в мире по величине миграционного притока). этнографическое исследование показывает, что иммигранты скрывают маркеры нелегальности, чтобы выдать себя не обязательно за белых этнических русских, а вместо этого за этнически неоднородных российских граждан (россияне). необходимость такого пассинга указывает на фундаментальную напряженность в российском обществе относительно самоидентификации, которая возникает из-за особой конфигурации расы, этничности и языка, возникшей в советское время. я показываю, как этническая ‘русскость’ действует подобно белизне, невидимому идеалу, рядом с которым существуют расиализированные тела, на фоне антирасистских кампаний советской эпохи и современных заявлений о многонациональности россии. эта статья вносит вклад в исследования, которые анализируют миграцию и гражданство как расовые проекты, демонстрируя, как локальные нюансы белизны взаимодействуют с глобальными и транснациональными движениями за превосходство белых. [пассинг, белизна, раса, миграция, гражданство, россия, европа] notes acknowledgments first and always, i would like to thank my friends and research participants in moscow, st. petersburg, and vladivostok, russia, whose critical insights about migration, nationality, and race form the basis of this article. research was made possible by a social science research council dissertation proposal development fellowship, a fulbright research grant to russia, a wenner-gren dissertation fellowship, a writing fellowship from the university of massachusetts amherst, and a postdoctoral fellowship at yale university’s macmillan center. i thank julie hemment, regine spector, elizabeth krause, sergey glebov, and alina ryabovolova, whose early feedback influenced this article. douglas -rogers, -agnieszka pasieka, edyta bojanowska, leslie gross-wyrtzen, and malika bahovadinova provided critical comments that, along with heather paxson’s editorial guidance at cultural anthropology, helped transform this essay from a dissertation chapter into an article. i would also like to thank brad weiss, christopher nelson, and three anonymous reviewers for their engagement and comments, which greatly improved the article. 1. i later learned that minju was a nickname she had selected in her korean language classes. she preferred it to her own name, which i never learned, and everyone at university referred to her as minju. for minju and the other immigrants i feature, i use pseudonyms. 2. western foreigners do not fit easily along the hierarchy. in large cities like vladivostok and moscow, i, as a white american woman, often passed unnoticed as ethnic russian. in smaller cities and villages, though, i was more difficult to place. although in my interviews and interactions with officials and immigrants i made it clear that i was an american, when simply walking down the street, i, too, like my interlocutors in this article, tried to pass. along russia’s border with china, being an american could mean being a spy, and thus i paid attention to my accent and clothing to avoid scrutiny. 3. “on the state policy of the russian federation concerning compatriots abroad” (“federal’nyi zakon o gosurdarstvennoi politike rossiiskoi federatsii v otnoshenii sootechestvennikov prozhivayushchikh za rubezhom”) passed in 1999 and revised in 2010. 4. soviet films, plays, and literature reproduced the idea of “unmasking” one’s innate ethnic identity. alaina lemon (2000, 69) gives the example of the play gypsy, in which a tatar boy realizes he is really a “gypsy” (tsygan) when he learns to dance with ease. during my fieldwork, the idea of discovering one’s true ethnicity played out in one instance when a young man discovered from a dna test that he had “jewish blood.” to his parents’ bewilderment, their son converted to judaism and became active in vladivostok’s jewish community. thus, while determining one’s true identity could be dangerous—a kind of racialized unmasking—it could also become a way of claiming repressed family histories. 5. during the soviet era, russian people had migrated due to resettlement orders and deportations under stalin, various economic development initiatives, military service, and study, but they had moved between the republics of one country (siegelbaum and moch 2014). before 1991, they had been internal migrants and soviet citizens, but with the soviet union’s dissolution, they suddenly became transnational migrants with multiple ties. it was estimated that 25 million ethnic russians lived outside of russia in other former soviet republics in the early 1990s (brubaker 1992). the 1990s were a period of mass migration and resettlement (see pilkington 1998). 6. this number refers to ukrainian citizens who immigrated to russia between 2014 and 2020. on february 24, 2022, putin initiated a full invasion of ukraine, leading to a second and larger wave of refugees fleeing conflict. unlike in 2014, most have fled to poland, hungary, slovakia, and other countries in europe. references abashin, sergey 2012 “sredneaziatskaia migratsiia: praktiki, lokal’nye soobshchestva, transnatsionalizm” [central asian migration: practices, local communities, transnationalism]. etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 4: 3–13. agadjanian, victor, cecilia menjívar, and natalya zotova 2017 “legality, racialization, and immigrants’ experience of ethnoracial harassment in russia.” social problems 64, no. 4: 558–76. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spw042 ahmed, sara 1999 “‘she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger’: passing through hybridity.” theory, culture & society 16, no. 2: 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632769922050566 baker, catherine 2018 race and the yugoslav region: postsocialist, post-conflict, postcolonial? 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and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.4.03 guest commentary: no stone unturned cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 1-8, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.01 guest commentary: no stone unturned deanna l. byrd the choctaw nation of oklahoma https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0823-2458 ian thompson the choctaw nation of oklahoma https://orcid.org/0009-0004-2425-3130 a prefatory note from the editorial collective. when the society for cultural anthropology selected our distributed, international editorial collective to lead cultural anthropology, they did so in part to support our commitment to opening channels of this crucial platform of our discipline beyond the scope of privileged, endowed higher educational institutions in the united states. as one step of this process, in this issue we provide space to the choctaw nation of oklahoma to describe their work since the passage of the native american graves protection and repatriation act (nagpra) in 1990. as deanna l. byrd, the nagpra liaison-coordinator and research and outreach program manager of the choctaw nation of oklahoma, and ian thompson, the tribal historic preservation officer of the choctaw nation of oklahoma, writes, since that time, “native american communities gained a measure of say in how ancestral burials are treated on federal lands. the law also established a mechanism to help native american, alaskan, and native hawaiian communities have open dialogue with institutions across the country about the return of their ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.” please read the rest of their guest commentary to learn more. choctaw people thrived for thousands of years in our homeland, what is now the southeastern united states, spreading from portions of western alabama, the panhandle of florida, and mississippi. deep cultural ties to the land, knowledge, and lifeways were passed from generation to generation. through time, choctaw communities shared this landscape with other muskogean-language speaking tribes and developed relationships far beyond the southeast region through trade networks, the negotiation of hunting grounds, and exploration. these relationships remain today in recognition of this long history. as european expansion encroached on choctaw homelands, a series of land cessions slowly forced choctaw people to move to the interior of mississippi or west into louisiana. beginning with the treaty of mobile in 1765, in just forty-seven years the choctaw ceded the vast majority of their land to the united states. millions of acres were relinquished, ending with the treaty of dancing rabbit creek in 1830 as part of the indian removal act. this treaty set in motion the removal period for choctaw people to land west of the mississippi river in indian territory, or what is now the state of oklahoma. as the first tribe removed by the federal government, the choctaw people faced merciless peril through disorganization and mismanagement. some members stayed in mississippi and make up one of our sister tribes, the mississippi band of choctaw indians (mbci), while others migrated west into louisiana, joining our second sister tribe, the jena band of choctaw indians. beginning in 1831, most choctaw people, however, left to indian territory and endured hardships, displacement, loss of generational knowledge, and death, the consequences of which still impact our community. the choctaw removal period lasted more than seventy-five years, ending with later removals to indian territory in 1903. today, the choctaw nation of oklahoma tribal membership comprises more than 200,000 descendants of these brave choctaw who journeyed westward along the trail of tears and death, what would later become known as the trail of tears. our reservation sits in the southeastern portion of oklahoma, with a land base spreading across ten and a half counties. while each community within our reservation is unique, we all share pride in our culture, history, and language. choctaw people have deep respect for our loved ones, something that also finds expression in the care for and preparation of an individual after their passing. through history, burial ceremonies have included bundling, basket burials, scaffolding, charnel houses, burials near and under the home, grave houses, and modern methods of internment, to name a few. the specific form of these ceremonies has varied widely in our community, from district to district, from family to family. traditions were adopted, faded away, and later revitalized. no single burial practice existed among our community, but it has always been a sacred responsibility to not only remember our ancestors but also to protect their resting places. for more than a hundred years, removed choctaws were unable to protect ancestors’ burial grounds against excavation and looting. as choctaw leader george harkins wrote in his “letter to the american people” of 1832, “here is the land of our progenitors, and here are their bones; they left them as a sacred deposit, and we have been compelled to venerate its trust; it is dear to us yet we cannot stay.” to the detriment of our community, the forced removal of the majority of choctaws from of our homeland to indian territory left countless ancestors in our homelands vulnerable to development, excavation, and disturbance. our community has the responsibility to rectify this desecration. with the passage of the native american graves protection and repatriation act (nagpra) in 1990, native american communities gained a measure of say over the treatment of ancestral burial sites on federal lands. the law also established a mechanism to help native american, alaskan, and native hawaiian communities have open dialogue with institutions throughout the country about the return of their ancestors, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. the choctaw nation of oklahoma’s nagpra program has found success in a proactive, systematic approach to researching institutions’ archaeological and ethnographic collections for nagpra eligibility. the journey brought many lessons, and more than twenty-five repatriations have been finalized, with more on the horizon, allowing for needed healing in our broader community. in 1990, the choctaw nation of oklahoma historic preservation department was merely a vision. the choctaw nation of oklahoma gained tribal historic preservation office status through an agreement with the national park service in 2004, when the tribe took over some of the duties of the oklahoma state historic preservation office. slowly, over the course of two decades, the department grew from a two-person team to thirty-one individuals supporting various programs. these programs include section 106, tribal archaeology, cultural gis, research and community outreach, nagpra, and growing hope, an heirloom-seed preservation and distribution program. the choctaw nation’s first repatriation and subsequent reburial ceremony occurred in 1999. in anticipation of future reburials, the nation created a repatriation cemetery in consultation with elders near our capitol grounds in tushkahomma, oklahoma, in 2001. in the initial years of its existence, the historic preservation department took a reactive approach to nagpra work, responding to inadvertent discoveries alongside federal agencies when there was a nexus with the section 106 program or when an institution sent a new inventory or summary to the office. sadly, it was recognized early on that these notifications only marked the tip of the iceberg. in 2009, the choctaw nation of oklahoma established a committee of elders and spiritual leaders to address concerns for future nagpra work. given that our people never planned to have to rebury our loved ones, we relied on its guidance to help establish spiritual protocols, procedures, and ceremonial considerations. beginning in 2015, discussions with that committee encouraged taking a more proactive approach to nagpra work. consequently, the historic preservation department hired a full-time dedicated nagpra coordinator to design and implement a project to search collections across the united states, state by state, county by county, in all federally funded institutions, historical societies, museums, and universities. the idea was to leave no stone unturned. since 2016, through the no stone unturned initiative, the program is systematically contacting every repository in the united states that may fit nagpra’s definition of a federal collection. the project takes a two-fold approach in its engagement with institutions. the department has compiled cultural knowledge into a research document that outlines the choctaw nation’s nine-state area of historic interest, known collectors, pottery types, and archaeological phases associated with choctaw ancestors, as well as previous historic names for choctaw people. this document is sent to each of these institutions, along with a letter inquiring about potential nagpra collections as well as collections of choctaw cultural objects not subject to nagpra. while priority is given to the location of our ancestors and their funerary objects identified as eligible for nagpra, we also begin conversations about an institution’s non-nagpra ethnographic collections. many times, items from ethnographic collections are added with permission of use to the chahta imponna (choctaw maker) database to help interested tribal members research and revitalize traditional arts. the chahta imponna database utilized an institute of museum and library services (imls) grant to purchase proficio software to catalog relevant non-nagpra choctaw cultural items found in collections for each record in the database. this allowed for the inclusion of detailed information about the maker, the date it was made, components, and high-resolution images. fostering relationships between the choctaw community and institutions through the imponna database allows for reciprocity of knowledge. on the one hand, the tribe has the ability to document additional choctaw cultural objects, allowing contemporary artists to learn from their construction. on the other hand, the institution obtains a richer level of knowledge about the choctaw objects in its collection through interacting with the office and the community that created them. to see examples of some choctaw artisan items from the search of collections, visit hina hanta—the bright path (hinahanta.choctawnation.com). returning to nagpra, through consultation with tribes, an institution learns the specific preferences of each tribal community engaged in the process. with that in mind, in addition to the research document and letter of inquiry, a document is also sent explaining the cultural protocols and preferences for the treatment of ancestors while in collections. for instance, the choctaw nation of oklahoma views an individual’s human remains, their funerary objects, and their soil matrix as sacred and gives instructions for their housing and preparation before repatriation. the preference is for ancestors to have as little disturbance as possible. this makes it essential to start consultation early to avoid having to make changes after their rehousing (e.g., transferring from plastic bags to unbleached muslin). adhering to these preferences marks one of the ways of building, often resulting in long-lasting, meaningful relationships between the choctaw nation and the institutions that make nagpra repatriations to the choctaw nation or that curate non-nagpra choctaw cultural items. each correspondence is recorded in the nagpra consultation database under an entry for that institution. for institutions that do have choctaw nagpra collections, the database records the current stage of the nagpra process: inquiry, inventory, review, consultation, notice of inventory completion (nic), or repatriation-reburial. this database is continuously updated as new correspondence and consultation occurs. the aim is to help each institution move from one stage in the process to the next every four to six months. the nagpra program staff often work with institutions that apply for nagpra consultation and documentation grants by providing letters of support during their application process. to date, phase 1 of no stone unturned has reached out to 2,100 institutions. although we are still on phase 1 in some states, we have simultaneously begun phase 2, reaching back out to those institutions that did not respond to the first round of inquiries. phase 3 will concentrate on data analysis to understand specifics about our experience with the nagpra process, including a story map of locations across the country where our ancestors were taken and housed in collections prior to repatriation. eventually, our systematic search will cross the ocean to other countries. in fact, we have already contacted and begun conversations with institutions in france, germany, england, scotland, sweden, and finland. consultation often lets us realize that collections deemed non-nagpra by institution in fact include nagpra-eligible objects as well. in 2022, the choctaw nation of oklahoma worked with the gilcrease museum to repatriate the leflore pipe, an item of cultural patrimony under nagpra. this pipe was used at the signing of the treaty of dancing rabbit creek on september 15, 1830, by greenwood leflore, other choctaw chiefs, and representatives of the united states government. louise leflore, direct descendent of chief greenwood leflore, gave this “pipe of peace” to the gilcrease museum in 1958. for the choctaw nation, the removal process lasted more than seventy-five years, forming a significant part of our national experience. signing the treaty of dancing rabbit creek put in motion the choctaw removals to indian territory, or the trail of tears. the trail of tears ultimately led to a physical and governmental split in the choctaw people, with some staying in the choctaw homeland, and others emigrating to indian territory. choctaw nation of oklahoma tribal members are all descended from trail of tears survivors. while each family’s experience during removal was unique, this pipe was present at a pivotal moment in our shared history. under the national nagpra definition, this pipe has an ongoing historical, traditional, and cultural importance to the choctaw nation of oklahoma; it cannot be owned by one tribal member alone. it is now prominently displayed in our cultural center in the removal history exhibit. to date, the no stone unturned project has allowed our nagpra program to consult and identify numerous collections of interest across the united states. presently our nagpra program is working with more than eighty institutions, twenty-four of them in the final phase of the nagpra process. we look forward to reburying thousands of ancestors in the coming years. this project is a work of love and honors those who came before us. it is an act of healing for our community and lessens the burden on future generations. we recognize that repatriation itself cannot heal the collective trauma experienced by choctaw people. however, with each reburial, the dark cloud of the past is slowly balanced by the joy and pride of ensuring our loved ones find the peace intended for them. while our nagpra work will continue for generations, the progress thus far has proved noteworthy. it has provided us with incredible insights to share about nagpra work throughout the country, the strength afforded by united efforts, and the affirmation that dedicated individuals exist to help during the lengthy process. in 2020, while moving into our new cultural center, the nagpra coordinator received files from storage to sort through. these files were essentially a time capsule from 1995. hundreds of institutions did reach out to our tribal community, sent inventories, and invited us to consultation while fulfilling their nagpra responsibility. yet these invitations were received before the choctaw nation even had a historic preservation department. this proved enlightening and, with all the discussion surrounding non-compliance, pleasing to learn. a tribal representative carefully organized the letters by state, and we used these invitations to start conversations—many leading to repatriation, more than twenty-five years later. we have also learned that strength lies in unity. the choctaw nation of oklahoma came together with our southeastern tribal partners, each as sovereign nations, to form the southeastern tribal alliance for repatriation and reburial (starr). together we advocate for one another as we progress through the nagpra progress. alliance members support one another by sharing information about collections of interest, their experiences with institutions, and holding space for important conversations about claims and the best path forward with a particular agency. this unity has proved helpful for many practitioners. they meet with our alliance, make introductions, and get conversations started. afterward, each tribal nation follows up with the institution individually to begin formal consultation. visit www.starralliance.info to learn more about our mission and the tribal nations represented. finally, this project would not have succeeded without the guidance of melanie o’brien, the current manager for the national nagpra program, her dedicated staff, and countless individuals across the country with compassionate, open hearts who have contributed to the healing aspect of this work. their willingness to go above and beyond has significantly impacted our level of success. institutional professionals offered their time and skill sets to provide images, prepare and send inventories, field phone calls, consult with sovereign nations to understand their preferences, and respectfully work through the nagpra process. they take guidance from tribes, collaborate with communities, and genuinely advocate for lasting change. oftentimes, they have inherited a nagpra collection at their institution and are unsure how to proceed, but they find a way through the mess. while some of these professionals are employed, many work as volunteers. some have little to no financial means or staff to assist them, yet they continue to make progress and pass on their wisdom to the growing group of practitioners across the country. this brings hope. in the first phase of our project, we contacted many institutions, never hearing back. now, in our second phase, seven years later, we are happy to connect with some of these institutions again and learn that they now have nagpra coordinators, that their administration has allocated funds, and that they are working diligently toward nagpra compliance. the tides are changing and the long-standing, accepted racist ethos that surrounded past collection efforts is being unwoven, slowly, by the next generation. the choctaw nation nagpra program finds great honor in offering guidance and mentorship to future professionals through classroom presentations, assistance in graduate research projects, and conference appearances. we hope to encourage the paving of new paths through meaningful and respectful tribal consultation. cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 1-8, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.01 cultural anthropology: marine inequality, borderization, and the radical potential of kinship 621 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 621-646, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.03 marine inequality, borderization, and the radical potential of kinship fiona mccormack university of waikato https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7421-3653 “it will be strange to give our evidence on other people’s whenua [land],” angeline remarked as we drove along the east coast, the white sand and blue pacific waves provoking unfavorable comparisons with the shimmering black beaches and volatile seas of whāingaroa harbor, the ancestral home of tainui o tainui ki whāingaroa. six of us, all women, had traveled in the tribal minivan to whakatane to present oral evidence at the march 2021 sitting of the waitangi tribunal’s marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act inquiry—a six-hour trip stretching from the west to the east coast of aotearoa/new zealand.1 te mania, the driver, had navigated the backroads, stopping briefly to welcome a baby newly born to the tribe, and later to pick up a cousin, the newcomers’ participation registering the interests of her recently deceased father. narratives of kin and place, of ancestors and their deeds, marriages, births, sicknesses and deaths, who had left and who had returned, as well as family conflicts and resolutions, were avidly discussed, each person and event mapped onto the tribal lands traversed on the journey. a moment of silence, a whispered karakia (chant/prayer), a visceral pause, signaled the crossing of tribal boundaries. the women grew quieter with increasing distance from whāingaroa, eventually inquiring of their cousin, “what are the issues for māori over here”? tribal lands do not 622appear as territorial lines on formal maps of new zealand, yet they are evident in the quotidian practices of contemporary māori life; in the burial of people on tribal whenua (land), the attendance of the diaspora at monthly hui (gatherings/meetings) on home marae (meeting house complexes), the welcoming and farewelling of visitors into and from tribal territory, or in the daily care of kin, environment, and seascape. the sea too is mapped in terms of which ancestors, nonhuman species, sacred sites, ocean passageways, significant events, resources, activities, as well as categories of people ought to belong where—a cultural history currently being produced by māori tribal groups across aotearoa as 623evidence for the claiming of customary marine rights and title, though the actual phenomena potentially returned are decidedly diminished. figure 1. map of te ika a māui: the land and its people, 1995. source toitū te whenua: land information new zealand. this article draws on scholarship on borders to interpret the persistence of inequality in indigenous seascapes, irrespective of moves to redress colonial wrongs or the growing anthropocenic recognition of human-nature interconnectedness (brennan 2022; bresnihan 2016; kawharu 2024; rohrer 2022). my use of the already vast body of literature on borders is selective and oriented toward directing an analytical lens on marine economies and environments, as well as on the conflicted relationships that inhere in settler-colonial societies. in this context, two approaches prove illuminative: the extension of borders as a mode of imperialism (campbell 2022; gahman and hjalmarson 2019; walia 2013, 2021) and the escalation of borderization in an era of planetary demise (mbembe and chaize 2018; mbembe 2019a). much border scholarship focuses on the precarious lives of migrants and their encounters with ever more securitized landed borders in the global north, a journeying that too often includes fatal voyages across treacherous seas (last 2017; pezzani 2015; vives 2017). indeed, lethality is enacted by seawater as it links with border regimes (talbayev 2024). significantly, a key finding in this research is that borders do not remain at the periphery; rather they are deeply embedded in the everyday workings of nation-states, producing exclusions, discriminations, and violence (campbell 2022). my interest here is in exploring this pedestrian operation of borders and their role in recalibrating specific forms of inequality in oceanic environments. i also turn to the “genius” of indigenous kinship, wherein forms of culture are “shared across recognized and valued differences . . . serving as much as modes of linkage as well as demarcation” (merlan 2022, 182). this alternative method of bordering human and natural worlds works at once to dampen hierarchy, to make distinct as well as to weave together. this article is informed by ethnographic research undertaken with tainui o tainui ki whāingaroa (tainui) over the past eleven years. it incorporates ten interviews with māori collected as part of an inquiry into claims under the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011 (maca).2 it also draws on my research with whānau (extended family), hapū (kin group), and iwi (tribe) over the past three decades, developed to address marine issues of concern. as an immigrant from northern ireland, my lived experience of the far-reaching material and cultural consequences of imperialism makes for a point of connection with tangata whenua (people of the land/indigenous māori) with whom i work, an epistemic solidarity that informs my research methodologies, objectives, empathies, and engagements.624 figure 2. the hapū of the waikato area. from kirkpatrick and greensill’s (2002) “tainui defined: mapping uncertain boundaries and contested spaces of te akau.” in the nz geographical society and the institute of australian geographers: joint conference 2001, geography: a spatial odyssey. conference held at university of otago, dunedin. tainui trace their ancestry to the original inhabitants of whāingaroa harbor as well as those who arrived later on the tainui waka (double-hulled canoe). place names given by ancestors as they journeyed the often treacherous west coast reflect the ubiquity of the ocean, as well as the accumulation of knowledge of particular ecosystems. waikeri (manu bay), the site of a kāinga (village) on the southern side of whāingaroa harbor, and now known for its world-famous left-hand surf break, speaks to the intensity of water and the surging of waves likely to carry away an unsuspecting person on a receding tide. ngarunui, the beach north of waikeri, warns of the large size of waves, while wainamu, south of the harbor mouth, signifies the breeding site of sandflies. about two hundred tainui continue to live in whāingaroa, with others returning periodically from elsewhere in aotearoa and from overseas. an exponential rise in coastal property prices, however, dents this return migration, and the whānau (extended family) summer camping ground houses year-round occupants. tainui share whāingaroa harbor with five other hapū (kinship groups) who,3 when collective action is required, coalesce as tainui-a-whiro. they are also linked by kinship ties to the inland iwi (tribe) waikato tainui, though they trace their descent from whatihua, an elder brother line, and the broader kīngitanga, a central north island anticolonial movement formed in 1858 to unify tribes under a single sovereign (papa and meredith 2012). 625the article is divided into three sections. the first explores border politics in the context of māori claims under the maca, drawing on harsha walia’s concept of border imperialism. herein, the spatial and social borders of māori kinship and marine ownership regimes, built on relationality, ebb and flow, and porosity confronts a settler colonial logic of hardening border distinctions and containment. the second, “kūtai and greenshell mussels,” situates the acceleration of mussel farming in new zealand within a broader narrative of neoliberal globalization, debordering, and the totalizing tendency of capital. section 3, “borderization, containment, and blue growth,” builds on this analysis to address the enclosures and entrapments arising in the context of climate demise and the intensification of marine industrialization. borders, in this synopsis, have come to reference the organized violence underpinning contemporary capitalism, as well as the concatenation of discriminations arising from blue growth extractivisms. the conclusion, “borders and the radical potential of kinship,” suggests that māori kinship (through which indigenous borders are constructed) can be conceptualized as a site of non-capitalist solidarity that has the potential to resist the logic of borderization. imperial bordering and the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011 harsha walia’s activist scholarship shows how borders, under colonial conditions, enforced a propertied relationship to land, subjugating other ways of owning and rendering people alienated from previously held and traversed places (walia 2013). this bordering includes lines on maps delineating nation-states, walls, fences, and the administrative infrastructure bounding regions, counties, and states. herein, the term immigrant also encapsulates an idea of immobility, that is, under settler colonialism, to be indigenous means to be held in place (walia 2013, 2021). such bordering politics starkly came to the fore during the covid-19 pandemic; in new zealand, alongside the closure of national borders, securitized checkpoints hardened formerly benign regional boundary lines, slicing across tribal lands and organization, and re-enforcing a settler affinity with place (fitzmaurice and bargh 2021; mccormack et al. 2025). the concept of border imperialism expands on the idea of propertization as intrinsic to nation-making, to describe the processes through which western formations in general—including capitalism, nationalism, colonialism, racism, patriarchy, whiteness, and so on—are extended and externalized far beyond western empires (walia 2013). hence, under border imperialism, rather than different 626ontological norms, othering is maintained through the proliferation and normalization of the west’s institutions and ideologies (gahman and hjalmarson 2019). this expansion foreshadows ongoing contradictions, that is, a coeval advancement of universalism and particularism, mobility, displacement and emplacement, fluidity and friction, and geopolitical centers and peripheries (campbell 2022; donnan and wilson 1999; fassin 2011). a close examination of the relationship between marine governance and indigenous claims in aotearoa reveals patterns of inequality sustained through the dynamics of border imperialism. in aotearoa, the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011 (maca) constitutes a node in the development of the country’s aquaculture industry, the cultural counterpart of the māori commercial aquaculture claims settlement act 2004. both acts evolved as concessions to indigenous challenges concerning the growth of marine farming in seascapes of special significance to māori, though they are informed by opposing classifications of nature and society. the former implicates a conservationist ordering, while the latter aligns with the wealth-generating strategies of blue growth. the settlement of māori claims to aquaculture, for instance, incorporates māori into the national aquaculture business development framework by allocating 20 percent of sea-farming spaces to mandated iwi organizations (or iwi aquaculture organizations), the corporate arm of tribes—a distribution filtered through te ohu kaimona (the central māori fisheries trust) and regional councils (mcginnis and collins 2013; ministry of fisheries new zealand 2010). rooted in a utopian model of spatialized capital accumulation, these spaces can be developed in co-partnership with established aquaculture interests, exchanged for cash settlements or other assets (mika et al. 2022; mclellan 2020; wiber et al. 2021).4 such exchangeability renders environments flexible, responsive to global financial markets, the pursuit of imminent returns, and new forms of inequality (high 2022). meanwhile, the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011, arising out of pan-māori activisms in the early 2000s, concerns the protection of ancestral cultural practices and marine title in the foreshore and seabed area, that is, the space between the high tide mark on the beach and the seabed out to 12nm from shore. of the 203 claims before the high court, and 385 lodged under an adjacent crown negotiation process, 11 have been settled to date, with the remainder projected to take up to thirty years (johnson 2021).5 the sea in whāingaroa is the rohe moana (tribal seascape) of five hapū. each hapū is associated with a particular harbor area, with whānau (extended families) having rights over designated fishing grounds and gathering spots, and 627linking genealogically with specific marine birds and species: oi (mutton birds), for instance, tuna (eels) or manaia (seahorses). that oi are now threatened and manaia disappeared references the entanglement of environmental demise with the loss of categories of kin (rose 2008; salmón 2000). overarching these distinctions is an emphasis on the sharing of resources as well as a propensity to collectivize as tainui-a-whiro. this amalgamation occurs for political purposes, decolonial struggles, ceremonial events, to produce seafood for prestation to inland tribes, and for the purposes of advancing indigenous claims. most recently, the reclamation of a seascape shared according to different levels of kin connectedness has galvanized the collective. under the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011, two categories of claims are recognized: customary marine title and protected customary rights orders.6 together these represent the jurisdictional evolution of aboriginal title and rights in ocean environments in new zealand. while the fiction of mare nullius was revealed in 1986 when tom te weehi, a pāua (abalone) fisher accused of breaching fisheries regulations, successfully argued that traditional māori fishing rights could override european laws (jackson 2013), and later in the 2003 ngati apa v. attorney-general decision regarding customary land in the foreshore and seabed area (charters and erueti 2007), the actualization of māori marine property rights and relations is constrained (harrison 2022; rout et al. 2024). in advancing claims under the maca, for instance, hapū are required to identify relationships between land, sea, and kin groups with a particular emphasis on acts of exclusion to signify ownership. māori have an ambilineal kinship system, such that descent is traced through a mixture of male and female links. this, coupled with ambilateral affiliation, means that māori society has an extremely flexible kinship system (van meijl 2006) and overlapping interests and rights in land, though these are subject to the status of ahi kā (burning fires of occupation/continuous occupation) and the weighting given to the eldest sibling chiefly line. narratives around significant sites, genealogical connections to mountains, rivers, and seas, alongside the journeying of ancestors, work to position one kin group as holding mana whenua (customary authority) while others play a tautoko (support) role. tribal lands and sea are thus at once porous and deeply bounded by kin. customary marine title refers to unextinguished rights held in a specified area of the takutai moana in accordance with māori tikanga (custom), and claimants must show evidence of exclusive use and occupation from 1840 (when the treaty of waitangi was signed) to the present without substantial interruption. 628following the first significant high court hearing of a maca claim in may 2021, the court expanded the exclusive use and occupation requirement to include the idea of “shared exclusivity.”7 this novel, albeit paradoxical, concept allows for a single customary marine title order over a claimed marine area to be shared between more than one māori kin group. a year later, the court reported complexities in ascertaining the correct owners of joint customary marine title, while a legal expert noted the practical difficulties encountered when trying to enforce such concepts. (wu 2023). significantly, while shared exclusivity goes some way toward recognizing inter hapū relations, it renders invisible that the linkage of kinship also legitimates claims across difference. in a critical response to common property debates, becky mansfield (2004) observes the reduction in centering the discussion on the need for defined property rights, based, ironically, on an individual, rational-choice model. a similar slippage is evident in the concept of shared exclusivity wherein māori marine tenure becomes conceptualized as private property writ large, while exclusivity as a property characteristic remains a borderization. as francesca merlan (2022) notes, a stark contrast exists in viewing kinship as an exclusive identity and property demarcation and kinship as a network phenomenon. pulling out a map of her tribal territory dotted with white feathers, kimai described the process of identifying those who “share a connection to the harbor and sea in whāingaroa.” the feathers, representing pou whenua (posts marking ownership) bounding her hapū, denote whakapapa (genealogical connections) and korero tuku iho (oral histories). pointing to one of the feathers, kimai explained that in stories held by her hapū, this was wairere, a significant ancestor, pou whenua, and the highest waterfall in the north island of new zealand. here mahanga, wairere’s father, reconciled with his enemies, baptized his son, united two whānau (extended families), and divided land between neighboring hapū: “it was a peace-making gesture . . . our pou whenua is based on the gift of land.” pou whenua can be carved posts, hills, streams, creeks, rocks, or other environmental features and are a prominent motif in contemporary māori artwork. these posts, however, do not create a continuous line distinguishing hapū territories; their eminence lies, rather, in the sites in themselves. pou whenua illustrate a key point about māori ownership: whereas a fence is concerned with exclusion, pou whenua are oriented toward the creation and maintenance of relationships: between neighboring kin groups, between ancestors and descendants, and between people and environmental resources. this capacity to border-cross, apparent in the categorization of kin, is also evident in māori marine estates. 629the granting of protected customary rights orders under the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011 requires evidence that customary rights have been exercised in accordance with tikanga (custom) in a particular part of the takutai moana since 1840 (when the treaty of waitangi was signed). the act recognizes that these rights may arise from a spiritual or cultural association if such associations are manifested in a physical activity or use related to a natural resource (emphasis added).8 te ataiorongo, an ancestor chief killed by his sister’s husband who lodged a fishhook in his forehead, is one of four taniwha (spiritual guardians) who mediate the relationship between tainui hapū and their seascape. manifesting as a stewarding stingray, red fish, or other sea creature, his appearance corresponds with significant kinship events and, up to the 1980s, was marked by the sudden abundance of fish. stories of te ataiorongo, his genealogy, untimely death, son’s revenge, and contemporary manifestations, form part of the evidence provided by the hapū in their marine and coastal area claims. these histories of kin relatedness, however, do not have a definitive pragmatic or functional orientation. manihera, a master tainui navigator, describes captaining a treacherous expedition, around the west coast of new zealand’s north island from manukau to wellington in 2007. under pressure to hasten the voyage, manihera decided to bypass the coastal towns of whāingaroa and kāwhia, and instead pivoted the waka (canoe) for the more southerly taranaki. immediately, in the midst of a worsening storm, the steering paddle broke, the substitute motor died, and the waka narrowly missed striking a small, offshore island, forcing the crew to seek refuge in a rocky point. the sailors were young māori people from whāingaroa and kāwhia, west coast harbors settled by polynesians who arrived on the tainui waka from hawaiki to join those already living there. today, the neighboring harbors maintain multiple lines of kin connections, as well as distinctive tribal identities that give genealogical priority to different ancestor lines. in explaining the precarious voyage, manihera mused: half our crew was from whāingaroa and half from kāwhia, quite a bit of whakapapa [genealogy] on board . . . . it was a respectful thing, we were not paying respect to everything on the coast; our tūpuna [ancestors], our taniwha te ataiorongo, our whānau [extended families]. it was a way of knocking our heads together and making us pull in and pay homage. (manihera, in mccormack and paekau 2020) 630crucially, an extension of kin relations through time, across terrestrial and saltwater environments, as well as human and more-than-human domains, exerted a pull toward shore. the tainui maca case is ongoing, and it is unknown whether accounts of te ataiorongo will substantially alter the outcome. the collective hapū lawyers, tasked with translating tribal stories into protected customary rights evidence, have experienced great difficulty in extracting the resource-management function of taniwha sightings from stories steeped in a kinship ethics of care and responsibility as well as, ultimately, ocean drownings when these obligations are transgressed. for māori coastal groups who successfully give evidence of having held onto land contiguous to the sea, despite the contingencies of colonization and rising oceans, the marine title returned is reducible to a “right of veto in relation to resource consent activities and conservation activities, the right to be consulted in relation to new zealand coastal policy statements and ownership in terms of newly found taonga tuturu (protected māori treasures)” (oyawale 2022, 7). marine title, hence, does not award the bundle of rights associated with private property in new zealand, nor is it commensurable with other marine ownership regimes conferred to māori through indigenous settlements, such as those distributed as financialized fishing quota in commercial fisheries or as exchangeable seascapes in aquaculture development. further, for māori to oppose resource consents, consent-granting local and regional councils need convincing that the activity has more than a minor adverse effect on customary protected orders. marine title also remains subject to rights of public access, boat navigation, and the needs of commercial and recreational fisheries (oyawale 2022), with the crown maintaining ownership of all undersea wealth such as petroleum, gold, silver, and uranium. herein, the universalization of private property constructs a particularized form of indigenous ownership. just as colonial law had a way of melting into its native counterparts as these were shaped in the movement from direct to indirect rule (coronil 2001), it gleams in the settler colonial law emerging in ocean governance in new zealand. my point is not that the tenure conferred by marine title is weaker or stronger than private property; rather, when unraveling the politics underpinning indigenous settlements, constitutive ideologies reveal themselves; the marine and coastal area act purports to settle colonial grievances by extending an imperial bordering of property and kinship. kūtai and greenshell mussels the west’s ability to shimmer in law universally and in the civilizing projects and programs aspiring to modernize the so-called third world in the 1960s 631(escobar 1995) is echoed in the west’s disappearance into the neoliberal market, melting and solidifying anew (coronil 2001). as a form of bordering, neoliberal globalization requires porous borders, fragmented fields, and compromised forms of sovereignty (yngvesson 2013), at the same time as it demands territory, precarious labor, individualized bodies, and flexible environments. in june 2023, tainui were informed, via a glossy 107-page document, of a resource-consent application to establish four mussel spat farms, covering 700 hectares of water, 3–4nm from the shore in whāingaroa. this was accompanied by a private plan change request to the regional council to zone the west coast as a new aquaculture space. in the application, north western mussel limited (the applicants) emphasize that under the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011, neither the crown, nor any other person owns, or is capable of owning, the common marine and coastal area (aquaculture direct 2023). the applicants acknowledge, however, that the proposed sea-farming site is subject to māori claims for customary interests, hence their obligation to notify relevant maca applicants (aquaculture direct 2023, 6). also emphasized is their openness to partnering with iwi so that settlement assets acquired (under the māori aquaculture settlement act 2004) can be optimized (aquaculture direct 2023, 7). tainui hapū concerns over the mussel spat farms’ application include that it ignores the coast’s designation as a protected site for the disappearing maui dolphin, the potential for it to disturb renowned surf breaks currently protected by legislation, as well as other unknown environmental hazards. further, the application is perceived to reduce their maca claim, aimed at safeguarding ancestral marine tenure and relationships, to one of limited consultation. most distressing, however, is that it repeats a pattern of marine economic exclusion. angeline, a tainui environmental spokesperson, comments: people go over our heads and do this sort of stuff. they pay no heed to history, and the fact that our people have sacrificed their livelihoods and not been able to fish out here. now we have this new threat coming. this is a confiscation of our space. (greensill 2023) angeline is referring to the loss of whānau and hapū commercial fishing livelihoods in whāingaroa and her concern that the aquaculture settlement will follow a similar pattern of dispossession. the hapū aquaculture allocation, distributed in the aquaculture claims settlement act 2004, sits with the inland river tribe, waikato tainui, a mandated iwi organization9 who also hold all iwi settlement quota. these fishing rights were introduced in 1992 to settle māori 632claims to commercial fisheries using the logic of individual transferable quota, a privatized catch share, in fisheries management (mccormack 2017). some three decades later, of the 58 māori iwi who received settlement quota nationally, only 8 percent have the capacity to fish (reid, rout, and mika 2019), with the vast majority future trading catch rights, wealth from which trickles down to coastal fishing hapū (mccormack 2017). only two māori commercial fishers remain in the west coast harbors of whāingaroa and kāwhia, signifying a new wave of enclosures contingent on the articulation of an indigenous settlement with the financialization of saltwater nature. green-lipped mussels, including mussel spat, were incorporated into new zealand’s quota management system in 2004. north western mussels limited, the mussel spat farm applicants, are a conglomeration of three separate quota-holding companies. the smallest of the three owns four mussel farms, leases additional space from mandated iwi organizations, and processes its products locally for a global export market. the second is a vertically integrated aquaculture company that grows, processes, packs, and exports greenshell mussels. in a typical season, they process 6,850 tons of mussels. fifty percent are exported to the united states, 25 percent to the uk and europe, and 25 percent to australia and the pacific. following covid-19 border disruptions, however, they have diversified into the domestic market, and now provide packaged product for two new zealand companies. the third, a private family company whose wealth is estimated at nz$315 million, owns a vertically integrated fishing company, is the sixth largest owner of fishing quota in new zealand, and exports frozen fish, frozen half-shell, and mussel meat to the global market (aquaculture direct 2023, 8–9). green-lipped mussels are a large, orange-fleshed bivalve endemic to new zealand waters, identifiable by their green-tipped shells. farmed under the trademark greenshell mussels, the species makes for new zealand’s most valuable aquaculture commodity based on tonnage (about 100,000 tons annually) and export value (nz$380 million annually), accruing roughly 55 percent of total aquaculture revenue in new zealand (stenton-dozey et al. 2021). mussel farms arose in the 1970s to coincide with the closure of the wild commercial mussel fishery, and they now extend across several thousand hectares of saltwater, mostly in the south island of new zealand (dawber 2004; toone 2023). in comparison to shellfish cultivation globally, greenshell mussels have experienced relatively few diseases (castinel et al. 2019), and indeed mussel farms, with mussels grown on longlines suspended in water columns and feeding from 633the surrounding ocean environment, provide a habitat enabling a diverse range of other species to thrive (stenton-dozey and broekhuizen 2019; van der schatte olivier et al. 2020). given this ecosystem benefit, farming greenshell mussels can be conceived as a form of restorative aquaculture (underwood 2023), attracting large amounts of research revenue concerned with aquaculture’s potential to advance the recovery and expansion of coastal ecosystem services (gentry et al. 2020). in contrast, mussel reefs throughout new zealand, significant in recreational and māori customary fisheries, have not yet recovered from the depletion events instigated by the commercial wild fishery, a species decline compounded by climate change, the incursion of non-native species, and micro-plastic pollution (toone et al. 2023; webb et al. 2019; ministry for the environment and statistics new zealand 2019). green-lipped mussel spat are microscopic, free-swimming planktonic larvae that drift through ocean currents until finding a suitable structure, typically seaweed or seagrass, to which to attach (gardner et al. 2021). once they have reached a certain shell size, newly metamorphosed juvenile mussels re-enter the ocean drift before settling on firmer structures, such as rocks, reefs or wharfs, often in deeper water. since 1978, about 80 percent of greenshell mussels have been grown from spat collected from beach-cast seaweed washed up on te oneroa-a-tōhe in the far north of new zealand (chaput et al. 2023). this wild interface, wherein quota holders lease annual catch entitlements to spat collectors, attracted public outrage in 2019 following the online release of a video depicting heavy vehicles competing derby-style for the spat laden seaweed (swannix 2019). the fishery is also increasingly viewed as a commercial risk due to variations in the timing and quantity of spat falls,10 and the likelihood of these natural events becoming ever more unpredictable with the advancement of climate change. accordingly, much industry effort and national blue growth strategy is directed toward the creation of spat farms and hatcheries (new zealand government 2024). mussel spat farms, wherein hairy ropes mimicking seaweed are suspended in water columns to lure the free-swimming larvae, are essentially a nursery, producing juvenile, green-lipped mussels for transportation to mussel farms ready to allow the maturation into greenshell mussel commodities. kūtai or kuku (mussels/green-lipped mussels) are a taonga (treasured/cultural keystone) species for māori and a significant form of seafood (paul-burke et al. 2018). they are also agentic in the networking and boundary practices of māori kin groups. pipirua, a mussel reef in whāingaroa harbor, is a source of food for snapper, a stingray habitat, as well as a gathering spot at low tide. the 634reef was seeded in the 1940s by mussel spat gifted from neighboring hapū in kāwhia, a species translocation inspired by princess te puea hērangi (1882–1952) (ellison et al. 2012). te puea, the granddaughter of the second māori king, was a much-admired leader of the kīngitanga, and is accredited with achieving a national status for the māori monarchy among māori and non-māori, though the kīngitanga remains unrecognized in new zealand law (papa and meredith 2012). whāingaroa hapū gift seafood for annual kīngitanga kroneihana (coronation) events, during which affiliated tribes gather over several days in inland ngāruawāhia, the seat of the māori king, to korero (story/discuss), celebrate, mourn, play sports, and feast. the obligation to supply seafood, however, is not a kīngitanga claim to dominion: “princess te puea would send a truck from inland to here, her people would not touch our resource, our people would fill the truck and send that back to them, so they recognized the mana [authority/power] of space actually stays with our people,” angeline explained. and indeed, whāingaroa hapū have an ambivalent relationship with the kīngitanga, with support waxing and waning over the years. pipirua had an abundance of mussels: “they were in big clumps, you could fill a boat in about ten minutes” (james [angeline’s brother], in ellison et al. 2012, 84). harvesting rights were, however, linked to key ceremonial events: “we used to go up there to pipirua and get mussels for tangi [funerals] and when ngāruawāhia had their koroneihana [coronation] celebrations . . . . it was never ever touched unless it was for a big gathering like a tangi or a hui [meeting]” (tex (angeline’s father) in ellison et al. 2012). in the 1960s, a pākehā (new zealand european) fisherman discovered pipirua and, armed with a commercial fishing license, began dredging the resource—a fishing method that captures everything in its path, destroys habitats, breaks shells, and decimates kūtai populations. in the 1990s, the hapū attempted to reseed pipirua, and while mussels are evident again today, a rāhui (temporary ritual prohibition) has been imposed on their collection as a result of ongoing pollution emitted by a regional council sewage pipeline. whaingaroa hapū opposition to the 700-hectare mussel spat farm application speaks to their role as tangata kaitiaki (human guardians), as well as a history of marine economic exclusion. of particular concern is the exchangeability mobilized in aquaculture territorialization once the up to five decades-long licensing consent has expired. in a comparison of indigenous involvement in aquaculture development in norway and new zealand, camilla brattland, else grete broderstad, and catherine howlett (2022) argue that while māori have more rights 635than sami, māori agency extends only to a certain level. indigenous knowledge is disputed as a valid knowledge basis in aquaculture licensing processes and, rather than sustaining ecosystem biodiversity, innovation is geared toward the commercial enhancement of single species. further, the aquaculture industry, driven by global demands, favors the use of marine space for global production rather than for indigenous marine livelihoods (brattland, broderstad, and howlett 2022). additional inequities exist. underlying the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011 and the māori aquaculture settlement act 2004 is a slicing of māori marine relations into economic and cultural spheres. this essentialization, increasingly associated with the rigidification of different levels of kin-group organization (hapū and iwi), suggests a neoliberal market melting and solidifying, wherein indigenous marine economies become absorbed into national and global economies, whereas hapū culture remains the purview of the dispossessed. borderization, containment, and blue growth the vision of a borderless world facilitating frictionless economic and political integration, common in the pre-2007 global financial crash era, has become ever more challenged with the acceleration of bordering work following the covid-19 pandemic. indeed, while liberal theorists observed post–cold war globalization in terms of population “flows,” postmodern fluidity, and dynamic hybridization (appardurai 1990; ohmae 1995), anthropologists of borders pointed to intensified social differentiation and hardening dividing lines (donnan 2005; heyman and campbell 2007). borders, thus, are at once social facts that divide people, working to concretize dissimilarities rather than affinities (chattopadhyay 2019), and highly mutable: they are continually redefined, imposed, and operationalized, both linking back to colonialism and forward to neoliberal practices of exploitation and abandonment (gahman and hjalmarson 2019; walia 2013). and while they obscure the role of the state, they also transcend it. achille mbembe’s (2018, 2019a, 2019b) thesis on “borderization,” defined as a speeding up of the logics of containment, enclosure, and contraction, describes a worldwide erection of walls and fortifications, offshoring and the fencing off of wealth, far beyond lines of demarcation separating sovereign states. borders, hence, have become “the name we should use to describe the organized violence that underpins both contemporary capitalism and our world order in general” (mbembe 2019a, 5). borderization, mbembe (2019a) argues, has been facilitated by three “‘mega processes”: first, corporate sovereignty, which in its twenty-first-century guise, includes global financial capital, private high-tech corporate entities, surveillance capitalism, and the legal frameworks supporting 636frictionless foreign investment, international trade agreements, and the unprecedented power of markets (see also zuboff 2019); second, the relationship between technological escalation and the redefinition of speed, leading to unshackled markets and economies as well as the dredging of information on human behaviors to classify and codify optimal human performance (mbembe 2019a; bresnihan and brodie 2021). third, the dialectics of entanglement and separation; this acceleration of speed, intensification of connections and expansion of life has hit terrestrial limits that imperil the very fluidity of life. in response, borders now work to control speed, partitioning and fragmenting space and territories, to quicken movement in some spaces and to decelerate it in others. hence, the move toward planetary entanglements confronts its opposite—enclosure and containment (mbembe 2019a, 2019b). and this enhanced entrapment holds particularly true for the discounted bodies of the deadly logic of borderization: those humans most exposed to storms, rising sea levels, warming oceans, toxic pollution, declining livelihoods, wars, and food insecurity, as well as the loss of material culture, environment, and kin. marae, the center of whānau and hapū political and ceremonial life, are crucial to the reproduction of kinship. they are also a leveling site wherein tikanga (custom/culture) trumps modern socioeconomic inequities (aikman 2015; bennett 2007). marae typically occupy small parcels of land, a consequence of colonial land grabs and the imposition of propertied relationships curtailing the seasonal movement of people. traditionally positioned near waterbodies such as rivers, streams, estuaries, and the sea, marae are particularly vulnerable to climate change, rising sea levels (bailey-winiata et al. 2022),11 and the challenges of a “managed retreat” (hanna, white and glavovic 2020). now emplaced, tainui hapū confront increasingly unpredictable king tides, eroding sand dunes, floods, storms, ocean pollution, invasive species, and species decline, all while needing to maintain their obligations as tangata kaitiaiki (human guardians) of urupā (grave sites), kōiwi (ancestral bones) buried in rocks and crevices, sea mammals, fish, shellfish, birds, sacred sites, gathering spots, their ancestor mountain karioi and the whāingaroa estuary and harbor. in coastal cannibals, a photo essay documenting the contested development of whangārei te rerenga paraoa (whangarei harbor, the gathering place of whales and chiefs), ngāhuia harrison (2022) captures the precarious lives of disenfranchised māori hapū and whānau as they negotiate employment in industries—including an oil refinery, a commercial seaport, freezing works, and cement works. ancestral connections and responsibilities are ensured through the long memories distilled in whakapapa (genealogies), yet these memories now also 637attach to the marine pollution that provides employment. the industries, harrison (2022, 174) observes, “are memorials to the deliberate exclusion of māori from economic opportunity beyond becoming factory fodder, as well as to land loss experienced by māori.” in the global north, marine industrialization increasingly articulates with blue growth visions and a historically unprecedented rate of extractivism (barbesgaard 2023; bresnihan and brodie 2021). the mussel spat farm application in whāingaroa sits beside a wind farm proposal to construct seventy-seven turbines, 22nm from shore. the latter, a six-billion-dollar development project proposed by a consortium of international offshore wind and energy corporations,12 is projected to generate more than a thousand jobs, largely in construction, and up to 1,150 megawatts of electricity (radio new zealand 2022). zoe brent, mads barbesgaard, and carsten pedersen (2018, 3) use the metaphor of a “masterfully mixed and powerful cocktail” to draw attention to the seduction of blue growth rhetoric. blue economies, they argue, work to occlude climate action by attracting private investment for protected marine areas and sustainable tourism, satisfy food security through the expansion of capital-intensive large-scale aquaculture, and “refresh the palate with a burst of wind energy and a splash of new deep-sea minerals without disturbing the familiar and persistent flavor of oil and gas” (brent, barbesgaard, and pedersen 2018, 3). in new zealand, unlocking blue growth has also meant grappling with treaty obligations to indigenous people (rout et al. 2024), responsibilities largely discharged through providing tribes differential access to the wealth-generating potentials of new ocean property regimes, participation in marine-licensing consultation processes, and the use of māori motifs in the branding of saltwater products. extracting capital through blue growth thus enrolls coastal māori hapū and whānau in a new network of enclosures that extend bordering work through the neoliberalized models mobilized in the settlement of indigenous claims. cutting across this extractive seascape, however, are māori kin-based cooperations, environmental relations, cultural factors, and spiritual associations, variously treated as obstacles to capital accumulation or factors to be regulated. conclusion: bordering and the radical potential of kinship in this article, two broad traditions of border scholarship are mobilized to interpret the persistence of inequality in ocean environments. the first, border imperialism, underscores colonial forms of dispossession enacted through the extension of western ideologies underpinning property, patriarchy, nationalism, capitalism, colonialism, whiteness, and so on. that these alienations now occur 638in the process of redressing colonial wrongs is illustrated through a critique of the evidence required under the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011, legislation ostensibly adopted in new zealand to recognize marine aboriginal title and rights. māori must, for instance, demonstrate exclusive ownership of tribal seascapes from the moment of colonization to the present to receive marine title. the granting of customary rights orders, meanwhile, requires that relations with shapeshifting ancestors, nonhuman others, alongside ritual practices, be evidenced in terms of a resource-management function. bordering work, in this analysis, hardens ontological distinctions and suggests the impossibility of translation across ownership, social organization, cosmological, and kinship domains. the second analysis, following mbembe’s thesis on borderization, locates borders within systems of capital expansion. i argue that blue growth, an instantiation of the logic of borders operating through neoliberal capital, upholds inequality by intensifying marine extraction. obvious similarities exist between colonial narratives, political economies, and juridical regimes that sustain indigenous alienations across space and time. yet there are also mutations and discontinuities. whereas imperial bordering is concerned with the privatization of indigenous-held land and the othering of indigenous bodies and lives, the entanglement of states with intensified extractive activities speaks to a neoliberal debordering and to changing relations to capital (mezzadra and neilson 2017). in this synopsis, marine environments, the current frontier of capitalist extraction, become sites wherein indigenous relations of ownership are both denied and recognized. that is, the relationality of tribal seascapes becomes an obstacle to capital accumulation, whereas their transformation into exchangeable assets, whether aquaculture space or fishing quota, aligns with capital’s relation to financialization and extraction. in this double movement, new ways of holding tribal resources unfold alongside new forms of inequality. similarly, the notion of sustainability, in restorative aquaculture or offshore wind farming, distinguishes between technological advances in blue growth and the pollution attached to older forms of marine industrialization, while eliding critique of the human and environmental costs of resource financialization. my other concern has been to highlight the existence of non-capitalist forms of social organization. in this context, the ethnography detailed in this article explores aspects of māori kinship that proffer an alternative method of bordering social, cultural, and natural phenomena. in terms of property, for instance, māori kinship reckoning links people to land and sea, wherein incorporation, 639rather than exclusivity, characterizes how things are held. whakapapa (genealogy) extends relations through time and space, binding ancestors and their descendants, human and natural domains (metge 2001; wehi and roa 2019). this expansion of kinship obligations to a dense network of relations is historically continuous in māori society, a dynamic at work in the reciprocity observed by manihera in relation to his ancestor taniwha, the mutuality expected in contemporary marae gatherings, as well as in stinging critiques of the emergence of new social hierarchies. underlying my ethnographic exploration, however, is the suggestion that māori kinship, a historically continuous solidarity, has the potential to resist imperial bordering practices and indeed temper neoliberal borderization. a rapid collectivization across tribal boundaries in response to settler colonial bordering makes for a striking feature of māori society. notably, this collectivization is especially revealed when marine relationships are threatened. as socio-spatial phenomena, borders prove key to contemporary manifestations of racial and extractive capitalism, working, for instance, to entrench colonial exclusions, distort indigenous social orders, and to control movement, materially and metaphorically. borders contain, locking people and culture in place, but they also forcibly remove groups, be it through land and sea alienations, aggression, capital accumulation, or through the climate change wreckages induced by histories of industrialization and extraction (gahman and hjalmarson 2019; mbembe 2019b; walia 2021). importantly, while global in scale and behavior, the effects of borders are also historically contextualized, that is, the aftermaths and ongoing consequences of border regimes can be understood ethnographically. the sea, a contemporary frontier of bordering violence, is constructed as kin across much of oceania (diaz and kauanui 2001; hau’ofa 1993; mccormack and mawyer 2022), suggesting that kinship is a particularly fertile idiom through which to reveal new border struggles. abstract this article utilizes scholarship on borders to interpret the persistence of inequality in indigenous seascapes, irrespective of moves to redress colonial wrongs or the growing anthropocenic recognition of human-nature interconnectedness. i examine border politics in the context of māori claims for marine title and rights and the post-settlement development of aquaculture. drawing on harsha walia’s concept of “border imperialism” and achille mbembe’s thesis on “borderization,” the article highlights the endurance of colonial forms alongside their neoliberal transformation into the enclosures and entrapments arising in the context of accelerated marine industrialization. by holding in tension the interconnection between marine environments and kinship, on 640one hand, and scholarship on borders, on the other, the article suggests that indigenous māori kinship, expanding through multiple layers of difference, constitutes a site of resistance that has the potential to refute the logic of borderization. [marine inequality; indigenous claims; borders; māori; aquaculture; kinship] notes 1. new zealand’s indigenous claims forum, a permanent commission of inquiry established in 1975 to make recommendations on claims brought by māori relating to crown actions that breach the 1840 treaty of waitangi. see waitangi tribunal, 2020 & 2023, marine and coastal area act 2011 inquiry, stage 1 & stage 2 report (wai 2660). legislation direct. 2. i was invited by tainui o tainui ki whāingaroa to conduct oral interviews, do archival research, and produce a report for the high court on their claims under the marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011 evidence. subsequently, i was invited to give expert witness evidence at the waitangi tribunal hearing on the marine and coastal area act (takutai moana) 2011 inquiry. 3. i use kinship group as a gloss rather than subtribe to emphasize the primacy of hapū as a central organizing force in māori social structure. 4. the settlement is divided into two phases. the 2004 act obliged the crown to provide iwi with the equivalent of 20 percent of existing aquaculture space (pre-commencement space), an obligation fulfilled in 2009 by the transfer of nz$97 million to iwi. the act also provides iwi with 20 percent of new aquaculture space (new zealand legislation, māori commercial claims settlement act 2004) 5. see ngā kōti o aotearoa (courts of new zealand), marine and coastal list applications https://www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/the-courts/high-court/high-court-lists/marine-and-coastal-list-applications/ and te arawhiti (the office for māori crown relations), applications https://www.tearawhiti.govt.nz/te-kahui-takutai-moana-marine-and-coastal-area/applications/ 6. new zealand legislation, marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011, https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2011/0003/latest/dlm3213131.html 7. re edwards (whakatohea) (no.2) [2021] nzhc 1023. 8. new zealand legislation, marine and coastal area (takutai moana) act 2011, 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london: routledge. zuboff, shoshana 2019 the age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. new york: public affairs. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 621–646, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.03 linguistic diversity on center stage: rewriting anthropology from the margins of an msi cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 412-420, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.05 linguistic diversity on center stage: rewriting anthropology from the margins of an msi shonna trinch john jay college, city university of new york https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6326-6629 barbara cassidy john jay college, city university of new york https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9063-0668 bianca suazo john jay college, city university of new york https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0630-5588 jadeline mallol nunez john jay college, city university of new york https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1890-015x standard american english (sae) at u.s. colleges often creates a learning obstacle for students who speak different languages (lawton 2013; snell 2013). additionally, standard language ideologies frequently act as gatekeeping devices that require students’ linguistic obedience in exchange for opportunities to be represented in universities (mena and garcia 2021; cushing 2020; shohamy 2006). as jonathan rosa and nelson flores (2020, 103) argue, “efforts to facilitate racialized populations’ mastery of supposed ‘codes of power’ are not empowering … but rather a mechanism for producing governable subjects that support the raciolinguistic status quo.”1 in the present contribution we argue that strict adherence to sae keeps people from learning new ways of being and innovating fresh practices and perspectives. in this essay, we—two white women professors and two latina students—discuss how our student-led theater project, seeing rape,2 uses language to attempt to answer bell hooks’s (1994) call for classroom “teaching to transgress.” we explore some of the challenges that arise in our project when we urge students to write in whatever language or dialect they like. we position seeing rape as an instance of pracademics, defined by dána-ain davis (2003, 153) as linking “research practice to critical inquiry and ultimately to action that will dislodge power.” we co-founded seeing rape in 2012 at the john jay college of criminal justice, both a minority serving institution (msi) and a hispanic-serving institution (hsi). the new york times (aisch et al. 2017) reports that the median family income of john jay students hovers around the forty-fifth percentile and is $41,900, among the lowest in both new york city and among students who attend other selective public colleges. almost a quarter of john jay college students come from the bottom 20 percent of income earners. over the past nine years, we have brought more than a hundred plays, written by more than a hundred undergraduates, to the stage in an annual production for audiences totaling more than 20,000. the plays originate in a class we co-teach that we call by the same name, seeing rape. we read about sexualized violence in genres ranging from social science to poetry. for their final projects, students write a short play about rape. at the end of the semester, we select nine to twelve plays for which we raise funds to pay professional actors to perform. descriptions of the class and the performance are found in shonna trinch and barbara cassidy (2020). students bring linguistic diversity to the center in our first years teaching this course, a few students wrote their plays in a spanish-english code-switching variety, varieties of african american english, and in a jamaican patois-english variety. their characters spoke in the languages germane to the contexts in which they appeared, and where necessary, they employed youthful slang and profanity. both actors and audience members say the work resonates with them because the language seems “real.” this oft-repeated response suggests that the plays are written in what the anthropologist john jackson (2005) would call “sincere” ways. below is a sample of the positive things attendees have said: it’s so real … . continue to make the scenes more gut-punching! this type of performance helps us a lot to understand what goes on everyday around us. raw emotions. each performance never failed to run tingles up my spine. each story carefully thought and relevant. brought awareness to so many rape scenarios. based on audience feedback and building on the work of flores and rosa (2015) to subvert the perspective of the white gaze/reception in language education, we argue for the value of the college’s undergraduates’ linguistic codes for education more broadly, outside of the language-teaching classroom. as we attempt to facilitate what hooks argues should be an exciting and open learning experience, students themselves can (re)write anthropology and reconfigure the university in their image. throughout higher education, stridently monolingual faculty members are often heard complaining that their students cannot write in english. such statements reveal little understanding among faculty about bilingualism or bidialectalism. rarely do faculty acknowledge the value of other linguistic codes for teaching and learning. with seeing rape, college students at an msi claim authoritative positions about important topics as playwrights. their work in different linguistic varieties then disrupts hegemonic language practices for their peers and faculty. we believe seeing rape offers an instance of what our co-contributor and colloquy editor, kimberley d. mckinson, refers to as pedagogy that originates in “the life experiences of our students that allows us the opportunity for a fundamental re-engagement with the possibilities of anthropological theory and method.”3 now we regularly urge our classes to write in whatever languages they want. when students do so, several things happen. first, the students’ plays communicate anti-rape messages to their peers in a way that no faculty expertise, college-mandated anti-violence training, or title ix officer ever could. second, as varieties other than standard english take center stage, the students themselves make an argument for the value of their linguistic codes to dismantle both patriarchy and white supremacy. third, untranslated dialogue shifts the power perspective by “othering” the english-only audience (jonsson 2014). fourth, this student-led initiative lays bare the learning that gets sidelined by the professoriate’s unquestioned devotion to standard language practices. ultimately, professors must reckon with the fallacy of a pedagogy that insists that people will be confused by texts written in anything but sae. in the space that remains, co-authors bianca suazo and jadeline mallol nunez provide their perspectives on language as seeing rape playwrights. bianca suazo, my journey through spanish environmental factors my first language was spanish. growing up in a predominantly dominican neighborhood in the bronx, spanish was everywhere—from the bodegas to the radio stations, television channels and the household. once i entered kindergarten, english slowly and steadily became my preferred and primary language. eventually, english sitcoms replaced sábado gigante. family expectations growing up, i had been called a blanca or blanquita (“white girl”) by relatives. while this description of me was used to express disapproval of my limited spanish, it was also meant to compliment my english competency. i never felt judged by friends, however. none of us had any formal teaching of spanish, and we shared the same slang. spanish in college i did not expect to use spanish in college, but was able to enroll in a 200-level spanish course to strengthen my knowledge of it. my incredibly awesome professor, maria julia rossi, provided the students with a judgment-free space and helped us form proper sentences in spanish. the shared experience among my classmates helped me acknowledge that the latinx community consists of diverse subgroups who experience being latino/a differently and speak spanish at various levels or not at all. language in seeing rape in the seeing rape course, i was excited by my professors’ encouragement to employ different languages to interpret the world around us. my play, la familia de papá, is centered on the lives of three sisters who immigrated from the dominican republic to the bronx. the sisters live together and work hard to make ends meet. tensions rise among them as past traumatic experiences, present sexual harassment, and varying opinions on how to respond to past secrets cause them to clash. the play tackles familial dynamics, immigration fears, poverty, sexual harassment, and incest. the taboos surrounding sexualized assault within dominican culture were important topics for me to explore, especially the rhetoric, misinformation, and what goes unsaid within households. i wanted the spanish used in the play to be authentic, so i incorporated the colloquial spanish used by people in my neighborhood. formal spanish would not have been a true reflection of myself or the people i know and our understanding, knowledge, and interpretation of sex, culture, and consent. throughout the writing process, i found myself having to translate thoughts from spanish to english, which was something i rarely do but found thrilling. it gave me the ability to tap into my experiences of everyday life from a different perspective. language as an extension and representation of culture while writing the play, i found myself thinking about language as a genuine extension of my culture and its customs. the amalgamation of new york urbanism and dominican culture strengthens shared experiences among people of dominican descent living in new york and elsewhere. the cheers and applause my play received confirmed that both spanishand english-speakers among the audience related to the story. i did hear from one professor in the audience that some of the plays made him uncomfortable. he asked if the curse words were “really” necessary and if we “really talk like that.” i was surprised by his questions. first, there were bigger issues we were representing in our work. he could have asked about our objectives and become part of the seeing rape conversation. second, i had taken a course with him, and he had liberally dropped a few f-bombs in class—so, couldn’t we? future writing for future students for students, being able to write in languages other than sae is great, because we can dive into their depths of meaning. there are worlds of untapped knowledge via other languages that we can make use of. as a writer, employing english and spanish and their colloquial styles makes me feel like i am widening the scope and broadening the minds of my audience. i can also connect to and validate the experiences i share with other latinx people. writing in these languages and styles also represents an avenue for people from all walks of life to voice taboo topics like rape while engaging with their culture and breaking the cycle of silence. jadeline mallol nunez, seeing culture and education language and academia i am hispanic, and my family’s background is dominican. just a few days ago, i caught myself editing my psych paper on multiculturalism to make sure i was critiquing white people in the “right way.” i was taught to always be careful with what i am saying and how am i saying it, especially when applying to college: an “old white” person could be reading my essays. through explicit statements, the books assigned, and the corrections on our papers, school teaches us that there is a right way to write. attending an hsi for college has revealed to me how much of my culture was lacking in my education. the importance of representation had not become clear until i reached john jay college. however, even at an hsi, references to hispanic culture often remain few. i have loved the once-a-month cultural events, but somehow they get separated from the “real” academics. one time, elizabeth acevedo, the author of the book poet x, came to john jay to give a talk. a dominican author! for the first time in school, i got to read something i truly related to. from the tone to the words written, i thought, “i always hear that at home!” should it have taken nineteen years for me to see spanish in the literature i am being taught? seeing rape course in the “seeing rape” course, my professors said we could write in whatever languages we wanted. i heard this and thought, “that’s nice,” and moved on. but now, i sit and reflect on that offer. while it may seem like students have options, a bilingual student like me still feels there is only one choice: english. i was trained to write in english, so the offer did not seem relevant to me. the thought of writing in spanish actually felt a little intimidating. i’m not sure what my professors could have done differently to convince me that i could write however i wanted. their suggestion came after a twelve-year educational experience that taught me to write in english only. my play how everybody sees me now was about a woman who takes the audience through her different relationships and experiences with people in her life after being raped. in my original draft, i did not incorporate spanish. and even after my professor personally mentioned that i could, i added only one line in spanish. i was hesitant. did it fit with the play? i think it odd that i questioned whether my native language fit with my play. but including one line in spanish seemed kind of random to me. the audience would not have thought the character to be hispanic until this one spanish line appeared. then i wondered if that was enough, but i could not think of anything else to add without changing the flow of the play. that one line took me a long time to write. i wondered if i used the right words. should i be wording it differently? i worried how google would translate it for english speakers. i was nervous at the beginning of the seeing rape course, as i knew nothing about rape or about plays. i thought it was not going to go well, but it was a fascinating experience. i learned that with knowledge and in certain settings, i am able to talk about rape. this class has made me realize how the idea of the “right language” can be subjective. for example, some people may prefer to be called a “victim,” while others prefer “survivor,” and yet others neither. it is important to communicate with different people to learn these varied perspectives. i kept all this insight in mind while writing my play. i think people saw my point, because during the talk-back after the plays, someone mentioned a line from my play about being labeled a survivor. having my writing and work displayed outside of the classroom was a significant experience. i took a step toward my future because this was my first time being recognized and paid for my thoughts and writing. i was motivated to write and think for reasons beyond a grade. i felt pride when watching the play and talking about the opportunity to friends and family. i will continue to feel pride and stand by my work as people watch how everybody sees me now. conclusion african american englishes, spanish-english code-switching varieties, jamaican patois, arabic, and urdu are not just objects of study that linguistic anthropologists teach as interesting examples of other people’s norms and ways of speaking. rather, they are languages that college students speak. these languages represent group cohesion and historical experience, and they command authority and respect as communicative codes through which important messages are relayed. as the college community witnesses these facts through the seeing rape performances, these other languages disrupt the hegemony of sae in a public forum. from the students’ work and by engaging with them about it, we learn of the power of their representational resources to reach their peers with anti-rape, anti-patriarchy, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory messages. by listening to the silences, hearing the resistance, and noting how many students refrain from writing in anything but standard english, we stand to learn again how anthropology needs to be rewritten. both suazo and mallol nunez’s words remind us that there is a sociohistorical, political, and economic context in which our requests and urgings to “write in any language you want” come to take on meaning. following davis (2003), we listen to the students where we work, and we try to reach a pracademics that puts theory into practice in a way that can bring about sociopolitical change. as linguistic anthropologists, we teach that no language or dialect is inherently better at communicating than any other, and we seek opportunities to value the students’ norms and ways of speaking on the college’s center stage. in so doing, faculty can learn what students have long known—sometimes it’s not what you say, but rather the way you say things that makes a difference. abstract we explore the use of linguistic varieties other than standard american (and academic) english in academia and in general, and particularly in a college theater program called seeing rape. seeing rape aspires to bring anthropology to a broader public to eradicate sexualized violence on campus. we discuss the possibilities and challenges encountered in trying to center different languages and dialects at the college through our program. [msi; hsi; (non)standard english; rape; code-switching] notes acknowledgments we wish to thank new york city council for providing funding for the students, jadeline mallol nunez and bianca suazo, to co-author this article with us. it is important to us that students are remunerated for their wisdom and labor. we are grateful to the many people at john jay college and beyond who give of their time and resources to make the seeing rape production possible. a complete list of these people can be found in each playbill, the latest of which is located on our website, seeingrape.com. a very special acknowledgement of gratitude is necessary for john jay college student council, mindy bockstein, karol mason, rubina shafi, jeff brown, jake jobes, and larissa dicosmo. 1. the internal quote comes from delpit 2006. 2. the plays can be viewed at seeingrape.com and on john jay college’s youtube channel under the same name. 3. personal communication, 2020. references aisch, gregor, larry buchanan, amanda cox, and kevin quealy 2017 “some colleges have more students from the top 1 percent than the bottom 60 percent.” the upshot by the new york times, january 18. cushing, ian 2020 “the policy and policing of language schools.” language in society 49, no. 3: 425–50. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404519000848 davis, dána-ain 2003 “what did you do today? notes from a politically engaged anthropologist.” urban anthropology 32, no. 2: 147–73. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40553624 delpit, lisa 2006 other people’s children: cultural conflict in the classroom, new york: new press. flores, nelson, and jonathan rosa 2015 “undoing appropriateness: raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education.” harvard educational review 85, no. 22: 149–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149 hooks, bell 1994 teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. jackson, john, l. jr. 2005 real black: adventures in racial sincerity. chicago: university of chicago press. jonsson, carla 2014 “power and resistance: language mixing in three chicano plays.” international journal of bilingualism 18, no. 2: 118–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006912458392 lawton, rachele 2013 “speak english or go home: the anti-immigrant discourse of the american ‘english only’ movement.” critical approaches to discourse analysis across disciplines 7, no. 1: 100–22. mena, mike, and ofelia garcia 2021 “converse racialization and ‘un/marking’ language: the making of a bilingual university in a neoliberal world.” language in society 50, no. 3: 342–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404520000330 rosa, jonathan, and nelson flores 2020 “reimagining race and language: from raciolinguistic ideologies to a raciolinguistic perspective.” in the oxford handbook of language and race, edited by h. samy alim, angela reyes, and paul v. kroskrity, 90–107. oxford: oxford university press. shohamy, elana 2006 language policy: hidden agendas and new approaches. london: routledge. snell, julia 2013 “dialect, interaction, and class positioning at school: from deficit to different to repertoire.” language and education 27, no. 2: 110–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2012.760584 trinch, shonna, and barbara cassidy 2020 “engaging f-words to create change: rape, representation, and performance.” feminist anthropology 1, no. 1: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12005 cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 3, pp. 412-420, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.3.05 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 162–190, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.07 nishita trisal ashoka university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2848-3086 too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. o when may it suffice? that is heaven’s part, our part. —william butler yeats (“easter,” 1916) given when you live under suppression, you have no control of that which belongs to you but has now been snatched from you . . . they took over your private spaces, they search your pockets, nothing is left to you . . . the only thing you can do is restrict your own movement in protest . . . you will not cooperate . . . [you] won’t do anything that is normal. —kashmiri journalist, 2017 in july 2016, following the assassination of a popular militant commander, burhan wani, residents of the kashmir valley launched a general strike against the indian state that seemed to have no end.1 yet amid the strike’s indefiniteness how to sustain a strike: rules, routines, and the essential in kashmir cultural anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-2164 how to sustain a strike 163 a new kind of routine emerged that dramatically reshaped daily life. every wednesday evening by 6 pm, the joint resistance leadership (jrl), an amalgamation of kashmir’s pro-freedom organizations, would release a strike “calendar” for the following week (see fig. 2).2 the calendar—disseminated through newspapers, social media, and word of mouth—outlined the strike’s weekly schedule.3 for example, on any given tuesday, the men of each neighborhood might have been asked to raise pro-freedom slogans or to collectively offer prayers (namaz) on the streets; on a friday, there could be a call to march toward the headquarters of the united nations military observer group in india and pakistan (unmogip) in srinagar, the regional capital.4 in addition to this schedule of protest activities, the calendar specified the time at which the strike was to begin and end each day, as well as its duration and intensity throughout any given week. a strict week of the strike, for example, called for no evening “relaxation” (dheel, literally, to loosen). during such weeks, the strike was to be upheld all day and all night, with the streets betraying an empty, ghostly quality. during a milder week, in contrast, the strike would be relaxed after 6 pm for shops to open and for people to safely come out of their homes. amid this radical restructuring of daily life, the strike calendar aimed to provide order and routine. the revolution, it turns out, would be scheduled. as weeks and months of the 2016 strike went by, and this schedule gained an anticipated yet anxious regularity, kashmiris deliberated the costs: how long would the strike last? what, if anything, would come of it? and would the sacrifices be worth it? the strike calendar, as well as statements issued by the jrl, reflected these concerns. the calendar was gradually adjusted so that the evening “relaxation,” which at the beginning of the strike started at 6 pm, was eased to 5 pm, and eventually, to 4 pm. by the third month, weekend days were designated as “full-day relaxation” to provide respite amid growing financial losses and concerns that the strike constituted a form of “economic suicide.” despite waning in strength and participation, however, the strike continued. in the subsequent months, from about july 2016 to february 2017, kashmir’s resistance leadership released more than two dozen strike calendars, marking one of the longest-running general strikes in the region’s history. this article examines how kashmiris labored to sustain the 2016 indefinite general strike. drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2018) conducted at a prominent bank in srinagar, as well as with shopkeepers, journalists, and other city residents, it argues that sustaining the indefinite strike required not only self-discipline and solidarity but also, paradoxically, cultural anthropology 40:1 164 breaking the strike. on the one hand, a successful general strike was a total one: shops shuttered, everyone in their homes following the strike calendar, a display of unity and resistance against the indian state.5 on the other hand, many workers, from bank employees and government servants to shopkeepers, returned to work or kept their storefronts half-shuttered. they described doing so to provide for public needs and essential services, but also, especially over time, for their own livelihoods. in the following pages, i demonstrate how deliberations about properly observing the 2016 general strike hinged on what was considered “essential” work and activity—essential enough to warrant breaking the strike. here i refer to two kinds of strike breaking: the first constitutes a rest from the strike, a literal break. these breaks (relaxations or dheel in local parlance) were built into the strike calendars, providing respite and renewal and hence the capacity to continue striking. they proved to be indisputably essential. the second kind of strike breaking, a matter of great contention, involved going to work during designated strike hours, in contravention of the calendar. while many kashmiris understood that employees in the formal sector (such as the state government and banks) faced potential termination if they did not return to work, the very act of resuming work was nonetheless seen as a betrayal. it also provoked resentment about the uneven costs of the strike across kashmiri society. i witnessed these contestations unfold from the unusual vantage point of a large urban branch of the jammu and kashmir bank (j&k bank). formed in 1938, the j&k bank is a semi-state institution that has been a dominant financial player in kashmir during the past three decades.6 it is associated with the (indian) state but also imagined as a symbol of kashmiri national sovereignty, particularly following the outbreak of a pro-freedom movement and armed struggle in 1989. during the 2016 uprising, i saw the bank’s employees embody the institution’s liminal status as they navigated the complex terrain of work and mourning, of breaking the strike while sympathizing with the cause of their fellow kashmiris. my interlocutors did not describe this as a contradiction, but rather as a complex, pragmatic choice. they suggested that their labor provided the much-needed infrastructure that kept the economy running: in keeping the economy afloat, they allowed the strike to continue for longer. in other words, even though their return to work diluted the absolute nature of the strike, the bankers’ actual labor provided a degree of stability, indirectly sustaining the strike and the greater cause of self-determination. it was in these complex and ambiguous ways their labor could be considered essential. how to sustain a strike 165 anthropologists and other scholars studying political mobilizations have highlighted the importance of the labor they involve, not only via acts of protesting (feldman 1991; bonilla 2010; thorkelson 2016; sharma 2020) but also in the form of the care work required for maintaining households and communal life amid upheaval (winegar 2012; weinbaum 2013; mittermaier 2014). notably absent within much of this scholarship is attention to the financial infrastructures and labor that support and make possible political movements. this elision is perhaps because financial considerations and principled political activism are often assumed to be incompatible, the former eroding the sanctity of the latter (bloch and parry 1989; maurer 2006; keane 2008). i was struck, for example, by the visible discomfort of some board members of the kashmir chamber of commerce when i inquired about the economic losses produced by strikes during an informal discussion in late september 2016. one of the board members replied, “rs. 130 crore/day ($2 million),” but quickly added, when another member admonished him for openly citing the figure, “we have made it clear in our press releases that it is the human loss we are concerned about—we can’t recover that loss.” he reiterated the point, “economic loss can be recovered in five, ten years.” it made sense to me why these chamber members would underemphasize economic loss, given that the strike was as much an act of mourning as it was a sign of refusal. and yet this tense exchange suggested that economic considerations were never far below the surface. in attending to financial labor and provisioning, this article aims to illuminate the pragmatic and ambivalent aspects of political action—the negotiations and compromises, as well as the everyday routines, involved in sustaining political struggles. since the late 1980s, when an armed freedom struggle erupted in the kashmir valley, the indian state has retaliated against the region’s residents, the majority of whom are muslim, with extreme forms of disciplinary restriction and corporeal violence. the various counterinsurgency strategies deployed over the past thirty-five years include extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, prolonged sieges and curfews, and psychological operations (bhan, duschinski, and zia 2018; bhan, duschinski, and misri 2022). during the 1990s, at the peak of the insurgency and counterinsurgency, more than 70,000 civilians were killed, nearly 10,000 individuals disappeared, and many more injured and tortured, largely by the state armed forces (hrw 2006). while a denouement in both the armed struggle and the broader movement for self-determination (tehreek) occurred in the early aughts, a resurgent activism arose in kashmir starting in the summer of 2008. this renewed movement brought large-scale street cultural anthropology 40:1 166 protests along with stone-throwing and general strikes, as a new generation of kashmiri youth rebelled against india’s ever-expanding military occupation of the region (kak 2011; kanjwal 2019). but these largely nonviolent street protests, too, met with violent state reprisals, including the use of “nonlethal” weapons that maimed and disabled hundreds of civilians in the summers of 2010 and 2016 (amnesty international 2017; misri 2020). given, then, that mass street protests would be met by state repression and that joining what remained of the armed struggle meant imminent death, the general strike was, according to some, the only path available.7 although there had been significant criticism since 2010 about utilizing the general strike (bazaz 2014), in july 2016, as kashmiris responded to the killing of civilian protestors, the strike was ready at hand, a humble but potent form of refusal. above all else, the strike offered an opportunity to reclaim one’s bodily and temporal autonomy. as the journalist friend quoted in the epigraph put it, “given when you live under suppression, you have no control of that which belongs to you . . . the only thing you can do is restrict your own movement in protest . . . you will not cooperate . . .[you] won’t do anything that is normal.” mohamad junaid (2020a) has referred to this self-imposed restriction on the kashmiri body as a “civil curfew,” the “mimic inversion” of the state-imposed curfew. he cites a shopkeeper from southern kashmir who uncannily mirrored my friend’s sentiments: “they can force me to stop going about my life, but they can’t prevent me from doing so on my own” (junaid 2020a, 10). a dogged stubbornness permeated the strike—self-abnegation as a sign of the people’s willingness to sacrifice short-term economic benefit for the greater good of kashmiri sovereignty, akin to the notion of sumud, the steadfastness or “staying power” that palestinians describe as necessary for sustaining the movement and themselves during the intifada (allen 2008; cf. thorkelson 2016). in kashmir, people described this staying power as a mark of distinction; it was common to hear people talk about how indians in the mainland would not have lasted more than a few days on strike. in this way, the strike was as much a performance for the collective kashmiri self as for its many other audiences (jeanklein 2001; rutherford 2012; chatterjee 2016; bishara 2017). in a context of extreme repression, it allowed kashmiris to demonstrate their distinguished capacity to self-sustain and to sacrifice and, in so doing, offer a counterpoint to the indian state’s wrongdoings. while there were slim hopes that the latter would be moved to accept the strike’s demands of demilitarization and an end to human rights violations, the hope remained.8 how to sustain a strike 167 notwithstanding the tenacity and moral standing of the strikers, non-cooperation could not be absolute. there were checks to cash and school fees to submit. there were marriages to be celebrated, however modestly, and babies to be delivered. there were rickshaw drivers and street vendors who depended on daily wages and shopkeepers who needed to repay the bank or wholesalers (cf. saraf 2020). over many months in 2016, in addition to talking extensively with bank employees, i spent time with individuals across sectors, especially journalists and shopkeepers, discussing the day’s news along with the efficacy of the indefinite strike. throughout these spaces, i witnessed a fierce reckoning emerge involving questions of loyalty, commitment, and the thresholds of sacrifice. if, as yarimar bonilla (2010) suggests, the strike provides an opportunity to engage in a “prefigurative politics”—to create and imagine an alternate polity—this essay attends to the fissures of the prefigurative moment and what might be learned from them. strikes and sacrifice we are living through a historic strike wave. across the world, labor strikes have resurfaced as potent forms of protest. in the wake of the global covid-19 pandemic, precisely through a stark awareness of their essential labor, workers across sectors have unionized and struck work in pursuit of livable wages and safer workplaces. in addition to important material gains, the success of strike actions has reignited a sense of worker power and a “revaluation of the strike” as “a positive good rather than a necessary evil” (baker 2023). at the same time, as in all strikes historic and contemporary, the question of how to sustain such refusal and how to deal with attempts to break the strike—by the state or the employer or fellow workers—remains ever present. alongside this strike wave, there has been a resurgent interest in strikes across academic disciplines (bonilla 2010; weinbaum 2013; spivak 2014; bargu 2014, 2016; gago 2020; albernaz 2022; mitchell 2023).9 among the most important of these recent interventions is the cultural historian joseph albernaz’s (2022) alternative genealogy of the general strike. albernaz argues that it was the refusal of work by enslaved populations that inaugurally “generated” the general strike. in so doing, he unsettles the oft-told origin story of the general strike as having been founded by the english radical william benbow, and the latter’s 1832 pamphlet advocating a month-long “national holiday” from work (1977). in place of this history, albernaz offers the writings of benbow’s contemporary, the british-jamaican abolitionist robert wedderburn, as well as the latter’s cultural anthropology 40:1 168 “maternal source(s)” and “the enslaved themselves” (2022, 549). wedderburn’s 1817 periodical, the axe laid to the root, called on jamaica’s enslaved plantation workers to refuse work by “appoint[ing] a day wherein you will all pretend to sleep one hour beyond the appointed time of your rising to labor” (qtd. in albernaz 2022, 543). according to albernaz (2022, 543), for wedderburn this “one reclaimed hour” was “to become charged with collective force, and to pry open time itself, leading to a revolution that would build on the achievement of the haitians.” in connecting the general strike with abolition, wedderburn via albernaz asks us to consider other figures of resistance beyond the striker as white male industrial worker. this provocation provides an opening for centering the question of labor within the anticolonial (and anti-occupation) strike, an often-overlooked element within resistance movements. aimed at both refusing and appealing to an occupying or colonial force, the anticolonial strike has historically involved the cessation of work and business across industries (the general strike) or acts of self-mortification (the hunger strike). such acts of non-cooperation, i suggest, constitute a kind of negative laboring—the labor of self-sacrifice and self-restraint.10 mohandas k. gandhi’s anticolonial movement is perhaps the most foundationally associated with non-cooperation, particularly his experiments with boycotts, fasts, and general strikes (hartals). gandhi understood the strike as a voluntary, nonviolent effort to “strike the imagination of the people as also to strike the imagination of the government.”11 to maintain the strike, and non-cooperation more broadly, required self-discipline and self-sacrifice; non-cooperation was “not justice based on violence but justice based on sacrifice of self, justice based on yajna and kurbani [sacrifice]” (gandhi 1996, 65).12 as karuna mantena (2012, 463) has argued, for gandhi, the non-cooperative act “would prove most efficacious, most demonstrative of conviction, when the satyagrahi [one who practices satyagraha, a philosophy of nonviolent resistance] visibly sacrificed tangible benefits (in terms of money and prestige) and bore adverse consequences (such as being jailed or fired) in a forthright and disciplined manner.” it would be such self-discipline and willingness to sacrifice that would “convert” (rather than coerce) one’s political opponent (mantena 2012, 463). a similar but intensified logic is present in the hunger strike, where the mortifying body signals both the strength of one’s convictions and the illegitimacy of the state. in her examination of the use of hunger strikes and “fastsunto-death” among leftist political prisoners in turkey, banu bargu (2016, 6) how to sustain a strike 169 suggests that we attend to a “logic of sacrifice that is opposed to our conventional notions of instrumental action.” while acknowledging that hunger strikes were “calculated responses” to particular prison conditions, she argues that “they were not necessarily limited in their political purpose to those conditions. rather, they were acts of corporeal, existential, and total resistance and refusals to participate in one’s dehumanization” (bargu 2016, 16). in this regard, bargu (2016, 330) notes, the fasts-unto-death can be better understood via their “expressive aspects, irreducible to the specific demands they make.” in another context, drawing on bobby sands’s prison hunger strike depicted in the film hunger (2008, dir. steve mcqueen), bargu (2014, 19; emphasis added) calls the hunger strike an “insurgent sacrifice,” one that “points, however briefly, to a dignified life beyond domination but one it cannot sustain.” extending bargu’s analysis to the indefinite kashmiri strike allows for a contending with the criticisms it has faced regarding its efficacy and tendencies toward self-harm. neither romanticizing self-abnegation nor presuming the self-evidentiary nature of its claims facilitates a more careful examination of the charisma, value, and sustainability of the strike’s sacrificial labor. in kashmir, the strike—spontaneous or organized, day-long or indefinite—has long formed a part of the region’s “repertoire of contention” (tilly 2003), from the mid-nineteenth-century labor strikes of shawl weavers to the political strikes deployed in the 1920s and 1930s during anticolonial and anti-monarchical uprisings.13 strikes would continue well after partition, including a major series of strikes and shutdowns in december 1963 through january 1964 following the theft of the prophet’s hair (moi-e-muqaddas) from srinagar’s hazratbal mosque (kanth 2018). then, in the late 1980s, kashmir entered a period of armed struggle. the strike, however, did not disappear. instead, strikes and spontaneous shop closures occurred alongside armed militancy, each their own method of resistance. as a local pro-independence activist put it, “in the 1990s, there was a strike almost every day—nobody would call for it, but people would just automatically down their shutters and close shop when a militant commander died.” in addition to these spontaneous commercial shutdowns, members of the local state apparatus—civil servants, police officers, and at least one senior manager of the j&k bank—went on strike during this period (times of india 1990; kaul 2011). however, as militancy waned by the early aughts, undone both by the counterinsurgent state and by internal divisions, so too did mass protests and strikes. cultural anthropology 40:1 170 after a lull of nearly a decade, in june 2008, large-scale street protests returned, accompanied now by the indefinite strike. triggered by the jammu and kashmir state government’s decision to transfer ninety-nine acres of forest land to the board of trustees that oversees a yearly hindu pilgrimage—seen as a step toward demographic change—the protests called for an immediate reversal of that decision. there were also renewed calls for kashmir’s freedom (azaadi) and right to self-determination. although the resolution to that summer of protest proved complex, a new era of mass, non-violent protest had arrived in kashmir (roy 2008). intermittent protests continued throughout the following year, including in the summer of 2009, following the rape and murder of two young women (also sisters-in-law) in the southern kashmir town of shopian; the town would observe forty-seven consecutive days of general strike that summer (hoffman and duschinski 2013). the strike’s efficacy and the scope of its demands became a topic of public debate during this period. yet despite concerns that strikes were hurting the economy and its people, they remained a compelling form of refusal. large-scale protests once again returned to kashmir in the spring and summer of 2010, and with greater force and intensity. responding to the indian army’s extrajudicial killing of three civilians in april and the killing of a young kashmiri student as he was returning home from after-school classes in june, the 2010 mobilization was marked by widespread street protests and stone pelting. more than 110 kashmiri youth were killed and many more blinded and maimed during the protests. the indefinite strike was again deployed; the fervor with which the calendars were followed seemed to indicate a potential turning point (kak 2011, xviii; handoo 2015). however, by the end of the summer, disillusionment set in. the pro-freedom leaders guiding the strike, including the most senior, syed ali shah geelani, were seen to have ended it without tangible gains or concessions by the indian government. according to a veteran activist, after the disappointments of 2010, an informal consensus held that the indefinite strike should not be used again: it had become counterproductive and was only hurting kashmiris. day-long strikes would still be carried out, marking important days in the kashmiri nationalist calendar or in protest against civilian killings, but indefiniteness would be avoided. then came 2016. routinizing the uprising: the calendar and the curfew on july 8, 2016, a twenty-one-year-old militant commander of the hizbul mujahideen, burhan wani, was killed, ambushed alongside two associates in a how to sustain a strike 171 jointly coordinated mission conducted by the jammu and kashmir police and the 19 rashtriya rifles, a counterinsurgency wing of the indian army. often referred to as the “poster boy” of the resurgence of armed politics in kashmir in the early 2010s, burhan was a beloved figure among supporters of the kashmiri self-determination movement, and his assassination a watershed event. as pictures of burhan’s lifeless body flashed across whatsapp messages and facebook posts—accompanied by angry and mournful inscriptions—it became clear that something truly momentous was about to happen. a friend summarized the mood as “electric.” figure 1. burhan wani’s funeral, tral, kashmir, july 9, 2016. photo by syed shahriyar. the next day, tens of thousands of mourners attended burhan’s funerary rites in his southern kashmir hometown of tral. they did so in defiance of the state’s curfew orders, preemptively put in place in anticipation of large crowds. mourners walked up to fifty miles to reach the site of the funeral, which lasted all day and included twenty-two rounds of funeral prayers (inzamam and qadri 2016). images from the prayers showed densely packed bodies in a four-acre open field, their mouths forming the shapes of slogans and their hands pointing at the sky, occasionally gripping a phone camera to capture the event. in addition to the funeral prayers in burhan’s hometown, crowds gathered in various parts of kashmir to hold prayers and participate in street protests. in response, the armed forces fired bullets and pellets, killing twelve civilians and injuring more than two hundred on that single day. cultural anthropology 40:1 172 the jrl called for a complete shutdown (bandh) and strike (hartal) for the next two days in response to the civilian killings. over the following week, the strike was extended several days at a time, with each extension a reaction to the growing number of deaths. by july 16, a week after burhan’s assassination, forty civilians had been killed and hundreds badly injured. it was clear that another rebellion was underway in the kashmir valley—and with it, growing momentum for extending the strike, perhaps indefinitely. the jrl released this uprising’s first extended calendar, for the week of july 19 to 24. unique to the “extended” strike calendar was a detailed schedule for people to follow. for example, on july 19 and 20, people were encouraged to observe a “complete shutdown,” and on july 21, the shutdown would last until 2 pm, after which it would be “relaxed” for the public to replenish “essential supplies.” as mentioned earlier, these relaxations (dheels) constituted important moments of respite that structured people’s days. akin to curfew relaxations, where the state allowed the public to move around freely, dheels were eagerly anticipated. they formed necessary parts of sustaining people’s lives during an extended strike. this was also precisely what made them objects of the state’s ire. on july 21, just as the strike’s relaxation was to begin, the jammu and kashmir police “strengthened” the curfew and prevented shops from opening and people from leaving their homes. this was seen as a deliberate attempt by the state government to counter the jrl’s alternate schedule (bazaz 2016). a news story confirmed this theory, citing a jammu and kashmir police officer saying that “people have to resume work when the government allows them and not when geelani [the senior pro-freedom leader] says so” (bazaz 2016). figure 2. strike calendar, august 1-5, 2016. how to sustain a strike 173 the officer’s formulation revealed not only the competing jurisdictions of the state and the resistance leadership but also the threat posed by the strike to the state’s presumed authority over its citizens’ time and mobility. let me return now to the artifact that reflected and produced this alternative regime, the calendar. its weekly release provided rhythm and ritual, both directing strike activities and metonymically representing the strike. at times it felt as though the calendar was the strike, such that to anticipate its release was itself a strike action. this is not to say that the calendar’s suggested activities were uniformly followed or its rules unbroken. instead, the calendar became the concrete expression of the strike; the calendar’s continual release, week after week, marked the strike’s indefiniteness. take, for example, the following calendar, issued three weeks into the 2016 uprising. the calendar announces what is to be done each day and when (including sometimes for what duration of time). the language of the calendar beseeches as well as commands; it is normative but also flexible. shops, businesses, and workplaces are expected to remain shut until 6 pm, after which they are free to open during the “daily relaxation.” a host of activities are offered as suggestions for routinizing daytime energies: “occupy main roads” or “offer special prayers.” finally, the calendar notes that “people should motivate employees not to attend their offices except for essential services” (more on which below). in outlining these rules, the calendar enacts the “normative” strike, an aspirational practice of producing solidarity and a coherent collectivity. what i found remarkable as i lived through the initial months of the strike was the way people grew accustomed to its rhythms and rules until it became part of their habitus, acquiring the status of expertise. it seemed as if everyone knew what to do, a tacit choreography learned through years of experience. a notable feature of this routinized expertise was the subtle reading of signs of the “situation” (haalat) and concomitant shifts in behavior. for example, on days marked by a particularly egregious spell of civilian killings and injuries, a solemn pall was cast over all public activity, including a dampening of noise and motion. people spoke in lower tones and moved at slower paces. the calendar for the following week would likely be stricter, with briefer periods of strike relaxations. as mentioned earlier, the state would respond to this tightening of the strike by intensifying curfew, citing anticipated violence and the threat of “unlawful assembly.”14 locked in a schismogenetic cycle, the curfew and the strike complexly shaped daily life in kashmir and did so in divergent ways depending on one’s cultural anthropology 40:1 174 residential location, occupation, and class status (bateson 1972; sharma 2020; mushtaq and amin 2021; wani and farhad 2022). for example, in downtown srinagar—considered the city’s political center—a strict curfew was usually imposed by 8 am for much of the 2016 uprising. people would buy groceries early in the morning, as early as 4 or 5 am, not long after morning fajr prayers. markets would pop up and close down just as quickly. this morning provisioning proved crucial, not only because of the stricter enforcement of curfew in this area but also because evenings in downtown proved much harder to predict; a stone-throwing incident at the end of the day, as the paramilitary forces retreated, could lead to an escalation and a further tightening of curfew. indeed, downtown srinagar was under strict curfew for nearly fifty-one days (ashiq 2016). it was briefly lifted in late august 2016, only to be re-imposed days later. figure 3. half-shuttered shopfront in an upscale residential area of srinagar. photo by nishita trisal. how to sustain a strike 175 in stark contrast, srinagar’s uptown, wealthier neighborhoods experienced far fewer restrictions, especially after the initial weeks of the uprising. by august, markets in these areas opened during the morning and shut around noon. most shops in these neighborhoods would keep their shutters half-down (fig. 3) to indicate that someone was inside and able to provide services. i came to understand this half-shutter practice as the shopkeeper acknowledging that things were “not normal”: the shop was open, but only temporarily and tentatively. the half-shutter practice was abandoned whenever the situation in other parts of the city escalated and the risk to stay open—even if partially—was too high. the half-shuttered shopfront came to exemplify the liminality of certain kinds of commercial spaces and actors, a point i highlight in greater detail in the next section. people in the commercial heart of the city—residency road and lal chowk—where the paramilitary and police forces maintained a watchful presence, adhered closely to the strike calendar. one rarely found shops open on strike days, but they would open as soon as the relaxation came into place. this area was symbolically crucial, with most images broadcast in indian media highlighting the empty streets and shuttered shops of lal chowk (literally, red square). when i asked shopkeepers in the area how they were dealing with the strike, one described getting used to the new timings, a reversal in schedules. he explained that instead of waking up early and getting ready to go to their shops, they now stayed at home during the day and left by 3 or 4 pm. shops were kept open until later in the evening to make up for the daytime losses. they were also now open on sundays, which the strike calendar almost always declared a time of “full” relaxation. along with adjusting and reversing their daily schedules, people across neighborhoods participated in care and solidarity work within homes, at local mosques, and in hospitals, where hundreds of injured boys were being treated. soup kitchens (langars) and makeshift aid camps were set up outside hospitals; additionally, neighborhood mosque committees created treasuries (baitul maal) from which money was distributed to those in need. as an interlocutor from the bank put it, “in such times of crisis, people come to an understanding [logon mein samaj aati hain] that they need to help others to survive.” similar to the “ethics of immediacy” that amira mittermaier (2014, 55) suggests arose during the 2011 tahrir square protests, in kashmir the 2016 unrest and indefinite strike produced new forms of communal self-reliance. cultural anthropology 40:1 176 the state, in response to the strike’s continuation week after week, deployed a number of tactics to break it. in addition to preventing markets from opening during relaxation, another tactic involved operating alternate markets to replace the striking shopkeepers. in early september 2016, vendors suddenly started setting up shop in the location of the city’s so-called sunday market, not far from the commercial area observing the strike. a number of people reported that the sunday vendors had been forced by the jammu and kashmir police to keep their stalls open every day. one journalist mentioned that these “scabbing” vendors were being given rs. 500 ($7.50 usd at the time) per stall per day; another interlocutor, a bank employee, reported that the vendors had been told that if they didn’t open their makeshift stalls when ordered to do so, they would never be allowed to operate them again. in addition to this forced strike breaking, the government unleashed the police, paramilitary forces, and the state surveillance apparatus on anyone protesting or caught near a protest site. more than 10,000 arrests occurred from july to december 2016. as the government clamped down on the strike, attempting to break it by all means, the public showed signs of breaking too. within a month of the start of the uprising, salaried employees of the jammu and kashmir state government and the jammu & kashmir bank—two of the region’s largest employers—faced pressure to resume work or risk suspension. these were the employees to whom the calendar had alluded, the ones who needed to be “motivated” to not go to work except to perform essential services. left unspoken was what constituted the essential and who had the authority to determine it. negotiating the essential: between strike breaking and strike enforcement kashmiris were debating the essential long before covid-19 thrust that term into global prominence. in a way, what counted as essential appeared self-evident: the reproduction of the (biological) self and society through the continuation of critical infrastructure and services.15 in actuality, these discernments were ambiguous, relational, and transformed over time. with the state’s administrative apparatus at a standstill, it became unclear who was responsible for governing and what was considered critical activity. at the level of the household, these activities could include buying groceries, visiting the doctor, or seeing an ailing family member in a nearby neighborhood. at the municipal level, the essentials were infrastructural provisions such as trash collection, electricity, and, especially, medical services. how to sustain a strike 177 doctors and hospital staff were the most obviously essential of workers, since so many people—young boys, particularly—were being admitted with gunshot and pellet gun wounds from protest sites. overnight, cars displayed improvised essential services signs for ease of movement through barricaded roads (fig. 4). figure 4. diy essential services sign on what appears as a civilian vehicle in srinagar. photo by nishita trisal. the signs meant to resemble a curfew pass, allowing protection both from the state’s armed forces, who policed the curfew (and were known to attack even hospital vehicles), and neighborhood boys looking to enforce the strike. as the threat of strike breaking increased, these “boys” (ladke)—not officially affiliated with the jrl, but rather self-appointed volunteers or enforcers—stood guard in their neighborhoods, asking questions of adults as they left, especially those who did so in cars. broken windshields on vehicles and auto-rickshaws became commonplace, the work of the “boys” as well as the armed forces. in response, people stopped taking their cars out or driving through neighborhoods known for being pro-freedom strongholds. rickshaws refused to travel to these areas altogether or charged slightly higher rates because of the risk. cultural anthropology 40:1 178 within this milieu, workers who did not neatly fall within the remit of essential services faced ostracism. these included employees of the j&k bank. like the shopkeepers with their half-shuttered storefronts, they were caught in between. their services and labor were needed, even essential, but were they essential enough? i had been told at the beginning of the 2016 uprising that the bank was often the reason the strike would fizzle out, because it would find a way to keep working and thus contribute to the strike’s dwindling. in reality, people needed banking services—to deposit checks, transfer money, consult a loan officer about repayment. still, the bank remaining open, defying the strike, also caused suspicion. take, for instance, a telling disruption on august 3 at the bank branch where i had been conducting fieldwork. early that day, news began circulating that an atm guard employed by the jammu & kashmir bank had been shot dead the previous night, his body found on the side of a road (some say near the atm, next to his scooter; others said his body was “dumped” near a local hospital). when i reached the branch around 1 pm, the gate was closed, and those lingering outside were told to go to the alternate, back entrance. a large crowd was gathered outside that entrance, anxious to enter the bank’s premises. i overheard the man pictured in the checkered shirt (fig. 5) say in frustration that he absolutely had to submit his university fees that day, otherwise he would lose his seat. figure 5. waiting outside a closed bank branch. photo by nishita trisal. how to sustain a strike 179 i later came to learn that the branch had been shuttered from the front because some boys had barged in at around 11 am and taken photos and videos of the employees. according to one of them, the boys had made veiled threats: “don’t you have to go home at night?” in response, the branch manager had sent home most employees. a few remained and were handling a rush of customers, mainly pensioners whose monthly payments had recently been deposited. “the situation isn’t good [haalat theek nahin hain]; we’re winding down,” one of the employees said as he entered transactions into his computer. i was struck by the ambiguous position in which these bank employees found themselves: essential to the work of customers and at the same time the target of strike enforcers. aware of the delicate balance they were striking by going to work, many bank employees reported traveling via back roads and side streets on scooters and by foot. throughout the first months of the uprising, some wore their house clothes (ghar ke kapde) to not draw attention to themselves as going to the office. others described carrying their lunch in old, dirty bags that would be easily overlooked. i heard of another case, of a bank employee at the corporate headquarters who brought the same bag of vegetables to and from work, so that if anybody stopped him, he could just say that he had gone out to get provisions. i was told that such social pressure was to be expected and even sympathized with. as an interlocutor at the bank who lived in the heart of downtown srinagar put it: “when there is a strike [hartal] and we attempt to come to work and are sent back [home] by the boys, we go back happily [ham khushi se waapas jaate hain]. somewhere, we feel like we are supporting the cause.” for many like my bank interlocutor, the boys’ violence did not resemble state violence. but this did not mean that it was any less difficult to negotiate. in late august 2016, nearly two months into the uprising, i was having lunch with some newly made friends at the bank’s corporate headquarters. as we ate, one of them, armaan, looked up from his cell phone: the general medical college (gmc) branch of the bank had just been attacked. its windows had been broken, but employees had managed to escape from a side door. the mood at the table, already grave, darkened. armaan continued: people were at that very moment holding funeral prayers (janaza) at the hospital for a boy from downtown srinagar who had succumbed to his injuries. another person who had joined the table interrupted armaan’s reporting: “but geelani sahib [the senior resistance leader] had said that hospital [bank] branches should be left open.” armaan replied, “the mourners cultural anthropology 40:1 180 were angry, though. they said [to the bank staff], ‘people are dying, and you are working’ [log mar rahe hain aur aap kaam kar rahe hain].” within these tense conditions, to work rather than mourn, or make money rather than suspend activity, suggested going along with things as they were rather than as they should be. as noted above, many bank employees i knew felt this dilemma viscerally. at the same time, they asserted that showing up to work was their job, their way of helping. in the words of one bank officer, “we’re responsible for the economy, to make sure it keeps running. who else will do it otherwise [aur kaun karega]?” but not everyone shared the view that showing up to work—at the bank or at a government office—meant supporting the movement. i asked a friend sympathetic to the “boys” why the bank and its employees were being targeted. he said, “if people don’t have money, what will they do . . . won’t they come on the roads? we want that people will have nothing, so that they will come on the roads. we want a fight—to end all of this, once and for all.” for this friend, the bank staying open enabled the liminal situation to continue; it was only the total strike that would pave the way to a resolution (cf. feldman 1991). in mid-september 2016, the senior resistance leader, syed ali shah geelani, released a statement that appeared in several newspapers, accosting banks as well as shopkeepers in certain neighborhoods for consistently breaking the strike (fig. 6). the statement began by noting the sacrifices made across class and generation: “people in general, and youth in particular, have sacrificed life as well as their livelihood for their basic right, right to self-determination.” he continued, “traders, employees, and other affluent classes have rendered their full support to the ongoing movement”; and, “the low-income group, especially the transportation fraternity, has been on the forefront with all its adversities.” figure 6. greater kashmir news article, september 17, 2016. how to sustain a strike 181 but others, the statement suggested, had proved less than ideal supporters, especially shopkeepers and office workers: “some egoistic and self-centered rogues and knaves continue to feed their bellies by humiliating the sacred blood of our martyrs. they include some shopkeepers in sanat nagar, rajbagh, jawahar nagar, and bank employees, especially corporate and bank offices of j&k bank, and some other indian banks.” in connecting strike breaking with acute economic self-interest—the feeding of one’s belly—the resistance leadership strengthened the discourse around commitment to the cause and the attendant sacrifices required. later, however, i learned that the leadership had privately communicated their support to the bank employees’ union, suggesting that they, too, understood that the work of sustaining the strike constituted a wholly ambivalent matter. junaid (2020b, 169; emphasis original) has recently argued that loyalty in kashmir operates as a “moral discourse, or a set of ‘ought’ statements and judgmental claims seen as a priori true.” he suggests that it is amid conditions of colonial occupation that such a moral discourse “acquires its social-pathological content.” here, loyalty demands an undivided and unconditional positioning of the self on one side of a political divide. those perceived to be straddling the divide, exhibiting aspects of or affiliations with both sides, and generally those who remain unclassifiable, produce what anthropologist mary douglas calls “a universal feeling of disquiet (even of disgust).” (junaid 2020b, 169) commercial actors such as bank employees clearly emerged as a source of disquiet. as liminal figures—breaking the strike by providing financial services considered essential, but ambiguously so—they complicated the ideal subject of loyal resistance (cf. fazili 2018). they also exemplified the paradox of needing, at times, to break the strike to sustain it. the strike’s threshold as months of strikes and curfews wore on, it proved difficult to keep spirits high: people described feelings of a life curtailed or suffocated, similar to the women jessica winegar (2012) reports as anxious and “fed up” (zahqana) at home during the january 2011 egyptian uprising as their male counterparts took to the streets. friends in kashmir would joke that they had gained weight and become unhealthy while sitting idly at home during curfews and strikes (cf. cultural anthropology 40:1 182 misri 2020). when the internet and telecommunications were not shut down, they would turn to social media, news portals, and mobile phones to consume hourly updates of where in kashmir the situation had escalated and how many had been injured or dead. these media provided a space of togetherness but also of a remarkable loneliness, leading to a mix of emotions—anger turned to sadness turned to exhaustion turned to boredom turned to restlessness turned to disillusionment and then often to togetherness again. in addition to exhaustion, people felt the economic losses piling up. the most severely affected were those who depended on daily wages: public transport workers, street vendors, informal workers (naqash 2016). many critics with otherwise pro-freedom leanings argued, as they had during previous summers of protest, that the extended closure of shops, businesses, and schools constituted a form of “economic self-harm” that only served to weaken the kashmiri people and strengthen the indian occupation. “in the process of hurting the enemy, you end up hurting yourself,” one person put it. * * * the conclusion of the 2016 strike proved a non-event. in december and january, strike calendars were continually released, but they were followed less and less, until finally around february 2017, one week there simply was no calendar. although both the government and media discourse suggested that it was the november 2016 demonetization of 86 percent of indian currency that led to the denouement of strikes—connecting the specter of counterfeit currency with the funding of protests—in reality it was the mix of reasons highlighted in this piece that led to the strike eventually running out of steam. the hard lessons of the strike suggested that its normative vision was complicated by the pragmatics of daily life—the servicing of essential activities, the need to sustain one’s household. in short, commerce, money, and banking could not be wished away, and neither could those who provided such services. as we neared july 8, 2017, the one-year anniversary of burhan wani’s assassination and the beginning of the 2016 uprising, there was fear that another cycle of unrest and indefinite strike was around the corner. on the day of the anniversary itself, curfew was imposed across the kashmir valley, and a strike was observed to mark the anniversary of bloodshed and rebellion. there were stories told that people had seen burhan’s face in the full moon the night before. but the large-scale unrest did not materialize. many of my interlocutors explained that kashmiris were too tired now and that it would be a few more years until another indefinite strike would be attempted. how to sustain a strike 183 slowly, things returned “to normal”—or to the new abnormal, as it were—with shops open, friends celebrating weddings, attending classes, and going about their lives. but there was a nagging feeling about the 2016 uprising and strike, one that i was only able to name after coming across sherine hamdy’s (2012) reflections on the pessimism that arose in the wake of the 2011 egyptian uprising: “did it actually happen?” coda much has changed in kashmir since the 2016–2017 indefinite strike. the most prominent of these changes occurred on august 5, 2019, when the indian government, through a “circuitous, three-step route,” dismantled the constitutional arrangements that had previously governed the relationship between the central government in new delhi and the state of jammu and kashmir (ghosh 2019). these arrangements included articles 370 and 35a, provisions within the indian constitution that provided limited legislative autonomy to jammu and kashmir and guaranteed employment and property rights for its residents. in addition to unilaterally nullifying these provisions, the indian parliament also voted in august 2019 to bifurcate the state of jammu and kashmir into two union territories, the first time in the republic’s existence that a state was “downgraded” to a union territory. following august 2019, kashmir was placed under a months-long communication blockade, one of the most draconian in modern history. local political and civil society leaders were jailed or detained. human rights organizations and media houses were raided and their staff called in for questioning. harassment, intimidation, and repression continues unabated. in the face of this relentless onslaught, the strike has seemed to disappear, or at least is no longer at hand as a last resort (though see chakravarty and zargar 2019). this absence begs the question of how to think about the momentous 2016–2017 strike today. what might that set of events have to teach us about the dramatically altered circumstances that kashmiris inhabit today? as this article has described, during the 2016 uprising, kashmiris drew on the general strike (hartal) and the suspension of economic activity to refuse the indian government’s militarized status quo. much work was required to sustain this refusal—from providing mutual aid in hospitals and neighborhoods to self-disciplining and restraint, what i have called the labor of self-sacrifice. but a more mundane form of work was also needed—that of facilitating economic activity. my interlocutors narrated their continued work at bank branches amid the cultural anthropology 40:1 184 strike as essential to keeping the economy (and, by extension, society) running. although often in contravention of the official strike calendar, this constituted their contribution to the kashmiri cause of self-determination. many critics did not view the employees’ labor as a legitimate contribution, or indeed as a sacrifice (cf. weiss 2014). a sacrifice entailed giving up something; in the case of the strike, it meant bearing financial losses, whether in the form of lost wages or a day’s business. that the bank employees (and government servants) did not have to face this kind of financial loss because of their uninterrupted monthly salaries was a source of resentment and ideological divergence. moreover, the fact their labor was put toward financial matters seemed doubly crass or morally dubious. as i have suggested, bank employees, too, felt ambivalence toward their work, even as they also understood it to be providing an essential service. attending to their own negotiations of their complex and disquieting positioning sheds light on the gray zones that constitute much of political life, in sites of militarized occupation and beyond. such liminal figures suggest that we look beyond the ideal subject of resistance alone—not because there are no principled stances to inhabit but because sustaining movements also requires pragmatic considerations by actors in situations not always of their choosing. abstract this article examines the 2016–2017 general strike (hartal or bandh) in indian-controlled kashmir, the site of a nearly eighty-year struggle for self-determination. drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork (2016–2018) conducted in the capital city of srinagar amid and in the aftermath of the indefinite strike, i show how the strike and the suspension of daily life it entailed was sustained through novel spatiotemporal techniques that coordinated and routinized the actions of the kashmiri public. yet sustaining the strike was not only defined by routine and self-restraint. instead, as the article demonstrates, certain forms of financial labor, too, prolonged the strike—but they did so, counterintuitively, by breaking it. i focus in particular on kashmiri bank employees, who were at times seen as betraying the strike, but who described their continued work during strike hours as essential for keeping the economy and hence society running. by emphasizing bank employees’ liminal position of breaking the strike while supporting the cause of kashmiri self-determination, i highlight the labor, sacrifice, and ambivalence that sustain—and threaten to unravel—political mobilizations. [general strike; financial labor; essential service; banking; self-sacrifice: kashmir] how to sustain a strike 185 notes acknowledgments this article, long in the making, has benefited from the labor of countless individuals. i am especially grateful to my interlocutors in kashmir for their help and good humor under challenging circumstances. for providing detailed feedback and encouragement at various stages of this article’s development, i would like to thank matthew hull, emma nolan-thomas, akhil sood, jane lynch, katherine martineau, webb keane, danilyn rutherford, jatin dua, mrinalini sinha, dilip gaonkar, john mathias, nicole berger, zehra hashmi, lily shapiro, nick caverly, sonia rupcic, jamie andreson, kevin donovan, scott maclochlainn, shrimoyee nandini ghosh, sarbani sharma, hafsa kanjwal, tapsi mathur, mekhala krishnamurthy, kathryn hardy, teri chettiar, and michelle beaulieu. micha rahder patiently read many early versions of this piece and helped me to find its north star. as i further revised the arguments, audiences at the departments of anthropology at wesleyan university, ucla, uc santa barbara, and ashoka university as well as at the yale modern south asia workshop (especially naveena naqvi) offered critical feedback that significantly improved the article. finally, my sincere thanks to the journal’s three anonymous reviewers for their keen commentary and to the editorial collective, particularly julia elyachar, as well as kate herman, for shepherding the piece to publication. funding for research and writing were provided by the wenner-gren foundation, the national science foundation, the social science research council, university of michigan rackham graduate school, and the american council of learned societies. all remaining errors are my own. 1. the kashmir valley (pop. 7 million) is an ancient lake basin eighty-five miles long and twenty miles wide. it serves as the historical center of kashmir’s self-determination movement. 2. the jrl brought together three of the most prominent pro-freedom or resistance leaders in kashmir—syed ali shah geelani, mirwaiz umar farooq, and yasin malik. 3. hartals and bandhs are often used interchangeably in south asia to refer to general strikes. hartal is a term popularized by the indian anticolonial leader, m. k. gandhi, to refer to the suspension of work and business as an act of non-cooperation, combining the words for market (hatt) and lock (tala). the term bandh means “closed.” 4. to deliver a petition demanding that the united nations make good on its long-promised referendum for kashmir. see zia and duschinski 2018 for a history of people’s marches to the un office in srinagar. 5. a general strike involves “a complete withdrawal of labor and productive economic activity across a preponderance of major sectors” (albernaz 2022, 539). 6. j&k bank is neither wholly private nor wholly state-owned. it is the only bank under the reserve bank of india’s jurisdiction whose majority shareholder (currently 69 percent) is a state and not the central government. it is officially classified as an “old-generation private-sector bank.” 7. as the kashmiri religious leader mirwaiz umar farooq put it, “we are not being allowed to raise our voice against the oppression. there are restrictions on protests, seminars and now even on our meetings. no door is open for us except calling for strikes” (kashmir observer 2018). 8. the complete set of demands were: 1) recognize kashmir as a disputed territory; 2) demilitarize the bulk of the approximately 700,000 armed forces in the region; 3) end human rights violations and the impunity for past violations; 4) release political prisoners. 9. for classic works on the general strike, see luxemburg 2008; sorel 1999; benjamin 1996; du bois 1999. spivak 2014 provides a useful overview of this literature. 10. there is a long-standing anthropological literature on ritual sacrifice that is beyond the scope of this article. i instead draw upon what mayblin and course (2014, 313) refer to as the “other side of sacrifice”—the “salience of sacrifice beyond the realm of ritual.” i have found especially useful erica weiss’s (2014) discussion of israeli conscientious objectors and the relational, recognition-based nature of self-sacrificial acts. cultural anthropology 40:1 186 11. evidence before disorders inquiry committee, january 20, 1920. the collected works of mahatma gandhi, vol. 16, 386. https://www.gandhiserve.net/about-mahatma-gandhi/ collected-works-of-mahatma-gandhi/016-19190802-19200131/ 12. yajna and kurbani both refer to ritual sacrifice—the former is derived from sanskrit and the latter from arabic. 13. one of the first recorded labor strikes in kashmir, by shawl weavers, took place in 1847, followed by another in 1865. in the latter, the maharaja of jammu and kashmir’s armed forces killed twelve workers (kumar 2022; zutshi 2004, 84). in the 1920s, strikes were a common means of protesting working conditions, 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uprising: the calendar and the curfew negotiating the essential: between strike breaking and strike enforcement the strike’s threshold coda abstract notes references bioeconomy and migrants’ lives in libya cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 9-15, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.02 bioeconomy and migrants’ lives in libya marthe achtnich university of oxford https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6378-447x i first met semere and tigisti, an eritrean couple, a few days after they had arrived in libya’s capital, tripoli, from the sahara desert.1 sitting silently in the derelict house on the city’s outskirts, where many undocumented migrants waited to move on to europe by boat, they gave the impression of feeling trapped and wanting to hide from the world. semere and tigisti were tired and emaciated after an arduous journey with human smugglers on overcrowded vehicles through the desert. fear had etched onto their faces. their journey had begun when they left eritrea for sudan, where they lived for some time to earn the money to continue their journey. “for a better life” they had to leave, semere remarked. the journey from sudan through the desert was so bad that semere and tigisti felt unable to recount it. they not only endured extreme weather conditions, but faced violence, harassment, and extortion at the hands of the smugglers and other criminal groups. the feeling of being traded “like a good” or a “commodity” among different actors in this desert landscape shaped migrants’ perceptions of such journeys to the south of libya. these predicaments often continued as people made their way through the country. many migrants ended up in sites of confinement and detention, sometimes being able to escape, but more often having to pay their way out by sourcing money through informal channels. semere and tigisti appeared unable to shake the feeling of fear that had engulfed their lives ever since the desert crossing. they had learned about the house in tripoli through a friend. owned by a libyan landlord, it was a place where a group of migrants paid rent to stay while waiting to move on to europe by boat. the house offered a relatively stable place for migrants to prepare for the boat crossing in the turbulent atmosphere of libya’s fragmented state context three years after the 2011 uprisings. in libya, migrants’ lives became enmeshed in predatory economic practices that generated profit from mobile life: they became human “stock” to be traded, were consumers of clandestine journeys and sources of rent for criminal and state actors. how are economic practices forged in relation to mobility and unauthorized migration in libya’s fragmented state context? commentators in europe and north america often frame migration as a “crisis” needing active management. biopolitical perspectives used to understand the management of migration focus on techniques of securitization and the actions of the state (de genova 2017; tazzioli 2019). yet attempts to securitize, control, and regulate unauthorized migration simultaneously target life economically and at multiple levels, from data to bodies to populations. this has given rise to what ruben andersson (2018, 414) calls “a human bioeconomy,” an economic arrangement that aims to generate “value from human beings’ vitality in the broadest sense, reaching from physical features to bodily presence, and from the capacity to move to the psychological experience of lived time.” going beyond specifications of the bioeconomy rooted in biomedicine and the pharmaceutical industry (cooper 2008; rose 2007; sunder rajan 2006), a human bioeconomy concerns how migrants’ lives become use-values for the state and for capital (see also achtnich 2022, this issue). it proceeds via border-control technologies, camps (andersson 2018; tazzioli 2019), and the creation of conditions that produce cheap labor (mezzadra and neilson 2013). but what might economic relations tapping into human vitality look like when we deflect ethnographic and analytical endeavors from familiar european vantage points and strong state regimes to other contexts where migration is not always governed in the same way (see also lucht 2022, this issue)? what insights can we draw from the lives of those who undertake perilous journeys and show an acute awareness of the economics of their predicament? semere and tigisti’s journey reveals a set of economic practices that tap into, and even predate on, migrants’ vitality. such practices are not necessarily tethered to a state-led biopolitics or the power to foster life. rather, they can hinge on a necropolitics, or the power of deciding “who is disposable and who is not” (mbembe 2019, 80). value-generation can take a rentier form, buttressed by violence that is no longer the monopoly of the state but exercised by militias and criminal gangs, among others. from this non-european vantage point, we better understand a bioeconomy as a set of practices that overlap and intersect with other economic arrangements crossing legal and illegal, collective and intimate, bioand necro-economic divides. new to tripoli, semere and tigisti did not have strong social networks with other migrants in the city. one day, following a misunderstanding about rent, they had to leave the house. semere felt lost and powerless. clearly identifiable as foreigners, migrants were targets of violence by criminal and state actors through muggings, beatings, money extortion, or detention. the legibility of people as “migrants” had less to do with them being object-targets of state power and discipline, as described by martina tazzioli (2019) in other strong state contexts, and more with being read as “foreigners.” racial categorization and violence were therefore crucial for rendering migrants’ lives into sources of predation and profit. criminal groups, often armed, could enter dwellings at any point to steal money migrants had saved for the boat crossing. taking a taxi, walking in the street, or shopping at the market came with the danger of interception and detention by state authorities—where paying money often offered the only way out. at the house, a network of landlords, taxi drivers, and brokers provided some “security” to those who paid for housing and onward movement by boat. at work was a form of rentier extraction both informal and extra-legal, exploiting vulnerable mobilities at what andersson (2022, this issue) calls a “granular/human, rather than (just) territorial, level.” eventually, through other migrants who had already left for europe, semere and tigisti found another place to stay. their new room, located in a row of run-down garages behind a rusting metal gate, was rented out by a libyan man who lived on the premises. the reduced size and visibility of the house allowed them to be a little more relaxed, although semere and tigisti did not feel entirely safe in their new surroundings. the landlord drank too much and had begun to harass them. as undocumented migrants, the couple had no power and could not speak up to the landlord. semere said, “he will kill me, he can kill me.” once again, they were exposed to a form of profiteering that proceeded by rendering peoples’ lives vulnerable and disposable. for semere and tigisti, life in libya became defined by waiting to move on (achtnich 2021). it was about dreaming of “normal” futures in europe and departing by boat as soon as they raised enough money to pay for the crossing. unable to find work, semere sourced money through friends. having received more than us$1,000, he was still a few hundred dollars short. “ninety-nine percent, i am sure 99 percent, they will help me,” said semere, who hoped to reciprocate in the future. the couple left a few weeks later when their broker suddenly informed them that the payment would be complete with only another us$100, an amount semere managed to raise quickly through his friends. migrants never “saw” the smuggler, who was often libyan or from a west african country. a broker would collect money on his behalf. semere and his friends felt convinced that smugglers were “rich people,” probably able to earn “at least us$70,000 per boat crossing,” they assumed. migrants were at times “goods” to be traded. not only did this mark a clear instance of predatory practices exploiting human vitality as “raw material” (andersson 2022, this issue) but it also constituted profiting in a necropolitical vein, where the treatment of people as goods denied their entry into the very category of “the human” (cf. manjapra 2019; mbembe 2019). at other moments, migrants became consumers of surreptitious mobilities, therefore contributing to the realization of value. the intensification of border controls, including the externalization of eu borders to north africa through investment in immigration detention centers and policies to criminalize migration (brachet 2016), allowed clandestine economic practices in libya to flourish. such clandestine economies emerging in the borderlands not only show resilience and adaptability (lucht 2022, this issue) but prove competitive. although predatory, these economies also involve trust and reputation. migrants could exert some agency by choosing a smuggler who only asked for a money transfer on successful arrival in europe. clandestine economies thus operated through tacit rules and practices that exceeded imperatives of the formal state and their punitive biopolitics, while remaining entwined in ordinary market relations through the payment for a specific service. smuggling, market economies, and economies of life itself thus become increasingly blurred. the house where i had met semere and tigisti soon after their arrival from the desert was also a space where new relations between migrants were forged. these relationships front-stage another crucial dimension of a bioeconomy in the borderlands—what wendy vogt (2018, 16), in the context of mexican-u.s. migration, calls “intimate economies of mobility.” many people arrived at the house severely injured or ill after prolonged stays in detention or following arduous journeys. some women were pregnant, at times as a result of rape. living conditions in the overcrowded house spread and exacerbated illnesses, including scabies and tuberculosis. sick and contagious bodies meant a threat to the landlord’s business, so the ill sometimes faced expulsion. investing every cent in the planned boat crossing meant that migrants often did not have money for necessary medical treatment. those who needed life-saving injections were, as one doctor remarked, unable to pay. yet because only somewhat healthy bodies could remain mobile, it was also important to become agile enough to survive the life-threatening boat crossing. social relations forged in the house became important in this regard. labors of care provided by other residents—often amid those with no shared history—proved crucial in enabling bodies to heal, even if only partially. they included monetary support, food, and medical care. in contrast to bioeconomies where intimate bodily processes are put on the market to generate exchange value (reeves 2022, this issue), such intimate economies concerned reproducing the body as a mobile body, especially in the face of abjection and under conditions that rendered life disposable. although deemed “extra-economic” in conventional analyses focused on the exploitation of wage labor, intimate economies are vital for reproducing “bare life” (agamben 1998), the “new frontier” on which capitalism predates (andersson 2022, this issue). *** semere’s and tigisti’s lives in tripoli, like those of many other migrants, provide a compelling entry point for attending to the ways in which bioeconomy and necroeconomy interdigitate. moving beyond the state-centric biopolitical perspective, on which most studies of migrant exploitation and bordering tend to rest, enables us to re-evaluate how life becomes a source of value and, at the same time, how surplus is extracted by rendering life disposable (cf. manjapra 2019). racialized violence and the dehumanization of people into “goods” prepare the ground for extracting rent. similarly, migrants’ journeys reveal how “the economic” in bioeconomy entails overlapping practices, where intimate economies of care intersect and shade into clandestine economies of mobility resting on illicit market relations. this ethnography makes room for other processes glossed over by a focus on securitization and the familiar locales—camps, borders, urban ghettos—from which economic practices and migration have been studied. it shows how value is not just extracted but also generated from mobile life in the borderlands (andersson 2018). predatory formations that profit from undocumented migrants do not always administer life or enroll it into further economic processes. a focus on migrants’ journeys thus rethinks bioeconomy and reveals how life is economized along multiple, often racialized and violent, pathways. abstract this essay examines how a bioeconomy might be understood in a context of fragmented state authority in libya, where mobilities are commodified by different actors, but not always tethered to a state-centric biopolitics of managing migration. it focuses on the unauthorized journeys of migrants moving through libya and onward by boat to europe. in this context, economies tapping into human vitality can be clandestine, where lines between state and criminal actors, as well as the value and disposability of life, become blurred. they are also contingent on intimate relations between migrants—proximities and labors of care through which mobile lives are reproduced and from which various predatory economic formations profit. moving beyond the foucauldian biopolitics that often inform studies of migration, security, and the state, ethnographic attention to value generation and extraction in the borderlands foregrounds economic relations as sets of intersecting practices in which mobile life and its disposability constitute a vital thread. [migration; mobility; bioeconomy; necropolitics; care; bodies; libya] notes acknowledgments i am grateful to my interlocutors who shared their experiences with me. i thank the other four contributing authors of this colloquy collection—hans lucht, madeleine reeves, sarah green, and ruben andersson—for their thoughtful comments. the colloquy emerged from a workshop that took place in 2020, supported by the society for libyan studies, an academic body, charitable organization, and a british international research institute, sponsored by the british academy; and by magdalen college, university of oxford. i also thank the editors, staff, and anonymous reviewers at cultural anthropology for their valuable feedback and support. 1. all names have been changed. references achtnich, marthe 2021 “waiting to move on: migration, borderwork, and mobility economies in libya.” geopolitics: ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1919626 2022 “mobile livings: on the bioeconomies of 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durham, n.c.: duke university press. tazzioli, martina 2019 the making of migration: the biopolitics of mobility at europe’s borders. thousand oaks, calif.: sage. vogt, wendy a. 2018 lives in transit: violence and intimacy on the migrant journey. oakland: university of california press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 9-15, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.02 the substitute and the excuse: growing sustainability, growing sugarcane in são paulo, brazil cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 439-466, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.01 the substitute and the excuse: growing sustainability, growing sugarcane in são paulo, brazil katie ulrich rice university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6048-376x on the powerpoint slide, a graph showed deforestation rates in the brazilian amazon over the past century. because of the charismatic role of amazonian deforestation in climate change discourses, no one in the audience had to actually look to know that significant deforestation had occurred. this was especially the case because the audience mostly consisted of brazilian scientists working on climate change mitigation. i was at this conference in são paulo as an anthropologist from the united states studying such scientific work. but then the presenter challenged this common deforestation narrative. he provincialized it, a move also familiar to this audience. he argued that few talk about the massive deforestation of europe only a couple hundred years earlier, or the widespread environmental destruction in the americas during european colonization before that. his point was that brazil is used as a posterchild for deforestation, yet it was merely doing what other countries had done earlier for their own development. the speaker then recounted the 1972 international climate meeting in stockholm where “developing” countries like brazil resisted the positioning of environmentalism as incompatible with national development (hochstetler and keck 2007). environmentalism, development, and growth could, and needed to, go together. as the speaker continued, describing how brazil’s environmental policies have evolved since then (seeing stronger regulations that reduced deforestation rates significantly until recent right-wing administrations rolled this back), a version of his point still hovered over the talk and infused the entire conference. “developed” countries could not define one-size-fits-all environmental policies. sustainability was coupled with growth and development for these scientists who were also “concerned citizens” (monteiro and rajão 2017). this article explores how the research practices of environmentally minded scientists in brazil align with conceptualizations of growth and development. how do these practices configure new sociotechnical assemblages of sustainability and growth, including how sustainability and growth go together (ong and collier 2008)? such assemblages include the concept of sustainable growth, but other permutations of sustainability/growth as well. and how do we assess whether or not these scientific agendas and sociotechnical assemblages reinforce growth-centric petro-extractivism? scholars have critiqued notions of sustainable growth for reinforcing existing racialized and geopolitical asymmetries as well as extractive growth ideologies (checker 2020; howe and boyer 2019), a critique i will continue to develop here. other scholars have meanwhile studied ways of doing science that directly challenge environmentally and socially destructive industrial production processes. this has included work on agroecology (rojas, de azevedo olival, and spexoto olival 2019; oliver 2016), “selva” farming (lyons 2020), anticolonial environmental science (liboiron 2021; murphy 2017a; tallbear 2014; green 2020), environmental civic science (wylie 2018), alter-engineering of hydrocarbon infrastructures (shapiro 2021), degrowth (escobar 2018), and “extraction without extractivism” (ureta and flores 2022). yet this article instead stays in the thick of notions like sustainable growth, asking what we learn from scientists who do not work on alternative scientific frameworks directly. like andrea ballestero (2019, 23), i find that for my interlocutors, “making a difference requires getting closer to, not distancing oneself from, what is already in place.” i argue that while their science sometimes reproduces the hegemonic contexts within which it takes place, it can also nurture the possibility for otherwise. in other words, this article most broadly concerns actors within peripheralized western imperial science (vessuri 1988; cesarino 2015) who potentially press on the grooves of the status quo while working in the thick of it. to do so, this article reflects on encounters with são paulo biologists leading research on renewable biofuels and materials, like bioplastic, made from sugarcane. renewables using sugarcane, the infamous founding colonial plantation crop, illuminate the complexities and paradoxes of coupling sustainability and growth. sugarcane-based biofuels have been produced at large scale in brazil since the 1970s, but new scientific advancements could expand their scope and volume. environmentalists, though, are concerned about the land-use and social impacts of sugarcane cultivation. sugarcane was brought to the country in the 1500s, spurring slavery-based colonial industry, and over the past five centuries the crop has seen widespread dispossession of land, environmental destruction, and notoriously difficult, even deadly, labor conditions. brazil still grows more sugarcane than any other country today. would renewables promote further land use and exacerbate enduring social issues? proponents of sugarcane renewables nonetheless maintain that especially with new scientific developments, these concerns are unwarranted and renewables would truly prove sustainable—as well as promote bioeconomic growth. a key variable in this logic is that these new scientific developments include making more sugar extractable from sugarcane, so that more sugar is produced per same area of land. this increases efficiency and, the thinking goes, sustainability. one form of growth, economic, is decoupled from another, land expansion. regardless of the actual feasibility of this decoupling (parrique 2019), during my work with these scientists i was struck by such differentiations in kinds of growth: not only the vegetative/biological growth of the crop but also growth in land and resource use, industry growth, economic growth, national development, and, finally, sustainable growth. while it is not unexpected that a term like growth be so polysemous, i felt curious about how these meanings of growth often contradicted each other. this prompted me to look more closely at growth in scientists’ practices around sugarcane, especially given that the very etymology of growth relates to plants and agriculture. take, for instance, the case of sugarcane maturation, which challenges expectations of a linear, proportional relationship between crop growth and productivity (i.e., more crop growth means more product). maturation, or ripening, consists of the conversion of carbohydrates in the leaves into simple sugars in the stalk. those simple stalk sugars are harvested to make refined sugar and biofuels, so maturation increases sugar/biofuels yield. chemicals called maturants applied to fields near harvest promote maturation. curiously, maturants work by impeding growth, as maturation is actually oppositional to growth. maturants divert the plant’s energy away from growth and toward maturation. once, while explaining this to an anthropology audience in brazil, i misspoke that chemical “killers” are applied to fields, as the portuguese word for “killer” is similar to that for maturant. but as we laughed, i realized and exclaimed that it still made sense. these maturants are growth-inhibiting plant killers. maturation begins to unpack the complexities of sugarcane growth as something distinct from sugarcane industry growth. so sugarcane biological growth, curiously, differs from sugarcane industry growth. is this simply due to growth’s polysemy, such that it isn’t fair to assume biological and economic growth should be aligned in the first place? why is it important to put these different growths on the same plane of analysis? i maintain it is not merely an academic leap to connect the biological mechanics of sugarcane growth to social configurations of capitalist growth (roy 2018; hartigan 2017). sugarcane productivity and growth were closely linked to early capitalist productivity and growth. sugarcane plantations proved central to the emergence of racializing extractive capitalism, and the biological specificities of cane and other crops continue to be more than incidental to formations of labor and production (mintz 1985; besky 2013). similarly, crop health and cultivation have directly shaped conceptions of population health and governance (hetherington 2020). as these scholars show, growth at molecular scales is worth analyzing alongside/as growth in broader conceptual domains. tracing this traffic between different domains and scales of growth within scientists’ research practices sheds light on how these scientists enact various sociotechnical arrangements of sustainability and growth. here, this tracing work constitutes following what i’m calling the “material of growth.” the material of growth names the objects, substances, or ideas doing the growing itself, distinct from the mechanism of growth (e.g., primitive accumulation, or anna tsing’s [2012] scalability, the key example indeed being sugarcane plantations in brazil) though these are always related. the material of growth might be anything: a market or economy, but also a plant or molecule. paying attention to materials of growth allows me to trace their contradictions, blurrings into, and divergences with each other. this in turn illuminates how they traffic with broader imaginaries around growth that blur and diverge too, even when the mechanism of growth does not appear to change. analyzing materials of growth opens up new dimensions of growth’s social lives that may otherwise prove too subtle to notice. in other words, tracing the materials of growth in sugarcane research makes for a method of understanding how visions of renewables are constituted by the traffic between biological, industrial, and economic growth. i ultimately show that scientists’ work on different materials of sugarcane growth enables different permutations of sustainability/growth, despite the similarity of their research practices at first glance. below i will briefly situate this attention to materials of growth within current literatures. then i will detail how my interlocutors’ molecular biology research explicitly intervenes into sugarcane growth, in ways distinct from traditional breeding or genetically modified (gm) crops. my analysis consists not of descriptions of complex encounters but subtle shifts in understanding seemingly straightforward moments. these include mundane lab practices and times when scientists narrated their work to me or others (which were rarely just transfers of knowledge, but important performances of the science itself [myers 2015]). this material is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2013 and 2022 in the state of são paulo. i highlight two cases, showing how despite similar technical practices, scientists enact distinct materials of growth that seed various permutations of how sustainability and growth might come together. specifically, the first case involves “sustainable growth,” which, despite ideals of renewability, lays the molecular foundations for reproducing petro-extractivist growth. this happens through substitution, replacing oil with cane. the second case, with no explicit substitution, creates the conditions for other potential arrangements of sustainability/growth. this happens when scientists use sugarcane renewables as an excuse to develop other research outcomes. with this excuse, scientists work on sugarcane renewables and at the same time do not work on renewables. this working-but-not-working marks a way of staying in the thick of sugarcane renewables while also not committing to sugarcane fully. working-but-not-working keeps people tethered to their existing conditions, but creates space for potentially doing something different in the future. this carries no guarantees for disrupting petro-growth, but it opens possibilities for otherwise while/through continuing work in the meantime. in all, this article asks how specific materials of growth make sugarcane into a “capitalist species” today (blanchette 2020). staying with the trouble (haraway 2016) of plant science, it asks what can be learned from sugarcane’s molecules (murphy 2017a; myers 2015; sanabria 2016; agard-jones 2014; choy 2011) via scientists’ attunements to them (hartigan 2017; reis-castro 2021; wanderer 2018; helmreich 2009). by analyzing how brazilian scientists’ research aligns with (sustainable) growth, this article shows how minute technical practices establish the conditions for reinforcing the petro status quo and/or opening more pluripotent possibilities. growth and its materials, in brazilian sugarcane and beyond how do we understand growth in terms of sugarcane renewables when sugarcane biological growth and sugarcane industry growth are not only distinct phenomena but sometimes even at odds? particularly when, in the meantime, growth is defined with concepts like development that often cut across and collapse biological and economic realms? in other words, growth is curious in being clearly polysemous at the same time that its many meanings are frequently transposed onto each other. as tsing (2012, 506) asks, “why have people called [capitalist] expansion ‘growth’ as if it were a biological process?” biological growth is laminated onto social processes, following carbon imaginary biontologies (povinelli 2016). because it seems commonsense to overlay individual biological growth, population growth, and national economic growth, murphy (2017b) requires a denaturalizing analysis to demonstrate how gdp is actually inversely related to increased birthrates (and thus why governments selectively discourage the growth of racialized populations). julie livingston (2019) similarly recognizes the seemingly paradoxical “self-devouring growth.” in this complicated traffic between biological and economic growth (cooper 2008), at stake is how one understands the ramifications of scientists’ work on sugarcane growth for broader ideas of industrial growth and/as sustainability. to empirically trace this traffic between domains and scales of growth, i follow how scientists variously intervene on and craft sugarcane’s material of growth. this attention to the material of growth builds on the scholars cited in the previous paragraph, who implicitly recognize various materials of growth, as well as scholars who analyze this more explicitly. for one, hannah landecker (2023) examines growth as not only an aim but an object in twentieth-century industrialized animal husbandry in the united states. this engendered a biochemical modernity “in which matter moves differently” (landecker 2023, 79). sandra calkins (2019) shows how bananas in uganda offer a distinct conceptualization of growth’s relationship with health. timothy mitchell’s (2011) analysis of carbon democracy illuminates oil as a material of growth engendering specific governance and epistemology. by focusing on the material of sugarcane growth in brazilian labs, i show how scientific manipulations of molecular possibilities enable different permutations of sustainability/growth—the next potential stage in sugarcane’s centuries-long history of shaping economic futures. refined sugar is made by boiling down and purifying sugary sugarcane juice from pressed stalks. it was the original commodity that motivated sugarcane plantation/industry growth and continues to be important today. sugarcane cultivation in brazil started in the early 1500s as the foundation of a colonial economic system that utilized indigenous and later african slave labor. over the next several centuries the industry grew through land expansion enabled by deforestation in the northeast of the country, and through the laboring bodies, regularly driven to death, of millions of enslaved people (eisenberg 1974). increases in sugar production during this time came almost exclusively from increased land use and slave labor, rather than technological changes (schwartz 1985). in the terms of this article, the material of growth was land and racialized laboring bodies. then in the late-nineteenth century, production rates increased as mills were industrialized, for example with steam-powered equipment (eisenberg 1974). this introduced exponential changes in productivity, compared to the linear changes from increasing land and labor. i argue that sugar-processing productivity became a new material of growth at this time via industrial technology. more sugar could now be produced on the same amount of land with the same amount of labor, though land and racialized laboring bodies continued as growth materials as well. in 1888, slavery was abolished, replaced by, effectively, indentured servitude (scheper-hughes 1992). around this time and into the twentieth century, sugarcane expanded into the whiter and richer southeast region, especially the state of são paulo. producers there utilized european immigrant labor to turn exhausted coffee plantations into sugarcane fields (dean 1969), forming part of state whitening projects (campos 2019). sugarcane production in this region continued expanding into and devastating the mata atlântica rainforest. production in são paulo grew throughout the twentieth century, exceeding the northeast in the 1950s. many laborers from the northeast started traveling south for the harvesting season in precarious labor patterns (elias 2003). in the 1970s, the industry expanded again when the military regime implemented a national sugarcane biofuels program (nunberg 1986). sugarcane production quadrupled within a decade through additional labor expansion, environmental destruction, and increases in productivity from breeding research (eaglin 2022).1 biofuel consumption burgeoned, aided by the development of flex-fuel vehicles that can take either gas or biofuels and that today comprise almost all cars on the road in brazil (bennertz 2014). in all, land (i.e., devastated environments) and racialized laboring bodies as materials of growth continued throughout the twentieth century, alongside increases in sugar productivity (through industrialization and breeding) as an additional material of growth. biofuels (ethanol) are made by not refining but fermenting sugarcane juice, a relatively simple process akin to making beer or wine. thus, sugary sugarcane juice is the key starting point in sugarcane commodity production, and this continues to inform how the material of sugarcane industry growth shifts and evolves. research on renewables today newly targets biochemical features of sugarcane, constituting the extension of the “plantation network” into molecular biology labs (labruto 2018). and yet, while scientists inherit this history, it is not always explicit in their understandings of how their work on sugarcane matters today, nor their ideas about the traffic between biological, economic, and other growth taking shape in and via the plant. this article takes up this work. part of this includes critiquing notions of sustainable growth stemming from sugarcane work. still, i also suggest that—without romanticizing sugarcane’s materiality as some antidote to its history (bond 2022), nor taking scientists’ visions of sustainability/growth at face value—staying in the material and industrial thickness of sugarcane renewables reveals how and whether molecules matter for the complex empirical practices of seeding future possibilities. this constitutes the focus of the following ethnographic sections. substitution (or, the renewal of petro-extractivist growth) today, almost all cane in and around são paulo is harvested and processed with machines, so labor productivity is managed increasingly through equipment maintenance and operator training. land expansion has slowed with environmental regulations. the pace at which new sugarcane varieties increase yield has also slowed; breeding offers smaller and smaller yield gains, and genetically modified or transgenic cane remain uncommon due to technical difficulties. after a surge around the turn of the twenty-first century, sugarcane productivity has stagnated, as producers discuss with concern at every industry event. as a result, academic scientists have promoted new kinds of solutions focusing on the plant’s biochemistry and metabolism (labruto 2018), even if the industry has been hesitant in taking up these still relatively experimental approaches. in this section i recount one such research agenda, developing “energy cane,” exemplified by a scientist i call joão.2 through attunement to the material of growth, i trace how energy cane distills sugar’s value (energy) to the extent that the sugar in sugarcane is no longer even necessary. this forms part of joão’s vision of substituting oil with cane, advancing sustainable energy-driven growth. i argue critically that this nonetheless creates the conditions for reproducing the structural aspects of petro-extractivist growth, merely swapping in a different source material (cane in place of oil) rather than changing manufacturing or extraction arrangements. i call this sustainability via substitution. by the time i spoke with joão in 2017 i had already heard him present at several major events. the new director of a national biomass research center and still an active professor, he was quite busy but gracious with his time. as i sat down in his university office, he launched into an animated overview of the current state of biofuels and sugarcane in brazil. his dedication to growing brazil’s bioeconomy made him an insightful interlocutor. he deftly traversed the granular details of his lab’s research and broader visions of sugarcane’s potential. this was less usual, though not totally exceptional, among the scientists i interviewed, who more often stayed within the technical realm. for joão, the technical details of sugarcane’s biochemistry were crucial to its potential for eco-friendly renewables, potential not just related to but one and the same as brazil’s bioeconomy potential. speaking quickly, joão sketched diagrams of cane and chemical reactions on large pieces of blank paper in front of me. he pulled a fresh page every few minutes from a nearby stack. he was especially enthusiastic about a variety called energy cane, drawings of which now covered the paper in front of me (figure 1). energy cane, joão declared, was the future of sugarcane in brazil. it grows massively, up to three times taller than typical varieties, sometimes towering almost two stories tall. by expanding skyward, it allows for the production of much more biomass in the same area of land, making energy cane, in theory, more sustainable. figure 1. joão’s sketch of energy cane, which can grow “two to three times more per hectare” than standard cane. photo by katie ulrich. before returning to my conversation with joão, i’ll note that one might think it odd, then, that few actually grow this spectacular energy cane right now. this is because per conventional processing methods, energy cane is not advantageous to the sugarcane industry. as another scientist playfully put it, energy cane is not an engineering marvel, but, in fact, a “crappier” version of cane. while sugarcane breeding historically has worked to maximize sugar production, energy cane is made to have less sugar. less sugar means more biomass (leaves, stems, and other fibrous components), as less of the plant’s energy is diverted to sugar synthesis, allowing the plant to grow and grow. so, energy cane has less sugar and more biomass, enacting a tradeoff between sugar and growth. sugar and biomass/growth are not just not equivalent, but compete with each other. yet the industry is built around sugar extraction. what happens now that energy cane literally decreases sugar content? people like joão nevertheless remain optimistic about energy cane because of new biochemical tools that allow the fermentation of biomass into bioproducts. these biochemical tools are the focus of joão’s research. he does not breed energy cane, which has been around for decades, but examines how to make it utilizable. after all, biomass does not equal utilizable biomass. unlike manually pressing stalks to extract sugary juice, the process to make biomass fermentable is techno-scientifically complex. joão develops biochemical tools that make biomass extractable and utilizable, allowing energy cane’s prolific biomass to be extracted and fermented into bioproducts. energy cane’s sugar-growth tradeoff becomes moot. rather than making cane produce more sugar, along the lines of many gm/breeding efforts to increase yields in other agricultural crops, energy cane represents a different approach. this constitutes a subtle but important shift. the desirability of energy cane works through taking what was ultimately valuable about sugarcane—being a source of energy, for both consumers of refined sugar and the yeast fermenting sugarcane juice to produce bioproducts—and making this no longer dependent on the stalk sugar. cane being a source of energy no longer depends on stalk sugar, because joão’s biochemical tools make biomass into utilizable energy for fermentation. as a result, cane no longer needs sugar for the fermentation of bioproducts. instead of sugarcane, we have energy cane. the shift in material of industry growth, then, is from sugar to energy, or from sugar to biomass-as-energy. biomass has been used for thousands of years as an energy source, with people burning wood for cooking and heat. yet, once more, i argue that energy cane does something subtly different. while in brazil sugarcane leaves and stems are indeed burned to make bioelectricity, energy cane enacts (mol 2002) the biomass of leaves and stems as sources of a different kind of energy: a fermentation energy to make bioproducts. with energy cane, biomass becomes meaningful through a lens of a particular type of energy, energy to feed fermentation. combustion shifts to fermentation. fermentation enrolls new relationships between energy, matter (biomass), microorganisms (fermenting yeast), plants (cane), and humans (landecker 2023).3 this only becomes possible with biochemical tools like the ones joão develops, which make biomass fermentable. put differently, the value of the biomass is its ability to stand in for stalk sugar. this is quite peculiar because, again, biomass (the plant’s growth) biologically and historically competes with sugar accumulation. “crappy” energy cane turns this antagonism on its head, allowing biomass to take the form of energy for fermentation. energy cane enacts a shift from biomass-as-growth to biomass-as-stand-in-for-sugar, because biomass becomes energy for fermentation. as a result, after 500 years cane no longer even needs stalk sugar, and promises 500 more years of capitalist commodity exchange. the paradox of “crappy” energy cane thus reflects the new way biomass is enacted as a particular kind of energy, that for fermentation, thanks to emerging biochemical tools. biomass could not always stand in for stalk sugar/energy in this way. this is helpfully captured in the unusual work it took to make the energy cane varietal cross. this did not form part of joão’s research, but i describe it because the energy cane cross reflects shifting materials of growth (sugar to energy) on the industrial level. in other words, it illuminates the traffic between molecular and industrial materials of growth. tracing the history of the energy cane cross takes us to a museum, the varietal garden of a government-funded sugarcane research center in the state of são paulo. the varietal garden is a large, fenced outdoor field that i visited one sunny fall day. as i walked through the gates of the varietal garden with carla, the researcher showing me around, she described it as a “living museum” because it preserves hundreds of different varieties of sugarcane. these include historical varieties five hundred years old, from brazilian sugarcane’s infancy. throughout the garden the varieties grow in neat rows, each labeled with their cross information, varietal traits, and historical notes. as we walked around, carla motioned for me to compare the historical varieties with the modern ones, noting their height, stalk thickness, and coloring. you could visually appreciate the impact of breeding over the past several hundred years, she reflected. the garden, as a living museum, mostly serves educational purposes for local high schoolers and international researchers. but the garden also served an important role in producing crosses of energy cane a few decades ago. energy cane consists of a standard modern sugarcane variety (with high sugar content plus pest and disease resistance) crossed with one of the oldest varieties, s. spontaneum, which has high fiber (biomass) and low sugar content. this is the tradeoff between sugar and biomass that defines energy cane. yet to create such crosses, this historical variety, s. spontaneum, was not simply growing in fields, available for breeding. being high-fiber and low-sugar, the historical s. spontaneum variety essentially stands as the antithesis of what the industry has desired for hundreds of years, high sugar production. as we walked around the varietal garden more, carla pointed out the thickness of stalks, thicker ones corresponding to higher sugar content. since early on, she explained, breeders have always selected for the sweetest, thickest varieties. thin, higher-fiber varieties were simply bred out of existence. to make the energy cane cross, they needed to use the historical, thin s. spontaneum variety preserved in the varietal garden museum. the researchers had to effectively go back in time to before modern industry had conditioned the genetics of cane to suit sugar productivity as the industry’s preferred material of growth, that is, to before this material of growth was physically inscribed into the plant’s genome and morphology. indeed, at an industry conference a couple of years earlier, i had seen a slide depicting the energy cane cross. a large red x in the middle represented the crossing (through breeding), and to either side of the x stood the “parent” varieties. one side was an image of a contemporary variety, labeled “year 2020,” while the other side was the historical variety (“recovered” a hundred years ago), labeled “year 1920.” the present was literally crossed with history. the resulting energy cane was exceedingly tall, with strikingly thin stalks. thus, energy cane’s very genetics and morphology are an inscription (latour and woolgar 1986) of this shift in the material of industry growth (hartigan 2017). the energy cane of the future is a cross between the industry’s conventional growth material, sugar productivity, and a growth material that the industry had devalued for centuries but that is now gaining new value through biochemical tools: fiber/biomass, made utilizable as energy for fermentation. this cross was only possible because of a museum that had motivations other than sugarcane industry growth and the national economic growth long tied to it. these other motivations, like education, led the museum to keep propagating this other yet-to-be material of growth in the form of the historical sugarcane variety. overall, this shift in material of growth—from sugar to energy, and therefore from sugarcane to energy cane—is related to a broader energopolitical shift (boyer 2014) called second-generation biofuels, which utilize the leaves and stems of conventional cane in addition to the stalks to make fuel. this approach intends to make biofuels more sustainable, as more fuel results from the same amount of crop. yet energy cane takes this second-generation shift in material of growth far beyond typical second-generation fuels. with energy cane, biomass actually supplants, not just supplements, stalk sugar. what’s at stake with biomass-as-energy supplanting sugar as the material of growth? what does it mean to joão to promote energy cane rather than other varieties or biotechnologies? i will argue that energy cane creates the molecular conditions of possibility for a substitutive approach to sustainable growth: growing brazil’s sustainable bioeconomy by substituting oil with cane. this substitutive approach, though, potentially reproduces petro-extractivist growth. namely, for joão, as he told me, “you have an energy cane that is a new petroleum.” energy cane could replace petroleum as a feedstock for fuels, plastics, and all other chemicals currently petro-based. instead of refining these materials from oil, one can ferment them from energy cane using biotechnologies. joão follows energy cane’s new material of industry growth, energy that supplants sugar, to its ultimate conclusion. sugar is supplanted by energy to the extent that now cane can even become oil, an energy feedstock. energy cane’s prolific biomass becomes the material of post-petroleum growth. yet this post-petroleum growth has a substitutive nature (badami 2021; rudge and ehrenstein, forthcoming). substitution articulates similarity and difference (hayden 2023). a substitute has to be similar enough to what it’s replacing, yet some axis of difference also needs to be in place. i use substitution here to flag problematic practices within environmental efforts that keep petro-extractivist structures, such as endless production and growth, the same while displacing difference onto other sites, such as the chemical form of the feedstock (oil versus cane). in many instances of post-petroleum sustainability, the ghost of petroleum (adams and fortun 2021) remains in this “post-” formulation, as replacements seek to replicate what petroleum has provided. this is sustainability also known as the drop-in. drop-in fuels or materials, constituting most renewables today, are those that can be smoothly dropped into existing infrastructures without much alteration otherwise.4 indeed, the actors spending the most money researching renewables globally are large oil and gas companies. this is precisely because drop-ins, in theory, don’t require as great a change in production processes, extraction practices, and consumer-end behaviors, including overall growth in energy use. with substitutive drop-in sustainability, energy companies and their primary consumers, industrial manufacturers, can still follow resourceand waste-intensifying production/consumption routines that exploit environmental and human health. different carbon sources (plants versus oil), similar practices and structures. this facilitates the continuity of petro-extractivism—which, after all, extends far beyond the technical extraction of oil to social systems and cultures (lemenager 2014; gómez-barris 2017)—including its mandate for (bio)economic growth. substitution, at once molecular and conceptual, masquerades similarity and continuity of problematic status quos behind the idea of desirable difference. energy cane’s material of growth, biomass-as-fermentation-energy, thus constitutes a new instance of the convergence of the biological and economic that goes back to capitalism’s sugarcane origins. it is a contemporary negotiation of the relationship between cane’s biological growth and the material of industry growth. cane’s biological growth no longer has to be traded off with the accumulation of sugar, as these are collapsed in energy cane. biomass can now take the energetic form of stalk sugar through biochemical technologies like those joão researches, merging these materials of biological and industry growth. joão’s research shows how this happens at simultaneously molecular and conceptual levels. his are the technical practices through which sugarcane today can be made into oil. this becomes the basis of sustainable growth. however, it also creates the conditions for the renewal of petro-extractivist-growth via renewables. joão still deeply cares about brazil’s environmental and bioeconomic futures, but this is the form his care takes (hartigan 2017). many have similarly identified how renewable energy efforts, perhaps surprisingly, tend to maintain petro-extractivist systems (caporusso 2019; howe and boyer 2019; ahmann 2019; shapiro 2021). the fossil fuel industry and government development apparatuses alike have adopted the phrase sustainable growth, often reproducing petro-extractivism’s geopolitical asymmetries as well (günel 2019; cross 2019; folch 2019; jobson 2019). but, staying in the thick of brazilian sugarcane research reveals further empirical complexities and possibilities. i take a cue from duygu kaşdoğan’s (2020) analysis of algae waste-to-biofuels systems, which also shows that sustainability is often premised on extractivist growth imaginaries. however, kaşdoğan argues that “blue degrowth,” or the actual material of algae growth in my terms, can challenge this. in a similar way, the next section asks how paying attention to the material of growth in a second case of sugarcane renewables can expand understandings of sustainability/growth efforts. this second case centers around the research agenda of a different scientist, gustavo, to “redesign growth” in sugarcane. gustavo redesigns growth as he works to expand what counts as sugar in sugarcane. expanding what counts as sugar is accompanied by a sensibility that renewables offer a “good excuse” for developing other research outcomes. gustavo’s work is thus not a direct alternative to petro-extractivism like agroecology or similar efforts. instead, the political ramifications of gustavo’s work lie in its inherent tension: between being about something but also not being about that thing. this about-sugarcane-but-not-about-sugarcane sensibility means that gustavo works within existing conditions in the meantime, but without a full commitment to the substitutive futures therein. the excuse (for other futures) gustavo runs a lab at a university in the state of são paulo, researching sugarcane and other biomass to the end of making renewables. gustavo is well known in the field and has been integral to developing brazil’s contemporary sugarcane-molecular-biology network, which includes dozens of labs and several new research centers. he was an early director of the same national biomass and renewables research center that joão now leads. gustavo first welcomed me into his lab in 2013, saying that the social impacts of sugarcane biofuels were crucial to understand. he was enthusiastic about my work and always happy to sit down with a fresh pot of coffee and speak at length about sugarcane’s history, economics, and politics in brazil. when i returned over the next several years to catch up and interview him further, the experience of talking with him was always quite similar, though with an increasing heaviness as the mid-2000s-to-early-2010s surge in sugarcane funding ebbed and right-wing administrations enacted increasingly restrictive science funding policy as well as detrimental environmental policy. after all, even though the previous section demonstrated how sugarcane biofuels can be enrolled to maintain petro-extractivist systems, gustavo’s deep concern for the environment was a main motivation for his current work. one of his projects throughout the years has focused on making renewables by utilizing not only the sugary juice from the stalk but also the leaves and stems (the second-generation approach). this approach, again, increases biofuel production without increasing land use, so gustavo hopes to elevate sugarcane’s sustainability. thus, through technical practices similar to joão’s, he works to make biomass (leaves and stems) utilizable for sugar-based bioproducts. yet key material-conceptual differences obtain in their approaches, as i will now examine. the first thing i noticed while working in gustavo’s lab was the difference between his lab’s two physical spaces. the first is accessed from the hallway of the main building. it’s a biochemistry lab, with neatly organized benches and hoods, centrifuges gently whirring, and a little loft housing bulky analytical equipment. this lab smells sterile and chemical. the second space is another lab accessed from outdoors behind the main building. it’s attached to a small greenhouse with rows of uniform plants in labeled tubs, so sunlight and the smell of dirt seep into this lab. i enjoyed spending my mornings writing notes in the greenhouse lab’s loft, looking through window blinds down onto the plants. despite sugarcane and other crops actively growing in the greenhouse, their vegetative growth was not quite the object of the lab’s investigation. instead, gustavo investigates what he calls “redesigning growth,” which started after the plants were harvested. it was an ordeal of a morning post-harvest, with all lab members called on to stop their research and help. the benches of the sterile indoor lab became cluttered with buckets of dry ice and dewars of liquid nitrogen, as researchers noisily ground leaves and stems in frozen mortars with frozen pestles, chatting while they did so. hands were cold despite layers of gloves, but at least it was only a few hours until all the biomass had been turned into frozen powder and stored in plastic test tubes, awaiting biochemical processing and analysis. the samples were kept frozen during the entire process to prevent changes to the biomass’s molecular structure. the lab cared about preserving this molecular structure of biomass so that they could elucidate its precise contents and architecture. the test tubes of frozen, ground-up biomass were eventually biochemically processed for the analysis of this molecular structure. processing involves days to weeks of adding various solvents to strip molecular layers off one by one to get to the base structure. samples are washed with water after each step. i spent hours in the lab moving tubes back and forth between centrifuge, bench, and sink. but the final outcome proved suspenseful and exciting. after all the processing work, the samples were sent through a high-performance liquid chromatography machine, which spat out a graph of various peaks representing the molecular structure. green and growing sugarcane leaves were transformed into frozen samples, then into small volumes of clear liquid, and finally into a digital line on a graph. whereas sugarcane producers in the fields take pictures of each other holding an upright cane stalk to demonstrate its impressive size, in this lab, the delicate graph peaks provided a different way of visualizing growth—reflecting a different material of growth. understanding biomass’s molecular structure allows gustavo to develop biochemical tools, or even modify sugarcane, to make biomass easier to ferment into bioproducts. this often requires compromising the plant’s structural integrity because, again, biomass is the basis of growth. for this reason gustavo describes his efforts as “redesigning growth.” in other words, gustavo seeks to redesign growth, so that growth’s molecular material (biomass) is amenable to not growth but different aims, i.e., being fermented into bioproducts. this resembles energy cane’s sugar-growth tradeoff, and gustavo’s techniques are indeed similar to and sometimes the same as joão’s biochemical tools. but, i suggest there is a subtle but important difference between gustavo’s and joão’s research, made clear by an analytical attunement to the material of growth. whereas joão’s energy cane enacts biomass as fermentation energy to supplant stalk sugar, gustavo’s redesign of sugarcane growth supplements the stalk’s sugar. he doesn’t seek to replace it altogether. gustavo expands what counts as sugar within the plant, rather than distilling sugar’s value (energy). energy cane enacts biomass-as-energy as a new material of industry growth, whereas gustavo’s redesigned sugarcane enacts “newly found sugars” as a new material of industry growth. these differing materials of growth enable various permutations of how these scientists conceptualize sustainability/growth. even though joão’s and gustavo’s technical work is similar—they are both researching biochemical tools to utilize the leaves and stems (biomass) to make bioproducts more efficiently and sustainably—energy cane constitutes the molecular conditions of a “new petroleum” crop that seeds substitutive sustainable growth, while gustavo’s redesign of sugarcane growth has the potential to do something different. i will elaborate on this difference next. the first hint about a difference between joão’s and gustavo’s research came in the form of gustavo’s nonchalance about energy cane. the several times i asked him about it, he would nod and affirm it is another variety, but he did not find it very interesting. one time, he went further by actually bringing up joão, his friend and colleague. joão is very excited about energy cane, gustavo explained, but it is an example of the disconnect between different research goals. much of the research on advanced renewables that gustavo helped coordinate in the 2000s and early 2010s focused on sugarcane, but now there is this “different plant,” energy cane. he implied that energy cane research differed enough to not be compatible with his research. gustavo summed it up: “this [energy cane] is one path. the other is improving the productivity of sugarcane.” for him, these constituted separate routes in fashioning cane’s sustainable future. how can we understand gustavo’s clear distinction in the context of very similar technical practices? there are many ways, as other scientists and even gustavo himself later described, that research on energy cane and research like gustavo’s are in fact translatable to each other. paying attention to the material of growth helps us see these shared technical practices in such a way that what seemed similar can now also be analyzed along an axis of difference. i suggest gustavo’s notion of separate paths speaks to the different materials of growth these research projects entail (biomass-as-energy with joão’s energy cane, and new sugar for gustavo), and the different sensibilities around sustainability/growth that accompany such materials of growth. specifically, in contrast to a cane that constitutes a “new petroleum” for ad infinitum extraction, gustavo maintains that sugarcane biofuels are likely only a transitional technology. in fact, in his words, his research will be more useful for broader applications, like improving the productivity of food crops. his research on finding new sugar within the plant may prove most important for helping find new starch in corn, new sweet in sweet potato, or some other application altogether. this view is captured in his explanation to me, in one of our first conversations, that biofuels are a “good excuse” (in english) to make other biotechnologies. in expanding what counts as sugar, gustavo expands how sugar may count in future outcomes, even if this entails going beyond sugar(cane) altogether. this notion of the “excuse” is key for gustavo, and it came up repeatedly in our conversations over the years. i also identified it in the practices and imaginaries of other scientist interlocutors. finding new sweet in sweet potato and the like could be seen as the continuation of industrial agriculture’s long history of extracting more and more value from crops and animals, central to capitalist expansion and growth. i do not argue that gustavo’s research repudiates this, but that the excuse creates the conditions for other possibilities as well. the excuse is defined by a productive tension of working on sugarcane renewables but also not working on sugarcane renewables. “biofuels are just an excuse.” in this working-but-not-working, one finds the chance to contest existing conditions, relations, and practices without floating away from their grounding. in this yes-and-no space, there is the possibility, though no promise, of laying the foundations for imagining sustainability and growth otherwise, without the pretense of being able to abandon sugarcane and start from terra nullius (liboiron 2021; ballestero 2019). in this way, the excuse (sugarcane renewables) is not fully an empty signifier. j. l. austin (1957, 10) devoted a lecture to the performative properties of excuses, explaining, “surely, it just the sort of situation where people will say ‘almost anything.’” an excuse’s content and truthfulness become less important than its form (herzfeld 1982). for gustavo, in contrast, the excuse of sugarcane renewables is not merely incidental or meaningless. yet his work is simultaneously not exhausted within existing value regimes around cane. the excuse is not empty, but nor is its contents settled. this suggests an understanding of the excuse more in line with sts theorizations of the material-semiotic (barad 2007). it is the contradictory fact of the excuse’s content mattering and not mattering that creates interesting political possibilities here. this contradictory mattering imbues gustavo’s excuse with a speculative temporal element. the excuse functions as a placeholder, a temporal hinge (riles 2011); it allows one to wait for something else (not quite knowable) while still doing work in the meantime that is necessary to bring about that something else (mckay 2018). within the waiting-but-working of the excuse, one might find time to negotiate new horizons (petryna 2022). for this reason the excuse is related to other ideas about potentiality within science, such as the distinction between basic and applied research. basic science is commonly understood as foundational, academic research that generates the potential for many as-yet-unknown, even surprising, insights and technological applications (rheinberger 1997). basic science is a term researchers like gustavo, and joão, use to describe their work. (both rely on government-sourced, academic research grants.) basic scientists may capitalize on hype, invoking fashionable or highly valued scientific topics to secure funding in an excuse-like modality (e.g., lomnitz and chazaro 1999). temporalities of potential within science are also central to venture capital in biotech, where speculation itself makes for a significant if not primary commodity (rajan 2006; pollock 2019; peterson 2014; hayden 2003; günel 2019). while basic science, hype, and even capitalist speculation can provide conditions for the excuse, i argue that the excuse is not reducible to these and widens how anthropologists and sts scholars can understand potential in a scientific context. the excuse is not only a temporality but also a tension that resists the future as a general form, unknowable or not, from totally inhabiting the present (adams, murphy, and clarke 2009). in this tension, the future is both meaningful and not meaningful, just as the past and present are both meaningful and not meaningful. one can stay within the thick of complex sugarcane relations and from within, not from without, create the conditions for possibly imagining a future without sugarcane (as we know it, or at all). gustavo works on sugarcane renewables, but he also doesn’t. like how queer petro toxicity helps us imagine “a future that extends from but arrives at a place radically different from the present” (davis 2022, 100), the excuse demonstrates how possibility can stem from unexpected places. this is similar to ballestero’s (2019) interlocutors’ production of “future histories of water.” these bureaucrats see their practices around water access as something that will become meaningfully legible, as historically important, from a not-quite-known position in the future. theirs is a different kind of critique of current systems, a practice of “creating a difference without resorting to radical difference or the otherwise,” which entails “committing to the world as it is, but differently” (ballestero 2019, 24). after all, gustavo’s research does not directly challenge petro-extractivist growth, like other efforts of agroecology or degrowth (kallis 2018; parrique 2019). the knowledge his research generates might (and probably will) be used within current production systems. he still finds brazil’s bioeconomic growth, or something like it, important. but i argue that this excusive modality of doing research creates space for other possibilities, such as, perhaps, excusive sustainable growth. as isabelle stengers (2010, 10) puts it, speaking of a scientist subjectivity i see as related to the excuse, “to resist a likely future in the present is to gamble that the present still provides substance for resistance.” sugarcane might become something else rather than oil, and gustavo is not only open to this but oriented by it. conclusion this article has considered similar sugarcane research agendas and argued that the ways different scientists have carried out and conceptualized their research practices have enabled different permutations of sustainability and growth. this insight becomes possible with attention to the materials of sugarcane growth that scientists work with. the first research agenda, exemplified by joão, centers around energy cane. energy cane draws out sugar’s value as energy, configuring biomass to stand in for that energy, to the extent that stalk sugar is supplanted and energy cane becomes a “new petroleum.” this creates the molecular conditions of possibility for a substitutive form of sustainability. the second research agenda, exemplified by gustavo and named by him “redesigning growth,” is characterized by working to find new sugar in sugarcane by expanding what counts as sugar. expanding what counts as sugar might even take him beyond sugarcane renewables. gustavo sees his research on sugarcane renewables as an excuse for other potential as-yet-unknown applications. energy cane and its substitutive sustainability can prove problematic because merely the carbon source is changed, not the petro-extractivist-growth system. how might a scientist working on sugarcane biofuels, the carbon source, also/instead work toward changing the system? the excuse is not a direct way of working on the system, but a way to work on sugarcane biofuels and also not work on sugarcane biofuels. the excuse forms a way of working on the carbon source but also not working on it. there might be other possibilities in that “not working.” gustavo’s constitutes a different way of “doing” sustainable growth, using it to think about something else. looking out from the middle of the “seas of cane” covering the interior of são paulo and the greater region—reflecting the crop’s long but also recent history of ecological destruction and racialized labor violence, all propped up by an imperial science developed out of spaces like sugarcane plantations in the first place (mckittrick 2021)—it seems clear that techno-fixes and sustainable development are not the simple solution. yet it also does not seem enough to say that scientists are merely cogs in the machine, or that they merely capitalize on eco-hype to get funding. many care deeply about climate change and its uneven effects in the world, as well as the unevenness of the world and its effect on climate change. we need better analytical tools to understand the role of these scientists in society today. this article has aimed to do this, by analyzing “the ethical possibilities for the future that [scientists] inscribed in their technical craft” (ballestero 2019, x). this article has attuned to the “material of growth” to empirically trace such possibilities, building a conceptual and ethnographic bridge between sociotechnical assemblages of sustainability/growth and anthropological work on materiality. ultimately, similar scientific practices and materials can make nonetheless different futures possible. even then, the line between similarity and difference remains fine. like joão’s and gustavo’s similar technical practices, the substitute and the excuse feel like two sides of the same coin. in one moment, they appear the same. both reflect sugarcane’s multiplicities, its becoming many other things than just refined sugar. both concern change amid the status quo, energetic or scientific. yet in another moment, the substitute and the excuse appear different again, laying the molecular foundations for distinct material-social arrangements. their multiplicities take on distinct natures. as i hope to have shown in this article, the relationship between the substitute and the excuse is not a strict dualism. the very tension between them is their forms. substitution is not oil but still oily. the excuse is sustainable growth but not sustainable growth. in scientists’ everyday practices, the conditions are created for new sociotechnical permutations. in the end, the work toward an otherwise might be found even right in the middle of technocratic petro-extractivism, in addition to the vital sites of non-normativity (anti–white supremacy, anticolonialism, anticapitalism, antiheteronormativity) that have long challenged status quos. abstract amid climate change and produced unevenness in geopolitical development, the question of how sustainability and growth might be brought together is a concern for many scientists of renewable energy in the global south. this article explores answers offered by scientists in são paulo, brazil, who make renewable fuels and materials from sugarcane. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and tracing the “material of growth,” the article analyzes the traffic between sugarcane biological growth, industry growth, and economic growth in the context of the crop’s history of colonial expansion and environmental destruction. it argues that some scientific practices lay the molecular foundations for a substitutive “sustainable growth” that replicates petro-extractivist growth. others allow for further permutations of how sustainability and growth might go together, particularly when scientists use sugarcane renewables as an excuse to develop other research aims. the article contributes to anthropological understandings of science, energy cultures, technical practices, and transition. [biofuels; sugarcane; energy transition; sustainability; substitution; excuse; growth; brazil] resumo em meio a um contexto de aquecimento global e de desigualdades produzidas no desenvolvimento geopolítico, a questão de como sustentabilidade e crescimento podem andar juntos é uma preocupação para muitos cientistas de energia renovável no sul global. este artigo explora respostas concedidas por cientistas de são paulo, brasil, que produzem biocombustíveis e materiais renováveis a partir da cana-de-açúcar. com base em trabalho de campo etnográfico e no rastreamento do “material do crescimento,” o artigo analisa a circulação entre o crescimento biológico da cana-de-açúcar, o crescimento da indústria, e o crescimento econômico no contexto da história canavial de expansão colonial e destruição ambiental. argumento que algumas práticas científicas lançam as bases moleculares para um “crescimento sustentável” substitutivo que replica o crescimento petroextrativista. já outras possibilitam novas configurações conjuntas de sustentabilidade e crescimento, particularmente quando cientistas usam produtos renováveis feitos a partir da cana-de-açúcar como desculpa para desenvolver outros objetivos de pesquisa. o artigo contribui para a compreensão antropológica da ciência, culturas energéticas, práticas técnicas, e transição. [biocombustíveis; cana-de-açúcar; transição energética; sustentabilidade; substituição; desculpa; crescimento; brasil] notes acknowledgments i thank the scientists in são paulo whose work and insights form the foundations of this article. the seeds for this essay were planted during a conversation with alex blanchette who encouraged me to pursue the question, what really is growth? an earlier version of this article won castac’s david hakken student paper prize in 2022, and i am grateful for the prize committee’s supportive comments. along the way, the article was strengthened by generous and generative feedback: thanks goes to andrea ballestero, svetlana borodina, dominic boyer, jessica caporusso, mel ford, konstantin georgiev, gizem haspolat, cymene howe, duygu kaşdoğan, gebby keny, nicole labruto, charlie lotterman, yesmar oyarzun, ryann ripley, and yifan wang. i am also grateful for integral conversations about substitution with nandita badami, véra ehrenstein, alice rudge, and my 2019 american anthropological association co-panelists. i thank helena fietz for editing the translation of the abstract. this article benefited significantly from the comments of three anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, in particular from abdoumaliq simone. the research was supported in its earliest phases by haverford college, and then by the national science foundation (grfp 1842494 and bcs-1918156), the brazilian studies association, and rice university. 1. green revolution interventions were typically less prominent than the country’s robust domestic cane-breeding research (eaglin 2022). 2. all interlocutor names in this article are pseudonyms. conversations and interviews were conducted in portuguese and translated by the author unless otherwise noted. 3. this shift is similar in form to what hannah landecker (2023) identifies as a shift in twentieth-century u.s. animal feeding from a focus on nutritional deficiencies to the industrialization 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circuits of knowledge production: producing multispecies potentiality.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 4: 650–79. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca33.4.09 wylie, sara ann 2018 fractivism: corporate bodies and chemical bonds. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 4, pp. 439-466, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca38.4.01 life extempore: trials of ruination in the twilight zone of soviet industry cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 317-348, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.10 life extempore: trials of ruination in the twilight zone of soviet industry lori khatchadourian cornell university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2022-2308 it was early afternoon on a crisp winter day in 2019, and the chemist, the guard, and i sat together in front of a wood-burning stove in a small office of a former chemical factory in yerevan. the guard had converted the office into his quarters so that, day and night, he could watch over the shuttered soviet factory. i will call it khimzavod, one of the many factories that lingers tenaciously in the post-soviet “twilight zone” (gonzález-ruibal 2019, 132)—the liminal state between use and abandonment, between prosperity and demise, where optimism and despair jockey for position in the lives of those caught up in ruination. we were sharing a roasted chicken wrapped in lavash bread and a bottle of orange vodka when the chemist’s phone rang. hands greasy, he hit speakerphone: “can you help me fill an order for 600 meters of glass tubing, like the ones we got from the factory in yeghvart?” asked the caller. the chemist hesitated, realizing that the quantity would require much foraging in other chemical factories, and negotiation with hard-nosed factory owners. the job would draw him into yet another trial of ruination, a struggle to discover value in old things, where the temporal and material logics of capital, and the waning life course of objects and humans, test the limits of those efforts. the caller explained that the deal was good, because the buyers had originally thought they needed to use costly quartz tubing from china but were then convinced that old soviet glass could work. “it sounds worth it”, the chemist replied, accepting the job in the spur of the moment. no sooner had we returned to the chicken than there was a knock at the door. the guard became agitated. he had a debt to pay and the creditor had arrived. as his distress mounted, the chemist reached into his wallet and placed a few hundred dollars on the stove, gesturing to the guard to take the cash and settle his debt. when the guard stepped out, i asked the chemist if his friend was good for the money. it didn’t really matter, he replied in so many words; if the guard didn’t repay him, the chemist could collect collateral from the abundant (but rusting) metal on the factory grounds, whose price on the scrap metal market he could estimate as though his eyes were scales. figure 1. the chemist smokes a cigarette as we sit together in front of a wood-burning stove and share a meal. photo by lori khatchadourian. so it was that, in the span of minutes, two projects unfolded for the chemist, both of which pivoted on the salvage value of soviet industrial remnants. salvage (or residual) value is an operation undertaken by firms to account for the highest exchange value of an old asset, after depreciation, generated by sale for future use or scrap. in business, salvage value is the stuff of accountancy and balance sheets. i am concerned less with corporate estimations than with the temporal and material relations at play when individuals like the chemist attempt to discover salvage value in the exchange of undead assets or, as another ethnographic case in this essay will show, to forgo salvage value to retain for use capital goods in their senescence. three decades after soviet collapse, privatization, and market liberalization, the trials of ruination in armenia arise in precisely these projects to unlock or reject the salvage value of soviet debris. by trials of ruination i am referring to strenuous efforts to make a living with defunct things when time and temporality, matter and materiality rebuff with opposing force. my terminology may call to mind the so-called qualification trials that economic agents undertake in a functioning market economy, where products are subjected to testing in the constant adjustments of supply and demand (callon, méadel, and rabeharisoa 2002). but in the deviant market of the ruins economy, where no production occurs, supply is finite and obsolescent, and where economic actors are ireduccible to either producers or consumers, what is being tried is less the product than the human agents who attempt to discover salvage or use-value in decaying goods. as i will demonstrate, my aging interlocutors are up against time and the life course of both people and things; and they are tested by the temporal and material logics of capitalism, both disadvantageous to their efforts. the story of the chemist and the guard suggests that relations to time and to things profoundly shape the trials of ruination. in this essay, i attend to the temporal and material relations through which the former soviet proletariat attempt to pull the heavy, metallic, unyielding remnants of the socialist factory out from the twilight zone of postsocialist stasis and into relations of capital. time figures as both an experiential and existential force in these trials. in the struggles to discover value from things undergoing slow decay and irreversible obsolescence, as i argue below, the experience of time is marked by urgency and an atunement to the here and now. while much writing on temporality amid ruins and remnants emphasizes the contemplative, affective, and past-oriented motif of nostalgia, the chemist and others like him alert us to an alternative temporal register in the post-soviet twilight zone, one in which nostalgia recedes as future hopes require living “for the moment,” as morton pedersen (2012, 145; emphasis original) describes it, with “an exalted awareness of the virtual potentials in the present.” consider the brief time it took for the chemist to accept the bids to enter into new trials involving glass tubes and rusting metal, spontaneous decisions made with little regard for socialist dreamworlds and the nostalgic affordances of industrial matter. the advancing age of my interlocutors, who reached adulthood in the period of late socialism, contributes to a sense that now is the time to realize goals. existentially, this temporal disposition takes shape in a context of displacement from progressive socialist time and is necessitated by the rapid temporality of the market, which renders soviet things anachronistic and on the brink of obsolescence. the primary tactic for either unlocking or forestalling salvage value under such unfavorable temporal conditions is extemporization, doing things in the moment, and doing things one never planned or was trained to do. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, extempore (in english), from the latin ex tempore—literally meaning “out of time”—could refer to practices of everyday life; ‘life extempore’ in this obsolete sense meant a life in which decisions were made in the moment, in accordance with the needs of the present, with little preparation.1 i want to dust off this anachronism and tinker with its semantic scope because i think that with a little work, it can condense the distinct temporal dispositions and improvisational practices of the former soviet proletariat whose livlihoods depend on revaluing the persistent material world of decommissioned soviet factories. relatedly, i argue that the trials either to strip and sell (unlock salvage value) or to retain and operate soviet matter in a postsocialist milieu (forgo salvage value) involve relations toward things quite at odds with the materiality of capitalism. critics have noted that the temporality of late industrial capitalism and just-in-time production is defined by the cult of the new (dawdy 2010), acceleration (harvey 1989, 284–307), and the annihilation of past worlds (gonzález-ruibal 2019). profit is generated through planned obsolescence and an ideology of anachronism that renders old things as out of “proper” time. the benjaminian tradition harnesses the ruins of capital toward a rebuke of the temporal-material order of capitalism (gordillo 2014), figuring ruinous and patinated things and places as offering emancipation from its oppressive logics (dawdy 2016; edensor 2005). a life lived off of soviet remnants stands at odds with fast capitalism’s commodity culture. as we shall see, it draws on practices of soviet materiality that involved extending the life cycle of things “to the extreme” (golubev and smolyak 2013). but far from rebuking capitalism or offering emancipation from it, the persistent, machinic material culture of soviet industry provides an opportunity to enter the market from the margins. existing concepts such as precarity offer limited analytical help here. having once belonged to the proletariat, people like the chemist may today be seen to live precariously in that their labor conditions entail self-reliance and their once utopian future has become unpredictable. in some respects, my portrayal in this essay of my interlocutors’ struggle for a good life through their “freedom of self-conduct” submits to the anthropological motif that ivan rajković (2018) has called the “virtue of precarity.” there are parallels, too, to kathleen millar’s (2018) recognition that livelihoods dependent on recyclable garbage outside rio de janeiro are irreducible to a struggle for survival or resistance, but can enable fuller forms of life. but wagelessness, the instability of income, and the looming threat of joblessness (or something worse) are not what define insecurities and affective registers of the life extempore. my interlocutors do not give voice to a condition of mere coping, “stuckedness” (hage 2009), or degradation (rakowski 2016). far from the state of “agentive impasse” that rajković (2018, 52) discusses, they take pride in their genuine, nonperformative productivity. such meaningful work is thought to have the real potential to restore them to a condition of stability (or something better). precarity emphasizes structural conditions rather than individual actions. where precarity indexes a state of being in the world, the life extempore attends to a way of being in the world. this essay draws on more than three years of living in armenia, cumulatively, since 1995—decades spent acquiring a slow, accretive understanding of the post-soviet condition, first in the field of political development, then in archaeology, and finally as an archaeological ethnographer. it is also based on two months of “patchwork ethnography” (günel, varma, and watanabe 2020) consisting of non-consecutive, short-term, intensive field visits in eleven factories in various states of decomposition located in the cities of yerevan, charentsavan, gyumri, ijevan, yeghegnadzor, vanadzor, and aparan. ethnographic fieldwork consisted of about twenty open-ended conversations with former factory workers and former factory directors (now private owners), who, despite their differing positionalities, shared a life lived off decommissioned, nearly abandoned industrial concerns. the study is further informed by unsystematic archaeological surveys at dozens of abandoned industrial sites, as well as archival work. it also relies, humbly and with gratitude, on relationships forged over the course of twenty-five years with armenians of the last soviet generation. the making and unmaking of industrial life in few republics of the soviet union did the process of industrialization prove more transformative than in armenia. on the eve of the 1920 bolshevik takeover, armenia was overwhelmingly a peasant society (suny 1993). moscow in the 1920s focused on increasing agricultural production to feed destitute refugees of the armenian genocide and win over a peasantry not particularly supportive of the bolshevik party (matossian 1962). here as elsewhere, the period of “dictatorial industrialization” (derlugian 2005, 105) began under stalin and continued through the khrushchev era. between 1928 and 1940, armenia’s industrial output increased almost ninefold; an additional sixfold increase from 1940 to 1958 positioned armenia as the fastest-growing industrial economy in the ussr. in subsequent decades, the republic continued to outpace most of the soviet union (nove and newth 1967). heavy, toxic industries predominated, including chemicals, polymers, precision instruments, electronics, and construction materials, alongside the mining of non-ferrous metals such as copper, molybdenum, zinc, and gold. light industries like textiles, processed food, and cognac trailed behind. industry transformed the urban centers of leninakan and yerevan and was the raison d’être for new factory towns like charentsavan and kirovakan. in the countryside, factories popped up around collectivized farms. by the mid-1980s yerevan reportedly set itself apart as the most polluted capital in the ussr after moscow (shakarian 2013). such was the “gift of empire” that the soviets bequeathed (grant 2009). from the late stalin through khrushchev years, armenia experienced the fastest rate of proletarianization in the ussr. party leaders relied on things at their point of production to reengineer society and personhood and create “docile subject dispositions” (verdery 1996, 23). setting aside the micropolitics of industrial life—the clientelism, bargaining, and sabotage that suffused the system—soviet subjects were constituted principally through their making of things. without discounting the role of socialist consumer culture in political subjectivization (chernyshkova 2013; fehérváry 2013; kiaer 2005), in armenia as elsewhere it was on the shop floor that the communist party produced “an enthusiastic and heroic working class that … became the mainstay of socialist construction” (siegelbaum and suny 1994, 21). industrial ruination in post-soviet armenia evades causal explanation by recourse to any singular grand narrative, be it empire, modernity, socialism, or capitalism. it has resulted from all these forces and more. it is tempting to place the weight of explanation on the inefficiencies of the planned economy, and on the dependencies soviet planners created among the republics. soviet collapse, the disappearance of coordination from moscow, and the redefinition of administrative borders into state borders severed ties between newly independent states and led to the “cataclysmic paralysis” (platz 2000, 114) of industry across the former ussr. industrial collapse decimated wage labor, but the material ruination of the factories in armenia derived from other forces. even before the soviet collapse, seismicity had proved a singularly destructive agent. the 1988 spitak earthquake not only reduced many factories to rubble but also led to the shuttering of the metsamor nuclear power plant, a precautionary measure given its location near a tectonic fault. as a major source of domestic energy, its closure hampered armenia’s energy-intensive economy, compounding the earthquake’s damage and creating levels of unemployment highly unusual for late soviet society. metsamor’s closure had ruinous knockoff effects. cast into darkness for much of the 1990s, armenians were left to scavenge for fuel.2 they turned not only to armenia’s scarce forest commons (isaryan 1994) but also to the damaged factories. earthquakes and the geological distribution of fossil fuels are not the work of soviet design, but economic planning intended to preclude self-reliance, the relegation of energy-intensive industries to a fuel-starved republic, and the building of a nuclear plant near an active seismic fault line marked decisions inseparable from soviet machinations. thus, in every respect, armenia’s “crisis of demodernization” (platz 2000, 114) constituted a soviet imperial aftermath. and yet, the large-scale destruction of many factories is less easily explained in the contained frame of soviet history. the proximal causes of rampant asset stripping included poorly regulated privatization and oligarchic corruption. in the scramble for soviet spoils, the winners were armenia’s nomenklatura—the soviet elite, including upper management of industries—whose members were well positioned to purchase vouchers or coupons, kopeks on the ruble from employees desperate for cash, and then turn a profit on the wholesale gutting of durable assets. the inequities of the privatization process thus extended inequities that ran deep in late soviet society (derlugian 2005). but during the 1990s, these inequalities were exacerbated by steeper disparities of wealth formed through the accumulation of industrial assets and by the new owners’ unbridled pursuit of personal enrichment through the stripping of heavy machinery, building materials, and scrap metal. these highly visible practices of enrichment, which left urban outskirts dotted with monstrous industrial carcasses, only became possible under the chaotic conditions of sudden market liberalization. to this day, the ability of a privileged few to profit off the collective assets of armenia’s former wage earners is perceived as a consummate betrayal of the nation at the very moment of its supposed rebirth. this pursuit of wealth accumulation was made possible by an unregulated market, a weak legal structure, and complicity between the private sector and government officials mired in graft. market demand for decommissioned machinery was transnational, and it emerged primarily from iran. in sum, large-scale industrial ruination resulted from systemic conditions that supported the extractive agency of the oligarchs; they percolated upward from historical structures just as they coalesced around new constellations of power and privilege. unlike industrial ruins in the west, decommissioned soviet factories are not places abandoned by the “systemic operation” of capital’s boom-and-bust cycles (gonzález-ruibal 2019, 32); rather, they constitute sites of destruction on which capitalism has been parasitically feeding. in this essay, the large-scale forces and heavy-handed oligarchic practices of the piratical 1990s, which left the eurasian landmass littered with a colossal agglomeration of “imperial debris” (stoler 2013), provide historical backdrop. brought to the fore are the everyday trials of ruination that the 1990s left in their wake. i turn now to what two “extemporists” were doing in 2018–2019 with what they have been left with, to paraphrase ann laura stoler (2016, 353), decades after the plunder of soviet industry. first, i attend more closely to the trials of the chemist and his business partners, who work to unlock salvage value through the exchange and creative repurposing of industrial remnants from khimzavod. next, the owner of a knitting factory in the town of yeghegnadzor presents an alternative relation to the remains of soviet industry, one premised on resisting exchange and deferring salvage value to put old machines back to use as intended, against formidable odds. these ethnographic accounts lead to a broader analysis of how relations to time and matter shape the trials of ruination, and in particular how the habitus of socialist materiality mediates the condition of both runningout of time and beingout of socialist and capitalist time. unlocking salvage value in post-soviet armenia, factory ruins are almost always protected private property. an apparatus of locks, cameras, guards, dogs, and gates formidably assert enclosure. while the livelihood practices underway in the factories can be read alongside ethnographies of reuse (isenhour and reno 2019) and of precarious lives lived off waste (millar 2018), the vigorous defense of property renders these trials of ruination distinct from other forms of post-fordist peripheral work. the decaying factories are neither sites of waste nor abandonment, but represent a liminal property phase between use and discard that characterizes the twilight zone. rarely do absentee owners relinquish ruins to the commons or tacitly permit “gleaning” (bize 2019). supporting the apparatus of ownership is an emergent customary law of the ruins, which prohibits any free pass into the enclosure. access is inextricably linked to expectations for exchange. this forecloses scavenging as a means for capturing salvage value (cf. rakowski 2016), instead demanding structured transactions. armenia’s industrial landscapes are not so much sites of disorder (cf. edensor 2005) as of “an order of a different kind” (doron 2000, 249). i first learned these customary laws in 2018 from the chemist, or khimik, as his friends call him. while khimik has taught himself a great deal about chemistry, he is not, in fact, a chemist. nor is he a thief or a trash-picker. khimik works as a trader, moneylender, and broker who has found sundry ways to extract salvage value from chemical factories, one of the largest sectors of soviet armenia’s economy. on several occasions in 2018 and 2019 i went to work with khimik. one afternoon we met at the factory metro stop at the southern outskirts of yerevan and made our way through the industrial graveyard of the shengavit district. khimik pointed out the ruins along the roads, picked clean by oligarchs under past prime ministers. “they should all be in jail,” he said with cold rage. figure 2. the ruins of khimzavod. photos by lori khatchadourian. we arrived at khimzavod, where, for unspecified reasons, khimik enjoys unusually unfettered access. the factory once employed more than 3,000 workers and produced chemicals for foods, perfumes, electronics, machines, and agriculture. today, some buildings are stripped to their foundations. some are partially destroyed, their interiors exposed to the elements. some remain intact, protected under lock and key. the archaeological correlates of oligarchic asset-stripping show themselves not only in the magnitude of destruction but also in what appear to be staging areas where heavy machinery—reactors, autoclaves, hoppers—stood on display for prospective buyers. we entered khimzavod from a back entrance. khimik, who was looking to procure a flask, invited me to take photographs before we reached the dog and guards. he knows these ruins well. for more than two decades, he has made a living trading in laboratory supplies from the twilight zone, taking advantage of the late soviet “storage economy,” which emphasized stockpiling excessively large inventories (oushakine 2014, 207). in the specialized world of the ruins economy, khimik’s expertise is glass. as we sipped unsweetened coffee with the guards in a gutted factory cafeteria, one of the men asked khimik if he could help him find a good motor. “if you want glass, i’ll give you glass,” khimik replied. “but what business do i have with motors?” figure 3. equipment from khimzavod moved to exterior spaces. photos by lori khatchadourian. no one plans for a life lived off ruins. once a well-heeled moneylender (and before that a worker in a hydroelectric plant), the chemist fell into this line of work in the late 1990s after a borrower defaulted. the debtor forfeited his collateral only disingenuously, according to khimik, in the form of ostensibly dead assets from his recently privatized, decommissioned chemical factory. the chemist turned to improvisation, finding ways to reap salvage value from the remnants. realizing this, the owner blocked access to the factory, leaving khimik to swallow his losses and ply his newfound trade as a broker of soviet laboratory supplies. “you have to support your family somehow, am i right?” he asked me rhetorically. what began as petty trade “buying and selling small, unimportant things” developed into transactions worth thousands of dollars. in our first meeting, the chemist handed me his business card, the phrase laboratory supplies displayed against a backdrop of flasks. khimik appreciates the timelessness of scientific glass. “here’s the deal,” he told me at his home, as we rummaged through dusty storerooms crammed from floor to ceiling with glassware: “if you wash glass, it turns completely new again.” rather than engage through practices of reuse a moral imperative to deliberately resist the excesses of consumer culture and develop alternatives to capitalist markets (isenhour and reno 2019), khimik alerts us to a countercurrent in which reuse provides the very means of entering and expanding the market. figure 4. a storeroom at khimik’s home compound. photo by lori khatchadourian. the chemist earned his nickname not merely because of his unique expertise in buying and selling chemical supplies but because he himself is an alchemist who puts soviet things to new uses. his particular magic is to assemble distilleries that produce 100 proof vodka with nothing short of scientific precision using glass from the factories. khimik’s storerooms contain instructional manuals that he also gathered, thinking they may come in handy. in time, he used them to teach himself distillation. improvisational carework comes naturally to the former proletariat. khimik is committed to realizing returns on the time and money invested in his contraptions, but he lacks the capital to move through the regulatory hoops for becoming a registered alcohol manufacturer. it is difficult to find investors for a business dependent on such deviant machines; their and his market marginality are obstacles in the chemist’s trial to extract value from ruins. yet his work as a broker in soviet glass allows for a more stable livelihood. after all, the factory glass will one day run out. figure 5. the chemist’s distilleries. photos by lori khatchadourian. the chemist also facilitates the transit of soviet-made glass into capitalist chains of production and consumption. in so doing, khimik and his associates normalize the abnormalities of privatization by enabling owners of defunct companies to profit from the sale of assets. his clients range from armenia’s leading enterprises, like the proshyan brandy factory, to unknown end users working through intermediaries. in one case, a trial to extract salvage value was hampered by the material properties of glass. a client requested 20,000 test tubes, offering to pay դ50 per tube (totaling about us$2,100). khimik called his contacts across armenia to confirm that he could fill the order. factory owners agreed to sell the tubes legally, for դ30 each, if khimik shouldered the 5 percent sales tax they would have to pay. the tubes were transferred to the buyer, who paid for them but deducted the cost of 2,000 tubes that, unbeknownst to khimik, had broken in their packaging. glass is less susceptible to obsolescence than machinery and, unlike metal, its salvage value is not diminished by the costs of corrosion, collection, and smelting. but it is not shock resistant. having already paid the taxes on the full 20,000 test tubes, khimik suffered a loss. sometimes, it is possible to follow the persistent remnants along their unlikely itineraries out of the factories and into new chains of production in order to witness the encounter of socialist and capitalist materialities in the trials of ruination. one of khimik’s dealings was with a high-end company called nairian, a producer of all-natural, non-toxic, cruelty-free beauty products. selling us$8 soap bars and related products in swanky yerevan shops, an online store, and on amazon, the company caters to armenia’s diaspora and the nouveaux riches. in 2018, i visited the nairian eco-farm and laboratory facilities in the town of aragyugh to follow the “biography” of khimik’s glass and understand how he discovers value in the folding of soviet materiality into capitalist production. as we drove into the mountains of the kotayk province, nairian’s co-owner, ara, explained that initially they considered locating their facility in a former chemical factory in yerevan, but the plundered industrial zone appeared too abject for a beauty company. ninety percent of nairian’s equipment is sourced from old chemical factories. while still a startup, the company’s scientists distilled essential oils using flasks purchased from the chemist. those have since been replaced, but other equipment, such as autoclaves and vats from khimzavod, remain in use, refitted to manufacture the company’s serums, cleansers, and other products. a military-grade cauldron (пищеварочный котел, гост 11697-66) was modified for saponification. to estimate oil yields, plants are weighed on a heavy-duty scale of 1981 vintage (гост 9483-73). here, toxic industry’s remnants are upcycled to produce all-natural luxury goods. in our last meeting, khimik had a new plan for his vodka business. instead of selling the spirit, he would invite customers to bring fruit from their gardens to distill their own vodka using his equipment, evidently a business model with an easier licensing process. it has to happen this year if it is going to happen at all, he told me in 2019. but the chemist didn’t want to close any doors. before we parted ways he suggested that i partner with him in the vodka business, and bring his product to the american market for a 50 percent cut. quintessential extemporization. the chemist proposed a risky partnership with a new and unqualified acquaintance on the fly, lest any opportunity that presents itself in the moment be missed. the chemist knows that i do not have the skills or experience of an importer or retail distributor, but when time is short, it cannot hurt to try. figure 6. refitted and upcycled equipment from khimzavod at the nairian factory: distillery from old flasks (top left); distillery from old autoclave (top right); cauldron used for saponification (bottom left); soviet vintage scale to weigh plants (bottom right). photos by lori khatchadourian. resisting salvage value material carework takes many forms. it is fair to ask what is caring about disassembly, about taking things apart and pulling the pieces into new configurations, sacrificing the value of the whole for the value of the part, about foreclosing the prospect of new beginnings with old things. the care that humans show toward things with which they are locked in dependency can also be restorative, aimed at preserving things as they once were, and in turn producing new formations (hodder 2012). i turn now to the extemporist activities of a former factory director, now private owner, whose trials of ruination consist not of extracting salvage value but of resisting the sale of his factory’s assets to one day resume production with dormant and dying equipment. in yeghegnadzor, a city in armenia’s vayots dzor province, hayk, the owner of a knitting factory, lives a life extempore dedicated to preserving his shuttered plant to one day liberate it from the twilight zone. founded in 1978, the yeghegnazor knitting factory exemplifies the unbounded reach of the soviet military-industrial complex. on the face of it, the factory specialized in children’s knitwear and undergarments, 80 percent of which were exported throughout the soviet bloc. but, like so many soviet concerns, it had a dual purpose. alongside children’s sweaters and underwear, the factory produced gloves and socks for the army. it was “a fundamental military enterprise,” said hayk. the production and distribution of gloves nicely exemplifies the workings of the soviet economy. each day, twenty tons of fabric for the gloves reached yeghegnadzor from a factory in the ural mountains. every third day, a twenty-ton container of gloves was shipped by train to a military facility in moscow, where the gloves were redistributed to defense units across the country. according to hayk, this was the only factory in the ussr that made gloves for the ministry of defense. the enterprise employed some 1,200 women in its main factory and three affiliate branches in nearby wool-producing villages. the factory continued to operate as a public enterprise through the dark years of the 1990s, when hayk took to the forests to gather timber to heat it. by that point, workers were hand-knitting wool socks for armenian forces in the first nagorno-karabakh war. five days after the factory’s privatization in 1998, hayk became embroiled in a legal dispute. armenia’s state revenue committee sued the company on charges of tax evasion, even though it had successfully filed for bankruptcy and had scarcely any debts. five years later, the court decided in the company’s favor, but the state revenue committee refused to accept the judgment. tax authorities froze the factory’s assets, imposed steep, arbitrary fines, and sequestered thirty machines. “they wanted to steal,” hayk said of the state committee. “take the machines and sell them in iran.” there were many more lawsuits and hundreds of court proceedings. for years, the factory lay dormant, its machines creeping toward obsolescence. hayk spent more than two decades fighting for the future of the factory. he sold his home and barely managed to put his kids through college. “the word court was a synonym for bribe,” he told me. “tax authorities would just hand over money to judges, and the most illegal decisions would be made.” the ordeal ended following armenia’s 2018 velvet revolution, a series of anti-government, non-violent protests that forced the resignation of serzh sargsyan as prime minister and led to sweeping anti-corruption efforts. a judge ruled that much of the state revenue committee’s case was unfounded. all that remains is a reduced us$10,000 debt. hayk contests even this, and felt angry that he was not compensated for twenty years of lost time. he told me he intended to take the case to the european court of human rights. but hayk worried that time was not on his side, and if he didn’t pay soon “they’ll come and take my machines. maybe in one month.” his trial of ruination is as much a literal, legal trial as a personal struggle against the demise of his machines and an embodied race against time as he, just as the chemist, enters into advanced age. figure 7. the yeghegnadzor knitting factory. photo by lori khatchadourian. as tax authorities held the factory hostage, its eventual revitalization became the focus of hayk’s life’s work. the yeghegnadzor knitting factory is a fossil of late-soviet light industry, and emphatically not a ruin. to render it as such would be to discount the very potential vitality that sustains hayk in his trials (see also middleton 2021). as hayk tells it, “for the most part, the communists left, and since then, not a thing here has been touched.” on the contrary, he has invested significant savings into preserving the factory’s use-value, for instance installing a new roof so that the hibernating machines would not succumb to water damage, and regularly replacing broken windows. the machines may be rusty, antiquated, and dusty, he acknowledged, but they work, and could be put to use until he has the capital to buy new equipment. he has installed locks and comes to the factory “morning, noon, and night” to guard it. hayk is deeply critical of the orgies of oligarchic plunder that defined the 1990s, which he says were orchestrated in part by powerful industrialist telman ter-petrosyan, the brother of armenia’s first president. he witnessed events that many have recounted but that remain absent from the media archive of those years. he told me: yeghegnadzor is on the road between yerevan and iran, and we saw it with our own eyes, all day, all night, beginning in 1994, 1995. … i would watch them [ter-petrosyan’s people] hauling such great machines that—being an engineer and understanding what they were—i would think, “if only just one of those machines were mine.” out in the wide open! there were some machines that the iranians didn’t even put to use. someone i know went to iran, said there are all these soviet machines piled up like a haystack in a desolate field near [unintelligible] metro. they’ve been picked apart. there was gold, silver, mercury, valuable metals in those machines. they separate the steel, the cast iron, the colorful metals. they took the machines from armenia for measly kopecks. the scrap metal they sell to turkey or pakistan for $200, $300 per ton. for hayk, the government-backed wholesale stripping of the country’s assets and the fate of his factory, targeted by officials seeking to grab the salvage value of its knitting machines, are inseparable. together they attest to intentionally destructive governance. speaking of armenia’s three post-soviet leaders, he said, “when independence and levon ter-petrosyan came, they thought, let’s see how quickly we can destroy this country. the sooner we destroy, the sooner we will build. they destroyed quickly, but they forgot all about building. levon destroyed it; [robert] kocharyan ruined it; serzh completely privatized it to himself.” such searing resentment is unanimous among my interlocutors. far from abetting the salvage economy, hayk’s trial has been to resist it. he wanted to put the machines and their operators back to work: “an iranian came, wanting to buy one of my spinning machines. i said no. … if i can close the debt, i will rescue those thirty machines. if not …,” his voice trailed off. hayk’s deeply felt but tenuously founded dreams for those machines would seem to reflect what lauren berlant (2011, 21) calls “cruel optimism,” yet here hayk maintains an attachment to a “problematic object” both already and not yet lost. the cruelty of hayk’s optimism is that it results from the broken promises of both liberal capitalism and socialism. in the climate of hope that swept the country following the velvet revolution, hayk seized the moment, extemporizing. days after the revolution, he sent letters to the new prime minister, the director of the national security service, the minister of justice, and the human rights defender. months later, he mobilized people from yeghegnadzor to protest in the capital, demanding the reopening of the factory. unlike most privatized enterprises, the knitting factory is an open joint-stock company. former employees, “now grandmothers,” hayk said with fondness, retain shares in the business. “there are 309 owners of this privatized enterprise, 95 percent of whom are the women who worked here,” hayk notes. many in yeghegnadzor feel invested in hayk’s cause. he promises the return of three hundred jobs if the factory reopens, and speaks passionately about industry as the means toward national self-sufficiency. “we should make what we need to dress ourselves. … did you see the words on the side of the building? one letter has fallen, but the rest are there. it says ‘glory to work.’” suddenly reinventing himself as an activist, hayk mobilized the community around the promise of wage labor. figure 8. assembled machines and oak barrels in hayk’s workshop on the grounds of the yeghegnadzor factory. photos by lori khatchadourian. but activism only made for his most recent act of extemporization. while hayk waited for his factory, he decided to launch a new business venture: manufacturing oak wood barrels for wine and brandy production. the forests of his home province are rich in oak, the required wood for brandy’s aging, and he has the necessary technical skills. hayk worked in a factory that made satellite parts before coming to the knitting factory. as scholars of improvisation have long recognized, extemporization entails “a union of some ad hockery with some know-how” and “the pitting of an acquired competence or skill against an unprogrammed opportunity” (ryle 1976, 77). while the legal dispute stretched on, hayk built a structure on the grounds of the knitting factory and assembled a stunning array of apparatuses to make barrels using machines otherwise destined for the foundry, as well as an assortment of other contraptions—a machine for shelling sunflower seeds that he will use to distill sunflower oil, a machine for pressing lumber waste into bricks that can be used as firewood, and so forth. “there is no useless metal,” he told me, “only useless people.” here, the “industrialist ethos of work” so central to state socialism, and in many postsocialist contexts impossible to realize, remains the invigorating affective register, and moral failure belongs to those who do not exercise their creative potency (rajković 2018, 49). the profits from the barrel business are invested in the upkeep of the decaying factory. figure 9. display of soviet artifacts in the director’s office of the yeghegnadzor knitting factory. photo by lori khatchadourian. at some point, hayk realized that his factory could appeal to socialist nostalgia and decided to try his hand at the “culturalization of industrial ruins” (barndt 2010, 276), turning the suspended factory into an unofficial museum. on my first visit to the knitting factory, he gave me a guided tour, saying, “turn on your voice recorder and we’ll begin.” in the dusty building, hayk paused to offer brief recitations about various objects: “here is a singer sewing machine made in nazi germany”; “here are locked workers’ safes—the owners died but i haven’t cut the locks”; “this machine is nearly one hundred years old and it still works”; “these are our gas masks, in case of chemical attack.” hayk’s improvisational curatorial practice caters to the ruination tourist’s taste for the sensational, the bizarre, the authentic: “if someone was a spy in the soviet union, whether in vladivostok or kaliningrad, for sure they were wearing my gloves.” when we arrived at a room that stores wool socks made for the war effort, he offered me a pair as a souvenir. the tour culminated in the director’s office, where he had brought together an assemblage of high-impact artifacts into an improvised exhibition: lenin’s portrait; a volume from lenin’s collected works; russian and armenian typewriters; a gas mask; a geiger counter; a device for identifying attack by mustard gas, phosgene, etc.; and an unfurled workers’ banner—the so-called transferable red banner (переходящее знамя)—awarded annually to factory collectives “for high performance in fulfilling the plan in a socialist competition.” on another table, samples of the factory’s products, including the spy gloves, were displayed with handwritten artifact labels. i asked hayk how many visitors had come to the factory. “many,” he replied, “hundreds, thousands.” he claimed that the site appears on online tourist itineraries “as a preserved soviet enterprise,” but i haven’t been able to find it, and there is little indication that the factory functions as a museum (i was not shown a visitors’ log, nor is there a ticket booth, although reddit and blog posts suggest paying hayk դ5,000 [us$10] for individual tours and դ10,000 [us$20] for groups, cash only). to hayk, “the factory is a museum now,” but as an unregistered heritage institution, it might be more accurate to call it a museological extemporization, quite unlike projects elsewhere in postcommunist europe that aestheticize industrial ruins (barndt 2010; oushakine 2019; pusca 2010). hayk seems to affirm berlant’s (2011, 2) point that optimism is cruel when “the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.” it was in the director’s office that i began to understand the relationship between hayk’s curatorial sensibility and the trial of ruination in which he is engaged. on the director’s desk he had arrayed a seemingly incongruous assortment of objects: shoes worn by factory workers, the building’s intercom, blank union cards, one of which he gave to me. these artifacts were perfectly commensurate with the room’s other museological displays. but placed beside them were unrelated documents attesting to his business ventures and credentials, such as brochures advertising the oak barrels and certificates from trainings he attended in the united states and europe. in other words, hayk plays with the idiom of heritage tourism not only to generate revenue but also to attract investors for the revitalization of the knitting factory. museological extemporization constitutes a business tactic deployed in response to the forces of ruination, legal and material. hayk—quite like khimik in offering me a 50 percent cut of any vodka i exported to the united states—is poised to discover that any given visitor might be the one who joins him in this trial. before i departed, hayk handed me a trilingual informational document reading, “business invitation to armenia: ‘taron’ ojsc invites partner-investors on mutually profitable terms for the production of textile clothes, handmade carpets, jams, juices, marmalades, teas, dried fruit, fruit vodka.” he asked me to give it to whomever i could in the united states. when i responded that, as a researcher, business remains outside my sphere of expertise, he seemed bewildered by the rigid box i was satisfied to inhabit and laughed in gentle reproach, as if to say, “can’t you extemporize?” temporality and materiality in the trials of ruination recent studies of the old, the ruined, the lost, or the failed often conjure nostalgia and other past-oriented affects as prevailing temporal postures. nostalgia emerges as a dominant temporal and affective motif in the ruins of modernity when the livelihoods of those engaged in such memory work are not directly dependent on the remnants of their past-oriented imaginaries. for example, nostalgia for fordism in postindustrial detroit is possible because detroit’s white suburbanites do not live precariously off the decaying factories they romanticize (steinmetz 2010). “secondhand nostalgia” is possible in some parts of the former ussr because the post-soviet generation that is stirred and charmed by the power of soviet remnants does not subsist off that very debris (oushakine 2019). “critical nostalgia” can be at play in new orleans because the ruins that profoundly shape the city’s aesthetic sensibilities are not directly enlisted in everyday, individual struggles to discover economic value in them (dawdy 2016). nostalgia blooms in the temporal imagination of the distant ruins gazer, removed and detached from the precarity of loss (huyssen 2006). yet for those whose livlihoods are tethered to the remnants of decline and failure, other temporal dispositions exceed or even eclipse the nostalgic register, even if attachments to lost worlds also persist. nostalgia for the past becomes inseparable from hopes for the future (pelkmans 2013), or from once expected futures (yarrow 2017; finkelstein 2019). threatened lifeways under conditions of decline require dwelling meaningfully in the “meantime” and “staying with the present” as a temporal-political tactic to forestall unwanted futures (middleton 2021). for their part, khimik and hayk have little time for nostalgia, unless, as with hayk’s museum, it can assist them in their trials. they thus alert us to an alternative experience of time under conditions of ruination inflected not by a receding past, but by urgency and immediacy. the life extempore entails a relation to time that dwells in the present, encourages experimentation, and embraces the kind of spontaneity that prompted both khimik and hayk to invite me into business partnerships. the trials of ruination enlist them and others not into nostalgic practices, but into high-stakes, tactical maneuvers to revalue soviet remnants in the here and now. as we saw with hayk’s museological extemporization, the capacity of soviet artifacts to engender nostalgic sensations in their afterlife is not only a matter of affect, resonance, and subject formation (oushakine 2019); it is also a performative asset—an economic resource in the trials to discover value from a declining material order. for people of the late-soviet generation who live a life extempore, the time left to attain the good life is running out. plans may not come to fruition in the years that remain. the vodka business may not come to pass, and the knitting factory may never be revived. time threatens not only human lives but the life cycle of things as well: as time passes, decay accelerates. hayk’s machines will complete their fall into obsolescence, a decaying material order that will not wait for better times. and the finite material offerings of the factories on which khimik depends are being depleted. if value is to be discovered from the ruins, now is the time to do it. experientially, the immediate and future-oriented temporality of the trials of ruination is distinct from the endurance that shapes autonomous self-employment involving, say, recyclable garbage, where the valued resource is effectively unlimited (millar 2018). life extempore calls up a sense of improvisational urgency. it is not a life without regard for the past or the future, but one in which past and future imaginaries are overcome by constant creative adjustments in the present, and little time. the senses in which extemporists live a life ex tempore are in fact multiple. thus far, i have focused on their experience of time as running out, a condition that enjoins them into impromptu interactions with people and things. but in addition to this experiential extemporization, they are also ex tempore in an existential sense, displaced from both the time of the socialist state and the time of the capitalist market. the time of the socialist state was a prophesied, developmental temporality that moved inexorably along the path to noncapitalism through a multiplicity of related temporal modalities (ssorin-chaikov 2017). while socialist time had lost its ideological meaning as early as the 1950s, most of my interlocutors, including hayk, served as leaders in their local komsomol (the soviet youth organization) and reproduced the utterances of late socialism (yurchak 2006). khimik and hayk reached adulthood on these performed promises of socialist time, only to be definitively cast out from that utopian vision in 1991. yet the time of the market has not provided refuge. capitalist temporality, as walter benjamin and others teach us, is premised on the insistent valorization of the new, and on ruptures between past and present (dawdy 2010)—a temporal ideology to which extemporists do not subscribe. the temporality of the global market renders soviet objects anachronistic: things out of proper (i.e., present) time. but hayk and the chemist do not accept untimely matter as such; instead, they recognize the persistence of things—an endurance that hinges on their relations to other things (e.g., their use and exchange value) and not their relation to a discrete unit within a successive understanding of time (lucas 2015). in the life extempore, the supposed obsolescence of a machinic order is not the end but the beginning of opportunity, a highly unorthodox posture in armenia’s neoliberal economy. in other words, hayk and the chemist are existentially ex tempore to the extent that they are outcasts of both socialist and capitalist time. from this exteriority, in their trials they harness the vanishing habitus of socialist materiality to gain a foothold in the marketplace. all of the contraptions discussed above—khimik’s vodka distilleries and the refitted machines used at nairian (both made from khimzavod’s remnants) and the assorted devices in hayk’s workshop used to finance the upkeep of the knitting factory—took shape in the frame of a soviet conceptualization of human-thing relations. by soviet materiality i am referring to what alexey golubev (2020, 27) calls vernacular soviet “techno-utopianism,” the ethos that “represented the soviet person as a creative subject, a representative of the species homo creativus.” soviet inventor genrikh altshuller’s theory of inventive problem solving (triz) construed machines and materials as “‘infinitely flexible,’ as possessing a hidden potential for their more effective usage, and as fully subordinate to the human will” (golubev 2020, 29). in the 1970s and 1980s, triz emerged as an extremely popular movement and didactic system. it relates closely to another aspect of soviet materiality, namely, the late soviet do-it-yourself culture of extending the life cycle of material things for as long as conceivably possible, which was not only a state-supported response to commodity deficit but also a process of subjectivization centered on making things with one’s own hands (golubev and smolyak 2013). in the do-it-yourself culture of late socialism, “any given thing could become anything else, and thus performed the function of raw material or assembly kit even if it was brand new” (golubev 2020, 33). the late-soviet practice of “working for yourself” (rabota na sebia), making and repairing things using factory resources (cмоляк 2014), belongs to this same system of human-thing relations. for hayk and khimik’s generation, inventing machines, making things with one’s own hands (rukodelie), applying ingenuity, bending the material world to human will were essential not only to masculine self-fashioning but, as the discourse went, to socialist progress and the building of a communist future (golubev 2020, 30). these embodied practices of the soviet proletariat, which were meant to create a socialist material order and realize a utopian vision, are now used to draw persistent soviet matter out of the twilight zone and into relations of capital.3 they remain strongly inflected with an ethos of progress and morality. hayk makes and sells oak barrels so that he can, one day, revive the knitting factory, because armenians “should make what we need to dress ourselves.” the scrap metal market is unscrupulous because “there is no useless metal.” this moral residue of a system of subject-formation premised on making and using materials for as long as possible, and in as many ways as possible, sets the life extempore apart from the lives of those who tinker in the ruins of industrial capitalism (cf. pine 2019). it is helpful to consider this encounter of systems through reference to what anna tsing (2015, 63) has called “salvage,” by which she means “taking advantage of value produced without capitalist controls” to expand capitalism’s reach. like the matsutake mushroom pickers of tsing’s study, khimik and others draw on skills and habits of mind that are “simultaneously inside and outside capitalism” (tsing 2015, 63). yet an important difference obtains. in tsing’s (2015, 63) study, the agents of “salvage accumulation” are lead firms, looking to “amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced.” in contrast, in armenia’s ruins economy, it is the extemporist activities that drive the process of bringing soviet salvage to capital. this inversion affects the market and leaves its own mark. consider khimik’s new trial over the glass tubing, which opened this essay. success depends on whether the persistent remnants can stand up for substitution against global commodities, in this case quartz tubing from china. when we toured the backyard of his home in 2018, khimik detailed his evasion of market prices through the procurement of goods from the twilight zone that he will resell: “i paid $100 for this, but in a shop it would cost some €800. do you see this machine? the glass alone is worth €500, but i gave only $300 for it. i gave $100 for this, but a new one in the store costs դ1,200,000 [$2,500].” in the ruins economy, the price of undead soviet commodities has nothing to do with labor and investment, or even with supply in the secondhand market; rather, it depends on personal relations, faith in the persistence of matter, and a judgment concerning the upper threshold of salvage value relative to the market value of new equivalents. traders like khimik harness never-untimely soviet things to help businesses intercept global supply chains. they enter the market by disrupting it. the inversion noted above also leaves a socialist residue, because the folding of soviet materiality into capitalism produces an incomplete shift across different “regimes of value” (appadurai 1986). the metamorphosis of soviet things into capitalist commodities is not total. suffice it to quote serguei a. oushakine’s (2014, 204) discussion of the soviet commodity, drawing on marx’s capital: in the situation of planned production and regulated prices and salaries, neither exchange-value (the commodity’s ability to generate different regimes of evaluation during its market circulation phase) nor even value (the aggregate expenditure of labor and ‘material constituents’) held any particular importance or interest. … the soviet commodity made itself known first and foremost as a material thing—through its “sensuous characteristics” and, consequently, through its ability to meet or (more commonly) to fail the requirements of quality and functionality. in the soviet economy, use-value was paramount, not exchange value. even as the remnants of socialist production become revalued within the logics of capital in a process akin to what arjun appadurai (1986, 16) calls “commodities by diversion,” this transformation remains somehow incomplete. the “sensuous characteristics” of objects still hold sway through the personal, bodily forms of labor required to realize their use-value. persistent soviet things do not permit reuse precisely as they are. resurrection requires rukodelie, making things with one’s own hands, with all the attendant sensory pleasures (widdis 2009). the resulting contraptions will be used to produce capitalist consumer goods, but they were never mass-produced through abstract labor on an assembly line. they acquire an insistent singularity (kopytoff 1986). in fact, one person in particular takes credit for refitting and operating the autoclave used to produce beauty products at nairian: khimik’s son. he learned such rukodelie from his father. unlike capitalist commodity relations, far from being concealed, the social origins of such improvisation are transparent because it requires idiosyncrasy and creativity embedded in social relations. in tsing’s terms, when it comes to soviet salvage, capital does not entirely control the conditions of revaluation. in the transfiguration into capitalist commodities of things once belonging to a planned economy, there is a socialist remainder. conclusion this article has focused on post-soviet armenia’s industrial twilight zone, a term that calls up a liminal ontological condition between use and abandonment, “a time of agony that is non-systemic but not fully archaeological either” (gonzález-ruibal 2019, 132). to investigate the twilight zone means to study “what happened after everything happened” (gonzález-ruibal 2019, 132). the privatized post-soviet twilight zone offers new insights into both the possible forms of life in ruins and the temporal and material logics through which informal economic practices shape relations of capital. i introduced the concept of trials of ruination to refer to the struggles to unlock or forestall the salvage value of soviet industrial matter that is decaying, becoming obsolete, and simply diminishing. the primary tactic in the trials of ruination is extemporization, here understood as condensing the temporality and materiality of the trials. life extempore complicates the prevailing temporality of nostalgia that informs much writing on ruins, alerting us to an orientation to time grounded firmly in the present, marked by a sense of urgency as humans and nonhumans enter into senescence, requiring creativity and spontaneity, and existentially linked to a position of exteriority from dominant temporal ideologies of socialism and capitalism. from this marginal vantage, the life extempore calls on the conventions and ethics of socialist materiality to bring soviet salvage to capital through minor but real disruptions of global supply chains and the refusal of capitalism’s fetish of the new. a life extempore encompasses both an experiential sense of living for the moment and being short on time, and an existential sense of displacement from the temporal logics of socialism and capitalism. in the trials of ruination, socialist and capitalist materialities collide. i made the case above that the life extempore is not reducible to precarity. yet neither is it a life of freedom, like the one often associated with artistic improvisational practice. for all its creativity, extemporization is less empowering than forced by structural and material constraints. but to practitioners, securing gains within conditions of loss through considered inventiveness itself proves sustaining. to paraphrase lydia goehr’s (2016, 5) analysis of friedrich nietzsche on improvisation, the life extempore is lived on a post-soviet tightrope, “with and between joy and suffering, affirmation and doubt, experimentation and habit.” as in all trials, during trials of ruination outcomes remain open-ended. the horizon of possibilities includes stasis, dystopian endings, and inventive reimaginings. abstract this essay attends to the temporal and material relations through which the former soviet proletariat and former factory directors pull the remnants of the socialist factory into relations of capital. i introduce the concept of trials of ruination to refer to the struggles to discover value in old things, when the temporal and material logics of capital, and the waning life course of objects and humans, test the limits of those efforts. a life extempore is one in which the primary tactic for discovering value is perpetual extemporization, doing things one never planned or was trained to do. life extempore alerts us to an orientation to time that is grounded firmly in the present, marked by a sense of urgency, requiring creativity and spontaneity, and existentially linked to a position of exteriority from dominant temporal ideologies of socialism and capitalism. this study focuses on the improvisational practices of two “extemporists”, and their efforts to revalue the persistent material world of soviet industry. [ruins; postindustrial; value; temporality; materiality; post-soviet; armenia] ամփոփում հոդվածում քննարկվում են այն ժամանակային և նյութական առնչակցությունները, որոնց միջոցով նախկին խորհրդային պրոլետարիատը և գործարանների նախկին տնօրենները կապիտալի հարաբերությունների մեջ են ներքաշում սոցիալիստական գործարանի մնացորդները։ ես առաջարկում եմ «փլատականացման փորձության» (“trials of ruination”) կոնցեպտը, որն անդրադառնում է հին իրերի մեջ արժեք գտնելու համար պայքարին, երբ կապիտալի ժամանակային և նյութական տրամաբանությունը, ինչպես նաև առարկաների և մարդկանց կրճատվող կենսընթացները փորձարկման են ենթարկում այդ ջանքերի սահմանները: «extempore», այսինքն «հանպատրաստից” կյանքը այնպիսի մի վիճակ է, երբ արժեքի բացահայտման հիմնական մարտավարությունը հավերժական մի փորձարկում է, որի ընթացքում արվում են այնպիսի բաներ, որոնք երբեք չեն պլանավորվել կամ սովորական չեն համարվել։ «extempore»-կյանքը ժամանակային առումով միշտ վերաբերում է ներկային, նշանավորված է հրատապության զգացմամբ, պահանջում է ստեղծագործականություն ու ինքնաբխություն և էքզիստենցիալ կերպով կապված է տարբեր ժամանակներում գերիշխող սոցիալիզմի և կապիտալիզմի գաղափարախոսություններից դուրս գտնվող դիրքավորման հետ։ այս ուսումնասիրությունը անդրադառնում է «extempore» կյանքով ապրող երկու անհատների իմպրովիզացիոն պրակտիկաներին և խորհրդային արդյունաբերության դիմակայող նյութականությունը վերարժևորելու նրանց ջանքերին. [ավերակներ; հետարդյունաբերական; արժեք; ժամանակայնություն; նյութականություն; հետխորհրդային; հայաստան] резюме в этой статье анализируются временные и материальные отношения, посредством которых бывший советский пролетариат и бывшие директоры промышленных предприятий втягивают останки социалистических заводов и фабрик в отношения капитала. я ввожу концепцию «испытания руинизацией», которая характеризует борьбу за обнаружение ценности старых вещей, в процессе которой временная и материальная логика капитала и сокращающиеся сроки жизни объектов и людей подвергают пределы этих усилий испытанию. жизнь extempore, то есть экспромтом описывается как состояние, при котором основные тактики по обнаружению ценности представляют из себя непрерывный поиск и попытки делать вещи, которые никогда не делались раньше и никогда не были привычными. жизнь extempore приводит нас к временной ориентации на настоящее, отмечена чувством срочности, требует изобретательности и спонтанности, а также в экзистенциальном смысле связана с позицией, которая всегда вне доминантных в то или иное время идеологий социализма и капитализма. исследование сфокусировано на импровизационных практиках двух персонажей, живущих extempore и их усилиях по переоценке сохранившейся материальности советского индустриального периода. [руины; пост-индустриальный; ценность; темпоральность; материальность; постсоветский; армения] notes acknowledgments i am especially grateful to the chemist and to hayk for allowing me to spend time in their reality. in 2019, i presented early versions of this study at the theoretical archaeology group, as well as at a conference and seminar of the department of cultural studies at yerevan state university, where colleagues provided valued feedback. the essay developed in earnest while i was a faculty fellow at cornell’s society for the humanities (2019–2020), and i am grateful to paul fleming and the other fellows who commented on early drafts, especially dana powell, rachel prentice, mary grace albanese, athena kirk, alena williams, and james redfield. many others offered valuable feedback along the way, including adam t. smith, raffi khatchadourian, marina welker, caitlin desilvey, ben anderson, and durba ghosh, as did students in my ruins of modernity seminar. i am particularly appreciative of yulia antonyan for our many conversations, and for her assistance with the translated abstracts. the article benefited greatly from the intellectual generosity of the four reviewers and the editors at cultural anthropology, especially heather paxson, whose deft editorial hand brought the article to its final form. this research was supported with grants from cornell’s society for the humanities and the einaudi center for international studies. 1. see oxford english dictionary. 2. drastamat isaryan (1994, 28) recounts an anecdote of the 1990s that captures the trade-off between independence and energy: “the country is not only independent of russia, it’s also independent of gas, light, warm water, and heat.” 3. this transfer of socialist labor practices into capitalist production recalls the endurance of “socialist personhood” in the firm in privatized poland (dunn 2004). references appadurai, arjun 1986 “introduction: commodities and the politics of value.” in the 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and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.10 cultural anthropology: waste donations: shopkeeper–waste picker relations in istanbul and the limits of hospitable giving 383 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 383-409, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.01 waste donations: shopkeeper–waste picker relations in istanbul and the limits of hospitable giving kevin yildirim university of cambridge https://orcid.org/0009-0002-8696-016x one june day in 2021, i stood on a quiet street outside an aluminum workshop in dudullu, a working-class district on istanbul’s northeastern periphery. in the midday heat, i watched my friend and interlocutor, a fifty-year-old man named bilal, enter the one-story building. inside, a male employee wearing overalls greeted him by name. he directed bilal to a corner of the workshop, where a small pile of cardboard rested on the cement floor. bilal walked over and gathered the materials in his hands. he then carried the cardboard out of the workshop, thanking the worker as he left. “did you pay for that?” i asked him in turkish. no, bilal answered, “there’s no money” (para yok). he flattened the cardboard boxes, shoved them into his large plastic pull-cart, and hauled his load down the street (figure 1). throughout the afternoon, bilal’s pull-cart came to hold nearly fifty kilograms of recyclable plastic and paper. apart from finding discarded items in municipal dumpsters—how waste pickers in istanbul typically locate recyclable objects—bilal also gathered at least half of his materials from a group of people whom he called his “customers” (müşteri). the employee in the aluminum workshop had been one of roughly twenty-five people who regularly gave bilal recyclables. originally from a town in the azad kashmir region of pakistan, 384bilal had come to turkey six years earlier to earn money and support his family. having worked as a waste picker for the majority of this time, bilal was experienced and effective in his job, and he was fully aware of the advantages of sourcing recyclables from local shopkeepers.1 for one, doing this allowed him to avoid handling dirty, non-recyclable waste in municipal dumpsters. it also added a social dimension to what could otherwise be a stigmatized and alienating mode of informal work. as i followed bilal on his collection route that day, i grew curious about his customers, and why, in a city with thousands of waste pickers, they would give their recyclable waste to him. later that afternoon, i began to learn why during a conversation i had with bilal and his favorite customer, ahmet, who was in his forties and owned a small bakery on a main street in the neighborhood. a turkish citizen of kurdish ethnicity, ahmet had migrated with his family to istanbul 385from the province of van in southeast turkey in the late 1990s. he had just opened his bakery that winter, at the height of the covid-19 pandemic, and by his own account, business had been slow. that afternoon in june, the three of us sat on the bakery’s unfinished terrace drinking coke. when i asked ahmet about their relationship, he put a hand on bilal’s shoulder and said, “everyone’s not like bilal. he is a good and honest [dürüst] person who keeps his word. when he calls and says that he is going to come to collect [recyclable] materials [malzeme], he comes.” ahmet said there was only one other waste picker with such a strong reputation in the neighborhood: a former dentist from afghanistan, though he couldn’t remember his name. but these are honest people, he told me, implying that others were not. plus, ahmet continued, bilal had left his family and children in pakistan to come to turkey and earn his “bread money” (ekmek parası)—a term in turkish that denotes money hard earned from honest work, enabling the poor to survive. knowing that bilal was in need and far from home, ahmet felt obliged to “give him [recyclable] materials to benefit him” (yararlansın diye ona malzeme veriyoruz). while ahmet gladly helped bilal in this way, he also clarified that any assistance was conditional. “bilal is a good person,” he reiterated. “if someone lied to me, i wouldn’t do the same for that person.” figure 1. bilal pulls his cart down a residential street in dudullu. photo by kevin yildirim. by giving his waste to bilal for nothing in return, ahmet was helping a poor migrant waste picker while also—however inadvertently—reproducing a hierarchical relationship with him. in this article, i suggest that these types of recyclable waste transfers constitute a novel type of hospitable giving in istanbul. since 2011, millions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers have come to turkey from the broader middle east, and these demographic changes have introduced significant challenges to a country already suffering from prolonged economic crises (tuğal 2021). in response, the turkish state has established various programs to accommodate persons displaced by war and economic deprivation. occasionally, state officials have also enlisted citizens to help with migrant integration. this has included calls for citizens to pursue relations of harmonization (uyum) and hospitality (misafirperverlik) with migrants to promote social cohesion in cities across the country. encouraging citizens to help migrants and asylum seekers in need of temporary assistance, these officials have invoked cultural and islamic tropes of hospitality, kinship, and care (düvell 2018). in turn, scholars have explored the impact of hospitality rhetoric on national political discourse (babül 2024), mutual aid in urban neighborhoods (alkan 2021), and the construction of religious and ethnic identity (dağtaş 2017). building on this body of work, this article examines everyday labor encounters (fikes 2009) in istanbul’s 386recycling sector to argue that the hospitable treatment of migrants is not strictly a humanitarian act or altruistic concern. it also constitutes a relationship that integrates migrant workers into a precarious urban economy. when citizens give recyclable materials to migrant waste pickers for free, they transfer items that workers can sell for cash to support themselves and their dependents. but receiving these materials also embeds migrant workers in istanbul’s informal recycling sector, where they endure difficult, hard-to-overcome social and working conditions. as waqas butt (2020) has observed in lahore, non-reciprocal, one-way transfers (pickles 2019) of recyclable materials can segregate those who produce waste from those who receive it. and yet, in istanbul, the short-term effects of these transfers leave both shopkeepers and waste pickers satisfied. shopkeepers dispose of unwanted waste from their small businesses and feel virtuous about helping the poor, while waste pickers access a cleaner and more consistent supply of materials that can be sold for money. alongside the practicalities of this interaction, i also came to witness a hospitable dimension to these labor encounters. in what follows, i interpret these waste donations as a particular type of conditional hospitality (derrida 2000) that reproduces social stratification between relatively well-off citizens and poor migrant workers. this is because shopkeepers tended to give waste to migrant waste pickers if and when they believed the donation was likely to inspire a particular kind of immaterial return. shopkeepers offered a variety of reasons for their actions, but i argue that all were inspired to give by the prospect that waste donations reproduce the moral authority of the citizen-shopkeeper over the migrant-waste picker. i use moral authority to refer to a relation in which one party claims, however implicitly, a non-legal right to assert how society ought to be organized. by analyzing different types of waste donations through the lens of moral authority, i argue that migrant hospitality reproduces existing inequalities between citizens and migrants by representing a service relation—between shopkeeper and waste pickers—as a hospitable relation between host and guest. although anthropologists have contended that informal recycling labor can free the poor from the constraints of wage labor (millar 2018), success for migrant waste pickers in istanbul often depends on cultivating obsequious and dependent relations (ferguson 2013) with citizen-shopkeepers. this, i suggest, limits the potential of hospitable giving to improve the well-being of precarious migrant workers. 387unlike other examples of migrant hospitality, where citizens offer universally valued resources like food or shelter (alkan 2021; katz 2022), waste donations prove unique because they place very little material burden on shopkeepers. in fact, they help shopkeepers dispose of unwanted items produced in the course of running small businesses, namely, cardboard boxes and plastic crates used for shipping commodities. this allows these transfers to persist in virtual perpetuity, beyond the temporary duration of most hospitable relations (agier 2021; ben-yehoyada 2015). it also encourages analysis of the longer-term impact of hospitable giving in contexts of urban labor, which counters an “ethics of immediacy” (mittermaier 2014) that lauds the benefits of aid on the here and now. advocating for a longer-term view, i show that while waste donations help build solidarity between citizens and migrants, they also distribute resources to migrants through bias, compassion, and service rather than a universal logic of welfare provision. the dangers of such an approach lie in it favoring certain waste pickers over others, encouraging migrants to adopt subservient attitudes to local shopkeepers and creating a migrant waste labor regime distinguished by its servility to citizen workers. in the conclusion, i suggest that the long-term impacts of this form of hospitable giving shed light on the precariousness of not only the migrant recycling worker as “guest” in turkey but also the citizen-shopkeeper as “host.” my data and argumentation draw from fifteen months of cumulative ethnographic study into migrant-citizen relations within turkey’s vast informal recycling sector, which i largely conducted during the covid-19 pandemic. my broader research asked how the recent arrival of irregular migrants into the recycling sector has changed how citizens in turkey conceive of economic and political justice. this article contributes to this project by analyzing how shopkeepers explained the merits of donating waste to select migrant waste pickers. waste picking in istanbul for decades, segments of the urban poor in turkey have earned money by collecting and reselling recyclable waste. these itinerant waste pickers (kâğıt toplayıcıları) sell their collections to informal recycling businesses located in urban neighborhoods.2 they operate largely in public space with no legal permissions or protections, exploiting a legal loophole that permits the collection and resale of items from public waste receptacles. with few specialized skills and minimal investment needed to buy a pull-cart and retrieve recyclable waste, the job has 388a low barrier to entry. consequently, it attracts individuals who struggle to find formal employment elsewhere and offers an important if unstable source of income for some of the most marginalized members of society. before 2011, waste pickers were primarily ethnically roma or kurdish citizens of turkey (dinler 2016), with occasional participation from poor ethnic turks. since then, the workforce has absorbed a significant number of irregular male migrants, with my interlocutors estimating that there are at least 10,000 migrant waste pickers in istanbul alone. in my field site of dudullu, foreign waste pickers proved the norm, with multiple long-term residents telling me that “turks don’t do this job,” as if working informally with domestic waste was socially unacceptable for ethnic turks. however, other segments of the local recycling sector were owned or staffed by ethnic turks, including the scrap metal trade and municipal waste-collection organizations. precarious labor conditions defined the migrant recycling workforce. migrants would typically work as waste pickers for only short periods before finding better jobs elsewhere in turkey, returning to their home countries, or attempting to transit to europe. in dudullu, they were often employed by ethnically kurdish citizens of turkey who owned small recycling depots. on condition that migrant waste pickers sold their collected recyclables to the depot at preferential rates, depot owners often provided migrants with housing, either at the worksite or in crowded rented apartments. while this arrangement created opportunity for exploitation—depot owners could coerce waste pickers into accepting exceptionally low rates—it also provided a stable cash income for waste pickers, who could earn more than minimum wage if they worked long hours. still, many were slow to accumulate savings. waste pickers commonly had outstanding debts to smugglers, lenders in their home countries, or depot owners, and most sent much of their income to family members as remittances. working on city streets posed further challenges for migrant waste pickers. unlike migrant workers employed in the agricultural, textile, or domestic care sectors, migrant waste pickers worked largely in public urban space. while collecting recyclables from businesses, houses, and waste receptacles, migrants routinely encountered local shopkeepers, residents, and municipal authorities. their success in the job depended partially on how successfully they navigated these interactions, since an encounter gone wrong could expose migrants’ illegal status and result in detention or deportation. the migrant waste-picking labor force in turkey has in fact faced periodic mass arrests since the mid-2010s, often 389coinciding with peaks of anti-migrant sentiment. to minimize these risks, migrant waste pickers typically attempted to adapt to the expectations and routines of area citizens. waste pickers could also benefit economically by forming strong relations with local residents, with many finding it more efficient to organize their routes around businesses and residences that regularly left out large amounts of recyclable waste. for shopkeepers, discarding recyclables like this not only eased their own waste disposal but also offered the satisfaction of helping those in need. and when it suited shopkeepers’ own interests, this could even become a self-conscious effort at symbiosis. for instance, employees at a print shop in dudullu told me that they left small piles of paper waste outside their front entrance every day. unlike ahmet the baker, they didn’t personally know any of the seven or eight waste pickers who gathered the materials—only that they were foreigners (yabancı) who lacked better job opportunities. regardless, they claimed that the arrangement benefited both parties. the business had recently downsized and was no longer able to store and directly sell its own recyclable paper waste. it now depended on foreign waste pickers to collect it, which could otherwise require alternative, pricier disposal methods. while there was little personal engagement between them, the two parties had nevertheless developed a mutually obligatory relationship by transacting with one another over time, fitting james carrier’s (2018) definition of a moral economy. shopkeepers were obliged to leave out recyclables, while waste pickers had to collect them in a manner that suited the shopkeepers. in istanbul, unlike in cities in vietnam (nguyen 2019) or pakistan (butt 2020), waste pickers do not tend to purchase recyclables from shopkeepers or residents. while some istanbul shopkeepers avoided migrant waste pickers due to a perceived lack of economic benefit, others saw opportunities to enter into a relation of mutual obligation with them. for these shopkeepers, the absence of money enhanced the social value of waste donations, transforming them into what some shopkeepers described as a favor (iyilik). had these waste pickers been turkish citizens, as most were before 2011, such interactions might well have been analyzed as examples of favors (ledeneva 1998) or polluted gifts (parry 1986; raheja 1988). however, in the early 2020s, the predominance of foreign migrants among waste pickers led shopkeepers to view waste donations as a means of supporting the temporarily displaced in particular. this development prompts consideration of how shopkeepers imagine these materials as helpful transfers given to guests. 390in this context, waste donations might be better understood through the lens of hospitable giving. this approach is productive not merely because waste donations are given to needy individuals temporarily far from home but also because shopkeepers’ willingness to assist was contingent on waste pickers meeting particular expectations. this conditionality echoes jacques derrida’s (2000) idea that hospitable acts inherently involve hosts maintaining control over their domain (see also shryock 2012). as i expand on later, waste donations were underpinned by shopkeepers’ implicit assertions of authority over spatial realms—the shop, the neighborhood, the nation—a characteristic that distinguishes hospitable giving from gift-giving (candea and da col 2012; ben-yehoyada 2015). to develop this aspect further, the next section introduces the broader contexts of migrant hospitality in contemporary turkey. migrant hospitality in turkey during the 2010s, millions of people came to turkey from neighboring countries in search of safer and more prosperous living conditions. most notably, the outbreak of the syrian civil war in 2011 caused millions to flee to turkey. while many eventually moved on to european countries, as of 2024, about 3.2 million syrians still lived in turkey. throughout the 2010s, the sudden influx of syrians led the turkish government to establish new policy frameworks for migration management. however laudable, the rollout was inconsistent and ambiguous (düvell 2018). due to clauses in turkey’s signing of the geneva convention, the country is only legally required to offer refugee status to those entering from europe (i̇çduygu and şimşek 2016). hence, when syrians began to arrive in large numbers in 2013, turkey was not legally obligated to recognize them as refugees. president recep tayyip erdoğan’s justice and development party (ak parti) instead established a so-called temporary protection regulation in 2014 that gave millions of syrians temporary protection status (baban, ilcan, and rygiel 2017). while this regulation provided access to health care, education, and social assistance for syrians, the expectation was that they would soon return to their homes, and they were not offered pathways for permanent settlement in turkey (koca 2016). since 2011, migrants, asylum seekers, and those under temporary protection in turkey have faced difficult working conditions. for syrians, obtaining formal employment requires an application for work permits through potential employers, which effectively prevents most from securing legal permission to 391work (badalič 2023). the prospects for legal integration and formal employment prove even slimmer for the hundreds of thousands of irregular migrants from afghanistan, iraq, and pakistan who entered turkey clandestinely during the past decade. these migrants, who benefited from turkey’s relatively lax border policies throughout the 2010s, lack even the opportunity to apply for temporary protection status. in all, these varied groups face a situation of “differential inclusion” (baban, ilcan, and rygiel 2017), referring to “the everyday ways that legal status, migration and employment policies, and social marginalization—gendered and racialized—stratify [migrants’] experiences” (george and borrelli 2024, 532). the framework of differential inclusion clarifies how a migrant-governance approach based on humanitarianism rather than the universal provision of rights creates uneven economic outcomes for diverse migrant groups (ramsay 2020), including within informal labor markets. beyond legal frameworks, differential inclusion emerges within broader systems of humanitarian governance. scholars have shown that global aid provision is shaped by affect, emotion, and moral evaluation, which speaks to how ostensibly universal doctrines of human rights become filtered through the subjective biases and judgments of otherwise well-meaning benefactors (fassin 2012; muehlebach 2012; ticktin 2011). in turkey, attempts to shift government responsibility for migrant integration onto the general population testify to how rights-based and sentiment-driven approaches to migrant well-being are not opposed, but inextricably linked. in the mid-2010s, as the turkish state provided accommodation, legal status, and resources for many displaced syrians, officials also called on turkish citizens to pursue relations of “harmonization” (uyum) with newly arrived migrants in their everyday lives (carpi and şenoğuz 2019). whether in public announcements or pro-government media outlets, this call was often substantiated through invocations of the role of compulsory charity in islam and the cultural importance of hospitality in turkey (dağtaş 2017; alkan 2021; babül 2024). as franck düvell (2018) notes, president erdoğan exemplified this approach by referring to syrian guests as “muhajirun” (early converts to islam who emigrated from mecca to medina) and turks as “ansar” (the helpers and hosts of muhajirun). in a 2015 speech during a fast-breaking meal at ramadan, at a so-called accommodation center with both refugees and un representatives in attendance, erdoğan (2015) further declared that “in our culture, guests are a divine gift [bereket], an honor, and a joy. you [speaking to refugees] have brought us a divine gift; you have honored us with your presence.” 392emphasizing language of generosity over rights (özden 2013), this approach influenced migration discourse in the years to come, aligning with what didier fassin (2012) terms “humanitarian government.” the problem with these calls is not that they are malevolent but that material circumstances and public sympathy are volatile bases for providing welfare to migrants. in 2015, turkey began negotiations with the european union (eu) with the aim of stemming migrant arrivals into greece and bulgaria, which culminated in a 2016 deal that provided turkey with six billion euros in funding to support syrian refugees and improve migration management. by referring to migrants as “guests” during this period, turkish officials strategically positioned their nation as benevolent to both domestic and western audiences. as elif babül (2024) observes, host-guest dynamics typically extend beyond bilateral relations, with hosts often invoking third parties to bear witness to claims of upstanding hospitality. but despite these rhetorical moves, everyday public interactions between citizens and migrants often cast doubt on the prospect of sustained harmonious relations between the two groups. officials’ early claims that syrians would stay in turkey only temporarily backfired, leading to growing public perceptions that foreign migrants had overstayed their welcome and now threatened national security and prosperity (koca 2016). ongoing economic crises in turkey have further intensified anti-migrant sentiments, which have occasionally resulted in displays of xenophobic violence. as a waste labor activist in istanbul once told me, “when the people are hungry, it’s difficult to share bread with foreigners” (toplum açken yabancılarla ekmek paylaşmak zor). for shopkeepers in dudullu, however, sharing recyclable waste with migrants came more easily, demonstrating how the qualities of the item being shared influence the practice of hospitality. when citizens help migrants in need by giving them “garbage” (çöp) instead of food, household goods, or shelter, a number of distinct social dynamics result. for one, migrant waste pickers’ eagerness to accumulate recyclable waste distinguished them as a group within the neighborhood. instead of flattening hierarchies between donor and recipient—as sophia stamatopoulou-robbins (2020) shows is the case with donated bread in palestine, owing to the near universal reverence for bread among her interlocutors—waste donations reproduced a relation of difference between waste pickers and shopkeepers because the recyclable materials in question were wanted only by waste pickers. recyclable waste accordingly functions as the inverse of annette weiner’s (1992) inalienable possession. rather than objects whose extraordinary 393value renders them ungiftable—and whose immobility structures social boundaries between insiders and outsiders—recyclable waste was considered valueless by dudullu shopkeepers, marking anyone in pursuit of it as different. this undesirability of recyclable waste is also why, counter to the temporal limits of most hospitable encounters, waste donations could occur in virtual perpetuity. the recipient never risked “overstaying their welcome” as a guest, or depleting the host’s limited stock of valuable resources, because the host was parting only with materials they would otherwise throw away. the absence of material reciprocity in waste donations, however, reinforced the shopkeeper’s sense of authority. as julian pitt-rivers (2012) has argued, hospitable relations are based on an imbalance of power between hosts and guests, which temporarily grants the host sovereignty over those they welcome (derrida 2000). with this in mind, hospitable giving becomes a vehicle for hosts to assert how materials or access should be allocated to those under their responsibility. crucially, the perceived worthiness of others is determined not only by collective social norms but also by individual and perhaps unpredictable preferences (cabot 2013). in contemporary contexts of migrant hospitality, these preferences may include hosts’ claims to special knowledge about migrants’ origins or circumstances. such encounters between migrants and citizens transcend more traditional frameworks of hospitality based on religious obligation, like islamic almsgiving (benthall 1999) or ritualized hosting practices (humphrey 2012). accordingly, contemporary hospitality is bound by customary belief and liberated by voluntary “expression of personal commitments” (agier 2021, 43). these dynamics underscore the ambiguity and unpredictability inherent in hospitality, which has long been a focus of anthropological inquiry. hospitality operates in an innately uncertain social space: it suspends conflict rather than settling it (pitt-rivers 2017, 178), “blurs the distinction between a discourse of rights and a discourse of generosity” (rosello 2001, 9), and contains an innate “scalar complexity” (shryock 2012, s20) that links interpersonal interactions to international relations. in the istanbul recycling sector, hospitable labor encounters reveal new ambiguities in the host-guest relationship. when hospitality occurs within economic relationships between shopkeepers and waste pickers, it testifies to georgina ramsay’s (2020, 5) insight that there can exist a blurred line “between humanitarian interventions and economic exploitation.” analyzing waste donations as both humanitarian acts and economic transactions, i explore how the imbalances of authority that typically govern hospitable relations shift 394when hosts and guests are also customers and service providers. the resulting relationship is neither purely hospitable nor strictly transactional. moral authority and hospitable giving relations of moral authority, i argue, offer a productive framework for grasping the common aspects of hospitable giving to migrants in istanbul’s informal recycling sector. i define moral authority as a relation in which one party claims a non-legal right to assert how society ought to be organized, whether on the scale of a one-to-one relationship or of broader social structures. in these terms, claims of moral authority seek a right to determination that resembles one of derrida’s (2005, 13) many explications of sovereignty as “having the power to decide.” yet compared to the more commonly used analytic of sovereignty, moral authority is better placed to theorize hospitable relations as they occur in labor encounters. moral authority can conceive of hosts’ insistence on “setting the agenda” with guests (rabinowitz 1997) without invoking the multiple, and at times confusing, spatial scales of sovereignty. moral authority also directs attention to the often-unspoken expectations and stipulations that motivate the relatively well-off as they distribute resources to those in need (see godelier 1999, 12), which elucidates mutually obligatory relations between two parties on unequal economic terms. two testimonies from istanbul shopkeepers will help me demonstrate how relations of moral authority influence everyday hospitable interactions. for some shopkeepers, giving recyclables to migrant waste pickers prompted reflections on the encounter’s international significance. a corner store owner in dudullu named niyazi, a man in his mid-forties, testified to this. one afternoon, when i asked niyazi about his recycling habits, he pointed to a pile of flattened cardboard boxes in the corner of his shop, previously used to ship cigarettes and potato chips. when the cardboard accumulates, he explained, he leaves it on the sidewalk, and a collector will come by to pick it up within thirty minutes. though niyazi did not know any of the collectors personally, he had developed clear ideas about their identities and life circumstances. this impersonal arrangement was in fact the most common type of interaction that i observed between shopkeepers and waste pickers during my fieldwork. in his case, niyazi said that most of the local collectors were young afghan men who had come to turkey because they needed money. he told me that he sympathized with the afghan people because their country had been ruined by decades 395of war with russia and the united states. and from a documentary he had recently seen on television, he had learned that afghans were hardworking and talented shepherds. all they want is “olives and bread,” he said, and he was happy to help provide them with this. this labor encounter was made possible by the relative economic value of cardboard waste. niyazi explained that the price of recyclable paper was too low for him to store and sell himself. “it’s garbage [çöp],” he said. “what’s the price of paper [per kilo]? forty to sixty kuruş? if it were one or two lira, i’d deal with it, but at the moment, it’s not worth it.” niyazi had succinctly described how an informal service economy had developed through interactions between those who generated unwanted recyclables and migrants who needed the income. shopkeepers like niyazi considered it acceptable to give away recyclables without any compensation because the quantities of materials were small and held little economic value. niyazi surmised that urban recycling must work differently in europe. then, unprompted, he began to tell me about perceived differences in how european countries and turkey approach foreign aid and intervention. from behind his counter, he explained that france and belgium had committed terrible atrocities in africa out of financial interests. in contrast, he said, turkey’s current diplomatic and aid presence in africa sought no financial reward: turkey is there to “help people,” he said. i had heard this story from many people during my fieldwork, particularly those with nationalist political views, like niyazi. he was a second-generation migrant from the conservative city of rize in turkey’s eastern black sea region, the hometown of president erdoğan and a hotbed of turkish nationalism. like the print shop employees i mentioned earlier, niyazi benefited from waste pickers’ removal of unwanted materials from his shop. but unlike them, niyazi derived a deeper satisfaction from these encounters because they perpetuated a historical narrative in which turks developed benevolent relations of dependence with poor muslims around the world. this claim was based on an implicit connection between his own good deeds and what he considered a national ethic of unconditional generosity. it also mirrored pro-government discourses that often portrayed the turkish nation-state as a magnanimous actor in an otherwise immoral world. indeed, babül (2024, 2) could almost be describing niyazi—rather than hospitality rhetoric from turkish state actors—when writing that host-guest metaphors in turkey “are used to assert power and leverage both domestically and internationally by exerting sovereign control 396over a post-imperial nation-space, performing neo-imperial guardianship over the downtrodden (especially the muslim community/umma), and claiming an ethno-religious, civilizational morality that exceeds the legalistic logic of human rights and entitlements.” for niyazi, donating waste enacted a sovereign claim—one founded on an assumed comparison that overlooked differences in scale between local and national contexts (candea 2012)—such that helping afghan waste pickers provided an opportunity to enact a moralized, national citizenship. however, shopkeepers in dudullu varied significantly in how they justified giving recyclable waste to migrants. for instance, ahmet the baker, whose explanations of waste donations opened this article, did not make the same type of sovereign claim that niyazi did when explaining his actions. on another visit to ahmet’s bakery, i spoke with him one on one, and he expanded on his relationship with bilal, the waste picker from pakistan: [bilal] left his home and came to turkey. he came into the country illegally. his economic situation is very difficult . . . . god forbid, if things get bad in turkey, my family and i might . . . for example, go to pakistan. or maybe i’ll go to another country. and if i am in pakistan, if through some means i can get in contact with bilal, what will he say? ‘ah, this man helped me a lot in turkey, i won’t leave him in a bad place, so i’m going to help him.’ yes, there are muslims and different kinds [of people], different sects [mezhepler], but in the end, what are we dealing with? human beings. and when human beings help one another, it is something very special. while niyazi had invoked a particularly nationalist ethic of helping dependent foreigners, ahmet referred to the virtue of treating other people as he would wish to be treated. he disregarded sectarian differences to promote universal solidarity. for ahmet, donating waste to bilal was justified because the pair resembled each other. niyazi, in contrast, had stressed the differences between an afghan and a turk. recalling pitt-rivers’s (2017) argument that reciprocity serves as the foundation of hospitality, ahmet invoked the chance, however unlikely, that bilal could one day host ahmet in pakistan. and as a kurd in turkey, ahmet sympathized with bilal in part due to their shared experiences of displacement and marginalization. moreover, bilal had been a baker himself in pakistan, and even though bilal currently earned his livelihood from ahmet’s recyclable waste, i had also witnessed the pair bond over their shared work history. 397yet ahmet’s sympathies should be contextualized against his earlier qualification that he helped bilal specifically because the waste picker was “honest” and “a good person.” ahmet justified donating waste to bilal because the transfer created an interdependent relationship between himself and a migrant waste picker who aligned with his vision of the deserving poor. the act was not motivated by bilal’s nationality, or any positive contribution to turkey’s reputation, but by ahmet’s commitment to fostering a relation of reciprocity with someone far from home and of good character. with recourse to a universal ethic of reciprocity that sought a relation of interdependence with his “guest,” ahmet’s position differed fundamentally from niyazi’s, which was founded on a model of humanitarian governance in turkey that sought relations of dependence with the global poor so as to enhance its national prestige. just as “differential inclusion” shapes the precarity of migrants in host societies, citizens’ diverse social positions and perspectives generate differing senses of entitlement and obligation, which influence how hospitable interactions with migrant workers unfold (see berg and fiddian-qasmiyeh 2018, 3). while hospitable encounters like these can be seen as tests of a host’s sovereignty (shryock 2012), analyzing these cases by identifying a common sovereign claim among shopkeepers would raise the following questions: what exactly does sovereignty here refer to, and does sovereignty claimed on different spatial scales not alter social relations in important ways? if sovereignty refers to power relations that test, engage, or reproduce state power, then niyazi’s testimony invokes sovereignty much more directly than ahmet’s. but if sovereignty is conceived more diffusely as any claim of control over a space or person, then both shopkeepers might be said to make sovereign claims. however, to adopt sovereignty as an analytic in this case would then overlook the significance of how this control is justified, and what type of dependent, conditional, or reciprocal relations it produces between shopkeeper and waste picker (see ferguson 2013). following rebecca bryant and madeleine reeves (2021), i am therefore less interested in asking what specifically sovereignty is, or how hospitable relations might generate sovereignty, and more committed to understanding how citizens respond to potential challenges of their sovereignty (here, in the form of immigration) by forging mutually obligatory relations with migrants that nevertheless contain aspirations to determine specific social arrangements. although some scholars emphasize the role of solidarity and mutual obligation in relations of migrant hospitality (alkan 2021; berg and fiddian-qasmiyaeh 2018), 398their work often undertheorizes the power imbalances that can determine and result from these relations. for instance, hilal alkan (2021) suggests that middle-class turks in istanbul have forged mutually obligatory relationships with newly arrived syrian migrants by hospitably gifting them household goods. alkan uses this ethnographic insight to suggest, contra derrida (2000), that a focus on hostility between citizens and migrants blinds us to the relations of care and trust produced through hospitable giving. while this analysis correctly follows the potential for more positive outcomes in migrant hospitality, it disregards the potential for relations of mutual obligation to be informed by distinct imbalances in authority, particularly if “gifts” or transfers remain unreciprocated. here, the literature on waste work offers important insights. butt (2020) shows that a lack of reciprocity between producers and collectors of waste can turn the provision of an urban service into a means of reproducing social stratification along lines of ethnicity, caste, or citizenship. in turkey, this stratification typically occurs along a “hierarchical ethno-religious order of belonging” (babül 2024, 13), where citizens’ treatment of migrants varies according to their respective identities and social positions. in the case of waste donations, while these transfers enable relations of mutual obligation to develop between citizens and migrants—dynamics couched in the language of hospitality—they also result in shopkeepers having the power to dictate the terms of the transfer. rather than positioning migrant hospitality as either purely altruistic or innately hostile, i suggest that the concept of moral authority can address relations of symbiosis and hierarchy at once—thereby capturing the ambivalences of hospitable relations as they occur within istanbul’s informal recycling sector. working under moral authority if moral authority can better attend to these ambivalences of hospitality, then what effect do relations of moral authority have on migrant labor in istanbul’s recycling sector? can we de-exceptionalize irregular migrants by treating them also as workers involved in a broader political economy that subjects many types of persons—not just the displaced or stateless—to conditions of precarity (allison 2012)? in this section, i heed ramsay’s (2020) call to develop new critiques of humanitarianism by exploring the links between moral economy and political economy. to do so, i suggest that hospitable giving to migrant workers can deepen, rather than flatten, hierarchical labor roles. this is because the conditions of hospitality align readily with service relationships built on the 399transferring of recyclable waste, materials that are worthless to producers yet vital for recipients’ livelihoods. examining what james ferguson (2021) terms “the politics of distribution”— that is, the question of who gets what, and why—reveals how the conditions that shopkeepers place on waste donations create uneven access to resources among migrant workers. the primary condition that governed the provision of waste donations was the conduct of waste pickers. shopkeepers in dudullu would withdraw any offerings of free recyclables if collectors scattered waste around storefronts, loitered, or disturbed local residents. bilal, the waste picker from pakistan, summarized this condition to me as, “if you make no problems, you have no problems.” this adherence to neighborhood standards represented a form of discipline imposed on migrants by local residents, workers, and authorities (rozakou 2012). those unable or unwilling to adhere to these standards of conduct typically left the waste-picking workforce—either voluntarily or driven by the municipal police (zabıta). those who complied were granted conditional access to work within what sébastien chauvin and blanca garcés-mascareñas (2012) call a “moral economy of deservingness,” where irregular migrants gain probationary rights to citizens’ recyclable waste provided that they act appropriately. scholars studying europe have noted that migrants who can effectively display their suffering are sometimes granted preferential treatment in asylum processes (fassin 2009). in this case, migrant workers gain acceptance from turkish citizens by conforming to expectations of propriety in public urban labor practices. a second condition lay somewhat beyond the waste picker’s control. successful recipients of waste donations were often obligated to fit into shopkeepers’ visions of the deserving poor through their social and political identities. niyazi the shopkeeper, for example, was willing to help afghan waste pickers because he considered them the dignified victims of war and poverty. bilal had also indicated that his popularity in the neighborhood resulted from his country of origin and religion. when he first started working, bilal only gathered recyclables from public waste receptacles. but soon after, he started to engage local shopkeepers in search of a cleaner and more consistent supply of materials. he would approach local workplaces, greet employees with selamünaleyküm,3 and ask politely for any paper or plastic waste. his requests were typically refused until he became recognizable to shopkeepers and disclosed that he was from pakistan. bilal claimed that this opened doors for him because “turkish people love pakistan.” while a generalization, his observation reflects a real tendency among dudullu 400residents to favor migrants from pakistan over those from syria, for instance, owing to perceived historical and religious connections between turkey and pakistan. bilal insisted it was harder for afghan or syrian waste pickers, as local residents often stereotyped them as thieves (see yildirim 2025). these prejudices indicate how the “racialized visibility of politically ‘out-of-place’ others serves as a reminder of the provisional, negotiated, and precarious social relations of hospitality” (harney and boccagni 2023, 328). the “guest” in these encounters does not resemble pitt-rivers’s (2012, 504) idea of a total “stranger” who is “unknown” and “potentially anything” to hosts. rather, the guest is a migrant worker who participates in public labor encounters, where they are subjected to variegated treatment because their behavior, origins, and labor resonate in particular ways with the host population. while this arrangement benefited bilal, it meant the exclusion of others—those from other countries, those less observant of religious customs, or those deemed less “honest.” the hierarchical relations produced via waste donations therefore extend beyond individual relationships between shopkeepers and waste pickers to structure the politics of distribution among waste pickers themselves. waste donations stood apart from other forms of more anonymous mutual aid common in istanbul during my fieldwork, including those aimed at offsetting the negative economic impacts of the covid-19 pandemic. this included the reemergence of a tradition called askıda ekmek, a practice allowing bakery customers to “pay bread forward,” so that those in need can acquire food without openly asking. the opposition-run istanbul municipality similarly introduced a digital platform called askıda fatura (pay bills forward) in 2020 that allowed donors to anonymously pay the utility bills of registered users who lacked the finances to do so. in both cases, the virtue of generosity lay in the donor’s anonymity, recalling the turkish saying, “the left hand mustn’t see what the right hand gives” (sağ elin verdiğini sol el görmemelidir). the phrase was also used to describe municipal welfare provision during the pandemic by istanbul’s mayor, ekrem i̇mamoğlu, as a backhanded critique of president erdoğan’s tendency to give to the poor ostentatiously and with expectations for political support in return—this despite the virtue of anonymous giving in islam (benthall 1999). waste donations in dudullu operated through a different logic, one predicated on the recipient’s visibility and the donor’s perception that the migrant worker represented a particular type of deserving foreigner in need of assistance. 401for shopkeepers, interactions with migrant waste pickers were also influenced by the shifting and ambiguous qualities of waste materials themselves. scholars have shown that waste is not inherently worthless but rather contains latent value that certain people or classificatory systems momentarily do not recognize (reno 2015; alexander and sanchez 2018). recycling work accordingly often focuses on the transformation of waste materials from one category of valuation to another (doherty and brown 2019) and creates encounters between people in diverse social and economic positions (halvorson 2018). in istanbul, this indeterminacy becomes evident in how shopkeepers speak of recyclable waste as both “trash” (çöp) and a “material” (malzeme). similar to the leftover bread examined by stamatopoulou-robbins (2020, 151) in the west bank, the value of paper and plastic discards in istanbul was unstable, their “semiotic and material statuses . . . constantly in flux.” this fluidity made waste donations possible, as both parties recognized that paper and plastic waste carried multiple, shifting values and meanings (alexander and reno 2012). as with anna l. tsing’s (2015) analysis of matsutake mushrooms, the status of recyclable waste materials shifted from commodities to gifts, then back to commodities again. shopkeepers received goods to sell wrapped in paper and plastic packaging, transferred the packaging to poor migrant workers for free, and these workers then re-sold the materials for money. enabled by striking economic inequality in istanbul, these labor encounters demonstrate that the precise values of donated waste are highly context-dependent. for shopkeepers, discarding paper and plastic packaging was justified because its exchange-value was so low that it was virtually nothing, or “garbage” (çöp). but this same waste carried a significant use-value as a channel of hospitable aid, which established power-laden relations of mutual obligation with migrant waste pickers. when discussing these ambiguities, shopkeepers and waste pickers often attempted to represent complex material and social dynamics in simpler, more palatable terms. this tendency effectively downplayed the hierarchical relations of dependency created by waste donations. for example, bilal, the waste picker from pakistan, called ahmet the kurdish baker his “customer,” although no money was ever exchanged between them. this choice of language dignified his receipt of waste by reframing it as a market transaction rather than an act of hospitality or charity. ahmet, meanwhile, described his donations to bilal as potentially reciprocal, which ignored the improbability of bilal’s ever being 402able to reciprocate. both statements speak to how waste donations leave both parties immediately satisfied, since the transfer can be spoken about in acceptable terms and the relationship is mutually obligatory. and yet, both statements also obscure the long-term dependency created by these donations, since the transaction is one of conditional hospitality rather than mutual self-interest in a commercial exchange. hence, while this mode of waste work reproduces social segmentation over the long term, the rhetoric of hospitality emphasizes immediate mutual satisfaction when embedded in service relations. these relational power dynamics extend beyond the immediate contexts of the transfer by giving shape to two distinct labor regimes within istanbul’s informal recycling sector. defined as “the assemblage of elements that set the conditions under which people work” (li 2017, 247), labor regimes encompass the broader political, social, and economic conditions that govern labor. in this case, a citizen labor regime produces recyclable waste and occasionally offers it to members of a migrant labor regime, whose lack of legal status has pushed them into jobs rejected by most citizens. waste donations not only create moral economic relations between citizens and migrants but also transfer valuable resources between two distinct groups within the political economy of consumption, waste, and reuse in urban turkey. waste donations configure these dual labor regimes by assigning participants to the roles of either giver or receiver of waste, enacting a relation difficult to overcome. as ramsay (2020, 8) notes, precarity does not emerge from a moral economy of deservingness, but from the “exploitative ways in which refugees become incorporated into the political economy of the nation in which they have sought refuge.” while hospitable discourses may explain why shopkeepers donate waste to migrants, they do not account for how such donations create a type of migrant worker who must acquiesce to shopkeepers for marginal improvements in their strenuous jobs. in the coming years, as more and more displaced persons are likely to ask for material assistance from citizens in the countries where they seek refuge, the presence of the needy will prompt considerations of whether or not it is just to help. anthropologists need to be aware that giving valued resources to migrant workers like this is not a neutral exercise in humanitarianism, but a transfer with significant aftereffects. a final episode with bilal clarifies the limits of hospitable giving for migrant waste pickers in istanbul. on a break from his collections one summer day, i sat with bilal on the curb of a side street, opposite a vacant lot. as we drank cans 403of iced tea, bilal breathed heavily, exhausted from hauling his cart around the neighborhood in the heat. then he touched the area above my right kidney. in english, he said “here hurts.” he grimaced, leaving me unsure how to respond. the usual advice, that perhaps he should see a doctor, seemed inappropriate. bilal lacked the legal status required to visit a state hospital or the funds needed for private health care. as an informal migrant worker, occupational health was a risk that he had to bear on his own. much of the city, in fact, remained off limits to him: covid-19 restrictions prohibited those without national id cards from using public transport or entering many private businesses in istanbul. moreover, informal recycling work provided virtually no paths toward turkish citizenship, political representation, or less precarious forms of work. for bilal, the only opportunity at gaining legal residency in turkey was to return to pakistan and apply through official channels from his home country—a plan he talked about regularly, his wishes bookended with “inshallah.” it struck me that, for all of the donations of waste he received from local shopkeepers, bilal’s relationships with these men offered him little lasting support. they helped him earn a meager wage and, occasionally, they might result in a highly conditional friendship. but when bilal was arrested and deported in the fall of 2021, in a raid targeting the migrant recycling workforce in dudullu, just a few months after i conducted the research for this article, there was nothing any of the shopkeepers could do to help. bilal had faced the risks of working as a waste picker himself, and he faced the consequences alone too. conclusion if weiner’s (1992) ultimate insight was that inalienable possessions create social differentiation by being kept, then what might focusing on what is withheld from migrant waste pickers reveal about waste donations? as indicated by the troubles bilal experienced with his health and deportation, hierarchies between shopkeepers and waste pickers were produced not only through the transfer of alienable waste materials. also significant were the privileges that shopkeepers had, broadly construed, that were not given to waste pickers: material resources, citizenship rights, and access to government services. for migrant recycling workers in istanbul, their job did not provide the flexible and liberating livelihood that kathleen millar (2018) describes for catadores in a brazilian garbage dump, where informal waste picking offered workers greater autonomy than formal wage labor did. neither did waste labor allow migrant workers in istanbul 404to represent their work as a positive and moral form of urban citizenship (fredericks 2018). rather, for many migrant waste pickers in istanbul, recycling labor meant entering into obsequious relations of dependence with citizens whom they encountered as they worked in public urban space. while anthropologists of charitable giving in islamic contexts have foregrounded an “ethics of immediacy” that attends to the virtues of helping in the here and now (mittermaier 2014), assistance aimed at migrants specifically must consider the longer-term impacts of humanitarian giving. short-term aid, like waste donations, can provide useful material support and help migrant workers develop relations of mutual obligation with citizens, but it can also reinforce migrants’ dependency on their shopkeeper benefactors. when resources are distributed according to subjective criteria—including the whims of compassion, social preference, or political conviction—the result is uneven welfare provision that reflects the biases of donors just as it does their earnest goodwill. this article has critiqued everyday humanitarian approaches to migrant integration by showcasing an example from istanbul, where the hospitality extended to migrant workers embeds them into a precarious urban recycling economy. even though waste donations prove satisfactory for both parties in the immediate term, an ethics of immediacy would obstruct attention to how the recipients of waste donations are not only objects of humanitarianism but also participants in capitalist work, and thus involved in longer-term (unmet) ambitions of sustaining life, rather than merely addressing present needs. one way to understand the ambiguities of hospitable giving is to utilize the concept of moral authority. while shopkeepers justified their act of donating waste to migrant workers with diverse invocations of their own sovereignty, they consistently sought a right to assert how society ought to be organized when assisting migrant waste pickers. but these claims of moral authority might do more than reveal the hierarchical dynamics behind good deeds. perhaps they speak to a broader, if uneven, uncertainty that occurs when social prosperity is sought through discourses of humanitarianism and compassion. just as the turkish state’s emphasis on harmonization might increase the precarity of migrants—by subjecting their material well-being to the whims of citizens—so, too, might it call attention to the instability experienced by turkish citizens. as my ethnography demonstrated, labor encounters with migrants challenged istanbul shopkeepers to locate or rediscover sources of authority in their own lives—whether in niyazi’s national identity or ahmet’s ethical principles. perhaps these divergences could be analyzed to understand hospitable giving as a window into 405the precarity of hosts as well, even as citizens consistently claim moral authority over their guests. when embedded in labor relations, hospitable giving does not simply align with the conventions or rituals of hospitality—or its expected outcomes. rather, we might explore hospitable giving to migrants also as a genuine way of helping others while seeking some elusive sense of security for the self, thereby de-exceptionalizing the migrant as a precarious individual. abstract in istanbul, shopkeepers frequently dispose of their paper and plastic waste by giving it to select migrant waste pickers. this article examines these waste donations as a novel form of hospitable giving in turkey, a country that has hosted millions of irregular migrants and asylum seekers since 2011. by analyzing the mutual obligations these donations create and the diverse ways that shopkeepers justify helping migrants, the article argues that waste donations occur primarily when they enable shopkeepers to reproduce their moral authority over migrant waste pickers. in doing so, it explores two related issues: the consequences of the state’s retreat from providing universal welfare opportunities to irregular migrants; and the embedding of migrant hospitality within service relations in a precarious urban economy. the article concludes by rethinking informal waste labor and host-guest dynamics through the lens of dependent relations. [hospitality; waste; migration; labor; moral authority; dependency; turkey] özet i̇stanbul’daki esnaflar, kâğıt ve plastik atıkları sıklıkla kendi seçtikleri yabancı kâğıt toplayıcılarına vererek bertaraf etmektedirler. bu makale, 2011’den beri milyonlarca düzensiz mülteci ve sığınmacıya ev sahipliği yapan türkiye’de, bu tür atık bağışlarını misafirperverliğin yeni bir şekli olarak incelemektedir. atık bağışlarının yol açtığı karşılıklı yükümlülükleri ve esnafın yabancılara yardım etmeyi meşrulaştırma yolları analiz edilerek, bu tür bağışların öncelikle esnafın yabancı atık toplayıcıları üzerinde ahlaki otoritesini sağlayabildiği durumlarda gerçekleştiği ileri sürülmektedir. bu doğrultuda, iki bağlantılı konu incelenmektedir: devletin düzensiz göçmenlere evrensel sosyal koruma sağlamaktan çekilmesinin sonuçları; ve hiçbir güvencesi olmayan sokak ekonomisinde faaliyet gösteren atık toplayıcılarıyla esnaf arasındaki misafirperverliğe dayalı hizmet ilişkilerinin doğurduğu etkiler. makale, enformel atık işçiliği ve ev sahibi–misafir dinamiklerini, bağımlılık ilişkileri merceğinden yeniden gözleyerek sonuçlanmaktadır. [misafirperverlik; atık; göç; emek; ahlaki otorite; bağımlılık; türkiye] 406 notes acknowledgments  thank you to my interlocutors and collaborators in turkey, even if they are not quoted or discussed here, particularly my uncles hayati and harun for their assistance. i’d also like to express my gratitude to andrew sanchez, yael navaro, andrea muehlebach, ekaterina mizrokhi, tim burger, kieran way, theo hughes-morgan, and julia perczel for their comments. thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their sustained and helpful engagement with this article, and to the editorial collective and administrative team at cultural anthropology, with special mention to abdoumaliq simone. i presented earlier versions of this article at the social anthropology phd writing-up seminar in cambridge, led by harri englund and the easa panel on “economic moralities” in belfast, co-organized by chelsie yount and stefan leins, and i thank everyone who commented on the essay in those spaces as well. 1. i use 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37, issue 1, pp. 1-8, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.01 mobile livings: on the bioeconomies of mobility marthe achtnich university of oxford https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6378-447x the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has made the economization of human and nonhuman mobile life stark and visible in new ways. concerns are raised about the movement of wild animals into human wet markets, or the juridical and social predicament of stranded surrogate babies. surveillance apps to prevent the spread of infection that track and trace peoples’ movement are gathering personal data, bringing biosecurity into the realm of capital. the circulation of vaccines is underscoring geopolitical inequalities. pandemic times unsettle taken-for-granted mobility, just as they bring the economization of different forms of human and nonhuman movement into sharp relief. such mobilities prompt us to ask a number of pressing questions: through what arrangements is mobile life, human and nonhuman, economized? what kinds of mobilities best help us specify and analyze the extraction of value from life itself? what does this mean for an anthropological inquiry into our present condition? this colloquy takes the economization of life to denote practices and processes of governing, managing, and even disposing of life, both human and nonhuman, to generate and extract value. specifications of such processes have formed part of a plural conversation in anthropology and the wider social sciences. focusing on biopolitics, or the management of aggregate populations, michelle murphy (2017) defines the economization of life as those processes of valuation and optimization through which present and future life is oriented toward macroeconomic horizons. others gravitate toward what michel foucault (1998) called “anatomo-politics,” or the correction and improvement of the body, to reveal how life is brought into the realm of accumulation (franklin 2007; also see helmreich 2008). a significant emphasis has been on pathways of economization that decompose “life itself”—the vitality of human and other living beings—“into a series of distinct and discrete objects,” such that they can be “isolated, delimited, stored, accumulated, mobilized, and exchanged, accorded a discrete value, traded across time, space, species, contexts, enterprises—in the service of many distinct objectives” (rose 2007, 7). these processes, as nikolas rose (2007, 5–7) argues, have, at the close of the twentieth century, given rise to a new economic space, “the bioeconomy,” with biological products and processes, or “biocapital,” as its new capital (also see braun 2007; cooper 2008; sunder rajan 2006; waldby and mitchell 2006). scholarship on bioeconomy and the rendition of life into exchangeable and tradeable units, however, has remained focused on the fields of biotechnology, biomedicine, pharmaceuticals, and genetics (lemke 2011), just as work on the economization of aggregate life has emphasized technoscientific practices such as statistics and birth control (murphy 2017). bringing mobility and migration into these conversations allows us to think of many other avenues through which value is extracted from life and how value travels across boundaries of different kinds. importantly, mobility highlights vulnerability and reminds us that the bioeconomy is always shadowed by the necroeconomy, where life’s disposability is a condition for wealth accumulation (cf. mbembe 2019), and which has been a persistent feature of colonialism and racial capitalism. a turn to mobility and migration therefore enables us to ask which forms of accumulation from human vitality continually persist and which forms have undergone change. equally, mobility allows us to interrogate different situations and practices that mediate the encounter between economy and life (helmreich 2008). in anthropology and the wider social sciences, engagements with mobility have broadly concerned themselves with social, political, and economic dimensions of mobile life and, simultaneously, with how movement and connections across time and space forge economic, political, and social activity (cresswell 2010; glick schiller 2018; glick schiller and salazar 2013; salazar and smart 2011). some of this scholarship gravitates toward foucauldian biopolitics, including the ways migrants’ lives and the mobility of people and things are regulated and governed so as to administer and securitize populations (de genova 2017; tazzioli 2019). this body of work brings the figure of the migrant into analyses of populations and biopower. however, economic implications of biopower, hinted at in foucault’s (1998) early formulations, from which much literature on bioeconomy derives, remain somewhat neglected. political economic analyses of migration and mobility, on the other hand, mainly concern themselves with the circulation of raw materials, commodities, and wage labor (mezzadra and neilson 2013), rather than mobile “life itself.” and yet, as ruben andersson (2018) argues, we are beginning to witness the emergence of bioeconomies that seek to manage, regulate, and profit from mobile life on multiple levels, from data to bodies to populations. at the same time, migration and mobility draw attention to the effects of occupation, extraction, and dispossession that result in “necrospeculation,” or the production of new capitalist value through the destruction of life (cf. manjapra 2019). the essays in this colloquy query how we might theorize the nature of the relationship between mobility and bioeconomies. we use bioeconomies in the plural, as different kinds of markets and economic arrangements exist through which value is extracted and realized. similarly, “life itself” takes on a variety of forms, from oocytes and animals to the human body. it travels differently across borders and its movement is underpinned and enabled by diverse infrastructures. life forms, and their disposability, become sources of profit in varying ways. in the concluding contribution, andersson (2022, this issue) argues that there is purchase in attending to the bioeconomy as a tentative singular, particularly in terms of highlighting processes that act in a top-down fashion. by turning to plurality, and to some of the productive tensions between the singular and the plural, this colloquy takes understandings of bioeconomies beyond their customary remit of pharmaceuticals and biotechnology industries, just as it brings migration and necropolitics into understandings of orienting populations toward economic horizons. a first set of contributions that the colloquy makes is to reveal the importance of different arrangements through which mobile life is economized. unauthorized migrants crossing borders are subject to predatory economic practices; they become “stock” and sources for a rentier form of extraction that has necropolitical orientations (achtnich 2022, this issue). similar bordering practices can give rise to other clandestine economies centered on vitality, witnessed in instances of smuggling that involve not only people but animal commodities as well. for example, where the securitization of borders results in a trade in parrots, the birds’ vitality has bearings on the itineraries of their circulation as drivers make periodic stops to ensure that the commodity is breathing and alive (lucht 2022, this issue). other essays in this colloquy further complicate what constitutes mobile life by drawing attention to relations between wholes and parts (also see paxson 2019), and how the economization of one depends on the other. markets for assisted reproductive technologies, for instance, arise from an intersection of regulations, infrastructures, and debt-driven migration (reeves 2022, this issue). in reproductive markets, gametes or oocytes might be hypermobile, while the bodies that provide them remain immobile or even banned from crossing borders. the economization of mobile life, therefore, results in clear hierarchies of which mobilities are valued. equally, bioeconomies become constituted through practices of policing and regulating nonhuman mobility (green 2022, this issue), many of which involve attempts to regulate unintended and unwanted mobiles such as pathogens that travel with the living commodity. by creating conditions of virulence, such mobiles can in fact disrupt bioeconomies that aim to profit from nonhuman vitality, although unwanted mobiles also spark new economies of control and eradication that emerge in response. these diverse, complex, and variegated bioeconomic arrangements are situated and contingent. they foreground the importance of anthropological inquiry for specifying how and where mobile life is brought into the realm of economic activity, and with what consequences. valorization proceeds through channels that are formal or informal, or an intersection of the two. there can be markets, with varying degrees of regulation, in which vitality is willfully transacted by those producing it (reeves 2022, this issue), or situations of predatory accumulation where those generating data have no say in its sale and circulation (andersson 2022, this issue). these specifications also point to new ways of thinking about borderwork and the bio-, necro-, and geopolitics of governing movement. borders can be generated from the very relations and separations enacted by policing and regulating different mobilities. thus, contra a narrow focus on biopolitics that places agency on actions of the state, this colloquy shows how biopolitical practices can emerge from the encounters between varied economies and mobile life. a second contribution of the colloquy is to pluralize the bioeconomy by drawing attention to the difference that constitutes the bio in the bioeconomy. “life” encompasses a range of beings and lives, rather than being subsumed by a singular, monolithic (human) entity. the essays attend to what madeleine reeves (2022, this issue) terms value “generated from the differential mobility and transactional value of human and nonhuman bodies” to capture what is not registered in the term bioeconomy (as singular) alone. value, for instance, can be generated through intimate relations and labors of care between migrants in precarious circumstances. these intimacies, vital for the reproduction of the mobile body, become the source from which predatory actors profit (achtnich 2022, this issue). equally, in markets for reproductive services, a worker’s living substrate helps create bio value. it makes for an essential element in the productive process, and reproductive capacity becomes exchange-value, that is, use-value for others (reeves 2022, this issue). profiting from mobile life can also proceed through human migrants themselves becoming raw material for surveillance capitalism and subterranean markets (andersson 2022, this issue). in a different register, the vitality of livestock, typically seen as “raw material” in conventional political economic analysis, is a means through which living creatures reproduce their own bodies. this is a long-recognized but often forgotten form of vitality that lies at the heart of the bioeconomy of industrial agriculture (franklin 2007); and more recently, techniques for intervening in the mobility of zoonoses have been added to the list of animal bioeconomies (green 2022, this issue). as melinda cooper and catherine waldby (2014) point out, querying what constitutes “life itself” in any economic arrangement has implications for the analytical categories one deploys to specify and analyze the economic. a critical thread running through this colloquy’s engagement with life is to note instances at which vitality is devalued. as hans lucht (2022, this issue) shows in the context of clandestine economies of mobility emerging in response to increased surveillance and border externalization, when migrants are “dumped” in the middle of the sahara as a result of law enforcement, journeys become more life-threatening. lucht (2022, this issue) and marthe achtnich (2022, this issue) show that the mobility of many human and nonhuman bodies is organized around their abjection. often, vulnerability or fragility are the preconditions to predation. this necropolitical dimension to the generation of value (manjapra 2019; mbembe 2019) surfaces again in andersson’s (2022, this issue) argument about surveillance capitalism, for accumulation’s raw material is often the life-threatening journey that migrants embark on. together, these ethnographic and analytical insights into life’s disposability allow us to move beyond specifications of the bioeconomy as that which veers toward life’s optimization (cf. rose 2007). bioeconomies in their plurality reveal the intimate connections between the biopolitical and the necropolitical. together, our emphasis on mobility, economic arrangements, and the difference that constitutes life, or bios,discussion at the time. i also thank the editors and staff at directs anthropological inquiry to arenas beyond what one could call a “pharmaceutical model” of the bioeconomy centered on the molecularization and optimization of life (rose 2007), as well as accounts of the economization of life centered on aggregate populations and their orientation toward a macroeconomy (murphy 2017). the expropriation of surplus, as our emphasis on mobile livings and bioeconomies in the plural indicates, is not universally uniform or homogeneous, but takes the form of diverse arrangements (cf. manjapra 2019). and yet, a wider bioeconomic frame allows us to hold mobile life and diverse economies in conjunction, to open up novel directions for economic anthropology beyond conventional political economic remits. conversely, viewing mobility through the lens of bioeconomies fosters new understandings of mobility, opening up fresh avenues of inquiry into a world constituted by movement. bioeconomies of mobility chart directions for anthropological research on a pressing contemporary issue, whose saliency will likely increase in times to come. abstract this colloquy brings into conversation two terms critical for an anthropological inquiry into our present condition: mobility and bioeconomy. it moves beyond established accounts of the bioeconomy based on biotechnology and biomedicine to draw attention to the tempo, intensity, and reach of the economization of mobile life across diverse scales and domains. case studies include emerging forms of surveillance and bordering regimes that generate profit from the vitality and vulnerability of mobile life. they also entail the escalation of certain mobilities and the halting of others, not only demonstrating how value travels and is remade as it crosses boundaries of different kinds but also revealing how life’s disposability can make for a precondition for trading in life itself. rethinking and extending conventional political economic analyses, the colloquy offers new directions for anthropological understandings of economy and mobility. [bioeconomy; mobility; migration; biopolitics; necropolitics; nonhuman; value] notes acknowledgments i thank the other four contributing authors of this colloquy collection—hans lucht, madeleine reeves, sarah green, and ruben andersson—for their helpful comments on this introduction, and for their essays and engaging discussion. the colloquy resulted from a workshop i organized in february 2020, kindly supported by funds from the society for libyan studies, an academic body, charitable organization, and a british international research institute, sponsored by the british academy; and by funds from magdalen college, university of oxford. other attendees of the workshop provided helpful inputs for shaping the discussion at the time. i also thank the editors and staff at cultural anthropology, in particular heather paxson, for their valuable feedback and support, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. references achtnich, marthe 2022 “bioeconomy and migrants’ lives in libya.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 9–15. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.02 andersson, ruben 2018 “profits and predation in the human bioeconomy.” public culture 30, no. 3: 413–39. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-6912115 2022 “the bioeconomy and the birth of a ‘new anthropology.’” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 37–44. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.06 braun, bruce 2007 “biopolitics and the molecularization of life.” cultural geographies 14, no. 1: 6–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474007072817 cooper, melinda 2008 life as surplus: biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. seattle: university of washington press. cooper, melinda, and catherine waldby 2014 clinical labor: tissue donors and research subjects in the global bioeconomy. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cresswell, tim 2010 “towards a politics of mobility.” environment and planning d: society and space 28, no. 1: 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1068/d11407 de genova, nicholas 2017 “introduction. the borders of ‘europe’ and the european question.” in the borders of “europe”: autonomy of migration, tactics of bordering, edited by nicholas de genova, 1–35. durham, n.c.: duke university press. foucault, michel 1998 the will to knowledge. vol. 1 of the history of sexuality. translated by robert hurley. london: penguin. franklin, sarah 2007 dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham, n.c.: duke university press. glick schiller, nina 2018 “theorising transnational migration in our times: a multiscalar temporal perspective.” nordic journal of migration research 8, no. 4: 201–12. http://doi.org/10.2478/njmr-2018-0032 glick schiller, nina, and noel b. salazar 2013 “regimes of mobility across the globe.” journal of ethnic and migration studies 39, no. 2: 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183x.2013.723253 green, sarah 2022 “the bioeconomics of domesticating zoonoses.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 30–36. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.05 helmreich, stefan 2008 “species of biocapital.” science as culture 17, no. 4: 463–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430802519256 lemke, thomas 2011 biopolitics: an advanced introduction. new york: new york university press. lucht, hans 2022 “eu border control in niger: from migrants to gold, drugs, and rare animals.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 16–22. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.03 manjapra, kris 2019 “necrospeculation: postemancipation finance and black redress.” social text 37, no. 2: 29–65. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7370979 mbembe, achille 2019 necropolitics. translated by steven corcoran. durham, n.c.: duke university press. mezzadra, sandro, and brett neilson 2013 border as method; or, the multiplication of labor. durham, n.c.: duke university press. murphy, michelle 2017 the economization of life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. paxson, heather 2019 “‘don’t pack a pest’: parts, wholes, and the porosity of food borders.” food, culture, and society 22, no. 5: 657–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2019.1638136 reeves, madeleine 2022 “vital labors: transacting oocytes across borders in the post-soviet space.” cultural anthropology 37, no. 1: 23–29. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.1.04 rose, nikolas 2007 the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. princeton, n.j.: princeton university press. salazar, noel b., and alan smart 2011 “anthropological takes on (im)mobility: introduction.” identities: global studies in culture and power 18, no. 6: i–ix. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289x.2012.683674 sunder rajan, kaushik 2006 biocapital: the constitution of postgenomic life. durham, n.c.: duke university press. tazzioli, martina 2019 the making of migration: the biopolitics of mobility at europe’s borders. thousand oaks, calif.: sage. waldby, catherine, and robert mitchell 2006 tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 1, pp. 1-8, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.1.01 cultural anthropology: fugitive kinships: imperial legacies, wayward acts, and queer bonds among filipino migrants in japan 647 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 647-671, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.04 fugitive kinships: imperial legacies, wayward acts, and queer bonds among filipino migrants in japan suma ikeuchi university of california, santa barbara https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6285-9502 philippines independence day, nagoya city, japan the sun in the cloudless sky glared down on the crowd, etching their shadows into the ground. hot air, loud music, and indistinct taglish permeated the urban park, walled on all four sides by concrete buildings.1 it was mid-afternoon on june 12, 2022, ang araw ng kalayaan, or the day of freedom. like their fellow filipinos at home and abroad, several hundred had gathered to commemorate the declaration of independence from spanish colonial rule in 1898, which makes for the celebration’s textbook explanation. there are also newer, evolving meanings. this was ikeda park in nagoya, japan, the capital of aichi prefecture, home to the largest filipino population in the country.2 the all-day event publicly celebrated their diasporic identity with foods (inasal, adobo, biko),3 traditional bamboo dance (tinikling), and a host of pop music performances (including ikaw by yeng constantino). a japanese officer stepped out of the small police station called kōban on the edge of the park to impassively watch the open celebration. we are here, the crowd seemed to assert. it was a gathering of filipinos by filipinos for filipinos in the middle of a japanese city’s downtown.4 648i joined a couple i knew from a local catholic church under their tent—a shady refuge from the scorching sun. antonio iketani was a third-generation nikkei filipino, or a filipino of japanese descent, who migrated to japan some thirty years ago with his non-nikkei wife.5 she took off her face mask to comment on the heat:6 “kumusta ka ate, ang init! [how are you sis, it’s so hot!]” i quipped that it was probably hotter than baguio, their mountainous hometown. laughter and nods. soon our conversation drifted to antonio’s family. in fragments, he reminisced about his japanese grandfather’s migration to the philippines before the war, the marriage to his filipina grandmother, their short-lived marital bliss before japan’s invasion of the philippines, his grandfather’s death after the return of the american forces, and the postwar reunion with his late grandfather’s kin in tokushima, who helped him obtain an ancestry-based visa to japan. after an hour or so, i stood up to have another stroll around the park. steps away, i ran into a filipino acquaintance, who introduced the young man beside him as satoshi, the son of our common filipina friend. satoshi, a slender lad in an aqua-blue business shirt, asked in japanese if i was part filipina. i shook my head and returned the same question, assuming he was mixed; i knew that his mother—a former hostess—had been married to a japanese man. he faltered and then said, “i believed my whole life that i was hāhu [mixed] but the other day i learned that my real father is filipino.” an out-of-the-blue message from a strange man in the philippines; a confession from his filipina mother that that man was his biological father; an admission from his japanese father that he had known all along; a newfound awe of his father, no longer dull, but gallant to have raised another man’s child as his own without a smidge of resentment. satoshi quickly narrated all this before walking off to “learn more about [his] filipino roots.” over the course of my fieldwork among the filipino communities in japan between 2019 and 2023,7 i was regularly taken aback by the prevalence of what i call fugitive kinships—bonds formed outside the narrow juridical definitions of family, typically without legitimate documents or state sanction, that sustain their vitality not through open defiance but by a quiet maneuvering of the existing system. antonio’s migration to japan on the ancestry-based visa was enabled by the kinship ties formed during the prewar period of japan’s imperialist expansion. the material records of these ties were often lost or destroyed in the final battles of the asia-pacific war, which ended with the japanese empire’s defeat in 1945. rather than contesting the japanese state’s requirement for document 649proof of japanese ancestry, antonio relied on his kin in japan to salvage such records, thereby meeting the official demand for a lineage traceable to a proper “japanese family.” satoshi is one of the myriad offspring born from the intimate unions between filipina women and japanese men against the backdrop of japan’s postwar economic domination in southeast asia since the 1970s—on paper, that is. now he knows that his mother leveraged her marriage to a japanese national to raise him as a mixed japanese, thereby obscuring his “fully filipino” roots even to himself. despite the difference in historical circumstances across the prewar/postwar divide, both antonio and satoshi have experienced fugitive kinships—a plenitude of human relationalities that thrive outside, underneath, and at times in interaction with the lawful sphere of “proper family,” without necessarily challenging the order that excludes them. fugitive kinship arises whenever the state sanctions only a limited range of relationalities to create an aura of finiteness, cohesion, and permanence around the body politic. as such, it is not limited to transnational migrants and may also impact relatively immobile groups of people. a cursory look at japan and the philippines yields ample examples. the relatively well-known practice among queer couples in modern japan where one partner adopts the other as their “son” or “daughter,” virtually the only feasible way for them to achieve legal family status on the national level in a country that has not legalized same-sex marriage (dale 2020). the common sight of extralegal families in the philippines, where the illegality of divorce upheld by the state and the catholic church forces those who cannot afford expensive annulment to remain married to their legal spouses on paper even after starting new lives with their next partners (abalos 2017). similar cases must abound in other parts of the world, especially among the groups of people who find themselves at a systemic disadvantage within the predominant political, ideological, and economic orders. in its transnational iterations, fugitive kinships often emerge within the imperialist and capitalist forces that course through the globalizing world, as illustrated by the lives of antonio and satoshi. the political regimes that rendered the two men’s kinships fugitive seem quite different at first glance: the prewar colonial rivalry over territorial expansion between the united states and japan, on the one hand, and the postwar economic competition over market domination between the two nations, on the other. as the japanese historian fujiwara kiichi (2011, 5) argued, however, postwar japan—defeated and occupied by the u.s.-led allied forces—adopted an american-style approach of “unofficial empire (hiseishiki no teikoku)” to its subsequent transnational projects. this 650analytical emphasis on the continuity between official and unofficial imperialisms also proves critical to e. san juan jr. (1998, 4), a filipino writer and activist. he insists on the historicity of the filipino diaspora, one major driver of which is “the finesse and ferocity of the colonial violence we have suffered under u.s. white supremacist power.” long after its official independence from the united states in 1946, the philippines remains “a neocolonized dependency” with severe unemployment. hence “filipinos have to ‘sell’ themselves in the predatory globalized market” (san juan 2009, xvi)—a trend backed by their own state that markets and brokers their labor to the world (guevarra 2009; rodriguez 2010). japan has served many filipinos as a major entryway into this global labor market since the 1980s, sometimes used merely as a steppingstone toward their ultimate dreamland called “america” or “the west.” thus the fugitive kinships among filipinos in japan are a historical product of dual imperialisms in multiples senses—american and japanese, official and unofficial, neocolonial and neoliberal. the proliferation of fugitive kinships amid dual imperialisms brings the double-edged nature of kinship into sharp relief. as the growing body of scholarship at the intersection of anthropology and migration studies shows, kinship nurtures solidarity but also breeds exploitation (amrith and coe 2022; brettel 2017; constable 2009; ikeuchi 2019; lan 2006; wang 2016). it is a safe space of inclusion as well as “a domain where hierarchies and inequalities are fixed and standardized and intimate aggressions thrive” (andrikopoulos and duyvendak 2020, 301). as it turns out, filipino migrants in japan—roughly 70 percent of whom are female8 —have long experienced this ambivalence. lieba faier (2009, 137–41) pointed out that the trope of ii oyomesan (good bride and daughter-in-law) disciplined filipina wives in rural japan as “kindred subjects” who deferred to their husbands and in-laws in a way that “privileged a notion of traditional japaneseness.” along similar lines, rhacel parreñas (2011, 179) applied the term sexual citizens to the filipina women who secured long-term residency in japan by marrying or giving birth to japanese nationals. such case studies show that, within the context of dual imperialisms that restrict their freedom, filipina migrants have frequently submitted to—or at least outwardly accepted—the patriarchal and heteronormative order calibrated to reproduce the racialized body politic called “the japanese.” ironically, the rigidity of family regimes can invite creative expressions of fugitive kinship instead of stifling alternative ways of becoming kin. inflexibility means predictability and, when fused with bureaucratic formality, can amount 651to a virtual announcement of when, where, and how the state will be watching—or not. this knowledge then informs the performance of kinships by some resourceful migrants who conform to the official standards of family in the presence of the state while privately engaging in potentially subversive acts of alternative kin-making, like satoshi’s mother who raised her son with a filipino man as a child of her japanese husband. this combination of public conformity and private waywardness—a duality characteristic of many fugitive kinships—can erode the common distinction between the performative and ontological models of kinship formation. as janet carsten (2020, 321; italics original) has observed, the more traditional framework in anthropology views kinship as “a stable or conservative repository of precepts and practices” and emphasizes “being over doing, origins over attainment, the past over the future.” the more open view, in contrast, stresses becoming over being, nurture over origins, and the future over the past, underscoring “the importance of processual and performative ways of becoming kin” (carsten 2020, 321). these two models—the ontological “kinship as being” and the performative “kinship as becoming”— coexist within most migrants’ lives. this article will show that the duality of fugitive kinship can further synthesize the ontological and the performative frameworks of kin formations. in fugitive kinship, ontology and performance can form a sticky whole. below, i will elaborate on the parameters and trajectories of fugitive kinship by illustrating three of its myriad manifestations: (1) salvaged kinships, or kinships once fugitive now (re)integrated into a family regime; (2) transacted kinships, or relationships performed within a family regime that may anchor other fugitive kinships; and (3) queer kinships, or ties that depart from the dominant, often state-sanctioned, expressions of gender and/or sexuality. in its transnational iterations between japan and the philippines, fugitive kinship arose from the confluence of imperial ambition, labor migration, and global markets in the early twentieth century, which i turn to now. salvaged kinship nikkei filipinos between two empires, 1900s–2022 it was american colonialism that precipitated the first wave of large-scale japanese migration to the philippines. having just seized the island territory after victory in the spanish-american war of 1898, the united states initiated one of its largest infrastructure projects in the new colony in 1901: benguet road, which connected manila and baguio (hayase 1989, 47). many of the japanese 652laborers who arrived in the thousands in 1903 and 1904 contributed to the road’s construction.9 on its completion in 1905, many dispersed to other parts of the island colony, beginning the first chapter of modern japanese diaspora in the philippines. tarō antonio lopez iketani does not know when exactly his japanese grandfather, iketani sōtarō, migrated to baguio. as his father was born in 1940 as sōtarō’s eldest child, he surmises that he must have arrived a few years before that. all he remembers from the reminiscences of his filipina grandmother, maria, is that they were married and living contently with two babies by the early 1940s—the eve of the japanese empire’s invasion of the philippines. at the heels of the attack on pearl harbor in december 1941, the japanese imperial army began their offensives in the philippines. by may 1942, they drove out the american forces and trampled the filipino resistance army. “i shall return,” prophesied general douglas macarthur as he fled, leaving the filipino people with yet another—this time asian—colonizer. suddenly, roughly 29,000 japanese settlers like iketani sōtarō found themselves under co-ethnic imperial rule in the foreign land.10 “sabi ng lola ko, mabait ang lolo ko [my grandma said my grandpa was kind],” antonio recounted his grandparents’ life during this period in tagalog at a café in aichi, japan, in 2022. “my grandma was like a princess. . . . my grandpa didn’t want [her] to work . . . just relax . . . and they had a maid back then. . . . this was already the wartime, but that’s the story of my grandma, that there were always eggs on the table; never ran out of eggs.” maria’s recollection of material comfort during the japanese occupation portrays a well-off and protective foreign husband. this complacency under japanese rule, however, would cost the family dearly after the fall of japan’s short-lived reign. after only two years in october 1944, general macarthur indeed returned to the islands, leading the american military. the embattled japanese imperial army started drafting the local japanese settlers—who had not come to the philippines as soldiers—and iketani sōtarō was among them. chaos ensued. all antonio knows today is that his grandfather must have died somewhere in northern luzon as the japanese imperial army suffered a spectacular defeat. it was a death of no news, no body, and no funeral. sōtarō simply perished in the tropical jungle. on the japanese empire’s surrender, the victorious american forces ordered all surviving japanese to repatriate to japan while giving their local wives and mixed offspring the ultimate choice: to stay in the philippines and face the now skyrocketing anti-japanese sentiment among fellow filipinos, or to “go 653back” to japan alongside the japanese migrants, leaving behind the only homeland they had ever known. with her nikkei children, now three and five, maria made a desperate attempt to reach a “big ship” (malaking barko) rumored to be awaiting people like them at the coastline in the aftermath of the war. but they did not make it. among the things maria lost to the chaos were the identity papers proving her family’s kinship to iketani sōtarō. this loss was shared almost uniformly among the nikkei filipinos, but it was a blessing in disguise for the time being. most hid their paternal ancestry to avoid the harsh stigma of being a child of japanese in the immediate postwar years. for instance, yōsuke marcos cruz iketani—maria’s eldest son and antonio’s father—was just marcos cruz until the late 1960s, when he felt safe enough to start introducing himself as yōsuke iketani. in the mid-1970s, yōsuke iketani decided to write to a japanese newspaper to find out more about his deceased japanese father’s kin. the small ad contained the fundamentals: a child of iketani sōtarō, a japanese national from tokushima who migrated to the philippines around 1938, is looking for his relatives in japan. yōsuke was luckier than most of the so-called left-behind orphans (zanryū koji) in the postwar philippines. his late father’s brother, who never emigrated, came across the ad and sent an enthusiastic reply. at his uncle’s invitation, he visited japan for the first time in 1978. the two-week stay was filled with tears and laughter. yōsuke shared the few mementos his mother managed to keep, such as his japanese father’s diary, and the uncle made sure his half-filipino nephew had ready access to japan’s family registry (koseki) as a son of japanese. kinship was thus salvaged from the ravage of the war. in 1990, japan introduced the long-term resident visa (teijūsha biza), available to the foreign nationals of japanese descent up to the third generation. it requires the applicant to submit their japanese ancestor’s family register (koseki tōhon or joseki tōhon) as a proof of kinship. the new visa promptly triggered the mass migration of nikkei brazilians, peruvians, and bolivians, but the same movement from the philippines did not gain momentum until the 2000s. unlike their counterparts in latin america, nikkei filipinos suffered from the consequences of japanese military invasion, wartime destruction, and postwar mandatory “repatriation” that attempted to expunge those with “the japanese blood” from the filipino soil. as a result, they could not preserve well the documents and memories pertaining to their japanese ancestry. the iketanis proved an exception; their japanese kinship had already been salvaged years earlier. in august 1991, antonio iketani arrived at narita international airport on the 654ancestry-based visa. he knew that japan was his paternal grandfather’s homeland, and he was excited to be there. at the same time, he came to work, save money, and send remittances back to his family. salvaged kinship meant economic opportunity. at the time of our interview in 2022, fifty-six-year-old antonio had been working in japan for thirty-one years. with his two adult children now independent in tokyo, he seriously contemplated early retirement in his hometown. “in japan, it’s just work, work, work,” antonio sighed during one of our strolls through a mall after sunday mass. “so it’s better to retire in the philippines.” at the food court, antonio and his wife decided to eat udon noodle topped with shrimp and pumpkin tempura. after the meal, they talked for two hours nonstop about their retirement plans, showing me on his iphone numerous photos of the land they had bought and houses they had built with the hard-earned money from their factory labor in japan. “saging ’to, mangga ’to [this is banana, this is mango],” they chorused pointing at each tree in their lush garden in baguio—the only place they called home. this was the culmination of fugitive kinship for the time being. the iketanis’ kinship to their emigrant ancestor was first rendered fugitive by sōtarō’s death, before being obscured further by the mandatory repatriation and postwar anti-japanese stigma. it was eventually salvaged by a fortuitous reunion with their japanese kin in tokushima, who never needed to run and hide like sōtarō in wartime luzon and maintained a firm grip on the official identity records. with the turning of the tide, what was once a curse transformed into “consanguineal capital” (seiger 2017). the salvaged kinship allowed the filipino descendants to return to their ancestral homeland, yes, but just as important, it enabled them to earn in yen and send remittances back to the philippines to build a better future. many nikkei filipinos are not as fortunate as the iketanis, however. to this day, their japanese lineages remain illegible and illegitimate to the japanese state due to the lack of proper papers. in 2023, there were 59,044 filipinos on the ancestry-based long-term-resident visa in japan.11 but it is difficult to determine how many of them are people like antonio, descendants of prewar and wartime japanese emigrants called “old nikkeis” (kyū nikkeijin).12 as far as the official statistics on visa issuance go, they are indistinguishable from the other major segment of this population called “new nikkeis” (shin nikkeijin), the offspring of postwar japanese-filipino unions born primarily since the 1980s. although the new nikkeis were born in peacetime, many still face the issue of fugitive kinship like the old nikkeis. to explain 655why, i must now bring in the figure of the filipina entertainer amid japan’s postwar economic prosperity. filipina entertainers and their offspring, 1980s–2022 it was 1994, and aileen gonzalez was on the run. she was a tangle of raw emotions—nervous, guilty, and excited. she had never done anything like this, having always been a responsible role model as the eldest of eight siblings. yet here she was, less than a year after arriving in japan, running away from her employer in fukuoka for a better-paying gig in chiba, officially becoming a fugitive from the japanese state. as much as aileen’s heart ached with guilt, running away paid off, even if it made her an illegal overstayer of the entertainer visa (kōgyō biza). at the hot spring inn in fukuoka, she made only 50,000 yen per month, or roughly $500 usd. as a hostess at club paradise in chiba, where she flirted with japanese customers while singing karaoke and mixing their drinks, she could make 10,000 yen every night, which added up to around $3,000 usd a month. her first paycheck from the club bought her family in the philippines an electric tricycle, so they could start a taxi business. next, she bought her mother a convenience store to manage, followed by cash remittances to send her seven siblings all the way up to college. soon, an even better job offer came from nagoya. she ran away again—the only way she knew to exert some agency against a legal system that restricted her freedom (faier 2008). little did she know that in nagoya she would meet her husband, a japanese customer who one night walked serendipitously through the door of club glamour. mr. matsumoto fell hard for aileen, a petite filipina of stunning beauty twelve years his junior. every evening, aileen recounted, he would take her out for a nice meal before her shift in addition to showering her with many gifts. despite her reluctance, he continued to woo her for more than six months until she slowly lowered her guard. thankfully, he did not hesitate when she divulged her overstayer status. he quickly married her, hired a lawyer, and got her a spousal visa that eventually turned into a permanent resident visa. aileen gonzales on the run became aileen matsumoto with legal papers. when i met her in 2022, the couple had been married for twenty-four years, and aileen at fifty-four was a grandmother to two. in many ways, aileen represents the waves of filipina women who entered japan between the mid-1980s and 2005, the year when the japanese government restricted the issuance of entertainer visas. first, the majority of filipina entertainers-turned-residents migrated to japan during the peak years between the 6561990s and 2004. as a result, the largest age group of filipina women in japan today, to which aileen belongs, is between fifty and fifty-four years.13 second, those on the entertainer visa who settled in japan usually did so in much the same way as aileen, by marrying japanese customers and/or giving birth to japanese citizens. third, although her life in japan had been limited by “indentured mobility” (parreñas 2011), which impelled her to run away from restrictive contracts, she presented herself as a proud woman with the agency to make her own decisions, not as a powerless victim who fell prey to the nightlife industry. like many other filipinas who chose similar paths, she feels especially proud that she has provided for her family through hard work and sacrifice. today, the filipina women who initially came as entertainers and their offspring exert a strong influence within the filipino community in japan (suzuki 2007). not all have managed to lead a life as stable as that of aileen and her offspring, however. many entertainer migrants had no option but to return to the philippines, be deported, or live as runaways far longer than they would have liked when the kinship ties the state deemed appropriate failed to materialize. as a result, countless japanese filipino children born out of wedlock have struggled to gain paternity recognition, access to the koseki family registry, and/or the transnational mobility they covet. the story of yolanda, who belongs to the generation of aileen’s children, is pertinent here. i met yolanda taniguchi at a caregiver training school in nagoya. petite, with a round face and rounder glasses, she looked younger than her twenty-seven years. every tuesday morning, she trudged into the classroom from a factory an hour away, where she worked a night shift. one day, a substitute teacher unaware of her job commented on the fat two-liter bottle of coke on yolanda’s desk. “nemui kara [because i’m sleepy],” she responded demurely in halting japanese. although yolanda was born in japan in 1996 to a filipina mother and a japanese father who had met at a pub, she could speak only basic japanese at the time. she grew up in las piñas from age two onward, after her mother discovered that her father was still married to his japanese wife and unable to marry her as he had promised with sugary words. despite her initial fury, yolanda’s mother kept seeing him whenever the man showed up on her doorstep. “i grew up in a broken family,” yolanda said bitterly during our conversation at a coffee shop one day. but when she turned thirteen, her japanese father proposed something totally unexpected: legally marrying her filipina mother. he had finally divorced his japanese wife. now that he was willing to give her paternity recognition and record her in his koseki register, yolanda qualified for both the 657long-term resident visa and even japanese nationality. at the age of twenty in 2016, she migrated to japan—the strange land of her birth—to work and build a better future, retracing the path her mother had taken twenty-six years earlier. thus it was her japanese father—about whom she still spoke sourly in 2022—who rescued her japanese kinship from obscurity and granted her the gift of transnational mobility. but for thirteen years, yolanda’s kinship to her japanese father had remained fugitive, like that of many japanese filipino children (known as jfcs) growing up fatherless in the philippines after their mothers returned or were deported from japan. according to itō rieko (1998) of the non-governmental organization jfc support network, many jfcs seek help to look for their fathers, ask for paternity recognition, request child support, obtain japanese visas, and/or acquire japanese nationality. in some cases, the located fathers refuse to acknowledge their paternity even in the face of glaring evidence for fear of offending their japanese wives and families—who might be blissfully ignorant—or to dodge the potential child support and other financial requests. if the old nikkei have faced fugitive kinship due to the imperial geopolitics that once pitted japan against the united states, the new nikkei suffer from fugitive kinships under the patriarchal order amplified by japan’s economic might. contrary to the pervasive discourse in japan that the 1945 defeat precipitated an absolute prewar/postwar rupture in history, the intimate relations between japan and the philippines expose the continuity of unequal power relations between the two nations. it is merely that the official imperialism of territorial expansion has been replaced by the unofficial imperialism of economic domination, with patriarchy as the consistent undertone. indeed, this historical continuity between the two imperialisms has been mediated by a potent mechanism that has long controlled citizenship and mobility in modern japan: koseki, or family registry, which records the marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and other family matters of every japanese household. existing in its modern form since 1871 to the present, japan’s koseki system has served varying political functions throughout the nation’s imperial, colonial, and postwar periods. despite the criticisms of its patriarchal and heteronormative nature, it continues to function today as an essential prerequisite for nationality, so much so that the citizenship principle in japan may well be termed jus koseki, “an ordering principle where a larger social order emanates from a generally accepted administrative micro-level ordering of the population into administrative household units” (krogness 2014, 161). under jus koseki, “the state allows the 658household to be a de facto gateway to registered citizenship” (krogness 2014, 152). consequently, those whose parents failed to register them in koseki suffer virtual statelessness; they cannot own bank accounts, legally marry, receive inheritance, access national health insurance, or obtain japanese passports, because all such activities require the submission of the koseki registers that they lack.14 indeed, the current system only grants nationality to those who are already registered in koseki, as opposed to entering those confirmed as japanese nationals into the koseki registry. thus koseki is the sine qua non of japanese nationality (endō 2013). as the backbone of the family regime in modern japan, jus koseki also extends to transnational migrants such as aileen and yolanda, who obtained their visas by way of kinship recognition. such migrants must rely on their japanese kin—oftentimes male—to access koseki registers and legitimize their fugitive kinships in the state’s eye. because the state virtually relegates the administration of citizenship to the intimate micropolitics of each family, many transnational migrants must seek the goodwill of their japanese kin to reach their goals. antonio had to rely on his japanese granduncle to obtain the document proof of his ancestry, as did yolanda on her japanese father. thus, salvaged kinships can be broadly defined as relationships once unsanctioned by the state that have achieved legal legitimacy by being subjected to the intimate discipline of the family regime. ironically, the strict requirement for official kinship records grants some migrants a space for creative maneuver. if koseki is sacrosanct in kinship recognition, they will find a way to buy it; if kinship to japanese is essential, they will find a way to fake it; if heterosexual union is necessary, they will find a way to perform it. transacted kinship: filipina entertainers and their japanese husbands gina rodriguez arrived in japan as an entertainer in 1997, tired of her filipino husband who would gamble away his meager income and determined to build a better future for their three little sons. soon she eased into the typical migratory rhythm of popular entertainers on the six-month renewable visa: “six months japan, one month pinas, six months work, one month rest, repeat.” the money she earned as a frequent “number one”—the most popular hostess at a club—granted her not only material wealth but also personal freedom. on top of several business ventures such as tricycle taxis for her family in the 659philippines, gina could finally afford a lawyer to obtain an expensive annulment to legally separate from her husband. in 2002, she made her last trip to japan as an entertainer and returned to her hometown iligan city, mindanao. good times never last, however. bit by bit, the financial foundation that seemed rock solid started eroding, in no small part due to her own bad habit of betting on cockfighting (sabong). by 2008, she had to admit that she needed to emigrate again to earn more money. but japan had already restricted the issuance of entertainer visas in 2005. so, when she heard about a new program to work in japan as a caregiver, she jumped at the opportunity. after extensive training in manila, she set foot in japan again as a participant in the japan-philippines economic partnership agreement that sent filipino nurses and caregivers to the country. ever resourceful, gina worked as a caregiver by day and secretly worked as a hostess again at night—the latter of which the terms of her visa prohibited. time flew by. the expiration of her three-year visa came into sight, but she was nowhere near reaching her financial goal. she panicked, contacted a japanese broker she knew from her entertainer days, and spilled all her worries. he had a simple response: “he decided for me: ‘run away already.’ so i ran away [siya nag-decide, mō nigete. dakara ako nigetano].” in hiding, gina moved from one unfamiliar house to another, sometimes huddling with a dozen other filipina runaways. she knew only one way out of this life in constant fear, something she had witnessed not infrequently as a hostess: imitation marriage (parreñas 2011, 200–213). the same broker who floated the idea of running away gave her the contact of a japanese man who was willing to provide the service in exchange for money. so in 2012, unbeknown to her family, gina took the strange man’s surname and became gina suzuki. to her new boyfriend in the philippines, she lied that she could not marry him because her visa in japan was for single mothers. the kinship she considered real—her filipino boyfriend—turned into a secret she must guard from the japanese state. the true nature of her kinship to suzuki-san, the japanese man she barely knew, had to remain hidden as well. after five years, gina applied for permanent residency, which was promptly approved. delighted, she immediately filed for divorce from suzuki-san—which proved a mistake. the local immigration agency became suspicious of the timing and summoned both separately for a cross-examination interview. in her lively retelling in a mixture of japanese, tagalog, and english in 2022, the interview went like this: “[our lives were] totally separate! so i didn’t know what color his bicycle was. ‘i’m sorry, i’m colorblind. in the past he had a different bike, so it 660might have changed, too,’ i said [to the immigration officers]. later suzuki-san told me, ‘right, right, it changed. it used to be white but now it’s black, it changed.’ good relief!” gina guffawed—she was not colorblind. her wit seemed to have done the trick, since her permanent residency was not revoked in the end. but just to make sure, she remarried suzuki-san and stayed that way for a few more years until all her filipino children moved to japan with him as the guarantor. then they divorced for good. in 2022, she remembered suzuki-san fondly as a rare japanese who was willing to go through all these troubles as long as she kept him content with allowances for pachinko gamble. she had no idea about his whereabouts, but hoped he was doing fine. all that was left of suzuki-san was his last name, which she still used in her day-to-day life to assert her belonging in japanese society, and her entire filipino family securely in japan living a comfortable, if not affluent, life. gina’s story demonstrates that the rigidity of bureaucracy paradoxically opens up room for maneuver. when the state clearly lays out the qualifications for legally recognizable kinships, such information can end up serving as accessible guidelines for resourceful migrants and brokers who wish to game the system. she played well by the rules; her husband was male, japanese, and registered in the nation’s family registry, which perfectly aligned with the patriarchal order, heteronormativity, and traditional japaneseness perpetuated by the nation’s family regime. the legal status she procured through grit enabled her to take better care of her real kin, although she now had to hide some of them from the japanese state. thus transacted kinship can be defined as a usually temporary relational anchor within the legal realm whose quid pro quo nature and capacity to facilitate other fugitive kinships must be hidden from the state. despite gina’s vague gratitude toward suzuki-san, their relationship remained business-like until the end. for other filipina migrants, however, imitation marriage created unexpected possibilities for human relationality, blurring the line between fake and real. queer kinship: same-sex relationships and platonic companionships i met jocelyn tominaga, a fifty-five-year-old filipina from davao, mindanao, for the first time in 2022 at a catholic church in aichi with a large filipino congregation. petit in frame and bubbly in spirit, she laughed boisterously in the quiet hallway, only to be shushed by other filipino congregants who knew the father was having a meeting. looking at her button-up shirt tucked into baggy 661pants, short hair spiked up in gel, and lack of facial makeup, i thought to myself that she looked like a “tomboy,” a term filipinos use to refer to a lesbian who assumes a stereotypically masculine role. so i was taken aback when she nonchalantly mentioned her spouse (ang asawa ko), for whom she used the english pronoun “he” as the group conversed in taglish. i thought my first impression was just wrong until jocelyn and i met for a long lunch a few months later. raised in a poor family with six other siblings, she managed to go to college by cobbling together various aids and scholarships, but she remained underemployed even after graduation. having heard the stories of abuse against ofws (overseas filipino workers), she wanted to stay put in her own country. but her fate changed forever one day when she agreed to accompany her then girlfriend to an audition in manila for the entertainer visa. a japanese broker recruited her on the spot, despite the absence of an application form and her boyish looks. “i guess i was still pretty,” she chuckled. her girlfriend, ironically, decided against going to japan in the end, partly because her family opposed their relationship. so in 1995, she came to japan alone as an entertainer and started working as a hostess. the separation broke her heart but, in retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise. three months after her arrival, she met the love of her life—a fellow filipina entertainer—and started dating her seriously. over the next few years, they worked as hostesses in various japanese cities, renewing their entertainer visas in the philippines every six months. in the summer of 1998, jocelyn and her girlfriend were back in japan again after a month in the philippines. this time, they were sent to a club in sendai. they assumed the usual work routine: sitting next to male customers, fixing them drinks, singing karaoke songs, and entertaining them with flirtatious talks. the new club, however, told them that they needed to striptease at least. when they protested that this was not what the broker had told them, the manager simply declared that they had three days to practice. they felt they had no option but to run away. a japanese customer jocelyn knew from one of her previous hostessing stints—tominaga-san—agreed to come all the way to sendai on short notice to take them to nagoya. so only three days after their arrival in japan, they were on the run, huddled together on shinkansen seats in a mixture of fear and relief. jocelyn and her girlfriend lived together near nagoya and worked in different filipino pubs for several years, fearing arrest and deportation. soon, living in constant terror became too much. tominaga-san agreed to marry jocelyn; her girlfriend found another willing japanese customer. “and when we went to the 662immigration office, my girlfriend was there, too! we went there on the same day, with different men! funny!” jocelyn laughed. after the interview, she said bye to tominaga-san and went straight home to her girlfriend. the apartment he rented for their conjugal life sat empty “like a garage.” the immigration officers became suspicious. they started harassing her with calls and visits, interrogating why she rarely went home, to which she invariably responded that she slept over at her female friend’s home because her husband worked night shifts. “and that was true! [totoo iyan eh!]” jocelyn exclaimed. but she also understood that her queer relationship with her lover now became a fugitive kinship, something that must remain hidden from the authorities. after some close calls, a spousal visa came through, which eventually turned into a permanent resident visa. all the while, jocelyn continued to live in the same-sex relationship until 2007, when they broke up due to her girlfriend’s drug issues. heartbroken, jocelyn started living with tominaga-san, who quietly accepted her without any questions. throughout the years, he never confronted her about her sexual orientation, although she was sure he had heard through the grapevine that she was a lesbian. at the time of our interview in 2022, jocelyn and tominaga-san had been married for twenty-one years. “why do you stay married to tominaga-san?” i asked, remembering jocelyn’s declaration earlier that the marriage was not for love but for a visa. “you can divorce now if you want.” “because i don’t want to [kasi ayaw ko eh],” jocelyn answered without missing a beat and continued: it’s my choice to stay married to him. he gave me life here in japan with his [spousal] visa . . . . i have real respect for him, and yeah, of course, a lot of gratitude, yes. the visa he gave me, i cannot repay with money, i cannot pay him back. no visa, no me, no life, no land [in the philippines] . . . i’m truly thankful because there are so few japanese men like him, maybe only a handful in a thousand! us, no sex, no intimacy, his bed there, my bed here. . . . sometimes i look up to the sky and i ask: do i deserve this? i’m happy thanks to what he did for me. i nodded, taking in the sudden gush of emotions. “do you know how tominaga-san feels? why did he stay married to you all these years?” 663“no clue [ewan ko],” jocelyn shrugged. “i wonder myself, but i never confronted him. i guess i’m scared. probably in the beginning, he liked me, and then he pitied me. but after that . . . no idea. i just know that our life together now . . . it’s fine. it’s good.” the fake marriage she entered into to protect her life in japan with her long-term girlfriend transformed into something unexpected over the years. it would be difficult to label the current relationship between jocelyn and tominaga-san. friendship? fellowship? even jocelyn herself struggled to categorize it, much less name it. at minimum, it was a kind of companionship founded on mutual recognition and long-lasting familiarity, with an overwhelming sense of gratitude on jocelyn’s part. over the years, tominaga-san changed from a generic man who could give her a visa to a special person whom she was unwilling to leave. the real queer kinship to her girlfriend ended after twelve years; the fake hetero kinship that initially functioned as a mere cover outlasted it. the line between real and fake thus became blurred. in a sense, jocelyn’s relationship to tominaga-san also turned queer, as it troubles the expectation for marital sexuality that lies at the core of reproductive kinship, the institution of marriage, and—in the context of japan—jus koseki.15 instead of functioning as a procreative unit of nation-building, their platonic relationship entered an unlabeled territory of queerness, that is, the “alternative relationalities, intimacies, and solidarities forged outside of state-sanctioned heterosexuality and its ideological enforcement through familial discipline” (ponce 2012, 25). indeed, the asexuality of their now decades-long bond gestures toward a fertile terrain of “alternative modes of being with others” (przybylo and cooper 2014, 311)—modes mediated not by sex or romance but by queer-platonic mutuality. here, asexual relationality is defined no longer by its lack of sex but rather by its expansive potential for kin-making (kenney 2020; przybylo 2011). it is no wonder that the line between fake and real marriages, often marked by sexual intimacy, becomes fuzzy in her story. for her, fake transformed into some kind of real. martin manalansan (2006) pointed out that the literature on the feminization of migration—which often features filipina migrants—has unwittingly naturalized heteronormativity by centering the figure of the wife and mother. as it turns out, jocelyn’s queer kinships to her girlfriend and husband decenter not only heteronormativity but also marital sexuality, thus defying the expectation for reproductive kinship that serves as the handmaiden of nation-building. in the eye of the state, she remained another filipina woman who married a japanese 664man to settle in japan, an amenable subject of the family regime. privately, however, she has forged queer kinships out of a series of wayward acts that can potentially elude—if only temporarily—the reach of familial discipline. conclusion in november 2022, gina suzuki—who acquired permanent residency in japan through the transacted marriage with a japanese man named suzuki-san—invited me to the birthday party of her granddaughter, mari, who was turning four. as soon as i arrived at her home in an old danchi (subsidized housing complex), i was enveloped in the mouthwatering smell of sizzling pork wafting from the small kitchen. a tall man, gina’s eldest son and mari’s father, greeted me as he flipped pork legs. as i waited for the rest of gina’s family to arrive, i struck up a conversation with the two women sitting across from me, who turned out to be mari’s mother and maternal grandmother. the older woman stressed that she was nikkei, not an entertainer. i nodded, wondering if she presumed me to be another japanese with negative stereotypes about filipina entertainers. gina’s family and relatives trickled in. the last to arrive was her youngest son, a willowy man in his twenties in a tight lacoste t-shirt and skinny jeans, whom gina once jokingly called a kalahating babae (half woman). mari in a pink princess dress shrieked with joy and ran straight into the open arms of her favorite gay uncle. after he and his boyfriend greeted everyone in a mixture of english and tagalog, they both sat down in front of the small mountain of gifts and started unwrapping them with mari. “now what is this? this one’s not that big, is it? let’s open it, yeah?” “yubiwa da, kawaī! [it’s a ring, so cute!]” the girl, born and raised in japan, exclaimed in japanese. the entire apartment full of kin watched over her with smiles. slowly, the faint discomfort i felt as a non-kin guest morphed into quiet awe. i was witnessing an unlikely convergence of multiple fugitive kinships shaped by the transnational history of japan and the philippines—a moment of small culmination for all the aspirations that must have filled mari’s forebearers as they set out on their migratory journeys to reach a better future for themselves and their kin. mari’s mother grew up in japan as the daughter of a nikkei filipina migrant, who obtained her ancestry-based visa by salvaging the legitimate koseki record of her japanese ancestor who emigrated to the philippines in the past century. mari’s father was brought to japan as a dependent of a filipina permanent resident, a legal status gina achieved through the transacted kinship with a japanese man named suzuki-san. mari’s uncle—who was clearly accepted 665as he was by his extended kin—doted on the little girl with his boyfriend by his side. taken together, the birthday party was made possible by salvaged, transacted, and queer relationalities, making mari a living meeting point of multiple fugitive kinships. no one in gina’s extended family has openly challenged the dominant family regime in japan, which has regulated the lives of so many transnational migrants like themselves. instead, they have formed various fugitive kinships—bonds fostered while skirting or maneuvering the legal system that only sometimes result in official state sanction. although a small number of filipino migrants have defiantly sued the japanese state to assert their legal rights,16 such individuals are in the minority, as most working-class migrants, including gina’s family, understandably resort to ordinary resilience in their busy day-to-day lives. this article shed light on this quiet majority, or the migrants who may outwardly accept the status quo while inwardly embracing subversive emotions and alternative relations. antonio iketani, yolanda taniguchi, and mari’s maternal grandmother all secured their right to transnational mobility by way of salvaged kinships—the once-obscure relationships without official records that have successfully earned legal recognition by being subjected to the disciplinary power of the family regime. gina suzuki successfully transferred and rebuilt her kin network in japan by capitalizing on her marriage to suzuki-san, which was a transacted kinship—a lawful relationship secured in return for some kind of payment, often for the purpose of facilitating other fugitive kinships. jocelyn tominaga and gina’s youngest son have found themselves in fulfilling queer relationships—a type of fugitive kinship in the context of japan, where heteronormativity and marital sexuality constitute the legal and ideological standards. publicly, all the fugitive kinships listed above conform to or at least fall short of disrupting the dominant family regime. privately, however, they often simmer with wayward sentiments, alternative relationalities, and erratic movements—the kind of unruliness the state bureaucracy suppresses in its attempt to control the national polity. this duality of fugitive kinship—that is, the bifurcation between public acceptance and private subversion—reinforces the institutional performativity of family. as s. p. f. dale (2020, 149) wrote regarding same-sex unions in japan, the heteronormative patriarchy perpetuated by the koseki system creates an environment where “the individual is complying with (or feels compelled to comply with) social norms in order to gain social recognition and to ‘pass’ as a good 666citizen who abides by social expectations. . . . institutional performativity functions through this psychic regulation of individual lives and is further reinforced when relationships comply with it in legal form, though not necessarily in actual shape.” fueled by the creative dissonance between “legal form” and “actual shape,” fugitive kinships can “serve to maintain the illusion of the hegemonic idea of the family, although in reality they also serve to undermine it” (dale 2020, 149). such subversive conformity inevitably leads to ambiguity, which different parties capitalize on for different purposes. as this article has demonstrated, many migrants draw on this gray zone to quietly and cleverly resist japan’s restrictive immigration regime. at the same time, the duality of fugitive kinship also benefits the state by allowing it to enjoy more leeway for two-faced engagements with those on the margins of citizenship. in any given political regime, there will be individuals who cannot or will not confine their lives within the realm of lawful kinships. by demanding public conformity from such people in legal twilight zones without exerting utter control over private practice, the state can continue to harness their labor power and reproductive vitality without compromising the performative cohesion of its polity. in this sense, fugitive kinships invigorate rather than destabilize the national body politic, even as the state endeavors to pathologize and obscure their existence. whether it be foreign migrants, queer persons, or any other group of people suffering from social precarity because they lack “proper” papers, statecraft effectively corners them into quiet—not defiant—subversive acts to pragmatically exploit their capacities while formally disavowing their belonging in the nation. the workings of fugitive kinship fuse the ontological and performative models of kin formation, especially in the process of nation-making. in modern japan, where nationality and citizenship are granted primarily as a right of blood, an array of legal and ideological apparatuses have construed “japanese blood” as a powerful ontological substance that inheres in the racialized body politic called minzoku (robertson 2012, 99). the nation’s koseki regime annexes foreign migrants to this ontological unity by mandating official kinship ties to legally defined “japanese families”—an attempt to maintain an image of ethno-national kinship in an era of intensifying transnational mobility. some migrants meet this mandate by way of japanese ancestry, like antonio iketani and yolanda taniguchi, while others find the way through marriage to japanese citizens, like gina suzuki and jocelyn tominaga. yet the aforementioned duality of fugitive kinship complicates the essentialist notion of japaneseness. while most migrants publicly 667conform to the family regime that reproduces the national polity as an ontological continuity, their private engagements in fugitive kinships—often errant, wayward, and transitory—affirm the performative aspects of kin formation. indeed, fugitive kinship points to the performativity of ontology, entangling the state of being kin and the process of becoming kin into a hybrid whole. fugitive kinship matters because it captures messy human reality and, in the context of contemporary japan, counters the dominant discourse of relationless society (muen shakai) that portrays the people as isolated, alone, and lonely (allison 2013; ozawa-de silva 2021). granted, conventional relations legible to the state—marriages, childbirths, multigenerational co-residence, and the like—may well be on the decline. but this trend says little about the formations of fugitive kinships, which may be proliferating and deepening as we speak, unbeknown to the authorities. after all, recorded kinships constitute only a tiny island in the vast ocean of ever-shifting relationalities, where most currents will always remain fugitive. abstract like countless other immigrants in the global north, many filipinos in japan have relied on kinship ties to citizens—descent and marriage—to become lawful residents. the hinging of mobility on family ties, however, has yielded a messy by-product: fugitive kinships—bonds formed outside the narrow juridical definitions of family, typically without legitimate documents or state sanction, that sustain their vitality not by open defiance of the exclusionary rules but by a quiet maneuver of the system in place. by tracing the transnational history of japan and the philippines that seeps out of the ethnographic portraits of contemporary migrants, this article elucidates three manifestations of fugitive kinship: salvaged kinship of japanese filipinos, transacted kinship between japanese men and filipina women, and queer kinship formed in gay, lesbian, and asexual relationships. in fugitive kinship, being and becoming—the two main modes of analyzing kin formation in anthropology—form a sticky whole. [diaspora; migration; kinship; queer; japan; the philippines] 要旨 国民との婚姻・血縁等の家族関係に基づいたビザは、資本先進国への移住民が技能レベルに関わらず正規のルートで定住できる数少ない手段であり、在日フィリピン人の間でもこの方法で定住者となった人々が多い。しかし在留資格が法的に証明可能な家族関係の有無に左右される時、移住民はしばしば理想と現実の隔たりに戸惑い、その結果様々な関係性が公の領域から排除され不可視化されることとなる。本論文では法的記録や証明書類の提出が困難で正式な「家族」の基準を満たさないとされる一連の関係性を「fugitive kinship（不可視化された把握し難い関係性）」として捉え、このような法の外に置かれた家族関係を生きる人々がシステムに真っ向から立ち向かうのではなく規制の間隙を縫って立ち回ることでどのように生活の基盤を築いてきたのかを考察する。焦点となるのは日系フィリピン人の「回復された血縁関係（salvaged kinship）」、フィリピン人女性と日本人男性の間の「取引された婚姻関係（transacted kinship）」、そしてゲイ・レズビアン・アセクシュアルカップルの「クィアな家族関係（queer kinship）」であり、この三つの関係性を通してグローバルな日本における正式・非正式な「家族」の射程を分析するのが狙いである。[移民；ディアスポラ；家族関係；クィア；日本；フィリピン]668 notes acknowledgments  i thank the leaders of the filipino migrant center, chubu philippines friendship association, avance life support, and various filipino catholic communities across the chūbu region for guiding and teaching me during fieldwork in japan, which was generously funded by the national science foundation (award # 2110838 “dimensions of care giving and eldercare technology in an aging society”). the members of the reinventing japan colloquium at ucsb provided valuable feedback to the previous versions of the article, as did the four anonymous reviewers with sharp constructive comments. i am of course responsible for any remaining shortcomings. 1. taglish refers to a mixture of english and filipino used by many filipinos. 2. as of june 2023, the aichi prefecture had 43,228 filipino nationals, followed by 35,365 in tokyo, and 25,385 in kanagawa. these figures are based on the statistical data compiled by the immigration services agency of the japanese government in 2023 and accessible on the portal site of official statistics of japan called “e-stat.” see table 23-06-03 titled “shikuchōson betsu kokuseki, chiiki betsu zairyū gaikokujin [foreigners in japan by nationality, region, and municipality]” on the linked page: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/stat-search/files?page=​1&layout=​datalist&toukei=00250012&tstat=​000001018034&cycle=​1&year=20230&month=​12040606&tclass1​=000001060399&tclass2val=0 3. inasal is a filipino-style grilled chicken. adobo is meat with vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, and other ingredients. biko is sticky rice cake with coconut milk and brown sugar. 4. although i am aware of the term filipinx and support its use in many contexts, in this article i choose to use filipino and filipina because those are the terms used by the people whom i write about. they also used the tagalog equivalents such as pilipino, pilipina, pinoy, pinay. 5. all the names are pseudonyms. filipino and american names appear in the order of given name and family name while japanese names are in the order of family name and given name, following the conventions of these countries. japanese persons often appear as their family names plus the suffix -san, which is a common way to address people. 6. due to the coronavirus pandemic, most still wore facemasks in public in japan in 2022, even in summer heat. 7. the fieldwork consisted of three stays in japan: the summer of 2019, april to december 2022, and the summer of 2023. the research locations were primarily in aichi and tokyo. i conducted the research in a mixture of tagalog, english, and japanese, the three languages most long-term filipino residents in japan freely mixed. at the 669time, my tagalog language ability was advanced; it had been certified by actfl as “advanced low” in august 2021. i am also a native speaker of japanese, with professional proficiency in english. 8. in june 2023, of the 309,943 filipino nationals registered in japan, 210,224 were women and 99,719 men.” see table 23-06-02 titled “kokuseki, chiiki betsu nenrei (5 sai kaikyū), seibetsu zairyū gaikokujin [foreigners in japan by nationality, area, age (by 5 years), and sex]” on the linked page in footnote 2. 9. in 1903, the number of japanese migrants to the philippines jumped to 2,215, from 77 in the previous year, and remained on the same level at 2,923 in 1904 before dropping to 427 in 1905 (hayase 1989, 32). 10. in 1940, the recorded number of japanese in the philippines was 28,731 (hayase 2024, 7) 11. see table 23-06-02 titled “kokuseki, chiiki betsu nenrei (5 sai kaikyū), seibetsu zairyū gaikokujin [foreigners in japan by nationality, area, age (by 5 years), and sex]” on the linked page in footnote 2. 12. many teijūsha visa holders become permanent residents as soon as they can, so the number does not reflect the entire nikkei filipino population in japan. 13. see table 23-06-02 titled “kokuseki, chiiki betsu nenrei (5 sai kaikyū), seibetsu zairyū gaikokujin [foreigners in japan by nationality, area, age (by 5 years), and sex]” on the linked page in footnote 2. 14. japan has estimated 10,000 mukosekiji, or “children with no family registers” (chapman 2019, 235). 15. in postwar japan, heteronormative marriage has long served as a unit of reproduction in ideology and practice, which explains the extremely low percentage of children born out of wedlock. the cultural emphasis on reproductive kinship inversely means that, after having children, many couples cease to have sexual intimacy, a pattern socially accepted as more or less normal (alexy 2020, 48; moriki 2017). although the cultural norms have been diversifying since the 2000s, marital sexuality remains a general expectation, especially for younger couples without children. 16. in the mid-2000s, a group of unmarried filipina mothers and their children who received paternity recognition after birth sued the japanese state to redress the jfc’s denied japanese nationality. given their victory in court, the nationality law was amended again in 2008 to include post-birth paternal recognition (seigo ninchi) as a legitimate means to obtain japanese nationality (suzuki 2010). references abalos, jeofrey b. 2017 “divorce and separation in the philippines: trends and 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the tropics: manhood and nationhood in filipina-japanese marriages.” anthropological quarterly 80, no. 2: 427–54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053061 2010 “outlawed children: japanese filipino children, legal defiance, and ambivalent citizenships.” pacific affairs 83, no. 1: 31–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25698395 wang, leslie k. 2016 outsourced children: orphanage care and adoption in globalizing china. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 647–671, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.04 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 27–54, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.02 cultural anthropology amira mittermaier university of toronto https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0723-7361 mona has short hair and a contagious smile. in a coffeeshop in downtown cairo, against the backdrop of live music, she recalls her experiences at tahrir square during the egyptian uprising in 2011. although eight years have passed since then, mona, now in her mid-twenties, brings tahrir square back to life. speaking in english, she tells me, “the revolution was a trippy spiritual experience. for eighteen days this was god manifesting in the mīdān [square], and you could feel it like there was no escape.” on the fourth or fifth day of the uprising, she recalls, she felt the presence of angels: i felt like there is this blanket of light, and i was like, man, god is so merciful, like there are atheists and nonbelievers and christians and muslims and liars and givers and haters and lovers . . . this mīdān at this moment contains everyone who believes in one thing, and they all have hope in something that’s outside of them. . . . this is “holy” or whatever you want to call it. this is not human. i felt it go through [the crowd]. i was like “how [on earth] am i supposed to undo it?” “why would you want to undo it?” i ask. “because it’s so heavy, so intense! how can you live after that?” religious afterlives of a revolution https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0723-7361 cultural anthropology 40:1 28 drawing on interviews and conversations with upper-middle-class egyptians who participated in the 2011 uprising, this article delves into mona’s question: how can one live after a revolution?1 what does it mean to return to one’s mundane life after having experienced the holiness of tahrir square? what happened to the atheists, non-believers, christians, and muslims who had gathered at the square? how has the “trippy spiritual experience” of the revolution affected them? what worlds has it brought into existence? figure 1. tahrir square. photo by amira mittermaier. reading the revolution as an ongoing and world-making event, i build on a growing body of literature on the afterlives of revolutions. whereas anthropology has long had an interest in studying protest and resistance, research on revolutions used to be dominated by political scientists, political sociologists, and historians (thomassen 2012). this is changing—not least because of the so-called arab spring, a series of revolutions that burst into the scene at a time when few people believed in the idea of revolution (bayat 2017). several recent publications address the topic of revolutions (e.g., cherstich 2020; elyachar and winegar 2012) and ruptures (holbraad, kapferer, and sauma 2019). going beyond the question of whether a particular revolution failed or succeeded, anthropologists inquire into revolutions’ aftermaths (navaro 2020), afterlives (al-khalili, religious afterlives of a revolution 29 ansari, lamrani, and uzel 2023), and traces (napolitano 2015). they describe the long-lasting effects of revolutions in places like oman, syria, egypt, iran, and serbia (elyachar 2014; greenberg 2014; lamrani 2021; wilson 2023). they uncover recursions—“partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations” (stoler 2016, 27; guyer 2017)—occurring in the wake of revolutions. as terms like post–cold war, post-socialist, or postcolonial have taught us, post never implies a clean break—turning a page, something ending, and something new beginning. whatever is joined to the post by a hyphen shapes and haunts the supposedly new state. to appreciate revolutions in their indeterminacy and longevity, we therefore need to follow them beyond the moment when protesters pack up and return to their seemingly ordinary lives. we need to look at, and listen to, how aspirations, belongings, and subjectivities are transformed in the wake of revolutions, and how former revolutionaries posit or contest continuities with the revolutionary experience. we need to ask, with mona, what it means to “live after that.” much ethnographic work on revolutions’ afterlives shifts the focus from political parties, elections, counterrevolutions, and military coups to embodied subjectivities, sensibilities, socialities, and imaginations. studying revolutions as inconclusive occurrences helps direct our attention to how revolutionary uprisings “linger and ripple through people’s intimate and collectives lives” (lamrani 2021, 2), how “reverberations of radical political projects extend into the present and the future” (al-khalili, ansari, lamrani, and uzel 2023, 4), and how revolutions are “processes of societal transformation that penetrate deeply into the fabric of people’s lives, unfolding and refolding the coordinates of human existence” (cherstich 2020). charlotte al-khalili (2023, 16) describes the syrian revolution’s ripple effects at the social, intimate, and cosmological level. “rather than looking at the epicentre of revolutionary action—protests, occupations and political organizations,” she explores “what is often seen as peripheral and apolitical: everyday life, kinship relations, religious imaginations, and spatio-temporal practices.” similarly, alice wilson (2023) highlights the ways in which an armed uprising in southern oman, expunged from official historical narratives, lives on in social relations, and how people deliberately keep alive revolutionary values in their everyday lives. the egyptian uprising, too, percolates in the post-revolutionary present even while its legacy is contested and its physical traces erased. the uprising gave rise to alternative education initiatives (mossallam 2017; dorio, abdou, and moheyeldine cultural anthropology 40:1 30 2019) and feminist countercultures (elsheikh and lilleker 2021), and it inspired city-dwellers to learn about self-sufficiency farming (as some of my interlocutors tell me). approaching the egyptian uprising as a “life-altering experience,” youssef el chazli (2020) points to the unintended consequences that participation in mass protests had on the private sphere. individuals, he writes, “experience revolutionary events as personal awakenings.” what previously might have been an unquestioned “adult checklist”—finding a job, getting married, enjoying consumer goods, and having children—after the revolution no longer held the same self-evident importance (el chazli 2020, 5). life projects and future horizons were rethought and remade, both individually and in community. the absence of people from the streets does not mean that the revolution is over. figure 2. traces of a revolution. photo by amira mittermaier. zooming in on the revolution’s religious afterlives, this article examines how former revolutionaries like mona have remade and rethought their relationship to islam and to god. several interlocutors of mine described the tahrir protests religious afterlives of a revolution 31 as not only a political or social event but also as one with spiritual and religious significance. starting from the idea of god at tahrir square, i delve into the religious experimentation that unfolded in the years following the 2011 uprising. i draw on interviews with upper-middle-class egyptians who were in their late teens or early twenties when the revolution happened.2 most of my interlocutors joined the protests at tahrir square; some were held back by their parents but still understand themselves as part of the revolution.3 all were shaken by the aftermath of the uprising, the return to military rule, and specifically the rabaa massacre in august 2013, when police and military forces killed more than eight hundred muslim brotherhood supporters. since then, my interlocutors have been trying to pick up the pieces and put their lives back together. for many, this process has involved a profound theological questioning and ongoing spiritual bricolage.4 drawing on my interlocutors’ stories, i highlight a widespread turn to sufism and an increasing focus on a personal connection to god. post-revolutionary islam is reclaimed from the previous generation, decoupled from politics, and reinvented on yoga mats and in therapy sessions. the practices of self-care popular among urban post-revolutionaries—yoga, meditation, therapy—can easily bring to mind the wellness industry and the trend of dismantling public welfare resources and shifting the responsibility for care onto individual citizens. they could be read as yet another face of the neoliberalization of islam (atia 2013; rudnyzckyj 2010) and as part of a broader global trend of declaring oneself “spiritual-but-not-religious.”5 the post-revolutionary turn to sufism furthermore mirrors the egyptian regime’s embrace of sufism as the peaceful alternative to islamism. without ignoring global forces, local inheritances, and uneasy convergences, i inquire into my interlocutors’ own understanding of their spiritual-religious self-fashioning as an embodiment of the legacy of the revolution. following the tahrir experience into the post-revolutionary present requires not jumping too quickly to the role of judge: deciding what is defeat and what resistance, what revolutionary and what conservative, what liberating and what neoliberal. as jessica greenberg (2014) argues for the serbian context, the post-revolutionary era in egypt is profoundly ambiguous, resulting not in “apolitical” resignation, but in a messy post-illusion politics beyond the binary of cynicism and hope. in egypt, the revolution lives on not only in memories of tahrir square and remnants of utopian imaginings but also in sufi yoga classes and in an intense grappling with, and ongoing rethinking of, god. cultural anthropology 40:1 32 god at tahrir square inspired by the street protests in tunisia that led to the ousting of longterm president zine el abidine ben ali, hundreds of thousands of egyptians took to the streets in january 2011. the mass protests in egypt built on previous social movements (mossallam 2017), histories of revolt and revolution (elyachar 2014), and specifically pro-palestine activism (abou-el-fadl 2012), but many participants also emphasized their sense of surprise. the revolution was hoped-for and simultaneously unexpected, as maybe are all revolutions (bayat 2017). different groups of people converged at tahrir square, joining in from working-class and upper-class neighborhoods alike. the revolutionary masses, youssef el chazli (2012, 80, 96) writes, were “largely made up of ‘lay’ people’” or “revolutionary apprentices.” the crowd was significantly more diverse than later representations of the “ideal revolutionary” (educated, tech-savvy, peaceful, globally connected) would have us believe (mellor 2014). protests happened all over egypt, but the most iconic manifestation of the uprising was the sit-in at tahrir square. writing about the eighteen days at the square, anthropologists have referred to a “time out of time” (sabea 2013), to communitas and liminality (armbrust 2019). what tends to be missing from most accounts of tahrir square is religion (apart from the occasional mention of how christians protected muslims during prayer, and vice versa, usually read as signs of a newly found unity).6 but if we believe mona, then tahrir square was filled not only with up to half a million people during the height of the protests but also with angels and divine presence. some scholars described the beginnings of the uprising as “asecular”—as unconcerned with the question of whether the revolution was “religious” or “secular” (agrama 2011; hirschkind 2012). soon, however, religious players did get involved, and theological positions on the (il)legitimacy of protest against the ruler were formulated. the coptic orthodox church took a firm stand against the revolution (guirguis 2012), and the grand imam of al-azhar, the official voice of sunni islam, asked demonstrators to go home, declaring support for the demonstration a “sedition ( fitna) that is forbidden by god and his messenger” (al-anani 2012, 7).7 al-azhar was not united, however. its official spokesperson resigned to join the protesters, and a former student from al-azhar led friday prayers at tahrir square (zeghlal 2011). the azhari cleric shaykh emad effat, who came to be known as the “shaykh of the revolution,” died of gunshot wounds during clashes with the police in december 2011. earlier he had told the main mufti of egypt that the air at tahrir square during the protests was “purer than religious afterlives of a revolution 33 the air around the kaaba” (hellyer 2021). ‘amr khaled, a well-known muslim televangelist preacher, proclaimed on national egyptian television that he had seen god at tahrir square (moll 2013), and a salafi preacher insisted that “god alone is behind this revolution” (peterson 2015, 64). while some spokespeople for islam denounced the protests, others allowed for the possibility that god might be the main force behind the uprising, or at least that god was univocally pro-revolution. figure 3. the “shaykh of the revolution.” photo by amira mittermaier. cultural anthropology 40:1 34 ordinary protesters like mona, too, grappled with god’s presence at tahrir square. mona describes tahrir as a “trippy spiritual experience.” other interlocutors spoke of an “overwhelming feeling that god [was] supporting the revolutionaries,” or they said, “i felt that god was definitely there; god was protecting us,” or that god helped them get rid of long-term president hosni mubarak since “god is the enabler of everything.” as we strolled through tahrir square in the summer of 2011, at a time when the square was once again occupied by protesters, a friend told me that looking at the protesters’ faces, to him, was like “looking at god.” others reported having dreamed of the prophet muhammad during the eighteen decisive days at tahrir square, with the prophet shaking hands with the protesters, telling them to be patient (mittermaier 2012).8 in mona’s account, the divine manifests as a blanket of light. this is mona’s recrafting of “god”—it is her very own connection to god. for her, experiencing the holy at the square triggered a profound reorientation in religious practice and, ultimately, a turn to sufism. the tahrir experience gave rise to a god who doesn’t prescribe rules but is more akin to a force—a god quite different from the one mona had grown up with. mona’s mother is a political and religious activist, but she always let her daughter make her own decisions. after having veiled for three years in high school, mona took off the veil after the uprising, having realized that it made her “feel turned off from god.” she was tired of the image of “god with a stick” that had been dominant in the private islamic schools she had attended, one of which asked parents to keep a record of the kids’ prayers at home. others of her generation similarly complained about the quantitative approach their parents and schools had taught them: prayer tables, keeping track of good and bad deeds, the logic of a checklist. in mona’s view, this approach turned religion into a competition and had the effect of severing her connection to allah. her mother’s god, she finds, comes with too many rules attached. sipping a cappuccino in that downtown cairo coffeeshop, mona says, “to hell with that god!” not my parents’ islam when describing their newly found god, my interlocutors often highlight a contrast to their parents’ religiosity. mona told me how, after rejecting her mother’s god, she came to connect with the god of her grandmother, for whom praying isn’t about fulfilling a ritual obligation but about “showing up for god.”9 turning their back on their parents’ religiosity for mona and others meant rejecting the islamic revival, or sahwa (awakening), which had reshaped egypt’s religious afterlives of a revolution 35 religious landscapes since the 1970s. the islamic revival brought with it more visible performances of piety and a new appreciation for techniques of evoking fear (tarhīb) through graphic depictions of the tortures of hell (hirschkind 2006; mahmood 2004). rejecting the emphasis on fear, my interlocutors tend to resort to stereotypes when describing their parents’ religiosity, sketching a stern, dogmatic form of islam, or “god with a stick,” as mona puts it. their own islam is about an inner state and intimate connection to god. it is quite possible that my interlocutors’ parents would not agree with the ways in which their children portray their religiosity. what interests me here is not the (in)accuracy of these portrayals, but what my post-revolutionary interlocutors construct as “good religion.” the emphasis on inner experience, as opposed to outward practice, echoes a modern protestant-secular understanding of religion (asad 1993; sharf 1998). the emphasis on an intimately present god brings to mind a north american evangelical god who is always by your side, who speaks to you, and whom you can ask for advice in the most mundane matters (luhrmann 2012). but, as we will see shortly, the inward turn among revolutionaries can also find expression in embodied practices such as yoga or hadras, sufi recitation gatherings. at the same time, in my interlocutors’ eyes, while god is close-by, humans still depend on god in very fundamental ways. whereas older god-images have come undone, the fundamental hierarchy between god and human has remained intact. like mona, layla grew up in a strict religious family. she, too, describes a sharp u-turn from her parents’ religiosity, and like mona, she eventually stopped veiling. she recalls how throughout her childhood she felt that “god [was] watching” and that she had to be perfect; there was a constant sense of guilt. once, she recalls, she was playing in the living room, spilled a soda on the carpet, and went to the kitchen to get a rag. her mother asked her what she had spilled. water, she answered. the mother followed her and smelled the spot: “this is not water.” layla insisted that it was. her mother responded, “layla, don’t lie; you know where liars go, they go to hell.” then, layla recalls, the mother started beating her “like hell” and said, “any time you’ll want to lie again, you’ll remember this pain!” the uprising made it possible for layla to break with the god-image she had grown up with. the god of tahrir square, to her, was fundamentally linked to justice. more broadly, she has come to believe that god does not care about nitty-gritty details. god cares about the big things: whether you hurt yourself, whether you hurt others, whether you stand up for the oppressed. trying to cultural anthropology 40:1 36 consolidate her new theology, layla started attending lessons at religious institutes that opened in cairo after 2011.10 she also dabbled in sufism but never joined a sufi order. she started her own daily routine of recitations (dhikr), and during a visit to the sufi shrine in the south of egypt in which abu al-hasan alshadhli, a thirteenth-century moroccan saint, is buried, she had a transformative experience, feeling “high” and talking to al-shadhli for hours, feeling heard. it wasn’t easy for layla to leave behind her mother’s punishing god and make peace with god. she lost a friend to the rabaa massacre, and she lost her younger brother when he went to syria to join the fight against the assad regime. the father wanted to hold him back, but the mother cited a verse from the quran that she understood to mean that neither one’s parents nor one’s children should be dearer to the believer than allah. “i can’t hold him back,” the mother said; “i won’t be able to face god on judgement day.” layla’s brother left and was killed in 2013. he was twenty years old. layla has struggled with severe depression that sometimes makes it difficult for her to get out of bed. after the revolution, therapy prompted a slow healing process that strengthened her connection to god, a process of self-discovery that resulted in “seeing god in a totally different way.” layla says that through therapy she came to realize that god doesn’t care about being known by us but wants us to know ourselves. she came to connect with the prophet muhammad’s saying man ‘arafa nafsahu fa-qad ‘arafa rabbahu (the one who knows herself knows her lord). encouraged by her therapist, she realized that it was okay to be angry at god. ultimately, however, she realized that she didn’t have a problem with god, but with human authority: her parents, a coach who once humiliated her, the military, abusive shaykhs, and religious leaders who “kiss the ass of the government.”11 layla learned to stand up to her parents and to her coach. while questioning human authority, she actively reclaimed god but simultaneously came to accept that “god is the lord [rabb] and i am his slave [‘abd].” arriving at this conclusion wasn’t easy. layla tells me that, for a while after the revolution, she treated god “like an equal.” during a ramadan healing workshop, she realized that the hardest thing for her is accepting that she isn’t god but, rather, fundamentally depends on god. the healing workshop was run by an egyptian-cuban teacher who, layla tells me, “used to be atheist until she found spirituality.” having come to accept god’s power, layla’s favorite dhikr now is the phrase lā hawl wa lā quwa illā billāh, “there is no power and strength except with allah.” layla recalls how, leading up to a difficult confrontation with an ex-boss, religious afterlives of a revolution 37 she recited the phrase nonstop for a few days. in submitting to god—and only god—layla has kept alive the power of resistance. it has proved a long journey for her: away from her mother’s threatening god to questioning authority writ large and finally to the insight that god holds power but does not need to be a source of fear. like layla, many egyptians have re-imagined god while grappling with the material effects of the revolution and counterrevolution. god at rabaa square the first presidential elections after the uprising were won by mohamed morsi, the muslim brotherhood candidate. after one year of morsi’s presidency, the egyptian military, riding on popular discontent, overthrew morsi and reinstated an authoritarian military regime under the leadership of president abdel fattah el-sisi. muslim brotherhood supporters gathered at two big squares in cairo to protest, and on august 14, 2013, the military and police violently cleared both camps, killing more than eight hundred people. this has come to be known as the rabaa massacre. like layla, many of my interlocutors lost friends to the massacre, and even those who were not personally affected view it as one of the darkest moments of post-revolutionary history. many struggled with the fact that egypt’s main mufti, ali gomaa, supported the massacre. he called the protesters “dogs of hell” (warren 2017, 458) and instructed the army to “shoot to kill” (al-azami 2022, 98). the rabaa massacre resulted in trauma (matthies-boon 2017), a disengagement from politics (abdelgawad and magued 2022), and a reawakening of long-standing questions about theodicy—why god permits evil (quisay 2022). where was god during the massacre, many wondered. as mahmoud, a former revolutionary, put it: [the islamists] were very loyal to god, why couldn’t they take over? . . . rabaa was so unjust. there cannot be someone up there watching all of this . . . . people after rabaa started realizing that there is no god. former islamists have now disappeared. they have died, traveled, or are hiding. if there is a god who accepts that, then we need to talk. if there is a god, then he failed miserably. by way of the conditional clause “if there is a god,” mahmoud seems to be gesturing toward atheism. along with agnosticism and non-religiosity (lā-dīniyya), atheism has been on the rise in egypt since before the uprising (elsässer cultural anthropology 40:1 38 2021; franke 2021; schielke 2012). but mahmoud’s position appears ambiguous: maybe god doesn’t exist, or maybe god has failed. like mahmoud, many of my interlocutors didn’t fully abandon their god-beliefs in the wake of the rabaa massacre. they have continued asking hard questions about god—and of god. mahmoud’s god differs from the authoritative, inscrutable, punishing god that my interlocutors tend to associate with their parents. it is a god we need to hold accountable, with whom we can “have a word.” while mahmoud contemplates the possibility of a weak or failing god, other interlocutors began wondering about god’s cruelty. ahmed, who joined the muslim brotherhood only one year before the rabaa massacre, tells me how, after losing multiple friends at rabaa, he started contemplating the possibility of god as a tyrant who enjoys tormenting his subjects. while for layla, god’s power eventually became a source of comfort, for ahmed, god’s power is a source of anger. in post-revolutionary egypt, theologies and theodicies are formulated every day in coffeeshops, among friends, in the privacy of homes, and in therapy sessions. new imaginaries emerge: god as light, a weak god, an abusive god. the religious ripple effects of the revolution live on in the counterrevolutionary present by way of this ongoing rethinking. my interlocutors don’t abandon god, but neither are they willing to settle for conventional theological answers. god vs. islam the post-revolutionary era has proved an inward-turned moment, and for many it has brought with it an inward-turned religiosity. in striking contrast to the politics of piety described by saba mahmood in the early 2000s, at the height of the islamic revival, when outward practices like veiling were thought to bring about an inner state of piety or “awareness-of-god” (taqwa in arabic) (mahmood 2004), recently unveiled egyptian women report feeling closer to god since taking off the veil (van nieuwkerk 2021). instead of outward performances of piety, they emphasize an inner connection to god. sometimes not only the islamic revival is rejected but also islam as a whole. mona told me a “paradigm shift” occurred for her when she realized that one could “separate god from religion.” layla, too, described to me a process of slowly and carefully separating “god” from “islam.” for both, islam is entangled with human claims to authority, social hierarchies, and patriarchy. god is the opposite: god is not human. religious afterlives of a revolution 39 one interlocutor told me: “islam is a tradition and an ideology. god is an energy.” another realized, following many therapy sessions, that it was “religion—or rather our misinterpretations”—that prevented her from finding peace with herself. another said: “i don’t have a problem with god. i have a problem with a system that was established and that people are blindly following while forcing it onto each other.” one former revolutionary, now in her thirties, explains that she respects al-azhar for its historical role but doesn’t rely on alazhar’s rulings. when she feels confused, she prefers consulting her own heart (istafti qalbī—literally, seeking fatwas from one’s heart).12 what we have here is an inward-turned self—but not a secular, buffered self, isolated from a transcendent reality.13 a self-identified agnostic explained: i realized i will never know if god exists or not. but sometimes i find myself making du‘ā’ [speaking personalized prayers]. at whom? i don’t know. my brain is not certain whom i’m reaching out to. is it energy? all i know is that the islamic way of describing god is not correct. the islamic description of god and the throne and heaven is superstitious. seemingly unafraid of the charge of blasphemy, another post-revolutionary said that the quran was written by a smart military leader named muhammad. she finds it a brilliant book: “it’s just not divine. i don’t believe that the prophet was just sitting there, and god talked to him and told him to marry all those women.” strikingly, she doesn’t believe in muhammad as a prophet, but she does believe in god and considers herself (to some extent) a muslim. her belief in god is grounded in her knowledge of science (what she calls “the miracle of blood circulation,” for instance), and while she thinks that god does not control our lives, she believes in baraka, divine blessings. the god of baraka is not a supreme being who once upon a time sent down rules and warnings by way of a prophet but is more akin to a force intimately bound up with the world. the process of separating god from islam is sometimes triggered by exposure to other religious traditions. a young egyptian man recalls how, during a visit to germany, he met a woman from china—“a really good person without any connection to religion”—which made him rethink his assumptions about islam’s superiority. a young muslim woman from cairo after the revolution lived in new york city for a while and went to church there every sunday; she told me she enjoyed widening her horizons: “sayyidnā ‘īsā [jesus] is badass, and sittinā cultural anthropology 40:1 40 mariam [mary] is badass. [jesus] was a rebel just as sayyidnā [our lord] muhammad was a rebel.” another young woman told me that, during a trip to india, she came to realize that the “33 million gods” in hinduism are all manifestations of what muslims call “allah.” my interlocutors eclectically draw on different religions, but that doesn’t mean they understand themselves to be fully in charge of their path. mixed in with their accounts of self-making and bricolage is an element of surprise—and stories of divine interventions, big and small. khalidah, for instance, got divorced from a husband simply too pious for her. (he prayed and read quran even during their honeymoon on the maldives.) she was worried that her divorce might anger god, but the day she got divorced, she heard the quran on the radio, and what happened to be playing was the surah al-talāq, the “surah of divorce,” which reassured her. another young woman described how god accepted her prayers for the first time. she had a biology exam, hadn’t studied much, and left a number of questions unanswered. she asked god for help and got an a. she felt that god had listened to her. later she came to experience god’s seeming inaction as a blessing. when she learned that the man she hoped to marry had gotten engaged to someone else, she looked up to the sky and started blaming god. in hindsight, as she learned more about the man, she realized that, if god had accepted her prayers, she “would have been screwed.” we see in these examples not a distant god who centuries ago revealed the quran and set down a list of rules. rather, this is a god who intervenes in people’s lives, one intimately present. this god has taken centerstage while islam—interpreted as an ideology and as tied up with social hierarchies—has partially lost its hold. at the same time, for many, the search for an intimate, personal connection to god has brought with it a turn to sufism. the turn to sufism shortly after hosni mubarak stepped down in february 2011, mona was walking by a mosque. a man on the sidewalk was selling sibhas, prayer beads, historically associated with sufi practice. sibhas had not formed part of mona’s family’s religious repertoire; at best they were used as gifts. but that day, she felt a clear message in her heart: “buy a sibha!” she did and used it to recite religious phrases, following her intuition. soon thereafter, a friend introduced her to a sufi order that at the time was welcoming many former revolutionaries. mona joined and spent three years attending the weekly hadra (recitational gathering) religious afterlives of a revolution 41 and lessons by a murshid (guide) from the order, as well as hanging out with the community throughout the week. “it was like crack,” she says, “god god god.” figure 4. prayer beads. photo by amira mittermaier. sufism has a long history in egypt, with seventy-seven sufi orders registered, along with 15 million sufi disciples (ladjal and bensaid 2015). even more egyptians temporarily enter the folds of sufi devotion at the saint shrines and through saint day celebrations, or mawlids. many of my interlocutors never visited the shrines growing up. their parents found sufi devotion and saint visitation suspect—too close to shirk, polytheism—or they associated sufi practice with the working classes and peasants. yet after 2011, sufism became a middleand cultural anthropology 40:1 42 upper-class trend (futuh 2021), at the same time as the state endorsed it as the peaceful alternative to islamism. after the military coup in 2013, president el-sisi declared the fight against islamism the number one priority. that fight has involved the call for a “renewal of religious discourse,” the promotion of a reformed islam, and an embrace of sufism. besides having africa’s second-largest mosque (and the middle east’s biggest cathedral) built in the new administrative capital, el-sisi also ordered the renovation of the cairo-based shrines of ahl al-bayt, the prophet muhammad’s saintly descendants, who stand at the heart of egyptian sufism (hoffman-ladd 1992). while saint shrines have been attacked by islamist groups, el-sisi emphasizes their “historical and spiritual nature” (al-shahawi 2015). supported by donations from the indian bohra community, he has overseen the renovation of the popular mosques of sayyida nafisa, sayyidna al-hussain, and sayyida zaynab. he claims sufi sensibilities by way of his investment in the shrines and through frequent references in his speeches to speaking directly to god or receiving messages from god. the post-revolutionaries did not discover sufism by way of presidential speeches. they came to sufism in their own ways, including through yoga or meditation retreats, or through time spent abroad, backpacking or studying, such as in denmark, where hind, a student in her early twenties, encountered mindfulness, or in rishikesh, the indian “yoga capital of the world,” where at least three of my interlocutors discovered their love for sufism. others spoke to me of a sense of void or depression after the defeat of the uprising, a darkness and emptiness from which sufism rescued them. put more positively, some noted how living in the counterrevolutionary present, where the best one can do is stay away from politics and keep one’s head down, has opened up the possibility of experimenting with other ways of being in the world. more rarely, drug experiences feature in stories i’ve heard, with acid and ayahuasca offering a first taste of altered states of consciousness. in line with a broader longing for immediacy, interlocutors compared acid trips to dhikr, sufi recitation—a fully immersive experience, the “brain on fire,” the feeling of “dying several times,” of “meeting god.” none of these elements—yoga, meditation, travel, drugs—have anything to do with islam as such. some are clear class markers and signs of privilege, such as the ability to travel. others form part of a global world of spiritual bricolage, sometimes referred to as new age. but all of them speak to an openness religious afterlives of a revolution 43 toward change and experimentation that is, directly or indirectly, shaped by the revolution. many post-revolutionaries who joined sufi orders since 2011 note that just a few years ago they would have never dreamed of joining the sufi path. some were previously agnostic if not atheist. many report having grown up without any real knowledge of sufism. an artist recalls that, ironically, when he told his mother that he had joined a sufi order, she was alarmed because she confused sufism with salafism. many of my interlocutors are themselves surprised by their generation’s discovery of islam’s mystical traditions. but they have come to accept, and embrace, the fact that life paths are rarely predictable—and that god can act in ways we don’t always understand. sufi yoga if one is no longer exclusively bound to islam, one is free to experiment with practices that stem from other traditions and places, such as reiki, crystal healing, tarot readings, mindfulness, or yoga (chams 2018; el fakhany 2021). yoga has been around in egypt since at least the 1990s, when a cultural exchange program between egypt and india led to the establishment of an indian cultural center in cairo that offered language, art, and yoga classes.14 in 2004, the main mufti of egypt, ali gomaa, issued a fatwa against yoga because of its association with hinduism (amini and ouassini 2020). unfazed by this verdict, egypt’s post-revolutionaries embrace yoga widely, sometimes in combination with sufi rituals. one leading figure in egypt’s sufi yoga scene is ali, also known as yogi ali. ali was introduced to yoga at a ymca when studying business administration at mcgill university in canada. during his teacher training in india, he picked up a small book on rumi. for ali, rumi doesn’t belong to islam alone; rumi speaks of a “formless god that is the one true reality.” one day, after attending a sufi recitation gathering in cairo (ali had moved back to egypt in 2011), someone sent him the quranic surah al-sharh, which he recognized immediately as speaking of the chakras. it all came together for him, and he eventually joined the naqshbandi sufi order. today he hosts rumi poetry circles, teaches a yoga class that includes dhikr, and runs yoga retreats in konya, rumi’s birthplace, dubbed “the kaaba of the heart.” ali changed the name of his classes to “yoga with dhikr” after realizing that the earlier name, “sufi yoga,” brought “the god police out of the woodworks.” skeptical of those who insist on traditions’ firm boundaries, he told me: cultural anthropology 40:1 44 ultimately, we seek to connect with allah, to come back to god, to celebrate his presence. at least that’s my intention. so if i call him allah or i call him brahman . . . if i connect through one of the five prayers or through sun salutations or both, what does it matter? isn’t what’s important the ultimate connection? people say “no, no, no, our religions set forth a certain way and we must follow this way,” but a lot of people had been following this way for decades now, and they seem unsatisfied. i’m not saying that way doesn’t work . . . but there are other ways. post-revolutionary sufism is not confined to cairo’s saint shrines or mawlids. it unfolds in upper-class neighborhoods like maadi, mohandeseen, zamalek, and shaykh zayed. nor is post-revolutionary sufism necessarily guided by the quran and sunna, or at least not only. the revolutionaries’ discovery of sufism emerged from broad and open-ended experimentation that disregards established boundaries, including the boundary between secular and spiritual self-care. my interlocutors refer to self-help books such as the power of now by eckhart tolle or the miracle of mindfulness by thich nhat hanh, and to elif shafak’s novel the forty rules of love, published in 2009 and translated into arabic in 2012. the historian mark sedgwick (2017) reads the latter as part of a broader global movement of “eclectic sufism” or “new age sufism.” a self-identified turkish writer born in france and living mostly in london, shafak wrote the novel while teaching at the university of michigan, during a period in which she was, in her own words, “leftist, agnostic, nihilist, feminist, anarcho-pacifist, [and] environmentalist” (sedgwick 2017, 67). in writing the novel, she drew on western scholars of sufism (such as william chittick and annemarie schimmel), and she infuses the classical persian story of shams and rumi with new age elements (such as the ability of the two main characters to see auras). many post-revolutionary sufis recommended the book to me. what the novel presents is a rumi already packaged for a cosmopolitan readership—rumi as a best-selling poet in the united states, presented as a mystic, saint, and sufi but from whose poetry islam has been erased (ali 2017; el-zein 2000). in the global “mystical marketplace,” sufism tends to be “white-washed” (arjana 2020). yet even if first passing through a commodified rumi, many of my interlocutors eventually turn to classical sufi writings and join long-standing sufi communities. some describe how their search for something spiritual-but-not-religious eventually led them back to a commitment to islamic ritual practice, such religious afterlives of a revolution 45 as the five daily prayers. layla, as a result of her spiritual journey, eventually went back to veiling, but in a new style. in a context in which people juggle revolutionary impulses and divine sovereignty, bricolage is not simply about free play, individual creativity, or resistance. to my interlocutors, bricolage also emerges from god acting in unexpected ways. in the end, spiritual bricolage in post-revolutionary egypt does not efface religions—it remakes them. figure 5. the forty rules of love, dance performance in cairo. photo by amira mittermaier. conclusion the personal revolution of those who took to the streets in 2011 turned some things upside down (the association we tend to have with the term revolution): “to hell with that god!” says mona. but there is also the older meaning of re-volution as in re-volve or re-turn—an apt description of how mona rejected her mother’s god only to connect with the god of her grandmother, or of layla temporarily not veiling only to return to a new style of veiling. this isn’t a linear story, and it isn’t a story of secularization, of an increasingly buffered self. it’s a story of fluid god-human relations. egyptian millennials have been putting back together their lives (and their religion) in a post-revolutionary world under dire political conditions. this is a world that talal asad (2015, 169) has described as not particularly hospitable to traditions, a world that makes it “difficult for certain kinds of embodiment, certain kinds of ethics, to flourish.” yet in this very world—globalized, fragmented, authoritarian, neoliberal, and high-speed as it is—god-talk has found cultural anthropology 40:1 46 new homes in cairo coffeeshops, therapy sessions, and yoga classes. despite an overarching sense of defeat, my interlocutors keep alive the spirit of tahrir—its magic and holiness—through their religious experimentation and spiritual bricolage. to them, the uprising had a religious-spiritual dimension, and as such it also impacted their religious practice and their very understanding of “religion.” while shaking off the legacy of the islamic revival, most of my interlocutors have not resorted to atheism. they reclaim and remake islam, trying to square liberal ideas of personal freedom with islamic notions of divine sovereignty. whether post-revolutionary experimentation will affect the islamic tradition in any lasting ways remains to be seen. regardless, the uprising’s religious afterlives deserve our attention—not just for what they say about islam but also for what they can tell us about the long-term effects of revolutions. calling something “revolutionary” doesn’t mean it is divorced from longer histories. the religious bricolage i have described rides on class privilege, and it contains various traces: of reformist trends in islam, protestant-secular understandings of religion, a modern emphasis on experience, and globally circulating new age spiritualities. it mirrors, at least partially, the state’s embrace of sufism as the peaceful alternative to islamism. it reproduces stereotypes of an outdated, stern, fear-infused islam, reinscribing what nadia fadil and mayanthi fernando (2015) call the “impossibility of the ‘salafi’ muslim.” one could argue that the post-revolutionaries’ islam is defeatist and apolitical, if not neoliberal and consumerist—keeping people busy with recrafting themselves instead of attending to politics. it is a religiosity obsessed with the self, an “introspective isolationism” (ladjal and bensaid 2015), with little attention paid to society or even to tradition as a communal project. one can easily bring a critical and cynical perspective to bear on the religious afterlives of the revolution—one can explain and contextualize. as naisargi n. davé (2023, 65) notes, however, the call for context can function “to normalize, to exhaust, and to restore otherwise gestures to existing, familiar, lines of force.” by taking seriously my interlocutors’ accounts of how the tahrir experience led them onto the sufi path, and by dwelling on their own sense of surprise, experimentation, and discovery, i seek to honor the revolution’s indeterminacy. in the eyes of some, the uprising’s indeterminacy was its weakness: a lack of planning and vision (bayat 2017). because of its indeterminacy, the revolution can be co-opted by counterrevolutionary forces. it can whittle away—people can become so busy with yoga and therapy that these practices turn into ends in themselves and no longer carry traces of the uprising. but the religious afterlives of a revolution 47 revolution’s indeterminacy also means that it can live on in unexpected places, and that the revolution can be recuperated and re-emerge. as one interlocutor reminded me, “politics hasn’t died, but it has been put on hold.” as i complete this article, israel’s war on gaza has been raging for more than ten months. unable to take to the streets because of egypt’s strict anti-protest laws, my interlocutors in cairo have expressed solidarity with palestinians within, and through, their seemingly apolitical religious and spiritual practices. sufi communities hold hadras for gaza; others recite specific litanies reserved for spiritual warfare. ahmed, who contemplated god’s cruelty in the wake of the rabaa massacre, more recently declared god a coward. sometimes he thinks— verging on blasphemy—that maybe god died after creating us. yogi ali offers sessions aimed at grounding oneself, explicitly recognizing the emotional toll the next-door genocide is taking on his community. layla supports gazan families who have made it to cairo and boycotts israeli products, at the same time calling on god’s mercy for the people of gaza. in its post-revolutionary forms, islam offers a frame for political action that is neither islamist nor easily recognizable from a secular, materialist perspective. for those who saw a blanket of light descend onto tahrir square, who saw god reflected in the protesters’ faces, or who think that god is fundamentally about justice, the line between prayer and protest is never stable. the revolution can lie dormant and embed itself in quietist practices, but its fervor doesn’t thereby go away—it can be reawakened. abstract when do revolutions end? how do revolutions live on in embodied affects, relationships, and horizons of aspiration? this article describes the remaking of religion among upper-middle-class egyptians who participated in the 2011 uprising. it traces a widespread turn to sufism, yoga, and meditation, along with the search for a personal connection to god. my interlocutors’ spiritual bricolage could easily be read as an effect of political defeat, neoliberal self-care, or part of a global trend of declaring oneself “spiritual-but-not-religious.” yet such contextualizing moves fail to grasp the sense of newness, surprise, and experimentation that pervades my interlocutors’ narratives. i suggest that the revolution’s indeterminacy is kept alive through the ethos of experimentation. post-revolutionary spiritual bricolage results in seemingly apolitical practices like sufi yoga, but from these practices a revolutionary spark can re-emerge. [egypt; revolution; aftermath; islam; sufism; spirituality; experimentation] cultural anthropology 40:1 48 ملخص متى تنتهي الثورات؟ وكيف تعيش الثورة بعد انتهائها وتستمر يف املشاعر واألفكار والعالقات واآلفاق واألحالم؟ يصف هذا املقال إعادة تشكيل الدين بني املرصيني من الطبقة املتوسطة العليا الذين شاركوا يف ثورة 25 يناير. يتتبع املقال التحول نحو الصوفية واليوغا والتأمل، إىل جانب السعي للبحث عن اتصال شخيص بالله. ميكن تفسري هذا التحول نحو الروحانية بسهولة كنتيجة للهزمية السياسية، أو كجزًء من الفردانية النيوليربالية، أو باعتباره جزًًءا من االتجاه العاملي املعروف باالنتامًء إىل »الروحانية ولكن غري الدينية »ومع ذلك فإن التفسري من خالل هذا السياق قد يفشل يف استيعاب روح املغامرة واملفاجأة والتجريب التي تربز يف روايات من حاورتهم. يقرتح هذا املقال أن روح الثورة التجريبية كانت حية يف تلك التجارب، وأن روح التخبط والتجريب واإلبداع ما بعد الثورات تنتج العديد من املامرسات غري املسيسة أو التي تتناىف مع الفعل السيايس، مثل اليوغا الصوفية وغريها ولكن من بني هذه املامرسات قد تنبثق رشارة ثورية جديدة. ]مرص – الثورة – ما بعد – اإلسالم – الصوفية – الروحانية – التجريب[ notes acknowledgments i’m deeply grateful to my interlocutors in egypt—those who appear in this article (most under pseudonyms) and the many others who don’t. our conversations over the years have kept me inspired and on my toes—they have been far more to me than “fieldwork.” i’m also grateful to my research assistants, especially alaa mitwaly and khadiga embaby, who put me in touch with a number of the interlocutors featured in this article, who conducted interviews for me, and without whom i would have never understood the nuances of god-human relations in post-2011 egypt. the research on which this article is based was supported by an insight grant from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc), and i completed most of the writing during a fellowship awarded by the guggenheim foundation. for critical feedback on earlier versions of this article, i am grateful to alejandra gonzález jiménez, alaa mitwaly, and audiences at waterloo university, mcgill university, whitman college, mcmaster university, and princeton university. finally, many thanks to the cultural anthropology editorial team, the anonymous reviewers, and the ca production team. 1. social class in egypt is a complex matter and rather unstable, especially in the wake of a recent currency devaluation. most anthropological literature approaches class in egypt via a lens of aspirations, rather than a purely economic lens. i use upper-middle-class as a somewhat lose marker to indicate a certain amount of privilege, to suggest relative safety from the effects of the ongoing erosion of the middle class, and to reflect the self-understanding of most interlocutors mentioned or quoted in this article. 2. i draw on intermittent fieldwork between 2013 and 2023, as well as on interviews that research assistants and i conducted in cairo during that period. my larger project on post-revolutionary god-imaginaries in egypt received approval from the university of toronto ethics review board. 3. the term revolution, or thawra, is contested (moll 2020), and former revolutionaries are continuously rethinking whether the term makes sense (abdelfattah 2022). i nevertheless call my interlocutors “revolutionaries” to reflect how most of them understand themselves. 4. bricolage is the skill of using whatever is at hand and putting existing things together to create something new. claude lévi-strauss used the term to describe mythical thinking. through michel de certeau’s work, the term came to be associated with improvisational tactics of the subaltern. 5. on the limits of a comparative spiritual-but-not-religious (sbnr) lens, see gür 2020. one difference between north american sbnr movements and my interlocutors in egypt is that, whereas the former understand god generally as a non-interventionist power (mercadante 2014), many of the latter continue to believe in a powerful god. religious afterlives of a revolution 49 6. the prayers at tahrir square broke with tradition by having men and women pray shoulder to shoulder (aslam 2017). a number of my interlocutors described the prayers at the square as deeply empowering. 7. whereas the coptic orthodox church opposed the protests, the coptic evangelical church supported them (guirguis 2012). on the broader religious-political playing field and the many parties that emerged after the uprising, see al-anani 2012. on religious afterlives of the revolution, see also amin 2021a and 2021b. 8. the miraculous also showed up in other spaces of the revolution, such as during the battle of muhammad mahmoud street (ryzova 2020). 9. mona’s evocation of her grandmother brings to mind talal asad’s (2020, 4) account of his mother’s religiosity: “her prayers, recitations, and fasting were intended neither for other people to decode nor for enhancing her own experience; they were addressed to her god.” it also evokes the common trope of “old women” as bearers of an authentic form of religiosity (lemons and manoukian 2022). 10. young azharis founded these new institutes after the uprising as a counterspace to the official azhari establishment. a main figure was shaykh anas sultan, a former student of emad effat’s. the two main institutes were closed under abdel fattah el-sisi (bano and benadi 2019). 11. for a number of my interlocutors, televangelist preachers like 'amr khaled and mustafa hosni proved a formidable influence before the uprising. after 2011, many came to mistrust these preachers, feeling that they betrayed those standing up for justice. 12. the phrase istafti qalbak (“consult your heart”) stems from one of al-nawawi’s forty hadiths. 13. on the buffered self, see taylor 2007 and krämer 2018. islamic appropriations of self-help do not necessarily revolve around an isolated self but one connected to other selves and to god (zarate 2019). 14. on more long-standing connections between yoga and sufism, see ernst 2005. yogi ali tells me 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https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317x.2022.2047257 https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317x.2022.2047257 https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz029 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743812000062 cultural anthropology 40:1 54 thomassen, bjorn 2012 “notes towards an anthropology of political revolutions.” comparative studies in society and history 54, no. 3: 679–706. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0010417512000278 van nieuwkerk, karin 2021 “‘uncovering the self’: religious doubts, spirituality, and unveiling.” religions 12, no. 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010020 warren, david h. 2017 “cleansing the nation of the ‘dogs of hell’: ‘ali jum‘a’s nationalist legal reasoning in support of the 2013 egyptian coup and its bloody aftermath.” international journal of middle east studies 49, no. 3: 457–77. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0020743817000332 wilson, alice 2023 afterlives of revolution: everyday counterhistories in southern oman. stanford, calif.: stanford university press. zarate, arthur shiwa 2019 “the american sufis: self-help, sufism, and metaphysical religion in postcolonial egypt.” comparative studies in society and history 61, no. 4: 864–93. https://doi.org/10.1017/s001041751900029x zeghlal, malika 2011 “what were the ulama doing in tahrir square? al-azhar and the narrative of resistance to oppression.” sightings, university of chicago divinity school, february 17. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417512000278 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417512000278 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12010020 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743817000332 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0020743817000332 https://doi.org/10.1017/s001041751900029x religious afterlives of a revolution god at tahrir square not my parents’ islam god at rabaa square god vs. islam the turn to sufism sufi yoga conclusion abstract notes references cultural anthropology: the revolutionary’s two temporalities? activism, failure, and uneventing 697 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 697-725, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.06 the revolutionary’s two temporalities? activism, failure, and uneventing elliott prasse-freeman national university of singapore https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3078-0530 ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee—“the revolution must be victorious”—became the rallying cry of the ongoing people’s uprising against the myanmar military’s coup d’état of february 1, 2021, when kyaw moe tun, myanmar’s representative to the united nations, condemned the military regime in an impassioned speech to the general assembly three weeks later.1 he concluded his talk, voice quivering with emotion, by switching to burmese to deliver the exhortation that would be repeated millions of times. but the speech snippet quoted above comes neither from kyaw moe tun nor any of the millions participating in the revolution today. rather, it is extracted from a facebook post from early 2016, within the heart of myanmar’s so-called democratic transition, an era that commenced circa 2011 and ended, unceremoniously, with the aforementioned coup. aye than, a mandalay-based activist, included the exhortation at the end of a post announcing a “plow protest” that would begin in mattaya (a township near mandalay city) the following 698day. after describing the situation—“the ancestral lands of the farmers have been forcibly exploited . . . making them farm servants, slaves, landless people”2 —aye than declared that 500 farmers were coming to take the land back. aye than and the activist group with which he was affiliated—movement for democracy current force (mdcf)—organized, by their account, dozens of plow protests during the “transition” era (prasse-freeman 2023b: chaps. 3–4) of 2011–2021, particularly in anya (the “upriver” domain of mandalay, sagaing, and magwe regions). strikingly, every one of these struggles had, in the group’s assessment, ambiguous outcomes: those which appeared to fail contained traces of potential—as subsequent mobilizations might overwhelm opponents. conversely, however, those that appeared successful were always at risk, i was told, of ensuing catastrophe—officials could return and seize the land again. and similarly, at a larger scale, even the democracy that appeared to have been attained during the transition was always vulnerable to being undermined by a coup that, indeed, did materialize. moreover, in reflecting on the necessity of attending to both successes and failures of the past, ko taw—an mdcf leader—also highlighted the need to apply the same analytic to today’s ongoing taw-hlan-yay (revolution; literally, overturning). indeed, while considering the possibility of the revolution’s victory, ko taw was circumspect in a late 2023 conversation over the encrypted messaging app signal: “the sit-tat [military] will fall sooner or later surely. for the people are not afraid of them and they really hate them. . . . but abolishing the sit-tat entirely doesn’t mean we’ve got democracy. there may be another dictatorship of another style forming. we must continuously fight against any kind of dictatorship. that is what i have been working on since a long time ago.”3 the perdurance of calls for revolution across these multiple moments, not to mention the perpetual activist mobilization and its indeterminate outcomes, index a particularly potent and enduring challenge faced by political activists everywhere: that they are compelled to work at multiple temporal scales. activists must remain aware that action in one instant (leading a protest or a strike or, conversely, provisionally capitulating to an apparatus of repression) must be assessed both for what that action enacts (relatively) immediately, and also for what it might produce in the (relative) longer term. rather than fetishizing the event—as performatively enacting “rupture” or “destabilization” of the status quo (e.g., butler 2015, 25–26; lara 2020, 32) or, alternatively, producing unequivocal failure and defeat—burmese militants in particular (and perhaps activists tout court) entertain varied and often inscrutable potential trajectories. indeed, 699they interpret some of the most “present” or apparently “immediate” phenomena imaginable (the evental protest) as dependent on sources and responses that are both proximate and distal. reflecting on a decade of ethnographic work with burmese activists, and drawing from a 20,000-word chat log between myself and ko taw amassed between 2021 and 2025, as well as from three fieldwork trips to the thai/burma border (february 2022; april 2023; september 2023) where i conversed with exiled activists and militants, i seek in this essay to focus on questions of time vis-à-vis indeterminate failure and success, asking: how do activists manage and manipulate temporality by, in laura bear’s (2014) phrasing, “laboring in/of time” (see also goodale 2022; harms 2011)? specifically, how do activists assess the effectiveness of their actions? for how long can they maintain certain versions of the future when the material evidence in the present suggests inefficacy? how do they assess whether it can really be said that a “rupture” has occurred—and how do they render legible the signs that were created by such a rupturing event? do they transform these traces into more durable representations (narratives, slogans, dances, songs, and so forth) that can be drawn on in future mobilizations? and how do they align their conceptualizations of temporal scales with that of those they are trying to mobilize—those who may have different assessments of current power dynamics and future potentialities? unsecured victories, resourceful failures anthropological literature (robbins 2007; kapferer 2010; holbraad, kapferer, and sauma 2019; cherstich, holbraad, and tassi 2020; chambers and cheesman 2024, 749–50), often building on the philosophical inspirations of alain badiou and gilles deleuze, has advocated for an increasing focus on rupturing events whose spontaneous emergence can fundamentally alter social reality. “the idea,” as joel robbins (2007, 12) puts it about christian conversion, is “that at any moment a future could arrive totally independent of the causal thrust of the present.” these calls edifyingly intervene against a disciplinary structural-functionalist residue (kapferer 2010, 7; cherstich, holbraad, and tassi 2020, 1) that guides anthropologists to prefer continuity over change, instead attuning us to the immanent possibilities for sociopolitical transformation. recent anthropological writing on activism has, however, foregrounded the social labor necessary to construct events (povinelli 2011, 12–15): such that while they may appear to explode out of nothing, they are actually the outcome of extended collective efforts, a fact that directs focus toward activist conceptions 700of temporality—what david scott (2014, 1) calls “the lived experience of time’s passing.” for example, sian lazar (2014, 93) describes a seemingly heterochronic dimension of activist practice in which political organizers imagine themselves embedded in “historical time” (in lineages of “iconic events, epochs, and people” from past mobilizations) even as they work through “attritional time” in “the mundane, repetitive, constant struggle that makes up political activism in the everyday” (lazar 2014, 101; see also krøijer’s 2010 contrast between “active time” and “dead time”; see also berlant 2011, 95). chloe ahmann (2018, 146) identifies how, for the environmental activists she studies, certain acts constitute an “explicit . . . marking of time that condenses protracted suffering and demands an ethical response.” but to achieve such temporal distillation and compression, time is first stretched in the opposite direction: activists mimic the slowness of the state-corporate projects that would dispossess them, while deploying delay as a tactic (see also fung and lamb 2023). such tasks take time itself “as the object, not merely the context, of human behavior—it is something people use to direct attention and make claims” (ahmann 2018, 153). yet i propose that creating the event is not so much the question—or, rather, it is only the beginning of many questions. as a growing anthropological literature on “political failure” (greenberg 2014; jansen 2019; allen 2020; contributions in oustinova-stjepanovic 2020; musallam 2020; morningstar 2021; greenberg and muir 2022; schielke 2023; prasse-freeman 2023a; mathias 2024, 159–60; trisal 2025) observes, evental ruptures often fail to ultimately materialize. because this literature shows how failures can follow apparent successes, we may need to question the model of the event, particularly how it presupposes a temporally unidirectional unfolding of entailed consequences (after this, things will never be the same) that misunderstands the fact that struggles are typically polydirectional (nielsen 2014; al-khalili, ansari, lamrani, and uzel 2023, 5–6)—meaning that events can be continually resignified, even annulled, as evental. events are hence subject to their own uneventing, in which past events become severed from the present from which that event is perceived, “because,” as scott (2004, 41) puts it, “it is no longer clear what [the present’s] relation to the future might be.” put otherwise, the event can be understood as a machine that continues to work after its immediate effects appear to dissipate, potentially generating the seeds of its own banalization or obsolescence, as it produces new conditions that give rise to other events, which operate recursively on the initial effects. the point here is that activists not only do things to time, but are subject to time doing things to them. 701temporality’s double edge warrants increased attention; to understand it, a detour into more formal anthropologies of time is necessary. alfred gell (1992, 149–65, 166–241), in the anthropology of time, builds on philosophers who distinguish between the ontic time of the universe (“b-series time”) and the time subjectively experienced by individuals (“a-series time”). b-series time is fourth-dimensional and tenseless—events do not happen in any definitive past, present, or future relative to some agent’s perspective on them; rather, they only relate to one another as before or after. the coup’s five-year anniversary—february 1, 2026—is always earlier than the preceding year, february 1, 2027, no matter when you are reading this sentence. a-series time, by contrast, is agent-dependent: the same february 1, 2026, is future or past depending on when your act of reading this occurs. we lack phenomenological access to fourth-dimensional b-series time, and so, for anthropological purposes, what time is in any metaphysical sense is irrelevant to how humans perceive it, and how different human communities perceive it divergently. but the perceived reality of b-series time—the perpetually becoming-later of time that encroaches on human life—provides the ontological ground on which human communities manipulate their temporal experiences. hence there aren’t different times, but rather “different conceptions of the world and its workings” (gell 1992, 36) in which some cultures “refus[e] to regard as salient certain aspects of temporal reality which [others] regard as much more important” (gell 1992, 72). while time can only be comprehended through our socially constructed and intersubjectively ratified interpretive schema (“time-maps” for gell; see also “temporalization” for munn 1992) that allow us to “generate templates, in the form of anticipations of the proximate future, which are involved in the active process of perception itself” (gell 1992, 237), the larger point is that these maps are circumscribed by the temporal parchment (b-series time) on which they are inscribed. this constitutes a critical fact for anyone (e.g., activists) desiring to alter the perceived course of time: b-series will keep churning along (to which culturally specific temporalities respond), forcing a reckoning by activists who cannot simply pause time or reverse it, but instead must make sense of its relentless pushing forward and what their actions in it produce: should a lack of change or transformation over any specific period be construed as a failure, or a mere “not yet”? to summarize: a-series is to activist temporal strategies with time as b-series is to activist reckoning with its inexorable march. how, then, are time maps written? as michel-rolph trouillot (2003, 29) reminds us, objective reality has material effects on the world (his “historicity-1”) 702that constrain the degrees of freedom we have in crafting narratives about it (“historicity-2”), a general critique also advanced by matt hodges (2008, 407) and erik harms (2011, 102). materiality parametrizes the time-world that activists maneuver as they respond to outcomes of their and others’ actions. as pierre bourdieu (2000, 221, quoted in nielsen 2011, 406) puts it about how failure circumscribes ensuing perceived possibilities: “below a certain threshold of objective chances, the strategic disposition itself, which presupposes practical reference to a forthcoming, sometimes a very remote one . . . cannot be constituted.” in other words, time can be manipulated—but only within reason, one that is intersubjectively determined: if one fails four times, five times, six times, one might no longer be able to credibly claim—to others, or even to oneself—that these failures are only temporary, contingent, insignificant. rather, the failures may become collectively interpreted as revelatory of a reality highly resistant to change—or at least to the mode of enacting change pursued by the repeated fail-er. we could then propose that respective semiotic communities have differentially flexible time-maps that afford constituent members the ability to variously represent time to themselves, as well as to interpret material reality—thereby constructing their respective perceived “threshold[s] of objective chances” (see also gell 1992, 292–93). what might motivate or account for various semiotic communities retaining divergent collective temporal understandings? one explanation is the framework of ontological difference, in which some researchers identify “indigenous time” (e.g., awâsis 2020; whorf 1956) as fundamentally (phenomenologically, grammatically) divergent from “western time.” in the burmese case, for instance, the historian michael aung-thwin (1991) argues that “circles” and “spirals” define not just burma’s history but also burmese thought itself, while the linguist a. l. becker (1995) asserts that circularity in burmese orthography (vowels circumambulate consonants, forcing a typewriter to “pause” before it proceeds) reflects, and is produced by, burmese circular thinking. melford spiro (1966) has stressed, citing burmese buddhism’s emphasis on the cosmology of future lives, a burmese aversion to considering what jane guyer (2007) calls the “near future.” but as martin holbraad and morten pedersen (2017, 46) argue, ontologies are necessarily plural, “in line with the demonstrable diversity of people’s lifeways.” harms (2011, 99) observes, for instance, that peasants “can conceive of the passage of time in two ways”—understanding “industrial time discipline” and “the peasant mode of production”—“without developing a fundamental 703metaphysical crisis,” a phenomenon paul kockelman (2024) interprets as reflecting humans’ capacity to have various degrees of ontological commitment. this point is borne out by how the activists featured below read and think beyond any circumscriptions located in an ostensibly hermetically sealed “burmese culture.” while not dismissing the partial relevance of deep cultural foundations, i would like to consider what we might call an activist ontology (one likewise not immured but incorporating of other ontologies). by way of elaborating this ontology, i use the term activist (cf. taylor 2016; battistoni 2019)4 as shorthand to identify political militants defined by revolutionary practices and orientations:5 (1) they engage in activities—disruptive actions directed at extant apparatuses of power and organizing activities directed at communities they perceive as marginalized—often as their primary vocation or otherwise as their way of life;6 (2) these practices reflect a commitment to fundamentally altering a world activists see as requiring radical change; (3) they are conscious of their ability, and hence their politico-ethical responsibility, to intervene in the course of history (strange 2018).7 indeed, burmese activists’ continual fixation on responsibility (prasse-freeman 2023b, 63–64; 256–57) reveals an understanding of the future as available for, and even demanding of, alteration. but because the world not only affords but resists change, failure becomes constitutive of activist praxis (explaining, i argue, why the many explorations of activist subjectivities cited above focus on it), forcing activists to manage time within and beyond defeat. indeed, as scott (2014, 2) argues, failure “provoke[s] . . . a more acute awareness of time,” compelling activists to reckon with the paradoxical temporalities that their sense of responsibility imposes. fuad musallam (2025, 223), for instance, identifies how failure is imbricated in temporal management when he argues that “activist futurity is affected by a very shallow historical depth that is tied to the immediate past of failure and the circulation of narratives of that failure. this shallow historical depth, however, is productive of a very patient and long-term strategy that pushes the future out and populates it with moments of potential rupture.” in other words, activists must have short memories when it comes to failure, while retaining long-term views of ultimate success. and yet, can the future be pushed out indefinitely? how do activists in such situations resist accusations of quixotic tautology (that their method and theory of change cannot be falsified through assessment of their actions’ effects), not to mention deal with the exhaustion, despair, and even madness (see proctor 2024) 704that attends the imperative to perpetually rehabilitate failures and preempt victories from eroding? some do so, according to alex flynn (2021, 156), by recognizing “the very impossibility of distant objectives,” consequently transforming means (practices) into ends in themselves, forfeiting transformative change as a realizable objective, thereby dissolving time, as work toward the future collapses into an everlasting present where activists “striv[e] ever harder in perpetual struggle” (see also graeber 2009, 210; edwards 2023). david graeber’s (2009, 527) famous emphasis on activist “prefiguration”—“acting as if one is already free” (adopted from boggs 1977)—seems a version of this (although only to the extent that the one “acting already free” can resist a reality that acts as if one is not!). and lazar (2014, 102) observes a similar phenomenon in which activists she studied “seemed on the whole comfortable with the ongoing and attritional nature of their struggle,” something they achieve by “folding” their present into the “longer tradition of struggle” derived from the past. noteworthy here is how musallam, flynn, graeber, and lazar, respectively, identify unique ways that activists labor with time: some insert themselves into a quasi-mythical lineage of past revolutionaries (lazar); others remain in a permanent present in which they continue their struggles without concern for futures that may never materialize (flynn; graeber); while still others focalize the future to deemphasize, if not obliterate, failures in more present temporalities (musallam). but rather than identifying these as separate temporal domains (past, present, future), i seek to highlight their shared commonality: all three temporalities inure activists against the possibility of ultimate loss—they are antilinear in the way that a-series time affords, and evoke the timeless, eternal “presence of the now” endorsed by walter benjamin (1986, 261) in his famous “theses on the philosophy of history.” by contrast, i suggest that revolutionaries—if burmese ones are at all representative—also must engage b-series time, a temporality not only contingent but also productive of limiting path dependencies, in which victory may be possible to imagine but in which irrevocable failure also remains a perpetual option. consequently, benjamin (1986, 261) seems to overstate things when he insists that revolutionaries are nothing less than fully aware that, “at the moment of their action,” “they are about to make the continuum of history explode.” this is because at the very least the agents with whom activists interact—state officials, corporate shareholders, on-the-fence masses—likely understand history as resistant to such explosion, leaving activists less certain of their interventions’ potential effects. i hence propose that we perceive this temporal division—between a series and b—as demarcating a 705stance toward time that activists can, and perhaps must, oscillate between. but, as i demonstrate in the ethnography that follows, any tidy division between the two temporalities dissolves in practice, with activists living both senses of time simultaneously.8 living perpetual revolution the older members of movement for democracy current force (mdcf)—(mostly) men born in yangon or mandalay in the early or mid 1970s9 —had already lived through the failure of several earlier uprisings when they helped burma’s 2021 spring revolution emerge. first, and most indelibly, there was the “8888” (shiq-lay-loun) failure of august 8, 1988—a mass protest event that responded to nearly three decades of military oppression. because while it forced the military-led burmese socialist program party (which took power in burma through its own coup in 1962) to step down, the mass movement was ultimately repressed by an ensuing coup and demobilized by the promise of an election—one that occurred in 1990 but whose results the military rejected. as participants in the protests, aye than, soe aung, and ko taw occasionally referred to themselves as part of the “88 generation”—soe aung was only thirteen at the time but was arrested for throwing stones at a propaganda billboard. but given that so many others also identified as such, they preferred to distinguish their sacrifice and commitment by highlighting the number of years they spent in prison for their participation then and afterward, especially after the failed 2007 so-called saffron revolution.10 that uprising, much smaller in scale and now discursively associated with (although not actually organized by) buddhist monks, was precipitated by mdcf comrades who, in the nine months leading up to the protest, led monthly wildcat demonstrations against the regime’s disregard of declining living standards (schrank 2015, 59–60; prasse-freeman 2023b, 105–8). most were imprisoned after the ensuing crackdown. after promulgating a new constitution in 2008—one that guaranteed the military veto power over parliamentary processes—myanmar’s military state began to release political prisoners in the run-up to the 2010 elections, an act meant to index its putative sincerity in transitioning to democracy. ko taw reflected on beginning mdcf in response, as well as on the membership’s thought process at the time, and why they chose to include “current” (sin-hset ma-pyat) in their name: at that time the junta released dassk [aung san suu kyi] and some other prominent leaders such as 88 gen students. so, some people thought we 706are on the way to democracy, and we need no longer fight against the dictatorship. sin-hset ma-pyat warned [everyone] that it still remains to abolish the military dictatorship entirely.11 translating sin-hset ma-pyat into english as “current” plays on the dual english meanings: first, present-tense temporality (current as in now), and second, and closer to its literal meaning in burmese, current as in a river’s flow. however, according to ko taw, “it actually means ‘continuous,’ ‘constant,’ ‘non-stop.’ it comes from marxism, and mao’s thought too.” this name was chosen consciously—and mdcf was formed in general—to contest the country’s ostensible political “transition” that lasted from 2011 to the 2021 coup. this era was defined by a liberalization of markets and an increase in political and social freedoms, changes that many believed brought the country out of “the dark ages” (aung 2021). as elizabeth rhoads and courtney wittekind (2018, 204) argue, such discursive and governance practices effectively framed burmese history as a teleological progression in which myanmar became “only dynamic when . . . tightly bound to western capital flows” (see also campbell 2022, 18; aung 2022a). mdcf responded by devoting itself to three interlacing objectives: contesting the transition’s atemporal framing; defending laborers, peasants, and poor people victimized by the transition’s processes; and reminding others that an apparent end was rather a continuation of struggle against a more insidious apparatus. this was not always a popular position, and members relayed how journalists covering their activities regularly challenged mdcf strategy as defeatist. further, burma’s ngo and policy elites—whom mdcf called yay-baw-si (“oil on top of the water”), meaning these individuals claimed to be part of the people but actually stood above them, refusing to mix—condemned mdcf’s actions as inopportune. elite rhetoric emphasized the fragility of the transition, stressed doing nothing to upend it prematurely, and implored everyone to give it a chance. members of mdcf were not immune to these appeals, especially after suu kyi’s national league for democracy was elected in 2015 and came to officially—if not materially—control the country (prasse-freeman 2016).12 this is perhaps because elite appeals took the same a-series temporal logic as (one of) their own: both bourgeois ngos and mdcf radicals identified a future state that had to be enacted through efforts in the present, and if those efforts did not produce that future, the only remedy was more efforts, indefinitely. while the relationship between current means and deferred ends remains in all human 707endeavors somewhat inscrutable (candea and heywood 2023), this is particularly the case when transformative political change is the desired objective, given the unpredictable effects of iterative efforts, unintelligible or hysteretic feedback loops, and complex intermediate variables (petryna 2018, 571–72). liberals argued that the liberalization of markets and political institutions would produce path dependency, “locking in” reforms; mdcf argued the inverse—only the abolition of the military would guarantee a just transition for myanmar’s poor. only time could prove which perspective was correct—but how much time was enough?13 yet unlike the transition supporters, the activists recognized that, to paraphrase albert einstein, doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result might be dangerously insane. this b-series awareness derived from their semiotic attunement to the risk of failure, not to mention their sense of responsibility for that failure’s consequences, in which various instances of discrete disappointment would aggregate into congealed social truths, both for those they were trying to mobilize (who would conclude that it is better to not fight than to risk painful failure) and for themselves (subject to exhaustion and defeatism—indexed by comrades leaving the struggle or going mad).14 simultaneously, they were unwilling to give up on the struggle, given the inability to know when pushing just a bit harder or for a bit longer would produce a substantive rupture. this dilemma can be ethnographically illustrated by returning to the plow protests introduced above. many of these direct actions of land re-occupation appeared to fail at their immediate outset, in the sense that security forces arrested protest leaders and destroyed the fields they attempted to sow. and yet, when i recently asked ko taw about these failures, he made intertemporal connections that forced reassessment of those protests’ provisional meanings: it was difficult to fight the sit-tat during those days. but the farmers were ready to fight against the dogs [military] before the coup. so, when the national crisis [the 2021 coup] came out, they can easily change themselves from oppressed farmers into lpdfs [local people’s defense forces]. that is why sagaing region became the most popular lpdf area. . . . the farmers have nothing to lose [but] their chains.15 ko taw here credited earlier land struggles as explaining the surprising fact that the revolution is being maintained by those in central burma who had rarely before participated in burma’s political uprisings (callahan 2022; huard 2024). soe aung further elaborated how these farmers evolved during the past decade: 708at the time [of the first plow protests] when we entered their community, we learned that they were afraid to see a person wearing long pants (not even a uniform)! they thought that the person wearing long pants is a police or soldier. former governments governed them by using fear. now they are night heroes in the revolution. their sacrifice is no less than that of famous people. . . . they had to divide into two groups. one group works as daily workers to get income to buy the food. the rest remain as revolutionary armed group and continuously fight against the dictatorship. sometimes, they change the groups after some months . . . . many died. many were killed. many were arrested. i don’t have an exact list. but they are still in the revolution, and they never give up.16 here soe aung notes the transformation that peasants experienced, going from fearing trouser-wearing people (burmese villagers wear sarongs) to being “night heroes” (attacking the military). he and ko taw reframe farmers’ struggles, shifting them from the fight to reacquire land to the fight to reinstall democracy.17 conversely, however, even those struggles that appeared successful—such as the plow protest in mattaya mentioned above—proved difficult to assess as such. when i visited mattaya in 2016 and 2017 after their apparently victorious direct actions—in the sense that they re-entered the fields from which they had been evicted, planted seeds, cultivated those plants, and then later harvested them for consumption and sale—aye than refused to endorse my assessment of victory. “the cronies and military can come back at any time,” he told me. “the farmers must remain ready.” and, sure enough, soe aung relayed that several times from 2016 to 2021 mattaya farmers mobilized against imminent attacks from “cronies”—a class of tycoons connected to both the military and the democratically elected government of nobel laureate suu kyi—who had designs on peasant land.18 this semiotic sensitivity to temporal inscrutability applied, i would argue, even to how they considered political tools. during the transition era, millions of dollars in the form of legal aid reform and rights-based trainings flooded myanmar (prasse-freeman 2015). members of mdcf expressed skepticism of these models’ presuppositions. soe aung observed in 2014 that “some ngos come to communities to explain formally about the un, etc. most people don’t understand.” instead, he counseled: “don’t talk about human rights; talk [instead] about sa-wut nay-yay [livelihoods].” when aye than was asked if he considered 709himself a “human rights defender,” he scoffed: “i myself have no security. for myself, human rights are broken [lu akwint-ayay cho-pauk]. so, i cannot defend them.”19 i have elsewhere observed that burmese activists see rights as alienable rather than inalienable possessions (prasse-freeman 2023b), and aye than’s response further clarifies that the problem with possession (how could he defend something he did not have?) was impacted by security and its temporality. what separates a “right” from a gift, for instance, is that rights are temporally durable (and inalienable rights temporally eternal). to wit, the fact that one could understand oneself as having rights even when one materially lacks them highlights two dimensions of durability: one possesses rights both across contexts (rights vis-à-vis both the weak and the powerful) and throughout time. consequently, a “right” that exists for only one moment should be called something else: a privilege, a concession, an exception. conversely, activists have focused on “opportunities,” ones that, as they put it repeatedly, “depend on the situation” (achay-anay-aya mu-teeday), and which emerge only through the perpetual production and reproduction of that very situation. the contingency of time here is also reflected not just in their partial dwelling in a perpetual present (as seinenu thein-lemelson [2021, 262] argues, many burmese activists seek to neither “‘heal’ from a ‘psychic wound’ nor to ‘recover’ from ‘violence,’” as activists want to keep those wounds fresh). it also emerges in the spatial circularity of activist practice, in which they go from one struggle to the next, constantly looping back so as to help, to the extent possible, solidify gains made in each area of intervention (worker organizing; plow protests; daily survival in peri-urban yangon), rehabilitating and trying to transform losses (strikes broken; land stolen; increasing precarity), while also preventing victories from atrophying or becoming vulnerable to the forces of reaction. activists move elliptically not only to continue to push struggles forward but also to prevent “uneventing”—to, in other words, intervene against the erosion of proximate gains.20 for instance, on one particular trip, we went from mandalay to visit farmers; on to shan state, where the activists held a community-organizing workshop in moe meiq for four days; back to a mandalay flophouse en route to letpadan in bago region, the site of an early 2015 stand-off between students protesting for curriculum reform. sensing the ensuing state crackdown, mdcf decided to leave letpadan as “this is not our time to get arrested” (as teza, another comrade, put it). they had to get back, anyway, to a yangon industrial zone where every sunday they provided english and computer-skills trainings for workers—these laborers themselves building displaced futures deferred far into the time to come. 710i was able to ride this movable feast for a week at a time, perhaps two, but i always needed to exit the flow—to return to home base in yangon to rest and consolidate thoughts about what had transpired. by contrast, in experiences at levels both micro and meso, there was a sense that activist life had no “home base” to speak of—there was no exiting the flow. at the micro level, consider the perpetually befuddling fact (at least to me) that no one ever turned off the lights when they slept. i take this, in perhaps an extreme interpretation, as indexing that there was no delineated “sleep time” that could be separated from the time of action. at the meso level, activists were continually on the move. in 2016, soe aung recounted how he had not seen his mother for years after his release from prison: in 2013 april i started serving my sentence in shwe bo prison. when i was released [in november], i was not able to return to my mother’s house; i was moving around from friend’s place to friend’s place. i got out and went to mattaya and organized [the farmers]. i protested at the chinese embassy. as the police came to arrest me, i ran away. as the battles were continuous, i had to run away. i did not see my mother for two years. finally, i returned to her. she told me “i am happy to meet with you again before i die.” she cooked and served the curries that i like. i stayed with my mother only one or two days and then the next day returned. when i asked why soe aung only spent two days with his mother, he replied that he did not want to get her in trouble with the police, and that he had to respond to queries regarding his work in central burma. he continued: “in my mother’s area, communicating is difficult. and so, because i had to communicate, i was not able to stay there for very long.” he re-entered the flow soon thereafter. using failure the activists with whom i worked have remained active during the current revolution. while many of their comrades have joined armed militias in the liberated areas of kayah state, most of my interlocutors have remained in lowland cities. their activities have evolved as the revolutionary terrain has changed, progressing through four overlapping phases: organizing for protest; guerrilla warfare; hiding (and surviving covid-19); and organizing communities under the protective aegis of social welfare service delivery work—in these activities, they returned to the clandestine, plausibly deniable social support labor that they had pursued before the transition (prasse-freeman 2023b). 711when it first became apparent that the coup indeed had occurred, mdcf members joined an emergency meeting organized by the famous dissident min ko naing to coordinate responses. as the dictators had declared martial law and forbade gatherings greater than four people, this put them on the run from the start. at that point, the country had responded with a spontaneous ceremony of banging pots and pans each night at 8:00 p.m., repurposing the traditional ritual of driving away ghosts to address a new evil. ko taw, soe aung, teza, and others began planning street marches to escalate those pot bangings into mass uprisings. on february 4, the eve of their first day of protests, ko taw posted the following, imploring the country’s youth to join them: your generation is superior, ours is inferior. in the time we are thinking to avoid, you are trying to come face to face. our leaders are over there. coming behind these leaders in these fucked up times you guys are starting to lead campaigns to oppose the military dictatorship. . . . i am ashamed that up until this point we have lived as the military’s slaves. . . . i’m proud of all of you! . . . if i get a chance, i’m willing to sacrifice my life in this battle we’re facing.21 when i asked him about the addressee of this message, ko taw acknowledged that it was directed both at the youth and at his own generation. striking here is how, at a time when one might expect narratives of unity that insisted on an unbroken connection across generations, ko taw highlighted the failures of the past, his generation’s avoidance of and capitulation to the military (its willingness to live as its slaves), and the consequent shame produced. ko taw is not the only activist to use this device. several activist reflections published since the coup explicitly reflect on earlier failure (e.g., kyaw zwa moe 2024). for instance, lay lay mon (2023, 111), writing about her and ko taw’s shared activist cohort, asserts that “my generation lives as deviants instead of living like young leaders. there are many opportunists.” phyo phyo aung (2023, 131), taking a more positive tack, “welcome[s] the new steps of our younger generations, who are honest and brave and in whom we put our trust.” min han htet extends this failure analytic to the entire postcolonial history: the military dictatorship still existed before the coup, which as an event was just the reawakening and resurgence of the still-powerful military . . . we burmese have had generations and generations of activism 712and several revolutions aimed at eradicating the military dictatorship. but these revolutions never reached their goals. they always fell short, and the military dictatorship has endured. the recent 2021 military coup is just the next chapter in the story of dictatorship written by the military. (kaung sithu 2023, 485) by calling attention to failure, these texts acknowledge b-series time encroaching on reality, making this acknowledgment the ground on which the current political demand is made: opposition to the regime must continue, but with a difference, so as to avoid the same outcome. as such, the distinction between the two “temporalities” mentioned above here again breaks down, as the repetition of actions, the commitment to perpetual struggle (a-series), only occurs because failure is recognized (b-series). failure can only be used if it is accepted as a potential outcome, not if it is raised to be dismissed and displaced as “mere” setback. emptiness as openness as alluded to above in the critique of rights paradigms, grassroots myanmar activists engage in a double refusal: they not only reject authoritarian abuse and neglect but also simultaneously rebuff what they see as liberalism’s false promises (prasse-freeman 2023b). a question emerges: what exists in the gap between these refusals—we can observe what activists are against, but what are they for? what constitutes them as political subjects?22 clearly these activists are influenced by marxism, as the discussion of sin-hset ma-pyat above demonstrated. ko taw and mdcf tapped into, and have helped advance, myanmar’s vibrant radical marxist tradition (aung and campbell 2024). but this is not all—they are also influenced by other strains of thought, particularly by the inchoate political anarchism endorsed by the farmers whom they defend (huard 2024). their politics thus seems close to maoism (see shah 2021), in the sense of: (1) a commitment to perpetual revolution, (2) an ecumenicism about tactics, and (3) a tethering of themselves to “the people,” even when the people’s politics do not align perfectly with their own. in these senses, their politics seems to have definitive contours: forms of solidarity, values of sacrifice for clearly delineated senses of justice, and so on. we might call this the “horizontal” dimension of subjective formation—in the sense that it happens through interactions with communities, other activists, and more. ethnographers of activism have highlighted how the affect generated both in protest actions and through reflections on those actions 713creates both subjective transformation and solidarity with their comrades (juris 2008; krøijer 2010; knight and stewart 2016; laszczkowski 2019; schielke 2023; musallam 2025). it is tempting, then, to answer the question above by concluding that their politics are a mélange of influences from different sources, drawn from their own experiences. and, of course, this holds true. but it is striking how often both mdcf members and other burmese activists (kaung sithu 2023, 490; vfurp 2023, 540) explicitly disavow universalizing political ideologies, as when ko taw condemned elites in the revolution as “wrongly think[ing] that their way of thinking is the only universal truth.”23 more importantly, revolutionaries disavow their own political influences as well, while endorsing ones that do not appear consistent with their praxis. “i don’t like communism. but i like some of its ideologies, such as historical materialism and dialectical materialism, and i like the class perspective. and if you are really on the sides of farmers and workers, you can never stay together with capitalism for a long time under the same shelter peacefully. but i cannot accept dictatorship of the proletariat. i don’t like any kind of dictatorship,” ko taw conveyed recently. in a different conversation: “i am not an anarchist.” instead: “i am a social democrat.” when i pointed out that few of his actions seemed particularly aligned with social democracy, with its formal institutions and desire to contain, not eliminate, capitalism, he told an illustrative story: i think i have told you about sexual harassment at a garment factory named kind dream in shwepaukkan? the supervisor, line leader, team leaders—we beat those four men harshly and warned them not to do such a kind of sexual harassment anymore. it worked. we sometimes emphasize more on what we believe than how we should do effectively.24 he clarified that he and his comrades make proclamations (adherence to social democracy) that do not necessarily align with what is necessary “according to the situation”: “for example, as an authentic social democrat, we must avoid bloodshed in revolution. but for the current situation, we can’t avoid it . . . . if our chosen political way doesn’t work to protect and promote the community, we must choose another right and suitable way.” the declaration of being a social democrat becomes an empty signifier, its substantive meanings deferred or refused, substituted for an immanent politics that is aligned “with the people” and “the situation.” this emptiness warrants comment because it appears 714counterintuitive—we may presume that activists are staunchly committed to ideologies, even dogmatically so, as that clarity guides and sustains their struggles. badiou (2008, 152) explains this subjective absence through his theory of the event: as “an event brings” a “void” that reflects “the latent inconsistency of the given world” and ruptures intelligibility, struggles are hence contentless, their meanings deferred, until they recreate the world through their generated effects (see jansen 2019, 244–45; petryna 2018). but given the critique of the event advanced throughout this article, such a theory seems inadequate. i propose that subjective ambivalence also derives from the near-universal activist experience of failure and the consequent temporal destabilization that failure entails. if revolutionary activism is defined, as igor cherstich, martin holbraad, and nico tassi (2020, 33) propose, as agents enduring personal costs when attempting to realize their utopian vision for the world, what happens to that vision when it is thwarted? revolutionary activism can be profitably assimilated into an adornian marxist dialectical model where subjects respond to the wrongness of the world itself—“the ontology of the wrong state of things” perceived “after the attempt to change the world miscarried” (adorno 1973,11, 3)—to generate a non-identity with themselves. as jessica greenberg and sarah muir (2022, 312; emphasis added) have it, the disappointment that results from failure “involves, by definition, the splintering of perspectives, as one simultaneously sees and feels the appeal of a particular promise and the pain of its unfulfilled condition” (see also geuss 2020). hence, the emptiness is produced—subjectivity is partially evacuated—as an outcome of the failure dialectic: on one hand, the stabilization lent by a governing set of values that guides their praxis is met by, on the other, an imperative to maintain a distance from those values given the potential of failure to dampen their potency, and because becoming overly aligned with them could separate the revolutionaries from an ever-evolving situation that might demand tactics so different as to potentially generate different values. taking the event and failure together, subjective emptiness hence derives from a similar orientation toward temporality: rather than only being embedded in a-series (of a perpetual present, past, or future)—in which values are static—activists are also receptive to the open-ended element of time (b-series), in which rupturing events and failures necessarily alter their perspectives on the world and themselves. 715 activism for all? this activist openness, reflecting a humility conditioned by failure, aids in a critical task: dissolution of the barrier between themselves and those they would mobilize. this impels a reconsideration of the apparent schism between activists and non-activists, where the former are particularly attuned to the way that conditions assent to, or resist, change, while the latter might be more given over to dailyness—carried by time rather than proactively attempting to alter (perceptions of) it. indeed, some burmese activists have been lamenting the withdrawal of the masses from revolution, observing that “after the miliary coup, the decrease in people’s support is a bitter reality. consequently, there is a limit to persuading more members to join and start new battles” (vfurp 2023, 536). but ko taw emphasizes that “if they people don’t take part in revolution actively, it is only [because of] the weakness of taw-hlan-yay-thama [revolutionaries]. . . . we must organize them to fight against the dictator by themselves.” critically, and consistent with the openness elaborated above, ko taw continues by presenting the masses not as inert material to be assembled, but as teachers in their own right—imminent revolutionary activists: “we must listen to their daily lives, obstacles, and how they think. after that, we can consider how to educate, organize, and agitate them based on those data.”25 but how to bridge the gap between activists and non-activists regarding both the possibility and responsibility for altering the future? it is useful to revisit the call ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee—“the revolution must be victorious”—invoked both before and after the coup, and introduced at this article’s outset. it has, critically, been used by both radical activists and those less directly involved in the current uprising. the slogan appears at first glance focused on the future, and what must now be done to enact it. but the call for victory evokes an entire history of struggle, extending to the buddha himself, who declared aung-bi (“victory has been achieved”) when reaching enlightenment (see prasse-freeman 2023b, 24–25). several activists told me that ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee was an ateiq-nimeiq: a prediction or omen that partakes in cosmologies beyond the secular and temporalities beyond this lifetime. the burmese historian phyo win latt describes it as aung-taw-mu ga-hta—an “eventual victory manifestation mantra.” he elaborates: “i use the phrase ‘eventual victory’ rather than just victory. people who joined these movements sincerely don’t know when the eventual victory will come. but they are anticipating the eventual victory and disregard other incidents along the ways as temporary.”26 this point is well taken, consistent as it is with an a-series approach, but such speech acts must be invoked in the first place because the manifestation of actual 716victory is contingent in a b-series sense (otherwise why shout out, and continually reiterate, ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee, if the eventual victory is always already secured?). such speech acts do not claim to immediately alter history (as in the model of the evental performative critiqued above); they rather act to haunt the present (langford 2016; good, chiovenda, and rahimi 2022). in this sense haunting does not entail a ghost coming from the dead to trouble the living, because here injustice and violence have not killed the political dream. haunting therefore disrupts temporality not in the sense of past in the present, but by producing different spectral routes running in parallel: that which exists now is haunted by the alternative reality that continues being imagined playing out astride the current one (strange 2018; benjamin 1986). this fork in temporality produces alternative trajectories to be made legible by further political work, all while the b-series marches on. in this sense, haunting disjunctively synthesizes a-series and b-series time. ayay-daw-boun aung-ya-myee and related texts entextualize (silverstein and urban 1996) this haunting,27 making it available for reiteration and circulation. each time the slogan is chanted, a particular element of the dance reproduced, the chorus of the song reprised, the revolution and its potential are cited, recalled, and re-assessed. while this is inherently risky—what if the call is interpreted as a reminder of failure?—such devices convey activist temporality to those who may not share the same understanding of history and the way in which it is available for manipulation. a key activist tactic for mobilizing others to shared objectives hence becomes aligning non-activist conceptions of temporality with their own, in which both a-series and b-series are entertained simultaneously. this requires enacting a double move: activists intervene in the regnant understandings of time held by farmers and workers (in which time is resistant to change), but not such that farmers and workers simply come to believe that revolution is imminent (and that time is subject to easy manipulation). the plow protests again prove instructive here: peasants had to be convinced both that another future is possible and that it is unlikely to materialize any time soon. often they were unwilling to risk the attempt; in other cases, they did take the risk—only to feel betrayed when they did not get their land back (prasse-freeman 2023b, 140–42). yet as described above, these events sometimes merely make for short-term failures; across longer trajectories, they become instructions on how to live revolutionary time. 717 conclusion: writing the unknown future this article has illuminated how revolutionary activists deal with the failure that saturates their praxis. it has demonstrated how political activists often delineate temporality allochronically, differentiating the time of the event (the weeks when decades happen) from banal time (those decades when nothing happens) to then highlight how this view of cleanly bifurcated temporality underestimates the potential for the event to later dissolve (juris 2008; jansen 2019), receding again into a normal time now laced with the residue of failure. given such mutability, activists consequently are compelled to perceive different understandings of how their work in the world envelops them in different temporalities. they then oscillate between strategies calibrated to each. to wit, at some points, activists inoculate themselves against the possibility of ultimate failure by embedding themselves in perpetual struggles that efface ends through an embrace of means; conversely, at other moments, lest they be dismissed by those they are trying to mobilize, activists embrace a contingent and open-ended temporality in which victory is only one of several potential outcomes, and absolute failure remains a perpetual potential conclusion. this experience of failure produces a striking subjective emptiness—or, better, openness—to various visions of the future. by braiding together different temporal strategies—resisting failures as mere setbacks while also adjusting their tactics to respond to unassailable material realities—they create an ontology of historical change that they attempt to imbue in others. reflecting on this indeterminacy, anthropologists might ask ourselves about ethnographic renderings of political struggles: how do we write about subjects and engagements that remain undecidable because both remain literally unfinished? if ethnography—writing about people—is a literary genre with narrative constructions containing beginnings and ends, does this get put into crisis when any semblance of an ending gets undermined? it seems that ethnography might mirror the dual temporalities described here: conveying not just what occurred but also the haunting alternatives of what might have and what might still. abstract radical activists assess actions both for their relatively immediate effects and for their potential longer-term consequences. provisional failures can become resources for future victories, while erstwhile successes can dissolve after apparent achievement. drawing from ethnography with burmese revolutionaries, this article shows how activists appear to engage two divergent temporal strategies divided by respective 718orientations toward failure: in one, activists inoculate themselves against failure by inhabiting constant struggles that efface ends by committing to means; in the other, activists embrace a contingent temporality vis-à-vis ultimate outcomes, thereby remaining responsive to evolving conditions. yet as activists oscillate between them, the distinction dissolves, revealing that it is not time that is manipulated but various intersubjective renderings of actions’ efficacy. ultimately, engagement with failure splinters activist subjectivity, generating an openness to both senses of temporality that aids activists in altering the understandings of temporality held by the non-activists they seek to transform. [activism; temporality; revolution; subjectivity; political ethnography; the event; burma/myanmar] အနှစ်ချုပ် တိုးတက်သော တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူများသည် ၎င်းတို၏ လုပ်ဆောင်ချက်များကို ချက်ချင်းဖြစ်ပေါ်လာနိုင်သည့် ရလဒ်များနှင့် ရေရှည်အကျိုးဆက်များ နှစ်ခုစလုံးအတွက် အကဲဖြတ်လေ့ရှိကြသည်။ တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားမှုဖြစ်စဉ်များ ယာယီကျရှုံးမှုများသည် အနာဂတ်အောင်ပွဲများအတွက် အရင်းအမြစ်များ ဖြစ်လာနိုင်သကဲ့သို တစ်ချိန်က အောင်မြင်ခဲ့သော အရာများသည် ထင်ရှားသော အောင်မြင်မှုရပြီးနောက်တွင်လည်း ပျက်ပြယ်သွားနိုင်သည်။ မြန်မာတော်လှန်ရေးသမားများနှင့် ပတ်သက်သည့် လူမျိုးနှင့် ယဉ်ကျေးမှု သရုပ်ခွဲခြင်း ပညာရပ် (ethnography) နည်းလမ်းဖြင့် သုတေသနပြုထားသော ဤဆောင်းပါးက တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူများသည် ကျရှုံးမှုအပေါ် ၎င်းတို၏ ကိုယ်ပိုင်သဘောထားများအရ ကွဲပြားသော အချိန်ကာလဆိုင်ရာ ဗျူဟာနှစ်မျိုးကို မည်သိုအသုံးပြုပုံကို ပြသထားသည်။ ပထမဗျူဟာတွင် တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူများသည် နည်းလမ်းများကို ဆက်လက်လုပ်ဆောင်ခြင်းဖြင့် ရည်မှန်းချက်များကို ပျက်ပြယ်စေသည့် အဆက်မပြတ် ရုန်းကန်လှုပ်ရှားမှုများတွင် ပါဝင်ခြင်းဖြင့် ကျရှုံးမှုကို ကာကွယ်ကြသည်။ ဒုတိယဗျူဟာတွင်မူ တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူများသည် နောက်ဆုံးရလဒ်များနှင့် ပတ်သက်၍ ဖြစ်ပေါ်လာနိုင်သော အချိန်ကာလကို လက်ခံကျင့်သုံးခြင်းဖြင့် ပြောင်းလဲနေသော အခြေအနေများကို တုံပြန်မှုရှိနေစေသည်။ သိုသော် တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူများသည် ၎င်းဗျူဟာနှစ်ခုကြားတွင် အတက်အကျ ပြောင်းလဲနေသောကြောင့် ခြားနားမှုမှာ ပျောက်ကွယ်သွားပြီး အချိန်ကို ကိုင်လှုပ်ခြင်းမဟုတ်ဘဲ လုပ်ဆောင်ချက်များ၏ ထိရောက်မှုဆိုင်ရာ အချင်းချင်းဆက်စပ်သိမြင်မှုဆိုင်ရာ အဓိပ္ပာယ်ဖွင့်ဆိုချက်အမျိုးမျိုးသာ ဖြစ်ကြောင်း ဖော်ပြနေသည်။ အချုပ်အားဖြင့်၊ အချိန်သည် ပြောင်းလဲ၍မရသော်လည်း ကျရှုံးမှုနှင့် ထိတွေ့ဆက်ဆံခြင်းက အဘယ်ကြောင့် တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူ၏ ပုဂ္ဂလပညတ် (subjectivity) သည် ပြောင်းလဲနိုင်သည်ကို ရှင်းပြထားသည်။ ဤပြောင်းလဲနေသော သဘောသဘာဝသည် တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူများအား ၎င်းတို့ပြောင်းလဲလိုသော တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားသူမဟုတ်သူများ၏ ကာလဒိဋ္ဌိ (temporality) ဆိုင်ရာ နားလည်မှုများကို ပြောင်းလဲရာတွင် အထောက်အကူပြုသည်။ အဓိကအညွှန်းစကားလုံးများ: တက်ကြွလှုပ်ရှားမှု၊ ကာလဒိဋ္ဌိ၊ တော်လှန်ရေး၊ ဘာသာသာဝယတာ၊ နိုင်ငံရေးနှီးနွှယ် လူမျိုးနှင့် ယဉ်ကျေးမှု သရုပ်ခွဲခြင်း ပညာရပ်၊ ဖြစ်ရပ်၊ ဗမာ/မြန်မာ719 notes acknowledgments  this article emerged out of audience feedback provided during two talks, one at the cuny graduate center and the other at the university of washington, both in november 2023 (see note 22 below). the article was then refined at talks given at ucla and uc berkley in march 2024, and then at australia national university, the university of melbourne, deakin university, and stockholm university in october 2024. these talks were supported by nus grant a-8000900-03-00. for close readings of drafts, thanks go to sayres rudy, phyo win latt, joshua mitchell, stuart strange, lisa mitchell, canay özden-schilling, sayd randle, ting hui, timothy gitzen, and two anonymous reviewers for cultural anthropology. special thanks goes to ko taw and members of mdcf for sharing their insights. 1. from aye than’s facebook post, january 19, 2016. all names are naingan-yay nahmay, noms de guerre. 2. translations from burmese by the author. 3. chat with the author, december 2, 2023. 4. astra taylor (2016) and alyssa battistoni (2019) prefer “organizing” over “activism,” the latter of which they eschew as denoting episodic and ultimately unserious work. given that the revolutionaries tracked here spend more time organizing than participating in activist actions, i mean activist to include organizer as well. 5. those burmese i call activists typically introduce themselves not as such (as hlouq-sha-thu) but as “former political prisoners” (naing-kyin-haung) or, increasingly, “revolutionaries” (taw-hlan-yay-thama). that said, mdcf’s name includes the term for activism (hlouq-sha-hmu), which it translates as “movement,” a term functionally equivalent to “activist.” especially given that mdcf is not oriented toward english-speaking addressees, this suggests that hlouq-sha is relatively emic. 6. for a discussion of activists generating their own communities and cultures—and the ways this demonstrates both connection with and separation from the communities from which they come—see david graeber (2009, 228–37). on the class dimensions of activism, comparative research suggests that activist groups constitute a mix between (relatively) privileged (in the sense of education or wealth) and a society’s most marginalized (graeber 2009, 245–56), a structure born out in the burmese activist groups i worked with. 7. not everyone feels such interpellation; as stuart strange’s (2018) research on conceptualizations of accountability in suriname demonstrates, various communities have divergent semiotic ideologies regarding the relative affordances of material reality to willful human intervention—was that sickness caused by bacteria . . . or by witchcraft?—and therefore feel greater or lesser responsibility for worldly outcomes. 8. see also mittermaier 2014; aung 2024; özden-schilling 2024; and mitchell 2025 for aspects that inform my argument. 9. two women were affiliated with mdcf. on affiliation, see the following note. 10. in myanmar, “affiliation” rather than “membership” is a more apt description of an individual activist’s relationship with a social movement organization, as most activists 720participate in many organizations simultaneously, depending on the specific objective and area of the country in which the organization works. activists subordinated the specific organizations to their own histories, identities, projects, and solidarities. 11. chat with the author, december 13, 2023. 12. it remained in a tense and awkward power-sharing arrangement with the military; see aung and campbell 2016. 13. david graeber (2009, x) makes a related observation about temporal logics across the left/right divide. 14. see elliott prasse-freeman (2023b, 104) 15. chat with the author, december 1, 2023. 16. interview with the author, january 15, 2024. 17. for similar analyses of transition-era worker and student movements, see vfurp 2023. 18. land’s value was rising because of liberalizing land markets; see faxon 2023. 19. in-person interview, november 14, 2014, led by ginny, an american working for a self-described human rights defenders non-governmental organization. 20. geoffrey aung (2022b, conclusion) identifies similar strategies employed by land activists from dawei, who periodically circulate and recirculate amongst local villages to provide ongoing support and mobilization in the wake of their victory, to prevent it from eroding. seinenu thein-lemelson (2025, 131–32) tracks ritual commemorations enacted by burmese activists who seek to achieve what she calls “mnemonic security”—preservation of their existence and role in myanmar’s history—amid attempts by the regime to eliminate material evidence (e.g., destruction of their photos, letters, and keepsakes) of their existence (thein-lemelson 2025, 129). i, however, did not observe such activist memory work during my fieldwork. 21. ko taw’s facebook post in burmese, february 4, 2021. 22. i thank jeff maskovsky and sayres rudy, in respective personal communications, for 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162–90. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.1.07 trouillot, michel-rolph 2003 global transformations: anthropology and the modern world. new york: palgrave. virtual federal university research program (vfurp) 2023 “young revolutionaries from past and present.” independent journal of burmese scholarship 3: 521–44. whorf, benjamin 1956 “the relation of habitual thought and behavior to language.” in language, thought, and reality, edited by john b. carroll, 134–59. new york: wiley. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 697–725, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.06 “take our land:” fronts, fraud, and fake farmers in a city-to-come cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 1, pp. 91-117, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.05 “take our land:” fronts, fraud, and fake farmers in a city-to-come courtney t. wittekind purdue university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8442-3382 one day in may 2015, a crowd was seen streaming down the unpaved shoulder of a highway stretching across twante township. this agricultural region lay just beyond yangon, myanmar’s largest city and former capital.1 residents of nearby villages peered out from their homes, gawking at the group traveling on foot. it was still hot season, after all, with temperatures exceeding 40°c. villagers watched as the pedestrians strolled lazily with no apparent aim. however, each gripped a plastic water bottle and a printed handout—details suggesting that theirs was not an impromptu gathering. later, locals told news reporters that a throng of hundreds had come from villages near twante town.2 once assembled, the crowd marched to their destination in the thousands, snaking behind three men. these three men, u khin zaw, u tin tun oo, and u kyaw win, were known to their neighbors as members of a loosely organized network of village elders, most of whom were also movers-and-shakers in government and business.3 despite the heat, the men had donned the long-sleeved formal jackets of state officials, topped by wide-brimmed bamboo hats called kamauk.4 if passersby had initially thought the crowd had gathered spontaneously, it was clear on seeing the three men that something was afoot. a few minutes later, the crowd—approaching 8,000—left the highway and followed a dirt path to a clearing. untended fields stretching in all directions served as a reminder of the ongoing shifts in local livelihoods from agriculture to daily wage labor (li 2009). twante’s farming families were proud of their status as “three-season” growers, but they faced exceedingly narrow profit margins, and only a few families still cultivated their farmland. in fact, preparing this field for the arriving crowd was the only agricultural labor that u khin zaw had done that year. but with a mass of people now assembled, carrying signs and chanting slogans, the field fulfilled the purpose u khin zaw had envisioned—primed not for planting but for protest.5 bright plastic banners hung at the entrance, each featuring a polite if impassioned request, written in formal burmese: to the people’s representatives: please respect the people’s lives and desires! the success of the new yangon city project: our cause! please realize the new yangon city project as fast as possible: the locals’ desire! the slogans—printed on signs and repeated in call-and-response chants—referred to an ambitious effort to develop a “new city” across tens of thousands of acres of farmland in yangon’s southwestern townships of twante, kyeemyindaing, and seikkyi kanaungto. this new city project had gone by several names since rumors of its construction first surfaced in 2013: the southwest yangon expansion project, the southwest new city project, the new yangon city project and, since 2018, the new yangon development project. the project had been promoted as a landmark undertaking of myanmar’s “transition era” and fast-tracked as the first of seven high-priority plans to upgrade urban infrastructure across the yangon region.6 but the shifting names of the project reflected its successive suspensions and restarts, triggered by suspicions of corruption, poor transparency, and fears of the project’s technical impracticality. demands that the new yangon city be built “as fast as possible” responded to this ill-fated history, which had left residents anxious to see the project move from plan to reality. tied to land degraded by cycles of flooding and drought, once—but no longer—apt for agriculture, the crowd’s mission was summed up by u khin zaw as he stood at the center of the clearing: “please take my land, i don’t want it anymore. please make our farmlands a city.” demonstrators’ demands would reverberate far beyond twante, appearing in major myanmar publications, televised news segments, and online. they also featured in my conversations about the new city project during preliminary field research later that same year.7 interviewees from yangon’s civil society sector would routinely reference the “absurdity” of demonstrators’ requests, before pulling up photos of the event published online. while attendees may have resembled farmers, the critics of the project asserted that it was “obvious” attendees were imposters, whose simple clothing, sandals, and farming hats constituted a thinly veiled disguise. or, as some put it, perhaps these were locals, but like a piece of ginger slipped into one’s meal—so the idiom goes—their unassuming presence hid a secret: a bribe, perhaps, or a kickback from a developer keen to keep the project moving.8 “who is in the background, behind this ‘local people’s demonstration?’” asked a reporter for kamayut media in a segment about a 2014 demonstration, the first of five held between 2014 and 2016. the locals carried professionally printed signs, the reporter observed, so “some group must be behind it.” attendees interviewed in the segment stayed quiet, but the event’s organizers—a group that included the three men who had led the 2015 procession—quickly responded after the story aired: “we, the committee for local development, are just a group made up of local young people and professionals from the project area. our main purpose is to disseminate accurate information about the project to be done in our region, so that the residents are kept up to date.” they criticized elite commentators from yangon in statements they distributed to neighbors and shared on social media: “some media outlets have attacked us with inaccurate conjectures, based on the empty words of outsiders.” explaining that they were “genuine” locals with “no background to speak of,” the group asserted something that would become a motto of sorts over the coming years: “if we are cronies, we are cronies of the dullest of colors, smeared with mud down in our barren fields.”9 the argumentative impact of this assertion hinged on the peculiarity of what it described. mud-encrusted farmers were not myanmar’s prototypical cronies—nor were they typically imagined as the beneficiaries of the new yangon city and the influx of global capital it promised to lure. for the committee for local development, this incompatibility bolstered members’ claims that demonstrations comprised “genuine” locals, whereas, for skeptics, it suggested the presence of “fake farmers” wielding influence that flowed from the outside. for me, a vigorous debate around the authenticity of this “local people’s demonstration” implied something else entirely: landowners’ own pursuits of profit were increasingly imagined to depend on the flows of speculative capital, and in ways that did not conform to established categories of the “inside” and “outside” or “genuine” and “fake.” indeed, in 2018, the yangon regional government’s compensation policy would allocate local landowners a stake in the new city’s speculative land market by offering them developable new city plots of one-fifth the acreage of their prior farmlands. but even before the value of landowners’ compensation was anchored to the success of the new city, southwest yangon’s residents were already crafting spectacles to spur forward investment in the repeatedly postponed project. in this article, i describe a series of demonstrations-turned-spectacles organized in yangon’s outskirts and ask how spectacle functions when devised by those living at the center of a speculative urban plan and poised to benefit from its impending implementation. crafting the front speculation on land and property has been extensively studied in relation to transnational investment as mobilized across the expansive geographies of global capitalism (tsing 2000; weszkalnys 2015; fairbairn 2014, 2020). central to speculative practices are the myriad “acts of looking” that the term speculation encompasses: the “statistical picturing” mobilized by investment firms to support large-scale acquisitions; the mapping of “empty” landscapes ripe for investors’ discovery; or the polished publicity images of foreign “wilds” ready for taming (humphrey 2020; li 2014; tsing 2000, 2005). these are what laura bear (2020) calls the “technologies of imagination” that lie at the heart of the affective, physical, and intellectual labor of speculation (see also bear, birla, and puri 2015). speculation on the construction of a new city, too, requires imaginative labor from outside observers (wittekind 2022); but rendering a region “investible,” to borrow tania murray li’s (2014, 2017) framing, also involves crafting what is to be seen—a process of “spectacle-making” that attracts outside attention and renders sites visible and valuable. research into high finance has clarified this dynamic, showing that, as anna l. tsing (2000, 57) put it, “the self-conscious making of a spectacle is a necessary aid to gathering investment funds” (see also ho 2008; wu, li, and lin 2016). but what becomes of this “self-conscious making” when producers of spectacles are not corporate entities and neither distant nor detached from the site of investment? in asking this question, i build on a growing literature on so-called speculative urbanism and, in particular, studies that see project-affected populations as “stakeholders” in the booming markets that transnational investment in “world city making” proposals create (roy and ong 2011; goldman 2011; upadhya 2020). over the past decade, a cross-disciplinary commitment to documenting the unprecedented extent of dispossession carried out in the shadow of a “global land grab” has motivated a reanimated focus on the impact of large-scale land acquisitions on farmers and other agrarian populations (hall et al. 2015). yet in analyzing local responses to such projects, this research has tended to emphasize peasant agency and sought to identify cases of resistance (hall, hirsch, and li 2011) and, when absent, has attributed compliance to the value of compensation provided to impacted residents (borras and franco 2013; cai et al. 2020; jiang, sargeson, and tomba 2020; shin and kim 2016; steel, van noorloos, and klaufus 2017). recent studies of large-scale infrastructure development in india, in contrast, suggest that developers may reduce local discontent and tamp down on protest movements by creating avenues for affected populations to benefit from speculative land markets, even when conventional compensation in cash or comparable property remains absent (rouanet and halbert 2016; levien 2018; goldman 2020). indeed, as vinay gidwani and carol upadhya (2023) have shown in a strikingly similar case to my own, local action may involve aggregating land and driving up prices, with resulting profits accruing to landowners, land brokers, local real-estate companies, and large project developers. in such cases, new imaginaries of value or “land fictions” draw in willing subjects (ghertner and lake 2021), prompting a range of responses beyond resistance; these include cool indifference, cautious acceptance, and even unmitigated enthusiasm on the part of affected populations (harms 2016; smith 2021; paik and lee 2012; cross 2015; woods 2020). my analysis of demonstrations held in support of the yangon new city contributes to research on local responses to “speculative urbanism” by underscoring not merely that project-affected populations might respond positively to new city construction; i also explore how these populations carve out spaces for profit through everyday practices of speculation and spectacle-making. more specifically, i propose that local participation in spectacle-making involves manufacturing a front,10 in the sense of a forwardor outward-facing representation that also consolidates and coheres what lies behind. in places such as southwest yangon, speculation often functions through this kind of front, which mediates between foreground and background or an inside and outside. rather than veiling or screening, which produce concealment by blurring or inhibiting vision (mazzarella 2010; strassler 2009; jusionyte 2015), the front presents a simplified representation to elide controversy or gain support from an external audience. as such, i suggest, spectacle-making undertaken by community leaders in southwest yangon is less about truth and falsity than about a flattening of contingent and sometimes convoluted relationships between diverse actors with diverging interests. by foregrounding the plight of the region’s farmers and their support for a coming new yangon city, demonstration organizers sought to ensure that prospects for the project’s realization—and, likewise, prospects for future profit—would appear as immediate and accessible as possible. when circulated on and offline, i suggest, manufactured representations or fronts can refine local dynamics as much as conceal them outright. challenging zero-sum accounts of exploitative cronies and farmers, these spectacles magnify the overlapping forms of aspiration and anxiety experienced by diverse coalitions in (post)authoritarian myanmar. all this became clear to me in 2016, during fieldwork in the three townships poised for absorption into the new city, where speculation on property and politics surfaced side by side (morris 2019). this was just one year after myanmar’s 2015 general election delivered a supermajority in parliament to the national league for democracy (nld)—concluding, if only temporarily, a half-century of military rule. as early as 2011, reforms in myanmar were “dual” in the sense that a political transition to a multiparty electoral democracy paired with market liberalization (tin maung maung than 2013; jones 2014). in the aftermath of such shifts, myanmar quickly emerged as asia’s “final frontier” for foreign investment (parker 2016), slated for multiple projects aimed at imagining, pursuing, and realizing new forms of profit (li 2014). in this sense, yangon—the most recent southeast asian city to “come into its own” (simone 2018)—is but the latest stage on which the twin dramas of economic and dramatic performance are playing out (tsing 2005). yangon’s new city project thus provided a site from which i could track speculative practices flourishing alongside interlinked proposals for the construction of a “new yangon city” and a “new myanmar nation,” with both reliant in part on outside investment from china (wittekind 2021). yet uncertain project timelines and a changing political climate meant my inquiry into a proposed new city and new nation ultimately made for an account of unfulfilled promises (aung 2023). successive project delays, a global pandemic, and, ultimately, myanmar’s 2021 military coup rendered southwest yangon’s highly anticipated transformation endlessly—and, in most cases, ruthlessly—deferred. but optimism remained high before the coup of 2021 made evident the stakes of speculation on new city futures. landowners, in particular, hoped to benefit from the project through formal compensation proposals or through the sale of project area land. in town halls and four months of land-compensation and redistribution meetings held in southwest yangon in 2019 and 2020, i met developers, government planners, investors, real-estate brokers, and landowners—a category that included many members of the committee for local development, or cld. my engagement with these different groups was aided by my western background, which enabled me to “study up” (nader 1972) through meetings with government officials, project planners, and international consultants who were careful to limit their engagement with the public. as a result, community members, too, eagerly shared their perspectives with me. local farmers, land brokers, and cld members sought out audiences with me for the front they collectively crafted—and hoped i would reproduce. please look like many other peri-urban areas lying just outside myanmar’s largest cities, southwest yangon is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind landscape at the boundary of the rural-urban divide (campbell 2022). yet the southwestern townships of twante, seikkyi kanaungto, and western kyeemyindaing are uniquely isolated, separated from yangon’s bustling downtown by not only an administrative divide but also the yangon river, a major marine estuary notoriously treacherous during monsoon season. supporters of the new yangon city stressed the vexing nature of their proximity to yangon’s downtown: a mere 850 meters lay between residents and yangon’s central districts. so close, as one resident stressed in a 2018 public town hall meeting about the project, that “we can see their skyscrapers.” but with no bridge, the southwest fringes stayed in the shadow of a city just out of reach. life on “the other bank”—as most city dwellers referred to the southwest region—meant not merely physical distance but a material divide (boutry 2017; harms 2011, 2016). yangon had expanded generation by generation, absorbing similar areas through a combination of urban expansion and forced relocation (nwe 1998; rhoads 2018; sarma and sidaway 2020). the southwest, meanwhile, was left to wait, seemingly forgotten. a sense of invisibility compounded what residents described as the “torture” of keeping up hope in an “extended meanwhile” (weszkalnys 2015; harms 2013) in which potentiality remains perpetually not-yet realized (gupta 2015; anand, gupta, and appel 2018; zee 2017). u khin zaw had reviewed plan after plan for the regional development of the yangon region, all of which highlighted yangon’s southwest as the necessary site of urban expansion. but by late 2014, he was tired of waiting. he rose from his seat with great urgency to deliver the opening speech for the second demonstration organized by the cld that november. hundreds of attendees sat on the ground below. his mission, as he would later put it, was “to be seen.” and if the field’s bamboo platform could be considered a stage, then u khin zaw certainly had his costume at the ready. standing in the scorching sun, he donned a farming hat and adjusted on his chest a yellow pin that signified his status as a village elder. his presence at the demonstration was significant and seemingly straightforward. he and the other twelve members of the cld represented each of their home villages, all of which lay in the project area. their mission, which they later printed on handouts for future rallies, was as follows: “the committee for local development is made up of genuine local residents who have been selected to implement the dreams of local people at the request of the area’s community of agriculturalists.” all cld members held day jobs—often as civil servants, but also as shopkeepers, brokers, and businesspeople. given their roles as community leaders, they also acted as low-level bureaucrats called into meetings to verify locals’ residency or to witness transactions such as land sales or informal contracts. these responsibilities meant that the members’ attire—farming hats atop office wear—was somehow appropriate. it suggested the multiple public and private interests they mediated in their day-to-day work. it also underscored the difficulty of disentangling their dual roles as local leaders responsible for ensuring the visibility of their communities’ needs while remaining private actors with literal and figurative investments in the locality from which they intended to profit personally. the crowd quieted as u khin zaw welcomed the event’s attendees. he then narrated the troubled history of agriculture in the region, which he knew intimately. “i have over forty years of experience as a farmer,” he began, “and so the first point i want to make is that, throughout the many periods of history, we farmers never had enough for our basic necessities. we labored for our country, even though, season after season, we lost money because of our choice to farm.” he then proceeded to narrate the losses faced by each generation from the time of his great-grandparents: “every farmer knows about this history.” pausing to gaze at the crowd, u khin zaw continued, “and that was when we were benefiting from pun hlaing river, when it was still flowing. … but now the pun hlaing has dried up, and the farm and village lands are no good anymore.” these were the facts on the ground, a situation u khin zaw asserted was well-known by every farmer. in the next speech, u tun tun, a resident of a neighboring village, picked up on u khin zaw’s points from under a wide-brimmed hat. his comments made clear the dual purpose of the demonstrations, which the previous speeches had only implied. oscillating between addressing, first, the crowd of residents that sat below him and, second, a temporally and spatially absent audience of “outsiders,” he ensured the narratives presented to both remained in alignment. he began welcoming the crowd, stressing the reasons for their attendance: “you who are wholeheartedly supporting this rally, i wish you all good health, wealth, and peace in your lives.” pausing, he then switched to address an external audience: “these people are the farmers who are producing rice and grains and laboring for our country,” he said, gesturing to those on the ground below. “these are the farmers who were unfazed by potential dangers in their fields such as snakes, and they continued to labor all year round. if you look at their situation, there are no proper hospitals. … if you look at our transportation, our roads and streets are flooded with mud. if you look at electricity, the sky is full of light in the districts to the east, north, and south of downtown yangon. but here in the west, it is dark.” he cleared his throat before concluding his impassioned comments. he again addressed an outside audience he hoped might come to understand his community’s situation, even as he stressed the common concerns and shared goal for those present. “if you look, you can see that the quality of life of our farmers is very poor. we believe the new city project is our hope.” two more speakers would volunteer to share their own strife, each marshaling their identities as farmers to distill the struggles of those situated behind the front for an outside audience. both described a decrease in productivity so dramatic as to make farming “pointless,” a reality i had observed in many interviews with self-identified “farmers who no longer farm.” for them, an existence “not yet urban, no longer rural” (oakes 2020; see harms 2011) amounted to an ever-tightening vise, each unproductive planting season a turn of the screw (bernstein 1979). yet these events were not merely an effort to render the plight of the southwestern townships visible, as one instantiation of asia’s well-researched “urban margins” (harms 2016; elinoff 2016; herzfeld 2016; simone 2018; campbell 2022). rather, participants’ plea to “look” was a pointed one, an attempt to manipulate the attention of those deemed able to guarantee a way out of the suspension that the new city—and its future population—faced. with thousands of his neighbors crowded in front of him, i found it striking that u tun tun addressed his comments to others not present at the demonstration site. yet given that the farmers knew firsthand the trials they faced, it made sense that u tun tun’s goal was to inform others about “what every farmer knows.” the plurality of the gathering’s intended audiences emerged not only in the speeches but also in the layout of the demonstration site.11 first, three rows of plastic chairs sat alongside the stage, shaded by a large red tent, set aside for members of the media. that some reporters had been enticed with exclusive interviews or “tea money” to travel across the river suggested that the resulting articles were the outcome of extensive planning. the cld knew intuitively that the image of farmers rallying in support of a megaproject could prompt an explosive “image event”—to borrow karen strassler’s (2020) term—with the potential to reconfigure the conditions they confronted. second, flanking the stage were photos of key government officials from the then ruling union solidarity and development party (usdp) government and the opposition party, aung san suu kyi’s nld. above each photo was a request that the depicted leader “please fulfill the people’s wishes.” while cld members often directed their comments to officials, they clarified that their allegiances were not to a party but to a cause: “we are not campaigning for votes on either side, just asking for our representatives to work hard for local desires.” last—and most ambiguous—were the dozens of signs the cld had distributed to the crowd, directly addressing “those who are advancing the new city project.” i would later ask u tin tun oo about the identity of “those who are advancing the new city project,” and he emphasized the capaciousness of this category—that it could encompass anyone who might propel the project forward if they understood the region’s “real” conditions,12 and acted accordingly. this included elites from yangon who may otherwise have opposed the new city project on principle. again and again, u tin tun oo and his neighbors had opened the newspaper to see that the pending proposals had been criticized, that the plan would be revised, and construction delayed or suspended outright. the project’s skeptics—lawmakers, scholars, and policy experts turned “watchdogs”—expressed concern not only about environmental harms, governmental transparency, and logistical complications but also about the future of the farmers affected by the plan (sandhi governance institute 2020; kyaw phyo tha 2020). while farmland—at least in the abstract—could sustain a family’s basic needs and potentially provide a stable livelihood for generations, in interviews, the project’s critics expressed concern about the population’s ability to transition into wage labor. this concern was one u tin tun oo could not countenance. watchdogs might proclaim they are “watching,” but “they have never been here to see us. for us, this project is a dream come true [compared to farming]. even if others reject it, we farmers will not.” he sought to make the local stakes of the project abundantly clear to those across the river: not only would the residents refuse to obstruct the new city; they would in fact vocally champion its restart and speedy completion. a local people’s demonstration? despite impassioned declarations from public figures like u tin tun oo, as the demonstrations grew in size—from 8,000 in 2015 to more than 10,000 in early 2016—skepticism about their authenticity persisted. nearly a dozen articles repeated the question first asked by kamayut media: “who is in the background?” two theories about what lay “behind” the spectacle of farmers protesting in support of a megaproject gained notable traction, circulating widely in burmese-language print media and online. the first suggested that the demonstrations comprised “fake farmers,” manipulated by a shady network of real-estate developers, property brokers, and investors—an assortment of actors commonly glossed with the english-language term cronies. the myanmar post, a yangon-based paper, would spread this theory widely, accusing crony businesspeople of bribing alcoholics from the neighboring industrial township of hlaingtharya, encouraging attendance by offering them liquor. by march 2016, the month of a final demonstration held, meaningfully, on myanmar’s farmers’ day, a second theory had surfaced on township-wide facebook pages. the posts still referred to attendees as “not real farmers,” but they now suggested a different force operating in the background. this time, demonstrators were cast as protesters-for-hire, known locally as “5,000 eaters,”13 a name referencing the meager payment of 5,000-kyat (then about $5) paid to attendees. with 5,000 eaters long associated with myanmar’s dictatorships and their pro-military rallies, this suspicion revealed a growing fear that the real force behind the demonstrations might be the military-backed union solidarity and development party. the supposed answer of who operated in the background remained unsettled, but, in either case, the rumors confirmed civil society activists’ worst fears. not only had military-aligned “crony capitalism” so wholly penetrated myanmar’s rural regions that local farmers were advocating for a plan that would spell an end to their agrarian way of life; but, as the criticism went, they did so by appropriating transition-era ideals of accountability, authenticity, and popular protest for a purpose activists worried was less-than palatable. that cld demonstrations generated accusations of fakery and fraud underscores that the desires for new city development voiced in southwest yangon persist in an interpretive vacuum. while “local people’s demonstrations” were common in myanmar throughout the 2010s, they had a decidedly different purpose. in 2012, the government passed two laws that encouraged investment and granted individual usufruct property rights, effectively erasing the socialist property regime that had structured land governance in myanmar for the past sixty years. legal reforms, combined with moves toward a self-styled transition to “discipline-flourishing” democracy, together set off what international organizations’ reports, local civil society groups, and media narratives often glossed as a “rush” for myanmar’s land. on the ground, those threatened with landlessness faced a series of deep-seated constraints on landowners’ ability to claim and maintain claims to land, including a weak (or in some places, non-existent) tenure system, outdated legal protections, and a powerful network of military-state aligned cronies whose companies faced few curbs on their ability to scoop up whatever acreage remained following large-scale land acquisitions (mark 2016; woods 2011). the resulting “land rush” was one slowed or halted, most often, by efforts that drew on “weapons of the weak” (scott 2008), increasingly possible after the lifting of military-era restrictions. these restrictions included, in january 2013, a twenty-five-year ban that had outlawed public gatherings of more than five people. soon, collective meetings, letter-writing campaigns, and, most commonly, “farmers’ protests” became a mainstay on the front pages of myanmar newspapers and in scholarly accounts of the global land grab’s emergence in the country (kiik 2016, 2023; prasse-freeman 2012, 2016; kirchherr et al. 2017; faxon 2023; kramer 2021). from the cld members’ perspective, their gatherings resembled these recent farmers’ protests and would resonate in a political landscape that viewed mass mobilizations as a sign of impending disaster for planners, developers, and investors alike. take, for example, the widely celebrated movement that arose in opposition to the myitsone project, a hydroelectric power proposal featuring a dam that, if completed, would be the fifteenth largest in the world (kiik 2016; kirchherr et al. 2017). a joint venture between burma’s ministry of electric power, the military-associated asia world company, and china’s state-owned china power investment corporation, this myitsone dam project attracted strong resistance, particularly among the affected kachin community (kiik 2016). critics highlighted the project’s poor transparency, its links to military businesses, ties to chinese state-owned industry, and its potential environmental impacts. ultimately, the myitsone project would be suspended in 2011, amid further political reforms promising democratization in myanmar. buoyed by the success of the myitsone case, protest efforts would take off in the intervening years, as civil society grew increasingly bold (buschmann 2018). public outcry caused protracted delays, if not reversals, in projects such as economic zones, new regional highways, and mining ventures. the parallels were clear to u tin tun oo, who first envisioned the pro-project demonstrations: if local opposition forced megaprojects to decelerate, local support would surely speed up a project on hold. if myitsone activists routinely underscored the prospect of millions of farmers losing their livelihoods, then cld members could certify that their livelihoods had already vanished. finally, in the myitsone case, activists worried that the project’s profits would flow to “crony companies.” supporters of the new yangon city countered these fears with what they considered an uncomplicated local people’s perspective on the project’s benefits. as u tin tun oo declared at the may 2015 rally: “if i can speak frankly, for us, cronies of any kind … we don’t really care much. what we care about is whoever can best implement the new yangon city plan in line with the wishes of the local people.” in the end, for u tin tun oo, khin zaw, and other members of the cld, that their gatherings did not trigger the project’s restart implied a double standard; local perspectives on development proposals seemingly mattered only when they mirrored the preconceived notions of urban elites who, as the group would post on facebook, cared more for the flourishing farmers they imagined than the “real ones,” who “sat starving in their mud-filled fields.” this supposition by cld members was not without merit, given region-spanning debates about farmers’ “genuine desires.” but doubts about the supposedly true nature of the cld’s events suggest a more far-reaching conclusion. they highlight the ambiguous status of not just demonstrations but also fronts—able to project persuasive local perspectives outward, if also to obscure the presence of background forces, left unseen. no background in 2019, i sat just minutes away from the site of the first demonstration, on the floor of u tin tun oo’s wooden home. i balanced my laptop on one hand as i scanned through an hour-long video of the first demonstration. “ah, you opened it,” he gasped with surprise. believing the file corrupted, he had stored the dvd behind the thick doors of an old wooden cabinet. from inside, u tin tun oo proudly pulled out hundreds of newspaper clippings that he had bound together—a self-made archive of the troubled trajectory of the new city. as he sorted the documents, i looked around his home. across from the cabinet stood a makeshift divider covered in motivational posters, hung side by side with professional headshots from his career with a timber company. we sat between the photos, on the one side, and, on the other, the cabinet, full of papers from his years supporting the new city—bookended by his life’s greatest achievements. while i had never visited before, u tin tun oo’s home seemed familiar. years before, in 2015, this small wooden house had emerged as a source of conflict between residents of his peri-urban neighborhood, minutes from the river’s western bank. photographed and circulated on social media, the wooden home’s small size and simple construction provided evidence of its owner’s status. the following caption, posted with the photograph, underscored the intended message: “this is the small little house of u tin tun oo, a member of the cld, which is actively promoting the new city project as much as possible.” the message addressed several rumors, including that cld members had “bought and held onto a lot of land” and therefore were promoting the project for their own benefit, to continue increasing the price of land in the area. the house gave proof of u tin tun oo’s modest status, which he repeatedly underscored to me in our conversations: “i do not own any land at all. all i own is the dirt in my flowerpots.” the photographs of his house, combined with the details of his career as a low-level employee, evidenced his assertion: “look, i can say openly, i have no background.”14 in myanmar, it is not uncommon to be asked about one’s background. background can refer not only to identities of ethnicity and religion, for example, or to one’s home region or village. as in english, background can also refer to formal training. but in burmese, the term encompasses other less obvious resources. these include social ties, professional networks, or other accumulated connections that might smooth one’s path. in this latter sense, it is often an indirect way of inquiring about contacts or resources available behind the scenes. drawing on pierre bourdieu’s theory of social capital, in a related case, michael levien (2015, 2018) describes an “unequally distributed form of power that allows certain people to differentially exploit new economic opportunities because of ‘who they know’” (2015, 80). in myanmar, background is used to capture similar dynamics. however, to ask about someone’s background there is to ask not only about “who they know” but also “what they know”—resources necessary for economic success, if not basic survival (thawnghmung 2019). as jayde roberts and elizabeth rhoads (2022) have argued, across periods of military rule and in the shadow of state violence, people in myanmar have relied predominantly on nalehmu arrangements, defined as a set of informal relational practices for negotiating differential access to power, resources, and knowledge. this holds particularly true among land brokers who—as part real-estate agents, part fixers, and part mediators—rely as much on their fluency with formal mechanisms for land transactions as they do on informal contracts outside the state (rhoads 2020; wittekind and faxon 2023). u tin tun oo was not the only member of the cld targeted as a part of efforts to uncover the backgrounds of organizers and the direct or indirect ties that might motivate their actions. online, project watchers from neighboring urban areas shared photographs of another cld member, u kyaw win, drawing attention to his chinese features—assumed to prove his links to chinese companies rumored to have a stake in the plan. this included not only the chinese businesses awarded a contract to implement the original project in 2014 but also the majority state-owned china communications construction company (cccc), which would later agree to build the new yangon city’s basic infrastructure. more often than not, u kyaw win laughed off these accusations with a shrug of the shoulders, pointing to his family’s generations-long residency in a village to twante’s south. only once were the accusations commented on publicly, via a 2015 burmese-language post to the cld’s facebook page: “some suggest that u kyaw win is an expatriate chinese man who is cooperating with chinese nationals to buy land.” to this, u khin zaw was said to have replied with a chuckle, “u kyaw win is a genuine burmese person, born in this area to a chinese father and burmese mother. … i have no idea who he is related to, except that he is a genuine son of his village. he has no land to speak of, since he recently had to sell it for [the cld’s] purposes.” this last comment shed light on another point often stressed by cld members to explain their authenticity. “we knew we needed to demonstrate our support of the project,” explained u kyaw win during a gathering in seikkyi kanaungto. “so … four of us divided up and sold pieces of our land so we would have money to support the work.” if there were something “in the background”— these explanations seemed to assert—it was project-area residents themselves: simple people who believed so deeply in the new yangon city project that they willingly invested the value of their land to ensure its success. shuttling between community discussions, formal land-redistribution meetings, and the makeshift offices of local land brokers, however, i began to have doubts. u khin zaw always seemed to be in yangon, and, after months of stories about his life as a farmer, i would learn he lived in an apartment downtown. in government land-redistribution meetings, which officially existed to assist landowners in claiming new developable plots provided in lieu of monetary compensation, cld members held court along the edges, chatting with brokers about their latest sales and introducing them to the villagers who filtered in and out. there was talk of a rented office in yangon, used for business meetings. and area residents would occasionally refer to cld members as “brokers” or, even more ominously, as “twisted people,”15 a term used for tricksters, cheaters, or crooks. in the end, the doubts created by a slow accumulation of whispered insinuations (on the part of residents) and momentary slipups (on the part of cld members) collided with a document sent to me after a subset of the committee grew frustrated with the group’s leadership. addressed to the group’s leaders, the document referred to their conditions of employment. it was printed on the letterhead of one of the largest construction companies in myanmar. the same company whose logo was emblazoned on that letter would later secure a contract for part of the new city’s construction. at least some accusations, it appeared, had had a basis all along. pushing from behind the cld’s gatherings were clearly a spectacle: a carefully crafted series of events that mobilized the established model of farmers’ protests for seemingly paradoxical—and therefore attention-grabbing—ends. by the end of my field research, i felt equally convinced that the demonstrations also served as a front. as an outward-facing projection of local desire, the demonstrations situated area residents and farmers in the foreground—to conceal the presence of entities seeking profit in the background. yet conventional understandings of a front, for example, in the case of an illegal business operation, equate its existence with an instance of fraud—a categorically false representation turned outward that conceals a truth behind. the defining characteristic lies in the contradictory relationship between the foreground and background—a relationship all the more evident in an alternative usage of the front as a site of battle: that is, as a boundary where opposing forces come into contact. this latter connotation was certainly present for the journalists, commentators, and civil society actors who observed demonstrations held in support of the new city from across the river and who sought to penetrate the appearance of so-called fake farmers to reveal what lay concealed in the background.16 but if the front amounted to a site of contestation and boundary between opposing realities, where was the local opposition exerting pressure on the front from behind? despite the best efforts of journalists, including a team of investigative reporters from mawkun, myanmar’s major investigative news journal, opposition from project-area residents unaffiliated with the cld remained subdued. in my conversations with villagers formally represented by the cld, all recalled the events, and many had attended one or more demonstrations. but none opposed the effort’s core aims, even if they paused when endorsing the tactics of the cld’s leadership. “i don’t want to say much about [the cld],” one woman told me as her husband sat at her side, nodding in agreement. “i’m not sure about them. but do we want the new city? that is for certain. we do.” this was a viewpoint echoed by u than sein, then the representative for kyeemindaing in myanmar’s national parliament, to whom landowners referred me. while on record as supporting the new city’s construction, and thus aligned with his constituents, u than sein worried about corruption and demanded transparency in project planning. in an interview with myanmar daily, he was asked explicitly about the demonstrations in his region and the “rumors that there are leaders behind.” he responded, “what i can say, as a representative of this region, is that i think no matter how much someone may push from behind, it is only the local people that can make [these events] happen. what kind of demonstration would this be if it was instigated without the people? this is something we have to think carefully about.” u than sein did not confirm the presence of others, pushing events forward from behind, but he also did not refute the possibility. for him, this was beside the point. turning to list the numerous benefits that would accrue to those living in the project area—rising land prices, higher housing valuation, ease of transportation to and from yangon—he concluded, “of course [locals] support it.” such a statement does not mean to suggest uniform approval of the cld or their motives. southwest yangon was crosscut by deep class, ethnic, gender, and generational inequalities that resulted in differing opinions, including about the cld, the new city’s anticipated trajectories, planners’ calculations for measuring farmland, and the order of stages in the plan’s progression. but the insight that area residents with differential access to the project’s benefits can collude—and sometimes enthusiastically—in the creation of a front underscores why, as i see it, the front is a modality of spectacle-making that is illustrative, ethnographically and analytically. i have shown how residents living in the shadow of a large-scale urban development effort use carefully manufactured fronts to manipulate attention and attract the gaze of those otherwise indifferent to their plight. the decision of cld leaders to foreground farmers, project-affected villages, and area residents’ desires was simultaneously a strategy to obscure varied “backgrounds”: from personal contacts to professional capacities, financial backers, and networks of overlapping private and public interests. but to construct this front, cld members had to render themselves and their neighbors visible, as objects of sympathy and guarantors of the project’s uninterrupted and undisputed implementation. while related to well-documented processes of “global conjuring” (tsing 2000)—operating through performances, dramas, tricks, and illusions that seek to define, value, and shape “truth” to promote investment—this case describes a collective conjuring of self and locality likely to become increasingly widespread amid compensation proposals that absorb residents into large-scale investments’ speculative land booms. this holds particularly true given the likelihood that large-scale urban development in myanmar will continue under the banner of china’s belt and road initiative (bri), a global infrastructure development program that provides debt financing and technical expertise for the establishment of trade and infrastructure corridors across asia, europe, and africa. while scholars have underscored that the bri is better imagined as a set of contestations than a cohesive whole (lee 2018), bri-associated projects nevertheless share similarities, including a model of spectacular infrastructure construction first developed domestically. numerous scholars have underscored the solution of “land exchange” mobilized by the chinese state in sites like shenzhen, where formerly rural counties were transformed through a forward-looking process of plot-by-plot urban development (karaman et al. 2020). crucially, this policy compensates landowners for acquired farmland by granting village collectives the ability to develop a percentage of what they owned (lai, chan, and choy 2017), a strategy not dissimilar from the speculative mode of compensation employed in rajasthan (levien 2018). for new yangon city–affected residents, in 2018 authorities announced their intention to replace agricultural farmlands with new “developable” urban plots at a rate of 20 percent of landowners’ original agricultural holdings (nydc 2019). when i completed my field research in 2020, members of the cld—joined by their neighbors—were hurriedly advertising the location of their new urban plots, eager to attract investors who might help them build dormitories, apartments, and even factories. a new method of spectacle-making was to follow—but this time, as one landowner-turned-broker told me, “we can’t seem like farmers if we want to develop. we’re professionals now.” the launch of a new city project in southwest yangon unsettled relationships between the city and its agricultural margins and created a viable, if fragile, pathway into urban life for the project area’s struggling farmers—one that expanded access to potential profit promised by the city-to-come. while these speculative dynamics are most concrete when identified in overlapping models for bri projects and their speculative land-compensation proposals, they equally speak to broader theorizations of urban life in global cities’ rapidly expanding edges (simone 2004). the story of southwest yangon and the speculative practices that have flourished in the new city’s shadows are, too, a story of what abdoumaliq simone and colleagues (2023, 3) have called urban life “at the extensions,” within spaces and amid processes that cut across established categories of the rural and urban, and that demand residents’ collective experimentation with “different itineraries of engagement with ever-expanding urban regions.” like the cld’s demonstrations-as-fronts, experiments at the extension are multifaceted and fleeting, but they amount to efforts to speculate on “where things are headed” by hedging bets across multiple locations and affiliations (simone et al. 2023, 3). they require new strategies and maneuvers that fit poorly within the oppositional models that have, for too long, structured relationships between the city and its margins, urbanites and agrarian populations, and even rural farmers and the businesspeople, cronies, or professionals found in urban centers. this indeterminacy ultimately rendered attempts to peer behind “the front” futile. in the end, the cld offered only an ambiguous idiom, which they posted online when confronted with accusations of their involvement with developers: “dust isn’t stirred up because a flea jumps.”17 this seemed to me, initially, to constitute a confession, confirmation that, given the extent of the havoc caused by the demonstrations, entities much more powerful than the cld—myanmar’s prototypical cronies—must be involved in their execution. but puzzling over the statement months later, i was struck by another interpretation: that southwest yangon’s impoverished, struggling farmers—in the context of the idiom, the fleas—would be unable to disrupt the status quo alone, no matter how much energy they exerted. in the latter case, rather than a confession, the phrase simply justified their choice to align their speculative efforts with the interests of those who might help extricate farmers from the fields in which they were suspended. abstract focusing on demonstrations held outside yangon, myanmar, in favor of urban development, this article intervenes in the binaries of “truth” versus “falsity” and the “genuine” versus “fake” to advance anthropological theorization on demonstration, speculation, and spectacle. the article traces contrasting claims about “real farmers” and their “genuine desires,” as marshaled by both supporters of a large-scale urban project and those who oppose it. it argues that the notion of “the front” helps illuminate the strategic and pragmatic frames in which spectacles are staged, as well as amid the “economy of appearances” that anna lowenhaupt tsing argues are generated by transnational investment. narrating the flattening of social relations and political motivations by project-affected residents, the notion of the front displaces simple binaries by emphasizing a conjuring of self and locality increasingly widespread when residents are, themselves, absorbed into the speculative land markets that large-scale investment creates. [speculation; urbanization; spectacles; agrarian change; land and property; southeast asia; burma/myanmar] ဆောင်းပါးအနှစ်ချုပ် ယခုဆောင်းပါးသည် မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ ရန်ကုန်မြို့ပြင်နေရာများတွင် ဖြစ်ပွားခဲ့သည့် မြို့ပြဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေး ထောက်ခံဆန္ဒပြပွဲများကို အာရုံစိုက်လေ့လာကာ၊ “အမှန်တရား” နှင့် “လုပ်ကြံဖန်တီးမှု”၊ “အစစ်အမှန်” နှင့် “အတုအယောင်” အစရှိသည့် ဘက်နှစ်ဖက်အနေအထားများကို ဝင်ရောက် ဆွေးနွေးသုံးသပ်ခြင်းအားဖြင့်၊ ဆန္ဒထုတ်ဖော်ခြင်း၊ ထင်ကြေးပေးခြင်း၊ သရုပ်ဖော်ပြသခြင်း ကိစ္စရပ်များအပေါ် မနုဿဗေဒရှုထောင့်မှ သီအိုရီများ ပိုမိုတည်ဆောက်ဖော်ထုတ်နိုင်ရန် ရည်ရွယ်ရေးသားထားပါသည်။ ယခုဆောင်းပါးသည် အကြီးစားမြို့ပြစီမံကိန်းတခုကို ထောက်ခံနေသူများနှင့် ဆန့်ကျင်ကန့်ကွက်ကြသူများ နှစ်ဖက်စလုံးက စီစဉ်ပုံဖော်နေကြသည့်  “လယ်သမားအစစ်” ဆိုသည် နှင့် ၎င်းတို့၏ “လိုအင်ဆန္ဒအစစ်အမှန်” ဆိုသည်တို့အပေါ် ကွဲလွဲစွာ သတ်မှတ်ကြေညာ ပြောဆိုနေကြခြင်းများကို ခြေရာခံ ရေးသားထားခြင်း ဖြစ်ပါသည်။ သုတေသီ anna lowenhaupt tsing တင်ပြခဲ့သည့်အဆိုဖြစ်သော ပြကွင်းပြကွက် ရင်းနှီးမြုပ်နှံမှုများကြောင့် ပေါ်ပေါက်လာသည့် “အသွင်အပြင်ပဓာန စီးပွားရေးစနစ်”အလယ်တွင် “မျက်နှာစာ” ဆိုသည့် အယူအဆ ရှုမြင်သုံးသပ်ပုံသည် ပုံဖော်ပြသမှုများကို ဗျူဟာမြောက်ပြီး လက်တွေ့ကျသော မူဘောင်များအတွင်းမှ စီစဉ်ဖန်တီးနေကြခြင်းဖြစ်ကြောင်း နားလည်မြင်သာစေရန် အထောက်အကူပြုသည်ဟု ဤဆောင်းပါးက အဆိုပြုတင်ပြလိုခြင်းဖြစ်သည်။မြို့ပြဖွံ့ဖြိုးရေးစီမံကိန်းဒဏ်ခံကြရသော ဒေသခံများ၏ လူမှုဆက်ဆံရေးနှင့် နိုင်ငံရေးစေ့ဆော်မှုများ ထိုင်းမှိုင်းရပ်တန့် သွားရခြင်းအကြောင်း ရေးသားတင်ပြရာတွင်၊ “အပြ မျက်နှာစာ” ဆိုသည့် ယူဆသုံးသပ်ပုံက၊ ဒေသခံများအနေဖြင့် ကြီးမားသည့် ရင်းနှီးမြှုပ်နှံမှုစီမံကိန်းများ ကြောင့်ဖြစ်ပေါ်လာသည့် မှန်းဆတွက်ချက် မြေယာစျေးတက်မှုများ အကြား ၎င်းတို့ကိုယ်တိုင် ရောက်ရှိသွားကြရသည့်အခါတွင်၊ ကိုယ်တိုင်ရှုမြင်ထားသော “မိမိ” ဆိုသည့် အတ္တ နှင့် “နယ်မြေအနေအထား”ဆိုသည်တို့ ပိုမိုကျယ်ပြန့်လာသည်များကို အလေးပေးခြင်းအားဖြင့်၊ အစစ်နှင့်အတု ဘက်နှစ်ဖက်သာ ရှိသည်ဆိုသည့် ရိုးရှင်းသောအမြင်ကို ပယ်ဖျက်သွားသည်။  [မှန်းဆမှုများ၊ မြို့ပြဖွံ့ဖြိုးမှု၊ သရုပ်ဖော်ခြင်းများ၊ စိုက်ပျိုးရေးပြောင်းလဲမှုများ၊ မြေယာနှင့် ပိုင်ဆိုင်မှု၊ အရှေ့တောင်အာရှ၊ ဗမာ/မြန်မာ] notes acknowledgments my deepest thanks go to friends, interlocutors, and collaborators in southwest yangon—and across myanmar—who gave so generously of their time and knowledge over the course of my research. presenters and participants in the third chinamade workshop, and especially darren byler and timothy oakes, contributed greatly to the development of this article’s argument. special thanks go to the harvard mellon urban initiative, including to bruno carvalho and the 2020-2021 cohort of doctoral fellows, who provided feedback on an early draft. i am especially grateful to dean chahim, geoffrey aung, and jerry zee for feedback during our 2021 american anthropological association panel called “modernity’s resilience”; to andrew bellisari, paul clarke, ilkim karakus, elizabeth rhoads, jasena sarma, and anna wherry; as well as to julia elyachar, the cultural anthropology editorial collective, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for insightful comments on this article’s many versions. harvard university, the national science foundation, and the wenner-gren foundation generously provided support for the research on which this analysis is based. 1. in 1989, the military junta changed the name of the country from burma to myanmar. to maintain consistency throughout this essay, in english, i use myanmar and yangon as transliterations for the official names used from 1989 onward. 2. in this essay, “twante” will refer to the township and not the town, unless specified. 3. names and identifying details of individuals and some locations have been changed to protect anonymity. 4. the kamauk, ခမောက်, is a conical hat plaited with bamboo, considered emblematic of myanmar’s deltaic farmers. 5. in this article, i use the terms demonstration, rally, and mass gathering to refer to what might also be called “pro-project protests.” in burmese, these efforts were called hsanda pya (ဆန္ဒပြ), a term commonly translated into english as “protest.” literally, the term translates to show or put on display (pya, ပြ) one’s desires or views (hsanda, ဆန္ဒ), without an explicit reference to a stance of support or opposition. 6. i use the notion of a “transition” critically, aware of the teleological assumptions of a natural progression from authoritarianism to liberal democracy— an assumption core to the problematic framework that katherine verdery (1996) has called “transitology” (see also wittekind 2018; rhoads and wittekind 2018; girke and beyer 2018). 7. research described in this article encompassed two-month preliminary research trips in 2016, 2017, and 2018, as well as an extended fieldwork period of in situ and digital research between 2019 and 2021. 8. the phrase gin hte (ချင်းထည့်) or to insert or “stick in” ginger, implies an unseen surprise, a trick, or scam. 9. cronies, in myanmar, refer to those with stateor military-affiliated business interests, commonly suspected of receiving undue favors or profiting from corruption. 10. a front or facade, in burmese, carries similar connotations as she dou, ရှေ့တို. 11. for a related discussion of social action and its (un)intended audiences, see prasse-freeman 2023. 12. in his comments, u tin tun oo used asit (အစစ်), meaning that which is pure, real, genuine, unadulterated. 13. here, i refer to 5000 eaters, or ငါးထောင်စား. 14. when discussing their “background” in this multivalent sense, cld members would use the term nauk kan, နောက်ခံ​. 15. here, i refer to the common phrase lu leint (လူလိမ်), an epithet that parallels the concept of being “two-faced,” though the term broker or pwe sa, itself also occasionally has connotations related to “taking a cut” or securing one’s own profits. for a detailed account of the overlapping usages, see rhoads 2020 and brac de la perrière 2014. 16. chloe ahmann (2023, 325) similarly narrates the way in which youth activists were diminished into a front, as “players in somebody else’s game.” 17. ခွေးလှေးခုန်လို့ ဖုန်မထဘူး or, literally, “dust doesn’t rise because a flea jumps.” references 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1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.1.05 cultural anthropology: green involution: mediating plant times and lifetimes in a chinese rice genetics laboratory 435 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 435-462, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.03 green involution: mediating plant times and lifetimes in a chinese rice genetics laboratory lyle fearnley singapore university of technology and design https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7144-7342 chen sun university of california, davis https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7825-7865 “hurry up” in may 2021, more than 100,000 mourners gathered outside a funeral parlor in changsha, china, to pay their last respects to a rice scientist. often called the “father of hybrid rice” (zajiao shuidao zhifu), yuan longping played a leading role in china’s socialist green revolution: the development of a hybrid rice-production system claimed to have “fed billions” (wu 2021). journalists noted with surprise the large number of young students and professionals among the mourners, suggesting that yuan’s death highlighted a moment of generational transition amid china’s development from a “land of famine” (lee 2011) to global prosperity. a university student explained, “the majority of my generation have never experienced hunger or suffered poverty. i read about his contributions in textbooks. after paying my deep respects [chongjing], i feel more closely related to him” (wang 2021). inside a laboratory at meizhou university, the death of yuan longping also drew attention to a generational transition taking place within the community of 436chinese rice scientists. in 2019, we conducted more than six months of fieldwork at the wet rice laboratory at meizhou university.1 founded by professor huang jianchi in the 1990s, the wet rice lab studies the genetics of the rice plant using molecular biology techniques. until recently, the lab was notable for its successful transfer of knowledge and authority across generations: indeed, among the seven professors now leading the wet rice lab, two are former students of the lab. but the junior researchers we met—including master’s students, phd candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and assistant professors—worried that a different fate awaited their generation. for them, yuan longping’s death not only represented the gift of food security that china inherited from the green revolution. it also highlighted how poorly their own struggles in the laboratory compared with the heroic achievements of past scientists. “it is a competitive field.” yang zihan, a postdoc in the wet rice lab, carefully chopped pale white rice shoots with a very small razor. originally from south china, yang had come to meizhou for his postdoctoral studies a few years earlier. he was alone in the laboratory this saturday, dressed casually in a button-down shirt and green rubber gloves, happy to be working without the crowd of students that filled the lab on weekdays. that morning, yang was preparing a sample to put in the spectrometer to characterize proteins in the rice shoots. i am worried that someone else is doing the same thing, so i have to hurry up. i have heard that there are more than 10,000 scientists studying rice in china. last year, researchers from huazhong agricultural university published great papers in plant journal and nature plants. compared to the progress at the same stage of previous students, such as professors liang and song,2 i am still very far behind. i can only worship [mobai] them. the term mobai refers to acts of devotion, traditionally combined with bowing the body or head, that play a ritual role in chinese religious practices involving ancestors or divinities. although we should not take yang’s exaggerated language literally, his articulation reflects the hierarchical organization of the “ecology of chinese academia,” in which senior scholars are treated as “big bosses” who demand “loyalty, awe, or even fear from . . . affiliates, admirers, and others” (tenzin 2017, 15). these days, young rice scientists idolized their superiors and antecedents not only in awe of their scientific accomplishments but also as a more intimate confession that they could not match them. 437looking back at the history of the laboratory, yang noted a process of inflation. the paper on the gene nal1 was accepted by nature genetics, a highly respected journal published by springer nature with an impact factor of 23 (a number that indicates a high number of citations to the journal). ten years later, a paper on a similar gene (nal5) was only published in plant physiology, with a much lower impact factor of 5.7. one student had recently completed an experiment, but someone from wuhan had published on the same topic while he was writing the paper, so he was only able to publish his findings in a low-ranked journal. while competition was increasing in the field of rice science, the impact of published work seemed to be declining. these days the research all looks similar, and we just do the same thing with a different gene. if everything goes well,” yang continued, as he poured the chopped rice shoots into a glass vessel, “people can get something in one or two years and that is considered fast. if not, it may take three, five, or even ten years. one phd student in our lab who studied the gene sub1 only graduated last year, after working for eleven years in the lab. “rice research requires a long time cycle,” a phd student, zhao lianhua, later told us. alongside work at the laboratory bench with spectrometers and thermal cyclers, every experiment also runs through the experimental field where rice plants are grown from seed to observe and characterize the function of genes. because of the long growing time of the rice plant, “it takes half a year to observe the phenotypes for one generation. if you want to get good results, like a publication, you need at least four years.” as increasing competition drove researchers like yang and zhao to hurry their experiments, they found themselves obstructed, delayed, and entangled in the tempos of rice growth. “time is very important to us,” zhao concluded with resignation. yang put it clearly: “i have to hurry up.” the anthropology of scientific time time is a valuable resource in the sciences. in her classic ethnography, sharon traweek (1988) showed how scientists in a high-energy physics laboratory negotiated the relationships between their scientific “lifetimes” and “beamtime”—the prized moments of access to laboratory devices. sociologists of science have examined the complex “timework” required to coordinate career trajectories with machine schedules, experimental systems, and institutional obligations 438(bruyninckx 2017). in particular, the distinctive tempos of the nonhuman objects of scientific research, ranging from the speed of an electron in a particle accelerator to the slow growth of “plant time” (cf. besky and padwe 2016), constrain the “temporal emergence” of scientific practice (pickering 1995). figure 1. a rice plant in the laboratory. photo by lyle fearnley. the importance of time also reflects the changing times experienced by a younger generation of rice scientists in china. a generation, in karl mannheim’s (1952, 290) classic definition, is a group of persons with a “common location” in historical time and an awareness of that historical location. studies of generational change in the sciences have examined how the “aging” of a discipline can lead to “diminishing returns” (gusterson 2005), “generational tensions” (kohler 1994), and questions about “succession” (özden-schilling 2021). in china, dramatic economic growth and rapid social change during the reform-era have also produced stark generational divides, particularly around work, family, and perspectives on the future (rofel 1999; pun and lu 2010; bartlett 2020). during the reform, socialist “mass science,” which “emphasized the collective efforts 439of peasants, technicians, and scientists” (schmalzer 2017, 101), was replaced by lengthy education pathways, high-tech laboratories, and audit regimes that measured the value of individual careers. amid intense competition over limited academic positions and opportunities, young researchers like yang now fear they will fall “far behind” if they don’t “hurry up.” concerns about increasing speed in scientific and academic institutions are proliferating in china and beyond. according to the sociologist ruth müller (2014, 15), “an increase in experienced tempo of work is characteristic of recent changes to academic research management worldwide.” filip vostal (2015, 73) has suggested that the “central experiential modality” of scientific time today is “the acceleration of the pace of academic life.” in a recent manifesto, the philosopher isabelle stengers (2018) decries the dominance of such “fast science” and proposes a range of measures for slowing down. the “idea of ‘slowing down’ the sciences,” stengers (2018, 74) writes, involves “challenging all those modes of appreciation and judgment through which [scientists] are supposed to take on board their duty ‘not to waste their time.’” alongside stengers’s critique, the term slow science has become a popular discussion point for those who advocate for liberating science from the constraints of funding institutions, industry influence, and audit regimes (slow science academy 2010; frith 2020; berg and seeber 2016). yet to envision “another science” that could work at a slower pace, stengers and others rely on a universalizing account of dominant science that posits a single, linear process of acceleration affecting all disciplines, anywhere in the world. anthropologists of time have complicated the use of such “singular” or “uniform” temporalities, arguing instead for ethnographic inquiry that elucidates how “social rhythms, conflict, mediation and heterochrony unpredictably emerge in relation” to “dominant representations of time” (bear 2014, 6). instead of uniform narratives of global acceleration, anthropological studies are uncovering multiple “time-maps” (gell 1992) or “timescapes” (hodges 2012; bear 2016), including not only human but also nonhuman “pulses of growth” (tsing 2015). sociologists of science have begun to challenge the dominant account of acceleration to argue that “science is characterized by layers and levels of diverse temporalities, rather than one type of temporality” (vostal, benda, and virtová 2019). laura bear (2014, 6) suggests that anthropologists can turn the practices that “mediate divergent representation, techniques and rhythms of human and nonhuman time” into an ethnographic object. such an ethnography examines what she calls the “labour in/of time” (bear 2014; bear 2016), that is, how 440“labour . . . reconcile[s] disparate social rhythms, multiple presentations of time and non-human time” (bear 2014, 20). for example, in a study of fast fashion in korea, seo young park (2021, 11) shows that the critique of speed obscures the multiple temporalities at stake in fashion production, and she instead provides an ethnographic account of how workers “embody and stitch together” industrial speed with the lived experiences of multiple “paces, cycles, intensity, and temporal density” (park 2021, 21). working in parallel, sociologists of science have arrived at a similar conception by examining the “timework” devoted to the “synchronization” of multiple times and paces. rather than associating science with either fast or slow speeds, these sociological accounts highlight how scientific success is achieved when diverse and sometimes divergent tempos are “effectively reconciled” (bruyninckx 2017, 824) by the invisible work of technicians in the management of laboratories or the agility of lead scientists. “synchronization,” conclude vostal and colleagues, “[is] a central skill of science” (vostal, benda, and virtová 2019). in this article, we offer an ethnographic account of how young rice scientists worked to mediate divergent tempos in their scientific practice at the wet rice laboratory, ranging from the institutional structures of the scientific career to the nonhuman biological time of the rice plant. rather than documenting the effective “synchronization” of these paces and temporal cycles, however, we follow their struggles as these rhythms fell increasingly out of sync. despite working overtime, young rice scientists seemed less and less able to mediate the temporal divergences of their experiments and their careers. drawing on a concept recently popularized in contemporary china, we describe this increasing difficulty of synchronization as neijuan, or “involution.” in 2020, students and young office workers began to blog about overwork, intensive stress, and competition over opportunities that they named neijuan, adopting a term that originally entered chinese discourse as a translation from anthropological discussions of involution in agricultural development (geertz 1963). on social media, users circulated images of a student studying with a laptop perched precariously on his bicycle’s handlebars, and shared news about the death of a woman working overtime at a tech company. comments described how these viral stories captured a sensibility of increasingly complex gymnastics of effort and futile competition that was widely shared among young students and professionals. the anthropologist xiang biao has described neijuan/involution as “the experience of being locked in a competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless” (cited in liu 2021), a definition that the journalist yi-ling liu (2021) 441glosses as “acceleration without a destination, progress without a purpose, sisyphus spinning the wheels of a perpetual-motion peloton.” as a concept with a long history in anthropology, involution offers an important model for imagining alternatives to modernist models of speed, because it articulates a pattern, rather than a pace, of temporal change. for clifford geertz (1963, 81), involution describes “culture patterns which, after having reached what would seem to be a definitive form, nonetheless fail either to stabilize or transform themselves into a new pattern but rather continue to develop by becoming internally more complicated.” neither fast nor slow, neijuan/involution highlights how young rice researchers in china are struggling to mediate the increasingly asynchronous tempos of their scientific lives, as if riding on a kind of “perpetual-motion” yet stationary bicycle. in the next sections, we explore how young scientists experienced conflicting temporal constraints—from the demand for increasing speed of outputs in the post-mao individualized scientific career, to the slow pace of rice growth and the emerging biological limits of the rice plant. drawing on ethnographic observations in the wet rice lab, we then show how young scientists struggled to mediate or synchronize these divergent tempos, arguing that the concept of neijuan/involution describes a distinct pattern of temporal work that goes beyond linear accounts of fast or slow science. laboratory times: from mass science to individual career the institutional organization of science in china, and the associated time-maps that structure rice research, changed dramatically between yuan longping’s era and today’s wet rice lab. the irony of the “heroic individualist narratives” (schmalzer 2017, 98) surrounding yuan longping is that the development of hybrid rice took place during china’s great proletarian cultural revolution, a period where so-called mass science, rather than individual expert achievement, was promoted and recognized. during the cultural revolution, government leaders and politicians criticized professional scientists, punished them with imprisonment or forced labor, or sent them to the countryside to work on farms (dikötter 2017; jiang 2017). fields such as genetics were labeled counterrevolutionary (schneider 2003). as the historian sigrid schmalzer (2017, 101) points out, hybrid rice developed within “a research and extension system that downplayed the efforts of individual scientists and instead emphasized the collective labours of peasants, technicians, and scientists organized in a network of numerous, diverse institutions.” 442although often attributed to yuan longping, the development of hybrid rice was directly built on the institutions and practices of mass science. first, hybrid rice relied on the mass collection of wild and cultivated rice varieties by peasant farmers enrolled as student-assistants, a search that took place across the country—including the discovery of the naturally male-sterile wild rice variety, by student-assistant li bihu in 1973. second, the rapid distribution of hybrid rice technology took place through the mass extension system of provincial agricultural institutes and village communes, which rapidly spread the technology across china and distributed seeds to millions of farmers (schmalzer 2016). in the late 1970s, china’s reform and opening up policies completely overturned the system of “mass science” and brought professional science to the center of the communist party’s legitimation efforts (greenhalgh and zhang 2020). the reforms placed highly educated, professionally trained scientific “experts” in charge of scientific funding, research institutes, and educational institutions (andreas 2009). elite universities established laboratories devoted primarily to research rather than teaching (orleans 1980; simon and goldman 1989). important changes to the scientific life accompanied these institutional reforms: much like the “individuation” of factory workers (rofel 1999) and peasant farmers (yan 2009) during the reform era, new roles and audit mechanisms tied scientific work to the measurement of individual research outputs. from education and training, to funding for research, and employment or promotion, reform-era policy reformatted collective scientific work into individual scientific careers. in the four decades since the beginning of the reform era, the competition over scientific careers has increased dramatically. forty years ago, the entire country had only eighteen phd students. in 2018, 95,502 new students enrolled in phd programs, bringing the total number of doctoral students to almost 400,000. as a result, students feel tremendous pressure: as a cell biologist interviewed by the scientific journal nature explained, “graduate students from most institutions are required to have at least one first-authored paper with certain levels of impact factor to get their phd degree. . . . therefore, everyone has to be productive, which is impossible” (woolston and o’meara 2019, 712). competition proves equally intense for junior researchers such as postdocs or assistant professors. although we do not have precise numbers for the specific field of rice research, yang zihan told us that there were more than 10,000 scientists studying rice in china. in the wet rice lab itself, the laboratory employs seven professors and around thirty junior researchers, including postdocs, 443doctoral candidates, and master’s students. recently, the laboratory increased recruitment of graduate students and other junior researchers in response to the university’s efforts to be accredited as a “double first class university” by the national government. since 2017, the number of faculty has doubled and the number of graduate students now exceeds undergraduates in the department. we asked professor song heping, a former student of professor huang who successfully built a career for himself as a senior scientist in the lab, about how these new policies would impact generational transition within the laboratory. he acknowledged that career advancement would prove more difficult for the coming generation. “there are a lot of teachers i do not even know,” he told us. “overrecruitment will be a problem in ten or twenty years when they compete for positions and tenure.” in china, academic competition is increasingly structured and intensified by time. most positions are based on specific durations in which certain levels of research production must be achieved. graduate scholarships are limited to a specific number of years (typically two or three) during which students must not only complete a dissertation but also publish in a peer-reviewed journal. for faculty, chinese universities began introducing u.s.-style tenure-track promotion systems in the 1990s. they demand the review of research outputs after three to five years and include an “up or out” policy of promotion or dismissal (wang and wang 2024). china’s historical shift from mass science to an increasingly individualized and competitive scientific career has put junior researchers under pressure to “hurry up” their research. at the same time, this experienced demand for speed troubled these scientists because it conflicted with another tempo: what they described as the “long time cycle” of experiments with rice plants. in the next section, we unpack why rice research came to be so “slow.” slowing science: from revolution to improvement we sat in professor huang’s office, just across the hall from the laboratory benches, looking over a memorial book that described a pioneering campaign to collect wild rice varieties conducted by his own graduate supervisor in the late 1970s. professor huang told us that the tempo of rice research had changed. rice researchers in china no longer aspired to achieve scientific and agricultural “revolutions,” he explained interspersing the english keyword in his speech, like those that followed from the development of hybrid rice (china’s 444green revolution). instead, scientific inquiry into rice genetics now sought a much slower pace of “improvements”: look at our past, the establishment of [the people’s republic of] china is a revolution, right? now today we want to progress [jinbu]; how do we want to do it? we want to reform [gaige], reform. so now we can’t do a revolution, revolution causes society to fall into chaos. in short, we can’t overthrow the political authority, right? today studying sociology, it’s the same [as studying rice]: societies change, having reached today’s situation, you cannot revolution. you can only reform, or improve, slow, slow slow, slow change, slow, slow advance [gaijin], that’s what it means. but also today our improvement [gailiang] of [rice] varieties, you also cannot say revolution, you can only say . . . slow, slow, slow, slow improvement. it’s like this.3 whereas china achieved a political revolution in the establishment of the people’s republic in 1949, the so-called reform era (from 1978 onward) sought to achieve progressive change more gradually. adopting this language metaphorically to describe two generations of rice research, professor huang acknowledged continuity in the effort to achieve advances in productivity, but highlighted the different tempo of change. as we followed researchers in their experiments at the lab bench and in the field, we found this slowing pace of rice research to be the combined effect of two constraints. first, researchers believed there were diminishing opportunities available to improve yields due to constraints in the biology of the rice plant. and yet, second, government-imposed constraints on research—or what the critical agrarian scholar rajeswari s. raina (2015) has called “institutional rigidities” that reproduce modernist models of high-technology agriculture—kept rice researchers focused on improving yields. trapped between the demand for improvement and its diminishing possibility, rice research came to feel slow. yang zihan told us that the potential to get a “good” publication depended on the capacity of the rice “materials” (cailiao) that the laboratory provides a researcher to work with, and “whether everything that can be done has already been done.” scientists in the wet rice lab mean something very specific by the term cailiao. they use it to describe rice plants or seeds as the embodiment of a single genetic line. seeds and plants are different moments in a plant’s life, but they represent the same genetic line, so a seed and a plant can be the same “material.” scientists also spoke of the two plants that are crossed in a hybridization 445experiment as representing different materials. initially, we had mistakenly equated the entities the scientists call cailiao with “varieties” (pinzhong), but a professor explained to us that the term varieties refers only to stabilized, commercial lines used by farmers. materials, by contrast, refer to the seed/plant hereditary lines that remain within the laboratory’s experimental system. the collection of materials is one of the wet rice laboratory’s key resources. as a graduate student, professor huang took over the collection of wild rice varieties assembled by his graduate supervisor and used novel molecular biology techniques to identify key genes that differentiate domestic from wild rice. moved between laboratory storage (as seeds) and the experimental field where they are planted, the collection of wild and domestic rice materials constitute the pivotal resources that allow researchers to identify and characterize the functional genes of the rice plant. but why would yang see this collection of materials as a potential limitation, rather than a resource, for producing “good” publications? when professor song gave us a tour of the experimental fields, we began to understand what yang meant. song walked ahead of us and pointed to a patch of rice plants that towered three or four times taller than any others. he told us that the wet rice lab was experimenting with a new approach to increase plant productivity by looking for genes that will increase the strength of the stalk so that plants can grow taller. the high-yielding varieties of the green revolution, including yuan longping’s hybrid rice, were bred to be very short, or “semi-dwarf,” varieties. semi-dwarfism proved key to increasing productivity because it enabled larger panicles of grain without causing the rice plant to fall over. unfortunately, professor song explained, rice researchers had recently hit a roadblock—since there are biological constraints on the ratio of grain to the overall biomass of the plant, the small size of semi-dwarf varieties ultimately posed a limit on further increases in productivity. to increase yield, researchers now believed they needed to increase the biomass of the plant, and that meant abandoning semi-dwarfs and growing tall rice. yet even as he told this story to us, song remained skeptical about this research’s potential. “yuan longping was recently photographed under the shade of a tall rice plant,” he told us, laughing.4 “it’s not difficult to make rice grow tall. after all, wild rice is naturally a tall grass. but to make it actually yield more grain” proves much more of a challenge. although a sensibility that “the now-familiar tools of the green revolution are facing diminishing returns” (mann 1999) is common in the agricultural sciences today, this concern about scientific practice must be situated within a 446rigidified agricultural imaginary focused on yield improvement. critical studies of agricultural science and development have pointed to a tendency for “lock-in” or path dependency in the post–green revolution approach to increasing agricultural productivity (see cowan and gunby 1996; stone and flachs 2017; puig de la bellasca 2016). raina (2015, 7) describes “institutional rigidities” and even “institutional strangleholds” in many developing countries like india or china, in which government and private-sector funds for research remain “euphoric about the technological successes of the green revolution” and unwilling to support alternative research approaches. in china, agricultural science remains framed in the context of its utility for national economic development, continuing “an extensive agricultural history and concerns about feeding an ever-growing population” (chen 2010, 96). at the wet rice lab, researchers constantly encountered institutional demands to frame their research in terms of its contributions to agricultural improvement. any presentation about findings related to a specific rice gene would inevitably be discussed in relation to how this gene (if included in new rice varieties) could increase grain productivity and improve food security. as yang zihan told us, “i think the ultimate objective is to benefit the people, [so] we must work in the direction of production.” according to professor song, even researchers who previously studied model plants such as arabidopsis “recently . . . redirected to the study of crops [such as rice or maize] because less funding goes to the model plants” that have no immediate agricultural application. in the next section, we focus on how young scientists at the wet rice lab attempted to “mediate” the fast pace of their scientific careers with the slow time cycle of rice research, examining the techniques that they employed to synchronize divergent tempos in their experiments. the limits of synchronicity professor huang acknowledged that rice research was decelerating, but believed that the wet rice lab was still making progress and improving yields—if perhaps only “slow, slow, slow, slow improvement.” when we spoke with young researchers such as yang zihan, however, they expressed a very different sensibility about the pace of experiments, reflecting a generational concern that it was increasingly difficult to fit experimental “timework” within the timespans of their scientific careers. building on sharon traweek’s (1988) pioneering study of the complex management of “beamtime” and “lifetime” in particle physics experiments, joeri bruyninckx (2017, 825) 447highlights the “timework” needed to manage “scientific time [that] unfolds across multiple registers at different speeds, intervals, or range that may affect each other.” bruyninckx (2017) argues that the success of experimental science relies on the (often invisible) work behind the effective reconciliation or “synchronization” of organizational schedules, institutional plans, biographical careers, and the temporalities of research instruments. steven jackson and colleagues (2011) add that the multiplicity of temporal frames in scientific practice also includes nonhuman “phenomenal time,” putting the “temporal alignment” of human and nonhuman time at the center of scientific practice. for scientists at the wet rice lab, the tempo of the rice plant posed the most significant constraint on experimental schedules. plant growth is one-way and irreversible, and each plant follows the same stages from seed to plant to seed. moreover, each rice variety or material has a roughly fixed duration of maturation, though these differ among varieties—105–120 days for quick-ripening varieties and up to 180 days for others. rice plants imply a linear timeline that orients specific material interactions between scientists and rice plants at specific timings. it is not simply that plants are “slow” (myers 2015; besky and padwe 2016), but more accurately that rice plants—indeed, each different rice material—follow their own tempos (hathaway 2022; hartigan 2017; kirksey and helmreich 2010; gan 2017b). indeed, green revolution programs that aimed to master rice time through “simplifying logics” struggled to manage an unanticipated “interplay of differential yet coexisting speeds” (gan 2017a, 77). at the wet rice lab, scientists strategized how to synchronize the nonhuman tempo of the rice plant with human biographical and social time. for example, scientists grew sprouts under grow lights, enabling them to explore phenotypes in the lab rather than the field, and allowing these grow-out experiments to run at any time of year, independent of seasonal calendars. researchers also used freezing techniques to slow or stall growth. these classic laboratory mechanisms detach the rice plant from its natural context and, in doing so, also aim to reposition the plant within the social time of the experiment and the career (knorr-cetina 1992; latour 1999). on a larger time-scale, the annual experimental calendar of the laboratory is closely coordinated with the stages of rice growth. research activities are patterned on seasonal changes: experiments must factor in the timing of seed-planting; the transplantation of seedlings into the main field; flowering and pollination; and death, each of which occurs at particular times of year from spring to autumn. although resembling the time-maps of traditional agricultural 448calendars associated with rice societies (lansing 2007), the wet rice lab introduces a number of mechanisms to mediate or synchronize the growth cycle of the rice plant with experimental schedules. one strategy for adapting rice time to laboratory time is the use of a second experimental research station on hainan island, the tropical island south of guangdong province. on hainan, where rice can be grown year-round, the wet rice lab plants at least one experimental crop each winter so that experimental work can continue while the fields around meizhou university lie fallow. figure 2. rice seeds grow in petri dishes. photo by lyle fearnley the flowering stage, during which researchers conduct hybridization experiments, probably constitutes the most significant temporal event on the laboratory calendar. hybridization experiments involve controlling the sexual reproduction of the rice plant through the manual pollination of two distinct rice materials. hybridization marks the critical moment when laboratory theories and laboratory objects (such as genetic clones) are brought into the field, so that the phenotypic effects of specific genes can be assessed. hybridization is also extremely time-sensitive. rice plants flower for only a few days, meaning the manual labor involved in the hybridization experiments must be done very quickly. work must be completed before eleven in the morning, when the increasing temperature of midday triggers the plant to release pollen. finally, because different rice materials (or varieties) have different growth periods (maturing anywhere from 105 to 180 days), they reach the flowering stage at different times. therefore, researchers typically grow two or three separate batches 449of rice, separating the planting of different varieties by a week or two. this staggered planting enables researchers to produce a hybridization encounter between different rice materials with different temporalities of flowering. the difficulty of coordinating rice growth with experimental schedules means that the career of a rice researcher is timed alongside the life cycles of the rice plant. going beyond the “timework” on the laboratory floor, doctoral students, postdocs, and young professors also engage in a more expansive effort to mediate the divergent time-maps of china’s scientific institutions with the tempos and rhythms of the rice plant. as we watched students transplanting seedlings from the sowing bed to the main experimental field, xu yongren, a doctoral candidate, highlighted the uncertain tempo of working with nonhuman organisms: “finding a gene, knowing, and examining its functions is like fishing in the sea. at the early stage, you need to map out the gene and find out the qtls,5 which takes two to three years on average. if you have bad luck, the process will take three to four years.” although uncertainty and failure are common in any science, the slow tempos of the rice life cycle means that each failure sets researchers back by a season or even a year. researchers instinctively calculated their bad luck, uncertainties, mistakes, and worries in rice time. when one student caught a fever during the hybridization, another from her cohort encouraged her to still go to the field: “if you are sick, you can recover soon, but if you miss the hybridization, you need to wait for another year.” as a result, young lab researchers think about the prospects of their own lives in the rhythms of rice time. anthropologists have recently brought new conceptual tools to examine the mediation of organizational, bureaucratic, and biographical times in labors of repair and recovery. rather than assuming large-scale “temporal fixes” to the imbalances of modern time, laura bear (2014, 85) shows how concrete temporal practices—for her not timework but “labour in/of time”—make possible the reconciliation of divergent tempos and provide a “temporary fix” for the contradictions of global modernity. in her study of shipping pilots on the hooghly river, for example, she shows that bureaucratic extraction of investment in the upkeep of river infrastructure, driven by temporalities of debt, increases the uncertainty surrounding piloting ships and the likelihood of accidents. yet through an ethics of “workmanship,” river pilots mediate temporalities of historical decline and environmental change: “their labour . . . orchestrate[s] and reconcile[s] incommensurable rhythms” (bear 2014, 81). as students transplanted their seedlings into the soil, a recently hired assistant professor named xie weihua made clear to us how precarious the 450coordination of career with the tempos of the rice plant is becoming. as a new member of the lab, he was planting his own rice materials for the first time to begin his research program. however, he missed the sowing season for the first batch, and his second batch did not grow well because of overwhelming weeds. discussing with the doctoral students, he explained that he needed to publish a “big paper” soon. “at least five years,” doctoral student xu yongren pointed out to him. “small papers take about two to three years, but they are meaningless for your level.” xie replied, “my seedlings did not grow well. i can start my research in november next year, after [i grow] one generation in hainan this year and another generation in meizhou next year.” we were talking in june 2019, and xie had already estimated a full year of rice growth (two planting cycles) as preparation required to initiate the laboratory component of his research study in november 2020. in his plans, he integrated his career objectives with the life cycles of two generations of rice plants. the problem of time is exacerbated by factors such as age, aging, and gender (cf. özden-schilling 2021; fox-keller 1984). xie, the new faculty in the lab, explained that in china scholars are anchored to a linear path because research funds and national prizes have an age limit for application: forty-five is the age limit for outstanding youth funding, one of the most prestigious grants for scientists in china; while fifty-five is the limit to apply for the creative team prize. rice researchers are caught between the growth time of plants and human age-based time limits to receive research funding and awards. for women, the negotiation of careers proves particularly challenging. many senior scientists in the lab (all men) believed that women had unique gendered life obligations—such as family and childbearing—that occupied time needed to build a career. lab scientists have rejected qualified female candidates because, after making calculations for this “lost time,” certain metrics of achievement seemed impossible to reach in time. when the department recruited new faculty in 2019, the committee rejected the application of a thirty-four-year-old woman because, as one senior faculty member explained to us, “she is a bit too old. as her background does not match that of our lab, she will need a long time to catch up and it would be hard to apply for funding in the first five years.” the lead professors in the lab also worried about romance among their students. “in our time,” professor song explained, “students fell in love, but it was more indirect, hidden; but now it is very direct and in the open.” to him, it is a big problem if people are dating within the lab—the couple are always together, even doing field experiments together, and they don’t get their work 451done on time. professor song told us he has even started asking his female master’s students if they have a boyfriend before starting research. if they don’t, he discourages them from doing doctoral work. china’s contemporary society still looks favorably on older single men, he opined, and they still have a chance to get married. but for women, he believed, their best chance is to find someone when they are an undergraduate. by the time they finish a doctoral degree, professor song declared, “it will be too late.” in our fieldwork at the lab, we observed a range of techniques—from the winter migration of the lab to hainan, to the staggered planting of rice seedlings, to the freezing of plant samples, to the coordination of romance—that aimed to synchronize the tempos of the rice plants with experimental times and lifetimes. but unlike the successful “synchronization” (bruyninckx 2017) or “reconciliation” (bear 2014) of divergent tempos observed by sociologists of science and anthropologists of time, we saw that the labor of time was becoming more intricate and convoluted, while the outcome was becoming more uncertain, insignificant, and precarious. “the science we are doing now,” xie lamented, “has become really small and mechanical, and the time pressure to publish and get a position and funding does not allow us to do long-term or slow science . . . . some of my peers are already excellent, and it is hard to catch up. i try to get some research out in the next few years. if not, i just accept that.” in the laboratory and in the field, social and nonhuman rhythms, careers, and experiments had fallen out of sync. as we observed young researchers at the wet rice lab, we came to see the limitations of critiques of so-called fast science: after all, young researchers did not want to slow down or speed up per se; rather, they wish to mediate and align the divergent tempos they confronted. as this synchronization became more difficult, though, the diminishing returns on their efforts became more and more evident, suggesting a spiraling dynamic that young professionals in china have recently described as neijuan (involution). neijuan involution: virtuosity within monotony we tend to think about time in the sciences, as hugh gusterson (2005) noted, in progressive tempos: the construction of facts, “bursts of creativity,” and the advancing rhythms of “scientific evolution and revolution.” yet the experience of young researchers in the wet rice lab seems to reflect another trajectory of scientific time: “the withering, decay or arteriosclerosis of fields of knowledge” that gusterson (2005, 75) has called “scientific involution.” writing about generational change among nuclear weapons scientists in the united 452states, he argued that the scientific revolutions of the pioneer manhattan project later gave way to a “pedagogy of diminishing returns” (gusterson 2005, 76). as atomic scientists retreated to digital simulations after the prohibition of nuclear testing, advances in nuclear weapons design became “incremental” and scientific practice became “increasingly repetitious” (gusterson 2005, 99). like gusterson’s nuclear scientists, students and young researchers like yang zihan or xie weihua described working on ever smaller problems under increasing time pressure, suggesting that rice science in china had “simultaneously matured and withered” (gusterson 2005, 75). yet the drivers of involution in the wet rice lab also derived from institutional changes in china’s reform-era society outside the laboratory, such as the individualization of work that pulled apart the temporalities of scientific careers and wet-rice experiments. in this respect, the involutionary experience of young wet rice lab scientists resembled the experiences of other members of china’s 1990s generation (90hou, or “born after 1990”), for whom the term neijuan has become a key buzzword on social media (wang and wang 2021). young people identified neijuan with overwork in the high-tech industry, where managers required workers to perform increasingly laborious tasks, introduced invasive surveillance mechanisms, or set workers in competition against one another (xu 2022). in the ballooning education industry, young people struggled to outcompete others through additional self-study or tuition programs (chen and hong 2024). others observed a form of “academic involution” (xueshu neijuan) among graduate students, characterized by “publication for publication’s sake” and stagnant innovation (wang and hu 2023). as wang qianni and ge shifan (2020) explain, “the chinese word, neijuan, is made up of the characters for ‘inside’ and ‘rolling’ and is more intuitively understood as something that spirals in on itself, a process that traps participants who know they won’t benefit from it.” involution in contemporary china is an “endless, energy-draining loop of competition.” the term neijuan was first introduced into china’s academic and public discourse through the translation of phillip c. c. huang’s works on china’s agrarian economy (ling 2006). huang (1985; 1990) drew on clifford geertz’s (1963) famous model of “agricultural involution” to explain why china failed to achieve the rapid development associated with western modernization. due to population growth, huang argued, china’s farm output expanded per unit of land but declined per unit of labor—a process of “diminishing marginal returns” or “growth without development” that he called involution. translations published by zhonghua books in 2000 introduced the term neijuan for “involution” and 453stimulated wide-ranging discussion around the agrarian constraints on china’s modernization (ling 2006). today’s viral discourse on neijuan adopts huang’s pessimistic diagnosis of china’s economy but ironically transposes the sense of involuted growth from pre-modern agrarian settings to highly modern offices and classrooms. rather than an explanation for the failure to achieve modernization or development, young chinese today articulate a feeling of “despair” (yu and yong 2023) about the diminishing returns that have followed in the aftermath of rapid growth. by shifting how involution is located in time against the trajectory of development, the emerging discourse of neijuan draws attention to the temporal features of the original anthropological concept. geertz’s account of “agricultural involution” in indonesian rice farms does not describe indonesian rural society in itself as involutionary. rather, he argues that involution follows from a historically specific interaction—a “mal-integration” as he puts it (geertz 1963, 48n2)—between the cultural ecology of wet-rice farming and the colonial extractivism of the dutch sugar industry. geertz described involution as the progressively complicated technical practices, labor-sharing schemes, and land-tenure arrangements adopted by javanese farmers to mediate between the “dual economy” (geertz 1963, 48) of colonial sugar and subsistence rice, grown with the same land and labor yet operating in completely different temporal and spatial frames: fast-changing global capital markets against slowly expanding rice ecologies. because dutch colonialism led to a “steadily widening disparity” between these two economic tempos, or what he called “runaway dualism” (geertz 1963, 62), javanese farmers were forced to increase the complexity of their labor and land-sharing arrangements to maintain subsistence under increasingly fraught conditions—leading to “progressive complication, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity within monotony” (geertz 1963, 81, quoting goldenweiser 1936). adopting the concept from a short essay by the boasian anthropologist alexander goldenweiser, geertz (1963, 82) stressed that involution was an “analytic concept” that described a “form” or “pattern.” building on the idea of “culture patterns” popular among boasian anthropologists (e.g., benedict 1934), goldenweiser had explored how a “process of development” takes place within the “frame” set by patterns. his examples of involution included maori decorative art and johann sebastian bach’s fugues, where “the complex design is brought about through a multiplicity of spatial arrangements of one and the same unit,” a kind of “pattern plus continued development” (goldenweiser 1936, 102). 454in contrast with dominant theories of modern social time, the concept of involution described the pattern or form of temporal change, rather than its pace or direction. this concept of involution as pattern helps clarify that what troubles young researchers in the wet rice lab is not the increasing speed of the academic career or the slowdown of rice-based experimental systems. rather, they worry about how to “mediate” and “synchronize” across multiple temporal frames ranging from the time-maps of scientific institutions to the biological growth of the rice plant. coordination and timing, not simply speeding up or slowing down, are required for the synchronization of diverse and sometimes conflictive tempos. due to increasing disparities across these tempos—as career demands feel faster and rice research feels slower—the labor of mediating time is complicating research plans, diminishing marginal returns, and producing a sense of despair. back inside the lab, we watched yang zihan as he chopped rice shoots. yang worried about whether he could garner a significant publication during his postdoc, particularly given the competition from an expanding cohort of young rice scientists across china. in his own work, he told us, he sought to distinguish himself from his cohort by shifting his research from traditional gene hunting to the characterization of gene expression. “these days, the research all looks similar, and we just do the same thing with a different gene,” yang reflected. “so this is why i focus on the mechanism.” shifting his research from gene identification to gene characterization held out the potential that yang could achieve a significant, innovative finding that differentiated him from the competition. and yet, we realized that doing so also brought him into more intricate temporal entanglement with the rhythms of rice growth. to study the mechanism of gene expression, yang’s experimental practice involved extracting and analyzing protein rna from a variety of plant parts (shoots, leaves, panicles, etc.). but protein rna, unlike genome dna, only appears at specific moments in plant growth, rendering synchronization between experiment and plant time more difficult. while the genome is a static code that does not change throughout an individual plant’s life, the expression of these genes into proteins occurs at different moments in time as the plant grows from seed, to sprout, to flower, and to death. therefore, yang must take samples repeatedly from roots, leaves, or flowers to extract rna at every important stage of growth. protein rna also degrades more quickly than dna, meaning that yang needed to work faster in each experimental procedure. yang cut samples from 455shoots, tillers, chaff, flower, or other plant parts, then froze them on tin-foil boats that floated on a liquid nitrogen bath inside a styrofoam box. back in the lab, he would transfer these samples to the freezer, or else immediately unwrap them, continuously pouring liquid nitrogen as he crushed the sample on a mortar before submerging them in a prepared chemical solution. studies of “cryopolitics” have pointed out that techniques of freezing aim to defer death: “temperature work[s] as a temporal prothesis” to “create a form of life without death” (kowal and radin 2015). but temperature can also freeze a moment of life (e.g., a rice plant’s development of green chaff) and extract it from the temporal process of growth. yang could then, to the best extent possible, coordinate the life cycle of the rice plants with the rhythms of his experimental study and the duration of his postdoctoral position. as his shift in research objectives toward genetic mechanism made timing more important, the laboratory choreography that aimed to synchronize rice time, lab time, and career time became more intricate. science, for yang, was neither too fast nor too slow. rather, his effort to achieve “virtuosity within monotony” (cf. geertz 1963; goldenweiser 1936) merely intensified a process of neijuan/involution that followed from the desynchronization of rice time and his own lifetime. conclusion: beyond slow science when young scientists at the wet rice lab speak about the need to “hurry up” or worry that rice research is “too slow,” the critique of fast science seems ready to hand as an explanatory and moral frame. in the “slow science manifesto,” a group of berlin-based scientists write that “science needs time.” “science,” they write, “creeps about on a very slow time scale, for which there must be room and to which justice must be done” (slow science academy 2010, 1). the philosopher isabelle stengers (2018) compares slow science to the more well-known slow food movement, arguing that slowing down enables scientists to consider public matters of concern alongside the production of facts, reconnecting scientific producers with the broader public. yet this critique of speed tends to ignore the specific, multiple, and divergent time-maps mediated in the everyday practice of science, and it therefore obscures “the attempts by people to bring incommensurable rhythms and representations into synchronicity” (bear 2014, 18). staggering the planting of rice materials, freezing and thawing samples of rice plants, working overtime in the laboratory or in the field, young scientists in the wet rice lab design 456increasingly complex experiments to make plants, experiments, and careers align in time. but whereas sociologists of science heroize the work of repair that mediates divergent tempos, these young scientists struggled as lifetimes and rice time diverged. instead of “effective reconciliation” or successful “synchronization,” the mediation of divergent tempos led to increasingly complicated, repetitious, and intensive forms of work. neither fast nor slow, the labor of the young scientists in the wet rice lab is better described by the imaginary of neijuan: pedaling faster and faster but stuck in place, as if riding a “perpetual-motion peloton” (liu 2021). as an analytic concept, neijuan/involution points to a pattern, rather than pace, of temporal change. in doing so, it allows us to think critically about the sciences beyond the critique of speed. stengers (2018, 68), in the end, clarifies that “‘slowing down’ the sciences is not itself the answer”; for her, it is a necessary first step toward identifying underlying problems such as the “capture” of scientific practice by “technical-industrial innovation” (stengers 2018, 74). at the wet rice lab, though, the individualization of the scientific career and production-focused agricultural policy pushes young scientists in divergent temporal directions, not along a linear path of acceleration. for them, the legacy of the green revolution is not only the heroic discovery of hybrid rice, but also a persistent “stranglehold” (raina 2020) on their own research, as agricultural science policy drives them to seek new ways of increasing rice productivity at the very biological limits of the rice plant. facing “diminishing returns” despite virtuosic experimental labor, the imaginary of linear advance associated with the green revolution is now left in tangled spirals: green involution. although aspects of neijuan/involution may be specific to contemporary chinese science, a concern with the patterns of temporal mediation is also apparent in other scientific settings. in the field of protein modeling, natasha myers (2015, 128) describes how “faster computers and better equipment helped to speed things up,” enabling an “exponential” growth in contributions. yet speed itself was not the critical problem, she later notes; rather, the move from a physical to a virtual medium transformed the relationship between models and proteins, creating new challenges for “adjudicating truth claims.” in a very different context, tom özden-schilling (2023, 13) points out that the slow growth of temperate forests requires forestry scientists “willing to cultivate deep, long-term attachments to the locations of their work.” once again, it is not the pace of forest growth that is the problem on its own. rather, forestry scientists struggle to maintain continuity and “succession” (özden-schilling 2021) of research experiments across shifting political demands, budget cutbacks, tenuous alliances 457with indigenous communities, changing research technologies, and their own biological lifetimes. the critical interrogation of scientific labor requires more than a blanket call for science and scientists to slow down. instead, anthropologists can contribute to remediating the labors of scientific time by revealing multiple and site-specific time-maps, understanding their unique historical and cultural patterns, and explaining the causes and consequences of their divergence. the temporal challenges involved in the allocation of beamtimes, a scarce machinic resource in particle physics (traweek 1988), differ from the challenges faced by rice researchers who time the growth of rice plants to match the growth of their careers. and both differ, in turn, from the struggles of anthropologists to redefine the classical form of long-term fieldwork to be more responsive to contemporary events and audit cultures (strathern 2000; fischer 2003; rabinow et al. 2008). it is not so much that we need manifestos for “slow” science against a universal increase in pace. instead, anthropological inquiry can untangle the conflicting temporal demands inside and outside the laboratory that are pulling the sciences—and scientists—out of sync. abstract the mao-era development of hybrid rice—known as china’s green revolution—is one of china’s best-known scientific achievements. for young rice scientists in contemporary china, however, this heroic past contrasts sharply with their struggles to keep pace in increasingly competitive scientific professions. engaging with the anthropology of time, we argue against treating their experience as an inevitable response to the global acceleration of academic work. instead, young rice scientists struggle to synchronize the divergent tempos of the contemporary scientific career with experiments set to the rhythms of the rice plant. drawing on a current chinese buzzword, we argue that young scientists are experiencing neijuan (involution), a pattern of growing intensity and complexity of work that yields diminishing returns. philosophers have issued manifestos for “slow science,” but anthropological inquiry illuminates the locally specific patterns of temporal mediation that are pulling scientists out of sync. [laboratory ethnography; anthropology of science; china; multispecies; slow science; anthropology of time; involution] notes acknowledgments  research for this article was supported by an sutd start-up research grant. we are enormously grateful to the rice scientists who invited us to join them in the lab and in the field. the article benefited greatly from discussions at the singapore workshop on food/agrarian studies, from astute readings by nicholas bartlett and tom 458özden-schilling, and from suggestions by the editorial collective of cultural anthropology and three anonymous reviewers. 1. we conducted fieldwork over a year-long period, either singly or together, to capture key moments in the laboratory schedule and rice life cycle. the research was reviewed by sutd’s institutional review board for social, behavioral and educational research. meizhou university is a pseudonym, as are the names of all wet rice lab researchers. 2. professors liang yonglin and song heping are the two 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transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.03 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 105–130, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.05 paolo heywood durham university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2983-9240 “duce, 100 years ago you started a glorious period. today, we can finally remember it freely.” —inscription in the visitors’ book at the tomb of benito mussolini, predapppio, october 2022 the epigraph above was noted by a journalist visiting predappio, the birthplace and burial site of benito mussolini, the week of the one hundredth anniversary of his seizure of power in 1922 (giuffrida 2022). the reference to fascism as a “glorious period” is characteristic of most of the inscriptions in the visitors’ book in mussolini’s tomb i had occasion to read over the course of four years of fieldwork there. predappio is italy’s premier site of neofascist tourism: mussolini was born there in 1883, and from almost the moment he took power in 1922, he began the process of transforming what had been a small and entirely inconsequential settlement of a few hundred people into a new town of several thousand, built around key sites from his childhood and designed to celebrate both his life and the genius of fascist urban engineering. since 1957, when his body blessed acts of oblivion: on the ethics of forgetting cultural anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8589-2164 cultural anthropology 40:1 106 was returned to the family tomb after a series of postmortem misadventures that included being stolen and hidden in a convent by a successor to the fascist party (cf. luzzatto 2014), predappio and the mussolini family crypt receive hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, many of whom dress in black, and many of whom will leave a celebratory or hagiographic comment in the visitors’ book. the upbeat tone of this one proves quite unusual, though; most of the inscriptions in preceding years were more likely to bemoan contemporary italian politics and wish wistfully for their duce’s return. the reason for the upbeat tone is that, in a loose sense, that wish was fulfilled in october 2022. almost exactly one hundred years to the day that mussolini took power after the so-called march on rome, giorgia meloni, leader of the post-fascist brothers of italy, became italy’s prime minister. this was the first time that an italian government had been led by a direct descendant of mussolini’s national fascist party (pnf), itself banned since the end of world war ii. meloni named ignazio la russa, her party co-founder, whose father served as secretary of the pnf, and whose middle name is benito, as president of the italian senate, the second-highest-ranking office of state. all these developments help explain the anonymous visitor’s unusually optimistic tone. much less unusual is the author’s concern with memory, long a dominant focus for neofascist visitors to predappio. every year this very small comune is visited by “dark tourists” (lennon and foley 2000), many of whom come to pay tribute at mussolini’s grave and to write their names and messages in the visitors’ book positioned in front of a large marble bust of his head and the italian tricolor flag. figure 1. mussolini’s tomb and visitor’s book. photo by sailko, source: wikicommons. blessed acts of oblivion 107 on three anniversaries in particular—those of mussolini’s birth, death, and seizure of power—thousands of neofascists in black shirts or military uniforms descend on predappio to march from the center of town to the mussolini family mausoleum, where flowers are laid and speeches are given, arms upraised in the (illegal) fascist salute. a typical banner carried at one such march read, “those who do not remember the past are not fit to govern the present.” figure 2. the beginning of an anniversary march in predappio in 2018. photo by paolo heywood. this sentiment also mirrors claims often heard from the opposite side of the political spectrum in italy—and abroad—regarding what are held to be predominantly “forgetful” italian attitudes to their fascist heritage. indeed, some commentators lay the blame for meloni’s election on precisely this forgetfulness with regard to historical fascism, with specific reference to predappio (e.g., corner 2022). predappio captures an ambiguity often present in commentary on forgetting fascism in italy: is it an attitude or stance of forgetfulness? or a simple absence of memory? as i have described elsewhere, people who live in the town often go to great lengths to ignore its fascist heritage, despite the fact that— thanks to its unique urban fabric, the presence of mussolini’s body, and the constant influx of tourists—the town is thoroughly suffused by it (see heywood 2019, 2022, 2023, 2024a). i have described this avoidance as cultivated, and it cultural anthropology 40:1 108 is an avoidance that extends, unsurprisingly, to a sometimes forgetful attitude toward the town’s unique history. but rather than dismiss such forgetful attitudes as merely instances of bad faith, here i want to ask how practices of remembering and forgetting work together to situate the self in relation to wider political narratives, perhaps especially in contexts of “difficult” heritage (macdonald 2009). there is an extended western tradition going back to the stoics in which memory and technologies of remembrance are understood to play important roles in the cultivation of virtuous selves by emphasizing the stability and continuity of the self in the face of change. (the same holds true in some non-western traditions; see cassaniti 2022.) echoes of this tradition seem to abound in contexts in which forgetting appears as an enforced duty, an obligation imposed on people by the state or other powers (e.g., mookherjee 2006), and in which to remember means to cultivate a memorious self in opposition to such compelled discontinuity. yet what of contexts in which some discontinuities of selfhood are actively pursued, rather than imposed? what of situations in which a stance of forgetfulness may serve to index a fact about oneself—that one is a different person than one was—rather than merely to reflect or feign to reflect the absence of memory? here i want to explore forgetting as an ethical technology, rather than only as a form of public duty, imposition, or weakness of character. if memory and technologies of memorialization fit easily within western and non-western traditions of self-examination and self-cultivation, what role might forgetting and forgetfulness play in ethics and in the ways in which people imagine their relation to themselves? if memory, as seneca argued, is thought to foster a sense of stability and continuity of self that lend coherence to one’s thought and action, what, if any, good might be thought to come from forgetting, and how do people go about it? memory wars and predappio given its history and heritage, concerns about memory have unsurprisingly stood at the forefront of international debates about predappio’s place in italian public culture. a furore erupted in the international press in 2017, for example, over plans to install a museum of fascism in the town’s imposing but derelict former fascist party headquarters (casa del fascio). blessed acts of oblivion 109 figure 3. the former casa del fascio in predappio. photo by paolo heywood. for proponents of the project, such as predappio’s former mayor giorgio frassineti, it was an opportunity to rescue his home from what he often called the damnatio memoriae into which he felt it had been cast by association with its most famous son. turning that association into a strength instead of a weakness by creating the nation’s first museum to its totalitarian past in predappio would offer a way to reclaim that past and the memories associated with it, as instruments for the education of a younger generation otherwise oblivious of the perils of fascism (see carrattieri 2018). for the project’s many opponents, on the other hand, a “museum of fascism”—especially one sited in italy’s most notorious site of fascist heritage—would only encourage those who seek to memorialize fascism. a number of alternative proposals with memory as their focus—such as a memorial to the italian resistance, or to victims of fascist crimes—were put forward. almost everybody, in other words, worries about how and what to remember in predappio. predappio crystallizes a wider problematic of remembering and forgetting in relation to fascism in italy, and debates over the museum project reveal “an obvious sense of anxiety regarding the history of fascism” (storchi 2019, 18). as a large body of scholarship has shown, while injunctions to remember fascist crimes form some of the foundational components of the postwar italian state and the basis of some its popular culture and social movements (see, e.g., passerini 1987), public memories of fascism in italy are also “hazy, selective, cultural anthropology 40:1 110 and unreliable” (malone 2017, 445; see also corner 2002, 2005; fogu 2006; foot 2009; mammone 2006; pavone 2000). while this lack of shared narrative in part results from a revisionist approach to fascist historiography in italy that emerged in the 1990s (see, e.g., de felice 1995), as far back as 1983 luisa passerini (1983, 196) wrote of the ways in which “there is no ‘work of memory’ without a corresponding ‘work of forgetting,’” and noted that working-class memories of the fascist period tended to focus on the rhythms of everyday life, erasing difficult or traumatic moments (passerini 1987; cf. also heywood 2022, 2024c). the selectivity of memories of fascism in italy finds a parallel in the treatment of fascist heritage, such as that which dominates predappio (see arthurs 2010; carter and martin 2017; malone 2017; storchi 2013, 2019). lucy maulsby (2014), for instance, highlights the way in which former fascist party headquarters, like the one in predappio, have often been only partially cleansed of their architectural associations with fascism, yet many italians remain ignorant of their history and original purpose. comparing the country with those who drank from the river lethe in greek mythology, she notes that such forgetfulness “can be . . . understood as a collective inability to completely engage with the moral and ethical problems posed by fascism” (maulsby 2014, 32). a noteworthy ambiguity obtains in this analogy, as those who drank from the river lethe did so deliberately, in conscious pursuit of forgetfulness, and echoing a classical tradition concerned with the importance and arts of forgetting (see below). this voluntaristic quality differs quite markedly from the “inability” gestured to in the subsequent analysis. arguments and rhetoric around defects in memory when it comes to fascism are often framed in moral terms, as in maulsby’s claim that forgetfulness marks an ethical failing (and, for a very different set of reasons, that of neofascist marchers). more broadly, memory and remembrance are often framed as virtuous practices, duties to people or objects—as in invocations to remember to avoid the repetition of appalling crimes, or to pay tribute to the dead (see, e.g., kwon 2010). this sort of perspective on the necessarily virtuous nature of memory is echoed in critical assessments of the italian case beyond maulsby’s specific points about fascist heritage. as rosario forlenza (2012, 2018) brilliantly documents (see also forlenza and thomassen 2021), while it is certainly true that public memory in italy surrounding world war ii and the fascist regime has often proved selective and generally oriented toward establishing the “myth” of the blessed acts of oblivion 111 anti-fascist resistance as a second risorgimento or national rebirth (see, e.g., cooke 2011, 2012), to see remembering and forgetting in purely presentist and instrumental terms means to reduce “memory, which is a fundamental concept of culture, to a by-product of politics, created from above and isolated from a broader understanding of the social, cultural, and historical context” (forlenza 2018, 141). as forlenza (2018, 173–74) goes on to describe, this perspective also fails to account for “the complex relationship between forgetting and remembering, which cannot be understood only in terms of the implementation of strategy by political parties and elites . . . memories of wartime experiences were threatening and painful, and haunted individuals for years; some therefore strove to forget. silence and forgetting were ways of coping with the past; these mechanisms supported the attempt to build a new and different life . . . we are not only the past that we can remember, but we are also the past that we can forget.” the question of individual practices of forgetting and their relation to wider public narratives connects these issues to a larger historical tradition of understanding memory and forgetfulness not just as public practices but as ethical technologies and ways of instantiating particular kinds of subjectivity and selfhood. connecting arguments about public forgetfulness to this tradition may offer a way of thinking about both why people forget and how they do so that goes beyond imposed silence and absence. memory has an extended historical place as a virtuous technology in and of itself, one of the many means by which people from seneca to aquinas have practiced self-cultivation (see, e.g., foucault 1986). here, in the range of writing devoted to ars memoriae or mnemotechnics, techniques of memorialization are thought to be good not merely for what they allow one to remember but for what they do to the soul and the subject, for their role in self-examination, and for their encouragement of piety and religious obedience. such practices are not confined to the west: julia cassaniti (2022, 7) has described the ways in which theravada mindfulness practices are rooted in an ethics of non-forgetfulness, in which memory—in the sense of connecting one’s past and present selves—is “good” and forgetting is “bad.” here, in other words, memory functions as a technology of self-cultivation, good not only because it fulfils a wider social duty but also because of its effects on the person. somewhat buried within the western historical tradition of ars memoriae is an equivalent set of concerns in which memory constitutes not a virtue but a problem. ovid prescribed remedies for forgetting a lost object of romantic cultural anthropology 40:1 112 affection; cicero tells of the wisdom of themistocles, who wished to learn to forget rather than to remember; and cornelius agrippa thought mnemotechnics would lead to mental overload and madness from a surfeit of memory (cf. zahora 2015). friedrich nietzsche famously argued for the benefits of active and selective forgetting, and jorge luis borges’s story titled “funes the memorious” fictionalizes cornelius agrippa’s fears coming true for a man who cannot forget, and so cannot think, because “to think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.” some recent scholarship outside of anthropology has also returned to questions of forgetting in critique of the memory studies boom (rieff 2016; symons 2019), and there is an extensive psychoanalytic literature on pathologies of memory going back at least to sigmund freud (1917) on mourning and melancholia. what unites this buried undercurrent of literature is forlenza’s point about the italian case: that despite a tendency sometimes to assume that memory has a necessarily positive ethical valence in relation to the construction of the self, “we are also the past that we can forget.” anthropology has long recognized forgetting as a constituent part of memory (e.g., trouillot 1995), along with the fact that, as paul ricœur (2004, 452) puts it, “recounting one drama is forgetting another.” ethnographic interest in social practices of forgetting has been relatively sporadic and unsystematized, however, a fact noted by a number of those who have written on the subject (e.g., battaglia 1993, 430; carsten 1995, 317; vitebsky 2008, 244). while some work emerged during the memory studies boom of the nineties (augé 1998; battaglia 1992, 1993; carsten 1995; cole 1998; forty and küchler 1999; taylor 1993), just as the ars oblivionalis emerged alongside the ars memoriae, relatively little has been said on the subject since then (though see connerton 2008; harrison 2004; vitebsky 2008). paul connerton notes that euro-americans are habituated to think of forgetting as a moral failure of sorts (connerton 2008, 59), and much of that earlier anthropological work on forgetting set up an implicit or explicit contrast between this euro-american perspective on forgetting as failure and non-western contexts in which more or less ritualized versions of forgetting lead not to disintegration and social anomie but to what connerton (2008, 63) calls “the formation of a new identity,” or, in debbora battaglia’s (1993, 430) case, in an echo of ernest renan’s famous characterization of a nation as united by forgetting, even to “society” itself. while there is much that is ethnographically specific to these anthropological accounts, the echo of renan—and western traditions of problematizing blessed acts of oblivion 113 memory, from cornelius agrippa to borges, nietzsche, and freud—should lead us to pause before assuming a sharp distinction between forgetting as moral failure in euro-american contexts and as productive elsewhere. indeed, while battaglia makes an argument about the way melanesian views of partible social personhood allow them easily to incorporate the idea that some parts of the dead should be remembered with the thought that other parts should be forgotten, again the point returns us to the more general view that selves are always composites of what is forgotten and what is remembered. keeping in mind the duality of memory and forgetting as ethical technologies—the idea that any art of memory as a way of establishing continuity of selfhood will necessarily also involve the art of forgetting—points a way out of a classic problem for scholars (and practitioners) of forgetfulness: how to remember to forget without remembering. in thinking about ways in which people might actively engage in processes of forgetting, umberto eco (1988, 258) famously described the impossibility of a true ars oblivionalis, a conscious technique of effacement comparable to the techniques of memorialization, since any such technique would be semiotic in form, and inherent to semiotics is the making present of something absent: a sign that stands for something will bring that thing to mind no matter what form the sign takes, so saying “there is no rose” nevertheless brings the picture of a rose to mind (see also candea 2022). as jon elster (1993, 81) puts it, “the commandment ‘forget him’ requires an effort that can only inscribe in memory the object that one is demanded to forget.” this point makes evident a problem with the assumption that ritual behavior around memory and forgetting is necessarily about inducing a certain sort of inner state (the presence of memories or their absence). while it might appear intuitive to imagine that practices of remembrance serve to accomplish something like this in a simple sense by bringing to mind the object of memory, the same cannot easily be said of practices of forgetting—it is not straightforward to imagine a practice that could induce the absence of memory, as eco and elster make clear. the idea that forgetting is an imposed “commandment” intended to induce the inner state of forgetfulness but unable to do so successfully seems to sit behind the view that memory should be understood as virtuous “resistance” to such commandments, as in james scott’s (1990) notion of the “hidden transcript.” a thought like this seems also to be at work in critiques of forgetful italian attitudes to fascism (just as it is more obviously at work in the neofascists’ invocation of cultural anthropology 40:1 114 memory, as well as in wider antifascist injunctions to remember fascist crimes). that is, the implication of such critiques is often that while the postwar italian state has thoroughly failed to come to terms with the nation’s fascist past, it remains open to italians themselves to do so. there exists, then, a certain disjuncture between the collective and the individual often built into our ideas about forgetting as an external imposition: because such imposition is in fact impossible, societies may forget, but individuals (should) remember. the fact that many do not is what is hard to explain, as revealed by the ambiguity of the lethe metaphor in the case of italian fascism: are italians “unable” to remember because of some overarching contextual failure, or do they actively drink from the lethe themselves, deliberately seeking oblivion? in juxtaposing classical literature on the ethics of remembering and forgetting and anthropological engagements with forgetting, what i want to draw attention to is that one way to answer the question of how people forget might be to shift focus from what socially imposed practices of forgetting do to inner states to what practices of forgetting as ethical technologies do to perceptions of self. in other words, instead of asking about the presence or absence of particular memories, in certain contexts it might prove more productive to ask about what kinds of continuities and discontinuities of self are exhibited by such memories or their absence. eco (1988, 260) suggests one of the ways in which this process may function when he describes the possibility of an art of oblivion that would succeed not by dint of effacement but of excess: “i can try to forget [something] by training myself to pronounce [something else] repeatedly, day after day, until i become incapable of remembering which of the two versions is the right one.” this process resembles connerton’s (2008, 63) description of forms of forgetting directed at the formation of new identities, insofar as the forgotten object is not so much destroyed as written over and replaced. it resembles battaglia’s (1992, 9) descriptions of melanesian understandings of “forgetting’s constructive role in the creation of . . . new memory.” and of course it reinforces forlenza’s point about the italian case that we are not only the past we can remember but also the past we can forget. it is also, in a sense, the equivalent of ricœur’s point that remembering and forgetting go hand in hand. in other words, in an important sense, eco’s prescription for an art of forgetting is also an art of memory: the technology of forgetting is the same as the technology of remembering. to forget something, you must remember something else, just as, as we know from ricœur and many others, to remember something is to forget something else. blessed acts of oblivion 115 in other words, it is not hard to think of comparable instances in which a process of “active remembering” produces a form of “active forgetting,” and the line between the two may be blurred, partial, or ambiguous. indeed, absent special psychological insight or access, it may prove impossible to know which is more important: the thing remembered or the thing forgotten. in connecting such instances to the notion of an art or ethical technology, my point again is that the self that results from the process of remembering and forgetting may sometimes be just as important, if not more so, than exactly what it is that is remembered and forgotten. in such situations, the relevant questions to ask would be not just what has been forgotten and how, but also what has been remembered in its place; against what wider background does it make sense to forget this, and remember that; and what kinds of continuities and discontinuities of self are effected by such practices? furthermore, and just as seneca sought to remember for its own sake (regardless of what in particular it was that he remembered) because he prized continuity of subjectivity, so it may be that there are contexts in which exactly what it is that people forget, or whether or not in fact they really have forgotten it, matters less than the attitude of having forgotten, and the consequent demonstration of certain discontinuities of subjectivity. below i examine a number of different attitudes to forgetfulness in an ethnographic context in which memory constitutes a problem partly because the continuity of political subjectivity constitutes a problem. in a town built by a fascist dictator to celebrate his life in the middle of the most left-wing region of italy, a place where most families have a deeply complex history of affiliation with both the left and the right, forgetting—clearly separating yourself from your past—may sometimes be just as important a duty as remembering. the red and the black outsiders often assume an obvious sense in which people in predappio exhibit discontinuity in their political subjectivity: because of its emblematic status in relation to fascism, italians who don’t know the town, from both the left and right, often think that all its inhabitants must themselves therefore be fascist, and any protest to the contrary must be disingenuous. thus people in predappio tell stories of favorable treatment from right-leaning policemen as soon as they show their id cards and residency, and frassineti, while mayor of the town, used regularly to receive a postcard addressing him as “dear fascist dickhead” (see heywood 2024a, 2024b). cultural anthropology 40:1 116 in fact, frassineti was only the latest in what was, until 2019, an unbroken line of left-wing and communist mayors of predappio since the end of the war; the town sits in the historic heartland of the italian left; and mussolini himself, along with his father, were well known locally as socialist activists—his father was a town councillor for the socialist party, and gave his son the names of famous left-wing heroes. none of these facts, however, deter many outsiders from assuming that, deep down, anyone from predappio must share the political coloring of their most famous fellow citizen, and this has led many predappiesi to spend their lives lying about or hiding their place of origin whenever they go abroad. to this view any attitude of forgetfulness toward fascism may be dismissed as dissembling, an attempt to mask genuine historical loyalties beneath a veneer of pretense. unsurprisingly, things prove much more complex than this in reality. predappio is no more politically homogenous than any other town of comparable size in the region, and in fact, its long history of voting for the left reflects an extended local historical tradition of anticlerical, agrarian, and socialist activism. and local attitudes toward discontinuous political loyalties and subjectivities reflect an equally long-standing and complex set of circumstances, in which forgetting has a nuanced role to play. the roots of predappiesi concerns with the problem of the continuity of political allegiance and conviction are to be found in the roots of mussolini and fascism themselves. “historic turncoat number one in predappio was benito mussolini, the duce of fascism, son of alessandro mussolini, anarchist socialist, and blacksmith of dovia [as predappio was then known],” notes one of the only histories of predappio, written by three amateur historians and local residents (capacci, pasini, and giunchi 2014, 212). mussolini and his family were wellknown in the village when they lived there: his mother was the local schoolteacher and his father the blacksmith, as well as a councillor for the socialist party, until his arrest and imprisonment for participation in a riot after the loss of an election. many in the village would have followed mussolini’s early political career in the same party as his father, first at the local level, when he ran unsuccessfully for the post of secretary to the village council after finishing school in 1901, and then much more successfully at the regional, and later national levels, as he rose to prominence as a firebrand speaker and the editor of avanti!, the national organ of the socialist party. no doubt many would also have followed his expulsion from the party in 1914 over his decision to support and lobby for italian intervention in world war i. blessed acts of oblivion 117 questions were very quickly raised in italian socialist circles as to the motivation behind this volte-face on the part of mussolini, who had previously toed the party line on neutrality, and one question in particular was asked often: “chi paga? [who is the paymaster?]” r. j. b. bosworth (2002, 350–53) describes evidence that mussolini was paid both personally and in the form of funding for the new newspaper he would go on to set up by the italian and french governments, who hoped his change of position on the war would draw in support for it from other northern leftists. whether or not such suspicions occurred to any of his fellow citizens in predappio, the disparity between the socialism of mussolini’s youth in the village and the fascism he espoused by the time he returned home for his first visit as prime minister shortly after ascending to that position in 1922 will certainly have been obvious to his erstwhile compatriots. for at least two years by that point fascist squads had been terrorizing the north of italy—including the environs of predappio—beating, kidnapping, and killing political opponents and destroying and burning any homes or buildings suspected of harboring socialists or communists. the disparity clearly did not escape mussolini himself either: in an early instance of an active attempt to forget political disloyalty, he had several of his former socialist comrades from the village rounded up and imprisoned for the duration of his visit, so that their presence would not prompt the recollection of any inconvenient memories. the occasion of his 1922 visit home was the inauguration of a project that formed, in some sense, a large-scale version of eco’s forgetting by remembering. this essentially involved the construction of an entirely new town in the place of the village in which socialist mussolini grew up, a town built around the myth of mussolini’s biography, but one in which his early politics had no place (heywood 2022, 2024a). a number of local political friends-turned-opponents were sent into internal exile, and thousands of migrants were bussed in to take their place in the sparkling apartment buildings of the new settlement. mussolini’s father became mythologized to some extent as part of this project thanks to his status as a man of the people and humble blacksmith, but his fervent anarchist socialism of course never found mention, and he largely took second place to mussolini’s mother, the teacher after whose saint the nursery school in predappio is still named. in mussolini’s case, in other words, we meet what is very obviously a situation in which a clear set of continuities between past and present are established: mussolini’s proletarian origins, his mother’s career caring for and teaching cultural anthropology 40:1 118 children, and, as i have described elsewhere (heywood 2022), predappio’s status as an “ordinary” italian town were all heavily emphasized in regime propaganda and the wider “cult of the duce” (serenelli 2013) as clearly contributing to a hagiographic narrative in which mussolini emerges from his humble roots to become the savior of the nation. by contrast, factors seen to fit this narrative less well, most obviously his father’s and his own socialism, were performatively forgotten. i say performatively because had such things truly been forgotten, there would have been no need to arrest mussolini’s erstwhile compatriots on the occasion of his visit. this example of the phenomenon i describe may seem almost too easy for us to recognize, as the narrative of the self at issue is that of a dictator, and his medium is nation-state propaganda. mussolini is obviously far from the only example of a political leader who has sought to suppress some aspects of his own biography in service of producing a coherent hagiographic narrative. it is, though, worth remembering that for people in predappio, mussolini was both more and less than this: more in the sense that he was a concrete person, united by ties of kinship and affinity with many locals, and familiar from his youth; less in the sense that for precisely that reason, the performative forgetting his propaganda demanded was unlikely to succeed. of course people noticed the temporary (or sometimes permanent) disappearance of mussolini’s old friends, and locals tell a number of stories in which predappiesi feel entitled to make their memory of mussolini’s political past slyly clear: in one, a godson of mussolini is baptized by the duce himself, when he was a socialist, with the anticlerical name of “rebel.” after the lateran pact between fascist italy and the catholic church, mussolini tells the child’s father he must change his son’s name, and the father replies coldly that since, after all, mussolini gave him the first name, he had better be the one to change it (capacci, pasini, and giunchi 2014, 214). in another, on a visit to the town, mussolini stops a local character he recognizes from his days in the socialist party to ask him what he thinks of the political situation, and the man replies (in local dialect) that he has never liked the white poplar leaf (la fója de farfaraz) and turns pointedly away from him (capacci, pasini, and giunchi 2014, 203). the farfaraz, or pioppo bianco, in italian, is a type of poplar tree famous for the contrast between the striking white underside of its leaves and their dark green upper side. poplars are noted for their mobility in the wind, which can cause their leaves to flip rapidly back and forth even in a slight breeze, and for blessed acts of oblivion 119 this reason the white poplar’s leaf is locally symbolic of a voltagabbana, or turncoat, someone who switches political colors for convenience. la fója de farfaraz is also the title of the local history book from which i have just quoted, and it is filled with other, similar stories. in fact, the reason it refers to mussolini as “historic turncoat number one” is because he is but the first of a large number of turncoats who fill its pages and from whom the book takes its name. one favorite such story—that i have recounted elsewhere (heywood 2024a, 2024b)—is of angelo ciaranfi, the last democratically elected mayor of predappio in 1920, before the advent of fascism forced his resignation in 1922. after a few years under the regime, however, ciaranfi underwent a conversion, joining the italian fascist party. to make the strength of his new convictions clear, he even rewrote his will to include a codicil requiring him to be buried in a fascist blackshirt. later still, “after the disaster and the tragedy of war, and the failures of fascism,” runs the story in la fója de farfaraz, ciaranfi, good old ciaranfi, realized he’d made a serious mistake, and turned on his feet politically again, joining the italian communist party. after the liberation of predappio, he served in the administration of the first postwar democratic mayor, giuseppe ferlini. but those tumultuous years had no doubt radically transformed ciaranfi’s existence, like those of many other italians, and it’s probably for this reason that he forgot to rewrite his will. so, when he died in june 1948, and his testament obliged him to be buried in a blackshirt, there was much consternation and embarrassment among his comrades, who were expecting to send him off draped in the red flag with the “internationale” playing. in the end, and not without argument, it was decided that his body would lie in an open casket, and obligatory blackshirt, for a brief private ceremony with the family, before being buried with casket closed in a civil ceremony, complete with the pci band and the red flag. (capacci, pasini, and giunchi 2014, 219; all translations my own) in ciaranfi’s case, as in mussolini’s, we have a very clear case of remembering and forgetting both equally cultivated. the case literalizes eco’s idea of inducing forgetfulness through synonymy, as ciaranfi is buried with full communist cultural anthropology 40:1 120 honors and trappings, with the approval of the local party apparatus, in an obvious attempt to memorialize a consistent political subject, loyal to the cause of the left, and to paper over the blackshirt in the coffin. yet there is nothing in the story itself—or in the humor with which people relate it—to tell us which we should understand as primary: the funeral’s memorialization of ciaranfi’s left-wing politics, or its papering over of his rightwing politics. indeed, we may even suspect that ciaranfi himself forgot the inconvenient will with the blackshirt codicil precisely because his transformation was genuine. had it not been for the will, ciaranfi’s fascist service may very well have been forgotten, as has that of many others. the twin tales of mussolini and ciaranfi, from the beginning and the end of the fascist period, both stand as examples of the uses of memory and forgetting in the crafting of a narrative of self. in mussolini’s case, the performative nature of the forgetting is made obvious by his arrest of his former socialist comrades. but in ciaranfi’s case, there is no such clarity about whether the point of the narrative of self is to forget or to remember. both stories also evidence the fact that the kinds of narratives of selfhood produced by the cultivation of memory and forgetfulness belong not only to their subjects, even when those subjects possess the machinery of nation-state propaganda. the so-called cult of the duce may have in many ways succeeded in erasing mussolini’s socialism from the italian public sphere, but it could not erase it from the memories of those who knew him as “turncoat number one.” in ciaranfi’s case, one can imagine that those officiating at his communist party funeral may well have felt it worthwhile to collude in his forgetting, perhaps for the benefit of the postwar town settlement; it is ciaranfi’s own failure to be consistent in remembering and forgetting that causes his discontinuous self to spill out beyond his narrative. forgettingscapes the fascist and post-fascist period in predappio was rife with discontinuous political subjects, “white poplar leaves,” in local parlance. this no doubt held true in many places in italy, but it was particularly true in predappio, whose whole existence throbs with political contradiction: located in the heart of italy’s “red belt” but built by its fascist dictator (a man whose own political contradictions were intimately known to its inhabitants), subsequently governed by a nearly unbroken series of communist and post-communist mayors, and all the while a pilgrimage site for italy’s neofascists. in the face of such contradictions, blessed acts of oblivion 121 then, sometimes what you forget is just as important as what you remember in its place. contemporary attitudes to what to remember and what to forget about predappio’s past in many ways exhibit a similar degree of cultivation. this becomes particularly evident in relation to spaces of memory (and forgetting—see diemberger 2016; harrison 2004). for example, the rocca delle caminate is a medieval castle that sits atop one of the hills surrounding the town. it was already a thousand years old when gifted to mussolini by local authorities in 1923 for use as a summer residence. it played host to a number of famous domestic and foreign visiting dignitaries over the years of the dictatorship, as well having a spotlight installed in its highest tower that would project the fasces onto the night sky when mussolini was in residence; the spotlight was so powerful it could be seen sixty kilometers away on the coast (heywood 2024a, 2024c). during the war its history darkens, as it becomes a barracks and a prison to hold local partisans. some locals claim the first meeting of the government of the republic of salò took place there in 1943, but undoubtedly, a number of prisoners were tortured and murdered there over the subsequent two years, including one famous local hero called antonio carini. the only acknowledgment of this history today is a small plaque, almost hidden behind several outbuildings, hard to come upon except by accident. it denotes the place as the site of the deaths of “noble spirits who courageously resisted brutal torture and gave their lives for a free italy.” this plaque was first erected in 2009—before, the site had no marker at all. today, an expensive remodeling project has restored the rocca, leaving almost no trace of its fascist past. designed to host companies from the burgeoning tech sector of emilia romagna, the castle, at my last visit, was home to only one so far. nevertheless, the interior now boasts a mass of offices, conference suites, reception rooms, and meeting halls, all decorated in the bland style of a modern aesthetic that sits uneasily within the much older walls of the building. some of the walls and ceilings have had renaissance frescoes and mosaics restored, but none of the many fasces mussolini had added to the decor remain. on one visit to the rocca, i traveled with giorgio frassineti, the then mayor of predappio, and two visiting bbc journalists, who had come to cover the increasing international furor over the museum project. the mayor wanted to display the rocca as an example of how predappio could make successful use of its difficult past, but his praise of the costly remodeling rang somewhat hollow in the empty offices. after viewing the inside, we strolled through the castle’s cultural anthropology 40:1 122 extensive grounds, moving past the old barracks and prison without comment, and out into a small forest. frassineti began describing memories of how he used to play in the ruins of the castle as a boy, before its restoration. like the “restoration” itself, which rendered the rocca an odd concatenation of old (renaissance mosaics) and new (aluminum and leather furniture), made strange partly by the notable absence of anything from the period in between, the mayor’s cheerful stories of boyhood games offered a strikingly particular way of narrating the past of the place, feet away from the hidden plaque honoring carini. as in the cases described in the previous section, the forgetting at work here does not happen in isolation from remembering, and it would be a mistake to imagine that the large sums of money devoted to the rocca’s restoration were spent simply in an attempt to erase aspects of an uncomfortable heritage. the restoration certainly does not highlight the rocca’s dark history, nor do frassineti’s memories of postwar happiness, but that past is also not completely erased— nor indeed could it be, given its local and national infamy. at the same time, the rocca’s renaissance past and the mayor’s childhood games offer easy alternative memories, in eco’s terms, ones that establish a certain history and continuity to predappio’s existence while sidestepping the wider national narrative that inextricably connects predappio to only one aspect of its history. a great many other spaces of memory (and forgetting) in predappio exhibit similar qualities of having certain histories cultivated in them and others cultivated out of them, as i describe at length elsewhere (heywood 2024a). a comparable example is the town’s cemetery, about a kilometer away, built during the predappio’s reconstruction under the dictatorship. one enters the large walled structure through one of three imposing arches to the vista of a tree-lined pathway leading to the romanesque crypt that houses the remains of the mussolini family. the whole cemetery, in other words, like predappio itself, is built around memories of mussolini, but it is also filled with the kin of almost everyone currently living in the town, no matter what they felt or feel about fascism. this becomes painfully obvious during the days of the neofascist anniversary marches, which always take place on a sunday, a day on which many locals choose to visit and tend the graves of their relatives. to reach the tombs of their loved ones, elderly townspeople step around blackshirted marchers giving the roman salute, and i have written elsewhere of the marked quality of the way in which the visitors are studiously ignored (heywood 2023). my point here is about the ways in which memories of their own kin and relatives in the cemetery blessed acts of oblivion 123 can serve to overwrite, or at least compete with, the memories of mussolini that neofascist visitors keenly keep alive. in a brilliant discussion of the complexities of unearthing republican civil war dead in spain who were secretly buried in regular church cemeteries, sometimes in the interstices between normal tombs, layla renshaw shows how francoist executioners sought—for a long time successfully—to disguise the dead bodies that lent evidence to their crimes by hiding them amid other corpses (renshaw 2023; see also ferrandiz 2022). the republican dead were forgotten not by being cast into oblivion, but precisely by being housed in a place of memory, the memory of others. there is a sense in which locals in predappio seek—against the odds—to effect the same sort of operation on mussolini. in their insistent memorialization of their own loved ones, even in the face of predappio’s neofascist tourists, they treat the cemetery like any other, a repository of all the dead, instead of a monument to only one of them. “they’re just visiting a dead person, like i am,” says valentina, a nonagenarian with a plethora of relatives buried in the cemetery. she dislikes the visitors, precisely for the memories of the war they conjure up, a war in which she endured hardship and starvation, and that left her with injuries that persist today. like eco, though—and like anyone who has tried—she knows she cannot simply will herself to forget unpleasant memories. instead, she tries to remember those she prefers and takes comfort in small successes: “the other day i got out some old pictures and i was looking at the photo of the school football team from before the war, the one my brother played for, and so did bruno [mussolini’s son]. of course i knew which one my brother was, but then i realized i couldn’t remember which one was bruno—lucky me, i thought. i wish i could forget them all.” what the case of the cemetery makes particularly clear is that to see attitudes to predappio’s fascist past as “merely” forgetful, whether successfully so or in bad faith, is to see only half of the story. it is to miss the extent to which such attitudes are not only about avoiding a past that is “difficult” or “uncomfortable,” but also about remembering other things in its place—about constructing a self not only discontinuous in some ways, as all selves are, but also continuous in others. such operations of remembering and forgetting are necessary aspects of cultivating a narrative with which one can live more or less happily in predappio because of the wider local context within which they occur, one in which injunctions to remember fascism come most explicitly from the thousands of far-right visitors the town receives every year. cultural anthropology 40:1 124 conclusion in a manner parallel to the ways in which casey high, ann kelly, and jonathan mair (2012) note that anthropologists and others are wont to assume that knowledge is always good and ignorance always bad, here i have argued that we sometimes make similar assumptions about remembering and forgetting. remembering, we may assume, must be ethical because of the duty it fulfils to those things and people remembered, and/or because of the beneficial effects it has on the self. likewise we may assume that—like ignorance in respect of knowledge—forgetting is simply the absence or failure of memory, and perhaps even that it induces a fragmentation rather than coherence of subjecthood (as in the figure of the amnesiac in popular imaginaries). understanding forgetting as a technology of the self yields a potential answer to the problem of how to forget that goes beyond forgetting as failure or imposition. that is, if the staple that “remembering one thing is forgetting another” is correct, the technologies of remembrance with which a number of ethical traditions are replete are necessarily also technologies of forgetting—and vice versa. we forget things by insistently remembering other things in their place, as eco argues. i have argued that it is simplistic to frame forgetting as always a simple moral defect or passive process, one to be countered by active technologies of remembering. insofar as they are necessarily selective, such technologies themselves also constitute instruments of forgetting, and sometimes, as here, they may be employed as such, useful for what they paper over as much as for what they bring back to mind. in other words, not only may forgetting make for an active process, as nietzsche and others have argued, but it may also constitute the same sort of process as active remembering. seeing this mutual imbrication of technologies of memory and forgetting in the pursuit of narratives of subjectivity reveals a set of alternative questions to those that ask simply about what has been forgotten and how successfully. it makes clear that in some cases—particularly perhaps those that sit against a background of conflict and difficult heritage—it is the crafted narrative that remembering and forgetting aim to create that proves more important than what has been remembered or forgotten. this essay has showcased a number of different forms this can take. mussolini’s “forgetful” political discontinuity is most obviously self-serving and performative, as evidenced by the arrest of his former socialist colleagues. in ciaranfi’s case, on the other hand, we have a much clearer example of the point blessed acts of oblivion 125 made here: like the sabarl funerary practices battaglia (1992) describes, ciaranfi’s communist burial aims at forgetting parts of his self to remember others. the parts remembered are continuous only in the absence of the parts forgotten. but it is impossible to say which process is primary. and contemporary attitudes to the past in predappio prove equally ambiguous: to narrate them as merely forgetful of what seems most striking to outsiders about the town is to ignore the fact that they involve memory too. these issues tie into broader debates on memory in italy, as forlenza’s work, among others, makes clear. as he describes, there were many reasons why forgetting, as “a blessed act of oblivion,” in winston churchill’s words, might have seemed attractive in postwar italy (forlenza 2018, 173). what i have sought to make clear here is that such forgetting need not only work through silence and absence: rather, successful forgetting (of one thing) is often manifested precisely in the presence of memory (of something else). we can see comparable instances in other ethnographic cases, such as some of the literature on post-soviet memory, for example. bruce grant (2001, 335) points to the ways in which many of the expensive new monuments built by the state in moscow in the wake of the fall of the soviet union generated an aesthetic of childlike innocence by depicting figures from fairy tales and folk stories, thus gesturing to what he calls “a return to an age of simpler pasts and new beginnings.” part of his point is to indicate that forgetting takes remembering—forgetting the soviet union means remembering (anew) a pre-communist national narrative. but of course, as in the examples described here, the point and interest of such practices is not only the “negative” work of forgetting and erasing, which is in any case likely to be unsuccessful; the point is also what positive story emerges, and the place in it for various historical elements. framing conflicts over memory—such as those found in italy around fascism—as simple choices between remembering and forgetting is thus unlikely to prove helpful or explanatory. as suggested by the note in the visitors’ book at mussolini’s tomb that opened this essay, neofascists are just as likely as anyone else to think that “remembering freely” is ethical, and that forgetfulness is a sin. indeed, in a context in which memory (“nostalgia”) is actively demanded in the service of neofascist politics, forgetting may be a—complex and ambiguous— way of evading such demands, much as passerini (1987, 65) described “popular and archaic cultural forms” as a “complex and contradictory” means of eluding political control under fascism: it is as much a mistake to deduce the presence of consent from the absence of memory as it was under fascism to deduce it from cultural anthropology 40:1 126 the absence of political opposition. understanding technologies of memorialization—both public and, as i have tried to show here, individual—as necessarily also technologies of forgetting allows us to ask what is at stake in these twin processes, and what happens when they become blurred. abstract this essay explores the ethics of forgetting as a technology of the self. forgetfulness is a feature of a range of contexts of political conflict and “difficult” heritage. such forgetfulness is often imagined as an imposition (as when states deny the freedom to remember) or a weakness (as when people are thought to repress uncomfortable or difficult memories). here, by contrast, i examine a context of difficult heritage and political conflict in which people forget some things by remembering others, and i highlight the ways in which it is often hard to disentangle the primary process. rather than ask whether the point is what you remember or what you forget, alternative and more interesting questions are revealed, i suggest, by asking what kind of subject constitutes the ideal end result. [forgetting; memory; italy; fascism; predappio; ethics] riassunto questo articolo esplora l’etica dell’oblio come tecnologia del sé. l’oblio è una caratteristica di una serie di contesti di conflitto politico e di “eredità difficili”. tale oblio è spesso immaginato come un’imposizione (come quando uno stato nega la libertà di ricordare) o come una debolezza (come quando si pensa che una persona reprima ricordi scomodi o difficili). qui, al contrario, esamino un contesto di eredità difficile e di conflitto politico in cui le persone dimenticano alcune cose ricordandone altre, e sottolineo come spesso sia difficile districare quale processo sia primario. piuttosto che chiedersi se il punto sia ciò che si ricorda o ciò che si dimentica, suggerisco che domande alternative e più interessanti si rivelano chiedendo quale tipo di soggetto sia il risultato ideale. [oblio; memoria; italia; fascismo; predappio; etica] notes acknowledgments research on which this paper is based was carried out with generous support from an erc consolidator grant and by a junior research fellowship at homerton college, cambridge. i am very grateful to catherine alexander, joanna cook, james laidlaw, adam reed, and thomas yarrow for their comments on early drafts of this piece. thanks also to matei candea for introducing me to eco on forgetting so long ago that i have forgotten exactly when, and to the three anonymous reviewers and the editorial team and managing editor at cultural anthropology for their extremely thoughtful and generous guidance. blessed acts of oblivion 127 references arthurs, joshua 2010 “fascism as heritage in contemporary italy.” in italy today: the sick man of europe, edited by andrea mammone and giuseppe a. veltri, 114–28. london: routledge. augé, marc 1998 les formes de l’oubli [the forms of forgetting]. paris: payot et rivages. battaglia, 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https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.51 mammone, andrea 2006 “a daily revision of the past: fascism, anti-fascism, and memory in contemporary italy.” modern italy 11, no. 2: 211–26. https://doi. org/10.1080/13532940600709338 maulsby, lucy m. 2014 “drinking from the river lethe: case del fascio and the legacy of fascism in postwar italy.” future anterior 11, no. 2: 18–39. https://doi.org/10.5749/ futuante.11.2.0019 mookherjee, nayanika 2006 “‘remembering to forget’: public secrecy and memory of sexual violence in the bangladesh war of 1971.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 12, no. 2: 433–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00299.x passerini, luisa 1983 “memory.” history workshop journal 15, no. 1: 195–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/ hwi/15.1.195 1987 fascism in popular memory: the cultural experience of the turin working class. translated by robert lumley and jude bloomfield. cambridge: cambridge university press. pavone, claudio 2000 “negazionismi, rimozioni, 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new haven, conn.: yale university press. serenelli, sofia 2013 “a town for the cult of the duce: predappio as a site of pilgrimage.” in the cult of the duce: mussolini and the italians, edited by stephen gundle, christopher duggan, and giuliana pieri, 93–110. manchester: manchester university press. storchi, simona 2013 “mussolini as monument: the equestrian statue of the duce at the littoriale stadium in bologna.” in the cult of the duce: mussolini and the italians, edited by stephen gundle, christopher duggan, and giuliana pieri, 193–208. manchester: manchester university press. 2019 “the ex-casa del fascio in predappio and the question of the “difficult heritage’ of fascism in contemporary italy.” modern italy 24, no. 2: 139–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2019.8 symons, stéphane 2019 the work of forgetting; or, how can we make the future possible? london: rowman and littlefield. taylor, ann-cristine 1993 “remembering to forget: identity, mourning, and memory among the jivaro.” man 28, no. 4: 653–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/2803991 trouillot, michel-rolph 1995 silencing the past: power and the production of history. boston: beacon press. vitebsky, piers 2008 “loving and forgetting: moments of inarticulacy in tribal india.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 14, no. 2: 243–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14679655.2008.00500.x zahora, tomas 2015 “the art of forgetting the middle ages: cornelius agrippa’s rhetoric of extinction.” sixteenth century journal 46, no. 2: 359–80. https://doi. org/10.1086/scj4602005 https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2019.8 https://doi.org/10.2307/2803991 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00500.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00500.x https://doi.org/10.1086/scj4602005 https://doi.org/10.1086/scj4602005 blessed acts of oblivion: on the ethics of forgetting memory wars and predappio the red and the black forgettingscapes conclusion abstract riassunto notes references the afterlife of sacrifice in the kurdish movement cultural anthropology, vol. 39, issue 4, pp. 507-532, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.02 the afterlife of sacrifice in the kurdish movement esin düzel sabancı university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9079-4673 in march 2015, i went to the diyarbakır greater metropolitan municipality, just as i had done many times over the course of my fieldwork, to conduct a follow-up interview with berivan,1 a kurdish woman in her early thirties. her work at the municipality involved close interactions with diyarbakırites, inhabitants of a city that had traversed two very different stages of kurdish revolutionary politics—a period of intense warring and states of emergency (1984–2002) and a period of democratization (2002–2015).2 when the conflict between the kurdistan workers’ party (partiya karkerên kurdistanê, hereafter pkk) and the turkish state broke out in 1984, the state declared a state of emergency across the kurdish-majority cities of southeastern turkey (or northern kurdistan), including diyarbakır (amed, in kurdish). it turned rural areas into security zones and forcefully evacuated the villages to cut off the pkk’s contacts with these villages. the expansion of conflict into the rural and urban areas led to mass migrations to diyarbakır, doubling its population to 1.5 million inhabitants and creating many infrastructural problems. in 1999, pro-kurdish parties began to win seats in municipal elections.3 with the lifting of the decade-long state of emergency in 2002, diyarbakır became an example of “a laboratory of sovereign rule” in the revolutionary struggle (klem and maunaguru 2017, 630). my research traces the translation of the kurdish movement’s revolutionary ideas into urban culture, as well as the reconstruction of a democratic society amid an ongoing but decelerated conflict, neoliberal encroachment, and the adverse influence of the turkish state in diyarbakır.4 it was during that decade and a half that revolutionaries like berivan—herself an ardent supporter and militant of the movement, with three martyrs in her family—became civic workers, shaping the everyday life of the war-torn city. as we moved from her crowded office to a private room in the municipality, berivan became visibly tense. she explained that her supervisor, a kurdish man also from the movement but with upper-class privileges she lacked, had summoned her to his office and had proceeded to reprimand her over a resident’s complaint. a diyarbakırite seeking services had evidently disliked the way berivan had talked to him. berivan recounted to me the angry words she and her supervisor had exchanged. berivan: i talk to people in kurdish. maybe that’s why it sounded harsh to him. you cannot berate me like this without understanding the situation. my family put you in your position here [benim ailem seni buraya getirmiş]. you have no right to do this. supervisor: this is not your father’s place [burası senin babanın yeri değil]! berivan: you know what? this is exactly my father’s place [burası tam da benim babamın yeri]. this seat you’re sitting in is my father’s seat. it was secured with my father’s blood. get up! [kalk] in the end, berivan left the office—in tears. despite bringing in a reference to her martyr father, and even the sacred word blood, she had failed to establish a moral authority that would take her out of a difficult situation. instead, she acutely realized that the moral hierarchy based in the sacrifice her father (and other martyrs) had made during the revolutionary struggle had vanished. what was her father’s sacrifice for, then? the exchange was one example among many of the deep frustrations i encountered during my fieldwork. they communicated an ever-widening rift between the revolutionary cause and kurdish governance. for some, the democratization period needed to be led by revolutionary principles: a moral hierarchy based on the superiority of heroic, fatal sacrifice, and a political struggle toward self-rule that included self-defense. others welcomed the change. for them, the new kurdish revolutionary politics needed to demonstrate its capability of ­handling everyday matters, such as garbage management, as well as cultural, social, and political matters, such as domestic violence and gender equality, ecologically sound living, and grass-roots democracy. people like berivan saw themselves as marginalized, dismissed, and denied their value as relatives of the sacred. in the context of 2011–2015 diyarbakır, such rifts had surfaced into a bitter polarizing language within the kurdish revolutionary community, breaking long-term friendships and comradeships at a time when the kurdish movement had finally gained power. munici­pal seats were won, but what had happened to the revolution? kurdish studies scholars analyze tensions and disappointments through a comprehensive and multilayered attention to the ideological, economic, and social differences that surfaced in the democratization period. situating kurdish governance within the decolonization literature, zeynep gambetti (2009) identifies early signs of neoliberal encroachment in the movement, shaping new class identities. cuma çiçek refers to the deepening conflicts of interest between national and economic blocs in the movement that the democratization agenda failed to resolve (çiçek 2017, 107–27). bülent küçük (2019, 7–10) shows how these economic tensions reflect on and are shaped by two political subjectivities: the radicalizing youth and the legalizing middle classes. küçük (2019, 12–13) also underlines the tensions arising from the pkk’s imposition of its violent strategies over democratic politics. umut yıldırım (2019) demonstrates how the dual agenda of kurdish governance, functioning within neoliberal structures and decolonization, has simultaneously led to the pervasion of neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivity and affective states of “dissonance.” building on this literature, i focus on the moral confusions and uncertainties around the new political project: how to translate the value of revolutionary sacrifices into the democratic struggle to remake the social and the political? as this ethnography demonstrates, this translation was not simply a matter of a shift in political agenda, but a deeper transformation of values, subjectivities, and everyday life in the kurdish movement. how would this-worldly correspondence to revolutionary sacrifice be identified within the everyday life in diyarbakır? who would do the translations? how would they shape the new politics in the democratic project? sacrifice lies at the core of moral hierarchies and socio-political orders. unsettling the ancient notions of sacrifice as a gift to god, earlier anthropological theories contend that there is no such thing as a free gift (mauss 1992). gift-giving and sacrifice initiate relationships based on moral and social indebtedness; “there is perhaps no sacrifice that has not some contractual element” (hubert and mauss 1981, 100). through sacrificial rituals, societies form a “wider, nonindividual, and life-transcending unity” and mold their “vital” powers into societal, political, and even military structures (bloch 1992, 42). sacrifice and the communities of indebtedness help the nationalist and militarist sovereignties control and produce effects to bind their subjects closer in an ever-widening way (rashid 2020). in contrast to this earlier work, more recent studies refuse to think of sacrifice in terms of its function and focus on its disruptive, disordering, and revolutionary aspects. they argue that too much emphasis on reciprocity inserts an insidious logic of debt into social relationships, foreclosing the possibility of a “true” gift or sacrifice (derrida 1992, 24). these critics find in gift and sacrifice an excess irreducible to debt (derrida 1995; bataille 1991). giving can be meaningful as much as it looks like destroying or losing, a principle that precludes ­exchangeability or reciprocity (bataille 1991, 68–70). sacrifice is revolutionary as it creates an absolute rupture from existing reality, and unleashes a transformation that cannot be foreseen, contained, or managed. carrying out a liminal period with a lot of uncertainties, and thereby with potential for political intervention, sacrifice in essence constitutes a revolutionary act. while these positions on the possibility or impossibility of a repayment of a sacrifice approach the question from within the ritual, i suggest a shift to its temporalities. sacrifice exists across disparate, changing, and at times overlapping temporalities in relation to its context, the actors who sacrifice, the sacrificial object, and what is considered sacred. two senses of temporality are present in this ethnography: first, chronological time (emergency and democratization periods), and second, sacred time (the centrality of revolutionary sacrifice as sacred, and its decentering). scholarship on one of the most dramatic forms of sacrifice, martyrdom, has mostly analyzed sacrifice from within its sacred time—where it creates bonds, releasing an energy considered sacred, and making violence into a “formation” (feldman 1991). yet sacred and chronological temporalities diverge, converge, and otherwise relate to each other. malagasy, for example, alternate between pre-colonial, colonial, and present temporalities of sacrifice in an “artful” way to resolve tensions and remake their communities (cole 2001, 197). the present tense is used in angolan revolutionaries’ self-sacrificial practices as “an invitation to optimism, concretization of change” (blanes 2021, 136). chronological time, especially the present tense, constitutes the most neglected temporality of sacrifice in anthropological theories, subsumed under sacred pasts and sacred futures. alternative presents cast a different light on sacred temporalities, reshaping evaluations of loss, debt, and revolution. in this essay, i use sacrifice’s afterlife to examine moral confusions in a democratizing society. in chronological time, afterlife refers to the indeterminate but gradual slippage of fatal loss due to the conflict’s slowing down. it makes for a messy episode, because sacrificial death has never completely disappeared, though notions of survival, normality, and future have come to the fore. in sacred time, the afterlife of sacrifice refers to the ongoing succession of afterlives that entail changes to the kurdish movement’s moral/social temporal order within the lived historical time of emergency/democratization periods. it entails both the “victory” and the frustration that the victory does not completely feel like one. to explore the messiness of these afterlives, i turn to recent explorations of “afterlives” in anthropology. the term afterlives resurrects specters of what is assumed dead, lost, or otherwise disappeared. anthropologists explore the lingering presences, or “hauntings” (gordon 2008), in the aftermath of an event that would challenge our understanding of the event and its social and political meanings (schäfers 2020; navaro et al. 2021). alice wilson (2023, 3–4) collects values, ideas, social networks, and hopes of the dhufari revolution, “the lasting legacies” that persist even after the revolution’s demise and under authoritarian repression. refusing to interpret the revolutionary afterlives through a static win-or-fail lens, wilson (2023, 13) sees them as a potentiality, like “a living tree with branches and roots” growing into new experiences and insights. in turkey, aslı zengin (2019, 92–93) traces queer afterlives: trans sex worker women are subjected to hate crimes, and it is their trans friends who create an afterlife for their lost one by taking care of her body, grieving for her, and creating a home and a queer family among themselves. through such care, transwomen cultivate their own forms of sovereignty from within their intimate lives. whether a movement, an aspiration, or a human is assumed dead, afterlives indicate the continuation of their lives in other ways, often with critical insights and potentialities that can unsettle existing orders. the afterlife of sacrifice refers to a potentiality that casts new light on both sacrificial loss and the sacred it aims to regenerate. in the kurdish case, we have seen the divergence of sacrifice from its ritual form at the convergence of chronological and sacred temporalities of sacrifice, “the victory.” this is experienced by berivan and other relatives of the martyrs as the apparent failure of their relatives’ loss to accumulate into a hope for a revolutionary future, or a shared value for a revolutionary community, or a power over mundane life. marlene schäfers (2023) illustrates the pervasive concern among of the relatives of the martyrs to establish afterlives for them through their photographic images. these “latent” images carry within them the regenerative, hegemonic, and yet undeterminable power of sacrifice, which can project sovereignty but also instill ambivalence into such projections. sacrifice does not indicate “birth” (lambek 2007) or “oneness” (holbraad 2014) anymore; it proves much more plural and messy. however destabilizing, debilitating, and frustrating the decentering of revolutionary sacrifice is, sacrifice branches out into new forms in the aftermath. failure, or “a victory that cannot feel like one,” opens into a multiplicity of possibilities shadowed by the polarizing narratives of neoliberal complicity, revolutionary nostalgia, or hopelessness. catherine alexander (2023, 24) describes failure as “a mode of excess and refusal that transcends or merges scales and temporalities, spills over from work into kin care, threatens to turn charges of moral failure back at the accusers, reverberates across space and time.” afterlives of sacrifice help revolutionaries impose their own temporalities, vulnerabilities, and aspirations onto the revolutionary cause and gesture toward new revolutionary possibilities. the expansion of the revolutionary temporality with the afterlives of sacrifice disrupts the linear accession of past, present, and future (walton and i̇lengiz 2022) also engrained in the revolutionary projects. being open to the interventions of the chronological present, afterlives save chronological time from being subsumed under sacred time. multiple temporalities revealed through sacrifices, some of which can be mundane, help rethink revolutionary politics not only as events of rupture but also, and rather, as slow events, one sacrifice at a time, that are not lost to its accelerated temporality. there emerge new interactions across different temporalities, across political and moral spheres, and across revolution and its others. they nourish the optimism for revolutionary futures because they are “impossible events that happened nevertheless” (al-khalili et al. 2023, 12). in the kurdish movement, such interactions have allowed diverse articulations of sacrifice with implications for the moral orders tightly dependent on the primacy of heroic, fatal sacrifice and for new forms of revolutionary politics. in the afterlife, we talk of plurality; “the experience of revolutionary legacies is as intersectional as is that of revolution” (wilson 2023, 10). similarly, translations from sacrifice to the aftermath are as diverse as the experiences of and aspirations for revolution. the experiences of wounding and dying are complemented by different vulnerabilities and how to care for them. the notion of life also becomes diversified; it is no longer imagined only as a weapon that exposes the weakness of sovereign power (bolton 2023, 165) but also as a world of radical vulnerabilities, connections, and relationalities. through sacrifice and its legacies, this ethnography shows, revolution travels into spaces beyond the formal structures of power and order, reaching into the moral, intimate, and everyday realms of remaking the world. this inquiry ­reflects the shifts in my ethnographic research. i arrived in diyarbakır in 2011 to do fieldwork for eleven months. here, i followed my feminist activist friends and acquaintances as they shuffled from one ngo to another while simultaneously volunteered at a human rights organization. over time, my fieldwork gradually moved away from the conventional sites of politics in ngo offices, rituals, and protests to more commonplace settings such as beauty parlors, sports centers, cafés, and homes. in these spaces, i have witnessed how people engender a new revolutionary culture from the bottom up, through their own sacrifices, loss, and hope. sacrifice can still involve relinquishing something for the greater cause, but the forms, temporalities, affects, spaces, and scales of this sacrifice are more diverse. these intersecting realities coincided with the fragile kurdish-turkish peace process (2013–2015). in the following i offer a glimpse into the first experiments in creating the afterlives of sacrifice. ethnography involves shifts, and it shifts things. in diyarbakır, for the first time, i had to contemplate what having a kurdish maternal line meant to me. this fact had neither been pertinent nor a source of pride before. i always thought of it as a stifled part of my family history. my close friends in the field saw me as a beginner in kurdish matters; others, however, rightly saw in me the signs of several privileges: turkishness, a republican upbringing in western towns with state officer parents, and a higher education in the united states. during my research, i felt that i could not claim that heritage, but i could also not ignore its slow, intimate emergence in that kurdish-majority environment. while this foreignness kept me away from the more active and radical parts of the kurdish movement, i managed to connect more closely with the ordinary members of the movement. in our ­respective distances, we found the time and space to talk about their experiences of navigating the difficult questions of the democratization process, conversations that constitute the basis of this article. the revolution in the earlier stages of the pkk’s martyrology, we see both anthropological senses of sacrifice at play; sacrifice as building an order, “debt without gift,” and sacrifice as an absolute gift, “gift without debt” (bolton 2023, 164). for the first, the pkk’s discourses revolve around “our debt to the martyrs” (şehitlere borcumuz), an idea that invites the incoming guerrillas and militants to remain sacrificial subjects for the revolutionary cause. for the latter, the emphasis lies on the heroic resistance of the sacrificer, his/her embodiment of the sacred, and the jump forward toward the utopian future enabled by their sacrifice. their “divine” gift cannot be repaid on similar terms, but one is still indebted, and there still exists the possibility to reciprocate by further sacrificial action (in the form of debt) that can emulate the heroic resistance. while the pkk discourses on martyrdom in the first and intense stage of the war with the turkish state—from 1984 to 1999—depicted exemplary acts of sacrifice as the basis of a new moral hierarchy, debt coagulated a sacrificial community that first forged in the mountains and later expanded into the city. this section provides the background to this development, demonstrating the construction of a moral hierarchy based on sacrificial death and the formulation of debt repayment as a form of resistance. “fires of liberation” (özgürlüğün ateşi) has been a recurring theme accompanying the pkk’s guerrilla warfare since its inception in 1984. during the brutal rule of the turkish military junta from 1980 to 1983, some of the members of the pkk had fled to lebanon. others found themselves captured and imprisoned. mazlum doğan, the founding member of the pkk, was among them. in 1982, he hung himself to protest the widespread torture at the notorious diyarbakır prison; the matches that he lit before dying created the myth that he burned himself alive (hakyemez 2017, 122). later, other militants would conduct similar self-immolation acts in prison and in europe. their sacrificial acts were spectacular events enchanting revolutionary kurds. doğan’s sacrifice would later be recognized in the establishment of the pkk’s guerrilla academy under his name, institutionalizing the sacrificial act into the pkk’s state-like becoming. the image of fire, creation out of destruction, became central to the pkk’s “myth of resistance” in the ever-growing war of the the 1990s. this myth centered on an indigenous spring festival, newroz, whose epic tale of revolt against an evil assyrian king became re-narrated as an allegory of the pkk’s own resistance movement and whose traditionally lit bonfires were redefined as “fires of liberation” (aydın 2014; gunes 2013). associating the kurds with the medes, an ancient iranian people who won their liberation from the assyrians, the pkk’s resistance myth marked its struggle with the authority of ancient origin. but it was the self-immolation of pkk militants in and beyond prisons, particularly on the day of newroz, march 21, that endowed the party’s myth of resistance with the force of life and death. the literal and metaphorical connections between fire, death, and rebellion helped forge sacrificial death as the ground of moral certainty, or the revolutionary “truth” (hakikat). the deceased guerillas, including berivan’s father, were considered the martyrs and new building blocks of the pkk’s resistance myth. an institutionalizing, utopian, and supposedly truthful struggle emerged from this sacrificial energy, elevating the present to the messianic temporality of sacrifice. this construct was moved to a new level with the suicide attack by zeynep kınacı (code name, zilan), who in 1996 dressed up as a pregnant woman and killed herself, along with seven soldiers, in dersim (tunceli). as the first suicide bomb attack in turkey and by the pkk, her death sacralized the revolutionary goal of “a free kurdistan” even further: kınacı was designated “a goddess” by öcalan, her self-destruction held up as the metaphorical rebirth of the kurdish nation (çağlayan 2013, 16). other female militants in the mountains and elsewhere used the expression “becoming zilan” (zilanlaşmak) (düzel 2018, 1), construing their militant subjectivities through sacrifice. the pkk’s elevation of self-sacrifice as an exemplary act for the kurdish struggle inserted a gendered moral hierarchy of martyrdom. self-sacrificial acts helped increase the mobilization and recruitment of new guerrillas and create the image that the pkk embodied the struggle for freedom (gunes 2013, 263). pursuing a transcendentalist struggle for freedom, the pkk invented its own theology of revolution by binding sacrifice with death to generate a yearning for martyrdom and a conviction in the utopian future. as banu bargu (2014, 259) observes with the socialist death-fasters in turkey, every martyr embodied the future community, building it “cell by cell” and ensuring its immortality. indeed, both the death-faster and the pkk guerrillas constituted “living” martyrs; by joining the struggle, they entered a liminal period during which they were assumed to leave aside their previous lives and enter the world of utopia. in their recruitment ceremonies, the initiating guerrillas made their oath for the martyrs, and öcalan and took their noms de guerre from the martyrs, such as mazlum, egîd, zilan, or berîtan (rudi 2019, 202). their transition to the world of the sacred would start with joining the struggle and end with their heroic death. sacrificial gift (“gift without debt”) required transcendentalist action, and sacrificial debt (“debt without gift”) required relentless resistance. one can find the theme “dying resisting” (direnerek ölmek)” in the guerrilla narratives published in the pkk’s official magazine serxwebûn (independence) between 1984 and 1999. the propensity to die “easily” is called “suicidalism” and repudiated. the guerrillas express constant worry of dying from accidents of nature, such as in an avalanche, rather than during an armed confrontation, because that would be a “worthless death” (boşa ölüm). what emerged was a moral hierarchy in which self-sacrifice was held up as the yardstick against which other forms of revolutionary sacrifice were measured. this elevation of martyrdom to pride of place had the unintended effect of rendering other forms of revolutionary sacrifice invisible. the afterlife of sacrifice allowed other forms of revolutionary sacrifice, especially for women, to become visible and reveal the multiple ways that sacrifice generated unforeseeable consequences for the democracy project of remaking the social, the moral, and the political. an emerging universe of debt kurdish revolutionaries like berivan saw the first win of a municipal seat in diyarbakır by the pro-kurdish party in 1999 as a victory. “we hardly dared go inside,” she said, looking at the municipal building. the phrase “we hardly dared” here is an imperfect english translation of the negative turkish verb kıyamamak, used to describe situations in which one cannot do something to someone or something due to the love one has for them. for berivan, the municipality was a new political power and an object of affection over which she and the rest of kurdish society fussed tenderly. it was an experiment in alternative sovereignty, which soon became the center of evaluations of sacrifice and debt. the year 1999 marked a watershed moment in kurdish revolutionary politics. after his capture by the turkish security forces, öcalan formulated a new political program for the pkk titled “democratic confederacy.”5 the new program abandoned the project of a separate state and reformulated radical democracy as the new direction of kurdish politics (öcalan 2015). by pursuing diverse forms of direct democracy and defending the values of gender equality, ecological revitalization, and civil politics, kurds and the other peoples of turkey and the middle east would gradually forge mature systems of self-rule within their respective national borders (akkaya and jongerden 2013). öcalan’s groundbreaking declarations came in parallel with the turkish state’s turn to democratization as part of the european union (eu) accession process. in 2002, the state of emergency was lifted and restrictions on the expression of kurdish identity were relaxed, albeit in a two-step-forward, one-step-backward fashion. from 1999 onward, pro-kurdish parties began securing municipal seats in the kurdish-majority cities of diyarbakır, mardin, van, hakkâri, and others. during that time, revolutionaries like berivan, who had previously engaged in clandestine activities, began working in public service departments on water resource management, public transportation, public relations, preschool education, and women’s shelters. their work negotiated the uneasy shift in kurdish politics from a revolutionary militarized resistance toward urban civil democratic governance. the imperative to transform kurdish (and turkish) society from within the neoliberal conditions of municipal work dictated by the turkish state’s policies made this transition contentious. attempting to trade in the familiar “struggle with arms” for a new “struggle with the pen” even as the conflict persisted in the form of turkish military blockades punctuated by periods of ceasefire and a pkk guerrilla army standing on alert in the iraqi mountains rendered the place of revolutionary sacrifice in the new order of things indeterminate. the municipality’s victory was not only symbolic. working within the legal system brought advantages: municipal budgets, institutional buildings, thousands of employees, and the power to shape public discourse (watts 2010, 162). employment in municipalities run by pro-kurdish parties became one of the most secure forms of income in the region. prior to 1999, only nonrevolutionary kurds had been allowed to become civil servants. for kurdish revolutionaries, becoming civil servants now meant working to reestablish kurdish society by realizing commensurations between revolutionary and democratic social and moral orders while living economically secure lives. growing social and political capital and slowing down conflict enabled alternative forms of politics, increasing the visibility of the martyrs. cemeteries for the pkk martyrs were built (which would later be destroyed in the post-2015 resumption of the conflict). statues of important resistance leaders were erected; one of the most significant ones was seyyid riza’s in dersim (ilengiz 2020, 87–88). the kurdish youth, emerging as the new actors of revolutionary politics in the city, contributed to this sacrificial politics. circulating stories of violence that they and/or their relatives had endured, and reproducing the moral hierarchy of the revolutionary sacrifice through definitions of the martyrs as heroes (neyzi and darıcı 2015, 62), the kurdish youth imagined themselves in the “sacred communion of the living and the dead” (neyzi and darıcı 2015, 68). mixed feelings of loss, guilt, hope, and hopelessness, joy, celebration, and, above all, indebtedness shape the afterlife of sacrifice. a central term that reflects indebtedness in the revolutionary vocabulary is bedel. bedel, originally an arabic word, translates as “the price of something,” as in the price of bread. yet glossed from within the kurdish revolutionary moral universe, it denotes the sacrifices one has made for the sake of the cause—a free kurdistan. the common expression among kurdish revolutionaries, “we paid a high price” (çok bedel ödedik), underlines sacrifice’s excessive loss and suffering and affirms the central role these losses play in the formation and maintenance of the sacred, defined as “the cause.” voiced frequently in the peace process period—both publicly in turkish media representations of the state violence endured by kurds and privately in human rights organization meetings—the statement “we paid a high price” testifies to the sacrifices made by the kurdish people. the pressing feelings of bedel and indebtedness raised possibilities of repayment in the aftermath. initial assessments were saturated by gendered, moralizing, and class-based distinctions articulated through everyday lives in the revolutionary community. a binary language of politicians (and politics) emerged, separating “revolutionaries” (i.e., those who “truly” sacrificed) from “careerists.” the separation was deepened with references to symbolic, social, and cultural capital: the latter group had bachelor’s degrees in the relevant professions and spoke turkish with no accent. some knew english. they lived bourgeois lifestyles, residing in newly built, upscale gated communities. this contrasted with the revolutionaries who lived in crammed neighborhoods like bağlar. they had shorter cvs, for they had dropped out of school and university in the 1990s at the height of the conflict, either to commit to the struggle or when requested to leave “the schools of the colonizers” by the pkk. for women, going to a hairdresser (for a hairdo, coloring, or other services) could be seen as a symbol of privilege and a lack of sacrifice. the increasing, everyday linkages between sacrifice and new forms of capital indicated an aftermath of sacrifice focused on reciprocating debt in the new order. at the heart of such debates were the families of the martyrs. embodying debt during my fieldwork, i met several relatives of the deceased pkk guerrillas. in a city that has been torn by decades of conflict, it would indeed be hard to find anyone without a martyr relative in their extended families. yet a specific group had more public and organized visibility under the honorific titles of “value families” (değer ailesi in turkish) or “martyr families.” these value families formed solidarity-based communities and organizations, one of which was the mesopotamian aid, solidarity, and cultural association for those who have lost their relatives (mezopotamya yakınlarını kaybeden ailelerle yardımlaşma dayanışma ve kültür derneği, or meya-der), with the express aim of helping families identify the burial sites of deceased guerrillas, organizing funerals and mourning tents, handling the legal bureaucracy pursuant to the death of a guerrilla or the imprisonment of a family member, and arranging transportation to prisons. they also performed a task of vital importance to these families: they helped locate their children, whether alive or dead, which required keeping communication channels open with the pkk. the association was located in the impoverished neighborhood of the bağlar, thirty minutes walking distance from the urban center where most ngos were located. a small plate with “meya-der” written on it was pinned to the edge of the apartment wall. as i climbed the stairs and approached the door, a strong smell of food seeped out from inside. with a meya-der staff member, we entered the room they called “the office.” inside were three desks, each with a computer, and a few chairs. my interviewee sat behind one of the desks in a formal meeting manner, while i settled into the guest chair. the other rooms i saw after our conversation reflected a different atmosphere from our formal setting: two large rooms were decorated as living rooms, with pull-out sofabeds to be used when the value families outside of diyarbakır needed to come to the city to arrange a visit to a prison, to make an appeal at a state organizations, or to attend a funeral. in another visit, i would see the space converted into a mourning house after the arrival of a dead pkk guerrilla’s remains. this home-turned-office’s distance to the urban and political center exemplifies the decentering of sacrifice as acutely felt by berivan and others. yet, as it simultaneously carried out the formal and informal practices of democratization politics, the value families brought a new collective body, and a new life to sacrifice. my interlocutor, ayşe, described how they were “united in pain” (acıda birleşen). all the staff hailed from value families. they pledged to “carry the struggle forward” mainly through preserving their relatives’ legacy, living exemplary lives (işık 2023, 263–79), and remaining devout to the martyrs. out of their indebtedness to the martyrs, they took care of each other, which meant providing monthly food subsidies, scholarships for children, or logistical support with funeral organization. their stories were distinct but also common, to an extent that if i listened to one “mother’s” story, i could understand the suffering of the rest (also see karaman 2016). it was not uncommon to hear that marriages were arranged within the value-family community: one of my interlocutors who had such an arranged marriage reasoned that it was not so much love but the shared sense of loss and pain that brought and kept her and her husband together. as they clamor about their indebtedness to the martyrs and perform behind-the-scenes revolutionary work, the value families continue to sacrifice, in forms such as claiming the remains of their guerrilla relatives, conducting a proper burial, exposing the state’s necropolitical treatment of the guerrilla bodies (bargu 2019), or in more “mundane” forms such as taking care of the remaining members of the families. they endure state’s constant mechanisms of rendering them indebted to themselves (biner 2020). it was from within this unending, communal, and varied complexity of suffering and debt that value families created an afterlife of sacrifice. with the merging of indebtedness and sacrifice in the decentered, quiet yet continuous experiences of the value families, sacrifice is no longer neatly defined in terms of heroic, resistant self-sacrifice. the “gift of sacrifice” is not only oriented toward a sacred future but also to the present, demanding to remake the political and moral order. bridging the connection between sacrifice and the sacred, the aftermath of sacrifice turns bedel into a demand, a claim, an expectation. value families’ experiences shift the focus away from the beginnings of sacrifice, where the question of whether one’s sacrifice is genuine or not dominates, to its aftermath, where sacrifice is integrated into social and political life as an untenable/unpredictable force. governing sacrifice recall how the revolution’s expansion into everyday life in diyarbakır enabled diverse afterlives of sacrifice. the employment policies at the municipality constituted a contentious area of commensuration; for the kurdish revolutionaries, translating their militancy into the emergent languages of professionalism and efficiency created a new challenge. not knowing the expert lingo became grounds for their dismissal. unable to respond to the question “which school did you graduate from?” and not being able to prepare lengthy cvs, these militants-turned-civil servants had to work extra hard to demonstrate the relevance of their revolutionary militant work to urban politics. value families’ integration into the employment policies enabled a calculative logic in the afterlife of sacrifice to flourish. in the early 2000s, the municipality implemented a controversial hiring policy by imposing unofficial quotas for value family members in their cadres. the rationale for the quota was that the care and upkeep of surviving family members and militants had been entrusted (emanet etmek) to the movement. that was not just a matter of moral conscience and revolutionary solidarity; it would also endow the kurdish civic authority, which had deep ties with the movement, with moral strength. the rumor was that at some point, the job application forms included a section inquiring about the number of martyrs the applicant had in their family. while i have yet to see an example of such a form, if it ever existed, it would have been hastily retracted: such bare-bones bureaucratization risked stripping martyrdom of its sacredness, something the movement could not afford and would not have intended. this rumored blunder notwithstanding, during my fieldwork scrutiny over the authenticity of one’s sacrifice and the evaluation and judgment of fitness based on employees’ revolutionary past, the number of martyrs in the family, and the family’s level of commitment to the movement formed part of everyday conversations. the gift of sacrifice was made sense of through counting, calculating, and quantifying: the number of martyrs a family had given to the cause, the number of years a person spent in prison, and the number of torture techniques the body had endured. how much suffering would count for which position? what kinds of jobs should value-family members be given without undermining their moral standing? such were some of the emerging metrics of revolutionary sacrifice in the new social order that took place next to the turkish state’s authoritarian debt logic: selecting arbitrarily “deserving” citizens and punishing the rest (yoltar 2020). similar moral judgments suffocated the kurdish community; for some revolutionaries, value families’ “demanding” and “taking” constituted pure “selfishness” and “not knowing the struggle and its values.” the irony was that the position for the irreducibility of the sacredness of sacrifice to any social form would end up taking it out of the emerging political and moral order. such correspondence and proportionality constantly drawn between sacrifices made and sacrifices accounted for is both revolutionary and painfully otherwise, for the failure to commensurate them would mean the irrelevance of the revolution. the possibility of irrelevant sacrifice lurked around the edges of the new political and moral order. one can argue that the employment policy was one example where the kurdish municipal governance intended to go beyond what i would call a “theater of nationalist sacrifice” and create a revolutionary afterlife of sacrifice. such a “theater” was happening in turkey; even though the disabled turkish veterans who fought in the war with the pkk were provided with enormous state resources, they could not escape marginalization and irrelevance within society (açıksöz 2019). seeking ways to integrate the value families into the new social and political order could have gone beyond turning them into mouthpieces of a bygone era and turning them into real agents in everyday politics. nevertheless, the accounting logics engrained in employment presented challenges to turning suffering and loss into socially reproductive forms; the stereotypical example would be the hiring of a value family member in what was considered as “menial” jobs, such as garbage collection. in the aftermath of sacrifice, separations between the moral and the social, the past and the present, the timeless and the timebound are only possible when sacrificial loss is seen as a singular, unrepeatable, one-time event. the problem is that it is not: loss is generative. it rarely remains in place and is thereby subject to the unpredictability of sacrificial operations. the “purity” of the sacrificial gift is no guarantee of its alterity. kurdish municipal governance needed to reciprocate: the new order to be built through the process of civil politics was not only about continuing the revolution; it also meant to return on the many sacrifices made by building an afterlife. expanding the public evaluations of sacrifice and its repayment, it experimented with certain ways, such as employment, only to confront the dilemma of reproducing the moral universe of original sacrifice within the new politics. their experimentations failed to respond to the question: if a martyr’s sacrifice is so irreducible to everyday social forms and temporalities that it is painfully difficult for their biological kin, who have in many ways come to embody the now eternal martyrs themselves, to function within them, what then remains of the revolution? in the last stages of the peace process, the period in which i conducted this research, the kurdish movement’s political power, exerted through the municipal government, was undermined by this moral deadlock between commensuration and incommensurability, measuring and evaluating. mundane sacrifice besides the municipal policies, the potentiality of the afterlife of sacrifice among the revolutionary crowd sprouts in quiet, messy, and gradual ways. the multiplicity of the aftermath enables the recognition of other forms of sacrifice that have remained invisible within the moral hierarchy, shaped by the sacredness accrued to martyrdom. these sacrifices can be quite mundane, such as not being able to get pregnant, continue one’s education, travel, or spend more time with one’s family, living in the hypermilitarized environment of diyarbakır, witnessing the death of a close friend, being unable to distance oneself from politics and war, or “not wearing a more relaxed attitude toward life,” as one interlocutor put it. such “mundane sacrifices,” as i call them to point out their distinction from the martyrly sacrifice and connection to everyday life, insert their own temporalities into the struggle. they turn the wait for a utopian future into a revolutionary present. while sacrificial debt partakes in the construction of a wounded collective identity for kurdish youth, as in leyla neyzi and haydar darıcı’s (2015) ethnography, it can also establish generative, fluid, and caring relationships within the kurdish community. diverse translations of the gift of sacrifice into everyday lives do not necessarily mean forgetting about the debt, but channeling it to forge other relationships of responsibility and care. for example, gûlasor, a young woman whose father left for the mountains when she was two, had a different notion of debt. she saw her father’s sacrifice as his individual decision and did not find it right to make a claim as a member of a value family. it was rather her mother, a single mother and an activist, whom she felt more indebted to, and she planned to “do many things for her.” gûlasor reciprocated her debt as a member of the kurdish collective by establishing a relationship of care with her mother in their everyday lives in diyarbakır. such care “work,” roxani krystalli and philipp schulz (2022, 15) make clear, substantiates the political work of revolutionary politics, as well as bringing insights into “the practices and politics of remaking a world in the wake of violence.” afterlives of sacrifice make the different agencies and subjectivities of the revolution visible, as well as their gendered experiences. during my fieldwork, i met several interlocutors who joined the movement in their early youth in the late 1980s and 1990s and had been to the mountains only for a short period or not at all, spared from this sacrifice because their families “had already sacrificed enough.” some participated in urban militancy, helping build grass-roots networks for the emerging civic organizations. some spent years in prison. some are traumatized due to the loss of a close friend. others left the movement. these revolutionaries, whom i would call “ordinary” revolutionaries just to underline their non-heroic forms of resistance and their situatedness at the peripheries of the movement, formed increasing voices for an end to bedel language (bedel dili). one of these ordinary revolutionaries was sevgi. she was a kurdish woman in her early forties, working as a cadre, which meant committing all of her time and energy to the struggle. after a brief period in the mountains and two years of imprisonment, she was charged with public relations duty in the city. she was a self-made revolutionary, rising out of poverty and an oppressive marriage. while hers was a story of empowerment, it entailed a lot of “mundane” sacrifices: not being able to conceive during a period of intense activism, being unable to look after her sick mother as much as she wanted, being unable to go public with her new partner as a divorced woman, and being unable to have a private space of her own or a stable life because of her cadre responsibilities. she continued, “one never has a plan or a project about one’s life. the bedel i’m paying is both material and immaterial [manevi]. and it seems like we’re going to have to keep on paying it until the end of our days … i’ve given up on having a child. i could have had a child. i’m also a woman, you know. it’s in my nature to have needs—in the emotional and sexual sense. i can’t meet them now. this, too, is bedel.” in our first meeting, she sounded hopeless, but during our second meeting, sevgi announced that she was taking big steps in her life; she would settle into her own home and live with her new partner, both of which were moves of privacy and done in secret not to jeopardize her position in the movement. encouraged by the moral imperative, “i have paid a lot of bedel,” these ordinary revolutionaries brought sacred temporality into their lifetimes, because it was now possible to change things in the present. at the time of our interview, sevgi was struggling to reverse the effects of the excessive medicalization of her body she had endured during fertility treatments. sevgi’s life changes were not undertaken explicitly as a way to transform political discourses within the movement, but rather to slowly recreate the world through care and creativity (kurtović and sargsyan 2019). ordinary revolutionaries like sevgi turned everyday life into a space where afterlives of sacrifice sustained the revolution. for them, the convergence of the sacred and sacrificial temporality of sacrifice helped challenge its moral hierarchy without abandoning sacrifice’s moral world. yet it still enabled exchanges across previously distant spheres of time, value, and action. distancing from the moral hierarchy of revolutionary sacrifice forces one to be creative in their translations. israeli ex-soldier conscientious objectors redefine nationalist sacrifice to include their own marginalization and abjection; they intend to frame their “mundane” sacrifice as marginalized members of a militarist society as social capital to create a change from within (weiss 2014, 402). such interventions can queer sacrifice; kurdish trans sex workers in turkey adopt “chameleon subjectivities,” using tactics both from the revolutionary and turkish nationalist political repertoire (karakuş 2022). creativity includes uncertainty; there is always the risk that the sacrifice will not be recognized as such, and they will meet the accusations of being “traitors” or “selfish” (schäfers and düzel 2020). by publicly articulating their mundane sacrifices and making changes to their lives in the service of recompense, ordinary kurdish revolutionaries like sevgi probe an end to a moral hierarchy based on revolutionary sacrifice as heroic death. summoning the possibility of a life that might be lived otherwise, these articulations take as their aim the attainment of social status, social capital, employment, and the less visible assets of privacy, intimacy, health, a return to education, travel time, or the possibility of detachment from political norms. this diversification of sacrifice allows kurdish revolutionaries to articulate their past and ongoing hardships and forfeitures. they transport bedel out of guerrilla space and into their own nonguerrilla lives and shift the story of sacrifice from the heroes in the mountains to the ordinary revolutionaries—neither heroes nor abject victims—and their everyday city-life sacrifices. as they open up revolutionary sacrifice to forms other than heroic death, social life opens to revolution. through mundane sacrifice and its repayment, revolution turns into an everyday remaking of a new life. bringing sacrifice down from the transcendent heights of heroic death to the mundane hubble-bubble of the lived life through myriad acts of commensuration is not declaring “an end” to the revolution. revolutions are not mere one-off events, but unfixed cultural phenomena that can only be understood by acknowledging both sacrificial conviction and “the dissipation of conviction where such sacrifice seems altogether meaningless” (haugbolle and bandak 2017, 202). in the democratization era, ordinary kurdish revolutionaries reclaim the symbolic and social ­capital of sacrifice without drawing on hegemonic public discourses, opening instead possibilities for the moral agency with which to insert their own formulations of what revolution might mean. in the context of struggles over power and influence and the ongoing conflict between the pkk and the turkish state, an end to sacrifice makes for a stretch in imagination. bedel in both its guises—revolutionary and mundane sacrifice—remains a worn-out but omnipresent moral anchor. even when people complain of the excessive use of bedel—“bedel again? really? enough with this rhetoric!”—there is an awareness of its dormant potential to expand evermore. if attempts to commensurate the revolution with the new order pose hard questions about the relevance and results of the revolution, they also provide clues about the new ­socio-moral orders being forged. conclusion an interlocutor friend once said, “revolution took everything from me and gave me everything i have.” life as gifted, life as a gift, all in one revolutionary body. sacrifice’s afterlives are as many as the ways revolutionary experiences are remembered, accounted for, and continued. the experiences of the value families expose the central irony of sacrifice, how it tends to be both the sacred as an aspiration and the mundane for a new politico-moral order. the kurdish ­municipal governance’s experiment with the integration of the gift of sacrifice into the new order reproduces neoliberal logics of quantification. ordinary ­revolutionaries ­quietly translate their own sacrifices and debt into the realm of the everyday. ­tracing these painful, disruptive, and transformative paths reveals how afterlives of sacrifice are both messy and insightful about revolutionary potentialities. in the aftermath, new temporalities of waiting, of recuperating a medicalized body, of taking care of an aging mother, and others interact with sacred time. my interlocutors constantly move to and fro between different temporalities, the ritual and the everyday, the social and the political through creative, caring, gradual acts of translation. these translations brim with conflicting effects, such as frustration, desperation, hope, and care, among others, yet they are where the revolution breathes. the concept of afterlife of sacrifice aims to go beyond affirming the presence and power of “the ghosts” of the past. these ghosts sustain the revolution in unlikely spaces (wilson 2023), stir both hope and desperation (salem 2020), and catalyze ethical self-transformation toward resistant subjectivities (yonucu 2023). this article points to a messier situation: while revolution shapes sacrifice, afterlives of sacrifice shape revolution. i offer the concept of the afterlives of sacrifice as a comparative operator for underlining the intersecting, uneven, and constantly changing temporalities of revolutionary commitment. the concept allows us to see how revolution finds new lives through invisible, generative, and diverse forms of loss and sacrifice. rethinking revolutionary temporalities reveals the attempts to reorder moral hierarchies, the introduction of new political practices and relationalities, and explorations of “the other sides” (mayblin and course 2014) of sacrifice. the afterlives of sacrifice, then, shed a new light on the revolution, where loss and care, destruction and healing, perfection and imperfection can coexist. as ordinary kurdish revolutionaries in this ethnography recounted their lives in and through bedel, mobilizing it into demands for repayment, relevance, and recognition, they did so acutely aware of the fact that the afterlife of sacrifice can be restricted in a present with no possibilities of sustaining revolution in an otherwise. the moral confusions and fragility of translations become harder to bear. in such an environment of diminished possibilities, there is no guarantee that ordinary sacrifice will be recognized as such. this came to pass with the resumption of conflict in 2015. the months-long conflict took place not in the mountains but also in the urban historic centers of kurdish-majority cities, in and among people’s houses (ohchr 2017). in 2016, most of the democratically elected kurdish members of parliament and mayors were arrested via emergency decree, and trustee (kayyum) governors appointed to the municipalities. more than a few of my interlocutors, including berivan, saw themselves dismissed from their positions. confronted with the possibility of imminent death, living in a reoccupied city under siege, and no longer able to invest in legal forms of politics, the kurdish revolutionaries must now decide how to evaluate the return to emergency and the suspension of sacrificial afterlife. abstract what happens when sacrifice is imagined in terms of a debt that can be repaid? in the ongoing conflict begun in 1984 between the kurdistan workers’ party and the turkish state, kurdish revolutionary discourse has characterized death as the required price for liberation. after 2002, a shift away from revolutionary violence and an increase in civil politics with more diverse actors allowed for public recognition of sacrifice other than death. this ethnography in diyarbakır conceptualizes “the afterlives of revolutionary sacrifice” to unearth the multiple temporalities of revolutionary struggle. rather than viewing sacrifice through the lens of the revolutionary sacred, the article rethinks revolution through the vulnerabilities, relationships of care, and hopes that such temporalities entail. it highlights the afterlives of sacrifice to complicate the traditional narratives of heroism and martyrdom, sheds light on everyday struggles, affects, and relationships, and questions how we value sacrifice for political change. [sacrifice; revolution; debt; bedel; afterlives of sacrifice; kurdistan workers’ party; turkey] özet bedelin geri ödenebilecek bir karşılığı tahayyül edildiğinde ne olur? kürdistan i̇şçi partisi ile türkiye devleti arasında 1984 yılında başlayan ve halen devam eden çatışmada, kürt devrimci söylemi ölümü özgürlük için ödenmesi gereken bir bedel olarak nitelendirmiştir. 2002’den sonra devrimci şiddetten uzaklaşılması ve daha çeşitli aktörlerin yer aldığı sivil siyasetin oluşması, ölüm dışındaki bedellerin de kamuoyu tarafından görülmesini sağladı. diyarbakır’da geçen bu etnografik çalışma, devrimci mücadelenin çoğul zamansallıklarını ortaya çıkarmak için «devrimci bedelin sonraki yaşamlarını» kavramsallaştırıyor. makale, bedeli devrimci kutsalın merceğinden görmek yerine, devrimi bu tür zamansallıkların barındırdığı kırılganlıklar, ihtimam ilişkileri ve umutlar üzerinden yeniden düşünüyor. geleneksel kahramanlık ve şehitlik anlatılarını karmaşıklaştırmak için bedelin sonraki yaşamlarını vurgulamakta, gündelik mücadelelere, duygulara ve ilişkilere ışık tutmakta ve siyasi değişim için bedel nasıl değer verdiğimizi sorgulamaktadır. [bedel; devrim; borç; bedelin sonraki hayatları; kürdistan i̇şçi partisi; türkiye] kurte çi dibe dema bedêl wek deynekê tê xeyalkirin ku paşê dikaribe bê dayîn? di şerê navbera partiya karkerên kurdistanê û dewleta tirkiyeyê de ku di 1984an de destpêkirî û hê jî berdewam e, gotara şoreşger a kurd mirinê wek bihayeke ji bo azadiyê lazim wesf kiriye. piştî 2002yan, dûrketina ji şîdeta şoreşger û bi geşbûna siyaseta sivîl ya bi aktorên cihêtir, rê li ber vekir ku derveyî mirinê jî bedelên din ji aliyê raya giştî ve werin dîtin. vê xebata etnografîk a li diyarbekirê, ji bo derxistina holê ya pirhejmariya wextînî ya têkoşîna şoreşger, “jiyanên paşê yên bedêlên şoreşger” têgînî dike. gotar, di dewsa dîtina bedêlê ya ji rojika pîroziya şoreşgerê de; şoreşê bi rêya şikestinbarî, têkiliyên îhtîmamê, hêviyên ku wextîniyên vî cureyî dihewînin ji nû ve difikire. ji bo tevlîhevkirina vegotinên şehîdî û qehremaniyên kevneşopî, bal dikişîne ser jiyanên piştî bedêlê, ronî dide ser têkoşîn, hest û têkiliyên rojane û pirsiyar dike ka ji bo guherînên siyasî em çawa qîmet didin bedêlê. [bedêl; şoreş; deyn; jiyanên paşê yên bedêlê; partiya karkerên kurdistanê; tirkiye] notes acknowledgments i would like to express my sincere gratitude to my colleagues who have dedicated their time and expertise to reviewing the previous versions of this manuscript over the past four years of its writing: my heartfelt thanks to ayşe gül altınay, özlem aslan, zerrin özlem biner, suzanne brenner, elina hartikainen, ruşen işık, denisa kostovicova, yael navaro-yashin, esra özyürek, marlene schäfers, seçkin sertdemir, and umut yıldırım for their invaluable contributions. the attendees of the brown bag seminars held at the department of anthropology, university of kent, and the european institute at the london school of economics, as well as the participants of the pasts and futures of sovereignty in kurdistan conference at the university of oxford, assisted me in developing a more discerning perspective on the ever-evolving temporal aspects of sacrifice. under the guidance of my editor, theresa traux-gischler, i have been equipped with the necessary tools to find ways to gather my fragmented thoughts on such a complicated topic as sacrifice. i also thank kübra sağır for her attentive work on the kurdish translation of the abstract. my family—ziya, aren, and ­devran—helped me by keeping me focused on what really mattered. the constructive and caring feedback i received from the reviewers and the editors of cultural anthropology, particularly alberto corsín jiménez, restored my belief in academic solidarity and scholarship. finally, i express my deepest gratitude to the kurdish revolutionaries who graciously shared their narratives with me and persistently cultivate hope amid the darkness we live in. 1. all names are fictitious to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors. all translations in the text are my own. 2. the periodization aims to mark a) the major condition within which the kurdish movement struggled (emergency), b) the major direction toward which the movement gears itself (democratization). 3. due to the repetitive cycle of banning by the turkish courts and their re-emergence under a new name, the pro-kurdish parties referred to in this article are effectively one and the same party. so as not to confuse the reader, i refer to them en masse as “pro-kurdish parties.” 4. although the pkk initially dominated the kurdish movement, i use the term kurdish movement here to refer to a large conglomeration of civilian and armed organizations, the majority of which endorse the realization of “radical democracy” via different and often conflicting means. 5. charged with treason and separatism, in june 1999 öcalan was sentenced to death without appeal, later to be commuted to life imprisonment. öcalan remains in solitary confinement on i̇mralı island to this day. references açıksöz, salih can 2019 sacrificial limbs: masculinity, disability, and political violence in turkey. oakland, calif.: university of california press. akkaya, ahmet hamdi, 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should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca39.4.02 cultural anthropology: fracking and historicizing: on deepened time in west texas 354 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 354-382, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.07 fracking and historicizing: on deepened time in west texas cameron hu wesleyan university https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3039-8550 exposure a traveler crossing what is now called west texas, a desert plain sometimes loathed and sometimes beloved for its surpassing flatness, may take note of two vertical features: the mountain and the extractive zone. to the west, guadalupe peak juts up from the desert floor, limestone cliffs visible and stirring at a great distance. to the east, pumping units and drilling rigs and pipelines sprawl across the permian basin oil fields, so much extractive machinery suggesting the presence of something enormous underground. there, such height—here, such depth. contemporary geological thought instructs that this height and this depth are together expressions of the same ancient structure. geoscientific consensus holds that mountain and oil field are fossilized remains of a single reef complex formed more than a quarter of a billion years ago, when the earth’s continents were joined and “west texas” was sea. according to prevailing earth history, tectonic forces have since exhumed the fossil reef in the west and pushed it skyward to make mountain, while in the east the same reef is still buried by time. 355 figure 1. approaching the guadalupe mountains. photo by stefan schäfer. thus was it plausible that i could pass several days of a recent summer hiking the guadalupe mountains in the company of two dozen petroleum geologists. we believed this tour would help us understand the oil field. in the mountains, the idea went, we could see what the oil field looks like where its strata are “exposed”—where the same formations that are elsewhere underground heave above the surface, into view. we could climb what in the oil field lay beneath our feet. we could register the scale and order of strata against our bodies, smell in certain rocks the sour signature of hydrocarbons, shade in personal maps of the reef, and otherwise vibe our way into full-bodied knowledge of the oil field’s geologic past—a sense of deep time in west texas.1 our hike through the mountains was professional development for experts in fracking. my companions were geoscientists advancing the growth of multinational oil firms. a richer idea of the region’s “deep history” was the stuff of virtuosity in exploiting it in the present. and whenever our energies flagged in the heat, the eminent scientist leading us through the backcountry would repeat a well-worn maxim about the making of petroleum geologists. it cast the labor of geohistorical inquiry in the familiar jargon of the american imperial tradition. “first you’re a slave to the data,” he would say, recalling decades spent traversing the american southwest and arabian peninsula, charting their prehuman pasts at the behest of a u.s.-based multinational oil corporation, which i will call the company. “and then,” he continued, “you make the rock your slave.” and then you make the rock your slave. his slogan, an incitement to mastery by way of historiography, condensed the circumstance that i will examine in this 356essay. building on recent studies of the logic and practice of fossil fuel capitalism (see appel 2019; bakke 2019; bond 2022; high 2022; jobson 2024; rogers 2015; smith 2021; weszkalnys 2015) and recent critiques of the settler-imperial contours of geological thought (see ferry 2020; povinelli 2016; yusoff 2018), i observe that it is via the exercise of a specifically historical science that the company addresses the earth as its slave. in west texas, as throughout the world, multinational petroleum corporations have simultaneously spoliated the earth and elaborated its deep history. in what follows, i explore the enterprise of petroleum extraction as a massively distributed “historiographic operation” (trivedi 2021)—one whose violence exemplifies the modern compulsion to explicate more and more of the world as so much historical process. the destructive progress of fossil fuel capitalism, i show, elicits from the planet the same provincial structure of processual, contingent, and indeterminate time that euro-american imperial modernity projects into human affairs under the sign of “history.” preoccupation with the “depth” of geologic history or the relative shallowness of human history can obscure this common orientation and its moral-political undertow. historicity has reordered human life as an open-ended process that modern powers might continuously adjust, direct, and accelerate. today, texas fracking elaborates a similar fantasy about the planet as it unfolds the layers of a historicized earth. fracking, i argue, is a nigh-inevitable project to adjust, direct, and accelerate geological process on the premise that the earth, now burdened with historicity, is somehow too slow. the view from west texas may compel us to decline recent calls to emplot the political present within geological history. it ultimately suggests a maxim quite different from the geologist’s: that modernity historicizes the earth by wrecking it, and wrecks it by historicizing it. * * * at the end of the excursion, the geologists convoyed in suvs back to midland-odessa, capital of the permian basin oil field and the american fracking “revolution.” these men and women led an industrial avant-garde that was turning the permian basin into the most productive oil field on the planet—for an uncanny second time. multinational petroleum corporations had largely abandoned the permian basin by the close of the twentieth century. now they returned to west texas and furiously re-engineered the moribund resource into the “center of the oil universe” (drane 2024), in the same movement proliferating earthquakes and toxic spills and leaking more methane into the atmosphere than any 357other oil field in the americas (see presley 2022; pskowski and aldhous 2023; and zhang et al. 2020). and as our air-conditioned luxury vehicle descended from the mountain into the resurrected extractive zone, and the high-wattage lights of twenty-four-hour drilling machines broke into view against a purple dusk, some of the geologists fell to talking about the pleasures of doing petroleum geology at the height of the fracking boom. industrial science in west texas was “so much fun,” they avowed. and everyone in the car agreed on what was most fun: it had to be the sublime moment when the company removed a “core” in the course of drilling a well. an oil well is engineered negative space. it is a long and narrow hole connecting a point on the surface to a point of depth, through which dead life transformed by pressure, heat, and time meets capitalist political economy. the “positive” rock withdrawn to make that “negative” space is usually ground to bits as a drill bit churns into the subsurface. but sometimes the company would pay extra to carve out and preserve, rather than pulverize, a section of the underground. out from claustrophobic darkness emerged the core. on a basic principle of sedimentary geology—that in a vertical sequence of rocks the oldest are usually at the bottom, such that going “down” in space is going “back” in time—the core recorded the passage of millions of years at any single point in the extractive zone. one of the geologists in the car dramatized the moment like this: when the core emerges from the earth, “you are looking at a piece of rock that no one has ever seen in the history of humanity.” in his appreciation, two timelines crossed as the company carved out a core. the core described the processes of earth history. from its texture, density, color, and other qualities he might understand something about the events of the prehuman past. yet at the same time, he grasped the moment in which the core was exposed to light and air and human vision as an event in a total “history of humanity,” whose progress might be measured when the sciences learned still more about the history of the earth—an earth whose peculiar fate was to be known historically from the late nineteenth century onward, not least because the metastasis of fossil-fueled industry made geology a ubiquitous technoscientific enterprise (see lucier 1999). another of the company’s geologists added, resonantly if less rhapsodically, that “the best geologist is the one who has seen the most core.” our hike through the reef-become-mountain had its value, sure, but it was core, he said, that truly honed his ability to visualize deep history in three dimensions. envisioning the 358past, he could locate more petroleum; locating more petroleum, the company could drill new wells; when the company drilled wells, he might see more core—and his understanding of the region’s past might be enriched yet further. over years of fieldwork in the permian basin, as on trips through oil fields in south texas and north dakota and saskatchewan and sumatra, i was surrounded by cores. in conference halls and corporate offices, those cylinders of subsurface lay out in trays for geologists and engineers to mist, sniff, magnify, and stroke. in academic and corporate laboratories, i watched geologists pulverize cores for chemical analysis, scan cores in three dimensions, and crush cores in hydraulic vises. i killed empty afternoons visiting warehouses where the bureau of economic geology stores millions of boxes of cores carved out across a century of extraction, on the premise that the debris of exploitation will educate future generations or future corporations about the earth’s past. the manager of an archive in houston once offered to show me some celebrity rocks. she produced cuttings from one of the first horizontal wells drilled into south texas’s eagle ford shale. i rubbed my finger across the grain of the formation whose spoliation reanimated u.s. oil extraction amid ever more extreme fossil-fueled ecological turbulence. figure 2. core samples displayed at the petroleum museum in midland, texas. photo by cameron hu. 359and as i admired a bit of rock removed from a recent oil well—admired an index of earth’s deep past, or an index of petro-capitalism’s present, or maybe both at the same time—i had a first, hazy glimpse of the possibility that i will try to get into clear view in this essay. it is, simply, that extraction is a historicizing operation. that the drilling of oil wells simply is the writing of the earth’s past, and that the prevailing form of life elaborated by euro-american imperialism has given the earth a deep past by degrading it. or, in equal and opposite terms, that the historicization of the earth is its destruction. for what do so many cores, drilled out from countless wells and archived in warehouses and laboratories, actually record? are they records of the past of the planet, those longue durée processes by which the earth has come to be what it seems today? or are they forensic evidence of the violation of the earth and human communities by so many companies, records of the world-destroying enterprise by which petroleum corporations have installed themselves in the structure of collective life and the planet? the cores, i believe, compel us to perceive not a contingent “relationship” between geohistorical inquiry and corporate destruction but their profound unity. the cores beckon us to consider the arc of a multigenerational, hyper-destructive historicizing operation. they describe a single trajectory of techno-scientific “explication” that, laminating the word’s contemporary and archaic meanings, makes the earth’s history explicit through the muscular unfolding of its layers.2 in what follows, i trace this trajectory across two episodes of simultaneous destruction and historicization in the permian basin. in the 1920s, petroleum corporations expanded en masse into west texas, turning the desert into an extractive zone and turning it into a former reef. today, petroleum corporations are transforming west texas into the world’s most prolific oil field and fracking is—as literally as one can mean it—accelerating the geological timelines that petroleum corporations projected into the landscape a hundred years earlier. the first episode has enabled the second, and in the movement between them i observe a tendency in which the meaning of historicization drifts, as if inevitably, from chronicling deep time processes to modulating them. in this way the modern historicization of the earth reveals a profound resemblance to the modern historicization of human life; and it suggests the continuity of geological thought with a provincially modern orientation of the moral and political imagination that amira mittermaier (2021) has designated the “human horizon.” for in historicizing earth and world alike in terms of contingent, indeterminate, and indefinite temporal processes, earth historiography and 360human historiography have released unprecedented ambitions to manipulate and accelerate those processes. i will pause briefly over this likeness so that its provocations may guide a return to west texas. the deepened horizon as scholars try to make sense of a planet degraded by capital and empire, many have called on the powers of deep time to loosen the grip of the prevailing form of life. the destructiveness of that form of life, some assert, is enabled by a shallow sense of historical time confined to human historicity—a temporal myopia seen to facilitate a catastrophic overvaluation of human agency as the story of the world. in response, scholars from across the disciplines have called to “decenter” the agency of human beings by contextualizing it within fathoms of deep time, fusing “the limited timescale over which modern humans and humanist historians contemplate history with the inhumanly vast timescales of deep history” (chakrabarty 2021, 4).3 in anthropology, provocative new works assert with a certain urgency that “the material conditions of human existence can only be understood as the product of processes occurring over deep time” (irvine 2020, 173), and they invite their readers to become “more skilled deep time reckoners” (ialenti 2020, 5). the moral and political significance scholars assign to deep time resonates with contemporary works of popular geoscience insistent that “thinking like a geologist can help save the world” (bjornerud 2018). amid the so-called anthropocene, it has become broadly plausible that “saving the world” might begin with an expansion of historical sensibility beyond human recency, and into the depths of the earth’s past. but geological time is politically complex (see zee 2017; oguz and whitington 2023) and its moral force is less than self-evident; and it is, i think, possible to see something rather different in the humanities’ turn to geological history. might it be the special cruelty of the prevailing form of life that in striving to overcome its moral-political constraints we deepen one of its basic commitments: to apprehend the world historically? could the turn to deep time actually affirm the destructive tendencies of that form of life, by deepening modernity’s overwhelming compulsion to historicize?4 indeed, historians of geology have indicated that deep time, far from eroding modern anthropocentrism, may actually be all too human. the paleontologist martin rudwick (2014, 4), for example, has argued that the source of the revolutionary “historicalness or historicity of nature” elaborated by geologists “lay in the contemporary understanding of human history, which was deliberately 361and knowingly transposed into the world of nature.” deep history rendered the earth intelligible along the same metaphysical pattern by which euro-american modernity had come to appraise human life and action anew. in particular, human history was recognized as being deeply contingent: at every point things could have turned out differently. . . . this was the new sense of historicity that was transferred from culture into nature, generating a new understanding of nature, and specifically of the earth, as similarly historical (rudwick 2014, 4). deep time may or may not be “anthropocentric,” but a historicized earth is in basic ways an anthropomorphic earth—and it is anthropomorphic on a provincial conception of the human as a creature of history. moderns, rudwick indicates, project onto the planet the basic temporal blueprint along which they prefer to construct themselves: a contingent, processual, open-ended time connecting events that—to conjure a commonplace of critical social science—could always have been and may yet go otherwise. the purportedly inhuman timescales of geological inquiry are doubtless vaster than those on which moderns usually historicize human activity. yet a fundamental conception of time’s shape has remained consistent as the natural sciences expanded modernity’s historicizing enterprise from the human shallows to the more-than-human depths. from a certain angle, deep history may be seen to deepen euro-american modernity’s provincial metaphysics of contingent, processual time. in the elaboration of deep history we might see not a break with the prevailing weltbild but the expansion of its empire into still-further territories. i think this shift in aspect perception is worth cultivating. for it introduces a different and difficult question about the politics of historicity amid contemporary planetary turbulence. the prevailing form of life may not distinguish itself by the shallowness of its historical thought. it may distinguish itself, rather, by the automaticity with which it progressively historicizes world and earth. to get that destructive form of life into new critical view might not only mean inquiring, as the humanities and social sciences so often do at moments of moral-political anguish, which history or whose history or (lately) how deep a history scholars should now elaborate. it might also mean cultivating critical attention to the compulsion to historicize as it expresses itself in the flow of thinking and acting, and so learning to see moderns—including ourselves—as conscripts of a historicizing form of life.5 in turn, we might explore how the modern destructiveness 362that today draws our concern may be internally related to, may flow through, the operations by which modern powers cause world and earth to radiate contingent, processual—historical—time. here i am channeling mittermaier’s recent provocation. as scholars go searching for the more-than-human, mittermaier (2021) indicates that to venture “beyond the human horizon” may demand more than the broadening of established critical-empirical strategies so that they will be inclusive of further objects (encompassing more histories, more agencies, more knowledges). it would, mittermaier implies, also require us to hesitate over certain conventional presuppositions that organize critical-empirical inquiry: not least, the provincial assumption that history is the ground of being, and that to understand the world in any morally or politically salient way is to know the present as the outcome of so many contingent, indeterminate processes—that is, to historicize it (see, for resonant arguments, agrama 2012; asad 2018; hirschkind 2020; iqbal 2020; trivedi 2021). my aim in this article is not to reach “beyond” what is conventional but to see another aspect in it. and from mittermaier’s provocation i would develop the following implication: if moderns are destroyers, it may not be for the incompleteness of their histories. moderns may destroy as historicizers. modern destruction may be the kind that issues from a historicizing form of life. indeed, as so many writers now associate planetary destruction with too-familiar fantasies of the human as a sovereign, world-constructing agent, it is worth recalling how the historicization of the world has cleared the metaphysical ground for that promethean ideal. hannah arendt (1961), constantin fasolt (2003), michel foucault (2002), reinhart koselleck (2004), and many others have observed that a historical temporality of contingent, open-ended process constitutes the corollary of modern aspirations to world-engineering agency. when the past becomes historical, the future becomes more or less free from the determinate closures of fate, providence, and custom. history’s world is a world that has been intentionally or inadvertently “made”—and which therefore remains available to being made. when we historicize the present as the temporary congelation of a contingent process—whether we are explicitly writing a past into the present, or just marking off the present from the future or past as, say, pre-trump or post-9/11—we tacitly affirm the version of reality in relation to which human agents could author a future different from past and present.6 history’s fundamental seduction, as the meta-historian fasolt (2003, xiv) sums, has been the “enhanced control it promises to human beings over the world of self and society.” the modern inscription of reality as so much contingent, 363open-ended process “put human beings in charge of their own affairs and gave them the liberty to differ.” and although historicization arose in the later renaissance as a radical operation for contesting specific authorities by revealing the all-too-human processes by which they became authorities, history’s subversive gesture, fasolt demonstrates, became ubiquitous, mandatory, and automatic in choreography with enlightenment ideals of human freedom and self-determination. “history allowed us to create a kind of humanity”—so many potential world-shaping agents—and “now we cannot think of any other kind.” whether the content of a particular historical narrative aligns with recognizably radical or conservative ambitions, historicization effectively carves out the operating space, the room to move, for the agent who might in some way “change the world.” historicization pries time open for the progressive and revolutionary endeavors that anthropologists often admire—just as it wrenches the future open for the creative destruction of the imperial man (wynter 2003) or settler futurist (tuck and gaztambide-fernández 2013) whose prestige comes still further into question today, as so much imperial world-building looks even to its protagonists and beneficiaries like desultory world-breaking (see anidjar 2019; masco 2020; livingston 2019). so if planetary destruction today animates redoubled critical attention to pernicious ideologies of agency, we might explore how the fantasized modern agent takes form, and draws strength and ambition, from imperial modernity’s historicizing operations, social scientific and geoscientific alike.7 to be sure, within and beyond anthropology there exist many sophisticated and self-reflective styles of historicization. their intellectual and political ambitions vary, as do the terms on which they render past time intelligible as so much contingent process. they differ, too, in the figurations of present and future agency they tacitly or explicitly extract from the historicized past. to chronicle the disacknowledged dynamism of those supposedly “without history” (wolf 1982) is nonidentical to the work of characterizing how the production of silence structures historical memory (trouillot 1995). a practice theory of history concerned with “how social beings . . . make and transform the world in which they live” (ortner 1989, 193) responds to a different question of self-determination than the “narrative of subaltern agency . . . [whose] objective is to displace a story of submission with a story of resistance” (scott 2004, 114). the historical materialism whose transhistorical mantra is “always historicize!” (jameson 2002, ix) approaches the etiology of prevailing conceptual equipment differently from the historical ontology emphasizing “the contingency of events 364that led to the predicaments we find pressing or inescapable” (hacking 2002, 24). anthropologists and their fellow travelers have serious disagreements about how to historicize. yet serious disagreement requires something shared about which to disagree—it reveals, as ludwig wittgenstein (2010, §241) wrote, “not agreement in opinions but in form of life.” for their considerable divergences, the breadth of historiographic styles converge as rival stances and strategies adopted in relation to a world presumed, in the final analysis, contingent, processual, and open-ended. and they converge as stances that tacitly or explicitly deliver the future to some image of agency, whether they beckon the reader to modernist world-engineering or political revolution or the lower-octane foucauldian optimism that in historicizing ourselves we may come to “understand, act out, and resolve present problems” (hacking 2002, 25). what would truly amount to disagreement in a form of life—and what is thus genuinely scarce—is the social scientist who asserts that a present state of affairs is inevitable, or providential, or embodies some eternal principle, such that it is simply to be suffered and nothing can or should be done about it. the point of contemplating the breadth of historicizing enterprises together, as variations on a theme, is not to bundle them for critical dismissal in favor of some equal-and-opposite determinism. it is to begin to appreciate the force with which the compulsion to historicize expresses itself in our thinking, sometimes despite ourselves, and so to nominate it as something worthy of attention. the reader will not have missed that the compulsion is expressing itself in these very paragraphs. even as i try to get the modern compulsion to historicize into critical view i am drifting into a now familiar pattern of assumptions and assertions: that the way moderns address the past is a historical contingency, with the implication that we could become more aware, and so more free, in relation to our unexamined conceptions of time and action, such that—and now my drift reaches its fated destination—we may engage time and action “otherwise” in response to the demands of the present. this is what it means to be conscripted to a historicizing form of life. this is the compulsion to historicize at work. if scholars desire to loosen the grip of the prevailing form of life, or unsettle its pernicious images of agency, it might prove interesting to get this compulsion into view, even if we cannot get it under control. being “conscripts of modernity” (scott 2004), and so of historicity, we may find more or less irresistible questions of what history demands acknowledgment, how deeply we acknowledge it, and what future endeavors it enables. but as we turn to those questions, 365we might also pay attention to how our practices express this conscription, this compulsion—the myriad ways in which the prevailing form of life is “possessed by history” (fasolt 2003, xiv). and as the modern degradation of the planet commands anthropological attention, we might respond not only by historicizing more deeply but also by exploring the ways that historicity, having placed the world at the disposal of human agents, similarly puts the earth at the discretion of modern powers. an anthropology of historicization today might contemplate the operations by which imperial modernity has forced the earth to radiate deep time: the concrete procedures of geohistoricization, the drives that animate them, the hitherto unimaginable agential fantasies they release, and the deformations they induce in their object. the planetary devastations of the present may describe, however ironically, the natural history of natural history—or perhaps, with a different irony, the fated outcome of a modern compulsion to explicate further and further stretches of world and earth in terms of contingent, open-ended process. in the remainder of this essay, i follow that compulsion through the permian basin—where drilling historicized the earth, and a historicized earth in turn beckoned the industrial agent who would accelerate the processes of deep history. and maybe even change the past. in which west texas becomes a former reef at the center of the west texas extractive zone, the petroleum museum offers up “an amazing journey through over 230 million years of history” (petroleum museum 2021). the journey begins in a video booth advertised to “crack” putative “myths” about the american fracking boom—dispelling environmental anxiety in roughly the way refineries “crack” long-chain molecules into chemical commodities. and then a history of the present begins in earnest in front of a large diorama of an underwater reef. it is soothing to find yourself before all this stilled marine ecology, installed like an aquarium behind floor-to-ceiling glass, artificial light falling in gently from above. you get to the petroleum museum by traveling through miles of industrial traffic on hot and dusty highways. the nearest sea is some 450 miles away. but the diorama is, on closer inspection, bewildering. it takes some time to notice, but few of the creatures behind the glass are recognizable. there floats, for example, what looks like a school of fish—elegant, tapering cones in reflective silver—until your eye tracks to a wide end that opens in short tentacles. 366these are cephalopods that have not existed for eons. the diorama reconstructs a reef on the far side of 250 million years ago, the “before” of the late permian extinction event, the most severe extinction event that geologists and evolutionary biologists read off the fossil record (see erwin 2015). figure 3. at the petroleum museum, a meticulously-carved diorama depicts west texas as a former reef. photo by stefan schäfer. so absorbing is this waxen reef that you may forget: this is a petroleum museum, and you are looking at extinct cephalopods because you are yourself standing above that reef, or the “resource” it became. the diorama represents a chapter from the autobiography of fossil capitalism. the next rooms of the museum display a variety of extractive machines—drill bits, pumping units, refineries—and indeed the diorama itself depicts a phase of the historical process by which the earth began to gather some of itself into a “hydrocarbon machine” (meissner, woodward, and clayton 1984) for the generation, preservation, and transport of petroleum molecules. it went, the petroleum museum instructs, roughly like this: the earth’s continents were once joined in a single landmass, what is today west texas was the location of a sea, the reef depicted in the diorama established felicitous conditions under which dead microorganisms could fall gently to the sea floor and there be buried, undisturbed by turbulence. over millions of years heat and pressure converted those organisms to molecules of 367petroleum and methane, and then caused them to migrate through the underground until they came to rest in the pores of formations whose given names—wolfcamp, san andras, grayburg, yates—grace the pages of the wall street journal and bloomberg when someone invests in their exploitation. the petroleum industry invites you to marvel at the deep history through which the earth has made itself into a fossil resource. yet anthropologists might also marvel at the weirdness of crossing the desert plain only to be told that this plain is, most importantly, a reef-cum-hydrocarbon-machine. the diorama embodies a historicizing operation that itself invites an anthropology. the history of west texas has not been deep for long. west texas has arguably not been historical for more than 150 years. i do not mean that the many peoples who crossed the plain for millennia did not have rich conceptions of the past of that place. rather, i mean that it was from the 1870s, when u.s. military campaigns began clearing the region of every human and more-than-human obstruction on behalf of transcontinental railroad and settler ranches, that the region would be made intelligible in the specifically historical terms of a continuous temporal process connecting a receding and “closed” past to a contingent and “open” future. the progress of settler empire delivered historicizers to the plain. they caused the region to radiate a novel and specific sort of past, one continuous with the expansionist, eradicationist horizon that critics of u.s. colonialism have characterized as “settler futurity” (tuck and gaztambide-fernández 2013). some historicizers wrote books and articles about the peoples they replaced. some chronicled, in celebratory or critical moods, the military and industrial occupation of west texas.8 yet perhaps the most consequential of u.s. empire’s historicizers were the corporations whose expansion forced west texas to radiate fathoms of deep history in the early twentieth century. as geoffrey c. bowker (1994) observed, the oil industry writes its extractive zones not only into new rhythms of labor discipline and depletion economics but also into the frame of geohistorical time. in texas, the drill bit was the stylus that inscribed earth history. a century ago, west texas was not yet a former reef. in 1925 it had still to be deeply historicized. the american geologist p. b. king (1977, 36) recalls being dispatched by the marland oil company to a “backwash of the frontier,” a professional “siberia,” where minimal oil was produced and petroleum companies made only haphazard guesses as to the structure and genesis of the subsurface. king’s remarkably titled evolution of north america describes a year spent 368surveying the surface of the permian basin to no meaningful end, for the one thing geologists knew was that the surface was “uncomformable” with those depths from which oil might be produced.9 the impasse was breached, however, in the following year—and not by a heroic act of geoscientific theorizing, but by an oil well drilled in denial of all prevailing science. in desolate winkler county, where geologists were resolute that no petroleum could be found, “a wildcatter without geological inhibitions . . . struck oil—spectacularly—irrevocably overturning all previous theories about the west texas permian basin” (king 1977, 37; emphasis mine). it is conventional to say that the industrial degradation of the earth is a use, or abuse, of geoscientific knowledge. but in west texas in 1926, things worked rather in reverse. the oil well was not an application of geological thought. it cut through the haze of prevailing geohistory. and then it gave geohistory something to do. petroleum “gave impetus to the study of the permian rocks, and furnished the geologist with records of hundreds of drill holes from which to deduce the nature of the strata not exposed at the surface” (king 1948, 2). as petroleum corporations plunged hundreds of wells around the first, in turn exhuming oil and cores and other evidence of west texas stratigraphy, they extracted from the ground a question that geologists could debate, ask, and research. the ever-proliferating wells produced an anomaly that required a theory. what came out of the oil wells revealed that subsurface rocks to the east of winkler county were differently sequenced than those to the west. if that discrepancy could be explained, oil corporations would possess a surer idea about where they should expand extractive operations. explaining this discrepancy meant writing the deep history of contingent processes through which west texas assumed its contemporary shape. it is at this moment in evolution that king inserts himself into the story of geohistorical knowledge. in search of a history that could explain the anomalous oil wells, industry geologists fanned out across the region’s mountains, among them the guadalupe exposures that i would hike a century later with corporate scientists aspiring to become “slave,” then “master,” to west texas geology. their expeditions established the genre of our own. and in the glass mountains to the south of the oil field king observed a similar stratigraphic puzzle to that posed by oil wells in the extractive zone: outcroppings on one end of the mountains displayed a series of rocks wildly different from those on the other. whereupon king revisited a drawing he had once glimpsed in passing, of a triassic reef-become-mountain in the tyrolean alps. its resemblance to the texas 369structures spurred this speculation on deep time in west texas: “perhaps the odd structures were marginal to a great reef! perhaps (but the idea seemed too outrageous) reef barriers were responsible for the unlike stratigraphic sequences” (king 1977, 40). other geologists were coming independently to a similar conclusion (e.g., lloyd 1929) and however “outrageous,” “reef theory became reef fact” very quickly—not least because it was effectively tested and refined with the drilling of every new oil well (king 1977, 40). a deep history of west texas as a former reef would guide conjecture about the location of petroleum.10 if a geologist standing on the desert plain in the late 1920s could envision themself 250 million years prior along a coral reef, they might try to point the drill bit at lagoons behind the reef, where organic matter fell to the sea floor undisturbed by turbulent ocean, or perhaps toward deep waters just in front of the reef—appropriate burials for the small lives that in death become fossil fuels. and any well drilled anywhere in the permian basin would further delineate the shape and story of the ancient reef. with the progress of extraction, west texas became the former reef whose waxen imitation you may today appreciate in the chilled air of the petroleum museum. the dense spoliation of west texas would historicize it in such detail that the permian basin became a globally celebrated model on which sedimentary geologists would understand—and search for petroleum in—fossil reefs throughout the planet.11 king fills his reminisces with many of those mythic tropes—lone researcher, frontier questing, sudden eureka-discovery—that the critical anthropology of technoscience arose to dispel. but the datedness of king’s memoir is its interest. first published at the height of the oil industry’s post–second world war prestige, before petrochemical pollution inaugurated the reinterpretation of the earth as so many destructible “environments” (see bond 2022), evolution was written before “oil well” was metonymic with “oil spill.” thus might king fondly reminisce about the chaos of extractive endeavor and the ineliminable ignorance with which it expands into new zones. and thus he could characterize, direct and unembarrassed, the unity of destruction and knowledge in the writing of geological history. as a historical science, geology has often been distinguished from the so-called exact sciences on the grounds that its knowledge does not arise through experimental interventions. as adrian currie (2018, 229) observes, it is widely held that although experimental practices in physics and chemistry “bring about test cases” that disclose the unforthcoming properties of their objects, the 370hypercomplex and contingent object of geohistory—the events of earth’s past—does not disclose itself to manipulative interventions. geology, currie reports, has long been seen to suffer an “experimental impotency” (229). it does not make its knowledge in the laboratory, but can “only ‘happen upon’ correlations” (229). yet the process through which west texas became a former reef belies this commonplace. it suggests that earth history deploys an “experimental system” (rheinberger 1997) so vast as to go unrecognized: the multinational system of petroleum corporations and drilling rigs, their holes and what comes out from them producing the question of deep time in west texas, and supplying its answer.12 it indicates that the contingent history of the earth has been written via the decidedly teleological expansion of multinational corporations. that the long arc of american continental imperialism historicized the earth in the course of wrecking it. or maybe, that it wrecked the earth by historicizing it. the closing comments of king’s memoir speak to the unity of violence and historiographic inquiry—braided aspects of the historicizing operation through which the human horizon has been extended into the earth’s deep past. “now the west texas basin has been probed to its depths,” he concludes, “and perhaps we can be content” (king 1977, 41). in which the company accelerates the past when i first followed petroleum corporations to west texas in 2016, in the wake of a global collapse in oil markets, i was often asking why u.s. fracking surged here after it had stalled in appalachia, the dakotas, and south texas. among the disquieting lessons of the fracking revolution is that the oil-rich formations at which fracking aims—“tight,” impermeable stones whose hydrocarbons are trapped in infinitesimally small pores—are ubiquitous. tight oil is not scarce. it is, more or less, everywhere. something apart from the location of the resource would have to explain why so much machinery, labor, and investment now descended on west texas. at the start of my research i had expected an answer about politics—the standing rock protests of that year had harried profits in north dakota’s bakken shale—or about some distinctive quality of the texas economy. but most often i received an answer about the history of historiography. gary, a middle-aged petroleum geologist who had left pennsylvania’s gas fields to seek new prospects for the company in west texas, answered by introducing a metaphor that i would meet everywhere in the oil field in 2016.13 371west texas, he explained over drinks, was a “pincushion.” it had been “drilled to death” over the twentieth century. the permian basin was perhaps the mostly densely drilled landscape on the planet. and this ultimately prepared it, he explained, for the present boom. in the 1990s, large corporations abandoned the region. they declared it depleted. yet today they returned en masse to west texas precisely because it had been so densely depleted in the past. the permian basin was among the most thoroughly exploited petroleum basins on earth. it was therefore one of the most completely historicized. being a pincushion, it was well known and understood—and so it was ready for a “second life.” i nodded, but had trouble disguising that i didn’t understand how this explained anything at all. how do you kill something twice? figure 4. oil well pads in winkler county. imagery © 2025 airbus, cnes / airbus, maxar technologies, usda/fpac/geo, map data © 2025 google. something in west texas fracking seemed to contradict a basic principle of geological history. in the historiography of the earth as in the historiography of human life, historicizing elucidates its objects from the standpoint of their finitude (see foucault 2002). as drilling turned the desert plain into a former reef, west texas oil became logically finite. to apprehend west texas petroleum as the outcome of a very gradual process of deposition, diagenesis, and migration was to concede some limit as to how much petroleum could ever be extracted from the region. in the technical paper that popularized the once captivating, lately forgotten notion of “peak oil,” m. k. hubbert, a geologist then working on shell’s first fracking experiments, grounded his assertion of the global limits to fossil fuels by rehearsing precisely this principle: 372when we consider that it has taken 500 million years of geological history to accumulate the present supplies of fossil fuels, it should be clear that, although the same geological processes are still operative, the amount of new fossil fuels that is likely to be produced during the next few thousands of years will be inconsequential . . . we can assume with complete assurance that the industrial exploitation of fossil fuels will consist in the progressive exhaustion of an initially fixed supply of which there will be no significant additions during the period of our interest. (hubbert 1956, 4; emphasis mine) 500 million years. on premise of deep time thinking, oil corporations would now seem to have depleted the limited volumes that natural history had generated in west texas. historicized as the remains of a reef and simultaneously “drilled to death,” west texas should now be history so far as corporate expansion was concerned. yet this common sense comes with a footnote so absurd as to never go stated. one might say that, by the end of the twentieth century, oil corporations had depleted most of what the permian basin had generated so far. the hydrocarbon machine might still be at work on further petroleum. it was just doing so very slowly. further petroleum in significant volumes was not ready yet. but on the assumption that natural law and geological process remain invariant across space and time, more oil might someday present itself for extraction in west texas, if a corporation could wait millions of years. this would surely occur “beyond the period of our interest,” as hubbert (1956, 4) put it. gary detected my confusion. he proceeded to rehearse the reef theory of west texas oil. i groaned inwardly at the prospect of hearing it told for the hundredth time. organic matter, gary began, was buried in the margins of a reef more than a quarter billion years ago, subterranean heat and pressure “cooked” some of it into oil and gas, and also made some of those oil and gas molecules “migrate” from the strata in which they were created into the “porous” and “permeable” strata in which they awaited the drill bit. being porous and permeable, the molecules contained therein would flow readily to the surface—almost, gary seemed to suggest, as if they desired it14—once an oil well opened a channel of unequal pressure between surface and depth. this was the familiar deep history of west texas oil, the same history recounted at the petroleum museum. but now he added a further chapter. there remained, he continued, an enormous, “practically infinite,” volume of petroleum stored within the tight mudstones in which oil formed. the 373molecules held there had not yet migrated into a more permeable formation, where they might respond well to the solicitations of the drill. they remained in the “source rocks.” and the petroleum industry already knew the location of the source rocks where so many still-unmigrated molecules lay, because west texas was a pincushion—its space thoroughly drilled, its history well documented in many cores. for decades petroleum companies had acknowledged those formations in passing. “we used to call it crap rock,” gary said, laughing. now, alongside tens of thousands of geologists and engineers and laborers, he had come to west texas to target “crap rock” in particular, and cause unmigrated molecules to move. this was fracking. the company fractured those source formations with water and abrasive chemistry at high pressure, shattering tight rocks like safety glass, and then pressured enormous volumes of sand into the rock to “prop” those fractures open—creating microscopic channels in which petroleum molecules, now “unlocked,” could flow into an oil well and to the surface. gary’s explanation placed fracking within an ongoing and unfinished geological process whose future the company might yet direct. the molecules that remained in tight source rocks hadn’t migrated yet. their deep future, like the human future, was indeterminate. the earth-qua-hydrocarbon machine, one might say, was still working on them in its plodding, unpredictable way. now the company had come to the permian basin to make those molecules move on capitalist time. it would induce the migration of hydrocarbons within “the period of our interest.” fracking—this thought took shape as gary narrated the fracking revolution within the timelines of petroleum genesis and migration—induces and accelerates geohistorical process because the earth has proved too slow.15 anthropologists, activists, journalists, and scientists have written at length of the destructiveness of the fracking revolution. they have documented how fracking’s operations exhaust fresh water and spread endocrine-disrupting chemistry into aquifers and atmospheres (grant 2020; tabuchi and migliozzi 2023; wylie 2018; willow and wylie 2014); how fracking’s appetite for sand turns hills into mines (pearson 2017); how the injection of fracking’s waste beneath ground induces earthquakes (skoumal and trugman 2021); how drilling sites and refineries release enormous volumes of uncombusted methane (zhang et al. 2020); how the sprawling “invasive infrastructures” of fossil fuel logistics (spice 2018) reiterate the process of settler-colonial incursion into indigenous territories, at the same time wearing out the minimalized public infrastructures on which marginalized communities depend (grant 2025). a full accounting of the 374violations would be, like texas oil today, practically infinite. from west texas, one starts to see that via these and other intensities of violence the petroleum industry is trialing a distinctive relationship to deep history—a new industrial historicism. if prior extraction cast west texas in terms of a gradual geological process, fracking would now speed up that process. from the standpoint of the company, the earth had come to seem sluggish. it needed hastening. the entire catastrophe of the u.s. fracking revolution—despoiled landscapes, ruined water tables, carcinogenic atmospheres, anthropogenic earthquakes, and volatile markets—would service this acceleration. fracking would push the subsurface toward a geological event for which a corporation might have to wait millions of years, or which might never eventuate at all. multinational oil corporations fantasize themselves immortal. the ceo of exxonmobil once famously declared, “presidents come and go; exxonmobil doesn’t come and go” (cited in coll 2012, 123). yet even for exxonmobil, several million years is too long to wait. a century ago, drilling projected historicity into the west texas subsurface; and when drilling exhausted west texas oil, petroleum corporations would move to expedite earth history.16 in the plain known as a pincushion, the modern historicization of the earth now displays a new continuity with the modern historicization of human affairs. arendt (1961) often observed that as soon as human life was grasped in terms of an ongoing, contingent historical process that could have been otherwise and might yet go otherwise, it gave rise to a new structure of political desire: to sculpt and direct that process, whichever way one wanted it to lead; to shatter obstructions to its advancement; and to accelerate the process if a desired future was not arriving fast enough.17 with the ascent of fracking, geohistory appears to produce a parallel aspiration. beneath the surface differences that make deep history seem like a subversive alternative to human history, there may lie this stratum that connects them as twin expressions of an historicizing form of life. the petroleum industry has historicized the earth. historicizing the earth, the industry has expanded catastrophically throughout the world. yet to explicate the earth as the outcome of contingent geohistorical processes has marked out limits to continuous extractive expansion. and as those limits have neared, a deeply historicized earth has given rise to a prospect at once novel and overfamiliar: that the industry might modulate, induce, and accelerate those processes it has so far chronicled. 375 after history and if the contingencies of geohistory seem increasingly insufficient to the necessities of the corporate present, perhaps the industry might even move to change the past. in the idle moments before the start of a night class in petroleum geology at a local college, my classmates, most of them working geologists, talked excitedly of an extravagant recent experiment with “frac sand.” the chesapeake energy corporation had announced the experimental injection of an unprecedented 50 million pounds of sand into a tight gas play in louisiana. at the time this was more sand than had ever been used to prop open the rocks chesapeake fractured. the company declared it a “world record frac.” at a banking conference, they nicknamed the trial “propageddon.” “what we’re doing,” announced chesapeake’s vice president of operations, “is unleashing hell on every gas molecule” (quoted in carroll and wethe 2016). our instructor, a soft-spoken petroleum geologist in his mid-forties, was visibly astonished. he struggled for a few seconds to explain what made propageddon so disturbing. he seemed to find it repulsive. he settled on this: by relocating so much sand beneath ground it was almost as if chesapeake had inserted a new sandstone stratum into the earth, a formation not deposited over millions of years but injected all at once—and thus the company had effectively falsified the past. by the standards of geohistorical reason that apprehends the past from the sequence of strata, chesapeake energy had turned some of the earth into an unreliable archive of its own past. in the future, he speculated, some geoscientist examining a core pulled from that field might even be misled about the events of geohistory. chesapeake had injected dunes from the surface, maybe 2 to 3 million years old, into the remains of a jurassic world laid down one 150 million years before. in propageddon, chesapeake, soon to file for bankruptcy, had made history with a disturbing literalness, inserting extra time into the sequence of deep history. the instructor’s astonishment now jogs my own speculation about some future traveler crossing the permian basin. the reader may recognize it as the speculation of a compulsive historicizer, straining at the limits of that modern compulsion. the world has not been historical for long. it is plausible, even likely, that at some date in the deep future the world will cease to be historical. i do not mean that it will cease to have a past. i mean that its past will cease to be intelligible 376in relation to those provincially modern notions of human and planetary reality continuously unfolding as a contingent and indeterminate historical process. some other form of time will prevail. and perhaps on that far side of the present, someone traveling across what is today called west texas, from the mountain to the plain, will observe a landscape punctured by hundreds of thousands of oil wells, the rusting pumping units and drilling rigs and pipelines, and observe that here were certain familiar leavings of the historicizing form of life. abstract this article draws on ethnographic research in the oil fields of west texas to reflect on the imperial-modern compulsion to historicize—to explicate more and more of the world in terms of contingent, indeterminate historical process. a century ago, petroleum drilling turned west texas into a vast extractive zone and simultaneously historicized the desert plain as a former reef. today, i show, fracking moves to shape and accelerate the region’s geological processes on the logic that the earth, now burdened with historicity, is somehow too slow. this confluence of events highlights a common moral-political undertow shared across the “deep” historiography of the earth and the “shallow” historiography of the human. conceptually and concretely, both historiographic operations reorder their objects as open-ended processes that modern powers may adjust and modulate. from west texas, the question arises: does modernity wreck the planet by historicizing it? [oil, geology, extraction, fracking, historicity, contingency, agency, destruction] notes acknowledgments  for critical exchanges that shaped this article in ways large and small, i am grateful to: hussein ali agrama, geoffrey rathgeb aung, nandita badami, gretchen bakke, emily bock, damien bright, lillian canright, lauren cubellis, matthew furlong, silas grant, anke gruendel, joseph masco, amy mclachlan, andrea muehlebach, zeynep oguz, emma pask, elana resnick, stefan schäfer, lachlan summers, mudit trivedi, jerome whitington, and troy vettese, along with three insightful reviewers, julia elyachar, kate herman, petra dreiser, and the editorial collective of cultural anthropology. research for this article was supported by the wenner-gren foundation, the alexander von humboldt-stiftung, and the research institute for sustainability, potsdam. 1. the evocative phrase deep time was popularized by john mcphee, 1981. 2. for a related use of “explication,” see sloterdijk 2009. 3. from a different angle, many scholars have critiqued the undifferentiated “human” that often populates anthropocene theory. see, for example, davis and todd 2017, as well as whyte 2017. 4. anthropologists have marked out a wide range of positions on the politics of geological time. of special interest are cultural anthropology’s “theorizing the contemporary” collection on “geological anthropology” (oguz 2020) and “earth as praxis,” a special section of environmental humanities (oguz and whitington 2023). beyond anthropology, efforts to “geologize the social” (clark and szerszynski 2021, 49) have been highly generative. the question i would like to introduce into this conversation is whether the disciplines of the “social” and the “geological” already presuppose a common 377metaphysics—a world of contingent, indeterminate, historical process—such that each quietly confirms the other’s modernist premises and prejudices. 5. to investigate imperial modernity as a condition of “conscription,” as david scott (2004) writes, discussing talal asad (1992), is neither to insist on modernity’s homogeneity, nor to emphasize the perdurance of difference and contestation. rather, it is to explore how “difference, such as it is, is increasingly obliged to respond to—and be managed by—the categories brought into play by european modernity” (scott 2004, 9). the connected wittgensteinian notion of a “form of life” (wittgenstein 2010, §241) invites exploration of the tacitly shared assumptions and excitations that choreograph explicit, impassioned disagreement. 6. for a mind-widening discussion of stratigraphy and periodization across earth science and critical theory, see roosth 2022. 7. anthropocene-proximate conversations about how to take in a broader cast of agencies have still to engage the rich critical reflections on the concept of agency arising in feminist and queer theory (for example, berlant 2007; bersani 1987; sedgwick 1993) and secular studies (for example, asad 2003; mahmood 2001). 8. important recent studies addressing what is today called west texas include hämäläinen 2008, martinez 2018, stanford-mcintyre 2017, and pask 2024. 9. in this section, most quotes are from king’s (1977) popular-audience evolution of north america, but my paraphrase draws as well on king’s typescript memoirs (king 2000) and studies published by the bulletin of the american association of petroleum geologists (1942) and the u.s. geological survey (1948). a resonant account of the ascent of the reef theory is found in rigby and millward 1988. 10. reef theory would utterly transform the corporate search for petroleum in west texas and elsewhere. per king’s contemporary e. russell lloyd (1975, 2): “if this theory could be maintained, the search for oil in the basin should be primarily a search for buried reefs.” 11. j. keith rigby and ann millward (1988, 71) write: “no other reef has influenced thinking about carbonate models equal to the guadalupe and glass mountains of texas and new mexico.” 12. although here i refer to an “experimental” apparatus, i have elsewhere argued for a wider conceptualization of the relationship between scientific representation and technological intervention, investigation of which is perhaps unduly constrained by the notion of experiment (see hu 2021). for provocative suggestions of such a wider relationship beyond “experiment,” see bond 2022 and masco 2010. 13. gary is a pseudonym. our conversation returned to these points over several meetings. 14. david hughes (2017) observes a similar assignation of surface-ward desire to petroleum in the aesthetics of petroleum-resource classification systems. 15. it is not just the extractive corporation to whom a historicized nature suggests the prospect of speeding things up. consider the following passage from sabrina imbler’s (2022, 222) admixture of natural history and queer memoir: “in the brief splendor of my human life, i don’t have millions of years to let evolution figure it out for me. i have to start morphing on my own.” across very different modern projects, from fracking to queer theory, it is noteworthy that a conception of the world as a gradual, continuous natural-historical process enables the agential prospect of accelerating natural history—bringing those deep time processes into “the period of our interest” (hubbert 1956, 4). 16. fracking is arguably just the most prominent in a long series of petroleum industry experiments with the acceleration of geological processes. for several decades shell experimented with inducing a phase of petroleum genesis prior to migration, by heating sections of subterranean oil shale formations so as to force the “maturation” of kerogen that has yet to turn into oil and gas molecules (see ryan et al. 2010). 17. this is a central tendency of modern political thought, evident throughout the -isms (republicanism, liberalism, etc.) that organize politics as the problem of “anticipating future historical movement and 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zhang, yuzhong, et al. 2020 “quantifying methane emissions from the largest oil-producing basin in the united states from space.” science advances 6, no. 17. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz5120 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 354–382, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.07 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 82–104 issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.04 garima jaju university of cambridge https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9068-843x “once he starts sending money, he will start loving,” isha says once again, repeating the statement to emphasize the point and elicit my confidence in her “plan.” the look on her face is an all-knowing one that seems to suggest that she knows that this is indeed what will happen, that this is how it works. isha and her sister,1 two young hindu dalit (ex-untouchable) women of the dhobi (washermen) subcaste, were married at eighteen years to two husbands of the same caste in a town in the state of rajasthan, india. following multiple episodes of physical beatings, economic exploitation, verbal abuse, and coercive control, the parents brought the two sisters back to live in their natal home in an overcrowded residential colony in old gurgaon, in the state of haryana. isha has an ongoing case against her husband on two counts of domestic and dowry-related violence. through the legal action, her main hope is to secure a monthly “maintenance” payment from her husband,2 heera, who has a stable government job as a jailer in a city prison in rajasthan, secured within a “scheduled caste” quota.3 the court-case proceedings—expensive, slow-moving, uncertain, and further disrupted by the pandemic—form the backdrop to the ethnographic story of this essay. in the foreground stands isha, back in her isha’s wait: money, love, and kinship in the wake of domestic violence in india cultural anthropology isha’s wait 83 natal home and living with her parents who run a clothes-ironing station servicing an upper-class residential complex in the city. as a legal concept in india, “maintenance money” has been understood as a “civil remedy” for the injury and harm caused by domestic violence that can sustain women’s exit from abusive marriages. while the broader patriarchal practices around inheritance, property, employment, and unremunerated domestic labor that make women economically vulnerable and dependent within martial and affinal kin structures remain unchallenged, the supposed compromise of maintenance money hinges on the promise of offering a modicum of financial independence and self-sustenance for separated women (roychowdhury 2020; mandal 2024; basu 2015). in this essay, i show that while these are indeed the stated goals in isha’s demand for maintenance, her demand also entails imaginations and speculative wonderings about the force of money in reviving, sustaining, and nourishing kin relationality and conjugal love to ultimately yield reconciliation. intertwined with isha’s hope for maintenance money is her hope that forcing heera to pay will force him to improve his conduct, feel love for his family, realize his role and responsibilities as a householder man and husband, and compel him—emotionally, socially, and financially—to ask isha and their daughter to return to him. isha’s desire for reconciliation is not about her passive forgetting and forgiving of subjugation and violence suffered through the mere restitution of conjugal rights. instead, i demonstrate, it tells the story of her agentive and strategic faith in the power of money to engender social, moral, and behavioral correction in the abusive husband such that it will deliver to isha the hallowed promises of economic stability, sexual and emotional intimacy, and social respectability through marriage and rescue her from her current kin-dislocated life. this is analytically salient. money features not just as a compulsion to stay in an unhappy marriage and endure violence, as is commonly observed, but as a potential tool with which to solve the problem of violence and “fix” the marriage. in the essay, i trace the ways in which different streams of money flow, unflow, or mis-flow to and from isha. following these flows and non-flows over a period of two years, i probe the role money comes to play in the experience of domestic violence, its aftermath, and the imaginations of the way out of it. anthropologists have long questioned the ideological opposition between the realms of money, market, and economics, on the one hand, and those of emotions, social relations, and moralities, on the other, demonstrating how they “might, in fact, be deeply intertwined” (cole 2009, 111). how money is earned, how it is cultural anthropology 40:1 84 spent, who spends it, who it is spent on and to achieve what ends is tied up with social codes, morals, and values (parry and bloch 1989). studying money in its material, relational, and affective dimensions, i locate the various gendered subjectivities and moralities that dictate the social code of how money should flow within the family, and the sense of dislocation experienced when it does not flow along this normative path. i follow the rich anthropological scholarship that ascribes an “agentive force” to money—money is not a neutral economic resource flowing in a frictionless form from one person to another, but a socially vital, emotionally charged, and morally enlivened resource culturally understood as possessing an agency of its own (gamburd 2004; also see cornwall 2002). in fact, money can prove a particularly malleable and liquid substance, capable of opening space for renegotiation and readjustment within social relations—undermining some, while reinforcing others that matter (zharkevich 2019). this implies that the directions and manner of money flows are not just shaped by extant social systems but can also shape new social norms, orientations, relations, and personhoods (kwon 2015; walsh 2003). it is in this agentive capacity of money—to not just reproduce but also transform relations and people—that isha places her hopes. i listen to isha as she talks about pyaar, or love, and domestic violence as arising from the absence of its ehsaas, or feeling/realization, by the abusive husband. the anticipated maintenance money is infused with the hopeful imagination that it will generate both pyaar and its ehsaas. it is evoked as an effective tool to fix the disrupted flows of reciprocal love, care, and material support within the marital home, and restore the heteronormative order of kin roles, responsibilities, and reciprocities. this maintenance money, initially flowing from afar following a legal mandate, is imagined as eventually translating into more natural, proximate, and embodied flows of love, service, and care within a repatched conjugality and domesticity. such a smooth-flowing narration of the imagined sequence of events belies the fact that court sanctions for maintenance money are notoriously difficult to obtain and even more difficult to enforce, owing to the workings of a patriarchal and “incapable” legal system (roychowdhury 2020; banerjee et al. 2022). claimants constantly grapple with legal delays and deferments, as well as the evasions or counterclaims of the offending husbands. however, as megha sharma sehdev (2018) argues, a sole focus on “outcomes” leaves us with an impoverished understanding of the social life of domestic violence laws. situating her research “in the interim,” she draws attention to the “productivity of failed or unfulfilled isha’s wait 85 legal promises” and explores everyday textures of “hope in abeyance” (sehdev 2018, 8). such a focus invites us to think about the indefinite period of isha’s wait for maintenance money to flow and for it to then do the things she imagines as constituting an ethnographic space. my essay is situated within this space of waithood. her waithood is not experienced as a problem of excess time filled with boredom and idleness, as has been noted for unemployed men cast aside by the neoliberal economy (mains 2011; masquelier 2019; jeffrey 2010). isha is very busy, shuttling between various low-end service-sector jobs in the city, balancing childcare, the heavy load of domestic work re-assigned to her in her natal home, and the running of her legal case. nevertheless, her waithood manifests as an “existential limbo” (haas 2017, 77), the awaited decision a “matter of life and death.” however, this is not just a landscape of despondency and despair but also one marked by “cultivating hope” (mattingly 2010, 22). this is a hope sustained by her imagination of what maintenance money will do. for long, i struggled to understand this imagination and the optimism that underwrites it, especially given well-founded suspicions that the maintenance money may never come or worse, provoke patriarchal backlash in the form of increased violence (mandal 2014). with time it became clear that isha’s claim about money engendering love and disciplining is not just about what will happen but how she can agentively “construct a narrative” (mains 2011, 44) and “redefine terms of belonging” (masquelier 2019, 28), so that she may wait in her natal home where she has exceeded her welcome. it allows her to interpret and narrate her kin-dislocated present as oriented toward an improved future based on a possible return and reconciliation with the marital family. there exists a rich body of scholarship on domestic violence in india that focuses on laws and courtroom proceedings (e.g., basu 2012; mandal 2014). at the same time, scholarship has recognized the need to study the “other” of law: paralegal, extra-legal, and even illegal spaces where ngos, counseling centers, brokers, families, local headmen, or elders operate to variously interpret, implement, or subvert the law and its afterlife (e.g., basu 2015; kowalski 2022; oza 2022). pushing this further, my ethnography explores another “other” of law—the affectively charged landscape of private thoughts, hesitations, desires and bitter anger that occupy the complainant’s heart (dil) and mind (dimaag), where legal definitions, provisions, and possibilities come to be personally owned and imaginatively reworked within a love and kinship calculus. i draw on fourteen months of postdoctoral fieldwork conducted in gurgaon in north india as part of a project on domestic violence, working with housewives and cultural anthropology 40:1 86 “working moms” in posh gated complexes, young migrant professionals living in girls’ hostels and “paying guest” accommodations, domestic workers in tenement blocks, local women in the “urban villages” that intersperse the modernizing city. in this essay, i focus singly on isha, who i was first put in touch with by a gated colony resident i had interviewed. our first whatsapp call lasted a long three hours, where isha spoke with infectious humor and startling frankness. we started meeting regularly at her parents’ or her uncle’s home, my unmarried status a constant source of curiosity and confusion for all, and also generative of animated discussions and advice-giving. in the essay, i make the following interrelated arguments: domestic violence can become less about violence and more about the failed social relations and frayed social worlds it creates. money constitutes a crucial site where the experience of violence as the misalignment of love and kinship is registered. then the legal demand for maintenance money becomes not just a monetary demand for sustenance and independent survival but also a social and moral critique of the violence suffered, articulating the interpersonal hurt, desires, and moral deservedness of the wife. money, as i will outline below, operates as a substance of kinship that does not just reflect existing kinship but also sustains imaginations of transformed kinship futures. importantly, the awaited money can create the space to agentively wait for the ethical correction of the husband and the wider marital kin. ultimately, this complicates ideas of exit from violent marital homes and articulates loveand kin-forward visions of justice and moral retribution that exceed the frame of the criminal justice system. this is a vision based on the complainant’s own ideas of redress, reform, repair, and reconciliation that are deeply gendered, interpersonal, and structurally shaped by the patriarchal make of both the natal and marital homes. fractured kinworlds and the substance of money reconciliation is a common cry in cases of domestic violence in south asia, shared by the family-preserving courts and the family-dependent victim alike, and one that reverberated throughout my fieldwork. anthropological scholarship has focused on the way legal and paralegal spaces institutionally mediate reconciliation—by providing “emotional fixes” (gardner 2022) and “tutoring” women in “kinwork” toward “liveability” (lemons 2016), with the aim to uphold the contractual integrity and social sanctity of marriage (basu 2015). such measures are critiqued to be ambiguous, tentative, and contradictory in how they render the violence suffered secondary and further violence by returning women isha’s wait 87 to unhappy, even dangerous homes—a failure of gender justice (basu 2015). at the same time, however, it is also important to “vernacularize” understanding of gender-based violence, as julia kowalski (2016) argues in her work on counseling centers, by putting women’s own desires for kin and intergenerational familial dependencies front and center of the analysis. violence, she notes, can come to be registered as “neglect” and absence of care that results in “disordered households” which must be reordered by paying attention to “kinship ideologies” of hierarchy, reciprocity, and service, not just within the conjugal units but also engaging wider kin networks of affines, parents, siblings, and children. such an approach is an important rejoinder to westernized discourses in academic scholarship and ngo advocacy that places emphasis on women’s rights, empowerment, and independence. “interdependence,” as kowalski (2016, 66) writes, “produces both families and people.” here, she is echoing james ferguson’s (2013) important “declaration of dependence” that discusses the radical need for vital interdependencies to create meaningful personhood and social life. writing about the social primacy of kinship in chile, clara han (2011, 13) notes, “to be constituted through family is not a choice; it is how one inhabits the world.” then, even in situations of intimate violence that cause emotional, physical, and material hardships and hurt, people can remain tied up in the “thickness” (povinelli 2006) of kin relations and the network of obligations, care, and hopes they constitute (pinto 2014; banerjee 2019). it is within this context that we can appreciate isha’s plan for reconciliation: heera’s stable government job offers the possibility of demanding substantial maintenance money from him and of reasonably hoping that the courts will enforce this demand. beyond the share of economic support this will offer isha and her daughter, it will provide tangible material means to make more substantial claims of maintenance on heera as a husband and father, and a tool to discipline him into being a good husband and good father—“when they have to pay, they all fall in line. then they start saying sorry. a realization starts to fall on them.” here, the specific character of heera’s money proves crucial. unlike commonly observed cases where the income of the husband is difficult to determine—either because it is unsteady or undocumented or difficult to isolate from the collective income of joint families (basu 2015, 121), the steady and publicly documented, state-sanctioned income of the husband is known both to the claimant and the law. this legibility inspires confidence in the possibility of money to flow from the estranged husband, which in turn feeds the possibility for kin re-making to be materially felt and envisioned. it also explains the cultural anthropology 40:1 88 socially exceptional support extended to isha by her natal family to pursue legal action, when in other cases women have experienced “estrangement” from kin (roychoudhury 2020, 112), even violence (banerjee et al. 2022). in fact, the very idea of “putting a case” arrived on the back of the promise of this money, and the parents took out loans to furnish the requisite legal fees from their upper-class customers, one of whom also provided the contact for the lawyer. kinship, as we know, is not a natural, solid, and unchanging given. feminist and critical kinship scholars have long emphasized how it is made and unmade by the doing of kinship through the performance of relatedness and reciprocities. an important aspect of this phenomenon is the sharing of “substances,” such as food, gifts, bodily fluids like blood, semen, and breastmilk (sahlins 2013; carsten 1995; lamb 2000). ina zharkevich (2019) has asked if money, too, can become a “substance of relatedness” through which kinship is constituted and re-constituted—embodied, performed, reinforced, and altered. studying remittances in nepal, she finds that the money wired from abroad proves instrumental in maintaining and replenishing kin ties, especially in the absence of physical proximity or cohabitation. andrea wright (2020) has studied the ways in which the gold sent back by male indian immigrants in the gulf allows them to perform their familial duties as brothers, fathers, and sons, thereby themselves maturing into adulthood. the crucial role of money in performing kin intimacy, care, and obligations has been variedly explored in contexts of familial separation because of economic migration (kwon 2015; coe 2011; hannaford 2017). in fact, even in cases where migrants are unable to earn enough to send remittances home, the “striving” to earn money contributes to building “responsible” personhood and the maintenance of social relations of duty and reciprocity (fioratta 2015). money can thus sustain kinship even in its absence, as long as there is the exhibited desire to earn and share it. in this essay, i trace the role money comes to play as a substance of kinship in the case of domestic violence—in the making of fractured kinworlds and the imagination of their suturing. here, crucially, the nature of kin separation is different, haunted by the memories of past violence endured and the threat of its future reoccurrence. the flow of money is different too, as it is not voluntary but legally decreed. at variance, then, the essay does not concern itself with how money flows to testify to the endurance of kinship ties across physical distances (i.e., testifying the “thicknesses” of blood). rather, inversely, it follows isha as she wonders if money—forced to flow by law, social pressure, and circumstance—can make the imperative of good kinship visible, felt, and realized. isha’s wait 89 i ask what exact mechanisms underpin isha’s “cruel optimism” (berlant 2011) that maintenance money, when and if forthcoming, will lead to kin disciplining. i probe how money relates to questions of pyaar, or its lack, and in what exact ways money is seen as capable of creating its ehsaas, such that it corrects bad behavior, solves the problem of violence, and brings about kin reconciliation. the striking point with all this money talk is that the money is not actually flowing. it is only hoped that it will flow and perform its supposedly vital role in marital kin rehabilitation. crucially, then, the kinship evoked here is not one already present, performed through everyday actions, reciprocities, and sharing rituals (carsten 1995). rather, it is defined by a set of imaginations about possible “kinship futures” (cooper 2018). the present, then, becomes a period of “active waiting and patience” sustained by ideas of what han (2011, 8) calls the “what if ” and the “possible”—“an indeterminacy of lived relations in the present,” where domestic relations are considered not just for what they are but also for their potentiality. in a similarly speculative vein, it is not heera the husband and father he is, but, rather, the husband and father he can potentially become in the future. contributing to emerging scholarship that recognizes the role of imagination, faith, and ideology in the constitution of kinship even in the absence of its everyday experience or practice (cooper 2018, carsten 2000, härkönen 2023), my essay maps the role of money as a substance of kinship in creating and sustaining these imaginations. central to isha’s imagination of sutured kinship futures, i argue, is the idea that money has corrective potential. the fluid and agentive substance of money can be directed to flow in such a manner that it creates a set of ethical and affective realizations, or ehsaas, that engender the desired individual and kin transformations. such an understanding rests on the ways in which the perceived malleability of the substance of money (zharkevich 2019) is expected to interlock with the perceived malleability of personhood (maqsood 2024) and the malleability of kinship (kowalski 2016). it is important to point out that these imagined transformations in no way prove structurally transformative. continuing to operate within heteronormative visions of kinship, masculinity/femininity, and love, what is sought is a transition from bad kinship to good kinship. ultimately, however, these transformations remain elusive for isha. lawyers and ngo activists i spoke to said that it was not uncommon for courts to order wives to return to abusive homes, but they remained skeptical about isha receiving her maintenance or a reformed husband, adding that such hopes for abuser reform are common but often end in disappointment (also see roychowdhury 2020, 7). against such cultural anthropology 40:1 90 odds, isha’s optimistic speech reveals the active role of the imagination, desperation, and hope in endowing the substance of money (which may not come) with a singular disciplinary force (which it may not possess) to narrate her present waithood and legal efforts on her terms. writing about women’s experience of marriage in pakistan, ammara maqsood (2024) warns that the wives who wait can be just as susceptible to be changed by time as the husbands whose transformation they await. it is not yet clear in what ways time will change isha’s faith in the agency of money and the achievability of her plan. for now, we see her grappling with the un-flows and mis-flows of money that make up her present domestic condition—money that remains disobedient to her will, by either flowing in the wrong direction or not flowing, all the while testing the limits of parental love and kin support in her natal home. these misaligned or absent flows of money mark out her precarious position and unbelonging in both her natal and martial home, shaping her expectations of potential flows of money and love from the violent husband. the analytic of flows (behena [to flow], aana [to come], lena [to take], dena [to give], paana [to receive]) evokes the multiple vectors of reciprocities and relationalities through which isha negotiates her fractured kinworld, in a wider social context that accords recognition and respectability only to women in “good marriages.” mis-flows: bleeding money and multiplying kharche isha is the eldest daughter of jago and shanti, both dhobis or washermen, who have four children—three daughters (one unmarried) and a son (unmarried). jago’s elder brother, bade papa, married to shanti’s elder sister, badee mummy, also have three daughters (all married), and a son (recently married). following an amicable separation, their “joint family” split a decade ago. while the two families remain closely knit emotionally, their material realities have diverged over the years. speaking directly to this point, isha once said, “our papa has bled so much money [paise bahana], bade-papa [uncle] has made money [paise banana].” while there could be various factors at play, including the superior luck and enterprise of jago’s brother, the tale of divergence in the two family’s ability to find security, mobility, and wealth in the city is often linked implicitly to the continuing “trouble” in isha and her sister’s marriage. isha’s father sold off his share of the family land to finance the wedding celebrations of the two daughters, as well as to furnish the demanded dowry. since then, substantial money has been spent on hefty lawyer fees for isha’s case of dowry and domestic violence, as well as to pay medical bills for isha’s isha’s wait 91 hospitalization following domestic assault and continued ill health. additionally, there have been multiple trips to rajasthan to negotiate with the estranged husbands, as well as to fight the case when it was escalated from the district court to the high court. during the same time period, jago’s brother has built a three-floor house in one of the old colonies in gurgaon, in which they rent their extra two floors to low-end migrant workers who flock to the city to work in the growing real estate construction, motor, and garment industries, while jago is only able to rent two rooms in his comparably smaller house. the brother’s family has also become, alongside being dhobis (washermen), local contractors for labor and construction machinery, which they supply to small-time construction companies in the city’s booming real estate sector. additionally, there are the multiplying household kharche (expenses) in jago’s house where the two daughters have returned along with their two young children. “these two kids” isha says grabbing her daughter, “are so greedy. get chocolate! get toys! get juice! their demands are unending” the child giggles and isha mock-slaps her bottom. “mummy-papa can’t say no, even if it is a 150-rupees-juice these monsters want . . . they just give.”4 even then, isha tells me, it sometimes slips out of her mother’s mouth that the kharche are too many now, alluding to the increased expenses of childcare, school fees, food, transport, clothes, and other daily items for a family that has doubled in size again, living in a city with growing mehengai (inflation) that can “suck you dry” (choosna). gurgaon has seen spectacular urbanization in the past two decades, with heavy flows of private capital transforming the city from an agrarian hinterland to india’s “millennial city.” while jago’s brother has been able to use family money to engage the ever-expanding capitalistic “frontiers” of the city (cowan 2022), building small-scale land assets and labor forces to make money for the family, isha’s father’s money has flown endlessly in the “non-productive” direction of care, sustenance, repair, and redress in the lives of the two daughters in an economically inflationary “sucking” context. flow is behena in hindi. in reference to money—paise behana—it is either linked to the way in which water flows, as an abundant and freely available substance flowing without obstacle, or, as in the context of material constraints, it is linked to bleeding, to the way in which blood flows out of the body, indexing critical loss and stress. in the sisters” case, the behena of money has meant the latter. this bleeding money—spent on legal fees, the cost of the wedding, and the unreturned dowry items, as well as the daily expenses of a redoubled family—has constituted a form of mis-flow cultural anthropology 40:1 92 of resources within the patriarchal kin structure that has consolidated neither wealth for the patrilineal family nor the “right” kind of extended kin through the daughters’ marriages. it indexes the lapsed responsibilities of the husbands appointed for the two daughters, as well as the additional expenses that their poor behavior has generated. further, it implies the asynchronous and unbudgeted expenses borne by the father for the two daughters, long after they were married off, and in the interim period of uncertainty before they are returned to their old or new marital homes. within the home, money is a “gendered item” (rogers 2005) linked to the gendered construction of power, authority, and respectability. isha has always insisted on having a job, an easily available option in the increasingly feminizing service economy of the city. throughout fieldwork, she was in and out of lowend service-sector data-entry or secretarial jobs, moving from job to job seeking a salary raise of a few thousand rupees. the salary, ranging between 10,000 and 13,000 rupees, must remain hidden from heera and the courts as it will affect her maintenance claims. but within the confines of their house in gurgaon, it is repeatedly mentioned by isha. she routinely slips into conversation how she does not need to ask for money from her father for a new dress or accessories. one day, offering me a glass of water, isha declared, with performed smugness: “ro [water purifier] had stopped working. for the repair i said, ‘kato mere salary se’ [cut it from my salary].” toward the end of fieldwork, isha also convinced her sister to get a job in a beauty parlor nearby for 8,000 rupees a month, swapping the sister’s unremunerated labor of housework and childcare with salaried work that generates visible income. together they also started contributing to the legal fees of their court cases. this flow of money from the sisters’ salaries goes some distance in correcting the mis-flows of the money bleeding out of their natal home. however, its corrective reach remains limited, both because of the insubstantial amount of the salaries and the patriarchal norms that discourage the father to take money directly from the daughters. un-flows: love, or pyaar, before money the parents’ bleeding money is a show of their love, or pyaar, for their daughters and grandchildren. it is a love not determined by economic rationality. in contrast to this, isha points out, stands the lack of love in her marital home, evidenced most strongly in the lack of any material offerings—the un-flows of money. isha’s wait 93 “if the two kids would ask for toffee in our house, they would ask them to go eat shit,” isha claims. both husbands’ and the in-laws’ lack of affection and attention registered in their disinterest in ever buying them new clothes, sweets, chinese food, snacks, toys, film tickets, and the like. any protests from the two sisters would be met with the rebuke that they had been “too spoilt” at their parent’s home in gurgaon. “none of these things costs very much,” isha clarifies; “it is not about money, it is about dil [heart].” expending money on consumption activities is central to individual and collective projects of class making, signaling social success and participation in modernity, especially in consumerist urban contexts (jaju 2023). but equally important, the buying and giving of consumer goods can constitute critical “modalities to care” for kin and become a vital way of “enacting kinship,” even amid economic precarity and interpersonal violence (han 2011, 15, 22). the lack of these material offerings registers a lack of companionate kin-making. added to this, the two sisters were kept tied to endless domestic chores which they worked tirelessly, without respite or reward. even for the domestic work they did, they received little material support to ease their hardship—“a washing machine they also did not want to buy.” furthermore, the family shifted the entire burden of their commercial dhobi work to the two sisters, who washed and ironed clothes by hand but were never allowed any part of the income. the paralegal counselors in kowalski’s (2016) study on domestic violence suggest the use seva, or familial labor, as a tool for re-ordering domestic relations and reciprocities. here however, the sisters’ labor and familial service met with erasure, keeping them exhausted and away from the husbands, who would go to their mother instead to eat, drink tea, chat, get their hair oiled, or watch television. the regular eruptions of physical violence resulted—and this is isha’s repeated claim—from this misalignment of labor, money, and leisure. the family’s money never flowed as kin substance for the care, protection, nourishment, or enjoyment of the wives and children, and the labor of the wives was never rewarded, materially or emotionally. unaided by the sharing of material items or leisure time, the two couples could never develop closeness, friendship, or understanding. “they never got the chance to fall in love with us”—a strikingly structured sentence from isha that stayed with me. “and if there is no love, there will only be jhagda and maar peet [verbal and physical fights].” this love, absent in her marriage and marital home, is abundantly available to isha in the city, where opportunities for romantic and sexual engagement, however furtive, abound, especially for a seemingly single woman who works cultural anthropology 40:1 94 and moves alone in the city. blushing, she would share with me romantic poetry that her much older boss had dedicated to her eyes, or how a “sweet office boy” had started dropping by and picking her up for her daily work commute and one day texted to say, “i luv u 😊.” however, even as these interactions and happenings appeared tantalizing in the moment, signaling isha’s sexual and emotional desirability, she never seemed to genuinely consider them. more commonly, she enjoyed making mockery of the suggested remedy of re-marriage. trying to be as provocative as possible, she would ask loudly in a room full of people, including family elders, “so, has anyone got a husband for me?” often in such moments, irritated by isha’s insincerity, someone from the audience would be compelled to call out her “timepass” (cf. jeffrey 2010). clicking their tongues, they would rhetorically ask her why she kept joking like this when everyone knew that she wanted to “go back.” once, in a moment of real tenderness, isha told me, “didi, i loved him. he didn’t love me, but he was my pehla pyaar [first love]. i loved him even before his government job. he got his job after marriage. my love was not for his job. my love was pure.” this idea of “pure love” came up in conversation often. the supposed purity of this love was premised on the fact that it was not tied to the socially and materially valuable government employment, that is, it was a love that hailed from before the money. in fact, she claimed that this was a love she had waited for throughout her adolescence, maintaining her virginal purity for her husband. in school, isha used to be called rani ki jhansi, after the famous martial queen of the province of jhansi. she earned this title because of her general no-nonsense attitude of not entertaining any boys “acting smart” by offering her flowers, poetry, chocolates, or cards. she emphasized her virtuous alignment with socially legitimate forms of love, romance, and sexuality sought through a heteronormative, endogamous marriage arranged by parents. this ideal is neither universal nor static (davidson and hannaford 2022). within south asia, women’s experiences of love, desire, and abandonment have been studied as varied and complex (karim 2022; donner 2016; lamb 2022, grover 2017). yet isha finds it important to uphold the ideal, allowing her to express her moral outrage at having suffered domestic violence despite voluntarily and zealously committing herself to the upper-class and caste-biased socio-moral ideal of the respectable “good girl”—a shock shared by the law and performed in court proceedings that shapes socio-legal expectations of the “good victim.” bristling with rage, isha would routinely make caustic comments, calling her husband a “dog,” “animal,” “villain,” and “black-hearted,” prodding her daughter to repeat these isha’s wait 95 epithets after her. centering her narrative of unreciprocated love in marriage, she critiqued the violence suffered as a cruel act of neglect by a “characterless” man toward a woman of “character,” bolstering her reparative claims on the husband’s money and love. as fieldwork progressed, however, the possibility of reform and reconciliation was starting to look slim given the husband’s continued recalcitrant behavior. in the family chatter around isha, increasing pressure emerged for her not be so “stuck” on heera and willingly marry any other man that the family could arrange, even if he was inferior in employment or monetary status to heera, which would likely be the case given the reality of the employment landscape, isha’s “reduced value” as a divorcee with a daughter, and the parents’ reduced ability to furnish a second dowry. people would say she should not have so much lalach, or greed, for heera’s money or his government job. here, family members were rehearsing the gendered and class-agnostic stereotype of maintenance-seeking women as after men’s money—elevated to claims of “legal terrorism” by male rights activists (basu 2016, 58)—stereotypes that ignore the structurally created dependencies between men and women linked to gender-unequal practices around property, employment, and inheritance in both the natal and martial home (lamb 2022; banerjee et al. 2022). given the broader landscape of unemployment or precarious employment in a privatizing and liberalizing india, heera’s permanent government job truly constituted a unique path to material security and social respect, furnishing him with a desirable masculinity (jeffrey 2010) and, indeed proffering a key motivation for isha to stay in the marriage. isha’s younger brother’s caste-based struggles to secure a decent job that does not involve “cleaning toilets” in the city’s hospitality sector stands in sharp contrast here (see mosse 2020). any supposed greed for heera’s money and status is thus shaped by the context of a caste-based political economy that determines isha’s critical need for his money. isha, however, insisted that hers was a love that predated his government job and remained unchanging in the face of the un-flows of money. it was the supposed virtuosity of such a love that gave her a moral right to his money and to the social prestige attached to being a government employee’s wife. the relationship between love and money proves a complex one, and the subject of much scholarly debate (hardt 2011). recent literature has questioned any simplistic dichotomies between “pure love” and “dirty money,” drawing out the reciprocal fragilities, contradictory motivations, moral ambiguities, and suspicions that underwrite the tenuous yet enduring entanglements of love and cultural anthropology 40:1 96 money (cole 2009; coe 2011; härkönen 2019; zelizer 2005). through such ethnographic elaboration, the definition of love itself expands. pyaar, as namita vijay dharia (2022, 197) writes in her ethnography of the construction industry in northern india, “gathers a slipperiness, an intimacy, a coercive weight, a longing, and a political economy leaning.” it is this multivariate and hyphenated form of love—as constituting an “affective state,” “social relation,” and material reality (cornwall 2002)—that is clearly at work in isha’s case too, where romantic attachment, material pragmatism, and social image operate in conjunction. it moves us beyond the conjugal unit to emphasize the totality of social and economic relations that make up her personhood and how she participates in the moral economy around her (hannaford 2017). the ethics of love, then, has multiple modalities (govindrajan 2021). yet the idea of pure love dominates isha’s narrative. i argue that it must be considered not for its actual supposed purity or impurity—the realness or fakeness of romantic feeling—but for the strategic narrative work it does of garnering a moral force with which to make a rightful claim on heera’s money, status, care, and love, given isha’s social vulnerability and economic precarity without it. flows? realization, or ehsaas, after money the problem, as isha saw it, was that in the current context of the un-flows of money—that is, in the absence of sharing his income—heera did not participate in reciprocating her love or feeling appropriate responsibility for her. this needed fixing. “he doesn’t love me? that’s fine. he loves money? a person like that can be brought to his knees with money.” heera, restless for a second marriage and second dowry, had initially offered that isha take two lakh rupees and divorce him.5 isha starts counting on her fingers to show how this number is not remotely sufficient. her father spent thirty lakhs in marriage, and five lakhs in furniture, dresses, food items, and other gifts. refusing heera’s pitiful offer, isha had demanded 12,000 rupees per month in the session court. after six years, the courts had finally ruled on a monthly maintenance of 8,000. when heera starts paying this monthly sum, he will also be liable to pay the total sum for the months of separation so far. “bleeding” money from his monthly salary in this manner will start to “pinch him” (chubna). money can function as an “emotional currency” (hannaford 2017, 5). spending on someone other than oneself can create the conditions for “a love that is never for itself, but instead in itself constitutive both isha’s wait 97 of the personhood of the spender and the social relations that spending enables” (cornwall 2002, 967). in such a situation, several ehsaas, or realizations, can emerge. isha speculates that he will first think “practically” and aim to contain the mis-flow of bleeding money by asking her and their child to return to his home. doing so, the transferred money will stay in his home, where he will also be able to control and limit the ways in which it is spent. additionally, if he “pays” for his family, their honor and conduct will be linked to him, and he will be keen to keep that under his control too. the reason why these realizations have not been easily forthcoming, isha continues in her speculative vein, is because heera is rumored to have a girlfriend. however, once he starts paying a share of his income to isha and their child, the rumored girlfriend will object, quarrel with him, and leave. progressing in her imaginative flight, isha adds, that in the time it will take for all these events to unfold, the mother-in-law would have gotten old and “taken to the cot” (khatiya pakad legi), finding herself in need of the care and services of a daughter-in-law. these speculations anticipate the cultural logics of the broader gender regime in south asia where material support, romantic attachment, and care work should “naturally” draw women and men into specific social contracts that assign a “provider” and “protector” role to the man and a “dependent” and “caring” role to the woman (philip 2022; srivastava 2023). patience is important, isha explains to me as much as to herself, citing a broader crisis of masculinity. “the problem in our society is that men get married off when they are still very young.” while women of the same age are already socialized to have sense and maturity with regard to “family values,” men are still “boys” at the time of marriage. their violence comes to be equated with their continued “boyishness.” the possibility of seeking money from them opens the possibility for them to learn to “provide,” and following their role as the provider, to learn to protect—the ultimate ehsaas of becoming a responsible householder man. toward the end of fieldwork, and six months after the court’s orders, heera had paid a mere four lakh rupees of the total owed to isha. to avoid paying the remaining amount, he had begun spinning lies about having visited the family in person to pay the rest of the money in cash. isha’s plans and desires to employ the substance of money as a tool of kin re-ordering—through a “fusing” of love and material support (cole 2009, 115; also see constable 2009)—was now palpably pressing against its own impossibility. in han’s (2011) ethnography of debt-ridden chilean homes, it is the women’s borrowings of money for addicted, ill, violent, or precariously employed male kin that “generates a time for cultural anthropology 40:1 98 waiting” for improved kin relations. similarly, among waiting spouses of korean chinese migrants in yanbian in june hee kwon’s (2015) ethnography, it is the flow of remittances that maintains the elusive “promises of love,” sustaining the affective labor of waiting, even as transnational marriages become increasingly vulnerable and tainted by the doubts of deception and infidelity. however, in the absence of any substantial flows of money, isha’s wait for kinship futures, rooted solely in the anticipation of money, is one set against time. the finiteness of waiting was further necessitated by the awareness of the finiteness of parental love that materially sustained her, as well as an awareness of the changing familial dynamics around her. it had started to become clear that the parents would not continue indefinitely to offer the material support they were currently extending to isha and her daughter, or to bring them back home once again should isha suffer another round of violence in her marital home. in fact, this would become nearly impossible once isha’s younger brother was married. the arrival of a daughter-in-law in the house would not only add a member to an already overcrowded house but also reinscribe heteronormative norms of the family and emphasize the social shame and stigma of “keeping” returnee daughters who are to be written out of family property, home, and income. the weight of this shame was already making itself felt in the extended family. the eldest daughter of isha’s uncle had begun complaining, in whispers, about how her husband had started to put pressure on her “to behave,” threatening her with the same fate as her two cousins who were “just sitting at home.” an exit from the natal home was imminent, given the economic stress and social dishonor brought about by isha’s stay, and she was more desperately seeking a return to a “transformed” husband. “didi, do you know the chief minister?” isha asked me in our last meeting, her mind racing ahead of her. “what i want is for the chief minister to announce that heera’s salary will be cut directly at the source and come straight into my bank account.” unaffected by the incredulous look on my face, she continued speaking, evoking the state in an extraordinarily personal, proximate, and direct manner. not a cold, impersonal, and objective authority adjudicating on her case from a distance following its own legal and socio-moral diktat and pace, the state, in her speech, featured as a personal tool at her disposal, to reach the desired ends within her own schematic imagination of justice, reconciliation, repair, and moral retribution. her “only problem,” as she would sometimes put it, was that heera refused to pay. she hoped the state, embodied in the figure of the chief minister, could use its socially sanctioned power to intervene strategically isha’s wait 99 and issue orders such that the money would begin to speedily flow toward isha. if she can mobilize the force of the state to activate the force of money, she is on track again to await heera’s moral and behavioral transformation. poulami roychowdhury (2020, 111) has noted how her informants master legal vocabulary and processes through the course of their legal action and become “enmeshed” in the larger state entity. what is striking in isha’s fantastical evocation is not her enmeshment, but, rather, the state’s complete subsumption within the domestic, where the state is recast as a character in isha’s personal story, the central axis of which remains her pain and her plan. conclusion put simply, in this essay i have longitudinally traced the behind-the-scenes of a plaintiff’s demand for “maintenance money” from her abusive husband following the filing of domestic violence and dowry cases against him. this legal provision for maintenance money operates within a wider social system where it gets reworked following the logics of love, kinship, gender, and the economy. then, a legal tool to enable separation from harm can, counterintuitively, also make apparent the reasons for and modes of return. this can only be grasped fully when we follow the money, and the deliberations around it, beyond the courtroom and other para-legal spaces. ethnographically mapping one woman’s private life in her natal home and city, away from the institutional spaces where state adjudication slowly proceeds, i have shown how the promise of legally decreed money intersects with many other types of legal and non-legal money flows: the daily costs of city living, legal expenses, the capital gains of the uncle’s family, the socially exceptional steady income of the government-job-holding husband, the nonexistent income of the wife’s brother, the newly acquired small income of the wife, or the wife’s lack of formal share in her natal family’s income. studying the ways in which these multiple flows, un-flows, and misflows of money interact, i show that money is a strongly gendered substance of kinship tied to gendered roles, obligations, and relations (also see wright 2020). it creates gendered anxiety when it mis-flows in the wrong direction. at the same time, also revealed is the gendered struggle of women—as wives and daughters—to make money flow in the “right” direction to secure kinship and belonging for themselves, in either the marital or natal home. ultimately, money proves an important, if often overlooked, analytic to tell the story of domestic violence and the fraught management of its aftermath. cultural anthropology 40:1 100 violence fractures kinworlds, creating material vulnerability, stress, and loss, but money, as a substance of relatedness, is also seen as opening new avenues of sustaining kin relationality and encouraging kin repair and redress. this is by building an emic understanding of why violence occurs (because of the lack of realization of love given the absent or misdirected flows of money) and how it can be “solved” (through the realization of love when money flows in the “right” manner). the fluid substance of money, it is believed, can be redirected to flow in such a way that brings about positive transformations in people, social relations, and kinship structures, moving a “bad” husband and kinship toward “good.” money, in this schematic imagination, does not just passively follow or reproduce existing kinship, but works, with an agentive force, to discipline it, such as to deliver “corrected” personhood and kinship. this faith in the agency of money to link pyaar and its ehsaas within a reformed kinship endures even in the face of little evidence that any substantial change is forthcoming. this is not about misplaced faith, but about women’s contextual constraints. it is about the ways in which gender-based violence is experienced as the loss of love, material support, kinship, and suitable personhood for the women, and the agentive pursuit of restorative justice through a return to an ethically and affectively reformed husband, household, and family. money, as a kin substance, exerts its agency not just in the actual doing or making of kinship but also in the hope for kinship futures it sustains—a hope that enables an agentive waithood amid the social and economic suffering caused by domestic violence. abstract isha waits in her low-income parents’ home for her estranged husband, charged for dowry and domestic violence, to pay her the legally mandated maintenance money. i listen to her as she talks about pyaar, or love, and domestic violence as arising from the absence of its ehsaas, or feeling/realization, by the abusive husband. the awaited money is infused with the hopeful imagination that it will generate both pyaar and its ehsaas. i argue that money becomes a substance of kinship assigned an agentive role in engendering the ethical transformation of a “bad” husband to create “good” kinship. exploring the ways in which the tenuous legal promise of money sustains imaginations of reformed kinship futures, i outline how centrally money shapes the experience of domestic violence and its aftermath. [money; love; waithood; kinship; domestic violence; agency; legal pluralism] notes acknowledgments i am deeply indebted to manali desai, nandini gooptu, shannon philip, rangan chakravarty, and the entire gendv project team for their unwavering support and guidance. i extend my heartfelt thanks to julia kowalski, rupal oza, mukulika isha’s wait 101 banerjee, katy gardner, amita baviskar, and saumya saxena for their feedback on earlier versions as discussants in various workshops. i am profoundly grateful to the three peer reviewers for their generous engagement with my work and their incisive comments, which pushed me to sharpen the argument and significantly broaden the scope of the essay. i also benefited greatly from the audience questions and comments received at several workshops and conferences, including the european conference on south asian studies in turin, south asia day at oxford, the cambridge max planck exchange for economic life workshop in halle, and the social anthropology reading group at cambridge. hugs and thanks to ikuno naka for reading this piece at a critical juncture. lastly, all my love to isha. the research is based on fieldwork supported by the “gendv project” funded by the economic and social research council (esrc), which forms part of the uk research and innovation (ukri), with a grant from the global challenges research fund (gcrf). 1. all names in the essay have been anonymized. 2. domestic violence has been reported under section 498a (1983) of the indian penal code, where it is punishable with imprisonment and fines. dowry-related abuse has been reported under the protection of women from domestic violence act (2005), a quasi-civil. quasi-criminal law. it is common for women to tactically deploy such “legal pluralism” (roychowdhury 2020; basu 2015)—using the threat of criminal prosecution to more forcefully bargain for the civil remedy of maintenance. 3. the dhobi caste is classified as “other backward caste” in haryana and 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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-023-09532-x https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.14046 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x19000039 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2005.32.1.63 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2003.30.2.290 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2003.30.2.290 https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.3.04 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13316 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13316 isha’s wait: money, love, and kinship in the wake of domestic violence in india fractured kinworlds and the substance of money mis-flows: bleeding money and multiplying kharche un-flows: love, or pyaar, before money flows? realization, or ehsaas, after money conclusion abstract references opening editorial cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 1-7, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.01 opening editorial matilde córdoba azcárate https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3680-8717 alberto corsín jiménez https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1360-4060 julia elyachar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3627-9707 joanne nucho https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2489-8196 abdoumaliq simone https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1630-1997 manuel tironi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2733-8071 ather zia https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7210-2239 our generation of editors faces a shared set of critical challenges (ests editorial collective et al. 2021; neale et al. 2022). this is no different for our collective, which in addition has an experimental distributed organizational structure. we view those challenges with both familiarity and alarm. the problematics at issue have, we know, been around for a long time. like so many, we feel both the urgent need to do something now and anxious awareness of how little we can do—right now, at least. how to steer an informed, confident, and yet modest editorial course through challenges of earthly habitat loss, global energy crisis, cold war revivalism, right-wing theo-political awakenings, pandemic mismanagement, white supremacism, massive urbanization, dataveillance, and platform capitalism? how can we do so while remaining attuned to this period’s huge potentials: black lives matter, sanctuary and fearless cities, indigenous resurgence, renewed feminist internationals, atlases of parasites, modest witnesses, other-than-human diplomats, and anthropological companions? as members of the editorial collective of cultural anthropology, we stand as humbled witnesses to this crucial moment. we began work wondering: what is relevant? what is called for in this historical moment of world history and in the history of academia, anthropology in particular? how can we help give form to experiences and experiments in other than a reactive mode? such questions have guided cultural anthropology’s signature orientation to anthropology since its foundation. our vision for the journal builds on this trajectory to intervene in the affordances of editorship as a platform for connective transformations in anthropology and beyond. our approach to editorship also reflects our desire to enable a multiplicity of sensibilities, methodological practices, and scales of consideration. there are many stories that need to be told, and many stories that can no longer be told in the same way. stories require specific kinds of arguments and styles. this goes beyond simply amplifying our intellectual and political concerns. rather, different modes of analysis might help us better understand—and engage with—contemporary experiences and movements of justice and reparation, autonomy and solidarity. this moment demands, we think, more than analytic engagement with ongoing and radicalizing systems of extraction, displacement, violence, and subjugation—crucial as that analytic work remains. nor can we only document intransitive worlds of affectivity, improvisation, vulnerability, and silence. the moment, as many have pointed out, demands a retooling of anthropological methods to concretely prefigure more judicious dispositions of social and collective experience. as such, we imagine editorship to include the collective design of concrete tools to further anthropology’s salience to the exigencies of transformation, resurgence, and collaboration. what does this mean concretely? as editors, we do not aim to weigh in on matters of academic credibility, to force adherence to any particular canon, or even to render judgment on contributions to the literature. rather, we want to be useful: to engage with writing that speaks to a broad range of interests and audiences. we do not aim to exhibit or bolster a collective academic background. rather, our collective wants to emphasize operating procedures that really attend to the difficult experiments and work scholars are taking on in complicated terrain, and to draw concrete lines of connection among different kinds of places and experiences. our editorial collective is composed of individuals with extensive experience in editorial, curatorial, and administrative work in universities, journals, digital platforms, activist organizations, and learned societies. together, we have more than ample expertise in writing, curating, mentoring, and editing scholarly works and journal articles. we take that work traditionally conceived with the utmost seriousness. however, we also envision our team as more than a group of well-prepared individuals. we propose instead a collective that responds to this moment with organizational as well as theoretical innovation. we build on our experience in collective projects and distributed organizations to imagine editorship differently, as a curatorial platform that circulates and amplifies ongoing conversations and controversies around the world. can editorship become a catalyzer of transversal connections between publics and counterpublics as much as a manuscript-processing stationary office? to this end, we have expanded the collective to include seven scholars from around the world, a change of scope and scale that is the only way, in our view, to compensate for structural inequalities embedded in contemporary academic geographies of knowledge production. our collective comprises scholars with diverse backgrounds, institutional locations, and experiences—across race and ethnicity, migratory routes and roots, academic settings of structural precarity and illicit wealth, as well as intergenerational and interdisciplinary backgrounds in anthropology, urbanism, sts, poetry, the environmental humanities, and scholarly communications activism. we bring a plurality of voices, perspectives, and sensibilities to our collective, fully aware that simply having them in the same room does not lessen the difficult work of simultaneously finding common ground, respecting singular ways of doing things, and getting specific jobs done. for we are moved by epistemologies and experiments of coordination in an age largely beholden to epistemologies of crisis (whyte 2021). experiments of coordination: attunement, curation, intervention shortly after taking over as editors in 2015, dominic boyer, cymene howe, and james faubion invited the journal’s past editors to reflect on cultural anthropology’s trajectory over the thirty years since its founding in 1986. recalling an essay he wrote in 1991 toward the end of his term as the journal’s inaugural editor, george e. marcus (2015, 8) noted that “perhaps the most enduring legacy” of the journal lay in its orientation toward engaging “with events in the world as they unfold with ever more perceived rapidity … and by an alignment and critical analytic engagement with found thinking.” the unfolding temporalities of irruption, novelty, and situated endurance, and the forms of innovative response they demand, were central concerns of the journal from its earliest days. along those lines, daniel segal (2015, 197) recalled how the legacy he inherited as the journal’s third editor was shaped by marcus’s “deserved reputation for always looking ‘for the next thing.’” segal felt uncertain that newness should indeed drive anthropological curiosity. yet a conversation he had with donna haraway, who did in fact value such an inclination toward “the new” for “fostering a sense of the possibility of radical change” (segal 2015, 199), gave him pause for thought. in time, segal came around to articulate a space for novelty in the pages of the journal in terms of anthropology’s complex inhabiting of the histories and margins of modern empire and statehood. over the years, cultural anthropology has led the way in shaping intellectual modes of attention toward the emergent and the novel, an orientation carried through the tractions of ethnography, its grounded obligations and responsibilities, and the glimmers of adventurousness and mobilization that energize it—an orientation swaying forward in between temporalities, a “method,” as anne allison and charles piot (2015, 528) have put it, “of untimely timeliness.” inevitably, expressions of untimely timeliness have shifted over the course of the journal’s thirty-five-year history. already in 1991, when fred myers (1992, 3) took over from marcus as editor of the journal, he noted how “a principal dimension of this change has been the shifting of boundaries between those who study and those who are the subjects of study, as well as a radical reorganization of the boundaries between disciplines and their relocation in the world.” cultural anthropology has undoubtedly been at the forefront of the human and social sciences’ navigations of these shifting boundary formations and epistemic equivocations. the journal’s brazen commitment to keeping alight the “magical mix of theory and ethnography” (allison and piot 2015, 525) has driven its unrepentant experimental ethos, from its early inquiries into the genres of textual reflexivity to the cross-examination of anthropological positionalities, on to more recent experiments with the infrastructural designs of anthropological publics. “experimental work that brings new problems, concepts, and political possibilities into play is critical,” have noted kim fortun and mike fortun (2015, 366); “so is the infrastructural work on which those experiments depend, and which is itself a form of experimentation.” cultural anthropology’s experimental vocation has opened new vistas and possibilities for the digital futures of the human sciences. building on kim and mike fortun’s foresighted design of a lively digital scholarly platform during their term as editors (2005–2010), the journal became in 2014 a fully open-access operation. its website has since grown to become the premier site for rapid-response conceptual prefigurations in anthropology and related disciplines. these are not simply technical add-ons to a scholarly operation: they lie at the heart of how cultural anthropology has redesigned itself as a knowledge exchange in recent years. in the words of the journal’s outgoing editors, we are witnessing how publishing programs are “swinging away from bespoke systems and processes toward new forms of interdependency” (weiss, paxson, and nelson 2019, 2). such pressures and opportunities prompted boyer, faubion, and howe (2015, 5) to reimagine the editorial office as an “editorial collective,” an organizational framework enabling “a greater decentralization of authority and responsibility as befits an open-access model of publication.” our own vision for the journal partakes of this distinguished genealogy of critical possibility, untimely timeliness, and experimental expansiveness. we could not do otherwise. we treasure the journal’s long-standing exploration of the forms, media, and designs of scholarly inquiry and accompaniment. we recognize ourselves as heirs, too, to its critical explorations of the uneven epistemic geographies and decolonial aspirations rushing through the structures of the academy today. in response, we are committed to both the “blurred genres” and “complex trajectories” of situated apprenticeships, to paraphrase a distinction once made by marilyn strathern (1999, 25), in the belief that there is room for reimagining scholarly, community, and infrastructural alignments for “dealing with the unpredictable.” a program for collective unpredictability we image our editorial vision for cultural anthropology as a concerted effort to bring to the fore unpredictable sensibilities and readings of various social fields and more collectively based experiments for engaging and representing them; to distill multiple ways of reading from them and to find practical ways of putting them in touch with each other, learning from each other. as such, we have invested in a specific suite of pragmatic operations. we have expanded the editorial collective into a group of seven scholars, including academics based outside the anglo-american academy. our collective is inclusive and diverse, and includes senior and junior scholars with experience of academic work in universities and activist organizations in the global south, europe, and the americas. this expanded editorial collective allows us to distribute the editorial workload among scholars who have otherwise no access to service and teaching buyouts. it is only by expanding the collective that we can set in place an ethics of care in academia, including a division of labor that is mindful and attentive to the structures of academic employment outside elite and wealthy institutions. while deeply invested in world anthropologies, our editorial collective is also interdisciplinary, including scholars well known for actively shaping emerging debates in sts, media and design studies, the environmental humanities, and urban studies. a plurality of sensibilities and trajectories offers us the means to attend to emerging intersections, diffractions, and invisibilities in boundary-making and boundary-policing between and within disciplines. an expanded editorial collective will further enable us to effect a “distribution of the sensible” (after jacques rancière), learning to listen and attune to conversations, controversies, and struggles in a wide variety of regions, places, and problem spaces. for instance, we are opening cultural anthropology to submissions in spanish. we are excited about the possibilities that this modest experiment at bilingualism generates for pluralizing the arts of journal curation by allowing us to stage more complex and diffracting conversations across different publics, intellectual sensibilities, and empirical traditions. we are particularly keen to experiment also with the curatorial philosophy of the journal’s digital venues—the theorizing the contemporary and hot spots series—to cultivate choral exchanges and collective compositions that address the aspirations of a younger generation of engaged thinkers in the south. the pandemic has brought to light emergent alliances of scholars whose orchestral productions are not always easily accommodated in mainstream publishing venues. we wish to explore and engage with these ways of working and commoning that remain unreflected in mainstream academic publications. our collective is ideally positioned to tap into currents of transitional thinking, epistemic disturbances, and grassroots counter-philosophies in university systems and activist arenas across the world. from cairo to dakar, from karachi to santiago de chile, one finds tectonic transformations in public debate taking place across public universities, civil organizations, and social movements. these debates sometimes get “stuck” in systems of circulation that do not travel, or have no connection to normatively valorized academic venues; say, conferences, roundtables, or public discussions at places like cairo university or the university of karachi, where one can find inspiring intellectual work that rarely exceeds the confines of those institutional structures. we believe that cultural anthropology’s digital venues offer an ideal platform for hosting and transducing some such conversations. finally, as regards our editorial line or agenda, we remain committed to the journal’s long-standing investment in refunctioning the richness of ethnography through ongoing innovations in method and collaborative designs. we will be open to submissions in all areas of anthropological research and will welcome in particular redeployments of ethnographic sensibilities in an interdisciplinary register. we are keen to explore modes of writing and storytelling capable of prefiguring new forms of gathering, valuation, and social becoming. references allison, anne, and charles piot 2015 “editing the times.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 4: 525–30. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.01 boyer, dominic, james faubion, and cymene howe 2015 “editors’ introduction to 30.1: circles not pyramids.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 1: 1–5. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.01 ests editorial collective, aalok khandekar, noela invernizzi, duygu kaşdoğan, ali kenner, angela okune, grant otsuki, sujatha raman, amanda windle, and emily york 2021 “infrastructuring ests.” engaging science, technology, and society 7, no. 1: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.17351/ests2021.1275 fortun, kim, and mike fortun 2015 “an infrastructural moment in the human sciences.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 3: 359–67. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.3.01 marcus, george e. 2015 “editorial curation and the durability of anthropological ideas in a time of ambient innovation: a comment on the thirtieth year of cultural anthropology.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 1: 6–11. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.1.02 myers, fred 1992 “a note from the editor.” cultural anthropology 7, no. 1: 3–5. https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1992.7.1.02a00010 neale, timothy, courtney addison, kari lancaster, and matthew kearnes 2022 “a meeting point for sts interventions and conversations.” science, technology, & human values 47, no. 4: 664–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439221102994 rancière, jacques 2004 the politics of aesthetics. london: bloomsbury. segal, daniel a. 2015 “some reflections on editing with contrarian sensibilities.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 2: 197–202. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.2.02 strathern, marilyn 1999 property, substance, and effect: anthropological essays on persons and things. london: athlone press. weiss, brad, heather paxson, and christopher nelson 2019 “editors’ introduction.” cultural anthropology 34, no. 1: 1–2. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.01 whyte, kyle 2021 “against crisis epistemology.” in routledge handbook of critical indigenous studies, edited by brendan hokowhitu, aileen moreton-robinson, linda tuhiwai-smith, chris andersen, and steve larkin, 52–64. london: routledge. cultural anthropology, vol. 38, issue 1, pp. 1-7, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca38.1.01 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 1, pp. 55–81, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.1.03 else vogel university of amsterdam https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8319-0975 a veterinarian once summarized dairy farming to me with the sentence: “a cow is a rumen [een koe is een pens], and a rumen is nothing else than a barrel that processes nutrients.” this pars pro toto pointedly indicates that on the dairy farm, everything is about digestion—productive digestion. these days, however, the side effects of such an “industrial metabolism” (landecker 2013) are more and more apparent—not least in the netherlands, the country with the highest density of humans and livestock living together in the world. while black-andwhite dairy cows make for somewhat of a national symbol, the methane, ammonia, phosphate, and nitrate released through their digestive processes also mark them as major culprits of global warming and biodiversity loss. ecologists have for years been warning that nitrogen-deposition levels specifically, the majority of which come from livestock production, are severely affecting plants and wildlife in the netherlands. as a result, cows’ burps and farts no longer constitute an unremarkable side effect of rumen fermentation, but “a sign of a planet in trouble” (govindrajan 2020, 198). concerns with bovine metabolism have of late become strikingly public. in 2019, the netherlands’ council of state, the country’s highest administrative court, judged the dutch approach to curb nitrogen emissions as in conflict with good digestion: the metabolic politics of dutch dairy farming cultural anthropology https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0403-1918 cultural anthropology 40:1 56 european directives for nature conservation.1 as a result, permits for industrial expansion and infrastructural projects were withdrawn. the ruling propelled the country, where more than half of the surface is used for agriculture or horticulture, into the so-called nitrogen crisis, a set of legal, economic, ecological, social, and regulatory challenges posed by an excess of nitrogen. to bring emissions in line with eu legislation, large reforms in animal agriculture are on the political agenda, including drastically reducing the national herd and the forced buyout of farms in the vicinity of nature reserves. these plans, however, have faced major resistance from the farming community, increasing anti-government sentiment among these groups (moses 2022). taking the nitrogen crisis as an exemplary case of contemporary debates over the environmental effects of industrial food production, in this article i introduce metabolic politics as a theoretical frame for understanding contested forms of governing biochemical flows and more-than-human eating and feeding relations. as hannah landecker (2019, 542) states, thinking with metabolism draws “empirical attention toward systems of interlinked processes rather than things.” metabolic politics accentuates not just how the ways such interlinked processes are currently organized spread vulnerabilities unequally among us. in this article i argue that it also, as a more-than-human biopolitics (asdal, druglitrø, and hinchliffe 2017), must engage the question of how metabolic relations are known, problematized, and intervened in. in my conceptualization, i draw on michel foucault’s (2003) formulation of biopower, which referred both to late modern practical techniques to use and tame bodies and their forces, capacities, and desires; and to ways of regulating life and its vicissitudes at the level of the human population. in this case, the bodies and populations in question not only cross species lines; it is the relations between species, and the material effects of such relations, that emerge as sites of control and care. where foucault (2003) famously defined biopower through the maxim “to make live and let die,” i suggest metabolic politics revolves around the power to make and organize eating and feeding relations. this power does not simply lie with the state, capital, or humans; it is relational and multiple, crossing species and involving lively more-than-human activities. at stake is which relations and worlds are forged through eating and feeding—who eats and digests, who is eaten, who is left to stomach the waste, and what is transformed through eating. this politics plays out not only in parliament and public debate but also and importantly in the mundane yet technoscientific practices in which good digestion 57 more-than-human metabolic relations are established, regulated, and cared for—such as on dairy farms. to focus my inquiry, i take as my case one of the first concrete interventions that followed the 2019 nitrogen ruling. in 2020, the government announced it would put legal limits on the protein content of cattle-feed concentrate in an attempt to curb the release of ammonia, a nitrogen compound, from livestock excretions. the so-called feed measure (voermaatregel) became highly controversial. i show how this seemingly small measure formed a “hot situation” (stassart and whatmore 2003; cf. callon 1998) where diverse ways of understanding, regulating, and improving metabolic relations, and in particular cow digestion, clashed and opened up to contestation. the feed measure was eventually retracted. yet the controversy it sparked reveals key features of metabolic politics. contestations and tensions arose over the forms of life that comprise the metabolic collective or polis; over ways of evaluating the health of organisms and ecosystems; and over forms of regulating the behavior of and relations between various eaters and feeders. i highlight how these clashes were sustained by the ac/counting practices through which various actors concerned with cattle metabolism enter in relation with cows and others implicated in their, and our, eating. different knowledge practices enact various versions of metabolism, animated by different concerns and implying contrasting relations and courses of action—or what i call socio-material modes of ordering “good digestion.” metabolic political tactics therefore often focused precisely on shaping how metabolic relations were sorted into discrete units of analysis and became legible for human intervention. the aim of this article is not to advocate for one politics or mode of ordering digestion, or to suggest what a multispecies or metabolic justice (chao, bolender, and kirksey 2022) would look like in this context. rather, i hope my articulation of the key stakes and techniques of metabolic politics in this case serves to enliven the space of contestation over what constitutes good digestion in contemporary food systems by offering critical terms and questions that sensitize readers to some of the dilemmas and strategies involved in metabolic politics, in this case and others. metabolism(s) and more-than-human biopolitics by introducing metabolic politics, this article contributes to recent morethan-human reworkings of foucauldian biopolitics (asdal, druglitrø, and cultural anthropology 40:1 58 hinchliffe 2017; foucault 2003), with a particular focus on biopolitical tactics that cross species (helmreich 2009; paxson 2012). as has been described, the governance of reproduction and sex provokes concerns with purity, performance, and belonging (svendsen 2021), while an immunological biopolitics, focused on biosecurity and haunted by threats of contagion, draws boundaries between inside and outside (blanchette 2015; porter 2019). by contrast, metabolic politics highlight entities’ transformative relations with their environments in ways that defy bounded subjectivities, configuring bodies as having semi-permeable boundaries (mol 2021, 2008; solomon 2016). by outlining its key features, i show how engaging bodies in this way shapes how more-than human biopolitical collectives are assembled, health is valued, and governance strategies are elaborated. as a nineteenth-century concept, metabolism moves between the biological and social realm; while industrial metaphors of the factory and labor deeply shaped biological renderings of metabolism (landecker 2013; cf. rabinbach 1992), biological theories on metabolism also figured as a metaphor in social theory, especially in marxian understandings of industry-nature relations and the material flows of capitalist production (clark and york 2005; foster 1999; swyngedouw 2006; moore 2017). concerned with capitalism’s ecological ramifications and drawing on marx’ work, john bellamy foster (1999, 370) famously described capitalism as having caused a global “metabolic rift between human production and its natural conditions.” in this vein, and to underscore the extractive and violent nature of contemporary food systems, scholars have described the farm itself as having a metabolism. george cusworth (2023, 58), for instance, argues that “food production operations are linked to the food system they operate within by those things that are brought onto (animal feed, labor, fertilizers, diesel, etc.) and leave (fruit, grain, greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, etc.) the site in question. these material vectors are a vital part of their metabolism.” through engaging asymmetrical and intimate relations of eating and feeding, and by moving beyond the farm gate, cusworth’s proposal for a “metabolic ethics” importantly engages in political questions not just those whom we eat but also those who are implicated by our eating (cf. mol 2021) and by what our food is eating (landecker 2019). rather than theorizing farms, dairy farming, or the netherlands as “a” metabolism, however, my articulation of metabolic politics concerns itself with how metabolic living emerges as an object of knowledge and governance, and with how the metabolic capacities of organisms and ecosystems are drawn into good digestion 59 economic production (beldo 2017). inflecting an eco-marxist interest in metabolism with a foucauldian attention to how life is administered and fostered (foucault 1978, 138), i argue that a critical analysis of livestock farming’s metabolic relations must include careful consideration of the conditions under which metabolic life becomes “a distinctive domain of practice and thought” (lemke 2014, 14). hence, while cusworth’s notion of metabolic ethics foregrounds the politico-ethical question of whether the metabolic effects of farming are accounted for, i suggest that it is equally politically salient to ask which “metabolic logics” (vogel 2018) are mobilized and come to normatively shape ways of relating eaters, food, and their environments.2 here, i take my cue from previous social science engagements with bovine metabolism that have focused on technoscientific practices concerned with the greenhouse gas methane, and thus on cattle’s contribution to processes of global warming (govindrajan 2020; folkers and opitz 2022; turnbull and oliver 2021; hastrup, brichet, and nielsen 2022). for instance, frida hastrup, nathalia brichet, and liza rosenbaum nielsen (2022, 5) write that sustainability discourses in animal agriculture often involve “sorting out potential symbiotic relations and identifying units to intervene in,” thereby staging humans as the ones who fix, rather than cause, problems. drawing on theorizations of symbiopolitics (helmreich 2009) and microbiopolitics (paxson 2008, 2012), andreas folkers and sven opitz (2022, 330) critically interrogate the “spatial imaginaries” of proposed dietary interventions on cattle and their rumen microbes to tackle climate change, analyzing these as biopolitical techniques of “symbiotic engineering” (see also lorimer 2021). in a blog essay likewise focusing on how cattle bodies become cast as sites of climatic governance, jonathon turnbull and catherine oliver (2021) introduce the notion of a more-than-human “metabo-politics,” which they describe as “a form of governance concerned with interlocking corporeal and global flows.” emphasizing the political economic processes that bring bovine “life into the ambit of capital” (turnbull and barua 2022, 1), they warn against the false promise of a techno-fix in corporate greenwashing tactics. my articulation of metabolic politics resonates with their notion of metabo-politics but draws closer ethnographic attention to the various ways in which metabolic relations are known and problematized by the state and bureaucratic practices. i also highlight clashes over forms of metabolic governance and the role of agricultural and veterinary expertise in shaping such controversies. my analysis, moreover, is shaped by a sensitivity to materiality, relationality, and multiplicity characteristic of post-actor-network cultural anthropology 40:1 60 theory or material semiotic approaches (law 2008), resulting in a formulation of metabolic politics invested in showing the open-endedness and liveliness of practices, rather than in the identification of a dominant (capitalist or anthropocentric) ordering or discourse (asdal, druglitrø, and hinchliffe 2017). as concerns with the ecological aftermath (landecker 2024) of industrial dairy production increasingly come to shape dairy farming’s modus operandi, in my field i witnessed how this multiplicity spurred a politics around defining and intervening on the metabolic relations, capacities, and needs of organisms and ecosystems. in the narrative that follows, i highlight how this politics is embedded in the knowledge, standards, and practices relevant to the controversy of the nitrogen crisis, and to the feed measure in particular. after introducing my research and the dutch nitrogen crisis in more detail, i first zoom in on the proposed governmental interventions in cows’ digestive processes. i then contrast this version of good digestion with ethnographic narrations of how bovine digestion is problematized and cared for in dairy production, elaborating key features of metabolic politics. the dutch nitrogen crisis with the aftermath of the world war ii’s famine still reverberating throughout the nation, dutch agricultural policies in the 1950s embraced the motto nooit meer honger (never hungry again). guided by a novel paradigm for agricultural progress, the government implemented income support and market measures to steer farmers toward becoming profit-seeking, risk-taking entrepreneurs and invested in the intensification, specialization, and mechanization of farming (theunissen 2020). this model, which would later inform the common agricultural policy of the european union, made the netherlands one of the largest exporters of agricultural products in the world today. the nitrogen crisis casts the post–world war ii agricultural revolution as a mistake, not an accomplishment. while industrial farming hinges on nitrogen as a key nutrient, current environmental concerns foreground that too much nitrogen harms the environment. nitrogen oxides, ammonia, and nitrate acidify and overfertilize soils and waters, damaging plants and decreasing biodiversity. while construction machinery and traffic emit nitrogen oxides (no x ), dairy, pig, and poultry farms are the biggest sources of ammonia (nh 3 ) from animal waste, making up more than half of nitrogen emissions.3 to curb pollution, the european union’s wildlife and habitat legislation puts limits on nitrogen emissions around so-called natura 2000 reserves. for these limits, this legislation relies on good digestion 61 european expert panels, on which dutch scientists are well represented. based on measurements of soil and plant growth across europe, these panels have since the 2000s been defining and revising threshold values for eutrophication and acidification—so-called critical loads after which the amount of nitrogen becomes damaging to plants (van robben et al. 2012). in the netherlands, europe’s largest nitrogen producer, nitrogen deposition in these areas has been well above such defined critical loads for decades. once a source of pride for its productivity and technological advancement, nitrogen-deposition data and legislation thus call attention to the environmental impact (natuurdruk) that comes with being a large food producer. many farmers feel, however, that their sector is unfairly represented and made to bear the brunt of environmental measures. while the nitrogen crisis was not as visible in the bigger cities of the netherlands, it was inescapable as soon as one drove away from urban centers onto the highways connecting dutch agricultural lands. in 2022, seemingly unending rows of blue-white-red striped protest flags—the dutch national flag, but turned upside down—were planted on the edges of the meadows and crop fields that span more than two-thirds of dutch land surface. occasionally, protest signs complemented the flags, most commonly with the english slogan “no farmers, no food” and the hashtag “proud of our farmers” (#trots op de boer). in the past years, their tractors have blocked national highways, dumped manure on politician’s doorsteps, and occupied food-distribution centers. the actions stood out in a long history of european farmer protests against eu policies, subsidies, pricing, and environmental regulations, reflecting the complex relation between the agricultural sector and an ever-changing eu governance landscape (cf. theunissen 2020). backed by a powerful agricultural lobby and widespread public and political support, the farmers’ resistance has made stikstof (nitrogen) not just into an everyday topic of conversation across the country but also a point of division. so much so that at the dutch provincial elections of march 2023, the boerburgerbeweging (farmer-citizen-movement, or bbb), a new populist political party launched to protest the proposed nitrogen policies, secured the largest vote, while a green-left alliance advocating in favor of a green agricultural transition and even stricter environmental measures followed suit. in the theater of the dutch nitrogen crisis, cows take center stage. sometimes literally, such as when in 2022, a media-savvy farmer brought two of his cows—klaartje and betsie—to the parliament’s doorstep, asking the newly appointed minister of nitrogen and nature in front of dozens of journalists to cultural anthropology 40:1 62 choose which one of them he should send to slaughter should he be forced to downsize his farm. (the cruel irony being that both of these cows, like all dairy cows, are bound to end up in the slaughterhouse eventually.) in this article, however, i move away from the spectacular politization of cow digestion in the public sphere and focus on the practices through which various actors concerned with cattle metabolism attempt to optimize cows’ digestive capacities. to do so, i draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2023. during the summers of 2020 (june–august) and 2021 (may–september), when covid-19 lockdowns were lifted temporarily, i joined livestock veterinarians on their planned and unplanned visits to dairy farms. during these visits, vets and farmers conduct fertility checks, evaluate health and production, and perform regulatory tasks for the dairy industry and government. this participant observation gave me key insights into how health is problematized and responded to in the daily practices of cow husbandry. by studying industry and governmental policies and scientific publications on animal husbandry, and through following discussions in trade journals and on social media as the nitrogen crisis unfolded, i could further clarify and contextualize the knowledges, techniques, regulatory frameworks, and economic logics shaping both dairy farming and the proposed feed measure to combat nitrogen pollution. i have conducted (online and in-person) interviews with more than twenty-five livestock veterinarians. in addition, i spoke to more than twenty scientists, inspectors, and ngo representatives involved in the governance of livestock production. as a coffee break generally formed part of veterinary visits, i also came to meet many dairy farmers and their families and farmhands. during all these fieldwork events, the nitrogen crisis invariably came up. navigating this polarized political field proved challenging. most farmers considered the political turmoil a threat to and attack on their livelihoods. an ethnographer was, to put it mildly, somewhat of a curiosity on farms, and often my introduction was met with a series of questions meant to determine whose “side” i was on. i specifically had to shake the suspicion i was an animal activist or nature fanatic that would expose them as animal abusers or polluters. other informants saw the nitrogen crisis as a promising turning point toward more sustainable agriculture. all, however, seemed to agree it would fundamentally change the future of farming and human-bovine relations in the netherlands. sensitizing myself to such different positions through fieldwork allowed me to grasp the complex stakes and tactics of metabolic politics. they reveal themselves if we look at the specific practices through which nitrogen’s metabolic relations become problematized and intervened on. good digestion 63 creating nitrogen space: cows on a diet since 2019, a curious term has begun to occupy political and policy discussions: stikstofruimte (nitrogen space). rather than depicting a physical space, this term indicates the margins within legislation for developing economic activities that add to nitrogen emissions. much like the notion of the carbon footprint renders climate change into a matter of accounting (lahn 2020), a focus on nitrogen space quickly framed the governance of nitrogen as a budgeting exercise, where all policies were evaluated in terms of how much nitrogen space they would create. when the 2019 verdict came through that judged the dutch approach to curbing emissions invalid, the netherlands found itself in a legal deadlock. in an effort to decrease emissions quickly and create nitrogen space, the minister of agriculture announced immediate measures. the government changed the maximum speed on most highways from 120 to 100km/h and offered pig farmers voluntary buyout schemes. the third measure directly affected dairy farmers: it stipulated the reduction of the amount of protein in feed concentrates for cows; cows had to go on a diet. the bulk of a dairy cow’s diet in the netherlands consists of farm-grown food such as grass or corn. this food is supplemented by concentrate feed supplied by livestock-feed manufacturers. the proposed governmental rule to limit protein content only amounted to the latter. in a press release and letter to parliament, the minister explained the rationale in simple input-output terms: “generally, dairy cows in the netherlands are fed more protein than the animal needs. the protein that is not digested by the animal will be released in the form of nitrogen. by reducing the protein content of feed, nitrogen emissions will be decreased.”4 the measure thus hinged on a stated imbalance between what cows eat and what they need. while on average concentrate only makes up a quarter of the total ration in dry matter, the minister acknowledged its importance for farmers: in practice, feed concentrate “functions as the ‘regulator’ of the ration, used to substitute fodder and optimize the cow’s nutrition.”5 it was thus important to ensure that the change in diet would not impact cows’ health. an expert committee (commissie deskundigen meststoffenwet, cdm) was asked to secure the scientific basis of the measure. in their report, and building on available data sets that track dutch cows’ diets, they proposed to make the permissible upper limit for protein content dependent on the farm’s soil composition and productivity level.6 these distinctions should account for a diversity of dietary needs in dairy cultural anthropology 40:1 64 production: farms on richer peat or clay soils tend to have access to protein-rich grass, but sand-based farms usually grow more starchy corn. for this land-bound ration, intensive farms (>20000 kg milk/ha) have to compensate by adding protein through concentrate. the more milk is produced per hectare land, the more farms rely on food imported from elsewhere. by comparing the current food intake of dairy cows with these proposed limits, the committee could fairly easily calculate how much nitrogen emissions (in the form of ammonia) would be reduced by a lower protein content of feed. however, the committee’s report acknowledged that not all farmers may conform to the rule, or that some would find ways of substituting the reduced protein in the concentrate through other means. to control for these possibilities, the committee adapted the estimated ammonia-emission reduction to account for 15 percent nonconformity and 5 percent substitution. with these adjustments, the measure still promised to yield a 0.23 kiloton reduction. this was more than the 0.2 kt ammonia reduction the ministry hoped to achieve. the extra 0.03 kt constituted an important safety margin that, the committee argued, controlled for any remaining uncertainties and adding confidence that the desired reduction would be achieved. in the end, the committee ended up with a legally “hard” estimate of how much nitrogen space would be created through the feed measure. this was important. in their report of may 11, 2020, the cdm wrote: “the measure aims to juridically, demonstrably, and verifiably reduce the amount of nitrogen in manure of dairy cattle” (emphasis mine). other ways to reduce ammonia emissions, such as letting cows graze outside more, or mixing manure with water, might have been equally or more beneficial for the environment, but they were not effective legally. they could not be accounted for in a time frame that would allow building projects to resume. the minister emphasized, too, the practicality of the measure. whereas roughage is variable, dependent on the soil, the crops, and the harvest of that year, feed concentrates’ protein content is stable. it is already listed on the invoice of suppliers and thus easily accessed. from a governance perspective, this makes it controllable: inspectors would only need to request these invoices to check whether a farmer has acted in accordance with the law. the announcement of the measure marked a new, more radical phase in the farmers’ protests. citing the dutch law for the protection of animals, which stipulates that animals deserve proper food, hundreds of farmers went to the police to press charges on the minister for alleged animal-abuse offenses. agrarian good digestion 65 organizations declared “war” on the government and pulled out of ongoing conversations to reduce emissions. on july 9, 2020, the minister responded in a letter to parliament, restating that the measure included a subclause that allowed farmers to be exempted from the rule if they could demonstrate that the protein content of the total ration for their cows was below a certain threshold. the minister also stated that she was consulting veterinarians on the issue. the dutch royal society for veterinary medicine swiftly conducted a survey among its members: 70 percent of bovine vets indeed expected the measure would have “serious consequences for the health and well-being of dairy cattle.”7 in particular, the press release of the professional organization stated that the measure may make it impossible for vets and farmers to regulate the health of individual cows through rations. the result, vets predicted, would be less resilient and fertile cows, and the poorer health of calves. in the end, it was the instability of statistical knowledge itself that undid the feed measure. in the summer of 2020, it became clear that the initial calculations to prove the effectiveness of the feed measure could not hold up in court. the predictions of the average protein content of silage had used 2018 as a reference year, but researchers had calculated that the situation in 2018 was no longer applicable to that of 2020. due to a recent period of drought, farmers were faced with a shortage of good pasture grass. so as not to harm the health of cows, this shortage must be compensated with a higher protein content in concentrates. no legal nitrogen space would thus be created through the measure. somewhat ironically, then, climate change interfered with the plan to reduce nitrogen levels. the feed measure constituted a form of managing metabolic relations that relies on accounting logics and the techno-legal tools of the state. as it made headlines for weeks in all major dutch newspapers, it drew previously relatively unproblematic metabolic relations between cows, wildlife, farmers, and citizens into stark public relief. how did, despite precautions and subclauses, this seemingly rational and rather mundane measure evoke such a strong response? to answer this question, i turn to the dairy farm, where cows’ digestive capacities are ordered in strikingly different ways. good digestion on the dairy farm “untapped potential” on a sunny day in august 2021, i joined the veterinarian caroline on a visit to johan’s family farm. after a walk around the stables, inspecting both the cultural anthropology 40:1 66 dairy cows and youngstock, and checking up on a sick cow, we met johan in his kitchen for a cup of coffee. after some chitchat on the weather, caroline turned to the dairy-milk control data. based on samples from individual cows, the dairy factory sends the farmer regular detailed overviews of milk production, and the amount of fat, protein, urea, and white blood cells in the milk. these numbers give crucial insight into the health of the cows, and caroline has carefully studied them prior to her visit. she concluded that although there are no major health problems, there is an issue with bad retainment, meaning an inefficient digestion. in her words: “there is untapped potential in your cows. you are now feeding your manure tank,” indicating that although johan is spending a lot on food, he does not get a return on investment. it all leaves the cows “at the back end,” because the rumen microbes are not able to process it. johan’s cows are black-and-white holstein-friesians, the predominant dairy cattle breed in the netherlands.8 these cows have an astonishing daily milk production averaging thirty liters, while some surpass this amount by twofold. next to careful breeding, dairy cows’ bio-intensification is the result of sophisticated feeding and management regimes (overstreet 2018). to underscore this need for care, people in the industry often refer to holstein-friesians as “metabolic athletes” (leblanc et al., 2006, 1272) or “top-sport cows” (verkaaik 2022). the central node of the elaborate network of cow nutritional care is the rumen and its complex community of microorganisms. the rumen only remains healthy if proteins and starch remain in balance in the cows’ food supply. caroline indicated that she thought johan could increase production if he added more protein to the feed ration. but how? she suggested brewer’s grain, a waste product from beer brewing. but that is expensive and needs to be bought from the food trader. johan rather wanted to adapt the ration with the existing grass silage from his land. but due to drought, the quality of the fermented grass had been really bad all year. together they looked at the analysis made of a sample of the grass’s latest cut. the numbers indeed indicated that the silage had very low protein content. they decided that adding soy flakes might be the way to go, as long as johan added enough roughage––grass, corn, or beets often produced on the farm itself. when caroline noticed my somewhat puzzled look, she explained: “soy flakes contain a lot of rumen-undegradable protein, but you also have protein sources that the rumen can degrade to intestinal digestible protein. you kind of want the latter, because that is not only cheaper, but that way, the bacteria do the work for you. they process the food to microbial protein that the cow can then use to produce milk.” good digestion 67 here, the veterinary’s description of the cow with which i started this article—a cow is a rumen—comes to life in practice. dairy farming relies on activating the metabolic activity of rumen microbes to produce value. farmers and their advisors, however, cannot directly observe the rumen.9 they make use of various signs and proxies to value digestion and get to know microbes. the dairy milk controls, for instance, allow caroline to check the balance between milk protein and nitrogen urea. this balance tells her something about microbial activity in the rumen and specifically their protein conversion. the liver makes urea from unused ammonia in the rumen. high urea levels thus indicate an inefficient digestion, while a low level indicates a lack of (rumen-degradable) protein in the diet. such evaluations are aided by industry-wide norms, for instance, that urea levels should be between 20–30 mg/100 g milk. samples from the silage and other parts of the ration allow farmers to detail the nutritional content of their cows’ diets with remarkable accuracy. optimizing digestion does not just involve attending to the contents of food and milk. committed farmers and their vets will also walk around in the stable. farmers told me that a well-metabolizing cow ruminates often and chews at least sixty times per belch. at a training event for farmers, a presenting veterinarian reminded his audience that the best stable invites cows to lie down, as one hour of extra lying per day can mean an increase in milk production of up to two liters. in its ideal form, then, the entire socio-material organization and epistemic infrastructure on a dairy farm promotes the digestive capacities of rumen microbes. metabolic vulnerability as bovine digestion is pushed to ever greater intensification, it also becomes increasingly vulnerable. one of the first things i learned during fieldwork was to pay close attention to manure. on my first day on a dairy farm, i joined the veterinarian gerard and the farmer hans for their round in the stable. gerard, with his long veterinary glove and portable ultrasound scanner, checked on the fertility of a number of cows. almost without exception, the cows we got close to started defecating, and many released long bouts of gas after gerard’s arm left their rectum. unfazed by these sounds and smells, my company concentrates on registering which cows were pregnant, in heat, or suffered from an infected uterus. the round also provided a good occasion to check on other health aspects of the cows. gerard pointed out some white foam lying around the feed, coming cultural anthropology 40:1 68 from the cows’ mouths. he then mentioned that the manure of a particular cow was rather runny. the farmer, surprised, looked around. “hmm, yeah . . . .” curious, i asked: what is good manure? gerard explained it must be dry enough to stay on the slatted floor, but liquid enough to slip through if it falls on the cracks between them. the vet took out some dung from a cow’s rectum and moved it between his fingers. a grassy substance remained: inefficient digestion. the runny manure and the foam confirmed what, based on the dairy-milk controls, johan had already suspected: hans’s cows suffered from rumen acidosis. this is a key concern on farms as it leads to health problems and a decline in production. johan and hans discussed the summer—which had been hot and hard on the cows. the vet proposed to adjust the cows’ diet, explaining to me that rumen acidosis is associated with an excess of carbs and sugar in the ration. but the farmer mentioned that he was already talking to the feed advisor to adjust the ration, so they decided to wait a few weeks and see whether this would have any effect. conditions change constantly, and climate, grazing, and weather affect the quality of food and the condition of cows. optimizing digestion is not only complicated by seasonal flows and dietary changes but also by the fluctuations of the gestation cycle. during biweekly or monthly visits, veterinarians’ fertility checks were often accompanied by appraisals of the fat reserves of a cow through the visual inspection of markers such as the visibility of the ribs and the prominence of the backbone. this informs so-called body condition scores (bcs), where a bcs of 1 is a severely emaciated cow, a 5 indicates a cow that is too fat, while a score of 3 signifies an optimal condition. noting them down in the farm’s digital management system allows vets and farmers to capture fluctuations of cow metabolism and health over time, and to adjust the ration accordingly. in particular, farmers will aim at an optimal bcs at the start of cows’ “dry period” (the time before the next calving where the cow is not milked). this prepares her for the later stages of pregnancy and especially the immediate postnatal period, during which she rapidly starts producing milk again. during this period, a cow will often produce more milk than her eating can support and must draw on her fat reserves. if she has too much fat reserve to draw on, however, her liver will have trouble metabolizing the quick release of fat into the blood stream, a process that can make her vulnerable to pathologies. common health problems on the farm—milk fever, ketosis, laminitis, hepatic steatosis, displaced abomasum, and calf diarrhea—all stem from metabolic misalignments. despite an elaborate knowledge infrastructure, then, dairy farmers never get a full grasp on metabolic processes. their work toward achieving good good digestion 69 digestion is never finished and fundamentally uncertain. as disturbances might express themselves months later, questions often remain: was it the ration, the heat in the summer, the stress of a switch to a different milking system, or her genes? for farmers, the challenge, and the fun, lies in anticipating, using, and supporting volatile bodily processes that can be cultivated but never fully controlled. on regular dutch dairy farms, then, achieving good digestion involves operating on the razor’s edge of maximizing production while managing its associated health risks. figure 1. a cow in her dry period with farm silage in the background. photo by else vogel. metabolic politics contrasting the ways in which the feed measure problematized metabolic processes with how cow digestion is worked with and cared for on dairy farms reveals different modes of knowing, valuing, and engaging with microbial and bovine digestion. in the next sections, i articulate three key features of metabolic politics as they play out in this case. configuring the metabolic polis my case involves different problematizations of metabolic relations: while the nitrogen crisis, and the feed measure in particular, foregrounded a concern with metabolic excretions, pollution, and excess, on dairy farms it is the synthetic, productive qualities of metabolism that take center stage. these different ways of approaching cow digestion both enact concern for more-than-human cultural anthropology 40:1 70 metabolic collectives. these collectives, however, are composed differently. metabolic-political tactics, then, assemble communities of eaters, and this assembling puts boundaries on who or what can eat, feed, digest, and waste, and with which effects. what gets enacted as the unit or scale through which metabolic input or output is analyzed—a country, a farm, a cow, or a nature reserve—itself emerges as important in shaping how such relations are constituted and evaluated. focusing on the national territory, the eu’s legislation and the nitrogen-deposition data draw equivalences between the excretions of cows and emissions from cars, airplanes, and machinery. they enact the netherlands as a crowded land in which these various industrial digesters share and compete for limited space. the critical deposition loads (van robben et al. 2012) legally solidified the right of protection of the metabolic needs of the plants and animals living in dutch nature reserves. interestingly, the scientific data and models defining vulnerability to nitrogen pollution focus only on vegetation types deemed “characteristic” of a habitat type and “plant community” (van robben et al. 2012, 17). environmental policies thus also include selections of which life belongs where and needs to be taken into consideration. as a result of ecologists’ administrative efforts, these life forms, although food for neither cows nor humans, emerge as deeply implicated in their eating and become part of the political community. but where wildlife is staged as a precious, vulnerable life worth cherishing, dutch cows are enacted as polluters who literally and administratively take up nitrogen space. while the feed measure did include some consideration for their welfare, in the nitrogen crisis’s overall metabolic-political frame, they emerge as deeply problematic nature-culture hybrids (anneberg, vaarst, and bubandt 2013)—echoing the indian “natural farmers” in daniel münster’s (2017, 26) ethnography, who considered holstein cows as “outside the boundaries of the cow species and even outside nature itself.” statistics showing the large contribution of agriculture to national nitrogen emissions cast farmers, too, as wasteful citizens claiming scarce public resources. on the dairy farm, by contrast, it is bovine and microbial life that is of central concern. its business model banks on the surplus value that emerges through their vital metabolic capacities. here, the cow is enacted as a fragile but valuable contributor to the common good of food production. moreover, dairy production also involves the recognition of relative conditions of edibility: cows and consumers of dairy products alike make use of rumen microbes’ unique ability to digest cellulose. the notion that food is not food for everyone, and that there good digestion 71 are crucial differences between eaters, thus constitute the fabric of this metabolic collective. metabolic politics also revolves around the power to obscure or erase needs, or to exclude eaters from consideration if they do not belong. for instance, the dutch government did not always act as nature’s advocate. in the years preceding the nitrogen crisis, several efforts were made to solve the problem by lobbying to remove the eu’s administrative designation of areas as protected nature, thus prohibiting its flora and fauna from placing demands on the metabolic collective. the newly appointed far-right government’s coalition agreement in 2024 promises to once again lobby for an exception to eu environmental policy, although experts doubt this will succeed. on dairy farms, competing eaters also emerge at the margins of the polis: parasites are eradicated, as are calves, although they first need to be born for their mothers to keep producing milk. importantly, both modes of organizing digestion do not incorporate accountability relations to the eating and feeding relations outside of the netherlands, such as those affected by the soy or palm oil plantations that provide the feed concentrate in question. a first salient metabolic political tactic emerging from my field, then, concerns the kinds and categories of metabolic life that are administered and fostered (foucault 1978, 138). how populations are included or excluded in optimization efforts determines which lively beings enter the polis, how distinctions emerge between eaters—human or nonhuman, characteristic or not, natural or in excess—and how different life forms are brought into relation with each other, as eater or food, as polluter or threatened. defining dietary needs and metabolic vulnerability second, at stake in the controversy over the feed measure were different ways of knowing, categorizing, and valuing normal, optimal, or bad digestion. in the netherlands, what dairy cows eat, produce, and excrete is meticulously recorded. both the dutch government and farmers and veterinarians make use of this elaborate epistemic infrastructure. but they do so in different ways, shaping different metabolic politics. for the government tasked with creating nitrogen space, the available data on farms, soil, feed, and animals opened bovine digestion up for intervention on a national scale. the expert panel providing the scientific basis of the feed measure drew on statistical averages of milk and silage contents to assess the nutritional requirements of the national herd and compare this to the current cultural anthropology 40:1 72 average protein intake of cows. this resulted in an apparent gap between dietary need and consumption. what characterized the government’s mode of ordering bovine digestion, then, is its reliance on principles of economic bookkeeping. as scholars have described, from the minimum living wage of the nineteenth century to the weight loss strategy of calorie counting, such economic accounting logics—that what goes in must come out—have proved central to knowledge of and interventions on (human) metabolism (landecker 2013; mol 2013; vogel 2018; yates-doerr 2012). similarly, here, the goal is to keep checks and balances in order through a restricted budget. nutritional practices on farms, by contrast, orient knowledge toward the volatile needs of individual cows as they emerge on their farms. where statistical averages serve government in controlling for and eliminating variations, thus allowing for generalizable and legally effective conclusions, the food-and-milkcontents data used on farms enact nutritional needs as changing over gestational, seasonal, and reproductive cycles. moreover, seeing, feeling, and sometimes smelling manure, and appraising cow bodies and behavior also form a crucial part of knowing digestion on the farm. the establishment of needs on dairy farms is, moreover, deeply entangled with the demand of production. knowledge serves to both establish and anticipate the metabolic capacities of particular cows—high-yielding cows are described in breeding magazines as having “a strong will to milk”—and to identify “untapped potential,” so these capacities can be optimized. as such, knowledge on digestion signals metabolic vulnerability as well as opportunity. with the feed measure, the government deprived farmers of a crucial way of responding to both. the general norm imposed by the minister was at odds with the very game that constitutes dairy farming: customizing and fine-tuning a diet for a particular cow and herd. so much so that it posed, in the vets’ words, “serious consequences for health,” or, in the farmers’ words, even animal abuse. that the ministry consulted the veterinary profession on the feed measure shows how, as in other forms of multispecies coexistence, veterinary expertise mediates metabolic relations (broz, arregui, and o’mahony 2021). the professional organization’s depiction of dietary needs, however, did not go unchallenged even within the veterinary sector. yet others destabilized the very metabolic script underlying the “cow form” of modern agriculture. a vet who is no longer a practitioner but a consultant in the sector, stated in an interview: “like in professional sports, if there is no top-level support, the whole system collapses. the argument that if we take protein out of the food the animals will good digestion 73 suffer—this is bullshit, holsteins are just bred to produce way too much milk. the ones with really high milk yield, they all have foot and udder problems. they are very sensitive for all kinds of systemic, production-related diseases. this is where the health problems lie, not in a little bit less protein.” echoing this position, in an op-ed in a prominent newspaper, a retired vet asked the rhetorical question: “now who is really abusing our dairy cows here?”10 in this framing, then, it is not the proposed measure that poses health risks—cows’ metabolic vulnerability rather emerges as the “capitalist indigestions” (overstreet 2018) of agriculture itself. the alternative version of good digestion conjured aligns with the practices of a minority of dutch farmers who work with less productive cattle breeds, often of dutch heritage (verkaaik 2022). in contrast with the u.s.-imported holsteins, breeders value these cows for their “robustness,” a category of metabolic health that indicates an animal’s resilience to environmental fluctuations. a key aspect of the metabolic politics at play in this case, then, is the question of what constitute dietary needs, as well as metabolic health and vulnerability, and how these should best be appraised. from the critical loads for nitrogen deposition to the minimum defined protein content of feed, and from urea levels in milk to bcs, my analysis highlights how metabolic politics involve forms of enumeration that make distinctions between what is relevant or valuable and what is not, thereby performing some realities as changeable while taking others for granted. yet in the controversy, although some expertise (i.e., that of veterinarians) was staged as more authoritative than others, these knowledges were also contested. political tactics thus involve forms of digestive and “nutritional black-boxing” (yates-doerr 2012), but also, crucially, the “un-boxing” of metabolic relations, destabilizing the terms of comparison underpinning proposed interventions into bovine digestion. aligning eaters third, the controversy does not just reveal different notions of what comprises good digestion but also highlights different modes of doing and styles of governance. these include different ways of engaging actors toward achieving such goods, and ways of handling deviations from the norm. on the dairy farm, metabolic productivity is possible thanks to generations of selective breeding that has allowed farmers to “grow” ever more efficient digesters. this industrial bovine metabolism is fragile. enacting good digestion on the dairy farm is a matter of constantly attending, adapting, and tinkering (mol, cultural anthropology 40:1 74 moser, and pols 2010) with what is practically available. farmers and vets grapple with lively bodies and materials, such as a food offer dependent on weather and finances. although highly advanced and technological, it is also a craft requiring sensorial attunement. crucially, it does not just depend on the actions of farmers and vets. the farmer is highly dependent on cows, rumen microbes, and their metabolic labor (beldo 2017; barua 2019). as the veterinarian caroline put it, after all; “ideally, microbes do the work for you.” aligning eaters, however, is not an easy task. if a cow does not feel good, she will stop eating or produce less milk—while microbes will simply die. but while a farmer can and will send an uncollaborative cow to slaughter, cows and rumen microbes cannot be forced to eat. they can, however, be nudged, invited, tricked, or disciplined into eating, for instance by total mixed rations, a method of feeding that involves cutting different foods together so finely that it becomes difficult for cows to select some over others. in the nitrogen crisis, a different set of techniques for managing actors emerged. interestingly, the government seemed reluctant for the state to take on a role in reducing nitrogen emissions. it was only when animal activists took the government to court that eu regulations became binding and the state was enacted as an arbiter in regulating the metabolic material flows of its territory. the government then approached metabolic relations as, or in as far as they are, under its control. rather than cultivating a responsiveness to the lively actors that comprise dairy farming, the feed measure was designed to be as little dependent on their conduct as possible while producing maximum effect. the metabolic fluctuations and uncertainties on farms were dealt with by reducing the measure to the easily accessible feed concentrate. possible non-conformities with the rules were handled through the threat of inspections and fines, but also by adding safety margins in the legal accounting of the measure, and allowing for exceptions. nitrogen accounting, as other sustainability policies, conjures the world “into an up-for-grabs inventory of controllable units” (hastrup, brichet, and nielsen 2022, 12). the state thus emerges much like an operator on a switchboard, engaging both cows and farmers as mere levers to pull in the nitrogen cycle. in the feed measure, moreover, intervening in microbial flora is portrayed as an intervention on a much larger scale. the feed measure betrays a similar ambition of “symbiotic engineering” as folkers and opitz (2022) identify in efforts to reduce methane emissions. rather than connecting the microbiological and planetary scale, the ecological, economic, and legal realms of nitrogen situate good digestion 75 cows and their rumen microbes within metabolic relations with local soil, waters, livelihoods, and ecosystems. still, the goal is to intervene in a system of interlinked processes by making few but key adjustments. targeting the microbial flora of the rumen promised to circumvent or postpone politically sensitive discussions about the sustainability of human consumption of dairy products and the future of the dutch food system, including the dreaded possibility of having to cut the size of the national herd. but what seemed like a techno-fix turned out to touch on the core of dairy farming. the protests that erupted revealed the elements as far more unruly than hoped for. hence metabolic political tactics may include putting limits on who can feed, eat, digest, and excrete, and penalizing or eliminating those who divert from such limits. but contrasting the state’s failing approach with the more successful governance of life on dairy farms suggests that a more felicitous tactic may consist of creating conditions for growing, cultivating, and training eaters, enrolling them as good nutritional subjects by working on palatability and taste (cf. overstreet 2018). conclusion the nitrogen crisis forms a key moment in dutch agricultural history, where the nation’s metabolic ambitions and more-than-human socialities are profoundly reconfigured. in this article i explored the first concrete problematization of and interventions in bovine metabolism that followed the 2019 court ruling. the case highlights that different ways of knowing, valuing, and intervening in more-than-human eating and feeding relation—in this case, between cows, humans, microbes, wildlife, and technology—enact differing normative ideals of society and nature. the challenges revolved not around convincing stakeholders of the value of sustainable farming, but around how to socio-materially embed and embody different forms of “good digestion” in practice. while a technical matter closed the feed-measure controversy, how to calibrate “individual and collective relations of agreement” between foods and eaters (mol 2021, 118) in the nitrogen crisis remains disputed. metabolic politics adds to recent scholarship on multispecies eating and feeding relations, which details the various nonhuman eaters, such as animals, plants, and microbes, with whom people are “entangled in a messy meal” (haraway 2008; abrahamsson and bertoni 2014; bertoni 2013; mol 2021; paxson 2023). these entanglements offer no cozy conviviality: since “there is no way to eat and not to kill,” the dilemmas of more-than-human living offer “no way to cultural anthropology 40:1 76 pretend innocence and transcendence or a final peace” (haraway 2008, 295). yet the specificities of how metabolic collectives are shaped and organized do matter. like other more-than-human biopolitical projects (asdal, druglitrø, and hinchliffe 2017), metabolic politics thus involves troublesome and situated valuations of who/what deserves protection and what is expendable for the greater good. in this article, i have made these valuations explicit by contrasting different modes of organizing metabolic relations, extending to distinct political communities, ways of valuing health, and governance techniques. this article, then, equips the reader not with a normative yardstick to “evaluate how the enactment of agricultural care can be done” (cusworth 2023, 66), but with critical terms and questions to analyze how such conundrums are handled and played out already—thus learning to become affected by the irreconcilable dilemmas and lively normativities that animate metabolic politics. while i have described metabolic politics in the case of an agricultural sector deeply entangled with technocratic, multilevel governance apparatuses, this article provides a frame for tracing how the ecological conditions of possibility and effects of food systems are problematized in other bureaucratic, social, and geographical contexts. it would be interesting to see how metabolic politics play out in contexts without elaborate regulatory frameworks, where industrial food production is not the norm, and where scientific and professional expertise play more marginal roles in shaping configurations of metabolic communities, health, and governance. the analytical scope of metabolic politics, finally, also extends to forms of more-than-human metabolic living outside the world of food production. in the “age of flatulence” that is the anthropocene (govindrajan 2020), the resource extraction and pollution from other industries or urban infrastructures increasingly come into public focus, leading to contestations over how to govern their ecologies (cf. barua 2023). while the metabolic political tactics in these cases will differ, it remains vital to ask which metabolic relations are foregrounded, how and whose metabolic vulnerability is accounted for, and when metabolizing is framed as nourishing or destructive, and for whom. abstract in the netherlands, what dairy cows eat, produce, and excrete is meticulously recorded and controlled. while farmers optimize cows’ diets for production, the side effects of this industrial metabolism have recently become problematized in new and strikingly good digestion 77 public ways. since 2019, the country has faced a so-called nitrogen crisis, a set of ecological, legal, and political challenges posed by nitrogen pollution from industrial activities, predominantly livestock farming. this article offers the concept of metabolic politics as a theoretical lens for understanding contestations over the power to organize more-than-human eating and feeding relations. drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with veterinarians and farmers, i contrast governmental interventions in cows’ digestive processes with how bovine digestion is cared for on dairy farms. this reveals key features of metabolic politics: struggles over the forms of life that comprise the metabolic polis; clashing ways of valuing the health of organisms and ecosystems; and diverging styles of governing metabolic collectives. [biopolitics; metabolism; dairy farming; nitrogen; veterinary medicine; the netherlands] samenvatting in nederland wordt nauwgezet bijgehouden en gecontroleerd wat melkkoeien eten, produceren en uitscheiden. waar boeren het rantsoen van koeien optimaliseren voor productie, krijgen de neveneffecten van dit ‘ industriële metabolisme’ steeds meer publieke aandacht. sinds 2019 staat het land namelijk voor een ‘stikstofcrisis’, een reeks ecologische, juridische en politieke uitdagingen die grotendeels voortvloeit uit stikstofuitstoot door de veehouderij. dit artikel introduceert het concept metabole politiek om inzicht te geven in de machtsdynamieken die spelen bij het organiseren van eeten voedingsrelaties tussen mens, dier en natuur. op basis van etnografisch veldwerk met dierenartsen en boeren vergelijk ik overheidsinterventies in de spijsverteringsprocessen van koeien met de manier waarop op melkveebedrijven gewerkt wordt aan ‘goed verteren’. dit illustreert belangrijke kenmerken van metabole politiek: strijd over welke levensvormen deel uitmaken van de metabole polis; botsende manieren om de gezondheid van organismen en ecosystemen te waarderen; en uiteenlopende benaderingen van het besturen van stofwisselende gemeenschappen. [biopolitiek; metabolisme; melkveehouderij; stikstof; diergeneeskunde; nederland] notes acknowledgments the essay greatly benefited from the feedback of participants of the metabolic life workshop at cambridge university in 2023; thanks in particular to maan barua and françois thoreau; and to jonny turnbull and participants for the inspiring workshop on metabolism at oxford university in 2023. i am grateful to annemarie mol, filippo bertoni, pierre du plessis, willemijn krebbekx, lieke wissink, lisette jong, cristóbal bonelli, and francesco colona and the clean team for commenting on earlier versions of this work. i also thank the master’s students of the “multispecies ecologies and planetary matter” and “environmental politics” courses with whom i discussed a draft of this article. lastly, i am deeply indebted to my informants for their hospitality and generosity. this work was financially supported by a veni grant of the dutch research council (nwo) and co-funded by the european union (erc, vetvalues, grant agreement 101115677). views and opinions expressed are mine only and do not necessarily reflect those of the european union or the european research council; neither the european union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. cultural anthropology 40:1 78 1. the existing approach, the programma aanpak stikstof, or pas, allowed farmers to expand if they simultaneously implemented measures that promised to reduce emissions in the future. 2. studies in feminist sts and anthropology on metabolic science and human nutritional practices have also shown that significant historical shifts have occurred within the science of metabolism (landecker 2013; levin 2014), and there are various contrasting scientific or medical accounts of what (good) metabolism is and how it should be intervened on (yates-doerr 2012; vogel 2018). 3. website of the environmental data compendium of the netherlands, https://www. clo.nl/indicatoren/nl0189-stikstofdepositie (last accessed march 27, 2024). 4. government of the netherlands website, https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/ nieuws/2020/05/06/tijdelijke-regeling-krachtvoer-voor-melkvee-in-kader-van-stikstofaanpak (last accessed march 27, 2024). translation mine. 5. the letter of parliament, published on the open website: https://open.overheid.nl/ documenten/ronl-02f8d4bf-c630-49c4-8a6a-5854b28e5421/pdf 6. my translation from the website of the government of the netherlands, https://www. rijksoverheid.nl/documenten/rapporten/2020/08/10/cdm-advies-'vermindering-ammoniakemissies-door-minder-eiwit-in-krachtvoer-van-melkvee' (last accessed march 27, 2024). 7. my translation from the royal dutch veterinary organization website, https:// www.knmvd.nl/stikstofregels-veehouderij-mogen-niet-ten-koste-gaan-van-diergezondheid-en-welzijn/ (last accessed august 28, 2023). 8. for histories of the emergence of these high-yielding cows, see theunissen 2020 and orland 2003. 9. radhika govindrajan (2020) notes that for scientists, too, the rumen is “hard to know” and has a somewhat mysterious quality. 10. https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/opinie-wie-mishandelt-hier-eigenlijk-onze-melkkoeien~bda95ff2/ (last accessed august 28, 2023). references abrahamsson, sebastian, and filippo bertoni 2014 “compost politics: experimenting with togetherness in vermicomposting.” environmental humanities 4, no. 1: 125–48. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119193614962 anneberg, inger, mette vaarst, and nils bubandt 2013 “pigs and profits: hybrids of animals, technology and humans in danish industrialised farming.” social anthropology 21, no. 4: 542–59. https://doi. org/10.1111/1469-8676.12049 asdal, kristin, tone druglitrø, and stephen hinchliffe 2017 humans, animals, and biopolitics: the more-than-human condition. london: routledge. barua, maan 2019 “animating capital: work, commodities, circulation.” progress in human geography 43, no. 4: 650–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518819057 2023 lively cities: 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ceremony: #sayhername, #citeblackwomen, and the practice of reparative enunciation cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 191-198, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.03 citation as ceremony: #sayhername, #citeblackwomen, and the practice of reparative enunciation savannah shange university of california, santa cruz https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3980-9897 rem’mie fells. breonna taylor. nina pop. korryn gaines. aiyana stanley-peterson. layleen xtravaganza cubilette polanco. sandra bland. wells-barnett (1895). hurston (1935). primus (1966). mullings (1984). bolles (1996). thomas (2004). reese (2019). “audre lorde.” “ashé,” we murmured in reply. an ozarka bottle crinkled affirmatively as the facilitator sprinkled a bit of water onto a potted pothos plant. “nanny of the maroons!” “ashé!” resounding this time, swelled by the pride of resistance. “my great grandmother ida bowles,” i offered quietly, adding my own lineage to the collective. “ashé.” “miss penny proud.” “ashé, ashé!” we replied emphatically this time, pinched by the grief for a black transwoman slain just up the block from tremé’s community book center where we were gathered for the evening’s panel about labor organizing. after each name was peppered in, the water bottle crinkled and the three dozen of us voiced affirmation. the libations ceremony ended with a thick moment of silence honoring those ancestors whose names we will never know. the plant was tucked back onto its windowsill home and the facilitator went over the agenda, handwritten in multicolor markers on chart paper. life and death went on. while these libations were offered on bayou road, one of new orleans’s last black cultural corridors, they form part of a wide topography of secular-spiritual naming practices that stretch across the americas and into a digitally mediated diaspora. there we find #sayhername, a protest hashtag that resists the invisibilization of violence against black women amid the swell of activism against spectacular murders of black boys and men by the state. coined in hashtag form in 2014 by the african american policy forum (aapf) and center for intersectionality and social policy studies (cisps),1 #sayhername draws on longer histories of transfeminist of color organizing like sylvia rivera and marsha p. johnson’s leadership in star (street transvestite action revolutionaries). rather than an additive politic—the police kill us too!—the hashtag #sayhername is a fractal intervention that radically alters the terrain of black struggle. the list of names that opens this essay, each circulated with the demand to #sayhername, refuses several commonsense binaries that subtend liberal politics: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. rem’mie fells was murdered and dismembered by a boy i grew up with blocks from my adolescent stomping grounds—her sacred, gender-defiant body torn asunder by the lethal force of trans-antagonism and misogyny. korryn gaines was a sovereign black mama who dared defend her child against the armed forces entering her baltimore home. if she had been able to make $500 bail, maybe layleen xtravaganza cubilette polanco would still be twirling on her haters, but instead, corrections staff prevented her from taking her epilepsy medication, and she was left to seize uncontrollably and die in solitary confinement on rikers island. the deaths of these women are parenthetical to the mainstream narrative of black lives matter, one that reduces a century of political activism to the archetype of an unarmed black boy murdered on camera by the police. in that narrow frame, deaths like those of fells, gaines, and polanco are by turns private, justified, and accidental. tragic? of course. political? no. #sayhername refuses the lie that these black women’s deaths lie outside the realm of politics. from vigils to protests to literal twitter threads, the hashtag stitches together a black feminist resistance to patriarchal violence that weaves through the combahee river collective organizing against murders in boston in the 1970s and black women organizing against the grim sleeper serial killer in los angeles a decade later (grigsby 2014).2 the ritual listing of these names is a fundamentally citational technology, one that simultaneously calls in our newest ancestors and calls out the structures of violence that stole them from us. in this sense, both #sayhername and the bayou road libations ceremony are legible as archives of affect (thomas 2019). following deborah thomas (2019, 7), archives of affect are “technologies of deep recognition” that “can cultivate a sense of mutuality that not only exposes complicity but also demands collective accountability.” the mutuality produced by these modes of public citation grounds a black feminist political ethic that materially organizes for accountability—this is one way that we “tend to the black dead and dying: to tend to the black person, to black people, always living in the push toward our death” (sharpe 2016, 10). how, though, does this embodied mode of citation intersect with textual genres of citation, such as those invoked by the #citeblackwomen hashtag? these impulses—say her name, cite black women—intersect at the site of erasure that renders black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. the two hashtags bridge digital communities and material politics, syncopated rhythms that insist on presencing black women in spaces we were never meant to survive (lorde 1978). a two-strand twist of invitation and indictment, #sayhername calls in a capacious vision of black womanhood while calling out liberal respectability. styled the same way, #citeblackwomen invites academics and the broader digital public to engage with black women’s scholarship while it indicts the systemic erasure of black women’s names from the literal and figurative indexes of our disciplines. citation is ceremony, and a bibliography is an altar—a literary libation invoking the ancestors of the word, honoring those who make it possible for the text to emerge. textual citation calls forth the names of both the living and the dead, crafting a horizontal genealogy of those with whom we share mitochondrial markers of meaning. just like in the family trees of black folks in the americas, malignant names are listed in our bibliographies, those rotten apples we hate-cite and read against themselves.3 for anthropologists, citation is also a methodological concern. when our interlocutors appear in the text, do they arrive only for the purpose of illustration? beyond a catchy chapter title, are we honoring the words of those whose stories put lines on our cv and food in our refrigerators? careful, ethical ethnography cites our research participants as thought and theory partners in the effort to speak back to the silences and violences of extant social science. citation, then, can function as a mode of black relation, in which the writer releases the enlightenment lie of sole authorship to embrace the polyphonous nature of the ethnographic text. in our discipline, the citation of black women can mirror the worst tendencies of ethnography. black women’s work is trotted out in a list of regional exemplars or lifted as an illustration of a systemic pattern illuminated by michel foucault or pierre bourdieu or bruno latour or, or, or. what would it mean to teach governmentality through deborah thomas or kinship through zora neale hurston? reframing our approach to theory in this way would help us further dislodge empire’s tenterhooks from our ways of teaching the social world, a project already begun in earnest by formations like the applied anthropology program at oregon state university, where a collective of graduate students created the decanonization syllabus (buell et al. 2019). in this model, canonical man-cestors like marcel mauss and franz boas are swapped out one for one by the likes of makareti papakura and anténor firmin, sweet turbinado in the place of splenda. moving from the register of legibility to the deeper lexicon of mutuality, #citeblackwomen invites all of us to grow beyond the transactional mode re-placing black women’s work in a slot originally carved out by and for white thought, and instead becoming fluent in black women’s scholarship, so that we begin to think, write, and yes, speak in black feminist grammars in the first instance. conventional metrics of academic citation attend to frequency as an analytic and involve computational queries like: how many black women are cited in this paper? how many times was each one cited? parenthetically or quoted? if quoted, was it an in-line citation or a block quote? if it was a block quote, was it an epigraph or used as a segue between sections of a chapter? these questions are crucial to assaying the material valuation of black women’s intellectual labor within the academic economy and provide a starting point for a just appraisal. they emerge from a market logic in which citations are receipts for a debt owed to those whose ideas we build on; we “give credit where credit is due,” because we have inherited a transactional framework for citation. in a context where power, privilege, and publishing are unevenly distributed across axes of race, gender, ability, sexuality, and nation, it is imperative for those who have accrued such resources to use the citational market to redistribute them. by contrast, when we engage citation as a practice of relation, we shift away from market-based approaches to attend to the quotidian suite of academic, political, and spiritual “creative practices of refusal—nimble and strategic practices that undermine the categories of the dominant” (campt 2017, 32). in her work on photographic practice in the black diaspora, tina campt (2017, 4) pushes us to understand the quotidian “as a practice, rather than an act/ion. it is a practice honed by the dispossessed in the struggle to create possibility within the constraints of everyday life.” these everyday citational practices are recursive and reparative—in the forging of relation, they “sound an ordinary note of care” (sharpe 2016, 132). #sayhername and #citeblackwomen are congruent repertoires of reparative enunciation, operating in different octaves in the dissonant symphony of black life and death. atatiana jefferson. monika diamond. rekia boyd. latasha harlins. riah milton. pearlie golden. kayla moore. nia wilson. day (1932). dunham (1947). gonzalez (1988). harrison (1991). cox (2015). smith (2016). mariner (2019). i sing these names as a junior scholar whose campus is under a mandatory evacuation order for fear of a wildfire raging less than a mile away. my students log into class from the cars that they lived in long before the pandemic, desperately gambling on the economic promise of a college degree even in a moment when dozens of prestigious universities are predicted to “perish” in the coming years (galloway 2020). i am acutely aware that the academic infrastructure i will leave behind is not the one i entered, and that armed white supremacists gallivant on streets painted with “black lives matter.” at the moment, discrete acts of citation trapped within the academic text do little to defend black life. the practice of relational citation demands more—don’t cite black women in jstor if you do nothing to protect and defend black women in your department, on your campus, and in your city. at the moment, i don’t want to know if you cited my book or articles—i want to know if there is space to lay out an altar here, because the ceremony must go on. abstract liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. each of these binaries render black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. in this essay, i examine the hashtags #sayhername and #citeblackwomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. when citation is practiced as a form of relation, it offers a model for an ethical ethnographic practice in which we cite our research participants as thought and theory partners in an effort to speak back to the silences and violences of extant social science. [citational politics; black feminism; grief; digital activism; social media] notes acknowledgments may all those ancestors whose stories animate this article rise in peace and power. a flood of gardenias at the feet of christen a. smith & anne-maria b. makhulu—you transformed this colloquy into a living space of black radical care. i would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for helping shape this essay, as well as acknowledge orisanmi burton for his generous and sharp feedback—thank you for being a comrade among colleagues. 1. for more on the #sayhername campaign, see african american policy forum | center for intersectionality and social policy studies 2015. 2. the grim sleeper is a moniker given to lonnie franklin jr., a serial killer who murdered at least sixteen black women in south central los angeles between 1984 and 2010. his reign of terror was met with fierce and organized resistance from black women activists, particularly those invested in reproductive justice. this nexus of black feminist praxis, black geographies, and black terror is theorized by juli grigsby (2014). 3. we see you, hegel. references african american policy forum | center for intersectionality and social policy studies 2015 say her name: resisting police brutality against black women. new york: african american policy forum | center for intersectionality and social policy studies. bolles, a. lynn 1996 sister jamaica: a study of women, work, and households in kingston. lanham, md.: university press of america. buell, rebecca renee, samuel burns, zhuo chen, lisa grabinsky, argenis hurtado moreno, katherine stanton, froggi vanriper, and loren white 2019 “reworking the history of social theory for twenty-first century anthropology: a syllabus project.” footnotes (blog), february 15, 2019. https://footnotesblog.com/2019/02/15/decanonizing-anthropology/ campt, tina 2017 listening to images: an exercise in counterintuition. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cox, aimee meredith 2015 shapeshifters: black girls and the choreography of citizenship. durham, n.c.: duke university press. day, caroline bond 1932 study of some negro-white families in the united states. cambridge, mass.: peabody museum of harvard university. dunham, katherine 1947 “the dances of haiti.” acta anthropologica 2, no. 4: 1–64. galloway, scott 2020 “uss university,” july 17. https://www.profgalloway.com/uss-university gonzalez, lélia 1988 “a categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade.” tempo brasileiro 92, no. 93: 69–82. https://institutoodara.org.br/public/gonzalez-lelia-a-categoria-politico-cultural-de-amefricanidade-tempo-brasileiro-rio-de-janeiro-v-92-n-93-p-69-82-jan-jun-1988b-p-69-82/ grigsby, juli 2014 “grim sleeper: gender, violence, and reproductive justice in los angeles.” phd dissertation, university of texas, austin. harrison, faye v., ed. 1991 decolonizing anthropology: moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. washington, d.c.: american anthropological association. hurston, zora neale 1935 mules and men. philadelphia: j. b. lippincott. lorde, audre 1978 “a litany for survival.” in the black unicorn: poems, 32. new york: w. w. norton. mariner, kathryn a. 2019 contingent kinship: the flows and futures of adoption in the united states. berkeley: university of california press. mullings, leith 1984 therapy, ideology, and social change: mental healing in urban ghana. berkeley: university of california press. primus, pearl 1966 a pilot study integrating visual form and anthropological content for teaching children ages six to eleven about cultures and peoples of the world. washington d.c.: department of health, education, and welfare. reese, ashanté m. 2019 black food geographies: race, self-reliance, and food access in washington, d.c. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. sharpe, christina 2016 in the wake: on blackness and being. durham, n.c.: duke university press. smith, christen a. 2016 afro-paradise: blackness, violence, and performance in brazil. urbana: university of illinois press. thomas, deborah a. 2004 modern blackness: nationalism, globalization, and the politics of culture in jamaica. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 2019 political life in the wake of the plantation: sovereignty, witnessing, repair. durham, n.c.: duke university press. wells-barnett, ida b. 1895 a red record: tabulated statistics and alleged causes of lynchings in the united states, 1892-1893-1894. chicago: donohue & henneberry. cultural anthropology, vol. 37, issue 2, pp. 191-198, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. © american anthropological association 2022. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. use, reproduction, or distribution of journal content for commercial purposes requires additional permissions from the american anthropological association; please contact permissions@americananthro.org. doi: 10.14506/ca37.2.03 cultural anthropology: soil forensics: property and the buried truth in medellín 753 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 753-778, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.08 soil forensics: property and the buried truth in medellín meghan l. morris temple university https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8052-6886 it was first communion day when the earth rained down. when residents of the neighborhood of villatina recall their memory of that sunday in 1987, they recount looking up and seeing “nothing but dirt.” the mountainside where villatina is perched, far above medellín’s city center, had come down onto the neighborhood, covering people and homes under 20,000 cubic meters of soil. residents ran to the site to dig out family members and neighbors. some were found alive, but hundreds were buried under the earth. official city reports described what occurred as a natural event: a landslide. technical investigations by engineers confirmed the disaster resulted from water accumulation in the mountainside soil above villatina during the rainy season. officials noted there was a canal feeding water tanks that supplied informal settlements on the mountainside; lack of maintenance of this canal could have exacerbated the earth’s saturation and contributed to the landslide. residents, however, frequently began their recollections of the tragedy by saying they suddenly heard an explosion. while they were unsure of the specifics of the explosion, they were sure of one thing: it was because of the m-19, a left-wing guerrilla group active in the neighborhood at the time. villatina residents recalled seeing m-19 guerrillas habitually roaming that area of the mountain. in 754a television interview about the disaster, a resident explained: “people say they [the m-19] had dynamite stored up there, and maybe with the heat it exploded. . . . and yes, because the thing is, it was not a landslide. yes, there was mud, but because there was a canal there. and when everything broke and the pine trees came down and everything—because that explosion ripped out pines by the roots!—then the canal emptied out.”1 nearly thirty years later, with the country poised to finalize a historic peace agreement with the revolutionary armed forces of colombia (farc) guerrillas after a half-century civil war, people in medellín were still talking about villatina. the neighborhood was one of the initial construction sites of the cinturón verde (green belt), a municipal green infrastructure project involving walking paths, bike paths, and eco-parks that would eventually circle the upper reaches of the mountainsides surrounding medellín. the green belt was in part intended to delineate the urban-rural boundary, discouraging further expansion of the informal settlements that populated the city’s peripheries. it also aimed to help medellín move past decades of war, and, as billboards across the city proclaimed, “turn the page on violence,” as part of national efforts to achieve peace. this orientation toward peace built on the city’s history of “social urbanism,” which focused municipal infrastructural investments in poor neighborhoods to combat violence and social inequality. but pending green belt construction threatened to remove residents in areas like the upper comuna (district) around villatina, the vast majority of whom had built informal settlements there after displacement from rural farms during the war. i analyze how both city officials and residents built divergent narratives around soil as a forensic site for determining culpability for the disaster in villatina and its implications for the green belt as its construction commenced. their “soil forensics” drew on the material and sensory qualities of soil—its color, its humidity, its movement—as evidence toward a particular account of what happened that sunday in 1987. as the city government attempted to evict residents to turn the upper comuna into an eco-park, claims to the comuna by both city officials and residents also activated these forensic accounts of soil as evidentiary arguments about property. the notion of finding evidence in the soil to establish the truth about a violent past recalls exhumations, which have formed part of a “forensic turn” in transitional justice processes (gessat-anstett and dreyfus 2015; rosenblatt 2015; fournet 2017). and indeed, exhumations to locate mass graves were occurring across colombia, including in medellín, where local bureaucracies proudly 755advertised the number of bones exhumed and returned to families whose loved ones had been disappeared. and yet it was not soil as a repository for more conventional forensic objects like bodies or bones, but soil itself—its morphologies, scientifically determined qualities, temporalities, and legal materialities—that became a central object of forensic inquiry as the green belt unfolded. the term forensics originated with the latin forensis, denoting something pertaining to the forum. the roman forum was a site of public debate, as well as a court of law. people could present objects as evidence or even put them on trial in the forum, blurring boundaries between object and subject, evidence and witness (weizman 2014). drawing on this history, forensic architecture has theorized forensics as establishing “a relation between the animation of material objects and the gathering of political collectives” (weizman 2014, 9). in part following this conceptual lineage, work on forensics in transitional justice focuses largely on forensic regimes in criminal legal fora, understood as the core of political transition. in colombia, however, it was not only crime, but also property that played a central role in attempts to forge peace. historically unequal land distribution and tenure informality were widely understood as root causes of the war and key to its resolution (arias vanegas and caicedo fernández 2017; reyes posada 2009). efforts to achieve peace included programs focused on reordering property, such as a land restitution program to return and title land to those who lost it during the war, along with urban interventions like the green belt, which used green urban planning to confront violence by curbing urban expansion through invasión (land invasion).2 it was, in fact, a question about property, not soil, that led me—unexpectedly, as with other anthropologists encountering disaster in colombia (camargo 2020)—to the villatina disaster. i conducted fieldwork in colombia over eighteen months between 2012 and 2015, in the northwestern region of urabá and in medellín, on the role of property in peace efforts. in urabá, i examined restitution claims to rural land. while it was estimated at the time that more than 7 million people had been internally displaced in the war, many of the displaced lived in cities and did not necessarily dream of returning to their former farms. as i conducted research with displaced people in medellín, conversation repeatedly turned to villatina. property disputes opened up the decades-long debate about the disaster’s origins, in turn feeding disagreements over notions of “risky soil” that grounded both the city government’s explanation of the disaster and its justification of resident removals for the green belt. in examining how soil forensics operated as an evidentiary argument about property, i follow other scholars of forensics in analyzing how forensics are used 756outside the context of crime and policing (azuero-quijano 2021; pietz 2002; ralph 2015). i draw on alejandra azuero-quijano’s (2021) conceptualization of forensics in colombia as a legal infrastructure that involves classic evidentiary objects (such as bones or blood), but also animates specters around illegal assets and other forms of finance capital that become key to broader narratives of political transition. the rendering of soil as a forensic site illustrates the ways that transitional evidentiary regimes drew on what many understood as the country’s most significant natural asset: its soil. as city agencies broke ground for the green belt, soil forensics activated old specters on new terms, challenging official narratives of the war and of reordering property for peace. the transitional justice process oriented this forensic animation of soil toward the arrangement of property in a future peace, framing its language and political stakes. but soil forensics and property also had affinities that exceeded the logics of transitional justice. property, like forensics, constituted a form of legal knowledge that drew together material and social worlds through the delineation of objects, subjects, and their relations. property disputes are often arguments over the definition of these boundaries—of who can or should be an owner and what can be owned. in the context of crime detection and investigation, forensics often involves reckoning with the delineation of perpetrator and victim, their identities, and their relations (olarte-sierra 2022). property claims activated these capacities of forensics, but at different scales and legal temporalities, centering different material objects. soil carried its own particular material and social ambiguities (krzywoszynska and marchesi 2020), rendering soil forensics a type of evidentiary argument about property that had the potential to muddle boundaries. i draw together work on forensics and on soil to examine how the reordering of property rendered soil a forensic site, which different actors animated through narrations of its material and sensory qualities. literature on soil emphasizes the many ways people make worlds through soil, refusing notions of soils as inert spaces in which to simply dig and find objects (tironi et al. 2020; krzywoszynska and marchesi 2020). maria puig de la bellacasa (2019) describes how visualizing soils as living worlds requires “shifts in modes of attention” in which people “re-animate” soil through material and speculative engagements. in medellín, this re-animation unfolded through efforts to evidence a truth about the past that might support particular arrangements of property for the future, as the city government mobilized the green belt as both a form of green infrastructure and a mode of achieving peace. this required a mode of attention with 757a capacity for attunement to the multiple temporal materialities of soil and the legal frameworks facilitating action around it. forensics—as an “art of paying attention” (m’charek 2023) to material traces—was precisely this mode of attention, ready-made for attunement to the material and social worlds the villatina disaster inhabited. soil as a “sociobiophysical object” (krzywoszynska and marchesi 2020, 194) sat similarly within these worlds (tironi et al. 2020). as a forensic object—one instance of what william pietz (2002, 48) called “materialities that exercise a causal power over life and death”—soil carried a particular power, serving as a node around which social, legal, and political relationships unfolded, in ways that were both immediate and also had a long afterlife (crossland 2018). forensic attention to soil in relation to property, as opposed to the frequent orientation of forensics around the definition of criminal perpetrators and victims, implied a more expansive role for soil in forensics than it generally held in processes like exhumations. soil’s unique capacities allowed it to serve not only as a forensic object par excellence for multiple, divergent accounts of the disaster but also as a foundation for future horizons at different scales, from the national project to reorder property for peace to municipal visions of green urbanism and residents’ dreams of permanence. what might soil forensics tell us about the evidentiary politics of property in an aspirational transition from war to peace? how do efforts to reorder property for peace shape the modes and objects through which ecologies become evidentiary (lyons 2018; pugliese 2020)? forensics in transitional processes is often understood to reconstruct the social by rebuilding relations of democracy, kinship, or citizenship (rubin 2020; sanford 2003; rojas-pérez 2017; gessat-anstett and dreyfus 2015). through the centering of property in transition, this rebuilding involved the reconfiguration of both social and material worlds, as the state attempted to put people and land in place for peace. soil forensics served as an evidentiary argument for multiple actors enacting and contesting this reconfiguration. through forensic inquiry into soil’s sensory and material qualities, these actors reconfigured both property and territorial relations, in turn shaping the possibilities for war and peace and questioning the very idea of transition. in the following pages, i first elaborate on the ways different actors animated soil as a forensic object to support divergent accounts of the villatina disaster. i then discuss the history of soil politics in medellín after villatina, when the city government reclassified areas like the upper comuna as high risk zones. 758i examine how soil forensics became an evidentiary argument both for city officials attempting to justify resident removals for the green belt and residents opposing them. residents’ arguments drew on soil as evidence that the green belt was implicated in displacement and the cover-up of disappearances. these claims, articulated in the language of transitional justice, operated as counter-forensic forms of resistance both to the green belt and to city officials’ claims that medellín was moving beyond its violent past. the final section illustrates how resident gardeners and city officials drew on these evidentiary arguments to articulate claims to property and territory for the future. soil forensics the green belt was a source of pride for a city that had spent years building a reputation for green urban planning. mayor sergio fajardo’s 2004–2007 administration established “social urbanism” as medellín’s approach to urban renewal, which focused on developing parks, libraries, public transit, and educational centers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods (brand 2010). the city government’s efforts to resolve violence and drug trafficking, such as its mid-2000s demobilization of right-wing paramilitaries, also included social urbanism by integrating demobilized paramilitaries into gardening and recycling projects (universidad nacional et al. 2009). through social urbanism, medellín rebranded itself as an urban “miracle” for its conversion from a place defined by violence and drug cartels into an innovative, green, equitable city. the green belt and the city government’s articulation of its relationship to peace had deep roots in this history. medellín’s 2012 territorial ordering plan, featuring the green belt and other infrastructure projects discouraging the expansion of mountainside settlements, coincided with the initiation of the national peace talks. medellín promoted itself as a prime example of transition, emphasizing how its expertise in urban planning as social intervention dovetailed with national efforts to achieve peace. while the conflict was often understood as a rural problem, the medellín government insisted that sustainable, equitable urban planning was critical to achieving peace. medellín’s international recognition for social urbanism won it the honor of hosting the 2014 un-habitat world urban forum (wuf), where the city promoted itself as “medellín: city for life.” during the wuf, i joined a group of foreign planners and architects for a green belt tour. stands flanked a green belt walking path called the camino de la vida (path of life), where city employees promoted fique, a plant in the agave family. the city development corporation 759(cdc) leading green belt construction planned to plant more than 20,000 fique, and was training community members to make placemats and exfoliating gloves out of fique fibers. officials from the cdc i spoke with emphasized fique’s “dual purpose.” it would stem mountainside erosion, protecting against landslides. and fique would also “guarantee that it doesn’t become invaded again, at least in a disordered way,” one official noted proudly. fique acted within environmental, legal, and security logics, protecting soil against natural disasters and simultaneously preventing illegal, disordered urban expansion by displaced people. the first walk i took on the path of life was with jessica and césar, residents of the upper comuna.3 we walked on a sunday, their worn shoes pacing slowly along the path’s hexagonal concrete tiles. partway through the walk, césar called me over to look into a trench. it had recently been dug by local workers like césar, who had a temporary day job building the green belt. we looked into the trench, lit by sun filtering through the pines. “mira el suelo [look at the soil],” césar said. i peered past the dry, red-brown earth and scrubby grass of the mountainside into the depths. “see the two different colors?” he asked. near the surface, the soil was light brown. césar pointed to another layer, about two feet down, that was almost black and looked damp. “that layer below is the natural soil of the mountain. and then the layer above was what formed with the explosion . . . they said it was a natural disaster or avalanche, but it was the m-19 that exploded a bomb here. the crater is still there,” he said, pointing up the mountain. he leaned against the trench with a pained expression. “i remember coming here and digging bodies out of the dirt.” césar’s account of the disaster centered soil as evidence, pointing to the soil’s color and humidity to contest the official account. other residents recounted memories of the earth’s movement during the disaster as evidence for their version of the story. on arriving at a community meeting about the green belt, i once found residents deep in discussion about the disaster. one man proclaimed it had been a bomb, prompting another to recount how “there was gas mixed with earth” at the site. a woman exclaimed to me, “the earth went like this!” throwing her hands high and wide in the air to demonstrate its arc. she then moved her arms in the downward sliding motion often used by city engineers to describe the event, shaking her head and saying, “not like this. that was no landslide!” city engineers also used the soil’s humidity and movement to support the official account. they cited technical reports of the soil’s humidity that day, and its movement downward in a slide that fanned out, as indicators that the mountainside had weakened, causing a landslide. for both city officials and residents, 760soil had evidentiary value and operated as a forensic object, offering proof of the veracity of one version of events and rendering other accounts implausible. although soil had the potential to contain evidentiary traces that might be invisible (of violence or toxicity, for example) (lyons 2018), in villatina, it was soil’s tactile and visual materiality—just look at the soil, and it will become clear to you, césar urged—that rendered this evidence so incontrovertible for officials and residents. soil had the assumed facticity of other forensic objects, such as exhumed bodies, understood to have evidentiary power precisely because they “spoke for themselves” (crossland 2018, 2009). the animation of soil’s material and sensory dimensions was necessary to present evidence of its qualities in the past and produce soil as a forensic object. scholars of forensics have emphasized the sensory and material aspects of forensic practice, as forensic experts produce embodied knowledge through material objects as both evidence and modes of attunement to that evidence (olarte-sierra and castro bermúdez 2023; kruse 2015; m’charek 2023). producing soil as a forensic object in villatina required achieving a “heightened aesthetic state of material sensitivity” (weizman 2014, 30) to render visible the material and sensory specificities of soil at the time of the disaster. city officials animated these qualities through data, using engineers’ reports to demonstrate the soil’s saturation and movement during the disaster as evidence of a landslide. residents’ accounts animated soil through the narration and performance of memory as a forensic technology, using visual and sonic recollections of the soil’s qualities during the disaster as evidence. the use of memory had a specific political valence, as memory was a key technology the transitional justice regime sanctified as testimony capable of producing valid evidence of truth about the war. the use of data and memory to perform this animation had roots in what carlo ginzburg (2012) theorized as a historical tradition of drawing together narrative threads and material traces to produce historical truth. this animation granted soil forensic power as an evidentiary argument toward particular accounts of past disaster, and simultaneously, the proper subjects and objects of property for the future. this production of soil as a forensic object was not the exclusive domain of experts, but rather was multiply authored, as both city officials and residents used soil to articulate divergent accounts of the disaster and its implications for property in the comuna. while city officials mobilized soil forensics to assess the soil’s riskiness, residents contested their approach to forensics. they responded instead by inverting the forensic gaze in a type of “counter-forensics” (weizman 2014; 761keenan 2014), arguing that risk resided not in the soil, but in the war. this was one iteration of a broader trend toward the use of “counter-forensic knowledge” to redefine the terms of warfare in colombia (azuero-quijano 2023). it had affinities with other sites where counter-forensics have focused on property, but with different legal materialities; unlike the documents and titles populating narratives of forensics around property elsewhere (kohlbry 2022; mukharji 2019), it was soil that grounded forensic and counter-forensic accounts of the villatina disaster. despite residents’ counter-forensics, city officials never accepted their version of events. this led to the persistent belief among residents that they were never told the whole story behind the loss of their loved ones, an uncertainty that a local television special on the disaster called a “buried truth.” this term implied that if there were the political will to dig, the real truth might be uncovered—a sentiment also common in forensic processes around exhumations, in which the discovery of bones might simply confirm the truth everyone already knows (rubin 2020). unlike in exhumations, however, the notion of one buried truth did not reflect how evidentiary arguments about the disaster or the stakes of those arguments for the reordering of property for peace unfolded. the truth was fractured and contested; there was no one clear public secret about the war to which soil forensics might be mobilized. rather, it fed a constellation of explanations of the disaster that circulated within medellín, used to confirm multiple conflicting theories rather than one underlying truth. this facilitated the evolution of the disaster into a narrative locus for the ongoing elaboration of a politics of suspicion, particularly of city government. this suspicion reframed the green belt as an elaborate cover-up, of both the cause of the disaster and the motivations behind municipal interventions around property that came in its wake. risky soil and the territorial displacement plan the evidentiary arguments that developed around the green belt centered notions of “risky soil” that had roots in the villatina disaster. the tragedy had followed several natural disasters that had provoked a nationwide reassessment of risk policies: the 1983 popayán earthquake and the 1985 eruption of the nevado de ruíz volcano. as austin zeiderman (2016) observes, the ruíz eruption occurred in tandem with an m-19 siege on the judicial branch headquarters in bogotá, which together created the conditions for a new national emphasis on risk prevention. it was villatina that brought this national security culture of risk 762prevention home to medellín. city officials spearheaded a swift institutional uptake of the national focus on risk after villatina, making medellín’s upper mountainsides an immediate target of intensified urban planning. risk prevention policies had already led to the delimitation of zonas de alto riesgo, zones at high risk of landslide, flooding, or natural disasters. soil studies by municipal agencies proved central to the determination of high risk zones. after villatina, the city government developed resettlement, territorial ordering, and development plans focused on risk prevention, and also created new maps of high risk zones. these included significant portions of villatina that had not previously figured as high risk (universidad nacional et al. 2009). the establishment of new high risk zones had significant ongoing implications for residents. families with homes destroyed in the disaster were relocated by city agencies to other neighborhoods, including far-flung suburbs. those with intact homes faced new challenges to their stability. in particular, the classification of high risk zones came with strict building restrictions, which residents understood as an obstacle to titling their homes. city planning officials frequently corrected this interpretation in my conversations with them, specifying that residents could hold title to a plot in a high risk zone, but they could not legally build on it. for residents, however, the notion of holding title to a plot without building a home on it, which was their primary reason for coming to the upper comuna in the first place, was unimaginable. for them, a desire for property in the comuna fundamentally revolved around a house and the ability to stay in it. the villatina disaster occurred at a time of increasing violence in rural areas surrounding medellín. thousands of displaced families arrived in the city, and frequently the only option available was to live on the upper mountainsides. neighborhoods were built and expanded above villatina, and were almost entirely populated by displaced people. the liberal party as well as guerrilla groups sponsored many neighborhoods, organizing invasions of unused church or municipal land. local activists talk about this time as one of political resistance against city government, fueled by organized guerrilla insurgency that sponsored invasions as a form of community organization. this resistance made the enforcement of no-build zones or the removal of informal settlements difficult for the city government, just as invasions were spreading up the mountainside. in the late 1990s, right-wing paramilitary groups expanded in medellín and pushed guerrilla groups out of the comuna. while invasions also proved central to paramilitary strategy, residents described paramilitary-backed invasions as more commercial endeavors than those sponsored by guerrillas, as paramilitaries 763sold lots for around $100–$200 usd each. with few other housing options, displaced people purchased plots, sometimes taking loans from paramilitaries to pay for them. those who couldn’t repay loans were often forced to flee to other neighborhoods to escape retribution. paramilitaries also targeted activists, some of whom were killed or forced out. the upper comuna thus became not just a receiving site for displaced people but also a site of displacement (piedrahita arcila and gil ramírez 2017). while the paramilitaries formally demobilized in the mid-2000s, armed successor groups retained control over housing markets in the comuna.4 as neighborhoods grew, high risk zones initially remained largely unenforced. the city government made it difficult, however, for neighborhoods to be “legalized,” as residents called official municipal recognition. while armed groups facilitated land access, residents had problems titling homes and obtaining public services in high risk zones. neighborhood committees often “pirated” electricity, built roads, and established community water tanks themselves. city officials criticized these efforts, arguing that residents’ unplanned expansion of neighborhoods was itself “risky.” one city engineer noted to me that “they install themselves in high risk zones and create risk themselves.” a cdc employee complained that people who had built shacks on the banks of the comuna’s streams (all designated as high risk zones) to access water were “creating risk with their garbage.” when green belt construction began in 2013, the classification of entire swaths of the upper comuna as high risk made residents of those areas easier targets for removal, as they couldn’t legally build without risk mitigation. this situation was complicated by the fact that few residents held title to their homes. the green belt thus produced an air of uncertainty in the upper comuna of who would be removed and where they would go. as the green belt progressed, risky soil became a crucial node around which different players—the cdc, residents, armed actors, the police—organized both their actions and their narration of soil as a forensic object. the cdc’s initial interventions in neighborhoods focused on the enforcement of high risk zones. although city officials had publicly promised the project would not displace anyone, some residents received relocation letters, while police or cdc employees advised others against making home improvements, given the possibility of eviction. yet the exact location and perimeter of high risk zones remained unclear to both residents and city employees themselves. the extent of this mystery 764unfolded over several public meetings in the upper comuna. at one meeting, residents demanded to see a map of high risk zones. a cdc engineer pulled up a powerpoint with a blurry image of a map of the comuna, dotted with pink ovals, yellow lines, and orange blocks. “what’s the pink color for?” one resident asked. “that is where people need to be relocated, according to the territorial ordering plan,” said the engineer, emphasizing that these were all high risk zones. residents in the audience began to mutter to each other, squinting at the map, trying to identify whether they lived inside a pink oval. but the scale of the map didn’t allow for seeing blocks, or even sectors of neighborhoods. “you’ve categorized it like this, but we still don’t know which [homes] are in high risk zones,” one resident complained. the engineer shifted uncomfortably. “we still have to complete the risk study, actually. think of it like a cake that’s already baked, but needs some final adjustments . . . the territorial ordering plan says there need to be soil studies by micro-zones, which we don’t have yet.” soil studies were city agencies’ central evidentiary basis for classifying zones as high risk, and the audience seized on this admission of their absence. residents began to protest, demanding soil studies before anyone’s removal. the engineer stood stolidly in front, increasingly annoyed. “high risk zones are there to protect life where you all live, to protect life!” the protest reached a fevered pitch, and one woman yelled, “the city government is going to displace us!” both cdc engineers and residents understood that soil studies constituted indispensable evidence for classifying high risk zones. in their absence, removals by city agencies could be framed not as protection against the risk of harm, but as displacements. the notion that the city government was “displacing” people invoked the legal category of desplazado (displaced person), used to determine people’s status as war victims and their rights to reparation. residents’ use of it reframed the green belt as an act of war, contesting the notion that the project was turning the page on violence. instead, people argued they found themselves once again under threat of displacement—this time, however, with the threat coming not from an illegal armed group, but the city government itself. they made this critique by drawing on agencies’ lack of evidence from soil studies to imply that the city government was the source of risk. this dismantled the divide that city officials attempted to maintain between static, “natural” risks grounded in the soil and the “unnatural” risks of war and violence. they did not make this critique using documents or deeds; while these material objects were frequently mobilized in counter-forensic arguments around property elsewhere (kohlbry 2022), they were precisely the evidence that residents lacked or that 765had been used in attempts to displace them. instead, residents mobilized soil as a counter-forensic object that people might perceive as more trustworthy than paper. their counter-forensic arguments around soil opposed not only city officials’ designation of high risk zones but also the implications of that designation for who could be a proper subject of ownership in the comuna, as well as the legal, political, and temporal boundaries of that ownership. their critique also contested the terms of transitional justice, which generally articulated displacement as a rural problem caused by illegal armed actors. by claiming they were going to be displaced, residents both identified the agent of war as the city government itself and rearticulated displacement as an urban problem. as federico pérez (2020) observes in bogotá, this brought rural land-grabbing narratives into the city, where residents grounded them in urban materialities. while these materialities included physical and bureaucratic infrastructures that ethnographers have observed elsewhere (anand 2017; hull 2012), it was soil that proved central to both the city government’s project and residents’ rebuke. these arguments defied the bureaucratic division between rural and urban problems that saturated both national transitional justice efforts and municipal territorial ordering plans. local organizers created an image that visualized their articulation of how the green belt facilitated displacement by the city government and armed actors, turning the medellín territorial ordering plan logo (see figure 1)—a mountain composed of green, seemingly contented people—into a medellín territorial displacement plan logo, featuring a mountain composed of unhappy people displaced and terrorized by armed figures (see figure 2). figure 1. logo, plan de ordenamiento territorial de medellín (territorial ordering plan of medellín). figure 2. sticker, plan de desplazamiento territorial de medellín (territorial displacement plan of medellín). 766this articulation of displacement underscored the stakes of the green belt not only for property relations but also for territorial relations, as threats of removal in turn threatened the integrity of the territory. this was related directly to the possibilities for peace, both on the local and the national scale. state officials frequently emphasized the importance of territorial peace, understood to involve both local peace and the recognition of land as the root of the war (jaramillo 2014). for residents, the possibility of peace in the territory rested on their ability to have permanence within it. their soil counter-forensics, in this sense, not only questioned the terms of transitional justice but also the very notion of transition. work on forensics in transitional justice emphasizes the role of forensics in knitting together relations, from democratic relations after dictatorships to kin relations fractured by disappearances. forensic inquiry often focuses on the dead body, which takes on its own political life (verdery 1999; crossland 2009). ana guglielmucci (2020) analyzes the intimate relationship between dead bodies, land, and territory in colombia, highlighting the ways that “displaced” corpses appearing in rivers point to broader processes of dispossession and displacement, reworking territorial and social relations. soil forensics in medellín invoked these intimacies between forensic objects, land, and territory by centering inquiry on the materialities of soil itself, reconfiguring both property relations and territorial relations while questioning the idea that a transition to peace was underway. cover-ups the 2014 wuf overlapped with colombia’s annual commemoration of victims’ day. upper comuna residents marked the day with a march through their neighborhoods. the demonstration snaked through narrow alleyways, stopping periodically for speeches protesting the destruction of homes for the green belt. at dusk, we congregated around a cross marking an area declared a campo santo, or sacred ground, due to bodies buried there that had never been recovered after the villatina disaster. the event organizers handed out white flowers to lay at the cross, followed by a candlelight vigil. armando, an organizer, sat down next to me. “that spot is where the earth opened up and split apart,” he noted, nodding toward the cross. he had gone there with a team of foreign investigators afterward and seen water spilling out of the mountain. city agencies were bringing up water for the gardens, which was why the soil was oversaturated that day, he said. “there was no evidence it was the m-19 . . . that explosion we heard was gas that hit the side of the mountain, making the earth slide down . . . the m-19 version was made up by the city 767government, since they didn’t want to pay the victims—couldn’t pay all the victims—so they blamed it on the guerrillas. then the paras [paramilitaries] joined in, blaming it on the guerrillas.” armando drew on his memory of the soil as evidence, pointing to the water-soaked mountainside as an indicator of the city government’s culpability. like other resident narratives, his account suggested a broader critique of municipal government motives in the comuna in ways that resonated with residents’ present struggles against the green urban governance initiatives that threatened their removal. but armando’s account was also a story of a cover-up. while the soil’s saturation led him to disagree that the m-19 had caused an explosion, he by no means concurred with the official account that it was a natural disaster. the waterlogged soils, for armando, constituted clear evidence of the city government’s own responsibility for the tragedy—a responsibility they chose to cover up by planting the false rumor that the m-19 had caused it. this dovetailed with residents’ accounts of an explosion, in its conviction that the city government wanted to bury the truth. another organizer offered just such a story that night, telling me that “the city government is the one that is interested in not telling the truth that it was an explosion—they didn’t want to admit the m-19 was doing big things!” residents drew on these interwoven narratives about villatina to argue that the city government was using the green belt to engage in a literal and figurative cover-up. an advocacy campaign by residents illustrated this view by identifying projects like the green belt as a form of municipal facade (see figure 3). figure 3. ciudad fachada (façade city). 768one campaign image that circulated, titled “ciudad fachada [facade city]” featured a large facade with a sign stating “medellín: la más maquillada [medellín: the most covered up].” the wording played on an official municipal slogan, “medellín: la más innovadora [medellín: the most innovative],” taken from an international award medellín won for “most innovative city.” the term “maquillada” in a literal sense referred to makeup, while in the image it denoted the facade covering the real city. the facade displayed the defining infrastructure of medellín’s social urbanism: public libraries in poor neighborhoods, green spaces, and the infamous metro. tourists photograph this facade, while behind it residents suffer municipal theft and paramilitary extortion as the city burns. while many residents looked forward to the green belt’s parks and soccer fields, this image illustrated their suspicion that these developments were not meant for them, but rather as symbols of a green, equitable, peaceful city for foreigners to appreciate, even as war and poverty persisted. in this case, it seemed to residents that risky soil was simply an elaborate ruse created by the city government to justify their removal. this view of risky soil developed into a slogan residents often used: “it’s not a high risk zone, but a high cost zone.” the slogan reflected the perception that the comuna didn’t have unmanageably risky soil, but rather that it was costly to improve these neighborhoods—a cost the city government was unwilling to spend on poor, displaced people. residents frequently raised the example of a recent disaster in el poblado—medellín’s wealthiest sector, which also caters to tourists—to make this point. in october 2013, a residential tower in el poblado called space (in english) collapsed. space was one of el poblado’s many high-end complexes, with luxury interiors, a pool, and twenty-four-hour security. only two people died in the collapse, as residents had evacuated the building the day before after cracks appeared in the walls. the collapse, however, led to a national scandal questioning the integrity of the tower’s engineers and developers. in the upper comuna, the scandal unfolded largely around the apparent similarities between el poblado and the comuna’s neighborhoods, and the vastly different ways in which the city government treated risk in each. there was the location of el poblado: also on a mountainside, not significantly lower than the upper comuna. pink ovals of high risk dotted the upper comuna, but residents noted that there was not a single plot designated as high risk in el poblado. there was also the question of the way that space residents had been treated. a year after the space disaster, a resident at a community meeting in the upper comuna noted that “people are still talking about it because it’s rich people . . . the city 769administration is still crying for those people.” another chimed in, “and they covered the months that they were going to have to be out of the building, they sent them to the intercontinental [hotel]! so for some, one way, and for others, another.” residents also suspected that city agencies were engaged in a quite literal cover-up involving soil. many held the belief that green belt construction sites were set around multiple mass graves, and that agencies were knowingly covering up unidentified human remains. and city workers had indeed found bodies, albeit by accident. in 2014, a city worker digging to place a structural support for a green belt eco-park hit something hard with his shovel. it was a skull. three bodies were exhumed from the site: a grandmother and her two young granddaughters, dressed in their sunday best. investigators concluded that they had been heading to celebrate the girls’ first communion when they were covered with earth in the 1987 disaster. this discovery prompted renewed public discussion of the fact that city agencies were building the green belt directly over the campo santo and the unrecovered bodies it marked. the media called these bodies los desaparecidos (the disappeared), a term generally used for victims of violence (macías and loaiza bran 2014). the discovery led to whispered commentary about what residents called the “other desaparecidos” in the soil where workers were digging near the campo santo, victims of recent gang violence that people believed were buried in unmarked graves. city agencies were starting a search for bodies in an enormous trash heap called la escombrera in a nearby comuna, where paramilitaries had allegedly buried bodies of the disappeared. what if, rather than search for the bodies of all these disappeared around the campo santo, the city government covered them up with their eco-park? as with the word displacement, residents used the term disappeared to make demands by evoking the language of transitional justice. their use of the term implied that rather than paving the path to peace through green urban planning, the city government was covering up evidence of war—and, according to people like armando, its own culpability—with a park. the invocation of the disappeared activated multiple specters simultaneously: those that the state acknowledged as disappeared in the war, but also those never recovered in 1987, and those vanished due to gang violence in the present. as in the landscapes yael navaro-yashin (2012) describes in cyprus, these specters were instantiated within the materialities of residents’ surroundings. residents invoked them through their arguments that the city government wanted to bury the truth, 770using soil forensics to claim both property and territorial belonging as their ability to remain in their homes and neighborhoods came under threat. rather than confirming a single public truth, soil forensics reproduced a politics of suspicion (davis 2023). this suspicion revolved around official accounts of the disaster, which residents perceived as intentional cover-ups: of the city government’s own role in displacement, its disregard for the disappeared, its responsibility for the villatina disaster, and above all, its inability to counter guerrilla and paramilitary violence and bring true peace to medellín. in this sense, counter-forensic claims to displacement and invocations of the disappeared operated in tandem as resistance to the green belt, and simultaneously to the idea of a transition to peace. putting down roots in borrowed land the upper comuna was home to a community garden with a few dozen plots, planted on municipal land largely by gardeners displaced from rural farms. usufruct contracts with city agencies established gardeners’ rights to use the plots, but they could not claim title to them. gardeners had cleaned up a log cabin by the plots, painting it and hanging begonias. it now served as a community gathering space, though for years it had been one of medellín’s casas de pique, a macabre reference to houses paramilitaries used for torture. residents recounted hearing screams coming from the cabin, resonating across the mountainside. the change to a community center surrounded by gardens marked an important symbolic shift. given the precarity of people’s homes and family economies, the plots were also important for gardeners’ sense of belonging and stability in the neighborhood. with the green belt’s arrival, however, governance of the garden began to change. city contractors started instructing gardeners about what to plant—a welcome intervention for some, and a decidedly unwelcome one for others. gardeners felt particularly frustrated with contractors’ mandate to stop planting yuca (cassava) and plantain, two crops they considered staples. during a walk in the community garden with mariana, a gardener, we discussed the crop restrictions. mariana had removed her yuca and plantain, as the contractor had required. “but they are important crops for campesinos,” she said, frustrated. “those of us that don’t work with [the contractor], they tried to kick us out of the gardens initially, but they couldn’t, because we have papers,” referring to her usufruct contract. other gardeners described opposition to the garden from local gangs, who “didn’t want anyone digging around” the mass graves rumored to lie underneath it. 771we continued our walk and ran into a city employee conducting an inspection. while chatting with him, the subject of crop restrictions came up. hearing i was a student, the employee turned toward me to explain the restrictions. “crops like yuca and plantain aflojan el suelo [loosen the soil],” he emphasized. “they pull up the soil, and also retain water. this area has a history of landslides, and so it isn’t safe to plant those here.” mariana and i continued our walk, ending in her garden full of crops—scallions, cilantro, ground cherries. in a corner were two young plants, their broad, ribbed green leaves unmistakable. i asked mariana if those weren’t, by chance, plantains. yes, they are plantains . . . after i pulled out the other ones, my son came and planted these. [the contractor] is going to pull them out at some point. they say it’s a risk . . . what risk can there be from a plantain? they just don’t want us to plant them because they are stable things. plantain, for example, plantain is permanent. and since the land is borrowed, they don’t want it here. this underscored how both city employees and gardeners mobilized the material and relational qualities of soil as evidentiary arguments to establish claims to the plots, and to the neighborhood. the employee cited technical assessments of the relationship of specific plants to soil (claiming yuca and plantain loosen it) and the qualities of the soil (suggesting its riskiness by mentioning the “history of landslides”). his account of soil implied that claims by residents to the plots—and the neighborhood—were temporary and contingent. mariana contested this narrative, questioning the employee’s account of both the relationship between plantains and soil and the soil’s riskiness by querying what possible risk there could be from a plantain. she rejected city agencies’ evidentiary basis for the ban on yuca and plantain, concluding the rule was motivated by the desire to prevent people from putting down roots and making claims to permanence. this notion that crops might help establish a property claim connected to long histories of using crops to establish possession over rural landholdings (morris 2019). mariana’s assessment that the city government’s goal was to impede displaced residents from making claims to plots dovetailed with the broader sentiment within the neighborhood that the city government’s image of peace did not align with residents’ desires for the future. a leader of a displaced persons’ organization in the comuna, sergio, opened a meeting by narrating the problem and the horizon he imagined for displaced residents: 772there’s been an armed conflict and these communities have come here displaced, and they are made invisible [by the government] . . . we have to have a sense of pertenencia (belonging) in the territory . . . if they want to build a green belt by force, at least we have to say we have the right to legalization [of titles]. this called into question the state’s imaginary that displaced people aspired to a return to a rural past, rather than a horizon of urban belonging. sergio evoked belonging in its dual sense of both membership and property (sullivan et al. 2025); belonging depended on both state recognition as part of the territory and securing title to homes. residents used soil counter-forensics as an evidentiary argument to contest the city government’s assertions and simultaneously attempt to bring this alternative image of territorial and property relations into being. this reversed the forensic gaze, challenging the state’s monopoly on the truth about both the past and the future. acts like replanting plantains asserted a permanence that municipal agencies’ crop restrictions and evictions attempted to deny. this claim to permanence demanded attention to residents’ ownership of particular spaces in the comuna and their sense of territorial belonging. these soil counter-forensics challenged not only crop restrictions, but more broadly the official city vision that by reducing informal ownership and disorderly urban expansion, projects like the green belt would facilitate peace. conclusion anthony oliver-smith (2002, 24) notes that disasters “come into existence in both the material and the social worlds and, perhaps, in some hybrid space between them.” any attempt to explain a disaster requires attunement to those dimensions simultaneously. in medellín, it was soil forensics that accomplished this, for both city officials and residents. they drew on the capacities of forensics as a mode of attention, animating soil as a multivalent object that could ground multiple accounts of both past and future, as both a space of death and risk and a source of productivity and speculative potentiality. if the corpse constituted the ultimate forensic indicator of physical crime, it was soil that served this evidentiary role for property as the green belt threatened the removal of residents from their homes. soil, like the corpse in exhumations, became the witness to events and the category through which the material-social relations that defined property might be rebuilt. city officials and residents animated soil, drawing on 773data, memory, sound, and performance in a “materialization of urban (in)security” (pérez 2020, 1496) that was simultaneously evidentiary, rendering arguments about both the truth of villatina and claims to the comuna’s future. on the one hand, soil was a technocratic category, a form of municipal governance of the comunas through green urban planning, as in other urban peripheries (meulemans 2020). risky soil governed displaced people via their need for housing—initially through lack of enforcement and later, with the green belt, through removal. the city government’s narrative held that the category protected life, establishing order and restitching the social and material bodies of the nation to build peace. for residents, soil spoke to the ways their relationships to property and territory had been riven asunder both during the war and through the green belt. their soil counter-forensics challenged the city government’s account, recalling the soil’s color and humidity, its specters and sacred grounds, and its role in building a stable future as evidence of the post-conflict city as facade, behind which the war kept on raging as plantains were ripped from the ground and people were evicted from their homes. they articulated this in the language of transitional justice, mobilizing soil as evidence of the city government’s role in displacement and disappearance, and to contest the idea of transition. both officials and residents turned to soil forensics as an evidentiary argument that simultaneously operated at multiple temporalities and scales. it was an argument about the cause of the villatina disaster and, at the same time, one about the future of the comuna—about who could claim ownership and what the boundaries of that ownership would be. while the city government used notions of risky soil grounded in a forensic account of villatina as natural disaster to deny residents the possibility of remaining in their homes, residents mobilized soil as a counter-forensic object to question this narrative and claim a permanent future in the comuna. these were evidentiary arguments that grounded multiple accounts of truth about past disaster and about the proper future subjects and objects of property—and, in their broadest sense, the terms, stakes, and possibilities of peace. soil was thus the site of multiple intertwined narratives, from state fantasies of peace through green urbanism, to resident fears of displacement and disappearance, both from the past and those to come. it was never clear if the villatina disaster was a landslide or a guerrilla explosion, or if what was being waged in the upper comuna was peace or war, as the narratives around them bled together. soil forensics were less about reinforcing a common set of facts that 774might be agreed on as the truth than about providing evidentiary arguments for multiple conflicting visions of the future. it perhaps comes as no surprise that a central locus for these plans, dreams, and nightmares would be the soil. soil, as kristina lyons (2020) theorizes, is a site of both past and future, death and rebirth, in which one can plant new seeds of peace or dig up old skeletons of war. as michel serres (1995) reminds us, soil is not simply the stage on which war or peace is waged but also provides the conditions of possibility for victory or death. this was even more true in a place where land was understood as the root of conflict. what better place to go than the soil to understand war or to forge peace? soil forensics offered powerful evidentiary arguments regarding the truth about the past, and order for the future, both for city officials reordering property for peace and for residents building future horizons. bureaucratic fantasies drew on soil as the basis for maps of high risk zones that might provide order to people and property in a time of future peace. in the meantime, residents recalled earth exploding into air as the path of life paved over in hexagonal concrete tiles the homes of the living and the unmarked graves of the dead. abstract as colombia attempted to achieve peace, the city of medellín aimed to move beyond its violent past, breaking ground on ambitious green development projects to bring parks and infrastructure to the city’s most peripheral neighborhoods. but these projects threatened to evict local residents, as city planners deployed maps of soils at risk of landslide as the basis for their removal. in debating removals, both city officials and residents turned to soil as a forensic site, using soil’s qualities as evidence of conflicting accounts of a 1987 landslide to support their arguments about property. while forensics in transitional justice generally centers exhumations as a source of truth about crime during conflict, here it was not corpses exhumed from the soil, but soil itself that became an object of forensic inquiry. this approach challenged official narratives of transition and reconfigured both property and territorial relations, in turn shaping the possibilities for war and peace. [soil; forensics; property; evidence; transitional justice; medellín; colombia] resumen durante los esfuerzos de lograr la paz en colombia, la ciudad de medellín aspiraba pasar la página de su pasado violento, embarcando en proyectos de desarrollo verde ambiciosos para llevar parques e infraestructura a los barrios más periféricos de la ciudad. pero esos mismo proyectos amenazaban el desalojo de los residentes de los barrios, mientras planificadores municipales desplegaban mapas de suelos en riesgo de deslizamiento como básis de su desalojo. en debates sobre el desalojo, tanto los funcionarios municipales como los residentes alistaban al suelo como sitio forense, 775utilizando las cualidades del suelo como evidencia de narrativas contradictorias de un deslizamiento en 1987 para fundamentar sus argumentos sobre la propiedad. mientras las ciencias forenses en la justicia transicional por lo general se enfocan en las exhumaciones como una fuente de la verdad sobre el crimen durante el conflicto, no fueron cadáveres exhumados del suelo, sino el suelo como tal que se volvió un objeto de investigación forense. eso desafiaba a las narrativas oficiales de la transición y reconfiguraba a la propiedad y las relaciones territoriales, a su vez dando forma a las posibilidades para la guerra y para la paz. [suelo; ciencia forense; propiedad; evidencia; justicia transicional; medellín; colombia] notes acknowledgments  my thanks go first to the many people in medellín who have welcomed me into their neighborhoods, homes, offices, and community spaces over the years. my deepest debt of gratitude goes to the comuna residents who walked their neighborhoods with me, teaching me through their example that i had to “walk the territory and get tired in the territory to know the territory.” while they must go unnamed here, without their generosity, trust, time, and friendship, this research would not have been possible. i am grateful for comments on versions of this article and its argument from maria aguilar, alejandra azuero, diana bocarejo, hannah chazin, john comaroff, mariana diaz chalela, nate ela, eric hirsch, vanessa koh, kristina lyons, joe masco, stephan palmié, justin richland, paula rodríguez, shivi sivaramakrishnan, kaushik sunder rajan, joey weiss, courtney wittekind, elisabeth wood, and austin zeiderman. i also received helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay from participants in the yale agrarian studies colloquium, the princeton-mellon forum on the urban environment, the temple university latin american studies program, and the university of cincinnati department of anthropology colloquium, as well as the annual meetings of the american anthropological association and the law and society association. the article benefited substantially from the contributions of several anonymous reviewers and the cultural anthropology editorial collective, particularly matilde córdoba azcárate, who guided the piece into its final form. different stages of the research and writing of this article were funded by the social science research council; the wenner-gren foundation; the inter-american foundation; the land deal politics initiative; the university of chicago center for latin american studies, department of anthropology, and pozen family center for human rights; the american bar foundation; and the national science foundation under grant no. ses-1655497. 1. see “villatina recuento de una verdad enterrada,” teleantioquia infrarrojo (2012), available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggem1bipl8w. this is my translation of the original spanish. 2. invasión is a legal and colloquial term referring to the taking of land without prior agreement from the legal owner. 3. names and identifying details of individuals have been changed to protect anonymity. 4. the official term for paramilitary successor groups is bandas criminales (criminal bands). i use the word gang to refer to other terms—bandas, combos, muchachos—more commonly used by my interlocutors in medellín. references anand, nikhil 2017 hydraulic city: water and the infrastructures of citizenship in mumbai. durham, n.c.: duke university press. 776 arias vanegas, julio, and alhena caicedo fernández 2017 “aproximaciones al despojo desde colombia: despojo y antropología hoy” [approaches to dispossession from colombia: dispossession and anthropology today]. revista colombiana de antropología 52, no. 2: 7–15. azuero quijano, alejandra 2021 “forensics of finance: the science of crime and debt in post-agreement colombia.” phd dissertation, university of chicago. 2023 el paro como teoría: historia del presente y estallido en colombia. 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cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.08 cultural anthropology: reactive regulation: rethinking urban growth and governance through property relations 192 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 192-220, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.01 reactive regulation: rethinking urban growth and governance through property relations indivar jonnalagadda miami university https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9629-647x in october 2020, hyderabad, india, was hit by a cyclone off the bay of bengal, resulting in massive and unprecedented flooding in many parts of the city. in news media, expert commentators pointed out that the issue was not just the result of extreme weather but also of unplanned growth in the built form of the city (times of india 2020). such flooding events have gained frequency in recent years in the ostensibly arid city of hyderabad, resulting in a growing discourse about the adverse environmental impacts of unplanned growth and real estate expansion (ndtv 2020; also see ranganathan 2022), which have disrupted centuries-old networks of tanks and canals; decimated 2.5-billion-year-old rock formations; and resulted in the destruction of ecological commons. although this article does not concern urban flooding per se, incidents like flooding offer a provocation to investigate how the city is known and governed and to imagine new methods to rethink and remake the city. unplanned growth is widely understood by both experts and ordinary residents as the result of a lack of governance or planning, thus eliciting technocratic prescriptions for more planning, more rationalization, more data-intensive solutions. instead of responding to purported failures of governance with calls for more governance, i follow the political anthropology method of explaining the 193accomplishment of rule, despite appearances of failure or lack (ferguson 1994; li 2007). while this has been productively conceptualized using the analytical term governmentality (gupta 2012; li 2007), i instead work with the emic term governance, which circulates widely in hyderabad and other cities confronting similar issues. i understand urban governance as the process of rule. that is, the structured interaction between governmental agents and other societal actors in exercising power over space, time, and social relations either through discipline, force, or exception.1 understanding structures of governance leads to better explanations for processes of growth in global south cities without emphasizing a lack. this requires attention to the granular interactions that regulate the city. regulation is a component of governance, and i define it as processes through which social relations are incorporated into the rules and representations of governance (following hetherington 2020, 11). in what follows, i describe processes of reactive regulation, which cyclically reconcile relations on the ground with the representations of the state. this occurs through micro-political encounters with lower-level bureaucratic offices, and through the case of hyderabad, i show that it has significant consequences for broader configurations of space, time, and social relations in the city. figure 1. a view of hyderabad from the centrally located ameerpet metro station. photo by indivar jonnalagadda, march 2020. 194hyderabad is india’s sixth most populous urban agglomeration (see figure 1). this urban agglomeration has a distinctive history as the capital of a wealthy princely state outside direct british rule, which evolved with relative autonomy from colonial urbanism (beverley 2024). today, hyderabad is best known for being one of india’s major it hubs. the west of the city, rebranded in the 1990s as cyberabad, has witnessed staggering urban expansion and has garnered global attention for its real estate growth. in rankings generated by jones lang lasalle inc., hyderabad has recently ranked as high as first and second among emerging destinations for international real estate investment (kelly, hodgson, and mcauley 2019; kelly and davies 2020), along with bengaluru, which has a similar property landscape (ranganathan 2022). however, this astonishing expansion of hyderabad real estate is coeval with the everyday landscape of the city, which most hyderabadis reflexively describe as an unplanned sprawl, marked by uncertainty and anxiety about land ownership and the wanton destruction of the city’s topography. one afternoon in july 2018, i was speaking with maheep singh, a prominent urban planner and frequent consultant to the government in hyderabad. among the most respected planning professionals in the city, singh is interviewed by most urban researchers in hyderabad for his incisive understanding of urban governance. as we talked about unplanned growth in the city, singh insisted: “look, planners in hyderabad are in a purely reactive role! we are only responding to things already happening on the ground.” he argued that planners in hyderabad aren’t exercising regulatory influence over urban development. instead, the bulk of work carried out by planners is designing layouts that developers manipulate from the outset to allow for future unregulated expansion. or else, planners find employment in the vast enterprise of regularizing the many already existing unplanned developments in the city. regularization exemplifies what singh called “reactive” work. this process reconciles record with reality by forgiving violations of rules on payment of a penalty fee, without any physical changes to the built environment. regularization is not an exceptional process but a routine mode of governance, which i conceptualize as reactive regulation. in hyderabad, i often heard bureaucrats at various levels defensively arguing that they were merely reacting to relations that had already materialized in the city. further, i found that bureaucrats understood these relations almost exclusively through the frame of property relations. this property-centric approach defines the prevailing routines of governance, which occur through intimate negotiation and compromise 195between the government and individual property owners at the micro-scale. this mode of governance emphasizes maintenance and the re-assertion of government authority over minute property exchanges, without concern for the aggregate effects of property expansion and development. the city for these bureaucrats is a fait accompli network of relations in which they only intervene after the fact through reactive regulation. as a result, the complex social, physical, and ecological dynamics of the city are tethered to property-centric governance. if regulation is the incorporation of social relations into rule, as i defined above, then planning is one kind of regulation that entails the creation of rules at a macro-scale through which future social relations are shaped and ordered. but regularization is also a kind of regulation (see bhan 2016; bhide 2014; ghertner 2021), in which the state reactively asserts its authority over fait accompli social relations at the micro-scale. i show that in hyderabad, this micro-scale reactive regulation has replaced macro-scale planning, which has aggregately resulted in a city sprawl where lakes have become shopping malls, disaster-prone hillsides have become low-income housing, and villages have become financial districts. this essay builds on foundational scholarship on the anthropology of state (gupta 2012; hetherington 2011; hull 2012; mathur 2016) to conceptualize the space, time, and social relations of the city in terms of everyday bureaucratic epistemologies. further, i examine divergent vectors of governance operating simultaneously. albeit siloed into distinct departments, i reveal that these vectors intersect and have compounding effects through specific micro-negotiations around property. instead of focusing on state ideologies as powerful by default, i follow christian lund (2020) in showing how the state assembles authority through governance. adding to this anthropology of the state in an age of extended and extensive urbanization (cowan 2022; simone 2022), i describe the networked and patchy processes of urban governance that occur by enlisting a range of actors including government officials, citizens, and intermediaries, to participate in knowing and regulating urban spaces. in doing so, i offer a conceptual framework that can be applied to illuminate both the political economy of land grab through a caste-state nexus (gururani 2024; ranganathan, pike, and doshi 2023) and the politics of insurgent citizenship through which marginalized groups make significant claims to land (benjamin 2008; holston 2008; patil 2024). this enables a productive conversation with anthropological debates on city planning. there is rich scholarship on the ideologies, inadequacies, and failures of planning, both in the global south (caldeira 2017; pérez 2020; roy 2009) and 196in the global north (abram 2014; mack 2014). while federico pérez (2020) has brilliantly shown how planning operates “after the fact” and ignores larger social and political networks, i turn my attention to the role of other vectors of governance in constituting facts out of the social and political networks of the city. i particularly attend to the ways in which governance enlists the participation of a variety of societal actors (see hasan 2024; zimmer 2012). shifting attention away from the overly privileged lens of planning, i illustrate the wider bureaucratic field through which competing claims to the city are translated into documents, records, and governable relations. i argue that these reactive and micro-political practices forestall the pursuit of macro goals like sustainability or justice, which are the normative objectives of planning in the global south (following bhan, srinivas, and watson 2018, 1). in contrast to powerful policy discourses that call for more planning, more rationalization, and more data-intensive smart technologies, i practice and advocate for what tess lea (2021) has called “staying with the bureaucracy.” i argue that the urgent questions of urban futures can only be addressed through engagement with actually existing governance practices of knowing and making the city. toward an anthropological rethinking of urban governance, i follow alberto corsín jiménez’s (2017) approach of conceptualizing the city as a method of inquiring about social, political, and ecological being in space and time. in my fieldwork in hyderabad among lower-level bureaucrats, i was constantly struck by their eagerness to discuss their own methods and knowledges. i stay with lower-level bureaucrats and their modes of “thinking the city” (see knox 2020; pérez 2020) to understand how the city emerges from below, and how reactive regulation shapes the agendas of various actors engaged in property-making and city-making. in the five sections that follow, i demonstrate the processes and consequences of reactively regulating the city as property relations. in the following section, i show that bureaucrats see the city as fait accompli property relations that they must capture in their records. the two bureaucratic processes crucial to producing the bureaucratic rendering of the city as property are “property registration” and “property regularization.” they exist in circular relationship with each other, as i illustrate in the following two sections. the processes of registration constitute the facts of the city, which reveal many gaps in bureaucratic procedures. they produce irregular property landscapes where the government record does not match the ground reality, which sets the stage for a discussion of the widespread bureaucratic practice known as regularization. the 197penultimate section describes what these bureaucratic practices and processes entail for thinking and governing the city at large, before i conclude with a final section discussing the importance of understanding and engaging with reactive regulation. seeing the city from the offices of the state in july 2015, i attended a conference organized by the world bank called “unlocking land for urban growth” at the nalsar university of law in hyderabad. conference speakers and attendees included “urban planners, architects, lawyers, bureaucrats, social activists and academics interested in the field of urban growth and regeneration.”2 the vision of the conference was a future where urban land would be “unlocked” from informal arrangements and red-tape-ridden land legislation, and would be delivered to an even further future where land could find its highest and best use as real estate. we were listening to a presentation by an urban planner on the delhi development plan and its supposedly effective use of mapping technologies when a prominent social scientist, gautam bhan, raised a note of caution and quipped that “these maps have as much truth-value as an expressionist painting.” he added that the spaces represented in those maps have already been completely built up, contrary to the representations of the development plan. although bhan’s point revealed a disconnect between planning and the facts of the city, his comment was met with a moment of awkward silence and then forgotten. the conference persisted in its faith in mapping technologies as the best techniques to achieve a future of planned urban growth. in a similar vein, planners, consultants from private firms, and high-level technocrats in hyderabad routinely engage in discussions about planning innovations to make governance more efficient, without acknowledging the ground realities of the built environment. the websites and offices of these planners and consultants are replete with maps that overlook facts of occupancy, erase undesirable land-uses, and thus represent entirely unattainable visions of the future. these maps indeed manifest a largely aesthetic appeal like an expressionist painting, but they also denote a vision of state command over urban space (crawford 2020)—a command often more ideological than real, especially in cities of the global south where practices of planning exist in transversal relation to actually existing processes of city-making (caldeira 2017; pérez 2020; roy 2009). thus, the expressionistic nature of master plans and zoning maps compels an investigation of unplanned growth in hyderabad through attention to other agents and processes altogether. 198these are agents conspicuous by their absence and omission from conferences about land management and planned growth, namely, the officers in charge of actual land administration in cities like hyderabad. the revenue department is the seat of both land and civic administration in the districts that constitute hyderabad city. much of my fieldwork was conducted in the revenue offices at the sub-district level known as a tahsil, which is headed by a tahsildar. tahsildar offices are generally austere and small; with private rooms for the tahsildar and deputy tahsildar, cubicles for other employees, and a small “record room.” but these austere offices are nonetheless of great significance to public life in the city and are one of the major public interfaces to access the government (see jonnalagadda 2018). people gather here to negotiate with low-level bureaucrats, sometimes attracting crowds comparable to a busy railway station. i conducted fieldwork at these offices for six months, throughout 2018 and 2019, to examine the techniques employed in maintaining the property records or cadastral records of the city. at the outset, i expected to find maps as in the offices of planners and consultants. yet over visits to multiple offices across hyderabad, i was proven wrong and found neither new nor old maps of the districts and sub-districts. instead, i became intrigued by the routine absence of cadastral maps of the city or district. once during a visit to the tahsildar office at asif nagar in central hyderabad, i came across a map on the wall of the tahsildar’s office room. it was printed from google maps, with the administrative boundaries of the revenue sub-district outlined by hand with a marker. the tahsildar i was speaking to was known as an especially candid government officer. in fact, i was introduced to him by an activist interlocutor who said this tahsildar would give me straight answers to my questions. so, at some point during our meeting, i pointed to the map and asked: “do you update new property titles into a cadastral map of the district?” he looked up at the map blankly, and after a pause, responded to my question in a baffled tone: “map? no, we don’t update any map. there has not been a cadastral survey of the city since the 1970s . . . . we have those files and we use that as a base.” the tahsildar’s response draws attention to what laura bear (2016) has called “timescapes of governance.” they are the different techniques of reckoning with the time and space of the city, each entailing different practices and ethics of governance (also see abram and weszkalnys 2011; ghertner 2017; lindblad and anand 2023). tahsildars and other officers are trained in working with the old survey map along with a relational knowledge of the present city 199landscape, a knowledge emerging from their own everyday functioning. in contrast to the planners whose master plans represent an abstract projection of space in terms of land-use twenty years in the future, the land administrators work with a representation of land ownership or property relations fifty years in the past (see figure 2). land administration and urban planning, thus, seem to operate as competing timescapes of governance. however, master plans themselves ironically use the outdated cadastral map for their baseline spatial information, creating a temporal dissonance. this dissonance between different vectors of governance is addressed through the frame of property relations in bureaucratic epistemologies of the city. figure 2. a portion of the survey map of hyderabad from the 1970s. photo by indivar jonnalagadda, october 2014. the desire for ordered cadastral records and the permanent conquest of land through technologies of property began as a colonial project (bhattacharyya 2018). historians have shown that in both colonial and princely indian cities there were iterative and forceful efforts to establish order on cities using technologies of writing and documentation to wrangle and settle property relations (beverley 2024; bhattacharyya 2018). these efforts, however, were persistently challenged by fragmentary realities of possession and were further complicated by the invention of racially differentiated and divided regimes of property (bhandar 2018). thus the rule of property in south asia has always been reactive to the politics of possession, and the idealized cadastral order has always been fragmented and striated. those fragmented colonial representations and practices continue as the baseline for governing the fragmented city of today. by tethering 200questions about the present and future growth of the city to deeply rooted historical approaches to governing the city as property, the temporal dissonance becomes further perpetuated. despite these historical difficulties, the ideology of cadastral order and top-down planning influences contemporary approaches to urban governance (jonnalagadda and cowan 2024). further, the ideologies of property exercise this influence while continuing to remain incomplete and imperfect (jonnalagadda and cowan 2024). thus, although there is an already built-up city that is unrepresented and unmapped (bhan 2016; roy 2002), this city of fait accompli relations is only treated as governable if it is incorporated into processes of rule geared toward ordering property. that is, through regularization. regularization entails the suspension of the state’s rules, but it accomplishes the reassertion of the state’s authority. however, regularization is never a conclusive settlement, and it does not prevent future irregularities from emerging. instead, it propagates a chain of reactive regulation. the work of regulating urban space and time, then, occurs through a patchwork of institutions and interventions focused on capturing the fait accompli relations irrespective of their adherence or non-adherence to rules. specifically, reactive regulation occurs across processes of registering property claims, maintaining property records, and periodically reconciling records with changing realities (respectively described in the following three sections). the normative imaginations of neoliberal good governance, as espoused in the nalsar-world bank conference, for example, are premised on the eradication of these patchy forms of governance with the promise of abstract and high-tech substitutes. rather than pursuing new abstracted techniques of governance, which are just as likely to achieve new forms of unmapping and deregulation (cowan 2022; lea 2021), there is a need to recognize how existing relational networks of governance mediate urban growth. they need to be looked at not just as obstructions but also as historical and political relations with the power to regulate and produce the city. the objective is not just a better understanding of processes of city-making but also alternative ways to conceptualize urgent, multiscalar challenges that can go beyond the micro-politics of property. in the following two sections, i elaborate on how these micro-politics underpin wider networks of relations in the city. 201 registration of claims in real time during my research on property transactions in the city, i was constantly following interlocutors to the bustling offices of the registration department found across the city. in particular, i often found myself at the registration office at erragadda in north-central hyderabad. although the revenue department is the ultimate arbiter of land records, the registration department describe themselves as the “royal record keepers” of the state. they examine documented claims of ownership to verify the legitimacy of property transactions. sometimes, however, their documents might not reveal a clear picture. in such situations, they will consider the facts on the ground, such as duration of possession and extent of construction, to make a judgment. this role of making decisive judgments places the registration department at the center of regulating property-making and, unwittingly, city-making as well. the business of the office begins when the sub-registrar arrives in the office. i made it a habit to arrive before them. during early visits, i found that the flow of events had a puzzling consistency. there were no signs directing the flow, but everyone reliably followed the same chain of actions with hired brokers. the ones who came alone were conspicuous because of the way they stood at the door looking around in confusion. when they exited in desperation, right outside the offices, they would be greeted by a dozen promising shop fronts teeming with brokers who have both the codified and tacit know-how about getting things done (see banerji 2024; björkman 2021). in january and february 2020, i shadowed a broker named rahul as he navigated through the registration office with his clients. brokers like rahul now call themselves “consultants,” because most offices have signs plastered on the wall warning visitors that no brokers are allowed (see figure 3), owing to their alleged corrupting influence (see björkman 2021). nonetheless, brokers are ubiquitous in government offices. while most brokers were middle-aged, rahul was under thirty years of age and had about five years of experience. he told me the erragadda office is a “torturing” one, in terms of how difficult it is to negotiate with. but, in five years rahul had learned a tremendous amount from grueling experiences and now had “perfect information” about how things work. he assiduously maintained this persona of an expert broker with me and with all his clients, rarely revealing personal details. one time i heard him speaking to a client in fluent marathi and asked if that is his mother tongue. he said, “i am everything. marathi, hindi, telugu, kannada, urdu,” and offered nothing beyond this cosmopolitan creed. 202but these tactics made working with him especially interesting, as he was eager to draw attention to the performances of working with clients of different kinds. figure 3. typical sign in a government office. photo by indivar jonnalagadda, september 2019. let me illustrate how the registration process routinely occurs with the participation of the sub-registrar, brokers, and the seller and buyer of a property in the city. in january 2020, rahul was hired by an elite upper-caste man named shastry who was buying a property from rao. rahul first drafted a “sale deed” for shastry and rao based on a template, to which he added the exact details of the property being transacted and the amount of the transaction between them. alongside drafting the sale deed, rahul checked that the seller, rao, had all the necessary “link documents,” which prove a chain of registered transactions. rao provided a stack of documents, most importantly a sale deed previously attested by the registration department, but no title deed. although a title deed is the strongest document attesting property rights, link documents in cities rarely include a property title deed (more on this in the next section). instead, the documentation and verification occur with almost exclusive reference to registered sale deeds. on a busy weekday morning, rahul and the buyer, shastry, visited the sub-registrar’s office. the seller wasn’t present, but he would add his signature remotely using newly introduced technology. the link documents for the transaction were checked by an administrative assistant, with whom rahul made constant small talk during the process of inspection. once the inspection was completed, they were directed to the sub-registrar, the main authority. the sub-registrar checked their records to verify the information in the link documents, while rahul maintained constant and polite chatter with him as well, mostly stating the details of the transaction. in this case, the sub-registrar briefly went into the record room through a curtain behind him, before returning to complete the process. the link documents from rao were clear 203and corroborated by the registration department’s records. shastry could now have a registered sale deed to attest his ownership of the property, pending the completion of the final step of paying a percentage of the transaction amount as “stamp duty” to the state. not all cases proved so straightforward, and i was kept at a careful distance from the details of rahul’s work on tougher cases. however, i observed that rahul was gaining a reputation for being highly effective, or, in his words, “a very good consultant.” he told me it was because he had “mastered the art” of compiling and presenting link documents. i followed that up by asking, “so tell me, what happens if the link documents are missing?” he laughed and said, “that will take you a year of experience and observation to understand. you’ll just have to keep following me around.” that is something i was unable to do because the covid-19 pandemic was quickly making its way toward us. but in the meantime, i posed the same question to the officers themselves too: what happens if the link documents are unclear? if there is any missing information in this process, one sub-registrar told me, the officers would “use their best judgment.” in some cases, if the judgment is hard to make, an official from the registration department will be sent to conduct fieldwork and verify that the seller has rightful possession of the property in question. the department therefore employs a range of tools to ground-truth property transactions that come to its offices. they accumulate and register information brought to their offices to produce a documented reality of the city. other ethnographies have shed light on this kind of veridiction from uncertainty (gandolfo 2013; pérez 2016) and on how bureaucrats employ various “authoring technologies” (cowan 2022, 193) to generate economically and politically productive benefits from uncertainty at a micro-scale (gururani 2024; pati 2022). but i found myself pushing further and asking officers what they think this process entailed for the city at large. while the sub-registrar always appeared swamped with ongoing registration processes, the neighboring office of the higher-level district registrar found itself less frequented by the general public. i particularly enjoyed talking to the registrar at that time, because he shared a curiosity for the working of the state and would offer his own theories of governance in hyderabad. one time as i pressed him on the imperfect land record in the city, he interpreted my comments as an accusation that land irregularity was caused by the registration department. in a defensive tone, he said: “the sub-registrar can only proceed based 204on the information he has. we need the evidence to make the judgment.” after a pause and returning to his usual candor and composure, he added, “but actually, in our line of work, there is no evidence. there are only claims. after all, we do not have real-time data” (emphasis mine). with these observations, the registrar illuminated for me a crucial dimension of the work he and his co-officers do. they do not just draft and document property transactions to constitute the reality of the city but fundamentally adjudicate which claims to land can be enshrined in the government’s record of properties. the registrar also plainly acknowledged that many of the urban property claims never even go through the government’s offices. in the same conversation as above, he said, “we can only deal with what comes to our desks. unless the revenue department lets us know about a change in the record, how can we take it into account in our own work?” thus sometimes the claims that do go through this office are false claims that they are not able to discern in the course of the registration process. thus the work of registrars manages the “traffic between the legal and illegal” (pati 2022, 35), and claim-by-claim it adjudicates and assembles the state’s representation of the city. the registration officers, owing to the nature of their work, thus accept that at some level, property relations have to be conjured and consolidated out of uncertain claims. the graphic practices of the state (hull 2012) do not simply recognize the ground reality as is, nor do they always meticulously establish the truth of ownership through juridical reasoning (pérez 2016). rather, they often expediently commit the most credible claims into the records of the state. as a result, the property record represents an unusual governmental technology: not one simply exercised from the top down to enable the legibility of populations, but, rather, one that requires people to come forward and participate in making themselves legible to the state. this entails that the city is assembled as property by various actors bringing their claims to the government, with the support of brokers like rahul who know how to mobilize the right documents, connections, rhetorical strategies, and even bribes to facilitate the successful registration of claims. sub-registrars are the agents who ensure the assertion of the state in the process of property-making and city-making. they enact a reactive regulation that engages tactically with the urban landscape as they encounter it in their offices. here i’m thinking with kregg hetherington (2020, 136) who argues that the work of regulation is “tactical”; that is, a constant local negotiation between government and governed that results in “ever so slightly changing the potential 205futures” of property units, but also the city itself. this is where staying with the bureaucracy and their understandings of the urban in terms of uncertain claims and ground-truthing proves most useful. it reveals a landscape with a range of competing actors making the city through micro-negotiations, with little concern about the aggregate urban landscape. in aggregate over time and space, these micro-political processes engage with fait accompli property relations that might be licit or illicit, and thus might technically be within the boundaries of a protected lake (see maringanti 2011; vidyapogu and jonnalagadda 2023), or might be protected land assigned to disadvantaged groups (jonnalagadda, stock, and misquitta 2021). as a result, they create problems of irregularities (often, but not always, unwittingly) between the property records and the property claims, which in turn must be regularized by the revenue department. regularization in a global real estate hub after the registration of a sale deed (described in the previous section), the creation of a title deed with the revenue department requires a process known as “mutation,” the ultimate stage of gaining state recognition for property. in everyday practice, most urban transactions rely entirely on registered sale deeds and do not bother with title deeds. the onerous process of mutation is perceived as lacking utility in the context of small parcels of urban land, which are bought, sold, and subdivided frequently. but this disconnect results in property claims staking ground and often being registered in violation of the revenue department’s records. these situations are construed as irregularity by the revenue department, and they initiate regularization proceedings to reconcile their records with the ground reality. processes of regularization have been implemented recurrently for decades in hyderabad. so much so that people have come to expect them as a routine feature of governance (jonnalagadda, stock, and misquitta 2021). this means that, contrary to enforcing rules as an a priori requirement, the role of regulation has become to negotiate with fait accompli rule transgressions, cyclically collecting fines, and legitimizing violations of planning rules. the nature of this process is evocatively captured by the telugu term used for the process, kramabaddhikarana, which i translate as “correcting the order.” thus the task of the revenue department, in their own discursive registers is reacting to the relations produced beyond the state’s control, and incorporating these irregularities into the records of the state, while also generating some revenue. 206the emic category of irregularity strikingly contrasts with categories like illegality or informality or illegibility, which are already laden with teleological frames of privatization, rationalization, and abstraction. instead, irregularity makes for a more ambivalent category that creates opportunities for a wide range of social and property relations to exist in the city. when processes of regularization are announced, large crowds gather at the offices to negotiate their land claims and rights. in these situations, governance explicitly requires the interaction of government and governed. although a governmentality lens is focused on how social relations are rendered technical and apolitical (li 2007), in contrast, situations of reactive regulation are treated by all participants as simultaneously socio-political and technical. thus processes like regularization interpellate people from all classes who vie to regularize their property claims. and depending on the outcomes and the socially situated perspective of the observer, regularization proceedings might be morally construed as either obscene corruption or as state welfare.3 consider the regularization scheme announced through government order 59 in december 2014, which stated: “there is a need to regularize possession of government lands, which are having dwelling units and permanent structures and people are in occupation of these bits of land since a long time . . . such a step will be in public interest as it will bring clarity about title of land and promote planned development and improvement of services.” in the name of bringing clarity about land title and promoting planned development, two government orders offered the opportunity to regularize landholding to a wide range of people through a two-pronged process in 2014. one prong, presented in order 58, was oriented to households below the poverty line (bpl households), to whom the government was offering the opportunity to regularize up to 250 square yards of land, free of cost, but the property title they would get would be inalienable. the second prong, governed by order 59, was oriented to those who are not poor. to these non-poor households, the government offered a clear property title if they paid a certain percentage of the current value of the land they irregularly held. the percentage was on a sliding scale depending on the extent of land, thus affording a lower cost for some, while on the other hand placing no upper limit on the extent of land that could be claimed. these orders were not an exceptional event; rather, they marked a significant moment in a longer-term process of reactive regulation and governance. for instance, when order 59 was first announced, within a single day, contestations against the order’s terms emerged, and they were based on prior regularization 207schemes enacted in 2008 and 2002. in fact, there were still applications pending under these prior schemes, which had to be addressed and acknowledged in a separate order 60, issued the following day. further, these processes are never officially completed. in august 2019, i landed in hyderabad to study land administration but lamented that the orders i was concerned with were now outdated. but to my surprise, in the very week i arrived, i found posters and newspaper articles beaming out the message that order 59 had been re-opened for applications, and that people will have “another opportunity (maro avakaasam)” to benefit from the scheme. regularization is an ever-present potential routinely materialized. when a regularization scheme is available, there is an intensification of negotiation and contestation that bureaucrats, brokers, and activists in hyderabad describe as “heat.” in both 2015 and 2019, this heat was palpable at the revenue offices where crowds of people flooded not just the office itself but also the photo-copy centers, public notaries, and brokers around the office. as many scholars have shown, land in the city is occupied and claimed by people across classes (benjamin 2008; holston 2008; patil 2024), albeit with different degrees of legitimacy (bhan 2016). thus, for hyderabadis of all classes, the landscape of property is full of both promise and anxiety. on the one hand, schemes for regularization offer promises and pathways to stability, status, capital, and even citizenship, which have been long cherished aspirations.4 but regularization is not a guarantee of any of these things, unless all the relations and paperwork align just right for the bureaucratic stamp to be given. thus it also evokes great anxiety about documentation (hasan 2024; hetherington 2011). in wrangling property and paperwork into legible formats for the state, with the help of brokers and mediators, sometimes even through bribery and forgery, new relations are conjured. these new relations will on the one hand be recorded by the state, but on the other, they open space for new irregularities between the record and reality. these anxieties engender extensive speculative practices of property-making shaping the lives of people across classes in cities like hyderabad (goldman 2011; ranganathan, pike, and doshi 2023). these speculative practices put pressure on the bureaucracy and produce what many brokers described to me as heated and energetic property landscapes. the process of regularization, which is intended to clarify and promote planning, instead creates chain reactions: intensified friction, leading to heated contestation around land, leading to new potentials for reactive regulation. 208these further engender chains of discourse about regularization and property. two days after the announcement of order 59, telugu-language tv news channels hosted debates about land regularization. in one discussion on ntv, a mix of civil society representatives and political spokespersons debated the merits of the scheme. the first speakers were political spokespersons who argued that there was no better solution for messy land records than regularization. the civil society representatives had a different perspective and retorted that the scheme represented a massive collusion among political elites to grab lands. they were furious that the government order did not place any upper limit on the extent of land that could be regularized. one of them said, “this scheme is basically telling us: stop wasting your time making tv appearances and talking about issues. go grab some land! you can make it your own.”5 this heat also becomes palpable in less mediatized forms. one thing i found in common across tea shops in slum settlements, small talk on public transportation, and parlor conversations of the elite in hyderabad, is discourse, debate, and gossip about property (see figure 4). property prices, new neighborhoods worth investing in, new developments, new clients, new brokers, and so on. after all hyderabad, despite all this irregularity, is an internationally favored destination 209for real estate development (kelly, hodgson, and mcauley 2019; kelly and davies 2020). but the land situation means that a certain unreliability persists, and even renowned developers are not seen as safe from land irregularity. the biggest issue with regularization is that the city is a constantly changing set of relations, so every act of reconciling irregular records merely creates the baseline for future irregularities. further, the incentive for developers to adhere to regulation is considered more onerous than the process of post facto regularizing. thus people engaged in heated transactions remain tremendously anxious about property relations owing to the constantly morphing landscape of irregularity. figure 4. an event organized by the revenue department to educate senior citizens about legal services for addressing property disputes. photo by indivar jonnalagadda, january 2020. but this heat has another explanation. it is not the bureaucrats, but ruling political elites who control the frequency and rules of regularization. and it is also political elites (overlapping with businesspeople, media icons, and other elites) who benefit most from spectacular corruption around land in the region. the political economic atmosphere generated by this corruption narrative in the city evokes what malini ranganathan, david pike, and sapana doshi (2023) have called a “gray ethics” of property-making among all classes. the heat of property then appears as a counter-politics that demands a corrective through recognition of their own ambiguous property claims. the agents of reactive regulation, or the officers of land administration, are the mediators through whom this politics is negotiated. thus regularization is not just a tool of statecraft but also a popular demand. let us return to the evocative idea presented by my registrar interlocutor in the previous section: that from a bureaucratic perspective, there is no such thing as evidence of property ownership; there are only property claims, which are political claims. but the revenue department does not engage with these as broad collective claims; it translates them into granular individual claims. governance becomes a matter of intimate and arbitrary engagement with individual property owners in a cyclical pattern, where reactive regulation begets further reactive regulation around property. such dynamics mean that even macro-scale processes of urban growth—be it infrastructure expansion (tassadiq 2022), real estate development (searle 2016), environmental management (anand 2023), or even the digitization of property governance itself (hasan 2024)—must react with the micro-political friction of property. governing the city as property relations so far, i have described a bureaucratic property epistemology of the city, which underpins reactive regulation. but how does this property epistemology 210apprehend the city at large? this question requires an understanding of the documentary traces of property, which become the documentary traces of the city itself. the tahsildars who work mostly from their desks with reference to paper records, co-ordinate with village revenue officers and surveyors, who gather embodied knowledge about land in the city through fieldwork. in addition, the department also knows the city through the documents of the numerous people who come to their offices. during my futile quest for maps in the revenue department, one staff member at the district collector’s office told me, “we don’t have to map it. we have divided the city into survey numbers. now the city has grown and there are many land owners under each survey number, so we have files of all the title holders within each survey number.” in lieu of the maps i wrongly expected to find, the revenue department’s records are maintained as files and lists in hard copy. the land titles in the files include a “location sketch” representing the boundaries and dimensions of the plot of land, along with information about the owners of the neighboring plots in a schematic diagram. this mode of knowing the city has many ramifications for urban governance. that the data of urban property relations was not mapped struck me for two reasons: first, the government itself claimed that regularization would prove a tool to translate irregular land claims into clear and governable units. for instance, in order 59 quoted above, the regularization of property ownership was justified with the promise of “clarity about title of land” and “planned development.” however, a documentary regime of lists and files located in specific offices means that coordination across departments remains a challenge, especially when the property landscape is extremely energetic and heated, as it is in hyderabad. second, it was striking because of the unexpected contrast with rural land records, which seem to be meticulously mapped using digital technologies. revenue department officers have imbibed an encyclopedic and obsessive knowledge of the taxonomies of rural land categories (telangana revenue 2019), while lacking this kind of categorical and technical thickness when it comes to urban land. contrary to my expectation of an urban bias in governance, i found that rural spaces are both taxonomically thicker and more definitively mapped. for instance, the telangana integrated land resource management system (ilrms) provides comprehensive data about rural land ownership,6 but zero data exists on urban land ownership. the urban district of hyderabad and some of the surrounding urban sub-districts around it remain completely unmapped in this state database. 211 figure 5. an ironic mural inside the ministry of urban development premises. photo by indivar jonnalagadda, march 2020. most revenue department officers i interacted with have worked in both rural and urban districts, and they would often express misgivings about the function of revenue departments in urban areas. “you should come and see our work in rural areas. there everything is organized and in control,” one tahsildar told me. another noted that “the urban revenue department is a misnomer. we don’t even collect revenue here!” thus, for officers in this crucial department of land and civic administration, it is rural space that proves normative and rational, while the urban is unruly. the normative framework of an unchanging and durable landscape of rural relations shapes how they engage with social and environmental relations in the unruly city (see figure 5). i learned over time that property relations are construed through the moral and normative lens of rural land-holdings tied to caste and traditional families. when asked about the divergence between thick rural data and thin urban lists, the answer offered by revenue department officers was deceptively simple: property subdivision. as the secunderabad revenue division officer explained to me, constant property subdivisions through the fragmentation of estates and families created the complexity of urban governance. he suggested, “take any survey number in the city . . . . since [the time of the survey], it’s been broken up, redistributed, sold, etc. say, in the 1970s at some point a record was created of these subdivisions with some numbers assigned to them; now we add a ‘/’ to those numbers and create sub-units.” outside the patchy official record, in everyday practice, even those subunits have been subdivided with further placements of a “/” through both licit and illicit transfers. the revenue department is ever 212alert to this “city otherwise” (wilhelm-solomon 2020) beyond its record, but its members see these unruly relations as beyond their everyday documentary capacities. the department is thus invested in recapturing these fait accompli relations through regularization, reasserting the government as the authority in property relations, and restoring order (through kramabaddhikarana) to the city. at urban revenue offices, i didn’t observe any conversations oriented to digitizing urban records, nor any interest in questions of unplanned urban growth. however, there was constant conversation about correcting, aligning, re-ordering, and regularizing the record in terms of individual property claims and rights. as other anthropologists have illuminated, information does not have an existence that is autonomous from the medium of documents (hetherington 2011; hull 2012). in everyday practice, space for urban revenue officers is not dynamically inscribed into an aggregative form like a map or a digital database. thus, the city as a whole is not a legible aggregate object that can be acted on. while the dynamic property landscape of the city elides digitization and conclusive settlement, the emptiness of the digitized map for urban land ownership is not a result of an absence of knowledge. rather, it is a result of the plenitude of knowledge and a hypervigilance to changes in property relations. representing the thickness of these urban relations would require greater cost, effort, and some technological ingenuity. further, it would need to settle a deeply unsettled political landscape. so instead of attempting this digitization, a pragmatic thinness and uncertainty about urban property is constitutive of the documentary practices of everyday administration. because the city as an aggregate object exceeds the epistemic capacities of the revenue department, governance becomes a site-specific engagement with contingencies and claims defined primarily in terms of property units. this means that the uncertain property records continue to serve as the baseline for processes much beyond land administration, such as master planning, infrastructure development, slum governance, and so on. the low-level bureaucratic agencies that know the city in disjointed units also limit the governance of the city at large to a disjointed incrementalism. incidentally, this procedural reliance on uncertainty proves tremendously productive of new social relations and is amenable to political manipulation (beban 2021; hetherington 2011; jonnalagadda and cowan 2024). as a result of this generative potential extending across classes, reactive regulation reinforces and reiterates a micro-politics of property, but it forestalls macro-policy shifts and interventions by rendering them infeasible or impractical. 213 conclusion in a book published shortly before his passing, k.c. sivaramakrishnan (2014, xxiv), a hugely impactful urban policymaker in india, commented that “in india, the big city is a theme that continues to be shrouded by doubt and bewilderment.” his comment pertains not only to the difficulties of governance but also to bureaucratic and popular anxieties about urban spaces. building up from micro-political encounters in bureaucratic offices, in this article i conceptualize the processual construction of how these bewildering spaces are known and governed. i show that unplanned growth at the city scale has resulted from numerous micro-political negotiations at smaller scales. this does not amount to saying that indian cities are actually planned, contrary to their reputation. but in lieu of circular prescriptions for more planning and rationalization, an anthropological attention to the constitutive processes of governance should compel new methods of inquiry and intervention toward transformative macro-goals like social justice or sustainable development in megacities of the global south. reactive regulation makes for a mode of urban governance with two crucial features. first, it does not engage with the city as an aggregation of social and environmental relations; instead it apprehends the city through individual property relations. second, in lieu of enacting protocols that can direct urban growth, this mode of governance reacts to fait accompli relations on the ground. thus, the goals of reactive regulation are local and contingent: managing the heat of property claims, registering fait accompli relations as best as possible, and ultimately asserting the state’s authority over city space. this mode of governance most broadly serves the interests of political elites, but through a counter-political demand for recognition, it also serves a variety of other class interests. it does so unequally, however, without substantively resolving socioeconomic contradictions in the city. thus, the kinds of property granted are differentiated and stratified by caste, class, and gender (see jonnalagadda, stock, and misquitta 2021; jonnalagadda and cowan 2024). however, beyond social stratification (which i address in jonnalagadda 2018; and jonnalagadda, stock, and misquitta 2021), reactive regulation raises different concerns when situated in its larger spatial and environmental context. through reactive regulation, property becomes the common-sense rendering of space, time, and social relations in the city. ecological and geological understandings of urban environments are rendered ineffectual categories submerged under the property epistemology of governance. as are alternative cultural and political practices of city-making. 214 figure 6. announcement of a layout regularization scheme, with offices of planners in the background. photo by pullanna vidyapogu, october 2020. returning to the scene of the october 2020 floods i opened with: even as hyderabad was drowning in a deluge of unseasonal rains, the telangana government was aggressively promoting a layout regularization scheme enacted to forgive violations of planning rules by private properties (see figure 6). to apply for layout regularization, one can simply engage with brokers (in this case, a qualified urban planner) and the bureaucracy to draft the paperwork to bring the fait accompli physical transgressions into the fold of governance. once again, people flooded government offices to engage in micro-political and individualized claim-making. and thus, even aberrant weather events that multiply crises in the built environment consistently fail to push governmental and public discourses beyond the micro-politics of property. where do we go from here? following corsín jiménez (2017), i advocate for thinking of the city through actually existing methods of knowing and making the city. in the edited volume life among planners, margaret crawford (2020) argues that urban planning needs an anthropological attunement to contingency and process, and james holston (2020) suggests that the failure to plan for the future arises from the need to render the present inhabitable through a responsiveness to contingency. applying such an anthropological attunement to urban governance, i have shown that urban growth and governance in cities like hyderabad emanate from below. but this city from below is submerged in ideological projections like cadastral order and master plans, which remain chronically incomplete and exclusionary. nonetheless, investments in these top-down 215ideological projections continue to pressure urban governance in hyderabad in the direction of more rationalization, to be achieved by eradicating the human interface and relationality of the bureaucracy. such reforms are heavily promoted by the same political elites that already have the most control over technologies of property. can we imagine alternative opportunities within the existing modes of governance? reactive regulation is defined by sociality and relationality, which gives bureaucrats the ability to responsively mediate claims emerging from diverse social strata. albeit problematic and fragmented, this allows for a politics of regularization and property from below. a substantive dialogue between the abstract realm of planning and the concrete practices of land administration might reorient these relational processes away from a restrictive property epistemology toward constructive new frames for thinking about the relations between peoples, lands, and environments in the city. abstract as social and environmental crises multiply and compound each other in the urban global south, i ethnographically illustrate the micro-scale, obscured, but constitutive modes of governance that shape megacities. through an account of property record-keeping, registration, and regularization in the emerging global real estate hub of hyderabad, india, i show how macro-scale urban transformations form an aggregate outcome of micro-political bureaucratic processes that enlist the participation of bureaucrats, city-dwellers, and intermediary brokers. i argue that in lieu of regulatory processes that direct actions toward future goals, governance takes the form of reactive regulation, wherein the objectives are to render the city as property and re-assert the state’s authority. on the one hand, these constitute deeply political processes, ones that incrementally transform urban environments. on the other hand, these processes exclusively frame urban space, time, social relations, and ecology in reductive terms of property, forestalling transformations toward sustainability or social justice. [urban; property; governance; bureaucracy; planning; regularization; sustainability] సారాంశం ఈ వ్యాసంలో, అభివృద్ధి చెందుతున్న దేశాల్లోని మెగాసిటీలలో పరిపాలనకు సంబంధించే విశదమైన ప్రక్రియలను నేను వివరిస్తాను. పెద్ద ఎత్తు పట్టణ పరివర్తనలు ప్రభుత్వ అధికారులు, నగరవాసులు మరియు బ్రోకర్లచే నడపబడే విశదమైన బ్యూరోక్రాటిక్ ప్రక్రియల ఫలితమని నేను చూపిస్తాను. గ్లోబల్ రీయల్ ఎస్టేట్ హబ్ లలో హైదరాబాద్ ఒకటి. నేను హైదరాబాద్ లో ఆస్తి రికార్డు-కీపింగ్, రిజిస్ట్రేషన్ మరియు క్రమబద్ధీకరణ ప్రక్రియలను ఇక్కడ వివరిస్తాను. పాలన అనేది, భవిష్యత్ 216లక్ష్యాల వైపు చర్యలను నిర్దెశించే నియంత్రిత ప్రక్రియలకు బదులుగా, రియాక్టివ్ రెగ్యులేషన్ రూపాన్ని తీసుకుంటున్నది అని నేను వాదిస్తాను. పరియావరణంలొ మరియు సమాజంలొ సుస్థిర అభివృద్ధి సాధించడానికి బదులు, రియాక్టివ్ రెగ్యులేషన్ యొక్క లక్ష్యాలు నగరాన్ని ప్రైవేట్-ఆస్తిగా మార్చడానికి మరియు ప్రభుత్వ అధికారాన్ని విస్తరించడానికి పరిమితమయి ఉన్నాయి. [నగరాలు; ఆస్తి రికార్డులు; పాలన; ప్రభుత్వ అధికారులు; పట్టణ ప్రణాళిక; క్రమబద్ధీకరణ; స్థిరమైన అభివృద్ధి] notes acknowledgments  in the four-year-long journey this essay has taken from first presentation to publication, it has benefited immensely from platforms provided by many. i am especially grateful to nikhil anand and envirolab, asif agha and the semiotics lab, irteza mohyuddin and the penn urban studies colloquium, yamini krishna, swathi shivanand and khidki collective for opportunities to intensively workshop this article. for comments on written drafts, i thank the anonymous reviewers, nikhil anand, lisa mitchell, anant maringanti, asif agha, deborah thomas, sneha annavarapu, adwaita banerjee, tayeba batool, eric beverley, debjani bhattacharyya, aliyah bixby-driesen, tom cowan, ishani dasgupta, xiao ke, jeanne lieberman, karan misquitta, jane robbins mize, kristina nielsen, kareem rabie, ferhan tunagur, rebecca winkler, stephen young, tali ziv, and nancy roane. thanks to madanmohan jonnalagadda for help with the telugu abstract. finally, thanks to the editorial collective at cultural anthropology for their consideration of this manuscript, and especially to ather zia for working with me on the final revisions. the research for this article was funded by the american institute for indian studies, the wenner-gren foundation. the writing has also been greatly supported by my department and colleagues at miami university. 1. this definition combines frameworks from anthropologists of the state (gupta 2012; li 2007) and from prominent policy analysts (baud and de wit 2008; sivaramakrishnan 2014). 2. “annual report—2015,” nalsar university, 35 (https://nalsar.ac.in/sites/default/files/annual%20report-2015%20-final-1.pdf), last accessed january 2, 2025. 3. for more discussion on the rampant circulation of corruption talk, see ranganathan, pike, and doshi 2023, as well as sharma 2018. on the construal of regularization as state beneficence or toleration, see 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https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/8/review-urban-affairs/cultural-ecologies-urban-lakes.html wilhelm-solomon, matthew 2020 “the city otherwise: the deferred emergency of occupation in inner-city johannesburg.” cultural anthropology 35, no. 3: 404–34. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.3.03 zimmer, anna 2012 “enumerating the semi-visible: the politics of regularising delhi’s unauthorised colonies.” economic and political weekly 47, no. 30: 89–97. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23251772 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 192–220, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.01 cultural anthropology: delivering the state: state-making through maternal health “care” in bangladeshi public maternal health spaces 328 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 2, pp. 328-353, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.06 delivering the state: state-making through maternal health “care” in bangladeshi public maternal health spaces janet e. perkins university of edinburgh https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2868-1752 rima lies in a fetal position, her knees pulled to her chest on the medical bed next to the window of the capacious labor and delivery room at kushtia district public hospital, located in the west of bangladesh. her mother stands by her side, rubs her daughter’s back, and chats with me and my research assistant, tamanna, surprisingly energetic despite a previous sleepless night. rima’s labor pain started three days earlier, although her water broke only yesterday evening. the family had sent for a dai, a traditional birth attendant, to support rima’s birth at the family’s village home. unsatisfied with the progress of her labor and fearful, since rima’s previous and first pregnancy ended with the loss of the baby at six months’ gestation, the dai instructed her family to take her to the government district hospital. rima’s family, still haunted by the loss of the first baby, heeded the advice and brought her to the hospital in the morning, with all their hopes of the saving power of biomedicine and the promises of the state wrapped up in this institution. in passing through its entry gate (see figure 1) they crossed a vital threshold shaping the forms that rima’s birth care would take, from care shaped by the intimacy of a domestic space and enacted primarily by female household 329members and close ones, to care delivered in a very much public space, shaped by what it means to be the “state” (shorkar). figure 1. entry gate of the kushtia district hospital. photo by janet perkins. within anthropology, care operates as rich and contested theoretical territory, with much debate residing in the space between what we think care ought to look like in health service delivery settings juxtaposed with what care looks like in the ethnographic encounter. when addressing childbirth care, much of this scholarship stakes its footing in obstetric violence discourses, which also holds ground in global health policy and programming, suggesting that not only is institutionally-delivered maternal health care often uncaring but that it also crosses over the threshold into violence—manifesting, for example, as neglect, disrespect, and non-consensual overuse of biomedical technologies (see, e.g., chadwick 2023; van der waal et al. 2023; davis 2019; bowser and hill 2010; bohren et al. 2015). in contrast, other social science scholars have considered how practices that, from an outside perspective, may appear as uncaring—for example, yelling at a patient, withholding information, or failing to obtain informed consent for procedures—counterintuitively function as demonstrations of care when situated in a social and cultural context (strong 2020; brown 2010; livingston 2012). this big umbrella approach to care—that is to say, categorizing practices as care “despite our moral intuitions to the contrary” (mckearney 2020, 330223)—has become common enough that patrick mckearney (2020) refers to it as the “dominant trope” in anthropology. this article suggests that both camps are insufficient for capturing the contours of maternal health care in bangladeshi public health settings, often characterized as “uncaring.” rather, making sense of enactments of care in these settings requires considering how particular enactments of care are constitutive of everyday state-making (sharma and gupta 2009). as anthropologists have observed, despite appearances, the state is not a monolithic thing, but rather, as paul nadasdy (2003, 4) describes, “an ideological project, one that confers legitimacy upon the complex constellation of government institutions and processes that have many different (and often contradictory) agendas and interests.” public health settings operate as one space within this constellation, wherein the state as a project is enacted, experienced, and constituted. the specificities of care enacted here must be understood as extending beyond biomedical encounters, shaping and shaped by ideological state-making projects. over the past two decades, birth care in bangladesh has shifted dramatically toward institutional spaces. in 2004, giving birth institutionally in bangladesh was exceptional, as fewer than one in ten women ventured to a biomedical institution to give birth. less than two decades later, this figure skyrocketed to 65 percent (national institute of population research and training and icf 2023). while both public and private facilities deliver biomedical maternal health technologies and services, the public sector operates as an important point of contact within many women’s maternal biomedical journeys where they seek care during pregnancy and as a reference point for imagining health services delivered through the state, shorkari, and through private facilities, suggestively referred to as beshorkari, “not state.” public maternity spaces in bangladesh operate as among those, as michel-rolph trouillot (2001, 126) suggests, in which state “processes and practices [become] recognizable through their effects.” encounters of care in these sites unfold as spectacles of state performance (hansen 2001) in which the state is enacted and during which women and families learn what it means to be state and who they are in relation to it (sharma and gupta 2009, 11). this article contends that the idea of the state is not tangential to how care is conceptualized and enacted in these settings, but rather fundamental to it. drawing inspiration from joanna cook and catherine trundle (2020), i attempt to move past conceptualizations of health care delivery in public maternal health spaces as somehow “tainted or absent” or an appeal to the “evaluative reversal” mckearney cautions against, toward an “ethnographic consideration of 331the ongoing and morally ambiguous practices with which actors strive to grapple, achieve, or, indeed, curtail” (cook and trundle 2020, 180). based on ethnographic fieldwork i carried out in dhaka, the capital of bangladesh, and kushtia district between september 2019 and march 2021, this article tends to the nuanced conceptualizations and enactments of care in bangladeshi public health settings, sensitive to the varying shapes and meanings they take, and, in particular, to how they map onto ideological projects of state making. during fieldwork, i engaged in participant observation and conducted interviews in maternal health settings, including in maternal health policymaking and programming circles in dhaka and government and private facilities in kushtia. with my research assistant, tamanna, i spent time in kushtia with women and health service providers in antenatal care service points, labor and delivery rooms, and operating theaters, as well as in their homes. through these encounters, the “morally ambiguous practices” of maternal health care came into view. this article illuminates the nuances of maternal health care, paying attention to its distinctive conceptualizations as foundational to understanding the unfoldings of care and the socialities constituted through these peculiar unfoldings. i do this by illuminating coexisting conceptualizations of care in kushtia: jotno as the personal and intimate labor involved in forging kinship ties, and sheba, service-related labor. i argue that rather than being uncaring, health care delivered by providers in public maternal settings is structured by state-oriented imperatives to provide “services” (sheba), though not necessarily intimate care (jotno) to non-state heath service recipients. enactments of care that unfold in these spaces map onto and reify broader imaginaries of the bangladeshi state as an entity separate from the people it is designed to serve and underpinned by a sense of bureaucratic indifference. these enactments of care are naturalized as state processes, and transcendence is imagined as possible through the beshorkari, services provided outside of state structures. conceptualizing care: sheba and jotno biomedical discourses use the term care extensively, pairing it with health to generate the uncontested term health care. of course, care encompasses much more than biomedicine. arthur kleinman (2007) reminds us that care has little to do with medicine and suggests that care is foundational to what it means to be human. other scholars, demonstrating kinship as socially produced rather than rooted in biology (carsten 2003, 2000), describe care as constitutive of kinship and relatedness (ringsted 2004; weismantel 1995). erdmute alber and heike drotbohm (2015, 3322) push this understanding further, suggesting that care “not only connects kinsmen, and friends, neighbors and communities, but also collectivities such as states and nations.” figure 2. kushtia district hospital labor and delivery room. photo by janet perkins. care is achieved through enactment. in her examination of diabetes care, annemarie mol demonstrates care as made through the social and relational practices of and between bodies that act. for, she and john law tell us, we not only know and are bodies, we also do bodies. in enactments of care, bodies both act, and are enacted on (mol and law 2004; see also mol 2008). through care enactments, entities and phenomena come into being (or not), not only health conditions but also kinship and, as this article will argue, the state and people’s relationship to it. to understand care as practice that constitutes the state, it is helpful to disentangle coexisting notions of these practices in bangladesh. when discussing maternal health care, my interlocutors often appealed to two coexisting conceptualizations of care. one way care was conceptualized was as jotno. in kushtia, the women i engaged with spoke of jotno as the support they provided to their families and children, consistent with care that fosters kinship (weismantel 1995). jotno was associated with intimate practices that encompass attention and 333concern. in their narratives of their encounters with biomedical institutions, it was sometimes evoked to describe care they experienced from health staff when seeking maternal health services, though more often used when describing experiences in the beshorkari sector. however, jotno was not the only concept of care emerging among my interlocutors in kushtia. within the public health sector, the term sheba, which more closely corresponds to the english term “service,” is privileged over jotno. in official policy discourse, the term sheba is paired with shastyo, health, for shastyo sheba, and thereby privileges the term health service for the typical english use of health care. this is reflected in the way that health service providers articulate the labor in which they engage. when public health service providers discussed their work, they framed their responsibilities almost exclusively in terms of providing sheba. both aspiring and seasoned nurses articulated the desire to provide sheba as a motivation for securing a job in the public health sector. one of my visits to the district-level family planning facility in kushtia coincided with the clinical rotation of the batch of third-year nursing trainees from the kushtia nursing institute. the energy of the dozen young women, dressed in matching green uniforms and pursuing their ambitions, bubbled in the antenatal care room. in the afternoon, when the room grew quiet, i chatted with them and asked them about their motivations to train as nurses. their responses varied little; they were all enthusiastic about the possibility nursing training offered for obtaining a highly desired government job. a few said they might consider working in a private facility to earn income after completion, but this was considered only an interim space while they waited for the government to release the circulars for nursing applicants and to hopefully claim one of these enviable positions. with a government job, they explained, they would enjoy a reliable livelihood and earn more than they would in the private sector, thus benefiting their families more fully. the significance of the potential for securing a government job cannot be overstated in this context. bangladeshi livelihoods tend to be marked by a sense of precarity, except for those who manage to secure a government job (shorkari chakri) (see also perkins 2024). government jobs are seen as secure: it is practically unheard of to lose government employment, at the end of which one receives a pension for retirement. the focus on sheba can be read within the imaginary of the state institutions animated by civil servants enjoying a shorkari chakri, a government job, associated with performing sheba across state institutions and 334agencies. many people, particularly those coming from villages, see government work as the best opportunity to gain a solid foothold in middle-class status and maintain a reliable livelihood. these livelihoods benefit not only the person holding the government position but also their families. thus many parents aspire to have their children obtain a government position, and these young women felt the weight of these aspirations. entry into government employment through the health sector is seen not only as facilitating economic security but also as a way to do so morally, which renders it a particularly desirable way to enter government service. indeed, the second shared motivation of the young women was to provide sheba to the people. most of the young women came from villages in kushtia, and they shared their desire to help (shahajo korte) the poor (gorib manush), whom they considered unaware (oshocheton) of how to be healthy. the young women aspiring to health service delivery imagined the nursing profession as a gateway to satisfy an economic imperative to secure a stable livelihood and contribute financially to their family. simultaneously, it would allow them to fulfill a moral imperative to help the poor, especially the poor in their home district, and solidify their social standing as distinct from the poor whom they serve. indeed, rather than servicing a general citizenship, public health services in kushtia are imagined to serve the category of gorib manush. this category is discursively sustained by government health service providers, as well as public health service users, who often explained to me that they had gone to a public health facility because they were gorib. while seasoned nurses seemed more jaded, they shared similar accounts guiding them to pursue the nursing profession and evoked religious motivations. senior staff nurses (ssns) articulated that, as nurses, if you provide good service, then people will bless you (doya korte). in islam, these blessings from others result in benefits in this life and the afterlife, where they help one pass into heaven. according to one ssn, through providing sheba in the profession, people to whom you provide sheba give you blessings in turn; or, as she put it, “we get blessings [on our behalf] just like that [i.e., without additional effort].” for government health providers, delivering sheba constitutes the moral core of their professional obligations. while these articulations of sheba illuminate its moral underpinnings as something good that one does, sheba does not require the intimate, kinship-oriented engagement entailed by jotno. indeed, sheba takes on particular meanings within government settings, connecting the constellation of bureaucratic and 335administrative work throughout dispersed government institutions. it is at these interstices of sheba, whether one applies for a passport, files a complaint with the police, or seeks public health services, that people encounter the materiality and processes of the state. therefore, in these moments, people learn what the state is and what it means to interface with this entity. in government settings, sheba is enacted through bureaucratic practice, without expectations that sheba be coupled with the intimacy of care recognizable in jotno. michael herzfeld (1993) explores the workings of bureaucratic practice in western societies, asking why in societies otherwise imagined as committed to human rights and advancing human flourishing, bureaucrats can appear callous to human needs. he argues that formal regulation, everyday bureaucratic practice, and reliance on symbols generates indifference, which he defines as “the rejection of a common humanity” (herzfeld 1993, 3). the postcolonial bangladeshi state differs from the eurocentric states considered by herzfeld, and is hardly imagined as a beacon of human rights, most recently brought into relief in the violent use of state force to quell what started as peaceful protests against the government job quota reform (corea and erum 2024). still, the concept of bureaucratic indifference proves useful in everyday encounters with the state in bangladesh, as does herzfeld’s argument that bureaucratic practice generates indifference. sheba lies at the core of bureaucratic practice and everyday encounters with the state, including in public health service encounters. in most bureaucratic functions, my interlocutors did not expect sheba to be paired with jotno, or otherwise intimate care, allowing indifference to permeate these processes and enactments. while one might expect the interactions in health settings to differ (as development actors do), they often unfold as consistent with the bureaucratic practice of perfunctory sheba, a corporeal performance of indifference. while sheba does not foreclose the possibility of sentimentality, it fosters possibilities for indifference that jotno does not. these enactments of care play out in the labor and delivery room in care enactments in kushtia, as health service providers deliver sheba, while kin provides jotno to birthing women. enacting sheba and jotno in government hospitals how do enactments of maternal health care unfold in the labor and delivery room of the kushtia district hospital? this section returns to the birth encounter of rima, introduced at the beginning of this article, as a typical birth encounter in the district hospital labor and delivery room. rima is between 336twenty and twenty-two years old, her anxious mother tells tamanna and me as she kneads her daughter’s lower back. rima tells us that she is worried; the last time she felt the baby move was before she arrived here at 7 a.m. “the baby is not moving; what should we do?” rima’s mother asks us, her eyebrows stitched. i look around the room, bereft of health service providers. several ssns giggle on the other side of the curtain thinly veiling the labor and delivery room from the nurses’ duty station—aware of but unfazed by rima and her family’s worry. asmani, a middle-aged ssn, enters and approaches the mother and daughter. rima’s mother asks whether the young woman can have a shejar (cesarean section)—the outcome they both desire and the primary reason for coming to the district hospital where they might access it at a lower cost than a private facility. “have you arranged blood?” the nurse asks. no, the mother admits. then, there is no way to do the shejar, asmani tells her. rima’s mother holds a bottle of water to the young woman’s mouth. when rima finishes drinking, her mother exits the room to discuss with the other rugir-lok, rima’s father, husband, and several other men and women. we overhear as they scramble to identify someone with o-positive blood, like rima, a particularly challenging blood type to find a match for, in hopes the hospital staff will thereafter approve the cesarean they all desire. blood transfusion can be a life-saving procedure for hemorrhage. however, stocks of impersonal blood stored at health facilities are uncommon in even the best-equipped hospitals. the task of locating blood falls to the family, who leverage social networks to identify a person whose blood matches to contribute the life-saving corporeal substance. afroza, a physician intern, whooshes in. with a doctor here for rounds, laboring women flood the room. the intern weaves toward rima, prostrate on the bed, her mother stroking her hair. without addressing the young woman, she approaches to perform a pervaginal examination (pv), or pelvic exam. in protest, the young woman clamps her knees together, eventually using the force of her tiny, clenched legs to push afroza backward. on the adjacent examination table, a nurse performs a pv on another woman, touching her only to check her cervix with a gloved hand. “i am breaking the water,” she announces to no one in particular. the nurse inserts the metal hook into her vaginal canal and quickly jumps back out of the line of fire, avoiding the spray of amniotic fluid. afroza moves on. asmani shakes her head. “be soft,” she urges. “if you do not allow me [to do the pv],” she threatens, “i will discharge you [chuti diye debo].” shahanaj khala (honorific which denotes aunt), a dai-turned-aya (helping 337hand) of the hospital, works to pry rima’s knees open just enough for asmani to check her cervix, with success. “ten centimeters,” the ssn announces. rima’s cervix is fully dilated; now she just needs to push. rima’s mother’s face is anguished as she exits the room to liaise with the rugir-lok. the other laboring women, cervixes checked, rearrange their petticoats and evacuate the room to pace the hospital corridors. rima creeps toward the entryway. a thin man with a short, white beard appears through the curtains. “let’s go, let’s get out of here,” rima begs the man, her father. “where will we go?” he scowls. they both know that outside the public hospital, a vast private market offers any number of refuges. it is common for women in the labor room of the district hospital to surreptitiously disappear with their rugir-lok, without a word to the health service providers, who shrug off these disappearances. however, since rima’s family traveled to the district administrative center, any of these private hospitals and clinics will be much more expensive than those near their village. “we are gorib manush [poor people],” he says, disappearing through the curtains. rima hovers near the entryway for a moment. she glances toward us again, then absconds through the pink into the nurses’ duty station. in the station, asmani sits at the desk over one of many oversized registers. she squints behind her glasses, flips through pages, jots notes. rima’s mother, father, young husband, a couple of related older women and young men stand respectfully in front of her. rima’s father tells her that the family has successfully arranged a blood donor and asks whether the nurse can now arrange the shejar. eyes still glued to the register, she says it will take some more time before the doctor decides whether to do a shejar. rima cries out and begs her family to take her away. “i will not stay here!” she wails. asmani ignores her and turns pages and scribbles notes in the register. shahanaj khala takes hold of rima and steers her back to the delivery room. after several minutes, asmani returns to the labor and delivery room and approaches rima. she then pushes her knees back, revealing her pelvic floor. her mother stands next to her daughter’s head and gives her some water from a repurposed sprite bottle. she holds her daughter’s hand. asmani presses her fingers inside rima’s vaginal canal. suddenly, rima moans, gripped by a contraction. asmani positions herself below rima’s hips. “push!” she urges. rima bears down. she passes stool in the process, and feces tumble into a strategically placed bucket below her hips. 338shahanaj khala grunts and presses her headscarf to her nose. “what a smell!” she derides. “like a khataish!” comparing the odor to a notoriously foul-smelling animal. “you are the one delivering the baby,” complains asmani to rima, “but our souls are coming out.” the baby’s head protrudes visibly from rima’s pelvis with the next push. all eyes are on rima. a woman from the nearby laboring woman’s rugir-lok recites surah passages from the quran on rima’s behalf. “push . . . push,” asmani coaxes. rima bears down while her mother strokes her hair. five minutes pass, and a small moon of thick, dark baby hair appears. rima pushes diligently with each contraction. five minutes pass, then ten, fifteen. the medical staff deliberate: should they perform a much-dreaded episiotomy? one of the ssns prepares the scissors and holds them dangerously close to rima’s perineum. under this threat, rima heaves. the baby’s head, then body slide into asmani’s hands. she promptly places the newborn girl on her mother’s belly. i hold my breath as the seconds tick by—fifteen, then thirty. finally, the baby musters a weak cry. with the baby born, and alive at that, relief floods the room. rima’s family exhibited more exasperation than many of the rugir-lok in trying to achieve the desired birth, in this case, a low-cost cesarean section, compared to the more expensive procedure outside in a private facility. when this service was foreclosed, they became desperate for her to give birth vaginally. rima’s birth experience in the district hospital was otherwise unexceptional and illustrative of typical encounters that unfold in the kushtia district hospital labor and delivery room. these encounters are structured by coexisting conceptualizations of care, ideas of how and by whom these forms of care should be delivered, and the nature of relationships that proceed from the work of caring. delineations between sheba and jotno figure centrally within this social world of care at the hands of the state. launching from rima’s birth encounter, the following section will illuminate how these forms of care, and the boundaries between them, emerge through embodied enactments. intimacy, the management of substances, and paperwork as mentioned, jotno encompasses the intimate care constitutive of kinship bonds. care enacted as jotno is personalized, hands-on, and supportive. jotno is rooted in relational labor. in the labor and delivery room, laboring women were, almost without exception, accompanied by one or several female family members, often a mother, as rima was, but also by mothers-in-law, sisters, and 339sisters-in-law. these women attendants maintain close physical proximity to the birthing woman and enact jotno through massage, holding the laboring woman’s hand, stroking her hair, massaging oil into her locks, untying and retying the woman’s hair in and out of a bun, and fanning the laboring woman with banana leaf fans. jotno by the patient’s party subsumes providing physical support to women’s laboring bodies as they pace to spur labor or make their way up and down from beds as instructed by the health service providers. it also entails encouragement and often comforting words, sometimes enacted in reciting quranic verses. it involves nourishment, primarily by giving water. it is rare to see a public health service provider enact the intimate work of jotno in the labor and delivery room. in contrast to jotno, the embodied enactments of sheba tend to be mediated through the materiality of biomedical technologies. it often consists of using technologies to foray into the body, the insertion of cannulas to introduce oxytocin-infused saline into the bloodstream to speed up labor, or a metal hook into the vaginal canal to rupture the amniotic sac. occasionally, though not routinely, sheba entails an incision of the perineum for an episiotomy, a contested feature of medicalized birth, when the nurses see fit. it comprises suturing this cut or, more often, perineal tears, generally sans local anesthetic. the performance of pvs—vaginal examinations to check the dilation of the cervix, another contested practice of medicalized childbirth (moncrieff et al. 2022; shabot 2021; kitzinger 2005)—is a routine feature of health service providers’ performance of sheba. although these examinations are not mediated through material technologies like many other sheba practices, they are mediated by latex gloves purchased and provided by the patient’s party, which maintain physical boundaries. laboring women flock to the labor and delivery room when doctors or nurses decide to perform pvs according to the service providers’ schedules. sheba is deliberate, punctual, and typically enacted according to the health service providers’ timetables. physical touch is curtailed to the most limited type. health staff rarely refer to women by name or honorifics such as apa (sister). the management of bodily substances, historically considered polluting in south asia, features centrally in the boundary work between sheba and jotno. the preoccupation with the containment and avoidance of bodily pollution, long central to ideas around birth in the subcontinent (jeffery, jeffery, and lyon 1989; mukherjee 2017; rozario 1998, 1992), maps onto statist encounters in public health service delivery spaces. here, it serves to mark state/non-state categories, as well as categories within state hierarchies. in her seminal work purity and 340danger, mary douglas writes that the power of pollution lies in its inherence to the structure of ideas and that this power “punishes a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate” (douglas 2003, 114). within public maternal health spaces, these ideas require a separation between state and patient bodies, the margins of which are located at the fleshy boundaries of human bodies. douglas (2003, 122) contends that margins are always dangerous, as this is where the structure of ideas is at its most vulnerable. at the margins of human bodies, pollution threatens distinctions between the state and non-state bodies. no one among the health staff demonstrates comfort in managing the various bodily excretions inherent to the birthing experience—urine, vomit, blood, fecal matter, amniotic fluid—regardless of job title, religion, class, or marital status. it is not uncommon for hospital staff to deride or scold a laboring woman for defecating, urinating, vomiting, bleeding, or spilling amniotic fluid, or to complain of the smell, as shahanaj khala did during her encounter with rima. furthermore, the ayas, understood as present to do the “dirty work” (nongra kaj), express as much disgust (if not more) as they push the management of bodily emissions onto rugir-lok and deride patients for their pollution. indeed, all categories of hospital staff—doctors, nurses, and ayas alike—exhibit an aversion to bodily substances, despite the immanence of these very substances to their professional work. the enactment of this avoidance indexes hierarchical divisions: the protection of doctors from contact with pollutants is prioritized, as doctors constitute a class apart as “first-class gazetted officers” and occupy a decisively higher social status, followed by ssns. while technically the ayas are responsible for the dirty work, they tend to pass this off to rugir-lok and hand them mops, bedpans, and cloths to do the work. ayas tend to occupy a similar social status to the gorib manush in public health institutions, placing them at particular risk of having boundaries break down between them and the gorib manush with whom they interface in these settings. while concerns around birthing pollution also figure into birth enactments in the private sector, the predominance of surgical birth in private facilities—83 percent of private facility births occur through cesarean (national institute of population research and training and icf 2023)—significantly curtails transgressive pollution. while bodily fluids are present in cesarean and vaginal births, corporeal substances are more easily predicted, controlled, and contained in the surgical encounter: tubes suck amniotic fluid and blood into glass containers as soon as the belly is open, and catheters drain urine from the bladder. while this 341does not eliminate the nongra kaj, it constricts the opportunities for engagement around the spontaneous release of birth pollution—transgressions integral to and unpredictable in the experience of vaginal birth. while i never witnessed a vaginal birth in a private facility—accounts from my interlocutors suggested that these primarily occurred when a surgeon was unable to reach a particular health facility in time, times i was also unlikely to be present in a facility—the ayas did not demonstrate the same avoidance of the nongra kaj, and i did not witness them passing this on to the rugir lok, who were, in general, treated with more respect by the private health staff. blood also figures centrally as a bodily substance to be managed in sheba/jotno divides. while health service providers carry out the clinical sheba of blood transfusion, arranging the blood to be transfused is a profound act of jotno. in northern india, jacob copeman writes of the social significance of blood and blood donation. his work demonstrates that far from an impersonal endeavor implied by predominant public health discourses, blood donation in northern india is imbued with social, cultural, political, and religious significance (copeman 2009; copeman and banerjee 2019). similarly, in bangladesh, blood donation constitutes and reinforces bonds within kin and social groups. even in the most reputable public hospital in the country, impersonal blood stocks are unreliable. if a person needs a blood transfusion, this kinship-constituting substance must be arranged through the care work of the family and social networks. in addition to enacting sheba in the embodied encounters with service seekers, sheba is enacted through paperwork. the excessive amount of time that government nurses in bangladesh spend engaged in paperwork is well documented (hadley and roques 2007; hadley et al. 2007; zaman 2009). in his ethnographic account of a district hospital orthopedic ward, shahaduz zaman (2009, 367) observes that “it appears that bangladeshi nurses are primarily caretakers of papers and registers, rather than caretakers of patients.” papers and paperwork hark back to the centrality of documents within the colonial project in south asia, such that the term kaghazi raj, document rule, assumed synonymity with the british colonial regime (hull 2012b, 7). matthew hull describes how governance through documentation became central to the colonial project as a reflection of the need to ensure accountability from a distance and maintains centrality to the postcolonial state-making project in pakistan. similarly, paperwork remains crucial to the postcolonial state-making project in bangladesh. on the one hand, this reflects the preoccupation in the state-making project with enumeration, one facet of what james c. scott (1998) 342describes as rendering the population legible, and thus justifying projects of “high modernity” to organize it in particular ways (see also gupta 2001). in bangladesh, vast infrastructures for rendering legible health practices and behaviors of the population have been constructed throughout the country (murphy 2017). the concern with counting predates but was galvanized further by the recent trends in global health practice to insist on the metricization of health for the justification of health interventions (adams 2016, 2013). while this trend is evident throughout global health practice, quantification of maternal health rose to prominence as an object of metricization in the 2000s, as reducing maternal mortality became a focal point of the millennium development goals (mdg) for health. the concern with tracking maternal mortality was further propelled by the global observation of the imperviousness of maternal mortality to discernable improvement on a global scale nearly a decade into the mdg era (wendland 2016; storeng and béhague 2017). countries were thus impelled to devise strategies to better trace maternal health-related indicators. to these ends, the bangladesh maternal mortality survey, a population-based household survey of hundreds of thousands of households, was implemented to render the childbearing population and their practices legible. national health policymakers, programmers, and global health practitioners consider this survey, along with the bangladesh demographic and health survey, as authoritative for understanding maternal health in the country. in contrast, metrics generated through the public health information system and fed into the national health information system, are viewed as suspect by international and national policymakers and programmers. thus, despite the emphasis on doing documentation in public health spaces and the push by numerous actors to improve documentation processes to result in “reliable” data, this documentation remains peripheral to what is considered authoritative by national policymakers and programmers (begum et al. 2020). still, the spectacle of doing paperwork is central to state sheba in kushtia public health spaces. state-making is thus achieved through the embodied art of doing it, not necessarily in the accuracy of what is recorded, or how it will be used thereafter. a good case in point is the use of the paper-based technology of partograph. designed for “low-resource settings,” partograph is a who-endorsed, paper-based technology to track labor progress, identify complications, and inform decision-making. the technology requires health service providers to use paper-based graphs to track fetal heart rate, uterine contractions, cervical dilation, and drugs administered throughout labor (world health organization 2018). 343however, in the kushtia district hospital labor and delivery room, i only observed health service providers recording partograph information after birth. in the still of the labor and delivery room during lulls between births, an ssn would sit down and piece together the women’s names and estimate their labor progress according to the aspects demanded by partograph, documenting these on the paper form. figure 3. whiteboard partograph in labor and delivery room. photo by janet perkins. using the partograph after birth strips its usefulness in its presumed decision-making purposes, but it figures into the constitution of the state through the doing of paperwork. performing paperwork, which mol (2002) refers to as the “enactment” of bureaucratic objects in practice, forms part of doing the state. in this enactment, documents come to be constitutive of “bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes and even the organizations themselves” (hull 2012a, 251) in the maternity ward. unlike the intimate work of jotno, which fosters kinship, the enactment of paperwork sheba serves to disconnect public health service providers from those they serve, and is only loosely organized around birth events in this setting. 344although public health workers complain about the amount of paperwork required, this paperwork becomes a locus of power and a site at which the legitimacy of the state’s right to “write society” (hansen 2001, 225) is reaffirmed, as health service providers carefully guard authority over paperwork. in the labor and delivery room, this can go so far as withholding discharge certificates when women leave to seek care elsewhere—an elsewhere in the private sector—which leaves women and their rugir-lok with no medical documentation of their labor history in this public health space when they seek care outside. presumably, when the ssn threatened to discharge rima if she did not behave appropriately, part of the risk was foregoing these discharge papers. in private health facilities, paperwork plays a tangential role in health service delivery. while small and medium-sized clinics kept basic tallies of services delivered and would count these up when we as asked about the number of cesarean procedures and vaginal births in a given month, paperwork was less visible in enactments of health service delivery in these settings. each facility had its own system for managing this information. although they admitted that they were expected to share this information with the district-level public health manager, few did so. among the many managers i spoke to, only the son of the kushtia district hospital manager, who managed the clinic owned by his mother in a neighboring district, indicated that he regularly provided this data to the local health manager, and suggested that their clinic was the only one to do so in the area. thus paperwork in private facilities separates these spaces from state-making projects. that government nurses in bangladesh perform relatively little hands-on care is well documented (hadley and roques 2007; zaman 2009). these stories tend to be written as indictments of the failure of nurses in such settings to adhere to the ethos generally associated with nursing as the delivery of patient-centered and compassionate care (livingston 2012, 96–97; zaman 2009). however, to single out nurses as an isolated category draws attention away from how they and all other cadres engage to enact the state in public health settings. indeed, it is not only ssns but also medical officers, interns, midwives, ayas, and other hospital staff who enact the state in public maternal health care settings, and the ways that they do so strikingly resemble each other. beshorkari “not-state” care: imaginaries of maternal health care otherwise it is not only in these embodied enactments of care in government maternal health settings that these imaginaries of the state through sheba and jotno become reified. they are also discursively constituted (gupta 1995) in the circulation of 345narratives. with the widespread availability of maternal health care through the beshorkari private health sector, these narratives are often formulated in reference to these not-state services. one day, i sat with fahmida, papish, and mala, three sisters-in-law, in the buzzing courtyard of their in-laws’ home in a small village, where they recounted their birth experiences. each gave birth three times, and each gave birth both normale and through shejar. though they identified as farming people (grihosto manush), they mostly avoided the public maternal health facilities and privileged home birth or birth in private clinics. the exception was fahmida, whose water broke when she was only eight months pregnant with her third birth baby. she went to the home of a government doctor whom she knew personally, who advised her to go to the district hospital. she recounted the experience as follows: after going to kushtia, i was admitted to the hospital. when i went there, the hospital people told me to take a paracetamol and lie down. if you lie down, then everything will be ok, and we are not going to do anything. . . . let’s just say that they did not do anything. they did not care about how many months pregnant i was, that i still had time to go, one month to go. my shejar date was one month later. so that way, they are not going to do a shejar. also, [they said] you cannot have it normale. you are not going to have the baby normale, and we are not going to do a shejar; they were saying things like that. the hospital doctor did some tests, and she said to lie down like this and take some paracetamol, and you will be fine. then my abbu [father] said, no, you will not sit around here and die just taking paracetamol. what am i going to do with my money? i have earned money for my children. if i cannot save my children, then what was the point of earning this money? after saying that, he took me to sono tower [a private hospital], where dr. shamsul sits on the fourth floor. dr. shamsul was about to go out right when we got there. dr. shamsul is a very good doctor. he saw me with good care (jotno). he checked me over adoringly (ador kore), and he said, “come with me, i will help you go. i will admit you to the clinic, and you stay there, and i will do the shejar [when it is time].” fahmida’s story is emblematic of circulating representations of care in state and non-state spaces. through these, the state is reified as an entity that does not care for those under its purview. in fahmida’s recollection, the state was even willing to let her die, an uncanny, if macabre, echo of michel foucault’s maxim 346of biopower as the power to “make live” and “let die” (rabinow and rose 2006, 239; foucault 2003). in contrast, in fahmida’s account, care in the form of jotno was to be found outside of state spaces in the beshorakari private sector. the possibility of accessing jotno was borne out in my encounters in private health settings and with those animating these settings. although private health managers and providers discussed their engagement in delivering private health services as a moral work of providing sheba, they also expressed a desire to provide the kind of care to women that they do not experience in public health facilities. astha apa (honorific used to denote sister), a government health service provider and private clinic manager in one of the kushtia subdistricts, described her motivation for engaging in private health service delivery as propelled by a desire to compensate for public health services wherein, even when women reach them, “nobody, not the doctors, nurses, or anyone, ‘cares’” (for which she uses the english cognate). she advertises the possibility for women to benefit from jotno at the private clinic she manages. even at the gate of the clinic one reads that “with care [jotno] and low cost, we do normal delivery” (see figure 4). figure 4. clinic entry gate reading “with care (jotno) and low cost, we do normal delivery.” photo by janet perkins. 347private health clinic managers and providers in kushtia rarely described the advantage of the services they delivered as superior to the clinical care available in the public facilities. rather, they highlighted the fact that services would be reliably delivered at any hour of the day and with interpersonal care. talking to two managers and a health service provider in the well-established jonari clinic in the bheremara subdistrict, i heard them describe the sincerity of the care they provided as the principal draw for women to come there. as the manager summed up, “[at the government facility] they don’t give care like this. the hospital does not give beautiful care [for which he uses the english cognate] like the private [sector] provides to them, so that is why they come to the private.” this claim is borne out in practice, where health service providers attend to women with more warmth, exhibited through more physical touch and calling mothers-to-be by their names or affectionate honorifics. even for health service providers working in both the public and private sectors—a common practice among doctors (licitly) and other categories of health service providers (illicitly)—their interactions with women in the private sector tend to be marked by more intimacy and warmth. of course, not all women experience care of the type described by fahmida in the private sector. that the little-regulated private health market wildly varies both in terms of sheba and jotno is no secret. still, the private health sector, the beshorkar, sustains its representation as an entity in which one might receive jotno, even if for a price, and, as i have explained at length elsewhere, by drawing on personal and kin-based bonds (perkins 2023). in contrast, none of my interlocutors, whether health service users or providers and managers, expected the offering of jotno in public shorkari spaces. conclusion “they just don’t care.” i often heard this refrain from my interlocutors engaged in development practice when frustrated by the lack of interest demonstrated by the government health service providers enlisted to implement various development interventions. sometimes i could not help but think it myself. i certainly did when i watched the events of rima’s birth unfold, and even more in the rare moment when a woman arrived with no rugir-lok (hospital security held them back at the gates) and was therefore deprived of all forms of jotno from hospital staff, even when she was in labor with twins at twenty-nine weeks and on the precipice of losing them. 348arguably, such enactments of (un)caring could be viewed through a lens of obstetric violence. certainly, the embodied enactments of care that unfold in the kushtia labor and delivery room resemble little the ideals set forth in the respectful maternity care charter (white ribbon alliance 2022), or those of person-centered care now included in all global health guidelines for maternal health (see e.g., world health organization 2018). however, women and their families rarely described the treatment in public health facilities as violence or mistreatment. rather, they accepted the sheba delivered in public health facilities as what is. in one sense, this reflects what nadasdy refers to as the totalizing project of the state, in which people embrace the state as “the natural order of things” (nadasdy 2017, 8). as people have accepted that this is what constitutes the state, just as he describes, it becomes difficult to question the “legitimacy of these processes or the implicit assumptions that inform them” (nadasdy 2003, 8–9). in the public health setting, one of the implicit assumptions guiding enactments of care is that the state delivers state-making bureaucratic practices of sheba, almost always to the exclusion of intimate, kinship-fostering jotno. while the apparent lack of compassion may appear as uncaring in public health settings from an outside perspective, my aim in this article has been to demonstrate that public maternal health spaces constitute a crucial stage in the performance and constitution of the state, and that embodied enactments of care through sheba and jotno prove central to this constitution. public maternal health spaces function as sites of embodied performance in which ideas of state are constituted. on this stage, and acting on and with bodies (mol and law 2004), the state is instantiated through the embodied enactment of service as sheba by government actors (i.e., medical officers, ssns, midwives, interns, even the ayas) vis-à-vis the non-state (i.e., pregnant and birthing women, and their families accompanying them, their rugir-lok). these enactments are significant beyond the health service encounter—they operate to legitimize the state-making project and materialize the state as an entity that stands above (ferguson and gupta 2002) and separate from those who seek sheba at its interstices. these encounters are usefully understood within the context of state imaginaries in which government staff are expected to deliver care as service, sheba, while not necessarily kinship-constituting jotno. here i expand on alber and drotbohm’s (2015, 2) assertion that care connects not only kin and communities but also states and nations to show that it equally disconnects. the enactments of bodies in public maternal health encounters in kushtia serve to disconnect, 349that is to say, disconnect government health service providers and maintain distinctions between them and those to whom they provide service, through specific enactments of care. while the performance of public health staff can sometimes appear as uncaring, these encounters are shaped by broader imaginaries of the state and morally consistent with what it means to be a state functionary. through the re-enactment of these embodied performances, government health service providers and staff enact boundary work around service (sheba) and care (jotno), reifying the state as an entity that delivers service, though not necessarily the intimate care that fosters kinship, crystallizing within a broader constellation of imaginaries of the state and one’s relationship to it. abstract within anthropology, care operates as contested theoretical territory, with much debate residing in the space between what we think care ought to look like in health service delivery settings juxtaposed with what care looks like in the ethnographic encounter. in bangladesh, public health service providers are often represented as not caring in health encounters. based on ethnographic data generated in maternal health settings in kushtia district, this article nuances conceptualizations of care in government health settings, centering the concepts of sheba (service), which is rooted in clinical care, and jotno (care), intimate, hands-on care that constitutes kinship. through the enactment of embodied performances, government health service providers and staff enact boundary work around sheba and jotno, which serves to constitute the state during and beyond health service encounters, crystallizing within a broader constellation of imaginaries of the state and one’s relationship to it. [care; state; maternal health, childbirth; pollution; ethnography; bangladesh] সারসংক্ষেপ নৃবিজ্ঞানের পরিপ্রেক্ষিতে যত্নের ধারণাটি একটি তাত্ত্বিক বিতর্কের ক্ষেত্রযা মূলত স্বাস্থ্যসেবা প্রদানের ক্ষেত্রে যত্ন কেমন হওয়া উচিত বলে যা আশা করা হয় এবং নৃতাত্ত্বিক নিবিড় গবেষণায় যা দেখা যায় এই দুটোকে পাশাপাশি রেখে বিভিন্ন আলোচনা-সমালোচনাকে কেন্দ্র করে আবর্তিত। বাংলাদেশে জনস্বাস্থ্য পরিষেবা প্রদানকারীদের প্রায়শই স্বাস্থ্যসেবা প্রদানের ক্ষেত্রে ‘যত্নশীল নয়’ হিসেবে উপস্থাপন করা হয়। কুষ্টিয়া জেলায় মাতৃস্বাস্থ্যসেবা নিয়ে পরিচালিত নৃতাত্ত্বিক গবেষণার ভিত্তিতে, এই নিবন্ধটি সরকারি স্বাস্থ্যসেবা ব্যবস্থায় উপস্থিত যত্নের সামগ্রিক ধারণাটিকে সূক্ষ্মভাবে উপস্থাপন করছে মূলত দুটি ধারণাকে পাশাপাশি রেখে: প্রথমটি ‘সেবা’ যা চিকিৎসাকেন্দ্রগুলোর চিকিৎসা বা রোগ উপশমকেন্দ্রিক যত্নের সাথে সম্পর্কিত এবং অন্যটি এমন ধরণের 350‘যত্ন’ যা ঘনিষ্ঠতা ও প্রত্যক্ষ সহায়তা সংশ্লিষ্ট যা আত্মীয়তার সম্পর্ককে গঠন করে। সরকারি স্বাস্থ্যসেবা প্রদানকারী ও সাধারণ কর্মীরা তাদের মূর্ত ক্রিয়াকর্মের মাধ্যমে সেবা ও যত্নকে ঘিরে কিছু বিভাজন রেখা তৈরী করেনএখানে এই বিভাজনক্রিয়াটির মাধ্যমে স্বাস্থ্যসেবা প্রদানকালে এবং এর বাইরে রাষ্ট্র প্রপঞ্চটি গঠিত হয়ে থাকে, যা বৃহত্তর পরিসরে রাষ্ট্র ও ব্যক্তির সাথে রাষ্ট্রের সম্পর্ক নিয়ে কল্পনাসমূহকে ঘিরে পুঞ্জীভূত হয়। [যত্ন; রাষ্ট্র; মাতৃস্বাস্থ্য; সন্তান প্রসব; দূষণ; নৃতাত্ত্বিক গবেষণা; বাংলাদেশ] notes acknowledgments  this work was made possible thanks to funding awarded under the economic and social research council (esrc) postdoctoral research scheme of the united kingdom research and innovation (ukri) (grant number es/y010299/1). i would like to acknowledge my research assistant, tamanna majid, for her dedicated support and invaluable insights. i would also like to acknowledge jeevan sharma, lucy lowe, and ahmed ehsanur rahman for reviewing previous drafts of this article. i am particularly indebted to the health service providers and women who welcomed me into their lives, shared their stories with me, and allowed me to take part in their birth experiences. i obtained 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journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.2.06 cultural anthropology: debt and the american dream: the specter of debt and its invisible violence among irregular migrants from nepal 597 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 597-620, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.02 debt and the american dream: the specter of debt and its invisible violence among irregular migrants from nepal ina zharkevich king’s college london https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7199-5074 “i am a sold man” (ma becheko manche ho), said a young man in one of the peri-urban towns in nepal in the spring of 2017.1 he was summarizing for me the story of his irregular journey to the united states that spanned india, malaysia, singapore, the philippines, and mexico. the journey, undertaken in a group of twelve people, lasted ten months. this young man had just returned to nepal from mexico with a debt from a loan of $29,000.2 now he faced the predicament of paying back a loan inconceivable for nepali standards—and debt kept steadily increasing every month because of accruing interest. even those migrants who made it to the united states, only half of the group, would take years to clear their debt. during that time, all the migrants from the group would be trapped in a liminal situation, with the rhythms of debt repayment constituting an overbearing presence in their lives. whereas for those who made it to the united states the liminal situation had a distinct temporal horizon and a hopeful energy to it, for those deported without having reached their ultimate destination, debt became a burden that slowly exhausted not only material resources but also the life force and vitality of migrants and their families. for many of the failed migrants, another journey to the united states, with its promise of relatively high wages, became the only means to repay the debt incurred previously, making it 598increasingly difficult to distinguish between debt-driven and debt-financed migration, something on the rise globally (o’connell davidson 2013; stoll 2012). international migration from nepal is often celebrated for its significant contribution to the nation’s development: remittances comprise a third of nepal’s gdp. but there is a dark side to this success story: international migration from nepal thrives on debt. debt-migration is a global phenomenon, not limited to nepal: migrants from latin america to the united states (johnson and woodhouse 2018; stoll 2012), from central asia to russia (reeves 2022), from africa and asia to the middle east, europe, and the united states finance their journeys through debt (brachet and scheele 2022; reumert 2023). yet the case of nepal is peculiar because of the enormity of debt that individual migrants take on. international migrants from nepal have to pay anywhere between $2,000 and $60,000, depending on the destination country, with irregular journeys to the united states reaching up to $80,000. be they legal migrants to the gulf or irregular migrants to the united states,3 many of the migrants take years to repay the debt, if at all—for debt passes on in the family if the migrants die. much of the money remitted is used to repay the debt, with family members in the communities of origin making large contributions, not only to repaying the debt but also to supplying cheap labor for the destination countries—labor that can be exploited ruthlessly thanks to migrants’ precarious status. so acutely felt was the danger of becoming trapped in debt by young people in mid-western nepal that already in 2016 some of them said that they no longer wanted to go to the so-called small countries (sano desh), that is, the gulf states, malaysia, or india.4 they associated migrating to the latter with low-paid jobs and prolonged cycles of indebtedness although the initial loans were a dozen times smaller than the debts incurred by going to the united states. a new kind of migration rush settled in mid-western nepal: going to the so-called big countries (thulo desh)—the united states, australia, japan, canada, or europe—countries to which one’s migration meant to settle, not return.5 my interest in debt-migration began with my encounter with nepali undocumented migrants from the kham magar ethnic group, who borrowed anywhere from $30,000 to $60,000 to finance their perilous journeys via south america to the united states. by borrowing money at high interest rates (annual 36–50 percent), my research participants found themselves trapped in a cycle of debt even before leaving nepal. their departure was often postponed by brokers-cum-smugglers seeking higher profits (zharkevich 2021). their journeys could take up to a year of transit through multiple countries. migrants often 599ended up in one of the u.s. deportation centers. but despite the risk of violence en route and the risk of deportation, my interlocutors in nepal saw debt incurred to go to the so-called big countries as productive—it promised a better future, symbolized not so much by better earnings but rather a residence permit and a passport that would allow migrants to bring over their families. “there is no future [in nepal]” (bhabishya chhaina), my interlocutors told me, adding that “america is a dream” (america sapana nai ho). so to realize that dream, they agreed to suspend their lives, get into grave debt, mortgate ancestral land and houses, and not see their families for years on end. living for a utopian future, suspending their lives and taking big risks while searching for a better lot is nothing new for the inhabitants of mid-western nepal. many of my interlocutors from the kham magar ethnic group grew up in the heartland of the maoist base area—the districts of rolpa and rukum—during the civil war of 1996–2006 (de sales 2003; zharkevich 2019a). some of them joined the maoist movement during the war, ready to sacrifice their lives for maoist ideals (zharkevich 2009), only to become transnational migrants in search of the american dream in its wake. others became internal or international migrants during the war in an attempt to avoid both the maoists and the royal nepalese army. becoming a maoist and becoming an irregular migrant were both animated by powerful visions of a long-term future (guyer 2007). young people yearned for and sought more than social and economic mobility. their quest was for existential mobility as well—a sense that one was going “somewhere in life” (hage 2009). many of my interlocutors were better off financially than other villagers. many had been part of the maoist movement, held bachelor degrees, worked as salaried empoyees (teachers at school), and had successfully migrated to south korea and the gulf states in the past. some were simply second-generation migrants. they had high aspirations and dared to “dream big.” when in 2016 i returned to rolpa to explore the impact of the large-scale outmigration of men on the communities of origin, i was taken aback by the scale of debt-migration—first observed in the village of takasera in rukum, the town of ghorahi in dang, and later in the village of thabang in rolpa—and the fact that the villagers no longer wanted to go to the gulf states. at the time of my fieldwork in the spring months of 2016, 2017, and 2018, the districts of rukum, rolpa, and dang were no longer as remote as they were before the start of the maoist people’s war (1996–2006).6 connected to the rest of nepal through a network of roads, and to the rest of the world through a 600steady flow of labor migrants and remittances, a remarkable difference between the three fieldsites still existed. the northernmost village of takasera, known for its vibrant tradition of shamanism (oppitz 1981), transhumant herding, and early conversion to christianity (watters, watters, and watters 2011), was a proper transnational village, with hundreds of people who had made it to the united states by 2017. in the past, most households in takasera had flocks of sheep with at least sixty animals. yet by the 1990s, many villagers turned from transhumant herders into eager migrants: they sold the sheep, bought land in ghorahi, and started migrating in big numbers. the money earned by the first generation of migrants, who went mostly to the gulf states or south korea, was later invested into risky migratory journeys of the second generation to the united states and other “big countries.” the kham magars of takasera still practiced matrilaterial cross-cousin marriage (oppitz 1982) and had the strongest kinship network, one anchoring an informal banking mechanism. figure 1. fieldsites. map of nepal. at a time when many households in takasera were connected to at least three continents, with sons living in australia, europe and the united states, the village of thabang, hailed as the maoist wartime capital, had only three or four migrants in japan and two migrants en route to the united states in 2017. within five years, there were close to fifty thabangis in the united states and europe, with more thabangis on the way. ghorahi, on the other hand, was a peri-urban town and a migration hub, situated in the plainlands of nepal. increasing numbers of kham magar from takasera and thabang had migrated there during the civil war and after. it was bustling with activity: brokers sold 601journeys to faraway destinations; young people loitered around waiting for departures; young men enrolled in the british recruitment training centers, hoping to join the u.k. army. they also enrolled in korean language classes, hoping to go to south korea. in the meanwhile, wives and children of successful migrants waited for remittances from abroad, often to pay them right out again to return debt. embodied debt: or why do debts beg to be returned? despite its pervasiveness in public discourse, debt was something of a taboo theme during my fieldwork in mid-western nepal in the mid-2010s. people loved to talk about how much brokers charged. but they did not want to talk about their own debts or their own moneylenders. debt cases were common in the local court. debt was a common cause of quarrels in transnational families. but the details of all these cases and quarrels remained shrouded in mystery. in many ways, debt was invisible. however, as i was doing fieldwork, i started noticing signs of debt and its presence in the lives of migrants who “carry” the burden of debt (rin bokne). at the time, i had not linked all the phenomena. wives of soon-to-be migrants or those who had already left complained of tension and took medication; soon-to-be migrants were possessed on their journeys abroad; migrants’ wives joined christian churches in significant numbers. indebted migrants disappeared abroad, or disappeared in nepal after returning from an unsuccessful journey. in some cases, indebted migrants committed suicide. one young man withered away within months, with symptoms locally interpreted as a spirit possession by some villagers. this was embodied debt. it reshaped the bodies and subjectivities of migrants and their families. in exploring the material effects of debt on the body and soul of debtors and their families, my analysis draws on a rich body of work from medical anthropology on how purportedly abstract structures of domination get under the skin, altering people’s bodies, impacting their health and well-being, and transforming their subjectivites (scheper-hughes 1992; fassin 2007; farmer 2004; han 2012). in so doing, i shift focus from more common approaches to debt that emphasize political economy, the social embeddedness of debt, or the power relations underpinning debt relations (james 2021; guérin, kumar, and venkatasubramanian 2023; schuster 2016; graeber 2012). i focus instead on being in debt as an ontological state with phenomenological dimensions. despite the consistently positive evaluation of credit and its impact on creditors and the negative evaluation of debt and its impact on debtors across 602various ethnographic contexts (peebles 2010), not all forms of debt are the same (roitman 2003; guérin 2014). as shown by isabelle guérin (2014, s40), good debts “release, liberate, and enrich,” whereas bad debts “enslave, subjugate, and improverish.” i bring this notion of “good debt” together with janet roitman’s (2003) notion of productive debt to shift focus from good debt’s “liberating or enriching” potential (guérin 2014). for my interlocutors, the productivity of debt did not only concern debt’s capacity to affirm sociability (roitman 2003, 212). it also concerned opportunities for a better future for migrants and their families, often envisioned as family reunification in the “big country.” productive debt had a peculiar relationship with time: it “provided confidence in the future” (roitman 2003, 223). it gave certainty. productive debt shrank with time and fostered hope in what is to come. it added vitality to the borrower and their kin alike. unproductive debt, by contrast, accumulated with time. it consumed resources in the present and contributed nothing to the future. unproductive debt weighed heavily on debtors, foreclosed the future, and killed hope. when debts multiplied and became so huge as to exceed what was possible to repay, they became destructive. the cycle of credit and debt froze, circulation stopped. debt piled up on the individual bodies of the debtors and, as will be shown further, on the social body of whole families. one could argue that monetary debt of the unproductive type made itself present through invisible, slow violence: bodily affliction, exhaustion, anxiety, and dis-ease were its visible signs. unproductive debt came to haunt debtors and their family members. it was like being possessed: such debtors lost weight, life force, and agency. my interlocutors used the term tension to describe their state of un-ease and anxiety when plagued by debt. similar to the way nepalis talk about eating money (paisa khane), one could argue that the negative side of money, debt, eats people in ways not dissimilar from the ways in which, the local belief goes, witches (boksi) eat people (or the layers of their soul), depriving them of life force. for many of the kham magars, the depletion of the life force and vitality is linked to the loss of parts of the soul (which is partible), caused by the agents of the invisible world—with the two, the soul and the body, being linked.7 debt, this article argues, can become one of the agents of the invisible world. indeed, while my interlocutors usually used the expression “perish or sink because of debt” (rinma dubne), they said that debt “ate” (consumed) the person (rinle kaidiyo) when talking about cases of suicide caused by indebtedness. given the slow violence of unproductive debt, it might not be incidental that in some contexts people are averse to borrowing. as noted by emilia ferraro (2004, 88), people in quichua communities in ecuador are reluctant to 603borrow because they believe that with borrowing, pain grows. according to the local belief, after dying, debtors who have not fulfilled their obligations, transform into roaming souls until their relatives repay the monetary debt. debt, thus, becomes an agent of haunting. responding to david graeber’s (2012, 3) provocation on why debts need (or need not, in his view) be returned, this article seeks to demonstrate that monetary debt, operating within the household domain, begs to be returned because of what it does to people: it turns into a specter haunting people or “eating” them as surely as people “eat” money in nepal, leading to cases of spirit possession, tension, and even suicides. journeys that exceed the route: the temporality of debt and its slow violence much has been written about the ardous nature of a migrant’s journey and the suffering it entails (de león 2015; andersson 2014; achtnich 2022, 2023; vogt 2018). but for many of my interlocutors, the journey began long before embarking on the route. the journey began at the moment of procuring debt. from this moment, time became a ticking bomb: every month of waiting for departure or being delayed en route increased the sum owed. the physical violence of the journey—the setups between police and smugglers, the difficult travels through the jungle in colombia, being driven for twenty-seven hours in small vans—was manageble. worse was the debt. the worries of debt preceded the journey and extended after its close. procuring a loan, surviving multiple delays in departure, facing extortion along the way, needing to trouble kin back home for yet more money along every leg of the journey. many of my interlocutors from mid-western nepal had survived a decade of civil war. they had traveled to the gulf states or malaysia. but this, the down way (tallo batho)—the term the migrants used to refer to the journey—felt more dangerous than life in the jungle during the civil war.8 debt outlived and exceeded in its dangers the physical journey itself. ki bachne, ki rinme dubne—one will be saved or die because of debt—was the constant refrain of migrants and their family members in mid-western nepal. the temporality of debt defined the lives of irregular migrants, taking hold of them. if the money is not returned in three years, the sum doubles, and it is on double the sum that the new interest rate must be paid: in three years one lakh ($1,000) turns into two lakhs.9 multiple temporalities are entwined with this debt: the temporality of the journey and of the court process deciding on possible deportation, of the visa process and green card and asylum applications (for details, see shrestha 2019). 604the effects of debt proved so insidious because they were prolonged and distributed over time, in some cases becoming chronic by lasting for years. debt exerted, using the term coined by rob nixon (2013), “slow violence”—something that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,” “incremental and accretive” (nixon 2013, 2), often not viewed as violence at all. crossing the u.s.-mexico border carrying little more than a heavy burden of debt and hope for a better life, my interlocutors quickly saw their dreams turned into a harsh reality (sapana bipana jastai bhayo). they spent long months in immigration detention centers, with only rare opportunities to talk to family back in nepal. they were obliged to pay the bond to the authorities via the so-called local sponsor, who had to be found among kin or nepalis in the united states, many of whom acted as brokers and charged market prices for the service. after release from the immigration detention center, they started working for long hours—up to twelve hours per day, six days per week—to pay off loans as quickly as possible. thus the cherished american dream turned into a nightmare: there was “no america even in america” (žižek 2015). “money does not grow on trees in the usa,” said my interlocutors, and paying off their debt would take years. yet despite the suffering along the way and the indebtedness, theirs was a productive debt that guaranteed that life still had more in store for irregular migrants and their families who had taken on risk. en route to the american dream: the productivity of debt and the promise of a better future i met natan on a cold and sunny morning in boston in october 2017.10 it was four years since he had reached the united states. his physical journey—the transit through multiple countries covering india, thailand, cambodia, laos, brazil, bolivia, and all northern latin american countries—took eighteen months. but his journey was far from over. “having spent twenty months [keeps changing the number of months during the interview] en route and having lived for four years in the usa, my debt is not about to finish any time soon.” he had paid more than $35,000 for the journey itself, and natan still had between $17,000 and $18,000 to repay. for natan, the journey’s end point was not just about repaying the debt but also about getting a green card that would allow his wife and two children to join him. unlike some of the other interlocutors who spent three to six months en route to the united states, natan had spent eighteen months suspended along the 605way, in a state of limbo, uncertain when and whether he would reach his final destination. furthermore, natan had to return to nepal after deportation from mexico and start the journey all over again, because crossing the border into the united states and getting a job were the only conceivable ways for him to start returning his debt. natan described the shame (laj) and tension—the expression many nepalis use to refer to anxiety—he experienced on having had to return to nepal with a huge debt on his hands, and no prospect of repaying it: “i have been cheated, my life has been broken, and i have lost all the money” (ma phasyo, jindagi tutyo, paisa harayo). instead of going to see his family after nine months on a treacherous journey, natan decided to hide in the suburbs of kathmandu. staying in a small hotel room in the capital and pretending to be en route somewhere in latin america, he had long conversations with his wife, asking her to borrow yet more money. he could not tell her that he had been deported—she would not be able to endure it. taking on more debt was the only way to reach the united states and get his family out of debt. “one could not go and meet one’s wife. one had either to die or reach the usa,” he explained. the connection between debt incurred to finance the journey and death was quite real. natan’s decision to temporarily disappear in kathmandu could be interpreted as self-imposed social death. such cases were far from uncommon in nepal. i heard of migrants who never returned from malaysia. others stopped contacting their families because of intense feelings of shame and helplessness. whereas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in britain, the institution of debtor prison allowed some debtors to “use their bodies as economic collateral for debts” (gregory 2012, 434), in nineteenthand even twentieth-century nepal, people became bonded laborers or slaves if they could not repay debt. in many cases debt led to life-long slavery institutionalized as the kamaiya system, in existence in nepal until 2000 (bajracharya 2022). while both debtors’ prisons and the kamaiya system have been abolished, the relationship between debt and body remains, though in a different form. debt was embodied. it altered the presence of the person in the world, with self-imposed disappearance or social death being one of the outcomes, tension and dis-ease another. natan spoke to me about what debt does to people. he was thinking back about how he hid from his wife and mother while desparate to see them. he noted that some people simply committed suicide after their dream of getting to the united states failed and they could not manage to return the debt. the pressure was often so high that people went mad (baulhaunchhan). natan recalled the story of someone from western nepal who, having spent nine months on the way, was deported back to nepal and committed suicide by eating poison. 606kinship networks made natan’s journey possible, as was common with many other kham magar migrants. he received help or an interest-free loan of $10,000 from his father’s sister and the son of his father’s brother (kakako chora) for the first leg of the journey. when local-level brokers in latin america paused natan’s journey by locking him in a hotel room and demanding additional payment from him to continue his journey, natan paid the smugglers through additional loans solicited by his kin in a himalayan village. natan’s mobility and his journey to the united states via latin america depended on his kin in the himalayan village, even when they were thousands of miles away. the constant flow of cash that went toward paying smugglers was in fact debt on the other side of the world. thus, to amass the sum of $30,000, many of my interlocutors had to take loans from many people. some of these were kin acting as moneylenders and charging a high interest rate. others were kin who lent money without interest and without a deadline for repayment. borrowing and lending (lin-din) is very common among the kham magars, who have traditionally practiced cross-cousin marriage. the boundaries between lenders and borrowers were often blurred. the same person could simultaneously be both borrower and lender (for similar observations in south africa and china see james 2021; chu 2010, 168). with borrowers and lenders entwined in relations of kinship, the compulsion to repay loans of all types was high. still plagued by debt four years after his arrival and counting the days until it could be repaid, natan nevertheless started making plans to bring his wife and daughter to the united states. although he would not manage to quickly settle his debt, natan’s debt could be considered productive. not only was it steadily getting repaid but it also gave confidence and hope in the future. this was not the case for irregular migrants whose journeys failed and who, on having been deported from the united states, returned to the village with a huge debt on their hands—debt further increasing day by day. it was in these situations that the materiality of debt became palpable and debt turned into a specter haunting migrants, leading to the gradual exhaustion of vitality and, in some cases, to slow death. haunted by debt back in the himalayas: failed journeys, tension, and lost futures debt is at first glance immaterial. but its presence in the lives of people becomes overbearing when debts remain to be cleared, and they increase with time. in nepal as elsewhere, people speak of debt as a weight that one has to 607carry (rin bokne). the bigger the debt, the heavier the load. as noted by kiran, a former maoist activist, a migrant first to south korea and then to the united states: “once i fell asleep with a calculator on my chest. i kept asking myself how much should i earn [to return the debt], how long it would take me to earn, how much is the percent to pay.” in kiran’s case, he barely owed $3,000, but he had borrowed it during the civil war, when money was more scarce and opportunities to earn were not easy to come by. for kiran, thoughts about debt repayment became obsessive. those thoughts came to possess him: might we say that debt possesses the people who have no means for its repayment? in the case of mid-western nepal, the haunting presence of debt was akin to that of malevolent ghosts, spirits, or witches: it gradually ate people, depleting their life force and strength. many of my interlocutors whose journeys failed suffered from a loss of appetite and sleep, turning into shadows of their former selves. the idea that debt eats or possesses people is thus both an emic expression and my analytical move based on long-term participant observation, which included three cases of spirit possession among returned and soon-to-be migrants. it is also based on recent scholarship that approaches haunting as a process or event dissolving the boundaries between the past and present (good, chiovenda, and rahimi 2022), with thoughts about the past plaguing those in the present (pozzi 2021, 14). yet it is not only the past that can haunt: as noted by the cultural theorist mark fisher (quoted in in pozzi 2021, 14), “lost futures” can haunt as viscerally as memories from the past. this is especially so when “lost futures” are based not only on an investment of the imagination or “dreaming” but also on significant financial resources in the form of debt, as is the case of irregular migrants searching for a better future. discussing the haunted properties in milan after the eviction of debtors, giacomo pozzi (2021, 16) notes that “debt . . . is an active agent of haunting” that “produces ghosts” and through which “abusive systems of power make themselves known.” for pozzi, the ghosts of debt, manifested in the traces of the past, become a “symbol of social imaginary stuck in an ambiguous and nostalgic temporality”—“a no more, and not yet” (pozzi 2021, 16). drawing on pozzi’s ideas, i suggest that rather than producing ghosts or constituting a symbol, debt itself acts in a ghost-like manner, consuming the vitality of debtors who cannot return the debt and do not see any prospect of managing to do so. consider the case of pirman. i met him in kathmandu when he was staying with his ritual relatives in an attempt to get back thousands of dollars that he 608had borrowed back in the village to pay for what turned out to be a fake canadian visa when he was stranded in a hotel in mumbai, waiting for the start of his journey to canada.11 he was part of a group of twenty-three people, eleven of whom had paid $16,000 for the fake visa, while the remaining twelve people paid sums ranging from $5,000 to $8,000. before entrusting his life to brokers, who turned out to be scammers, pirman had worked in dubai. on his return from the gulf, he had opened a clothing shop in the village, but failed to find the happiness he sought. he wanted a better life, one that would guarantee a better future for his wife and children. when the news came about the prospect of going to canada, he made a quick decision. he incurred a debt from his brothers and villagers, at an annual rate of 36 percent. when he realized that the whole scheme was a sham, pirman was afraid to return to the village because of the shame. already slim by nature, pirman lost more weight, lacked appetite and sleep, and remarked that it was the “end of his dream” (sapana tutyo). with such a huge debt, there was no longer any question of dreams or a long-term horizon, just a present with its sleepless nights, meals that turned tasteless, and an overbearing demand for debt repayment. a clear inverse relationship existed between vitality and indebtedness. here it proves helpful to think with marcel mauss (2016, 118), and how he claimed that the word mana in polynesia referred not only to the magical force of the individual but also to their honor, authority, and wealth. here, i read mauss as arguing for how wealth, broadly conceived, is inseparable from the vital force or glow that emanates from a person.vitality can be entangled with one’s material possessions and the prestige produced in exchange. my interlocutors trapped in debt were clearly losing the glow. while mana is not a term used by my interlocutors in nepal, they do have a notion that might be used to refer to the strength of one’s vitality: life force (pran) or soul (purush) (zharkevich 2024). when a person falls ill, my interlocutors would visit biomedical doctors. yet some of kham magars would also call shamans to restore the integrity of the soul (purush) and to return the layers that had been lost, eaten by witches, or, as this article suggests, lost to tension or the state of being in debt, which “eats” people along with other agents of the invisible world, such as bhoksi and pret (spirits of the dead). the effects of debt are visible not only on the debtor’s body but also on the social body of the whole family, pointing toward the sociality and distributed nature of debt (schuster 2016). nabin is one of the people who, at the time of fieldwork in 2017, was in the process of going abroad—one of the thousands of young people who could be stuck in the process for years before embarking on a 609journey. having spent three years abroad in malaysia and having worked for a couple of years for an ngo in nepal, he decided to go to japan on the so-called business visa, hoping eventually to bring his wife and two children with him. while his friends’ visas all arrived, nabin’s did not. after two years of waiting in kathmandu and paying different brokers, his debt had grown to between $17,000 and 18,000. in the meantime, his wife was working in a family shop in the village—from early morning to late evening—selling anything from sweets to rice, flip-flops, and telephone cards. always smiling and seemingly cheerful, rinu in fact was suffering from pain. in 2017, she told me that she felt a lot of discomfort in the stomach and head, which the doctors diagnosed as depression, prescribing two sets of pills, one each for the morning and evening. she had experienced the first major episode of illness when it became clear that her husband would not be able to leave for japan and that his debt was growing. at that time, rinu started wandering around the village. she could not sleep: she would walk at night, hoping it would calm her down. it was at that time that she started taking medication. rinu would use the term tension to complain about recurrent pain in the stomach and pain in her head. this emic english term, tension, is often used by nepalis and south asians to describe the state of un-ease or dis-ease, excessive thinking and worrying that is often accompanied by various physical symptoms (for india, see simpson 2023). tension is a local idiom that describes distress and a distinct set of bodily and emotional sensations: headaches, bodyaches, heat in the body, and an overabundance of thoughts. students use this term to describe their state before sitting exams, just as migrants trapped in debt do. rinu explained the term tension as an inability to stop thinking: one small thought would lead to many others, including thoughts of suicide. nabin’s parents, including his father who was himself a moneylender, were also affected, with the usually cheerful mother not looking quite herself. as rinu explained, the whole family was returning the debt: the salaries of her in-laws, of her sister-in-law, and even the husband of the sister-in-law went toward repayment. debt literally bound family members to each other. murphy halliburton (2005) argues that in recent years, the idiom of tension has displaced possession as a way of talking about distress and malaise in south asia. while this is certainly true—with tension being the core local idiom of talking about distress—spirit possession exists alongside it. someone who describes their situation as that of tension might be thought to be possessed in other cases—with shaking and trembling making for some of the signs of 610possession (speaking in voices is usually taken as a clear sign of spirit possession). while people might not necessarily use the idiom of spirit possession, they would acknowledge the ontological possibility of being possessed by deities and other agents of the invisible world (lecomte-tilouine and sales 2024). they would call shamans in the hope that the former might help heal those suffering from tension arising not only because of debt but also because of the compulsion, or obligation, to migrate. the gender of debt: male migrants, spirit possession, and death the burden of debt often concealed yet another burden: the pressure on young men by their families—often wives and mothers—to migrate at all costs and provide for the family (zharkevich 2019b). labor migration has been shown as key in constituting dominant masculinities in contemporary nepal, with the ability to send remittances being one of its core components (maycock 2017). debt, too, is constitutive of specific forms of masculinity associated with migration culture (on debt and femininities, see guérin, kumar, and venkatasubramanian 2023). while international migration in nepal has been shown as a pathway to freedom away from the tightly knit kinship networks and rigid structures of rural communities (sharma 2018; maycock 2017), many male migrants also see it as an obligation to perform toward their kin (bruslé 2018, 216–20). indeed, i heard this narrative often during my fieldwork, but i also witnessed signs that even the men who framed their narrative as choice were in fact under significant pressure to migrate. the pressure came not just from kin but also from the culture of migration in nepal, which has become the norm. thus, like debt, migration, too, exerts violence on young men from rural areas of nepal. many people have little choice but to migrate, and allegedly they can no longer voice their opposition, apart from becoming possessed or falling into silence. i found striking evidence for this phenomenon in the cases of spirit possession in soon-to-be migrants i encountered in 2017. in the past it was more common for women to go into spontaneous spirit possession and thus have an opportunity to voice concerns otherwise not talked about (gellner 1994). during my fieldwork, i observed two cases of soon-to-be migrants getting possessed by deities or ancestral spirits—trembling, shaking, and speaking in foreign voices. in both cases, the migrants’ departures had been delayed and their obligations were put on hold, at least temporarily. in one case, the recurrent possession by the spirit of a deceased ancestor shaman intervened with the migrant’s attempts 611to go to the united states. only after having become initiated as a shaman and after years of being dis-eased did this person manage to migrate successfully. his successful initiation as a shaman (which put an end to involuntary spirit possession) went hand in hand with his success in reaching the united states (zharkevich 2024). in two other cases, young men were possessed by deities as they were just about to leave nepal. one man was en route to india, passing through ghorahi, when he was “touched” by the local deity. the other was just about to leave for malaysia, which he later admitted to me was his mother’s wish rather than his own. after repeated bouts of possession, the crisis in these two cases was resolved by the building of two shrines, as demanded by the deities speaking through the possessed young men. exploring the stories of several shrines emerging within a span of a few months would take us too far afield, and these stories warrant a separate essay. what is important here is that both young people experiencing spirit possession belonged to the category of soon-to-be migrants who could not withstand their families’ pressure. the classical functionalist explanation of spirit possession indicates that it is often people from marginalized groups in society, mainly women, who get possessed (lewis 2002, 135–39; ong 2010). however, in contemporary in nepal, the pressure on men to migrate is so high that young men have emerged as a new category of marginalized people who canonot voice their 612objections to the dominant culture. indeed, after the maoist civil war, young women in eastern nepal were possessed in significant numbers, with one of the explanations being that they were protesting violence committed by the “maoists, the army, or males in general” (ghimire 2018, 175). in the meantime, in contemporary nepal some young men have gone into spontaneous possession—a phenomenon we might interpret as a protest against the harsh demands placed on them by society. figure 2. one of the shrines built in ghorahi after episodes of soon-to-be migrants’ spirit possession in the spring of 2017. photo by ina zharkevich, 2018. not just aspiring migrants feel under huge pressure. the returning migrants suffer from debt and the difficulty of readjusting to life in a himalayan village afer being abroad. in contrast to the above cases, where both the young people and observers believed that they were witnessing a case of spirit possession by deities, in the case of samjhan, described below, interpretations differed. some saw the symptoms of shaking and trembling as a sign of possession. samjhan himself pointed toward tension caused by debt. i had known samjhan since 2011, when he returned to the village to visit his parents from iraq, where he had worked around one of the u.s. military bases.12 his father then gave him an ultimatum: if samjhan wanted to go abroad again, he had to marry. the elderly parents needed someone to help take care of the household and the fields. samjhan did get married and left shortly afterward. several years later, he returned to the village, this time for good, and started his own business: he took out a sizable loan to buy a tractor. his father, known as a moneylender in the village, felt distraught that his son had never managed to earn enough money abroad and was unable to pay back all the money that had been given to him by his parents to finance his trips. the additional loan for a tractor did not turn out to be productive: something was wrong with the machine. from a young man beaming with strength and vitality, samjhan had turned into a shadow the last time i saw him in the spring of 2017. he had lost weight and started drinking to be able to fall asleep. his father, close to eighty, also seemed very different: he was no longer distraught about his son’s debt or the debts of other debtors who never intended to return what they owed. all he worried about was the health of his son. the previously vibrant household was falling apart. the last time i saw samjhan, his family had called a shaman to restore the integrity of samjhan’s soul and to heal the dis-ease that did not respond to biomedical treatment. samjhan displayed all the signs of what locals would have described as possession by malevolent spirits. yet samjhan, while not opposing his parents’ intervention, noted that he knew exactly the reason for his malaise: it was debt (linko-dinko kura) and the impossibility of its return. instead of being 613cleared with time and becoming productive, his debt grew ever bigger—until it was too much for samjhan to bear. in our last conversation, samjhan declared that he had never wanted huge sums of money, just regular work. but there was no regular work in nepal. it was the last time i saw him. he died shortly afterward. figure 3. samjhan’s father, baje, walking through the fields next to his house, thabang. photo taken in the spring of 2016, one year before his son’s death. photo by ina zharkevich. conclusion: unproductive debt as an agent of haunting so, is the state of being in debt similar to that of being possessed or being haunted? can we think about unproductive debt as one of the agents of the invisible world on par with deities and spirits who can disturb, haunt, and possess? samjhan was not the only person who over the years turned into a shadow of his former self. not only were the young men in debt getting smaller or thinner but they were also suffering from a small heart-mind (sano man), that is, they had a propensity to worry that exhausted their life force.the worries of the failed migrants trapped in debt would increase exponentially because they had close kin who, while supporting the young men, also expected them to migrate, to provide, and to create a better future. so not only was debt relational in the sense that it established the relationship between the creditor and debtor but also between the debtor and their kin (schuster 2016). debt tied them into a close bond of relatedness from which there was no escape apart from its repayment, the alternative being—dis-ease, tension, social death, or death itself. 614“lost futures,” in the case of deported migrants, haunted them as viscerally as unproductive debts. the two were closely related: debt always turned unproductive in the case of deportation. unlike in the classical definition of debt, where a debtor borrows “speculative resources from his/her own future and transforms them into concrete resources to be used in the present” (anderlini and sabourian 1992; summarized in peebles 2010, 227), my interlocutors in mid-western nepal got nothing in exchange for a loan in the now. instead, they received just a promise of a better future and the nebulous hope that they would be among the lucky ones to cross into the united states or find “their america” elsewhere. when their dreams of reaching the united states failed, migrants found themselves haunted by “lost futures,” oversaturated not only by emotional but also financial investments in the form of huge debts. debt appears to constitute a quintessential agent of haunting because of its inbuilt capacity to dissolve the boundary not only between the past, present, and future (peebles 2010) but also between the mind, soul, and body. when loans accumulated instead of getting repaid, loans piled up on the body and debt became destructive. anxiety about debt repayment slowly consumed the vitality or life force (pran) of debtors. the violence of unproductive debt proved slow and invisible: it was the gradual onset of un-ease, starting with anxiety and tension, often leading to dis-ease later. in nepal, debt of the unproductive kind materialized as a void or absence: of life force, vitality, health; of the migrant family member that should have returned yet remained absent even by phone; of the house that should have been repaired or built anew yet was slowing decaying instead. the presence of debt could be characterized as a slow withering away of life force, well-being, houses, and persons themselves, some of whom chose social death over the shame of facing their village community as a debtor. the ways in which debt materialized across space, in transnational families i studied—with debt having effects not only on the bodies and souls of debtors but also their family members—points to a distinct sociality of debt. in nepal, it was rarely an individual phenomenon, but rather distributed within the social or moral body of the whole family or kin relations that mattered (schuster 2016; ferraro 2004; guérin, kumar, and venkatasubramanian 2023). rather than being an individual affair, irregular journeys, too, constituted a collective endeavor—a life project with a long-term horizon, with whole families embroiled in the journey and de facto experiencing a limbo state. the limbo state was defined not by the length of the journey by rather by the temporality of the debt repayment, which could last for years, binding recently arrived migrants to their communities of origin and to the kin located thousands of miles away. 615by focusing on the centrality of debt in defining irregular migrants’ life trajectories, this article de-individualizes and de-exoticizes irregular migrant journeys. it also shows that debt, despite its perils, can simultaneously turn productive and hopeful, thus explaining the rationality of what otherwise might be seen as the reckless financial behavior of my interlocutors. their decision to take on such big loans and to commit to such risky journeys for a nebulous american dream cannot be understood if one looks only at short-term cycles of exchange (parry and bloch 1989). in the case of kham magar irregular migrants, getting into debt pertained to a long-term cycle of exchange and social reproduction. families or parts of the kinship group made a huge sacrifice of financial and vital resources in the present in exchange for a better future exemplified by the american dream. inasmuch as the american dream formed part of the collective imagination of leaving nepali villages, often perceived as “rural voids” that held nothing in store for their inhabitants (driessen 2018), debt became a collective sacrifice of migrants and their families in exchange for the dream of a radically different future. the violence of debt could be survived if a better future was in sight, and if the hope remained active that the debt would turn productive in the end. when i returned for a short period of fieldwork in 2023, nabin and rinu were doing well: nabin had made it to the united states and become a successful chef; rinu was preparing to join him. the tension was gone. nabin’s mother and his sister were their former radiant selves and their house was full of guests. rinu was joking, as in the days of her youth. she kept her plans to join nabin in the united states somewhat secret to help ensure it would all go well. unlike the debt of failed migrants that led to the closure of the future and the void in the present, one that slowly but steadily consumed migrants and their families, the debt of migrants who made it to the united states, however exploitative and risky, produced social relations, future possibilities, and hope beyond the here and now. abstract drawing on research with irregular migrants from nepal who borrow up to $60,000 to reach the united states, this article explores what i call the invisible slow violence of debt. by focusing on how debt is embodied in cases of spirit possession, tension, and dis-ease among migrants and their families—the article demonstrates how debt can become a haunting specter that exhausts the vitality of debtors who cannot pay off loans. by following cases in which debts multiplied and became so huge as to become impossible to repay, i show how unproductive debts became destructive and haunted 616failed migrants. i contrast these unproductive debts with the debts of migrants who made it to the united states and were, however exploitative, productive of social relations and future possibilities beyond the here and now. debt not only begs to be returned: it can turn into a specter haunting people, or “eating” them out, leading to bodily affliction, dis-ease, social death, or death itself. [debt; body; haunting; invisible slow violence; spirit possession; migration; nepal] notes acknowledgments  i would like to express my gratitude to everyone who helped me in the process of writing this essay. the discussion of an early draft at the anthropology writing group at the university of oxford gave me much-needed inspiration for working further on the manuscript; thank you to rosalie allain, gwen burnyeat, bhawani buswala, and matthew porges for a stimulating and joyful discussion. i am grateful to inge daniels, miriam driessen, and david gellner for reading the later version of the manuscript and for providing helpful suggestions, and to iliyana angelova for advice. the article benefited from the review and editorial process at cultural anthropology. i would like to thank the reviewers for carefully (re)reading the manuscript and for providing comments that allowed me to sharpen the arguments. i am grateful to the editorial collective at cultural andthropology, and especially to julia elyachar for her generosity on so many levels and for her care with language, which taught me a lot about the craft of writing. finally, i am indebted to my interlocutors who have patiently answered my questions over so many years and shared their life stories with me. this article is based on research supported by the leverhulme early career fellowship and the john fell oxford university press fund. 1. this article draws on fieldwork i conducted in the spring months of 2016, 2017, 2018, and in june of 2023 in nepal, as well as on short fieldtrips to the united states (2017) and portugal (2024). it also draws on my long-term engagement with the kham magar ethnic group in the district of rolpa since 2008, and year-long fieldwork in 2011, conducted in the former maoist capital during the maoist civil war (zharkevich 2019a). 2. all dollar equivalents relate to the usd rate at the time being described. 3. i use the term irregular migrants to refer only to the mode of entry into the country, i.e., without papers. many of my participants later legalized their status, if only temporarily. 4. the distinction between “small” and “big countries” is rooted not only in the wealth of prospective destinations but also in the symbolic logic that places some destinations higher in the hierarchy of countries than others. for more detail see fischer 2024. 5. while indebtedness in nepal is not unique to migration, and while there are many indebted people who are not migrants at all, the case-study described here focuses specifically on the debt-migration nexus of an extreme kind. for the portrayal of the suffering caused by debt in rural nepal, see the novel by lil bahadur chettri called basain (2007). 6. due to the longitudinal nature of my fieldwork, i knew many of my research participants from fieldwork in 2008 and 2011 and therefore enjoyed a certain level of trust, which eased the process of meeting irregular migrants both in nepal and in the united states. in ghorahi and the united states, i was introduced to many participants by their kin whon i had first met in rolpa and rukum. by following transnational or, rather, translocal family networks across these three sites in nepal and several localities in the united states, i focused on transnational families as a “single dicontinous site,” rather than on multiple sites where my research participants were based (hage 2005). i designed my study in such a way that in the united states i would meet the kin of the research participants who i had met previously in rolpa, rukum, and dang. by focusing on understanding the dynamic within transnational families composed 617of multiple generations, i prioritized depth and connection between receiving and sending contexts over the quantity of research participants. all conversations across fieldsites, apart from in portugal, where some of my participants spoke english, were conducted in nepali. 7. for a more detailed account of the kham magar concept of the 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way of being young in nepal: the idea of maoist youth and dreams of a new man.” studies in nepali history and society 14, no. 1: 67–107. 2019a maoist people’s war and the revolution of everyday life in nepal. cambridge: cambridge university press. 2019b “money and blood: remittances as a substance of relatedness in transnational families in nepal.” american anthropologist 121, no. 4: 884–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13316 2021 “‘we are in the process’: the exploitation of hope and the political economy of waiting among the aspiring irregular migrants in nepal.” environment and planning d: society and space 39, no. 5: 827–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820954877 2024 “reluctant shamans: on the limits of human agency and the power of partible souls among the kham magars of nepal.” in encounters with the invisible: revisiting spirit possession in the himalayas, edited by m. lecomte-tilouine and a. de sales, 58–76. london: routledge. žižek, slavoj 2015 “the non-existence of norway.” london review of books, september 9. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 4, pp. 597–620, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.4.02 cultural anthropology: on exile and postcolonial nationhood in rwanda and burundi 519 cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 519-542, issn 0886-7356. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.06 on exile and postcolonial nationhood in rwanda and burundi natacha nsabimana the university of chicago https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9911-0204 exile, edward said (2002, 137) wrote, is “strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience . . . its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” for said, this sadness begins with the fracture between individuals and their homes. the impossibility of return in the present and the memory of this rift make exile “terrible to experience.” in this essay, i ask what happens at the collective level if return becomes actualized. does the experience of exile have any bearing on the exiled once they have returned? what if this return is not itself totally secure, but repeated across time and generations? what kind of political communities are created under conditions of anticipated flight? these questions constitute the core of my research inquiries. my preoccupations concern not so much geographies of origins (where people are exiled from) but postcolonial serialized geographies of exile. that is, sociopolitical landscapes, in the aftermath of european colonialism, predicated on a fundamental tension between the imagined stability of a supposedly native place/land/geography and the fear of losing said place/land/geography. these questions emerge from ethnographic fieldwork i have been conducting in rwanda for the past decade, on the memory and narrativization of the genocide against tutsi in 1994. in july 2019, four years after my initial fieldwork, 520i returned to rwanda. there were thousands of burundian refugees scattered throughout the country in cities, towns, and refugee camps. my rwandan interlocutors repeatedly asked me, “why are you still talking to us? talk to them.” they reasoned that rwanda’s turmoil lay in the past, but burundi’s was now. most rwandans i talked and worked with, however, were also deeply familiar with exile, having experienced it themselves or through family members. despite the differences between the political histories of rwanda and burundi, in both countries, during most of the seven decades since independence, different groups have faced violent expulsion from the political community. this recurring political violence, often articulated in terms of ethnicity or race, always occurs in conjunction with massive displacement. i focus on these rhythms of displacement and the kinds of political landscapes they produce. put simply, i approach the question of political violence and its aftermath through the experience and repetitiveness of exile, instead of political identity. focusing on familiarity with exile reveals understudied dimensions of postcolonial national fashioning. for most of rwanda and burundi’s postcolonial period, different political groups have organized while in exile for a forceful return, sometimes successfully. part of what it means to understand oneself as a burundian or rwandan political subject today—regardless of ethnic affiliation—entails reckoning with this history and present of past or anticipated displacement. i show this by focusing on the movements of two interlocutors: muzehe, a rwandan who returned to rwanda from exile in the democratic republic of congo (drc) in the mid 1990s, and claude, a burundian who escaped to rwanda from burundi in 2015. two decades after muzehe’s return to rwanda, his town neighbored the biggest refugee camp for burundians (like claude) fleeing persecution in 2015. claude and muzehe’s movements are not unique. thousands of burundians and rwandans have for decades followed similar exilic routes. their paths are analytically useful precisely because they emblematize the constitutive relationship between postcolonial nationhood and the repetition of exile. the postcolonial here designates a temporality characteristically political and inaugurated by euro-colonialism, in which subjects have become intimately attuned to collective flight. this political predicament and its corollary movements across time and space highlight an undertheorized question in research about rwanda and burundi: how do we understand nationalist imaginaries formed in or around exile? to comprehend political violence, in my view, we need not only look through the prisms of identity and law but also grapple with political spaces in which exclusion is anticipated and repeated and the political 521boundaries of the nation redrawn and contested. understanding postcolonial nationhood requires considering these movements as significant factors that constitute a political imaginary both haunted and presaged by exile. this history of displacement indexes a larger “discursive field” between events and memories of them (scott 1991, 278). this layered field is what is at stake politically and semiotically. it is a field in which collectives have been assigned ethnic and racial categories. these markings—which franz fanon called overdeterminations from the outside—point to a larger order that connects both rwanda and burundi to the racializing logics of euro-colonial modernity. “maman look, a negro; i’m scared,” fanon (2004, 91) famously wrote, recalling a young white french child pointing at him. with his body, “things take on a new face,” he noted. “let’s face it,” hortense spillers (1987, 65) would write a few decades later, “i am a marked woman. but not everybody knows my name.” fanon’s marking in france, spillers’s marking in the united states, and the ongoing ethnicized racialization of african populations, beginning with colonization, escape the temporalities and geographies of their origins. at stake is the paradoxical gesture of simultaneously being stripped of a (proper) name and being named: native, black, bantu, african, ethnic, hutu, tutsi. this structuring logic—rooted in a historical order that includes the transatlantic slave trade, european colonialism, and postcolonial ethnicization—is why the violence of these names is both instantaneous and immanent to rwanda and burundi and part of a longue durée that exceeds these geographies. when commentators take up the question of political violence in rwanda and burundi, and in africa generally, the focus is usually not on these movements in and out of the polis but on political identity and the postcolonial successes or failures to create national cohesiveness. for both countries, the discussion concentrates on the legacy of colonial law and the racialization of the hutu, tutsi, and twa ethnic categories. a rich literature delineates the intricacies of these identities, and for good reasons. the violence, after all, appears to be targeted toward ethnicized groups and understood as such by those fleeing (chrétien and dupaquier 2007; dumas 2016). a different strand in this literature has focused on the ways in which ethnicity is mobilized to hide pre-existing individual animosity or to advance the political agendas of threatened elites (braeckman 1996; mamdani 2001; melvern 2004; newbury 1988; prunier 1995). though compelling and certainly salient, one drawback of a focus on political identity is precisely that it misses the commonalities between the antagonistic groups, such as the temporal recurrence of displacement outlined here. my interlocutors always 522narrated episodes of political violence in a serialized manner: anti-tutsi violence in rwanda in 1959 is connected to 1994; the targeting of hutu in burundi in 1972 is narrated alongside displacement in 2015. the historical moments tied to each date were brought together in serial form to explain the past and justify the present. this attunement to serialization, i argue, makes for a particular habitation in the social: exile and displacement become normalized and anticipated. one could tell the story of my two interlocutors, muzehe and claude, using the familiar prism of ethnicity. although neither claude nor muzehe ever explicitly shared this information. claude, the burundian, reads as tutsi, and muzehe as rwandan hutu. from this angle, the story becomes one in which they are both placed within a constellation of political events unfolding in the past six to seven decades that overdetermines their stories: hutu and tutsi are antagonistic racialized groups caught in a contested web of competing narratives about the genesis of their schisms and the responsibility for decades of political violence (lemarchand 1996; péan 2005; reyntjens 2004). my contention here, however, is that emphasizing the links between political identities, violence, and power assumes the boundaries of the political community as stable. what needs repair is only a matter for governance and/or electoral politics. yet the recurrent experience with exile shows us that the nation is in fact not a stable entity. at stake is not how to govern but who can. seven decades after gaining political sovereignty, a crucial determining question remains what constitutes the political community. many in postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, and political anthropology have taken up the question of sovereignty and self-determination, especially regarding the years leading up to and following decolonization in africa and elsewhere. (chatterjee 2019; getachew 2019). except we live in the wake of the failures and romanticism of that era and the aftermath of the devastating effects of structural adjustment programs, bandung solidarity, and the end of cold war politics (scott 2014). our political world is one in which horrible crimes are committed in the name of humanity and planetary care and the political sovereignty so central to the decolonization era is disavowed again and again (meister 2011; moyn 2010; ticktin 2019). i am convinced of the centrality of this earlier question of who and what constitutes the political community, even decades after the repeated failures to cement, in whatever form, the “imagined community” dreamed up during decolonization (anderson 1983, 1). in other words, i aim to take seriously what it means to return to sovereignty today and to bring up the semiotic and political contours of the political community not in terms of 523a failure to achieve abstract citizenship and national cohesiveness or as a failure of governance, but rather that of nationhood as still an open fragmented sign and thus not a resolved question of yesteryears. this essay is divided in two: part 1 concerns time and part 2 concerns space. the first section reflects on the anticipatory logic resulting from repeated flight by paying attention to narrations of political violence as serialized. claude’s escape to rwanda from burundi in 2015 is tied to an earlier moment in 1972, and muzehe’s escape and return to rwanda is linked to an earlier episode in 1959. these two different historical events resulted in the first large waves of displacement in both countries. i discuss them together to highlight this attunement to serialization. both moments produce communities in exile who subsequently contest the meaning and boundaries of the originary nations from exile. the second part returns to present-day rwanda and the world that muzehe and claude now share to think about the political space that this history of ejection from the political community makes. this is a space where thousands of burundians like claude fled after the latest iteration of political persecution in burundi in 2015. the burundian refugees now share the same political landscape with people like muzehe and countless other rwandans who also fled decades ago beginning in 1959 and returned. the rwandans once in exile have come back and are now re-narrativizing the past and making new moral claims on the country they were once exiled from. my central arguments are, first, that what is at stake within the geographies of rwanda and burundi and at their borders is a claim on the moral contours of the political community and its rightful inhabitants. second, this claim on the national imaginary has been, since the early years of independence, often articulated in exile, making exile a crucial constitutive aspect of postcolonial life. the rhythms of recurrent displacements signal collective political imaginaries haunted by originary fragmentation. part 1: the past as prologue rwanda and burundi both formed part of german east africa beginning in 1885. with germany’s loss in world war i, both countries were partitioned and put under belgian control by a league of nations mandate beginning in 1916. among the transformations instituted by colonial rule was the classification of both countries’ populations into three racial identities: hutu, tutsi, and twa. these categories, however, predate european arrival. scholars have explained them as transforming through time and shifting between kinship, economic, and political categories. with euro-colonial rule, racialization became primarily 524enforced through education, taxation, censuses, forced labor, and the organization of power and juridical categories (kimonyo 2015; lemarchand 1970; mamdani 2001; newbury 1988). during the five decades of belgian colonial rule, the three groups were homogenized and hierarchized according to euro-colonial governing racial logics and changing political preoccupations. they were also pitted against each other, especially the hutu and tutsi (fujii 2009; strauss 2006; taylor 1999). for this reason, most experts on the region agree that postcolonial violence, regardless of the historical and political nuances in both countries, decidedly takes the form of racialized-ethnic violence, in large part because of this history of colonial racialization (chrétien and kabanda 2013; muvunyi sebagabo 2017; nahimana 2007; ndahiro, nkusi, and rwagatare 2015; vansina 2005). the arch of this colonial story and its political consequences is well known and largely follows the oft-cited classic divide-and-rule archetype. the overarching structure goes something like this: rwanda and burundi are either idyllic pre-colonial ancestral paradises or tyrannical enclaves of monarchical rule by a small group. euro-colonial rule radically transforms existing social hierarchies by granting proximity to power to one numerically minor group. with this structure, the postcolonial period marks a revolutionary one in which the demos finally comes to power by radically altering relations of power, that is, the marginalized majority takes the reign. or the postcolonial period remains fraught with contestations for power and control of the government along the same racializing logics implemented during colonial rule (mamdani 2001). to maintain this telling of the postcolonial story, key actors or acting agencies are important. first comes the centrality of the state and the ideological interpellation of the purported masses by threatened elites. thus, as the historian rené lemarchand (1996, xxvi) writes, political violence in burundi is, for example, “a mode of discourse and political action,” where “ethnicity” is transformed and “ultimately incorporated into the horrors and irrationality of genocidal violence.” though commentators sometimes acknowledge that more complex social interactions and group dynamic (fujii 2009) and actors exist on the ground, these nuances seem to often get eclipsed by an insistence on the manipulation of the population by threatened political elites (reyntjens 2011). for rwanda, state institutions and the governing political party rhetoric also occupy a central role in explaining political violence. the “perfect storm” that ultimately leads to the genocide against tutsi in 1994 is a combination of party politics and the state’s genocidal ideology (kimonyo 2015; nahimana 2007; muvunyi sebagabo 2017). in short, political violence results from postcolonial 525states’ failure to transcend the colonial legacy of racialization (mamdani 2001) or from a set of competing factors that sometimes include more localized power dynamics (fujii 2009; lemarchand 1996). though we see, in other words, a recognition that ethnicity in this context is neither transhistorical nor the only factor for ideological interpellation, in the final instance, some version of the past is the element evoked to mobilize hutu versus tutsi. so, in the case of the 2015 influx of burundian refugees into rwanda, ethnic antagonisms eventually also resurfaced, even if not overtly as part of the political crisis at hand. this version of the postcolonial story where the past serves as prologue is also how claude, the burundian, narrated the political crisis in burundi that prompted him to flee to rwanda. violence in the past is a sort of ghost haunting the present, threatening repetition. burundi 2015/1972 the crisis began after the president of burundi, the late pierre nkurunziza, decided to run for a third term. segments of the population contested this choice, particularly in the capital city of bujumbura, where claude lived. nkurunziza had come to power in 2005 by parliamentary nomination, with the burundian parliament acting as an electoral college. he was the nominee of the conseil national pour la défense de la démocratie-forces pour la défense de la démocratie, the political party that gained a majority in the national elections of the same year. according to protesters like claude, by running a third time in 2015, the president violated the two-term presidency clause in the civil war’s 2010 peace agreement that had brought him to power. this agreement stipulated presidential terms be limited to two five-year terms. nkurunziza justified his 2015 run by exploiting a loophole, stating that his first term had in fact not resulted from a national election, but from parliamentary nomination.1 this argument, compounded by documented targeted attacks on journalists and radio channels, the manipulation of election results, and general discord about the management of the country, did not sit well with the civilian population, particularly in bujumbura, and people took to the streets. for a little over a month, the streets of the capital filled with demonstrators against the president’s campaign, using the slogans “sindumuja” (i am not a slave) and “nonau3ememandat” (no to the 3rd term).2 the government responded violently to the protests by jailing and kidnapping the perceived dissenters. claude, however, insisted that the situation in burundi was in fact “revenge from the past . . . 1972, that is what they like to say often,” he remarked in one 526of our encounters. “hutus were killed; all [tutsi] governments always discriminate against hutus” was the constant refrain hurled at people like him. i asked him who said this—all hutus? “not all,” he answered, “only those in power; the others we don’t know, they don’t have a way of showing it yet.” i first met claude in rwanda in july 2019 on my way to the eastern town of nyamata. we were seated next to each other on the bus, and i asked claude if he was going to nyamata. he didn’t hear my question and responded, “sa?” i repeated the question but also asked if he was burundian. he was indeed going to nyamata and yes, he was burundian and asked how i knew. “your use of sa gave it away,” i told him jokingly. this word, a shortened version of sabwe and generally used by kirundi speakers, can be used to signal presence or to signal incomprehension, as in the expression pardon me? claude was following a lead on a potential job. intrigued, i told him who i was and my reason for being in rwanda (doing research on post-1994 rwanda), and asked about a potential collaboration. he agreed, but with caveats. we opted for semi-structured interviews at claude’s request. i delineated possible ways of collaborating: formal interviews with predetermined questions, semi-structured interviews, or regular ethnography, given that i already lived close to his neighborhood of gikondo in kigali city. claude, unlike muzehe, refused the classic format of the ethnographer following him around. we would meet regularly over a period of three months after our initial encounter. our meetings, one-on-one in quiet restaurants, lasted several hours. in these meetings, we agreed that claude would update me on his job hunt and news of political meetings about the situation in burundi. he would share what he deemed sensitive information only under these circumstances. his life felt precarious enough as it was. i respected this request and took what he told me, his own narration of his life in rwanda and his nostalgia for home in burundi, at face value, but with the recognition that his retelling was exactly that, a retelling, and thus in part mediated through his own interpretation of the events in his life. “i didn’t say goodbye to anyone or pack anything,” claude explained. in march 2016, he took a bus from bujumbura for the southern border with rwanda and never looked back. claude would later reveal that he had in fact also fled to rwanda in 1998 and again in 2003. his first stop in 2015 was kigali, where he stayed with a rwandan childhood friend. the friend in question was born in burundi to rwandan parents. this friend had returned to rwanda in the mid 1990s. claude’s network in kigali was constituted, in other words, by individuals also familiar with having to flee. rwandan families who had fled to 527burundi at some point starting with the first wave of political violence in rwanda in 1959. “why did you go to rwanda?” i asked him. there was a network of “old friends and political allies in rwanda,” he said, and in kigali in particular, that he could plug into precisely because of this postcolonial history of displacement. claude’s other network comprised burundian refugees like him, who arrived in rwanda beginning in 2015. haunted presents ikiza (a grand calamity) is the 1972 event in burundi that claude referenced as the historical antecedent to his escape. historians are divided on what exactly transpired in 1972. to some, this event constituted a “selective genocide” that targeted an educated hutu class and was motivated by decades of repression perpetrated by a predominantly tutsi elite. others, perhaps mindful of the legalities of a morally and politically loaded term, speak of “proximity to genocide” or simply retain the kirundi word, ikiza (chrétien and dupaquier 2007). what is certain is that on april 29, 1972, an insurgency against the regime of then president michel micombero, who had been in power since independence in 1962, started in nyanza-lac and rumonge near bujumbura and rapidly escalated to other parts of the country. “roving bands of hutu attacked civilians,” lemarchand writes, and “countless atrocities were reported by eyewitnesses” (lemarchand 1996, 4). the decisive factor behind the insurgency was president micombero’s “rigid discriminatory policies” against hutus (lemarchand 1996, 4). the government met these attacks with a powerful suppression of the civilian population. within three months, between 100,000 and 200,000 burundian hutus had been murdered. thousands fled the country for refugee camps and cities in neighboring countries—“no sector of society was left untouched” (lemarchand 1996, 6). president nkurunziza, the key protagonist of the 2015 crisis, also lost his father to armed repression in 1972. he later, in the early 1990s, fled during yet another civil war, and returned in the 2000s.3 the 1972 massacres and their consequences have haunted burundian politics ever since. like claude in 2015, decades before, thousands of families found themselves in the same situation. liisa malkki’s purity and exile tells the tale of some of these families in the refugee camp of mishamo and the town of kigoma in neighboring tanzania in the 1990s. in malkki’s account, burundian refugees apprehend the reality of exile differently depending on whether they live in the camp or town. in the camp, the history of hutu exclusion in burundi was extended beyond politics to create what malkki (1995a) calls a “mythico-history” 528and a cosmological order in which tutsi signify moral corruption and hutu-ness is synonymous with “purity.” the camp served as a “place of purification,” transforming its residents from servants of tutsi in burundi to refugees in a foreign land, to final ascension into a collective free hutu people. for those in town, the past, present, or future were not “firmly localized in burundi or anywhere.” this “challenging cosmopolitanism” suited the interests of the refuges in kigoma town. they juggled multiple identities, preferring to be burundians rather than simply hutu (malkki 1995a, 161). for this reason, malkki insists, the town refugees did not find themselves in a “state of exile” per se, because their narratives did not insist on collective return to a “homeland, an origin or a proper place.” the “mythico-history” in the camp was “replaced by a partial, potential immigrant mythology” (malkki 1995a, 193). though both groups share “the fact of exile,” the cosmopolitan town refugees denied this history and past. the rooting in burundi signaled a kind of “parochialism” (malkki 1995a, 233). while malkki emphasizes the differences between those in the camp and those in the town, i would like to underscore their shared expulsion from nationalist citizenry. though resulting in different “mythologies,” both groups share a fundamental and significant factor in their life as political subjects: because of what they are perceived to be (hutu), they have been targeted and expelled from their political community and in exile must cope repeatedly with what this means as political subjects. political violence erupted again in burundi in 1988, 1993, 2001, and finally in 2015, when claude fled. moreover, as malkki’s (1995a, 277) postscript to the book illustrates, in 1987, the tanzanian government re-signified the cosmopolitan town refugees as “illegal immigrants,” targeting them for “repatriation” to burundi. a few years later, in 1992, the tanzanian government gave the burundian exiled “three months” to choose between two options: repatriate to burundi or naturalize in tanzania. that is, it demanded them to anchor into one place, naturalizing here or there, but in one place. this choice resulted from political negotiations between the governments of burundi and tanzania (malkki 1995a, 277). this political landscape that insists on the fact of exclusion and its corollary nationalist citizenry makes it difficult if not impossible to maintain an “immigrant mythology.” the nation (its meaning and content) remains the hovering overarching narrative with each episode of violence and exclusion. the camp site and the town share a history of repeated marking of belonging and exclusion from it. both groups of exiled may appear to live “the consequences differently” (malkki 1995a, 234), but they can just as simultaneously be interpellated back 529into the “national order of things” despite their individual desires. the cosmopolitan path is contingent on larger political structures and the state’s attempts at capturing and claiming national stability by reinscribing a rootedness into one place. both town and camp eventually became locations from which both groups were marked as political subjects “out of place,” with an “ultimatum” to repatriate or naturalize (malkki 1995a, 277). once more, the people in exile were reminded of the nationalist logic precisely because the state logic in burundi and tanzania insisted on rooting them in one place, whatever immigrant mythology they desired. originary fragmentation these movements to and from the postcolonial nation merely ten years after political independence from colonial belgium make exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial political life. exile for the refugees in the camp marks one step toward their ascension into a collective hutu people and the regaining of their “homeland” as free political subjects. for the people in kigoma town, the experience of exile makes them itinerant burundian migrants, rather than simply hutu subjects, perhaps for a fleeting moment until they become re-signified again as burundians—in exile, out of place. nationhood here is shaped through and by the experience or memory of repeated flight. the idea of a homeland is somewhat paradoxical. there is at once an attachment to autochthony and a cosmology that remains invested in the existence of a purportedly authentic geography, but this supposed homeland is also constituted since the history of its inception by fragmentation. the postcolonial homeland is here scarred by a repeating caesura, constantly threatening to unmake it, and thus requiring repeated re-imaginings of collective boundaries. these are the terms under which nationhood and belonging are navigated. malkki’s interlocutors in mishamo camp and kigoma town, as well as my interlocutor claude four decades later—despite their different geographical and temporal locations—share this postcolonial historical reality of originary fragmentation. the nation itself is not a stable political entity but fragmented since/with colonization. that is, there exists an idea of what it is and perhaps was in the past as formulated through political struggles and mythico-history, but each political contestation puts this idea itself at stake. this is what the formulation of originary fragmentation entails. it is not only membership in the political community that is fought over but also the content of what constitutes the nation itself: politically, semiotically, and morally. 530the way out of originary fragmentation is political, mahmood mamdani (2022) has suggested for decades now, though most emphatically in his latest publication, neither settler nor native. radical postcolonial reform, he writes, requires “decoupling the nation from the state” (mamdani 2022, 329). for him, to decolonize the political requires “stripping away the nation, or the tribe as nation,” and replacing it with “the mere state,” that is, a “legal sovereign, with equal treatment of citizens” (mamdani 2022, 328, 330). this is so because “power in nation-states lies always with those who identify with the nation, not with coalitions that assemble through a political process” (mamdani 2022, 329). postcolonial states in africa inherited a legal system both racialized and ethnicized. decolonial reform, mamdani writes, succeeded in “deracializing” the civic sphere by applying civil law, once the domain of the colonizers, to decolonized africans, but it failed to de-ethnicize. this fact constitutes the core of the “crisis of postcolonial citizenship” (mamdani 2001, 14). a consequence of this crisis is precisely what malkki crystallizes in describing the mythico-history of the mishamo camp as cosmological ordering. exile becomes essential in this repeated exercise of reordering the cosmological and political boundaries of the nation. from tanzania, these exiles will, for decades, renegotiate their relationships to nationhood and citizenship vis-à-vis both burundi and tanzania. some will return to burundi peacefully as individuals and sometimes flee again. others will attempt to return forcefully with rebel groups formed in exile. and others yet will return generations later in the 2000s because of a peace negotiation treaty organized with the help of the tanzanian government (burihabwa and curtis 2019). this reordering of the nation does not just happen in individual minds and narrations of the displaced. it finds support not just in people who return but also in political parties and movements formed in exile. the party for the liberation of the hutu people in burundi (palipehutu) emerged in 1980 in the same mishamo camp malkki discusses. the front for democracy in burundi (frodebu), the party that brought to power the first hutu president in burundi after democratic elections in 1993, was created in butare, a southern rwandan town at the border with burundi in 1980. key leaders of the main political party in burundi today, the cndd-fdd, have also organized for forceful return while in exile (burihabwa and curtis 2019). thirty years after mishamo and kigoma in tanzania, through yet another wave of displacement, claude arrived in rwanda. “i am lucky; this gray beard saved me,” he noted. “it makes me look older.” the primary targets of 2015 were young adult males, the people in the streets of bujumbura who most ardently 531protested nkurunziza’s third presidential run. but, claude remarked, “nkurunziza is trying hard to turn this into an ethnic problem. a large majority of the people disappearing are young tutsi men between twenty and forty years old.” i asked why. “revenge from the past,” he responded, reiterating the narrative of serialization vis-à-vis political violence. this seriality, as we shall see, also reverberates in narrations of violence in rwanda. rwanda 1994/1959 the 1994 rwandan genocide against tutsi is also narrated as having antecedents in earlier episodes of violence against tutsi, beginning in 1959. as with the events of 1972 in burundi, those in 1959 rwanda also remain contested (onana 2002; péan 2005). by the late 1950s, the country offered a tense political scene, with different political parties demanding independence from belgium. political independence finally became a reality in july 1962. a few years earlier, in november 1959, a wave of anti-tutsi violence had engulfed the country, targeting primarily the tutsi local administrative chiefs favored by the belgians. thousands of tutsi fled the country and decades later some of their descendants began preparing for a forceful return under the umbrella of a guerilla army: the rwandan patriotic front, or rpf. thus, beginning with the first agitations for political sovereignty, the boundaries of the new nation were contested by people inside and outside of it. fast-forward to 1994: the rpf—the guerilla army formed in exile by descendants of the exiled ‘59ers—ended the genocide against the tutsi after a four year civil war. in power since 1994, the rpf-led government and its state institutions have been centrally preoccupied with the narration of the genocide and the country’s history. in 2011, the national commission for unity and reconciliation (nurc) brought together researchers and historians from the national university to rewrite the history of rwanda since its inception. the resulting volume describes the genocide against tutsi in 1994 as the “result of a culture of institutionalized crime based on ethnic racism beginning in 1959.”4 in this rewriting, the past also serves as prologue, and the violence of 1959 proves key as the moment of expulsion and the beginning of the project of return. many state celebrations express this conception of the past. on july 1, 2012, as rwanda celebrated fifty years of independence from belgium, thousands lined up before sunrise to enter amahoro stadium in kigali for festivities. the official end of the genocide, when rpf troops took over kigali in 1994, took place on july 4, and on this day in 2012, the two historical moments were joined. people had gathered to celebrate imyaka 53250 y’ubwigenge (fifty years of independence) and imyaka 18 yo kwibohora (eighteen years of collective self-liberation). kwibohora loosely translates as “untying oneself,” in the sense of freeing oneself politically; july 4 is hence liberation day. ubwigenge means “independence.” ubwigenge is a noun, and it is passive vis-à-vis kwigenga (to be independent), the active formulation. at the semiotic level, the choice of these two words indicates the different levels of significance accorded to both events. kwibohora, or self-liberation, is agentive. the word kwibohora denotes a purposeful action by the self and the collective to escape bondage. july 4, 1994, is marked as the true decolonial moment that creates a new moral order—unlike 1962. another formulation was imyaka 18 twibohoye (eighteen years since liberating ourselves). independence from belgium is inserted into a past prior to real liberation. all events before july 1994, still rife with “ethnic divisions,” do not make for “real independence,” but are rather prologue to genocide.5 today, outside the country, other political groups are yet again contesting the meaning of these resignifications and redrawing the political and moral contours of what rwanda 1959 and 1994 mean. part 2: on the run this question of haunting and movements in and out of nations came sharply into view in the summer of 2019 while i was doing fieldwork in kirehe in rwanda, near tanzania. i was there to spend time with muzehe, a seventy-four-year-old accused of participation in the genocide in 1994 and imprisoned for eight years beginning in 1996. i had last seen him in 2014 in a rehabilitation camp, or travaux d’intérêts général (tig), for perpetrators sentenced through gacaca courts. these courts were active from 2005 to 2012, trying close to 2 million genocide cases (brehm, uggen, and gasanabo 2014). the courts offered sentence reductions in exchange for a guilty plea confession and a public apology (clark 2010). sentencing varied between prison, time already served, community service, and a combination of the three. perpetrators were classified into three categories. category 1 comprised leaders and planners—that is, individuals with political and administrative power. the second category included those who killed in groups or “aided” in committing offenses. category 3 concerned offenses against property (brehm, uggen, and gasanabo 2014). muzehe fell into categories 2 and 3; the gacaca courts sentenced him to eight years of community service. 533our first interview took place in august 2014. though first hesitant, muzehe gradually warmed up and agreed to a recorded interview. this approval, i suspect, came partly because of my continued presence in the camp over an intermittent period in the summer of 2014, but most probably because i was legally allowed to be in the camp. though i have no sure way of knowing, i doubt he would have spoken to me about his case otherwise, especially while in the camp. through a long, complicated bureaucratic process that took many months and multiple presentations to various state institutions i had managed to secure first a research permit for fieldwork in the country and then a permit to visit the tig camps from the rwandan correction services (rcs), the institution in charge of them. muzehe’s camp held 110 tigistes (in reference to tig) serving their sentences and 5 rcs staff to manage the camp. four of the staff were men, the other a woman. staff and tigistes living quarters were separate. the tigistes lived in a dormitory-style, makeshift tent. the staff had their own living quarters: an individual house with two small rooms (a bedroom fitting a little more than a single bed and a smaller room for a shower). when in the camp, i roomed with the woman staff. muzehe stood out to me because he was older than most of the other tigistes. though he was clearly in excellent shape, with no visible signs of mobility issues, for example, the work hours in the camp were grueling. work fell into two categories: 1) activities necessary for the functioning of the camp, such as cooking, cleaning, and any form of repair work; and 2) the specific work required for this camp, in this case brickmaking for the rcs. inmates worked monday to friday from 6:00 am to 2:00 pm, and saturdays from 6:00 am to 11:00 am. when we met in the camp in 2014, muzehe had spent six and a half years of his sentence in various camps around the country. he finally came home in october 2014 and, given the mark of his active role in the 1994 genocide, the septuagenarian faced extremely thin job prospects in his largely rural agricultural community. after a long battle between his family and the local authorities to reclaim his small house (consisting of a living room, a bedroom, and an outdoor kitchen), which had served as a military base for the rpf soldiers in 1994, he breathed a small sigh of relief at the thought of being rent-free. his family won the battle because of a plasticized deed title muzehe carried in his pocket every time he left the house. the other plastic-covered document always on him was his official release form. without it, muzehe ran the risk of being sent back to camp at the will of someone in power. since being released at the end of september 2014, after serving his prison and tig sentences, he had spent 534two weeks in jail when mistakenly accused of not finishing his time in the camp by one of the people who had accused him during his gacaca trial in 2007. like claude, muzehe locates a sentiment of revenge among those in power and capable of acting on it. though he was now free and supposedly rehabilitated because of his time in the tig camp, muzehe’s return to his hometown was not totally secure. he anticipated having to prove his innocence at any time. he lived with his wife, who by the time of my next visit the following year had passed away from illness. he had four sons and two daughters. one son had escaped “somewhere in congo” in 1994. muzehe and his wife also owned a plot of land two kilometers from the family home, where another small house, destroyed in 1994, used to stand. given his age and reduced mobility, muzehe enlisted a younger neighbor to tend to the beans he planted on the plot, and they divided the crops. burundian refugees also did these kinds of odd jobs for the kirehe residents, he told me, but they preferred to be remunerated in cash, which he did not have. kirehe is located near mahama, the biggest burundian refugee camp in rwanda. as of november 2019, there were 72,927 burundian refugees in the country, the majority of them having arrived after april 2015. rwanda had taken in the second-highest number of burundian refugees in the region, behind tanzania. most of the refugees—more than 60,000, or about 85 percent—live in mahama camp, and around 11,000 have been resettled in the cities of kigali and huye.6 mahama camp, opened in april 2015, began with temporary structures such as tents and communal hangars. by 2016, however, mahama had already developed into what the united nations high commissioner for refugees likened to a “small city.”7 it had established two health centers, a school, a bus line, and small business centers. semi-permanent structures made of mudbrick and aluminum sheeting were constructed in 2016, funded by the unhcr and other donors. by 2019, refugee children had been integrated into the rwandan school system and attended the primary and secondary schools close to the camp.8 securing a research permit for the camp site itself required incredible bureaucratic gymnastics and proved impossible. still, the sheer size of the camp and its population were clearly visible throughout the district as i walked in the area. muzehe’s neighbor was a burundian refugee, he told me. “what do they do to survive?” i asked him. odd jobs, such as cultivating for muzehe, for example. if he had the money, he would pay them in cash or crops to work on his plot. his neighbor paid rent weekly, 4,000 rwandan francs per month. the refugees also sometimes bought green bananas to sell in the camp. 535in muzehe’s current social world and family configuration are juxtaposed two exiled groups: his son in the democratic republic of congo, fearing persecution for crimes committed during the 1994 genocide, and the burundian refugees next door, fleeing because of political antagonisms linked to political violence against burundian hutu in 1972. muzehe’s world, his family story, and the current population makeup of kirehe district provide an excellent illustration of the kinds of movements that i am suggesting constitute postcolonial political life. muzehe’s son is in neighboring drc, perhaps in a refugee camp or perhaps among the groups plotting to overthrow those in power in rwanda. all muzehe could say was that his son was probably scared of coming back and being jailed for committing genocide. muzehe himself also fled to congo following the end of the genocide in 1994. he constantly anticipates having to justify his membership in the new rwanda, hence the constant carrying of his release form. the situation in kirehe offers another good illustration of exile as a constitutive aspect of postcolonial life. people are repeatedly in and out of national ordering: ejected, returning, ejected again. in and out of national ordering claude had chosen to live far from muzehe’s town and outside the mahama camp. kigali offered a wider array of choices given his childhood friends in the city. he missed being in burundi, however, and often insisted that there was no place like home. he wanted above all to go back to bujumbura. but he was also clear that “there is no other country we could have fled into,” both claiming a collective “we” and marking an affinity to rwanda, his place in exile. pressed to define this “we,” claude seemed surprised. i should have understood. he gave me a long-winded explanation on the ethnic composition of groups in the region, their kinship relations, and origins. he insisted that what propelled him and the other burundians to flee was not an ethnic but “a political problem,” an unwanted president taking revenge on his opponents by manipulating pre-existing ethnic antagonisms. the choice of rwanda, however, was related to what he just told me about kinship relations. unsurprisingly, claude’s imagined kinship relations mapped onto the racialized colonial ethnic categories. without saying it explicitly, he indicated that people like him—read tutsi—felt welcome in rwanda because “their kin” were now in power. the ascension to power of the predominantly tutsi rpf, mahmood mamdani (2001, 261) writes, has brought forth a “diasporic state” whose main preoccupation is an “overwhelming sense of moral responsibility for the very survival of all remaining tutsi, globally.” this logic is in part what claude’s explanation reveals. 536claude’s we also illustrates the co-existence of multiple forms of political identification: 1) a we that anchors him in a purported homeland and a specific geography (burundi, like the camp refugees in tanzania decades prior); 2) a we that claims a politic exceeding this same geography, tying him to a political network in rwanda today (his childhood friends once exiled in burundi who have returned to rwanda; 3) and finally a we deeply familiar with exile (like muzehe and his family, malkki’s interlocutors, and countless others). in other words, there is in claude’s reference to a we a collective of political allies in geographies beyond burundi. the first level of signification for this referent is imagined ancestral kinship certainly. the mythico-history in malkki’s work and claude’s own ethno-historical account of the region indicate this much. this collective is conceived as racial because it maps onto the racialized categories of hutu and tutsi. a second layer of this we is the diasporic orientation of the state both in rwanda and in burundi, as evidenced by the history of political organizing in exile in both countries. this layer secures nation-state interests by insisting on return and state power. but it also simultaneously, in its diasporic inclination, holds onto an ethno-imaginary beyond the nation-state, one rooted in a mix of an attachment to a homeland and this history of recurrent exile as cardinal features of postcolonial history. in all layers—the we as kinship and the we as national and diasporic—the experience of exile and exclusion from the postcolonial nation prove central. home here is connected to movement and emplacement, to destination and return, to ethnos and citizenship. this recurrence of movement complicates the fetishism of rootedness as a cardinal feature of ethnic being. these attachments in and beyond the nation signal a type of politic insistent on the normative call of nation-ness as linked to a geographically bound, political, and collective self. yet they also gesture to something exceeding it. the national referent is filled by different ethno-racial passions, internal and diasporic ones that exceed the boundaries of nations. the recurrence of collective flight creates these other kinds of attachment moving alongside nationalist projects. put differently, claude is burundian, and that means either fleeing or growing up in the shadow of prior generations who have done so. but claude also feels part of a collective tied to rwanda today. this is so certainly because of imagined ethnic bonds—inheritance of colonial law—but also because those in power now in rwanda understand exile, having fled themselves and returned forcefully to power. similarly, the late president nkurunziza in burundi was imagined as governing based on residual resentment from the 1972 mass exodus of burundian hutus by targeting tutsi families in 2015 and turning political opposition to his presidency into a hutu/tutsi problem. 537the academic literature about 1972 or 1994 usually focuses on internal dynamics within one country. that is, the historical and political circumstances within contemporary national boundaries that led to political violence and exile (chrétien and dupaquier 2007; lemarchand 2004). regional analyses, despite the move beyond national boundaries, also focus on nationalist imaginaries by critiquing what they read as expansionist ethno-nationalism. for rwanda, for example, it becomes a matter of expanding the power of the current rpf government into the region, such as the democratic republic of congo (prunier 2011). this focus on national boundaries as epistemological units is in some ways trapped in the same logic that critics of methodological nationalism have noted (getachew 2019; wilder 2015). for them, to imagine the ultimate outcome of decolonization in 1960s africa only as national independence and state sovereignty means to miss an important aspect of liberation movements: their “worldmaking” practices, their aspirations to transform the world after empire into a just world from africa to the caribbean (getachew 2019). to be sure, what is stake in rwanda and burundi today is in no way close to ambitions of creating a world of political equals and/or other forms of political communities that exceed the nation-state form. in fact, quite the opposite: there are strong political attachments to nationalist imaginaries. claude misses his “home,” and that is and might always be burundi, not his place of exile, rwanda. nonetheless, methodological nationalism misses these simultaneous diasporic and nationalists’ aspirations co-existing side by side that result from specific historical conditions and embodied experiences: repeated exile for collectives based on claims to a “national” homeland. this, i have tried to argue, in fact illustrates that the nation is fragmented—and has been since colonization. this originary fragmentation is what the postcolonial governments have repeatedly tried to remediate with rigid enclosures and claims of autochthony. this is another enduring legacy of the worlds engendered by colonialism. the postcolonial evokes autochthony while also being fragmented and exilic. access to rights for some and exclusion for others are linked to discourses about rightful inhabitants. at the same time, repeated displacements have created forms of political stakes that exceed these same rigid autochthonous boundaries. malkki’s work shows us one side of this: in exile in tanzania, the camp refugees narrate their return into burundi as their rightful return to a homeland. as burundian hutu, they belong rightfully to burundi. the nation emanates from them as autochthonous subjects. claude’s exile results from resentment about the 1972 violence, which results in the displacement of malkki’s interlocutors. burundi for him is also 538home, however, a home whose origins he narrates as emanating from people like him first—read tutsi. yet—and this is the crucial point—his relocation to rwanda is made possible by rwandan friends who, because they were once exiled in burundi, understand his plight and help. conclusion: on the limits of postcolonial geographies as epistemological units this diagnosis of collective attachments may read as passé, or perhaps more importantly as a dangerous acquiescence to the discourse of africa as always already producing derivative and defective forms of universalizable categories, such as nation. instead of democracy, this type of ethno-attachment resembles ethno-democracy or, more precisely, ethno-power (reyntjens 2013). there are interesting rebuttals to this kind of argument, namely, that the assumption of an abstract demos and its universalization should be historicized and problematized in the first place (kasimis 2013). my point in highlighting this dance between nationalist projects tethered to geographies and diasporic collective imaginaries is to underscore a kind of postcolonial politic forged via different generations of exiles and beyond official nations. exile, given its recurrence, may be read as an experience of emanation that creates political subjects and authorizes specific discourses about pasts and futures. to inhabit the postcolonial moment requires constantly having to secure membership in the nation and to re-imagine its political boundaries both within and outside officially designated borders. exile in this context differs from exile as the experience of a longing, solitary, and alienated individual. it is a political category, a collective making a claim on a contested political community, in this instance, the nation. to posit exile in this way is not to naturalize “the national order of things” as an “ideal habitat . . . the place where one fits in, lives in peace, and has an unproblematic culture and identity” (malkki 1995b, 509). the “habitat” is far from ideal, given the postcolonial history of displacement outlined here. the nation itself is fragmented and its meaning and content constantly contested with each wave of exiled. what the movements of claude, muzehe, and the thousands of others caught in the web of these postcolonial waves of displacement show is one terrible consequence of the nation as a contested “locus of political identification” inherited from colonial management and reproduced in the post-independence era in both countries (mamdani 2022, 328). the result of this struggle over membership, i argue, constitutes a postcolonial temporal and spatial imaginary haunted by exile (anticipated exclusion from the political community and contestations about the purported nation from outside its boundaries), thus making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood. 539exile constitutes a crucial component of a form of political activism and political subjectivity, both tethered to the nation-state and exceeding it. the recurrence of exile and its political characteristics activate a form of political potentiality—we can return, we have political allies in exile, we can win, we can regain state power. this political consciousness certainly differs from fanon’s call for a “substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another” transcending the amputating and negating moral universe of racializing colonial tropes, but it does tell us something about life in the post-colony (fanon 2004, 1). inhabiting these social and political landscapes in the wake of european colonial domination, much like living under the tropes of a racial polity, entails anticipating dreadful flight. these social scenes—muzehe’s town, the proximity to the semi-permanent mobile camp, claude’s movements—are not unique to this political moment but in fact emblematic of postcolonial life and time. the postcolonial nation—though assumed to have a grounded, definite quality—in fact remains a fragmented, open sign with recurring moments of rigid self-enclosure methodically sought after by postcolonial power as eventful opportunities to purchase a groundedness and remedy the constitutive lack of fragmentation. muzehe and claude’s displacements must be understood within this historical order—an order in which certain bodies have lost their names, so to speak, and have come to be imagined as things, as ethnic entities, habituated to being on the run. abstract this essay makes an argument about the relationship between political life and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial rwanda and burundi. i argue, first, that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement constitute central aspects of postcolonial nationhood and life in both countries. with each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. second, this rhythm of repeated collective exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity and activism that though tethered to the geography of the nation also always exceed it, making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood. [exile; postcolonial nationhood; political sovereignty; rwanda; burundi] notes acknowledgments  i thank adom getachew, axelle karera, sumayya kassamali, demetra kasimis, firat kurt, sarah newman, and aarti sethi for their invaluable feedback. i also acknowledge and thank the cultural anthropology editorial team for their support and engagement with my work. lastly, i also acknowledge the anonymous reviewers for their time and suggestions on how to improve the manuscript. the research for this piece was made possible with a grant from the center for international social science research at the university of chicago.540 1. president nkurunziza tragically passed away in june 2020. the official cause of death was cardiac arrest. 2. all translations from kinyarwanda, kirundi, and french are mine. 3. “burundi’s born again ex-rebel leader” charles bigirimana, bbc world news, 2004. available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4162504.stm 4. commission nationale pour l’unité et la réconciliation (nurc), histoire du rwanda: des origines à la fin du xxe siècle (université nationale du rwanda, 2011), 602. kigali. available at https://www.minubumwe.gov.rw/index.php?eid=dumpfile&t=f&f=62735&token=9020ebe75a9b73d1c4ae4af7eada4acd84cdd00a 5. the press release from the ministry of local affairs (miniloc), dated june 3, 2012, stipulates that “independence was achieved through blood and fire, to call that real independence would be a lie.” the press release appeared in kigali today, available at https://www.kigalitoday.com/amakuru/amakuru-mu-rwanda/kwibohora-bizizihizwa-ku-munsi-wibukwaho-ubwigenge-bw-u-rwanda 6. united nations high commissioner for refugees. regional update: burundi situation. unhcr, 2019. available at https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/73422 7. united nations high commissioner for refugees. regional update: burundi situation. unhcr, 2019. available at https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/73422 8. united nations high commissioner for 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the human to the planetary: speculative futures of care.” medicine anthropology theory 6, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.6.3.666 vansina, jan 2005 antecedents to modern rwanda: the nyinginya kingdom. madison: university of wisconsin press. wilder, gary 2015 freedom time: negritude, decolonization, and the future of the world. durham, n.c.: duke university press. cultural anthropology, vol. 40, issue 3, pp. 519–542, issn 0886-7356, online issn 1548-1360. cultural anthropology is the journal of the society of cultural anthropology, a section of the american anthropological association. cultural anthropology journal content published since 2014 is freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes under the creative commons by-nc 4.0 license. reproduction and transmission of journal content for the above purposes should credit the author and original source. doi: 10.14506/ca40.3.06 an infrastructural moment in the human sciences an infrastructural moment in the human sciences kim fortun mike fortun rensselaer polytechnic institute the essay is both more open and more closed than traditional thought would like. it is more open in so far as, through its inner nature, it negates anything systematic and satisfies itself all the better the more strictly it excludes the systematic. . . . on the other hand, the essay is more closed in that it labors emphatically on the form of its presentation. the consciousness of the non-identity between presentation and presented material forces the form to make unlimited efforts. —t. w. adorno, “the essay as form” very early in our tenure as coeditors of cultural anthropology (2005–2010), before we began our years-long, nagging push for open access—an issue about which we had almost no awareness at the time1—we had a seemingly more minor and short-lived nagging struggle with the journal’s copyeditor (whose work overall we greatly appreciated). when our first issue’s redlined manuscripts came back to us, in every essay, every instance of essay—a word that appeared at least in each abstract (“in this essay . . .”)—was struck through and changed to article. publications of the american anthropological association (aaa), we were told, were “articles.” writing in the margins, among the comment boxes and queries and typographers’ instructions, we explained our insistence on retaining the word: the essay as form, we had learned from theodor adorno, was “more open” than the traditional form of the article. if anything made cultural anthropology different from other journals in anthropology, it was its openness to more open forms of writing, its openness to methodological, conceptual, and textual experimentation. recognition of this in our representations of the journal’s work wasn’t trivial. we needed a way to describe and invite experimentations like val daniel’s (2008) epic poem in terza rima, crafted to convey the labor, violence, and enduring legacy of the coolie labor system in sri lanka. and writing like todd ochoa’s (2007, 2010), which mimed the hauntological incantations of palo, a cuban-kongo society of affliction, to convey how palo initiates come to apprehend kalunga, the vast sea of the dead. ochoa demonstrated both the inadequacy of a representational theory of language and the openness of language to other powers—leveraging terms native to both palo and the theoretical traditions of gilles deleuze, félix guattari, g. w. f. hegel, friedrich nietzsche, and karl marx. daniel’s and ochoa’s experiments with form were deeply poetic, while also deeply empirical—experiments run to draw out the textures and rhythms of human experience, as well as the histories and structures that shape them. this demand for experimentation—to support ethnographic commitment to the empirical—can be said to be the vocation of cultural anthropology, its purpose and its challenge. and we came to see it as our challenge, as editors, to build infrastructure to support this. with only minimal resistance, we managed to retain “essay” as the name for contributions to cultural anthropology. the harder, ongoing challenge lay in building the social and technical infrastructure needed to support what a commitment to the essay implied. open, experimental forms of writing are called for by what adorno (1984, 165) describes as “non-identity between presentation and presented material.” this, in turn, “forces the form to make unlimited efforts.” essays aren’t easily open, and they certainly aren’t undisciplined; they depend on closures, on persistent and emphatic attention to the form of their presentation. they need to be written, reviewed, and revised on many registers, constantly moving between form and content. they also need open, inventive, and experimental modes of access, circulation, and feedback. building cultural anthropology’s infrastructure, it seemed, presented similar demands: it had to be open, and thus carefully structured; inventive, and thus constantly reviewed and re-evaluated; hospitable toward unknown future content, and thus attentively disciplined for present demands. our years as editors were an exciting and technically challenging time that seemed to call for all this. it was a time when the business model for academic publishing moved into full crisis, a time when the aaa publications division was transitioning through multiple directors, a time when digital infrastructure was becoming available and thus expected, and a time when various forms of open access were being innovated and advocated across the human, social, and natural sciences. it was also a time when the very success of cultural anthropology challenged its future; by 2005, cultural anthropology had become a leading journal and guarantor of recognition in the institutional processes through which scholars got and kept jobs. it offered a way to become credentialed and established. this recognition was an enormous accomplishment that needed to be honored, upheld, and strategized; as editors, we were mindful of our responsibility to protect this success. we were also mindful of the many ways desire for professional recognition and establishment could be at odds with experimental sensibilities and practices, and thus at odds with cultural anthropology’s distinctive signature. this was the “infrastructural moment” of our time as editors, a moment we did not anticipate but one to which we had to respond. building the back end when, in 2006, our immediate predecessor ann anagnost handed us a disk containing a microsoft access file of reviewer names and contact information that dan segal had started during his editorship, we did not think of it as a valuable infrastructural legacy. yet that’s precisely what it was. the information itself, of course, was incredibly valuable; few things impressed us more in our job as editors than the collective knowledge of and care for the field represented by the names in that reviewer database, people who (with some cajoling sometimes necessary) would provide—or gift, in the refrain that we would use with increasing frequency—generous, critical, and productive readings. but almost immediately we were forced also to think about the material form of that information, and about the platform on which it ran. because all aaa journals were transitioning to digital platforms for back-end editorial management, that access database housed on a local computer was soon transmitted to the distant server of the berkeley electronic press (be press). we had barely learned the electronic ropes of that system when we received the news—journal editors were as surprised as any aaa member—that the university of california press would be replaced as publisher of aaa journals by wiley-blackwell. as dramatic and drastic as the change from a nonprofit to a profit-driven publisher was, the issues were less binary on the infrastructural level. even though our editorship quickly became dominated by discussions of page costs, download rates, impact factors, and the allocation formulas incorporating them, by which journals and their sections would receive money (or be bankrupted in some cases), and numerous other issues that arose with this transition, such would have been the case regardless of publisher. one of our first decisions was the supposedly merely infrastructural one: should we keep the reviewer data and review process on be press’s electronic workflow system that we had just started to learn, or transfer it over to wiley’s scholarone system? either option would result in significant charges annually to the society for cultural anthropology (sca); equally significant to us was the prospect of ceding control and even ownership of our review and submission data. we would go with neither option, opting instead for a local installation of open journal systems (ojs), an open-source editorial management platform developed by the public knowledge project. our editorial assistant at the time of this transition was casey o’donnell, now an associate professor at michigan state, where he studies, designs, and builds computer games, attuned to their critical effects and erasures, and to the kinds of play they allow and disallow—career interests shaped in part by his more mundane experience with cultural anthropology. it was casey who, after we received the support of the sca board, downloaded ojs, installed it on a server at rensselaer, and did the initial configuration of the system. (casey did many other infrastructural jobs, like figuring out how to have submissions automatically converted from .doc or .rtf form, which could not be anonymized, to pdf form, which could—a nontrivial curatorial task at the time.) it still instills in us a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when our login information continues to work to this day as we sign in to ojs to contribute a review—and an even greater sense of satisfaction (and relief!) that someone toggled the permissions box that now prevents us from seeing, as we did then, all those submissions and reviews demanding attention! if ojs became the most visible, enduring, and satisfying manifestation of our infrastructural experiments, it also became a daily, taunting reminder that cultural anthropology had then become only a few small digital steps away from open-access publishing. the legal, cultural, and organizational steps necessary were much, much bigger. jason jackson and chris kelty did the most to impress on us the logics, questions, and culture of open-access publishing, tutoring us on the issues as we began our editorship.2 they also initiated the writing of the collaborative essay “anthropology of/in circulation: the future of open access and scholarly societies” (kelty et al. 2008), the first essay in cultural anthropology leveraging a number of other infrastructural experiments in form: the authors included an author addendum allowing them to retain copyright, and they blogged about its publication (jackson 2008; kelty 2008) to redirect traffic from the anthrosource and wiley pay sites to the toll-free, open versions posted by jackson in the iuscholarworks repository and on our journal’s new blog. the latter version incorporated an additional experiment: wanting to see what kelty called the “special sauce” that wiley added to our manuscripts before publishing them, we requested the xml document that they made from the .doc file we submitted to them, so that the article could be integrated into the open-source wordpress plug-in commentpress before being posted on cultural anthropology’s blog for further comment and elaboration. only many years later, long after our hammering on the issue ended, through the continued hammering done by subsequent editors charles piot and anne allison, would these early infrastructural labors in form become the structures of an open-access cultural anthropology.3 building the front end building the early versions of cultural anthropology’s digital infrastructure involved more than an important technical upgrade; a new platform was not simply a more efficient way to manage and deliver content from authors to readers, and it did not run on electrons alone. an upgrade to the social infrastructure also proved necessary, and it was coproduced along with a new web presence. here, too, the enthusiastic support of the sca board and its presidents judith farquhar, bruce grant, danilyn rutherford, and brad weiss (who also served as treasurer during much of our editorial tenure) should be counted as a crucial component of cultural anthropology’s infrastructure. they backed the filmmaker and graphic designer vani subramanian’s complete and beautiful overhaul of the cultural anthropology print look in a digital-centric time, and then her continued design and production of each issue’s cover. they committed to the ongoing investment in a managing editor and editorial assistant for the journal; ali kenner, our graduate student at the time and now an assistant professor at drexel university, became cultural anthropology’s first managing editor. (she provides her own, more in-depth views on cultural anthropology’s infrastructure in kenner [2014].) the first cultural anthropology website was built with drupal by casey o’donnell, but it was ali who really began to give it content and form. much of it was achieved through the editorial intern program we created at the same time, a vital part of the journal’s social infrastructure that ali eventually came to manage. an ever-growing number of graduate students from anthropology programs throughout north america came to cultural anthropology, first generating supplemental pages for each new article we published: synopses, critical commentaries, questions to use in teaching, and links to videos and other related materials on the web—anything except the cultural anthropology essay itself. culanth.org quickly became one of the richest and most innovative digital portals for any anthropology journal, and indeed for any journal in the humanities and social sciences. anne allison and charlie piot extended this basic infrastructure further by adding photo essays, author interviews, podcasts, and fieldsights to the evolving mix (see elfenbein 2014). importantly, the production of cultural anthropology’s web presence depended on and facilitated the growth of a lively group of young scholars who became technically adept, knowledgeable about the politics and economics of publishing, and learned about the signature history of scholarship that cultural anthropology published. those interns will no doubt provide leadership in the sca and in our field going forward. cultural anthropology and/as infrastructure and/as experimental system culture, defined as a methodological concept or tool of inquiry, might best be understood in terms of its historically layered growth of specifications and differentiations, refined into a series of “experimental systems” that, in a manner akin to the “experimental systems” of the natural sciences, allow new realities to be seen and engaged as its own parameters are changed. —michael m. j. fischer, “culture and cultural analysis as experimental systems” infrastructures also exist as forms separate from their purely technical functioning, and they need to be analyzed as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees. . . . focusing on the issue of form, or the poetics of infrastructure, allows us to understand how the political can be constituted through different means. —brian larkin, “the politics and poetics of infrastructure” anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in the human sciences (marcus and fischer 1986) was published the same year cultural anthropology was launched. the book articulated the mid-1980s as characterized by “crises of representation” resulting from a world outpacing and exceeding the explanatory adequacy of established social theory. the challenge for anthropology was to conduct ethnographic work that, by design, queried and exposed what established social theory missed. what was missed—what didn’t function—was what drove the call for experimentalism. feminist, race, postcolonial, and other theoretical currents working in a minor key—invested in marginality—were crucial resources. cultural anthropology took shape in this context. during the past thirty years, experimentalism in anthropology has been debated without end, but also elaborated. theories and practices of experimentalism in the sciences have become formative, interlaced with theories and examples from the arts. experimentalism has also moved back into the research process, enlivening ethnographic research design and methods. and experimentalism has moved online, into efforts to leverage digitization to open up and support new forms of ethnographic sociality and expression. as the editors of cultural anthropology, we were deeply committed to its signature openness and experimentalism—motivated by enduring, disciplinary commitment to ethnography as a means to understand and politically address a rapidly changing, structurally violent world. we came to realize the importance of robust but equally experimental infrastructure—technical and social—in realizing these commitments. as brian larkin has described, infrastructures matter, having effects and affects far beyond their technical functioning, providing opportunities to constitute the political through different means. the infrastructure we felt it was necessary to build was, by design, at least double-visioned. we tried to build infrastructure as a stable base for the continued flourishing and prestige of the journal, and of the community of authors and readers who contributed to it and depended on it for insight and legitimacy. we also tried to build infrastructure for the continued unsettling of that community, prompting and supporting new forms of experimental research and writing. the infrastructure thus needed to serve our reviewers as well as our authors, and our readers as researchers, writers, and teachers. and we tried to make sure that a new generation of researchers, writers, and teachers were welcomed into the collective effort of ongoing experimentation. following adorno (1984, 165), we thus “labor[ed] emphatically on form,” recognizing our editorial moment as an infrastructural moment. it has been a collective effort with diverse, relayed responsibilities. we’re honored to have had the opportunity to play the editor’s role—a role now, as george marcus (2015) has pointed out, closely synonymous with that of the curator. as we write this retrospective essay, the social sciences writ large are under attack by u.s. politicians, and they have little standing in public spheres. yet the need for social science and humanities insights—particularly anthropological and ethnographic insight—is clear and pressing, offering ways to understand and change how problems are identified, conceived, addressed, or discounted. experimental work that brings new problems, concepts, and political possibilities into play is critical. so is the infrastructural work on which those experiments depend, and which is itself a form of experimentation. cultural anthropology, through its decades-long “layered growth of specifications and differentiations,” is well-positioned for the important work ahead. notes 1. our crash course in the process and significance of open-access publishing, led by jason jackson and chris kelty, has had enduring effects. from open-access publishing we have now moved to an effort to make anthropological data itself more open, and more open to collaborative interpretation; with jason jackson, we are co-chairs of the digital practices in history and ethnography interest group, part of the research data alliance, an international organization working to make research data more interoperable, shareable, and freely accessible. 2. see jackson and anderson 2014 for an excellent primer on open-access publishing. 3. see also kelty 2014. references adorno, t. w. 1984 “the essay as form.” new german critique, no. 32: 151–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/488160. first published in 1954. daniel, e. valentine 2008 “the coolie.” cultural anthropology 23, no. 2: 254–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00009.x. elfenbein, timothy w. 2014 “cultural anthropology and the infrastructure of publishing.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 288–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.06. fischer, michael m. j. 2007 “culture and cultural analysis as experimental systems.” cultural anthropology 22(1): 1–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/can.2007.22.1.1. fortun, kim 2003 “ethnography in/of/as open systems.” reviews of anthropology 32, no. 2: 171–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00988150390197695. jackson, jason baird 2008 “anthropology of/in circulation: join the conversation.” shreds and patches. http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2008/08/26/anthropology-ofin-circulation-join-the-conversation/, accessed may 24, 2015. jackson, jason baird, and ryan anderson 2014 “anthropology and open access.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 236–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.04. kelty, christopher 2008 “anthropology in/of circulation.” savage minds, september 30. http://savageminds.org/2008/09/30/anthropology-inof-circulation/, accessed may 24, 2015. 2014 “beyond copyright and technology: what open access can tell us about precarity, authority, innovation, and automation in the university today.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 203–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.02. kelty, christopher, michael m. j. fischer, alex “rex” golub, jason baird jackson, kimberly christen, michael f. brown, and tom boellstorff 2008 “anthropology of/in circulation: the future of open access and scholarly societies.” cultural anthropology 23, no. 3: 559–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2008.00018.x. kenner, ali 2014 “designing digital infrastructure: four considerations for scholarly publishing projects.” cultural anthropology 29, no. 2: 264–87. 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